Page 26 of Cherry Beats

“What’s wrong, Presley?”

“I wish I knew.” He shrugged. “I just thought it would be… more. You know? I thought it would be more than this. The work hours are crazy, which I don’t mind. I live for the music. I live for the beat. I live for those drums. I love women.” That one stung like a direct punch to the gut. “They seem to like me.”

“You think?” I chuckled pathetically.

“I don’t pay for shit anymore. Nothing. And it’s only been three years. I never have to buy a drink, which means I’m never having to watch how much drink I consume. I never have to buy clothes. Goddamn fashion labels are offering me six figures to wear one of their leather jackets instead of my own. Six. Fucking. Figures. But I can’t take it because I wouldn’t be me without this on my back.” He grabbed the collar of his leather, tugged on it twice and then dropped his hand.

“I love that jacket.”

“Well, you practically own it. Why wouldn’t you?”

“Is my name still in there?” It was the one question I really was desperate to have an answer to.

“You’re there… always at my back. Everyone else is either shouting orders at me, offering me contracts I don’t want to look at, passing me drinks, drugs, or their pussy, and I just needed some fucking peace. I needed an escape. I needed…”

“To be home for a while.”

“You. I needed you.”

There went my heart again.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Have you ever watched Notting Hill?” he asked suddenly, throwing me off course. He leaned farther forward, rocking back and forth. “There’s this bit in there, where the woman…”

“Julia Roberts.”

“Yeah, her. She escapes to the guy’s…”

“Hugh Grant’s.”

Presley glared at me—he had the ability to warn me to shut up with just a simple, seductive narrowing of his eyes.

He smirked. “Hugh kinda lets Julia hang out at his for a bit, and for one day, she does normal shit, like take a bath. Eat cake. Watch a movie. Disappear from the media shit storm that she’s caught up in.”

I couldn't help it. My smile broke free like he’d just proposed, even though I knew I was about to march straight back into the eye of the storm and would possibly spend the next ten years of my life licking my self-inflicted wounds. There was a certain satisfied feeling in knowing that I—the girl who’d pined desperately for the hot boy in school—happened to be the one person he now wanted to escape to. The place he called home.

Or maybe he knew I was the only mug willing to drop my life for him and make him happy? Hugh Grant was a fucking mug in that film. Is that what Presley was trying to tell me?

Either way, I was taking it. Just like I’d taken it three years before. Just like I’d probably take it again in ten years if he decided to offer.

“I can be your Hugh,” I told him. “You can hide here.”

Presley’s shoulders relaxed instantly, and when his eyes met mine, I saw the silent thank you he was throwing my way. I only hoped that, while I took pity on him, he took pity on me.

On my weak little heart, too.

Chapter Nine

His jacket was strewn over the back of my sofa like it lived there.

With me.

With us.

In this apartment.

One happy little make-believe family.

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