by Hazel Jacobs
When she snaps out of it, she catches Slate looking at her with a knowing grin. He’s squeezed in on her other side, the many chains from his belt digging into her thigh, and he smells of chocolate and leather.
“So do you guys do anything together besides play music?” she asks, quickly licking a long stripe of her own ice-cream and ignoring the smirk from Slate.
“We do literally everything together,” Dash replies.
“Except groupies,” says Logan.
Tommy and Slate share a look over Sersha’s head and snigger.
“Most of us don’t share groupies,” Logan says. Beside him, Mikayla is smiling wryly and shaking her head at Tommy and Slate, her lips quirked up in amusement.
Sersha sizes the two men up. “I can think of worse threesomes,” she says.
“Hell yeah, you can!” Slate says, slinging his arm around her shoulder, his chocolately, leather scent becoming stronger. It must be his cologne, though Sersha can’t remember ever smelling anything like it. “Tommy and me know how to treat a lady. I should warn you, though, Tommy’s a dog.”
She glances out of the corner of her eye at Tommy, who’s paying more attention to his ice-cream than he is to the conversation. But she can see a flicker of some unidentifiable emotion in his eyes when Slate’s hand rests on the booth behind his head.
“Oh yes, I can tell,” Sersha says. “He’s a real beast. It’s a wonder the girls make it out alive.”
Tommy nearly chokes on his ice-cream while the rest of the group cackles at him.
“He acts all sweet and innocent,” says Slate leaning conspiratorially into Sersha’s ear. “But when he gets his hands on a girl, he goes from zero to sixty like a rocket.”
“I hope that doesn’t mean he burns out quickly?”
Dash has to cover his mouth because his laughter is starting to disturb other diners. Even Tommy is lightly chuckling next to Sersha, she can feel his jostling laughter against her side. Only Slate and Sersha have completely straight faces, speaking casually as though they’re discussing the weather.
“I’m afraid he does,” Slate says, earning a squawk of protest from Tommy. “But that’s when he tags me in.”
“Like a relay,” says Sersha, nodding sagely and avoiding Tommy’s arm when he swings around to smack Slate. “I understand completely.”
Sersha allows Slate’s arm to stay around her shoulders because she knows, though she couldn’t say how she knows it, that Slate is not interested in her. Maybe it’s the way his eyes remain on her face and nowhere else. Maybe it’s the way he has his arm slung around her shoulders, but he keeps his body from touching hers—his armpit and his hips being the only things to brush against her even in the tight confines of the bench. Maybe it’s the way he talks about Tommy in bed while ignoring any opportunities to talk himself up. His body language and his manners seem to scream ‘flirting only, no sex expected.’ Slate could probably turn flirting into an Olympic sport and win the gold every damn time as well. Sersha might get the silver if she brings her A-game, but she’s no match for a man like Slate.
It’s nice, actually, to let a man sling his arm around her and talk about threesomes with the knowledge that she’s not expected to reciprocate. That she can flirt as hard or as light as she wants to, and both will have the same result.
“But what does he do when you’re not there to tag in?” Sersha asks.
Slate shrugs, jostling her a little bit. “Play Scrabble?” he suggests. “Girls like Scrabble, don’t they?”
“Not as much as they enjoy orgasms.”
“There are children in the room,” says Tommy.
Sersha instantly glances around, but as far as she can see there aren’t any children nearby. She hears screams and laughter coming from the playground outside of the restaurant, though.
Nevertheless, it has the desired effect. Logan changes the subject.
“To answer your question, Sersha,” he says. “We live together, so we do most things as a group.”
Slate snickers next to her and Sersha doesn’t need to look at him to know where his mind just went.
“That sounds nice,” Sersha says.
“It’s hell,” says Tommy. He’s finished his ice-cream and wipes his mouth with the napkin that had been wrapped around it, once again, drawing Sersha’s attention straight to his mouth. “Thank God we have thick walls, so we don’t need to hear Logan and Mik going at it every night.”
“It’s not every night!” Mikayla says. The apples of her cheeks go pink as Slate, Dash and Tommy grin at her. “I have my own place. We go there at least… thirty percent of the time.” Logan nods along beside her.
“I’d say fourteen percent,” Dash says. “Conservatively.”
“Maybe an even ten,” Slate says.
Logan rolls his eyes at them and brushes his hand lightly down Mikayla’s forearm, apparently quelling the fire that had been building behind her eyes. “Are we ready for the main course now?” he asks. Everyone nods. Sersha quickly stuffs the last of her ice-cream cone into her mouth. “Sersha, what do you want in your Happy Meal?”
“Um…” She quickly swallows her mouthful noting that Tommy’s eyes seem to watch her throat with interest. She files that away for later. “Happy Meal?”
“They always get Happy Meals,” Mikayla says, waving her hand dismissively at her boyfriend. “You can get a normal meal with me.”
“Okay… a Big Mac, then. With a Coke?”
The men of Black Lilith all snort when they hear her order. She must be too vanilla for them, but Logan heads to the counter anyway, pulling his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans as he goes. The swirling blue lines of his tattoo sleeve dancing under the harsh fluorescent light. The girl behind the counter freezes when she sees Logan approaching, a small smile creeping over her face that tells Sersha that he’s been recognized.
Mikayla seems to notice the girl.
“Thank God McDonald's employees can’t tweet on the job,” she says. “Or we’d be up to our necks in teenagers in less than a minute.”
“And paparazzi,” Dash says ruefully.
Mikayla’s phone goes off and she quickly answers it, sliding out of the booth and heading outside to where the children are screaming but, presumably, the reception is better.
Sersha feels a breath of air blowing through her scalp and looks over to catch Slate sniffing her hair.
“I don’t care how beautiful you are, smelling a girl’s hair is creepy.”
“I’m trying to figure out what shampoo you use,” he replies, apparently completely unconcerned with the fact that she just called him creepy.
“Lychee and apple.”
“Ah,” he says. “Pretty.”
“Thank you,” she replies. “Though there’s no shampoo on this earth that can turn this mess into something resembling a style,” she adds. “The best I can do is keep it clean.”
“Mik can arrange a stylist for you,” Slate says, reaching up to wrap one of her curls around his finger. The action would have been flirtatious if he weren’t looking at the curl with the kind of detached interest that told her he was busy imagining what it could look like, and not what it looks like right now. “For the gala, I mean.”
“The gala?” Sersha asks. She looks over at Tommy and Dash, but they don’t seem to be surprised by this declaration. “I’m not going to the gala?”
“Sure you are,” Dash says. “You helped write our song. You should be there when we perform it.”
Tommy nods at her. Even though Slate is the one with his arm still around her, it’s Tommy that she can feel pressed against her side. It is him that she wants to be able to smell, but Slate’s cologne overpowers everything. She remembers what Slate said about Tommy being an animal in bed and decides that he must be joking. Tommy might like a good flirt, but the gentle way that he speaks, even when he’s trying to be insulting, and the kind way he treats the women who approach him for pictures, makes Sersha think that he must be really sweet and
gentle in bed as well. That he’d be the sort of man who’d kiss her on the lips the whole time, who would wait until she’s reached her peak before even trying to take his own pleasure. The sort of man who spends more time on foreplay than he does on the act itself.
Which is a pity, a part of her thinks. She’s always had a soft spot in her heart for wild men who kiss and fuck like they’re running out of time.
She thinks that Slate is definitely lying about Tommy not lasting long. She could tell from Tommy’s reaction it wasn’t betrayal at a friend for telling someone something private, it was the annoyed reaction of a guy getting lied about. That, at least, is something she can look forward to. But then Sersha wants to smack herself in the head because she’s not looking forward to anything. She and Tommy aren’t going to be a thing. They just flirt a little, that’s all.
It’s that thought which sends her spiraling out of her fantasies and back to the present.
“I don’t have a dress,” she says lamely.
“Mik will fix that,” Dash says. “Mik fixes everything.”
“She even set the clock on our DVD player,” Tommy says. “It’s like she’s magic.”
“She’s pretty much the coolest person we know,” says Slate. “Logan thought she was a groupie at first.”
“He didn’t!”
Slate and Dash share a smirk while Tommy launches into the story of how Mikayla was introduced to the band’s lead singer. Or, rather, how the lead singer mistook her for a groupie who’d snuck in the green room for a fuck, and how she’d turned out to be the band’s new PA.
“And the best part…” Dash says, speaking around a mouthful of laughter while the rest of the booth sniggered with him, “…was that she said that she was there to meet the whole band. So Logan just assumed that it was going to be a five-way!”
“Oh good Lord,” Sersha says, pressing a hand to her cheek. She can feel how flushed with laughter she is.
“His only objection was that he thought Tommy wouldn’t be into it.”
“No five-ways?” Sersha asks, glancing at Tommy.
He shrugs. “Too many limbs, someone’s bound to get hurt.”
“That’s quitter talk.”
Tommy grins at her.
Slate tells Sersha that, at the time, the band had a rule against dating PAs. That rule had kept Mikayla and Logan apart for months.
“Sounds like a stupid rule,” Sersha says.
“Yeah, it kind of went to shit when Mik showed up,” Slate agrees. “Logan took one look at her and dropped his panties.”
“What are we talking about?”
Logan has returned with a tray laden with food. Four Happy Meal boxes, two Big Macs, two sets of fries and more Cokes than one man should reasonably be able to carry. Dash slides out of the booth to help his brother, still laughing.
“When you and Mikayla met,” he says.
Logan cringes and Sersha lets out another bark of laughter. “In my defense, she was giving me ‘the look.’”
“The look?” Sersha asks.
“You know… ‘the look,’” Logan replies as he slides her food over to her and takes a seat beside Slate. “The look that groupies give you.”
“Groupies do a look?”
“They give good look,” Slate mutters next to her, his attention now firmly fixed on his food. “Ask Tommy, he does the best impression.”
Sersha turns in her seat expectantly, but Tommy has a mouthful of fries and just looks at her like a goldfish, his jaw working as he chews, his hair flopping into his eyes so that he probably can’t even see.
“Oh, yes, I see,” Sersha says wryly. “That’s definitely a look.”
Tommy swallows while the rest of the band laughs at him, throwing her a glare that has no real heat behind it.
“It’s like this,” he says.
Then he lowers his face a little, apparently getting into character. When he looks back at her, his eyes are half-lidded, his hair swept out of his face so that she can see them better. His blue eyes are deep and heavy with promise as he runs them over her face, looking as though he’s trying to memorize her and strip her bare at the same time. His lips are parted slightly and there’s a soft smile playing on them. He looks like he’s ready to take something of hers, put it in his mouth, and never let go. Sersha can feel that look shooting down her belly and straight between her thighs.
“Well, damn,” she says. “That’s quite a Look.”
Tommy drops the look immediately, his face morphing back to his usual half-sad expression, but there’s a hint of a smirk in his eyes now. “Mikayla was not looking at you like that,” he says, turning to Logan.
Tommy’s shift in interest gives her a chance to catch her breath. She quickly takes a drink from her Coke while Logan and Tommy bicker over how, exactly, Mikayla gave Logan the impression that she wanted to fuck him.
Slate leans over and speaks into her ear, “You should wear green to the gala,” he says. “It’s Tommy’s favorite color.”
Sersha purses her lips, glances at Slate out of the corner of her eye, and nods. “Cheers to that.”
They tap their Cokes together and lean back to watch Tommy and Logan’s argument slowly wind down.
Sersha buries her fingers in her long, shamrock green dress to keep herself from running her fingers through her hair. Dominique, the stylist Mikayla had hired to give Sersha a going over before the gala, had spent over an hour on it.
“Honey, ya’ll need to start treating this ‘ish with Moroccan oil or sumthin’,” Dominique had told her, running her ebony fingers through the mess of wild blonde curls on Sersha’s head. Dominique’s own head was shaved and covered in lime green tattoos.
It had taken Sersha a while to get the hang of Dominique’s thick southern American accent. Now she understood how people felt when her Irish got too thick.
“Moroccan oil, you say?” Sersha had asked. She’d tried most hair products at least once, but she couldn’t remember ever trying that.
“Or sumthin’,” Dominique had replied.
Mikayla, who had been watching from Sersha’s bed, had nodded sagely as she scrolled through her phone and answered emails in between doing her own makeup.
In the end, Dominique had wrangled Sersha’s hair into an up-do that kind of seemed to celebrate its messiness. It was as if all of her aberrant curls had been pushed up with sheer force of will, resting on the top of her head like an elegant nest, held up with a mixture of pins, hair spray, and Dominique’s willpower. Once the hair was done, Sersha squeezed into the flowing, feathery dress that she’d picked out of one of Mikayla’s catalogs. Sersha was lanky and gawky in her teens, tall and lean in her twenties, but the dress seemed to accentuate that aspect of her figure. When she looked in the mirror, she thought she looked almost like an Elvin princess.
“Are you sure it isn’t too much?” she asks Mikayla for the hundredth time in the limo on the way to pick up the band.
Mikayla looks stunning in navy blue, her soft hair artfully curled to frame her pretty face. She doesn’t roll her eyes, but Sersha can tell that she wants to.
“It’s perfect,” she says. “The gala is formal. There’ll be women there with diamonds worth more than the band’s house.” The shoulder of her dress slips a little, revealing the edge of a dark purple hickey. She pulls it up almost unconsciously.
“Oh,” Sersha looks back down at herself, wondering if maybe she’s underdressed.
“You’re not underdressed.”
“How did you—”
“You looked like you were about to have a heart attack,” Mikayla says. She reaches over and squeezes Sersha’s hand. “Relax.”
The limo moves smoothly through traffic, heading toward the brownstone that Black Lilith shares. Apparently, the band bought the place with their first big cheque from Bass Note. Logan reasoning that getting into the property market would be a good investment, even if they never made another buck in this industry. Considering the fact that Vanity Fair put the
band on their cover last month, his financial sense wasn’t needed, but Sersha still thinks it was a good idea. You never know what curve balls life will throw at you.
Sersha squeezes Mikayla’s hand back. “You’re right,” she says, aiming for the best of the bubbly that she can be. “Besides… I look fantastic!”
“That’s the spirit!” Mikayla replies. She winks at Sersha. “If you have any problems, just fake it. That’s what Black Lilith does.”
Sersha had read in the band’s many interviews that not one of them had come from money. Quite the opposite in fact. They’d met and started the band in a public school. Logan had worked to put Dash through school, Slate learned to play drums on empty ice-cream cartons, and Tommy had recorded the band’s demo on a borrowed bass guitar. If they can fake their way through an elaborate, formal charity gala, then maybe Sersha can too.
But then, she remembers, she is not performing. Sersha is not the talent or the celebrity face drawing donors. She’s just the lyricist that the bass player begrudgingly allowed to help him with the song that the band is going to play. She can’t even pretend to belong there.
Sersha is glad when they pull up to the brownstone. As the band piles into the limo, swearing and shoving, and she feels her anxiety melt away. Black Lilith and Mikayla won’t leave Sersha to the wolves in their diamond necklaces.
“You look gorgeous,” Logan tells Mikayla, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. He’s wearing a soft pink button-down with the sleeves rolled up to show off his tattoos and black slacks. Mikayla accepts the kiss with a soft, loved-up smile.
Slate looks Sersha up and down and raises his hand for a high-five. “Hot damn, Galway Girl!” he says.
Sersha high-fives him. Leaning back in her chair, she takes in the rest of the band. Slate’s in his usual black jeans with chains, but he’s wearing a black button-down that looks to be a similar style to Logan’s. He’s also got a long, thin tie decorated with little drums. Dash is wearing a bright yellow shirt with golden snitches from Harry Potter embroidered into the sleeves. Sersha thinks that it would look gaudy on anyone else, but on him it seems to fit. It matches his bright personality. Dash is one of the only people Sersha has met who has more bubbles than she does.
