Page 131 of The Comedown

I tug on her hand, making her stop to face me.

“Here?”

“Yes, here.”

Here is way too small for someone like Collette to be performing. It’s a fucking club. Even without a headliner, she could sell out superdomes by herself. I don’t know why she hasn’t tried yet. She’s always on tour with someone she probably shouldn’t be…like me.

“Fuck that. I’ll play with you.” She doesn’t need my name by hers to fill this entire club, but I still want my body by hers when she does it. I could watch her perform every night for the rest of my life and not get tired of it. “Just lemme know when and—”

Her lips cut me off, but before I can deepen the kiss, she’s pulling back.

She did it. She kissed me in public.

Holy. Fucking. Shit.

“I missed you,” tumbles out of me. It’s only been a matter of hours of us being apart, but I don’t care. Missing her doesn’t even begin to cover what I’m feeling right now.

Those kissed lips lift into a small smile, hypnotizing me, and she whispers, “I missed you, too.”

She descends the final few steps, revealing an entire other dance floor, except unlike the one upstairs, this one’s got a giant pit of red Jell-O taking up the large space. A couple people are already sloshing around the foot-high gelatin, pushing at each other like they’re trying to wrestle but can’t get their footing.

“Happy birthday.”

I twist my head to her, asking, “You did this for me?”

Her gaze finds mine, and I open my mouth to say something else I probably shouldn’t, but somebody crashes into me from the side, causing the words to catch in my throat.

“Happy birthday, fucker,” Axel says near my ear, wrapping me in a tight hug and lifting my feet clear off the floor as he bends backward. Laughing, he carries me all the way over to the pit before dropping my ass into the Jell-O—strawberry-flavored from the smell of it.

All at once, several other people jump into the red gelatinous sea, slipping and sliding and throwing handfuls of my all-time favorite food in every direction. Someone else tackles me to my back, then my hands are out, blindly yanking others to the floor as well.

After a few failed attempts, I make it to my knees, sending anyone in reach back into the thick ocean of Jell-O, only to lose my balance when they try to take me with them. It’s a free-for-all in here and the smile on my face is so big it hurts. I’ve done a lot of crazy shit in my life, pulled a lot of stunts, wound up in even more sticky situations, but this puts all that to shame, mainly because I’m not faking anything right now. Even during my highest highs, I’ve had to fake a portion of my happiness. Probably because I don’t ever feel like I deserve it. Any of it. Not when I’m told what to do, what to say, who to fucking be. The person everyone sees, the person everyone wants to see, is different from who I feel like I’m meant to be. Definitely different from who Collette sees when she looks at me, really looks at me. She thinks I deserve this. She thinks I deserve her.

Amongst all the red, I spot her sun-golden hair, and my smile grows even bigger. I don’t know if I actually do deserve her, but I’m gonna try my fucking hardest to, damn it. I want to deserve her, more than I’ve wanted to deserve anything else in my life. With her, everything feels possible. I’m already playing instruments again. Piano and guitar aren’t optional—they fucking fuel me—but I’ve been treating them like they are because I was following someone else’s directions.

I don’t feel like following shit anymore. I want to be myself, and it’s finally starting to feel like I might actually be able to.

But the person who made that seem possible in the first place isn’t by my side. I need her next to me. Now. Always.

I notice Slade inching his way over to Collette, and despite every molecule in my body screaming for me to steal her away from him, I hang back to see what his next move is. I’ve given him plenty of warnings already about Collette, so what’s he gonna do when he thinks I’m not watching?

Suddenly, two sets of slim hands grip both of my shoulders, tugging me backward, and it’s only when I’m flat on my back that I’m able to see who did it…the twins from the bus.

Collette

“There we go,” Slade mutters beside me as two beautiful girls, identical in almost every way, crawl over Julian in the Jell-O pit. The Jell-O pit I had to bribe the club owners with two free performances just to get them to agree to let me have in here tonight. The Jell-O pit I had to ban Julian from my bus all day, so I could make call after call after call, ensuring it’d be ready in time. I wanted to spend the day with him today, but an entire dance floor of Jell-O is actually incredibly difficult to pull off. It’s much more labor-intensive and time-consuming than I anticipated, so after spending practically every minute together since New Orleans, I had to leave Julian to his own devices for the day in order to keep all this a surprise.

I wasn’t sure how it was going to go, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried all day long whether Julian would be the one to turn up tonight. Or if it’d be Julez. Or if he’d even show at all.

He did though. Julian came through with a beautiful new song, with lyrics I’ll be thinking about for days to come, and he had clear eyes and even clearer intentions…until he disappeared under a pair of model look-alikes much, much younger than me. And skinnier. And sexier.

Some king of mine.

Unable to even see Julian anymore, I spin around, keeping my back to the Jell-O pit, keeping my back to him. Maybe I should just leave now. It’s what I should’ve done from the beginning.

The problem is even with me seeing Julian coming, I still wasn’t able to stop him from breaching my rules, my walls, my…

This is what I was afraid of, what I’d be afraid of every day if I was to be with Julian, actually be with him. Not only the constant worry of which version of him I’ll be getting thanks to his substance abuse, but also the temptation all celebrities face on a daily basis. Dangle a carrot attractive enough in front of them and they’re bound to bite.