by Lisa Suzanne
I realize in the back of my mind that a huge audience of viewers are going to witness this moment on television. I further realize that this episode will air on Monday on televisions across America.
But when a hot girl is touching your dick and you want her to, it’s like trying to stop a freight train coming at full speed...and I’m no Superman.
She grabs my hand and giggles as she pulls me away from the suite. One of the cameramen chases us down a hallway until she ducks us into a restroom, where they’re prohibited from following us.
Her hand goes right to my zipper without hesitation and she kneels down between my legs. “Here’s a little something to help me stand out,” she says.
I gasp when she pulls me into her mouth without hesitation. She sucks on the crown of my dick and licks the tip before she sucks in my entire length. I hit the back of her throat then moan and my fingers dive into her hair.
She cups my balls and tugs a little and I’m about to lose my mind with the lust building inside me. She bobs her head up and down and I hold her head in place for a few beats. It’s dirty and raw what we’re doing here.
It’s wrong.
The other girls are mere steps away from us. After a night of kissing and connections with other girls, this is how it ends. With my dick in Poppy’s mouth.
The thought of this being so completely forbidden is what pushes me over the edge. She tugs my balls some more as they tighten up and then I come into her mouth for what seems like forever. She sucks and moans and I groan as she takes down every last drop of me.
And then her throat bobs and she swallows.
I almost come again just at the thought of it. I wonder how it’ll be shown on TV—but in this moment of bliss, I don’t really give a fuck.
I bury the feelings of guilt deep when we gather back in the living room for the elimination ceremony a little while later. I was ushered back separately from Danny this time, and as I was interviewed in the back of a limo about tonight’s dates, I realized that maybe I am making some connections here.
Or it could just be the euphoria of a blow job talking.
Either way, I don’t care who Danny gets rid of tonight as long as he keeps Eden and Poppy. I like a lot of the girls, but I’m not ready for Poppy to go quite yet. Especially not after what happened tonight.
Danny shoots me an urgent look, and I have no idea what it means. I’m a little drunk from all the beer and definitely operating in a haze. I’m just ready to go home and sleep for seventy-five hours or so.
Danny heads to a private room to cast his votes, and when he returns, Melanie turns toward him. “Danny, it’s time to reveal which woman is going home tonight and which of the women have potentially taken your heart. Have you cast your vote freely and without influence?”
He nods. “Yes.”
“Then I will read the votes.” She pulls a piece of paper out of the box. “Talia.” She proceeds to read all the votes, and I keep my face devoid of any hints that might reveal how I feel about each girl he keeps even though I want to grin widely when I hear Eden and Poppy. He keeps Nicole, Lexy, and Kristy, too.
Melanie reads the final name. “Amber. I’m sorry, Charlotte, but neither Dax nor Danny has taken your heart.”
Charlotte turns toward the girls and hugs them, and then she comes over to hug me. She hugs Danny next. “Thank you for letting me go,” she says to him, and he gives her a warm smile as she walks out the door.
“You let her go?” I whisper to him even though we’re supposed to start moving toward the center of the room to toast to our next date.
He nods. “She missed her kid.”
“That was nice of you.”
He shrugs. “I’m a nice guy.”
I laugh. We’ll see about that.
19
I’m nervous as the car pulls onto my street late Wednesday—or early Thursday, depending how you look at it. A conflicting wave of relief and stab of disappointment washes over me when I find that Kylie’s car isn’t in the driveway.
She’s probably with the guy who called her name at one in the morning.
It’s a little after four, and the house is dark and quiet. I creep quietly up to bed, but just before I get to my bedroom—the master suite of this house—Brody’s door opens. He’s bleary-eyed and looks surprised that he ran into me.
He glances back into his room then shuts the door behind him. “How’d it go tonight?” he asks quietly, rubbing his eyes.
“Fine,” I mutter. “What are you doing?”
“Going to take a piss. Remind me not to chug a beer right before bed.”
“Noted. You got someone in there?” I nod toward his door.
He grins and nods.
“Good for you, man,” I say.
“You sleep with any of the girls yet?”
I chuckle and shake my head. “Just the hostess, though one of the ladies did slobber on the old knobber tonight.”
He laughs. “And?”
I shrug.
His brows furrow. “What’s going on with you, dude?”
“Nothing.” I turn to head into my bedroom, but he stops me.
“Don’t give me that shit. I’ve known you a long ass time and I’m not buying that everything’s fine.”
I glance down the hall at Kane’s room. “Is he here?” I ask.
Brody shrugs, and I open my bedroom door as I take a deep breath to make this confession. I trust Brody more than anyone in the world. He’s been my best friend for a long time, and if there’s anyone in the world I can talk to about these strange feelings I seem to have developed for Kylie, it’s him. “Step into my office,” I say lightly despite the gravity of what I’m about to confess.
“Let me just go take care of business real quick,” he says, and he dashes off to the bathroom.
I sit on the recliner in the corner of my bedroom, a place where I do my best thinking, and it’s there I realize I can’t tell Brody how I feel about Kylie. I can’t tell anyone, Kylie included.
I have to get rid of these goddamn feelings for her. It’ll only fuck with the band and our livelihood if I act on it, and it’s not just that. I’m already putting myself into a sticky situation with this dating show. I’m setting myself up for the same kind of heartbreak I’ve dealt with in the past, when the women I fell for chose another man in the end.
I’ll probably get over it if it happens on the show since I’m mostly doing it for the wrong reasons.
But if it happened with Kylie, I’m just not sure I could recover from that.
“All better,” Brody says, bouncing into my room like using the restroom was the same thing as a gallon of caffeine. “What’s going on?”
I shake my head, sure I need to keep my Kylie feelings to myself. “Nothing. Just stressed about the show and our upcoming tour. I feel like I have no time to prepare because I’m always in LA.”
His brows draw together. “Is that really all it is?”
I nod. I’ve never lied to my best friend before...but I’ve also never had a reason to.
“You want to talk about it?” he asks.
I shake my head. “Not really. I think I just need to get some sleep.”
“Okay. But you know I’m right across the hall.”
“Fucking some random chick,” I mutter, and he laughs.
“Yeah, you may want to knock first.”
* * *
Kylie walks in a little before noon the next day and catches me scarfing down some pancakes, and the room feels a little brighter with her in it even though what I did with Poppy yesterday sends a stab of guilt through me.
It shouldn’t. Kylie pushed me into this. I’m free to do whatever I want with whomever I want.
And yet...
I don’t want her sparkling chocolate eyes to fall upon me with disappointment. I draw in a deep breath and bury more feelings.
“You and your pancakes,” she says with a laugh. She glances down at my shirt. “And your shirts.” She rolls her eyes.
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I glance down at my green shirt that says I’ll Eat Your Cookie with a picture of a cookie and grin up at her. “What?”
“Why do I feel like that doesn’t mean chocolate chip?” she asks.
“It doesn’t. It means pussy.”
She wrinkles her nose at me. “You’re so vulgar.”
I wink at her. “You love it. Why are you here?”
“Band meeting in six minutes,” she says. She plops down in the chair across the table from me.
I glance at the clock. “I don’t know where everyone else is.”
She shrugs. “Good. That gives us a few minutes to catch up.”
My heart races as my eyes catch hers. A heated moment passes between us, and then I ask, “About?” My voice comes out much huskier than I intend for it to.
She clears her throat and looks away, breaking the moment between us. “Yesterday. How’d it go?”
I shrug. “Fine.” I don’t bring up the whole slobbing of the knob thing with her the way I did with Brody.
“That’s it?” she asks. “Fine? Are you gonna win this thing? Are we gonna get two hundred grand minus that ten thousand dollar mistake?”
I chuckle. “I don’t know. I’ve made some connections, but I just don’t really believe that this is going to turn into love.”
The closest connection I’ve made is Eden, but we’re pretty far from love. I also connected with Poppy, but it’s entirely sexual in nature. I can’t bring myself to admit that to Kylie. She’ll probably see it soon enough for herself, anyway, once the episode airs on Monday.
“You need to make it turn into love, Dax. Get the girl and get the money.”
I blow out a breath as I realize that the heated moment that passed between us mere seconds ago must’ve been completely in my imagination as she pushes me into love with someone else. “Working on it,” I mutter. I stand up with my empty plate that’s practically clean despite all the syrup I poured on my pancakes and bring it to the sink.
Kane walks in next. He shoots me a look of warning like I need to watch what I’m doing around Kylie, and I just roll my eyes at him. Adam walks in the front door and Rascal bounds down the stairs. Everyone slides into their seats and tosses their cell phones onto the pile.
“Where’s Brody?” Kylie asks. Just then we hear a door open upstairs. Brody and a blonde chick I’ve never seen come down the stairs. She looks mortified as we all stare at her while she walks behind Brody to the front door. He kisses her, opens the door, and after she walks through it, he smacks her ass. “I’ll call you,” he yells out the door after her, and we all laugh.
He closes the door behind her and saunters with arrogance over to the table. He tosses his phone in the middle and slides into a chair. “Sorry I’m late.”
We all laugh, and then Kylie starts in with business. She flips open her notebook and reads some stuff from her agenda to us. “No show tonight. We’ve got tomorrow and Saturday booked at Emerson’s. Anyone up for a viewing party tonight?” She directs the question at me.
“I’d rather just watch here,” I say.
“Can I invite a few people?” she asks.
I shrug. I want to say no, that it’s sort of mortifying to watch myself on television as I get to know these women, but I also want to appease her.
“Okay, done. Party tonight here. I’ve got a few ideas in the works for Monday’s episode,” she says.
The blow job episode. There’s no way in fuck we’re doing a viewing party for that one. I shake my head. “No,” I say before I can stop myself.
Everyone looks at me in surprise. “I don’t want a big viewing party. Or, if you have one, I don’t want to be there for it.”
Kylie’s brows furrow. “Why not?” she asks.
“He connected with one of the girls last night,” Brody says, putting air quotes around the word connected. I shoot him a look that clearly says to shut the fuck up.
“That’s good, Dax. That’s what we want,” Kylie says.
No, it’s not what we want. It’s what’s best for the band, sure. It’ll get me closer to the end, to the money, maybe to a relationship...but it’ll be with a girl who it’s not supposed to be with since the one who I think is meant for me is currently sitting at my kitchen table pushing me into something else.
“Fine. Do whatever you want,” I mutter.
I feel five sets of eyes fall upon me. I’m acting out of character. I’ve never not enjoyed having the limelight squarely on me. I’m the life of the party, the good time guy, the prankster and the jokester.
But I’ve got a heart in there. I’ve got feelings that are foreign and confusing pulsing through me, and I don’t even have anyone I can talk to about them.
We have practice after our band meeting, and I go through the motions. I sing the songs, but I’m off. I fuck up the words on one of our newer songs four times before I get it right. Kylie finally hands me a sheet with the lyrics on it. I play guitar for three songs, and my fingers are clumsy on all three. We all have off nights, but this is worse than usual. Brody seems to get the angriest, but he’s the guy who I’d expect to most understand my plight.
I start drinking as soon as practice is over, so by the time the wine and paint date viewing party rolls around, I’m wasted. Being drunk makes it much easier to bear when my final art project splashes across the screen and the cameras zoom in on my face as I kiss Lexy during happy hour. At least it isn’t the date from yesterday, though.
As I pass out alone in my bed a few hours after the viewing party, I’m not quite sure how I’m going to handle watching that one in the same room as Kylie.
20
We’re at Emerson’s for Monday’s viewing party. Kylie set it up despite my objections, and it’s packed with people. Emerson, the owner, set out trays of appetizers. He always tells us our job is to sell alcohol, and I’m starting the trend by ordering myself a beer the second I walk in the door. We take our favorite booth, and somehow Kylie, the unofficial member of the band, slides in beside me.
I can’t be next to her when Poppy goes down on me.
I can’t even be in this bar when that happens.
The past few days have been...strange.
We played our gigs on Friday and Saturday, but apart from that, I haven’t seen Kylie since the party at our house Thursday night. I largely avoided her. I even avoided looking at her. But she’s sitting right the fuck next to me tonight, the coconut scent of her shampoo washing over me. It’s so strong tonight that I feel like I’m at the beach, but instead of comforting me like it usually does, it’s making me nauseated.
The show starts and the date begins. I watch Danny’s group date with the ladies. He seems to have a decent connection with Nicole, who I’ve barely spent any time at all with. We watch my group date in right field, too, and then the show cuts to the one-on-ones. The one with Poppy and me is last, so I know I have a little more time.
We watch together as Eden makes a few offhand comments about the other women in her confessional, and I’m starting to see why she was dubbed The Bitch by the producers. She’s not a bitch—not to me, at least—but she’s blunt, and I can see how that would rub people the wrong way. It’s one of the things I really like about her.
“Amber’s not here for the right reasons,” she says, her gorgeous face lighting all the screens in the bar and her voice loud over the speakers. “She’s what my friends would call a starf—cker.” The middle of her word is edited out, but we all get the gist of what she’s saying. The scene cuts to a quick sequence of Amber shots. One is when she interrupted Lexy and me during happy hour. Another is when she looped her arm around Danny’s waist when he was talking to Nicole. She even tried to steal Jonathan away from Amanda on the first night. I see Eden’s point.
“Talia walks around like she’s got a stick up her ass,” Eden continues. “And Poppy is clearly here for the free alcohol. Lexy’s too sweet to get caught up with either of them, but I could see myself with both.”
I
focus on her last few words. I could see myself with both.
But she can’t have both. What about the connection we built?
Sure, Poppy’s the one who sucked my dick, but I felt a stronger bond to Eden than most of the other women. Maybe I need to step up my game to ensure she feels it with me, too—to try to pull ahead of the all-American baseball star.
“Isn’t she the one you said you felt a connection with?” Kylie asks, nudging me.
I tear my eyes from Eden on the screen and look over at her, and I get lost for a second in her pretty brown eyes. They’re light brown, a sweet milk chocolate, almost but not quite hazel. They’re glowing at me as the screens flicker all around us, and I feel like they’re eyes I could get lost in for hours.
I clear my throat when she nudges me again. “I’m not really supposed to talk about it,” I mutter.
I slide out of the booth and head up to the bar for another beer even though Emerson was clear that I could just signal them and they’d drop more off. I need to get away from Kylie for a minute. When she looks up at me like that, her glowing brown eyes on mine, I wish for a future that’s just out of my grasp.
These feelings seem to keep intensifying rather than going away no matter how much I’m burying them or willing them to stop.
Kane joins me at the bar as the show cuts to Danny’s group date on the picnic blanket in left field.
“Tell me what’s going on between you and Kylie,” he says. His tone is direct, but his voice is only loud enough for me to hear.
I shake my head and blow out a frustrated breath. “Nothing, man.” I glance over at him pointedly. He looks so different since he cut his long, blond hair shorter.
“Then why do you keep looking at each other like that?”
My brows draw in. “Like what?”
“Like you want to tear each other’s clothes off.”
Fuck. I need to reign this in. “We’re not. You’re seeing things. I’m on a reality show that she signed me up for to find love. Time for you to get out of Fantasyland and join us back here in San Diego.” I stare down at the beer bar manager Dinah places in front of me.
