Chapter Eighteen #2
“Yes, but they’re about to talk about the guys Adriana’s gotten frisky with in Bravetown, and we don’t have to make that even more awkward by listening in.” Esra winked and blew me a kiss over her shoulder.
I grimaced. Totally not awkward at all.
“I didn’t,” I said once the two of them had sat down at the corner table they usually occupied with Esra’s brother and his fiancée, and I turned to Brooks.
“I’ve only worked summers in the kiosks as a teenager before leaving for Nashville after graduation.
If you really want to know if I ever got frisky on-site: I had a boy feel me up on the Ferris wheel, over my sweater.
And I got to third base with my high school boyfriend in the parking lot, in the backseat of his car. And you already know about Sam.”
“Sam?”
I gestured toward the stage even though the Stallions weren’t in town for a few more days. “Stallion Sam. Comes to town once a month.”
“I see. Right. I suppose you’re both in the saloon after hours, so that makes sense.
Is it always the saloon? Like do you just do it in the specific place you work at?
” He rubbed his chest, trying to ground himself, and maybe under different circumstances I would have offered him my hands—but not when he was probing into my past sex life.
“Seriously? Do you want to know all the places I let him fuck me in? Which positions we tried? Do you want to know if you’re the first man to bang me in the bathroom?”
Brooks actually seemed to think about the question, and only when I threw my hands up in the air did he shake his head. “No. I’m sorry. I don’t know. Maybe.”
“I’m not doing this,” I said. “You don’t get to go caveman over the fact that I had a sex life before you.”
He tried to say something, but I slammed the card reader down in front of him and talked him through how to charge people on their staff badges, then beelined through the back door to grab the next dishwasher basket and restock the rest of the glasses.
I got to stew in my anger for a while as people trickled in and we got too busy preparing orders to even look at each other.
The audacity of a middle-aged straight white man.
Ugh. Where did he get off, wanting to catalogue my sexual history like that?
I didn’t ask him about all the groupies he’d fucked throughout his career.
At least clenching my jaw and stomping around him helped me ignore the exhaustion gnawing at me, and the dull ache at the bottom of my spine from being on my feet all day.
“Can you please tell me why you’re mad at me?” Brooks asked when things finally quieted down at the bar and people were just crowding around their tables with their drinks and their snacks.
“Brooks, I don’t care about the women you’ve slept with.
We both know I’m wearing this because you fucked around a lot,” I hissed under my breath and held up my hand with the engagement ring on it.
“In fact, I was very close to becoming just another notch among hundreds on your tour bus bedpost that one night.”
“You were never going to be—” He took my hand and pulled me through the swinging door behind the bar to the back room.
“I don’t care whether you’ve slept with five or five hundred men, Addie.
I don’t even care if I’m the tenth man you fucked in that bathroom.
I’m trying to learn. If this is a thing that young people do for fun here…
I’m trying to understand the culture of…
Fuck, I just don’t want you to miss out on anything just because you’ve tied yourself to me. ”
“Wait…You don’t want me to miss out on staff member hookup culture?”
“Yes.”
I deflated. Of course. I’d pinned my own stupid insecurities on him because most men I’d met wanted to stake their claim on my body. They wanted to have. Brooks wanted to give. “That’s so weirdly wholesome.”
“So? Do you just have sex here at the saloon? All over the park after dark? What can I do?”
“You’re already doing it.”
“The lunch break quickies? That’s it?”
“No,” I laughed, “you’re you. That’s all I need from you. I don’t care about what other people do around here. I like what we’re doing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Very.” I nodded and rose to my tiptoes to whisper a quick kiss to his cheek for reassurance.
“Will you have dinner with me?”
“In case you haven’t noticed, we’re on the clock,” I laughed, twirling my finger around, even though my stomach rumbled on command. I definitely needed food. Soon.
“We’ll get you food later, but I don’t mean tonight. I’m asking you out. I actually don’t just want to hook up with you. I want to go on a date with you. A real one.”
“Oh.”
“You can say no. It won’t change a thing between us, I promise.”
“No, I…”
“No?” he asked.
“Not no. I’m not declining.”
“So yes?” he asked, more eager.
“Hold your horses.” I rolled my eyes at him. “What if it sucks?”
“Then we laugh about it and go back to what we’re doing now if you want to be friends with benefits.
Or even go back to what we had before we kissed.
” I wasn’t sure I could go back to the before, but I appreciated Brooks offering.
“I know you’re wearing the engagement ring for the wrong reasons, but being with you feels right. I want to at least try.”
So much for my idea of taking things easy. Then again, this wasn’t too complicated either. We’d always enjoyed each other’s company. We’d lived together in a cramped tour bus and in my one-bedroom now and still didn’t want to rip each other’s heads off. And the sex was a-fucking-mazing. So…
“Okay,” I breathed.
“You’ll go on a date with me?” He beamed.
“We’ll give it a shot. It’s a test run. And if it doesn’t work, we go back to being friends who really like each other’s genitals.”
He laughed and pressed a quick kiss to my lips. “Deal.”
A loud gong droned through every speaker in the building. Brooks cringed, but he wasn’t as sound-sensitive as Skye.
“Last call,” I sighed, “saloon’s closing early for the fireworks in thirty minutes.”
We managed to close up without so much as a minute’s delay. The stupid cash register even worked like a charm for Brooks, neither freezing nor crashing on the end-of-day numbers. Traitor. That thing was mocking me.
Brooks angled to head down the back stairwell, where I usually exited the building, but I grabbed his hand and tugged him in the opposite direction. Upward. A faded sign pointed us toward stage props, but Brooks didn’t question me beyond furrowed brows.
“I probably shouldn’t confess to this, considering you’re technically my boss,” I whispered in the dim and narrow hallway.
The ceiling was slanted so low, Brooks had to duck to follow me.
“But when I was seventeen, I stole one of the saloon’s master keys from Renee’s office.
It’s not like I did anything drastic. I’d sneakily pour myself a tiny bit of Jack Daniel’s, which felt incredibly cool, and I’d spend hours up here with my guitar. ”
I slotted the key into the rusty lock at the end of the hallway. You had to lift the handle a little and tilt the key downward for the lock to give. The door creaked open on old hinges. I wasn’t sure anyone but me had been up here in years. If they had been, they hadn’t touched anything.
I didn’t bother with the light switch, following the glimmer of light from the window instead.
The storage room spanned the entire width of the saloon, and its edges were plunged in the kind of shadows I hadn’t been brave enough to dig into since I’d first discovered the place.
I was happily pretending spiders and mice didn’t exist up here.
Crates and mismatched chairs were stacked toward the low ceiling, and I’d covered a heap of broken cowboy mannequins in a large tarp years ago because it had looked like a Wild West massacre of missing heads and limbs.
The circular window nestled right into the Rattlesnake’s sloped gable, which meant getting on all fours to reach the small alcove.
From here, however, you had a perfect view of almost the entire park.
From the entrance gates, along Main Street, to the Mountain Pass roller coaster at the west end, and the entire south side of the park down to the stables.
“Stay there for a second.” My voice came out as a whisper. Not because someone might overhear us. But because I’d never spoken a word up here. It seemed almost sacrilegious.
I grabbed my old box from the corner, the green faded to a murky yellow, and pulled out a picnic blanket to cover the floorboards with.
Old barrels were stacked on one side of the window, and I had blanket-to-barrel placement down to a science to use them as backrests.
Once I was happy, I turned back to Brooks.
He had one arm braced against an overhead beam, leaning in to watch me, and I allowed myself a shameless moment of appreciating the stretch of fabric around his biceps, and the little triangle of skin between his shirt and his jeans.
“Come on, fireworks are about to start.” I patted the spot next to me.
Brooks slowly lowered himself to his knees to fit in beside me. While I could comfortably sit upright, he had to bend his long legs and slide down to make it work without bumping his head.
“You’re not saying anything. Is it that bad?” My heart sputtered a nervous beat. This wasn’t much, and it wasn’t really mine, but it was safe.
“On the contrary.” He reached for me, and I let him pull me into his lap.
Up here, far away from prying eyes, not a single doubt flickered through my mind as he positioned me on top of him with my legs on either side, then tugged my blouse from my skirt and undid the zipper on the latter.
His fingers worked carefully, slowly, giving me the time to halt him, while clearly in no haste to get me undressed more than this.
He folded his hands around my bare middle and held me there.
He was merely seeking a certain kind of physicality. “It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful.”
“You’re the only person I’ve ever taken up here.”
“Thank you.”
Outside, the first fireworks popped off.
Our little corner lit up bright orange, lulling Brooks into a perfect warm glow.
Instead of watching the show, he was looking at me.
And I couldn’t fault him, because I was looking right back.
Somewhere behind the angle of his cheekbones or the lines of his dimples was a famous country singer, but right here, in this room, holding me, that was just Brooks.
It was a perfect moment. The kind you knew you’d return to later again and again. The kind you wished to last forever, while fully aware its temporality was what made it special.
The kind of moment I wanted to immortalize in music. I’d add a quiet triangle in the background as the fireworks. I’d sing about the lights painting his skin in all the colors no one else was close enough to see. I’d look at him while singing, only him.
I was itching for the empty notebook in my bedside table. I wanted to find the right words for this, and I wanted to sing them to him. I hadn’t wanted to sing in a long time.
A rocket shot through the air on a screeching whistle. Brooks’s hands twitched around my waist, digging deep. I sucked in a sharp breath at the momentary pain. I’d be sporting fingertip-sized bruises tomorrow.
“Shit, I’m so sorry, Addie.”
“It’s okay. Here.” I lay down, cheek against his chest, and slid one arm around his back until I was pretzeled around him. I used my free hand to push one of his from my waist to my backside. “Maybe squeeze down here if you must. More comfortable.”
“Fuck, I don’t know how you do that.” He let out a husky breath. “You uncomplicate me.”
“You’re not that complicated,” I whispered, “just tactile by nature. You said yourself that touch helps you feel grounded. Makes sense that you go from holding to squeezing when you’re dealing with overwhelming situations.”
He dropped a kiss to the top of my head. “Thank you.”
“Hmm…” Within moments of lying down on his warm chest, the last shred of energy dissipated from my muscles. I watched the peony-shaped explosions in the dark sky beyond the window, brain going smooth.
Warmth.
Lights.
Brooks.
Good.
My eyes fluttered shut. It reduced the fireworks to whistles and bright colors flashing behind my closed lids. Brooks’s hands circled up and down my back, lulling me into an even deeper comfort.
I was peripherally aware of the air stilling. No sounds, no lights. I’d melted into a puddle of bliss under Brooks’s fingers. He kept drawing patterns even in the quiet dark.
“Magic hands,” I mumbled, blinking.
“Hi,” he whispered, brushing some of my hair back. “I thought you’d fallen asleep.”
“Just blissed out.”
“Good.” He smiled. “See? I told you I can do more with my hands.”
“Smart-ass.” I grimaced and pushed my face into his chest. “Thank you,” I grumbled, recalling our conversation about accepting nice things. I knew myself well enough to know that I would have turned down back rubs if he had just verbally offered.
“What was that?”
“Thank. You,” I muttered into his shirt.
“That’s it.” He kissed my forehead. “Good job.”
My insides did a silly flip at those words. God fucking damn. He was praising me for letting myself be snuggled and my body went haywire. I was so fucked in the head.
I braced my hands on his chest to sit up, the exhaustion of the shift gnawing at me. I could have definitely fallen asleep in his lap. My eyes barely stayed open in the dim room.
“I know you were excited about having the house to ourselves, but I think I’ll pass out as soon as my bed is within reach. It’s been a really long day. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize.” He smoothed my hair aside and kissed the delicate skin of my neck. “I’ll just have you for breakfast instead.”
“How do you say things like that with a straight face?”
“My face is actually very wonky. You just can’t see. The mustache hides it.”
Silly man. Making me silly smile. “Kiss please.”
He obliged my request, giving me one of the sweetest kisses of my life, careful and slow.
“One question,” I whispered. “Now that the festival fireworks are over, and you’ll head back to the suite, can I come stay over some time, so we can lock the bedroom door, and you can fuck me into that hotel mattress until I see stars?”
Brooks closed his eyes and swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He shifted slightly beneath me, and I felt the effect my words had on him against the inside of my thigh. “God, I’m fucking obsessed with you,” he rasped.
“Is that a yes on fucking me until I forget my name?”
“One hundred percent.”
“Okay. Cool. Just wanted to check.”
“Okay, cool,” he repeated and laughed, “thanks for checking.”
So don’t use words, this cannot be defined
I paint you in vibrant colors
You taste me like white wine
Take your time, don’t let the moment end
But when it does, please call me “mine.”