Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Each time my shop bell rings, a new story crosses the threshold…
The sign above the door of Naughty Bits was intriguing, but the humming note of the bell drew DJ’s attention. It soothed the agitation that had propelled him out of the SUV and into the store.
He hadn’t started out any better today than he had yesterday. If anything, he’d spiraled down further, but Roy had ignored DJ’s surliness and loaded him in the SUV.
As they rode, one thing changed, though it didn’t seem like much. DJ had thought about their destination and what he might see there, and it started to engage his imagination.
Kind of like how Roy’s first touch had grabbed his mind and made it consider how it would feel everywhere else. Only back when that had happened, his imagination had been far less sluggish.
So it shocked him when that shop bell note made a home in his head…and started a song.
I sing and you answer
I answer and you sing
When we came together
The music changed.
Come soft and it’s a lullaby
Come hard and it’s a storm
But still, the notes are nothing
When they stand alone.
They’re not together.
The last line would repeat, only the music would change, taking it down a darker path. Increasing the sense of isolation.
They’re not together.
We’re not together.
He’d end the song with tapped harmonies to sound like the bell, fading away.
Panic flooded him. He needed to write that down, but when he dug into the pockets of his faded jeans, he came up empty. He always had pen and paper.
Roy’s large hand closed around his fingers, pressing a folded paper and a pen against his palm.
He needed that touch, but in this precarious moment, if he reached for the hand instead of the pen, his soul would crack.
I am too fragile.
I need to come to you strong.
But will I ever be strong enough?
He’d change the vocals on the last line, driven upward and harsher by the fiercer drumbeat. The guitar strings would create a shriek of sound as he crossed the frets, letting that savagery lead.
His heart’s drumbeat moved into the base of his throat. His head started to roar. No. Get it down, DJ. Don’t lose it.
Reawakened, the muse refused to be thwarted by loss. Hell, it would probably thrive on it, using up the so-called artist until there was nothing left. What remained would be only what the muse had given him. Or what it decided not to take back.
What does it matter? Why does any of it matter?
Only yesterday, he’d worried that the words and music would never come together for him again, and now that it was trying, he was pissed. Pissed at the muse, pissed at the world. He wanted them to be pissed back.
A different muse spoke, with a voice like a mountain god. “Write it down, Dory.”
Roy was the only one who used that name. Even if he hadn’t discussed it with DJ, he wouldn’t have needed his permission. From their first meeting, there’d been certain things it seemed Roy had the God-given right to do.
Roy rested his fingers against the hollow path of DJ’s spine, connecting to all the other hollow spaces inside. The sub in him wanted to obey, take that shelter. The sudden inexplicable rage in him was having none of it.
No. Fuck you. I'm out.
Roy’s touch moved back to the clutched pen and crumpled paper and closed over DJ’s hand. The man had a grip like a bear trap. Had he forgotten DJ needed working fingers, in case he ever played guitar again?
“Write it. The fuck. Down.”
Every enunciated word was backed by a power he’d like to capture, translate into a fuck-me-before-hopelessness-kills-me song.
DJ lifted the paper, a used envelope from a power bill. Wow. He figured Roy just ordered the lights in his condo to turn on, because Roy’s voice could turn on anything.
Neither his dick nor the muse gave a fuck about how much his heart hurt. Both of them were willing to use the pain for their own purposes.
While he scribbled the words on the envelope, Roy turned his back to DJ, bookends with no books in between. He was shielding him. DJ guessed he’d signaled the shopkeeper to keep her distance.
He folded the envelope and tucked it and the pen into the back pocket of his jeans.
His elbow brushed Roy’s coat, and DJ registered the butt of the gun Roy wore harnessed beneath it.
In the interest of blending, it was a casual jacket over jeans and one of those cotton crew necks he looked so good in, this one a blue-gray that picked up his eye color.
DJ inhaled Dial Mountain Air soap, and the aftershave that kept Roy’s square jaw mostly smooth.
Shaving products could only do so much against facial hair driven by uber alpha testosterone.
When DJ had told him that at breakfast, a welcome and leisurely interlude sitting on the deck, watching the river and the birds, Roy had called DJ a wiseass.
Heat. Roy always smelled like heat.
Fire banked
Fire unleashed
Hellfire glow
I always know
That heat is for warming me
Heaven or hell or from the Earth
The source is true
Straight from them to you.
No need to scribble again. He’d already written that song. Before. He hadn’t had a chance to play it for the band. Let them do their magic to it.
“Are you shopping or dicking around?”
The edge in Roy’s voice snapped him out of his fog. Roy was yanking his chain, and since DJ refused to appreciate why he was doing so, he returned the favor.
DJ tilted his chin toward his shoulder, giving Roy a sneering look without actually looking at him. “Since you get paid the same, why do you care? This place make you blush?”
Deliberately ignoring Roy, DJ stepped past him and started checking out what the store had to offer. Vibrators, sexy lingerie, artwork, videos. Metal, rubber, latex, leather. Incense, oils. Music played with a cock-throbbing beat.
Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he sauntered past the shelves until he reached the items he’d come to see.
Neon signs glowing in shades of pink and purple were scattered across the wall above them. The sensations the products below offered were described in cursive lettering.
Soft. Warm. Smooth. Hard. Pleasure. Pain.
The shop catered to women and couples, which worked for DJ.
He’d been in plenty of the male-oriented places.
They made him feel unclean and unsettled, in the wrong ways.
Sure, he’d jack off later thinking of the blatant visuals, but the coarse and purely physical stimulation left a bad taste in his soul.
Not that he would have admitted that to Steve, Tal and Pete. They laughed it up together over squishy pink rubber pussies and crazy triple X movie titles.
As he stared at floggers, paddles and crops, he imagined them striking his flesh. He captured a flogger’s strands between his knuckles, the texture teasing his skin as he followed the tails to the end and let them fall free.
DJ felt it when that Roy-shaped heat went still and focused more intently upon him. Another shudder jolted his fingers.
Fire became a touch
With a tight, tight coil.
A column of need
Burning me.
Bind me in it
Burn my flesh, my bones, my mind
To ash.
After weeks of silence in his numb soul, the muse was pummeling him. DJ was once again a gawky high school kid, hunched over his guitar in the high school cafeteria, everything he saw a song to be written. Like the shop bell, heralding a story as soon as it crossed the threshold of his awareness.
Roy’s muttered curse was a veiled threat—or promise—that shot adrenaline through DJ, tightening every muscle.
“I’ll be right outside, DJ.”
The bell spoke, followed by the decisive thud of the door. His bodyguard had scoped the place, determined it was secure, and gone outside.
Except DJ only really felt safe when he could see Roy.
He needed to trash that pathetic thought, and the half-assed verses he’d just composed. He needed to go home and get shit-faced.
It brought to mind what had happened a few nights before they started this road trip. If Roy hadn’t been set on it at the time, it had likely tipped the scale in that direction.
DJ hadn’t drunk to excess in years, but the pain had become too much, and he’d given it his all. By the time Roy came off shift and back to the cottage, he’d needed help to walk. Roy had had to physically dump him into his bed.
He'd then stood over DJ a few hours later while DJ expelled the alcohol and his internal organs into the painfully snow-white toilet.
Roy dragged him there before he could throw up in the bed, knocked him to his knees and put a firm hand to the back of his neck when DJ unwisely tried to fight him.
Between heaves, DJ told him to fuck off, and Roy threatened to drown him in his own vomit.
But by the time he was done, the clamp of the hard hand had softened, and was kneading his tense muscles. Roy had brought him a towel to wipe his mouth and helped him back into bed. As he turned the lights off, he spoke in a mild tone that was anything but.
“This ends soon. We’re going to get your ass out of that bed and go somewhere.”
“Don’t want to go anywhere.”
“I don’t give a shit. Go to sleep, Dory.”
A pleasant female voice intruded on the memory. “I should have asked if you need my help five minutes ago, but watching you two took away my power of speech. Logan, my husband, says that can’t be done without a gag, so I’ll be delighted to tell him he’s wrong.”
Startled enough to be amused, DJ focused on the store employee. As with most women, the top of her head barely reached his shoulder. She’d lifted her chin to meet his eyes. “You’re a tree in the forest, aren’t you?”
“A sapling that never filled out.” A shot of pain went through his heart as he remembered who said that.
A voice from a fresh grave.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
“DJ? Are you all right?”
“You know my name.” Even with the hat and glasses, Foo Fighter T-shirt and nondescript jeans, it was a stupid no-brainer. Or so he thought.
“Dory sounded personal. But DJ seemed like everyday use.”