Page 174 of Before You Fell

I walk her toward the bathroom, my hands on her waist, my mouth on her throat, already thinking about the tiles, the hot water, and her back against the wall as my cock is deep inside her.

At least I can give her that.

It may not be the words that sit in my chest. But it is everything I know how to give her right now. And I’m going to give it to her until she cannot stand it. Until she knows without words that she is it for me.

That she has always been it for me and I’ve been too much of a coward to ever tell her.

Chapter Thirty

Willow

Iknow Phoenix is an asshole. He’s a rockstar and the egotistical prick with too many women in his past and too much applause running through him. I know the smirk, the selfishness, and the way fame built a shrine to his worst habits and called it a personality. I have known all of it since we were teenagers.

But lately I keep seeing him again. The real him.

Not all at once, but he returns in pieces. And most of those pieces still swear too much, leave wet towels on the bathroom floor, and firmly believe that a shirt is optional if the temperature is above freezing.

Phoenix brushes past me in the kitchen with one hand at my hip. Not long enough to mean anything. But long enough to make my body remember exactly what he did to it three hours earlier.

He smiles at me and the room tilts under the weight of our history.

Those smiles scare me most.

They aren’t the filthy grin he usually wears when my thighs are around his head and all the arrogance in the world tucked behind his teeth. I know what to do with his mouth when it is dirty. I can pull his hair and shove his face back between my legs and tell him exactly what I want. Tell the arrogant shithead to stop making me beg for it and just put his fucking mouth on my pussy and mean it. And he does. God help me, he does. He tells me to open wider. He pulls orgasms out of me with his fingers, his mouth, his cock. Drawing those noises out of me until I’m shaking, swearing and hating him for how well he knows my body. For how quickly he learnt every note of it and how little shame he has about playing them all at once.

The filthy mouth I can handle. The cocky bastard who makes me forget every sensible thought I’ve ever had, I can handle that too.

But the smile and the arm that pulls me in after the hot filthy sex. That one I have no defense against. That one I never did.

The days blur and a week passes.

The apartment is alive again. Coffee cups multiply on the counter. Phoenix’s guitar leans against my couch. The notebook that used to sit closed on my desk now stays open, pages bent, ink everywhere, and his handwriting tangled with mine in the margins.

We work on new songs every day. Not because the label wants it. We work on them because they are ours. Because they feel the way they used to before all of this became stages, headlines, and women hunting for the lead singer with the dirty smirk and the reputation.

Before any of that, it was just us. A boy with a guitar and too much ego. A girl with a notebook and too many feelings. And a melody passing between them until neither could say who had written what anymore.

It seems that way again. Only older. Darker. The innocence of youth is gone and I don’t think either of us would know what to do with it if it came back. But the intimacy is there, threaded through the apartment in low notes, half-written lines, and the particular silence of two people who have stopped pretending they don’t need each other.

He watches me now. Not the way he used to watch me from across a crowded room, with enough arrogance to make me furious. This is different. Quieter. His gaze catches me when I’m writing, when I’m on the floor with my knees pulled up and a pen between my teeth. Sometimes the way he looks at me makes my chest hurt in ways I cannot yet name.

I sense it in the way he pulls me into him. In the way he buries his face in my hair and holds me a few seconds too long, as if he is checking that I’m still here. As if he is back in that hospital room, sitting beside my bed with his hand in mine.

We sit on the living room floor, his arm around my waist, his chin resting near my shoulder. The guitar is pushed aside and my notebook rests across my knees.

He is gentler than I have ever seen him before.

Phoenix, who has never been gentle with anything in his life, is gentle toward me.

He still fucks with the confidence of a man who knows exactly how to play my body and enjoys every sound he drags from it. He is still cocky, and still the dirty mouthed bastard who can make me shake with one low command and then look smug about it as if my orgasm is a round of applause he has earned.

He tells me my pussy belongs to him. He says it with enough certainty that my body believes him before my brain has caught up. But he doesn’t turn cold once he has had me. Sometimes he pulls me into him before I have stopped shaking, one hand moving slowly over my back as his breathing settles. Sometimes he drifts off with his fingers intertwined with mine, as though a piece of him doesn’t trust the darkness without being able to sense me there.

I keep telling myself that this is temporary.

Because what happens when he no longer needs to be here? When the two weeks are over, real life will return. The world will press its filthy hands against the glass. Damon. The band. Fame. Women with glitter on their skin and Phoenix’s name already halfway out of their mouths. The machine that taught him to mistake being wanted for being whole.

That thought doesn’t crush me the way it once would have. I love him. God, I love him in a way that settles under my skin and refuses every eviction notice I have ever served. But I am no longer living on the edge of his attention. I’m not waiting to see if Phoenix remembers to give me enough scraps to make a meal.