The shower has been running for an hour. I’ve stopped myself from checking on Addison over a dozen times. But enough is enough. I knock on the door. No answer. I blow out a ragged breath, leaning my head on the door. Please don’t hate me for coming in.
I turn the doorknob slowly, pushing the door open even slower, but it’s when I don’t see the outline of Addison’s body in the frosted glass that I start to worry. Fuck being careful. I run to the shower.
When I round the corner and look in, she’s sitting in the corner with her hands wrapped around her legs. Her head is against the wall and her eyes are closed. She looks like she’s meditating. I turn the shower off, surprised that the water isn’t ice cold, and she opens her eyes. Her red-rimmed eyes lock with mine.
“I’m sorry for going to my apartment,” she whispers.
Words that come to mind, I don’t dare say. Yes, I’m pissed. I’m pissed she is so goddamn stubborn. If she had let me go home with her, or she had stayed with me, I could’ve been there to protect her. You can’t always be there. The rational part of my mind reminds me of the one thing that I hate to admit, but I seem to think with the irrational part when I’m around her.
I want to be her protector.
I want to be her hero.
And I keep failing. But I’ll settle for being the person she needs to lean on right now. Help her get through this. So instead of saying anything, I grab a soft, white, cotton towel. I lift her up and wrap the towel around her. She gives me a soft smile as I lift her in my arms and carry her into the bedroom.
She sits on the bed as I dress her in a pair of her panties and a T-shirt that I had grabbed out of her bedroom before we left. When I’m done, she lies back and snuggles into my covers. I lie down beside her, pulling her into my chest. I can feel the warmth of her breaths on my shoulder.
“Why didn’t you become a musician?” she asks softly. So softly I almost didn’t hear her.
I jerk my head back, looking down at her. Where the hell did that come from? She looks at me expectantly. The randomness of the question still has me in shock; I’m more concerned with why she’s asking than to actually answer the question.
“Aiden, I’m okay,” she says. “I was just thinking about all the times you’ve sang to me, and you have an amazing voice. And you seem to love to sing.”
I stare at her apprehensively. I know she’s not okay, but maybe not thinking about it for a while will help her relax. “I don’t love to sing,” I say. She stares at me. Okay, so that wasn’t entirely correct. “I love to sing to you.”
Her smile widens. I run my hand down her arm until I reach her fingers, then I weave our fingers together. She squeezes my hand. “So, answer my question.”
Touching her has temporarily wiped my mind clean, so it takes me a few seconds to remember what the question was.
I nod slowly when I remember. “Before my mom died, I sang all the time,” I say. I chuckle to myself, remembering that I used to piss Max off by always singing. I tell her a couple stories of the times I embarrassed Max with my singing. It wasn’t until I started to attract the girls that he decided it wasn’t so bad.
“I played the guitar, so he learned to play the drums so we could play together. He’ll swear to this day it was only because the girls loved it.”
“How cute! You guys had your own little band,” she says. “What was the name?”
“What makes you think we named our band?”
She laughs. “Oh, please. You and Max and your overzealous egos. It was probably called something like…” she pauses to think, “…Audacious Flames.”
It’s my turn to laugh out loud. “Audacious Flames? We were thirteen when we named it. We didn’t even know what audacious meant. Hell, I’m not even sure I do now.”
“See! You did name your band!” she says, poking me in the chest. “Tell me.”
“Okay, okay. We used to deliver newspapers, so we went with Delivery Boys.”
“Oh,” she says blandly. “It’s catchy.”
“Well, sorry our name doesn’t live up to your Audacious Flames,” I say, tickling her.
She grabs my hands, begging me to stop. Instead, I flip her around and pull her into me, spooning her.
“Are you okay?”
She inhales deeply, blowing it out slowly. “I will be. I’m really surprised that I didn’t see it. I’m usually so good at reading people. I had him pegged so, so wrong.”
I stay quiet because I don’t want to tell her what I’m really thinking. I warned her. She didn’t listen. Silence consumes us for a few minutes before she talks again. Here I was thinking that she was deep in thought about the events of tonight, but instead she says, “So, did you stop singing because your mom died?”
“Are we on that topic again?” I ask.
“Yes! You never told me why you stopped.”
“When my mom died, my whole life changed. My priorities changed,” I say. I hug her tighter. I definitely don’t need this conversation adding weight to her already grieving body.
She nods her head slowly. “I understand,” she whispers. “It’s a shame. You could have been famous.”
“Then I would’ve never met you.”
“Oh, I’m sure I would’ve been your number one fan,” she giggles.
“Would you have flashed me while I was up on stage?” I say into her ear. My dick twitches, and I tell myself to shut it down. Just thinking about her glorious tits while she dances to my singing has me scooting my ass back a little bit so she can’t feel how hard I’m getting.
I don’t know why I thought having her in my bed, so close to me, would end up any other way. Any self-control flew out the window the second she asked me to take the handcuffs off her at Travis’s.
“For you, definitely,” she says, laughing again. I thank God she doesn’t wiggle her ass back. “You seem to get me to do things I normally don’t do.”
The irony of that sentence isn’t lost on me. She has flipped my world upside down and sideways, leaving permanent marks in its place. I’ve never given someone this much power over me. Given. I chuckle to myself. More like taken. I would do anything she asks of me. Except leave.
I thought I would never sing again. I hadn’t sung in over twelve years before I met Addison. Now I can’t seem to stop. I’ve always thought the words that come out of music impact us more than just saying them. I was always able to express my feelings through music. That was before though, when I had feelings. When my mom died, everything went numb. I didn’t want to feel the words, definitely didn’t want to express them.
I wanted revenge.
But the first sight of Addison’s gorgeous body and her hypnotic, Caribbean-blue eyes … fuck, I was goner. I can tell from her breathing that she has fallen asleep. I kiss her on the head and whisper, “I love you.” She softly moans and scoots closer to me. Wrapping my arms around her, I drift off to sleep dreaming of concerts and her perfect tits.