"So this is the famous Fortress of Solitude," I said, taking a look around. The room was barely wide enough to fit Jax’s king-sized bed. I had no idea how they’d gotten the mattress in, but it hugged snugly against two walls. Thick fabric swaths hung from the ceiling, in dark, subdued hues.
An assortment of pillows in dark brown, deep purple, and navy blue covered a bed layered thick with dark comforters. A guitar hung next to the wall-mounted flat-screen. The effect was somewhere between gypsy caravan and blanket fort.
He sat on the bed in a gray v-neck, a different shirt than he’d been wearing before, probably because I splashed water on the last one. Jax looked like a Mongol khan in his tent, his golden skin a glistening highlight against the dark fabrics. The room smelled of him—a rich, earthy scent I couldn’t get enough of.
Control yourself, I thought, tempted to slap myself again. Just finish the expense talk, say goodbye, and get out.
"Since you’re already here," Jax’s voice broke through my daydreaming and jolted me back to reality, "Want to stay for the movie?" His eyes were glued to the screen.
A couple of hours of being next to him in a room with a locked door? That couldn’t possibly be a good idea. "Maybe some other time," I responded nicely. "Right now, we’ve got more important things to do."
"More important than the greatest film of all time?"
I broke away from my paperwork and looked closely at the screen, but all I saw was two men on a train car. I shrugged. "I don’t think I’ve ever seen it."
"I’ll give you a hint. It’s from the director so great I named the band after him."
Ah, right, The Hitchcocks. "And here I thought the band name was just an excuse for innuendo," I said remembering how I’d first mistaken the band’s shorthand for its real name.
His eyebrow scar moved almost imperceptibly upward, and the corners of his mouth turned up. "You should know by now," he said, each syllable making my heart beat faster, "that I don’t need an excuse for innuendo."
I had to steer the conversation back to safety. "You know, I’ve never seen one. A Hitchcock movie, I mean."
"Not even Psycho? The Birds?"
"Nope," I said grinning. "Guess our tastes are incompatible. Ready to talk business now?"
"Exactly the opposite. I’m ready for you to watch," he said, but he wasn’t smiling back. "You need to know what you’re missing." I tried to interrupt, but he continued, "If you don’t watch Strangers on a Train, I won’t talk expenses with you and that’s final."
I felt myself bristling. "Hey! You promised in the hot tub you’d make the expense cuts."
"That’s true. But I didn’t promise I’d make them in the middle of my favorite movie. Now, are you staying or going?"
"Just so we’re clear, if I stay for the movie, we can talk expenses right now. No bullshit, no tricks."
He nodded once. "No bullshit. No tricks."
I sighed. It didn’t seem likely, but it would be far easier to talk to him now and watch the movie than to try to catch him later when he could come up with some other excuse to be "unavailable." I also kind of found myself almost looking forward to a break from work. "Oh, what the hell," I said.
As soon as I plopped onto the bed with my laptop, my eyes went wide. The mattress was the exact kind I liked best—supportive, but with enough pillowy softness at the very top to keep it from feeling like a board. Given what I slept on last night, I couldn’t help letting out a soft, comfortable sigh.
Jax’s dark eyes twinkled. "I knew I was good, but I didn’t know I was that good."
"Get over yourself." I shot him a wry smile. "It’s this bed."
"Strange," he said, scratching his chin in mock mystification. "It’s never had that effect on me."
"It’s definitely the bed, and not you," I reiterated, not wanting to feed his ego. "At least it doesn't plant fake female fans in the audience to come on cue."
"There aren't any planted fans," he said with amusement. "It's real."
"Really?" I rolled my eyes. "Let me guess, the Jax Effect at work."
He rubbed his thumb against his chin, smirking. "The Jax Effect." He laughed, sending a tingle of warmth suffusing through me. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh. It displayed a warm, human side of him I hadn’t seen before in our interactions. "I like it. Sounds like an album title."
I started laughing. "Maybe we’d better talk about those budget cuts," I said. Even though Jax was playing nice for now, I couldn't let this conversation get too far off track.
A dark cloud passed over his face and just like that his voice became cold and pure business. "What’s my easiest route to keeping the label off my back about money?"
I knew that I’d messed up. The brief glimpse of the warmer side of Jax had disappeared so quickly that I wasn't even sure if it was real. But then again, talking business was exactly what I wanted to do. If he wanted to keep things professional, that suited me just fine. "I’ve noticed one of the most expensive discretionary spending items you have is pyrotechnics. It’s literally burning up your money."
He looked skeptical. "Pyro’s an important part of a good rock show. It’s something that separates us from bands that aren’t doing as well, and bands that aren’t willing to go the extra mile."
"I’m not talking about getting rid of all of the pyrotechnics," I said hastily. "But I don’t think you understand the kind of financial trouble you could be in."
"Explain it to me then." His response seemed like he was genuinely interested.
Does he really not know? I’d heard band members were often kept in the dark about finances, but I’d never seen it in person. "So, to start with, your spending money isn’t really yours," I told him. "It comes from the label, and it’s an advance on your future album sales."
"I know that much."
"Well, you’re selling a lot of albums right now, but you only make a small percentage from each one. Every show you put on, every firework blast you set off, is coming out of that percentage."
He looked mildly annoyed. "So we wait for the money to come back to us through the tour receipts and merch table. No band really makes their money on album sales. That’s why we have accountants, to keep the cash flowing."
"But that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you," I said. "You’re spending so much that your tour will be lucky to break even. Look at this page, here."
Jax squinted at the columns of numbers. "What am I supposed to be looking at?"
"This means that right now, given how much you’ve brought in and how much has gone out . . ." I thought for a moment about how to best express the band’s financial situation. "You can think of your concert budget for today’s show as coming out of your album sales from next week. But if you keep going at this rate, soon, all of next week’s money will be spent. You’ll be spending more and more in advance, a month, then two—"
"And then we’re playing low-budget shows in dive bars just to avoid bankruptcy."
"Exactly."
He stared at the wall, seeming lost in thought for a moment. "Fine," he said at last. "We’ll cut the huge pyro scenes from ‘Glass Brick’ and ‘Find Your Way.’ Those songs are probably off the set list once we’ve got new material, anyway."
I looked down at my detailed budgets. The cuts would reduce the pyro spending by forty percent, which put The Hitchcocks one step closer to solvency and me one step closer to a huge bonus. "Thanks," I said. "This is a step in the right direction."
He let out a low grunt that I assumed meant approval, or something close to it. I got the feeling from his reaction that I’d be better off not pushing him into cutting more—at least, not yet. I also knew that once I got the momentum moving in the right direction, the rest of the cuts would get easier.
"So we’re done?" he asked. "Because I have a movie I’d really like to get back to. I’ve held up my end of the bargain."
Well, that’s that. I was surprised at how smoothly it had gone, though now I’d have to watch the res
t of the movie with him. I hoped there wasn’t much left. "Don’t bother starting it over again. I’ll figure it out."
He pressed the remote, and the movie started scrambling until he pressed it again and opening credits started playing. "I’m not having you start a Hitchcock movie halfway through. It wouldn’t make any sense."
I felt a sudden twinge from him ignoring what I’d said. But still, I felt oddly curious about watching his favorite movie. Since I’d gotten Jax to agree to cuts I thought I’d have to fight for, I was even a little bit ahead of schedule. It could be worse—at least the mattress is comfortable.
Within a few minutes, I could see why he wanted to start over. It wouldn’t have made any sense if I’d missed the first part. The two strangers on a train from the title each had someone they wanted dead. The problem was, the first suspects for any murder are the people closest to the victim—neither of them could get away with committing the murders they wanted.
But, one of them reasoned, what if two people who didn’t know each other at all traded murders? Then, the victim’s attacker would be totally unknown to them, and the person who actually arranged the murder could also arrange to be somewhere with witnesses at the time of the murder’s commission. The perfect alibi meant it was the perfect crime.
At least, that was the plan. Since it was a movie, everything started to go wrong right away: an alibi didn’t work, one of the men had a flashback and almost killed a second person, and the police were always hot on their heels. I was surprised to find such an old movie so entertaining.
"You’re pretty clever," Jax said. "Think you could pull it off?"
I blinked and looked at him curiously. "I’m sorry, what?"
"The murder plot."
I shrugged nonchalantly. "Yeah, sure, easy."
His scarred eyebrow shot up. "Easy?"
"They’d never even find a body."
"Okay . . ." he said with uncertainty.
I was amused by his reaction. I put my hands behind my neck and laid flat on the bed, getting comfortable. "It’s not that hard," I said coolly. "You start by destroying identity evidence for the victim. Use a hammer on the teeth and the face, torch the fingerprints. Crush as much skeleton as possible, cut the body up into small parts and put the parts in plastic bags full of bleach, bury them in the middle of the night in graves as deep as possible, and clean up with more bleach. Or just use sulfuric acid to dissolve them so you can trickle them down the drain a bit at a time."
His nose wrinkled. "Jesus. Where the hell did you learn all that?"
"Nowhere that crazy. TV shows and a little bored Googling . . ."
He shook his head. "I’ve got to be more careful about pissing you off. I didn’t realize the guy you maced got off easy."
"Yeah, I bet you didn’t know you dodged a bullet when you gave me my bikini top back," I said, an over-the-top gruff look on my face. "I already had a plan to make sure they’d never find you."
He smirked. "And you say that I lay the dark and dangerous act on thick."
I couldn’t help but smile back—television show knowledge aside, I didn’t make a very convincing tough guy, and I knew it. "So how about you? Think you could get away with murder?"
"Sure," he said, laying down next to me. I suddenly felt like we were on a picnic blanket, watching the stars—except that there was only the fabric-covered ceiling above us. "Know where I can find a willing stranger?"
"Well, my next couple of weeks are booked up, but I can probably squeeze in a quick kill after that," I deadpanned. "But too bad we’re not strangers anymore."
"Getting to know one another isn’t so bad. I’m learning that you’re not against watching horror films."
I chuckled. I thought about some of the worst horror movies I’d sat through with my exes. "Actually, I usually hate them."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, a lot of them are just about chopping people up. Plus, if you’re a woman who isn’t a virgin, good luck making it to the end of the movie. Gives me nightmares." I shuddered, imagining what would happen to me if I was put into one of those movies.
Jax put his arms behind his head. "You know, Hitchcock said he wrote his films so he could get rid of his nightmares."
"Then he’s kind of a jerk, right? He makes movies to get rid of his nightmares, but then he ends up giving them to everyone else."
He laughed. "Not quite. In nightmares, bad things happen for no reason. It’s the way we feel when we’re out of control in our lives, like we can’t do anything."
I looked toward the screen. "And like everything that could go wrong is about to."
"Right. But Hitchcock beats other horror directors by turning a nightmare into a fantasy, all by giving order to it. When you’re done watching, his characters make sense."
I nodded at Jax, musing the information as I soaked in the sight of him in bed next to me. I noticed his muscles bulged through the thin grey t-shirt, and I found my eyes idly tracing his shoulder’s curve.
"So no scary movies," he said. "Should I download Sleepless in Seattle for next time?"
"Ugh, gag me." My face contorted with mock disgust. "Screw that boy-meets-girl, boy-marries-girl stuff. Who cares? They’re always so boring." It was only after I’d answered that I realized I’d gone along with the idea that there’d be a next time.
He raised a brow. "No scary movies, no romcoms. Well, Riley, what do you like?"
I grinned. "Action movies! The more over-the-top, the better. Kill Bill is my favorite, but I’ll watch basically anything with a crazy revenge plot and a lot of broken glass."
"Revenge?" I thought Jax would laugh, but he didn’t. "Seems like that could be terrifying, too."
"But action movies really are fantasy. The bad guy almost always gets what’s coming to him, and the good guy’s basically magic," I said. "It’s my personal favorite brand of escapism."
"I’ll bring something with more explosions next time." He grabbed the remote and hit pause just when it was getting to the good part.
"Hey! Why’d you stop the movie?"
"I know you’re not a horror fan now, so I’m surprised you’ve stuck it out so long. But I think I’ve tortured you enough. You can go ahead and leave if you want."
"Are you kidding? You can’t just tease me with the first half of the movie then stop it when I’m getting into it. We gotta finish this." I reached over and pushed play on the remote.
He smiled. "Whatever you say."
As the movie continued, I felt my body relaxing and realized it was the first time I’d ever been truly comfortable around Jax. Was there more to him than bullshit? We’d just had a conversation that felt natural, and given the situation, almost normal. We were laying next to each other, but I didn’t feel pressured or anxious—just at peace.
If I could just keep this moment, just like this, I thought with a yawn as I nestled into the pillow. I closed my eyes, trying to lock the memory into my mind.
When I opened my eyes again, it was dark outside, and the TV screen in front of me was black. Shit! I’d fallen asleep in the middle the movie. In his bed, quite possibly the least appropriate place on the entire bus—or the world—for me to be. But then I remembered our conversation. We’d gotten so personal. How had it happened? Where was Jax?
Disoriented, I propped myself up on my elbows and looked back. He was there, wide awake, scribbling into a notebook.
"Oh god, I’m such an asshole," I started. "The bed was so comfortable, and I’ve been so tired—"
"It doesn’t matter," he said. "But we have to talk about something serious. You’re tired during the day. More than tired. Practically falling over."
I didn’t want him to think I was sleeping on the job. "I’ll get used to sleeping on the couches," I said quickly. "It won’t keep interfering with—"
"No. I don’t care about that," he said. His hand squeezed my shoulder. The gesture was oddly reassuring—I had to admit, I was starting to like this kinder, gentler Jax. "I care about you getting
enough sleep. The couches clearly aren’t working out."
"I’m only here for two weeks," I said. "I don’t need anything special." I was here to salvage the band’s finances, not cost them even more.
He scratched his chin. "Hmm. Did you try the fold-outs up in the hallway?"
"Yeah. They’re harder than the couch." I groaned. "Seems impossible, I know."
"Too bad we don’t have room for another bed." He seemed lost in thought for a moment. "Well, then. It looks like you’re going to be sleeping right here."
The mattress was comfortable, but not enough to make me completely lose my mind. "I’m going to be doing what? I think you misunderstood what it meant for me to watch a movie with you."
He laughed briefly. "Riley, it’s not what you’re thinking. It’s a big bed. I barely sleep as it is. If you can relax in it . . . well, I’m just glad someone can."
"Seems kind of convenient. Was this your plan all along?"
He looked at me with a puzzled expression. "You really don’t trust people, do you?"
"I only trust people who give me good reasons to trust them," I said. "You’ve done nothing but play games with me since the day I got here. Since before the day I got here, if I count the groupies." I twirled my hair and imitated their vapid looks.
"So you think it was my plan to, what, lure you up here and force you to sleep with me, using the power of the Jax Effect?"
"Sounds very Hitchcockian." I knew it wasn’t fair, but when had Jax ever played fair?
He winced at the jab, sending a momentary pang of guilt through me. "Listen to me. I didn’t bring you up here. I didn’t make you sleep here. How could this be my plan when it depended on what you’d do?"
I knew he was right, but I was stubborn. "Right. Next you’ll probably tell me that you sleep naked," I said. "You always just keep pushing it."
His face slumped slightly. "We’ve played a lot of games. But I’m not a monster, and I’m not playing tonight. You’ve made your position clear. Our deal from earlier still stands, one kiss after every concert, but there will be no sex in this room—and that’s a promise."