This Strange Addiction by Julie Steimle (e book free reading .txt) 📕

Audry replied, thinking that as soon as they had a home, arrangements could be made for Silvia to hide somewhere else. She knew Silvia believed the spell was only effective as long as she called that apartment home. Once Audry was married and moved in with Hogan, that would be the end—and she wanted a home with Hogan as soon as possible. She didn’t want a long engagement.

“I know we never really talked about this seriously, but, what do you think about kids?” he asked after a while.

Leaning against him, squeezing his hand, Audry grinned as her heart sped up. “I like the idea.”

He leaned down and kissed her gently. “Good.”

They talked about other things, simple things, while they strolled at a slow romantic pace. Going not far from the campground, they found a rock where they could sit down without anyone stumbling upon them. There, Audry sat in his lap, and they talked more in between kisses, discussing what names they might give their kids, where they might go on their honeymoon, and how might they want to celebrate their consecutive anniversaries. Were they going to follow the tradition? …Which was paper the first year and the fiftieth anniversary was with gold. Or make them mini honeymoons where they went to a hotel and lived it up for a day? Audry didn’t know when they had starting seriously kissing, but under the moonlight with him warm in her arms, she wanted it to keep going as long as it could. She was getting married. She loved him. And kissing him stirred up all sorts of feelings inside, her making her not want to stop as her heart pounded harder. He was hers. She had finally found the one.

“Let’s go back to the camp,” he whispered when he got a breath.

Nodding, kissing him, Audry agreed. She and Hogan quickly walked back. But they didn’t really stop kissing. They paused along the way, leaning against trees in passionate embrace until Hogan pulled her along for them to return. It was getting late. The campfire was low in coals and nearly everyone was in a tent, either sleeping or… doing more. They hurried to the ring of tents, Hogan and Audry in one long kiss, dropping into his open tent doorway. And as she knelt within the opening with her fiancée in passionate embrace, several thoughts went racing through her brain.

She was going to marry him anyway. She didn’t want that moment to stop. She had the ring, and they had talked to their family and were getting wedding a venue. They had already discussed having kids, let alone house shopping. What did it matter now? They were getting married. He was hers. He wanted kids. And so did she.

And they went inside. The passion got more intense between them. Her own hands slipped into his shirt to pull it off. While he was unclipping her bra, a wolf cry lifted onto the air. It sounded so mournful. And it made her think of Rick Deacon for some reason.

Audry pulled away, breathless. “Um… Hogan, we shouldn’t.”

His eyes asked ‘What?’ His mouth almost formed the words. But he licked his lips, thought a bit, and removed his hand out from her shirt and off her breast. They were both trembling from overexcitement.

“Let’s save it for the honeymoon,” Audry said, reattaching her bra hooks and straightening up her shirt with a blush.

She quickly left the tent and went back to hers and Silvia’s tent. When she went in, Audry could tell from her breathing that Silvia wasn’t yet asleep. Silvia had a slight rasp in her breath when she was truly out, not quite a snore. A relieved breath even escaped her tent-mate as Audry zipped up the door.

As she kicked off her boots, Audry had to sit there on the sleeping bag to let her heart calm down. Her face was still flushed with all the racing hormones surging through her, remembering the feel of his hands against her skin, how it felt when he touched her. Her hands were shaking a little. She had almost done it. She had almost given in to her gut desire to embrace the passion between her and Hogan. Other tents were already occupied with residents in the act—and listening to them made her wonder if it would have been all that bad. Why had she stopped again? She was marrying him. Did waiting really matter that much? She could always go out, go back.

Yet after hearing another wolf howl, Audry shook her head. Of course it mattered. They weren’t mere animals. They were human beings with human repercussions and responsibilities. Besides, just because she was engaged it did not mean the same as being married. They needed to both put rings on it.

She climbed into her sleeping back and tried to go to sleep.

 

Green Club did everything they could to leave the campground better than they had found it when they packed up in the morning. It was their philosophy. Once dirt had been thrown on the remaining fire coals after a breakfast, sand shaken out of their tents and off their sleeping bags, they rolled everything up and loaded the vans. They double-checked for trash and cleared out all human clutter.

Audry fell asleep against Hogan’s shoulder on the ride back. She also noticed that Jandra was snuggling with Bobo. She wondered if they were one of the couples together that night or if they too had quit before it got too heated.

Back at their apartment—as Hogan had dropped Audry and Silvia off on the street but oddly not in front of the actual building door—they went inside where Silvia went directly to the showers and dumped all her clothes into the washer. Both of them did laundry, cleaning out everything and hanging things on the roof to dry.

As their clothes things were drying, after her own shower, Audry pulled out her computer and went online to check on her research updates and reconnect with family about the wedding plans. Funnily enough, Audry also noticed a text from Jessica on her phone. The entire trip, she had had it off. Audry read it.

 

I don’t want to rain on your parade. I just want to make sure you know what you are getting into with Hogan. For your safety, we found information on his stalker ex, whom you told me about. Here it is.

 

Then Jessica sent her a link to an old tweet Charlene Olsen had posted talking about Hogan. They were screen shots Jessica’s friend had collected, though he gave her the original links also. Audry clicked on it. She expected a typical rant about being used, and was that how they started. There was more than one tweet, as it turned out.

 

411. Never date Hogan Orwell—aka Orion. He weaves sticky lies about love, but once your knocked up, he ditches you. #jilted #MeToo #stopOrion

 

Audry wanted to correct her grammar, staring at ‘your’ when it should have said, ‘you’re’. It was driving her crazy. But she then read the tweet before it, which said:

 

I just had amazing sex. Orion should be a god. And I am his goddess. #hunk #amazingmanhood #doithard

 

Her face felt hot. Not just because Charlene had no filter on language, but also because it was annoying people were bringing this up again. She already knew Hogan and Charlene screwed around together and she got pregnant. She had also gotten an abortion. But Audry continued to read her texts as they were right there, highlighted by Jessica’s friend in a screenshot.

 

Abortion sucks. But I was lied to. I can’t afford a kid. Worst part, I hunted down the hunter, and he was already banging another woman. #allmenarepigs #MeToo #stopOrion

 

Audry stared at the post, frowning. It was Charlene’s point of view, nothing more. But it angered her when she read one a tweet where Charlene doxed Hogan—showing his address to the entire world, calling for his lynching. The next tweet revealed he had moved and they were looking for the new address. #huntingthehunter #stopOrion. Apparently even Charlene had a hacker friend.

But the comments under Charlene’s tweets were more than a little nasty. They called her a whore and worse, telling her she can’t use #MeToo when it wasn’t rape. They posted shots of her earlier tweets about the sweet sweet sex she had had with Hogan. Others were telling her she was stupid for thinking sex would not produce a kid. ‘Hadn’t she ever heard of birth control’ and so on.

Charlene didn’t tweet much after that. And #stopOrion got buried in Twitter.

Audry texted Jessica back.

 

Ok. I read them all. I knew his past already. Charlene is a psychopath. She’d say whatever she wanted to destroy Hogan in revenge. What do you expect me to do?

 

And she sent it. She was feeling angry. Angry at Jessica. Angry at Hogan. And really angry at Charlene. Even when she could not follow them, she was ruining everything. That Isis was not going to let them alone.

While she was folding her dried laundry, Audry got this text back:

 

I see you’ve made up your mind. Alright. I didn’t know what you knew. But just so you know, our friend Semour found this as part of an ongoing search program. We just had to make sure you knew.

 

After reading the text, Audry huffed about it. And after a while, her anger had shifted once more. She really had to clear this up with Hogan once and for all. So, she called him and arranged to meet with him.

<< How about dinner? >> he asked cheerfully.

His happy voice made Audry immediately feel guilty. She was judging him. What right did she have to do that? She already knew his past. And he knew hers. However, Audry felt the air had to be cleared none-the-less.

Hogan picked her up on the curb. He still seemed to have a difficult time finding the apartment, which was bewildering. Audry looked several times at the building, and though it was an ordinary brownstone, hers was easily distinguishable from the other buildings and entryways.

Opening his car door, she got in, sitting next to him. Looking at his eager, almost, golden retriever kind of face, she said, “We have to talk.”

“Oh, no,” he said, his expression falling. “You’re using that tone.”

Audry closed her eyes, huffing. “What tone?”

He cringed, rubbing his nose ridge. “The tone that says you’re mad about something, and you need to have it out. So, ok. Let’s have it out.”

They did not pull into the road to go to the restaurant as planned. It was futile anyway when both of them were in that state of mind.

Taking out her cellphone, Audry drew up the files Jessica had sent and showed him Jessica’s texts. Saying nothing, she sat back with folded arms and waited for his reaction.

Hogan read them in silence. His eyes flickered from the screen shots of the tweets, the messages, and to Audry’s face a number of times. After scrolling through them all, he handed back the phone. “What do you want me to say? You knew about Charlene.”

Nodding, Audry heaved a sigh. “That I did. But Hogan, I have to say, did you just ditch her after getting her pregnant?”

“No,” Hogan said firmly. “I may have played it loose back then, and yeah, I got her pregnant—but she also liked to play it loose and hot, up until she got pregnant. It was her choice to have the abortion, not mine. She didn’t want to ‘play house’, she said. And I thought that was that. She totally melted down, got really control freaky.”

And that really was all she knew about Charlene. The vengeful Isis. Isis wanted to destroy Hogan and all his happiness.

“You also have some pretty dangerous people in your past, Audry,” Hogan reminded her.

Closing her eyes, Audry unbuckled her seatbelt.

He reached out, grabbing her wrist as she was about to open the car door. “What are you doing? Are you leaving?”

Shaking her head, Audry murmured, “I’m not in the mood