Chapter Thirteen
There’s an arm on my chest and it’s not mine.
My eyes fly open, taking in Dax’s apartment, the wall of warmth at my back.
I fell asleep.
I fell asleep with Dax.
I close my eyes, praying that when I open them again, I’ll realize this was a dream. Reopening them, I shift, peering over my shoulder.
I’m not dreaming. Dax is still very much behind me.
“Not yet,” Dax murmurs into my hair. His arms tighten around me, pulling me closer. I squirm, rolling over to face him so my ass is no longer aligned with his crotch, but I’m not sure this is any less dangerous.
Golden light spills into the living room, announcing that we’ve slept for a few hours, passing out after our latest round of Tell Me a Story.
“Stop squirming,” Dax chastises gently, his voice scratchy with sleep.
I give one last squirm to annoy him, and he cracks an eye open, his lashes casting long shadows over his cheekbones. His hand at my side tickles my rib cage, and I squeak at the contact.
“Five more minutes,” he pleads. Pulling me tighter against his chest, he nuzzles his face into my neck, throwing one long leg over me.
I curse that I still haven’t done laundry, meaning I’m wearing a body-con dress with a cropped ElectricOh!
band tee on top. The brush of his jeans over my stockinged thighs is erotic.
Something more than body heat has my skin flushing warm.
Lying next to him in the back of Barrett’s SUV was one thing, four other people within arm’s reach.
But napping on the couch with Dax, entirely alone in his apartment…
We’ve never done this before, not even when we were a couple.
Our moments alone were all stolen, measured in seconds, not hours.
What a luxury it is to wake up in Dax Nakamura’s arms.
It’s a luxury I cannot afford.
“Dax,” I murmur. I’ve practically lived at his apartment all week.
Working in the same space I can rationalize.
Cuddling on the couch, however… That’s blurring a line.
A line I desperately need to stay in place.
The devil on my shoulder—that feels a lot like Brooklyn humming the Jeopardy!
theme song two days ago—waits for me to make a move, to stop this.
I don’t.
Dax extricates himself from my neck, the stubble on his jaw rough against the sensitive skin there.
But Dax’s face next to my face, sharing the same pillow, is worse.
He gently brushes my hair back, gathering all of it in his fist before twisting it out of the way.
A stray strand tickles my cheek, and he tucks it behind my ear.
His finger traces along my jaw down to my chin, pinching it between his thumb and forefinger the way he used to before tilting my mouth up to his.
“I should go,” I say, despite making no moves to do so.
“Mmm,” he hums thoughtfully, also not moving.
His thumb brushes over my bottom lip, his attention wholly on the freckle he claimed as his favorite three years ago, the one at the corner of my mouth. “Dax,” I warn gently. “We can’t.”
“I’m not doing anything,” he says innocently.
I make a noise of disbelief. “Then why are you looking at me like that?”
His gaze flicks up to meet mine. “You know why.”
I squirm beneath the heat of his gaze, looking away.
He shifts, hovering over me slightly before tucking his face into the crook of my shoulder, his breath warm against my skin as he confesses, “I want to kiss you so fucking bad right now.”
A strangled noise escapes me. “We can’t.” I meant it to come out firm, but it’s more of a whine.
“For what it’s worth,” he muses, the tip of his nose tracing down the curve of my neck, his mouth a whisper against my gooseflesh skin. “I’m one hundred percent positive AP doesn’t have my place bugged.”
I roll my eyes, grinning despite myself. “I know that. That’s not the problem. I mean… it is, but it’s not just that.”
“Then what is it?” His hand trails along my shoulder, my arms, the curve of my hip, tracing all my edges, fraying them.
My mouth is as dry as a desert, every fiber of my being restructuring so it’s no longer oxygen that sustains me but his gently wandering hands.
“We’re working together,” I begin shakily.
If he stops touching me, I’ll combust. If he keeps touching me, I’ll combust. Forming coherent thought is a struggle.
“Tomorrow, we have the photo shoot,” I remind him.
His fingers trail up my leg, his thumb arcing out so he can grab a handful of my upper thigh, a groan of longing echoing deep in his chest. I swallow thickly, pushing past the lump in my throat.
“And then there’s the Halloween show—” His hands continue their slow exploration, and I know he’d stop if I told him to, that he’s only pushing his luck because I’m letting him.
“If I kiss you now”—I force the words out, because a few more moments of this delicious torture and I won’t remember why they’re important—“I won’t be able to pretend like I didn’t.
If I kiss you now, I won’t be able to stop kissing you. And that’s a problem.”
Dax’s attention, which was following his wandering hands, snaps to mine.
The hand grazing my hip turns into a grip, rolling me onto my back as he comes to hover over me fully.
Ducking his face down until his mouth grazes the shell of my ear, he murmurs, “So then don’t kiss me.
” He takes my earlobe between his teeth, tugging gently.
“What?” I say around the hitch in my breath.
He smiles against my neck, and goddamn if that isn’t as sexy as his touch. His lips brush over my pulse point, his breath raising goose bumps everywhere it ghosts across my skin. Kissing—but not kissing. He pulls back, studying me with heavy-lidded eyes, asking if this is okay.
We shouldn’t. We should wait until after the article is done, when this can be aboveboard.
It’s like someone turns the volume down on my logic until the knob clicks to Off.
I haven’t been touched in so long, haven’t found anyone I wanted this with in years—three, to be exact.
Surely I’ve earned a hall pass. Just this once.
My head sags against the pillow as I give in. “Do your worst, Nakamura.”
Challenge lights his eyes and I flush as his attention returns to my neck.
When Dax touches me, my skin sings. I can’t create melodies the way my friends can, the way he can, but I can feel them, deep in my bones.
Dax is the ache of a Fleetwood Mac song, two exes, one microphone, a lost future on their shared breath.
Dax is the hope of a fledgling band, their voice breaking with the want of it all, the notes coming out wrong, the imperfections reaching out across the void we’re all screaming into, perfectly imperfect.
Dax is the worn-away paint on the buttons of your CD player, where you pressed Rewind over and over to hear that line again, the one that made you feel seen in a way no one else ever has before.
He moves torturously slow, not-kissing his way down my arm, the warm drag of his mouth and the rough scrape of his teeth so at odds with the cool press of his septum piercing.
Sinking back onto the balls of his feet, he kisses the pad of my thumb, my pinkie, my index finger, my ring finger, pausing when he gets to my middle finger, meeting my gaze when I show it to him.
He grins drunkenly, nibbling it affectionately before releasing my wrist. It drops, limp, against the top of his thigh.
The words rush out of me. “Can I touch you?”
“If you think you’ll be able to stop,” he says with a smirk. At the same time, his hand slips around the back of my thigh, hitching it up around his waist.
I make an unintelligible noise, forgetting entirely what I’d just asked.
Dax guides my limp hand to rest against his side. Touching him feels both new and old, forbidden and inevitable. “Always, Sloane,” he answers for real this time.
“That’s a broad statement,” I say, amazed I’m still forming words, my entire body pulsing like a bomb about to detonate.
“Always,” he repeats without hesitation, meeting my gaze with an intensity like he’s saying one thing but vowing another.
Before I can overanalyze it, my mind goes blank as he resumes meticulously reclaiming my body. He doesn’t know I never stopped being his.
Dax doesn’t break eye contact as he continues his slow mapping of my body, kissing along my other arm, from my shoulder to the crook of my elbow, nipping at the pulse point in my wrist. This time, he interlaces our fingers before working his way back down.
He nuzzles the frayed hem of my T-shirt but doesn’t explore further, which is a shame because this dress makes my boobs seem almost impressive.
His hand not intertwined with mine grabs my hip with the exact pressure I like, not too light to be ticklish, just shy of too rough. His stubble snags on the hem of my dress, and I hold my breath in anticipation of the scrape of it against my inner thigh. He stills.
“Don’t stop,” I plead.
He’s groaning before his mouth is even on me, lips parting as his canines scrape across my stockinged thigh, not quite hard enough to rip them.
He pulls back a fraction, his movements trackable by the heat of his breath coasting higher on my leg, my dress now less of a dress and more of an overlong tank top for how high it’s ridden up.
He rests his head against my pelvis, his shaky exhale taut, like he’s warring with himself.
His nose nudges along the core of me, over the damp fabric of my tights.
When his mouth comes over me entirely, his hand at my hip is the only thing keeping me from bucking off the cushion.
“Dax,” I rasp, need curling my fingers into his shoulder.
He pulls back, pressing his face into my thigh, taking one, two, three deep breaths, his eyes shut tight. “I know, baby,” he breathes. “I know.”
I don’t know what he knows—how good it feels, or how we shouldn’t be doing this—I just know all thoughts fly from my head at the sound of the endearment sighing past his lips.
His mouth traces a line to my knee, where he presses his forehead against it, as if he’s the one falling apart right now and not me.
“I need to tell you something.”
[Excerpt from Sloane Donavan’s Final Revelations interview transcript]
1999: The Petty-Little-Bitch Tour
MARCUS: We started rehearsing with Dax, and I knew my place in Final Revelations was in jeopardy. We needed him to get through the tour, but I made sure he knew—that everybody knew—he was only temporary. A fill-in.
CAIN: Marcus was an absolute dick to Dax.
BARRETT: [laughs] Dax didn’t care that Marcus was marking his territory. He was just so fucking happy to be there.
JONAH: That only pissed off Marcus more.
MARCUS: I wasn’t that bad… Okay, maybe I was.
DAX: I had no intention of just being a fill-in. For the first time in my life, I was all in on a band. Marcus being a brat about me being there when I was doing them a favor? Just made my job of convincing them to keep me even easier. [grins] I can be a good boy when I need to be.
CAIN: The rest of the guys, we all have brothers.
Marcus and Dax don’t. Dax was like the annoying little brother who worships his older brother, tagging along behind him, and Marcus had no idea what to do with that.
It was really fucking funny watching the two of them figure out how to share a stage.
BARRETT: [laughs] Marcus wasn’t used to standing stage right and would wander into the middle, but Dax didn’t care. He was like a Tasmanian devil, running all over the fucking place, jumping off risers and amps and never missing a note. The guy’s lungs were—are—insane.
JONAH: Marcus couldn’t really scream anymore, but he wasn’t content with just playing guitar, so a few shows into tour, he came to us with the idea of adding in some melodic backing vocals.
CAIN: It was clearly a ploy at getting more control, reminding everyone who the real frontman was, but—
BARRETT: Dax and Marcus battling to be frontman was the best thing that ever happened to Final Revelations. Their tension was impossible to look away from. They gave every line, every note, their all.
JONAH: Then someone—[coughs]
BARRETT: [coughs]
CAIN: [coughs]
MARCUS: [coughs]
DAX: [grins]
JONAH: Someone put our album on Napster, and suddenly, kids from all over the world could download our album. We put up a shitty camcorder recording of our set on our website, and as tour went on, the audience learned Marcus’s melodies—
CAIN: People could sing along to our songs for the first time ever.
BARRETT: That was really fucking cool.
MARCUS: I basically guaranteed that Dax had to formally join the band, because now people expected the melodies. Our songs required two vocalists. Really played myself with that one.
DAX: [singsong] Thank you, Marcus.
MARCUS: Sometimes, being a petty little bitch makes your band better, y’know?