by Kayti McGee
“You’re in a good mood today, Marlee,” he says, pulling his glasses down his nose and eyeing me.
I nod and smile at him and go back to listening to the conversation. He claps his hands a few times which usually cut into the air like their own staccato warnings but this time they just felt like an annoyance that was keeping me from hearing the last of what Tanya had to say about her hangover cures. We get in line and I keep pace through the warm up, feel the strength of my body as I step in time, stretch my ham strings, swivel my hips. I’m feeling myself just in the warm up and I almost can’t wait to see what I can do once we get going.
Loren puts on the song that gave me a hard time yesterday and this time I’m feeling it flow through me. I’m still thinking through the more complicated moves but I hit it: passé, spiral, turnout, then contraction hitting it with the flourish I heard in Loren’s voice when he yelled it at me yesterday. He doesn’t stop us but when we get through the song he starts handing out criticism and for the first time I notice that there is an unreasonable amount of shade for everyone. When he gets to me he scoffs for a moment before saying that I was too on point, practically stiff. I smile at him, because I know what I felt in my body. It’s powered by the desire and love that Jake showed me and I feel free.
I’m grateful that Jake isn’t home when the car arrives and I clack down the driveway in my highest heels, my contract in my hand. It’s a perfect evening with the kind of soft breeze that would carry Jake and me out to the pool, that would play over our bodies as we played with one another’s body. I’m wearing a silk purple jumpsuit—dressed what I considered modestly while still looking fashionable and professional but Richard wraps his creepy hands around my shoulders when I walk in and gives me a long kiss on each cheek.
“You’re a knockout,” he says. He pulls out a chair for me and then takes off his suit coat and I note how clean cut he is compared to Jake, his smooth face and well trimmed fade salt and peppered on his scalp. There’s a dirty look in his eye that’s nothing like how Jake looks at me when he’s imagining my body. Richard’s is more lecherous. His diamond pinky ring glints in the light and I let him order for us. Two fillet mignon and a bottle of champagne, he insists, telling the waiter.
“I’m fairly certain that we are having a celebration.”
For the first moment all day my confidence falters. I nervously talk about the show, how close I’m getting with the cast and how I catch myself dreaming of the dance moves.
“Well, let’s toast to that,” he says when the champagne arrives. The steaks follow soon after and its as he’s sawing into the meat that I decide to slide my contract across the table. He smiles when he sees the envelope and pads his lips with the cloth napkin before opening it. His face goes rigid.
“It isn’t signed,” he says.
“I know. I was really excited about doing this with you. I had planned to sign. But over the last month, I realized that I don’t want to make it just because of who I know or sleep with or attend award shows on the arm of. If I fail, if this show doesn’t take off and no one else will touch me, I’ll know I did it by myself.”
“That’s… bold.”
“Bold might be code for stupid with you,” I say and he nods, “but you know what? I actually think I’ll do just fine. I’m good. I’m worth this. And I’m worth more than a piece of paper.” I point to the contract with my fork.
“I think you’re making a boldly stupid move, but I respect the thought behind it,” Del says, softening.
I put my napkin on the table and collect my purse.
“I should go, let me pay for my half.”
“I won’t have it that way. I insist you stay and eat. There’s no point letting any of this go to waste. Please allow me to pay for this meal. I can’t avoid an opportunity to say that I treated a beautiful young star back when she was a nobody.”
I don’t appreciate the nobody comment, because with Jake I learned that I never was a nobody, but I graciously accept.
“Tell me one of your stories,” I say, knowing already that he has some escapade with some impossibly wealthy and powerful somebody to share from his latest travel. He leans forward with his champagne flute, looking over his shoulder.
“Well, you’ll enjoy this one,” he says, his eyes glinting.
He has no idea that the recorder I’ve turned on on my phone will be the best sotry of them all.
As I’m waiting with Richard in the lobby for my car to arrive I feel a hand on my shoulder. I see a familiar looking tall man with a beard.
“Felix,” he says pointing to himself. “Jakes guitarist friend. You aren’t from Kansas!”
“Missouri!” I scream, and throw my arms around him, happy to have another familiar face nearby, feeling like maybe LA might start to feel like home.
“I was going to email you tonight. There’s another opportunity I want to talk to you about.”
“Let me leave you to his conversation,” Richard says and kisses me on the cheek. “Good luck, Girlie.”
“You too, dude,” I’m done covering my midwestern roots. “You’ve done more for me already than you know. Good luck finding what you need,” His smirk is kind of adorable actually, considering that he has no idea I’ve hired a lawyer to go through this recording.
“Maybe neither of us will need luck,” he says. He’s right. I have proof. When he’s out of ear shot Felix leans in.
“He’s weird. I hope you aren’t too close with him.”
“He’s harmless,” I say. He shrugs.
“If you say so.
Listen…” and we spend fifteen minutes waiting for a car and discussing opportunities. Am I sex goddess? No. Just a fiend. But am I going to make it in Los Angeles? Hell fucking yes I am.
The wind in LA is different from Kansas City, when it does blow, its much softer. Like a caress that feels like its meant for me because I’m starved for it. I’ve never felt it against my face when it does this shit and for the first time since moving here I realize that its always been at my back. I’m watching the curtain blow in the night air when a light turns over me.
“Why are you in my room?” Jake asks. He looks at me and gives a rueful smile.
“Waiting for you,” I say. I stand and remember how the last time I did this I was so nervous about what it would mean to touch this body in front of me. Now, I’m real fucking confident.
He walks towards me and I run my hands over his dress shirt up his chest towards his collar. He swallows hard and looks me deeply in his eyes and I feel lost in them until I remember that what I’m feeling lost in is us. I start to slowly undo the buttons in his shirt, working my pointer finger and thumb deliberately.
“This feels like one of our lessons,” he says as I make my way to the last button. I smile looking at his firm body and feel excited knowing what it can do to me and that there’s still so much to learn. I slip my hands against his heart and feel the rapid pulse and then I slide up to his shoulders, slipping the shirt down his arms. I bring my hands to his back and press my lips to his chest and feel the only muscle I haven’t felt against my mouth beat out its rhythm. He presses his lips into the top of my hair and exhales. I think that maybe this is one of our lessons, and this time we are teaching each other how to love. I get wet at the feeling of his breath in my hair and my body yields to his. He pulls me towards him and kisses me long and deep and I meet him there. His hands slide to my ass and he picks me up, my legs wrapped around his waist and he moves me against the wall my body hitting with a careful thump.
“It ‘s my turn to teach now,” I say to him. “It’s a special lesson called I’m An Idiot and You Must Forgive Me.”
“My rebuttal paper is titled, How Is This Real,” he says and we both laugh quietly together. But just as quickly as our laughing starts he grows serious.
“Honestly, do you mean it?” he asks and I could fall to pieces at his earnestness and how I almost destroyed it.
“I mean it. I’ve loved you since I was
thirteen, you asshole. Now will you just fuck me on our new desk?” I ask. “Please pretend I’ve been as naughty as I actually have, by the way.”
“I love you, Marlee,” he exhales.
“I love you too.” I feel him get even harder and press himself against me. “But listen, I have some notes about a yoga mat, because it occurred to me a while ago, not like a long-long time ago, but like long enough that we can call this pretty well thought out, that—” His mouth is done with me, but the rest of him is just starting.
Maybe knowing what you want is overrated.
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More by JD Hawkins
It starts with a bang.
As in me and Hadley, the maid of honor, during my brother’s wedding reception.
Sure, it was amazing, but I’m a one-and-done kind of guy.
After spending years of my life getting screwed over by managers and agents with the Ryder Brothers, I no longer like to commit.
I don’t even play music anymore.
The secret that I haven’t told anyone- is that I can’t.
A chance to raise money for my best friend’s nonprofit to help child stars means it’s time to deal with my block.
Hiring Hadley seems like the obvious solution.
She wants inside my head (not happening). I want to bang her again (she says she can’t sleep with clients).
Between my baggage and her professionalism, can my problem even be fixed?
Or will we both end up just wanting more?
Coming December 2018.
Turn the page for a sneak peek!
Close by Laurelin Paige
"Love. Lust. Heartbreak. Devastating turns in story. Off the charts hot sex. Larger than life romance. An ending to swoon, sigh and die for." -- Paramita Patra, Goodreads review
Everyone wants to get close to a rock star.
The bright lights.
The music.
Those talented fingers strumming... a guitar.
Everyone wants to bang a rock star.
So why do I keep running from the one who wants me?
I'm America's Sweetheart.
I have a reputation.
He's a boy-band icon turned rock god.
I'm vanilla.
He's every flavor of bad.
And he's much, much too young for me.
If I end up in Nick Ryder's bed, my career and I will both be screwed.
...but that's only if I'm caught.
"This book is the confetti kind, with extra sprinkles on top. Sexy sprinkles. NickNat forever!" - Kayti McGee, USA Today Bestseller
A Sneak Peek of the next Ryder Brother…
More by JD Hawkins
Jonas
I’m pretty sure no one at the wedding knows I’m nailing a bridesmaid in the happy couple’s guest room, but I swallow her moans anyway. The girl presses me up against the armoire with her big tits, gasping hungrily as she sucks at my mouth. I let her tongue twist over mine a little while I grab and smack the round cheeks of her ass through the pink fabric of her dress. Her body is incredible, and now that I’ve got my hands on it I want to make the most of every inch.
I grab her hips and push her back onto the desk, sending my brother’s things flying, my body between her thighs, leaning over her to suck at her neck so hard the hickey could be permanent. My hand pulling at her hem to reveal more of her taut thighs.
“Careful!” she stage-whispers even as she pulls my head toward her. “You’ll rip my dress.”
I pull back to cast an amused look at those dark eyes.
“They don’t make bridesmaids’ dresses that easy to tear off.”
She holds up a hand. “I’m not a bridesmaid—I’m the maid of honor.”
I smile at her.
“Could have fooled me.”
The girl pouts her lips into a mock-offended grin that makes me even harder. She shoves me onto the bed, and before I know it she’s got me splayed out on my back, her curly brown hair dangling as she impatiently works my belt and fly open.
From outside, the sounds of the wedding reception float through the open window. It’s small enough for me to identify every voice I hear. Just our closest friends and family chat and drink and clang forks on plates as they finish off the last of the cake. Innocent fun.
But the grunt I let out as she pulls my cock out of my pants, her soft moan as I grab her hair and pull her face onto it, is anything but innocent.
She’s got a smart mouth. A quick tongue. For the past hour we’ve been swapping sexually-charged repartee over cocktails, and though her body’s got me thinking like a caveman, her wit is what got me acting like one. Her lips kiss their way up my shaft and the wetness of her mouth sends shockwaves throughout my body, an entirely different set of skills her mouth has mastered. Passing on the wedding cake to skulk off together was the best decision I’ve made in ages.
She pops her mouth off my cock and takes it in her hand, sliding that tight body up against mine. I wrap my arm around her waist and swing her over, me on top, hand pushing up that tight hem again, face buried in the perfect valley of her cleavage.
“Wait,” she says breathlessly. “We don’t have a condom.”
I stop to pull one from my back pocket and she raises a dark eyebrow.
“You brought a condom to a wedding?” she asks.
“I like to be prepared at all times.”
“How presumptuous,” she teases, plucking the condom from my hands and tearing it open with her teeth.
“Besides, weddings make women horny.”
“Is that so?” the girl smiles, pushing the condom over my cock firmly. “What’s your excuse then?”
Finally getting her skirt over her hips, I run my fingers up the inside of her thigh, searching for her panties to pull them aside.
“I’m Jonas Ryder,” I tell her. “I’ve never needed an excuse to indulge.”
She grins again with that thick-lipped smile, lips as red as sin, and I feel a whole new surge of lust possess my body. I lift her leg over my shoulder and hold those thin panties aside as I enter her, eyes keenly watching every shift in her expression. Her smile turns into an open-mouthed silent moan, her eyes glazing over with exhilaration, and I’m only just getting started.
I take it slow, knowing from experience I’m a little bigger than most women can handle, turning to nip and lick at the inside of her knee on my shoulder as I push myself deeper inside her. Slow thrusts that make her body go soft, making those breasts bounce so beautifully I can’t take my eyes off her. Until she’s clutching at the bedsheets, tensing that slender neck with suppressed groans of ecstasy, body shaking to the rhythm of my drives.
This woman whose name I don’t even know. Whom I couldn’t take my eyes off since I first saw her at the wedding. This woman who has something about her…
She stood out among the wedding guests, even in that pink dress similar to the ones all the bridesmaids were wearing. L.A. standards, music industry standards, the standards I’ve been held to all my life have kept my own high, too. But there was something about her that seemed different, more special than generic hotness.
Special enough to risk this. It’s a small wedding where we could easily be missed. I might have stepped back from the public eye myself, but Nick and Jake still make music and make headlines all over the world. The guest list was less a question of who to invite, but who to let down. They might not be as big with their solo careers as when I made music with them, but they’re still big enough to make regular appearances on the Top 40 charts, still big enough to snap their fingers and have half the industry jump.
A small wedding was smart, not least because the press are all over it. You don’t get to be the youngest member of the world’s biggest boy band and not have them be intensely interested in who you’re marrying. Even more so when that someone is an
A-list actress, and more even when she’s thirteen years older than you.
The whole thing has become a minor scandal since the first pictures of them together came out last year. Every hack journalist and underpaid blogger having their say on Natalia and her ‘boy toy.’ Personally, the whole circus just reminded me of why I quit the industry so dramatically in the first place.
Nick might be the youngest, but he was always smart beyond his years. Makes perfect sense to me that he’d choose someone as smart and savvy as Natalia. They make a great couple if you ask me—not that I’m an expert on it or anything. I’ve known a lot of women, slept with even more, but you’d have to stretch the definition of ‘relationship’ to say I’d ever actually had one.
Yet even among the scores of women I’ve loved and left, the maid of honor stood out to me. Her curves and breasts and sensuous lips forcing me to imagine things that would have got me kicked out of the wedding party if the minister knew. She was just my type, with that glossy tumble of curly brown hair, huge dark eyes, and those long legs. I’ve never been the marrying type—I don’t even do second dates—but I think I could reach an anniversary before I got bored of an ass like hers.
After the backyard ceremony turned into the reception, I navigated conversations and congratulations on autopilot. Letting the old media training taking over so I could eye-fuck her over other people’s shoulders and come up with a whole month’s worth of things I want to do to her.