Caged: Cellar Door Series Read Free Page B

and paced a tight circle around our living room. Our apartment wasn’t big by any stretch of the imagination so it’s not like I could have walked miles around it, I was running a short track of turns, my head spinning. Kylee was in town.
    My one time best friend besides Matt, the one girl that could tell me what to do and I’d move heaven or hell to try to make it happen, hell I wouldn’t even go quite that far for Matt, close but not quite that far, was back in town. I knew she’d graduated about the same time Matt had, a few weeks back but fuck….she came back here?
    As Matt’s words digested I stopped dead in my tracks, my head cranking around to look at him. “A few weeks? What the fuck do you mean a few weeks? She’s been in the same fucking state for a few weeks now? She was at fucking Cellar Door!” My emotions were ping ponging all over the fucking place knowing she was not only in the same damn state as me, but was within miles. I really had bull shitted myself into thinking I wouldn’t see her again.
    Matt’s hands jerked up in front of him defensively. “Hey man, I’m just telling you what her dad said. She’s been gone almost four years JD, didn’t even come home this past Christmas, and didn’t even tell me she’s back home. Maybe she’s been busy playing catch up with her family. And ease the hell up man. She wasn’t in the basement. She was upstairs at the Club with some of her friends from high school.”
    Matt was smart enough to avoid pointing out the obvious, Kylee probably didn’t want to see me. Couldn’t blame her.  She’d always felt the need to keep me close, like she could protect me from myself, my dad, stuck up fuckers who looked down at me because of my tats, the whole package. She’d even forced me to do normal shit in school, claimed I needed the full experience. I’d only gone to the dances and shit because of  her. Fucking kryptonite. I could refuse anyone anything but damn Kylee and her big brown eyes, her please….and I was done for. I’d never advertised that fact to her, had kept that shit close to the vest; even gave her an ass load of shit before giving her exactly what she wanted, every damn time. I might have felt like a pansy ass around her at times but I never acted like one. There was just something about making her happy, her giving you that big smile that did you right.
    A few nights before she headed off for college, she’d starting worrying about leaving, particularly about leaving me. No fucking way I could take her future from her, let her settle for something other than what she’d worked so hard for. She’d finally promised she was definitely going and did. After she’d headed off for college I’d learned something that hadn’t dawned on me during all the years I’d known her, just how much Kylee meant to me. I knew I cared for her, knew I’d knock someone the fuck out if they messed with her and I’d do about anything to keep a smile on her pretty face. She was my family, her and Matt both were two of the most important people I had.  What I hadn’t known was the depth that she lived in me.
    With her gone, there’d been a gaping fucking wound in my chest along with the crystal clear knowledge that I’d never be the kind of guy Kylee deserved. I stopped answering texts, emails, letters and phone calls to put some emotional distance between us because within hours of her leaving, I was losing it.  There was no way  I could have survived hearing about her life moving on without me; about her finding her Mr. Right. I had almost had to force her to go off to college, to do the things she had always dreamed of, no way could I risk falling apart and begging her to come back.
      I’d needed to cut the feelings the fuck out and the only way I knew how was to let her go, completely.  I couldn’t even cut it in college much less give her the kind of future she was worthy of, the kind I saw her having. Never crossed my mind that she would