13. Phoenix St. Pierre
PHOENIX ST. PIERRE
This is the quickest I’ve ever fallen in love with a song, and we’re still tweaking the rhythm to the second verse three hours into the bedroom session. But the hook is killer.
I’ve scratched out a few words, but on a clean page, I rewrite a draft of what we have.
Rip apart my flesh and bone
To use as kindling
Only to be left alone
Skeleton in a nuclear cold
Where nothing good grows
Pen bleeds on my thumb, and I smudge the red ink against the margin. Tom sings the chorus as he finds the melody with his guitar.
His rasp is spine-tingling. It pricks the hairs on my neck. As he belts the first verse, he sounds so raw yet controlled. Like he’s spent hours perfecting his timbre and pitch and won’t let a note derail.
I want to hear him scream.
But I’m too wrapped in the haunting sound against my ears to suggest one coming off the last verse.
His voice is blood-pumping, soul-smashing. Destructive power. A blizzard hurting to be a firestorm. I have trouble not staring at Tom when he emotes with the same intensity as the bleeding noise pouring out of him. It’s hypnotic.
He’s hypnotic.
A lump forms in my throat. My nose flares. I swallow hard and focus on jotting down the lyrics.
Is this what you wanted?
Frozen into eternity
Is this what you wanted?
Nuclear winter
In a nuclear cold
Is this what you wanted? (wanted)
Where nothing good grows
Tortured into eternity (left alone)
Is this what you wanted?
Nuclear winter
In a nuclear cold
(Flesh and bone)
Ice Age in a chokehold (oh no)
Where nothing good grows
Tom stops singing the same time my pen stops moving.
Our eyes catch, and he tells me, “The drums should feel as fast as ‘Motivation’ from Sum 41 but heavier, like lungs trying to burst.” It dawns on me; that’s the only song he’s heard me play on drums. I bet he’s watched my little brother a dozen times.
“It won’t be a light hi-hat.” I throw my head into the rhythm I hear in the silence.
“I’m thinking a forceful driving beat, propulsive, but I’ll sit right on it, so it doesn’t feel like I’m getting ahead of you.
Maybe a deep kick drum, hard snare on the twos.
” I jot some notes down for when I get behind a kit.
“We’re not doing a kick drum on every beat,” he says aggressively, like he grabbed a shotgun expecting a fight.
“Did I suggest a four-on-the-floor?” I snap.
“It’s the first thing every drummer I’ve played with wants to do,” he defends.
“Again, I’m not every drummer you’ve had,” I force out.
Tom opens his mouth, then takes a big swig of an energy drink. I watch his left hand rub his thigh, and heat builds against my neck when I see that I turned him on.
It’s dialing up the temperature in the room.
In me.
Thick arousal gathers in my body, and I flex my abs to stop from getting hard. Fuck. I force my gaze on my journal. “Let’s lean darker with more reverb.”
“Yeah, okay,” Tom relents too quickly. I realize his attention has veered to his brother’s side of the room. Then he looks at his phone. “Fuck, fuck, it’s already one a.m.”
My stomach caves.
I’m not ready to leave. Not when we haven’t finished and we’re making actual strides.
Tom climbs off the bed in a rush. “Take five. I need to go check on Ben.”
“You can’t send him a text?” I frown.
“I need eyes on him.” Reaching the door, he whirls back to face me. “Don’t go anywhere. Seriously. Stay.”
“Not a dog.” Relief loosens my muscles knowing he wants me here for longer. “And I wasn’t planning on leaving.”
He exhales, then he’s out the door in a flash. He said Ben’s on the eighteenth floor hanging out in his cousin’s apartment, so I’m not expecting Tom to be forever.
I don’t take a break. I grab his guitar and fixate on the melody to the chorus. Less than fifteen minutes later, Tom returns.
By 3 a.m., he’s checked on his younger brother four times.
Apparently, they’re engrossed playing a horror video game called Until Dawn downstairs—one where their choices would affect who’d survive in the end.
“And I thought I had a sick sense of humor,” Tom mutters. He seems in his head about the video game.
I wonder what’s so sensitive that his brain is a fucking dam and not a sieve—when I have a feeling I’ve heard at least eighty percent of his internal thoughts.
“You want to talk about it?” I ask while I do a deep squat to stretch out my cramped legs.
He grabs a sky-blue Gibson off the wall. “Let’s pick up at the first verse. I think the tempo should be faster.”
“So that’s a fuck no.” I straighten up.
“Glad you can read between the lines.” He plugs the electric guitar into the amp, then takes out some pedals. The deep slits in his black muscle shirt show off his ribs…his abs, and I snap my gaze away from him as my blood runs even hotter.
Tom is lean, over six-foot, and definitely my type. But like fuck was I going to tell him that. He bites down on his guitar pick while he untangles wires at his feet. I think about helping him, but I force myself to stay the fuck away.
His confidence says he doesn’t need an assist. He combs a hand through his golden-brown hair. The waistband of his Calvin Klein underwear sticks out from his jeans and rests against his bare skin.
Stop looking at him.
I take a seat on the edge of his bed and thread my arms over my chest. When Tom casts a glance back, he makes me more aware that A.) my leg is jostling and B.) my thighs are spread wide open. He’s staring at my dick.
I glare. “Eyes up here, Tom.”
“You’re the one committing a crime, Phoenix,” he retorts, angrily whipping one of the wires. “It’s illegal for my bandmates to manspread on my bed.”
“Sorry I broke your fake law.”
“You’re not sorry,” he says while crouching down to a pedal. When his gaze flits up to me, I suck in a deep breath through my nose to control a base desire.
He’s not the first attractive guy I’ve been around.
Not an issue.
Because it can’t be an issue. Hooking up with Tom would be the worst thing for the band.
For the next hour, we both hyperfixate on “Nuclear Winter.” The song suffocates, and I don’t even want to breathe around him. I want to pick up a pair of drumsticks and bleed into the raw emotion he sings.
I lose myself to the hour as it passes like seconds. There’s something tragic about enjoying sixty minutes but only remembering the feeling of five.
My eyes are dry and sore as we wrap up the song for the night.
Tom looks spent, seconds away from passing out on his bed. “Can I call you a cab?” he asks into a yawn in his bicep. The offer is kinder than I deserve.
I’m collecting my journal off the mattress and shrugging on my moto jacket. My fingers are stained with ink. “I’m taking the train.” I look him over. His eyelids drooping. “You need to be tucked in before I leave?”
He flips me off in the middle of another yawn. “I don’t even need to think of a pithy reply, dude. You’ll be thinking of me until we see each other again. It’s going to fuck you up.”
“You’re not supposed to tell me your bedtime wishes, nepo baby. They don’t come true that way.”
He groans. “Can you let me have the last fucking word?”
“No,” I say and head to the door. “Same time tomorrow?”
He plops his head against his pillow and closes his eyes. “Yeah, but not here. Your place?”
I think about my roommates. “We’ll find neutral territory.” I’d like to work on the drums, so we might just book some time at a rehearsal studio.
Tom doesn’t say anything in reply, and I realize he’s already fallen asleep.
Even the cockatoo has stopped mimicking the sharp E that Tom kept playing.
The quiet feels so unusual around him. There’s normally so much noise, whether it’s music or talking, and the stillness throws me for a second.
It’s too intimate—me being in his room while he’s sleeping.
Especially after tonight.
Especially after I know what he wants. A boyfriend. A relationship.
I can’t be that. But our partnership requires so much time spent together, and I don’t want him to think this is something it’s not.
“Night, Tom,” I whisper and flick off the wall lights.
I leave the apartment. It’s so late, I’m not shocked I don’t run into any of his brothers. I make it home to an even quieter apartment.
No one is awake this early. And I try, I really fucking try, to go to sleep. But I toss and turn on my full-size bed, the comforter heavier tonight than normal. I’m still suffocating. Constricted. I kick it to the floor.
The fan above me whirls in slow circles.
My brain spins and spins and spins with it.
The song we wrote tonight circulates in my head, but it’s Tom’s voice that has me spiraling.
The way he sings is a mindfuck. His powder-blue eyes scream, plead for understanding.
For compassion. It’s still tearing through me.
Flesh and bone. In one night, I understood how badly he desires connection.
So yeah, Tom wasn’t wrong.
I keep thinking about him.
And it’s fucking me up at 6 a.m. I cannot sleep.
Fuck it. I jump out of bed, grab my towel hanging on the door, and head to the shower.
Hot water pelts me in the face, and steam fogs the bathroom.
I spend countless minutes doing my shower routine.
Raking my fingers against my scalp, scrubbing shampoo through my hair, washing my body with soap from my neck to my feet.
After I rinse the suds off, I just breathe beneath the water.
Letting it pelt my neck and drip off my face.
He’s. In. My. Head.
Fuck.
Fuck.
My hand lowers to my hardening shaft, and I start stroking myself in slow, languid movements.
Not him, I coach myself. Don’t think about him.
I try to visualize favorite actors, favorite musicians. Anyone other than him. Every single time an image fills my mind, I see his emotive blue eyes, carrying fire and angst. His fucking face. Lighting up like he’s about to play with a hundred matches around me.
That smirk. That arrogant, cocky smirk.
In my mind, I growl out, “You think you’re so funny,” as I stalk toward him.
“What are you going to do about it?” Tom goads with a mischievous laugh. “Because I’m not changing—”
“Shut the fuck up.” I push him against a plaster wall. We’re heavy, hot breath.
Like at his apartment when I had him there, he doesn’t back down. He can’t back down. “Try me,” he taunts.
My hand flies to his mouth. I feel the warmth of his lips, the warmth of his ragged breath. I thread my legs between his, bearing my weight into his lean build. With my other hand, I reach for his zipper.
Tom is glaring like you won’t.
I will.
I will undo him. I think about shoving him to his knees and shutting him up with my cock. But I want my hand wrapped around him. So I dive my palm down his elastic waistband and stroke his hard length. Then I fist him.
His humor fades into a rough, bottled groan. His knees shift against me. He struggles to stay on his feet as I squeeze. My lips hit his ear in a deep whisper, “I will be unrelenting. Until you can’t form one fucking word outside of please.” I make him feel my erection.
“Fuck,” he moans against my palm. I drop my hand from his mouth to hear him groan out, “Fuck me.”
In the shower, I’m sliding my hand along my length, mimicking what I’d be doing to him. I place a hand against the tiled wall. My breathing deepening.
I cup his skull, bringing his head down to my shoulder so he can rest his forehead there.
So that I can feel him spasm against my body.
When he comes in my imagination, I spin him around and shove his chest hard against the wall.
I yank down his jeans with his boxer-briefs.
As soon as I imagine gripping his ass and slipping inside him, I jerk forward and release into the shower.
A knotted groan tries to scrape out of my burning throat. My abs flex, and I milk my arousal with two final strokes. So much cum. Too much. How fucking pent-up had I been?
My chest rises and falls heavily as the adrenaline and dopamine slowly recede. I squeeze my eyes closed and guilt crawls across my skin.
“Fuck,” I curse and slam a fist against the tile wall. Tom admitting he’s masturbated to me doesn’t help the situation. I should be above this.
I should know better.
I’m aware how bad this could go.
It didn’t even make me tired. Not that I thought it would. Masturbating has never helped me sleep. I also hate that I just proved Tom right. He’s all I can think about. He’s like a poison I drank, and it’s altered my DNA. I don’t know how to rid myself of my new genetic code.
It honestly feels like I belong to The Carraways in body and fucked-up soul—and it’s only been a fucking week!
Jesus Christ, I have to get a grip. After washing my body again, I exit the shower, pushing aside the pickle-printed curtain that Steffi bought for the shared bathroom. My feet sink onto the matching pickle rug. The dill spear wears a cowboy hat and bites a toothpick.
Knotting a towel at my waist, I seize my phone quickly from beside the sink basin. It’s buzzing with a call.
Great.