I thought of her legs spread wide, her dress hiked up, a hole in her pantyhose exposing her pussy and her top pulled down so that I could see her large breasts with those perfect pink nipples.
How was I ever supposed to forget something like that?
I couldn’t was the simple answer. And it was tormenting me. I could feel my body respond even to the mere memory of her body, slick and hot and wanting. My cock was twitching to life in my sweats and I made a forceful effort to think of something, anything but Ashley.
By the time we finally landed, I was half hard and so goddamned frustrated that I felt like punching people just to find some sort of aching release.
For a wild moment, I thought about getting a prostitute. It wasn’t difficult—hell, it probably didn’t even have to be a prostitute. I saw all the girls around us, looking our way, giggling, some with signs that had our team name on it or our numbers. I could probably pick up any one of them and fuck her brains out and she would thank me for it.
My eyes scanned the crowd and I spotted a petite thing with a huge chest that was probably fake and medium length blonde hair that was probably bleached. But she looked a little like Ashley. Not as pretty, not as perfect, not as natural, but there were a lot of similarities and I thought that if I took her back to my hotel and pounded into her hard enough, I might be able to make myself forget that it wasn’t Ashley I was diving into.
Because that’ll solve your problem, a voice inside my head whispered.
I sighed and looked away from the girl and the crowd, following the rest of my teammates and we headed for the bus that would take us to our hotel. We’d have a free day tomorrow before the game, so we could sit and relax if we wanted, or go out and see the city. I wasn’t feeling much like either.
As we passed the baggage claim, I spotted the large announcement board. It showed flights arriving and departing, flipping between them digitally and announcing if there was a delay or if it was on schedule or cancelled.
I was about to look away when something caught my eye.
NYC.
I stopped in the middle of the airport and stared at it for a moment. That was when my phone buzzed in my pocket. I’d turned it back on almost as soon as we had landed, though I wasn’t sure why. Dad was waiting for a call from me, but wouldn’t try to get ahold of me during the flight. My mother was dead—still a raw, painful ache on my heart—and Ashley wasn’t speaking to me.
But it was a force of habit, so the thing was on when I got the call.
When I dug into my pocket and retrieved my phone, I was started by the face flashing on my screen, displaying the caller ID. For a second I just stared at it. Ashley? I was so startled that she was calling, so thrilled and nervous and hopeful that I almost forgot to answer and missed the call altogether.
Quickly I caught it on the last ring. “Ash?” I asked, hating how hopeful my tone sounded. What was I, ten?
“What the hell are you doing?!” came Ashley’s angry voice. I could picture her flushed face, her cheeks red and her lips pressed tightly together, her bright blue eyes flashing with passion. Even angry she was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen
“Um, what?” I asked, focusing on the conversation and trying to decipher why it was she had any right to be mad at me. After all, she’d been the one to just dump me without so much as a goodbye. I was pretty sure that gave me the right to be angry, didn’t it?
“Don’t you what me!” She yelled into the phone. I had to pull it away from my ear she was so loud. “You know exactly what I’m talking about!”
Actually, I didn’t. I really, really didn’t and at first I hadn’t cared, because at least she had called me. It was a step in the right direction and gave me hope that maybe we could work things out. But hearing how angry she was at me and knowing that it was me that had the right to be angry, I started to be less hopeful and more annoyed.
Half folding my arms over my chest—one hand still held the phone up to my ear—I said, “No. I don’t. So why don’t you enlighten me?”
“I saw your game.”
I winced, suddenly realizing exactly why she was angry with me. Part of me was kind of glad she was in a weird sort of way. It meant that she clearly still cared about me. Unfortunately, it didn’t tell me how she cared and it didn’t mean that we’d get back together so the elation was pretty short lived.
“Yeah? A lot of people saw my game,” I told her stupidly. “A lot of people saw us win. Thanks to me.”
I could practically hear her rolling her eyes at me. I knew what she thought of showing off and thinking you were the only guy on a team with a bunch of other guys, but right then I didn’t care. I felt like I’d earned a little anger and a little pride and she’d left me anyway, so what the fuck did it matter?
“You’re being an idiot,” she accused me in a steely tone. “I know the doctor did not give you the okay to play! If anything, he probably told you to take a couple of weeks off. Maybe even sit out the rest of the season!”
I felt my anger grow, mostly because she was right. The doctor had told me to take a week and check back in. If I looked like I was getting better, he’d recommend one more week on the bench and after a last check up, he’d likely clear me to play. Assuming that nothing came up and assuming I made as quick a recovery as he thought I might.
But that was all bunk. I felt great. Sure, a little woozy sometimes and a little unsteady if I took a hit too hard, but that was all pretty normal. I was fine. And that last game proved it. There were other guys on my team, and I knew that. Just like I knew that without me, they would have been hard pressed to win.
But I was there. And we won.
“He didn’t tell me I’d have to sit the rest of the season out,” I argued with Ashley mostly because that was the only part she’d mentioned that the doctor hadn’t told me. At least, not directly. The implication had been there that if I didn’t make a quick enough or thorough enough recovery that I might have to sit things out this season, but he had never directly told me that would happen. And I was feeling fine. “He said I was looking good.” True, but he hadn’t told me playing would be a good idea. No doctor would have told me that after only a night in the hospital and a day of not playing.
“You’re so full of shit,” Ashley told me. “You’re risking your damn life over a stupid game! What were you thinking? That you could just get yourself killed and it would rip the family the rest of the way apart? Are you really that selfish?”
“Selfish?” I heard myself saying, so angry that I couldn’t even see straight anymore. “You fucking left! Nothing but a note slipped under my door because you’re too chickenshit to talk to me face to face! And then when I try to clear the air, when I try to make things right, you don’t even take my fucking phone calls! But I’m the selfish one?”
“You know why I had to do that, Danny,” Ashley said, her voice a lot quieter, a lot firmer, and a lot sadder, but it wasn’t enough to quell the sudden fury that had swept through me. I couldn’t let her off that easy. Just because it sounded like maybe it hurt her too wasn’t enough anymore. I wanted blood.
“Yeah, I do,” I spat at the phone angrily. “It’s because you’re a fucking coward. You feel something and you run. I’m shocked.”
“That’s not what happened!” she tried to argue, but her anger had dwindled while mine was just beginning. “I knew that you’d try to talk me out of it and—”
I interrupted before she could make her point. “So instead of being an adult and talking it out like an adult, you ran back home so you could hide away in your little corner of the world, pretending that if you just ignored it, it might go away.”
“Danny—”
She sounded almost in tears now, but I was too far gone to care. How could she do this to me? How could she let me have a taste of her, to feel her body and dive headlong into her just so that she could yank it all away from me? Didn’t she know how long I’d wanted her? Didn’t she know that now I’d compa
re every woman to her?
“No, fuck you,” I told her, so angry that I had to work at not shaking. I wasn’t doing a very good job. “You wanna know why I’m playing when I shouldn’t be? Because of you. You left. You used me like a fucking toy, not caring at all about my feelings, about me in the first place, and then you finished and tossed me to the fucking curb. You—”
Before I could say anymore I heard a quick sob and then the phone clicked. She’d hung up on me. For a long moment, my anger continued to burn. I felt all the hurt and the pain over the last week well up inside me, trying to explode within me, and then, abruptly, it died.
For a cold moment, I held the phone and stared at it. Her quiet, single sob echoed in my head and I felt like shit.
But she’d pushed me to it. She’d driven me crazy with all this subtle, nonverbal promises about how we could be together. About how she cared about me. And then she just left. What was I supposed to do with that? How was I supposed to move past that?
I didn’t know.
My decision was impulsive and probably stupid, but before anyone got the chance to stop me, I was in line at the ticket counter. When I was two or three people away from the front counter, Alec, one of my teammates, came over to talk to me.
“Dude,” he said, as gently as he could, as though he were worried I’d finally just lost my fucking mind. “What’re you doing? We don’t need another ticket.”
I rolled my eyes. Duh, I thought, but what I said was, “I know that.” I moved up in line. Alec sent a quick, shrug and what I imagined to be a frantic look back to the rest of our teammates, before following me.
He cleared his throat. “So, what’re you doing then?”
I thought about what I was doing and where I was going and how stupid all of this was. I obviously couldn’t explain to him everything. Ashley was my sister and a few of the guys would realize it, I thought, though most didn’t really know her. They knew of her, but they probably wouldn’t recognize her. So, I’d give Alec and my team about half of the truth and leave out all the rest.
No one needed to know that I was romantically interested in my sister and this ticket was about patching that up.
“I’m getting a ticket to New York,” I told Alec, trying to figure out how to explain the rest.
“Um.” Alec glanced at the other teammates for help, then back to me. “Dude. We play here. In Boston. The day after tomorrow.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “I know that,” I told him, exasperated. After a moment where he just gave me a what the fuck? look I finally sighed and told him at least a piece of the truth. “Look, there’s this girl…”
Before I even got the rest out, realization dawned on his face. He clapped a hand quickly on my shoulder and said, “Oh, man, why didn’t you say something? You do what you gotta do. Just don’t let her mess you up, you know? Chicks, man, what a pain. But you take care of things. Whatever you gotta do to get your head back in the game.”
And with that, I gave me a mock salute before jogging back to the rest of the team. I stood there bewildered for a moment, watching as Alec explained and the rest of the team slowly began to nod their heads as though this suddenly all made perfect sense.
I shook my head. I never would have guessed that would have been so easy.
“Sir? Excuse me, sir? Can I help you?”
The lady behind the counter was speaking to me and I quickly realized that the line had sped up and now I was at the front. I quickly went over to her and said, “I need one ticket to New York City. As soon as possible.”
Chapter Fifteen
I got a gig that night and had to switch some things around last minute. Cindy was pissed about cancelling—a second time—on her get over Christopher (or was it Darien?) girl’s night out, but I explained that this was my career and it was important, so I was pretty sure she’d forgive me by Monday. Phil had been eager to give me the night off. I thought that after the other night at the bar, my first night back, he was pretty relieved to get me the hell out of there.
I couldn’t explain to him that I’d been such a shitty bartender that night because of Danny, so I didn’t bother to try. I let everyone think that I was all worked up over Selene—which was partially true, just not as true as it should have been—and kept the whole Danny thing to myself.
The Black Swan was an elegant place that was almost forty five minutes in the tube and another fifteen minutes’ walk away from home, but I was just eager to have a paying gig. It wasn’t going to do better than my job as a bartender, but most of that was because I wouldn’t work as regularly. If the maître d’ liked my work, there was a good chance he’d hire me again to sing. It was a good shot for me and the location was much classier than I was usually invited to perform at.
I took it as a sign that I was finally getting somewhere in my aspiration to become a professional singer, and it should have elated me.
It didn’t.
As I walked the last fifteen minutes to the Black Swan, I tried not to frown and to focus on my upcoming performance, but I just couldn’t. My mind was filled with Danny and him playing after his injury and most of all, that phone call.
He’d been so angry.
Just the memory of his words and his tone brought tears up behind my eyes. He had never been so angry with me before in the entire time we’d known each other and it hurt now. It hurt because the last thing I wanted was for us to be broken up. I knew we couldn’t be a couple; that just wasn’t an option. But I thought we could at least still be family.
When I finally got to the Black Swan, I was stopped by the hostess. She was a tall, pretty thing that was both attractive and thin enough to be a model, but she was a little off putting. It was as though she was perpetually looking down her overly long nose or like her lip couldn’t help but curl at the sight of someone.
Or maybe just at the sight of me.
“I’m sorry, it’s reservation only,” she told me, not even bothering to check to see what my name was. She just assumed that I wasn’t the type of person to have a reservation.
Her attitude irritated me on a number of levels, but I tried to be the better woman about it. Holding my head up a little higher by lifting my chin, I squared my shoulders and fixed her with my best haughtier stare. It was a little hard to do, because even though I’d done my hair and makeup as best I could—the hair had fallen a little due to my walk down here—my coat was still the same one I’d had for years. It was nice enough, durable with a long hem and very warm for those cold New York winters, but it had seen the wear of four winters now and I wore it every night I walked to work over the top of my uniform.
“I’m here to see Mr. Corsica,” I told her in my best steely tone.
My change in demeanor and my tone of voice was enough to grab her attention, but it wasn’t enough to really convince her. Her eyes dropped down to examine me more closely, snagging on my worn coat and my slightly deflated hair.
Coming back to my face, she gave me a lethal smile and asked, “And who should I tell him is calling?” She asked it like she thought I might be his hooker or something.
Biting back a quick retort that had something to do with her beak of a nose, her too thin arms, and that shit stain I kept imagining every time she sneered at me, I gave her a forced smile. “Ashley Cassidy. I’m singing tonight.”
The woman’s eyebrows rose in skepticism, but she called for Mr. Corsica just the same. “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Corsica, but a Miss Cassidy is here to see you?”
She fixed me with a look that said she was pretty sure I was about to be kicked out at any moment. Thus her complete and utter surprise by whatever Mr. Corsica said back to her; something along the lines of letting me back stage.
Clearing her throat, she forced a smile and said, “Down that hall to the left. First door and through the curtains. They’ll prep you there.”
She looked away from me then and became very busy with the list of reservations in front of her, ignoring me completely. I rolled m
y eyes and walked away.
People like her weren’t uncommon in my line of work. When you were famous, everyone is your best friend. They all want to be able to say that they’ve known you forever and where there when you finally made it big. But when you are that struggling artist, no one wants to give you the time of day. You’re not worth the gum they’ve collected off the sidewalk on the bottom of their moderately priced loafers.
It drove me nuts, but I reminded myself that eventually I would make it and girls like the stupid hostess wouldn’t matter anymore. I’d show her and everyone like her that I was a somebody and always had been.
I followed the rude hostess’s directions, moving down a dimly lit hallway until I found the only door on the left. I thought about knocking, but decided it was more professional to just walk on through like I owned the place. Trying the door knob, I found it to be open and went on through. The room behind it was some sort of prop room. It didn’t have a lot, a few spare parts it looked like, an extra dress, a mirror that wasn’t lighted, and what looked to be an old, worn piano hiding beneath a tarp.
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