He wasn’t going to get off easily. And not with me.
“So, here we are,” I said, snuggling into Matt’s side. “So let’s hear about your love story again.”
Kingsley had his lips pressed together and was glaring at me.
Dolly didn’t seem to care much, looking at me with eyes shining.
“Is it true you’re banned in France?”
“Yeah—” Kingsley said, cutting in. “That was on our very first tour and I dared her to go past the barrier around the Mona Lisa.”
He cocked his head as if daring me tonottalk about our first tour. Or our next tour. The one to Botswana. The one to Italy when we’d taken a boat around Venice. Singing in the Alps. Hiking up the Canadian Rockies. Through the rainforest in Peru. He was daring me to deny our shared history.
And we had a lot of it.
Entwined, entangled, inseparable. Riffing and joking and shit-talking each other from one continent to the next while we fucked like bunnies at night. But I was always in the darkness. I wanted to be the girl who got taken out into the light.
And I was done waiting.
Every time poor Dolly tried to talk about something, even answer Matt’s polite questions about how long she’d played the harp, etc. etc., Kingsley had to break in with some story from when we were in college together.
That first time we’d had a BBQ and set the porch on fire.
Then time we’d been thrown out of a bar because Kingsley took exception to some guy slapping my ass, except he ended up being the bar owner.
Every story was about me. Aboutus.
I was even more sure that Dolly belonged with someone sweet like Matt.
Fans kept breaking in even though Kingsley had security, asking to take a picture, and he was even more of an ass than usual, forgetting to introduce Dolly and instead pointing to me and insisting I get in the picture too.
“Get my collaborator in here, too.”
Collaborator?
Kingsley had never admitted once that he’d had any help rising to superstardom. And that had always been fine with me—we’d always found it funny when people called him “the songwriter of a generation.”
This wasn’t genuine, it must just be an attempt to get me to blow him again, and as such it was not happening.
“Stop trying to piss all over me and mark your territory!” I hissed as Matt pointed out things on the drinks menu for Dolly.
“We have a lot of history together,” Kingsley retorted. “Why shouldn’t I remind people of it?”
“I was in college with Matt, too. We were all friends.”
“It was always Kingsley and Rosalie, though,” he said, his eyes gleaming at me.
“And now it can be Matt and Rosalie.”
He reached under the table and gripped my thigh, dragging me closer so he could trap my leg between his. I could feel him pulsing with passion.
“You think I’ve forgotten about what he did? That he went behind my back and seduced you?”
“Seducedme? Are you the granny in a melodrama? MaybeIseduced him.”
“You did not.”
His fingers spanned my thigh, and I remembered very well what those fingers could do to me, if he chose to exert himself.
