Fill Me by Michelle Hazen (rm book recommendations .txt) 📖

the worried way he tugs at his hair, always trying to make it a little better, a little brighter. I’d fuck him if he’d let me.

If I gave him music loud enough, dancing sweaty enough, the right amount of drinks? He’d let me. Boy’s not as straight as he thinks he is, but he doesn’t have the balls to go bi.

One of the girls looks away from Jax, her eyes catching on me instead. I tick my chin upward at her. I don’t smile, but I don’t have to. All I do is fail to disguise the part of me that’s hungry and a little bit out of control. The only part of me I hide from Jera, because she has enough problems in that area. She doesn’t need to know what I do, what I want. What I feed on.

The girl has dark eyes, dark skin. Her smile is brilliant in the multicolored lights of the bar, and she doesn’t even glance at Jera, who’s still held tightly under my arm. Funny, normally strangers assume we’re together. This girl either knows better or is hoping for a package deal.

My dick flexes against the cage of my zipper. If that trio included anybody but my best friend, I’d be in like fucking crazy.

Jera pokes me in the ribs. “Did you even hear what I said?”

“No.”

She steps away and turns to face me. “Do you think we should get the fake IDs after all?”

One of the reasons Jera is better than all other girls is she doesn’t get pissed about stupid shit like me saying I didn’t hear her when I didn’t. Very unlike my last girlfriend.

“You said we’d still be playing these same venues in a year when we’re twenty-one, so we can’t risk getting fake IDs and then switching,” I remind her.

In my peripheral vision, I see Package Deal girl moving closer to us. Jera flicks her hair impatiently out of her face. It’s streaked with a bunch of shades of yellow and gold, the springtime sun starting to bleach out her dark brown already. She curled it for the show and put on makeup that makes the amber-green of her hazel eyes almost as attention-grabbing as her breasts stretching the front of her Ramones shirt. She’s filled out a lot since we met in eighth grade, and all of it in places that make it hard for people to keep their gaze on her face.

I take a half-step to the side to block Package Deal girl’s view. If I have time after the show, I might see if she’s up for a ride, but she needs to keep her eyes right fucking off my best friend. Jera usually laughs it off when girls try to get her in bed, but she’s raw on that topic right now. On a night when her boyfriend ditched her for his textbooks, I won’t allow anybody else to accidentally hit her hot buttons.

She bites her lip. “Yeah, but—”

I drop my chin and stare her down, concern beating back the beast in me—enough that I can look like the Danny she knows again. “The Red Letters are as good today as we were last week. Better than we were last month.” I flick her glass. “Drink your Coke. In a year, we’ll be on this stage or a bigger one, and we’ll order our own fucking drinks.”

She purses her lips and half-glares at me. “How do you always know exactly the right thing to say?”

“Truth ain’t that hard to come by.” I take another gulp of my drink and glance away.

Jax comes back, all his Office Boy washed off in favor of dark, sexy rock star. He’s got a little mousse in the waves of his hair, a hint of eyeliner in his bottom lashes that he’d hit me for pointing out. When he grins at me, it’s sharp and cocky as shit.

Wonder if he got a little help changing out of his clothes?

The bar owner stares at me from the doorway of his office, tapping his left wrist. I gulp down the last of my whiskey, leaving the ice to rattle in the glass. “Showtime.”

“What?” Jax’s jaw clamps down and lines of stress appear at the corners of his eyes.

Jera groans. “Jax, it’s fine, you don’t need time to check. Seriously, we’ve probably been putting together equipment for more years than you have. I was setting up for my dad’s band before I bought my first training bra.” She scowls at him, but it doesn’t quite cover the hurt in her eyes. 

I clap him on the shoulder. “I got it.” I leave my glass on a table and head for the stage. Jera hurries after me, sucking whiskey and Coke as fast as she can through her straw.

Jax bounds forward until he catches up with me. “You tuned it?”

“Yup.”

He lets out a breath, and steps the six inches up onto this bar’s poorly-painted-plywood excuse for a stage.

It’s not that Jera can’t tune a guitar. It’s not even that he doesn’t trust her to tune his expensive-as-God’s-balls guitar. Fuck, when we brought him into the band, she could match him on the guitar, and outplay all of us on the drums, piano and violin. The only thing she can’t play is the bass, and that’s just because it was already my instrument on the day she met me, when I was slumped over the toilet in the girl’s bathroom of our junior high school.

Jax picks up his Pete Townshend-edition Les Paul, shrugging the strap over his head and testing the strings, though his shoulders have already relaxed. Actually, it was Jera who tuned it. But her exasperation feeds his neurosis, and then she gets upset that he doesn’t trust her, whereas if I step in, the cycle stops and everybody calms the fuck down.

I walk back to my black Fender bass guitar, in a fancy-ass stand because Jax insists it builds anticipation to display the instruments onstage before we get up there.

“How are we all feeling tonight, Portland?” Jax growls into the microphone. Something about the way he pitches his voice makes people hoot and scream like this is a stadium show with seats stretching all the way to the horizon. Maybe it’s the way he names the city—the only one we’ve ever played in—like we’re on a tour full of pussy and private planes. Instead of performing after a full day of college classes for Jera, UPS warehousing for Jax, and the buzz of a tattoo machine for me.

Our lead singer stomps his boot once on the stage, and the echo of it becomes silence, stillness.

I drink it in, and though my face doesn’t smile, something in me does.

I work a stage like this, too. But not here. Not yet.

Tonight.

Jax stomps again, and then his hands swing up over his head and he claps once.

Stomp. Clap.

Stomp. Stomp. Clap.

He builds the rhythm until even the bartenders can’t look away. He doesn’t fidget, doesn’t glance away.

Up here, Jax exists.

By the time he leans into the microphone and rips into the Queen cover, he owns every soul in the building.

My microphone waits on a stand and when the chorus comes around, my voice comes in along with Jera’s and I fucking grin, her drums holding the space at my back. “We will, we will...rock you!”

We break the song again here, owning the cover because The Red Letters doesn’t play anything unless we can make it ours.

Jax’s hands come together, the slap like a palm against the plump curve of a naked ass. When his boot stomps the stage, I hear the hit at the end of a thrust, my cock wet and buried deep in a woman.

I’m hungry.

And the music is just an appetizer.