Rae
Itake the stage to deafening applause.
I play some experimental shit. Some stripped down remixes, even the song I was working on that I can’t get quite right.
The crowd is dancing and loving and living, and I’m in it with them. My hands are in the air, and I’m losing myself in the music.
Leni’s right. This feels like home.
I might even know how to fix this track now.
I’m hearing the changes in my head, committing them to memory when awareness jerks me back to the present.
The champagne bucket appears at my side, full of waters.
I put off responding for thirty seconds. A minute. Even change the tracks once without giving in to the desire to look up.
When I can’t hold back anymore, I lift my gaze to the VIP.
Harrison King is wearing a tuxedo, bracing both hands on the railing. His perfect jaw is set, firm lips pressed into a hard line, his hair mussed as if he caught himself running a hand through it.
His eyes are locked on me.
In a room full of pagans dancing underground…
He’s a god.
And he’s pissed.
Part of me wishes I could tell him I didn’t do this to mess with him. Even though there’s nothing he can do. He can’t very well drag me from the stage.
Though the idea makes me shiver.
We can’t be together in public because I can’t have Mischa thinking we’re an item again.
And in private, it’s too risky to my heart.
But like this, I can touch him without touching him.
We’re surrounded. It’s the most dangerous place to be, and the safest.
Since he walked into my hotel room, I’ve been a mass of emotions. Wanting, aching, longing, regretting.
I can wish he didn’t leave me, but I can’t change that he did. But I wouldn’t rewind time and erase what happened between us. I wouldn’t even erase the hurried sex in his bathroom last week.
The more I stare at him, the more I realize…
I wouldn’t erase a thing.
We never should have been, and that only makes me cling more determinedly to what we were. What we are. Even if we’re not a couple and I’m not hoping for a happily ever after with this man, something between us is alive and teeming, now, in this basement.
So, I play for him.
I choose the songs, tracks that will move the crowd and fit the stripped-down theme of “Come As You Are,” but that also fit us. I create a new set on the fly, my fingers moving as fast as my mind.
This set is my own personal mixtape for my fuck-hot ex.
He watches like he knows it.