Dirty Like Brody: A Dirty Rockstar Romance (Dirty, Book 2) Read online

  She was right there, in the same city as me, right on the street across from me, and we weren’t even talking.

  I was nowhere near the neighborhood and just thought I’d swing by to stare at you and not say a damn thing. Cool?

  I didn’t stop. I kept right on driving. I drove to Jesse’s house and headed for the gym. I didn’t even have workout clothes with me. I just took off my shirt and started punching things.

  At least I was working out like a fiend. If I could remember to eat once in a while, if I could get some sleep, I’d probably be feeling pretty damn good. Physically, at least.

  As it was, I was just trying to beat the shit out of myself and in the process pummel the anger and frustration and impotence away, the powerlessness that overtook me whenever I got in the same room with Jessa. Whenever I was reminded of how she’d crushed me, all those years ago… over and over again. And the memories… all the fucking memories that were coming back to bite me completely in the ass.

  Because in every single one of them, I’d fucked up.

  At least maybe I’d eventually exhaust myself so I could sleep.

  I caught Jesse’s eyes on me again, and Jude’s. They weren’t even lifting anymore. Just watching me, and once in a while throwing each other a look, doing that annoying best-friends-forever mind-reading shit they did.

  What the fuck was I doing here?

  “Heading home,” I said abruptly, yanking my shirt over my sweaty torso and heading for the door.

  “Shit, Bro, you can take a shower if—”

  I slammed the door behind me before I could hear the end of that sentence. What the fuck did I have to say to anyone anyway? I couldn’t be around people like this.

  I couldn’t even stand myself.

  At least tomorrow I was getting the fuck out of town.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Brody

  That night, I lay in bed awake for hours. Again.

  I kept thinking through the last night Jessa spent in my bed. And the next day, when I told her I loved her.

  And all the things I could’ve—should’ve—done differently.

  I stared at the tattoo on my forearm. The runes that spelled out abstinence. And that joke ran through my mind, the one that sometimes did when I looked at that tattoo.

  Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.

  I’d had that tattoo marked on me like a brand at twenty-five, angry and righteous, like I could make her feel the pain of the needle etching the ink into my skin across the miles. A reminder to myself, that I’d see every fucking day; every day that I abstained from Jessa. From calling her, from messaging her, from thinking about her. From loving her.

  And every day that I’d failed miserably at all of it. Because I would never stop loving her.

  It was fucking chemically impossible.

  I could pretend I didn’t, but it was a fucking lie. I was drawn to that woman like a magnet. I always had been.

  She was drawn to me, too. I knew she was.

  We’d smashed together enough times, whether we liked it or not, that even as stubborn as she was, she couldn’t deny it.

  And every time we smashed together, I came away more damaged and disoriented, wondering why the fuck my world made just that little bit less sense.

  Yeah. My world, without Jessa Mayes in it, was fucking nonsense. A total fucking sham I’d been working my ass off to make heads or tails of for years.

  You might think, over time, that would get easier to do.

  Time heals all wounds, and all that shit.

  Wrong.

  Time did not heal wounds. I was now thirty years old and I’d been aching for Jessa Mayes since we were kids. By the time I was twenty-one, she’d broken my heart. When I was twenty-four, she ripped it right the fuck out.

  And what did I do?

  I slapped a dirty bandage over that shit and left it to rot.

  There were people crowded into every square inch of my house. The music was pumping, drinks were flowing, the sweet, slightly skunky smell of good pot clung in the air, and I really should’ve been fucking ecstatic. Dirty’s debut album, Love Struck, had just dropped, and it was shooting up the charts with a fucking bullet. We felt poised to take over the world.

  Yeah; I should’ve been over-fucking-joyed.

  Instead, to distract myself from the fact that it was the night of Jessa’s high school graduation—which meant she was going to her grad party with a bunch of horny teenage assholes—I threw a party for the band at my new house.

  My father had died last year, leaving me a larger inheritance than I’d expected, since when he was alive he never gave me shit. So I’d taken his money, invested some in stocks, invested some in the band, and invested the rest in a piece of real estate up the side of the mountain in North Vancouver, overlooking the city. A piece of real estate with a big-ass house on it; a house that my father would hate, especially if he saw the three-car garage where I stored my bikes, the music room filled with band equipment, and the party room filled with beer kegs.

  Since my house was bigger than anyone else’s at the time, it quickly became the party house. This was the biggest party I’d thrown yet—but then again, we had the most cause to celebrate—and all the usual suspects were there.

  At least, most of the usual suspects.

  Jessa was at a high school dance, probably getting groped. Or giving it up to some jock in the back of a car. Because that’s what hot girls did when they graduated from high school, right?

  Seth was God-knew-the-fuck-where, but that was nothing knew. More and more, he’d been ghosting in and out, partying with a different crowd. As our newest member, he hadn’t become quite as invested as the rest of the band, who were pretty much one big, happy, but slightly dysfunctional family—just the way we liked it.

  Around one a.m., Jessa rolled in, alone.

  Impossible to miss her, as usual, but especially so because the boys went up in a fit of chest-puffing pride for their number one girl when she appeared, wearing a silky little charcoal-gray top and black sequined tights with sparkly silver Chucks, a limp white corsage on her wrist, and looking kind of dazed, her eyes glassy from a night of whatever debauchery she’d been up to.

  The guys flocked to wrap her up in a whirlwind of hugs, then Jude tossed her up on his shoulders and paraded her through the house, passing her off to Zane and Dylan to do the same. Eventually Dylan deposited her in front of me.

  She stood there looking awkward as I looked her over.

  “Hey, Brody.”

  “That what you wore to your grad?”

  Her pretty mouth twitched downward at the corners. “What was I supposed to wear? Some fancy dress?”

  I didn’t give one fuck what she wore. What I gave a fuck about was why one of the skinny straps of her shirt was broken; she’d tied it in a knot to keep the whole thing from falling off.

  “Oh, I dunno. How was your date?” I pretty much spat the word at her. Yeah; definitely knew I sounded like a crazy jealous freak. So be it. “You get laid?”

  She cringed. “Don’t be gross.”

  “Isn’t that what high school kids do on their grad night?”

  “You’re drunk.” She eyed the bottle of Canadian Club in my hand. “Just leave it alone, okay?”

  I didn’t leave it alone. I was drunk.

  I didn’t normally drink much at band parties since I’d taken it upon myself, early on, to be the businessman of the group. The level-headed one, the man behind the band; the one who kept everyone else’s shit together. But that night was not a normal night, and I was drunker than I’d been in years. I was sloppy, messy, stupid drunk.

  “I mean, I wouldn’t know,” I went on. “Never went to my grad. You’ll have to correct me if I’m wrong.”

  “I didn’t go with a date,” she said, hugging herself. “You have a good night? You get laid?”

  “Not yet.” I took a swig from the bottle of rye, staring her down. “Who gave you that ugly fucking corsage?”<
br />
  “My brother did!”

  “Yeah? He rip your shirt getting at your tits too?”

  She turned on her heel and disappeared into the crowd, and I let her go. I had nothing else to say to her anyway.

  Jessa Mayes could go fuck every horny little prick in that high school for all I cared, and she could go fuck herself while she was at it.

  I didn’t even keep tabs on her for the rest of the night like I usually would. At least, after a while, I stopped. The last I saw her she was in the kitchen, doing shots with Jesse and Zane—a totally fucking rare sight, but maybe they were finally starting to accept the fact that she was a woman and not a little girl anymore. Though I could understand it was difficult to swallow that point when she acted like such a goddamn spoiled brat all the time.

  God, I fucking missed her.

  I missed hanging out with her, just getting up to shit. She used to be so fucking fun. And she used to like hanging out with me. Long ago, before we’d had that first kiss under the tree out at that party, and for a while afterward… we were friends. And she used to flirt with me like crazy.

  And I fucking ate that shit up.

  At first, I’d thought the way she went out of her way to touch me all the time was to irritate her brother. The two of them were always bickering and battling for control, Jesse still fighting the fact that she was growing up and getting a mind of her own, that she wasn’t always gonna be that little girl who’d followed him around and did exactly what he said. And him seeing her sitting next to me, her leg draped across my lap or her arm slung around my neck, whispering in my ear, was sure to get her unceremoniously thrown out of whatever room we were in.

  How long had it been since she’d done that shit?

  Since Seth.

  Or maybe earlier than that; maybe since her mom died, and she seemed to lose her sense of humor.

  Somewhere near three a.m. and the bottom of my bottle, I decided I should find her to apologize.

  Christy had left a while ago because she had to work in the morning. I was mildly disappointed I wouldn’t get to fuck her while I was thinking about Jessa, which was also a relief, because even I knew the frequency with which I was doing that was getting really fucked up.

  Christy and I had become official about half a year ago—when I’d told myself to stop waiting for Jessa. Which was right around the time I’d pretty much stopped talking to her.

  But not talking to her didn’t mean I didn’t think about her, all the fucking time.

  When I’d hooked back up with Christy, it had been over a year since Jessa’s mom had died and shit had fallen apart for her; I knew it had. I’d tried to be there for her and somehow give her the space she needed. She’d turned sixteen before her mom died, and that year I’d given her to decide she was ready to be with me? It had run way the fuck out.

  But I wasn’t gonna pressure her to hook up with me; not in the midst of what she was going through.

  For a while, I’d lost track of her. She was modeling a lot, she was in school, she had more friends her own age. I was busy managing the band and she was spending more time alone, writing.

  And then suddenly all the evidence started adding up to the fact that she was spending more time with Dirty’s new rhythm guitarist and co-songwriter than she was with me.

  I never saw that shit coming.

  But I saw it happening right in front of me like a slow, slow, slow-fucking-motion train wreck with the force of a locomotive that I could not stop.

  Since then, everything had been messed up and fucking inside out.

  I searched for her all over the house, in a bit of a frenzy… pretty much resigning myself to the fact that I was a total piece of shit because she’d left the party and I hadn’t gotten my drunken shit together to apologize for being an asshole—when I stumbled out the back door and right into her.

  She was on her way inside and we got kind of tangled up, mostly because I was drunk and she was trying to keep me from falling on my face, and I was holding on to her, not because I didn’t want to fall on my face but because I didn’t want her to leave. I was just so fucking relieved she was still there.

  “Jessa,” I said, my voice all slurry and pathetic, “you’re here.”

  “Dance with me,” she said. She was still holding onto me. I was holding onto her.

  Then she burrowed her face in my shirt.

  The Black Keys were playing on the sound system in the party room, the music pouring out the windows into the dark around us, but I just stood there like an idiot, wavering and drunk. “What?”

  “It’s my grad night,” she said. She peered up at me, her face still buried in my shirt. “I should get to dance.”

  “You didn’t get to dance?”

  She started to pull away. “Can you for once just not turn this into an argument, and dance with me?”

  I pulled her to me before she could get away, and I danced with her, really fucking slowly. We were barely moving at all, just sort of swaying to the music a bit and holding onto each other. Mostly because if I did anything more I might lose my balance and take her down with me.

  I just held her tight and nuzzled my face into her hair, smelling her.

  Jessa.

  This was happening?

  Why was this happening?

  Why didn’t she get to dance?

  As her heart beat against me, her breaths warming my chest through my shirt, her hands clasped tight around the back of my neck, all I could really feel in my sorry-ass state was jealousy.

  Blistering, fucking festering jealousy.

  Because I could see Seth through the windows into the party room.

  He’d turned up about an hour ago. Looked like he’d been having a rough night, but I knew for fucking sure he’d never gone near Jessa, because I’d kept an eye on him since he arrived. More and more I’d had an eye on Seth, for various reasons; some to do with drugs, and even more to do with Jessa.

  She never said she was dating him, or dating anyone. And not like I expected her to. Jesse probably would’ve had a shit fit if she started openly dating Seth Brothers. For one thing, he was three years older than her, which was three years too many in Jesse’s books. For another, Seth liked his drugs—pretty much more than he liked anything else. But the girl had definitely learned over the last few years how to keep her brother off the “people in the know” list. If she was partying, drinking, or smoking up, chances were, Jesse was blissfully ignorant about it. I didn’t much care about that—until it seemed that I, too, was getting excluded from her go-to list.

  Seth clearly wasn’t.

  Why she’d decided to let him, of all people, into her very secretive—and apparently, exclusive—inner circle was beyond me. Why she was hanging out with him so much, or dating him, or screwing him, or whatever the fuck she was doing, was totally fucking beyond me.

  I liked Seth. Everyone did.

  I did not like him with Jessa.

  But how could I begrudge her the one thing she had in her life that seemed to be giving her some kind of comfort? Comfort that, apparently, I’d totally fucking failed to provide?

  Because Jessa sure as shit didn’t come to me when she needed something anymore. She’d stopped coming to me around the time Seth came on the scene, and I wasn’t fucking stupid. But no matter how I tried to wrap my head around it, I couldn’t allow myself to believe that Jessa was giving it up to Seth.

  Not her.

  Jessa Mayes was, and would always be, in my mind—until the day I had sex with her—a virgin. How could she possibly be anything else?

  I couldn’t stand it.

  And yeah, that was my bullshit male pride talking. Because I couldn’t fucking stand that Seth, or anyone else, had gotten a taste of her first.

  No. More bullshit.

  I couldn’t stand that he’d gotten a taste of her at all.

  And according to one incredibly ill-advised comment he’d dropped in my face when I’d confronted him on the subject late las
t year, he had.

  Which was how he’d ended up with a fractured eye socket and a chipped tooth, and I’d stopped talking to him for all of December. But that was a short-sighted plan since he was not only my friend but my client, and “Dirty forever” and all that shit.

  So instead, I stopped talking to Jessa.

  I told myself I’d let her choose.

  Three long years ago, I told her I’d wait for her, and if she wanted me, I told myself she’d come.

  I’d told her I’d wait a year, but I was still fucking waiting.

  And it was eating me up, bit by bloody bit.

  The next morning, I’d parked my truck on the street in front of Dolly’s house, where Jessa had lived since her mom died. It was raining and gray, and I was hungover as fuck.

  Jessa sat silently in the passenger seat, slowly taking off her seatbelt. She was wearing my Led Zeppelin T-shirt and her sequined tights. Last night, after we’d danced together in the dark, she’d slept in my bed, fully dressed. And even though she’d slept in my bed, holding me through the night, I couldn’t say that was a good thing.

  It wasn’t the first time it’d happened, either. But it’d been a long, long time.

  Mostly I used to find her there in the middle of the night, after some party, and more often than not she was drunk. But she’d hold me tight when I slid in next to her, and if she was awake enough, she’d kiss me.

  I’d kiss her back.

  But if I ever tried to put my hands on her—and I did—she’d stop me.

  I didn’t pressure her. I didn’t push her boundaries. I left them intact, telling myself when she was ready, she’d be mine.