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She’s wearing a t-shirt with a logo I don’t recognize stretched across her tits, a slim cotton skirt, and a pair of low-top Chuck Taylors that are cute as fuck on her. She looks young, bite-able like a fresh cherry, and curvier than a mountain road.
Thank God I wore tight jeans today because I need that pressure to keep my cock from growing too big in their stretched confines. Even my workout isn’t helping. I can feel the tingle already.
My body’s immediate and fierce reaction to her presence pisses me off. It makes me feel wild and out of control, and I don’t like it. I’m the one in control. Always.
So I take out my body’s betrayal on her, barely grunting before turning and walking, not to the living room, but deeper into the house this time. We didn’t get through the whole house. She might as well see some more this time.
I hear her sigh of frustration behind me. I can virtually hear the eye roll too, but she closes the door and follows me without complaining. It gives me an ounce of satisfaction that even if my body’s out of control, she’s still doing what I want her to do.
That slight lift is broken when I hear her behind me, her shoes squeaking quietly on the tile flooring of my hallway. “So, we’re back to grumpy and asshole-y? I’d hoped we’d made some progress yesterday.”
I don’t answer, just head into my music room. I have an office as well, but this room is where I’ve done some of my best recent work. As she walks through the door, I close it behind her, locking us inside these four walls without ever turning the actual lock.
Elise looks around, eyes jumping from the art on the dark-paneled walls, to the awards in a case in the corner, to the bar, to my collection of old vinyl and their record player. “You jam in here? Or is this where you come to brood about how you want your girl back, your dog back, and your truck back?”
I hold back the chuckle, not wanting to give in an inch, not even for an old joke about country music. “This is my cave, basically,” I admit, letting my voice be honest, slightly soft, and in reverence for what this place means to me. “It’s a warm and cozy place that I can hole up and do my music away from everyone and everything. I write all the time these days, in little notebooks I always carry with me, but this is where it all comes together. This is where scribbled notes turn into songs, where melodies that play on repeat in my head become harmonies between instruments and voices. This room is my music. The recording studio’s just . . . production. This is where the magic happens.”
Elise looks taken aback at the openness in my voice, in what I’m telling her. And it’s hard, so fucking hard to let her into this room, this place in my soul, but somehow, talking about my music feels safer, easier than anything else she might ask about me, my history, or this supposed mystery woman I’m hiding. Music. I can always take it back to the music because I can talk about that for hours.
“It feels sacred in here. Thank you for sharing it with me.”
There’s no insincerity to her voice, no note of teasing, just truth, and it makes me feel better for sharing something so personal. She’s right. The music has always been pure, even when sometimes performing hasn’t always felt pure. But that’s not the music’s fault. Here, I can tell the truth. I can take my soul out for inspection, see where it’s tattered and frayed, and see if I can somehow stitch it all back together long enough to make it through the next day.
And Elise seems to understand this. It’s because of that, more than anything else, that lets me gesture to the couch. She plops down on the end, pulling her recorder out of her bag before slipping her shoes off.
Once she’s satisfied with the recorder setup on the table, she curls up in the corner of the couch like a kitten, ready to ask me questions. But I have one for her first as I sit on the opposite end.
“Do you listen to my music?” I ask, maybe a bit more harshly than I intended. “To country at all? Or are you into like electronica dance shit?”
I gesture at her shirt, taking in the logo and the lushness of her tits all at once. She looks down at her shirt, then back to me. “Actually, I do listen to country some. It’s not always my first choice, although that’s definitely not EDM either. If I’m jamming on my own, I’ll usually pick rock . . . Highly Suspect, which is who this t-shirt depicts, or Cage the Elephant, stuff like that. But if a song is good, the beat hits you in your chest and the lyrics make you feel, I’ll listen to any genre. Even country.”
