occasionally bumping lightly against his.
She had no idea where he was taking her, but she trusted him and that in itself was something vibrantly alive and real between them.
He drove into St Kilda and parked the bike. They were back in the same street outside the same laneway they’d shot the video in.
Now it was dark and deserted; a laneway used by delivery vans and garbage disposal trucks, a place for unease to lurk. He wasn’t speaking and he was beginning to make her curiosity harden into something less compliant. Still, when he pulled her into the dark and backed her up against the coarse brick wall, she went willingly. But when he spoke, his words came from the place his fears lived, the place where he rejected taking risks with impossible odds.
“You’re a bitch, Rielle. I should have seen you coming.” He pressed against her, one hand on the wall, one on her face, stopping her from dropping her chin as his words bit. “I should’ve run a bloody mile.”
He saw defiance widen her eyes and it sliced through him. He dropped both hands to his sides and stepped back. “Now it’s too late, game over. You win. You’re under my skin; you’re in my head. You’ve drugged me and I’m terminally addicted to you.”
Rielle reached for him, but he took another step back, ran his hand through his hair. A yellow light from a nearby neon sign bathed her in a dirty glow. All or nothing, kiss or kill, pleasure but certain heartbreak. Everything about this confused him, even his responses to her were beyond his understanding. Like the Bolt from the Blue gig, she was outside his experience and dangerously out of control. One minute he had her captured against a wall, and the next he remembered she played games and was a rock star with the world at her feet and he wanted to walk away cursing and not look back.
She saw it; his conflict, his indecision. “Jump, Jake.”
He knew that was the choice. Leap into this thing with her or dive away and never regret it, but decide it now. No more trying for a better hand, no more point scoring.
He snatched her elbows and dragged her against his body, finding her mouth and kissing her hard. She wrapped her arms around his neck, and he shuddered as he hugged her close. When he broke away to take a breath, he said, “I’ll take anything you give me, anyway you give it and I promise I’ll never ask for more than you want me to have.”
Rielle used her hands and her lips to show him she’d jumped too. She kissed him like she was chasing fame, like she was sacrificing ordinary, like he was the world tour. Pent up desire flooded through his centre, heating his fingertips, railroading his senses with need for her. He forgot where they were when he tore at the buttons on her shirt. He didn’t think to stop when she let him slide her jacket off and tear the shoulder of her top down so his lips could tease her nipple.
Their touching was a frenzy of sensation: warm silken skin and sharp nipping, scraping teeth, hard grips and soft strokes. Jake found last night’s milk crate, kicked it deeper into the shadows and sat, pulling Rielle onto his lap to straddle him. He had her bare to the waist, his hands everywhere, his lips following, his heart on stage making music you could scream to.
“This is what I wanted to do last night and to hell with who was watching.” His voice was shredded with want.
She panted, throwing her head back to let him lick a path from breast to ear. “I knew it. You bastard, you made me wait. You made me need you.” In the dark, she was a live flame in his hands, sparking heat, feathering, undulating against his body. Setting him ablaze. Jake was white hot, without cogent thought, functioning only to adore and possess her.
The headlights from a truck entering the opposite end of the laneway stopped Rielle’s hands on his jeans zipper; woke them from their dazed passion; both of them blinking in surprise. She laughed and he pulled her against his chest to hide her nakedness as the headlights flared and switched off, the driver’s startled face visible a moment and then gone.
Rielle shimmied back into her top and Jake found her discarded jacket. “We’re not finished.”
In place of an answer, she twisted