I glance from him to the privacy glass. “I could ask him to circle the block.”
His eyes fall closed. “Fuck. Now I’m hard. All you had to do was offer and it happened that fast, Drew.” My hand unlinks from his and travels, hip to groin. He wasn’t lying. It’s lovely and long and firm. I manage to give it one solid squeeze before he removes my hand.
“Not here,” he says through gritted teeth.
“No?” I ask.
“I have a pretty specific fantasy involving you doing that, and you’ll probably want to be undressed when it happens.”
Joshua Bailey has specific, filthy fantasies about me. The muscle in my core clenches so hard it hurts.
In the hotel room, he pulls me against him the minute the door shuts behind us. We shrug off our coats, and his hands slide to my thighs as I kick off my heels.
I tug at his belt and then stop myself. “Wait,” I command, then go to the bed and lie back against the pillows. “Now undress.”
He grins and slowly, seductively pulls off the jacket, his eyes on me. His button-down is smooth as glass, molding to the curves of his chest. He raises a brow. “Are we good?”
I laugh. “Hell no. Now the shirt.”
His mouth tips up at the corners. “I’m feeling objectified,” he says, making quick work of the buttons.
The shirt falls open. He tugs at the belt, undoing the buckle without instruction, and pulls the zipper down on his neatly pressed pants, watching me the whole time with that slow smile on his face.
The shirt flutters to the floor. The pants follow. There’s a bulge in his boxers that makes me dizzy.
“Now—” I begin, and he shakes his head.
“It’s my turn, Drew,” he says, walking toward the bed. “Pull the dress up.”
It’s a short dress. There is little pulling required. I remove the panties without being asked and let my legs fall open. His lids flutter closed for a moment and then he kneels on the edge of the bed. His lips go to my left thigh, and begin to work their way up.
“I—” I begin.
“Shhh,” he says. His tongue sweeps over my center. “Your time in charge is over, for the moment.” His mouth closes over me. My hands fist the bed sheets at my sides, and all I can do is hold on for dear life.
It’s the middle of the night and I’m lying with my head on his chest and his hand on my hip—just like we did when we were camping except, you know, naked. He really ought to get some sleep and so should I, but this is it. The last time I’m going to see him. “What’s the rest of your week look like?” he asks.
I list it out for him—more interviews here, a two-day press junket in London for a charity thing beginning the moment I arrive, a performance, interviews in Paris, another charity thing, more interviews, a single night off, and then the tour continues as planned.
He runs a hand over my back. “That’s a lot.” His brows are pulled together in that way they are when he’s worried. My heart melts a little.
I smile. “I just spent two weeks in Hawaii, so it’s hard to argue I don’t get enough me time.”
“Do you need to argue it though? How are you even going to function in London all day if you haven’t slept on the plane?”
I look at him. I already know he won’t like the truth. That he will look down on me for the truth, which is that when I can’t keep my eyes open, Davis will locate some cocaine or anything else that might work and prop me up. That I get through a lot of these things like the corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s, dressed up and carted around while someone else moves my limbs. I want him to be the one person I don’t lie to, even if the truth is ugly, but I find in this moment I’m not quite ready.
“I’ll manage,” I reply.
“I still don’t see why you have to,” he argues. “You’ve never said a single word about this guy Davis that makes him sound like someone you’d want around.”
I shrug. “Davis made me what I am. If it weren’t for him, I’d still be playing guitar in a dive bar somewhere, sleeping on friends’ floors.”
“From the sound of it, you’d be happier if you were.”
Maybe I would be if I hadn’t come this far, but going backward now would be a huge failure. “It’s kind of like when you’re driving and you make a wrong turn, but there’s no way to get off the road,” I explain. “I keep waiting for my chance to exit and it never comes. Just like you at the camp. You could do just as much good here, you know. You were so persuasive yesterday. If I had one iota of useful knowledge, I’d have been signing up to help.”
He flashes me a dimple in the dim light. “I think you might be biased,” he says, and there’s something so sweet in his gravelly voice I don’t doubt he’s right. I’d go anywhere he asked me to based on his voice alone. For that dimple, I’d go twice.
“Well, you’ll never know unless you try,” I say. “How about this? You leave your vital work saving lives, and I’ll record a song on acoustic guitar that my fans might not like.”
He laughs. “Yes, that sounds fair.”
I knew I wasn’t going to change his mind, and it’s not as if we would ever be a couple even if I did.
Nothing is going to change. And I’m so sickeningly disappointed by that.
35
JOSH
I’m the one who drives my mother to the oncologist. My father—who has spent years blathering to Joel and me about honor and being a man—is too busy with work and screwing the woman who manages his practice.
Moving as far away as I could and becoming the furthest thing from my father—it was my own, quiet fuck you to him. And now my mother is dying and I’m the one who’s fucked. I’m the one who’s going to be thousands of miles from her, unable to help.
I waited to confirm it until we were home, but I already knew. I knew it the moment I stepped into the Honolulu airport and saw that desperate look in her eyes. It said Let me have this last vacation with you all. Let me pretend.
And so we pretended. Now we’re here to face facts.
The oncologist comes in. He wants to cut out the diseased parts of her liver and put her in an experimental trial. She says yes to all of it. She knows she will die, but she simply wants more time to set us all straight before she goes.
Once again, I allow her to believe something that isn’t likely to happen.
“I was able to get a little more leave,” I tell her on the way home. “I can take you to get the port put in.”
She squeezes my hand. “I wish we were doing something slightly more fun, but thank you.”
My jaw grinds. I hate that I can’t stay.
“Have you heard from Drew?” she asks suddenly.
My tongue prods my cheek. Ever since New York, Drew and I have been texting a hundred times a day. It’s as if that was the moment we took the cork off the bottle, and I don’t see how it could ever go back on. I wake thinking of her, I run thinking of her, I eat thinking of her, I jerk off thinking of her.
I’ve never experienced anything like this obsession. And it isn’t just sex, though God knows when she video calls from an interview, whispering from the bathroom and wearing the thinnest possible tank top, those are the thoughts that come to the fore.