23. Zak
“We have another early day tomorrow, you know.”
Zak hadn’t had a sip of alcohol all night, but now she felt it—drunk on Chase’s voice as he came out onto his balcony later that evening. It paired excellently with the ego-high she’d been riding since their second performance.
They had all stayed behind in the contestant-reserved balcony seating to scope out the competition, and inadequacy reigned supreme. Remedial lyrics. Drummers who couldn’t hold a beat. Sluggish guitar playing. The only thing to impress her had been the brutal metal growling that came out of chatty, dainty, Izzy Sartori.
After tonight’s showing, Zak left the studio feeling extremely optimistic about making it through to the semifinals. Barring a complete disaster during the live episode in three weeks, no one could make a sound argument for Chase being a publicity pick.
What she didn’t feel confident in, however, was the announcement of the semifinal episode themes. To qualify for the last round of the show, they needed a ballad.
She should have seen it coming. Nearly every rock band had a ballad, but hers didn’t. Not because she hated them, but because she was about as capable of writing one as any other person who thought love was a fictitious condition afflicting only those with an excess of free time or a lack of self-control.
She had started brainstorming ideas as soon as she got back to her room, but the notion itself gave her a wicked case of songwriter’s block.
“Then why are you still up?” Zak closed her notebook. “If I didn’t know any better, I would say you were waiting for me to come out here.”
Chase rested his forearms on the railing facing her. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were hoping I did.”
Pointedly, not a denial.
Did that cross the line into non-friendly territory? It felt like it should.
“It’s weird having a room to myself,” she told him. He was right about his first statement, but this was the second true reason she was outside at midnight. “I never have. It’s quiet and empty. And nice, but I’m not used to it yet.”
There had to be a joke in there somewhere. This was the fanciest place she had ever stayed, and it somehow felt like a haunted tomb compared to her twin bed in a tiny apartment. She didn’t realize how much she liked noise, commotion, and passive companionship until those things were all gone.
“Let’s get out of here, then.”
Quick. She needed a reason not to be alone with him. “It’s late. Like, really late.”
“This is the city that never sleeps, right?”
He had a point. That was a terrible reason. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she wanted to be alone with him. She wanted to get out of the hotel and make the most of her time in the City.
“Are you sure?”
“Is that a no?”
She smiled. For some reason, she couldn’t help it. She also couldn’t help but tease him for smiling back. “Should I wear the dress?”
“Nice as it was,” he said “nice” like a curse, “I like this better.” He nodded to her Foreignertank top and destroyed jeans.
Liar, she wanted to say, but she was too busy trying to bring herself back down to Earth. She went with it anyway and threw on a leather jacket, but even if it was the most impractical decision she ever made, nothing could stop her from wearing the heels.
Not the prospect of a walk to the Brooklyn Bridge, where their laughter echoed down the channel. Not the cafe they passed by, which only had standing tables. Not even the questionable-looking puddles and debris she had to sidestep on their way to the subway station, which was an event all on its own.
Underground was teeming with street performers, graffiti, and oddities rivaling even the chaos of Venice Beach. They listened to musicians and poets. Watched deranged circus and magic acts. Made up outlandish stories about the artists behind the spray-painted tags.
Both woefully inexperienced with the world of public transit, she and Chase got off at random stops and checked out anything that was open and looked interesting. They caught the last fifteen minutes of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, had their tea leaves read, and somehow ended up at a hole-in-the-wall jazz club, where they now stood outside watching a sold-out concert under the string-lit awning.
A smooth tenor saxophone solo drifted through the open windows of the industrial brick building, joined by piano, then trombone. Music had always been Zak’s antidote to unhappiness, but tonight, it was the final element to a perfect evening.
Los Angeles was all slow, summer heat. Shiny buildings stacked one next to another. Shiny cars lined up in rush hour traffic. Beautiful bodies and faces all sculpted to sell. Whatever it took to impress crusty old executives with cigar breath and a taste for the next big thing.
New York City was all fast-beating hearts. Humid East Coast air and grimy streets and kindred artists, more willing to struggle than to sell their souls to make it. It was night owls and daydreamers and hopeless romantics. She had barely arrived, and she never wanted to leave.
“Why did you do all this?” she finally found the courage to ask Chase. “Thank you” didn’t seem like enough.
“I had a hard time living alone at first, too. I always enjoyed music, as much as the next person, but that’s when listening to it became more of a need. I always had it on in the background, getting ready, working out, making dinner. I dropped by the record store every week to find something new to fill that silence.”
“You’ve given me that. Faith, hope. I was missing both for a long time, and you’ve given me a chance to find my way again.”When he had told her that, she thought it was all a matter of his health struggles, but health wasn’t skin deep. It was the years he spent in crowded isolation. The way the limelight had crept in and dissected his life. The slow crawl of starting all over again.
“I only took three things with me when I left. My guitar, a backpack full of clothes, and an even bigger backpack full of albums. They’re good company.” It was silly, but his story made her wonder if they were listening to the same albums at the same time. Discovering the same artists. She wondered which songs he played on repeat and which ones he skipped. If the same music that filled her empty spaces kept him company as well. “Did things ever get better?”
“Eventually. At first, I think I hated being alone because it left me with too much to think about. I learned early on that I didn’t know myself too well. Not like you know me. You knew I was going through the motions trying to make people approve of me, trying to look good, way before I realized that was my entire personality.”
“You’re giving me too much credit,” she said. “In the most important ways, I didn’t know you at all.”
I didn’t know how big your heart was. How easy it would be to talk to you.
“You were a good guesser then,” he said. “Because over the years, I kept cutting people out of my life. And each time there was this relief, where there should have been sadness, because one less person meant one less version of myself to keep track of.”
Feeling emboldened by the shadows of night, she took an unsteady step toward him. With the added boost, she was closer to his height. Close enough to read his thoughts in the blue of his eyes. Close enough to press her lips to his pulse and tell him she misspoke last night, but she froze. Unsure where to start. Whether it was worth shattering the fragile illusion of innocence encapsulating their friendship.
She wrapped her arms around him instead. A safe line. One they had already crossed.
If she was going to risk everything because of an intoxicating cocktail of hormones and adrenaline, she needed to be damn sure the sex would be worth it. Every touch, a test. As if she needed to test anything when the closeness of his body made her forget how to breathe, how to think, how to speak.
“How did you feel up there today?”
She hadn’t yet stopped to ask. Time was one setback. The other being, she was scared to hear his answer. Even before Chase’s happiness mattered to her, she had still never wanted a singer they would have to handcuff to the mic stand.
“It was surreal. You are surreal.” Chase’s fingers twined in the ends of her hair as she pulled away, almost as if he didn’t want her to know his hand was entangled in it, or maybe didn’t realize it was. The gentle tugs on her scalp gave her goosebumps. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to be in your band when I’m your biggest fan. You’re going to make it big someday, you know?”
She tried not to dwell on that sinking feeling in the way he said “you,” not “we,” because, with the way things were going, maybe it would be for the best if Chase left someday. She was clearly incapable of being around him without wanting more as it was.
“What makes you so sure?”
“You see it in sports, too. Yeah, it pays to have the genetics. The height, the weight, the money for training and equipment. But there’s this grit behind every good player. The reason for competing. For me, hockey was all I had. It was my only outlet, and I wasn’t just good at it, I clung to it. That’s what took me to the top. It’s like I told you about the gig I walked into. Today’s crowd was exactly like the crowd back then. Everyone feels it. You have that thing inside of you that makes people listen.”
Funny, she used to say that about Link, and she thought it of Chase as well. He was the reason their shows were so successful tonight. His name was the one people would be screaming. His face was the one they would remember.
Zak breathed a sigh as a slow tenor sax solo drifted out the windows, and Chase’s focus shifted between her and the concert inside. There was something warring in his eyes, and it didn’t subside until he took her hand and pulled her to him.
“Do you dance?” he asked, low.
Dancing was her guilty pleasure, which was dumb because there shouldn’t be any guilt associated with such a harmless activity. But it was a thing she reserved for mornings alone, after she turned on the music in the kitchen and shook her head at that expensive-looking coffee machine from Chase. She would give up on trying to follow moves or rhythms and slide around the cold linoleum floor on fluffy socks as she soaked up the comforting aroma of dark roast.
“Not like this.” But that didn’t stop her from dragging her fingertips along the bare skin of his arm, placing the other hand on the base of his neck.
Because this wasn’t really dancing. It was an excuse to feel him. His chest against hers, his hands—one low on her hip, the tip of his pinky brushing underneath the waistband of her jeans, and one resting in the crook of her waist. She felt the smooth, reedy lilt of the jazz all the same as she gazed up at the cavernous sky.
The dimple on Chase”s right cheek appeared in a quiver. “What do you hear when you get lost in music like that?”
“G-9, D-7, Eb-9, G… suspended? You’re an Aerosmith fan, it’s the same progression as ‘Angel’.” She hummed the chorus to that very ballad as she let her eyes drift shut to listen more imaginatively. “Sunsets. Candles burning out the last of the wick. Velvet.”
She opened her eyes, knowing what would happen next. There was not a force in the world powerful enough to contend with her need for him.
But it happened slowly.
His fingers tangled into the tresses at the nape of her neck and held her close by her waist. Instead of passing, the seconds expanded. His eyes warned her before the angle of his jaw did. Before the tentative brush of his lips against hers gave her the barest taste of what was to come.
He kissed her like it was the last time he would ever lay his hands on her. Like it was the only one they would ever share.
Soft, sure. His lips moved against hers with such reverence at first, they turned every touch to pain. She could feel the buttons on his shirt through her clothes, feel his fingerprints like fresh scars on her skin.
But once he realized she wasn’t pushing him away, not this time, the hunger bled through.
She barely had a chance to catch her breath before his hand turned to a fist in her hair and he kissed her again, hard. Hot.
They weren’t dancing anymore, but he was still moving her with the other hand, his fingers hooked through a belt loop as he backed her against the brick wall and caught her bottom lip between his teeth.
Her gasp filled the air between them as he parted her legs with one knee, denim against denim, then turned to a pant that he tasted with his tongue.
A groan vibrated from the base of his throat, rough and heady like whiskey. Like a rock song. Like the beautiful words she wrote, and he sold. A sound like one kiss would be enough to unravel him completely.
So, what would he do, then, if she touched him everywhere else she’d fantasized about?
She tucked her hand under the hem of his shirt, laying her palm flat on his stomach, fingers splayed across divots of muscle to feel the burn of his skin on hers. The way he shivered under her touch and responded in kind. His knuckles brushed over the small of her back, where he had held her as they swayed on the sidewalk.
Still, she wanted more. She wanted to taste that skin she was touching, then lower. She wanted him up against this wall, wanted his hands everywhere. She wanted it to never end, but it did. And she was dizzy, delirious, driven to the brink of fucking insanity by one kiss.
That was all it was: one kiss. The kind that just destroyed her world. Made her believe in all those songs about sex, love, and longing.
“You have no idea,” his lips brushed hers as he spoke, “how long I’ve been waiting to do that.”
No. But she felt it in the way his touch stopped between the band of her bra and her jeans, like it took everything he had not to let his hands roam further. In the way his heart raced against her own chest until their beats merged to create one rapid rhythm. In the way he stayed, caging her against that solid surface as he brought his thumb to her lips. As though he couldn’t believe what they’d done. As though he was equal parts terrified and desperate to do it again.
Or maybe that was her projecting. Because she was terrified of just how badly she needed more.
Her voice came out threadbare. “You could tell me.”
“You’d think I’m crazy.”
“Already do.”
Whatever happened after tonight, she’d save the smile he gave her then. Eyes like denim under the glow of violet lighting, looking at her like she wasn’t just something special, but like she was the only thing that was special to him.
“A long time,” he said.
All summer, she hoped. Because that was how long she’d been waiting for him to do it.