Uncomfortably close, intolerably far away.
That’s how I felt about staying at my parents’ house. Stardust and I would sleep in my old room. I didn’t believe in sentimental shit. Not usually. I was too hardened by life, circumstances, and the very people I shared a roof with. But there was no point pretending it wasn’t a little monumental. To have a girl in my room. A girl whom I’d given a black eye to—by accident, sure, but fuck it, it looked so bad, more so since it was tainting her beautiful, olive skin—a girl who was willing to sleep at a strangers’ house for me, without batting an eyelash.
When Indie went to take a shower, I was still watching the paparazzi swarming under my window. One raised his head and spotted me, and I flipped him the finger. He immediately raised his camera and took a slew of pictures of me, his mates following suit. I shut the holey, twenty-year-old curtain before they got any good shots. Stardust walked in with a towel wrapped around her body. Her hair was wet, clustered into little snakes, dripping water onto the beige carpet. She wiped her chin with the hem of the towel and stared at me, her bottomless blues not dimmed, even by the black eye I’d given her.
“Hey, you.” She attempted a smile.
I hated that she was the perfect combination between sweet and tough, because it made letting her go less easy. And letting her go was not fucking optional. I had Fallon to recollect—to punish her for what she’d done—plus, even if Fallon hadn’t been in the picture, Stardust was simply too good. Once we went back to the real world—where days and the weather and family mattered, the world outside this tour—it’d be very easy for her to walk away. And walk away she would, because I was a fuck-up, an addict, and I’d screwed up everything with her before it even started.
I’d given her a black eye, for fuck’s sake.
Instead of answering her with words, I walked over to her—towering over her tininess and liking us even more for it—and shut the door behind her back. She looked up; I looked down. I laced our fingers together; she didn’t resist. I’d fucked Stardust many times, in many places. I’d fucked her hard, and then rough, and then lazily, all while shoving my fingers in places that made her eyes widen. But when the towel fell off and pooled at her feet, her freckled, tan skin and toned body bared in front of me, I didn’t want to destroy her like I had all those times in London.
My hands on her neck. Gentle.
She flinched at the memory of how I’d held my dad, but melted when I put my lips to her forehead and backed her to the single bed.
“We’ll need to spoon, you know.” She grinned, catching my lower lip between her fat, juicy ones and sucking. “Bed’s too small.”
“I don’t do spooning. We’ll be forking instead.”
“What’s forking?” Her hoarse giggle poured into my mouth, skating right into my dick, making it salute between her thighs.
“It’s porking, but with an F that stands for fuc—”
“Crude alert!” She shut me up with a kiss that was far dirtier than my words.
We tumbled into the bed, and I let her strip me, slowly, the way she’d always wanted to strip me a minute before I kicked my shoes and tore my clothes so I could drive into her like a sledgehammer. She lay down on my childhood bed, and I hovered over her. A demon, destructive and undeserving. Yet still there, despite everything.
“We need to keep it quiet. Your parents might hear us,” she whispered.
I pinned her arms above her head and buried my face in her luscious hair. “I don’t give a fuck about my parents.”
“Well, I do.”
She did. She gave a fuck about everyone. Every Tom, Harry, and Louisa. And I needed to start respecting that, even if I didn’t respect them.
I grinded myself on her, bare, feeling her damp, clean flesh against mine. Her skin was gold, her hair silver-blue. Her eyes—her fucking eyes—a dark spell enveloped in a sweet girl who brought so much light into my miserable life. I pushed between her thighs, fumbling for the condom and unwrapping it with my teeth. The scent of latex attacked my nostrils, but not even that took away from the moment. The sheer moment of elation. Of having her, submissive and mine—so utterly and entirely at my mercy—despite her promise to me, and to herself, that we would never sleep together.
I felt like a flower that had just endured weeks of hail and rain, finally feeling the soft kiss of the sun, and knowing that somehow, someway, things would be all right. Maybe not tomorrow, and certainly not today, but they would.
I drove into her and closed my eyes, plastering my forehead to hers. She felt so good, so tight, so fucking wet. I moved slowly, allowing her a second or two to adjust. Our eyes were eloquent, our expressions self-explanatory. Hers were the ocean. Mine were the earth. She moaned when I thrust into her, slowly and deeply, biting that lower lip.
“I don’t want to fall in love with you,” she croaked. It wasn’t a statement as much as it was a plea.
I thrust deeper, my forehead wrinkling in concentration as my balls tightened.
“You don’t seem to have much choice,” I answered.
She moaned louder, looking away from me, at the wall, at The Cure, at Robert Smith, hung above us on a wrinkled poster, eyeliner, lipstick, and ridiculous hair galore.
After a few minutes, she began to rock into me while I poured into her.
This wasn’t fucking. This was something else entirely, and if I were a good man—if I were halfway decent, even—I’d stop, flip her over, drive into her from behind, and make sure to bang her head on the headboard for good measure. But I wasn’t a good man, so I let her fall in love with me in that moment, because she was the only person who took my loneliness away.
“I’m coming,” she said, sinking her short, square nails into my back. I liked her nails. They were the epitome of her. Chipped and clean, always coated with a funky color. “I’m coming so…so…hard.”
I felt it, too. In my body. In my balls. In my veins. The release wasn’t immediate. Like our sex, it trickled down gradually, from my neck, down my spine, feeling my muscles spasm and slack as she quivered and tightened around me. Robert Smith and Morrissey watched silently as I did to Stardust what they had taught me.
I put her under my spell, to make sure she was mine.
Scribbling onto her the notes only I could play.
Now that Tania was gone, Stardust was my main instrument.
And it saddened me, because I knew I had to break her, too.