by Alexa Land
“I dunno. No one. Only you, but you’d already know I drowned in a tub.”
“Get in, Brian, and try your best not to drown. I’ll be right outside the door, make noise so I know you’re okay.”
“What kind of noise?”
“I don’t know. Sing or something.”
“I can’t sing. I wish I could. Be cool to sound like Axel Rose. Woah a woah a woah!” That last part was sung so badly that it should have made the paint peel off the walls.
“Good lord,” I muttered, stepping around his chair and setting the brake. “Come on, Axel, the soap is calling.”
“I don’t hear it.”
“Oh, but I do.”
Brian swung himself onto the edge of the bathtub and swayed precariously before finding his balance. Next, he looked at the water and murmured, “Needs bubbles.” He then proceeded to dump an entire bottle of body wash in the tub, and turned the water back on. Immediately, huge billows of white foam began rising from the water.
“S’ better,” he said, then peeled off his clothes and dropped down into the water. I turned my back to him as he did that to give him some privacy. Then I decided I really should stay in the bathroom in case he passed out, so I sat on the lid of the toilet, facing away from him.
After a few minutes, he muttered, “Shit. This is bad.”
“What is?” I asked as I glanced at him over my shoulder.
“I’m starting to sober up. I need a drink.” He looked around the bathroom, as if maybe he was going to find something in here. And then, to my astonishment, he pulled a half-empty beer can out from behind the tub and started to raise it to his lips.
“Oh, come on!” I yelled, lunging for the beer. “That’s so gross! How long has that been back there?”
“I dunno,” he said, holding the can out of my reach. “But it’s probably not, like, tainted or anything.”
“Give that to me,” I said, making another grab for the beer.
“No way. I told you I was sobering up, and that cannot happen. Especially not now, with you here.”
He tried again to take a sip and I grabbed for the beer with both hands. “Don’t do it, Brian!”
He yanked the can just out of my reach, and I went after it. That made me lose my balance and land in the tub on top of him, water and bubbles sloshing everywhere. But that still didn’t deter me, and I tried again to grab for the can. His arms were a lot longer than mine, though, and he held it up and back, over his head, while holding me down with his other arm.
“Shit!” I exclaimed. “Fine. You want that nasty, probably toxic beer so damn bad? Be my guest. But don’t come crying to me later when you’re picking barf chunks out of your beard.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and then he burst out laughing. “That’s really disgusting,” he said.
“Oh, that’s disgusting? You’re trying to drink used bathroom beer.”
Brian grinned at me. I could tell he really was sobering up. He’d lost some of that wide-eyed booze-buzzed expression. “I’ve missed you so fucking much,” he said.
“I’ve missed you, too.”
He dropped the can of beer, which landed with a clatter on the tile floor behind him, wrapped both his arms around me, and delivered a deep, long kiss that I felt from my lips to my toes. I wove my arms around his neck and returned it passionately.
But after a while, I pulled back and said, “We shouldn’t be doing this. You’re drunk, and you’re going to regret this once you sober up.”
“The only thing I’d regret is not kissing you while I had the chance.” His lips met mine again and we made out wildly, for so long that the tub started to cool. But Brian just reached over and added more hot water, stirring up the bubbles again, then slid his hands under my waterlogged sweatshirt and held me to him, kissing me like his very existence depended on it.
“God I’ve missed you,” he said again. “Every single minute of every single day. I drink to forget, but it doesn’t really work. Nothing could make me forget you, or this.” Again he kissed me, and I completely gave myself over to it.
“I don’t get it, though,” I said, next time we came up for air. “You broke up with me, you didn’t want to be with me anymore. I don’t get why you’d still want to kiss me.”
“Didn’t want to be with you?” he repeated, shaking his head. “I wanted to be with you more than anything in this world, Hunter. But I just couldn’t face you anymore, not after what I did to you.”
I sat up a little and asked, “What did you do to me?”
“I completely failed you. I let that maniac take you from the gallery, and I will forever be so fucking sorry.”
“You didn’t fail me! No one could have predicted he’d strike like that, in a room full of people. None of us were ready for it, there was nothing we could do.”
“I could have gotten to my gun and shot him. Then he wouldn’t have been able to take you.”
“But I’m okay, Brian.”
“He hurt you, though. The sight of you naked and bloody, limping down that road, is seared into my memory forever,” he said, his eyes pools of agony. “You trusted me to keep you safe, to protect you, and God, how I failed.”
“That’s why you broke up with me? Because you think you failed me?”
“Yes. And I don’t deserve you.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Brian. There’s only one person to blame, and he’s dead.”
“I should have stopped him. I was your bodyguard, and your boyfriend. It was my job to protect you.”
“You have to stop blaming yourself.” I took his face in my hands and looked him in the eye. “I survived, I got through it. Yeah, he took me, but I got away. And you’re part of the reason I found the strength to escape. I wanted to get back to you, more than anything. You’re what kept me going.”
“I was?”
“Yes. But now, we’ve both gotten so bogged down with guilt and blaming ourselves that Swensen is getting what he wanted all along. This is driving us apart, and I don’t want that, Brian.”
He knit his brows and looked at me soberly. “Why are you blaming yourself?”
“Because of his obsession with me, that man hurt Christopher, and maybe other boys, too, and shot you, and—”
“No!” Brian sat up in the tub, taking hold of my upper arms. “Don’t you dare blame yourself for any of that! Swensen was a sick individual. You didn’t make him that way.”
“But my films fed his sickness.”
“If you’d never moved to California and never made those movies, what do you think would have happened with him? Do you think he would have ended up healthy and normal?”
“Well…no.”
“Exactly! If he hadn’t had you to obsess over, he would have found something else. That man was deeply, deeply disturbed, and that has absolutely nothing to do with you.”
I rested my head on Brian’s chest and thought about that for a while. Slowly, a little of that message was seeping in. “You’re better than my therapist,” I said quietly.
“I’ve always said the same about you.”
“So, you honestly believe that man was going to snap no matter what. That it really didn’t have anything to do with me.”
“Absolutely.”
I sat up and looked at Brian, straddling him, my hands on his shoulders. “Well, then the same goes for you. If I can’t blame myself for that man’s actions, then neither can you.”
He shook his head. “It’s not the same thing. I could have prevented him from taking you, if only I hadn’t messed up so badly.”
“How did you mess up?”
“I knocked myself out when I hit the deck, when that fucking chair shot out from under me.”
“And you’re blaming yourself for that?”
“I should have focused on getting to my gun, not diving for cover.”
“Someone was shooting at you! Diving to the ground was the only thing that made sense in that situation, otherwise the next bullet could
have killed you! So you hit your head and got knocked out. Good! That meant you stopped moving, making Swensen think you were dead. If you hadn’t, he probably would have emptied his clip into you!”
“But—”
“The fact that you got knocked unconscious is the best thing that could have happened. You probably would have been killed otherwise. I could have lost you forever. As it is, I almost lost you anyway, because we were both so overcome with guilt. We let it get in the way of this, of us. But we have to stop doing that. We already lost the last month, and I don’t want to lose even one more day. I want you, Brian, I want to be with you. But that can only happen if we both stop blaming ourselves for things that weren’t our fault.”
He stared at me for a long moment. And then, Brian’s face lit up in a smile. It was beautiful to see, and it made me smile too. “What?” I asked.
“I was just thinking that it’s a damn good thing I’ve sobered up, because that was a hell of a speech, and it’d be a shame if I missed it.”
My smile got wider. “It’d be a downright tragedy.”
And just like that, the mood shifted, just enough of the fog of the past clearing away to reveal the path ahead. Yes, we both still had a hell of a lot to deal with. There were no quick fixes or easy answers for any of that. But I knew, right then, that we’d be dealing with all of it together now, and that made it all seem so much less daunting.
I stripped off my wet sweatshirt and t-shirt, reaching over and depositing both in the sink to drain. I shifted around and pulled off my wet sneakers and socks, setting them on the tile floor, as Brian drained out some of the cold water and added hot. It was hard to shimmy out of my wet jeans, but eventually I got out of them and my underwear. I pulled my phone and wallet from my pockets then, and said, “Damn.”
“Nice one.” Brian grinned at me.
I tapped the dark screen on the phone, then said, “Oh well,” and tossed it in the sink with the rest of my wet things.
“You know, you could have just let me drink that beer,” Brian said. “You didn’t have to commit cellphone suicide.”
“Yeah, that was not going to happen.”
“It wasn’t going to kill me.”
“It might. For all I knew, you were one sip away from alcohol poisoning. Plus, ew! Used bathroom beer. That’s so nasty.”
He chuckled at that, then said, “Come here.” When I slid between his thighs, he took my glasses off and put them on the floor outside the tub, then carefully untangled the elastic band from my ponytail. With one arm behind my shoulders, he dipped me down into the water, wetting my hair. He then laid me on his chest and proceeded to shampoo me, so gently.
“That feels good,” I murmured, letting my eyes slide shut. “But I should really be doing that to you. You need a lot more TLC than I do right now.”
“I think we both need a lot of TLC, and you can do me next.”
“You know,” I said, sliding an arm around him, “you’ve sobered up really quickly.”
“I have a high metabolism. Plus, I wasn’t that drunk.”
“Like hell you weren’t. You were passed out on the kitchen floor!”
“I wasn’t passed out, I was sleeping it off. There’s a difference.”
“That was not sleeping it off.”
“How do you know?”
“Because you were face down on the kitchen floor, that’s how!”
“It’s as good a place as any to sleep off a bender,” he said.
“Right. Like you’d purposefully pick the floor, and not your bed.”
“I can’t even get to my bed right now, that’s how messy my room is. I’ve been sleeping on the couch. Or, you know. Wherever.”
“Is that how you spent the last month? On one long bender, living on the couch?”
“And the floor.”
“Wow, when you fall apart, you really fall apart,” I said.
“Oh, I know.”
“Kieran thought you were being super productive, going to therapy, fixing up the house.”
“It’s really easy to lie to him, especially in a text. I just had to be sober enough to keep the typos to a minimum. He bought all that stuff because he wanted to believe it, and I just didn’t let him see how much breaking up with you affected me.” Brian tilted me back then and rinsed the shampoo from my hair.
“My turn,” I said. I proceeded to shampoo his hair and wash every inch of him, and when there was nothing more to wash, we got out of the water and wrapped each other in towels. As he sat on the lid of the toilet, I lathered his face and shaved him, slowly, carefully.
“I’ve never done this to anyone before,” I said as I slid the blade over his skin.
“I’ve never let anyone do this, either. Obviously.”
“Why obviously?”
“Because this takes a ton of trust, I have to believe you’re not going to mess up and slice my jugular. And usually, I’m not so big on trusting people. Only you.”
I bent down and kissed his forehead, then said, “I trust you, too. Now stop talking. I don’t want to nick you.” A minute later he slid his hand behind my head and pulled me in for a kiss, leaving me with a muzzle of shaving cream.
“That’s a good look for you,” he said with a grin. “Makes you look slightly rabid, but it’s a good look nonetheless.” I smiled at him and ran the corner of a towel over my face.
When we’d finished cleaning each other up, we wove our way to the living room. There was barely enough room for his wheelchair to maneuver. “Wow,” I said, tossing a pizza box off the arm of the sofa. “I see you’ve been busy. But that’s okay, I’ve been needing a project since I quit working, and cleaning the hell out of your house is going to be really therapeutic.”
We settled in on the couch. As Brian pulled a blanket over us and I nestled in his arms, he asked, “You quit working?”
“Yeah. I’m now the only thing worse than a porn star. I’m a washed-up ex-porn star.”
“You’re not washed up, you chose to walk away. Right?”
“I did.”
“Why is that, exactly?”
“Two reasons. First of all, after that nightmare with Swensen, I’m really not so eager to keep putting myself out there for whoever will have me.”
“And what’s the second reason?”
“You. Even though you broke up with me and I thought you didn’t want me anymore, I still…well, I still felt like I was yours, Brian, and making another film would have felt like I was cheating on you.”
“Really?”
I nodded and said, “That’s kind of problematic, actually, because I’m required to make one more movie under my current agreement. If I don’t, my studio’s going to sue me for breach of contract and take all my money. I don’t quite know what to do about that.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Well, I kind of brought it on myself.”
After a pause he said, “It’s kind of surprising that you’d feel like you were cheating on me, even after we broke up.”
“Breaking up with me didn’t change what was in my heart.”
“I shouldn’t have done that. I should have stayed so we could talk about all of this, like we’re doing today.”
“You know what, though? It would have been too soon to try to talk,” I said. “You were right about needing time, we both had a lot to work out for ourselves.”
“We still do. Our personal issues haven’t just evaporated.”
“I know,” I said. “But I’m better now than I was a month ago. And next month, I’ll be even better, especially now that you and I are back together. I mean, let’s face it. We’re both kind of disasters on our own.”
“But two wrongs don’t make a right. If we’re disastrous separately, who’s to say we won’t be disastrous together?”
“We won’t be.”
“You sound pretty sure of that,” he said.
“Oh, I am.”
Brian rubbed my back gently, and after a while asked,
“So, what’s the plan now that you’ve left the world of adult entertainment?”
“Poverty, I’m assuming, and probably a glamorous job in the fast food industry. I’ve been practicing by asking everyone I meet, ‘would you like fries with that?’ I think I’m a natural.”
He chuckled at that, the laughter rumbling in his broad chest. I’d missed that sound. “I doubt that’s your only alternative.”
“We’ll see. At least I have some savings, since I always knew my porn career wouldn’t last forever. I can probably keep the paper hats at bay for a few months with that, at least until I lose it all in that inevitable lawsuit.”
“You’ll figure out a new career. I suppose I will, too.” I glanced up at him, and he grinned a little and added, “Not that my career as a professional drunk wasn’t going swimmingly. I think I had a real future in round-the-clock inebriation.”
“You had a real future in liver poisoning.”
“That too. Hey, maybe there’s a job we can do together.”
“Like what?”
“I was a crack ventriloquist as a kid. You could be my cute, blond dummy.”
I grinned at that. “Such a terrible, terrible idea.”
“Yeah, you’re right. You’d totally steal the spotlight, and I’d be forced to trade you in for a less adorable assistant.”
“I hope you’re kidding about doing ventriloquism as a kid. Because that’s kind of creepy,” I teased.
“Oh, just for that, I’m going to introduce you to Mr. Wiggles. He’s still around here somewhere.” Brian sat up a bit and looked around.
I shuddered dramatically and said, “Oh lord, you’d better be kidding. You don’t really have one of those horrifying dolls around here, do you?”
“And now you’ve hurt his feelings,” he said with a big grin, laying back against the arm of the couch.
I burst out laughing. “Oh my God, you really need to shut up.”
“Make me.” Brian flashed me a huge smile.
“Okay.” I leaned in and kissed him, softly, gently.
“I have an idea,” I murmured against his lips after a few minutes of kissing. “Let’s never break up again.”
Brian kissed me once more, then said softly, “I’m so fucking sorry I did that to you.”