Before I could respond and refute his statement, Dillon had descended on us, one of his arms going around my neck, and the other going around Phillip’s. “You guys coming out?”
“Where are you going?” Phillip asked him.
“South Beach, man. The ladies await, and I’m ready for some action.” Then he looked around. “Where’s Kelsey? Did she leave?”
I watched Phillip’s expression harden. “Don’t fucking go there,” he warned.
“Why not? She finally broke up with her boyfriend. She’s single and hot, and I’m single and hot. It’s kind of a no-brainer.”
“Dude, she’s been single for like a week,” Phillip told him. “Don’t go there.”
“Misery loves company,” Dillon reminded him in a sing-song voice.
Phillip’s eyes narrowed. “Then how about this. She’s like my sister. Don’t touch her unless you want me to kick your ass.”
Dillon just laughed. “Yeah, right. Like you kicked my ass last year in Tahoe? Like that night?”
“Fuck you,” Phillip told him.
He’d told me about that night. It was after the Billboard Music Awards when he’d gotten so drunk that he’d embarrassed himself and Westside on the red carpet and then had been too out of it to perform with them during the show. Cam and Dillon had been pissed and had kicked his ass all over Van’s house a few days later. It hadn’t been pretty from what Phillip had said.
Dillon removed his arms from our necks and pointed his thumbs back at himself. “Trained fighter with a decade of experience.” Then he pointed his index fingers at Phillip. “Chump who looks like he could kick someone’s ass but is really a giant pussy.”
“Don’t push me, Dillon,” Phillip calmly warned him.
“You’re too pretty to risk getting in a fight with me,” Dillon said as he backed away from us, grinning the whole time. “Wouldn’t want to mar that baby face of yours.”
“Keep walking away,” Phillip told him.
Dillon laughed. “Will do. See you suckers out tonight?”
I held my breath as I waited for Phillip to say he was going to go out. I didn’t feel like going out, so I was going to end up going back to my room no matter what he ended up doing.
“Naw, man. I’m tired,” he told Dillon. “I’m going to crash early.”
“Dork,” Dillon told him. “How about you hot stuff?”
“Are you talking to me?” I asked him as I stifled a laugh.
“Yeah, you’re totally hot.”
“Ooh, sorry,” I told him. “But you’re just not my type.”
“Like hell I’m not.”
I shook my head. “Nah, you’re too eager.”
Dillon waved me off. “I’m a catch. You wish you could be with a man like me.”
“Every night,” I said sarcastically, making him laugh.
I looked over at Phillip to see if he was laughing too, but he didn’t look very amused.
“You okay?” I asked him as Dillon disappeared around a corner.
Phillip watched me for a few seconds before he said. “So what is your type?”
I looked up at him in amusement, determined to keep things light and playful. If I did that, maybe he wouldn’t know exactly what was running through my mind every time I thought of him. I knew he’d loathe the fact that the l-word was even on my mind where he was concerned, but I’d be lying if I said he wasn’t exactly my type. I just had to tell him that in a way that made him smile instead of run the other way.
“Why do you ask?”
He shrugged. “Just curious.”
I took a step toward him. “Well, if I’m being honest, I’ve always been insanely attracted to preppy bad boys with blue eyes and full, sexy lips who can turn me on with just a look. Do you know anyone like that?”
I watched his mouth curve into a smirk. “I think I know someone who might fit that description.”
“Good. If you see him, tell him to come up to my room in an hour. I’ll be waiting.”
“An hour?” Phillip questioned as I started to walk away backward.
“An hour,” I echoed. “I want to take bath.”
“I’m all sweaty,” he told me. “I could use a bath.”
I smiled. “So take one. I’ll see you in an hour.”
“You suck,” he grumbled.
I winked at him. “I sure do.”
Even though I wanted to see his reaction more than anything, I turned away, determined to maintain some sort of mystic. I figured it would only make our night hotter if he spent the next hour with that image in his head. And I absolutely loved the thought of that.
Chapter Sixteen
Phillip
“It was nice to see your friends again,” Sabrina told me as she lay with her head on my stomach, looking up at me as I ate the ice cream sundae she insisted we order.
I was sitting up against the headboard on her hotel room bed, and every few minutes she’d look up at me wistfully. I’d give her a bite, but I was ending up eating most of the ice cream.
It was fine. I was hungry, and I hadn’t eaten much dinner anyway, since I’d been nervous about performing in front of Kelsey and Leah.
It was a little nuts. I performed nightly in front of thousands of people, and I rarely got nervous, but in front of my two oldest friends I was a complete wreck. The show had been awesome, though, and there was really nothing better than seeing them when I came off-stage. In that moment, every person I cared about was within thirty feet of each other. That didn’t happen often in my world.
“And I liked seeing Kelsey again,” Sabrina continued when I didn’t answer her.
“Oh yeah?”
She nodded and opened her mouth for another bite. “Get at little more hot fudge on it,” she said when I scooped up mostly ice cream.
I raised an eyebrow at her. “Greedy, aren’t we?”
“What? Do you think I’m not deserving of hot fudge?”
I felt my mouth twist into a smirk as I thought about just how deserving she was. I had no idea what had gotten into her, but when I’d shown up in her room an hour earlier, she’d surprised me by showing off a kinky side of her I hadn’t seen before. I liked it though. I really, really liked it. She was incredibly deserving as far as I was concerned.
“You are so deserving,” I told her as I scooped up as much hot fudge as I could fit on the spoon and carefully lifted it to her mouth.
Watching her lips close around the spoon gave me flashbacks to seeing her lips around my dick. It was truly a sight to behold, and it was one that I was hoping we could repeat again soon. She was the first girl in years who I’d let suck me off without a condom, but in truth, I hadn’t even considered asking that of her the first time she’d done it. It was like everything was different with Sabrina, and I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
“So sexy,” I muttered, making her smile.
“I try.”
“You don’t have to try,” I told her, considering she had me turned on most of the time I was around her.
Her smile widened, and then she let it slowly fall away, her amused gaze on me the whole time. “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” I said as I brought a scoop of ice cream to my mouth.
“So you used to hook up with Leah. Did you ever hook up with Kelsey?”
I should have known she was going to ask that. It was a question I got more often than not when people saw us together. What they didn’t understand was that Kelsey was the female version of me. She might have been hot as hell, and her long, lithe body looked great in designer dresses, but she was a tomboy at heart. I knew she felt at home in jeans and sneakers, she loved to skateboard, and she only wore make-up when she had to. She also had an addictive personality and gave into temptations way too easily. Dating her would have been like dating myself.
“No, we’ve never hooked up,” I told Sabrina, sparing her the finer details as to why.
“Really. That’s surprising.”
“We’r
e just friends,” I assured her.
“She’s so beautiful.”
“She’s a model. She’s paid to be beautiful.”
Sabrina rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean. She’s effortlessly beautiful. It’s no wonder she’s a model.”
“Do you think that about me?” I asked her as I set the dish of ice cream on the nightstand. I was done with it.
“That you’re effortlessly beautiful?” she questioned.
“Sure. I was a model, so wouldn’t it stand to reason that if that’s the criteria I’d fit it too?”
“Are you fishing for a compliment?” she asked me. “Because if you are, I’ll give you one. I could probably compliment every part of your body if you wanted me to.”
“I’ve never thought I was all that good looking,” I told her honestly. I hadn’t shared that little nugget of insecurity with anyone before, but like with everything else, I felt I could trust Sabrina.
Although she was looking at me like she didn’t believe me. “Bullshit.”
“I’m not lying. Growing up I hated the angularness of my jaw and how severe my eyebrows are, and I hated that everyone said I was pretty. I’m a guy. The last thing I wanted was to be called pretty.”
“But you are,” she told me as if it should have been obvious.
“I know. And I’ve learned to live with it. But as a kid I hated it.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought I looked like a girl.”
“I’m sure you didn’t, and I’m sure girls threw themselves at you nightly, just like they do now.”
I smiled, because she was right. “Yeah, they totally did.”
“And you still hated the way you looked?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess not. I just looked different from everyone I knew. My mom was Romanian, and I got a lot of my features from her. A part of me thought I looked weird.”
“Hand me my phone,” she told me.
I grabbed it from the nightstand and handed it to her. She started to look up something on the Internet, but with the angle of the phone, I wasn’t sure what it was.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m Googling you. If you were a model, I’m sure there are pictures.”
I sighed and leaned back against the headboard. “There are.”
“Oh, yes there are,” she said as she found the stash of images of me when I’d modeled for a fashion house based out of Miami. They were the only proof of my modeling career on the Internet, but there were plenty of them. Sabrina shifted her gaze up to mine. “How old are you in this picture?”
She held it up for me to see.
“Sixteen,” I told her.
“Sixteen,” she echoed, shaking her head. “Damn, I totally would have been into you at sixteen. You were really hot.”
“So does that mean you’re not as into me now?” I questioned, not sure what was happening.
She rolled onto her side and looked up at me. “No, I’m totally into you, but the boy in this picture looks so innocent. I would have loved to teach him a few things when I was the same age as him.”
“Just because I looked innocent doesn’t mean I was.”
“Oh yeah? How old were you when you had sex for the first time?”
“Fourteen. By the time that picture was taken, I’d been with a few girls.”
“Interesting.”
“What’s interesting about it?”
“That you were a slut.”
I laughed. “I was a teenage boy who had endless amounts of money at my disposal and knew a lot of girls who had low self-esteem. It wasn’t that much of an effort to have a little fun when I wanted to.”
“Would you have wanted to have fun with me when you were in high school?”
I nodded. “Hell yes. I remember the pictures of you from when you were all pure and virginal.”
She snorted. “I was so not virginal.”
“No? So that was all an act?”
“It was totally an act.”
“Nice. You and I probably would have gotten along great back then.”
“We probably would have.”
“So how did you become a ‘virginal’ pop star without actually being a virgin?” I asked her.
She rolled her eyes. “That’s a long story.”
“I have time,” I told her, simply wanting to know more about her.
It was kind of a vice, but I loved hearing Sabrina talk about herself. I always wanted to know more.
She sighed. “Fine. My mother was the one who pushed me into it. She had me acting in commercials as a kid, and then I was on a kids TV shows for a few years. The natural progression was obviously for me to be a pop star, so that’s what I did.”
“Did you like it?”
“I hated every second of it.”
As soon as she said that, I remembered why I liked her so much. She was never afraid to be honest. I loved that about her.
“So why did you do it?” I asked her.
“Because the last thing I wanted to do was let my mother down. She was destroyed after what happened with Dustin and my dad, and as the only one left, I felt like I had the ability to make or break her happiness. So I did whatever she wanted, no matter how miserable it made me.”
“Did she know how unhappy you were?”
Sabrina shook her head. “No, she didn’t. Looking back, I’m not sure she was even living in reality at that point. She never wanted to talk about my dad or Dustin, and anytime I brought them up, she changed the subject. It got to the point that we just never talked about them. Instead we lived this shell of a life where she shuttled me to auditions and rehearsals, and she lived to see me get a part. She was on the set with me every day, and when I got my record contract, she was over the moon. I didn’t even feel like I had room to fight for what I wanted, so I just went through the motions, doing what everyone asked me to do, feeling like a fraud the whole time.”
“So how did you get from there to here?”
“I found cocaine, and I learned that I really liked it. From there I sort of spiraled, and you know the rest. It’s not a stellar story.”
“I can only imagine how your mom felt about that.”
Sabrina sighed. “She never knew. She had a stroke when I was eighteen, and she never really recovered. I wouldn’t have gone off the rails like I did if she was lucid, because it would have destroyed her. But once I came to the reality that she wasn’t ever going to be the same, when the doctors told me she’d never come out of the catatonic state she fell into the day she had her stroke, and that they wanted to put her in a long-term care facility, I took a long hard look at my life. I realized I was alone – truly alone – I was unhappy, and I just wanted out. But I didn’t know how to do it. I needed an escape. I found one when I met Jason.”
“How did you meet him?”
She smiled a small smile. “He was my publicist’s son.”
Phillip narrowed his eyes. “Didn’t Katherine Baker represent you back then?”
She nodded. “That is accurate information. Jason was her son, and she absolutely hated that I was dating him when she found out about us. It was one of the best parts. I was rebelling, and he was making me smile for the first time in years. It was a win-win all around.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t meet you back then,” I told her. “We probably could have had some fun.”
“I’m sure we could have,” she agreed. “Although, I think we’re having some pretty good fun now.”
I looked over at the toys that littered the nightstand on the other side of the bed. “I like this kind of fun.”
She smiled. “I’m game for another round if you are.”
“I’m always game,” I told her. “But let me digest some of this ice cream first. I wouldn’t want to get a cramp.”
That made her laugh. “Whatever you want. And while you’re doing that, tell me how you ended up in Westside. How did you go from being a model to being in a boy band?”
; “Leah and Kelsey made me audition.”
“Really?”
I nodded. “Yup. They saw how unhappy I was with my life, and I think they were both afraid I was going to spiral like I did when I was younger. They knew I missed music, so they set me up for an audition. They bought my plane ticket to L.A. and everything. I didn’t have a choice but to go after that.”
“And you got in.”
“And I got in. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I never would have done it on my own.”
“Oh yeah? What would you have done instead?”
I sighed. “I would have finished college – I was taking classes at UM, since that was my dad’s alma matter, and that was what was expected of me. I was majoring in business, and I hated every second of it. Kelsey and Leah saw that, and had it not been for them, I probably would have continued to go through the motions, graduated and worked in finance. And I would probably despise my life right now.”
“But instead you love it.”
“I love every second of it,” I told her honestly.
A few months ago I might not have said that, because I’d really loved my life when I’d been able to party whenever I wanted. But six months of sobriety and having someone like Sabrina in my life to make things suck a little less was actually turning out better than I’d ever thought. She’d become like sunshine to me, and a part of me was already dreading the day she’d realize I couldn’t give her what she wanted. That was the day she’d walk away.
Now we were good. We were friends, and we got to have really hot sex, but that was all I could ever give her. We both knew it, and maybe it was enough for her now, but it wouldn’t be enough forever. I had to live with that reality, and when the time came, I had to be okay with letting her go.
But for now she was mine, and I was the happiest I’d been in a long time.
“I think I might be ready for another round,” I told her as she gazed up at me.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding as I leaned over to kiss her.
She met me halfway and pulled me down to her, twisting her body, so she was suddenly beneath me. I loved looking down and seeing her there, especially when she looked up at me with pure lust in her eyes.
“How would you like me to return the favor?” I asked her.
Westside Series Box Set Page 101