Laurel let out a bitter scoff and turned her eyes down, away from the fire, and suddenly I worried I had struck a nerve.
“What is it?” I asked, leaning my head next to hers.
There was something I wanted her to say. But I didn’t know if she felt it.
“I just…” She stopped when her voice cracked, and I realized how close she was to tears. The smile on her half-turned face was pressed, forced. “I’ve been hearing that for a long time now, and it still hasn’t been true. I’m starting to think everyone just doesn’t know what else to tell me.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, and in turn, I wrapped my arms tighter around her. Lips against her hair, I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. And I don’t know about everyone else… but I really mean it.”
“Really mean what?”
“What I said. Watching someone who is good at what they do is the hottest thing. I’d consider myself a lucky man if the woman I ended up with was so talented.”
Laurel inhaled sharply under my touch, and something about it made my heart stop. But the moment fell silent between us, filled by the sounds of the crackling fire and softly flowing river.
I didn’t understand what I was feeling for Laurel. When I wasn’t thinking about this disaster with the band, or how badly I wanted to beat Duke to a pulp, I was thinking about her. When she was next to me, I felt like I could handle whatever the world threw at me. And being apart from her was starting to feel a lot like being apart from something vital to my life.
In that moment by the beach, I wanted to spill everything to her. I wanted to hand her my darkest secrets and see if she could hold them, see if she would still want to kiss me when it was all said and done. I craved to know if what was building in my heart had any bearing on the real world, or on her. I wanted to cut open a vein and bleed everything out.
Just like with the festival, even though I knew I did the right thing back in the Graveyard Club by stopping that guy from assaulting her, guilt still raged through my mind. Guilt that Laurel had seen me, up close and personal, at my most violent. Duke’s bitter accusations rang in my ears, and I realized I actually was scared that Laurel saw me as an animal. I didn’t want her to think that of me. The thought was unbearable.
“I want to tell you something,” I said. “And I know we haven’t talked about this yet… and you’ve been… you’ve been really amazing to just spend time with me and get my mind off what’s happening without bothering me to bring it up.”
Laurel said nothing, waiting for me to continue. Her body shifted under me, though, scooting closer, grasping the cloth of my jeans.
“I’m not allowed to say much to anybody, but not talking about it is fucking killing me. The festival… the festival was an accident,” I said. “Not just an accident, but…a complicated one.”
“What do you mean?” said Laurel. She turned in my lap to look at me, sliding in the sand until her gaze met mine, and I could tell by the worry in her eyes that I looked sadder than I realized.
“Look, I told my band, I told the cops, and now I’m telling you, even if you don’t believe me like the rest…” Anxiety spread through my veins.
“Believe what, Noah?” Laurel rubbed her hands up and down my chest, and then grasped my hands with hers. “What happened?”
I took a deep breath. Pulse rushing in my ears, I spilled out the words before I could lose my cool. “The man who fell… who I killed that day… he had a knife when he climbed up on-stage. I saw it. I saw it with my own eyes. He had a knife, and he was going for Quinn. That’s why I shoved him offstage.”
Laurel’s eyes widened, but she didn’t lean away. She gripped my hands tighter.
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” I said. “I just didn’t want him to hurt Quinn. We’d been attacked before, remember, and people die from asshole fans all the time… I saw it about to unfold and I just… acted.”
“Like you did earlier in the club,” she said in a soft voice.
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly. Laurel, I don’t want you to think I’m a fucking monster. I don’t want you to believe all the shit the press says about me. It’s not the truth. I may be a fighter, but I don’t fight over nothing.”
“Noah, I don’t think you’re a monster,” she said, putting her hand on my cheek. “You’ve proven to me that you aren’t. And I believe you about this.”
“You do?”
“Yes,” she said. “I believe you about the festival. There’s been something off about this whole thing for me for a while. Hearing this from you… it just confirms it.”
Relief crashed into me like a wave. I took Laurel into my arms and hugged her tight, feeling her warmth against me. “You have no idea how good it feels to hear you say that.”
“Are you telling me no one believes your story?” Laurel said, pulling away to look at me. “Noah, seriously? I figured you hadn’t said anything to the press for other reasons. I didn’t think it was because… because they didn’t believe you.”
My expression fell. Sadness rose in my mind, and I couldn’t find the words to say to her, lie or otherwise.
“Noah…” Laurel trailed off, distress in her voice. “That’s what’s happening with the band? They don’t believe you were protecting Quinn, and now they’re all jumping ship to save themselves?”
Hearing it said so starkly made the reality of my cold situation all the more hurtful. My eyes closed and I dropped my forehead onto Laurel’s with a sigh. Laurel nuzzled against me with concern, her hand on the back of my head.
When she spoke again, her voice was quivering. “You don’t deserve this to happen to you, Noah. You’re the last person in the world who deserves this.”
Laurel held me on the beach while the fire popped next to us. Emotions raced, bittersweet, through my mind. Having Laurel believe me, however, and the relief that knowledge held, was stronger than all of the others in that moment.
She nuzzled against me in the warm light of the fire and we didn’t talk for a while. The moon was much farther overhead by the time it got too chilly to enjoy the scenery, and Laurel waited, shivering in place, while I put out the fire and followed her back up the hill to the truck. She held my hand the whole way.
Something overcame me when we got to the truck. Maybe it was the way she looked in the moonlight, or the fact that she had only crawled in closer when I offered to show her my scars. Before I opened the door to the truck, I wrapped my hands around her face and kissed her fiercely, pressing her body up against the driver door. Laurel moaned into my mouth and traced her hands up my body, under my jacket and shirt, until they hit the heated skin of my back. Only a few seconds of this passionate mess and my dick was steel, aching for her.
Lips still devouring her kisses, I bent and lifted Laurel up, arms under her ass. She only made the tiniest noise against my mouth as she drew tight around me. I fumbled open the truck door and tossed her inside, and then crawled in and shut the door behind me.
Laying on top of her, we made out and pulled desperately at each other’s bodies with our hands, as if we had never touched one another before and would never again. A few minutes of that and my dick was practically begging to be inside of her—and that was to say nothing of my enflamed heart.
After some careful maneuvering, my jeans and boxers were slid down my legs, and I sat waiting on the bench seat of my truck like some horny teenager while Laurel wiggled her own pants off, stealing kisses the whole time. I had just rolled on an old condom from the glove box when she finally straddled my hips, and I could feel her wet heat dangerously close to my dick, even through the thin latex.
Grasping my shoulders for leverage and balance, she maneuvered herself over my cock and looked straight into my eyes as she impaled her pussy on my dick. It was so fucking hot I had to roll my head back and growl. My hands gripped her ass cheeks tight as she lowered herself, inch by inch, onto my stiffness until it filled her completely. Her muscles clenched around me with sweet pressure as sh
e let out a long, soft sound of contentment. She paused for just a moment, as if simply enjoying the feel of having me inside her, and then she began bucking her hips and riding me hard.
We couldn’t keep our mouths off each other in this cramped space—not that we would have wanted to. I couldn’t get enough of Laurel’s taste, the heat of her skin, the feel of her soft womanhood around me- hell, even the sharp but sweet pain of her nails, digging into my neck. I kept one hand clenched on her ass, helping her rhythm, and tangled the other in the back of her hair. I pushed her gasping mouth down to mine and she kissed me ravenously.
“Fuck, Noah, you feel so good,” she cried, her forehead pressed against mine as she rode me.
“So do you,” I whispered back. “I want you to cum hard all over my dick, Laurel. I want to see your face.”
“Oh, God.” She shivered at my words, and I felt the pressure of her bouncing get harder and faster.
One hand ran up and under her shirts until I had a handful of breast. I rolled her nipple between my fingers and she groaned. “Are you going to cum for me?”
“Yes,” she gasped. “Yes, Noah.”
“Come hard for me, Laurel,” I said.
Her pussy started clenching around me and I knew she was close. I bucked my hips up to meet hers, driving my cock deep and hard inside of her, and Laurel screamed at the added pressure. She gripped my shirt like she was falling off a cliff as her orgasm rocked her body and didn’t stop fucking me until she had pulled me over the edge with her. When she did, the waves of her orgasm milked my cock, as if they were desperately trying to draw every ounce of fluid I had left in my body.
Laurel didn’t seem aware of herself for the first few moments after she came. She rocked slowly on my hips and cock, her beautiful face looking calm and still through the dim half-light of the fogged-up truck windows. I pulled her lips to mine and kissed her, enjoying the soft moans still escaping from her throat.
“Noah,” she said wistfully. Her eyes were closed.
“Yeah?” I whispered back.
Laurel paused. She rubbed her face against mine longingly. I had a sense the words that finally came out of her mouth weren’t the first that she thought of—but I liked hearing them, anyway.
“I’m glad I found you.”
Chapter 13
Laurel
I’d been staring at my laptop for forty-five minutes, just circling around the same mindless websites and think pieces I had already checked. There was a lot of important work to do, but my brain was flooded with thoughts of Noah. Yesterday had been unbelievable, dreamlike. I wasn’t sure exactly what was happening to me, but it wasn’t like anything I’ve been through before.
In my mind a quiet question was gaining strength, demanding attention, and it was taking more of my energy than ever to ignore it.
But I fought it. I had to keep fighting it. I had a job to do, and now that job was more important than ever. After hearing what Noah had to say about the festival—exactly the scoop we dreamed of—this hunch that I had been wrong about him only seemed more certain. Since the first time I met him, Noah Hardy had thrown me for a curve, yielding layers of complexity beneath the bullshit image the media had built for him. Wasn’t it reasonable, then, that there was more to the story of the festival than we expected? It was true of everything else about Noah.
It had been hard to contain my excitement when he told me about what really happened at the festival. I found myself flooded with all sorts of relief; but more than that, I wanted to sprint away from that beach right then and there to find a solution to his problems.
That night had turned into something I didn’t expect in a lot of ways. I was still reeling from the incredible sex, from the intimacy, from the warmth I felt in Noah’s arms that I had never felt anywhere else before. Warmth I didn’t know was possible to receive from another person.
But I really did have work to do. I had to check out what Noah had told me. After hearing his story, I started doing some digging, and I was more certain than ever he was telling the truth. It was just that no one would listen to him.
Finally, Steve’s knock at the door interrupted my mindless surfing. He brought coffee and donuts this time, still a little sour from me wasting the extravagant feast from the other day, and together we gathered up around the tiny circular table near the window.
“So, you finally remembered you’re not here on vacation?” he said with a raised eyebrow as he passed out the donuts.
“It’s been like, two days, you big baby. You really need me around all the time for entertainment? This city is great.”
“I’ll take the Atlantic chill, thank you.”
I shook my head and drank some of the black coffee he’d brought. “Anyway, shut up, we have a lead on something and we need to drive at it hard.”
“Oh, yeah?”
I hiked my leg up onto the cozy, round chair. “We’re missing part of the story. We always have been. Noah killed that guy in self-defense.”
Steve coughed on a bit of the donut making its way down his throat. “Are you fuck-drunk? How many times did you watch that video, Laurel? That dude didn’t even see Noah coming, let alone go after him.”
“The guy was going after Quinn with a blade. Noah stopped him.”
Steve just watched my face like he was waiting for me to break. I gave him a withering look back and asked him to respond.
“Man, are you in love with this guy or something?” said Steve.
I rolled my eyes, but didn’t admit to Steve—or myself—how much my chest tightened up at the question. “That’s not the reason, Steve. I’m serious about this.”
“It’s not the reason, but it’s a reason?” Now Steve was smiling like a fucking idiot.
“Steve, goddammit.”
“Big bad Laurel quivering for Noah Hardy? Battista is never going to believe this,” said Steve as he dug in his pocket for his phone.
“If you don’t put that fucking phone down, I’m going to call Diane right now and tell her how many mimosas you made me sneak you on the plane ride over here, I swear to God. Test me.”
Steve froze. Silently he slid his phone back into his jacket pocket and looked at me with renewed interest, fingers crossed on the table top. “All right, fine. I’ll bite. Tell me more about this bat-shit theory of yours.”
“I’m not saying we run with it without proof,” I assured him, pulling up the pages I wanted on my laptop. “I’m saying we find proof.”
“Find proof that the dude Hardy killed was on-stage to attack Quinn with a knife, you mean. Proof that, somehow, both the security company and the cops missed that during their investigation.”
“Your sarcasm is noted and rejected,” I said, sliding the laptop around to face him, and then dug into the éclair he had put next to my coffee. “To answer your immediate concerns, I don’t think the cops and security missed the proof. I think they’re hiding it.”
“Goddamn, it is too early for this.”
“Just shut up and listen. Our best bet as far as looking at proof is the video evidence, but that also presents our biggest problem. We have a lot of cell phone footage from the crowd from different angles, but none of it helps us. Did you notice why?”
Steve stared at the laptop, his finger sliding over the mousepad. After a few seconds he said, “They’re all too far away.” He looked up at me with a curious face, chewing slowly.
I raised an eyebrow at him and nodded. “Exactly. They’re all too far away. Somehow, not a single person that was in the first ten rows near the stage was using their phone when the attack happened. Does that sound right to you?”
“Sounds like straight-up bullshit. Half the crowd at every show is on their phone, and the ones up-close have more reason than anyone,” said Steve.
“That’s what I thought too,” I said. “I can’t find a single video that close. So last night after I got back to the hotel, I started sniffing around some of the fan message boards and Tumblr and the like, hoping s
omeone from the crowd posted what they saw happened.” I waved a finger at the laptop. “Pull up the tabs of the ones I’ve saved, and you’ll see what I saw—a pattern of a couple different people claiming they had their phones confiscated by the security team after the attack.”
Steve’s eyes went wide as he browsed over the blog posts. “Holy shit. Do you think they could be making it up?”
“I found a few bullshit posts among the sites, sure, but these four share consistent details, and proof they were really at the festival that day. It’s enough that I don’t think it’s bullshit. I think the security team working the festival that day took the phones of everyone they could—everyone reasonably close to the stage barricades.”
“It’s a fucking cover-up,” said Steve, both excitement and disbelief in his voice.
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