Sinful Rhythms: The Black Lilith Series #4

by Hazel Jacobs

  “So what was the concept that you started with?”

  Tommy bites his lip. “Why do people hurt other people?” he murmurs.

  “And did you figure it out?”

  Silence falls between them for a beat too long. Then Tommy shrugs and gives her his most cheeky smile. “Nope!” he says. “But I’m not a philosopher. I don’t think that music should be in the business of answering questions. Maybe its goal should be to put the questions out there, and then we can all figure them out together.”

  Tessa quickly taps away at her laptop, desperate to catch everything he’s saying. Most of it is pure gold. She’d known the moment she met him that Tommy would end up being really quotable. Not that she wants to compare, but Slate’s interview had mostly been about him deflecting her questions rather than answering any of them. She’ll need to work harder on that guy if she wants to get to the heart of him.

  But that thought makes her wonder. Should she be trying to get to the heart of these men? She’s been given complete creative freedom because they’re all assuming that she won’t make fools out of them. And even though she has no intention of doing anything like that, she still wonders what they could consider ‘being made a fool of.’ Is plastering their private thoughts on a magazine going to be too personal? Is Tommy saying this stuff here and now because he’s comfortable with her, only to feel exposed and vulnerable when he reads it in print later on?

  Tessa wants to get to the heart of these men, mostly because she thinks it will make for a better story, but also because she’s genuinely curious. Something about the way that they interact. The seamless way that they fit together as though they’ve been designed for each other, makes her wonder what it’s about them that makes them so special. Because they are special. Any idiot can see that.

  “Do you always go deep like that?” Tessa asks Tommy, pushing aside thoughts of creative integrity for another time. It’s the same thing she does with thoughts of Dash.

  “Nah,” Tommy says, waving his hand. “You’ve heard our song, ‘Termites in the Toothpaste’? That’s about Logan and Dash’s first apartment.”

  “Do you ever draw inspiration from anything outside of your experiences?”

  Tommy bites his lip again, the fingers of his right hand clicking as he considers the question. “Well… okay… take the song I wrote for your little sister,” he says.

  Tessa already thanked him for it. She bought him a whole packet of chocolate-chip cookies as a thank you, but she’d gotten the feeling that he was more delighted with the texts she’d shown him from Jackie gushing about how great the song is.

  “I have no idea what it’s like to be transgender, so I can’t write from that perspective,” Tommy says. “I know what it’s like to want to change, and to feel like I’m looking at the wrong person when I look in the mirror, but it’s nothing like what she went through. So I had to look at it in a different way.”

  “What way was that?”

  Tommy shrugs. “Just… wanting to understand, I guess?” he says. “Just putting out the questions and hoping that someone will answer.”

  Nodding, Tessa types that out. She thinks that Jackie will probably appreciate that. Jackie sometimes talks about how people with good intentions will try to speak for her. Allies who would call out transgender microaggressions, only to make a gaffe a few minutes later. Jackie isn’t a poster child for trans youth, and it annoyed her when people would try to put her in yet another gender-role box. So the fact that Tommy came to her with questions, instead of answers, delighted her.

  “What about you?” Tommy asks.

  “Huh?”

  “What inspires you to write?”

  Tessa shakes her head quickly. “This interview isn’t about me,” she says.

  Tommy stretches his hands above his head and falls back onto the bed, kicking his legs up into the air and letting them flop down.

  “The others will be coming back soon. And then Slate will make a dirty joke, and Dash will drape himself over you like a cat, so the interview will probably be over then. Besides, I feel like I hardly know you? Except what I’ve heard from Dash.”

  Dash, who’s all hot words and sexy moves, but who hasn’t once tried to get off with her. And that’s something else that confuses Tessa to no end—the fact that Dash has made it a point to avoid letting her touch him. He seems so fixated on getting Tessa off, that it doesn’t even seem to occur to him that he has needs too. Ordinarily, this would delight Tessa to no end. But now, looking at it from a few weeks of experience with Dash, she’s starting to wonder if he doesn’t want to sleep with her or let her touch him because he wants to maintain distance. Like maybe sex is something he does with groupies, but not with his friends. Maybe he’s holding out on her because he doesn’t want to get her hopes up.

  She doesn’t even know why she keeps coming back to the thought of being in a relationship with Dash. They’re happy the way that they are and there’s no need to escalate. But Tessa’s a romantic at heart, and she likes the idea of being exclusive with someone. To know that they’re happy together, that they don’t need anyone else, that they don’t need crowds or groupies.

  Off topic.

  “There’s not much to me,” Tessa says finally.

  Tommy raises his head up a little to look over at her. “Not much? Not likely.”

  Tessa runs her hand through her hair and rubs her nose. Somewhere outside, a drill sounds and Tessa realizes that someone must be doing construction nearby. Why is it that people always do construction near hotels? At both of the hotels that they’ve been in these last few days, there has been construction both times.

  The thing is, she knows that there is something to her. Just like she knows that she’s pretty and that most men would be interested in dating her if they weren’t rockstars. But right now, she wants to stay focused on her job. She doesn’t want to break and become too chummy especially since she’s given herself a chunk of time when she’s supposed to be working.

  “I’d rather just stick to the interviewing right now. Maybe later, when we’re eating, I can tell you more about me?”

  “Sure, that works.”

  So they kept going, with Tessa asking leading questions so she could get a better sense of Tommy’s process. She wants to get into the backstory of this character, of course, but right now she doesn’t know if she’s ready to start pushing. The fact that she instinctively pulled back when the questions about his ex-girlfriend were on the tip of her tongue proved that. Instead, she’d gone for safety. Not exactly what she’s being paid for, but Tessa is confident that in a few weeks, they’ll have reached the point where she can ask those kinds of questions. In the meantime, she knows that she can rely on Dash to give her whatever information she needs.

  Sure enough, when the others returned with take-out in hand, Dash draped himself over Tessa and Slate started cracking jokes, breaking the interviewing tone immediately. Tommy and Sersha ate fried chicken on the bed, while the rest of the band sat around with their legs crossed in a circle like they were having a picnic. Tessa finally put her laptop away after Logan insisted.

  “You’re off the clock now, Tessa. Go easy on yourself.”

  Easy for you to say, she thought as she joined Dash on the floor, accepting a piece of chicken from him. You’re already well-established. My career hasn’t even started, and I’m already interviewing one of the biggest bands in the country. No pressure or anything.

  “Do you ever feel like you might have skipped some steps in your career?” Tessa asks Jared as they wait together in the green room. He’s resting against the wall with his hands across his chest while she’s perched on the long, bright red couch with her laptop resting on her knees.

  “Sometimes,” Jared says. “Especially when I call my parents on the weekend and they keep asking me to get the bands’ autographs. I only went into personal security a few years ago, you know? Didn’t think I’d be doing national tours this early.”

  “Right? It
’s just… so unlikely. It feels like I cheated.”

  Jared looks down at his nails, before turning his gaze back up to her and giving her a cheeky grin. “Nothing wrong with it, though. Is there? You’re here now unless you want to take a few steps back?”

  “No,” Tessa says. “Of course not. I just… I guess, I just have to earn it?”

  Jared is prevented from answering when Sersha and Harper return to the green room, their arms linked at the elbows. They’d gone to the bathroom together, and Tessa had politely declined their invitation to join them. She still has edits to do.

  “Still at the computer?” Sersha says, making a graceful gesture in Tessa’s direction. “Tessa, love, as one workaholic to another, put the fucking computer away.”

  “I’ve just got one more paragraph to fix—”

  “Nope!”

  Harper takes the laptop from Tessa and puts it on the table, mercifully leaving it open so Tessa doesn’t lose her work. Tessa briefly panics until Sersha reaches over to save the document. Then both women take seats on either side of Tessa, barricading her in.

  “Why don’t you two ever watch the show?” Tessa asks because in all the time she’s known these women, she’s never seen them actually watching their boyfriends perform.

  Harper waves her hand in an almost fond slash dismissive way. “Unless the boys are planning a grand gesture, their shows are usually pretty similar.”

  “Grand gesture?”

  Harper and Sersha share a look over Tessa’s head.

  “Tessa, allow me to introduce you to several years of escalating fuckups known as ‘Black Lilith’s courting strategies,” Sersha says.

  And so Tessa is treated to a blow-by-blow account of how each of the women joined the Black Lilith family. She is awestruck at first at all the drama, mostly because she thinks that there’s a lot more to each of the stories than Sersha and Harper are telling her, but she’s too enthralled to ask leading questions or to try and fill in the blanks. She’s itching to take notes. She thinks about reaching for her laptop, but after a moment she decides not to. Mostly because it might break the flow of what they’re saying. Also because it’s funny.

  “Logan wrote a song for her?” Tessa asks, grinning as she tries to imagine it.

  “Yep. This is before either of us joined up, by the way,” Sersha says. “But yeah, they’d been dating in secret for weeks, then broke up. Then Slate thought that he was helping them get together. Then Logan decides that the only way to win her back is to improve a song for her in front of a crowd full of people.”

  “Next level drama queens, the lot of them,” says Harper, taking a sip of water from a bottle she took off of the table. In the corner, Jared is still leaning against the wall and looking amused. “Sersh, tell her about the Tommy thing.”

  “Right, so Tommy and I started dating, okay? And then Tommy’s ex plants one on him, and I think he’s cheating. So I leave the country.”

  Tessa raises an eyebrow. “Naturally,” she says. “That’s not at all next level drama queen.”

  “Hush you,” Sersha says, winking. “We’re perfect for each other. Can’t you tell? Anyway… Tommy Skypes my mam, finds out where I am, flies to Ireland, stalks me to a favorite spot of mine, and after I’m done trying to beat him to a pulp, he explains himself. Then he and Logan sing a duet for Mikayla and me at their next show.”

  Tessa smothers her smile and leans over to the table to grab a Coke. When she sees Harper’s disapproving look, her hand skims the Coke bottle and grabs the water instead. Harper nods approvingly.

  “Harper, did you get a song?”

  “Nah, I got a limo and a bouquet of roses.”

  “What?”

  Harper explains to Tessa how Slate had shown up to their hotel, standing up through the roof of a white limo, and then scaled the wall of the hotel to reach her on the balcony.

  “That’s… dangerous,” Tessa says. “Wait… so each member of the band managed to colossally fuck things up with their girlfriend, and then had to make a grand gesture to get them back? That sounds, I don’t know… ridiculous? Like, surely they’re not that much of a collective disaster.”

  Sersha sighs and rests her head on Tessa’s shoulder. “That, my dear, is exactly what they are.”

  “And we love them for it,” Harper adds.

  “But we also want to kill them for it,” Sersha continues.

  Tessa shakes her head. “But… they’d dated people before, right?”

  “I mean, I guess?” Sersha says. “I don’t know. I get the feeling that… for Slate and Logan and Dash… they didn’t really think about dating much after they started the band.”

  “They started the band in high school?”

  “Indeed they did,” Sersha nods sagely.

  Harper clicks her tongue and stretches one arm over her head, showing off her toned stomach muscles as she goes. She’s wearing a skin-tight blouse that seems designed to make everyone looking at her want to go home and do some sit-ups.

  Above them, the stage is rocking. The green room is right beneath the stage, so Tessa had assumed that it would be ridiculously loud, but generally, it’s just the vibrations from the speakers that are bleeding through the ceiling above them. Thinking about vibrations gets Tessa thinking about the vibrations from the railing that Dash had made her sit on, which makes heat rise in her chest and she has to clear her throat.

  “So Black Lilith is a collective dating disaster,” Tessa says. Sersha and Harper nod wryly. “That’s sad.”

  “Yeah,” Harper says. “But, hey! Maybe Dash will be the exception?”

  “How is it going with Dash, anyway?” Sersha asks.

  Tessa ducks her head, her eyes drifting over to Jared who’s still waiting on the other side of the room. He’s schooled his expression into one of blank, watchful boredom. She wonders if he has an interest in this conversation. Tessa and Jared haven’t been able to talk much since he’d flirted with her at the airport, but she’s still hyper aware of him whenever they are in the room together, or whenever he’s following her and the rest of the women between hotels and venues.

  Jared might want a relationship. In fact, he probably does. He’s not a rockstar who’s more used to being with groupies than he is with real people like Dash seems to be.

  That’s a thought that Tessa hasn’t really given much thought to. If the men of Black Lilith are a collective dating disaster, and Dash hasn’t dated much since high school, then maybe he just doesn’t know how to date? Maybe he’s never given it any thought. He’s had sex on tap since Black Lilith got famous, and he’s got Tessa as a friend and a fuck buddy. Why bother with a girlfriend?

  “Dash is… my friend,” Tessa says.

  “So Tommy didn’t totally cockblock you when he got high in Manhattan, and decided that he wanted to eat the uncooked cake batter in the kitchen?” Sersha asks, raising an eyebrow.

  “People can be friends and still be in positions where they can be cockblocked,” Tessa says evenly.

  Jared’s lips quirk up, but otherwise, he doesn’t react.

  Harper cocks her head at Tessa, before sharing a look over Sersha’s head. “So… okay, I’m gonna ask… what is the nature of your relationship with our favorite guitarist?”

  Tessa can’t help but grin at the word choice. It sounds like the sort of thing that she might hear Scott asking when Jackie finally gets a significant other. Probably with a BB gun across his lap and a glare on his face.

  “Like I said, he’s my best friend.”

  “So you… turned him down?”

  “Huh?” Tessa gives Sersha a look, assuming that she misheard the woman. Against the wall, Jared is checking his nails again. “He hasn’t asked me out?”

  “He hasn’t?” Sersha and Harper shout together, making Tessa flinch.

  Jared, for his part, doesn’t move. Tessa can’t tell if he’s just well-trained, and therefore not affected by loud noises, or if he’s as surprised by Tessa as Sersha and Harper seem to
be.

  The two women stare at Tessa like she’s made the most profoundly strange comment either of them have ever heard.

  “But he is completely infatuated with you?” Sersha asks.

  “Seriously, it would be creepy if we didn’t know that you’ve known each other for months.”

  “No, I get that,” Tessa says. “But, like, he hasn’t asked me out. I don’t think he’s interested in making it a thing, you know?”

  Sersha and Harper don’t need to say anything about that, their expressions say it all.

  The door opens next to Jared, and he quickly pushes himself away from the wall, turning to face it, but it turns out to just be Mikayla with her cheeks flushed and a cheerful smile on her face. Unlike Sersha and Harper, Mikayla watches every show. But not because she’s infatuated with the band, although that is probably a factor. She watches the show because she is literally the one person holding everything together. Tessa thinks that if the world were fair, she would be focusing the entire ten thousand word article on Mikayla being a queen, but Bass Note will probably not be happy about that.

  Tessa will spend a few thousand words expounding on how wonderful Mikayla is. If Rolling Stone doesn't like it, then she can figure it out in the edits.

  “Hey, the show’s nearly over. What’s going on?”

  “Dash hasn’t asked Tessa out yet,” Sersha says, as though it’s the greatest injustice that she’s ever heard.

  Mikayla raises her eyebrows, but otherwise, she doesn’t seem to react too much. “Maybe he’s planning a grand gesture,” she says, shrugging.

  Tessa raises her hand into the air, drawing the attention of the other women. “Um… I’m not comfortable with that?” she says. “No grand gestures for me, please?”

  Mikayla nods with sympathy. “I understand that. If only the Todd boys would understand that.”

  “It’s not a genetic thing. I honestly think there’s something in the water at the brownstone,” Harper says. She’s finished her water bottle and is twirling it in her hands with the kind of coordination that Tessa can only dream of. “Maybe even some collective head trauma.”