by Lisa Suzanne
We hang up without another sign of affection—no I miss you or I love you.
I fall into a sleep filled with strange, confused dreams. In one scenario, I’m with Brian, and in the next, I’m with Mark. It feels like my subconscious is trying to tell me something—trying to warn me of some impending doom, but I can’t quite decipher the real meaning.
I wake feeling guilty, horny, and hungry when the smell of bacon wafts to my nose. I don’t do anything to alleviate the horny situation, though, because Brian will be there to take care of my needs tonight.
I do, however, head down for some of that bacon after a quick shower, and I find my dad in the kitchen flipping pancakes as bacon sizzles and pops in another pan. “You smell the bacon?” he asks.
I grin. “You know it.”
“That’s my girl.”
I pour a couple of glasses of orange juice and then I hear a knock at the front door. My forehead wrinkles in confusion as I look at my dad, but he just smiles.
I go to get the door, and when I see who’s standing on the other side, my face breaks out into a wide smile. I throw my arms around my sister. “Rachel!” I squeal.
She giggles. “Reese!”
“What are you doing here?”
“Dad invited me to breakfast since I missed out on dinner. I can’t stay long because I have to get to work, but I thought a family breakfast sounded fun.”
“It’s so good to see you!”
“You, too,” she says, squeezing my arm.
We walk toward the kitchen. “You should come visit me soon.”
“You know what, I have a flex holiday I need to use in the next two months or I lose it.”
“Yes! Come stay with me.”
“And meet the boyfriend?”
“You couldn’t keep your mouth shut, by the way?” I glare at her, and her brows draw in.
“What?”
“You told Mom?”
She giggles. “Of course I did. She was badgering me for Reese news.”
“Who was badgering you for Reese news?” my mom asks.
“You,” we say together. Rachel and I glance at each other and burst into giggles.
My mom rolls her eyes. “So I care about my girls. Big deal.”
“You could just ask me, Mom.” I give her a hug.
“Like I tried to yesterday when you got me all riled up about Aunt Janice and her children that run around like little monsters?”
I lift my shoulders in mock innocence. “I have no idea what you mean!”
“Food’s ready, girls!” my dad interrupts, and we all sit at the table.
It’s like a scene from a picture-perfect movie, the whole family sitting together at the table, glasses clinking and silverware scraping against plates amidst the sound of conversation, recollections, and laughter. Part of me feels like I’m on the outside looking in as I try to categorize my feelings—as I try to interpret the dreams I had last night versus the reality of my situation, whether I’m in love with Brian or if my feelings for Mark will never allow me to fully give myself to Brian. As I wonder if my feelings for Mark are real or if they’re based on some fantasy I’ve held for ten years.
I try to participate and let go of the internal struggle I’m facing, because I miss this. I miss being with my family. I love Vegas, love my job, love the life I’ve built there, and I certainly don’t want to move back home, but nothing beats family.
I don’t get a chance to talk to my sister privately about the boy they keep referring to. I don’t get a chance to talk about my confusing feelings or the fact that I slept with the lead singer of her favorite band, too. I don’t get a chance to mention Brian’s warnings and pit them against Mark’s sincerity. I don’t get the chance to admit that I’ve slept with a pair of brothers.
I will get the chance to share all of that with my sister at some point, but breakfast with my parents isn’t the right time. So for now, I pretend like everything’s fine. I laugh at the right parts and interject my own familiar brand of sarcasm where it fits as if I’m not facing absolute turmoil at the hands of brothers.
*
I toss my overnight bag in my car and head inside to give my mom one last hug before I take off. My dad is off to work, but I said goodbye to him this morning along with my sister.
“You sure you have to go?” my mom asks.
I nod. “Yeah. I’m sorry it was such a quick visit.”
She gives me a hug. “You know you’re welcome any time for however long you want to stay.”
“I know. Thanks, Mom.”
“You sure you don’t want to talk about the boy?”
I giggle. “Not yet. Maybe soon.”
She smiles. “I’m just on the other side of the phone whenever you’re ready.”
We walk to the front door. “Love you, Mom.”
“Love you, too.” She kisses my cheek. “Drive safe and text me when you’re home.”
“I will.” I open the door and say one last goodbye, and then she waves a final time and closes the door before she bursts into tears because I’m leaving again. Just as I take my first step toward my car, a huge black Yukon screeches to a stop right in front of the driveway.
My mouth goes dry and my heart thuds as a nervous energy zips down my spine.
I know who it is before the door even opens, before the feet wearing black Nikes and the legs clad in black jeans step out of the vehicle.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
This is extreme, even for him.
Mark strides up the driveway toward me, looking every bit like the rock star he is—black shirt to match his black pants, tattoos snaking down his arms, sunglasses perched on his nose, dark stubble peppering his jaw—and looking completely out of place in the quiet suburban driveway of my parents’ house. He stops a few feet in front of me in the shade provided by the garage. He flips his sunglasses up on top of his head, and his green eyes search mine. “I had to see you.”
“Why?”
He pauses and looks around. “It’s really fucking hot here.”
I can’t help my laugh despite the gravity of the situation. “Yeah, it is. Why are you here?”
“I’m not sure. I just spent five fucking hours in a car trying to figure out what the hell I’m doing, but I came up short.”
“I’m headed back to Vegas now.”
“You are?”
His eyes look hopeful for a second, and I hate what comes out of my mouth next.
“Yeah. Brian’s…um…coming back tonight.”
The hope disappears and is replaced with a hardness that physically hurts my heart. “Oh.” He looks away from me.
“Don’t you, like, have a concert or something? Why are you wasting your time with me?”
He heaves out a melancholy laugh. “Tour’s over, babe. I’ve got commitments here and there and we’ve got studio time booked in a few weeks, but I’m pretty much off for a bit.”
I’d have probably known that had I not deleted all social media related to Mark Ashton. “Oh,” I say, echoing his earlier word. “So you decided to take a road trip?”
He shrugs.
“How did you even find me?”
“You told me where you were.”
“I said my parents’ house. I didn’t say where that was.”
“I might’ve hit up your friend for information again.”
I roll my eyes. “Some friend she is.”
“Maybe she is, Reese.”
“By throwing temptation at me?”
He takes a step closer to me. He’s close enough that I can smell him, and desire warms my belly. “I tempt you?”
“Every second of every day,” I breathe.
“Jesus,” he mutters. He pulls me into him, and I don’t have the strength to fight him off. He doesn’t kiss me, just holds me for a few beats, and it feels so damn good here, so right here, that I don’t even care if he is using me because of some competition with his brother. “To answer your question, this is why
I came here.”
He buries his face in my neck, the scruff on his jaw scratchy and rough against my skin. My heart feels so full here in his arms. My blood heats, my nerves awaken, and all the feelings rush south to the throb pulsing between my legs.
I don’t just want him—I don’t just want this to be real, to be sincere. I need him. I ache for him. Our one night floods my memories, that hand running along my thigh, his kiss, his touch, his body as it entered mine. It’s so strong, so familiar…yet it’s starting to fade. And then it fades completely as I realize what I’m doing.
I pull out of his embrace, not sure if I’m being noble or stupid.
“Ride with me,” he says. “Vinny can drive your car back and we can sit in the back of the Yukon, just you and me, and talk.”
Trapped in a car for five hours with Mark Ashton?
It’s like a dream come true…except it’s dangerous. Suicidal, even.
“I—I don’t know. And who the hell is Vinny?”
“My head of security. Please, Reese. I came all this way to see you.” This isn’t the fifteen-minute drive from the Strip to my place. He took a five-hour car trip to come see me in another state. For someone who seems as busy as he is, that deserves some recognition. I can hardly think of a reason to say no to him when he did all this because of whatever hope he’s clinging to that we can work this out. “Please just give me a few hours.”
I sigh. I didn’t need to be convinced. The I don’t know was out of obligation to my boyfriend, not because I truly didn’t know what to do. I know what the right thing to do is, but I find myself doing the opposite despite myself. “Okay.”
twenty-six
I press my body as close to the door of the car as I can to distance myself from Mark and all that temptation, but he won’t have it. He sits in the middle, clicks a button that throws up a black divider between us and the driver, and arranges our bodies so we’re sitting the exact way we sat when this same car took us from the concert at Mandalay Bay back to Mark’s place at the Mandarin Oriental.
His hand is on my thigh, and my arms are wrapped around his arm, hugging it to me. He sits with his legs apart, his knee brushing against mine, and I sit with my legs together, like a good girl. I don’t feel very good right now, though.
“I can’t do this,” I say by way of protest. “Let me out. I need to drive myself home. Alone.”
The Yukon lurches forward, and we’re in motion. I sigh and untangle my arms from around his. I cross my arms over my chest, but he doesn’t move his hand from my thigh nor his knee from beside mine. I pick up his hand and place it on his lap, careful not to touch any other part of his body.
“Go sit over there,” I say, nodding across the small space at the row of seats facing us.
He chuckles and scoots over a few inches. “You can have your space.”
“Gee, thanks.”
We’re quiet for a few beats, each staring out our respective windows, and I wonder what in the actual fuck he’s doing.
I finally turn and look at him. “You’re not like I thought you’d be.”
His eyes find mine. “What did you think I’d be?”
“Honestly, I never thought I’d get the chance to meet you. Everything I’ve read and heard about you tells me you use women for sex, but you don’t seem that way with me.”
“What have you heard?”
“Magazines tell me you’re with a different woman every night. Twitter tells me you’re proud of it.”
“An English teacher who believes everything she reads,” he muses.
“Don’t give me that shit. Deny it, then.”
“I can’t deny some of it, but you’re only seeing what my publicist wants you to see, like the whole exhaustion thing I told you about.” He makes air quotes around the word exhaustion, and I remember how he confessed that secret to me—just me. “I don’t even have a Twitter account.”
“Yes, you do.”
He unlocks his phone and tosses it on the seat between us. “Show me.”
I’m highly tempted to look at his phone. What apps does a rock star have? It’s a stupid, random thought that makes me sort of realize he’s kind of like everyone else—just hotter and richer.
I don’t touch it, though. It feels too personal. Instead, I pull up his Twitter account on my phone and hand it over to him.
He glances through, narrowing his eyes at some, chuckling at others. “I’ve never written a single one of these. Why are they all so short?”
“You can’t use more than a hundred forty characters.”
“Why not?”
I lift a shoulder. “That’s the limit.”
He scrolls some more, reading through the posts he supposedly made that someone else made on his behalf. “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
“What?”
He flashes my screen at me. Maggie Westin is trouble AF and I like it.
There’s a picture underneath with Mark looking out of it and a very drunk Maggie Westin hanging on him.
“What’s wrong with that?” I ask.
He rolls his eyes. “Didn’t you see the media shit storm a few months ago linking us?” I nod, and he looks pissed as he holds up the phone as if its evidence. “Looks like my fucking publicist started the whole damn thing.”
“Because of the tweet?”
“Because she posted a picture of us together and it looks like I posted it. What the fuck does AF mean?”
“Are you, like, seventy-four and just look really good for your age?”
His brows draw in. “What are you talking about?”
“How do you not know what common slang means? How do you not know how to tweet?”
“AF is not common slang.”
“It’s common AF.”
“Don’t do that.”
“What?” I ask innocently.
He narrows his eyes at me. “I still can’t believe Penny pulled this shit. Fuck. I should call her now and fire her.”
“AF means as fuck.”
“So I called Maggie trouble as fuck? What does that mean?”
“Like she’s a lot of trouble and you like the sort of trouble you can get into with her. And the picture sort of hits that point right out of the park.”
He nods slowly. “Teach me more slang.”
I laugh. “I feel like a rock star should have that part down.”
“You’d think, but I’m really just a seventy-four-year-old man parading around as a rock star.” He hands my phone back to me. “I don’t think I want to read any more.”
“What about Facebook? Do you have one of those?”
“I did, and then the band got popular and I deleted it.”
“Why?”
“My agent at the time advised against posting anything online that could negatively affect my public image, and rather than take the chance of posting something stupid or drunk or both, I got rid of it.”
“Do you ever miss having a normal life?”
He lifts a shoulder and averts his gaze to the landscape passing us by out the window. “I’ve been in a band since I was in high school. We were signed when I was in my early twenties. I’m not totally sure I know what normal even means.”
I didn’t think I could feel bad for the man who seems to have it all, but I suddenly realize that having it all might not be as glamorous as it seems.
“My publicist handles all my social media. If I need to get in touch with someone, I text or call. Besides, there’s so much negative shit out there. I don’t need to read the reviews that say we played like shit or my voice sounded like I was gargling sandpaper.”
“Someone said that?” I frown.
He nods. “All the fucking time.”
“That’s just not true.” I think about how beautiful his voice is and can’t imagine anyone ever saying anything bad about his singing.
“Except the one time I actually did gargle with sandpaper.”
“I bet you still sounded on point.”
&nb
sp; “On point AF?”
I laugh. “Close enough. What about Instagram? Snapchat?”
“Insta-who? Snap-a-what?”
“Okay, I’ll get you set up on Snapchat.” I hold my hand out for his phone and walk him through setting up an account.
“What does it mean if I click My Story?”
“Don’t press that,” I say sharply.
He looks so scared that I actually giggle.
“It’ll post the picture publicly. You don’t want to do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because then anyone who follows you will be able to see it.”
“Yeah, bad idea.” He stares down at his phone as he weighs the implications of that. He isn’t just some guy learning how to use some new social media platform. He’s Mark Ashton.
He picks up the concept quickly and sends a test Snap to me. It’s just a picture of his face next to me in the back of his Yukon, and I screenshot it—mostly to show him what happens if you screenshot a snap. Not at all because I want that picture saved to my own camera roll.
Right. Even I don’t believe the lies in my own head.
We play with Snapchat filters for a bit, laughing together as the urban development out the window turns into an endless desert and Mark sends me a snap of the two of us wearing flowers in our hair. I can’t help it. I screenshot that one, too.
I don’t even realize we’re already halfway home and we’ve gotten nowhere so far—well, with the exception of Mark having a Snapchat account and me feeling like myself around him instead of an obsessed fangirl.
“So why did you kidnap me for a five-hour ride back to Vegas?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I wanted a lesson in Snapchat.”
“Be serious.”
He looks uncomfortable for a beat. “I don’t know.”
“Why did you really come to Phoenix, Mark?”
“The heat.”
I roll my eyes.
“I can’t explain it. I needed to see you.”
“Why?”
He lifts a shoulder and shakes his head as if the whole idea perplexes him, too. “I’ve already told you, Reese. You’re different.”
“But how?”
“It’s this connection I have with you. I can talk to you. I can be honest with you.” He lowers his voice so the next part comes out all husky and sexy. “And the sex. Your kiss. Your skin. Your mouth on me.” He shakes his head.
