by Hazel Jacobs
“I said all or nothing,” he tells her, his lips brushing against hers and she can smell butter on his breath.
“I thought you meant the sex part.”
He chuckles. “That too,” he says.
Sersha reaches around the back of his head to pull him into a real kiss, tongues and all, but it loses none of its sweetness. “All or nothing, then?” she says when she pulls away. “Are you… I’m sorry, I’m about to ask something really shitty… but are you ready for it?”
Tommy pulls away, frowning, but it’s not an unhappy frown. He looks at his toast thoughtfully.
“I am,” he says. He looks at Sersha. “You mean Danielle, right? You’re worried about Danielle? Yeah, I meant it when I said that I was over her. But I wasn’t sure about getting into something new until… well… until I met you.” He slams her with a look that’s so full of feeling that it makes Sersha melt. “I know it’s a bit cliché, but I think I needed to meet you before I was ready for something better.”
Sersha’s afraid that if she opens her mouth then she might start welling up like a crazy, so she leans over the table and kisses him again, this time with more heat, more desire, more promise. She kisses him like she’s drowning and he’s a life preserver. She kisses him like it’s the last thing she’ll ever do.
Something is stirring within her and it’s scary and wonderful. Sersha never thought, not for a moment, that a man she’d admired on a professional level, and yes, had a minor crush on him because he was so beautiful, would end up being such a wonderful person. And for him to kiss her the way he kisses her, to hold her the way he holds her, to fill her up and make her feel so wanted, is better than anything she could have hoped for.
Tommy reaches down to pull her by the hips onto his lap. Ordinarily, it would have been an awkward, weird sort of maneuver, but Sersha slides over like it’s nothing. Everything about them is so easy. He holds her in his lap and kisses her thoroughly.
“There’s already one baby in the house, you don’t need to make another one!”
Sersha and Tommy jerk apart. Geoffrey is in the doorway with Emily on his hip and a sly grin on his face. With his face sleep-soft and his hair messy, he looks so much younger. Emily looks more like a baby sister than his child.
Tommy gives Sersha a smack on the hip, which excites her more than she’d ever admit out loud, and slides her back over to her chair. He’s got a bit of a smirk on his face that makes Sersha grin at him, and then pass that grin over to Geoffrey.
“Morning, Geoff,” Tommy replies. “Just made some eggs for me and Sersh… want some?”
“Yeah, that’d be great,” Geoffrey replies, nodding to Sersha and joining her at the table.
Emily blubbers and gropes toward Sersha’s hair. Geoffrey gives her a questioning look and when she nods he passes the baby over to her. Sersha settles Emily into her lap and lets the baby grip a handful of her hair. The sweet smell of baby powder fills her nose.
Tommy climbs out of his seat and starts moving pots and pans around the kitchen. It’s a bit cramped in there, but Tommy moves around easily. He fills a pot with water and adds two eggs, setting it to boil before making formula for Emily.
Sersha watches Tommy work, and she’s almost troubled by how content it makes her feel when she sees him being all domestic like this.
Get a grip, fool, she tells herself. He only just asked you out. Now is not the time to be getting all clucky watching him mix baby formula.
But it is still a lovely sight to see. Like when she sees him with his fans, or when he accepts criticism and promises to do better. Sersha’s just grateful that she’s met a man who’s open to his feelings, who’s willing to talk about their relationship so quickly after they had sex, and who loves his family. It’s the sort of thing that her high school self dreamed of. The fact that the sex is amazing, and he’s man candy is a delightful bonus.
When Emily gives her hair a particularly hard tug, Sersha winces and glances over to Geoffrey to see him giving her a knowing look. She starts to blush at the thought of a sixteen-year-old kid giving her that look before she remembers that she’s literally holding his child in her arms.
“So what are you going to do when you finish school?” Sersha asks him as she tries to untangle Emily’s fingers from her hair.
“I’m not sure yet,” Geoffrey replies easily. Tommy drifts over to hand Sersha Emily’s bottle, and Sersha offers it to the baby, who has absolutely no interest in it while she’s still got her hands in Sersha’s hair. Geoffrey watches the baby with a soft look in his eyes. “I want to go to college. Might be a bit tricky with Em, though.”
“We’ll work something out,” Tommy calls over his shoulder while he makes the eggs.
“Girls go to college with babies all the time,” Sersha says. “What do you reckon you want to study?”
“Literature and philosophy,” Geoffrey replies immediately. “Me and Tommy are a huge disappointment to Mom.”
Tommy snorts. “I think she’ll be glad if at least one of us ends up going to college.”
“There’s still time for you, Tommy,” Sersha says. “You can be the grumpy old man on campus.”
“But what would I study?”
Geoffrey and Sersha answer at the same time, “Poetry.”
Tommy puts two eggs into an egg cup, butters toast and cuts it into strips, walking over to put the plate on the table in front of his brother and ruffle his hair. Sersha clutches Emily closer to her when she sees them together. Tommy leans over to kiss Emily and Sersha catches him lingering to enjoy the baby smell. He gives her a wink over Emily’s head.
They have breakfast together. Geoffrey starts talking about his English assignment on The Great Gatsby, which is due in a couple of days. He gets animated quickly as he talks about the metaphorical implications of the green light across the bay. Sersha realizes that her iPod is still playing and quickly shuts it off before the battery dies, enjoying the sight of Tommy’s kid brother getting excited enough that she doesn’t feel the need to listen to music at the same time.
Their mother comes downstairs after they’ve finished breakfast, but she’s clearly useless without her coffee. She gives Sersha a tight smile while she waits for the coffee machine to get to work.
Eventually, Tommy and Sersha say their goodbyes. Tommy had planned to catch the morning train back to Manhattan, and Sersha will be joining him. Geoffrey googles the train times to confirm that the trains are running again.
“Thanks for letting me hold your daughter,” Sersha says, handing the baby back to Geoffrey and pulling her hair out of Emily’s hand. Tommy is giving the kitchen a quick clean before they leave, so Geoffrey and Sersha are saying their goodbyes at the front door.
“Thank you for saving my scalp for a couple of hours,” Geoffrey says. “She’s a hair puller, don’t know where she gets it from.” Then Geoffrey surprises Sersha by leaning over to give her a kiss on the cheek.
Sersha’s fingers reach up to brush the place on her cheek where the boy had kissed her.
“Tommy’s really happy,” Geoffrey says, lowering his voice slightly and glancing over at the kitchen door to make sure that Tommy’s not there to hear them. Emily is nestled against his hip looking sleepy. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen him like this. I don’t know what happened with his last girlfriend, but I think you’re good for him. So thanks.”
When Sersha was a kid, she watched The Grinch and laughed when the Grinch’s heart grew three sizes. It wasn’t until she was older that she realized that hearts growing three sizes is an actual thing. She’s only felt it a couple of times when she’d felt particularly grateful. Her heart grows three sizes when Tommy’s brother thanks her.
She pulls the boy into a hug. He can only hug her one-handed—the other hand being full of baby—but Emily giggles when she’s squeezed between them, making Sersha’s heart grow six sizes.
“Aw,” Tommy’s voice breaks through the beautiful moment. Sersha looks over Geoffrey’s should
er to see him leaning against the kitchen door jam with a fond look in his eyes as he watches them hug.
Sersha and Tommy say their goodbyes and head over to the train station. Tommy holds her hand in the cab. When they get to the station and climb onto the train, Tommy has his arm around her waist. They find a seat together and Sersha puts one of her legs over Tommy’s thighs so that they can cuddle. They share her headphones.
They’ve become one of those couples.
“Do you think if we saw people being as openly affectionate as we’re being that we would be disgusted by them?” Sersha asks.
“Oh absolutely,” Tommy replies. “Frankly, I’m disgusted with us. We’re gonna have to tone it down.”
“Later.”
“Later,” he agrees. He kisses her temple as the train starts to move. They’re heading back toward the city. Back to Sersha’s job and Tommy’s band. “Can’t wait to tell Slate we’re together now…” he goes on, “…he’s been up my ass to ask you out since we met.”
“Slate’s creepily observant with stuff like that,” Sersha replies. “Let’s be real, he didn’t need to send me to give you your phone.”
Tommy freezes. She feels the sudden tension in his muscles. He slowly reaches around to touch his pocket, groaning.
“You left it at home, didn’t you?” Sersha asks. She’s grinning as he squeezes his eyes shut. “You had one job, Tommy.”
He reaches around to her pocket, slides a hand inside and pulls out her phone. Without asking her permission, he swipes through and calls his brother. Sersha finds that she doesn’t mind.
“Geoff, it’s me. Yeah… it should be on the kitchen counter. Thanks. Love you, too.” Sersha smothers her smile in his shoulder as he says goodbye to his brother. “Geoff’ll courier it over,” he tells her. “I sometimes leave my phone in places.”
“I noticed,” Sersha replies. Tommy reaches around to slide her phone back into her pocket. He lets his fingers slide up under her shirt and rest on her lean stomach. “I like Geoffrey,” Sersha says. “He’s a good dad.”
Tommy leans his head on top of hers. “He is,” he says. “He shouldn’t have to be. The poor kid, he didn’t deserve that.”
“At least she let him keep the baby when he asked her,” Sersha says. “Not a lot of men would want that.”
Tommy hums in agreement. “You’re right,” he says. “To be honest… it’s a bit shitty. And to be even more honest I thought that he was making a mistake. When I heard that she was pregnant, when I heard that he wanted to keep it even though she didn’t, I thought that he was going to end up ruining his life. I’m so glad I was wrong.”
“It must have been a stressful time,” Sersha says. Something occurs to her, but she isn’t sure how to word it. But then she considers that Tommy has been so open with her so far. She decides to ask, “Is he sure that it’s his?” she asks. “An eighteen-year-old with a sixteen-year-old. Is he sure that he was the only one?”
She feels Tommy nod against her head. “I paid for a paternity test. Emily’s his.”
“That’s good then.”
Then she has a moment to feel bad that she’d assumed Geoffrey’s girlfriend would cheat on him. Sersha doesn’t know anything about the woman, except that she’d committed statutory. But she’d let Geoffrey keep the baby. She could have just put it up for adoption and never had anything to do with it again. Or even gotten an abortion. She’d made the right choice, regardless. Geoffrey may be young but he clearly dotes on Emily, and she’s got a loving uncle and grandmother as well. That’s pretty beautiful.
“Do you think the paparazzi will ever find out that you paid for a paternity test?”
Tommy shrugs. “I’ll take the blame. That’s one thing all us guys in Black Lilith agreed at the beginning, that we’d leave our families out of it. Well,” he considers, “Slate and I will leave our families out of it. Logan and Dash are all they have. But yeah, if anyone ever finds out about the test, I’ll tell that it was for me. Geoff doesn’t need that kind of shit. He’s too young.”
Sersha leans up to kiss his jaw. They’re alone in the carriage. Outside, buildings pass with flashes of green in between.
“I’ve got your back,” she says. She doesn’t know what that’ll end up meaning—that she’ll have to be by his side if he takes the fall for Geoffrey if, or when, someone in the press finds out about the paternity test.
But she wants to be with him. She wants to share the best and worst of his life. She wants this to last.
Tommy leans around and kisses her lips. “I’m glad,” he says.
It’s a blissful week. Tommy’s made his way into Sersha’s bed nearly every night. Technically she’s not supposed to have men over in the Airbnb apartment, but she’s sure as hell not going to spend nights in Black Lilith’s overcrowded brownstone. Not with Slate and Dash smirking at her at every turn. Not with Logan and Mikayla trying to break the record for ‘most flat surfaces defiled.’ Black Lilith has actually been incredibly supportive, which Sersha is delighted with. Tommy has insisted on telling them immediately. He doesn’t like the idea of lying to them.
“Lying just creates bullshit,” he’d said. After what the band has told Sersha about Tommy, Logan, and Mikayla, she can understand why he insists on telling Black Lilith the day that they returned to Manhattan.
Dash immediately handed Slate ten bucks. He’d thought for sure that it would take Sersha and Tommy another week to get together.
They spent the week mostly working on the band’s next album in between Black Lilith’s rehearsals for the Streamys. And having sex. Lots and lots of sex. But the sex isn’t the best thing they’re sharing. Every night, after a long round, Sersha and Tommy talk. Sersha shares things with the man that she’s never shared with a boyfriend. She tells him about her dad. About how much she’d like to see him again, if only to ask him why he left in the first place. Tommy plays ‘Free Bird’ by Lynyrd Skynyrd for her, the only song he loves to sing as well as play, sitting naked and extremely sexy on her mattress with his bass on his lap. He tells her that ‘Ripped Apart’ wasn’t a song for Danielle, it was a song for Logan. Tommy had written it before he found out about Danielle’s betrayal, back when he’d thought that Logan had fired her for no reason.
“I apologized,” Tommy tells her while he draws on her back with a red sharpie. She can’t see what he’s doing, but she thinks he might be writing poetry on her skin. Later, she’ll twist and turn in front of the mirror trying to read them. It’s a Coleridge poem that he knows by heart. “I told him he didn’t have to sing it, but he likes the song. That’s the kind of guy he is. He thinks that someone listening… a fan, or someone… might be able to relate. So we put it on the album.”
“Did you ever think that the four of you would be so famous?”
“I did, actually,” Tommy says, surprising her. “I knew from the minute I heard Logan sing. With him as our front man, we couldn’t be anything but famous.”
“They’re your words he’s singing.”
“If Justin Bieber can get famous off ‘Baby,’ then we could get famous on anything.”
“You’re being too modest, Tommy.”
He silences her protests with kissing, turns her words into moans, and later she makes him wash Coleridge’s words off her back and replace them with his own. Tommy taps his sharpie against his lips before he writes…
Shamrocks are a stereotype.
Effortlessly gorgeous.
Really, really talented.
Sexy as hell.
Hair like a bird’s nest.
Absolutely perfect.
It takes her a few reads to realize that it’s an acrostic. She writes her own onto his belly, but she gets distracted halfway through and ends up writing…
Totally hot for Sersha
Open to three ways
Major dom in bed.
At that point, she feels the bulge growing in his pants and ducks down to let her lips and tongue sort him out.
They
prepare for the Streamy Awards. Bass Note pays for Sersha’s ticket to LA, and she and Mikayla find a bronze-colored dress that makes Tommy’s eyes go wide when he sees her in it. He takes great pleasure in peeling it off her the night before the awards, making love to her slowly and carefully until she loses her patience and demands that he sort her out properly. He does. He always does.
The awards themselves are boring as hell. Sersha thinks that she would have loved them if she’d known the people who were nominated, but most of them are YouTubers and social media entrepreneurs. Apart from uploading her songs online, Sersha doesn’t spend a lot of time on the internet. She spends most of the night enjoying people’s outfits and sharing jokes with Mikayla, who looks stunning in silver. The highlight is when Black Lilith takes the stage and the presenter—Lilly something—starts dancing like she’s been training for it her whole life. #ThanksALot starts trending on Twitter again.
After the Streamys, the band gets ushered into the back of a limo and dragged to a club. They get pushed through the line so quickly that Sersha doesn’t even have time to see what the club is called. She’s too focused on Tommy’s hand on her lower back to pay attention. When the paparazzi flash their cameras in her face, she just smiles.
Inside, the club is practically vibrating with movement and action. Sersha thinks everyone is bubbling, some may be relying on artificial help, going by the way they are dancing. Slate zeros in on a couple of girls immediately and Sersha looks away when she sees him show them a tiny baggie with suspicious white powder in it.
“You’re not going to ask Slate to find you a girl tonight, are you?” Sersha shouts in Tommy’s ear. The band that’s playing is very good, but they’re also very loud.
Tommy smirks at her, reaching down to brush his hand over her ass. “I’m gonna show you exactly how silly that question is as soon as we get back to the hotel.”
