Jahleel (26 page)

“Now,” he whispered, “will you relax and watch crap TV with me? I like havin’ you near me.”

Dumbly, I nodded, and a complacent smile crawled onto his face as he shifted me up further to the middle of the bed, grabbed the remote and switched on the television.

A choking warmth woke me.

Indolently, my eyes whispered open and it took me a minute to remember where I was. And with whom.

I was in a tangled, fever-hot heap with Jahleel Kingston—his right leg sandwiched between both of mine, one arm crooked around my waist, the other hooked under and around my neck, with my face pressed against his chest. I was being held on a tight leash, with little to no breathing space, forced to inhale whatever air he exhaled.

There was no cognitive memory of how we ended up in this heap, except that I’d dozed off watching a
Sons of Anarchy
marathon with him.

Being as quiet as I could, I untangled myself from the white-hot man-heat, snuck out of bed and sleepily strolled out to the kitchen.

The sun’s glare had faded outside the windows, heralding the inevitable darkness called night, so I decided I might as well start preparing dinner. No matter what the gold-eyed man in the next room said, he had to eat.

It had been a while since I’d taken care of anyone, what with Ferbie and Timberly not so dependent on me anymore. It was the other way around now, as I had the world at my beck and call. So much that I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed giving, helping, taking care of. Now, I was back in my zone.

As I was sliding a baking tray with two stuffed Cornish hens into the oven, music came on over the integrated speakers. Jahleel was up.

But I didn’t see him until around half-an-hour later when I was striking up a Davidoff while leaning against the kitchen counter. Just as I lit up the cigarette, it was snatched from my fingers. Turning, I saw Jahleel behind me, his fingers crushing my cigarette into a painful mess of tobacco.

“Hey!” I yelled, slapping my palm down on the counter.

“You need to quit.”

“You’re not the one to say I quit,” I shot back. “Look, I only get to smoke one cig per day now with my tour around the corner. Back off.”

“Not while you’re here.”

“Really, JK, I need to take at least one draw or I’ll go crazy.”

“Go crazy.”

Snatching up the pack of cigarettes off the counter, I started moving down the other side of the island to leave the kitchen. “Fine. I’ll smoke outside.”

By the time I got to the end of the island, Jahleel was there, his bare chest in my face. “What about the food? It’ll burn, ‘cause I won’t check on it.”

“Let it burn, then.”

“And what will I eat?” He licked his lips. “You?”

Slowly drifting my eyes from his chest and up his face, I hissed, “You really like to play, don’t you?”

Jahleel was like a heavy-current river you can’t get around, and if you tried crossing it, its depth and wild, swift rush will swallow you up whole and whisk you off to somewhere beyond your control, taking the final decision of your destination out of your hands. No woman stood a chance with him.

Biting his damned lip—which I now realized was a teasing habit of his—he slanted his head to the side, one eyebrow raised, and I stood there wondering what the hell that look was about, until our silence made me aware of the song playing over the speaker: Goapele’s
Play
.

How bloody apt.

To think I wasn’t even paying attention to the music when I said that. But, of course, he thought differently.

“You don’t like that I like to play?” he asked, mischievousness flashing in his eyes.

“No,” I snapped. “That’s the point. You have too many curves and intricacies. I want you to be
straight
.”

All that was a waste of breath, because he wasn’t even listening to me, as his hips were already moving to the music. He was wearing a white pocket-less sweatpants riding dangerously low on his hips, his defined V starting from his hipbone and disappearing down below the sweatpants.

Hell and damnation
, I wished he’d stop moving his hips to the rhythm like that so I could continue being irritated instead of distracted, and go get my smoke fix. I needed to forget about the ball of fire in front of me.

Jesus, why did he continue to do this? Torture me?

“JK,” I whispered, forcing my eyes away from his V. “You know how you look. You know how I feel. You know what I want.
Stop
fucking playing with me and this platonic thing will work out fine.”

Still, he wasn’t listening, as he snagged the cigarettes and lighter from my hand and tossed them aside. They bounce off a wall and fell to the ground.

Clasping my hips, he roughly yanked me up against him, urging my hips to move in sync with his. For a brief moment, I wondered if he forgot I couldn’t dance. Not even a little bit.

A brief moment was all I was allowed to wonder, because before I knew what was happening, I was being lifted up off the floor quite effortlessly by my hips, and placed up on the kitchen island.

To a sharp base drop of the music, he ripped my legs wide apart with a swift, yet smooth move, and next he was easing up on the island, moving in so that I had no choice but to lower back on the counter. He kept coming forward, slow, to the flow of the music, and I kept slithering further up on the island until we were in the centre.

What was he going to do? Dance on top of me?

Seizing my arms, he raised them above my head and left them there, slowly dragging the tips of his fingers down my inner arms, down my sides to settle on my hips again.

There was a passionate expression on his face as he listened to the music and made his every movement match the rhythm. He wasn’t even looking at my face, he was watching my body and his hands on my body.

In his mind, he was dancing. In my mind, I was being seduced.

Non-platonically so.

Lifting my Bob Marley tee up to my breasts, he touched the spot where the tee was bunched up with one finger and trailed it down my stomach, face intense, like a sculptor admiring his work of art.

Next, his tongue touched said spot and followed the path of his finger, stopping at my navel, where it dipped inside and swirled.

I moaned and sighed at the same time, as searing, aching heaviness settled within.

Without lifting his head, Jahleel flicked his eyes up the length of my body to meet mine peering down at him. Eyes still on mine, he pushed my thighs far, far apart, all in tune with the music. Then moving his head to the left, he licked his tongue down my inner thigh, traveling down and around to the erogenous area behind my knee.

“Hmmmnh,” I moaned again, as he switched over to the other thigh and did the same.

Drawing up on his knees, he lifted my right leg up with him and, oh so gently, ran his fingertips along my sole.

One would expect that to tickle, but with the gentleness of his touch in the right way, at the right spot, I was letting out another long-winded moan, frustratingly aroused.

The song dimmed in volume, signalling its inevitable end, and I knew once Goapele stopped singing, Jahleel would stop dancing. That thought frustrated me even more.

“Just fuck me already!”

At that, three things happened: the music ended, the oven beeped, and Jahleel’s phone rang from somewhere in the house.

End of.

I wish he had just let me go smoke the damn cigarette.

Crawling up over me, bottom lip caught between his teeth, he brought his mouth to my ear and said, “
That
was playing. I plead not guilty to any other alleged ‘playing’.”

He shifted and hopped off the island, sauntering out of the kitchen just as Neyo’s
Say It
came over the speakers.

Did he always put on these kind of music whenever he had women over and ‘played’ with them like he did me just now?

With each touch of his hands on me, each press of his lips on mine, thinking about him with other women was starting to hurt. It never used to. I used to feel crazy jealous, yes, but not hurt.

Being here, being with him, spending time creating memories to think back on, was downright stupid. A death-trap for my poor, piteous heart.

Why was I doing this when I knew it would never be more than what it was? When I knew Jahleel would never be anyone different than who he was?

Amanda’s right
, I slid off the kitchen island and turned off the oven,
I’m a frigging masochist.

Finding my pack of cigarettes and lighter where he’d tossed them on the floor, I scooped them up and stormed through the front door, slamming it with a loud bang. I didn’t want to think about which slut he was talking to on the phone in the other room.

More than ever now, I needed a smoke.

Chapter Fifteen

“O
h, wipe that miserable look off your face. Another fifty frames and we’ll be out of your hair,” declared the photo shoot director, Derek.

He stood behind my chair in the makeshift dressing room, watching me with queer fascination as Amanda dabbed my face with dramatic make-up. Extra-smoky eyes, long fake lashes, exaggerated eyebrows, ruby red lips, the works.

“Hallelujah?” I wearily proclaimed.

Having been at this acrobatic photo shoot in L.A for the past six hours, changing hairstyles, make-up and outfits, and being instructed to twist and contort my body into positions I didn’t know were possible. I was hungry, knackered and most of all, sexually repressed.

For the past eight days, I’ve been stuck in L.A with events too close together for me to fly back and forth to SF. But the main reason behind my miserable temperament was, of course,
him
.

The longer I was out of SF, the more distant I felt from
him
, and the more I missed something we didn’t have. Something we didn’t share.

It was dumb, I know. But I liked keeping my imagination alive.

Derek flashed me a wide grin that wrapped around his face, walking away as some distant voice called for him. He loved me, loved working with me, and always wore that broad grin whenever I was around.

Truth be told, most people just inexplicably loved me. A warm, automatic love, just as most people would automatically love a precocious prodigy.

Sometimes I thought it was because of Lion—the man was possibly the world’s most loved person—and sometimes I thought it was because he’d trained me well. My facial expressions, smiles and comments were, half the time, stark contradictions to what was truly going on inside my head: nasty, boorish, mocking thoughts. One could never tell based on my outer appearance.

“So,” Amanda swept the blush brush over my cheeks as she opened up the conversation.

She was transforming me into Cat Woman. My hair had been straightened and gelled back into a tight ponytail, my nails were painted black, and I was dressed in a butt-tight, faux leather onesie.

“…you’ve been unusually tight-lipped since you spent those two nights with…you know…
him.
”

Pulling at the faux leather sucked onto my thigh, I ignored her and that topic. Again. True, I hadn’t spoken of him at all and didn’t want to, but my thoughts were right there.