by Anna Bloom
I shake my head. "Have you any idea where the letters are coming from?"
His fingers stroke the length of my hair, tugging with a gentle pull at the ends. I shiver in response despite the heat of his naked body pressed against mine.
"Well we never found out who sent the originals when you were a child." My god I love his breath on my skin, it’s hot and warm and makes me want to kiss him in the dirtiest way. "Soph, are you listening?" he tugs harder on my hair to gain my attention.
"Uh, sure."
He chuckles and the movement rocks us back and forth, making me want to reach down between us and have him back inside me. "I don’t want to know what you are thinking, do I?"
I shake my head. "Not if you want to continue to think of me as your pure innocent charge, no."
He rolls me, caging me between his arms, his mouth sliding along my throat. "God, I want you." It’s a low growl and my insides liquefy into a warm welcoming goo.
"The letters?" I squirm against his hold, but he doesn’t relinquish his grasp, dipping his head until he can suck one of my nipples deep into his mouth. His dick hardens against my thigh and I shift, rubbing it with my body.
Holy crap that’s good.
"Letters can wait."
My eyes roll back in my head, lost in a blistering sear of ecstasy as his hand skims along the side of my waist, sliding over my hip until he can ease my thighs back, using both hands to spread me wide, exposing the centre of my being.
I fight against his hold, trying to close my legs. His head pulls up, a question lifting an eyebrow. "I’m not going to hurt you, Soph. It’s me, I will never hurt you."
I count slowly in my head. This is Blake. He wants nothing apart from to love me. I can trust him.
His lips trail along my stomach, lowering until his tongue flicks across my sensitive core. My hips buck off the bed, thrusting into his face. Sliding his hands under my hips he tilts me as if I’m a cup filled with fine wine as he licks and sucks, his teeth grazing my sensitive clit until I’m clawing at the sheets and shouting his name in a rising crescendo.
When I’ve calmed he slowly kisses a trail back up along my stomach. "Sophia, whatever happens." His eyes meet mine and he talks around one of my breasts, his words halting every so often to flick a hardened nipple. With each flick an aftershock of my orgasm shudders and I sigh. "Whatever happens next. You are mine."
I inhale a shuddering breath, but he continues. "You always have been and now you always will."
Settling back at my side he hooks his arm around me tight, tugging me back into an iron clad grip and I doze off into calm sleep feeling securer than I have in a long, long, while.
When I wake it’s to find him staring at me with dark eyes, his lips turned down. "What is it?" I pull at the sheet, gathering it around my chest. "Was I snoring?"
"Will you tell me what happened with Johnny Fairweather?"
I bat him away with a playful swat. "We’re not talking about Johnny Fairweather after having sex for the first time."
He lifts his elbow, placing the crook of his arm over his face, shielding his gaze. "I'd rather just know. Did you love him? Do you love him? Is that why the press always put you together?"
"What?" I struggle to sit up. "Did I love him, are you mad?"
"But you were with him though?" He still wouldn’t look at me, hidden behind the weight of his arm.
"The studio dreamt it up, and do you know what, Blake?" I pull his arm away from his face and tilt his chin until he’ll meet my eyes. "I was all for encouraging it too back then. I knew you hated him, and I wanted to hurt you. Plus, I knew the more the press saw us together, the more chance there was of you seeing it."
He pouts which is just damn cute. "It worked." Sitting up, his abs crunching in a mighty fine display of athleticism, he grabs my hand. "But there is something else. You flinch every time he touches you. I know that’s why you took so long to film that scene on set. You were frightened."
I go to pull away, but he holds me tight, refusing to allow me to run. Tears prickle my eyes. I don’t want to go there now, not after just experiencing my first real intimate moment of love, not just sex. "Things got twisted, Blake. What do you want me to say?"
"I want the truth."
Shuddering, every cell in my body tells me to run away and hide—preferably in a bottle or snort of something.
He’s asking me to reveal my darkest place, the truth that sent me to rehab. He wants me to just blurt it while sitting naked in his childhood bedroom? "You really want to know? Even if it changes how you see me, think of me?" I ask.
He nods, his fingers binding tight with mine.
"Okay." I inhale a lungful of air. "We used to get high—sometimes we’d have sex, sometimes we’d play." He sucks in a breath and I focus on the cotton of the sheets. "We were always high though, so it was hard to remember what had happened and what hadn’t. Being out of it and high is all I associate with sex." My fingers tangle on his, anchoring myself. "Before you left, I knew I wanted you. I wanted to know what sex would be like with you. Hell, I was seventeen, of course I did. You were my teenage fantasy."
He strokes the outside of my thumb with his.
"Then you left and I couldn’t see the point in caring." I drag in another breath, my focus on the silver line across my wrist. "So I got high and Johnny did what he wanted."
Silence. It meets my words until they echo back at me.
Blake leaps from the bed surprising me, and paces for the window. "This is all my fault?" He pulls fingers through his hair, his back muscles rippling with his tightened hold.
"No. It’s my fault for not having any self-respect." My throat tightens. "I never did what those letters said though, Blake. I told you the truth. I never sold sexual favours to get my hands on drugs. There was no need. I always had money." I hesitate until a dry laugh escapes my lips.
He turns for me, his eyes startling in their intensity. "There’s still something else. I know you and you’re still holding back. Tell me. Tell me what happened that night."
Sitting and folding my legs, I tuck the sheet under my arms, holding my shaking hands together. "We were high. Johnny was in a bad way. He wanted to have sex, but I wasn’t in the mood." If I close my eyes, I can remember the smell of his vodka soaked breath. "I just wanted to take another hit, but he kept insisting, kept pushing." Blake turns for the window, one hand leaning against the window frame as I talk. "I’d never tried Heroin before, it always seemed one step too far. As desperate as I was, as much as I hated everything including myself, I just couldn’t go there."
Blake inclines his head and I continue. "So, Johnny set it up. I told him I wasn’t sure, but he said it was because I’d never tried."
The words begin to tangle with sobs. "So he shot me up. It hurt, but then afterwards I couldn’t remember anything—it was bliss, the nothingness. Nothing could hurt me. It didn’t matter that I hated my life because right then in the moment my life didn’t exist.
"I can only remember patches after that, there are just deep holes of black in my memory." I drew in a shaky breath. "When I woke I was naked but couldn’t remember when I’d taken my clothes off." I gave Blake a shrug, not that he could see with his face still turned away. "Johnny was out cold next to me. I tried to wake him to find out what had happened, but he didn’t wake." Tears splatter into the cotton. "I wanted it all to end. It’s all I can remember. I didn’t want to be me anymore."
Blake turns and I die on the inside when I see the look on his face. It’s marred beauty, like an angel caught weeping. "Then what?"
He knows what I’ve done. The whole world knows I’d slashed my wrists and ended up in rehab.
"Do you know what my mum said after I’d been patched up?"
He comes to the bed sitting on the edge, picking up my hand, holding it gently in his grasp, his thumb running along the scar. "Honestly, I hate to think."
"She said it would do wonders for my career, everyone loves an act of desperation.
" A catch hitches my breathing and then the dam I hold in places crashes down. Tears roll, chasing one another until they bounce off my skin.
One lands on the back of Blake's hand, and he watches it with fascination. "She’s an idiot." His deep gaze lands on my face with sincerity. "But then she did come to get me, she said I would be the only person you’d listen to." His fingers chuck under my chin, lifting my face. "Why is that? You have so many people who could help you, yet even your useless mother knows you will only listen to me." His expression turns thoughtful as he mulls over the question to himself.
The words gush. "Because you are the only person I’ve ever loved, since before I even knew what love was."
He shakes his head. "You loved the stability I could give you that’s all."
My tears fly as I swipe at them with my palms. "No, I grew to love you because of who you are."
"And do you still love me now, even though I left you and you lived through hell?"
I grasp his hand. "Can you love me knowing I’m so weak?"
I want to ask him when he started to love me, when he knew his feelings for me had transcended into something he was no longer comfortable with. I know now that’s why he left. Because he believed it to be wrong. Was it? Maybe. Would I have stopped him? No. Did that make this some fucked-up mess? Definitely. But it’s our fucked-up mess.
"Do you think he raped you?" His question shatters my chest. It’s the one question I’ve wrestled with. It near on tore me apart during my first sober days in rehab. Did Jonathan Fairweather rape me? That night was so messed up. I’d been desperate. I must have been to hurt myself the way I had.
"I don’t think I can say. The lines were always blurry, Blake, and at the end of the day who’s going to believe the girl who nearly killed Hollywood’s golden boy? Everyone thinks it’s me who led him astray, who made him overdose with me."
He doesn’t speak. His eyes hold mine with such intensity I squirm away.
"You know girls get abused in Hollywood all the time, it’s part of the territory. It’s fucking sick, it doesn’t make it right but it’s never been any different." He lifts my hand, running his thumb along the lines of my palm. "Couldn’t you speak out and help them?"
"Help who?"
"The other girls, the girls who don’t have your name. The girls who will pay any price for fame."
A flutter fills my chest. Could I do that? How? It would go against every single established rule. I shrug. "Maybe."
"Just an idea." Blake sighs. "This is all so messed up, Sophia, are you sure you want this?"
I reach for him, my hands sliding along his face, holding him still. "Always."
"When we leave this room, you will be mine, I can’t be anything less than one hundred per cent in this, it’s the only way it will work."
"And you’re going to sit there, watching me when I go back to work and have to film alongside Johnny even though you know what I’ve told you?" Eventually I will have to leave Wales and go back. The break I arranged with Ted Stein is only for a limited time while they film scenes I’m not needed for—I can’t think about it now though, I need longer away from there.
"I shall take enormous delight in visualising ripping his dick off and nailing it to a post."
I chuckle. For so many months I’ve been repulsed by the waves of dirt residing deep within my soul. Blake lifts them, washing away the stains of who I used to be.
"You know?" He pulls me into his chest and settles back on the pillows and I fit myself into the grooves of his firm body. "I used to think you were like a fifties movie star. That shine you have, that inner glow, it reminds me of them."
"I think I’m all shined out, Blake."
He kisses the top of my hair. "Wasn’t Hollywood dirty then too? A sordid underbelly beneath the beauty?"
"Possibly. What are you getting at?"
"Maybe you can rise above it all. I still think you have it in you."
"Blake, I never wanted it. Do you know the only dream I have?"
He shakes his head. Of course he doesn’t, nobody does.
"Roses. It’s all I want, a place of my own with roses around the door. Does that sound stupid?"
He grins, and it melts my insides until I can feel myself reforming, restructuring into something else, a better version of myself then I’ve ever known. "It’s a good thing I’m a skilled gardener."
"Are you?"
He laughs, his breath on the skin of my neck. "No, but for you I will learn."
Then he kisses me again and like a butterfly flapping its newly unfurled wings for the first time. I become something else. Someone new.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Blake
I flick the kettle on. Sophia’s still sleeping and I’m stuck in no-man’s-land, between the horror of what I’ve allowed to happen, and relief that finally, after all these years of want and misery we’ve got to that place where she’s mine. A place of honesty.
Fairweather. I’m going to fucking kill him.
Revenge will be sweet, of that I’m sure. The Sophia I just made love to had no place playing those dangerous games, she deserves more and even if she didn’t appreciate that for herself, he should have.
There’s this constant nagging voice telling me he's behind the letters. Wouldn’t he want to keep her quiet? He could have filmed every time they’d been together, the sick fucker.
With a frustrated snap I pull my phone from my jeans, hitting a saved number. "Sloane, it’s me."
"How’s the Valley?" he puts on his worst Welsh accent, but I’m not in the mood for jokes.
"What do we know about Fairweather?"
There’s a moment of silence followed by the spark of a cigarette being lit. "As in, Jonathan Fairweather, Sophia’s boyfriend?"
I bristle and grip the phone tighter. "Whatever. I’ve been thinking about the letters and pictures. It’s almost obsessive don’t you think, personal almost?"
"Yeah, I’d say." Sloane sighs down the line. "Listen, I’ve found a lead to a private investigator; whoever this is, they are paying for someone else’s skills…" he trails off.
"What?"
"Blake, it reeks of vendetta to me. Someone, somewhere wants her to pay."
My stomach rolls. "Pay for what? It’s Fairweather, it’s got to be."
"Does he know where you are now?"
I shake my head despite the fact he can’t see it. "No, no one knows."
"I’ll keep digging, best you keep where she is quiet. The campaign has definitely increased and you know what happens when situations like this escalate."
"I know," I snap before pulling myself under control. "Sorry. It’s, it’s, just if anything happens, you know…"
"I know. I’ll check in as soon as I discover something."
"Cheers, Sloane, you’re the man."
He mutters, cursing at me and hangs up.
With the phone in my hand I stop and stare at the boiling kettle, trying to remember what I was doing—trying to see anything apart from her in my head. Scrubbing a hand down my face, exhaustion sweeps over me. She’s under my skin, crawling with an intensity that makes me realise the way I felt about her before is nowhere near close to what this has the possibility of morphing into.
"Happy now, Blake?"
Turning I find Mam watching me from the door. She’s a bloody ninja. She’s probably been stood there listening to the whole conversation. Her boots are muddy, but she’s never been the kind to worry about taking shoes off in the house.
"It’s not about being happy, it’s about what’s right." I watch her, willing her to understand and accept the decision I’ve made. "All these years, Mam. It’s been tiring."
She sits down at the kitchen table in her place, picking up the glasses she left there earlier. The same things are always in the same spot. Glasses and a biro—they are intricately her. "I know, Blake, I do. I just wonder where this is going to lead you, she’s so damaged."
"She just needs love, that’s all."
/> Mam raises her eyebrow. "What sort of love, that of a lover or that of a father?"
I grit my teeth. "Don’t be low."
"Have you told her you’re still in contact with her dad?"
I shake my head. There are only so many truths that can unravel in one day. "I’ll lead up to that slowly."
Mam gives me a pointed look in response which speaks louder than any words.
I brush my hair out of my eyes, my classic stalling tactic, which judging by the loud tut she gives me fails. "I will, I will." Fiddling with tea mugs to distract her from glaring at me I say, "Someone is trying to push her over the edge, that much we know, but we don’t know why. Mam, they were burning weed in her oven for goodness sake, only someone who knows how delicate she is would do that. I’m sure it’s Johnny, he’s trying to scare her into keeping some secrets quiet."
"Johnny Fairweather is clean, that’s what everyone says." It’s my turn to roll my eyes. Since life had taken me from Wales to Hollywood, my mam has become quite the gossip page connoisseur.
"Don’t be naïve, Mam. He’s not clean, I don’t think he even got through rehab. He’s a lying, disgusting bastard who doesn’t want everyone to know it’s him that caused his own overdose and not her. I mean let’s be honest here," thoughts whirl in my brain. "It was just the two of them there that night, one of them has to come out on the right side. I’m guessing he would do anything to make sure she stays broken and down."
Mum stares long and hard, her scrutiny sweeping over my face. "And you’re going to be the one to help her up?"
"If that’s what it takes. Yes."
"And when he’s working alongside her on that film, or they are walking the red carpet together and people are asking if they’re together because no one knows she is dating her bodyguard. What then?"
"Even then."
Dating. It seems such a silly word for what we’ve been through to get to this chilly afternoon in Wales.