Page 48 of The Comedown

I shake my head at him as much as myself. “This isn’t my first rodeo and you’re not the first one to try to get in my pants.” He’s just taking longer to get the hint. “It won’t work out for you though, just like it didn’t work out for them.”

“Who else tried?”

A bitter smile forms on my lips. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Why don’t you tell me their names and I’ll let you know if I believe it. Addresses, too. You know, for shits and gigs.”

“And you swore I wouldn’t be getting off tonight.”

“You get off on torturing me, Collette?”

Our eyes taking in the other’s, I stick my tongue to the corner of my lips and give him one minuscule truth by nodding. I don’t know if it’s his jealousy or just his protectiveness overall, but I do like it. More than I should.

His fingers creep up my breastbone before grasping my neck in a firm, yet somehow still gentle chokehold, and for whatever reason, I let Julian tilt my head to the side.

“That scene you just caused,” he rasps against my cheek, making me sink my teeth into my bottom lip to keep from moaning. “That fantasy you created for me and every other motherfucker in the club, that was fucking torture. Tonight, I’m gonna replay that in my head, picturing it was my hands all over you, then I’m gonna fuck my hand, pretending it’s yours.”

I can feel myself melting. On the inside, the outside, everywhere. I’m like warm putty in Julian’s hands, he just hasn’t realized it yet.

Good. I have to keep it that way, by any means necessary.

I force a swallow down, the lump barely making it past Julian’s palm on my throat to say, “So, now you know the next time you try to teach me a lesson, you’ll be the one getting schooled. Now, get your fucking hand off me, and go back inside to find someone who’ll actually stroke your cock and ego at the same time because like I keep telling you, it won’t be me. I may enjoy winding you up a little, but that’s all it is. All it will ever be because I don’t fuck celebrities.”

He releases me to step back, a scowl etched on his heartbreakingly beautiful face.

Getting my breathing under control again, I run my gaze the length of Julian, remembering the image I walked out on of him at the photo shoot. Gloriously naked with tight and toned muscles everywhere. Colorful tattoos on even more skin than I realized. Julian may be good-looking, but that doesn’t change the facts, and the fact is, he is a celebrity. A clueless one, yes, but still, a celebrity just like me. Even worse, just like Bodee.

Eyes on the ground between us, he says, “I’m not just a fucking celebrity.”

“What else are you?”

“I don’t know. I just… Everyone wants something from me because I’m a celebrity, but you don’t want anything from me because I’m a celebrity. They both feel the fucking same, like I’m…”

Please don’t say like he’s not good enough. I don’t want to make Julian feel that way. I wish there was another way to do this without making it personal, but he’s not leaving me many choices here. He’s making me melt.

The silence grows sour, churning my stomach, and I reach out, lifting his face with just my middle finger under his jaw. For the first time, his heartbeat actually speeds up, pounding strongly under my touch.

“What does it feel like?”

His swallow jostles my finger momentarily, but then those turbulent thumps spring right back up, beating with wild abandon again.

“Like I’m free-falling.”

That’s exactly what being a celebrity feels like. You expect it to be some high honor, except instead of ever reaching it, all it feels like is falling with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hands thrust out at you. Not to catch you, or save you, only wanting. Always wanting. Something, anything. They’re constantly pulling you in all different directions until you don’t even know which way is up anymore.

Then one day a hand appears in front of you and they’re not asking for something, so you grow even more suspicious because sometimes those are the most ravenous of all. I can handle the people that make their intentions clear, it’s the other ones, the ones with hidden agendas and ulterior motives, that you really have to watch out for because they will take everything, and they’ll do it without a second thought.

But that’s just it, I don’t want anything from Julian. At all. He doesn’t know that though. Or if he does, he doesn’t trust it.

“It’s the comedown,” I say, pulling my hand back. “The free fall from whatever high you’re on, or think you’re on, to a reality that’s harsher than you were expecting, than you could’ve ever expected. This life isn’t all glitz and glam, Julian. It’s the fucking jungle, except during our fight for survival, we also end up killing ourselves.” Our creativity, our happiness, all the things that makes us us—we shrink those parts of ourselves either until they’re unrecognizable or they disappear altogether. Always with the same intention though—getting ahead, then staying ahead. Even the most innocent, well-meaning newcomers can turn into bloodthirsty hounds after their first taste of stardom. And the ones able to catch the scent of their own weakness early on, they’re usually the ones that make it the farthest because they already hunted down and killed whatever was holding them back.

The last time I showed weakness was…just before I killed it myself. When I was forced to kill it. That or be killed by it because it could’ve ended me. It would’ve.

I made rules after that, rules to keep me from being in a position like that one ever again—way before Julian came along—and I refuse to break them. I have Holter to keep safe, and in order to do that, I need to be safe, too. No matter the risk, and no matter the sacrifice.

“That’s what I’m counting on,” Julian says, and I frown.

“Counting on?”