Grey eyes registering my state, scanned across the bubbles that I was trying desperately to hide under.  But with the savage way he dove in, there wasn’t much left to conceal myself with, and I saw his eyes widen and hunger took over reason.  Slowly, a flush of heat crept across my naked chest, up my bare throat and onto my cheeks.  My God, if I could bottle the way that man looked at me, I’d never feel unattractive again.  It was an indulgent feeling, one I wanted to keep, sip at it, swirl it around my tongue for a while, and then swallow.  Any sense of guilt or shame, fear or insecurity was absent, and all I felt was beautiful, as if I could stand up before him and be viewed as a priceless, one of a kind sculpture, perfect and unbreakable.

The way he looked at me made me forget the things I was upset over.  Whatever they were that I was just thinking about.

The sight of him was gloriously perfect, how…how to describe what this man looked like?  The muscles of his entire torso were clearly defined and they rippled as he moved towards me.  His shoulders, thick and solid, his arms tight and sinewy, he was the perfect specimen of a male and I simply couldn’t take my eyes from him.

“It was my turn to use Google,” he whispered hoarsely, his wet hands reached my chin, lifting it to him.

“Did you know that there’s a missing person’s report on two women from New York City?  One’s name is Jennifer Coswell, and the other is Samantha Matthews.  Jennifer is a nurse at New York-Presbyterian University Hospital and Samantha, well Samantha Matthews is the fucking head trauma surgeon there,” his nostrils flared.  “And they’re both wanted for questioning in some sort of suspicious circumstances.”

I tried to pull away, but he savagely grabbed the back of my neck and held me there; his cold grey eyes frozen, waiting for answers.  I couldn’t find the right ones.  I couldn’t find the words that would tell him…anything.  I just wanted to run, run so he wouldn’t know me, the real me.  “Well, I hope those two woman are okay.  Because, sometimes I hear stories like that and wonder, maybe, if certain women are better off missing than being found.  But I wouldn’t know anything about them, because I’m Lainey Nevaeh, and I’ve never been anything but a waitress.”

“If you keep piling more bullshit on your story, you’re going to get buried in it.  You have some sort of dark fucking secret that you think you can’t tell me, and I want to know. I want to know you.”  Leaning in, his rough, unshaven chin scraped harshly against mine, “I want to know you.”  Wet lips slid over mine, and the hands that held me down tangled themselves tightly through the wet strands of my hair, tugging my face closer to his.

My eyes fluttered closed with the pull, and there was nothing in the room, nothing in the world, but his mouth on mine, and the sounds of the lapping water against the porcelain tub.  Pressing the warm tip of his tongue across my lips, he parted them, dipping in, persuading me to give in, to lay me bare, know my secrets.  “Let me in, Lainey.”

Wet fingers slid down my neck as I leaned back to look at him. “Something dark haunts us all.  What darkness haunts you at night, Kade?  What do you squeeze your eyes closed to when the darkness bites against your back when you’re alone at night?  Because I was married to mine. I was daughter to mine, and I refused to look into the mirror and see it make me as dark as them, so I walked away from it all.”

Reaching my hands up, I pulled a white towel that hung from a small brushed-nickel hook on the wall.  As Kade thudded his head back against the corner of the tub, his eyes fluttered closed and I stood, wrapping the towel tightly around me.

“Please don’t push me away.  Let me know you,” he whispered when I reached the door.

“How very fucking hypocritical of you, Kade.  Weren’t you just the one in your truck screaming for me to get out when I tried to get you to talk to me? Why did you push me away?  Why do you push everyone away?  Maybe you have things you don’t know how to talk about, maybe you’ve seen things that you don’t want to see again, maybe you can’t even get the words to fumble out of your mouth.  Whatever reason it is, Kade, you should understand that it’s probably the same reason as mine.”

“I can’t trust anyone,” he whispered, clipped.

“Me neither,” I replied.

“I’m not comfortable around people,” he snapped.

“Join the fucking club.  We meet in the bar every Wednesday night at ten,” I said, stomping out of the room and grabbing my bag of clothes.  I tore it open and shoved a shirt over my head and a pair of yoga pants on without wasting my time searching for any under garments. I growled out loud when I looked down and realized my shirt was on backwards.  Screw it. I left it on anyway.

Kade was storming out of the bathroom, soaking wet pants, slicked against his skin and dripping all over his rug.  “Don’t fucking walk away from me.  I’m doing what you wanted.  I’ve been fucking telling you everything!”

“BULLSHIT!” I screamed.  “The lack of exposition from a fucking award winning writer astounds me,” I yelled, barking out a hideous laugh at his expense.  “You haven’t told me anything.  I found out everything by reading about you online, and you know what?  It still doesn’t scratch the surface, does it?  Because an entire town of people hate you and fear you. That’s not what would normally happen when someone goes through a tragedy like that.  You did something that scares the hell out of everybody so much that even your own brother is afraid to push you to live!” His expression looked ashen, repulsed by the words I was saying, “What, Kade?  Just say it!  Scream at me to get the fuck out again!  But don’t expect me to tell all of my secrets to a total stranger, no matter how good he is at making me come with his mouth.”  I shot him a tight smile, and shoving my feet into my sneakers, I strode past him and out his bedroom door.  I couldn’t believe I had just said that, but I needed him to let it go. I needed to keep him away from all my problems, because it was safer.

There was a small staircase at the end of the corridor that I didn’t remember Kade carrying me up when we first arrived, and I barreled down each step as the wood tapped and echoed my footfalls.

Kade caught me halfway down, grabbing my waist, “Samantha, stop.  Please.”

My knees weakened hearing the name I loved, the name I missed so much, fall from his lips.  It brought me right to the edge though, right to the edge of losing it, not certain if I’d scream more or lash out in tears, so I bit down on my tongue to stop myself.

He stepped ahead of me, pulling me down against the hard surface of the stairs causing me to slam down on the side of my cheek. It wasn’t painless, but it also didn’t warrant a cry, but I knew I’d be bruised in the morning.  He fiercely cupped my face to make me focus on him.  I closed my eyes.

“Don’t block me out.”  He pressed my body against the wall of the stairs, my head lightly thudding against the handrail.  His wet pants seeped a cold dampness into my skin. “I want to saw off my own hand, just so that I could let you go, let you go to keep you safe from my mind, from my issues.  But you, you’re just like me, right?  Something’s wrong inside you too.”

“Fuck you,” I spat, pushing him off me.  “You’re still not saying anything to me, Kade.  You are still regurgitating the same fucking bullshit, just a little more poetically.”

Without effort, he lifted my body off the stairs, carrying me down the rest of the way into a darkened living area and tossed me on a large couch, pinning me down with his weight.  The feel of him on top of me made me breathless and needy.  Burying his face into the side of my neck, hot breath fanned against my skin, and open lips across my flesh.

“You’re adorable when you’re angry,” he whispered, breathing heavily.

“Oh, really?  Then get the hell off me, because I’m about to get gorgeous all over your ass.”

His sudden kiss stunned me, and the heavy thundering of his heart against my chest made my lips open to him.  Breathing in each other, lips drinking thirstily from each other, I couldn’t stop. My body wanted him too much.

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 fucking drowning in it.  Guilt is like a fucking 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 fucking months, I didn’t take him seriously, and I could have stopped it.  Lainey, he went for me first, shooting both my fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking 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.