Brutally Beautiful(71)

He shuffled backward, and walked out of the office, leaving me…breathless.

Oh, my God…I was smiling.

The Kade-coma didn’t release me from its tight grasp until late afternoon. We spent the day cleaning, me demonstrating to everyone how to sterilize and scrub the hell out of things, and everyone moaning and groaning about me being an anal-retentive crazy clean freak. Well, everyone but Kade. Kade understood and scrubbed harder than I did, and I know this sounds sick, but it made my muscles clench and pool with want.

As night settled, and darkened the skies outside the bar windows, four men came in, a handful of regulars, and one of them, Bobby, dropped a few quarters into the old jukebox. Without looking, I could hear the familiar jingle jangle of the coins clinking against the sides of the metal as they slid in. It was so quiet in the bar that I heard the clicks of the buttons as his fingers chose the numbers to the songs, and soon after, the first guitar strums of Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones drifted eerily to my ears.

Bree, Dylan, Kade, and I, were sitting behind the bar on our small booth. Bree sat next to me, the smell of lemons, limes and thick dark beer erased the clean sent of disinfectant, and I missed its calming sterile scent. I’d been staring down at the little square napkin I’d been unknowingly folding into one of those origami animals and thinking about the heat of Kade’s lips on mine, when I felt Bree shift to stand. She walked over to the group of four men as Dylan made his way to the other end of the bar. My stomach did a flip knowing Kade and I was alone at the table and just out of the view of everybody and my hands stilled their movements.

My heart rate sped up when the small cushion I sat on shifted under more weight next to me. The warmth of Kade’s arm brushed against my skin and the slight touch made my body tremble. Leaning in closer, he brushed his knuckles along my jaw, immediately making my eyes meet his. So many thoughts were said between us in that stare, so many secrets were shared, so many strings were pulled that I lost myself a little drowning in those eyes.

“You’re going to leave, aren’t you?” he whispered.

“Why would you ask that?”

“You haven’t looked at me all afternoon. Your eyes are constantly on the door, and you look ready to run…Please stay…I didn’t mean to scare you before…” Intense.

“Kade, I’m not scared of you. There’s just…”

An explosive gritty crack rocked through the bar, a bright flash of light and the sizzling sounds of showering sparks and broken glass shattered out across the room, landing at my feet, and the music died instantly.

Even if I had never heard a gunshot before, it was not one of those sounds that you could mistake this close, but I knew for sure with every heartbeat what it was. That explosive sound that could deafen for minutes after, the slow motion of events right after, as chaos prepared its introduction. My heart thudded hard and all my muscles tightened into fight mode. For a half of a second, the room stilled and everything was bathed in thick silence. The smell of burning wires and acid filled my nose.

“Now that I have all you redneck’s attention, where can I find Samantha Matthews,” the gritty voice said, and I felt it in every cell in my body. This was it. Game over. I’d been found. My muscles tensed. Would he kill me quickly or drag me back home and kill me slowly in front of a live audience?

I still wore the stains of my decisions in slight white scars and discoloring on my skin. The strong feelings that I once had for my husband were locked in a small hidden box, and once that gunshot rang out, once the knowledge that his heart still beat somewhere, the lid of that box popped right open. My past exploded like warfare before my eyes. The feelings that I once had of love and comfort were twisted into hate and fear.