Jax laughs and lifts off me so I can fish it from my pocket.
It’s the bar. I take a call about where to stack the chairs we have to move to make room for the cabling to the stage. By the time I’m done, Jax has his coat on again. He’s bent over and messing with a camera bag on the floor. I come up behind him as he straightens. I press my face into his neck and breathe him in.
He reaches back and rubs my forearm with his spare hand. “Okay?”
I take one last lungful of him and press my lips to his warm skin. “Yeah, you just make me feel lucky sometimes, is all.”
Chapter Fourteen
Jax
Tanner is much better at communicating without words. He helps me carry my gear back to V and V and leaves me alone to set up, but he’s never far away, and he passes me often, every light hand on my back an apology for shit he doesn’t need to apologize for. He’s…complex, and he didn’t ask for me to show up in his life and make him explain himself.
He didn’t tell me that V and V has archaic electrics, though, and that shitisfucking criminal.
“It’s an old building,” he says with a wince. “It got refitted to be a bar, not a studio.”
“Yeah, all right, mate.” I’m grumbling and it amuses him enough for me to turn my back on him and try and figure out my cabling problem on my own. If it was just the cameras it would be no thing—they run on batteries. But if I’m going to catch Molly’s best side, I’m gonna need more light.
Rainn finds an extra cable from Lord knows where. Tanner helps me run it along the wall where no one will trip over it. As a thank-you I tread on his hand by accident, but he doesn’t seem to mind. “Where are you going to put the light?” He stares up at the wooden beam I’m taping the cable to. “In the corner?”
“Yup.”
“You want a chair to stand on?”
“Nope.” I find the variable LED I bought off eBay for filming tarantulas in the California desert. It’s small enough to be incognito if I can get it high enough. I find another beam and lift myself from the ground with one arm, using the other to hang the light on a thick nail that was probably hammered in a hundred years ago.
It holds. I drop to the floor to find Tanner watching me from behind the bar with his lip caught in his teeth. “What?”
He rolls his eyes. “Nothing. Just keep doing shit like that all night long and see where you end up.”
There’s too many people around for me to respond. I wonder if he knows that watching him do the simplest of things has become my favorite activity. Like now, as he diverts his attention back to hefting trays of glasses from one end of the bar to the other. He’s not officially working, so he’s still wearing the gunmetal gray tee I wanted to tear from him an hour ago. His forearms are always on show; add his popping biceps and I need a fucking drink.
Shame Iamworking. The cider I had with our angsty lunch date seems a long time ago.
I finish my set-up. There isn’t much to it, just my faithful spider light and a camera on a tripod pointing at the stage. I’ll film the rest of the bar with a handheld on a gimbal and hope I’m not too out of practice at dynamic shooting. It’s been a while.
“All set?” Tanner’s hand on my back startles me. His lips at my neck, not so much.
Humming, I lean into his touch. “Think so. I’m trying to remember the last time I used the gimbal, though, so don’t pay me until you’ve seen the finished result.”
“Anything you produce will be better than the crap we already have.”
“Hold that thought.”
Tanner snorts. I can tell he wants to bitch me out for my pessimism, but he’s called away again before he can comment.
The bar opens. Happy hour kicks off and I retreat to a side table to stand guard over my equipment and people-watch. Molly arrives. She looks tired and wet-eyed.
I frown. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Sure about that? Cos you look like you just got dumped.”
Molly flops into the seat opposite and drops low on the table. “Ididn’t get dumped. He did. So he stole all my clothes, my guitar, and my laptop.”
“He stole your clothes? That’s fucked up.”
