Fill Me - Michelle Hazen (best books to read for knowledge .TXT) 📗

“Feet off my fucking furniture, dickhole.”

“Sure enough, Martha.” His feet don’t budge as he grabs the beer he dropped on the coffee table before he followed Jera down the hall. Hooking his middle finger around the neck, he tips it to his lips. Cool and casual like nothing has ever bothered him for a second in his life.

His Adam’s apple bobs, and as he lowers the bottle, he puckers a kiss at me without looking away from the screen. I glance away, annoyed at having been caught staring.

Jera crawls up and grabs another controller from the drawer under the TV. We add a player, and for a while, the only sound is the mechanical soundtrack from the TV, the clink of beer bottles against my coffee table. Still, all I hear is my own guitar, that one perfect solo pouring from my throat during “Disturbed.”

“Can I tell you guys something?” My voice sounds odd interrupting the video game: too quiet, or something.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get your period soon enough,” Danny says.

Jera reaches across me and gives him a deadleg punch in the perfect center of where I smacked him a minute ago. He actually flinches a little from that one, frowning at her, and I smirk.

She high-fives me, dropping back to her butt and grabbing her beer. “You can tell us anything you want, Jax. And Daniel is going to keep his trap shut unless he has a masochistic streak, because he knows I’ll beat him like a red-headed stepchild.”

Danny pauses the game and links his hands behind his head. “I think I’m a little closer to a sadist, actually.”

I twitch and nearly sprain an eyelid trying not to look up at him. Is he stupid, hinting at his club life like that? Or does he sort of want her to guess? I always thought it was weird, him keeping that one thing secret when they know every other tiny detail about each other.

Also, I may not be a BDSM Jedi knight or whatever the fuck like he is, but I understand enough to know Danny doesn’t get off on anyone’s pain. What he gets out of that shit is way deeper. Maybe darker.

“Subjecting us to your sense of humor is pretty fucking sadistic.” She flicks a loose penny at the bassist, squinting her hazel eyes at him as she makes a “zip it” motion across her own mouth before she turns her full attention to me.

I scrub a hand through my hair, feeling stupid now that everybody’s looking at me. “It’s just...my day job, right?”

“UPS?” Jera shrugs. “What about it?”

“I kind of...” I glance away. “Like it.”

Danny opens his mouth and Jera hurls the TV’s remote control at him without looking away from me. The crack of plastic on bone tells me her aim was its usual bullseye, but he doesn’t make a sound.

“That’s cool, though, right? What do you like about it?” she asks, obviously still on her best behavior since our fight earlier.

I pull my knees up, propping my arms over them and grabbing one wrist. “I don’t know, like today. I—it would take me a long time to explain it all, but I solved a problem. A big one, that’s been screwing everybody up for a while. I saved a lot of money and a shitload of time and...” I take a breath. “It felt good. When I got out of work, it didn’t even matter if I did anything else today because I was happy, you know? Chilled out.”

Jera nods, her face a little too smooth as she fights not to look confused. “Uh huh?”

“That’s a damn good day job, man.” Danny tips up his beer and takes a drink.

I glance up at him, because I’ve seen him work, and I think that might be how he feels about tattooing. A nice, quiet kind of peaceful. Which makes me all the more curious about what he’ll think about what I have to say next.

“But then I got all stoked about the show, and once I got up on that stage...” I suck in a breath through my teeth, shaking my head. “It was so much better. Better than everything, this wild crazy rush in every part of my body.”

Jera grins, nodding now that I’ve finally said something she can connect with. “God, yes. It’s just like that.”

“Afterward, though, I didn’t feel all calm and perfect. I was still raging, kind of dizzy and off-balance because I wasn’t ready for it to be over.”

“Who could ever be ready for that to be over?” Jera’s eyes go unfocused for a second, and then she shakes her head quickly, as if to clear it. She picks up her beer. “It was a good show, you guys.”

“I know, it was. It really was.” I fumble, hesitating. I haven’t quite said what I wanted to say yet, but I’m not sure I have the words. “I just got to thinking, I mean...maybe this band thing shouldn’t just be for fun. Maybe we could be big, famous even.” I stop for a second. “Maybe we’re supposed to be famous and that’s why everything else feels so—”

Not enough. I don’t say it, but the room all but echoes the emptiness back to me, and I know I’m not the only one feeling it. Even Danny, I think, because he keeps shifting his weight when Jera’s not looking, like he can’t quite get comfortable.

Jera snorts, her voice forced a little too loud when she says, “Or you could man up and learn how to attract girls without warming them up on our subwoofers. I’m pretty sure we’re not the only garage rock band to wish we were the next big thing. But yeah...” She laughs. “A platinum record would pretty much fix everything that’s ever been wrong in my life.”

She un-pauses the game, as if that’s the end of it.

“Maybe it would, right?” I say softly, still staring at the screen and seeing the lights of a much bigger space. “Maybe it could.”

~