Smiling at him, I nodded and sat in the seat next to him.  The four of us ordered dinner together and our dinner discussions went from one extreme to another, never touching on anything personal.  Throughout the dinner, I couldn’t help but feel as if I was separated off from the three of them, even though we all shared in the conversations.  They seemed so far removed from my life and my experiences that I felt as if I were from another universe. Of course, my mind wandered to Kade and that kiss.  What made it so earthshattering?  Was it my attraction to him?  Was it because he was mean and degrading, and I wanted to prove to him what and who I really was?  I always did have a big issue with people who underestimated me. I loved to prove them wrong.  Then I wondered what was it that made Kade so damaged.  Was he just as damaged as me?

After dinner, Fran, as promised, took me to the best bookstore I’d ever been to.  Well Red was a bookstore/wine house, where you could buy books, sit and read them over a glass of wine; a little spin on the bookstore/coffee houses of the city.   We sat there for two hours, sipping a glass of red wine and read.  I left with a stack of new books, and he left with a smug, proud smile on his face.  Nevertheless, I let him keep it there, since the bookstore was perfect and I guess I was thawing a little towards him.

Chapter 6

Kicking my foot through the pile of clothes on the floor, I watched them fly up until I spotted my pants and pulled them on.  The rest of the material belonged to the naked woman sleeping on my bed, the one that still had my reddened handprints on her ass. I’d already let her sleep fifteen minutes past the time I would let anyone stay in this room (incidentally, that’s usually fifteen minutes), and that’s only because I left her to search my house for the strongest whiskey I had.  A fifth of the bottle was gone already.  Do you know how many shots are in a fifth of whiskey?  About twenty-drunken-five shots, so I should have been out cold.

I kicked my foot against the bed, the mattress moved about half a foot off my box springs, and I took another swig.  “It’s time to go, um…” I’d completely forgotten her name.  “Hello, love?”

The body stirred quietly on the bed and the woman’s eyes peeked out from under the covering of my sheets.  I scooped up the clothes that belonged to her and dropped them right in front of her face.  “I’ve got work to do, so you have to shove off now.”

She sat up, and the sheets fell away revealing a pair of large breasts that I didn’t even bother to look at, let alone touch, thirty minutes ago.  I tossed her purse onto the bed and leaned against the far wall where I’d already opened the door for her highly anticipated (only by me it seemed) departure. Resting my body against the frame of the door, I gestured my hands for her to move along and hurry.

The whites of her eyes became bigger, but I didn’t feel remorse.  I felt completely nothing. All right, I lied. I felt like throwing her body out of the window, because she wasn’t moving fast enough.

The woman dressed quickly, trying to do so seductively, but I was too busy pretending to look at my phone and the empty inbox of messages I had, to watch her.  I’d already had my fun with her, well just one certain part of her, and that’s all I needed. She was the one that propositioned me, at the grocery store, no less. I was just a willing dick.  The only reason I said yes was because of her dark black hair that allowed me to pretend she was someone else.  Sick, yes?  Yeah, and that was why I was holding said bottle of whiskey to my lips.  Open.  Insert liquor.  Forget.  Repeat until you could look in the mirror again.

“Will you call me?  Maybe we could go out some time,” she smiled, walking to my front door.

“Love, I don’t even remember your name, and I don’t plan on asking you for it again.”

“You’re an asshole, you know that?”

“Yes, and you’re the whore who let me stick my dick in you and spank your ass,” I said, closing the door on her surprised expression.  I would say I cared, but I hated lying.

Anything other than sex is off limits.  Out of bounds.  Most women (read as every fucking last one of them) have wanted something from me that I couldn’t give them.  It was not the typical excuse of me wanting to fuck without strings either.  I would give an organ away for one fucking normal day, where I could pretend to be right in the fucking head and whole enough to be in a healthy relationship with someone.  I would love to find one person I could be comfortable to be myself with, but I was lost and I couldn’t. I didn’t cherish taking someone along with me through my hell, skipping along, clueless to my madness.  Even Lainey, which was why I wanted her to hate me; she would anyway if she ever got the chance to know me. I was one sick fuck.

I took another swig of the whiskey and found myself in front of my writing desk staring at my two newest manuscripts, one titled Behind Green Doors and its sequel, Accepting Darkness.  I had emailed them both to my editor a few days before. Eight hundred, twenty-three pages altogether.  Two hundred, eighty-two thousand, six hundred fifty-nine words.  Two weeks, three days, nine hours and change.  That was all the same amount of pages, words, and time since I last saw Lainey dance around with a mop, cleaning her kitchen and knocked at the door to my soul almost punching my heart right out of my chest.  I didn’t want to let her in. I wanted nothing to do with her, but the words that poured from my fingers across my keyboard stated otherwise.  So I locked myself in my office and wrote straight through until the entire story was told.  My way of trying to purge myself of the obsessive thoughts of Lainey that ran loops in my brain.

Personally, I hated the story.  It flowed from the first page to the very last and shocked the hell out of you with a terrorizing mindfuck that I’d never seen written before.  I loved it.  I hated it.  It was everything I was.  My entire being was in those words.  Everything I had ever felt was there for the entire world to read.  Pure insanity, horror at its finest.  Just plain me.

And, let’s up the insanity here for a minute…if I believed in it, if there was a possibility of it being actually able to happen, I would have said I might have fallen in love with my character.  She consumed every thought I had. I felt the need to protect her from everything and everyone.  I could feel her silken skin under my fingertips when I wrote about touching her, and I could smell the spiced apples of her soap when I wrote that she was near.  And, the fucking way she tasted?  It wasn’t waitress flavored, but completely Lainey, and my God, did I taste her in my book.  Over and over again, like a goddamn addict I slid my tongue against the unique sweetness of her body, outside and in.  It wasn’t just these physical things that I obsessed with, either.  This character’s mind possessed me. Her words tore through my heart like bullets.  I had written the perfect woman for me; the perfect lover, the perfect friend and companion, based on a fucking waitress that I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Do you want to hear something else that has twisted my dick right the fuck around?  For the first time EVER, I wrote a happy ending.  CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?  A happily-ever-fucking after that would leave a Disney princess with tears and slit wrists from the jealousy of it.  For her.  And me.

I clawed at my hair as my stomach rolled.  I’m…I’m…fucking…insane.  I always knew I’d snap completely one day.  Never thought it would be over a woman I hardly knew.