“I said I’ve sworn off falling in love,” he corrected me, ignoring the comment about Elle. He never wanted to talk about her. Or any of the other people who’d ever rejected him, including his mom. “I’ll still fuck whoever I want to.”
“Uh-huh. So why’d you sleep here last night again?”
He flashed me an annoyed look. “I’m not into her, Cope.”
“You can say that as many times as you want, but I won’t believe you.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Call it gut instinct.”
He grunted, took a swig of his coffee, then set his mug on the island and finally looked me hard in the eye. “Don’t worry, buddy. You’ll always be my favorite.”
He was using humor, sarcasm, to deflect, like he so often did. I knew that.
“Glad to hear it,” I said, equally sarcastic.
I was just about to leave, to go put some pants on, when he blocked my way. I almost spilled my coffee on him. Then he took my neck in his hands, leaned in and kissed me.
If he wanted to catch me off guard and shut me up, it was effective.
I didn’t say another word.
It wasn’t exactly a mouth-to-mouth kiss; his lips had landed right next to the corner of my mouth, but it was soft and lingering. And as usual, I didn’t know what to do with it.
I just stood here, letting him do it. It wasn’t like he’d never done it before. I just waited for him to stop when he was done making his fucking point or whatever, because I knew he would.
But before he stopped, a flash of light caught my eye.
Amber.
She was standing in the stairwell to the basement. She was behind me, looking in through the cutout in the kitchen wall; I could only see her because she was reflected in the glass door of a cabinet across from me. Her camera was to her face and the morning sunlight had glinted off her lens. She looked like she was taking a photo—of Ash kissing me.
Great.
I was about to pull away when Ash withdrew. But he was still holding my neck, loosely, was still inches from my face, his eyes on mine. “You need anything from the city?” he asked me, eyelids lowered. “I’m gonna splash over today, get some food and stuff.”
“Nope. Just whatever you think we need.”
“Okay. Got it covered.” He released me, and that’s when Amber made herself known, knocking lightly on the wall.
When we both looked over at her, she’d dropped her camera to her side.
I exhaled; didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath so tight.
“Um… is it okay if I come up? I’m finished shooting downstairs.”
“Yeah. Come up.” I watched as Ash retreated to the other side of the island and took off his apron. “Ash made breakfast, if you’re hungry.”
“Oh…” she said, cautiously, “that’s really nice.” She drifted in, setting her camera down on the island. “Thank you—”
By the time she looked up to thank Ash, he’d disappeared out to the back deck with his plate. We often ate out there, but still.
When Amber’s eyes met mine, I smiled and tried not to stare at her legs. She was wearing short cut-offs, and her thighs were toned and tanned. Her recent months of backpacking through Brazil were showing. Not that she’d told me about Brazil; Liv had.
“He’s not a morning person,” I informed her.
She just smiled a little. Her thick hair was pulled back in a messy little pony tail again. She looked like the kind of girl you could make out with and she wouldn’t give a fuck if you messed up her hair or smeared her makeup. Again, she wasn’t wearing any makeup, as far as I could tell. She looked like the kind of girl who wouldn’t taste like makeup either, but like sweet, clean skin.
She was wearing a flowing blouse with big, pink flowers and leaves on it that were the exact same color as her pale, minty-green eyes. It was the kind of shirt that gave up zero information about her tits, yet it looked sexy as fuck on her, kinda drifting off her right shoulder, showing the little freckles sprinkled there like pink-gold dust.
I couldn’t take my eyes off her as she ate a strawberry off her plate, her lips sliding in a plump, round, very blowjob-like O around the berry for a moment before she bit down.
Jesus.
I shook my head, searching for something else to fixate on. Like anything. I offered her a coffee, but she declined. Apparently, she preferred tea. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any. I made a mental note to tell Ash to get her some from that hippie tea place near Summer’s house when he went into the city today. He wouldn’t love it, but too bad.
“How’s the picture-taking going?” I asked her.
I listened as she filled me in, all the while wondering where the fuck Ash was. And if he was coming back. It fucking irritated me that he’d taken off.
And why the fuck did he kiss me like that, when she was in the house? Kinda felt weirdly like he was marking his territory or something.
Very fucking weirdly.
Amber showed me a couple of images on the screen on the back of her camera, gorgeous shots of my drum kit all aglow in the sunrise. Girl had a serious eye. I noticed, too, that the only time she didn’t seem unsure of herself or self-conscious or borderline prickly was when she was talking about her photography.
She didn’t say a word about taking a photo of me and Ash. A photo of Ash kissing me, while he was wearing that frilly apron and I was in my underwear. I also didn’t ask. I didn’t particularly want a photo like that splashed all over the internet, mainly because everyone on Earth would then ask me about it, and I’d have to come up with some kind of response that didn’t piss off Ash. Wasn’t sure I was that clever.
But maybe she didn’t even take a photo of us anyway.
If she did, I actually wasn’t worried that she’d sell it to some online rag or whatever. I already knew that wasn’t her style. She had too much integrity for that shit.
And besides that, she wanted me to like her.
That was made pretty clear to me last night.
If she took a photo of me and Ash this morning, she probably just did it because she was a photographer and that’s what photographers do. I wasn’t gonna make her squirm about it.
I really didn’t mind if she took photos of me, half-naked or not.
And I did like her.
Any girl who could handle Ash’s bullshit had my respect. The fact that she seemed so unsure of herself in my house, yet she wasn’t letting Ash scare her off, was a major turn on. The fact that she wasn’t impressed with the things that usually impressed the women I met—women like Susanna—was also a turn on. The fact that whenever she picked up her camera, she lost all that uncertainty and her green eyes blazed with passion, was also a turn on.
The fact that she’d spoken her mind at the Underlayer shoot, even though it had gotten her fired? Biggest turn on of all.
That, and the girl was the kind of ridiculously, naturally pretty that only got prettier the more you looked at her.
I hadn’t found a thing about Amber Paige Malone, yet, that didn’t turn me on.
And that was beyond interesting.
Plus, it was pretty fucking adorable that the entire time we spoke and looked at photos on the back of her camera, she very purposefully kept herself on the other side of the island, as far away as possible from me and my tighty-whities.
Mid-afternoon I hit the shower, briefly, to rinse off the sweat; I’d spent several hours playing drums and probably smelled like it. Then I threw on some sweats and headed downstairs, towel in hand, heading for the pool.
Amber was on her knees at the front entrance, photographing the staircase that swept up to the second floor and the sunroom off to the side of it.
And shit, the girl was sexy. I could really get used to finding her hanging out in my house like this. The fact that she was down on her knees didn’t hurt. I really wasn’t trying to get any dirty ideas about her kneeling there, but come the fuck on.
When she looked up at me, I peeled m
y eyes off her ass and smiled. She smiled back. When Ash wasn’t around, she definitely smiled a lot easier.
“Check this out,” she said.
Already am…
She had her camera set up on a tripod with a short, wide lens, and she clicked the shutter with a remote. The exposure lasted several seconds, then she showed me a series of identical images on the back of the camera, each one darker than the last.
“Multiple exposures,” she explained, looking anywhere but at my bare chest. “I’m gonna do some HDR on some of them. It’s popular with real estate photography, though it can get cheesy if it’s overdone. The images start to look cartoonish and fake. But if you do it right, you get all this detail in the highlights and the shadows, with the various exposures, that you couldn’t otherwise get with just one exposure, and if you merge them properly, it’s gorgeous. Rich, saturated colors and tons of detail.”
“Sounds like you know what you’re doing,” I said, impressed, trying not to stare at her legs again. It was just too tempting. She was still on her knees, right in front of me.
And I so had a thing for legs.
Shapely, slender calves.
Toned thighs.
All of which Amber Malone possessed.
“You, too,” she said, blushing a little. “I heard you playing.”
“Yeah. Shit. Remind me to give you some earplugs.” Really should’ve thought of that before I beat the house down. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay. It really wasn’t that loud, after I shut the door to the basement. You’ve got good soundproofing.” Then her face fell, like she’d realized that might offend me. “I mean, not that I don’t want to hear you play…”
I laughed. “Trust me, I know. No one wants to live with a drummer.”
She smiled a bit, but didn’t say anything.
“I’m going out for a swim,” I told her, “so you might want to avoid the back yard for a while.” I winked at her, but she didn’t giggle like she did last night after all the wine.
“Um. Why?”
“Because I like to swim naked…?” Damn. Did she already forget our flirting last night? Or was she really that drunk on the Prosecco?
Her reaction was priceless as she seemed to strive for neutral professionalism, even as her cheeks flushed beneath her freckles. “Oh. Right. No worries. I’ll be here for a while…” She seemed to be trying, hard, not to appear wound-up by whatever mental image I’d just put in her head.
But I knew when a woman was wound-up over me, and Amber was definitely getting there.
Normally, that would’ve been great. Perfect. But with Ash being such a stubborn dick… I was gonna have to be careful here. Play this one slow. Like really fucking slow.
After all, the idea was to hook her up with him, right? That was what was important here.
I didn’t mind baiting her a little, on his behalf, since he couldn’t get his shit together to make a move. I also didn’t mind if she decided she wanted us both. At all. The more time I spent with her, the more I liked that option best.
But what I wasn’t gonna do was sweep on in and take her for myself.
Sometimes, I seriously regretted being such a generous guy.
“So, uh… catch you later,” I said, and got the hell out of there.
Amber was maybe a little confused by my abrupt departure, but what could I do? If I stood there flirting with her any more, I was gonna poke out her eye with my dick. She was still down on her knees, and I was starting to throb in my sweats, with her pale green eyes gazing up at me like that. In about three more seconds I was gonna be rock hard, and it was gonna be obvious.
Fuck, Ash.
I went out back and stripped down, the way I would if no one was in the house. I took my time, letting the fresh chill of the October air cool me down. I didn’t cover up. I didn’t even worry about shrinkage; fact was, I had a lot to work with.
I checked the pool. It was warm, almost hot, the way I liked it. As I slipped into the water, I couldn’t tell if Amber could see me; if she was just inside any of the windows. Really, she could’ve been anywhere in the house. She could’ve even left, gone back to Ash’s place for a break. But for all I knew, she was in the living room or the kitchen, right now, watching me through the windows.
That thought sent the blood thundering to my groin. My dick grew heavy, stiff, even though I tried to tell it to cool its fucking jets. No matter how willing she might be, Amber wasn’t for the taking.
Not yet.
So I tried to ignore my hard dick—though I could hardly fault it for being a little confused about the situation—and started swimming. As it turned out, doing the front crawl with a hard-on wasn’t so comfortable.
A few minutes in, I’d managed to lose the hard-on, mostly. Probably because I was mostly thinking about Ash. Wondering, as I had many times lately, how and why he’d gotten himself to such a shitty, dark place—and what the hell I was gonna do to change it if the Amber thing didn’t work.
If it were me… he’d try to change it. I knew that, without a doubt.
We were that close, and I knew he cared that much. He wouldn’t want to see me in any kind of depressing funk.
We’d been best friends since pretty much hours after we met. We just had that connection. I’d always had a lot of friends, but since I’d never really had a best friend before, the position was open. Ash just clicked right into it.
We made each other piss laughing, we saw eye-to-eye on a ton of shit, and we were different enough in the right ways that we balanced each other out somehow.
We kept each other entertained.
Our relationship was the ideal ecosystem of fun, comfort and loyalty.
We even hooked up with the same women, sometimes.
But it wasn’t until after Ash and Summer broke up a few years ago that he and I started sharing women.
Like everything else in our relationship, it just sorta happened. We didn’t plan it. One night, we’d both made out with the same girl. It wasn’t the first time that had ever happened, but it was the first time the girl in question had ended up in bed between us. And after that, we never really looked back.
Before Ash got together with my bandmate, Elle, who was also one of my best friends, I actually hadn’t hooked up without him in a couple of years.
Weird, maybe. To some people. To me, though, it was the new normal.
Sex with a woman, with Ash in the room, was just hotter.
That was the simple truth.
I didn’t examine it. I didn’t overthink it, partly because it wasn’t my style to overthink things, and partly because overthinking it might’ve ruined it. My other friends, by now, thought I was kinky as hell, or maybe they thought I was closet gay, or maybe they didn’t quite know the extent of my extracurriculars with Ash.
I didn’t care.
We didn’t exactly broadcast our personal business, but we didn’t lie about it either.
When Ash hooked up with Elle, I’d started having sex with women solo again, because no way Elle and I were hooking up. Elle was hot, but she’d been like another sister to me since we were teenagers. Sex would never be part of the picture in our relationship; we both knew that.
But Ash had had a thing for Elle for a long time. And when the two of them finally hooked up, he was more stoked about it than he’d let on.
And when Elle blew him off… he took it hard.
I waited it out, waited for him to bounce back to his old self—like he always did—so we could pick up where we’d left off.
But it just didn’t happen.
The night Dirty officially announced that Seth was back in the band, at a bar show we played for the documentary series—and Ash found out Elle was pregnant with Seth’s baby—Ash seemed to turn a huge-ass corner in the right direction. He seemed like he was back on the prowl. I even saw him making out with Summer’s cousin for a while.
But he didn’t leave with her.
He didn’t leave with anyone that night
.
Well, he left with me. Drunk. I’d dragged him home to his condo in the city and dumped him into bed. I’d taken the couch, even though it was too fucking small for me to get a good night’s sleep on, and in the morning, I didn’t even give him a hard time about it. Figured I should let it slide for a while.
Seeing Elle with Seth was maybe a harder blow than I’d realized.
And since that night, a few weeks ago, we still hadn’t sealed the deal. With anyone.
I’d never known Ash to go without sex for more than a week, before Elle.
It was getting downright freaky.
Ash had always lauded “the breakup party” as the ultimate cure for a broken heart. You got dumped or you broke up with someone, no matter what the circumstances—whether you were happy about it or totally not—you had a party. An epic party, to celebrate your newfound freedom—and, of course, to get laid.
So I just kept waiting for the breakup party on this one. Surely Elle brushing him off was worthy of a sex bender.
Meanwhile, I’d attempted to instigate a three-way—several times. Dropping the names of a few women from our shared past. Suggesting we hit up some party. Dragging his ass out to parties.
But it just never happened.
I knew Ash wasn’t hooking up with anyone on his own, either, because he was pretty much living at my place, sleeping on my couch or in one of the guest rooms every night.
A few mornings ago, I’d found him passed out on the floor next to my drum kit downstairs.
And I was starting to fucking worry about the guy.
I was definitely not gonna step in on the first chick to come along since Elle that I thought might actually have a chance at getting under his skin.
Not before he was ready.
Ash was broken, but even if he wouldn’t admit it, for whatever fucked up reason—protecting himself, punishing himself, just being a dick—I could feel the sparks between him and Amber from moment one. I could feel the sexual tension between them. I’d been down and dirty in the same room with Ash while he got his groove on with a chick enough times to recognize it. It was an angry, irritable tension, but it was there.
Dirty Like Dylan: A Dirty Rockstar Romance (Dirty, Book 4) Page 9
