Seasons of Change
Authors: Olivia Stephens
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Romance, #Contemporary, #Romantic Suspense, #Mystery & Suspense, #Suspense
This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons--living or dead--is entirely coincidental.
Seasons of Change copyright @ 2014 by Olivia Stephens. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews
TABLE OF CONTENTS
There’s a dream that I feel like I’ve been playing on repeat in my mind. It just keeps going round and round in my head. Making it impossible to forget what happened. As if that was even a possibility in the first place. The dream has followed the same pattern for the last six years; I know it so well now that I don’t even have to close my eyes to see it anymore.
I can hear the sound of the hail of bullets as they find their mark, I can smell the metallic scent of the blood that ran like a river down the street that night. My heart still clenches when I see him, when I see what they do to him, and I always know in that final moment before I wake up that his arm will be outstretched towards me, almost like he’s asking for help. But I’m frozen to the spot, unable to move.
Terrified. I wake up covered in a cold sweat, just like every other time. Outside the window, the fingers of dawn are just starting to spread across the Nevada skyline and I miss my dad so much it’s as if it were that first morning without him all over again.
“Order up,” Big George says in his incongruously quiet voice.
“Thanks G,” I say as I grab the plates of steaming eggs and bacon, piled high with toast, and carry them over to the table of regulars that eat breakfast in the diner almost every morning of the year apart from the only day that we close, Christmas Day: They nod their thanks to me and dig into their food as if it were their first meal in weeks.
Not for the first time that morning, I wonder where the hell Suzie is. Friday morning is always crazy busy and this isn’t the first time that she’d been late and left me dealing with all the tables on my own. But this was definitely the latest she’d ever been—we are almost an hour into the shift and there is still no sign of her.
If this were any town other than Painted Rock, I probably wouldn’t be worried. I’d probably just figure that she was suffering from a particularly awful hangover or that she’d forgotten to set her alarm. But in this town, you learned to think the worse; experience had failed to teach us anything different.
As I head back into the kitchen George looks at me with a question in his eyes. His name isn’t actually George—it’s Jorge. But when he’d arrived in Painted Rock he’d quickly realized that it paid to try to blend in. That’s as much as an almost-seven-feet-tall guy can blend in. He is what’s often described as a gentle giant; a big mountain of a man who is really just a huge teddy bear. The man doesn’t have an aggressive bone in his body, but the way he looks is threatening enough for people to think twice about giving him any trouble.
When I’d first started working at Sunny Side Up I had been a little afraid of George—he looked like your typical thug and he was always so quiet there was no way of knowing what he was thinking.
But, as I got to know him, I quickly realized that he was actually the stereotypical gentle giant. I learned that his silence was a result of shyness and of not wanting to speak unless he had something important to say. He’d made a joke about how ironic the falsely cheerful name of the diner was in a town like Painted Rock, and from that moment I’d known that we saw things in much the same way.
“Still no sign of her?” George asks, keeping his tone as measured as always.
I shake my head, trying to stop myself from biting my bottom lip, a nervous habit that I never seemed to be able to grow out of. “I’m going to try her again,” I tell him, keeping my voice steady as I flick a glance out towards the diner to check that none of the customers are looking around for a refill or their check.
I press the speed dial button on my cell for Suzie, and this time her phone doesn’t even ring—it just goes straight to the beep of her voicemail. I try to keep the awful images that start swirling around in my head at bay, but it’s harder than it sounds.
“She’ll be fine, Aimee,” George says, his eyes concentrated on the sausage links he’s frying but his attention clearly on me.
“I wish I had a little of your positivity, G,” I tell him. “She could be anywhere, with anyone,” I add, trying to get my breathing under control.
The panic attacks had started six years ago, and I remember to breathe normally, focusing on the techniques that Jake had helped me to develop over the years to cope. Just as I feel like I’ve managed to get myself back under control, the bell over the diner door dings and my head whips round to see a slightly-disheveled Suzie strolling through it as if she had all the time in the world, her sunglasses firmly over her eyes.
I rush over to her, ignoring the curious looks from the diners as I grab her shoulders, and don’t bother to lower my voice. “Where the hell have you been?” I ask, resisting the urge to shake her. I feel like I tower over her and although Suzie has always been petite, it was only now for the first time that she looked small to me.
“Chill, Aimee,” she says, looking uncomfortable as she glances around the diner and sees all eyes trained on us.
“
Chill?
” I ask, incredulously. “I’ve spent the last hour thinking my friend was dead in a gutter and you’re asking me to chill?” I ask, and then stop as I suddenly take in the oversized sunglasses which she’s still wearing despite being inside, and I notice the slight tremor in her normally steady hands. “What happened?” I hiss at her.
“Order up,” Big George’s quiet voice penetrates the tension in the room and I know he’s trying to avoid us causing any more of a scene than we already are. News spreads like wildfire in this town and we all knew it was better to keep off the radar than to draw attention to yourself.
“Got it,” Suzie nods to George, and then drops her voice as she says to me, “Talk later.”
But we don’t need to talk; I already know the shorthand of what Suzie is going to tell me. It’s not the first time I’ve seen her like this and I knew from experience that a guy was involved.
Suzie’s petite, fragile blondeness attracted men like moths to a flame. The only problem is that she is almost inevitably drawn to bad men: jealous guys, guys with drinking problems, guys who liked to push women around, and guys who liked to hit.
When the morning rush is over and the last few customers drift out into the scorching Nevada sunshine, leaving the diner finally empty before the lunch crowd arrive, I round on Suzie. “Spill it,” I say to her, not willing to let her duck out of talking to me again.
“It’s nothing Aimee, you don’t have to make such a big deal out of everything,” she replies a little huffily, but still trying to keep her face turned away from me. I’ve known Suzie pretty much since we were born; our moms had been best friends and we’d grown up in each other’s houses.
Aimee and Suzie, always together; that had been us, one petite and blonde, the other long-limbed and dark. We couldn’t have looked more different if we had tried but we had been inseparable as kids. Now, nineteen years later there’s not much that we don’t know about each other. I know all of her tells and, without thinking twice about it, I reach over and pull off the sunglasses still sitting on the bridge of her nose and expose what I had already guessed was there: an impressive shiner.
“Oh Suze,” I breathe as I force her to look at me despite her trying to avoid eye contact.
“It’s fine Aimee,” she tries to give me her trademark cheeky smile only to fail miserably.
“It’s not fine,” I tell her. “Wait here.” I guide her into one of the seats at the bar and rush back into the kitchen. George is already holding out a bag of frozen corn for me and he waves away my thanks as he sets about cleaning all the fat off of the grill.
I hand the frozen bag over to Suzie and take a seat opposite her. “Tell me,” I say, my voice hard and not brooking any kind of argument.
Suzie places the frozen bag over her eye gingerly and closes her good eye for a moment as the coolness against her skin takes the sting of her bruise away, at least for a few seconds.
“You have to promise not to freak out,” she says eventually, flicking a glance over to me.
“You know I can’t promise that,” I tell her, something she already knows as my green eyes meet her exposed blue one. “One of my oldest friends walks in looking like she’s just done a couple of rounds with Rocky, so don’t give me the ‘I walked into a door’ excuse. I think you’ve used up your quota of that one,” I tell her.
I know that I’m being harsh, but we’ve been through this dance so many times that tough love is really the only way forward. I wonder if it’s the only kind of love that Suzie understands anymore.
“Was it Kyle?” I ask, and watch as she blinks the eye not covered by a bag of corn.
“No,” she admits, and I can tell that there’s more to it.
“So who was it?” I ask. “Who’s the guy?”
“Aimee.”
She's pleading like she’s asking me not to make her tell, but she knows me well enough to know that I’m not going to let her back out of this. She sighs heavily, her shoulders dropping and she looks more broken than she did when she first walked in.
“We met a couple weeks ago,” she says eventually. I don’t ask why she hadn’t told me about it then. We used to share everything, but in the last couple of years I’d felt Suzie starting to move away from me a little, as if she were drifting in another direction. Her mom had run off with some guy she’d only just met, leaving Suzie on her own, and that’s when she’d started to get involved with bad people—bad people and bad things. “He seemed really nice and not like the others,”
Her single blue eye is looking at me with such sincerity that it’s hard to be mad at her. She had always been an eternal optimist, desperate to see the good in people, whereas since I’d lost my dad I’d become much more prepared to see the bad. To me, it was just a matter of mathematics: there were more of the bad around.
“But he turned out to be just like all the others?” I ask gently.
“Worse,” she whispers, and her voice cracks as a single tear slides down her cheek. I’ve never seen her look so scared.
“Suze,” I say as I pull her towards me and hug her fiercely. She’s like a sister to me and I wish that I could protect her from all the badness in the world, that I could protect her from herself.
We sit like that for a few minutes until she pulls herself together and leans back, giving me a rueful smile as I nod towards the rapidly-melting packet of corn and she places it over her eye again. “Why is this guy worse?” I ask, but my senses are already at DEFCON 1.
“Because he’s an Angel,” she whispers eventually, her voice barely there.
“
What?
” I ask, hoping that I’ve misheard her but knowing that I haven’t.
“I didn’t know he was when we met,” Suzie explains hurriedly as I sit in shock, staring at her. “We were in a bar and Kyle was being a dick,” she says, making a face. “As usual. And this guy appeared out of nowhere and basically told Kyle where to go,” she says, and there’s warmth in her voice that I wish wasn’t there. “I started finding little notes in the mailbox at home and I knew they were from him. It was really sweet, you know?” she asks, and I nod, not wanting to interrupt her. “He left me a note asking me out and I replied saying yes. I felt like a high-schooler, passing notes in class.” She laughs ruefully. “Then he arrived on a bike and I just knew that he was an Angel,” she says.
“And that’s when he hit you?” I ask between gritted teeth, trying to keep myself together.
Suzie looks at me nervously and I know there’s more to the story and that I’m not going to like it. “No,” she admits quietly. “He didn’t seem anything like them; he was sweet and kind and didn’t even talk about the MC, like he wasn’t really a part of it. But then we got to talking and I mentioned you, and he knew exactly who you were,” she says as my heart clenches. “He— he said something about your dad,” she tells me.
“What?” I ask, impressed at how level my voice sounds. “What did he say?”
“Aimee,” she pleads again, but I just shake my head, I need to hear it. “He said that he got what was coming to him, that he should have known better than to cross the Bleeding Angels,” she says softly, avoiding my eyes.
“And then what happened?” I ask, filing the information away in the back of my mind—it’s something to think about later, not now.
“I told him he didn’t know what he was talking about, that he had it all wrong, and that your dad was a good man. And that’s when he got angry,” she explains gesturing towards her black eye. “Guess he wasn’t so sweet after all,” she admits.
“Jesus Suze,” I breathe out. “And he knows where you live,” I add, stating the obvious.
“He apologized and he said that he likes me and that he hadn’t meant to hit me, that I just made him mad because he likes me so much,” she whispers, and I can see the fear in her eyes. “He’s picking me up tonight,” she finishes miserably.
“Suzie you can’t,” I tell her, that old familiar fear making my chest contract. “He’s dangerous,” I remind her. “They all are.”
“I know Aimee, but what the hell am I supposed to do?” she explodes, her blue eyes suddenly full of the fire I’m used to seeing. “If I don’t show up, God knows what he’s going to do. I have to think about this shit now that it’s just me. I don’t have anyone to protect me, we don’t all have a Jake to hide behind,” she says, and her acidic words hit me like a slap in the face.
“That’s not fair,” I tell her, but I can already see from the look in her eyes that she regrets what she’s said. “You know it’s his turn soon and they’re not going to leave him alone. They’re going to keep coming for him until they get him,” I say, and try to keep the fear from choking me.
“I know Aimee, I’m sorry,” my friend says as she grips my hand tight. “I just meant that I have to look out for myself now that Mom isn’t around anymore. And right now there aren’t a whole lot of options open to me,” she points out.
“You know that I’m here for you Suze. Always,” I tell her, returning her hard grip on my hand.
“I know Aimee, but you can’t stop them,” she reminds me. “He’ll get bored eventually and then it’ll be like he never met me. I just have to try not to make him mad.” She shrugs her shoulder like it’s no big deal.
“At least promise me that you’ll look after yourself, that you’ll be careful,” I ask her, and she nods grudgingly, like pleading with her to take care of herself is one of the hardest things I could ask of her.
“He’s going to hurt you, Suzie,” I warn her, knowing that with the Bleeding Angels, a black eye is just the beginning of what they’re capable of, especially with someone as impressionable as Suzie.
“They all do anyway.” She shrugs again as she says it, her voice hollow as we sit in silence and the hopelessness of her statement hanging heavily in the air.