by Emily Snow
Seventeen too many tattoos.
Wyatt inclines his head, and I almost expect him to say something else about the blackbirds, but when he speaks, it’s about sex. How typical.
“I want nothing more than to wrap your legs around my shoulders and fuck you for the rest of the night.” He pulls me on top of him, one leg at a time. “But in all the years we’ve been doing this, not once have I ever just slept with you. I figure if we’re pulling the plug, we might as well do it just once.”
The change of subject is like a fist to my stomach. It’s so painful that it comes damn close to knocking the air out of my lungs. It’s hard for me not to react, but I maintain my composure as I grip his shoulders tightly and lower my face down to his. Our lips graze briefly, softly, and I can’t help but want for more.
“Sweet dreams.” I don’t give him time to respond. I roll off of him and curl up on my side with my back turned to his body.
We’re quiet for several minutes before he makes a noise deep in his throat. “Come closer, Ky. I need to touch you.”
His body finds mine in the dark, and he wraps his arm around my waist. He presses his lips against the tattoo between my shoulder blades—the caged bluebird. He picked it out for me a few years ago when I went with him to Atlanta for his father’s funeral. It was supposed to symbolize happiness, a new beginning, but it hasn’t done me much good.
“This, Kylie, this is how I need to remember you, if you’re not bullshitting about being done with me.”
“I’m not.” I curl my fingers around his hand, but I say nothing. I don’t trust myself to speak.
It doesn’t take long for him to fall asleep. He sleeps hard, soundly, so he doesn’t even flinch when I untangle myself from his body to turn back over to face him. I spend the next hour studying him, running my fingertips gently over his lips and the angles of his face. I etch every detail of him into my memory.
Chapter Three
“Fuck…”
The sound of Wyatt’s voice cutting through the silence of the dark hotel room immediately snaps me out of my sleep, which is already fitful, thanks to him.
“Don’t do that, Ky,” he continues.
It takes a moment, which I spend with my eyes squeezed together, to realize that he’s talking to me. And it takes another few seconds to grasp that at some point since I drifted off to sleep, he closed the tiny amount of space that had been left between our bodies earlier. He’s wrapped his arm loosely around my waist and thrown one of his long legs over mine, trapping me partially beneath him. He’s also gotten rid of his boxers.
Once some of my grogginess disappears, I realize that his very bare and—as much as I hate to admit it—incredibly epic cock is pressed against my stomach.
“Fuck is right,” I mutter under my breath, echoing the very word he used to wake me up.
“Kylie,” he says my name again, this time in an urgent growl.
His hold on my waist tightens, and I flinch. I just know he’ll mention how hot my skin feels, how he knows that every inch of my body is reacting to him right now.
But he doesn’t say anything. And that’s so untypical of Wyatt that I freeze. “Hmm?” When he doesn’t rush to answer me, I drag open my eyes. “Wyatt, what the—” My words catch in the back of my throat.
He’s asleep.
Wyatt is asleep, and he’s saying my name desperately, hopelessly.
Call it cliché, but when the man I’ve loved since I lost my virginity to him at seventeen, the heavy sleeper that I’m just a few days away from leaving for good, calls out my name in his sleep, I’ve got no choice but to react.
The question is: What am I supposed to do?
Blowing a short blue strand of hair up and out of my eye, I curl my fingers around his shoulders. “You okay?” I nudge him back and forth.
He grinds his hips down and doesn’t stop moving until his erection finds the outside of my panties. My lips part slowly, and something that sounds like a rumble mixed with a moan comes out of my mouth. What the hell is this man trying to do to me?
“Wyatt, are you okay?” I repeat.
He exhales roughly. “I’m fine.” He takes his hand away from my waist and moves it to my wrist, pulling my hand away from his shoulder. “I’m fine, but sleeping with you like this fucks me up.” He grazes the tip of his tongue over my fingers and then sucks every other one completely into his mouth, skimming his straight teeth over the ridges of my knuckles.
Even though I know where this is going, I still gasp when he presses my palm to his erection. “Not fucking fair, McCrae,” I say through a forced smile.
He closes my fingers one by one around his cock and then guides my hand up and down his shaft. No, this isn’t fair at all.
“Go back to sleep,” I tell him.
He finally decides to open his eyes, parting them lazily so that he can stare at me unblinking. The back of my throat constricts, and inadvertently, I tighten my grip on him.
The side of his mouth with the labret pulls up into a wicked grin. “We’ve slept long enough, Kylie,” he says. In a couple of swift, well-executed motions, he pins me flat on my back and rolls over on top of me, his knees sinking into the mattress on each side of my hips. “Now, I’m planning to fuck you until my wake-up call.”
When he tries to bend his head down to mine, I stop him, shoving my palm to his chest. I succeed at not wandering my fingertips over the defined muscles taut beneath them, but the hand that’s below his waist is not so resistant. It strokes him even harder. “And what time would that be?”
He moves his knee, and just when I think he’s about to get off me and go back to bed, he nudges it between my closed thighs. I don’t budge.
“Ten thirty,” he says. “And your ass is mine ‘til then.”
Rolling my head to the side, I check the time on the digital MP3 clock sitting on the nightstand beside the hotel telephone. It’s 5:53 a.m.
“Ambitious, aren’t we, McCrae?” I ask, loving the way he shudders when I move my hand that’s wrapped around him faster.
“One part ambition…” He reaches down and splays his hands on my thighs. He gives me a pointed look that clearly says he’s not going to tell me part two until I oblige.
Sighing, I spread my feet apart, curling my toes in the crisp white sheets. “Now, part two?”
He caresses two fingers back and forth between my legs, sucking in a breath at how wet I’ve become, and he whispers something unintelligible about how much he hates my panties. It takes every ounce of self-control I have not to moan.
I want him to feel what I am feeling. I want him to experience every flash of exquisite torture and numbing pleasure. And I want him to feel it now. I move my hand up the length of him and then back down again, and I feel a thrill spread through my veins as a slow but uncertain smile builds on his face.
“That’s my girl,” he whispers into my ear.
“What’s the other part?”
“Every time we see each other after this is all over, and you’re pretending like we don’t mean shit to one another, I want to think back on how tonight and every night before it, your pussy belonged to me.”
Without warning, he dips a finger into my panties and traces a heart around my clit. Wyatt’s always hated playing his guitar with a pick, so his fingertips are rough. It’s the most erotic, addictive thing I’ve ever felt—just a little painful but incredibly satisfying.
I’m not aware that I’ve let go of his cock, and I have started to dig my fingers into his back until a low noise slips from his lips.
“You tryin’ to draw blood?”
I drop my hands. “Damn, sorry. You screw me up, too. You make me want—”
“What? Tell me what you want, Bluebird.”
You make me want to keep trying.
But even Wyatt’s magic fingers, pierced lip, and unforgettable dick aren’t enough to make me want to go through all the emotional bullshit again. “You make me want to kick you in the throat for talking too mu
ch.”
When he throws his head back and laughs, I kiss the tattoo on his throat.
“You are fucking amazing,” he growls, pinning me back down.
He presses his mouth to his T-shirt that I’m wearing. My back arches as he skims his tongue around my breast, wetting the thin fabric. He pauses, his expression pensive for a few seconds, but then he makes up his mind. He shoves the tee up and over my head. Cupping my breast in his hand, he pulls my nipple into his mouth, sucking hard and using his teeth.
God, he knows what that does to me.
“You’ve always been amazing to me,” he says, in between strokes of his tongue.
His words push so many of my emotions to the surface at once that they all seem to crash into each other, causing my head to spin and my vision to cloud. What I feel is love, but there’s something else, too—something that’s bitter and nauseating, but not quite hatred. And I realize that I need to say so much to him before we’re done. There’s so much I hadn’t even considered when I came here to get away from him.
But putting everything out there will have to wait.
Because if Wyatt’s going to look at me a few months from now and think about what we did in our final hours, I want him to remember how I rocked his world, not how I turned into a sentimental sap.
I curve my fingers back around his erection. Racing my free hand up his chest, I bring my face up to his. When I clench the skin close to his neck, he groans and squeezes my clit between his thumb and forefinger.
“Fuck me,” I pant.
He leans over and rummages around in the nightstand drawer. “Shit,” he says in a harsh whisper. When his eyes meet mine again, his gorgeous features are worked into a frown. He rubs his palm back and forth over the top of his head, mussing his short blond hair. “Ah hell, I’ve cockblocked myself.”
Because my head is obviously not in the right place, I release an exasperated moan. “Well, stop.”
He makes a soft noise that sounds like a chuckle against the column of my throat. “Trust me, it was unintentional.” He rubs my center faster, and my legs tremble. “Damn, I need you.”
My hand finally closes around his neck, not hard but just enough for him to growl a curse against my mouth. “Why not now?” I demand as he pulls himself out of my grip.
He glances up at me for a moment. “Because as good as I know you’ll feel, I’m not prepared.”
Realization dawns on me that he’s condomless. I nod my head in understanding, even though for the life of me, I can’t fathom why a rock star would leave the house without protection. Before he even has the chance to think about asking me if I’m willing to go without, I shake my head.
“You’re not fucking me bare.”
He crawls down the length of my body and kisses the insides of my thighs. “We’ll just do this the hard way.”
My muscles grow tense as he sucks hungrily on my clit. My next question is muffled because I cover my mouth with my wrist to keep from crying out. Once I catch my breath, I tease, “Wake-up call, my ass.”
“Don’t worry. Tonight, your ass and that wake-up call are mine.”
What exactly does he call this then? He lowers his mouth to my sex again, and I bite down on my tongue as if it’ll keep me from making a sound, but finally, I whimper.
Because Wyatt knows me so well, he leans away from me for a split second. “Oh, you’re mine right now, Kylie. It only takes a little improv.”
“Improv?” I repeat.
He nods, his dark blond hair tickling my thighs. “Like this.” With one hand gripping my waist, he parts my wet slit with the other, and without warning, he pushes two fingers inside me. I ball my hands into fists, clutching onto the crumpled cotton sheets.
“And this.” The tip of his tongue races around my clit as his fingers glide back and forth inside me.
His rhythm makes me dizzy. I buck my hips toward him. He releases a low sound that seems to hum through my body. Wyatt and I have done this more than once. We’ve fucked so many times that I’ve lost count, but this is the first time that I’ve felt like I’ll catch fire.
Keeping his fingers deep inside me, the pad of his thumb replaces his tongue as he strategically kisses up my body. With one kiss on each hipbone, I shiver. After a kiss on my belly button, he pauses to circle it with his tongue, and when I try to grasp his hair, he catches my wrist. And then he kisses each of my breasts, using everything from his teeth to his piercing to get a rise out of me. By the time our bodies are flush with each other again, I’m a wreck.
“More improv?” I moan.
He hooks his free hand under my knee and wraps my leg around his waist. I follow suit with my other leg, clenching him tight.
“Mmhmm, like this.” His mouth covers mine, nibbling my lips and battling my tongue.
So, when I come intensely a moment later, whispering that I love him, my words are nothing more than muffled sobs.
Wyatt is in the shower when the alarm on my phone suddenly goes off at exactly six twenty a.m. At first, I don’t do anything to silence it. One, my legs are still shaky from his improvisation. Two, my phone is all the way across the room, lodged down in the back pocket of my jeans. And three, I love The Black Keys, and I could probably listen to my “Lonely Boy” ringtone over and over again for the rest of the morning. But when the person staying in the next room over taps gently on the wall, I suck it up and slide out of bed. As I steady myself and tiptoe over to my pants, I try not to think about why our neighbor didn’t knock on the wall five minutes ago.
I bring my jeans back over to the bed, pluck my iPhone out of them, and drop them on the floor. As I deactivate the alarm, I pause, my gaze zeroing in on the reason for the reminder: CHECK ON LUCAS’S ATL FLIGHT!
Last night, just as Heidi and I were leaving our hotel room, I realized that I had never confirmed today’s flight with Sienna. It was too late to call her then, so I had tipsily left a message for myself. It was a stupid move on my part because I should have taken care of it immediately.
“I go on vacation, and I’m still doing work.” As I climb back into Wyatt’s bed, I know I shouldn’t complain. Making sure my brother’s trip to Atlanta goes smoothly is my responsibility, it’s what he pays me for, and it’s something I shouldn’t have left on a to-do list for my replacement just because I was in a hurry to get the hell away from Wyatt.
I log in to both of Lucas’s email accounts and search through the last six days of messages three times, going back to well before I left for vacation. Finally, I give up and send Sienna a text message.
6:32 a.m.: Hey, babe, what email address did you send Luke’s confirmation for the flight to Atlanta to? Don’t see it in the regular email and was worried.
A few more texts and a thirteen-minute phone call (where I fib and tell her I’m just checking up on her because I had a bad dream that today’s flight went horribly) later, I’m frantically scouring every travel website in existence for a couple of tickets.
“You’re sexy when you make that face,” Wyatt says, flipping over on his side. He’s been lying beside me since a few minutes into my conversation with Sienna, but this is the first time he’s faced me directly since getting out of the shower. He traces his fingers in lazy circles across my kneecap, finally pressing the end of his thumb and middle finger against the sensitive spots that make my muscles jump.
He did the same thing and more the entire time I was on the phone with Sienna, driving me to distraction.
“Concentration is—” I start, but he cuts me off.
“If you pull a fucking Lucas and say it’s my friend, I swear I’ll lay you down right here and show you how easy it is to forget about being an assistant.”
“No protection, babe. Remember?” I refuse to go down that road with him.
He snorts. “Ky?”
I glance up from Travelocity.com and the roaming gnome’s creepy face to raise an eyebrow. “Wyatt?”
“My tongue doesn’t need a condom.”
Re
membering precisely where his tongue had been before I started frantically searching for plane tickets makes my mouth go dry. “Don’t you have a song to write, or…I don’t know, a guitar to strum while I do this?”
“Guitar is in there.” He jerks his thumb toward the hotel closet. Laying his head on my lap, he blows on my belly button. “Besides, I’m resting. Cal and I are road-tripping it, starting tomorrow.”
I clench my phone but manage to keep my brown eyes focused on the screen. So, he’s really leaving tomorrow morning. “Really? What for?”
“Last minute guest thing for another band.”
Now, he’s got my full attention. The search for my brother’s flight is momentarily forgotten as I place my phone down beside me and frown. “A guest gig? That’s not really your type of thing. Is everything alright?” When he nods, I narrow my dark eyes suspiciously. “Are they paying you in booze and vag?”
“God, you’re so eloquent sometimes.” He reaches up to my face and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. When he moves his hand, I readjust the same lock of hair, putting it back where it was. He flashes me a little grin. “No, it’s for Cal’s cousin. They’re transitioning members and had some prior commitments. It’s only a few shows.”
This is not the Wyatt McCrae I know. My Wyatt would tell Cal’s cousin to go fuck himself. “Is everything alright with the band? You and Lucas aren’t ending your bromance, are you?” My tone is playful, yet slightly serious.
The corner of his lip tugs up just a bit. “Everything’s fine.”
I tighten my shoulders, so I won’t drop them in relief. Your Toxic Sequel is like my family, and I’d take their breakup as badly as I would my own parents. I pick up my phone, but I can’t resist peeking over the edge of it to study him. “You and Cal are doing bar shows?”
“Yeah.” He must not miss how my features suddenly go taut. He curls his long fingers around my hand and brings it down to rest on his chest. “What’s that look for?”
“Can’t find a fucking flight,” I say sharply.
