I start to pull out of her, but I’m still rock-hard and she sucks in a quick breath at the friction.
“Too sensitive,” she hisses. “Don’t move yet, ‘kay?”
I freeze, caught between guilt and the instinct that wants to pump her all over again. My brain has cleared enough for me to be afraid of everything I’m going to feel once I’m not touching her.
Ava touches my cheek. “Hey. Something’s still bothering you, isn’t it?” She smiles faintly. “I guess it was a little cocky to think all you needed was a shower seduction.”
“What else could I possibly need?” My smile feels stiff on my face, even after all those orgasms. There’s nothing wrong—I just need a few more rounds than she can give, that’s all.
“Hold on one second.” She eases back from me, my erection leaving her one slow inch at a time. She breathes through her teeth at the pain of it and I pale. “Wow, you’d think he’d have the grace to shrink a little after all that,” she jokes, patting my shoulder. “Easy there. You should probably be looking more smug and less horrified right about now.”
“I shouldn’t have started that,” I mutter. “I fucking knew I’d get carried away.” I can’t help my reaction to my girlfriend—Ava’s crazy beautiful, and her gentle lips and wicked hands wake up all the wildest parts of me. But sometimes there’s an urgency to our lovemaking that reminds me of searching for a dealer in an unfamiliar town.
Ava snorts. “There are starving people all over the world. I think I can refrain from whining about getting fucked silly by my overly-considerate boyfriend.” Her hand drifts lower on my abs before she pauses, seeming to change her mind. “Look, if there’s something you want to talk about, I’m plenty awake now.”
The last thing I want to do is talk. Words won’t fix me. Neither will a quick self-maintenance session behind the bathroom door, but at least that might allow me to sleep tonight. I look away, and the clock on the side table glares at me. “I’m just tired. We have to be up in an hour and a half. Let’s get some sleep, okay?”
Her eyes narrow on my face. “You sure?”
“Absolutely.” I brush a kiss over her forehead as I reach across her to turn off the lamp. I can get up again once she passes out.
The bed creaks as she settles in, and every movement jars my too-sensitive skin. Ava’s sex drive is higher than most, but it’s nothing like the ache still throbbing in the base of my erection, the pit of my stomach, and I’m so sick of this shit. It doesn’t even feel like desire. It feels like something a lot darker, and even more familiar.
Find what the drugs are covering up, and stare it straight in the face.
My sponsor has given me that advice dozens of times, but it’s not like I talk to Gertie about my sex life. I knew the girls helped me get by, but I’ve never thought I might be as addicted to them as the booze. On the shadowed ceiling above the bed, my mind flashes memories of gasping lips, bared nipples, clenching thighs. It’s always the worst on tour. Between the high of a thousand people who love only me, and the slump of my regular life, when I have nothing to do and I’m surrounded by friends who are all more stable, kinder, more responsible than me.
Ava snuggles a little closer, and failure wrings blackly in my gut as I inhale her clean scent. No matter how hard I tried to be respectful, I was using those girls. I was using her. My sobriety chips are in the other room, but I ought to chuck them in the toilet because I’ve never really been clean.
I gather my courage and try to imagine how I’ll get by if I can’t use sex, but behind all those girls is just an endless, sinking hole. The nothing that is me without a stage and a guitar. And how do you fight nothing?
“Jax?” Ava’s whisper is small in the darkness of the vast hotel room. “You still awake?”
“Yeah. You can’t sleep, either?” I reach for her, her skin warm as I scoop her onto my chest.
I hate the uncertainty in her voice. There’s nothing uncertain about how I feel about this woman. Except how can I separate wanting her from needing her? How can I satisfy the endless thirst that is me without wringing her dry?
“Listen, I feel like we hardly ever get any time alone lately,” she says, “and we do have a four-day break coming up. This probably makes me a terrible bitch, but is there any way I can talk you into ditching your band to maybe spend part of it with me?”
I hug her more tightly against me, tucking her head underneath my chin. That won’t be hard. My band used to be the only steady thing about me, but now I can’t look at Danny or Kate without all of us thinking about it and I’m terrified Jera will see all the lies in our faces.
Jacob already suspects. He keeps dropping open-ended questions whenever we’re alone, feeling me out. His daughter is almost worse: last week when Maya was traveling with us, I ditched Ava’s plane and stayed on the bus during the day to hang with her so her parents would get a chance to rest. But even little six-year-old Maya kept asking me if my tummy “felt bad.”
With the future of my friends and my band a giant question mark, I can’t rely on crutches any more, whether they’re sexual or chemical. I have to learn to stand on my own, because if I stumble this time, I don’t want to take Ava down with me. I kiss my girlfriend’s hair, and try to forget everything churning through the world outside this room. “There’s literally nothing I’d love more than to spend the weekend with you. Where do you want to go?”
Chapter 19: Breathe
Leafy shadows flicker through the taxi windows as palm trees whip by on either side of the road. Their fronds wave gently above huge, modern beach houses, and choke the yards of older huts with flaking paint and blocky walls. The smaller houses squat at odd angles to the street that announce they were here before the vacation homes, and the roads, and official lot divisions.
I glance over to see Ava’s reaction, but she’s still buried in her phone. “Ave, you’re missing Brazil. And it’s kind of fucking amazing.” Even the air is spicy here, like the whole country is cooking with windows thrown wide.
She smiles without looking up. “I know, it so is.”
I sling an arm around her and lift her phone gently out of her hands. “This is supposed to be a break. Rest. Time for just us.”
“I know, but that was before the album fell to number nine. And trust me, the label is even less happy about it than I am.”
“Number nine is still tens of thousands of records. Do you know how many times I’ve had to referee Jera asking Danny to tattoo the Billboard chart on her ass since we finally broke the top ten? Besides, last I checked you were forty percent of the label’s revenues. Pretty sure you’re not in line for a pink slip.”
“Oh really? What exactly do you think this mega-tour is?” She stiffens, and my arm falls from her shoulder. “It’s my transition toward the graveyard of greatest hits albums, while they introduce my audience to the next big thing that’s going to pay their bills when I’m gone.”
“You think we’re your replacement?” I don’t even know what to say to that. “Ava, I hope you know that’s not why I took this gig.”
She blows out a breath. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I know that’s not how they pitched it to you. Or me, for that matter. But I have my suspicions. And some days, I think they can have my damn career and good riddance.”
I shake my head, because I’m never sure what to say when she says stuff like that. I know she’s a little burned out, but I don’t think she could ever give up music. I go to click off her screen and one word in the headline catches my eye: my new least-favorite in the English language. Java: we like our coffee with a little cream. Beneath it, there’s a shot of Ava and me at a breast cancer fundraising 10K, both of us laughing as she splashes me with a cup of the Gatorade.
“Java,” I scoff. “What a crock of shit.”
“Would you prefer Ax? At least they’re not screaming to the rafters about you dating a black girl.”
I shove the phone in my pocket. “This is almost worse. It’s the
really racist kind of non-racist.”
“Add that to the long list of things I am not thinking about for the next four days.” She sighs, hunching forward with her elbows sagging onto her knees. “Seriously, just distract me.”
I reach out, trailing my fingers over her spine where her pants don’t quite meet the line of her top, but she doesn’t move closer to me. “I would, but I’m not sure the driver needs to know quite that much about the birds. Or the bees. So...” I wrack my brain for something non-music related. Sometimes, it’s hard to connect back to the world outside of touring. “Tell me something about you as a little kid. Something not even Twitter knows.”
Ava snorts. “Is there such a thing? Okay, let me think.” She stares out the window, where peeks of the ocean are starting to show through the trees. My hand drops to the seat between us and I watch her shoulders, wishing she’d lean into me for comfort.
“When I was a little kid,” she says quietly, “my mom used to read me these stories—you know the kind, where the dragon kidnaps the princess and locks her in a tower or a cave or something?”
“Sure, yeah.”
“You’re supposed to be excited for the princess to get rescued, but I always made my mom stop before that point, because I was afraid the dragon stole the princess because he was lonely. I didn’t want to hear the part where the princess left him on his own again.”
Something twists in me, aching where I can’t reach to rub it away. She left her hair curly today, and I reach up to tuck a lock of it away from her face, letting go sooner than I want to because I don’t want to push. She smells like cucumbers again, and I swear I’m going to get her to eat something more substantial than a vegetable on this trip, at least once.
“My nanny stopped reading me those stories,” I say. “I drove her crazy with a million questions about if the dragon remembered to feed the princess and how he got food there with no hands. How she did her laundry and got more dental floss and stuff when she ran out.” I snort. “I was a barrel of laughs as a kid, for real.”
Ava leans into my side, her arm wrapping over my stomach as she suddenly hugs me hard. “I don’t think that—” The cab stops before she can finish. My skin tingles at the loss of her while I wait for her to punch in the code at the gate. When she pulls her arm back in the window, the scrolled wrought iron of the gate lifts and the taxi takes us around a giant fountain rimmed with ferns.
The house is white, a lofty Greek Revival softened with the trees draping its every edge and creeping in under the tall roof of the porch. This is our place for the next four days, just ours. I swallow. Alone, there will be nowhere to hide the burn of arousal that tugs at me at every different time of day. The nerves that pull my fingers to check websites and update my spreadsheets and wake up in the middle of the night, worried about the promotion for a show that’s still weeks away. I’m not sure Ava’s ready to deal with all the parts of me that are wound a little too tight.
I get out and pay the driver before she can beat me to it. I can’t see the ocean yet, but we’re close enough the sound of crashing waves carries through the thick forest to Ava’s circular driveway. The taxi drives away, and I pick up our suitcases at the same time as Ava reaches for my hand. I fumble with the bags, not sure if I should put them down again, but she lets her hand drop and glances away before I sort my shit out. I cough once and start toward the front door, walking a little too fast. Maybe it was too early for a couple’s trip.
But then I stop dead, my thoughts totally derailed. Beside the thirty-foot-tall Greek columns, there’s a crazy gnome face peering around the edge of a palm tree. A very familiar gnome face. I burst out laughing.
Ava elbows me, a smile creeping onto her face beneath a dark flush. “Shut up, I love my gnome! When I heard SkyMall Magazine might go out of business, it was the first thing I bought.”
I shake my head, still chuckling.
Ava wrinkles her nose. “Come on, he’s ridiculous, but he’s not that funny.”
“No, it’s just that—Nope, never mind. Too embarrassing.”
Ava holds up the key to the front door. “I’ve got four days, pal. You’re not getting inside until you spill. And apologize to Gnomey Man.”
I hold up a fist. Ava narrows her eyes, pretending to consider, and then bumps it, sealing yet another of our secrets. “I’ve been saying I was going to buy that gnome for years, but Jera always threatens to throw me out of the band when I get close. Plus, I live in a condo. No trees to nail a gnome face to.”
“Really?” Her eyes sparkle as she peeks up at me through her lashes. “You were going to buy Gnomey Man?”
I nod, and her lashes flicker down. She fidgets with her purse and keys, finally getting them in the right hands and unlocking the door. I watch, trying to decipher her reaction, but then I’m distracted by the view of the room beyond.
Ava’s house is made of sunlight and air. That’s my first impression, but as I move farther inside, I realize that’s just an illusion created by glass walls and fifteen-foot ceilings. The kitchen anchors the center of the room, the round sweep of a bar backed with stools dropping into a work island and dividing it from the living area. White lounge furniture punctuates the open spaces, each piece mounded with cushions in all different shades of blue.
Ava ducks past me to the wall of windows, pushing open filmy curtains and unlocking the French doors. The house snuggles into a hill, so the ocean is farther below us than I expected, separated by several levels of patios and pools before it gives way to untouched white sand and whorls of driftwood.
I struggle to look unaffected. This is a hell of a long way from my little loft condo in Portland. It may have a river view, but it’s only some frosted-glass half-walls and a fancy chandelier from being a studio. I am suddenly glad I didn’t invite Ava to spend the break at my place. Hopefully the tour will do well enough I’ll still be able to upgrade my condo before she sees it, even though I blew my savings on replacing my guitar after I gave mine to my mom’s charity auction, and then Ava’s Girls Kick Ass charity, when I was trying to impress her into actually dating me.
“So, what are you in the mood for? Want to go for a swim? Grab some lunch?” She pokes at her hair, trying to smooth it. “I’ve got a couple surfboards, if you want.”
I’m not sure if it’s her slipping sales that are throwing her off, or if it’s because this is her hideaway and she’s not used to sharing it. Her nervousness tugs me forward, my shoulders settling broader as if I could shield her, make her happy and comfortable.
“Actually, what I really want to do is uncover exactly how much SkyMall magazine garbage you’ve got stashed around here.” I half-turn toward the stairs, my eyes gleaming a challenge. “You’ve got the sock carousel in your closet, don’t you?”
Ava catches my hand, pulling me back from the stairs as she grins. “Don’t even, Sterling. Not unless you want to lose a finger. My sock carousel is a state secret.”
I pull her into a hug, burying my face in her hair, because I’m so relieved to have gotten that smile. “Ave,” I whisper. “It’s okay, you know?”
She sucks in a sharp breath, and then my phone rings. I pull it out just enough to check the screen, and step back with a curse. “It’s Kate, I’d better answer. Hold that thought, okay?” Into the phone, I say, “Hey there, Ms. Manager. I am at your service. Unless you booked another show between now and Thursday, in which case the connection is breaking up and I might have to call you back.”
Ava points through the French doors, mouthing, “I’ll be outside.”
I nod and mouth back, “Naked?”
Ava winks. “You wish,” she whispers and disappears out the door.
“Jax.”
It’s only one word, but it makes the South American sun turn to ice on my skin. “Kate? What’s going on?”
There’s a scrap of a sound, like she’s taking a breath or holding in a sob. I crush the phone into my ear, but I can’t quite tell. I grip the back of a piece of furn
iture—a couch, a chair, I have no idea. I can’t feel my legs.
“What happened?” It might not be him. It could just be a problem with the tour, with the label.
“Danny’s—” She’s crying.
I can hear it for sure now, though she’s trying to muffle it with something. The room around me starts to shimmy, like it’s not quite real. I need to sit down, throw up. Throw something.
“Danny’s what, Kate?” I hate myself when I hear how harsh the words come out. “Dammit, I’m sorry. Talk, please just tell me—”
“He’s sick, Jax.” She swallows another sob, but her voice squeaks with the strain. Kate never cries. I’ve seen her eyes red, but she never breaks down in front of anyone, not ever. “It’s not just a cyst, or a harmless lump. Last week, he gave our turn in the bus bedroom to Jacob and Jera, and it almost seemed like he was avoiding me. He’s been weird for months now, you know? And then today I heard a noise from upstairs, and found him doubled over in pain. He tried to play it off, but he couldn’t even straighten up enough to walk and...” Her voice shatters into a sob. “It’s happening, Jax. Oh God, it’s real, it’s really happening.”
I turn in a circle, scrubbing my hand back through my hair. I don’t even recognize the room around me. It’s tranquil white and buttery sunlit yellow and everything about it feels jarring in contrast with my thoughts. “I...But...”
“I don’t know what I thought—maybe it would just turn out to be nothing, you know? I figured we had some time still, and—” Her voice breaks. “I fucking deserve this, you know? But he doesn’t, Jax.”
“What are you—” I try to interrupt and she talks right over the top of me.
“I was so set on keeping my career and now I’d give anything to have all those months with him that I just threw away.”
I draw a breath and focus on my friend. I can’t hold one thought together with the next, but she needs me right now. “Kate, there’s nothing wrong with having a career. If you just stayed home and focused on him 24-7, Danny would go batshit. I know you love him, and I know he’s sick, but that doesn’t change that you both need your space. You always have. Listen, I’m coming home. I’m in...” I have to think for a second. “South America. Shit. So it’ll take until tonight, maybe tomorrow morning. But I’ll be there, okay?”
Insatiable (Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll Book 3) Page 20
