“You know we can’t do that. We’re booked every night along the Gulf until we return to L.A.”
Disappointment sunk him into the seat. They were opening for some of the biggest rock bands in the business, and concert goers had begun to take an interest in them. If he bailed out, he’d be bailing on his friends. A venue cancellation would void thousands of ticket sales, and the penalties would be monstrous.
Rio’s grin widened. “I guess if you’re going to compose while you’re hung up on a girl, just try to save your menstrual tearjerkers for your jerk off sessions.”
“Where’s the faith?”
“I have faith in you, but we’re not a soft rock band.”
“I’m not writing soft.” He traced a finger over the fret of his guitar. “It’s a rock ballad.”
The stare returned. “As good as Huntress?”
He’d composed Huntress the night he met Charlee, and the fans loved it. “It’s better. Now go change your tampon or whatever it is you do in the bathroom, so I can make a phone call.”
A laugh burst from Rio’s barrel chest. “I like this.”
“Like what?”
“Straight edge, pussy-whipped, jolly Jay.” He jumped out of the van and leaned in the open crack of the door. “Just don’t let that faggoty shit anywhere near our music.” He slammed the door.
Jay shook his head as he pressed Redial on his cell and put it to his ear. “Please pick up. Please pick up.”
Ringing blared down the line. Once. Twice. He sucked in a breath. Beep.
Fuck. He squeezed the phone to keep from throwing it through the windshield. Then he did what he always did when he heard her voice over the recording. He closed his eyes and visualized her gorgeous blue eyes and blinding smile.
“You’ve reached Kilroy Tattoo. I’m either inking or sleeping. Leave your deets and I’ll holler back.”
“Hey, Charlee. It’s Jay Mayard again. I really need to talk to you…uh…about finishing the tattoo. You should have my number”—he’d only left it a hundred times—“but here it is again.”
He rattled off his digits. What else could he say to convince her to call him? “You know, I realize I might’ve come across like a dick the night I was there. If I did, I’m sorry. I…um…”
Christ, he was fucking this up. “The tattoo…it…well, it changed a lot of things for me. Made me look at things differently, and I’m anxious for you to finish it. I’ll be there in a month, but I would really like to talk to you about it ahead of time. Just…just give me a ring, okay?”
His voice was dripping with desperation. Time to shut it down. “Well, I’ll…uh…catch you later.”
He pressed End and stared at the phone with an ache in the pit of his stomach. He left messages every day. Several times a day. At all hours. How could she not answer the phone for thirty-three days?
In the back of his mind, something murmured. Deep behind his longings, buried beneath his Charlee dreams, his greatest fear whispered.
Heat flared through his face. No, he hadn’t lost her. Her voicemail box was never full. She was picking up the messages. She was just busy. Or annoyed.
He’d give his Martin acoustic for her cell phone number. Hell, he’d give his soul for her returned call.
Chapter Ten
‡
Cross-legged and naked on the cold hardwoods, Charlee leaned her forehead against the floor-to-ceiling window and waited for the sunrise to cast its glow on the Golden Gate Bridge. But it was the sensual voice humming through her ear buds that held her frozen to the glass, as though under a spell.
The music player was the first thing she’d earned in her two months of perfect obedience. Roy allowed her one song. When she requested anything by The Burn, he gave her their only hit single. Huntress.
She closed her eyes and let the deep, velvety voice she remembered from that night in her tattoo shop wrap around her. “Huntress of the room in my head. Fearless and knowing.” The melodic voice hit the high notes and sent a shiver through her. “Your blue eyes plunder the depths of my song. Tonight is only the beginning.”
A flutter unfurled in her chest. Then his voice dove so low she felt it in her belly. “Nothing can stop me. To be who you saw. To be the steel. To be yours.”
His words…God, his words stole her breath.
The instrumental change in rhythm seemed to lead to a close, but it didn’t. His whispered baritone sent a chill down her spine. “You showed me beauty in survival. I’ll show you strength in healing.”
She sucked in a breath. Blue eyes. Steel. Survival and healing. He was singing to her, about her, about his tattoo. She looked down at the leather bound sketchbook in her lap, the only other thing she’d earned during her captivity. Flames leapt around the sketched scars and bled off the page beneath her pencil.
Jay was the only memory she allowed herself to linger on. He was alive, and Huntress confirmed he hadn’t forgotten her. The power in that was fortifying. She could suffer another two months, hell, she could endure years beneath Roy’s whip knowing someone out there thought of her and maybe even missed her.
“Come back to bed!” Roy’s shout bellowed over the music.
The lead tip of her pencil snapped and rolled off the paper. She lifted her head from the window, yanked out her ear buds, and blew the graphite dust from her drawing. The graphite that had enabled her to hold onto the vividness of her memories. “What time is it, Sir?”
“Five in the fucking morning. Bring the book.”
She hugged it to her chest. Not the book. Please, not that. She ate with it, slept with it, staved off insanity with it. She’d drawn the same flames over and over again, perfecting the illustration. Someday she would finish Jay’s tattoo, and her conviction in that was often the only thing that got her through another day.
“Now.”
If she disobeyed him, he would destroy her music player. She set the device aside and rose from the floor, an effort that sent her molars crashing together. The hours spent hanging from the ceiling the prior night had torn something in her shoulder. Just thinking about it sprung tears in her eyes. She swiped them away, kicked the chain from her path, and trudged to the bed.
The pencil was plucked from her hand and flung outside the reach of the tether. Didn’t matter. A few practices on her wrist confirmed it wasn’t strong enough to pierce his trachea.
He gripped her hips and pulled her over to straddle him. Then he opened the book to the last drawing. His customary callousness blanked his expression as he studied the page. “Always fire. Why?”
“A couple months without clothes.” She shrugged. “I’m drawn to warmth, Sir.”
He set the book aside, stared at it, then swung his hand and struck her face. The force of it whipped her head back. “That was your only warning.”
Perfect obedience hadn’t warded off daily beatings. His strikes still hurt like hell, but her body had grown pliable. When the hand reared, she didn’t stiffen. She bent with it. “It was the last tattoo I did when I was free.” Truth, yet it meant so much more.
“Whose?” His voice was calm, eyelids half-mast.
Lying wasn’t an option. Perhaps because it took a liar to know a liar. “A walk-in. Some musician.” With a beautiful voice, a steel determination, and a body rendered for art.
“What do you know of your mother?”
Her shoulders drooped even as her brain scrambled to keep up. Her mother? All she knew was the woman died of health-related issues a few months after giving birth to her. “I don’t have a mother.” Had Roy tried to find her?
He watched her in his calculating, unblinking style that made her want to look away. “I searched for her when I lost you four years ago. I thought maybe you’d seek her help.”
She’d had no one until Noah. If she had a mother, Roy would’ve killed her, too. A lonely ache swelled in her chest, and more damn tears burned down her cheeks. Would she ever run dry?
“You had no money. No family. No skills. And no education beyond ten
th grade.”
She didn’t like the direction the conversation was headed, and she wanted to flail on him for the last part. Not worth another strike to the face.
“Rather than succumbing to drugs or prostitution, you leveraged an impractical talent in the most efficient way.” He wrapped his hands around her waist and ground her groin against his. “I made you who you are. I gave you the strength to survive.”
Even as he boasted his perverse pride, he was trying to unbalance her, weaken her emotionally. He could try all he wanted. Her tears were involuntary, but she was not broken and her strength was her own. She gave him her weight and her eyes.
There was a self-interested air about the way he regarded her. “You tattooed to earn money. Yet you have none yourself.” He smirked. “Money, nor tattoos.”
Another one of his games. Whenever his dick wouldn’t harden from his physical lashings, he turned to humiliation and verbal fighting. Fuck him for being such a cruel, sadistic bastard. “No, Sir. I was the payment for a gambling debt, remember? Not the heir of a billion-dollar monopoly.”
His fingers dug into her waist, and his eyes narrowed. “Tell me why you aren’t covered in skulls and flames.” He smacked the sketchbook, sent it flying off the bed. “I want to hear you say it.”
His dick swelled beneath her, and the need to draw into herself strained her voice. Fuck that. “A girl on the run needs plain looks to go unnoticed. No identifiable marks.” Someday, she would have a tattoo.
The room held still and his eyes didn’t stray from hers.
“Tell me, girl-on-the-run, what are you planning now?”
She could lie and get the truth beat out of her. Or she could tell the truth and maybe learn something from his reaction.
“You should remove the chain.” She rotated her ankle. “Because I intend to strangle you with it while you sleep.” She kept her muscles relaxed, prepared to absorb the next strike.
If he were another man, the stiff prod of his groin would’ve been at odds with his words. “I would kill you if you tried.”
Knowing he fed on her rebellion, her question rolled out anyway. “Would you survive my death?” He would either hit her or fuck her, but maybe, just maybe, he’d give her an answer.
The torso between her thighs rose and fell with his breathing. A cyclone of emotions stormed over his expression. Eventually, his cheeks smoothed and his eyes cleared. “You belong to me, beautiful girl. I retain what is mine, even if I have to retrieve it from hell myself.”
As he flipped her to her back, she wasn’t sure if his response reassured her or terrified her. Knowing her death might bring about his was an option to consider, but if one were to believe in afterlife, would she never escape him?
He moved over her and entered her in one urgent stroke, hammering his hips and slamming her head into the headboard. “Not even death will separate us.” He reached beneath her ass and shoved a dry finger into her rectum.
The pressure was horrible and wonderful. She bit her tongue and bottled the cry bubbling in her chest, her hands wringing the bed sheets.
“I own you.” His hot breath curled around her ear. “Now come for me.”
Two months of training pushed her over. He’d mastered his strokes, knew how to balance the pleasure and pain to perfection. As with all the orgasms before it, her body shook and her tears flowed.
His attempts at humiliation had bounced right off her, but the manner in which he’d degraded her sexually might’ve been beyond repair. What kind of person climaxed while being raped? She wept, limp beneath the weight of his body, as he grunted and thrust his way to his own finish.
When he caught his breath, his tongue roved over her cheeks, collecting her tears. “I’m meeting with my security staff in the dining room tonight. You’ll be joining us for dinner.”
A dinner party. Her stomach bottomed.
Chapter Eleven
‡
Jay strode out of the airport terminal and choked on the humid Missouri air.
“Damn, dude. Seriously.” Laz zigzagged behind him, veering around the flow of pedestrians. “Slow it down a notch. Or ten.”
“Didn’t ask you to come.” He whistled at an approaching taxi, and it stopped at the curb.
“And miss watching you try to romance the girl who’s turned you into a faggot?” Laz held the cab door open and waved Jay inside, smiling like an asshole.
“Fuck off.” Jesus, he was wound tight, but he hadn’t seen Charlee in two months. How would she react to him seeing him? After all the unanswered voicemail messages, he could guess.
They slid into the cab, and Jay directed the driver to Kilroy Tattoo.
“I’m just here for the tat.” Christ, he needed to see her. “We’ll barely have enough time to finish it and fly back to L.A. for tonight’s show.” The ink on his back tingled. For the first time in twenty years, he looked at his scars when he took his shirt off. Not only that, sometimes he took his shirt off just to look.
“You flew eighteen hundred miles on a redeye to get a tat?” Laz’s eyes danced. “Come on, man. Just admit you’re a lovestruck chump.”
Jay stared out the window but could only see her pearlescent blue eyes. He wasn’t lovestruck. It went so much deeper than that. Somehow she’d managed to dig her needles into his scarred up mind and leave them there where he couldn’t stop thinking about her. Maybe it was infatuation that first night, but all the nights since had burned into a heartsick, soul-saving kind of love. The kind of love chumps like him wrote songs about.
“Listen.” Laz shifted in the seat beside him. “The guys and I have been talking.”
He groaned. It was his preface for the lay-off-the-drugs speech. “Save your breath. I’ve been clean for over two months.”
Two months without his unhealthy coping strategies. Two months without setting off emotional triggers. Two months living clean, normal, and deserving of Charlee. And along the way, he’d decided she wasn’t just a cure. She was the secret fucking ingredient to happiness.
“That’s just it,” Laz said. “The smack, the self-loathing lyrics, the angsty sex…don’t look at me like that. The girls talk. The point is it’s all mellowed since you met Miss St. Louis. Since you won’t let me see the tat, I got to know. Was it her soul-piercing artwork or her brain-sucking pussy—”
“Jesus. I didn’t fuck her.”
“That might be true, seeing how you’ve lost your will to fuck at all.”
He stared at the roof of the cab. He hadn’t had sex since that night in St. Louis, and he couldn’t blame it on a limp dick. No, that organ worked just fine…when he thought about the pixie with huge blue eyes.
“I didn’t tag along to scold you, man. I’m here to help you catch your girl.” Laz’s hair stuck up every which way, and his eyebrows hopped behind his aviator glasses. Laz couldn’t scold if he tried.
“My girl? My encounter with her was so brief, I’m not sure I could even consider her an acquaintance.” He hoped his eyes impressed the words his heart rejected.
“Bullshit. What about Huntress?”
A prickling sensation stiffened his spine. “What about it?”
Laz clutched his chest, cleared his throat, and belted, “Huntress of the room in my head. Fearless and knowing. Your blue eyes plunder the depths of my song. Tonight is only the beginning.”
And that was the consequence of having no separation between his soul and his lyrics. “Don’t knock it, douche bag. It’s our bestselling single.” The song he wrote the night he met Charlee. Lucky fucking break. A record promoter caught wind of it, came to a live show to hear it, and ran with it.
“That song is carried by the brilliant guitar solo, my friend.”
He smiled. There wasn’t a musician on the planet who could shred a diminished chord in lowered fifth as drugging and eerie as Laz Bromwell. “Ah yes, the charms of the devil’s note.”
“And someday soon, women everywhere will cluster in overcrowded arenas chanting Bromwell note.”
He cupped his mouth. “Raaaaah. Bromwell note. With their shirts off, of course.”
“Of course.”
They shared a look, one born in high school where they met over a clutter of scrawled lyrics in a clichéd garage. Neither of them hid their expressions, their smiles overflowing with equal measures of excitement and uncertainty.
The driver slowed the cab. “Kilroy Tattoo.”
Laz paid the fare and twisted on the seat to look him in the eye. “Let’s go get the girl. And try not to fuck it up.”
He gripped the door handle. “Tone down the battle cry. I’m pretty sure there’s a boyfriend.”
Laz smiled, all teeth and mischief. “There’s two of us and one of him. I’ll hold him while you show him how it’s going to be.”
Yeah, that would win the girl. “This is why I never ask you for advice.”
He jumped onto the sidewalk beneath the neon sign. A thrill fluttered through him and settled in his gut. He wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans, sucked in a deep breath, and pulled the door knob. It didn’t budge.
A knot clotted in his throat. Maybe she took the day off. He peered through the dusty window between cupped hands.
No furniture. No supplies. No Charlee. His heart pounded and his stomach dropped. “She’s gone. Fuck, her shit’s gone.” His greatest fucking fear.
Laz mirrored his pose beside him. “What’s with the police tape?”
He followed Laz’s point at the floor just inside the door. Pieces of yellow tape stuck to the tiles and nearby wall. A suffocating dread fell over him. He couldn’t move. Laz was running his mouth, but his voice was so far away. What the fuck happened in there?
He unlocked his muscles and scanned the neighboring businesses. “There.” He jogged toward the bar across the street. A car honked. At him? At Laz? Who the fuck cared? He quickened his pace.
Inside, the woman behind the bar slung a towel over her shoulder. “Hey, boys. What can I get you?”
His body buzzed with adrenaline as he moved toward the bar on autopilot. “What happened at Kilroy Tattoo?”
Make Me: Twelve Tales of Dark Desire Page 116