“No whining.” Her gloves slam my mitts like a roll of thunder. “I’m one confession and one piece of clothing down.”
“So? I’m arguably two to three pieces down.”
“Tell me about it.” Her punches go soft and her eyes gleam. “The next Rocky movie definitely needs to have the coach in nothing but tuxedo pants and tattoos.”
I waggle my coach’s mitts. “Hey, eyes up here, Cupcake.” If she keeps looking down at my abs, she’s going to glimpse more than she bargained for. “So, when I was a kid, the one thing I wanted more than anything was a little sister.”
Her left hook slides off the mitt and she glances at my face, her next set of punches half-speed.
“Come on, three more rounds and then you can rest.” I clap the mitts together and sink deeper into my crouch. I wait until she slams through one round before I say, “My mom liked things quiet when I was growing up. If I started having too much fun when I was playing with my nanny and I forgot, Mom would get a headache from the noise and disappear to her room for a whole day. Sometimes two. Oh, come on!” I blow a raspberry and crowd back toward Ava, forcing her to keep her hands up. “That round didn’t even count. Let me see what you’ve got.”
The next cross rattles through my ribs and all the way into my liver. I fight to keep the wince off my face and continue the story. “Anyway, genius that I was, I figured if there were two of us, Mom would have to let us make noise sometimes.”
Ava pushes through her final round, her face twisting with effort, and then she backs up, panting. “Really? That’s why you wanted a baby sister?” She makes a face, but there’s something odd in her eyes. “They’re a pain, anyway. Promise.”
“That’s why I wanted one at first,” I correct. “When I got to grade school, I was also kind of obsessed with the idea of beating people up in defense of a little sister.” I wink at Ava, shucking my mitts in favor of the towel on the counter. “You’re dazzled by my maturity, I know.” I take a swipe at my own face, then grab a fresh towel before I approach her.
She’s as still as a deer on the edge of flight, her eyes searching my face even as I smooth the towel over her forehead, something tugging deep in my belly at the intimacy of being allowed to do this for her.
“Is that what you still want?” she whispers. “A little sister?” Her eyes flick lower than my eyes. Maybe to my lips, maybe all the way to my chest. Through her lush lashes, it’s hard to tell.
She raises a glove and I pull back automatically to give her space. She doesn’t push it, the smooth leather of her glove hovering between us for a second before she steps back and lets it fall. “It’s not just your ribs.”
I touch my jaw, realizing too late I probably just wiped the covering makeup away from my bruise. “Not a big deal.”
“It is a big deal, Jax.” She presses her lips together, her gloves creaking as her hands try to ball into fists. “I don’t want to cause trouble in your band, between you and your friends.”
“You’re not.” I pick up the coaching mitts and hang them up, turning back to face her. “Look, when Danny gets erratic like this, he always has a reason. I just really doubt you’re it.” I brush her hair out of her eyes and pick up her hand, starting to unlace her glove. “I’ll take care of it, okay?” I tap her glove with my fist, then smile as I pull it off her hand. “Musician’s code.”
She stretches her fingers, her knuckles capable and tough where they emerge from the black wraps. When I pick up her other glove, she flattens her hand on my chest. “I’m not your baby sister, Jax. You don’t have to protect me.”
My heart roars, hammering so hard against her palm I bet she can feel it through all the stretchy layers of her hand wrap. I keep my eyes down, carefully loosening the bright pink laces around her other wrist. “I don’t have much in the way of family. There are only two women in the world who have ever given a shit about me and they are both part of my band.” I look up, my eyes connecting to hers with a near-electric snap as I pull her glove off. “I’ve never fucked either of them.”
The laces of her boxing gloves slip easily over the hook on the wall. My cock has become a rigid line of pain in my pants, begging for relief it’s not going to get. I like her too much to let her be just another lay.
I grab her shirt off the counter and playfully dab at the sweat on her nose before I drape it over her shoulder. “C’mon. I’ll get you home safe.”
Chapter 10: Before
The curb seeps dampness into my jeans, the cold sinking too deep for it to really be May. I turn the beer in my hands, but the salty air off the bay isn’t enough to combat the heat from my hands. The liquid inside is starting to warm, the thick glass smudged with my fingerprints.
I love the weight of bottled beer, the way it tips so casually to your lips. The crisp bite of hops waking up your tongue as the carbonation tingles just enough to feel good, not enough to sting.
The side door to the venue bangs open, and one of the roadies recognizes me, then averts his eyes and hurries for one of the semi-trucks. Because everybody in the English-speaking world knows my hands aren’t supposed to be holding a beer, not anymore.
I should have picked a more private spot for my ambush.
My throat is scratchy-dry and the hollowness in my chest goes far deeper than my bones. I know the beer would be a tiny lift; not the rocket-launch of a line, or the weightless float of a needle. But it would be something, damn it.
I squeeze my eyes closed and fight the tension at the base of my cock, the ticking clock in my head telling me I could have an orgasm to tide me over, if I left right this second. If I bought her a drink instead of dinner, picked a girl with just a hint more hero worship in her eyes than I normally allow myself.
Then again, after an hour and fifteen minutes of waiting with this beer bottle clutched in my hands, I’m not sure I’m in any shape to be around a drink that’s actually open.
It doesn’t make it any easier that last night keeps playing through my head. The hurt on Ava’s face before I took her home. It was either the best or the worst choice I’ve ever made; admitting she’s already too important to me to fuck. I’m leaning toward calling it the worst, because she obviously doesn’t feel the same.
The side door opens again and Danny’s dark, lean shape slides through. He looks around, but the loading dock is mostly deserted. A smile pulls at the edge of my tense lips. I still know my best friend, after all.
“I bummed a cigarette off a light tech an hour ago!” I call. “Let you have it if you smoke it over here.”
He hesitates, but fortunately he’s far enough away I can’t decode the expression on his face when he sees what I’m holding. He heads my way, crossing the loading area and then the street to my fog-dampened curb.
I hold out the beer. “We used to be able to get past most shit by cracking a cold one. I can’t so much do that anymore, but you can. Well, a semi-cold one, anyway.”
He takes it along with the cigarette, his skin pale beneath his black beanie. “Don’t suppose you bargained for a lighter.”
“Shit.” Danny only smokes sporadically these days, so I should have realized he wouldn’t be carrying a lighter. I check around, but the crew is all busy inside. They built the stage and rigging before yesterday’s show, but I’m always surprised at how much crap there still is to do when we play two dates in one venue.
“It’s okay.” He drops his ass onto the curb next to me, dangling his arms over his bent knees. “The fuck was I thinking last night, huh? Reporters have been calling all day. Told the first one what I thought. The whole thing, about women and performers and clothes and all of it. Why none of us should have to be doing that shit to make music. After that...” He gestures impotently with the beer. “This was the first time I had something I really wanted to say, but now they just won’t stop.”
“Yeah, well, you had a lot of sequins on that ass. Tends to attract the wrong kind of attention.” I lean back and prop my hands in the grass behind me.
Danny tosses me a look that’s as tolerant as it is annoyed. “Fuck off.”
I smirk, but then offer, “Look at it this way—Ava’s been giving three times as many interviews as you. Maybe they’ll get enough from her to move on.”
Danny flicks at the cap of his beer with a thumbnail, but doesn’t open it. “I don’t get her, man. Lot of times, she gives off this vibe like she just wants somebody to wrap her up in a blanket and tell her it’s okay to go home.”
My abs clench at his assessment. I push forward again, staring at the gritty asphalt between my shoes. “You’re closer to the mark than you think.” It’s all I’m gonna say, but I’ll admit I thought he was doing all this because he was reading her wrong, not right.
“I just look at her and think, what if that’s Jera in ten years?” Danny’s shoulders knot tighter than mine. “Up there wearing nothing but whips and bullets?”
Sweat prickles at the small of my back despite the haze-filtered sunlight. “Then I guess...I guess I hope it was by her choice.”
“I mean, most days I want to just lose myself in the beat, the giant sound of these stadium shows,” Danny says. “But then I see what this life does to people and I want to stick my Fender underneath the tire of our bus.” I take a breath to argue, and then he says, “Fuck man, look what it did to you. Less than two years.”
Two years to Ava’s nine. That girl’s solid as bedrock, compared to me.
“I’ve got a lump,” Danny says.
My ears pop. Painfully, like all the air in the parking lot just turned inside out. “What? What kind of self-breast-exam commercial are you right now?” We used to stick those little cards in each other’s showers. Like porn, like a joke. I laugh shakily. “What do you mean you have a lump?”
Danny looks at me, and his hazel eyes sock me straight in the throat. My jaw muscles burn and tears leap to my eyes. I suck them back and cough once. “Where?”
“The fuck do you think?”
My eyes widen and drop to his lap. “Seriously?”
He taps the end of the cigarette against the back of his opposite hand, packing down the tobacco inside. “Biggish lump on one side, just a little one on the other, but...”
This is like having the spins, except I can’t put a foot down to steady myself, because they’re both already on the ground. “What did the doctor say?”
Danny taps the cigarette twice more, then stops, squinting up at the low-hanging sun.
“No way.” He didn’t even see a doctor? What was he thinking? “You’re fucking kidding me right now.” I’m going to hit him. Fuck my ribs, fuck the bruises turning greenish-yellow beneath both his eyes. I’m going to demolish him. “What about Kate, huh? What about—” I can’t finish.
“Kate knows.”
That can’t be right. She would have told me, she would have done something, fixed this already. His words are strangling me, invisible fingers leaving dents on my windpipe that are never going to come back out. I cough again, because I feel like I might have to puke.
“Look, I read about it on the internet,” Danny says. “All they can do is take them out, and they take the whole testicle with it. So they cut your balls off, then they poison the shit out of you with radiation. Which may kill cancer, sometimes, but it also causes more cancer. Depending on how far it got, you might die anyway. I’m not doing it.”
I try to swallow and have to spit instead, the tiny splat of it hitting the pavement only churning my stomach even faster. If it was just one side, then okay, but...
“So what do we do?” My voice comes out thin, frantic like he’s the older one here.
“We wait.” Danny sticks the cigarette in the side of his beanie for later. “If I live, I live. And if I start to get sick, then we know.”
A breeze swirls through the parking lot, kicking up a candy wrapper in the gutter by my motionless foot.
Danny draws back his arm and hurls the beer with all his strength. It arcs up, spinning weightlessly for a second before it explodes down onto the pavement, leaving a wet, malty stain. The biggest piece of glass rocks a couple of times and then it, too, falls still.
Chapter 11: Homeless
The flat, white counter beside the hotel sink is calling my name. Howling it. It’s not tile, where things get stuck in the grout. Or my favorite: impermeable marble. No, it’s some kind of composite plastic, soft enough the razor blade would score its surface, the scraping sounds it made dull and precise. I used to grit my teeth at the sound of powder slipping under the sharp blade as I dragged it into a line. Sounded sloppy, dry. Like a cheese grater against dusty knuckles.
Saliva wells in the back of my mouth and I grip the sink to keep my hands from shaking. I need something to carry me through all the hours before sound check. If I stand here for one more second, I’m going to explode. Or maybe disappear.
I had to blow off an appointment today to go to a meeting. No piddly radio station either—a photo shoot for a GQ spread. Kate’s going to skin me when she finds out, but I had to do it. I’ve already called my sponsor, twice.
Gertrude’s raspy old smoker’s voice snapped out of the phone at me like a falling anvil. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re not the one who’s dying. Now put up or shut up.”
The last is her ever-so-diplomatic way of telling me to find a way to be of service. A suggestion that always sends a bolt of panic through my throat, because the only thing people look to me for is a performance: for the cameras, on the stage, between the sheets. And that’s so not the kind of service Gertie’s talking about.
I throw a guilty glance at the locked bathroom door. There’s no way Regina is awake. My abs are slightly swollen, my cock just as raw, and she was exhausted two rounds before I finally let her sleep.
It didn’t help worth a shit. The orgasms faded like cotton candy on my tongue, gone to grit and a slightly sour aftertaste before her sweat had a chance to dry on my skin.
The only thing that would truly make me feel better is helping Danny, but there’s not one fat thing I can do. Even being in the same room with him right now is excruciating. He knows I know, and I know he knows, and we both know Jera can’t know and that means neither of us can think of anything else.
I can’t even look at Kate.
I grab the handle of the door, my bruised knuckles twitching. I want to rip it off, to throw all my weight and screaming muscle against it until it torques and bends and breaks. I want to leave a gaping hole in this wall, in this hotel, in this fucking day I have to somehow keep breathing through.
Finally, I open the door, the lock button popping out loudly. I yank my hair back into a rough knot, grab what I need from my suitcase and go, forgetting to look back to check on Regina sleeping in my bed.
A note. I should leave a note, or call for flowers, or something. I don’t just take off on girls, especially after the working over I gave this one. She’ll be sore for days. She loved every minute of it, but that doesn’t keep the memory from lurking in my stomach like an accusation. I don’t want Regina to ever feel as alone I do right now.
The hotel room door shoves against my hand as I ease it closed. Shit, these things are heavy. Or I’m so tired I’m weak as a toddler. It’s only four in the afternoon, but my bandmates are passed out in adjacent rooms and the bang and clatter of these doors falling shut is loud as hell. We drove all night to get to Seattle from San Francisco, and it won’t be long before we have to be at the venue.
Sleep would be my best shot at pulling off a decent performance tonight. I’d give anything to close my eyes and check out of my life for a few hours, but I just can’t do it.
I need to do the one thing I have outside of the band, to remember the part of me I don’t owe to them.
“Psst!”
My hands freeze halfway through zipping up the cheap hoodie I swiped from Danny months ago, specifically to wear on these kind of errands. Slowly, I turn around.
Ava’s head peeks out of her room. At the sight of
my face, she grins and bounces out into the hallway. Her feet are snuggled into bright white Keds, and I stare at them for a second before my eyes lift past toned calves bared by capri-length white yoga pants, then a tank that clings to her abs, and a wrap sweater whose open edges fall in elegant curves that skim the edges of her thighs. She looks painfully pettable, and I want to curl up inside her life and vanish into a nap.
“Hey, you,” she says. “Wanna play hookie with me?”
“You want to ditch our concert?” I move closer, already halfway on board with this plan, until I remember what tonight is. “After Kate went through all those gymnastics to get the special permit for the starlight show?” We’re starting late tonight, timed to the rising of the full moon for maximum laser show shebang. The people in Seattle are especially hard to impress, according to our well-traveled manager.
“Mmm, not quite.” Ava hooks a finger into the front pocket of my hoodie and I have to set my shoulders to keep from pulling her into my arms and simply holding on. I don’t know exactly where we’re at after our late night in the boxing gym, considering her sort-of pass at me and my sort-of rebuttal. She grins. “More like I have friends who live on Lummi Island, and they want to take us out on their sailboat for the afternoon.”
I try to pull a smile onto my face. “Honestly, don’t think I’m up for socializing this afternoon. That sounds amazing, though. You have fun.” Her face falls, and I remember to add, “Send me a picture of you looking hot on a sailboat.”
Her brow scrunches slightly as she tips her head back to study me. Christ, I love it when she takes off her heels and she’s all small. “I could stay here with you, if you want. Bet we could stream some James Bond movies or something.” She reaches up and touches my cheek, and my heart jumps. “Maybe catch a nap.”
There’s something in her eyes, a question like I saw back in San Francisco and I want to fall into it and run away all at the same time. I want, so hard, to be something other than the man I am.
Insatiable (Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll Book 3) Page 11
