Brutally Beautiful(83)

What he did in front of me re-wired my brain. I resorted to violence - lavish in it now, so I stay away from everything and everyone so it doesn’t completely overthrow me. It’s like I feel as if I can become him. Redemption for me is unthinkable, because I still grieve for my best friend, and the fact that I still miss him…is sick. Nobody ever understood me after. And everyone blamed me, accused me of planning it with him, encouraging him, creating a suicide pact with him. He left diaries and video journals telling whomever would listen that it was my fault for not stopping him. And he was right. I should have stopped him. And I shouldn’t miss him.”

I heard him swallow, felt it against my skin. He tangled his fingers through mine and tightened his grip. I think he was using me for strength. “I mean, I didn’t understand any of it. School was supposed to be a safe place. My girlfriend, we had just started dating, she…she was shot with a sawed off shotgun which blew a hole in her chest the size of a baseball. It blew her f*cking shirt right off her body. That was the first time I’d seen her without a shirt on. Do you know what that’s like? To get to see the tits you been trying to see for two months with a bloody gaping hole between them. It was horrific.

Bodies were all around me. All I saw were limp bodies. Some moved sluggishly trying to escape, gasping for their lasts breath. I can still see them, in front of me, as if it was happening all over again. The sounds were inhuman. Cries. Pleas. Gasping rattles of blood through lungs. The sounds of boots sloshing through the thick puddles of the blood coated floor.”

Kade laughed darkly, a choking sound that made my chest ache and I needed a break, a pause. A moment to help me deal with how f*cked up everything was that he was saying, but he kept up. Anguish and savageness dripped off his words. “There were blast holes in the monitors of the computers in the back of the classroom and someone’s sneaker, smeared with blood, covered a keyboard with a dangling mouse moving back and forth. Back and forth. I was left hollow inside; my insides…the things that made me Kade, never escaped that classroom. He never made it out of that school alive.”

Kade shifted off me and stood. The absence of his weight and tightness of the grasp he had on me, made my body throb with pain. He walked over to a stone fireplace and went about building a fire and as the first flames licked at the dry wood he had placed inside, the scent of pine and burning cedar filled the room. His muscular broad back, full of its hard ridges and tight muscles held a tattooed list that ran down his spine. A list of names, 32 of them, with Thomas’ at the very bottom. Just as if he’d carried the weight of them on his shoulders and down his spine since that very day. My throat knotted and I jutted my chin out painfully to stop my tears from falling. Kade Grayson was not the kind of man that wanted anyone’s pity, but I sure as hell wanted desperately to cry out loud and sob for the sixteen-year old boy who lived through that hell. As he turned back to face me, a log crackled in the fireplace and a burst of small sparks shot against the darkness of the room.

I folded my legs underneath my body and leaned further into the cushions of the couch, quickly wiping at the stream of tears rushing down my cheeks. “Have you ever spoken to anyone about this?” I asked.

He was gazing down at something on the floor, and I waited patiently until he lifted his head and pained pale eyes locked on mine. “No.”

“But, you should. Talking through these…”

“Will do nothing,” he snapped. “Don’t. Please, don’t.”

“But you’re telling me?”

His body collapsed on the couch next to me. “I think you’re hiding demons too, Samantha Matthews. I want you to introduce me to all of them, because I think I finally found someone whose demons would play nice with my own. It’s okay if I call you Samantha Matthews, right?”