by Ren Benton
She never worried about him violating sexual boundaries. Enthusiastic participation was mandatory with Lex. What fun was going all out with someone who wouldn’t meet him at his level?
His enthusiasm not being a given was the most remarkable thing about this conversation — other than the fact that they were negotiating sexual terms at all. “What are your obstacles?”
He set the controller on his knee to free his hands, crisscrossed his arms, and pointed one finger toward Simone’s room and two toward the side of the house where Olivia and Ethan slept. “We’d never hear the end of it.”
“Well, I wasn’t planning on doing it in front of witnesses.”
He stared at her for a long moment. “I’m breathlessly interested in hearing any plans you do have. Your turn.”
She’d start in the shower, since he mentioned... Oh. He meant more obstacles, not her plans.
Her pulse was going haywire over the potential for climbing on Lex, but her brain held back as if wondering who the people having this discussion were. “This whole thing feels calculated.”
Sex between them had never been casual. They knew each other for a year before they even kissed, and she was in love with him by that time. When they finally got around to sex, it was more than physical for her. What they were talking about tonight would be nothing but a fuck to burn off stress — and Lex seemed fine with that.
The thought made her heart hurt and her body burn.
He put the controller on the coffee table. When he removed his glasses and set those beside the controller, it had the same drool-inducing effect as stripping. Still occupying the opposite corner of the sofa, he turned his body ninety degrees so he faced her. “Come here.”
Her knees quivered, and a hot flush washed over her face.
He nodded as if he’d expected as much. “I think we’d agree that the second we touch, we’ll both be incapable of calculating anything more complex than how to remove our pants.”
“We should probably take care of that first, actually.”
A lazy grin took over his lips. “See what I mean about your superior planning skills? We’re getting all this tedious thinking out of the way now so there are no unpleasant distractions later, when we’re too preoccupied to have such an intelligent, mature discussion.”
For the moment, at least, she wasn’t his boss, and she didn’t doubt he could reduce her to a babbling glob of nerve endings once he put his mind and more tangible parts to it. He’d dispatched the two most strenuous objections in her hand with ridiculous ease, and the simple no that would put an end to the matter was nowhere to be found. “Did you have another obstacle?”
“I didn’t want to spoil the illusion that my intentions were pure by rolling up to your door with a case of condoms in hand, so I’m not carrying. You?”
His hopeful inquiry splashed cold water on her aspirations. “I thought you were bringing your girlfriend. I tried to leave everything from the waist down at home, but it apparently fell into my suitcase.”
“I call that a happy accident. Since going door to door begging for handouts brings us full circle to my first obstacle, that leaves us taking a road trip.” He rolled to his feet. “I’ll get my shoes.”
“There won’t be a store open at this hour for fifty miles.” Disappointment warred with relief that lack of condoms would postpone the loveless sex.
He leaned over her and planted his hands on the back of the sofa, arms braced on either side — not touching her anywhere but enveloping her in the warmth radiating from his body. He rumbled, “Is sleep anywhere on the horizon for you?”
She wordlessly shook her head, positive she’d never been more alert.
“Then we’ve got nothing better to do than go on a fetch quest.” He shoved himself upright and backed away. “Besides, there’s no point continuing the discussion until we surmount the obstacle at hand. Grab the car keys and meet me at the door.”
The proposal had a surreal quality. He offered so much that she wanted, but a warped version.
Lex without love.
That might be what she needed to get over this bittersweet yearning — proof that like any other relationship, theirs had run its course. They had moved on without it, apart, and now there was nothing between them but memories and garden-variety sexual tension between two people living and working in close proximity.
There was one sure way to dispel that tension.
Lex returned with jackets for both of them and the comforter from his bed. Gin wasn’t waiting by the front door, so he stuck his head in the office. His heart and several other levitating organs sank when he saw her phone and keys still on the shelf. He grabbed them just in case she’d gotten lost along the way but resigned himself to a change of plan.
The plan, such as it was, had been his idea, so he shouldn’t be surprised she’d reconsidered the wisdom of going along with it. He reserved the right to be sick with disappointment, though.
He found her in the kitchen, bent over a notepad — probably making a bulleted list of reasons she’d changed her mind. “Second thoughts, Greene?”
“I’m leaving a note in case we get abducted by aliens.”
The little gray men would have fun studying his abrupt shifts from solid to gelatinous goo in response to her decisions. “Are Ethan and Maisie authorized to carry on without you in the event of extraterrestrial interference?”
“Carry on and exploit the media coverage associated with my disappearance.”
“Clever.” He pulled the pen from her fingers. “Skip the postscript. They’ll figure it out.”
Glittering green eyes looked up at him. “Are you in a hurry, Perry?”
He crowded her against the island, as close as he could be without touching her because there were so many things they could do without condoms and he was game for doing all of them on the damn counter if she didn’t want to go anywhere. “The slower we move, the closer I get to being that asshole who argues we can’t make a baby and I’m clean, darlin’, I swear. Safe sex is the one thing I’ve got going for me in the responsible adult department. Don’t ruin my streak, woman.”
She tugged her jacket off his arm and headed toward the exit. He gave her just enough time to program the house alarm to let them leave before hustling her out the door.
Gin pushed back when met with a wall of impenetrable darkness. “Slow down. We’ll break our necks on these steps.”
He thumbed her phone awake and tsked when he easily bypassed her lock screen. “You haven’t changed your password. And you call yourself security conscious.”
“It will keep a stranger out. If I’m missing and my phone isn’t, I want someone close to me to be able to unlock it in case I got a photo of my abductor or left a cryptic message that will solve the mystery.”
“You could leave a clear message.”
“I wouldn’t insult your intelligence by suggesting you couldn’t crack the code.”
“That’s considerate of you.” He tapped the flashlight icon. Cool blue LED illuminated the path before them as thoroughly as a full moon.
They made it to the garage without bowling down the steps. Lex opened the driver’s door of the SUV, shoved the comforter over the headrest into the back seat, and jingled the keys. “I can’t drive in the dark.”
She huffed and came around the hood. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
He allowed his hand to graze her hip under the guise of helping her into the driver’s seat — one brief, mostly innocent touch to prove she was real. “I had other things on my mind.”
The brake lights bathed the side of the house in red as she backed into the driveway. Lex closed the garage door and jumped into the passenger seat. “Go, go, go,” he urged like a bank robber directing the getaway driver.
She piloted the hulking vehicle down the driveway with a dismaying adherence to safety. “Why no night driving?”
“Oncoming headlights and streetlights bloom, bleed across my entire field of vision,
and blind me like I’m staring into the sun.”
“I can see how that might be dangerous.”
Opening night of his comeback tour, he’d discovered a manifestation the doctors hadn’t warned him about. “I nearly fell off the stage once because of the lights. Everybody thought I was drunk. I almost let them keep thinking it rather than admit I was having a problem, but it would have been shitty to let them keep believing they were on death watch.”
She tentatively asked, “Have you had it checked out?”
At the time of her last attempt to get him to seek medical attention, he’d refused to see a doctor who might discover his secret identity as a lush, but that cat had exploded out of the bag years ago. “I’m thoroughly diagnosed. It’s one of a dozen -opathies I drank myself into. All the recovery I can expect from virtuous living has already happened. Now it’s a matter of holding the fort until the inevitable decline of age.”
She looked both ways at the foot of the driveway before pulling onto the road. “Time to get a full-time chauffeur, rock star.”
“Haven’t you heard?” He drew a knuckle along the curve of her ear — another mostly innocent touch that turned into a flash of dark pleasure when she shivered. “I am the worst rock star. I’d rather be in bed before the streetlights come on.”
She bumped his hand away with her shoulder. “Quit it. That’s more dangerous than texting and driving.”
He rubbed his fingers on the seat, trying to scour off the temptation to stroke her velvet skin. He changed the subject from his infirmities before she started to wonder if his dick was broken, too. “How many shows have you been at?”
“Um.” The abrupt shift seemed to unbalance her. “I’m not sure. If we’re in roughly the same place at the same time and I can get tickets, I go.”
“You can always get tickets, Gin.”
He didn’t show his face for a year after hitting rock bottom, resulting in a three-year delay between albums, which was long even for him. He released two in the three years that followed, his pace quickened by sobriety and the pressing need to compensate for that first post-rehab farce.
Critics had hailed that album as a “triumphant return,” proof critics didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. Lex heard every bit of his weakness and fear in that recording. If he could erase it from the collective memory, he would. He refused to play those songs now. He cringed at the thought of Gin hearing them live at those early gigs, and the discomfort darkened his mood. “Why come at all?”
“Because you’re good live.”
He was, but the excuse sounded like bullshit nonetheless. “I’m better in the studio, and you hate the noise and crowds at concerts. Why go to mine?”
“I don’t know, because I want to see with my own eyes that you’re okay?” His irritability had infected her. “Why do you watch my movies?”
“There’s a huge difference. You weren’t in the same goddamn room when I was watching you work.”
“Are you angry because I was there or because I didn’t let you know I was there?”
“What do you think?”
She stepped on the brakes and stopped the SUV in the middle of the road. “Is the sex cancelled? Because we can fight without driving fifty miles in search of rubbers.”
What the hell was he doing? He’d never tried so hard to sabotage himself without the help of alcohol. He shouldn’t have touched her. Those two little hits had impaired his judgment. “My vote is for cathartic yelling and makeup sex, but it’s your call.”
“Fine.” She shook her head and gassed the SUV back into motion. The road was too narrow for a U-turn. “Yell away because I didn’t ask for permission to gawk at your glory like thousands of other people.”
“That’s another thing! You can’t mingle with the rabble. Men go to concerts for the sole purpose of rubbing their dicks on strange women.”
“Not all men.”
A vein throbbed in his forehead. “Yes, all men! There has never been a show where a bunch of dudes hung out together and just enjoyed the music.”
“That’s a sexist stereotype. You haven’t been to every concert. You don’t know for a fact there aren’t pockets of abstinent guys defending each other from the hordes of horny women flashing their tits and throwing their underwear at the stage.”
He threw her an incredulous look. “Did you just go men’s rights activist on me?”
The dashboard lights gave her stoic expression a greenish tinge. “You wanted to yell. Dumb arguments aren’t as easy as men make them look. I’m doing my best.”
“This isn’t a dumb argument. If you don’t want to be backstage, fine” — less fine that she was determined to avoid him, but beside the point for the purposes of this not dumb argument — “but at least let me know you’re there so I can give you a security bruiser to flick away the creeps.”
“That would attract way more attention. A woman with no tits and no ass has a pretty easy time being unnoticed.”
So if something bad happened to her, it would be unnoticed. Christ, he was going to have to put somebody on the door at every show to look for her and be her shadow if she showed up unannounced.
She drove past a driveway, and he compounded his offenses for the evening by backseat driving. “You could have turned around there.”
“All this yelling is making me the opposite of sleepy. Now I’m going to need one orgasm to wind me down to normal insomnia and another to put me to sleep.”
He leaned forward to get a better look at her face, trying to determine which one of them had finally cracked.
“Go ahead and get all the bitchy out of your system,” she encouraged. “Just keep in mind, ongoing attitude is going to make more work for you later.”
His chest tightened, in the overly full way. “You’re indulging my combative streak. On purpose.”
“It’s going to be a long drive. I have to keep you attentive somehow.”
He made a war of everything. He was loud. He overreacted to the slightest provocation. It was one of many unadmirable traits he’d tried to hide from her — without much success, evidently.
But instead of being repulsed, she was humoring him as if his melodrama wasn’t deranged.
Her indulgence made him even more reckless. “It’s not like we can make a baby, and I’m clean, darlin’, I swear.”
Grinning, she swatted the hand inching toward her thigh. “What about your streak of adulting responsibly?”
“I’ll still have a good record for flossing.”
“Oral hygiene is sexy,” she conceded, “but not as sexy as latex.”
They passed the only gas station Grayson boasted. As predicted, nobody was home.
He slouched in his seat to alleviate pressure on his prematurely excited groin. “Drive faster.”
“You want to argue about the speed limit now?”
He groaned and melted toward the floor.
It took thirty minutes to find a crossroads with enough traffic to justify the operation of an all-night convenience store.
Lex opened his door. “Keep the engine running. I’ll be right back.”
He trotted into the store. The universe smiled on not-so-young lovers and made the condoms prominently displayed and fully stocked. He grabbed a variety pack so he could switch if the first choice didn’t tickle Gin’s fancy and took the box to the register.
The elderly gentleman behind the counter fell outside the demographic Lex expected to get a wide-eyed stare from. He turned around to see if he’d interrupted a robbery, happy to be an accomplice if it would get him back to Gin faster.
Only a rack of tabloids confronted him. Post-rehab, his behavior had rarely been outrageous enough to warrant a corner on the front page, primarily when he was standing next to an actress or model he was presumed to be dating. He attributed that attention to beautiful women selling magazines.
The beautiful woman dominating the covers this week was Gin. The anniversary of the encounter with Jeremy Fogle th
at proved fatal for both her brother and her stalker was a perennial favorite of the scandal rags, so it was no surprise to see her there. One headline reached out and slapped him, though.
Gone and Forgotten: Gin Greene observed the anniversary of her brother’s death by partying with the band.
It accompanied a photo of him and Gin that was five or six years old. They were leaving a party he didn’t remember but assumed was for his benefit because she never showed that much thigh at her own industry shindigs. She was watching her feet because she worried about her footing when she wore sky-high heels.
He was watching her with the fixation of a ravenous predator.
He met the clerk’s stare unflinchingly, silently daring him to say one fucking word and give him somewhere to direct the anger boiling in his guts.
The old man’s brows lifted, but he had the sense to keep his mouth shut except to state the total due.
Lex paid cash, snatched his purchase off the counter, and stalked out of the store without waiting for his change.
Gin’s eyes widened when he slammed into the SUV. “Is it one of those pro-STD stores that doesn’t sell rubbers?”
He threw the box on top of the dashboard. “Let’s get out of here.”
She steered the SUV back onto the road. “What happened?”
He dug his fingers into the back of his rigid neck to wring out the strain saturating his muscles. “I don’t know how our promotional efforts are doing with legitimate media, but the tabloids are in full swing.”
In defiance of his ill temper, she laughed. “Did you see the one where they edited an old photo of us together trying to make it look current? They gave you stubble.”
“As if I’d show my face in public without shaving.”
“And you’re the lucky one. I looked like I slept face down on a pleated pillow. The years have not been kind to me.”
Lex had seen no indication she’d aged at all, but more than ocular damage might be blurring his vision where she was concerned. Even if she did have a few more lines around her eyes, he had better things to do than count them to compare to a younger version lost to time while the real thing was sitting beside him, here and now. “You’re more beautiful than you’ve ever been.”
