Make Me: The Black Lilith Series #3

by Hazel Jacobs

  It makes her feel like she’s not alone in this.

  Harper opens her mouth to say that, but her words are cut off by the sound of a blood-freezing scream coming through the wall. Sersha drops her mug, sending scalding hot tea onto the floor, and all three women are on their feet in seconds and heading for the door.

  It’s a woman screaming. It’s an awful, vicious scream that echoes through the three women on a primal level. They can hear her—she’s somewhere on their floor. When they come out into the hallway, Harper realizes with a sudden jolt that the screams are coming from her suite. She fumbles her key out of her pocket and Mikayla snatches it, opening the door deftly so the three of them can run inside.

  “Dash?” Mikayla calls, real fear in her voice.

  The screaming is getting louder. It’s coming from Dash’s room. Rushing forward, Sersha gets to the door first and throws it open. Then freezes. Harper comes up behind her and feels her jaw drop.

  A woman is lying on Dash’s bed, back arched, eyes scrunched up in pleasure, her mouth hanging open as her scream peters away into a loud moan of ecstasy. Between her legs, Dash is kneeling with a hand wrapped around a long black vibrator, a look of steady concentration on his face. He’s completely naked. When the door opens, he jumps and nearly falls off the bed as he turns to see who’s there.

  “Jesus, guys… haven’t you heard of knocking?” he asks, scrambling to get a pillow and cover himself.

  The woman lying in front of him is still twitching with the force of her orgasm. She doesn’t even seem to have noticed that there are other people in the room.

  Harper realizes that her throat has gone dry. Dash has nothing on Slate’s muscle-clad body. But still… damn. He’s heavy-set with wide shoulders and thick thighs, and his chest is deep and sprinkled with hair. The black vibrator isn’t the only toy he’s got on the bed—there’s also some beads, a bottle of lube, and a small whip. Harper snaps out of her amazement-induced paralysis just as soon as Sersha seems to. She grabs the door and slams it closed.

  “Sorry, Dash,” Sersha calls through the wood.

  The three women stand at the door for a moment. Then they make a collective decision to leave, quietly, the way that they came.

  They get out into the hall and close the door behind them. They lean against the wall together. No one seems to know what to say. Mikayla and Sersha both look shell-shocked, and Harper can guess that she probably looks the same way.

  “Did…” Sersha swallows and starts again. “Did anyone else notice that massive unit he’s working with?”

  Harper did. She’s still trying to wrap her head around it. “That’s porn-worthy.”

  “I didn’t…sweet mother of…”

  The three of them shake their heads.

  Logan steps out of the suite that he shares with Mikayla, his phone loose in his hand and a look of concern on his face. “Did I hear screaming?” he asks.

  The three woman turn slowly to look at him.

  “Logan,” Sersha says. “Are you aware that your brother is part giant?”

  “Specifically the penis part?” Harper adds.

  The apples of his cheeks go a little bit red as he shrugs. “Yeah, I know. I’ve come to terms with it.”

  Mikayla speaks for the first time, “It’s bigger than yours.”

  Logan’s cheeks go redder and he laughs awkwardly. “Well, I had come to terms with it.”

  “No, I didn’t mean…” Mikayla gets suddenly flustered, “…I didn’t mean it like that. It’s just… surprising.”

  “No, it’s cool, my ego needed deflating.”

  “Logan,” Mikayla says exasperatedly as Sersha finally breaks down into sobbing fits of laughter. She laughs so hard that she ends up sliding down the wall and into a ball on the floor.

  Seeing her in that state makes Harper start giggling too, and then Mikayla, and soon all three of them are collapsed on the floor, laughing so hard that Logan begins to look a little worried. He presses the phone to his ear.

  “Tommy? Yeah, I’m still here. Your girlfriend just saw Dash with his pants down.” He listens for a moment, nods, then says to Sersha, “Tommy would like to remind you that you’ve already picked a member of the band and that there are no take-backs.”

  That sends the three women into more peals of laughter.

  Harper doesn’t sleep in her suite with Slate and Dash that night. Dash is clearly using his and Slate’s room, and Harper doesn’t want to risk running into Slate during the night. Sersha—in a move that seems almost superhumanly kind—kicks Tommy out of their suite and sets up the king-sized mattress in the living room. She, Mikayla and Harper curl up on it, eating popcorn and watching Netflix until the sun starts to rise through the window, before finally drifting off into an exhausted sleep.

  At some point, Harper changes her ringtone to ‘I Don’t Wanna Be In Love’ by Good Charlotte. She looks up to see Mikayla watching with a sad frown, but when Mikayla realizes that Harper has caught her looking, she turns away.

  “Let’s go with the TV series Stranger Things,” Mikayla tells Sersha to deflect any embarrassment that Harper might be feeling. “Millie Bobby Brown is a badass.”

  “And a Brit, but we won’t hold that against her,” Sersha replies easily.

  After a few episodes, they lapse into talk about Harper’s problems, though this time Sersha and Mikayla don’t try to offer advice. They just listen.

  “I mean… I don’t know why I’m getting so emotional about this. I don’t even know his name.”

  “Nobody does,” Sersha says, rubbing Harper’s shoulders. “It’s a national secret.”

  “I just… you know what? I shouldn’t have told him my name. I should have just been Tiffany the whole time. Then at least we’d be on equal terms here.” She wrings her hands and shoves them under a blanket while Mikayla frowns and fiddles with her phone.

  They fall together in a pile of bedsheets, pillows, and empty popcorn packets, talking over one another about who would die first in the Upside-Down movie. Mikayla drifts off first with Sersha at her back, and after a few hours Harper is the only one left awake. She stares at the other two women in the bed and thinks to herself that, while it’s nice to be warmed on either side by these women who have taken her into their little family, it would have been even better to sleep in Slate’s arms.

  Her body still remembers him holding her down, enveloping her in strong muscles, gripping her hips and pounding into her. She’s got the bruises—she checked in the bathroom before she went to bed. Her mind replays every moment of her evening with Slate. She loses herself so completely in the images that she has to remind herself that Sersha and Mikayla are in the same bed as her. They’re good friends now, but Harper doesn’t want to stretch the friendship just yet.

  Still, before they had their little ‘talk’ afterward, Harper had thought that it was going so well. But then Slate had started panicking, and she’d offered him the way out, and then he’d gone and… well. Her mind shifts to the moment she saw him biting that other woman’s lip.

  Discretely, she pulls her phone out from under her pillow. Slate hasn’t tried to contact her since she left him at the bar. She pulls up Google. She searches ‘Slate Black Lilith Women.’ Instantly, dozens of photos come up on her screen. There are so many different women—pictures taken with cell phone cameras, with regular cameras, with special paparazzi lenses. Harper can only take a few minutes of scrolling before she tosses the phone away and buries herself back under the covers. She falls into a fitful sleep to dreams of Slate kissing hundreds of other women and forcing Harper to watch.

  The next day, at around midday, Mikayla wakes up in a flurry of motion.

  “Shit, shit, we’re late. Everyone get dressed and meet me downstairs in twenty minutes.”

  And then she’s disappearing through the door before either Sersha or Harper can say anything.

  “The fuck?” Harper says as the door closes behind Mikayla.

  Sersha stretches. �
�Impromptu band outing. We’re going to a hospital, I think.”

  “Oh, that’s nice.” Harper knew about the charity work that Black Lilith does—she had to tell half of Slate’s relatives about it at the wedding—but she hadn’t realized that they would be fitting it in around vacations.

  The wedding feels like a lifetime ago.

  Sersha reaches over the edge of the mattress and picks up a phone, swiping it open and taking a look at the open screen. Before frowning. “This isn’t my phone,” she says. “Harper, why were you Googling pictures of Slate and his groupies?”

  “Because I’m a glutton for punishment.”

  “Jesus, come here woman.”

  Sersha pulls Harper into a hug that lasts probably a smidge longer than it should have considering they had to meet Mikayla downstairs.

  Harper decides to forgo makeup, and even a change of clothes because she doesn’t want to risk running into Slate in the suite. Not yet. She tells herself that she just needs to see him in a group setting—like at a hospital, with the rest of the band, for example—and then she’ll be over the awkwardness. She braids her hair instead and feels a twinge of regret when every movement causes a pleasant pang in her groin and thighs, which are still aching from the night before.

  Sersha doesn’t even try to wrangle her hair. It looks like a golden bird’s nest, so she crams a Black Lilith beanie on top of it, cheerfully explaining to Harper that it creeps Tommy out when she wears his merchandise.

  “I got a Team Logan shirt a few weeks ago. Tommy didn’t talk to me for a whole day.” She gives Harper a devious wink. “But he was only too happy to rip it off me that night.”

  “Are there Team Dash shirts?”

  “Not as many as there should be after what I saw last night. His cock is big enough to run a small country for fuck’s sake.”

  She sounds annoyed, as though she feels betrayed by Dash’s surprising girth. It’s definitely a big thing for Harper to wrap her head around, and if it weren’t for the fact that there were so many witnesses, she would have thought that she’d been imagining things last night.

  They get downstairs to find Mikayla waiting. She’d sent the band ahead.

  “It’s my own fault, I didn’t think to set my alarm last night—”

  “Relax, Mik, we’ll get there,” Sersha tells her.

  They clamber into a taxi and, within half an hour, they’re at the hospital. It’s a gray, monolithic building with fake palm trees on the roof and a clean line of pavement out the front where hospital maintenance staff seem to regularly bleach. Paparazzi are outside, flashing their lightbulbs at everyone who goes into the hospital, whether they look famous or not.

  Mikayla sighs loudly. This was supposed to be an unscheduled, spontaneous event, but somehow word had gotten out. Black Lilith were supposed to be performing on the roof. From where she sits down on the pavement, Harper can see roadies already setting up.

  “When do they start?” Harper asks, neck craning so she can see the roof without opening the window and letting in the dusty desert air.

  “In a few minutes,” Mikayla replies. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

  She opens the door and the paparazzi immediately pounce on them. Mikayla has been a draw card for them since the incident on the band’s last tour, when she’d stepped in front of a knife-wielding fan to save Dash. Harper had read about it while she’d been researching the band for the wedding. Sersha is also known to the press because of Tommy’s very public announcement that they were dating. Harper can only imagine what the paparazzi think of her when she steps out of the cab, walking on Mikayla’s heels with Sersha taking up the rear.

  “Mikayla, look this way!”

  “Give us a smile, Sersha!”

  “Girls, girls, what’s it like being the women behind the band?”

  Behind the band. Harper wants to laugh. Without Mikayla, the band would fall apart, and Sersha’s clearly going to be responsible for some of their greatest hits in the years to come.

  Beyond the crowd of paparazzi is a stream of men and women with band T-shirts and their mouths open in perpetual screams. While the women tend to outnumber the men, the men are making themselves heard over the shouts of paparazzi, so by the time Harper and the others make it to the entrance of the hospital, Harper is nearly deaf with the sound wall that had been blasting into her.

  They get inside the hospital, behind the line of security that has set itself up inside the doors to make sure that only legitimate patients get inside, and not rabid fans or sleazy men with cameras. They’re ushered into an elevator. Mikayla pulls her phone out and starts texting the minute they’re inside.

  “They’re just getting through the last of the prep,” she says to Harper and Sersha.

  Harper nods like she knows exactly what Mikayla is talking about.

  “What are they playing?”

  “A couple of originals for the kids, and some classics for the grown-ups.”

  When they come out onto the roof, they find a huge crowd of people in hospital gowns and slippers clustered around a raised bandstand where Black Lilith is waiting to get started. Some people are in wheelchairs, while others are laying prone in beds that have clearly been wheeled up to the roof by the nurses who are hanging around in excited clusters, their eyes fixed on the band. One little girl, who looks about seven with burn scars across her face, sits on a teenage boy’s shoulders, her head high above the crowd.

  “We’re never gonna get through that,” Sersha says decisively.

  “Nope,” Mikayla replies. She presses her phone to her ear and, on stage, Harper sees Logan answer. “Hey, can you make sure that they tweak Dash’s amp settings? Some of the kids are epileptic and we can’t freak them out.”

  Logan nods and says something, before hanging up and tapping Dash on the shoulder.

  Harper finds herself staring at the crotch of Dash’s jeans without meaning to.

  Tearing her eyes away, they fall almost naturally onto Slate. He’s fiddling with his drum sticks, looking remarkably still in a way that he never does when he’s away from his drum kit. The man is nearly always in motion until he gets behind his drums. Then a calm seems to fall over him like he’s coming home from a long day and he can finally relax. It’s quite a sight to see. The Nevada sun glints off of the steel rims of his drum kit, and his white sleeveless T-shirt shows off his tanned arms in all their glory.

  He looks up, tosses his fringe off of his forehead, and their eyes meet over the crowd. Harper feels like someone’s burying a cold hook into her chest, and she drops her gaze. Every time she looks at him, all she sees is that woman he’d thrown in her face.

  Sersha seems to notice because she wraps her arms around Harper’s shoulders.

  Then Slate starts playing. Completely without warning—Logan hasn’t even done his customary introduction to the gig. Harper looks up to see Dash and Tommy exchanging confused looks, while Logan cranes his neck over his shoulder to look at Slate. Slate has his eyes closed, his head down, and he’s beating the drums with both hands in a slow, deliberate rhythm that Harper vaguely recognizes.

  Whatever it is, the crowd seems to be picking up on it. Some of the kids start clapping along with the bass drum, while others clap to the snare, effectively rendering the entire crowd as backup percussion. All while Slate plays, eyes closed and lips slightly parted, losing himself to the beat.

  Finally, Tommy scrambles into a bassline of smooth, soulful blues notes. Dash picks up the tune with his guitar. Logan enters with his smoky vocals.

  I can feel it calling in the air tonight.

  Oh, Lord!

  Harper instantly recognizes the tune. Beside her, Sersha puts a hand on her chest.

  “Phil Collins,” she mutters. “Typical Slate.”

  Harper watches as Logan and the band start swaying to the low, rhythmic beat that Slate carries. The crowd starts to sway with them. Until, when Logan repeats one of his ‘Oh, Lord’s, Slate throws his head back and pounds
through five loud, heavy repetitions of beats, and the crowd cheers.

  Harper watches him as intensely as she had when she’d discovered him in the studio alone. Only now he knows that she’s watching. He knows, but he’s still playing with the same blissed-out expression, the same close eyes and thrown back head, the same fluid motions like he’s swimming through the beat instead of playing it. There’s a whole crowd of people between them, but when his eyes finally open and fall on Harper again, she feels the air sucked out of her lungs. His gaze makes her feel like they’re the only people on the rooftop.

  And she hates it.

  Because she knows it’s not true. She’s replaceable to him. Why else would he go out of his way to show her how easy it is for him to pick up another woman, kiss her, while looking Harper right in the eye? He makes her feel like she’s the only one in the world, but he can also make her feel like she’s one of hundreds.

  The music builds, then ebbs away naturally. When the song is finally over, the crowd—both on the rooftop and from the street below—applaud.

  “Thank you,” Logan says, giving Slate a look over his shoulder. “Just a bit of smooth Collins to get your attention. How are you guys doing today?”

  The crowd screams their answers. Slate’s still gazing at Harper, running his fingers absently over his drumsticks while Logan gets the crowd hyped. Harper doesn’t think that she can take another few hours of watching Slate be so deeply affected by the music.

  Then she realizes that she’s under no obligation to be here.

  Muttering a quick goodbye to Sersha and Mikayla, Harper turns on her heel and walks back inside the hospital.