Sinful Rhythms: The Black Lilith Series #4

by Hazel Jacobs

  “Why do I have fifteen thousand dollars in my bank account?” he’d asked.

  “Oh, good, that went through,” Tessa replied blithely.

  “Tessa—”

  “Tell Scott to stop killing himself with work. Buy Jackie some new skates. Get Kaden and Halley some decent clothes… and the twins a new laptop each.”

  “Tessa—”

  “I gotta go. Love you!”

  She has no regrets. Now that she’s had an article published in Rolling Stone, she thinks she can afford to spend the majority of her first big paycheck on her family. It’s about time her dad got a break.

  Dash’s thumb runs over her fingers as he holds her hand lightly in his. They’ve been pretty much constantly touching since their first night together. Tessa has never had such an attention-drunk boyfriend. Not that she could ever complain about it.

  “Do you think I should have gotten a bigger portfolio?” Tessa asks, holding up her thin booklet and tapping the cover.

  “Tessa, you sent them an e-portfolio.”

  “I know, but what if they want to see hardcopy?”

  “Then direct them to the stone age, where the rest of the Luddites live,” he says affectionately. He’s so adept at deflecting her anxieties that she wonders how she’d ever managed to get through a job interview before now.

  She supposes that she should be grateful. Dash’s usual tactic for distraction is to drag her into a shadowy corner and give her a physical reason to forget what she was stressed about. She can’t go to an interview looking freshly fucked.

  “How do I look?”

  “Beautiful.”

  “You’re biased. Lance, how do I look?”

  “Very professional, love.”

  Tessa feels a little bit better after that.

  Her phone buzzes in her pocket, and she considers her options before opening it. She’s had good luck texts from the rest of Black Lilith, as well as her dad and the rest of her family.

  It’s not a good luck text. It’s Jackie, sending her a picture of the outfit she’s going to wear for her free skate at the state championships in a couple of months.

  Jackie: i look just like yurio in welcome to the madness i am deceased

  In the picture, Jackie is wearing a purple punk jacket, black leggings, and a black shirt that is just on the edge of too revealing. She’s also got a pair of sunglasses in one hand, her eyes smudged black and her hair in a half-up, half-down style.

  “Aw,” Dash says, looking over Tessa’s shoulder at the picture. “Our little punk is growing up.”

  “She’s so looking forward to you guys being there,” Tessa says, tapping a quick congratulatory reply to her sister.

  “We wouldn’t miss it for the world. Tommy’s pretty excited about seeing her ice-skate to his song.”

  “Isn’t it the whole band’s song?”

  “Nah, we’re gonna give Tommy this one.”

  Tessa puts her phone on Do Not Disturb and sips her coffee, mulling over the fact that she can’t remember a time when she was this nervous. This interview won’t make or break her career, but still… it’s The New Yorker. She’s interviewing to be a book reviewer for The New Yorker. This is the kind of dream job that she’d only ever thought about in the dead of night while typing up term papers and spinning fantasies, because those were the only things that would get her through the coffee-induced haze of exam season.

  “I know you’re nervous,” Dash says, probably for the sixtieth time today. He kisses her cheek and sighs against her skin. “But I’ll be right outside, waiting for you.” And then he lowers his voice so that Lance can’t hear him. “And then I’ll take you home, and we’ll celebrate what a great job you did.”

  “I swear to God if you get me horny—”

  “I’m just talking about celebrating,” Dash says, his innocent voice belied by his thumb still stroking her fingers. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

  “And if there’s nothing to celebrate?”

  “Oh, baby that would be a tragedy,” Dash says. He runs his nose down her neck, a move that would look affectionate to onlookers but sends a shot of arousal through her immediately. In the three months they’ve been together, her body has become conditioned to understand what every caress is implying. “But I’m not worried. You’ll be amazing, and we’ll have a reason to celebrate.”

  Tessa turns her head to give his lips a soft kiss. “Wouldn’t want to disappoint you,” she says.

  Dash returns the kiss, lingering just a little as he whispers, “You never could.”

  [The following excerpts have been reprinted with permission from ‘Black Lilith is Flying on Butterfly Wings’ by Tessa Hunt, published in Rolling Stone]

  It started with two young boys looking for a reason not to go home. It became a global phenomenon.

  “I met Slate at school, and he was a drummer,” says Logan Todd, the Black Lilith’s charismatic frontman. “We put together a band so we would have something to do after school.”

  Black Lilith just completed a national tour to celebrate the release of their latest album ‘Sinful Rhythms.’ The band is known for combining beautiful lyrics with musical mastery, all while tapping into every demographic possible. They work together, they live together, in a beautiful brownstone with golden walls and a gaming room in the basement, and they have tapped into a golden vein of the popular consciousness. There’s no stopping them now.

  Like the butterfly beating its wing that starts a hurricane, Black Lilith’s beginning was seemingly innocuous. A couple of boys playing in a garage, with one of them bringing in his younger brother, while the other coerces a local poetry prodigy into playing bass for them.

  […]

  Logan’s hands are constantly in motion, which draws the eye to the ring on his left ring finger. Logan married the band’s manager, Mikayla Strong, in a secret ceremony. His face lights up beautifully when he speaks of his new wife.

  “I think I knew the moment I met her,” he says. “We didn’t get off to the best start. I kind of thought she was a groupie. It wasn’t until I was done striking out with her that I realized she was our new PA!”

  Mikayla was brought into the band’s little family as a personal assistant. It wasn’t until she proved to be amazingly over-qualified that she was upgraded to the band’s manager.

  “I always wanted to go into events management,” Mikayla says, with one eye on the interviewer and another on her tablet. “I thought it would be challenging. Much more challenging than being a PA. But events mean that I don’t have to deal with people, and I can’t imagine that now that I’ve worked with Black Lilith.”

  So what changed? How did the fairytale romance between Logan Todd and his new wife begin?

  “There were a couple of misunderstandings,” says Logan. “In the end, it took Slate intervening to help me get my act together and convince her that I trusted h7er and I wanted to be with her. Mikayla is my soulmate and soon to be mother of our first child in five months. We were always going to be together. We just had to take a few detours on the way.”

  Logan’s relationship with Slate, the band’s drummer, is unique. Logan looks almost as delighted as he does when someone mentions his wife.

  “Slate and I were close friends. Not like brothers. If I had to think of a comparison, I guess I’d call him an ex-boyfriend. We were inseparable.”

  […]

  Slate is frustratingly tight-lipped about his background.

  “I grew up in America’s armpit. There’s no need to bring it up, and it’s only going to make people bored.”

  Slate began his drumming career inauspiciously, turning restless hands into music by pulling a prank in the middle of a high school assembly. But now he is on par with Keith Moon and Neil Peart. Though he drips humility in our interview as he deflects the spotlight to his fellow band members. Preferring to remain behind his drum kit, Slate is the strong presence at the back of the band keeping everyone else on rhythm.

  “It�
�s my job to make sure that no one else misses their cue. I’m not about to forget how important that is.”

  Slate is responsible for bringing Mikayla onto the crew—scouting her from an internship with Bass Note Records and offering her a position with the band on sight. He is also responsible for drawing out the latent talent of the band’s lyricist and bass player, Tommy Jones.

  After reading a line of poetry that Tommy had written in his math notebook, Slate says that he fell in love with Tommy’s words.

  “Dude was a poet. We needed lyrics. Before that, we were doing shitty covers and playing songs that Dash wrote. There’s only so many ‘moons’ and ‘Junes’ a guy can sing before he starts to go crazy.”

  Slate is also happily engaged to a personal trainer and professional superwoman, Harper Styles. Proposing in a ludicrous stunt that involved a dwarf Elvis, and three baby goats.

  “She’s pretty much the best thing that ever happened to me, so I had to get that shit in lockdown.”

  For her part, Harper is not impressed with the rockstar lifestyle. Especially not since she was hired to keep the band in shape.

  “The amount of Red Bull and carbs I had to cut out of their diets is insane,” she says, working in our interview between sessions at the gym. She gives a cheeky grin as she continues, “But it’s worth it, right? You should see my fiancé’s abs. Total babe status!”

  Thousands of fangirls thank you for your service, Harper.

  Of the two of them, it seems that Slate is the most starstruck.

  “The girls are not on stage with us, but we couldn’t do this without them,” he says.

  […]

  Tommy Jones is a poet in a rockstar’s body.

  “I usually think of a good line or a concept,” he says. “If that’s cool, then I usually build a song around it. It sounds cheesy and cliché, but I kind of write to get all my thoughts out. Otherwise, they pile up and get in the way of everything.”

  Whenever Tommy enters a room, the atmosphere instantly becomes more relaxed. He has a remarkable ability to put people at ease, to quell their insecurities, and make them feel as though they are the most important people in the room.

  A born and raised a Jersey boy, and the son of a college professor, Tommy Jones met Slate in tenth grade. He did not know how to play the bass guitar. He had never even considered music as a hobby, much less a potential career path. But his willingness to be surprised made him the perfect addition to Black Lilith.

  “Slate set me up with some YouTube videos. It was a bit hard at first, but once I got the hang of it, playing music was really fun! I remember when I figured out the Super Mario theme, and I thought, that’s it. It’s not gonna get any better.”

  But Tommy’s main joy lies in writing lyrics. While Tommy’s long-time girlfriend, Sersha Walsh, is his official collaborator, he considers every listener a potential collaborator. He enjoys the idea of creating a dialog with his audience, and his delightfully complex lyrics achieve this.

  “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.”

  Sitting in on his writing sessions with his girlfriend, the first thing that a viewer will notice is how easily he smiles, how quickly he articulates his thoughts, and how happy he is to collaborate. Tommy seems as though he is constantly ready to be delighted.

  Sersha finds this trait a mixture of endearing and troubling.

  “The problem is that he’s too adorable,” she says. “It’s impossible to stay mad at him. The asshole.”

  There’s clear love between them. It is evident in every gesture, every shared look that seems to speak volumes, and every song that the pair of them write together—building Black Lilith’s incredible presence in the music industry with every lyric.

  After shadowing the band for several weeks, it was clear that Tommy is the heart of the Black Lilith family.

  “I love these guys just as much as I love my little brother,” he says cheerfully.

  While on break from tour Tommy Jones and his girlfriend Sersha Walsh will be looking after his niece full time in New York, while his brother Geoffrey starts his first year in college. It’s extremely apparent that he is a family man first.

  “I don’t know where I would be without them. Frankly, I don’t want to think about.”

  […]

  Dash Todd is an interesting dichotomy. The baby of the band, the youngest member, Logan Todd’s little brother, and resident nerd.

  “I like pop culture,” he says, shrugging and lifting his hoodie so the interviewer can see his The Empire Strikes Back T-shirt. “It’s fun.”

  He is also the band’s lead guitarist. He delights in performing the solos and riffs that characterize Black Lilith’s sound, he throws himself into performances with vigor. But he also embodies a calm sense of power when he performs. Watching Dash Todd play guitar is like watching Thor call down lightning—there’s a lot of power there, and a lot of control.

  “Right before I go onstage, I’m totally pumped and nervous. Our personal trainer, Harper Styles, makes me do reps to get the energy out. But then once I get out there I feel a lot less freaky. I barely even hear the music. My fingers know what to do, and I’m just playing with my family.”

  He tries to play off his talent, even though he was named in the Top Ten Young Guitarists to Watch list, from last month’s Rolling Stone.

  “I don’t think I’m any more talented than anyone else,” he says. “I’m the lead of a great band, so it’s easy to look impressive.”

  While Dash is making waves in the music industry, he’s also taking steps to improve his mind. Like Brian May and Tom Scholtz, Dash Todd has a high IQ and an interest in mathematics that survived his public school education and is a constant source of pride for his older brother.

  “He’s a doofus, but he’s also a genius,” says Logan, with a mixture of frustration and admiration. “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 classes, where all they did was teach him how to play the recorder. I’m pretty sure he learned Dutch just despite his French teacher. He’s that kind of brilliant.”

  Now that the band is taking a well-deserved break from touring, Dash will be taking a Bachelor of Mathematics at Columbia University. It’s quite a big change from music.

  “Since we started to build up a following, a lot of things have changed,” Dash says. “And sometimes that scared me. But I’m getting better at embracing change.”

  Really? So what is the change that Dash Todd is most excited about?

  He smiles at the question and gives it some thought before he answers.

  “I’m really excited to start taking risks with relationships. I want to share my whole life with someone special… and I’m super excited because I’ve found her.”

  Interviews were conducted by Tess Hunt.

  ** You can also find Tessa Hunt’s work weekly on - The New Yorker **

  Thank you for reading Sinful Rhythms.

  If you enjoyed it, please consider leaving a review at your point of purchase and on Goodreads. It means a lot to me to hear what you think.

  Check these links for more from Author Hazel Jacobs.

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  authorhazeljacobs@yahoo.com

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  Hazel Jacobs is a passionate fan of romance novels and a crazy fan of rock and roll. Never trained as a writer, she began creative writing as a hobby. That quickly evolved into a mission to pen a novel that brings a new generation of readers into the wild realm of loud music and total passion.

  >   Hazel Jacobs, Sinful Rhythms: The Black Lilith Series #4