Chapter One
Jonathan
Oppressive silence greets me as I walk into my empty apartment. My ears still ring from tonight’s show. The first of many to come.
I started my first official North American tour as a solo artist at the El Rey Theatre, and it was sold out. The audience was on their feet almost the entire time, and they ate up everything I gave them like they were starving for my music.
My music, this time, not something someone else wrote. My words, my melodies, my feelings. That Gabby helped craft into something showstopping. There were moments of transcendence on that stage tonight. And Gabby had to miss it.
The exhilaration of performing, of doing what I know I was always meant to do, is tempered by her absence.
I wish she were here.
That’s the overwhelming thought that’s followed me every day since she left. I carry her absence with me like a physical thing, an ever-present accessory for my wardrobe. It’s been just over two weeks since I took her to the airport to fly back to Texas to be with her parents before school started again. She moved into her dorm today. She texted me pictures of her room this afternoon, but we haven’t had a chance to talk. I’ve been busy all day with the soundcheck and show prep and then the actual concert.
The concert tonight blew my mind. I haven’t felt as amazing as I did on stage in so long, maybe not ever. With Brash it was different. Colt was the front man, and I played guitar and sang backup vocals. Now it’s all me. And I had the audience eating out of the palm of my hand.
This is the start of the prerelease concerts to push sales of my album, which drops in a month. I’m spiraling out from LA—playing in San Diego, San Jose, and San Francisco—before heading farther north. The lead single went out last week, and it’s already topping the Billboard charts. Not only was tonight’s show sold out, but so are the ones for the next month. The tour manager and booking agent are scrambling to find bigger venues in some of the cities or adding additional shows where only smaller venues are available.
It’s crazy.
And being here, alone, makes it all even more surreal.
Everyone thinks that life as a musician is full of glamour and prestige. But the reality is that more often than not you end up alone in an apartment or a hotel room, crashing hard off the adrenaline rush.
Making my way through my apartment, I drop my keys on the breakfast bar in the kitchen, softly humming through the chorus of “Everything” to keep my cords from seizing up as I switch on the electric kettle to make a cup of chamomile tea. After the show I barely had time to gulp down room-temperature water before getting ushered into the post-show meet and greets that are part of the premium VIP tickets. Concert days are a whirlwind of preshow soundchecks, meetings with the press, the concert itself—which always feels like it’s over in a heartbeat—and then meeting fans after the show. The VIP ticket holders tonight were an interesting mix of twenty-somethings and teenagers—fans from my days with Brash as well as new ones who discovered me when that video went viral last year. They seem to be representative of my entire fan base if the wider audience on social media is anything to go by.
But the only one I want to see, want to talk to, is Gabby. Once the water reaches boiling, I switch off the kettle, pour the water over the tea bag, and carry it, the honey, and a spoon into my room. I’m impatient and don’t want to wait for it to finish steeping before I call Gabby. Setting it all on my desk, I pull up Skype and click on her icon.
In seconds, her smiling face fills the screen, and a wave of warmth washes over me. “Hey!” The picture jostles, and I know she’s carrying her laptop to her bed so she can talk to me and be comfortable. “How’d your show go tonight?” She sits cross-legged, her elbows propped on her knees as her eyes scan the screen, eating up my picture the same way I’m eating up hers.
“Good. Great. It was …” I search for the right words. It was amazing and surreal and insane and awful. Because she wasn’t there to see it, to hear it, to share it with me. “It was really good.”
She snorts at my inept description. “Weren’t you an English major? Shouldn’t you be better at painting a picture with words?” But before I can answer, she shakes her head and gives me a wistful smile. “I wish I could’ve been there.”
“Me too.” I force a crooked smile in return. “I doubt your professors would count it as one of the concerts you’re required to see this semester, though.”
She laughs at that, a genuine laugh, and my smile becomes more real. Even though we talk every night, I miss hearing her laugh in person. Video chats and phone calls aren’t the same. Propping her face on her hand, her eyes flick to the camera and back to the screen. “Talk to me, though. Tell me more. You have to have something to say about the show besides just ‘good.’”
Settling back in my chair, I tell her everything—the two hundred or so pictures I took with fans before the show while signing everything from magazine covers to cleavage. Gabby’s eyes narrow at that one, and that little flicker of jealousy makes me happier than it should. “Don’t worry, Gabby. Your cleavage is much better.”
She snorts, sitting up and pushing her breasts together with her arms. “Yeah, my barely B cups don’t really count as cleavage.”
My eyes are glued to her breasts, framed in the neck of her berry-colored tank top, and I don’t register what I’m saying.
“What?” She sounds surprised and almost irritated.
“What?” I’m confused.
“Did you just agree with me?”
“Did I?”
She stops squishing her boobs together, staring at me with pursed lips and an arched eyebrow. “You said, ‘Mmhmm.’”
Wiping a hand over my face, I give her my most serious look. “Gabby, your boobs were filling my screen. I’m not responsible for anything that comes out of my mouth when that happens.”
She laughs again, her brief annoyance mollified by my honesty. “Well, good. I don’t like you looking at anyone else’s cleavage.”
“I don’t want to look at anyone else’s cleavage.” I lean closer to my screen, my eyes staring straight into the camera. “If you want to give me a closer look at yours, I wouldn’t object.”
Her laugh this time is tinged with nerves. “You want me to take my top off?”
“You have your own bedroom this year, right? With a shared space in the middle. So Lauren shouldn’t interrupt …”
She bites her lip, her cheeks turning a little pink. “Hang on,” she says, then the picture jostles again, and I’m left staring at the shadows on the wall behind her headboard. The microphone picks up ambient noises of her moving around, but I’m not quite sure what she’s doing.
Then she’s back, more jostling, a close up of her face as she scoots the computer farther down the bed, and when she straightens I can see her from the waist up. Biting her lip again, she crosses her arms at her waist and strips off her tank top in one quick motion, and I’m staring at her in a little red lace bra, the kind that closes in the front. My favorite kind.
I let out a groan as blood rushes south. “God, I wish you were here with me.”
“Oh yeah? What would you do if I were?” Her cheeks are still pink, but the nervous lip biting is gone, replaced by Gabby’s sultry, sexy voice.
“I’d tease your nipples through the lace while I kissed you, then undo that front clasp and push the lace out of the way so I could suck on them.”
My breath catches when her hands cup her breasts, and she rubs her thumbs back and forth over her nipples. “Like this?”
“Fuck yes,” I breathe. My sweet, innocent Gabby from a year ago is gone, replaced by this vixen.
I sit back in my chair, needing more room in my pants for my now rock-hard dick as I watch her undo the clasp and peel the lace away from her breasts. “Jesus, Gabby.” Her perfect pink nipples are hard, and my mouth waters, wanting to taste them. “I miss you so fucking much.”
“Me too. I wish you were here touching me. It’s so much better than touching myself.”
I groan again, needing to touch myself now. I squeeze my dick through my jeans, wishing it was her hand. “I wish I were touching you too.”
“Are you touching yourself?” Her voice is breathless, her lids heavy, her lips glossy.
“Yes,” I grit out, my hands undoing the button and fly on my pants. I can’t take watching her tweak her own nipples without some kind of relief.
“Let me see.”
“Oh God.” I have a desktop, so I can’t tilt the camera. Standing, I shove my jeans and boxers down past my hips, running my hand over myself, letting her watch.
This is a first for us. While she was at her parents’ house she didn’t feel comfortable doing anything like this. We had phone sex late one night after her parents had gone to bed. But she was scared of being overheard, so it ended up being a one-time thing.
But this—her eyes avid as she watches me stroke my hard cock—this is so fucking hot. Amped up on adrenaline from the show and coming down fast off that high alone in my house, this kind of release is what I need. The only thing better would be if it were her hand, her mouth, her everything, here, in person instead of a thousand miles away. But I’ll take what I can get.
“I want to watch you too,” I pant. “Let me see you touch yourself.”
She bites her lip again, but leans back, her hands sliding under the waistband of the cotton shorts she sleeps in when she’s not with me.
“No.” I stop stroking myself, giving the head a squeeze. “No, not like that. Take off your shorts. Let me see you.”
She hesitates a second, then the bouncing of her bed jostles the picture again, but when it settles, she’s back on the bed, naked, spreading her legs for me.
“Jesus.” My hand starts working my cock again as her fingers slide down her torso, gathering the wetness glistening between her legs and rubbing circles over her clit. She starts slow, but I know she’s as turned on as I am. Soon her fingers start to speed up, and my own speed matches hers.
She has one hand clamped over her mouth, muffling her sounds and the way she always starts saying, “Oh my God,” when she gets close. Her hips arch into her hand, and she clamps her legs together over her fingers, her muscles twitching in the aftermath of her orgasm.
Watching her come, listening to her whimpers of pleasure, has my balls drawing up tight, that tingle starting at the base of my spine and shooting outward as my own release spills over my hand. “Jesus.”
I can’t see much of Gabby because her leg mostly blocks the camera. She hasn’t moved since she came, and I wish she were collapsed on top of me instead—our skin stuck together, her breasts pushing into my chest, her head on my shoulder, her hair spread around us. God, I miss her.
While video sex with her has satisfied one need, it’s opened a whole new depth of aching desire for her. Not just sex, but connection. Our connection, the way we move and operate on the same wavelength when we’re together, sharing the same space, the same air. This is a paltry substitute.
“Are you there, Gabby?”
She stirs as I strip off my shirt, cleaning myself up with it and tossing it to the side. Her cheeks are pink as her face fills the screen again, and she presses her hands to them.
“I can’t believe we did that,” she whispers to the camera.
The look on her face makes me want to cup her cheek, but I can’t. Clenching my hand into a fist at my side, I force a lopsided grin. “It was fucking hot. Thank you.”
She bites her lip. “You’re welcome. Did you um … finish?”
Chuckling, I nod. “Yes. How could I not with that kind of show?”
Her cheeks turn more pink, and the fact that she’s blushing about this is so damn cute.
She props her head in her hand, her eyes looking over the screen, and she sighs. “October seems like ages away.”
“I know. But I have good news on that front.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.” I smile at her face on the screen. “Someone had to pull out of the Tinnabulation Festival in Spokane. They want me to fill the hole in the lineup.”
Gabby’s eyes go wide, and her hand drops to the bed. “I heard something about that on the radio. It’s soon, right? When is it?”
“I’d play on September ninth.”
She props herself up almost all the way so I can see her breasts again, her nipples now soft. The picture bumps as she adjusts her position on the bed. “That’s in like two weeks!”
“I know.” I can’t wipe the smile on my face.
“Oh my God! I’m so excited!” She does a little dance that sets her computer bouncing on her bed again, making it so she’s nothing but a blur. When she settles down, her face fills the camera again, her smile as wide as mine. “When did you find out? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I just found out yesterday. I was waiting to tell you on our video chat because I wanted to see your face. My tour manager is still working out all the details. We’ll have to move one of my other shows that was supposed to be here. But it’s pretty much a done deal.”
“Yay,” she says softly, clapping her hands. “That makes me so happy. The thought of two months without seeing you was like torture. Now we’ll only be apart for a month between visits. It still sucks, but it’s a lot sooner. How long will you be here?”
I scratch my chin, thinking about that. “I’m not sure. A couple days at least. I’ll let you know when the plans are finalized. But at the very least I’ll be there two nights. You’ll come stay in the hotel with me.” I make it a statement, but I’m happy when she nods her agreement.
“Of course. If you didn’t insist, I would. I can’t wait to see you.”
“I can’t wait to see you either.”
She gives me another wistful smile, then her eyes go to the camera so it looks like she’s looking right at me. “We didn’t get to finish talking about your show tonight. Tell me the rest. You signed cleavage, but mine’s better, and then? How was the performance? Was the crowd excited or dead? How full was it?” She makes gimme motions with her hands. “I need details, dude.”
That provokes a laugh from me. “The crowd was great. Even though my lead single just came out like a week ago, people were already singing along with it. And the reaction to ‘Everything’ … It was like they were captivated. Everyone was quiet, still. It was almost like being at a recital with you, except they went crazy, clapping and screaming and cheering, when I was done. It was amazing.”
“You’re amazing,” she says.
“You make me amazing. I wouldn’t be where I am without you.”
She drops her eyes, but doesn’t contradict me. It’s true, and she knows it, even if it makes her uncomfortable for me to say so. We chat for a few minutes longer, but she’s yawning, and exhaustion drags at me as well. Coming down from a show happens in stages. The initial adrenaline has burned off, and now I’m left with the crash.
“Get some rest, Gabby. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
She yawns again, so wide I can practically see her tonsils. “Okay. You too. I love you.”
“Love you too.”
I wait for her to end the call before getting up and discarding the forgotten chamomile tea, the tea bag still sitting in the tepid water. Even though all I want is to crawl into bed, I make a new cup, knowing my throat needs the soothing warmth and honey to recover from tonight. This time, I steep it for a few minutes, add honey and stir in an ice cube so I can gulp it down before taking a quick shower.
But I toss and turn when I get into bed, unable to get comfortable on my top-of-the-line mattress. It’s too empty. Too cold without Gabby.