Chapter Two #2
The crowd roars, and I shake my head to clear it—once, twice—before heading back inside.
Hollow Graves will go on soon, and I don’t want to miss the start of their set.
The sound tech lets me back into the booth, and Dax takes half a step back—as much as he can in the cramped space—so I can squeeze by to be next to Robb.
A well-intentioned gesture, except my ass brushes up against Dax’s front as I pass, and even the opening notes of the Hollow Graves set can’t drown out the groan Dax fails to muffle.
I can see the band on the stage, I know there’s music playing, but all I can hear for the entirety of the first song is that moan.
The applause that follows the opening song jars me out of…
whatever that was… and I shove it all down.
I will not let my nostalgia for that summer get the best of me.
I know all too well the specific pain of waiting for someone who’s never coming back, but I’m not a five-year-old girl anymore.
I have a job to do. If I want Alt Press to offer me a full-time position and, thus, keep my five-year career plan on track, I need to focus—not get swept away.
When the Hollow Graves set ends, Dax is out of the booth before I can blink.
I’d be offended if I weren’t so relieved.
It’ll be easier to concentrate on work without wondering if he’s sneaking glances at me like I’m sneaking glances at him.
It should be easier, except I blink and I’m backstage, with no memory of how I got there, going through the postshow interview on autopilot.
I’m supposed to be leading this interview—Robb wants to hand off the Artists to Watch column to me so she can finally launch the vertical she’s been gunning for—but Robb has to jump in a couple times with follow-up questions that I like to think I would have thought of were my mind not half on a man who’s not even here.
I hate that it’s affecting me this much, but fuck.
Seeing him, hearing his voice, the smell of him that evokes memories of his soap resting on my shower caddy for that one perfect weekend before everything fell apart—
“And how’s working with Final Revelations?” Robb asks, cutting off my trip down memory lane and bringing Dax into the present.
I blink over at her. She didn’t share that fun fact about Hollow Graves with me. She’s avoiding my gaze, and I know the omission was intentional.
Hudson glances at me before answering, and my chest flushes as I realize why he recognized my name earlier.
Not many people know about Dax and me. Our “relationship”—for lack of a better word—was brief and bright and burned out quickly.
Whatever it was, it’s not a part of my past that I like to flaunt.
While Robb knows I knew Dax—Dax introduced us, after all—I don’t think Robb knew we were more than a tour fling. But there’s no way she doesn’t know now. The tension in that sound booth could’ve been cut with a knife.
Thankfully, Final Revelations doesn’t talk to the press, so the likelihood of our history ever getting out, of that summer being used against me, is slim. It’s fine.
But tell that to my inner monologue. If there’s something to overanalyze and nitpick until three a.m., then I’m wide-awake, alternating between the highlight reel of Dumb Shit Said by Sloane Donavan and my favorite think piece, All the Ways Anything and Everything Could Go Wrong.
So when Robb asks if I want to go for a drink after the interview, I say yes even though I don’t really want to.
Well, I kinda want the drink, but I’m tapped out as far as being social goes, even though I can’t remember the last time I just hung out with someone.
My new apartment doesn’t feel like home yet, but I still long to return to it, a place where I can’t be blindsided by the appearance of the only man who’s ever made me come.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt as soon as Robb reappears with two beers in hand. This dive bar’s minimal decor isn’t nearly distracting enough to drown out the heady turn of my thoughts.
Robb hands me one of the beers before promptly downing half of hers. “For what?”
“I was unprofessional back there. I’m sorry, I… I was off my game. I swear I’m normally better at this.”
Robb smiles knowingly over at me. “Sloane, this isn’t our first time working together. You think I’d be handing off my column to you if I didn’t know that? You think they’d even let me give it to a freelancer if they didn’t also know that?”
I take a deep breath, nodding. “Yes. Thank you, I needed that reminder.” I begin absentmindedly picking at the label on my bottle. “I guess… I didn’t expect it to be this hard.”
“Choosing art as a career?” Robb asks, brows arched high above her glasses.
The laugh comes out of me in a snort, which makes Robb laugh, which makes me laugh harder, and soon, I’m lightheaded. Rubbing my brow, I try to pull it together. “Thank you, I needed that, too.”
“Besides,” she says quietly, rolling her beer back and forth between her hands contemplatively.
“I owe you an apology. I should’ve told you Dax gave me the tip on Hollow Graves, but I didn’t think he was coming, so it didn’t seem relevant.
When I met you, I suspected you two were”—she wiggles her eyebrows suggestively—“but I didn’t know it was… ” Her eyes widen. “Like that.”
I take a long sip of my beer to delay answering. “We dated for, like, a month.”
Technically, a month and a half, but it’s what I always say if someone asks about it.
A month is nothing. Unless you’re on the same tour.
Then there are multiple cities, thousands of miles, all day, every day, isolated from the real world so it’s nothing but you and them and music. It’s all-consuming.
It’s the only relationship I’ve ever had that’s actually worth talking about, except for the fact that I absolutely do not want to talk about it.
So, I downplay it. A few weeks. Small potatoes. Conversation moves on.
“Must have been an intense month.”
Goddamn Robb and her pitch-perfect journalistic instincts.
I can’t look back on that summer and not blush.
I went from having done nothing more than kissing with a side of heavy petting to realizing I’d put my underwear on inside out after hooking up with Dax in the back of an empty tour bus.
I met a side of myself I hadn’t known existed.
On the road, suspended from reality, the summer before my final year of college, my postgraduation internship at Offbeat already lined up.
For perhaps the first time in my life, I felt secure enough to let loose.
It’s not that I didn’t like that version of myself—it’s that I did.
And that scared me. I finally understood how my mom once thought building your life around another person could be enough.
It was the antithesis of everything I’ve ever worked toward.
So, at the close of that magical summer, I ended it.
He let me go with two mumbled syllables, and I knew it had been the right thing to do, even if, three years later, the ache refuses to fade.
Bracing my elbow on the dingy pub table, I rest my face in one hand, tracing the condensation rings on the surface with the other. “It was, yeah. Off the record, though, please,” I say with a grimace.
Robb huffs a laugh. “Dating Dax isn’t exactly a story.” She flinches. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that how it sounded.”
I shrug. She’s not wrong. I wasn’t Dax’s first or last, never mind that he’s both for me. “I would appreciate it if no one else at work knows, though.”
Robb tilts her head to the side. “Okay, but… knowing Dax is a good thing. Networking is everything in this business.”
Before I can shove the words back in, they come spilling out. “I wouldn’t call what Dax and I were doing networking.”
Robb throws her head back and laughs, attracting the attention of a few nearby tables. “I meant if it’s possible for you and Dax to move past, well, the past, he knows a lot of people. You’ve got connections—use them.”
“A girl using her ex to get ahead in her career? Yes, everyone will think, Aw, poor Sloane, so brave, getting her heart pulverized but still soldiering on. Not, Ah, she slept her way into her career.” I fix her with a frown.
Robb grimaces but doesn’t contradict me, knowing I’m right. I don’t name-drop Dax for a reason.
“One last thing—and then I won’t mention it anymore,” Robb hedges carefully. “But I think he was just as thrown seeing you as you were at seeing him.”
I frown. Dax said hello and not a single thing more. Never mind I did the same.
“He asked about you,” Robb continues. “When you left between sets. He tried to be subtle about it, asking why Offbeat was here. I told him you were with AP now.”
I wait for Robb to continue, but she only studies me with a knowing look before draining the last of her beer. She won’t tell me more unless I ask—and we both know I’m too proud to do so.
“Anyway,” I say around a heavy sigh, steering the conversation back to shoptalk.
“I don’t care if it takes me longer, or if I have to work harder, but I’m going to earn this on my own merit.
Well”—I gesture between us—“besides utilizing you to get the job in the first place. Which I still owe you for.” I laugh self-depricatingly, kneading my brow.
“I still can’t believe we met because Dax ran errands on our date. ”
Robb makes a noise of disbelief, methodically peeling the label off her bottle.
I don’t need a journalist’s intuition to tell me she’s holding something back. “What?”
She smirks. “That wasn’t chance. He was supposed to come by the day before with the rest of the band but asked to come that day, with you, and for me to be there and pretend it was chance because he didn’t think you’d accept the networking help.”
I blink, sitting back in my seat. That considerate, genius asshole.
“Don’t overthink it, babe.” She swats me lightly on the arm, bringing my attention back to her. “We needed more women on the team, and I’m sorry all I could get you was freelance for now, but knock it out of the park with the Artists to Watch column and you’ll be on staff soon enough.”
I sincerely hope so. With the inconsistency of freelance paychecks, and rent eating up the entirety of my meager internship pay, I have no savings to speak of, no cushion to fall back on.
I need this to work out. I’ve already left one dream behind in California.
I’m not ready to give up on this one, too.