Chapter One

Amy

I wish it were my mouth, the man’s voice said, so faint I could barely understand.

I was sitting on the train, taking the T from Porter Square to South Station on the Red Line, a day of fun in Cambridge alone capped by this trip. We were underground, the train lit up by blinking fluorescent lights, and the rumble of the cars along steel tracks made it hard to hear.

And then, again, a man’s voice:

...bucking against his hand, rushing to find the climax she wanted him to give her. “And if we weren’t about to get caught, it would be.”

“Caught?” She panicked—

This time, the voice was louder and...tinny. Robotic. An older, friendly-looking woman with a service dog glanced up, ears perked.

Someone giggled. Where the hell was this coming from? I looked across the way to see my reflection in the train car window, the same old Amy staring back. Cultivated, half-lidded stare for city walking. Rumpled hair in a ponytail. Yoga pants and a v-neck t-shirt. My bag, filled with my wallet, some cosmetics, and—

My eReader tablet.

“Not yet, my sweet,” he insisted. “Not until I’ve given you this pleasure, and you’ve given me your abandon.” His fingers stroked her—

“My, oh, my,” said the woman across the way, who began to fan herself with a piece of paper. “Someone is getting it on.”

Frowning, I unzipped my bag.

The voice grew louder.

Very loud.

lips and tongue tasting her as he drove two fingers inside her aching pussy, clit on fire from his fingers...

Pussy? Clit? What the fuck was going on?

Snorts and hoots filled the train car as every single set of eyes—including the dog’s—were on me now.

“What you listening to, girl?” asked some old man five seats away.

“I—what? No, I don’t know what that is,” I protested, frantically pawing through my purse.

“You are reading something hot and steamy,” said a young voice with an unplaceable accent. My head tilted up to follow the sound as my hands searched for the tablet, buried under a bunch of new student orientation notices from my grad school program.

“I’m not reading any such thing—” I locked eyes with a woman my age, with a huge halo of unruly blond curls, merry green eyes, and eyebrows that twitched with amusement.

“Let go, Lydia,” he whispered, grinding into her from behind, his words an urging she didn’t need to hear twice.

Mouth open, neck straining, she mewled a scream of unleashing, her body thrusting against his fingers, her thighs shaking as she lost control...

Except she was right. The last thing I’d read on my tablet had been a very hot romance novel, which left off with the hero and heroine trapped in a broken elevator (doesn’t every romance novel have to have at least one scene like that?), and the words were familiar.

Too familiar.

“Turn it up! This is getting good!” called a guy across the way, wrists covered with tats, a leering smile on his face.

Found it! The tablet almost slammed to the ground as my fingers fumbled, face flushed with fear and shame, the voice pouring forth unbidden:

Matt turned her around, thumb steady as it circled her hot, red nub, and he took her mouth with his, her lips tense with climax, mind on fire and body overcome with surges of heat, then chill, of riding his hand to wring every drop of ecstasy

The blonde woman with the accent and the crazy hair started to clap. A bunch of people joined her. I hate you, I thought. The train came to a halt at Harvard Square and I reflexively stood and darted through the pneumatic doors, the damn tablet continuing its passionless robotic narrative, the crowd hooting and laughing hysterically. Someone pulled out their phone and began snapping pics.

Dear God, please do not let this be some Facebook viral story.

the intensity so much she nearly came again from the sound. “Next time,” he hissed, lips taking hers, pinning her lower lip between his teeth, sucking, then using his tongue to explore her teeth, her palate, her mouth being loved by his

Damn it! Where was the OFF button? This was a new tablet and in my overwhelm and horror I forgot how to shut it off.

“You readin’ Fifty Shades?” She’d followed me? The voice was so distinct for Boston that I didn’t even need to look up. Evil Blonde Subway Torture Ringleader was staring down at me as I crouched on the ground in front of a wall covered with ads for movies, music, and other performances.

Skirt around her hips, he used both hands to pin her ass to him, the weight of her release resting in his palms as she swallowed, breathing labored and sensual, his own breath...

“That’s some damn fine writing. Who’s the author again?” Stepping back, she finally got the hint as I ignored her, mercifully stopping the barrage of words from my tablet, words that had comforted and amused me just minutes ago, now turned into weapons of social destruction.

Ready to snap, I looked up to find her fading into the crowd. A Dunkin’ Donuts cup, greasy and covered with a fine layer of soot, was shoved under my nose.

“Got any change?” a panhandler asked.

Hastily standing, I shook my head furiously. “No.”

“Got a vibrator? Cause I need to rub one out after hearing that.” A six-toothed grin on the face of a woman my mom’s age came along with the comment, like a side of fries. She turned away to ask the next person for money, leaving me holding my tablet, clutching my bag, and too many stops away from my final destination.

As the new crowd assembled to wait for the next train, my heart rate gradually slowed from hummingbird to sloth, the flush on my face receded, and my mind raced to replay what had happened. Jostling from the train car going around a curve must have made something turn on the text-to-speech option, but how?

A laugh escaped through my nose, soft and touched with a cringe that made me want to hide under a rock. An un-narrated rock.

I shrugged. Ten more minutes and the next train would come. Might as well read for the next ten minutes. After pointedly shutting all sound off on my tablet, the whoosh of air that indicated a new train’s arrival short-circuited my attempt. Shoving the tablet back in my bag, I turned and saw it.

The poster.

Random Acts of Crazy. Tonight, at a bar a few blocks from my new apartment.

Oh, Sam.

That night, I walked into not a high school dance or a community center gathering, but a very grown-up bar that reeked of ancient cigarette smoke (long outlawed) and rancid liquor, staring at a stage peppered with sound techs doing final checks. I paid my cover charge and absent-mindedly pocketed the raffle ticket the guy gave me.

“Save it for the drawing,” he said, turning to the next person behind me.

Sam, Trevor, Joe and Liam would be on display any minute now, and I slid into a seat at an empty, sticky-topped table toward the back. I sat with a tilt to one side, hiding my face with my hair, grateful as the lights were dimmed and the stage lit up, from dull to bright by a dimmer switch some unknown hand cranked to full throttle.

And then—they strutted out to the cheers and catcalls of the crowd. My own mouth stayed silent as a guy who looked like a bouncer swiped the table with a very wet bar cloth, the motion efficient and distracting, though appreciated. With another hand he used a dry towel and within twenty seconds the table was wiped clean.

But not the slate between me and one of those guys on stage.

Two, actually.

“What can I get you?” a pleasant woman’s voice asked. The crowd crushed the edge of the stage as Trevor marched to the mic and shouted his introduction.

His words were lost as I shouted back, “Amaretto sour, please.”

And then—the opening chords of their first song made my table shake, with Sam the maker of the room’s heartbeat.

Drummers are mysterious creatures who seek the erratic microbeats of authentic life that are layered between the macrobeats of society. Sam’s hands were always tapping. Did they move in his sleep? Were his dreams filled with the nuanced undertone of beating movement? What did those hands seek?

With his hands in constant motion, how could I let him know my body should be the one place where those fingers could be still?

His hands moved like a poem, the left one tapping out a line, the right one pausing at the perfect moment to communicate emotion. Hot and sweaty on stage, the band moved as one organism. Trevor sang lead vocals. Hot, tall, muscled, and taking the crowd to a new layer of existence—and everyone willingly followed. Joe stood quiet in the background, playing bass, providing the undercurrent of emotion that allowed Trevor to fan the flames inside all of us. Liam played guitar like a man strumming a woman’s body. He seemed to make love to the instrument in a way that I could admire from afar, but that never quite caught the essence of me.

Oh, no—that was all in Sam’s fingers, in his forearms, his muscled shoulders, the obliques that twisted to play each part of his drum set as if it were my body. In a way, it was. Sitting here in the crowd, far in the back at a quiet table—as if there were such a thing as a quiet table at any set played by Random Acts of Crazy—all I could do was imagine.

A well-practiced hand slid my drink in front of me, a cardboard coaster under it advertising some local dot com dating service—Good Things Come in Threes. What the hell did that mean?

Half a drink later, I found myself immersed in the fever of their song. Maybe I was deluding myself, and maybe it wasn’t the song. Delusion has a way of becoming part of life when you least expect it, or maybe when you most need it. I could sit here and pretend that Sam was just a guy on stage playing his drum set, fulfilling his part in the puzzle pieces that made up the song they played so expertly. I could even imagine that I just came here because I was looking for something fun to do after moving into my new apartment and getting ready to start grad school.

My imagination knew few bounds when it came to the taut rope that pulled me in two directions: one, to the carefully calibrated side of me that organized and categorized and protected and planned to make sure that no uncertain variables could sway me from being centered and grounded; and then there was the other side, the one where my imagination ran wild.

That was the side pulled tight in a tug of war by Sam’s fingers.

“You want another one, honey?” the cocktail waitress shouted over the fray of the end chords of Random Acts of Crazy’s famous song “I Wasted My Only Answered Prayer.”

I nodded. Taking risks wasn’t part of my nature, but what the hell—a second Amaretto Sour wasn’t going to kill anyone, was it? Drinking was new to me. I’d only been legal for the past year, turning twenty-one late, after all my friends, with this damn August birthday. So, a year of drinking under my belt (at least legally) meant that it was still a novelty. Besides, I could walk home.

Alone, of course. My boyfriend these days was molded pink plastic, with stamina that lasted as long as two energized double-D batteries.

I wasn’t exactly the kind of woman guys picked up and took home. That’s not quite true—it’s more that I wouldn’t let myself be that kind of woman. Not that guys didn’t try. Although, for the past two years I’d either been dating my now ex-boyfriend, Brent, or I had just carefully cultivated an outer shell that screamed, Don’t even try!