“Kaoli is something else,” Jori said. “Is she really your girlfriend? Because she doesn’t act like it.”
“She’s—”
“Please tell me she’s not.”
What could she say? She didn’t want to continue lying to her. When she’d agreed to lie for Kaoli, she’d known it might interfere with any chance she had of dating anyone real, but she’d told herself she’d be too focused on rehabbing her stupid body to want to date. Rae reached down to rub the sore tendons around her knee. She should be more focused on rehab.
“She’s not, is she?” Jori said.
Why was Jori pushing?
Rae straightened. She didn’t want to lie, but there was a lot of wiggle room between lie and truth. “She’d probably sleep with you either way.”
Jori’s mouth fell open. “You think I want to know if she’s your girlfriend because I want to sleep with her.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a fan had her on their to-do list,” Rae grumbled.
“She’s not the one I want to sleep with,” Jori said, herding her toward a narrow stretch of solid wall near the back of the band shell and crowding her against it until there was nowhere for her to go. Her voice—always hoarse from cheering on her aerobics students—was rougher than usual. The sound reverberated up and down Rae’s spine. Jori could make love to her with only her voice and it would be a high point of her life.
Oh God. Jori wasn’t joking, was she.
“Are you propositioning me?”
Jori stepped closer. She planted one hand on the wall next to Rae’s head, boxing her in, then shifted forward onto her forearm, narrowing the distance even more. “You want me to be, don’t you?”
Rae licked her dry lips and shrank back against the wall even though it already pressed into her spine. Jori’s tough-dyke attitude was doing funny things to her insides. She’d never heard her I-eat-problems-like-you-for-breakfast, and-I-do-not-mean-eat-the-way-you-want-me-to-mean-it voice—never thought of her as someone who might have one. And now she could think of nothing else, except for how it would feel to have Jori’s mouth on various parts of her anatomy.
But she wasn’t going to fall for someone who had red flags plastered all over her very attractive…uh…personality? No, really, that’s what she meant. Personality. She had a very attractive personality. Except, of course, for the red flags. The main red flag being that Jori could stand the thought of being with a man.
Jori reached for Rae’s hair and stroked it. Gently, like Rae was precious to her. Rae’s breath hitched. Jori’s did, too.
“But if you’re really dating her…” Jori stared into her eyes with an intensity that made Rae shiver. “Maybe I shouldn’t touch you.”
She should. She really should touch her.
Jori didn’t move. Didn’t pull away.
They were standing so close that all Rae could do was keep looking into her eyes. All she wanted to do was keep looking into her eyes. Breathing was optional.
“I…” Jori’s voice failed her.
Rae swallowed hard, as if she were the one who couldn’t speak.
“I don’t…” Jori cleared her throat. “I don’t think you should date her.”
Rae was glad there was a wall supporting her spine, keeping her upright. “Why is that?”
“Because she’s about to get married?”
Oh, Jori. “That’s not why.”
“She’ll disappoint you. She’ll hurt you.”
Rae shrugged. It was a little too late to worry about Kaoli disappointing her. “I don’t know about that. She’s made it pretty clear she’s going through with the wedding. It’s not like she’s stringing me along.”
Misleading, even if it was all true. But what was she supposed to say? Don’t worry about who I’m dating, it won’t change anything?
“And you’re okay with that?” Jori’s voice sharpened with disapproval.
Great. Now Jori thought she had no standards. “I have my reasons.”
“Fine,” Jori said. “Go have unsatisfying, uncommitted sex with her.”
Jori was annoyed. She cared enough to be annoyed.
Rae took a deep breath. If Jori was another straight girl tempted by a fleeting urge that would lead to nothing… No. She wasn’t going to go down that road. She wanted this to mean something. She wanted this to be real. She wanted…this.
“I was lying before,” Rae said. “I’m not dating Kaoli.”
The pulse at the base of Jori’s throat jumped.
God, that pulse. She wanted to close the gap between them but couldn’t move.
“Good.”
With an uneven breath, Jori thrust her fingers through Rae’s hair and cradled her head. Their foreheads touched. Rae closed her eyes. The band shell, the boardwalk, the passersby who might or might not be near—all of it disappeared, her entire existence reduced to the delicious scent of Jori’s skin and the warmth at the spot where Jori’s forehead touched hers, a warmth that grew and spread downward, outward, everywhere. Rae shifted her hips closer, pressed her body into her, whispered her name. Jori was going to kiss her, and this kiss wasn’t going to be about revenge. This kiss would be sweet. Beautiful. Pure.
Their lips met and Rae stopped thinking about what this kiss would be because she was too busy opening her mouth to her and letting her in. Jori’s tongue touched hers and she reeled from the welcome shock of it. And then she couldn’t think at all, because Jori tasted better than she’d imagined possible, and the gutsy optimist kissed like kissing her was the only thing that mattered. Jori kissed without guarding her emotions. She kissed like she was already in love with her.
Rae’s heart pounded out of control. Her crutches clattered to the floor.
Jori’s hands moved to her neck, her shoulders, her chest, sliding over the rise of her breasts as if she had every right to. And she did. If Jori wanted to touch her, Rae was more than happy to let her, because everywhere she touched her, she came alive. As a dancer, she thought she knew everything about her body—every ache, every soreness, every joy of every one of her muscle fibers—but Jori was giving her a whole new perspective on how her body could feel.
Was this what it felt like to be wanted? Was this was it did to her? Or was this what Jori—Jori and no one else—did to her? She hadn’t reacted like this to Kaoli. Not even close. She hadn’t reacted like this to anyone. Hadn’t known anything was missing. But Jori…Jori’s touch was a rush. A revelation. It made her feel not just full of wanting her, but wanted in return.
Her knee, though…her knee was giving out. She clutched at Jori’s shoulders as her strength failed her, and Jori pinned her to the wall with her hips, the force of her sudden thrust stopping her fall. Jori adjusted her balance and their hip bones jutted into each other again, hitting her with another wave of heat. She felt so good pressed against her, their bodies finding where they fit.
“It doesn’t bother you that I lied to you?” Rae asked.
“Nothing bothers me when you’re kissing me.”
They were so close she couldn’t see her whole face, just her blond eyelashes as they fluttered downward. And her lips.
“Will it bother you later? When we’re not kissing?”
“No. I’m sure you had your reasons.”
“You sound so positive.”
“Let’s never stop. Then we won’t have to find out.”
Jori met her lips again, and it was just as good. Better. Rae wanted it to last forever and at the same time she desperately wanted to get underneath her clothes because this ache wasn’t going to be satisfied by mere kissing. This ache demanded an all-out, full-body commitment to getting as close as physically possible. This ache was not going to go away until she slid up Jori’s bare legs and tasted her in a whole list of places that couldn’t poss
ibly be appropriate in their current, not-all-that-hidden location.
Jori was perfect. She was supposed to not be perfect, but at the moment she couldn’t for the life of her remember why.
“Where is everyone?” Kaoli’s voice carried from somewhere not far behind the other side of the wall.
Rae’s eyes flew open and she broke the kiss, cursing Kaoli’s bad timing. Jori sighed.
“Go away,” Jori told Kaoli under her breath.
Jori stroked Rae’s hair, her fingertips lingering on the side of her face. A spark lit inside Rae’s heart and glowed, expanded, spilled out, made the world shine—even made her forgive Kaoli. Her timing could have been worse, after all. If she’d returned earlier they might not have had this moment alone together at all, and that would have been unbearable.
“Promise me this isn’t over,” Jori said, closing in for one last kiss.
Rae tried to answer, but all that came out was a moan. Jori had obviously meant for this kiss to be chaste or at least brief, but it was already spiraling out of control.
“Rae? Jori?” Kaoli sounded much closer.
Jori gently pulled away, then licked at her lips and kissed her once more. And then she was sauntering across the stage, away from her, intercepting Kaoli and greeting her like nothing had happened.
But something had happened. And now Rae was slumped against the wall, unable to take her eyes off the woman she wasn’t supposed to want, burning in places that hadn’t ever burned with this kind of intensity, wondering how long she was going to have to wait before she could trust her legs to hold her and risk pushing away from the support of the wall. And how long she would have to wait before she could have that bliss again.
Chapter Thirteen
Sitting all morning in Jori’s passenger seat for the long drive to Washington, DC, for Kaoli’s concert shouldn’t have been awkward, but somehow the easy conversation Rae had looked forward to never materialized, and instead she was watching the highway fly by and enduring hours of study review podcasts on accounting practices while she tried to figure out why kissing had thrown them both off-balance. For a while, she rested her hand on Jori’s knee, and Jori covered her hand with a sweet gentleness that was an affirmation that her gesture was more than okay. But Jori never clicked off her podcast, and Rae didn’t ask her to.
Jori was the only one attending the concert with her—Sierra had begged off at the last minute because of an urgent but vague problem requiring her attention at the lodge, and Melanie wasn’t coming, either. Which was too bad, because Rae had hoped the tickets would be a small token toward thanking them for their generosity. But there’d be other opportunities.
Right now, her plan was to stop by afternoon rehearsals to catch up on whatever ongoing changes were being made to the choreography. Her friend Sylvie—who, during the months they weren’t on tour, shared an apartment with her in New York—had warned her that while she was away, Lorenzo had been up to his usual perfectionist ways and was tweaking and re-tweaking the material they had supposedly already learned until it was difficult to remember which version he wanted. She didn’t want to find herself ready to dance but unable to jump in because the show she had lived and breathed for months had moved on without her.
Her other, even more important reason for dropping by was to remind Kaoli she was still one of her dancers and to remind Lorenzo she still existed. She didn’t want out of sight to become out of mind and end with her not getting her contract renewed.
Jori pulled up behind the unmarked back entrance of the massive concrete-and-steel building that was Kaoli’s concert venue, and Rae stepped out of the car onto the oil-stained pavement. The building wouldn’t open to the public for a few hours, so Jori drove off with her backpack full of accounting textbooks and left Rae to walk up to the door by herself. A middle-aged man wearing a long-lensed, expensive-looking camera around his neck leaned against the wall snacking on cheese curls.
“Kaoli Morgenroth coming in for rehearsal today?” he asked between mouthfuls, licking artificial cheese powder off his fingers.
How did he even know who she worked for? He didn’t. He was fishing. Or worse, he’d done his research, which meant he was professional paparazzi. According to Lorenzo Marziliano, their choreographer, the correct word was technically paparazzo if there was only one them, but whatever. It sounded pretentious coming out of the mouth of someone who didn’t have Lorenzo’s authentic Italian accent.
“I have no idea,” Rae said. He must get bored out of his mind, stalking celebrities who never showed. So bored that he either hadn’t recognized Kaoli’s supposed girlfriend or couldn’t be bothered to take a photo of her. Unless it was all an act calculated not to scare her off before she led him to the real money shot. “She usually doesn’t.”
The rehearsal space was hidden deep inside a warren of administrative offices most people had no idea existed behind the public portions of the music venue-slash-sports arena. When Rae found it, her coworkers were busy practicing a new sequence Lorenzo had come up with for “Wildcat”, the song Rae had been injured performing.
Kaoli was not there. The line she’d been trained to feed the press—that she had no idea where Kaoli was—was frequently true.
“Welcome back,” said Lorenzo from his perch on a stool at the front of the studio while the dancers continued their run-through in time to recorded music, sweat flying from their hair as they spun. “Are you fixed?”
“Almost.” Rae did her best not to limp as she made her way toward him, but it had to be obvious to him that she was struggling. She’d chosen not to wear a brace into the studio because she didn’t want to remind anyone she was out of commission, but it made it that much harder to move. She wasn’t graceful and she wasn’t comfortable, but if she was lucky, Lorenzo wouldn’t notice.
“I see.” He turned dismissively to his notes. “Then you are not needed here.”
Of course he’d noticed. What was she thinking? He spent hours a day watching his dancers and clearly had no trouble at all detecting her condition.
“I thought I could watch rehearsal and catch up on changes.”
“Don’t bother,” Lorenzo said. “You’re no use to me like this. Go home.”
“I’ll stay.”
Lorenzo spit out some choice, angry words in Italian that she didn’t need to understand to get the gist of. No one challenged Lorenzo, not unless they wanted to be yelled at. “Enough of this. Go. You scare the others with the bad luck.”
“You won’t even let me watch?” How could he do that? She was still part of the tour, wasn’t she?
“Rest. Heal. Return when you are ready to dance.”
Rae was sick of being away from the action. She collapsed on the bench beside him and faced the dancers, her back to the steamed-up mirror. “I’m watching.”
Lorenzo raised his hands to the saints and deplored the world’s overabundance of female stubbornness. Of which there was a lot in his life, because unlike many female stars who surrounded themselves onstage with only buff male eye candy in order to appeal to the female fans, Kaoli didn’t assume that was what her audience came to see. Sure, she had the buff men, but two-thirds of her dancers were women, and she wasn’t afraid to show them off. Which was part of what made this a great job.
“Fine. Watch.” Lorenzo turned his back on her and rose to give corrections to the dancers one-on-one.
Rae memorized as much as she could. She flexed and pointed her feet, endlessly rotating her ankles, antsy to get off the bench and join the others but unwilling to provide incontrovertible proof that her body wasn’t ready to dazzle.
Eventually her friend Sylvie came over. “I’m so glad you made it. We missed you.”
“I missed you guys, too.”
“How’s the leg?”
“Better. I’m planning to be back here dancing before the tour ends
.”
“Sylvie. If you please,” Lorenzo said. “Catch up on your social life later.”
Sylvie shrugged and returned to Ralph, who was paired up with her for some lifts. They whipped through a series of steps that were not remotely like the ones Rae was expecting. Then Sylvie stretched her arms out to the sides, preparing to jump, and Ralph lifted her overhead.
“You weigh a ton,” Ralph complained, lowering her beautifully to the ground. “What have you been eating? Doughnuts and rocks?”
“Don’t blame me if you’re slacking off with the barbells,” Sylvie retorted.
“I’m not slacking off. It’s you.”
“I weigh the same number of pounds I did last week.”
“Lose a few of them.”
“Don’t be a wimp.”
“You think I’m a wimp? Not a lot of guys who can lift two hundred pounds of bitchy ballerina over their head.”
“I do not weigh two hundred pounds, you jerk.”
“A hundred and seventy-five?”
“A hundred and two!” Sylvie shrieked.
“You lie.”
With Ralph’s hands on her waist, Sylvie bent her knees and jumped straight up to practice the lift again. He raised her over his head and paraded her in a circle as she split her legs and extended her arms in a line that looked too balletic to be what Lorenzo wanted. Most of the dancers came from a ballet background, because it was excellent training, but dancing for a rock star was a whole different art form. More earthy and gymnastic.
Ralph gave an unnecessary grunt of effort meant to annoy her. “You do not weigh a hundred and two pounds.”
Sylvie finished the move with an extra stretch of her long legs as she landed. “I should tell your adoring fans you can’t do an easy lift.”
“I did the lift.”
“And you were so manly about it, too.”
“Hey, Chloe,” Ralph said to the dancer next to them. “How much does Sylvie weigh?”
“A hundred and twelve,” Chloe said.
“Ha.” Ralph planted his hands on his hips in a very unmanly fashion.
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