Brutally Beautiful

by Christine Zolendz

  Chapter 14

  I knew I was far-gone when I woke to an empty bed, after a night of continuously shifting towards the warmth of her body in my sleep, a sleep without the sweat of nightmares, only to wake and find a cold empty spot where I hid my heart. She had it too, and I was intrigued with what she’d do with it. Crush it beneath her little white converse sneakers, or with her bare fucking hands? I didn’t care too much how it was she crushed it, just as long as she did. Pain was just as good as pleasure, because it was something. In a blind frenzy, I dove head first through the tangle of sheets to find her.

  She was beyond my ability to put what I felt into words.

  Something other than the emptiness.

  The hate.

  And rage.

  But my fucking bed was empty. Empty and cold.

  Slipping on a pair of shorts, I stormed past the balcony ready to search the ends of the earth for that woman, but I noticed a small movement just outside. Pressing my hands against the cold glass, I could see her silhouette in the darkness, huddled up on one of the lounge chairs, as soft flakes of snow fluttered down around her.

  The door creaked as I pulled it open and her head turned in my direction.

  “Jesus—Lain…Sam…it’s freezing out here. What the hell? You’re so cold that you’re shaking.” I hovered over her and gather her small shivering body in my arms, “Bloody hell, Sam, you’re fucking soaking wet.”

  Her body shook against me. Then trembling lips touched mine with such a hunger that I was instantly kissing her back, carrying her inside the warmth of the house and thrusting into her so violently, so dominantly that I was afraid I might have broken her. But her hands fisted my hair, clawed at my back and matched my thrusts, her body pressed against mine, encouraging me, begging me for more.

  Being inside her wasn’t like any of the empty fucks I’d had before, it was filled with some sort of overwhelming emotion that made me feel like I could breathe. Her pussy was flooded with thick pleasure; her moans were all the music I would ever need to hear. It was pure insanity, crazed hunger that drove me into her over and over again.

  It felt…it felt like I had never had sex before. Yeah, yeah, I know how damn crazy that sounds, but…it was the first time the flesh beneath me came with heat, and scent. It was the first time I noticed the taste of someone, the touch that only she gave; the tingle that only her breath could cause on the surface of my skin. It was as if I’d been abstinent for years, alone in a dry uninhabited land, completely unaware of what sex really was.

  It was the first time I cared about someone. It was the first time it was real for me. She was just as damaged and out of bounds as me. All I wanted was to seep into her skin, curl myself around her heart, disappear completely and escape into her body. To have her taste on my tongue forever, have her smell and touch drown me, and her face always in my sight.

  I wanted to erase everything fucked up that had ever hurt her. I wanted to spill myself inside her and fill her with me, no one else. She clung to me, clawed into me, ravaged me just as I did her, and finally, as sleep crept over her body, I watched her. The repetitive thought of her walking out of my door looped over and over again in my mind. I knew she would leave. I also knew that whatever darkness that held her prisoner was not something she was going to go back to.

  I watched her. For hours, I just lay and watched her.

  I watched as the first rays of glistening sunlight fell against her skin, soaking it with a golden morning glow. Her inky black hair splayed chaotically across my pillows, her breathing light and even. She lay on her stomach, as the sun and shadows danced their way across the curves of her flesh, unknowing. She laid bare, save for the thick comforter she’d tucked her toes under in her slumber.

  She shifted onto her back and a small sound, almost a sigh, passed her lips. Watching the light spill into the room, crawling up her skin, my cocked twitched to life. Hardened rose tipped nipples lay perfect atop her ivory breasts. Her raw beauty paralyzed me.

  I watched her.

  My tongue found its way to the perfect peaks, and she moaned quietly against me; so close to her smooth skin. Then, with the sunlight slowly brightening up the room, I noticed things I hadn’t seen the night before.

  Torrid heat flushed through my body, stinging my cheeks and burning my scalp as adrenaline slammed through my bloodstream. Violent images flipped through my mind, a flash slide show of horror and blood, and Sam.

  “What the fuck is that?” I growled before I could stop myself.

  “Kade?” she asked in a sleepy voice. She lifted her head off the pillows, wild dark hair spilling past her shoulders, and sat up, tucking her feet underneath her. “Kade? Is something wrong? Is it…is it Dylan?”

  Fuck yeah there was something wrong. She had scars across her body; raised fucking ridges of flesh, a pale pink shade that matched the natural color of her lips. Yeah, there was something real fucking wrong, because some of those scars spelled out fucking words. It was a fucking name.

  David.

  I could feel the anger coiling tight, threatening to explode.

  “Kade?” She was looking at me with those beautiful doe eyes, and then realized what I saw and clawed like an animal for the blankets to cover herself.

  “No. Don’t,” I whispered, but she continued to scramble for the covers, pulling them out from under my body, tugging and yanking. “No! Don’t fucking COVER YOURSELF!” I screamed. I tore the comforter off the bed and hurled it across the room, and there she sat, naked, alone on my bed with her arms wrapped around her body as if she could hide behind them.

  “Who the fuck is David? Was that your husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would you do that to yourself? Why the fuck did you let him brand his fucking name on you?”

  She laid her palms flat on the bed and shifted herself over to the edge, and turned her face away from me, “I wasn’t conscious when he did it.” Moving off the bed, her beautiful lithe form glided across the room and started dressing.

  No. No. No, no-no-no-no-no.

  All the air just sucked out of my lungs and I had no idea what I could have said. I probably should have said so many things, but didn’t, nothing filled my mind but emptiness. I watched her cover my sanctuary with remorse.

  “He had his own branding tool and a butane torch.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam. I shouldn’t have yelled. I…I don’t know what to say…I don’t know anything and I want to know everything…”

  “Coffee,” she whimpered, standing there in just an oversized tee-shirt.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I need coffee. I go through serious withdrawals without it,” she smiled then, but I knew she was humiliated, and it drained away part of my impulsive anger, part of it. I knew she was just buying time until she could get out of there and never have to explain anything to me.

  So I made her coffee. Because, well, if Samantha Matthews, whoever she was asked me to build her a boat, I would have worked on that too. Placing my hand over my own scars, I tried to think of anything but someone branding her smooth skin. Smooth ivory skin that smelled like apples and cinnamon. Smooth ivory skin that tasted like sweet sugar and felt like soft cream melting under my hands.

  That pussy whipped me real good last night. Now I’m hard again.

  The coffee mugs clanked as I slid them over the uneven wood of the butcher-block table, and midway across she just reached out, grabbed the steamy hot cup, and brought it to her lips. After the first few sips the relief in her expression was priceless and her shoulders loosened as she leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table.

  “Sam?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Please fill in some holes for me.”

  “Which ones?”

  “All of them. Start with your childhood, I don’t care. But I want to know everything about the woman that will destroy me when she fucking walks out of my life,” I clipped. Damn, I was being a dick. But, it hurt like hell and I wanted to
fight with her, sick twisted me, wanted her to ball up her fists and hit me.

  She only offered me a tight smile.

  That just made me angrier.

  “Think those words are going to get me to fight with you? Think I’m going to fuel your rage, stoke the fire, Kade?” Then she leaned over and kissed me on my fucking lips; warm wet lips that tasted like the richest delicious coffee.

  “I, ah…I didn’t have much of a childhood,” she began, sitting back down on her chair. “My father was the best neurosurgeon in Manhattan, my mother a socialite. They had no time for my brother and me, so we played in the hospital while my father worked and my mother did charity work. I grew up in a very sterile environment.”

  I leaned back in my chair, my anger bubbling just under my skin, yet surprisingly restrained. “Go on,” I whispered, taking a sip of my coffee. It tasted better from her lips.

  “I was better known for my brains, freaky bookish ways or just being the nerd sitting quietly in the corner. I was obsessed with taking things apart and putting them back together. Breaking and fixing. I was different, so different from everyone else that surrounded me, and I knew it too, deep inside that, I wasn’t like everybody else. Instead of playing with dolls, I read my father’s medical books and my brother and I snuck peeks at the cadavers. It’s crazy to say really. And being that my father wanted my brother and me to follow in his footsteps, he let us view surgeries standing alongside the med students. Everything was always hidden from my mother though. My mother,” she chuckled, darkly. “My mother and I didn’t get along.”

  “Why not?” I asked, intrigued that someone couldn’t get along with her.

  “I was a reminder to my mother of her regrets and the heavy amount of wrinkles that her life delivered to her so unexpectedly. I was never going to be the gorgeous New York City socialite she always strived for me to be. There was not one ounce of sex-tape-diva in me at all. She tried to raise me to be a prim and proper wannabe-heiress. Frilly skirts, patent leather shoes, nails perfectly manicured and skinned tanned to a bronze. But my father raised me to use my brain. I was so against everything my mother wanted me to do, because it wasn’t me. I was the Goth girl in the corner, listening to heavy metal music, smoking cigarettes and cutting class to read in the hospital’s student library. I didn’t want to be anything but a doctor. I wanted to be in the middle of it all.” She sipped again at her coffee, placed the mug down, and absently stroked the rim.

  “Sneaking into the morgue, or watching the doctors and nurses care for patients was thrilling to me, powerful. It became my obsession, and best of all, completely forbidden by my mother. Later, I would understand her reasoning for wanting me to abstain from the clinical detachment of medicine, but by then, it was too late to learn more from her, since injecting herself with the world’s largest dose of morphine was of more importance to her. When my mother died, I was a girl interrupted. I no longer had to hide my addiction to saving people; I no longer had to hide my mother-disapproved freak-side bookish ways. I dove into my freakish nature, along with my brother and father to bury the truth about my life-taking, family stealing, morally corrupt, vain mother, and for the first time in my life, I got to be me.”

  “Wait, whoa. Your mother’s deceased?” I asked.

  “Yep. Her suicide letter was written on a neon pink post-it note…she blamed her death on my father’s lack of attention, and the hate she had for her life as a mother and wife, and nothing more.”

  Silence overtook the room as she quietly stared into her coffee. Her brows pulled elegantly together and she leaned back and sighed heavily, “Anyway, I realized I had something special to give to the world and I fucking did it. I took pre-med college classes when I was still in high school. They put me in the accelerated program in a medical charter school and I started medical school when I was just nineteen. After med-school, I ah…I wanted to start helping people…I was exceptional at what I did; it was all I knew. So I did my doctoral program and my residency where I thought I’d see the most trauma, where I was needed the most, you know.”

  “In the city?” I guessed.

  “No,” she said swallowing nervously, one hand cupped around her coffee and the other twisting the bottom of her shirt. “I was a Medical Corps Officer in the 82 division of the US army. I spent six years there. What should have been my residency years doing rounds in a sterilized hospital with holier than thou doctors making me guess what was wrong with patients, I spent in the bowels of Afghanistan, where real life hell was being played out. Where I learned to be a real trauma surgeon. Where it mattered.”

  Holy fucking hell.

  Anger bubbled over, and I jumped to my feet, fisting my hair in my hands. “Fuck, Sam. Fuck, Sam. FUCK!” God, seriously? What the fuck? Can there be more shit to make me want her more? Can there be more shit to make me fall in love with her faster?

  “What about you, Kade?” She asked, ignoring my outburst. “What was your childhood like?”

  “Normal,” I barked, kicking over the garbage bin and sailing it across the room. “I was a jackass, my best friend was a dick and all we ever did was to try to get laid, and then he turned into a mass murderer. I never did anything remotely worthy of mentioning in the presence of someone who fought in wars or saved lives. You…you’re like some sort of…of…I don’t know, saint or something.” I was yelling. Bitter words, twisted heart and devastation hooked its talons into my brain. Why was I becoming more and more enraged with how precious and moral she was? Oh, the fucking answer was simple really, because when she leaves, she’s going to take it all away from me.

  Her phone beeped and vibrated against the table like the ring at the end of a boxing match. She reached for it hesitantly and read the message.

  Clearing her throat, she whispered softly, “Bree just messaged me that she’s going to leave the hospital in about an hour. She wants to know if she could come here to wash and change. Says she smells like rotten meat. Deputy George will drive her…”

  “Yeah, of course. She can’t go back to that trailer and don’t you mean Jennifer?” I snapped, trying hard not to lose it completely.

  “Um…yeah.” Her fingers deftly moved over the screen of her phone, then a moment after they stilled, it beeped and vibrated in her hands.

  “Deputy George said the gunman had a rap sheet on him a mile long. They are linking the incident up with a bunch of highway robberies and suspicious missing person’s reports from the city, but they don’t believe we have anything to do with why it happened. Your brother was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She typed something else quickly and placed the phone down in front of her, exchanging it with her cup of coffee.

  “Stop talking about other shit! Tell me about the fucking scars. Tell me about David,” I fumed.

  “You’re way too angry to talk about this,” she said, rising off her seat.

  She moved in front of me, her knees touching mine. I slid my chair back automatically, giving her room. Then…then once again, she did something in-fucking-credible to me. She straddled her legs over my lap, wrapped them around the chair, threw her arms around my neck and fucking hugged me.

  She. HUGGED. Me. I hadn’t had someone hug me since I was sixteen.

  For a minute, my arms awkwardly flailed at my sides, hugs were foreign territory for me. “You’re just trying to get out of talking to me, and this is making me even angrier.”

  Her lips pressed against my forehead, long silky hair fell around our faces like a dark thick curtain, closing us in. The slow circular swirl of her hips over mine, the liquid motions from the muscles of her thighs and the delicious heat between them had me fighting to hold onto my anger.

  Then one of the hands that had been holding my enraged expression, trying to calm it into a smile, slid slowly down into the warmth between those thighs. Fuuuck me, I forgot she was only wearing that tee shirt. The most delicious sounds of fingers slipping through wet flesh made my world spin and saliva flooded my mouth.

 
“No. I’m not trying to avoid telling you about him. I just want whatever time we have left to be worth something, and not spend it on him. He’s taken too much from me already,” she whispered, tracing her tongue against my lips. The sensation sent all the blood in my body surging lower, pumping my heart faster and made my cock throb with anticipation.

  “You’re right, but I can’t let it go. I want everything from you, everything, Sam. Give me something, Sam.”

  “David was the kind of man that could bewitch the rarest of butterflies to land in the palm of his hand, then tear their wings right from their bodies and laugh when they tried to fly away. No more talking, Kade. Not now, the anger rolling off you is so thick I can see it. Please. Please, just take me.”

  Her lips brushed against my neck, her hand still moved between her legs and the violent thoughts in my head were building. “You’re not going to be able to handle me when I’m this angry, Sam. I’m not a nice lover like this. I’m harsh. Rough. Demanding. I’ll fucking break you.”

  Her movements stilled, her eyes locked on mine, “I’ve been broken by lesser men than you, Kade Grayson. Being broken by a good man is something I haven’t done. Break me, Kade. Trust in me enough to know you can.”

  The spark of craving in her green irises and the seal of her lips over mine was all it took. Grabbing her by her wrists, I yanked her off my lap and pulled her into the bedroom, flinging her on the bed. “Take off the shirt,” I demanded.

  With my hands blindly rummaging through my top drawer for something to tie her with, my eyes were fixed on the sheer velocity of her yanking the shirt over her head and flinging it across the room. Stalking to the bed, I pulled up her wrists and bound them to my bedframe with my tuxedo ties with half hitch knots. Pushing open her legs, I kneeled between them, feeling the heat of her pussy against my skin. “Am I scaring you?”