LOW: A Rockstar Romance (12 page)

Chapter 22

Low

I had to hold back and wait for a moment or I wasn't going to make it. This girl, fuck, this amazing girl, she had me going so hard I was going to pop off like a twelve-year-old who'd just discovered porn. I wanted to savor this.

Sliding against the slick heat of her, watching the way those delicate lips just grazed the length of my cock as I moved, helped me get myself back under control.

And it had the added bonus of driving her fucking crazy.

"What are you doing?" she moaned.

"You don't like it?"

"No I...oh god."

"You like it."

"Fuck, Low, this is...."

"Tell me how you like it."

"You're a sadist." She was starting to tremble a little.

"I'm a genius. I can fuck you all night like this. Don't you want me to fuck you all night, Zoe?"

The trembling started at her thighs and moved upward. I caught her up in my arms and used my thumb too, getting her there, right there, right there.

Her low moan turned into a shout and then a yell and then just as she screamed, I got greedy for her and slipped into her pussy. I wanted to feel her coming from the inside, too.

She clamped around me and all of a sudden she was riding me, head thrown back. I bit a line along her collarbone, licked the salt from the hollow of her throat, then bent her backward to the floor and fucked her like I'd been wanting to fuck her from the moment I first saw her.

I was trying so hard to be gentle and careful with this girl, to not hurt her even a little, but suddenly I was an animal and I couldn't fight the instinct to fuck her, hard and raw and primal.

"Zoe, fuck, Zoe, fuck..." my words stopped holding any meaning, becoming nothing but a series of panted syllables, and then suddenly I was coming so hard that my vision blacked out and I was kissing her blindly over and over and over again.

She made a series of little sounds, but in my stupor, I couldn't recognize them as speech until she giggled and tried again.

"You're crushing me," she whispered in my ear.

I laughed and slid from her and watched as the cooling air raised goosebumps on her skin. "Sorry," I grinned. "I guess I needed a moment."

"I needed it too," she smiled. She sat up slowly, stretching like a cat. The spotlight lit her like the sun, and what could I do but move into orbit? I kissed her lips, her nose, her cheeks. It was too intimate for pictures, so I pulled back and stood to look at her and sear this moment into my memory.

Her naked body fairly glistened in the spotlight. All the moisture fled by mouth. "Oh shit, do you have even the slightest idea how beautiful you are?"

She stood on to her tiptoes, pressing her naked body against mine. "I do now," she said, pressing her lips to mine. "Thanks to you, I do now."

Chapter 23

Zoe

It turns out that fucking on a hard stage floor leaves all kinds of incriminating marks on your body.

I winced as I pulled my skirt back on. "I'm going to be sore," I moaned.

Low breathed on his knuckles then brushed them against his chest, a proud smile on his face.

I bopped him on the nose. "No, not there! Though," I considered a moment, "that's probably never going to be the same again either. But I'm talking about my knees."

"If you didn't want sore knees, maybe we shouldn't have tried that position."

"You enjoyed it is much as I did."

He grinned slyly. "Maybe more."

Something slowly dawned on me. "I can't believe I'm lying naked on a stage in an amphitheater that holds twenty-three thousand people."

Low laid-back and cradled his head in his arms. "Twenty-four thousand, four hundred and two," he corrected.

"How the fuck do you know that?"

"I know everything," he said cheekily.

"Then tell me something I don't know."

He looked at me. "I don't know what that could be. You're a whole lot smarter than I am."

"Try me."

He sat up and held pressed his finger to his lips like he was trying to hold back the words that were about to come. Then I swear I saw him give up and stop fighting. 

He reached out and pressed his finger to my lips. "I'm falling for you. Did you know that?"

*****

His words echoed in my head the whole drive back to my parents' house. With each sensation, with each pang in my body, I remembered what we'd done, what we'd shared. And all the while his voice rang like a bell in my mind. "I'm falling for you. Did you know that?"

I fucked a rockstar onstage at the Bayfront.
Zoe Chandler. Me.

I could picture myself rocking in the nursing home, telling the tale to any and all who'd listen. I wished there was some way these bruises could last for fucking ever, to mark this moment as real. I imagined myself rolling up to a tattoo parlor tomorrow and asking them to ink reds and purples into my flesh, the shape of his kisses claiming me as his.

Driving through the dark streets was like flying through space, but pulling into my neighborhood was definitely pulling me back to earth. As I drove down the normal, familiar street, I realized that I had suddenly returned to my real life.

This night had been something like a dream, so different from my reality that it may as well have happened to a completely different person. If it weren't for the marks on my skin, I might have actually believed that.

But it had happened. And it had been incredible. And even if it never happened again, I'd still have that to fall back on.

I pulled up to our darkened house. Or at least it was darkened save for one bright light shining in the upper front window. Max's window.

"Shit," I breathed, throwing my car into park. It was well past one AM. Mom and Greg would never turn the light on if he got up in the night for fear it would disrupt his sleep schedule.

A light on this late meant he never went to bed in the first place.

I crossed the lawn at a run. I could hear Max's wails from out here. Not cries of pain that could be healed, or screams of anger that could be soothed. He was well past just plain
upset
. This was a full-on
meltdown
, and nothing could bring him out of it once he got this way. You just had to batten down the hatches and wait it out for as long as you could stand.

My mind was racing with strategy. Diversion and redirection rarely worked anymore. Maybe I could just spot my parents, let them have a breather.

Then I heard something that made me stop in my tracks, my heart squeezing in my chest.

My own name was mixed in there amidst the shrieks. A high, keening "Zo-weeee! Zo-weeee!"

I grabbed my keys from my purse and took the porch steps two at a time.  Max's cries were even louder from the front door, which meant they must be deafening inside. Mom and Greg had to be losing their minds. "Shit," I said again, putting my key in the lock.

The front door swung open with its distinctive creak.

The wails paused. Like Max had taken a breath and was listening.

"Hello?" I softly called up the stairs.

The wails stopped like someone had cut the sound.  I heard the dull thud of bare feet on the hardwood floor. Then the sound of Max's door, the one that always stuck a little, popping free.

And then my pajama-clad brother appeared at the top of the stairs. His hair was sticking out at crazy angles, his face was red and puffy with tears.

"Hey, Maximus," I said. "What going on?"

He stretched his arms for me, and I quickly climbed the stairs and scooped him into my arms. His little body hitched once against mine, and then went still, and he sighed a great sigh. His lashes fluttered against my cheek as his eyes closed for probably the first time tonight.

Bewildered, I looked up at his doorway to see Greg emerging, rubbing his neck. "He refused to go to bed when you weren't here in the house," my stepdad explained.

I felt my stomach drop. My poor parents. My poor brother..."Why didn't you call me? I would have come right home."

"We weren't going to call and ruin your date," my mother said flatly, but she sounded exhausted.

"Well you should have," I said, moving to put Max in his bed. He clung to my neck tighter. "Okay, buddy want me to lay down with you a sec?"

"Lay down with you," he repeated. His pronouns always got more screwed up when he was agitated.

I was agitated myself. "I can't believe you guys let him go on for hours like this," I hissed. Guilt was squeezing my voice box. I'd fallen asleep onstage at the Bayfront while waiting for Low, and all the while hell had been breaking out at home. "I could have come home and gotten him to bed in two seconds."

Indeed, my brother's body had already gone limp and heavy. He closed and opened his eyes, wanting to fall asleep but also wanting to make sure I was still right there. I kissed his forehead with a lump in my throat.

"Zoe, he's not your responsibility," my mother said firmly.  "We're his parents."

For some reason, that stung. "But he wanted me."

"But we also need to teach him that the world won't always bend to his will. You give in to him too much."

"He calmed down literally the minute I came back." I wanted to yell, but Max's breathing had slowed, so I had to content myself with a shouted whisper.

"Yes," my mother said in that sing-song voice she reserves for small children and crazy homeless people, "but you won't always be there for him."

I snapped my head to stare her down there in the doorway, hot blood beating at my temples. "Of course I will!"

My brother wiggled into me, pressing his little body flush against mine and burying his head in my neck. I rubbed his back in slow circles. "Of course I will," I repeated in a gentle, soothing murmur. He squeezed me tighter and gave a great sigh of contentment.

I turned away from my mother and blinked, staring at the ceiling. After a long while, she left the doorway. I heard the tap running, and her and Greg talking in muted voices. Max shifted, flopping his leg over my knee, and I pulled him tighter, clinging to him like he was a life-raft and I was drowning in a sea of fierce guilt and even fiercer love.

Chapter 24

Low

I could still smell her on my fingers, but now that I was back home again, the overwhelming rush of being with Zoe was starting to fade, and in its place came the anxiety about what to do next.

"The pain stops here." It was a promise my sister and I had made to each other. No, it was more weighty and solemn than just a promise. It was a fucking
vow
.

When Pepper told our parents what Uncle Mitch had done to her, she did it because I told her everything was going to be okay. How could it not be? Our parents were the adults after all, and in my blind, childish trust, I believed they would make it all better. They would believe her, not just because she was their child but because she was telling the fucking truth.

I knew she was telling the truth because she was my twin and I knew her face better than I knew my own. Even if I hadn't seen what happened, I would have still believed her because Pepper couldn't lie to me.

But I had seen it. I had seen it with my own five-year-old eyes because I was the only one looking out for her that day. I had stood there watching as she wandered back to the party with her underwear balled in her fist and a dazed expression on her face. I hadn't been able to be there for her back then because I didn't know what I was seeing.

But once I knew, I understood, I made sure I was there for her, quite literally, that horrible evening just before our twelfth birthday.

I stood in the doorway of our living room, leaning against the wood, hoping I looked strong for her. I listened to her tell our parents - in a calm, clear voice - that Uncle Mitch had taken her away from the party that summer's day when we were five. That Uncle Mitch had kissed her. That Uncle Mitch had done more than just kiss her.

My mother jumped to her feet. So did my dad. They both leaped up.

I remember that because I think it was the last thing they ever agreed on.

Pepper and I now look back on that day as the moment our family fractured down the center. But in reality, it took days, then weeks, then months for the reality to set it. My father didn't move out that day. My mother didn't go after her brother-in-law with a hunting knife on that day.  Pepper didn't stop speaking that day. Everything took time, like a slow-acting poison flowing sluggishly through the bloodstream of my family.

But that day was the day I hugged my weeping sister tightly. "I shouldn't have told," she said, over and over again. "I shouldn't have said anything." And what could I say to her? We were twelve. We weren't adults. We didn't know how to handle this mess. So I promised her. I made that vow.

The pain stops
here.

Family isn't about blood. I took my sister out of the toxic wreckage of our blood family and built a new one for her. Our musical family, this silly fucking band, it had been everything to her, to me. We weren't going to continue the cycle of fucked-uppedness. We would stop the hurt, make the world a better place by not being shitty fucking people.

That day that Pepper told. The pain stopped
there.

What happened to my sister fucked me right up. There was no escaping the shadow that lived over us both. But as the years went on, I liked to think that we'd found our own ways to exist side by side with the shadow, to step into the light from time to time.

For Pepper, it's by being a bitch.

Yeah, I love my sister, but she is, indeed, a fucking bitch. Sarcastic as fuck and really fucking hard to like. She wears her wounds like armor and always attacks first.

I am, of course, the total fucking opposite. Because we're the worst twins ever.

But I
want
people to be happy. In particular, I want to make
women
happy. Make them smile. Make them feel beautiful, loved and worshipped. That's what I want. To see grins, blushes, and shining eyes. To hear laughter, gasps, and those moans that escape their lips when you know they're trying to be quiet. I lived for making chicks happy, but when I inevitably fucked it up - made them cry, made them shout - well, then I fucked on out of there.

Over the years, I got this shit down to a science. You never stay too long. Just for the good stuff, the bloom of the first rush of togetherness. When everything is still new and exciting and you can get them to smile just by saying their name.

Pepper noticed of course and gave me a new nickname. "One-Week-Woe."

She
was
a huge bitch, after all.

Tonight with Zoe... fuck. I liked it. I liked her. A whole fucking lot. I was falling for her and I could see it, stretching right out to the end. With the hurt and the choices, the ultimatums she'd make about my sister, my band, the life I'd chosen. And then I'd hurt her because none of that would...could... ever change.

I'm going to have to end this shit quick. I liked her too much to let it get fucked up.