by Lux,Vivian
But then she gave me a small shove.
Then she smiled this small, patronizing smile and fucking patted me on the chest.
She patted me.
"Let's be grown-ups here, Jax, okay?" she cooed in this false calm voice. "We've already done the whole horny teenager thing."
"Horny teenager thing?" I stepped back from her. My head whipsawed between drunken anger and sober sorrow. "Is that what it was to you?"
She sniffed, her little lips pressed into a thin line. "Clearly, that's exactly what it was."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah." She folded her arms across her chest again, her jaw tight.
"I don't believe you."
"Well, you should." Liliana shook her head. "We were kids, Jax. Puppy love and hormones. It didn't mean anything."
All the breath went out of my lungs and I sagged against the far wall. Didn't mean anything?
"Fuck you, it didn't mean anything," I muttered, staring at my shoes. For a moment everything was swimming, and I knew I would start crying like a bitch if I didn't pull myself together. I looked back up at her.
She was staring at me with pity in her eyes. Fucking pity for me, Jaxson Blue.
No one pities me.
"It meant a lot to you, anyway," I said slowly. Her eyes widened—God, how could they get even wider?—as she listened to the cruel words that tumbled out of my mouth. "I taught you everything you know. It was cute, really, how eager you were to learn." I wanted to hurt her. I hated that I want to hurt her. But I needed to hand her some of the pain I was feeling. "Been nice really, ever since, not having to do all that hand-holding while I'm fucking a chick. Virgins are exhausting."
She made a little noise, and for one second, I could have taken it back. But I didn't. I watched her turn her back on me and slam the door in my face.
Chapter Fifteen
Liliana
Stop crying. Why are you surprised? He's cruel. He's evil. You already knew that, so why does it bother you so much?
Berating myself wasn't helping me sleep, and neither was the crack of early morning light that was working its way up the far wall of my bedroom. Maybe I dozed a little in between bouts of recrimination, but I didn't sleep.
When my stomach growled, I finally gave up on forcing myself to sleep and just lay there. My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls and my eyes were puffy and swollen.
And my cheeks were scratched from Jax’s stubble and my lips still tingled from his kiss.
I could leave. Go back home, put an entire continent between him and me once more. It was an enticing thought.
Dammit, no. I'm not running away again. I have as much right to be here as he does, and he's not going to get to me.
Fierce.
I closed my eyes, feeling marginally more composed.
I swore I never fell asleep. But I must have. Because when I opened my eyes, Jaxson was sitting at the edge of the bed, my laptop opened in his knees. "Mornin' Bit," he said.
I sat bolt upright, yanking the covers up to my chest. "What the fuck, stalker! What are you doing here?"
He stretched like a cat in a sunbeam and shot me a lazy grin. "Waiting for you to wake up." He gestured to the laptop. "You took forever and I got bored."
My heart started hammering in terror before my lips could form the question. I gaped at him, watching his eyes dart back and forth across the screen, an amused, and frankly triumphant smile twisting his lips. "Are you seriously reading my book?" I demanded, trying to mask my horror with belligerence. "Oh my god, Invasion of privacy much?" I reached over, trying to snatch the laptop away while simultaneously clutching the blanket to my chest.
He deftly swung the laptop just out of my reach and kept on reading. "You publish these books for everyone else to read, why can't I? Besides," he tapped the screen, "I see a few things in here that might constitute an invasion of my privacy, Bit."
I blushed. He was reading the sex scene. "What are you talking about?" Though I well knew.
He licked his lips. "Well that move sure sounds awfully familiar." He swiveled and looked me full in the face and twisted the laptop so I could see. "Right here? We did that, right?"
I couldn't look at him. I couldn't look at the screen. Mortification was hitting me from every possible angle. "I guess we did, yeah. Why, you don't remember?"
He pulled the laptop back. "No. I do." His eyes went far away for a moment. Then his lip quirked slightly. "Though I don't remember it going exactly like this. 'The center of her pleasure?' Why not just call it what it is?"
"That's… more or less what it is." I bunched the blanket in my fists and contemplated pulling it over my head. "You can't be too clinical."
He rolled his eyes and kept reading. "So many euphemisms." He paused and burst out laughing. “ ’Nethers’?! Really?"
The corner of my mouth twitched involuntarily. "Yeah?"
"That's a terrible word!" he laughed.
"It's evocative!" I tried to protest, but suddenly I was laughing too.
“ ‘Nethers.’ For fuck's sake. The real words for it are so much nicer."
"The real words?"
"Yeah, you know." He shifted a little, tucking his leg under him. His warm thigh pressed against my leg. I could feel his heat even through the blanket. "Clit," he said, rolling the word through his mouth like he was tasting each letter. "Cunt."
My mouth went dry and I swallowed, suddenly at a loss for words.
He stared at me for a moment too long. No way was he going to make me admit how sexy those words sounded when he said them. It was like he was calling right to them and mine were answering with a clutch of need.
A slow smile spread across his face. "Yeah, you think those words are better too, don't you, Lily?"
"They're too… dirty."
"Nothing's too dirty."
"Maybe not to you…"
"You either, Bit." His eyes darted down the page. "Oh my God, 'shaft'? Really? That's what you're calling it?" His hand went to his groin and I realized I was watching way too closely and quickly glanced away. "How about 'cock'? That's a much better word. Better yet, make it a pierced cock, since I remember how you liked that so much."
I ignored his jibe. "I doubt there were many pierced cocks in 19th century England, Jaxson. I was trying for a bit of historical verisimilitude."
"Yeah? Well whatever that means, I think it's too bad. Your Geraldine character seems like she would enjoy a piercing sliding against her G-spot. It would help her reach the… er… 'pinnacle of her pleasure,' faster than this lame-ass Tristan guy gets her."
I suddenly realized something. "Jax, you're like, at the end of the book. It's almost ninety thousand words. Did you even sleep?"
For the first time since I woke up, that cocky little smile slid off of his face. "Nah. Not really."
His beautiful face looked pinched too tight and the bags under his eyes were an angry looking shade of purple. My irritation melted away and I reached for him without meaning to. "Why?"
"I wanted to catch you before you woke up. So we could maybe talk about last night. Before you woke up and stormed off."
Did I say my irritation left? Never mind, it came flooding back in an instant. "Stormed off?" I repeated.
"Yeah, storming off without talking to me. It's kind of your thing," he shot back."
I flopped back down on my pillow. I couldn't believe how quickly he veered from being sweet and sexy to the most annoying person on the planet. "Oh, fuck off," I cried, pinching the bridge of my nose.
I felt him shift, lean forward. "We can, you know. All these things you wrote down…" His voice went lower. "Mmm… such vivid details, Bit. If I had known you were paying such close attention, I would have stepped up my game."
I clapped my hands over my ears. "Shut up!"
He leaned over me. I looked up at him, hovering over my bed. My breath was coming too quickly, my heart beating too rapidly. Realizing I was biting my lip, I licked them instead and his eyes went ri
ght to them. "It's given me a few ideas, frankly. How about it? Wanna do some research with me?"
His offer hung there, for one, two, three heartbeats before I finally came to my senses. I reached up and pushed him away. "Oh my God, get the fuck out of my room."
He stood up. "You never even heard why I was here."
"I don't care, get out." I flopped over to my side and waited until I heard the door close before I finally exhaled.
Chapter Sixteen
Jax
I stared at Lily's bedroom door, wondering how the fuck I had just gotten it shut on me again. I stayed up all night and into the late morning, wanting to apologize to her the minute she woke up, and yet somehow, I fucked that up as well.
Dammit, this wasn't happening again. I raised my fist to bang on the door, ready to batter it down if I had to, when my cell phone rang. I grabbed it out of my pocket, ready to hurl it down the hallway when I saw Bev's name. My heart, already in my stomach, splashed right down to my toes.
She was already talking when I pressed the green button. "… studio full of highly skilled, highly paid technicians and musicians, all getting paid to twiddle their thumbs waiting for you to show the fuck up. Where the hell are you, Jaxson?"
"I'm right around the corner," I lied, tearing down the stairs. "Calm down, Bev."
"Calm down? Do you know how much this is costing right now? Get here. Now."
"Yeah, yeah." I was sprinting down the lawn, but I didn't want her to know that. "Go take a Xanax, or something."
She hung up, but not before I heard her distinctly hiss, "Asshole."
I stopped in the middle of the lawn and stared at the phone. I had nothing ready. Bev had handled everything, booking the studio time and the musicians on nothing more than my promise that I'd have the album written by then. Then, meaning now. Today.
Fuck.
Maybe I was the flash in the pan everyone claimed I was. Maybe “Cocky” was an anomaly and I really wasn't a songwriter. Because fuck me if I'd been able to write a decent song since.
Part of me wanted to just skip it. Bail on them all and go get drunk with Annie's roadies. Pussy out and let them believe I sucked. I certainly believed it myself.
But I knew I couldn't do that. I had a reputation to maintain. Ever since “Cocky” dropped, the press wanted to see me swaggering. I wasn't allowed to fail. It would ruin everything.
I grabbed my keys and hopped into the 1985 Ferrari 288 GTO I bought myself with “Cocky” money and had painted a custom shade of electric blue. Like my hair. Image. I'd go to the studio and brazen it out. Fuck, maybe something would come to me on the drive.
Even I knew I was lying to myself. I was a panting wreck by the time I double-parked outside of the studio, a full hour and a half later than I was supposed to be there. Banks was standing on the sidewalk, smoking one of his hand-rolled cigarettes that smelled like dirt. I lifted my chin at him.
"You know, I honestly wouldn't give a fuck, since I get paid either way," he said coolly, letting a wreath of smoke billow around his head. "It's the fact that I have to show up to get paid." He stubbed out his cigarette against the building. "Must be fucking nice."
"Oh, give it a rest, Banks. You might think you're better than me, but who the hell is paying your bills right now, hmm?" The keyboardist my label had hired still clung to his classical training like it meant something in this world.
"Whatever. I turned down a pretty big name for this, Blue. I just want to get to work."
Bev was on the other side of the door. "You ready?" she asked crisply.
"Whaddya got for us, Blue?" Toad hopped up from the sofa in the lounge, his bass flopping around dangerously.
"Were you finalizing, or something?" Casper asked. He was trying to cover for me. I could tell. "That's why you were late?"
I nodded. "Absolutely."
"Well, everybody is ready to get down to work, Jaxson. Ready when you are."
I nodded again, feeling like I was moving upstream… or maybe caught in the undertow, the current dragging me toward that sound-proof booth with nothing to sing. I searched my head, wracking my brain for some little snippet to pull from the noisy static… but there was nothing there except a door shut in my face.
Chapter Seventeen
Liliana
Jaxson didn't come home last night.
I wished I didn't know this, but I did. I would have heard him if he had, because I spent the rest of the day locked in my room, writing like my fingers were on fire.
I wrote down exactly how the kiss felt, the press of his lips against mine, how they parted without my meaning to. How I sagged into him like I lost the ability to stand. How the bottom of my stomach dropped out like I was on a roller coaster and pleasure that was close to physical pain coursed out from every touch of his fingers on my skin. That's all that happened in the hallway—just a kiss—but on the page I was free to let it go further, just the way my body had wanted. On the page, I was licking and sucking a trail of kisses down his bare, glistening chest while his blue eyes never left mine—ah, fuck.
I swore I could feel his lips on mine a day later, like he had burned or bruised me. But that was ridiculous. This whole thing was ridiculous; he was going to be my fucking stepbrother in two weeks. I should fucking know better, but the minute I saw him, all of my carefully laid defenses fall apart.
I sat up from my laptop like it had scalded me. I needed to nip this train of thought in the bud. With my mind made up, I changed out of my schlubby clothes and emerged from my room.
"Mornin', Lil," Diggs croaked over his coffee. His big body was perched ludicrously on the small stool at the breakfast bar. "Didja sleep well?"
"Coffee?" I croaked back. My throat felt raw and hoarse with disuse.
"I'll take that as a no." His ruined face crinkled into a wide smile and he slid off the stool and patted it. "Have a seat."
"Thanks," I whispered and settled into the stool, grabbing an orange from the fruit bowl across from me. "How about you? Did you sleep okay?"
"Like a baby," Diggs chuckled, grabbing the coffee pot. "Doctor's got me on these new pain meds and they knock me the fuck out."
"Your hand looks good!" I suddenly noticed.
"Yeah?" He smiled proudly, gripping the coffee pot in his right hand and extending his arm straight out at the shoulder. "Can barely see it anymore, can you?"
There was a ghost of a tremor, but that was it. "Wow, that's a whole lot better. You're barely shaking at all."
"Grip's stronger, too."
"You finally found a doctor who doesn't have his head up his ass?" I accepted the mug gratefully and cupped my hands around it.
Diggs leaned against the counter. "New guy, young, barely out of diapers. Hell, he might be your age." I swatted him and he chuckled. "Doesn't seem right to call him ‘Doctor’ since he's barely old enough to shave, but he listens and he's willing to try new things. Turns out I had nerve damage in my wrist, of all the shit luck." He shook his head ruefully. "Falling off rigging will fuck you up pretty properly, you know, but no one took the time to really figure up how properly. He's the one that discovered the nerve damage that caused the tremor in the first place. Everyone else wanted to believe there was something wrong with my head."
"Well, there is something wrong with your head," I teased.
"Ooh, good burn. Where'd you learn to roast a guy like that?"
I grinned at him. "From the best."
"Damn straight," he puffed proudly. "Now how's my girl?"
I sipped my coffee and considered. "Really fucking confused, Diggs."
"Yeah? About what."
"Pick a topic."
"Heh, yeah, being young sucks that way."
"How would you know?" I smiled.
"Little shit. I was young once, you know. I remember how it felt."
"Did your dad suddenly decide to get married when you were nineteen?"
Diggs inhaled deeply. "Nah. Never had that to deal with, thankfully."
; "What the hell, Diggs?"
He shook his head. "Guess they figured it was time."
"It just seems so… out of the blue."
"Well, you know Annie; that's how she works. Makes a decision one day, and suddenly, that's how things are going to be forever more. My guess is that she woke up one day and told Nails to either get a ring or get the fuck out. And we both know your dad ain't going anywhere."
"No." I shook my head. It was true. For all his faults, my father loved Annie—worshipped her, even. "Guess you're never too old to change the path you're on."
Diggs raised his one good eyebrow. "Listen to you, all philosophical. You're too smart to be hanging around the likes of me."
"Shut up." I smiled, pride pinkening the tips of my ears. "I like hanging around you. You're not an arrogant asshole."
Diggs smirked. "I'm guessing you're talking about someone in particular?"
"I plead the Fifth."
"He got worse when you left, you know," Diggs confided. I looked up sharply. That wasn't what I was expecting to hear. "No, it's true. Jax and your dad got into this huge-ass argument right after you left for New York. None of us heard what he was saying, but we could hear the crashing and we saw the broken furniture afterward. Ever since then, he's been a real little shit to deal with… I mean, more so than normal. Annie was really hoping you coming home would settle him back down again."
I slowly sipped my coffee, hoping like hell that my pounding heart wasn't as loud as it was in my ears. My dad and Jax had fought? About me? He wasn't supposed to know—no one was supposed to know about what had happened, about Jax and I getting together. No one was supposed to know why I left. I had announced that I was eighteen and ready to strike out on my own and that was that, they had accepted it. I had cut ties, cleanly and easily, or so I thought.
"Well it isn't working," I said lightly, or so I hoped. "He came home drunk the other night. Said some stuff…"
"Ah, shit. Sorry about that, Lily. He can be really mean when he's drunk, takes after his mother that way. The two of them drunk together… boy, batten down the fucking hatches."
