by Kate Stewart
Right about now I’d love to choke Parker with said string.
“I’ll touch base about the Pirouette gig in the morning,” I say, not acknowledging his comment. I scrounge up a smile slightly more sincere than the one I offered Meryl. “I’ll see you there tomorrow night. Get some rest.”
I start toward the SUV like I had expected it to be there waiting. Halfway to the SUV, Parker covers the ground between us swiftly, stepping into my path.
“It’s been too long,” Parker says. Equal portions of ownership and lust mix in the eyes studying me. He takes my bag and snakes an arm around my waist, pulling me into him. His erection pokes my stomach, and I draw a shallow breath.
“Someone’s happy to see you,” he whispers through my hair, into my ear.
I can’t take it. I didn’t want to cause a scene, especially with Grip and Qwest deplaning behind me, but I instinctively pull out of his body lock.
“What are you doing here, Parker?” I leave my irritation close to the surface where he can see it. “How did you know I was landing today?”
“I have my sources,” Parker says with a smile. “I have my ways.”
He wraps possessive fingers around my elbow, and I jerk out of his hold again.
“Don’t.” I chop the word up and serve it cold. “You said you would fix this. To spare you the public embarrassment, I’ve left it to you. You’ve done nothing to address the rumors and then show up here like my long-lost lover. Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Who do I think I am?” His voice is a brick in a kid leather glove, a buttery soft blow. “You know who I am, Bristol, and I’m here to remind you who you belong to since you seem to think this is a negotiation. It’s not. I’ve waited. I’ve been patient. That’s over.”
“Belong?” I keep my voice low and trap my outrage between Parker and me. I can practically feel Grip’s eyes on us, and this could get ugly quick. “Parker, you’re right. This isn’t a negotiation because I’m giving you nothing, and I want nothing except for you to leave me the hell alone.”
He grabs me again, and I jerk my arm, but this time Parker doesn’t let go.
“Bristol.” Grip’s deep voice rumbles from behind me, and I go still, my eyes snagging with Parker’s. The less contact he has with Grip the better.
I turn to face Grip, still clamped to Parker’s side.
“Hey.” I curve my mouth into a smile that I hope fools him. “What’s up?”
His eyes move from Parker’s iron hold on me to my face. The concern, the question in his eyes, doesn’t bode well for things remaining drama-free.
“Everything okay?” he asks. “You need a ride home?”
“She has a ride home,” Parker answers before I can. “It’s Grip, right?”
Grip’s icy eyes freezer burn Parker’s face.
“Bristol can speak for herself.” Grip’s answer comes dangerously soft.
“Of course she can.” Parker leaves a soft kiss at my temple. “Tell the man, Bristol.”
The muscle knotting along Grip’s jaw tells me I need to diffuse this. Even as angry as I am with him, I can’t have him caught in Parker’s crosshairs. He’s mad with me, and I’m mad with him, but we’re both still trying to protect each other.
“I’m fine, Grip.” I loosen the hold Parker has on me so I can loop my elbow through his. “I’d forgotten Parker was picking me up.”
“You sure?” He makes the mistake of touching my hand, and I feel Parker stiffen beside me. He’s inspecting Grip with new, alert eyes.
“I am.” I pull my hand away and pat his shoulder. “Your girlfriend is waiting. It’s sweet of you to check, but I don’t want to keep you away from Qwest.”
He glances over his shoulder to find Qwest walking up with Will in tow, her eyes inquiring about the tableau playing out on the tarmac.
“Okay.” He still doesn’t seem sure, looking at Charles Parker like he might be Charles Manson. “We’ll touch base about Pirouette tomorrow then?”
“I’ll have Sarah call you.” I inject a little venom into the statement, a small jab that he’ll feel, but no one else will notice. “May as well start as we mean to go, right?”
He sighs and turns to join Qwest and Will without saying another word.
I keep my silence until we reach the SUV. I stop in front of Clairmont who stands guard at the door.
“Take me home right now.” My voice and glare are low-level radioactive.
I don’t wait for Clairmont’s response before climbing through the open rear door and waiting for the reckoning that’s long overdue between Parker and me. As soon as the door closes, I turn on him.
“Let’s get something absolutely straight,” I bite out. “You and I are not in a relationship. We aren’t dating. We aren’t getting married. I had to be so far under the influence of hard liquor I didn’t even know I was in the world to fuck you again after a decade, and I guarantee that was the last time you get anywhere near this pussy.”
Maybe I went too far, too hard. I’ve seen Parker’s eyes cold, but they’ve always held a warm center for me. There aren’t even trace amounts of heat in the subzero look he directs my way.
“Careful, Bristol.” He covers my hand with his, a gesture intended to smother. “You don’t want to make me angry.”
“Why?” I elevate my brows to the appropriate level of disdain. “Would I not like you when you’re angry? Who are you? The Incredible Hulk? And like I’ve told you before, you don’t scare me.”
“Maybe I should. Love and hate and fear and respect are all bedfellows.”
“That sounds like one messed up orgy, if you ask me.”
“Huh.” His casual shrug comes at odds with the whipcord tension of his shoulders. “Maybe you and I will try the real thing once we’re married, and you can tell me how you like it.”
“I’m not a doll in the window.” I shove his hand away from me and press my body into the leather seat as far from his as I can. “You don’t just decide you want me and expect me to fall in line. How many ways can I tell you it isn’t happening?”
“Is there someone else?” The question falls from his tongue so smoothly, but I know there’s a dagger tucked into the silk of his words.
“If there were someone else, it wouldn’t be any of your business.”
“You know, through the years, I’ve given you space to sow your oats, so to speak, but I need to settle down. You’ve been groomed for me, Bristol, since we were kids. I’m ready for this to happen.”
“You’re crazy, and I don’t want to see you again, Parker.”
“And I want to see you for the rest of my life.” He crooks stiff lips into a one-cornered smile. “Is that what they call an impasse?”
“No, an impasse is when there is no apparent solution.” I channel all my frustration into my words. “I have a solution. Leave me alone. It’s something stupid our parents dreamt up. Let it go.”
Through the tinted window I see that we’re already in my driveway. My cottage is my refuge. I need to get inside, lick my wounds from the disagreement with Grip, and shower Parker’s touch away from my body.
“This is over,” I tell him. “Don’t call me again. Our families will of course remain close, but we don’t have to. I don’t want to.”
“You don’t decide how this ends, Bristol.” A fiery tongue of rage licks through the cold eyes. “I do.”
I nod to Clairmont, who opens the door and holds my luggage. I take the bag from him, not wanting him or Parker anywhere near my front door.
“Either you address the rumors in the press,” I tell Parker, who watches me stonily from the back seat. “Or I’ll do it. That’s the only end you can control.”
I don’t look back as I make my way up the cottage drive, but I know he’s still there and he’s still watching. He won’t let this go.
My cottage, though empty and completely quiet, welcomes me home like a friend. This place is all mine, from the decorations I personally chose to the plants I p
otted myself. Of all the things I’ve accomplished, my home is one of the things that makes me most proud.
I drag the luggage back to my bedroom and collapse onto the bed I didn’t get the chance to make before I left for Dubai. The last few hours land on me like bricks. I don’t even bother stripping away my clothes, but crawl in just as I am, under the fluffy duvet. I toe my boots off under the covers, leaving the shoes in the bed with me.
I have no idea how Parker will retaliate. That nefarious brain of his is hatching a plan to either trap me or to make me suffer for defying him. Not wanting him, not grasping the privilege of his desire is, in his mind, my gravest infraction. If he had an inkling of my feelings for Grip, that would add insult so egregious to an injury so deep, I have no idea how he would retaliate. But I know it would be swift and unreasonable.
On top of that, the full implications of Grip firing me unravel the last of my fraying composure. I’ll have no place in his life. He wants us to “go our separate ways.”
Separate?
When I’ve felt more connected to him than to anyone else? Even when I was spitting mad over Tessa, I felt his guilt and his regret. I felt how it tore him up that I left and gave no sign we would ever make good on the promise of the week we shared. Wanting him, pushing him away, watching him with other women, knowing I could stop it but too afraid to try. What I want more than anything, I deny myself. I deny him.
I sit up in bed, longing for all I have left of that week we shared. I open the drawer housing all my vibrators and sex toys, reaching to the very back until I touch a key. I carefully unlock the bottom drawer and pull out the worn leather volume of poetry a boy gave a girl years ago, a guarantee of his affections. The page corners are dog-eared, and the margins are filled with notes written in a brusque, masculine hand. I trace the bold strokes of Grip’s handwriting, the audacious hope in his g’s and p’s, the impatience of the I’s he took no time to dot and his hastily half-crossed t’s.
I flip the page to a poem so familiar I could almost recite it backward, Neruda’s “Sonnett LXXXI.” In one of my favorite lines, the poet tells his love that already she is his, and implores her to rest with her dream inside his dream. That he alone is her dream. The note of possession, the inextricably linked futures, speak to me, especially with Parker’s possessive claims still ringing in my ears. I would never belong to him, but how would it feel to love someone so deeply you relinquish yourself that way? To embrace the responsibility of them belonging to you. And to know whatever the future holds, you face it together. Whatever you accomplish, you celebrate together. When there is pain, you endure it together. I’m not sure I’ll ever know.
Grip’s scrawled note written to the side in black sharpie cuts my heart.
Bristol, never forget our ocean. Remember our last night together. Your dream was inside my dream. Please believe that I would never hurt you. Give me a chance to explain. I need that second chance.
I can’t read anymore. Not that I need to. I’ve read each poem, each note countless times since he mailed this book to me. By then I understood the curse I carried in my blood. Loving too deeply, too fiercely, too wholly. A love like that for the wrong man would ruin you.
I’m about to replace the book of poems when something silver in the drawer caches my eye. It’s a cheap whistle, tarnished by age. I pull it out by the discolored string from which it dangles. I don’t have to blow it to hear its piercing shrill. It’s as sharp and clear in my head as the smell of funnel cake and the cool night air on my face at the top of a Ferris wheel.
I fall back into my bed, placing the whistle and the book of poems on the pillow beside me. They’re like artifacts from another age that was marked with the promise of love. Marred with the agony of loss. It wasn’t eons ago. It wasn’t a light year away. It was eight years, and now the man who scrawled in these margins and presented this whistle to me like a piece of his heart, is cutting me out completely. This is all I have left of that night, of those days. Of the man who begged me to never forget.
Chapter Twenty
Grip
MY BODY HAS no idea which damn time zone it’s in. I couldn’t sleep last night, but it wasn’t the jet lag. I kept thinking about the interaction with Bristol on the tarmac. Something’s off with Charles Parker. When Bristol jerked away from him, I knew it. I think I’ve known, but that one moment confirmed the suspicion I hadn’t allowed to fully form until yesterday. I tried to dismiss it as a lover’s quarrel, but I still found myself standing in front of them on the tarmac, prepared to punch Parker if he grabbed her like that again, even with that meathead security guard standing there.
I check my playlist one last time. Typically when celebrities deejay, there’s little pressure to be any good. They don’t have to actually know what they’re doing. All they have to do is pick great songs and press play. But I used to live by the spin. Deejaying in between the songs I would write for other artists kept a roof over my head and ramen noodles in the pantry.
“We ready?” Hector asks from the floor.
I save the playlist I have loaded on the laptop set up for tonight before hopping down off the stage to join him.
“Yep, let’s get it.”
“You laced tonight, bruh.” Hector points to my feet. “I heard your shoe game was beast. Which ones are those?”
“The Space Jam Blackouts.” I grin and bow at the waist. “I broke out the classics for your grand opening.”
“I feel honored.” He laughs and looks around the stage. “Where’s Qwest? She here?”
“Yeah, she’s already in our dressing room and we’ve sound checked.”
I look around the mostly empty club for anyone from my team. Sarah is at a table, her curious eyes glued to the scantily clad strippers onstage rehearsing their routines.
“Hey, let me introduce you to Sarah from the label.” I start across the room with Hector falling into step beside me. “If you need anything tonight, she’ll be your contact.”
“Not Bristol?” Mischief sparks in Hector’s eyes. “Does Qwest know you’re sprung for your manager?”
“Shut up, man.” I shoot him an annoyed glance that just makes him chuckle.
I’m more annoyed that he brought up my dilemma with Qwest than I am that he peeped my feelings for Bristol. I’m getting through this performance, and then I’m ending things with Qwest tonight. I have to. The flight home was a disaster. I didn't want to have sex with her, so I didn’t, which definitely raised her suspicions. We shared a room in Dubai, but nothing happened. I told her I was tired and that my body was off because of the trip. Lame excuses. My dick would be ready in an outer space time zone if the need arose. It’s not that she isn’t beautiful. She’s fine as hell.
It’s that she isn’t Bristol.
And as much as I wanted to try with someone hoping to get over Bristol, it isn’t working. And it isn’t fair. Not to Qwest. Hell, not to me. This isn’t about convincing Bristol to be with me. I’m done with that shit, too. If she wants me, wants to dump Parker, she knows where to find me. That doesn’t mean my feelings have changed for her. Bringing Qwest into this only made a bigger mess. One I have to clean up tonight.
“Sarah, hey,” I say when we reach her table.
“Hey.” She hugs me and smiles politely at Hector. “Is this Mr. Abrentes?”
I already gave her a heads up that she would be the contact for anything Hector needs. I’ll let Rhyson and Bristol determine when she finds out she’ll be handling a lot of things for me until I find a new manager.
I give her and Hector a moment to talk through a few details before asking her the question that’s been on my mind since I arrived.
“Sarah, have you heard from Bristol?” I ask. “Seen her?”
She’s always at venues well ahead of her artists, and I’ve been here for more than an hour with no sign of her.
“She told me she’d be here by the time the show starts,” Sarah says.
“Why so late?” The frown feels heavy on m
y face, so I can only imagine what it looks like. “She’s usually here hours ahead.”
“Oh.” Sarah bites her lip and blinks a few times too many, betraying her nerves. “She said this would be a good training opportunity for me. Is that not okay?”
“No, no, it’s fine.” I squeeze her hand and reassure her with an easy smile. “I was just curious.”
I ignore Hector’s knowing grin. He’s got my number now. But that’s okay. Hector may be a dog, but he knows not to shit where his friends eat, to be crass about it. And even though Bristol and I aren’t together, in his mind, that’s where I eat. Nasty code, but it works.
I notice Sarah keeps looking back to all the nipples and ass onstage. I’m betting this is her first time in a strip club.
“Don’t get any ideas, Sarah,” I tease her. “Prodigy pays you well. Don’t be working that pole tonight.”
She gasps her shock but laughs when she realizes I’m playing with her.
“I think I . . . no, that wouldn’t . . .” Her cheeks burn pink. “I mean, I won’t.”
I’m halfway through spinning the first set when I spot Bristol at one of the bars. Damn, she looks good. The dress shouldn’t look good. It has no shape. It just hangs off one shoulder, but every time she moves, it molds to the curves and lines of her body beneath the blue silk. The hem doesn’t even hit mid-thigh, and her long, toned legs go on forever, the high heels emphasizing the cut of her calves. My mind goes blank of every image except those legs wrapped around me as I pound into her. I don’t need this hard-on within fucking distance of Bristol.
The blonde beside her makes me set aside my reservations about going over. If it weren’t for her, me and my hard dick would run in the opposite direction.
“If it isn’t my favorite rock star,” I say from behind Jimmi.
She turns, squealing and hurling herself into my arms.
“I won’t tell Rhyson I’m your fave if you don’t.” She lets out that rich, husky laugh that hints at her top-charting singing voice. “How the hell are you, Grip? I mean besides having the number one album!”