Ch 31 ~ In The Loop

Liquor and food both flowed freely at the post-orgasmic party convening high above the Las Vegas strip, and all of the Jovi brotherhood seemed to enjoy themselves.  For an already mello Rachel, it was a truly relaxing evening in which she found herself comfortably slipping further into Jon’s world. 

While she’d met the band back in New Jersey when they were working on the record, she was glad for more of a chance to interact with the men who made up such a huge part of Jon’s past and present.  So far, each of them had been kind and congenial, readily accepting Rachel into their inner circle with a minimum of crude jokes and banter.  Truthfully, the crude jokes and banter were pretty entertaining with a little tequila under her belt.

Their significant others had also been in attendance tonight and she was introduced to them for the first time.  The meeting went pretty well from her perspective.  Like their counterparts, the women were friendly – or at least as friendly as they needed to be. 

Women came and went in the private lives of these men and they didn’t know that she’d be any different.  Rachel took no offense that they didn’t immediately draw her in like a long, lost friend and start sharing their deepest secrets.  She would have been suspicious if they had. 

Jon and Rachel were feeling the effects of the merriment, but no pain, when they left the party in Matt’s able care.  He may have been the youngest of the three Bongiovi brothers, and maybe that made him try that much harder, but he was diligent in his role of bodyguard, accompanying them all the way to the suite door before bidding them a good night.  Matt’s ornery smile reminded Rachel of Jon when he bent from his gargantuan height to kiss her cheek, telling her slyly to, “Take it easy on the old man.”

Once inside, Jon headed to the bathroom while Rachel kicked her sexy sandals off, shrinking a good four inches in the process.  Padding noiselessly over to the suite’s refrigerator, she lifted a bottle of water from inside and plopped on the couch. 

“So… a party like tonight?” she asked when Jon joined her, throwing an arm across her legs. “You end up picking up the tab for all that?”

“Oh sure.”  He helped himself to a deep swallow of her water before returning the bottle to her.  “Honey, anything you see on this tour I’ve ultimately picked up the tab for.  Every bottle of water, cup of coffee…  Every roll of toilet papers comes right off the top.”

“Do you ever get tired of it?  I mean, always being the one responsible for paying every penny of every bill?”

“I don’t end up paying for everything with you.  If I remember correctly, you picked up the tab for a might pricey vacation in Turks and Caicos.” Jon leaned across to kiss her, lingering a little longer than really necessary.  “You’ve always made a point of trying to do things for me that nobody else does.  I’m aware of it and appreciate the effort, even though it isn’t necessary.  As for the other?  It’s part of the beast of this organization.  Somebody has to be the guy that cuts the checks and that falls on me.  I’m used to it.”

She couldn’t fathom his having sole financial responsibility for all of those people and their comings and goings.  It was almost beyond her comprehension.   

“Oh.  Since you brought up work,” he continued. “I just want you in the loop on something Paul brought to my attention after the show.”

“Mmm.”  His thumb was stroking lazily up her leg as he spoke, making her not really care.  Her head fell back against the couch as she mumbled, “What’s that?”

“There’s a girl I spent a couple hours with, and she’s gone to the press.  It’s nothing, really, but I didn’t want you to to be caught off guard by reporters or the story in the papers.”

Her head slowly lifted back to its former upright position as snakes of dread coiled in her belly.  If it was nothing, he wouldn’t be telling her about it.  “Care to translate exactly what that means?”

“It means she’s sold a story of her night with me and it will be in the tabloids for a couple weeks until the next celebrity scandal.”

Jon’s air quotes around the word ‘scandal’ combined with the rolling of his eyes and matter of fact approach were probably meant to reassure her, but they didn’t exactly settle the serpent writhing its way through her gut.  Its warning hiss and rattle coaxed Rachel to strike out at the danger.

“Her night with YOU?  What… the fuck… are you telling me, Jon?”

Unlike him and his Jersey entourage, the “F” word wasn’t her favorite term of endearment, so her use of it should’ve offered Jon a clue as to how… unhappy she was about the loop she’d just been dragged into.  Yet, he still looked stunned when she threw his arm off of her and sat up ramrod-straight, fixing him with an accusatory glare.

“Calm down, Rach.”  He was unnervingly blasé about the whole thing.  “It happened weeks ago.  Before you and I were back together.”

Weeks ago, he says. Well, that made it all better now, didn’t it? This week he wasn’t being a man-whore.  

The snake tried to slither its way from her stomach, through her esophagus in the form of an acidic bile that scorched Rachel’s throat.  “Is she… pregnant?”

“Oh God, no!  Jesus, Rach!” he exclaimed as though she were being ludicrous.  “I used rubbers the whole time.  You know I’m careful like that.”

“Uh, you weren’t with me the first time.”

He flipped his hand carelessly in the air. “That was different.”

“Why?  Why was it different, Jon?”  She rose from the sofa, parking the bottle of water on the coffee table and went in search of something with a little more bite.  She wanted her happy little buzz back from earlier.  The one that made her giggly and horny and let her pretend she was the only woman ever in Jon’s life. 

A bottle of premium tequila on the bar commanded her attention as effortlessly as if it had been bearing a neon sign flashing DRINK ME, and Rachel made a beeline for it. 

“Oh, come on, Rach...”

“What?” she demanded, pulling the top out of the bottle and quickly scouring the area for a glass.  “I was just the hot neighbor whose panties you wanted to get into.  You said so yourself.  You sure as hell didn’t slow down long enough to put a condom on before you slammed me up against the kitchen wall.  Why would I have any reason to believe you were any more careful with some groupie whore you picked up out of a crowd?”

He remained seated, pointing a single finger at her.  “Just so we’re both remembering the same night, you weren’t exactly fighting me off that kitchen wall.  Or the bed later that night.  Or the shower that next morning.  So, let’s not paint me the big bad wolf and you the lily-white virgin, okay?  You were as hot for me as I was for you.  As for the difference between you and said groupie whore, I knew you weren’t gonna give me the clap, so I wasn’t as concerned about a rubber as I normally would have been. ”

She poured the tequila into one of the crystal highballs she found on the bar and turned to salute him with her drink. 

“Well that’s wonderful.  In fact, that’s so beautiful I could cry.  I didn’t set off your clap radar, but this girl you weren’t so sure about, huh?  Maybe she’d give you something you couldn’t get rid of?   Well thank God for your gift of VD discernment...” 

She shuddered and threw back a slug of her tequila.  Where the hell was her happy place? Surely it was in this glass someplace? 

As the liquid gold seeped into her veins, she narrowed her eyes at him.   “Are you sure she’s not pregnant?  I mean, if she sold her story, there’s got to be a point to it.  What’s the headline here, Jon?”

He blew out a breath and picked up Rachel’s discarded water bottle, glugging down two-thirds of it in one gulp.  “I don’t have all the details yet.   Paul only knew she was saying she and her friend spent the night with me and claimed I had to take Viagra, which is bullshit.  I’ve never taken one of those pills in my life.  Well... once, but that was just for fun.”

The tequila-drenched snake had friends.  At least five or six of them had just hatched in Rachel’s stomach.  She was going to be sick with shock, anger, disgust and awe at the lowlife behavior of the man she loved

“Wait a minute.  Back up.  She AND HER FRIEND spent the night with you?” 

Please tell me I misunderstood.  Tell me you weren’t sleazy enough to do a threesome.

“Yes.”  He shattered her hope with firmly set jaw. “She and her friend.”

“That is...  disgusting,” she hissed, clunking her empty glass down on the bar.

“Oh C’mon, Rachel!” He was finally starting to show a little emotion.  She could see the quick flash of anger in his eyes as she reached once again for the tequila bottle.  “I had a fuckfest with a couple of women who don’t mean a damn thing to me.  It happens.  It was hardly one for the record books.  I mean, Christ... I didn’t even go down on ‘em.   I’m sorry you’re having to deal with it, but it happened while we were apart and it doesn’t have a goddamn thing to do with US!”

Really.  He could be a total pig, a total clichéd rock star, and he didn’t think it had anything to do with them.  Because it happened while they were apart.  Two whole weeks ago. 

“I can’t believe the sleazy things you do sometimes.”

That was Jon’s tipping point.  He was no longer anything close to blasé and a little emotion spewed into a lot as he jumped to his feet, throwing his arms out to the sides.  “You really wanna do this, Rach?  You wanna start back up with the fighting like rabid dogs?  I don’t.  This happened while we were apart.  Do you get that?”

“I get that perfectly, but for crying out loud, Jon!  You’re nearly 50 years old and still find a threesome worthy of your time.  That doesn’t have anything to do with us being apart, that’s just who you are and it’s pretty gross.”

“Oh yeah?”  He stalked two steps toward her, his quieter voice brimming with antagonism.  “Have you noticed that I’ve never once – not once, Rachel – asked what happened on your end while we were apart?  Your ex-boyfriend slash new boss who saved you from my evil clutches and whisked you away to secret corners of the world so you could have your pseudo nervous breakdown claims he wants to make you his next wife and the mother of his children.  Tells me this shit to my face, but I still never asked what happened between you and James while you were gone.  You know why?  Because it has nothing to do with m – us.  It has nothing to do with US!”

She laughed mirthlessly and screwed her face into a disbelieving sneer.  “No, Jon.  You haven’t asked because you don’t want to know!  And you don’t want to know because it’s painful to think of me naked against James, fucking his brains out.   Just like it’s painful for me to think of you with another woman that way.  And the whole threesome thing  just takes it to another level of vile painfulness.”

Fuck, Jon thought.  I’m not doing this again.  It isn’t getting us anywhere we need to be.

Rachel facing the other direction, topped off her glass, and he exhaled sharply, coaxing the anger to leave his body along with the bad air.  Jon took the few steps that would put him directly behind her and slid his arms around her waist. 

When he pulled her against him, she went stiff, but made no move to break away.  Jon took courage in that, hoping it meant she didn’t want to tear each other apart either.   Despite all outward appearances, they might actually be making progress in this relationship.

“I don’t wanna do this, Rach,” he murmured into her hair as she drank.  “Let’s dial it back before we say things we regret.”

“Too bad you didn’t take that approach before you DID something we regret,” she spat, clearly not ready to revert to hearts and roses yet, so Jon slowly released her.  “But now I’m the bad guy who needs to dial it back because I don’t happen to like that the man I’m in love is still whoring around like a twenty year old.”

She threw back the small amount of clear liquid remaining in the bottom of her glass before reaching for the bottle again and continuing on her rant.  “I can’t WAIT to face my entire family at the wedding this weekend.  How fun that will be!  I mean, I get to explain all this shit to my parents while you’re off playing rock star again.  What a crock!”

“I think you’ve had enough booze for one night, babe,” he suggested, easing the bottle from her hands.  At this rate, she’d end up with alcohol poisoning by morning.

She whirled around to face him, gripping the tequila with determined fingers.  It was the first time Jon had gotten a good, clear look at her face since telling her and he was surprised at what he found there. 

Despite the tirade that she’d been spouting off, it wasn’t hard to see that she wasn’t really angry.  Her eyes weren’t spitting fire, her nostrils weren’t flared.  All of the classic ‘tells’ were missing.  That meant Rachel wasn’t pissed – she was hurt.

Dammit all to hell...

He stepped into her, opening his mouth to apologize, but she tore into him again before he could form the words. 

“I’ve not had nearly enough, babe,” she mocked. “I’m probably just getting started, as a matter of fact.” 

The tequila bottle went from his custody to hers when he willingly let it go.  In a hot second, she had sloshed another serving of her favorite poison and was turning back to address him with it in hand. 

“Let me tell you something, Jon:  all these months we’ve been apart I have ached for you every single second of the day.  That’s not an exaggeration, it’s just a plainly stated fact.  I ached for you.   I’d wake up in the morning and run until my legs were rubber just to be able to face the day.  And then, at night, I’d do it again hoping it would exhaust me enough so that I'd have a prayer of sleeping.”

She defiantly took another swig.  “You don’t need to wonder what I’ve been up to with James, you dumbass.  Wanna know why?  Because as hard as I tried to fall in love with him again, I couldn’t let him in my heart again because you still had the whole damn thing.  So you sure as hell didn’t need to worry about him being in my bed!”

Another swallow had the glass empty and she nearly slammed it down on the bar before delivering her closing speech. 

“But you?  You didn’t have any trouble getting it up for a couple two-bit skanks, did you, Jon?  No… While I pined for you, you fucked anything in sight.  But hey, you didn’t go down on them, right?  And it was no big deal to you.  Isn’t that what you said?  Well guess what?!  It’s a big fuckin’ deal to me.”