Chapter Seven #3
Now that his facade has cracked, my own crumbles, my next words coming out less factual and more pathetically honest, tinged in self-doubt.
“And Robb could do that.” Everything I’ve ever wanted is at my fingertips, but I can’t reach out and grasp it, because I’m bleeding insecurity everywhere.
You think when opportunity knocks, you’ll answer, but I’m standing on the other side of the door, paralyzed with doubt.
He concedes with half a nod. “She could, but… I trust you more.”
My gaze bounces across his face, searching for some hint of a lie. How? How does he still trust me so implicitly after all this time? How is it everyone believes in me, but I can’t? And would they still, if they knew how I’d spent the past two years?
When I don’t say anything, a pinch appears between his brows. “Why did you leave The Offbeat?”
I glance away, failure burning my cheeks, unnerved at how he seems to be reading my mind, even though there’s no way he knows. “Just say it.”
The furrow between his brows deepens. “Say what?”
“I told you so,” I say in a poor impersonation of him. I gesture for him to get it over with.
It was always a point of contention between us.
I’d had my sights set on Rolling Stone ever since I first decided on this career path.
I combed every volume for Mike Song’s articles, reading them before diving into whatever else was on the cover.
And I wasn’t the only one. It’s why Rolling Stone chose him to launch The Offbeat—and why I chose him to be my mentor, step one in my five-year plan to get to Rolling Stone.
Even knowing what he’d written about Dax, seeing firsthand the impact Song’s salaciously addicting writing style had on his subjects…
Sometimes, I kick myself, thinking I should’ve known he wasn’t going to be the mentor I’d hoped.
But I was young and naive, and I let my hero abuse his mentorship, all because I thought I was paying my dues.
If I wanted my name on a byline, I had to earn it.
I had to do the grunt work, the invisible work.
In reality, it wasn’t my work that was invisible. Just me.
Dax studies me, reading my body language like a book. He nods at my arms crossed over my chest, knows I don’t want to talk about this, and drops it.
“Fuck Mike Song,” he says instead.
I laugh sadly. Song is no longer my personal paragon of success, but losing that has left me adrift, no North Star to guide me.
“Say it,” Dax whispers.
“Say what?”
“Fuck Mike Song,” he repeats, savoring each syllable like it’s delicious. “C’mon. It feels good.”
I watch him through narrowed eyes. “I didn’t even tell you what happened.”
“You don’t have to. If you left before getting to your dream job, then…
” He shrugs, toying with his straw wrapper, winding it around the tip of his finger until it turns purple.
“He fucked up.” He releases the tense hold he has on the paper and it unfurls, drifting lazily to the tabletop. “Say it,” he eggs me on.
With a sigh, I mumble, “Fuck Mike Song.”
“Like you mean it, Donavan,” he all but growls, curling over the tiny table between us.
I match his stance, leaning in so he can hear the contempt in my voice. “Fuck”—the hard snap of the consonants against my tongue is cathartic—“Mike Song.”
It’s only then I realize how close our faces are, giving me a front-row seat to the pride softening his gaze as he watches my mouth form the words. His lips quirk up in a wicked smile, like the venom on my breath is a palpable thing and he likes the taste.
“That’s it,” he says encouragingly, his voice low and deep.
And just like that, my mind is hurtling back in time to when he used to say those same two words to me in a very different context, the same purr in his voice and pride in his eyes.
I jolt backward, my chair scooting away from the table a fraction with the force of it.
I clear my throat, my right hand coming up to fidget with my earrings, twirling each piercing half a turn until I’ve rotated all seven of them, a calming mechanism I’ve tried to break but that reappears occasionally.
“Well,” I say, taking a deep breath, resurfacing from being caught in the undertow of Dax’s presence.
“As wonderful as this interview foreplay has been,” I begin, reverting back to our previous metaphor and cursing that it was so sexual, “I will have a deadline, so you will have to seal the deal eventually.”
Dax slips back into his stage persona seamlessly. “I’ll give it up to you. Don’t worry.” He winks.
I huff a laugh, and I realize he’s not the only one having trouble being vulnerable here.
But maybe we can figure it out together.
For whatever reason, he believes in me. Despite everything, I believe in him implicitly.
Maybe we can believe for each other, until we can believe in ourselves again.
Happily ever after may not have been in the cards for us, but maybe we can give each other a happier ending.
“So,” he says, cutting across my thoughts, a flicker of the real Dax peeking through. “We doing this?”
There’s an edge of desperation to his voice, and I realize how badly he wants this, needs it, even.
I forget, for a moment, about myself and what this could mean for me.
My journalistic instinct hums as, for the first time, Dax gives himself away, just a little bit.
The question isn’t Why me? but Why now? What changed for him?
It’s a risk, to be sure. I could write the best article of my life, but if our past gets out, it’ll all be for nothing.
I’ll forever be the girl who slept her way into the exclusive of the decade.
My integrity is already in the gutter after my Offbeat internship, so I have nothing to lose—and everything to gain if we pull this off.
The question isn’t whether I can undo nearly a decade of bad press, but rather Could I live with myself if I don’t try?
I extend my hand to him, and he grins as he slides his hand into mine.
His thumb ghosts over my knuckles, and the unconscious habit sends a jolt through me.
His grip tightens, like he felt it, too.
He gives a perfunctory pump before taking his hand back, flexing his fingers like they’re waking up from having gone numb, the same electric sensation pulsing through my own.
We share a glance, and I know my expression mirrors his.
What have we gotten ourselves into?
If we want to walk away, now is our chance. But neither of us says anything. We’re in this together now. For better or for worse. His legacy, my name—they’re ours for the reclaiming.
Setting my phone face up on the table for Dax to see, I pull up John’s contact and compose a two-word email.
I’m in.
[Excerpt from Sloane Donavan’s Final Revelations interview transcript]
1997: Semi-Somebodies
MARCUS BAILEY, VOCALS/GUITAR: I’m not saying I started the band, but—
BARRETT JOHNSON, DRUMS: I got everyone together.
CAIN WILLIAMS, BASS: I introduced Barrett and Marcus, which was kinda how it all started.
Marcus was this scrawny little Jewish kid with something to prove, and Barrett was just…
serious? Not a word typically used to describe Barrett [laughs], but he takes drumming and being in bands seriously.
You just knew he wasn’t the guy who’d be selling you carpet or whatever in five to ten years. He was going to do this for life.
MARCUS: The first time I saw Barrett was at The Lot. It wasn’t a venue—it was just the gravel lot behind this Mexican restaurant where they let bands set up a stage made out of pallets between the dumpsters. Real highbrow shit.
BARRETT: Oh god, yeah. I used to play a lot of shows at The Lot with my old band—one of them, anyway. We were shit. [laughs]
MARCUS: Barrett is an absolute monster on drums. The band I was in at the time was alright, but it was college and I knew once we graduated, they’d all go off and get “real jobs,” and I wanted to keep making music.
I knew I needed to link up with someone like Barrett.
Didn’t think I’d ever actually get him. He was older, a staple on the scene.
He’d actually done tours—national tours.
I didn’t know anyone else who’d done that.
The rest of us were just local semi-somebodies.
CAIN: Barrett’s from California. You could tell because of the girl jeans.
Everybody wears them now, but back then, we were all still wearing JNCOs so big you could fit an entire laptop in the pockets—not that anyone had laptops back then.
But yeah, Barrett was cool. Barrett wore skinny jeans.
So, every band dude in Cleveland started wearing women’s jeans.
BARRETT: Yeah, you could say I’m a style icon. [chokes, laughs]
JONAH JACOBS, GUITAR: No one would call Barrett a style icon.
He was a damn good host, though. His house had a basement and a backyard good for putting on shows, and extra bedrooms that bands would crash in when passing through Cleveland.
Back then, before the internet became more than just a few message boards, we were so isolated.
The only bands you knew outside of the mainstream pop stuff were your local bands.
So, if you were part of the Cleveland punk scene in 1997?
Barrett’s house was the place to be, to party.
It’s how you met bands from other cities.
What were they doing? What was their sound? What were they writing about?
MARCUS: Girls. Every band, everywhere. We were all writing about—whining about—girls.
Well, some of us were writing about guys, too, but that’s when you conveniently stopped using gendered pronouns in your lyrics.
The punk scene’s always prided itself on being political—progressive, but it wasn’t there yet back then.
CAIN: I was in a couple of bands. That was pretty normal.
There were too many bands and not enough musicians.
Or too many ideas and not enough bands. So, some days I was in this band that sang about girls they were too scared to talk to, and other days I was in this band whose every show ended up with the cops getting called because we were talking about politics, raging against the machine and all that, and our frontman liked to pick fights with people in the audience.
Anyway, the guys in the hardcore bands hated the guys in the feelings bands, but really, guys talking about feelings was pretty radical stuff, too. Neither of those bands lasted long.
JONAH: Who started Final Revelations? No idea.
I just knew my current band’s infighting was so bad I would’ve said yes to anyone.
I just wanted to play, and I knew Cain and Barrett from, y’know, around.
They’re both massively tall and take up space, so you can’t exactly miss them.
Marcus… Marcus was pretty. The Cleveland scene was very grungy, but Marcus was super into that Brit rock look at the time.
Very put together. He wore vests and rings and his hair was always perfect.
He took himself a bit too seriously. But then we started writing together, and yeah, he’s a bit of a control freak, but his ideas were also really fucking good.
BARRETT: Industry trends are constantly shifting, but slowly.
And usually, whoever’s out there pushing boundaries?
Gets fucking shit on. Then, in three to five years when everyone’s imitating it, everybody pretends they knew it’d be big all along.
[laughs] But there’s no way to know which way it’s gonna go while it’s happening.
You’re just doing shit that sounds cool and hope people dig it.
JONAH: I don’t think I was good enough at playing [guitar] to even dream of being in a band as big as Final became. But when you’re surrounded by people that talented—I didn’t want them to catch on that I wasn’t as cool as they were, so I got good quick.
MARCUS: I always knew we’d be big.
CAIN: Don’t tell Marcus this—that first album was good—but I didn’t believe we were gonna be more than a flash in the pan, at best. But then… we got Dax.