by Paige North
When I get outside, I start walking, hoping Colt isn’t following. I’ll just call a Lyft and leave all of this behind.
At least that’s the plan, but by the time I round the corner onto a street with hipster boutiques, legalized pot shops, and artisanal restaurants, I hear his voice rumble in the summer air behind me.
“Serena.”
I stop, not knowing what else to do. “What, Colt? What do you want?”
“Shit, where should I even start?”
My legs are Jell-O now that I’m facing him. The dim lights from the store windows cast shadows over half of his rocked body, making him seem like an animal stealthily inching out of the darkness to corner his prey. I’m the prey, and I hold my breath, wondering what he’s going to do next. Pounce? Or will he leave me in a quivering mess after he scowls and tells me that he’s a big star now and I’m nothing to him? That he’s been waiting over a year and a half just to say that to my face?
As my breathing quickens, a black Porsche tears around the corner and stops at the curb next to Colt. A man in sunglasses gets out and leaves the engine running as he purposefully walks back toward us.
“You’d best get out of here,” he says to Colt. “You’re about to be swamped.”
“Fuck.” Colt moves toward the purring car. It’s sleek, shiny, luxurious, and mean, the total opposite of the rusted pickup he used to drive. He goes to the passenger door and yanks it open. “Get in.”
I bar my chest with my arms. “Are you crazy?”
“Serena, if you want to hash this out right here and get your picture splashed all over TMZ with me, be my guest.”
Dammit, my parents would be furious if they knew I was within a mile of Colt. And my brother…? Jack would lose his mind.
I get into the car and, after Colt closes the door, I sink into the buttery upholstery. The seatbelt automatically eases over me, pinning me in place. As Colt goes around to the driver’s side, I blow out a breath. What am I doing? Then it occurs to me that maybe I’m only dreaming because of that stupid billboard I saw on the way here…
Colt dashes that theory as he slides into the car, shuts the door, and punches the accelerator. He easily navigates the city streets while the blue glow from the dashboard hushes over us.
I grip the sides of my seat, sitting as far away from him as I can manage. But that doesn’t mean I can’t smell the soap on his skin. It’s as if he’s giving off heat, and I can’t get enough of it. My own flesh is even vibrating because he’s so close.
“Where’re you taking me?” I ask.
“Away from prying eyes.”
“Why?”
He doesn’t say anything for a taut moment. There’s just illumination from the streetlights rolling over his insanely gorgeous, brooding face. There’s just the sadness of how I still love him but I don’t ever want to hold him back from the life he now has.
So why did he bust into that bar and tell me to come with him? I almost laugh to myself. Well, obviously Colt has come to sweep me away now that he’s famous, and the ugly past will be forgotten, right? Sure. First of all, he’s rumored to be dating Jennifer Page. Like I can compete with that. Heck, I never could compete, because the girls have always loved Colt, even the older, hotter ones. When I was fourteen and he was seventeen, he was dating women in their twenties. I never thought he would ever notice me—not until two years ago, the summer before I graduated.
The night that started everything.
Maybe he’s remembering those sunny days and hot nights too, back when everything was perfect during that magical summer. Right now, his knuckles are white as he grips the steering wheel, so whatever is going through his mind is definitely doing something to him.
At the possibility that he might still care, my heartbeat bucks, and I stir in my seat. His hold on the wheel tightens.
“So you have a bodyguard now,” I say lamely.
“You can call it that, but the studio hired them when I started getting bad PR. They’re just expensive babysitters. As soon as I start laying low, I won’t need them. They’re more or less here to see that I don’t fuck up in public again.”
The bar fights, the drinking, the scourge of the tabloids.
As we speed out of the city on the road to Haverill, his grip loosens on the wheel. “That’s why I’m in town, you know. Because of all the shit I’ve been getting into lately. The suits who produced Mystery Man pulled me off the press junkets, so my agent suggested that I get out of the public eye and cool off.”
“They don’t want you to create bad publicity for your big, new movie.”
“And they don’t want me to spoil my budding career.” Out of the corner of my eye, I see him smile bitterly. “They don’t want me to crash and burn and become what they call a ‘tabloid tragedy.’ So I came home to get out of the spotlight and spend time with Mom. I haven’t seen her but once or twice since I went to Europe.”
Europe. I nearly wince, because that’s where Colt’s career took off when he went there on location for that first, star-is-born movie with J. Page.
“Your mom,” I say. “I heard you bought her a new house.”
“You heard right,” he says. “It’s a tri-level near your parents’ place.”
So he’ll be visiting her nearby as long as he’s in town. “And how is your mom?”
“Good.”
I don’t need to ask about his dad, because Colt never met him. The guy took off the moment he found out Colt’s mom was pregnant.
That’s only part of the reason for the huge chip Colt always wore on his shoulder—and part of the reason I lied to him about Sebastian. I thought that if Colt ever found his way back to me, it needed to be because he truly loved me, not because he wanted to prove that he wasn’t like his old man. If he was to be a father, it would have to be without that chip. But there was also fame and fortune calling him, and I couldn’t keep him from that.
I just couldn’t.
As we fly down the road, I see another billboard for Mystery Man quickly approaching, and I brace myself for the sight of Colt and J. Page slobbering over each other. Then it passes without comment from him.
“Colt,” I say. “If you’re laying low, why were you in a bar in the city tonight?”
At his silence, I sneak a glance at him. He’s still as hard as granite.
Then he relents, slowing down the car while running a hand through his hair. He loosens some strands from the band holding his hair back, and they make him look even wilder. All I want to do is smooth them back from that perfect face.
“I was in that bar because I saw the picture you posted on Instagram,” he says quietly.
I keep staring at him. “You what?”
“I follow your account under a different name.”
A violent tingle shoots through me, tickling my belly, then my clit. I feel possessed, owned by him, and damn me, I’m into it. “So this whole time…”
“I’ve been seeing the pictures you’ve been posting.”
Thank God I haven’t posted any photos of Sebastian, but it’s as if Colt is this close to asking about him, still wondering who the “real” father of my baby is, still confused as to why I would supposedly cheat on him like I told him I did.
“Jesus, Serena,” he finally says. “The truth is that I couldn’t come to town without seeing you, and I figured the sooner it happened, the better. If I’m getting my shit together, this is a good first step.”
He lets up on the gas, slowing down even more, going the actual speed limit. I realize that I’ve been grasping the edges of my seat, and I loosen up.
He slides a look over to me and sighs roughly. “Listen, this night didn’t start out like I wanted it to. What do you say we start again?”
He sounds more like the old Colt, the guy I crushed on, the one who used to tease me and joke around with me, even though he never seemed to otherwise be very interested in Jack’s little sister. The one who suddenly kissed me on a night when I was twenty and I wasn’t e
xpecting it.
I want that Colt back more than anything.
“I’d love to start again,” I say, wishing deep inside that we could do the same when it comes to our son.
Chapter 3
I wouldn’t say the ice has been broken between Colt and me, but there’s a little bit of thawing as he turns on the radio to a local indie station, then sits back in his seat and drapes his hand over the wheel. I lay my head back too, watching him. Everything inside of me melts as my mind wanders to the good days.
To the first time he kissed me.
I’d just come home after my junior year of college, on the edge of giving up on Colt, assuming my love would be just as unrequited as always. He was my brother’s best friend, the bad boy of the county. When I returned, Jack and Colt had already stopped hanging out after Colt had gotten into one too many fights and ended up in jail again, and I was walking the short distance to a party in the neighborhood when Colt pulled up alongside me in his battered pickup.
Need a ride? he’d asked with that daredevil smile I could never resist.
I hopped into the truck, but before he started to drive, he teased me about the dangers of hitchhiking.
That’s not what I was doing, I’d said. And, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m too old to be lectured like a kid anymore.
His eyes had gone hazy, as if a sudden truth had snuck up and jumped him, and that’s when it happened.
Out of nowhere, he’d slid his hand to the back of my head and brought me in for the most head-spinning kiss in existence. It’d been heavenly, dizzy, wonderful, everything I’d been hoping for. And I never made it to that party because Colt ended up driving me to the lake and kissing me all night. We couldn’t get enough of each other, and in the following days and nights, he surprised me again by taking things slowly, whether it was unbuttoning my shirt, bringing me against him so I could see how hard I made him, or slipping his fingers into my panties and feeling how wet I was for him right before working me to my very first orgasm.
That summer, we met secretly, intensely, dating without telling anyone, especially my family.
The problem wasn’t just that Colt was like a son to my parents and a brother to Jack—being close to my family meant that they knew about all of his baggage, and they would have freaked out if they knew I was with a guy who didn’t have much of a future. Besides, I didn’t know if we truly were a real couple, because we never talked about what our relationship meant. It was just the two of us meeting every night and spending that enchanted time together.
What I would do to have that Colt with me again…
The blue dashboard lights bathe him as I gaze at those lips, thinking of how soft they used to be against mine, then more demanding whenever I would pull him to me, leading his hand to my pussy to stop the ache…
Oh…
After I sigh, Colt pulls over to the side of the lonely road, then leaves the engine humming. He looks at me, and I think he heard me make that soft sound of need. A thrill travels through me, happy that he heard it, nervous that he’s going to laugh and then tell me to go to hell. I’m already damp between my thighs, and I wonder if he’s had so many women that he can sense when one is in heat for him.
As I stare through the windshield, I realize that he’s brought us to the high school with its brick walls and green lawn, and I frown.
He laughs, low and gravelly. “This would be the second step in getting my shit together.”
“Visiting the high school in the dead of night?” Am I here to take a walk down memory lane with him so he can purge every memory and move on with his new life?
“Sure, why not come here?” He jerks his chin at the two-story building. “This is where I really learned to be a total fuck up. Haverill High was basically the start of my tabloid tragedy.”
“You might want to talk to your middle school teachers to make sure you didn’t start even earlier.”
Silence hangs between us because… Did I just crack a joke to the guy who looked like he was ready to rampage through that bar in Portland just a short time ago?
I used to be able to joke a lot with Colt, and when he laughs a little now, I start wondering if he’s not as angry at me as I first thought.
It might be a good idea for me to test the theory that we can have a normal conversation, so I go for it. “I still remember the day you got kicked out of school for mouthing off to Mr. Tolby in Civics. I think that was the day you became a legend in the hallways.”
“Tolby was a bully. Besides, that incident was just the last straw in a long line of deep shit I plowed for myself here.”
Tell me about it. Bad grades, bad attendance, and an even worse attitude got him expelled when he was just sixteen. My brother, who’d become a decent student and a respected athlete, got extremely pissed at Colt for the expulsion, saying he was too lazy to study anyway and confronting Mr. Tolby was his solution for getting the hell out of school early. But in my eyes, Colt was just misunderstood, a James Dean who drove fast cars and seduced women with a tilted smile. There was so much more to him than this; there was a deeper, more contemplative side that I truly saw after we got together.
But there was always that chip on Colt’s shoulder too. I can even see it weighing him down now as he watches me. The delinquent with a dad who left. The fuck up who always tried to make good but who always ended up fucking up more.
“What matters,” I say, “is that you stuck your neck out for your fellow students back then.”
“Yeah, a lot of good it did me. Got myself a job at a gas station and ended up managing it. I really commanded great respect in this town at that point.”
Some of the resentment he always felt about growing up poor hardens his words, and he puts pedal to the metal and peels away from the high school. But he’s not as tense as he was on the ride here. He’s a little looser now, slumping in his seat, sliding me another look that turns me to bubbling liquid.
“Tell me, Cookie,” he says, using the childhood nickname he gave me from back in my Girl Scout cookie selling days. “Didn’t you ever want to stand up in Mr. Tolby’s class and tell him to cram it where the sun don’t shine?”
“No, because even back then I wanted to be a teacher. True, I’m going to be in an elementary classroom and not in a high school, but I still showed respect, no matter what I thought about his teaching style.”
“I still think you could’ve given him the business.”
“Somehow I doubt he would’ve been very intimidated by all five foot four inches of me.”
“I don’t know. You pack a lot of power, kind of like Mighty Mouse.”
We both smile, but with each moment that passes, I get more nervous that he’s going to ask about Sebastian. That has to be the real reason he got me into his car, and he’s just biding his time.
My heartbeat kicks with nerves as he turns onto Main Street, then pulls into Lindy’s Burger.
“If I know you,” he says, heading for the drive thru, “you’re hungry by now. You might be the size of Mighty Mouse, but you sure eat like Bullwinkle.”
“Hey.” I laugh. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you that guys who don’t insult women have a lot more charm? And maybe if you used some of it you’d get another million dollars or so for your next movie.”
“I should hire you as my agent.”
As we peruse the lit-up menu, I remember so many nights driving through here, ordering double burgers and loads of fries with chocolate shakes and soda, then driving somewhere private where we could stay out of sight from everyone, existing in our own little world together. After the food was gone, Colt would lay me down on our blanket and do things to me that I can’t imagine any man ever doing for the rest of my life. He was my first time and, as far as I’m concerned, my only time.
We end up ordering what we used to order, and after we get our food, he drives us away. I’m already well into the fries, and I offer him one. When he reaches out to take it, I snatch it from him and bite into it.
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“Real slow for a guy who was in an action movie,” I say with my mouth full.
Now I get a genuine smile out of him—God, my Colt—and I sigh into my seat. I’m not only as turned on as hell, but I’m relieved that he seems to have forgiven me in some way. Still, I can tell he still has that chip on his shoulder. Maybe it’s never going to go away.
“Where to now?” I ask.
“Somewhere you can scarf down all this food without anyone seeing you.”
He turns the car onto Berry Road, and I know exactly where we’re going for the next stop on memory lane: the lake.
He drives around to the far, remote side where the kids never go. You can see their bonfires and a big party across the water, but we’re all alone, and he cuts the car’s engine. There’s a look on his face that tells me he’s affected by being here, at the place where we spent so much time together.
He leaves the music on, grabs most of the food in the cardboard tray, and gets out of the car. I watch him go to the hood where the headlights are still on, washing over his perfect body. I’ve got a beautiful, pussy-throbbing view of those wide shoulders and his muscled back under his tee shirt, as well as his tight ass in those faded jeans. He doesn’t seem to care how expensive this car is, because he sits on the hood. Then, without looking back at me, he nonchalantly gestures for me to join him.
Good idea? Bad? I’m not sure yet as I carry the shakes and soda, then lean back against the hood too. I set the cardboard tray behind us, then we eat our burgers and fries.
He laughs out of the blue. “You wouldn’t ever catch any of those Hollywood people out here eating burgers like this.”
“Hollywood people?” I lift an eyebrow. “Aren’t you one of them now?”
“Fuck no. Do you know how silly and pretentious they are? The actors I’ve worked with get manicures and enemas at day spas. And everyone eats little bitty portions of food at real expensive restaurants, so I don’t know how they have enough in their systems to even need all those fancy cleanses. The first time I went to a five-star restaurant, I had to go out for burgers just like this afterward.”
