Chapter 50

CHAPTER FIFTY

JOULES

52 bobas left until my baby sister dies … (the same day)

I walk into the bedroom to find Kaycee sitting on the edge of her bed, lithe body leaned back onto her palms. She was waiting for me. I smirk as I stroll in, heeling the door shut behind me.

Something about today felt comfortable for me, like riding in to save the day for Lake is what I’m supposed to do. But then Tam came back, and he wasn’t nearly as horrible as I expected him to be.

I rub my chin, images of her throwing her arms around him flooding my brain.

My baby sister doesn’t need me anymore, does she?

For real, at this point, there’s nothing that I can do to break the curse.

“Are you okay?” Kaycee asks, her voice softening a little as she sits up and plants her chin on a fist, that pornographic mouth of hers puckered up. I have to look away, sweeping a hand through my hair. I’ve already given her my biggest secret, so what’s one more?

“Not really,” I admit, a completely uncharacteristic confession. I don’t tell people my problems. I fix other people’s problems. I … Shit. “I don’t think that Lake needs me anymore.” I sound so lost when I say that, but Kaycee shifts her expression into a gentle, understanding smile. “I know that she’s twenty-three years old, and that this is normal. She should be transitioning into her own space, meeting new people, growing up.”

I let my head fall back, closing my eyes against the pain.

Growing up is both sad and joyous, all at once. What’s worse is having that journey cut short. As long as Lake is happy with Tam then … then I’m happy, too. I’m fucking happy for her. I’m so goddamn happy. All I want is for my little sister to live.

Joe, please. If you can hear me, put all of your love and your energy into Lake and Tam. Help them break the curse, so that I can die in peace.

“Joules.”

I open my eyes and drop my chin to find Kaycee standing right in front of me. She puts her palms on my chest, and some of the tension leaves me. She slides that same palm up to rest against the side of my neck, and I come apart.

I put my arms around her, and she makes this soft, happy little sound, hugging me back. Since that night in Chinatown, we’ve been fucking each other nonstop. But hugging? This is a little new to us. Well, it’s a lot new to me. I haven’t been with many girls that I just felt like hugging.

“I ran over there to play white knight, and she didn’t need me.” I give a soft little laugh, nuzzling against Kaycee’s sweet-smelling hair. She always smells good, like peach and vanilla. Better is when I fuck her, and she smells like our combined sweat, her arousal, my release. Ugh.

“You know what that means, right?” Kaycee whispers, not at all bothered by the media shitstorm caused by that video. When I get home, I’m going to pay my female cousins to beat Chloe up for me. What a cunt. How dare she betray my sister like that? She might’ve killed her. If Tam were behaving as unreasonably as he was in the beginning, she would have.

“You tell me,” I murmur, walking Kaycee back toward the bed. I want to feel her naked skin against mine, to remember that I’m not alone in this, that I have someone who knows that the curse has struck me, too. “You’re smarter than I am.”

“Oh, really?” she teases, but she relaxes back on the bed when I push her down on it, spreading those sexy thighs as she looks up at me. Her lashes are so long, so dark, and she knows just how to wield them like a weapon. I reach down and flick open the button on my pants. I need this today, to lose myself in Kaycee’s embrace, so that I can feel alive. Primal. Human. “Joules, wait,” she says when I reach out to put my hand on the inside of her knee.

But oh. She says to wait? Her thigh muscles tremble when I trail my fingers up toward her pussy.

Kaycee reaches out to put her hand over mine.

Our gazes clash, and I wet my lips, pulling my cock out and fisting it in my hand.

“Yeah?” I arch an eyebrow, but we both know that there’s some serious shit we need to talk about.

“The show in San Francisco was my last show with Tam. I have a few days on-set for the drama next week, and then I’m off for the rest of the month. Longer, if I say so.” Kaycee tucks her knees together, nice and tight, and then leans in toward me. I almost can’t look at her because I know where we’re going with this, and I’d rather talk about anything else. “Joules, let’s go to Arkansas together. Let’s find your Match. Let’s save your life.”

Now, I don’t even know if Kaycee truly believes in the curse. I’ve told her everything that I know about it. I’ve shared my Frost family journal with her. I’ve shared the Cloud drive with the uploaded archives. I … told her about Joe and Marla. But whether she believes me or not, she acts like she does, and I can’t ask for anything more than that.

I stop rubbing my cock. I almost go soft, actually. Kaycee notices and scoots closer to the edge of the bed, gently pushing my hands away so that she can take over. I hiss out a breath and close my eyes.

“Joules, let’s go to Fayetteville together. We have time.”

We have less than eight weeks. It’s not enough.

But … but it could be.

I hate this sense of hope in my chest, like I might live through this to see Tam and Lake get married and make little pop star babies. Like I might live to see if Kaycee really is the woman I’ve been waiting my entire life to meet. Like I might not die on the ground, gasping for breath, the way Joe did.

“Take me home to meet your family,” Kaycee insists, and damn it, she says it while her hands are wrapped around my cock. She fists me nice and hard, gives a possessive tug that has my lips curling and a little growl slipping out. But then you know what this woman does? She drifts the tips of her sharp fingernails along my length, and I lose it.

I open my eyes to see her staring up at me in challenge.

“Suck my dick, and I’ll consider it,” I tease. We both know I’m going to give in. Because as much as I pretend like I don’t care about dying, I do. I’m afraid, too. I want to stay with Lake and Kaycee and my parents. God, my fucking parents. Aunt Lisa and Maria and Lynn and Uncle Rob and my grandmother.

“You better not renege on this deal, Joules Frost,” Kaycee warns me, letting go of my cock so that she can grab a pillow. I take a step back, and she tosses it onto the floor in front of me, getting to her knees with her blond hair falling in loose waves around her shoulders.

“Sorry for pullin’ a Tam Eyre on ya,” I tease, but Kaycee doesn’t take the bait.

She’s dead serious.

I feel myself sobering up, but then she wraps her pretty hand around the base of me again, and I’m struck right through the heart. Lost to her. I hate losing, but when it comes to KQ? It’s a privilege.

“No, Joules. Not a joke. Take me home. Let’s break the curse together.”

“You forget that breaking the curse might involve me screwing a married mother of three.” Definitely getting soft now, but Kaycee takes care of that by working her hand in a corkscrew down the length of me. My breath hisses out, and I buck my hips into her grip.

“There’s a chance of breaking it platonically, right?” Kaycee pumps me once, twice. I’m not thinking about platonic anything at this point. I’m not thinking, period. Which is probably why I agree to this shit. “You’re not allowed to give up on me, Joules. You’re not.”

She leans forward, spreading her bright pink lips over the head of my cock. Lipstick smears over my shaft as Kaycee takes me in until my crown hits the back of her throat.

“Shit, yes,” I murmur, letting my head fall back, fingers digging into her hair. Kaycee is the female version of me, a persona that I never expected to vibe with let alone fall for. She takes what she wants when she wants it, and she isn’t shy about it.

She attacks my dick with that same level of vigor, pink lips wrapped around me, an enviable level of suction in her throat that has my pelvis gyrating against her face. I fuck her mouth like it’s her pussy, and she responds like she’s getting off on the act as much as I am. Kaycee sucks hard, her lips tainting me with waxy fuchsia lipstick, her tongue wet and hot and wanting. She isn’t shy in her movements or her noises, bringing me right to the edge of climax before she pulls back.

I’m panting above her as she swipes an arm over her mouth, smearing her lipstick. She looks up at me from big brown eyes framed in dark, curled lashes.

“I am not going to let you sabotage yourself, Joules.” Kaycee uses the bed to get to her feet, reaching up with both hands to snatch my shirt and yank it over my head. I fist my own cock, wet from her saliva, and I work myself up into a frenzy as I watch her undress. Kaycee shoves her hot pink sweater over her shoulders, shimmies out of her tight, black pencil skirt. “I’ve put my money on you, and I refuse to be widowed at such a young age.”

“Widowed?” I tease, voice rough, husky, desperate. She could ask me for anything right now, and I’d grant her wish—even if her wish is for me to go after a married mother of three. I thought Lake’s Match was bad, but mine is worse. Mine is so much worse. “Getting a little ahead of yourself, eh, Kaycee Quinn?”

“I could have any man I wanted, and the man I want is you, Joules. Are you going to spit on that reality or are you going to embrace it?” Kaycee lifts a brow and then slips the straps of her bra down, revealing her taut, little breasts, her furled pink nipples, her heaving breaths. When she steps out of her panties, I lose myself.

“I’m embracing it, KQ,” I tell her, panting between strokes of my fist down my lubed cock. “If I live through this, I’ll put a ring on your finger.”

She smirks at me.

“As if that’s the ultimate goal. Don’t fool yourself, Joules. All I want out of this is a slice of happiness, okay? We don’t have to get married.” An entirely naked Kaycee crawls onto her Beverly Hills bed, falling back into the pillows and then spreading her pale thighs for me. She says something to me in Korean that I don’t understand but makes me feel crazy anyway.

All of that is great. All of that is hot as hell. But what’s even more intense is when she opens her arms to me in an embrace.

Before Kaycee, but after Joe, I didn’t have anyone that I could break down in front of. Anyone that I could be vulnerable with. I have that now, and it feels so temporary that I just freeze where I am. For once, I’m not a hot-blooded fuckboy with an easy smirk and quick hands.

I’m just … Joules.

“God, don’t look at me like that, Joules, or I …” Kaycee gestures at me, and I take a deep breath. I kick my boots off, push my pants down, and crawl into bed with a pop star.

Her long nails drift through my hair, teasing my scalp and drawing breathless sounds from me that I’m not sure I’ve ever made before in my life.

“How are you doing this to me?” I whisper, kissing her shoulder, the fine birdlike bones of her clavicles, between her perky breasts. “You let me fuck your mouth like a bad girl, and then cuddle me in your bed like a lost boy.”

Kaycee strokes my hair as I kiss down her belly, tracing her stomach muscles with my tongue. When I hit a spot she really likes, they contract, this concave shape to her sharp inhalations that I memorize. My teeth grip her belly button ring, give it a tug. She exhales, stirring my hair as California sunshine bathes the room in a surreal golden halo.

It’s just an afternoon like any other, fifty-four days before my death.

“I’m not a girl, and you’re not a boy,” Kaycee murmurs, still petting my hair. I look up at her, and the expression on her face is pure confidence, the same sort of take-no-shit attitude that she used to claw her way to the top of a cutthroat industry filled with wolves and ringed with judgmental onlookers.

She’s a queen, a goddess, and that expression? It makes me feel like maybe she’s right, like we could break this curse together if we tried. It’s a false hope, but I cling to it because I want so desperately to live. For her. With her. Because of her.

“You could’ve fooled me,” I tease, pressing my lips to the smooth silk above her clit. Kaycee is hairless from the neck down. Her brows are sharp and arched over those big eyes, her lashes full and thick. But that halo of wavy hair around her pale, dichotomous face? That kills me.

Half-angel, half-devil.

I smile as she smirks down at me, fisting my hair and trying to push me where she wants me to go.

“I’m a woman—your woman. You’re a man—my man. And we’re going to make this curse our bitch. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I reply with a little smirk, but when she tries to push me down again, I surge up over her, gathering her into my arms. We’re both laughing as I slip a condom on, throw her over a small mountain of pillows, and fist that golden hair for a nice, hard ride.

Afterward, we put silky robes on—mine is too short, and too pink, and ridiculous—and we make our way downstairs to the hot tub. KQ has champagne, a wall-mounted TV, and exquisite taste in slasher films.

A pop star and her bodyguard.

Such a cliché.

Such a promise for a happily ever after.