Chapter Eight #2
I cross over to the door that connects the control room to the sound booth, and it opens before I reach it.
Placing a hand on Dax’s chest, I try very hard not to think about how it’s the same spot I claimed as my pillow during long stretches between tour stops.
He gives under my touch, allowing me to guide him back into the room.
Crossing my arms, I fix him with an unamused frown. “I’m surprised, Nakamura.”
From the drum booth, Barrett giggles at my continued use of Dax’s last name. For such a large man, the sound is surprisingly delicate.
Dax throws his marker into a cup as the others begin packing up for the day.
They’ll leave most of their stuff here, camped out in studio B until they finish the album, but an attempt to tidy up at the end of the day is half-heartedly made.
“That I have zero concept of what day it is? Because that shouldn’t surprise you, Donavan. ” He says my surname pointedly.
It’s so easy to fall into this rhythm with him. If only that would translate into an actual fucking interview. But I don’t need banter. I need an article. “No,” I quip innocently. “That you’re giving up an opportunity for your favorite pastime.”
The corners of Dax’s mouth curl up, but I wouldn’t call it a smile. “Oh yeah?” he purrs, hovering over me so I have to tilt my head back to look at him. “What’s that?”
“Talking about yourself.”
Marcus bursts out laughing, and I half forgot there was anyone else in the room, that they were paying any attention to us. Dax sucks on his teeth, annoyed with himself for walking into that one.
Cain claps me on the shoulder as he passes by. “God, I fucking missed you.”
“It’s always nice watching Dax get shit from someone else for a change,” Jonah chimes in from where he’s tucking his guitar back into its stand.
“Just get back together already so we can stop keeping secrets,” Marcus grumbles from where he’s meandering around the room with a trash can, tossing their daily damage into it.
I blink, several thoughts flashing through me at once.
One, I was never sure Marcus liked me that much.
Two, I’ll definitely be capitalizing on that when I ask him for a copy of the unreleased album, a topic I’ve only allowed to drop so they’ll let their guards down.
Three, they think we’re getting back together?
That absolutely cannot be a narrative that gets around.
“Give me some credit,” I scoff, hoping it doesn’t sound as forced as it is. “It would take a lot more than an article for me to get back together with a guy who let me go with one word.”
Everyone titters, but I regret my words immediately.
I intended it as a joke, but it came out so much more bitter than that.
I can feel Dax’s penetrating gaze like an X-ray, and I can’t bring myself to meet it, so I attempt to smooth it over.
“Seriously, though, no one here knows… No one can know about—”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t want anyone to know either,” Cain teases, shrugging on his jacket and sliding a beanie atop his buzzed hair.
This time, my gaze meets Dax’s before I can stop it.
His expression is impossible to read.
I blink away, the back of my neck heating. If anyone at AP found out how deep my history with Final Revelations runs—even if I manage to pull off this article and redeem the Final Revelations name—my own would be forever ruined. “Please?” I ask, needing confirmation that we’re clear on this.
“You got it, Boston,” Barrett calls from the control room, having left his drum booth.
Cain and Jonah meet my eyes and nod briefly before finishing packing up.
“More secrets,” Marcus confirms with a grunt as he slings his bag onto his back. “Got it.”
“Thank you,” I say to the room at large before approaching Dax. “Are you seriously bailing on me again?”
He won’t look at me, very intent on arranging the contents of his backpack. “I didn’t bail on you. My sponsor kid called me last time.”
My mouth parts slowly, and I nod jerkily.
“Oh.” It’s weird how you can feel like you know someone so fully and still know nothing at all.
How badly I want to know everything. I knew Dax on tour.
I knew Dax in suitcases and hotel rooms and tour bus back rooms. I don’t know Dax at home, his morning routines or social circles, the NA meetings he still goes to religiously.
Swallowing around the lump in my throat that won’t budge, I try again. “And today?”
He takes his time situating his dented, scratched, and stickered thermos into his bag, handling it like it’s precious and not beaten to hell and back, before finally zipping his bag shut and turning to me.
But whatever honesty snuck through with his admission of where he really was last Thursday, it’s long gone, locked away.
“We’ve got something more fun than an interview,” Marcus says, his hands grabbing my shoulders and jostling me. “IC show.”
My mouth gapes open. “Immaculate Conceptions are playing a show?”
Marcus smirks, knowing he’s got me on the hook—and Dax off the hook. “C’mon. You can grill Dax on the two-hour car ride to Columbus.”
“Shiiit,” Barrett rumbles. “We can do Dax’s interview for him.”
“Hey, I’m Dax,” Jonah says in an uncanny impersonation of him. “I’m six four. My favorite color is black. I like eating my weight in noodles and writing sad emo poetry.”
Dax glares at Jonah out of the corner of his eyes, a barely repressed smile tugging at his mouth. “They’re called lyrics.”
Ignoring him, the guys continue dropping ridiculous Dax facts like I’m a writer for J-14 and drafting a pull-out magazine poster for girls to hang on their walls.
I laugh under my breath, my gaze drifting on autopilot back to Dax, only to find him already looking at me.
When our eyes lock, he shakes his head at me like, Do you see what I have to put up with?
They keep up their nonsense all the way through the studio and out the alley door, and I grin.
God, I’ve missed this. Even with music constantly playing, my apartment always feels too quiet without a plethora of older brothers or bandmates to drive me up a wall.
As we come to a halt outside Barrett’s SUV, I pull Dax aside.
“This is great and all,” I say, gesturing toward the guys holding their sides from laughing so hard at Dax’s expense. “But I need your interview. Tomorrow. I’ll beat down your door if I have to.”
A ghost of amusement flits across his face before quickly being snuffed out by whatever melancholy has him in its grip. “What if I moved since last time?”
“He didn’t!” Marcus calls.
Dax flips him off.
I raise my brows at Dax, and he concedes with a nod.
“Tomorrow.” His attention flicks up, his left hand going to my hair.
A gentle tug, and it comes cascading down from its bun.
Dax clicks the pen I’d used to secure the messy knot atop my head and gently cups the back of my hand, extending my arm.
He scrawls something on my forearm, my entire being reducing not to the drag of the ballpoint but to where the side of his palm brushes against my skin as he scrawls his address.
“In case you forgot,” he murmurs once he’s finished, his gaze drifting to mine.
I don’t have time to school my face into something professional, though I don’t know if it matters, given how close he’s standing, in the circle of my arm, his hand still cupping the back of mine, never having dropped it.
He’d see everything anyway. I pull my hand back in a daze, breaking our eye contact.
It’s unfair how he affects me still, even when he’s so distant.
“I haven’t forgotten,” I breathe. I haven’t forgotten a single fucking thing. This would be so much easier if I had.
“Ready?” Marcus calls with a pointed arch of his brows, gaze bouncing knowingly between the two of us.
I nod, breaking the hold of Dax’s gravity and crawling into the third row of the SUV.
Marcus and Jonah are the shortest members of Final Revelations, so I expect one of them to crawl in after me, but as I’m settling into the corner of the back row, Dax plops down next to me, long limbs invading my space without actually touching me, as if learning his lesson from whatever that was outside the car.
The entire two-hour drive, despite numerous potholes that jostle us and despite both of us possessing way longer limbs than are meant for these seats, we maintain the careful no-man’s-land between us the entire two hours.
They’re the longest two hours of my life.