Chapter One

Sara wiped her face for the millionth time. Beads of sweat poured down her temples and forehead. Her whole body felt sticky and feverishly hot, as if she'd been drenched in honey, rolled in dirt and then locked in an oven. She wanted to tear her work clothes off, not caring what all the people in the cars crawling alongside her on the freeway thought.

Almost.

She was baking inside the Toyota hatchback, the air-conditioning long since broken and there was no money to fix it. Her boyfriend had claimed that he didn't have the money either. Opening the windows gained her no relief. Hot gusts of wind simply buffeted her face when the breeze bothered to stir itself at all. Trapped in a sea of traffic, the tortoise-like race for home had begun. She wished now that she hadn't canceled on the girls'-night-out after work. At least her cubicle-mates who went weren't sitting in rush hour traffic. At least it was Friday.

Business was booming at Streamline Inc. and the workload would soon be much higher. She had noted that wages remained the same – low. She heaved an impatient sigh and turned off the radio. The constant stream of commercials was getting on her already frayed nerves. Jay had better not have a bunch of friends over. She simply wasn't in the mood to entertain his stupid friends tonight.

. . .

“Home, at last!” She pulled up into the tiny parking space, eager to peel out of her clinging, sweat-drenched clothes. She caught that strange sight in the sky again, just as the sun was setting. She often came outside to watch the sunset, as if trying to brand its burnished brilliance into her memory, trying to remember what it was like to have a horizon, to wonder at an unknown and exciting future and grasp it before it got away. She felt as if she'd forgotten what that was like.

It reminded her of those wild and heady times with Troy. The vagabond king, who got her drunk when she meant to stay sober, who always pushed her boundaries to the bleeding edge when she wanted things to be safe. Troy, who convinced her to drop out of college and travel the world with him. Troy was wild and volatile. Troy had many faults, but at least he was exciting and imaginative. They'd had some of the ugliest fights. But afterward. . . . . . .

The thought made her shiver inwardly. She'd never taste sex like that again. She missed Troy. He represented all that she had now lost. He was more than a daredevil bad boy. He'd loved nature too. He'd loved mountain summits, stormy oceans, sunrises, and sunsets.

She was only twenty-four, but she felt that the sun was always setting on her life, never rising.

But this evening the sunset display included brilliant ribbons of color, sometimes, blue, sometimes green or violet. She'd never seen an aurora display in Portland. Nor had she remembered hearing about it on the news. It was indeed strange and wonderful to watch. She watched until the mysterious lights once again disappeared.

They lived on the third floor and after climbing two flights she nearly bumped into one of their next-door neighbors, Leo, another one of Jay's shady friends. His eyes grew wide at seeing her and he stopped short as if caught in the middle of something he didn't want anyone to witness. She was always pleasant enough to him but secretly she'd never liked him. And she loathed his twin sister, Lisa.

“Jay said that you weren't coming home till late?” He said. Sara lifted an eyebrow.

“Well, I changed my mind. Why?” Why is it your business anyway? She thought he looked distinctly uncomfortable, an unusual expression for a man who normally wore a permanently sly expression that suggested he was always up to no good. He shrugged. She shrugged. Then she pushed past him and went to her apartment. Sara unlocked the door and walked in, fully expecting a party in progress. To her great relief, the place was empty. The air-conditioner was blazing. This met with her approval. She went over to the portable air-conditioner and stood over it, cooling herself down. She flung her purse onto the couch.

“Jay?” She called. Silence. She went towards the kitchen to grab a beer and passed by the hallway. And froze.

Lying on the hallway floor was a hot pink, sequined, platform stiletto.

Now, she had plenty of spikes but she didn't own any pair of shoes that high and none of them, for God's sake, had sequins.

But she knew who did own those shoes. Sickening realization stabbed her like a knife in her heart. She stalked down the hall and to the bedroom. With each step, she could hear them going at it. A rising tide of rage grew in her. She threw open the door to see her boyfriend thrusting mechanically between Lisa's legs. The woman moaned softly, her eyes closed. At the bang of the door against the wall, they fluttered open and her mouth opened wide in shock, her red cheeks deepening a darker red as she realized that Sara was standing in the doorway. Sara threw the beer bottle at them both. It bounced off of Jay's sweating back with a muffled thud.

“What the. . .” he turned around and his face grew slack with surprise.

“Pigs! Disgusting pigs! Get out! Get out of my place, you nasty pigs!” Her eyes grew stormy and she began to shake, red rage blooming in her.

“What are you doing home?” What? Is that what he has to say after this?

“I said what are you doing home?” He demanded more stridently this time. Sara saw nothing but both of these two rats framed in blood. He had flipped Lisa over and she fell off the bed and made a mad scrambled for her clothes that were strewn about on the floor.

“I live here you asshole! I got off work early! Why is this slut here? What's she doing in my bed?”

“What the f-”

“I can't believe you brought this slut here!” She heard Lisa making protestations to the contrary about her character, but it only sounded like white noise.

“Calm down, Sara!” Jay demanded. He got up, naked, sweating and full of bravado letting loose a stream of expletives at her for walking in on them. She dashed toward Lisa and grabbed her by her hair, yanked it back slapping her so hard she spun around. Sara tore out a handful of hair for good measure. Jay did nothing to rescue the woman. Lisa ran screaming from the room.

“Hey? Why don't you just calm down, okay? You're never here! I never see you anymore! You're always at work! What did you expect? I've got needs, you know?”

“I'm always at work because you're always broke! You've never even so much as filled out a resume since we've been together!” He began to protest, but she wouldn't hear it.

She flew at him, leaping over the bed and landing smack right into him, grabbing his head and biting down on his ear. She was biting, scratching, screaming. By the time he pulled her off, blood was running down his face and the police had arrived, banging on the front door for all the ruckus the three were making. Jay had bruised her arms and chest in the struggle.

She lay crumpled and hysterical in the corner when they finally took him away to stay the night in jail. Now behind a protective wall of police officers, Lisa was spitting fire and invective at her, though half her hair was pulled out and lay on the ground in long, dry, straw-colored streaks. With her dyed-to-death brown hair with thick blonde streaks she looked like a skunk that had gotten into a fight with a weed-whacker and the image would have been comical if it weren't for the current situation Sara found herself in. Lisa kept up her bad-ass act until one of the cops told her to be quiet.

Leo had probably called the police when he saw his sister run screaming, half naked, out the door. No wonder he was surprised to see her show up. She was sure this would be the talk of the apartment complex for the next few days until some other drama would get the gossips wagging their tongues again. She was surrounded by back-stabbers.

Sara sat on the bedroom floor, burying her face in her knees and let out a soul-wracking sob. Tears ran down her face, hands and legs in streams. It was a bout of painful crying that hurt her chest even more than the bruises and made her shake. Her whole body and soul hurt. Not because she loved him but because she had wasted so much of her life here. All of the warnings that she'd been given about him from friends and family came back to stick their fingers in her face. Her father had never liked Jay. He told Sara that he was a loser from the moment he saw him, that she could do far better. Which at the time triggered her temper and had stirred up a huge argument between them before she packed up with Jay and left for Oregon. Her father had been right all along and now she was forced to face the ugly truth.

Jay had styled himself as a player before they'd met. He acted as if he'd changed when he met her. He had never changed. She had just refused to see it.

After hours of crying, Sara felt hollow. When she finally got up she picked up his phone from the nightstand and looked at the time. It was two o'clock in the morning. Her head hurt and her weeping had finally sputtered out into occasional dry heaving sobs. She felt as if nothing else left of substance would come out. She glanced around at the apartment. They had nothing of any real value. She'd wasted three years of her life with him. She was going home.

Suddenly, a plan was forming. Her father had a fixer-upper in the Central District neighborhood of Seattle. She would go there and clear her head before she figured out what to do next. She had dreams once. Wild and irrational ones, erotic ones, sometimes brilliant ones. Now she couldn't remember them. Except one recurring dream, which confused her. She needed new ones.

Jay had thought her dreams of building an herbal practice for herself were stupid. So she'd stopped talking about them. Her life became filled with stress, static and people sucking away her energy. Hell, she'd even thought she'd been married by now. Her mother, who was as old-fashioned in respects to women and marriage as they came, would have been disappointed to know she was twenty-four and still not married. Her mother had married young. Sara's father was her mother's third husband. Or that's what she had claimed. How she was able to accomplish this was a mystery to Sara. Her mother didn't talk much of the first two husbands. Sara wasn't in any hurry for marriage. She wanted to experience the fullness of life. But she had to admit, looking back, that this last bad relationship was a repeat of others that had come before. She had a spectacular talent for attracting duds. Tonight made all the old expectations and dreams come up like a poorly digested meal. Even though she wasn't sure she wanted to get married, her mother would have been disappointed in her just the same. And that hurt. It was the only thing that made her relieved that Mary McGregor was no longer living.

Sara packed up all the things she wanted to keep, which wasn't much, turned her mobile phone ringer off, wrote a check for next month's rent with a note that she was leaving and slid it under the manager's door, packed everything into her Toyota and went back to the Emerald City to start over again. If any dreams were to come true for her, they would be found there.