Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
JC
The next morning, my body and mind slowly and painfully recover from last night.
I’m sitting in the lounge, nursing a cup of coffee.
We cleared the darkness of the Chunnel, and our bus motors through the rugged beauty of the French countryside.
Empty roads and shifting morning light, treetops skimmed by birds, Paris only three hours away.
Gotta love Europe. In Canada, you drive for hours, and there’s still more Canada.
“Hey, stranger.” Gia appears, trailing steam from her shower. She plunks down next to me and fires up her phone. “You look so serious.”
I laugh, even though it hurts to. Better this than yesterday, clenched with the intensity of our scrap. Order restored, if organizing the chaos in my heart is humanly possible. My eyes travel over her legs and her messy, wet hair. She smells warm and dangerously sexy.
“I think you’re confusing hungover for my resting professor look,” I joke.
Gia grins. “You’d make a hot prof. Convince an entire generation of TikTokers of the merits of higher education.”
“That’s setting the bar high.”
“You’d slay at anything,” she insists. “One of those people who try anything and, boom, master of the craft.”
“For that to be true, I’d have to try my hand at something other than music.”
“Which is not happening, ever. The world needs your brand of magic. Clearly.”
Gia elbows me in the ribs, her form of apology.
She knows she overreacted. There are some wrongs you can never right, but I’m not holding Gia entirely responsible for her blow-up yesterday.
Blindsided by emotions she didn’t have the vocabulary to process properly, she’d blamed me, irrationally.
I read it right, in the end. If she thinks she’s cornered the market where uncertainty masks genuine feelings, guess again.
Because what went down between us is the kind of real that drives you batshit crazy. The kind you don’t recover from.
Her kisses make me want things I shouldn’t want.
“If you wanted…” Gia seemingly plucks the word out of my brain, “there could be a permanent towel rack for JC in Pop My Cherry’s bathroom.”
“Are you two pretending to flirt or real flirting?” Brady grumbles from his bunk, his voice deep and croaky. “Either way, it makes me want to puke.”
“You already puked twice last night,” Gia reminds him. “Do you even chew your food?”
Brady erupts in a fit of phlegmy coughing. Both he and Tai have been dead to the world since passing out last night. Can’t say I’ve missed the military-level testosterone blast while they virtually kill each other. Or the feet in dirty socks on the coffee table.
After clearing his lungs of grit and vape tar, he says, “Gia, fuck off, from the bottom of my heart. And JC. Bro, if you join our band permanently, I will crawl over and kiss your feet right now.”
“Thanks for the offer,” I answer. “Not sure my liver can hold up with the under-twenty-five patrol.”
Gia’s gaze narrows in on me, but she says nothing.
We both did our thing last night, pretending not to clock every move the other made.
The crowd at the pub went apeshit when we arrived, and I didn’t entirely mind the flock of females flapping around me, because Gia, with her murderous glare and flared nostrils, told me everything I needed to know.
Sometimes the best medicine is humble pie.
“Practice makes perfect,” Brady, the prince of sound advice, chimes in. Then, “Later, dudes. I’m going back to sleep.”
Within a minute, he’s snoring loudly. The humming grind of the bus engine sounds operatic in comparison.
Gia flashes me a look. “You make it sound like you’re old. Old is, like, eighty.”
A hollowness carves out in my chest, a flash of her in that dress at the gala. It made me think of her at my age, a gorgeous sylph of a woman, the world at her feet. And me, pushing fifty.
Everything I’ve told myself about me and her, the logic, the anti-logic, hums helplessly in my heart.
I used to think love was the leap. Now I know it’s the landing that ruins you.
I’m on the wrong side of thirty to be setting things in motion without having some idea how they’ll work out, but Gia makes me forget how endings work.
Which is why I’m tied in knots over a woman whose story has yet to start.
“Jameson,” Gia whispers, obviously not wanting any other ears listening in.
“Yes, Regina?”
“The other night.” She pokes my foot with a fishnet toe. Her eyes are all sparkly. “I liked it.”
I scratch my head in mock confusion. “Remind me again what happened?”
She slants her head to one side with a look that means she knows perfectly well I know what happened. “Apparently, you wear contacts.”
“Apparently, I saved you five hundred bucks.”
She smiles. A different smile. We’re having an entire conversation with our eyes.
“My knight in shining Converse.”
“At your service, my rock and roll queen.”
She’s trying hard not to laugh as she says, “As long as we’re clear. About everything.” Gia rearranges herself on the couch, resting her stockinged feet on my lap. She drops her head to the phone, taking her loaded gaze with her. “Now, excuse me while I light up social media.”
I force myself to breathe evenly. Her feet are inches away from ruining me.
I kept my hands off the morning-long ache between my legs, my dick so hard it hurt, our fully clothed sex on an endless loop in my mind.
I feel myself drifting back to that, because, god, it was beyond amazing.
I can’t explain to myself how good it was, that it was all I wanted with all my heart.
To fuck the woman I considered a good friend, maybe even a best friend, with desire so deep and true, it scared me.
I steal a look at her, all fire and tiny everything. She blew every circuit I had, taking control, searing straight through all the dark layers wrapped tight around my mind.
The aching explosion left me cross-eyed and reeling.
I wanted more. I wanted her to touch me all over. I wanted to make her explode.
She gave me what I needed, and I left her unsatisfied.
That guilt burns hot.
There’s a lot of that going around.
My heart’s beating fast, mind spinning backward as I stare out the window. I saw her last night, in front of the stage. Took many steps backward until I ran out of space.
Neither Gia nor the boys said a word—not even an offhand Didn’t that woman look familiar?
Not that they would’ve placed her as Amber Devlin, the drummer from my old band, Read My Rights.
It took a few songs and her steady stare before I connected the dots.
My nose-ringed ex-lover, who liked to whistle showtunes, eat an alarming amount of poutine, and crawl into my bunk to indulge every fantasy a nineteen-year-old could conjure up, was near unrecognizable as a polished corporate blonde in a blazer.
The last time we spoke, she said I was dead to her.
Last I heard, she’d moved to Spain.
Her disappearing act benefited me in that the messy destruction of us was neatly packed away like forgotten summer clothes. Maybe she’d relocated to London. Maybe her appearance was a one-off, morbid curiosity; time passing, wounds healing.
Or maybe it was something else.
“Hey.” Gia’s voice snaps me out of the fog.
I find her eyes reluctantly. “Yeah?”
“You look sad.”
“Nah, just a little tired.” I wiggle her big toe as Gia studies my too quick, too fake smile, weighing it against whatever truth she sees behind my eyes. My mind keeps racing, trying to fill in the blanks, the vague, unfinished outline of me and Amber.
Not something I want to think about at this moment.
But if she shows up in Paris, I’ll have to rethink a lot of things.
Like I said, there are some wrongs you can never right.