11. Chapter Eleven
Chapter Eleven
Willow
Two days later and Phoenix is still under my skin.
Not in a soft, romantic way. There are no rose-colored memories tangled in the sheets. No gentle afterglow warming the room. And no pretty little lie my heart can crawl into and use as shelter.
There is only the ache.
It lives between my thighs, deep in my hips, and along my neck, where his mouth had been too rough and too greedy to pretend it meant nothing.
It sits beneath my ribs, where something stupid and hopeful had tried to bloom while he was still inside me, looking at me as if I were not another bad decision in a room already full of them.
I can still feel his mouth at my ear telling me he wanted me and how he had wanted me longer than he should have.
My body remembers him before my pride has a chance to drag itself out of the wreckage.
That’s the cruelest part.
After all of that, after his hands and his mouth and the hard, desperate way he fucked me as if he were trying to prove something to both of us he turned away. He fixed his jeans and put his smirk back on as if he had not just cracked something open inside me.
“Well,” he said. “We should get back out there.”
The words sit heavy in my chest.
I stare at the ceiling of my bedroom as morning light cuts through the gap in the curtains.
I squeeze my eyes shut and lie here as the brutal little truth presses down on me. I let my best friend fuck me in a storage room and now I am trying to figure out whether I was a mistake, a fix, a conquest, or something he regretted the second his cock was out of me.
The worst part is that I can’t even hate him.
God, I want to. I fucking want to. I want to wake up furious at him for his arrogance, his selfishness, and the fact that I might have been another woman added to his long list of terrible decisions.
Instead, shame floods my stomach because I believed him when he said he wanted me. For a few terrible minutes, I thought I mattered to him in a way he could not laugh off.
Then he turned his back on me.
I get out of bed and go straight into the shower.
The water pours down on me, hot enough to sting and hard enough to make me flinch when it hits the tender skin at the side of my neck.
I stand beneath it anyway, letting it run over my hair, my face, my shoulders, as if heat could rinse him out of places he had no right to leave himself.
Steam gathers against the glass until the bathroom disappears behind it, and for a while, that seems easier.
Being blurred. Being hidden. Being nothing but breath, water, and skin that still remembers too much.
I scrub until the soap turns slick beneath my palms and my skin begins to burn. I scrub my neck where his mouth had been, my thighs where his hands had held me open, and my hips where the ache sits deep and mean.
The bruises from his fingers are still there when I pull on my jeans. Of course they are.
Phoenix Stone doesn’t even have the decency to ruin me in ways I can hide.
I run a brush through my hair and try to make my face appear normal.
Normal is important. It means Jax will not stare at me with that loud, worried expression he wears when he wants to ask a question but knows I will bite his head off if he opens his mouth.
Normal means Jett will not study me as if my face were a puzzle he has not yet decoded.
Normal means Cruz will not go quiet, which is somehow worse than when he opens his mouth to talk.
They know what happened that night. Fuck, they warned Phoenix and I against it.
And I saw the pity on their faces as I walked out alone, after I ordered an Uber because Phoenix went straight to the bar, ordered a drink, and leaned in to talk to some blonde as if he had not been inside me less than two minutes earlier.
As if I were nothing. As if I had imagined the whole filthy, stupid, heart-shattering thing.
Normal means Phoenix doesn’t get to humiliate me twice.
By the time I arrive at the studio, my spine is straight.
That is the part I can control. I walk into the studio with my bag on my shoulder and my face arranged so it doesn’t bleed. The guys are already there, scattered around the room with instruments, coffee cups, and cables.
Jax’s gaze flicks up the moment I step inside. “Morning, Wills.”
“Morning.”
My voice sounds fine.
For half a second, it feels important. It is almost believable. Then Phoenix lifts his head from where he is standing near the mic and looks at me.
No. I correct myself before hope can make a fool of me again.
He averts his eyes from me. His eyes skim past my face, land near the back wall, then drop to the lyric sheet in his hand, as if my face has become a dangerous place to fix his gaze.
As if I’m something inconvenient. Something he touched by accident and now has to pretend doesn’t bear his fingerprints.
“Damon’s late,” Cruz says, still adjusting his guitar strap. “Which means he’s either somewhere ruining another poor asshole’s day or making someone cry before breakfast.”
The guys laugh, but Phoenix doesn’t. He taps the lyric sheet with two fingers and keeps his gaze fixed on the page.
“Second verse drags,” he says.
My eyes go to him. “It doesn’t drag.”
“It does.”
His tone is cold enough to cut through the room.
Flat and professional. Detached in a manner that seems practiced.
He speaks to me as though we are in a meeting, as though we are discussing tempo and structure rather than the fact that he shoved his hands under my dress over forty-eight hours ago.
As though his mouth had not been on my neck.
As though his cock had not been inside me while he said things that still have the nerve to live under my skin.
Cruz’s eyes shift from Phoenix to me.
I walk over and snatch the lyric sheet from Phoenix’s hand because I need something to do with my fingers before they start shaking. “The verse holds back so the chorus hits harder.”
Phoenix’s jaw flexes.
For a second, he just looks at my hand on the paper, then he snatches it back with a sharpness that makes the air between us flinch. His eyes finally meet mine.
And there it is. For one second, the cold slips. Something raw flashes through him, quick, furious, and frightened enough to almost knock the breath out of me. Want. Regret. Panic. Some ugly, tangled thing he would rather choke on than name.
Then he buries it beneath that beautiful, arrogant face of his, and I hate him for being so good at disappearing even while standing right in front of me.
“Fine,” he says.
Damon enters the room swiftly, phone in one hand and an expression on his face that suggests someone has already pissed him off.
Jax looks up from behind the drums. “You’re late. If that were us, you’d be riding our asses so hard we’d have to buy you dinner afterward.”
Damon barely glances at him. “If I were riding your ass, Jax, you’d make too much noise, finish too fast, and still swear you nailed it.”
Jax’s mouth drops open. “That was fucking rude.”
Jett glances over from his bass, calm as ever. “He’s still right. You are late.”
Damon points at him. “Do not defend him, Jett. Being the better twin doesn’t mean you have to babysit the defective one.”
“Fuck off, asshole,” Jett says. “I’m the only one who gets to talk to him like that.”
Cruz coughs into his fist, badly hiding a laugh.
Damon gives them all a flat, deadly stare, then turns toward the control room. “Okay. From the top.”
He goes back out to the soundboard, and the glass door shuts behind him.
Jax counts them in. Cruz’s guitar slides beneath the rhythm, and Jett’s bass fills the space. Then Phoenix sings my words.
He stands at the mic, his lip ring catching the light, one hand wrapped around the stand, his body loose and careless in that way that makes people stare before they realize they are doing it.
Every note comes out of him rough and perfect, scraping against the ceiling before dropping straight into my chest.
My lyrics turned into his power.
I sit on the battered couch and pretend I’m listening for phrasing. That I’m not watching his mouth. I pretend the sound of him still doesn’t know exactly where to hurt me.
Phoenix’s eyes never meet mine while he sings.
After all these years of friendship—after every song, every secret I have told him, and every stupid piece of trust I handed him because I thought he knew how to hold it—he cannot face me now that he has fucked me.
He can put my words in his mouth and make them sound powerful and alive.
He can stand two feet from me and sing, but he cannot meet my gaze.
By the second run-through, Jax is playing too hard. Cruz keeps missing cues by half a second. Attention is split between the music and the silent war unfolding two feet from the mic stand.
When the song falls apart near the bridge, Jax throws a stick onto the snare and leans back.
“All right, what the fuck?”
Phoenix turns on him. “What?”
“What crawled up your ass and started charging rent?”
“Just play the fucking song,” Phoenix tells him.
“I would love to, man, but you’re singing as if the microphone sucked your cock, called you mediocre, and then asked Cruz for a second opinion.”
The room tightens around us.
The tension has been there since I walked in, crawling through every missed cue and every note Phoenix refuses to aim my way. It’s in Jax’s too-hard drumming and in Cruz’s clenched jaw.
Cruz shifts his guitar off his shoulder and sets it against the amp. “Take five.”
“No,” Phoenix says.
Damon’s voice cuts through from the control room. “No, we don’t have time.”
“I don’t fucking care,” Cruz says, voice flat enough to cut, as he takes his guitar strap off his shoulder. “We are taking five before I say something I’ll fucking regret.”
His glare lands on Phoenix causing Phoenix’s mouth to tighten.
For a second, I think Phoenix might fight him. That’s what Phoenix usually does when someone backs him into a corner. He pushes, bites, and makes it ugly enough that nobody wants to come any closer.