by Malcom, Anne
I told Lexie I needed to gorge myself on pasta and men but really what I needed to do was feast on other people’s pain.
It was as I was back in L.A., walking home, clutching my ice cream in my hand, watching the shadows move against the lights surrounding them did I get hit with it.
A strange and visceral kind of loneliness that those pills had numbed. A sensation that crawled over my bones with the knowledge I was walking home alone in the middle of the night with no one waiting on me at my empty apartment, no one to notice if I didn’t make it back. Granted, this was a nicer area than I spent the first eighteen years of my life—in DC no less—but it was still L.A. I was still a woman walking alone at night, and despite how far feminism had come, I was vulnerable, as much as I hated to admit it.
I had pepper spray in my bag, did boxing classes twice a week, I could take care of myself—to a point. Because there was a point, woman or man, became a target and fate put their number on a bullet, no pepper spray or boxing classes could fix that.
But as that strange and brutal loneliness clutched me, I didn’t want to take care of myself. I wanted someone to care that I was walking home on my own. Someone to be fucking concerned about my wellbeing.
No one had been concerned about my wellbeing until Lexie and Mia.
Steve and Ava.
I felt the unpleasant stab in my chest as I thought of them.
And the fact that there was now two fewer people that gave a shit about my wellbeing.
Sure, Lexie would lecture me if she knew I was doing this, sigh good-naturedly and worry. But it was different.
I found myself wanting...a man.
Not something I’d let myself want in… ever.
But I wanted someone waiting at home for me.
Wanted a man to yell at me for putting me—the most precious thing on his earth—in danger.
But I was never going to be precious to anyone.
I wasn’t even born precious.
* * *
Two Weeks Later
I didn’t know what I was doing here.
I was drunk, so maybe tequila knew what I was doing here.
Though I was sober enough to know not to ask the small, airplane size bottle of Patron that was rattling around in my purse against the half-empty pill bottle. I was never without the latter. I didn’t really know how much they helped, but it was nice to have a routine, to actively pretend I was doing something about that shadow of hopelessness that was sometimes impossible to breathe around. I could have done the responsible thing and gone to a shrink instead of medicating. But that’s what tequila was for, therapy and bad decisions.
“Do you know what I’m doing here?” I asked the man in front of me. “Do you think it’s a bad idea?”
The man turned. “Lady, I’m your Uber driver, not your therapist.” He sighed. “If I had a dollar for every drunk bitch who thinks that this is the place to vent their feelings I wouldn’t be driving drunk bitches around.”
I scowled at him in response. “If I had a dollar for every time an asshole guy referred to women as ‘bitches’ I’d have enough money to buy Uber and get you fired.”
Then I gathered myself out of the car, slamming it for good measure and stomped toward the door, my anger fueling me and making me forget my crisis I was having moments ago.
My fist was pounding against the wood before I remembered that I definitely shouldn’t have let tequila make decisions for me.
The car I arrived in had screeched off the curb as soon as I closed the door, so there wasn’t an immediate escape in sight. I glanced down to my phone to give him a crappy rating.
That took a while since I decided to also write a short paragraph on how he should learn the proper terms for addressing women and that he should also go and fuck himself.
By the time I was done getting annoyed with Uber for not letting me use ‘profanities,’ I’d forgotten I was meant to be running as quickly as I could from this situation.
The door opened.
“Em?” Wyatt’s voice was thick, slightly slurred.
I glanced up.
I’d been wrong about all the art I’d been feasting on, about it containing beautiful pain. No, all the beautiful pain was right here in front of me.
It was him.
I didn’t have a chance to speak before he yanked me into his arms. He smelled of whisky and weed.
The hug lasted a long time. Longer than it should’ve. And it shouldn’t have even begun in the first place, but I forgot the reasons for that, but I did understand that Wyatt’s embrace offered more comfort than tequila or the little white pills I’d been kidding myself actually made a difference.
It lasted too long, and it was over too soon.
He let me go enough to hold me at arm’s length. His eyes roved hungrily over me with naked desire that had only been hinted at over the years. It was mixed with the unfocused gaze of someone who was on their way to being very drunk. Someone who was drinking for more than a good time. Someone who was drinking because of a particularly bad time. I had experience recognizing the difference because I saw it in the mirror a lot.
“You’re a sight for sore...everything,” he said, eyes meeting mine. “I’ve missed you.”
I didn’t hesitate. “I’ve missed you too.”
He let me go to step aside. “Wanna come in?”
I didn’t hesitate doing that either.
Wyatt
The first thing he focused on when he woke up was the fact that his skull seemed to be shattered and rogue pieces of bone were jabbing themselves into the flesh of his brain.
“Fuck,” he hissed when he tried to blink open his eyes.
The second thing he noticed was a dim scent around the pounding in his head. It was something that didn’t turn his curdling stomach. It was vanilla and coconut. Not just that. Something else, something slightly bitter against the sweet. Something...like her.
He reached across the bed, expecting to find warm, soft skin that was blanketed in that scent. He clung to cold and empty sheets with nothing but a ghost of it.
The motion itself was enough to stop him from trying to recall the night before, from where that scent came from and focus on not barfing all over himself.
He hadn’t been this hungover since his first Hollywood party after they got signed. His agent got a doctor in to hook him up to an IV. It made him feel like a total pussy and Sam had teased him about it for months—until the same thing happened to him—but hangovers took no prisoners. And mixing whisky with vodka would fell the strongest of men, let alone a naive eighteen-year-old who was drunk on whisky, vodka, and fame.
That’s what he told himself anyway.
Since then, he’d routinely gotten drunk on whisky, vodka, and especially fame. He and Sam had earned their reputations as the partyers of Unquiet Mind.
He’d never drunk so much that he completely blacked out, though.
Which he guessed had kind of been his point, to forget his father’s phone call. But while everything afterward was an empty pocket of his mind, that was stark and burned into his memory. The whisky hadn’t worked on that score.
He opened his eyes again. He was in his bedroom. That was a good thing. It would serve him to be waking up in some chick’s apartment with a camera shoved at his junk, or worse, his face.
He was naked.
But that wasn’t abnormal, even when he slept alone, he was naked. But he rarely slept alone. He was the only one who had a different partner every night, now that Sam and Lexie were fucking married. Both of them had kids. It suited Lexie. But no one expected Sam to be a father and a husband, and actually fucking good at both. Which he was. He treasured his wife and son with a ferocity no one knew the fucker was capable of.
So Wyatt was a lone bachelor.
Well, there was Noah, but he kept his shit tight.
Something ticked at his mind as he saw his pants draped over a chair. Something stuck to coconut and vanilla.
Someone.
H
e glanced at the rumpled sheets again.
“No,” he whispered to himself.
It can’t have been the image that thrust itself into his mind. The one that cut through his hangover and hit him straight in the dick.
That was definitely not something that happened. It was something his idiotic and drunken mind had conjured up. No way would he let himself go there. Not even drunk as he was. And no way she would go there, she’d made that clear a year ago.
Sam bowled into his room before he could give it more thought.
“Morning, fucker!” he yelled, grinning.
Wyatt winced. Sam grinned wider. “Ah, you’re hungover.” He rubbed his hands together. “You’re gonna be so much fun at this interview.”
Wyatt groaned. “That’s today? I can’t do it.”
Sam strode over and yanked the curtains so the room was bathed in light bright enough to make Wyatt’s eyes bleed.
“You fucking asshole.”
“Save that for the reporters, sunshine,” Sam said happily. Then he ripped the covers off him and stared unashamedly at his cock. “Ah, don’t worry, puberty comes late in some people. Not everyone can be blessed like me.”
Then Wyatt was focused on how he was going to kill Sam without breaking up the band, so the coconut and vanilla left his mind, the dull scent still clinging to him.
* * *
Wyatt had managed to get his clothes on, luckily not having to think too much about matching shit for the inevitable photos that he would be required to pose for since Mark shoved them at him. That along with two white pills and a bottle of water. He didn’t hesitate to take the pills. Mark never gave him the bad shit, it didn’t do well to have his main meal ticket hooked on drugs. The fucker wouldn’t jeopardize his ten percent, and he actually cared about the band. That’s why he’d been their manager for as long as he had.
He was wearing his glasses when he walked to the kitchen, because even inside, the light was too bright.
“Dude,” Sam said, his arm around Gina, as it always was when his wife was around. Their son, Zeppelin, was for once, quiet and asleep in his stroller. Wyatt thanked fuck for that, he loved that little kid, but he didn’t think his brain would cope with a baby’s screaming right now. It could barely deal with its father’s taunting. “You’re really gonna be the douchebag rock star that wears his sunglasses inside. I always knew you had it in you.”
Wyatt couldn’t do anything but flip him the bird.
Sam was looking to ramp himself up for more when someone entered the room.
Someone who smelled of coconut and vanilla.
Wyatt’s entire body froze.
Maybe he didn’t imagine it.
His stomach fucking swirled with the conflicting emotions he had about her. About having a reality with her.
“Ah, Emma, a partner in crime to tease Wyatt mercilessly about the sunglass situation,” Sam said, grinning. “And you brought coffee. Excellent.”
Wyatt had been having trouble focusing on people without feeling like his eyeballs were bleeding, but now Emma was in sharp focus as something tugged harder at his mind.
She seemed stuck in place as Sam took two coffees from the tray she was balancing on her hand.
“You got food too?”
She wordlessly handed him a paper bag, still staring at Wyatt.
Something about the way she was looking at him hurt him, for reasons he couldn’t understand. But then he thought about the fact he hadn’t seen her in months and hadn’t heard from her apart from that text she’d sent after he’d lost his dignity and damn near stalked her when she dropped off the grid in Italy.
Where she was fucking Italian men.
He’d read that on Lexie’s phone. It was a shitty thing to do, but Emma made him do shitty things sometimes. Especially when he’d conjured up all sorts of Taken type situations for someone like Emma disappearing in Europe. He did that every fucking time she dropped off the grid, went to fucking Afghanistan for some dusty old painting. Through a war zone, like she wasn’t in danger. Like she wasn’t fucking priceless. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told her he’d get someone in there to retrieve her. He’d pulled all his considerable strings and had a team on standby. One he’d intended to be part of if she got herself hurt or fucking kidnapped.
But she managed to get out, unharmed. And then she resumed her globetrotting, Wyatt resumed his horrific daydreams about her getting taken from him when she wasn’t even his. This time was worse than ever, this year had been worse than ever. Because something changed after Lexie was shot. Well, fucking everything changed. Those three days left scars on them all. But it also brought to the surface what had been simmering between him and Emma. And fresh from almost losing his best friend, he’d realized how fucking precious life was, so he was half mad with desperation to snatch onto Emma and forget all the reasons why they wouldn’t work.
She wasn’t a woman to be snatched or even held tenderly.
So she’d walked away from him and forced them back into their fucked-up friendship. And that was all Wyatt could get from her, so he fucking took it. Until she disappeared in Italy and he entertained ideas about her being hurt.
But no, she wasn’t kidnapped, she was just fucking Italian dudes.
That didn’t make him feel any fucking better.
He’d finished up the European tour in a foul mood.
He was mad at her, he may not have remembered last night, but he remembered that. And he was also mad at himself. That trumped whatever feelings he had about her scent, about the rogue fantasies his mind had conjured up when he’d been drenched in whisky and his past the night before.
“Hey,” he said coolly, no matter the fact he wanted to cross the distance between them and yank her into his arms.
She never looked so small before. She was petite, naturally, but you never thought of someone like Emma as small. She was loud, and she took up all the breathing space in a room. She sure as shit never looked vulnerable because of her size. Fuck, she’d waltzed into this very room and punched one of the most dangerous men Wyatt knew right in the face. But somehow, makeup smudged under her eyes, free of her trademark red lip and long blonde hair mussed, she looked vulnerable. Small. Fucking beautiful.
“You lookin’ for Lexie?” he asked since there was no way she’d turn up here to see him or Sam. Not after it’d been so long since she’d seen Lexie. They were tight, those two. Emma didn’t like to let people into her life, he knew that first-hand, but Lexie got in. Wyatt knew she must’ve missed her, hence the early morning visit and coffee—the only drug Lexie did, despite the fact she was in one of the most famous rock bands in the world. Emma had obviously come from a party or some guy’s bed. Wyatt almost ground his fucking teeth to dust at that thought.
Lexie and Killian had planned on staying in the beach house for a bit after the last leg of the European tour was over, but changed their minds and obviously didn’t tell her.
Emma blinked at his question.
Something about that simple blink hit Wyatt harder than his skull splitting headache. He didn’t know why.
Then again, he never knew why when Emma was around. She snatched all the sense in the room along with his oxygen.
“Lexie?” she asked, her voice throaty and strange.
“Yeah, she’s in Amber with Kill,” Wyatt said. He squinted more memories hitting him with that sexy throaty voice that hit him straight in the dick. “Did you come last night, looking for her?”
Now that he was seeing her, he had a vague recollection of seeing her after half a bottle of whisky. Of thinking she was the most beautiful fucking thing he’d ever seen in the midst of the ugliness dredged up by one simple phone call. He pushed that phone call aside, focusing on Emma, holding onto the memory of the relief that came when he’d opened the door and seen her frowning at her phone. “Yeah, you came last night.” He paused, trying to call up more memories than holding her and then letting her inside. He couldn’t. It was a black hole. “I
didn’t do anything that’s gonna make Mark need to hire another Fixer, did I?”
Mark had a friend of Keltan’s on speed dial, mostly from Sam’s bachelor days, but there had been a couple of times Wyatt needed certain things taken care of.
Sam looked up from a donut. “Please say yes.”
Wyatt flipped him the bird again. But only half-heartedly. Emma was doing that weird slow blink again that had no reason to hit him square in the gut, but it did. Because there was pain in it. Wyatt would kill anyone that caused Emma pain. Because she’d had enough. And she convinced the world she was strong—and she fucking was, but she wasn’t invincible. She didn’t show it, but Wyatt knew that when something hurt her, it cut deep. To the bone. And the thought of her hurt roiled his stomach worse than any combination of whisky and vodka.
“Come on Emma, please tell us he left an insulting voicemail on a supermodel’s phone. Or went on some kind of Twitter rant,” Sam said, both things he’d done, not Wyatt.
“No,” she croaked, her voice rough. “No, he didn’t do anything like that.”
Sam scowled in disappointment.
“Sorry,” Wyatt said to her, forgetting his plans to be cold with her. He’d forgotten all the fucking melodies to their songs at her look. “If I did anything I need to apologize for.”
She paused, visibly inhaling, her vulnerability suddenly disappearing and hardness returning to her eyes. “No, the only thing you need to apologize for is thinking that you’re at the Usher level of fame and can wear sunglasses inside.” Her voice held a hint of familiar teasing, but it didn’t quite reach it.
Sam chuckled.
“We need to go, now,” Mark said, striding into the room, pocketing his phone, nodding to Emma and then focusing on Wyatt and Sam, they were his money makers after all.
“You gonna come with?” Wyatt asked, finding himself loathing to leave her presence because there was still something yanking at the corner of his mind. Her stopping in last night explained the scent of her since whenever he was around her, she seemed to imprint that shit on his skin for days. But it didn’t explain the feeling that something more had happened. Something he couldn’t fucking remember. “You can tease me more about the sunglasses and then I’ll buy you lunch to make up for whatever embarrassing things I did under the influence.”
