Brutally Beautiful(48)

I changed my clothes. Again. My body was shaking, worse than it normally did. I was livid. I was shocked. I was…I was smiling. Why the FUCK was I smiling? This was bad. This had BAD written all the f*ck over it. This…this is just a morbid filled ice cream cone dipped in psycho flavored sprinkles. My mind was racing, from pictures of the murders he witnessed as a sixteen-year-old boy, to the erotic violently sensual way he kissed me, to the lone man sitting in a diner, bloody and devoid of any expression, emotionally detached from the rest of the world. The room was literally spinning around me, pulling me under, and panic was pumping straight adrenaline through my veins.

Picking up my eReader, I tried again, taking a deep breath and counting backwards from twenty. I scanned the words on the device until my eyes blurred from tears…and my heart broke from…no, for Kade.

I can clearly remember the first time I met her. Those brilliant green eyes hiding all her secrets, keeping them from me… Like a wrecking ball, she came in, crumbling my walls into dust… She was as broken as I was…I could see some sort of pain in those green depths, some sort of mirrored knowledge that the world sucked. And, I thought to myself…finally…finally someone on my side of the fishbowl. I wanted to know what haunted her and hold hands in the darkness…together…

Blood. Gore. More blood and gore. By the fourth chapter, I was sure the male main character was a f*cking serial killer.

As soon as my lips touched hers, her smile wandered its way to my mouth. I loved the softness of her lips, the warmth of her tongue, the way she moved her mouth over mine, her body leaned closer against me. “You make me smile when your lips are on mine, like I’m borrowing your happiness, like it’s wiping off on me. Maybe I’m just stealing it, I don’t know. All I know is that it gives me a calmness, a happiness I never thought I could feel…you give me a reason…”

She was mine, and no other’s. Only my lips could kiss hers. Only my hands could hold hers. Only my body could sink deep inside her between those smooth ivory thighs…And only she could tame the beast I was. Only she could quench the thirst I hungered after, and coax the monster inside me to be a man again, if only a broken one…

More carnage. An eerily true to life decapitation scene from an accident, and wait…by chapter twenty, I believed the female character might have been the serial killer. This book…this book was dragging me to the dark dungeon of my own psyche where I did not wish to linger. Holy crap, I just got mindf*cked. The book ended with a cliffhanger that made me scream. Like literally, scream. Out loud. His words were like liquid poetry, emotion dripping thickly off of every single sentence. It made my heart thunder in my chest and ache for the characters. They were written so close in likeness to both Kade and me, right down to the way my hands trembled and twisted napkins when I got nervous, to the destructive and angry way he tugged on his hair. The scenes of carnage, the gruesomely horrific violence, were so real and terrifying that I found myself gripping the edges of the couch cushions with anxiety.

Is that why the people in this town think he’s the devil? Because he writes horror-fiction? That’s absurd.

Rubbing my eyes, I looked at the clock on the wall; it was eleven. I read his words, his book, straight through for seven hours. Rifling through my drawers, I changed into a pair of jeans and a turtleneck to go back to the bar. Every sound I heard had me wondering if someone was outside the trailer, every howl of the wind had me hearing voices of people I never wanted to see again, and I didn’t want to be alone. Kade Grayson was one talented writer, because I was still feeling the effects of the complete terror of his book.