by Lisa Suzanne
She told me it was, and I need to trust her. I just don’t know where we go from here. I hear a gentle knock on my bus door an hour later and I open it to Maci.
“Can we talk?” she asks.
I don’t say anything as I move aside and she walks up the steps. It marks the first time she’s ever stepped foot on my bus. She glances around at my home on wheels. It looks much like the same layout as hers, just with a man’s touches rather than a woman’s.
She stands in front of my couch, a hand over her flat stomach. I wonder when that becomes instinctual for a pregnant woman to hold a protective hand there. I wonder why she feels like she needs to protect the baby from this conversation.
“Griff tells me I have studio time booked with Vail today,” she says.
“Fuck,” I mutter. In the chaos of the last few days, I’d completely forgotten. I’d sort of planned on just getting over to the hotel and lying in a bed that isn’t moving for a few hours. I check the clock. We still have hours until we need to be anywhere, but I suddenly feel pressed for time.
“I’m not ready,” she says. “Mark and I have only run through it a handful of times and I haven’t even practiced it with the rest of you.”
“We’re professionals. We’ll make it work,” I say.
“But your process is different from mine.” I sense the fear in her voice, and I wonder if she’s talking about more than just a recording studio.
“That’s the risk you take when you collaborate.” My answer is just as laden with an underlying meaning.
She presses her lips together. “I guess,” she says. “Has your publicist sent out press about it yet?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you ask Mark?” I regret my tone immediately.
“I’m not sure,” she says, pacing around. “I guess I’m waiting for your apology.”
“I appreciate you giving me the chance,” I say rather unapologetically. “We’ve both made mistakes, Mace. But I think we both know this’ll never work.”
Her brows rise in surprise. “We do?”
I nod. “I wish it could be different.”
Those raised brows come down as they furrow. “What are you saying?”
I glance toward the window because saying these words with her gaze pinned on me is harder than I expected it to be. My chest aches as I say, “I’m saying I’ll give you whatever support you need for the kid, but I’ll never be who you need me to be. I’ll always fuck this up.” I motion between the two of us. “Whether it’s hurting you or blurting out something private or hanging out with strippers in New Orleans.”
She takes a step toward me, and then another, and then she’s standing in front of me. She fists my shirt in both her hands passionately by my chest, and I can’t help when my eyes turn back down to her savage beauty. “What the fuck do you know about what I need?” she hisses at me.
I blink and look away from her eyes as they glow a false, royal blue at me. I know what lies beneath the surface, and she won’t fucking admit it. I’m so tired of it, tired of whatever game she’s playing and tired of battling how I feel and tired of becoming someone I’m not.
“Nothing,” I finally mutter, and she drops her hand from my shirt. She steps away from me and toward the table where my notebook sits open.
“What’s this?” she asks, picking it up.
“Don’t read that,” I say, my voice a hard warning that she completely ignores.
Her eyes rove over the words on the page, words I’ve already memorized after they poured out of me the other day. Words I was reading again just now as I tried to convince myself why this can’t work with her.
Stay with You
I don’t know how to do this
I never even gave a shit
But then you came along
And made me want to quit
Made me want to be a man
Made me want to take a stand
I had my own life and did my own thing
But you’re more than just another fling
I can’t go on living the old way
When all I want is just to stay
With you
When you told me about the baby
At first I was scared, I can’t lie
It’s everything I’ve never known
I wanted to run, wanted to hide
But the more I think about it
The more I want us to fit
I had my own life and did my own thing
But you’re more than just another fling
I can’t go on living the old way
When all I want is just to stay
With you
Let’s make this work
Let’s figure this out
Let’s raise him together
We both have doubt
It’ll all be okay
Just say you’ll stay
With me
When she finishes reading, she looks up at me. One tiny glance of her glassy eyes tells me the words spoke to her on the level they were meant to—but it was the level they were meant to before I realized I’ll only fuck this up just like I fuck everything up.
She opens her mouth to say something, but I cut her off.
“Mark taught me how to dig at emotions others might feel in similar situations.” My voice is flat.
“You’re saying you don’t feel this way?” She shakes the notebook in her hand for emphasis.
I shrug in nonchalance.
“Bullshit,” she says. “You fucking told me just yesterday that you love me. Things don’t change that fast. I see it in your eyes when you look at me.”
“You don’t see shit. You see what you want to see. Some fantasy of a boy and a girl and their baby.”
She tosses the notebook on the table and steps toward me. “You’re a fucking liar!” she screams at me. She pounds her fists on my chest in anger. She’s petite, but she can still pack a punch. She might leave bruises that will just blend in with the ink there on my body. But I deserve it. The physical pain feels good. It hurts far less than the cracks she’s making in my heart—the cracks I’m forcing on myself. It hurts less than the aches across my chest, than the sharp slices of agony through my head, than the pains that shoot through my abdomen.
The physical pain hurts far less than her love.
I let her pound away at me in anger for a few beats, and then I grab both her wrists in my fists. “Stop,” I say sharply.
“Fuck you,” she spits at me. “Fuck you!” she says again, a little louder this time as her face turns red with anger and her eyes fire pistols at me.
I can’t help it.
I yank her wrists toward me, and as she falls into me, I press my mouth to hers. It’s not sweet, it’s not gentle, it’s not tender. It’s hot and hard and angry as the fury pours out of both of us into this singular connection. It’s a clashing of teeth, a sharp biting of lips, an aggressive assault of tongue battering against tongue.
It’s every emotion I feel for her all rolled into one rough kiss, and it all comes barreling right back to me. She feels it, too. She didn’t say it yesterday, and she might not say it today or tomorrow, but I know she feels it. And I know it’s because she’s the person she won’t admit she is. Our love stems back to a high school crush, but it can go so much deeper now if either of us will just give it a chance. My fear is that neither of us will, though. So instead of talking through our fight like a normal couple might do, we fuck.
She tears off my shirt, possibly ripping it as it flies over my head and flutters to the floor. I pull her shirt off, too, and I paw at her bra before I toss it behind her. I groan as my rough fingertips brush across the porcelain skin of her naked back. My hips buck toward hers without shame, like some sort of animal who needs relief.
But that’s what I am, after all, isn’t it?
Her hips thrust, too, meeting the harsh angle of mine. I let go of her skin long enough to unbutton and unzip my jeans, my mouth never leaving hers. My balls are already drawn up tight an
d my cock is a solid, angry mass of veins and blood and need. I haven’t fucked anything other than my own hand in too long, and I need her, need this. I rub off a few quick strokes to diminish the edge of my need. It only makes it worse.
I grapple at her pants, some easy yoga things that just slide right off. She’s not wearing panties. What kind of woman comes over to a guy’s bus without panties?
The kind that wants to get fucked, that’s who.
I’m no better. I wasn’t wearing anything under my jeans, either, but I’m always in the mood for sex. I figured it would be on my own once again, but this woman is full of surprises.
She knocks my hand out of the way from my dick and grabs it with both fists. A groan rumbles out of my chest at the feel of her hands on my body. She reaches down to cup my balls, and when she does, she gives them a little tug that has me whimpering. She has me by the balls both literally and figuratively, and as much as I know I’ll never be what she needs me to be, when I’m with her, when we’re like this...I’d give anything just to try.
I feel like I should be gentle because I don’t want to hurt the baby. That doesn’t mean it won’t hurt her, though—but it’ll be the kind of pain that’ll make her beg me for more.
I don’t check to see if she’s wet, don’t slide a finger through her, because I can’t. She moves to kneel so she can suck me into her mouth, but I need her body. I can’t be a second longer here on the outside. I sweep the notebook off the table and onto the floor and step out of my pants in one move, and then I lift her by her hips onto the table. I thrust into her as I grab her breast, and she leans her head back, her neck corded with strain as her breasts push out toward me.
It’s heaven.
Being inside her, no condom and nothing between us, is like nothing I’ve ever felt before and everything I’ve ever wanted. Sex has always been good for me. It’s always been an outlet, an adrenaline rush, a way to express myself. A fun activity with few emotional ties on my end.
But with her like this, it’s something else entirely.
It’s elemental.
It’s everything.
We’re two crazed animals who can’t claw themselves inside hard enough, fast enough, deep enough. We’re two beings made by design to be this way. We hold each other’s red thread. It’s too cliché to say she completes me, but like this, she’s an extension not just of my own body, but of my very soul. It’s in my core, my make-up, my cells, and I’m swimming inside hers now, too.
I push myself into her as deep as I can go and pull back, fast and furious, not worried about such things like condoms because the only result that could come from it is already our reality. The anger at each other is still there as it transforms into a furious and fiery passion.
She claws at my back with razor sharp fingernails, making her mark on me, and when I lean in to kiss her, she pulls her head back and slaps at my jaw as I shove into her still harder, still faster. It’s like I stored up every emotion for this moment, and it all comes pouring out in each ram of my cock into her body.
I squeeze her breast until she cries out, leaving red fingerprints in my wake, and then I pinch her nipple. She squeezes her eyes shut as the pleasure meets the pain, and then her body rolls into violent shudders as she throws herself back onto the table. I fuck into her as she pulses around me, squeezing my cock and milking me as she continues to shudder. I thumb her clit, and she clenches her legs around my lower half. It’s too much, these strokes and beats and pulses and contractions in the most freeing sex of my life—free not just because there’s no condom, no worries, but because I love her so hard and so much and this is the only way I know how to show that to her.
I let go.
My body roars with an intense orgasm as I come into her, something I’ve never purposely done with a woman before. I’ve come into a condom plenty of times—even the broken one was meant to be there, but I’ve never had sex willingly without a protective barrier between my partner and me save for the one time I dipped into Maci in the back of a car.
She screams through my orgasm as I continue thumbing her clit, and she clenches again as I push her into a second one.
As our trembles slow, all I want is to collapse over the top of her and stay that way forever. Instead, though, I be the man she needs me to be. A cold table in the middle of the forward cabin of a tour bus is no place for a lady. I pull out of her, gather her up in my arms, and carry her to my bed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
ETHAN
“This doesn’t change anything,” she says.
Of course it does. I tell her that, but she just shakes her head.
“I’m mad at you for running the first time it got hard.”
“Oh, it wasn’t the first time,” I say, and I grin as I grab my now semi-soft cock as we lie together on my bed in our post-orgasmic bliss after the hot, angry sex.
“Stop it,” she says, giggling despite her words. “Be serious.”
“Sorry,” I murmur. “I’m not running, Mace. I just don’t know how to do this.”
“I don’t either.” We’re quiet for a beat, and then she asks, “Is it always going to be like this?” Her head is on my chest and I breathe in the scent of her hair. It reminds me of sunshine in the spring, which is about as cliché as it can get.
“Be like what?” I ask, stroking a hand tenderly down her hair—the gentle move a complete contrast to what we just did.
“Misunderstandings. Miscommunication. You acting like some goddamn martyr and thinking I’m better off without you.”
I sigh. “It doesn’t have to be.” It wouldn’t be if you’d just tell me the truth about who you are. This whole conversation feels so hypocritical of her, and I realize just now she never denied it when I asked her if she was Dani Mayne. She ran out of the room, but she didn’t deny it.
I’m trying to let her tell me on her own terms, but every time we have one of these conversations, I want to scream from the top of my lungs that we can never move forward if she’s going to keep lying to me.
She shifts so we’re looking at each other. “Can you just promise me one thing? Can you promise me you won’t fuck this up and run when things get...tough?” She purposely avoids the word hard so I don’t say something stupid.
“I’ll fuck it up. Now there’s a promise.”
“You’ve already tried,” she points out.
“And succeeded.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” She says it softly, and it speaks directly to that cold part of my chest she’s managed to thaw.
I nod, conceding, and then I give her my honesty because I can’t put together why she’s here when I’m doing my best to push her away. “That’s what I don’t understand. I don’t want to jinx it, but why do you keep coming back?”
“Because I love you too, you goddamn idiot.”
I feel like I should laugh at her words, but I don’t. It’s exactly what I wanted to hear, but it doesn’t change the fact that there’s a wall between us that’s going to be difficult to climb.
“Why?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. But when you’re pregnant, everything is amplified times a million. This is just the beginning.” She pats her belly. “But I’m already overwhelmed with how I feel about you. I know it’s only going to get stronger, that our connection will grow as this baby does, but if I feel this way about you now, I know it’s worth fighting for.”
I’m quiet as I process her words, and then I exhale a long breath, as if I breathed in her words and breathed out all the self-doubt. “The song was real.”
“The one I read before?”
I nod. “I found myself in this weird place where I was letting go of this selfishness I’ve always clung to. I wanted to put you and him first.” I nod toward her flat stomach.
“Or her.”
I nod, the fear eating at me. Any baby is terrifying, but the thought of me with a baby girl? I don’t even have a word strong enough to convey my anxiety for that.
“Or her,” I finally say.
We’re quiet for a while, and then she says, “What if something goes wrong?”
“Something will go wrong, Mace. This is me we’re talking about. But if we want this, we’ll figure out how to get past it.”
“I don’t mean with you. I know things will go wrong. I know we’ll fight. I know it’ll get hard—er, difficult. I mean the things we can’t control.”
“Like what?” I ask, propping myself up on my elbow and resting my head on my hand as I gaze at her gorgeous face.
“Like with the baby I mean. What if I hurt it or do something wrong or we lose it?” She says the last part like it’s a real fear, like this is a real thing to her...like she wants this.
My heart squeezes in my chest as I realize I want this, too. Despite everything and against all odds, I want it and I want it with her.
I choose my words carefully. “Babe, I’m sure those are the same things every parent fears, but you won’t hurt it or do something wrong. You’ll do what you can to keep him safe in there.”
“What about the other thing?” she asks, referring to the idea of losing it. As I look into her eyes, I can see how scared she is. I am, too. I have no idea how any of this works, but since my best friend’s wife is also pregnant, I intend to learn. Quickly.
“We’ll battle whatever comes our way. Together. Okay?” I say. I say it because it feels like the right thing to say. I’ll work myself into believing it—I do believe it, but it’s going to take some time to get used to the idea of working with someone else as a partner.
She finally nods. “Okay.” She glances up at the clock I have hanging on my bedroom wall. “I need to go shower and get to the studio.”
“Can I watch?”
She laughs as she sits up. “No. I’ll see you there.”
She leans over and presses a kiss to my lips, this one gentle and soothing after the rough ones we shared earlier. I watch from my spot on the bed as she finds her clothes and gets dressed. She blows me a kiss and slaps her ass before she disappears out the door, and I grin like a goddamn fool.
