Page 57 of Dedicated

Chapter 33

Iwent back and forth with myself trying to decide whether I regretted telling Evan how strongly I felt about him.I love youhad been on the tip of my tongue, but I’d restrained myself at the last second, biting it back the way you would a curse, still afraid I’d scare him off or overwhelm him. And I wasstillscared I’d said too much. But in a way, it was a relief to have it out there. His reaction hadn’t been ideal, but then I’d dropped it in a stressful situation, so what did I expect? The article was annoying and pissed me off, mostly because it once again put Evan on a pedestal and made me sound second-rate. I didn’t hate Evan for that, though. And shit, Adam Slade was right. I’d done nothing to show anyone otherwise.

After I cooled off downstairs and reread the article, I decided it didn’t matter. What mattered were our fans, and I hoped this new album would prove we were worthy of the support they’d given us so far, regardless of what Evan and I were doing in our personal lives. It wasn’t like we were murdering kittens or anything.

Evan was trickier. I’d meant what I said when I told him to take his time, and yeah, I could have said it with a little less bitterness, but I was being honest. We would always bicker. That was the nature of us. But as we worked through another couple of songs later that afternoon—songs I’d had no trouble writing, since I was practically bleeding out my feels by that point—I noticed we were cohesive again. At least, musically speaking. I wasn’t going to press him on anything else, no matter how much I wanted to. I resisted the urge to touch him, which was hard because I constantly wanted to touch him now—wanted to feel his skin against mine, smell him, wrap myself in him. I did my best to keep my actions and words light and innocuous, and it was such a mature response I was kind of amazed at myself, really. I thought Evan was, too. I caught him studying me at intervals, his eyes narrowed, like he was expecting me to fly off the handle at any moment.

By evening, we’d run through the entire album and were trying to pregame an order for the songs—and also a title for the album—when I looked up to find Evan watching me again, his brows furrowed over his straight nose in a fierce blond bunch. I loved his nose, the slight natural flare of his nostrils giving him this dignified profile, how the heavy line of his brows intensified him. He was an intense-looking guy in general, but especially so in that moment.

“You solving the mysteries of the universe over there or what?” I rocked my pen back and forth in my hand a couple of times before settling it between my teeth. The plastic end was all chewed up. I went through a pack in a week, discarding them when the ends were so mangled and sharp I couldn’t chew on them anymore. Evan had a cigarette stuck behind his ear that’d been there all day, some quirky battle of willpower taking place within him. He touched it lightly before replying. “How many notebooks do you have?”

I thought about it. “Twenty or thirty since we’ve been writing together, I think.” I had a weird organizational system that probably wouldn’t make sense to anyone else, but there were notebooks allotted for each album, some that I used on tour that got transferred into the album notebook if I thought the lyrics were worthy, and some that just kind of floated around and acted as a journal for the time period. I’d tried writing on a computer or my phone before, and it didn’t work. I needed the physicality of a notebook and pen. Needed to see the ink bleed on my words. There was a kind of catharsis to it.

Evan shook his head, exhaling a chuff of breath. “You realize we’ve written this album faster than we’ve ever written anything before?”

“Guess we’ve had a lot to say.”

He quirked a smile at that. “Remember the first time we met?”

I nodded, putting my pen down in my notebook and closing it. I was lying on the floor on my stomach, and Evan sat across from me, his guitar on his lap. He was so rarely without it. Even when we weren’t actively playing, it was in his hands. It was like twisting a lock of hair or twiddling your thumbs. Some people did that. Evan plucked at the strings of his guitar.

“Jensen’s. God it was hot that night.” The AC in the bar had felt like it was pushing out lukewarm air.

“And smoky. Could hardly see the stage.” He twanged a few ominous notes, making me laugh. “I kept hearing about you. This drummer from Virginia who’d just up and decided he wanted to play guitar, instead. All my bartender buddies would whisper about you, usually the chicks. Talking about your perfect hair. I think it was actually Mo who told me your own stuff was good. Then Dan mentioned you and said you’d be playing soon and I should check it out.”

Evan already had a label interested in him, I remembered that, but they’d wanted to pair him with a lyricist, and Evan had felt uncertain about it.

“You were wearing a T-shirt with something really stupid on it.”

“I will end you.” That’s what the T-shirt had said. It featured a squirrel brandishing its tiny fist. Thinking about it made me laugh. “I love that shirt.” Still had it, in fact.

“I thought ‘what kind of jackass gets up onstage in a shirt like that?’ You looked like you’d just rolled out of bed.”

“I think I had.”

Evan tried to suppress a smile but failed, and it came out as this small, affectionate curve that I wished I could keep there for the rest of his life. “But then you played, and you talked to the audience. Small crowd, but they fucking loved you. Loved how you joked with them, how you’d try to play anything, even if it was terrible.”

Someone had requested Barry White’s “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love” that night. It had been… interesting. Evan must have been thinking the same thing, because he tipped his head back against the chair and laughed, the sound full-throated and infectious, and I adored the rumble of it even more than his smile.

“I murdered that song.”

“You did, oh shit. The way you tried to beatbox through the opening.” He put his hands over his face, his shoulders shaking.

I snickered. “You should’ve been there the night I did ‘Like A Virgin.’”

“You could do it right now?” Evan played the opening chords, brows hiking up in invitation.

“I’ll spare us both.”

“But you were good,” he said, sobering. “Aregood.” He bit at the inside of his cheek, an action that hollowed out one side of his face and made his cheekbone stand out in stark relief—a tic of his I’d always found incredibly sexy. For fuck’s sake, he’d turned me into nothing but gooey caramel filling.

“You told me my arrangements were off and they were losing impact, but my pipes were good and my lyrics were amazing.” I’d remembered those words exactly. I’d known who Evan was back then. Everyone did. But we’d never spoken. He had a devoted following on the circuit and was known for being dry and serious. I’d had no idea why he was talking to me since I’d just started out. Evan ticked a look down to me as I added, “You were right. You usually are. It’s annoying.”

He blew out a breath, fiddling with the strap of his guitar, then raking a hand through his hair. “Not always.” He smeared his palms up and down his face, then just sat there like that for a minute, and a split second of fear rushed through me like water let out of a dam, sudden and all-encompassing. He was going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear, I was sure of it.

But he only smiled and shook his head. “You wreck my brain, you really do. And you drive me up the wall, and I know I do the same. But shit, I want you. I keep thinking about that. The past few days, it’s all I can think about. Can’t make sense of it. But I don’t want to stop this.”

It was a confession, not a dismissal, and though it lacked the three words I craved hearing from him, the naked look in his eyes was enough. I was straddling him in seconds, pushing the guitar out of the way, taking the strap over his head, and running my hands over him like they’d been itching to all day. He stilled them with his own.