Christine Zolendz - Brutally Beautiful

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“Please fill in some holes for me.”

“Which ones?”

“All of them. Start with your childhood, I don’t care. But I want to know everything about the woman that will destroy me when she fucking walks out of my life,” I clipped. Damn, I was being a dick . But, it hurt like hell and I wanted to fight with her, sick twisted me, wanted her to ball up her fists and hit me.

She only offered me a tight smile.

That just made me angrier.

“Think those words are going to get me to fight with you? Think I’m going to fuel your rage, stoke the fire, Kade?” Then she leaned over and kissed me on my fucking lips; warm wet lips that tasted like the richest delicious coffee.

“I, ah…I didn’t have much of a childhood,” she began, sitting back down on her chair. “My father was the best neurosurgeon in Manhattan, my mother a socialite. They had no time for my brother and me, so we played in the hospital while my father worked and my mother did charity work. I grew up in a very sterile environment.”

I leaned back in my chair, my anger bubbling just under my skin, yet surprisingly restrained. “Go on,” I whispered, taking a sip of my coffee. It tasted better from her lips.

“I was better known for my brains, freaky bookish ways or just being the nerd sitting quietly in the corner. I was obsessed with taking things apart and putting them back together. Breaking and fixing. I was different, so different from everyone else that surrounded me, and I knew it too, deep inside that, I wasn’t like everybody else. Instead of playing with dolls, I read my father’s medical books and my brother and I snuck peeks at the cadavers. It’s crazy to say really. And being that my father wanted my brother and me to follow in his footsteps, he let us view surgeries standing alongside the med students. Everything was always hidden from my mother though. My mother,” she chuckled, darkly. “My mother and I didn’t get along.”

“Why not?” I asked, intrigued that someone couldn’t get along with her.

“I was a reminder to my mother of her regrets and the heavy amount of wrinkles that her life delivered to her so unexpectedly. I was never going to be the gorgeous New York City socialite she always strived for me to be. There was not one ounce of sex-tape-diva in me at all. She tried to raise me to be a prim and proper wannabe-heiress. Frilly skirts, patent leather shoes, nails perfectly manicured and skinned tanned to a bronze. But my father raised me to use my brain. I was so against everything my mother wanted me to do, because it wasn’t me. I was the Goth girl in the corner, listening to heavy metal music, smoking cigarettes and cutting class to read in the hospital’s student library. I didn’t want to be anything but a doctor. I wanted to be in the middle of it all.” She sipped again at her coffee, placed the mug down, and absently stroked the rim.

“Sneaking into the morgue, or watching the doctors and nurses care for patients was thrilling to me, powerful. It became my obsession, and best of all, completely forbidden by my mother. Later, I would understand her reasoning for wanting me to abstain from the clinical detachment of medicine, but by then, it was too late to learn more from her, since injecting herself with the world’s largest dose of morphine was of more importance to her. When my mother died, I was a girl interrupted. I no longer had to hide my addiction to saving people; I no longer had to hide my mother-disapproved freak-side bookish ways. I dove into my freakish nature, along with my brother and father to bury the truth about my life-taking, family stealing, morally corrupt, vain mother, and for the first time in my life, I got to be me.”

“Wait, whoa. Your mother’s deceased?” I asked.

“Yep. Her suicide letter was written on a neon pink post-it note…she blamed her death on my father’s lack of attention, and the hate she had for her life as a mother and wife, and nothing more.”

Silence overtook the room as she quietly stared into her coffee. Her brows pulled elegantly together and she leaned back and sighed heavily, “Anyway, I realized I had something special to give to the world and I fucking did it. I took pre-med college classes when I was still in high school. They put me in the accelerated program in a medical charter school and I started medical school when I was just nineteen. After med-school, I ah…I wanted to start helping people…I was exceptional at what I did; it was all I knew. So I did my doctoral program and my residency where I thought I’d see the most trauma, where I was needed the most, you know.”

“In the city?” I guessed.

“No,” she said swallowing nervously, one hand cupped around her coffee and the other twisting the bottom of her shirt. “I was a Medical Corps Officer in the 82 division of the US army. I spent six years there. What should have been my residency years doing rounds in a sterilized hospital with holier than thou doctors making me guess what was wrong with patients, I spent in the bowels of Afghanistan, where real life hell was being played out. Where I learned to be a real trauma surgeon. Where it mattered.”

Holy fucking hell .

Anger bubbled over, and I jumped to my feet, fisting my hair in my hands. “Fuck, Sam. Fuck, Sam. FUCK!” God, seriously? What the fuck? Can there be more shit to make me want her more? Can there be more shit to make me fall in love with her faster?

“What about you, Kade?” She asked, ignoring my outburst. “What was your childhood like?”

“Normal,” I barked, kicking over the garbage bin and sailing it across the room. “I was a jackass, my best friend was a dick and all we ever did was to try to get laid, and then he turned into a mass murderer. I never did anything remotely worthy of mentioning in the presence of someone who fought in wars or saved lives. You…you’re like some sort of…of…I don’t know, saint or something.” I was yelling. Bitter words, twisted heart and devastation hooked its talons into my brain. Why was I becoming more and more enraged with how precious and moral she was? Oh, the fucking answer was simple really, because when she leaves, she’s going to take it all away from me.

Her phone beeped and vibrated against the table like the ring at the end of a boxing match. She reached for it hesitantly and read the message.

Clearing her throat, she whispered softly, “Bree just messaged me that she’s going to leave the hospital in about an hour. She wants to know if she could come here to wash and change. Says she smells like rotten meat. Deputy George will drive her…”

“Yeah, of course. She can’t go back to that trailer and don’t you mean Jennifer?” I snapped, trying hard not to lose it completely .

“Um…yeah.” Her fingers deftly moved over the screen of her phone, then a moment after they stilled, it beeped and vibrated in her hands.

“Deputy George said the gunman had a rap sheet on him a mile long. They are linking the incident up with a bunch of highway robberies and suspicious missing person’s reports from the city, but they don’t believe we have anything to do with why it happened. Your brother was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” She typed something else quickly and placed the phone down in front of her, exchanging it with her cup of coffee.

“Stop talking about other shit! Tell me about the fucking scars . Tell me about David,” I fumed.

“You’re way too angry to talk about this,” she said, rising off her seat.

She moved in front of me, her knees touching mine. I slid my chair back automatically, giving her room. Then…then once again, she did something in-fucking-credible to me. She straddled her legs over my lap, wrapped them around the chair, threw her arms around my neck and fucking hugged me.