Tessa isn’t insecure, she never has been. She knows that she’s pretty enough, and she’s confident in her sexuality. Ex-boyfriends would often tell her how cute, sexy, or beautiful she is.
But she’s also realistic. And over the next few days, as Dash continuously avoids the subject of their relationship, she realizes that he’s probably not interested in her beyond a fuck buddy. She tries to bring it up, but he dodges, or distracts her, or brings up her writing, or tells a joke. Dash is still as sweet and attentive as ever, but it doesn’t take Tessa long to realize that his interest in her does not extend to them being anything more than friends with benefits.
Tessa tells herself that she’s cool with that. Dash is her best friend, and he’s not comfortable being anything more than that, then she’s not going to risk what they have by trying to make more out of it. She might be a romantic, who prefers being exclusive with the guys that she’s with, but Tessa likes to cuddle up to guys and enjoy their company without sex as an end-game or a forgone conclusion. But that doesn’t mean that she can force Dash into a relationship just to satisfy herself.
“Sorry, Tessa? Did I lose you?”
“No, Tommy…” Tessa quickly straightens her reading glasses and puts her fingers back on the keyboard, forcing herself away from thoughts of Dash and what they are to each other. She’s working. She can’t afford to be distracted. “Go on?”
Sersha and the others have gone out to get some take-out, but Tommy and Tessa had already carved out this time to have their interview. Tessa is sitting at the desk with her fingers resting on her laptop’s keyboard, while Tommy lays on the bed with his hands resting behind his head. They’ve been in New Orleans for a couple of days, but tomorrow they’ll be heading for Houston, and Tessa doesn’t think she’ll get the chance to talk to the band properly until afterward—there will be too many shows then. The next time she’ll get the chance to talk to any of them in any depth, will probably be in their next tour stop in Mexico City.
“Okay, well like I said, I usually think of a good line or a concept,” Tommy goes on. They’re huddled together in the hotel room he’s sharing with Sersha. “If that’s cool, then I usually build a song around it.”
“Can you give me an example?”
Tommy thinks about it for a moment. Tessa has noticed that he tends to give his words some thought before he speaks, unlike Dash and Slate, who tend to barrel in without thinking, or Logan, who gives the appearance that he’s thinking his words through but is actually just in the process of putting his foot in his mouth.
“There’s one song, called ‘How Dare You,’ that I wrote after an ex-girlfriend broke up with me. I wanted it to be about her, but it ended up being about Logan.”
“Logan?” Tessa asks. She’s heard the song, and it’s kind of rage-inducing. It had made her want to smack whoever it was who had inspired it.
“Well, he was mostly responsible for the breakup. Actually, no…” Tommy sits up so that he can see her clearly, “… Logan didn’t do anything wrong, but I didn’t know that at the time. There was a bit of a mess, and some stuff with money, and basically he let me believe that he broke me and my girlfriend up.”
“That’s… brutal.” Tessa can’t tell if she’s missing vital information or if Tommy is just speaking too quickly. She makes a note to herself to ask Dash for clarification later on. “So the song was about her to begin with?”
“It sounds cheesy and cliché, but I kind of write to get all my thoughts out. Otherwise, they pile up and get in the way of everything,” Tommy tells her. He smiles this self-deprecating smile, as though he thinks that what he’s saying must make him sound a little weird. “It’s kind of a mess in my head, and putting it into words helps me sort through it. At the time, I’d wanted to figure out why she’d left me, and then Logan… or, what I’d thought Logan had done… kept getting in the way. It ended up hijacking the whole song.”
“So what was the concept that you started with?”
Tommy bites his lip. “Why do people hurt other people?” he murmurs.
“And did you figure it out?”
Silence falls between them for a beat too long. Then Tommy shrugs and gives her his most cheeky smile. “Nope!” he says. “But I’m not a philosopher. I don’t think that music should be in the business of answering questions. Maybe its goal should be to put the questions out there, and then we can all figure them out together.”
Tessa quickly taps away at her laptop, desperate to catch everything he’s saying. Most of it is pure gold. She’d known the moment she met him that Tommy would end up being really quotable. Not that she wants to compare, but Slate’s interview had mostly been about him deflecting her questions rather than answering any of them. She’ll need to work harder on that guy if she wants to get to the heart of him.
But that thought makes her wonder. Should she be trying to get to the heart of these men? She’s been given complete creative freedom because they’re all assuming that she won’t make fools out of them. And even though she has no intention of doing anything like that, she still wonders what they could consider ‘being made a fool of.’ Is plastering their private thoughts on a magazine going to be too personal? Is Tommy saying this stuff here and now because he’s comfortable with her, only to feel exposed and vulnerable when he reads it in print later on?
Tessa wants to get to the heart of these men, mostly because she thinks it will make for a better story, but also because she’s genuinely curious. Something about the way that they interact. The seamless way that they fit together as though they’ve been designed for each other, makes her wonder what it’s about them that makes them so special. Because they are special. Any idiot can see that.
“Do you always go deep like that?” Tessa asks Tommy, pushing aside thoughts of creative integrity for another time. It’s the same thing she does with thoughts of Dash.
“Nah,” Tommy says, waving his hand. “You’ve heard our song, ‘Termites in the Toothpaste’? That’s about Logan and Dash’s first apartment.”
“Do you ever draw inspiration from anything outside of your experiences?”
Tommy bites his lip again, the fingers of his right hand clicking as he considers the question. “Well… okay… take the song I wrote for your little sister,” he says.
Tessa already thanked him for it. She bought him a whole packet of chocolate-chip cookies as a thank you, but she’d gotten the feeling that he was more delighted with the texts she’d shown him from Jackie gushing about how great the song is.
“I have no idea what it’s like to be transgender, so I can’t write from that perspective,” Tommy says. “I know what it’s like to want to change, and to feel like I’m looking at the wrong person when I look in the mirror, but it’s nothing like what she went through. So I had to look at it in a different way.”
“What way was that?”
Tommy shrugs. “Just… wanting to understand, I guess?” he says. “Just putting out the questions and hoping that someone will answer.”
Nodding, Tessa types that out. She thinks that Jackie will probably appreciate that. Jackie sometimes talks about how people with good intentions will try to speak for her. Allies who would call out transgender microaggressions, only to make a gaffe a few minutes later. Jackie isn’t a poster child for trans youth, and it annoyed her when people would try to put her in yet another gender-role box. So the fact that Tommy came to her with questions, instead of answers, delighted her.
“What about you?” Tommy asks.
“Huh?”
“What inspires you to write?”
Tessa shakes her head quickly. “This interview isn’t about me,” she says.
Tommy stretches his hands above his head and falls back onto the bed, kicking his legs up into the air and letting them flop down.
“The others will be coming back soon. And then Slate will make a dirty joke, and Dash will drape himself over you like a cat, so the interview will probably be over then. Besides, I feel like I hardly know you? Except what I’ve heard from Dash.”
Dash, who’s all hot words and sexy moves, but who hasn’t once tried to get off with her. And that’s something else that confuses Tessa to no end—the fact that Dash has made it a point to avoid letting her touch him. He seems so fixated on getting Tessa off, that it doesn’t even seem to occur to him that he has needs too. Ordinarily, this would delight Tessa to no end. But now, looking at it from a few weeks of experience with Dash, she’s starting to wonder if he doesn’t want to sleep with her or let her touch him because he wants to maintain distance. Like maybe sex is something he does with groupies, but not with his friends. Maybe he’s holding out on her because he doesn’t want to get her hopes up.
She doesn’t even know why she keeps coming back to the thought of being in a relationship with Dash. They’re happy the way that they are and there’s no need to escalate. But Tessa’s a romantic at heart, and she likes the idea of being exclusive with someone. To know that they’re happy together, that they don’t need anyone else, that they don’t need crowds or groupies.
Off topic.
“There’s not much to me,” Tessa says finally.
Tommy raises his head up a little to look over at her. “Not much? Not likely.”
Tessa runs her hand through her hair and rubs her nose. Somewhere outside, a drill sounds and Tessa realizes that someone must be doing construction nearby. Why is it that people always do construction near hotels? At both of the hotels that they’ve been in these last few days, there has been construction both times.
The thing is, she knows that there is something to her. Just like she knows that she’s pretty and that most men would be interested in dating her if they weren’t rockstars. But right now, she wants to stay focused on her job. She doesn’t want to break and become too chummy especially since she’s given herself a chunk of time when she’s supposed to be working.
“I’d rather just stick to the interviewing right now. Maybe later, when we’re eating, I can tell you more about me?”
“Sure, that works.”
So they kept going, with Tessa asking leading questions so she could get a better sense of Tommy’s process. She wants to get into the backstory of this character, of course, but right now she doesn’t know if she’s ready to start pushing. The fact that she instinctively pulled back when the questions about his ex-girlfriend were on the tip of her tongue proved that. Instead, she’d gone for safety. Not exactly what she’s being paid for, but Tessa is confident that in a few weeks, they’ll have reached the point where she can ask those kinds of questions. In the meantime, she knows that she can rely on Dash to give her whatever information she needs.
Sure enough, when the others returned with take-out in hand, Dash draped himself over Tessa and Slate started cracking jokes, breaking the interviewing tone immediately. Tommy and Sersha ate fried chicken on the bed, while the rest of the band sat around with their legs crossed in a circle like they were having a picnic. Tessa finally put her laptop away after Logan insisted.
“You’re off the clock now, Tessa. Go easy on yourself.”
Easy for you to say, she thought as she joined Dash on the floor, accepting a piece of chicken from him. You’re already well-established. My career hasn’t even started, and I’m already interviewing one of the biggest bands in the country. No pressure or anything.