My dressing room door opened, and Zoe walked out, wearing a smile that hit me like a punch to the gut. Fuck the rest of it, I wanted her. I pushed out the memory of saying client like it was a dirty word last night and focused on her eyes.
Zoe. Zoe. Zoe. She might be pissed at me, but she wouldn’t let me go with them. Wouldn’t stand by and watch me fuck up the last ten and a half weeks of sobriety.
“I’m going to take a rain check,” I said to Green Hair, vowing to look his name up later.
“You sure?” His face fell with disappointment as we reached my door. Three of the girls hanging off their members looked at me with wide, hopeful eyes, but I didn’t want them either.
The buzzing in my head roared to be released, but I managed to nod.
“Damn. Well, if you change your mind, we’re heading out in about twenty minutes,” he said. I saw him shake his head from the corner of my eye, but I was focused elsewhere.
“You sounded like you were having fun out there,” Zoe said as I walked past her into my dressing room. I cracked open the nearest bottle of water and chugged the whole thing. Performing sucked the water right out of me. How the hell had I done it drunk?
“I was,” I assured her, dragging my cases from the wall.
Right on time, the stagehands knocked, then filled my cases one by one, tucking my girls in for the night. “They’re coming back to Colorado with us,” I told Zoe as I closed each one of them personally. “It just about gave me hives thinking of someone else bringing them here.”
“Not a problem.” She jotted down something in her planner as she sat back on the counter, crossing her legs.
How could someone so buttoned up be so incredibly sexy? Even her heels were hot.
I finished with the cases, then started to strip out of my sweat-drenched clothes. Zoe looked up, raising her eyebrows. “I’ll…um…wait outside.”
“No.” Outside was too far. Outside meant I had to make another choice of going to get her once I was done or leaving with that other band, and with the energy coursing through me, that was a very bad option to have.
“All right.” She pivoted on the counter slightly, turning her back to me. “You feeling okay?”
“I feel like a ball of billion-watt electricity held together by bones, with some skin stretched over it,” I admitted, stripping off the last of my clothes and shoving my legs into the clean ones. A shower could wait. Everything had to wait.
“Oh.”
I could almost hear the cogs in her mind turning from here.
“Well, do you want me to follow through on your last request?” she asked with a hint of snark in her voice.
“My last request?” I tugged a shirt over my head, trying to recall what it was. Bringing my guitars back to Colorado?
“You know, that I…” She sighed. “That I pick a girl.”
I paused with one sock on. That’s right, I’d been an ass and given her shit just before I’d taken the stage, which, oddly enough, had worked almost as well as alcohol to take my mind off the nerves. And it wasn’t like I didn’t have a reason to be just as pissed at her as she was with me.
She was embarrassed that she’d crossed a line? Hell, I was the one who’d kissed her, then caged her in on the kitchen island, confessing how badly I wanted her. I was the one in knots because I couldn’t decide if I was thankful she guarded my privacy with such ferocity or livid she only saw me as a client.
“Well?” she prompted.
I finished putting on my socks and shoved my feet into my favorite Converse. “No, I don’t want you to get me a girl.” Unless that girl was her, in which case I was more than on board.
She glanced over her shoulder, then turned fully when she realized I wasn’t naked. “Then why would you be such an ass and ask me that in the first place?”
I ignored the question completely. I wasn’t getting into this with her right now. Not when there was a very real chance I’d cross that professional line she loved so much. This shit between us was too raw, too powerful, and way too tempting.
“I need you to get me out of here. Call the pilots, we’re going straight to the airport.” I looked her dead in the eye and let her see the trembling in my hands, the monster of addiction that lived just under my surface.
Her entire presence softened, transforming her from Shannon to Zoe. “Okay. I’ll call.” She took out her phone and made the arrangements as I guzzled another bottle of water. “When do you want to leave?”
“Right now.”
* * *
We’d been airborne for forty minutes and I still couldn’t get myself level.
“Anything else I can get you?” the flight attendant asked with a professional smile as she delivered our drinks.
“Privacy,” I snapped. People had been in my face since ten o’clock this morning and I just wanted to be left the hell alone. I felt like I was dancing on a tightrope between two high-rises in the rain, risking my life to perform for everyone below, and it wasn’t just on stage.
“No, thank you, Kelly,” Zoe replied. “I think we might just need a little space for the duration of the flight.”
“Of course. If you need anything, just press that button.” With those instructions, I was finally, blissfully alone.
Guess my standards for privacy had changed with Zoe around.
I leaned back against the soft leather of the couch and swirled the ice in my glass, watching the cubes spin round and round, wishing it was something a little stronger than orange soda.
“You didn’t have to be a dick.” Zoe put down her laptop and unbuckled her seat belt from the single seat across from me.
“That’s just who I am. You think you’d be used to it by now.”
“That’s not true. You’re still pissed at me for last night...or what I said before the show, since it’s all interconnected.”
“That’s just a part of what’s going on in my head, Zoe,” I admitted, rolling my shoulders. My skin felt too tight.
She closed the small space between us and took the seat next to me, kicking off her heels and curling her bare feet under her. “Want to talk about it?”
“No.” If I wanted to talk about it, I would have.
“I’m not embarrassed about kissing you.” She relaxed, resting her cheek against the back of the couch.
“Just at how people would look at you if they knew.” I looked away before those eyes of hers could unravel me. The strings on my self-control were already frayed. I’d actually run away from my own band, sending lame texts to Quinn and Jonas on our way to the airport.
“You know how Peter assumed I’d gotten my job because I was sleeping with you?”
“Peter is an asshole, and you’re not sleeping with me.” I leaned forward, bracing my elbows on my knees.
“But if I did—”
My gaze snapped to hers.
“And if people knew, everyone would assume that’s exactly how I advanced.” She kept her voice soft, and I heard the honesty in what she was saying.
“But it’s not the truth.”
“Come on, Nixon, we both know that in this business, perception is truth.” Her lips turned up in a sad smile. “You might get crap for slumming it with the assistant, or breaking your promise not to sleep with the women on staff, but no one would ever doubt your right to a piece of that stage.”
My brow furrowed. “So, it’s really about your career and not that you just see me as part of your job?”
Her eyes widened. “You’re not…” She swallowed. “You’re not just the job. Not to me. If people like Jonas, Quinn, Ben, or Ethan saw the way I’d kissed you back? Or if they knew how badly I wanted you, it would do some serious harm to my professional credibility. I’d rather be known as the buttoned-up, organization freak who can’t color outside the lines but nails her job, than the girl who nailed the rock star to climb the ladder.”
“You want me, huh?” Shit, that was knowledge that could only do more harm than good, especially when she p
ut reasoning like that behind her logic.
“Of course that’s the one thing you latch on to.” She rolled her eyes.
My stomach sank. “That night in the park…did I screw it up for you?” Had that single moment undone her reputation? Just the thought of it added a heaping serving of anxiety to my already overloaded system.
“No.” She shook her head. “No one cares what happens in Legacy. If there was only one video of you singing, I highly doubt anyone has one of us kissing.”
By that logic, no one would care about what happened on this plane either, or at the house in Colorado, or anywhere we couldn’t be seen. My focus dropped to her lips, my memory all too happy to play back that kiss in my mind. She wanted me. This was just as hard on her as it was for me. That shouldn’t have made me feel better, but it did.
“Since that was only a part of it, what else is on your mind?” she asked.
She’d been honest. It was only fair that I was too. “I can’t figure out if I miss the buzz of the alcohol, the release of the post-show adrenaline, or the blackout that usually followed,” I said quietly.
“Maybe all three.”
“Maybe.” Round and round, I swirled the ice, pausing only to drink.
“Is there anything I can do?” Her voice was so soft.
“You already did it.” I tried to force a smile, but it wouldn’t come. “You got me out of there. Another few minutes and I might have taken the green-haired kid up on his offer to go party.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“Me too.” I would have been plastered by now, knee-deep in bad decisions with zero fucks given.
“His name is Ryan De Rosa, and he’s the lead singer for Blue Lotus. They were the first opener. Sound is a little raw, but the bass player’s dad is a friend of Ben’s.” She braced her palm on the seat between us. “I think Ben might take them on.”
“Would you?” I swirled the ice faster and faster.
“No. I don’t think they have a unique enough sound to make a dent in the market. They might develop one, but they’re not there yet.”
“I only heard one of their songs, but I wasn’t exactly blown away.” One shot, that was all most of us got in the industry. One night where some exec wandered into a bar. One song before they tuned us out. One chance.
“Exactly. It’s not enough to be good, you have to stand out.” She shook her head slightly. “I kept telling Peter he—” She pursed her lips.
“What?” I put my glass in the cup rest and turned to face her.
“I told him that he had to offer something no one else could if he wanted to get picked up.” Her eyebrows knit, as if she were reliving the moment. “I spent my senior year filling out college applications. He spent it sending in demos. I knew he didn’t have it,” she whispered, her face falling, “but I couldn’t tell him that. I had instincts but no experience, and you can’t look at someone you love and crap all over their dream.”
“You don’t look at someone you love and then fuck the cheerleader,” I countered.
“I guess it worked out for them. It doesn’t hurt anymore, but we’d been together for years, and when you’re that young, it’s hard to see how much more to life there really is.”
“He said you’d fail?” I asked, remembering his words from the night of the festival.
She nodded. “I got into college. He didn’t.”
“He knew he couldn’t hold you back, so he found someone he could.” Maybe it was the pent-up energy still coiled inside me, but I couldn’t stop my stomach from tensing in frustration. Was it jealousy?
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “Either way, he’s partially right. I haven’t made it yet. But I will.”
I scoffed. “Zoe, you’re smart as hell, fuckably gorgeous, and currently flying back to your little hometown on a private jet. I think you’ve made it.” I downed the rest of my soda, leaving the ice cubes to melt.
“It’s not my jet,” she countered with a chuckle.
“Semantics.” I abandoned my glass in the cup holder of the coffee table and my fingers started drumming on the seat beside me. I was going to have to come up with a new way to channel the post-show high or I’d never stay sober.
“Do you still feel like a ball of electricity?” Zoe asked, sitting up slightly as she watched my fingers.
I nodded. “It’s always been like this for me. Jonas and Quinn get the post-show high too, but for me, it’s different.” How could I possibly explain this to her? “What’s your favorite drug? Don’t look at me like that, I don’t mean illegal ones. I know you better than that.”
“Caffeine.”
That was something I could work with. “Okay. You need caffeine to function because you’ve taught your body to expect it. Right?”
“Right.”
“So, you need it, but then something like tonight…it’s like being fed espresso shots by a hundred thousand people over the course of two hours, and they’re draining that energy out of you, sure, but not at the same rate they’re putting it in. Maybe you’ve burned off fifty thousand of those shots when you walk off the stage, but there’s still fifty thousand more coursing through your bloodstream, giving you the jitters, searching for an outlet.”
“You get overstimulated,” she said quietly. “The alcohol helped you manage the sensory overload.”
I nodded. “It feels…” There weren’t enough words, but then again, I’d never tried to describe it before, so I stopped trying. “Like this.”
I showed her instead, spearing my fingers through her silken hair and bringing my mouth to hers in a hard kiss. Fuck the professional lines. There was no one here but her and me. The only lines between us were the ones we chose.
Her lips parted, and I plunged into her mouth, taking it with deep, sweeping strokes. She tasted like ginger ale and the sweetness I now recognized as Zoe, and I tilted us both to seal that perfect angle of our lips.
God, this was exactly what I’d needed. The first time I’d kissed her, I’d gone in playfully. It had been symbolic to start with, then quickly sparked to more.
This felt like pouring jet fuel on a bonfire.
Her hands gripped my shoulders as she gave it back just as hard as I was dishing it out. There was too much space between us, too much clothing, too many reasons we weren’t supposed to be doing this. Handling the first problem was easy. I left the other two to sort themselves out later.
I palmed her hip and tugged her toward me. She slid over my lap, then groaned in frustration when her skirt didn’t accommodate her. I grinned against her mouth as she yanked her skirt up so she could settle a knee on either side of my hips.
I stopped grinning when she sank onto my lap. Then I was the one groaning, tightening my grip in her hair to hold her mouth to mine as I kissed her breathless, losing myself in the process. This wasn’t just chemistry—this was nuclear, something capable of powering the world or destroying it.
She rolled her hips over mine, grinding against my dick, and I ripped my mouth from hers, sucking in a breath through my teeth before setting my lips to the column of her neck.
“God, Nixon.” Her fingernails bit into my shoulders as her head rolled back.
“How do you feel right now, Zoe?” I asked, then ran my tongue over the patch of skin between her jaw and ear. Given where she was sitting, she already knew exactly how I was feeling.
“Good.”
I bit gently on her earlobe, letting my teeth scrape along the sensitive skin. “Just good?”
She rocked against me. “Better than good.” Her lips dipped to my jaw, and then she pressed openmouthed kisses to my throat.
Holy shit. The hum in my blood channeled into pure, unfiltered need. “A little buzzed?” I asked, desperately trying to remember what I was supposed to be showing her.
“Buzzed. Hot. Achy. Restless.” She punctuated each word with a kiss until she’d made her way back to my mouth.
“Like you have a pretty good idea what to do about it, but getting
to that release is going to make you cross some lines you’ve promised yourself not to cross?” My hands shifted to her ass and I squeezed lightly, groaning at the feel of her.
“Is this a game to you?” she asked softly, looking me in the eyes and gripping each of my wrists in her hands.
“What?” A game? I stopped in my tracks.
“Me. This. Whatever’s between us. Is it a game? Just something to get under my skin?” She swiped her tongue over her lower lip as a flash of something that looked a lot like fear streaked through her eyes, her breaths as unsteady as mine.
“No. This isn’t a game.” I held her gaze so she knew I meant it. There was far too much at stake here for any miscommunication. “Nothing about you is a game to me.”
She exhaled a sigh of relief, then smiled slowly as she took one of my hands from her ass and placed it on her breast.
“Fuck.” My mouth watered at the weight that more than filled my hand.
“Then forget the lines and touch me.” She arched into my palm, her lips kiss-swollen, her eyes glazed, and her hair disheveled from my fingers.
I nearly swallowed my tongue.
Then I pulled her back to my mouth, kissing her deep and hard as I shaped her breast, running my thumb over her nipple. Seeing the green lace of her bra as I unzipped her last night had just about undone me, and, given the texture beneath the silk of her blouse, my bet was on lace again tonight.
Her fingers tangled in my hair as the kiss spun out of control. Who the fuck was I kidding? Everything about this was out of control—just the way I liked it. I flicked open the middle button of her blouse and slid my hand inside.
Lace.
She gasped as I worked her nipple through the fabric, her breath coming in pants against my lips. I checked to make sure the door to the cabin was still shut, then flicked open the next button and shifted her blouse so it opened right where I needed.
Lifting her slightly with one hand, I sucked the peak of her breast into my mouth, then teased her nipple between my teeth, playing with the lace to increase the friction.
MUSES AND MELODIES Page 12