t as I felt heat pooling between my legs. Every limb on my body tingled.
Reid’s mouth parted, and my body was begging me to inch just a little closer, to just put my lips on his, to ease the burning that was getting more intense the longer I laid on him. I lazily brought my eyes up to his, and he was staring directly at my mouth, too. My tongue darted out involuntarily, and I ran it over my plump bottom lip.
I heard Reid gulp, and I inhaled a sharp breath before he reached up and placed his mouth on mine. The second our lips touched, it was like I was fully awake for the first time in my entire life. Everything disappeared in the room as he moved his mouth over mine, coaxing the life right out of me. I was in a frenzy, focused on the feeling driving me to reach an end goal that I wasn’t even aware of.
My body went into straight sex-kitten mode as I moved my tongue inside Reid’s mouth to lure it open even further, and instead of our legs being tangled up in one another’s, I moved my body and straddled him right there on the floor. Reid’s hands gripped my waist as we continued to move our lips, soft kisses turning into passionate, hungry ones. I felt the pads of Reid’s fingers inching underneath my sweater, enticing even more sparks as they touched the bare skin of my stomach. My hips moved of their own accord, and a small growl of Reid’s echoed in my mouth before a loud alarm was sounding off throughout the house. The shrill noise broke us out of our trance within seconds. I panted, and Reid’s grip tightened on my body as his eyebrows bunched together as if he were trying to remember where we were and what we were doing. It was like a punch to the gut when I saw the look of defeat on his face when he realized that I was on top of him and we were just kissing like… that. He quickly released my hips, and I crawled from on top of him, moving to rest my back along the cool wall. Reid jumped to his feet and hurriedly strode into the kitchen to figure out what was burning and why the alarm was going off. I could smell the smoke wafting throughout the house, but I couldn’t quite get myself to get up to make sure there wasn’t some type of fire from the unoccupied red sauce and noodles on the stovetop.
I was too surprised. Frozen. Too taken aback from the kiss. The kiss that tore right through my chest. The kiss that stripped every single thought from my head. The kiss that swept me away completely and had me forgetting that I was being paid to be there.
I stayed in the same spot, sitting on the hard, wooden floor, when Reid came around the corner minutes later. His head was turned down, his shoulders drooping low. I could feel it coming—the straight disappointment.
Reid regretted kissing me.
But I didn’t.
“Brooklyn,” he said, standing a few feet away from me. I didn’t want to look up at him, but I also knew that I needed to, so I slowly raised my head and peered up at his looming stance. His golden eyes drove into mine, steely and cold as ever. “That can’t happen again.”
I felt the need to jerk backwards, as if the words were there to strike me, and I had the sudden urge to ask why. Why couldn’t it happen again? Because a soul-crushing kiss like that felt like falling in love for the first time. It was an all-consuming, one-of-a-kind, something-that-wasn’t-just-lust-and-attraction kind of kiss. But instead of asking him and giving him even more ammunition to throw my way, I nodded my head tersely and hopped up to my feet.
I brushed past him quickly, unable to even look him in the eye, and went directly into my room, shutting the door behind me. I rested my back along the oak door and slid all the way down until my butt hit the floor. My shirt was still clinging to my skin from the dampness, and my hair was stringy and hanging down past my shoulders, but the only thing I could focus on was the kiss. My mouth felt singed, burned, marked.
Angry that I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Reid looked after he realized we were caught up in one another, I crawled over to the bed and snatched my phone. I was seconds from texting my sister or Jane and spilling the naughty truth in my head that slowly circled the idea of me wanting Reid in a way that I simply shouldn’t, and then I saw Jane’s text. It read, “This is your daily reminder to guard your heart from that cynical man we in the music industry call the King of Music. Tread lightly, my dear friend. Love you.”
I chucked my phone back onto the bed and raised my fingers to my mouth.
What have I gotten myself into?
Chapter Nineteen
Reid
The kiss between Brooklyn and me was something that was bound to happen. I knew it. She knew it. The whole fucking world knew it. But it was a mistake. One that I couldn’t take back. And one that I couldn’t stop thinking about.
Even as I cleaned up the mess from burning my nana’s legendary, homemade red sauce after it boiled over onto the stove while Brooklyn and I were simply losing control on any bit of reality that was left between us, I couldn’t stop the thoughts. The way Brooklyn’s auburn hair fell all around her heart-shaped face, the damp tendrils framing her lightly pink-tinted cheeks. The playful glimmer in her green eyes when I sprayed her with water as I chased her around the island. The feeling of her body moving on top of mine, showing that she also felt what I felt: pure desperation and lust.
It was all too much.
I recognized the fact that my body hummed afterwards, and I knew that I couldn’t hold on to the guilty conscience that had been weighing down on my shoulders since I first saw Angelina on that cold bathroom floor for much longer. Because everything that I was feeling for Brooklyn completely demolished it.
There was just something about her—the lightness she carried, her pure beauty, the way her laugh made my lips tip upward even when I didn’t want to smile, the way she pushed me to be better, and the fact that she hadn’t given up on me even though every single verse/song/tune that I produced was complete shit. And the reason it was complete shit was because it was fake and forced.
It wasn’t the truth.
Every bit of the truth I had locked inside of me was in that notebook that I’d scribbled in a few nights ago after I let go of the denial for a few moments.
I thought that maybe listening to Angelina’s voicemail again would take my mind off Brooklyn. That maybe if I reminded myself that Angelina was in a psych ward—no doubt because of me—that maybe I could push Brooklyn away, that I could shove the kiss clear out of my mind. But this time, instead of falling into a pit of darkness that was full of remorse and rotten guilt, I grabbed my notebook and started to furiously write down even more lyrics that dripped of hidden reality.
Each verse I wrote, each song I perfected, revolved around Brooklyn.
“This is good… kind of,” Brooklyn said from across the living room, sitting cross-legged in another pair of tight leggings and a loose t-shirt that, once again, showed just a hint of her shoulder. The awkwardness from our last encounter was still lingering in the air. She never came back out of her room after the kiss, not even to eat, and now that it was the next day, she could barely look me in the eye without scowling.
“You think?” Because I don’t.
I strummed my fingers along my guitar, playing with a few chords that were more comfortable than anything. I glanced upward as Brooklyn pulled her old guitar over to her lap, resting it gently along her legs. Her fingers moved gracefully to their rightful spot, and she began to strum a few tunes while quietly singing the bogus verse I gave to her.
“The sun rises in the east, as the wolf howls in the west.
You’re not like all the rest.”