Her skin blanched, turning bright alabaster white.  “Nah, I used my mega brain power to make him self combust,” she tried to joke, and then tears poured down her cheeks, because she knew it wasn’t funny.

“What happened?” I asked.  Did she really try to kill her husband?  Husband?  She was married?  She was a killer?  Attempted murderer?

“I stepped out of the train wreck.  Battered and bruised, but free.  It all started in a heartbeat when my world shifted right out from beneath me and everything I’d ever believed was one huge lie.”

“Fuck, give me one night of truth.  One fucking night of truth for the both of us, before you run for the rest of your life and I get left here wondering why I let you go.”

Samantha opened her mouth, about to share something then closed it tightly.  Averting her eyes to her hands, she shook her head in frustration.  She wiped the stream of tears off her cheeks and struggled to find the words.  Her pain was killing me.  She sat in silence, and I thought to offer her a bit of space to gather her thoughts together, so I excused myself to change out of my wet pants and get us both a drink.  Brandy was always my choice.

With heavy wet pants, I trudged back up the stairs and into my bedroom.  Inside my mind, I could feel the pressure building, the not knowing what had happened in her past, and whom she was running from.  The question that slammed around my brain like a damn pinball machine was if the person I was obsessing over, the one that made me calm, the one I didn’t want to leave. Was she a cold blooded killer?  Or was whatever she did justifiable?  My mind raced, and the pressure came close to bursting through my gray matter and splattering it against the walls.

Struggling to peel my pants off, my anger took over and I ended up ripping them off and launching them across the room into the corner, where they landed with a loud wet splat then slid wetly down the wall.  I yanked open my armoire so forcefully the inside drawer came flying out at me and landed on my foot, sending sharps spikes of pain across it.  “Bloody-Motherfucker-Wank-Shanking-Bugger!”

Pinching my fingers over the bridge of my nose, I knew I had to calm myself; I needed to get back downstairs and try to talk to her.  I couldn’t be up in my bedroom having a goddamn episode.

Rummaging through the mess of clothes that had spilled all over the floor, I found a pair of boxer shorts and pulled them on, then ran for the brandy.  Opening the plug, I took a long swig right from the canister trying to settle my anger, then with harshly clenched fingers, I poured us both a glass.  The only image that came to mind to help calm myself was smashing both glasses against the wall while still in my hands.  I wanted to see the blood that would drip from the wounds and feel the burn of pain.  I itched to taste the coppery liquid when I placed my mouth against the broken skin, craved it.

The walls of the room felt heavy against my flesh, moving in, taunting to close around me and collapse upon my body, trapping me.  Sounds became solid and tangible.  My antique hand-forged wrought iron clock drummed its heavy ticks and tocks inside my temples.  Outside the window, rain hissed and clanked against glass like bullets from the sky.  Creaks and groans of the floorboards under the rug cracking and whining from my weight sent splinters of electric heat up through my legs.  Every sound was somehow physically assaulting my senses, and my breathing accelerated along with the beating of my heart.

Desperately, I tried to focus on the image of Samantha, downstairs, trying to control my monster.  I barely made it back down the steps without having an attack.  All I had to do was see her.

When I walked back into the room, Samantha was standing in front of the fire, staring into the burning embers as if they held all of life’s answers. For a moment, I stood quietly and watched her, wondering if I would ever really get to know her.  Her pale ivory skin took on a golden glow in the firelight and I knew I would never again in my life see such a beautiful haunted woman.  She raised her arms, twisting up the long dark locks of hair, and clasped them in her hands almost as if cradling her head from frustration.  Her chest rose and fell slowly as she took in deep breaths, and I could do nothing to take my eyes from the curve of her breasts and the perfect contour of her hips.  She was no cold-blooded killer. Someone hurt her and she needed to defend herself.  A fierce wave of possessiveness washed over me and my mouth ran dry.  I wanted to erase everyone she had ever loved, any man she had ever cared about, and take her all for myself.  Obliterate every memory of anyone that had ever hurt her, and fill her mind with just me.  Only me.

Would she even want me after all I had said?  Would she take me for half the messed up person I was?  Why did it feel like she understood me, as if she’d been touched by violence too?

There was no easy synopsis to give her for what I had gone through, but there was never an easy way to let people in when all you want to do is hide from the things that have hurt you.  So, I understood her silence, her hesitation and her pain.  I could have told her every little detail of my nightmare, but to what avail?  I just wanted to give her some part of me, so she could give me a part of her, so she could trust me.

There are never any easy answers for the questions that came with violence.  Thomas made a goddamn videotape of his farewell speech, his suicide note to the world, and left it in the front seat of his car blaming me for everything, making everyone who watched it believe it was all my fault, which was all bullshit. I’d never known he’d go to such bloody lengths to hurt people.  Nevertheless, for the rest of my life, I would constantly fight battles with invisible demons because of him, and whatever triumph I accomplished thus far was little to me now, as I stood in front of this woman, because I wanted to be a man she could confide in, someone who is not so damaged.  Something about her, standing in front of those flames made me have hope.  That made me calm, like the cool misty rain that comes after the chaos of a hurricane.

There were things that I never wanted her to find out about me.  There were things I’d done that I felt weak for doing, yet I did them out of feeling so helpless and so full of despair I saw no other options.  Did she feel as helpless in her situation to have had to use violence on someone she had once loved?

There were things that changed in me so completely from that one day that reverberated into everything and everyone in my life.  My life became one huge domino chain, piece by piece, smashing into each other, knocking one another down.  I was nothing more than a flimsy house of cards and one strong gust of wind tore me down, blowing my cards to the ends of the earth.

The demons I faced were not only the nightmares from that day, but the faces of the people whom I let down every day after that, because I couldn’t hold myself together.  My mother, God, my mother found me when I slit my wrists almost to the bone.  I will never forget her expression. I will never forget that horror, and I would never forgive myself for it.

I could remember that moment as if it were a mere minute before.  My mother unscrewing the hinges of my bedroom door, so quietly that I had no idea what she had been doing until the door fell flat on the floor of my room.

Tears poured from my eyes that day, for the first time since the shooting, when I was shoved into the back of an ambulance.  The expression on her face broke my heart.  See, I didn’t stop to think about how it would affect her; I just wanted to stop my own pain. The paramedics, if you could call them that, orderlies maybe, since they had no knowledge of anything medical, hauled me up and literally threw me into the back of an ambulance, and I bled all over the white sheets of the gurney I sat on since nobody thought to tend to my wounds.  The whole ride, my mother got to watch in horror, my life bleeding out from my wrists.  I did that to her.

At the hospital, I was restrained in a lovely white form-fitting jacket that wrapped my arms fully around my body and I was labeled insane.

The people I met in that hospital made everything worse for me, because I knew I wasn’t like them.  I was touched by violence. There was no chemical imbalance in my head, no malfunction in my cerebral cortex, but no one understood this… They all thought I was mad just like before.  The other kids in that asylum were terrifying, constantly listening and arguing with the shouting voices they heard in their skulls.

Jesus told me to kill my dog!

Yes!  He did!

My dog told me to kill my teacher!

Yes!  I fancy the idea too!

An alien from the planet 971 in the Garfilplex Galaxy offered me a million shiny golden stars if I slit my wrists.

Pass me the razor!

You could see the madness and chaos when you looked in their bouncy nervous irises.  That was where I learned to watch people, read the body language of everyone around me, learn their innermost thoughts and their next moves.  You just needed to recognize the tightness in the skin around their eyes and the tension that coiled the muscles of their faces when they were about to have an episode, because their voices became too loud for them to handle. Or watch the corners of the lips of the nurses and the way they moved their fingers before deciding to inject you with syringes filled with brain-to-broccoli-induced-crap. I lived there for three months until my mother finally understood that I wasn’t insane, packed Dylan and me up, and left the country.

Nothing had changed since I was that young boy.  Now I was this award-winning novelist, with nothing…nothing but scary stories on paper.  What was I truly doing, but glorifying murder and horror?  Yet, how many fans did I have?  Millions.  So few of them have actually had their life in jeopardy, faced a near-death experience or been introduced to the real terror of violence. Their way of experiencing it is by being perpetually entertained by books and movies that safely portray it.  If they only knew how it seeped into your cells and overwhelmed your psyche, I wonder if they would cease to partake.  The truth is easy.  Once you felt violence, most people couldn’t cope with it, they couldn’t even push the words through their lips. It instantly freezes the images in your mind, and those images are indestructible.  Then there are people like me, who have been touched by violence so deeply that they completely lose their soul to it.

“Are you okay, Kade?” Samantha’s voice, as soft as a symphony, floated through my muddled mind.

I lowered the two glasses of brandy to the table, and sat down on the couch, eyes fixed on hers.  I’d been hovering on the edge of humanity for far too long.  I wanted to step away from that ledge and I wanted to love her. “Everything that happened…to me…is stained here,” I whispered, touching my hand to my heart. “It will forever be in my heart, but what I want, Sam, is to move it over a little so I can fit you in there too.”

Her cheeks bruised crimson and I felt a surge of power knowing I could make a grown woman blush so deeply.  She was taking all the chaos that constantly swarmed by mind and calmed it, without ever trying to.

I needed her.  Right then.  Right there.

She was going to be mine.

I didn’t want to let her go.

Chapter 13

“Undress for me,” he whispered, raking his teeth over his bottom lip.  “Slowly.”