Page 106 of Naughty Dreams
Straight from them to you.
No need to scribble again. He’d already written that song. Before. He hadn’t had a chance to play it for the band. Let them do their magic to it.
“Are you shopping or dicking around?”
The edge in Roy’s voice snapped him out of his fog. Roy was yanking his chain, and since DJ refused to appreciate why he was doing so, he returned the favor.
DJ tilted his chin toward his shoulder, giving Roy a sneering look without actually looking at him. “Since you get paid the same, why do you care? This place make you blush?”
Deliberately ignoring Roy, DJ stepped past him and started checking out what the store had to offer. Vibrators, sexy lingerie, artwork, videos. Metal, rubber, latex, leather. Incense, oils. Music played with a cock-throbbing beat.
Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he sauntered past the shelves until he reached the items he’d come to see.
Neon signs glowing in shades of pink and purple were scattered across the wall above them. The sensations the products below offered were described in cursive lettering.
Soft. Warm. Smooth. Hard. Pleasure. Pain.
The shop catered to women and couples, which worked for DJ. He’d been in plenty of the male-oriented places. They made him feel unclean and unsettled, in the wrong ways. Sure, he’d jack off later thinking of the blatant visuals, but the coarse and purely physical stimulation left a bad taste in his soul.
Not that he would have admitted that to Steve, Tal and Pete. They laughed it up together over squishy pink rubber pussies and crazy triple X movie titles.
As he stared at floggers, paddles and crops, he imagined them striking his flesh. He captured a flogger’s strands between his knuckles, the texture teasing his skin as he followed the tails to the end and let them fall free.
DJ felt it when that Roy-shaped heat went still and focused more intently upon him. Another shudder jolted his fingers.
Fire became a touch
With a tight, tight coil.
A column of need
Burning me.
Bind me in it
Burn my flesh, my bones, my mind
To ash.
After weeks of silence in his numb soul, the muse was pummeling him. DJ was once again a gawky high school kid, hunched over his guitar in the high school cafeteria, everything he saw a song to be written. Like the shop bell, heralding a story as soon as it crossed the threshold of his awareness.
Roy’s muttered curse was a veiled threat—or promise—that shot adrenaline through DJ, tightening every muscle.
“I’ll be right outside, DJ.”
The bell spoke, followed by the decisive thud of the door. His bodyguard had scoped the place, determined it was secure, and gone outside.
Except DJ only really felt safe when he could see Roy.
He needed to trash that pathetic thought, and the half-assed verses he’d just composed. He needed to go home and get shit-faced.
It brought to mind what had happened a few nights before they started this road trip. If Roy hadn’t been set on it at the time, it had likely tipped the scale in that direction.
DJ hadn’t drunk to excess in years, but the pain had become too much, and he’d given it his all. By the time Roy came off shiftand back to the cottage, he’d needed help to walk. Roy had had to physically dump him into his bed.
He'd then stood over DJ a few hours later while DJ expelled the alcohol and his internal organs into the painfully snow-white toilet. Roy dragged him there before he could throw up in the bed, knocked him to his knees and put a firm hand to the back of his neck when DJ unwisely tried to fight him. Between heaves, DJ told him to fuck off, and Roy threatened to drown him in his own vomit.
But by the time he was done, the clamp of the hard hand had softened, and was kneading his tense muscles. Roy had brought him a towel to wipe his mouth and helped him back into bed. As he turned the lights off, he spoke in a mild tone that was anything but.
