Under His Skin (6 page)

She wanted to kiss each scar, smooth them away, but from what she knew of Brian, he wouldn’t want that. Instead, she pressed her lips to his stomach, above his navel. She needed to get dressed and go. There was nothing to be gained from going another round with him. But she didn’t.

Grasping the base of his cock, she slowly pumped him, taking her time to feel each vein, the way he hardened in her grasp and how his hips flexed even in sleep.

She’d always been a glutton for punishment.

Dropping down to her elbows, she licked the head of his cock and watched as Brian’s body shuddered. She wondered how far she could go without him waking up. Watching his face, she began a slow rhythm, her mouth and hand working counter to each other. He hardened as she continued, observing how his head tossed back and forth and his hand flopped on the bed next to her hip.

Cupping his balls, she caressed them with her fingers, running the tips along the crease between and back behind his sac.

Groaning in his sleep, Brian’s eyes flickered open. His hand fluttered against her cheek before digging into her hair. He pulled painfully, her locks a tangled mess, but she didn’t let that stop her. Squeezing his balls brought his eyes open wide, shock and lust mixed on his features. She smiled right before she closed her eyes and went down on him, swallowing around his cock, dragging another tortured groan from his lips.

Brian muttered under his breath and eased the hold on her but didn’t let go. His hips thrust lightly into her mouth, a helpless gesture she didn’t think he could control, not that she wanted him to. She was enjoying herself, partially because when it came to sex, she excelled at it and because this was her dream man. The one she wanted to fuck and suck.

“Pand, Pandy,” he panted, unable to get her full name out. “Oh god, you’ve got to stop.”

On that, she disagreed. Shaking her head, she pushed his hand away and settled more comfortably between his thighs. They’d used the last of his condoms before falling asleep, so this was all for him.

“Pandy,” he wheezed, drawing her name out as his hips lifted up again and again.

She worked with him until she felt the little tremors shaking his body, the way his back twitched and his legs flexed around her before he came in her mouth. She stayed with him, caressing him through the orgasm until he lay against the mattress limp and spent.

Crawling up to stretch out next to him, she was surprised when he grabbed her, pulled her partially on top of him and brought her lips to his. He didn’t just kiss her, he held her face between his hands and tasted her deeply.

“Morning,” she said when he finally released her.

“Hot damn.” He cupped her ass with one hand, a sleepy smile on his lips. “How about breakfast?”

Startled, she glanced at the clock. It was almost noon, not that she was an early riser by any means.

He must have sensed her hesitation. When she looked back at him, he had the saddest puppy dog expression on his face. “Come on, please?”

“Fine.” Even as she said it, she knew it was a mistake, something that couldn’t be undone. But she’d already checked out of the room she’d shared with the girls, and her suitcase was in her car. She didn’t have to be anywhere for two days, so why not in bed with him?

* * * * *

Brian stretched and grabbed the headboard with both hands. Pandora straddled his thighs and laughed, a bottle of lotion in one hand. She’d put on one of his t-shirts when breakfast was delivered. He already missed seeing her tattooed breasts. The leopard spots, as he’d learned, did not go farther down, but highlighted a part of her body that was highly sensitive.

“This is going to be cold.” She squirted a liberal amount of lotion into her hand and tossed the closed bottle onto the bed.

“Getting tattooed is one thing. Sometimes I think this is the worst part.” He looked up at the ceiling and sucked in a deep breath.

“Don’t be such a big baby,” she said, trying for stern and failing.

She slicked the cold lotion onto his tattoo and he hissed. Gripping the boards tighter, he groaned and squeezed his eyes shut.

“I swear guys are such pussies when it comes to pain.” Pandora sighed. Her hands were gentle, sliding over the angry flesh, up and over his shoulder and down to his hip.

He knew what she saw, the scars as though someone had dumped him into a blender. Though she’d touched his leg already, he still wanted to pull the blanket up and cover it. She hadn’t asked about his injuries, even during the tattoo or when they’d had sex. Like everyone else, she had to wonder.

“You can ask me about it,” he said despite the tightness in his chest. He’d regained almost all of his range of motion, but it would never be the same as before. Closing his eyes, he waited.

He missed the weight of her body. The bed dipped as she lay alongside him, her hand splayed over the snake on his shoulder.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”

He covered her hand with his. Her voice lacked any hint of pity, it just held acceptance. It made him want to tell her everything.

“People ask me all kinds of questions. Stuff you wouldn’t imagine. I get that they’re fans, but it’s like they forget we were people. And a band. It’s more of the same shitty stuff, but now it’s worse because the guys are gone. Ya know? I’m the only person they can ask about Ike’s allergies and Jake’s history as an opera singer.”

“Mm-hm.”

He sucked in a deep breath and rubbed her hand. “It sucks. I mean, I can’t tell everyone we were talking about making
Homeward Bound
our last album.” He turned his head to see her reaction.

Pandora was beautiful with her long hair tousled and spread out over the pillows. Her focus was centered on him. She looked a little surprised, but not what he’d expected.

“Was it time?” she asked, scooting closer until their bodies touched from knee to shoulder.

“Yeah. I mean, Ike and I had been doing
Sucker Punch Sunday
for over ten years. That’s a lot of sleeping on floors, missing holidays and everything. We were flying out for the New Year’s stuff in New York. Ike and I, we’d been fighting and just made up. We were on the plane, and we had this game where one of us would say, I’d never eat whatever it was you wouldn’t eat, and the next person would say what they wouldn’t eat. It was stupid. He’d just looked at me and said, ‘Dude, I will never eat cow boobs.’ We were laughing one second and the next stuff is flying everywhere. It felt like we were on a roller coaster. I’m pretty sure I passed out before the plane hit the mountain.”

It had been turbulence. A strong storm had sprung up and the pilot came over the intercom, warning them it was going to get a little bumpy. He’d laughed along with everyone else and tightened his seatbelt. After traveling as much as they did, a little rough ride wasn’t anything to be worried about. If he closed his eyes, he could still hear the voices of each person, what they’d said, how they’d laughed.

The plane shook like a tumbler and they’d stopped the game for a moment. After a tense silence, Ike had chuckled and turned to him. Those last words were so absurd, and just like Ike. He hadn’t even had the time to laugh before the plane careened out of control. Oxygen masks slapped him in the face, but they were descending too fast to grab them. The guys in the seats facing his hadn’t had a chance. The doctors had later told him the three had died before or on impact.

To the best of his knowledge, he’d blacked out, only recalling moments while the plane crashed, skidded and bounced along the mountain as if it were a ping pong ball. He’d been told Ike’s and Jake’s bodies protected him from the worst debris, possibly saving his life. It was a poor way to console him in the aftermath of losing what had amounted to his whole reason for living.

His first memory was of the cold. Then came the pain. There were no words to describe the agony he’d felt during his few moments of lucidity on the mountain, alone with the bodies of his best friends. He could still smell the fetid odor that had been the sewage tank cracking open nearby. The way the cabin had split had pinned him with more debris on top of his body and slicing into his leg. Sitting through Pandora’s tattoo had been a breeze in comparison.

He’d been trapped in the wreckage, in the dark and alone for hours. At first, Ike had talked to him, but after a while he went silent. Brian hadn’t even been able to hold his best friend’s hand while he died. Next to him. In the cold and snow and broken pieces of the plane.

“Hey.” Pandora’s lips brushed his cheek, banishing the dark memories.

He turned to her and kissed her, focusing on the feel of her skin against his. How she was soft where he was hard. The way her body curved and fit against him. Letting go of her hand, he tugged her closer to his side and wrapped an arm around her waist. She settled against him, a warm weight on his shoulder, her thigh thrown over his. Her fingers traced the line down his sternum where she’d shaved him.

“What happened next?” Her voice rumbled against his skin, her breath fanning his chest. “You don’t have to tell me, but you sound like you want to talk about it.”

Did he? He had a shrink he used to see regularly, at least until he came to terms with his survivor’s guilt. He hadn’t sat in the chair for two months now. Everyone he’d told his story to had lost someone, and he’d glossed over the hardest part of it all. The living. Picking up his sorry ass and learning how to put one foot in front of the other.

“My life’s a damn cliché. We all wanted to be big rock stars, we left on a jet plane and went down in history as yet another promising band destroyed in a plane crash. The flight attendant and I ruin that story by actually surviving.”

“There was a flight attendant that lived?” Her surprise was understandable. He smoothed her hair out of her face and looked up at the ceiling.

“Yeah. I guess they kept him quiet or something, but he and I were care-flighted out of there together. I went into surgery when we landed. Everyone always talks about the crash and how terrible it is but I don’t remember it. For the most part, it’s a blur. There are moments that I remember, but I kept passing out from the pain, it’s all messed up. It’s everything that came after that sucks the worst. I felt bad for not dying with them. I’d wake up and forget the guys were gone. The worst was in the beginning when I woke up and didn’t remember I couldn’t walk.”

“You couldn’t walk?”

“Nope.” He stroked her back, reminding himself it was history. “They said I wasn’t going to be able to walk again. I should get ready to live the rest of my life in a wheelchair. For a while I was depressed, a complete wreck. They had me on 24/7 monitoring. I couldn’t sneeze without someone coming into my room and offering to wipe my damn nose.”

Pandora propped her chin up and watched him. “But you walk and, um, use your legs fine.”

“I can’t jump. Running is out of the question, but I can walk.” He smiled, each painful moment spent in therapy still raw. His parents and the people at the hospital had been hypervigilant about his privacy. There were very few people who knew the extent of his recovery. “Would you mind not telling anyone this stuff?”

She rested her chin on his shoulder and smiled. “Consider it client-privileged information.”

“I bet you hear all kinds of crazy shit.”

Pandora laughed. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff people tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”

“That’s cool.” He ran his fingers through her hair, content, which was a feeling he hadn’t experienced in a long time. He glanced at the bedside table where his wallet sat. “Can I tell you something and you not freak out?”

She tipped her head back and looked up at him, her brow furrowed in a puzzled expression. “I don’t know.”

He was going to do it regardless. Since he couldn’t retrieve the wallet with his nonexistent Jedi mind powers, he let go of Pandora and snagged the folded duct tape creation. “I always thought you were cute, when I first met you. I don’t know if you remember this or not, but you were behind that shitty desk and answering the phone. You kept drawing these little flowers over and over and over again.”

It felt as if he were revealing an even more private part of him as he took the tiny scrap of laminated paper out of his wallet and held it up. Pandora reached for it and he had to force himself to hold still and allow her to examine it closer.

She chuckled and propped herself up on an elbow, turning the paper over and over again. “Shit. I was supposed to be practicing lotus flowers and I couldn’t get it right. I think I drew a thousand of these, easy.”

He released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “Yeah, and I wouldn’t leave you alone.”

“You asked for my autograph. I can’t believe you still have this.” She held the paper close, probably looking at the curling script that had long since been obscured by swiping his thumb over her signature for luck.

“I wish I could say I meant to keep it. I stuck it in my wallet and didn’t think about it. Probably a year later we were at some guy’s house playing poker and I didn’t have a dime to my name. I had to bet something, so I put this out in the pot and I won like four hundred dollars. I started calling it my good luck charm.” She offered it back to him and he took it and slid his thumb across the plastic surface. “I laminated it after the crash. That’s why this edge is burned.”

“That’s kind of crazy. I can’t believe you kept that. At least something good came out of working for Robert.”

That man’s name was a black cloud. He pushed her hair away from her face. “Is it hard working with guys like that asshole?”

She rolled her eyes. “You mean Robert?”

“Yeah, what’s up with him?”

Her body tensed under his touch. “He’s not right in the head.” She blew out a breath and sat up. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but he’s not all there.”

“You worked for him for a long time, didn’t you?” He knew she didn’t want to talk about it, but he had to know to put his mind at ease.

“Yup. Few years. I was the shop girl, store manager and I apprenticed there for two years. When he wouldn’t let me charge to tattoo there, I went to So Inked. I was even engaged to him for a little while, so my depravity knows no bounds, I guess.”