A Hundred Ways to Break Up (Let's Make This Thing Happen 2) (7 page)

“And the story that appeared online on Thursday? ‘Curvy lurv for Ray. He’s back in the game!’ What about that? Was that him, too? Was that just part of the game? Am
I
just part of the game? What
is
this, Ray? I never did know what you could possibly see in me...”

“No! You have such a low opinion of yourself. You blow me away, Emily. Right from the first time I set eyes on you in the crowd. Do you know what it’s been like? Right now I should be focused, committed, but instead you’ve set my head spinning and all I can think of is you. You don’t know what I see in you? I see everything I could ever want. I see a beautiful person. I see the woman I long for. I see my dreams.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Like I’ve possessed you.”

He looked hurt. He looked like everything was bottled up and he was about to explode. A man accustomed to being in control who now did not know what to do or say. Rocking from foot to foot, he opened his mouth, then closed it. Opened it again.

“You have,” he said softly. “Possessed me. Obsessed me. Become the focus of everything. And you know what? I love it.”

She wanted to cry. She wanted to laugh. She didn’t know what she wanted. All at the same time.

He came to her, reached out, put his hands on her arms and drew her in against him so that she could breathe his scent, feel the solidity of his lean body, hear the thudding of his heart as she tucked her head into the hollow between neck and shoulder.

“I love you, Emily. This isn’t a game. It isn’t a ploy. I love you.”

She should have said it back. That was what you did, right? Guy says he loves you, it’s only polite you say the same.

You shouldn’t hesitate. You shouldn’t still have that tiny part of your mind saying, Wait up, Emily, what if this really is all just some kind of ploy, a bit of a fling to feed the gossip mill?

That tiny voice that’s always determined to question everything, undermining anything that might be good in your life.

The tiny voice that stops you from saying the words that rush to the surface.
I love you, Ray
.

And then the moment had slipped away and she was still standing there, tucked into his tall frame, and he was holding her, and they were both wondering–

§

“So where did
that
come from?”

She looked up into those dark eyes. “Everything’s moving so fast,” she said, knowing that wasn’t the complete explanation. “I think I know where I stand and then I don’t. And I don’t like feeling as if I’m being manipulated. I have enough at stake in my life without having to worry about whether I’m being used or not.”

He nodded, then stepped back and guided her down to the big, dark sofa where he sat with one leg tucked up under him so he could turn to face her, holding her hands in his.

“You’re not being used,” he said. “And this isn’t a game. I’m dead serious. That story in the press... I don’t know. It could have been Mo. He pulls that kind of shit every so often if he thinks it might help ‘build the buzz’, as he puts it. I’ll ask him. It could have been someone else. Your friend Marcia knows about us: maybe she’s been indiscreet. Or maybe someone saw us: Caffè and L’Auberge are public places, after all – we could have been spotted at either of those. But I’m not fooling with you, Emily. I know what’s at stake. You have to believe that.”

Hesitant, she nodded. “I do have to believe that,” she said, knowing that if she didn’t, then what did that leave? “I’m sorry.” She had to try to explain. “I do believe you. It’s just... my head’s spinning. I can’t concentrate. I just leap from thought to thought.”

His words from moments ago came back to her then:
Right now I should be focused, committed, but instead you’ve set my head spinning and all I can think of is you
.

What she was feeling was what
he
was feeling, only he’d put it so much better.

I love you
.

She’d been staring at her hands, clasped in his, but now she looked up at him. “Hold me,” she said. “Hold me, and don’t ever stop.”

§

“So how was Berlin?”

This afternoon hadn’t gone quite how she had anticipated. How long had they been sitting like this? Settled back into that deep sofa, her head on his chest, just being together, no words. Letting that awful tension that had come from nowhere pass.

Maybe it was seeing Kayleigh and Uncle Bill this morning that had put her in this strange mood. Organizing the wedding while the funeral loomed; planning a future that wouldn’t include Kayleigh’s mother, Bill’s wife. Such an awful, awful thing.

“Berlin? Have you ever been? I always think it’s one of the strangest cities in the world. Place looks like a building site, even this long after the Wall came down. It’s stark and austere, but they’re some of the coolest, most creative people on the planet. Or some of them are, at least.”

“And the rest of them?”

“Sadly, they’re the ones I do business with.”

There was a tension in the way he held himself now. It was a shift she had learned to recognize. Ray was a man who didn’t like to lose control of things, didn’t like being pushed around, didn’t like it when he didn’t know for sure what was happening. It was why he could record an album in twelve days straight and then spend months mixing and tweaking the recordings, because he wanted to get it just right.

“Mo said it was TV people you were seeing?”

“TV. Record company crew came along for the trip. They all want a piece. There’s a lot at stake with this new album. I’m a lot of people’s pension plan and they all want to call the shots. And everyone tells me I have to just go along with it all. I haven’t been this much of a corporate whore since I was a nineteen year-old kid from nowhere on the cusp of breaking through.”

“When all you really want is to make music, right?”

He looked at her, as if he thought she was teasing, or mocking, but then relaxed when he saw she wasn’t.

“I don’t need all this.”

“So what
do
you need? Why are you flying to Berlin and jumping through the corporate hoops again? Do you need the money? Is that what this is about?”

He snorted a laugh. “No,” he said. “Ray Sandler Inc isn’t about to run dry.”

“So why are you doing it? To prove a point?”

“Is this what you do? In your business consultancy? I bet you’re good.”

“I’m very good.” They were both smiling now. “I’m very
very
good.”

“Oh, I know!”

They kissed. Slow and tender.

“So what would your advice be?” asked Ray, as Emily settled her head on his chest again. Such an intimate way to be: half-sitting, half-lying like this.

“I wouldn’t give advice yet,” she said. “I could offer you some truisms, of course, like try to understand what you can control and learn to let go of what you can’t. Treat people well. Try to dictate the pace and the rules. That kind of thing. But you can get that kind of advice anywhere. What I do is work my way into your business mindset, understand it from the inside. I’d keep asking questions until I understood what made Ray Sandler Inc work, or not work.”

“So ask.” He’d moved a hand to the back of her head now, the thumb gently stroking the nape of her neck, sending thrills right through her.

“Why are you doing it?”

“‘It’?”

“This comeback. You say it’s not for the money, and yet you’re frustrated because you’re being pushed around by the people who do control the money. Why?”

There was a long pause while he thought about her question, then he said, “Because that’s how the business works?” His answer had turned into a question, because he clearly didn’t understand his own motivations.

“But you don’t need it. You don’t need ‘the way the business works’ to dictate to you. Why make this record?” She sat up now, so she could see him better.

“Mid-life crisis?”

“You’re a bit young for that.”

“It’s been a while,” he said. He’d only released two solo albums before: one immediately after the Angry Cans split, and then another a couple of years later. Nothing in something like seven or eight years. “A few months ago I was talking with Rake about the old days. I guess that set me thinking...” Rake had been the Cans’ bass player, the one everyone fancied if they didn’t fancy Ray. According to press stories Rake and Ray weren’t on speaking terms but that was clearly not true. “A couple of new songs came along and then without ever planning to I was thinking in terms of an album.”

“Did you feel you had to prove something?”

“Maybe. But it’s more than that. To be honest, there’s not much left to prove–”

“Except that you can still do it.”

“Ouch!” His mock hurt face was very close to the real thing.

“Maybe not prove something then,” she said. “Are you trying to recapture something?”

“The music.” Unlike his earlier answers, this one was sharp, decisive. “It really is all about the music. I wanted to get back to that passion for the music, and to do that properly you have to be playing in a band, putting a record together, putting on a few shows. The works.”

It really was all about the music.

“You know the most valuable piece of advice I can ever give?”

He waited for her to go on.

“It’s to stay true to yourself. To understand why you’re doing what you do and then make everything you do serve to further that.”

“You could have said that at the start.”

“I could. It wouldn’t have meant anything, though. But after a bit of digging you’ve just told me what it’s all about, and suddenly the advice means something: stay true to your music and don’t let people lead you away from that. You’re not doing it for them – you’re doing it for
you
.”

Now she echoed his position from earlier, sitting sideways on the sofa, one leg tucked under the other. She liked him like this, so wrapped up in his world, exploring.

He smiled now, and Emily said, “What? What’s so funny?”

“Just wondering how much you charge?”

“For my advice? I’m expensive. But I take payment in kind.”

An eyebrow, slowly raised. He leaned forward so that his face was close to hers. “You think it’s time to settle up?”

“Maybe.”

He traced a finger down the side of her neck to her collarbone, teasing her blouse open just a little so that the fabric pulled at the buttons and across her breasts.

She reached up and released one of those buttons, so that now his finger could run down over the first swell of her breast. He turned his hand and the contact from one knuckle was firmer than his finger had been. She released another button and he ran his knuckle down her cleavage, the back of his hand on the smooth skin of one breast, the back of his finger running across the other.

As she moved towards the next button he covered her hand, his fingers inside her blouse, against one breast. Holding her like this, he drew her towards him, kissed her, made her heart race and thump.

She rested her free hand flat against his chest, the muscles so solid.

It felt almost like a first time. That kiss. The feel of him. Maybe it was a reaction to the tension from earlier. It hadn’t exactly been a fight, but it had come close, and it had changed this moment, made it into a tentative, exploring thing, made it into something incredibly precious and valuable.

She ran her hand down over his ribs, over his belly to his hip.

When she had freed his jeans he raised himself slightly so they could both ease them and his shorts down over his thighs.

She met his look, and held it as she moved to kneel between his legs, as she took him in both hands, as she dipped her head and swept her tongue up across his balls and along that hard shaft. As she took the swollen head into her mouth and pushed down.

He was so big... She was barely halfway down when he hit the back of her throat and she had to swallow.

His hand came to the back of her head, fingers laced into her hair, applying gentle pressure. She swallowed again, and felt him slip briefly into her throat before he slid back out. Swallowed again, and held him there, before slowly drawing her head upwards.

His eyes had narrowed, but still he held her look. His mouth had sagged open, and now his hand fell away from the back of her head.

She started to bob up and down, as fast as she could go, matching her rhythm with those two hands around the base of his shaft.

Pressing his hands into the sofa, his whole body stiff, he pushed upwards against her.

She wanted him to have this. Wanted him to feel how he made
her
feel.

She squeezed her mouth tighter around him and that was all it took. He thrust upwards against her and she felt a throb in the base of his shaft, felt a pulse of wet heat exploding in her mouth. She swallowed, sucking him in deeper so that she swallowed that salty wetness and the swollen head of his manhood. Swallowed again and another pulse of his juices filled her. Again, and he started to grow soft in her mouth, a delicious, intimate transition.

She swallowed again, more gently, and then held him in her mouth. Swallowed again and this time was able to take him fully inside her so that her face was pressing against his belly, her chin against his balls.

She would have stayed like that, but his hands drew her head away, and then he extricated himself, moved to kneel next to her, took her head in his hands again and kissed her. He must taste his own juices in her mouth, must be taking them in, sharing them.

He eased her onto the sofa, and this time it was her jeans that they removed, her lacy shorts that he drew down her legs. Her leg that he lifted to rest over his shoulder so he could slide a hand underneath her, squeezing her ass, holding her.

He dropped his head and kissed the narrow strip of hair that ran down the center of her mound.

He worked his way down, his lips kneading that softness, his tongue sliding. She felt a tremor of the muscles in her belly when his tongue slid over the hood of skin that covered her clit, and then again when the tip slid between her labia and swept back up to that little hard stud, flicked over it, started to glide slowly around it.

Lower down, he pressed his knuckles against her, grinding against her softness, then allowing his knuckles to slide along the folds of her sex, parting them. A finger found her opening, pressed, and she felt it slide inside, pressing deep until the inside of his thumb and the knuckles of his other fingers came to press against her. He pulled away again and now, when he pushed, there were two fingers sliding inside.