Tarsh, the owner, was cool, a thirty something single woman with shoulder-length brown hair and turquoise tips. She had a wicked sense of humour, and she didn’t take herself too seriously. She was good to work for—in fact, she’d been the only person so far that I’d interviewed for who hadn’t either flat out refused to hire me or wanted to exploit my connection to the band Taint.
So it shocked the hell out of me when Tarsh leaned across the table at our booth and asked, “So, Ali, I’m dying to know. What happened between you and the rock stars?”
“Was it real, what you had? Did you love them both?” Evie—the bookish freak—jumps in before I can even get my wits about me.
Max—DJ wannabe—says, “That dude doesn’t really have a twelve-inch cock, right? I mean, surely that’s bullshit. You’re so fucking tiny. How did it fit inside you?”
“Oh, wow, that’s a lot of really intrusive questions. Um ... I don’t really know where to start,” I say, blowing my new fringe out of my eyes. I’d cut most of my hair off, wearing it in a shoulder-length bob with a heavy fringe to hide my face. I hadn’t bothered colouring it, because I couldn’t be arsed visiting a salon every six weeks for some arsehole hairdresser to pour chemicals over my head and charge me a small fortune for hours of torture. But the cut had been a good thing. Less and less people recognised me now.
“You don’t have to answer them, Ali,” Kit—scarily beautiful tortured musician—says.
“Yeah, tell them to fuck off,” Buzz—our weirdly grounded stoner—says.
I let out a deep sigh. “It’s fine. You’re all just gonna keep pestering me at work about it anyway, and I’d rather you hear it from me than listen to all that crap in the tabloids. So ... yes, it was real. At least for me, but I can’t speak for them.”
“That’s so sad.” Evie’s big blue eyes sparkle with unshed tears. Jesus Christ, where did Tarsh find this woman?
“Yes, it is,” I agree.
“So why did you break up then?” Max asks.
“There were a lot of very painful reasons why we ended it—no doubt you’ve likely seen some of them. But it is what it is. And, Max, my vagina is magical. You could stick any old thing up there and not find it for weeks.” I laugh, and the others do too, but there’s tension at our table, and I find myself wishing I hadn’t answered any of their questions. When I glance up, I notice Kit watching me. He’s not leering, or anything creepy like that. He’s just ... studying. It makes me more uncomfortable than their questions.
“Beer’s empty, time for a refill,” I announce, perhaps sounding a little too overzealous as I get up and snag the empty pitcher on the table. I walk over to the bar, letting out a puff of air as I think of ways to forget. Most of the time, I’m pretty good at it. Today, not so much. I order another jug of beer, and when I move away from the bar, a man’s voice stops me in my tracks.
“Hey, I know you. You’re that—”
Oh my god, if he says that girl who took it up the arse in the elevator I will commit the worst sin known to mankind and pour this jug of beer all over his arsehole head. I turn around, levelling a glare on him, but it quickly turns into a grin, and I almost drop the pitcher when I launch myself at him.
“You’re the girl I used to live with,” Tim, my old flatmate, finishes, ruffling my hair as I hug him. “How’s it going, super star?”
I laugh humourlessly at the jibe. “It’s about to be going real well,” I say as I raise the pitcher of beer in the air.
“What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were living it up with the rich and famous.”
“I think we need to expand your definition of that. Living on a tour bus is hardly as glamorous as it seems.”
“So ...” He smiles mischievously at me. “You and Taint, huh?”
“Yeah.” I shake my head, not wanting to get into this with Tim at all. He was always Brad’s friend before he was mine, and though we’d come to be very good friends over the course of the time that we’d lived together, it still felt weird talking about this stuff with him.
“Well, I can see you’re pretty torn up about it—”
“I really am,” I say, hoping he’ll change the subject.
“You have my number if you want to catch up.”
“Actually, I don’t. Lost my phone,” I add, when he looks at me warily.
“Oh well, give me yours then.” He pulls out his smartphone and he types in the numbers as I read them out.
“So, how are you?” I venture, because I’m not yet ready to deal with more questions from my workmates. “How’s the wedding coming?”
“I don’t know.” Tim shrugs, waving at a guy dressed in a monkey suit just like his as he shouts a farewell from across the bar. When he turns his face back to me, his eyes are guarded. “She’s planning it with some other dude, now I guess.”
“Cloe left you?”
“Yup,” he says, swigging down half of his beer in one go.
“Oh, Tim, I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not. Dodged a fucking bullet, if you ask me. She was a colossal bitch.”
I nod. “Yes, she was.”
“Let’s do drinks on Tuesday. We can sit around a jug of beer and regale one another with how pathetic our lives are now that we’re nearing thirty and wasting our sexual prime.”
“Speak for yourself,” I say.
“About nearing thirty, or wasting our sexual prime?”
“Nearing thirty. I’ll have you know that my sexual prime is going awesomely.” Or, at least it was.
“Well, yeah, I guess it would have to be when you’re fucking two of the hottest rock stars on the planet.” He grins like a maniac, and I laugh despite myself. He’s such a fucking dork.
“Was fucking. You’re missing the past tense there.”
“I gotta say, I didn’t quite believe it when Brad texted me the video.”
“Brad texted you that?” I raise my brows in disbelief. “Jesus, Tim. Please tell me you didn’t watch it?”
“Of course I watched it. Come on, Ali, you think I’m not going to watch a video of my old roommate banging two guys? It was fucking intense.”
“Actually, it was in an elevator.”
“Ha. Tents, funny girl.” He laughs and leans in, pressing a kiss to my temple. “It’s good to see you. We’ll do drinks and bond over our misery.”
“Sounds good.”
Tim starts backing away as he says, “I’m calling you Monday so you better answer.”
“I’ll answer,” I tell him with a mock shut-the-fuck-up-and-go-away-you-douche expression. “I’m looking forward to the catch up.”
“Ali, for the record, they’re all fucking idiots for letting you go.” He winks and disappears into the crowd and I walk back to my table, resolute in preparing to tell my workmates to shut the hell up and mind their own business.
MONDAY, TIM HAD CALLED just as he’d said. We’d decided on beer and pizza at his apartment.
I lie back against the couch, my belly distended from too many carbs, and I study the room.
“You’re like all grown-up and shit,” I say.
He unscrews the bottle cap from his beer and tosses it at me. “I know, right? It’s fucking weird. All of this shit was Cloe’s. I think she felt sorry for me so she just left it all here.”
“Oh, thank god. I was beginning to think you’d completely been domestic and rearranged knickknacks around the place.”
“Fuck no. I don’t even like half the shit on those shelves.” He points to the huge entertainment unit lining the wall. It contains several turquoise ornaments, from empty vases, to glass-blown bowls, to a pair of dinted metal balls that just look like testicles.
“Why don’t you get rid of them then?”
“I don’t know. When I’m feeling particularly miserable, I like to take them down and stroke them. She had a thing about not touching anything and leaving fingerprints all over the glass.”
“You’re such a child.” I shake my head.
; “Look who’s talking. How in the hell do you go from being with someone like Brad, and never putting out, to winding up in a polygamist relationship, Jones?”
“Hey I would have put out if he’d wanted it, but that was the problem. Brad didn’t want me; he wanted a fantasy.”
“And how did your fantasy go? ’Cause I know his wound up biting him in the arse.”
I sigh. “It all came crashing down hard, like all good fantasies do when reality hits home.”
My phone rings. It takes me a moment to realise that it’s mine, because no one ever rings me. I pull it out and glance at the screen, balking when Levi’s face appears on it. I stare at it for far too long, thinking that if I just leave it long enough it will go away and I won’t have to deal with it.
“You gonna answer that?” Tim asks, and I frown.
“I don’t know.”
“You want me to do it for you?”
I shake my head. I’m about to hit end, but I don’t know what I want. I want so badly to talk to him, but it’s just going to open wounds that have barely even scabbed over. I set the phone down, firm in my decision, and then my hand reaches for it, hits okay, and I press the phone to my ear.
There’s heavy breathing from the other end, and a woman’s voice in a very thick French accent says, “Oh Levi. Oh god, I love the feel of your big cock inside me.”
I close my eyes as tears spill out through my lashes. My heart squeezes painfully in my chest. I’m torn between hearing more and wanting to hang up on him. I have so much guilt where he’s concerned, so I figure I probably deserve to hear all this and more.
“I miss you,” he says with a shaky breath. He sounds drunk. “I fucking miss you so much, Red.”
I suck in a sharp breath, and cover my mouth with my hands so he won’t hear my sobs. What can I say to that? That I miss him too? That it hurts too much to hear him fucking someone else? Why would he do that to me? Even as I think it, I already know the answer—because he’s drunk and hurting. He gave me his heart, and I broke it. I walked away and broke us all. But what we had wasn’t natural. It was never going to end well, because it was destructive, and it was never just about the fucking. Maybe in the beginning it had been, but they had opened me up to a whole new world, and I feel the loss of it with every second that passes.
“Levi,” I beg on a sob. I don’t know why I’m begging. What can either of us do? But I think that one little word between us erases all of the distance these last few weeks apart have caused, if only for a moment.
“Ah, fuck,” he groans into the earpiece, and I wonder who he’s with, and what she makes of him calling someone else while he’s fucking her. “Fucking love you, Red.”
I hear him come; no, I don’t hear it. I feel it. I feel that betrayal across the ocean, across time zones and the hundreds of kilometres between us. I wait until he rides out his high, and then I steel my voice and say, “Don’t call me again.”
“Ali,” he slurs, but I don’t hear any more. I can’t. I don’t even end the call—I just drop the phone and sink to the floor in Tim’s lounge room.
“Hey, Al, you okay?” Tim says, coming towards me. He picks up the phone. Levi is screaming my name into the receiver. Tim puts his ear against it and speaks low into the mouthpiece. “You call again, and I’m gonna kick your fucking arse.”
“Who is this?” Levi says, and he’s alert now—I can hear it through the receiver. If I know anything about Levi, it’s that he’s an angry drunk. And right about now he’d be ready to punch someone’s lights out. “Who the fuck is this?”
“Your replacement,” Tim sneers into the phone, and hangs up before Levi can utter another word. To hear him, so desolate, so lost and so hurt, and to know we caused that—that I caused that? It destroys that last little vestige of my strength.
The sobs break free from my chest and they don’t stop. Eventually, Tim carries me into his bedroom. He places me on the bed he used to share with his ex and lies down behind me, pulling my body tightly against his. It’s not a sexual thing—it never could be anything sexual between us. It was nice to have someone champion for me. It was nice, but it makes no difference. My heart is still just as broken as it was the second I’d heard him come inside another woman, because with one thoughtless phone call he cheapened everything we shared during those weeks on tour.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
PLEASE DO NOT FEED THE BEAST
COOP
I glare at my phone and slide it back into my pocket when I see that there’s no text back from Ali. I’d been drunk last night after the show, and I’d gotten it into my head that I should drunk dial, only with texting, because she’d always responded well to those in the past. Drunk Cooper had thought that this was a fucking brilliant idea. Only when I’d pulled out my phone and brought up her number, I had stared at the blank text screen for too long, and wound up typing I miss your wild pussy, referring to all the times we’d talked about her vagina needing a leash. At the time of my drunk text decision-making, I’d thought it conveyed the fact that I missed her while also saying I missed her vagina. In the harsh light of day, I sounded like a fucking arsehole. It was a fact that was no less true—I did miss her wild pussy, but I missed so much more than that.
I sit in the venue’s green room, drinking an Italian beer that I can’t pronounce while the guys chat to a bunch of VIP groupies. Levi’s been AWOL since the second we came off-stage, disappearing with a bottle of liquor and a hot brunette. A blonde with a pixie-cut sits down on the couch beside me, braving the frosty reception I’ve given any woman who came within a foot of me tonight. I know, I sound like a spoiled douche, and if Ali were here right now she’d likely kick my arse and tell me to go treat my fans with the respect they deserve, but I’m burnt out. Weariness has wormed its way through my bones. It eats at the core of me and there is nothing left.
“Ciao.”
“Hey,” I say, tilting my bottle of beer towards her.
“That was a great show.”
“Thanks.”
“Do you want to go somewhere? You want to er ... get away from here?”
I turn my head and take her in. She’s cute, and her cheeks blush bright pink as she waits for my answer, which of course reminds me of Ali.
“Yeah, I really do wanna get away from here,” I murmur, thinking about going home, seeing Ali. Even if it’s only for an hour—even if I spend the next month regretting it, because it just makes the wound that much deeper. Hell, I’d settle for five minutes alone with her.
“Great,” she says, her eyes dart away from me, glancing down at her small hands curled in her lap. “I know a place we can go that’s quiet. No one will recognise you, and if they do they won’t pester.”
Shit. “Uh, what’s your name?”
“Sophie.”
“Sophie, right,” I say, and then I sigh because, well, what the fuck else do you do in this situation? “Listen, I didn’t mean—”
“I knew it,” she interrupts, and a sweet smile spreads across her face. “You are in love with the redhead, with Ali. My friends didn’t want to believe it, but I knew. So where is she?”
“Home.” I sigh. “She’s home.”
“But you are here.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Don’t you miss her?”
“So much I feel like I’m barely breathing.”
Levi chooses that moment to re-emerge, with a woman on each arm and a bottle of Sambuca in his hand. He stumbles over to the couch opposite me and falls into the plush cushions, spilling liquor from the open bottle all over his arm. The blonde to his left laughs like a hyena, and the brunette to his right doesn’t waste any time in licking up the mess. Her tongue flicks all the way to his neck, though her eyes are fixed on me.
Her hand slides over his cock, and she smiles in mock surprise. “Bestione.”
“That’s right, baby, it’s a motherfucking beast. You think you can handle it?” Levi says. She mutters something in Italian, but it’s cut short
by Levi unzipping his jeans and releasing his cock, which he then shoves in her mouth. She takes it willingly. Of course she does. I glance at Sophie, who watches on with a disgusted expression on her face.
“Take it somewhere else, Quinn,” I hiss, watching the faces of the people in the room around us.
“Ah fuck,” he says fisting her hair, forcing her head to bob faster and her to choke on it. The blonde beside him licks along his neck and he lazily tweaks her nipple beneath her shirt. “What’s the matter, Ryan? You don’t wanna double time this one?”
“Get up,” I say, launching myself across the coffee table and kicking his shin.
“Ow. Fuck you.”
“I can fuck you both, if you like?” the brunette purrs, latching onto my arm. “I always say two rock stars is better than one.”
“Get out.” I shrug her off, and turn back to Levi who is zipping up his pants.
Zed cups his hands around his mouth and booms, “Ladies, it was awesome getting to know you all, but I’m afraid our time is up. If you could all head through the open doors there, next to Mr Cohen, we’d be much obliged. Don’t let him pinch your arse on the way out though.”
Alarmed murmurs travel through the group of around twenty women as they gather their purses and move hurriedly towards Zed and Ash. Ash opens the door and they file out like good little lemmings. Levi’s women make no effort to move.
“Does she mean that fucking little to you?” I lunge, straddling Levi and wrapping my hands around his throat. The women beside him squeal, gather their things and vanish along with the rest of the groupies. Levi’s hands claw at my own.
“No.” he gasps. “She means ... that much to me.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I loosen my hold to allow him to speak.
He coughs and rubs at his throat. “It means I love her enough to make her happy, by removing myself from the equation.” I let go of him altogether, standing up. I rake my hands through my hair and turn furious eyes on him.
TAINTED: THE COMPLETE DUET Page 27
