“Do you ever feel like you might have skipped some steps in your career?” Tessa asks Jared as they wait together in the green room. He’s resting against the wall with his hands across his chest while she’s perched on the long, bright red couch with her laptop resting on her knees.

“Sometimes,” Jared says. “Especially when I call my parents on the weekend and they keep asking me to get the bands’ autographs. I only went into personal security a few years ago, you know? Didn’t think I’d be doing national tours this early.”

“Right? It’s just… so unlikely. It feels like I cheated.”

Jared looks down at his nails, before turning his gaze back up to her and giving her a cheeky grin. “Nothing wrong with it, though. Is there? You’re here now unless you want to take a few steps back?”

“No,” Tessa says. “Of course not. I just… I guess, I just have to earn it?”

Jared is prevented from answering when Sersha and Harper return to the green room, their arms linked at the elbows. They’d gone to the bathroom together, and Tessa had politely declined their invitation to join them. She still has edits to do.

“Still at the computer?” Sersha says, making a graceful gesture in Tessa’s direction. “Tessa, love, as one workaholic to another, put the fucking computer away.”

“I’ve just got one more paragraph to fix—”

“Nope!”

Harper takes the laptop from Tessa and puts it on the table, mercifully leaving it open so Tessa doesn’t lose her work. Tessa briefly panics until Sersha reaches over to save the document. Then both women take seats on either side of Tessa, barricading her in.

“Why don’t you two ever watch the show?” Tessa asks because in all the time she’s known these women, she’s never seen them actually watching their boyfriends perform.

Harper waves her hand in an almost fond slash dismissive way. “Unless the boys are planning a grand gesture, their shows are usually pretty similar.”

“Grand gesture?”

Harper and Sersha share a look over Tessa’s head.

“Tessa, allow me to introduce you to several years of escalating fuckups known as ‘Black Lilith’s courting strategies,” Sersha says.

And so Tessa is treated to a blow-by-blow account of how each of the women joined the Black Lilith family. She is awestruck at first at all the drama, mostly because she thinks that there’s a lot more to each of the stories than Sersha and Harper are telling her, but she’s too enthralled to ask leading questions or to try and fill in the blanks. She’s itching to take notes. She thinks about reaching for her laptop, but after a moment she decides not to. Mostly because it might break the flow of what they’re saying. Also because it’s funny.

“Logan wrote a song for her?” Tessa asks, grinning as she tries to imagine it.

“Yep. This is before either of us joined up, by the way,” Sersha says. “But yeah, they’d been dating in secret for weeks, then broke up. Then Slate thought that he was helping them get together. Then Logan decides that the only way to win her back is to improve a song for her in front of a crowd full of people.”

“Next level drama queens, the lot of them,” says Harper, taking a sip of water from a bottle she took off of the table. In the corner, Jared is still leaning against the wall and looking amused. “Sersh, tell her about the Tommy thing.”

“Right, so Tommy and I started dating, okay? And then Tommy’s ex plants one on him, and I think he’s cheating. So I leave the country.”

Tessa raises an eyebrow. “Naturally,” she says. “That’s not at all next level drama queen.”

“Hush you,” Sersha says, winking. “We’re perfect for each other. Can’t you tell? Anyway… Tommy Skypes my mam, finds out where I am, flies to Ireland, stalks me to a favorite spot of mine, and after I’m done trying to beat him to a pulp, he explains himself. Then he and Logan sing a duet for Mikayla and me at their next show.”

Tessa smothers her smile and leans over to the table to grab a Coke. When she sees Harper’s disapproving look, her hand skims the Coke bottle and grabs the water instead. Harper nods approvingly.

“Harper, did you get a song?”

“Nah, I got a limo and a bouquet of roses.”

“What?”

Harper explains to Tessa how Slate had shown up to their hotel, standing up through the roof of a white limo, and then scaled the wall of the hotel to reach her on the balcony.

“That’s… dangerous,” Tessa says. “Wait… so each member of the band managed to colossally fuck things up with their girlfriend, and then had to make a grand gesture to get them back? That sounds, I don’t know… ridiculous? Like, surely they’re not that much of a collective disaster.”

Sersha sighs and rests her head on Tessa’s shoulder. “That, my dear, is exactly what they are.”

“And we love them for it,” Harper adds.

“But we also want to kill them for it,” Sersha continues.

Tessa shakes her head. “But… they’d dated people before, right?”

“I mean, I guess?” Sersha says. “I don’t know. I get the feeling that… for Slate and Logan and Dash… they didn’t really think about dating much after they started the band.”

“They started the band in high school?”

“Indeed they did,” Sersha nods sagely.

Harper clicks her tongue and stretches one arm over her head, showing off her toned stomach muscles as she goes. She’s wearing a skin-tight blouse that seems designed to make everyone looking at her want to go home and do some sit-ups.

Above them, the stage is rocking. The green room is right beneath the stage, so Tessa had assumed that it would be ridiculously loud, but generally, it’s just the vibrations from the speakers that are bleeding through the ceiling above them. Thinking about vibrations gets Tessa thinking about the vibrations from the railing that Dash had made her sit on, which makes heat rise in her chest and she has to clear her throat.

“So Black Lilith is a collective dating disaster,” Tessa says. Sersha and Harper nod wryly. “That’s sad.”

“Yeah,” Harper says. “But, hey! Maybe Dash will be the exception?”

“How is it going with Dash, anyway?” Sersha asks.

Tessa ducks her head, her eyes drifting over to Jared who’s still waiting on the other side of the room. He’s schooled his expression into one of blank, watchful boredom. She wonders if he has an interest in this conversation. Tessa and Jared haven’t been able to talk much since he’d flirted with her at the airport, but she’s still hyper aware of him whenever they are in the room together, or whenever he’s following her and the rest of the women between hotels and venues.

Jared might want a relationship. In fact, he probably does. He’s not a rockstar who’s more used to being with groupies than he is with real people like Dash seems to be.

That’s a thought that Tessa hasn’t really given much thought to. If the men of Black Lilith are a collective dating disaster, and Dash hasn’t dated much since high school, then maybe he just doesn’t know how to date? Maybe he’s never given it any thought. He’s had sex on tap since Black Lilith got famous, and he’s got Tessa as a friend and a fuck buddy. Why bother with a girlfriend?

“Dash is… my friend,” Tessa says.

“So Tommy didn’t totally cockblock you when he got high in Manhattan, and decided that he wanted to eat the uncooked cake batter in the kitchen?” Sersha asks, raising an eyebrow.

“People can be friends and still be in positions where they can be cockblocked,” Tessa says evenly.

Jared’s lips quirk up, but otherwise, he doesn’t react.

Harper cocks her head at Tessa, before sharing a look over Sersha’s head. “So… okay, I’m gonna ask… what is the nature of your relationship with our favorite guitarist?”

Tessa can’t help but grin at the word choice. It sounds like the sort of thing that she might hear Scott asking when Jackie finally gets a significant other. Probably with a BB gun across his lap and a glare on his face.

“Like I said, he’s my best friend.”

“So you… turned him down?”

“Huh?” Tessa gives Sersha a look, assuming that she misheard the woman. Against the wall, Jared is checking his nails again. “He hasn’t asked me out?”

“He hasn’t?” Sersha and Harper shout together, making Tessa flinch.

Jared, for his part, doesn’t move. Tessa can’t tell if he’s just well-trained, and therefore not affected by loud noises, or if he’s as surprised by Tessa as Sersha and Harper seem to be.

The two women stare at Tessa like she’s made the most profoundly strange comment either of them have ever heard.

“But he is completely infatuated with you?” Sersha asks.

“Seriously, it would be creepy if we didn’t know that you’ve known each other for months.”

“No, I get that,” Tessa says. “But, like, he hasn’t asked me out. I don’t think he’s interested in making it a thing, you know?”

Sersha and Harper don’t need to say anything about that, their expressions say it all.

The door opens next to Jared, and he quickly pushes himself away from the wall, turning to face it, but it turns out to just be Mikayla with her cheeks flushed and a cheerful smile on her face. Unlike Sersha and Harper, Mikayla watches every show. But not because she’s infatuated with the band, although that is probably a factor. She watches the show because she is literally the one person holding everything together. Tessa thinks that if the world were fair, she would be focusing the entire ten thousand word article on Mikayla being a queen, but Bass Note will probably not be happy about that.

Tessa will spend a few thousand words expounding on how wonderful Mikayla is. If Rolling Stone doesn't like it, then she can figure it out in the edits.

“Hey, the show’s nearly over. What’s going on?”

“Dash hasn’t asked Tessa out yet,” Sersha says, as though it’s the greatest injustice that she’s ever heard.

Mikayla raises her eyebrows, but otherwise, she doesn’t seem to react too much. “Maybe he’s planning a grand gesture,” she says, shrugging.

Tessa raises her hand into the air, drawing the attention of the other women. “Um… I’m not comfortable with that?” she says. “No grand gestures for me, please?”

Mikayla nods with sympathy. “I understand that. If only the Todd boys would understand that.”

“It’s not a genetic thing. I honestly think there’s something in the water at the brownstone,” Harper says. She’s finished her water bottle and is twirling it in her hands with the kind of coordination that Tessa can only dream of. “Maybe even some collective head trauma.”

Sersha, Harper and Mikayla debate amongst themselves whether the band’s weird obsession with grand gestures is a problem that they’ve come to recently, or whether it’s a problem they’ve had all of their lives and, after a moment, Tessa’s hand creeps toward her laptop. When neither Harper nor Sersha slaps her hand away, she drops it into her lap and pulls up the paragraph that she had been working on before. Though, now that she can finally work on it again, she finds that she can’t focus on it. She’s too busy mulling over what the other women had told her.

Later, when the band is moving back to the hotel, Logan and Mikayla lead the way through the waves of fans waiting outside of the venue with the rest of the band and their significant others bringing up the rear. Dash and Tessa are at the very back of the party, but Dash gets pulled away pretty quickly to take selfies with fans. He gives Tessa’s shoulder a squeeze before he goes, sending her an apologetic look over his shoulder before he joins the women in the line.

Tessa chooses not to be jealous of the fans who press their breasts against his chest when he takes pictures with him, or the significant looks they give him when they tell him what big fans they are. She chooses not to be jealous, because she’s not in an exclusive relationship with Dash, and she doesn’t think that she will be anytime soon. Why should she be jealous of women who want to sleep with Dash when she’s in the exact same boat, and he’s avoided the subject pretty successfully.

“Everything all right?”

Tessa jumps, but it’s only Jared speaking into her ear.

“Yeah, sure. Hey, sorry if that conversation in the green room was a little awkward for you?”

“Not nearly as awkward as it seemed to be for you,” Jared replies.

There’s a shout, and they both turn to see Dash being enveloped by a young woman in a skirt so short that Tessa thought it was a belt at first. She raises herself up to plant a kiss on his lips, which Tessa could have considered a form of assault if Dash weren’t holding the woman up by the hips so she wouldn’t fall. The security guards arrive pretty quickly to pull her off of him, but they can’t wipe the embarrassed smile off of his face.

“Glad I’m not those guys,” Jared says, nodding to the security guards who are flanking Dash.

“Considering he’s been attacked by crazy fans before…” Tessa says. She watches the woman who kissed her best friend get escorted away.

He’s a rockstar. He can have any woman here, and he knows it. Why would he bother getting exclusive with one woman?

“So, I actually wanted to ask you something,” says Jared as he and Tessa keep walking through the crowd, leaving Dash to his fans. “But, ah… after hearing your conversation tonight, I should probably ask something else first.”

“Oh?” Tessa thinks that she knows where this is going, but she’s not about to come out and ask just in case she’s wrong.

“Are you interested in Dash?” Jared asks.

He’s forthright, Tessa has to give him that.

“Honestly? Yes,” Tessa says. “But… I guess I’m open to other offers.”

And as soon as she says it, she feels weird about it. Probably because she’s not open to other offers, and she really just wants Dash to ask her to be his girlfriend already and stop holding out on her. She wants him to drop his pants and give her what he’s promising since the day he sent that dickpic by accident. Mostly, though, she wants the security of knowing that they belong to each other in a way that doesn’t extend to just friendship.

But she figures that’s not going to happen.

“In that case,” Jared says, grinning down at Tessa and reaching out to push some of her hair over her shoulder. “Would you like to have coffee with me?”

Tessa sees another fan kiss Dash’s cheek out of the corner of her eye.

“Sure,” she replies, pushing an answering smile on her face to match his.