Rock Notes (Book One of the Heartbeat Series) (28 page)

He pulled me over toward the corner of the dance floor, while there were still many people moving side to side and we stopped near another of the many decorated holiday trees. We remained there like we had our own private piece of the floor. As the music slowed and the lights dimmed, he right there on the dance floor, slid his hand down the back of my skirt. I felt his grazing touch searching my naked skin and he caught himself on the elastic of my black lace thong panties and tugged lightly. He pressed his lips to mine deeply and explored the depths of my mouth with his tongue. His firm hand explored my backside and traveled deeper. I could feel myself getting wet between my legs. Here we danced together and our bodies were having a moment of pure wanting and longing for one another while so many others still surrounded us. This just increased my excitement.

When the song stopped, and it seemed like the longest playing song, the lights came up brightly. We stood and parted our moist, kiss swollen lips and Rand glanced to the clock on the wall, it was eleven o’clock. He removed his hand from my rear and trailed it slowly to the center of my back. He said, “Let’s get out of here, and go someplace private, I think I know the perfect place. Do you trust me?” I smiled and did not say a word as I nodded. I knew my expression told him, that I not only trusted him but told him what my body wanted as well. I did not expect what happened next. He left me there briefly and talked to most of the band members quickly. He grabbed my wrap and put it around me and led me out the front door where the hired valet had his Hummer waiting all warmed and ready to go.

I only asked as we got into the Hummer, “Where are we heading to?”

“To your house for some uninterrupted privacy and if we time it right we should be there before the midnight countdown. Maxwell and the guys will handle the party outcome and make certain everyone gets home. If they can’t drive they’ll all be crashing in my house, even Russ is staying there tonight, so we wouldn’t have the chance to be alone.” He looked into my eyes and asked, “Are you okay with this last minute change of plans?” I nodded yes to him and parted my lips to take in his tongue before we drove off.

We made it to my house in record time. At each stop light along the way he placed his right hand into the front of my skirt and traveled down only to be stopped when the light changed. The roads were still a bit icy so he kept his focus on driving safely but also kept me excited with each anticipated touch. I was hoping all the lights would be red and stay on extended red as we approached them. Finally we were at my house. Rand stopped before we entered to remove from the back of his Hummer two bottles of chilled champagne. He didn’t miss a beat, as we hurried in from the winter’s cold.

I kicked off my heels and gathered two champagne glasses. We poured the champagne in very large pours overflowing the glasses and drank and refilled it immediately and drank some more. We laughed, we kissed each other playfully. Rand lifted me onto my kitchen counter, and hiked up my long skirt and positioned himself underneath like he was wearing a veil. I laughed as I poured another glass of the bubbly and drank. I felt his soft kisses and little nips press along the flesh of my inner thighs and I giggled. I felt his tongue continue to sweep the skin on my thighs and he licked the bottom of my lace panties. He removed his head from beneath the tented skirt and told me that he could not take this anymore and filled his glass and drank.

It was now that I blurted out to him, “I’m on the pill” and his response came to me with a smile.

“And you are telling me this why? Are you assuming something might happen between us?”

I responded, “I was hoping, finally…”

Rand looked at me with such intensity. “Good because I don’t want to have to wear a condom with you, I want nothing between us.” He carried the other bottle and our glasses, leading me as usual by one finger toward my bedroom. The clock was a moment from striking midnight. Setting the bottle and glasses next to the bed, he quickly gathered me and tossed me back to the bed. As the east coast was now counting down the time,
Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven
, he was pressing passionately into my lips,
Six, Five
, he was tearing at my top and unzipping my skirt,
Four, Three
, he was ripping off his shirt and pants and his shoes went flying toward my massive clothing pile on the floor.
Two, One
,
Happy New Year
, the rushed passion between us halted, he paused and looked at me and said, “Let’s take this slow, no one’s coming to interrupt us, we have all night.”

Rand dipped into the lower folds of my body. It was the slow, deliberate steps like one would take on the first day of the season at the beach where you gently touch the water’s edge, tentatively testing. Slowly inching in further. Rand took his time savoring me at the entrance of my body. Slowly, watching me and pausing a moment to breathe us in. Then he entered me deeper, pausing again and then he dove in and filled me completely with his length. We bobbed together and rocked back and forth like a traveling, forceful current in the ocean and waves of ecstasy rose up cascading through us. We made love to one another over and over until I was boneless and exhausted and smiled from my release and he was very, very tired.

I watched him drift as I was resting comfortably in his arms. I watched the rise and fall of his chest as he took each breath. I leaned on my side and I took the tip of my finger and traced the cross tattoo on his chest with the lightest touch. I crossed it over the heart and said in a whisper, “I love you Max Rand, I was never getting back with Thomas, because you Max Rand fill up my heart. I fell in love with you with you the very first night I met you.” I looked at his closed eyelids and I kissed his chest and he slept. As I drifted off I thought I heard—

“I am sorry, I have to leave you. I must leave now; I can’t tell you I love you…

Snow had started to fall outside lightly and I looked out my bedroom window taking in the beautiful virgin whiteness falling downward. I awoke to find Rand gone, and I believe what I heard while I slept was real, I hear it again in my head,
I am sorry, I have to leave you, I must leave now. I can’t tell you I love you…
I know it was his pattern, I should have seen this coming, and I was so stupid. I cannot believe I finally told him I loved him as he slept. I don’t think he heard my words and yet he slipped out this morning and left unable to face me. I wrapped a bed sheet around me and walked past my writing room and glanced in to see all the work I had written this year with the band in a different area than I had last placed it. Rand must have wandered in there as one his journals was an arms distance from my writings. Several pages of my written work was scattered on the floor. He had probably started to read
Rock Notes
, and Rand saw that at some point I began to write another piece titled
Love Notes
.

This other piece was my soul, my passion, my making it back to love again, and to love him. There were only a few of the love notes there but I had begun to write so many and they were actual love letters to him. Oh no, I freaked him out. I wish he hadn’t read how deeply into him I was and that I was ready to move on with him and make him feel loved. I poured my heart out in the love letters that he made me love once again and it was a real love, like none before. Oh I wish and hoped that he did not read my hidden secrets and feelings that I had not shared with him yet and wasn’t sure if I ever could. I blew it, I scared him, and he ran off as this was too much for him.

I got to the door like so long ago and slipped to the floor beneath me and wept…. Broken again, emptiness overcame my body and I broke down weeping for being so swept up and so naïve…repeating my life’s pattern. I laid and cried for some time. I thought Rand would have accepted me and that his passion and touches and kisses were evidence that he could let me in his heart or I could rebuild his heart. Especially after last night I believed that he could make love to me, really feel love for me and I knew I could love him, I had for so long. Oh how I prayed for last night to finally happen between us and just as I released my whole soul to him, he had to leave, leave me…

Hours have passed and the snow has piled outside now and somewhere in the pounding of my head from crying I hear a slight knock. It wasn’t really a knock on the door, but a fragile tap. I silenced my crying and slid to one side to open the door. Rand was standing, towering over me covered in glistening snow, with a very sad look on his face. I looked up in my pathetic frame of mind and wanted to replace all the doubt and fear that I just absorbed. But I didn’t know if he had come back to grab the remainder of his clothes on the bedroom floor and his journal and then leave. He slowly joined me on the floor, reaching over me and cradling me in his sturdy arms he knew without speaking, he knows that I thought he left for good, as I assumed he used to with all the other girls he met. I didn’t want to ask what he read; I figured he read it all, every page of my raw emotion.

We stayed together like that for so long and I kept running my fingers over his arm and didn’t want to speak or leave the floor. He lifted me up into his arms and carried me to the bedroom where we had just spent the night before of making amazing love and wonder. The night before was so powerful, from the moment I gave in and let him take me over completely, love me, want me and let me release what I’d felt for so long. He made me think that I could feel whole again and experience something so intense with him.

He now tenderly laid me flat on the bed and leaned up and brushed my bangs away and kissed my forehead. He lingered there for a moment only to then move from me to where he sat at the very edge of the bed and there he remained, silent. I thought he was just being compassionate in this awkward situation, I assumed he was feeling sorry for me and then he started to remove his shirt with his back facing me and slowly he pulled it up over his shoulders and head. My eyes were so sore from crying, still unsure if he was just changing his shirt that I had cried all over. Then I thought he would leave with a fresh shirt on. He turned to me briefly and in a low tone said, “Madison I am so very sorry” and turned back. “I went back home this morning because last night was too much for me, for us, I think something is missing.”

The words plunged into my stomach as this had been the same scenario with Thomas so long ago. I was frozen and unable to speak; I looked up at him as my eyes filled in the corners and seeped to the sheet below. He leaned further forward bending toward the floor in front of him reaching for his clothes and belongings. I leaned up slowly to look at him one last time. I started to stare at his perfectly fit shoulders, then my eyes traveled down his back, and then my eyes widened and fixed on a new tattoo. It was freshly inked with shiny ointment coating it. Under the sheen I saw a heart, severed in half. There were dark crimson blood droplets cascading downward. My eyes blurred. He had a broken heart tattooed and I was saddened. As I followed the path of the redness and each newly drawn drop, I then saw the long, green stem of a rose. It was a single long stem rose that was crème in color with and a trace of the deepest pink trim. It twined, and climbed like green ivy across the naked skin of his lower spine and reached to a large red solid heart. It was the words in the heart that stunned me……

Beautifully inked within that heart were two written words………
Madison Rand.

He was not leaving me, he was committing himself to me, Max Rand was here with me now as I had never seen him, so certain of himself and us, he was inked with the permanence of his commitment. Rand turned slightly toward me and caught my tear filled eyes trying to focus on his back. He spoke lightly, “Madison, I’m so sorry, I never wanted you to doubt me. I should have known that you would think I left, but I had to take care of something first, but you can see what that was.”

I then raised, my body tired and weak from crying, and climbed across the bed toward him. I completely threw my messy crying self on his back actually hurting his newly inked tattoo. I say smiling into his eyes, “Yes, Yes, YYYYEEESSSS.” I said it over and over and over. I inched up to the rim of his jeans on his back and spoke aloud “Yes” to his skin and kissed it gently. Tears streamed from my eyes. Rand stood up and came down over me with the kind of smile he so often has and he wrapped his arms tightly around me, so tightly to not let me go. I think I saw a shine in his eye that was beginning to tear.

He whispered lightly in my ear, “Madison I love you, I’m not going anywhere” and then he continued, “I tried to meet you years ago when you wrote the column about our band, but I was stopped in my tracks when I was told you were happily married. I always kept your photograph and studied it and hoped and wished. When you contacted my uncle Maxwell to write about the band and you were never answered, it was because he brought your request to me. He had known that I had once tried to meet you. I knew you were married and that in some cosmic way I felt for you something intense without ever knowing you. It was like being a fan of an idol or movie star that you think of all the time. Please understand that I couldn’t reach out to you to offer you the opportunity to write for the band and have you so close to me when I was then suffering so much love lost in my life then. It was the wrong time. Then it was you, my eyes caught sight of as I entered the stage, in the front row of our Philly concert when you turned my world upside down, my empty heart pumped.”

“No it was you Rand that took my breath away as I watched you from that front row.”

“Well I’m glad I make you breathless, you made me completely love struck crazy. I became so consumed that very night to find out everything about you, I read on the internet gossip that you left the newspaper column at a high point in your career to write other things and I also read you had gotten divorced. I figured I had received my sign of hope.”

“Rand, I am so glad you looked for me, I mean into me, and about me. I often listened to your songs and thought of you singing them to me alone.”