Rock the City: A Midnight Fate Novel (17 page)

“Long enough to wish I never drank any of that liquor.”

“Are you okay?”

She nods, looking away from me like she’s ashamed of how drunk she was when I found her. “I’m fine,” she says, barely above a whisper.

I couldn’t care less if she was on the damn roof standing on her head. All that mattered to me was that I was with her and she was okay. “Do you still want the cat?”

“Oh, shit, I didn’t.” She sits up, the sheet falling away from her chest. She doesn’t have a stitch of clothing on, and I can’t think of a better vision to wake up to than her naked body.

“You didn’t actually buy one, but you were trying pretty hard to make it happen.”

Lying back down, she closes her eyes and rests. “I can be such an idiot, but I guess we should talk.”

“Do you remember everything I said when I got here?”

Opening her eyes, she smiles a little when she says, “She’s your sister. That’s the only part I really needed to remember.”

When the urge to touch her becomes too strong, I find her smooth skin under the blankets and pull her closer. Her back arches when my fingers traces down it and over the curve of her ass until I have a handful of it. “I don’t ever want you to think I don’t want you, Noelle. You’re everything to me. Nobody can come close to what you make me feel when I’m with you—and even when I’m not.”

She grinds her hips against my leg, creating the friction she needs. Her hand snakes around her back, latching on to my fingers still holding her ass. I let go of her, linking my fingers with hers. With emotion clogging her throat, she says, “I don’t need you to hold my hand, Lane.”

“What
do
you need? I’ll give you anything you want, Noelle.”

“I need you to hold my heart.” She pauses as she bites her lip to keep from crying. “Because when I thought you were gone, I forgot what it was like to smile for no reason.”

Her words rip me to shreds as a tear leaks from the corner of her eye. “I’m never leaving you, baby. God, I fucking promise you I’m not going anywhere.”

“I want to believe you, because I’d rather go to Hell and back with you than be safe and warm all by myself. I didn’t know what to do without you, Lane. I can’t even remember when I stopped being me and became us.”

There’s still so much I have to tell her, things that will probably take days for me to put into words, but without a shadow of a doubt, I want to tell her my whole story. No more hiding from the one person who is capable of loving me unconditionally.

“Every piece of me is devoted to your happiness, baby.”

She nods, letting my words soak in and heal the pieces I shattered last night when I left with Lemon. “My sister’s going to love you, too. You’ll see.”

“Can I meet her? I need to put a face with the name, so it’s real.”

“I’m not lying to you.”

“I didn’t say you were. I just need this more than I realized.”

Rolling on my side, I grab her by the hips and pull her on top of me. She sits up so she’s straddling me, looking down with her hair tucked behind her ears. Her warmth against my skin ignites my dick, and I have to do everything I can to keep this from going someplace sexual. I plan to fuck her senseless, but not until I tell her about why I had to leave last night.

“Do you want me to put clothes on?”

I stare at her, thinking about how I should answer this question when my mind is at war with my body.

“Let me rephrase that,” she says knowingly. “Do you
need
me to put clothes on?”

“Yeah, I think I do, but I don’t want to let you go long enough for you to do it.”

She smiles, shyly—something you don’t often see from Noelle. Her confidence is usually overflowing, but I have a feeling our dynamic’s already changed a little bit. It’s not fair for me assume she’ll understand or even care to deal with my past, but I think it’s time I gave her the option. Especially if I expect her to be by my side through it all.

Before she moves off me, she leans down and brings her lips to mine. Working her tongue against mine, she deepens the kiss until she’s flat on her back beneath me.

“I’ll tell you everything, but here’s how it’s going to go. We’re going to get out of this bed and go back to New York. I’ll tell you as much as I can in the car and when we get back, you’ll meet Lemon. Any questions you have left, I’ll answer in bed tonight.”

“Why do I feel like there’s something you’re not saying?”

I flip her over and pull on her hips until her ass is in the air in front of my face. “Because what I have to say doesn’t need any words.”

She groans as I dive into her pussy from behind, licking and sucking on her clit until her face is pressed against the mattress and she’s clutching fistfuls of the pillow in her hands.

“Shit, Lane. Where did this come from?”

“It came from me wanting you so much I can’t stand it. It came from me needing you to know how much I love you—and how much I cherish this body. I’ll never take what you give me for granted.”

She nods, practically panting as she says, “Less talking. More doing.” After that, she starts to say something else before my mouth silences her again, our bodies continuing the conversation instead.

When I add two fingers, her legs give out and she falls to the bed, sprawled out with shaky legs. She’s so wet I could slide right into her, but this isn’t about me—it’s about her.

With my mouth on her, my fingers inside her, and my thumb pressed against her clit, giving her just the right amount of pressure, she comes undone, screaming my name over and over until there’s nothing left for her to give.

Completely spent, she rolls onto her back and looks up at me. “That was your best yet.”

I think she expects me to pull off my boxer briefs and finish myself inside her, but I surprise her again when I pinch her nipples and kiss her neck, saying, “I need a quick shower before we go.”

“What?” she questions, as she wraps her legs around my back. Her small hand reaches for my dick and grabs hold it of tightly. “Don’t you want to?”

“I always want to, Noelle. I just don’t need to.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Entirely different. Now, get dressed before I bite your ass again.”

She sits up, her mouth hanging open in shock. “You have a twin, don’t you? There’s more to this story. Because the guy I know would be inside me right now.”

Smiling, I can’t help but laugh. Who would have thought showing a little restraint would be so foreign to her? “I’m not hiding a brother. Lemon’s the only sibling I have.”

“But if you had a twin, I’d have a better chance of that threesome.”

“Fuck, Noelle. I wouldn’t screw my brother.”

“Obviously. But I would.”

“You’re so twisted sometimes, woman. I’ll be in the shower.”

Noelle’s been quiet so far, the drive moving faster than it did on the way here when I thought the world as I knew it was over. But now that she’s expecting me to open up, I can feel the seconds passing by, and all the minutes we could be talking getting away from me.

Where do I begin when I have a lifetime of baggage?

After two more songs on the radio, I clear my throat and glance at her. She makes eye contact with me, and for the first time since I met her, it’s uncomfortable. I would do just about anything to forget about all the skeletons trying to climb their way out of my closet. It’s not that I’m hiding from her; it’s that I don’t want her to think differently of me because of what I’ve been through.

I don’t need sympathy or pity. All I need is her. She’s what makes me happier when the memories come back so strongly I have to fight through the day.

“Do you want some road head or something?” she asks me with a straight face, mostly because she’s probably not kidding. If that’s what it took to get me to smile, she’d do it.

As tempting as the offer is, she gives me what I need without realizing it—confidence that this girl isn’t going to run from me again. She wants to hear my story no matter how long it takes and how awkward I make it. “How many times have you done that before?”

“You’d be my first,” she says, proudly.

“Nice.”

“Nice? Come on, Lane. I can’t stand when you get quiet.”

Even though my head was anything but silent as I pictured her bobbing up and down on my cock, I can see how I’m driving her crazy. I can hardly stand myself right now, but this is the first time I’ve had to put all my cards on the table and hope the girl I’m in love with accepts them. This is the first time I’ve been all in. That’s why I take a couple more minutes to stall, still trying to come up with the perfect words to lead her into my darkness and down a path you can never escape from once you’ve experienced it. “I can’t believe it only took two days for me to fuck us up.”

She rests her head against the back of the and pinches the bridge of her nose. “You didn’t mess anything up. I’m going back to New York with you, aren’t I?”

“You are.”

“Then talk to me, Lane. I want to be in your world with you—good or bad.”

“It’s hard for me to talk about when it’s not my story.”

“Tell me why you don’t ever see Lemon. Or why you never mentioned her to me before. She can keep her truths and all her secrets. I don’t need
them
to understand
you
.”

Her words mean more to me than she’ll ever understand. It’s why my shoulders finally fall and I can take one hand off the wheel without feeling like I’ll crash the car if I do. Flexing my fingers, my knuckles are so tight it takes a couple seconds for the blood to flow back through them. “Until last night, it’s been ten years since I’ve seen Lemon.”

“That’s a long time. You must have missed her.”

“The night I left her, she had just turned eighteen and since she wasn’t a minor anymore, I had no hold over her. It was the first birthday she had that I felt relieved she was turning another year older.”

“Were you her guardian?”

“Not officially, but nobody ever checked on my uncle because we still had a father—even if we never saw him.”

“Jesus,” she whispers. “What made you leave?”

“Easton and Dom were on my ass to try to get our demo together so we could find someone to back us. We’d been playing the bar scene and doing well, and they felt we should try to strike while the iron was hot. That meant I had to leave my sister if I wanted to chase the Midnight Fate dream.”

Reading me like she’s always been able to, she says, “And you felt like shit about it.”

“That’s putting it mildly, but yeah. Lemon knew it was coming, and I think she encouraged me to go for it because she didn’t want to be a burden. So before I changed my mind, I made sure she had enough money to get through a couple weeks before she got her first paycheck at the diner. After that, I packed my shit and took off. It sounds so reckless looking back on it. I mean, for fuck’s sake, she was barely eighteen and I left her. I was all she had.”

“She couldn’t stay dependent on you forever, Lane. You wouldn’t have been happy and she never would have grown up.”

“I would have gone back to get her if Midnight Fate had tanked.”

“But you succeeded, and now you feel guilty that you did and she didn’t.”

“I tried to find her, Noelle. Fuck, did I try, but she didn’t want to be found. No matter who I asked or where I looked, everyone said the same thing—they hadn’t seen her.”