Full, pouting lips wrapped around my cock, and I buried my hand in her raven-black waves. Hair, soft as silk, slipped between my fingers, each lock in stark contrast to porcelain skin. Blue-green eyes looked up between thick lashes, desire visible in their ocean-like depths…

“Fuck me,” I muttered as I flopped down on the couch.

I wrote notes and lyrics, not prose, but that didn’t mean my imagination wasn’t vivid enough to make me hard. And my imagination had been working overtime from the moment I opened my door to see my PR rep giving me a look full of enough disdain that I probably would’ve felt ashamed if the alcohol flowing through my body had allowed me to give a damn.

I didn’t need a PR rep. I shouldn’t need one. Wasn’t everyone entitled to fuck up once in a while? I’d been in the music industry for nearly ten years, and all that time, I’d behaved myself. No scandals, no tabloid fodder beyond what the vultures made up. I showed up to things on time and always sober. I didn’t have temper tantrums or make outrageous requests. I worked my ass off, and still found time to do charity work. I had casual sex, but it was always safe and consensual.

The only part of my life before this that could have caused issues, I made sure I kept private. Being into BDSM wasn’t even really that shocking anymore. If I’d been a teacher or politician, the kind of guy parents wanted their children to emulate, sure, I’d understand. Even now, my sexual preferences wasn’t something I wanted advertised, but it wasn’t like I had some fucking morality clause in my contract that dictated what sort of sex I was allowed to like.

What had happened with Mitzi changed all of it. Everyone who’d gotten wind of the story had painted a sympathetic picture of me. At first.

Chester had made an agreement with Mitzi that I’d keep my mouth shut about certain aspects of the break-up if she did the same, but most fans figured out that Mitzi had cheated. I started losing sympathy points when my brooding over a beer or two became reclusive behavior with too much alcohol, especially when Mitzi seemed to be appropriately ashamed in public.

I understood that some poor choices over the weekend deserved head-shaking and finger-wagging, to use some of my mother’s favorite phrases, but I could have done a lot worse things than trash a hotel room during a consensual threesome and punch a senator’s son for making disparaging remarks about my dead father. The way I saw it, that incident was completely justified.

Okay, maybe I would’ve had a bit more self-control if I hadn’t been drunk. But that didn’t mean he deserved a punch any less.

I picked up my remote and turned on the TV, flipping through channels too fast to really see what was on. I wasn’t much of a TV or movie watcher. Sometimes something would catch my interest, but I preferred music and reading. I hadn’t been doing much of either recently though. Too much thought was involved in reading, and listening to music was a reminder of how little I’d written over the last six months.

I couldn’t even blame that one on the break-up. I knew that part of the reason the studio had less patience with me than they would have in the past had to do with the fact that they had to keep pushing back the release date of my next album because I hadn’t written anything beyond the first song. And that one was a steaming pile of bullshit.

I was still buzzed, walking a fine line between drunk and sober, but as everything piled up, reminding me of all the ways my life was fucked up at the moment, I wanted to get completely shit-faced. And why shouldn’t I? I was in my apartment. If I wanted to get black-out drunk, whose business was it but mine? After all the times I’d made the smart, responsible choices, I deserved a break from dealing with my life.

I was still wallowing in self-pity and lethargy when someone knocked on my door.

For a moment, I thought Paige had come back, that my attempt at being flirtatious and charming had actually worked and she would let me lose myself in her body for a few blissful hours.

But then I remembered how disgusted she’d looked by the time she left. Disgusted…and relieved.

“Reb, open up! I have a key, but if you make me walk in on you naked again, I swear I’ll take a picture and sell it to the highest bidder.”

Erik.

Great.

I forced myself up and to the door. When I opened it, I saw it wasn’t just Erik, but Jace and Alix too.

Even better.

“Come in,” I said, not even bothering to try to curb my annoyance. “Shouldn’t you all be living out your happily-ever-afters or whatever it is you do now?”

“Don’t be an ass, Reb,” Erik said mildly.

Sanders had been my college roommate at Columbia during the two years I’d gone there. I’d met his cousin one of the times Alix had come up to visit. The three of us had met Jace Randell at Gilded Cage, a club where people like us went to explore our desires without judgment.

These three were my closest friends, and in a lot of ways, they were closer to me than my own sisters. Each one was an artist of some kind. Jace was a painter slash sculptor. Alix, a photographer. Erik was the writer of the group. The four of us understood what it meant to think and create differently than most. If I told them that I was struggling with my music, they’d immediately know that it meant more than simply an issue with work. Because they’d all been there too.

Not now though, I remembered as I caught a glimpse of the ring on Alix’s left hand. All three of them hadn’t just found the loves of their lives recently, but also their muses. All of them were creating bigger and better things than they had before they’d met their soulmates.

Erik’s newest book was flying off the shelves, and everyone wanted to know the real identity of Erika Summers. Being around him and his girlfriend, Tanya, was like having a front-row seat to the sappiest romantic comedy in the world.

Jace and his ‘true love,’ Savannah Birch, had another of those sickeningly sweet relationships, complete with overcoming odds. She’d woken up something in him, in his art, that I’d never seen before. His most recent show had been fantastic.

Then there was Alix. He’d just married his muse, Sine McNiven, even though she’d left him for more than a month without a word about where she’d gone or why she’d left. He hadn’t been able to work the entire time she’d been gone, and the two of us had commiserated over our artistic block and the women responsible for them. Then she’d come back from Ireland, announced she was pregnant, and now the two of them were planning their nursery.

I was happy for them. Granted, the odds weren’t exactly in their favor when it came to long-term happiness. If they didn’t crash and burn like most couples, then chances were they’d end up like my parents, with one outliving the other, always aware of that aching, bleeding emptiness where their other half had been. I hoped that my friends would make it work, that they’d build something lasting that wouldn’t get their hearts broken in the end.

But I wasn’t going to hold my breath.

“You look like shit,” Jace said as the guys followed me back into my living room. “And so does your place. Don’t you have a cleaning service?”

I shrugged and sat back down. “I canceled it for a while. Didn’t want anyone bugging me.”

“I figured that staying at a hotel would manage that,” Alix said as he disappeared into the kitchen.

“You guys have been listening to the news.” I made it a statement rather than a question.

“Is it wrong?” Erik asked, his expression serious. “Are they exaggerating?”

I reached for one of the beers Alix brought out, but he handed it to Erik instead. I glared at him, but answered Erik’s question, “Depends on who’s telling the story.”

“You really punched Senator Mitchell’s son in the middle of a fundraiser?” Alix chuckled.

Less than a month ago, Alix had been devastated, barely sleeping, drinking too much, and now he was laughing. He’d been as pathetic as I was, and I hadn’t even loved Mitzi.

The revelation made me frown. I’d never actually stopped to think about it, but it was the truth. She’d been my first serious girlfriend, the only serious one, and we’d been together for ten months before the shit hit the fan.

But I didn’t love her. I hadn’t ever loved her.

Which meant I couldn’t blame a broken heart for what I’d been doing.

Shit.

Before I could become too introspective, Alix spoke, “Look, I’m not going to bust your balls. I’ve been there. But if you miss my show this weekend, or you come in wasted, I’m going to kick your ass.”

I didn’t need to look at him to know he was serious. I nodded slowly. “Fair enough.”

Erik leaned forward. “All right, Reb, let’s cut the shit. This has been going on long enough. You need to get your act together.”

I stared at him for a moment before laughing. “Come on. I watched all three of you do your own downward spirals after you had women problems. I was there for you and didn’t tell you what to do.”

“That’s true,” Jace said.

“But we didn’t carry on for three months, cause random destruction of property, and commit an assault,” Alix pointed out.

“Also true,” Jace added.

Rather than snapping at them like I wanted to, telling them that they didn’t get it because they’d all found what they’d been looking for, I flipped them off. “I think, after a lifetime of being the guy who always does the right thing I’ve earned the right to a couple mistakes.”

I didn’t see them look at each other, but I felt it. I knew they were trying to figure out how far to push because I’d been on their side of things, needing to decide what to say and how to say it.

“You guys don’t have to worry,” I said, swiping Alix’s drink. “Chester got me a PR rep.”

“Seriously?” Erik said, his expression incredulous. “That’s his solution for all of this?”

I glanced at him. “He trusts me to deal with my shit on my own. Paige’s job is to fix my image.”

There was a moment of silence, and then Jace asked, “Your PR rep’s name is Paige?”

The tension in the air eased. “That it is,” I said. “And she’s hot. A pain in the ass, but what a fine ass.”

As my friends laughed and started talking about their significant others, I let my thoughts turn to my hot PR rep and that fine ass of hers.