by Elle Greco
I peeked through the peephole, ready to see a savior in a tool belt. Instead, a sea-green eye stared back at me.
I recognized that eye.
“Who is it?” I asked through gritted teeth, even though I knew the answer.
“Your stepbrother,” Dion’s voice answered back.
I pressed my forehead to the door. “What the hell do you want?”
“I want to talk to you,” he responded.
“Did you lose my phone number?”
“Come on, Nik,” he said with another thump on the door. “Let’s not do this so your entire building can hear, please.”
I rested my hand on the doorknob. He was right. My neighbors didn’t need to know about our family drama, and there was a good chance they would sell it to the highest bidder. Rogue Nation always turned up on all the gossip websites. It’s partly why their debut album was doing brisk sales. It just broke the Hot 100.
I opened the door, and Dion shoved himself in.
I backed into the wall behind the door. “Really, come in. Make yourself at home.”
He kicked the door closed and turned on me. “You are a scheming little asshole, you know that?”
I stepped toward him, my hands balled into fists. “Whoa, you can’t come into my home and—”
He ignored me. “I don’t know how the hell you blackmailed Satan’s Sisters onto the bill, unless… Are you fucking Grimm?”
I shoved at his chest, trying to push him back. “Are you insane? How can you even say that?”
“It wouldn’t be the first time a Benson woman spread her legs to get ahead, now would it?” he growled.
My back stiffened at the obvious reference to my mom. “Your father didn’t have to marry the woman. That decision was on him.”
“My father was high on pussy.” His body tensed against mine, and my knees went a little weak. “Jesus, Nik, why’s it so hot in here? Why don’t you turn on the air?”
“It’s hot in here because the AC is broken,” I said. My body flushed with what I hoped was anger, but the spicy mix of Dion’s soap and sweat was more likely the culprit. Dammit.
He backed away, putting some distance between us. With a little bit of breathing room, I went on the attack.
“At least my daddy didn’t buy my way into a record contract,” I hissed.
“Because your daddy’s standing in a methadone line in the backwoods of Maine,” he said.
Low blow. I pushed past him and strode into the middle of my living room. “At least he’s alive.”
Dion turned to face me, and for once he didn’t have a retort. We both stared at each other, chests lifting as we sucked in the thick air around us. The silence stretched between us, and I dropped my eyes to my feet. Bringing Kyle into this was a low blow. But so was bringing up my deadbeat addict dad.
I crossed my arms, eyes still pointed down at my pedicure. “Great. We both have shitty family histories to throw in each other’s faces. So, what the hell did you come here for, Dion?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just thought…”
He leaned against my door and raked his hands through his soft curls.
“You thought you could bully me off the tour?” My tone was calmer than I expected.
“No.” He raised his head and met my eyes. “Yes. Maybe?”
“You need a drummer. I know the songs,” I said with a shrug. “That’s all this is, Dion. I am not trying to join your band.”
“Why did you insist on Satan’s Sisters touring too?”
I snorted. “You think I want to be on that tour bus with you and Rafe by myself? You boys have made it quite clear how you felt about all of us for the past seven years. I’m not up for a months-long hurl-abuse-at-the-little-stepsister tour.”
“I think we’ve grown up by now,” he said.
“Have you really, now? Your dad married my mom because he was ‘high on pussy’? How adult is that?”
“Well, let’s not count tonight,” he said, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, giving his face a rakish charm. “You got a beer or something? It’d go down nice in this heat.”
Before I could respond, Dion made a beeline to my kitchen and opened the fridge.
“Guess you don’t eat,” he quipped as he surveyed the contents. “But you do have an open bottle of something French here, so let’s drink that. Celebrate the tour.”
He pulled out a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, then picked and poked his way through my cabinets looking for wineglasses, singing softly to “Heart-Shaped Box.” I closed my eyes and listened, caught up in the vocals. Dion was gifted with an extraordinary voice, just like his dad.
“You know, Dad was supposed to open for Nirvana back in the day,” he said. “Then Cobain overdosed.”
I opened my eyes, hoping that he hadn’t caught me listening so intently. “Yeah, I remember Pamela going on about it. She was a huge Courtney Love fan.”
Two wineglasses in hand, he settled onto the couch and poured the wine. “Of course she was,” he said, shaking his head. “Courtney Love, the ultimate groupie.”
I snarled at him. “Celebrity Skin was an exquisite album. And before you even say it, the only way Cobain had a hand in that one was from the afterlife.”
“I’m not going to fight with you over Kurt verses Courtney.” He sighed. “For the sake of this tour, we need a truce. We can start with that.”
“A truce,” I repeated, sitting stiffly at the opposite end of my couch, keeping some distance between us. My short robe rode up my thigh, and it did not go unnoticed by Dion.
“Do you do that on purpose?” he asked. He gestured in my direction with his wineglass.
I pulled the edges of the robe down on my thighs, silently cursing that it didn’t cover more. “Do what?”
He sipped at his wine and stared at my legs, brows raised. “Tease me with those legs of yours.”
“God, Dion, no,” I said. “You are the one who showed up unexpected at ten o’clock at night. What’d you think I’d be wearing? A freaking muumuu?” His eyes crinkled in humor. “Don’t you dare even laugh.”
“Right,” he said on a cough. “So, about the tour…”
“I’m listening.”
He glanced around the room. “This is your place? It’s nice. Small.”
“Venice Beach is expensive, so small is all I can afford,” I said. “Why are you here, Dion?”
He ignored my question. “Dad’s allowance not big enough?”
My head jerked up. “Allowance? What am I, ten? I’m paying for this. There’s no allowance.”
“Really?” he asked, looking at me over the rim of his wineglass. “I just assumed.”
“Really,” I said, and gulped down some wine. “I make my own way gigging. Vince doesn’t give me or Jett or Presley any allowance.”
The money I made rerecording Kyle’s drum tracks on the album paid for nearly a year’s rent. But I wasn’t about to share that.
His eyes dropped to my chest. “Do you always wear that robe when you’re home?”
“Are we still talking about my robe?” I asked, my nipples poking through the soft silk. I took another swallow of wine and crossed my arms strategically.
“It’s distracting.” He raised his eyebrows and glanced down at his crotch. “If you think I’m lying, you can check for yourself.”
“Dion,” I said, “maybe we should talk about what happened between us after Kyle’s funeral. You know, get it out in the open.”
“Later. Right now we need to talk about this tour.”
“Okay,” I said, little red flags waving in my head. “So, talk.”
“We need to set some ground rules.”
“Ground rules?” I repeated. I chugged the rest of the wine from my glass.
“You can keep a beat, I’ll give you that,” Dion started. “But I don’t think we’ll be giving you any drum solos just yet. That said, you’re a beautiful woman, Nik.”
“Dion—” I protested, my voice low, but he leaned toward
me, almost too close. My heart stalled out as his face tilted and he licked his full, soft lips. Lips that had me completely captivated. I inched my head toward his, aching to feel the press of those lips against my own.
Instead, he poured more wine in my glass. When he was finished, he leaned back and propped his legs up on the coffee table, boxing me in.
“And I think some of our fans would appreciate that,” he said. “Like, if you wanted to wear that robe behind the kit, that’d be cool. Or one of those smoking hot bra tops with a pair of short shorts. That sort of thing.”
My desire deflated on a whoosh of breath. I narrowed my eyes at him. How far was he going to go with this?
“Show some skin. You’ve got the body. Fuck knows you’ve definitely got the tits.”
I didn’t have to wait long for him to take it all the way. Leaning back against the couch, I waited for him to dig himself a bigger hole.
“The point is, let’s make the male fans want to fuck you and the female fans want to be you. Then there’s a chance I’ll forgive you for blackmailing Satan’s Sisters onto my tour.”
I blinked at him. What could I say, really? Everything that came out of his mouth was sheer asshattery. Dion wasn’t really this horrible. Right?
I took a swallow from my refilled wineglass. “Is this coming from you? Or that A&R guy?” His face turned about six shades of crimson. I had my answer. “So, the jackass A&R guy thinks I can’t play because I have boobs?”
“He did say you could keep a beat,” Dion repeated.
Jesus. Dion was parroting the asshole A&R guy. How deep did this bullshit go?
Dion’s eyebrow cocked. I wanted to rip it off. My rage simmered just below the surface.
“I’ll give him that,” I tossed back. My anger was under control, but my voice was thick with sarcasm.
“He’s not wrong.”
That hole Dion was digging was at least six feet deep right now, and it was well on its way to seven.
I sipped my wine and considered how to handle the latest round of Rogue-related bullshit. They didn’t want me on the tour. Obviously. And this was their way of trying to make me quit.
Did I tell him that those were my beats on his album? I stared at his face, and his piercing green eyes gave away the pain still raw from the loss of his brother. He wasn’t ready to listen to the truth about Kyle. The wall of denial Dion had built about how far gone Kyle was before he overdosed was probably the only thing that kept Dion from falling apart. I knew him, and the guilt would kill him.
So, let the guilt kill him, right? Why the hell was I being so nice to him?
Because he was Dion. And with Dion, I was all in. Always.
He was an asshole, no doubt. But there were moments where he softened. Like when my mom would go on a bender and lay into me and my sisters about being ungrateful little bitches, Dion would shuttle me into his bedroom and we’d sprawl out on his floor and talk about bands and listen to music.
I always thought he did things like that because deep down he felt sorry for me. I was the unexceptional youngest sister in a line of three. Presley’s soulful voice was like a honky-tonk angel. Jett brought love and heartbreak to life with her lyrics.
And then there was my mom. She made Madonna blush. (No, really. It was at a fancy party just after she got together with Vince, and she literally made Madonna turn red, her behavior was so outrageous.)
But me? I was the gawky tomboy with snarls in her hair who came home with bloody noses from hard-won fistfights. Only when I replaced pounding on kids with pounding on drums did I finally find an outlet—hell, even a purpose—for my aggression.
It wasn’t an easy childhood, and in some ways, I was easy to feel sorry for. But then I turned eighteen.
Mom and Vince decided I had to celebrate my arrival into adulthood. Of course, it was just their excuse to throw a rager. So, it was a bunch of people—a bunch of old people—I didn’t know getting rowdy by the pool, a typical Vince Davis bacchanalia. I didn’t invite any friends, because my mom in full-on groupie mode was embarrassing.
Dion recognized it was going to be a disaster. So he came home with a six-pack of beer and a pizza. We hid out in the practice room and ate pizza, drank beer, and watched stupid videos on YouTube. After we polished off the pizza, he surprised me with a box of cupcakes.
That’s when it happened.
After he sang “Happy Birthday.” In that voice. His voice. A voice that could be quiet and vulnerable and soulful. A voice that could find its punk edge but be no less emotionally charged. Dion was put on this earth to sing. And that voice, that man, turned his rendition of “Happy Birthday” into a love song.
That’s when we kissed.
Or I kissed him. Maybe he kissed me. Whoever started it wasn’t the point. The point was we kissed, and immediately I was ready to hand over my V-card. But instead of progressing to groping and then to sexing, Dion begged off, leaving me behind, along with the empties from the six-pack. My dignity was barely intact, but my virginity, infuriatingly, was. (Three months later I fumbled my way through it with Connor Lordes, heir to the Lordes & Ladies Renn Faire fortune. I broke up with him two weeks after we did the deed, when he gave me a wench dress to wear to a party. Or he broke up with me after my fist collided with his nose and broke it.)
Still, it was the best birthday ever.
But the next day, everything returend to normal: Dion and I actively hating on each other. All was right with the world.
“So, Nik, what do you say?” Dion repeated, snapping me back to the present. “Show some boob, get a bonus?”
I met his question with steely silence. He withered under my stare. Or maybe the heat. At any rate, good.
Between the temperature in the apartment and the anger rising from Dion’s asinine comments, my body burned. I stood up, climbed over his legs stretched out on my coffee table, and headed to the kitchen to get an ice cube out of the bin in the freezer. I pressed the ice to the back of my neck. It melted as soon as it touched my heated skin. The freezing water trickled down, leaking under my robe and slipping down my spine. I melted, too, at this small relief from the heat.
“Nik?”
I turned away from the fridge and saw Dion’s broad body blocking the entry to the kitchen. “I’m on the tour, Dion. You and Rafe and everyone else need to get the hell over it. Because I’m the best drummer for the job.”
“You sound sure of yourself,” he said.
“I am sure of myself,” I lied. I wasn’t sure of myself at all. But I’d heard somewhere that projecting confidence eventually gave you confidence or some such shit. It was a method I was game to explore.
The first ice cube gone, I snatched another from the bin and rubbed it along my throat. The cold water dripped across my clavicle, and the rivulets of water slipped between my breasts.
Dion licked his lips. “You got another one of those?”
“What, ice?” I asked.
“Yeah, ice.”
I reached into the freezer, removed the bin, and offered it to him. In one whoosh, Dion’s shirt was off. He reached in and snagged a cube, then rubbed it along his neck.
The air seemed thicker in the kitchen all of a sudden. Watching the water drip down his solid pec, my mouth went dry. I fought the urge to quench my thirst by licking the droplets off of his body.
“You should go,” I said. But my voice betrayed me, clearly not sharing in the demand of the words.
“I should,” he agreed.
But instead of heading for the door, he reached for another ice cube from the bin. Since I now clutched the thing to my body, he took a few steps closer to grab one. Then my eyes followed as the cube slipped down his midsection, over the colored ink of the way hot—and I don’t mean temperature—tattoos that covered his torso.
“Nik,” he said, and I forced my eyes to meet his. “I’m an asshole. You know that.”
His face softened, and he reached his hand behind my head, fingers pressing into the back of
my scalp. Oh my God, that felt so good.
I lifted the ice cube bin higher, as if it could protect me from Dion’s pheromones. “You choose to be an asshole. And usually toward me.”
His face gentle, his hand still massaged the back of my head, lulling me with his touch. “I’ll work on that. For the sake of the tour.”
His stare had captured me. I cleared the lump in my throat. “I’d appreciate it. For the sake of the tour.”
I pulled out another ice cube and put one end in my mouth. I closed my eyes, enjoying the cold water as it saturated my dry mouth and the pressure of Dion’s fingers on my scalp. His touch turned firm, and I opened my eyes. His gentle expression had been replaced with a fiery gaze. It wasn’t anger though. It was something else. Something that nearly caused my knees to give out, because a volt of desire shot through my thighs.
“And you’re right,” he said, his voice rough. “You are the best drummer for the tour.”
I pulled the ice out of my mouth. “It’s late. You should probably go.”
My own voice was low and husky, and the words didn’t match the need that dripped from them. I didn’t want him to go. I wanted him to hoist me onto the counter and finally, finally give me what I’d dreamed about for years.
Dion. All of him.
“You sure?” he asked. His hand pulled at the back of my head. It was a small pull, and I could have stood my ground. But Dion was right there. It was late. I was hot. He just admitted I was a good drummer. There were too many articles of clothes between us. Not to mention a bin of ice.
“No,” I whispered, closing the two-foot gap.
He took the cube out of my hand, the water from the melting cube leaving my arm slick. He popped what remained of the ice into his mouth. Then he took the ice bin from my arms and placed it on the counter.
Now there was nothing between us but clothes.
His head dipped to meet mine. He ran his icy tongue along my neck, sending shock waves of pleasure straight down to my toes.
“Dion.” I sighed, my body relaxing into his. I meant for it to come out as a question. But why would I question the sensation of his cold mouth against my hot skin? The ice shifted in the bin on the counter beside me as he dug around inside. Then Dion sucked on a new cube before holding it out to me. His eyes stared at my mouth as I took it between my lips, the cold a relief from the heat between us. After a moment, he slipped the ice down my neck and between the swell of my breasts.