It was fucking official. The woman was trying to kill me.
Wasn’t enough that I was dead to her; she was actually trying to end me.
As I watched her across the room the most fucked up thing was, after being that close to her again—close enough to breathe the same air, close enough to smell her, close enough to glimpse all those colors in her eyes—I’d probably let her.
I put the wine glass down on the bar and stared at my hand wrapped around it, afraid if I let go the whole thing would fall apart. Stared kind of blankly at the tattoo on the inside of my forearm, a single line of runes that read abstinence. A tattoo that only I, or someone who happened to know how to read ancient Germanic runic writing, would understand. And for the life of me I couldn’t remember what it was supposed to mean or why the fuck I had it permanently inked into my arm, other than the fact that it had nothing to do with abstaining from alcohol or any other such substance—and a lot more to do with the goddess across the room in the silk-sorbet dress.
I let go of the wine glass and ordered up a beer from the bartender. Why the fuck was I drinking wine anyway? I didn’t even like wine.
Amanda. Amanda liked wine.
My gaze fell to her. She was standing next to me, sipping her wine and watching me over the rim of her glass. It really wouldn’t take a genius to match my line of sight to Jessa Mayes’ ass and Amanda was far from stupid, so I wasn’t even gonna pretend that wasn’t where I was staring for the last half minute.
“That’s Jesse’s sister, right?” she asked lightly, like what I’d been staring at didn’t bother her at all. But yeah, it did.
Because perfect, heart-shaped ass.
“Yeah,” I said, trying to keep my tone business-neutral. Like, Yeah, that’s the sister of one my best friends, and isn’t that nice she made it to the wedding? I haven’t seen her, or even thought about her, in six-and-a-half years. Have you tried the crab cakes yet?
No idea if Amanda knew me well enough yet to see through that shit. But she smiled softly and the uneasy, suddenly self-conscious look in her eyes made me feel like that much more of an ass. “Maybe you could introduce us?”
Yeah. I’d get right on that.
“Have you tried the crab cakes yet?” I asked her. “I’ll get you some.”
Then I took my beer and got the fuck out of there.
Chapter Three
Jessa
The rehearsal dinner was served at five o’clock sharp; afterward, I was told, both the bride and the groom were being whisked away to their respective stag and stagette party. The food was amazing, the room was beautiful, and my brother wasn’t even pissed that I’d missed the rehearsal. No one was.
Which kind of just made it worse.
Both Jesse and Katie were just so thrilled that I was here, I felt like such an ass for everything I’d ever done to make them think maybe I wouldn’t be.
I was seated at their table along with Roni, Devi and Grandma Dolly, next to a table with Katie’s family, which consisted of her parents, a sister named Becca, her husband Jack and their two children. Since Jesse and I had no family to speak of, it was truly lovely to see him so embraced by hers. They were warm and friendly people and Becca was hilarious, an older, more boisterous version of Katie.
But as nice as they all were, as welcoming as they were, as much as they tried to include me in conversation and asked all kinds of genuinely interested questions about me, about my life growing up with Jesse, about my time writing music with Dirty, and about my years as a model, I couldn’t hold up my end of the conversation. I really, really tried. I tried to steer the conversation back to any one of them, any chance I got, to keep them talking, because I simply could not keep up a coherent line of thought.
How could I, when Brody was right there?
He was sitting across the room with his date, and all I could see was Brody talking, Brody laughing, with people who weren’t me.
Brody with his serious blue eyes, with the laugh lines permanently etched at the corners.
Brody with the slightest glint of gray in the hair at his temples, which I’d only noticed up close, in his truck, in the daylight. Brody who hadn’t bothered to color his hair, who didn’t give a shit his hair was beginning to turn gray at age thirty, because why would he? Brody would be gorgeous gray-haired or bald.
Brody with his short-sleeve button-down shirt and his rocker’s tattoos, the mashup of business-meets-pleasure that had always done me in. His sleeves rolled up to reveal the same tribal guitar tattoo he’d had on his left bicep at fifteen, a bicep which was now larger, the guitar surrounded by tribal symbols that swirled down his arm in a partial sleeve. The same grace tattoo, spelled out in Danish runes, that he’d had on the left side of his neck at eighteen. And a tattoo of runic letters spelling something I couldn’t read down the inside of his right forearm.
I wondered if Amanda knew what those runes said. And there was something so devastating in imagining her knowing, and seeing his tattoos up close, touching them… like she was accessing some intimate part of him that I had never been able to touch.
I should’ve just looked away, but my eyes kept landing back on him.
On her.
She was very… compact. Muscular, in a good way. Apparently, she was a yoga instructor with her own yoga space in Kitsilano; I’d learned more about her than I ever cared to know in casual conversation over pre-dinner drinks. Vancouver was lousy with yoga instructors and yet I couldn’t even quietly roll my eyes.
So she was all Zen and fit and flexible and had her own business.
She had Brody.
And even if I didn’t envy her Zen or her flexibility, there was always something to envy, and something to loathe, about a woman who was with the man you secretly wanted for yourself. So I let myself envy her, and loathe her.
And then I tried to forget her.
It wasn’t easy.
I did not know how Elle did it. Watching the man you always thought you’d end up with in the arms of someone else. I’d met up with Elle a few times for drinks while I was in L.A. these last few months and I knew she was still hurting over the breakup with my brother, even if she didn’t say so; she didn’t have to.
At least Brody wasn’t marrying this one.
I took a glass of the port that was offered after dinner, even though I didn’t particularly like port. Would it be wrong to get blind drunk at my brother’s wedding in hopes of blacking out and forgetting the whole thing entirely?
Yeah. Most definitely.
Which meant I was just going to have to grow the hell up and deal with the fact that Brody had moved on. Which, as it turned out, was a really hard pill to swallow.
I knew he wasn’t mine. Had never really been mine.
But that didn’t mean some selfish part of me, deep down—or maybe not that deep down—didn’t still want him. And want him to want me.
Which, until a few hours ago, I actually thought he did.
How stupid was I?
Somehow I’d convinced myself that when I went away, everything had stayed the same. Including Brody’s feelings for me, as evidenced by his continued text messages and voicemails over the years. But clearly, that wasn’t true. A lot of things had changed.
Even the band had changed without me.
Seth Brothers, Dirty’s original rhythm guitarist, was long gone.
Zane had stopped drinking. That was a big one; he’d gone into rehab soon after I left the band, after Seth was kicked out because of his drug addiction, and managed to stick it out.
And my brother… he was so, so happy. Not that he wasn’t happy before. Jesse had always been a pretty happy guy. Like me and like our dad he was prone to brooding, but unlike the both of us, Jesse’s periods of brooding were usually brief and few and far between, and he tended to bounce back to happiness without the traumas of life making much of a dent. He was more like our mom that way—at least, how she was before Dad died.
But this… this was different. This
was the kind of happiness that only the truest, deepest, most lasting type of love could bring.
So maybe it was only me who’d failed to change.
As Roni and I mingled over post-dinner drinks I watched my brother with Katie across the room, chatting with Brody and the lovely Amanda, all four of them smiling, laughing, and looking happy. No; happy wasn’t even the word. Joyful. Brimming with life and love. The way you looked when you were surrounded by the life you belonged in. And how fucking jealous I was, of all of them.
Because it was supposed to be me standing over there, with them; not her.
It was always supposed to be me.
My brother had always dated around and never seemed intent on settling down; not until Katie suddenly came into his life. Meanwhile, I just knew I’d fall in love and get married and look as happy as my brother looked right now, and my husband would look at me the way he was looking at Katie. I’d be the perfect wife. I’d make my husband happy and he’d never even think of leaving me.
That was my little girl fantasy.
Oh, and in that fantasy? My husband was Brody.
As I watched him across the room with another woman by his side, a woman that—who knew?—maybe he would marry, I realized I couldn’t even be upset about it. I had no right to be. Because I was the one who’d let him go.
He was right; I ran away.
However… that didn’t mean that when I saw Amanda hop up on her tippy-toes to say something in his ear and lingeringly kiss his cheek, I totally kept my cool. No. In fact, I lost it.
Big time.
As in my knees started to give out and I reached back, grabbing onto what I was sure was a sturdy but empty banquet table to sit my ass down—and sat my ass right in the cake.
The ladies around me gave a collect gasp… and wouldn’t it be just perfect if Brody chose that moment to look over?
Yeah. He did.
Maggie grabbed my arm and hauled me up and I turned, mortified, to find a dent in the shape of my butt, dead-center in the cake. Some of it had slopped over the edge of the table and smushed down my leg. There was icing in my open-toed pumps.
At least—thank God—it wasn’t the cake. As in, the wedding cake.
This was just a simple, single-layer thing that had been set out alongside a mountain of other dainties, and in my Brody-induced daze, I’d failed to notice the catering staff setting up behind me. Nobody would even miss this cake, I told myself.
The cake, I told myself, would be a multi-tiered deal that would be served tomorrow, after the ceremony, and would be so big there’s no way I could fail to see it and accidentally back my ass up into it.
“Shit,” I said, because really, what else could I say?
“Look at me.” Maggie got in my face as the attention of the room converged on my icing-coated ass. “Don’t worry about it. You should be charging for that service. It’s a great ass.” Then she snickered and yanked me from the room.
I did not look back.
Since I had icing and cake smeared all down my leg and inside my Manolo Blahniks, I kicked off my shoes, did my best to wipe them out with some damp toilet paper and set them to dry. Then I got in the shower. I turned on the water and let it pummel my backside until my dress was cake-free.
It looked like the butter in the icing was going to leave grease stains, which was a damn shame, because I loved this dress. It was a gorgeous, pale coral—my favorite color.
I peeled it off and cleaned the rest of me off, lamenting my inability to get through a couple of hours in Brody Mason’s presence without doing something lame. It was as if, when I’d climbed into his truck at the airport, I’d travelled back in time… and regressed into a complete and utter dork.
I was just stepping out of the shower and wrapping myself in a towel when Roni strolled into the bathroom with a freshly-opened bottle of wine. Since Maggie had stagette party business to attend to, she’d tasked Roni with walking me back to our cabin to help me clean up. Though Roni’s idea of helping was pretty much helping herself to the fridge in my room.
“Why are you acting like a freak?” she asked, leaning back against the sink and taking a swig of wine.
“Huh? Oh. No reason. You know, sometimes I’m clumsy.”
“Right. How about a tall, blue-eyed reason who keeps trading fuck-me stares with you across the room.”
“What?” I feigned utter confusion. “What blue-eyed…?”
“‘Fuck me’… ‘No, fuck you’… ‘Uh-uh, not if I fuck you first’… Does any of this sound about right? I mean, I wasn’t exactly involved in the conversation. Just a witness. But I’m pretty sure that’s more or less how it went.”
“Fuck-me stares…? I don’t even know what you’re talking—”
“Save it, Mayes,” she said. “Never bullshit a bullshitter.” Then she turned to fluff up her hair in the mirror. “Better move that ass. We’ve got a stagette to attend. Although if you wanna go fuck Brody, I found a closet at the lodge that would do and I can cover for you. Just don’t take too long. I wanna call dibs on one of the strippers, if they’re fuckable, before the other girls do. I’ve got some chocolate lube in my bag if you want some.”
I looked at her like she was loony. Which maybe she was.
My brother’s friends hadn’t nicknamed her “wild card” years ago for nothing, and apparently, the nickname still fit. Because now all I could picture was Brody Mason’s dick, slathered in chocolate-flavored lube.
Not that I’d ever seen Brody’s dick. But I had felt it up against me—hard and ready—enough times over the years, I had a pretty good idea of what he was packing.
Roni grinned triumphantly.
“Um, no,” I mumbled. “I’m good.”
“I also have peach,” she said. “They’re sugar-free.”
“No, thanks.”
“And strawberry.”
I sighed and pointed toward the door. “Still no.”
Roni rolled her eyes and said, “Boring.” Then she handed me a clean pair of shoes and strutted out.
Chapter Four
Jessa
After dessert, Devi ran through the details of tomorrow’s wedding ceremony with me—and with Brody and Jude, who were also in the wedding party but had missed the rehearsal. Because of me. Which was horribly uncomfortable, since Brody was dead to me and all, which apparently meant he wasn’t talking to me or even acknowledging my existence.
Fun.
At least I could thank God for small favors when I learned I wasn’t paired up with him in the wedding. He’d be escorting Katie’s sister, Becca, down the aisle, while I’d been paired up with Zane.
When that was done, Devi and Becca hustled all the ladies under thirty-five off to Jesse and Katie’s luxury cabin, which they’d decorated for Katie’s stagette. The cabin itself was huge, with a loft for the master bedroom and a wraparound deck—a weirdly fitting combo of rustic and posh, with exposed wood, giant windows, designer furniture and a giant, three-tiered deer antler chandelier, dripping with crystals, in the center. If Kanye West had a cabin in the great white north, this would be it.
“Wow,” Roni remarked as she sauntered into the middle of the room and gazed up at the glittering chandelier. “There are a lot of rubber dicks in this room.”
There were. Aside from the penis-shaped balloons that were dangling on ribbons from the chandelier, there was an anatomically-correct male blow-up doll laid out on the dining table, serving as a sushi platter, penis party trays filled with snacks, and penis drinking straws standing in the cocktail glasses along the bar.
There was also a handsome gentleman with slicked-back hair and large, perhaps steroid-induced biceps, standing behind the bar in a sleeveless tuxedo shirt, mixing drinks.
Devi rolled her eyes a little. “You can thank Becca for that.”
“You’re welcome,” Katie’s sister said. “I put myself in charge of penis-shaped party favors.”
“Katie’s just kissing her man goodbye,” Devi informed u
s, “which could take a while, obvs. When she comes in, the order of business is girl talk and drinking.”
“And not necessarily in that order,” Becca put in.
“Where’re the strippers, though?” Roni turned in a slow circle, like she expected a bunch of oiled-up, g-string-clad hunks to pop out of the woodwork any second. “Please tell me you got strippers.”
“Katie wants girl talk,” Devi said as she started handing out cocktails, “so that’s what we’re going to give her. Tomorrow will be a little difficult for her, so get yourselves lushed up and let’s make her feel the love.”
Difficult?
Why would it be difficult?
Before I could inquire about that, Roni asked, “Where’re the guys going?”
And I was glad she did, because it was kind of killing me that I didn’t even know where Brody was and Amanda most certainly did. She’d probably just kissed him goodbye.
I glanced at her face, like I might see traces of him there, evidence of the kisses he’d given her only moments ago. She caught my eye and smiled.
I tried to smile back.
Holy hell, this was going to be awkward.
But I could fake my way through it, right? I was pretty much a professional faker. Act like these ugly-ass panties are the hottest undies ever designed? No problem, I’m your girl. Look happy and sexy while frolicking in the waves on an ice-cold beach? Do it all the time.
Pretend it’s no biggie to share some girlie bonding time with the woman who’s sleeping with the man of your dreams tonight?
Easy-fucking-peasy, right?
Fuck.
“The guys are hopping into helicopters,” Devi was saying as I sipped my frothy strawberry daiquiri through a penis straw. “They’re taking off up the coast to some remote rescue service cabin. Some guy Brody knows is letting them use it.” She waved her hand in the air, like this was redundant. “You know, Brody knows everyone.”
“They’re gonna chop fire wood or throw logs or some such shit,” Becca explained. “You know, be manly.”
Dirty Like Brody: A Dirty Rockstar Romance (Dirty, Book 2) Page 5
