Sinful Rhythms: The Black Lilith Series #4

by Hazel Jacobs

  Logan taps his finger on his knee and rubs his thumb over his bottom lip. “So, maybe we can trade questions… one for one?”

  “Ugh… must we?”

  “Oh, I think we must,” he says slyly.

  Tessa considers her options, then dips her head in consent. She knows that she can probably talk her way out of it. In fact, if she wants to keep this interview professional, she probably should. But Logan is a persistent man. He won’t give up on this, and if he does then it will be by walking out the door and cutting their interview short. More than that, Tessa realizes that he knows Dash. He knows Dash better than Tessa ever could. Maybe he can give her a bit of insight.

  “So, you’ve had your first question.”

  “If I’d have known that it would be tit for tat, I would have started with something better.”

  Logan just smirks. “Shoulda, coulda, woulda.” He slides back onto the mattress and crosses his legs. “Here’s my question… are you okay?”

  Tessa honestly hadn’t been expecting that. “I’m pretty much numb to it all, right now,” she says. “I wasn’t… I wasn’t expecting the way he reacted, but in the end, I guess I should have? I don’t know… you probably think it’s stupid that I want a commitment.”

  Logan raises an eyebrow and waves his left hand at her, wiggling his ring finger. “You’re talking to a newlywed here, sweetheart.”

  The room, which had started to feel a little bit claustrophobic, felt warmer. Tessa and Logan share a grin.

  “So—”

  “Ah ah,” Tessa says, holding her hand up. “My turn.” Logan grins and nods for her to ask her question. She taps her chin and thinks about it for a moment. Since it’s tit for tat now, she figures it should probably be something juicy. “What’s the one thing you regret most about starting this band?”

  “Regret?” Logan replies. He raises an eyebrow and then frowns as though he’s never really thought about it. “Regret… I don’t think… no, I know, I don’t regret anything.” But he’s silent for a moment longer, thinking hard. He’s silent for so long that Tessa actually looks at her watch and begins to wonder if she shouldn’t have asked the question. Then he sighs and says, “I wish Dash could have gone to college. Now that we’re in a band together, he’s not going to leave, not for anything. I wish he’d had the chance to be an average eighteen-year-old, starting out as a freshman, doing all the stupid stuff that freshmen do. Even if he goes back to college now and gets his degree, it won’t be the same. He’ll never get those years back.”

  Tessa is silent for a moment. Then, she quickly types Logan’s response into her laptop. He waits patiently while she does. “That must be hard. I know that you’ve kind of taken responsibility for him.”

  “Had to. No one else would.”

  “For what it’s worth, I think he turned out really well.”

  He smiles then. It’s not a grin like they’re sharing a secret, but a genuinely pleased smile. “That leads me to my next question… What’s your version of what happened? Because I love my brother, but I think there might be more nuance to this than he seems to think.”

  Tessa sighs and leans back on her seat. She realizes that, given a choice, she would have liked to talk to Mikayla, Sersha, or Harper about this. Baring her feelings has always been easier when she was dealing with other women. Not that Logan isn’t an attentive listener, but even in the moment between hearing the question and answering it, she finds herself editing her response. Downplaying the emotions and trying to get to the heart of the problem as much as she can. It’s a strange instinct, and one she should probably train herself out of.

  “My version is… I asked him if he wanted to agree not to see other people, and he said he preferred to stay as friends. But… friends with benefits. I told him that won’t work for me. I told him that I’m going to see other people, but I don’t want to cheat on them. So. Yeah. That happened.”

  Logan chews his lip thoughtfully, thinking it over. “Yeah, that pretty much matches up with what he said. Except, he was a little bit more emotional about it. Did he tell you why he doesn’t want things to change between you?”

  Tessa shrugs. “I guess he’s so used to groupies… or just, one-night stands and that sort of thing that he probably doesn’t want to give it up.”

  Shifting on the bed, Logan turns, so his entire body is facing Tessa, and she feels instantly as though she has his undivided attention. “Do you really think so?”

  “My turn,” Tessa says. Because if she can avoid the question even for a moment, then she’d like to do just that. Anything to give herself time to think. Logan doesn’t look happy about it, but he nods his assent. “Tell me about how your relationships with the other band members have changed since you started it?”

  Sometimes, Tessa thinks that the boys must get the same questions in every interview. She’d noticed it in the way that Slate so easily side-stepped some of her early attempts, and how Tommy’s responses were a little too well-spoken, as though they were stock responses that he’d given before. She’d thought that this question would be something like that. But, to her surprise, Logan’s face lights up.

  “Slate and I were close friends,” he says, after again giving his response some thought. “Not like brothers, but close. Now, I think we’re all a big family, but Slate is more like… well, if I had to think of a comparison, I guess I’d call him an ex-boyfriend?” He laughs at Tessa’s expression. “We’ve never crossed swords. Tommy’s a bit more adventurous than I am when it comes to Slate, but Slate and I got really really close in high school. We were inseparable. And then we started to get famous, and we both began to get a little jealous of each other, and the time we were spending with other people. It’s only the last few years, probably about the year before Mikayla joined us, that Slate and I have both started to understand where we stand. I think we’re both a lot happier to let other people spend time with the other because we know that we love each other and nothing’s gonna change that.”

  Tessa types all of this into her laptop fascinated and intrigued at the same time. “So, it’s like the ex who’s still your friend and wants the best for you, but knows that you’re going to see other people?”

  “Exactly,” Logan says, tapping his nose. “Tommy… at first, Tommy was the little brother with Dash. When you meet him… and you’ve probably noticed this… but when you meet Tommy you kind of want to bundle him up in a blanket and protect him from everything bad in the world. It took me a while to understand that he doesn’t need protection. Or, if he does, then he’ll ask. It’s taken all of us a while to stop protecting Tommy and just let him get on with his life.”

  Tessa nods. She types that response up, hoping that there will be a chance for her to ask Logan to elaborate on that later. She feels like there’s a story there.

  “And Dash… well, Dash is still my kid brother. I’m still his big brother. I think of everyone in the band, my relationship with him has changed the least.” He waits until she finishes typing before asking, “Speaking of changing relationships with Dash. Do you really think that he doesn’t want yours to change because he enjoys sleeping with other women too much?”

  Tessa wishes that she’d had more time to think about it before answering, “Honestly, I can’t think of any other reason. Why mess with a good thing?”

  “But surely you know that he adores you?”

  “That doesn’t mean that he wants to make things official,” she says, remembering how shocked Sersha and Harper had been when they realized Tessa and Dash weren’t an official couple. “I mean, he’s never even been in a relationship before… not a grown-up one, at least. Not one with actual emotions involved.”

  “Exactly,” Logan says, shifting on the bed as though he means to get closer to her, but he’s already perched on the edge, and that’s as far as he can go. “Maybe that’s the problem? Maybe he doesn’t know what being in a real relationship means?”

  “And so he’s going to avoid it indefinitely?”
Tessa asks. “Sorry, that’s not going to work for me.”

  Logan leans back a little bit, nodding with something bordering on respect in his gaze. “I understand that.”

  “And he can’t blame me for wanting more just because he doesn’t.”

  “You’re right about that.” Logan shifts forward again and smiles at her. Now she’s looking at him more closely, Tessa thinks she can see a hint of sadness in his eyes. “Though, I think there’s more to this than he’s telling me. Just a feeling I have. I’ve known him his whole life, you know.” He plays with the wedding band on his finger and shrugs. “Maybe you should ask him about it?”

  “I will,” Tessa says. “As soon as he can look me in the eye again.”

  Logan winces. “Yeah. Since you’re probably not going to hear it from him anytime soon… I’m sorry on his behalf. We Todds are pretty much cowards when it comes to the women we care about.”

  Tessa rests her hands back on the keyboard and turns her chin toward Logan. “Speaking of… tell me about Mikayla.”

  Logan’s face, if possible, brightens even more.

  A tour bus drives them to Denver—an overnight trip that takes them through some wonderful countryside. Tessa spends the first few hours admiring it and sending pictures from her phone to Jackie and her father whenever she has coverage. Scott and Kaden had both demanded more pics of the bus than they had of the countryside.

  In their defense, it is a pretty awesome bus. It’s the size of a small apartment, with a kitchen and living area in the front, a master bedroom in the back, and a row of four bunks in between the two. There’s also a shower that none of the band was particularly interested in trying out. After Tessa had pried a little, Slate had spoken cryptically of buses swerving, sudden stops, and ‘the Unsolicited Penetration Incident,’ and Tommy had shivered like he’d had a bad dream.

  Since it was over twenty hours to Denver, they were going to have to sleep eventually. The master bedroom had a bed big enough for a few, and the women had claimed it. The men having to take the bunks.

  Tommy and Sersha have a seat near the front. Tommy, for once, is not scratching away at a notebook. He’s nibbling on his thumbnail and reading The Handmaid’s Tale while Sersha gazes out of the window with her iPod blasting into her ears. Their fingers are loosely entwined.

  Slate sits behind them with his knees on the back of Tommy’s seat, playing some Nintendo DS game. He’s gotten so riled up that his elbows and shoulders move with violently every few seconds, jolting Tommy’s seat and bothering Harper so much that she’s had to move away. Retreating to one of the bunks to read a manual on muscle development with her legs in a lotus pose that Tessa couldn’t manage if she had a million years to perfect it.

  Dash is in the master bedroom with Logan, probably because it’s the furthest he can get from Tessa without actually leaving the bus. She can hear the explosions from the movie they’re watching from where she sits next to the driver.

  “Loud bunch, aren’t they?” he says, leaning over to talk to her with his low Texas twang. He’s an older man with a Rangers baseball cap turned backward. He’s taken a liking to Tessa, and he’s allowed her to sit and bother him instead of sitting with the rest of the band.

  No matter what she does, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s an outsider to them. She thinks that it wouldn’t be like that if Dash were still talking to her. If he were trying to pull her into the conversations and forcing her to drop her professional demeanor to make her laugh. The other band members will still talk to her and laugh, of course, and the women give her long looks full of sympathy whenever they see Dash push her away. But apart from Logan, no one has really tried to reach out. Tessa wonders if they’ve been waiting for something, or if they didn’t want to give the impression of taking a side that isn’t Dash’s.

  “Pretty loud,” Tessa replies. “But they’re lovely people.”

  “I had to drive Kanye West’s bus a few years ago,” the bus driver recalls. “Seemed a little full of himself. A lot of them are.”

  His voice is just low enough that no one beyond Tessa—perched as she is on the step between the driver’s cabin and the rest of the bus—can hear him. She can see Mikayla out of the corner of her eye leaning against the kitchen sink and tapping her tablet as usual.

  “These ones are decent,” Tessa says. “Good people, every one.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, darlin’,” he says. “At least there’s no entourage with these ones.”

  Tessa nods. The entourage is coming in another bus behind them. Even the bodyguards are riding with the roadies and Tessa’s happy about that. She hasn’t really had the chance to talk to Jared since he asked her out. She knows that if they’d had the opportunity to talk, Dash would probably figure out that they were planning to go on a date. She can only imagine the way he would react to that.

  Her phone pings and she glances down. It’s a text from Jared. She wonders if he knew she’d been thinking about him.

  Jared: How’s things?

  He texts with proper punctuation. That’s something she’s not used to. She licks her lips and texts back quickly

  Tessa: Not much. I’ve made friends with the driver.

  Jared: Really? Is he hotter than me?

  Tessa: Much hotter. He’s got the sexiest liver spots I’ve ever seen.

  Jared: Well, there’s no competing with that!

  Tessa grins. It’s the sort of joke that she thinks Dash might make, though the moment the thought crosses her mind she’s kicking herself because she shouldn’t be thinking of him. She shouldn’t be comparing other men to him. It’s not fair. Not to the men and certainly not to her.

  She hears footsteps coming up behind her and turns her head to see Mikayla standing over her, with a tired smile on her beautiful face.

  “Hey Tess,” she says. “How are you doing over here?”

  “Fine,” Tessa replies.

  “And Robbie… you’re okay? Don’t want any coffee?”

  “No thanks, Mrs. Todd. I had plenty when we left Temple.”

  Mikayla looks happy when the driver calls her ‘Mrs. Todd.’ She’s still in the flush of her newly wedded bliss. Tessa knows that she and Logan never did get to have a real honeymoon.

  To Tessa’s surprise, Mikayla slides into the space next to her and sits on the step. Tessa takes a moment to wonder whether it’s good for her skirt to sit on the ground where people have been walking.

  “Fine, huh?” Mikayla says. She gives Tessa a knowing look. Tessa’s eyes flicker over to the driver and Mikayla seems to get the message. She takes out her tablet and taps out a message.

  Mikayla hands her the tablet.

  You’re not feeling left out, are you?

  Tessa reads the words and chews her tongue, before quickly typing her reply into the notes app.

  I’m here to do a job, not make friends.

  Mikayla sighs and takes the tablet back. It takes her a little while to type out her message. It’s almost as if she’s writing a novel. Tessa watches the road pass through the window, waiting for Mikayla to finish her note. Finally, Mikayla taps Tessa on the shoulder and hands her the tablet.

  When I came to the band, they were all single and happy to play with someone new. Now that they’ve all got someone they’re not as excited about new company. But I promise you, they all love you. I think they would love it if you would reach out. For something besides an interview.

  Tessa chews her nail again and types her answer almost without thinking about it.

  I get that. It’s a bit hard when interviewing is all I’m here for. You’re paying me a ridiculous amount of money, so I feel like any time I’m not working is time I’m stealing from you.

  Mikayla clicks her tongue and gives her a knowing look.

  Maybe when you’re done getting your material?

  Yeah, perhaps.

  Behind them, Tommy finally loses his patience and turns around to smack Slate over the head with his book.

>   “Stop fucking kicking my seat!”

  “Ouch, asshole… what even…” Slate waves his DS to try and defend himself, but Tommy keeps smacking him around the head with the book.

  “Feel the wrath of a feminist masterpiece, dickhead!”

  As Mikayla and Tessa watch, Sersha glances at Tommy—who’s leaning over the seat with his ass in the air—and before turning back to the window and turning up her iPod to drown him out, giggling, Tessa and Mikayla turn back to the front while the driver shakes his head, muttering about loud musicians.

  Mikayla types out another message.

  Dash is distraught. How are you?

  Tessa sighs.

  Not distraught. I miss him like hell, though.

  I swear those boys are the worst when it comes to relationships. It’s like they’re cursed.

  Tessa tips her head back and laughs.

  One of these days, I’m going to get the full story about all of the nonsense they’ve pulled.

  I hope that you’ll be able to laugh about this fight with Dash someday.

  The bus rocks beneath them, and Tessa feels a powerful urge to lean over and rest her head on Mikayla’s shoulder. It’s the sort of urge she’s often felt with her sisters. It’s something she might have felt with her mother if she didn’t despise the woman. Finally, Tessa gives in and lets her head fall. Mikayla doesn’t seem to mind. Instead, Mikayla reaches around so one arm is curled over Tessa’s waist, pulling her close, the way Tessa often would with her younger sisters.

  “You will be fine, my love,” Mikayla whispers.

  Tommy’s voice quiets down, so he must have gotten his point across. Tessa hears Slate muttering as he gets up from his seat, his heavy boots stomping down to the other end of the bus where Logan and Dash are still playing their game together.

  Mikayla taps into the tablet.

  For what it’s worth, I think Dash knows that he’s in the wrong here.