“You went toJuilliard?” I said. I studied her, watching as she rocked with the song blasting through the bar, and tried to meld the idea of a fiercely disciplined, world-class musician with the ballsy, boho chick in front of me.
Who exactly did I share that elevator with?
“Yeah, it’s not a big deal.” She waved the notion away as if to suggest anyone could wander into Juilliard. “Anyway . . . I met someone. A musical theatre nerd. A really gorgeous, attention-whoring musical theatre nerd who was being lured into more commercial settings. And in the infinite wisdom of nineteen-year-olds, we got married. Our parents went ballistic.”
She laughed, shaking her head while she continued studying the crowd, drained her martini, and then untied her hair.
“It was fun for a little while, but it was just pretend. A scene he wanted to act out. It wasn’t real,” she said. “None of it’s real when you’re nineteen. And then he cheated on me. Apparently, he cheated a lot. And since we were poor college kids, neither of us could afford to move out of our studio apartment. So . . . we lived together, separated. I learned very quickly that I wasn’t the center of the universe when I was sleeping on the sofa while my ex-husband fucked understudies.”
At some point we’d stopped having a frisky conversation about bedpost notches, and it’d turned true and heavy. I scratched the back of my neck, my eyes wide as I digested her story. “I have to tell you, Tiel, I did not expect the jaded divorcee story from you.”
“I’m not—”
“Oh, that was jaded,” I said. “You’re jaded, I’m jaded, we’re all really fucking jaded.”
I stared at her, studying her eyes, her mouth, her beaded chandelier earrings, the trio of amber necklaces around her throat, and then dropped my gaze to her chest. They truly were sensational tits.
“Ah, Samuel? Eyes up here, please.”
I dragged my gaze from her breasts to her lips, and lifted my brows. “Yeah, you’re not my type, but you have an incredible rack, and I’d like having those lips on my dick.”
It sounded like my usual bullshit, but it was possibly the most honest, unfiltered thing I’d said all day.
She snorted, spraying vodka from her mouth and nose, and shook her head. “You need to shut that shit down. I’m not giving you a blowjob. Stop thinking about it.”
I brushed the fluid from my shirt, but I’d been a sweaty, wrinkled mess for hours now. A little backwashed martini wasn’t changing that. My eyes moved back to her breasts while she mopped the liquid from her face. “I probably won’t, Sunshine.”
She plucked my drink from my fingers and placed it on the bar, and grabbed my hand. It wasn’t my style—no handshakes, no high-fives, not even fist bumps—but I let Tiel lace her fingers with mine anyway. I figured the adrenaline was still running high, and it was obscuring all my natural reactions. “Come on, perv. I want to dance.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I danced in a dingy bar, if ever. College was about reinventing myself, and I accomplished that with a full slate of frat parties and mixers masquerading as structured hook-up opportunities. After college, I replaced frat parties with Boston’s most exclusive club scenes, and on most nights, I couldn’t tell the two apart. It was all about shallow people trying to look good enough to fuck.
I didn’t spend time trading innuendos with easygoing girls who didn’t care how ridiculously enchanting they looked as they sang along. But here I was, watching as Tiel’s yellow skirt tangled around her legs while she twisted and bounced with the music, her arms high over her head, and I could almost taste her inhibitions melting away. She didn’t care whether her hair was disheveled or her mascara smudged, and it didn’t matter to her whether anyone was watching or judging.
The opening chords of the next song rang through the bar, and Tiel searched the crowded dance floor, her eyes lighting when they landed on me.
“What are you doing over there?” Tiel yelled, pulling me toward her. She wrapped her arm around my waist and smiled up at me. Shit, she was pretty. “You have to sing with me. This tune demands it.”
She was short—taller than Lauren and Shannon, but those two bordered on pocket-sized—and this angle gave me a priceless view down her shirt. It also meant that my cock was nestled against her belly, and her soft heat felt a little too magnificent for this situation.
Talking to her meant leaning down, moving further into her space, breathing in her sweet scent. As my nose brushed against her shoulder, I had the most overwhelming urge to lick her.
I’d never wanted to lick another human being in my life, and on most days, I wasn’t comfortable touching anything that I hadn’t personally sanitized.
But I really wanted to taste Tiel.
Instead, I brushed her hair away from her ear, dropped my hand to her waist, and asked, “What is this?”
“It’s Bleachers,” she said. “‘I Wanna Get Better.’”
Even as we leaned into each other, she continued moving, jumping with the beat. I followed her lead, and I tried to see what the world looked like from her eyes. She sang every word, her bright, happy eyes fixed on me while her expression morphed with the music as if she was telling me a secret story.
Some brittle, rough part of me spasmed, softening and rupturing by degrees as the words rang in my ears.
It was too much—this song, this day, this girl—and I wanted to surrender to all of it. Turn off the noise in my head, shut down the anxiety in my veins, and have one night free from my fucking issues.
But all that shit—it was the only thing I knew to be true. It was my filthy fucking security blanket, and I’d been dragging it around longer than I could remember. Somehow, somewhere in the haze of my masochistic workload and mindless fucking, that blanket turned into a gin-soaked noose, and it was tightening each day.
All I had to do was decide if I wanted to let it take me.
