Five Months Later…

 

“I’m nervous.”

“Don’t be nervous, you’re going to kill it.”

Dash runs his hands lightly over Tessa’s arms, trying to soothe the tension there. She tries to calm herself and enjoy the way his fingers feel on her skin, but at the moment her mind is too busy racing to feel anything beyond slightly sick. She stares up at the tall, ominously-gray building, dreading whatever waits beyond the doors.

“Tess? Hey, stay with me, baby.” Dash kisses her on the cheek.

Tessa forces a smile and turns to give him her full attention. “Sorry,” she says, still feeling a little flustered.

“You wouldn’t be this nervous if you hadn’t insisted on getting here half an hour early,” Dash says, and he looks at her fondly even though there’s a hint of worry in his voice. He seems to be genuinely concerned that she might plummet over any minute. She’s probably really pale beneath the makeup that she and Sersha had painstakingly put on that morning.

It’s been five months since she and Dash became an official couple, but it feels just as surreal every time she wakes up next to him. She wonders if she’ll ever get used to the feeling of him inside of her, or the knowledge that she only needs to reach out and take his hand to let the whole world know that he belongs to her, and that she belongs to him. They’d kept their relationship a secret until the article was published in Rolling Stone this week, but after that Bass Note’s publicists sent out a press release and suddenly Tessa Hunt was hot property. That, and the notoriety of the Rolling Stone article, had landed her the job interview that she and Dash were standing in front of that building for. She shivers when she stares up at the building again, turning away from her boyfriend and gazing skyward.

“You’re right, we shouldn’t have come so early.”

“Ah, it’s no big deal. At least we left time for a flat tire, traffic jam, and alien abduction,” Dash says. He’s wearing his standard slogan tee—the Incredible Hulk today—and sunglasses to avoid being spotted. His bodyguard, Lance, is standing a discrete distance away from them.

Tessa takes Dash’s hand and gives it a tight squeeze. She feels hopelessly overdressed standing next to him in her interview clothes, but she couldn’t help it. Nothing but the best for The New Yorker.

“Let’s get coffee,” Tessa says. “We’ve got time.”

They duck across the street to a coffee shop that’s almost certainly frequented by some of the journalists who work at the magazine that Tessa will be interviewing for in less than half an hour. She tries to avoid eye contact as she and her famous boyfriend sit down in the corner of the room and order a café latte each. Lance orders nothing. He just sits quietly beside them, trying to look inconspicuous in his black T-shirt and jeans.

Whenever Tessa sees Lance, she’s sadly reminded that Jared isn’t on her detail anymore. They’re still good friends, but after she and Dash had gotten together, Dash had started to get a little alpha male whenever he and Jared were in the same room, which was a lot, considering it was Jared’s job to shadow the women behind Black Lilith. In the end, to save Tessa the indignity of having to tear her new boyfriend a new one, Mikayla had discretely reshuffled their deck of bodyguards so that Jared was shadowing the support band, Lost in Time. It had turned out to work in his favor. A couple of weeks after the change, Tessa got a text from Jared to tell her that he and Lost in Time’s petite bass player were dating. Dash stopped his ridiculous posturing after that.

“Hey,” Dash says, kissing Tessa’s cheek to bring her back to the present. She realizes that there’s a steaming mug in front of her that hadn’t been there when she’d zoned out. “Where’d you go?”

“Oh you know, just thinking about one of my exes,” she says.

Dash nods sagely. “Yeah, I feel sorry for those guys, too.”

She grins at him. When it’s just the two of them, he’s still a huge dork. Only now, he’s a dork who shows his affection with lingering, public kisses, and his eyes entirely focused on her. The night they came out as a couple, there were still a few women who’d inundated him with texts trying to coax him into their beds. He’d firmly shut them down in front of Tessa.

When the Rolling Stone article had been published, Tessa had felt a brief moment of panic at the thought of having to return to Chicago. It had been Tommy, of all people, who’d shut that down.

“So when are you moving in?” Tommy had asked over a coffee one morning last week.

“Moving in?”

“To the brownstone?” he’d said. “Just, you know, I need to know when I have to up my gym regimen to burn off the cakes you’re hopefully going to cook for us. You are going to keep making those, right? Because I don’t think I can go back to Dash’s cakes.”

“Woah, slow down,” she’d said, raising her hands. “You think I’m moving in with all of you?”

Tommy had cocked his head at her, looking for all the world like a confused puppy. “I mean, you’re a writer, right? What better place to live than Manhattan?”

“I haven’t even talked to Dash about this.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s a given at this point. You’re family now.”

Tessa had been touched, but she’d chosen not to get her hopes up until she’d spoken to Dash. Dash had blushed and sputtered adorably before he’d admitted that he wanted to ask her father’s permission to move in with her—‘to court you’ in his words—and Tessa had nearly died laughing before bringing the subject up.

They’d flown back to Chicago only three days ago. Dash had met her father. And just like that, she’d become a fully-fledged member of the Black Lilith family. She’d tearfully bid her family goodbye in Chicago, only to get a furious call from her dad as soon as she touched down in Manhattan.

“Why do I have fifteen thousand dollars in my bank account?” he’d asked.

“Oh, good, that went through,” Tessa replied blithely.

“Tessa—”

“Tell Scott to stop killing himself with work. Buy Jackie some new skates. Get Kaden and Halley some decent clothes… and the twins a new laptop each.”

“Tessa—”

“I gotta go. Love you!”

She has no regrets. Now that she’s had an article published in Rolling Stone, she thinks she can afford to spend the majority of her first big paycheck on her family. It’s about time her dad got a break.

Dash’s thumb runs over her fingers as he holds her hand lightly in his. They’ve been pretty much constantly touching since their first night together. Tessa has never had such an attention-drunk boyfriend. Not that she could ever complain about it.

“Do you think I should have gotten a bigger portfolio?” Tessa asks, holding up her thin booklet and tapping the cover.

“Tessa, you sent them an e-portfolio.”

“I know, but what if they want to see hardcopy?”

“Then direct them to the stone age, where the rest of the Luddites live,” he says affectionately. He’s so adept at deflecting her anxieties that she wonders how she’d ever managed to get through a job interview before now.

She supposes that she should be grateful. Dash’s usual tactic for distraction is to drag her into a shadowy corner and give her a physical reason to forget what she was stressed about. She can’t go to an interview looking freshly fucked.

“How do I look?”

“Beautiful.”

“You’re biased. Lance, how do I look?”

“Very professional, love.”

Tessa feels a little bit better after that.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket, and she considers her options before opening it. She’s had good luck texts from the rest of Black Lilith, as well as her dad and the rest of her family.

It’s not a good luck text. It’s Jackie, sending her a picture of the outfit she’s going to wear for her free skate at the state championships in a couple of months.

 

Jackie: i look just like yurio in welcome to the madness i am deceased

 

In the picture, Jackie is wearing a purple punk jacket, black leggings, and a black shirt that is just on the edge of too revealing. She’s also got a pair of sunglasses in one hand, her eyes smudged black and her hair in a half-up, half-down style.

“Aw,” Dash says, looking over Tessa’s shoulder at the picture. “Our little punk is growing up.”

“She’s so looking forward to you guys being there,” Tessa says, tapping a quick congratulatory reply to her sister.

“We wouldn’t miss it for the world. Tommy’s pretty excited about seeing her ice-skate to his song.”

“Isn’t it the whole band’s song?”

“Nah, we’re gonna give Tommy this one.”

Tessa puts her phone on Do Not Disturb and sips her coffee, mulling over the fact that she can’t remember a time when she was this nervous. This interview won’t make or break her career, but still… it’s The New Yorker. She’s interviewing to be a book reviewer for The New Yorker. This is the kind of dream job that she’d only ever thought about in the dead of night while typing up term papers and spinning fantasies, because those were the only things that would get her through the coffee-induced haze of exam season.

“I know you’re nervous,” Dash says, probably for the sixtieth time today. He kisses her cheek and sighs against her skin. “But I’ll be right outside, waiting for you.” And then he lowers his voice so that Lance can’t hear him. “And then I’ll take you home, and we’ll celebrate what a great job you did.”

“I swear to God if you get me horny—”

“I’m just talking about celebrating,” Dash says, his innocent voice belied by his thumb still stroking her fingers. “Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“And if there’s nothing to celebrate?”

“Oh, baby that would be a tragedy,” Dash says. He runs his nose down her neck, a move that would look affectionate to onlookers but sends a shot of arousal through her immediately. In the three months they’ve been together, her body has become conditioned to understand what every caress is implying. “But I’m not worried. You’ll be amazing, and we’ll have a reason to celebrate.”

Tessa turns her head to give his lips a soft kiss. “Wouldn’t want to disappoint you,” she says.

Dash returns the kiss, lingering just a little as he whispers, “You never could.”