I'm dedicating this chapter to my most awesome reader & commenter (not sure, if that's a word) IMUSTBECRAZYY. Thank you soooo much for your encouraging words in your messages & in all your comments. You are awesome, seriously! I really hope that I would be able to write this story just as nicely so I can hear such wonderful words from you always. :) Your comments mean a lot to me. :)

Comment your views, maybe you'll get the next dedication. :)

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CHAPTER - 17

OPENING UP

It felt like a repeat telecast of last night, when this night too, I couldn't sleep even for a second. Tossing and turning was all I could do. Trying all sleeping postures in the hopes of making my eyes, most importantly, my mind sleep for the day seemed like my mission that required to be accomplished. I tried to remember all the history crap that I had studied in school; it used to work the best in getting loads of amount of sleep in teenage years, but tonight even that failed.

I got up from my bed and cursed the same bed that I once used to find the best place in the entire world for a peaceful slumber. I went out of my room and in the next one minute, found myself nervously standing in front of Kim's room.

'What the hell am I doing here?' I asked myself. But it's a well known fact by now that I sucked at telepathy, so, I didn't get any reply from myself.

Staring at the closed brown wooden ply in front of me, I wondered if Kim was awake too. My eyes went to the little gap between the floor and the door to see if any ray of light was coming from inside her room, but it seemed all dark. Her expressions while watching the pictures kept coming back in front of my eyes and I knew that I had to know what the matter was.

Unknowingly, my hand went up and the next thing I knew was that I lightly knocked on her door.

"Kim?" I whisper-yelled as I didn't want to wake up anyone in the middle of the night and find me standing in front of Kim's room. "Kim?" I repeated myself when she didn't answer. Very lightly, I pushed the door and found it already open. Cautiously, I stepped inside and said, "Kimberly Jones?" I was hoping of getting a reply from her even in her deep slumber upon hearing her full name from me, but here too, my expectations failed.

The room was dark and I switched on a dim light on entering inside.

It was empty.

Kim was not there.

Confused, I did the next thing that every sane man on television does; check the bathroom. She was not there too.

Running a hand through my already messy hair, I muttered with a lightly clenched jaw, "Where are you, Kim?" I started moving out of her room and told myself, "Calm down, Keith. She's not a kid, she must be downstairs."

Following my instinct, I went downstairs keeping in mind not to make any noise. There was no one in the living room, which was lighted up by the same dim light this night too. I went to the kitchen and she was not there too.

"Where are you, Kim?" I muttered under my breath as I looked around the kitchen. Just then, a cold wind blew past me making me shiver slightly. My eyes went to the windows which could have been the source of this wind, but they were shut down. I turned towards the backside of the kitchen and found the door of the backyard open.

It was strange.

We seldom keep the backyard door open during the day and keeping it open at night was completely out of the question. Frowning in confusion, I went towards the door and stepped out in the backyard amidst the cold chilled winds, which made me regret not carrying any pullover while leaving the warmth of my room.

My eyes were trying to adjust to the completely dark backyard and I didn't pay attention to the broken wooden plank in front of me. The moment I stepped on it, it made a loud cracking noise.

"Who's there?" A loud, frightened voice asked, making me look towards my right side. It was a voice, I was well aware of.

"Kim?" I asked as soon as my eyes adjusted the dark and I saw her sitting on the bench. Now, I could easily see her under the moon's dim light and her expressions changed to that of relief the moment she heard my voice.

"Oh! It's you," she muttered in relief with a sigh and her mood took a complete U-turn as she looked at me with narrowed eyes and pointed her index finger towards me in accusation. "You scared me."

Moving towards the bench, I shook my head in disapproval and said, "No, you scared me." My answer confused her as she looked at me with scrunched up eyebrows and just when she opened her mouth to ask something, I interrupted her. "What are doing here at this time?" I dug my hands in my pants' pockets and stopped near her. All the time she was looking up at me and I watched as she took a deep breath and faced the front.

"I couldn't sleep," she answered.

"Did you want an extra blanket or something? Or is your bed not comfortable? You can tell Mom, whatever problem you have. She'll take care of it," I told her truthfully.

She faced me with a smile on her lips and she said, "I know she'll take care."

Nodding my head, I sat beside her and faced forward towards the plants and the open land, where Kim was looking all the while. "But, there is one problem," I warned her and looked at her.

Frowning in confusion, she looked at me and asked, "What?"

"Tsk..." I made a disappointing noise and said, "You'll have to bear my mother's non-stop talks if you ask her anything."

This made both of us laugh lightly and she said, "I like your Mom."

My laughter died and I looked towards her to see if she was serious or making some kind of joke, because with Kim, one can never know. She was serious, very serious.

"Thanks." I smiled in return. 

There was silence for the next few moments as we both just stared at the simple view in front of us. Many questions were running through my mind. There were so many things I wanted to know about the girl sitting beside me, but I had no idea that how I could ask any of those questions.

I was terrible at emotional talks.

The best thing I could do was talk about something which would lead her to talk about the thing that was worrying her when she was looking at my disturbing pictures.

'No!' my mind shouted at me. 'The best thing to do is to get up from this dirty bench, tell her 'good night' and go to your bed, eventually never talk about any emotional crap with any girl.' Every fiber of my body was shouting at me to listen to my mind, but there was something which was much stronger than those shouting voices; something that was asking me to just sit quietly with Kim and go with the flow.

"Keith?" Kim's voice broke my train of conflicting thoughts.

"Yeah?" I asked abruptly, looking at her.

"Do you remember the night we made that deal about two years ago?" she asked, looking at me with her eyebrows lightly scrunched together.

A chuckle escaped my lips at her question and I answered, "Do you think I can ever forget that night?"

She too chuckled at my response and again fell silent for about a minute or two. And all I could do was look at her in confusion; confusion as to why all of a sudden she had asked me this question; confusion as to where she was going with this question.

She asked again, "Do you think that I challenge random, strange boys every other night to spend the night, according to me and make a deal about having the best time in their lives?" She was looking at me with a completely blank face, but there was certain amount of curiosity in her voice which couldn't be hidden.

Her question threw me off guard. In the last two and a half years, whenever I thought about Kim, I had never thought about her in this way. Never! I told her the truth, "No." My voice was firm and final, telling her that the question she had just asked was completely ridiculous and unnecessary.

She got the message in my voice and smiled a little in return, but I couldn't smile back. I just stared into her eyes, which were full of so many emotions, that I couldn't point out any, except one - sadness.

I couldn't stop myself and asked the question that had bugged my mind quite a few times in the last two years. "Why did you make that deal?" The little smile from her face vanished and she turned to look at the view in our front, but I kept looking at her, demanding from my gaze that I wanted the answer now. "Why?" I asked again with determination.

I watched as her jaw clenched a bit and she faced me with anger in her eyes, but that anger was short lived because the moment she looked at my expressions, she sighed in defeat. She closed her eyes and took few deep breaths. It worked for her as when she opened her eyes, they were again blank. With a little fake smile on her face, she answered me, "I didn't want to spend my seventeenth birthday alone."

"Wh-what?" was all I could say. Her answer left me flabbergasted.

She faced me again and said, "Yes, I didn't want to spend my birthday alone in my room. Apparently, you were the only person I met that night who didn't know me and I thought of taking a chance." I had no idea what to say to that. I opened my mouth to say something, but I couldn't come up with anything. At my lack of response, she continued after looking aimlessly at the front, "My mother left us when I was three. My father has always been a very busy person. It was always just my sister and me. My sister went to her college in San Francisco and I was all alone. My father didn't even remember that it was my birthday." She finished with a humorless chuckle.

My mind went to all my twenty one birthdays till now. All I could remember were the numerous phone calls from all my relatives and uncountable friends; the birthday cake that my Mom always bakes for me and the huge presents that I had always received; the hangovers that I've had with Adam and my school friends till high school and in college with Lee. Birthdays were supposed to be like that. This was my theory, well, until now.

Then, my mind went to that one night when I had lost the only bet of my life. Not even once, there was any sign of sadness or loneliness on Kim's face. We both were, undoubtedly, very happy that night.

Kim looked at me again and said with a smile, "You, Keith Warren, were my escape from my loneliness."

Her answer in some way calmed me and I asked her, "Why didn't you tell me that it was your birthday?" If she would have told me, we could have celebrated her birthday in some way special, like a birthday is meant to be celebrated.

She rolled her eyes at me and said, "Hey! You were a stranger, Mister. You should be glad that I even told you my true name." Both of us started laughing at what she said. I recalled how we didn't even introduce ourselves to each other till almost four or five hours of meeting each other. That night was funny.

"Thank you very much, Miss Kimberly Jones," I said in a fake heavy accent with sarcasm dripping from my words.

She stopped laughing and looked at me with all the seriousness. "My mother kept that name and I hate it." Her voice lacked all the emotions.

"I won't ever call you that again," I promised her. She nodded her head and I asked, "You never met your mother again?"

"Not until this winter," she answered almost robotically. "She was to visit Miami this Christmas and said that she wanted to meet her 'darling daughters'. Sarah made some excuse of her job in San Francisco and I self invited myself to Nashville with Lauren. I never want to see that woman's face again; the woman who left her kids when they needed her, for some rich, sick b*stard." Humorless chuckles and sarcasm was lacing her every word in the beginning, but as she mentioned her mother again, it was full of disgust and anger. "Why the hell should I even meet her?" she asked. It was like she was talking to herself. "She spoiled my entire childhood. The times when parents of other kids used to pick them up from school, I used to look at their mothers' faces and wonder that what wrong I had done that my mother never looked at me like that. All the birthdays, thanksgivings, Christmas and new years; all were empty for me. I don't have a single good story to remember of these occasions. All I can recall is Sarah and me, dressed up and waiting for our father to arrive home and those waiting hours many times changed to waiting for days. Well, at least he used to call but our mother never even called us. It was like she completely forgot that she had two daughters who needed her so badly; and she went away with that man without giving a second thought. And now she wants to meet us. Are you f*cking kidding me, woman?"

All I could do was stare at her all the time as she vented out all her sorrows in front of me.

She looked at me and said, "I'm very jealous of you, Keith."

Whenever someone had been jealous of me in my entire life, I had always been very happy and boasted about my greatness to make them much more jealous. I remembered that night on the beach in Miami when Kim had looked at me with pity in her eyes and I wanted her to be jealous of me.

Here, I was getting what I wanted. She herself said that she was jealous of me and for some strange reason I didn't like it even a bit. I didn't want her to be jealous of me.

"There is nothing in me that you've to be jealous about," I told her.

Snorting was her reply and she continued, "You've a perfect family. Your mother loves you to death, your father cares about you so much, your sister and you have the perfect relationship. You've Adam who wants me dead because he thinks that I'm interfering between you two and you're saying that there is nothing that I've to be jealous about. Are you out of your mind?" She looked at me with disbelief and didn't let me answer as she continued, "Do you know that I've hardly twelve pictures of myself until I turned five? And, damn, you've five huge albums and you're embarrassed about them? Ask me, how much I want to be in your place in life. I loved watching all those pictures."

Now, I understood the expressions on her face when she was so fondly looking at my childhood pictures. I kept quiet as I couldn't think of anything to say. I had no idea what to say. Consolation was something I had never done in my life.

"Do you realize that how lucky you are, Keith?" she asked me with a small smile.

I thought about everything she had said and realized that, yes, I've been very lucky all my life. I always got whatever I wanted and whenever I wanted. But, most importantly, what made me lucky were the people around me.

"You should be very grateful for whatever you have," she said, smiling at me.

"I am," I told her truthfully.

"You better be, else I'll steal your family from you," she warned with complete seriousness.

I raised my eyebrows at her warning and told her, "Really? Well, they already love you. You can take them away from me anytime."

"I know, right?" She grinned and I couldn't help but grin back at her.

Silence again took over as we kept on looking at each other and she said with a grateful smile on her lips, "Thank you."

"You don't have to thank me. I'm pathetic at sympathizing and emotional talks," I confessed while scratching the back of my head.

She laughed lightly and shook her head at me, all the while smiling. "That's why I'm thankful to you. I didn't need any sympathies or 'Oh! I'm sorry for what happened with you' crap," she said and I looked at her in surprise. "Stories are not always told to gain sympathy, Keith. Sometimes, there is so much in your heart that you just need someone who'll quietly hear every sh*t you've to say and won't even judge you. Thank you for being that 'someone' for me," she finished her sentence.

My lips twitched up in a smile and I told her, "It's my pleasure." After a few minutes of comfortable silence, I asked her, "Adam wants you dead?" I couldn't stop the laughter that escaped my lips as I remembered what she had said just a few minutes back.

"Oh, yes," she said fully alarmed. "Haven't you looked at the way he looks at me? It's like he wants to kill me any given moment." I just kept on laughing at the wide-eyed look she was giving me. She continued, "Are you and Adam secretly dating?"

With this question my laughter died. "What?" I asked her ridiculously.

She shrugged innocently and said, "Well, he is kind of possessive about you."

"Shut up!" I grumbled.

"Your grumbling can never change the truth." She shook her head in disapproval.

"I'll kill you, Kim." I clenched my jaw playfully.

"See, you too want me dead. You and Adam are perfect for each other." She beamed at me and clapped her hands in excitement.

Shaking my head in disbelief and smiling back at her was all I could do. Remembering something, I stood up from the bench and looked down at Kim, who was already looking at me with a confused expression. "Get up!" I told her.

"What? Why?" she asked, furrowing her eyebrows in confusion.

I rolled my eyes at her and said, "Can't you just once do something that you're told to do without any questions?" She narrowed her eyes at me, but did exactly what I had asked her to do. I went towards the kitchen and then the room where she was watching my childhood pictures with Mom and Hailey a few hours back. "I'll be back in a minute. Wait here. Alright?" I ordered her like I was ordering a five year old.

She sighed heavily and said, "If I'll refuse, then you'll say 'can't you just once do something that you're told to do?' So, okay, I'll wait for you." She said this like she was doing a huge favor for me.

"You're a drama queen," I told her and ran outside the room before she could say anything else.

I made my way towards my bedroom and searched for the thing I wanted. It took me almost two minutes to search it and when I did, I carried that thing downstairs to the room where Kim was waiting for me. She had already lighted up the lights of that room.

The moment she saw me entering inside, she kept her hands on her hips and said, "I'm not a drama queen."

I chuckled at her and asked, raising my eyebrows at her, "Have you been fuming over this since the last three-four minutes?"

She opened her mouth to retort, but her eyes went to the huge books in my hands. "What's that?" she asked.

Smiling, I went towards the table and placed them on it. "It's for you to see," I told her. She took slow steps towards the table and bent down, looking at me in confusion. I rolled my eyes at her and said, "You're wasting my precious time. I do not have all night" She gave me a short disgusted look and concentrated on the first book. She opened it slowly and what she saw made her gasp. She looked at the opened page and then at me, again at the page and me. "Kim, you can keep looking at me all day and night, but I'm going to take these back in a few minutes," I informed her smugly.

She ignored my smugness and asked in complete surprise, "These are the albums that you had hidden from everyone?"

I scratched the back of my head and shrugged uncomfortably. "Yeah," I answered.

Her eyes were lit up in complete astonishment as she looked at me in a strange way. "You don't mind if I look at these?" she asked as if she couldn't believe that I was currently following the path of self-humiliation. Well, neither