18. Tom Cobalt
TOM COBALT
“Tell me. Please.” His growl sounds tortured and blistered in frustration. “What did I do?”
Everything about Phoenix is scalding hot, and it scares me just how much I like that too. Because he’s started to feel different. He’s started to feel like the one.
The one who will create legendary music with me.
The one who can put up with me.
The one who doesn’t want to pack up and toss in the towel.
The one who’d let the towel strangle him before he ever gave up.
It is gut-wrenching—thinking he’s just like everyone else. That maybe I am so impossible to work with, not even Jeremy’s other problem child could handle me.
I can’t pick up my feet. Can’t move. “I don’t know, dude,” I mutter.
“You do know. You came in here looking like I backed a Mac Truck over your Gibson.” He knows it’s my favorite guitar. “So what the fuck did I do?” He bows toward me, arms still crossed tensely, maintaining the death-grips of eye contact.
I intake a sharp, painful breath. “You’re trying to ice me out—”
“What?” His arms break apart like he needs to hold on to something, but the desk is to his right, not behind him. So he roots his hand to the back of his skull, then inhales slowly.
“Dude, I’ve been through this before. It’s not the first time someone scheduled a studio session early and told me to show up an hour late. Just so I couldn’t be involved in the arrangement because I’m too ‘uncooperative’—and that…” I work my jaw. “That was the last time I saw Warner.”
My old bassist. We formed The Carraways together.
The day Warner and I fought still feels like two hands wrapped around my windpipe. Like a boot thrust against my sternum. Like my back cemented to the hard earth.
I don’t want to go through that again.
Especially not with Phoenix.
He drops his hand with a deep exhale through his nose and a clenched jaw. The flame in his eyes never extinguishes. His intensity is strangling me because I’m more off-kilter than normal. More unbalanced. More…vulnerable.
Then he charges forward.
I flinch backward.
He rocks to a complete, excruciating stop only inches from me, and I can’t tell who’s battling to intake more breath, me or him. He’s unblinking, his nose flaring, as he says, “If I put my hands on you, it will never be to hurt you. You understand that?”
I feel that. “I didn’t think you were going to hit me.”
Phoenix’s deep, dark caring look barrels into my core. “Then why’d you raise your arm to block your face?”
Fuck.
I smear my hands over my face, then I inhale, exhale. “It’s not you.”
“What’d this Warner piece of shit do to you?” Phoenix asks tightly. “Other than be a little bitch and go behind your back?”
“I told you I’d tell you lat—”
“Later, if we get through a tour, yeah,” Phoenix interjects. “I remember our deal.” He shifts his weight, glances left and right, then pins his harsh gaze to mine. “Look, I’m going to need you to break it, and I know it’s not fucking fair to you, but I’m going out of my mind right now.”
Beneath his impatience, all I see is his concern, and I want it badly, even if it’s unwarranted. “It’s not as terrible as what you’re picturing.”
Phoenix motions with his hands like hurry. “I need more than that.”
My lips quirk. “Has anyone ever told you to stop and smell the roses?”
“Unless you’re going to throw a rose at me, I will happily rush you along, nepo baby.”
I shake my head, mostly at myself as my face contorts. “I’m not weak, dude.” I need him to know this. “You don’t think I can defend myself?”
He holds my gaze in a vise. “Coming from someone who has a brother almost your exact age, I think you have three older brothers who’ve probably defended you your whole life.”
“True,” I admit. “But if someone tries to get physical with me, I don’t just cower and hide.”
“He got physical with you.” His eyes flash up-down my body, and his jaw muscle tics harder.
I’d care just as much if I heard someone put their hands on my drummer, so I don’t know why I’m surprised at the level of Phoenix’s ire. “I might’ve deserved it.”
He’s pacing. “Don’t ever say that to me again.”
“You don’t even know what I did.”
He stops to look at me. “You think I don’t know how you are?
You fixate on tempo changes. You obsess over the emotion behind the bridge to the final chorus.
You want the climax to hit just right—because if it doesn’t, then what’s the point?
What’s the fucking point if no one feels completely undone by the end?
” He takes a molten step closer. “You are an impossible, agitating, terrifyingly beautiful perfectionist.”
This might be the most out-of-body experience I’ve ever had. Because it feels like he’s up against me, but he’s halted a few inches away.
His eyes fall to my lips. I shake my head stiffly, my gaze burning as I refuse to meet the overwhelming temptation of him.
Something inside me is screaming for the hazardous collision.
For his strong, masculine hands to frame my face.
For his mouth to crush against mine. I wonder how it’d feel to be close enough for his heart to drum ceaselessly against my body.
I hate how much I want all of that.
Phoenix weaves his arms over his taut chest. “Whatever the fuck he did to you—it wasn’t deserved.” He rocks toward me on his feet. “And this is where you give me details.”
Holy shit, I was not prepared to rehash the most humiliating moment of my life today. I rotate a little away from him to gather the nerve.
When I turn back, Phoenix looks like a four-wheeler has run over him now. “Tom.” I wish he’d been there that day.
It’s a sudden, choking thought. It pushes me a few steps backward. Why would I want Phoenix there to witness my ego being shredded alive? Something I bet he’s wanted to do himself.
Maybe that’s it.
Maybe I’d just prefer to be humbled by him, if given the choice.
Maybe.
Phoenix drops into a deep squat. He’s digging his fingers into his forehead. Then he rises and spins on me to say, “Put me out of my fucking misery, I’m begging you.” His brows hike. “Or do you like me like this? You want me tortured over you?”
I wonder what it says about me—that I don’t hate it. “Thanks for caring, Phoenix Wolfgang St. Pierre, but it’s not like Warner beat the shit out of me. In fact, I would’ve rather he privately broke my jaw than doing what he did.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Yeah, I do.” I put my hands to my chest. “I’ve never felt…I’ve never been so…” Fuck me. I glare up at the ceiling. “Don’t laugh.”
“Man, if you think I’m about to laugh right now, you are delusional.”
I smile back down at the floor, then I’m wincing.
“He threw a microphone at my face during a recording session. And the stand. Oh, and there was that cute part where he spit on me. My only defense is that we sounded like a pack of dying hyenas, and I wanted to do another take. I think all his frustrations just exploded that time, and he was done with me.” I lift my shoulders.
“My first black eye. So I guess there’s that achievement. ”
Phoenix hasn’t cooled off. After one deep breath, he says, “Fuck it.” He closes the distance between us in two strides, and I don’t reject the incoming danger.
Not when his arms wrap around my shoulders. He pulls me into a steel-fortified hug that has me grinning like a fucking idiot. I’m so glad he doesn’t kiss me. It’s my second thought. This is better. This won’t jeopardize us finishing the album.
I’m clutching his waist, my palm slips against his muscled back, and my pulse tries to accelerate as our chests remain welded.
Phoenix pinches my chin. My eyes snap onto his intense gaze, and he says, “He better never meet me.”
My smile edges higher. “What are you going to do?”
“Hit him.”
“You’ll have to get behind my brother. He’s decreed Lex talionis ever since he heard.” Off Phoenix’s confusion, I add, “It means an eye for an eye in Latin.”
“Which brother?”
“Eliot.”
“I already like him,” he states so simply, as if that’s not the best news of the day.
Because there is no realm where I could be with someone who’d hate Eliot.
It would be a death knell to this partnership.
I know it’s why I haven’t brought Phoenix around him yet.
Because if I really wanted to, I could’ve found a way.
His eyes graze my mouth again, and I’m the first to step out of his strong embrace because it’s starting to feel like too much. Heat is buried in my chest as I tear away from him.
I go to the mixing table and mentally repeat, He’s just your drummer. He’s just your drummer. The strain in my muscles isn’t helping me back to reality. It’s just a blistering reminder that I am ridiculously attracted to Phoenix.
I sit on the leather stool and spin toward him. “So you weren’t meeting with Gage behind my back then?”
“No.” He takes off his hat and frisbees it onto the nearby couch. “I walked in maybe five minutes before you.”
I can’t watch him rake both hands through his hair. I need to focus on the music, not the thought of him in any position other than behind a drum kit. Whirling around to the monitors, I grab the mouse on the pad.
I’ve worked with a sound engineer and mixer in the past, but I found out Phoenix took college courses related to both and spent a lot of time using the software on his own.
He’s just as good as they were, but it’s better with him.
He hasn’t made me feel guilty for requesting tweaks, and he’s willing to hear me out just to understand my vision.
We’re not financing this album ourselves, so the label has the right to tell us no and assign us a mixer of their choice.
But we’ve both fought to have ultimate creative control, which means doing whatever we can ourselves. After many, many email threads and a few phone calls, Riot Records relented here and there.
They’re letting Phoenix mix the record. It was a huge win for us.
Though seeing him yawn into his fist, I wonder if maybe it’d been a mistake on some level. “For your information, I could’ve pulled an all-nighter with you,” I tell him while I scroll through his mixes. “It wouldn’t be my first.”
“Did it occur to you that I didn’t want my singer sounding like he choked on a frog when recording backing vocals today?”
His singer. Get used to that, Tom Carraway. “My voice sounds flawless no matter the hour.”
“I see your ego never left the building,” he says in annoyance, standing behind me but a little to the right.
Then he bends forward to peer at the monitor in front of us.
He puts his hand on mine, moving the mouse for me, and he might as well have just incinerated me.
The strength of his callused palm on top of my hand is striking match after match against my neck, my face—every inch of tender skin.
“If you keep breathing like that, Tom, I’m going to get hard. Stop.” His angered voice is a forceful stroke against my cock.
Fuck. “I’m breathing normally,” I defend. “And I’m just sitting here, Phoenix. You’re the one holding my hand.”
He lets go—no, actually, he doesn’t just let go. He pries my hand off the mouse and takes over. He clicks into the third track. “Start with this one.”
I try to relax. “That’s the one with extra reverb?”
He turns his head just slightly, and our lips are one perilous inch away. “You listened to it already?”
I think I say, yeah. I want to add how I listened to all of them the minute he sent the link, but I’m not breathing. I feel delirious.
Phoenix is rigid. He’s stopped moving for once. Until he wets his lips, then he faces forward and backs away from me like I’m a bomb. “Fuck,” he mutters.
I peek backward, just to see him palm the erection bearing against his pants. Damn.
His eyes knife me. “Shut the fuck up.”
I’m smirking. “That’s what you get for closing in on me. Keep your distance if you don’t want a raging hard-on.”
“Don’t act like you didn’t want me there.”
I flip him off, about to press play on Track Three when the door whips open and both Jeremy and Gage enter the booth.
“Tom, you’re up,” Gage says. “We need your vocals.”
Without looking backward, I do my job. Which isn’t even a job, really. It’s been the fuel inside my soul.