3. Chapter Three #2
“They want pain, Willow.” His mouth tightens. “The show tonight proved what we already knew. The darker material is connecting. Phoenix bleeding your lyrics all over that stage is moving numbers everywhere. The audience wants more of that raw, intimate damage.”
Raw, intimate damage.
God, only Damon could make heartbreak sound like a quarterly report.
Damon’s eyes narrow slightly.
“We need to capitalize on the moment. You are brilliant, Willow. Truly.” His voice stays smooth, which somehow makes it worse. “But brilliance does nothing for anyone if it sits locked inside your notebook.”
“My notebook isn’t a factory.”
“No,” he says, “It’s a goddamn goldmine.”
Phoenix is looking at me again over the brunette’s shoulder.
My chest does that stupid thing it always does when he looks at me.
I hate that a single glance from him can still excavate her—that stupid thirteen-year-old girl who handed him her notebook with shaking hands and watched his face light up like she’d handed him something sacred instead of just a song she wrote in forty minutes because she couldn’t stop thinking about his hands.
I hate that I miss a ghost who keeps breathing in front of me, walking around in low-slung jeans with someone else’s lipstick on his throat, looking at me like I’m the one who left.
Damon’s still talking. I catch the tail end of it. “—that’s why we need you.”
I glance back at him.
I am so tired. Tired in places sleep can’t reach and caffeine can’t bully back to life.
Damon steps into my eyeline. “Three demos by the end of the week.”
“Sure,” I say. “Let me just pencil in a breakdown after lunch.”
“Three demos,” he says again, as if I’m the problem.
“I heard you.”
“Good.”
He walks away.
Music thumps low from the corner. A champagne cork goes off somewhere behind me like a small, celebratory gunshot.
Someone’s already yelling about an afterparty.
Someone else is already too drunk to find it.
Cruz has both women laughing now, his smile doing that thing that makes every smart girl forget every warning their mother gave them.
I see Marcus enter the room. Roadie. Tall. Broad shoulders. Black tour shirt. Warm brown eyes. Headset hanging around his neck. He has the calm, steady presence of a man who knows how to lift heavy things without needing applause for it.
A rare fucking species in this room.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.”
“Are you okay?”
I almost laugh because nobody backstage ever asks that.
“Depends how honest you want me to be.”
His smile is small and real. “I can handle honest.”
“I’m fine,” I say anyway.
“Liar.”
My eyebrows go up.
He nods toward the hallway. “You want to get some air? It’s quieter out there. Less—” His gaze flicks across the room, taking in Cruz and his women, Jax’s chaos, Damon’s shark smile, and Phoenix’s throne of bad decisions. “—all of this.”
Cold air. Concrete. Fluorescent lights that don’t flatter anyone and don’t care.
A closed door between me and the smell of Phoenix’s poor decisions.
Five minutes of being Willow Hart instead of Phoenix Stone’s emotional support songbook.
Five minutes with someone who looks at me and is not trying to find his reflection in my gaze.
I want to say yes because I’m tired of being the thing men take from. Maybe for once, I just want to stand outside with someone who doesn’t have my childhood, my songs and my whole stupid heart already crumpled in his fist.
I open my mouth to answer Marcus, but his gaze shifts over my shoulder. His expression changes before I can get a word out.
It is not much. Just a flicker. A small tightening around his eyes. The expression a man gets when trouble steps into the room and everyone pretends not to notice because trouble is famous, gorgeous, and used to getting away with shit.
Then Phoenix is beside me. He slides one arm around my shoulders as if I am something he left unattended for too long and has now decided to collect. His body presses in close enough for the heat of him to soak through the air between us.
The smell of him hits me hard. Whiskey. Weed. Someone else’s perfume clinging to his skin like a cheap souvenir.
My pulse does something embarrassing, because apparently my body has no pride and even less common sense.
For one stupid second, I feel him everywhere. The weight of his arm. The warmth of his side and that familiar, awful pull of him.
I glance at Marcus and see the careful way his face has gone neutral, the way his gaze drops to Phoenix’s arm on my shoulder, before lifting back to mine.
Something in me hardens.
I reach up, take Phoenix’s wrist, and lift his arm off my shoulders.
“Don’t,” I say.
Phoenix’s jaw tightens and his eyes turn dark in a way that has nothing to do with hurt and everything to do with being challenged in front of another man.
He doesn’t direct his sight towards me. Instead he looks at Marcus.
“She’s busy.”
That is all he says. Two words dropped between them as if they were enough to make it true. Possessive as hell.
As if busy means his.
As if one arm around my shoulders can wipe away the lipstick on his neck and the stranger’s perfume still clinging to his shirt.
The hypocrisy is so sharp I could cut myself.
Phoenix can sit across this room with a woman in his lap and let her hand stroke his cock while everyone pretends not to watch. He can let her kiss his throat, touch his body, laugh into his skin as if she has been invited somewhere sacred.
But the second another man gives me attention, Phoenix turns up as if a line has been crossed. As if I were his to lose.
The absolute, stunning, world-class nerve of this man.
I observe him.
He looks at me.
“She’s really not busy,” I say, before turning back to Marcus.