Page 31 of Always Been His

“Because the rest of you,” her finger taps the second button of my shirt, “didn’t seem to mean it. And you just kissed me.”

I don’t have a comeback for that.

I let go of her wrist and her hip. She crosses her arms over her chest, and the action pulls my eyes down her body before I can shut it down.

“Where do you want me, Gray?” she asks, soft, the corner of her mouth tipping up.

Riding my face. On my cock. Between my sheets.

I drag my eyes back to her face.

“On stage, Songbird.”

9

GRAYSON

TWO YEARS AGO

The line wraps three times around itself in the back hallway of TD Garden. I’ve been standing in it for over two hours, and everybody around me is vibrating with excitement. Practicing what they’re going to say. How they’re going to pose with her. Most of them are teenage girls in synthetic purple wigs and her signature off-the-shoulder crop top, mouthing lines into their phones and fluffing their curly wigs. The twelve-year-old in front of me is in a homemade ECHO shirt and her mother is in matching denim, and the kid keeps craning her neck to count the bodies in front of her while her mother shushes her with little words of encouragement that only stroke her excitement higher.

I wish I’d come here with Iris.

My palms are sweating like a goddamn middle schooler at a winter formal. I don’t know what I’m going to say. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know whether Sienna will even be as excited to see me as I am to see her. She has been away from home for four years, and I don’t know if that was her choice or her obligation. She might want to leave everything from Maine behind her by now. Who could blame her? She’s a popstar.

The line shifts, and I’m finally in the primary room. Ten people stand between me and her.

And there she is.

She is sitting on a high black stool behind a small white table with the ECHO step-and-repeat behind her, and my whole chest does something I’ll never admit to under oath. The wig is the purple one she has been wearing for the last year, but tonight it’s bigger than anything I’ve seen on her in a magazine, a violent fucking wall of curls falling over her shoulders and down to the middle of her back, parted off-center so a curl drags across her cheekbone every time she tips her head to listen. She is in a tiny white crop-top with little gold stars scattered across the front, a bright red bra underneath visible through the cotton, and baggy jeans puddling at the heels of her boots.

She looks unreal.

A teenage girl in a denim skirt and combat boots steps up to the table holding a folded leather jacket against her chest like it’s a baby. Sienna’s eyes light up before the girl has gotten close enough to put it down.

“Oh my god,” Sienna gasps, sliding off the stool. “Bring it, bring it, bring it. Let me see.”

The girl lays the jacket out across the table. It’s hand-painted, Sienna’s name across the shoulder blades in dripping silver letters, the cover art from her first EP painted underneath in careful detail, and along one sleeve in tiny print, the entire chorus of one of her songs.

“You did this?” Sienna breathes, her fingers hovering over the paint like she is afraid to smudge it.

“With my mom,” the girl manages, her voice already breaking.

“This is the most beautiful thing anybody has ever given me,” Sienna says, lifting the jacket. “Are you serious right now?”

“I love you so much,” the girl chokes out.

“Oh, girl,” Sienna coos, rounding the table and pulling her into a hug. “I love you, too. And I love my present so, so much.”

She pulls back and cups the girl’s face in both hands, her thumb sweeping under the girl’s eye to catch a tear.

“You and your mom made me something I am going to wear every single tour for the rest of my life. Every tour. Forever. I’ll be wearing this jacket onstage when I’m sixty.”

The girl nods, frantic.

“What’s your name?” Sienna leans over the desk on her tiptoes and grabs a silver marker.

“Mara,” she squeaks.