My mom or my dad could leave. Or they could erupt in a rage. They never directed their rage at me, but that wasn’t what scared me.
I managed to look up into Dylan’s eyes. He looked back at me, steadfast.
“They were crazy about each other, literally. Passionate. Their love was so… volatile. It was violent. And as a little girl all I could do was sit there and watch. I couldn’t do anything about it. Liv, though, she was different. A different personality, and she was five years older than me. She would storm right into the middle of it and scream at them, tell them to stop, try to drag them apart. But nothing would stop them. It never stopped, until the day my dad walked out, and he didn’t come back. He broke Mom’s heart.” My voice broke, and tears started streaming down my face. My heart broke, for her, all over again as I said the words to Dylan. It broke for us, Liv and me.
Dylan took my other hand in his, as I sat here trembling with emotion.
“Mom never recovered from it. He broke all our hearts, but she never recovered. She still talks about him like he walked out yesterday. She knows he’s gone, but she talks about him like he’s coming back, like he never really left. I mean, she talks about him like he’s still with her. Like they’re still in love. It’s sickening. And… it scares the shit out of me.”
“I can see that,” Dylan said, his hands tightening gently on mine. “I can imagine… that the whole idea of loving someone would be fucking scary. If that’s how you grew up.”
“That’s what I thought love was,” I said. But, no. It was worse. “I thought that’s all love was. I thought that was the only kind of love there could be between a man and a woman, if they were really in love. If there was passion. I thought that was what passion looked like. That was what passion felt like. Painful and heartrending, fucking scary and unstable. Traumatic. That it was something you never recovered from.” I pulled my hand from his to swipe the tears from my cheeks. “I know that’s why I’ve kept the bar so damn low with men. Why I’ve let them treat me so shitty. Why I’ve let them use me up and dump me. Because I couldn’t bear to hope for more and find out I couldn’t have it. Or worse, that it didn’t even exist.” I sniffed, looking at his perfect face. “And then… I met you.”
Dylan reached up to smooth his knuckles along my jaw. He brushed my hair back and laid his hand gently on the side of my neck. “There are all kinds of passion, Amber,” he said, looking in my eyes. “Not all of them painful.”
“Yeah. I’m learning that now.” I sniffled and dabbed the tears from my eyes. “It’s strange, you know, how differently my sister and I came out of that situation. It affected us both so powerfully. But Liv takes no shit. I just kind of avoid the shit.”
“Well… what if it’s not shit?” His mouth did that cute quirk, that crooked smile of his that totally slayed me. “What if it’s really fucking good?”
“Yeah.” I shrugged uncomfortably. “I guess I never really… um… asked myself that before. Until you came along.”
He laughed. He fucking laughed at me.
“And I thought I was bad at relationships,” he teased.
“Please. I’m fucking terrible at love.”
“Terrible?”
“I’ve been dumped by every guy I’ve ever dated,” I admitted.
Might as well just lay it all out there.
Dylan raised both eyebrows at me. “Every guy?”
“Every guy.”
“Even Johnny O?”
“Even Johnny O.”
“You didn’t dump his ass? I thought he cheated on you.”
“He did. And then he sat me down and suggested we’d rushed into things. Really, he let me down easy, considering how many vaginas he’d been up inside behind my back.”
Dylan’s eyes flashed with something that I was pretty sure was anger, on my behalf. “Amber—”
“Don’t feel too bad for me. We really weren’t together all that long. And we did rush into it. You know, me and my low bar.”
He considered that, his green-gold eyes thoughtful. “Have you ever been with anyone longterm?”
“Not really.” I tried to smile. “What, are you telling me you’ve had a serious relationship with anyone? And Ashley doesn’t count.”
“Why doesn’t Ash count?”
“Because you were never in love with Ashley.” I swallowed, staring into his eyes. “Were you…?”
“No,” he said, growing serious. “No. Ash doesn’t count. But I’ve had a couple of girlfriends. I’ve never dated anyone exclusively for more than a few months, though, so you’ve got me on the relationship thing. Guess I’m kind of a virgin when it comes to making those work.”
That perked me up, actually. “Well, then… maybe we can be virgins together.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, pulling me toward him, his eyelids instantly lowering. “So let’s go pop our cherries together.”
I grinned and he kissed me. The heat between us ignited so fast, I lost my breath and fell against him, panting, moaning into his mouth.
“Shit,” he said, pulling back. “I almost forgot… You got me all distracted with those cute teeth of yours, smiling at me.”
“Cute teeth?” I panted.
“These little fangs.” He nudged my upper lip up and pressed his thumb to one of my eyeteeth. “Cute as hell.”
“Yeah? You like the fangs?” I smiled, showing them off, as I slid my leg over his lap to straddle him, cozying into his crotch. I wrapped my hands around the back of his neck. “If I was a vampire, would you let me drink your blood so I could stay alive forever?”
“Totally.” He drifted his thumb over my cheek. “As long as I get to look at these freckles for eternity. Kinda lose my mind over these…”
He kissed me again and nibbled on my bottom lip, and I moaned softly, kinda dazed and floored by his words. … for eternity…?
“Jesus.” He pulled back. “You did it again.”
“Did what?”
“Distracted me. I was trying to ask you to come on tour with me.”
“What?” I pulled back to look into his eyes.
“Tour,” he said. “After the album comes out. We’re leaving in January. Bunch of dates in Australia, South America, the US, Europe after that… Whole bunch of places.”
“Um. You want me to go travel the world with you?” My heart was suddenly pumping a billion beats per minute.
“Yeah. Is that cool?”
Holy shit.
“Have you met me? I fucking love traveling. But, wait… Do I have to ride in a car behind the bus with the other bitches? Because that’s not happening.”
He laughed. “What?”
“I saw Rock Star, with Marky Mark. Jennifer Aniston had to ride in a car behind the tour bus with the other girlfriends and wives, while the guys in the band took groupies on the tour bus with them.”
“Not happening,” he said, smoothing his thumb over my bottom lip. “No fucking way. You get to eject any idiot who tries to take your place at my side. Or I’ll get Jude to do it.”
I shook my head, trying to consider all the angles of what he was offering. “I dunno, though.” I wrapped my arms loosely around his neck, playing with his hair. “Sounds kinda gross, Dylan. I don’t want to be your convenience pussy, warming your bed while you’re working on the road and too busy to see me except to fuck. We’ll hate each other by mid-tour and break up and I’ll leave you in some random country and we’ll never see each other again.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“Hmm.” He gripped my hips and pulled me closer against him. Probably trying to distract me with his massive hard-on, which was now jammed against my pussy.
I narrowed my eyes at him.
He smirked.
“Hear me out, though,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about this, and I think what it comes down to is ownership.”
“Ownership?”
“Yeah. You’ve gotta have ownership in something to really feel a part of it. To
know we’re on equal footing. We learned that lesson with Seth.”
“Seth?” I asked, confused.
“We never gave him rights to the songs, in the beginning.”
“Oh…”
“Yeah. Even though he was one of our primary songwriters,” he explained, “he didn’t get the songwriting credit, and that meant he didn’t make the same money as the rest of us. He didn’t get what they call publishing royalties. Even though Jesse and Zane have always written most of Dirty’s music, me and Elle have always shared the songwriting credit, so that the band splits the publishing royalties equally, four ways. Lot of bands do that, to keep things equal, avoid conflict. Jessa was also credited as songwriter on the first Dirty album and gets the publishing royalties for those songs.” He paused and sighed a little, shaking his head like he now couldn’t fathom what they’d done. “In the beginning, leaving Seth out of the publishing rights seemed to make sense, because we hired him on almost like a laborer or something, like a crew member. We didn’t originally hire him to write songs. He got paid a cut for the shows, for the album he played on, and a lump sum for the songs he’d co-written, but that was it. No ongoing publishing royalties. It sounds shitty now and pretty crooked, but we did it because when it came down to it, we didn’t really trust him. Brody didn’t trust him, for good reason. Seth was already pretty heavy into drugs, hard drugs, and we all knew it. So Brody and our lawyers advised us to structure his deal that way.”
“It was probably for the best, then,” I offered.
“I don’t know. I think the band figured that at some point in the near future Seth would prove to us all that he was one-hundred-percent in, and we’d bring him in closer, give him an equal cut. But that just never happened. By the end of the first world tour, he’d already spiraled out of control, and we let him go.”
“That’s so… sad,” I said. “It’s hard to imagine some out-of-control drug addict when you meet Seth. He seems to have his shit so together.”
“He does. Now that he’s back, things are so different. And we all sat down and had a conversation about it, realized that in order for this thing to work, we need to bring him in tight, give him a real stake, and treat him like an equal part of this. So, with his new contract, Seth gets the shared songwriting credit and now he’ll be paid an equal share of royalties on the new songs, just like Jessa and the rest of us, so we’re all on equal footing. We even gave him a generous signing bonus when he came back, to start things off on the right foot. Show him we’re serious about the band’s future with him.”
“That sounds like the right thing to do,” I said, still wondering what this had to do with me. “Smart.”
“Yeah. So, what if you were hired as Dirty’s tour photographer?”
I stared at him. “Tour photographer…?”
“Then you get paid. And you get to take photos all the time, and if you get sick of me you can go take photos, and if I piss you off, you can go take photos, and you can just generally get paid to take photos of everything until you forgive me for being annoying and you come back to my bed.”
“Um—”
“And you get regular checks issued to you by band management.”
“Well—”
“So then you have a bunch of money when you leave me in some foreign country never to be seen again. But most importantly, you’d own the rights to your photos, so you’d always have that. And you could do your gallery tour, or your coffee table book, or whatever the hell you want to do down the road… no matter what happens between us.”
“Hmm. That does sound like a better plan…” I was playing it cool, maybe, but tingles of excitement were rising in me; the whole idea was giving me goosebumps.
Dylan ran his hands up my arms, pulling me closer. “But then, maybe you’re so happy because you get to do all your favorite things that you don’t leave me. And we live happily ever after.”
“My favorite things…?”
“Yeah. Taking photos. Making money taking photos so you can support yourself. Traveling the world. And fucking me.”
“Are those in order from most to least favorite?” I teased.
“You tell me.” He leaned in and kissed me, slowly.
“Mmm…” I broke away, before I hit the melting point and totally dropped the ball on this conversation. “No. Fucking you goes above everything on that list, except making money to support myself. That’s gotta be in first place, right alongside fucking you, because if I can’t support myself, I can’t respect myself. And if I can’t respect myself, trust me, I’m gonna be a lousy, grumpy lay.”
“I dunno, Amber. You’re kinda sexy when you’re grumpy.”
I frowned, doubtful.
“See?” He kissed my pouting lips. “Duck face.”
“What?” I laughed.
“Ash calls that your duck face. I believe the exact term was ‘fucking adorable duck face.’”
My face fell. “Ashley Player thinks I’m adorable when I’m grumpy?”
The happiness faded from Dylan’s face a bit. I could see it in his eyes, how the mention of Ashley bothered him.
Ashley taking off didn’t sit well with either of us.
“Of course he does,” he said.
“Oh.” I felt my eyes fill with tears again, but I quickly blinked them back.
“He cares about you,” Dylan said, his voice low and husky. “He would’ve loved you. If you…”
“If I let him,” I finished, my voice soft and parched. And I knew he was right. “But… I just can’t, Dylan. If that’s what you want… believe me, I understand.” I was trying to, at least. “You knew him long before you met me. You guys have tons of history, memories. You have this amazing, beautiful bond. If you want him in your life that way… with a woman, and the two of you… I understand. It just can’t be me.” The tears had run over again, and I swiped them from my cheeks. God, it had been such an emotional night. “That’s not an ultimatum. I’m just telling you… That’s how I feel. I just… I can’t love Ashley. Not the way I would have to, to live like that. It’s hard enough, the whole idea of…” I stopped short before saying it.
“The idea of loving me,” he finished for me.
“I’m sorry. This is all knew for me. I know I’m bad at love. But… I know how I feel. I know how I feel about you, and about him. I care about him. A lot. I think he’s an amazing person. I really do. He’s complicated but so loyal to you, and he has a big heart beneath all the angry, rough edges. But I just don’t love him like that. It kinda kills me that I don’t. But I don’t. And if you need a woman who does, who can make room for him that way…”
“I need you,” Dylan said, pulling me against him, his green eyes delving deep into mine. “I need you, Amber.”
I sighed with relief, but I did it quietly. I didn’t want to be so happy for myself when it meant it was hurting someone I cared about. “What about Ashley?”
“You know I love Ash,” he said. “But I’m never gonna love him the way he wanted me to. There’s nothing I can do about that.”
It hurt; I knew that. I could hear it in his voice.
“That must be so fucking hard.” I cupped his beautiful face in my hands. “To know that he’s hurt and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Yeah. I hate it. But keeping him around, doing what we were doing, that’s only gonna hurt him more. I was hurting him all along, Amber. I just didn’t realize it until last night.” He shrugged. “I guess I was a little slow on that.”
“You really didn’t know he was in love with you until last night?”
“No.”
“Wow.” I tried to smile a bit. “You are slow.”
He looked like he felt really fucking bad about it, and I wrapped myself tighter around him.
“Sorry. Too early to make jokes?”
“I’m always good for jokes, Amber,” he said. “I just can’t laugh about this.”
“Okay. How about we make each other a promise, then?” I gazed at
him, so full of hope, and brushed my fingers over his full lips. “To help each other through this relationship thing. I’m not even asking for forever, and I’m not promising it. I just know I want to see you onstage rocking out in your kilt and I want to wake up next to you every morning and I want to see the world with you. And I promise to give you all the space you need in your friendship with Ashley. You’ll give me the space I need to do my photography. I’ll try like hell not to scratch out all your groupies’ eyes on the road. And you’ll keep me happy by doing that thing where you screw me with your big dick until my eyes roll back in my head and I forget my name. Deal?”
“Deal,” he said, his eyes darkening as his hands slid over my ass. He gripped me tight and ground me against his stiff cock. “But do you think you can be satisfied with one man, now that you’ve had two?”
He was teasing me, taunting as he pressed his hard-on against me… his incredibly large hard-on… But I knew there was a touch of fear behind the words.
“If that man is you,” I said, “totally fucking yes.”
Then I kissed him, with all the love I already felt for him… and all the potential of the love that I knew we could share.
Maybe I wasn’t asking for or promising forever, but I so fucking wanted it.
With him.
“Besides,” I told him, “you’re so freakin’ tall, you’ve got incredible reach. You can hit all the important places at the same time, and I can just close my eyes and imagine there are like three of you. So… we’re totally covered.”
“That’s good,” he murmured against my lips. “I wouldn’t want to miss any important places.”
“You know, there’s this one place you’ve never quite hit, at the base of my spine…”
Dirty Like Dylan_A Dirty Rockstar Romance Page 38