“The song says his eyes, but your chest says hers,” she continues and I feel my breath escape in a rush. I pluck some crab sashimi from a plate and pop it into my mouth, trying not to grit my teeth or clench my jaw. “Is it about Ransom and Chloe?” she whispers, leaning forward across the table.
The other three guys are talking, but I bet Mikey can hear her.
“This is a bloody boring conversation,” I say as I feel my heartbeat start to pick up inside my chest. Sure, maybe Lilith is right? Okay, fuck, she definitely is right. That song is about Ransom and Chloe, the betrayal I felt when they confessed their attraction to each other … and the pain I felt that night when I essentially lost them both. “Why don't we talk about your dead dad instead?” I ask and Michael narrows his eyes at me and scowls.
“Goddamn it, Paxton, what the fuck is your problem?”
“Leave us the hell alone,” I say, pointing at him with the chopsticks, thinking how ridiculous he looks with his tattoos and eyeliner in the middle of this sleek white and silver restaurant. I'm the only one dressed for the occasion, in my fucking suit. “She's not just your girlfriend, Mikey, and you don't control my interactions with her.”
“And you don't get to be a complete and utter prick whenever the hell you feel like it, so step off,” he says, and I have to really resist the urge to chuck a plate at him. First off, it'll probably hit Lilith instead, and second, I refuse to let either of them see how damn emotional I am right now.
I lean back in the chair again and smirk.
The more I smirk, the less I feel.
“Hey, Ran,” I say, looking back at him and seeing his gaze lift slowly from his food to my face. Both Cope and Muse pause their conversation to listen. “After All There's Us, who's that song about?”
He just stares at me, his stupid hands trembling as he adjusts his grip on his fork. Like who the hell eats with a fork at a Japanese restaurant?
My lips purse as we continue to stare at each other, and I can't help but think of that kiss. That damn kiss. That fucking stupid arse kiss. God, I've kissed a lot of people in my life—girls, obviously—but I've never, never kissed anyone that sad, that empty, that fucked-up. Ransom is a mess, a scarred up, messed up, twisted nightmare of a man.
What the hell's happened to him? To that guy who came to my house with his hair slicked back, a confident smile on his face, a yellow t-shirt on. He stood there and slipped his hands in his pockets, looking like some kind of charmed hipster asshole. Then he told me he was in love with my high school sweetheart, that she was in love with him. We got into an epic row … and the rest is history.
Ransom was friends with my little sister, too. So … he lost her that night, he lost the girl he was in love with, and he lost me.
Then, he found Kortney, fell in love … and I took her from him. Just because I could. Because I wanted to punish him. Because he needed to suffer the way I was suffering.
But goddamn, the world has certainly given Ransom Wilder Riggs suffering in generous spades.
“Is it about me?” he asks, half like he hopes it is, half like he's praying it's not.
His eyes, they're the same color as the dried blood on Harper's pink jacket, the one she was wearing when I identified her body in the morgue.
I try to hold onto my anger, but it just slips away and I turn back to the food.
“That's the beautiful thing about art, isn't it, Miss Lilith Tempest Goode?” I ask as I pick up a piece of yellowtail nigiri and stare at it clutched between the two glossy black chopsticks. “It can be interpreted in so many different ways. There's no one meaning, is there?”
“No, but usually the artist has some sort of idea in mind when he creates the piece, doesn't he?”
“Sometimes the artist is as baffled by his work as his audience,” I say, putting the food between my lips and looking over at Lilith, at the way her wavy red hair falls over her shoulder when she leans forward to grab her drink, sitting back on Michael's lap like she was meant to be there. She looks like a fucking queen presiding over her court.
“Paxton,” she starts as I study her curvy body cloaked in that scribbled shirt-dress, my hands tingling with the memory of her heavy breasts trapped inside her lace bra, the slickness of her cunt, the strength of her muscles when she came wrapped around me. “What's your middle name?”
I pause and then set my chopsticks down, my body shaking with a burst of laughter.
“Cheeky bitch,” I say and then lift my chin, meeting her hardened stare with one of my own.
“You said you didn't give your name to strangers. I'm not a stranger anymore. I want to know what it is.”
She sips her drink with those full lips of hers, bruised from Michael's brutal kisses.
I tilt my head to the side and lick my lips.
“It's Charles,” I say, smiling slightly. “And yes, I'm aware that my name is English as fuck, thank you very much.”
“You're welcome,” she says, and then she stands up, walks around the table and sits on my lap.
I can't even begin to figure out why I'm so goddamn pleased by that.
I've never much liked museums, probably because the houses I grew up in were like museums themselves. Cold. Impersonal. Stuffy. My parents' own art collection is worth as much as everything in this building—and that's in their summer home.
What I do like is seeing Miss Lily's reactions to the art pieces, seeing the way her big eyes get even bigger, her lashes fluttering as she takes in pots, paintings, sculptures, dresses, and murals with a child's sense of wonder.
“Do you see the careful intensity in those brushstrokes?” she asks, clutching at my sleeve as we pause in front of a dark painting featuring a girl in a hat with a briefcase held tightly in her pale hands. “It's like each and every single one was made with … with this fucking crazy amount of passion.”
Lilith lets go of me and stands up, leaning as far over the red velvet rope as the security guard will allow. They've already asked her to step back three or four times, and I swear, I thought about beating the shit out of them. How can they interrupt somebody that looks that damn eager?
“Can you even imagine the love and the pain it would take to do something that intricate?”
“I can take a wild guess,” I say, feeling my heartbeat speed up again. Even now, her eyes shiny and lips parted, Lilith is fucking with my emotions. I stare at her—how could I not?—and feel my cock get hard inside my slacks. I haven't had a chance to wash up since our encounter in the alley and I swear, I can still feel her juices covering me, soaking my balls, the inside of my pants.
“What do you think, Ran?” she asks, drawing him away from a life-size painting of a man in a white suit, and over to where we're standing. Derek, Cope, and Michael are engaged with the proprietor that's giving us our private tour of the building. I wonder how much Muse had to drop for the privilege?
“It's … kind of tragic, doll baby,” he whispers, keeping his voice at that frustratingly low pitch that demands attention. If you don't give it your fuckin' all, you can't hear a damn thing the man says anymore.
“You think so?” she asks, leaning into him when he slides his arms around her and closes his eyes, breathing in the scent of her hair as I watch, feeling my skin prickle with want. I want to touch them, get in there and see what happens between the three of us.
And yet, I'm supposed to hate the man, aren't I?
But every damn day that Lilith is on our bus, she makes it harder and harder for me to do that. I swipe my hand down my face and look up at the painting, Ransom's words echoing sharply in my skull.
“At some point, you're just going to have to accept that you fucked up, sweetheart. But you won't, will you? Because if you do, you'll have to accept that Chloe and Harper died in an accident, that you have no right to make me the enemy anymore. And then you'll have to accept that you kicked me when I was down for no goddamn good reason at all.”
Hell, I'm drowning in pride, in hubris, in a nightmare of
my own making.
I turn away from the two of them and wander out the door and into another wing, this one filled with more ancient paintings, from times and worlds so far away from here that I can barely fathom them. My education demands that I recognize the styles, the time periods, oftentimes the painters, the names of the paintings themselves, but my apathy refuses to care about any of it.
“Pax, wait up,” Lilith says, jogging to catch up to me in the empty quiet of the museum. The marble floors echo with the sound of her heels as she walks alongside of me. “Are you okay? You seem a little off tonight?”
“Off?” I ask, pausing and turning to look at her, loving the shape of her mouth and her eyes and her face. “How would you know? We barely know each other.”
“That's not fair,” she says, her voice softening as she studies me with eyes the color of the English countryside, green and vibrant and alive. I should probably tell her that my parents have been calling me nonstop, driving me up the damn well. They want me to quit the band, come home, and marry the girl they picked out for me when I was seven.
Fuck them, and fuck her.
“Aren't we dating now?” she asks and she smiles so sweet when she says it that I get the urge to kiss her. I grab her chin with my fingers, probably a little harder than I should, and drop my mouth to hers. My tongue pushes between Lilith's lips, draws this small fervid sound from her throat. It makes me want to be crueler, rougher, take her into me and fuck away all my worries.
“Hey, the tour's moving on,” Ran says from beside us, his voice as distant and dark as a ghost's.
“Shit,” Lilith says, wiping her mouth, her cheeks slightly flushed with desire. “I don't want to miss anything. Which room did they go into?”
“Straight ahead, to the left,” Ran tells her and she takes off back the way she came, leaving the two of us alone together in the empty hall, the dead smiles of portraits staring back at us from the white walls. “Don't tell Lilith, but I think it's totally creepy in here,” he says.
I almost smile at that.
Almost.
“Not an art connoisseur, are you?” I ask as we walk back in the direction Lilith went, my Barker Blacks loud against the floors, Ransom's boots soft, almost shuffling. “That would require some level of class, wouldn't it?”
His mouth twists down at the sides and he tucks his hands into his pockets, smelling like cigarettes and that fucking violet perfume he never stops wearing.
“Now that Lilith's here …” he starts, taking a deep breath, pushing his hood off his dark brown hair. It's a trust move, when he does that, bares his face. Ransom looks over at me, that jagged length of scar marring what was once a picture-perfect expression. “I was hoping we could figure out some way to be friends again.”
“And why would Miss Lily change anything between us?” I ask.
Of course, that's bullshit.
Lilith is changing everything between us.
Just like her name implies, she's a tempest tearing into our bullshit and our hurt, cutting it up into smaller, more manageable pieces.
“We're in this together, Paxton,” he says, still looking at me, sharing one of the longest looks we've had since that awful fucking night. There've been times over the years where I've wanted to give up my vendetta, tell him that I'm sorry, try to get back what we had before. Ransom's the reason I'm a musician in the first place. I mean, my parents raised me to sing, to play piano, cello, violin … but it was Ransom Riggs that taught me the ugly beauty of rock, the aching agony of a metal riff. He encouraged me to explore my feelings in song, to write my own music, to start my own band. “If we both want to be with Lilith, we'll have to find some way to get along.”
“And how's that? I just forgive you for murdering my sister and my old girlfriend so we can share a new one?”
Ran grits his teeth, but he just takes a deep breath and keeps calm. Good for him. He's a better man than me. That much I'm sure of.
“I want you to listen to me, Paxton. I know I've said this a hundred times, but I'll say it again: Chloe and I never had sex. Never. We wouldn't do that to you, Pax.”
“And why not? She was going to leave me for you, wasn't she? You were going to take her away? Why the fuck should I believe that you cared how I felt?”
“Because we both loved you, Pax. Both of us,” he says, almost pleading, turning to look at me full-on. I keep his gaze, even though it makes my blood boil, my hands curl into fists by my sides. I've spent so many damn years being gutted by his betrayal, hating him with every cell in my body, I'm not sure I know how to get past that. “We loved you; we didn't want to hurt you. I swear on my life that we never meant to cause you any pain.”
“Well, you did. A million times over. You stole everything from me that night, Ransom.”
“But I didn't,” he says, his voice cracking, pressing his palms to the sides of his face. “It was an accident what happened to those girls. You think I wanted that?”
“Are we done with this conversation?” I ask, getting out a cigarette and then spotting the narrowed eyes of a security guard down the hall—not one of ours, one of the museum's. I tuck the fag back in the pack and shove it in my slacks pocket.
This is all getting too heavy for me …
“We're not done,” Ransom says, his face pained, his voice weak and thready. “Pax, I lost just as much as you did that night. But you know what the worst part of it all was? The hardest part? As much as I loved Chloe and Harper, I loved you more. You're my best friend.” A pause as my heart thunders and I grit my teeth in … anger? Frustration? Fear? Fear that I'll be pushed to a place I'm not comfortable with, a reality that I won't like … or that I might end up loving. That'd be worse though, wouldn't it? Ending up with something I'd be beyond terrified to lose. “Were my best friend,” Ransom corrects. “But you've surely proven to me that there's nothing so awful and bitter as love turned to hate.”
“I don't hate you,” I say, and even though my gut instinct is to just tear into this man, say the worst shite I can think of, I simply fucking stand there and wait, breathing hard, shaking slightly.
“The worst part of everything that's happened to me is losing you,” Ransom says again, and I feel some strange tearing sensation inside my chest, this horrible wrenching ache that makes me sick to my stomach. “I wish … if I could go back in time, I'd just ignore the feelings between me and Chloe. I'd watch you guys be together and I'd be happy for you instead. I don't want anything like that to happen again, with us and Lilith. I want you … us to try and be happy.” He pauses and licks his lips, dropping his hands at his sides and glancing away. “I really like her, Paxton.”
“More than Kortney?” I ask, and I don't know why I'm even bringing her up.
Ransom looks back over at me.
“Maybe you did me a favor by getting rid of Kortney. If she was willing to cheat on me, then she clearly didn't care about me in the first place. Besides, you freed me up to get with Lilith, right?”
He takes several long, deep breaths and tries to smile at me.
Jesus bloody Christ, he really is taking this seriously, isn't he?
“Fuck you, Ransom,” I say, and then I turn and storm down the hall.
It takes him a few seconds to follow after me, catch up, grab me by the arm.
“Goddamn it, Paxton, please. Please. I need this to be over. I need it so fucking bad that it's killing me inside. Don't you see it? That you're fucking killing me?”
I look over at him, shaking and trembling again, his hood thrown back up, his face lost in the strange shadows of the museum. Somebody flicks off the lights accidentally in the wing we're standing in. Now the only glow comes from the individual bulbs aimed at the paintings.
I don't know what the hell comes over me, but … I lean forward and grab Ransom Riggs by the mouth. And then I kiss the fuck out of him.
I push between his lips with my tongue, kiss him as hard and deep as I did Lilith a few moments ago, and I taste all of that ca
scading pain, that dreadful terrifying emptiness.
After a moment, he kisses me back, his palms pressed flat against the front of my suit.
When I press forward, he takes a step away, bumping into the railing at the edge of the room. Down below, I can vaguely hear voices. I think everyone else has gone downstairs.
They've gone down … and I'm kissing Ran for … some goddamn reason.
In that second though, it's not for Lilith's pleasure, is it?
Ran tries to break away, and I kiss him harder, take his mouth and push him against the railing. If he can feel the hardness of my cock, I don't care. It was for Lilith anyway, wasn't it? I just haven't stopped being hard is all, not even kissing that dirty awful mouth of his.
Just before I pull away, I drop a hand and feel Ransom's cock, stiff inside his jeans.
The lights flicker back on and I pull away, swiping an arm across my mouth.
But I can't even look at him.
I just can't fucking look at him.
There's a strangeness perfuming the air when we get back to the bus, this unfamiliar tension wound around the entire group but stemming from two people in particular.
Paxton and Ransom.
I mean, not that there wasn't tension between them before, but it's different now, shifting, morphing and changing like the storm outside the bus' windows. Thunder rumbles, shaking the glass, sending chills down my spine. There's violence in the air, the promise of nature's wrath. I might be kind of excited about it if I wasn't so sure there was another storm going on inside the bus.
“Are you alright?” I ask Ransom once we're all inside and Pax has stormed into the hallway and slammed the door. Ran's shaking, but his expression isn't … completely awful. I'm confused. “Did something happen with Pax?”
Ran pauses, his flirty scent sweeping me up, making me lean into him. As soon as I do, I can feel his arousal, pressing at the fly of his jeans, making my body go up in flames. And the way he looks down at me … My heart is in my throat, my sex silken and slick.
Roadie (Rock-Hard Beautiful Book 2) Page 11