“We made plans for this champagne.”
“Mmh, hmm.” He brushed his lips to hers. “Refresh my memory.” Just thinking about the words coming from her mouth had his cock standing at attention.
“Pouring it down your body so I can lick it off.” She swayed, the tips of her tits tickling his skin as she spoke.
“I like those plans. But I thought there was more.”
“To hold a sip in my mouth and suck you off while it bubbles around your dick.”
“Fuck, Scar…” He ground said dick against her. “You’re such a wicked bitch. You’re killin’ me…” Biting her bottom lip, he held her gaze, daring her to say the wrong thing again. “What else?”
Finally, ‘sip,’ ‘suck,’ and ‘pussy’ spilled from her lips, and he fell into a hypnotic-like stupor watching the formation of the dirty words and hearing the hitch of anticipation in her voice.
Chapter 47
Despite our slutty talk, things slowed down once we were stretched across the bed. We traded sweet, gentle kisses and tender touches. Like a song, these would crescendo into crazed moments of bruising, biting kisses, rough passionate grasps and desperate clutches. And then back down again.
We stopped to catch our breath, and he swiped the bottle from the bedside table. He’d already stabbed the opener into the cork and now he worked it. The top shot off, and I screeched when he held the spew over the bed instead of off it. Wiping my fingers down my belly, I swiped at the spray of liquid coating my skin and put my fingertips to my mouth. “How are we going to toast with no glasses?”
His brows shot up. “You really want glasses?”
“Maybe.”
He wiped a fingertip down my skin, trailing it down past my waist, way past the spilled champagne, barely brushing the lips he had yet to kiss tonight. “I can get glasses…” He tasted his fingers. “Might take me a while to find ’em.”
Rising up, I grabbed the bottle. Tipping it to my mouth, I took a sip. “C’mere.”
Like molten black lava, his eyes blazed, and he snatched the bottle back. “Nope. Me first. Or you. Depending on how you look at it.” He sucked in a sip and I saw his throat bob. And then another sip, and his head dropped for that intimate kiss.
My back arched when the warmth bathed my insides. I bit my bottom lip. Still, a moan escaped and immediately became a whimper when he promptly slurped any lingering traces back into his mouth.
Was this weird?
Shit. On a scale of kinkiness, with the rock star slash candy bar legend being a ten, how demented was this? I didn’t care now. Holy fuck, no. Not while he was lapping and sucking up each sip. From my pussy. From my navel. From the shallow valley between my tits. Not when his champagne-coated palate was against my tongue, making sure I had a taste too… I couldn’t care now. Would I care tomorrow? If the candy bar legend was true, had that iconic rock star’s girlfriend cared the next morning? Probably the only thing she regretted was having it witnessed, having it a topic of crude jokes, and having it thrown in her face for the rest of her days.
Damn rock stars.
No regrets, I decided when my eyes opened and the memories flooded. Even the unfortunate choking and subsequent coughing fit when I’d paid Gage back, sip for sip, hadn’t put a damper on how I viewed our celebration.
If I had to rate getting my freak on, well, waking up uncovered and naked with my feet in the fur of a hundred-pound dog lying on the foot of the bed would be up there on the freaky scale.
“Hey.”
“Morning.” I soaked in the sight of him as I returned the reverent greeting.
How with his hair wild about his head and eyes bloodshot with fatigue did he look good enough to eat again? Maybe the secret was all that ink. Self-consciously, I rose my one tattooed wrist to smooth wayward strands of my own hair.
“You feeling okay?” His finger trailed my cheekbone.
“I need something. Tylenol or whatever you’ve got.”
“Headache?” He seemed worried at this prospect.
I shook my head. “Just all over, you know?”
“Must be bad if you’re going all over-the-counter instead of whipping up smoothies,” he teased, but he continued to assess me with concern. “I’ll get it for you.”
“I will. I’ve got to pee anyway.”
“Scar? You sure you’re okay?” He stayed me with a gentle brush of his fingers on my neck, but his mood quickly turned angry. “I was too rough. Shit. You should have told me. Damn it!”
“No. It wasn’t like that. I just feel…” Sore all over. I bit my tongue on words sure to make him feel worse even thought he’d be taking them out of context. “I’m not feeling this way because of our sex.” I caught his hand and squeezed his fingers. “Gage, being connected like that—fucking you—was the only thing that kept me sane last night.”
Instead of glowing with passion at my ‘four letter’ words, he still blazed with anger. “I want to kill him.”
“What? Who?”
“He fucked you up. Those little bruises last night are now… If I’d known it was that bad… Dammit, I can’t believe I didn’t knock him the fuck out.”
I’d seen Gage on a very thin line as we’d all watched Ketchum being led to the squad car. His fingers had curled. His jaw had worked in that way I’d learned was a grit of his teeth. While his fury had touched me deeply, his restraint of it had been another sign to me that Gage had his shit together.
Reaching out, I traced a caressing hand down the inked guitar strings on his arm, and then back up the broken one. Leaving the bed, I padded to my bag and pulled a tee shirt over my head.
In the bathroom, I was as shocked as he at what I saw in the mirror. My neck was yellow and black, finger marks clearly present. Deluged by the visible reminders of an hour in my life I had no desire to remember, I pulled the vanity drawer open. I would swallow something for my aches and even though Gage and I had showered the champagne and sex away before falling into bed to sleep, maybe I could talk him into another shower if for nothing more than to feel his soothing touch soaping my body. Keeping my eyes averted from my reflection and onto the contents of the drawer, I reached for a familiar label and froze.
Lying noxiously among the vials of pain reliever was a Ziploc bag. The sight of the syringe and other paraphernalia inside the plastic had me jerking my hand back. Why in holy hell?
In the other room, Gage was out of the bed, and I watched him step into a pair of pajama bottoms like the ones he sometimes wore around the house. Twisting toward me, he met my eyes. His expression was sweet and gentle until he read whatever was on my face. His look dropped to the drawer, and the life seemed to fizzle out of him.
Unlike on tour when he’d adamantly denied drugs the second he thought I was suspicious, this morning, he simply lifted his brows. I held his searching gaze, and sudden clarity settled me.
Before, he had been quick to defend himself because he couldn’t stand my thinking even for a second that he’d screwed up. Now, something had changed. There was confidence in his eyes. As if he knew I wouldn’t jump to conclusions.
“Why do you keep it?” I wondered. Because yes. I trusted him. Because of who he was. Gage. And despite of who he was. A disturbed rock star. “Isn’t it bad to have it around?” Tempting?
“That’s what they say. The shrinks in rehab. But, if I’m having to hide the shit away from me because, ‘fuck me, I might lose control,’ isn’t it controlling me?”
He had a point.
“If I look at it every day, choose whether to pick it up, choose whether to shoot it up, then I’m in control of my life again.”
I didn’t have a good feeling about this. But I knew Gage. He didn’t bullshit. He didn’t lie. And he was a very controlling person. “So, you just leave it there? Look at it sometimes?”
“Mostly.” A shadow of shame passed over his features.
Mostly? There was that weird feeling again.
“What?” My question came out in a fearful
whisper.
“A few times I’ve done more than look. But I needed to. I needed to know I was in control. Not the other way around.”
My spit seemed to congeal in my throat, and I swallowed the painful lump.
His steps ate up the distance between us. Before I could agree or disagree with this roulette game he’d obviously played a few times, he shook the contents of the bag out. I gnawed my lip raw when he meticulously and with a practiced hand went through the motions until he was drawing the golden liquid through the needle into the syringe. Next came the tourniquet, and here, I looked away. “Don’t!” I couldn’t stand to see this. Even though I knew he wasn’t going through with it, this shit was too real for me.
Trapped in a fog beyond the reach of my voice, he dragged the needle across his skin, tracing the bulge of a vein, and then with a flick of his wrist, depressed the pump, shooting the contents into the toilet.
With a whoosh, my breath blew out, and dizzily, I sucked in another, realizing I’d been holding it.
“And that’s that. Me. In control of my shit.”
“Did you bring that on tour?” I tucked my icy hands between my arms and sides.
The pride in his eyes fizzled, and he huffed out an offended breath. “I’m not stupid, Scar.” He dropped the syringe into a plastic case, similar to the ones in examining rooms, but his wasn’t adorned with an orange hazardous label. “It may be ‘very rock ‘n roll’ to be arrested at customs, but that’s not me. Not anymore.”
“Get rid of it, Gage.” I hugged my arms closer to my chest and skirted around him to exit. “Seriously. You have to have proved your point to yourself by now. Get it out of the house.”
Chapter 48
Well. Fuck. He’d been an idiot to think she’d understand. He’d been an idiot to subject himself to the disgust in her beautiful blues.
Pivoting, he made haste to the door and shoved it closed. Reaching into the shower, he twisted it on and set the temperature a couple of degrees higher than he was normally comfortable with. He threw off the pants he’d just put on and stepped in. The heat calmed him quickly. His eyes dropped to her handwriting on the bench. He eyed the numbered progression, the chords automatically converting and bouncing around his brain. He uncapped one of the markers and began to write, slowly at first and then faster as words became verses and twisted into more verses.
It was later that evening when Scar saw. After a day of dropping by the police precinct so she could sign her statement and they could take more pictures of her bruising. After a drop by her apartment for a few necessities she’d forgotten. After dinner with his father. After sex on the giant chaise between the pool and patio heater. After she’d raced him up the stairs for the shower. After he’d caught her and they’d fooled around on the warmed tiles of the bathroom floor.
“What’s this?”
He was too busy lathering her long hair to answer, and she was quiet while she continued to read. His fingers massaged and played for a while before he turned her to tip her head and rinse.
“Something completely new or something you’ve been working on?” Her eyes narrowed, and when she glanced at her scrawlings on the bench, he realized his eyes had strayed that way with her question. “It better not be for my song.”
“Why’s that?”
“It has lyrics already.”
“They just changed.”
“Nuh, uh. Nope.”
“Let me hear ’em. Your lyrics. If they’re so fuckin’ stellar.”
“Oh, they’re way stellar.”
He shoved the marker into her hand, and let his brows drift up in a clear challenge. Truthfully, he antagonized her out of curiosity. Scar had yet to write lyrics as far as he knew. At her house earlier, he’d faked a piss just to get a look of the whiteboard she’d mentioned. It had been filled with tabs only. If she had verses floating around in that pretty head, he longed to see them.
“The lyrics to that song?” She waggled the marker and her lips pursed. He could almost see the hamster wheel in her mind as she tried to wiggle her way out.
“Pick a spot.” He hitched his chin to the plenty of white space.
She tipped her head back. Soap suds ran from the long length of her hair, disappearing down the drain. When she was done rinsing—or stalling as he called it—she wiped a hand down her face. And then to his surprise, she bit the cap off the pen and began to write fast and furious, her body shielding her masterpiece in progress from his view.
Seriously? She had lyrics? Now he felt bad for goading her.
Capping the marker, she turned, still shielding what she’d written, and tossed the pen to him with a smug smile. A draft hissed into the cubicle when she exited. He voyuered through the beads of water on the glass as she dried, before turning curiously to her words.
A smile tugged his lips when he saw she’d rewritten his lyrics and after every few lines had penned, ‘Btw, you’re an asshole.’ At the end, she’d added, ‘but I love these lyrics. And I love you.’
He emerged, finding her wrapped in the towel, sitting on the flipped down lid of the toilet, rubbing the polish off her toenails with one of those magic-disposable wipes for everything that women always seemed to have. He enjoyed the way her eyes followed his every move as he dried, just as he couldn’t help himself when it came to her.
Moving to the mirror, he peered into it, testing the scruffiness of his facial hair. Too rough for Scar’s silky skin, or not? Deciding it could wait another day on his razor, he picked up his toothbrush. Scar was still attending to her toes and returning his looks. The domesticity of the moment had him hooked as hard as any drug he’d ever put in his system.
“So…” She threw the last cloth away and let her foot drop from the toilet edge. “I guess we just wrote a song.”
He spit toothpaste into the sink and took care to rinse it all down the drain. “Yeah. If you want. I was just messin’ with you. You don’t have to―”
“I want them. The lyrics. If you want me to have them.”
“Oh, wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait a minute. It’s your song now?”
She giggled, and he loved being the one to cause that secret laugh that no one else ever heard—unless she was silly drunk.
“To be decided.” He pointed the toothbrush at her with mock sternness.
Opening the door, he stepped into the bedroom, moved to the bed, and pulled back the sheets. Housekeeping had removed the champagne sheets and replaced them with the usual Egyptian cotton but in a deep red hue. Rose.
“Coming to bed?” He turned, contorting his face into a silly leer and knowing after they’d banged from the pool to the shower they’d likely just fall asleep.
The bathroom door was closed.
He hopped into bed, gave Rascal the okay to come aboard, and picked up his tablet to scan his social sites. His fingers froze in the middle of typing a reply to Colt when he heard a distinct squeak. With his ears tuned to the bathroom door, he listened as cabinets were opened then a few seconds later, closed. As drawers slid out on their tracks and then back.
The tablet skidded from his lap as he swung his legs from the bed. Stomping to the door, he wrenched it open and watched when she jumped up guiltily from her crouch next to the trashcan.
“I have maids. I’m not going to throw fuckin’ junky shit into the bathroom trash.” Hadn’t he though? Sometimes? Wrapped everything except the needle in t.p. and dropped it into the wastebasket. Fuck. He hated that version of himself. And he hated that Scar still had Gage 1.0 lurking in the crypts of her mind.
Grabbing her arm, he dragged her from the room, through the bedroom, down the hall, down the stairs. She struggled. Demanded to be released. Demanded an explanation. He gentled his grip, but he didn’t stop until they were barefoot in the grass next to the trash bin.
He swung the lid up, and it fell back on its hinges, banging to the side of the plastic can. By the moonlight, he scanned the clear plastic bags until he found the one that looked familiar. In the corn
er of his eye, he saw Scar move away. Assuming she was going back inside, he turned angrily, but she still stood a foot or so away, fiddling with the pendant on her necklace.
The late Tyler Conterra’s silver cross.
Anger ebbed away and remorse eddied in.
There was no clearer casualty of the damage a needle could do than icons like Tyler Conterra. And left in their wastelands were roses budding among the ashes. Their children. Their loved ones.
Little girls like Scarlette Rose Conterra.
Bringing his attention back to the bag, he used a finger to tear a hole. The Ziploc bag was settled some, but still near the top. He tugged it through the opening, turned, and held it up for her inspection.
She only looked for a second before dropping her eyes to Rascal who had followed them out and was sniffing at her feet. “Thanks.” Her gratitude was quiet but so sincere he felt an ache in his eyes. She dropped the cross and bent, petting Rascal. A movement of her mouth drew his attention, and he knew her well enough to know she was gnawing on the inside of her lower lip. “Part of me feels like I’m stupid for going off. You know, if having that is helping you in some way.”
“It’s fine, Scar. You’re right. It’s a stupid thing to have in the house.” Nudging Rascal aside with his ankle, he moved in close, splaying his fingers to the side of her head. Bending enough to touch his lips to her hairline, he repeated the promise he’d made to her ages ago. “I won’t ever make you worry again. Not about that.” And not knowingly about anything, he promised to himself. “You coming to bed?”
When she nodded, he swung her up into his arms and she shrieked. There was no happier man than him at this moment. With her in his arms, he took the stairs, slower than he wanted to since his crazy dog was getting caught up in the excitement and running back every few steps, tail waggling.
Chapter 49
The buzz of activity and the hundred conversations floating around were distracting, and for the fiftieth time, I reigned in my attention. My PA was patient, even observant enough to repeat anything of importance whenever my attention strayed.
Hung Out: A Needles and Pins Rock Romance Page 28