Rock Me (New Adult Rockstar Romance) (12 page)

The lights are gyrating before my eyes as I feast greedily on this newfound energy. The fury in my speech crescendos. I look straight into his eyes, all fire and brimstone, as I deliver my last line.

“Fuck you,” I say. “I’m done here.”

***

Silence.

Silence.

Icy sickly silence, the kind of foreboding moment devoid of all noise, the kind where you wake up sweating about it three nights or a week later, the kind where the blood pounding in your ears sounds like the drumbeats of bloodthirsty jungle savages who know their way through the shadows far better and cleverer than you do.

Bellamy has stood up. He towers above me. The fire in my gut immediately cools. His gaze is ice, ice that threatens to extinguish the bravery raging through my bones.

His eyes are slitted half-crescents and the light seeping out from under them roils with flickering cruelly. His hands clench and unclench, clench and unclench. In my imagination, I see him in the jungle, leading the headhunters, plucking still-beating hearts from the corpses of foolish fat girls who tried to run away between the trees, raising them up and letting the blood run in rivulets down his chin…

Stop it,
I tell myself.
Focus.

One of the fluorescent lights overhead is dying. Its beams spasm and contort with every erratic jolt of electricity flowing through its veins so that the patches of darkness under the hood of Bellamy’s eyebrows and the hook of his nose run rampant with the sputtering illumination. The clock overhead reads one o’clock.

His lips are pressed together so tightly that the fleshy beams of tendons running through his jaw are vividly perceptible. When he starts to speak, I can see them flex.

“You’ll be back,” he growls.

The sound of his voice is like a freezing cold claw swooping under my rib cage and scraping at my insides, stabbing through guts that shiver and shy from the predation. I shiver once, but stand my ground.

“You’ll be back and I’ll be waiting.”

For the first time since we began talking, Bellamy smiles. I have never before seen a grin so devoid of warmth. It freezes and chills and makes my spine twist in place, makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention like icicles. I back out the door slowly, never looking away from him until I am safely outside his office. As soon as I am out, I bolt.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I can almost hear the invisible shackles crumbling from around me. I am walking down the street, bouncing merrily on the balls of my feet. Every time I step forward, I feel as if my body could disregard gravity altogether and take off into the air, soaring between the jagged antennae on top of the city’s buildings and flying pinwheels with the pigeon flocks. I haven’t felt like this since the day I left home.

The murky fear that always coats my skin and taints my tongue after an encounter with Bellamy is sloughing away with every stride. It's startling to think that he is actually gone from my life.

He’s gone,
I tell myself.
Actually. Finally. Permanently. Gone.
I laugh out loud at the thought. A man in a boxy-shouldered suit gives me a strange sideways glance as he walks by, jabbering into a cell phone. I laugh again.

The wind is fresh and insistent on my cheeks. The blood against my temples is reminding me that my heart is pumping and my lungs are breathing and everything is moving forward as it should. I am leaving Bellamy’s – forever. I am going back to Garret’s. School, bills, stress – these things are afterthoughts, casually irrelevant, practically nonsensical. I weigh each of them briefly in my mind and discard them like unwanted wrappers. The wind picks the thoughts up and carries them away – Lord only knows where to.

I laugh. The sun is bright today.

I wonder for a moment how I ever lived before this.

I survey my surroundings – hundreds of unfamiliar faces reveling in the throes of the same emotion, the same tumbling ecstasy that is swelling in me. The pitched ceiling arcs above us, swallowing the sound and sweat as it flows upward and outward in waves from the crowd. Hands pierce the air – raised fists that thrust and undulate in time with the music that pours from the monstrous speaker stacks. The speakers’ gaping maws, though restrained by intertwining mesh, stare out at the gathered masses hungrily.

On stage, bound by beaming spotlights and the gazes of everyone at his feet, Garret stars.

It is alchemy coming from his throat. He is conducting the transformation of our every-day boringness into a shared bliss that wraps everyone here tightly together. With every note, every hum, every twitch of his hand or gyration of his hips, he obliterates the mold that pins us into the normal and the anxious. Freed from it, the crowd is speechless, like a baby deer taking its first steps. We knew to expect it – we had all experienced it before – but every time that Garret unbinds us, liberates us, the shock of suddenly realizing that we are free from the rigidity of our obligations takes a long time to register.

He is gentle with our hesitancy, though, endlessly urging us to leap in it, to pirouette in the emancipation. He shows us how – on stage, he dances with electricity, sometimes fluid, sometimes jerkily spastic, but always unburdened.

I feel so lucky to have known him, to have touched him, to have let my eyes sweep over his form and be able to reach out and lay a finger on something that could change me so much.

The music rises and consumes me like a tidal wave. Together, the crowd and I are battered about as we cascade from note to note, from song to song, from emotion to emotion; Completely beyond our control but blissful in surrendering the responsibility to move ourselves the way we thought we must. The only trick is to open up to it.

I look onstage, see Garret’s lips parted slightly in the midst of a long slow note, and know that I am as wide-open as I can be.

I wonder again how I ever lived before this.

***

I peek my head around a corner backstage and see Garret, seated on a couch and laughing with a couple of his bandmates. He sees my craning head and beckons me over with a smile. I oblige.

He does a double-take as I approach, his eyes jolting wide as they glimpse the entirety of my body. I am clad in a tight black dress that barely grazes the tops of my thighs, shoulders bare, white skin glinting in the harsh glare of the fluorescent lights overhead.

His gaze drinks me in from head to toe. My hair, curling in finger-tooled waves, pours down my shoulders and splays in the valleys of my cleavage. The dress squeezes my waist and hips into an outrageously curvy parabola, while the legs jutting out from beneath the hem of my fabric roll along thick contours into spiky, black leather pumps that add four inches to my height.

I had spent hours getting ready. The obvious desire exuding from his eyes justifies my effort. The two men on either side of him have fallen silent, too. The same kind of libido is oozing from their pores.

“I wasn’t sure if this was the right dress for the occasion… What do you think?” I demure, batting my eyelashes girlishly. I spin in place slowly, pausing with my ass towards them and leaning forward ever-so-slightly so that my curves strain against the fabric dangerously.

They all stammer, unsure of what to say. Garret’s voice is low. “I think it’s perfect,” he says. He rises from his seat and reaches for my hand. I lace my fingers between his – porcelain against bronze. 

“Gentlemen.” He bows mockingly towards each of the other men, “I will catch up with you later.” He turns to me. “Miss Sutton, would you care to accompany me to the tour bus for a brief respite?” He arches an eyebrow. I giggle and nod, biting my lip. His eyes flash before he turns and tugs me down the hallway in a hurry. I follow behind him on my heels, laughing.

***

The inside of the tour bus is dark and lavish. Mirrored surfaces scatter our reflections everywhere, so that every time I turn, I see Garret’s face, its lines drawn in perfect sharpness, or my own, looking at him with an intense heat.

We walk towards the back, where a bright-red backpack is perched on a vacant seat. He pulls me around so that our chests touch and I am looking up into his eyes. The emerald hue is deep tonight, his pupils dilated and searching. The trademark grin is seared on his face as I count his teeth and imagine running my tongue over every one of them.

“The show was incredible,” I whisper. “Your best ever.”

“Thanks.” His voice is silky. I shiver at the sound of his voice so close to me. After seeing the way the crowd had worshipped him on stage, it is like having a god reach down and caress me. Tingles race down my exposed spine.

The silence between us palpitates with tension as we stare into each other’s eyes. Hunger, heat, shadows, roars – all of it unspoken and present in the middle of the space where the soft sounds of our breathes co-mingle.

His voice doesn’t break the silence so much as it prods it, slithers through it, envelops it and makes it his own. “So the show was a hit. Should we celebrate properly?” He asks.

Now it is my turn to arch an eyebrow. Sensing my confusion, he gestures towards the backpack behind us. My heartbeat quickens.

“I...I don’t know,” I say. My bravado shrinks a notch.

“Don’t worry.” He squeezes my shoulders. “It’s all going to be fine. We’re just going to have a bit of fun. I’ll be here. You can trust in me. I’m not going anywhere.”

His voice strokes at my fear, soothing it, calming me, although a current of uncertainty still runs at the base of my throat and stomach.

Garret unzips the backpack and withdraws a small plastic baggie. It contains two brightly colored tablets, emblazoned with the logo of a bumblebee. He plucks them out between delicate fingers.

“Come here.” He gestures. I gnaw at my lip but sidle towards him anyway. He drops to a seat and motions for me to sit on his lap. Quickly, he downs one pill, then places the other on his outstretched tongue. Encircling my head with one brawny arm, he pulls my face into his.

Our mouths meet. The familiar warmth and texture of his lips is the cure to my panic. His tongue slips past my teeth and I can feel the weight of the pill slide down. With a hesitant gulp, I swallow.

The kiss deepens. My tongue lashes at his, playing with it. His fingers toy at the back of my neck. Deep in my chest, I feel my longing for him swell. His touch draws away the remnants of my fears and I press further into him, my breasts squeezing against his chest.

The kiss seems to last forever and when the ecstasy of the pills takes hold, fireworks seem to explode in my vision. The world shatters into colorful, revolving patches, a kaleidoscope of sound and motion, whirling, distorted, ravaging, beautiful. My perception of the kiss multiplies and deepens into layers that contradict one another. Garret’s lips are soft -- cloud lips, rain lips, the lips of the horizon meeting the ocean. The salt of his tongue is sharp and sprinkled around the edges of the sensation, while his fingers plucking and petting at the nape of my neck feel like birds’ wings fluttering gently over my skin.

The entirety of my body is alive and craving -- craving touch, his touch, his love, his wanting, his passion, his heat, his grin, his manhood. The warmth between my legs flowers infinitely.

Like I had been when I was leaving Bellamy’s office, I am weightless, prone to lifting off the ground at any moment. The tide of emotion in my chest is overwhelmingly light. It draws me up and into Garret’s embrace. The kiss we are sharing is sloppily perfect, as is the feeling of fingertips scrabbling at the folds of each others’ clothing.

I rip his shirt over his head and lean back for my eyes to consume his body. The rippling muscles, the skin stretched in bronze relief and the shadows that dance, dance as we rock back and forth with the intensity of the moment – all of it shimmers before me like frozen music.

I pause for a moment like that, with our bodies separated. A nagging thought trickles through my head:
Old Jodie would never have done this.
I consider where I am – half-naked and clearly pre-coital in the tour bus of a budding rock star, blindly trusting him as he feeds me unknown drugs.
Old Jodie would never have done this.
I am swept up in my lust for Garret, but the thought won’t go away.
Old Jodie would never have done this.
The multi-colored, fractured world spinning before my eyes only adds to the delirious confusion.

I put a hand on his chest. “Garret…” I say uncertainly. “I’m not so sure about all this.”

He pauses, cocks his head to the side to take stock of my concern.

“Babe,” he murmurs. “Do you trust me?”

I nod. “Of course.”

“Do you love me?”

He has never asked me that before. I have refused to let myself think about it until now, wondering if love was even a label that could be applied to the relationship between Garret and me.

I open my mouth and hear myself say, “Of course.”

There, it has been said. The words hang in the air – I can see them, spelling out in colors and flashes of sweet-tasting light.

“Of course I do,” I repeat.

He grins. “Then you’ll be safe with me. I’ll take care of you, Jodie.” His eyes glimmer.

Tenderly, Garret pulls my chest towards his mouth. I let my head loll backwards as I focus on savoring his tongue flicking down the line of my neck, over my collarbone, plunging between my breasts. I shrug off the shoulders of my clinging dress, exposing my breasts.

He suckles at each nipple, drawing slowly and strongly on one while he gently squeezes the other with his hand. Back and forth, back and forth he goes, his tongue tracing calligraphy over my bare skin. It's like nothing I've felt before. Is it the drugs that are taking me to these dizzying heights or is it Garret? I don't know. I can't tell. Only a single thought races through my mind.

More.

He leans me in that position, back arched, head lifted, breasts open to the air.

“Stay just like that,” he urges.

Reaching into the backpack again, he grabs a small vial and taps out a crumbly white powder onto the arc of one breast. Pressing a finger against his nostril, he vacuums it up.

The powder disappears.