“My God.” Fallon covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.
Not how I envisioned my first experience being.
Except I think — she was crying for me, for the person I felt like I had to be all the time. And for the scared little boy, I still was.
She grabbed my hand and linked her fingers with mine, as tear after tear slid down her face. “Let me love you.”
Nobody had ever said that to me before.
They all wanted to screw me.
They wanted me to screw them.
They wanted. They wanted. They wanted.
They took. They took. They took.
They stole. They stole. They stole.
I nodded, hands trembling as I cupped her face and brushed a soft kiss across her lips, my tongue tasting the salt of her tears.
Tears shed for me.
She tugged me toward the bedroom. Of course she’d know where it was; she cleaned the rooms.
The moonlight cast a silver glow through the partially open window as the wind lifted the curtains in an ethereal dance of shadows across her face.
She took the lead.
I let her.
Not because I couldn’t.
But because she asked me.
She asked permission, to show me something that nobody ever had. How could I deny her that? How?
I would like to think, my life truly began, when Fallon grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the bed, then slowly crawled on top of me and kissed me.
She kissed my eyes.
My ears.
My nose.
My mouth.
My eyes again.
As the tears dried across her beautiful face, her eyes lit up with wonder. More kisses slid down my chest, driving me crazy, making me want to take the moment from her and sink into her.
That’s what I wanted.
But it wasn’t what I deserved.
Or her.
So I let her keep kissing.
And when I thought I was going to lose my mind, when her mouth found the one part of me that I’d never let any girl touch.
I let myself go.
I closed my eyes, grit my teeth, and let her love me.
And when that same mouth trailed farther down my body, only to come back up as the chill of the wind hit every wet kiss, I shivered and trembled.
My hands roamed across her back, and I lifted her up just as I slid down, my mouth pleasing her in ways I knew my hands never could.
She moaned, arching back against me, her hair a tangled mess of darkness as it slid against my stomach.
We didn’t talk.
Words have a way of shattering precious moments in time, moments where talking won’t ever enhance the situation.
She cried out, her hands tugging my hair as I slid her back down my body and kissed her open thigh.
Her watery eyes met mine and in a hungry kiss I grabbed her body and flipped her onto her back, sinking myself between her thighs.
I reached for the nightstand, but she grabbed my hand and winked shaking her head and whispering “pill” just as she hooked her legs behind me and pulled me all the way in.
“Damn,” I muttered across her mouth.
“So now he talks,” she joked softly as I moved against her.
“He’s kind…” I thrust slowly, so many feelings, her warmth, her body clenched around mine, hard verses soft, warmth and searing heat. My brain was firing so fast that I couldn’t focus on one single thing that made the moment amazing, but everything at once, in this huge epic combustible explosion of nerve reactions, not to mention privilege, that she was opening up to me — trusting me. “…of busy …right now.” I finally finished my sentence as she cried out, her breathing heavy as liquid heat surrounded me.
I wanted this forever.
No. Longer than that. I wanted it longer than that.
She kissed me deeply, her tongue sliding against mine, it was too much, the feel of being inside her, the feel of her tongue as it flicked inside my mouth, mimicking my every movement.
“You can lose control, you know.” She said pulling back. “It’s us.”
“It is us.”
I swallowed her scream as I fell over the edge, and felt her come right along with me.
Fallon
“What are you doing?” Zane sat up in bed while I held up my hand motioning that he needed to give me a minute. When I returned with a bag of marshmallows his grin was so huge it took over half of his face. “Best sex of my life and you bring me marshmallows in bed? Who are you?”
I rolled my eyes, feeling myself blush. “I figured you’d need some sugar after all that yelling, mainly on your part.” I tossed him one. “Cursing, which by the way, still you.” I tossed him another while he rolled his eyes. “And collapsing across the bed… still you, by the way.”
“I had a lot of pent-up sexual aggression that was just released.” His naked chest was impossible not to stare at. “You can’t just release the beast from its cage and not expect it to tucker itself out.”
I covered my face with my hands. “You did not just say that.”
“Why are you blushing?” he asked innocently. “Why do you keep trying to take all of my jobs away from me, damn it! I’m supposed to be the innocent maiden, blushing at the loss of her innocence.”
I threw a pillow at his face. “British accenting me while eating mallows in bed is not the way to get laid again, sir.”
“My bad.” He opened his mouth.
I tossed another marshmallow at him then crawled into bed next to him, placing my hand against his chest, the steady rhythm of his heart. “Tell me.”
His heartbeat picked up. “Tell you what?”
“Everything.”
I expected him to hesitate, to make a joke.
He didn’t.
Instead, Zane stayed Zane, the guy I liked, the one I was head over heels for, and he started sharing.
“My first foster parents were nice. I hated the orphanage, my sisters were adopted right away. They were younger and closer in age.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Yeah well, for some reason the parents didn’t want a troublesome boy.”
My heart broke for him. “You were a bad kid?”
“I cried.” He shrugged. “Apparently, that was enough. Weakness was enough, you know? When my sisters said goodbye, they didn’t really understand what was happening, and I felt like I was letting them down. It wasn’t abandonment to me. It was more like, I was letting my grandmother down.”
“Oh, Zane.” I hugged him tighter.
“I wrote them, they wrote back — for a while at least. I was able to visit them at their perfect house. With its white shutters, blue paint, and ice tea on the porch. They were always laughing and smiling and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t.” He swallowed. “Foster home after foster home, until the end, when I was accused of raping or trying to rape my own foster mother, the jealous bitch.”
He sat up a bit, I followed. Please don’t leave, please don’t leave.
“I had three more months in the system, three months before I could go to college on a full ride scholarship. But you can’t stay in the dorms until registration. So, I stayed on the street, worked where I could, sometimes slept on friends’ couches, and basically lived the life of a bad ass nomad until school in the fall.”
“Thus the education.”
“Yeah.” He trembled. “I took music as one of my elective courses, fell in love with basically every instrument I could get my hands on, lucky for me, my professor was…” He smiled. “He was incredible. He wasn’t even my academic advisor and he let me be his TA for a semester so I could have keys to the music building. I basically slept in there.”
I frowned. “Probably better than the streets.”
“Better than anything.” His voice grew wistful. “Music surrounded me, and music has this way of feeling alive. It didn’t scare me, my anxiety wasn’t as bad because I had life around me, buzzing
, comforting me, all I needed to do was hop over to the piano — with my bag of marshmallows, mind you — and everything was good.”
“So how did this all start?” I was almost afraid to ask, but for some reason, I felt like I needed to. Maybe for him, for me? For us. “The anxiety? The craziness? The attacks?”
“They’ve always been there. I mean as a kid I remember having them all the time. Maybe I was just so busy in college that it didn’t register? I started playing at a local coffee house. That’s where Will found me and signed me immediately to one of his friends’ labels. That was four years ago.”
“Four years and you have seven Grammys.”
“Eight.” He corrected. “Actually.” I smiled to myself at his nonchalant correction, like it wasn’t a big deal that he had one more Grammy than I assumed. I mean it wasn’t like I had any awards laying around. I won my eighth-grade spelling bee, and I was pretty sure the trophy was no more than a participation one.
“And the anxiety?” I prodded.
“Music makes you vulnerable.” His voice was distant. “You may as well invite someone into the deepest parts of you — I’ve never been able to write music without putting myself into the words, into the songs. And people, they sing them, they identify with them, they worship you for them, they condemn you for them. Suddenly, I was getting criticized for being afraid, for being hurt, for falling in and out of love. My soul was a punching bag, and nobody taught me how to be anything but that person with music. It’s always me, so I took it personally and eventually it just broke me down.” He shifted his position and muttered a curse. “The same people who wanted my autograph talked trash about me backstage. Other bands started doing the same, and it got hard, so I pulled back more and more because that’s what you do when you don’t know what else to do, you retreat. You tell yourself that by retreating, you’re really allowing yourself to lick your wounds, to heal. But instead? The mind, it takes control of so many things, plays tricks with you, lies, hell my mind is a damn liar it’s been lying to me since the day I was born. Telling me I wasn’t good enough, that everyone I loved was going to leave me, that I wasn’t worthy of love, I was able to push past that when I had goals But when I had everything the world told me I needed to achieve to maintain that level of self-actualization, I looked down from my tower and panicked because I thought I was at the top and I was only halfway, how could that be? How does that make sense? It’s because it’s not achievable, but it was already too late for me, my retreat became my hell and it’s where I’ve been ever since.”
“And now?” I whispered, reaching for his hand, linking our fingers together, trying not to freak out over the fact that he was still talking to me, opening up, allowing me to see who he truly was and not shoving me out of bed and making me sign some sort of agreement that I wouldn’t talk about him. “What do you feel like now?”
Zane’s long eyelashes pressed against his cheekbones as he blinked down at the white duvet then up at me. “I feel everything.”
I gulped as his hands moved to cup my face.
“I feel your breathing. I feel your heartbeat. I feel the tension in the air, the scent of your body, the rhythm of your pulse — I feel it all.”
I exhaled slowly through my mouth, worried that I’d ruin that look of bliss on his face by breathing too loud.
“But mostly…” A smile crept across his face. “I feel you and me.”
“Us.”
“Yeah, us.” His hands trailed down my neck, resting on my shoulders.
“I think I’m going to keep you.” I smiled, licking my lips.
He sobered. “I’ve never been kept before.”
“Well…” I crawled into his lap and wrapped my legs around his waist. “Now you are.”
His eyes crinkled at the sides as his smile widened. “I think I like this idea of being kept.”
“I’ll be sure to administer the daily marshmallow allotment before and after bed.” I nodded encouragingly.
“Oh, baby.” His knuckles grazed my sides, his hands spreading across my skin causing goose bumps to flare everywhere. “I love the sound of that.”
“I knew you would.”
“What about marshmallow trails to bed? Are those out too? Because I’m really good with positive reinforcement.”
My cheeks heated. “Yeah. I bet.”
“Stay.” His forehead touched mine, chest heaving, he kissed me across the mouth. “Stay.”
“I will.”
He nodded and then I was drowning in his deep kisses, my body already responding to his, ready for whatever he had to give me.
Zane
I was flying.
Every time she gave herself to me — which by the time five a.m. rolled around, had already been twice more, I was flying.
Each experience was different.
Each kiss evolved.
Each touch transformed into something more meaningful. Something that meant a hell of a lot more than a twenty-four-hour booty call.
She was breathing deep, her wild hair falling across her face, kissing her barely parted lips.
I leaned down and kissed her forehead then walked over to my guitar and picked it up.
I processed things differently than most people. Therapy had never worked for me because talking about the anxiety had always made it worse, almost like this weird paranoia that if I talked about it, it made it more real, so I kept it to myself.
But talking to Fallon felt freeing.
Like I could trust her with the deepest darkest parts of me, and she’d still hold my hand.
It was hard to process or even explain the openness with which she treated me, like I wasn’t a freak, like there wasn’t something wrong with me because of my past.
Grandma would have loved her.
I sighed and strummed a few chords then a few more as the roar of the waves crashed in the distance when a knock sounded at the door. I quickly grabbed a sheet and wrapped it around my body before I cracked it open and peeked out.
Will stared at me, then at the sheet, then back at me, his grin widening the more his brain cells added two and two together. “You smell like a girl.”
“It’s five in the morning.”
“You used to wake up at three.” His eyes narrowed as he crossed his bulky arms across his chest and smirked. “So…” He rocked back on his heels. “How was it?”
“Oh, God.” I groaned. “This is hell, isn’t it? Where I have the best night of my life and then get questioned by the only father figure I have!”
“Screw you. I’m thirty!” His eyes widened.
“Oh sorry, dirty uncle then? How does that work?”
He flipped me off.
I barricaded my arms against the door and shook my head. “No, not a chance in hell, what do you need?”
His green eyes narrowed behind thick black-rimmed glasses that I still wasn’t sure if he actually needed or just wore, so it made him look more intelligent. “It’s not like I want to see your girl naked, I’m just curious. Is this the one that broke you? And had you walking around like a zombie for the past week mumbling under your breath and refusing to do anything except for glue your ass to the piano bench and go through ten pounds of marshmallows? That girl?”
I didn’t answer.
He cursed under his breath. “Great, just great. Look, I’m not trying to be a jackass, but you were in a pretty dark place before her and the music, it was good, not great, and now it’s… effortless.”
I looked down at the plush carpet.
“It’s pure gold. Even when she hurt you, it was pure gold. If you lose her, if something happens… what happens to your music then? Is that when the great Zane Andrews finally cracks? Is she the catalyst that sends you over the edge? I mean, do you even realize how fragile you are?”
“Goodbye, Will.” I tried to slam the door in his face but his hand wrapped around the edge, and I might be a bastard, but I didn’t want to break every bone in his playing hand.
“Z
ane.” His worried expression wasn’t helping the tightening in my stomach or the anxiety that continued to wrap itself around it. “I’m saying this because I care. Look, you’ve found your muse, awesome, fantastic, but what happens when you start touring again? What happens when she finds out the truth?”
My blood ran cold. “The truth.”
“When was the last time you even had a checkup? Your doctor called and said you missed your last two appointments. The team’s concerned.”
“Concerned.” I repeated, like that was all I could actually do in that moment. “About what? Not getting paid? Look, I’m fine, my last checkup was completely normal, no weird tumors, no passing out anymore.” I jumped up and down.
“You could have been brain dead from the accident, Zane. As it is, the concussion was so bad your brain was bleeding, you asked if I was a chicken. We monitor you because if we don’t, you could die. You get that right? Death.”
“Will.” Anger raged through my veins, anger at him, myself, the situation, the reminder that it wasn’t just about my album but being able to finish it before I went under the knife for the aneurysm doctors were almost ninety-eight percent sure was one of the dangerous ones, the ones that like to pop. “I’ll be fine. The album’s almost done. I feel the best I have in years.”
“Because of her,” Will said in a flat tone. “So don’t screw it up just because you omit in order to protect her. If you’re all in, you’re all in, that’s how these things work. I would hate to lose you, Zane, and I’m going to guess, so would she. Either figure your shit out and go all in, set all the cards on the table, or let her go.”
The door shut quietly.
I stared at it.
Outraged.
Afraid.
And then outraged all over again.
The stupid thing was — doctors would have never discovered the slight tear in my brain had I not fallen off the stage and had my little breakdown.
One test turned into twenty.
And they all showed the same thing.
An area of my brain was compromised, and it was just a matter of time before a tiny little particle smaller than the pin of a needle, released itself and tried to kill me.
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