Selfie (40 page)

“Anything but Brussels sprouts. Those things make my pee smell weird.”

I looked over my shoulder and grinned at him. “And they make your cum taste like beer,” I told him seriously.

He laughed and kissed me, then reached out and closed the blinds. He didn’t have to. It was all on the island now.

Jilly showed up after dinner with a bottle of wine, and we sat in the living room and talked. Noah passed on the wine, went for a beer instead, and I noticed Jilly had stocked the fridge with his favorite.

I thanked her for it, and she shook her head.

“No, hon—that was all Viv. I put her in charge of taking care of you guys, and she’s insanely good with details. I’m trying to poach her to stay down here and intern—I’d pay her but—”

“School!” Noah interjected, concerned.

“They have schools down here too,” she said dryly. “Maybe you’ve heard of them? And I’d give her free room and board—and she’s a natural. I’m telling you, Noah. The whole reason she hasn’t moved in here with you guys is that she’s interested in what I’m offering her on my end of town, so don’t go all big brother on her.”

Noah looked at me, clearly unhappy. “This is not a good place,” he said grimly.

Jilly’s expression softened. “It’s not if you’re young, unconnected, and working your way up from the bottom,” she agreed. “But she’s young,
very
connected, and working her way from the upper middle.” She swallowed. “I promise, hon. My kids may both have that fresh-out-of-rehab smell, but they’re living in the condo down the block so they won’t have too much a place in her life, if that’s what you’re worried about—”

Noah wrinkled his nose. “Jilly, if you think we don’t have drugs in Seattle, you are sadly mistaken. It’s just . . .” His eyes begged me for help.

“Broken heart,” I told her. “He’s worried about her broken heart. Her boyfriend just broke up with her because he thought she was destined for bigger, better things, you know?”

Jilly cocked her head at both of us. “Well, guys. Maybe her boyfriend was right, ya think?”

Noah glared from her to me, shook his head, and growled. “I don’t like this logic. I think this is a
flawed system
.”

“You were fine with it when it applied to Viv and Cheddar,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, but then you tried to apply it to us, and I was not a fan,” he grumbled.

I kicked him gently and smiled. “Well, it just means the two of you are too much awesome for the average guy.”

Noah scowled at me. “You are a
movie star
.”

I glanced away. “Yeah. Well, I’m sort of a
media
star at this point. Movie stars are a whole other—”

“Argh!”

Jilly laughed, and I smiled at her gratefully. This discussion depressed me—and I wasn’t sure if there was any room on the island for this one. It seemed to be a fact of life that wouldn’t swim.

“You two will find a solution,” she said, patting my leg. “I’m sure of it. You’ve got your shtick planned about him for the presses, right?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “He’s a friend. I mean, I don’t have anyone else in my entourage, so ‘driver and friend’ is pretty innocuous, right?”

She shrugged and cast a doubtful look at Noah. He returned it blandly.

“O-
kay
,” she murmured, like there was something I wasn’t getting. “Now, are you ready for the premiere?”

“Red carpet at three, interviews until five, movie at five thirty, post chat at eight, take the car to the after-party, drag Noah around like a woobie for half an hour, back here by eleven so we can be fresh and minty in time to leave in the morning.” I recited the agenda dryly, because Jilly had drilled it into my head.

I’d finished the shoot fifteen months ago—it had been nine months in postproduction and five months looking for the “perfect” release date. Honestly? Like the public, the delay didn’t inspire me with confidence. In any other year I would have shot two movies in the interim, but not this one. I felt that year of dormancy keenly—one of the things you have going for you when you’re nervous about a project coming out is the deep and abiding surety that whatever project you
just
completed is a thousand times better.

Right now,
Wolf’s Landing
was holding all of my ego eggs, and I was almost psychotically afraid of the Comic-Con appearances, lest they disturb my fragile little basket.

“Good job.” Jilly downed the last of her wine. One glass apiece for us—there would be no long talks tonight. “You’re going to do fine.”

“Of course!” I smiled brightly. “Now, tell me who you’ve signed in the last year to replace me.”

“Nobody could replace you,” she lied.

I’m saying.

“But I
did
just sign this eighteen-year-old for a vampire movie who’s got a chest that would make you weep with desire.”

“I bet
he
doesn’t have to wax,” I muttered. I’d needed to turn to the on-set stylists for my
Vogue
shoot, and my chest still stung when I thought about it.

“You can stop anytime,” she said, and Noah’s warm hand on the back of my neck told me she wasn’t bullshitting.

You’d look like a blond chia pet.

The conversation tumbled along for another hour and we hugged her good-bye in the driveway.

She said something quiet to Noah as he was bending down, and he straightened a little and nodded. He said something back, both of them speaking just low enough that we’d have to engage in ménage a trois if I were to have any hope of hearing what it was.

They broke up, and she drove away, passing a car that added itself to the line of them in Vinnie’s driveway.

“Huh,” I said.

Noah shrugged. “Family reunion? Party? Who owns the place now?”

“His family,” I said, gazing at all the lights mournfully. Yeah, sure, it had only been a few days a year for a couple of years running, but still . . .

You know what it is.

I . . . What day is it?

You know what day, Con.

I can’t.

He slung his arm over my shoulders and steered me inside. “You want to go look at the computer and see what new lawn ornament we can order for Gran?” he asked kindly.

“I thought we were going to have sex,” I said, feeling surprisingly innocent. “The kind where you tie my wrists and make me call you ‘sir.’”

He rumble-growled. “That too. But we can still go shopping.”

I thought about it, about the many, many possibilities for whimsical, darling little objets d’art. And then I remembered that Noah’s father had needed to bring us to the airport in his pickup truck because Noah was getting the town car repaired on his own dime.

“Has your dad been able to gravel the road yet?” I asked, figuring Noah probably texted his family ten times a day and he’d know.

“Not yet,” he sighed.

“Then let’s do that. Nobody has to tell him where the gravel comes from—we’ll just put in the work order and let it happen.”

Noah stopped still, hand on the doorknob as he was about to usher me into my own house. “You’d do that?”

“Yeah, why not? I mean . . . you know. I haven’t really spent my money on anything this year. That’s not a big deal.”

“It is to the people in Bluewater Bay!” Noah said, like I wasn’t seeing something.

“Noah, man, don’t be weird about it. It’s not a thing.”

Fifteen minutes later as I sat at my desk and finalized the work order on the laptop, he was still looking over my shoulder and being weird.

“You do not even—”

I stopped him with a kiss. “What is the big deal?” I asked when I pulled back. “Is there some sort of pride thing? Have I offended either one of your ancestral cultures? Is there a non-Californian tax I haven’t heard of? It’s a need, and I can do something. What’s the deal?”

“I don’t know. I mean, it’s a nice thing. You just do random nice things for people that—”

“Who else am I going to do them for?” I asked, feeling the hurt here keenly. “Jilly has pretty much everything she wants, the only thing my family ever wanted from me was money, and Vinnie’s dead.”

“Oh God!” Noah sounded horrified. “You’re not still paying them off, are you?”

“No.” It had been one of the first things Jilly had done after that vlog interview—told my parents they could say anything they wanted to the press, it was all out now. I was just holding my breath for the story of the basketball game facial to hit the news, but hopefully they had more dignity than that. “But you’re missing the point. All of the ‘friends’ we had before he died weren’t close enough to trust with the big fucking secret, so they just think I’m a reclusive hosebag, and who else am I going to do nice things for—”

His mouth on mine was firm and no-bullshit. He pulled back and stroked my cheek with his thumb.

“You want to do something nice for
me
?” he asked, his voice authoritative and playful. “Because I can think of some
really
nice things you can do for me that aren’t going to cost you more than a bottle of lube.”

I closed my eyes, suddenly desperate to be taken some place where my body awaited Noah’s pleasure and pain, and nothing else mattered.

“Would you like me to strip naked, sir?”

“Yeah, boy. I’d like that very, very much.”

He grasped me under the chin and put just enough pressure to tell me to stand. He searched my face, and I looked back, pathetically grateful to have him in charge, to have that implicit promise that whatever he told me to do, whatever I begged him to do in bed, he was going to make me feel something in the here and now, in the moment, something perfect that wouldn’t let me lose any more of myself than I’d already let drift away.

Whatever he saw, though, it tilted the corners of his eyes down, and he pinched my earlobe roughly between his fingers.

I whimpered and gasped, going hard with just the bite of pain.

“I think,” he said softly, “tonight we’re going to need to get a little rough.”

He left paddle marks on my ass.

Paddle marks on your ass.

And I begged him. I begged him to do it.

Every smack, every crack of his hand, every thrust of his cock inside of me was here and now and
real
. There was no island in the land of Noah taking over my body. There was no island in the land of Noah fucking me until I screamed.

And I did scream. I screamed until he gagged me with the scarf he’d used to tie my hands, and when I whimpered, unbound and ungrounded, he’d pulled out the silly padded handcuffs instead.

I relaxed into their grip like they were Valium, and proceeded to beg like a pain slut, because damn it, I wanted some fucking
pain
.

This night, the night before I went back in front of Hollywood and put on a happy face, like someone who had no more secrets to tell, Noah didn’t try to tell me what I needed, or teach me any lessons, or probe too deeply into where I went when my mind and body weren’t possessed by his mouth and his hands and his cock.

He just smacked my ass until I screamed, and fucked me until I came.

When it was over, I lay floating while he took care of me. I could barely remember to roll out of the puddle of my own cum, but he helped me anyway and washed me, then wiped down the comforter and slid me between the sheets.

When he came back, his breathing sounded congested, and I pulled myself out of lethargy to tug on his shoulder and invade his space. “Noah?”

He didn’t answer, but he rolled into me and wrapped his arms around my shoulders so tightly, breathing became optional.

“What’s wrong?” I managed to ask.

“Con, I hope you find yourself here,” he said after a moment. “Because you are losing more and more of yourself as the days go by. And I’m just . . . just watching you go.”

“No,” I told him, lucid and honest in subspace as I was not ordinarily. “You don’t understand. You’re my only reason to stay. Don’t let go of me now, okay? You’re what’s holding me here.”

“You’ve got to help me,” he said wearily. “You’ve got to help me, Con. I can’t do this alone—you have to want to stay.”

“I do,” I told him perplexed. “If only the house wasn’t brown.”