It’s like embracing the very ground that’s going to shatter you to pieces.
A moan escapes from a locked-away place inside me when his hips press me into the bus and his fingers clasp with mine, lifting my hands higher and higher until my breasts are pressing against his chest and every chemical in my brain is rushing like white-water rapids. My hands are trapped against chilled metal, his to control, and my knees are barely holding me up.
“Shawn,” I pant when I finally summon the strength to turn my head away from the kiss that’s making it impossible for me to breathe or move or think.
His name on my breath sounds like a protest, it sounds like a plea for more.
“I’m not finished,” he promises in my ear, his nose brushing my hair away so he can nip at the exposed lobe. When I squirm, he lowers those lips to my neck and closes them over a spot that floods a pool of heat in my belly. All I can do is tighten my knees, let him kiss me, and try not to moan his name. His tongue does things that send tingles racing from my head to my toes, and those lips trail lower, lower, peppering kisses against my skin until he’s exploiting the curve of my neck and I’m burning from the inside out.
What we’re doing is wrong—the forbidden resurrection of a secret that’s been kept too many times. And it feels good, so fucking good—but I can smell the vodka on his lips.
When I break away from him, it’s not pretty. It’s not clean. It’s messy, with my hands jerking out from under his and my body stumbling away from the cage of his arms. He looks at me with half-lidded eyes, and I’m sure I’m mirroring that look right back at him. I can feel it in the way my nipples are perking, the way my skin is blazing, the way I still can’t quite breathe evenly.
“No,” I say, and Shawn steps forward before reconsidering and staying put.
“Why?”
“You’re drunk.”
This is the night after our first performance all over again. I want him, but I can’t take another morning-after. I can’t take him regretting what he did, him choosing to forget it. I can’t be forgotten again.
I walk away from him because it’s the only choice I have. If I stay . . .
I can’t stay. Not with him looking at me like that. Not with every fiber of my body wanting to wrap itself around the softness of him, the hardness of him.
“Kit,” he calls after me as I retreat toward the door to the venue. Every step I’m taking hurts, like I’m resisting the pull of something I belong to. The farther I get, the harder it is.
I don’t turn around.
“No, Shawn. I’m not doing this again.” What I’m not saying is that I can’t . . . I can’t. Every time we do this, I lose another piece of myself, and another.
I hear his footsteps following me.
“Kit,” his voice pleads before I swing the metal door wide open.
“No. Talk to me when you’re sober.”
I don’t look back. Shawn’s presence behind me tingles at the back of my neck, but the whole walk to the greenroom, I pretend he doesn’t exist.
I’m not a toy. I’m not something he can just play with each time he gets bored and then forget about until he feels like it again.
“Guys,” I say from the doorway, flinching when a heavy hand lands on my shoulder. I turn my head to glare at Shawn, sighing when I realize he’s simply leaning on me to steady himself, staring down at his feet like they’re about to jump out from under him. “Shawn is drunk as hell,” I finish. “Can someone help me get him to the bus?”
A roadie walks over, clapping him on the shoulder so hard that Shawn is nearly knocked off his feet. The roadie laughs and dips his head under Shawn’s arm, holding him up while Adam attempts to crawl over the back of the couch, trips in the process, and proves he’s just as wasted as Shawn. Shawn starts giggling, and Adam lies on the floor laughing his ass off while I roll my eyes.
Joel is the one with enough sense to stand and walk around the couch instead of scaling over it. He stares down at Adam with glassed-over blue eyes of his own. “Dude, you are so trashed.”
When Adam holds up a hand for help, Joel is about to reach down and take it, but Mike jumps in instead to prevent both of them from ending up on their asses. “Alright, let’s go.”
“Are we taking the party back to the bus?” Victoria suggests in that annoying daddy’s-girl voice of hers, and my mouth is quick to open before anyone else’s can.
“Sorry, invitation only.” I shoot her an oversweet smile and wait for Mike to haul Adam off the ground.
Victoria is in my personal bubble before I know it, turning her big hazel eyes on Shawn, who still has his hand on my shoulder. “Can I come, Shawn?”