Page 8 of Volatile

“You like?” Aspen asked.

“You look hot as fuck.” Levi drank him in, and I wanted to hit him in the face.

Aspen smiled, getting a little shy. “Thank you. Do you think it’s okay for stage?” So he hadn’t run it by anyone.

“A little late now.” Levi laughed and tilted his head, eye fucking Aspen. “It’s going to get a lot of attention.”

“Bad?” he asked, showing a hint of insecurity.

“No, I think your fans will like it. A lot.” He shook his head, clearly processing how turned on he was.

I snarled, wanting to slit his throat for looking at Aspen like that.

Both of them looked at me.

I stared Levi down, trying to tell my manager to fucking test me and he’d be a dead man. He better get it the fuck under control. He was never getting near Aspen.

“What?” Levi asked.

“We need to get on stage.”

“I know. I was just saying you two are late. We have a curfew at this stadium.”

“I’ll pay it. I don’t care.” I grabbed my guitar from Steve and stalked out to not make this any worse. I took my place, looking over at Aspen expectantly.

He hesitated, then shrugged at Levi before following me out. Taylor and Kingsley were close behind him.

The flip of his skirt caught the corner of my vision as the lights came up to his sinister smirk. All the shyness was gone.

He was Aspen Cole, and fuck, why did that not stop me from getting harder?

He stood lit from underneath with that fucking grin. He knew how he looked. He knew what people said about him. They called him a vampire and a gremlin. They delighted in his energy and that he wasn’t afraid of being unapologetically himself. It took years to get here, but Aspen had cemented his image as the weirdo in the hardcore punk scene, and he loved it. He’d told me so years ago when he was high off his ass, and sometimes, I wondered if he remembered the conversation.

This would be received as him pushing more limits.

My best friend was most alive when he was on stage.

As he screamed into the mic, I saw glimpses of his best days. The person he was before the light went out of his eyes. Flickers of the humanity he shunned. The asshole he could be when he needed to. The weirdo I loved.

Aspen might think of himself as ruined because of what happened to him, but I can’t imagine loving him any other way. I wouldn’t want him to be any other person.

I don’t know who he was before he was that boy I met all those years ago, but this was the version of him I didn’t want to lose.

I almost missed my line, leaning into my mic to rap the lyric an eighth of a second behind the beat. No one in the crowd would notice, but Aspen turned on me, locking eyes, curiosity curving one brow.

I shrugged. It happened to the best of us. We couldn’t be perfect every night.

I figured Aspen would drop it, but he didn’t. As we came into the next song, he flipped his guitar behind him and walked over to my side of the stage, which wasn’t unusual, but the way he sauntered and then put one of his booted feet on the speaker, letting everyone in the pit see up his skirt, definitely was.

He better be fucking wearing something under that. A growl stirred in my chest. What the fuck was wrong with me? How many people had he fucked over the years? They’d all seen him naked, so why did it matter if it was up a skirt?

But it did.

A lot.

He bent over, getting closer to the crowd as he held his note, belting with everything he had.

Giving me a full view of the curve of his cheeks peeking out of the bottom of his skirt.