Chapter 1: The Dressing Room Confrontation
The roar of the crowd was a fading tide, sucked out through the concrete throat of the stadium. Backstage was the dregs of that energy—a neon-buzzing labyrinth, the air thick with cigarette smoke and the desperation of people trying to cling to the high. Alyssa Galey shouldered through it, a bolt of furious red in a sea of black t-shirts and sweaty denim.
Her heels clicked a sharp, angry staccato on the grimy concrete floor. She’d seen
Her heels clicked a sharp, angry staccato on the grimy concrete floor. She’d seen it from the side-stage shadows—that glossy-haired girl with the feather earrings, all eyelashes and pouting lips, leaning into the space Jax’s body had just vacated from the stage. She’d watched his hand, the one that had just ripped a thunderous line from his bass guitar, come to rest on the small of the groupie’s back. A casual, proprietorial touch. It had lasted three seconds, maybe four. Long enough.
The door to his dressing room was heavy, painted a scuffed black. She didn’t knock.
Inside, the chaos was curated. A velvet sofa was littered with discarded guitar picks and a half-empty bottle of expensive whiskey. A haze of stage smoke clung to the ceiling lights, giving the room the feel of a dissolving dream. And there he was, Jax Wolff, with his bac
A haze of stage smoke clung to the ceiling lights, giving the room the feel of a dissolving dream. And there he was, Jax Wolff, with his back to her, peeling the sweat-damp t-shirt from his torso. The muscles in his back tensed and rolled, illuminated by the unforgiving bulbs framing the mirror. He didn’t turn. He just watched her reflection storm into the room in the glass.
“Took you longer than I thought,” he said, his voice a low rasp worn raw by two hours of singing.
Alyssa stopped dead. The door swung shut behind her, muffling the distant chaos. “You arrogant son of a bitch.”
He finally turned, leaning his hips against the makeup table. A slow, infuriating smirk spread across his face. A single drop of sweat tracked a path down his temple. “Which part? The playing, the singing, or the waiting?”
“The flirting.” The word tasted like acid. “Right in front of everyone. Right in front of me.”
“I flirt with everyone, Alyssa.” He shrugged, picking up a towel and dragging it over his neck. “It’s part of the job description. ‘Charming frontman.’ You’ve read the articles.”
“Don’t give me that garbage. Your hand was on her back. You looked at her like…”
“Like what?” He dropped the towel and took a step forward. The space between them crackled, charged by the leftover adrenaline from the stage. “Like she was interesting? She wasn’t. It was two seconds of nothing.”
“It’s never nothing with you!” Her own voice sounded too loud, too sharp in the small room. She hated the shrill note in it, the loss of control. “It’s the same act it’s always been. The careless rock star. The guy who doesn’t have to try. Meanwhile, the rest of us live in the real world where actions have consequences.”
His smirk vanished, replaced by something harder. “The real world. Right. Where you get to stand in the shadows and judge, but God forbid you ever step into the light where it’s messy. Where people might see you want something.”
“I don’t want that.” She gestured wildly, as if encompassing the groupie, the whiskey, the whole tawdry backstage scene. “I don’t want to be another name on your very long, very public list.”
“Then what do you want, Alyssa?” He closed the distance until she could smell the scent of him—stage sweat, cheap body spray, something inherently Jax. It infuriated her how familiar it was. “Because you’re here. You’re always here. At the shows. Lingering after. Picking fights about groupies you don’t give a damn about.”
“I’m your friend.”
He laughed, a short, harsh sound. “We stopped being just friends in Mr. Henley’s chemistry lab, and you know it. You’ve just spent the last seven years building a fort out of that fact and hiding inside it.”
The direct hit stole her breath. It was too true. The memory of that stolen, clumsy kiss against the lab tables, the smell of ammonia and desire, flashed between them. Her carefully constructed walls felt paper-thin.
“You don’t get to rewrite history because you’re bored,” she fired back, her voice dropping to a venomous whisper. “You chose this. The band, the tours, the… parade. You don’t get to point at me and accuse me of hiding because I didn’t want to be part of the audience for your greatest hits.”
“Is that what you think this is?” He ran a hand through his dark hair, frustration etching lines beside his mouth. “A performance? You think that out there,” he jabbed a finger toward the stage door, “means anything? It’s noise. It’s light. It’s a transaction. They get a fantasy; I get a paycheck.”
“And what do I get?” The question ripped out of her, raw and unplanned.
He went very still. His eyes, usually alight with mockery or lazy charm, darkened. “You get the version of me that doesn’t exist anywhere else. And you’ve been holding that over my head since we were eighteen.”
The unfairness of it was a lightning strike. “I’m holding nothing over you! You’re the one who’s never satisfied! You have everything, and you still–”
“I don’t have you.”
The words hung in the smoky air, simple and devastating. They argued fiercely, the space between them no longer a buffer but a battleground.
“You don’t want me,” she spat, even as her heart hammered against her ribs. “You want the fight. You want the chase. The second it was real, you’d be out that door. That’s what you do. You’re a chaos agent. I built a life. A real one. With order.”
“Order.” He repeated the word like it was a curse. “Your ‘order’ is a cage you built because you’re terrified. Terrified that if you let go, just once, you might like it. You might feel something you can’t manage with a spreadsheet and a to-do list.”
She slapped him.
The sound was a crack in the quiet room. Her palm stung. A faint red mark bloomed on his cheek. He didn’t flinch. He just stared at her, his chest rising and falling with the force of his breath.
Her own hand trembled at her side. The shock of the action, the violence of it, reverberated through her. She’d broken her own most sacred rule: control.
He saw it. The fracture. His gaze softened, just for a second, not with pity but with a deep, weary recognition. “There she is,” he murmured, almost to himself.
Then he turned, walked back to the table, and picked up his leather jacket. The moment was gone, sealed shut by the sound of the zipper. “The car’s out back. I’ll drop you home.”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just shrugged the jacket on and walked to the door, holding it open for her. The argument was over, but the silence between them was louder than any shout. It thrummed with everything unsaid, and with the terrifying sense that a line, once crossed, could never be uncrossed.
It thrummed with everything unsaid, and with the terrifying sense that a line, once crossed, could never be uncrossed.
He held the heavy door open, a silent, brooding statue framed by the chaotic corridor. The roar was gone, replaced by the mechanical whir of a floor polisher somewhere down the hall. Alyssa’s palm still throbbed. The imprint of her fingers felt like a brand on her own skin.
She didn’t move.
“Come on, Lys,” he said, his voice devoid of its earlier heat. It was just tired. “Let’s go.”
“I don’t want to go home.” The words fell flat into the stale air. They weren’t a plea. They were a statement, simple and stark.
Jax turned his head slowly to look at her. His eyes were shadowed. “What?”
“I said, I don’t want to go home.” She folded her arms, a brittle mimicry of her usual defiance. “Not like this.”
He let the door swing shut with a solid, echoing thud. It closed off the world, sealing them back in the room. The quiet was suddenly oppressive, thick with the scent of him and her floral perfume, now turned cloying.
“What do you want, then?” The question was a low growl. “You want to stand here and dissect it all night? You want to re-litigate every stupid thing I’ve ever done?Fine. But my tolerance for your contradictory bullshit has officially hit zero.”
“My bullshit?” A bitter laugh escaped her. “You’re the one who—”
He moved. It wasn’t the slow, predatory stride from before. It was fast, a blur of contained fury. In two steps he was on her, his hands gripping her shoulders, spinning her, and pinning her back against the cold concrete wall beside the door. The impact knocked the air from her lungs.
His face was inches from hers. The faint mark from her slap was vivid on his cheek. His breath was warm and quick against her lips.
“You don’t get to do this,” he said, his voice a raw, quiet scrape that vibrated through her bones. “You don’t get to poke the bear, throw a grenade into the room, and then announce you don’t want to deal with the fallout. You don’t want to go home ‘like this’? You started this.”
She tried to shove him, but his body was a wall, unmovable. “Let go of me.”
“No.” His fingers tightened, not enough to hurt, but enough to make his point. “You want to have it out? We’re having it out.Right now. But you don’t get to run. Not this time.”
“You arrogant, entitled—”
“You’re terrified,” he cut her off, his gaze boring into hers. “You’re so goddamn terrified of what you actually feel that you have to turn it into a war so you can pretend it’s not about want. It’s about winning. Well, guess what? I’m not leaving you here in this fake battlefield you built. Not tonight.”
He leaned in closer, his forehead almost touching hers. The anger in him was a living thing, but beneath it she saw something else, a desperate, furious kind of care. It was more unnerving than any of his practiced smiles.
“I’m not going to leave you here,” he repeated, each word measured and heavy. “Alone with your ‘order’ and your spreadsheets and your righteous anger. You can hate me in the car. You can scream at me the whole drive. But you are walking out that door with me right now, and we are leaving this green room, this night, and this fucking fight behind. Decide.”
He pushed back from the wall suddenly, releasing her. The abrupt absence of his pressure made her sway. He didn’t look back. He just walked to the dressing table, snatched up his keys, and headed for the door again.
Her heart was a frantic drum against her ribs. The cold of the wall seeped through her thin blouse. Everything in her screamed to stay, to freeze him out, to win by not following.
She followed.
Her heels sounded different now on the concrete—less certain, softer. He heard her, slowing his pace just enough so she could fall into step beside him without running. He didn’t offer his arm. He didn’t speak. He just led her through the labyrinth, past roadies coiling cables, past a girl crying softly in a corner, out into the sharp bite of the night air.
A black SUV idled by a loading dock, exhaust pluming in the chilly air. He opened the passenger door for her. She paused, looking up at him. The stadium lights haloed his hair. His profile was all hard lines and tension.
Without a word, she climbed in. The leather seat was cold. He shut the door firmly, a solid, final sound, and walked around to the driver’s side.
The engine turned over with a low growl. The heater hadn't yet cut through the deep chill in the cabin, a chill that had nothing to do with the night air outside. Alyssa stared straight ahead, her fingers clamped around the edge of the leather seat. She couldn’t feel them.
The city slid past the window, a smear of neon and streetlight. Jax drove with one hand on the wheel, his profile a silent, unreadable cutout against the passing glow. He didn't turn on the radio.
The silence was a physical pressure. It crowded against her eardrums, vibrating with every word left unsaid. It pressed down on her lungs, making each breath a conscious, shallow effort. In her head, it wasn’t silent at all. It was a deafening replay.
His hands, gripping her shoulders, pinning her to the cold concrete. The searing heat of his body against hers, the solid, unyielding wall of him. That look in his eyes—not just anger, but a furious, focused intensity that had stripped every retort, every defense, clean away. For three heartbeats, she hadn’t been Alyssa Galey, controller of her own universe. She’d just been… his. A shockwave of pure, undiluted sensation. And a terrifying part of her, a part she kept in a locked basement and fed only on scraps, had craved it. Had wanted him to prove it. To show her exactly why everyone whispered his name. To be the thing everyone said he was, just so she could finally hate him correctly, efficiently, and be done with it.
And he hadn't. He’d just… held her there.And talked. The contradiction was maddening. The player didn't talk. The player acted. He was supposed to be shallow, easy to dismiss. Instead, he’d looked right into the fractured heart of her and named it. Fear.
She’d built her whole life on never being afraid. On out-working, out-planning, out-managing every variable. Jax was the ultimate variable. Un-manageable. Un-predictable. He was chaos in a leather jacket, and the worst part, the truly unbearable part, was how her body still hummed from the confrontation. From the loss of control. The memory of that friction, the wall at her back and him as the only thing in her world, played on a loop she couldn’t stop. She clenched her jaw until it ached, trying to force the images out.
“Just say it.”
His voice, rough from disuse, shattered the quiet like glass. It wasn't loud. It was just there, filling the space between them, inevitable.
She didn’t look at him. “Say what?”
“Whatever you’re cooking up in there. The character assassination. The itemized list of my failings. The ten-point plan for my moral realignment.” He glanced over, his eyes catching a streetlamp’s glare, turning them silver for a second. “The silence is worse. You’re never not insulting me.”
She wanted to fire back. She should have. A scalding remark about his ego, his assumption that he occupied her every thought. But the words died in her throat, calcified by the sheer, exhausting weight of the truth. He was occupying her every thought, and the thought wasn’t an insult. It was a branded image she couldn’t erase.
She looked out her window, at the bleached-out ghosts of buildings passing by. “You pinned me to a wall.”
He was quiet for a long moment. The tires hummed on the asphalt. “Yeah. I did.”
“You were angry.”
“Yeah.”
Another block passed. A traffic light turned red. He slowed to a stop. The engine idled. “That’s the thing you can’t stop thinking about?” he asked, his voice softer now, edged with a skepticism that felt like a probe. “That I got physical?”
“No.” The answer was out before she could police it. It hung there, a single, vulnerable syllable in the dark car.
The light turned green. He didn’t move. The car behind them gave a short, impatient tap of its horn. Jax ignored it, his gaze now fully on her, a tangible weight in the periphery of her vision.
“Then what, Lys?”
He was peeling it back. Layer by layer. And she was so tired of fighting him, of fighting herself. She turned her head slowly, meeting his eyes in the dim dashboard light.
“I wanted you to be the cliché,” she whispered, the confession torn from a place deeper than pride. “In that moment. I wanted you to shut me up, to be everything they say. It would have been easier.Cleaner. I could have hated you perfectly. Instead, you just… looked at me. And you saw it. You see it. That’s the problem.”
The horn blared again, longer this time. Jax finally looked away, his jaw tight, and eased the car forward. He drove for another two blocks without speaking, turning onto the quiet, tree-lined street that led to her apartment.
He pulled to the curb but left the car running. He didn't put it in park.
“Seeing you isn’t a problem for me, Alyssa,” he said, staring straight ahead at the empty street. His hands rested on the wheel at ten and two, a formal, controlled posture. “It’s the only thing that’s ever made any fucking sense since I was seventeen. The problem is you don’t want to be seen. Not by me. Not by anyone. You’d rather live in the fortress.”
He finally turned to her, and the raw honesty in his face was more disarming than any anger. “The thing you wanted in that room? The easy out? I thought about it. For about half a second. But you don’t get the version of me I give to strangers. You never have.”
He reached across the space between them, not touching her, but flipping the latch on her door. A soft, mechanical click.A release.
“Go on up to your fortress. Inventory your control. It’s late.”
The dismissal was gentle, absolute, and it shattered her completely. It wasn't a challenge. It was a surrender. He was letting her win. And winning, she realized with a cold, creeping dread, felt exactly like losing everything.
She didn't move. She looked at the door latch, then back at his hands on the wheel. The silence returned, but it was different now. It was full. Crackling with a terrible, beautiful potential.
The running engine murmured. A light rainbegan to speckle the windshield.
A light rain began to speckle the windshield.
The click of the door latch echoed in the quiet cabin.A release. A dismissal.
It was the gentleness that ignited the final, white-hot fuse. This magnanimous, exhausted surrender. He got to be the better person. He got to choose when the fight was over. He got to frame it as some grand, noble concession. The architect of her frustration was now playing the weary saint.
“That’s it?” Her voice was dangerously quiet. She didn’t touch the door.
He didn’t look at her. “What more do you want, Alyssa?”
“I want you to stop curating!” she snapped, the word lashing out. “Stop editing the version of Jax Wolff I get! You get to be the charming asshole to everyone else—flirty, easy, a goddamn open book of predictable moves. But with me? You’re this… this tormented philosopher. This deep, misunderstood artist who ‘sees’ me. Why? Why am I the only one who gets the dickhead version?”
He finally turned his head, his eyes narrowing. “The dickhead version?”
“Yes! The confrontational, frustrating, intentionally obtuse dickhead! You pin me to a wall and have a therapy session! You corner me and then give me a lecture on my emotional fortifications! You drag me out here and then hand me this… this wounded puppy routine about how seeing me ‘makes sense’?Bullshit. If that were true, you wouldn’t treat me like your personal emotional punching bag.”
“Punching bag?” A bitter laugh escaped him. He shook his head, turning to stare out the front windshield again. The wipers made a single, slow sweep, smearing the droplets. “You have no idea.”
“Then enlighten me! Because from where I’m sitting, you just love the tease. You love winding me up, pushing every button until I’m right here—on the edge of whatever this is—and then you step back. You get to walk away looking like the one who tried, while I’m left looking and feeling like a crazy, frustrated shrew. That’s the game, isn’t it? It’s not about wanting me. It’s about wanting to be the one I want and then holding it just out of reach. It’s fucking cruel, Jax.”
“You think this is a game?” His voice dropped, low and rough. “You think any of this is fun for me? Watching you dissect every interaction for hidden motives? Walking on eggshells because one wrong move, one wrong look, and you’ll rebuild the wall another six feet higher?”
“Eggshells?” She barked a laugh. “You don’t walk on eggshells! You stomp through my life in combat boots! You swan in with your groupies and your smirks and your ‘charming frontman’ act, and the second I call you on it, it’s my fault for being jealous, for being rigid, for not understanding the performance! You set the trap and then blame me for springing it!”
“I don’t bring other women around to trap you!”
“Then why do it? Why, if I’m so goddamn special and ‘seen,’ do you feel the need to perform your availability for the whole world right in front of my face? Huh? Is it to remind me you have options? To keep me in my place? To prove that Jax Wolff doesn’t get attached, not even to the one person he claims to actually see?”
He was silent for three long heartbeats. The rain picked up, a soft tap-tap-tap on the roof. “Maybe it’s to remind myself,” he said, the words hollow.
“Oh, spare me the existential crisis.” The anger was a pure, clarifying fire now. It burned away the confusion, the hurt, leaving only a sharp, clean rage. “You don’t get to have it both ways. You don’t get to dangle this… this possibility for seven years and then act put-upon when I finally snap. You don’t get to be the wounded soul who just can’t help but flirt and then turn around and accuse me of living in a fortress. You built the goddamn moat, Jax. With every careless comment, every public display, every time you looked right through me after kissing me in a chemistry lab.”
She fumbled for the door handle, her fingers numb. “I’m done. I am so done. If you’re not going to do something—actually do something, not just talk about it, not just analyze it to death—then this… whatever this painful, exhausting thing is… is over. I’m done renting space in your emotional storage unit.”
She shoved the door open. The damp, cool night air rushed in, a shock against her heated skin.
“Alyssa—”
“Save it. Go write a song about it. I’m sure it’ll be a hit.”
She slammed the door shut. The sound was a period at the end of a screaming sentence. She turned, her heels sinking into the soft grass of the tree lawn, and headed for the glowing lobby doors of her apartment building twenty yards away. The rain misted her hair, her shoulders.
She heard his car door open. Not a careful click. A violent, metallic groan as it was flung wide. Then the solid thud of it being shut hard enough to rock the SUV on its springs.
Footsteps, fast and heavy on the wet pavement, closed the distance behind her.
She didn’t turn around. She walked faster.
His hand closed around her upper arm, not hard, but unequivocal, spinning her to face him. Raindrops caught in his eyelashes, on the stubble along his jaw. The streetlight above them cast harsh shadows, making his expression look carved from stone.
“You don’t get the last word,” he said, his breath pluming in the chilly air. “Not like that.”
“Let go of me.”
“No. You want to know why I’m a dick to you? Why I ‘tease’ and ‘do nothing’?” His grip tightened, his other hand coming up to frame her face, his thumb rough against her cheekbone, forcing her to look at him. “Because every time I see you, Alyssa, I am fucking dismantled. Do you get that?”
His words were a low, desperate snarl, stripped bare of all pretense. “That girl backstage? I didn’t see her. I don’t see any of them. I see you. Standing in the wings with your arms crossed, your mind already writing the indictment. I see you in every front row. I see you in every empty seat. I have been eye-fucking you from across rooms, across stages, across this fucking city, since we were kids. It’s not a game. It’s a sickness.”
He leaned closer, his forehead almost touching hers, his voice dropping to a raw, intimate scrape that vibrated in the space between their mouths. “You want to know what I imagine when I ‘do nothing’? I imagine what it would be like to finally stop imagining. To have you under me. To peel every single one of these defensive, smart, infuriating layers off and see the skin you hide underneath. To put my mouth on every inch of it. To feel you shiver. To hear you finally make a sound that isn’t a critique or a challenge. To feel your pussy wrapped around me, tight and hot and finally, after all this fucking time, mine. Not an argument. Not a problem to solve. Mine.”
The vulgarity, the sheer visceral hunger in the confession, hit her like a physical blow. It wasn’t a sweet confession. It was a claiming. Angry.Possessive. Real in a way his poetic "seeing" never was.
“That’s why I’m a dick,” he breathed, his thumb stroking her jaw now, a contradictory caress against the tension in his frame. “Because that’s what’s in my head. All the time. And you’re over there talking about fortresses and emotional real estate. So yeah, I push you. I piss you off. Because that fire is the only thing that feels honest. And the alternative… the alternative is walking over to you and doing what I actually want to do, and knowing it would terrify you so completely you’d never speak to me again. So I stand across the room. And I flirt with a stranger. And I wait for you to come and yell at me, because at least then you’re here, in my space, and for a few minutes, I’m not just imagining it.”