Summer (Four Seasons #2) (24 page)

I remember Mrs. Woodward distinctly. She had a hairy mole on her chin, and she never wore a bra, despite having humongous, pendulous boobs that were almost down to her waist by the time I left Breakwater High. They’re probably on the floor by now. “Sweet Jesus,” I sigh.
 

“Right. You’re basically turning life upside down here in small town Wyoming, big brother.”

“Fantastic.” My phone starts making an urgent beeping sound in my ear, notifying me that someone else is trying to call me. I look down at the screen and Cole’s name flashes at me. “Ahhh, sorry, Em. I have another call. I should probably take it, otherwise I’m gonna have a very anxious guitarist on my doorstep any second.”

“Wait, wait. Mom just walked in. She wants to talk to you.”

“Em, I—” Too late, though. She’s gone. Cole’s call cuts off, silencing the line so that the only thing I can now hear is my mother as she scuffles around in the background, probably taking off her jacket and dumping her grocery bags on the counter. And then she’s saying, “Hello? Is that my infamous son?” into the cracked receiver in the kitchen where I used to hide from my drunken father in the pantry, and it feels like my heart is being cleaved in two.
 

“Sure is,” I tell her. “You okay?”
 

“Of course, baby. Are
you
? You don’t sound like you’re okay.”

“I am. I’m fine. Really. I think this is just a bad line or something.” I can’t tell her about the shit going down with Marika and D.M.F., and I can’t tell her about my sessions with Rafferty. I want to, but I’m feeling so frayed around the edges right now that I won’t get the words out. I just want to sit here and listen to my mother’s voice, and hopefully by the end of the call I’ll feel better.
 

“That’s good, love. How’s Los Angeles?”

“Hot,” I laugh. “Plastic.” This isn’t what she wants to hear, though, so I tack, “Inspiring,” on the end, too. “You meet so many creative people every day. You can’t throw a stone without hitting a writer, a musician and an actor all in one go. It’s very motivating.” I keep my mouth shut about the fact that LA would dissolve into a Hunger Games style free-for-all if the police weren’t here to keep things civil. All those budding wannabe actors, writers and musicians would be shooting each other with crossbows and clawing each other’s eyeballs out if it meant they could get ahead. It’s a savage place, filled with savages.
 

“So you’re having a great time, then?” Mom asks. “I have to say, Luke, that music video…”

“I know.”

“I barely recognized you.”

“Me, too,” I say quietly.
 

We stay quiet for a little while after that, and a lot’s communicated through the silence. I never wanted to tell my mother what Dad was doing to me when I was a kid. I felt dirty about it. Wrong. And I thought if she knew all the depraved, fucked up things I’d participated in and witnessed in order to keep my father’s fists out of my face, she’d love me less. When everything came out after my father was dead and buried, cold in the ground, I still couldn’t really talk to her about it. Instead we’d sit there in silence, her feeling hollowed out to the very bones of her body for not for a second suspecting what had been going on, and me feeling tainted and broken in my adolescent skin. We’d found a way to share our thoughts and feelings through simply sitting together and allowing each other to hurt, without ever saying a word.
 

“You have mail here, y’know?” Mom says eventually. “Looks important. Want me to forward it on for you?”

“No, just open it for me,” I say quietly, grateful for the change of topic. Glad to be saved from the burden of thinking about dad. The old bastard’s ghost emerges from the far recesses of my mind and comes at me, knocking my feet out from underneath me so he can grab hold of me by one ankle and drag me kicking and screaming back into the shadows with him far too often these days.
 

 
I hum a piece of music while Mom puts the phone down to fetch the mail she was talking about. Just hearing the rise and fall of the music grounds me again. Brings some semblance of order to the chaos in my head. When I realize that it’s a Fallen Saints song, one of their biggest, most successful hits, I can’t help but laugh a little. I’ve been humming that song for years in the pauses between work and coffee and laundry and driving and love making and everything else in between, and now here I am with a chance to not only see them perform the song live, but to support them at the Staples Center, and I’m turning it down. Funny how things turn out.
 

“All right, Luke. You there, baby?”

“Yeah.” Mom’s lost that laid back, dreamy note to her voice that she spoke with before. She sounds focused and tense, now. Slightly worried? “What is it?”

“You have a couple of letters from the bank. Nothing important. But there’s a letter here from the Wyoming D.A.’s office, too. They’re calling you back to Breakwater for a court hearing.”

“What the hell for?” My spine’s straightened, as though an electric current’s being passed through me, tightening nerve endings all over my body.
 

“Chloe,” Mom says. “She’s applied for an appeal. Looks like it’s been granted. They want you to repeat your testimony.”

“When?” I can’t really breathe, but I manage to squeeze the word out.
 

“September 9
th
. That’s fast. Isn’t that fast? I thought, if she wanted to do something like that, it would take months to get a court date. Seems strange. Not really giving you much time to decide if you’re going to go or not, are they? God, I need a beer all of a sudden.”
 

She’s rambling—something she does when she’s nervous. “I don’t get to decide if I want to go, Mom,” I tell her. “It’s a subpoena, isn’t it?”

She pauses, probably re-reading the letter, and then, “Yes.”

“Then I have to go. And, yeah, it probably would take longer normally, but Chloe’s got a lot of friends on the police force. The Wyoming D.A. has probably been working with her for twenty years. When you have friends in high places, these things tend to be expedited.”

“I…I suppose I just don’t…understand. Didn’t she
confess
? And what about double jeopardy? I thought someone couldn’t be tried for the same crime twice? ” I can tell my mother’s on the brink of tears right now.
 

“She did confess, yes. But she could say she was in shock. Coerced. Not in her right mind. She could be pleading insanity for all we know. And this isn’t the same thing as double jeopardy, Mom. She’s not being retried for the crime. She’s appealing it. Don’t worry, though. Everyone knows what she did. There’s no way she’s changing anyone’s mind. It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

She makes an unsure noise on the other end of the phone, and I can hear Emma asking what’s wrong in the background. I speak to Mom for another few minutes, and then to Emma as she rants and rages about the social injustice of a woman like Chloe Mathers even being afforded the luxury of an appeal, and then I’m telling her that I’ll speak to her soon and hanging up the phone. I’m numb. Completely and utterly numb.
 

Ironically, when the sensation begins to return to my body, the twisted scar in my chest where Chloe Mathers shot me is throbbing like a bitch.
 

I can’t figure out whether to laugh or cry. Being called back to Breakwater to an appeal being held for the woman who tried to murder me should be an awful prospect, and yet it’s not. Chloe isn’t getting out of jail. There’s just no way. Psychopaths love attention. They bond with their victims on an intimate level. Chloe loved the courtroom circus, loved the cameras on her, loved answering the incessant questions that were thrown at her for days on end as the case was being heard. The only time Chloe wasn’t glowing or practically bouncing out of her fucking chair was when Avery was called to the stand. For weeks before the trial, I coached Avery through what was going to happen when she walked into the court room, what she was going to be asked, how the defense was probably going to trip her up, how they might imply that she and I had concocted the story and attacked Chloe for our own unknown purposes. I’d spent hours calming her down, and I’d told her that she wasn’t to make eye contact with Chloe under any circumstances. On the day that Avery had to give her evidence, she’d been incredibly nervous but also incredibly brave. My girl did exactly as I told her to. She explained what happened clearly and slowly and she didn’t panic when the defense tried to unseat her. And she didn’t even look in Chloe’s direction, let alone made eye contact with her.
 

You could see the pure fury in Chloe’s eyes. She wanted to see how afraid and small Avery felt. She wanted to know how permanently and irrevocably she had damaged her, and Avery had given her nothing. That was the day Chloe was found guilty of her crimes and Avery had walked out of the courthouse with her head held high.
 

I’m certain that this new appeal is a mind game on Chloe’s part. She’s been rotting in hell for the past nine months and no one is paying any attention to her anymore. She wants to be a part of the circus again. She wants the cameras back in her face, and more questions thrown at her. But most importantly, she wants to see Avery again. And this time she wants her to be broken.
 

I find my conversation with Cole in my messages and I write him a text, explaining what’s just happened.
 

Cole:
Fuck man, that bitch is crazy!

Me:
Clinically insane for sure.

Cole:
So you HAVE to go? What does that mean for Fallen Saints? I know you don’t wanna talk about it, man. But, y’know…

Me:
It means that you should tell Marika she can play with us for the concert. If the appeal runs long, I won’t be back in time for it.

Cole:
Fuck. And then what?

Me:
Then she plays lead and you sing.
 

Cole:
And if you CAN get back in time?

Me:
Then she plays lead and I sing. You guys get your Saints experience, and then you think long and hard about whether you want me to stick around afterward. I haven’t changed my mind. I’m either a guitarist for you guys, or I’m a cop back home in New York. It’s your call.

Cole:
Not even a choice, man. If Marika wants to blackmail us, we’ll give her what she wants for one night. After that, she’s gone. There’s only one Lucas Reid.

My face feels odd. Takes me a second to figure out why: because I’m smiling. I haven’t smiled in so long. I mean, yes, I’ve plastered on a grimace that resembles something similar when I’ve been around other people, if only to get them to stop asking if I’m okay, but right now I’m alone. I’m not faking for anyone. I’m just actually, very weirdly happy. Because, yes, going back to Breakwater and dealing with this shit all over again is going to blow, but on the other hand…I get to see Avery. It will be under terrible circumstances, and it’s going to be fucking harder than hell to face her, but I get to see my girl again.

TWENTY-THREE

AVERY

I’ve never been one to act out of rage. I’ve never been one to lose my temper at all, even when I was being kicked and punched and harassed at every turn all throughout high school, I never once got so pissed off that I retaliated. It’s just not who I am. Or it wasn’t, anyway. It appears I just hadn’t been pushed quite far enough. When I see Luke on MTV with some smoking hot woman riding him like a motherfucking theme park attraction, I’m suddenly a different person altogether. I’m fury personified. I’m so angry I can taste metal in my mouth. I’m so angry, I—

The woman opens those pouty, bruised lips of hers and grinds her barely covered tits up against Luke’s bare chest, and then her pointy little tongue darts out and she fucking
licks
him, up his neck, toward his ear, and it’s like the lights are simply switched off. Everything goes black. Or red. Or white. I don’t really know. All I know is that I’m moving, moving as fast as I can, and then the sound of D.M.F’s song is no longer playing, and there’s an alarm of some sort going off somewhere, and there’s also a seven-inch-wide hole in my brand new television. The screen’s gone blank, and there are sparks and plumes of smoke pouring out of the hole.

“Shit!”

I hurriedly unplug the television, dodging more white-hot sparks, and then I’m pacing back and forth in front of the burnt out Panasonic, wondering what else I should do. Is it going to burst into flames? The smoke detector in the ceiling certainly seems to think so. Crap, crap, crap!

I grab a towel from the kitchen and fan it at the shouty alarm until it shuts the hell up, and then I peer into the hole in the middle of the TV’s screen and see the heavy marble paperweight I must have picked up and thrown. It’s tangled in amongst broken glass and a nest of wires, completely undamaged. No way I’m sticking my hand in there to fish it out.
 

Instead, I slump to the ground and start crying because Luke and that smoldering sex kitten keep flashing into my brain, looking like they were about to start procreating, and it feels like my soul just got sucked out of me and I’m never going to see it again.
 

This really isn’t fair. That’s a petulant, whiny thing to think, but when other couples break up, they get lost in their lives. If Luke and I were a normal couple in New York City, I would probably never have to ever see him again. He would vanish into a sea of millions and millions of people and maybe in six or seven years we’d accidentally bump into each other outside an art gallery or at a concert or something, but by then we’d both have moved on and it would be okay. We might even be pleased to run into each other, only remembering the awesome, happy times we shared together a long, long time ago.
 

But no.
 

Things are still just about as raw as they can be and Lucas Reid is on my television screen with another woman trying to eat his face. I can’t fucking cope with this anymore. If that makes me weak and pathetic, then so be it. Trying to be strong is one thing, but trying to be strong, seeing stuff like that and then knowing I have to see him in the flesh in a couple of weeks?