by Hazel Jacobs
Music helps her write. It helps her shut out the world, which is pretty important when she’s concentrating so much on what she needs to write. She’s got a few more questions which need answers.
How did Slate and Harper meet?
Who was Tommy’s ex-girlfriend?
What the fuck was Slate’s last name?
These were all personal questions, but there are professional ones as well. The basic facts about the band have already been published a hundred times.
When they got together.
How they got together.
How long they had practiced their instruments in music class and in garages before Bass Note signed them.
So what can she bring to the table that’s new?
Someone knocks at her door, and she jumps, so caught up in her own thoughts that she wasn’t expecting the noise.
“Who is it?” she calls.
“It’s Dash.”
Tessa runs a hand through her hair. She loves spending time with Dash, but there’s so much work to do. Not to mention Logan’s words from earlier are still ringing in her ears…
“Hang on.”
She goes to the door, opens it, and gets an armful of Dash. She lets him hug her, enjoying the feeling of his body against hers, before pulling away and giving him a smile.
“Glad you’re here, I have some questions about the article.”
He’s wearing a suit and loose tie, his hair is swept up on his head. Tessa thinks he looks good like this, but she prefers him in his usual slogan tee and jeans. This looks like a young man dressing up in his father’s clothes. It’s not her Dash.
He’s not yours, he’s just a friend.
“All work and no play makes Tessa a dull girl,” Dash says, kissing her on the cheek and waving the bottle of spicy rum that he’d brought with him in her line of vision. “Have a drink with me?”
“After this,” Tessa says.
Behind him, she sees one of the bodyguards who usually follows the boys around. Jared has gone with the rest of the entourage because most of his charges were going too. Only Tessa had chosen to stay in and work. Dash must have brought one of the bodyguards back when he’d left the restaurant.
“How was dinner?” she asks, drawing Dash into her room and giving the bodyguard a nod over her shoulder as she closes the door.
“Boring without you.” Dash settles himself on the bed and leans on her pillows. He seems to fill the room with the strength of his personality, and he beams over at her before his eyes slide over to her laptop. “Close the laptop, Tess. Take a break.”
“Dash… you know I love you, but I really do need to work. If I didn’t, I would have gone to the dinner.”
The Spotify playlist switches to the next song and Tessa finally hears a song that she recognizes—Queen’s ‘Friends Will Be Friends.’ Queen is one of Scott’s favorite bands.
Dash looks fondly at the laptop. Tessa realizes that while she was talking, he’d actually looked startled for a moment. It wasn’t until the song switched that he dropped the look. What had made him look like that?
I told him that I love him.
Well, she does. Tessa adores Dash. She wouldn’t consider it love in the romantic sense. At least, she wouldn’t admit to considering it love, especially since Dash has made himself perfectly clear about how he feels. The surprise in his eyes was yet another confirmation that he’s not trying to get into anything other than to fuck her, along with all the other women.
Dash pulls his tie off and waves it at her, along with the rum. “What do you say we have a little fun?” he asks, raising an eyebrow at her and winking.
Tessa can imagine what this fun entails, and for a moment she considers going along with it. She wonders what would happen. Would he tie her up and lick rum off of her like he did with the whiskey? The dark rum would stain the hotel sheets. He’s loaded, so he can probably afford to pay for the damages.
She is leaning toward the bed, getting ready to climb on. And then she remembers that she’s got a date with Jared.
Tessa is monogamous by nature. Even if she and Jared aren’t really serious and haven’t even been on a date yet, she feels obligated to avoid sex with Dash until she knows where that’s going. Dash is not going to have sex with her, anyway, she reasons. He’s avoided that so far. He would probably have just tied her up and played around. Nothing that could be considered a commitment.
But then Logan had seemed pretty adamant that she come out and ask him. As though Dash wouldn’t know his mind without someone actively taking him by the hand and explaining how they felt.
“Actually, why don’t we just talk?” Tessa says.
Dash cocks his head, his smile still on his face, though there’s a hint of confusion to it now. “Talk?” he asks. “What’s there to talk about?” He lowers his eyelids. “I can keep you extremely entertained with my tongue if that’s what you’re after.”
Tessa knows that he definitely could. But she just shakes her head. “Actually, there’s something I want to talk to you about, and I think it’s pretty important.”
“Okay, spill…” Dash says, starting to look worried now.
Tessa sits with him on the edge of the bed and puts her hands on her lap. Dash hesitantly puts his tie on the bedspread—maybe so that he can reach for it later—and the rum bottle on the bedside table, right on top of her book. Pet Sematary by Stephen King. The hotel table is so small that it’s only big enough for the lamp and the book, so the bottle teeters a little on the edge. Tessa watches it for a moment. Eventually, it stops moving and settles completely.
“Are we friends?” Tessa asks Dash, deciding to start with something easy.
Dash actually looks shocked. Much more shocked than she’d thought that he would be.
“Of course,” he says. “What kind of fucking question is that? Tess… we’re best friends.”
Tessa nods because she already knew that. It feels good to hear him say it as though it’s a given. “Yeah, we are.” He looks noticeably relieved. She continues after drawing a breath, “What about… more?”
“More,” he says slowly. Now he’s looking a little bit nervous. “More, as in… like… boyfriend and girlfriend?”
That’s such a sweet, high school way to put it. It’s the sort of thing that a boy might have asked her in grade twelve. Tessa nods again, watching him carefully. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“Well, I mean, that’s a bit…” he pushes his fingers through his hair and continues, “… why would we need to put it a name on it? Can’t we just keep having fun and being friends?”
She was expecting that, but it still hurt. It’s not a heavy pain, though. It’s a paper cut near the heart, one that stings a little with every beat. To hear it confirmed isn’t the same as understanding it without words.
Dash is clearly trying really hard to hold onto his smile, but his body has seized up. He looks almost cold compared to the way he usually sits with his arms open and muscles relaxed. He looks like he’s ready to take flight. His eyes are darting between her eyes and lips and chin like he’s trying to decide what he wants to focus on. He doesn’t want to be ‘boyfriend and girlfriend.’ He wants to keep up with the casual sex and continue to enjoy the freedom of his rockstar status. Tessa can’t say that she blames him. She knows that it would have to be a pretty spectacular woman who would draw him into a real relationship after the way he’s been living since, well, since he left high school. Tessa clearly isn’t that woman.
Logan had been wrong. It isn’t that Dash needs Tessa’s desires spelled out for him. He just isn’t interested.
“That’s totally okay. We can keep being friends.”
Dash looks relieved. “That’s best.”
“But I can’t keep ‘having fun,’” Tessa says.
At that point, his body language becomes even colder than it had when she’d asked whether he wanted to be anything more than friends. His shoulders turn inward, they hunch, and his chin dips down. For the first
time since he came in here, Dash frowns.
“What? Why?” he asks. “Because I’m not going to commit? I didn’t realize our friendship meant so little to you.”
“I didn’t realize our friendship was dependant on me putting out,” she says, matching his cold tone.
He backtracks so quickly that Tessa thinks he might as well be walking backward. “No, no, no… that’s not what I meant—” he says rapidly.
“I know that we basically started this because of the sexting, but we’re more than that now, right?”
“We are, definitely,” he says. “You’re my everything, Tess. I’ve told you things I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
Tessa leans over and puts her hand on his, squeezing his knuckles. She’s glad when he squeezes back, though it’s really weak. So weak that she wonders if he’d even meant to do it. Was it just a nervous spasm, or an instinct?
“Same here,” she says. “But we can be friends without the sexy stuff, you know? That’s all I’m saying.”
“Because… I’m not going to date you?” he asks. He is clearly hesitating, thinking, pondering. He looks so confused and stressed-out that Tessa almost wants to take it all back. But instead, she plows ahead.
“Well that, and I’ve got a date in a few days. So I feel like I probably shouldn’t cheat on the guy, you know?”
Dash pulls away his hand. Immediately. “A date?”
“Yeah,” Tessa says. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you about…” she waves a hand between them, “… this. Us. Just so we’re both on the same page.”
She wants to brush it off as double-checking, and not that she’d secretly hoped he’d sweep her off of her feet like something from a romance novel. She wishes that she hadn’t secretly hoped that he’d want to put a stop to her plans with Jared, and immediately demand that they become exclusive, but Dash doesn’t speak. He seems to be making his mind up about something, and Tessa doesn’t dare to hope.
Then he leans forward, pressing a kiss to her lips and crushing her breasts between them. He pulls her around so that she’s sitting in his lap. Tessa’s body immediately goes into its usual powerless lust. She wraps her arms around his neck and presses herself closer, because that’s clearly what he wants, and Tessa can feel his hands dip over her hips and waist, sending warm shivers through her body. Tessa falls completely at the mercy of Dash’s hands and mouth. When he reaches up to bury a hand in her hair, she can only gasp when he pulls just a little too tight.
Tongues meet in Tessa’s mouth. She groans at the taste of him—sweet, as though he has eaten cake recently.
Dinner. Food. Drinks. Coffee. Jared.
Her mind can barely form words, but the ones she can form are enough to pull her up short. She presses her hand against his chest. At first gently and hesitantly, then harder.
“Dash, stop.”
Her words are almost muffled by his lips, but they’re unmistakable. Dash stops immediately. No matter how hot and bothered he gets, he seems to know how to stop when he needs to. He pulls away, and Tessa takes a moment to catch her breath before pulling away completely and taking her legs off of his lap. She settles herself on the bed and sighs, brushing out her hair even though she can still feel the phantom warmth of his hands on her scalp. She looks down, half-expecting to see a handprint on her waist and hip as well, but her blouse is unmarked.
“I told you, I don’t want to do that anymore,” she tells him. Her voice is breathless, and she’s honestly surprised that the words don’t come out as a moan because she’s still so dizzy from the kiss.
“So this new guy… is he your boyfriend? I don’t get it?”
“We haven’t even talked about that yet.”
“Where did you even meet him?”
“Why does it matter?”
Dash stands up so quickly that the table gets knocked by his knee and the bottle of rum drops to the floor with a heavy thud. The bottle’s still intact, but Tessa winces and thinks about what kind of hell she would be in if she had smashed a bottle of dark rum on the carpet in her own home. Dash doesn’t even look down. Has becoming famous skewed his understanding of stains and carpets so much?
“I have to go,” Dash says.
“Dash… I don’t want to finish the conversation like this. Please don’t leave.” But he’s already heading for the door. “Dash!”
Dash closes the door behind himself.
Tessa leans down and picks up the bottle. She’s on auto-pilot. Her body going through the motions of cleaning up, even though her mind is reeling. One moment she has Dash in her room, cheerful as always, begging her to get out of the room and hang out with him. Then he’s gone, just because she told him that she’s got a date with someone else.
And what the hell was up with that kiss?
Had she made herself more desirable to him because someone else wants her?
Or was it a power trip for the rockstar, to try kissing her when he knows that she isn’t interested in getting physical with him.
Tessa gets up, her legs are still shaking from his kiss. Her core is tight, and her groin is a little heavy as well. One kiss and she’s wobbly like a new-born calf. Dash’s kisses are like a superpower. Tessa sits at the desk and runs her finger over the keypad, lighting up the screen again, and the moment she sees her notes she knows that she can’t work anymore tonight. Her head isn’t exactly a mess, but it is preoccupied.
It doesn’t help that she’s made a list of questions that she wanted to ask Dash. Questions that she probably won’t be able to ask now.
She sighs, closes the laptop, and pushes herself away from the desk. Standing up, she falls face-first onto the bed.
The first thing Logan does when he enters the hotel room is give Tessa a long, sad look.
“So, what’s your side of the story?”
Tessa hisses through her teeth and clicks her tongue. “Unimportant,” she says. “Why don’t we talk about you?” She draws the man to the bed and takes her place at the desk, resting her hands on the keyboard.
“Okay,” Logan says, slowly.
Logan doesn’t seem to like the idea of letting things go and focusing on the interview, but Tessa can tell—maybe it’s the way he holds himself, maybe it’s the way his eyes flicker between hers like he’s looking for something—that he’s either going to try and bring Dash up again in a few minutes, when they’re halfway through their interview, or at the end. Tessa hasn’t known Logan long, but she’s known him long enough to know he’s probably not going to give it up. He sits down anyway, and that’s a good start, making himself comfortable on the bed.
Dash hasn’t really spoken to her since their fight the night before. He’s been polite, in the sense that he hasn’t outright ignored her. He says ‘good morning’ and ‘how are you?’ But during breakfast that morning, in the dining room of the hotel, he didn’t look at her. He’d just picked at his omelet and smiled every time someone else spoke to him, clearly doing his best to pretend that nothing was wrong. Tessa had tried to catch his eye at first, offering a few observations about the meal and trying to pull him into a conversation about the new Fantastic Beasts movie, until she got the message—Dash simply was not interested in talking. At least not now.
Maybe when he’s had time to cool off, Tessa will try again.
She wonders how many women have ever actually turned Dash down. Not many, she thinks. Why would they?
But it makes her ache to see him like this—so cold when usually he’s so warm. He’s withdrawn and apparently determined to avoid eye contact at all costs. He won’t even look at her. A part of Tessa thinks that it serves her right for trying to turn what had begun as a fling into something more serious. Dash is her best friend—is, not was, because it’s not over, not yet—but the moment she wanted more, she should have known that it could all end in tears. Wasn’t that always the concern with trying to change relationships? That the change may trigger something awful?
She misses texting Dash. She misses laughing w
ith him. She misses kissing him. She misses spending hours and hours talking about everything and nothing at all. It’s barely been twenty-four hours—no, it’s barely been twelve hours—and she already misses him like she’s lost a limb.
“Can you tell me a little bit about why you wanted to start a band?” she asks Logan, reminding herself again that she should be doing her job.
That’s another thing. She shouldn’t have brought something like this into her work. She shouldn’t have let herself get romantically involved with someone she works with. That was her first mistake.
“Mostly for kicks,” Logan replies easily, leaning back on his elbows so the ring on his left hand glints in the low lamplight. “I met Slate at school, and he was a drummer. We put together a band so we would have something to do after school.”
“So was it just an after school thing?”
“Yeah,” Logan says. He seems to think about it for a second. “Slate needed something to keep him away from home. He wasn’t on good terms with his aunt and uncle. And I didn’t really need to be home.”
Tessa hesitates for a moment, before asking, “How come? If you don’t want to answer—”
“No, it’s okay. You’ll decide for yourself whether it needs to be in the article,” he says. “I didn’t like to go home because there wasn’t really much to go home to. Dad left when we were young, Mom farmed us out. It was pretty much just Dash and me, and he was always in late honors classes, so going home without him just meant I’d have to come back a few hours later.”
Tessa nods. She’d known, of course, that Dash’s parents weren’t around when he was younger.
“Do you talk to her much?”
“Not really,” Logan replies. “She’s in Jersey, still. Don’t know where Dad is.”
Tessa’s hands are completely still on the keyboard. She doesn’t need to write this stuff down. She’ll remember it later, and she doesn’t want the sound of keys tapping to break through Logan’s words, to remind him that he’s being recorded and that this might all wind up in a story someday. She wonders if it’ll even wind up getting into the article. Or whether this is way too personal.