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“You wrote that one song. The one with all the weather metaphors.”
Beckett groaned. “Don’t remind me. Everyone hated that song.”
“Not everyone.”
Beckett’s chest warmed at the affection in his brother’s voice.
When Jackson spoke again, his voice was low, careful. “I know I fuck everything up.”
“You don’t—”
“This is the one thing I’m good at, Becks. I want to give you something good. Like you’re always doing for me.” He shot him a sad smile, but looked away again quickly, as though even that brief eye contact was too much when he was this cracked open, honest in ways only the music ever allowed him to be. Even when they were kids, he hid inside the music, got lost in it, built himself fortresses out of melodies.
Beckett glanced around the room, ensuring no one else was listening to his brother’s confessions. “You don’t need to give me anything, Jackie.”
His eyes fell closed, and he rested his head back against the wall again. “It’s just a song.”
“It’s a good song,” Beckett said more fiercely than he’d intended.
“It will be.”
Chapter Thirteen
Kat lay in bed at the back of the tour bus, laptop perched on her knees, writing in the dark. Somewhere around the middle of the last set of the band’s final concert in Albuquerque, she’d had a breakthrough. While the boys danced and sang their way through “Hurricane,” she imagined the small mountain cabin where her characters would get snowed in, ice crystals forming patterns on the glass while the storm raged and the fire crackled. When they belted out the final chorus of “Love Attack,” she heard her hero’s gruff insistence that the heroine change out of her cold, wet clothes and into his t-shirt and sweatpants. By the time the concert had wrapped and she’d made her way back to the bus, she had the next few scenes written in her head. Writers’ block officially obliterated. She just had to get it down on paper.
On the other side of the flimsy door separating her bedroom from the rest of the bus, a cheer rose up from the guys, deep in a Smash Brothers tournament. She grinned, her fingers flying over the keys with rhythmic precision. The door opened, a shaft of light spilling across the bed around Beckett’s broad frame.
“—old married couple and you aren’t even married yet!” Zach laughed.
“Fuck off,” Beckett called back, closing the door behind himself, blocking out the light and leaving them with only the intermittent passing headlights through the window and the glow of Kat’s computer screen.
Even in the dark, Kat could see he was wearing his glasses. Why did he have to be wearing his glasses? There was something about the thick black frames, the way they emphasized his square jaw and the dark slashes of his eyebrows, the contrast of the traditional frames with the tapestry of ink covering his body—she was a total sucker for Beckett Hayes in his glasses.
But it wasn’t his eyewear that made her pause, her fingers hovering over the keyboard for a moment before she closed the lid of her laptop, plunging them into darkness. “What’s wrong?”
He scraped his hand over his mouth and chin, his face flickering in and out of view with the passing headlights. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“Is it your knee? I can arrange for a doctor in Denver. I’ve already got the contact info for orthopedists in every city we stop in,” she said, reaching for her phone.
“My knee is fine.” She arched an eyebrow at him and his lip quirked up at one corner. “As fine as it ever is after a show.”
She set her phone down and watched as he reached between his shoulder blades and pulled off his shirt, tossing it into the corner where his bag lay somewhere in the shadows. It was only when his hands dropped to his belt, his eyes holding hers like a challenge, that she turned away, busying herself with tucking her laptop back into its case. The soft click of his glasses being set down on the bedside table. The rustle of sheets as he pulled back the blankets. His muffled grunt when he swung his bad leg onto the bed and lay down beside her.
“What the fuck?” He reached under the blanket and pulled out an oversized teddy bear wearing a Midnight Storm t-shirt. “Is that—” He flipped back the blanket revealing a line of stuffed animals laid end to end down the center of the bed, dividing the space neatly in two. Beckett waved the bear in his fist at her. “Why is half the merch table in our bed?”
Our bed. She shouldn’t like that so much. It shouldn’t conjure memories of the countless beds in countless cities they’d slept in, of all the things they used to do in those beds.
“You said you didn’t want me touching you while we slept,” she said, trying to sound more casual than she felt.
“That’s not— I didn’t—” He exhaled harshly through his nose, and she could practically hear him mentally counting to ten. “You said no touching.”
“And you said you didn’t like it when I accidentally touched you in my sleep.”
“I never said I didn’t like it.”
She froze at his gruff reply in the dark, heat gathering low in her belly. She waited for him to take it back. But he didn’t. Memories pushed in, crowding her, suffocating her—
She grabbed the teddy bear and shoved it back into its place in line. “This way there’s no confusion. You stay on your side of the bed and I’ll stay on mine.”
