Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
“ They probably rush out on you because you’re horrible at sex .”
She tried to lighten the mood with a little joke. Instead, at reading her comment, Draven’s eyes narrowed and darkened, radiating an intensity she had not expected. An intensity for which her body was not prepared.
At that challenging, sultry, and sinful look in his eyes, Thea’s nipples tightened. Her lips separated, seeming to pucker for him of their own volition.
Her body hummed .
He placed his fork down on his plate, stood to his full swoon-worthy height, and walked around the kitchen island to stand behind where she balanced on the barstool. Her mouth went dry at his proximity.
His scent of lime, mint, and man swam through her brain, drugging her thoughts.
Once he stood behind her, his chest heating her back through the thin T-shirt, he slid her plate away from her, flattening his hands to the granite, his arms on either side of her.
He trapped her against the kitchen island counter, his body a warm, hard cage. Dear God, those forearms …
She swallowed—unsure if it came out as an audible, nervous gulp.
Leaning his hard, muscular chest into her back, he took her pen from her shaky fingers and wrote directly onto the notepad in front of her. “ Baby, you don’t want to know how good I am at sex .”
Gulp.
He was saying something out loud. She couldn’t hear him, but she felt his lips moving against her hair, then the back of her neck. The warm puffs of air coming from that active mouth caressed the sensitive skin of her cheek and chin. What was he saying?
She could imagine.
Dirty words. Dirty promises. Dirty threats.
I can see your hard little nipples poking through your shirt. You want me to suck them, Thea?
I’d make you beg for it. Take my time. Your pussy would be dripping for me by the time I got to it. A pink, wet little mess. Soaked for me. Clit swollen and throbbing.
I’d spread your legs wide open. Admire what I made so slick.
Then, I’d devour you like a tray of warm cookies.
Had Thea moaned? She was not sure. Her mind blanked as the fantasy speared through her—spearing between her legs at the same time. Heat coiled low in her abdomen. Twisting and curling.
He dragged his lips down the edge of her jaw as he moved her hand to rest on the notepad. He pressed her finger down to where he had written a new note while she zoned out in sexual fantasy.
He had written, “ The thing about drummers is that we have an incredible sense of rhythm and stamina. I’ve got steady hands, sure. But, baby, the way I can move my hips, the way I’d ride you… You have no idea .”
Well, she had some idea, considering that morning sex dream.
He wrote, “ I could be deep inside you, and I’d still hold that rhythm, that beat. Pounding between your pretty thighs would become a song .”
She wanted it. She wanted him. Her breaths escaped in huffy pants, which he was sure to hear with his face grazing the side of hers.
His palms slid down the countertop before her; she felt the motion, the invisible touch of those hands, gliding over the tops of her thighs. The inner tops of her thighs.
“ When I woke up and realized you were the one lying next to me, I got so hard .” As he wrote the new note, the chords of his muscular arms flexed. The sight made her shift on the barstool. Her legs clenched together as a pulsing began in her core.
His left hand drifted toward her, moving off the counter and rising to delicately drag his fingertips over her throat in a tender yet dominating touch.
She exhaled all of the oxygen in her lungs. Her body blazed and ached for him.
He gently cupped her throat like a collar as he moved his lips over her hair from his stance behind her. With his right hand, he wrote, “ What are you doing to me, Thea ?”
With a shaky breath and a trembling hand, she wrote, “ I think the seven-day sex ban is starting to get to you .”
He released her throat but did not move away from her. His hard chest burned into her back. “ I promise you, it’s not that ,” he wrote.
Did that mean his desire for her was more than pent-up arousal? Would he feel this way about her in three months? In two weeks?
Thea, you’ve been used and discarded before. You have been dropped by friends who felt it was too much effort to learn how to sign. This man would be just like the rest . Yet, somehow, she knew he would manage to break her heart worse than the others.
He said he wanted someone to eat breakfast with .
And his body —his presence—overwhelmed her senses. She felt like a tuning fork, vibrating with sound. The air changed when he entered a room. Oxygen molecules shook until everything had a hazy, wavy shimmer like a desert mirage.
Thirsty. She was thirsty.
She jolted up in her seat, trying to snap out of the overwhelming fog of lust. Shuffling to get around him, she signed, “ Drink .”
He reluctantly uncaged her, and she fumbled to the refrigerator. She dug around, rooting at the very back of the fridge for her special lime waters. She shifted items around, so she could get to the back, and froze.
When she pulled out a full, now close to expiration date, almond milk—the exact same brand as the empty carton beside the microwave—she locked gazes with Draven.
His mouth hung open.
There had never been one milk. They had each bought the same carton and assumed the other was using it. The cluttered fridge caused an entirely unnecessary and dramatic roommate tiff.
Thea’s giggle rose from the depths of her soul at the ridiculousness. Draven’s chest shook with laughter.
They could not stop laughing and snickering like first graders at the park who shared a sacred secret. Thea wiped at her eyes as she laughed harder than she had in years. Both of them bent over, wheezing for breath.
Laughing has never felt like this , she thought. She was a grown woman, yet those overwhelming giddy hormones of a mindless middle school crush ran through her veins like pure adrenaline.
Draven’s grin didn’t cause butterflies. It caused woodpeckers, leaving permanent damage and chipping away at the surface to leave a newly carved masterpiece.
* * *
“Stop smiling,” Wren told Draven as his band sat on Draven’s living room couch. Draven sat on the seat of his drum set as they all brainstormed the band’s next album.
The men had all been deep in discussion while Draven grinned at the kitchen behind them.
The men always met up at Draven’s apartment to practice anything that wasn’t “studio-ready.” Since Thea now lived with him, Wren’s fiancé Mallory and his daughter Armie joined Thea in the kitchen to bake cookies. Considering Mallory, Armie, and Thea were all deaf, they had no problem hanging out while the band strummed some chords and exchanged some curses.
Draven, however, was utterly distracted by Thea’s presence. She wore a bright yellow, to-the-knee dress, sporting her classic pearl necklace. A Belle from Beauty and the Beast reimagined as a 50s housewife.
“ Looks like a flower,
but she’s got teeth.
Venus fly trap,
promise to consume me .”
Lyrics flowed through Draven.
“ Looking like a politician’s wife.
Baby, I’ll give you a stance.
Hands on the desk; let’s make the journalists happy.
Be my scandal, my everything. ”
Thea glanced up from the mixing bowl and connected gazes with Draven from across the rooms. There must have been something powerful in Draven’s expression because her hand moved up. Her fingers toyed with her pearl necklace as she nervously broke eye contact.
“ That’s right, baby, clutch your pearls.
Would Mr. Trust Fund touch you like me?
Pull that hair?
Kiss you like a religion?
It’s not up for debate.
I’d give you what you need .”
“Draven, stop grinning like a damn idiot. What has you so high right now? Did you smoke something?” Wren asked. “I swear to God, if my daughter is in a house with drugs in it—”
Draven frowned, the insult wiping away his giddiness. Drugs? Did he not know Draven at all? “Dude, I’m clean. You know I don’t mess with anything.”
“What’s got you so happy? It is freaking all of us out.”
“Can’t a man smile at one o’clock in the afternoon and not be questioned by his friends?”
Wren’s eyes narrowed suspiciously at him, then he followed Draven’s line of sight to the three girls in the kitchen. Wren’s head spun back to stare at Draven. His narrowed eyes became little slits.
Uh, oh . Draven quickly jumped into the album conversation, “I say we go for a few more love songs in the new album. The audience loves those.”
“The female audience loves those,” Yin replied.
“The female audience makes up eighty percent of our fanbase,” Draven replied.
“Yeah, because you keep doing shows shirtless.”
Draven huffed. “I get hot when I drum.”
“ Sure , you do.” Yin rolled his eyes but grinned at his friend.
Wren still stared at Draven, glaring.
“Maybe we could play a new song at the Halloween bash?” Tomi, the lead singer, suggested.
Draven’s band, Medusa’s Tears , had been instructed to play the Halloween party at the home of the owner of their record label. No one said no to Judas Maximo of Maximillian Records . The man was a god when it came to music careers. He had the Midas touch for turning records to platinum and gold.
The same man who Draven had approached to ask for a raise/loan due to his siblings’ college and his grandmother’s nursing home expenses.
Ice-cold Judas Maximo had replied, “ Draven, you’re a drummer who doesn’t write music. Easily replaceable. If you want more money, do something to earn it .” Because saying a simple “no” was below Judas Maximo’s standards. Has to hit you where it hurts .
After more of a brainstorming and songwriting session, and the dominating smell of chocolate chip cookies tainted the air of Draven’s kitchen and living room, the band called it quits for the day.
Draven moved to join Thea—and those delicious-smelling cookies—in the kitchen, but Wren’s hand flattened onto his chest and held him back. Draven flashed him a distressed expression of: “ What the heck, dude? There are warm cookies at stake .”
“What’s going on with you, Draven?”
“What do you mean?” Draven watched from over Wren’s shoulder as Tomi and Yin greeted Thea and Mallory and ate the warm, fresh cookies.
“I mean, you were smiling like a crazy person when we got here. Then, you were suggesting lyrics for a love song. A love song, Draven. You. Lyrics .”
“You make it sound like the world is ending.”
Wren shifted to move his face in Draven’s line of vision of the kitchen, securing his attention. “Is it?” Wren asked. Shaking his head, he accused, “You’re lusting after Thea.”
Draven blinked and focused his full attention on Wren. Why did he have to accuse him of “lusting” after Thea. Why not “liking” her? It was one thing for his new roommate to think of him as shallow and sex-obsessed, but his closest bandmate? Someone he had known for over ten years… It was a special kind of hurtful.
“So?” Draven countered. “Is this the part where you threaten me to stay away, so I don’t break your future wife’s best friend’s heart?”
Shocking Draven, Wren shrugged. Shrugged . “I’m not worried about it.”
What the hell did that mean?
Wren let his words dangle there until Draven snapped, “Elaborate.”
Wren sighed. “I know you, Draven. You need someone to stroke your ego. You would never date a woman who couldn’t hear your music and spew compliments all over you.”
He’s wrong , Draven thought. But was he?
Draven knew he needed reassurance; he knew he was needy. It probably had something to do with having barely-present parents who had only ever been disappointed that he didn’t go into science or law or mathematics or basically anything but music. Hell, they might have been happier if he had been an English major. Always a disappointment .
“Dude, you’re making me sound like an egomaniac douchebag,” Draven shot back, the hurt ringing in his voice like the lingering sounds of smashing metal cymbals.
“I don’t mean it like that. I just—look, you two aren’t a good match, and I don’t want my future wife having to pick up the pieces of her friend’s heart when you get tired of the chase.” Wren crossed his arms and shifted out of Draven’s way. “I don’t know why I was worried, sorry, man,” Wren said. “She might be getting back with her ex soon anyway.”
“WHAT?” Draven shouted. His bandmates, who were currently enjoying hot chocolate chip cookies, glanced over at where Wren and Draven spoke in the living room.
“Mal said he keeps texting Thea to ‘talk’ and that Thea’s been ‘thinking about it.’ You know how off and on they’ve been. Plus, her parents are pushing for them to get back together, so who knows?”
Draven’s mind was a mess of lightning-speed thoughts and rising dread. Thea deserved better than Alex or Alric or whatever the heck his name was. “But he cheated on her. How can her parents want them together?”
Wren shrugged again. He calmly moved his shoulders up and down while Draven’s heart beat out of his chest. “Apparently, her parents love the guy. You know he’s making serious money. Mal said Thea’s parents are hearing, so maybe they think a rich deaf dude is the best choice for her.”
“He cheated on her,” Draven repeated, spitting out the words with such disgust that Wren’s eyebrows rose. “And what’s the deal with them assuming she has to be with a deaf guy? You hear, and you and Mal are together.”
“I got fluent in sign language for Armie,” Wren replied slowly, his eyes narrowing again. “You don’t actually like Thea, do you?”
Tense and impatient for this conversation to end, Draven said, “Wren, there are semi-warm chocolate chip cookies in my kitchen right now, growing colder and colder as you warn me away from my roommate.”
Wren snorted and stepped out of Draven’s way, gesturing for him to go to the kitchen.
Draven strode over, nodded hello to everyone, and grabbed a warm cookie. He wanted to shove it in his mouth and block any potentially dangerous thoughts from boiling over. He wanted to scream.
Why do you not think I’m capable or deserving of anything more than lust?
Why do you think I’m not good enough for her? Why assume I would break her heart?
The chocolate chips melted into his mouth as he stood beside Thea in the tiny kitchen area where his band dominated the space. Thea bit into a cookie at the same time, looking up at him and watching as he swallowed and licked the chocolate from his lips. She did the same, her tongue dabbing out in slow motion to slick those perfect pink lips.
Wren warned from beside him, “Careful not to burn yourself, Draven. Or anyone else.”