The Daymakers, page 15
What a fantasy come to life that would be.
Only Royal was in his stage mask, the other guys just lazing around in what I liked to call their leisure masks—hand-painted spandex blend, according to Helen earlier today. She’d been explaining the differences between all the different masks the guys had. Apparently, they all had half masks, but none of them wore them except Royal.
Knight didn’t let something as pesky as a mask stop him from burying his nose in my neck and nuzzling me softly. The makeup girl’s eyes burned as she stared at us. Well, until Royal cleared his throat, and she went back to work.
“If you take the mask off, I could definitely do this more easily,” she whined, and I rolled my eyes. Not that she could see. I must’ve made a soft noise too that gave away my feelings, if Knight’s chuckle was anything to go by.
“You know the rules,” was all Royal said, and the girl clucked her tongue.
“Fuck the rules. I’ve already signed an airtight NDA. What am I going to do?”
I wanted to tell her I was fucking them, and even I didn’t get to see their faces. I held my tongue, though. I already didn’t like the catty way she was staring at me, and while I wasn’t here to make friends, I also wasn’t here to make enemies.
Royal gave her a haughty look. “Run your fucking mouth.”
She gave a fuzzy giggle that made me grind my back teeth. “As if I would. Does Knight’s girlfriend get to see your faces? What are they calling her? The Toy?”
My lip curled, and Poet popped in front of me before I opened my mouth and told her what I thought of her. “Nah, that’s just what Royal calls her when they fuck. Her name is Dreamer.”
Shep ran a hand down his face. “For fuck’s sake, Poet.”
The girl leaned back, looking between us all. “Seriously? She’s your girlfriend?” I wasn’t sure why she seemed so angered by the concept. Her eyes ran up and down my body, and judging by the look on her face, she didn’t see what all the fuss was about.
I trained my eyes on Royal. He was a fucking wildcard at the best of times; who knew what he’d say right now. His eyes flicked between the two of us, looking like the bored, insouciant god that he was.
Finally, he pursed those perfect lips. “That’s none of your damn business. Just remember that NDA you were so quick to bring up.” He looked around her in the mirror. “You done?”
“Umm, yeah,” the makeup girl said, pushing back and swishing her pretty blonde hair over her shoulder. “We’re done.” She stomped out of the dressing room, and I looked at Poet.
“He fucked her, didn’t he?”
He threw back his head and laughed. “What do you think?”
Royal crooked a finger at me. “Come here and kiss your boyfriend, Toy.” There was a challenge in his tone, but I wasn’t going to shy away from a little verbal sparring. I sashayed toward him, my eyes daring him to make this my fault.
I stepped between his knees, where the girl had just been, but instead of sitting on her stool, I straddled his thighs. The buttery softness of his faux leather pants squeaked, and I ran my fingers down his buttons, the very ones I’d sewed on this morning. I leaned forward, brushing my lips against his, and the pupils of his deep blue eyes were blown wide. He gripped my ass hard, and I tested the structural integrity of his chair by rolling my hips over his.
“Here I am, Your Majesty. What are you going to do with me?”
He growled low in his throat, his hand coming up to wrap around my ponytail. He bent my head back and ran his tongue in a stripe up my throat, making me moan. “Not a goddamn thing. I just got my makeup done.” He picked me up by my hips and lifted me off his thighs.
Rejection burned in my gut, but I pushed it back down. I could see the bulge in his pants, the way his eyes were hooded as he stared back at me. He wanted me as much as I wanted him.
“Tonight, though, you’re mi—”
“Dibs!” We all turned to Poet, who had his hand raised, gesturing between himself and Hero. “We call dibs.”
“We do?” Hero asked, and I laughed as Poet elbowed him in the ribs. “I mean, yeah, we do.”
Royal frowned. “You can’t call shotgun on a person, Poe.”
Poet hooked an arm around my waist and dragged me between himself and Hero. “Just did. Don’t be a sore loser, Royal,” he teased. “They made a TV series out of the books I loaned her, and we’re going to watch it.”
“Can’t you do that after—”
“Nope. If it has to be sexual for it to be approved time, we’ll watch it naked. I’ll eat Milk Duds from between her tits. Whatever it is, she’s with me and Hero tonight.”
I grinned, because as much as I enjoyed whatever crazy game Royal and I were playing, it was nice to be wanted. Just to hang and watch movies.
Somehow, that seemed more perilous to me than whatever Royal had planned.
TWENTY-THREE
POET
I showered in the dressing rooms, because trying to shower on one leg in a tiny-ass bathroom on a moving bus was always a physical challenge I tried to avoid. We’d done the meet and greets, Royal and Knight were doing the media interviews, and I was just appreciating the cool water running over my overheated body.
I was excited for two days on the road. Not because I enjoyed traveling—honestly, it sucked being trapped on the bus, but it meant we didn’t have any work commitments. We could jam a little maybe, binge-watch movies and shows, get lost between the pretty thighs of Charlotte.
I mean, Dreamer.
It was a great name, because Knight wasn’t the only one having dreams about being inside Charlotte. I wasn’t completely on board with this arrangement, except to help Charlotte out, but the more I got to know her, the more she slipped her way under my skin.
Hero stepped into the bathroom with me, closing the door softly behind him. He pulled off his mask, and I took in the sharp angles of his face and his brow that was in a perpetual frown.
“We should talk,” he said solemnly, and I raised an eyebrow at him.
Turning off the water, I stepped out into the cold, gray room. “You can’t break up with me. We aren’t even a couple,” I teased, and he handed me my towel, his eyes drifting down my body. He’d seen it hundreds of times in our lifetime. Before my accident and after, though not in the same way he looked at it now. Back then, we’d been little kids at school, or hanging out at Knight’s house, playing in his pool on holiday breaks.
Now, when he looked at me, it was sometimes with lust in his eyes. Sometimes it was with concern. And sometimes, like right now, it was with a seriousness that meant we were going to have one of those conversations.
Wrapping the towel around my waist, I hopped over to the toilet and sat down on the lid. “Okay, hit me with it.”
“I want to have sex with Charlotte.”
I blinked. “Okay…? I don’t blame you. I do too.”
Hero frowned again. “I love you, Poet.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d told me he loved me. The first time had been when we were seventeen and had sex for the first time. He’d held me in his arms, promising he’d love me forever.
I’d run away as fast as my crippled body could carry me. Eventually, though, we’d had to talk about it in a conversation that sounded a lot like this one. We’d worked out that we loved each other, but we weren’t enough. No matter what side we landed on, with girlfriends that came and went or with just each other, it always felt like the grass was greener on the other side.
When I’d had my last serious girlfriend—who hated Hero—all I had wanted was to feel his arms around me again. Then, when Hero and I had decided to be monogamous with just each other, I’d missed that softness that came with being in love with a woman. We were both too prickly, and with Hero, I found myself becoming the softer one. The submissive. I didn’t want to be that all the time, no matter how fun it was occasionally.
So we dipped our toes—and dicks—outside our relationship, but we always came back to each other. Knight had called it an open relationship, and if anyone would know, it would be Knight.
“I love you too.” I reached out and dragged him toward me. “Where are you going with this?”
Hero sighed, resting his head on top of mine. “For the first time in a long time, sleeping with anyone else feels wrong without asking you first. We aren’t getting any younger, Poet—”
“Hey, you’re twenty-four, not sixty-four,” I protested, and he hushed me.
“And I feel like I owe you more than I’ve been giving you. If you asked me not to see anyone else, I wouldn’t. So I guess, what I’m saying is that I’m interested in Charlotte, more than I thought I’d be. The whole contract thing makes me feel…”
“Ick?” I supplied, because I got it. It made me feel kind of weird too. “Don’t worry. How about, from now on, if we pursue anything with Charlotte, we do it together. I know we’ll both treat her with respect. We’ll give her choices. She’s sweet, and I don’t want her to fuck me out of obligation.” Or pity, which had happened more than once. “Tonight, we’ll make it clear that she holds all the cards. We can be friends. We can be more. It all rests with her.” I pulled back, so I could see his face.
He looked relieved as he nodded his agreement. “Okay. Okay, yeah. That’s what we’ll do. And if she just wants to hang out and watch romcoms, we can do that too.”
I finished drying myself, pulling on my boxer shorts, and Hero handed me my sock. We’d done this dance so many times now, I was pretty sure if I ever went permanently lame, all of the guys could put on my prosthetic for me.
“Agreed. Now, get out of here so I can get dressed and we can go home. Actually, box up some of the stuff from the rider. We could use the snacks for the road.”
And the booze. Man, I was going to need the booze.
When we made it back to the bus, everything was quickly loaded. Charlotte—I mean, Dreamer—was already on the bus, dressed in a pair of shorts and an oversized band hoodie.
She was blindfolded again, but it didn’t slow her down as she told Knight and Hero all about her day with Helen, sewing buttons and patching tears, then making her own mask. She told them her plans for it, which sounded amazing.
It was easy to see that she had the soul of an artist. There was already a finished little book nook in a rarely used cabinet beneath the kitchen counter. It was a tiny little library, glued together carefully, with working lights and everything. It was pretty cool.
We didn’t know much about her history, but what she’d dropped in conversation told me she hadn’t had a great upbringing. If she’d been given the same opportunities as us, would she be where we were now?
Rich-person guilt was such a fucking cop-out. All I could do was insist we kept the ticket prices to our concerts affordable for everyone, and give the woman in front of me a chance to do whatever it was she wanted.
“Sounds like it’s going to be beautiful, Lottie. I can’t wait to see you in it and nothing else,” Knight purred, and her whole body flushed. Her lips parted as she leaned into the warmth of his body.
I was on my feet and had my arms wrapped around her waist. “Uh-uh, we called dibs. I have snacks and a laptop filled with three seasons of a glorious man encased in leather, with a big sword,” I told Knight, who just laughed at me, lifting his hands.
“Okay, okay. Man, you’re like a dog with a bone there, Poet. Or should I say, a dude with a boner.” He chuckled at his own joke, which was such a Knight thing to do.
Spinning Dreamer around, I hustled her toward the bedroom. Royal was in the shower, and I could feel the bus start to vibrate, telling me they were getting ready to roll out.
“Hero, grab the snacks! It’s party time.” Knight pouted, but I shook my head at him. Fuck off, I mouthed, and he laughed again. He made a rude gesture with his fingers, and I flipped him the bird in return. “Hero and I will wear our masks so you can watch,” I told Dreamer, as I led her to her room, grabbing my laptop from my bed on the way past.
She kept her space incredibly clean, her bed made, her clothes tucked into the drawers. Pulling my mask from my pocket, I slipped it on.
“Okay, you’re free to see,” I murmured to her, pushing down the residual guilt that she had to be sightless for most of our interactions. “I meant what I said earlier, though. We’re just having a chilled-out night—nothing more is expected from you, unless that’s what you want.” I winced, glad she couldn’t see my face. Man, there was no good way to say I wouldn’t be opposed to you riding my cock, but don’t want you to feel obligated, without it sounding like I didn’t want to fuck her at all.
She crawled up the bed toward the headboard, and my eyes snagged on that ass. That perfect, perfect ass. Man, I wanted to sink my teeth into it, leave my mark so anyone else who saw it would know she was claimed.
Hero pushed into the room, and I took a moment to appreciate how damn hot he was. He’d lost his shirt at some point, and his tattoos were all on display. He collected them like someone might collect Boy Scout badges.
It was the thing that Knight and Hero really bonded over, a tattooed chronicle of their lives. Though stylistically different—Knight’s were a cohesive artwork, while Hero’s were a random quilt of neo-traditional tattoos—they each got one after significant life events. I could find my accident on both their bodies. Knight had a twisted wreckage of a crash. Hero had a small fine-line tattoo of the earth exploding.
I snuck a look at Dreamer and spotted her ogling Hero, like she wanted to write a thesis on the hard lines of his body. I mean, I got it. I looked at him like that too.
He gave me a cocky smirk, dumping all the snacks at the end of the bed. I streamed the show from my laptop to the TV on the wall, queueing up the first episode while we all got comfortable.
I pulled off my shirt and lay down beside her near the headboard, sitting up slightly so I didn’t choke to death on my Twizzlers. “Ready?”
She nodded, taking the cookie that Hero offered and snuggling further down into the bed. He climbed in on the other side of her, and I saw her muscles tense. Man, maybe this was a bad idea. We should have eased into this level of familiarity.
Hero just leaned back against the headboard, not touching her, seemingly completely unaware of her tension. I knew him better, though; he was letting her figure out her own level of comfort. If she asked him to move, he would.
Still, I watched her from the corner of my eye, just in case. Eventually, she relaxed as the extended opening sequence played. I slid further down the bed and wrapped her up in my arms, content to just hug her. She snuggled into my chest as an action sequence with a lot of grunting and more than a little decapitation flashed across the scene.
The airbrakes signaled we’d rolled out, and I settled in for a long couple of days on the road. We’d stop occasionally to eat and stretch our legs, and the driver had to have mandated breaks.
I fed her Twizzlers, and this close, I could see that her bottom teeth were slightly crooked, and that she had a slight scar below her bottom lip. I wondered what it was from, but didn’t want to ruin the moment by asking. You didn’t have to be an empath to know the story of her life had been fucked up.
I hoped this wasn’t just the newest chapter.
TWENTY-FOUR
HERO
Poet watched her with heart eyes. I wasn’t sure if he even realized how smitten he was, but when he fed her an entire Twizzler bite by bite, I resisted the urge to laugh. She’d been tense when we started the first episode, but now we were on episode three, and she’d relaxed into me. Her knees touched mine as she curled on her side, her head near my elbow. She looked more relaxed than I’d ever seen her, and I relished the moment.
This little bubble of peacefulness wasn’t something we found often.
I’d been getting tired of the road. We’d only been on it for a few weeks, but I felt like we were stuck in a loop of record, release, tour, repeat. It had been years since our first headline tour, and few more since we’d first started touring as support acts. Normally, I loved it. But lately, it felt stifling.
We’d needed something new, and in had flown a breath of fresh air in the shape of a battered girl with a proposition and a set of brass balls. I eyed the nearly completely faded bruise. When she put makeup on, you could hardly see it anymore. But I knew it had been there, and the anger that burned in my gut only intensified, the more I got to know her.
A hand reached up and touched my chest. I looked down at a frowning Charlotte. Are you okay? she mouthed at me, and I nodded.
I stroked her face, because I couldn’t help it. The soft curve of her cheek was made for cupping. “Just thinking.”
“About?” Her voice was still pitched low so we didn’t upset Poet, who was immersed in the story of the show now.
“The tour. The rockstar lifestyle. You know, the usual,” I teased, and she grinned back at me.
“Practically an everyday Joe,” she quipped back, her brow raised.
I ran my finger over her cheek, tracing the edges of the bruise. She watched me with eyes that were pale in the darkness. “Be honest. Are you really okay with this? With being here?”
She bit her lip, dragging it between her teeth. “I know I shouldn’t be. I know that I should be disgusted with myself, exchanging sex for money. But I think about what my life would be like if I hadn’t had this opportunity, and feel nothing but gratitude. Happiness.” She gave me a lopsided smile. “It’s not like it’s a hardship. You’re all pretty nice to look at.”
I made a small hum of agreement. You didn’t have to be bisexual to appreciate the guys. Poet was beautiful, his fine features making him look like a high-fashion model. Royal was fucking sex and sin rolled up in an asshole package, and any person, no matter their orientation, would be drawn to him. Especially on stage, where he was the embodiment of sensuality. The fucker. Knight was handsome in a devilish kind of way too; his personality was so big, you sometimes missed the fact he was classically attractive, in a very rock’n’roll way.
