Chapter 44 #2
Trouble tilts his head back and smiles. Worse than before.
Worse than sin. Worse than temptation. He saunters over to the left of the stage.
A metal pole glints pink and purple as the light hits it.
He leans back against it and his hips start to move.
Slow circles. Lazy, languid gyration that works the audience into a frenzy and slices a deep grid into his torso.
He starts moving, sliding down the pole, leaning against it, steadying himself with one hand over his head.
He hits every note. Hips, shoulders, neck.
Every part of his body works in concert and meets every beat with such precision it’s surgical. It’s unreal. It’s magic.
He sinks down into a deep squat, head and back still leaning heavily against the pole, with his legs pressed together at the knees.
We wait.
And wait.
As the beat drops, Trouble parts his legs. Hard. Wide. Open. Several women shriek. Will chokes and starts coughing beside me. I lean over and pat his back without taking my eyes off the stage.
The song hits its stride. A steady, heady pulse goes through me and every person in the room.
Mostly, though, it goes through Trouble.
It takes him and shakes him. It moves him, twisting him around the pole, snaking his body up it, against it, around it.
Moving him in a way that doesn’t look real.
It doesn’t look possible. It’s serpentine and sleek.
A heavy bass thuds. Cymbals clash. A twenty-five-person choir raises the roof.
Trouble takes flight.
He’s airborne. Soaring. Flying. Arms, legs, hair—all of it weightless. Free. Whipping around the pole like a ribbon in a gusty wind. Writhing and thrashing. Resetting my brain and my cock, rewiring them, changing me, making me different from how I was before.
A high, desperate whimper escapes from Will. He takes my hand in his and mashes it to his mouth. I look at him, and for a second, he looks back. Our eyes meet and fuse, and I think that might be the moment we stop being two people.
We stop being Will and Mat. Mat and Will.
We become three people.
Will, Trouble, and Mat.
For better or worse, that’s who we are now.
We turn back to the stage as the song hits its final crescendo, building and swelling, taking the mood in the room and crushing the air out of it.
Trouble is up near the top of the pole. He’s up high.
Still flying. Moving with speed and strength and no concern whatsoever for mundane things like gravity.
Drums pound. Cymbals crash. Trouble lets go of the pole and throws his body backward.
He arches back. He arches impossibly, unbearably, leaning all the way back, holding himself up on the pole with nothing other than his thighs.
Then he falls.
He drops like a stone.
The audience gasps in horror. Will shouts out.
At the very, very last second, Trouble clamps his legs together and stops the fall before his head hits the ground. He cuts it so fine that by the time he stops moving, his hair is touching the floor.
The crowd collectively draws a long, unsteady breath.
Trouble, being Trouble, smiles sweetly and has the nerve to run his fingers through his hair and shake it out. I sit there with my heart in my throat, beating so hard it feels like a fist punching, fighting for freedom, wondering how the fuck he’s going to get himself back into an upright position.
He smiles again, and his lips tighten in quick determination. His abs clench, drawing deep lines across his abdomen, and he flicks himself up in a big, graceful arc, pulling himself up with the momentum.
He slides down the pole and lands on his feet, stepping away from it with the grace of a seraph. A spirit. An angel taking its very first steps on terra firma. A dark angel, but still, an angel nonetheless.
The theater falls silent.
The song has ended.
The show is over.
He’s at the front of the stage now. A few feet away from us. The theater is still silent. People are shocked. Too stunned by magic to move. He gives us the cockiest grin I’ve seen yet, and raises a shoulder as if to say what? As if it was nothing. No big deal.
Not electrifying.
Not the best thing anyone’s ever seen.
There’s a beat.
A split-second lull.
Then a low rumble. A heavy vibration. A deep roar as chairs push back and hundreds of people clamber up. As fast as they move, Will moves faster. He’s the first person on his feet, and he drags me up with him, hugging me hard against him, opening his mouth and his lungs.
“That’s our boyfriend!” he screams. “That’s our boyfriend!”
Pandemonium breaks loose. Every soul in the place is on their feet.
Thunderous applause erupts. Reverberating through the space.
Shaking the walls, quaking the floors. I press my tongue down with two fingers and whistle loudly enough to break glass.
The two women join Trouble on stage, and they all take a bow.
They smile and wave, faces open and shining, as they’re recognized as gods among mortals.
The entire time, Trouble doesn’t take his eyes off us.
I become dimly aware of someone tapping my shoulder. I wave them off without looking away from the stage. I feel another tap. Harder this time. I look to my right in annoyance.
A heavy-set bald man crouches beside me, smiling and holding a laminated pass on a royal-blue lariat.
“Will,” I say, squeezing his arm. “Will, look.”
He looks down at my hands and his face changes from captivated amazement to something deeper and even more beautiful as he reads the same words I’ve just read.
Backstage Pass
Admit two.
Guests of Mr. Hendrix Teller.
“Follow me,” says the man who gave them to us.
He leads us through a set of heavy double doors, and as they open, we see Trouble.
He’s standing in a poorly lit corridor leaning against the wall with one leg bent at the knee, still wearing nothing but lacy hotpants and boots.
A light bulb flickers above him. Washing his features intermittently.
Highlighting cheekbones and occipital orbits.
Long lashes and an untamed spirit. His hair is a little more disheveled than usual.
When he sees us, his eyes flare with an unlikely mix of mischief and something that would look like nerves if it appeared on anyone else.
Will’s strides lengthen and lengthen again.
He’s still holding my hand and is dragging me along, forcing me to trot awkwardly to keep up.
He slows down and pauses when we’re a few feet away from Trouble.
It feels as though, for once, he might be affected by the invisible forcefield around Trouble that renders everyone else a daft prick in his presence.
“Hendrix,” whispers Will, reaching out cautiously to smooth Trouble’s hair. “Hendrix Teller.” Trouble tries to swallow, but it looks like one of those swallows that don’t go all the way down. “That’s a big name. A majestic namesake. A legend. An icon. A long shadow.”
Trouble digs his thumbnail into the flesh of his bottom lip, and I realize I was right before.
It wasn’t my imagination. He is nervous.
He’s shown us part of himself. A big, beautiful part.
He’s made himself vulnerable, and that isn’t like him.
Trouble opens his mouth to say something, but Will beats him to it.
“It suits you,” he says simply. His voice sounds like it does in the morning.
Deep and a little hoarse. Trouble expels a quick breath and looks up at Will, holding his gaze even though it looks hard for him to do it.
“You were majestic up there, Trouble. Straight-up majestic. A legend. An icon. A magical little shit who left everyone else on that stage in the shadows.”
“I-I was worried you wouldn’t like it. I know it’s a lot, and—”
“We didn’t like it.” Will’s voice cuts like a knife. Trouble’s eyes widen microscopically. “We didn’t like it at all, did we, Mattie?”
I can hardly dare believe where I think this is going, but I know Will like I know the back of my hand, and if this is how he wants to play it, then, as always, I have his back. “Nah, we didn’t like it.”
Will takes Trouble’s face in his hands, holding him firmly, making him look. “We loved it.” Before the smile taking over Trouble’s face can fully take hold, he adds, “I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience. It was the best thing either of us has ever seen.”
“Really?”
“‘Course it was. It was you, Hendrix Teller. It was you seeing a line and crossing it with both middle fingers raised in defiance.” His voice thickens and softens. “It was you, Trouble, living.”
Will sniffs rapidly a couple of times, and I look over at him to see if he’s okay.
He isn’t. Or he is, but he isn’t in a way that’s usual for him.
His eyes are wet in the corners, and as he strokes Trouble’s face, I see a slight tremor in his hands.
He pulls Trouble toward him with one hand and me close with the other.
The three of us are toe-to-toe. Face-to-face.
He brushes his lips against Trouble’s lightly and then offers them to me. I want to do more. I want to grab him and kiss the breath out of him, but the moment feels big. It feels unusual and new, so I follow Will’s lead and kiss Trouble softly.
Will sighs, and his shoulders droop slightly as if he’s lost a fight he didn’t even know he was fighting. “We love you, Trouble.”
Trouble’s eyes spark and dampen. He presses a curled fist against his lips, and he looks at me and then back at Will. “A-are you sure this is one of those times you can speak for Mattie?”
Will releases a dry, sexy laugh. “I really am.”
“He’s right,” I say softly. “He’s right. We love you.”
I kiss Trouble first this time, tightening my hand around a fistful of his hair. I press my lips against his and lick into his mouth deeply. He’s open, inviting. Waiting for me. Waiting for us like he was made to be ours. Will and I share his mouth, passing him back and forth between us.
Will breaks the kiss and looks at me for a long time before he speaks. I can see the words in his eyes as clearly as if he’s said them out loud, “Mattie, I…”
“You don’t have to say it, Will. I know.”
“No, you don’t. Not like this. I don’t love you like always. It’s not like that for me anymore. I love you like this.”
He covers my mouth with his and runs his tongue lightly along the seam of my lips.
He dips his tongue into my mouth and mine rises to meet his.
I lean heavily against him when we part, not entirely by choice.
As usual, he has me. He stands firm. Solid and steady.
Always by my side. Always beside me. Always there.
“I love you too,” I say when I can.
A tiny series of high-pitched squeaks escape from Trouble. His makeup has run, and dark lines streak down his cheeks. His reaction, and the way he looks, is so imperfect and so undone and so completely un-Trouble that it makes Will and I start laughing.
The three of us close our arms tightly around each other and move as close as we can get with our clothes on.
We kiss wildly. Madly. Lips colliding and teeth gnashing.
Over the din of the crowd leaving the venue and scratchy announcements coming from the direction of the stage, I hear a string of garbled words spilling out of Trouble over and over.
When pieced together, they can best be deciphered as this: “I love you and you. And you. And you.”