Taming Jett (The Chaos Coven #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter one

The bass at Neon Pulse hit differently on Friday nights.

It wasn’t just sound. The bass got into my chest, into the floor, into the part of my brain where last weekend’s wedding was still trying to argue with me about centerpieces.

Pink strobes, electric blue, the fog machine working overtime to convince us we were having a moment.

Somebody’s glitter on somebody’s collarbone two feet from me.

The bartender who always wore the same Black Sabbath shirt was on tonight, and then I forgot him.

I was in my element. Or doing a passable job of pretending.

I’d dressed for it. Tight black jeans. The burgundy shirt my mother had bought me three Christmases ago and that I still wore, even though the color was fading.

Sleeves shoved up because the air in here was already wet.

Glitter gel on my arms because I love the way it glows under the lights.

Silver hoops. The expensive cologne, the amber-and-vanilla one I only wore on nights I wanted to leave a trail.

“Jett!” Calliope had my arm. Half her drink ended up on my forearm. “This song! We need to dance to this song!”

I never argued with Calliope about dancing. Sierra and Raven were already gone in it. I went where the song wanted me. Hips, shoulders, hands up, the whole thing.

Freedom, the version I’d built for myself. Exactly where I was supposed to be on a Friday at eleven.

Sierra spun past me, laughing, and I caught her hand to twirl her.

“Show off!” Raven called out, grinning into it. Crushed velvet pants and a sheer top over a mesh bra, dark lipstick that should not have survived this much sweat and somehow had.

“You love it!” I dropped into a move that might be illegal in several states.

Calliope wolf-whistled. “Work it, darling. Give them the show.”

I gave them the show. Why not. Life was short.

The music was loud. I had not always been allowed to take up this much space in a room.

Eight years of gym time over the scrawny kid who’d gotten shoved into lockers in tenth grade by a guy named Brad.

Brad became an accountant. I’d heard. Two hundred and five pounds of muscle, earned.

Twenty-four now. A build that nobody messed with.

The song picked up. I closed my eyes. The week kept trying to follow me onto the floor: four hundred guests in Williamsburg last weekend, the caterer who tried to swap brisket for short rib at 4 P.M. on the day of, the mother-of-the-bride meltdown over the seating chart that had taken every ounce of charm I owned to defuse.

I shut all of it off. Stopped managing. Stopped performing the version of me that managed.

For a minute, just movement.

When I opened my eyes, someone was watching.

Edge of the dance floor, drink in hand, not even pretending.

Blonde hair done in that careful way that took twenty minutes to look like he’d just rolled out of bed.

Built. The arms were the first thing you registered, then the shoulders, then the tattoo sleeve.

White guy, mid-twenties maybe, on the shorter side, with the look of someone who already knew the math worked in his favor.

Our eyes met. He smiled, the smile of a person who didn’t have to wonder how it landed.

Good.

I didn’t approach him. Kept dancing. Made sure he had something to watch. Eye contact long enough to mean something.

By the time I went for water, he was already at the bar.

“I’ve been watching you dance.” He leaned in close enough that I caught his cologne. Sharp citrus, the kind that came in a square bottle and cost more than it should. “You move like you own the place.”

I took a sip and made him wait. “Maybe I do.”

He laughed. It was a genuinely good laugh. “I’m Alex.”

“Jett.” He said it slowly, like he were tasting the shape of it. “That’s a great name.”

“It does the job.” My eyes went over him, no rush. The tattoo was a whole landscape of mountains, pine, and what might have been a wolf in the lower half. Whoever had done it knew what they were doing. Gray t-shirt, jeans, Nikes that hadn’t been worn enough yet. “You new here? I haven’t seen you.”

“First time. Friend told me about it.” He stepped closer. I didn’t step back. “Said it was the best place in Brooklyn for… dancing.”

He left a beat between for and dancing that did all the work for him.

“Your friend wasn’t wrong.” I set my water down. “Want to test the theory?”

His smile grew wider in increments, like he were deciding how much to give away. “Absolutely.”

Back on the floor, and this wasn’t dancing the way my friends danced.

Slower than that. His hand found my waist and stayed there.

The space between us closed, and I let it.

The song could’ve been anything; I wasn’t really listening to it.

I was listening to the choice we were both making in the next four minutes.

“You’re good at this.” His breath was warm against my neck.

“I’ve had practice.”

Calliope’s cackle came from somewhere behind me, and I didn’t have to turn around to know all three of them were watching. They were probably betting on how the night ended. They were probably already right.

The song slowed, and his hands slid lower. “So. What happens after this?”

I pulled back enough to look at his face. Interested. Available.

Why not?

“We could get out of here if you want.”

“I want.”

Forty minutes later, we were walking through Bushwick.

The streets had dropped quieter the way they did past the main drags, after the people who came out for the bars had stopped existing in this part of the borough.

Calliope was on her way home with Sierra.

Raven had peeled off at her corner with her usual benediction.

“You sure about this?” she’d said, eyes sharp under the busted streetlamp. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“So. Everything?”

She snorted. “Fair. Have fun. Be safe. Don’t catch feelings.”

“Never do.”

Now it was Alex beside me in the humid air and the kind of buzz I knew from a hundred Friday nights. This part, the walk part, was always easy. The before-anything part. Nobody had decided who was going to be a disappointment yet.

My building was a converted warehouse, four floors, the kind of place that had been a sweatshop in some prior century and was now apartments nice enough not to be depressing. I knelt at the entrance to dig my spare key out from under the fake rock.

“Really?” Alex laughed. “It’s the most obvious hiding spot in human history.”

“Everyone says that.” I unlocked the door.

The apartment did the trick the way it usually did.

Event planning gave you an eye for making small spaces look like decisions instead of compromises.

Strategic mirrors. Lighting that wasn’t overhead.

The exposed brick I’d never painted because the day I tried, I realized I didn’t want to.

Fairy lights on the ceiling, which was Calliope’s idea three years ago, and I’d never taken them down because they did exactly what she said they would.

“Nice place.” Alex was not looking at the apartment.

“Thanks.” I tossed my keys on the counter. They slid further than I meant. “Drink?”

“I’m good.”

We stood there for a beat. The fridge hummed. Then he closed the distance, and his mouth was on mine.

I kissed him back. Beer and mint gum, the chest of someone who took his lifts seriously, his hands already on my shirt buttons, practiced. Mine went to his belt the way mine always did. Shorthand. Negotiation by hand.

We made it to the bedroom with most of our clothes off, and the rest came off at the foot of the bed. Belt buckle on the hardwood. His t-shirt somewhere I’d find later.

He put me on the mattress and looked at me. I let him look. The fairy lights threw enough glow that I could read the want in his face, which was the part I always liked best. The part where someone hadn’t gotten what they wanted yet, the part where you got to watch them want it.

“You’re gorgeous.” Five hundred guys had told me that, and somehow it never got annoying.

“I know.” I pulled him down to me.

What followed was good. Practiced. He knew what he was doing, and so did I. Hands, mouths, skin, the choreography I’d done in enough bedrooms to do half-asleep.

Even moving with him, half my brain was already running the exit calculus. Cab vs. subway, when to shower, what version of I have a thing tomorrow I was going to use.

Because that was what happened next.

After. Alex collapsed beside me, hand finding mine on the sheets. “That was…”

“Yeah.” I didn’t need him to finish.

He rolled onto his side. The look was soft. The look was the wrong look. “Can I stay? I’d like to wake up next to you.”

There it was.

“I’ve got a thing in the morning. Work.” I made my voice apologetic in a way I’d practiced. “Don’t want to wake you up.”

His face did the small fall I knew. “Oh. Okay. I could leave early with you?”

“Better if you don’t.” I was sitting up now, putting space in the room before I had to put it in my voice. “Tonight was great, though.”

He sat up, too, and his face worked through whether I was telling the truth or doing the thing. “Can I get your number? We could do this again.”

I gave him my number. I knew what I was going to do with the texts when they came; he didn’t.

He got dressed slowly. Slow enough that I knew he was hoping I’d change my mind.

I didn’t. I stayed in bed with the sheet around my waist and tracked him buttoning his shirt with hands that had been all over me twenty minutes ago, which should’ve been weirder than it was.

The trick was not to think about it that way.

At the door, he hesitated. “Thanks for tonight, Jett. You’re… really something.”

“You, too.” I meant it. Half-meant it. He was great. Just not mine.

The door clicked shut, and I was alone again.