by L. P. Maxa
Marley: You guys don’t have to tour. Plenty of bands didn’t do nonstop live shows. Barbara Streisand didn’t tour for like thirty years or something.
Talon: Streisand? Not really a good comparison, M.
Marley: Okay, how about the Beatles? They didn’t tour for a few decades either. And historically, the Beach Boys hated touring too.
Talon: The Beatles and the Beach Boys? Are you secretly a very old lady living inside a hot young chick’s body?
Marley: You’re hilarious.
Talon: So you’d support me if I decided I didn’t want to be a famous rock star?
Marley: Of course I would. Fame means nothing to me, and all I want is for you to be happy. Happy and obsessed with me, obviously.
Talon: Obviously.
Marley: I have a distribution meeting in five minutes. I’ve got to go be the boss.
Talon: I thought Jett was the boss man in the distribution department.
Marley: Jett had to go up to campus and meet with his adviser, he was a little late registering and he needs to pick classes.
Talon: I bet Luke about shit himself when Jett told them he wanted to go to college.
Marley: I was there. He did not shit. But he did cry.
Talon: You know that I have your back, no matter what, right?
Marley: Is there a lecture coming my way?
Talon: And I understand why you guys are nervous about the world finding out that you own MJ Botanicals.
Marley: Yeah, you’re for sure about to lecture me.
Talon: Your family is good at keeping secrets, about keeping you kids out of the spotlight. If you told them the truth, they’d make sure it was never leaked to the public. And then Luke wouldn’t need to weep over the fact that Jett is taking the minimum hours needed to be a college freshman. He would be able to celebrate the fact that you two are changing the world.
Marley: You’re right.
Talon: I’m sorry, what was that?
Marley: All the words you just typed are accurate. You are right. BUT. Then we’d be bringing them into our lies, into our secret. And that’s not fair.
Talon: I feel like I’m never going to win with you.
Marley: Aw, T, you win sometimes.
Talon: Name one time I’ve won.
Marley: Um, well, the no sex ’til graduation. You won that.
Talon: No I didn’t, I compromised. If you’ll recall, I wanted no sex until we told your family about our relationship.
Marley: My 18th birthday, that’s when you won. The first time we didn’t have sex. You got your way, if memory serves.
Talon: Okay. I’ll give you that. But my dick has been inside you before anyone knows about us.
Marley: Mmmmm, yes it has.
Talon: Dammit, now I’m fucking hard as a rock.
Marley: I have to get to my meeting, sorry.
Talon: I need to go take a shower. Be nice to your employees, baby.
Marley: Jett gave me the same warning, minus the baby part.
Talon + Marley
Before
Talon: I come home in four weeks.
Marley: Which means I get to come in four weeks. Ha. See what I did there?
Talon: I’m starting to wonder if you miss me or just my dick.
Marley: I also miss your mouth, your tongue, and your fingers if that helps.
Talon: Stop, I can’t get hard right now, we’re about to start a meet and greet. How’s work?
Marley: It’s really good. Everything’s going better than I thought it would. We have so many employees now though. And it’s a little weird because they are mostly all a decade older than me. Have you talked to Brody about staying with him after this tour is over?
Talon: Yeah, he’s excited. He said they’ll need help with Wyatt after the baby comes.
Marley: So you get unlimited baby snuggles? Jealous.
Talon: I think I love all the contradicting things about you the most. Like how you’re sweet but sassy, how you seem so hard, but you love babies.
Marley: I do love me some babies.
Talon: You want your own one day?
Marley: I guess, I don’t know, I never really thought about it before.
Talon: Would you think about it if I asked you to?
Marley: Are you asking me to have your babies? I know that no one in my family really follows the social norm in order of events, but are we at that step?
Talon: No, but, I mean we will be eventually.
Marley: Hmmm…
Talon: You don’t need to give me your answer right now.
Marley: Did you know that biologically speaking, the best age to get pregnant is between the ages of 18-23. It’s actually when your body is primed to conceive and carry a child. The majority of women wait because they have things to achieve. College, a career, meeting the right man. So the average age now that most women get pregnant with their first child is around 32.
Talon: When did you research this? I thought you said you’d never thought about it.
Marley: I haven’t. I learned that in health class last year and I guess it kind of stuck in my brain. Maybe, subconsciously, because of my old-ass boyfriend.
Talon: Funny.
Marley: I do want to finish college, but a doctorate takes time. And we have plenty of money to hire help if we need it. And I already have an insanely ambitious career, to be honest, I’m at the top of the game.
Talon: And the right man?
Marley: I snagged him when I was sixteen.
Talon: So you’re saying…
Marley: I’ll have your babies, just give me a year or so?
Talon: Are you serious? You’ll let me put a baby in you next year.
Marley: Yes.
Talon: My dick is hard. This meet and greet is going to get real awkward.
Marley: I love you.
Talon: I love you more.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Marley
Before
Talon had been home for a couple months now, and it’d been constant sneaking around and trying like hell to keep quiet in the middle of the night. Don’t get me wrong, it was hot. We couldn’t seem to get enough of each other. We had sex all over the compound. Seriously. Anywhere we could be alone was fair game. And Talon was here at the red barn hanging out all the time, but the problem was so was Jett. And now Devin, Jett’s new girlfriend.
Talon always left at the end of the night, making sure that Jett saw him walk out the front door. But then either I’d sneak out and meet him somewhere, or he’d sneak back in after Jett was in bed.
I felt fucking awful about lying to my best friend, I really did. But I still wasn’t ready for him to know Talon and I were together, that we’d been together for a while.
Jett was getting suspicious, asking all kinds of questions and hinting that Talon was into me. I brushed him off as best I could, but I knew that it was starting to really bug Talon. Which made sense because he’d wanted to come clean to everyone months ago.
I was lying on my bed, staring at my ceiling with my phone resting on my stomach. When it vibrated, I got to my feet, knowing what the text said without even having to read the words.
Talon: I’m here.
I stuck my head out of my bedroom door, tiptoed across the landing, and peered down into the living room. It was after one o’clock in the morning, and thankfully Jett had finally gone to bed.
Marley: Okay, come in.
Talon opened and shut the door, making zero sound because we oiled the hinges every few weeks. He came up the stairs, careful to step over the fifth tread from the top because it creaked. He passed me, wordlessly, and I waited for him to close my bedroom door behind me before he spoke.
“This is getting really old, baby.” He sat down on the edge of my mattress, grabbing my hips and pulling me in between his legs. “Jett thinks I’m an asshole. He thinks I’m afraid of your dad. He thinks all these horrible things about me and our relationship.” Talon’s eyes were pleading with
me. “Can we please fucking tell him?”
I was the asshole. I knew I was. But I had my reasons, reasons that no one would understand. “Of course, we can.” I kissed his lips deeply, stealing his breath and hopefully his anger. “Soon.”
“I’ve heard that before.” His smile was sad, which was breaking my heart.
I felt like my life was a series of dominos and once one secret broke through, they would all get knocked down. “Not much longer. I promise.”
But recently, I’d been thinking more and more about telling the truth. Not only about my relationship with Talon, but about MJ Botanicals too.
It was one thing when it was only mine and Jett’s secret. But slowly over the last few years, we’d brought in our family. Not that the Devil’s Spawn didn’t owe us. We’d kept their secrets for years. But now it was Devin and Talon too. Things had happened with Jett exactly the way I’d said they would. He met a girl who didn’t make things easy for him, and he’d fallen hard. Which meant the people we were in love with were now involved in our lies too.
It didn’t feel fair.
They didn’t grow up the way we did. They didn’t deserve what we were putting them through.
“Baby, I love you so fucking much.” Talon kissed the tip of my nose. “I hate hiding how I feel about you.”
“I know you do, I know.” I tangled my fingers in his messy blond curls. “I promise I’ll fix this, I promise.”
And I would. I would make everything right. I would make everything better.
I pushed Talon down onto the bed, and climbed up and straddled him as I unzipped his jeans.
“Take these off while I lock the door,” I ordered, using my boss voice.
On my way back to bed, I’d taken off my shorts and panties. Talon’s fabulous dick was hard and lying against his stomach. I climbed over him, grabbed his cock, and put the head at the entrance to my core. As I lowered myself onto him, he grabbed my hips and opened his mouth. I took advantage. I leaned over and stuck my tongue in as I sealed my lips with his. Whatever he was going to say turned into a moan.
I was going to fuck him stupid, and I was going to fix everything.
I loved him, and he deserved to have all of me.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Talon
After
“And that brings us to the last few weeks, with you being an even bigger pain in my ass than usual.” I had Marley’s legs in my lap, her back resting against the wall and our third pot of coffee gone.
If Dash had been worried about Jett’s energy levels before, he certainly wasn’t going to like the result of him mainlining coffee for the last two hours while we sat in the empty diner waiting for Halen to have her first baby.
“I promised to fix everything and Devin’s paper was the perfect opportunity.” Marley smiled across the table at Jett’s girlfriend.
“Wait a fucking minute.” Jett held his hand in the air. “Are you telling me that the whole time I was giving you a hard time and thinking you weren’t manning up, you were actually banging my cousin behind my back?”
I smirked. “More like above your head and under your feet.” I glanced at Marley, smiling, and utterly enamored by her pretty face. “It was never my idea to keep you or anyone else in the dark, but to be fair, I did tell you that I would do anything M asked of me. And you assumed keeping me at arm’s length meant physically. I meant arm’s length as in she was still making us hide everything from the family.”
I’d been enamored with Marley from the first moment I’d laid eyes on her three years ago. And by the grace of god, she’d fallen for me too. Our journey hadn’t been easy, but there wasn’t anything I would do differently. Everything we’d been through had made us stronger, had made us a team, had led us to where we were today. And where we were was pretty fucking spectacular.
Jett moved his attention to Marley, a hurt expression on his face. “I would have understood. I would have been supportive. You should have told me.”
I could understand why he was upset. Marley was his best friend, and she’d kept an important part of her life from him.
“I wasn’t ready to leave our little bubble.” She reached across the table, putting her hand on his. “There were so many times I wanted to tell you, but it seemed like once you knew it would all be real. I thought that once it was out in the open, everyone else’s opinions would taint what we had.” Her smile was sad, and all I wanted to do was kiss her and make it better. “I was in love for the first time in my life, and I was terrified.”
Jett dipped down, kissing the back of her hand. “I can understand that.” Then he smirked, better than I ever could, turning back into his usual self. “I mean the hesitation. The dude is old as fuck.”
“Well, I think it’s a beautiful story.” Devin was basically vibrating in her seat. I wasn’t sure she’d ever had that much caffeine in her body before. She certainly had the purest system in this cracked leather booth. “He loved her from the moment he saw her, and then did everything he could to do right by her. It’s admirable.”
“Except he had his hands all over a seventeen-year…Whoa. Wait.” Jett pointed across the table, accusation in his wide dark eyes. “I told Uncle Dash at dinner that you didn’t touch her until after she graduated.”
“Yeah. I wasn’t understanding where you pulled that from.” Marley bit her lips together, stifling one of her rare girly giggles. “Because he for sure touched me before graduation.”
“Baby.” I sighed, lightly slapping her thigh. “You’re making it sound worse than it was.”
“Okay, he only touched me a little before graduation.” She let that restrained giggle loose. “But then all bets were off the second after I walked across that stage. Like, like, literally, that very night.”
“I saw you two the night of your graduation, he was following you into the pool house.” Jett nodded, like he was remembering a distant memory. “I thought, I wonder if those two are going to start boning now that she’s graduated?”
I nodded. “Yeah, we did.”
Jett narrowed his eyes on my girl. “He said under my feet, did you two—”
“In the basement, and the tunnel.” Marley nodded, lips pursed. “My room, my bathroom, the—”
“Okay, he gets the picture.” I pulled at her calves, making her slide closer to me so I could wrap her back in my arms.
“You fucked in my tunnel? I haven’t even fucked in my tunnel.” Jett sighed. “I mean, who hasn’t done it in the basement. But my tunnel?”
Devin raised her hand. “Uh, I haven’t done it in the basement, so you want to stop talking about your fuck boy days before your girlfriend flicks you in the dick?”
“Sorry, turtle.” Jett picked her up, making her squeal as he sat her in his lap. “As soon as we get home, we can go do dirty naughty things in the basement, then no one will be able to hear you scream my name while I’m fu—”
“Speaking of home.” I spoke up, cutting off Jett’s commentary. “Should we talk about living arrangements now that we’re all together? Everyone heard you asking Devin to move in with you back at the hospital.”
“Not until next semester.” Devin was tearing up a napkin into tiny pieces.
Jett picked them up and started making it snow paper onto an empty pancake plate. “But she’ll still be staying over every night.”
“Most nights.” Devin turned to look at him, a playful reprimand in her green eyes.
He quickly kissed her lips before glancing between us. “You two want to live together?”
“I finally got her, like for real got her. I’m not about to spend any more time sleeping without her beside me.” Did I want to live in the red barn with Jett? Not especially. But if that was what it took to live with my girl, then I would do it, without question. I’d dreamed of lying next to her in bed, waking up to her every morning for a long time, and the fact that the time for that to happen was here was almost surreal.
It was one of those moments when I nee
ded to pinch myself to make sure all this was actually happening. That I had my girl, and there were no more secrets. I was in love, and she was all mine.
“Are you two going to get weirded out if I say that I don’t want Marley to move out yet?” Jett pointed between Devin and me.
Devin cuddled up to his chest. “I love Marley, you know that. I don’t see anything wrong with wanting to live with your girlfriend and your best friend.” She giggled. “And your girlfriend’s best friend, and your cousin’s boyfriend.” Her laughter got even louder. “There are so many ways we could word this little foursome of ours.”
“If Marley wants to stay in the red barn, then that’s fine with me.” I glanced at her, a smile on my lips. “For a little while. I’m not living with Jett’s half-dressed ass for the rest of my life.”
Jett chuckled. “I knew it bugged you when I walked around without all my clothes on, but I had no idea how much you hated me while you were touring and Marley was with me.”
I shrugged, trying to downplay my years of jealousy. “It was hard to be away from her, and then every time I did get to see her, you were always hanging all over her when I couldn’t.” I raised my eyebrows, pointedly looking across the table at Devin. “How would you feel if every time you walked in the barn for the next year, Devin was cuddled up on my chest instead of yours?”
“I’d attempt murder, man.” He sent me an apologetic smile. “It was all innocent, I swear. It used to be so fun pissing off my Uncle Dash.” He stuck out his lower lip. “But then the parents got super up our asses about every aspect of our lives, and it was less enjoyable.”
“Yeah, super up your asses, but still clueless as fuck. You built a tunnel and they didn’t notice.” I still couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that Jett and Marley had construction going on under their parents’ feet and no one suspected a thing. It was utterly mind-boggling.
“Talk about fucking under someone’s feet, yeah?” Jett scoffed, shaking his head.
“You’re really stuck on the fact that we christened the tunnel, aren’t you?” I smirked, liking how much he hated it. It was a small amount of payback for all the times his hands were on my girl.