Gina

I let him peel the hoodie off me once he’d put me down.

This was after he carried me up his stairs.

Three flights of them.

And he wasn’t even breathing heavily.

I knew that was a testament to his strength and fitness and not my lack of heaviness, despite what he said.

I had hard, photographic evidence to the contrary. And photos didn’t lie.

His eyes roved over me in the tight cami and boy shorts I’d yanked the hoodie over top of. I wished I was wearing a ski suit, regardless of the fire, the desire that was all over his face.

“Turn around,” he ordered, voice thick.

He’d deposited me not on the bed, as his dark eyes and his previous intention had led me to believe, but on my feet at the end of it.

Because he had magic sex wizard powers, his voice and the erotic command behind it had me forgetting about everything else but obeying.

When I turned around, I understood why he hadn’t put me on the bed.

I tried to turn, to shrink away, Sam’s body and firm hands stopped me.

“Sam,” I protested, looking anywhere but the reflection the floor-to-ceiling mirror in front of me was presenting me with.

“No,” he growled. “I need you to look. To see. Not the lies that you’ve been telling yourself for too long. What bitter and ugly people have been telling you. You need to see yourself for what you are.”

“I see myself, Sam,” I gritted, focusing on the mirror. But not my reflection, on Sam’s eyes.

“No you fuckin’ don’t,” he growled. “Look,” he demanded.

His hands went to the bottom of my cami, purposefully, slowly, showing his intention. His worship.

My entire body was stiff as he peeled it upward, exposing my bare skin.

“Watch,” he ordered again.

The cami fluttered to the floor and I was standing there in my black cotton bra and black cotton boy shorts.

Sam’s muscled arms contrasted the undefined skin of my stomach. He trailed his finger along it. I watched, even though I was still replaying those words in my mind, I was also letting another part of me respond to Sam’s touch, letting it loosen my emotional muscles.

“Feel,” he demanded. He kissed my neck. “Feel what you do to me.”

He pressed himself against me and the hardness of his arousal did so too. “Ever since I saw you, once I stopped being blind to my own bullshit, this was my reaction. Before I knew how fuckin’ beautiful you were on the inside, I was awed by how beautiful you were on the outside.”

He kissed along my shoulder, hand going to my bra strap and pushing it down. Then he did the same on the other side.

“There is not one thing that I would change about you. Not one thing.” He paused as his hands trailed up my back and then unfastened my bra so it tumbled to the ground with my cami, my hardened nipples exposed to the air. To Sam’s hungry gaze.

My breasts were immediately covered with two tattooed hands, kneading them. “Most beautiful fuckin’ tits I’ve ever seen,” he rasped in my ear. My entire body shivered with need. “Ever tasted.”

I sucked in a ragged breath as he trailed his lips up the side of my neck, grazing my skin with his teeth. And I watched him do so. Watched him worship me.

His eyes met mine in the mirror, wicked with desire.

The cold air bit at my nipples once more as his hands left them and went downward.

I watched their journey, felt it, my body humming with expectation.

He watched his own hands as they hooked into the top of my panties and rolled them down.

His lips left my neck as he lowered himself.

I should’ve felt self-conscious when his lips met my bare cheeks, when the lights were exposing every sin, every bite, every imperfection. But I was too far gone for that.

Before I knew it, I was stepping out of my panties and Sam had left a trail of kisses down the backs of my legs and was now literally kneeling in front of me.

His eyes ate me up, right there. I’d never been more exposed, naked, both physically and emotionally, to anyone. Ever.

“Most beautiful fuckin’ pussy I’ve ever seen,” he mumbled, voice thick, almost unrecognizable. His fingers trailed the insides of my thighs, danced atop the sensitive skin, but missed the important places.

It was torture.

Exquisite torture.

He leaned forward, not hesitating, not pausing, and then he was there. Right there, kissing the most important place with practiced expertise. I would’ve collapsed right then and there if he hadn’t gripped my hip to help keep me up.

He gazed up at me in wonder.

In wonder.

There was no other way to describe it, the way he was looking at me.

“Sweetest fuckin’ pussy I’ve ever tasted,” he said.

His mouth wasn’t even on me, but I almost came from that sentence alone.

Then his mouth was there again. Bringing me to the precipice. Right there, dangling on the edge of the most orgasm I’d ever had. Anyone had ever had.

Then he stopped and I almost screamed in frustration.

He grinned up at me, eyes wild.

Then he was up, kissing me, my taste intermingling with his own.

“No, babe, you’re gonna come around my dick. You’re gonna come watching this. Watching us. Watching the beauty.”

He’d yanked his shirt off at some point, so when he went behind me, his bare skin brushed against mine.

He flattened his palm on my lower back, putting gentle pressure on it to bend me forward.

“Brace yourself on the glass,” he ordered.

I did as I was told.

“Good girl,” he hissed. “Now you watch. You watch every fuckin’ second.”

I heard the crackle of his zipper lower as he freed himself, his eyes never leaving mine in the mirror.

Then he was inside.

I cried out, squeezing my eyes closed on reflex.

He stopped. “Watch,” he growled.

My eyes opened immediately, taking in the cords in his neck as he practiced extreme restraint in not moving.

The second my eyes met his, he moved.

And I watched.

And he was right.

It was beautiful. Magnificent.

And I forgot everything.

During.

Pity about the after.

* * *

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I swear I thought you ran away and joined the circus without me. And I was about to get so mad.”

The voice, penetrating the velvet silence that goes with the inky blackness of the witching hour, shocked me into sloshing my thankfully lukewarm tea all over myself. The strangled scream that communicated my fright cemented my mortification. And it wasn’t even a soft girly scream. No, one might go so far as to call it a grunt.

So while I was grunting and spilling tea and cursing myself for not screaming more attractively, the owner of the voice had traversed the shadowy landscape to come and stand right in front of me.

Like right in front of me.

I’d snuck out of bed, out of the grip of Sam’s sleeping body, to come down to the living room, which offered floor-to-ceiling views of the twinkling beyond.

Now the twinkling beyond harbored no temptation.

Regardless of the dim moonlight casting him in shadow, I could see every inch of him. His tattoos, the silver glint of his jewelry, his washboard abs. I knew he was topless; one didn’t need the gift of sight to know when a half-naked rock god was standing in front of them.

Girls sensed that kind of thing.

It was imprinted into our DNA.

That and the ability to sense the last Twinkie in the house on the first day of PMS.

The dead of night did an interesting thing to the human mind. Somehow that inky blanket of night, the silence that echoed throughout the stillness, it all created the environment in which to engage in self-reflection or self-inspection that wasn’t possible in the light. Because monsters—hide-under-your-bed, eat-your-children type of monsters—resided in the night.

All those children’s books got it half right. They did exist in the night, but not outward in a closet, or slinking in a window, or creeping out from under your bed. No, they exist inside your head, and that midnight chime is when we see them. And in that environment, inspecting your monsters, fighting them, having tea with them, another thing happens. You either feel incredibly lonely with only you and your demons, or you feel comforted that someone else and their own demons are battling the night too.

I had always been the former.

Even when I was with Simon. Which should’ve been my earliest warning sign, really. The worst thing isn’t having no one in the night, it’s someone who makes you feel more alone than you have before, even in your deepest moments of solitude.

Being alone is, by definition, a solitary endeavor, but one where ultimately another human serves as the catalyst. For you wouldn’t recognize being alone if you didn’t have someone to make you feel that way, whether they leave or make you stay with them, make you watch yourself disappear. That was alone. Someone who made you feel alone.

So yeah, I’d always been the former, the solo battler. Which was, at least in part, a reason for my love of books. Because not only did they distract me from my own demons, but they showed me how to fight them.

It’s much easier, preferable even, to witness the heartbreak of others instead of facing your own. That’s the ugliness of society. The best of us try to trick ourselves into thinking we’re selfless and we care about suffering. The better of us might even do something about it.

Or try to.

But it’s the worst of us, or maybe just the human in us, who admit it in that dark little place where the voices whisper and echo with unsaid words and unuttered rage.

Witnessing someone else’s suffering is painful. It can be shattering.

But it’s not as soul-destroying as looking in the mirror. And really looking. Beyond the nose that is just a little too small, the eyes that are a little too big. The extra pounds, the stretch marks, the dimpled skin.

Beyond all of that, it’s the heartbreak.

Those of us who can, we heal it. But like a bone that wasn’t set right, it’s never the same. It aches in the cold, lonely hours where the barriers of the mind are lowered enough.

Those of us who can’t heal, those of us who aren’t just broken bones but scattered ash, we hide it.

And then most of us try to bury ourselves in other sadness. Like me with books. They took me on adventures, sure, made me think for a split second that magic could be real. Empowered me with strong female characters. Took me into a dream with love so impossibly perfect it could only ever live in the pages of a book.

But most importantly it showed me suffering. Presented me with other people’s suffering. Not just the fictional characters I’d come to nurture and love like friends, but the person who sat and agonized over such words on paper.

Because no author conjures heartbreak out of nowhere. They can call up mystical dragons, witches, monsters of all the fantastical and supernatural varieties, merely from the made-up part of the brain.

But ones that write suffering, heartbreak so real you can almost taste the tears in your mind, that’s not something even the most imaginative of minds can conjure.

Pain cannot be reproduced.

It had to be felt, reimagined, rewritten in all its ugly splendor for someone else to experience. Mostly it’s a suffering so bad that you know the author had no choice but to externalize it should they go mad with only sharing it with themselves and the demons of the soul.

That’s my ultimate escape.

My ultimate comfort.

Because knowing someone felt something so profoundly devastating, yet managed to finish the book, that makes me want to finish mine. And continue to hide my ashes.

I was so sick of hiding it.

So in the dead of the night, in the darkness, I decided to finally reveal it.

“I’m worried,” I whispered, not looking at him, I couldn’t, not then.

He settled in beside me, seeming to sense that it was not the time to touch me. “You’re staring out into the nothingness in the middle of the night, baby. I’m getting that you’re worried.”

A long silence descended between us.

“A worry shared is a worry halved. Or doubled, depending on whether it’s gonna make me worry too. Even if it does, I’d rather know,” he said finally.

I smiled around my melancholy. “I’m worried that we don’t… fit. That I don’t fit here, that I’m not cut out for the loud and fast life. You don’t fit there either. In my little life. I didn’t really even fit, but you certainly don’t. You’re not made for that.”

I blurted it all out in a rush, still staring at the twinkling lights of the city.

Then Sam did touch me, turning me so those lights illuminated him just enough to see the expression on his face. He framed mine with his hands.

“I’m not here to fit neatly into your life, Gina,” he said. “I don’t do neat. I’m here to teach you that life isn’t neat. Not the way I live it.” His eyes danced with demons. “But getting messy is what life’s all about. What love’s all about.”

“Is it?” I whispered.

“Yeah,” he whispered back. “It is. There’s the good kind and then there’s the bad kind. I’ve had both. And the worst thing about the bad? It tricks you into thinking it’s good,” he uttered, his words the introduction to something the inky darkness had invited him to reveal. “Addiction is interesting,” he said, smile still firmly on his face. But he wasn’t smiling, not really. I’d come to be able to recognize that. That outside smile that he used to trick the world—and more importantly, himself—that he was okay.

I knew he wasn’t. And I had a sinking feeling that I knew where this was going.

“Yeah, it’s interesting. And great for publicity.” He gave me a look.

“But only after you’re dead, mind you. Most bands only really cemented themselves in the rock ’n’ roll hall of fame when at least one of their members ODed, killed themselves, silenced the music in their own head. That’s what drugs were, to me at least. But a kind of loud silence, you know? Not peaceful. Cocaine doesn’t exactly give you peace.” He laughed, shaking his head and rubbing at the stubble on his chin. “No, it speeds everything up. Makes it clearer and blurs it beyond recognition. And I don’t know how it really grasped me in its hold, but it had to, at least one of us. Have you ever heard of a successful band without at least one drug addiction?” He shook his head again. “So I took one for the team, so to speak.”

I blinked at him, shocked and saddened at the same time. Sure, he’d jokingly mentioned recreational drug use. And although that shocked the little bookish and naive me, I hadn’t exactly been surprised, per se. He was right, that world came with a side of cocaine like mine came with a side of Earl Grey. So I’d accepted it. Didn’t approve, or really even understand, but a foreign part of me kind of got it.

Everyone was just trying to get through life, fighting their own battles. Who was I to judge the weapons they used when they felt like they were backed into a corner?

Despite that, there was a little part of me that was disappointed. Not in Sam exactly, but this whole wretched world that was his dream and nightmare at the same time.

“But—”

He held up his hand to silence me, though not unkindly.

“Yeah, it wasn’t published. Anywhere.” He read my mind.

Because that’s exactly what I’d been about to ask. Despite myself, over the years, I had bought those glossy trash magazines if Sam was on the front. Torturing myself with the stick-thin and beautiful models on his arms, the smiles on his face and the utter adoration of everyone who was close enough to be in his orbit.

Those images had hurt. A lot. But I didn’t buy the magazines as a form of emotional self-harm. Well, not entirely, at least. I’d bought them so I could follow his success and watch him with a painful happiness. The kind of happiness I felt for Lexie, but a lot more complicated. I’d always known they’d all deserved to catapult out of their lives and go to something great. Because of their talent, obviously. But also because all of them, in their own way, needed it. Because their lives were not suited to anything else.

But talent and deserving something more than you were given doesn’t guarantee that you get more. Usually it was exactly the opposite. The world liked to play with the people who deserved the smoothest roads by giving them more potholes than any asshole ever got.

Like Simon. His road had been as smooth as freshly laid asphalt.

But Sam’s hadn’t, by a long stretch.

So I’d reveled in life finally giving him smooth.

Or I’d reveled in the appearance of it. Apparently nothing was smooth beneath the surface.

He regarded me, cautiously, pensively, as if he were midway through an attempt to read my mind. Then he abandoned that endeavor to continue with his story. “Drug addictions may have been good for publicity after the fact, but Unquiet Mind has never been and never will be about publicity stunts. About broadcasting our skeletons and parading them out of our closets for a quick buck, a quicker fifteen minutes.” He paused, a skip in his words signifying the interruption of his stream of consciousness with a memory. “Well, apart from the unavoidable.” I knew he was talking about the stalker incident with Lexie. That was burned into public consciousness for sure; it shook up the world for a long while. And for a world with the memory of a goldfish, a long while was significant. But even for something like that, collective memory had a timestamp. The next tragedy, the next scandal was shiny and new.

Not for those in the inner circle. I knew that. Because even I, who existed in the shadows beyond that circle, still felt the chill from that memory.

“Sure, Wyatt and I were always in the rags for stupid shit,” Sam continued, still watching me, smile now just another memory. Well maybe for the world, but not for me. I stored it away on my shelves for later inspection so I could recognize it next time.

“Parties, girls, fast cars, fights,” he listed the qualities he and Wyatt were known for. “The odd international incident.” He grinned again, mischievously. That one had a twinkle of authenticity in it. “But all of that was a performance. For the cameras, sure, maybe. Or maybe they just happened to be there while we were putting on a show for ourselves. Trying to trick ourselves that this was going to sustain us.” He shook his head, then leaned forward to lightly trace circles over my skin.

The places he touched exploded in light and pleasing prickles of sensation.

“It didn’t take long for that performance to become flimsy. Paper thin,” he said, no longer looking at me but concentrating on his fingers journey around my skin. “I couldn’t have that. I didn’t need to see behind the curtain, so I looked for something to rebuild that shit. Or distract me. Or to make me move so fast I didn’t recognize, didn’t fucking care about what life I was living.” He circled my hands with his and squeezed tightly.

Such a gesture was usually used to support the other person. But the way he did it, the expression on his face, made it apparent that he was clutching me for something. So he didn’t drift away into whatever shark-filled waters he was currently wading in.

“So I did it for a while. Hid it for a longer while.” He met my eyes then, trouble swimming in his. Strength too. And truth.

Tears prickled at the corners of my own.

“Then I couldn’t hide.” He shrugged. “Maybe it was on purpose. Drug addicts usually excel at that part. The act. The performance. Maybe that’s why I became one. I was one all along, since I was a teenager. I’d perfected the performance, I just needed the drugs to compliment it.” Another hand squeeze. “Whatever.” He shrugged again. “I ain’t no shrink. I hit drums with metal sticks. Whatever it was, Wyatt figured it out first. Tried to talk to me. I was in a world far too loud to listen. Lexie tried, but have you met that girl? When she’s not singing, she’s quiet as shit.” He paused. “Well, unless she’s yelling at her husband, and then she’s loud. Brave too, because I wouldn’t yell at that motherfucker. I actually enjoy my head being attached to my shoulders,” he said, injecting comic relief into the moment, seeming to need the quick break from the harsh confession. “So that left Noe.” His eyes swam with something. A memory. A dark one. One that hurt even to look at within the shadow of his eyes. They focused on me, clearing. “And he got through,” he said simply, deciding to not treat me to the ugly details. I knew there was more to that particular story. Much more.

“I’m not gonna say it wasn’t hard,” he continued. “This isn’t a fairy tale where it was goodbye cocaine and I was clean forever after.”

Despite everything, the seriousness of the moment, I giggled. I couldn’t help it. That was Sam’s magic. He made you laugh in the face of tragedy. His own.

He grinned back at me.

That one was real.

“I relapsed. Couple of times. And when life gets a little too quiet, a little too much, I’m not gonna say I don’t crave it.” He paused. “Because addiction makes someone interesting, doesn’t it? Somehow addicts and greats go hand in hand. That’s what I told myself when I was in the middle of it. Cocaine addiction added to my character. It was creatively necessary.” He grunted. “Yeah, I was a motherfucking idiot. That’s not to say I’m not now, just a different kind. A more honest one.”

He leaned forward, hands releasing mine so they could frame either side of my face, forehead touching mine. “And this idiot needs to tell his girl his truth now. Because I get it. The quiet with you, the absolute silence that accommodates a lotta truth. All of it. I can’t escape it when I look into your eyes.” He kissed my nose. “And I don’t want to. Ever. I don’t crave anything that’ll take that quiet, that truth away. I don’t think I ever will. I’d have to be completely fucking certifiable if I did and I only vacation in insanity. I don’t live in it.” He paused again and something changed in his eyes, something so stark, so different than before that I almost got emotional whiplash.

And then physical when he let me go completely to lean back, his face blank.

“But you’re used to it. Living your truth. Fuck, you’re so much stronger than me, Thumbelina. You’ve lived it this whole time. Without escaping into cowardice like I did. So I get it if knowing that about me is it. The deal breaker. God knows I’ve dealt you enough of them.”

I blinked at him, almost more surprised at what he was saying in that moment than the ones before. “So, let me get this straight,” I said. “You think I’ll want to end this.” I waved my hands in the space that hadn’t been there before, the space I despised. “Us. Because you had one weakness? Because life happened to you and you weren’t some kind of emotional superhero?”

It was his turn to blink at me. Digest my words. He tapped his fingers on his knees, eyes never leaving mine. “Yeah, I guess that’s exactly what I’m asking, Gina,” he said quietly. Too quietly. He barely sounded like Sam with his voice full of that much vulnerability.

I shook my head. “Congratulations, Sam. You’re human. I’ve got a secret—we all are. And you think I’m strong because I didn’t find a substance to abuse to deal with my life? No, I didn’t because I was too scared of my own shadow for a long time to even find the courage to do anything about… well, anything. You think you’re weak because you escaped out of your own head? No. And I’m certainly not strong, because I didn’t even make it out of my own, Sam. I gave burying your head in the sand a new meaning. I didn’t live in the real world, which is why I didn’t have a reason to escape. You said it yourself, I used all of this”—I shook the abandoned book in my lap that I’d intended to read—“as a reason not to live. We both went in opposite directions. You lived too much. I didn’t live at all. And now here we are together,” I ended the last part on a whisper. “That has to mean something. Both of us. Maybe you’re here to make me live a little faster, and I’m here to slow you down just a little.”

I sucked in an uncertain breath, my heart beating a thousand miles a minute with the preparation of what I was about to say. “Maybe we’re just… meant to be. Us. You and me. So no, I’m not being an idiot either, Sam. My truth is sitting right in front of me. My truth is you. And for once, I don’t want to escape it.”

The words had barely come out of my mouth before Sam moved in a blur. And without completely knowing what was going on, I was underneath him on the sofa, his warmth pressing into every inch of me, one of his hands bracing on the edge of the sofa so he didn’t give me his entire weight.

I thought he was going to speak, his eyes full of so much intensity that he needed to let it out with words.

But I should’ve known better. My man was all about actions rather than words.

Afterward, we were naked, lying in each other’s arms, my skin flushed, heart thumping through my ribcage. We hadn’t said a word since I’d spoken. Not one word.

They said actions speak louder. Whoever “they” were. I didn’t know if they were right all the time, because sometimes words were needed. But at that point they weren’t. The intense and silent and brutal love Sam and I made on that sofa was worth all of the words shut away in every single one of my favorite books.

I was lying there, trying not to burst into tears. Not because of the profound sadness I felt when I heard Sam’s story. No, because I was so full and I was terrified. I didn’t know a person could feel this much, could have something like this.

So as I was trying to steady my heart, my breaths, I didn’t even notice Sam trailing lazy patterns on my jaw, watching me. Not until he spoke at least.

And that time the words spoke loud.

“No maybes, Thumbelina,” he murmured.

I stared at him, confused, still a little love drunk. Yes, it was a thing, not a Hollywood concept. “What?”

“Us. No maybes. We are meant to be. You are meant to be mine. It was written somewhere, before either of us knew it. You’re my truth. And unlike that shit you read about where some bloke saves some poor damsel and they create a love for the history books, your love saved me. You’re my princess, babe. You’re my fuckin’ heroine.”