Tyler and I had kept things on the down low for about two months because we weren’t sure how Christian was going to handle us dating. Also, I had a hard time building up the courage to tell Kayde. It made me feel more than a little guilty because we were sneaking around behind not just my brother’s but also Kayde’s back.
In fact, it especially upset me that I hadn’t told Kayde right away. Maybe because we had been best friends. Nearly everything I did, he had been a part of. Kayde had taught me to color in the lines. Taught me to ride a bike. For crying out loud, he had been the one to take me into Walgreens to get pads after my first period, because by then my mom had run off with a rodeo clown. No, I’m not making that up. She did. But that’s another story I’ll get into later. Anyway, Kayde was always there for me, so to make the decision to date Tyler without talking to him first felt like I was betraying him as well as their friendship.
The day I finally told him was confusing and incredibly awkward. The look on his face… God. First, he was astonished, and possibly a little angry, but that quickly morphed into pain. He said it was because I had hid it from him for so long, but it seemed like more than that.
After the day we talked, he seemed okay with it, but things changed. Not in a way that would have been noticeable to an outsider, but I think we all felt it. Just no one said anything. Christian was surprisingly cool about it, but he honestly surprised me when he said he always thought it would be Kayde. That added to my guilt and discomfort, wondering if Kayde had felt that way too. Had I messed up? Ruined my friendship with him because I was so excited to have beautiful Tyler interested in me?
He’d never said anything to me though. Instead, it seemed he was always dating a new girl and had begun spending more time with them than me. It hurt, and I didn’t want to examine why. Seeing those girls hanging on his arm any time we all went somewhere together used to piss me off something fierce. I hated each and every one of them and their long hair, full lips, big boobs, and too much makeup.
Then time went on, and Tyler and I were just a “thing.” It was comfortable and sweet. Back then, we really thought we were in love.
On the day of my high school graduation, as everyone was standing around taking pictures, chatting and congratulating, Tyler got down on bended knee and asked me to be his wife. Kayde had looked shocked, and no one but me noticed when he turned heel and walked off. Tyler’s gray-blue eyes had lit up when I said, “Yes.” Yeah, maybe we were young and foolish, but we had been “dating” for nearly a year and it felt so real. I say “dating” because the four of us had been hanging out since the boys were about ten or eleven and Tyler had moved in across the street with his mom. But for that past nine to ten months, we had been a couple.
It took me a while to find Kayde that night. He wasn’t answering his phone. When I finally found him in the backyard fort that he, Tyler, and Christian had built when they were about twelve, he was just sitting there staring out into the night sky. Trying not to hit my head on the low ceiling, I had crawled over to sit next to him. His arm had wrapped around me, and he kissed the top of my head. Warmth had spread through my body, and I had felt like I was home.
We had talked about my graduation, and then about Tyler’s proposal. He had been happy for me on the surface, but I could tell he wasn’t really thrilled with it. He tried to talk me into waiting, telling me Tyler and I should wait, that we were young, that I was going away to college and long-distance relationships were hard, but he was right about one thing. I was young, and I knew everything—meaning I thought I knew everything.
Then, the week after my graduation, he became scarce. We found out he had been talking to a recruiter. Hell, I had begged him not to go. People were dying every single day, and the odds of him being deployed and becoming one of those statistics was too great. Pleading with him did absolutely no good. He had held me, and I felt his breath hitch as he told me he’d be fine and this was something he had to do. Despite my tears, a week later, he left for the Marine Corps.
Just like that, I had lost my best friend.
Christian was pissed at him for joining the Marine Corps, because they were supposed to join the police academy together. They had all been taking college courses in preparation for the academy. It had been their plan since we were all little, playing cops and robbers in the backyard.
Tyler and Christian were devastated. Me? My heart was crushed. He was the one person I could tell everything to, and he had left me.
On our wedding day, it was just a small group of us. But Kayde was absent then too. He had told Tyler he couldn’t get leave approved. He sent a card simply signed with his name and a gift card. It wounded me because I had really wanted him to share that day with me.
I’d only had random e-mails and phone calls from him since then. Christian wouldn’t talk to him when he called. Conversations with Tyler had been stilted, and I knew it hurt him something fierce. We’d often sat talking about it after he would hang up from the call. Tyler said he felt like he did something wrong and could never figure out what to do to fix it.
My heart ached whenever I’d spoken to Kayde. I missed him so much it hurt, but if my relationship with Tyler hadn’t caused a noticeable change, the Marines had changed him for sure. It was impossible to miss on the few occasions he came home over the last few years. He was harder, he laughed less, and his eyes seemed duller, dimmer… subdued. Something told me the military had been hard on him.
My mind had wandered longer than I thought. The pastor was just finishing his speech, and he asked me if I was ready to speak. Though I’d written down what I wanted to say and I had tried to memorize it, my mind was blanking as I prepared to stand. The gaping wound in my chest nearly brought me to my knees as I stepped up and moved toward the small podium set up by the casket holding my husband. A casket that I had avoided looking inside because that wasn’t my husband. The man whose smile had once lit up a room. My friend. My confidant. The father to my unborn child.
That last thought was my undoing, and the coffin I had avoided became my crutch. Leaning heavily on the edge, I looked upon the face of the man I thought would be there for our child even if he wasn’t going to be with me. Guilt ripped and tore at me like talons. No one knew we were on the verge of filing for divorce. Not because we couldn’t get along, but because we had finally realized our relationship was mostly a friendship, that the exciting spark of youthful infatuation was gone—was maybe never more than that—and we both agreed life was too short to stay together just because we were “comfortable.”
Staying together as long as we had had been dumb. But we’d done so because each of us felt like the other was the one in love and worried about how bad we would hurt them. When I finally gathered up the courage to talk to him, he’d been so relieved. We both wanted to find that ever-lasting romance. The one that set us on fire. The one that made our hearts race. The only reason we were still together when he died was because we found out I was pregnant, and in Texas you can’t divorce during a pregnancy. The plan was to continue to live together, just to share finances until after the baby was born.
Then, on a routine traffic stop, Tyler was shot by a tweaking meth-head, leaving me with this wax figure look-alike in the coffin in front of me. There was no way this was my Tyler. Tears rolled from my eyes and dropped on his neck, where the wound was nearly invisible, as I leaned over him. My whispered words were broken and coarse through my tears.
“Why? Why did you leave us, Tyler? This isn’t fair. You were supposed to go on to find the one. We agreed. We had a plan, dammit.” A deep hiccupped breath helped me compose myself enough to continue walking to give my speech.
Looking out at the sea of faces, I had a hard time focusing on any single one; they all just blended together. The words on my paper were blurry, and my hand shook. Tears spilled over and down my cheeks, momentarily clearing my vision. Blinking rapidly only cleared it briefly. Giving up, my hand holding the shaking paper dropped to my side. In despair, I swallo
wed the lump in my throat, trying to find the words—any words.
Jesus, how am I going to get through this?
“I had a speech written, but eloquent words won’t change the fact that a great man is gone. I don’t need to extol his amazing qualities because you already know. I still needed him, but evidently he was needed somewhere else. I love you, Tyler, and I’m going to miss you.” My eyes raised and zeroed in on a pair of stormy-gray, pain-ravaged eyes in the very back of the large church. As my knees buckled, sobs were wrenched from my spine through my chest.
No one caught me. This wasn’t the movies. God, I wished the whole thing was just a bad dream or a bad movie. My knees hit the ground with a painful jolt, just as my brother and father reached me. Desperation had me searching over their shoulders for the person I thought was Kayde, but he was gone. Now my mind was playing tricks on me, and that made it worse.
Kayde, wherever you are, I need you! My mind screamed for him, but all I was met with was silence.
“Marry Me”—Thomas Rhett
SEEING SERA BREAK DOWN was one of the most traumatizing things I’d ever seen. And trust me, I’ve seen a lot. It was cowardly of me to leave, but I didn’t deserve to share my pain with them. I was an outsider. Not that I hadn’t prepared myself for that. I knew when I joined the Marines that I was essentially cutting ties with Tyler and Christian, and hell did it hurt, but the worst was Sera. She was my everything, but she belonged to one of my best friends. That was something I knew I couldn’t stay around to watch, and the driving force behind my leaving home.
Growing up, I had held myself away from her, other than being her friend. It felt wrong to be obsessed with my best friend’s kid sister. Yeah, she was my best friend too. At least that’s what I told her. It was easier than telling her the truth—that I was in love with her and had been since I was five. It had been as if my soul recognized hers immediately. Like we had lived before, and when we met again in this life, there was a connection.
You know how when you’re standing under power lines and sometimes you hear that buzzing as the current races along the wires? That’s how I felt every time I was around her. Like there was this energy current that connected us. My skin felt her when she walked in a room.
As we got older, I began to lust after her, and it made me feel awful. She had looked at me like her best friend or big brother. Feeling that way made me feel like there was something wrong with me. There was a certainty in me that said she would have been repulsed had she known how many times and ways she haunted my dreams and fantasies. Besides, I knew I was kind of like the neighborhood stray, with my parents being absent most of my life and my grandparents raising me. There was no way I was good enough for her. She was an angel.
When my lust for her became more than I could deal with, I started hooking up with girls who I thought would make me forget my thoughts and fantasies of her. They were easy to come by. After all, it was Texas, and anyone who was a decent size and had any talent at all played football. Not to mention none of us three guys lacked in the looks department, and we were never short on girls who wanted to be able to say they had been with one of the “three musketeers.” Hell yeah, we knew people called us that. We didn’t care; it made us laugh and think we were hot shit.
Never in a million years would I have told her how I visualized her in my mind anytime I had my dick buried in a girl’s mouth or somewhere else. Especially if I was high. Fuck, I may have even called them by her name during those times. Though I was pretty good at hiding it, weed and I were really good friends back then, so it may have happened a lot. Thankfully, she never heard about it, but then again, the girls I used were usually older. Yeah, I said “used.” Because I always knew none of them would be girlfriend material, despite what they may have hoped for. They weren’t her, after all.
Then when Tyler broke the unspoken code that she was off-limits because she was Christian’s sister, fuck, I lost my shit. I beat myself up for being the one who sat back and “did the right thing.” It should have been me. Instead, he had gotten to her first.
Despite how bad it sucked watching them date, it was worse when he completely ensured she would be his. Fuck, that was an awful day—the day Tyler asked her to marry him. It absolutely gutted me and was the catalyst for my entry into the Marine Corps. However, no matter how bad that tore me up, seeing her at the funeral service was so much worse.
Anytime she was in pain, it eviscerated me. It always had. But this type of pain? It was too much. He was her husband, but he had been one of my best friends too. It made me angry because I didn’t know how to deal with that type of pain. Which was why, instead of being at the graveyard watching my friend get buried and being there as support to his wife, I was at the gym. Where I wasn’t really supposed to be. My doc would be pissed, but it was either I work out my frustration there or I fell apart.
No one knew I had come home for my convalescent leave. Well, other than my immediate family. Not that I had gone home for the funeral. I hadn’t even known. It was just shitty fate, I guess, because up until about a month or so ago, I had been deployed. Then Erik and I got shot, so we were sent back. He was back home in Iowa on convalescent leave while I was here. I had made my family promise not to tell anyone I was home because I didn’t want to deal with people.
Either no one cared to notify me, or I had missed the messages due to our team being extremely… uh, mobile. Either way, I still hadn’t had notification.
Maybe that was a lie. The little voice in my head had to poke at me and stir up guilt. There had been numerous e-mails from Sera, but I had deleted them without reading them. It was part of my most recent attempt at cutting her out of my life, in hopes that I would one day get over her. It made me feel like a big piece of shit because she might have been trying to let me know what had happened. No, I’m sure she was trying to let me know. Guilt gnawed at me from the inside out.
The only reason I knew he had died and when the funeral happened to be was because my family asked if I was going the minute they picked me up from the airport. They’d had no idea I didn’t know. It had felt like someone pulled a rug out from under me. I fucking swear to God, I almost passed the fuck out.
Yelling through each exhale during the last lift of my bench set, I racked the weights and sat up. Fishing around on the floor under the bench, I grasped the towel and scrubbed the sweat from my face. The throbbing in my thigh was evidence I had probably done too much, but I didn’t give a flying fuck. Raising the leg of my shorts, I assessed the angry red scar on my leg. Shit, a few inches more and it might have hit my dick. Now that would have been a bad day. Getting shot in the damn thigh while I was trying to keep my battle buddy from bleeding out was shitty enough. Losing my dick? Fuck that, you might as well shoot me dead.
Moving on to the dip bars, with Guns N’ Roses blasting in my headphones, I brutalized my body a little more. By the time I had pushed through three sets of forty, I was dripping sweat, and I knew I was done for the day. The last two hours had been an intentional, self-imposed torture session, but I was beat.
Limping slightly, I made my way to the shower. The gym was dead today, and I was glad of it, because I was in no frame of mind to deal with peopling. As I grabbed my gym bag from the locker I’d shoved it in, I saw my phone was lit up with a missed call from Erik. Making a mental note to call him back, I slid my shower shoes on, dropped the phone in the bag, then stepped into the shower stall and turned the water on as hot as it would go.
Fuck, I couldn’t believe Tyler was gone. Scalding water sprayed my back, and I wished it would peel away the layer of self-loathing and shame that encapsulated my entire being. Hanging my head, water ran down over my face, converging at my nose and mouth to run to the drain in a thick waterfall. When I couldn’t hold my breath anymore, I tossed my head back, sending a spray of water slapping against the wall behind me. Air gusted into my lungs with a gasp.
Sera’s face filled my head; her different expressions overlapped and
created a collage in my mind. Every expression, unique and precious, stored away in my mind to be pulled out on cold, lonely nights in caves, deserts, and hard bunks. I’d loved her for what seemed like my whole fucking life. Even as I stood at the back of the church where one of my best friends was being honored and remembered, I had coveted his wife.
Just the thought of her had my dick surging toward the picture in my mind. Wrapping my hand around it, I squeezed, imagining it was buried inside her. In my imagination, I saw her head tip back, eyes fluttering, mouth slightly parted in ecstasy as I drove into her relentlessly. Her dark blonde hair cascaded across the pillow, and breathy moans slipped from between those luscious lips. When my mythical Serafina screamed my name in her release, I felt my balls tighten and electricity gathered at the base of my spine. My own release exploded from my cock and hit the shower wall in front of me.
Yeah, I was ten kinds of fucked up, and unfortunately I couldn’t find it in me to care. She was the one temptation I fought daily, but fantasized about just as often. My soul might be damned to Hell for the things I’d done, but I wouldn’t go near her and taint her with my sins. Sera was goodness and light, whereas I was darkness and hate.
Finishing up in the shower, I wrapped a towel around my waist and dug through my gym bag for my phone. Too tired to dress, I sat on one of the benches and waited for Erik to answer.
“Hey, man, you doing okay?” Erik had been my battle buddy and good friend. Like me, he had been through some shit that pushed him to walk away from a lot and join the Marines. Maybe our two fucked-up souls had sensed each other; whatever it was, the bond between us had always been extremely strong. He and I had gone through training together and had then been paired up when we joined the Force Recon unit. He and my team were some of the few people I really trusted.
Kayde's Temptation: A Demented Sons MC Novel Page 2
