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 work 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…

Blood.  Gore.  More blood and gore.  By the fourth chapter, I was sure the male main character was a fucking serial killer.

As soon as my lips touched hers, her smile wandered its way to my mouth.  I loved the softness of her lips, the warmth of her tongue, the way she moved her mouth over mine, her body leaned closer against me.  “You make me smile when your lips are on mine, like I’m borrowing your happiness, like it’s wiping off on me.  Maybe I’m just stealing it, I don’t know.  All I know is that it gives me a calmness, a happiness I never thought I could feel…you give me a reason…”

She was mine, and no other’s.  Only my lips could kiss hers.  Only my hands could hold hers.  Only my body could sink deep inside her between those smooth ivory thighs…And only she could tame the beast I was. Only she could quench the thirst I hungered after, and coax the monster inside me to be a man again, if only a broken one…

More carnage.  An eerily true to life decapitation scene from an accident, and wait…by chapter twenty, I believed the female character might have been the serial killer.  This book…this book was dragging me to the dark dungeon of my own psyche where I did not wish to linger.  Holy crap, I just got mindfucked.  The book ended with a cliffhanger that made me scream.  Like literally, scream.  Out loud.  His words were like liquid poetry, emotion dripping thickly off of every single sentence.  It made my heart thunder in my chest and ache for the characters.  They were written so close in likeness to both Kade and me, right down to the way my hands trembled and twisted napkins when I got nervous, to the destructive and angry way he tugged on his hair.  The scenes of carnage, the gruesomely horrific violence, were so real and terrifying that I found myself gripping the edges of the couch cushions with anxiety.

Is that why the people in this town think he’s the devil?  Because he writes horror-fiction?  That’s absurd.

Rubbing my eyes, I looked at the clock on the wall; it was eleven.  I read his words, his book, straight through for seven hours.  Rifling through my drawers, I changed into a pair of jeans and a turtleneck to go back to the bar.  Every sound I heard had me wondering if someone was outside the trailer, every howl of the wind had me hearing voices of people I never wanted to see again, and I didn’t want to be alone.  Kade Grayson was one talented writer, because I was still feeling the effects of the complete terror of his book.

After locking up the trailer, I silently made my way through the park, staying on the road with eyes wide open.  No matter where you might have met up with your nightmares in your past, you could always find new ones on cold dark country roads.  Relief swept through me when I had the bar in my view. The neon lights of the shaking ass sign were like a beacon of safety to me, but I still had a strange gnawing fear in the back of my head.  It was probably from reading the horror story, alone…but I just couldn’t shake the thoughts that someone was right behind me, reaching out their hand to grab me in the darkness of the night.  You know that fear…that something is there just beyond your sight, waiting…watching you.

When my feet hit the asphalt of the parking area, I ran to the door of the bar and stumbled in, breathless and shaking.  I could brush it off as being out of shape and cold, but truth was, I was dead scared.  Because Kade Grayson wasn’t the only one who’d lived through a real-life horror and I remembered all too well what those hands that spring from the blackness of the dead of night felt like around my throat.

The bar was practically empty.  Cynthia (aka Sin Dee) was on stage, surrounded by four men raptly watching her spin herself around the pole, and for the briefest of moments, I envied her sexuality, her lack of inhibitions and her confidence in her beauty.  I would love at least one night in my life to feel that free about my body and myself.

Dylan, Bree, Fran, and Natalie, another dancer, sat around a table in the middle of the bar, deep in some sort of discussion.  Natalie was still dressed in her thong and a sparkly bikini top, and Fran didn’t seem to own the ability to lift his eyes off her breasts.  Good, maybe he’ll ask her out and leave me alone with my coffee.

Kade sat in his normal booth.  Back to the wall, facing the whole bar nearest to the back door, and now I completely understood why.  He would always need to see the whole of a room, always need to be nearest to an exit, just in case.  Kade Grayson had a whole new personality to me now, and I understood it.  God, I understood him.

Immersed, consumed in whatever he was writing, I took advantage of his distraction to study him raptly.  Leaning forward, the chiseled features of his face illuminated by the glow of his computer screen, his fingers danced quickly over the keys.  He looked a mess.  Hair tousled, falling darkly across his forehead, tight gray shirt, a simple cotton one, clung to his body, demonstrating his powerful chest and hard solid muscular arms.  A smear of ketchup covered his cheek from the half-eaten hamburger lying on the dish next to his laptop.  I found myself drawn in, in front of him, softly wiping the smear from his cheek.  “Shit,” he whispered, looking up with wide eyes.

“Nope.  Just ketchup,” I whispered, feeling every beat of my heart as it banged hard against my chest.  I couldn’t believe I had touched him.  Quickly, I wiped my fingers on a napkin, then balled it up tightly and squeezed it spastically in my hand.  “I’m sorry.” I gave him a watery smile and tried to hold back my tears, because I could still see the death and chaos around him. He wore it heavily on his face and in the tightness in his eyes.  Like a soldier just home from war.