The Pain I've Grown to Know

Florida!
Florida was a great place for Lea to start over again! Not only had she found a very accommodating job with a guy she had been doing photo jobs for in the past few years, but the whole laid-back atmosphere down here was so much needed. There was no public pressure like there had been during her months in California, and to her delight, she had been able to make new friends easily, with the help of her 'boss' . Seen that she had cut off all ties with people from her past, new friends were an essential!

After all the troubles of the past, she would need a life time to settle her mind again!

She hadn't been in contact with Dave or even Sandra in a little over 2 years, apart from a post card she had sent her best friend when she was on a weekend trip with her new friends to New Orleans. A little postcard, letting her friend know that she was alive and well, but needed time to get her head straight and didn't want anybody to interrupt that process. Lea knew, that if she started contacting one person, all of the people she had left behind would know at some stage...and she was not ready for that. Not yet anyhow.

She had canceled all her e-mail accounts the day she had left Las Vegas, knowing that after not answering her phone, avalanches of mails would be piling up in her private and work accounts, and since she wouldn't check them anyhow, there was no point in keeping them, instead she created a new account, adding work contacts to her address book.

The only person that knew her forwarding address was an estate agent, who she had asked to sublet her apartment in Brooklyn, fully furnished. The woman was an old friend of Lea's late mother, and she could confide in her secrecy, and Sandra was not likely to know her. It had only taken her a few hours to sort through the little stuff she hadn't taken to Zacky's during her previous move out to Huntington Beach, and everything was shipped within the same day she had gotten back from Nevada.

Her cell phone was restricted to only let through certain numbers, the only people she was talking to were the estate agent and her friend in Florida. That was, until she arrived in Florida and had gotten herself a new cell phone, with a different number! Why he had been the first person she could think of...no idea...but it had been the right choice, and even 2 years after, she felt blessed that she had called him that night.
She was down in Florida within 2 days, rented a small but neat 2 bedroom apartment, and started settling in rather quickly.

Drastic measures you say?

Maybe, but with everything that had happened in the year before her disappearing act, she'd rather be presumed dead by some people, then kept being stuck in this immense web of lies, disloyalty and hurt she had managed to get herself tangled in!

The aching heart, every time her eyes caught sight of the tattoos she had gotten in tribute to Zack was indescribable and fierce.
How could she have been so in love with a man that had mistreated her so badly in so many ways!?
Her boss had done a great cover-up job of "Zacky's Lair" , by planting an elegant looking tribal across her vulva area, that was snaking its way up towards her pantie line. But the back piece was mocking her everyday!
Although people that didn't know her thought that the 'Vengeance' tattoo across the full length of her back was supposed to signal, that she wouldn't take crap from anyone...her boss and her new friends knew better. They were the only people she had told the whole story, of everything that had happened, with Zack, Matt and Brian...and most things in between. She appreciated that they didn't bring up Zack or his band's name, as every time she even heard one of their songs on the radio, she cringed, cried, or flung the radio across the room to watch it shatter in a million pieces against the next wall.

The past belonged in the past, this was the future!

Although it was not too easy to kick the past to the curb. Not only would the tattoo on her back always remind her of the months she had spent amongst the guys of Avenged Sevenfold, as friend, girlfriend, fiance and once-off fuck.

Zion James Hernandez would always be living reminder to herself of the passion that once was. Her 15 months old baby boy.

How she knew it was Zacky's and not Brian's?
The first look into his jade green eyes that looked so much like his father's, had eliminated all her doubts, questions and even fears. When she had found out she was with child, she had been thinking of terminating the pregnancy. But she simply couldn't deny life to something that was part of her, too, just because she had been foolish enough to believe in love, and the person she had pawned her love to had spat on this love and crushed it on more then one occasion.

All Lea could attempt to do was keep her son away from the corrupt world and people like her father and his friends, who bent things for their benefit. And try to raise him by teaching him what true love was.