by Frankie Rose
MY EXISTENCE is a dream. Time has no real meaning for a while—I drift and fade from a world where everything is too bright, too loud, into something less tangible, something less painful, until I can’t really tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t anymore. The beeping sound at my head is the only means of counting time. Eventually, I don’t even notice the beeping. Sometimes a rough hand in mine brings me back to the soft bed I lay in, and sometimes it’s gentle words from familiar voices that tempt me back into my body. For a long time, the pain of returning is just too much to bear and so I flee from it, preferring the abyssal peace of the dark places inside my mind. It’s comforting there.
But I can only hide for so long. My body wants me back, wants me to move, to confront the pain so I can heal. And no matter how hard I try to ignore it, it becomes more persistent each day. And then, one day, I don’t have a choice anymore.
I wake up.
“Avery? Look, she’s waking up. Somebody get a nurse.”
A throbbing ache punches through my head as I open my eyes. Everything is white for a second as my eyes struggle to focus, remembering how to process colors and shapes. And then Morgan is sitting on the edge of my bed, brushing her hand slowly up and down my arm. Her lip is wobbling like crazy as tears race down her face.
“Morgan?” My throat feels like someone took a sandblaster to it. I wheeze painfully, and she reaches forward and helps me sip some water out of a white, ridged, plastic cup. I choke on most of it, but the water feels good running down my skin, pooling at the hollow of my throat.
“Oh my God, Ave. I never thought you’d come back. I never thought—” her voice catches and she can’t speak anymore. Her face crumples into a half smile half grimace and she leans forward and buries her face into my hair, hugging me tight. The pressure of her skin against mine hurts like crazy.
“Morgan? Morgan,” I rasp, “I can’t breathe.”
She lets go immediately. “Oh, sorry. I just… I can’t…” she starts crying and shaking her head, holding her hands up to hide her face. I reach up and brush my fingers against the back of her hand, and the effort of the movement nearly kills me. She pulls in a deep breath. “I’m sorry.” She sniffs, wiping her face with the sleeve of her black shirt. “Your uncle’s here.” Her voice is still wobbly. “He ran to get the nurse. He’s gonna be right back, Ave. We’ve all been so worried.”
I finally take a look around and notice my surroundings. Light pours in through a huge window, revealing mountains beyond. To my left, an IV bag drips at regular intervals, while a heart monitor maps out the fragile perseverance of my heart. Everything smells of bleach, and the sheets on the bed I’m laying in are starched within an inch of their lives. I’m in hospital, in Wyoming by the looks of things.
“What…what happened?” I manage.
A torn look flashes across Morgan’s face. “I’m not supposed to tell you anything until you remember, but fuck that. Are you sure you want to know?” The last thing I recall is a sinking, falling feeling, and unbearable pain pulling me into a forever darkness. I nod my head.
“I need to hear it.”
“You were drugged by that insane police woman, and Luke found you. He attacked her, and both he and you got shot in the process. You fell into the pool but Luke managed to knock that bitch out and jumped in to save you. He gave you CPR for forty minutes until the ambulance could get to you through the snow. He nearly bled out and died, Ave.”
Tears blind me halfway through Morgan’s brief description of what I’d believed were going to be the last minutes of my life. So I’d fallen into the pool. That explains why it had felt like my mouth was filling with water; because it actually had been.
Luke had been shot trying to save me. He nearly died defending me, giving me CPR while his own life blood seeped out of him. I suddenly feel sick.
“Where was he shot?” I whisper.
Morgan’s smile fades a little. “In the chest. The bullet punctured his lung and shattered. Three different pieces of shrapnel lodged inside his chest cavity. He had two operations, one to remove the shrapnel and then another when he coded later on. They didn’t know what was wrong until they went back in and realized they’d missed a piece and it was pressing down on his aorta. He nearly died all over again, but he pulled through. You’re so alike, Ave. You’re both fighters.”
My first reaction is to try and sit up. It hurts like hell, though, and the room spins.
“Whoa, girl, where d’you think you’re going?”
“I need to see him, Morgan. I need to see with my own two eyes that he’s okay. What room is he in?”
She shakes her head, pressing her palm against my shoulder, forcing me back into the bed. “He’s not in any of the rooms, Ave. He was checked out of hospital three weeks ago. He’s still recovering, but he’s up and walking around just fine now.”
“Three weeks?” That information just won’t compute. Won’t make any sense inside my head. “How long have I been out for?”
Morgan pulls up one shoulder, looking a little sheepish. “Not long, chica. Only seven weeks.”
My mouth hangs open. I’ve been unconscious for seven weeks? I’m no doctor but even I know it’s a miracle that I’ve woken up at all after being gone for so long. I should have noticed that the mountains out the window aren’t covered in snow anymore. I stare down at my bed sheet, feeling awful.
“I missed Tate’s funeral,” I say quietly.
“Yeah,” Morgan agrees. “It’s okay. I’m sure he knows you would have been there if you could have been.” I squeeze her hand, hating that she’s trying to comfort me when I should have been there to support her.
“I’m sorry, Morgan. You had to go through that on your own…”
She shushes me, squeezing my hand back. “It’s okay. My mom actually came with me. She’s…she’s been surprisingly good actually.” That’s unexpected news. Maybe bridges are starting to be built there. “The cops actually arrested the person responsible for the drugs.” Morgan continues cautiously. “Leslie’s been remanded until her court date later on in the month. They’re trying to charge her with manslaughter.”
“Leslie? My roommate Leslie?”
“I know. I didn’t want to tell you. I just didn’t want to have to deal with it at the time. I’m sorry.”
I had been way off base about Noah, then. “So she’s a drug dealer?”
Morgan nods, yes. “She wanted to show her parents she was capable of earning her own way. She wanted to leave college with more money than when she started, and she figured selling pills was an easy, lucrative way to do that. She knowingly bought pills that were cut with goodness knows what.”
“My God. I had absolutely no idea.”
Morgan just shrugs. “You were shot in the leg in case you were wondering. And the quacks thought you’d suffered major brain damage from lack of oxygen to the brain. They told your uncle that the kindest thing to do would be to take you off life support, that you weren’t going to come back and if you did you were gonna be a vegetable. But Luke wouldn’t even let them talk about it. He punched a doctor and got banned from the hospital for a week. He groveled until they eventually let him back in.”
I trace my fingertips over the bump in the sheets that is my right thigh, feeling a twinge of discomfort when I try to flex my toes. Shot in the leg. That’s what that secondary pain had been. I close my eyes, taking a deep breath. I feel like I’m on the brink of losing it. “I need to see him, Morgan. Right now. Where is he?”
“I’m right here,” a soft voice answers me. I open my eyes and Luke is standing in the doorway, his left arm bound against his body in a sling. As always he’s wearing a black t-shirt and faded out jeans, but there are dark shadows under his eyes. They tell stories of countless nights of lost sleep, of anxiety and worry. He looks like the broken little boy my father had taught to play Blackbird. My heart breaks a little for the lost, haunted look he wears. “You woke up,” he states. Hi
s voice is flat, expressionless. I nod my head.
“Been a while, I hear.”
Luke doesn’t say anything. He just stares at me. Morgan clears her throat. “I think I’m going to go see where Brandon’s got to. A girl wakes up from a coma, you expect the nurses to come running, right? Sheesh.” She stands and ducks past Luke, who doesn’t move an inch when she sidles past him through the doorway.
“Are you okay?” I whisper. It’s a dumb question; I can tell just from looking at him that he’s far from okay. He blinks, and the action seems to wake him from his trance. He steps into the room and pauses, looking behind him before he closes the door softly. He paces towards the bed and stares down at my hands clasped in my lap.
“I would have killed her. I wanted to, but I couldn’t leave you. If I stopped pressing down on your chest, you would have been gone forever. I kept going, Ave. I kept going.” His eyes are filled with tears. I reach out and take his right hand, hanging limply at his side, and pull it to my cheek. He is so cold. I can smell cigarettes on him, and I know he’s been smoking.
“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I ran out on you.” I promised him I wouldn’t. He told me twice that I would hightail it the second I found out about his past, and after everything I’d said in return he’d been right. I’d done exactly that. I’m disgusted with myself as I press the back of his hand against my forehead. His fingers twitch, wanting to curl around mine, but they don’t. I think he’s too numb to do anything but stand there and let me touch him. “Will you forgive me, Luke? Please say you’ll forgive me?”
A strangled sound comes out of his throat as he sinks down and sits on the edge of my bed. “You have nothing to be sorry for, Ave. You still don’t know what happened back when I was a kid. I should have been honest with you when we started all of this. That would have been the right way to do things.” He smiles a sad smile. “Why is it that the right way is always the most scary way, huh?”
I’m too overwhelmed to answer. I wait with baited breath to see what he’ll say next. Whether he’ll tell me that he’s happy I’m okay, but he really should be getting back to New York. That I screwed everything up and it’s too late for us. He clears his throat and I prepare myself for the worst.
“If anything, I’m the one who should be sorry.” I can’t keep the surprise from my face. Luke holds a hand up to stop me before I can start speaking. “I should have figured it all out. Chloe would never have been able to get close to you if I’d realized she was involved in this whole thing.”
“You couldn’t have known, Luke. How could you? She’s a cop for crying out loud. She knew exactly what to do and what not to do to stay under the radar.”
“She bragged about that,” Luke admits. A look of pure bewilderment crosses over his face. “She told us everything. They worked together, the four of them, each took it in turns to kill whoever they felt like killing. Chloe knew the four different signatures would throw us off. She fed the others information about our investigations. Made sure we never got too close.”
The one question that has been bothering me since Chloe pulled the ski mask off her head and revealed herself back in the basement forces its way out of my mouth. “I just don’t get it. Why? Why would she want to kill anyone in the first place?”
“Her twin sister died when she was eight. Their parents had strychnine traps all through the crawl space under their house to deal with a rodent problem. The two of them crawled under there one day during summer and Chloe dared Michelle to eat the stuff. She didn’t realize it would kill her. Anyway, it changed Chloe. She became obsessed with her sister and the way she’d died, and how it was all her fault. She wanted to relive it over and over again.”
I shiver, the horror of the story sinking deep inside my bones. Luke sees my reaction. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s all over now. She’s going to prison for the rest of her life. Let’s not talk about that.” He inches closer up the bed, a determined look forming, and slowly reaches out to stroke my hair back out of my face. I close my eyes and lean into his touch. My eyes are stinging again. Sadness weighs heavily on me, fear racing through me as I pluck up the courage to ask my next question.
“Luke, what happens now?”
His hand stills. “What do you mean?”
“Well…” my voice hitches. “We obviously can’t—”
Luke moves instantly, closing the gap between us. He scoops his hand beneath my head, supporting me as he pulls me to him. “Avery, I’m so sorry for letting you down. For being so selfish. I just have to hold you one last time.”
My throat closes up, refusing to let me breathe properly. He can’t do it. I hurt him too badly when I ran out on him. I want to tell him that I understand now, that my mother’s vicious words confused me and I wished I’d stuck around so he could explain. I guess I deserve this—him leaving me—but that knowledge doesn’t temper the all-consuming devastation I experience as he lets me go. I finally crumble when he pulls back, and a loud sob escapes from my mouth.
Luke doesn’t even try to hide the tears rolling slowly down his cheeks. “I understand, Avery. I really do. I get that too much shit has happened for you to want this—” he gestures between the two of us, and the motion means so much. It means us; me and him, everything that we could ever be. Confusion crowds inside my head. He thinks I don’t want him?
“Of course I want it, Luke. I love you,” I whisper.
His brows draw together. “But you just said, yourself…‘We obviously can’t…’”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I was going to say we obviously can’t carry on with all the secrets, Luke. I need to trust you and you need to trust me. Because this isn’t something either of us can run from anymore. Our pasts keep trying to bury us. Brandon was right; we need to help dig each other out. Which means—”
“Which means I need to tell you everything that happened to me. Starting from the beginning, right?”
I nod my head, suddenly tired. “Can you do that?”
Steel resolve solidifies in Luke’s eyes. “I can. I will.” He’s telling the truth. He really will tell me. Finally, all of the secrets, all the pain acting as a buffer between us, pushing us apart, it’s all going to be over. Luke inhales, preparing himself. “Firstly, I’ve signed the contract. I’m going on tour with DMF. I’m no longer a cop, Beautiful. There’s only one person I want to protect now, and that’s you. Secondly, you father’s been cleared of all the charges against him. You should know, he didn’t kill any of those men, nor any of the girls. I knew it all along.”
A surge of emotion so powerful floods through me, bringing tears to my eyes. To call it relief just isn’t doing the sensation justice. Luke reaches out for my hand. “Avery, your dad did do something though.” He looks away, his eyes shining brightly as he stares at the floor. “He did kill one person.”
And like a candle flame being snuffed out, suddenly the relief is gone. Vanished in a heartbeat. It isn’t over. After everything, after all the pain and hurt, something still remains. Adrenalin lights my nerve endings on fire as I wait to hear what Luke will say next. A single tear forms on the tip of one of his eyelashes.
“He killed my father for me, Ave. He protected me. He saved me. And I'm ready now. I'm ready to tell you why.”
Summer, the next book in the Four Seasons series will be released in October 2014! Make sure you add it to your TBR to catch more of Avery and Luke!!
In the meantime, if you enjoyed Winter, don’t forget to leave a review!
Thanks so much!
Nikita
