Pulse: A Stepbrother Romance (15 page)

“Okay, Kevin, play that part again, except can you make the sounds a little crisper? I want this to be haunting when it harmonizes with Liana’s voice.”

I hit the record toggle and leaned back as Kevin sat in the booth and played the piece over again with his violin. As he went, I could already hear the finished song in my mind: the way the bass would emphasis the right parts, the way I would mix in Liana’s vocals and the other sounds I’d created for the track.

“Perfect. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.”

My time was almost up in the booth, so I gathered everything and met the others in the hall.

“That was a good session, everyone, thanks for sacrificing your afternoons for me. There’s still time to make one more song before the party and I want to nail it.”

“You did well in there,” Liana said, touching my arm. Her hand lingered on my bicep. “I’m impressed with how you’ve come along. You’ve been working so hard the last two weeks.”

The guys left, on to practice for their next round of exams.

“I haven’t had much choice,” I said. “Leah sprang this on me two weeks ago, right after my laptop got smashed at work. And then I quit because of that. This is all I have, and I need to ace it. Every waking hour has been dedicated to creating music. It’s like I’m constantly on a high.”

Liana leaned in. Close. “It’s very passionate. And very sexy. I’d like to come over to your place to listen to the finished tracks sometime.” She leaned in until her lips were right next to my ear, and she whispered, “I’ll make it worth your while.”

I didn’t know how to respond, but she bailed me out by walking away with an extra bit of a lift to her hips as they sashayed back and forth.

“Holy shit,” I muttered as I watched her go.

Liana was a girl I would have been ecstatic to pull back before I hooked up with Leah. Tall, blonde, with proportions that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Barbie doll, and she was a cool person, to boot. We’d spent a lot of time together since she started doing vocals for me, and apparently it was enough to make her want me, even though I hadn’t been shooting for that.

Well, that might complicate things.

I’d have to figure out a way to let her down easy. After all, I didn’t want to lose her as a vocalist—she was dynamite, and her voice created masterpieces out of what were merely decent songs without her.

Maybe I shouldn’t turn her away.

The cat and mouse game with Leah was months old, and still no different than the first week after we’d met and had sex. She still danced around with David, and I had no one. We both knew it would go nowhere. How could it? We were stepsiblings.

Maybe being with Liana wouldn’t be that big of a deal. There wasn’t much Leah could say about it—she had pushed me away more times than a teenage prom date.

The whole thing could wait. There was only one more day until the event, and I didn’t feel prepared at all.

Kevin had shown me around campus, including the recording booths that the students could sign out for personal use. It was easy to pretend to be a student. All I had to do was wear a shirt that covered my tattoos and put on preppier clothing and it dropped a few years from my appearance.

Instead of going home to work on the track, I went to a café nearby that Leah had shown me. It had taken a few days after quitting before I’d gone stir crazy, unable to take the same surroundings any longer. It sapped my productivity, and I needed exposure to other people even if I didn’t choose to talk to anyone.

Time passed in a haze of notes and melodies and bass lines. A comet could have exploded outside and it wouldn’t have stopped me unless it upended the table.

Even a tap on the shoulder wasn’t enough to break me from my trance. My mind registered it and discarded it as an unnecessary distraction until someone pulled my headphones off.

“Hey!” I looked around.

Leah plopped into the chair opposite me. “Something told me I’d find you here.”

She pulled her feet up onto the chair and wrapped her arms around her legs as she balanced her coffee cup on her knees. It was beyond cute.

“I do my best work here,” I said.

I extended my neck upward and groaned as the vertebrae cracked and the muscles cried out in pain.

“How long have you been sitting there like that?” Leah asked. She bounced out of the chair and walked around behind me.

She settled her hands on my shoulders and started to knead. There was nothing soft and easy about her shoulder rubs—they got right to the point.

“Damn, that feels good,” I said, caught in a mixture of pain and pleasure from the release of sore muscles as she worked on the knots that had built in my shoulders. “You can keep right on doing that forever.”

“Is that your latest song?” she asked, looking over my shoulder. There were countless parallel strips across the screen, each one showing the notes that a particular sound played.

“Yeah, want to listen? I think it’s one of my better ones. Kevin’s violin meshes perfectly with Liana’s voice. It gives me goosebumps every time I hear it, and I put the damn thing together.”

I passed back the headphones and waited for her to put them on before I hit play. Thankfully, her hands came back down to my shoulders once they were free.

I couldn’t hear the music, but I knew the song intimately well by this point. I could feel her moving behind me, swaying from side to side in time with the beat. Her fingers even changed their pattern, moving to the pace of the song.

It’s amazing how people will change what they are doing to line up with music, and they don’t even realize it’s happening.

I saw it happen all the time. Just that morning I walked behind a businessman in a suit while on my way to the campus, and we passed by a tattoo parlor that played AC/DC. The man’s steps changed so he walked in time with the music, marching to the beat of a drummer.

“Wow,” Leah said as the song rolled to a close and she took the headphones off. “That was fantastic, Chris! Is it done yet?”

I hesitated. I could just call it quits on the song and have it be one of the better tracks I’d ever created. But I knew it could be even better.

“No. No, I still have polishing to do on this. There’s something Sean showed me the other day I want to try to put in. I think it will take it over the top. I might save it to be my killer song of the night tomorrow.” Sean’s suggestion had only just come to me, but it felt right.

“Are you ready for tomorrow?”

That was the million-dollar question. Tomorrow could be the start of a career doing what I loved. Or it could prove that I was better off moving out to the country and begging Jerry to get me that boring office job.

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“Are you ready?”

It was an eerie echo of the café from the night before. Chris stood in the DJ booth set up on a stage next to the enormous dance floor. Tables groaned under massive turntables that had rows of glowing toggles and laptops loaded with music and everything he needed.

“I think so,” he said. “Don’t get a chance to do the more live-type stuff, but I’ve been taking a cue from you and practicing my ass off.”

I laughed. Rehearsing was my answer to everything, and Chris knew it. “It’s a proven phenomenon, the more you practice doing something the better you get and the more comfortable you’ll be doing it in front of other people.”

“Three thousand people,” Chris corrected. “And a lot of them are in music programs and will spot a phony up here telling them to get pumped.”

“You’ll be fine. You know your music is good. And you can always just play stuff from the famous DJs and throw a little spin on it. That’s what everyone else does.”

His eyes blazed. He didn’t want to be like everyone else. He wanted to be better.

That was the passion I loved in him.

I skipped around the table to give him a hug. “Knock ‘em dead, stepbro.”

“Is that what we’re doing now? Calling each other stepbro and stepsis?”

“Oh, shut up, it slipped out. I’m meeting up with Tyra. You’ll be fine?”

He shrugged. “I’m an adult. I’ll survive. Go see your friends.”

It was still early; beyond the organizing committee for the event, only a few early birds had shown up and wandered around looking lost. The only reason I’d come was to check in with Chris.

In fact, if he hadn’t been playing the gig, I wouldn’t have come at all. The play’s opening night was in a week, and I itched to be rehearsing. Never mind I could recite all the lines backwards and forwards in my sleep for all the characters in the entire masterpiece—it was wrong to take a night off so close to a performance.

“Leah!” Tyra called from the bar when I walked in. She had found the alcohol already. One benefit of being third-year students—we were old enough to drink. Not that we hadn’t found ways when we were younger, but it was liberating to just walk up to any bar and order something.

“Hey, girl, how are you?” I gave her a hug. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages.”

“That’s because it’s been forever, biatch,” Tyra said. “You got all wound up in your play and your stepbrother and I’ve been left all on my lonesome hunting for dick. You know how sad that is?”

As usual, she had me laughing as soon as she spoke. “Tyra, something tells me that being alone at the bar doesn’t hinder your ability to reel in penis. I think you’d do better when you don’t have to worry about me tagging along.”

She winked. “Well, I had to try to make you feel bad about it. Where is he, anyway? Is it true I’ll finally hear that music you promised me? It’s been months and I still haven’t gotten laid to the sounds of your stepbrother’s handiwork.”

“It’s even better than it was before,” I said. “He’s gotten in with Kevin and that gang and even has Liana singing for him.”

“Liana? I bet she sang for him all right. That bitch.” Tyra had never liked the tall blonde. My favorite theory was because the leggy singer was a more refined version of Tyra herself, and it bugged her that someone was being Tyra better than she was.

“I don’t think Chris would go for Liana,” I said without thinking. “We’ve still been…” I cut myself off before I could finish the thought.

“You’ve still been…?” Tyra leapt on it far too quickly. “Please tell me you are still banging that sweet piece of ass, Leah!”

“Jesus, Tyra, no! He’s my stepbrother!”

She shrugged. “Not blood. Besides, it didn’t stop you before.”

“Our parents weren’t married before,” I retorted. “And we’d never met, so even if they were, it wouldn’t have counted.”

“Sure, sure,” she said. “I totally believe you don’t have the hots for him. That’s why you’ve been spending all your time with him instead of your boyfriend.”

“David is not my boyfriend.”

She grinned, the little shit-disturber. “And why’s that? Who’s sweet Leah holding herself open for?”

“You’re a royal pain in the ass, you know that? What have you been up to, anyway?” I was eager to get off the subject of my stepbrother. My sexy, irresistible stepbrother.

One side effect of being at the party so early was that there wasn’t much to do except for drink. And we drank. It wasn’t wise to go so deep so early, but Tyra and I hadn’t had a girl’s night out in a long time, and it was good to catch up.

The bar area got more and more crowded as the hall filled out.

“I dare say,” Tyra slurred, “that I think the party has started.”

“It has, hasn’t it?” I replied. “I think, my sweet, we should find the dance floor.”

We giggled and took off into the big open room that housed most of the crowd.

The lights were dim, the figures on the floor occasionally lit by the bursting light of a strobe or the sweep of laser lights. I could see Chris on his pedestal in the corner, working his laptops, the blue light highlighting his face in the sea of darkness.

It was too loud to talk, but Tyra grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the floor. We danced together, but I could see she had her eye on the crowd as per usual, checking out potential suitors and looking for someone who met her type.

Before too long we danced our way to the shadow of the DJ platform. There were two figures up there. One was Chris, working away on his computer.

The other was Liana.

Seriously?

I tried to get Tyra's attention and tell her I was going up there, but she was already dancing with a big, handsome guy. From the way he moved he was probably also in the dance program. They made quite the pair as they cut a swath through the floor and disappeared from sight.

When I climbed onto the stage behind Chris, Liana was cozied up next to him and had her arm around his. He pointed something out on the screen and she gave a cute little bounce that made her ass in her tight skirt jiggle.

Ugh. She’s disgustingly attractive.
Now I knew why Tyra hated her. I tried to be above the whole hating other women because they are talented and gorgeous thing, but in that moment that’s exactly what my problem with her was.

Before I could back down, I walked up and tapped Chris on the shoulder.

“Oh, hey,” he shouted, but I could barely hear him. “Liana just wanted me to play one of the new songs!”

It took a moment for me to puzzle out what he said, and he had to repeat the last part again. That’s when I realized that the killer vocals I was listening to was Liana singing.

Well, that’s just not fair.

The woman herself had backed into the center of the platform and started to dance to her own voice set to Chris’ music while he looked on in appreciation.

Neither is that!