Hard as Rock (The Rock Star's Seduction 3)

There was the insane sexual tension before we slept together… the hilarious ride in the car with his fans… him buying the convertible Mercedes… the slipping into the concert incognito and bursting onto the stage… the nights of partying… the time Shanna had come to San Francisco, and we had gone wild until dawn…

But all of that was just fun.

It wasn’t sweetness, or tenderness, or romance.

It was just Derek playing the rock star, and me being seduced by that lifestyle.

I struggled to recall something really good, and all I could remember was the sex.

Of course

I remembered the sex: our first night together in Irvine – first tender, then deliriously savage. The mind-blowing orgasms in Joshua Tree. The over-the-top fucking as we drunkenly destroyed the hotel room. The almost religious experience on the salt flats in Utah.

But had he told me he loved me even once?

Only in his fucking drunk voicemails, where he was just as likely to call me a bitch.

But four years ago, he had told me he loved me… gently… sweetly… over and over again.

I had fallen in love with a boy four years ago, when I was just a girl… but the boy had grown into a completely different man.

I had just been too stupid and blind to realize the difference between the two of them.

They were both cocky, charismatic, sensual, fun, sexy, and gorgeous.

But the boy was tender and romantic, and would have given anything to keep me by his side.

The man was narcissistic, impetuous, addicted to ever-increasing highs – of attention from women, of adulation from his fans, of acting like an asshole.

And I had just been another drug for his addiction.

Idiot.

Idiot.

IDIOT.

Like a recurring dream that turns into a nightmare, I kept coming back again and again to our heartbreaking conversation at the very end:

Would you have cheated on me? Maybe not in two weeks, maybe not in two months… maybe not even in two years… but eventually?

…yes. Probably. At some point, yes.

You would have cheated on me before you got famous?

…probably.

Just with… somebody you met in a club?

Maybe.

The scorpion couldn’t have spoken any more clearly than that.

And worst of all, the final jab, the one that tore my heart clean out of my chest:

YOU cheated on YOUR boyfriend. YOU cheated on him with ME. But I guess since it was YOU doing the cheating, that makes it alright, huh?

That was the killer.

That was the one that gutted me and left me dying on the floor.

Because he was right.

I

had

cheated on Kevin. I could rationalize it all day long – that my boyfriend was an insecure jerk, that I was in love with Derek, that I was young and stupid and should have just broken up with Kevin, but didn’t know enough to follow my heart instead of my head – but, in the end, I had cheated.

Like my mother had cheated on my father.

Like Derek had cheated on me.

I was no better than him.

Except in one way: never,

never

in a million years would I have thrown it in Derek’s face like he threw it in mine.

But the fact of the matter was, I had given him something to throw.

I had committed the crime he’d accused me of.

I had done the same thing he had, just to somebody else.

All that self-loathing came back, and I wallowed in it. In the guilt, in the shame. And even as I hated Derek for what he had done to me, I wondered secretly if maybe I hadn’t deserved it. If maybe this was my punishment, my karma, for what I had done four years ago.

As much as I hated him, I hated myself even more.

Stupid little frog.

Of course she had given a ride to the scorpion.

Because she deserved to be stung.

Not just an idiot.

Not just stupid.

But bad.

I am bad.

I am bad, and broken, and horrible, and I hate him and I hate myself and I want to die.

It was a very, very dark plane ride.