16. Tom Cobalt
TOM COBALT
“What the fuck are you doing?” Phoenix asks me with narrowed, judgmental eyes.
We met in Washington Square Park this morning, and I already downed three shots of espresso and fixed problems with the second verse in one of our more complicated songs. It’s been a productive morning, so I’m expecting the other shoe to drop at any minute.
Never did I think it’d be over this.
“I’m uniting the nations with my charm,” I tell him. “What does it look like I’m doing?”
“It looks like I’m about to take you to the emergency room for rabies.”
He’d take me to the emergency room.
Would he carry me there or call a cab? And why is that question destroying my brain right now? I don’t move my hand away from the squirrel as it nibbles the nuts out of my palm.
“Dude, I’ve been feeding these squirrels since I was like four. They’d never betray me.”
“You do know you can’t earn loyalty from a fucking rodent—” He glances to the empty spot on the bench where I hear the buzz of my cellphone. “You’re getting a call.”
“Be free!” I call out and toss the remainder of the nuts in the grass. The squirrel jumps off the fence and dashes for them. My fingers bite from the cold, and I slip my glove back on.
Still sitting on the bench, Phoenix holds out my cell toward me. The longer strands of his hair stick out from his baseball cap. A black scarf is loosely tied around his neck, and his exposed skin flushes pink from the cold.
His brows rise when I reach for my cell. “You really don’t have your mom in your phone as Mom?”
The words ROSE CALLOWAY engulf the screen.
“Correct. Because I’m not boring.” When I snatch my phone from him, I silently remind myself to stop leaving my cell sitting around. It’s a bad habit when someone else could have swiped it from the bench if Phoenix hadn’t been sitting right next to it.
I pull off my beanie, pressing the phone to my ear. “Hi, Mom,” I greet.
“Is this a bad time?” she asks, the frost in her voice perpetual.
That’s also been her standard question ever since Phoenix joined the band.
She knows I’m under an astronomical amount of pressure to finish the album—and more than anyone, she sympathizes with deadlines.
With her fashion line, it’s not like she can put out winter wear in the middle of July.
I eye Phoenix. His brows furrow as he types on his phone, engrossed with something.
“I have a second,” I tell her.
“Good. I’m adding your father on the call. He’s flying home from Paris.”
I frown. That sounds ominous. Most of my joint calls with them result in me being reprimanded for something.
You do know it’s illegal to…
Ride an e-scooter on the sidewalk.
Release helium balloons (even if they are shaped like miniature balloon versions of your uncles).
Vape at Coney Island (or any beach nearby for that matter).
Feed the pigeons and squirrels.
I glance at my squirrel friend munching on the remaining peanuts.
Shit. I scan the area. Is my dad around the corner?
Seriously, sometimes it feels like he has eyes in the sky.
He knows way too much. But Ian, my bodyguard, is the only one watching me.
He leans an elbow on the fence and casually adjusts the mic in his ear.
He’s been my bodyguard since I was fifteen.
I’ve broken enough rules and petty laws to know for certain he doesn’t snitch unless I do something incredibly dumb.
Staticky noise on the phone cuts me out of my thoughts.
“Hello?” I ask. “Mom? Dad?”
“Richard,” my mom says in her usual curt, cold tone. “Remove yourself out of whatever microwave you’ve stepped in.”
“It’s called a Faraday cage, Rose,” my dad replies, his voice a little crackly. “And unless you’d like me to tell the pilot to ground the plane in the Atlantic, there’s going to be some interference.”
“I know what a Faraday cage is,” my mom snaps. “But by all means, go swimming with the sharks. I’m sure they need to be quizzed on electromagnetic fields.”
“I’m sure I’ll be dead if the plane hits the ocean.” I can hear the grin in his voice.
“And I’ll be sure to wear my ugliest heels at your funeral.”
I’m smiling so hard my cheeks hurt. Nothing entertains me more than my parents’ hyperbolic banter.
I slip into the conversation. “Dad, I can’t believe you’d voluntarily step inside a cage when you’re so dominat—”
“I’m still on this phone call.” It’s my mom cutting me off. “Keep talking, and it will be you swimming with the sharks.”
“So you’re going to drop me in the ocean?” I stare around at the city high-rises flanking the park. “I’m a little far away. What’s the plan here? Snatch me from behind? Blindfold me? Toss me in a helicopter? Do you have a hit man on speed dial?” I gasp. “Can I have his number?”
“Tom Carraway.”
“Oh, sorry. Is she a hit woman? Can I have her number?”
“You can have the number of my surgeon. For when I remove your tongue.”
I hiss a breath through my teeth. “Is this because I mentioned you and Dad being into BDSM—”
“Tom Carraway Cobalt,” she seethes, and that’s when I know I am pushing too far. When Eliot and I were teenagers, we stumbled on various Wiki facts about our parents that we’d never know otherwise. It just became easy fodder to try to make our dad squirm.
Spoiler: it hasn’t worked.
I think our dad might have unbreakable armor. Doesn’t get embarrassed. Barely gets flustered. If I hadn’t seen him bleed after slicing his thumb on a broken Christmas ornament, I’d think he was made of iron.
“Sorry, Mom,” I apologize. “What’s with the group call anyway? Not that I don’t love catching up with both of you at once. But I’m sensing an impending lecture.”
“Did you do something we’d need to lecture you for?” my dad asks, and the static has noticeably cleared.
I suck in a tight breath. “Nope.”
“You don’t sound suspicious in the least,” my mom tells me with a heavy dose of sarcasm. “Does this have to do with Phoenix? It’s odd we haven’t met him when we’ve met every one of your new drummers. Even the one that smelled like sour cream.”
“That’s because Phoenix and I are too busy hitting up crack dens for a meet-and-greet.”
On the bench, Phoenix lifts his head from his own phone. Oh shit. He definitely heard that. He gives me a confused look. I wave him off with a hand like it’s fine.
“Hilarious,” my mom says dryly.
“Not a joke, Mom,” I tell her. “We’re getting inspiration from every avenue we can. Next stop: Starship Surplus so we can buy some paddles and spank the creativity out of each other.”
Phoenix’s brows rise, and he mouths, the fuck.
I rub my lips, trying to hide my smile. This is too much fun.
“Interesting,” my dad says very calmly, very casually. “We’ll let his parents know that charming fact when we have dinner with them next week.” It feels like the floor just dropped out from underneath my feet.
“What?” I frown.
“It’s why we’re calling,” my mom says. “His parents reached out. They want to do dinner with me and Connor. And we wanted to check in with you before accepting.”
“Hold on.” I pull my phone back and nod to Phoenix. He’s been watching me ever since I invoked crack dens into the air. “Your parents asked my parents to dinner.”
He lets out a heavy, almost exhausted sigh. “I didn’t know, but I’m not surprised. They’re worried about this partnership. I think they’re just trying to feel out the situation.”
You’re twenty-four, I want to say. But his parents care about him enough to “feel out the situation” or whatever that means.
Is that a bad thing? It’s good they didn’t just stop caring about their kid when he turned eighteen.
That they’re actively involved in his life, right?
Then again, my mom wants to meet Phoenix, but she’d never force a meet-up behind my back.
“So it’s okay?” I ask him.
“Unless your parents aren’t up for it.”
I put the phone back to my ear. “All good. Enjoy dinner with the St. Pierres.”
“Likewise, enjoy your spanking,” my dad tells me. My face turns beet red. Can dish it, can barely take it.
“Richard. Please wait until I’m off the fucking phone,” my mom curses. “Goodbye. Both of you.” She hangs up first.
My dad must be grinning like mad.
Once we say our goodbyes, I end the call and then join Phoenix back on the bench.
“Crack dens? Starship Surplus?” Phoenix says into a shake of his head. “Who talks to their parents like that?”
“I do,” I say proudly. “They know I like to get a rise out of them, and it’s just innocent fun.”
Phoenix studies me for a second. “I can’t tell if they’re pushovers or it’s just a weird Cobalt thing.”
“Weird Cobalt thing,” I say into a smile. “They’re definitely not pushovers. I was grounded so fucking much growing up. My favorite position was staring at the wall in timeout.”
He rubs at his lips with a bare hand. He didn’t bring gloves today, and his fingers blush from the cold. His eyes descend on mine with more seriousness. “How’d they react when you came out?”
The wind picks up, and I pull my beanie back on and down over my ears.
“I never really had a whole coming out moment with them. I just always knew I liked guys. At such a young age, I was pretty vocal about my crushes. And they never made a big deal out of it. It was just understood that ‘Tom likes boys and not girls.’ And that was it.”
“I’m happy for you,” Phoenix says genuinely. “I honestly didn’t peg your billionaire blue-blooded parents for being accepting like that.”
“Not surprised. You have judged a lot about my family.”
“Hmm.” The deep noise in his throat and subsequent nod in agreement skips my pulse a beat. “I didn’t have much to go off of.”
“Because you still haven’t done your Cobalt Empire research. There are infinite-scroll fandom pages dedicated to my fam.”
“Infinite, huh?” He’s smiling a little.
“The lore never ends,” I say. “I’ll send you a link—”
“And I won’t click into it.” When I start to protest, he adds, “Never going to happen.”
“I’m going to go hoarse explaining this shit to you, dude.”
“Wow, having to have a real conversation with someone and not making them do homework to know you. I feel so bad for you, nepo baby.”
It’s not even that. I just want him to know me instantly.
And yeah, okay, that is a cheap way to make it happen.
But I’ve never felt like this with anyone else.
This eagerness for them to really understand me, and maybe it is because he’s pumping the brakes at even trying to fish for the barest of details.
“Fine. A fact most people know,” I tell Phoenix. “My dad isn’t straight. He doesn’t do labels. He’s attracted to who he’s attracted to, and in the past, he hooked up with men before my mom came into the picture.”
Phoenix blows back in surprise. “You had your dad to talk to growing up? About dating men?”
“Uh, no,” I say into a deeper laugh. “I didn’t and don’t talk to my dad about that.”
He tilts his head. “You just bring up sex shops and spanking around him. Checks out.”
“Sarcasm noted,” I tell him. Holy shit, I’m burning up.
I tug off my beanie, my hair sticking up, and I flatten it with a hand.
“And when I say that stuff around my dad, it’s not serious.
He knows it’s a joke. Going to him for genuine advice on dating guys and sex actually sounds like a horror story, and not because he wouldn’t be comfortable.
He would. Like he is super casual about most everything in an analytical, logical way, and it’d embarrass the shit out of me because I can’t be that calm about it. ”
“So you can get embarrassed.”
“Yeah, badly. Like full-on, I-never-want-to-leave-my-room kind of embarrassed. And there are only a few people in my life who can make that shit happen. You are not one of them.”
He glares at me. “Had to finish with that.”
“Had to,” I agree. I eye him, worry clenching the muscles in my abdomen. “What about you and your parents? They seem like they care about you if they’re attempting a meet-up with mine.”
“They do care. They care a lot. They want to make sure I avoid mistakes, even if that means not telling me about setting up a dinner-date with Rose Calloway and Connor Cobalt.” He takes off his baseball cap just to run an agitated hand through his hair. “Sorry about that by the way.”
“It’s cool. You don’t need to apologize. I mean, the inverse is they’re assholes—right?”
He nods, but I still see the heaviness in his body.
“And I came out when I started dating my high school boyfriend, Garrett. My mom asked if I was bi, and I told her I was pretty sure I was gay. She hugged me. Dad hugged me. Then Birdie brought home a rainbow-sprinkle cake just so he could shove it in my face.”
“Literally?”
“No, it was a metaphorical cake. Yes, literally.”
I’m smiling. “Sounds nice.”
“Yours does too.”
We share a soft moment of acknowledgment that maybe we had different experiences, but the end result is the same.
People in our lives care about us, and I’m just as happy for him as he is for me.
His phone beeps in his hand, and he lets out a soft growl.
“So while you were having that insane conversation with your parents, I got a text from my brother—I’m going to need to meet up with you in about an hour. If that’s okay?”
I frown. “Yeah, everything all right?”
He winces. “So we have these things called Future Favors. Basically they’re IOUs. Bird did me a solid a few weeks ago covering for me at the orchestra. He just cashed in his favor.”
And he thinks my family is weird.
“I’ll bite. What’s the favor?”
“I’m picking up my brother’s prescription for Klonopin. The pharmacy is a pain to get to, and I think he’s busy at rehearsals, so he wants me to do it for him.”
“If it’s just an errand, I can go with you…if you want.”
He considers for longer than ten seconds, which sets my skin on fire. The cold? What cold? My body thinks it’s July.
“Hmmm,” he breathes deeply through his nose before he tucks his helmet under his arm. “Okay.” He twists toward the street. “But let’s take your car.”
I’m confused why he wouldn’t want to take his bike. Maybe he doesn’t like riding with other people. Maybe he doesn’t trust me on the back of his Suzuki. But it’s not like I haven’t ridden motorcycles before, and I own a Yamaha. I just don’t ride it all that much.
“You don’t want to take the Suzuki?” I ask, eyeing the bike parked on the street.
“It’s fucking freezing.”
Of course, Tom. What a reasonable explanation that has nothing to do with you. Fuck, why am I so bad at figuring him out?
At the pharmacy, while Phoenix is at the checkout, I linger in the allergy aisle and, out of curiosity, look up Klonopin. It’s an antianxiety med.
I know I also signed an NDA and am legally bound to not leak personal info about Phoenix’s life, but I’m still shocked he trusted me with this. I’m glad he did.
It means more to me than he probably realizes.