Then he says, “It’s not a bad thing to be small.”
Something in his tone changed. I lift my eyes, listening.
He chuckles to himself, as if at a private joke. “I guess I wish some other people would realize that.”
“Like who?”
“You can fight to be at the top your whole life, but what’s the point if you’re up there all alone?” He turns his face away from the stars and brings his eyes to mine. “Sometimes, TJ … I wish I never wroteHate Me. Wish I’d stayed small … just hittin’ bars, laughin’ it up with my friends who still called me Austin. And it … it wouldn’t be anything at all to just …” His eyes drag down my body, the rest of his sentence left hanging.
My chest tightens. I think he’s looking at my hands. Or maybe my dick? Every word he ever says drips in sex even whenasking for directions to the bathroom, I can never tell with this guy.
But I’m also seeing the picture he’s painting. I wonder what it would be like, to have known him during those “smaller” times, to use his words.
It moves me to speak. “You know what’s the first thing about you I appreciated? Back at the Horseshoe, when we first met?”
He lifts an eyebrow. “My stunning hair?”
“Your ears.” He frowns at me. I smile. “You listened to me. All of me. I feel like you even somehow heard the things I didn’t say.”
“That so?”
“And after your ears—which are also super cute, by the way—it was your voice I noticed. But not in the hall. Outside, after I left. I didn’t know it was you. I thought it was that overhyped country singer called Chase Holt—who I was instantly proven wrong about. Your song that night, it saved me.”
He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t have even written it had we not met. Can’t even think how different things would be right now if you hadn’t found me. Probably would’ve just gone on that stage like any other night, never having written that song that sent me on this … this wild path to you … to here and now, on these sweet-ass chairs under the stars.”
Without thinking, I put my hand on his arm. His eyes drop to it. Then, perhaps also not thinking, he takes my hand into his, our fingers gently entwining.
I smile. “Guess we’re one-for-one with saving each other.”
“Guess so,” he agrees, and like that, we give in to a kiss across the arms of our side-by-side loungers. There’s a desperation in our kiss, the first one we’ve managed since he arrived, long overdue.
It’s so different this time. Without the sterile, lemony aroma of hotel carpets. Without the fear of someone spotting us.Without a TV on for background noise. Without windows drawn shut.
Just me and Austin.
The silence, punctured by a smacking of lips from our kisses, against a backdrop of crickets singing.
Austin makes it easy.
He makes everything easy.
“Feel tired yet?” I ask him when our kissing finally ends. He shakes his head no. “Feel tired enough … to retire to my room?” I ask, revising my question—and pushing what I’mactuallyasking. It hits him, and with a smirk, he slowly nods.
I take him from the spot, head inside, cut through the guest wing into the main house, fly up the stairs, and pull him right into my room. The kissing resumes the second that door shuts. I peel off his shirt. He grabs at the button of my shorts, working it open, then slides his fingertips over my waist, grazing my sensitive skin. Our clothes fall off our bodies like butter.
My back hits the bed.
He crawls over me.
I reach to the side and pull open the nightstand drawer like I’m displaying a fine collection of jewelry for sale.
He stares at it. “That’s a lot of just-in-cases.”
“I’ve missed you,” I answer back, before grabbing his face and pulling it to mine, dive-bombing into more kisses.
There’s something about our energy tonight. Is it being with him in the privacy of my house? Away from the nauseating stench of sterile hotel rooms? Away from the sickly bluish glow of TVs we kept on just to diffuse our noise? I don’t think we realized that in the seeming fun of sneaking around to see each other on tour, we were also suffocating.
In this bedroom, there’s no suffocating. Just freedom.