“I was killing time until you got here.”
“With eighteen-year-old models?”
“I was avoiding Rihanna,” he laughed. “Stop. You’re walking too fast. I want to look at you.”
I turned to face him. He looked ridiculously sexy, even for him. Black suit, sheer black shirt partially unbuttoned, long silk scarf draped around his neck. Hair, elegantly disheveled. The fact that he was still wearing a light dusting of makeup from the show didn’t even bother me.
“Hi,” he said, again.
“Hi. I’m sorry you lost.”
He shrugged. “It happens. Where did you get this dress?”
“Balmain,” I said. “A few years ago.”
It was easily one of the sexiest things I owned. An intricate lace top, a high-waisted, studded fitted skirt ending just above the knee, my Isabel Marant bondage shoes. Daring, black, rock-and-roll.
I turned and continued heading toward the table, still pissed about the model.
Hayes’s hands were on my hips, pulling me into him. His mouth at my ear.
“Bloody hell, I just want to fuck your arse in this dress.”
I laughed. “Who the hellareyou?”
“I’m the guy who gets to fuck your arse in this dress.”
His words stopped me. There, in the middle of the theater at the Ace Hotel. Surrounded by music execs and wannabe starlets and Grammy winners. My rock star boyfriend pushed up against my back.
“You wanna gonow?”
“I want to go now,” he said. “There’s aGQand Armani party in Hollywood, and we have to swing by there because I have to show my face. And then we’re going to stop by Sam’s party in Bel-Air because I told him we would. And then we’re going to go backto the hotel so I can fuck your arse in this dress… Are you okay with that?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“You always have a choice.”
“Do you have lube?”
He laughed. “We’ll improvise.”
His hand was spanning my abdomen, pressing me into him. All of him.
“Okay. Call our driver.”
“Done.”
Later, much later, when Hayes was passed out in a signature suite at the SLS Beverly Hills, I lay awake, watching him sleep. The night had passed in a blur of champagne and music and sex. It was going to hurt in the morning. It was already hurting now.
My eyes scanned the room, plush and slick with Philippe Starck touches and an overabundance of leather ottomans. The floor-to-ceiling mirror facing the bed was anything but subtle.
“Who chose this place?” I’d asked when we arrived, sometime after one. Two? “I feel like a hooker.”
“You’re going to feel even more like a hooker when I’m done with you,” Hayes said, making me laugh.
He was rough. And fun. And I loved everything about it.
At one point, when he was lying above me, inside of me, his chest against my back, his arms splaying mine, fingers entwined, he brushed his mouth against my ear and said, low: “Do you feel like you could be my mother now?”
