by Riley Knight
Why would anyone want to pay him the ridiculous sums of money that he’d gotten, just to do what he’d done for much less in that jazz bar? More than that, why would anyone pay to watch him in concert, when they could have seen him for the cost of a beer before?
Life was funny.
More than that, though, his number one hope hadn’t happened. He had hoped that, by putting that song out there, by basically telling everyone that he was looking for Luca, Luca would reappear in his life. The fact that he didn’t made him wonder if Luca could have somehow missed the song, if he still didn’t know that Julian was looking for him.
A far, far more horrifying thought, one that made his skin crawl and his innards twitch, was the thought that Luca had heard the song and had immediately skipped town or something. That he’d been relieved for the excuse to get away from Julian, who was, after all, so crazy and so paranoid that he hadn’t even given the man he was dating his phone number.
Sitting in his dressing room (his very own dressing room!) Julian sat and waited. He was wearing honest to God makeup, which was never anything that he’d been into, but otherwise, he was wearing the same type of suit he’d worn to the jazz bar every night for so long.
So much had changed, but fundamentally, how much really had? He had more money, less privacy, but otherwise, he was still doing essentially the same thing. And the face in the mirror, as he gazed at himself, was the same face that had, since he was an adult, looked back at him.
He was still just as lonely as ever. He still missed Luca every bit as bad as he had from the very first day the man had gone to Japan. People kept telling him that he would stop missing him so much, given time. Well, he’d given that time, and those people were all just flat out wrong.
Big things were ahead of them, he was assured. He had an agent, who told him very clearly that he could have it all. If he just kept going, kept writing songs that people loved, national success should follow. And those who were famous in the United States tended to be famous throughout the world.
The sad thing was, he wasn’t even sure that he wanted that. Especially because the main reason he’d been excited about the success that he was having so far was that he’d hoped to reach Luca.
He still hoped for that. And that was the main reason that he would keep going with this path, as far as it took him. Just on the off chance that Luca did still want something to do with him, he wanted to give him every chance possible to find him.
Someday, he supposed that he would have to give up, but he had a hard time imagining that. Maybe he would be able to move on, but it didn’t feel like that. Not deep down.
It still felt like there was a strange connection between him and Luca. He couldn’t really explain it, but he could feel it. Luca was out there, and something told Julian that Luca was looking for him, too.
Though that could just be wishful thinking, and Julian knew that very well. His logical brain told him, very calmly and rationally, that it probably was.
That logical side had ruled his life for so long. Somehow, when it came to Luca, he found that he couldn’t let it. He couldn’t give up hope, no matter that it would make the most sense for him to do so.
“Julian?” Ella’s voice came, along with a brief rap on the door with her knuckles. Julian smiled, but he didn’t bother to tell her to come in. He knew that she would, whether he said anything or not.
She was probably the only person keeping him even as sane as he was these days. The one person still in his life that knew him before he was some sort of big deal. Well, big deal in a minor sense, anyway.
The point was, she wasn’t looking to get anything from him, and she wasn’t more impressed with him than she’d always been. She’d been a good friend before, and she was still a good friend.
“You ready?” she asked, leaning casually against the wall as she looked at him. Her pose might be casual, but the look in her eyes was anything but. She knew how terrified he was, and she knew why, too, he would be willing to bet.
Part of it was, of course, the terror of actually being in front of thousands of people. He’d been told that the venue he was playing held about five thousand and that it was mostly sold out. That was terrifying, yes, but it was more than that. That alone, he could have dealt with better.
The terror, though, that really threatened to grip his limbs and utterly paralyze him was in the fact that, once he’d performed this concert, he would know that he really was a big enough deal that Luca should have heard of him. And if Luca still didn’t contact him, what did that mean?
“Yeah,” Julian said, and he stood up and went to stand in front of her, looking her directly in the eye. “I’m ready.”
She smiled at him, reaching out to take his hands in her own. She squeezed his fingers lightly.
“Just remember, whatever happens, you’ll be okay,” she told him, giving him a bright, hopeful smile. He searched her face, looking for any sign of sarcasm from her, but he didn’t find anything. Though there was the slightest hint of an edge there that he didn’t quite understand.
He arched an eyebrow at her, and she shook her head and gave him a wry smile.
“It’s just that … I really want it to be okay for you,” she said, and he smiled and squeezed her fingers tighter. She didn’t say more, but she didn’t need to. He understood what was going on, and he couldn’t be any more clear on it unless she’d actually said Kiran’s name.
“We both messed up,” Julian said, and then he leaned in to kiss his best friend on the cheek.
“Five minutes, Julian,” someone said. Julian supposed that he should know who the tech guy was, but there were just so damn many people involved with his career now, it was hard to keep up with them.
“Go get ‘em,” Ella said, and the smile on her face made hope well up inside of Julian and made him feel like there might actually be a point to all of this. Like maybe he wasn’t crazy for hoping that this just might work out after all. That there was a point in trying.
“For both of us,” Julian said, and then he turned and walked out of his changing room, ready to go on stage. It wasn’t the first time, of course, he’d been performing for years, but it was definitely the biggest show that he’d ever been a part of.
* * *
Julian had never been through an experience that was quite like what he’d just had. He’d never been the center of attention for so many people, all at once, hungry eyes on him like they might devour him.
It was strange. He’d experienced groups of people before, of course. He’d been to concerts, even. But there was this energy that a large group of people got like they wanted to lift him up onto a pedestal and lock him down so that he couldn’t escape from them.
The whole thing was deeply exhilarating in a way that wasn’t entirely unpleasant. Julian knew what it was like now for people to look at him, to want to possess him, to scream his name.
He could see why people got addicted to that sort of thing.
It was sort of similar to arousal, actually, and he was half hard and covered in sweat when he left, exhilaration humming through his veins and making him feel alive in a way that wasn’t quite like anything he’d ever felt before. He wanted to fuck, he decided. Or dance all night. Or any number of other reckless things that he’d never tried before.
No wonder famous rock stars, high on their fame and on the desire of their fans, would go out and do idiotic things. Never had Julian come as close to understanding them as he did.
And that was terrifying.
It took everything in him to just go back to his changing room, to take deep breaths and to keep himself under control. He was who he was, and he didn’t want to rush off and do anything that he would regret while he was high on endorphin.
Sitting down by the mirror, he looked into it, gazing into the familiar face of the man there. His own face. Flushed and with eyes almost unnaturally bright, he looked every bit as hectic as he felt.
He was still staring at his own face
, as if that somehow held the answer to everything, when the door opened. It was probably Ella or his stage manager, only either of them would have said something and whoever had opened the door said nothing.
As the seconds stretched on, Julian swore that he could feel the pressure of someone looking at him, a sort of tingling between his shoulder blades. And it was only then that he remembered that there had been a few tickets with backstage passes sold and that his room wasn’t quite as safe as he would have imagined.
“It’s rude to stare,” Julian said, and he realized that he was going to get himself a bad reputation if he wasn’t careful. Right then, though, he found that he didn’t care. He was grateful to his new fans, he really was, but he was finding that the energy he’d had during the concert had started to bleed away, and he just wanted to be alone.
“Julian,” someone said, and Julian almost fell out of the chair with the force of how fast he whipped around. His legs got tangled up in the legs of the chair, and they gave a scraping sound as his momentum actually caused the chair, which didn’t have wheels, to turn sharply around, almost dumping him out of it in the process.
It was all highly undignified, and under normal circumstances, Julian would have been deeply humiliated to have acted like that. To have shown so much desperation that he couldn’t control himself. But this wasn’t normal circumstances.
“Luca,” Julian whispered, and then his throat was too tight, his eyes too blurry with tears, for him to say anything more, to force anything past that blockage of emotion in his throat that made it almost impossible for him to breathe, much less speak.
Luca’s eyes were shining the same way, though, and somehow, that made it better. Luca was there, physical and real and not just some hallucination. Through the months of their separation, Julian had, from time to time, wondered why his desire to see Luca didn’t just summon the man to him.
But they had. In the end, they had.
Julian stood up, and Luca was right there in seconds. He looked just as Julian remembered, still so damn beautiful, strong and tall and hard and big. Yet despite all of that strength, he was still so gentle when he folded Julian in his arms.
Like Julian was something precious and beautiful himself. When Luca was with him, Julian could almost believe something like that.
Closing his eyes with the sheer force of the hope and the love that swelled inside him, Julian wrapped his arms around Luca’s waist and clung to him. He rested his head on Luca’s chest and listened to the sound of his heart, felt his warmth, smelled the distinctive scent that was masculine musk and sweetness and just Luca.
“Oh my God, Julian,” Luca whispered, and Julian felt the other man’s breath as he puffed through his hair. “Julian. It’s really you. I couldn’t really be sure until I saw you.”
Julian let delighted little bubbles of laughter rise through him, and he opened his eyes to look up at Luca. His lips were tilted up in a smile, a wide, happy smile, more sincere than anything he’d felt in six long months.
It turned out that even being a local celebrity, even singing his own songs on the stage, didn’t have much on being back with Luca again. Back with the man that he …
“I love you,” Luca said, cutting off Julian’s chain of thought. Though it was sort of funny, because it was almost like Luca could read Julian’s mind, and had been responding to his thoughts with his words.
“Luca,” Julian whispered, and he didn’t say those words very often, really. Not since his parents. He’d felt love, of course, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t even think it, not very often.
Still, when he looked into Luca’s eyes, which were just as gorgeous a shade of jade green as ever, it felt so easy to just open his mouth and let the words come out. For once in his life, he could do it.
“I love you too, Luca,” Julian whispered. Then he stretched up on his tiptoes and Luca came down to meet him and their lips joined in a searing, beautiful, intense kiss, a kiss that was one of greeting and love and a joint understanding that things were going to be much different now.
“Julian?” A familiar voice came from the direction of the door, which Luca had left slightly cracked open, maybe in his hurry to get to Julian. There was hardly time, but for a moment, Julian considered pulling away. It was probably too late, but …
But whatever. Let everyone see. Let the world see. Julian wasn’t afraid, not when he was with Luca. There was nothing to hide, so he kept kissing him, lost himself in the way Luca’s body moved against his, in the sweet taste of his lips and mouth.
“Julian, this is Tammy and Jade, they have backstage passes, and they wanted to meet you … oh. Wow.” It was Ella, of course. Ella who was doing what he should have been doing, reaching out to the people who had paid extra for the backstage passes.
“Oh my God,” another female voice said. “What about Luca? Was that just a song to you?”
“Maybe that is Luca,” the other girl said. Her tone of voice was slightly dreamy, and Julian finally let the kiss come to an end, though he kept his arm around Luca and felt the comforting weight of Luca’s arm around his shoulders.
“He is Luca,” Ella confirmed, and she was beaming, her face full of obvious joy, though Julian felt like there was just the slightest hint of sadness there, as well. She looked wistful, somehow, like she didn’t even fully realize that she had that expression but it was there.
“I am Luca,” Luca said, and then turned down to look at Julian while the two girls giggled and watched, clearly delighted. It was enough to embarrass the hell out of him, or it would have been if he weren’t so fully distracted. “And I’m back.”
Chapter Twelve
Luca
Until Luca actually opened that door and saw Julian sitting there, he hadn’t been entirely sure that he was right. After all, it wasn’t completely outside the realm of possibility that this Julian could have been someone else, right? Even if it would have been a ridiculous level of coincidence, Luca had been braced, on some deep, subconscious level, to be disappointed.
The moment that he saw Julian, though, even just the back of the other man’s head and shoulders, he’d known. And for a few seconds, he hadn’t been able to say anything, hadn’t been able to do anything but stare and drink in Julian’s presence once more.
It took awhile, but luckily, Ella helped. She ushered the two girls out of the room, then shot Luca a wink and a relieved smile before departing as well. That smile told Luca a lot about what Julian’s state of mind must have been since they’d been apart.
Or maybe it was just that Luca, having been separated from Julian, could make some pretty informed guesses about how Julian had felt about it. Either way, Ella was glad to have Luca back, and that, Luca figured, was a good sign.
“You’re here,” Julian said, and there had never been anyone as beautiful as this man was. Never, not in the history of the world. This guy was perfect, completely and totally, and somehow, he was Luca’s. “You’re really here. Oh my God, I thought I lost you completely.”
Luca took a deep breath, trying to think. He had planned past this moment, of course. He had huge plans. But he was having a hard time remembering them when Julian was looking at him with all of those hopes and desires and all of that love in his enormous dark eyes.
Brown eyes could be mysterious, in Luca’s experience. It could be hard to see what was going on in the soul beneath them, or so he’d always found. But maybe he was getting better at it because Julian’s feelings weren’t mysterious at all to Luca right then.
“I’m here, baby,” Luca soothed him, and then leaned in for a kiss, just a light brush of his lips against Julian’s. Or that was the plan, anyway. Once they were kissing, Luca needed more, and he pressed close to the other man’s solid, warm, sexy body, his cock already desperately hard.
Julian groaned, and then reached out and locked the door with a quick, decisive movement. Then he was right back to Luca, kissing him frantically, his hands plunging into Luca’s clothing, deft, st
rong musician’s fingers stroking over his sides and stomach and chest.
The entire time that they’d been apart, Luca hadn’t slept with anyone. Once or twice, he’d wondered if he should, but he’d never been able to make himself do it. It had just been himself, his own hand, for months, and now that he was back with Julian, he felt like even the man’s fingers plucking at his nipples might be enough to have him shoot off in his pants like a teenager.
“Julian,” Luca said, almost pleading with him for mercy. They needed to slow down, and that was getting to be increasingly difficult for him to do. Somehow, he’d thought that their first time back together would be somewhere more romantic, but from the flushed cheeks and almost crazed eyes that Julian sported, he couldn’t wait.
Neither could Luca, honestly, and he gave a soft, desperate little moan as he worked his own hands into Julian’s pants, cupping his bare ass as he hauled him against him.
“I need you,” Julian said, and it wasn’t just with his words. Everything in Luca noticed the signs that Julian was broadcasting, how his eyes seemed to sparkle brightly with arousal, how his body inclined toward Luca, and of course, it was hard to miss the large, prominent bulge in the front of Julian’s pants.
Not that Luca wasn’t in the exact same shape. The heat between them had always been undeniable. With fingers that trembled just a little bit, Luca reached down to toy with the thick shaft in Julian’s pants, jacking him off slowly through the fabric while his other hand kept gripping Julian’s ass.
Slowly, Luca backed Julian against the wall, and he held him pinned there with his hips, knowing that Julian could feel just how much Luca needed this. They rubbed against each other, shirts only half removed, but both too fascinated by the interactions of their bodies to pull away long enough to take them off more.
Instead, they were both fumbling with their pants, and Luca lost all thoughts of stopping this. He’d had some thoughts about how their reunion would be, and it hadn’t included this heat and desperation, but really, it should have. Their joinings had always been like this, so eager for each other, needing each other almost more than they needed to breathe.
