Playing the Pauses

by Michelle Hazen

  I cough. “Nothing.” Nothing except that my crotchety, Mohawked drum tech has apparently been replaced by a pod person. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her be...nice.

  “She likes my tattoo,” he explains.

  “Oh, right.” I try to keep the eye roll out of my voice as he leads the way back toward the gas station. I bet she likes the hell out of his “tattoo.”

  Danny doesn’t like to nap wearing clothes, and like most guys, he doesn’t appear interested in the awkward squirming involved in changing behind the curtain of a bunk. My cardiovascular system is still recovering from the first time he started to strip in the aisle, unveiling all those lean, ink-highlighted muscles with such nonchalance.

  The real surprise, though, was the underwear. I had him pegged as a black boxer briefs or commando kind of guy, but the first day, his boxers were printed with kittens wearing Santa Claus hats and brandishing butcher knives. The second day they were pot leaves with the caption across the ass: “I heart gardening!” The third day, Chuck Norris’s head superimposed onto gnome bodies.

  Chuck Norris.

  And gnomes.

  There must be some conclusion to be drawn about his personality from these boxer shorts, but I’m failing the interpretation with flying colors. Though I guess it’s comforting that I’m not the only girl who hasn’t been able to keep their voyeuristic tendencies in check. I file away Jayna’s tattoo excuse for later use.

  Danny’s still walking, striding past the gas station and toward the empty forest beyond. I hurry to keep up, slipping my sweater on despite the sunshine because my shoulders feel a little too bare, my leggings too clingy now that it’s just the two of us.

  “We gonna hike it all the way to the next venue?” I tease. “If you want to talk shit about my obnoxious roadies, you can do it right in front of them, you know. They’ve got thick skin.”

  He stops by the dumpsters behind the store and turns to face me, tilting his head as his eyes soak me in. My skin prickles and I cross my arms while the silence stretches.

  “I can’t decide,” Danny says, “if I need to apologize.”

  Electricity jolts all the way down into my toes and I look away, focusing on the colors of a discarded granola bar wrapper caught in the dumpster lid. “Danny...”

  “You didn’t seem like you were sorry for what happened between us. And then once we got on the bus, you were. Did I upset you, that night?” His words are deliberate and so carefully stated that they’re setting off alarm bells all through my head.

  “Of course you didn’t upset me.” My head rears back a little at the thought. “Though I probably should have made more of an effort to clear the air with you afterward. I mean, it can’t happen again, but...” My skin is heating under his eyes. “But that doesn’t mean I regret it.”

  He cocks his head. “Then who says it can’t happen again?”

  The warm breeze blows my hair back and I turn my face into it, his words tugging at every wild and reckless impulse I have.

  “I work for you,” I tell Danny. “And groupies belong in front of the stage, not behind it.”

  “So because I want you and I know how to play a bass, that makes you a groupie?” He snorts. “Screw that.”

  “No, but that’s what everybody’s going to think, and the music world is small. If my reputation tanks, my career goes with it.” I take a breath. “Besides, I don’t do Doms.”

  “Bullshit.”

  I smile ruefully, remembering the beautiful relief of having his belt wrapped around my wrist. “Oh, I didn’t say I didn’t like them. Thing is, controlling is only fun until my clothes go back on, and most Dominants can’t draw that line like I can.”

  “What if I told you I wasn’t a Dom?”

  “Then I’d call bullshit.” After overhearing his confession in the airport prayer room, I can’t stand to hear him try and deny what comes naturally to him. “I know my favorite poison and you were absolutely it.”

  His eyes flash, but instead of pushing the point, his confidence shivers and falls away until I can feel the disquiet that aches underneath. I take a step closer without meaning to and wish I could comfort him as easily as Jera does, just by handing over a marker or a well-placed jibe.

  Danny turns away and pushes a hand back through his hair, staring out at the parking lot. “It must be nice.” He won’t look at me. A muscle twitches in his jaw and I want to touch it, to help him settle.

  “What do you mean?”

  He looks back over his shoulder at me, and his brilliant eyes are chaotic and nearly black. “Knowing what you want.”

  Unease ripples through me.

  I lay a hand on Danny’s shoulder. Just like that, I’m jolted back to the moment when his chest shuddered against my back and we gasped in perfect synch. The soft, old cotton of his shirt wrinkles as my fingers tighten.

  “I can make you feel good and as soon as you’re excited I’m right there with you but...” Danny’s next words are so low they’re like a pulse of his bass, truth bleeding through every note. “I just don’t know anymore. Nothing feels right anymore.”

  A bus horn blows, and I’d bet my next paycheck it’s ours. We’re on a tight schedule today to hit the venue in time for load in, but right now I can’t even remember what state we’re in, much less where we’re going.

  His head sags forward, and I bite my lip as if my body needs to feel the pain in his voice right along with him. Danny’s presence is always so overwhelming I forget he’s a couple of years younger than me. He’s still sorting all this stuff out.

  I shift around in front of him and duck my head to catch his eyes. “Sometimes it’s not as easy as people think, to get out of your own way and admit what you really need.” Both my hands come up to his shoulders, squeezing lightly as the heat of his skin seeps into my palms. “But whatever doesn’t feel right, you shouldn’t do it anymore, Danny. It’s not worth the...” I stall out, the emptiness of the feeling swirling through my chest; like it was only yesterday I was so alone and lost in my own body. “It’s just not worth it.”

  His lashes flicker, but he won’t meet my eyes. His shoulders are tense under my touch and it’s physically hurting me to watch him struggle so hard with his thoughts.

  “It only feels wrong to be you until you find somebody whose kink matches your own. And I promise they’re out there, Danny, I promise you. It’s a great big world and whatever you want, there’s somebody else who wants it too.”

  His lashes lift and I realize for the first time that the rim around his irises is the deepest, smokiest blue. “Why not you?”

  I’m too close. Shit, I’m way too close and my nipples are tightening as if they’re straining to get nearer to the heat of his body, the intensity of his troubled gaze.

  I step back, shaking my head. “You’ll figure it out,” I tell him, forcing a smile.

  He shakes his head once, a silent slice of negation that seems to summarize years I know nothing about. My heart catches in my throat and I try to think of something that will reassure him, but I can’t seem to look away long enough to think.

  “All this,” he says, making a small movement that indicates the direction of the tour bus, the world beyond. “When I get up on stage, people hear me, but they see whatever they want. And this shit all over the internet about Jera and me...I didn’t even know that many thousands of people had heard of us, but now it’s like every person in America has their own idea of who I am and I just want to feel like me again.” His eyes are bruising mine. “I don’t want to be anybody else’s fantasy, not anymore.”

  I cross my arms over my chest and squeeze hard. “Danny, if that’s how I made you feel, I am so—”

  “No.” He shakes his head, hard. “With us, everything started to feel right again. Scary right. But then we never talked about the boundaries of the scene and I started second-guessing, wondering if you had wanted something else or if you wanted me to finish in a caretaker role and draw you a bath or go authoritarian and as
k if you’d learned your lesson, or just drop all the crap and untie you and get you some fucking water...” He lets out a syllable of a laugh but it’s bitter and lost.

  “Danny, I...” I drop my hands, and the bus horn blows again. This is not a smart thing for my career or for the balance of my personal life, and usually I don’t have a problem saying no.

  The only reason I’m not saying it now is because I can’t stop thinking about how he’s normally so unshakable. On stage, with the crew, with the fans. This morning I watched him draw on Jera’s arm for an hour and he never had to stop to think about what he wanted, didn’t make a single misstep even when the bus hit a bump in the pavement. Right now all that certainty is gone, and he looks like he’s splintering inside.

  “Why me?” I finally ask. “It should be someone you know, someone you trust.”

  It’s the best advice I know how to give and it’s what I want for him. But even more than that, I’m afraid for him to ask this of me. I don’t know if I can go back to the vulnerability of that moment when he fucked my soul raw and then walked away.

  But instead of explaining, he reaches up and touches my temple, just beside my eyes. “That’s why,” he says. “For this? It has to be you.”

  Chapter 8: Close Calls

  The bus doesn’t leave without us, but when we get back on, Reggie glares disapprovingly at us from the driver’s seat.

  Danny jerks his chin at him. “My fault.” The driver mutters, unsatisfied, but clicks on his seatbelt anyway because he knows better than to argue with one of the band members.

  Crew members sprawl all over the front lounge and the bunks; tattoos, old concert shirts and earbuds providing dashes of color amidst the eclectic crowd. I snag a spot by Simon because I know the shy sound engineer won’t expect me to make small talk. Jera glances up from a tattered notebook with a look that has a touch of concern in it, and I toss a tight smile back her way.

  I’m overheated and nearly sweating, so I take off my sweater, pull out my phone and snap off three emails. By then, the A/C has caught up and my skin is raked with chills, my nipples clearly outlined against my tank top. I put my sweater back on, wrapping it more firmly closed when I catch Pete stealing glances.

  I stand up and go to the back lounge, but Jax is there and when he looks up, a question already forming on his lips, I retreat to the bunk I claimed but haven’t even touched yet. I climb inside and pull the curtain. The last thing I see before it’s closed is Danny’s face, his head tipped back against the front lounge couch and eyes shut, the muscle in his jaw tight.

  Rolling to face the wall, I hug my sweater around me as I line up the facts.

  I can have an affair with Danny O’Neil and it would be screamingly, wretchedly, once-in-a-lifetime hot. It’s not like I have an outside boss to answer to, and we’d be far from the first fling the rock world has seen.

  Roadies are fickle: I’ve seen some girls get blackballed after a single one-night-stand with the talent, and I’ve seen others returning season after season. If we do this and people find out, I won’t know for sure what it’ll do to my career until it’s too late to take it back. As for the media, if we go public, it’ll either kill the rumors about Jera and Danny or stoke the fire as everybody decides I’m the rebound girl and delights in hating me. I can see the pro and con of both those scenarios.

  But whatever finer points Danny needs to sort out, a big slice of that man’s preference pie is going to end up labeled D for Dominant as fuck. When those tendencies start to creep into the rest of our lives—and they will—it’s going to make managing for his tour a total bitch.

  My job is already a delicate balance of topping from the bottom, as I try to let the artists believe they’re in charge while I make all the major decisions that are going to hurt or help their careers and their pocketbooks. None of that’s going to be any easier when Danny starts trying to assert his authority over me, especially since his interest in the business side of this industry appears to be equal with my interest in corrective toenail surgeries.

  Not only that, The Red Letters aren’t another baby band touring out of the parental minivan. This job could be my big break. Whatever pretty lies Danny and I tell ourselves, an affair is going to shrink my future job opportunities, not expand them.

  One, two, three chords rally out through the bus, the upbeat rhythm tingling across my skin. Jera murmurs a line of lyrics and repeats the chords. It’s a song I’ve heard her toying with a couple of times before, and I like the start, but right now I’m too distracted to enjoy it because I keep thinking about Danny’s confession.

  When I was sixteen, I dated a boy named Toby. He had sweet blue eyes and a big farm truck, and after seven months of dating that felt like a teenager’s eternity, I confided that sometimes I liked erotica about spankings and I wanted a taste of that for myself. Toby was horrified, and I dropped the subject. The next day he brought me a flier for a sexual abuse hotline, his eyes a combination of fear and pity I couldn’t face.

  In the end, it turned out the dominance aroused me as much as the spanking itself, but it took me years to figure that out because I didn’t tell another soul what I wanted until I was eighteen. I spent all that time having polite, vanilla sex, never complaining and never asking for more of anything because I wanted to be “normal.”

  From what I overheard at the airport, Danny’s been everything but polite or vanilla, but he’s been fulfilling everyone’s needs but his own. I can picture it more clearly than I’d like, and it makes me sick to think none of those women noticed the difference. Did anyone ever ask him if he was okay? I know I didn’t. I was so lost in everything he could make me feel, I didn’t even think to worry.

  My hand fists in my pillow, knuckles aching with the force of my grip.

  Jera repeats that romping line of chords with a teasing trill of single notes, rolling all that momentum right toward where the chorus will fit in. “Jax!” she calls. “Bring that ugly voice of yours up here and help me out with something, would you?”

  I’ve struggled through years of finding myself sexually and personally. I like the place I’ve carved out for myself, even if I’ve had to sacrifice some of my fun between the sheets in order to keep the independence I crave. Danny’s poised at the very beginning of that process, and at the opening of a career that can consume him: fulfilling all his dreams or twisting him into something he won’t even recognize in a few years.

  In his position, it’ll be hard enough for him to find a girl who doesn’t want him for his fame or his money. My fingers pull and pluck at the rough cotton of my pillowcase as I try to picture a girl who could hold the safe space he needs, who would let him experiment without getting caught up in her own desires.

  Jax’s voice croons the lyrics Jera was trying out. In his lower register, they jump sharply into three dimensions, rippling goosebumps over my skin.

  I love their music and I want to help them bring it to the world, but when I think of Danny’s troubled eyes, I know where I want to leave my mark on this band. No matter what, I want him to have the safety, the support, and acceptance I never had. This may be an incredible opportunity, but there are other tour manager jobs, even if I’m still begging and scraping to get them. For what Danny needs, there’s no one I’d trust but me.

  But I also know how he gets under my skin. I’m going to have to be very, very careful with myself to get out of this with my hard-fought balance intact.

  There’s no way I can let him use a whip on me, not even once. His eyes are powerful enough and with ropes? Intoxicating. If I let him stroke the sweet sting of a crop over my back, I’ll hand over every boundary I’ve ever had, wrapped up in a pink ribbon with his name on the tag. It’s been so long since I’ve allowed anyone to pull me over their lap and pin me into place.

  But this isn’t about fulfilling my fantasies. Not this time.

  I pull back the curtain of my bunk and roll out, pausing to re-do my long ponytail. Clancy’s lying on a bunk across th
e aisle and he looks up from his book.

  “Have a nice nap?” he asks knowingly. Apparently Reggie wasn’t the only one who noticed Danny and me boarding the bus late, and I didn’t help appearances any by retreating to my bunk. I narrow my eyes at the old production manager. “I can take a five-minute break, Clancy. I’ve earned that much.”

  He grunts, because we both know I can. I just never do.

  In the front lounge, I drop into the seat behind the table, pulling out my phone. Jera sits on the couch on my side of the bus, Jax leaning over her notebook as he points out a chord he wants her to try. Simon’s next to them, his lids resting closed as he listens to the song take shape. The tremor in his hands has paused for now.

  Their bandmate is on the other couch, his knee pulled up and an arm draped across it. I tap out a text and sneak a peek at him from beneath my eyelashes as his phone vibrates and he lifts up to pull it from his back pocket.

  I have three conditions.

  He looks up at me and one eyebrow arches. Nothing else in his expression changes, but I get the oddest feeling that he’s smiling. Warmth pulses through my chest and I duck my head and keep typing.

  I want current STD and HIV test results.

  Our arrangement ends when the tour does.

  Nobody finds out.

  Once I send my three texts, I pretend to check my email, but over the top of the phone I watch Danny. He needs to understand, right from the beginning, that this is just sex.

  There’s still a chance I can keep this job, my professional reputation, and help out Danny, but we’ll have to be scrupulously careful. With that in mind, I change my phone’s setting to silent. It’s not uncommon for me to be using my phone on the bus, but if Danny and I are trading text chimes, someone is bound to notice. I finish adjusting the settings in time for three text bubbles to appear.

  Yes.

  We’ll see.

  No.

  I press my tongue against the roof of my mouth to silence my quick inhale, and put my phone face down as I watch Jera and Jax for a moment.