Gently, I pulled her T-shirt over her head, revealing, full, creamy breasts capped by tiny, dark brown nipples. They stood at attention and Andrea moaned and writhed against my lips as I kissed them one by one, flicking my tongue against the hard tips. I lay on top, bare chest against bare chest, my groin against hers. She could feel my erection pressing insistently against her warm pubis, and the more I licked, suckled and massaged her breasts, burying my face between them, the harder she ground her pussy against my dick. Even in the dim bedroom light, I could tell her tight, thin leggings were totally soaked through. She pressed herself against my shaft, through my soft, faded jeans, with such dexterity that I thought I would come in my pants.
“Where’d you learn how to do that?” I asked, marveling. I’ve never been so close to orgasming from dry humping. But maybe it was my intense attraction to both her body and mind that was pushing me to the edge.
Andrea just smiled and pulled my face up to her. Once again, I dove in for the kiss, this time going deep and slow. It felt like diving into a deep lake—restorative, peaceful, calming. I lavished her face and neck with kisses until I wasn’t on the brink of orgasm any more. She gazed into my eyes with longing, and I made my way back down, kissing her neck, breasts and lower abdomen before pulling down her leggings to reveal her beautiful pussy.
I buried my face in the fawn-brown tuft of pubic hair, deeply inhaling her salty-sweet scent. Andrea moaned and pressed her cunt against my lips, eager, but I kept my kisses to the outer labia, teasing her with light kisses, circling her wet opening ever so lightly with my tongue. I was savoring this, too—every new discovery, every new taste. With my left hand, I rubbed one nipple, and with the right, I deeply inserted two fingers as I found her hard pink clit with my tongue. She was wet, so wet, and I sensed the pleasure wracking her body as I ran my tongue up and down against her clit, bringing her to the brink. Her whole body shuddered and she moaned uncontrollably.
“Fuck me,” she said.
That was all the permission I needed. I pulled down my jeans and sank the hard, hot length of my shaft into her tight, slick pussy. We both paused for a moment, savoring the perfect fit, before I withdrew my glistening length and plunged in again. Andrea matched me thrust for thrust, undulating her hips in perfect rhythm, her pussy contracting around my cock as if determined to milk every last drop out.
Her warm, wet cunt, soft, full breasts and beautiful face were too much to take. As I took my pleasure, mercilessly pounding her cunt, I knew I wouldn’t be able to last long.
“I’m going to come,” I told Andrea.
She nodded and smiled. “I want you to come in me.”
I assumed she was on birth control—but I had the sudden thought that even if she wasn’t, and she got pregnant, that would be okay, too.
“I’m going to come so hard.”
She grabbed my ass and pulled me deep, deep inside her. I groaned as the pleasure mounted and overtook me, surging with uncontrollable power. Quivering, spent, I lay beside her. She smiled down at me, curling one tendril of my long blonde hair around her finger.
“You’re amazing. I usually last longer,” I said. “You just made me lose control.”
“You have nothing to apologize for. That was incredible.”
“Really? You came?” I was surprised—I’d shot my load so fast it was surprising she’d had time to get off at all.
She nodded and blushed. “While you were going down on me. I guess I didn’t last very long, either.”
I pulled her against me and we cuddled, her warm breasts pushing against my chest. “This just means one thing,” I said, kissing the top of her head.
“What?”
“We’re going to need to do an encore performance.”
Chapter 14
Andrea
As we lay tangled together, deliciously spent, I wanted nothing more than to drift off to sleep. Vance was so incredibly good in bed—which was not surprising, considering how much experience he’d had. Still, I was surprised that he’d been so attentive, so mindful of my body’s responses. He seemed to genuinely garner pleasure by pleasuring me.
My ex only cared about himself. He thought there was something wrong with me because I couldn’t get off from his cock being jammed inside me again and again. We never had any foreplay; he rarely touched me down there, and I could count on one hand the number of times he’d gone down on me in the course of our five-year relationship.
“What are you thinking about?” Vance asked, his rich, resonant voice right up against my ear.
“Just that it’s funny to me that a rock star is so focused on my pleasure.”
“What did you expect? A pump and dump? Because I can supply that, too,” he said, joking.
“Ew, no!”
“No? You’re going to turn down my pump, just like that?”
“Stop,” I said, whacking him in the face with a pillow.
“Hey, watch it with that. This profile is insured for a cool million.”
“Really?”
“No, not really.” He snorted. “I’m a rock star, not a model. Which is why you’re going to get it!”
Vance tickled me, and I shrieked and kicked the sheets away. Finally, he relented, but not before another obtrusive thought flashed through my mind.
I hope he didn’t see my scars.
Some of the fallout from my relationship with Jonathan was emotional, but some of it was all too physical. Specifically, the constellation of cigarette burns on my back.
The burns started when I lectured Jonathan to stop smoking. It was early in our relationship, and I had just moved in with him. I couldn’t stand the constant reek of cigarette smoke in the house, the many ashtrays constantly sprouting butts. And most of all, I didn’t like that he disappeared for hours on end when he went on “cigarettes runs.” Or that he most often ducked out of the house for a smoke soon after his phone lit up with an unfamiliar number.
“Must be one of those robo-calls,” he’d said, pressing ignore. “Think I’m going to step outside and have a smoke.”
I was only seventeen, angry and emotional and jealous and in love—but I didn’t know how to communicate those emotions. I hardly knew how to deal with them at all. And in retrospect, even if I had expressed myself responsibly, it would have fallen on deaf ears.
“I’m sick of you always smoking,” I said, my voice bitter and angry. “You should quit.”
“I thought you liked it when I smoke outside the house, honey,” Jonathan said. A strange smile spread across his face. His expression was like pewter—it had a cold shine, but no light to it.
“No, I hate it!” I said.
“I’ll quit then. For you.” He walked up to me, still smiling, and held me as if to kiss me. Instead, he put his cigarette out on my upper arm.
The pain didn’t feel like pain—it felt like the silvery outlines of a tiny, round door. Something I went through and beyond, escaping the shackles of myself. I struggled weakly, but he held me there until the ember was completely extinguished.
“See?” He held up the cigarette butt. “I quit.”
The burn scabbed, a tiny red sun, then blistered. Finally, it healed into a silvery round white mark the size and shape of a smallpox vaccine scar. That’s what most people thought it was. Never mind that I was far too young to have been vaccinated for smallpox.
Jonathan didn’t stop burning me, but he did change locations. Anytime I did something he didn’t like, he punished me by putting a cigarette out on my back. The tiny circles traced my spine and spiraled across my buttocks. If we hadn’t been in a dim room, and if we hadn’t had sex in the missionary position, there’s no way Vance could have overlooked them.
From his rhythmic breathing and totally relaxed muscles, I could tell he was falling asleep. I gazed at his beautiful, long-limbed muscular body, splayed out in my bed, haloed by that golden mass of blonde hair. Every impulse in my body told me not to do what I was on the verge of doing.
But I
couldn’t let him see that part of me. Not yet. I’d never told anyone the depth of Jonathan’s sickness—which had become my own, more and more, with every day that I stayed with him.
I wanted to be a different person with Vance. I wanted a chance to heal with him. To tell him about my past—at my own pace.
So ever so gently, as Vance’s deep breathing became gentle snores, I extricated myself from his embrace, picked my clothes up from the floor, and tiptoed out the door.
Chapter 15
Vance
Lying in bed beside Andrea, I felt relaxed and at peace—sort of like I was drifting in the ocean on a sunny day. I totally wanted to fuck her again, too…after a brief nap.
I closed my eyes and considered how lucky I was. I’d been having fast, meaningless sex for so long that I forgot how good it could be with someone you genuinely cared about. How long had it been since I had sex with a girl more than once before moving on to the next? It had to have been longer than I’d been topping the charts with Brothers Three. So, five or six years?
Just as I was contemplating my good fortune in life, Andrea made the classic groupie maneuver. She scooted ever so slightly, ever so carefully, toward the edge of the bed. It could have been that she was getting up to go to the bathroom. Or she could be trying to sneak out. I decided to keep my eyes closed, my breathing regular, and see what her next move would be.
She lay still for a few moments, her body stiff. I kept still and threw a few soft snores into the mix. Believe me, I’m a pro at faking sleep. Andrea fell for the act and scooted quickly out of bed.
I can’t lie; I felt a little wounded by that. She was clearly trying to get away without me knowing. But why? I was sure we’d both experienced something special. And what was a better way to wrap it up than with a good snuggle session?
I peered through my barely parted lashes and saw Andrea in a familiar pose: bent over, hurriedly gathering her discarded leggings and panties. What was going on? Was she actually ditching me?
Maybe she actually was a groupie. Maybe the song was all a ruse, an elaborate way to get close to me. People had tried that before—Kent’s last intern, for example.
If you were just a piece of man meat to Andrea, I thought, let her go. You got your dick wet and you got some much-needed rest and relaxation. All she wasted was your time.
I wasn’t used to feeling this rejected. I snored again, then sneaked one last peek at Andrea as she scurried out. Her pale, narrow shoulders and luscious rear end were framed by the molding as she slowly turned the doorknob so as not to make a sound. The dim, late afternoon light faintly illuminated her gorgeous figure—as well as the dozens and dozens of scars marring it.
The tiny procession of round circles started at the very top and center of her back, right below her neck, before splitting into two lines of circles, one on each side of her spine. They ran parallel to each other until they hit the place where her waist flared into her hips. Then, they split off, each forming a spiral over one butt cheek.
An outside observe might have thought this was deliberate body modification, a form of scarification. Clearly, someone had done it with an eye toward the end result. But that person hadn’t been Andrea. She couldn’t have physically reached the places on her back where scars existed.
And judging by the way she’d hidden them from me, I could tell she wasn’t proud of the scars.
Someone did this to her, I thought as she clicked the door closed. Someone hurt her, and she didn’t want me to know about it.
How could I have been so dense? This knowledge explained so much about Andrea’s behavior. The fact that she didn’t have any belongings other than her backpack and laptop. Her willingness to join total strangers in a cabin in the woods. She was clearly on the run—something I should have recognized, having been on the run once myself.
And there were other things, too. The way she’d clenched her backpack in the car. The way she flinched, early on, when I made moves, even though she was clearly attracted to me. That first passionate kiss—and her immediate retreat.
Andrea had been a victim of abuse. I only hoped I hadn’t compounded her hurt. Had she really wanted to have sex with me, I wondered? Or did she just feel like she owed me in some way?
I didn’t think that was the case—Andrea seemed to enjoy herself as much as I had. But she couldn’t have totally let her guard down. Even in the throes of passion, she’d been careful to prevent me from seeing her back. What else had she kept from me? What else had she not wanted me to see?
I didn’t know. I only knew that I felt like a totally insensitive jerk. What was Andrea doing now? Where was she headed beyond the bedroom?
I hoped she hadn’t left. Every fiber in me wanted to go after her, to tell her that it was okay, she could trust me with her secrets. But I knew she didn’t want to talk about the scars. I was afraid that if I followed her, she would flee like a feral cat into the woods.
I decided it would be best to stay in bed a few minutes longer. At least until I’d processed everything that had happened today. Maybe then I’d figure out a way to deal with this. Or—even better—maybe Andrea would come back and join me under the sheets.
In the end, neither one of those things happened. I actually fell asleep for real while I was trying to figure out what to do. Chalk it up to another insensitive rock star moment, I guess.
Chapter 16
Andrea
As I sat on the landing of the spiral staircase, separated from Vance by a solid oak door, my heart pounded. I was panting as if I’d escaped a real menace—but the only thing I’d succeeded in doing was creating distance between myself and a beautiful man who’d done nothing but nice things for me.
This wasn’t logical. This wasn’t rational. I was running from intimacy like it was just another meth fire. I’d convinced myself that hiding the truth from Vance was the best way to promote my healing. But now that I was away from his embrace, it felt less like a support and more like another wall made to separate me from my true desires.
Pour yourself a drink, put on some lipstick and pull yourself together, I told myself, channeling my inner Elizabeth Taylor. And so, with a fatalistic now-or-never mentality, I went downstairs and took a shot from a half-full bottle of silver tequila. The warm, peppery liquor coursed through my veins, emboldening me. My tinted lip balm was still in the bathroom, on the other side of the door with Vance.
So I was as ready as I’d ever be.
I marched into the bedroom as if facing a firing squad, not my new lover. Sprawled naked in the bed, the sheet clinging to the generous outlines of his package, Vance had never looked more appealing. His cat-green eyes opened sleepily as I slid back into bed.
“Hey, babe,” he said.
I tingled with pleasure when he called me that. “No more Ms. Hebert?” I joked, poking his ribs.
“I think we’re well beyond formalities.” He kissed me and pulled me close. “I was wondering where you’d scooted off to. Tastes like you’ve been at the bar.”
“I had a little of your tequila.”
“I see my ways are already rubbing off on you.”
“Listen, Vance.” I sat up and looked down at him. He folded his arms behind his head, a concerned look on his broad, handsome face. “There’s something I have to tell you. I’m not…”
“A female by birth? Listen, I don’t care. Trans women are women, and you’re beautiful.”
“…sure where to begin,” I continued. “Although it’s good to know that you’re so accepting.”
“Begin at the beginning.”
I took a deep breath. Where was the beginning, really? Did the story start with my fundamentalist upbringing? That first night at the rave? We could be here for hours.
“Listen, I know I’ve been acting weird. Very hot and cold,” I said.
Vance nodded and held my hand encouragingly.
“The thing is…I just got out of a relationship. It wasn’t good. My ex gave me these.”
I pulled up my shirt and revealed the extent of my scars to Vance, feeling more exposed than I had when I was spread eagle in front of him. I’d never revealed my scars willingly to anyone, and I wasn’t sure how Vance would react. With disgust? With contempt for me? Would he start making threats of revenge against my ex?
He didn’t make a sound, and I couldn’t see his expression. I hoped it wasn’t one of revulsion.
“Can I touch them?” he asked.
I nodded, and for some reason, my eyes brimmed with tears as he delicately traced the spiraling patterns with his gentle musician’s fingers. “You’re not disgusted? That I let someone do that to me?”
“Andrea. Of course not.” He pulled me into a tight embrace, and we stayed that way for a few minutes, until my tears dried.
“I just wanted you to know that my behavior—it’s not about you,” I choked. “It’s about me and my past.”
“Well, I’d love to know all about it. As much as you’re willing to tell me.”
I bit my lip and gazed out the window, at a point in the waving green trees. “He was my high school sweetheart. My first boyfriend. But he wasn’t exactly a boy. He was a former corrections officer at the prison, turned security guard at the casino. He had a good salary, a flat stomach and no kids. Not many twenty-seven-year old guys in Amelia could say that. Plus, he loved music as much as I did. I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with him.”
“What happened?”
I laughed, a dry, mirthless bark. “This happened,” I said, gesturing at my back. “Of course, not all at once. We were really happy for a while there.”
I told Vance about Jonathan’s DJing hobby, which looked like it could actually become a viable career at one point. Plus, Jonathan had started producing his own tracks, which he said was the way to go if he wanted to get his name out there and started headlining the big parties.
Rifted Rock: Secrets of a rock star series Page 5