by Piper Lawson
“Spoken like someone who’s afraid.” I’m supposed to be making friends, but I can’t resist stating the obvious. Tyler looks up. “Fame is only as dangerous as the person who commands it. If you’re talented enough to get the world’s attention for more than a few minutes, you have a responsibility to use it. It’s not something you can toss aside.”
Tyler’s nostrils flare, a muscle in his jaw working.
I’ve hit a sore spot in this boy they love to worship.
“It’s your turn,” Carly reminds Tyler.
Kellan drapes an arm around my neck, and I’m surprised because I almost forgot he was here, but Tyler’s attention locks on the arm around my neck as if he wants to melt it away with sheer disdain.
“I’ve never worn a garbage bag as a fashion statement.”
The comment works under my skin like a dull blade even before Carly screeches with laughter. “Drink, Annie. A lot. Jenna? You too.”
“But damn, girl, you make it look good,” Kellan murmurs, running a finger absently along my collarbone. It tickles like an insect, and I want to brush it away, but my attention’s on Tyler.
He looks pissed, or his self-contained version of it. I’ve never seen him lose his temper. He’s easygoing except when he broods, when whatever’s below the surface is carefully leashed and dealt with deep down, where he’d never let me. Where he’d never let anyone at this party, I’m willing to guess.
I’m genuinely at a loss for why he’s still standing here when he looks as though the last place he wants to be is poolside.
My throat is already burning, but I tip the cup back, swallowing gulp after gulp, and by the time I straighten, it’s empty and all I can taste is cherries and vodka.
“Your turn,” Kellan nudges.
I square my shoulders and deliver my challenge at the boy in front of me. “I’ve never lived in a pool house.”
I regret the words before I finish them.
They’re mean because they’re insensitive but also because they’re true.
Tyler reaches for his cup and lifts it in a silent, mocking toast. “You win.”
He turns and starts back across the patio.
You win.
It sure doesn’t feel like it.
I don’t know why I said that except I felt cornered and attacked, but my chest tightens unbearably.
“What’s his deal?” Kellan complains.
“What that boy has money can’t buy,” Carly purrs. “For every girl who’d give her allowance to lick your abs, there’s another who’d blow her trust fund to suck his dick.”
My entire body stiffens as she takes off across the patio toward the pool house. I can’t hear what she says when she catches up to him because Kellan says, “Fuck him. You look like a real mermaid.”
“Thanks,” I say, but my gaze lingers on Carly and Tyler talking at the door.
He’s going to reject her. Any minute.
I chew on my cheek.
Come on, Tyler. Shut the door.
Instead, he meets my gaze as if he can hear my words, holds it for a beat.
Then he lets her inside.
It shouldn’t hurt.
Still, after our talk the other day, I’d thought that maybe he was over being these peoples’ prince, that he saw through her bullshit.
I was wrong.
“Your house is amazing,” Kellan says when Jenna and the minions go to get more drinks. “I bet it’s even better inside.”
I flash him my biggest smile. “It is. You want to see?”
I pull Kellan through the side door of the house to avoid Uncle Ryan and Miss Norelli.
“This is the backstage tour,” I say under my breath.
We sneak past the living room, bending over at the waist to avoid being seen. My heart’s hammering in my ears by the time we get to the garage and I hit the lights.
“Whoa,” Kellan says.
My dad’s cars are here. There are also shelves of awards. “Take your pick. The Grammys live inside because my stepmom made him bring them in, but everything else is here.”
“Why does he keep them in the garage?”
“I don’t think he has a lot of respect for awards and formality. Your parents have this shit too.”
“Not like this.”
My head’s buzzing from the cup I drained outside, but it’s Kellan who looks drunk—on the surroundings. I know what that’s like. People get a hit of my dad, and they’re hooked. It’s why I don’t bring many friends here.
“So, we didn’t have a chance to rehearse.” Kellan shoots me a loaded smile. “You could show me your room.”
I’m not interested in taking Kellan there, even if he’s the only person in the musical who doesn’t have a raging hate-on for me. I’m not holding my breath for poetry and professed love, but I’m also not looking to punch my V-card with some lacrosse player who doesn’t even know my best friend’s name.
“I have a better idea.” I take his hand, and we trip toward the other side of the house and out into the gardens.
Torchlight bathes everything in a warm glow, but it’s blurring together. It’s a grid of flowers, waist-high but almost like a maze.
“That’s a shit-ton of roses.”
I can’t help smiling. “They came with the house, but my dad planted more. He likes building stuff, working with his hands.”
“I get that rich, I’m not touching anything.” He brushes a hand over a rose bush and snaps off one of the blooms. My heart kicks as he tosses it into the shrubs. “You into pain? Because if we fall into these, it’s gonna hurt.”
He snickers as he pulls me against him. I inhale, startled, and catch a hit of booze on his breath, his expensive cologne.
I push against his chest to get a few inches between us. “Whoa. Slow down.”
“Come on. You’ve been flirting with me for weeks.”
“Not flirting.” Desperation edges into my tone, the need to explain and be understood. “I mean, you’re attractive. Obviously. But you’re the only person who doesn’t think Carly should’ve gotten my part.”
“Good deeds should be rewarded, and I can think of a few ways for you to use that pretty mouth.” Kellan’s gaze flicks deliberately down to his pants, then his hand slides down to grab my ass.
Alarm has my throat tightening, my body stiffening. “Stop.”
He doesn’t. I duck under his arm but catch my toe on the rock edging the garden and trip.
I stick my hands out to brace my fall, wincing as I land in the rose bushes, their thorns scratching at my skin, but I push myself up and trip through the garden toward the patio.
“Annie, what the fuck?”
I glance back, but Kellan's lurching toward me. A muttered curse says one of the rose bushes bit him, too.
I round the back of the house, the pool coming into view. Laughter floods my ears. Cans litter the patio. I watch in horror as someone empties a bottle of liquor into the pool.
These people aren’t my friends, and there's nothing I can do to change that.
My stomach plummets, the ground tilting at a reckless angle beneath my feet.
I shove past bodies to the pool house and hit the code for the keypad. After two tries, the door opens, and I fall in.
The door closes behind me and a low, rough voice splits the darkness. “Party’s by the pool. Get out.”
I don’t move. The next second, I’m shoved up against the wall by something hard and warm.
Not something. Someone.
A hard chest crushes my breasts, and male hips dig into my stomach. I’m so thrown it takes me a moment to catch up.
But it’s his scent, cedar and sunshine, that keeps me from freaking out the way I did with Kellan.
“Annie?” Disbelief cracks the anger in his voice, his lips inches from mine in the dark.
“I know,” I whisper. “You didn’t recognize me without the garbage bag.”
Tyler steps back, and I sway.
He lunges for me, wrapping
an arm around my waist.
Even though I want to shove him, I’d fall in a heap without his support. So, my fingers close over his hand, and as he helps me across the floor, I imagine away the heat of his body.
Six uncertain steps later, I'm deposited on something soft.
His bed.
The glow of light—the nightstand lamp switched on—has me wincing until my eyes adjust.
Tyler’s staring down at me, a shirtless, scowling god. His toned chest floods my field of vision.
I swallow. The buzz from the alcohol has my gaze sliding down the muscles of his stomach, lingering on the indentations left by the shadows, the faint trail of hair that disappears into the top of his unbuttoned jeans.
“What did you take?” His voice is commanding, forcing my eyes up to his.
“Nothing. I had one—two drinks?” Tyler lifts a dark brow under the thick fall of hair. “Two and three-quarters drinks,” I decide.
He doesn’t smell like cologne and liquor. Tyler smells clean and warm, like a forest.
“And you’re here because…”
I think I prefer my trees quiet.
I slide onto my side, closing my eyes and sinking into the relief the new position brings. “Kellan wanted to wrestle in the roses. I didn’t.”
A string of impressive curses drifts through my head, almost as if I’d uttered them, but the voice isn’t mine.
Then he’s gone. I feel him vanish from the side of the bed only to reappear a moment later.
“Did he hurt you?” Tyler’s voice is so low it’s barely audible.
I shake my head, and the room spins. I force my eyes open to see him braced over me, close enough his knees brush the bed, holding a glass.
“It's water,” he says flatly. “You’re dehydrated.”
“You don’t have to sound like you care.”
The growl would have made me jump if I wasn’t so buzzed.
I’m not trying to be a brat. He doesn’t need to pretend when we’re alone. It’s not like with Dad and Haley, when civility is a must.
Okay, maybe I’m being a bit of a brat, but I’m protesting Kellan, the fuzziness in my head, my own stupidity in thinking I could win these people over…
Plus the shirtless Hottie McTraitor in my pool house.
The one who sinks onto the bed next to my head, making the mattress dip with his weight. My fingers brush his thigh.
“Annie. Drink the damn water.” There’s a note of worry in his impatience. “You can hate me again after.”
I sit up and drink, studying him over the rim of the cup as he studies me.
We’re closer than we’ve been in months, except for maybe the other day at my car when he moved down my body.
But now he’s searching my face—not for emotions, but for marks, for trauma, for signs of something that shouldn’t be there.
“You won’t find anything,” I murmur when I finish the water. His dark gaze comes back to mine. “Anything worth finding is underneath.”
But he takes my chin gently in his hands, turning my head and brushing back my hair.
His fingers graze my cheek, and I flinch at the sting.
“He scratched you.” Tyler utters the words as if they’re vile, and I twist out of his grasp.
“I fell into a rose bush. It bit harder than Kellan.”
I reach past him to set the cup on the nightstand, but he takes it from me before I can.
“It doesn’t feel as good as I thought it would,” I inform him.
“What doesn’t?”
I drop back onto the bed, my eyes closing before I hit the duvet. “Hating you.”
4
When I wake, my head’s on a pillow, and it smells like home.
No. Home is a fabric softener brand. This pillow smells like sunshine and cedar.
Like him.
Blinking my eyes open reveals I’m in a strange bed.
And I’m not alone.
Tyler Adams is stretched out across the sheets as if he owns them. He’s as beautiful asleep as he is awake. Maybe more so.
His firm mouth looks more forgiving with his lips parted in sleep. His eyelashes are black and so long I want to trace them with a finger. Thick, dark hair falls across his forehead, shielding him from the world.
I wonder what boys who have everything dream of.
The sheet is twisted around his legs, and his chest is bare. I drink in the cut lines of his body.
What the hell am I doing here? Did I crawl into bed with him? Did we...?
Please, God, tell me I didn’t sleep with him.
Not that I haven’t imagined having Tyler Adams pop my cherry—back before he revealed himself as an ass who cares more about popularity than me.
But, hello, that’s why we have dreams and the privacy of our own heads—so we can fantasize about stupid shit we’d never admit to ourselves in the light of day.
He groans, stirring. When his lashes flutter, my heart leaps into my throat.
Shit, shit, shit.
He stills once more, and I exhale slowly.
Pulling back the edge of the blackout curtain reveals the soft colors of the early-morning sun peeking over the hills and trees along the horizon.
I make a lap of the room I haven’t visited in months.
Tyler’s schoolbooks and bag sit on the desk my dad and Haley got when he moved in. His guitar rests against the wall by the door. He got it secondhand from my dad’s label, played it until his fingers bled.
A pile of street clothes is neatly folded on the dresser. Faded T-shirts, black and gray. A Henley. Two pair of jeans.
The same day my dad’s agent sent him a car for his final album hitting platinum, I got Tyler a Ramones T-shirt for his birthday.
He wore that shirt until the hem frayed.
I miss those days. We didn’t care about anything but having fun and being alive. Every second we spent together—messing around with music on my dad’s tour-bus-turned-studio, or questing to find the best cheese fries in Philly, or doing impressions behind the soundboard—felt like we were taking control of our lives. Making new memories.
Tyler didn’t value our friendship. He traded it for popularity at Oakwood.
I’d figured the pain would fade over time, but seeing him every day—even for a moment in the hallways or before or after school—means the ache in my gut never quite goes away.
He saved your ass last night.
He saved my ass because if something had happened, my dad might’ve thought he was involved in the party and come down on him. It’s the only explanation.
The boy I knew, the one I laughed with and dreamed about, is long gone.
I tug on the door of the pool house and step outside in my bare feet. The speakers have long since gone silent, and there’s no breeze, but I can still smell him as if he’s followed me.
I clean up the patio, collecting bottles and cans before putting the bags behind the pool house.
When the cleanup is done, I sneak upstairs to my room.
I don’t bother hitting the lights. The ominous, lumpy shapes are my king-sized bed, my dresser and desk, and the comfy armchair by the window I use to read and do homework. The dark spots along the wall across from my bed are music boxes, lined up on the shelf like guardians.
On impulse, I stop by the last one and lift the top.
“It’s a Small World” streams out until I shut the lid again.
It’s the same song every time, the same arrangement, played by gears instead of humans. The little dancing dog in a tutu has always been the best part.
I’ll figure out how to keep my part in the musical and keep Carly and her damned minions at bay without Kellan’s help. Without anyone’s.
In my ensuite, I reach for a washcloth, but the reflection of the girl in the mirror makes me freeze.
Not because she’s hungover or lonely.
Because she’s wearing a frayed Ramones T-shirt.
Sunday morning, I shower off the booze and pa
rty, dress in jean shorts and a tank top, and fluff out my damp hair.
There’s a text from Pen with a picture of the villa they’ve rented, asking how the party was.
I enter and delete a few texts, settling on: No one died. I don’t think Carly and I are destined to be best friends. Go drink more wine.
Tyler’s T-shirt sits on top of my laundry hamper. I toss the T-shirt and some other clothes into the laundry, then grab The Great Gatsby for English class and pad down the hall. The sound of a guitar pulls me toward the kitchen.
I pause to listen, my eyes closing as I lean a shoulder against the wall.
Thousands of years ago, human beings should have spent every ounce of their precious time finding food or shelter or safety. Having sex.
Not singing songs and creating instruments.
We did it anyway. Maybe we knew then what we seem to have forgotten since: life isn’t about money or winning or even surviving. It’s about finding meaning in the time we have.
When I peek around the corner, Uncle Ryan is laughing from a chair at the table and Tyler’s playing on a stool at the island.
He’s a magician. There’s no other word for the way that instrument sings under his hands.
I don’t believe in gods, but if they ever existed…
Their ashes stir each time that boy lifts a guitar.
I swallow my envy and enter the kitchen. “Morning.”
“It’s afternoon,” Ryan points out.
“Like you and Dad ever got up before noon on tour.” I head for the coffee maker without making eye contact and pick out a pod. Haley found this killer Columbian blend I could live on. “Dad call you this morning?”
“Not yet. But far as I know, everything went fine. Now is when you bribe me,” he adds with a wink as I set my mug under the stainless nozzle and hit Start.
Uncle Ryan’s attention shifts to Tyler. “You play like a prodigy, kid, but that guitar is a piece of shit. Get Jax to give you a new one.”
Ryan’s phone erupts into a rendition of my dad’s band laughing their way through a cover of Johnny Cash, and I glance over my shoulder.
“Tell my dad no Jamieson belongings were harmed in the making of last night’s gathering,” I call as Ryan heads down the hallway to answer.
The coffee finishes brewing, and as I go to retrieve it, I sneak a look at Tyler.
