Disclaimer: If you've ever read any of my stories you know that I am a broke little girl and that suing me would get you no where.

Sidenote: I would like to thank Regan Trinity for beta reading (I guess that's the proper term?) the start of this story for me, I really appreciate it, and ya'll should check her out if you get the chance! On to the story, please enjoy!

She Will Be Loved

I hated the sound of my alarm clock, it signaled the time of day that I had to drag myself from my warm bed and drive myself in the freezing cold Canadian weather to the small motel that I owned. There were only five other people who worked for me, four who cleaned the rooms and one maintenance man. Check in time was from midnight to nine a.m. and check out time was three p.m. to nine p.m. I worked from midnight to nine in the morning, went home, slept five and a half hours, worked there to nine, and then went to get dinner to eat back at the motel. I hadn't originally desired to own a motel, I wanted to go to college and become a teacher, but my grandparents on my father's side had owned it and when they died, they left it to their only living relatives. Since no one knew about my father, or where he was, my cousins, whom I had never known, gave it over to me. I tried selling it, but no one would buy it and I figured that as long as it was making decent money there was no point in closing it down. Not many people wanted to work for me, either. Because, you see, my grandparents' last name was Bates, so they named it The Bates Motel. Yes, the same name as the one in the movie "Psycho". Therefore, when I heard about it, I packed up, moved from my home in Tennessee and moved back to Canada all by myself. My mother had moved there when she was younger and had married my father, but once I was born, he left us. My mother started dating a string of men that didn't stay around for very long, until she met one man when I was around five or six years old. I couldn't remember his name, or his face, all I could remember was that he had been good to me. He would sit and watch movies with me while my mom would get ready for their dates. He would bring me dolls to play with, and I would even get to go out with them every occasionally. I couldn't remember him, but I remembered that he had always treated me like a little Princess. Then something happened; one day when I woke up my mom had everything packed and we moved back to Tennessee without an explanation. After that, my mom's boyfriends became worse and when I was eight years old, her boyfriend of the time began abusing me. Punches, smacks, cigarette burns, by the time I was ten-years-old I had a large family of scars living on my back from cuts, gashes and burns. When I was fifteen I had tried cutting my own wrists and ending it, but I couldn't do it. I couldn't make myself go through with it and I had to live with the constant reminder of it with the scar on my right wrist. When I was sixteen, I moved in with my mother's parents, stayed there until I was twenty and received the phone call telling me that my grandfather had died and that I was the inheritor of his motel. I moved there straight away, wanting to start my life over. I thought that I would be able to change things around and rework the schedule but in the entire year that I had been there, I hadn't been able to. I had to work the working hours around my four girls that worked for me, or otherwise I wouldn't have any employees. My life had been stuck in a rut since I had moved there and I felt like I was working towards something. I felt like 'If I can just get through this week, I'll be closer to it'. I just didn't know what 'it' was. It was an invisible goal that something in me yearned after. I hated the sound of my alarm clock.

"Haven, I refuse to clean Mark Figg's room again, he's so disgusting,"

"Alright, don't worry about it," I told Clara as I walked through the door and moved behind the front desk. I peeled off my coat and hung it over the back of my roller chair. I started up the computer and pulled off my scarf and gloves while it was loading. I then pulled off my cap and pulled my hair up into a messy ponytail.

"No, I'm serious, I will quit if I have to do his rooms again and you know how much I need this job,"

"You're not going to quit, I'll talk to him about it and you can get Becky to do them from now on,"

My grandparents had opened the motel back when it was a cheaper alternative to a hotel, but when I had taken over, the majority of the customers would pay for one night and bring in girls that wore way too much make up, not enough clothes and fishnets with thigh-high boots. They would disappear for a few hours and then the girls would leave by themselves, looking only slightly more disheveled than when they had arrived. The stress wasn't all that bad, my workers pretty much knew their routine and I just left them to it. Bryan, the maintenance man who had worked there for over thirty years, knew the place inside out, checked everything himself and usually didn't need a report to fix something. The four girls had a set of usual clients that they had split between themselves and cleaned without questions, and then they would divide the rest of the rooms all on their own. All I had to do was handle the customers and hand out the check out room list. We had become like a small family, and all the better for it, I thought, considering how little time we all had to ourselves. Granted they only worked for eight hours during check out time, and one before and one after. It would seem as if I got the short end of the stick on that, doesn't it? It wasn't too bad. I had decided that I was going to run it for the rest of the year and then I was going to give it to Sally, the oldest working there. She was sixty and was the mother of the group. Then there was Becky who was thirty-five and a single mother of two seven-year-old twin boys, Meg who was twenty-eight and married with a three-year-old daughter, and then Clair who had just turned eighteen and had been working there only a year before I had gotten there, starting at sixteen. Her mother was a diabetic and she was trying to help take care of her. Bryan was a widower with no other family, except a daughter who barely visited him. As much as I loved them all, I did not want to spend the rest of my life working a job that I dreaded, having no social life what so ever. I wanted to go to school and study to become a teacher, but I wasn't going anywhere there.

By ten o'clock that night everyone was leaving and Sally offered to bring dinner back to me. Once everyone was gone I went over to the fireplace and tried to stir the fire back up, but it had dyed out. I searched for a lighter or matches, but I couldn't find either. I looked around to make sure that no one was watching, reached in my hand and emitted a flame from my palm. When I was around eleven, I had learned what I could do. My mother's boyfriend had been burning me with a cigarette while I was sleeping and I jumped up and got so mad that I set him on fire. He was sent to the hospital and received care for third degree burns, but sadly, it wasn't enough to keep him away. I didn't tell my family, there were southern, not that I had a problem with that, I loved the south, Tennessee was my home, but their views were constricted and being a mutant was not something that was okay, especially not in my family. I hated myself for being different when I was younger, I didn't understand why my whole life had to be so much different than all of my friends' from school. Therefore, the older I grew the more bitter I became, not wanting to be around anyone that was normal and confining myself in my room. When I was eighteen, just before I graduated, a teacher of mine pushed for me to get a job at the local hospital working with the children and it didn't take too long for me to stop feeling sorry for myself and being bitter at everyone else just because they were normal. I got the chance to work with children who had genuine problems, sicknesses, and what I had wasn't a sickness or a problem, it was a power, a gift.

It wasn't long before Sally brought me back some of the left over roast beef, corn, green beans and rolls that she had made for her family earlier that day. After I finished eating I decided to take a small nap before check in time started, So, I curled up in my roller chair, pulled my coat around me to keep me warm and fell asleep.

I was having a dream about my mother's boyfriend that I liked, I had been having them a lot and had a feeling that soon I was going to be able to see his face, but every time he was in the dark, a shadow casting over him. Then there was a bell. A bell? Oh, someone was ringing the bell! I woke with a start and tried to make myself look as awake as possible as I walked up to the counter.

My past was shrouded in darkness, with memories hidden in the dense fog that clouded my memory, claiming parts of my life for its own. There were things that I could no longer remember, didn't want to remember and would never be able to forget. Everything that had happened had left a scar on my mind, matching every one on my body.

I walked up to the counter and saw him. He had been a fairly regular customer for a while but I hadn't seen him in a few months. "Sorry, I fell asleep," I apologized. He didn't say anything to me, he just watched me as I began filling out his papers. Our computer was slow and not much good for anything really, so everyone signed in the old-fashioned way and wrote their names on a clipboard. "Single?"

"Excuse me?" he said.

"Oh, sorry," I said, blushing and looking up at him from my paper. "I meant the room; do you still want a single?"

"Oh…yeah,"

"That weather is crazy out there, isn't it?" I asked, sliding him the clipboard and an ink pen.

"Yeah,"

"I don't envy anyone out there in it right now,"

"You don't have to worry about it, I don't think you ever leave this place, do you?" he asked with a slight smile, signing his name.

"It seems that way. I would probably be better off moving in here, wouldn't have to pay rent," I said as he slid the clipboard back to me and I handed him his room key. "You're in room sixteen."

"Is it still fifteen a night?" he asked, reaching for his wallet.

"I might be able to work something out just for you, even though you haven't been here in a while," I said with a smile.

"I moved to the states," he said, pulling out fifteen dollars and handing it to me.

"Really, which one?"

"New York,"

"Ah, I've always wanted to go there,"

"Have you ever been to the states?"

"Yeah, I lived there for about fourteen years while I was growing up, I lived down south, though. I never got anywhere north unless I was coming here," I said, putting his money into the cash register. "How long have you been living there?"

"A few months,"

"Did you buy a house?"

"No, I live at a school,"

"Oh, are you a teacher?" I asked.

"No yet, probably will be next year," he said.

"I think that's what I'm going to do after I get rid of this place,"

"You're getting rid of it?"

"Well, I'm giving it to one of the women that works for me. I just don't think this is what I want for the rest of my life,"

"You don't like hanging out with these people?" he asked sarcastically.

"Oh yeah, I love it here, having to clean up after prostitutes, shoveling snow, only getting five hours of sleep a day, that's my kind of life,"

He laughed. "You shovel the snow, shouldn't you have a man do that?" he asked.

"Find me a guy who wants to work outside in this kind of weather for the 'Bates Motel' and I'll hire him. People are stupid and actually think that Norman Bates works here, or something,"

"Who?"

"Norman Bates, the guy from the movie 'Psycho' who kills Janet Leigh in the motel bathroom,"

"I've never seen it,"

"You've never seen 'Psycho'? Are you kidding me? That's a great movie,"

"Apparently not so good for business,"

"True," I laughed.

"Well, I'll let you get back to your nap," he said with a small smile.

"Oh yeah, the important part of running a motel; taking naps in rolley-chairs," I said sarcastically. "I'm glad you're back, we missed you here."

"Yeah, I'll see you later," he said, talking towards the hall.

"Bye," I said just before he walked down the hall, going to his room.

I looked down at the clipboard in front of me and wondered, not for the first time, what the 'W' in Logan W. stood for.

"You're still here? I'm beginning to thing you don't go home," Logan said to me as he walked up to the front desk, where I was sitting and doing a crossword puzzle from the Sunday Newspaper.

"I can't get out, no one else can get in, I have no choice but to stay here," I said with a 'what can you do?' smile.

"I guess you'll be keeping a few extra guests tonight, then,"

"As lovely as that would be for business, you're the only person staying here,"

He raised his eyebrows at me and walked over to the door to look out at the storm. It had picked up at around three that morning and was slamming us hard. It was around nine forty-five in the morning and I was missing my bed pretty badly. "Do you want me to drive you home?" he asked.

"Are you crazy? You don't need to be driving in this weather," I said, to which the power responded by shutting off. "Freakin' brilliant, just what I need." I threw my paper down, moved to the fireplace, and tried to throw some more wood on it. However, since nothing was as I had planned, we didn't have very much wood left. He came over behind me and looked at the small fire.

"Do you have anymore wood cut somewhere outside?" he asked.

"I don't know, there's probably some beside the tool shed, but it's too cold to go out and get it,"

"I'll get it," he said, heading back towards the door.

"No, it's freezing out there!" I protested.

"And if you don't keep that thing going it's going to be freezing in here," then he opened the door and disappeared out into the storm.

I looked around for the flashlights and lanterns that we kept in my office and decided to sit them out, just in case. It was about ten minutes before he came back, carrying enough wood to last us through the morning and probably that night. He dropped it in front of the fireplace and threw a couple of extra pieces in it.

"I guess I should give you a refund, working for me isn't really what guests are meant to do," I said with a laugh.

"Don't worry about it,"

"Well, I guess you better pull up a chair, then, you won't get to go back to your room until the power comes back on,"

The two of us pulled chairs from behind the front desk and set them as close to the fireplace as we could, it had already started to get cold.

"So how long have you owned this place?" he asked.

"Around a year, I guess,"

"And you hate it?"

"I don't hate it, I would just like it a lot better if I didn't have to work so many hours,"

"Well, you get today off," he said with a slight smirk.

"Yay," I said dryly.

As the conversation lulled, I suddenly felt quite awkward. I didn't usually talk much to the customers and so the only people I had kept conversations with over that past year were my employees and the odd phone call with my grandparents, and I felt like I had lost all long-term communication skills because of it. However, by the look of him, he didn't seem to notice. He looked comfortable propped back in his chair, his hands behind his head and his legs stretched out in front of him. I had noticed how attractive he was from the moment I had first seen him, not in the pretty boy model kind of way, but in a very masculine way. I had tried to be discreet about it, but he had caught me a few times as I checked him out. He hadn't seemed to care. His hair was wild and weird, but very sexy in an animalistic sort of way. His sideburns grew into his beard, which only grew to the edge of his chin. If I had remembered correctly, they were called 'muttonchops'. His eyes were hazel, with a constant feral look locked into them, and I felt as if he were looking right through me when he looked at me.

He wasn't exactly the bad boy type that I had always seemed to date when I was younger, he wasn't one of those guys who would put on a leather jacket, light up a cigarette and move from woman to woman because it 'looked cool'. No, if he did that it was because that was just how he was. I had seen him bring countless woman back to his room with him, but as cliché and cheesy as it may have sounded, I felt like he was looking for something else and bidding his time until then with younger woman who didn't know any better.

He didn't seem like the kind of guy who would stride up to you in a bar, buy you a drink and then try to take you home. No, I had a feeling that the woman flocked to him. I wouldn't blame them if they did; he gave off an air of always knowing what he was doing. He didn't seem cocky or uptight about it, he seemed comfortable and knowing of himself, and that, for me, drove me wild.

"Are you up here all by yourself?" he asked.

"Yeah, it's just me,"

"Why did you move up here just to open a motel?" He had moved his hands from the back of his head and began raking his fingers through his sideburns, moving the hair into place and looking like an animal preening itself.

"It was my grandparents' on my dad's side and they were from up here, so when they died it was left to their kids, who had all pretty much already died, except for my father, they don't know where he's at… Anyway, so my cousins, or whoever, decided that I should have this place. It's not too bad; it's just sort of lonely up here by myself,"

"Don't you have a boyfriend?"

"No, there's no time for one, is there? At least that's my excuse for now," I said with a small smile. "What about you, what are you doing up here if you live in New York now?"

"Just taking care of a few things,"

"By yourself, don't you have a girlfriend?"

He cocked an eyebrow at me and dropped his hands to rest on his knees. "You've seen me a few too many times to think I do,"

"Not really, most of the men that come here with woman are usually married, so just having a girlfriend wouldn't be that bad,"

"Yeah, well those guys are jerks," he said. I had a feeling that his choice of words would have probably been a little different from 'jerks' if he had been talking to someone else.

"So that's a definite no, then?" I said with a laugh.

"Yeah,"

I was intrigued by the thought of his logic; it didn't matter if he slept with a different woman every night, there was nothing piggish about that, but cheating on someone, that didn't bode well with him. I suppose that it was respectable in its own right, even though it wasn't my personal opinion.

It was not too long before I had accidentally fallen asleep in my chair, but I soon woke startled. There was smoke all over the place and I could not see anything. At the shock of seeing the lobby on fire, my breath jerked in and I inhaled a large amount of smoke and began coughing. "Help!" I managed to scream out.

"Where are you?" I heard a distant voice yell, it sounded oddly familiar and I was momentarily confused until I realized that it was Logan.

"I'm over here!" I yelled back.

"Where?"

I crawled around until I felt something, it was a door but it wasn't the outside door, so I couldn't have been in the lobby. I started to band on the door, hoping that wherever I was Logan would be able to hear me. I couldn't scream anymore, my lungs were too filled with smoke to do anything but cough. I slide down the door, resting at the bottom and watched as everything around me faded out. The last thing I remember is hearing a noise that seemed to be come from above me, right outside the door. A sound right before I blacked out going 'snikt'.