by Megan Walker
Allison rolls over on top of me, kissing me deeply and desperately. We’re locked in this frantic embrace, and I feel beads of sweat forming on my forehead, on my arms, on my back, and our bodies slide against each other like we were made to fit. This deep-down ache spreads through me as my body demands to be inside her, encompassed by her, swallowed up entirely in my siren, my muse. Allison’s legs spread, and she reaches over to her nightstand, I’m guessing for a condom.
Deep in my heart, something turns to ice. I choke on my own breath, sitting up, pulling away from her, leaning against the headboard. Allison’s hand pauses, halfway out of the drawer with the square wrapper. Her eyes are wide and vulnerable.
“Shane?” she says.
I shake my head. I want her, god, I want her so bad, and JT seems to be keeping his bargain and staying where he can’t see us, so I should be able to do this, but—
“I have to tell you something,” I say, not even sure what it is yet, just certain that if I don’t recognize my fears, I’m not going to be able to follow through.
Allison looks terrified, and I pull her into my arms again, holding her around the waist, still against my body. “I know this isn’t fair, and I know you can’t know what you’re going to want, or what’s going to happen. But I’m a mess, Ally. I’m such a mess, and I cannot handle being left by you right now. I don’t have any right to demand anything of you, but after everything else—” My voice cracks and I pause until I’m sure I can speak again. “I can’t do this and then lose you. Not right now. Not when everyone else has already left me.”
Allison’s fingers trail up my neck. “Shane. Have I given you any indication that I’m leaving?”
I bite my lip. Half the world has seen me naked, but I don’t think anyone has ever seen me this exposed. “I need you,” I say.
Allison smiles. “I need you, too.”
Something inside of me shatters apart. No more hesitation. I pull her against my chest and roll over on top of her, kissing her desperately. In that moment, she’s everything to me, and I reach up and take the condom from her and roll it on. We kiss, our tongues slipping back and forth as I slide inside her, tight enough to see stars, and we rock back and forth, our voices blending into each other like instruments in tune. Being with her is like the moment that the pieces of a song—the words and the melody and that ethereal thing I’m trying to say but can’t quite pin down—all snap together, and suddenly it’s good, and it works, and I can’t imagine it any other way. I reach one hand under her hip, resting it on the small of her back and lifting her off the bed, joining with her in a rhythm all our own. She calls my name, and there’s an urgency to it.
But I’m not ready yet for this first time to end. I drop to my elbows on the bed, supporting myself on top of her. I run one hand under her chin and kiss her gently, slowing our pace. “Trust me?” I ask her.
She nods.
I smile and pull out of her, lying next to her on the bed again and pulling her into my arms. Neither of us is finished, and she whimpers softly and reaches down, like she’s checking to make sure I’m not done.
“Is this working for you?” she asks. “I mean, it’s good for you, right?”
That is not even a problem. “God, yes, it’s good. You can’t tell?”
“Mmmm,” Allison says. “I thought so, but—”
“Trust me,” I say again. “Let me know when you’re getting close.” I climb on top of her, slipping back in where I belong. Our ardor soars to new heights, and I call out her name and she responds with mine. I was taught this method years ago by a girl who said it was the only way she’d ever been able to finish—walking right up to the edge and then backing off, rolling passion forward like waves, cresting and breaking. I liked it well enough then, but since then I’d generally regarded it as too much work for the return.
But with Allison I want to return again and again. We work up again, until we’re not only floating but hovering somewhere above the clouds. Her cries grow urgent again, and her fingers dig deep into my back. “Oh, god,” she says. “I’m getting close.”
I kiss her deeply and pull out again, rolling onto my back and pulling her with me. She lands on top of me, her fingers digging into my hair, tugging just the right amount. I ache against her, and I’m sure this is the last time I can bear to stop.
“God, that’s good,” she says, her voice raw, and I murmur my agreement. I’m holding back still, holding on to everything I want to pour into her. It won’t be long now.
Allison lays her head on my chest. “Tell me it means something,” she whispers. “I know you said sex means something different to you than it does to me, and that’s fine, but tell me it isn’t just physical.”
I lift her chin, drawing her back to me. “This means everything to me. I get it now, what you mean about trust. About being vulnerable. I need you, in more ways than one.”
I think I see tears gleaming in the corners of her eyes, and she spreads her legs again, squeezing me between her thighs. “I don’t want to be some stopgap,” she says. “I don’t want to be someone you need right now and then move on from when you go back to your normal life.”
“You’re not,” I tell her. “I’ve needed you for years. Maybe always. I just didn’t know it.”
One tear slides down her cheek, and then she shifts on top of me, sliding me inside her again, and we’re moving with a fever I’ve never felt. My vision blurs, and the fever spikes, and we both scream out together and collapse in a tangle of fears and hopes and desperation. Our mouths find each other and we kiss and kiss as our hands tremble against skin and our bodies gasp for breath.
I love her, I realize. I love her.
I’ll never be the same again.
Thirteen
Shane
We order food in and stay in bed for hours afterward, talking and laughing and holding each other. When Allison goes to answer the door for the delivery guy, she pulls on my shirt, and I shake my head at her. “You’re going to get photographed answering the door in that. The press has had enough time to figure out where you live and stake out your apartment.”
Allison smiles. “Would you rather answer the door in my shirt?”
“I might be religiously opposed to you putting on clothes,” I say. “But my shirt looks hot on you, so I say go for it. As long as you’re cool with being on TMZ tomorrow standing in your doorway wearing that shirt and holding a wad of cash.”
“We paid on the website,” she says. “Tip included. Which you’d know, if you were paying attention. I put it on your card.”
I grin at her and stretch out in bed. The truth is, I like the idea of her being in the news wearing my clothes. It probably makes me a territorial jerk, but I want everyone in the world to know she’s with me. She pulls on a pair of jeans to go get the door and comes back with containers of Chinese food that didn’t come from the place down the street from me, which makes it all kinds of new and interesting compared to my general diet over the last few months.
Good thing I’ve been spending the sizable portion of the night I’m awake working out on my gym equipment. I think I’m actually in better shape now than I was before the accident. Spending all your hours—waking or not—feeling trapped is some powerful motivation to keep your body moving.
“So,” Allison says, handing me a fork and a container of mushroom chicken, “speaking of the press, have they been harassing you to talk about the accident?”
As much as I don’t love talking about the accident, I’m also not ready to unpack everything that just happened between us. I’m feeling things I’m afraid to say, all of which scare me more than telling her about the way I’ve been avoiding the press.
Besides, she’s Googled me, so she knows I haven’t been talking about it. I swear reporters can write more about what I haven’t said than would fit in any interview I could possibly give them. “Yea
h. I hate it, but it’s my own fault. I was always kind of a media whore before, so they feel entitled to know what’s going on. And I haven’t given them anything.”
“Is it that you don’t want to talk about what happened to JT?”
I don’t want to talk about him standing next to my girlfriend’s bed and sticking a finger in her honey shrimp. “Yeah. Mostly, though, they want to know what I’m going to do now. The truth is, I don’t know.”
Allison nods and slides off her jeans, then climbs in bed next to me still wearing my shirt. I put an arm around her and eat my chicken one-handed. “Right,” Allison says. “And you don’t want to go solo or join another band. Do you have any ideas what you do want to do?”
I shrug. “Music is the only thing I know.”
“Have you thought about taking a less public role? Being a manager? Or an agent?”
“Yeah,” I say. “But I don’t really want to have to advise jerks like me, you know? I’m really bad at shutting up and doing what other people want, and I’m even worse at not telling people when they’re being complete idiots.”
“I don’t know,” Allison says. “A lot of the managers I’ve worked with are happy to tell people when they’re being complete idiots.”
“Yeah, well, I think it would drive me nuts.”
Allison nods. “So you don’t have any ideas?”
“I don’t know. I’ve mostly been sitting at home, so busy not writing that album my agent thinks I’m working on that I haven’t had a lot of time to put thought into it.”
That makes no damn sense, but it’s true all the same, and Allison doesn’t call me on it. “Do you feel like maybe you don’t want to move on? Like if you decide what you’re going to do next, it’s a betrayal of JT?”
JT licks his fingers. “Dude, I don’t care if you move on.”
“I think it’s even dumber than that,” I say. “I think it feels like giving up. Like if I don’t admit that my life is over, maybe it won’t be.”
“That part of your life, anyway,” Allison says, and I run my fingers up under the hem of her shirt.
“Yeah, okay,” I say. “That part of my life.”
She snuggles up against me, and JT wanders off down the hall.
“I used to think it would be cool to own a nightclub,” I say. “To be in charge of the atmosphere and the community and the curation of shows, you know? I wouldn’t really want to do it, because the idea of dealing with staffing and zoning and liquor licensing is kind of a nightmare, plus I don’t like the idea of being trapped in one place all the time.” I roll my eyes. “I know. I sound like a total asshole, right? Most people are stuck in one place dealing with all kinds of crap for their jobs. But I’m spoiled.”
“I don’t know. I’m just as spoiled as you are.”
“So you get it?”
“I do,” she says. “I just wonder if there isn’t something that would involve the parts of owning a club that sound good to you, but not the bad parts. Like, event management for a venue? With your connections you could probably start somewhere pretty big.”
I chew a bite of chicken, considering. “I’d be stuck in one place, still. And I’d probably end up dealing with a lot of details I don’t want to be in charge of.” I pause. “But there was this thing I used to talk about doing with Kevin and JT. We wanted to sponsor a music festival.”
Allison looks up at me. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I had this idea for a whole series of festivals, actually, but we figured we’d never have time for it. I thought it would be awesome to pull in a bunch of headliners, with the requirement that they have to do something novel, something people can’t see anywhere else. It could be a new song that’s not on any of their albums, or a cover that their fans have been dying for, or swap out with the singer or guitarist from another band. So the big draw for the festival is you have all these bands doing stuff you can’t see otherwise, and then you also get a bunch of new bands who haven’t gotten the attention they deserve yet, you know? We’d be sort of paying it forward to the people who haven’t made it yet, and we’d get to direct people’s attention to bands we think they should know about, people who ought to be getting more press than they are.”
“Clearly that is what you should be doing.”
“Eh,” I say, spearing a mushroom with my fork. “I don’t know.”
“You should. Because that’s the most excited I’ve seen you about anything. You barely even stopped talking about it to breathe.”
I smile, running my hand under her ass. “The most excited you’ve seen me, huh?”
She swats at me. “About your career.”
“It would be a hell of a lot of work. There’s a lot of stuff I wouldn’t want to deal with. Like finding a venue and getting permits and all of that. I’d want to do the part where I pull strings and use my connections and get bands to play, and the legwork finding new bands to showcase, but a lot of the rest of it—”
“You’d hire someone for the rest,” Allison says.
“Okaaaaay,” I say. “But that’s going to be a huge undertaking. It would cost a shit-ton of money upfront, and then it might fail. So yeah, I could probably bankroll it, or take out loans, but if people don’t come or if something goes wrong, I could lose everything.”
“That’s why you get investors,” Allison says. “With your name alone you could get people to invest, even more so if you made some phone calls and got people you know to agree to attach their names to it too.”
That’s something I’ve never thought of. “Investors, huh?”
“Yeah. There are people who pretty much just do that. They have a lot of money, and they’re always looking for endeavors to invest in. If it pans out, you have to pay them a cut, but there’s less risk up front. That’s what I did with my fashion line.”
I look at her. “You know how to do this.”
“Yep,” she says. “I can help you with that. I know how to put together a kick-ass professional presentation that got even my most skittish investors on board. You could totally do this.”
I’m quiet for a moment, thinking about whether or not that’s something I’d want to do, if it were possible. It was always a thing Kevin and JT and I had talked about doing someday, when we weren’t touring or writing the next album. We might have put together one of these events, or headlined it and used our name and had someone else put it together for us.
“I always thought it would be cool to have a whole series,” I say. “Different festivals around the nation. That would be a full-time gig.”
“It would,” Allison says. “It’d involve a lot of travel.”
“Yeah, it would. Not just going to the events, but going to see bands, networking, finding new music and bringing big names on board.” I look at her. “Would you be cool with that?”
Allison looks startled. “With you traveling?”
Oh, god. I shouldn’t have said that. I’ve suggested that she needs to be okay with what I’m doing in the future, which is suggesting that we’re going to have a future, which, yeah, I want, and she did offer to help me with the project, but—
“I’d be fine with that,” she says. “I have to work a lot, but the fashion design work I can do from anywhere, so sometimes I could come with you.” She squirms slightly. “If you wanted.”
“That would be awesome.” A part of it still sounds lonely to me, the hazard of having worked my entire adult life alongside my two best friends in the world. “I don’t love the idea of being in charge of something like that all by myself, though. I’d rather have someone work with me. Share the decision making, you know?”
“I’d help you,” Allison says.
“Which I appreciate,” I tell her. “But you’ve got your own fashion line to work on, plus the pageant stuff, plus costuming, so . . .”
“Fair point. But I do have
a lot of connections to bands.”
“Which I will exploit, trust me,” I say.
“And I’m always happy to offer an opinion.”
I laugh. “Yeah, that’s the truth.”
She elbows me and I bend down and kiss her shoulder. “I wonder if Kevin would be interested in something like that.”
“You should ask him,” Allison says.
I shrug. “I don’t know. I’ve badgered him so much about coming back to the band that I think he’s kind of done with me. He’s moving to Denver, and he’s got his own thing going on.”
“Does he have a job?” Allison asks. “Because he could probably work with you from Denver.”
I hate this idea. I know it’s an asshole thing to feel, but I don’t want Kevin to move away. I don’t want him to move on and leave me behind, but it’s already happened. It’s already done. “I don’t think I could ask him. I don’t think I could stand it if he said no.”
Allison is quiet, and I know she thinks that’s the wrong call, but I can’t imagine saying those words to him, not right now. If he told me he wanted nothing to do with it . . . I can’t take any more rejection.
“You can think about it,” Allison says.
“I will. You really think I could do something like that?”
“I think you’d be great at it.”
I set the empty carton of chicken on the nightstand and burrow down under the covers, my arms sliding up Allison’s body under the shirt. She murmurs softly and sets her food aside too, slipping down into my arms.
“You don’t sleep,” she says, “so what do you do? Watch TV? Play video games?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Exercise. Listen to music, sometimes. Lie in bed and try not to sleep. Probably tonight mostly that one.”
“Mmm,” she says. “I’m definitely going to sleep. But if that doesn’t bother you, I’d love for you to stay here.”
I pull her closer. “I’d love that. Are you a cuddly sleeper?”