No Half Measures (All Strings Attached Book 2)

1. Zak

“Again with this shit?” Dallas shouted from somewhere in their new apartment.

The rest of his tirade was blessedly muffled. Was this what it was like to have insulation? Bliss.

A door slammed down the hall before he appeared at the threshold of her room, the mutilated carcass of a leather shoe dangling from his finger. “I didn’t sign up for a fifth roommate, Zak. Train your mutt before I donate her to a coat factory.”

The mutt in question, Snickerdoodle, compacted her fifty-pound-and-counting frame as small as possible and wedged herself under Zak’s desk. A fluffy maize tail poked out through the side, where further incriminating scratches and punctures marred the wood. The vet suspected Snickerdoodle was a retriever and collie mix, but still, their household’s consensus was that she was part feather duster, part beaver.

Zak grinned, the back of a ballpoint pen tucked between her teeth. Dallas may talk a big game, but she had come home to find her dog curled up with him on the couch more than once. White-dipped muzzle resting on his chest as they napped, snored, and drooled together.

“Or you could remember to shut your door.”

His eyes narrowed. “These were my favorite shoes.”

“They were your only shoes.”

“Maybe you would have a little more sympathy if Shredder there destroyed your favorite pair next time.”

She closed the cover of her notebook and set her pen on top of it. “Are you threateningme?”

“Not at all.” He stalked to her closet and opened the bi-fold doors, perusing the bins on the top shelf where she stored her heels. “Just sayin’. It would be a shame…”

The truth was, Snickerdoodle had already demolished a few pairs. Hence why the survivors were now neatly tucked out of reach when Zak had never been lauded for her organization. The first time she walked in to find a fashion casualty, Zak had run through the dictionary of every foul word she knew, but she could only be so angry with a pair of big, brown eyes staring up at her and a wagging tail thumping against the carpet.

Plagiarizing her mother’s vocabulary, she had taken to calling Snickerdoodle her “happy accident.” She never intended to own a pet, not then and maybe not ever. But two days before their move-out date, a neighbor had knocked on the door to their old apartment with the pup on a leash, a baby propped on her hip, and another on the way.

Zak had never met the woman before, but everyone in the building knew her voice. Half the police calls there had been for her unit. Noise complaints about the screaming.

Though Zak had been in no position to take care of an animal herself, she couldn’t help but wonder: Who will this lady’s husband slap around now that she’s finally leaving him?

So now Zak had a dog, and her roommates all had holes in their socks, hair on their black clothing, and chew marks on their door jambs.

“Try me.” She crossed her arms beneath her chest. “If any of my shoes go missing, I’ll change the locks and make sure everyone but you gets a new key.”

He chuckled. “Feisty.”

“Always. I just happen to have the money to back up my threats now.”

Zak’s life had been a whirlwind from the moment they returned.

They had spent two hours combing through messages from all the old venues they used to play at—who wanted them back—and plenty of new ones, with an odd solicitor here and there claiming to be a manager for the stars. While they weren’t selling out the Hollywood Bowl quite yet, they were compensated well and booked solid every night of the week. Stacked on Fridays and weekends.

The first thing Zak had done as a newly instated member of the middle class was walk to the library and fax Janet a signed photocopy of her middle finger as her formal resignation letter. Then she’d gone apartment hunting with Edge, Dallas, and Alex.

Not only did they have their own rooms now, with full-size mattresses, but they also had two bathrooms, with full-size bottles of soap. This new place may as well have been the Ritz-Carlton as far as she was concerned.

Snickerdoodle bolted from the room at the sound of the front door opening.

“Anyone home?” Chase said.

He had a key and was free to drop by whenever he wanted, despite still renting with his sister. Lydia was on a two-year lease, and even if she wasn’t, Zak saw no reason he would abandon a high-rise downtown with garage parking and a sauna.

“Depends. Did you bring gifts?” Alex joked.

“Merry Christmas!” shouted Edge.

He’d started using the greeting the day after Thanksgiving. The same day he had put up a tree in their living room while blasting holiday music out of the boombox. The week after that, Zak had gone into his room to look for her missing sunglasses and found a hodgepodge of multicolored star lights dangling from the ceiling. This was the first year her best friend had been able to actualize the Christmas wonderland of his dreams, and he’d spared no expense.

Though she could do without the nativity sets and the midnight mass Edge would be attending tonight with his family, cookies and presents were both concepts Zak wholeheartedly supported. And tonight, she intended to reap the added benefit of having a friend who celebrated Noche Buena by stuffing her face full of Marisol’s leftover tamales until not even a stomach pump could separate those delicious spices from the lining of her digestive tract.

Zak shoved Dallas out of her room, then followed, taking in the carnage along the way. This time, from Snickerdoodle’s manic propeller tail. She righted a table lamp and a TV remote strewn across the floor, and when she stood straight again, she found herself lost in Chase’s loaded blue gaze.

“Hey,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

“It’s not Christmas yet.” Zak swallowed. She’d never been turned on by an argyle sweater before, but there was a first for everything.

Some days it felt like she wanted to touch him more desperately than she’d ever wanted for anything.

Okay. Most days.

But that wasn’t the kind of relationship they had. Less so, in the two months since they’d returned from New York. They’d never been together in the real world, so she had no frame of reference for normalcy, but the distance he kept and the hollowness of their interactions couldn’t be a figment of her imagination.

They would go weeks without the slightest contact, then fall into bed. Separate, then fall again.

Before, sex had felt like the one infraction in their relationship. Something forbidden and wrong. Now, it was the only time things felt right between them.

Snickerdoodle pried between Chase’s legs and rolled over for her customary belly rub, and Zak took the opportunity while he was crouched over to peek into the bags full of mediocrely wrapped gifts he had brought.

“Those all for me?” she joked.

“Not all of them.” He dug around in the bottom of one bag and pulled out a rawhide the size of Zak’s forearm, adorned with a bow her dog would equally enjoy ripping into. “This one’s for my special girl.”

How stupid, to be jealous of a puppy.

“You’re a little late to the party,” Dallas said, still holding his shoe. “Couldn’t have gotten here ten minutes earlier with that thing?”

“She didn’t mean to,” Chase cooed in a sickly-sweet baby voice reserved for Snickerdoodle, his undivided attention still devoted to petting the dog. “It’s the puppy teeth.”

Zak elected not to remind him that the vet said she was around nine months old and should be way past the teething stage.

He stood, looking past her. “What is that, by the way?”

“Fucking ‘Silver Bells’,” she grumbled. The only thing keeping her from taking a baseball bat to that stereo was the mutual respect between her and her friend. That, and the fact that she didn’t own a baseball bat.

Chase gave her a bemused look. Slight, but still enough to turn her insides fuzzy like she was some sort of lovesick moron. “You really hate Christmas music, huh?”

“It’s cheesy, annoying, and so cheerful I could puke,” Zak said. “What the fuck is a sugar plum? Are we pretending ‘stocking’ isn’t just a fancy word for ‘sock’? And why am I supposed to believe that a snowman coming to life, forming a close bond with children, and then slowly melting to death before their very eyes is anything less than a gorefest?”

“You know, I don’t like Christmas music either, but you make ‘Frosty the Snowman’ sound pretty metal,” Dallas considered.

“I was talking about the smell,” Chase said. “It smells amazing in here.”

“Christmas Punch.” She walked to the open entranceway that separated the kitchen from the living room and spied on her friend.

Edge stood in front of the stove, idly stirring a simmering pot full of fruits as he attempted to crack the code to his mother’s top-secret Ponche Navide?o. But his concentration on perfecting the recipe wasn’t the reason he hadn’t answered Chase. It was the phone cord wrapped around his neck as he talked into the receiver with a smile.

That was Zak’s first clue he wasn’t ironing out last-minute Christmas plans with his family. The second being he was only speaking in English.

“… yeah, yeah. And how have things been over there?” A long stretch went by where he nodded to himself. “I bet. Good thing you can wipe away the tears with that nice fat advance check… No, we don’t hold grudges here… No, she’s not mad at you. Shit, she’d be the first to tell you if she was. She didn’t answer because Chase just got here…” He laughed. “You know, the Fleetwood Mac jokes are rich coming from you…”

Zak stepped into his line of vision and reached for two mugs from the cabinet above his head. “Izzy?” she mouthed.

Edge ducked out of her way and answered Izzy instead, “Speaking of Zak, she’s here now. Want me to hand you over?”

Zak assessed his expression with a smirk as she ladled the drink into each cup. She made a kissy face and mouthed, “Flirting?” as Edge handed her the phone.

“Please.” He covered the receiver. “You of all people should know that I’m perfectly capable of being friends with a woman.”

“Sure.” She slowly raised the phone.

“Just friends. Not you-and-Chase friends.”

With the steep decline in their more-than-friends activities, Zak wasn’t entirely sure she and Chase weren’t just friends. But that was a separate issue.

She shooed Edge away and sandwiched the phone between her cheek and shoulder as she uncorked the rum bottle on the counter. It was a glorified paperweight now for a graveyard of business cards from agents, each one declaring themselves capable of scoring them a bigger contract than the last.

They had yet to decide whether they even neededa middleman when they had already entered negotiations with a few mid-sized record companies. Zak knew the days were ticking down to capitalize on their recent boost in fame, but that was exactly why she was holding out for the big contract. The one that would ensure their careers soared rather than fizzled out.

Thankfully, corporate America’s holiday breaks had bought them some much-needed time to evaluate their options.

“Hey, Izzy.”

“I hear you’re enjoying your Christmas Eve so far.”

“Things are festive around here. And you?”

Izzy sighed, but when she got back to talking, her voice was chipper as ever. “Things are crazy around here. The timeline’s brutal, but hey, that’s to be expected. Gotta release the album and start touring before season two starts up next summer. You know how it goes. I don’t want to bore you with all the details.”

“Bore me with details about songwriting and recording? Never.”

“Funny enough,” Izzy said in a tone that didn’t sound remotely humored. “There’s not a whole lot of that first one going on. Recording, sure. Mostly, it’s a bunch of marketing meetings. Gemma had to wake me up during a few of them. Actually, I called because I wanted to see if you had time to meet for coffee or something next week? We have a last-minute conference in LA with the booking agency on Tuesday.”

“You know I’m always game.” Zak glanced at the magnets on the side of the fridge, then remembered, “Fuck. One issue though. I don’t know how long you’ll be in town, but we’re heading out on Wednesday for a gig at High Note in San Francisco. We won’t be back until the next evening.”

Zak could practically hear the cogs turning in Izzy’s brain, trying to figure out a way to make this work. And she hoped there was one, too. Though she and Izzy had talked on the phone a few times since the show ended, it was hard to stay in touch with distance, opposing time zones, and jam-packed schedules working against them.

“I’ll figure something out,” Izzy said eventually. “But hey, I have to get back to the studio. A microphone awaits me. And a big frowny guy who stands by the mixer to calculate and announce the exact monetary cost of every mistake I make.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah, I told him last time that it costs nothing to be kind. But then I remembered being a dickhead is also free. So in short, we haven’t made any progress in our professional relationship.”

“Merry Christmas,” Zak said in parting. If she didn’t assume responsibility for ending the conversation now, it could go on forever.

“Merry Christmas. Say hi to everyone else for me, and oh! The puppy! Don’t forget to give that sweet little baby my love.”

Zak made the promise and hung up before anything else derailed her new friend’s fragile attention span.

She returned to the living room and handed Chase a ceramic cup filled with holiday punch as he finished placing the last of the excessive gifts he had brought beneath their tree. The branches—cluttered with spare aux cords, paper chains made from bar menus, hole-punched picks, and other random knick-knacks they’d collected from gig venues and hung with zip ties—rustled precariously.

“Thanks for coming over,” she said. “I’m sure you had other places to be.”

Chase rose to her level. Steam filled the air between them, scented with the sweetness of fruit and the sting of rum. It coated her throat and settled in the pit of her stomach like heartburn, then like a hug, as she took a long sip.

“Are you going to keep doing this? Thanking me every time I come over?” Chase asked with an air of resignation. His smile seemed like a consolation prize. “I’m happy to be here.”

Are you?

Zak used to think the universe would align as her career climbed. But as she got closer to where she wanted to be, her mind kept drifting back here, to her and him. Everything they were and would not be.

“Party people!” Alex double-clapped. “What’s first? The Christmas Movie Drinking Game, or Shred That Holiday Song?”

“Not drinking,” Dallas reminded him sullenly. “And I don’t even know why we still do the other one. Zak always wins.”

“She lost three years ago,” Edge reminded him, still clinging to his singular victory.

“‘Mele Kalikimaka’ was a poor song choice,” she conceded. “A mistake I will not be repeating. So bring it, bassist.”

A friendly competition and a guitar in her hands. It should have been the perfect distraction from Chase and the cryptic nature of their conversations these days. The rapid oscillation between burning hot and ice cold. The way he looked stupid-good in that stupid sweater, and the way it had been sixteen days since he’d last kissed her, and she had been tallying every one of them like there was a hidden message in that pattern.

But the message wasn’t hidden—it was loud and clear. He owed her nothing. Especially not his affection.

She had made sure of that.

As a kid, the weeks leading up to Christmas morning and her birthday had been filled with mounting dread. She used to hate getting presents because, on the sporadic occasions she received them, gifts from her mother only served to further indebt her. They were shiny supplements to, “I pay for the roof over your head,” and, “I pay for your food and clothes.”

Her friends had replaced all those memories with better ones. Holidays had gone from nerve-wracking to fun the instant she started spending them with people she cared about.

This year was the new exception.

Her heart rate quickened as she finished opening the gifts from her constants one by one. Trying not to stress out about the massive box Chase had left for her beneath the tree. But soon enough, it was all that remained amid the red and green paper rubble.

Chase had pulled out all the stops for the holiday. A set of Japanese chef”s knives for Edge. A solid leather motorcycle jacket for Alex. The nicest pair of Western boots she’d ever laid eyes on for Dallas, which couldn’t have come at a better time—and which Snickerdoodle attempted to devour immediately.

It figured that he would be a thoughtful gift-giver. He was a thoughtful person. One with lots of money, no less. But how was she supposed to accept something lavish from him?

Or, at the other extreme, how was she supposed to explain away what she had gotten him for Christmas if he had bought her a generic present to match the generic new nature of their relationship?

She dragged the weighty box out and set it on the rug between them, examining it like there was a fifty-fifty chance it contained either a brick of solid gold or a vial of live poliovirus.

“It is okay if you rip the paper,” Chase said. “That’s kind of the whole point.”

“It’s not the paper I was admiring. It’s your wrapping job.” She placed her right hand over the glob of tape holding together one end and her left hand over the thick wad of paper folded on the other.

“Smartass.”

There was a sense of normalcy, of rightness, in the simple curse that made the knot of tension between her brows dissipate. “No, I’m serious. It’s nice to know you’re not perfect at everything.”

Although Chase had poked fun at her internal dilemma, he appeared to be battling one himself. His face wouldn’t betray it, but the column of his throat did, when his Adam’s apple bobbed as he returned her smile.

She tore straight through her name in pretty cursive, Chase’s cursive, and peeled off the tape holding the cardboard box together.

Last poker night, she’d popped in a CD for some background music and made a passing comment about how she still preferred the imperfect sound of vinyl. There was something about the act of dropping down the needle and watching a disc spin as music floated from it. It turned an auditory experience into one involving touch and sight. It made her feel more connected to some of her favorite original recordings.

Of course, Zak had never been in a position to care for or store records, and there was no need when Alex had scored all their album collections on discount from his old job at the CD store.

But what she was looking at now was more than a simple music player.

The turntable rested on a mahogany plinth and had shiny gold hardware from the spindle to the tonearm. Their band’s logo had been custom printed onto the slipmat, and Saint of Spades had been engraved in the side in what appeared to be Chase’s handwriting.

He reached behind the tree to pull out a gift bag. “I, uh, got you some albums to go with it.”

When Zak finally looked up, her friends were no longer on the couch, but the source of muffled conversation coming from the kitchen. The smell of the food Edge had made, warm from the oven, wafted through their apartment.

She traced the sunken letters in the wood. “This is really amazing, Chase. It’s too much.”

“Define ‘too much’ for me,” he said. “Because I don’t know.”

She couldn’t define it, but she could show him exactly what “too much” looked like because it was sitting in her closet.

“I got you something too.” She got up and offered him a hand that he stared down like the barrel of a loaded gun.

But he took it anyway and followed her to her room before dropping that small contact and standing, rigid, in front of her dresser. As if he was remembering the day she had moved in, too.

He had kissed her as soon as the door swung shut behind them and hadn’t let go of her once. Not when the backs of her thighs bumped against the bed, or when she landed with his body weight on top of her. Not when everything was slow and hushed, and neither of them said a word. And not after.

Not until she finally turned to look at him and he’d broken the silence by saying, “It’s late. I should be getting home.”

She went to her closet and pulled out a guitar case with a red bow tied around the handle.

“I didn’t know how to wrap it,” she said as she laid it across the mattress. “And I didn’t know what to get the guy who has everything.”

Chase flipped open the latches and stared back at the vintage Gibson Dove.

“I thought I could teach you, if you want. Every singer should know at least a little guitar.”

He admired the instrument for a moment longer before directing that tenderness toward her. She couldn’t blame him. While sheshould have expected the thought he put into his gift, he had no reason to expect the same from her. “You would do that?”

“Of course.” She sat at the edge of the bed beside the open guitar case, warding off unbidden memories of him sitting in that exact spot. With her kneeling between his legs. “Controlling your knowledge base is the only way to ensure you never outshine me.”

He came toe-to-toe with her. His breath, tinged with winter fruits and spices, crossed her lips.

For a moment, she thought he would kiss her, and for however long it lasted, she would cling to the way he felt before it was all over.

But better than his touch, were his words.

“No one’s going to outshine you, angel, least of all me.”

The endearment slipped out so easily that she wondered if he noticed the warmth in his own voice.

It was the first time he’d called her that since New York.