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The burn of tears rise behind my lids. Leave it to Jack to say something so trite, and have it be so sweet that it makes my heart instantly overfill. “Whatever you want, Jack, is always fine with me.”

  His eyes comb my face in a fast study and he shakes his head once and then sighs. He wipes his lips with a napkin and scrunches it up in the wrapping on the coffee table. His rises to his feet in a slow, lazy movement of long body parts, tosses his mess into the trash, and then holds out his hand to me. I let him guide upward until I’m standing and he folds me against his chest, his cheek resting atop my head.

  “I love you, Linda,” his whispers, burying his lips in my hair.

  “I love you too, Jack.”

  He sighs heavily. “I wish we didn’t have to go out tonight. I don’t get enough alone time with you, as it is.” He eases enough back so I can see him. He smiles. Happy Jack again. He looks past me at the clock on the end table. “Let’s jump into the shower. The car is going to be here for us in about an hour,” Jacks says, dropping a kiss on my nose.

  He steps out of my arms and pulls me with him toward the bathroom.

  Three

  I stand beneath the dual streams of the shower, tilting my head so the water hits my neck. It’s a nice shower. I’ll give that to the Hyatt, their high end suites have nice showers; large, tiled, and dual stream. I have been in a lot of hotel rooms. A lot of hotel showers. I’ve been in this hotel more times than I can count. The West Hollywood Hyatt, the rocker Hyatt.

  I cut short that train of thought and look over at Jack. We’re actually going to just take a shower. I feel the heaviness of his mood here with us, within the tile and steam. Is it is daughter? Or is it me?

  A sharp prick of uncertainty is followed by an unpleasant chill of worry. I’ve fretted on and off for weeks if all the tension and arguments meant we are on our way to being over. We’ve lasted eight months. I never expected it to last this long. A girl like me doesn’t get to keep a man like Jack. I just wish inevitable would slow the fuck down.

  I step under his stream of water and take the soap from his hand.

  “You have to use the soap, not just stare at it, if it’s going to do you any good,” I say, a little flirty, with my features carefully arranged in a suggestive expression.

  I start to lather his shoulders and arms, and he starts to relax beneath my touch, and he looks like a man savoring the tending of my hands. I move down his chest, adding little kisses to the soapy surface. I run my tongue with my hands toward his navel, swirling there before plunging it inside. Even as I lower before him I don’t take my eyes of his. Very deliberately I wash and kiss across his pelvis, missing that part of him hardening and twitching as I bypass it. Down the firm line of his thighs. Up the inside. First with soapy hands. Then I run my tongue to the base of his cock, but I lift and let my hands rest on his sides as I lay my cheek against his lower abdomen.

  I nuzzle my cheek against him and his fingers move in my hair, lightly stroking me, asking for nothing, and tender. There are times we are so gentle and giving with each other—even in these moments of sexual rising—that I feel like my insides have been sucked out and into him.

  “I love the feel of your touch,” he whispers, and I grasp him lightly, in a feather glide, teasing the hard length of him with my fingers. His eyes close and I place my lips around him.

  “I want to make love to you,” he says through ragged breathes. I suck harder. He groans. Then I tease the tip with my tongue and swallow him fully.

  “Stop, Linda. I want to be inside you,” he murmurs, but I suck harder, flicking with my tongue, and he doesn’t move to stop me. I clamp my mouth around him, letting my tongue twirl around his cock, teasing, then moving away from that little spot near the head of his erection that gives me instant control over him.

  I feel his fingers in my hair, trying to ease me off him. No Jack, you need a good blow job. You’re fucking tense as hell. I don’t like this uncharacteristic tension beneath the surface of him, but I sure as hell know how to get rid of it. I suck harder, pushing him deeper.

  “Linda…” he moans, even as I feel his body flex within my hands holding onto him, his eyes widening as he thrusts into my mouth.

  His hands grip my hair. He cries out and stills. My mouth lightens around him as I swallow and then I kiss my way slowly up until I’m standing. I touch my lips to the underside of his jaw and smile. It’s not an act I usually enjoy, but with Jack there is no sexual act I don’t enjoy. How could I not love this with Jack, I wonder, staring at his closed-eyes-content expression, feeling him melt into peacefulness against me, feeling myself fully turned-on by my own power and giving him carnal pleasure.

  “There. Loose, and ready to go on stage,” I whisper, satisfied with my success.

  His eyes open and glitter at me. He frowns, studying me speculatively. I tense. He doesn’t look like a man who has just gotten a blow job. What nerve have I hit in him now?

  He steps out of the shower and wraps a towel around his waist. His cock is tame, but something tells me that Jack is not. The most even-tempered man I’ve ever known is lately like walking a mine field. Jack’s mood is volatile tonight.

  After I shut off the water, he hands me a towel and goes back to the rack for another one to dry his hair with. Silence. I grab a second towel for myself, bend over in a movement that conveys I’m starting to get a touch irritated as well, and wrapped it around my damp curls. When I toss my head back up, securing the towel, I notice he’s moved away from me to the sink and is brushing his teeth. He fills his mouth with water and even the way he swishes it around in his cheeks says he’s not happy at present with me.

  OK, Jack, message received.

  “Why are you pissed off?”

  “I’m not,” he says complacently and starts to comb out his golden, wavy hair. After he drops the comb onto the counter, he runs his fingers through his hair and then turns to look appraisingly at me. “You shouldn’t have gotten your hair wet. We’ve only got about twenty minutes.”

  I grab his comb. “Well pardon me for being willing to take one for the team.”

  His blue eyes sharpen and meet me in the mirror. “Is that what you’re doing here, Linda? Taking one for the team?” He says that through practically gritted teeth.

  The color drains from my face. That was harsh and unkind. But I did phrase my flippant remark stupidly, a loaded comment full of unpleasant meanings. Stupid, Linda. Stupid. Why did you say that?

  My eyes round. “Oh, for god’s sake, you know that’s not what I mean.”

  He steps close to me, putting his hands on either side of my face, turning me from the mirror to face him. He looks distressed. And.. oh no…more than a little offended. The ever-present smile is gone from his eyes in a way I’ve not seen before.

  “If you want to be sexual because you love me that’s one thing. If you do it only because you think it will please me, Linda, that’s a problem,” he murmurs and steps away from me, not giving me a chance to answer that before he drops his towel and reaches for his pants.

  “I do all the things I do with you because I love you,” I whisper. It’s the truth. I don’t know how he can doubt that.

  He’s reaching for his shirt. “You don’t have to work to please me. Or to give me what you think I want. I’m pleased just by being with you.”

  A flash fire rises on my flesh and concentrates on my cheeks. “I would never do that. Not with you.”

  Oh crap! Me and my big mouth. I wish I could slap my lips and trap those words back in me. That sounded totally disgusting and it wasn’t at all what I meant to say.

  “Jack...”

  His eyes fix on me. “Get dressed.”

  He leaves me alone in the bathroom. I sink on the edge of the counter. Well, You’ve really made a mess of things this time, Linda. What’s wrong with you that you can’t just love him without doing something that fucks it all up?

  My fingers curl around the edge of the counter.
Only Jack would read something more into a blow job than just getting a blow job. It’s part of what makes his so damn appealing and inescapably him. His complexity of thought and emotion. That he isn’t like other men. It’s also part of what gives me fits because understanding him is, at times, a monumental effort.

  I cross the cool, damp tile and grab my white bathrobe from where I dropped it. I pull it on and then remove the towel from my hair. I scrunch my damp curls with my fingers. That’s going to have to do. I don’t have time to dry it.

  I step into the bedroom to find it empty and continue on to the living room. Jack is staring out the window, back towards me, and he’s smoking. By the amount of smoke in the room, he’s smoked more than one cigarette while I stayed in the bathroom trying to figure out how to get us good again.

  He looks over his shoulder at me. “Do you enjoy the things we do sexually, Linda? Or do you just do them because you think I expect you to? I don’t, you know. I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  I feel that icy prickling sensation, followed by my flesh rapidly heating all over again. So, we’re still on this.

  I make a face. “God, you are such a man at times. Why isn’t it an option in your thought process that I do them to please myself?”

  Jack frowns. “OK. But that’s not an answer.”

  Why is he focused on this tonight? Shit, this isn’t even close to the right time to have a serious conversation or, worse, an argument. Not when he’s got to be out the door in fifteen minutes.

  I shake my head. “I just gave you my answer. You figure out what it means.”

  “Whoa. Slow down. Why are you angry?”

  I still.

  “Because the way you phrased that makes it sound like I’m running some sort of groupie game on you. That I’m with you for other reasons than because I love you. That what we share isn’t something special. That it is just some kind of sex performance I do for you that I’ve done for other men. Not us. But just what I do.”

  “Well is it?”

  It’s like I’ve been punched, really hard in the stomach, without warning. I never expected that one from Jack, not in a million years.

  “No! And fuck you for asking if it is!”

  I’m meeting him stare for stare in what promises to evolve into a fully heated argument, when he suddenly frowns and the emotion on his face changes.

  “Why aren’t you dressed to go? Garret is on his way up.”

  I sink down on the arm on the sofa. “I’m not coming tonight, Jack.”

  His penetrating eyes rapidly search my face. “Why not? You’ve never seen me perform. I want you there, Linda. I don’t want to be a minute without you that I don’t have to.”

  I run my fingers through my hair and meet his stare steadily. “I’m not going, Jack. Not here. Not in LA. Don’t ask me to, and don’t expect me to.”

  He lights another cigarette and studies me through the smoke. “What does us being in LA have to do with anything?”

  My eyes round. “I know too many people here. There’s no way I can go with you tonight and not run into someone I know. I don’t want that, Jack. I don’t want my past all mixed up with what we have.”

  He sighs heavily and studies me for a moment. “Do you think I care if you run into a guy from the old days? Whatever you did before me, doesn’t matter. Not to me. I don’t care if people know we’re a couple.”

  When he talks like that it’s so believable I want to melt and be everything he wants me to be. But you can’t run away from who you are, who you’ve been, even if Jack is so temptingly trying to make you believe that you can. It makes me feel so dirty when I think back to those days, and somehow it touches Jack not at all. He’s too good, in a strange way naïve, to think my past doesn’t matter because it doesn’t matter to him. How my life feels to me is so alien to him, he can’t even imagine it.

  Groupie is just another term for whore. A whore a musician doesn’t have to pay. That’s what I’ve been, whether he wants to acknowledge that or not, whether he realizes that’s what is buried underneath his suspicions of me tonight. I suddenly understand what’s been wrong with us of late. It’s the subtext of who I am, always in the room with us, and it’s starting to be a subtext making Jack doubt my love for him and doubt my motivation to keep coming to him.

  Hurt shoots upward from my center, making me instantly defensive and blurt without thinking, “We’re not a couple, Jack. We’re a cliché.”

  I’ve kicked up his anger. I can see it in the subtle tensing of the flesh across his cheekbones. “The only thing cliché in this room is how you think. I don’t know where you get these ideas you have, but don’t you ever think they apply to me!”

  He crosses the room in angry strides and stomps out his cigarette.

  That was said meanly. I stare at him in wide-eyed shock. I’ve never pushed Jack far enough to be mean to me and I don’t like it. I lift my chin. “Oh, nothing applies to you, because you don’t live in the real world, Jack, and you never have,” I counter with more ire than I intend.

  His gaze locks on me, burning. “My world is as real as anyone’s, Linda. Don’t insult me by suggesting it’s not.”

  My cheeks flood with a fiery burn. He’s right. In some ways, his world is more real and cruel than mine has ever been. My comment was completely an unfair thing to say to a man who lost both his wife and son tragically, and is trying to cope with a daughter messed up by growing up in a house of death. That last part makes my stomach turn. God, I wish I hadn’t phrased it that way in my head.

  I say, “I’m talking about you and me. We don’t exist in the real world. We exist in this neat little bubble of hotel rooms and isolated hours. Just you, me, and the good parts of being together, Jack. We don’t ever have to deal with the crappy parts of who I am and of being a couple. We just have the good times and that’s fine by me. But don’t pretend that if we try to make more out of us, the real parts won’t change what we have now.”

  “There is nothing more real in my life than being with you, Linda,” he says half-exasperated and almost half-growling. “The only thing that makes sense to me right now is me and you.”

  My eyes round as I study his face. What else is going on here that I don’t know about? Something more is happening with Jack than just junk about us. I can feel my gaze grow sparkly. “I love what we have, Jack. I don’t want to change it.”

  He crosses the room then, taking me so quickly against his chest, nearly crushing me in the protective hold of his arms. His lips bury in my hair as he whispers, “You hold on to things too tightly, Linda. And you worry too much that everything is going to be taken from you. I’m not going anywhere. Not ever. Nothing is going to change how I feel about you. Nothing.”

  He steps back from me.

  I stare up at him. “I’ll see you when you get back?”

  I don’t like the way he’s looking at me. “There’s a thing after the show,” he says. “I’ll try to cut out early.”

  He looks away first. Jack has never done that before and I’m dropped into a shaky, emotional pit. All I ever want to do is please Jack. It’s what I do best, being what men need me to be, but I can’t seem to do it at all anymore. Everything I do comes out wrong. I don’t know why. I just want to love him.

  I watch him move around the hotel room. Jack doesn’t stop until he’s at the door. “I’ll leave your name on the list at the security entrance, Linda, in case you change your mind.” His brilliant blue stare locks on me. “I hope you change your mind, baby. I could really use you being there tonight.”

  He opens the door. I recognize the roadie waiting in the hallway. Garret says, “You ready to do it, man?”

  “Sure. Let’s roll,” Jack says. He doesn’t look back, but Garrett gives me a shy smile over his head.

  The door clicks closed between us. I stare at it, feeling miserable and alone and really shitty. I hate that I can’t be everything he wants me
to be. I want to. But you can’t just magically be someone you’re not. There is too much garbage from my past in Jack’s world waiting to collide with me. There is still so much about me I’ve got to fix. Heck, I can’t even afford to get my car out of the Hyatt parking lot.

  Four

  Without Jack, the room is just a room in a Hyatt. It’s lost its luster. Sterile walls, stock furnishings, and little touches of creature comforts and assembly line art arranged in hopes of making it homey. It’s not homey. It’s a lifeless space, empty and lonely, and tonight the emptiness mocks me.

  I slip off the arm of the couch onto the seat. It’s 9p.m. Jack should be on stage by ten. A ninety minute set. The backstage thing. An after party. I won’t see him for five, maybe six hours.

  I feel anxious and uncomfortable with only my own company. A lot went wrong tonight. It started out wonderfully, but boy did we end in an awkward place. I fight the replay of the prior hours in my head, but the flashing moments are unrelenting. I’ve strayed so far with Jack from the type of relationship I’ve always known with men that it’s little wonder I can’t figure out what’s going wrong with us and why.

  I reach for the phone. For some reason, calling my mother sounds like a really good thing to do right now. I can’t call Jeanette. My best friend doesn’t approve of my affair with Jack. She thinks I’m letting myself be used, setting myself up for another heartache, and that I’m delusional to think it could end any other way.

  I punch my mom’s number into the phone and wait. Ring. Ring. Ring.

  “Hello.”

  “Hi Mom. Sorry to call so late, but I wanted to check on you.”

  Doris laughs. “I just saw you for dinner last night, dear. It’s Friday night. I would have thought you had big plans or something.”

  “Nope. Just me all alone tonight.”

  Silence through the receiver for a moment. Then, “What’s wrong, Linda? Something has got to be wrong for you to be alone on a Friday night and calling me.”

  Oh crap, how does she always know? It’s unnerving that a woman who understands so little about human relationships—her affair with my father and her continued idolization of him is proof of that—can read me accurately without effort.