Walking Heartbreak Read online

  The pressure of him increases against me, and suddenly I don’t feel like he should be down there. I already own all of his love; this—joining us—can’t possibly make it grow bigger. The buildup against one small area of my body with him harder than bone doesn’t feel natural.

  I erase the thought. Breathe through the initial pain until he ruptures the first, soft barrier and exhales in a shallow pant as he pushes deeper.

  “This… it?” I ask, because I hope it is. It’s already a lot.

  “No… there’s more,” he answers, his voice shaking.

  “Hush,” I whisper, reminding him to be quiet, but then a searing pain stabs me in hot, red places I’ll never reach and it’s my unplanned penance for the sin we’re committing—

  Oh God! Oh God!

  Jerkily, erratically, he moves over me. I moan from the friction. Jude is merciless, hurting me… and rousing a little bit of wonderful at the same time. Unsure, I shape my hands over his behind. My heart skips at the tautness when his butt flexes.

  The searing pain dulls, leaving moisture and warmth in its wake. He thrusts, working to make us both soar, but then he collapses so very quickly, wheezing a small groan out with his apology.

  Skin pearled with sweat against my own, he whispers, “Ah. I’m sorry, Nadia. I had no idea it would feel this good. It’s like you’re squeezing around me— I… Shit. I couldn’t control it at all.” He chortles, embarrassed. “It’ll be better the next time.”

  I emerge from the dream slowly, a smile in my heart at my silly Jude. Enveloped by love, by awkward sincerity, by unselfishness that couldn’t outdo desire, I can’t imagine a more beautiful way to lose my virginity.

  “Jude,” I sigh out. “Do you remember?”

  BO

  “Storage key?” I snap my fingers at Emil who doesn’t react. That just-blow-dried, meticulously shaggy head of his dives into his backpack instead, in search of tweezers. Dude’s the poster child for a lead singer, two hundred percent narcissistic, and now there’s supposedly a stray hair between his brows. God forbid he rehearses with anything off-kilter on his face.

  “In my pocket,” he mumbles, rearranging the inside of his bag.

  “Dude, I warn you. If you don’t fish the key out ASAP, I’ll be reaching in there for it myself,” I tell him.

  “Pff, hold on.”

  “You might never get to make mini-Emils,” I add for fun.

  “Shithead.”

  We’re at the Marzania Rehearsal Studios where we rent storage for our gear and rehearsal space while we’re off tour. Los Angeles is full of bands, and rehearsal space doesn’t just plop into your lap. When we got word of an opening a few months back, we immediately grabbed the chance. Marzania is expensive, but we’re also with the big bands here. We rub elbows with Luminessence—who put in a good word for us to the owner—and other legends like Tom Rocks and Witch Cockers.

  We finally stride down the hallway to our assigned room for the day, Emil with a bright pinprick on his forehead, a reminder that he ended up finding the tweezers. A text from Troy comes in, saying he’ll be here in a few. He’s just picking up bagels for us. Right. I have yet to eat today.

  Coffee too? I text back.

  Shit yeah. You owe me 20. Like 4th bagel run now.

  3rd, I reply because I’m pretty sure.

  No. 4th. Got receipts.

  And Troy’s the typical drummer: organized and on the ball to a fault. The only times he’ll be late is if he’s doing something for the band. Like now. He’s the only American in Clown Irruption too. Our original Swedish drummer couldn’t stand leaving his girlfriend and chose hos over bros back in the motherland. Yep, you got it: he too was assembly-line-worthy drummer material.

  All rooms at Marzania are the same. Small and utilitarian, with matte black walls scuffed up by boots and instrument travel cases. Our room has a small podium where Troy assembles his shit once he arrives—drums always take the longest to set up—while the rest of us tune guitars and fiddle with the soundboard until Elias, the bass player, arrives.

  “Dude, I forgot,” he says, blowing white hair out of his hyper-light blue eyes.

  “Did it have anything to do with a groupie?” Troy asks, eyes on the cymbal he’s mounting.

  “Oh hell yeah. Freaking Ebele from Nigeria. Damn, she’s beautiful. She’s like a New Year’s Eve firework! Her boobs, man, and her ass—and her skin is so black it’s, like, almost blue.” Elias’ eyes turn all beamy.

  Emil starts humming Ebony and Ivory, and I can’t help snorting out a laugh. Because seriously, it’s hard to get any less colorful than Elias. He’d give hospital sheets a run for their money.

  Troy, who’s African American, a taller version of Lenny Kravitz, and a total babe magnet with his safari green eyes, smirks. “Opposites attract—again, Elias.”

  “All right,” I say. “Enough talk about chicks or Emil will be demanding a shower break before we even start, here.”

  Troy points at me and moves his hand seamlessly into the universal sign for rubbing dollar bills between his fingers. “True, time’s money. It’s ten already.”

  “Exactly.” Elias flings his arms out. “Why does Bo get to decide this shit? We’re a rock band. Party until dawn, roll out of bed in the late afternoon, then rehearse all night.”

  “Elias is shouting,” Emil mutters into the microphone in lieu of the regular “Testing, testing.”

  “Okay, quick reminder everyone.” I grab Emil’s mic unnecessarily. My own is wired and ready to go, but he’s mounted his on the stand already. “Nights in this joint are always—always—booked solid. We good?”

  Thankfully, once Clown Irruption starts, we don’t stop. We don’t take breaks until someone’s bodily functions crave it, and with that I don’t mean Emil’s sex drive. Not usually.

  At one fifteen, we all pee like racehorses. We have the room for another four hours—a good day—and we’re not wasting it on a lunch break.

  At three, Elias’ skinny-ass stomach is growling. He sets the mic against it and turns the volume up, which coincides with Zoe calling Emil to let him know she’s outside.

  “You’re all pussies,” I tell them.

  “Bo’s being a butt,” Emil says into the phone and angles me a look. “He’s in a mood, all obsessive and shit. He won’t let me out to play.”

  “Dude,” I mumble. “We’re on a roll.” This is an uncalled-for break, so I might as well spend it wisely and exchange my guitar cable. The old one has been causing random static all day.

  “He’s inspired,” Emil mock-specifies. “Hold on, I’m gonna take my chances and let you in, Zee.”

  I’m pretty sure those words are the death sentence for today’s rehearsal; once Emil’s got a girl over, all he wants is to swoon out lounge lizard versions of our ballads with the purpose of drenching the girl’s panties. Then he whisks them off to the bathroom to perform damage control slash first aid on his victim. Always the romantic.

  The two of them are all over each other by the time they trip in the door. The rest of us greet Zoe with a chin pump or a wave. She’s cute, for sure, and has that playful blonde thing going for her that Emil likes. They’ve hung out for days now, ever since we got off the road Sunday. I’m impressed. Might be her mouth, in more ways than one.

  “Hey guys,” she greets us back. “Emil says you’ve got a new song.”

  And that’d be an understatement. We’ve been working on five, but I know which one Emil means—the X-rated one. Elias enjoys playing the bass line on it, the main reason why we’ve been concentrating on it for so long today. Not to brag, but it’s sexy as hell, with a slow, deep, lingering thud that vibrates through your balls. Emil grates out the melody and the lyrics, his voice still road-worn, which suits the song.

  I wrote it after Nadia left that morning. I was hard the rest of the day and needed an outlet.
All I could think about was the agonized, heated look in her eyes, the timid way she’d raised her hips to meet me, guilt and denial and lust warring in every shift of her body.

  At one point I’d pushed her wrists into the mattress. Stared into her eyes and owned her. I told her sweet things I meant, about how beautiful she was and how she shouldn’t be ashamed. If you do it, mean it, they say, and for me, that girl was gasoline. I fucking did it, and I meant it hard.

  Is it biological that we react to people in different ways? Why did one night with Nadia flood me with a level of creative juices I haven’t experienced since my string of breakups with Ingela? To this day, the only song of mine that has set college radio stations on fire is Never Ever, which I wrote while I was dying over a love my ex deserved and I didn’t have in me to give her.

  Nadia. Christ, she gave herself to me, and yet she’s not going to be easy. I should lay off—the girl’s baggage is boulders. Just, she jacks my pulse up with how she slinks off and doles out fragments of herself.

  I’m in trouble. There’s so much there, behind that chocolate brown curtain of hair and those well-deep eyes. I want to own her secrets.

  Nadia, I begin in my mind, maybe I just need to—

  “Fuck You,” Emil says, “is the name of the song.”

  “What? That’s a crazy title. You know you’ll have to come up with an alternative, right, because it’s going to be censored the crap out of on the radio,” Zoe tells us.

  “See?” Elias says as if we haven’t already discussed this.

  “Yes, and we don’t give a damn, Bo says,” Emil nods out.

  “Or maybe what he actually said was ‘let’s wait until we cross that bridge. It’s not even finished yet,’” Troy supplies, and I feel special because they’re treating me like the bandleader I am for once.

  “Soo… are you going to play it for me?” Zoe asks.

  “Oh babe, yeah, yeah, because it was written for you,” Emil smarms out, thrusting his cock against her hip. Dog.

  “Reaaallyyy? Omigod, you’re so sweet.”

  We all turn, fiddle with monitors or scratch our foreheads while Emil sticks his tongue so far down Zoe’s throat he might as well have gone for a blow job.

  Damn, I think Zoe gets Emil. I mean, when has a girl ever found a song named Fuck You romantic? The minor issue about me writing it over another girl doesn’t faze him. I did get a quick “Sounds like Bo’s stoked on a lady?” from Troy when I first played it, but apart from that, the guys have stuck to music-related comments.

  “Sugar Cookie,” Zoe hums between smacking noises. “You don’t have to lick my teeth. People don’t have nerves in their teeth.”

  “No, I think they do,” Sugar Cookie says, squeezing her butt. I’m seeing a bathroom visit in their near future, maybe even before we play the song.

  “Oh yeah,” she agrees. “Like for instance, it hurts at the dentist’s sometimes.”

  Emil mm-hmms and presses her into the wall.

  “Okay. ’Nuff public display of all-but-nudity,” I say, and Emil lets out a disgruntled huff.

  “Dude’s so bossy.”

  “You realize minutes and rehearsal dollars are ticking away from us while you grope each other, right?”

  “Your drummer makes us sound dirty, Cooks,” Zoe murmurs, all sexy-sounding.

  “See? Now you’ve hurt her feelings, Troy.”

  I clap my hands. “Okay, eyes on me? Ready to roll?”

  Wide-legged, Emil trots back to his stand, grabs the microphone, and does another mm-hmm into it for the sake of the girl. She giggles… and freaking puts a finger in her mouth. Jesus. If she sucks on it, that’s it: I’m tossing them both out. We’re not made of icicles.

  Troy counts us off without waiting for me, probably catching on to how I’m about to lose it. Elias cuts in with the slow, sexy bass line, nailing you right in the cock. Emil’s little uh-huhs and yeahs begin to slink out. He’s a pro at sounding like he’s under the same sheets as the woman he stares at in the audience, and this song is perfect for it.

  The little groans of contentment the tune calls for are exactly what Emil emits through the wall between our bedrooms most nights. My cunning plan is to get us a new apartment with the sleeping quarters on opposite sides of the digs. It probably won’t muffle the lighter pitch of his girls, whose sounds I can absolutely live with, but it should keep Emil’s grunts from haunting my dreams.

  I compose most of our songs, and I’m also Clown Irruption’s lyric writer. This particular tune though is all music. The words are banal and repetitive, but they’re only there as another instrument to add to the mood. And the mood I wanted to create was—

  Horny as hell, sexy as shit, go-all-out hotness, and plain old dirty, all-consuming lust. Oh yeah. Exactly the way I felt buried deep inside Nadia, staring into her eyes and wanting to possess her and convert her too into pure pleasure.

  Holy shit, when she came.

  “Fuck you. Fuck you. I want to fuck you again,” Emil husks out. Sex is so thick in his voice, he’s sobbing the words out. Hell, I’m growing behind my guitar.

  “Oh I’ll take you ’til you come, come, come.”

  Who needs porn when you can sing songs, right?

  The initial sluggish, lingering rhythm is the first slow strokes inside a woman, sensing her warmth, her moisture, the tight embrace, the ultimate welcome.

  Troy’s drums, man. He’s in it, his body moving seamlessly, a slow wave behind the skins as he bangs out the most perfect lay, speeding us up steadily until we’re frantic, banging, banging, my back-up vocals gravel-gritty, supporting Emil’s roar of mercy.

  Troy’s hands blur as he punishes the drums, rocking, shaking in his seat, death-metal hard and so fast he could have doubled with a clone. I barely catch a glimpse of Elias from within my own haze. His fingers fly across the bass, ripping, faster, faster, simulating the last sprint of my last fuck if I hadn’t held back.

  We’ve rehearsed this: we’re completely in tune, freezing the song just when everything becomes a maelstrom of sensation, pleasure, insanity—hysteria! It’s the ultimate orgasm, and the last echo lingering for just the barest nanosecond is Emil’s “Gimme more!”

  I’m not the only one slumping my shoulders once it’s over. Like Never Ever, this little thing won’t be our opening song. It’s a workout, and you either want to take a nap, like after an actual lay, or just… barge out in search of the real thing. Yeah. I can see it as one of the last songs of the night.

  Besides everyone’s harsh breathing, the room has gone quiet. I don’t care enough to check out our one-female audience’s response to Fuck You. I wrote it to relieve some pent-up horniness over a woman I’ll probably never have in the way I describe in this song, and the guys happened to like it, so—done deal.

  The skin on my index finger, so calloused from the constant contact with metal strings, has ruptured. There’s the faintest hint of pink shining through, and under the right circumstances it could be taken for blood. I’m surprised. Because from years of abuse by guitars, my fingertips could probably rebuff gunshots.

  I guess hammering this song out in front of my muse’s friend did inspire me; Emil might not be the only one giving his all—which is how it works between the four of us: one band member’s inspiration gets the others rocking. If two of us, like in this case, go ape, insanity ensues, and it’s out-of-body. I wish we’d caught it on film.

  Finally, I focus on our audience. In my limited experience with Zoe, she’s not one to be rendered speechless. Turns out she is now, and in her expression, there’s a naked vulnerability, an openness you don’t see unless you’re in bed with someone who loves you and trusts you like crazy. Someone this unguarded can make the most jaded bystander uncomfortable. But we’re bare too, after giving it all in this song.

  “Zoe,” Emil croaks out. “Let’s…”

 
I hear the others shift around us. Start unplugging gear and crinkling with bags. We’re giving them privacy.

  Yeah, this was too much. Zoe wasn’t prepared for her own reaction to the song and neither were we.

  Emil, he’s utterly extroverted and everyone’s best friend, including mine. When he embraces her, it’s like he wants to shield her from our unintentional voyeurism by making her disappear in his arms.

  He mumbles something against her ear, and Zoe’s short replies erupt with a breathing pattern that speaks of a heat no one but Emil should be privy to. It makes me clear my throat in an attempt to block her out.

  “Guys, we’re off,” Emil says after a minute, and I’m impressed. No rambunctious laughter or silly behavior from my best friend and no bathroom visit for his chick. Emil’s hooked. It makes me wonder if it’s the real deal.

  “All righty then,” Elias quips, head in the song and thoughts probably in the Nigerian girl.

  All of these feelings. I guess I just wrote us some smut.

  NADIA

  “How could you do this to me?” I sob out. “You suck, Jude! I’d never pull this on you.” I’m flinging cups and plates in our kitchen, all china Jude took me to buy with his first paycheck. “You’re the worst husband ever, and I hate the day I fell in love with you!”

  My phone rings, and it’s making me mad too. I can’t deal with this much crap at once. All of this. Every single problem in my life. Is due to my beautiful, wild, sweet, kind husband who’s a traitor.

  I slump to the kitchen tiles, raking shards between my fingers, not budging when they pierce the flesh of my left ring finger—because it’s perfect, right, true to who I am right now.

  “See?” I hold up my hand, do a small circle on my knees in the kitchen, showing him, showing him. “Okay, I can do better,” I yell. “Here.”

  I was raised to become a silent, subservient wife to a godly husband. Twice now in as many days, I’ve lost my temper, and it makes me sadder than I was before. On TV, people say it’s good for you to “let it out,” but me, I feel worse.