by Lisa Suzanne
DRIVING ME CRAZY
© 2020 Lisa Suzanne
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Published in the United States of America by Books by LS, LLC.
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All characters and events in this work are figments of the author’s imagination.
Cover Design: Najla Qamber Designs
Cover Photograph: Wander Aguiar
Cover Models: Andrew and Joli
Content Editing: It’s Your Story Content Editing
Proofreading: Proofreading by Katie
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BOOKS BY LISA SUZANNE
A LITTLE LIKE DESTINY SERIES
A LITTLE LIKE DESTINY (Book One)
ONLY EVER YOU (Book Two)
CLEAN BREAK (Book Three)
THE UNBREAKABLE THREAD DUET
THE POWER TO BREAK (Book One)
THE POWER TO BREAK - AUDIOBOOK
THE INVISIBLE THREAD (Book Two)
THE INVISIBLE THREAD - AUDIOBOOK
MY FAVORITE BAND STANDALONES
TAKE MY HEART
THE BENEFITS OF BAD DECISIONS
WAKING UP MARRIED
CLICK HERE FOR MORE
DEDICATION
To M, M, & M.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: WILL
CHAPTER 2: AMBER
CHAPTER 3: WILL
CHAPTER 4: AMBER
CHAPTER 5: AMBER
CHAPTER 6: WILL
CHAPTER 7: WILL
CHAPTER 8: AMBER
CHAPTER 9: WILL
CHAPTER 10: WILL
CHAPTER 11: AMBER
CHAPTER 12: WILL
CHAPTER 13: AMBER
CHAPTER 14: WILL
CHAPTER 15: AMBER
CHAPTER 16: AMBER
CHAPTER 17: WILL
CHAPTER 18: AMBER
CHAPTER 19: WILL
CHAPTER 20: AMBER
CHAPTER 21: WILL
CHAPTER 22: AMBER
CHAPTER 23: AMBER
CHAPTER 24: WILL
CHAPTER 25: AMBER
CHAPTER 26: AMBER
CHAPTER 27: WILL
CHAPTER 28: AMBER
CHAPTER 29: WILL
CHAPTER 30: AMBER
CHAPTER 31: AMBER
CHAPTER 32: AMBER
CHAPTER 33: WILL
CHAPTER 34: AMBER
CHAPTER 35: AMBER
CHAPTER 36: WILL
CHAPTER 37: AMBER
CHAPTER 38: WILL
CHAPTER 39: AMBER
CHAPTER 40: WILL
CHAPTER 41: AMBER
CHAPTER 42: AMBER
CHAPTER 43: AMBER
CHAPTER 44: WILL
CHAPTER 45: WILL
EPILOGUE: AMBER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 1: WILL
“Is this just sex to you?”
I can’t believe those words just came out of my mouth.
It’s supposed to be the woman who asks shit like that, isn’t it?
The waiter interrupts before she gets a chance to answer. “What can I get you two?” He’s a little breathless, like he’s been rushing around all morning.
I try not to give him an annoyed look while Amber orders her omelet and hash browns.
The waiter shifts his gaze to me to indicate it’s my turn to order.
“What’s Milwaukee known for?” I ask. I haven’t even looked at the menu.
“Beer and cheese,” he says, clicking the top of his pen a few times like it’s his therapy when he’s dealing with slow customers.
“All right,” I say. “Then I’ll take some beer and cheese. Throw in a bratwurst, too.” I look at Amber. “Isn’t Wisconsin famous for its brats?”
The waiter exhales loudly. The place is kind of crowded, and I guess he just wanted to take our order and bolt.
“What kind of beer?” he asks, ignoring my question about bratwurst.
“Heineken.” It’s the first beer that springs to mind and obviously he’s in a hurry.
The waiter walks away before I can ask what kind of cheese he’s going to bring me. Bratwurst, cheese, and beer isn’t a healthy breakfast, especially since I’ve been working on taking better care of my body, but I like to immerse myself in the local culture.
Amber’s brows dip down. “Heineken?”
“Yeah, why? Is it too early?”
“Well, yeah, it’s like ten in the morning, but you do know the Miller brewery is in Milwaukee, right?”
I laugh. “Oh shit. I got a Heineken in Miller town when my favorite beer is Miller?”
And there goes our talk about whether this is just sex because now we’re talking about the beer I’m about to drink at ten AM over breakfast at some joint not far from where my band played last night. But I’ve never really been one for smooth transitions, so I shift the topic back.
“It’s becoming more than just sex to me,” I blurt across the table, wishing she was sitting beside me so I could smell the raspberries in her hair.
Jesus Christ.
When did I become a sappy chump?
She lifts a shoulder as her chin dips down and she clears her throat. “I don’t know. We’ve just...” she trails off as she searches for the words, and I fill in the blanks.
“Had a lot of sex?”
She nods. “Well, yeah. It started that night in Vegas with the vibrator and it just seems like every time we see each other, sex comes first.”
She flew from San Diego to Milwaukee yesterday to watch my band play last night, and we’re free to explore the city before bus call to make the trip to St. Louis, where she’ll grab a return flight home. We’re making the most of our short time together...and apparently that means having a serious conversation over breakfast.
“Of course it does,” I say. “This is new.” The waiter drops off her coffee and orange juice along with my beer. “Plus you’re really fun to bang.”
The waiter raises a brow but doesn’t say anything, and she laughs. She waits until he leaves to respond. “You are, too. But is this just sex to you?”
I chuckle. “If you think it’s just sex to me, then I need to prove it isn’t. What will it take? Not having sex for a week?”
“That wouldn’t prove anything. Besides, you’re on tour.” Her brows dip down and she pouts a little, that juicy lower lip puffing out and reminding me of what it looked like wrapped around my cock this morning. “We probably won’t have sex for a few weeks once I go home anyway. At least not with each other.”
I laugh a little uneasily. “I hope that’s a joke.”
She giggles. “It is.”
An idea comes to me. “You know what I was just thinking the other day?”
She looks at me like I’m an idiot
. “How would I possibly have any idea?”
I narrow my eyes at her. “I want to take a road trip, one of those spontaneous ones where I can see the country on my own schedule. Where I can sit in the driver’s seat with the open road stretching in front of me, no rules and no plan. Doesn’t that sound incredible?”
She makes a face like she just sucked on a lemon. “Uh, not really.”
“Why not?” I ask, genuinely curious. I know opposites attract and all that garbage, but if she’s not on board with the kind of life I want to live, then maybe we’re not cut out for each other.
“The road trip part sounds all right, especially if you do it with the right person, but the no plan part?” She makes a face and flips her hand. “I may live in the clouds once in a while, but I prefer to have a plan. Goals. You know?”
I shrug. “It’s just always been a dream to travel like that. I have a few months off coming up and I want to take advantage of them. I’m sick of wasting time. I’m sick of wasting my life away. I want to do something. I want to go somewhere and see something and leave a mark somewhere.”
Her jaw drops as she looks at me in surprise.
“What?” I ask, swiping at my chin. “Did I spill something?”
She shakes her head slowly, a small smile curling one side of her mouth. “I just never pictured you like this.”
“Like what?” I take a sip of my Heineken, and this time I do dribble a little down my chin. I swipe it away with my palm.
“Vulnerable. Restless.” She shrugs. “You really have no idea what sort of impact you have made on the world, do you?”
I stare blankly at her, and my lack of response goads her into spelling it out for me.
“You and MFB,” she says, naming my band and gesturing toward me before picking up her coffee cup. “You make music for the world. You help people escape. You reduce stress and ease minds and provide a soundtrack to their lives. Do you have any idea how important that is?” She takes a sip from her cup.
I shrug. “I just do what I love.”
“And in doing that, you’re changing the world in your own way. You’re impacting people’s lives.”
“It’s not me,” I murmur.
“Yes it is.” Her voice is adamant, and she takes a sip of her coffee before she continues. “It’s you and it’s Adam and it’s Brody, Dax, and Kane. It’s all five of you individually and together. MFB would be a completely different band without any single one of you, but together, you make magic.”
I stare down into my beer in thought. “I never looked at it that way. It’s just a job.”
“You can’t really think it’s just a job.”
I lift a shoulder and glance up at her, and her brows are raised in surprise. “I know it’s not, but I just don’t think about it. It’s my career, and to be honest, I’m heading straight for exhaustion. We’ve been recording new music and playing anywhere from three to all seven nights a week for almost ten years, and now we’re heading for our second season of a reality show, and it just never stops, you know?”
She nods like she gets it. With most women, I’d think they’d never really get it...but her brother is in this band. If anyone would understand what I’m talking about, it’s someone related to a guy in the industry. “That’s called burnout, my friend, and I know the feeling well.”
“You do?” I ask. I’m frankly surprised. She seems to have her shit together.
She nods. “When I say I work three days a week, that’s sort of misleading. Twelve-hour shifts aren’t for everybody, and honestly, when I get home, all I want to do is sleep.”
“So why’d you come over that night after your shift before we left for the tour?”
Her cheeks turn a little pink—something I’ve noticed is rare. “You know why.”
I play dumb. “Spell it out for me.”
“Sex,” she says, not bothering to whisper even though we’re in a restaurant with people at the table next to us.
“With me?” I ask, pointing to my own chest dramatically.
She giggles. “Yes. With you. I needed you in me again before you left.”
“Well thank you for fighting through the exhaustion.” I down a few sips of beer in an attempt to cool my jets and get my raging boner to calm. It’s useless.
The waiter drops our food off, and we keep talking while we start eating. I eye my plate. The guy literally brought me a bratwurst with a slice of cheddar cheese on the side.
“What’s the hardest part about your job?” I ask, and then I cover the sausage with mustard.
“Probably that I never know what’s going to come in next.” She shrugs. “Could be something as simple as a broken bone or as traumatic as a heart attack.”
“Jesus,” I murmur. “How do you do it?”
She wolfs down a few bites of her crispy hash browns, and I can’t help my smile. She’s so damn sexy and I don’t even think she has a clue about that.
“I just do it. I like taking care of people, but I can’t be an ER nurse working twelve-hour shifts forever. It’s not a long-term, sustainable career for me. What about when I have kids someday? I can’t be away for thirteen or fourteen hours and expect to come home and be mom after that.”
My throat tightens at her mention of kids.
Kids.
That’s something she clearly sees in her future.
But me?
I’m still a kid myself.
Kids aren’t on my radar, and they’re not something I’ve ever thought about.
It should be a warning about our future together. She doesn’t want the spontaneous road trip I want. She wants kids. These are pretty big life events that we don’t really agree on.
But why does it matter?
We’re only a few weeks into this. We’re not committing to a lifetime, and even if there’s more than sex between us, we can get to those bigger issues later.
For now, I just want to have some fun and enjoy the ride.
Even though I asked whether this is just sex to her...and even though she didn’t really answer the question.
CHAPTER 2: AMBER
As we sit in the forward cabin of his tour bus with MFB and their manager, I feel a little sadness wash over me. We’re heading to St. Louis, and then I’ll have to go to the airport and fly out before their show so I can be back at work on Tuesday.
We don’t have much time together, and his question over breakfast that I never answered has been playing on my mind since he asked it.
Is this more than just sex to me?
It’s becoming that way, but I didn’t expect it to and I don’t really want it to.
A few weeks ago, I hooked up with the only single friend my brother had, not expecting anything to come from it.
The same weekend my brother drunkenly married my best friend.
I was drunk when I first hooked up with Will.
Like, really drunk.
I don’t get many chances to just let myself go and have fun. I work in a high-stress environment that sort of forces me to stay on the straight and narrow, but since it was my birthday weekend and I had my best friend and my brother around to take care of me, I decided to have some fun.
I hooked up with a guy and drunkenly talked my best friend and my brother into getting married and then getting tattoos...and apparently those two were even drunker than I was since they agreed to it.
And that was all it was supposed to be. A fun weekend in Vegas with a guy who has a surprisingly nice body beneath the vintage band shirts and dirty old jeans he’s so fond of.
I have to admit, he was always good looking beneath that mop of hair, but he looks ridiculously hot since the accidental haircut that happened that night in Vegas.
But the night we hooked up, I wasn’t looking for anything serious. I just wanted a fun weekend with a hot rock star, and it didn’t hurt that it was with someone I’ve known a long time who also didn’t want anything serious.
Because he’s not serious.
A
nd somehow he asked me over breakfast this morning whether this is just sex to me.
That’s how it started, and that’s where I wanted to keep it. But now I find myself with all these feelings that are starting to scare the hell out of me.
I don’t have time for a relationship right now. Between my job and my weekend hobby, I’m just busy. And relationships are like plants. They need nurturing and sunlight and water or they’re gonna die.
But I can think about all that heavy stuff later. For now, well, Will has a private bunk, the bus is just starting to move (and the rumble is rather loud, so it’s not like I have to be quiet), and everyone’s awake and up in the forward cabin. We have alone time if we want it, and just to prove that I do, in fact, want it, and that we need to take advantage of our short time together, I shift on his lap.
He lets out a soft gasp that goes undetected by everyone but me, and I’m satisfied that I’ve made my intentions clear.
“Can I talk to you privately in my bunk for a few minutes?” he asks me.
With the whole group of band members—including my brother, Adam—watching (and judging), I nod and stand. He stands behind me and grips my hip for a beat.
“Like you’re really going back there to talk,” Brody says, and everyone except Adam laughs.
“Nah, we’re not going back to talk. We’re gonna bang,” he says, and I just laugh.
“That’s disgusting,” Adam says. Maybe I should be embarrassed, but who cares? I need this time with the guy who’s basically my boyfriend even though we haven’t officially labeled it that way.
He drags me through the forward cabin to the bunks, and the little privacy curtain separating the two areas of the bus is barely pulled shut behind me when his mouth crashes down to mine. I give in because I want this.
I want him.
His tongue circles mine and I press a little closer to him as he hauls me more tightly against him. It’s not like anyone’s going to come back here right now, not after he admitted what we were really coming back here to do. I love kissing him...beer and brat and cheese breath and all.
