Still Into You (33 page)

The knock on her door was her call to the set. Mia stepped out and walked with the two assistants. Her eyes landed on Josh the moment she arrived. All the time Mia had spent with him had turned up her attraction to him and that made her nervous for tonight’s upcoming scene—their sex scene. That wasn’t the only reason for her nerves. The scene was also the first time Sophia took drugs. Mia remembered how she felt on ecstasy, the intensity of wanting to feel a man’s hands on her, the bliss from that and just the high in general. She replayed the times she took the drugs over and over in her mind—she drew from it, the desperation she felt leading up to taking the drugs. She had to pull from that memory because she no longer felt that desperation. She was happy in her own skin—a new but wondrous feeling for her.

Mia glanced at Josh leaning up against the wall and was surprised when her heart rate increased. She didn’t know what to do about her reaction to him.

With an exhale, she crossed the set to where he stood and took up the space next to him. He cocked his head to look at her and gave her a lopsided grin.

“Ready to get it on?” he asked.

“Oh my God, you are so crude,” she shot back, the desire ebbing as each word came out of his mouth. Though it shot right back up when he leaned forward, his breath right against her cheek. He pecked her cheek with his lips before he spoke.

“Don’t you know it!” he said with a smirk, backing away from her.

She shook her head and decided to play with him. “Did you brush your teeth? I saw what you had for lunch . . .”

Josh rolled his eyes. “Pfft, yes. Did you shave your legs? I don’t want bristly hairs touching me, scraping my skin raw.”

“Did you?”

The affronted look he gave her made her burst out laughing. “Not funny.”

“So funny,” she shot back.

They continued to make each other laugh until the director called them to get into their places. Mia took a deep breath and pulled out that desperation, focusing on that pain she felt right before she broke up with Ethan for the first time, when she ended their engagement, the pain leading up to her overdose, and the pain of Ethan leaving her after that. She took all of it and focused it on Sophia and this upcoming scene.

The director . . . and Josh . . . pushed her in the scene. Mia zoned out everything but Josh’s intense face in front of her. He turned her on and she
knew
he was turned on, too. It had been way too long since she had been this aroused.

She forgot that there was a room full of people looking on while she made out with Josh, while he undressed her. When the director yelled “cut,” Mia felt like she was snapped out of a dream.

Lying in bed with Josh, only a sheet covering their nakedness, she squeezed her legs together to ease the ache before rolling over to face him. She stopped when she found him regarding her with a thoughtful look on his face.

“Are you all right?” he asked, pushing her hair out of her face. His hand lingered in her hair, his thumb lightly caressing her chin. It was an unexpected, sweet gesture that threw her off-balance, especially since his eyes were dark with desire.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she replied. “That was pretty intense.”

He laughed softly. “It was. I almost forgot I was being filmed.”

“Same here. The other scenes didn’t make me lose focus.”

“You didn’t lose focus. I thought you did great.”

“You’re just saying that,” she said, staring at the well-defined chest in front of her, blond hair sparsely covering his torso.

“No, I’m not.”

Her head shot up and he was still smiling at her, yet his gaze slid down to her chest. “By the way, you have nice breasts,” he said, his smile growing even bigger, showing off his beautiful, white teeth, before he started laughing.

Mia tugged the sheet tighter to her, yanking it off him in the process, leaving his ass exposed for everyone to see.

“Ass,” she said, before laughing along with him.

After the long day on set, Mia returned to her hotel room, beyond exhausted. Her clothes dropped off as she made her way to the shower. Turning the temperature close to insanely hot, she stepped in. Despite the laughter on set that evening, her mind couldn’t let go of that last time she’d done drugs with Todd. How she wanted the pain to just go away, how she didn’t want to feel anything. As much as she told Ethan that she didn’t want to die, there were times that night when she had wished for it, wished for all the pain to go away.

It was still there the day she found out about Tom’s death. The day she almost took her life. Hell, it was still with her. She had pulled that bitch out and used it and abused it. Now her test—to put it away.

A knock on the door pulled her from her thoughts. Mia stepped out of the shower and ran to the door. Looking through the peephole, she was surprised to see Josh on the other side. She grabbed her robe and hurriedly wrapped herself in it before opening the door.

“Josh, what are you doing here?”

He stepped into her room, closed the door, and turned to regard her. She did the same to him. He appeared freshly showered and in different clothes than what he’d had on when he’d left his trailer.

Taking a few short steps towards her, he stopped, his eyes flicking to her robe before returning to her face. “I didn’t believe you when you said you were fine. So I wanted to make sure you were really all right. Did I make you uncomfortable?”

Hell yes!

He turned her body into an inferno and he didn’t even seem to realize it. Here he was being the concerned co-star and all Mia wanted to do was get freaky with him. She laughed. “No, not in the way you think.”

“What way, Mia?” he asked, taking one more step, overwhelming her personal space. She had to look up to maintain eye contact with him. His face hovered right above hers as he waited for her answer.

Maybe he was more than the concerned co-star, because the electricity she felt was humming between their bodies.

Chemistry.

They had it. And she wanted to explore it.

“The way that makes me want to take off my robe,” she said boldly.

Josh, just as boldly, raked his gaze over her covered body before raising an amused eyebrow at her. “Well, it’s still on.”

She wanted the comfort of being in a man’s arms. Ethan found the comfort of another woman . . . or ten, or a hundred. Why couldn’t she? Why couldn’t she have sex? It had been almost two years. Why was she denying herself this basic, instinctual way to make herself happy?

Mia opened her robe and let it fall to the ground. She’d just found a way to take care of the pain. She chose sex.

Mia

March 2010

Josh and Mia began to spend a lot more time together outside of filming. They often went out to eat together. She wasn’t dumb. She knew they were spotted by people. It was no secret they were in town filming the movie. The locals were all over them and pictures made it to the social networks . . . and then the gossips rags. But Mia didn’t care.

Josh was her companion. She didn’t feel lonely. Plus she was having sex again—a definite positive. Almost two years without it. Never ever again would she have a gap like that.

Sex with Josh was nothing like Ethan . . . Tom . . . or even Luke. It wasn’t bad. It was comforting, which she definitely needed. Mia had run away from her friends—her former sources of comfort—when she moved to California. She missed that companionship and needed it during the next few weeks of shooting.

Mia shot a scene where, after a bad night, Sophia took a shower and thought about the route her life was taking. She’s ashamed of her drug use. She missed Mitchell, her now ex-boyfriend, so much and finally broke down, sobbing in the shower.

As Mia stood in that shower, she tried getting into that state of mind again.
You know how that feels, Mia. Think of New York when you couldn’t get back to Ethan because of a freak blizzard.
Or when he didn’t come to visit you there. Or when he told you about that whore, Kristen.
As she worried those moments in her mind, Mia feared that she wouldn’t be able to put the pain back, that she didn’t have what it took to get past this.

After the scene, Mia remained in the shower, under the pretense of rinsing the rest of the soap off, but while in there, she had her own breakdown, letting the memories of the many times she and Ethan parted ways flood her mind, especially after ending their engagement, when she’d hit rock bottom and all the despair that had consumed and overwhelmed her. With the water cascading over her upturned face, she purged herself of all those tears.

After her cry, Mia placed a hand on the wall as she pulled herself together. A few moments later, she called out for her robe and glasses. She had finally gone to the eye doctor as Ethan had suggested many moons ago. Normally she wore her contacts, but today, she’d needed her glasses.

Her robe was thrown over the bar and she did her best to put it on in the cramped space. Stepping out of the shower, Mia was surprised to find Josh holding her glasses. He stepped forward and slid them over her ears and with his index finger, pushed them up on her nose. Mia looked up at him and couldn’t miss the concern on his face.

“You saw that?”

“You dug deep, hmm?” he asked, wrapping a comforting arm around her shoulder.

“I dug deep,” she said, letting him lead her out and to her trailer.

She curled up on the built-in sofa lounge, raw from that scene. Josh crawled behind and spooned her, holding her tight against him. She had to pull it together. Tonight was the show with the band, as well as her first time seeing Todd in almost two years.

But she was finding it hard to pull herself back.

This was it.

The Test.

What she pulled from was in the past. She needed to tuck it away and focus on this moment. The way Josh kissed her neck, trying to calm her. The way he slowly made her forget with the sensations he created. He pulled at the knot, opening her robe, his fingers caressing her still damp skin. Mia moved beneath his hands, crying out as his touch put the pain back where it belonged.

He slid the robe off her before standing up to quickly remove his clothes. He returned to spoon her, his hand going straight between her legs, causing her to squirm as his agile fingers brought her closer and closer to the peak she so desperately needed. Rocking her hips into him, she felt the rock hard indicator of his desire against her ass.

“Please . . . Josh. Take it away,” she begged.

“Shh . . . I got you,” he said as he lifted her leg a little and entered her with ease, doing what he had been doing so wonderfully the past few weeks—fucking the pain away.

Mia arrived at the venue early. The band definitely needed to do a quick run-through. They hadn’t played together as a full band in almost two years. More importantly, she wanted to see Todd. She hadn’t liked performing without him. He was her rhythm, her spark.

More than that, she missed him.

Running into the club, her eyes darted all over the room, searching for Todd, finally spotting him near the stage. She skidded to a halt in front of him, her eyes quickly going over his body, taking him in.

“Todd.”

“Mia.”