Page 38 of All Right No
“Could,” she mused. “Not going to. This is punishment after all, for what was it—oh yeah, being a dick and imagining I’m screwing your celibate mate. You know, the cute one with the swishy blond hair and a snow leopard lurking behind his beatific exterior. I think he’d like to plant some dynamite under your arse right now just to be rid of the constant headaches you cause him. I’m a sweeter alternative to dynamite, Ash. You’re going to leave those boys be to finish off that track without your interference, and you’re going to accept that they’re going to Australia without you and maybe even find it within yourself to be okay about that, because we’re going to stay here and work on making sure that it never has to happen again. Are you with me?”
Bodily, maybe. He couldn’t honestly swear that he was listening to what she was saying. His concentration was focussed further down his body than his ears. His balls were getting ready to burst, and his hips were lifting involuntarily in synch with the sweeps of her hand along his shaft. If she wanted him to do actual processing of information, this wasn’t the right way to go about it.
Two strokes of her thumb over his tip and she’d make him come. Literally, he’d be seeing stars. No one could put two and two together properly at a moment like this, and especially not when they were deliberately being held on the brink, an agonising stroke away from release.
“Ginny, please.”
“Say it. Swear you’ll let your perceived problems with Xane’s playing pass, and that you’ll not cause additional stress for everyone by digging in your heels over your exclusion from the trip.”
“I’m never going to be happy about it,” he huffed. Sweat lay beaded across his brow, and his temperature was soaring. His body was warring with his brain. His dick more than ready to fly off to Happy Land, while his mind was snarled up with migraine-inducing thoughts.
“You don’t need to be happy. You just have to accept. Say it. Promise it, and I’ll make all the pain and all the tension go away.”
He couldn’t. Much as he’d like to. He wasn’t going to lie to her.
“At least accept that it’ll be nice to spend some time here alone together.” She did the thumb sweep thing, causing his toes to curl and his breath to hiss out through his teeth.
“I always look forward to spending time alone with you.” If his words were rather disjointed, that was her doing.
Ginny smiled and nodded. “Do you want to come?”
“Oh, yeah!”
“Then come.”
He didn’t know how she did that. He couldn’t even make himself climax on demand like that. Ginny though, she simply had to purr the words and his mind and body joined forces and leapt to oblige. Okay, so it was the brush of her thumb that really tipped him over the edge. He couldn’t cope with the mental intensity of it. His nerves fired all at once. His mind gave way to oblivion. And hot spunk flew and landed all over his stomach. Ginny swirled her index finger through the mess.
“Feeling better now?”
Confused—that’s what he felt. She’d given him pleasure, yet he ached as if he’d gone several rounds with a professional boxer and got himself beaten black and blue. “Ginny, take these damn things off me, will you?”
He swore she actually considered leaving him tied up.
“Okay.” She pouted, and did as he asked, but left the lock on the handcuffs until last. Ash grabbed hold of her as soon as he was free. He rolled them onto the floor, so that he was stretched out above her. “I’m sorry I’ve upset you with my actions,” he confessed. “I’m sorry I’ve neglected you.” His gaze strayed for a second to the mould of his cock she’d left to set on the table.
“If you do it again, I will use Ever Ready Ash.”
He believed that.
“I don’t set out to be belligerent and unreasonable. I just need to feel like I’m contributing something useful, you know?”
“I get it, but the guys aren’t looking for the new Ash. They want the old one. The guy they’ve toured with for the past however many years. They want your flourishes, but they want them to appear as you hear them and as your fingers create them. No one can play the same way you can, Ash. Being able to pick up your guitar and play, that’s the important thing, not anything else. If you can’t play, the fact you’ve sat for hours upon hours in the studio with them working on the album won’t matter. Being able to walk out on stage with them and play for your fans is what’s important. And you need to be able to convince the guys, and manager that you can do that by the middle of next month. Right now, nobody thinks you’re going to pull that off, least of all you. So how do we change that? How do I make you believe in yourself?”
He shook his head, and rolled onto his back. “I don’t know, Gin. I don’t know.”
Was admitting that he knew she was right the first step?
Ginny sat up, with her legs bent before her, and hugged her knees. “Play something for me now.”
“Ginny, I can’t.”
“It doesn’t have to be anything complicated. What’s the first thing you learned to play? It’s okay to start small and ease back into it gradually, as long as you are doing it. Knowing that you’re going to muck up and get frustrated isn’t a reason not to try. It’s just a hurdle you have to get over.”
“I’ll try,” he promised. “But I’m not ready for an audience yet.”
She sighed, but accepted his assertion with a nod, before rising to her feet and hunting around for some clothes. She commandeered one of his T-shirts and pulled it on, along with a pair of his shorts too. “Okay, but pick the guitar up and play, and pick a pen up too. There’s no reason why you can’t write a song. It doesn’t matter if it’s not all that great. Muscles get more flexible with use. The next song might be epic, or the one after that. You can get back what you’ve lost, Ash, you can. I know you can, and if you can’t believe in yourself, then do it out of spite. Show Iain Willows that he hasn’t got the best of you. Show him his efforts amounted to nothing and that Black Halo are stronger than ever.”
“I’ll try,” he promised, catching hold of her and pulling her down so that she was sat astride his lap. “Can I have some of my clothes too, please?”
