She gets the strangest look on her face, almost as if I’m crazy. “Oh, Hawke, don’t be silly,” she says, shooing me away, but I’m rooted still as her words hit my ears, as she tells me she remembers me. “You act like you’re not going to see me again. I’m just running to the store. You know I love you, you silly boy. To the moon and back.”

The tear leaks over and slides down my cheek, the smile tasting bittersweet on my lips as my mom gives me the only thing I’ve needed from her in the past five years. She may still think of me as a little boy in her mind but she’s just given me the greatest gift. She’s stitched closed the wounds in my soul with those simple words, made me the most complete person I’ve been in the longest time.

Has given me the capability and hope to love someone else.

I nod my head and selfishly force my feet to move, afraid if I stay too long she’s going to revert back and ruin this moment I so desperately needed. “Bye, Mom.”

“Mm-hmm,” she says and smiles softly before looking back out her window. I stare at her for a moment longer, memorizing this feeling I have, the lighter heart and clearer head.

Quinlan reaches over and links hands with me as I leave Westbrook for the first time with a fuller heart than the one I entered with. With each step we take into the parking lot I feel a rush akin to the one I get after being on stage. It’s a bittersweet emotion but shit, I’ll take it. I’ll take anything that doesn’t leave me with that churning in my gut.

Once we reach my car, our hands still linked, it feels like there’s so much possibility stretched out before us that I’m looking forward to the tour now. I’m excited to be trapped on a tour bus with Quinlan.

Damn. The thought takes hold as I look over and meet her eyes and that fucking jolt hits me just as hard as it did the first time I laid eyes on her. I’m riding my high of the present and possible future. Hell if I’m waiting for the tour bus when everything I want is right in front of me.

I pull her into my arms, lift her feet off the ground, and I’m already spinning her around when my lips meet hers to quiet her laugh.

Rocker trumps everyone when it comes to her.


QUINLAN

Hawke moves inside me.

My head drops back and his hard cock slides against my tensed muscles to heighten the pleasure starting to rock my world. The piano keys fill the room with a mangled sound when our bodies hit against them, my feet and his thighs.

We move at a demanding pace yet there is an underlying tenderness to it that resonates within me. Even if he tied me up and blindfolded me it wouldn’t hold a candle to how much he owns me, mind, body, and soul, right now. His intensity, his reverence, his rough edges turned smooth just for me pull on so many emotions that I can’t process them right now. I’m so overwhelmed, consumed by him, and saddened that he’s leaving in a matter of hours and I’m just not sure how I’m going to cope with him thousands of miles away even if it’s for just a few days.

I push it all away. Allow the moment to exist, the emotions to flow, and the pleasure to pull us into its addictive haze. It’s only us, only him, only this, and hell if that doesn’t make me the luckiest girl on the face of the earth.

“Quin.” He calls my name in that liquid sex rasp of a voice at the same time he stills his hips. Our eyes connect, sensations tackling me from every angle as we sit in the silence of the room. It’s a fleeting moment because we’re both chasing the pleasure the other one is offering, but it’s enough for me to see what I need to see in his eyes, even if he’s unable to say it.

He leans forward and tempts my mouth, tongue fluttering, our moans expressing the pleasure we both feel. And then he begins to move again, to generate flashes of pleasure with his body that own my every nerve.

Hawke lets out a wild groan as he presses as deep as possible into me, strong hands holding on to my soft curves while he continues to drive us toward the razor-thin edge of desire. I want to close my eyes, succumb to the pleasure dragging me under, but our eyes are fused in an intimate conversation that’s just as intense as the union of our bodies.

“Hawke,” I moan, teeth biting into my lower lip, breath raw and ragged, errant notes filling my ears.

He flashes me a dirty smirk at the call of his name, as if I’m issuing him a challenge to bring me to the cusp quicker, harder, faster. He takes his hand from my hip to hold my neck for a beat before sliding his palm down between my breasts. Every ounce of skin he touches alights with an insatiable fire that I know only he can put out. A small reprieve in the onslaught of sensation—but I know it’s temporary because I can see his muscles tensing, can feel his dick swelling, and his restraint holding on like an unraveling string.

I shift my hips up, milking his cock in my own move that has him calling out my name in a curse the same time I begin to disintegrate, powerful shivers coursing through my body. I buck my hips, hands reaching out to hold him still because the pleasure is too much, too absolute, but I’m a second too late because Hawke’s head falls back as his hips buck wildly, dragging him over the edge with me.

The piano sounds a complaint to the two of us using it to make a different kind of music when Hawkin picks me up and carries me over to the couch in the studio. He sits down and then shifts us so that he’s lying down on it and I’m lying on top of him, my heartbeat trying to jump out of my chest and join his.

“Wow,” he says, blowing out a breath of satisfied exhaustion.

“You can say that again.”

“Piano, check!”

I laugh with him at our endless quest to mark off instruments as sex props. “What are you trying to do, kill me before you leave me?” I say off the cuff and then immediately fall quiet as it hits me that in a few hours he will be gone.

I try to push the sadness away, not wanting it in this moment, not wanting it to overshadow the good mood seeing his mom today put him in, but it still lingers.

“Uh-uh. Don’t be sad. C’mon,” he says, pressing a kiss to the top of my head and pulling me in closer to him.

“I know.” I shift to put my chin on his chest so I can look at his face. “I’m just going to miss you. Besides, I planted sexy panties all over your suitcase to find.”

“You did?” He laughs, eyes lighting up.

“Yep. You have to find them all and show them to me via text … and then once you show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” I explain with a devilish grin, pretty damn proud of myself for thinking up this one.

“Come again?”

“Already? Jeez … I know you’re good but that’s a supernatural recovery time,” I tease. Hawke just rolls eyes at me and begins to speak when I catch a glimpse of something on the inside of his wrist where there was nothing before. “What the …?”

I’m scrambling to sit up astride him, grabbing his wrist and turning it over so I can see his forearm. A freshly inked bright pink heart the size of a quarter looks back at me. I know my mouth is agape and my eyes are wide at the sight. I start to say several things but nothing coherent comes out.

I itch to reach out and trace it, make sure it’s real, but it’s pretty obvious that it is. And of course I suddenly feel horrible because I’m the reason he has it. “But you told me you’d never degrade your other tats by putting something meaningless …”

He looks at me oddly, and as I look back and forth between his eyes and his wrist, it feels like I’m missing something. “Look closer.”

It’s the only explanation he offers and I immediately lean in closer, noting that up close the outline is fuzzy. But then I realize it’s not fuzzy at all, rather it’s letters intricately curved as an outline. “Hawkin? W-what?” I sputter as I connect the letters to form words. My lips fall lax. My heart skips a beat. My soul sighs with hope.

The letters form a single saying: Make it count.

My breath catches as a smug smirk lights up his face. I still can’t speak and the astonished look on my face must be hilarious because he starts laughing at it. “Don’t you get it, Quin?” he asks me and I think that I do, I really do, but I want to hear it from him. Need to hear it from that desire-inducing mouth of his. “This is the next lyric of my life’s song. You’re the bridge, the chorus, the final chord. This heart,” he says, eyes softening and smile widening, “brought you to me. Was the catalyst that forced me to see so many things I probably otherwise wouldn’t have. This heart represents you, represents me, and is my promise to you that I’m going to make it count.”

The silence that echoes around us is deafening. My heart tumbles endlessly as the love I feel for this man surges to new heights. I start to speak and he brings his fingertips to my lips to quiet me so that he can finish.

“I know my life is crazy, unpredictable, and chaotic with tours, endless hours in the studio, crazy groupies, paparazzi, you name it…. I know that with your schoolwork and my music we’ll be apart some, but I don’t care…. I want to make this work any way we can because you’ve helped me find myself. I love the man you’ve brought out in me.” He shakes his head, his words stunning me silent but causing my heart to race. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m still fucked up, still have a sick mom and a whacked brother, but being with you makes it all bearable. I’ve done this all alone for so long that I didn’t know how lost I was until I found you…. And I don’t want to be alone anymore. I just want you, with all of your flaws, your mistakes, your smiles and giggles, sarcasm and bad habits, the way you play instruments, singing off key, everything. I just want you.”

The simplicity of the last line and the conviction with which he says it melts my heart. Simple terms that mean so much to me. I look at him, my bad-boy rocker who’s such a good man, and I know there is no one else I’ll ever want to be wanted by. Just him.

“Whew,” I tell him, my smile so wide I feel like my cheeks are going to crack. “And I thought you were going to say you just want me to be naked.”

He bursts out laughing, his fingers tickling over my ribs momentarily before he brings his lips to mine. “Oh, I definitely want a lot of that. I mean that’s a requirement of this thing we have here.”

“Oh it is, is it?”

“Mm-hmm,” he murmurs in that melodic way of his that turns me inside out. “Who else is going to be the star to my burst?”

I just shake my head at him and his ludicrous sweet tooth. “I thought I was the fruit to your loop?” I tease, loving the feeling of his hands on me, of our bodies pressed together, the feeling of his heart pounding so hard against mine.

“Sweetness, I’ll take you any way I can get you. All I want is to make it count, make this count, make us count.” He pleads with me like he’s making a case. And I don’t think he realizes that he doesn’t have to tie in my no regrets, make it count motto to convince me to pick him because there is no need.

This girl is already madly in love with him, tattooed pink heart and all.

And for some reason I’ve been so afraid to voice it, have held back the words on my tongue so many times. I was afraid that if I let him know how much I cared for him we would fall to the fate of my many other relationships. That the pushing-away defense mechanism that was ingrained in him would take over and I haven’t wanted to rock our boat.

But sitting astride him naked, hearing his confession, his reasoning, while he makes a case for me to choose him tells me how stupid I’ve been to wait. That he needs to hear it too. If he believes in us enough to permanently ink a tattoo when he’s only ever chosen symbols of all that he holds close, I know it’s time.

I can’t resist any longer. I lean forward and press a kiss to his lips as tears swim in my eyes. My heart swells with love for him and I need him to know. “I love you, Hawkin Play.”

He pulls back and now the tables have turned, his eyes are shocked wide and his expression becomes one of surprised enamorment. The image will be forever burned on my mind, the feeling ingrained in my soul.

“I’ve never fallen in love before, Quin…. I’ve never allowed myself to, but I know you are the only one I want to write the next song of my life with.”

I meet him halfway, fingers sifting through his hair, lips sealing our connection, hearts entwining with each other’s in a lazy decadent kiss teeming with emotion. He brings his hands to frame my face tenderly as he leans back and looks in my eyes, his breath still feathering over my lips.