Page 47 of Not Another Love Song

She’d had orgasms before.

She’d had plenty of orgasms before.

She’d had plenty of good orgasms before.

What she hadn’t had was an orgasm with another person.

Ever.

And there hadn’t been “another person” very often, either.

There had been Ronnie Schultz from high school. He’d laid her down across the couch in his basement and kissed her until their clothes were off.

And Kevin Peters, an old friend from her first neighborhood who she’d caught up with two years ago. He was a year older than she was. They’d ended up having sex on an air mattress on the floor of his apartment.

She hadn’t come either time.

Gwen was at the 6 train, sliding her card through the turnstile and running for a closing door before she could stop to think what this meant.

Maybe all that had happened was that Xander Thorne wanted to have sex with her.

And she wanted to have sex with him—had thought about it plenty of times—but things had moved too fast in there. She hadn’t felt that raw passion with Ronnie or Kevin or anyone else in her life.

Ronnie had asked her to take out the recycling when she left, and Kevin had texted her a week later to invite her to Trader Joe’s—to carry bags, she’d found out later. She’d felt thoroughly discarded by each of them. If Xander Thorne only wanted sex from her, she didn’t think she could handle that. To be discarded by him.

And furthermore, she still wondered what this was about for him. Just another groupie to play with? An “extraordinary” girl until the sheets were cold?

Or was it truly about the orchestra? Was he throwing her off her game just days before the first rehearsal, payback for taking first chair?

If he’d wanted to get her all turned around, confusing her before her big day, then he’d done a pretty good job.

She leaned on the subway doors as the train pulled away from the station, her mind circling the realization of how easy it had been to get her in his apartment. How easy it had been for him to find excuses to put his hands on her.

How easy she’d made it for him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Gwen threw herself into preparing for her interview and the first day of rehearsals, decidedly not thinking about the sound of his breath in her ear, the way his fingers played her like music, or the way the untitled song haunted her.

Or the way she’d called him Alex.

She didn’t tell Jacob. He wasn’t home when she’d come back to the apartment, and by the time the key turned in the lock later that night, she’d already decided she had made a mistake, and she didn’t need any advice on that mistake, thank you.

As it turned out, the “gig” Thorne and Roses had booked in the city was Saturday Night Live. Gwen’s jaw dropped as the announcer called out their name, a picture of Xander and the Roses popping up on the screen before the host started their monologue.

“Oh, shit,” Jacob said around a mouthful of lo mein. “Isn’t that that guy you know?”

The egg roll fell out of her fingers and onto the rug.

The next day, Xander Thorne had 172,026 Instagram followers by nine a.m. She accepted Jacob’s new boyfriend’s offer to sign her into his gym that afternoon, but the radio station playing at the gym had picked up the songs Thorne and Roses had played the night before. She had to crank up her music to drown out the sound of Ruby humming through the dance beat.

By Monday, the magazine with Xander Thorne on the cover had been pushed to the front of the magazine stands, and his follower count had risen by 50,000. SNL’s video of their performance had 2.7 million views.

She pushed all of it out of her head, though. Nathan had asked for a last-minute meeting with her that afternoon. She rode the train down to Carnegie and swept up the stairs to Nathan’s office just as the door was opening.

Xander Thorne stepped out of it.

Gwen froze in her tracks like a deer facing down a Dodge Durango. Her heart jolted awake.

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