by Jaime Samms
“In a sec.”
Stanley didn’t watch Vance stroll into the workout room and the shower beyond. He gazed at the pictures strewn across his desk. His body convulsed and he rubbed a hand over the tender muscles of his arms where Vance had gripped him. He’d have bruises. Pressing a palm to his chest, he suppressed a sigh. It shouldn’t bother him Vance was stepping back. It wasn’t the first time. Whether or not they’d been fucking over the years, they’d always been friends. He just couldn’t decide if he should be disturbed by the idea that Vance thought he’d bed Damian. Or that Vance thought he would do it with so little regard for their friendship.
7
WHEN DAMIAN managed to crawl out of bed the next morning, Lenny was sitting at the breakfast counter with a cup of coffee and handwritten sheet music in front of him. His heavy scrawl covered the margins, and he painstakingly colored in little black circles on the staff, every once in a while setting his pencil down to flex his hand or pick out the notes on his guitar.
“Need some help?” Damian asked.
“No.”
“I can write it for you.”
Lenny scowled. “I can manage.” But he smacked his pencil down and picked up his eraser to rub out half a line of hard work.
“Len—”
“I can do it!”
“I know you can.” Damian headed to the stove and hefted the kettle, hoping there was some kind of noncaffeinated tea in the cupboard somewhere. A mug sat beside the stove with a tea bag inside. “This for me?”
“You’ll have to boil the kettle again” was all Lenny said as he once more tried to get the notes out of his head and through his fingers to the page.
Damian knew something in his friend’s brain turned everything around and mixed it all up like a drum full of bingo balls before any of it reached the pencil, though. Dyslexia had made school nearly impossible for Lenny. Music came so cleanly out of his heart, through his fingers to his guitar. The same music gummed up in his brain and made no sense to him on paper. It frustrated him, and it frustrated Damian to watch him struggle.
“Let me help,” he said, turning from the stove to reach for the pencil.
“N-no! I c-can f-fucking d-do it!” Lenny spat, drawing out each word into mock stutters. His eyes flashed and his lips curled as he spoke.
Damian’s jaw dropped and he stared. “Wh-wh-wh—” He swallowed hard. “W-what?”
“Trev—”
“F-fuck you!” God-dammit! His tongue suddenly felt like lead in his mouth, unwilling to form a single word at his command.
“Trev, I’m sorry!”
“Y-you c-can g-go f-fuck yourself!” He grabbed the mug Lenny had laid out and hurled it, watching it pass just inches from Lenny’s head to smash against the apartment door ten feet away. “I w-wanted to help you!”
“I know. Shit.” Lenny put down his guitar and pencil and got off his stool, as though ready to cut Damian off if he tried to leave the kitchen. “I know. That was….” He held up both hands. “I shouldn’t have done that. God. I am so sorry.” He rounded the counter, and Damian snarled, furious.
There wasn’t anything on earth he hated more than his stutter. He’d worked hard to control it—was good at controlling it—and hardly thought about it anymore. It only came out now when he was too tired, too stressed, or too pissed off to think, to be able to keep it contained. And nothing made him angrier than being this fucking pissed at someone and not being able to tell them off properly. He stood there, fuming, too inarticulate to respond as Lenny launched into a stream of apology.
“F-f—” He clenched his fingers and his teeth and shook his head, forcing his mind to stillness and his tongue to cooperate. “Forget it.”
But Lenny shook his head. “No. I shouldn’t have made fun of you. That was an asshole thing to do when you were only offering to help.”
Damian sagged. “I k-know what it’s like.” He grimaced and bit his lip, but continued. “I know what it’s like when someone assumes I can’t speak for myself.” He breathed a little easier when the entire sentence came out smoothly. “I wasn’t trying to imply you couldn’t write y-your own music.”
“I know. I was just frustrated.” Lenny dropped his gaze, slumping slightly. “And maybe a little bit pissed at you for disappearing. I still shouldn’t have made fun of you.”
“God, would you look at the two of us?” Damian said as he shuffled to the door to clean up the shards. “Couple of spoiled brats.”
Lenny chuckled. “Guess so.”
Silence closed around them as Damian cleaned up. Lenny resumed his seat and picked up his pencil.
Damian didn’t offer to help again, and Lenny struggled through a few more bars before giving up, gathering his things, and heading toward his room.
“Listen, um….” Damian dropped the broken mug into the trash as Lenny stopped but didn’t turn around. “I need to get the guys together. We need to talk about the contracts and what we really want to do.”
“What you want to do, you mean,” Lenny said.
“I want to talk,” Damian insisted. “Think you can make it this afternoon?”
Lenny shrugged. “Sure. I’ll call Beks. We were supposed to get together for this”—he held up the sheets of music—“anyway. We can just as easily do it at the studio as here.”
“Okay.” Damian frowned at Lenny’s back. Used to be when Lenny got to the point of writing his songs down on paper, it was Damian he worked with. More and more lately, he seemed to be going to Beks. Damian didn’t want to admit that realization stung so much. It didn’t help his growing headache any.
“Lenny?”
“What?”
“Is she… Beks, I mean.” He hauled in a breath and started again. “Who’s writing the lyrics to that?”
Lenny swiveled to face him. “I don’t know, Trev. You’re never around much lately.” His gaze flitted to Damian’s arm and back up to his face. “You got other things on your mind, I guess.”
“Lenny—”
“You know what? You don’t have to explain. You don’t have to say anything. It’s not like we belong to each other, right? You do what you want.” It looked like he was going to leave the room again, and before Damian had time to think about what he was doing, he moved to intercept him.
“Wait.”
“For what?”
“Just.” He sighed and moved a step closer, pinning Lenny against the wall next to his door. “Let me explain.”
“What’s to explain? You go out, you get high, you get laid, and you come home and expect me to clean you up and act like nothing’s wrong. I get it, you know. I don’t put out, and why should you wait for me? Not like we’re dating. You can fuck whoever you want.”
Not really. Not when the guy he wanted kept locking him out. “It’s just a bit of harmless fun,” Damian said. He wasn’t about to bring up their very weird nonsex sex life. Lenny was right. They weren’t dating. They were friends. With frustrating benefits, maybe, but nothing more than that. “I don’t do it here, and I never do it around you. Why do you have to make it such a big deal?”
Lenny gaped at him a moment. “Ace,” he said.
Damian twitched, his hands clenching and unclenching.
“You remember him right? The guy who used to get high and kick me around? You remember peeling his drunk ass off me and giving me a safe place to crash? You remember when I found him dead with a needle in his arm?”
“Lenny—”
“There’s nothing to say, Damian. You do what you want. Don’t expect me to do this again. I can’t.”
“I don’t. I don’t expect—”
Lenny laughed. “Yeah, Trev, you do. You want me to tell you it’s okay, and it isn’t.” He shook his head. “I’m tired of this. You helped me get over Ace, and now you’re turning into him.”
“I have never hurt you like he did,” Damian said, startled into indignation. He’d never laid an unwanted finger on his friend. Any fooling around they’d ever done, Lenny
had been as much in favor of as he had, and it stopped when Lenny said it stopped. Usually when Lenny locked him out, but it didn’t take a locked door. If—when—Lenny ended their mutual groping sessions, Damian always, always backed off. He knew Lenny’s past. He never wanted to hurt him the way Ace had.
Lenny stared at him for another long moment, blue eyes bright with a fever of emotions Damian couldn’t interpret.
“Stop shooting up,” he said at last.
Damian nodded.
“I mean it.”
“Me too.”
“Promise.”
Damian nodded again. “I do. I promise. No more.”
Lenny gazed at him for a few more heartbeats, then sighed, pecked his cheek, and slipped away from him. “We’ll see.”
“I will,” Damian said again. “I promise.”
Lenny studied him a moment longer, then offered a faint, fleeting smile before dropping his gaze and scooting into his room.
Damian let him go and tried not to resent the snick of the lock.
ALICE’S HEELS click-clacked on the concrete as she paced. Each strike of heel on floor ricocheted through Damian’s head until he was ready to wrestle the shoes from her feet and crack the damn things off.
“Could you sit?” he snapped from where he had ensconced himself as deeply into the couch as he could manage.
“Could you shut up?” she fired back at him. But she did stop pacing, opting instead to fret over the slowly brewing coffee in the opposite corner.
“Hungover?” Clive asked, giving Damian a nasty glare. He hammered out a short snare roll and riffed on the cymbals a few times before getting up from his drum kit and going to Alice, the sharp ring of the metal disks lingering to burrow into Damian’s brain. He slid a hand around her waist. “Just ignore him, babe.”
She snorted.
Damian crossed his arms over his chest and closed his eyes behind his dark glasses. He wore them today more to hide the bloodshot eyes and dark circles than for their light-mitigating effects, though that was also helpful. It pissed him off that Clive had guessed right, and he shot Lenny a resentful glare. No doubt the guitar player had said something to them before Damian had arrived.
Alice glanced over her shoulder. “He’d be easier to ignore if he wasn’t running around screwing up everyone’s lives.”
“I didn’t screw anything up!”
“We were doing fine. All we had to do was wait out the rest of the contract,” Alice said.
“Yeah, and you’d all be free. What about me? I’d be stuck. This way, at least we all have a shot. Together.” He bristled at the derisive curl of her lip.
“So it is all about you.”
“This is a better deal and you know it,” he muttered.
Alice had spent the morning going over the contracts Krane had sent her. If they had been outright bad deals, she wouldn’t be this nasty. She would have just told the agent to go fuck himself in polite lawyerese. No. They were good contracts, and it annoyed her that the contracts she had negotiated with Kelly Granger sucked by comparison.
“What I know,” she said, turning to face him, “is the minute Granger hears he’s headhunted you all, she’ll activate every stipulation and clause in those contracts I had to fight tooth and nail to get you. She’ll use every concession I clawed out of her greedy, shriveled soul to get you the deal I did, and screw you over with them. I let those clauses stand on the good faith you’d never tempt her to invoke them. All you bloody well had to do was stick it out. There was no way she could have forced you beyond the five years if you had just fulfilled your end of the deal.”
He snorted. “Right. Five years of servitude doing all the work while assholes like Cage reap all the reward. Two years of doing that on my own, and selling out every decent lyric I come up with for the next five fucking years so she can rake in the royalties for my foreseeable lifetime.” He sat up straighter. “Krane doesn’t even want rights to the songs, does he?”
She glared at him.
“Does he?”
Grudgingly, she shook her head. “He’ll let you control the rights as long as he gets a certain cut of everything you earn from the songs written and recorded while under contract with him.”
Damian grinned. “You see?” He waved a hand at her. “So there.”
“Which will be nothing,” she pointed out, “because Granger will claim the rights to every word and note any of you write for the next five years and you’ll get nothing from any of it. She’ll jack up the buyouts on your contracts so high we’ll have to mortgage our houses, and you’ll have to empty every penny from your savings to even be able to afford the pen to sign the goddamn check. It doesn’t matter what Krane says he’ll give you. Any size cut of nothing is still nothing. In the meantime, we’re looking for a new house, Jethro’s dad is on the streets, and you’re out a practice studio. Not that you’ll have anything to practice anyway, because she’ll issue a no-play order on every single bar of music she owns. Which is everything you’ve recorded so far.”
“Then we’d best figure out a way to get around all that before she finds out he wants us. Isn’t that your job?”
She gaped at him, hands clenched tightly at her sides. “You’re an ass.”
Whirling on her heel, she stalked out of the garage, Clive hot on her heels.
“Way to go,” Lenny muttered.
“What?” Damian looked up to where he sat on the arm of the couch next to him. “What? I know there’s a way. Krane would not have called me to suggest any of this if he didn’t think there was something in it for him. He’s not a millionaire for nothing. And he can make us a fortune too. Look at all the acts he’s ever touched. He knows what he’s doing.”
“Yeah,” Beks said, rising from behind her keyboards. “But you don’t, and you have no idea what we’re all going to have to sell him to have him rescue us from Granger’s contracts.”
“Do you ever think things through?” Lenny asked. “What if the rest of us are perfectly happy being musicians? What if we don’t all need to make fortunes?”
Damian eyed him, unconvinced that was even remotely true.
“Look what you do with your money now,” Lenny said. “How much did you spend getting drunk and laid this week? High-priced hustlers are still whores, Trev.”
“You have no idea what I’ve been doing.”
“No, because you’ve been out”—he made air quotes—“for three goddamn fucking days.” He leaned closer and curled a lip. “I can smell it on you. The least you could have done was gone home once or twice and showered off the stench. Maybe let me know you were still alive. That would have been nice.”
He got up and moved to the other side of the room to sit facing Beks and her keyboards, his back to Damian. For a long time, the only sounds in the place were the unplugged guitar and the keyboards set to the lowest volume as the two worked on music neither one of them had yet shared with Damian.
“Where the hell is Jethro?” he muttered after a while. No one answered.
HALF AN hour later, Jethro slunk into the garage with Kelly Granger on his heels.
“So.” She beamed at them. “I hear Stanley Krane has made you all an offer you just can’t refuse.”
Damian glared at Jethro. “We agreed,” he growled.
Jethro shrugged and shoved his hands into his pockets. “What do you want, dude? I can’t afford what you want. I got Dad to worry about. It’s fine for you to spend everything buying out your contract and spend the next three years building your savings back up. I can’t do that because I don’t have savings. I have hospital bills.”
“So you went running to her?” He jerked a thumb at Kelly. “How the hell does that solve anything?”
“I didn’t. She came to me. She already knew everything. All I did was confirm it.”
“It makes sure everyone is on the same page, Mr. Learner,” Kelly said, her gaze turning to ice as she looked to him. “And now we are. You can let your band know their contracts ar
e over. They were never any use to me anyway. I will expect full buyouts by the end of the month.” She turned to Lenny. “The clause in yours remains intact, Leonard. You owe me a dozen more songs before the end of the year. And you, Mr. Learner”—she smiled at him with an expression of pure spite—“can play with Cage’s band until your five years are up. Since I control rights to all your music, you’ll sing what I tell you to sing from now on. Good day, gentlemen.” She smirked at Beks and strode out of the garage, past Clive and Alice who had arrived in time to hear the pronouncements.
Alice shot Damian an I-told-you-so look and went back into the house without a word.
Damian sat on the edge of the couch, numb.
The others stared at him, clearly waiting for him to say something.
“I—” He swallowed and looked at each of them. “Guys, I’ll fix this.”
Lenny turned back to his music. Beks said nothing. Clive followed Alice out and Jethro hung his head. “What the hell am I going to tell my dad? He signed his mortgage over to that bitch because he believed in this—in us—and look at us. We can’t even get along anymore.” He looked at Damian. “How the hell do I tell him he’s homeless, Trev? He won’t even understand what I’m talking about anymore.”
“He’s not homeless. I’ll fix it.”
“How?”
Damian bit his lip and looked away. He had no idea.
8
“YOU CAN’T go in there!” Miranda’s voice, rising in indignant alarm, drew Stanley from the cloistered back room of his office where he and Vance had been working out.
“Miri?” He snatched a towel from the rack by the workout room entrance to swipe over his face as he headed for the closed door between their offices. He reached for the handle only to have the door fly open in his face. He caught it just in time, though it set his heart pounding at the near miss.
A very made-up, very put-out Damian stood there, chest heaving, eyes blazing, both fists clenched at his side. Long black fingerless gloves nearly met the short sleeves of his tight black button-down and his skinny jeans left none of his long, leanly muscled legs to the imagination. The sight was enough to ratchet up Stanley’s already elevated heart rate another notch and make his palms sweat. The younger man had an extraordinary ability to get under his skin. Those pale eyes shot sparks of bright fury at Stanley, and it shouldn’t have been that sexy.