by Corri Lee
“Good afternooning, Miss White.” I sat up automatically when Blaze strolled in, freshly showered and dressed in just a red chequered shirt still hanging open. He smelled strongly of men’s shower gel, washed clean of the musky scent of our sex, but it still at least distracted me from the fact that he’d practically moved himself into my flat.
“Why do you do this?” I nodded down at the pillow I’d unwittingly kept clutched to me when I sat. “Why have you wrapped your t-shirt around this today?”
“I untangled myself from you earlier to go the bathroom. You were fine when I left but when I came back in a minute later, you were having a bad dream.” He sat down next to my feet and took one of my hands in his, turning it palm up to trace circles around my life line.
“I had no idea.”
“You calmed as soon as I sat next to you so I thought it was over. But you started to toss and turn again when I stood up, so I got my t-shirt from the lounge and made an alternative me. I didn’t think you’d appreciate it if I was there when you woke up, but I couldn’t just leave you like that. It was heartbreaking.”
His face fell and became morose and pained, like he was reliving watching me at the mercy of a nightmare. But then it brightened when he spoke again. “You immediately threw an arm over the pillow and nestled into it, calm and smiling. It was a joy to see, Emmeline.” A joy to see me act so daftly or a joy to see me so comforted by his scent?
I simpered, embarrassed by my somnial admission. Surely it was the behaviour I couldn’t control that betrayed me the most? “And this time?”
He smiled and stood, pulling me up to my feet. “I didn’t want to take any chances. I kept checking on you to make sure I wasn’t being big-headed. I wasn’t. Now...”
Whatever he said, I didn’t hear it. My mind was working on overdrive, clawing around for any shred of a clue at what I’d dreamt of that had made him want to comfort me beyond consciousness. That spread into a paranoia over what I’d done in my sleep, if I’d spoken or done anything untoward. What if I’d said something I shouldn’t have?
I acted compliantly as he dressed me like a child. The clothes he’d picked out portrayed me as anything but. The black vest clung to my body, showing off just how slight I was, but the low cut V revealed something that I didn’t usually care to show off: I was somewhat ‘blessed’ around the bust.
It was almost a point of embarrassment that my breasts look like someone else’s stuck onto a waif, and the minute Chris had pointed out that I was unrealistically stacked and trim like a video game character was the moment I started to cover up.
The flared, black satin skirt Blaze had picked to accompany the best was equally as revealing. How had I not realised that he’d been dressing me up like a baby hooker when I was in the shop trying them on?
“You’ve expanded.” Blaze spoke directly to my chest and leered, tugging at the V neckline. “You’ve gained those few pounds I was lusting for. This wasn’t so tight before.”
Fat Emmy roused from her sleep in my subconscious and shook her head at me disapprovingly.
You’ve been letting things slip.
“What, really?” Now he mentioned it, my underwear had been feeling a little snug, and the clothes he’d brought for me looked more like they would have on the airbrushed catalogue models who sold them.
“You look great for it,” he assured me, forcing his eyes away from my cleavage to meet my distraught gaze. No woman wanted to be told she’d gained weight, some women didn’t want to be placated with lies like, ‘You look so sexy’. I was one of them.
Blaze turned me around by the shoulders and groaned longingly behind me. “This skirt is so short...”
“Shouldn’t I have showered before you dressed me?”
“No point. You’re going to be filthy in minutes when the music starts and no man wants to stir another’s broth.”
It took moment to decipher his riddle. “You want me to go out smelling of you so I don’t make it with any rockstars?” His usual cockiness faltered with the betraying twitch of his eyes. “You do! Does my green eyed monster have a green eyed monster of his own?” I felt a little guilty for calling him mine, but it didn’t seem to be that particular point of the conversation that left him disgruntled.
“I certainly don’t want to stand there watching anyone else putting the moves on you.” He scrubbed a hand over his face and grabbed my brush from a shelf underneath a large oval mirror painted with brightly coloured filigree, a piece of art with my fingerprints all over it. Blaze sighed as he combed at the tangles in my hair, stroking the entire length down to my waist as it smoothed. “It’s like I told your friend, Chris, I have every intention of concreting this arrangement someday and I can accept that things won’t be ‘typical’ in the meantime. But I’ll be clear, Emmeline, one day I won’t care for the complications. Mine are temporary and I can overlook yours.”
“But you don’t know what my complications are.”
He shrugged. “I don’t care. I’ll take what I can get. God knows I had no idea that we’d be at this point when we met, but I don’t know that it would have stopped me anyway. Ten days away from you put it into perspective and scribbled a few question marks down into full stops. I just need time, if you’ll allow it.”
I don’t know if he needed my answer, but I was stuck too still to respond. As messed up as I was, he was looking for permission to stay and a license to become permanent fixture in my life. How could he say that he could just overlook my ‘why’s when he had no idea what they were?
There would be times when I’d regress and fall apart, a ticking time-bomb waiting to explode, and I’d always be in love with another man. It wasn’t fair to give him a green light when there was so much he didn’t know, so much that might overshadow his delusion that I was a joy to look at and ‘make love’ to.
“You really don’t know how messed up I am, Blaze.”
Flapping his hand uncaringly, he paced into the bathroom and returned with the case full of makeup I rarely used. “I’m a strange man, Emmeline White. I prefer to look a person’s problems as strands in a tapestry. Alone, they mean nothing, all the same dull colour and hue. Put a few strands of red in a white sea and you might say it looks wrong, blemished, unacceptable. I say it adds character and definition, all in the interest of improving the bigger picture. I could pick away and analyse, questioning why they’re there, or I could appreciate that they are and enjoy the masterpiece that took a miracle worker twenty-two years to weave. Now look up.”
With a smile on his lips, Blaze held my chin up with his forefinger and kissed the tip of my nose. I loved the way he could ham up any sentiment with something poetic when ‘I don’t give a shit’ would have done. There was no way in which he didn’t seduce me and leave my inner Juliet drooling and damp around the gusset.
Holding a kohl pencil next to my eye did, however, concern me. “You’re going to do my makeup? What, are you—”
“A model? Yes.” He gave me a look that warned me off the words ‘gay’, ‘cross-dresser’ and ‘post-op’. “I also spent a lot of puberty painting Warhammer armies. Look up.”
It was nigh on impossible to imagine Blaze as the nerdy type- huddled over collectors cards and hyperventilating over pictures of girls boobs. It was harder to imagine him ever not being attractive. Nobody just morphed into a stud when their balls dropped and I refused to believe that he’d been a special case.
He applied my makeup with care and a delicate touch I never would have expected from a man who could be so brusque and domineering. It was almost like having a very masculine big sister prettying me up for the prom I never attended.
He sucked on the back of his teeth thoughtfully when he’d finished and stepped back to examine me. “You’ll do. Any more and we won’t make it out. I already have balls like space hoppers from looking at that skirt.”
I glanced down at the short band of satin and smirked. “You like?”
“I’d like it better if it was all
you were wearing and your ankles were by my ears.” His eyes misted with a heavy haze of arousal that made heat pool between my legs. That look, Jesus, I was addicted to it. “Keep looking at me like that, Emmeline,” he warned, lips dipping to graze my earlobe, “and neither of us will leave this flat for days.”
“Keep talking like that, Blaze,” I countered, “and neither of us will leave for weeks.”
And a very small part of me thought it might just honour that threat, keeping him captive in my ivory tower whether it was complicated or not.
“That skirt is so short...”
“You mentioned.” I swatted at Blaze’s hand as I climbed out of our taxi onto the pretentious red carpet that was typical of one of Henry’s establishments. He said that he liked his guests to feel important when they arrived, like royalty. That was bullshit, he just knew how to market his businesses.
The Roses looked a lot like a small backstreet theatre, boasting a grand stage with rich ruby curtains that drew across by old fashioned pulleys. In fact, it had been at one point. The building had been renovated roughly fifteen years earlier, keeping the exterior’s old world charm of the street facing ticket windows that often sat vacant.
But inside, the auditorium itself had been rebuilt with a few mod cons like mismatched ultra-modern chrome bars fully stocked with all manner of spirits, and seating booths towards the rear similar to those in Esme’s.
As one of the first businesses Henry had started, it was one of the roughest around the edges, and that was why I’d liked to go there. It lacked the archaic yet still super-sterile air of Tudor blood-money and graced the least of his attention. Bands played there the most, seconded by independent theatre groups. Esme liked to hire out the building for her annual winter ball and knew exactly how to glamorise it to greatest effect. It didn’t attract the highly polished crowd Henry aimed for, instead enticing bohemians and alternative-rockers through it’s doors; the kind of people we were there to see.
But The Roses had a dirty little secret. Technically, it was mine. The club had been gifted to me after Henry saw how keen I was on the place, and that had immediately dulled it’s appeal. Designed as a ploy to brighten my mood and draw me into ruling his empire, the idea of being responsible for anything or anyone was horrendous to me, and I’d shied away as soon as the gesture had been made. There would undoubtedly come a day when I’d regret throwing all the benefits and privileges Henry had granted me back in his face, but that day wasn’t in sight.
Instead, I stood in front of it’s doors with a man who suited the demographic of any power hungry mogul, groupie or sycophant, tugging at the leash to cash in my backstage pass like a hyperactive teenager.
“I can see where your backside meets your legs. That hot little crease just below your buttocks...” Blaze grabbed me and spun me around, catching my bottom lip between his teeth then sucking it gently, groaning lowly against my mouth. “I changed my mind, let’s go back to bed.”
“But it’s Monday’s Miracle! You can’t drag me out like this, full of your cum because you denied me my right to shower, then change your mind when we’re right outside. It doesn’t work like that.”
“The hell it doesn’t.” He cupped himself through the seam of his jeans and shook his head at me. “ ‘Full of your cum’—Your dirty mouth might be the death of me, Emmeline.” Pulling me up close to him, he reached behind me and traced the ridge between my backside and my thigh. “I can see this.”
“You know, from the way your lips have swollen and reddened, your pupils have dilated, and that vein in your neck is pumping away, I’d say you’re crushing on me pretty hard, Blaze.”
“I daresay I am, cupcake. And I daresay that you know exactly how hard.”
Innuendo aside, I knew because I felt it too—the way that nothing else had mattered that afternoon because I’d been with him. The air became heavy and humid around him, suffocating me in a way that was almost erotic because it was so safe.
He was a talisman that protected me from the world and, more importantly, from myself. I was the most level I’d been in years and it was down to nothing more than the fact he was in my life, even if he wasn’t in the same room. Stupidly, I’d put him up on the same pedestal as Hunter, but found myself placated by the fact that he gave me what I’d needed for so long.
Still, I hated it when he got that look in his eye, that wild, inflammatory look he got when he spoke of how he felt for me.
“I’m sorry.”
“You keep saying that,” he laughed, pulling me into an embrace and rocking me playfully, “but you wouldn’t be if you understood. My heart aches for you sometimes, for the worldly things you don’t know because the world has been cruel on your young mind.”
“Hey!” I pushed back to look at him and scowled. “I’m not so naive! I might have had a pretty shitty adolescence, but you must only have a couple of years on me. Three at most.”
“You think so?” Looking almost embarrassed, he cocked his head at me and pursed his lips. “I turn thirty next February.” What? There was no way this guy was in the twilight of his twenties, putting a little over seven years between us. My birthday had been a few weeks before we’d met—I was barely in my twenties and he was fast approaching his third decade of life. He’d had so much more time to define his parameters, wants and goals, so what the hell did he want with a kid like me?
And then I thought of the twelve year difference between Daniel and Jonathan, the illicit student-teacher affair that had turned into a fairytale. They’d met in college, Daniel as a student and Jonathan as our graphics professor, and the heat wave that moved between them from the first moment had been palpable. The number of years that separated them had been irrelevant and unimportant, less of a factor than their professional positions or lack thereof. Who was I to grumble at the sex god’s age when he wore it so well?
“I must make the most of us both being vicenarian’s before you stagnate.”
“You been reading the dictionaries at work, cupcake?”
“My life has recently become quite a boring slog of staring at doors waiting for my favourite non-enabler to arrive. It was the dictionary or one of Esme’s overtly feminist ‘women’s interest’ magazines.”
“Tough call.”
I murmured in agreement and turned my attention towards the boom of music that radiated outward from within The Roses like a shockwave. They were inside, and I was practically vibrating with excitement to meet them. It may not have been a big deal to Blaze after being one of the group’s founding members, but the experiences of fame I might have experienced as a privileged teenager or student had been lost to illness, obsession and convalescence.
In a way, this opportunity made up for the wild-child I never was and had decided not to be when unwillingly submerged into a world of popularity with Henry. Not paying much interest in those who sat around me at A-list functions and dinner parties, I’d blocked out the famous faces when I might have stared in awe.
But if I’d taken it all in my stride then, maybe I might not be so convincingly anxious and star struck now. I might have known Blaze already and looked like less of an attractive prospect had I not spent years cutting my nose off to spite my face.
“Why did you leave the group? All the respect in the world to him, but you’d have made a much better front man than Chase-bloody-Garret.”
“The tours.” Blaze answered flatly, obviously a little sore over the subject. “As much as I hated it, my responsibilities kept me tied to London. My opportunities to leave are restricted to weekend trips and overnight red-eye drives. It was too much strain on the guys and an impossibility with international tours.” Wistfully, he shook his head and rested it against mine.
“That was a long time ago.”
“It was. Six years.” I felt his frown before I got a blurred, up close look of his eyes darkening. “I thought life might have changed by now. I thought I’d have more freedom.”
“Do you regret it?”
; “In some ways. I still got a lot of media attention, what with my face already known as their singer, so I didn’t lose out there. It led to a lot of work, the work you know. But as much as I loved the music, I couldn’t hold them back. Chase is a good guy. I knew he’d do me proud, even if he does act like a bastard around pretty women.” He shot me one firm, very pointed glance. “You’d do well to remember that.”
“He’d stir another man’s broth?”
“Not if he enjoys being attached to his genitals...” The humour was there but tainted by possessive vehemence I couldn’t help but smile about. Blaze sighed and rolled his eyes at me, trying to look annoyed and failing miserably. “All right then, let’s introduce you to some rockstars.”
Monday’s Miracle were an award winning collaboration of four far too attractive men who sang far too angry songs. Even after a generous dose of bad publicity after a particularly nasty case of blackmail, they were still one of the biggest UK bands to grace the industry.
And I was sitting with them in a club nobody knew I owned, drinking and talking movies. What were the chances? We sat on the stage itself in couches and chairs dragged up from the base level, surrounded by their equipment and using an overturned crate as a table for the drinks we’d swiped from the bar.
The band made comments that the owners would probably kill them for helping themselves. I casually said that I thought the owners might be particularly forgiving. I may not have taken the offer to have jurisdiction over the business, but Henry would know that I’d been there and be lenient.
I easily could have gotten away with calling Chris, Esme, Daniel and Jonathan down, but for once in my strange life, I was selfishly enjoying the limelight from being sat with incredible company, who were honestly looking at me like I was the amazing spectacle in the room.
Pictures didn’t do Chase Garret justice. He looked to be on top form that night, blonde hair combed back over a face that boasted bright blue eyes and an attractively angular jaw line. He had a foul reputation, but that didn’t seem like the man who sat on the other side of Blaze, who was territorially obstructing our conversation by hovering backwards and forwards while we tried to talk around him. Chase was the kind of gorgeous one-time-only lay I enjoyed in Blaze’s absence and I think they both sensed it.