Brutally Beautiful (11 page)

The two of us roamed around the booths. Every once in a while, Fran’s hand made it to the small of my back or his lips found my temple.  Every ten minutes, Fran would stop and take a picture with his phone and post it on instagram and twitter like an obsessed teenager.  I cut him off after he posed me in front of a booth that sold organic clothing and tweeted a picture of me to his 459 followers that said, “Organic socks rock!”

We found a small intimate restaurant and we were just sitting down to grab a drink at the bar before an early dinner or late lunch, whatever you wanted to call it, when in walked Morgan and an extremely distinguished looking older gentleman.  Fran waved them over and offered to share a drink with them, while we waited for our tables since the place was packed. Her faced blanched as the gentlemen she was with agreed, and I looked at her curiously.

He pulled out a chair at the bar for her and she offered a tight smile to us, and a curt serious nod. “This is my
husband
, Jeremy.”  She looked at him with flushed cheeks and continued with her introductions, “Jeremy, dear, this is Francis and Lainey.  I met them at a small dinner party I was invited to last night, while you were still away on your business trip.”

Well now,
wasn’t that just a dick-slap right there?

Morgan gave a brilliantly flirtatious grin at Fran and batted her lashes at him, “Francis, darling, would you mind if I stole your
treasure
here to accompany me to the restroom?” 

Really?  Really now?
  She just asked a man for permission to have me accompany her to the bathroom?  Oh, this ought to be
awesome
.

Fran just waved us away, as he dove into an intense conversation with a seemingly already intoxicated Jeremy about the degradation of our ozone layer and how without its protection, we would all fry up like little eggs on a hot stove.  Then he proceeded to list off all the
Organohalogen
compounds that we use daily, and which ones were the worst global environmental pollutants for our beloved layer of ozone.

Yes, I think I rather stay in the bathroom with Morgan, instead of listening to his next debate with himself. 
Masterdebation
.  He should go tweet that.

Once inside the bathroom, she slumped against the wall and covered her face, “Please.  Please don’t say anything to Jeremy.  I know how bad I look, but he’s never home, always away on business, and God, I mean have you seen Kade Grayson?  He’s a perfect specimen of a man.”

I giggled next to her. “Yeah, a perfect sociopath.  Don’t worry, I won’t say anything and I’m no one to judge.”  I opened my purse, took out my lip-gloss, and dabbed a bit on my lips.  “How long have you been married?”

“I’ve been imprisoned for fourteen years,” she laughed.  “Married me right out of high school and promised me the world.  He’s got loads of money and I live in the lap of luxury, but it’s a lonely world.”  She lathered her own lips with a bright fire engine red lipstick, which I would never have the courage to wear.  “So how about you and Francis?”

“We’ve only been on a few dates.  I’m not looking for anything serious, and he’s way too serious,” I answered.

“Kade seemed really taken by you last night.  His eyes were on you all night. He hardly ate his food.”

“Grayson is an ass,” I stated.

“He’s so damaged and dark. 
Intense
.  I think I like the danger of it,” she said softly.

“Oh, I can definitely see him as one of those dangerous bad ass types,” I laughed.

She gave me a measured stare and giggled, “Don’t knock the alpha male types, they’re delicious.”

“Oh sure,” I laughed.  “There is nothing wrong with bad boys, unless you have self-esteem and confidence.  Then you’re fucked,
and
you’re smart enough to know you’re fucked.  I know, because I’ve fallen down
that
dark hole before.”

“Yeah, but, I’ve always loved those dangerous damaged men.  I wonder why, you know?”

“Daddy issues?”  I laughed at my reflection in the mirror, “Mine was mommy issues, really.”  I glanced over at Morgan who was sniffing and staring down at her hands.  I nudged her and smiled. “I think the truth is that we are in love with the fantasy of being that
one
person who could inspire, arouse, or
affect
someone who is so untouchable to the rest of the world.  It makes us
feel
special; like we’re the diamond in the rough, the one in a million, the one that everyone else couldn’t be, and do what everyone else couldn’t do.  Imagine being
that
significant to someone?  To never have to doubt that he loves you, or needs you, or more importantly,
wants
you more than any other.”

“I totally agree with you,” a strange small voice said from behind me.

“Yeah, me too.  I’d give a limb to feel like that,” said another voice.

Lifting my eyes to the mirror, I noticed the group of women behind me, nodding their heads in agreement.  I smiled at all of them; we were all striving for that same desire, weren’t we?

“The question is,” a tall, older brunette began, “is that a
reality
?  Does love like that, desire and passions like that exist?”

Morgan shook her head next to me, “I don’t think so.  If it does, I’ve never felt it.”

Some of the women agreed, some didn’t.  I just shrugged and sighed, “For me, I’ve learned the hard way that I can’t ever expect a man to make me feel that way.  I have to make myself feel that way. I want to be the
one
person who could inspire, arouse, and
affect me
.  Because, let’s be honest, no one is going to be with me longer than
me
.”

The way those women reacted to what I said, I thought I was going to be carried out of that bathroom on their shoulders with them chanting my name.  I had never been more proud of my ovaries and uterus for all of womankind. 

Morgan and I walked back to our table laughing with our arms hooked like teenage best friends.  Fran was still on his soapbox, while a slanted Jeremy hovered over a dark amber drink, smiling at the table, and nodding his head.  Fran stopped mid-rant and smiled at me, “There you are. I ordered a red wine for you. I hope that’s okay.”

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.