Getting Real

34. Zen and Hunger



Rielle had on a skin-tight pair of jeans, a fitted shirt, a lightweight jacket and boots. Jake approved. Clothing appropriate for riding pillion. Clothing that showed off her athletic curves and highlighted her obvious attractions. She walked across the car park and straight into his arms. Close up he could see she wore more natural tone makeup. She’d dressed down, taken the green pieces out of her hair for their date, if that’s what this was. He shook his head to clear it; he wasn’t going to analyse this. If there was any time to be Zen and live in the moment this was it.

She said, “Hi,” standing on tiptoe to bring her face closer to his.

“Hi.” He dived straight into her violet eyes and swam in their velvet.

“You smell nice, like fresh cut wood, cinnamon—hmm,” she purred, “shame to waste it on the night air.”

“There’s more in the bottle.”

“And the bottle would be in your room?”

He laughed at the way her lifted brow punctuated the innuendo. “Yeah, that’s where it would be.”

“Maybe we can visit it later?”

“Maybe we can.” If she made one more mention of his room, later would functionally happen in the five minutes it would take to recross the car park, commandeer a lift and crash through his door. But he wasn’t ready for later; later was still a problem. There might never be a later, only a now. She was a rock star. He was a roadie. This was never going to go anywhere real.

Rielle saw the hesitation in Jake’s eyes and knew it was entirely her fault. She’d started this game, made it a challenge and the harder she played, the more Jake distrusted the outcome. That was the irony, the deeper she was falling, the more he walled up his emotions to keep his distance.

Why couldn’t this be simpler? Why couldn’t this be like Rand and Harry? Watching them together made her heart flap little wings. The way they looked at each other—like they could see past skin, the subtle touches and gestures designed only for each other. The back of Rand’s hand against Harry’s cheek when they didn’t think anyone was looking; the slide of Harry’s knee against Rand’s thigh when they sat together; and more critically, the way they left themselves wide open to each other. They weren’t playing a game. They were building their own world. Karma. Rand deserves his happiness. He’d long ago earned it. She was still behind on points in life. Always would be.

“You ready to ride, Jake?”

He curled his hand around hers. “You hungry?”

“It’s almost the same question.” She bent her knee and traced it up the side of his leg.

He caught it, wrapped his hand underneath her thigh and dragged her closer to him. “What’s the answer?”

“You first.”

“I’m ready to take you anywhere you want to go.” He hesitated; a more confident man would’ve said, “so long as it includes you naked in my bed”. He finished with, “on my bike.”

She laughed. He must’ve have known she was looking for another answer. “Chicken.”

A smile played across his face. “So, you are hungry.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, “hungrier than I’ve ever been before.”

Their first stop was a restaurant in suburban Albert Park that was quiet, relaxed, with excellent food and discrete service he arranged in advance. Rielle was barely aware of anyone else in the room but Jake. They started out sitting opposite each other, shared antipasto, a dry white wine, and a conversation that after all the flirting and teasing was suddenly awkward, halting and stilted. Just like a first date; just like they hardly knew each other. There was so much she lightly, flippantly steered away from: childhood, family and the future, and he let her. They were both riding the wavelength of now, knowing it wouldn’t take much to tip them off and send them hurtling back to someplace before they were so enchanted with each other.

She had fish, he had steak. They shared vegetables and bites from each other’s plates. Then over coffee, she moved her chair adjacent to his, put her hand on his thigh, rubbed her fingers against the inside seam of his jeans.

“What are you doing, wolf-woman?”

She stopped, blinked at him and lifted her hand. He captured it and placed it back down on his thigh, holding it there. “I didn’t say I wanted you to stop. I’m just interested in your logic. Do you think if you seduce me here at dinner, I’ll forget you’re a crappy conversationalist?”

“I didn’t think we were about conversation; I thought we were more about doing other things with our tongues.”

“Ah, you see right there.” He sighed. “Right there, is my problem, Rie. You bring me so close, then you slam the door and you expect me not to care about what’s behind it.”

She looked away. “You won’t like what’s behind it, Jake.”

“You’re not giving me the chance to find out.”

Frustrated, she met his eyes again. “If you want me, you have to take me as I am right now, not how you wish I’d be. I’m not Eliza Doolittle. You’re not Henry Higgins, you can’t make me over, change me.”

“So, if I say it’s all or nothing?”

She removed her hand, flattened it on the white table cloth and rocked back in her chair, dropping her eyes. She felt him tense for her response. “Then it’s nothing.”

“You’d walk away from this thing, whatever we have, that makes me want to forget my manners and screw you on the table right now?”

He spoke low voiced, close to her ear, but she felt his words hit like the roar of a stadium audience. They blew out her senses and left her momentarily blind, fumbling to remember who she was and what she wanted.

“I’m not the one making demands. I’ll take you exactly as you are, Jake. I think you’re perfect.”

The sixteen-year-old boy still a part of Jake wanted to leap to his feet and announce to the restaurant that this girl—this mad, brave, talented rock star—thought he was perfect. The twenty-eight-year old heard her words and felt a wave of conflicted feelings threaten to dump him on the shore. He could no sooner walk away from Rielle than let himself drown. But whatever she was running from—whatever she thought needed to be hidden, weighed him down, like swimming fully dressed.

He had a mouth full of sand. He said bluntly, “Let’s go,” signalling for the cheque.

Back on the bike, he thrilled to the touch of her arms around him. There was no distance between their bodies, and she moulded her curves to him as he weaved through the traffic, her hands pressed against his chest, the helmet he’d bought her occasionally bumping lightly against his.

She had no idea where he was taking her, but she trusted him and that in itself was something vibrantly alive and real between them.

He drove into St Kilda and parked the bike. They were back in the same street outside the same laneway they’d shot the video in.

Now it was dark and deserted; a laneway used by delivery vans and garbage disposal trucks, a place for unease to lurk. He wasn’t speaking and he was beginning to make her curiosity harden into something less compliant. Still, when he pulled her into the dark and backed her up against the coarse brick wall, she went willingly. But when he spoke, his words came from the place his fears lived, the place where he rejected taking risks with impossible odds.

“You’re a bitch, Rielle. I should have seen you coming.” He pressed against her, one hand on the wall, one on her face, stopping her from dropping her chin as his words bit. “I should’ve run a bloody mile.”

He saw defiance widen her eyes and it sliced through him. He dropped both hands to his sides and stepped back. “Now it’s too late, game over. You win. You’re under my skin; you’re in my head. You’ve drugged me and I’m terminally addicted to you.”

Rielle reached for him, but he took another step back, ran his hand through his hair. A yellow light from a nearby neon sign bathed her in a dirty glow. All or nothing, kiss or kill, pleasure but certain heartbreak. Everything about this confused him, even his responses to her were beyond his understanding. Like the Bolt from the Blue gig, she was outside his experience and dangerously out of control. One minute he had her captured against a wall, and the next he remembered she played games and was a rock star with the world at her feet and he wanted to walk away cursing and not look back.

She saw it; his conflict, his indecision. “Jump, Jake.”

He knew that was the choice. Leap into this thing with her or dive away and never regret it, but decide it now. No more trying for a better hand, no more point scoring.

He snatched her elbows and dragged her against his body, finding her mouth and kissing her hard. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he shuddered as he hugged her close. When he broke away to take a breath, he said, “I’ll take anything you give me, anyway you give it and I promise I’ll never ask for more than you want me to have.”

Rielle used her hands and her lips to show him she’d jumped too. She kissed him like she was chasing fame, like she was sacrificing ordinary, like he was the world tour. Pent up desire flooded through his centre, heating his fingertips, railroading his senses with need for her. He forgot where they were when he tore at the buttons on her shirt. He didn’t think to stop when she let him slide her jacket off and tear the shoulder of her top down so his lips could tease her nipple.

Their touching was a frenzy of sensation: warm silken skin and sharp nipping, scraping teeth, hard grips and soft strokes. Jake found last night’s milk crate, kicked it deeper into the shadows and sat, pulling Rielle onto his lap to straddle him. He had her bare to the waist, his hands everywhere, his lips following, his heart on stage making music you could scream to.

“This is what I wanted to do last night and to hell with who was watching.” His voice was shredded with want.

She panted, throwing her head back to let him lick a path from breast to ear. “I knew it. You bastard, you made me wait. You made me need you.” In the dark, she was a live flame in his hands, sparking heat, feathering, undulating against his body. Setting him ablaze. Jake was white hot, without cogent thought, functioning only to adore and possess her.

The headlights from a truck entering the opposite end of the laneway stopped Rielle’s hands on his jeans zipper; woke them from their dazed passion; both of them blinking in surprise. She laughed and he pulled her against his chest to hide her nakedness as the headlights flared and switched off, the driver’s startled face visible a moment and then gone.

Rielle shimmied back into her top and Jake found her discarded jacket. “We’re not finished.”

In place of an answer, she twisted her fist in his open shirt and dragged his mouth down to hers.


Back on the street among the crowds eating at sidewalk cafes, Rielle laughed. There was insanity in Jake’s eyes, there was promise in his hand as he dragged her past shop fronts and restaurants and dodged waiters with drinks trays. He alone could make her feel the same exhilaration she felt when fifty thousand people screamed her name—this extraordinary man—a roadie.

A rock star for her heart.

The touch of his body between her legs and through her ribs and chest on the ride back to the hotel made her feel electric, like pure energy crackled in her veins, like she could fly if she wanted to.

In the hotel foyer, she was recognised by fans and stopped to scrawl her signature on a man’s shirt and pose for some hasty pictures. Once Jake would have stepped back, given her space, now he kept a hand on her shoulder, his action saying, “She is mine”.

In the elevator, he kept her pulled tight against his side, his arm around her back, his fingers under the hem of her shirt. At her floor, she took his hand and led him down the corridor to her suite. She had her jacket and her shirt off before he was properly inside the room and his shirt followed hers to the floor, his grunt of pleasure meeting her gasp of anticipation as their bodies came together.

He backed her up against a hall table, lifting her so she sat, wrapping her legs around his waist. His mouth was firm, insistent on hers. One hand pressed against her tailbone, holding her against him, the other in her hair. She opened her body and flattened against him. All thought dissolved, the sensation of his touch and her body’s response overriding every other purpose in life.

He broke away to pull off her boots. She lifted her hips so he could drag her jeans down, inspired by the look on his face when he took in her black lace underwear.

“Too nice to tear.” He breathed in sharply, placed a finger in the elastic string over her hip while his teeth plucked at the shoulder strap of her bra.

She deep breathed his sandalwood scent, so much better on him than it would be in the bottle. “Not yet.” She pushed him away. “Let me see you.”

He stepped back, undid his belt. His eyes never left hers. He discarded boots and socks, jeans and underwear. He was lit by the warm glow of a lamp which turned his skin golden. She sucked in a breath. She remade her life when she saw him naked. This is the body she’d had under her hands in the dark, and been too scared to look at, too tentative to devour, too scared to trust. She was a chronic fool.

Jake played it up, turning in a circle, his arms wide, like he’d done at the sound check earlier. He was work hewn and lean—a man whose physical grace should never be defaced by as pedestrian an object as a shirt. Every part of his body from his athlete’s legs to the triangular flare of shoulders was defined by flexed tendons and bunched muscles placed precisely for perfect form and function. He had coiled energy and languid, unconscious confidence and he was built for being touched, for loving.

Rielle clamped her legs together. She was a mass of wet urges and zapping electric shocks. She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. “You’re beautiful, Jake.”

He laughed, disbelief etched on his face. “I’ll take whatever you give me, Rie. But it’s gonna need to be quick.”

“I can see that.” Quick would be glorious. It would burn out the fever, cap off the torrent of need, have the madness—the game—done with. She slid off the table, coming to stand in front of him. She unhooked her bra and then sent her lacy g-string slithering down her legs to the floor, making his breath hitch and his hands tremble.

In the lamplight, as she straightened, Jake saw the scar on her hip for the first time and frowned. It was a thick white line running from the dimple of her sacrum, across the crest of her hipbone, and along her lower abdominals to her pubic bone. He went down on his knees, his lips chasing his hands across that old highway of pain, that map line of remorse.

She gasped, her hands going to his hair, half wanting to push him away, half wanting to cry out his name. When she let them see the scar it always got a reaction, but mostly it stopped them dead, brought on conversation, killed the mood. It was ugly. It was fine and ghostly pale, easy to hide in the dark. Only the most subtle fingertips identified it. Letting him see it was her gift to Jake. And she loved him for the way he touched her and didn’t ask.

He traced the seam of once traumatised skin with his tongue, wet licks and flicks, hot kisses, sucks and scrapes of teeth. Her body vibrated under his hands, her head tipping back, her knees going soft. She would have folded to the floor had he not held her upright. He tucked his shoulder into her stomach and lifted her into a fireman’s carry to the bedroom.

He laid her down on the bed. “This time I want to see you.” His voice was pounded husk, unrestrained lust.

She shook her head. “You’ve seen.” She needed the shadows now; she’d shown him enough. She met his eyes for a second and thought he’d disregard her, but his face disappeared as he flicked the lamp off. In the dead dark before their eyes adjusted to the filtered light from the other room, his hands and lips moving up her legs were enough to make her grit her teeth to stop from crying out.

This time when they came together, she tried to stay with him, this man who she’d grown to trust and desire. Her body was his puppet to command. He made her twitch and flex and slide. He made her desperate for the touch of his hands and lips, light and heavy, soft and sure. His low sighs and murmurs made her twist and arch to get closer to him.

At the very edge of her reason, when she was lost, lost, lost, she cried out and pushed against him, struggled to crawl away. Too much. This was too much. Her brain fizzed with sudden fear; he had total control of her and she couldn’t let that happen.

“Stay with me, Rie. Stay with me.” Jake’s voice was ragged, his breathing harsh. “I’ll stop if you want me to.”

She flattened her feet on the bed and tried to push away from him, squirmed to slide out from under him.

He held her hips, “Trust me.” It was a broken whisper and a pledge carried on a current of electricity strung bow tight between them. She stilled. She looked into his handsome face, his features so even, his eyes so honest and saw his tempered desire. He would let her go. He would let her do everything she wanted before he took anything for himself.

She jumped, like she’d asked him to, gifting him her fear, relaxing in his arms, rolling her hips to meet his. She met him touch for touch, kiss for kiss, stroke for stoke, answering his open mouthed sighs with high, sustained pleasure notes of her own. This time she kept her eyes open, locked on his, as he braced above her, moving with a rhythm both deliciously taunt and sinuously free, until torrents of sensation made her body arc, sending her sightless, soundless, breathless, as Jake taught her how to let go of everything to feel it all.

“You. God. Rie. So f*cking good, so right.”

His tortured cry broke some barrier in her brain, tore it clear. Pins and needles pricked inside her head. Zipping white lights sparked behind now tight shut eyes, and the shock of it registered, threatened. She gripped Jake, crying out his name. She didn’t leave him, go someplace else to hide the feelings or lock them inside. She stayed and rode the swell of tension and release with him, panting in the heat and height of sensations that stripped away every defence she had.

He stayed in her warmth, slumping to rest his forehead heavily against her shoulder, his breath coming in shudders that wracked across his back. She held him til he found her mouth to kiss with lips that smiled and could only graze against hers with infinite gentleness.

He stroked her cheek with a hand that shook. “Baby, that was the hit single, the album, the show, the whole tour.”

He was at peace, happy—but she was utterly, recklessly undone.

Jake was drifting towards oblivion, every muscle gone to jelly, every bone to mulch, when he realised Rielle was shaking, sobbing softly in the bed beside him. He was instantly wide awake. He flicked the bedside light on and gathered her to him. “God. Rie, what’s wrong? Did I hurt you?”

She tried to push him away. “No, no—please let me go.”

Not a chance. Not again. He rolled her back into his arms, but let her hide her face. “Tell me what’s wrong.” But she sobbed harder, struggling to catch her breath.

He was frantic, his heart gone from near comatose to hammering a cracking, crashing pace again. He sat up and leaned over her. “You have to tell me.” She was flushed and her face was destroyed by whatever pain this was, tears glistening in her eyelashes and on her cheeks. “Rie, please, I’m dying here. If I hurt you, if I hurt you, I—” He’d never forgive himself.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing—it’s stupid.” She put her hand to his face and attempted a smile with lips that wobbled and a dimpled chin. Her voice was a fractured sob. “That was just, oh, I don’t, I can’t—” She reached for him and pulled him down to lock against her lips, her salt tears in both their mouths.

He pulled away slightly, to see her eyes. “What happened?” All four points of his personal compass had converged on a place of pure, mind-bending pleasure. He’d thought she’d been there with him in those singular obliterating moments of perfection. Disappointment might split him in two.

She dragged him back down, tried to hide in their closeness. Tried to stop him seeing her, understanding her. She fought him off with the softest, deepest kisses and stunned with distress, he almost let her win. Against her trembling mouth he said, “I need to know.”

And she whispered, so light, so delicate, “You made me fly away,” then she tugged his hair tight, “and I didn’t shatter.”

The tension fell away from him, like another eruption, this one near finished him off. “Ah shit, you scared me. I’ve never made anyone cry doing this, except you.”

“Oh Jake, I’m sorry.” Rielle curled her hand around his neck. “I couldn’t hold the tears, I tried. I didn’t want to spin you out like last time but it was too much feeling—good feeling. I didn’t know it could be like that. I didn’t know I could feel like that. I don’t have the words.”

He groaned and hugged her to him. Relief he hadn’t hurt her enveloped him like a thick blanket of exhaustion. He rolled to his back, settling her on his chest. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

She nuzzled against his jaw. “I am the sun and the moon and the stars.”

He smiled. “That good?”

She answered with a long sweet kiss that stung his brain to numbness. When he could talk again he said, “Way to freak a guy out, Rie.”

“I didn’t mean to.” She traced a fingertip across his lips, brought her lips to his ear. “You’re a sex god, Jake.”

He laughed. “Fit for a rock goddess.” But when his laughter died away he worried. Her reaction still freaked him. She lay with her head on his chest, her breathing synced with his, her body entirely relaxed, but her words capable of shocking him like 240 volts, killing him like 100 amps.

He traced the line of her scar, only just visible to his fingertips. He’d been rocked to see it. How had that injury not killed her? What part did it play in making her so fierce, so armoured from her true self? “You’re not—” He didn’t know what to ask. She wasn’t inexperienced in bed, he didn’t understand what just happened to her.

She trailed light fingers down his abdomen. “I trusted you.”

“Are you saying you didn’t trust other people you slept with?” He felt her nod. “Rie, why would you do that?”

She lifted her head, her eyes heavy with fatigue. “Because I didn’t trust myself either and I didn’t know it would make a difference.”

He hugged her close again, stroked her back, this wild woman, so strong but so brittle and insecure as well. He knew it would take some time to sleep now. Sorrow for her curled lonely claws around his heart. To be used and not to have been loved properly, he dared not show her that emotion; she didn’t do pity. But he could show her what the value of her trust was. Now that bridge was crossed, he could love her for all the others who hadn’t understood.

“Give us time, Rie. We can build a world from trust,” he said, but from her soft breath he knew she’d already crossed into sleep. He stared down at her, sprawled half across him, her face in profile: the wink of her nose stud as she rose on his inhalation, her tangled mess of hair, the curve of her lush lips and the fan of the outrageously long false lashes on her cheek.

He spoke on the fringe of aloud, knowing he had no audience and whatever he said was safe and secret. “I’m in serious trouble here. Serious. See, I think I’m in love with this tough chick rock star and I know she feels something for me too.”

He took her hand and moved it so it rested over his heart, trapped it there under his hand, waited to see if she’d stir, half of him wanting her to, so she could tell him what to do. “But I think she might slip through my fingers and I don’t know how to stop her. I don’t know if she’ll let me stop her. Tell me, what the f*ck am I supposed to do about that?”