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“The Ant Man!”
Fuck. Really, she’s not that surprised to see him waltz in like he owns the place, Ben and Tom and Siena trailing behind him. Simon is his friend, too. But it’s nearly eleven, and Kate foolishly took his absence as a sign that he had other plans.
The party has been a bit boring, all told, or maybe she just isn’t in the mood. It seems as good a time as any to make a quiet exit. Attention is fully focused on Anthony and his band, as it is everywhere they go, and it’s late. She doesn’t have the energy to deal with him tonight.
Kate is nearly to the door when a hand lands on her elbow. She already knows who it is by the tingle of awareness that works its way up her spine, knows by the large palm and guitar-calloused fingers, knows because she knows him.
He always finds her. She doesn’t know why she’d ever imagined she could escape his notice.
“Hey,” Anthony says, positioning himself in front of her. He’s already drunk; that much is obvious. His gaze is unfocused, and his words are slightly slurred, but his warm smile still makes her stomach clench. “You’re here.”
She nods, tucking a loose curl behind her ear. “I was just leaving.”
The smile falls, and Anthony swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing with the movement. “How have you been?”
“Good. Busy. Thanks.” There’s an awkward silence, as Anthony’s eyes fall over her white minidress. As many times as he has seen her legs – hell, the whole world has seen them now – he stares as though he’s witnessing her for the first time. She hates it, how exposed it makes her feel, how wet she gets when he’s undressing her like that, without even touching her. “I have an early shoot. I need some sleep. But it was good to see you.”
Without waiting for his answer, she pushes past the crowd and makes her way outside, inhaling deeply. She does have a shoot in the morning, for a perfume campaign, but that doesn’t mean much. Once upon a time, she would have jumped at the chance to have him in town, to spend an entire night wrapped around him, drinking and dancing and indulging in all the vices afforded them for being young and rich and famous.
“Kate.” She stops, car keys in hand, despising him for following her. “You’re not leaving because of a job. You’re leaving because of me.”
Turning, she crosses her arms over her chest. He looks sobered by her response to seeing him. Anthony is good at that; she can’t count how many times he has quickly gotten his shit together to answer a call from one of his siblings, often Hyacinth.
“Not everything is about you,” Kate says half-heartedly.
He takes a step toward her. “You used to party with me all night and then turn around and do a shoot at seven in the morning. I looked like shit, but you were still so fucking beautiful.”
She hates when he talks like that, too. “I’m not nineteen anymore,” she rebuts. “Some of us have to take care of ourselves now.”
Anthony winces a little at the thinly veiled barb, but he isn’t deterred. Closing the rest of the distance between them, he backs her against the side of her car, one hand curling in her thick hair as he buries his face in her neck. “Don’t leave yet,” he murmurs against her skin, inhaling the scent of her lily soap. He’s always been obsessed with it. “I haven’t seen you in months. I miss you.”
It's always so tempting. To fall into him, to let him kiss her and slip his fingers inside her until she’s crying out against his mouth. To have the kind of sloppy, desperate, hedonistic sex that she still fantasizes about every time she needs an orgasm to relax.
But she has changed. And he hasn’t. Unlike Anthony, her career won’t last forever, and she’s long since grown tired of being a tabloid darling with embarrassing knickerless photos splashed across the pages. She needs to be taken seriously.
He drops a kiss near her throat, and Kate allows herself that familiar, electric spark of need before she pushes him back, shaking her head. “I’m not your convenient little hookup anymore,” she reminds him, a hand on his chest to maintain their distance.
Eyes dark, Anthony stares at her intently, pressing his palms against the car on either side of her body. “That was never what you were.”
Kate is almost inclined to believe him, even through his glazed eyes and the bite of tequila on his breath. Until she spots the smear of red lipstick on his collar and she doesn’t know whether she wants to laugh or cry. Both, really.
Anthony is who he is. She didn’t have the power to change that when they were stupid teenagers, and she doesn’t now.
His gaze drops to where hers is lingering, regret falling across his features. “I didn’t know you would be here tonight. If I had-.”
“You don’t owe me an explanation,” Kate says, wondering how he could be so close to her and still feel a million miles out of her reach. “You never owed me anything.”
Extricating herself from his hold, she climbs into her Audi and starts the engine. Anthony takes the hint and backs away, watching as she pulls out of the driveway.
Stopping at the sign on the end of the street, Kate fights the better instincts that tell her not to look back at the house.
He’s gone. Returned to the party to get even more sloshed, probably.
And if that makes her chest ache just slightly, she has no one to blame but herself. Nothing good ever comes from looking back.
She’s fourteen when she gets scouted at a mall. Kate almost walks away, because it must be a scam. Edwina is the pretty one; Kate is tall and gawky and not nice enough. But it’s a legitimate opportunity, and Mary takes her to the agency that week and she books her first job.
She’s sixteen when her Appa dies, his heart giving out one random afternoon with no warning. That night, as Edwina sobs and Mary screams at nothing, Kate knows that her life will change. Modeling stops being a thing she does for fun and becomes the only way she knows to support her family. Success comes hard, but it comes.
She’s nineteen when she meets Anthony, when they’re young and beautiful and self-destructing. She thinks it’s love for the four days a month that she sees him and he has a never-ending supply of uppers and anything else they want. He’s her first; she’s not his. Kate has heard too many horror stories, and she hopes they won’t be her, but all the same she needs her first time to be with someone she wants.
He's surprisingly gentle, taking her apart thoroughly on his fingers before he even thinks about removing his trousers. “Are you sure?”
“Please, Anthony.” His hands are in her hair and he’s kissing her face and murmuring quietly to her and he’s thick and solid and it feels awkward before it feels incredible. She’s gasping, nails biting into his arms, whimpering his name like a vow.
It’s bright and fiery and gorgeous in a way that’s not like real life and she holds on to it until it starts to burn.
She’s twenty-three when she realizes she can’t be Anthony’s anymore.
She’s twenty-five before she realizes she never was.
It’s not all Anthony’s fault. Kate knows that.
Knows that losing Edmund broke something in Anthony the same way losing her Appa broke something in her. Knows they stay drunk and high and drown themselves in work and pleasure so they don’t have to wonder if any of it means anything. Knows they’re both just trying to feel alive for the people they love who don’t have that chance anymore.
Edmund Bridgerton was a producer, just on the cusp of legendary before his wreck. Anthony is a boy who got way too famous at sixteen with his brother and teetered on the edge until his father’s death pushed him right over.
Anthony is a good person, she thinks. Shattered and lost and sometimes prone to the wrong words when he’s intoxicated, but Kate has always seen the part of him that so desperately wants to make people happy. Sees it because she’s the same.
Kate never feels happier than when she has Anthony, when his mouth is on hers and his fingers are between her legs and he’s telling her she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen and her vision blurs into stars. She’s never happier than when she’s at his ridiculous mansion with his band – his friends, his family – and they’re talking about music and art and feeling on top of the world.
Don’t leave, she whispers into his mouth as he makes love to her. I miss you when you’re gone.
He stills, just for a moment, and sighs into her shoulder. I wish I didn’t have to.
She’s not entirely naïve. She knows he fucks other women when he’s on tour, knows she’s only his girl when he’s in London. There are other men at parties – not many, but she lets them touch her when Anthony is away for months at a time. They are both presented with too many temptations not to indulge.
It’s not enough. It’s not enough when she wakes up aching and hungover and he’s already gone, with a text to say goodbye. It’s not enough when she sees photos of him on gossip sites with his hand up some pretty brunette’s dress. It’s not enough when she starts to clean up so she doesn’t feel like shit all the time and he drags her back under. Not tonight, Ant. I have a casting call-
Hey. Hey, Kate. C’mon, I’m here. His hand cupping her jaw, making her face him, his eyes pleading with something she doesn’t know until much later is fear. Fear of spending a moment in his own skin without something to make him float. You’ll feel good. I’ll make you feel so good.
And then it’s a line and Anthony fucking her hard up against the wall and taking her high, so high, to the moon.
But the higher she goes, the harder she crashes.
She buys Mary and Edwina a house. A beautiful one – her Appa would be proud, she hopes.
Kate has deliberately not looked in a mirror for twenty-four hours, so she can’t imagine what Mary sees when she stumbles in after a vicious bender. Anthony is back on tour and Kate feels nauseated, her dress a little torn from his rough hands and the shine of the pills wearing off.
All she knows is the way Mary’s face falls, her eyes going glassy, and Kate has never felt smaller in her life. “Oh, beti.”
Edwina yells out a question about cereal from the kitchen and Mary rushes forward, grabbing Kate’s arm and practically pushing her up the stairs. For all that her money is responsible for this house, for their life, she is still Mary’s child.
“Don’t let her see you like this,” her mother hisses. “I will not let her follow in your footsteps, Kathani.”
Kate locks herself in her bedroom and looks at the beautiful furniture and the giant windows and the expensive clothes and she sinks to the floor, sobbing until her head aches. Nothing she accomplishes will feel like anything if her own family looks at her like she’s toxic. Like they’re ashamed.
Anthony calls when he’s drunk. He likes to hear her voice, likes to hear her orgasm on the phone.
She doesn’t answer.
Because it’s him, she knows. The critical failure in her life. The drugs don’t matter to her – it was always for him, to claim just a few more hours of his attention, to make him feel less alone.
Giving him up feels like stabbing herself in the stomach, but it’s a sacrifice she’ll make for her family, for her career, for the future she cannot have with him.
He doesn’t care about her that much, anyway.
But she never ignores him. So Kate isn’t even that surprised when he shows up at her front door looking like he hasn’t slept in three days. She knows there’s a baggie of something in his pocket, where his hand is shoved.
“Kate,” he sighs, wrapping his hand in her curls and pulling her close. She always goes willingly, loses herself in his arms, lets him take whatever he wants, but she is no longer that person.
She steps back, out of his grasp. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“You won’t answer my messages.”
“Because.” Kate starts, stops, turns herself to steel. Because it’s not enough that she loves him. It was never enough. “Because I don’t want to see you anymore, Ant. I want you to stop calling me, I want you to…I want you to stop.”
It’s not the first time she’s ever seen Anthony crumble, crushed by self-loathing and grief, trapped in that split second where the world is too quiet and he has nothing to hide behind. But it is the first time she doesn’t rake her nails through his hair and soothe him and pour vodka down his throat until he’s okay again.
“What?” he asks, his eyes sharpening just a little. Clarity breaking through the haze. “What are you talking about, Kate? Things are good, we’re good. Don’t I make you feel good?”
His hands are on her again, his face against her shoulder, the words pressed into her skin. He’s holding her tight, like he’ll break if he lets go. “I don’t want to feel good anymore,” Kate says, her throat cracking as tears fill her eyes. “I want to be happy. And I can’t do that if I keep escaping with you.”
Anthony stiffens against her, his fingers digging into her sides, and he shakes his head. “Don’t. Don’t say that,” he urges, pressing kisses to her collarbone that make her knees weak. “I need you, Kate. I love you.”
The tears spill onto her cheeks. He’s never said it before, and neither has she. But she knows, as his voice slurs across the words, that he has no idea what it means to love someone. He might need her, but she can’t need him.
She breathes out, slipping from his arms, a lingering kiss left on his cheek. “Goodbye, Ant.”
And she closes the door on him.
Every time a Honeycomb song plays on the radio, Kate turns it off. She just can’t bring herself to listen to Benedict’s beautiful poetry about love from Anthony’s lips.
It’s a shame, really. She always loved their music.
“Are you happy?” Edwina asks. Kate almost chokes on her smoothie.
“Everything’s good,” she says, frowning at her sister. “Why?”
Eddie stares at her for a long moment. She’s good at that; dissecting people down to their bones, finding all the things they try to hide from others, from themselves. “I’m really glad you’re healthy,” she explains slowly, and for all that Mary and Kate tried to hide the reality of her downward spiral from Edwina, she’s not all that surprised that her sister saw more than she let on. “But you did have this spark. This…passion for everything. And I don’t really see it in you anymore.”
It hurts, to hear her say it. Kate thinks it’s not totally inaccurate. Amid the drugs and drinking and sex, there were beautiful moments when Kate felt like she glittered. Like she could just reach out and touch other universes. She was infinite.
But infinity comes at a cost.
“I was young,” Kate shrugs. “I was living in a bubble that couldn’t last. And now I have a real life.”
“Does real life mean you can’t do anything but work?” Edwina pushes, ever curious, ever annoying. “Do you even like modeling anymore?”
“Yeah, of course I do.” She doesn’t know how true that is. She used to love it – the traveling, working with incredible photographers, finding new ways to push the boundaries and express herself. But everything becomes a little mundane if you do it for long enough. “It’s not all glamour, you know.”
“Okay. Does real life mean you need to be alone?”
The words land like a blow to her chest. She never really meant to be alone. Kate certainly hasn’t been waiting around for Anthony. She’s dated, occasionally – a few photographers, a TV host for three months. But Kate has had her fill of casual sex, and love simply hasn’t found her. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
“I’m entitled to worry about you,” Eddie insists, bumping her shoulder against Kate’s. “After everything you did for us. I want you to have a life you love.”
There was a time when her life felt like art, not just business. It was so tied up in Anthony and the partying that Kate fled from it, but maybe she had course-corrected too far. Walked away from everything that lit her up for fear of being sucked back into the dark edges.
“I love you,” Kate says by way of diversion, though she means it wholeheartedly. “That’s enough for me.”
She gets a last-minute call to present at the BRITs after another presenter gets sick. Models and musicians – a tale as old as time, she thinks wryly.
It’s two days before the awards and Kate’s stomach sinks as she reads the lines they’ve written for her. Of course, they would put her on Song of the Year.
Kate can handle it. She only has to see Anthony if Honeycomb wins for Inspiration, and even then, the whole thing will be over in a matter of minutes.
She’s never listened to the song.
To her surprise, Kate doesn’t really want them to lose. Anthony and Ben might be legacies, but they’re fucking talented.
Her hands shake a little as she opens the envelope, and she’s smiling when she announces their win. It doesn’t even feel fake.
They swarm the stage and she hugs them. Anyone who reads celebrity gossip knows their history, but there’s still a little murmur in the audience when Anthony slides his hand around her waist and drops a kiss to her cheek.
Her skin burns, long after he lets her go.
“Kate!”
Anthony finds her at the afterparty, only a few minutes after she arrives. He’s not drunk, she realizes with some degree of surprise. It feels like forever since they’ve had a sober conversation.
“Hey,” she says, gesturing with the sparkling cider in her hand. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you.” It’s loud in the restaurant, and he leans in a little so she can hear him. “Did you like the song?”
She doesn’t really see the point in lying, plays it off with a little chuckle. “I’ve, um, never listened. But I’m sure it’s great. Ben’s lyrics are beautiful.”
He looks at her strangely, his brows knitting, but only for a flash before his face smooths out. “Yeah. I’d be nothing without him.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
Something crackles between them, like a summer thunderstorm. She’s often wondered if their attraction was only ever fueled by the drugs, the liquor, the lack of inhibitions. But it’s still there, the hyperawareness; the way his eyes slide down to her lips, the heaviness of his breath, a little droplet of sweat traveling down his neck from the heat of the room. “Dance with me, Kate.”
Her own breath catches. God, she wants to. It’s a bad idea, but she can’t deny that she’s missed him. And who knows when she will have another moment like this with him, clear and untainted?
Kate nods, and he pulls her onto the floor. It’s been months since the last time his hands were on her, in the driveway of Simon’s house, and the heat still sears through her dress and soaks into her skin. That may never change, she thinks.
“You look beautiful tonight,” Anthony murmurs, keeping his hands respectfully high on her back. There are cameras around. “I’m glad it was you. Presenting. I still want…when good things happen, you’re still the first person I want to tell.”
She bites her lip, some emotion swelling in her chest that she doesn’t want to name. Her nails curl into his shoulders. “We don’t have to do this. It’s okay.”
He shakes his head, his long hair tickling her shoulder. “I haven’t been drinking, Kate. I’m not being nostalgic. I’m just trying to tell you that I’ve…” Anthony swallows. “I’ve not been good to you. And I know that. You always deserved so much better than me.”
Anthony swipes his thumb along her back, and she can’t stop the shiver that flows over her spine. “I just wanted to clean up,” Kate whispers, not sure why she’s bothering to tell him any of this now. He always makes her too honest. “If you’d been willing to clean up, I would have stayed. It was never about anything but that.”
His grip tightens, his heart beating faster against her chest. Kate feels like she’s drowning, and makes no attempt to save herself. “I’m trying to clean up now,” he says. “I want to be better.”
“Good. I’m happy for you,” she tells him, meaning every word, but anything else dies in her throat when Anthony pulls back to look at her. His eyes are dark and blown out, wanting in a way that no one has looked at her in all these years. “I have to-.”
She walks away, abruptly, hoping that the room is too dark and its inhabitants too wasted to notice anything is happening. Kate fumbles in her purse, trying to remember what number her hotel room is, her head so clouded and full that she can’t focus. Every cell in her body screams to go back, to tempt fate and let things unfold with Anthony as they might.
But the decision is made for her. The lift clinks open in front of Kate, and a hand wraps around her wrist and for an eternal second, they just stare at each other.
Anthony kisses her, and she lets him, or the other way around maybe. She can’t pick it apart when her back hits the wall of the lift and the doors close and Kate could sob with how good it feels to be surrounded by him again, overwhelmed, dominated. Tongue and teeth and his large hand squeezing her breast, teasing her nipple, filthy-sweet words in her ear.
They go to her room, and he has her on her back in ten seconds, her legs spread wide and her knickers tugged over her feet. This isn’t the first hotel room they’ve hooked up in, but there’s a new ferocity from so much time apart.
“I have to taste you,” Anthony growls, his nails blunt against her thigh. “Years, Kate. It’s never felt the same with anyone.”
“I know,” she says damningly, something she’ll take back in the cold light of day, but what’s one more bad decision now? “Yes, yes.”
When she comes on his tongue, three fingers and a thumb on her clit, it’s white-hot and almost painful. His eyes are nearly black, feral, his mouth slicked with her, and Kate feels drugged in a way she hasn’t since her last hit a lifetime ago.
She kisses him, drinks up her arousal off his face, strokes his cock with tantalizing slowness as his trousers hang open haphazardly. Anthony looks at her in awe, his lips parted, rough gasps spilling from his throat as he rocks his hips into her hand.
“Please,” he groans, his breath warm on her jaw. “Let me be inside you, Kate. It’s all I think about.”
He’s exaggerating, she knows he is, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. They won’t be the first exes to fuck for closure, or the last.
“Inside me,” she agrees, nearly begs, wrapping her legs around his hips. “I have an IUD. You can come in me.”
Anthony makes a raw noise as he slams home, both of them still mostly clothed, greedy and desperate. He grabs her wrists and holds them above her head in one large hand, curving into that spot that Kate has never quite been able to reach on her own, the one that makes her whine and shudder.
And then he kisses her. Delicate and sweet, so at odds with the way he’s fucking her, and she doesn’t know why she can’t get away from him. A ghost destined to haunt her, the imprint of his touch permanently burned into her skin.
Something lodges in her throat that she has not thought to say in years. Three words that will always be true even if she pretends they lost their power the second she closed the door in his face.
“Miss you. Miss you so much,” he murmurs against her lips. “Come with me, Kathani. Come with me.”
They almost manage it, with Kate falling apart on him only a few seconds before he bites her shoulder and fills her with his release. They always used condoms before, unwilling to roll the dice with just her birth control. A child would derail both of their careers, hers especially.
Anthony eases out of her, his hands running over her skin soothingly. She’s dripping with him, and it’s confusing, how badly she wishes she could hold onto it. A physical memory, like the mark of his handprint on her wrist.
She catches her breath first and rolls out of bed, cleaning up in the bathroom. Kate never hears the door, and Anthony is still there when she comes out, wearing fresh underwear and a thin robe, her face scrubbed clean of makeup.
“They have twenty-four-hour room service here,” he says, studying the pamphlet on the desk. “If you want to order something. And then we can talk.”
Kate is tired, and she knows Anthony can talk her into anything even under the best of circumstances, let alone when she’s sex drunk. “I think you should go back to your room.”
She just keeps hurting him. Anthony’s face falls again, his jaw tightening. Maybe they’re doomed to keep hurting each other. “You can’t tell me you don’t want me anymore,” he says, sounding exhausted. “I just, I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t do that,” Kate argues, raking a hand through her hair. Tracing the paths of his fingers as he cradled her skull. “I always wanted you more than you wanted me.”
He looks shocked. “That was never true.”
“I am…” She catches her nail on her teeth, bites at the raw edge like she does when she’s nervous. “I’m happy that you’re trying to get your life together, Ant. Honestly, that’s all I want for you. But it doesn’t change the fact that I was never a person you were serious about. So I built my own life without you, and I can’t let you ruin it. I just can’t.”
It’s way too harsh. Kate knows from the way all the air gets sucked out of the room, from the sheer pain in Anthony’s expression, but it feels like the only way to make him leave. The only way to redraw the boundary and protect everything he could so easily shatter.
And it works. Anthony doesn’t beg this time, doesn’t try to manipulate her back into his arms and into his bed. He doesn’t say anything, actually. Just runs his palm over his face and walks out of her room, the door clicking shut softly behind him.
Kate doesn’t know what to do with herself, except to call the front desk and ask them to bring a fresh set of sheets.
She’s always liked Ben.
He’s smart, gifted, less intense than Anthony. Ben didn’t break as hard after Edmund’s death, though some of Honeycomb’s most popular songs – some of her favorites, too – center around grief and loss.
So when she gets asked to interview him – one of those celebrities talking to celebrities series – Kate agrees. It’s easy; Ben is charming, and he can talk about the meaning behind his songs for hours. A true artist.
“You’ve recently come out publicly in your relationship with journalist Sophie Beckett. Congratulations, by the way,” Kate says, crossing her legs. “Was she the muse behind Inspiration?”
Ben smiles gently, picking at his nails. “Thank you. And, um…well, I didn’t write Inspiration.”
“You won Song of the Year for it.”
“Anthony wrote it,” he says, and her stomach twists at the mention of his name. It’s been six months since she last saw him, six months of avoiding every mention of him possible. It doesn’t take much to fill her with regret these days. “He’s written several Honeycomb songs, actually. He always insisted I take credit for them, but he’s finally given me permission to spill the secret.”
This is news to Kate. There were times that she would catch him scribbling in a notebook, but he always swore they were ideas for performances or the barest snippets of lyrics. Ben is the writer, not me.
She packs away her own personal questions and finishes the interview. They’re given a break for lunch before they take some promotional photos together, and Ben finds her filling up a plate of sushi.
“You’ve never listened to the song, have you?” he asks.
She chews the inside of her cheek. “I couldn’t,” Kate admits. “I couldn’t listen to any of it, after…”
There’s no need to finish that sentence. Ben looks around, ensuring that their conversation is private. “It’s for you, Kate. They were all for you. Going back a while, now.”
Ben’s words are so contrary to everything she’s believed that she can’t even really absorb them. She was never more than a piece of arse for Anthony – certainly not a woman to write grand declarations of love over. “You’re wrong.”
“He told me. I think I’m the only person he’s ever told.” Ben rests a hand on her back, as if trying to stabilize her. “He never knew how to tell you how he felt. Not back then. But the only time I saw him close to happy was when he was with you.”
Kate thinks maybe, deep down, the same is true for her. She’s calm now, settled, peaceful. But that’s not always the same as being happy. “I know you’re trying to help, but it just…it wasn’t enough.”
Ben makes a sympathetic sort of sound. “It was never your job to be enough, Kate. It was never your job to fix him.” She knows that, objectively, but it’s still comforting to hear him say it. “I’m only telling you because you deserve to know that you were always important to him. And he’s clean now, he’s in therapy, has been since before the awards. Do with that what you will, I guess.”
Kate goes home and listens to Inspiration seven times in a row.
She cries. For herself, for him, for everything they almost had.
Ben texts her a list of all the other songs Anthony wrote, and she listens to those too. Over and over and over until she knows them by heart.
The Bridgertons are having an oceanside fete to celebrate Honeycomb’s new album. Just family and friends – Ben invites her, but promises he won’t tell Anthony in case she decides not to go.
She goes.
The discovery that Anthony wrote some of their songs, not Ben, sets off a predictable flurry of gossip among their fans about who might have inspired the lyrics. But Anthony never says.
Kate knows, now. Finally, she knows.
The breeze from the water ruffles his hair and the loose linen shirt he’s wearing, his hands in his pockets. He looks good, healthy, handsome. So fucking handsome.
“Hi,” she says, standing beside him. Anthony looks startled by her presence.
“Kate,” he says roughly. “I didn’t know…”
“I know. Ben invited me. I hope that’s okay.”
There’s a beat of silence, and then the corner of his mouth curls up, just a little. “Yeah, it’s okay. I’m always happy to see you.”
Finding some untapped reserve of boldness that she thinks has been buried for a long time, Kate reaches out, laying her hand on his bicep. He flinches from the surprise of it, but doesn’t pull away. “Ben told me. About your songs,” she says. “I didn’t...I never knew.”
He presses his lips together, nods. “I made Ben take the credit because I just couldn’t…I didn’t want to open myself up like that. It was too vulnerable and I was so scared of anyone seeing me the way I really was. I didn’t even want to see myself.”
She rubs her thumb against his firm muscle. Addiction needs an outlet, she knows, and wonders if he’s exercising more now. “I finally listened to them,” she confesses. “Inspiration…all of them. I loved them, Ant.”
Hope sparks in his eyes, but it’s cautious. “Good. I never really cared if anyone else liked them but you.”
Kate steps in his space, the warmth of his skin familiar and comforting against hers. They’re staring at each other, the spark growing, and her heart races in time with his. “I loved you.” The words she has always kept tucked so close to her heart, set free and fluttering in the wind. “I want to know who we are. Without all that shit. Promise me that you’ll do the work to stay healthy, and I’m yours. If you want me.”
His chest rises and falls, his head tilting, and then he’s kissing her. It’s soft and passionate, her jaw cupped in his palm, his tongue dipping into her mouth and sending a jolt through her body that makes her toes curl.
Anthony pecks her lips once, twice, and exhales. “I promise. God, I promise,” he sighs. “I always loved you, Kate. That was never a lie.”
She curls her hands in his shirt, tugging him closer, and lets herself believe him.
“Holy fuck.”
Kate laughs and taps his nose. “Down, boy. This was your idea, remember?”
It only seemed right for Kate to star in Honeycomb’s video for Desires, since it was written for her. Anthony had suggested something Indian-inspired, but his gobsmacked reaction to the red-and-gold bustier and skirt set was equal parts amusing and arousing.
“Okay, but like – fuck,” he repeats. “You never stop getting more gorgeous. Do I have time to eat you out real quick?”
“Tempting, but I don’t think so,” Kate says, the unwilling voice of reason. She puts her hands on his cheeks, meeting his lustful eyes. “But I can wear it at home after the shoot and you can do whatever you want to me then.”
Anthony bites back a groan. “Deal.”
It’s a long day of filming, twelve hours, and Kate feels thoroughly exhausted by the time she and Anthony stumble into his flat in the city.
“You were incredible today,” Anthony says, tugging her feet into his lap and pressing his thumbs into her arches without asking. She moans a bit at the relief of tension after too many hours of wearing heels. “I like working with you.”
To her pleasant surprise, Kate has realized that Anthony is a good professional partner when he has his wits about him. He visits her shoots whenever he’s free, hyping her up or helping her relax depending on what she needs, and offers solid advice on occasion.
She returns the favor, joining him on tour or other engagements as her schedule allows. It’s a lot of flights, but worth it to support each other. “Yeah. Me too.”
He releases her feet, motioning to her with his hands. “I want to hold you.”
Kate snorts delicately as she crosses the sofa and wraps herself around Anthony, tucking her head into the crook of his neck. He’s new to communicating what he needs, still. In some ways, he was frozen in place at the moment his father died, when he started blocking out the world. But she sees how hard he tries. For both of them.
“I love you,” he murmurs into her hair, and Kate feels it spread over her body, a slow, dripping warmth. Something subtler than the dizzying rush of their younger years, less intense but more permanent. And happier than the days when she was afraid to feel anything at all.
“I love you too,” Kate hums. “The bane of my existence, and the object of all my desires.”
She feels the movement of his chest as he chuckles. “Are you tired of that line? I think we heard it fifty times today.”
Anthony’s probably right, but she doesn’t care. She’s heard all his songs a million times now, but they’re hers. His love letters to her, scattered over the years apart. Kate can’t imagine ever getting sick of them.
“No,” she says, drifting her fingers affectionately over the hollow at the base of his throat. “No, I still like it.”