Damn. I lost her there.
Of course, Elle and I rarely discussed sex or relationships. Not my choice. But she was incredibly careful about that. With me, even with her Dirty bandmates Dylan and Zane; basically all her male friends. Ever since the breakup with Jesse.
Actually, since things fell to shit between the two of them, she didn’t talk to me about much at all. Not like she used to.
When she was crushing on Jesse, I couldn’t shut her up about him. When it became more than a crush, I heard about that, too. When she fell head-over-heels in love… I heard more than I could ever want to know about it.
Now? Not a fucking word about her feelings.
It was as if when she got dumped, she decided not to feel anything at all—other than to freeze up like an ice queen and loathe men.
“Alright,” I offered, trying to keep things light, “I’ll go first. I like shy, virginal girls who turn into nymphos once I get them in bed.”
She scoffed under her breath. “That’s a load of shit, Ash.”
“Is it?” I challenged, deadpan. “I also like shy, virginal guys who turn into nymphos once I get them in bed.”
“That’s an even bigger load of shit.”
“Why?”
She looked up to the sky and gave a small sigh. “Because I’ve seen the girls, and the guys, you hook up with.” She was really starting to sound irritated. Though why my hook-up preferences would irritate her, I had no clue.
Other than occasionally checking me out when she thought I wasn’t looking, Elle had never expressed an interest in hooking up with me.
But she was in a rough mood. She needed a punching bag, she could go ahead and take her frustrations out on me. I didn’t mind.
“True fact…” I lounged back against the rocks, sinking deeper into the water. “I like churchgoers I can corrupt. The more virtuous, the better.”
“Bullshit.”
“I’m partial to nuns, actually.”
She shook her head. “So full of it.”
“Monks…”
She threw me one of her steely-eyed gazes. The kind that might send a lesser man running for the hills, tail between his legs.
“I’m serious.”
“Don’t try to play me, Ashley Player,” she said. “You like bad girls and bad boys. The badder the better.”
I shrugged. “Just because I hook up with them doesn’t mean I like them.”
For some reason, that seemed to rub her the wrong way. I could practically feel the night frosting over between us. Surprised the water didn’t turn to ice. “You like the pretty party people, Ash. Admit it.”
“Had a thing with a priest once,” I mused, even as she made an annoyed huffing sound. “Actually, he was a priest-in-training, or something.”
“You like Dylan.”
Her words crackled in the night, like an assault weapon fired out of nowhere.
I did not see that coming.
She stared at me, and I stared at her.
Silence fell.
Actually, it slapped me in the face.
For a long, sharply painful moment, I couldn’t breathe.
Not that what she’d said surprised me, exactly. I was just surprised she would say it. Because it really wasn’t any of her business how I felt about Dylan. He was her drummer and her friend. But he was my best friend.
And it wasn’t like I had a choice in how I felt about him.
When I found my voice again, I said, as cool as I could, “When are you gonna stop liking Jesse? That gonna happen anytime this goddamn century?”
She stood up with an abrupt splash. Water streamed off her body. And she must’ve been really pissed, because she was naked.
Like, completely naked.
No panties to be found.
Elle was famous. She was famous enough when I first met her, as Dirty’s bassist, but these days she was a veritable one-woman empire, with a solo music career on the side, a rising star in Hollywood, a charitable foundation, and a hot-as-shit makeup line—to list the highlights. Which meant she was incredibly fucking famous; way more famous than me.
She was also private as all hell about her personal shit.
Which meant you’d never find her flashing her goods on a “private” beach for the paparazzi or doing nude photos for Rolling Stone or “accidentally” leaking a sex tape to the media. She didn’t skinny dip when the rest of us dropped our drawers and dove right in. She didn’t go streaking through parties or humping randoms on the tour bus for everyone to see.
Which meant in the five years I’d known her, and our bands had toured together, I’d never seen her naked before.
I was seeing her now.
All lean and toned and sun-kissed and wet.
I saw her tits. Kinda medium-sized and that perfect tear-drop shape. Her nipples tight and flushed against the cold. The slim curves of her waist. The jewel in her navel ring glinting in the moonlight.
I saw her pussy. Neatly ladyscaped with just a delicate strip of blondish hair… right in my face.
I would’ve taken a closer look if I’d had the chance, but she was about to climb the fuck out of the pool, so I grabbed her arm and stopped her and looked her in the eye.
“I apologize,” I said, sincerely. “Forget I said that. Now retract your claws and stay. It’s not me you’re really pissed at.”
She stood there stubbornly for a long, tense minute as I stared into her eyes, willing myself not to gawk at the rest of her.
Then she softened and sank into the water, shrugging my hand off.
I let her go.
But my heart was beating, thudding, fast.
Elle settled back against a rock, an arm’s length from me, and fell silent.
I could’ve reached out and touched her.
I didn’t.
After a while, she said, “It’s none of your fucking business, Ashley.”
“I realize that.”
“You’re not in my band.”
“Painfully aware of that.”
Her eyes flashed to me and she softened some more, finally giving up on being pissed at me.
“You want a smoke?” I offered. I stood up to get one, because I couldn’t sit still. A restless, frustrated energy was roiling inside me, making my guts twist.
And making my dick hard.
Lust. I was totally in lust with Elle. No matter how irritated she was with me, my dick didn’t seem to care.
But this wasn’t exactly a new discovery.
“No thanks,” she said, not looking at me. “Just a beer, if you’re getting out.”
I hopped up out of the pool and grabbed a beer from her bag, popped it open and handed it to her, then fished a joint out of a cigarette case in my jacket, along with a lighter. I lit up and stood there a moment, just looking up at the moon, breathing in the pot smoke and the fucking freezing air, letting my lungs shudder and burn as my muscles jittered with cold.
Letting the discomfort of that other shit roll through me.
You like Dylan.
I took another drag, and as the weed gradually did its thing, I mellowed out.
I tucked the joint between my lips and got back in the water, setting the cigarette case, stocked with extra weed, on a nearby rock.
Elle glanced at me as I sank back beside her. “For the record,” she said quietly, “and just so we’re clear, and you never have to ask me again, I will always like Jesse.”
“Fair enough.”
“But,” she added, “I don’t love him anymore.”
Right.
“Well, I’ll always like Dylan.” It came out before I was sure I should commit to saying it out loud, but here with Elle, what the fuck did it matter? I’d probably tell her anything she wanted to know, if she asked. And not like this was new information, either. “You say anything to him, though, and I’ll have to kill you. You know that, right?”
“You think he doesn’t know?” she said simply.
I didn’t answer that.
“He
’s not stupid, Ash.”
“Don’t wanna talk about it, Elle.”
I didn’t. Admitting it to her was one thing. Didn’t mean I wanted to have an open forum discussion. I didn’t really give a shit what Elle or anyone else thought about it.
She went silent. And I could tell she was feeling a little sorry for bringing it up. She never had before, though obviously she’d figured it out.
Maybe the whole fucking world had figured it out by now.
I really didn’t give one fuck.
As long as it didn’t weird Dylan out and mess things up with the best friend I’d ever had.
“You know I’d never say anything,” Elle said with a small sigh. “You’ve always been cool about my bullshit with Jesse.” She looked at me. “Everyone else gets all tense and tiptoes around it. Even Dylan. Zane. ‘How you doing, hon?’ They talk to me like I’m some car crash victim recovering, too slowly, in the hospital. Like they can only approach me during scheduled visiting hours and speak in hushed tones. Like they’re just waiting for someone to magically appear and give them an update on my prognosis.”
“Things are looking up,” I said, turning on my best charlatan doctor voice. “She really came through that last bout of screaming diarrhea. She’s a real trooper.”
Her lips quirked in a slight smile. The first one I’d seen all night. “See? That’s what I mean. It doesn’t scare you.”
“What doesn’t?”
She got quiet, for a long moment. Then she said, “My broken heart.”
I stared at her, just trying to come to terms with that. With how totally fucking wrong she was.
“It scares the shit out of me, Elle,” I told her. “That’s why I make jokes.”
And for some reason, that made her smile.
“When did you become such a good friend to me?” she mused, sipping her beer. It sounded like an accusation.
“Who knows.” I took a drag off my joint. “You’re tight with Dylan. I’m tight with Dylan. Guess it was just part of the deal.”
“Uh-huh.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re very sneaky about it, you know? One minute, I’m walking into my dressing room backstage to find you screwing a bunch of groupies on my makeup table… Disgusting, by the way.”
I just shrugged, as if to say All in a day’s work.
“And the next… you’re baking a five-layer cake for my birthday.”
“Guilty as charged.”
She was skewering me with her cool grey eyes, but she didn’t have me fooled. Elle could act like an ice queen all she wanted, but I knew she was all warm, soft pussycat inside.
You just had to figure out how to rub her the right way.
“You are one confusing specimen, Ashley Player.”
“Ah, but I’m never boring.”
“I’ll give you that. You’re about the farthest thing from boring I can imagine.”
I took that as a compliment.
“Just following my mom’s advice,” I said, using that same humor I used to deflect everything that had ever come close to hurting me. “‘Whatever you do, never bore the ladies.’”
Elle half-smiled, but seemed to catch herself before she committed to anything like laughing. “I call bullshit. Your mom never said that.”
“She did. Right before she left.” I took a drag off my joint and looked her in the eye. “As it turns out, the bored ladies leave.”
Chapter 2
Elle
Well, shit.
Ash had never told me that before; that his mom had left him. I didn’t exactly know that. Just knew she wasn’t in his life.
He’d never really been the kind of friend who talked about that kind of thing. Like a lot of men I’d known, he tended to shy away from emotional stuff. Or made jokes about it.
At least, his own emotional stuff.
My stuff… a different story. Ash minced no words when it came to my shit. And as it turned out, that was just the kind of friend I’d needed this past year.
Someone who could look me in the eye and treat me like a normal, whole person instead of some broken disaster victim.
Someone fun, who made me smile when I couldn’t even remember how.
Somehow who kept the party rolling. Who kept life rolling.
Who took it upon himself to bake me a five-layer chocolate birthday cake with custard in the middle and cherries on top. Not because I was a huge fan of chocolate cake, but because he knew I’d appreciate the surprise party he threw me along with it, with just a few of the most important people in my life in attendance, and that they—my friends and family—would like the cake. That it would make them happy, which meant making me happy, at a time when I’d almost forgotten how to be happy. When I was so caught up in other things that I’d almost forgotten it even was my birthday.
That kind of friend.
But it was somewhere around that party that I started to get the feeling Ash liked me as something more than a friend. Which was to say that it became apparent he wanted to fuck me.
Very soon after I met him, Ashley, the legendary Player, went and got himself a girlfriend. My friend Summer, actually. She wasn’t my friend then. I didn’t know her. But when my band met his at a festival, over five years ago, and Dylan and Ash became fast friends, Ash’s band, the Penny Pushers, quickly became a staple on our tours. I met Summer through Ash, and she and I had become great friends over the years.
Somewhere along the way, Ash and Summer broke up. He went on playing. I drifted in and out of a few relationships.
Then I was with Jesse.
Then Jesse broke up with me.
And Ash threw me an amazing birthday party.
And I started to get that feeling when he looked at me. Especially when we were alone.
The feeling I was getting right now.
“When did your mom leave?” I asked, carefully, half-expecting him to blow it off with a joke.
But he just gazed off into the night as he smoked his joint and seemed to be thinking about it. “I was thirteen. She was never mother of the year, even when she was around,” he added lightly. “So don’t feel too bad about it. I have an aunt who kicks ass, so it all balances out.”
“Aunt Ginny,” I said. “I remember her. The one in Montana?”
“Colorado.”
“Right.”
A silence fell, not uncomfortable, though I could still feel that look he was giving me, even when I wasn’t looking back at him. Especially when I wasn’t looking.
No way I could ignore that smoldering interest, burning into me.
Ash was all smoldering heat and angsty intensity, and even though I knew his lighter side—his ridiculous side, the one Dylan brought out in him more than anyone—I could imagine the kind of flaming beast he’d be in bed. All lean and cut and tattooed…
Not that I’d ever really allowed myself to dwell on those thoughts.
It was too… strange. He was a friend. So many of our friends were friends that he felt, weirdly, like family.
Though Jesse felt like family too, and I’d still fallen for him.
Ash, though… he just wasn’t my type.
Except that he kind of was.
I stole a glance at him. Inky black hair, gorgeous face. High cheekbones, straight nose, all chiseled, fascinating angles, the kind a girl could get lost in. Dark eyebrows drawn together over blue, blue eyes. Tattoos visible on his shoulders, and a surfer’s bod—though most of that was hidden beneath the water right now.
Not like I hadn’t taken a good, long look—or a hundred—before. It was pretty epic, as far as male bodies went.
Ashley Player was a thing of beauty.
So maybe I just wasn’t exactly sure why I hadn’t jumped his bones yet? Or let him jump mine…
Other than the fact that it had never felt quite right to me.
Or maybe it was because he didn’t exactly get his last name, his stage name—Player—solely because he played guitar.
Or maybe, just maybe, it w
as because some small part of me was measuring him against Jesse Mayes… and no living human male had yet risen to that bar in my mind.
Right. That bullshit.
“You remember that time in Colorado?” he asked, kind of dreamily, which meant the pot was probably going to his head. “In the hot tub.” His slightly-hooded eyes roamed over my face as he spoke. “You were all steamed up, like you are now, in that hot silver bikini of yours…” He roamed off there, and I got a little uncomfortable imagining where his mind was at. “You were so fucking drunk,” he went on, “and happy, and that preppy douche tried to pick you up? Had no idea who you were. He was all fascinated with your platinum hair and your belly button piercing. Like you were some kind of exotic creature out of his wet dreams he couldn’t actually believe was real.”
“If I recall,” I said dryly, “you got me drunk.” I remembered that night alright, too clearly. Ash and his bright ideas. The man could bartend with the best of them, and decided to make homemade Bailey’s Irish Cream. It tasted so good I made the mistake of drinking about a blender full of it myself. I was epically sick the next day. “I can’t remember ever feeling that gross.”
“You were a hot mess,” he agreed. “You got lost looking for ice, and ended up in my hotel room in the middle of the night.”
“I remember.”
“I would’ve kept you there, tucked you in and kept you, if Jesse hadn’t come to collect you.” He stared at me with that smoldering, one-hundred-degree Fahrenheit look of his. “You know that, right?”
Yeah, I kinda knew.
I also knew he was flirting with me, and it wasn’t the harmless kind of flirting friends sometimes did, that didn’t really mean a thing.
There was heat behind it.
And a not-so-subtle challenge.
Actually, he was being downright cocky. Which meant he was being his usual Ashley Player self, but for some reason, it was more flattering than usual. More welcome.
Usually I just let Ash’s attempts to flirt with me roll off. He threw it out there, I ignored it.
This time, I smiled. Admittedly, Ash seemed to care a lot about making me smile.
Too much, maybe.
But right now, I’d take it. Because when had it become okay for me to go through life without smiling?
A Dirty Wedding Night Page 12