“You need my come?”
“Yes, yes, Ash!” I screamed, crazy for him. “I need your come. Please, give me your come!”
With a great roar, he exploded into me like a fucking firehose, coming deep inside me, shooting it out of his huge, thick cock. Screaming, clawing at his shoulders, I threw my head back and came, bucking against him, my quivering pussy clenching in orgasm around his shaft. Groaning, grasping, we shuddered and rode the waves together
, coming and coming into each other under the sky full of stars.
He held me close and we drifted there together in the warm, bubbling water. I breathed him in, his scent, his rough stubble, his heart beating. I looked up at the sky and I knew. I didn’t know exactly when it had happened. But I knew that it had. Somewhere along the way in the last few weeks, I’d fallen completely, hopelessly, impossibly in love with rock god Ash Black. Heaven help me.
26
Ash
Ana. I’d seen a lot of beautiful women in my life. Hell, I’d been surrounded by them. Models, actresses, debutantes. But Ana in that hot tub underneath the stars? She blew them all away.
I almost didn’t know what to say to her. Everything that came to mind sounded so clichéd, especially coming out of my mouth. I’d told her I thought she was amazing, gorgeous, all that. But this was a woman who worked with books for a living. She’d quoted Shakespeare to me just yesterday. Anyone could see that she was much smarter than me. If I had to rely on my powers of verbal persuasion with Ana, I didn’t have a shot.
So, I did what I knew how to do. I gathered her in my arms. Inside, we rinsed off and I toweled her dry. I loved how relaxed she grew with me, so pink and dreamy. The smile on her face looked so light and sweet, almost the smile of someone asleep and in the middle of the most enchanting dream. I wanted to make every day like that for her. She deserved it.
But first she needed some sleep. I loved how much I tired her out. The last few days we hadn’t done much more than have sex, make music, and sleep. Plus occasionally eat. And I’d managed to keep her out of clothes the entire time. Perfection.
Together, we settled into bed, her head on my chest, my arm around her waist. Her breathing drew deep almost instantly and I thought she’d fallen asleep. But then she murmured,
“They don’t know you like I do.”
“What’s that?” I leaned down to catch her quiet voice.
“All those people around you. They all know your image. But they don’t know you.”
I nodded. That was absolutely true. And I wasn’t the first celebrity to feel that way. When you as an individual became a brand with large dollar signs attached to your image, you got catapulted into this strange other world. I know, play me a tiny violin of sympathy. But I wasn’t trying to complain about it. It was just a fact. In my bubble, the more people knew your name, the less people knew the real you. It got so I barely felt like I knew myself.
“What about you? Do you feel like you know me?” The second I asked her, I almost wished that I hadn’t. I felt like so much hung on her answer and I held my breath wondering what she’d say. For some reason, I felt like it would just about kill me if she said no.
“I know you.” She rested her palm over my heart, beating steadily for her. “And you’re amazing.”
I was grateful she fell asleep soon after. I knew I was literally naked, but her answer stripped me bare on a whole new level. I had nothing left to hide. And if she’d looked up in my eyes at that moment, I knew what would have tumbled out of my mouth.
I would have told her that I loved her.
That thought woke me right up. As Ana sank into a deep slumber, my body began buzzing with nervous energy. Pale moonlight glimmered in through the windows, casting Ana in a near-unearthly glow. She looked like a woodland fairy, with her hair in a tumble cast across the pillows. Her berry-red lips, full and gorgeous in sleep. Her long eyelashes, her heart-shaped face. I’d never seen anyone more beautiful.
Or more terrifying. What was going on here? It was like I was bewitched. I was the guy who usually kicked out girls before we got anywhere near the sleep portion of the program. And now, here I was, gazing down at my love while she slept. I loved being around her. I loved having sex with her. I loved making music with her. I loved eating meals with her and learning more about her past and her future hopes and dreams. And, apparently, I loved watching her sleep.
I loved Ana.
I felt it, like a nail driving into my chest. She’s the one.
Was that supposed to make me panic? Was that realization supposed to make my pulse race and my throat constrict and my hands reach to see if I left a glass of water on the bedside table? Because suddenly I really felt like I could use a drink. Maybe something stronger than water.
Using my well-honed skills of slinking out of bed undetected, I shifted my weight over, over and away without waking up Ana. I sat there, head in hands, grappling with my middle-of-the-night realization.
Unexpected. Complicated. Completely out of my fucking league.
For a strange moment, I wanted to reach for the phone. I could really use a friend to call and have one of those conversations you saw in bromance movies. The guys would dish everything and then hug it out with an “I love you, man!”
I knew I could call Connor. He’d be up, I was pretty sure of that. When the sun was down, Connor was almost always up. He also made occasional daytime appearances, but those were rare. But how would that conversation go?
“Hey, dude, could you take a second away from snorting coke off of that chick’s boob to have a heart-to-heart with me about grown-up emotions?”
Not going to happen. It wasn’t Connor’s fault. Nothing like this had ever crossed his radar. Frankly, it hadn’t crossed mine, either. A month ago if he’d called me with the same problem I probably would have told him I had an incoming call and would love to talk to him but sorry had to go!
Swiftly, I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and headed into the kitchen to fix myself a drink. No fire in the fireplace, no storm raging outside, it was quiet. Too quiet. I flipped on the TV, surfing from one channel to the next. Why was it always hundreds of channels but nothing on? I knew it took a lot to hold my attention, but come on, all I found were sequels and reruns and boring porn even a raging beast like me didn’t feel like watching.
You know what held my attention? Ana.
Standing up, I headed over to the windows and started to pace. Walking back and forth like a tiger at the zoo.
What the fuck was going on here? I tried to tell myself that this was no big deal. So I liked a girl? BFD.
But it felt like a Big Fucking Deal. And I knew why. If I were honest about it, if I took a good, long look at myself in the proverbial mirror, I’d have to admit I was nothing more than a big, overgrown kid. I’d been riding out the longest adolescence in history. I’d been 17 for a good, long time now, 17 over and over again, not giving a fuck, holding up my middle fingers. Partying and breaking shit and screwing around with girls who passed in and out of my life like ships in a harbor.
So this big boy, mature moment? It was hitting me like a growing pain. I remembered those happening to me, when I was around 10 or maybe 12 years old. I used to wake up in the middle of the night with my legs hurting like hell. Of course that had coincided nicely with my parents divorcing and my mother sinking into a deep muck of depression. She hadn’t exactly bounded to my bedside to ask what was the matter.
But that was beside the point. The point was, I was having an emotional growing pain. How pathetic.
I took a sip of my drink. And thought about Justin Bieber.
I remembered a few years back the Biebs had been caught smuggling a monkey into Germany. He’d brought the monkey along with him from the U.S. and figured he could just land in a foreign country with it, no problem, no paperwork. He was Justin Frickin’ Bieber. That didn’t go over so well with the German officials. No monkey, even for JB.
The gossip sites had been all over it, calling him everything from a diva to insane. They’d compared him to Michael Jackson with his chimp Bubbles and wondered how anyone could get so detached from reality.
Me? I understood completely. When everyone told you yes you got to forgetting that anyone could ever tell you no. I’d had a nice, long stretch of yes. Seven years of it. I got comfortable with yes. It surrounded me like a thick down comforter, numbing my perceptions, drowning out anything but that constant, thick drone of praise. I started forg
etting what anything else ever felt like. No became a thing of the past, a foreign concept. And who liked hearing no, anyway? No one, that’s who.
But now, here I stood in my mountain cabin in the middle of the night with that down comforter stripped right off of me. Bare-chested and freaking out, my heart racing, sweat forming on my brow, I stood neck-deep in reality. The thing was, I knew I might be facing a no.
If I put myself on the line, let Ana know everything I was feeling, what I thought of her and how she made me want to take chances and be a better man and see if I could be the one for her, it was a huge risk. I might pour my heart out, leave it right there on the coffee table. And there was a chance that she would listen to it all and then say no.
Bloody hell. I’d only lived in England a couple of years, but I felt it gave me the license to use some of their better swears. Bollocks, bugger, cock-up, I’d pull them all out when necessary. Now was the time.
Pulling at my hair, I felt that urge again to pick up the phone and talk to someone about all this. But who would I call? And why hadn’t it ever occurred to me before that I had no one to talk to? I guessed I’d always been so surrounded by superficial fluff I’d never noticed the lack of substance.
It would be nice to be able to pick up the phone and call a parent. But even if my father hadn’t passed away this past summer, I couldn’t have called him. He’d thought I was a grade-A fuckup until the day he died. The more famous I got, the more it just made him shake his head and wonder what the world was coming to. Sometimes I had to agree.
My mom had cleaned up her act post-breakdown. She hadn’t touched a drink since. She also hadn’t touched any of us. She’d remarried and tidied her life up so much it was like she’d moved completely on, surrounded by her champion roses and purebred dogs at her estate in southern Connecticut. I couldn’t imagine anything she’d enjoy less than an early morning phone call from her embarrassingly outrageous son wanting to discuss his love life.