New Adult Romance Box Set

by Emme Rollins, Julia Kent, Anna Antonia, Helena Newbury, Aubrey Rose

  They were good—Trevor whispered so a couple times in my ear and I thought, but you're better.

  Finally, I moved Mike out of the way and went over to Steve and said, “Hey, I've got a friend over here who's a professional musician. Can we borrow your guitar?”

  Steve was this tall, lanky, geeky kind of guy. He reminded me of Josie in a way, and I hope to God he got enough of a scholarship to get out of town and leave. That's how it worked these days—you hoped that the people who brought you the most joy got the hell out.

  “Sure,” he said, twisting his baseball cap back around to the front of his head. “Just make sure that he doesn't break it.”

  “Oh, I'll make sure. By the way, Steve,” I nudged him, “you might want to stay and watch this.”

  I walked back to the table triumphantly and held the guitar high over the gnawed remnants of our dinner like a trophy from battle. “Ha ha,” I said and Trevor looked up and just shook his head but with a grin that told me he'd do it.

  Joe leaned back, stretched out, patted his stomach and said, “Whipped!”

  “Oh, now you have the balls to say it aloud?” Trevor said. “You've only been mouthing it for the past thirty minutes.”

  Mike moved again, his great, lumbering body like a boulder in action, moving in shifts. Trevor scooted out and I looped the guitar over him and then stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  Joe

  I was going to get a contagious disease from this place, wasn't I? Could I get away with asking for a straw for my beer? Putting my mouth on anything in this place made me shudder—and trust me, I'd put my mouth on some pretty scary people before. You date some of those Art Institute bitches in Boston and you find out, very quickly, just what your boundaries really are.

  Trevor kicked me under the table, or maybe it was Darla. Hell, it could have been her giant uncle, Mike, who looked like—still—Al from Al's Toy Barn. When he talked, when he laughed, he had the same mannerisms and it was like watching one of my kid movie characters come to life. All he needed was a Woody and Buzz doll and he'd have the trifecta of a Cracked.com article, a combination so bizarre you couldn't turn your face away, couldn't help but watch the wreckage.

  Darla was saying something to Trevor about open mic night. Thank God I wasn't the singer. I could play bass and guitar if I had to, but I wanted none of this. No way I was getting up on a stage in front of a group of guys who, back home, would have beaten the shit out of me at a Patriots tailgate party for looking at them funny.

  Trevor seemed to be persuaded though, and as the waitress delivered the food and I dug in, starving from deprivation and distraction, I just shook my head slowly. “Whipped,” I mouthed to him.

  He flipped me off in response.

  We ate happily.

  Darla nudged Mike and suddenly the great lump of a man was standing and she scooted out of the bench and walked off toward a sign that said 'restrooms'. Absolutely uncertain what to say to this guy, I figured my car was a good start.

  “Darla says you can help me with my car. Thank you,” I said, tentative and hating myself for it.

  He looked up from his wings, his fingers coated in barbecue sauce and said, “Yeah, I'll try,” then bent his face down.

  If he'd snarled while chewing he couldn’t have appeared more beast-like. People like him made me uncomfortable. I didn't know how to act or what to talk about or how to be around them. There was a cultural disconnect that made me just want to get away from them.

  Trev, on the other hand, seemed relaxed and confident, turning to Mike and saying, “So, you come here often?”

  Mike let out a choked chuckle. “Yeah, you know, when I'm not on a Carnival cruise or hanging out at Starbucks drinking a coffee bigger than my head.”

  The two shared an easy laugh and I was instantly green. Not that I cared about Mike's opinion or wanted to be his friend or anything, it was just so what the fuck? to see Trevor able to shift like that, to go from our world to this world and move with a kind of understanding of how to talk to these people, of what to say and how to connect. How did he do that? How did he do everything?

  It made me hate him and like him even more. Even if I tried, even if I de-stressed and let my body go loose, my mind raced, trying to figure out what to say to someone so different from me. Mom and Dad had spent so much time and money on tutoring and lessons and music appreciation and cultivating two languages, but as I sat here watching Trevor joke with this guy, the two talking football now, I felt like the uneducated one.

  And then Darla found a guitar and Trevor got to claim his place on stage.

  Darla

  Joe and I locked eyes as Trevor walked away and the crowd parted as he sauntered over. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, now in the periphery as I focused on someone completely different. There was a line, Trevor was third, and he patiently waited while someone else got up to do karaoke.

  “Excuse me,” I said, looking at Uncle Mike, breaking the gaze with Joe. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

  I took off, my heart thumping in my chest, my stomach twisted into a sickly knot, and my clit swollen and needy for a man who wasn't about to get on stage. I did my business in the bathroom, taking care to clean everything as best as possible, anticipating that there might be one last chance with Trevor. With Joe, I thought. Why was my mind doing this to me? It was all so comfortable, so easy, with both of them around. Was I the unwitting part of some threesome I didn't realize was forming? Were these two already in some kind of relationship? The thought seemed so outlandish that it nearly turned me crazy because Lord knew I was known for my crazy, whacked out thoughts. Mama had said for years that I could take a piece of dirty string, two sticks, and a cherry tomato and turn it all into a chocolate palace with nothing but my raw imagination as a tool.

  I had reading to thank for that one. Mrs. Humbolt at the library had turned me onto books in a way that had made them my first love. Josie's dad had been the town librarian and Mrs. Humbolt took us both in after our parents...well, after the accident. Mama had needed rehab for her foot and Aunt Marlene well, what she went through was a whole other story.

  So the reading, two, three, four books a day had filled my subconscious with so many worlds, and with pictures and facts and emotions and glimpses of the ways that people interacted with those worlds. Since then I’d always lived in my head, using it as my tool of escape. But as I washed up, dried my hands on the towel rack and just took a deep breath, staring into my own eyes in the filthy, cracked mirror I realized that my head was never going to really get me out of this place.

  That was going to take my heart.

  My reflexes were a little dulled by the beer I'd chugged a few minutes ago, so I wasn't expecting Joe to be right outside the restroom.

  I made a chirping sound of surprise and he said, “Whoa, sorry. I didn't mean to scare you.”

  “What's up?” I asked.

  We were in the narrow hallway where the bathrooms and an ancient cigarette machine sat, one of the last few left in any of the bars in town. A couple of kids’ high chairs were stacked, the wooden kind with the straps that never seemed to work, and serving trays were on stands, covered in clean glasses.

  “You really think it's a good idea for Trevor to sing?” Joe asked, coming close, speaking in a hushed voice.

  The air between us crackled with a vibration that made me want to reach across and just kiss him, touch him, to know what it felt like to commune with that perfect body and that sculpted face. I licked my lips and swallowed, widening my eyes, doing anything to take my internal state from the humming arousal that quickly pervaded me. It was like sticking your tongue in a light socket and getting zapped, except I wanted to stick my tongue in Joe.

  “What are you doing, Joe?” I asked, knowing damn well what he was trying to do.

  “I don't know,” he answered simply. A smoky, dusky look in his eyes obscured whatever he was feeling and at the s
ame time transmitted enough for me to know that we were definitely thinking the same thing. He reached out and within seconds his arms were around me and I was kissing the face of a god. That he'd been such an asshole to me faded, not because I was some kind of whipping girl—although...hmm, there was a thought—but because he seemed so needy, confused and in shambles on the inside using anger to cover it all.

  His mouth was more demanding than I'd expected, thinking him tentative and a bit too OCD for my tastes. There was a wild man inside Joe and it was coming out inch by inch through his tongue, through his hands and the way his thighs pressed into mine, hips pushing me against his obvious arousal. As he parted my lips, my surrender nearly complete, my betrayal well under way, we heard the faint clearing of a throat.

  There stood Trevor, the guitar slung around his neck, hanging down and covering his clothed body. It seemed incongruous, as if the only reason he should be wearing a guitar was as a piece of covering, redundant, the instrument now hung as his hands went limp and loose at his sides, his face questioning—not angry, not pissed like he had every right to be, just...curious.

  “I didn't know they offered CPR classes here at Jerry's,” he said quietly.

  Joe didn't let go of me and that felt surprisingly OK. Joe didn't pull away, his hands stayed firmly in place on my back, my ass, his head only turning to look at Trevor. He didn't answer the obviously rhetorical observation, and Trevor looked at me, a puzzled expression making him frown.

  “I'm so sorry,” I said, the words a gasp, astonished as much at my own behavior as I was at being caught.

  His eyes burned over the two of us, covering every square inch from head to toe and then a sickly grin followed by, “You don't have to apologize.”

  He reached out and put a hand on Joe's shoulder. Joe flinched but Trevor held steady.

  “I don't know why,” he whispered, “but it really doesn't bother me.”

  My whole body had gone numb from fear and humiliation. I wasn't one to cheat on people; that had never been my style. Some sort of supernatural force pulled me to Joe and not in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer kind of way or that stupid Twilight movie but more like soul mates drawn together in another lifetime. Trevor, too—it was as if standing here, the three of us touching, were creating an entity more powerful than each of us separated, individuals who were lesser when we weren't connected and together.

  Joe looked like he was going to puke—not from touching me, as he kept his hands safely in place—but from whatever internal state all of this generated for him.

  “You OK?” I asked, sliding my palm against his cheek. “It's OK.”

  His eyes were skittish and skirted all over, finally resting on Trevor. “Is it?”

  “I don't know,” Trevor said, honestly. “I just know that I'm not jealous and I'm not wicked pissed. I feel like I should feel those things...but I don't, so I'm not going to pretend to feel something I don't feel.”

  “Why not? That's what I always do,” Joe ventured. “That's how I get through the day.”

  “You don't have to do that here,” Trevor said, squeezing his shoulder. He looked around the nasty hallway at the back of the bar, its exit light blown out, cobwebs in the corners and some stain of undetermined origin on the dropped ceiling taking over, seeming to grow through like a mold or a cancer. “Right here, Joe, who would have thought? Here you don't have to feel anything you don't really feel and here you don't have to reject anything just because you think you're supposed to follow some kind of rule that tells you so.”

  A cloud of magic filled the air, enveloping us in it—not literally, of course. If that were the case this would be a Harry Potter mystery, only with lots of sex.

  “Trevor. Hey, Trev!” Mike's boozy voice echoed down the hallway. “You're up.”

  The three of us pulled apart and Trevor looked solemnly at me and then Joe. “We can all find a way to make this work,” he said.

  What did that mean? Was he giving Joe and me permission to sleep together? Was he proposing some sort of threesome? I guess that some people do that but around here...I tried to keep my mind open. I couldn't know what he was thinking and right now Jerry was up on stage shouting, “Last call for Trevor!”

  Trevor sprinted, bounding up the steps to take center stage with a lightness in his foot I'd never seen. Joe respected the fact that I'd come in holding one man's hand and probably shouldn't leave holding another's. Plenty of that happened here—but not in quite the same way. Uncle Mike would be suspicious and I didn't need Mama asking me any more questions or trying to pretend to be a parent again.

  Trevor

  “How is everybody tonight?” I called out. Darla and Joe cheered, but the rest were fairly muted. Undeterred, I kept going. Working a lukewarm crowd was no big deal. The stage felt like a high school assembly room, loud and thunky under my feet. The acoustics in here absolutely sucked, but there was a basic microphone and I could strum a borrowed guitar. Two songs and Darla would be happy.

  Plus I had a surprise for her.

  “My name is Trevor Connor and I play for a band back in Boston, Massachusetts.” Cold silence. “We call ourselves Random Acts of Crazy.” Eyerolls. “I know you've never heard of me, and that's cool. Give me a break, though—at least I'm a Red Sox fan and not the Pirates.” A few snickers. Better than nothing.

  “So I'll just shut up and sing, even if I'm not a Dixie Chick.” A low rumble of chuckling and a few more bodies came over and sat in the chairs sprinkled around tables at the front of the stage. “This is our band's most popular song, which means seven people have heard it. It's called 'I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer.'”

  The opening chords made me feel like I was right at home. Throat was fine—I'd practiced a little while Darla was at work—and this place had no harsh lights, no sound operations, nothing. It was great—me, my voice, and my guitar.

  That, and Darla, was all I really needed right now.

  Oh, I wasted

  my only answered prayer

  on a woman

  who didn't believe in God....

  The first verse came out slow, with a little touch of country I'd never added before, more a ballad than a rock anthem. Joe sat up straight and zeroed in on me, like an animal hearing something new in a field, attuning to it to figure out what it was. Darla's face was in a place of complete rapture, hair framing her face in soft curls, her eyes on me and her body loose and relaxed. The ebb and flow of her chest as it rose and fell from her breathing captivated me as I hit the chorus.

  At one she walked away

  At two she said no

  At three she said please

  At four she said more

  Darla's lips were mouthing the words, singing along with me, while Joe's foot tapped out the beat. His fingers knew the bass line and I wished we had the entire band here. The crowd grew slowly around me, and soon people were nodding their heads, tapping feet, and drumming their beer bottles with fingers.

  Gotcha. It made me dig in deeper and find more of my soul to pour into the song, my fingers on the fret and my heart on stage. Here I was the real Trevor Connor, the real naked soul for everyone to devour and share, to assimilate me into their consciousness and to go to a place where notes and chords combined created pure bliss.

  As the song ended, and I stretched out the last few words, “...didn't believe...”, the crowd went wild. OK, about as wild as fifty or so flannel-shirted rednecks could be for some overeducated punk from Massachusetts.

  It was better than great.

  “Encore! Encore!” someone shouted. It was Mike, raising his cup of coffee and calling for more. Mike! I'd won the big old lump over. Fuck yeah! Darla was clapping and jumping and bouncing in all the right places, her face beaming. For me. For my music.

  For us.

  I had something for her, too. As the crowd died down I put out my hands and said, “All right, all right. You convinced me. I have an original that I'm debuting right here, right now.”

  A frown cros
sed Darla's face. “I wrote it today,” I explained. “It's a tale about...well, it speaks for itself.” Joe looked at Darla, then me, and a strange sort of smile changed his face. I couldn't tell if he was happy or sad. Most of the time he was irritated, but this didn't look like any expression I'd ever seen on his face.

  Grabbing a chair, I adjusted the mic down so I could do this one sitting. A few people held up smartphones and Joe scrambled to get his out of his pocket. That made me nervous—brand new song I'd never practiced with a guitar? I picked some basic chords and stuck to those, hoping the lyrics were good enough to not humiliate myself.

  Why was I so worried?

  They were. So I began:

  Your Mama told you to watch out for me

  Your God told you to walk away

  Your Daddy said nothing, for he was gone

  And you weren't sure what to say

  The night you found me, wandering and lost

  Naked by the side of the road

  My guitar shattered, my body bereft

  You fought everything you were told

  And the chorus:

  When a naked soul finds you

  You don't have a choice

  You have to stop and pause

  You can turn away and never look back

  But it will yank you back, because

  Random acts of crazy draw you in

  Random acts of kindness draw you in

  Random acts of love draw you in

  A hushed, glowing silence filled the room, couples leaning on each other, a few people holding up lighters like at a big concert, people swaying to and fro at the beat. My heart was in my throat. I was more naked right now than I had been two days ago when Darla found me.

  And when I looked at her face as I strummed a few chords to give my throat a few seconds of rest, I saw all the random acts of love I needed.

  Darla

  Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Trevor was singing about me. About us. He had written a song for me. For me! Jerry's turned into a wonderland in that moment, something so familiar and so surreal, for my favorite singer and the man I was falling for wrote me a love ballad and sang it—premiered it!—in our little local shithole and he wrote it for me!