Thoughtless

A friend handed me Thoughtless with a warning I did not take seriously enough. She said you will love Kellan and you will want to shake Kiera, sometimes on the same page. I read it over a wet weekend in October, mostly on the couch with coffee going cold, and she was right. It was first self-published in 2009, then reissued by Gallery Books, and the standard paperback runs 530 pages. It is the first book in the Thoughtless series, told start to finish in Kiera Allen's voice.

The premise is simple and uncomfortable, which is why it works. Kiera has been with Denny for almost two years. He is steady, kind, and completely devoted. They leave Ohio together so he can start a plum job and she can start at the University of Washington on a scholarship. Money is tight, so they move into a house in Seattle with Denny's old friend Kellan Kyle. Kellan is twenty one, pretty in the way local rock singers get to be pretty, and used to attention from strangers. At first Kiera sees him as furniture with good hair. That changes fast.

What I liked right away, if I am being honest, was how normal Kiera sounds at the start. She is twenty one, sheltered, close to her parents and her sister, nervous about a big campus, proud of Denny in a way that feels young. She folds laundry. She worries about tuition. She makes tea for a house full of guys and then wonders why she volunteered. Stephens writes that early domestic stuff well. You can smell the coffee and the damp jackets. You believe these four or five people actually share a bathroom.

A move to Seattle and a crowded house

Kiera and Denny arrive hopeful. Denny has landed work that could set him up for years. Kiera has classes and a part time job hunt and that bright, scared feeling of starting over somewhere you do not know the bus routes. The house belongs to the band world. Kellan lives there with his bandmates, including Griffin on drums and Matt and Evan on guitar and bass, and the place runs on late hours, takeout boxes, and practice noise through the walls.

Pete's Bar is the other living room. The D-Bags, which is the terrible and perfect name of Kellan's band, play there to a loyal crowd. Kiera goes the first time as Denny's girlfriend, expecting to be bored. Instead she watches Kellan turn into someone else on stage. Off stage he jokes and flirts and washes dishes. On stage he sings with his eyes closed and the room leans in. That split matters for everything after. Kiera starts to look forward to shows in a way she does not fully admit to herself.

Home life fills in around that. Mornings in the kitchen with Kellan while Denny sleeps in. Shared rides. Anna, Griffin's wife, who becomes Kiera's closest friend in Seattle and the only woman nearby who will tell her the truth plainly. Anna is warm and funny, with a sharp edge, and her apartment feels like the one calm chair in a loud house. College scenes are lighter: registration lines, a professor who talks too fast, Kiera trying to sound older than she feels in seminars. None of it is fancy. It reads like someone remembering being twenty one and broke in a new city.

Denny is gone a lot even before he leaves town. His boss piles on hours. He falls asleep on the couch. He misses a show he promised to attend. Kiera tells herself work is work, and it is, but loneliness creeps in. She eats dinner alone. She studies while the guys laugh downstairs. She starts saving a seat for Kellan at the kitchen table without thinking about why.

Kellan Kyle and the D-Bags

Kellan could have been a cardboard bad boy and the book would have died on page fifty. He is not. Stephens gives him a past that explains the present without excusing it. His parents were cold in different ways, his father gone and his mother critical, and he learned early to trade charm for affection. Women throw themselves at him after sets and he lets them, then feels empty and a little sick after. With Denny he is loyal in the easy male way, all jokes and borrowed tools, until loyalty gets complicated.

The band details help. Griffin is loud and married and the steadiest of the group. Matt is quieter, funny in short bursts. Evan keeps the peace. They argue about setlists, about money, about who left the van a mess. Kellan writes most of the songs and hates talking about what they mean. When he plays acoustic in the living room late at night, just picking through a new verse, Kiera hears the strain under the confidence. Those living room scenes carry the middle of the book, more than the big stage moments, because nobody is performing.

I am not sure Stephens always trusts the reader here. She sometimes explains Kellan's damage twice, once in dialogue and once in Kiera's head right after. But the core holds. You see why Kiera leans on him. He listens. He remembers her class schedule. He teases her about her Ohio habits in a way that feels like flirting before either of them will name it. Denny loves her, no question, but Denny is tired and distracted and assumes she will wait. Kellan is right there, awake at midnight, asking how the essay went.

There is a small scene I kept thinking about. Kiera is sick with a cold and the house is empty except Kellan. He makes soup from cans, burns toast, brings her water without being asked, and falls asleep on the floor by her bed because the couch hurts his back. Nothing happens. It is sweet in a plain way. Later, when everything is messy, I kept coming back to that afternoon because it showed what they could have been to each other if timing and choices had been kinder.

Cheating in slow motion

The affair does not start with a grand plan. It starts with tequila and a night that goes too far and then immediate shame. Stephens does not dress it up. Kiera wakes up horrified at herself. She loves Denny. She knows what she did. She promises herself it was once, a mistake, never again. Then Denny gets sent out of town for a temporary work assignment, leaving Kiera and Kellan alone in the same house with the same kitchen table and the same late nights.

This is the part where readers divide, and I get it. Kiera lies, by omission at first and then directly. She tells Denny on the phone that everything is fine. She tells Kellan they have to stop, then lets him pull her back with a song or a look or a hand on her back in a crowded bar. She sleeps with Kellan, cries, goes to church with Anna, calls her sister, writes in a journal, and does it again. Around page three hundred I wanted to put the book in the freezer. Around page three fifty I could not stop reading.

To be fair to Stephens, she does not let Kiera off. Guilt sits on every chapter. Kiera throws up. She cannot eat. She picks fights with Denny so she can feel less guilty for a minute, then hates herself for that too. Sex with Kellan is urgent and tender, then ruined by the lie underneath. Sex with Denny, when he visits, is careful and sad. Kiera notices the difference and that noticing scares her more than anything. She keeps thinking if she can just get through this week, the feelings will sort themselves. They do not.

Kellan is no innocent here either. He knows Denny. He lives with Denny. He tells himself Kiera will leave Denny and then they can be clean, but he keeps taking what he can get in the meantime. He gets jealous of phone calls. He picks at Denny in small ways. He writes songs that are clearly about her and then plays them at Pete's while Denny claps along in the crowd, which made my stomach turn. When Kiera begs him to keep distance, he agrees for a day. Maybe two.

Anna sees more than she says for a long time. That felt true to me. Friends often wait, hoping you will fix it yourself. When Anna finally corners Kiera, the talk is blunt and loving and useless, because Kiera already knows she is wrong and does not know how to stop wanting two different lives at once.

Denny leaves and everything breaks

Denny's absence stretches. Work keeps him away longer than planned. Phone calls get short. Kiera tells herself distance is the problem, and distance is part of it, but the bigger problem is in her own house, sleeping down the hall. When Denny finally comes home, the book gets almost hard to read. Kiera tries to be the old girlfriend. She cooks his favorites. She wears the shirt he likes. She initiates the old jokes. Underneath she is tracking Kellan's car in the driveway and hating herself for it.

Denny is not stupid. He feels the shift. He asks if she is okay, if school is too much, if she misses home. He tries harder, which makes it worse. He brings flowers. He plans a weekend. He talks about the future in Australia, since his family ties pull that way and his contract might allow a move. Kiera nods and smiles and feels like a fraud. Kellan watches all of it with his jaw tight, playing the friend, dying inside the friend role he chose.

The confrontation, when it comes, is violent and chaotic. I will not map every punch because spoilers should keep some proportion, but Denny learns the truth in the worst way, in person, with no time to pretend. There is shouting. Kellan tries to explain and only makes it worse. Denny hits Kellan, or Kellan hits Denny depending how you read the scramble, and Kiera gets hurt in the middle badly enough to need a hospital. Glass breaks. A neighbor calls out. It is ugly in the way real fights are ugly, fast and stupid and impossible to take back.

Hospital scenes are quieter and worse. Kiera wakes up sore and foggy to Denny's face closed off. He does not yell now. He asks a few flat questions and her answers sound thin even to her. Anna sits with her and does not try to soften it. The doctor talks about rest and follow ups while Kiera stares at the ceiling tiles. Kellan is kept away, pacing somewhere else in the building, calling Anna for news. Nobody is the hero in these pages. That is the point, and Stephens lets it sit without a speech.

Denny ends it. Not with a big declaration but with a kind of exhausted clarity. He loved her fully and she split herself in two and he cannot live inside that. He takes the Australia option, for work and for air. Their goodbye at the airport or in the apartment, depending on which ride you remember, is restrained. He wishes her well and means it about eighty percent, which is honest. Kiera sobs in Anna's kitchen after and Anna holds her and says very little. There was nothing useful to say.

Touring, lies, and the long middle

After the breakup the book does not snap back into a love story. It sags, on purpose and sometimes past the point of patience. Kiera drops things. Classes blur. She quits or loses the part time job, I forget which came first, and spends too much time replaying fights while eating cereal for dinner. Kellan pulls back too, drinking more, sleeping around in a joyless way that embarrasses him the next morning, fighting with Griffin about showing up late to practice. The band gets a little traction out of town and touring talk starts, which sounds exciting until you see what it costs in missed calls and cheap motels.

This stretch is where my criticism sharpens. The same loop repeats: Kiera resolves to be alone and heal, Kellan shows up with coffee, they fall back together, they fight about trust, they separate for a week, repeat. One or two cycles would have shown the pattern. Stephens gives us four or five. At 530 pages, the paperback has room, but room is not always a gift.

Still, there are moments that earn their place. Kellan on the road, calling from a parking lot because he cannot sleep, asking Kiera what she is reading like a normal boyfriend instead of a rock singer with a bus full of people waiting. Kiera going back to Ohio for a short visit and seeing her old bedroom with clear eyes, realizing she left home to become an adult and instead became someone who hides phones. Griffin telling Kellan he is throwing away the one good thing that ever saw past the stage act, in language much rougher than that. Anna telling Kiera that remorse is not the same as change, and change takes months, not a weekend of crying.

The music writing stays specific. Rehearsals where Kellan stops the band mid chorus because the bridge feels false. A sound check in an empty club with chairs stacked and his voice too loud in the room. These bits reminded me that Stephens knows this world from the inside or did enough homework to fake it well. College fades a bit here, which is a shame, since Kiera's scholarship and grades were strong early stakes. I wanted one more scene with a professor or an advisor asking where she went.

If you have a low tolerance for cheating plots, this middle will test you. Kiera keeps choosing the immediate comfort over the hard clean break. Kellan keeps accepting scraps. Denny, mostly absent, becomes a saint in Kiera's memory, which is not fair to who he was either. He was inattentive and a little possessive near the end, and the book sometimes forgets that in its rush to punish Kiera. I wished Stephens had let Kiera name that without using it as an excuse. People can be wronged and still be wrong. The book almost says that. It does not quite.

An ending that hurts and a verdict

Months pass. That time matters. Kiera stays in Seattle, finishes the term as best she can, works, goes to therapy in a vague way the book mentions but does not detail. She does not date. Kellan tours, writes, tries to stay sober enough to remember sets. They talk rarely, and when they do it is careful. No grand gestures. Just a birthday text left unanswered for a day. A song on the radio she turns off.

When they reconnect, it is slow and awkward in a good way. Coffee that runs too long. A walk where they do not touch. Kellan says he cannot do secrets again. Kiera says she cannot promise she will never mess up, only that she will not lie about it. It sounds small. After five hundred pages of lies, small honesty feels huge. They agree to start clean, in public, with Anna and the band watching and ready to call them out. Denny, from Australia, sends a short kind note at some point that lets Kiera breathe. He has someone new, or the start of someone, and he does not hate her anymore. Forgiveness here is uneven and partial, which felt right.

So who is this for. If you want a tidy romance where everyone behaves, skip it. You will hate Kiera by chapter ten and the rest will feel like punishment. If you can sit with messy people who do a bad thing and then have to live inside the damage, there is a lot here to hold onto. The Seattle house feels lived in. The band feels like a band. Anna and Griffin give the leads people to bounce off so it is not two pretty people staring at each other. And Kellan, for all the hype around him online, earns it on the page more often than not. He is selfish and scared of being ordinary, and Stephens lets those traits argue with each other instead of smoothing them out.

I would still cut. A tighter edit could lose eighty to a hundred pages from the middle loop without losing heart. Kiera's indecision is the subject, I know, but subject and shape are different things. Repetition is not the same as depth. A few fewer reconciliations would have made the final one hit harder. And I wanted more of Kiera outside men: her major, her sister, what she actually wants to do after graduation beyond stay in Seattle. The book tells us she is smart. I wanted to see her be smart somewhere besides guilt math.

Even with that, I turned the last pages fast and sat quiet after. Not because I condone what Kiera did. I do not. But because Stephens captures how a good person can make selfish choices in small steps, each one easy to excuse, until she looks up and does not recognize her life. That recognition scene, in Anna's kitchen with cold tea, hit me harder than any stage kiss. If you pick it up, give yourself room. It is long, it is frustrating, and the best parts sneak up while you are annoyed. Read it for Kellan if you must, stay for what it says about telling the truth early, before kindness turns into cover.

I am already curious about Effortless, which follows straight on, though I need a break from these three first. My copy is creased and coffee spotted now. That seems fitting for a book about people who spill things and try to wipe them up after.