Snowscape Trilogy

Snowscape Trilogy

By Jessie Lyn Pizanias

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014

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Book 1

Amy

Chapter 1

The snow was falling softly around me
covering the streets in an unblemished white, glistening blanket.
It was so impeccably silent that I could hear the snowflakes
landing on soft piles and settling themselves into their fate. As I
walked forward the street lamp in front of me cast a soft yellow
glow across the whole serene landscape. I could hear the river
close by and its lapping current hurrying on toward the falls
downstream.

Although the only light source was the single
street lamp in front of me, the whole boulevard had the soothing
white glow that accompanied any major snowfall. My surroundings
were streaked with whites and silvers and greys. That’s why I
noticed him standing there immediately. His dark black robe caught
my attention in the way a blood smear on a crisp white shirt would
have. He stood directly under the glowing lamp silently watching me
as I took in the beautiful landscape that surrounded us.

I walked forward hesitant in my step but
confident in my purpose. This was my dream that he was invading.
This was my world, my escape. He had no right to be there. I could
hear my feet crunching the snow beneath me as I approached him and
stopped. The silence became obtrusive. I could no longer hear the
river as I stood silently in front of him.

The black folds of his robe and hood looked
velvet to the touch, soft, warm and inviting. I had the
inexplicable urge to reach my hand out and caress it with the side
of my fingers. I could feel my hand move slightly to do such, but
hesitated before even a slight twitch. I could tell he was smiling
about my internal struggle even without being able to see his face.
Although I wanted to be angry, I knew this was a game we often
played here. I knew he wanted to control me and although it
frustrated him that he could not, he continually tried.

I have been having dreams like this for as
long as I could remember. He had yet to win one of our fights. But
he kept trying and truth be told, I liked that he did.

“Who are you?” I asked breaking the
entrancing silence that surrounded us.

He raised his head silently and I could see
just the edge of his face peeking out at me behind his cowl. Before
I had a second to breath, he was almost on top of me. I could feel
the cold lamppost behind my back as he pressed against me and
buried his face in my neck. I could feel his warm breath against my
flesh and felt my body respond as the adrenaline coursed through my
veins. His dark black hair brushed against the side of my cheek and
I was taken aback with how much my body responded to him. Not by
his will, but by my choice. I was still in total control of the
situation that meant these decisions were mine to be made.

We stayed like that for a few seconds. I
didn’t want to move, to break this new interlude we had created. I
could feel his harsh breaths next to my ear and feel his body
against me quivering with indecision and need.

He took both of my hands and wrapped them
around his waist, leaning into me with all of his weight. The feel
of him so close to me was intoxicating. I tried to turn my head and
see his face, but he pushed against me harder and dug his chin into
my crook of my neck so I couldn’t move. It was painful and
amazingly provocative.

He kissed my neck gently
and pressed his mouth against my ear. “Stay
away
from him.”

I woke up suddenly in my bed, covered in
sweat and short of breath.

Chapter 2

Coffee. Coffee was always the key of starting
a good day. That was my first thought as I rolled over in my cozy
queen sized bed. I fingered the edge of the mattress peaking out
from the corner where the sheets had started to come off in my
thrashing about. I let the melancholy of the chill air on my face
wake me up as I toyed with the new thoughts of my dream visitor. A
smile played on my lips as I turned towards the source of the chill
breeze. I had left my bedroom window open just a crack last night
and was grateful for it as I rubbed the groggy sleep from my
eyes.

I smacked the alarm on my phone as it went
off again but stayed looking up at the plain white ceiling that
adorned my room. The only thing that I could call my own in the
three-room apartment that I shared with one of my few friends.
Alistair had his own bedroom on the other end of the apartment, but
the hallway wasn’t long enough to keep out the subtle sound of him
and his boyfriend giggling on the rare occasion that they actually
came home. Resigned to the fact that I wouldn’t be falling back
asleep, I swung out of bed and jumped in the shower, but not before
setting the coffee pot to brew in the kitchen. Time to start my day
in the exciting career of supermarket associate.

Freshly showered and sipping coffee, Alistair
met me in the kitchen as I stared out the window onto the
glistening streets of Olympia. It had just rained last night, my
reason for leaving the window open. I loved the sound of a
thunderstorm. “Bad dreams?” he asked startling me out of my
melancholy.

“You heard?”

He grabbed two cups out of the cupboard and
starting filling them with extra sugar. “Yes. You were loud enough
to hear across the entire block. Maybe you should think about
seeing someone. Get some pills. It can’t be normal for you to have
nightmares like that every night.”

I nudged the sugar out of reach. “Two
spoonful’s is really enough, you know. Ted has given you his
unhealthy habits.”

“That’s not all he’s given me,” he said with
a smirk as he kissed my cheek.

“Nope.” I sighed and put my hand up before
handing him back the sugar. “I don’t want any more details or bad
jokes this early in the day please. I slept just fine.”

He took a small sip, testing the sucrose
content. “That’s not what it sounded like from my end. I’m just
saying that maybe you should-”

“I’m fine,” I said cutting him off. “I warned
you before we moved in together that this might happen. I have a
tendency to have very vivid dreams. And if we are bringing up noise
complaints…”

He raised both of his hand in defense and did
a mock bow before I could elaborate, “Alright, you win.” He went
back to his side of the apartment, a cup in both hands, but not
before kissing my temple. “If you ever want to talk.”

It was an open ended option that I had never
taken advantage of. And probably never would.

In my life as a cashier for Kellogg’s
Grocery, I had always had secret hopes of a dashing stranger
walking in and whisking me away from my monotonous life of paper or
plastic. Alas, it had not happened yet so promptly at one o’clock I
threw my hair into a lazy bun on my head and drove to work. Finding
myself in charge of the ten items or less lane, I set about
checking out the daily dose of customers bleeding in and out
through the front doors. Time passes slowly while complacently
bagging assortments of fruit and pastas. I spent that time silently
musing away about my dark midnight stranger.

I had always had very disturbing dreams. More
often than not I found myself dreaming as someone else entirely and
it would consistently involved some sort of traumatic event. I had
dreamt of car accidents, diseases, death and bombing my whole life.
Although vivid and disturbing, there was never a feeling of
emotional attachment to any of the dreams. They were like movies,
without context. But apparently I vocalized whatever emotion I
hadn’t felt. Oh, and I have had dreams of the same man every night
for as long as I could remember. I considered myself a little
unbalanced compared to the normal individual. He was always there
in the beginning and in the end of every night for me. He would
sometimes show me things but he usually spent the time watching,
waiting, but never speaking. Not until last night when I was told
to stay away from him. Him? Him who?

A prickling sensation on the back of my neck
broke me out of my reverie and made me look up. A man was looking
in my direction over the magazine rack. A sharp jolt of electricity
coursed through my nerves as he peered at me expressionless and I
suddenly lost my breath for a moment.

 
He carried a sense of
familiarity about him but as I tried to picture him figuring into
my past, his face became unfocused in my mind. The stranger was
graced with pale features, thick grey tinted glasses and dark
blonde hair that curled over his ear slightly brushing above his
neckline. Wearing a faded dark blue jacket and black jeans that
hung off of his nearly perfect frame, I could tell he was the type
of man who took care of himself and spent a lot of time working
out. He had a solid strong build that showed through the white
T-shirt hiding just below the jacket. His overwhelming confidence
was his most defining feature though. As he looked at me pursing
his thin lips, I could see it radiating off of him in waves of heat
and it gave me stark images of my dream stranger. This was an
ability to take command that could not be learned.

He made no qualms about starring at me though
and within a moment’s notice I was slightly taken aback at the
audacity of the situation, as he impertinently examined me from
head to toe. The look on his face had a slight sense of wonder as
if not believing I could be real.

Not to be intimidated, I looked directly back
at him careful to show no emotion. I was not the waifish girl to
giggle and flirt and would be damned if he thought it was okay to
look at me like an unmoving object. No red touched his cheeks in
embarrassment and as our eyes matched through his glasses I could
see his lips part in surprise for a moment before turning into a
terse frown. He hadn’t expected for me to see him so quickly or to
forcefully return his gaze. He seemed about to speak for a moment,
but thought better of it. Without a second glance the man abruptly
turned and walked away, pulling his cellphone out of his back
pocket as he left the store. I quickly scanned around, but it had
seemed that no one besides me noticed his odd behavior.

I continued my shift without any other
unusual occurrences, but covertly kept looking around to see if he
had come back. To my slight dismay and equal part relief, he had
not and I spent the rest of the day trying to remember where I knew
him. The only familiarity came with the jolt I felt when I had seen
him. It reminded me of a memory from a dream. The feeling of
clarity when you awaken and the dream is fresh in your mind but the
tide of emotions is still high. The further away you moved from the
dream; however it faded into an unreachable memory and so had this
stranger.

Seeing as how I didn’t have a lot of
promising entertainment to keep my mind occupied waiting for me in
my three-room apartment, I tended to fill my days half up with work
and the other half up with drinking. Alistair was a great friend
and a great roommate, but he had his own life to lead. So fifteen
minutes after the end of my shift I found myself sitting alone at a
local dive called Blake’s. Blake’s was your typical small town
Irish pub. They had a short array of deep fried goodness on their
menu and a jut box that only played classic rock. The bar usually
sported a small assortment of working class guys most nights. I
knew a couple of the regular’s enough to nod my head, and avoid any
sort of deep life affirming conversation with them on a regular
basis. This was the type of bar that you went to drink silently
alone and ponder the life that the almighty had given you. This was
a bar to lament about lost love and lost fortunes to the
thirty-five year old bartender who would quietly nod and slip you
an extra shot on the house when he thought you might start getting
too deep in the barrel of loneliness. Besides the occasional frat
party that spilled over, this was the type of bar that someone
could get lost in and to pretend if their life had meaning.

As I squeeze in between the bar stool and the
counter, Eric walked over and threw a coaster down in front of me.
“What can I get for you today Amy?”

I picked up the flimsy thing that sat
silently on the bar mocking me. “Coasters? I thought this place was
too good for cardboard?” referring to one of Eric’s most recent
rants about advertisers taking over every surface of the world.

Eric smirked and tossed it in the trash. “My
Dad told me we can get an extra grand a month from coaster
advertising. If you haven’t noticed the economic downturn may be
over on Wall Street, but life hasn’t quite swung back to the norm
here.” Eric was a fully-fledged master degree holding financial
advisor that had once had big dreams of moving to Chicago or NY to
work in the stock market. Unfortunately his father, Blake, had come
down with lung cancer right before he had graduated and Eric, being
the good son of a proud Irish American family had settled in to the
fact that he would keep his father’s business afloat as long as the
old man was still around to see it. He still played the stocks a
bit online, but the excitement it had held in his youth had
curtailed itself behind his focus on his father and only living
relative’s health. Luckily the bar saw no end of steady business,
since even in the worst of times people need somewhere to down
cheap beer and liquor. Although their family wasn’t rolling in
cash, they could afford to put food on the table and pay for
Blake’s medical treatment, which was more than some people and why
Eric was always on the lookout to help his father make a few extra
bucks.