Damn. I debate taking off my shoes but I’m sure I’d skewer a foot on a splinter or stray nail.

Tyler must have seen my face fall. He pulls off his aviator glasses and tucks them inside his jacket’s chest pocket. “Hey, don’t look so worried. I won’t make you walk all the way up. We have a freight elevator, but it’s so old that it takes forever.” He turns his back to me. “Hop on,” he says over his shoulder.

Is he for real? I’m small, but do I really want him carrying me up five flights of stairs? My face heats.

“Come on,” he coaxes. I push my purse behind me with its strap across my body, hike up my stretchy black jersey dress and put my hands on his broad shoulders.

Tyler squats and bounces me up against his back so effortlessly that I squeak with surprise.

“Hold on.” He climbs the steps fast, his broad hands wrapped under my bare legs just behind my knees. I can’t help but feel how my legs are spread, my panties pressed against the small of his back and his leather jacket.

Each bounce against his back makes my nerves more raw, my body more traitorous with desire. Did I come here for a booty call, or to write a story? Gah, I don’t know. I want them both. But I can only choose one.

I need to keep him at arm’s length. He’s a story. A subject. And as a journalist, I can’t get involved.

But as I’m riding him, I know I’m already involved. His touch to my lips in the cab. His hand pulling me through the restaurant. Tyler’s got bad boy inked all over him in each tattoo and he’s got the attention of every cell in my body.

Bad boys are just my style.

My face is flushed by the time we reach the top stair landing and Tyler’s not even breathing hard. He lets me slide off his back and I pull my dress back into place and gather my wits.

Tyler unlocks two more deadbolts in another wide metal door and ushers me inside, hitting an industrial light switch panel to illuminate the old warehouse.

I gasp as I hear the locks click behind me. This was not what I expected at all. The ceiling is at least fifteen feet high, crisscrossed by massive timbers. The floor is wood, worn smooth and shiny in some places. Multi-paned warehouse windows run from waist high to the ceiling and bare Edison bulbs hang down on long cords.

I follow Tyler from the front door to the kitchen in the opposite corner of the wide-open warehouse, trying to look everywhere at once. Along the only wall without windows, an open set of stairs leads up to a loft. I can’t see what’s up there, but a storage area underneath holds a couple of old bikes, random sound equipment, and a speaker missing its cover.

“Want a drink?” he asks. He gestures for me to sit on a stool behind the kitchen island’s tall bar.

“Sure. Vodka, if you have it.”

Tyler opens and closes cupboards and I glimpse a few liquor bottles. They’re not what I want, though they’ll do in a pinch. He looks in the freezer. “Lucky you. Someone left this behind.” He puts a glass on the concrete counter and pours a stingy shot.

I shoot the ice-cold vodka and put my glass back in the same spot, gesturing to him to fill it up again. The first drink warms me and the second shot revives the buzz I’d been working on at the restaurant.

If I’m not getting laid tonight, at least I can get tipsy.

“Aren’t you going to join me?”

Tyler shakes his head. “I’ll stick to beer.” He pulls a low-carb light beer out of his refrigerator and I can’t help snickering.

“Seriously? You drink that? Or is that all that’s left after your last party?” I slip my notebook out of my purse and open it on the bar. These details are what fans crave and I scribble a few notes about what I’ve seen so far.

“On the record or off, Stella?” The way he says my name snaps my head up and his eyes blaze with intensity.

“On the record. I mean, you said you’d show me your practice space for the story. Right?” I’m uncertain what he wants off the record, other than the location of this warehouse.

“Yes. I promised you that. And I’ll tell you the truth when you ask me a question. But maybe not the whole truth, not if it’s for a story.”

I frown. “Fans want to know the little things. They want to know what kind of beer you drink and what your practice space looks like. That’s what makes the story real.”

Tyler walks around the counter and eyes my scribbled notes. I fight my instinct to cover them up, letting him look so he’ll trust that I’m not going to hurt him with another story.

I wouldn’t—I couldn’t—betray them again. But I also have to push him, make the story vivid so it doesn’t look like a sanitized press release.

I feel his hot breath on the back of my neck and goosebumps rise on my arms.

“Facts are real, Stella,” Tyler says, and I swivel on the stool to face him. His eyes travel across my bare shoulder, down the curve of my waist and land on my crossed legs, one knee on top of the other.

He brushes one finger across my kneecap, close to where his hands held me when he climbed the stairs. I hold my breath to see what’s next.

“Facts are real,” he repeats, “but stories are whatever you make of the facts. Stories are what we tell ourselves and each other.”

I hear his breath hitch as he touches my knee, trailing his finger across the top of my thigh where it meets the hem of my dress.

“A story might be true. It might not. You can have the same set of facts but two totally different stories. And stories can point to truth, or to lies. Don’t forget that.”

Tyler’s fingertip lights a fire in the path it traces on my leg. I drag my eyes from watching the progress of his one long finger to meet his molten brown eyes.

His pupils are dilated and I feel like he could devour me at any moment. I raise my hand, touching his chest through his thin T-shirt. I want to strengthen our connection and find out what his touch means.

But my touch breaks the spell.

SIX

Tyler turns from me and takes a long pull on his beer, coughing slightly. “So, uh, I’m going to show you the practice space now. OK?”

I swivel my stool back to the bar in disappointment, feeling cold without his presence. I down another vodka shot and it helps numb my throbbing feet. I’m growing to hate these shoes.

I grab my notebook and pen, trying to shake off the awkwardness and get on with the interview. Even if this isn’t going where I thought it might, it’s still an amazing opportunity to have this kind of access. I’m going to make the most of it.

Tyler puts plenty of distance between us and I follow him around for the tour. The space is about twice as long as it is wide, and Tyler explains that the hundred-year-old warehouse is basically cut in half, with two tenants on each floor.

“How long have you lived here?” I ask.

“A couple of years.” He shrugs. “The band needed a space to practice, somewhere neighbors wouldn’t complain about noise. Most of the other tenants don’t live in the building; they’re artists or fashion designers who want lots of space and light.”

“It’s really nice.” I mean it. On the long wall with windows, three slouchy couches cluster around a big-screen TV. There’s a distressed boardroom-style table past that with ten mismatched chairs.

We pass an elaborate setup of weightlifting equipment and move toward the largest area, which overflows with musical instruments. Cords snake across the floor between monitors, a soundboard, a drum set, and other expensive equipment. That probably explains all the locks.

“The loft didn’t always look like this. It was full of pigeon droppings and trash when I found it. Some of the windows were broken when I moved in,” Tyler said. “But once I cleaned that shit up and put in a bathroom, I started liking it here more than the band’s old place in Brooklyn. Plus, it’s quicker to get home after a gig in the city.”

“What’s up there?” I point to the loft along the back wall.

“Just my bed and my clothes. I built it when Jayce lived here for a couple of months. I was upstairs and he was downstairs.” Tyler points to the storage area beneath the loft. “Let me tell you about the practice space.”

I follow him, feeling the shots work their magic in my body, unraveling the tension from our awkward moment. I’m a little pissed that Tyler didn’t follow through with his teasing finger’s promise, but I try to focus on building a story.

Tyler points to various instruments and describes who plays what, but I know all of this. I take notes half-heartedly, pressing him for details, looking for something juicy that I can use. It’s got to drive fans wild without undermining Tattoo Thief, but I’m at a loss for how to do that.

“Tell me about your songwriting process.” That starts Tyler on a more productive path. He acknowledges the influence of Lulu Stirling, Gavin’s late muse, but now that Gavin’s given an interview about her death it’s no longer news. The fans want something fresh—they want a taste of what’s next.

I sit on the stool by the drum set and take page after page of notes while Tyler talks about how he found Gavin busking on a street corner and convinced him to join the band, and how they signed their first record deal after four years of playing together.

Now the band’s been together more than seven years and Tyler says they’re like brothers.

“Brothers fight sometimes. Do you guys ever fight?”

“All the time.” Tyler laughs.

“About what?”

“You know—band stuff. The direction of a song. Set lists. What shows we’re playing. But that’s cool. We handle it with majority rule.”

“What if you’re deadlocked two to two?”

“Eh, flip a coin.” Tyler shrugs, unwilling to dish me drama.

I frown. Another dead end.

Tyler picks up his electric bass, plucks a few bluesy chords, and explains that a lot of his solo practice involves anchoring his hand behind the fretboard and making his fingers stretch for the right chords.

“If your hand’s not sliding around, you make fewer mistakes,” he says. He lays several tricky chords down on top of each other and they’re glorious.

“It’s not a song yet.” Tyler shrugs. “But I have an idea for where it might go.”

This is cool. I’m learning. I ask him about the future.

That’s where Tyler balks.

“I can’t predict that, Stella. Who knows where we’ll go next? But what I do know is that we’re more solid and healthier that we’ve been in a long time. Lulu’s death was a tragedy, but it was also a gift. It brought back our perspective, which has gone pretty haywire in the past year.”

“How has your perspective changed?”

“I think we’re different people now that we’ve been through all of that. Gavin especially, but all of us. It made us wake up and realize what’s important.”

“And what’s important to you?”

Tyler thinks, really thinks, before he answers. “My family—my mom and my band mates. I like that the band’s had success, and making it was always really important to me…”

He trails off, so I supply the “But?”

“But the price is really high. There’s not much privacy, and no margin for error.” Tyler looks haunted, like some unknown demon is pecking at his flesh. It makes part of me want to hold and comfort him, but the reporter in me pushes that girl out of the way and presses the issue.

“Error? Like what?”

Tyler sighs heavily and sets his guitar back on its stand. “It’s hard to know who to trust. When you get success, it paints a giant target on your chest. Everyone wants something.”

I stop taking notes. Does Tyler trust me? After what I’ve done to Beryl, I doubt it, so I change the subject.

“Why do you have all the tattoos? Are you just cultivating a bad-boy image or do they mean something?”

Tyler grins. This is something he wants to talk about. He squats close to the drum set stool to give me a closer look at his long, muscled arms.

“They all mean something,” he says. “They’re not about being a rebel, they’re about my history.”

I shudder. My history is not something I want to remember, much less ink into my skin. On one of his forearms I see a raven, a fingerprint, twined bass and treble clefs, and a handful of snowflakes. Tyler shows me his other arm and explains a stylized compass rose—he and two friends got lost on a hike and spent an unexpected night in the woods.

“It’s like wearing your heart on your sleeve,” he says. “This one’s my favorite.” He pulls his T-shirt to the top of his shoulder and points to a retro sailor tattoo, complete with an anchor, a heart, and a scroll that says Mom.