Beyond Wild Imaginings
By
Brieanna Robertson
World Castle Publishing
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used factiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
World Castle Publishing
Pensacola, Florida
Copyright © by Brieanna Robertson 2010
ISBN: 9781938243271
Second Edition World Castle Publishing April 15, 2012
http://www.worldcastlepublishing.com
License Notes
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you respecting the hard work of this author.
Cover: Karen Fuller
To Katrina—
You who began it all. The first story told. The first world created.
You will never cease to be because you will never be forgotten.
You and yours will exist in the Creative Realm for all time.
And to Arnold and Folks—who always ate the eggs.
Chapter One
The pounding on the door was persistent. It had been going on for at least five minutes, and the person was getting increasingly more demanding. Kelly gave a weary sigh, knowing that the person on the other side wasn’t going to give up. It wasn’t in her nature, and it was way too much to hope that she would actually get the hint that Kelly didn’t want to be bothered. Why couldn’t everyone just leave her be?
“Kelly, for the love of all that’s holy!” The person on the other side of the door shouted. “If you don’t open the door right this second, so help me, I will kick it down myself!”
Kelly rolled her eyes. She knew she would too. That was the problem. Deciding she didn’t need to add a locksmith bill to her pile, she hoisted herself off the couch and trudged to the door. She unlocked it and turned the knob, but then promptly pivoted and headed back toward the couch.
“It’s about friggin’ time.” The door banged open, and a tall, blonde woman entered in a gray business suit and a lavender silk shirt. She stopped in the entryway and blinked rapidly as she looked around the apartment. “Holy cow, Kelly,” she breathed.
Kelly sighed again as she sat back down. “Come on in, Rachel,” she muttered. She kicked an empty box off the chair next to the couch. “Have a seat.”
Rachel took another look around the room, and Kelly could tell by her stunned and slightly disgusted expression that she was anything but pleased. She glanced around her apartment and sighed. Boxes were stacked everywhere, and half-opened ones were purging their contents all over the floor. The coffee table sat at a bizarre angle between the couch and the dismantled entertainment center, and it was littered with trash and candy wrappers. A garbage can in the kitchen was near to bursting.
Kelly shifted her glance to herself. She was in a blue bath robe and red and blue flannel pajamas. Her strawberry-blonde hair stuck out in short, messy pigtails, and she knew that dark circles were smudged under her eyes. She knew she looked awful. She just really didn’t care.
Rachel shook her head. “Kel, good lord. You’ve been here for two weeks now. Have you unpacked anything?”
Dismal, Kelly slid a glower toward her sister. “You know, not everyone is an obsessive-compulsive neat freak like you.”
Rachel snorted and shut the door. “Putting your stuff away before the turn of the century is a far cry from being obsessive-compulsive.” Her expression became concerned as she went to sit in the chair Kelly had indicated. “I know you don’t want to be here. I know you’d much rather be back in your cute little suburban paradise in Jersey, but you may as well make this apartment your own. Not putting your stuff away isn’t going to make all of this a bad dream.”
Kelly looked down at her lap and toyed with her fingers. “My dreams are the only good things in my life,” she mumbled.
Rachel frowned. “Have you been able to write, at least?”
“Yeah,” Kelly said dryly, “but they’re mostly hate letters to David and the two-bit tramp he left me for.”
Rachel’s eyes softened and she reached over to grasp her sister’s wrist. “It will get better. You have to believe that. David was a loser. The fact that he left you for his secretary while you were lying in a hospital bed proved that. Moving to the city is a good thing! It will give you a chance to start all over!”
Kelly forced a smile. Rachel was just trying to be encouraging, but she really wasn’t helping. Yeah, okay, so David had been a loser. She’d happened to love that loser, and try as she might, she couldn’t bring herself to shrug it off like everyone wanted her to. She couldn’t banish him from her memory no matter how badly she wished she could. She didn’t want to unpack her stuff. She didn’t want to go to a singles bar with her overly metro sexual friend and find someone who could “rock her world” for a night. She didn’t want to take up Pilates, or yoga, or grow bonsai trees and feng shui her apartment. She just wanted everyone to leave her alone.
“So, you’ve been sleeping, right?” Rachel prodded. “That’s progress.”
Kelly swallowed and nodded slightly.
“You said your dreams were good. What are they about?”
Kelly’s lips turned up at the corners. “Mainly a beautiful, winged man.”
Rachel blinked, then frowned. “Did you say a winged man?”
Kelly nodded and her smile grew. “Dark hair, violet eyes, fantastic smile…and big, black wings.” She shrugged. “Kinda Gothic.”
Rachel stared at her for a second before she shrugged. “Well, I guess that’s what makes you a famous writer, right? Having guys like that living in your subconscious.”
Kelly giggled a little in spite of herself. Maybe that’s what the dreams were about. A hero for a future novel. Strangely, though, that wasn’t how it felt. It wasn’t the lightning bolt sensation she usually got when an idea struck her. He was just…there. He seemed very familiar somehow, and every time she dreamed of him, she slept like a baby.
“Well, I have to get to work,” Rachel said suddenly. “I just wanted to check on you. I’m coming over tonight and we’re going to start unpacking.” She stood and pointed her finger at Kelly. “I mean it,” she said with her eyebrows raised. “No more wallowing.”
Kelly rolled her eyes, waved halfheartedly, and waited for Rachel to leave. Once the door clicked shut, she leaned back against the couch and heaved a sigh. What part of “leave me alone” did no one seem to understand? She was twenty-nine years old. She wasn’t a child. She didn’t need to be treated like one.
She stared at all of her unopened boxes for a while and tried to will herself to unpack one of them, but it didn’t work. She didn’t want to look at all of her stuff. All of the things in those boxes were from a different time and a different life. She knew what would happen as soon as she opened them. Her heart would flood with tons of memories of a relationship that had all been a load of crap. She would cry, down a half gallon of ice cream, drink a bottle of wine while watching a depressing movie, and then go to bed just so she could get a moment of peace. She really didn’t want to have to go through all that again.
She hated the hours of the day when she was actually awake. Consciousness brought awareness, and with awareness came the knowledge that she had no life anymore. No routine, no path, no nothing. Her whole world had been oblit
erated in a matter of months, starting from the moment she’d been broadsided on the road.
She’d broken a leg and her wrist and had received a nasty gash along her side that had ended up getting a stubborn infection. She’d remained in the hospital, being pumped full of antibiotics for two weeks, and during that time, her boyfriend of three years had decided that screwing his secretary was more important than visiting Kelly, or bringing her flowers, or telling her how happy he was that she wasn’t dead.
As soon as she’d been released from the hospital, he had sent her a text message. A text message. He hadn’t even had the balls to call her. He’d told her he was in love with Kimmy, or Kami, or whatever the heck her name was, and that Kelly had only been someone he’d used to pass through a difficult stage in his life. She still had no idea what that really meant.
She’d moved out of Jersey at the insistence of her sister and her best friend Chad, and now she had nothing. Only shards of a life she’d once had, but had burnt down around her while she’d watched in stunned horror. Her editor was constantly harping on her because she had a deadline for a manuscript due in a month’s time, but Kelly didn’t really care. It was impossible to write about anything when her mind was full of crap. It was even more impossible to write about love and fantasy when all she wanted was to puncture every heart balloon she saw and blow up cars that had “Just Married” written on the back.
With a groan, she rolled herself up and then into a standing position and went over to her kitchen window. It was large and overlooked the city. She opened it up and watched as all the cars sped along below. None of them knew that she was in pain. None of them knew that her heart was shattered. No one knew, and no one cared. They just went along with their hectic lives unaware that thirteen floors above a woman had lost every vestige of light and hope in her world.
A tear rolled down Kelly’s cheek, and she bit her bottom lip. She hated that she couldn’t get out of the blackness she had fallen into. Everyone seemed to think that she could and should, but she didn’t know how. She felt so alone and so lost.
Sudden wrath filled her at the thought of her ex-boyfriend. He had done this to her. He had ripped everything away from her. He had killed her heart and destroyed her entire existence while she tried not to get gangrene and kick the bucket. He’d had so much power over her, and he’d known it. And he’d used it to his advantage. Now he was living a new life with his blow-up-doll wannabe, and she was stuck in a desolate pit still pining for him. She hated him. She loathed the very thought of him, and yet, she ached without him. It was a sick and malignant cycle.
With a snarl, she grabbed a small box that was near her and flung it out the window. She watched it sail to the street below, and she smiled in sick satisfaction as its contents burst out and rolled around on the road. A horn blaring and a car screeching to a halt reminded her that she could have very easily hit a car or a person, and her stomach twisted at the realization of how careless she had been.
She was going to go back inside, but a soft breeze touched her cheeks and she sighed. She briefly wondered what it felt like to soar through the air like that box had done. What did it feel like in the few seconds of freedom before impact? Did it feel like flying? Without really thinking, she stepped out onto the ledge and peered down as far as she could. The breeze touched her again, tousling her hair. She smiled and closed her eyes. Freedom. What did that feel like, she wondered?
She didn’t know if she’d felt free since she’d been a little girl. When she’d been small, everything had seemed so bright and magical to her. Now her life was full of stringent deadlines and unpredictable, traumatic events. “Just like everyone else’s life, Kelly,” she said to herself. “You’re no one special.”
She opened her eyes with another heavy sigh and scanned over the sun’s reflection in the skyscraper across the street. New York City. The largest city in the United States. Who was she but one little speck? An insignificant part of an enormous whole. No one.
Looking down sadly, she felt more tears sting her eyes and started to turn to go back inside when a flock of pigeons flew up in front of her so unexpectedly that she jumped and lost her footing. She screamed in absolute terror as her foot slipped over the ledge, and she saw her window retreating as she plummeted down to the very street her box had just expelled its innards onto.
Time seemed to slow, and she was agonizingly aware of the thudding of her heart and the tears that leaked out of her eyes. No, this did not feel like flying. It felt like death. She closed her eyes and braced herself for what she knew would come, and briefly wondered what Rachel would think when she found out. Everyone would think she’d killed herself. They would never know just how badly she wanted to live. She’d been fighting for life ever since the accident. No one would know that now.
Suddenly, something strong and solid grabbed a hold of her wrist. A gasp caught in her throat as her descent toward the ground slowed. The wind rushed past her face, and she felt as if she was soaring like one of the pigeons that had just sentenced her to death. Before she could figure it out, the sensation was gone, and she found herself standing on firm ground.
Kelly looked around her in shock, shaking from head to toe, and was more perplexed than she had ever been in her life. She touched her cheeks and found them wet from her tears. She spun frantically, trying to make some kind of sense out of what had just happened to her, but people, oblivious to anything out of the ordinary, just bumped past her on the sidewalk. She cast her eyes up to the sky in a last attempt to find who, or what, had rescued her, and she frowned as a large, black feather drifted listlessly toward where she stood. She held out her hand and watched as it fell directly into her palm, as if that had been its destination the entire time. She ran an inquisitive finger lightly along the quill, and a strange shiver went through her body.
As the reality of the situation hit her hard, Kelly clutched the feather to her chest and tore back into her apartment building. One second she had been plunging to her death and the next she was standing on the sidewalk. It was freakish, and she didn’t understand it at all. All she knew was that the apartment she had abhorred only that morning seemed like the only safe haven she had at the moment.
* * * *
“Girl, I am telling you, it was like a swarm of locusts descended on that Starbucks.”
Kelly turned her vacant stare over to her best friend Chad as he used the key she had given him to open up her door. His six-feet-three, nicely toned self was dressed in a remarkably pink shirt that only he could get away with and a pair of jeans that hugged his slender waist and hips like they were tailor made. His dark brown hair was gelled into an immaculate, every-hair-in-place disarray, and he was carrying a drink holder with two caffeinated somethings in it.
“I’m serious. Don’t go to the Starbucks on the corner of Fifty-fourth and—” He stopped mid-sentence as he closed the door and looked up. He blinked in much the same way Rachel had that morning. “Good friggin’ lord,” he breathed. “Am I in the right apartment?”
Kelly couldn’t help but smile. After her rather…unusual and harrowing experience earlier, she had gone straight into her apartment and decided that Rachel had been right about one thing. The time for wallowing was over. She only had one life, and she had been about two seconds away from it ending…again. She was not about to let her stupid ex-boyfriend claim anymore of it. Somehow, miraculously, she had been given a second chance, and she was going to make the most of it. Actually, if she counted the accident, she supposed it would be a third chance, but she wasn’t about to test out the nine-lives theory. The last time she’d checked, she wasn’t a cat.
She’d gotten rid of eighty percent of her things. Called a moving truck and had them haul it all down to a charity store. They were just things. She could get new things. Things that didn’t remind her of painful events. She’d kept her furniture, but most everything else was gone. She’d only kept the essentials. The apartment that had looked like a war zone was now practica
lly barren.
“Well, I have to say, this is definitely a marked improvement,” Chad said as he set the drink holder down on Kelly’s now clean glass coffee table. “A little sparse, but better than bedlam. What lit a fire under you today?” He flopped onto the chair by the couch and slung one of his long legs over the arm.
Kelly scratched at her temple and wondered just exactly what she should say. Somehow, she didn’t think that, “Well, I was kinda standing on the window ledge when some pigeons scared the crap out of me and made me fall, but while I was falling, some mysterious who-knows-what snatched my arm up and put me on solid ground” would go over remarkably well. “I guess I just got sick of looking at all the mess. Rachel was over here hounding me this morning and told me that she was going to come over here tonight and help me unpack.” She forced a smile, even though she was still feeling very unsettled about the morning’s events. “Like I really need her going through my stuff, deciding what I don’t need, and throwing things out without my permission.”
Chad arched an eyebrow. “So you threw it all out yourself. That works, I guess.” He frowned suddenly. “Your sister is something else. Doesn’t she have enough control over her own life? She feels the need to control everyone else’s too?”
Kelly shrugged. “It’s how she’s always been.”
Chad shook his head and wrinkled his nose playfully. “Well, I can see that, even though your apartment has made progress, you have not. You’re still in those grungy old PJs. Here.” He handed her one of the coffees. “Drink that and then go take a shower, for crying out loud. Your hair is so greasy I could fry bacon in it.”
Kelly scowled and flung a pillow at him. His laughter made her feel a little better and gave her a semblance of normality. It was almost enough to make her forget about what had happened earlier. That was until Chad noticed the black feather sitting on her coffee table.
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