Page 33 of Give Me What I Want

I couldn’t believe him. It wasn’t like Ronan to play dumb, but here he was, acting like he’d donenothingwhatsoever, like he’d not just almost fucked our entire reputation. We had worked so hard on the image we put out to the world, especially now while we were ‘dating’, and he sat there, looking at me like a clueless cock-womble.

“The picture she sent you from my phone yesterday was leaked. She woke up to a load of alerts about it,” Mav explained for me, his even tone far calmer than mine could’ve ever been.

Ronan sat forward, his feet hitting the ground, eyes widening even more, jaw hanging as though this was genuinely the first that he was hearing of it. I wasn’t entirely sure I was buying it though.

“Fucking hell, no wonder you wanted to…” He spluttered a laugh then composed himself. “Sorry. Funny mental image of you trying to… Anyway, it’s no wonder you wanted to kill me. I promise you though, Queenie, I didn’t do anything.”

“Then how did it happen? Don’t go telling me it was an accident. You don’t justaccidentallydo that.” I jumped down his throat, leaning further forward, fists balled tight.

“I wasn’t going to claim that it was an accident.” He rolled his eyes, then blinked hard, his gaze soft as he looked at me. “I was going to say I just don’t know. It wasn’t me though.” He held his hands up in defence.

“Well, your phone was the only one I sent that picture to. I even deleted the original copies from Mav’s. His and Cole’s weren’t leaked, so what the hell happened?” I was seething, and the more I looked at his face the angrier I became.

“I’ve not seen my phone since yesterday morning,” he said calmly, thinking for a moment before he went on. “I got the picture, went for a wank, and that was the last time I had it. I’m pretty sure I left my phone in the bathroom.”

“If that’s true, it’ll still be there now,” I stated, getting to my feet and heading towards the bathroom.

Ten minutes of searching and I came out empty-handed and even more pissed off. “It’s not in there,” I stated, planting my hands on my hips as I glared at Ronan.

“I honestly don’t know where it is then.” He got to his feet, meeting me in the middle and placing his hands on my shoulders. “Queenie, I promise you, I did not do this. Maybe someone has been on the bus, everyone in the crew has access. We need Garth to speak to people to get to the bottom of it. I’m not happy that this has happened to you. Tous.But truly, it wasn’t me.”

His hold on my shoulders tightened, desperation in his eyes surprising me and knocking the air from my lungs. For the first time ever I was shouting at him, and he wasn’t shouting back. He cared that I didn’t trust him. He really cared that I believed he had betrayed me. Ronan cared.

I didn’t expect it.

“Bea.” He said my name with a frustrated sigh. “I will fight with you over the dumbest shit. I will fight with you over the realest shit. But I would nevereverlie to you. You know that. After all these years you have to know that.”

Sucking in a sharp breath I closed my eyes. Blocking out his dark gaze, I considered everything he had said. I thought back through the last seven years and felt the solid truth behind his statement. Ronan wasn’t a liar. Not when it came to his bandmates. He could fake a smile to the world. He could fake a whole damn relationship to prying eyes. But never to us.

“I believe you,” I breathed, and then I was being crushed to his chest, a heavy exhale whooshing from between his parted lips. He held me tight, just for a moment, bodies melting together. And then he stiffened, shoving me away with a laugh and a wink, telling me that I was funny when I was mad.

So I kneed him in the balls.

10

Oh, it felt good to be back in a familiar place, and with familiar faces too. Fall From Grace hadn’t managed to join us for the second half of the tour, which should’ve been really disappointing seeing as I had been looking forward to hanging with them, but it wasn’t. Not in the end, when Garth had announced who he had managed to rope into joining us instead. One Last Time. They were our oldest friends, and I was fucking thrilled to be sharing a stage with them again.

Bea was even happier than I was to have them joining us. She was close with their frontman, Elijah. I supposed that they were best friends, sharing the same type of bond that Mav and I have. We had a rocky start just like they did, there was a time when people thought that Bea and Elijah were dating, just like Mav and I, but there was no truth to any of those rumours. We were all just classic cases of enemies to friends, not lovers, not like in those sexy books that Elijah’s girlfriend liked to read. She got him hooked on them too, I overheard him one night when we were hanging on their bus, he was on the phone with her reading a steamy scene from one of her books to her. Apparently, it was a one-off and he usually read poetry, or so he said when we teased him over it. I wasn’t buying it; he had sounded way too into it for that to have been the first time.

Bea and I were lounging on the sofa, her laying with her head on my lap, me staring out of the window as we made our way over the Severn Bridge. I loved this journey, always had done, ever since I was a kid. Mum could never afford to take me and my sister anywhere fancy during the school holidays, so a caravan in Wales was our tradition. The majority of my best childhood and teen memories had come from those holidays. I had my first kiss in the playpark, sitting beneath the slide with a Scottish girl who was a year older than me. It was a good kiss from what I remember. She was leaving the next day though, so it only happened twice. Under the slide, and at the end of the kids’ disco that evening.

“What are you thinking about?” Bea pulled me from my memories, and I looked down at her. She was barefaced, with her hair twisted into cute twin braids. Her crop top had risen up, exposing more of the dagger tattoo that ran down her sternum, the tip aimed towards her belly button. Reaching forward, I traced the lines of it.

“Just thinking about childhood holidays,” I answered, my gaze darting between her lips and the tattoo I was tracing.

“And childhood holidays give you weird soppy grins?” she asked, a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

“They sure do,” I confessed. “I had my first kiss here in Wales.”

“You’re thinking about other women right now?” Her brows pinched and she sat up, adjusting her top and twisting to face me. “Is it wrong of me to feel a little jealous?”

It took me a minute to decide if I should be honest or not. “Kinda.” I settled on gentle honesty. “In the same way that it’s kinda wrong for me to feel a little jealous when you’re with any of the other guys. I know that I shouldn’t feel that way, but I guess it’s natural.”

“You’re jealous?” She sat back, her expression morphing into one filled with regret. “Fuck,” she muttered under her breath.

It had been a few weeks now since that night. The one that had kickstarted some casual sexual thing between us. Ro and Mav had acted as though it was nothing. It was just our new normal. But I wanted to know more. I didn’t understand how they could be so calm about it all. The pair of them loved control, needed it in fact. Yet they had left everything in Bea’s court and had given her the space to do as she pleased.

She and Ro continued to fight on a regular basis, and she’d alternate between making up with him or seeking out Mav for a comfort fuck. With me it was always playful, I got Bea in her good moods. I liked that. But I’d have taken her in any mood. She didn’tneedto keep the other stuff hidden away from me. Because deep down I already knew what I wanted. The same thing that I had wanted the first moment I laid eyes on her.

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