Playing the Pauses (Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll Book 2)

by Michelle Hazen

  Oh shit, oh hell, he’s here. I should have been practicing my speech this entire time instead of repeatedly checking the temperature on my iPhone, even though the weather station is obviously located somewhere a lot warmer than I am.

  His car door opens with a creak that stabs me in the center of my chest. Last summer that squeak drove me nuts until I bought some WD-40 and took care of it, but it must have worn off since then.

  “Kate?”

  I don’t have to do this. I can get in the rental car I paid for with my own hard-earned money. I can get on a plane back to the band that’s furious at me for taking two days off because everything falls apart without me. I’m great at what I do, and there are people who appreciate me for that, who enjoy my company. I don’t have to hand my heart over to Danny when he could break it so easily.

  Except I also remember his chest heaving against mine earlier tonight, and how hard he buried his face in my neck. I stand up, hugging my quivering arms around my stupid leather jacket, rooted in place as if the concrete of the sidewalk was poured in around my stilettos.

  The dim glow from a distant lamppost highlights him with shadows as his long strides carry him around the hood of the car. “You didn’t leave.”

  There are a hundred things in his tone, and a hundred more I need to tell him, but when I open my mouth, all I manage to stutter is, “Can I—Can I use your bathroom?”

  He frowns. “Don’t you still have your key from when you stayed here this summer?”

  “It didn’t feel right. Just letting myself in.”

  Danny bounces his keys once on his palm and looks away, clearing his throat before he moves past me to the door. He’s wearing only his slightly rumpled tuxedo jacket, as if he forgot to bring a coat.

  A shiver racks my teeth together before I clench my jaw to still them, and Danny glances over as he twists the knob; steps back to hold the door for me. I rush past him and straight to the downstairs half bath without even groping for a light switch. Once the door is closed and I’m finally seated on the toilet, I close my eyes and drop my face into my hands.

  This is so not how I pictured this going.

  When I finish, I wash my hands, my eyes touching every object in the restroom. Nothing’s different except the hand soap is lemongrass instead of unscented now. Probably it was just the first one Danny’s hand landed on. That’s some small comfort—that I know what he cares about and what he doesn’t. I square my shoulders at my reflection, wiping a fleck of mascara off my pale cheek.

  After I saw him at the wedding, I knew I wasn’t capable of walking away from him again. But he basically demanded I leave the reception because he couldn’t handle seeing me and now the silence in his apartment feels precarious. A more insecure kind of girl would have fled instead of coming here and risking him throwing me out again. But I saw his eyes when he followed me into the stairwell.

  I may have left him, but despite continents between us and months without a single text message, Danny never left me.

  “You are not a coward, Kate Madsen,” I murmur. “You’ve been a lot of things, but never a coward.”

  I open the bathroom door and step out. The apartment isn’t dark anymore: Danny turned on the soft light in the foyer, but not the fluorescent in the kitchen, which he hates.

  A floorboard creaks from upstairs. I pass dirty dishes in the sink and a small pot of water heating on the stove. There’s a bowtie tumbled in with his discarded dress shoes, and the sight of it makes me smile. I sit down on the bench to slip off my heels, rubbing some warmth back into my numbed toes while I stare at the floor. There’s something about the dark, satiny wood in here that makes it feel...calm. I’ve missed this place.

  Danny’s tuxedo jacket hangs half-off the arm of the couch. My gaze follows the spiral stairs upward, but he must have saved the rest of his clothes for upstairs. I look to the wall of windows before I can think better of it. His reflected image moves around behind the banister of the loft and I drink in the fluidity of his body, the way his hands land so gently on each object he touches. When he turns toward the stairs, I duck my head, concentrating on chafing my toes between my hands while the stairs creak under his steps.

  “Kate.”

  My heart jumps and I jerk to standing. Danny waits by the couch holding a fuzzy black blanket, but his face is stiff, guarded. That exquisite tuxedo is gone. He’s back in paint-spotted jeans and a tee shirt with worn, thin fabric that immediately makes my fingers ache to touch it. He drops the blanket on the couch and backs away before I get there, and I flash a thankful smile at him that fades too fast.

  He moves toward the back of the apartment as I snatch up the blanket and wrap it around my shoulders, curling onto the couch so I can flip it up over my chilled legs, too. It’s not the throw Jera bought him that he keeps in a basket underneath the coffee table. It’s my favorite blanket off his bed; the one I always pulled out of the wreckage of the covers after we had sex.

  Does he remember that? Our week-long vacation from the tour feels like such a long time ago.

  I turn to look over the back of the couch, watching Danny enter the shadowy kitchen. He takes out two mugs, opens the fridge. Closes it. Opens a cabinet. Slams it before opening a drawer and taking out two spoons. Stares at them. Puts back one. Opens a cabinet and takes out a box of green tea and a bag of sugar that’s ripped too far at the top. Grains of sugar spill audibly out the top of the paper bag when he plops it on the counter.

  I press my chilled lips together. “So, um, was the reception nice?”

  Danny glances at me and then spoons sugar into one of the mugs. Steam hisses as the pot boils over onto the burner, and he turns and flicks off the stove, taking the pot and pouring the water into two mugs before adding tea bags. I wince, uncertain why he has suddenly decided green tea is better with sugar. Maybe he thinks I’m in shock instead of just cold?

  Danny opens the fridge and takes out milk, pours a generous dollop into one of the mugs. For a long moment, he looks at it, and then puts the tea in the microwave. What is he doing? Does he think the milk made it too cold? Did he forget he already boiled the water? I want to ask, but I don’t want him to think I’m criticizing him. I’d drink it scalding rather than hurt him again.

  An electronic hum fills the quiet apartment. Through the appliance window, I watch the mug rotate hypnotically. When the timer dings, I flinch.

  Danny takes out the mug, curses, and sets it down onto the counter with a bang, some of the milky tea sloshing over the side.

  “Are you okay?” I fight the blanket to get a foot out and onto the floor.

  “Fine, I’m fine. Don’t get up.”

  I slump back into the couch. He thinks I’m hypothermic. That’s why he’s so tensely not talking right now. Because God forbid he ever admit to worrying about anyone, or ever fail to take care of them in his own idiosyncratic way.

  I stand up, letting the blanket slip free of my grip. “I’m in love with you,” I tell his back, my throat clutching.

  He stares down at the mug, not moving for long enough that I start to hold my breath. Did he not hear me?

  When he finally turns, it’s to bring the milky tea to me, the handle grasped in a scrap of an old tee shirt. “It’s hot.” He sets it on the coffee table and tucks the rag around the handle so I can’t accidentally pick it up without the buffer. Danny straightens, and glances away toward the wall of windows reflecting the room, the night a void beyond. “I made a plan, you know.”

  I blink, disappointment throbbing through me so brightly it makes it difficult to hear. “What?”

  “I still think plans are pointless. But after you were gone, our future was all I could think about.” He goes to push back his hair, but his pre-wedding haircut makes the strands spring right back up after his palm has passed. Warmth blooms in my chest.

  Danny made a plan. For me.

  It means everything that he would even try, but one thought still holds me back. “Why didn’t you tell me at the we
dding? Instead of asking me to leave?”

  He turns back and his eyes collide with mine. “Because if the plan wasn’t enough, I knew I’d—” He shrugs tightly. “When I lose my temper, I don’t always say the greatest shit, and I didn’t want to do that at Jera’s wedding. I’ve been kind of a dick lately, and when I saw you there... If it weren’t for Jax shoving me up the aisle, I don’t know what might have happened.”

  “I thought Jera told you I was coming, that I apologized to her for the bridesmaid thing and we’ve been keeping in touch.” Guilt owns me. “I didn’t mean to—”

  He shakes his head, cutting me off. “It’s not that. I just wanted to see you so badly I kinda couldn’t handle it when you were really there.”

  He wanted to see me, too, after everything. I couldn’t help but hope, but hearing the words is a thousand times better. Except it doesn’t make sense: tonight alongside his reaction for the last four months. “You never responded to any of my emails about the tour post-mortem details, so I thought you wanted a clean break.”

  His eyebrows rise as if he’s waiting for me to make a fairly obvious connection. “Kate, you’re not the kind of girl who can be chased.”

  I take a sharp breath, glancing toward my shoes by the door. I’ve never thought about it in those words, but as soon as he says it, the thought settles into place with a guilty kind of click. With my mom’s troubles and my domineering ex-boyfriends, love feels...heavy to me. Danny’s never been like that, but I’ve still been bracing for the moment when he’d start holding me back.

  God, I’m such an idiot. Why would he think it was okay to call, to text, after the way I rejected him?

  I blink against the sudden sting behind my eyes. “I don’t mean to be that way.”

  “I know that.” He takes the smallest of steps closer. “I’m a lot of things I don’t mean to be. But I’ve thought about what happened, about...you.”

  My pulse jumps, but he’s not done yet.

  “You were worried about how we’d date, and if you’d have to move, but you said it would be years before you could pick and choose your tours. So I figure whatever schedule you get, we’ll deal with it. The band already has to record in San Fran, so we’ll be in your town sometimes anyway. When you’re home, I can be down there. Look for a tattoo shop that’ll give me a room. We already know it’s not a problem for us to sleep together and work together, so if you want to run our tours, that’s a lot of months of the year when you can be working and still be with me.”

  He shifts his weight, and it puts him even more firmly between me and the door as he searches my face for a reaction. I don’t know if he meant to move or if it was unconscious, but it guts me that he wants me to stay so badly.

  “I know you don’t want to feel guilty about the time you’re away but listen to me, Kate. I’m not your mom. And whether or not you ever run a tour for us again, I’m not one of your clients. I want to be with you, but that doesn’t mean I need you to prop me up.”

  My fists clench, tight muscles aching all the way up into my chest. When I was leaving the wedding, the words of Jera’s song to Jacob ringing in my ears, I remembered how much his support did for her on this tour. This whole time, I’ve been thinking of travel time as subtracted from a relationship, but being a couple isn’t just about what you do when you’re together. It’s also about everything you are to each other in the moments when you’re apart.

  Four months ago, I thought I could save him from the imperfect reality of what it would be like to link his life with mine. But now I know for sure there aren’t enough miles in this world to dilute the force of what I feel. Even on the days when we didn’t speak a word to each other, he was the most real thing in my life. And I can read in his explosive silence that it’s exactly the same for him.

  If there’s ever been a couple who could play the pauses every bit as well as the melody, it’s us.

  I kick the blanket away and cross the room so I can catch his face between my hands, his irises a starburst of sharp amber shattering into clear green. “I want to be with you, Danny. I won’t give up my job, but I’ll compromise on anything else. Your plan is exactly the one I would have chosen. Except for one thing.”

  He tenses, but he doesn’t back away. “Yeah?”

  “I want to live in Portland.”

  His eyes bounce between mine. “You do?”

  I nod. “Your band is your family. You shouldn’t have to live apart from them to be with me and I...I don’t know if I’ve ever had a family, honestly. I’d kind of like to. Plus, your bed is so much better than mine.”

  His shoulders begin to relax, and a smile spreads across my face, the first bubble of giddiness starting to rise in me. This could really work. I’m still me, and he’s still him and maybe there is a life where we can be those things together.

  “What about your mom? How’s she going to handle it if you move away?”

  Warmth spreads through me that he would even think to ask. I smooth my thumbs over his cheekbones. I remembered their shape exactly, and somehow, that’s a relief.

  “Her therapist has been telling me for years that my erratic schedule was hard on her, and it would be better if my visits were just that—visits.” I run my hands down his arms, focusing on his new Buddha tattoo because I don’t want to look him in the eye when I say this. “You know, even if I spend most of my off time up here, I’ll be gone for months every year. I want you to be happy, want us to be happy. I’m just afraid that when I get on the first airplane away from you, that might turn out to be impossible.”

  “It won’t be as hard as when you were gone for good.” Something raw scrapes beneath his voice and he reaches for my hand. “You know me, Kate. I have never asked for easy: from you or anything else. Music’s not easy. My art’s not easy. People don’t come to me to buy a fucking painting. They don’t walk through my door until they’re ready to bleed.” He taps two fingers at the center of his chest. “I get that. I live the way I do because I get that and I’ve never asked for anything to be different. Not once. Not even after you walked away from me in that airport and I knew I’d have to wait for you to come back.” He doesn’t blink. “Even if you decided you never could.”

  I look up at him and everything that I am trembles, afraid this moment will shatter me into pieces I can’t ever grasp again. Shatter me into someone I don’t know yet.

  “I’m not saying it’ll never hurt. All I’m asking is that you let me choose my pain.” Danny slams my hand against his chest and holds it there even though my pinkie twisted a little over my other fingers when it landed. “I didn’t always, but I have money now. I can do whatever I want, go wherever I want. But I fucking love you, Kate. I can’t do that with anyone else.”

  And I break.

  Danny catches me when I sway with the impact. His hands are wide and safe on my back, and I push up onto my toes, my lips finding his. He tastes dark and brutally sweet, like a flavor that was invented just for me.

  And when my heels finally come back to the ground, I know his beautiful wooden floor won’t always be under my feet. But the next time I get on an airplane, I won’t be afraid when it takes off because it doesn’t matter where I am, or where I’m going.

  However far apart we are, he’ll always be with me.

  THE END

  Dear Reader

  Hi there! *waves* Thanks so much for reading, and I so hope you had a good time with Kate and Danny and revisiting the band.

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  Want more of Kate and Danny? Sometimes, an epilogue just isn’t enough...

  TIE ME DOWN

  Book 2.5 of the Sex, Love, and Rock & Roll Series

  Once upon a time, a tour manager and a rock star fell in love on a tour bus.

  MANY MONTHS AND MILES later, Kate and Danny are trying to build a life together in between two jet-setting jobs in the music industry. But despite their BDSM lifestyle, Kate is rope-shy once the bedroom door opens.

  Secretly, she craves more than professional satisfaction, even though she swore she’d never swap her backstage pass for a picket fence. But it's going to take more than words for this Dom to help his self-reliant submissive realize she's never been more free than when she's tied down.