Page 29 of Dedicated

“I need to bust a nut once a day, or I feel off.” My brow ticked higher. “Don’t look at me like that. You have your rituals”—I gestured widely at the forest around us, then his running gear—“I have mine.”

He rolled his eyes and wiped some sweat from his forehead. “Whatever. It’s moot anyway; you’re fine.”

I bent over, dusting dirt from the open scrapes over my kneecaps. Those were going to be fun in the shower.

“I’m good. Let’s go.” I started to brush past him to continue down the trail, but he caught the sleeve of my shirt and tugged me a half step back.

“Hang on.” He reached out, fingertips curling under my jaw as he brushed his thumb lightly over my cheekbone. I winced as the salt from his skin leached into a cut I hadn’t realized was there. But the sting paled in comparison to the sensation of his hand on my face, the almost tender way he touched me and the intensity of his stare as he examined my cheek. It sweetened the sting and made me want more. I took in a slow breath as my cock started to fill and the memory of his lips pressed to mine crowded every other thought from my head.

Maybe he was thinking the same thing, because his gaze transformed from intense scrutiny to a kind of hooded curiosity. I was careful not to react; after what he’d said last night, I was hell-bent on playing it cool. Two seconds later, he snapped his hand away. “Wash that good when we get back,” he said, and then loped off.

By the timewe got back to the cabin, my whole body was melting down. I left Evan to continue on with his push-ups, sit-ups, and whatever the fuck else he did to get those ripped arms, while I stripped my sopping-wet shirt off at the door, then went to bend my head under the kitchen faucet and suck up the equivalent of a small town’s water reservoir.

After showering—unfortunately not together, as I often fantasized about—we reconvened in the basement. I sat on the floor and opened my notebook, paging through it, looking for anything promising among my dark scribbles while Evan tuned his guitar.

With a quick glance over at me, he reached for my guitar and tuned it as well. It was an unspoken, unacknowledged practice between us when we were writing together, and I never minded it because I liked watching him do it, liked watching how his fingers soft-shoed over the strings, the deft plucks, the tilt of his head as he listened to the vibration, searching for the perfect resonance. His gaze would drift far off, eyes narrowing. Elsewhere. Someplace where there were only sound waves and pitch. Evan said I looked like an angry scientist when I was writing, stabbing at the page with the pen, bleeding ink all over my hands. He looked like someone who’d reached enlightenment when he played, and there was a beauty in it that never failed to mesmerize me.

We were so fucking different in so many ways that sometimes I thought it was a wonder we’d come as far as we had.

Evan finished tuning my guitar and handed it to me where I sat on the floor. We ran through some of our first album to warm up. At the end of “This Time,” his fingers hesitated over the strings, his mouth moving soundlessly, which usually meant he had some fresh notes wiggling on the line and was trying to figure out how to best reel them in.

He pulled a variation on a C chord, then dropped the note and slid his hand down the fretboard before dancing back up again through a series of minor chords that made my hair stand on end. It was dark and haunting, and it was definitelysomething. I listened, rapt, until he blinked up at me from beneath his lashes for my take. There was a tentativeness in his gaze that was so unusual, it was striking.

“Do it again,” I nodded, and he did, and then one more time until I’d picked up on the chord pattern and played it back to him.

“It needs an anchor, yeah? It’s just floating around there like a black balloon. Needs a string you can hold on to to keep it from floating off,” I mumbled, letting my fingers run over the strings. We tried out a few combos, Evan running the notes while I layered in beneath until we found it: a steady, metronome bassline that held the roots of the song in place and let Evan’s overlying chords dance lightly on top of it.

“This is really good,” I said, and Evan nodded slowly.

“Just have to fill in the rest. Not sure if that’s a chorus or verse yet.”

“It’s a chorus. Feels that way to me.”

“You getting anything yet? Because I’ve got nothing for lyrics.”

“Nope, but I can feel it.” It was like a tickle at the base of my skull, like anticipation. An edginess that ran through my fingertips and trembled in my vocal chords. “What were you thinking of?”

Evan dropped his gaze to his guitar, then over to the stack of records with a shake of his head. “I dunno. Old things. When I was a kid.” His lips pressed together, released. “You.”

“Me?”

“Yeah.”

I wanted him to elucidate and tell me what the fuck that meant, because what he’d played, it had pulled and tugged at me. It had gravity. It floated, then sank. It was hopeful and sad at once.

Did you ever worry that when you transitioned to larger shows some of the onstage chemistry between you two would be lost?

Evan:Nah, not really. We’ve always been ourselves, and Les has that kind of peacock presence that scales up easily—

Les:A peacock, huh?

Evan:Don’t even try to deny it. But that’s what’s great about… I mean, when I was doing shows on my own, it was very different, because I’m naturally quieter, I guess, and Les is so outgoing. He has a knack for drawing me out of my shell. We have fun up there. We always do, no matter where we’re playing.

Les:What he’s trying to say is: I help him be his best self, live his best life. Someone needs to give me my own talk show. I’m down to give away some cars.

Evan:That would be a disaster.

Les:A very entertaining one.