by Hazel Jacobs
Slate, Tommy, and Dash all wear identical looks of confusion.
“But you’re our PA,” says Slate. “You organize us. Don’t you need money?”
She hadn’t realized that the band didn’t know about that. She’d assumed that they had made the decision collectively as they seem to make all of their other decisions. She can see Logan out of the corner of her eye, chewing his lip and avoiding the other band members’ gaze, his jaw working in a way that makes her want to reach out and soothe it.
“Logan?” asks Tommy insistently. “Did you know about this?”
She decides not to give Logan a significant look at that point, and only because she feels that she doesn’t need to. This whole conversation is like a verbal glare in Logan’s direction.
“Yeah, I knew,” Logan says simply. Then he looks at Mikayla. “I’ll tell them to go ahead with it. We’ll need a security team before we do anything else on this tour.”
“We’ll need hotels for them,” Mikayla tells him. “Plus, travel arrangements.”
He nods. “I’ll take care of it.”
“Shouldn’t Mik be taking care of it?” Slate asks, sitting up straighter on the bed and leaning over to get a better look at Logan. “She’s the PA… that’s her job.”
“Why don’t you just tell Bass Note to let her use our money?” Dash asks. He’s still got one arm slung around Mikayla, and she can see the tired slant to his eyes and the way his skin seems to be flushed around the neck but still too pale in the cheeks.
She squeezes his arm, hoping to send some comfort toward him without words. It feels a bit weird to be standing there, quiet, while the men are talking about her as though she isn’t there. But it isn’t the weirdest thing she’s had to deal with since she started working for Black Lilith.
“I-uh,” stutters Logan. He looks like he’s doing some fast thinking. Then he shrugs. “You’re right. I’ll tell them to give Mikayla access.”
“Why didn’t she have access before?” Slate asks.
Logan gives him a look like he’s being an idiot. “Slate, you met her backstage and offered her a job. For all you knew, she was a serial killer.”
Slate snorts. “Mik wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“She’s actually actively trying to keep us alive,” Tommy adds. Dash gives Mikayla’s shoulders a squeeze, winking when she glances over at him.
“Well, we know that now,” replies Logan, in a tone that gives Mikayla the impression that he thinks that the rest of the band should be understanding where he’s coming from, and he’s frustrated that they don’t. He wipes his brown hair out of his eyes so he can see them better. “But we barely knew her when she joined up.”
Slate and Tommy both shake their heads at him. Dash rests his temple against the top of her head, so she can’t see his expression, but she gets the feeling from the way his arm has tensed protectively over her shoulders that he’s giving Logan a disappointed look that matches the ones worn by Slate and Tommy.
Mikayla had expected to feel triumphant when she finally got access to the band’s account, but she doesn’t. She’s just tired and wants to get the security detail sorted out so that her band is safe.
Her band. That morning, she’d been feeling out on the edge of the action, but now, with Dash’s arm slung around her and Tommy and Slate defending her, it makes her feel like she’s part of the group again. Maybe that’s what being on the tour will be like for her—a series of moments where she will feel left out, and then be a part of their make-shift family, and then be left out again. Mikayla wonders if she’ll be able to handle that.
It doesn’t matter, she tells herself as she locks eyes with Logan, who doesn’t look in any way guilty about freezing her out, just annoyed that the rest of the band hadn’t seen things his way when he was caught.
I’ll probably be moving on at the end of the tour.
Unless… No, she’ll be moving on.
It makes sense. She’s an events manager, not a PA.
“Look, whatever, I’ll get it done,” Logan says. “In the meantime, how do we get a security detail before our next show?”
Mikayla takes a moment to realize that he’s talking to her. He isn’t looking at her. She looks down at her phone screen and selects a number. “If you call this number, we can have a detail by tomorrow. You’ve got interviews in the morning. Considering this afternoon was an interview—”
“Yeah, you’re right,” he says, taking the phone from her.
His fingers brush against hers. It’s so cliché, and she hates herself for thinking it, but there’s a moment after their fingers touch when she feels static electricity jolting through them and a low heat coiling in her belly. Their eyes lock again, and there’s something in his expression that makes her wonder if he felt it too.
The moment is over now, and he’s looking away from her to stare at the phone. Then he takes his own battered smartphone out of his pocket and types in the number. He leaves the room to make the call.
“That was weird,” Slate says once the door has closed on Logan’s retreating back. “Mik, why didn’t you mention that you don’t have access to our accounts?”
“I thought you knew,” she said honestly.
Dash steers her over to the bed and pushes her down so that she’s lounging against the headboard next to Tommy, who puts his own arm around her shoulders as well. It’s a tight fit with the four of them there, but Mikayla can’t imagine trying to move away. She feels warm and comfortable and safe. Is this what it’s like to have siblings?
Her own family hadn’t been very tactile when she was growing up. Her father was the sort of man who showed his affection in little things, like making sure that the syrup was warm when she had pancakes, or holding the door open for her mother when she walked into a room. Her mother liked to show her affection with gifts. Mikayla sometimes thinks that it should have been obvious that their marriage wouldn’t last beyond her tenth birthday. They were never compatible.
The divorce hadn’t been the worst of it. The worst part was seeing her mother go through husbands, trying to find the spark that she’d been missing in her first marriage, while Mikayla’s father had worked himself into an early grave.
She pushes those thoughts out of her mind as she settles further into Tommy and Dash’s sides.
Tommy gives her shoulders a squeeze. “You were really brave today, Mik,” he says.
She snorts, but it doesn’t drown out Slate and Dash’s approving noises.
“If I’d had the chance to think about it, I would’ve realized that the security guards would have taken care of it,” says Mikayla.
“The fact that you didn’t think about it proves how brave it was,” Slate replies.
Mikayla can feel the heat growing in her cheeks. She’s always been uncomfortable when people praise her. Even if she likes to be praised, or she’s grateful for the recognition, she never knows how she’s meant to act. Should she be modest, or grateful, or cheeky and playful? She decides to just duck her head and hide her face. Tommy and Dash laugh and pull her into a tighter hug.
The door opens, and Logan comes back inside the room. His expression flickers as his eyes linger on Dash and Tommy’s arms slung around Mikayla’s shoulders, but then he grins like he’s in on the joke and throws himself onto the bed, across all four pairs of legs, ignoring their protests.
“It’s all sorted. We’ll be meeting our new detail tomorrow,” he says. He meets Mikayla’s eyes, and she understands the unspoken addition. That she can access the band’s accounts now and that she can finally do what she’s being paid to do. Instead of deferring to him for every decision.
Good, she thinks, because she’ll need to arrange the accommodation and travel expenses for the band’s new bodyguards. She might even have to arrange for another bus—the one they have might be too small depending on the size of the detail. And catering at the venues will need to be modified and notified as soon as possible. There are a lot of factors. She’ll need to be v
ery organized. Lucky for Black Lilith, being organized is what she’s best at.
But that could all wait. Right now, she’s enjoying being in the middle of the pig pile, basking in the knowledge that her band is safe.
The security detail arrives the next morning. A couple of toneless men named Jack and Finn, who seem to consider defending musicians to be a personal calling. It’s a lucky thing that they arrived so quickly because Twitter exploded with news of the attack within minutes of it happening. Mikayla spends the next few days with her ear permanently glued to her phone, organizing interviews and additional performances at the Getty and other venues. People were buying tickets faster than TicketHub could sell them.
Dash, it turned out, did know the woman who’d attacked him. Her name was Tammy Bergland—a woman he’d spent one night with at the beginning of Black Lilith’s rise to fame, who had apparently become more obsessed with the guitarist as he’d gotten more and more successful. Dash hadn’t remembered her at the time, and could only vaguely remember her once the police came to take his statement and explain the motivations that Tammy had given them.
He told Mikayla a few days later that he felt guilty for forgetting Tammy.
“I mean… I don’t think I deserve to get stabbed or anything. But it’s kind of a dick move, isn’t it? Forgetting a girl you had sex with?”
She thought that it was, but she didn’t say it. Dash already had enough guilt. She’d just nodded sympathetically and patted his shoulder as he’d tried to recall all of the others he’d forgotten.
They couldn’t extend their stay in LA. Soon, they were packing up the bus—and a second bus for the security detail and the roadies—and then they were in San Francisco with a handful more shows than they’d planned on performing with back-to-back interviews planned for the first three days.
“Can we not do this next time?” Slate asks after the eighth interview in a row, running a hand through his hair and letting his eyelids droop closed. The rest of the band nods tiredly in agreement.
Mikayla had sat in on a few of the interviews this time. The journalists all seemed to be asking the same questions over and over again.
Where do you get your ideas?
How long has the band been together?
Is it true that your PA tried to step in front of the knife?
Mikayla had been asked to do interviews as well, but she’d made her excuses. She didn’t want the attention. She didn’t want people to focus on her. That’s why she’d gotten into events management because she wanted to be behind the scenes, making sure everything went according to plan and the venues and talent were happy. That’s where she excels, not sitting in front of the camera cracking jokes like the men in Black Lilith seemed to do so easily. Those men looked like they were having the time of their lives for the first few interviews, but the novelty had apparently worn off.
“I’ll see what I can do. Get you guys some free time,” she says, pulling out her phone with the band’s schedule and scrolling through. “If we do interviews in the afternoons you can have the mornings free?”
“I love free mornings,” Dash replies easily.
Mikayla makes the changes and by the time they’re in Portland the band has a clean schedule. They fall into a pattern—a rhythm almost as smooth and omnipresent as one of Slate’s beats. They have leisurely mornings, do interviews all afternoon, then perform at night if they have a gig.
Slate picks up a woman or two early in the show and brings her back to the green room. They’re usually pretty nice and Mikayla will make conversation with them while the band plays. Slate usually introduces a woman to Dash or Tommy as well. Dash seems to be a lot more attentive to the women now, and she is proud of him for that. For some reason, Slate never tries to set up Logan. Maybe he thinks that Logan wouldn’t be interested, but after Tommy’s surprised reaction to the fact that Logan hadn’t been interested in the groupies in LA, Mikayla doubts that’s the case. But Logan doesn’t seem to pay attention to any of the women waiting hopefully in the wings for a night with one of the Black Lilith boys.
Mikayla can’t help but be glad for that. Even if she knows that they will never be anything but colleagues, she hates to think of him in the arms of another woman.
On their third night in Portland, the band is scattered around in various rooms, entertaining their guests for the night. Mikayla is in her own room, tossing and turning and glaring at the ceiling. She keeps repeating her last phone call with her mother over and over in her head.
‘I don’t see how you can justify being a personal assistant with your degree.’
‘You’re worth more than that, I know you are.’
‘Your father would have been disappointed.’
That was a low blow. Mikayla had hung up after that last comment, and then coiled herself into a ball in her hotel room and cried until there were no tears left. When she was done, she’d fixed her makeup and gone to Black Lilith’s gig as usual. Logan had given her a long look when she’d arrived, but she was sure that her concealer had hidden any redness. None of the rest of the band had noticed anything.
After staring at the ceiling for what feels like hours, trying to push her mother’s words out of her mind, she finally gives up. She rolls out of her plushy, too-large hotel bed and pulls on one of the robes with the hotel’s name on the breast. It’s itchy and a bit too short for her, but it keeps her warm enough. A walk is all she needs. She just needs to get her mind together so that she can get some sleep.
Mikayla wanders the halls, keeping one hand on her room key in her pocket and the other on her phone. She’s not reading emails or trying to do research. She just needs the warm, familiar weight of it to act as an anchor. She finds herself at the elevator and steps inside. It’s one of the fancy elevators that hotels like to have to make them seem more sophisticated than they are. Vintage chic, she thinks vaguely. On the wall is a button that reads—Gym and Pool. She presses it.
The elevator opens up into the pool area, right next to the showers and the entrance to the changing rooms. Down in the basement, the air is thick with humidity and chlorine. The gym is set up behind a huge glass window overlooking the Olympic-sized swimming pool. The lights are low and no one is using the equipment, but Mikayla can see someone doing laps in the water. A man swimming freestyle with a speed and aggression that surprises her.
He raises one glistening arm in the air and Mikayla freezes—it’s Logan—she’d know those tattoos anywhere. She thinks about turning around and heading back upstairs when Logan slaps his hand against the wall of the pool and stands up, revealing his long, lean torso which is dripping with water. She desperately wants to turn away, but her eyes betray her. They stare hungrily at Logan like she’s never seen a half-naked man before.
Maybe you should ask Slate to set you up, she tells herself as she admires the way the water slides down Logan’s bare chest, trying not to imagine following those droplets with her tongue. You obviously need it.
Logan is breathing heavily, leaning against the edge of the pool so that his back curves deliciously. He must have been swimming for a while. Then he looks up, their eyes lock, and he seems to stop breathing completely.
“Mikayla?” he asks. His voice is rough and heavy from the exercise, and it sends a blazing rush of want through her as it echoes through the pool area.
“Sorry… didn’t mean to interrupt…” She’s babbling. That echo isn’t nearly as sexy as Logan’s voice is. “I’ll just—”
She turns back to the elevator, feeling her cheeks go red, but Logan’s voice stops her.
“Hey, wait!”
Reluctantly, Mikayla turns back. She prays to every deity she can think of that her face is as inscrutable as his always seems to be. That she can look at him without the naked want that she can feel rushing through her.
“Yeah?” Mikayla calls back. She’s still standing right next to the elevator. All the better to make a quick getaway.
“Is everything okay?” he asks.<
br />
She blinks. “Okay?”
“You seemed a bit upset before the gig tonight,” says Logan. He’s leaning against the pool wall, still breathing heavily now that the shock of seeing her has worn off. She can see the water droplets falling off of his nose and getting blown away by the harsh exhales coming out of his mouth.
“You noticed that?” she asks, though a part of her knew that he had.
He shrugs. “Yeah, I noticed.”
Logan puts both hands on the edge of the pool and hoists himself up. Mikayla thinks that is a very dirty trick. She can’t possibly dodge any of his questions, or even think coherently when he’s striding toward her in nothing but a pair of shorts.
She realizes several things at once. The sleeve is apparently the only tattoo he has, he’s even more beautiful with his shirt off, and she really, really needs Slate to set her up with someone. Logan walks toward her, his eyes bright, before making a sudden detour and heading for the row of towel hooks along the wall. Mikayla hadn’t even noticed them. But then, she’d had more interesting things to focus her attention on.
“Is there anything I can do?” asks Logan as he takes the plain white hotel towel off of the hook and starts rubbing it all over himself.
She needs to physically restrain herself from saying, ‘You can let me switch places with that towel.’
“It’s not important,” she says instead.
“It seemed important.”
“How did you… I mean… I thought I covered it up pretty well.” Because it’s too late to try to deny it. Her brain’s too scrambled to even think of denial as an option.
He looks at her then. His brown hair is damp and coils tantalizingly along his neck, and his biceps bulge slightly with muscles she hadn’t even realized were there. His tattoo looks bright and vibrant even under the dull fluorescent light.
“I guess I could just tell,” Logan says. He rubs the towel over his head, and she has to chew on her lip when his lower torso and triceps start flexing with the movement. “Must have been important if it upset you. You usually seem pretty unflappable.”