The Hipster Chronicles
Copyright © 2017 by Faith Andrews
All rights reserved.
Cover designed by:
Marisa-rose Robyn, Cover Me Darling
Editor:
Brenda Letendre, Write Girl Editing
Interior design and formatting by:
Christine Borgford, Type A Formatting
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Except the original material written by the author, all songs, song titles and lyrics contained in the book are the property of the respective songwriters and copyright holders.
Contents
THE HIPSTER CHRONICLES
Dedication
JUST STRUMMIN’ IT ~ Emmy & Milo
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
SCRUFF YOU! ~ Greta & Ezra
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
COUNTRY BOY ~ Marley & Jasper
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
LET HIM EAT CAKE ~ Paulina & Zander
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
WHEN I MET YOU IN THE SUMMER ~ Epilogue
Jasper
Zander
Milo
Jane
Acknowledgements
Enjoy an Excerpt from MOORE TO LOVE
Chapter 1
About the Author
Books by Faith Andrews
To my favorite band of all time, Mumford & Sons. You opened my eyes and ears to a genre of music, love, and life that has seeped into my soul and made me my very own brand of hipster-centric.
“Where you invest your love, you invest your life.”
~Mumford & Sons
I WAS A grown woman, and today’s exercise was supposed to be fun. A bucket list item, in fact. Something to mark off the catalog of things I’d always put off doing. There was no better time than now. I was pushing the restart button. Newly divorced from my cheating bastard of a husband of three years, I was vulnerable on my own again and looking for a new lease on my suddenly lonely life.
Rather than throw myself out of a plane or visit Paris without someone to swoon with under the Eiffel Tower, taking up guitar lessons seemed to be the next best thing. Lucky for me, guitarists were a dime a dozen in the neighborhood I called home; all I had to do was walk down to the music store on the corner and ask for the next available slot.
I took that journey into the tapestry-lined walls of Just Strummin’ It only a week ago, where I purchased the Yamaha acoustic guitar in Oriental Blue Burst I now clutched with sweaty hands while my leg bounced against the dented cushion of the waiting room chair. On that particular day, I walked with my head held high and a skip to my step. Today, however, as I’d strolled under the green awning of my favorite Starbucks, past the antiquated bookstore I prayed would never go out of business, crossed the street to take in a whiff of what could only be a freshly baked batch of cupcakes from Pumpernickel, and wound up at the music store—my skip lacked the same pep.
I was totally out of my element as I people watched. The girl behind the counter had a head full of long dreads, a sleeve of intricate tattoos on her left arm, and gages in both ears. She strutted around, humming the words to a folk-rock song I hadn’t heard before with so much confidence I wished she’d spare some and toss it my way. She was intriguingly odd, but stunningly gorgeous. I, on the other hand, was plain, ordinary, forgettable, and resentful of my inability to assimilate to hipster living. I stared down at my poor attempt to fit into this trendy neighborhood—a city my ex-husband persuaded me to uproot my life in Arizona and move to because it was up and coming, the place to be, the hot spot—and snarled at the CBGB T-shirt I bought at a thrift store I meandered into one day after I found Charlie—my ex—screwing some chick in my Murphy bed.
“Wanna-be,” I muttered to myself in disgust before sensing a presence beside me and looking up into the most amazing eyes I’d ever seen. And let me clarify what I meant by amazing. Those eyes weren’t simply some run-of-the-mill blue. No, they were the color of the water somewhere in the Caribbean—turquoise swirled with green, sprinkled with sapphire and bronze specks. And that was just his eyes. They could be a person all on their own, they were so all-consuming. But no, the face attached to those eyes was equally gorgeous, if not more so—tanned, bearded, chiseled, and mighty fucking fine.
“Mrs. Dillon?” The lips ascribed to the mighty fucking fine face moved when he spoke, jolting me out of my wet dream.
“Uh . . . Um . . . No,” I stuttered.
The breathtaking specimen consulted a paper in his hand and then asked, “So, you’re not my six o’clock?”
I’d be his six o’clock, his eight o’clock, and his ’round the clock, but I was getting ahead of myself. “No . . . Um . . . I mean, yes. I am your six o’clock, but I’m not Mrs. Dillon.”
The reason for my sudden lack of intelligence gawked at me, clearly confused, and narrowed his piercing eyes.
I winced, hating that his lids obstructed the view of those soulful irises, but quickly regained composure before I sent him running for the hills in exasperation. “Force of habit. I was Mrs. Dillon, but I’m no longer marri—Never mind.” I shook my head and smiled shyly at the hint of amusement flashing across his face. Unraveling my tongue from the knot caused by his hotness, I took a deep breath and tried to get this out right. “My name is Emily Ryder now. Emmy. You can call me Emmy.” Why did it seem to take an hour to complete such a simple process?
“Milo. Nice to meet you, Emmy.” Milo—cool name for a hot guy—offered me a hand. I placed mine—clammy and all—in his and shook with fervor. Looking down at my vice grip on his teaching fingers, he cocked a side grin and a rough and gritty rumble spouted out of him. “Now that we got that out of the way, what do you say we get started on your first lesson?”
The vibration of his throaty chuckle mixed with his deep, sultry voice caused me to squeeze my legs together in fear of leaving a puddle of my desire on the waiting room chair. That wouldn’t be embarrassing at all, now would it? Terrified of the possibility, I rose from said chair, nonchalantly checked for signs of embarrassing leakage, and emitted a sigh of relief when I realized I was in the clear.
I bent down to grab the handle of my guitar case only to be stopped by Milo’s tattooed fingers curling around the handle. “Allow me,” he said, lifting it effortlessly off the ground.
“Oh,” I squeaked with my hand to my chest. Polite and dominant. Well, what have we got here? “Thank you.”
Milo simply nodded, motioning me to follow.
“Just lead the way,” I managed to say without fumbling on my words. I hoped our lesson was somewhere in his bedroom, under his sheets, with my legs wrapped around his waist, screaming something along the lines of, “Give it to me, Milo!”
I KNEW I should be paying attention to the way his deft fingers strummed the strings of his Gibson, but I could only
focus on how they were marked in black ink with a four-leaf clover and the letters L-U-C-K-Y across his knuckles from thumb to pinky. I should’ve been concentrating on memorizing the simple scale of notes he jotted onto the sheet music, but I was too busy melting to the melody of his voice as he made those simple notes sound like a symphony. There was an extremely low probability that I would retain even one iota of musicality from this lesson. Ask me to tell you how Milo smelled (woodsy pine and spearmint), or the exact shade of his hair (russet brown when the sunlight shone through the windows, dark chocolate in the shadows of the studio), or how I imagined his lips would feel if they met mine (soft, silky, dominant), and I would pass that test with flying colors. But ask me to replay the notes he just spent fifteen minutes teaching me and I’d stare back at you like a guppy at feeding time.
This wasn’t like me, but God help me, I wanted to jump his bones. After all, I was in the process of ticking items off my bucket list. Exploring my sexuality was at the tippy top of that list. I was a grown woman who’d spent her whole life doing things by the book. It would be fun to shake things up a bit. And besides, I wasn’t actually doing anything. Acting on impure thoughts of my new music teacher was one thing, but last I checked it wasn’t a sin to have an imagination.
“Am I going too fast?” Milo interrupted my mental drooling and pulled my focus to his lips—scrumptiously covered in the kind of bristle that would tickle me in all the right places. Totally letting that imagination run wild, aren’t I?
“No,” I muttered, somewhat embarrassed that I wasn’t paying attention but unwilling to admit it.
He gazed up at me from the typical seated guitar-playing position with a glint of mischief in those oceanic eyes. “You sure?” A chuckle merged with his words.
Caught. Shaking my head, I slid down in my chair. “I’m more lost than Jack and Hurley.”
Milo’s laugh filled the small sound-proof room, coating my skin with pleasure-induced goose bumps. “I finally finished binge watching that show last week. What a mind fuck! I’m still not sure what to surmise of that ending.”
“You’re telling me.” I scoffed and rolled my eyes. “My husband tortured me with it—we talked more about his Lost theories than anything else. He was obsessed. Me—not so much.”
At the mention of my ex, Milo arched a brow. To save him any further speculation and to make it perfectly clear that I was single and ready to mingle, I steadfastly intervened. “He’s no longer my husband.”
He bit his lower lip, triggering me to squirm. “Shit. You hated the show that much?”
“No.” I giggled. “It was his cheating I wasn’t so fond of.”
“Ouch! Sorry.” He swiveled from left to right on his stool, his posture stiff.
“Yeah. Not cool, but I’m over it.” I shrugged. “Very, very over it.”
It was Milo’s turn to smile—my blatant eagerness seemingly the cause—and though I sensed an easy flow of amicable conversation fused with a tinge of flirtatiousness, he straightened in his chair and tapped the hollow wood of his guitar. “Why don’t we start from the top?”
Back to business so soon? Dismissing the disappointment that heated my skin, I brought my hands back to the strings the way he’d demonstrated earlier. I wasn’t a total guitar-lesson virgin. I’d tried some DIY classes on YouTube, but I was here because I wanted to learn for real this time. Putting on my serious cap, I positioned my hands around the Yamaha. “Like this?” I asked.
Milo observed and shook his head, propping his own guitar on the floor beside his stool. Standing, he came behind me and, as if out of a cheesy movie in which the guy makes a clever move on the unsuspecting girl, he wrapped his tattooed arms around me and positioned his hands over mine. Chills of indulgence danced across my skin even though it was an almost ninety-degree day. His ardent and unexpected touch made me happy I was sitting; my legs surely would have buckled had I been standing. But when his breezy words and scruffy whiskers tickled my ear, I shuddered visibly.
“Relax a little and loosen your grip. You don’t want to pop the strings; you want to strum them . . . softly.” You’re killing me softly, I thought, but breathed deep following his orders.
With his left hand guiding my left and his right hand guiding my right, he pressed his front against my back and the growing amount of intermingling anatomy stole my breath. I closed my eyes, savored his nearness, and willed my heartbeat to calm the hell down.
“Yes. Like that,” he coaxed when my movements mirrored his with a little less guidance. After a few more thrums, his hands left mine and I momentarily ached for the contact. That sensation was promptly fulfilled, however, when I felt his strong but tender grip on my shoulders. “You’re very tense, Emmy.” His warm, minty breath was mere inches from my ear.
I rolled my head and nearly dropped the guitar when his thumbs dug into the pressure point just at the base of my neck. “Oh, my God.” It came out as a husky, premature moan that almost made me burst from my chair and hit the ground running out of utter embarrassment. But who was I kidding? I wasn’t going anywhere. This felt too good to deny. He could inappropriately massage my tension away as long as he wanted. All day, every day. And twice on Sunday.
“I thought you were a musician?” I groaned, loving the way his fingers worked my body. “The chick at the front desk said nothing about a masseuse.”
“Should I stop?” he laughed, his timbre telling me he knew full well I had no intention of asking him to cease his magical ministrations.
“Hell no,” I sang, melting into his touch.
“We still have a lesson to get through, you know.”
“A lesson? What lesson?” I joked with my eyes closed and my head lolled to the side.
Milo’s hands stilled and my head snapped back to see why. When my eyes met his, he was fingering his sexy whiskers in an up and down motion along his chin. “How about I make you a deal?”
That got my attention. Were all music lessons conducted this way? If so, I’d quit my job, milk the alimony, and sign up for five sessions a week rather than just the one. “I’m listening,” I answered, curiosity in full gear.
Milo crouched down and dug his elbow into my back. “Ohhh,” I moaned again, not caring how needy I must sound.
“You keep playing and I’ll keep rubbing.”
His offer to rub had my mind darting to dirty thoughts and my mouth salivating. “How do you expect me to do anything when you’re touching me like that?”
A devilish rumble vibrated in his chest. I felt it, too, as his body was now pressed against mine. “Deal or no deal?” he asked.
How could I say no to that? “Deal!” The word flew from my mouth so fast my brain didn’t have time to warn me to calm my jets.
“That’s what I thought.” Cocky bastard. “Now, I’ll recite the notes and you play. Let’s see how much you remember.”
“And don’t forget the rubbing.”
“I won’t forget the rubbing, Emmy, but if you get one wrong . . . there’ll be a punishment.”
Why did that sound so extraordinarily kinky? I snapped my head around to face him and gauge his expression, but flirting didn’t come easily for me so I had no clever retort. He grinned at my obvious wordlessness, his cool eyes dark with seduction. God, was he sexy.
Milo remained silent and merely circled his index finger to gesture that I turn around and get back to business. His elusiveness only intrigued me more. I loved the idea of figuring out the enigmatic type. It was a thrill I was sure would only get me into trouble, my heart taking the brunt. But with my body at the mercy of his long, nimble fingers, I was willing to lay it on the line for the greater good.
WE MANAGED TO get through the lesson with zero punishments (boo) and a ray of hope that I would one day actually play something other than “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” The stress in my shoulders was long gone, but the sexual tension was just getting started. The enjoyable flirting and his inebriating massage was cut short, however, by a phone alarm
which indicated our time was up.
After an awkward good-bye and a promise to practice what he taught me—more like fantasize about what I wanted him to do to me—we bid each other farewell and I left the studio with my guitar strap between my legs.
There was too much pent-up lust inside me to simply retreat home to my empty apartment, so, fishing my cell phone from my crossbody bag, I thumbed in my friend Jane’s number. Texting wasn’t her thing—she was a rarity in this day and age, a girl who still took pleasure in the art of real conversation. But Jane’s spare time was often occupied now that she was in a writing groove, so I left her a voicemail.
“Hey babes, it’s Emmy. I just spent the most exhilarating hour of my life at my first guitar lesson. I’m heading to Flask & Folly for happy hour. Was hoping you’d meet me so I could tell you all about it. If you get this, I’ll be there waiting with bated breath and a juicy tale. Drinks on me!”
Sensual daydreams about the warmth of Milo’s hands on my body swarmed my woozy brain as I hopped into Flask & Folly like the Easter Bunny in spring. This place was so cool it was almost laughable. One could say the owner tried too hard when it came to décor, but it was my favorite hangout because of those pleasing aesthetics. Strings of Edison bulbs hung overhead, a steady auburn glow illuminating the dark room. The walls were exposed red brick lined with chalkboards that listed the different kinds of cocktails, draft beers, and menu choices. The bar itself was constructed of what looked to be reclaimed barn wood, distressed to perfection and coordinating well with the worn leather seating throughout the entire expanse of the small space. At the back of the narrow room was a modest stage with a shabby sofa centered atop a threadbare tapestry rug. The throne and freestanding mic, fit for their performer, were spotlighted amongst scattered wooden crates and various pieces of turn-of-the-century luggage. It was so inviting I imagined myself sitting on that sofa one day, strumming the chords taught by my sexy instructor. But I was getting ahead of myself, and therein lay my need for a reality check—an ice cold brewsky.
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