Chapter Twelve
I haven’t burst into tears in days,” I say proudly.
Brooklyn snorts on the other end of the line.
She doesn’t know I’m not joking, or about that day where I embarrassingly cried in front of my mentor or how entirely unembarrassed I was crying in front of Dax.
How it felt cathartic, actually, to share that with him.
“Okay, but for real: How is the article coming?”
“Uh-huh,” I say quietly, not wanting my voice to carry.
From my position on the couch, I’m surrounded by printed-out transcripts of the guys’ interviews, all of them highlighted and covered in scribbles as I try to piece it together in a way that will appease John’s appetite for gossip, the guys’ need for truth, and the fans’ desire for both.
“That bad, huh? Did you finally get Dax’s interview at least?
” I can hear her opening and closing drawers.
She’s packing for her flight to Boston, where she’ll visit family before road-tripping with the guys to see me next weekend.
I hate that I’m jealous of a road trip that’s for me, but I miss my friends so much.
The network I’m slowly cultivating here is still too new to fill the void.
I’m grateful she’s too busy packing to have Skyped me and thus see the guilty grimace that flashes across my face—or that I’m not at home. “Yep,” I say under my breath.
“S, are you in a library or something?”
“No,” I confess, waffling for a second about if I want to come clean or not, but god, I need to tell someone, and Brooklyn’s the only person I trust to tell. “I’m at Dax’s,” I whisper.
The silence on the other end of the line is deafening. I can picture her in her dated LA apartment, messy bun of black hair that resents being contained, her bow mouth open in shock. All she gives me is a slight squeak of surprise and confusion.
“It’s easier,” I say defensively, still keeping my voice low. “If I need to fact-check something, I can just call into the next room.”
“Uh-huh,” B says, her voice more loaded than a baked potato. “I let all reporters camp out on my couch while they work. Especially when that reporter is my ex.”
I purse my lips even though she can’t see them.
“Forgive me if I don’t take your advice on ex protocols.
” I wasn’t the only one who got swept up that summer.
Only, what I thought was a summer fling for Brooklyn continued every time she and Asher were in the same city.
As two touring musicians, it happens a couple times a year.
Their situationship has more mileage than my car.
“That’s done,” Brooklyn says primly. Even without video, I can picture her fussily tucking a loose tendril of hair into her bun.
I snort, because I’ve heard that before.
“But more importantly, are you done?”
I glance toward the hallway, to Dax’s mostly closed office door. The soft guitar melody I’ve heard off and on the past few days drifts over to me, and I doubt he can hear me, but I keep my voice low anyway. “It’s not really an option right now.”
Brooklyn blows a raspberry. “Boring. Dish.”
“He’s literally in the next room.” I realize after the words are out of my mouth how telling they are. Because yes, there are a lot of things I’d like to say to Brooklyn that I wouldn’t want overheard, least of all by him, because they’re all about him.
“Fine,” Brooklyn says, undeterred. “I’ll do the talking and you can just say yes or no.”
I’m sweating. I know I can tell her anything, but I’ve spent the past few days trying not to assess what’s going on between Dax and me head-on.
“Is he still unfairly hot?”
I laugh. “Yes. It’s only gotten worse, I fear.”
“Ugh, you poor thing,” she groans, not sounding at all sympathetic to my plight. “Does he still stare at you every time you walk away?”
“I—How would I know?”
“Fair,” she concedes. “But do you stare at him?”
I exhale heavily, cradling a pillow against my front. I feel like a cartoon character whose heart won’t stop jumping out of her chest every time Dax comes around. “Yes.”
“Do you wanna do more than stare at him?”
“I can’t,” I remind her.
“That’s not what I asked.”
That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?
Do I? It’s the trickiest part for me, deciphering if I’m interested in someone—or just the idea of them, an emotional-support daydream.
How quickly I clam up when things move from theoretical to physical, everything so much safer in the confines of my carefully constructed fantasies where I’m completely in control.
I spent years feeling like a bad feminist for not being more sexy, more empowered, more.
It wasn’t until two years ago when I discovered the word demisexual that I fully understood it, understood myself.
I sat on my couch and cried, feeling seen in a way I never had before.
There was a word for it—why I felt things so differently from my peers—and I wasn’t alone in this experience.
I’m not a prude, or a tease, or any of the other things I’d been called.
I just need to trust the person I’m choosing to be vulnerable with.
Brooklyn begins humming the Jeopardy! theme song under her breath, letting me know she’s still expecting an answer.
Before I can give one, Dax wanders into the living room, clearing a space on the couch for himself before plopping down and stretching his legs out across my lap.
When he realizes I’m on the phone, his eyes widen and he makes to get up and leave, but I place a hand on his knee, keeping him there. Brooklyn, I mouth silently.
He nods in understanding, settling back on the couch.
He tucks one arm under his head, his shirt riding up, exposing a strip of skin above his waistband.
If I didn’t already have an answer to Brooklyn’s question, I do now.
I wrench my attention from the dusting of hair below his navel before my eyes can trace the path to what his sweatpants barely manage to conceal.
“Yes,” I say hoarsely when Brooklyn finishes humming her tune. “Call me when you land, bye!” I say over her screech, hanging up. We can dissect what I just admitted when she’s here next weekend.
“Sorry. Did I interrupt?” he asks when I toss my phone onto the coffee table.
I shake my head. “No, we were done.”
I shift sideways on the couch, tangling my legs with his, even though I know I shouldn’t.
It’s what I’ve told myself every day for the past four days that I’ve been working out of his living room.
I tried writing at my place the day after I interviewed Dax, but I ended up calling and texting him so much to confirm or clarify certain points that he told me to just come over—and he promised to feed me.
How was I supposed to refuse? After the second day, I stopped asking if I could come back and just told him when I’d be there the next day.
We’ve fallen into a rhythm of sorts. I come over midmorning with coffees from the shop down the street.
He makes breakfast while I spread out all over his living room.
He drops my plate on whatever available surface there is before retreating to his office.
He spends his mornings writing, melodies drifting down the hall to me as I attempt to work.
Come midafternoon, he leaves to rehearse with the guys for next weekend’s Halloween show.
He returns and either cooks or we eat leftovers or get takeout from down the street.
I don’t know what it means, us cohabitating like this, but it’s easy, natural.
I wish I could say the same about my progress on the article.
I could relent and write it the salacious way Robb and John want, but I don’t want to be that writer anymore.
I can’t be. It was one thing when I was writing as Mike Song, but now…
My name—my integrity—means too much to me.
So, instead of writing, I spend most of my days organizing and reorganizing my notes as my deadline creeps ever closer.
The only time I feel like I have a direction for the article is when Dax wanders in, worming his way between my research, tangling our limbs together, and whispers, “Tell me a story.”
He’s given me so many of his over the past few days that it’s only fair to give him some of mine, too.
I just wish I could figure out how to convert the simple magic of our couch talks into an article.
Every time I try to translate the guys’ stories, my own voice gets in the way—or rather, my lack of one.
Swapping stories with Dax, I’m beginning to find it again.
We spent weeks doing this, hours on the road with nothing to do but talk.
We shared so much that summer, but there are still so many nooks and crannies of each other we’ve yet to uncover.
Big things, like him reconciling with his dad and my youngest brother coming out as bi, and small things, like the smell of ketchup makes him nauseous and he thinks I’m a psychopath for eating pizza slices crust first.
Today, with it top of mind after my phone call with B, I tell him about me discovering the term demisexual, and he asks me to explain it to him. I do, and he asks what he could do differently next time. Next time, he says, like it’s not only a possibility, but an inevitability.
I think back to that summer, how I kept running away from him, scared he’d want things to move more quickly than I was comfortable with, how he apologized without even knowing what he’d done wrong, because I hadn’t explained what I needed from him, how he was the first person to make me feel comfortable enough to ask for it.
He let me set the pace after that, put all the power in my hands.
In the end, giving him everything didn’t feel like giving anything up at all. I tell him he was perfect.