by Peyton Banks
I didn’t try to fight the inevitable. There was no more likelihood of stopping my climax than there was of controlling a runaway train. Besides, there would be plenty more orgasms between us today, tomorrow, and into the future.
Back in the present I swept a stray curl from Luke’s forehead with my finger, then smoothed his furrowed brow.
“You okay? What’s bothering you? You look like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders.
He shook his head, smiling widely. “Not at all. I was just thinking about how far we’ve come, and where we’re going now that I’m back.”
“And?”
“And I don’t have any concrete answers, but right now I’m just glad to be home, and so grateful we don’t need to fight to be together anymore.
I lent forward to place a feather light kiss on his lips.
Amen to that.
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More by MV Ellis
Finding Marnie
If you enjoyed getting to know the young Luke Jones make sure you check out my full-length novel dedicated to him. They say we never forget our first love, and in Finding Marnie we follow Luke and his high school crush as they navigate the bumpy road to their happy ever after.
Finding Marnie Excerpt
© MV Ellis
Luke
JADED. It was a funny word. Funny weird, not funny haha. Definitely not funny haha. It was how I seemed to feel most days lately. “Over it” was another way to describe my vibe. A keen observer might say I was burnt out. On some level, that was totally understandable. We were back from weeks on the road, our Cold, Hard, and Heartless tour having been cut short due to Stevie, our drummer’s deteriorating condition. The decision was made by the whole band, management, and the man himself that the tour couldn’t continue with his worsening health. It was a relief for all of us to know that he was going to get the help he needed to hopefully conquer his addictions, but it left the rest of us in an awkward limbo as we waited to hear if and when he would get the okay to go back on the road.
That was definitely the most obvious and easily identifiable explanation for my increasing sense of unease but unfortunately not the only one. I’d always lived by the adage “do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life,” but lately, for the first time in fifteen years at the top—touring relentlessly, pushing out album after album, publicity, signings, all the shit in the machine of being the Heartless Few—it was all starting to feel like hard work, rather than the passion I got paid to pursue, as it had always been.
But then I guessed seeing the industry almost break one of your closest friends—pretty much your brother—chew him up and spit him out the other end like cannon-fodder would do that to you. Maybe the feeling of unease was nothing that a little R & R and sleep wouldn’t cure. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken a vacation. It was possible that a week or two stretched on a brilliant-white sandy beach in the Maldives would cure my ills, but I wasn’t so sure.
I reached for my notebook—I seemed to be doing that more often than not recently. When the mood struck me, I’d jot down whatever came into my head that I felt I needed to get out and onto paper. Single words and phrases, full sentences, even full poems. Flicking through the pages was like a mind map of where my thinking was at the time. The good, bad, and ugly. More ugly than anything these days. Everything and everyone seemed to piss me off, especially Arlo, which was awkward. I was crashing at his house while we were camping out in New York waiting for Stevie to go through rehab, we worked together, and just about lived in each other’s pockets 24/7 when we were on the road.
Maybe that was the issue. Perhaps I needed to stand on my own two feet for once and do something that had nothing to do with Arlo—nothing to do with anyone, in fact, but something just for me: Luke Jones. What would that even look like? I had never had a “proper” job, having finished high school and pretty much instantly hit the big time with the band. Barring my brief and ill-fated dabble with film school, there had been no time to pursue my own interests. I ate, slept, and breathed the Heartless Few, and had done so for half my life.
Until recently I had been happy with the way things were, but doubts had started to creep into my mind that maybe there was something more to life than playing second fiddle to Arlo, singing words he wrote and playing the rhythm while he played the melody. I had never wanted to be the center of attention, but there was a difference between not taking center stage and being overlooked completely. Sometimes I felt I was something between a moving musical prop and Arlo’s butler or faithful manservant. I was there to pick up his messes, be a buffer between him and the outside world, and be his filter when the buffer failed.
The part that seemed to be missing in recent times was me having the freedom, time, or leeway to do anything for myself. A band was a team, which often meant compromise and putting the good of the group ahead of our individual desires or benefits. I got it, I really did. A group like ours wasn’t together for as long as we had been without learning how to work around five very different personalities, and egos to match. On the other hand, some of us seemed to compromise a whole lot more than others, and that fact was starting to wear thin.
The truth was that the dynamic of the band was that Arlo did Arlo, and the rest of the band yielded, sacrificed, and negotiated around our own egos to make that work for all of us. We yielded. The word compromise was literally not in his vocabulary. It was his way or the highway, and if someone chose the highway, he wouldn’t give it a second thought. He was never going to be the guy to think that maybe he should back down or pander to the other person; it just wasn’t in his DNA. There might not be an I in team, but there definitely is one in “Arlo doesn’t give a fuck.” I’d accepted this as the status quo for so many years, but recently the imbalance of the whole thing had started to get to me.
I felt like we’d gotten stuck in a dynamic that had been established when we were kids—Arlo was the confident and gregarious twin. The lead twin. In fact, he was a leader in all aspects of his life, not just between the two of us. He had a presence that made people sit up and take note. It was beyond his looks, although I knew that was always a feature, but given that as kids we were pretty much physically indistinguishable to all but our closest friend and relatives, and now as adults it was Arlo’s menagerie of tattoos and our hairstyles that set us apart, it was clearly not just that. Even as a boy, he had gravitas and charisma that set him apart from me and our peers.
I, on the other hand, was the quiet twin, the B twin. I was chronically and cripplingly shy growing up, to the point where social situations were pretty much torture, and I hated meeting new people or being in large groups. In fact, apart from my family and the guys with whom I later went on to form the Heartless Few, I pretty much disliked being around people. Period. Back in the day, I went to great lengths to avoid situations where I would be forced to deal with random people, and when I couldn’t avoid it, I let Arlo lead, while I took a back seat.
In private, between the two of us, things were completely different. You see those cute ultrasound images depicting twins holding hands in the womb, but not us. The struggle for balance in our relationship began before we were even born. Even in utero, I had been dominated by Arlo—having spent six months with him pretty much standing on my head. I managed to assert myself once at least: clearly sick of carrying another human on my skull, when it came time for us to be born, I beat a hasty retreat. As a result, I was thirteen minutes older than Arlo, and I took every opportunity I possibly could to remind him of that fact, even as grown-ass men. Of course, it made no difference to anything, but the mere fact that I knew he hated it was enough to motivate me to repeatedly rib him about it.
I was aware it was petty and childish, but I was equally aware of the reams of research available documenting the unique dynamics at play between identical twins. It wasn’t exactly normal, and definitely wasn’t healthy, but considering how much time we spent in close quarters, relations betwee
n us could have been a whole lot worse, and in fact, at various times in our lives, they definitely had been. The lowest point was when, as teenage boys, we couldn’t be trusted to be in the same room at home for more than a few hours without threatening or trying to kill one another, to the point where our parents made the unorthodox decision to separate us with one living at Mom’s for half the year, while the other lived at Dad’s, and vice versa.
Those days were long behind us, but I was the first to admit that there was still a certain amount of residual toxicity in our dynamic. Whether overt or subliminal, a power struggle often raged between us in our spoken and silent communication. Over the years, we had made glaring an art form. It was like a game of chicken to see who would look away first. I never kept a tally, but it didn’t take a genius to guess that I conceded defeat a lot more often than Arlo. He was a no-retreat, no-surrender kind of guy, always had been.
Despite all of that, though we had our creative differences at times, as would be expected with any group of individuals working together, part of the secret of our long-term success as a band was that in reality, those differences were pretty few and far between, and when they did occur, they tended to be minor and resolved quickly. We expected to disagree, but we also expected to compromise. Everyone except Arlo, that is. We didn’t take it personally—it was all part and parcel of what we did.
The thing that Arlo and I had locked horns over most through the years was Marnie. This we couldn’t agree on. We couldn’t even agree to disagree. Marnie was the one subject I wouldn’t yield on, and unusually for someone who was generally quite laid-back, I had no qualms about taking one of our “conversations” to the limit if Arlo refused to back down. I was against any woman being disrespected or treated badly in any way, even more so this particular woman, and despite Arlo’s claims to the contrary and Marnie’s own emphatic denial, I could never shake the feeling that he was somehow doing wrong by her.
I totally got that she was a grown woman and absolutely capable of making her own informed decisions, but in real‐ ity, the “arrangement” between the two of them was the legacy of a bunch of choices she’d made at a very vulnerable time in her life when she was too young to know any better. No matter which way I looked at it, something seemed off about the whole thing.
If nothing else, I knew she deserved better than being one of my brother’s playthings. She claimed the situation suited them both—no strings, no complications, no feelings involved—the ultimate friends with benefits, but I always suspected that there were more feelings on her part than she cared to admit. Why else would she have returned to the arrangement time and time again when she was single for any period of time? Why hadn’t any of the “relationships” she’d gotten into over the years developed to become more than just a passing fling?
Full disclosure: I was biased as fuck when it came to Marnie and always would be. I’d loved her since the beginning, when she’d come scowling into my life. I’d thought about that day a lot over the years and was firmly convinced that the principal had nominated me as new student buddy as a way to try to coax me out of my shell. At the time, I saw it as her throwing me under the bus, but I later came to think she was trying to throw me a bone—which in reality translated to throwing me a boner. A fifteen-year boner, and counting, in fact. Not that she knew that. Whatever her intention, I guess I had Principal Campbell to thank for fifteen bittersweet years of friendship.
As usual, my dick stiffened painfully at the thought of Marnie, another legacy of high school Luke. She’d starred in more jerk-off sessions than I’d ever be able to count. Other women had come and gone—pun intended—but Marnie had been a constant in my fantasies and in my heart since day one. I took my hard-on in my hand, weighing up my options. I could scratch the itch, or just ignore it and wait it out. I decided to go ahead and make myself feel good.
After I came and cleaned up my mess, I sighed and grabbed my notebook again. I decided to try to make good use of the rest of the day, rather than waste it, and headed to our studio to play around with some sounds to go with the words I’d written over the last few weeks. I wasn’t calling them songs at this point, more like stream of consciousness poetic rants. That said, over the past few days, melodies had started to creep into my mind to accompany some of the lyrics, so I guessed when I put the two together, I had to admit they were essentially songs. Why I was writing them or what I would do with them when they were finished were questions I didn’t know the answers to at that point. It just felt like something I needed to do.
About the Author
MV ELLIS knows what it’s like to fall head over heels in love with a badass musician. She followed her heart halfway around the world to be with one. She moved from London to Sydney after a steamy holiday romance with a sexy bass player in sultry Brazil.
Twelve years, two children and a dog later, and she’s still smitten. All this with a guy she sat next to on a bus for 36 hours! She has toured internationally as a “WAG,” and her experiences inspire her writing.
Ellis’s love of romance began when she was 11 years old, after a summer spent secretly reading her auntie’s books. She’s been a sucker for an alpha hero and strong heroine ever since.
An avid reader, Ellis always knew she’d write a book of her own one day. She was right about that. Following a career spanning advertising, marketing, and social media, she finally wrote her debut novel, Catching London in 2017.
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MV loves to connect with readers. She can be reached on the following platforms:
a: https://www.amazon.com/MV-Ellis/e/B077VQWM7N
g: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17161992.M_V_Ellis
f: facebook.com/authormvellis
i: instagram.com/authormvellis
b: bookbub.com/authors/mv-ellis
t: twitter.com/authormvellis
p: pinterest.com/authormvellis
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For up-to-the-minute updates, giveaways, sneak peeks and perks, you can also join her reader group, MV Ellis’ Kickass Queens here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/300588877509845/
Broken Angel
Reana Malori
She was an angel... craving chaos. He was a demon... seeking peace.
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When Nico Mitchell met Lavinia Ross, it was annoyance-at-first sight. She pushed his buttons, created chaos in her wake, and made him fall in love with the very essence of her soul. He’d never claimed to be a nice man, or even a good man, but none of that mattered to her. When Lavinia believes he’s betrayed her, the anger and retribution are swift and unmistakable. They call him a demon, but he needs his broken angel to soothe his soul.
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They were a match made in hell, and their love for each other burned hotter every day.
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Lavinia Ross hated Nico Mitchell for what he’d done to her. He’d taken her love and thrown it back in her face, as if it were nothing. As if she were nothing. After everything they’d been through together, his betrayal was unforgivable. Yet, she couldn’t explain the love she still felt for him. Nor the ache in her heart when she thought of the years they spent together. And why the hell does it hurt so much to know that he no longer loves her the way she loves him? Everyone thinks she’s an angel, but she craves her devil’s darkness to tame the beast inside.
1
Lavinia
Rain pounded on the pavement outside as the wind whipped the trees back and forth. Lavinia hated nights like this. Cuddled under her favorite blanket, her eyes shifted away from the window, back to the television playing one of her favorite movies. It wasn’t that she feared the rain, because she didn’t. It was something more.
Shivering as a loud clap of thunder boomed outside, she grabbed the blanket a bit tighter, determined to ignore the increased level of anxiety traveling up her spine. Rainy nights like this were when things usually went bad. Something was bound to happen that would shatter her peace.
It was a rainy night simila
r to this one when she’d lost her mom. Tears filled her eyes as she thought back to that moment in her life. The screams. The yelling. She’d never seen her father cry until the moment he was told her mother passed away. That night, he didn’t eat. He didn’t interact with anyone. Family and friends would stop by and he’d ignore them. His grief was like a living, breathing thing. It was almost as if he’d wanted to die right along with her mom.
Thinking of her dad and how he was doing now, she smiled sadly. He’d slowly come back to her over the years, but it had been a long road. He was better now but he still had his moments when time seemed to stop. His memories of her mother would hold him hostage, and nothing else mattered but remembering. Those were the times he’d go silent, walking off on his own for some ‘time to think’ as he called it.
Yeah, nights like this were never good for her. Maybe it was best if she went up to bed. Sleep the night away, waking up to a brand-new day. Sighing, she leaned over to grab the television remote when a loud knock sounded on her door.
Although she jumped slightly at the unexpected sound, she didn’t make any noise. Knocks on her front door in the middle of a rainstorm weren’t uncommon. Not with the kind of friends she had. The only question on her mind was who, or what, was waiting on the other side.