Change
Jevenna Willow
Author comment
I’d wanted to do something different with this book; put a twist no one would ever expect. Then the epiphany hit—hard. There is no such thing as something no one expects. Our world is filled with the bizarre, the unrealistic, even the impossible…with every turn of the head we are bombarded by what we can’t believe.
So I went with my gut on this one. I wanted Sara’s story to come out, and now it has.
Change is a book that will pull at your psyche in the worst possible way, and have you step back, take a good hard look at the inner you, then truly ask yourself, would you be her, given the chance? Given the opportunity to change, without anyone knowing?
I believe the answer is yes—every time. We all want things to change. Some of us are just a little more open and honest about it than others.
I do hope you enjoy Change, as much as I loved writing Sara’s story. She may not be what you expect, but then…nothing ever is.
Jevenna
Dedication
To my darling Hubbie, who looks at me with that cute, “Yes, dear, I’m listening” face, then smiles every time I get another idea stuck in the head, another idea that needs to be written down—and will eventually end up as another book.
You’re still my Fox.
Change
by
Jevenna Willow
copyright © 2013 Jennifer J. Yost
published by JYCreations
This ebook version is licensed for your personal enjoyment. Pirating author’s work is a crime.
If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. All places, names, and ideas are purely fictional, and do not represent anyone or anything known, other than in the imagination.
I thank you for respecting my work.
Chapter One
Sara Rogan was going to let the blade of life cut deep. She’d found freedom, and the only way to enjoy it for what it’s worth, was to pay a high enough price where guilt couldn’t take over all else.
The longer she sat in her car, guilt replaced her anger and dread, but she knew she could afford just about anything at this point. Eventually she would buy her guilt back, if needed. She’d altered fate.
Nevertheless, stuck in the middle of the road, the corner of her car ripped completely off, glass and metal scattered all over the pavement, how was she ever going to get past the enormous debt of an emotional psyche, if the rescue squad was using a crowbar to get her out of her mangled vehicle?
Sara closed her eyes, clenched her hands to the steering wheel, and let life swallow her whole; allowed that blade of life to slice through her body—deep and deadly the cuts.
“We need to get you into the ambulance Miss,” one of the more than adorable rescue men looking in on her said. “Can you hear me?”
She stared at the man. She heard him well enough, didn’t want anyone’s help, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to get into an ambulance without probable cause. “I’m fine, really. The seatbelt took most of the impact.” Sara narrowed her eyes for better focus, seeing two of him.
The rise of her rescuer’s eyebrow suggested he didn’t believe she was fine. He seemed bored, as if a splat-victim no longer caught his attention and had turned him into a heartless human stuck doing overtime.
He couldn’t possibly have known she’d buried her nut job mother six feet under the cold, hard ground, and the only thing mattering in the world was for her to disappear—today.
Of course, Sara wasn’t all that perfect physically—felt a little out of sorts, a relentless throbbing in the forehead and ungodly sensitive to noise. Still, she’d perfected disappearing, was on an emotional high at this point, and a lousy car accident screwed with her easy escape.
If anyone knew there was a huge difference between gnawing on the thumbnail worried, and out of the freakin` mind terrified, Sara was that person. She couldn’t manage both right now.
~
Hours later…Sara sat on a hospital gurney with an inability to stop fidgeting. Her left arm set in plaster cast to endure for six long weeks, a bandage had been stuck to her forehead, and she kept darting her eyes every five minutes to the clock.
Her cute rescuer wasn’t anywhere to be found. She shouldn’t be surprised. He’d been a little distracted by the huge mess in the middle of the road and the wail of sirens.
Not so fine, was the man who T-boned her car.
She could see through the crack in his door the large amount of trained personnel, all trying to save his life. Thank God it wasn’t her lying on that bed. Life was to be lived. A hospital bed wasn’t living.
She curled her fist in her lap, blinking rapidly to drown out the glare of fluorescent lighting.
“You will need to take this prescription to your pharmacy when they open,” the emergency room nurse told her, with no emotion in her voice whatsoever.
Apparently, Nurse Ratchet had seen plenty of accidents, enough to harden her into stone, and pity was a commodity not shared freely at Sisters of Sorrowful Hope Memorial Hospital. Nurse Ratchet’s nametag read Emily. Sara didn’t think such a flowery name fit such an overbearing, needle-pushing woman.
She handed Sara the nearly legible scrap of paper made out by an attending physician who’d been stuck on night duty, same as the ambulance driver.
Sara glanced at the sheet. Other than a hurried look, she gave no interest to what it spelled out. She wouldn’t fill it. The prescription was for painkillers, and she felt perfectly capable of accepting pain as her due. In fact, she already told anyone who could hear she would survive a lousy car accident. Others had. Wasn’t anyone interested in that?
Sara stuffed the sheet of paper into her purse to appease the woman. When that didn’t work, she gave the woman a wry smile, hoping to aid her cause, because wanting to flee was the only determining thought in her head.
“And you will need to make an appointment with your regular physician in the morning.” Emily then handed Sara another sheet of paper. It spelled out what happened, and whom she should contact when able. She had three bones, slightly misplaced inside the wrist, and a small crack to the radius of her arm when the air bag hit her at eighty miles per hour.
All of her injuries were livable.
Clenching her jaw, her gaze scouted for an exit sign. Again, another quick glance made to the prescription sheet before she folded it in half and stuffed it inside the remainder of life.
Thank God, the authorities hadn’t confiscated her purse at the scene of the accident. Paranoia was one condition to survive. Distrust wasn’t as easy compensated over.
Practically glued to her hip was a cheap leather purse containing one hundred thousand dollars. She’d cashed in her lottery ticket ten minutes after she dumped her mother’s body into a burial plot—just pulled out from the lottery department parking lot, when WHAM! SPLAT!
Roadside savior, doctor, lottery department treasurer…they were all the same. Men. No matter how cute or helpful, they weren’t to be trusted.
Sara had good reason not to trust men. She’d developed a pattern of allowing no other to get close to her heart, or close to her. So far, this worked to her favor.
The winning lottery ticket had been the only good thing in her life. She’d spent five lousy bucks to buy it, the last five bucks to her name, and it paid off on the day her mother died…in a very big way.
Lady Luck never smiled on Sara before, but she certainly kept to the task of grinning her ass off for three full days. If only Lady Luck had kept up smiling, Sara wouldn’t be in this new mess now.
“Can I go?” she questioned the woman, a heightened, urgent need to distance herself from this place.
She turned a tentati
ve eye to the room at the far side of the emergency bay, expecting Lady Luck was no longer following her. All of a sudden, the door closed, and she could no longer see the man lying inside the room. The last glimpse of her hundred-mile-an-hour hell on wheels… he now lay still as a statue.
Sara didn’t feel sorry for him. She couldn’t. It wasn’t in her to feel right now. Yet, with perfectionist tendencies, she found herself asking, “Is he dead?”, and hoped the answer to be what she most wanted to hear. Explanations were always needed for dead men, and she had places to go and things to do. She didn’t want an unnecessary delay, keeping her from life.
She did want the man to stay alive—spite alone fueled this thought. He deserved a little agony and a long recovery. The jerk ruined her perfect day. What more could she have ever asked for than the disposal of the one woman who’d made her life miserable, on the very hour of becoming a rich woman?
Nurse Emily glanced toward the closed emergency room door, returning a cold unfeeling gaze to Sara. “No. He’s pretty ripped up, and likely to stay in the hospital for a bit.”
No shit, he’s ripped up! He hit me at a hundred miles plus. He should be more than a little out of whack; just like my car, and my…
Sara highly doubted the ER nurse was telling her the truth about the man’s condition. There’d been a lot of blood at the scene—face, legs, arms—and she’d heard from one of the paramedic who supposedly rescued her, there’d been a lot of blood in him, pooling around his vital organs and not staying in the veins and arteries.
The police told her the accident victim’s accelerator had stuck in a brand new car with less than one thousand miles on it, but she didn’t believe this. The man, though covered in blood at the scene, looked too much in control of life to have something as simple as an accelerator stuck while careening past others well beyond the speed limit.
She heard it could happen, things sticking. However, she did not believe it—not this time. One look at her cast, and the memory of a nearly cut in half hunk of metal proved, without a doubt, he’d been in full control of destiny.
Sara Rogan would now live life the only way it could be lived. The accident wasn’t her fault. She’d been well within her lane, one hand on the wheel, the other on a cheeseburger, her vehicles’ turn signal on, blinking rapidly due to a short in the fuse, while trying to make a relatively normal lane change, and not trying to draw too much attention to herself than was absolutely necessary.
She got slammed by a man fucking with destiny.
Then Sara found fate to be far crueler milliseconds after the accident.
Would she be contacting her lawyer, making a lawsuit? Hell, no! What good would her suing anyone do? She didn’t need the money. She had her own. One hundred thousand big ones stuffed inside her purse, and if she was frugal the money should last her until she found a better life.
What she needed was to get the hell out of this hospital before anyone discovered she gave the police and the hospital a false name, and used a faked driver’s license—with no insurance to pay the hospital bill. The laptop, her clothing crammed into a suitcase, the half-eaten cheeseburger…they could stay exactly where they were, rotting inside the crumpled pile of metal hauled to the junk yard.
Once she could walk out the revolving door on the other side of the emergency room, she was going to disappear. Again.
The man in the other room flat-lined quite suddenly. Christ! He had perfect timing to a perfectly wretched day, didn’t he?
While heads turned, and medical personnel rushed about, she took a deep breath of antiseptic overindulgence, slipped off the gurney, grabbing her purse by the only good hand left her, and walked out the door, cringing in pain. A dying man was a real attention grabber. Even the security guard at the hospital exit had turned his sight away—briefly, it was enough for an easy escape.
Once outside, Sara climbed into the closest taxi that would drive her the furthest distance away in the shortest amount of time. She gave the man a faked address. She would walk the three blocks back to the bus station once he dropped her off.
Sara Nobody turned into Sara Somebody and was a wanted woman less than two hours later. She hadn’t done anything wrong to be wanted. The police simply felt, in most cases, normal women wouldn’t walk out of a hospital a few hours after a rather horrific accident, with one of those involved in the accident flat-lined and the other with barely a scratch. Normal women would have called someone—made a fuss.
Sara wasn’t normal. Her nut job mother had made certain of this.
However, the police had questions, and Sara supposedly had answers to give.
She didn’t want to answer any more questions. She had money to spend. She couldn’t put much thought to what her disappearance would look like to others. She wanted only to be gone.
Her plan was to disappear from the memories, most especially, from the past. No one wanted to see a man die, or go through any unnecessary medical tests of her own, or have medical personnel fawn all over a few lousy breaks of a few lousy bones. She wasn’t going to sue anyone. She didn’t give a damn about her car. It had been a piece of shit to begin with. Bipolar Nut Job was dead. Life was good.
What mildly surprised her was all those tests hadn’t been questioned as to the healed over fractures of childhood, the broken bones of adolescent youth, and the haunting past of a very miserable life.
She paid her cigar smoking taxi driver a hefty tip for his service, gave him an easy smile through the window…then vanished.
Sara’s mother perfected disappearing acts while alive. Months on end, the woman would become invisible, leaving her young daughter home alone, and on more than one occasion Sara unable to fend for herself. She knew how to disappear…and when to do it. From this moment forward, things had to change.
They sure as hell couldn’t stay the same.
Chapter Two
Sara was nearly the shade she desired her skin to be. She turned over on her towel, letting the summer sunshine warm her, and started on the other side. Her well-endowed front side would gain the most UV rays today. Tomorrow she could even out the backside.
“Mecenna?” called out a voice in a higher octave than Sara preferred, and her ears perked up.
She’d become quite familiar with that high-pitched whine. However, she was not as familiar with the name she gave herself well over a year ago, so it took her a moment to react to it.
Sara pushed off the towel and sand, groaned inwardly, stood, and was easily rewarded with a hasty turning of the eyes from her body. She usually tanned while nude. It was the only reason she’d bought the beachfront property. Belinda, her next-door neighbor, did not like this about her.
To Belinda, Sara’s natural behavior was unnatural, and this was exactly why she did it—every day, at precisely ten-thirty in the morning, directly in front of their twin houses; twenty minutes before Belinda’s husband came home from work and the ‘witch’ had to leave for her corporate day job.
Regrettably, Belinda hadn’t left for work.
Sara had to hide her grimace. The wretched woman was stalling the eventual pleasure of the day and this simply would not do. She made her way over to the small fence separating their properties.
“Yes, Belinda?” she questioned the older woman by nearly twenty years.
Her gaze was trapped onto the woman’s crisp business suit, the hair pulled into a tight bun, and the lips pinched. Likely, the lips down below…sewn completely shut. Her mind then went wandering to if Belinda McCarlye even had any lips down there, or if the woman was completely made of stone.
Belinda was an uptight bitch in the worst possible way. She could barely see over the property fence, standing at four-feet-nine, but she could certainly make the skin crawl from the distance of one hundred feet by the simple use of her high-pitched whine. Chalkboard and fingernails came to mind every time Sara had to gain a scolding from her darling neighbor.
Sara stood at five-feet-eight when in bare feet. She physically towered
over the mousy woman. Her tone of voice more on the seductive, alluring, hinted with a whisper side than anything remotely close to whining; the allure came out easy today, but her temper was rising to a certain degree and had to be checked posthaste. She couldn’t afford to tick Belinda off.
“What is it today, Belinda?” she asked.
“You know exactly what I am about to say to you, Mecenna. It is the same as yesterday, the day before, and likely the same as tomorrow.” A hasty roll of the eyes confirmed this claim.
This time, Sara allowed her temper to rise, praying to end this, once and for all. Belinda should be off to work, so today wasn’t going as planned. And since today was not going as planned, Sara was reduced to wasting time until such a time her plan could be achieved.
“Then don’t say it, Belinda, because I don’t want to hear it.” Somehow, her stern tone fell short of hitting its intended mark; more than obvious when Belinda smiled.
How the frigid bitch was able to do get her goat so easily was beyond the worthiness of wasted brain cells.
Mrs. McCarlye wouldn’t look directly at Sara. The age of twenty-four, there was a price to pay for beauty. So far, Sara had yet to fork out a dime toward any required payment plan.
She put her hands on her hips to mimic her neighbor’s angry stance. This bunched up her youthful breasts—and pointed each right in Belinda’s paling face.
There was nothing wrong with the human body. You came into this world unclothed. Sara planned to leave it in this way. What you did to cover up in between birth and death was between you and God. Besides, the pristine beach directly in front of their homes was clothing optional. If uptight, pinched-lips (upper and lower), mousy Belinda, did not like this, she could always move. With any hope, during that move, she left behind her darling husband to compensate for the loss.
Sara highly doubted mousy even looked at a mirror while naked.
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