WILDER: A Rockstar Romance (14 page)

Chapter 30

Scarlett

The year I turned fourteen, my mother stopped paying for my clothes.

"I'm not spending my hard earned money to have you looking like some kind of slob," she complained one morning as I came down the stairs, still bleary from sleep and dressed in my older brother Clark's sweatshirt. "If you want to dress like that, you can pay for clothes yourself."

I was fourteen, with no money of my own, save for the few babysitting jobs I could pick up within walking distance of Wallace Street. I didn't have enough money to shop at the malls or the trendy shops along Elmwood.

So I started visiting thrift stores. But what started as necessity became an obsession. 

Thrifting allowed me to create characters. I would walk the length of the racks, touching each piece and letting it speak to me. This fuzzy sweater was clearly the favorite cozy comfort of a sad divorcee curled up with her cats. These bell bottoms were the last thing an aging hippie got rid of as he climbed the corporate ladder. This poly-blend pantsuit was the outfit a new mother wore to her first interview as she tried to dip her toe back into the working world.

I wanted to buy them all. Every time I saw a thrift store, I had to go in and check them out. It was my one addiction.

I was so excited, it barely registered that Keir kissed me in front of the whole band. Only after I put my hand on the door handle did it hit me what he had done.

He'd claimed me in front of everyone.

I pressed my fingers to my cheek, feeling the flush of warmth rise through my body.

Did I like that?

Yeah. Yeah, I liked that.

With a smile, I pushed my way into Secondhand Rose.

Secondhand Rose—why are they always called Secondhand Rose?
I wondered to myself. The inside smelled like they all did, like mothballs and disinfectant and occasional dirty feet. I made my way over to the women's section and started idly running my fingers over the hangers. When I was younger I searched through everything one by one, but years of practice had led me to a system that was now foolproof. I shopped by touch.

My fingers danced along the polyester blends and scratchy old mohairs until they came to rest on something that felt very familiar. I reached for the hanger and pulled out a navy plaid skirt.

A navy plaid schoolgirl's skirt. A navy plaid Catholic schoolgirl uniform nearly identical to the skirts we wore at Star of the Sea.

As I stared at the skirt, a whisper of a plan glimmered in my brain. Rushing over to the dressing room, I yanked it on over my pants. It was a little snug around the waist, but nothing that I couldn't handle.

Besides, if everything went according to plan, I wouldn't be wearing it for long.

I pressed my fingers to my cheek one more time before rushing to the counter to pay for my prize.

I waited at the entrance of the bus, steering clear of the glowering Steve, who was grumbling about traffic and schedules and douchebags as he puffed his cigarette like a steam engine.

Three minutes later, the door of the bar banged open and Ruthless tumbled out en masse. Even Pepper was laughing, though she seemed to realize it immediately and shut herself down with a snap.

Keir rushed ahead to me. "Did you have fun
shopping
?" he inquired sarcastically. His eyes were shining with drink, and he had that look in his eye.

The rest of the band caught up. I made sure everyone was looking, then wrapped my arms around his neck. "I did," I said, rising on tiptoe to kiss him in full view of everyone.

*****

It was dark in the conference room except for one spotlight on the raised dais. A single chair was placed there, just like I had requested at the concierge desk.

The heavy doors banged shut behind us. Keir raised his eyebrow but allowed me to lead him across the darkened floor.

"Sit there," I instructed.

He sat down and folded his hands on his lap, leaning forward on his elbows. "What's this?"

I grabbed the plastic bag from the thrift store and darted behind the partition. "You'll see."

At the thrift store, I had found a short-sleeved white blouse to go with it, the closest approximation I could get to my old uniform blouse. Quickly, I shimmied out of my jeans and yanked the skirt up to my waist.

Then I took a deep breath.

When I pulled him aside after the show and told him there was something I wanted him to see, he looked intrigued. And even though the rest of the band shouted at him for leaving the afterparty, he still followed me here, ready to see whatever it was I had planned for him.

I almost lost my nerve.

But when I stepped out wearing that little skirt and saw how his eyes went wide, I knew I had nothing to worry about.

"Scar?" he gasped. He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down. I shimmied closer to him, shaking the skirt, laughing. "Holy shit, that's... You look..."

He was looking at me with hunger in his eyes. I liked the way he was looking at me. I felt sexy. Powerful even.

I wanted to see just how much power I had.

"Okay, sit back," I ordered, smacking his hand away from touching me.

"What happened to my good little Catholic schoolgirl?" he asked, leaning in for a kiss.

"Catholic girls might start too late, but we catch up quickly," I told him, pressing my hand to his chest. Then I had a thought. "I actually didn't get that, you know."

He licked his lips and blinked, but his eyes were still slightly glazed. "What's that?" he said, tearing his eyes away from my breasts.

"A nice white dress and a party on my confirmation."

"Why's that?" He looked at me eagerly. "Talk to me. Tell me, Scar."

I closed my eyes. I didn't know why I brought that up. "Not much to tell," I said instead. "And it's certainly not a fun story."

In truth, my mother had been "mortified" that I had forgotten to wear a slip at my rehearsal at church the night before. She called everyone that night, canceling the confirmation party she had scheduled. I heard her on the phone telling every single one of my southern aunts and uncles not to waste their plane tickets on her "whore daughter."

"Let's not talk about it," I said instead.

For a second, I thought he might argue with me. I turned around, flipping that plaid skirt upward. "Should I take it off?"

He opened his mouth, then closed it, the eagerness in his eyes giving way to desire. "No," he growled. "Keep it on."

"Then sit." I planted my palms in the center of his chest and gave him a gentle shove. 

He leaned back in the chair and looked up at me. His tongue poked into the hollow of his cheek, and he gave me a Marlon Brando eye roll that nearly made me lose my cool.

But only for a second.

Stepping back from the chair, I turned on the balls of my feet and stalked over to the boom box the concierge had unearthed for me, swaying my hips, feeling the skirt swish against my thighs. My skin seemed superheated. I could feel his eyes boring into my back.

I pressed play.

As the tinkling piano started, Keir laughed out loud. "Are you serious?" he called.

I nodded, humming along, swaying to the intro. "Call me Virginia."

His grin faded. His lips parted, and he inhaled sharply.

I began to dance.

At first, I was self-conscious. I had to close my eyes and ignore the fact that he was watching me. Instead, I tried to remember that afternoon. The last time I had worn a skirt like this for him.

The first time.

The day I turned eighteen.

Girls at school whispered about it. The bad girls, the ones who rolled their eyes at the boredom of being a virgin. They all said it was nothing. But the good girls, the ones who had steady boyfriends and drove clean cars they got for their sixteenth birthdays, they all whispered that it would hurt. That it should hurt. That's how you'd know you weren't a slut.

When Keir laid me down on that loveseat in his garage, I waited for it to hurt. But I felt only ecstasy when he finally slipped inside of me. The way he called my name... I knew God himself had never been so worshiped.

I knew it was a sin, but how could something that felt so right be bad?

"Fuuuuck," Keir exhaled as I moved, dancing with my eyes closed. I unbuttoned the blouse one button at a time, tracing my finger down the space between my breasts, remembering how he had kissed a trail down, down, down, the fabric of the loveseat scratchy under my back. At first, I had been acutely aware of it, but as he kissed lower and lower, it fell away.

"Come here," he said from the chair. "Closer. Please." He was panting, almost pleading. I smiled and opened my eyes.

I loved this.

I had so much power right now.

Maybe I was a slut after all...

A slut for him.

"I took what you said to heart," I exhaled as I danced. "You were right back then. You and Billy. 'Only the good die young.'"

"I was only teasing you." I could hear the raggedness in his voice.

I grinned, licking my lips as I bent at the waist. "But you guys were right. Being a good girl? What did that get me?"

He was watching my breasts, his hands white-knuckled, gripping his thighs.  "I loved good-girl-Scarlett," he growled. I shimmied the skirt higher on my thighs. "But I think I love this bad girl even more." He reached out, grabbing the skirt in two fistfuls.

"Wait, I'm not done!"

"Yes, you are." He yanked my panties down with a savage jerk.

"But the skirt..."

"The skirt stays. "

Chapter 31

Keir

The skirt put up a valiant effort, but in the end, we left it discarded in a heap in that conference room with a giant tear down the back of it.

"I always wanted to tear that thing off of you," I whispered in Scarlett's ear as we rode the elevator back to my room.

"I always wanted to let you," she giggled, pulling my arm around her shoulders and snuggling close.

Any other guy would have left it at that. I wanted to fuck her, she wanted me to fuck her. Shouldn't that have been enough?

But I wasn’t any other guy, and her flippant little remark landed on me uneasily.

"What?" she asked, seeing my reflection in the mirrored walls. The door dinged open to the floor of rooms the band had rented out for the crew and us.

"Nothing," I said. And I really really wanted it to be.

I wanted it to be nothing as we showered together, smoothing the soap across naked, slippery skin. I kissed a trail down the center of her chest, licking the rivulet of water that pooled in the hollow of her throat. She turned me around, kneading her fingers into the tight places in my shoulders, and I tried, I fucking tried so hard to relax.

But I had to know something.

When we finally emerged, reddened and pruney, she wrapped herself in the white spa towel that hung on the door. She looked like a goddamned angel with her white robe and flushed cheeks and shining eyes

She cocked her head to the side. "Keir?" she asked. "You've been awfully quiet."

I tried a flippant grin. "That's because I was enjoying your sounds, baby."

"Smooth. But bullshit. What's wrong?"

I swallowed. How could I put it into words when I wasn't really even sure myself? Where the hell was Rane with his magical notebook of clarity?

"That was a pretty spectacular performance upstairs," I said instead.

She smiled and twisted her toes on the tile. "I'm not much of a dancer, I know."

"You're not a dancer, no. But you're a damn rock star." I flicked her wet hair behind her ear and kissed her, trying for the light, casual
ease
she wanted.

"Takes one to know one, I guess," she sighed, letting me kiss her cheek.  Then she looked at me with that calculating journalist look. "What’s the most rock 'n' roll thing you've ever done?"

"Are you asking me as Scarlett my interviewer or Scarlett my girlfriend?" I asked.

She bit her lip at the word "girlfriend," and suddenly I knew what it was that was bothering me.

"Let's say interviewer," she said.

That made it even more apparent.

I sighed and walked into the bedroom, shedding my towel and pulling on a pair of boxers. She was still keeping me at arm’s length. "Well, if this is an interview, then I'm dodging the question and telling you a story about someone else."

Her mouth twisted. "Okay."

"So, by rock 'n' roll thing, you mean idiotic thing, right?"

She perched on the edge of the bed, spine ramrod straight. She could sense my hostility but didn't know what it was about. "Exactly."

I thought for a moment. She'd be putting this down in her article. I had to be careful.

I hated having to be careful with her.

"Remember Justin Hale?"

"Vaguely."

"He's nobody now," I clarified. "One-hit wonder, lost all his money the second he earned it."

Her eyes lit up. "Was he the guy who pissed himself onstage at Coachella?"

I nodded. "The very same. He had that song with the sample from that Iggy Pop number. Ended up getting sued and having to give him all the royalties." I shook my head, remembering. "He was such a fucking idiot. Anyway, he invited us to his twenty-first birthday last year. Didn't even know him, but Rane was curious. Justin had this mansion up in the hills that he bought on credit, totally overextending himself at the very beginning, like most kids with a taste of fame do. When he couldn't find someone to sponsor it, he ended up financing the party too. Image and shit." I shook my head. "Anyway, he ended up getting so hammered he drove his vintage Rolls-Royce right into his swimming pool. Destroyed the thing and ended up hitting his tooth on the steering wheel and needing emergency dental surgery."

She reached over to the bedside table and scribbled something in her indecipherable shorthand.  "So glamorous."

I cleared my throat. "Glamour is just something the magazines made up to make their customers feel bad so they'd buy shit," I told her.  "The fabulous rock star life? It's just made up. We're still real people, with real day-to-day lives, making some good decisions and some really fucking bad ones. The world sees the highlight reel and thinks they know everything there is to know about a person. They don't know the whole story."

Scarlett's smile faded and she set her pen down. "What's your whole story, Keir?"

She was listening with her whole body, leaning forward.

I cleared my throat. "That this is just one chapter in the very long book of my life," I told her. Goddamn, her eyes contained the whole fucking universe. Why was I saying this?
We could just be having fun.
"There's still more that I want."

"What's that?"

"Kids," I said firmly. "A wife. A house I can putter around in. A dog that sleeps on my feet at night and a son I can teach guitar to."

I sat down next to her and debated taking her hand, but she was sitting as stiffly as if I'd slapped her. Were those tears? Why was she crying?

"Sorry," I murmured.  "You wanted to be wild, and I'm fucking trying, Scarlett. Yeah, I’ve got this really weird lifestyle going on right now, but it's not going to last forever, and I know that. I'm trying to just play with you like you wanted, fun and easy. Like we're teenagers again." I stood back up again. "The skirt, I get it. I get what you're trying to do, rewrite the past and all."

She was staring at me with those wondrous eyes, and I could feel every fiber in my heart straining against my chest, panicked, shouting, “
Shut up, shut the fuck up, you imbecile. You have her, you're ruining everything
.” But fuck, I needed to fix this hollow, hurting place that opened up inside of me the day I went looking for her and found she wasn't there.

"But our past is already written," I finally spat out. I was angrier than I wanted to be and I hated how she recoiled, but fuck... "It happened, and we can't ignore it and slap a glossy little Catholic schoolgirl striptease routine on top of it and pretend like that's what happened."

"I just wanted to have some fun," she choked.

"Fun?" I shouted. I couldn't hold back the incredulous laughter, even as she stared at me with narrowed eyes. "You put on this performance for me in a skirt
just like
the one you wore when we were kids, and I'm somehow not supposed to think about how it used to be with us?" I scoffed and shook my head. "How it ended so abruptly?" I stalked to the window, unable to take her eyes on me any longer, and waited, waited for the rage to pass. But it wouldn't. It grabbed me and whirled me around as I roared, "
I put a fucking ring on your finger, Scarlett!"
She backed up across the bed, terrified of me in this moment, and my heart was breaking all over again. "You made me promises," I shouted, stabbing my finger in the air, stabbing right in front of her chest. "And you were wearing a skirt just like that when you promised me!" My rage closed in red-hot fingers around my throat. "What were you thinking?" I demanded. "What the hell were you thinking when you showed it to me?"

"I just wanted to have some fun!" she repeated, seething.

"By dressing up like the old days?" Anger drained out of me, and I sagged onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. She pulled her knees up tight to her chest and hugged herself, and even in all of my anger I still wanted to comfort her, and I hated myself for that. "You pretend it's the past, but I can't ask about our past," I said softly.  "How is that fair?"

She swallowed. I watched her beautiful neck, her chin tucked down into the hollow of her throat as she hung her head. I waited, waited for her to open her mouth. She did, and then closed it, then shook her head and opened it again. A small, sad sound escaped her lips, then a little hitched breath.

Then nothing.

She wasn't going to tell me anything.

I stood up and went to the door. "I'm fucking exhausted, and we have a long haul ahead of us. Goodnight, Scarlett."