“Come on, beso, let’s get in bed,” he tells me.
“No, Pax. I don’t want to.” And it’s the truth. For the first time since I met Paxton, even when we were just friends, I have no desire to get into bed with him. Instead I head into the kitchen and open the cabinet that is stocked with alcohol. I take out the whiskey and uncap the bottle, taking a pull off it before going to find a glass. “You want some?” I ask without looking at him.
“No, kid, I don’t. I want to get in bed with you.”
I pour some in my glass and lean back against the counter, enjoying the burn as the alcohol slides down my throat. I stare at Paxton as he leans into the island, staring at me with frustration. “You got something you need to tell me?” he asks me. “‘Cause I don’t want to sit here all night staring at your cranky ass. If you’re pissed about something, let me know so we can move on.”
“You two seemed pretty comfortable with each other,” I tell him ‘cause I don’t know what to say. How do I describe the indescribable – the air, the shift, the change that happened when they were together?
“Ha,” he lets out a bitter laugh. “She makes my skin crawl.”
“Why, Pax? Why does she make your skin crawl?”
“Because, Jess, she is the epitome of everything I hate about this life.”
“Sounds like she got to you.”
He shakes his head at me. “Why did her in that room bother you so much?”
“It wasn’t her. It was your reaction to her.”
“My reaction? What the fuck does that mean? She walked in the room, I stood up, took you with me and got the hell out of there.”
“That’s not what happened, Pax.”
“Oh yeah? Tell me then, what happened?”
I stall, taking a drink, because I don’t know what to say. “Your voice, when you talked to her. Your hands, when you grabbed a hold of her.”
“You’re being paranoid. There was no ‘voice’ and no ‘hands’. There was nothing. There never was anything. Any reaction you saw out of me was disgust. That girl is scum, Jessa.”
“Then why were you with her? Why was it her that left you and not the other way around?”
“You want it? You want the whole story, huh? ‘Cause if this is the reaction I’m getting from her walking into a damn room then I don’t really want to see you after I tell you about being with her.”
“I’m tired of her being the one thing you won’t talk about. Why won’t you talk about her?”
“Because, beso, I know how it feels to hear about you wanting other guys. I know how it feels to watch you with one of those guys… two actually. Why the fuck would I tell you about me with anyone but you? Why the hell would I do that?”
“Because I’m asking you to.”
Paxton pushes himself off the counter, muttering curse words, his eyes burrowing into mine. He walks around the counter to me, propping his hands on either side of me, getting in my face. “What are you gonna do? You gonna pull this cold shit? You gonna not talk to me, not sleep in our bed after I tell you about her? Why would I do that? What the hell does it matter?”
“It matters because you won’t fucking tell me,” I shout, pushing at his chest, but he doesn’t move. “If all you had to tell me was that she was your girlfriend. That she left you for your friend, then you would just fucking say it, but you don’t. You don’t tell me because you know… you know what you had, what you have, is still between us.”
“Ahh… fuck off. You are already turning this into some bullshit it ain’t. If you are going to start comparing what happened with me and her to what I have with you then you are already fucking with yourself.”
“You’re telling me everything, Paxton, everything but what I want to hear. Everything but the truth.”
“There is no truth,” he snarls, his face so close to mine that I can feel his words on my skin. “You are telling yourself lies.”
“Unless you tell me, I can only listen to my imagination,” I tell him, grabbing a hold of his chin and clamping down hard. “Why are you so affected by her? Why are you trying to protect me from what you were with her?”
He flares his nostrils and flexes his jaw then pushes away from the counter. “If we are going to do this- rehash all this shit that is completely irrelevant and is only going to piss you off- it’s going to be in our bed with you in my arms.” He grabs the bottle of whiskey and my hand and brings us both into the bedroom. He sets the whiskey down on the bedside table, empties his pockets and takes his shirt off. “Fuck. I swear to God, Jessa,” he tells me, turning around and looking at me. “If you let that bitch come between us in any way, even if it’s just in your delusional head space, I will lose my mind. Do you hear me?”
“Yeah, Pax, I hear you,” I tell him, pulling off my clothes and pulling on one of his t-shirts. I grab the whiskey and sit down on the bed underneath his Venice mural instead of next to him where I usually am.
“That’s how this shit is gonna go, huh? You gonna stay out of my arms until you get all the details?”
“Yep,” I tell him, feeling no desire to curl up to him at the moment. I un-cap the bottle and take a swig, passing it over to him where he is sitting on the bed now. He does the same and holds onto the bottle.
“I don’t know what you want me to tell you, kid.”
“Start at the beginning.”
He takes a deep breath and pierces my eyes with his. “Day one?” he asks with a big, fake smile plastered on his face.
“Might as well.”
“I met her after my first show with Chaos. She was running the club we played at,” he tells me, like he’s bored to death. “I was fifteen and she was nineteen but she leached onto me from day one. I was trying to stay the fuck out of Glencoe and spending my nights on the couch of whoever would have me, so she took me in. We were fucking, but all I was was the girl’s roommate. She was my fuck buddy,” he pauses to give me a tight smile. “You know all about that, right?”
“We’re not talking about me,” I tell him, grabbing the whisky out of his hand.
“That was pretty much it. I was staying at her place and doing her drugs, but I was living my own life, doing my own thing, coming and going when I wanted, fucking whoever I wanted.” He stops, like that’s the end of the story.
“Get to the part where you fell in love with her.”
“That ain’t part of this story.”
I roll my eyes at him but don’t say anything because I’m not interested in having a conversation with him.
He takes a big, annoyed breath before carrying on. “When I left Chaos she came with me along with Billy, Louis and Elijah and they were all I had. Life was pretty fucking shitty at that point. Vincent was on some psychotic mission to take me down after we all left his band. I was depressed about Gabriel. I had officially become a high school dropout in order to avoid the Dixon’s and Glencoe altogether.”
My heart is pounding now, thinking about everything Paxton went through. Am I am being dramatic and selfish, making him rehash all this shit? I’m about to tell him to stop, but he starts talking again.
“Then we started Polly and things got intense with her. She needed all kinds of shit and words from me that I didn’t care if I gave her or not, so I played along with her game. Where I went she went. When I didn’t want her around it meant fighting and hearing her yell for days. When I would try to get with another girl it was suddenly a problem. I was in a seriously dramatic relationship and I had no idea how I got there. If I looked the wrong way or said the wrong word it was suddenly cause for a major meltdown and threats of suicide. It wasn’t worth my energy to put up a fight and eventually, when my sanity started to come unhinged, she was one of the only people I trusted. Which was the wrong fucking call on my part, but my head was fucked up and I let myself become her puppet. Life was pretty much out of my hands at that point. So that was it. That was us.
“When I decided I didn’t want to do it any more – play music- she decided th
at she was moving on but failed to tell me that. So when I came home to her place and found her fucking Vincent, our relationship suddenly became a bigger deal than it really was. She was gone, but so was the place I was staying, the life that she had made mine. I had already given up the band and I wasn’t in a good place with the guys. So yeah, I was in the gutter and I started using heavier than I ever had.
“If it wasn’t for Vi things would have gone downhill a lot faster than they actually did. She was all I had for those few months but even with her I couldn’t see a way out of my life. I was supposed to be in Venice, but I was living in this cock-sucking town. I was mourning the loss of the music and feeling like there was nowhere to go. I knew that without any way to support myself, I was gonna have to go home to Rachel.
“When I overdosed, what happened between Stella and I became blown way out of proportion. According to her, and anyone that would listen to her, I was so heartbroken I tried to kill myself because I couldn’t live without her. And that’s it. That’s all I got. It’s not worth talking about, but there you fucking go.”
“How long were you with her?” I ask him. I don’t know if I want to keep making him talk about this, but I know in my heart that what happened between them was so much more substantial than what he’s telling me and I don’t want to have this conversation again. I want to get it over with now.
“Umm, I don’t fucking know, there wasn’t really a start day.”
“How long from the point when you moved in with her to the point when you found her fucking Vincent?” Paxton winces at my words so I know it still hurts – what she did to him.
“Jesus, Jessa, let me consult my diary from fucking 2009.”
“So, three years?”
“Sure,” he says. He’s trying to blow past all of this and that fact is making it fucking obvious that it’s still part of him
“But you never loved her? You never cared about her?” If he says no, I’m going to snap because I’m not that stupid.
“I don’t think you are really grasping what was going on with me at that point in my life. Gabriel and the only good things in my life had just been taken from me. I left my house when I was fifteen and my fucking mom probably didn’t even realize I was gone because the few times I did show back up there they acted like I didn’t exist. Literally. I walked into that house and they didn’t even look at me and when I would try to speak to her she just looked right through me like I wasn’t even fucking there. So in my life where I was kept like a slave, locked in rooms, I was suddenly invisible.
“So I already had all of that awesome shit going on for me, and then I met Billy and literally in that same week I was up on stage at places like The Cellar. I know you want me to tell you that I was deeply in love with her, that she was my everything, that I couldn’t exist without her, but the reality is that the only reason I even gave a shit when things ended between us was because she fucking knew how deep Vincent was digging to take me down. She knew he was the fucking enemy and she went to his side. She was just one more person in this world full of people who said they loved me but never really did. So I hate to have to lay it on you like this, but she didn’t really factor into my life all that much. I mean fuck, if there was one thing I had had in my life it was women and she was just another one. In that department I wasn’t some stupid fifteen year old kid. I had been around that block more than a few times and with women that were older, sexier, and a hell of a lot better than that one.
“I know when you talk to Vi and the guys, they tell you that the things that took me down were the band, the drugs, the drinking and Stella, but that ain’t the truth. I had been doing most of that shit – getting drunk, getting high, having sex, partying with grown men- since I was a kid. Yeah, the band shit was eye opening and made me see that humanity as a whole is selfish and evil. And yeah, I was doing heavier drugs than I ever did in Venice, and no, I never had any kind of long term relationship before Stella. But it wasn’t the shit that they could see that broke me, it was everything else – all the shit I kept from them, everything with Gabriel and Rachel, and the fact that for the first time in my life I felt absolutely alone. I had no one. So you can listen to all the things that have been said and unsaid by the people here. And you can make up your own shit in your own head. But what I’m telling you now is the only truth. And I don’t want to say it again. If you can’t get past this stupid bullshit I don’t know what to say to you, kid.”
“Shit,” I mutter, because Paxton’s words are true and I knew that. I’m the one person he tells all of this to, that he tells the important things to and… yeah, in the grand scheme of things, she probably didn’t mean all that much to him and I shouldn’t have doubted him. Not with what I know. I crawl across the bed and into his arms. “I’m sorry. I’m stupid.”
“Whatever. I’m done.”
“You could have just told me all of that. I told you before, I didn’t want to be walking into your past unprepared again after what I went through at Rachel’s. You could have just told me that, for instance, when Vi told me your ex-girlfriend broke your heart, she was wrong. Or when your mom told me you overdosed because of your ex-girlfriend you could have explained why that wasn’t the truth.”
“I thought you knew me better than that,” he mutters through his irritation.
“Okay, Pax… whatever. I’m sure if there was some mysterious man from my past that everyone around me told you I had been in love with and who broke my heart and who I hurt myself over… a man who you had to watch put his hands on me and listen to telling me that he misses me…. a man that I refused to talk to you about, that you would just let it go.”
“Fuck no, I wouldn’t.”
“What?” I ask with mock disappointment, “I thought you knew me better than that. Obviously, I didn’t really care about him. You should have known that.”
“Okay, I get it smartass. Can we move on now?”
“Sure. Why don’t you tell me about the older, sexier, better girls that you’ve been screwing since you were thirteen?” I say, laughing.
Paxton pulls me on top of him. He’s smiling now. “Yeah, let’s talk about that. You want to hear about the twenty year old that took my virginity?”
“I was kidding, Pax. No. God, I don’t want to hear about that.”
“You should have seen her, beso. Jesus, the tits on that woman.”
“Paxton, shut the hell up,” I tell him, moving my hands around his neck, ready to strangle him.
“Come on, beso, I want to tell you about her.”
“Are you serious?”
“Nah,” he says, removing my hands from his neck and rolling me over onto my back, pinning my arms above my head. “I don’t even remember it I was so drunk. I lost it with my next door neighbor, she was fourteen. My cousin and her best friend were in the room with us.”
“You asshole,” I tell him, moving my legs around his waist.
“The thing is, beso, who I slept with before you came along, and who you slept with before me… none of that shit matters because this thing that we’ve got going on… it’s not the same. This,” he pauses to raise his eyebrows at me, “is not something we have ever had or will ever have without each other. So all those sorry fuckers in our past… they’re forgotten. They’re nothing. They were never anything.”
I suck in a long, heavy breath because he’s so right and that truth is overwhelming sometimes. “We were never us until we had each other,” I tell him.
“Exactly. Nothing started until us.”
“All that other shit is non-existent.”
“Like it never fucking happened.”
“I’m sorry,” I tell him, removing one of my hands that he has pinned so I can reach out to touch his lips. “That I’m such a jealous bitch.”
“Woman, I swear to god, I didn’t think you had it in you. It’s good to see you on your toes; thinking someone could take me from you. You never give me that. I mean, fuck, I’m a psychotic lunatic every time a
guy looks your way, but I got groupies showing me their tits and you don’t flinch. I like it. I like that you don’t want me with anyone but you.”
“You’re so blind, Pax. I flinch all day, every day. I hear women telling you they love you every time we go out in public. It’s not cool.”
He smiles at me and sits up, running his fingers under the bottom of my shirt. “I like it when you put my clothes on.”
“Oh my god, I know exactly what you are going to say next,” I tell him laughing.
“Oh yeah? Well then just do it so I don’t have to say it.”
I reach down and pull his t-shirt off me.
“Yeah… way better when you take my clothes off,” he says, running his hands over my breasts.
“You just couldn’t resist.”
“It was such a good line, beso.”
“You’re full of good lines.”
“They’re all true.”
“I know they are. I love you, Pax.”
“Everyone does,” he tells me.
“Jesus, that’s the truth,” I mutter.
“So you’re lucky, beso, because you… are the only one I love.”
“Holy shit Pax, you’re on a roll. You should take your hands off my tits and pick up your guitar. This shit is golden – platinum, actually.”
“If there is one thing I love more than making music with my guitar, it’s making sweet music with you,” he tells me in a deliberately sexy voice.
“Jesus, you have to shut up,” I tell him through my laughter.
“Put something in my mouth then, kid, and make me.”
“Hmmm, where to start…” I muse, pulling his mouth down to mine.
Chapter 5 - Paxton
It’s mornings like this when I gotta get up before Jessa and leave her arms that I’m opposed to this new life we’re living. The one where I gotta do shit beyond be with her. And after last night’s run in with Stella, I want to leave her less than ever.
That was a fucking trip, watching that bitch walk through the door. I guess I should have expected it. Word got back to wherever she’s been creeping around that the band is back together and she wants back in. I almost want to talk to her just to hear what that sorry motherfucker Vincent is up to. I’m guessing shit ain’t going so stellar for him seeing how she’s trying to crawl back into my arms. Which is why she’s here. I know her game too well. She’s a climber and whatever small steps I’ve taken performing a few gigs apparently puts me above wherever Vincent is and I shouldn’t give a shit but if that asshole is suffering then, yeah… it makes me smile.
Inside of You (Jessa & Paxton #2) Page 5
