Nashville Dreams
by Julie Capulet
Chapter One
~ Kade ~
“Let’s go to Aspen for New Year’s. Just you and me. By then we might have some celebrating to do. For something I think we both want to happen. It would be so fun, Kade. Can we?”
My girlfriend Carmen has been dropping some heavy hints lately. And I’ve been putting off the inevitable. I know that, as soon as I tell her how I actually feel, she’s going to go ballistic.
It’s a scenario I’ve been doing my best to avoid. But I can’t avoid it forever. I should never have let things get this out of hand to begin with.
In fact, why the fuck did I?
I know exactly why. Because there’s nothing I hate more than making a woman cry. It’s my one weakness and something that grates on me like nothing else does.
My father used to make my mother cry, with his binges and his moods. It was his own inability to stop himself from making her cry that fueled his downward spiral and eventually took them both. And it made a deep impression on me, imprinting me with an absolute aversion to the tears and sadness of women, especially tears and sadness that are inflicted by me.
This hang-up runs so deep that I often avoid getting into relationships in the first place, even though every night of the week, I’ve got a thousand hopefuls trying to get close to me.
Every time I do take the plunge—something I never take lightly—I’m always hoping like fuck that she’s the one. That one stellar, star-stuck, meant-for-me true love that I’ll fall head over heels for, that I’ll never want to leave, that I can spend every moment making sure she’s as happy and blissed-out as she can possibly be.
Deep down, I’d love to find that. I aspire to it. To me, it seems like the most beautiful dream there is.
But that’s all it ever is: a dream.
The reality is totally different.
Now, as it happens every time, I’m about to end it. I steel myself for the gauntlet of tears and heartbreak that’s coming—on her end, at least—and all the grating melodrama that comes along with it.
Things haven’t been going well. I thought maybe she’d pick up on that vibe and figure it out. No such luck. Instead, she’s fixating on rings and proposals and moving in together, when all I can think about is how to get myself out of this pathetic excuse for a relationship as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Carmen is all for creating scenes and feigning outrage even when the situation doesn’t call for it. And when it does call for it, like what I’m about to do definitely will, things get ugly.
Which is why the next twenty minutes is going to be a living hell for both of us. I’m about to give her a reason to cry the realest tears there are. Also why I’ve been putting this off.
I was hoping this time might be different.
I knew I wasn’t in love with her from the beginning but I kept hoping that would change.
It hasn’t.
That’s my problem.
It never fucking does.
Every single damn time, the doubt creeps in almost immediately. I fight those thoughts. I try so hard to see the good, the beauty, the draw. To feel a real, perfect connection. But over time, inevitably, it gets harder to do. It takes more and more effort. I find myself forcing it. I feel the need for distance closing in.
Right now, I feel the need for more than distance. I feel the need for a total break from the hellscape our relationship has become.
She’s dressed in a white jumpsuit that makes her look small and frail. I’ve tried to get her to eat a real meal but she never does. She’s all about denying herself the good things in life. Food, loud music—it’s ridiculous that we’re even together, for fuck’s sake—and the grittier, deeper side of lust that I haven’t even brought up with this one. I keep everything about what we have fairly vanilla because she can’t handle anything darker. Which is too bad, because that’s where the most intense kind of pleasure is always found.
It’s another reason this relationship was basically doomed before it began. I’m tired of holding back. I want to unleash the beast of my lust all over…someone. I don’t know who yet but she must be out there somewhere.
She has to be out there somewhere ...
