Dirty Letters(55)

“What?” She put down her chicken leg, wiped her mouth with a napkin, and squinted at me. “You look like you’re thinking something dirty.”

I smiled. “How could I not be? You’re sitting at the table with no knickers or bra on. And fuck, I’m getting a hard-on watching you sink your teeth into that chicken leg. Sitophilia—I looked it up while you were feasting on my potatoes. I never knew I had a food fetish.”

Luca bit her bottom lip. “Speaking of fetishes, I bet you must have . . . done a lot of things . . . you know, experimented with women. I’m sure there’s been lots of opportunity.”

This was most definitely a conversation that I shouldn’t have. So I redirected where it had been heading. “I want to do a lot of things with you.”

Luca tilted her head. “Like what?”

“Off the top of my head? Well, I’d like to take off your shirt and titty fuck you. Slip and slide my cock through those big, beautiful baps and come all over your delicate neck.”

Her cheeks pinked up and her hand rose to touch her neck. “What else?”

“Well, since you’re asking . . . I’d like to bend you over my knee and smack that sexy ass a few times—hard enough so you feel it, and I leave a handprint on your fair skin. Then I want to hold you down with your cheek pressed against your desk and take you from behind while looking at my handiwork.”

She swallowed. “Oh. Wow. Okay. What else?”

There were a million things I wanted to do to her. So many ways I wanted to have her—in every orifice, in every position. But there was one particular thing I’d wanted to do with her ever since I first set eyes on her outside of my house in California. It wasn’t erotic in the least, yet it was what I wanted. “You know what I’d really like to do? Maybe we can give it a go tonight?”

“What?”

“Drink a bottle of wine, fuck, then order pizza and eat it in bed naked.”

The two of us started to crack up. Luca stood and walked over to sit on my lap. “I honestly couldn’t ask for a better way to spend our last night together, Griff. That sounds perfect.”

She was right; it was perfect. Only I needed to correct one little detail. And she’d given me a seamless segue to have the conversation I’d been itching to have since before the sun rose today. I locked my hands around her. “It is a perfect way to spend tonight. There’s just one thing we need to fix about that plan.”

She smiled. “Okay. What’s that?”

“Let’s not make it our last night together. I need to spend more time with you, because soon enough I’ll be on tour again and life will be crazy. I want you to come away with me now while we have the chance, Luca.”



She was more freaked out than I thought she’d be.

I’d written my schedule for the next month on Luca’s calendar and laid it in front of her to explain what my plans were. I pointed to Friday.

“I have to be in New York the day after tomorrow for the taping of a late-night talk show. Saturday I head to Connecticut for an interview at some college radio station, then back to New York for three different morning radio station appearances on Monday. Tuesday is a down day, but I have to be in Detroit on Wednesday night for a private showcase my label put together with some industry people. We’re going to play a few songs from our upcoming album for magazine reviewers and the big music bloggers. Thursday we go on to Chicago for three days to shoot the video for the first single. Then I’m off for a week before the tour starts. This is what I was thinking.” I took one of her hands in mine and brought it to my lips for a kiss. “Hear me out. Keep an open mind.”

Luca closed her eyes for a minute in an attempt to keep calm. When she opened them, I smiled.

“That’s my girl. Okay . . . here we go. First, we drive to New York. We do that late tomorrow night so the roads are empty. I reserved an Airbnb on the Lower East Side—it’s a two-story brownstone, and I took both floors so there wouldn’t be anyone else in the building but us. The place has a nice big desk that looks out a window where you can work while we’re there. We’ll stay there Thursday through Tuesday. I’ll do a day trip to Connecticut on Saturday and come back at night. You can write while I’m gone. Sunday we can spend the day in bed, maybe trying out some of those things I can’t wait to do to you and watching old movies. Monday you’ll work while I go do the last of the radio shows, and then we’ll drive to Detroit at night before going on to Chicago. After that, we drive back to Vermont and stay here for a week. My assistant will pack up my guitars and send them here, and he found a studio that I can use to practice during the day so I’m not loud during your writing time. The tour comes after that, but we use the next two weeks to ease into things, and we won’t worry about that schedule for a while.”

Luca’s eyes started to well up. I pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “Talk to me,” I said. “Tell me what you’re thinking?”

One big, fat tear rolled down her cheek. It caused an ache in my chest as I wiped it from her beautiful face.

“I want to. I really, really want to. But I’m afraid, Griff. What if I have a meltdown in the middle of the trip?”

“What if you don’t have a meltdown and you have a great time?”

She frowned and closed her eyes. “You’re the sweetest. But I’m serious. I don’t think you fully understand how debilitating a real panic attack can be. Simply making plans causes an irrational amount of stress for me. I don’t just have anxiety the minutes before walking into a building, Griffin. I obsess over the possibility of even having a panic attack. It’s all I can think about when I know I have to do things that I’m uncomfortable doing. Every day my fear builds and builds until I get to a place where I start to crack.”