I’d never given much thought to falling in love.
For someone like me, it’d seemed like an impossibility. Why dwell on something that would never happen? I’d had no interest in chicks for more than what they could give me in one night. Fuck ’em and then show ’em the door.
There were always clinger groupies, who would claim to love me. But they loved what I could offer them—sex, a one-night stand, a story to tell their friends about how they’d slept with a rocker, with Grant McDermott.
I was a name.
A symbol.
Nothing more.
My eyes slid over to the blonde sleeping in my bed. I brushed a strand of hair out of her mouth and pressed a kiss to her lips.
That was before Ari.
“Grant?” she whispered in her sleep.
My name on her lips was better than a thousand one-night stands.
I’d almost lost her to a whole lot of stupidity. Some groupie slut, Kristin, had come on to me at the ski lodge where my band, ContraBand, was playing the Poconos music festival. And by come on to me, I meant she had stripped down naked in my room and ambushed me, thinking I’d fuck her desperate ass. Ari had walked in, and all hell had broken loose.
After a month of miscommunication over Christmas break, we’d reconnected on the shore at my uncle’s beachside pizza place, Duffie’s.
The past two weeks, we’d been pretending that nothing had happened, but I knew something was brewing behind her big blue eyes.
“Yeah, Princess?” I said, sliding my body against hers. My hand ran over the dip in her waist and down to the curve of her tight ass. I tugged her closer to me, rocking her against my dick.
“Mmm,” she groaned. Her eyes fluttered open. “Again?” Her voice held groggy disbelief.
Ari really hadn’t believed me when I said my appetite was insatiable. I could fuck her all day long, and it wouldn’t be enough. I’d still want more. Sex had been my escape for too long for me to ignore the pull now that the same person was frequenting my bed.
“Again,” I agreed.
I rolled her onto her back and kissed my way down her front—between her breasts, over her soft stomach that often made her self-conscious from my attention, to her hip bones that peeked out from her cotton underwear, and down between her legs. My breath came out hot and urgent as I blew on her through the material. She whimpered and writhed in my grasp.
“Grant…Grant.” Her words were a moan, an encouragement.
My fingers hooked under the elastic and pulled them off. She stiffened beneath me and pushed herself up to the top of the bed. I reached for her, but she shook her head.
“I have class.” Ari looked at the comforter, the desk, my cherry red guitar—anywhere but at me.
“Not for an hour.”
“I need to shower and change.”
“I can take you,” I insisted.
“Don’t worry about it.” She slid off the bed and shrugged on her jeans. “Don’t you have to work at the recording studio today?”
I’d gotten a job working at a studio in Trenton when I wanted to show Ari that I was serious about something other than playing in a band. Her dad was the CEO of a bank in Boston, and I’d never seen money like that before. I couldn’t give her that, but I wanted to.
“Yeah. Later.”
I wanted to throw her down on the bed and fuck her until she stopped suggesting ways to keep us apart. But I couldn’t finesse my way into that—at least not with Ari. She would call me on my bullshit.
“Okay. Well, I’ll see you after work then,” she said, sidestepping the issue.
She threw her cardigan back on, tossed my old man’s dog tags over her head that I’d given to her last semester when I asked her to be my girlfriend, gave me a peck on the lips, and then dashed out of the room.
I crashed back into bed and stared up at the blank ceiling. I didn’t fucking understand what had just happened. I had my fucking girlfriend back. We were fucking together all the fucking time.
Yet I felt like the pussy getting ditched after a one-night stand.
I roughly slammed my hands down on the steering wheel of my BMW. What the hell was wrong with me?
I couldn’t believe I’d run out of Grant’s bedroom like a crazy person. I wanted to sleep with him. I wanted to be with him. But I had been acting like a total idiot, and if he hadn’t already noticed, then he certainly had after that spectacular performance.
Unlike most people my age, I actually knew who I was, and I’d never pretended to be anyone but myself in a relationship. Not everyone liked that I wasn’t afraid to speak my mind, and I didn’t need someone else for my own personal validation.
Then, Grant McDermott had walked into my life.
He loved everything about me that intimidated other guys. He’d push back when I tried to pull away. He fought for me and sacrificed for me and…loved me.
And lately, all I could think about were the million logical reasons that we would never work, like the fact that ContraBand had been selling an insane number of copies of their new single, “Life Raft”—a song Grant had written for me last semester. They weren’t hitting the Billboard charts, but I saw fame on the horizon even if Grant acted as if he didn’t. As much as that excited me, it also terrified me. I couldn’t think about losing him.
Not to mention, there was the scary fact that his dad was about to get out of prison where he had resided for the last thirteen years after murdering Grant’s mom in front of him.
On top of that, we’d never really talked about what had happened over Christmas break when we were apart. We’d both swept it all under the rug, assuming it was fine now since we’d slept together, but there was still so much we needed to address, so we could move forward and trust each other. Our month apart had been a reality check that things weren’t always going to be perfect between us, and after we’d gotten back together, it was easier to ignore that than to face it head-on.
Plus, I still hadn’t even told him about Henry, the guy who worked for my father. My parents had tried setting me up with him, and he had kissed me while I was drunk one night in Boston. It had only happened because I thought that Grant had slept with some groupie slut on New Year’s. But still…he didn’t know about it, and this would never work out if we couldn’t be honest.
I shuddered. The last person I wanted to think about was Henry.
Parking at the apartment that I shared with my three crazy roommates—Cheyenne, Gabi, and Shelby—I bounded up the stairs and went inside. Since Grant and I had gotten back together three weeks ago, I hadn’t been home this early in the morning. I usually kept a change of clothes at his place and would leave for campus from there. Staring at my roommates’ surprised faces after I’d barreled through the door, I could see they thought three weeks seemed more like a year.