“Better?”
“Hell no,” Cole spat out.
“Sometimes it takes a few minutes to get your bearings back,” said the woman in a calm, soft, comforting and strangely familiar voice.
“You can take your hand away. I’m okay now.”
“Oh, sorry.” She snatched it away.
Once her hand left his head, Cole reclined back on the couch and looked at his savior. It was none other than Marlene Simpson, the talk show host he’d met when she’d interviewed Shannon. His body tensed and his guard went up. What could she possibly want? As if he didn’t know.
“If you’re hoping for an interview, I already told...”
Her hand rose up, palm out. “No. I respect what you told me before. But I suppose you’re wondering why I’m here?”
Cole raised a brow and when Marlene smiled at him he relaxed, and for some unknown reason he suddenly felt as though he could trust her.
“I came for the concert. My daughter and her friend are backstage waiting for me. I told them I could introduce them to you, but I saw you panic at something the reporter said, and the next thing I knew we were in here.”
Cole slid across the couch and invited her to sit down. It was the least he could do after she saved him from embarrassing himself in front of all those people by having an anxiety attack or worse, hitting the floor from fainting. He studied her and assessed her. She appeared to be in her mid-forties, average height, nicely built and attractive. Not that he was the least bit interested, but she was nicely put together. Cole cleared his throat.
“I owe you a thanks. I almost lost it. I thought I was going to pass out in there,” he snorted and put his hands up. “I can see the headlines. ‘Cole Jackson, after having drunk himself into a stupor, collapses after a concert.’” He pulled the leather strap out of his hair and combed his fingers through it. “I’m nobody. Why does everybody bother me?”
“Cole?”
He felt her warm hand on his knee, and he knew it rested there purely for comfort and nothing else.
“You are somebody. You’re a talented, handsome man who piques the interest of everyone around you because of your past. You’re an enigma which only makes people push harder to know the person behind the screen. And I speak from experience when I say it will not stop until you tell your story. And even then there are no guarantees it will stop.”
Cole knew what she referred to. Even though he’d been in prison at the time, he remembered Marlene making headlines a few years back. Her second husband had been arrested and convicted of statutory rape. He had sexually assaulted her daughter and some of her daughter’s friends. He supplied them with alcohol and drugs then had sex with them. It took a long time for the media to stop hounding her about it. Finally she’d gone public with her side of the story. But Cole didn’t know if he could.
“I can’t give an interview.” The words struggled to come out of his mouth because he felt so deflated of energy.
“Why?”
“That’s a damn good question.” Cole looked over at Marlene and was shocked to see a genuine concern for him reflected in her eyes. He didn’t even know this woman, so why?
“I can’t give an interview. You saw what just happened. The bastard asked if I killed my wife and I lost it. It would be one thing if I got angry, but I nearly blacked out. I would have blacked out if you hadn’t come to my rescue.” He paused and looked right at her. “By the way.” His face softened, and he smiled. “Thank you again.”
“What if you did the interview with...say...me?”
He narrowed his eyes at her, his guard back up. He should have known it would come up.
She put up her hand, the concerned look still there. “Hear me out. It’s just a suggestion. Say I interview you and promise not to bring up Lindsey. We chat about your life now. Your music now, and only, and I mean only, if you bring it up do we discuss it.”
She appeared so sincere Cole almost wanted to agree. He smiled at her. “You’re a nice person Marlene.” He shook his head, disgusted in himself. “I’m thirty-eight, a big guy, a tough guy, you’d think I could handle it.”
Everything she said about reporters hounding him rang true. He’d been out of prison for more than a year and still he couldn’t shake the press or his past. It was probably better to go public with his story once and for all. And Marlene would be the only one he’d go public with. What he said next shocked her and he liked that.
“I have another concert tomorrow night, how about tomorrow, early afternoon?”
It took her a moment to find her voice. “Perfect.”
“I want it to be informal, and I want to see the questions you will ask me ahead of time.”
“No problem.”
He figured she’d agree to just about anything to get her interview. “And you promise not to ask me if I killed Lindsey?”
She put her hand on her heart. “You have my word.”
“Good enough,” he resigned. “I’ll do it tomorrow at your studio and oh, one more thing, no questions from the audience.”
“We won’t have an audience. It’ll just be the two of us.”
“Even better,” he murmured.
Cole sent Marlene to get her daughter and her friend and they enjoyed a bite to eat at a small out of the way diner that served breakfast all day and night long. Cole indulged himself with eggs, bacon and home fried potatoes. He couldn’t remember the last time a meal went down so smoothly. Well, actually he could remember, the last time he’d been with Shannon. But so as not to spoil the night, he pushed all thoughts of Shannon out of his head until later when he relaxed in the privacy of his hotel room.
“Lindsey, ye don’t mean that?”
“Yes, I do. It’s over. I want to go back to Cole. He needs me and I really love him.”
“Ah can’t accept that. Ah love you. Ah know it’s not Cole ye love. There’s someone else, isn’t there?”
“Get out.”
“Lindsey, please?”
He begged. It was the most humiliating thing he’d ever done, and for what? A woman who’d suck any man’s dick that struck her fancy? But he loved her, God damn it, he loved her. Something inside him snapped.
Hating himself, hating her, he slapped her, then he saw something metal in her hands and there was a struggle for control.
AJ flew out of bed in the middle of the night, ran into the bathroom and dry-heaved again. It seemed to be all he did lately. Sitting on the cold tiled floor, he hugged himself as he rocked back and forth and hummed. Had he lost his mind? He probably lost it the night Lindsey died. The night he killed her. How else could he explain never having remembered it until now? His dreams and memories had progressed, so he knew most of what happened, but not all. Some of it seemed a little sketchy, like the actual stabbing part. He didn’t remember that at all. Nor did he remember seeing her dead body. Why were those memories lost to him?
Christ. He killed her. He’d killed Cole’s wife, Lindsey Jackson, his lover. How could he have done it? Never mind not remembering it until now? He didn’t even know what he’d done with the knife or his clothes. There must have been blood?
“Oh God, Lindsey,” he sobbed out. “Forgive me. Please, please, please forgive me for taking yer beautiful life.”
He couldn’t go on like this. AJ couldn’t go on living a lie, living in hell on earth. The guilt, the pain, the realization of the unimaginable. He found himself perched tenuously at the edge of a stone cliff, and the stones and dirt were giving way beneath his feet. Did he dive to the ground and save himself? Or throw himself off the cliff into the raging river below and end his torture?
What would happen to his wife, Elizabeth and his children? He moaned louder and louder as his insides twisted in silent agony for the pain and shame this would cause them. Oh God. He rose off the floor and stumble to his bed. He’d not eaten in so long. The lining of his stomach was in the toilet, and he was so weak he collapsed onto the bed. “Please God.” he mumbled. “Let me die. Let me die. It’s what ah deserve. Please take my life.”
When AJ woke and saw the sun the next morning, he cursed out at God as his heart pierced with pain. “Why didn’t ye take me?” he yelled out as he fell to his knees and pleaded with God once again.
“Ah dinnae deserve tae live, tae breathe. Ah dinnae deserve tae see the sun, or the moon, or the stars. Why dinnaeye take me?”
Cameron had trouble sleeping on the bus after Amber asked him to have sex with her. On the bus, was she serious? He couldn’t do it on the bus, and to her disappointment he told her so. But he’d also mentioned getting off at the next stop and renting a motel room for a day or two. He still didn’t feel all that great and needed—no wanted solid ground beneath his feet.
So here they stood in front of a rundown roadside motel in the middle of nowhere. The only other building in sight was a roadside café with its parking lot jam packed with eighteen wheelers. Besides that, there wasn’t anything around but miles and miles of mundane blacktop twisting and turning with beautiful mountains all around them. He had to admit, the mountains took his breath away.
His stomach still felt like shit from being sick, and now it also ached with nervousness. He’d never rented a motel room before and didn’t know what to expect. He hoped he didn’t have to show a license or something because all he had on him was his school ID.
The door to the office squeaked when he opened it, and he stepped inside and faced an ancient lady with wrinkled skin. She wore the ugliest purple dress, or bathrobe, he’d ever seen and purple fuzzy slippers. Her eyes were glued to the television, and she never heard him enter. He cleared his throat.
“Excuse me.”
“Rooms are sixty dollars a night. Cash only.” And still she didn’t look at him.
“Okay, I’ll take one for two nights.” He slid the exact amount over the dirty, sticky counter, and still she didn’t look at him.
“Room four. Sign the register and if you break anything you pay for it.”
Cameron scribbled his name on the register and then realized too late he’d signed his real name. Good going moron, you’re supposed to be incognito.
Before the lady looked at him, he grabbed the key and left. He signaled Amber and held up four fingers then pointed toward the room.
After they were inside, Cameron lay on the bed looking around and became nervous as hell because, oh shit, he was on the only bed in the room. While Amber took a shower, he curled up on his side and was nearly asleep when she came out of the bathroom. He swallowed the lump in his throat as his eyes followed her across the room. Amber’s dyed black hair hung long and dripping wet. The T-shirt she wore clung to every curve and Cameron felt himself harden as he stared at the puckered nipples straining against the thin cotton. His heart pounded as his eyes roamed lower to where the shirt barely covered her ... his breath came faster as he glimpsed her curly pubic hairs.
Christ. He’d never seen a naked girl, except in dirty magazines and some “R” rated movies, but never up close and in person, and how humiliated he felt suddenly for still being a virgin.
“I...um...I’m gonna shower.” He slid off the bed, grabbed his backpack and locked himself in the bathroom. Before he got in the shower he sat on the closed toilet seat and willed his pulse to slow down. Once it had, he stepped in the shower and paid meticulous attention, soaping up every speck of his body. After he washed his hair, dried off, threw on shorts, he brushed his teeth and placed his shaky hand on the doorknob. Shit! He was about to have sex for the first time and he felt like throwing up. Not good Cameron, not good at all. He released the knob, went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face and stared at his reflection in the mirror. The person staring back at him was someone he saw all the time, yet something appeared different. He looked different. He shook it off and before he chickened out and curled up on the bathroom floor for the night, he opened the door and found Amber sitting up in bed watching television. Maybe he was wrong, and she didn’t want sex after all? He didn’t honestly know if he felt relieved or disappointed. As he walked toward the bed, his knees wobbled and his heart hammered triple time inside his chest.
He nonchalantly, and boy was that hard to pull off, stretched out on the bed, flat on his back, his arms behind his head and he asked, “Anything good on?” Like he didn’t have a care in the world.
Amber replied, “Soap Operas and talk shows. What’s your poison?”
“Whatever, I’m gonna sleep anyway.”
Amber scooted closer to his body and snuggled against him, one leg thrown over his legs, and he hardened instantly as he felt her warm vagina make contact with his thigh.
“Amber?” Christ he sounded nervous.
“Hmm,” she mumbled.
Cameron took a deep breath and blurted it out before he lost his courage. “I’ve never done this before.”
She raised her body and looked at him with a smile curving her lips, and he felt his face burn up.
“Sex, are you telling me you’ve never had sex?” she asked, her expression one of surprise.
His stomach knotted and then dropped as he shook his head.
“Oral sex,” she questioned.
Again he shook his head and suddenly felt so out of the loop. Most of his friends had had sex already, and it wasn’t as though Cameron hadn’t wanted to, he just never had the opportunity to—until now.
He knew oral sex was like, the thing to do these days. He’d heard about these parties where the guys line up and the girls go down the line giving blow jobs. It was called a train or something like that. He’d always been too busy with his schoolwork, his music and shuffling between his mom’s house and his dad’s to go. But now he wished he’d been to one of those parties so he’d, like, have some experience.
“We need a condom,” she blurted out as she rolled off the bed. Cameron sucked in his breath as he got a good look at her naked butt when her shirt rode up to her waist. He gawked as his pulse roared. Amber fished inside her bag, turned to him holding up a foil-wrapped condom with a shy smile plastered across her pretty face.
“We have one. Actually, I have a whole box.”
Cameron physically felt his blood pumping through his body and settling in his dick as she climbed back onto the bed, onto her knees and peeled off her shirt. Christ, she was stacked was all he could think about as he reached out with his trembling hands and cupped her heavy breasts.
For the rest of the afternoon, Amber showed Cameron just what he’d been missing. And by the day’s end, there wasn’t much in the way of sex, oral or otherwise, Cameron hadn’t experienced firsthand.