Page 82 of Always Been His

He pinches my nipples, just hard enough to make me gasp, and his hips thrust up to meet my downward stroke. “I’m never letting you go. You know that, right? Never. You couldn’t lose me if you tried.”

“I’m not trying to lose you.”

“Good.” Another thrust, harder this time, and I cry out into the night air. “Because you’re stuck with me. You’re stuck with me forever, Sienna. This is it for me. You’re it for me.”

I want to say something back, something that matches the weight of what he just said, but he chooses that moment to thrust up hard and deep, and my words dissolve into a moan that echoes across the empty field. I don’t care who hears it. I don’t care about anything except the way he fills me, and his hands on my body, and the way he mutters my name under his breath like a prayer.

“Sienna. God. Sienna.”

I brace my hands on his thighs and ride him faster, my hips rolling, my breath coming in short sharp gasps that fog in the cool night air. Behind me, Grayson groans, his hips meeting mine, his hands gripping my ass and guiding my movements.

“Just like that,” he grunts. “Just—fuck. You feel so good. You’re so tight. So wet for me.”

“Always for you.” The words tear out of me, ragged and honest. “Only you.”

“I know.” He says it with such certainty, such unshakeable conviction, that tears prick at the corners of my eyes. “I know you are. My good girl. My perfect, beautiful girl.”

His fingers find my clit, and I shatter. My orgasm rips through me so hard I can’t breathe, my vision going white, my body clenching around him as wave after wave of pleasure crashes through me.

“That’s it.” Grayson doesn’t slow his strokes, working me through my orgasm with his fingers and his voice and his unshakeable attention. “Let go for me. I’ve got you. Let it all go.”

I come apart, my orgasm tearing through me like a storm as Grayson buries himself deep. He groans my name, and I feel him pulse inside me, filling me, his hips jerking against my ass as he rides out his own climax.

For a long moment after, neither of us moves. We’re both breathing hard, slick with sweat, trembling with the aftershocks. Grayson’s forehead is pressed against my shoulder blade, his arms wrapped around my waist, and I can feel his heart pounding against my back.

This is the way it was always supposed to be.

21

SIENNA

The options haven’t changed overnight.

I’ve been turning them over since before the sun came up, lying in Grayson’s bed in the dark with my eyes open, and his arm across my waist, consumed by the three days left on the deadline from my label. I’ve read the contract more times than I can recall, and the terms don’t change no matter which way I look at it.

Break it: fifty million dollars, the catalog locked, the masters gone, the songs I wrote about Grayson at nineteen in a tour bus bathroom owned by people I’ve never met. My entire net worth plus everything I would have to sell, and even then, I’m not sure the math closes.

Sign it: twenty more shows on this tour alone. Six more albums. At least nine years of Nicki making decisions about my life and calling them professional obligations, sending me contracts to sign at night when I’m too tired to read the clauses properly. Nine more years of becoming so fluent in Echo that Sienna becomes a character I play when I get a rare break.

Wait for the label to sell: become property of a machine I’ve never met, run by people who see a revenue stream and nothing else, who have no reason to care whether the person attached to the catalog is sleeping or eating or in love or falling apart.

Every exit has a cost.

I park on the street outside Hamilton County High, preparing myself for what could be my last ever appearance as Echo.

The building is exactly as it was ten years ago. Same brick face, same faded green on the doors, and same sign out front with the movable letters. I went to this school for four years. I sang in that building for four years. I won the district vocal competition junior year in the auditorium and sat in Miss Flack’s car afterward and cried because I couldn’t believe anyone had voted for me. And Miss Flack told me to eat a granola bar and stop being dramatic, which was the most effective comfort she could have offered.

I get out of the Jeep.

Room 114 is at the end of the first-floor hallway. I can hear it twenty feet from the door. A warm-up scale, several voices finding the same note from different starting points, a chord that is almost assembled but not quite, one voice slightly flat on the top, one slightly late on the entry.

I slip into the room and see six girls ranging in age from eleven to thirteen, binders open, and posture at various levels of correctness. Miss Flack is at the upright piano in the corner with her gray locks pinned up and her reading glasses on, her expression set at the specific calibration she used to save for seventh period, which is patient but not infinitely so.

She looks up when I come in, holds my gaze for one second, and looks back at the piano.

“Continue,” she says.

The six girls don’t continue.