32. Zak
It didn’t matter how Earth-shattering the sex was—Zak had carefully crafted a set of mental regulations for her and Chase to abide by when it came to this whole friends-with-benefits thing, and she was sticking to them.
The first and most important rule was: no cuddling. That was relationship shit. She knew this not from being in a relationship herself, but from how much it grossed her out when other people in relationships did it.
So she sent Chase back to his room that night with a, “You agreed, remember? Casual. Nothing serious.”
And the next night, he left with a, “Bye, friend. Oh, and casually, those tits are fantastic.”
And the night after that, she snuck out of his room with her nightgown on inside-out and a smile that was waytoo wide to be casual.
Honestly, it was a miracle she managed to fit in any solo songwriting sessions after adding such a time-consuming extracurricular to her already jam-packed calendar, but orgasms seemed to fuel the process quite effectively. She finally understood what all the fuss was about, but still, she should probably come up with a different explanation for when the camera crew asked, “What was the writing process like for this piece?”
She was getting ahead of herself, though. First, she had to make sure it wasn’t just her ego telling her that she had written a hit. That their ballad was good enough to earn its place as Saint of Spades’ second live song and carry them through to the final segment.
The mere thought of taking this song out of its dark, safe space in her hotel room made her heart float up to the back of her throat. But regardless of what she’d written it about, she had written it for the competition.
Time to see if it was a winner.
“Finally,” Edge said as he welcomed Zak into his room, her guitar case in tow. “You finished that ballad you were working on?”
“I think so.”
She looked around for a place to sit, but apparently, Alex had already beaten her to the couch. Normally, Edge was her sole sounding board for songs that weren”t yet whole-band material, but Alex had spent his first episode paycheck on a Nintendo 64, and the game console had rendered the two of them inseparable for weeks.
“We’re really cutting it close on this one, huh?” Without looking away from the TV screen, Alex dumped his stray game cartridges into a pile on the floor and scooted over to make room for her on the loveseat.
“You’re one to talk. You seem more concerned about shooting laser beams out of a cartoon cat’s spaceship right now than you do about the competition.”
But he wasn’t wrong either. They already had a strong handle on their songs for rounds seven and eight, but the next episode was still up in the air. Zak had been fussing over it for weeks now, and she suspected that the guys wouldn’t be dealing with the encroaching timeline half as well if not for the sheer, dumb faith they had in her.
“He’s a fox, and he’s piloting an Arwing, I’ll have you know,” Alex said, fingers still tapping away on the buttons. “Besides, I”m not going to waste my time worrying. You”d rather commit honor suicide than put out a bad song.”
“And you hated everyone else”s ideas, remember?” Edge recalled.
“I didn’t hate them,” she said. “The concepts were fine but… I don’t know. They all sounded like something I’ve heard before.”
“There is a formula to it,” Edge said. “Emotional lyrics with a nice easy beat. They”re probably looking for simplicity to single out vocalists next week.”
“Exactly.” She flipped open her notebook to a barely legible spread and interpreted her thought process. “What if it started vocals-only, and the instrumentals didn’t come in until the second verse?”
Edge squinted at the words scribbled across the page, heedless of lines and margins, in a font typically reserved for prescription slips. “What am I even looking at?”
“I’m calling it ‘The River’.”
She took out her guitar, already tuned down to compensate for the fact that she wouldn’t be able to belt out the higher register, like Chase, and played starting from where the guitar part would kick in. By now, she had run through the song enough times to have it memorized for life, but she looked down at the page anyway. Not nervous about performing for two people who had heard her worst compositions of all time, but nervous to learn what they would think about this piece.
Some songs were for fun. Some sent a message. And some were threads of the soul, those invisible strands pulled apart and embroidered into pretty patterns for the rest of the world to experience.
“So?” she prompted when she finished.
Alex and Edge stared back at her blankly.
“Are you okay?” Alex asked.
Zak made a small noise of confusion. “Great. Why do you ask?”
“Greed rushes in, I sink beneath. Blue on the surface, blacked out on my knees,” Edge quoted the pre-chorus.
“You don’t like the lyrics?” she asked, gaze darting between her friends.
If they both thought it sounded terrible, she seriously needed to have her hearing evaluated. Before coming in here, she had thought it was her best work in months.
“Oh, they’re great. I can already hear a slow fade in, starting with some kick bass, like this.” Alex tapped out a rhythm on his thigh that she fell in love with instantly.
“It’s a good song, Zak. A real winner.” Edge nodded. “It’s also horny poetry.”
She wasn’t sure what to say to that, so she kept her mouth shut.
Alex set down his controller. “You hear that, right? Zak, you need to get laid. If not by Chase, then by someone else. It’s happy hour at five of the ten bars down the street. Shots are on me. We’ll go find another ridiculously handsome retired athlete for you to climb like a tree.”
“No, I’ve got it handled.” She bent over to put her guitar back in its case, hoping that her hair would curtain the blush creeping up on her cheeks. “I’ll take you up on the happy hour though, if you’re paying.”
When she looked back up, Alex’s jaw was slack. “You dirty whore.” He smiled. “You did him.”
“What?”
It was the only coherent thought she could articulate. All the others were exactly that. Dirty.
She hadwritten this song about Chase, about the forbidden desires he provoked. But she’d also written it for him, to showcase every facet of his talent.
Edge wore his THIS IS A DISASTER BUT I’LL GO WITH IT? smile. “Ouch. Not even a denial attempt?”
“It was good then,” Alex guessed.
“It was.”
“Big O good?”
Did it matter how she answered that question when they were both going to read the truth off her face anyway?
Edge’s brows raised. “Holy shit, it was. Wasn’t it?”
“See man?” Alex thumped him on the shoulder. “At least it’ll all be worth it if the band falls apart.”
Edge and Zak wore identical scowls.
“Too soon? My bad. Thought it would lighten the mood. Now I’m really buying the drinks because I’m going to need the details. That man is fine.”
Edge grabbed his jacket off the coffee table and waited for them at the door. “I don’t need details. At all.”
“So, how big is his dick?”
“Alex!”
Happy hour turned into more of a happy fifteen minutes, since the three of them needed to meet Dallas and Chase at the practice room and make the most of the days leading up to their next live show.
Starting mid-afternoon would also give them a few hours of solitude before the videography team returned from lunch to shoot practice clips. Which ended up being an unexpected blessing when Dallas arrived first, wearing ratty sweatpants and a stained tank top. His black hair was a matted mess, his brown eyes rimmed with red and shadowed by bags.
“What happened to you?” Zak asked. “You look like shit.”
“But I’m here, aren’t I? Wouldn’t want anyone to have to babysit me, right?” he snapped.
She vividly remembered the way Link used to look when he was high—it was the only way he’d looked for the last six months of his life. Tired and gray, like half of himself. Exactly the way Dallas looked now.
She waited until he walked by and accidentally snagged her bracelet on the left sleeve of his flannel. Sure enough, a bright red track mark swelled at the vein in his elbow.
“The drinking is one thing, but smack?” Zak tried to see her friend when she looked at him, but a stranger stared back. “Are you out of your mind?”
“How I spend my money is my business.”
Alex eyed him. “Dallas…”
“Oh, shut up.” Dallas threw his hands in the air. “Don’t you dare try to guilt me about Link after you told me I wasn’t handling my shit. Guess what? I’m handling it. And I’m doing it my way. If you’ve got a problem with that, then you and Goody-Dos-Zapatos over there are just gonna have to get the fuck over it.”
It was like rewatching a horror movie. Déjà vu crept in during the unsettling calm of the exposition. She knew people would get hurt, she could pick out every latent warning sign and see the bloody path ahead so clearly, but she could do nothing to lessen the fallout.
“We’re here to practice,” Edge intervened. “Not to fight.”
The halls were crawling with staff members. If anyone caught wind of a screaming match in the Hendrix room, they could all forget the notion of uninterrupted rehearsal.
Dallas picked out a guitar and sat, wheeling his chair back until it hit the wall. “So, what have I missed?”
More like, what have we missed? How long has this been going on?
Seeing him like this was disturbing, but now wasn’t the time for an interrogation. She had gotten into enough arguments with intoxicated people to know they never reached productive ends.
“We need to run through the next song, but first I wanted your help with this—”
“Zak fucked Chase,” Alex blurted out. At least he hadn’t changed.
Dallas picked nonsense on his unplugged guitar. “Yeah, I know.”
“You told Dallas first?”
“No,” she said. Seriously, the mind-reading thing was getting old. After this, I”m finding new friends. “I wasn’t trying to tell any of you yet, actually.”
“Didn’t seem to me like you were trying to hide it.” Dallas smirked. “We do share a wall, Z.”
Before she could gauge exactly how mortified to be by that comment, Chase came in.
The only thing she felt anymore was an overwhelming urge to walk him straight back out, into an unoccupied room, and have him again. She knew she was staring, and she didn’t care. However, she did care that when that moment ended, when he broke eye contact with her and they both grounded themselves by looking elsewhere in the room, all her friends were staring at him, too.
The arch of Chase’s brow twitched, and the corners of his mouth ticked up. “You told them?”
Zak slapped her hands down on the table. “Seriously? All of you. Am I that transparent?”
“Yep.”
“Yeah.”
“Definitely.”
“Yes.”
“See the thing is, Zak,” Edge started. “Most people have about a dozen facial expressions they use to convey a wide range of emotions. You have, like, two hundred. And each of them is reserved for a very, very specific emotion.”
She questioned the scientific validity of that statement but thought it best not to argue. She didn’t want him to detail whatever very specific emotion they had all picked off her face five seconds ago.
Alex twirled a drumstick around his fingers. “Sounds like she just learned a few new ones, too.”
“How about you harass Chase about this instead, now that he’s here?” she said. “You’ve been giving me shit all morning.”
“Seems we should be thanking him if anything. For a female Slash, you sure act like a female Mozart most of the time,” said Dallas. “Nice to loosen up that powdered wig and stop being so fuckin’ uptight for once, huh?”
Oh, it was more than nice, and it was much more than once. But she was not conceding to a guy who was doped up on heroin and happy to redirect the interrogation lamp onto someone else. “We don’t have time for this, we need to get to work. This song needs to be perfect by the end of the week.”
“Never mind. Looks like you still have your work cut out for you, Chase.”
“What’ve you got for us?” Chase asked, pulling the notebook toward him.
Zak silently thanked him. Trusting they could have a professional relationship at the same time as a sexual one had been a leap of faith on her part, and she appreciated that he’d taken her doubts about it seriously. Now was the first time she had felt optimistic about their ability to separate the band from the bedroom.
“I can’t believe you can read my handwriting,” she said. No one else could.
“We used to do lab reports together.” He gave her a small, personal smile. “Sometimes I’d rewrite your sections, so we didn’t get points taken off for legibility.”
That was news to her, but then again, she had probably been Chase’s worst nightmare of an academic partner. Considering his goal had been to satisfy his parents’ steep demands, and her goal had been to keep her GPA at the exact two-point-oh she needed to graduate. Not a tenth higher.
Chase made a contemplative sound that spiked her blood pressure as his eyes darted back and forth across the page. Her hands itched to snatch away and rip apart the song she had been in love with only minutes before, but she directed her energy toward tapping her heel soundlessly against the top of her opposite foot while he finished reading.
Before he could set the notebook back down, she began to blather on about her concept for the rhythm. She even fingerpicked a few measures on her guitar to illustrate the key, tempo, and melody. And finally, when she could no longer delay the inevitable, she asked him, “So, what do you think?”
She held her breath.
“Oh, I think it’s some of your best work yet.”
Alex snorted. Zak elbowed him in the arm.
Chase eyed their exchange without comment and continued, “Is it about Link?”
Alex and Edge traded glances, and before either of them could say anything, Zak blurted out, “Yes.”
Dallas turned away. Suddenly in need of a new pick from the equipment cabinet.
“It’s beautiful. Creative. Like a love song about addiction,” Chase said.
“That’s what I was going for.”
She couldn’t believe Chase was buying the lie. She expected him to call her out on it immediately, and the fact that he didn’t brought with it equal parts guilt and relief. Operating under his interpretation was easier than admitting that he was her addiction.
It wasn’t a surprise he’d drawn that conclusion from the lyrics. Link had been the inspiration they all discussed from the very first day they’d brainstormed ideas. But while Zak wanted nothing more than to honor him on stage and eternally, there was one thing holding her back from writing an honest tribute.
She was still angry with him. And looking across the table at Dallas reminded her of exactly why.
Addiction wasn’t a choice, but all of the choices leading up to it were. Those little choices had taken him away from them, and they’d started his friend down the same fatal path.
It had been hard for her to love people who didn’t love her back, but it was even harder to love someone who didn’t love themselves. Grieving absent relationships couldn’t possibly compare to grieving ones full of joy, support, and acceptance.
“Dallas.”
Zak said his name without any real idea of what she’d say next, only knowing she needed to say something. She had held back too many times when it came to Link, and knowing she could have fought harder was a burden she would carry with her forever.
“You know you can come to us about anything, right? If you want to talk. When you need help.” She made sure he followed the trail of her eyes to the welted, bruised vein concealed by his shirt. “That’s what we do for each other. That’s what we’ve always done.”
“Yeah,” he said.
But Zak knew what it looked and sounded like to be faithless.