So I would. And fuck the rest.
“Come shower with me,” I said, rolling out of bed and stepping into a wet pool of water on the rug. “Fuck. Forgot you wet the rug, Jamie.”
He puffed out a laugh. “I didn’t wet your rug. I flung my shirt away as fast as I could and I hit the water glass. You made me do it.”
“How did I make you?”
“You told me to strip.”
I turned to watch him, naked, walking toward the bathroom. It took everything in me not to pull him close again and kiss the light red marks I’d left on his hips. He came back after a second with a towel, and pressed it to the rug.
“Yeah, I told you to strip because you were all ‘Oh my God, Leo, fuck me right this goddamned second or I’ll slap you in the fucking face.’”
“Ooh! Could I have slapped you? Would you like that?” His eyes were bright and wide.
“Pretty sure you could have done anything to me while I was inside you, Jamie.”
“Duly noted,” he said, standing and slinking away again into my bathroom.
I gathered up the sheets and our clothes, bundling them into a hamper.
“The hell? How does this even work?” I heard Jamie call out from the bathroom.
I walked in to find him staring at the buttons in my stand-up shower.
“Oh. Yeah. This shower was one of the reasons I bought this house,” I said, stepping in alongside him. I reached past him to point out the different buttons. “This one turns on the heated floor. This one’s set up for music, but I’ve got no fucking clue how it works, I’ve never used it. This slider is for hot and cold, and then these four are different... strengths, I guess, of water.” I pushed the buttons that I usually used, for the heated floor and medium strength of water output, and the shower slowly turned on.
“Okay. That’s getting a chapter in the book.”
“Fuck off,” I said, smiling and getting under the shower.
“A paragraph, at least. The world needs to know how a man like you showers. They’ll be begging for details about what settings you use.”
“Yeah, well then be sure to at least add sufficient detail. Because usually I’m showering off poor sleep or a hangover, or I’m too lazy to even shower at all.”
“Yikes. What then?”
“Well, then I use the bath, of course. You should see my collection of bath bombs and bath oils. I don’t know, I just, feel, like very zen in there.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Yeah, I’m kidding you. Now turn around,” I said, looking down at him and turning him around by his shoulders.
He seemed a little confused, but I poured body wash into my hands and lathered over his shoulders and back, and then I think he got the picture, arching back into my touch and relaxing. And I lost myself in washing him—down his hips and around to his cock, his thighs. Then back around to his ass, stroking him gently where I’d fucked him minutes ago. I can’t say it wasn’t just an excuse to keep touching him—it definitely was. I seemed to have developed an inability to keep my hands off him at some point, and now wasn’t the time to question that impulse.
I really laid it on thick, then, getting to my knees on the heated floor, washing down his legs, his calves, and to his feet. I’d almost meant it as a joke, to see how he would react if I were absurdly thorough. But now that I was actually there, on the floor and cleaning every inch of him, all I felt was adoration. I lavished the attention on him, working my hands slowly over his body, taking my time.
When I stood back up I saw his surprise.
“What?” I said. “You don’t usually have a man who washes you head to toe every time you shower?”
He sighed and shook his head like he was breaking himself from a trance. “Uh, no, but I could get used to it.”
He stood there for a minute with the same dumbfounded look on his face and I took the body wash into my hand again, pouring my own and then hastily lathering it over my own body, just to get the job done.
“Whoa, whoa, wait, what the fuck?” Jamie said, batting my hands away and putting his over my chest. “Let me. God. I wanna at least return the favor.”
“You don’t have to,” I said, but he was already doing it, and it did feel fucking amazing. His hands moved slowly and he paused at the bottom of my back, tracing his fingers there.
“I love these,” he said.
“What?”
“Your dimples,” he said, pressing at two spots near the base of my spine. “They’re sexy as all hell.”
I hadn’t even known they were there. I turned around and brought him into my arms, wet and hot under the water, and bent to kiss him.
After we got out of the shower I looked at him for a while, naked in my bathroom.
“I chucked our clothes into the dirty laundry pile,” I said, I can give you some of my stuff to wear?”
“Hell yeah,” he said, going back to my room.
Five minutes later and there Jamie was, wearing the shirt Eric had gotten me as a gag gift two Christmases ago—it was a picture someone had photoshopped of 5*Star so that we had the heads of the Spice Girls. The extra girl, Posh Spice, was depicted nearby in a dominatrix outfit.
“How often do you actually wear this?” Jamie said, grinning.
“Oh, all the time. I plan on wearing it to my wedding.”
“Solid choice.”
I took care of the laundry and when I walked out to the kitchen five minutes later, I found Jamie cracking eggs while coffee brewed. We ate at the breakfast bar, mostly silent but totally happy.
Then it was out to the couch in the living room, where we laid down yet again, in the cool grey light coming in through the rain. Jamie turned on the voice recorder under the impression that we’d conduct interviews, but it became more than that; it felt like we were getting to know each other more than just working. After a while I heard Mr. Ginger Boots near the front door, and I showed Jamie where his food was. I let Jamie be the one to give him some food—for some reason, I wanted Mr. Ginger Boots to get used to Jamie.
And then, it was 11 o’clock, and it was time.
“Jamie. Are you ready?”
He looked at me wide-eyed, possibly scared. “Ready for…”
“The most important part of the day, of course.” I grabbed the remote and turned the TV on to channel 14.
Jamie’s smile widened as he saw the opening credits to The Lakeside start to play.
“You’re fucking with me,” he said.
“I am not in the slightest fucking with you. Last episode, Michaela finally went crying back to David, and I’m hoping Danielle and Tom will finally have sex this time around. Been waiting for weeks.”
Jamie looked at me like he was about to burst out laughing.
“Don’t even,” I said, giving him a stern look.
He put his hands up in mock defense. “No, no, totally, just gonna act like its completely normal that you not only watch soap operas, but are unapologetic about it.”
“I don’t watch soap operas, I watch The Lakeside. And Jamie, you can quit while you’re ahead, because you’re gonna love this by the end of the episode.”
As we watched I pointed out the key characters to him. He felt the same way about David as I did (totally fuckable), completely the opposite about Danielle (I hated her, he loved her), and by the end of the episode he actually told me to be quiet, because he was so invested in what might happen.
I knew I liked Jamie, but watching him become absorbed in The Lakeside had catapulted that even further. I was doomed.
After it ended we ordered in sushi. I definitely shouldn’t have been spending what little money I had on getting sushi delivered, but it was a rainy day, I was inside and cozy with Jamie, and I wanted to treat him. We talked about The Lakeside over dragon rolls, and I filled him in on the epic pregnancy scandal that occurred on the show last year.
“Yep. No one knew who the father was, and Michaela briefly contemplated keeping the baby before deciding to give it up for adopti
on.”
“Wow,” Jamie said, shaking his head. “I had no idea.”
“Michaela definitely wasn’t ready for a baby. She’d make a terrible mother.”
Jamie snorted. “No, she’d be okay. Trust me, I’d know.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah,” he said, “My mom is… not bad, but not really good, either. At being a mom.” His eyes drifted to the distance, looking out the window instead of meeting mine.
“Were things hard growing up?” I asked, not sure how far I should pry.
He shook his head. “Not as bad as some kids have it. My mom just… wasn’t very motherly. She was more focused on herself, her own problems and journeys, and didn’t seem as concerned with me and my sister. I can’t even tell you how many times we were the last kids after school waiting to be picked up because she’d just… forget.”
“Ouch,” I said, and Jamie finally met my eyes. “That sucks, I’m sorry, Jamie.”
He shrugged. “I mean, it definitely taught me to be self-sufficient. My dad would be working all day at his store, and my mom would be off with one of her friends, so my sister and I would have the house to ourselves a lot. Learned to cook because of it. Also learned very well how to forge my mom’s signatures on school papers.”
I puffed out a laugh. “My mom was the opposite. She’s just a typical mom. Worries about my career enough for the both of us, which is annoying, but what can you do?”
He smiled at me. “It’s because she loves you,” he said. “It’s good.”
I shrugged. “Ready to keep going with the interview?”
He nodded, and we moved to the couch. Jamie turned on the voice recorder again.
“So, I wanted to ask you about the first couple of years in 5*Star. The first year that the band was in existence, you guys didn’t get much recognition, but after that, you exploded into pretty big fame. Did it shock you? Did you expect it to happen?”
I tried to recall the events that were now almost 20 years away.
“I know this is probably bad to say, but, some part of me did kind of expect it. Boy bands were hot in those years, and I think something about me was naïve enough not to know how hard fame is to achieve. When I look back on it now, I realize how immensely lucky we were—but back then, all I thought was ‘hell yeah.’”
“What did your friends from back home think?”
“Honestly, I didn’t really have that many friends from home. I was happy to get the fuck out of there and make new friends. I mean, when you’re having dinner with Britney Spears one night and then Brad Pitt the next, you’re not really thinking about your acquaintances back in Michigan. At least I wasn’t.”
“Wow. Holy shit dude, Brad Pitt?” Jamie asked, his eyes wide.
I nodded. “That was a little later, when Chandler started getting roles in movies. He was gonna be in some action flick with Brad, and so he came out to dinner with us once.”
Jamie rested his head back on the couch, staring at the ceiling. “Sometimes I forget that I’m in the presence of a major celebrity when I’m with you,” he said, finally turning his head to me and peering at me with a strange look.
“I’m not a celebrity, dude. I mean—” I gestured around with my hand, “you clearly see what my life is like. All the dinners with celebrities back in the day was brief and fleeting. It’s not like I keep in touch with Madonna.”
“Madonna?! You met her too?”
I sighed, smiling weakly at Jamie. “It was some awards show.”
“Which one?”
“Uh… the Grammys. We got to go in 2002.”
“Good God, Leo. You’re just proving my point,” he said, putting a hand to his forehead. He looked at me with narrowed eyes. “I have no idea why you even bother hanging out with me. Like, besides the biography.”
“If you think I give any semblance of a shit about fame, you clearly don’t know me well enough yet. I prefer non-famous people 99 times out of 100.”
“Yeah, I know,” Jamie said. “I just… wow. It’s weird to think that when I was seven years old you were at the fucking Grammys.”
I swallowed roughly. “Well, when you put it that way…”
He stared at me, looking rather fragile.
“Jamie. Seriously. Don’t get hung up on shit I did in the past. I got swept into it, and just went along for the ride. And… it didn’t make a difference anyway. Now I’m just an unambitious guy in his mid-30s.”
“You’ve done so much, though.”
I shrugged. “Who cares? I feel like I’m at square one again. Or worse than square one. At least square one would be a blank slate—instead, at this point, most of the general public just thinks I’m something to laugh at. A punchline.”
Jamie reached over and turned off the recorder.
“We’re not going there, Leo.”
I looked at him and reined in every complaint that I wanted to make. Because not only did Jamie deserve better than that, but he also still had so much hope, so much blind ambition. I was like that at his age too, and I didn’t want to impose my own bittered experience onto him.
“C’mon,” I said, standing up from the couch. I reached a hand out and pulled Jamie off the couch. “I wanna show you something.”
Fourteen
Jamie
Did I jump into some sort of alternate universe?
It was as if Leo had totally forgotten that he didn’t want to do things with me, that he didn’t want to let me into his life. I felt like a kid who’d somehow snuck into a party that he wasn’t allowed to be at, and for some reason, no one was throwing me out.
It was fantastic. And I never wanted it to end.
And Leo was pulling me to his music room, walking over to a set of drawers he had near one corner of the room. He crouched down near the bottom drawer and I followed him over, sitting on the floor next to him.
“So you’re about to see what I used to do in my spare time, like all the time, back in the 90s.”
I felt a nervous energy.
“Is it, like, something kinky?” I said, turning toward him.
He cracked a smile. “You wish.”
The heavy drawer opened with some effort, but as Leo slid it out, I saw rows upon rows of old tapes—cassette tapes, the kind my sister and my dad used to have lying around the house.
“Now Jamie, I know you’re too young to even know what these are, but they’re called tapes. We elderly folks used to use them to play and record music back in the—”
“Oh, shut up,” I said, smiling and giving him a tiny punch on the arm.
“I’m just messing with you,” he said, looking back down. He glossed his hand over the front row of tapes. Each one had a handwritten title, and there must have been at least 100 of them inside.
“I used to sit around at the radio, waiting for my favorite songs to come on, and then I’d tape them. I’d do it sometimes in one night, making a mixtape of all my favorite songs from that night, or sometimes I’d space it out over the course of the week.”
He looked through and pulled one out.
“Like, this one is kind of funny, but I fucking loved Queen when I was young, especially Bohemian Rhapsody. I can’t believe this tape is even still in one piece, because I used to sit around and replay it over and over, trying to learn it on piano.”
A smile crept over my face. Leo’s eyes had lit up completely as he remembered.
“Did you just play by ear? Picking out the notes as it went along?”
“Yeah, usually,” Leo said, slipping the tape back into the row. “But sometimes I’d even pull out some empty staff paper and try to transcribe what I’d learned into sheet music.”
“You know how to read music?” I said, surprised.
“I mean, yeah, how else am I supposed to play piano?”
I raised my eyebrows. “I don’t know, that’s just really cool,” I said, looking over the rest of his tapes. “You said your grandfather was the one who taught you piano?”
&nb
sp; “Well, he’s the one who first got me into it. We’d play together. But he died before he could really teach me much, so from then on, I just took lessons. Hated them at first, but then they became kind of the best part of my week.”
“Wow,” I said. “Did you do it while you were in 5*Star?”
He shook his head. “Sadly, no time for that. I mean, I’d play whenever I got the chance, but it was hard to find time to sleep in those days, let alone practice piano. I really fell out of it while I was in the band, but when we broke up I got back into it.”
I paused for a moment, searching Leo’s eyes.
“Oh God,” he said, his expression turning worried.
“What?” I said.
“I know that look,” Leo said, staring at me helplessly. “Don’t ask what I think you’re going to ask.”
The problem is, there was nothing that could stop me from saying it now.
“Leo, you have to.”
“No, no, no. I am not playing piano for you.”
“Why not? Seriously. You clearly know how, you do it all the time, how bad could it be?”
He stood up and sort of slunk away and went to lean against the wall by the tall windows. I got up and stood next to him, putting a hand gently on his arm.
“It’s just… weird,” he said. “Like, I play all the time on my own, but I have this hang up about doing it in front of people.”
“Dude,” I said, turning to look him in the eyes. “You literally used to perform in front of thousands of people—dancing and singing—like every day.”
“It was totally different,” he said, shaking his head. “First of all, everyone was looking at Chandler at all the 5*Star concerts anyway. And that was way different from sitting and playing piano. One wrong note, and I feel like the world is closing in on me. But in 5*Star, we had a huge backing band, backup dancers, all of that. If I messed up, it was unlikely that anyone noticed.”
“Um, Leo, I don’t know if you know this, but I sure as hell won’t notice if you mess up one note in a piano piece I don’t even know,” I said. “I don’t know the slightest thing about how to play music. I would love to hear you play, though. Like, seriously, if you played for me, I’d fucking… I’d….”
Your Fallen Star: Under the Stars Book 1 Page 12