30. Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty
Willow
Iknow Phoenix is an asshole. He’s a rockstar and the egotistical prick with too many women in his past and too much applause running through him.
I know the smirk, the selfishness, and the way fame built a shrine to his worst habits and called it a personality.
I have known all of it since we were teenagers.
But lately I keep seeing him again. The real him.
Not all at once, but he returns in pieces. And most of those pieces still swear too much, leave wet towels on the bathroom floor, and firmly believe that a shirt is optional if the temperature is above freezing.
Phoenix brushes past me in the kitchen with one hand at my hip. Not long enough to mean anything. But long enough to make my body remember exactly what he did to it three hours earlier.
He smiles at me and the room tilts under the weight of our history.
Those smiles scare me most.
They aren’t the filthy grin he usually wears when my thighs are around his head and all the arrogance in the world tucked behind his teeth.
I know what to do with his mouth when it is dirty.
I can pull his hair and shove his face back between my legs and tell him exactly what I want.
Tell the arrogant shithead to stop making me beg for it and just put his fucking mouth on my pussy and mean it.
And he does. God help me, he does. He tells me to open wider.
He pulls orgasms out of me with his fingers, his mouth, his cock.
Drawing those noises out of me until I’m shaking, swearing and hating him for how well he knows my body.
For how quickly he learnt every note of it and how little shame he has about playing them all at once.
The filthy mouth I can handle. The cocky bastard who makes me forget every sensible thought I’ve ever had, I can handle that too.
But the smile and the arm that pulls me in after the hot filthy sex. That one I have no defense against. That one I never did.
The days blur and a week passes.
The apartment is alive again. Coffee cups multiply on the counter. Phoenix’s guitar leans against my couch. The notebook that used to sit closed on my desk now stays open, pages bent, ink everywhere, and his handwriting tangled with mine in the margins.
We work on new songs every day. Not because the label wants it. We work on them because they are ours. Because they feel the way they used to before all of this became stages, headlines, and women hunting for the lead singer with the dirty smirk and the reputation.
Before any of that, it was just us. A boy with a guitar and too much ego. A girl with a notebook and too many feelings. And a melody passing between them until neither could say who had written what anymore.
It seems that way again. Only older. Darker.
The innocence of youth is gone and I don’t think either of us would know what to do with it if it came back.
But the intimacy is there, threaded through the apartment in low notes, half-written lines, and the particular silence of two people who have stopped pretending they don’t need each other.
He watches me now. Not the way he used to watch me from across a crowded room, with enough arrogance to make me furious.
This is different. Quieter. His gaze catches me when I’m writing, when I’m on the floor with my knees pulled up and a pen between my teeth.
Sometimes the way he looks at me makes my chest hurt in ways I cannot yet name.
I sense it in the way he pulls me into him. In the way he buries his face in my hair and holds me a few seconds too long, as if he is checking that I’m still here. As if he is back in that hospital room, sitting beside my bed with his hand in mine.
We sit on the living room floor, his arm around my waist, his chin resting near my shoulder. The guitar is pushed aside and my notebook rests across my knees.
He is gentler than I have ever seen him before.
Phoenix, who has never been gentle with anything in his life, is gentle toward me.
He still fucks with the confidence of a man who knows exactly how to play my body and enjoys every sound he drags from it.
He is still cocky, and still the dirty mouthed bastard who can make me shake with one low command and then look smug about it as if my orgasm is a round of applause he has earned.
He tells me my pussy belongs to him. He says it with enough certainty that my body believes him before my brain has caught up.
But he doesn’t turn cold once he has had me.
Sometimes he pulls me into him before I have stopped shaking, one hand moving slowly over my back as his breathing settles.
Sometimes he drifts off with his fingers intertwined with mine, as though a piece of him doesn’t trust the darkness without being able to sense me there.
I keep telling myself that this is temporary.
Because what happens when he no longer needs to be here?
When the two weeks are over, real life will return.
The world will press its filthy hands against the glass.
Damon. The band. Fame. Women with glitter on their skin and Phoenix’s name already halfway out of their mouths.
The machine that taught him to mistake being wanted for being whole.
That thought doesn’t crush me the way it once would have.
I love him. God, I love him in a way that settles under my skin and refuses every eviction notice I have ever served.
But I am no longer living on the edge of his attention.
I’m not waiting to see if Phoenix remembers to give me enough scraps to make a meal.
If this is all he can give me, I will take it for what it is. Something real that happened while we were both trying.
I can love him and still remember where the exits are. And then I will move on with my life, with him still in it somehow, because Phoenix will always be threaded through me.
That is growth.
Ugly growth. Hard growth. But rehab taught me to love myself, too.
The sound of him moving around my kitchen pulls me back into the room.
Phoenix is barefoot in my kitchen, wearing black jeans and a T-shirt for once, hair still too messy, tattooed arms exposed, a drink in his hand.
He brings a glass over, leans down to kiss me, then hands me the glass. It’s quick, almost casual, except nothing about Phoenix’s mouth on mine has been ever casual since the first night he walked me to my bedroom.
My cheeks heat as the memory of that night washes over me.
Phoenix’s eyes sharpen immediately. Of course they do. This man can spot arousal from another ZIP code.
“What?” I ask too fast.
His mouth curves. “Nothing.”
“Liar.”
He moves his lips to my ear. “You just thought about me fucking you.”
“I did not.”
“You absolutely did.” His hand glides along the back of the couch, boxing me in without touching me. “Your pupils went wide and guilty. Very obvious.”
“You’re impossible.”
“You moaned that last night too.” His mouth grazes my jaw. “Right before you told me not to stop.”
I pull back. “Phoenix.”
“Let me fuck you, Wills.”
“My parents will be here in ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes is enough time to make you come,” he says, voice low and filthy. “I have done it in less. Let me bend you over this couch, pull those panties down, and have you shaking before they hit the elevator.”
A knock sounds at the door.
Phoenix drops his head back and groans at the ceiling.
“Fuck.” He looks down at himself, his hard cock prominent in his jeans.
“How the fuck am I supposed to see your parents with a hard cock, Wills? Seriously. This is a medical situation. I am going to have to go sort this out in the bathroom, or I swear to God the second that door closes behind them I am taking you to that bedroom, and I am not letting you out until I have come at least twice. Maybe three times. Depends how long they stay and how much this ache builds.”
I stand up and lean in close. My hand slides over his cock through his jeans, feeling how hard he already is. He hisses at my touch.
I stroke him through denim, feeling him pulse under my palm, and watch his eyes close for one involuntary second.
“Fuck,” he breathes. “Don’t stop.”
I kiss the side of his mouth, and he turns into it immediately, as his hand comes up to my jaw, hungry for me.
I pull back and give his cock one more slow stroke, causing his whole body to shudder. A low moan escapes him before he can stop it.
“Maybe I’m not wearing any underwear when I open that door,” I say against his mouth, before stepping away from him.
His groan is so pained that it’s almost poetic. He turns away, shoulders rigid, muttering under his breath. “You’re gonna pay for that with my cock, Wills. Every fucking inch of it.”
I move toward the door and turn back to see him adjusting his cock in his jeans, looking furious about it.
His eyes meet mine and he gives me a small nod to let me know he’s ready.
I open the door.
“There she is,” Mom says, and her voice does that thing it has been doing since the hospital, that particular softness that sits just beneath normal and gives everything away.
She hugs me first. Both arms, pulling me in, her hands gliding over my back the way they did when I was small and sick.
When she pulls back, her eyes sweep my face, searching, the way she has been searching since everything fell apart.
“You look so much better, dear,” she says in a soft voice.
“I feel better.”
Her mouth trembles, but she smiles anyway. “Good.”
Dad stands behind her. His eyes have already shifted past me to Phoenix, who is standing a few feet behind me.
I step into Dad’s arms and hug him. He hugs me back harder than I expect. His arms are tight around my shoulders and his chin briefly drops to the top of my head.
“You look well, sweetheart,” he says. “Really well.”
I pull back and see it on his face. The relief he would never say out loud in a million years, but he can’t keep it out of his eyes.