As Long As You Hate Me

by Carrie Aarons

  “Oh my God, seriously? You didn’t even help pick it? That is trust, girl. I would never let my man propose without my sign off first.” Roxy Galore, a techno star, giggles.

  Kara discreetly raises an eyebrow at me, as if to say, “your world is fucking weird.”

  That it is, my dear.

  “So, love, going out on tour with this one, then?” British rapper, Magik, asks Kara.

  She looks at me and wrinkles her nose, in an almost intimate gesture. “I’m not sure. I have a full-time job, two actually, in the medical field. So, I may make it to some shows in the area, but definitely won’t be joining for anything outside of the United States.”

  My girl takes another large sip of the wine in front of her, and I can see she’s anxious to have the attention on her. Out of all of the social butterflies in the room, my high school sweetheart wants to crawl back into her cocoon and stay silent.

  “Where did you find this one, Dean? She’s hilarious.” Roxy lays a hand on Kara’s arm like my girl must be joking.

  Kara just rolls her eyes at me with a smirk.

  The night rolls on, with both of our visions becoming hazy with drink. Acts perform, people win awards, my name gets called a few times, and there is Kara, sitting under the spotlight when the TV cameras pan to her when I mention her in my victory speeches.

  During the longer break, the one where they’re debuting the fall TV lineup and viewers are getting goose bumps over the new shows coming out, we get up to go to the larger bar in the back of the room.

  “Hey, Dean …”

  “Buddy, congrats!”

  “Nice to see you, sexy.”

  As we walk, I shake hands and schmooze, all the while keeping my hand on Kara’s back as she sarcastically smiles up at me. I can smell the wine on her breath as I lean in.

  “Oh, admit it, you kind of love this.”

  “It isn’t the most boring Saturday night I’ve ever had.” Her voice tickles the stubble on my cheek.

  “I have to go to the bathroom, I’ll be right back.” I rub her back, but I really do have to take a leak so I excuse myself quickly while she gets in line at the bar.

  Ten more minutes until I get back into the room, because a music producer I’d worked with before was chatting my ear off in the can.

  I spot Kara from across the room, standing with a prick of a guy that I’ve seen mauling most of Hollywood’s A-list females at one time or another. Brad Coral is way too close to her, his hand on a dangerous spot just above her hip. Kara laughs, the curls framing her face shaking as she takes another sip out of the delicate flute she holds.

  My fists ball at my sides, and the animal instinct to protect my woman has the hair on the back of my neck standing up. Not only is that guy an asshole, but in all the time she’s spent out in LA in the past few months, not to mention seven years, I haven’t had to face Kara flirting with another man.

  It’s stereotypical, the huge green monster tearing its way out of my chest, because she saw Willow going down on me and forgave me for that. But something in me is about to go off like a time bomb, and I swear I’m going to break a tooth with how tightly I’m clenching my jaw.

  “You can take your hands off of her, thanks.” I don’t even try to hide the contempt I have for Brad when I stalk up to them.

  “Dean …” Kara hisses, her face going red with embarrassment.

  “My man, we were just talking about you. I was just telling your girl here about the wonderful time we had in Bali.” He smirks like the fucking devil.

  I shrug the hand off that he just clapped on my back. He’s threatening me, because there is no way Kara would even want to stand in the same room as me if she knew about that trip. We’d gotten high as kites and done things with several women … all at the same time. He’s baiting me, and it’s working.

  “Walk away, Brad. I don’t want to have to rearrange your face before your next teen angst TV series starts taping.” I curl Kara into me, although she’s stiff against my side.

  She won’t fight me in front of all of these people, but she isn’t molding into me the way she’s started to do whenever I lay a finger on her.

  Brad Coral was known for his high school age dramas, and for playing the bad boy everyone rooted for. Little did America know, he was actually an abusive pig who drugged drinks and paid prostitutes. From the outside, he looked like the perfect heartthrob. But in the industry, everyone knew to stay far away from him.

  “He was just asking how I was adjusting here, Jesus. Will you stop? He was being nice,” Kara hisses at me again, and Brad is within earshot and grins at me again.

  “That’s right, Kara was just saying how much she loved me in the Jasper High series. I always love getting to know my fans.” The way he says it, it sounds as if he’d like to do way more than talk to her.

  Kara doesn’t realize his innuendo, the wine making her reality a little skewed. But I do. I don’t care if there is security here, I’m about to snap this asshole’s tiny prick off and stuff it down his throat.

  “If you ever come near my fiancée again, I’ll end you. Are we clear?” A flash of a memory moves through my brain, of Brad forcing a girl to her knees while she cried in Bali.

  I should have done something about it then, and cold sweat covers my body. Thinking about any man doing that to a woman makes me want to vomit, and yet, I’m being accused of just that. Thinking about this bastard laying one skin cell on Kara? It makes me want to jump in front of a bullet to protect her.

  He holds his hands up like he did nothing wrong. But we both know better. “Whatever, dude … you’re fucking crazy. Good luck with this one, Kara.”

  Brad chuckles as he walks off, but my temper cools moderately when he’s clear across the room.

  Except it’s clear, when I look at her, that Kara is fuming. No one around us may be the wiser to what just happened, but she moves out of my embrace, and barely looks at me for the rest of the night.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Kara

  I stomp into the house, my heels clacking on the marble tile of the foyer.

  “What did I do this time, Kara?” Dean sighs behind me, loosening his tie when I whirl around, fury in my veins.

  “You had to embarrass me like that? I was having a good time, for once, at one of your industry parties. You made me look like some kind of owned woman, like you were peeing all over me!” I point my finger into his chest, the champagne fueling my anger.

  He throws his hands up, raking them through the straw blond hair that I want to wrap around my fingers. “I’m sorry, really I am, for protecting you from a monster who has the reputation of drugging women and having his way with them!”

  The stubble on his jaw tics as he grinds his teeth together. I can see the protectiveness and anger roll off him, and for the first time tonight, I stumble backward in my thinking. I didn’t know that man, other than the times I’d seen him on the silver screen, and he had been very interested in putting his hands anywhere he could on me. Logic comes through my hazy mind, drunk on anger and expensive wine.

  “Well, I didn’t know … but you didn’t have to attack him like that.” I sound like an idiot, and I know it.

  “Whatever, Kara, you’re only saying that because it’s the opposite of what I’m saying. Once again, you take whoever’s side is not mine.” Dean walks past me, into the kitchen where he grabs a beer out of the fridge.

  I feel like a child, a stubborn, selfish child who has just been proven wrong in an argument. My cheeks burn from his dismissal, and I shouldn’t, but I move into the kitchen because I don’t want to walk out on this fight.

  Those blue pools track me as he swallows multiple sips of beer, the house dark with nothing but the sound of the ocean filtering in every so often. The skylights in the ceiling cast spotlights of moon throughout the kitchen, illuminating us.

  “If you hate me so much, why don’t you just leave?” He says it quietly as he sets his beer down, bracing both hands on the cou
nter in front of him like he’s about to push off and start a sprint away from me.

  My heart convulses, panic suffusing my body. I’ve pushed him to the point of wanting to make me leave … something I strived for at the beginning of my stay but now dreaded like death.

  So, I snap, all of the repressed feelings bubbling to the surface.

  “Because I don’t hate you, you fucking asshole. I’ve been in love with you since I was fifteen, and my fucked-up heart can’t seem to stop it. Don’t you think it would be easier if I hated you? Or if I just didn’t care about you at all? Ignorance or nonchalance would be my bliss, but instead I hear your voice in one of those Goddamn songs and my brain plays our love story on a loop. I obsess over it, it brings me back to some of the best times and some of the darkest times in my life. I wish I could loathe you. It would be easier.”

  I throw my hands up, walking away as the tears begin to spill down my cheeks. I rub my arms, the goose bumps making me feel out of my element and alone.

  “Then don’t.” Dean’s voice is barely above a whisper.

  I can’t face him, but I don’t want to run away. “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t hate me. Don’t loathe me. Give in already, Kara. Let’s do this, for real. Try to make it work, be together. No more of this back and forth shit, being mad and then having hot makeup sex. Be with me. By my girlfriend, Jesus, be my fiancée, for real.”

  “We can’t.” I’m such a coward.

  “Why not?” He grabs me, spinning me toward him and pinning me to his chest. “We’re talking ourselves in circles. You haven’t left, even though you could and we both know it. You feel this. You want it, too.”

  I search his eyes, my heart falling and soaring as if it were on a carnival ride. “I’m scared.”

  There. I said it. The one truth that has been following me around like a big ape sitting on my back for the past seven years. If I let him in, will he hurt me again? Will I have the courage to state my desires? Will I be able to find both strength and love in a relationship with Dean?

  “I am too. You scare the shit out of me. But I know that any second of a life with you is better than no time at all. Be with me, Kara.”

  His eyes plead, and the last wall I’d constructed around my heart completely falls. I allow myself to fall, to trust him to catch me this time. Everything I’ve seen of this Dean reminds me of the boy I once fell in love with. He isn’t the superficial, egotistical man I’d built up in my head … he’s still the down to earth musician who occasionally lands himself in hot water. He is kind, funny, and has shown that he has my best interests at heart over and over again in the time I’ve been out here.

  Pushing up on my toes, I initiate a kiss between us for the first time in seven years. All of the other moments we’ve had in LA, it was him coming for me. But it’s a symbol of my trust, me bridging the distance between us.

  Dean stays still, his hands not coming up to greet my body, and his mouth unyielding under mine. He wants me to prove it, to show that I mean it. And between us, words were never enough. Even though he majored in them, made his fortune off of them, action had always been louder.

  I use my lips, teeth, tongue to coax him out, to show him that I’m agreeing to be with him, and not just because I signed on a dotted line. Finally, after what feels like eons of unrequited kissing, he folds to me.

  His hands come up to cup my cheeks, our kiss turning from one-sided to gentle and filled with love and soft passion. Emotion fills my throat, my last dam of resistance to him flooded by the need to give us a real chance.

  When Dean reaches down, grabbing my hips and lifting me to straddle his body, I don’t protest. When he walks to the stairs, his hot mouth landing on my neck, I can’t utter a word. And when he takes me to his room, laying me down and making love to me for the first time in his bed, I can’t think.

  I’m surrounded, body and soul, by this man. And finally, finally, I let it just happen.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Kara

  The morning light looks very different from Dean’s bed.

  We spent the past twelve hours making up, and coming together, in more ways, and positions, than one. Words were whispered, bodies touched, skin tasted. We would pass out for an hour or two, only to wake up and start all over, worshipping each other in some kind of intimate, middle of the night ceremony that only the two of us knew about.

  Pushing all doubts and past bad blood out of my brain, I consciously made the decision to see where this would go. Trying to deny that I still loved Dean was hopeless and futile, and also childish. It was time to grow up, time to face the fear, and the facts.

  And the fact was, I still had the same feelings for Dean that I’d been trying to bury since I was twenty. In light of the new truths he’d revealed, and everything we’d been through in the months since I’d been here, I had to give in. And give this relationship a real shot.

  “How does pancakes on the beach sound?” Dean’s warm stubble scratched my back as he nuzzled into me like an animal.

  “Perfection, is what it sounds like.” I cleared my throat, sleep still groggy in my eyes.

  “I can cook them.” He sounds proud of himself.

  “That would require us getting out of this bed, and right now, I simply don’t have the energy to.” I roll over as I say it, and have to promptly stop my heart from beating out of my throat.

  I don’t think there has ever been a more gorgeous sight in the entire world. A naked Dean Jacobs, all muscles and tattoos and sleep-tousled messy blond hair. I’m not sure if I want to stare for hours, or lick him from head to toe. The shadow of hair on his jaw has grown thicker in the last couple of days, and I want to nibble it from ear to ear.

  Moving into his arms, I settle for rubbing my hands up and down his smooth skin instead. His cock, miraculously still revving for action even after last night, twitches where it’s pressed to my hip.

  But something nags me, something that we haven’t spoken about in all the time I’ve been here. And if we’re getting everything out in the open, this is something that we have to address sooner or later.

  “Can I ask you a question that may seem weird, seeing as I’m lying naked in your arms?” I trace the patterns of ink on his chest.

  “Believe me, there is nothing weird about you lying naked in my arms.” Dean’s hair is sleep and sex tousled, and I have a hard time keeping my train of thought.

  I sigh, knowing I might just break the moment right now. “How are you feeling about the trial?”

  Those blue eyes move off of directly gazing at me, and I know I’ve made him uncomfortable. But he doesn’t move away from me. “Honestly, I think I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about it. Any time I let it in, it’s like this black sludge coating my mind, and the back of my throat. I don’t know why she’s doing this, babe.”

  His nickname for me is sincere, and my heart skips like a record in my chest. “Do you think she really believes … it?”

  I can’t bring myself to associate the word rape with Dean.

  He shrugs, wrapping his legs around mine, the soft hair tickling my skin. “No … there is no way she does. It’s for publicity, or maybe at first it was to keep me with her. Sure, our relationship, if you could even call it that, had turmoil, but never like that. I would never … you know I would never hurt any woman. It makes me sick that that word is being paired with my name.”

  It made me sick too. Although I didn’t really see as many stories about it anymore, our plan had worked in overshadowing them with media on our engagement, it was always floating over us like a black omen.

  “I know you wouldn’t, you know I never would have agreed to come out here if I did think you could do something like that. I just don’t understand the mentality of some people. How could you accuse a good man of something so heinous?”

  Just thinking about her makes me want to stick nails into her eyes, but I contain myself.

  Dean absentmindedly runs his fingers over my
back, leaving goose bumps in their wake. “Some people just want that spotlight so badly, they’re willing to do or say anything for it. I’ll admit, when I first ‘made’ it, that rush was heady. Chasing it was my drug, how many more dollars could I make? How many more fans could I get? After a while, for most people, that fades. You hone your craft, chase other dreams. But for some others, the fame is their lifeblood. They will step on anyone, suck the life out of anyone, to get it. And that’s what Hannah is doing. She will lie, cheat and ruin me, all because I cut her out of the fame she was getting when we were together. I can’t say I don’t understand her, because I do. But I sure as hell would never do that.”

  An idea dawns in my head. “That’s why you never told anyone who I was. All of those years, you never said my name in association with the songs.”

  His eyes become level with mine, those rough hands coming up to my cheeks. “Because I chose this world, you didn’t. You may have been the very factor that drove me to make music, but it didn’t mean you wanted to be thrust into the public. Part of me felt so guilty for even writing lyrics about our love story, but it was all real for me. I wasn’t pimping our relationship out for money, I was bleeding my heart dry.”

  I lay my hand on his chest, loving the way I can feel his heart beat. “I understand that now. I didn’t … for a long time. But I do now. I think, someday, I’ll have to sit down and listen to all of them.”

  “Have you never listened?” His mouth forms a small smile.

  I shake my head sheepishly. “Well, the early stuff. But after … I could never bring myself to hear your voice.”

  Dean looks pained for a second, but his eyebrow quirks up. “What, my voice would get you too wet?”

  I feel his hand snake down my thigh, gently parting my thighs. Sighing, I don’t stop him, instead inhaling softly when those skilled fingers find my core.

  “You’re insatiable, babe.” I breathe it out, loving the taste of that nickname on my tongue.