Brutally Beautiful(38)

Do you want to hear something else that has twisted my dick right the f*ck around? For the first time EVER, I wrote a happy ending. CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT? A happily-ever-f*cking after that would leave a Disney princess with tears and slit wrists from the jealousy of it. For her. And me.

I clawed at my hair as my stomach rolled. I’m…I’m…f*cking…insane. I always knew I’d snap completely one day. Never thought it would be over a woman I hardly knew.

And that kiss? The kiss in that little trailer of hers… Still burned my lips. Since that kiss, there was this unloosened feeling in my limbs, as if I could float away, as if gravity had just given up on me and I could hurtle into space at anytime.

I grabbed both manuscripts and stormed onto my back deck. It was freezing outside, matching the mess of my insides, frozen, alone, and empty. Ice had lined the stones beneath my feet, causing me to slip and fall right on my ass. The pain as I hit the ground was welcomed, and I laughed into the cold dark night, emitting a thick cloud of mist from my lips. My bottle of whiskey was unhurt, and truly, that was all that mattered.

Lying there on the wet ice for a moment, looking up at the stars, I wished I had cracked my head right open and died on the spot. By the time the maid would find me, a year would probably have passed and I’d be nothing more than a skeleton with an expensive pair of designer slacks on. I’d finally be free of the hold that Lainey had on my mind.

I crawled to the fire pit I kept on my patio and threw both my manuscripts in, and from the stone shelves under it, I pulled out the igniter and set them on fire.

I watched my books go up in flames and drank the rest of my whiskey, wishing my f*cked up feelings would burn along with my words.

Lainey.

Lainey.

Lainey.

I could barely see straight as I staggered into my office. I had to shake this need, this desire to know her. I felt cursed. Possessed. Her face haunted me. Her laughter echoed in my brain. Her smile plagued my thoughts. But mostly it was her calmness that affected me. Soothed me. Mollified the rage.

Who was she really?

Where did she come from?

What happened that she ended up bloody beaten at my brother’s bar?

My obsession continued; I was spinning out of control. I googled her. I read everything I could find on Lainey Nevaeh, which was about a gram of information. Facebook, blogs, MySpace, that ancestry site, and various forums stated she was either a twelve-year-old girl from Bessemer, Alabama, or a stay-at-home mom from somewhere in Colorado. I gorged myself on information, anything I could find. I tried to put together the pieces of her life from the tiny bits I found, the rush of it made me high. However, after hours of searching, I was more intrigued with the fact that no trace of any Lainey Nevaeh that matched the mysterious waitress from the bar could be found. It was as if she wasn’t real. I mean, really, you could find almost anyone on Google nowadays. Try it. Google yourself and see what happens. You’ll probably find some sorry ass picture of that one time you fell asleep drunk at a friend’s party in college and they drew a mustache on your face, and then snapped a photo of you. That’s your legacy. Google is the largest database of people and pictures that can pinpoint your exact f*cking location on earth, especially when everybody in the f*cking world had turned on their geo coding on their phones and tablets. Don’t people know how dangerous it is for the world to see exactly where you are at the exact moments you’re there? It’s a great resource for criminals. With Lainey though, it was as if she had no past. Like Lainey Nevaeh never existed. She didn’t even have a social security number.

A thick unsettling feeling washed over me; like some sort of darker shadow over my soul than the one that was already there. I hadn’t had one flashback since the night I met Lainey. Somehow, without me knowing, my uncontrollable compulsive thoughts of her brought a splash of color into my dark world. Like the colors of the rainbow, bleeding and seeping out of the darkened night sky. My obsessive behavior towards her filled that gaping hole that contained all my deep rage. She was like a medicine to me. She was like the fire I had just set on my books; her flames engulfed me and brought me to ashes. Charred.