Nick glanced back and smiled, the warmth never reaching his eyes. Then he kept going out the front door, letting it thud shut in his wake.
* § *
“How y’all doing tonight, LA?” Simon’s shout to the crowd at Rave made them scream even louder. “Who’s ready to fucking rock?”
From behind the kit, Jazz flexed her foot on the pedal. Something felt off and she couldn’t figure out what. Between Gray’s strange lurking around her and then his last second demand for a setlist change, he definitely wasn’t acting right. He’d insisted “Sugar Kiss” come off the list, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why. She’d thought that over their past few days apart, he’d cooled off a bit from his sexist stance but evidently not. The weird thing was that he’d really seemed to be coming around yet tonight he’d backslid big time.
Even more oddly, he’d hovered around her offstage, while onstage he hadn’t looked at her once. Normally they teased each other before a show, exchanging winks and quips to break the pre-performance tension. Tonight he hadn’t even made eye contact. He wasn’t engaging the crowd either while Simon went through his revving up routine. Normally Gray got into it too. His focus tonight remained entirely on his guitar.
“Get up on your feet, LA!”
At Simon’s directive, she forced a smile and started the steady buildup to “Balls To The Wall.” The song was fairly straightforward and didn’t require a lot of thought on her part, just mainly keeping the beat, so she was able to watch Gray. He didn’t respond to Nick’s good-natured—usually—posturing and taunts and barely seemed aware of Simon’s showboating across the stage.
Their lead singer was in rare form tonight, owning the space and sucking up so much of the energy in the club that it began to feel like they were Simon’s back-up band. But that helped disguise Gray’s lack of involvement beyond his manic playing. Rather than take part in the band’s antics, he focused on the instrument he cradled like a lover, plucking out notes that shrieked and wailed and raged. All of his passion funneled through his hands and became something inescapably beautiful.
And throughout, she counted off the beat, serving as the backbone to the music that roared around her just loudly enough to quiet the questions in her mind.
They went through their modified setlist without faltering, but their crazy cohesive energy from the other night had vanished. On the surface, everything seemed fine. Nick even bantered a bit with Simon and Deak in between “Lit” and “Ripcord,” which was about as rare as Gray not looking up from the strings.
Stylistically, he was perfect. Didn’t miss a freaking note. His face, though, never changed. He wore a stoic mask, the playful Gray from Tribute driven so far underground that she wondered if she’d imagined the whole thing.
The end of the show took a lifetime to reach and also came way too fast. She wasn’t ready for him to turn that mask on her. Seeing those eyes she loved so much frosted over like the coldest winter day hammered spikes of ice in her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. She didn’t know how to reach him when he was like that—the way he’d been for much of the past year.
But God, since they’d been together, it had been different. Yes, they’d only had a string of days together so far. She’d hoped it was a beginning.
She refused to believe it wasn’t.
As the stage cleared out, she peeled off her fingerless gloves and flexed her achy hands, waiting for the right moment to pounce on Gray. Turns out she didn’t have to bother. Once Gray handed off his guitar to the crew, he appeared at her side, closer than a shadow.
“You were fantastic tonight.” He stroked her cheek and gave her his beloved Gray smile, the one he saved for her alone. Not the public cordial one, or even the sex-personified rock star one. The one he’d been flashing at her since the first day in his parents’ living room, when he’d discovered she played the guitar too.
The first link in a chain of so many. She wanted that chain to be unbreakable. To be too strong to weaken or corrode. Nothing—not her goals, or her ambition, or even her principles—mattered more than building a family with Gray. She hoped she could have it all. She would try her hardest to make it happen. But if she had to choose, she would always choose him.
Because he had always chosen her.
“Thanks. So were you. You were kind of into your own thing, huh?” she teased, not expecting the flash of heat that came into his eyes.
“I’m into you, always.” His thumb smoothed over her lower lip. “Come back with me tonight. Don’t make me sleep alone again.”