Chapter 16 Salem
SALEM
The rough mix for “Locket” hits at the third bar. Houston prints the bounce, pushes play, and the room tightens the way a crowd tightens when a storm moves in. Piano dry, ribbon breath, his voice steady as a hand on the back of your neck.
Chills.
He makes it sound like air behaving. I hate how easy he makes it look. I love him for it. Both can be true. I clap once, sharp, before anyone can read my face and write the wrong song about it.
Lou’s at the table with a pencil behind her ear, head cocked, listening with her whole heart.
When the bridge lands, she bites her bottom lip, her eyes wet, and she doesn’t apologize.
I want to kiss her mouth for that, and I don’t, because the bounce is still rolling and I’m not the guy who steps on a take.
The last chorus holds just long enough to prove its point, then lets go. Silence after. The good kind.
“Wow. That’s the one.”
Lou wipes a thumb under one eye and pretends she’s moving her hair. I pretend I didn’t see it, then immediately watch her see me pretending. She smiles, small, private. I file it where I keep the things I don’t ruin.
Knox slowly nods. “That’s one hell of a single.”
Houston grins. “You think so?”
“It hits. Hard. You did good, man.”
I stand by the doorjamb and roll the pick between my fingers until it warms. Pride hits first, clean and bright. Then the little itch under my skin wakes up—jealousy, the useful kind if you don’t drink it.
Houston writes like he’s changing a tire on a moving car and never drops a lug nut. I play loud, break pretty, catch eyes, steal oxygen. He does algebra you can dance to. I want what he has without wanting him to have less. That’s the line. I’ve crossed it before and paid.
Not today. Today, I tune the kit to the room, let it breathe when the song needs space, and add exactly what makes the chorus feel inevitable. I can be gasoline or I can be a fuse. The trick is knowing when the fire should burn and when the light should stay steady.
Lou catches me breathing through it and tilts her head in that way that says she sees, and I take the win.
It should be a good day. This is some of Houston’s best work. But life has other plans.
A gossip site fires a push at lunch with a collage like a ransom note. A photo of Lou with me outside the diner. How anyone got that shot, I have no fucking clue… The waitress. Has to be.
One of Lou with Houston on the balcony, all snuggled up. That had to be a drone with a telephoto. We’re too high up for much else.
Then, Lou with Knox at the table, leaning over the budget doc, his hand on her ass. The headline says Cheating Scandal? in a font that can get bent. Comments are a fire ladder to the basement. Pick a brother, pick a sin, pick a slur. They don’t need details. They smell blood.
My thumb hovers over the keyboard. I want to post a scorched-earth reply that reads like a lighter held to a curtain.
Four of us, one story. We handle our business.
Everyone else can fuck off and hydrate. I hate cloak-and-dagger.
I’d rather get sunburned in the open than rot in a closet for strangers I don’t respect.
I even type a draft, because I’m me: We’re fine.
She’s with us. Touch her and we’ll end your week.
I stare at the words until they look stupid and true at the same time.
I hear Quincy telling me to count to ten.
I picture Lou’s DMs if I hit post. I picture my mother reading the replies and calling me by my full name, so I feel like I’m nine years old and got caught smoking a cigarette behind the studio.
Lou reads over my shoulder without touching me. “Don’t.”
“They’re turning you into content.”
“They’ll do that anyway. If we feed them, we teach them to come back. I’ve already received threats for holding Troy’s hand. I’m not giving them a bigger target.”
“What if I take the target?”
“You are the target,” she says, which is rude and true. “We all are. Silence and strategy. We do the work. We post art. We go quiet where they want noise. If we go official right now, it goes nuclear.”
I want to argue. I want to throw a brick through the internet. I want to say I’m not built for silence or stillness or normal. I look at her fingers on the edge of the table, ink on the cuticle from where the pen fought back, and I shut up.
“Fine.” It tastes like swallowing a lit match. I swallow it anyway. “Going for a ride.”
If I stay inside, I’ll put my fist through a window.
Out past the garages, across the overpass, into the ugly parts of town that don’t sell postcards.
The air bites at fifty, forgives at sixty-five.
I let my head clear at the edges and keep my hands clean in the middle.
A bar with a parking lot like a scar pulls me in without trying.
Inside is low light, a jukebox that hates everything after 2005, and three women who smell like they know how to ruin a day on purpose.
I take a stool, order club soda with lime, and watch my reflection in the back-bar mirror until I’m sure the guy looking back won’t start a fight to prove he’s breathing.
A brunette touches my forearm and introduces herself like she’s late to a party. “Aren’t you—”
“I’m a guy drinking soda,” I say, friendly enough to be rude later if I have to. “You want the stool?”
She laughs, surprised I told the truth out loud. “You’re cute.”
“I’m trouble. Tonight I’m off-duty.”
She leaves a number on a napkin anyway because people like to try doors even when the lights are off.
I tuck it under my glass so the water wrecks it.
Another girl floats by looking like vanilla and knives.
Just my type. She settles in next to me, asks my name.
I nod, polite, and keep my hands to myself. “Just here for a drink.”
“Drinks are better with company.”
“Not the way I drink.”
Dejected, she trots away. It’s a cute trot, to be fair, but nah. Truth is, I’m not interested. Not in anyone else. Not sure when the last time that happened was.
I text Lou instead and find out she’s still up. Thank fuck. I pay, tip heavy, step into the heat, and ride back before my better self gets bored and wanders off.
The suite is dark except for the TV. Knox’s door is closed. Houston’s light is out. Lou’s a blanket mountain on the couch, a horror movie throwing blue and red across her cheekbones. “You okay?”
“No,” I say, kicking my boots off. “But I’m trying.”
“Come here. Be still for ninety minutes.”
“Cruel.”
“It’s a horror movie, so that seems appropriate.”
I snort a laugh and slide under the blanket and sit close enough to feel the heat coming off her without taking any. On screen, a woman walks into a basement even though she was told not to. Classic.
Lou’s hair smells like hotel shampoo—floral—and her day. She hands me the bowl of popcorn, and I take three pieces so I don’t make a mess of the salt.
We watch in the kind of quiet people mistake for tension. It isn’t. It’s two humans making room for their own lungs. My knee stops wanting to drum when she sets her calf against it like a doorstop. She’s not cuddly. She’s decisive. I like that better.
The movie does a jump scare. She doesn’t move.
I flinch because I always do. Doesn’t matter how many horror movies I watch.
She grins into the throw and hides it, which is rude.
I elbow her, gentle. She elbows back, less gentle.
I catch her wrist under the blanket and hold it for a second because I want to, and because she lets me.
The hand I’m holding threads our fingers.
My other hand goes to her knee, warm through her leggings.
She breathes in, deeper but not dramatic, and then moves closer so the edge of the blanket tents over us, and the rest of the room doesn’t exist. My mouth finds her temple, then the shell of her ear, then her mouth.
She tastes like popcorn and cola. Perfect.
She answers like she meant to do this and got tired of waiting for me to catch up.
A kiss that says we have time even if we don’t.
My hand slides higher, and she nods. I move over her hip, under cotton, palm mapping heat and shape and wetness.
She exhales into me, and the sound short-circuits me in the right way.
She tilts her hips, and I adjust, learning the rhythm fast because I pay attention when the lesson matters.
Her fingers slip under my tee, travel up, down, lower, tracing a line that makes my breath stutter and then even out at a new speed.
When her thumb runs over my nipple piercing, a shudder of pleasure tickles through me.
She smiles like she knows she has me.
Good. She does.
“More?” I ask.
“Yes.”
The blanket makes us criminals. My hand learns her, pressure and pause, the places where less is more, and the places where more is the only answer.
She puts her palm on my jaw like she’s steadying me and then drops it to my chest and then lower, under my tee, fingernails skimming skin.
I breathe thick. The movie bleeds sound that doesn’t belong to us. We build our own.
She twists, straddles my thigh under the throw, slow and certain, a test I pass by not rushing the tempo. Heat climbs. I set a hand at the small of her back and keep the other where she wants it, fingers-deep inside of her wet pussy. She rides my fingers like an equestrian.
I mouth her name against her throat, just air, no mark, and she swears into my shoulder like she didn’t mean to. Her hand slides down, confident now, past my waistband, a check, a question, a statement.
“Yes,” I say before she can ask. She cups me through denim, and I see stars I can’t name. I laugh once, ugly and happy, and then swallow it because my brothers might wake up and want in on this.
Tonight, I don’t want to share. I want to be selfish with Lou.
“Tell me,” she says.
“What?”
“What works,” she says, plain. “We’re not guessing.”
“Pressure. Steady. Don’t get cute.”
She grins. “Rude.”
“You know me.”
She does exactly that, steady, fingers ringing me.
I return the favor, circles and lines, rhythm easy, two people who have done this before and decided to do it again.
Her head tips back. I kiss the line of her jaw so she doesn’t have to hide the sound, and she makes it, small and sure. It lights me up from the inside out.
The blanket makes a world where there’s no rumor mill.
Just heat and breath and trust I didn’t have to hustle for.
I keep my palm steady and my mouth gentle, and she climbs into my arms. When she comes, it’s quiet and inevitable, a low yes against my neck, fingers tight in my shirt and then soft.
I stay with her until she stops shaking.
She moves her hand again, fingers fitting me like she was made for this.
I shut my eyes and let her kill me slow, hips listening to her hand, not my ego.
It takes a minute. It’s supposed to. When it hits, I bite her shoulder through the cotton so I don’t wake the suite, and she laughs into my mouth like she likes me when I’m human.
We both breathe and count the seconds back to earth. I kiss the corner of her mouth, and she kisses mine, quick, like a promise with an escape clause. She adjusts the blanket so we’re decent if a door opens, practical even now.
We stay there under the blanket, wrecked and clean. She kisses me once, exactly on the mouth. “You’re getting good at stillness.”
“You make it easier.”
On screen, the credits crawl. The room is blue and gray and ours. The world still exists. We let it. She slides her hand back into mine and laces our fingers like it’s nothing. It feels like everything.
“I wanted to post a manifesto,” I say into her hair. “All caps. Burn the fake rules. Us four and a middle finger.”
“You could. But manifestos are for terrorists, and you don’t want to be on the no-fly list.”
I laugh. Can’t help it. She zigs when I zag, so I never really know what’s about to come out of her mouth. I like that about her. “Good point.”
I don’t recognize the feeling in my chest at first. It isn’t rage. It isn’t boredom. It isn’t the urge to feed a headline.
It’s quiet and warm and absolutely not what the brand deck says I am. I decide not to fight it. I let myself want this without rehearsing how it ends, without checking angles for cameras, without trying to get ahead of the next disaster by making one first.
“We’ll be okay,” she says, like she can read my weather.
The words itch. But I need to hear them. “Say it again.”
“We’ll be okay,” she says, and it lands right this time.
The next horror movie asks if we want to keep watching. The TV waits like a dog. We don’t. We burrow deeper under the throw and pretend the couch is a bunker and the bunker is a bed and the bed is a decision we get to make every night from now until the record ships.
Under this blanket, with her hand in mine and my pulse not trying to set the room on fire, I let myself be boring for one long minute. Just lying here with her, in the dark. In the stillness. It feels like winning.