Present
THE PRESS HADN’T SLEPT.
Then again, neither had I.
My phone buzzed on the counter as I poured myself the large cup of coffee that I was going to need to get me through the rest of the day. My temples throbbed as I took a sip of the black liquid. Shit was magic for a hangover but didn’t do anything for the ache in my dick.
Last night had been a fucking disaster. The bar. The beach. Everything.
Alex was already assed-out by the time I got up to the room. Cold shower and bed was what I needed. Unfortunately, I hadn’t been lying when I told Blake that the cold water wasn’t how my desire for her worked. I turned that shit to liquid ice and my dick still throbbed just as purple and angrily as when she’d been lying underneath me, all legs and lust, pressing her body up against mine. Touching her breast had been the first hit of a drug that seemed to come from out of this world. All I could think was how easy it would have been to move the lower scrap of her suit over her tight little pussy, unzip my fly, and shove myself inside of her.
And that’s exactly what I closed my eyes and thought of as I fisted my harder than steel cock, pumping it two—three times before I came all over the shower wall with a low groan. Yup. Nearing thirty and masturbating like a fucking teenager in the shower to images of the girl I’d grown up with. Life goals right here.
Of course, I’d thought about fucking her. I’d thought about fucking her on a regular basis since about the time she turned fifteen and my body told me she was fuckable even though my brain insisted that she wasn’t. Sure, it got a lot easier to think of other things when Ash and I moved to Alabama or when I moved back to Nashville. But that’s like saying that sometimes it’s easier to not focus on breathing. True, but it doesn’t change the fact that your body still needs air to survive; it didn’t change the fact that my body still needed her.
It didn’t change the fact that her brother was still my best friend.
It also didn’t change the fact that the more press and popularity ZPP got here, the more sleeping with her would seem no different than any of those other dipshits who’d used her before for her fame.
Guilt… self-loathing… familiar company throughout most of my life, wanting a girl who was at first, a child, but always off-limits in the bro-code.
There are times in life—unavoidable times, really—where in order to be the good guy, you have to be a bad one. I knew how much I hurt her when we were younger—when I told her I didn’t want her and that we would never be together. She thought I was ripping through her heart when the truth was that I was carving out my own.
‘Mistake.’
I was a modern-day Pinocchio with the lies I told her. Only it wasn’t my nose that got longer and harder every second that I was in her presence trying to fight the truth about how much I wanted her.
Maybe, I’d told myself back then, maybe when I moved back home, if she still had feelings for me, I’d find some way to make Ash ok with it. But the good guy in me wasn’t going to take advantage of my friend’s little sister. The good guy wasn’t going to let my desire take something permanent from her at only fifteen. The good guy in me wasn’t going to make promises to her only to leave for four years and expect her to wait. She had so much drive and potential, and the good guy in me knew that she would have put it all on the back burner for a chance at ‘us.’
News-fucking-flash. At eighteen, I had no clue what I wanted for my life or my heart. And when I second-guessed football, I second-guessed everything, including my feelings for her. Christ. At eighteen the goddamn weatherman had a better chance of predicting what I wanted for my life and we all know how terrible those fuckers are at predicting anything.
Blake Tyler had this funny way about her—an intoxicating blend of incognizant humility. She never really saw just how good she was at something and how much potential she had. Then again, are the stars aware of their own brightness in the dark night?
If we were meant to happen, some time wouldn’t make a difference. Of all the options of how the future would play out, this had never been one of them. This life where she was rocketed into a completely different universe and dated guys who were richer than Croesus and looked like they walked out of a Calvin Klein ad…
Everything had changed.
Understatement of my life.
Even just two nights on that stage had increased my respect for her ten-fold. I was a performer; I knew what it took to get out there every night, to put on a smile and a show for fans regardless of personal shit. But the level that she had to do it… wanted to do it… and been doing it—at was almost nauseating.
For the first time, I saw the toll that it took on her—standing there, in front of the ocean, begging me to let her go in.
You wouldn’t fucking think that going to the beach or going for a swim—simple pleasures for most people—would be a big fucking deal. I hadn’t. That is until your every breath becomes a marketable business transaction. Always being watched and judged for everything she was and everything that she wasn’t. The worst part about this whole plan was that fake feelings were the last thing I would ever attribute to Blake Tyler—and it was the only thing she stood accused of.
Hell, the damn girl wrote a fucking song and sang it to my face in front of a hundred people because she wanted to show me how real they were.
The world she lived in was beautiful. But like most beautiful things, there was a fucked-up and fickle side that it tried very hard to hide.
So, I let her have her wish—I let her have her real—while I watched from the shore, itching to follow her in, to hold her while the waves rocked us together.
Guilt gnawed at me for how I spoke to her but I’d been so fucking pissed.
I should have pushed her off. I should have stopped it as soon as she tackled me. Or as soon as she kissed me, intoxicating sugar-sweet mixed with the saltiness of the ocean. Hell, I should have stopped it as soon as she began to walk out of the water and I let my eyes drip over her tight, lengthy form, jealous of the water that had the ability to soak right into her. Long legs, the flat plane of her stomach, and then those tits, about to poke a fucking hole through the damn suit, begging to be warmed with my mouth just like the heat of her begged to warm my cock.
I’d sell drugs… Christ, I’d sell my goddamn spotless soul to the devil for a taste between her thighs.
But it was the look on her face that got me—the hurricane in those stormy blues; I knew she was coming for me—and I just stood on the beach waiting to be swept away.
I shouldn’t have let my desire for her get the better of me… again.
It was my fault that we were there long enough to get caught. But that was only half of it. The other half was the anger imagining just what photos were taken of her and what they revealed. I’d felt a lot of things—a lot of overwhelming things—for Blake up to this point in our lives, but the possessiveness and protectiveness that surged through me was crippling; it had me wanting to charge the boardwalk, grab as many cameras as I could, and throw them all into the ocean along with the necks attached to them. If I hadn’t had to shield her, I swear I probably would’ve done it. If they had put one fucking toe in the sand… My fist flexed around the coffee mug.
My headache had dulled to a distant throb; my dick was just as hard as ever though.
My phone buzzed. All night… all morning… I’d been waiting for this hammer to fall.
Ash was calling.
Nailed.
“Hello?” I answered, but he probably didn’t even hear it before he went off.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he yelled. “I wake up this morning to see you all over my baby sister plastered on every fucking news outlet I come across! What the fuck!”
I watched how the coffee in my mug rippled as his angry rant vibrated through the phone.
“I’ll fucking kill you.”
Throwing open my computer, I opened up a browser and began to look at the images of myself gracing every seedy to sincere news website. Fuck.
“You done?” I asked when he finally stopped for breath or to see if he’d berated me to death. Probably hoping for the latter.
“Only until you answer.”
I cleared my throat. The problem was that I needed a good answer—and I didn’t have one.
‘Just be glad they caught us when they did,’ were the words that I had to hold back; I’d been minutes away from fucking his little sister right on the goddamn shore.
I started with the truth—the bar, the ‘disguise,’ the split-up.
“I knew they were there,” I transitioned into the lies, my stomach rolling as I spoke. “I told her to lie… uhh… underneath me, hoping that they wouldn’t see a second person. Or at least that they wouldn’t be able to see that it was her. They were pretty far away. But they did. And then we didn’t want them to think something even worse, so I kissed her.” I coughed and ended with, “Because that is the fucking plan, remember? This wasn’t my fucking idea. I’m just the one stepping up for ZPP’s success. And for your sister’s reputation. Unless you don’t care about that.”
I dumped the rest of the coffee down the drain, my stomach revolting for using Blake against him.
“Yeah, well, looks like a price that you certainly don’t mind paying tenfold.”
“Whatever, Ash. You know the paparazzi. It’s their fucking job to make nothing into something. And if you don’t think that they edited and embellished the photos or the story, you’re fucking dumb and blind,” I countered.
It was the truth. That was their job. Then again, I was looking at the photos and while they’d been edited to make us more visible, if anything, they revealed far less than what was actually happening.
He swore on the other end of the line, taking a moment before he actually spoke to me. “I have to go. I’m at the airport.”
“We good?” I asked. The last thing I fucking needed right now was to be at odds with my best friend. Especially when all I could think about was how the hell I was going to make it through the rest of this charade without forcing him to make good on his threats.
“This better be fucking worth it,” he replied with a low voice, mirroring my own thoughts. “You touch her for real, though, and I’ll fucking kill you.”
Click.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
I was living in fifty shades of wrong.
As life happens, you learn to live with pain—mostly of broken hearts—but this… I was asking for it.
I’d gone too far this time.
‘Another fling for Blake? The rising star doesn’t seem to know how to settle down.’
“I can’t do this,” I said as soon as Tay walked into the living room.
I saw her step falter in surprise, her eyes widen when she realized I was there.
“W-what? What happened?” she asked with a groan, rubbing her eyes and then her head.
Usually Tay was up well before I was—too many things to do and not enough time for her organized mess of a mind to do them. Today though, she was struggling and I… well, I’d slept fitfully. Every time I closed my eyes, I was back on the beach, Zach was my sandman taking me further into my dream… until his words turned it into a nightmare.
‘It was a mistake.’
“One moment, please,” Taylor grumbled, using the Keurig to make herself a coffee before she came and plopped onto the couch next to me. “Ok, what’s going on? What happened? I thought you’d be back so much sooner last night. I mean, I just came up here and crashed right away—obviously, those shots did not do me any favors.” Her stomach grumbled in agreement.
“You’re going to kill me,” I groaned, my head tipping back against the back edge of the couch.
“What? Why?” Her brow furrowed. “I’m assuming something happened with Zach.”
“We ended up on the beach,” I began, blowing another bubble in the piece of chewing gum that this morning qualified as breakfast. “And I kissed him.”
“Seriously?” she sputtered. “Like for real kissed him or for the cameras?”
I winced. “Well… both.” I opened up Facebook on my phone—because, let’s face it—everyone was sharing the stories. Handing it to her, I explained as I watched her mouth drop open. “We ended up on the beach and I kissed him for real… and then it ended up on camera.”
I watched her eyes scan the headlines, knowing that she was going immediately into damage control mode.
‘Blake Tyler—a three-week break and now she’s back on the prowl, this time with her opening act.’
“Please tell me it’s not that bad,” I said softly, pulling my hair back into a messy bun; it hadn’t dried right since I’d gone to bed with it wet last night. I felt sand on my scalp in spite of how hard I’d scrubbed to try to get it all out. Just like the memories, I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, and yet they still lingered in my mind.
“Well…” Crap. “It could have been worse.”
I blew another bubble, waiting for her to tell me what to do—how we were going to fix it. I took my phone back from her, reading over the painful words again. How easily they wanted to believe that Zach was just one more notch in my bedpost—and how sensational they thought it was to make it seem like I was incapable of having a real relationship—or real feelings for that matter.
“Bruce is going to kill me,” I groaned, knowing he was going to have a field day with how this turned out.
“Oh, Blake,” Tay huffed. “You know the haters are gonna hate.”
“Yeah. Hate on me—the player who’s just gonna play with all my boytoys.” I clicked off the screen, tired of looking at all the eye-catching headlines.
‘Zach Parker becomes Tyler’s opening and closing act!’
“Just shake it off, B and let me handle Bruce,” Tay said, reaching out and grabbing my hand. “I want to know what happened—as your friend, not as your publicist. You kissed him… and from the looks of these photos, he was definitely kissing you back…”
In a daze, I outlined the events that had transpired the night before.
“What happened?” I repeated. Foolishness happened. Fearlessness happened. I happened. “He did a number on me, but honestly, at this point who’s counting?”
She squeezed my fingers and my eyes slid to hers.
“He said it was a mistake, just like before,” I ended with a ragged whisper. “I’m such an idiot, thinking that I could do this. I thought it was enough—the time, the space—for me to get over him and my persistent childhood infatuation. Heck, I’ve dated other guys—clearly. How can I still feel this way? How can it still hurt just as much as before?”
She held her cup of coffee out to me. I reached for its warmth and, sticking my gum in the top corner of my cheek, took a sip.
“I don’t know, B. I know how you felt about him before. I mean, you grew up with him. This isn’t like one of your exes that you knew for maybe a few weeks or a month before you started dating. There’s a lot more that’s going on and that’s rooted so much deeper than you just kissing a guy… it’s like Pandora’s box. Or, I guess I should say ‘Parker’s box.’”
I rolled my eyes at her lame but heartwarming levity. And true. I’d opened up a whole box of trials and had yet to find out what even half of them were.
She continued, “Time and space don’t always make things better. Sometimes, they just give us a reprieve from having to deal with the problem at that moment. Sometimes, they just give us the time to learn and grow to be able to handle the problem when it comes back around.”
I nodded and wiped a stray tear from off my face. “I was hoping that it just wouldn’t come back around…” I groaned. “It feels like all I’ve done is remind myself how I haven’t learned anything from the first time he broke my heart.”
“I don’t believe that,” she scoffed and gently swatted my arm. “I think that you really haven’t seen him in a long time and now, all of a sudden, not only are you on tour with him, seeing him all the time, but you are publicly going to be in a relationship with him. That’s huge—and a huge reminder of something that you wanted for a long time but never got. Bruce and I may have suggested this as your best—and possibly only—option, but that doesn’t mean that I thought this was going to be a walk in the park for you.”
“What do I do?” I begged her. She always had the answers for everything. All I needed was the answer to this.
“What you know how to do, B. You know how to go on that stage and put on a show. You know how to be yourself for your fans, and right now, that requires you to be the self that wants Zach Parker. It requires you to be the same self that wrote all of these songs about him—the self you channel when you sing them and the self that fades back away when you are done. So, let her indulge. And then let her go.”
“How do I not let the lines blur? How do I not get hurt?” My head tipped onto her shoulder as I passed the coffee mug back to her.
“Don’t make what happens for the tour become more than it is. This is the second… third… time that he’s said this was a mistake. I hate to say it, Blay, but don’t be a glutton for punishment. I know the fifteen-year-old-you wants to prove that he wanted you—that he still wants you. But what’s that going to cost you to find out? You just can’t put yourself in situations where it’s easy for the line to get fuzzy—basically any situation that involves you two alone and without the cameras.”
“It’d be easier if his words matched his actions,” I grumbled petulantly.
“We’ll keep the contact more structured, more business-like, and planned. Don’t worry, B, I got you.” Tay hugged me to her side, letting go when her phone began to ring from the other room. “That’s probably Bruce. Which means it’s time to get up, get yourself together, and show Zach Parker that off that stage, you’re no longer the girl whose heart stops for him.”
I nodded enthusiastically until she disappeared through the dining room and back into the bedroom before I let my face fall.
I was afraid it was too late and I didn’t want her to hear as I begged my heart to start beating again.
Please, heart, don’t turn us into a mistake again.
The saying goes, it’s easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission. Easier for who? I wondered.
Next time, heart, please ask for my permission before letting Zach break you; you have this depressing habit of tripping and crumbling for him, crawling back to me begging for forgiveness for being so easily fooled.
‘Don’t blame me,’ my heart whispered back, ‘love made me crazy.’
I quickly swiped a tear from my cheek.
Please, not again this time.