“Then go lie on the bed and stop playing coy. You know damned well I’m not trying to seduce you.”
“Jeez, I was just joking around,” she said and stomped into the bedroom.
She stretched out on the bed and tucked one arm under her head, shoving the pillows up against the headboard. Adam kicked off his boots and climbed up on the bed beside her to sit cross-legged. He examined her breasts closely. She trailed the fingers of her free hand over one pink tip.
“Do you want them hard for the drawing?” she asked, her voice low and seductive. “I think they look better hard, don’t you?”
If she didn’t knock it off, his dick was going to change his mind about not having interest in sex.
“Just lie still,” he said.
“They’d get really hard if you licked them.” The tip of her tongue traced her lip and then disappeared into her mouth.
“Do you even know how to have a nonsexual relationship?” he asked.
“I know how,” she said defensively.
“Then prove it.”
“It’s kind of hard not to get turned on when you’re staring at me like that,” she said.
“Like what?” He took the pencil to paper and restructured the under curves of her breasts so they no longer looked like Madison’s.
“Like I’m worth looking at.”
“We already established that you are. Now stop talking so I can concentrate.”
She smiled and went still, watching him draw and no longer doing her best to put his dick in charge.
He turned his attention to her nipples, careful to draw every detail in perfect likeness. The soft pink buds really would look better hard, he decided, but he was not going to lick them even for the sake of art. He was tempted to draw a second image of her with her chest intact and not marred by the gaping hole of her heart ripped out by the battling crows.
Maybe she’d allow him to draw her again sometime.
Adam yawned unexpectedly.
“I’m sorry you find my boobs so boring,” Nikki said, her lips twisted into a wry grin.
“Your boobs are perfectly tantalizing,” he assured her. “I just didn’t get much sleep last night.” And his brain had recognized that there was a bed handy for napping.
He returned to his drawing, moving faster now, because he suddenly wanted to finish as quickly as possible so he could catch a few Zs before the show.
“Once Melanie took me to bed with her last night, I slept great,” Nikki said.
Adam paused and glanced at her face. She was smiling dreamily and her nipples grew hard without her even touching them. Yep, Gabe definitely needed to be warned about the puzzling relationship between the two women.
“I thought she didn’t want you that way.”
Nikki sighed. “She doesn’t. And now that she knows I do want her that way, she probably won’t let me cuddle up with her when I sleep. I can’t sleep alone unless I take a couple of these.”
She shoved her hand in the pocket of her jeans and tugged out a small baggie full of bar-shaped white pills. Adam’s belly tightened. Yeah, he could use a few of those himself.
“What are those?” he asked, but he already knew.
“Bars. You want some?”
God, yes, he wanted some. He wanted the entire baggie full.
“I’m drawing,” he said. His hands were shaking as he pulled the tip of his pencil over the seductive texture of the sketch paper.
She popped several Xanax into her mouth and swallowed them with a chug from her beer. She set the bottle on the night stand and then returned to resting on her back. “Adam?”
He looked over the drawing, checking for anything he missed, and added a small mole to the under curve of one full breast. Hell, he might as well make the drawing as realistic as possible since he had a living model at his disposal.
“Hmm?”
“Will you hold me? Just until I fall asleep. And then I’ll be okay. I won’t dream on this stuff, so I’ll be okay.”
His first instinct was to refuse, but she was staring at him so hopefully that his resolve crumbled. “Yeah, okay. But just until you fall asleep.”
He set the completed drawing aside, and she smiled at it. “Now those are my boobs,” she said.
He chuckled and lay down beside her. “Glad you approve.”
Nikki shifted, resting her head on his shoulder, and snuggled into his side.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
He didn’t mind. He kind of liked feeling that someone needed him. Even if it was as a pillow.
“For you,” she said and pressed one of her pills into his hand. “It will help you forget her.”
He stroked her silky hair with his free hand, and she relaxed against him. Soon her breathing became deep and regular. Even though he was exhausted, Adam didn’t have such an easy time falling asleep. He held the pill she’d given him pinched between his thumb and forefinger and stared at it. What could it hurt? It was just one pill. It wasn’t as if it would even make him all that high. It would just take the edge off, let him relax. Allow his mind to clear. Maybe even make sleep possible. A lot of power to do good in this little pill, he thought.
What could possibly be so bad about swallowing one little pill?
He should call Madison and talk to her about his thoughts, these undeniable urges to self-medicate. But she’d left him, and he had no one to turn to.
The drugs had always been there for him; they had never failed him. Fucked him up and fucked him over, oh yeah, but they had always given him exactly what he’d needed. Or so he’d thought. Through all the rehab and treatment, had anything really changed inside him?
He still wanted to live outside of reality. Reality hurt. It sucked.
So what harm could it do?
Just one little pill.
What harm?
Chapter Sixteen
Something hit Adam hard in the belly. He sucked a startled breath into his lungs and blinked open his eyes, trying to focus on whatever was hovering above him. Turned out to be Gabe’s chick glaring down at him looking entirely pissed off. Weird.
“How could you?” Melanie bellowed at Adam and slugged him in the stomach again. “How could you take advantage of her after everything she’s been through this weekend, you fricking asshole?”
Adam managed to catch her fist before she pummeled him again.
“What the hell?” he growled, not close enough to awake to put up with this sort of bullshit.
“Do you even have a conscience?”
Well, that was debatable, but in this case he didn’t have a clue what had the woman so riled up.
The warm body resting against his side groaned in protest as Melanie shifted her attention elsewhere.
“Nikki,” Melanie said, shaking Nikki’s shoulder vigorously. “Nikki, can you hear me?”
Nikki was out cold and considering the number of Xanax she’d swallowed, Adam wasn’t the least bit surprised.
“What did you give her?” Melanie said, her voice taking on an edge of desperation.
“Give her?” Adam said, his confusion quickly turning to annoyance. “I didn’t give her shit. Why don’t you ask her what she gave me?”
“Nikki, what did you take? Wake up. Talk to me!”
“Let her sleep, for fuck’s sake,” Adam grumbled. “She’s