Blame It on the Bass (7 page)

His blood roaring in his ears, his gut a knotted mess, his whole body thrumming with charged energy, Corbin opened his eyes, twisted beneath Levi’s weight and gazed back at the man he loved more than any other. “I think,” he said, forcing calm to each word, “I would like to invite Sonja to our bed.”

Chapter Four

Standing under the shower for fifteen minutes didn’t help. Levi’s mind still roared with Corbin’s words, a hurricane of wretched shock. A maelstrom of dark thoughts.

Killing the water—icy cold and stingingly hard—he closed his eyes, clenched his fists and pressed his forehead to the tiles before him.

His body chilled, the cool air of the bathroom licking at his wet skin. His nipples pinched into tight tips, a perverse pleasure of physical sensation he closed his mind to.

With a strangled groan, Levi dragged his hand down his face. The excess water in his beard dribbled from his jaw and chin to his feet, each drop somehow a drilling echo in the oppressive silence. He opened his eyes and stared at his feet. A detached part of his mind—that part not whirling with Corbin’s request—studied the trickles of moisture running over his flesh before disappearing down the drain.

His blood pounded in his ears.

His stomach clenched.

His balls throbbed.

He closed his eyes again, drawing a deep slow breath.

Corbin waited for him somewhere in the house. Normally after sex they’d shower together, but this time his lover hadn’t followed him to the bathroom, leaving him to shower alone.

No doubt to give Levi the chance to think.

A dry snort tore at the back of Levi’s throat. To think? That was an understatement. He’d stood under the cold water, head down, hands flat to the wall and barely survived the assault on his mind. For a musician, Levi’s brain worked in a very left-sided way. He enjoyed the unquestionable reason of numbers, the comfort of logical thought. Throughout his childhood, until the age of fourteen when his high school music teacher had busted him doing his math homework in class and handed him a guitar—he’d always thought he was going to be a mathematician. When Mrs. Salvog handed him the school’s sole Stratacaster and told him he had lunch detention during which he had to figure out how to play it using math, the focus of his life shifted. But there was math in music, and Levi lost himself in both.

There was no answer to Corbin’s request in music, numbers or logic, however. In amongst the turbulence of his thoughts, Levi had tried his best to find the calm of numbers. He’d calculated the average rest beats in every song he’d recorded, he’d considered the time pattern Samuel had created in the lyrics of “Lily’s Song”, the song they were planning to record for
Dead Even 2
. He’d analysed the rhythm structure of the last soundtrack he’d written for Spielberg.

He’d done all those things and no answers to Corbin’s request presented themselves. None that made any sense at least.

Here they were, after two months of emotional separation, two months after the loss of their daughter before they even had the chance to cherish her, hold her, finally together again, and his lover was talking about bringing a woman into their bed. How did that make any logical sense?

It didn’t.

They should be addressing their issues. They should be approaching the situation of their loss with calm, modulated control.

Yeah, just like the calm, modulated way you fucked him out there, right? The way you punished him for how he’d made you feel? The way you punished yourself for being unable to show him your emotions. The way you punished yourself for the way Sonja made you—

A hot itch scratching at the back of his head told him he wasn’t alone.

Straightening from the wall, he turned.

Corbin stood at the mouth of the shower bay, fully dressed once again, his gaze fixed on the ceiling above Levi’s head.

The en-suite bathroom was large and opulent. One entire end of the room was dedicated to the shower, which comprised five separate showerheads that could be individually controlled. Along with the jets, there were two suspended stainless steel bars Levi would, when the mood took him, bind Corbin’s wrists to. Fucking his lover in the shower while Corbin could do nothing but beg for more had become a regular activity before the funeral.

Now…

An image of Sonja in the shower flashed through Levi’s head, her arms above her head, her breasts uplifted, Corbin’s lips circling one dusky nipple as Levi slowly sank his cock into her—

“Is this another one of those things we’re going to pretend didn’t happen?”

Levi drew a sharp breath at Corbin’s question, the implication behind the words smothering the wholly unexpected vision of Sonja at their mercy.

He scowled at his partner. “I never pretended Isabella didn’t die, Cor.”

“True. But if I recall correctly, this is the very place you spent the morning after we got the news. In this shower, with your head down, the water freezing. When you finally came out you’d shut whatever was in your heart, in your soul away.”

Levi narrowed his eyes. “And then you withdrew from me.”

Corbin’s jaw bunched. “What else was I meant to do? I wear my heart on my sleeve, Levi. You’ve known that from the moment we met. And your heart is locked in a fucking steel box guarded by a wall of impenetrable ice. For fuck’s sake, babe, we’d just lost our daughter. I needed to see you mourn. I needed to mourn with you. Fuck, I
needed
to know you were sharing your grief with me and I didn’t. Because
you
didn’t.”

Levi ground his teeth and turned his head away. That they were having this argument now, while Levi was naked and still dripping with water should have infuriated him. That it was happening while disturbing thoughts of his old high school girlfriend whispered through his head should have sickened him.

Neither was the case.

Because Corbin was correct. Levi had confessed as much to Nick only that very morning. He
should
have let Corbin see his pain instead of locking it away.

But that’s what Levi had always done. Lock away any emotions, any reactions that left him vulnerable. He kept them tightly controlled, constrained. Kept them from view and didn’t allow them to be used as a weapon by those who were meant to protect you.

It was a lesson he’d learnt as a child. A child desperate to understand the world when the only thing he’d understood was numbers.

And then music.

Staring hard at the glass-tiled wall beside him, he balled his hands into fists. “I should have let you grieve with me,” he said, the words a raw pain in his chest. “I should have…I should have shared that with you. I know that. But what I don’t understand is why you now want us to…why you want to ask…”

He faltered. Not because the words
ask Sonja into our bed
were too disturbing to vocalize, but because his body reacted the second they formed in his head.

A heavy spasm claimed his cock. His balls tensed. His pulse quickened and his throat grew tight.

Fuck, how could this be more messed up? How could he—

“Because I’ve never seen you so open than when you were with her.”

Corbin’s low statement, uttered on a voice strained with confusion, scraped at Levi’s fraying control.

He returned his gaze to his lover. “I’m open with you,” he said, the claim ridiculous to his own ears.

Corbin laughed a harrowed chuckle that tore Levi’s heart. “You tell me you love me, babe, and I know you do—at least I hope you still do, but open?” He shook his head. “When I watched you sing with Sonja, when I watched you smile with her, laugh with her, Christ, I wanted to cry. And then I watched you kiss her on the stage and everything changed.”

Levi swallowed. “You saw it? Not just at the booth, but on the stage?”

Corbin dipped his head. “I’d come home to tell you I was sorry, to beg you to forgive me for deserting you. I saw you walking towards Do Re Me and followed you. When I finally caught up, you were on the stage singing with her.” He chuckled again, the sound less hollow this time. “You have an incredible voice, babe. I know why you don’t sing lead. I know you can’t bear that kind of attention, but fuck me, your voice is incredible. And I stood there listening to you, losing myself in the power of your voice, loving you, aching for you, hearing your grief in the words you sang even as I watched you come to life on the stage next to her… I stood there wanting you on every level possible, and then you kissed her and I wanted that as well.”

The words caressed Levi’s sanity. Not just because Corbin spoke them, but because they stroked Levi’s body with the memory of Sonja’s lips under his.

His cock pulsed.

Corbin’s gaze fell to the stirring organ. His nostrils flared at the sight greeting him—a dick only a moment ago flaccid, now semi-stiff. And growing harder.

“I want to feel that life in you, Levi,” he said, motionless. “I want to experience it with you, and if Sonja is what makes you alive…even if only for the moment…if Sonja—whoever she is—is what helps you find the way out of your numb refusal to feel anything with me, then I want her to help you. Just let me be there as she does. Let me be there when you finally live again. And then be alive with me.”

The knot in Levi’s gut was a twisted ball of torment. “I am alive with you, Cor,” he said, his voice a broken whisper.

Corbin shook his head. “No, you’re not. Not at the moment. But you were with her, so alive the world damn near shook with the force. Everyone in that bar could feel it, babe. They feasted on it, thrived on it. And I did too.”

He took a step forward, and Levi couldn’t help but notice that, even though pain swam in Corbin’s blue eyes, the crotch of his jeans was tented.

Corbin was aroused.

By the sight of Levi naked and wet before him? Or by the memory of Levi kissing Sonja?

Does it matter?

Tight pain strapped around Levi’s chest and he ground his teeth. It didn’t. At this point in time, it didn’t.

Letting out a long, slow breath, he met his lover’s stare. “You really want this? You want me to invite my old high school girlfriend into our bed?”

Corbin’s Adam’s apple slid up and down the smooth column of his throat. “I do.”

Levi’s heart thumped fast at the answer. “So you can watch me fuck her?”

When Corbin shook his head, Levi’s breath caught. “You want us both…” He stopped. Stared at the man he loved.

“Yes.”

Levi felt hot, eager blood flood into his already stiffening cock. “You want to fuck me while I’m fucking her?”

Corbin nodded. The bulge in his jeans twitched.

“You want to be inside my body while I’m inside hers?”

“Yes. And…more.”

A thick spasm claimed Levi’s dick at the assertion. “Do you want to fuck her as well, Cor? You’ve never been with a woman before. You told me so years ago. Do you want to feel your cock sink into her slick, wet pussy?”

The faintest groan fell from Corbin’s lips. But still, he didn’t move. Didn’t crumble.

Levi stared at him. He hungered for what Corbin suggested. No, not just hungered for it. Craved it.

Needed it.

“How is it possible,” he whispered, every molecule in his body aching for Corbin, “that the man I love more than life knew I was in such a numb state when I didn’t?”

Corbin’s lips stretched in a smile so haunted Levi damn near crumpled to the ground. “That’s what love is, Levi. Knowing the secrets of the soul even when they’re not spoken aloud.”

A hot lump filled Levi’s throat. “Is this how we move forward? Is this how we fix us?”

Corbin shrugged. “It’s how we begin, I think.”

“What happens if she says no?”

Corbin laughed again, the ironic, self-deprecating laugh that had drawn Levi to him in the first place all those years ago on a Hollywood set, when Corbin had been openly gay and Levi was still hiding in the depths of a closet. “What happens if she says no? Babe, what happens if she says
yes
?”

An image of Sonja straddling Corbin’s hips, his mouth feasting on her breast, his hands worshipping her body filled Levi’s head, hot, vivid and exquisitely arousing.

Levi let out a ragged breath.

Fuck, how would they ever recover from this?

How would they survive it?

He studied Corbin, every molecule in his body charged with conflicted desire. “Question?”

Corbin nodded. His gaze swept over Levi, lingering for a moment on his groin. Levi’s cock pulsed in response to the visual caress. He may be messed up emotionally and psychologically—there really was no point denying it any longer—but when it came to Corbin Smith, his body’s physical reaction worked exactly the way it was meant to.

Drawing in a slow breath, he forced his stare to stay on Corbin’s face. Not the increasing tent in his jeans. Not the long, corded length of his legs, legs that felt so good wrapped around Levi’s hips, or torso. Not the broad expanse of Corbin’s shoulders or the wide breadth of his chest. “What happens if Sonja says yes and we—you and I—still aren’t fixed? What if I’m still…broken? Will you…”

Turning his head, he scrunched up his face and balled his fists.