They came out of the meeting, and there had been no more texts from Kat.
Indeed, there were no more texts from Kat that afternoon, and Julian tried to take that as being a fantastic state of affairs—assuming that she was completely consumed with Daryl temporarily joining The Ponytails that she had no time to text home with an update.
Deep breath, deep breath.
He headed home after work and dialed out for Chinese food. Being on his own at home while Kat was away did make him feel a sense of independence, of freedom. It wasn’t anything major, but it meant he could be lazy about tidying up, about making sure he was dressed around the house, about eating whatever crap came to mind instead of the more balanced diet Kat preferred—and all those fruits and vegetables she’d been into ever since the new tour had been announced.
He could go out if he liked, watch a movie at the theater and buy all kinds of terrible snacks, and he wouldn’t have to explain anything to his wife. He could go sit in a bar and watch sports over a huge plate of nachos. He could go visit college friends he hadn’t seen in ages.
Only, the thing was, it didn’t compensate for the big hole he felt in his existence with Kat gone away. He might be free to do what he liked without asking Kat what she wanted to do, but it felt kind of empty when he did it.
Over Chinese food and an On Demand movie on the TV, he found himself gazing at his phone, wondering what Kat was getting up to with Daryl. Hoping that the rehearsal was going well, and that maybe something might happen afterward.
Eight o’clock. In California, it was the end of the working day by now. Nerves jangled and rustled inside him. Had he really offended her with that innocuous text message earlier?
Or had Kat been enjoying her time with Daryl so much that they were shooting off to some motel somewhere to bang the living daylights out of each other?
Julian’s semi-erect cock certainly had ideas.
Then, finally, a text message:
[Kat]: Rehearsal was great—Daryl wants me to stay behind with him and run through a few more songs! And then he said we should go get dinner!
Julian felt a surge of heat flush through his system, and his semi became a full erection, his heart palpitating inside his chest. He texted her back:
[Julian]: That’s terrific, honey! Seems like he wants to spend every possible minute with you ;-)
As soon as he’d texted her with a wink face emoticon at the end of his message, he regretted it again. Text messaging was so dangerous.
But Kat came back:
[Kat]: I think he might :-) Accidentally told him it’s ‘a date’ when he suggested we go for food later, and was so scared he was going to think I was a freak.
[Julian]: I bet he didn’t. Bet he was over the moon.
[Kat]: He said ‘wonderful’.
So, the drummer from Blue Tonic was hoping to date Kat after all. Julian felt his hard cock throbbing away. Then his wife signed off quickly:
[Kat]: Gotta go, honey. Love you xxx
He responded with his own farewell and wished her luck, but he sensed she’d probably put away her phone by then, ready to rehearse on her own with a handsome, fit, younger drummer.
Wow. He was so turned on—how could he be quite so turned on, when he wasn’t getting any sex? There wasn’t even a semi-nude woman on screen to get him going. Kat was thousands of miles away on another coast, about to spend time on her own with her crush. And Julian was hard just from waiting to find out what was going on, and maybe from imagining what might be happening between them.
How could waiting be so thrilling?
If you were waiting for your wife to do something naughty, that was how it could, apparently.
Chapter Twelve
It started off well—that is, professionally.
Kat came out of the restroom, where she’d hidden herself away to briefly update her husband via text, to find Daryl alone in the room, drumming away. She recognized it, vaguely as being something Jacqueline played—that had been attempted this week by Lisa, albeit more slowly. Daryl picked up their material quickly.
“So, is it that you’re fantastically good at picking up new music… or that our music is so horrifically simplistic that it’s just easy to learn?” she said as she waltzed back to her place and picked up her guitar.
It wasn’t that she was feeling confident—quite the opposite, even if they’d been drinking beer all afternoon at Daryl’s prompting. She just found that if she could keep the subject on the music, she could distract herself from the… naughty thoughts.
“It’s not simplistic,” he grinned, placing a hand on one of his cymbals to silence it now she had returned.
“So what you’re saying is… you’re pretty good,” she laughed at making him sound conceited.
“I’ll let you in on a little secret,” he said. “People can’t tell much difference if you simplify things on a song, not when it comes to the drums. As long as you play loud and you get the right beat…”
They picked up where the last rehearsal had left off, and went on to the songs Josie was planning on working on the next day. Useful for Daryl, since as well as her regular guitar part, on most of the songs Kat could play guitar and just about pull off a passable impression of Josie’s singing at the same time—at least enough to make the music sound something like the real thing.
After an afternoon of drinking, they both continued into the evening as the beers were right there, still in the ice bucket. And while Daryl might have his own reasons for drinking, Kat found it easier to cope with her feelings if she was a little tipsy. It did slow her down after a while, however. That and the heat.
“God it’s sweltering in here,” Daryl said at one point, and she noticed that his t-shirt appeared soaked.
Not just her, then, finding it hot.
“Oh, the air conditioning’s broken,” she remembered.
“Broken?”
She shrugged. “It comes and goes—sometimes it’s too fricking cold in here, would you believe it. Then an hour or two later it’s hot like the mid-day sun.”
“We should go in the Blue Tonic room,” he said.
She said, “Your band mates wouldn’t mind?”
He shook his head, and they swanned out of there, clutching Kat’s guitar and a few beers each. Kat glanced at the clock as they were leaving, and it was almost nine o’clock. Jesus—had they been at it that long?
It was just as hot in the Blue Tonic rehearsal room.
“Jesus, nobody we can call to fix it?” Daryl said.
“You wanna call it a day?” she asked.
He smiled and cracked open another beer, before making himself comfortable behind his usual set of drums. “One more song,” he suggested. “Then we can go eat. How about it?”
She smiled, not wanting to end their little practice session despite the heat. “Sounds good,” she said.
Daryl pulled off his shirt, exposing his bare chest—his ripped bare chest. Kat felt her heart almost lose its rhythm. And despite all the alcohol in her system—or maybe because of it—she felt arousal blooming inside her.
“You drummers,” she teased him. “Always so quick to rip off your shirts.”
Daryl laughed. “It’s cooler this way. You should try it.”
And she was tipsy enough to do that. She felt his suggestion was almost a taunt, that a woman couldn’t pull off her shirt because of her gender. She wasn’t sure if that was it, but something in there tweaked her inner sense of feminism.
So she pulled off her own shirt, leaving her in a black bra and nothing else above the waist.
Daryl whooped at her bravery, or her exhibitionism, or both. “You see? Isn’t that better?” he asked her, tapping out a little quiet rhythm on the snare drum.
“Uh-huh,” she grinned, throwing her shirt away as though she didn’t ever need it again. She loved how he looked at her now that she was almost topless.
He was interested, there was no doubting it. It made her wet to know it. As did w
atching him play without his shirt on—seeing his muscles rippling, glistening with sweat. Yet as much as she liked to ogle him playing without a shirt on, it seemed he liked to do the same with her—and a day’s slow but meticulous drinking meant he wasn’t so worried about hiding his attention.
The sexual tension was positively crackling in the air as they went through that last song—but they managed to get through it. Though interested, Daryl seemed ever the gentleman, always bringing things back to the music and the rehearsal if there was any hint of the flirtation getting out of control.
“I’ll be with Blue Tonic tomorrow in the a.m.,” he pointed out once it was all done, “but this way we can just pick up at lunch time like I’ve been there all day.”
“Makes sense,” she said, unplugging her guitar, switching off the amp. “So, are we… going to get something to eat?”
She tried to be calm, to ask her question as though it wasn’t anything special, as though it was just one rock musician asking a co-worker if they happened to want to eat food at the same time in the same place, rather than suggesting something more, which might make her seem like some kind of idiot. She so desperately wanted to give the right impression to him—not that she was some silly girl with a crush on him, wondering if he was interested in her or only the music.
Daryl didn’t seem to care about impressions. What did anything like that matter to a rock star?
He walked over from the drum set, stooped to pick up her shirt, and as she looked on in mild astonishment, he put it to his face and breathed in her scent.
“You mean our date?” he smiled.
She caught her breath.
He stepped up to her and she could smell his perspiration. It made her feel light-headed, a little dizzy, flustered. His bare chest was inches away from her.
“Is that what we’re calling it?” she smiled, trying to act cool.
“Uh-huh.” He didn’t get awkward, he didn’t get flustered, he didn’t back down. His self confidence simply strengthened her desire for him.
“I haven’t… had a date in quite a while,” she said, not sure if she was attempting to warn him off, to lower his expectations or to test whether he really wanted this.
He smiled. “We don’t have to call it a date if you don’t want to.”
“What would we call it instead?”
God. Her heart was beating a thousand times a minute.
He shrugged. “We could call it ‘two people who really need to get laid go get food together’.”
She hesitated. A good girl, a God-fearing married woman away from her husband would have jumped right in and denied categorically that she really needed to get laid. But after a meaningful pause, she found herself giggling, and saying, “Okay.”
A moment later, as she saw a knowing twinkle in his eye, she felt herself blushing profusely yet again, the heat seeming to explode inside her, particularly between her legs—knowing that she’d essentially just confirmed that she did, indeed, really need to get laid.
“Come on, then,” he said, stepping back to invite her along.
She felt as though the ground was moving under her, as though the area was being hit by a silent earthquake. Was she really doing this? Going to get dinner with this gorgeous younger guy—with both of them putting it right out there that they needed sex. She could hardly believe it.
Well, they were both in rock bands. Rock musicians didn’t go for coy first dates. They went out, satisfied any need for food and/or drink, and then found somewhere suitable to satisfy their other needs.
As they walked out of the room, Daryl put his arm around her waist and she very nearly melted.
*
They found a steakhouse down a street off Sunset, recommended by the taxi driver despite the fact that it might mean a lower fare for him for the night. It was good, it was dark, they both felt like they had some privacy.
“Celebrities go there all the time,” the driver had said, sniffing as though he dealt with so many famous people, they were a dime a dozen.
Kat was kind of surprised he knew who they were. When she made the point after they were dropped off at the restaurant, Daryl chuckled, “He thinks we’re famous. Probably doesn’t know who we are, but he doesn’t want you to know that.”
“Why does he think we’re famous?”
“Because you’re insanely hot, and I probably look like an arrogant prick, and we’re both walking out of that building—a recording studio which belongs to a fairly decent record label.”
She smiled that he didn’t simply come out and say they both looked like rock stars—because rock stars don’t say such things, right? But her pussy throbbed at the way he said she was ‘insanely hot’.
Inside the restaurant, it was so dark it took a moment or two for their eyes to adjust.
“This way sir, madame.”
A booth at the back seemed perfect, but the place was fairly empty. They both talked about the music while they ordered, and while they waited for their steaks. More beers, but this time craft beers rather than the mainstream kind. They talked about the rehearsal, about the music. Daryl asking about who wrote which song, about why the need for this, why the need for that.
Funny how the music—that which brought them there, the day job, the thing that had to go right if they were to continue the tour—seemed like mere small talk. But it did. Once the food came, and the waiter left them to themselves, the need for small talk appeared over.
“So, your friend Josie said you were ‘married but available’,” Daryl said.
She smiled, and felt butterflies in her stomach stirring up at his sudden change of subject, at the intimacy of the topic compared to their conversation so far.
“That’s what she told you?” she smiled, and took a drink, playing for time to figure out what to say to him.
Did she tell him the truth and hope that he wasn’t put off by the thought of Julian waiting around back home to hear all the details? Or did she deny Josie’s claim and insist she was single, which might make a quick fling more likely, but might ruin their relationship as soon as the truth came out?
“I don’t know… bandmates always try to mess things up for you, don’t they?” he grinned, shrugged off what he’d heard from The Ponytails’ lead singer.
Kat saw that he was giving her an out. It only made her like him more, as distinct from lusting after him. But it also kept her choice open. She squinted briefly. What kind of a person was he? If they had a fling, would he get jealous about her husband back home? Would things get awkward when Julian came to visit?
She the heat building inside her. Men were often accused of thinking with their dicks, but just then, sitting across a table from the most gorgeous specimen of male beauty she’d seen in a long time—with apologies to her husband, but seriously—Kat was very, very driven to think with her pussy.
She sighed, but after a sip of beer—as another delaying tactic—she decided the friendly relationship with a member of their support band was more important to secure than a quick fuck. No matter how much she craved him physically, she was mature enough these days to see that in the long-term, she didn’t want the ignominy of a blatant lie to hang between them for the rest of the tour.
“Josie’s right,” she said, expecting Daryl’s face to suddenly sour, and maybe for him to groan and pull himself out of the booth altogether, ready to make a quick exit, stage left.
But Daryl just nodded quietly, calmly. “Married but available,” he said. Not quite a questioning tone, but inviting an explanation.
She took another sip of beer. Now she had the problem of how much did she tell him. “My husband… lets me do whatever I want with other guys… while I’m away from home,” she said. She could probably have left it that, right? She’d told him the truth. She didn’t have to tell him any more. But was it ethical to leave him in the dark about the other stuff?
Her obligation to share details of her encounters with Julian, for example. Suddenly that obligation seem
ed like a bit of a yoke around her neck.
“That’s nice of him,” Daryl smiled, keeping calm, apparently not reacting to news of her husband’s generosity. “You let him see other women?”
She thought for a moment of the previous night, when she’d stripped off Renee’s clothes right in front of her husband’s view on the webcam. Technically, he had seen another woman. But not quite as Daryl meant. Kat thought about Julian going off on some business trip, hiring a hooker. Or taking some business contact back up to his room after a conference. It made her feel mildly nauseous. It made her feel homesick. It made her feel quite seriously betrayed. No, Renee was a different ball game.
“No,” she said. “No, he doesn’t see anyone else.”
Daryl raised an eyebrow. “But you two… still…” he did a little hand gesture that seemed like the international sign for sex.
Here was another point where Kat could have lied, or stretched the truth. Maybe Daryl would be put off by knowing she still slept with her husband in a biblical sense. Maybe he would be more attracted to her if she said she no longer had sexual relations with Julian.
But where would lies get her on a potentially lengthy tour?
“Oh yes,” she nodded. “Very much so.”
Again, she waited for Daryl to get up and leave. Or even just say something to take the heat out of their conversation, turn relations with her platonic.
But he only smiled, said, “Interesting. I guess that’s the answer to my question, ‘what does he get out of this arrangement’—he gets to have you.”
Kat saw the easy logic. It wasn’t even a logic she’d thought of when Julian had first revealed his desire for her to sleep with other men. Her logic had suggested maybe Julian was bored of her, maybe he wanted her to give him the justification to cheat on her.
But to suggest that Julian could only have her by letting her see other guys… made her seem like a monster.
Rock Her World Page 14