Brutally Beautiful

by Christine Zolendz

  Placing my case on the table, I slid out my laptop and opened it up. My goal was to watch her and get some research down for my next book. Keying in the Wi-Fi password, I checked my email and opened one from my editor.

  Kade,

  These were impressive; I wouldn’t dream of changing a thing. Just scan through my notes and make any necessary corrections.

  Gary

  There were only three corrections for both books? Usually Gary had more to say. I quickly typed him a short email, explaining that I wanted to keep the manuscripts out of the publishing house, and self-publish. I did this with my books every so often, especially if I wrote a book that wasn’t scheduled for publication, which these weren’t. My publisher hated me for doing it, but I told them they could find another me if they wanted to place rules on the things I did. Being somebody’s bitch was not in my nature; it went completely against my DNA makeup.

  A soft clink of glass against the wood tabletop caused me to look up from my screen. Delicate fingers slid a drink closer to me and a smooth voice asked, “How’s the hand?” My lungs found trouble with the task of inhaling.

  All my senses were heightened as soon as I looked up. I tried to ignore the overwhelming emotions, but it was of no use. Spiced apples and cinnamons twirled in the air around me. Five shades of green danced in her eyes as my focused gaze caught hers and my chest just surged. What the hell was that about? As I laced my fingers around the brandy, her fingers brushed gently against mine with the slightest touch of almost infinitesimal tremors. “Just a little scratch,” I answered her hoarsely.

  She slid her hands away from mine and pushed them deeply into the pockets of her apron. Her cheeks started to flare with a deep blush. I tried, but couldn’t stop the slow smile it brought to my lips. “I’m surprised you still want to be friends, after such an arsehole I’ve been towards you.”

  “Friends?” She asked, composed, unsmiling.

  “Yes.”

  “Yep. Just wait. Our friendship bracelets are in the mail,” she said sarcastically. “Please don’t mistake my being a naturally caring person for wanting to be friends. Is there anything else I can get for you?”

  “A smile?” I whispered.

  “That’s not on the menu, is it?” Calm. Cool. Emotionless.

  “Fuck.” I took a pull from my brandy, letting the flavor smoothly fill my mouth and burn its fire down my throat. It didn’t quench my thirst though. I wanted a taste of the woman standing before me. I laughed and looked down, shaking my head. I cleared my throat, “So being friends is an impossibility? You’d be missing out.”

  “Yep. I guess I will just have to live with never knowing how great a friend you could be. It’ll be difficult, I’m sure. But, with years of therapy and psychoanalysis, I bet I’ll be able to overcome the heartbreak of not getting to know you.” Her eyes never left mine. Curt, yet nice and emotionless. She just completely handed me my own order of sublime indifference and I could have buried myself in it. “Will there be anything else?”

  “No, thank you,” I said, and watched her walk away, smiling at the other customers and going on with her life, with not one ounce of effect from me.

  All that night, I watched her work the floor, mesmerized. She never let anyone touch her; it was as if she would melt away right before their hands went to touch her. No one touched her but Bree. Always keeping a distance from everyone like she was more comfortable with being alone than with other people. She smiled politely and answered when asked questions, but there was something missing. It was as if she was missing. Every time my glass was empty, she would bring over another one, but I never caught her looking over at me. I stayed there until closing. I stayed there while she and Bree sat with that dolt Fran, and ate dinner after the bar closed. My brother gave me strange looks, but I just flipped him the finger and ignored him.

  I didn’t care how sick I looked. I couldn’t stop myself; I didn’t want to look away from her.

  Lainey leaned against the back of her chair swirling a French fry around her plate drowning it in ketchup, but not eating a bite. Very prim and proper, she sat back rigid and ladylike. It made me see images of her on her knees in front of me, seeing how dirty I could get her to be.

  Bree was laughing at something Fran had said, but Lainey wasn’t. She didn’t seem to be listening, not even looking at anyone around her, she just stared out across the bar. Bree touched her hand to get her attention, but she just planted a robotic smile on her face that never reached her eyes. Then she turned her attention back out across the bar again and her gaze collided with mine. She didn’t look away.

  Seconds.

  Minutes.

  She did not look away.

  Staring at me and me staring at her, our eyes locked, fixed; lost in each other.

  Bree interrupted our private moment by taking her plate into the back and walking through the view we had of each other. It was as if someone cut off my oxygen. As I sat there, practically gasping for breath, Lainey pushed herself away from the table, gathered her coat and belongings, and walked out the door not glancing back at me once. Fran was hot on her trail.

  “What are you bloody doing, mate?” Dylan’s voice asked next to me.

  “Drinking. Writing.”

  “You just eye-fucked that girl to death, Kade. You need to stop whatever is going on in that mind of yours.”

  “You just made it so much more tempting, brother,” I said, laughing.

  “Bloody hell, Kade. You’re laughing. You’re laughing? You’re barmy, brother. I haven’t seen you laugh in…” He looked at the table I had been staring at for the last hour and realization dawned across his expression.

  Want to hear how deep my sickness runs? I did it again the next day and the next. Followed her and ended each night sitting at the same table watching her, delighted as hell a restraining order hadn’t arrived for me yet.

  On the third night, the brandy slid across the top of my table and her eyes fluttered down to mine. “A sketchy black truck has been seen everywhere I’ve been for the past three days. Intense steel-grey eyes staring me down and peeking in my windows. You’re the worst stalker I’ve ever met. What are you going to do now? Ask me to help you find your lost puppy? Offer me some candy and shove me in your truck? Or will it be something subtler, like asking me if your napkin smells like chloroform as you grab me from behind? Or wait, maybe you’ll just sit here and stare at me menacingly and pet your imaginary cat while collecting strands of my hair to knit a sweater for yourself later.”

  “Wow. Don’t hold yourself back. I really get under your skin, yeah? Kind of hate me, huh?”

  “If I gave you any amount of thought in my head, I probably would.”

  I choked down the mouthful of brandy and almost spit it out all over the front of my laptop. “Are you always this witty? Or should I be afraid? And I haven’t peeked in your window since the mop dance. My heart wouldn’t be able to handle it again, although I do find myself listening to that same damn song every night. And I can’t knit…yet.”

  Then, for the first time since seeing her in the diner, she smiled at me. “You should be terrified, actually. You never know when that little stalking plan of yours will backfire and I show up everywhere you are, like a crazy woman with zero self-esteem.” She leaned over the table, hands laid out flat across the wood top, “I’d keep repeating in a high pitched voice…that we were made for each other…that I couldn’t bring myself to shower after being so near you. You’d find me stealing your clothes and wearing them just to have your scent all over my body. Maybe I’d crawl into your window at night and slip under your bed and poke you every so often so you couldn’t sleep.”

  “I will definitely be leaving the alarm off tonight,” I said, chuckling.

  “Why?”

  “Because I like the thought of you under me in bed,” I stated.

  “No, Kade. Why are you following me?” She whispered.

  Fuck. I had nothing to say to that. She would probably
slap me if I told her I had trouble breathing when I wasn’t near her.

  “My TV is broke?” Cold harsh humor laced my tone. I really was trying to be funny and flirtatious, but I needed to work on the lack I had of this talent.

  She crossed her arms, “Try again.”

  “I like the view?”

  “Well, that’s not creepy at all,” she said, dryly.

  Laying my palms flat against the table, I just let go. “Because Lainey, you somehow soothe the chaos that’s inside me. You heal me.”

  Chapter 7

  Kade had been at the bar every night for almost a week, staring at me so hard that I feared he might burst a blood vessel. I peeked out of the door in the bar’s kitchen and watched him walk in. He was scanning the room, dark serious eyes searching. Was he looking for me? Was it fear that had my hackles up? Or was it excitement? I wanted to punch myself in my head for thinking it.

  I mean his actions were incarceration worthy, but then what he said to me last night…it just…touched me. Because, Lainey, you somehow soothe the chaos that’s inside me. You heal me.

  You heal me.

  You heal me.

  “Let me guess. My brother is out there, yeah?” Dylan’s voice rumbled behind me. He settled himself next to me and peeked beside me behind the door. The closeness of his arm to mine made me shiver and I moved away. When he realized what I’d done, his eyes widened, “Ah shit. You’re scared of him? Damn, Lainey, is he scaring you? I swear Lainey; he’s not a bad person. He’s just not right in the head.”

  What the heck did that mean?

  “We need to talk.” Tears burned my eyes out of sheer frustration, and I ran. I ran down the hallway into his office, hoping he’d follow me so I could get some sort of answers. This was too intense. His brother was vile towards me one minute, then the next, he was apologizing and following me around, being flirty in a weird way. I got that there was an attraction there. I mean Kade Grayson was glorious to look at. I now understood the idea of being attracted to someone at first sight, or whatever you wanted to call it. There was no denying something was there that drew us to acknowledge one another and to look at one another. I couldn’t remember another time where I’d felt this instant attraction so strongly with somebody, and I saw it in him, the way he watched me, I saw that same strong pull in his eyes. But he’d been following me. Conveniently showing up in places I frequented, just watching and waiting. To say I was worried was the understatement of the century. I was ready to pull out my claws.

  Dylan’s serious face was in mine instantly, worry lines creasing his forehead, making him look so much older.

  I paced back and forth in front of his desk, wringing my shirt in my hands. “Look, Dylan. I appreciate everything you have done for Bree and I, showing up here all messed up as we were, and letting us stay and work here, but you had to realize by now that I’m running from a really bad situation and I don’t want to get myself mixed up in another one. So, please tell me what it is that is wrong with your brother.”

  Dylan’s eyebrows rose with a sad expression, his shoulders slumped and he just seemed to give in. “Take the night off, Lainey. Go home and Google Kade Grayson. He’s got his own damn Wikipedia page. You’ll find everything that everybody thinks about him there. Once you read all the articles on what happened and what he did, then look up his books. His pen name is Cory Thomas.”

  I stood there staring at him. This whole town was bat-shit crazy, and the Graysons seemed to be the supreme rulers. Ever since we got here, I’d been waiting for someone to ask me to drink whatever weird Kool-Aid they were passing around. He couldn’t just give me an explanation? I had to go on a freaking treasure hunt?

  Slipping out the back door, I yanked on my coat as fast as I could. It was freezing outside, but thank God, I had less than a ten-minute walk to the trailer park.

  I had no idea what I would find when I looked up Kade. What could possibly make an entire town fear him? What could possibly make a grown man choose a reclusive existence and have such a strong distaste of other human beings? And, why the hell would he take it out on me? Climbing the icy steps to my trailer, I was determined to find out.

  Warming my hands around a steamy cup of freshly made coffee, I turned my computer on. Logging online, I immediately typed Kade Grayson into a search engine, and clicked on the first site. Not prepared for what I saw, my coffee cup fell from my hands, stinging a burn across my fingers and splashing down my legs. The cup shattered into pieces across the crappy linoleum of the trailer and echoed itself in my ears.

  Saint Benedict’s High School Massacre.

  England.

  School shooting.

  1998.

  A sixteen-year-old student killed a total of twenty-eight of his fellow students and three teachers.

  Oh my God.

  Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God.

  My eyes scanned through the sickening photographs of the school. The crowds of screaming students, close-ups of crying teachers, zoomed in pictures of bullet holes in the windows of the classroom, and a terrifying black and white grainy video surveillance still shot of a lone gunman walking the hallway of the school, a duffle bag full of firearms hung from his shoulder. At the end of first period, each one of those guns would be emptied of bullets.

  A shuddering fear gripped me as my eyes scoured the pictures. My tears fell and my stomach rolled with each new photograph. My cold trembling fingers covered my mouth and my chest tingled, as I scrolled through the pictures of each dead student. The beautiful innocent faces of each dead student.

  Dead students.

  Photographs of the three teachers, and their families that would never see them again.

  The question whispered in my mind like the wind, slow at first, then picking up speed and howling through my skull. Was Kade a sick sadistic killer? Kade murdered those children. How can he do such a thing? My God…no wonder people said he was the devil. Why wasn’t he in prison? Was it because he was a juvenile when he murdered a classroom full of innocent kids? Through the blur of tears, I finally found my answers.

  Kade Grayson, sixteen-year-old high school junior was the only survivor in the entire junior class, although severely wounded. The gunman, sixteen-year-old high school junior, Thomas McKadley, committed suicide after the attacks by a gunshot wound to the head. In addition to the shootings, the disturbing and extensively planned attack involved propane tanks converted to bombs placed at each exit of the school, and two explosive devices rigged in a car and eight under the stands of the gymnasium.

  Oh, my God.

  Kade.

  What do I even do with that? What do you do? How do you get over that? Fucking hell. That was just like Columbine. How…how do you live from there? Oh God. Sixteen? Severely wounded? Watched his entire class slaughtered.

  How do you go on?

  My chest tightened and my throat thickened with knots I couldn’t swallow. A thick sheen of guilt and sweat covered my skin. I assumed Kade was a killer, just as he assumed I was a stripper. Kade was a man who lived through horror, real life horror. Of course, he would be untrusting and full of hate and rage. That’s a fucking given when people are trying to kill you. You don’t get over that. You never get over that; it scars you.

  How did he live through that? How did he deal with it?

  I googled Cory Thomas next, just like Dylan told me to, with tears stinging my eyes and racing down my cheeks. Websites upon websites, fan sites, fan forums, blogs, reading groups, Facebook pages and fan-fiction; it was an endless supply of people who loved this obviously incredible reclusive author. His readers loved him. That is how he dealt with it, he wrote about it.

  I clicked on his list of books; there were hundreds of them. Hundreds.

  All he did was write. All he did was hide from the world and write.

  His latest book, Behind Green Doors, was independently published just the day before. There was a crazed buzz about it. Reviews and comments in forums spoke about it being his best wor
k to date, a mixture of erotic horror, and thriller with a love story twisted inside of it. I downloaded it to my eReader, then cleaned up my mess of coffee, made a new cup and crawled into a ball on the couch. Wanting. Needing to climb into the mind of this man, this man who had seen mayhem first hand and had tried his best to live with it. I knew all too well how scary and real his nightmares might be. Trying to wipe away the last of my tears, my raw eyes strained to see my eReader.

  Two beautiful green eyes graced the cover of the eBook, floating in darkness. I hadn’t read a horror book in ages. I swiped the page and stopped on his dedication page, spilling my coffee for the second time in my lap.

  For the mysterious green-eyed waitress

  She is now my favorite flavor

  What the fuck? What the fucking FUCK? I stood up, dropped my eReader and paced the room, coffee still dripping off my shirt. He made me lose two fucking cups of coffee. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

  I was going to need an entire bottle of wine to read the rest of this shit.

  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 fuck 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…