Chapter Nine #2
“Want to talk about why you’re getting this?” Trent asked. He stopped the needles for a moment. It was after closing, just the two of them in the studio.
“If I said no, would you leave me alone?” She smiled at him, and he grinned back, the two dimples Harper always mooned over showing.
“Probably not.”
There was no value in regurgitating what happened.
Trent had seen her at her worst and was thankfully still there for her.
No way did she want him to know the full story.
Why would he want to hear about her humiliation of being stripped over and over?
Would he even understand why she’d felt the need to protect herself by killing someone?
She wasn’t so confused about the past that she thought of herself as a murderer, but she was sure a court would call it manslaughter.
What would the wonderful man in front of her think of her then?
“Pix?”
He wasn’t going to let it go, but she’d expected as much when she sat down for the ink. “I saw someone from before.” “Before” had become the synonym for everything that happened from the day she was born until they’d found her.
Trent finished the last detail of the shading. He put his tattoo equipment down—never call it a gun unless you wanted to get him pissed—and wiped down her arm.
“You okay?”
Not really. “Of course,” she lied. Pixie tilted her chin toward the new tattoo.
“I have my shield in place.” Her ink was her armor, the equivalent of Wonder Woman’s Bracelets of Submission.
Every day, she stood before the mirror in the bathroom and recounted the story behind each blossom, a mental pattern to start the day on a positive note.
Trent rubbed the ointment on her arm and wrapped it for her. “There you go. You know what to do with it.”
“Thanks, Trent. Perfect as always.”
Trent stood and started to unplug his equipment. “You know we’re here for you, right? If you need us.”
Shuffling to the end of the chair, she pressed down on the tape he’d stuck on her skin. Part of her considered telling him, but to what end? Until she understood Arnie’s motivation, there was no point sharing the parts of her she wished would just disappear.
They cleaned up the station together, and Trent dropped her off at her condo before heading over to Frankie’s to watch Harper.
She’d started training to fight back against her abusive ex, but it turned out she was great at it.
Her first amateur fight was in July, and Trent was as terrified as he was proud of his fiancée.
Pixie waited until Trent’s Plymouth disappeared from view and wandered toward the condo.
It was a beautiful evening. A little cooler now the sun had gone down, but nothing she couldn’t handle after freezing her butt off in Canada.
She’d missed the salty air. A guitar-playing busker was further down the street.
The Cuban music sounded familiar, like a song by Eliades Ochoa maybe, but she couldn’t be sure.
“You kept me waiting to see you again. Where did you go?” Arnie slipped out of the shadows by her building.
She should have anticipated seeing him, should have considered that he would approach her while nobody was watching.
Damn it. Why hadn’t she just run straight inside when Trent dropped her off?
Summoning confidence, or at least its mask, Pixie stood her ground. “I don’t owe you an explanation for anything. Now if you’ll excuse me.” Raising her head, she walked past him.
“We aren’t finished here,” he said, grabbing hold of her arm and wrenching it. “You thought you’d get to decide when I am done with you?”
She shrugged out of his hold, but Arnie grabbed her wrist, squeezed it real tight. Tight enough for the skin to burn as she tried to pull free. But he did it all with a smile. “Really, you thought it was going to be that easy?”
Pixie shook, her breathing spiralled out of control.
She needed to get into the condo. Fast. Men like him thrived on making women feel small.
With a sharp tug, she attempted to yank her wrist free, but his hold was too tight.
Arnie leaned in to her neck, the hiss of his inhale as he sniffed her skin sent a chill down her spine.
He slid a hand into her purse, and withdrew her wallet before she could stop him. Her life was in there. All of her details, her cards.
“What do you think you are doing?” she whispered, watching as he took the fifty dollars she’d withdrawn that afternoon. Slowly he fastened it, and dropped it back into her bag.
“Proving the point.” He folded the bank note into a small rectangle, held it between two fingers, and saluted her with it, a sickening grin on his face. “We’re square when I say so, S-J,” he said. “And right now, when I see how you’ve grown, I am most definitely not done.”
* * *
Razzmatazz in Barcelona had no idea what was coming if the sound check they’d wrapped up earlier was anything to go by.
They hadn’t made it big in Spain, so the opportunity to play alongside one of Spain’s biggest metal acts was too good to turn down, even if the long-haul flight and time away from recording were a pain in the ass.
They pulled up outside the Mercer Hotel in the Gothic Quarter. It was his favorite hotel to stay at in the city. All exposed stone walls combined with glass and chrome. It was inviting yet sparse, so suited Jordan perfectly.
Their bags had been taken straight to the hotel when they’d landed so it was a simple matter to collect their keys.
Once in his room, Dred headed straight for the shower.
Rehearsal had gotten him all sweaty and tense.
Things ran smoother when they had their own crew, but drop-in gigs like this rarely called for that kind of support.
The hot water pounded down on him, releasing the tension he was carrying in his neck as he scrubbed himself clean.
Petal, Pixie, the gig, the album. Giving Amanda the ten thousand dollars may not have been the smartest move, but he wanted her out of that shit-hole of an apartment.
No. He wanted Petal out of that shit-hole of an apartment.
Before he’d left his daughter that day, he’d laid Petal back into her bassinet and then turned on Amanda.
It had taken every ounce of his self-control to not tear the place apart, but one whimper from his daughter had him reining it in tight.
What burned more than anything was that she’d deliberately messed with the condom to get a better life for herself, without a single thought about the child they’d create.
He’d spent Thursday talking to Petal’s social worker and, with Sam’s help, a lawyer who specialized in custody cases.
Up until she’d spilled her secret to him, he’d assumed they’d been unlucky.
That the baby was as much of a shock to her as it was to him.
He was willing to man up, do the right thing, and buy them a fucking house on the Bridal Path, the multimillion-dollar community in the north end of the city, if that’s what she’d wanted.
Now, he was convinced Amanda didn’t deserve a dime.
Everything he gave them was going to go in Petal’s name.
If he bought them a house, it was going to be in his and Petal’s name.
He’d pay for all her needs directly. Amanda would get a minimal allowance for herself.
His daughter would want for nothing, but the conniving bitch who’d set them both up wouldn’t get anything of her own.
Then there was the photograph from the airport of him kissing Pixie like their lives depended on it.
Some cheap-shot blogger had bought it from a fan.
Pixie had taken it like a trooper, but they’d not had a chance to discuss it properly.
Building a long-distance relationship was proving harder than he imagined.
Nothing ever seemed to align for them. Between her shifts and his crazy schedule, they were limited to snatched conversations and text messages.
It had crossed his mind that his pursuit of her was selfish, but the idea of stopping sucked.
At some point, he was going to have to tell her about Petal, but it was still too raw and new. And Pixie deserved the courtesy of having that conversation face-to-face, where he could hold her hand, pull her close, and reassure her that it didn’t change the way he was beginning to feel about her.
He flicked the shower off and grabbed a towel.
After vigorously drying off, he left the bathroom naked.
It was one of the main reasons he wanted to get his own place, to have the freedom to not wear clothes if he didn’t have to.
Sure, the guys had few inhibitions around each other.
Living in such close quarters, whether it was in the group home, on a tour bus, or in their homes in L.A.
and Toronto, there wasn’t much they hadn’t seen of each other.
Dred wanted a place of his own, to explore who he was as an individual, rather than a permanent part of a collective.
And he wanted to be able to have sex anywhere he wanted, whenever he wanted it.
When Pixie had told him she was a virgin, he’d almost choked.
His tastes ran a little darker than average.
He loved sex. Used it to take the edge off life.
Used it to get inspired. He liked both ends of the spectrum, sexy and sweet versus dark and dirty.
Right now he needed dark. Rough. Something to work out the tension the shower hadn’t lifted.
Two in the afternoon. It would only be, what, eight, in Miami. He prayed Pixie was on the later shift.
He grabbed his phone and video-called her.
“Hey,” she croaked, patting the bedding down around her, her head resting on the pillow.
“Hey, gorgeous. Move that sheet, I want to see what you are wearing.” He prayed for naked, but knowing Pixie, she wouldn’t be.
When she did as he said, he smiled. She wore a thin purple tank. He could see her nipple straining against the fabric. Who gave a fuck about breast size with nipples as responsive as that? On her bottom, she wore lose pants in purple and white polka dot.
Nothing about the outfit was sexy, yet he wished he were there with her all the same.
“Boring,” she said.
“Beautiful,” he replied. “I wanna play, Pix. Can we?”
“Is this a booty call?” she asked, her eyebrows rose in surprise.
“Oh, gorgeous. I want much more than your booty. I was thinking about our time together in Toronto while I was rehearsing today.”
He reached his free hand around his cock. Pulled slow and tight, out of sight of the video.
“Me too. What were you thinking about?”
He wanted desperately to be himself with her. To not try to hide the sexual part of himself. “If I answer that honestly, Snowflake, I might freak you out.”
Pixie smiled and looked up at him through those perfect eyelashes. “Try me. Rule three. I won’t break.”
Dred ignored the nervous flip of excitement. “Well, I was standing there thinking about how my fingers smelled after I got you off. And how they would have tasted if you’d let me slide them deep inside you. Scissoring them as I pulled them in and out of you. I want that. Don’t you?”
“I . . . erm.”
“Play with me, Pix. Please. Don’t you? I am fucking hard from the want of you, and if you’re ready, I want you to get me off. I want you to touch yourself. I want this conversation to get you as turned on right now as I am. Play with me, Snowflake. I’m all yours.”
All yours. The words had all but spilled out.
“On the plane home, I wondered what it would have been like to unzip your jeans,” she said.
Fuck. She was going to play. And for all the dark he craved, her sweetness turned him on even more.
“Did you think about how I’d look, when I was hard? What you would do with me?”
Pixie took a deep breath. “I’d take you in my hand and stroke you. Get the feel of you.”
“Do you want me to touch myself now for you?”
“Would you?”
“You have no idea the things I would do for you. Talk to me, Snowflake.”
“I’d suck on you, I think. Put you in my mouth.”
Dred shivered. It wasn’t the most erotic line he’d ever heard, but from his virgin, it was the sexiest fucking thing. Ever.
“What would I taste like?”
“Hmm . . . salty, maybe. I’d lick the very tip for a taste.” Pixie turned and buried her head in the pillow then looked back. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
“I can imagine the inside of your mouth. It’s tight and wet. Warm. You’re on your knees in front of me. We’re at a cabin by the lake. Outside. And those perfect lips of yours are sucking me off.”
Perhaps it was overwhelming need, but Pixie placed her hand between her legs. When she realized what she’d done, she removed it quickly.
“No. Put it back. Do what feels natural, Pix. Wanna see what feels natural for me?”
“No.” There was too much certainty in her words to push her, even though he knew he could. He kept his phone focused on his face.
Tentatively, she put her hand back between her legs, and rocked against the side of her palm. A steady rocking to find the edge. The edge he was about to fall over. He moved his hand faster along his cock, searching for the telltale tightening.
“I want you to sit on my face and show me how you get off. And when you are good, and wet, and still riding your first orgasm, I want you to move those delicious hips of yours until you are sitting over my cock. Then you can lower yourself on to me, fast or slow . . . because I’m taking you at least twice .
. . so it really doesn’t matter to me which we do first.”
Pixie’s mouth opened and she gasped for breath. Her eyes tightened, her body spasmed. It was the most perfect orgasm he’d ever seen. At the sight of it, he let go and joined her.