Page 36 of Reverb

It didn’t take long. His breath got harsher, and then a hand tangled into my hair, brushing it back from my face, gripping it. A warning that he was close, because he didn’t have any more words.

I ignored the warning. I kept doing what I was doing, and with a loud curse he came, pulsing hard. I swallowed, something else I’d never done. I liked the taste of that, too.

I got off my knees and straddled his lap again. Stone’s big arms wrapped around me, pulling me close, as if he needed me just as much as I needed him in that moment. I slid my arms around him and rested my face in the crook of his neck, feeling his pulse, his breath, the warmth of his body soaking into mine.

We stayed that way for a few minutes, or an hour, I couldn’t be sure. Then Stone spoke, his voice a low rumble. “Like you said. A bad idea.” As if in reaction to his own words, his arms tightened around me.

“Awful,” I agreed, squeezing him and inhaling the smell of his skin. “You aren’t my type.”

“You aren’t mine, either.”

“I don’t even like you.”

“Same. We’ll never work.”

“All we do is argue,” I said. “Not to mention our professional conflict.”

“It’s profound,” he agreed.

“Probably insurmountable.”

He stroked the back of my neck. “You’re supposed to maintain journalistic integrity.”

“And you’re not supposed to sleep with the journalist who is writing a story about you.”

“Definitely not.”

“Everything about this,” I said, “is ill-advised.”

He didn’t answer. But he didn’t let go of me.

And I didn’t let go of him, either.

FOURTEEN

Stone

I’d always been restless. As a teenager, I’d had no problem packing my things and taking off for L.A. After coming back, I’d spent years touring with the Road Kings, and when that finished, I bought a plane ticket and traveled the world solo with nothing but a backpack. You might say it was a bit of a compulsion. A therapist would probably have a lot to say about it. But I didn’t have a therapist, because therapy required talking.

I had music instead.

I’d been just fine on the last tour, living half of the time on a bus between shows. Bad food, strange hotel rooms, and weird sleep hours were more tiring on my body than they’d been in my twenties, but they were still second nature to me. It was everything else about that tour that was exhausting.

Playing with my bandmates again. Our increasing popularity. Our new backer. Our next album. The songs we were writing and whether they were good enough. Our agent dying. Our future as a band. The decisions we had to make. All the shit I needed to think about.

Sienna. The fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about Sienna.

If it had been bad during the tour, it was worse now. I’d made it worse. In my usual, how-can-I-fuck-myself-now fashion, I’d had a taste of the woman I couldn’t stop thinking about, and now I was truly screwed. I’d gone to her house, and she’d been soft and sweet and ready, and then she’d been naked, and then she’d—

I was supposed to sleep with that image in my head? Jesus Christ. I was only a guy, and a pretty stupid one at that. I wasn’t gonna just say, Well, that was pleasant. I wonder what’s on TV. No, I was gonna lie awake in bed every night, thinking about my existence in the universe and wondering why I’d ever been born, while Sienna probably thought she’d made an embarrassing mistake, if she thought about me at all.

I’m good at doing my own head in.

The band was still on pause, waiting for Axel, but I needed to work, and I couldn’t work alone. So I ended up at Denver’s house.

I’d texted first. Denver had a girlfriend now, and I couldn’t just drop in unexpectedly, rolling him out of bed and telling him to get his ass in gear. All of my bandmates were pairing up, which was good for me, because maybe they’d be less irritable and annoying if they were getting laid regular. It made the domestic arrangements dicey, though.

Denver had told me to come over, which meant he wasn’t banging Callie in that particular moment, so I took my chance. I parked at his bungalow. Summer was over, and it was almost October, with the scent of fall in the air.

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