Brutally Beautiful(82)

His arms slid around me, hands slipping over my stomach, closing over my breasts. Cupping me tightly through my shirt, catching my nipples between his fingers, he squeezed gently, making my breathing uneven. “You want to know it all, Samantha, I’ll give it all to you,” he whispered against my lips.

The pressure of his fingers tightened; the pinch bringing tears to my eyes as the little tease of pain surged though my chest and pooled as thick hot need in my belly. “Do you know what it’s like to HAVE to continue breathing, dreaming, thinking, living, hating, needing, while the friends you once had are rotting deep below the dirt?

What happened to me that day shattered my trust in the world; my belief in goodness and innocence. It was my introduction to what is truly evil. I didn’t understand it at sixteen how I could have had a best mate, like a brother, do something so…so…heinous. It was NOT clear to me. He joked about it… I didn’t know the right way to feel and the remorse, the guilt, the shame paralyzed me. IT. STILL. DOES. It wasn’t like I got a bloody email from God that pleasantly said: ‘Kade Grayson, I have looked over the situation with your best mate Thomas and his complete annihilation of innocent youth, and I’m just dropping a line to let you know I consider your knowledge of the subject, and your continued love for your childhood friend to show no guilt of association for the murders and I hereby drop all judgment against you. You’re free to live with no regrets. You’re hereby off the hook. You have a guaranteed full paid ticket into heaven when your time comes. Signed, God. Cheers.’” The scruff of his unshaven face scraped sharply against my skin as he pulled away from me. A small moment of silence sliced through the air and the only sound that reached my ears was the heavy breaths we both took.

I wanted to cry for him. Brushing my knuckles past his cheek, I said, “That guilt and shame you have for surviving is going to destroy you, it is destroying you. It’s like a lethal injection that you’ve given to yourself. You’re f*cking drowning in it. Guilt is like a f*cking cancer, Kade. If you don’t stop, it will creep and crawl into every crack and crevice of your soul and kill you.”

“I’m not guilty for surviving. I’m guilty because I knew he was going to do it. He joked about it. For f*cking months, I didn’t take him seriously, and I could have stopped it. Lainey, he went for me first, shooting both my f*cking legs so I couldn’t run, then picked off every single person in that room and made me watch and told me I should have listened to him. I could have stopped him. Then he blew a hole in my chest, and finished off anyone else that moved. I wasn’t supposed to live.”

“Kade,” I whimpered, struggling to get up.

“No. No. No. Listen to me. You wanted to hear everything, know everything. I’m going to f*cking give you everything,” he hissed, hands gripped my face. “There will be no excuse for you not to trust in me. I’m giving you everything I am, right f*cking now.”

I tried to hold back my tears, but the words, the expression on his face, and God, the grip of his fingers just hurt so much.

“Their lives were over. Over. All of them. None of them would feel the warmth of the sunshine against their skin or get to look upon the shining stars in a midnight sky again. They wouldn’t be graduating with me that next year, learning to drive or fall in love and marry. They would never have those things. Never. They would NEVER.”

He pressed his lips softly against my bruised cheek, causing a small lick of pain. “School shootings are so breathtakingly evil. They carry such suffering that is so far beyond the imagination, so f*cking inconceivable to any ordinary human thoughts that no one can ever understand. No one can understand why, and no one can understand me. Everybody thinks they could figure out why, but they can’t, they never will. Thomas wasn’t someone you could ever think would do such violence. He was popular and everybody loved him…He wasn’t clamoring for acceptance or attention. He wasn’t bullied, or gay, or too short, too fat, too dumb or awkward, not a juvenile delinquent, not a depressed or disgruntled teen, not anything they claimed his reasons might be. He was a f*cking psychopath, sly and clever. Thomas was the most charming and well-mannered little psychopath you could have ever met. I have spent years, years, trying to put reasons to what he did. And there are none.