“The degenerate is. I’m a Player.”
She just kept smiling and shook her head. “Right.”
I wasn’t sure why her looking at me like that made me want to squirm, but it did. Maybe it was just that I wasn’t used to talking so much about my fucked-up family.
“Do you ever see them?” she asked.
“I send them money sometimes,” I said, “but I don’t visit much. They pretty much only come around when they want something.”
“And what about your mom?”
Blank. I went kinda blank at the mention of her.
What the fuck could I say? Usually I didn’t say shit about my mom to anyone, because the truth was there wasn’t anything to say. At least, nothing nice to say.
“She left when I was thirteen.”
“Left?”
“Yeah. As in she said she was going to pick up eggs and never came back. I remember that specifically because it was Father’s Day, and I was gonna make breakfast for my dad. Try to impress him, I guess.”
I looked away. I couldn’t handle any more of the sympathy in her eyes.
“Do you know what happened to her?” she asked.
“Nothing happened. She sent a letter about three years later saying she was sorry for leaving, but no return address. No phone number. She had no family left and the friends we asked said they didn’t know where she was. My dad was pretty bitter. I wanted to pay someone to find her for a while, but he wouldn’t, and I couldn’t afford to on my own as a kid. And by the time I was an adult, I guess I’d grown bitter, too.”
“You didn’t look for her?”
“She didn’t look for me.”
Amber went silent. When I glanced at her, she was staring at me.
“Hey, it’s not like I’d be hard to find. I’m pretty hard to miss, right?” I indicated my bare upper body, all the tattoos.
“You don’t have to make jokes, Ashley,” she said, gently. “I get it. At least your dad comes around when he wants something, right?”
Wow. Nailed it.
The truth was, I’d always been pissed at my mom because she didn’t want anything from me—even my money. At least my dad pretended to give a shit. Made an effort at remembering I existed, when it served him.
How did this girl get me so damn well?
Maybe she was right. Maybe we were alike.
“Tell me about your parents,” I said, needing out of this line of conversation before I ended up saying too much sad, stupid shit.
Amber shrugged and sipped her beer. “Nothing much to tell.”
I stared at her for a long moment, waiting for more. But she just drank her beer and stared back at me.
I pulled my knees up, resting my forearms on them. I took a swig of my beer and considered how hard to push her on this.
“I seem to remember a conversation we had recently,” I told her. “Everything out in the open, right?”
She blinked at me. “Everything?”
“Everything.”
She licked her lips and looked off for a moment. Then she took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring a bit, and looked into my eyes. “Can I ask you something first, then, Ashley?”
“Sure.”
“There’s really nothing going on between you and Dylan?” she asked, holding my gaze. “Other than sharing women?”
“No,” I said, my heart suddenly beating too hard. “There’s nothing going on.”
It was true.
It was also a lie.
The whole truth was that there was a whole shit-ton going on—in my mind. But I lied, looking her right in the eyes. The same way I’d done to Dylan, a thousand times.
She nodded, seeming to believe me. Then she sighed.
“Okay, then… My parents. My mom still lives here. Liv sees her more than I do, because I’m away traveling so much, but also because she handles her better. Mom’s become pretty… eccentric over the years. Living alone. Living with her delusions.”
“Delusions about…?”
“About the way things are. Between her and our dad.” She sighed again and glanced around, kinda like she was looking for a way out. No chance, unless she wanted to dive overboard and swim for shore. Instead, she went on. “He left her, long ago. Liv and I were still kids. We still saw him after the divorce, sometimes, even after he moved to Toronto, but they never got back together like my mom always seemed to think they would.” She picked at the label on her beer bottle. “They were in love. Like really in love. And their relationship was crazy. It was explosive and unstable. Bordering on violent.”
“He hit her?”
“I don’t think so. They pushed each other around when they fought, though. They screamed and threw stuff. She hit him a few times. It was bullshit. It was better that he left. But my mom never saw it that way.”
Well… that gave me a picture of why Amber was so defensive, careful, when it came to getting involved with Dylan and me. If that was her early example of people “in love.”
Hearing it made me want to push past her doubts even more than I already did.
Make her want to stay.
It wasn’t lost on me that I’d started to care about her. To want to keep her around for more reasons than just because she was an intimate connection to Dylan.
I wanted to show her that she was safe here, with me, with what she’d just shared with me. Safe to open up to me.
“Far be it for me to give advice,” I said, “but if I were to give advice, I’d say you should talk to your mom. Try to repair that relationship. While you can. If I had a chance to do that with my mom, I would.”
“Why don’t you try to find her?” she asked. “You could afford to pay someone to do it now, right?”
“I did. About six years ago.” I looked at her pretty face, then away. “Turned out she’d died about a year before that.”
“Ashley. I’m sorry.”
Amber reached out and slid her hand over mine, and I turned my hand to grip hers. I looked up into her green eyes again. “Are you really gonna stay with us like we asked you to?”
It came out before I knew I was gonna ask. Maybe. Or maybe I just didn’t want to pussy out and stop myself, so I blurted it before I could think it through.
Amber squeezed my hand and said, “Yes.”
That night, Dylan got home late and found Amber in my bed. She’d fallen asleep after we had sex, but I was still awake. He got undressed as he made his way to the bed in the near-dark. He didn’t say anything. I didn’t even know if he knew I was awake.
He just peeled back the covers and slid in next to Amber, and started kissing her. He started at her clit, and by the time he reached her mouth she was wide awake and whimpering that sexy, desperate sound of hers; that sound I’d noticed she only made for him.
He climbed on top of her and they started going at it, and by the time he buried his dick in her, they were both panting hard, wound up on the feel of each other, groping skin-to-skin in the dark.
He rode her with a single-minded intensity that left no doubt in my mind that he’d missed her, that he’d been thinking about her while he was away today. That he’d been thinking about this the entire way home.
Amber reached out in the dark and gripped me with her hand. Her fingers dug into my arm. And I just watched. Seeing them together like this… it blew my fucking mind. It was like I was sitting on the edge of goddamn heaven, gazing in.
I was rock-hard.
I watched him make her come. Felt her fingernails digging into my muscles as she cried out and gasped.
I watched him come, his hips rolling between her spread thighs, his muscular ass clenching as he shot off, as he buried his face in her neck and groaned.
Amber’s mouth was free, so I leaned in and kissed her. She kissed me back, hungry and soft… breathless kisses.
As Dylan pulled out and shifted off of her, I rolled right over and took his place. Amber was all limp and warm, sleepy and spent, but she took me. She spread her legs for me.
We
’d already tossed the condoms, and I slipped into her tight, wet warmth, bare. I wasn’t even gonna pretend it didn’t turn me on like hell to be fucking her with Dylan’s come still coating her. Coating me.
Dylan lay back and watched me fuck her. Even though I barely looked at him, I could practically feel his eyes on me. They were on us, on Amber for sure… but I could almost pretend he was enjoying watching me pump into her, and it pushed me over the edge. I felt the rush and I didn’t even try to hold it back.
I slammed into Amber and let loose, filling her, ridiculously mind-fucked over the fact that I was coming where he’d just come. I groaned and kissed her soft mouth as I relaxed, letting her tight pussy squeeze me as the aftershocks twitched through me. She ran her fingertips gently up and down my spine and breathed softly against me.
It was almost perfect…
But something was nagging at the back of my mind. The knowledge that this was all gonna fall apart on me. Because it always did, right?
Whenever I let myself care… care so much that there was so much to lose… I ended up losing.
But I shoved aside those bullshit thoughts. I didn’t want to listen to them anymore.
I wanted this.
I pulled out and shifted down, sealing my mouth over Amber’s pussy. She gasped and squirmed, but I pressed her thighs apart and went to town. I worshipped her with my tongue, rolling the smooth steel ball of my piercing around her clit until she came with a helpless little scream, clawing at my hair.
When I came up for air, they were making out. Dylan was kissing the fuck out of her, and his dick was hard, thick and heavy against his thigh, inches from my face.
I rolled away.
Rationally, I knew as I looked at them entwined in my bed, kissing in the aftermath of what we’d all just done, looking perfect as fuck, that I’d never be able to keep them both.
No matter whatever happened between me and Dylan that one time… I’d never be able to have them both.
No matter how much I wanted them.
We’d promised Amber: everything out in the open. We’d all promised each other. Everything.
Everything except my secret love for my best friend.
Late in the night, Dylan woke up. I was already awake. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, by the window, smoking a joint, looking out at the water through the trees. I could feel him stirring, knew he wasn’t sleeping. I knew the sound of his breathing, awake or asleep. Usually the dude slept like the dead, especially after he’d been laid.
I looked over at him in the dark. He looked back at me, met my gaze briefly, but I already saw what he was doing.
He was watching Amber sleep.
“You’re gonna fall for her,” I said quietly. Just like I’d told him before. But it was worse than that; he was already falling.
And just like he did before, he laughed. But he didn’t look me in the eye when he did it.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Amber
It was a beautiful day. Cool, but nice enough that we could hunker down behind the windshield in our jackets, with the cover off the Falcon Silver Sparrow, as Ashley drove me into the city. The skies were a brilliant blue without a trace of cloud, a rare sapphire-clear day in autumn as we sped toward Vancouver.
True to my word, I was staying. It had been a week ago that I’d promised Ashley, in this boat, that I would stick around. And I’d officially put my travel plans on hold, at least temporarily.
No more hitting up Google to research Thailand. No more watching airline ticket prices in case there was a price drop.
I put out feelers around Vancouver again, in case any work came up. And I’d picked up a couple of gigs this week, as assistant to an old friend from college on some shoots she was doing. Not exactly high pay or high prestige, but at least it kept me working. My pay for the Underlayer shoot had come through, too. Plus, Katie had given my number to that art promoter she’d told me about, and he’d called; said he had some events coming up that I might be able to shoot, and that he wanted to see my work. So I was planning to follow up on that.
Meanwhile, I’d insisted that I start paying at least some token rent. I wasn’t about to take a free ride from anyone, even from two guys I happened to be fucking.
The guys didn’t like it, but they’d finally agreed when they could tell I wasn’t going to budge.
I was still living at Ashley’s house, technically, in his guest room, but I spent pretty much every night in Dylan’s bed—with Dylan and Ashley.
When I didn’t spend the night in Dylan’s bed, it was because we’d all spent the night in Ashley’s bed instead or, occasionally, in Ashley’s bed in the city.
We’d also headed over to the big island—Vancouver Island—for a couple of days, and driven up to the very end of the highway at Tofino to rent a cabin and surf. According to Dylan, Ashley got twitchy when he went too long without surfing.
It wasn’t exactly California, but the waves were pretty good, just coming off of a storm. It was cold as shit, and we had to wear wetsuits. Ashley had his own, and Dylan and I rented from a shop in the little town. I’d learned to surf while I was in Australia a few years ago, which meant that I could actually get up on the board, but that only lasted about three seconds. After I’d bailed and swallowed cold saltwater for the third time, I called it a day and headed back up to the cabin to lounge by the fire.
Dylan didn’t last much longer; he’d come to find me and took me for a walk on the beach, and we’d sat on the rocks watching Ashley do his thing. Even in a wetsuit, with not a slice of skin showing, he looked sexy on that board.
I’d taken some photos, and afterwards, we’d spent the night in front of the fire, having sex. Slow, passionate sex that somehow had me feeling like I was in this incredible dream I never wanted to wake up from.
How did my life suddenly become this good?
Not that it was so bad before, but seriously.
All three of us had already gotten the results from our blood tests back, and passed with flying colors. The guys had insisted to me that they were safe; that they always wore condoms, except with Kitty, whom they’d also been tested with. So that was good, I supposed.
Great, actually, because it meant I could fuck them both without condoms. Which felt so good it was kinda scary.
It went without saying that this was the best sex I’d ever had.
With anyone.
It still blew my mind, whenever I paused to think about it, that I was having sex with two men. And I didn’t feel weird about it. Maybe because they didn’t make me feel weird about it. They treated it like it was so normal that it put me at ease. Made me feel wanted, and safe with them.
Too safe.
In the back of my mind, I just kept wondering if I was gonna discover something about either one of them—or both—that would turn me off enough to send me packing. Unfortunately, the image of Johnny in that hot tub with all those naked chicks had burned itself permanently into my brain, and that feeling of utter shock and betrayal? It had left a little crack in the foundation of my trust that might never fully heal.
But so far, nothing scandalous had been revealed. No giant skeletons had come tumbling out of the closet. No naked chicks had suddenly appeared in the symbolic hot tub with my men.
So I just kept dating both of them—together.
And sometimes, separately.
It all just seemed to be working out a little too well.
How was dating two men, even if they were okay with it, ever going to work longterm? Just seemed like it was against the laws of nature somehow. Like things were bound to go wrong.
Stupid or not, I felt kinda greedy. There was more than enough hotness here to go around, and around. Many, many women could be enjoying Dylan Cope and Ashley Player—and definitely had, before I came along—and yet here I was, hogging them all to myself.
But they’d asked me to be exclusive, right?
Truth was, I’d just never been this lucky. And most of th
e time I didn’t know how to get my head around it and just plain enjoy it.
I really wasn’t sure what I was doing, at all. I was just kind of going along with what they’d asked me to do.
But officially, I was definitely smack in the middle of a ménage à trois. And the whole thing was starting to get under my skin. Starting to get to me.
Starting to mean something to me.
I hadn’t even told my sister all of what was going on. I’d told Liv it was just about the sex. Partly so she’d stop asking questions, because I knew she wouldn’t want more details on that.
But whenever I looked at Dylan or Ashley—like I was doing now, catching Ashley’s eye as he drove his boat, the wind whipping his dark hair back as he smiled at me… I knew it was about a lot more than just sex.
And maybe that was the only real problem.
Somehow, I’d ended up in a relationship.
And I really wasn’t sure how I was getting out of it with my heart intact.
My mom’s little old house was the same as it ever was. Every single thing in the exact same place.
Literally.
It had been this way for over twenty years. Since before my dad walked out.
I could understand, if you lost a child—like if your child died—how you might not be able to bear changing anything. How you might want to keep the child’s bedroom intact for years afterward; decades, even. That, I could understand.
But keeping your home a shrine to your ex-husband, who’d walked out on you two decades ago—complete with his recliner in the same spot and his ashtray next to it, even though you’d never smoked? That, I could not understand.
And it wasn’t like Liv and I hadn’t taken Mom to see doctors. Repeatedly. They all said there was nothing wrong with her, medically.
Her sanity was intact.
Of course, they’d never been inside her home.
“How’ve you been?” I asked her, after a brief hug, as she shuffled us into the kitchen. I watched her putter around, preparing to make tea. She was overweight, too much bulk on her previously thin frame, weighting down her delicate bone structure, and she seemed listless, tired. But she’d been this way for years. Combination of a poor diet, comfort eating and a sedentary lifestyle.
Dirty Like Dylan: A Dirty Rockstar Romance (Dirty, Book 4) Page 26