by Hazel Jacobs
Tessa doesn’t mind the flirting. Or the sexting, or the fact that she knows that he could have any woman he wants. Because he’s her friend first. She thinks that won’t change. And if they happen to help each other get off on the phone, moaning into each other’s ears and giving each other suggestions, then that’s good too. But Tessa’s not going to make the mistake of thinking that she’s special.
“Okay, so the girls? Mikayla was your PA?”
“Yep. You can thank Slate for that. He scooped her up and brought her on. Logan started flirting, like, immediately. They got together in New Orleans, and then after that she became our manager.”
“And they got married in Vegas?”
“Yeah,” Dash says. His eyes go a bit dark. “Some of the press thought Logan got her pregnant. You probably saw that when you were researching us.”
Tessa had seen that. Some journalists had speculated that Mikayla was a gold-digger, or that Logan was ‘doing the right thing,’ or that the baby wasn’t even his. Women started coming out of the woodwork claiming that they too had been impregnated by members of Black Lilith, but none of them had been able to prove it. Tessa remembers, vaguely, that one woman had insisted on a DNA test, but the results had been negative. It hadn’t helped that she couldn’t specify which member of the band members had knocked her up, leading to speculation that the band engaged in wild sex parties.
As far as Tessa knows, that only applies to Tommy and Slate. That information will not be going in her article.
“I guess I can see why you guys don’t like the press much after that.”
Dash nods grimly. “Fool us once, you know? Mikayla went through the newspapers and made an excel sheet with all of the journalists who wrote about her. Now we don’t do interviews with them.”
“Savage.”
“That’s my sister-in-law,” he says proudly.
An attendant walks through first class, offering drinks to everyone. Her eyes linger hopefully over Slate and Logan, but she’s slowed by Dash almost with a prowl-like walk, giving him a wicked smile. Dash, for his part, just nods politely. He mustn’t have noticed that the woman was more interested in him than the others.
Tessa wonders how quickly he would have taken her up on her unspoken offer if he had seen that. Would he leave Tessa behind?
No, she decides. Because he’s her friend. He would probably wait until Tessa had someone else to talk to, before heading off for a quickie with another woman.
She feels a spike of jealousy and pushes it down.
“So after Mikayla joined, it was Sersha?”
“Yep,” Dash says, sipping his beer with one hand while keeping hers captive with the other. Tessa sips her red wine along with him. She’s not technically on the job just yet. “Bass Note brought her on to help Tommy write our lyrics.” He smirks over the aisle at them. “Her and Tommy, and Logan and Mikayla for that matter… they hated each other when they first met.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” He glances around the aisle at the rest of the passengers, before leaning over to Tessa. “There’s juicy gossip there, too, involving our last PA. I’ll tell you when we’re alone. Promise you won’t print it?”
“Not if you don’t want me to,” she whispers back.
He seems satisfied with that answer and takes another swig of beer. “Then after that was Harper. She and Slate met under… interesting circumstances. I’ll tell you about them later, too. And he brought her on as our personal trainer. She’s pretty great.”
“Seems like Slate has a gift with people,” Tessa says.
Dash snorts. “Yeah. He actually helped Tommy and Sersha get together, too. He really has a way with people. I still can’t believe he’s got a steady girlfriend before me, though.”
Tessa wrinkles her nose, ignoring the little voice in her head shouting ‘Pick me! Pick me!’ because that’s just ridiculous. She’s not rockstar girlfriend material.
“Well, maybe Slate can be persuaded to find someone for you, too?”
Dash purses his lips and looks down at their entwined fingers. It takes everything in Tessa not to read into that. Her vivid imagination immediately begins conjuring all sorts of ideas about what he’s thinking. About what that look could mean.
“Yeah, maybe,” he says.
They fall into a comfortable silence. True to her word, Tessa lets him hold her hand as they fly through the air, racing toward their destination. There will be a few shows in New York, so the band is going to stay at their brownstone, and Tessa has been invited to join them. Mikayla had offered to put her up in a hotel, but then Dash had cut across her and eagerly invited Tessa into a Halo tournament, offered his room, and just generally seemed firm to keep her with them.
He must be starved for company since his brother and friends have found significant others.
Tessa leans her head on his shoulder and feels him sigh beneath her cheek. It’s only a few hours left until New York. She closes her notebook and glances up at Dash, his strong jaw cutting through her vision, and his scent—a strong, but not overbearing cologne that smells of jasmine and wood—fills her up and makes her want to nuzzle into him.
“So what are you reading right now?” Dash asks, leaning his own head onto hers.
“Beowulf. The Tolkien translation.”
“God, that is so hot.”
She laughs, but not hard enough to dislodge her head. She wouldn’t dare. Right now, there’s not a lot that could get her to move from this spot.
Black Lilith’s brownstone is so very in-character that Tessa wonders whether, even with her imagination, she could have pictured them living anywhere else. For one thing, the house was full of instruments. The boys would be talking one minute, and then the next they would fish a recorder or a ukulele out from behind one of the couch cushions and start playing. All of their furniture is second-hand and comes with a backstory. The living room table was discovered on the corner of 54th and Lex. The bookshelf belonged to Tommy’s grandmother. The kitchen chairs are ‘probably haunted.’ The walls are painted gold, and there’s a keyboard shoved up against a corner covered in otter stickers.
Tessa loves it.
The brownstone is immaculately clean considering it’s mainly been inhabited by four boys for years. In the cab on the way over, Dash told Tessa all about how Logan had insisted they buy it with their first big check from Bass Note. He kept one hand on hers the entire way, but he also spent most of the journey fidgeting, looking out the window, and jumping from one idea to another with the kind of rapidity that kept Tessa’s brain whirring.
Dash eagerly drags her downstairs once they arrive to show her the basement with its massive television and game system. There are cushions and huge fluffy pillows, and several futons stacked up on top of each other. Tessa feels like she’s sinking into a cloud when she sits down. She knows Dash is talking, but she’s not really taking it in.
“… and we’ve got Call of Duty if you’re down to play against Tommy because none of the rest of us can play with him anymore, and… oh, hey, are you hungry?”
“Sure?” Tessa says, a little bit overwhelmed by his eagerness despite everything she already knows about him.
“I’ll get you some cake. Wait here!”
Tessa watches him go with what she knows is a bewildered expression on her face. If she didn’t know any better, she would have thought that he was nervous.
“He’s nervous.”
Tessa nearly jumps in her seat. Logan is standing in the doorway that Dash just left through, leaning against it with his arms crossed and a wry smile on his face.
“Nervous?” Tessa asks, trying to cover up how startled she’d been. She realizes that this is the first time she’s been alone with a member of the band who isn’t Dash, and suddenly wonders if she’s going to need that buffer.
Logan joins her on the futon and sinks into the cushions with a sigh. He’s taken off his jacket, and his colorful tattoos are on display even in the low lamplight.
“Nervous,” he agrees, nodding sagely. Above them, Tessa can hear the stomping of several boots as the rest of the band and their significant others go about whatever business they have. Dash had promised Tessa a tour, but so far he’d been more preoccupied with showing her his gaming system. “You make him nervous.”
“That’s … ridiculous,” she says.
As soon as the words leave her mouth, she’s worried that he might take offense. He’s technically her boss, after all. But he just snorts.
“Not as ridiculous as you think.”
“But. I mean… what does Dash have to be nervous about? I’m his friend, he shouldn’t be nervous at all.”
Logan looks over at her and Tessa is struck by the similarity in the brothers. Not just their looks—though Logan is slimmer and perhaps softer in his features than Dash—but in the way they hold themselves. Confident, like they’re sure of their place in the world, and with an edge of defensiveness in the curl of their shoulders, like they’re happy to prove their worth to anyone who asks.
What happened to these boys to make them like this, she thinks.
Dash and Tessa had never really shared particulars when they were D and T. Tessa knew the people in Dash’s life and how they were related to him, but she doesn’t know anything about extended family, his parents, or how he grew up. Her primary research of Black Lilith had hinted at some kind of drama in the lead singer’s and guitarist’s pasts, but after her conversation with Dash on the plane, she isn’t sure if she should take that at face value. She supposes that she’ll just have to wait until their interviews to get the full story. If she’s even comfortable asking about it.
The biggest difference is their eyes, she realizes. Logan’s are a soft brown, but Dash’s are light blue.
“My brother’s a simple guy,” Logan says, still smiling that wry smile that tells her he knows all of Black Lilith’s secrets. “He’s nervous because he wants to impress you.”
She wants to point out the ridiculousness of that. The fact that he’s a rockstar who can, and probably does, have any woman he wants means he shouldn’t have to impress anybody. But then, she supposes, he has brought Tessa into his home after months of getting to know each other by text. Maybe he’s just hoping that they’ll get along as well as they always have, now that there’s no phone and no distance between them.
“Well, he’s doing just fine there. This place is great.”
Logan rolls his shoulders. Tessa notices the way that his fingers toy with the wedding band on his finger, almost absently, as though he’s still not used to it. “I heard you two talking on the plane. It’s good to hear that he’s opening up to you. He’s been a bit lonely since the rest of us started dating seriously.”
Tessa feels her cheeks flush. “That’s… I mean… I can see that I guess.” She gazes around the room and notices the one-player games are stacked on top of the pile next to the console. She sighs. “Poor guy.”
“It’s not like we’ve never dated before,” Logan says. He cracks his knuckles and Tessa winces on his behalf. “Tommy was pretty serious with one woman once. And it used to be that you couldn’t not see Slate with someone on his arm. But it’s different when it’s all three of us.”
“I imagine,” Tessa replies.
“I also wanted to thank you for encouraging him to think about college.”
Tessa cocks her head at him. Then she nearly jumps out of her skin when something smashes upstairs. She and Logan look up, and Tessa can hear Tommy’s voice drifts down through the floorboards, “Everything’s fine!”
Sersha’s voice responds, “Are you bleeding?”
A pause. “Not badly.”
“Jesus Christ,” Logan mutters under his breath.
“Everything’s fine!” Slate’s voice calls out, joining Tommy’s. “But, ah, Mikayla can you join us in the bathroom? Bring a towel.”
“There are towels in the bathroom,” Harper shouts.
“Yeah…” Slate replies vaguely.
Tessa looks over at Logan, who doesn’t look like he’s in a hurry to move. “Shouldn’t someone address that?”
“I’m not going to panic until I hear the sirens,” Logan says. “FYI, that’s a good pro-tip for living with us, since you’re going to be here for a few days.”
“Noted.”
“What was I talking about?” Logan continues, scrunching up his face a bit. “Oh, yeah… Dash’s college. Thank you.”
Tessa purses her lips and has to look away. He looks kind of proud, which is silly. Dash’s college aspirations aren’t the most personal thing the man has shared with Tessa.
“Did you not know about it?” Tessa asks.
“I knew that he should have gone to college. He would have if I could have afforded it. I never asked him what he would have studied if he’d had the chance.” He blinks into the middle-distance, clearly losing himself in the thoughts swirling through his head. “Mathematics isn’t a surprise. But I would have picked him for a history major.”
“He was good at history?”
“He was good at everything,” Logan says.
Upstairs, Tessa hears the soft, even tones of Mikayla’s voice. She can’t make out what she’s saying, so she’s probably in the bathroom with Tommy and Slate instead of across the house shouting. Tessa hopes that everyone is okay.
“Dash is… he’s a genius,” Logan continues. “He’s a complete doofus, but he’s also a genius. The kid was good at all his classes. He could remember everything he ever learned. He picked up the guitar because he was bored with regular music lessons where all they did was teach him how to play the recorder. I’m pretty sure he learned Dutch just to despite his French teacher. He’s that kind of brilliant.”
“That’s really cool,” Tessa says. “I didn’t know he could speak Dutch.”
“Ask him about it,” Logan says. Then he looks lost in thought again. “I think… I think he spent a lot of time studying when we were kids because things were kind of tough.”
Tessa opens her mouth, then closes it. It’s not her business. Even though she’s burning with curiosity, because Logan is Dash’s brother, and if Dash wants her to know these things then he will tell her.
Logan glances at her from underneath his eyelids, which are so dark that they almost look like eyeliner has darkened the brim of his eyes. “You’ll probably hear all about it when you do the interviews.”
“Logan, I never really got to thank you for the opportunity,” Tessa says, sitting up a bit straighter and reminding herself that this isn’t just Dash’s brother she’s talking to—it’s her boss. She looks down at herself and almost clicks her tongue when she realizes how wrinkled her blouse has gotten since she boarded the plane that morning. “Really, this whole opportunity is… unreal. Thank you.”
Logan just smiles. He’s got a nice smile, she decides. Almost as warm as Dash’s, and with a hint of something extra that makes her feel safe in a different way. It takes her a moment to recognize it—it’s the way that Scott looks at Jackie. The way that Kaden looks at his twin, and at Mary and Stacey. It’s the older brother look. She’s never had it directed at her before.
“You’re welcome. Even though I’ll bet we’ll be thanking you in a few months. Dash kind of insisted on us giving you the job.”
And Tessa starts to feel her cheeks getting flushed again. She feels like she’s back in college, in one of those moments that she’d often shared with one of the other students when there was a calm respite in between classes. In those moments, Tessa would often find herself sharing way more about her life and her dreams than she ever would have normally. She never understood it, but in those moments she would often find herself talking to that person as though she’d known them forever. Instead, of just for a few hours, or even minutes in some cases.
“Did he tell you about my family?” she asks.
He nods. Unabashed, unashamed. “Yes, but that’s only part of the reason he insisted on giving you the job.”
“He told us you’re damn good at what you do. Wouldn’t tell us how, so I’m guessing it’s a little risqué?” He laughs when he sees her expression. “Don’t worry, we’ve all been there,” he says, reaching over to pat her knee the way that she’s often seen Kaden do Halley when his sister felt nervous or self-conscious. They’re twins, but Kaden was born first. And he never lets Halley forget it. “Dash knows good stories.”
“Yeah, Mikayla mentioned that.”
Logan smiles at the mention of his wife’s name. “We trust him. But honestly? I think the biggest factor was him wanting to get to know you. Outside of whatever you two text about twenty-four hours a day. And that’s cool. Slate brings in strays all the time because he likes the look of them. It’s how I met my wife, so I’m not complaining.”
Tessa wants to press her hand to her face to cool it, but she’s worried that it will just draw more attention to the fact that she’s blushing.
“So it’s like Han Solo offering Rey a job because he wanted to keep her around?”
“Just so we’re clear… if you make one of those references in front of my brother he will cream his pants.”
Tessa laughs with him, and it feels good. Like she’s laughing with one of her own brothers. Then she hears the clomp clomp of boots heading downstairs and then Dash is there, with a Tupperware container in hand, and an amused look on his face when he sees the pair of them.
“What’s funny?” he asks.
“Star Wars,” Tessa says. Dash is already well aware of how much she likes those movies.
Dash grins wider. “I’ve got a copy of Rogue One if you want to watch it?”
“Sure,” Tessa replies, quickly sitting up so that he can make himself comfortable next to her.
Logan rolls his eyes and pushes himself to his feet. He spots the Tupperware in Dash’s hand and raises one elegantly eloquent eyebrow. “Really? You’re gonna poison her?”