Page 119 of Dirty Rock

Her mouth cut me off. She rose on her toes, clamped a hand around my neck, and she pulled me down onto her lips, silencing me with a kiss.

It was manipulative. It was controlling. She was torturing me with the thing I loved the most; her touch, and I took it like a starved addict because without her, that’s what I’d become. I kissed her back for a few seconds before the irritation rose in me, and I gripped the tops of her arms and pulled her away. She was breathing heavily as she looked up at me—her mouth parted and lips wide.

“It’ll end in tears,” she whispered.

“I won’t fucking hurt you,” I promised her quietly.

Fucking promised. Like I was capable of making those kinds of guarantees.

She was a tiny doll in my clumsy hands, and I held onto her, too afraid she’d break if I let go.

“Shit, I shouldn’t even be saying that. I can’t promise you a damn thing, can I? And that’s the real problem here. You know that more than I know it myself. If you need me to be perfect, I can’t be that for you. I’m a little broken, a lot lost, and I don’t know how the hell to love and care for someone the way you deserve to be loved and cared for. Asking me to be perfect is asking me to be something I’m never going to be.” I bent at the knees and grabbed her face with both hands. “But I can make some promises. I can promise to hold you while you fall asleep. I can promise to listen when you’re fucked off. I can promise to sing to you when the world gets too noisy. I can promise to seduce you when you’re feeling shitty. I can promise to always whisper your favourite UB40 or Fleetwood Mac lyrics in your ear when you wake up. I can promise to make you forget about your troubles by fucking you senseless and loving you recklessly. I canguaranteethat you’ll never be bored. I can promise to always tell you the truth because I don’t know how to hold back when I have something to say. I can promise you that I’ll always have something to say, and I can promise, if you’ll let me, totry.I’ll try harder. I can try to do better… for you.”

“You silly fool,” she whispered, releasing a sigh as she stared into my eyes. “I don’t need you to be perfect. This is about me. The only thing I need is to find some courage and stop being scared of getting hurt. I don’t have time to waste.”

“You and your time.” I shook my head gently. “We have time, baby. A whole lifetime of it.”

“I hope so.” She tugged me closer again. “Because, yeah, I love you, and I want to spend all of it with you now.”

“Fuck, Jules.” I sighed heavily.

Her smile exploded into a toothy grin, and her cheeks blushed, just the way I loved them. “Now you know.”

“You’ve been killing me slowly here.”

“Don’t die on me yet. We’re only just getting started.”

We kissed each other, and we could have been on a private little island surrounded by nothing and nobody. Julia Speed had somehow become the only thing I could see, hear, feel, and need.

And she loved me.

Thank fuck, she loved me.

Chapter Forty

The after-party was your typical Hollywood bullshit. People praising each other for their efforts to help the real world when they had no idea what that was. They were The Capitol in The Hunger Games, and everyone else was District 13. It bothered me to see the way they stroked their own egos this way, but who was I kidding? I could hardly claim sainthood when I’d spent three years using women to give my own ego a hard-on.

People congratulated me on my performance, and Julia’s phone was ringing off the hook. She’d been scrolling through her emails and messages for the last forty minutes, while also trying to be polite to big-named music, film, and television execs. My face was famous, sure. Julia’s reputation within the industry was even more so. For the first time since knowing her, I saw the attention she got from the men lingering around in their power suits, and the way the women would look at her through narrowed eyes and with pursed lips.

She had no right to be beautifulandintelligent.

I was being distracted by a harem of women I didn’t know, each one singing their praises for my rendition ofHallelujah, but I wasn’t really absorbing their praise. I kept looking through the cracks of human bodies, seeking Jules.

The woman who now loved me.

“That smile,” a lady to my left said, forcing me to blink and focus on her. Her teeth had crossed over into the too-white category, and she cradled her champagne flute with both hands to showcase her perfectly manicured gold nails.

I could not for the life of me remember her name, but I had a feeling she was well-known in America for being on some kind of soap, drama, shit thing.

“You look like a young man with the whole world at his feet. I remember being a young woman with the same ahead of me. Life, love, so many adventures.”

I tried to look around her to see Jules again, but she was busy on the phone, walking in circles.

The woman in front of me craned her neck to see what held my attention. When she turned back, she leaned closer to me.

“Don’t settle down. It’s a trap.”

I frowned, looking at her ageing face hidden behind thick makeup. “Excuse me?”

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