1
Amelia
The moans and giggles coming from the room next door became a little louder. Somebody gasped. A male voice chuckled. I heard a sigh and then a loud shriek. Giggles and more sighs followed.
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” I whispered.
It was all too clear what my nearest neighbors were up to. I would have to buy them a proper bed one day, I thought with a wry frown. The creaks were even louder than the giggles, and both made it altogether obvious that my friend Tanya and her boyfriend weren’t watching TV in there.
“I need a house,” I groaned.
The sound of my best friend having sex in her bedroom was not the thing I would choose, given a choice, to hear as I tried to go to sleep. The sea, perhaps. The sound of water running downhill. Hell, even sleeping over the top of the busiest club in town would be more conducive to relaxing!
“Go to sleep,” I muttered, wiping tousled blonde hair out of my eyes.
I couldn’t be angry with Tanya, not for anything. She was kind, generous, friendly, everything a friend should be. And she’d let me stay here for a month, sleeping in her living room on a pull-out sofa. It was the best option after I’d finally run away.
I heard another shriek, and then silence. I sighed and reached for my headphones, hoping to drown out any additional noises that might come out of there. It was eleven p.m. I noticed, laying back down.
“Hey! Don’t go in there,” my friend’s voice called out, just as I was drifting off to sleep. I sat up suddenly as the light switched on. A massive individual, arms corded with muscle, blocked out the light from the doorway. I heard Tanya shout.
“Tex! Stop! There’s water in the bathroom, and you’ll disturb Amelia, who’s sleeping in there.”
“Sorry.” The massive man turned slowly, a distressed expression on his square-jawed face. “I didn’t think.”
“No, you didn’t,” Tanya said primly as she joined us. Naked, wrapped in a small towel, Tanya sat down wearily on a seat. She smiled at me. “What are you looking at?”
I looked at her, dumbfounded. It was late at night, I was trying to sleep, and she comes into the room naked? Followed by something Doctor Frankenstein would have balked at? I didn’t know what to say.
“Um, this,” I said.
I lifted the newspaper from the seat beside me.
Tanya, who did not have much capacity for irony, lifted the paper and looked through it. Her man friend poured water and gulped it noisily. I looked away. He was dressed, fortunately, in a pair of trousers. I spotted a big leather jacket draped over the dining room chair and assumed that it belonged to him.
He reached for it, confirming my suspicions. As he did, he leaned over Tanya’s shoulder, touching her bare skin. She giggled.
“What do you have?” he asked, looking at the newspaper.
“Nothing interesting,” Tanya murmured, looking up at him with fond eyes. I smiled to myself. It was a pleasure, I thought sadly, to see such closeness. Tanya might be a bit crazy, but she had a fine heart. And Tex, evidently, did too. He leaned down to kiss her brown hair fondly.
“That’s a good bike shop,” he said, pointing to something in the newspaper.
“It’s an advert for a job, not a bike, silly,” my friend said.
My ears pricked up. A job was something I had been looking for a lot recently. Ever since I moved out of Mom’s house, in fact. I surreptitiously reached for the newspaper. Tanya let me take it.
“Well, whatever. It’s the best bike shop in town. Can’t do better than Brand’s. Only people I let near my machine.”
“Oh, are they?”
I bit my lip as my friend looked naughtily up at Tex, whose faced reddened. Evidently, the “machine” Tanya referred to was not the one he’d ridden to get here. He swallowed hard.
“You know what I mean,” he murmured.
“Yes,” Tanya giggled. “I do. Now, don’t you have to go already?”
“I should,” he said, shrugging on a shirt and then the jacket. It made him even wider than before. “I probably need an early start tomorrow. We’re taking a ride.”
“I see,” Tanya said. I smiled. My friend could find innuendo in almost any words. Tex, though, was a bit more down-to-earth. He just smiled.
“Yeah,” he said. “Well, goodnight. Goodnight,” he added, shaking my hand. I took it. His grip almost crushed my fingers. Tanya let him out, and I heard a kiss in the hallway followed by giggles.
“Sorry,” she said, coming back into the living room. “He had to leave early. They’re taking a ride to Stafford tomorrow.”
“It’s not that far from Kansas,” I said, frowning. It was about a hundred miles from here, I thought. It wouldn’t take all day to reach it.
“Well, yes. But it’s a breakfast ride.” Tanya grinned. “So they want to get going early.”
I just smiled. Bikers were a breed of people I doubted I would ever understand. They had their own tightly-connected groups of riders, their monthly rides, and their rivalries about which bikes were better—BMW, Ducati, or Hyundai. I hadn’t known many bikers, though my father—or so my mother said—had been one.
I wouldn’t know about that.
My father left us when I was four. I barely remembered him. Mom didn’t talk about him much, except to say disparaging things, and I didn’t entirely blame her. Life was hard without him, and Mom often struggled to raise me alone. If she had felt less need to find a man to help her take care of things, our home and relationship would have been better.
Especially since Mom doesn’t have much luck.
I shuddered.
Mom’s latest boyfriend had been the reason why I left home. He had been more than a little interested in me—his words and visits when I was in a room alone scared me. I couldn’t tell her, and I couldn’t face him. I couldn’t bear it anymore. I was grateful that Tanya had let me stay at her place. It was the first time in months that I had felt safe from that guy and his intentions.
And now, I thought, reaching for the paper, I needed a job. When I had that part sorted out, I could really straighten out my life.
“I’ll go and get some sleep,” Tanya said from where she was tidying things in the other room. “I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Yeah. Goodnight,” I added fondly.
“Goodnight.”
With Tanya gone, I read through the newspaper, searching for that advertisement she had found. I scanned the advertisement listings and saw the name she had mentioned. Brand’s Bike Shop.
We are looking for a skilled receptionist and bookkeeper to manage records and appointments for us, the advertisement read. Apply in person at the following address. The position is currently open for immediate filling.
“They sound desperate,” I murmured. “That seems good.”
It would certainly work to my advantage. I wasn’t an accountant, but I had experience in bookkeeping, from when I helped my aunt Stella at her shop. I could certainly handle the phone and MS Office, and, for what it was worth, I had credits for the first two years of Social Work.
I wish I’d finished.
I bit my lip. I would never stop feeling bad about that, but I couldn’t afford to continue at the university after my second year. I was twenty-one when I left, and now at twenty-four and without a home, it seemed too hard to take up my studies again. That was another reason why I wanted a job: not only did I need money for my own place, but I also wanted to save so that in a few years I could finish my degree. I put the newspaper down with a sigh.