Page 22 of Crazy Love
“No,” Darke complains, turning the sound into a low hollow moan, while his brows concertina. “You can’t bail now. We’re a team. Don’t desert me.” I swear if he wasn’t clinging onto Knox to stop him pitching head first into the toilet bowl he’d have clapped his hands together in prayer and maybe fallen on his knees to beg.
I make the stupid mistake of looking at him, naked chest, tattooed biceps, multiply-pierced ears and all. It’s the doe-eyes that break me, though.
Needy bad boys with a drop dead sexy pouts, tats and truly wicked green eyes—yep, I’m a sucker. My mum always said I was too nice.
“All right, but you’re the one who gets to undress him.” I’ve already got more intimately acquainted with Mr. Knox than I really care to be. I’ve no desire to further deepen my knowledge of his person. Of course, if we were talking about me stripping Darke and getting him in the tub, things would be very different. I reckon he could make bath-time interesting.
“We could just wash him with his clothes on.” Darke squeezes his lips into a half-hopeful, half-pleading moue.
“You can’t put him to bed wet, and denim is a bugger to remove when it’s sodden.”
“I don’t wanna,” he complains, but he’s just moaning because it’s a grim job, not because he’s actually going to bow out of doing it. When he looks at Knox, his expression softens. There’s genuine affection there, despite the godawful mess Knox is in, and the trouble he’s going to cause. “Fuck it, all right, how are we going to do this?”
“I’ll hold onto Colonel Spew, and you do the rest.”
I position myself behind Knox with the vanity unit at my back as something to brace myself against, then wrap my arms around his chest, so that he’s flopped inside the ring I’ve made. I’m not going to be able to hold him like this for long, because the man has zero muscle tone at the moment. He’s like a sleeping toddler. Only he’s twelve…thirteen stones of dead weight rather than two.
“Still don’t wanna.” Darke gingerly unbuckles Knox’s belt. I get the impression his overblown expression of distaste—tongue sticking out, and eyes narrowed as if he’s sucking lemons—is for my benefit. If it were just the two of them, it’d be total efficiency, and barely a wrinkled nose.
Darke drags Knox’s jeans down to his ankles and leaves them there. “I’ll take them off when we upend him.”
Good plan. If he tries to do it now, we’re all going to end up in a tangled heap, which is closer than I want to be to Knox, and more intimate than it’s sensible to get with Darke. The fact Knox might end up with concussion in the process, might have a bit of bearing too.
Removing Knox’s T-shirt takes several attempts as we pause whenever he makes chomping noises so that Darke can leap hastily out of range. Then he gingerly tiptoes back. He’s light on his feet, so I actually enjoy the process of watching him dance about.
We do eventually get Knox bared and into the bath. Surprisingly, he turns out to be something of a furry beast. You’d never think it to look at him clothed. Certainly, I never think of fair-haired men as being hairy, but his arms, legs and chest are all covered. Admittedly, the hairs are pale, so you almost don’t notice them at first. Ivy would love him if she wasn’t so besotted with Nightshift. She loves hairy men, especially if they have tufts of the stuff that surrounds their navels. Knox has that, and a thick growth of golden fur that extends down over his stomach to form a thicker, darker thatch around his cock.
I stare at his slumbering beast for a good thirty seconds before my sense of propriety kicks in, and I avert my gaze, before I get accused of ogling a more or less comatose man. It’s not as if I’ve a particular hankering to look at Knox’s junk, but when it’s so blatantly on display, it’s kind of hard not to notice.
“I suppose it’s too much to ask you to help me wash him?”
Apparently it isn’t, since I grab the shower head and angle it at our charge. “Tell you what, you scrub and I’ll rinse.”
-10-
Nathaniel Darke
If I wasn’t infatuated with Loveday Trevaskis already, I am now. The woman is worth twelve of every member of Paradise Kiss. In short, she’s a living saint. Here she is, helping me perform a pretty unsavoury task, and there’s no benefit to her. If anything, the opposite is true, because if we manage to clean Knox up and rouse him into consciousness, then the competition between our bands remains on. Currently, Bitch Slap are set to win on a bye.
She’s not stupid, so I can only put her actions down to kindness. I haven’t seen a whole lot of that in my life, so I’m a little mesmerised by it.
Once we have Knox stripped off, it doesn’t take much effort to clean him. A squirt of complimentary shower gel, a bit of shampoo and he looks presentable, if still sickly pale, but we’re all going to have shadowy, dark ringed eyes and a ghoulish pallor come six o’clock. I can’t believe it’s a time anyone sees out of choice.
I look at Knox while I swoosh the face-cloth over his skin, and struggle not to blame myself for his condition. I know what he’s like. I ought to have hand cuffed him to my side post-gig, but I let Joel distract me, and then it seemed more productive to keep on working than waste time locating him when he failed to show.
Knox gets disorientated. He’s probably trying to figure out which room and which floor to find me on. How many times did I think that? How many times have I excused his behaviour with similar thoughts? And yet, he never has any trouble procuring his fixes.
What I need to admit, what Paradise Kiss as a whole need to accept is that Knox is an addict. Joel’s already accepted it. That’s why he’s making a fuss. I’m not sure I’m ready to completely pull my own blinkers off. Doing so is going to make life way tougher. I’m not even sure if Paradise Kiss will survive. Actually, I’m not sure we’re going to survive the meeting with Graham Callahan. Bands have to consist of people who respect one another, and who pull their weight. Knox is more like a lodestone weighing us down. If he fluffs this for us, then resentment is going to be running at an all-time high.
Yet, I can’t bring myself to cut him loose.
It feels wrong to do so. Desperately, desperately wrong. He stood by me when I needed him.
“Ready to rinse him off?”
I nod, and Loveday turns the shower dial. A smallpfftnoise, precedes a fierce blast of water that hits Knox square in the chest.
“Whaaaaaarrr!” He screams siren-like, as he folds up into a sitting position, head butting me in the process.
