In the end, Tessa decides on a nice purple top from Sersha and a pair of black jeans from Harper, with necklaces from Mikayla. The other three women look really pleased with themselves when they’re finished, and Tessa has to admit that she’s happy with what they have come up with. And she’s even happier that they support her in her frustrations with Dash. They were all his friends first, and it could have been easy for them to just take his side.

Tessa takes the clothes back to her room and leaves them on the bed, climbing into her shower and letting the hot water soothe her. Jared has planned the night. She’s just going to show up and try to have a good time. Because he is a good guy. Not a second-best option, but a good option in and of himself. She mustn’t let herself forget that.

When she finishes showering, she realizes that someone is knocking on her door again. She quickly wraps a towel around herself and rushes out, answering the door with her hair still dripping.

“What did you forget? Oh…”

It’s not Mikayla. It’s Dash.

Shit

He looks good. Dash’s wearing a Batman shirt with a sports coat over the top of it that’s tight over his shoulders and gives his muscles some definition. His jeans are almost reminiscent of Slate’s, tight in the right places, yet loose enough to be masculine.

Ugh, why does he have to look so good?

He looks Tessa up and down, and she feels herself starting to heat up when his pupils dilate. It’s not like he hasn’t seen her in less clothing than this. He’s probably still got the pictures in his phone. But it’s a little weird, almost forbidden, for him to see her like this in the flesh.

“Sorry,” he says, not looking sorry at all. He looks almost angry, though the hint of arousal around his eyes does soften that a bit. “Can I come in?”

Tessa thinks that might be a bad idea since she’s actually getting ready for a date with another man. But she moves anyway. She steps aside to let him into the room and closes the door behind him, hating the way that she leans over to smell his cologne as he passes her.

“I… uh… don’t have a lot of time.”

“Yeah, because you’re going on a date. With Jared.”

Tessa hears the annoyance in his tone, and the reproach, which is surprising. “You spoke to Mikayla.”

“No, I spoke to Jared,” Dash replies. He sits on the bed and glances over at the clothes there, waiting for Tessa to put them on. “I just wanted to come and see if it was true, but I guess it is.”

Tessa wants to cover herself. She feels way too exposed right now, standing in front of him in just a towel with her hair still wet from the shower. She wants to go and put her moisturizer on and start getting ready, instead of standing here, getting cold, knowing that this is going to wind up devolving into an inevitable argument.

“What did he say?” Tessa asks after the silence between them begins to fill to the point of bursting.

“He wanted to know whether you have any allergies,” Dash says. He’s speaking through gritted teeth, and Tessa can see the way his chest and stomach are taut with tension. “Since I’m your best friend, he thought I would be the person to ask.”

“I told you,” Tessa says. “I told you I had a date. I wasn’t lying or hiding anything.”

Dash purses his lips and looks away. He looks… upset. Not annoyed or angry. Though that is the tone he uses when he speaks. He looks almost sad. Dash’s eyes are turned down, and his chin tucked into his neck, and Tessa almost wishes that she could reach out to him, but she holds herself back. Dash had made his feelings about her clear.

Just sex—nothing more.

“Dash. I told you that I was going on a date. This isn’t news.”

“No, you’re right.”

“So why are you upset?”

“Who says I’m upset?” he asks. He stands up again and tries to reach for her, and she pulls away. Not out of fear, but out of concern that his touch will make her want to drop the towel, and right now it’s the only shield she has. He looks hurt anyway. “Seriously?”

“I’m not sure why you’re here,” Tessa says, pushing aside the moment of weakness. “I told you what I wanted, and you said you didn’t want that. So now I’m going out with someone else.”

“You said I could keep you,” Dash says. He’s not shouting, but he’s forceful enough that Tessa can feel his voice echoing in her chest like a bass line in one of Black Lilith’s songs. “You said it. Remember? In Chicago?”

Tessa does remember. She remembers sitting with him on the couch in the green room with their shoulders touching. She had been so giddy because she’d finally gotten to meet the man who could make her weak in the knees with a single text message. They’d talked forever, almost forgetting that there were other people in the room. She had been dressed in Ravenclaw colors, and he had been wearing a Severus Snape shirt even though he’s a Hufflepuff.

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Dash.”

Dash’s hands clench and unclench until he finally folds his arms across his chest and looks away from her.

“We’re still friends,” Tessa says. “I still want to be friends, Dash.”

“But… you’re… he’s… ” Dash shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it, and Tessa turns away to take the robe that’s hanging in the cupboard. Wordlessly, she drapes it over her shoulders and lets the towel drop. “He’s the one who’s going to keep you, now.”

That’s better, she thinks, cinching the robe around her waist and stepping out of the towel that’s pooled around her feet.

 “Nobody is keeping me. It’s just one date. It might not even lead anywhere.”

“He’s not good enough for you.”

She turns back to Dash, frowning. “You don’t get to decide that.”

“You’re going to leave us and spend all your time with him.”

“Considering he never leaves you guys, then nothing will change,” Tessa replies. She’s starting to get more and more annoyed now, but she channels as much energy as she can into remaining calm. If she and Dash get into a knock-down drag-out over this, she’ll be in no mood to see Jared later. “And I’ve only been here a few weeks. If anything, the biggest change would be me staying. I asked you to be with me. You’d said you weren’t interested, and that you didn’t want things to change between us.”

“I don’t,” Dash says. “Why does anything have to change? Why can’t we just stay the way we are?”

Tessa wishes that she could hear what he’s thinking. She feels like there’s something there, on the tip of his tongue, some thought that’s just out of his reach but will make all of this make sense. She doesn’t dare to hope that he might be changing his mind about their relationship. She doesn’t want to be disappointed again.

 “Because I can’t live like that. I’ve told you that.”

Dash lets out a noise that sounds like a mixture of frustration and desire. “You’re being unreasonable.”

“Unreas… oh, hell no. You did not just pull that card on me, Dash Todd!”

“If you could just be happy with the way things are, then nothing needs to change.”

“Life is change, Dash. Everything changes. People change. Get over it and grow up.”

Dash growls and runs his hand through his hair. Tessa sees the moment that he decides to switch tactics. She sees it in the way his hands drop down to his sides and the way his head cocks as he sizes her up. And even though she’s wearing a robe now, and she’s much less exposed, she feels completely naked.

“Has he ever made you come so hard that you forget where you are?” Dash asks. Tessa immediately feels her cheeks getting warm. “I could. You know I could.”

You already have, she thinks to herself.

He’s looking at her with those eyes that seem designed to trap a woman, his body leaning toward hers like it’s taking everything in him not to slam her against the wall. And honestly, Tessa is glad that he’s holding himself back because she knows the moment he tries anything she’ll be lost. He’s using that voice he’d used that night that they climbed up to the top of the stage, and he brought her to orgasm with nothing but his words and a railing.

What he could do to her now, she can only imagine.

“If I just wanted sex, I wouldn’t be going on a date with someone else,” Tessa says. Her voice is harsher than she’d thought it would be, and she knows that it’s at least partly to do with the way Dash is looking at her. Like she has to erect as many walls as possible between them or risk him slamming them all down with nothing more than a well-turned phrase. “If that’s all you can offer then it’s not good enough.”

Dash recoils like he’s been struck. Tessa reaches out to him before she realizes what she’s doing, and turns her hand up at the last moment so that she’s clutching her robe closed over her chest.

Dash turns away. He sits on the bed—nearly sitting on the clothes that Tessa had borrowed—and puts his head in his hands, scrubbing his head hard as though he wants to erase something from his mind.

“Everyone’s leaving,” he says. His voice is muffled, but Tessa can hear his words like shards of ice on her skin. “Tommy and Slate both have girlfriends, Logan has a wife, and now he’s talking about sending me to college. Alone. I haven’t… I’ve never been… it was always us. Together. Why does it all have to change?”

And just like that, Tessa’s heart breaks. She takes a step toward him, reaching out to try and soothe. “Dash…”

He looks up and quickly dodges her hand, standing up and walking to the door with his face pinched and his hands clenched at his sides. His feet beat the carpet so hard that Tessa actually winces.

“Whatever. You want to go get fucked by some glorified babysitter, you be my guest. Only I can really give you what you’re afraid to ask for.” He turns to look back at Tessa when he reaches the door, and there’s a sinful, sly smile on his lips. “Come find me when you’re done playing with Mr. Vanilla, Tess. I’ll show you what it’s really like to be fucked, and have you screaming my name like all those girls downstairs, within seconds.”

He slams the door on the way out.

Tessa stands in the middle of the room, right next to the bed, and stares at the closed door as her mind feverishly tries to catch up with what’s just happened. The argument had felt like it was going on forever at the time, but it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. Still numb, she sits down on the bed and clenches her fists into the robe she’s wearing, feeling the heat from Dash’s parting words starting to ebb away from where it had settled between her legs.

Slowly, she reaches for her phone and dials a number.

The dial tone is brief. “Tess?”

“Logan,” she says, finding her voice. “You need to find Dash and talk to him.”

“Is everything all right?” He sounds worried. There’s background noise on his end—some people talking, a voice that sounds like Slate’s. Tessa wonders if Dash had left whatever they’d been doing as a band, and come straight back to the hotel to confront her.

“Dash thinks everyone is leaving him,” she tells Logan, trying to cut to the chase as quickly as possible. “Because you’re all in relationships and he isn’t. He mentioned that you want to send him to college, and I get the feeling he thinks you’re trying to send him away.”

Logan swears quietly. “Seriously? Shit—”

“I think he needs his brother right now,” she says.

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I’m on it. Hey… are you okay? You sound upset.”

It’s not until he says it that she realizes she’s crying. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just… just talk to Dash, okay? Reassure him.” She hangs up before she can hear his reply, because the pain behind her eyeballs has hit an all-time high and she curls up in her bed, heaving a sob into her pillow.

Tessa was never a crier. She hasn’t really cried since she was in her early teens. She used to cry over the smallest things, everything from someone giving her a funny look in the hallway at school, to getting less than fifty percent on a math test. It was something she did so often that she’d even worked out a system for it. She used to give herself thirty seconds—counting each excruciating second under her breath as she went—to really let the tears flow, and then she would pick herself up and start problem-solving.

The last time she really cried was when her mom left. Since then, none of the people she cared about had made her want to cry.

Laugh, throw things, or scream in frustration? Sure. But not crying. This is new.

Dash is always surprising her.

“One… two… three…” She counts up, letting the tears fall onto the pillow and sinking further into her own mind, allowing Dash’s words to haunt her as she goes. It’s not just the jabs that he’d sent her way that’s making her cry. It’s the way he’d started to break down toward the end, only to retreat back into himself when he realized she was reaching out.

How long has Dash been carrying that?

How long would he have held it in, and plastered a smile onto his face without a catalyst?

“Twenty-eight… twenty-nine… thirty.”

And she stops.

She lifts her head up and wipes away the worst of her tears, before going to the bathroom to wash her face and blow her nose. She drinks some water from the tap and runs a brush through her hair. It’s gotten tangled since she’d gotten out of the shower, and the water that drips onto her neck is cold.

Tessa hadn’t been expecting Dash to react that way. That sudden show of emotion was out of character, at least as far as she knows. She hasn’t known him for long, and since they’ve only ever been the flirty kind of friends, she doubts that there would have ever been a chance for this sort of thing to come up. How strange to think of someone as your best friend, but still not know what their main anxieties are.

Maybe they’re not as close as she had thought.

She braids her hair into two pigtails, then pulls them up and wraps them at the base of her skull, using pins to hold them in place. It’s a hack that Jackie found on Pinterest that looks way more complicated and sophisticated than it actually is. Then she goes back out to her room and starts getting dressed.

Her mind is still on Dash, though. She can’t even try to focus on Jared and their date. It’s not only that she and Dash fought, but there’s something else niggling at the back of Tessa’s mind. Maybe it’s the way he’d tried to make the change between them to be much bigger than it needs to be. Maybe it’s the way that he’d tried to steer the conversation toward his own sexual prowess. Whatever it was, something about their fight made Tessa think that what he was feeling about his fellow band members was only the tip of the iceberg. That there was something else going on. Something that made him want to shy away from her like some skittish colt.

Whatever it was, she would have to drag it out of him. After her date.

Because no matter what, she is not giving up on him. Dash is clearly going through some shit that’s making him lash out, and if she didn’t already have such a good friendship with him, she would have kicked him to the curb by now. She can only imagine what her brothers would say if they knew that a man had made her cry.

‘Where the fuck is he?’ would be Kaden’s response.

‘How would you like him to die?’ would be Scott’s.

She finished getting dressed, did her makeup, and looked critically in the mirror. She looked fairly normal, really. A nicely-dressed version of herself. Tessa thinks that she looks nice. Nice enough for whatever Jared has planned anyway.

Taking one last moment to check her hair, Tessa drinks some more water and pops an Advil into her mouth before heading out the door to her date.