Off

By Carly Oberon

To the detriment of a meaningful social life, Maysea Heston, a young, highly trained ER nurse, devotes long hours to caring for others. Sea’s off hours are mostly filled with mindless distractions—movies, cigarettes, beer, and naps—salves that reset her energy for the next round of tending, even if she neglects herself. After a severe bout of flu, she reluctantly agrees to rest at her supervisor’s remote oceanside timeshare.

But she never makes her flight. She’s taken.

Waking in an unfamiliar bed with an unfamiliar man seated across from her, Sea quickly realizes she's a captive. Her life now depends on the mindset of this stranger who insists on calling her Baby. While he dotes on her and shows her compassion, there are no answers to be found. Who is he? What does he want? Why her?

As she plans her escape, her constricted world expands into one of survival, instinct, and psychological strategy. Little does she know how this obsessive, delusional, insanely handsome man will come to nourish the living, breathing, and vibrant parts of her she never knew existed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Evernight
• Release date: Aug 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9780369506696

Book preview

Published by EVERNIGHT PUBLISHING ® at Smashwords

www.evernightpublishing.com

Copyright© 2022 Carly Oberon

ISBN: 978-0-3695-0669-6

Cover Artist: Jay Aheer

Editor: Audrey Bobak

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and places are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

DEDICATION

To my husband, the love of my life. The smartest, funniest, and kindest person I know.

OFF

Off-On Duet

Carly Oberon

Copyright © 2022

Prologue

After checking my suitcase for the bare necessities one last time, I zipped the lid shut with a sigh, annoyed at myself for being talked into a last-second vacation I hadn’t wanted or planned for. The worst kind. Planning ahead was an operation I never skipped. Without it, life got messy. I didn’t do messy, not well anyway.

The clock on the wall of my sparsely furnished but functional one-bedroom apartment read 6:05, fifteen minutes faster than real time. The same on my watch. Always one step ahead. Early for work, early for appointments, early for the airport, where I was headed shortly. That was the way I needed my life. In control right from the start. And when I wasn’t because of unforeseen circumstances, I would be the next time. Because there usually was a next time.

I glanced around, making sure everything was in its place so when I returned, I’d feel like I never left. The small artificial Christmas tree on my dining room table would remain there until well after the New Year. Even with the branches threadbare of its once lush silver needles, I loved that tree. A gift from my parents when I was a sixteen-year-old pre-med student living in a dorm room a fourth the size of the place I lived in now.

Wherever I moved, my fragile tree moved with me. I cared for it, cloaked it in tinsel to camouflage advancing age, packed its branches one by one in sturdy bubble wrap after the holidays, and brought it back to my parents’ house when I dropped out of medical school in my second year to care for my mother.

Ignoring her emphatic objections at my homecoming, I settled into my old bedroom with my tree for the long haul. At least until my mother’s next round of chemo was history. After she went into remission, the tree traveled with me to nursing school across the river, a closer pathway for us in case I needed to go home again.

I didn’t during those years. I obtained my nursing degree early and even specialized training in emergency care that eventually landed me here, working in a top-rated trauma center at a large midwestern metropolitan medical center. My tree remained with me through it all and always would. There was nothing in my possession I valued more. Unlike my mother and later my father, it would never die.

I didn’t want to live in this city for one reason. There was no ocean. Growing up, my parents took me to one every summer so the setting would warm and strengthen us like it had for them during their courting years.

My surprise conception story occurred on a cloudless Memorial Day weekend atop salty, wet dunes my parents stumbled over while groping each other mercilessly. I wasn’t supposed to exist for the mile-long medical reasons my mother had accrued over the years. But I did, and my name reflected that start in life. Maysea Sun Heston, but Sea was all my parents ever called me. When I excelled in school at an early age, they jokingly proposed changing it to See, but I wasn’t having any of that. Everything about Sea was sacrosanct to me. My refuge. My soul.

In our later years, we returned to the ocean even more to distract our thoughts away from the inevitable. Before it came, the beach towns did exactly that and I swore I’d eventually find my way back to one and live in it forever.

Until my nursing advisor intervened. My record of academic and clinical accomplishments headlined my vitae that I had already sent out to most hospitals within twenty miles of a shoreline. But my advisor took the liberty of informing the two best trauma centers in the nation of my impending availability. The very day I graduated first in my class, both offered me positions on her recommendation alone, one she apparently seldom gave.

So no more sending out résumés and no beach. I figured I’d choose the better of the two, learn from them, and move on to a needier place with a tan-lined staff.

That was almost three years ago. Turned out I liked working among the best. The ocean would always be somewhere.

Lighting a cigarette, one of the few bad habits I’d yet to kick on a permanent basis, I checked the time again. Still early.

I settled into my brown faux leather La-Z-Boy strategically placed squarely in front of my 55-soon-to-be-65-inch 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV. A Christmas present to myself. No self-respecting movie buff would settle for anything less in this technologically advanced day and age.

The cabinet below the TV housed my assorted DVD collection that ranged from classic cartoon features, my first acquisitions thanks to my parents, to a wide variety of adult fare. Some were god-awful, but it was mindless fun to try to figure out better plots, better dialogue, and better endings. A habit I learned from my mother after watching endless hours of movies with her in our den.

My father willingly transformed the room into a mini theater complete with an old-fashioned popcorn maker and soda bar. His way of helping her through a journey that was never going to end well.

My contribution was watching every single movie with her, some like comedies and romances more than six or seven times, until we reconfigured each one into an Oscar-worthy nomination. Right down to altering dialogue and recasting actors we deemed better for the parts. I cherished those times in the den when she was lucid and laughing.

Even with pay-per-view, classic movie channels, and cineplexes on every other corner, I kept adding to my film collection over the years. Like my Christmas tree, to keep a piece of my parents close. And as a respite from a rewarding but challenging career that zapped nearly every ounce of energy I had by the end of the workweek.

The past year had been especially brutal on the entire medical staff. Too many domestic crimes, shootings, and drug overdoses capped off by a delusional young man blowing up a sightseeing bus not far from the hospital because he thought its passengers were invading aliens from the next galaxy over.

That particular day, I was the ER nurse assigned to triage when the victims were first brought in, one of the most difficult, complicated experiences of my professional life. Yes, I was highly trained medically but young for my position. Twenty-eight years old because I graduated early from every school I’d ever attended.

Many of the patients were unrecognizable, and those still alive were in critical condition with multiple injuries requiring multiple surgeries. Family members, best friends, and engaged couples as it turned out. All having significant others who converged on the hospital at the same time when the news first broke.

As a top-rated trauma center, we handled the devastation with precision, science, and empathy as we were trained to do. If not at the scene, some people died in surgery, but many who should have succumbed were saved in our hospital that day, a situation praised by the governor and one that landed my picture along with a few of my colleagues on the front page of the largest newspaper in the state. I loathed that part.

The good news was my job and necessary downtime in my functional apartment kept me occupied so I didn’t have a lot of close friends texting with unnecessary congratulations about some lame picture none of us realized had been taken. No boyfriends at the time either. Of course, none of my exes would have responded retroactively since my accessibility in the girlfriend department wasn’t the greatest in the universe. Heavy job commitments and all.

Truth was the energy of human need powering my world since forever created a ferocious work ethic that reduced what might be called the pleasures of life to a minimum. And I was okay with that for reasons I had no interest in understanding.

A few days after the bus attack, I did receive a small houseplant by delivery with a note attached. Not surprised. It was anonymous but I knew its sender. My advisor’s unmistakable none de plume as it were.

About a year later, I went down with the flu that diminished my energy reserves to the point at which my supervisor announced enough and deemed I was going to her seaside timeshare for a week to rejuvenate.

At first, I wanted to go. It was the ocean, after all. But the look on my patients’ faces when I told them was heartrending that quickly doused any spark of self-interest, a familiar condition I was always more than willing to accept in my life.

I tried to back out several times, but when my supervisor finally elicited help from my advisor who roundly informed me I had no choice, I relented without further comment. My advisor was someone you never argued with, even after graduation.

Brushing a few stray ashes from my black cotton twill traveling pants, I smothered my first and second cigarettes in water to make sure they were completely out then emptied the ashtray in an open garbage bag by the front door. Grabbing it along with my suitcase, I scanned my apartment one last time before throwing the trash bag in a hallway garbage chute and catching an Uber to the airport.

Fortunately, the driver wasn’t talkative. I wasn’t either.

As I stared out the window, my thoughts drifted to my parents, patients, and new TV. There wasn’t much more to contemplate.

Arriving early at the airport, I wheeled my suitcase through a mostly deserted lounge area and immediately washed my hands, an ingrained behavior I routinely performed at work and in public. That and a small prick on my arm were the last things I remembered that day.

Chapter One

What Was Happening?

When I awoke, I told myself to open my eyes all the way, but the physical process wasn’t that automatic. I still felt groggy, discombobulated, and my body failed to cooperate at first.

But I didn’t need wide-awake, alert eyes to sense something was in the room with me like I heard people describe a million times on Paranormal State. They were right. It was creepy.

Lurking in the darkness, the palpable presence stayed hidden, undefined, gripping my gut with roiling unease. A hovering mass of something neither benign nor malignant. Just there.

Raising my head a fraction from a mound of soft pillows on an eerily unfamiliar bed, I squinted at a blur of contorted geometric shapes suffusing the room while my eyes slowly adjusted to what little light there was. I rubbed my sockets hard until mini suns appeared, hoping to accelerate the visual acuity process. I needed to understand what was happening. Right this second.

When my eyes cleared, I spotted the strange presence I felt all along. At the same time, my body snapped into high gear against a thick, unforgiving, multi-slatted headboard. It stung instantly, but I remained quiet. Stoic behavior was firmly entrenched in my long-term repertoire.

In the far corner of the room, a male figure cast in gray silhouette sat voiceless and still. His chin rested atop long, steepled fingers like he was contemplating the very origins of life itself. Or just trying to figure out the situation every bit as much as I was.

He obviously wasn’t a ghost, but I couldn’t make out his features in the surrounding murkiness other than he seemed extraordinarily tall. Even sitting in a large chair, he towered over it.

As wave after wave of adrenaline flooded my system, my fingernails sliced into skin to center a fear I never experienced in nearly three decades of life. Bits and pieces of something off were buzzing through my head like a droning cardiac monitor in flatline mode.

Walking through the airport, freshening up in a lounge, sliding into nothingness. Now here. In an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room, with an unfamiliar man.

I … I’m sorry. What’s going on? Where am I? The garbled words slipped from my mouth in a tangled mess of confusion and manners so ingrained by my parents I couldn’t even swear yet.

He shifted a little but said nothing.

Swallowing hard, I stared back at him, unable to blink for fear of missing something while crushing levels of uncertainty immobilized my body on the bed.

Good god, he was huge. By paired association that happened to me often as a person who lived a lot of downtime through cinema, a freakish image of the giant King Xerxes fluttered through my head. I always hated when that character appeared looming lethally over 300 doomed but fearless Spartans. Monstrous.

While the massive form reigning before me kept his silent vigil, I tried to take a few deep breaths but couldn’t find the right amount of air to replenish my lungs. So I settled for a series of shallow puffs. But slow ones. I didn’t want to hyperventilate and pass out. I could not pass out.

I’m glad you’re finally awake, baby, a voice from the chair murmured so faintly I wasn’t sure I heard that last word correctly.

But when my body cringed in response, I knew I had. He called me baby. Baby? What the hell? Swearing suddenly got a lot easier.

Considering I had no idea who this man was, the word baby didn’t bode well. But I supposed it was better than some alternatives. At least I wasn’t buried alive in a crate with a single flashlight and a few bare-knuckle martial arts skills to break free from dense wood and several feet of freshly packed topsoil. Early on, I learned everything was relative. The concept was an essential component in my life alongside nursing, film, medical breakthroughs, and a few interesting TV shows. I practically lived on those alone. Apart from food, sleep, and oxygen.

I needed to breathe.

I inhaled more deeply this time and tried my questions again because I figured he wasn’t going to shoot me in the chest and leave me in a mismarked grave in the middle of nowhere. That kind of thing only happened in the movies. Right?

What’s going on? Where am I? I tried to speak louder, but my voice stuck in my parched throat as an influx of dry air and reality started to drain the saliva from my mouth. I had to cough a little just to get those words out.

I should’ve kept my mouth shut. He rose to full height, placed a glass of water on the nightstand next to me, and then sat on the edge of the bed, very close. Too close. Impossibly, he seemed ten times bigger.

Instead of quenching my thirst, I instinctively cowered away from his hulk-like frame. But he stopped