Chapter 22
Chapter twenty-two
Carter
“What are you doing here?” Jaxon asks me when I join his team leaving the Dome the next night.
“Filling in for one of the guys,” I respond. “Alan asked for some time off once the concert ended so he could call his daughter for her birthday.”
Jaxon nods his understanding as we make our way quickly toward the SUV waiting to take us back to our hotel a few blocks away.
“Great show tonight,” I say once we’re all situated in the car, Weston at the wheel.
“There are few feelings in this world as great as having fifty thousand people singing your songs back at you.”
“Do you write all your songs?” I ask.
“Every single one. I’ve been experimenting a bit with songs written by others lately, but I just can’t seem to bring the same energy to them.
There’s something about knowing the feeling behind every word, every chord progression, that makes it feel real.
Turns out, if I don’t have that, I’m just a guy playing a guitar. Doesn’t have the same impact.”
“How do you have enough to say? You’ve got what? Six albums out with roughly twenty songs on each?”
“Seven albums. One hundred fifty-six songs. But I also write songs for other artists occasionally. I think I’ve written over two hundred and twenty songs that have been produced. There are at least a hundred more that I finished that have never seen the light of day.”
“Why’s that?” I ask, confused why someone would finish a song and not just work on it until it was what they wanted.
“It depends. Most of the time, it’s just that my producers or I don’t think it’ll land right, or that it’s such a ‘quintessential Jaxon Steele’ song—their words, not mine—that we can’t sell it to someone else.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
We drive in silence for a few minutes, the bright lights of Tokyo flashing by in a blur of colorful streaks.
When we pull up in front of the hotel, Jaxon says, as if he’s talking to himself, “There have been a couple I recorded that ended up being too personal, so I convinced my team to pull them from the final album.”
I pause, my hand on the door to the car, and really look at Jaxon.
He’s still got on his dark jeans and black shirt he wears at basically every concert, his face still lightly coated in sweat.
His black cowboy hat is back in the dressing room, ready to be packed up and shipped with the set to Australia, where the team will see this group of equipment next week.
He looks tired, though it’s the middle of the night, but it feels like more than just lack of sleep.
The boy I knew in high school looks…weary now.
“Come on,” I say. “Let’s get you up to your room. I’m sure your team has your dinner waiting.”
“Correct,” Annie says, inserting herself into the conversation from the row of seats behind us.
“Want to join me?” he asks, and the small, hopeful smile makes me feel like a piece of shit for wanting to say no. I have a stubborn woman I need to convince to sleep with me, though I suppose I have a few hours until she’ll be back at the hotel.
“Sure,” I say, climbing out of the car and quickly moving around to meet Jaxon as he opens his door. An old pro at this, Jaxon is great about waiting until we’re in position before moving.
“I’ll get you some dinner sent up, Carter,” Annie says, typing furiously on her phone as we walk toward the elevators.
Once we’re all packed inside, Jaxon gives the order for Annie and the rest of his team to go to bed, assuring them anything they need can wait until tomorrow morning when they have their usual staff meeting.
Weston tells one of our officers to wait and get the food from the staff when it arrives but sends the rest of the team of close protection officers to bed.
The CPOs stay in the two rooms next to Jaxon’s and the one across the hall.
Normally, Kelsey’s team is monitoring the security footage at the hotel and coordinating with the CPOs to respond to anything that might come up while Jaxon is in his room.
Unfortunately for us, there are a lot of hotels in Japan that don’t have cameras in the hallways, and we’re staying at one of them.
Once we enter Jaxon’s suite, I do a quick security check, even though Weston’s officers confirmed the room was clear before we entered.
“You’re kind of a paranoid guy, you know?” Jaxon teases as he pours himself a glass of whiskey from the tumbler on the table. He lifts it my direction, silently asking if I’d like a drink.
I shake my head.
“A couple of tours in combat zones will do that to a guy,” I say.
Jaxon’s face turns serious, a common side effect of mentioning anything about my deployments. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I knew what I was signing up for, and overall, it was a good experience. Plus, I’m one of the lucky ones—the paranoia only hits when I’m working on security assignments. I know I’m safe at home, which is a lot more than many of the guys I served with.”
Jaxon nods, leaning back on the sofa with a sigh.
“You want to talk about what’s going on with you?” I ask, dropping into the chair across from him.
We’re interrupted by a knock at the door, and I jump up to grab our food. I don’t typically eat after the shows, but at the sight of the tuna nigiri on the plates, my stomach rumbles to life.
I deposit the food onto the black oval table between us, handing Jaxon a napkin with two chopsticks inside.
Jaxon seems uninterested in continuing the conversation, so I let it drop for the moment as we both dig into our plates of sushi.
“How are things going with you and Kelsey?” Jaxon asks.
I consider acting like I don’t know what he’s talking about, but the truth is I need someone to talk to about this.
After our not-date dates and then that night together in Berlin, it felt like we were something, especially after Jaxon all but gave us his blessing.
But then our plane touched down in Tokyo, and Kelsey went right back to being coworker Kelsey.
We still went out to dinner during our day off at the restaurant she’d picked out—a little restaurant hidden away in a back alley with only six seats in the entire place.
We had a front-row seat as the chef prepared our four-course dinner on the flat, stainless-steel stove in front of us.
It was delicious, though the image of the live lobster being placed directly onto the cooktop with a few ice cubes and then covered with a circular, domed lid will haunt me forever.
But we didn’t hold hands as we walked there or back, and when we reached our hotel, Kelsey went back to her room, declaring she had too much work to do to come to mine when I’d asked.
I’d been willing to chalk it up to tiredness on our first night in Tokyo, since we’d literally been on a plane the whole day, but I knew, when she’d turned me down the second night, that we’re on two different pages.
It hadn’t stopped me from trying again last night, unwilling to let this thing between us fizzle out. The relief I’d felt when she agreed to spend the night with me—I can’t even begin to describe it, though I tried to show it to her with every kiss and every touch last night.
“It’s confusing,” I say, answering Jaxon’s question honestly.
“Oh, yeah?” he asks, raising an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”
“I think she likes me, but she also seems fine with just hooking up occasionally.”
“And you’re…not okay with hooking up?”
“I mean, I’m not complaining about that part, but I was pretty clear the first night that I wasn’t okay with it being just about sex,” I say.
“Ahh,” is Jaxon’s only reply.
Looking around the empty space, I realize we haven’t heard many notifications of someone coming up to Jaxon’s room with him lately.
“Speaking of just sex,” I say. “Aren’t you supposed to be a rock star? Why are you spending your night with me?”
Jaxon chuckles darkly. “Kelsey might be to blame for that too.”
“Wha-what do you mean?” A blackness is rising in my chest, and it takes all my self-control not to let it out.
Jaxon’s chuckle turns brighter as he glances at me. “You should see your face. Fuck, man. I obviously don’t like Kelsey like that.”
Dropping my head into my hands, I laugh at myself. “Right.”
“She just reminds me of who I used to be, and apparently, that guy isn’t interested in sleeping around.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, it’s really fucking inconvenient. I used to have fun, Carter. Fun. Now it feels like I can barely remember what the word means if I’m not up on stage.”
“And Kelsey is to blame for that?”
“Partially, I guess. I think you two being around just reminds me of Wild Bluffs.”
I nod in understanding, pleased it’s not actually about Kelsey herself, before realizing I don’t actually understand. “Wait. Why does Wild Bluffs make it so you can’t sleep around?”
“It’s complicated,” Jaxon says with a sigh.
“I’m pretty smart.”
Clearly undecided on if he should tell me or not, Jaxon takes a long pull from his drink before saying, “I brought a woman back with me after the first show in Vancouver, ready to continue my normal pattern—the adrenaline from shows, it’s fucking brutal—and as I was, well, helping her out of her clothes, I swear Izzy popped into the room with me.
She was lounging in the chair in the corner of the room, her fucking legs draped over the padded arm as she gave her unfiltered opinion on my performance.
Do you know how hard it is to fuck another woman when Izzy’s laugh is flowing through your head? ”
“No. Thank God.”
“Yeah, well, I’d like it to go away, and it’s happened every time I brought a woman back to my room this tour.”
Thinking back to the beginning of our conversation and his comment about who he used to be, I ask, “And you think Izzy is the embodiment of past you? You don’t think it’s maybe about…her?”
“No.” Jaxon cuts me off. “I think it has to be about her representing who I was when I first started playing music. I always swore to myself I wouldn’t be the typical rock star, getting drunk or high or both all day every day, and sleeping with all the groupies.”
“You don’t do those things,” I remind him.
“Tell that to Izzy.”
I lean back against the cushion behind me. “Maybe you should tell that to Izzy. The imaginary one or the real one—dealer’s choice.”
Jaxon glares at me over the rim of his drink. “No. The stage of my life where I tell Izzy every little detail about my life is long gone. I just need her to leave me alone.”
I shrug. “Okay.” If he wants to continue to be haunted by the specter of his very much alive former best friend, that’s his prerogative. “Though it might help. And I bet Izzy would like to hear from you.”
I actually don’t know that. I know things are weird between them since he jumped town all those years ago, but I can’t imagine she wouldn’t want to see the guy she was best friends with for so many years.
And Kelsey likes Jaxon. If he’d done anything too terrible, she’d still hate him on her sister’s behalf.
Jaxon shakes his head as if forcing some thought out. “Anyway, we were talking about you and Kelsey.”
“I don’t know what else to say,” I respond. “I want her, and it’s seeming more and more like she doesn’t want me. At least, she doesn’t want me for anything more than the occasional night here and there.”
“But you’re still going to take the occasional night because it’s better than the alternative?” Jaxon asks, a knowing smile crossing his face.
“I’ll take anything she’s willing to give me.”
And I would. I don’t want to be just the guy she’s sleeping around with when she needs a good lay, but I will be that guy if the alternative is going back to being nothing.
I know I said I wouldn’t, that I was only interested if it was something more than one night, but it turns out I was wrong.
Now that I know what it feels like to be with Kelsey, I can’t give her up.
All of my eighteen-year-old fantasies are coming true, and it turns out reality is so much better.
“Not to be that guy, but why wouldn’t she want to date you? Is she anti-marriage or something?”
I sigh. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’m sure it comes back to her ex.
Even as a teenager, Kelsey was remarkably independent, never relying on anyone else for help, and after I heard about what happened with her first company, it makes sense that she would be slow to trust. Though the thought has slithered into my mind occasionally that it might just be me she doesn’t trust, especially with Jaxon’s long-term protection contract hanging in the balance.
“It’s not my story to tell, but her ex was a dick, and so she doesn’t trust many people. Or maybe she doesn’t trust me. I did fuck up a couple of times and not have her back like I should’ve.”
“Maybe. Or she doesn’t trust herself,” Jaxon offers.
I laugh. “Have you met Kelsey? She’s the most confident person I know.”
The look on Jaxon’s face suggests he doesn’t agree, but there is no way Kelsey doesn’t know exactly how amazing she is.
She’s the smartest person in any room, she is fucking gorgeous, and if that’s not enough, she actually gives a shit about the people in her life, including dumbasses like Nash. She’s perfect.
“You’ve got it so fucking bad,” Jaxon says, finishing off his drink.
“I’m the last person you should be taking romance advice from, since I’ve never had a relationship that lasted longer than the length of time I was in a city for a show—and now I can’t even get it up without picturing my old best friend’s face—but if I were you, I’d get my shit together and figure out a way to convince Kelsey you’re someone worth keeping around. ”
As I lie awake in bed that night, alone, staring at the ceiling of my room, I know he’s right. I’m just not sure how I’m going to convince her I’m worth it. Especially with this rivalry inserting itself between us, giving her an easy out.