We Are Made of Stardust - Peaches Monroe #1 (27 page)

“Good girl,” he said, sliding his fingers back inside me.

I moaned and closed my eyes, embarrassed by how quickly he made me wet.

“Now get on your knees,” he said.

Shuffling around, I got on my knees, praying he wouldn’t be turned off by the view from that direction.

He entered in one smooth thrust.

I gasped and got a tighter grip on the back of the seat.

Oh, the angle and the depth, it was exactly what I needed. My anger flared up as he filled me and left me no place to hide.

“You’re the worst!” I moaned.

He grunted, plunging deeper and shaking my whole body. “You don’t mean that.”

I clutched the seat. “You’re a bad influence!”

“I’ll show you a bad influence.”

What happened next was what I would call a Good Rogering. Flesh-slapping, grunting, sweaty grasping, and even (bless his heart) a courteous reach-around.

In the midst of the Rogering, with his fingers on my clit, I came, crying out and biting the back of the leather seat I was hanging onto for dear life.

By the time he finished, with a triumphant moan, my hair was stuck in strands to my face, and I was as damp as when we’d fled the hot spring.

As he withdrew, he gave my ass one hard slap. The crack sound startled me, and my flesh stung.

I turned around quickly, giving him a hurt and confused look. “What was that all about?”

He shook his head, like he was the confused one. “Sort of a high five?”

“You’re kind of a dick sometimes.”

He raised his eyebrows in a bitches-be-crazy-sometimes kind of look—the exact look that actually makes us crazy.

“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.

As I stared at his face, an anger simmered inside me. My orgasm had been deep, but also unsettling, as if the tremors and the rough physicality of what we’d just done had shaken something loose in me.

“You’re a lot more like Drake Cheshire than you let on.”

Smirking, he wiped a strand of damp hair from my cheek. “You love it. You fucking love it. You can’t wait to get reamed again.”

I shoved him away from me. “Gross. Get up front and drive me home right now.”

He made a pouty face. “But I’ve got the whole day off.”

I reached past him and grabbed the door handle to pop the door open. The summer breeze freshened the air in the back of the car and brought everything into focus.

I had the strangest out-of-body experience, where I was myself, but also outside of myself, seeing this chubby, naked girl, sweaty and used, in the back of a car. I didn’t like what I saw when I opened my eyes like that.

“We’ve had our fun,” I said. And there was that word. Fun. Was I having fun? I was uncomfortable and emotional.

“I’ve pushed you too far.” He shook his head, leaning toward the open car door, but not getting out. “I don’t have normal boundaries. It’s all my mother’s fault.”

Sarcastically, I said, “Oh, of course. Blame the mother. Don’t take responsibility for yourself.”

He stepped out of the car and closed the door gently.

My words hung in the air, and I shook my head with my face in my hands. I was doing it again. Pushing someone away. And I was glad that soon it would be over—albeit a little sad it was always so easy like this. Guys never fought for me. I wasn’t the kind of girl they fought to keep. Friday night booty call, yes. Grand romantic gesture, no.

The tinted glass separating the front and back rolled down enough for him to politely hand me back my clothes. Shockingly, everything except one sock was there.

In a minute, the car started moving, and I was finished getting dressed before we turned back onto the main road back to town.

“I know I shouldn’t blame my mother,” came Dalton’s voice. The glass divider was already rolled up again, so it had to be coming from a speaker.

“Hello?”

“Are you talking? I can’t hear you unless you push that green button on the ceiling.”

I looked up and spotted the button. Of course! Now that I saw the button, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t been able to find it when Vern was driving me out to Dragonfly Lake.

“You don’t have to talk,” Dalton said.

I pressed the button. “This is weird.”

His laugh crackled over the speakers. “It might be easier to tell you this way.”

“What?” A dozen horrible thoughts raced through my head, including but not limited to the following:

He was married.

He was dying of an incurable illness.

He was leaving town tonight.

He never wanted to see me again,
but thanks for the fun.

“I was born into an adult film star family,” he said. “Also known as porn stars.”

I had no response for that at first, but after a moment, I pressed the green button and said, “Congratulations?”

“My mother, my father, and their girlfriend were all porn actors. Correction. Some of them
continue to currently be
porn actors.”

I stared at the tinted glass on the driver’s side, where the outline of his head was barely visible.

“And that’s my big secret.”

I pressed the green button. “I didn’t know that about you.”

“Nobody does, except my attorney. When I was sixteen, I ran away from home with a… family friend. That was when I moved to New York and lived in that awful apartment I told you about. It was really stupid of me to trust someone who was barely more than a kid herself, mentally. I had no idea how dangerous it was.”

“I understand. I did some dangerous things when I was about that age.”

We continued to drive along the road into town, the trees outside the windows being interspersed with farmhouses and lawns. Who was this family friend he’d run away with? I didn’t feel jealous, so much as fiercely protective of a young and naive Dalton Deangelo.

He wasn’t talking, so I pressed the green button again. “So, I’m guessing Dalton isn’t your real name?”

“Do you hate me for lying to you?”

“I don’t hate you. And you lied to the whole world, so I know I’m not that special.”

“Ouch.”

I sat back in the seat and crossed my arms.

He continued, “Everything else I told you is true. My family members were fine with keeping the secret. As long as the checks kept coming. I’m always looking over my shoulder, though. That reporter, Brooke Summer, has a major hard-on for getting some dirt on me.”

I leaned forward and jabbed the green button. “She’s a phony piece of shit.”

“And a lousy lay.”

I sat back, crossing my arms again. I couldn’t see his face, so I had no idea if he was joking or not.

Dalton continued, “Full disclosure. I slept with Brooke once, after an awards function. It was the kind of dirty sex you regret while you’re still doing it. I took off right after and didn’t give her the intimate interview she’d been after, and then I refused to take her calls.”

Ugh. The image of Dalton and that woman. Together. I felt sick, a gritty nausea deep in my stomach. And his parents were in porno movies? I liked to think of myself as being open-minded and progressive, but I’d seen enough reality shows about the adult film business to know it had a real seedy side. And he’d been raised around all those people. What would that even do to a kid? I couldn’t imagine.

I pressed the intercom button. “Is that everything?”

“Yes, Peaches. That’s everything. I’m an open book to you. I hope you won’t tell anyone, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if my secret got out. I was only in a few adult films myself, and it was credited to other fake names.”

I pressed my fingers to my lips, horrified. He’d been in a few adult films? How many? Not that it mattered. Even one was too many.

He continued, “Okay, now that’s everything. I was underage when I did those films, so if word gets out it’s me, they’ll have to pull them. They won’t be able to profit. Of course, it will get leaked, and the gossip sites will run screencaps, and I’ll be a laughingstock with limited career options when my show inevitably ends, but I won’t die. You can’t die of shame, can you?”

The tinted screen was still up between us, and I was glad he couldn’t see the horrified look on my face. I’d just had sex with a former porn star—a former underage porn star who was himself the offspring of porn stars. My emotions were truly split. I was both horrified and also insanely proud, like that one time I drank vodka shots too quickly and threw up a little in my mouth.

I fucked a porn star.

Maybe I was a fun girl, after all.

“Peaches?”

“I’m still here. And no, I don’t think a person can die of shame.” I licked my lips, choosing my words carefully. “It’s very brave of you to bare yourself to me. It takes great strength to be vulnerable.”

“That’s really nice to hear. You’re a sweet girl, do you know that? I’m always slobbering over your hot body like a damn fool, but you’re the real deal. The whole package. You’re a triple threat: cute, smart, funny.”

The car came to a stop, and I blinked at the tinted window, surprised to see the front lawn of my house.

I turned and looked up at the green button on the ceiling. I could just press it and tell him my secret, too. My heart sped up at the thought, my cheeks flushing.

Instead, I pushed the car door open, jumped out, and ran all the way to my house without saying goodbye.

Trespassing? A sordid porn star past? It was all too much. Way too much.

~

When I ran from Dalton’s car into my house, part of me expected him to chase me. Not a big part of me—
because I’ve never been the type of girl guys fight for
—
but a small, hopeful, pathetic part of me.

The car sat in front of the house for a long time. Maybe fifteen minutes. From my bedroom on the upper floor, I watched the darkened windows for some sign. And then he just drove away.

Some sign.

Shayla wasn’t around, so I phoned my mother, just to hear a friendly voice.

“Oh, good. A sane person,” she said. “How are you, sweetie?”

That’s when I started bawling.

With patience, she eventually talked me down, and I explained to her a bit about what had happened that day. I left out the cowgirl-style sex from that morning, and the trespassing, as well as the car sex, and the porn-past revelations. So, basically, I told her almost nothing.

“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” she said. “He came over and you ate scrambled eggs. Then Shayla got weird and jealous, and said he was fake. You and the hunk went for a drive to Dolphin Falls, and then shit got real when you had sex in his fancy car.”

“Mother!”

“Petra. I may be twice your age, but I know what goes on at Dolphin Falls. And don’t forget, my generation invented the concept of
shit getting real
.”

“I feel like I’m being really stupid. He can’t possibly like me as much as he says he does, can he?”

“Why wouldn’t he?”

“Because I’m a regular person, and he’s Dalton Deangelo.”

“He’s still human.” There was a paused as she talked to Kyle for a minute.

“I should let you go,” I said. “Maybe I’m over-thinking this.”

“Is the problem that you still have feelings for Adrian Storm?”

“Hah! Not in a million years.”

“Mm-hmm. That’s not what I heard from his mother. From what I understand, you were flirting with him, inviting him upstairs to see your old bedroom.”

“Gross! Mother!”

“Then go for the TV fellow. At least he’s not bankrupt. Apparently Adrian had his fancy sports car taken away, so now he’s got nothing.”

“Don’t sound so disgusted. I’ve got the same amount of
nothing
as Adrian. I work at a bookstore for what amounts to minimum wage based on the number of hours, and I’m still paying off my credit card for a cuckoo clock I bought three months ago in an online auction.”

“We all live in houses of our own construction.”

“You live in a house bought by… some movie star who rogered you.”

“Exactly,” she said.

I howled in exasperation. I hated it when she got philosophical, but more than that, I hated it when she was right.

My phone beeped with a dying battery. “Running out of juice, Mom. I should let you go.”

“Date this movie star for a while,” she said. “And then when Adrian is on the upswing, maybe give him a shot. There’s no rush. You’re only twenty-two. Have some fun, will you?”

We said goodbye and I ended the call, feeling a tiny bit more normal after a typical conversation with my mother.

For the rest of the night, I vegged on the couch, alternating between TV and books. I forgot to plug my phone in, so it sat mutely on my bed while all my friends sent me text messages and left voicemails I didn’t know about.

I ate dinner in blissful ignorance as my mailbox filled up.

I went to bed, feeling confused and ambivalent about seeing Dalton again, but I slept soundly, still ignorant of what awaited me the next day.

~

On Sunday morning, Shayla tapped timidly at my bedroom door.

With my face still in my pillow, I waved in the general direction of my closet. “Help yourself. Wear whatever you want.”

Sounding really concerned, she said, “How are you feeling, really?”

I sat up, on high alert. “What did you hear?”

She gave me a patronizing look. “Everything.”

“You talked to my mother?”

“Not yet. Should I?”

My skin felt clammy. Something really bad had happened, and Shayla knew, but I didn’t. I reached for my cell phone, but it was cold and dead.

She said, “How are you? Really?”

“Shayla, my phone’s kaput. I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to be upset about right now. Would you please break it to me gently?”

“There are half-naked photos of you all over the internet.”

Every sweat gland in my body pumped its guts out. The world went dark, pulling into a pinhole of light. My mouth watered. The sweet relief of passing out, however, did not come. I was still sitting in my bed, in drenched pajamas, my roommate giving me her best concerned look, mixed with a touch of her I-told-you-so look.

“Show me,” I said.

She pulled up something on her phone and handed it to me. I fully expected to see hidden-camera images of me trespassing in the hot spring, or even images of me transferring naked to the back seat of Dalton’s car.