by Hazel Jacobs
Never hit the ground, you catch me, and you carry me around.
It’s all because of you, you, you.
Taking selfies, hugging, dancing, laughing,
this story starts at the climax, and we’re so glad.
Logan is the singer. His smoky, sultry voice fills the speakers and makes the room vibrate with it. Tessa can tell that he’s observing her curiously, even though his gaze is generally in the middle distance.
She wonders what Dash told them about her. Did he tell them how they’d met? He must have at least told them a little bit about her if they’re willing to offer her a job.
The job...
Suddenly, that part makes a bit more sense. Bands have to be concerned with their image. If they don’t trust a regular journalist to do the right job, then it would make sense for them to bring someone in. But Tessa had always assumed that some artists had veto power over some magazines. Couldn’t they have just gone to one of those places and asked them to write positively about them? Why bring in an English Lit major with no industry experience?
A small part of her wonders if this is less about giving Black Lilith a good write up and more about giving her a job. Had Dash made up this opportunity purely as an excuse to hire his struggling sexting buddy? That seemed a little farfetched, but it made more sense than the alternative.
She shakes her head, shoving that thought away.
Of course, he wouldn’t do that, she told herself, you couldn’t mean that much to him.
Tessa vows to herself to ask him when they’re alone. When there’s a chance to really sit down and get to know this man properly. She still can’t believe she gets to do what she’s studied so hard for, finally. After so many months of using codenames and carefully avoiding what he did for a living—how could she have just accepted that he and his friends were in business together without asking what that business was?
Without you, we’re charlatans
painting pictures with words in our basements,
singing on street corners,
and beating pots and pans in a kitchen somewhere.
Instead, we went and worked in entertainment,
we owe you more than we can say.
So thanks a lot!
The crowd screams, Logan bows, and Dash wipes a line of sweat from his forehead. He looks eagerly down at Tessa, and his expression is unmistakable. She can practically see the text message forming in his mind, being sent to her in his thoughts—did you like it?
I loved it, she thinks back at him.
He grins like he’s won the lottery, but surely there’s no way he could know what she’d been thinking? Or maybe her face is more expressive than she’d thought.
“Thank you!” Logan says into the microphone. “We really mean that. We don’t know where we’d be without you all.” The crowd screams and Jackie jumps up and down next to Tessa.
Even though the music has stopped, Tessa still can’t look away from Dash. Don’t ever take your eyes off of me. She’s probably taking that instruction a bit more literal than she should.
“Now, we’re going to play something from Sinful Rhythms in a second—”
He’s cut off by another scream.
“But first, are there any Lenny Kravitz fans in the audience?”
Tessa throws Dash a ‘you’ve gotta be kidding me’ look. He’s known that she’s a Lenny Kravitz fan for months. He just shrugs and smirks at her, before heading into the opening riff to ‘Pleasure & Pain.’ Logan’s smooth vocals fill the song up in a way that completely does justice to the master. Beside Tessa, Jackie sways along with the music.
And so they go on, playing song after song, stopping after each one to talk to the audience or each other. They’re great musicians, but Tessa quickly learns the thing that sets them apart as performers is their chemistry. The way they interact on stage has Tessa nearly crying with laughter at one point, especially when Slate punctuates their jokes with a badum tish on the drums.
Tommy is the butt of every joke for a while. Logan makes fun of his floppy hair and wholesome demeanor before Slate starts making innuendos about Tommy’s ‘beast mode,’ which gets the crowd screaming again. Tessa remembers the day that D walked in on Tommy, Slate and their girlfriends having a four way and laughs right in the guitarist’s face. He seems to be grimacing at the memory.
“But here’s the thing, right?” Slate continues once the crowd’s laughter has died down. “Tommy may go from zero to a hundred like a fucking rocket, but can we all talk about Dash?” The crowd cheers and Tessa raises her eyebrow at him. “This fucking guy…” Slate continues.
“No kidding,” Logan says, speaking into the mic and grinning at Dash, who’s blushing slightly. “All of our girlfriends walked in on him once. It was a fucking nightmare.”
Tommy raises his hand to his ear, like he’s talking into a phone, and puts on a lighter feminine voice. “Tommy, I’m leaving you for Dash because he has a massive unit!”
Logan joins in with his own fake phone and girly voice, “Logan, are you aware that your brother is part giant?”
The crowd is laughing so hard that some of the women near Tessa are doubled over. Tessa just smirks. She’s well aware of Dash’s unfair advantage over other men. Dash, for his part, is still blushing but looks pleased with himself.
“Maybe we should play another song…” Dash says, leaning over to borrow Tommy’s mic, “… before everyone in the audience switches over to Team Dash.”
And then the crowd is chanting Team Dash, Team Dash and it’s pandemonium. Tessa wonders if there’s any way that the man could have a wider shit-eating grin than the one he’s currently wearing as he looks pointedly at Tessa.
Jackie leans over to whisper, “Is it big?”
“Mind your business.”
“That’s not a no.”
The music picks up again. Jackie excitedly tells Tessa that they’re playing a new song, something from the album that’s coming out in a month. Tessa never listened to Black Lilith before today, but she decides that she likes them. The fact that Dash is strutting around the stage, thrashing around like he owns it and everyone else is blessed and privileged to be there would normally turn Tessa off of a band, but on Dash it looks good. A mixture of adorable and fucking hot. And he keeps looking over to check that she’s watching.
Don’t ever take your eyes off of me.
As if she would want to.
Jackie keeps thrashing beside Tessa, getting so into the music that Tessa starts to wonder if the girl has dreams of being a groupie one day. Tessa is pretty sure that she’s giving Tommy doe-eyes. Tessa hopes that Dash can be persuaded to introduce them, or even just get Jackie the bass player’s autograph.
After about an hour of music, two women make their way down the line of the front row. Tessa wouldn’t even have noticed them if they hadn’t stopped right in front of her. She tears her eyes away from Dash to look up at them.
One is a blonde with wild hair that’s piled on top of her head like a nest, an Elvin chin, and a wide grin. The other is an all-American beauty with gorgeous brunette curls and a perfectly taut abdomen beneath the dress she’s wearing. They’re both grinning down at Tessa.
“T?” the brunette asks, raising her eyebrow.
“Yeah?” Tessa replies. There’s a lull in the music, and the boys are drinking from water bottles that had been left on the edge of the stage. A bra lands on one of the speakers near the front and Slate promptly wears it as a hat, inviting a round of applause and laughter.
“I’m Harper, this is Sersha,” the brunette says. Tessa instantly recognizes them—Slate and Tommy’s girlfriends. “Dash told us to take you backstage.”
“Is this your sister?” Sersha asks, her beautiful Irish accent hardly affecting Tessa’s ability to understand her.
Jackie nods so quickly that Tessa thinks her head is going to roll off. “Yeah!” she says.
“You can come too, beautiful. The band’s really excited to meet you.”
Tessa takes one last look at Dash on stage before Jackie is pulling her to her feet, eagerly following Sersha and Harper away from the front row.
Tessa and Jackie are guided backstage into a long hallway that’s lit with flickering fluorescent lights, and walls that are decorated with lipstick kisses, and the signatures of the people who have performed there in the past. Tessa doesn’t have the presence of mind to look at them and try and pick out names. Now that she’s being brought backstage, she’s starting to understand that this is all real. They’re really real. She’s actually been offered a job with a famous rock band.
She takes out her phone and realizes that her dad has sent a message.
Dad: Hope you girls are having fun! Love you xx
Tessa sends a couple of emojis back and then sends her own message to Dash.
Tessa: You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do!
He probably won’t even get it until he’s backstage with her, but she’d felt like she needed to send it. That’s what she does when she’s having a weird moment or needs to wrap her head around something, she messages D. It’s just that now… well, now D is the thing she needs to wrap her head around.
“I can’t believe you’re friends with Black Lilith,” Jackie says, shaking her head and giving Tessa a reproachful look. “What the hell?”
“I swear, I had no idea,” Tessa replies.
Harper looks over her toned, tanned shoulder with a raised eyebrow. “You didn’t?” she asks.
“I really didn’t.”
“Well, that’s a bummer. Now I owe Logan five bucks.”
“We didn’t think that Dash is as sneaky as he thinks he is,” Sersha adds. “He kept saying… ‘we can’t just send her a contract,’ ‘she doesn’t know who I am,’ ‘how am I going to tell her?’”
“We suggested just… you know… calling you?” says Harper.
“But then the boys decided to go for a grand romantic gesture.”
“It’s their thing.”
“We’re going to go ahead and apologize in advance for that.”
Jackie is watching the two women with her mouth open in awe, apparently soaking the information in. Tessa just wants to facepalm. She sends a text to Dash.
Tessa: Your friends are telling me all of your secrets.
They’re guided into a back room with long, comfortable-looking couches lining the walls and a heavy array of food on the table in the center of the room. There are sodas and fried chicken, but also a couple of baskets full of protein bars, fruit, and juice. Tessa notices Harper wrinkling her nose at the chicken as Sersha grabs a wing.
“You can have some if you’re hungry,” she tells Jackie and Tess.
Jackie falls on that spread like a bear on a honey tree, but Tessa’s feeling a little queasy.
“So, you guys know anything about what I’m supposed to be doing for you?” she asks, trying to get a normal, casual tone into her voice. She sits on the couch and winces when she realizes how unprofessional she looks in her black jeans and Ravenclaw bow. It’s one thing to wear these clothes to a concert and meet a friend, but this is technically a job interview. She hadn’t known that she would be meeting her potential employers today. “What the job entails, I mean?”
Harper sits next to her and opens a bottle of orange juice. “I think Logan or Mikayla can probably explain it better.”
“Mikayla…” Logan’s wife. Dash had mentioned that his brother had a sneak-attack wedding a few months ago. “Is she around?”
“She usually waits side stage to make sure that the roadies all do their jobs,” Harper replies. “She’s queen of getting shit done.”
Tessa’s phone buzzes and she checks the message.
D: im on my way dont let them tell u lies
Just as she finishes reading the text, the door on the other side of the room slams open and Black Lilith come crashing in. It is a literal crash. Logan and Slate fall onto their knees the moment the door opens, shouting as though they’d been fighting to get through first. Tommy comes through within moments, and he’s clearly moving too fast to stop because he only manages an “Oh, shit…” before he trips over Slate’s leg and lands on the other two.
Dash leaps over the three of them and lands in front of the table, where Jackie and Sersha are standing together and watching the pile of men on the ground.
“Suck it, assholes! Oh, shit…” his eyes go wide when he sees Jackie, “… there’s a minor. Watch your language.”
Jackie snorts and puts the bottle of Coke she’s been drinking on the table, resting her hand on her hip. “So you’re my sister’s special friend, huh?”
Tessa hides her face, while Harper shakes with suppressed laughter next to her. Tessa thinks that Jackie is being heroically restrained, considering how excited she’s been to come backstage and to meet the band. But there’s a difference between enjoying someone’s music and meeting your sister’s special friends, and Jackie was just doing her duty as Tessa’s sibling. She took it seriously, too. Scott would be proud.
“I don’t know what you mean, small person. Special friend? Don’t do drugs. Stay in school,” Dash says rapidly, sidling past her and the table as though he’s worried about turning his back on her. But when he meets Tessa’s eyes his entire face breaks into a wide grin and he rushes over to grab her off of the couch and pull her into another hug.
Just like during the concert, when Dash pulled Tessa into that hug, she immediately felt a surge of joy. She held his neck, squealed when he picked her up and laughed when he spun her around. He was so strong and seemed too giddy to know what he was doing, but also apparently aware of Harper and the table since Tessa’s flailing legs never made contact with either.
“You’re here!”
“I’m here!” Tessa agrees.
Over his shoulder, she sees the rest of the band pulling themselves up onto their feet. Tommy and Slate come forward and join Dash in hugging Tessa, wrapping her in two extra sets of sweaty arms. It isn’t until they join in that she realizes how sweaty Dash is. But she doesn’t mind it as much with him as she minds it with the others.
“Guys! Get off. You’re disgusting,” Logan says, pushing forward and giving Jackie a respectful nod as he passes her, which makes the girl blush a little. “Seriously, you’re literally dripping with sweat. She’s probably too polite to tell you to fuck off.”
“There is a minor in the room,” Slate screams in Tessa’s ear.
Logan sighs, takes out his wallet and gives Jackie a dollar. “She’s too polite to tell you to frick off,” he says to Slate.
Jackie shrugs and pockets the dollar.
“Mind your fricking business,” Tommy says.
“You’re all a bunch of frickheads,” Dash says.
Sersha and Harper are cackling as this goes on, and honestly, Tessa is starting to get uncomfortable, but if it means Dash letting go of her then she’s happy to stay exactly where she is right now.
Slate and Tommy let go eventually, and in a moment Dash does as well, though he remains close to her. He’s still grinning like a madman, and his hands twitch like he’s restraining himself from grabbing her again.
Logan steps forward to shake Tessa’s hand. “It’s really great to meet you,” he says.
Tessa sees a silver wedding band glinting on his left hand as it dangles casually at his hip.
“Dash talks you up all the time. I feel like I know you.”
“That’s very nice of him.” Tessa notices Jackie’s hopeful looks toward the band and says quickly, “This is my sister, Jackie.”
“Yes, we know about Jackie,” Slate says, coming around to pull Jackie into his side and give her shoulders a squeeze. “Dash tells me you want to ice skate to one of our songs?”
“I don’t… I didn’t… ” Jackie looks to Tessa, who nods sheepishly, admitting to telling Dash about it. In Tessa’s defense, she hadn’t known that D was Dash Todd, and that she was essentially telling the band that her sister was a huge fan of th
eirs.
“If you want, we can write something just for you,” Tommy says, coming around to Jackie’s other side and looking at her through his fringe with a gentle, hopeful smile. “That way, it’ll be completely original. No one else will be able to skate to it.”
“Nothing but the best for T’s family,” says Slate.
“Can we come and watch it?” Tommy asks excitedly. “I bet it would be awesome. We never thought a figure skater would like our music. Honestly, it’s really flattering.”
Jackie’s looking between the two men as though all of her dreams are coming true. On the couch, Harper has crossed her legs and is watching all of this with a look of nostalgia, as though she’s seen it before. Or maybe she’s been on the receiving end of it.
“This is a really cute shirt by the way,” Slate says. “But I think you’d look better in one of our shirts. To the merch!”
“To the merch,” Tommy and Sersha both shout like they’re about to go on an adventure.
They guide Jackie over to the corner where a box, overflowing with shirts and baseball caps, is waiting.
“They’ll be there for a while,” Logan says. “Sorry, I think your sister’s going to be smothered in affection. We don’t really, you know, have gears? It’s just off and on.”
“She doesn’t mind,” Tessa replies. She’s torn… part of her wants to sit Logan down and have him explain to her exactly what this job that Dash had lured her with entails, but most of her just wants to settle into the couch and finally have a conversation with the man she’s been texting for the last five months.
Logan looks between his brother and Tessa. His lips quirk up, and he says, “Look, we’ll talk about why you’re here in a little bit. Mikayla’s still wrangling people, and she’s better at explaining things than I am.”