Page 81 of Silver Sweet

“Great.” He leans stiffly against the glass window that separates the control room from the tracking room, and he threads his arms. Drumsticks poke out of a pocket in his black cargo pants. Tension carves his six-four, lean-muscled frame the longer I stay silent.

My lips are glued shut. My fists buried in my jean jacket. My pulse on a fast descent to where I almost feel faint.

Phoenix looks unnerved, as if my quiet disturbs and torments him with each passing millisecond. Then he asks, “What’d I do?” I notice the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallows harder. “Tom.”

I wait for the ensuing insult, the trigger he loves to pull and aim at my bulletproof body, and I like when he tries to strike. So I’m more thrown when he doesn’t.

18

TOM COBALT

“Tell me.Please.” His growl sounds tortured and blistered in frustration. “What did I do?”

Everything about Phoenix is scalding hot, and it scares me just how much I like that too. Because he’s started to feel different. He’s started to feel likethe one.

The one who will create legendary music with me.

The one who can put up with me.

The one who doesn’t want to pack up and toss in the towel.

The one who’d let the towel strangle him before he ever gave up.

It is gut-wrenching—thinking he’s just like everyone else. That maybe I am so impossible to work with, not even Jeremy’s other problem child could handle me.

I can’t pick up my feet. Can’t move. “I don’t know, dude,” I mutter.

“You do know. You came in here looking like I backed a Mac Truck over your Gibson.” He knows it’s my favorite guitar. “So whatthe fuckdid I do?” He bows toward me, arms still crossed tensely, maintaining the death-grips of eye contact.

I intake a sharp, painful breath. “You’re trying to ice me out?—”

“What?” His arms break apart like he needs to hold on to something, but the desk is to his right, not behind him. So he roots his hand to the back of his skull, then inhales slowly.

“Dude, I’ve been through this before. It’s not the first time someone scheduled a studio session early and told me to show up an hour late. Just so I couldn’t be involved in the arrangement because I’m too ‘uncooperative’—and that…” I work my jaw. “That was the last time I saw Warner.”

My old bassist.We formed The Carraways together.

The day Warner and I fought still feels like two hands wrapped around my windpipe. Like a boot thrust against my sternum. Like my back cemented to the hard earth.

I don’t want to go through that again.

Especially not with Phoenix.

He drops his hand with a deep exhale through his nose and a clenched jaw. The flame in his eyes never extinguishes. His intensity is strangling me because I’m more off-kilter than normal. More unbalanced. More…vulnerable.

Then he charges forward.

I flinch backward.

He rocks to a complete, excruciating stop only inches from me, and I can’t tell who’s battling to intake more breath, me or him. He’s unblinking, his nose flaring, as he says, “If I put my hands on you, it will never be to hurt you. You understand that?”

I feel that.“I didn’t think you were going to hit me.”

Phoenix’s deep, dark caring look barrels into my core. “Then why’d you raise your arm to block your face?”

Fuck.

I smear my hands overmy face, then I inhale, exhale. “It’s not you.”