Page 60 of The Duet

“I think the pleasure is all mine.” I close the distance between our lips and kiss Cleo. I could kiss her all night long. In fact, I may do just that.

When we break from our kiss, Cleo gives me a funny look, the tips of her eyebrows drawn together.

“What?” A smile breaks on my face at the sight of her.

“Even your down-to-earth spiel has something sexy about it.”

I chuckle because it sounds so very much like something Joan could have said. Maybe Cleo has reminded me of Joan all along, of certain aspects of her, of all these things I’ve been without for too long.

“What’s so funny?” Cleo has recovered from the intensity of her climax. She pushes me off her and lies on top of me, wedging her knee between my thighs, reminding me of the fact that I’m fully naked and a whole lot turned on.

“Absolutely nothing.” My voice has dropped into a lower register. I’m so hot for Cleo, not only because she’s gorgeous and so much fun to be around but, also, because part of me still believes that I shouldn’t be—that there’s a forbidden edge to what we’re doing. I’m too old. She’s too young. Her bandmates don’t approve. I can only imagine what her parents would think of this, of us. The PR people at the record company, a department I’ve grown to care less and less about over the years, will surely throw a hissy fit. But what turns me on the most, is that I don’t care, because I can do whatever I want, and so can Cleo—and there’s no doubt the fans will love it.

“Good.” Cleo gazes down at me. I gaze back into her clear blue eyes, and I realize that she’s the only person who can hurt me when it comes to this. She has chosen her band over me once before, and she might do it again. She’s still so young. She has so many tours left to go on, and dozens of records to make, hundreds of hearts left to break—I can only hope she doesn’t break mine, but I can’t control it. Just like I couldn’t control, nor stop, Joan from dying, without a single word of warning, of a massive stroke, right in front of me. “Because things are about to get serious again.”

I swallow hard at her words because of what they mean. Because I want things to get very serious right now. I want Cleo. I want her in the way I’ve only ever wanted one other woman.

She leans in, and I kiss her as though there’s no tomorrow—although there very much is, and in a few days we’ll be going on stage together again. I can’t wait for that particular stint of magic either.

But first things first. I pull Cleo close and revel in the touch of her thigh pressing against me. She’s all over me, the way Joan used to be. Given the chance, she was always touching some part of her to some part of me, be it a finger hooked into mine or a hand resting against my back. Joan was possessive that way, although not in any other ways. I know because she died much too soon, and at a time when our love, which had gone through many peaks and valleys by then, was at its best, I’ve come to idealize her. I made her into a saint that she surely wasn’t. Perhaps I could even draw a parallel with how Cleo sees me as a version that only exists in her head.

But none of that matters now because these are Cleo’s lips meandering down my neck—and decidedly not Joan’s. It’s Cleo whose warmth is all over me, breathing new life into parts of me I had allowed to die, making me feel as if I can fully become the Lana Lynch I used to be, with the addition of a few wrinkles. Cleo doesn’t care one bit about the lines on my skin, judging by the way she skates the tip of her tongue along my neck. I guess what turns me on most of all is how much she still wants me, because, by now, she must have caught a glimpse of the Lana she didn’t know—the real me with all my vulnerabilities and hang-ups. Yet, she’s still here. She came back to me, and I opened my arms to her as wide as they would go.

Cleo’s lips have reached my breasts. My nipples ache for the soft touch of her tongue. My entire body throbs with need for her. She takes a nipple into her mouth, and I groan wildly. I let it all out, the way I do on stage, when my vocal cords are the perfect extension of what’s going on in my heart. Making music again has been healing in more ways than one, but when I decided to go back on the road, to sing for people again, I had no inkling of all the other things I would get in return. One of The Other Women—the opening act I believed we didn’t need—in my bed, raking her teeth over my rock-hard nipple, making me moan low in my throat.

Cleo slips off me and her wet lips on my nipple are replaced by her fingers. She cups my breasts as though they are the best present she has ever received in her life, before lowering her hand, and drawing ever-tightening circles around my belly button.

My entire body aches for her now, for a resolution to what she has set off in me. I may be older than her, but that doesn’t mean I feel any less of this—on the contrary. The wounds that life has left me with are deeper, their scar tissue more fragile, because all she’s been doing since I met her, since our voices hit that first note together, is niggling at it, leaving me ever more exposed.

Cleo fixes her stare on me as her hand wanders lower still and my clit becomes the center of attention.

I gaze back into her eyes, which are the color of a hazy summer sky in LA, the endless blue sky that I can watch for hours from Joan’s favorite vantage point in our garden.

My breath hitches as Cleo’s fingertip edges along my clit, only to retreat immediately. With her gaze glued to mine, she brings two fingers to her lips and sucks them deep into her mouth, before lowering her hand and, ever so slowly, slipping her fingers through my wetness.

Cleo moves inside me and I’m all the way there with her already. She may end up hurting me, or I may end up hurting her. But we will always have had our time on stage, and we will have had this, which is much more than two people on tour having sex. Cleo made me open myself up again to something I believed I was no longer interested in—to something that I thought was no longer in the cards for me after my wife died. Although I should have known, all along, how surprising life can be.

When I was growing up, singing along to Kay Cooper songs, I could never have guessed that I would someday be part of a boundary-breaking all-female rock band with a career of decades—and counting. So many things could have happened to The Lady Kings over the years. We could have split up over the most silly thing, but we didn’t. The only thing that brought us to our knees was our guitarist dying. Yet, here we are again. Joan couldn’t be resurrected, but our band could.

I could have put my foot down and said no to taking an opening act on tour. I could have made “I Should Have Kissed You” work on my own, dismantling the duet part of it and making it into one of our own songs. So many things could have happened, and so many things did happen. Still, most of them were unforeseen.

What’s most unforeseen is that I’m thundering toward a climax at Cleo’s fingers in this New York hotel room. Cleo Palmer, lead singer of The Other Women, front woman extraordinaire—and she’s not bad with her fingers either.

She thrusts high inside me, leaving me breathless, leaving all of me a little ragged, like parts of me are coming apart at the seams, the parts of me that had come to subsist on denial, on no longer doing what I love doing most in the world—and no longer believing in the possibility of love.

I pull Cleo toward me and kiss her divine lips as wave after wave of climax rolls through me, as I give myself to her completely, and, piece by tiny piece, I go back to the joyful, fearless Lana Lynch I used to be.

Chapter 36

Cleo

On the bus out of New York, every one of us is suffering from a hangover. Jess seems to be worse off than most. She’s bundled underneath a blanket, a thick eye mask covering her face.

“She stumbled into her room as Tessie and I were getting up for breakfast,” Daphne whispers to me. “I bet she didn’t spend the night in her own room.”

“You’re kidding.” I look into Daphne’s amused face. Maybe because she’s newly in love, the collective hangover we’re all suffering from seems to affect her less.

Daphne shakes her head. “We all know she didn’t sleep with Lana. Not after that kiss.”

---