BloodLust // yungblud fanfic

Chapter 25

     When he woke up the next morning, Holly was gone; but she had left a note for him on the side table: Snuck out early so no one would catch me. I cant wait for our next hotel night! xoxo

     He flopped back on the mattress, grinning. Christ, Holly. Hellion, succubus. What a night they'd had together. He didn't know how he was going to survive until the next hotel night, which was - shit - in three days. An eternity. He had sort of hoped that sleeping with her would - well. Not cure him. But certainly get it out of his system. But now that he'd actually been with her, he knew there was no way in hell that once would be enough.

     Well. Three times.

     Technicalities.

     He showered and went downstairs for breakfast. Holly was there in the dining room with Tom, very innocently eating a bowl of cereal. Was she sucking off her spoon? Was she winking at Dom while he waited in line to toast his bagel? Maybe he was imagining things; but she was a sly thing, so you never knew. 

     He joined them at the table, and Tom raised his coffee mug in a wordless salute. Dom sat down and opened a little plastic tub of cream cheese, and valiantly tried to ignore his body's automatic response to Holly's presence. "How's the intrepid explorer?"

     Tom groaned. "I'm so sore i can barely walk. This sedentary bus life is slowly killing me."

     Dom grinned. They had spent the bus ride to Vegas yesterday evening looking at pictures Tom took on his hike, and Dom wasn't at all surprised that Tom was in bad shape. The trail had something life 1500 feet of elevation gain. It looked brutal. 

     "You should have taken it easy, like us," Holly said. There was the faintest shadow of a bruise on her neck. "A woman in a manual wheelchair passed us on our way back to the bus."

     "To be fair, she looked incredibly strong and she was going pretty fast," Dom said.

     Holly bumped her foot against Dom's beneath the table. Tom, oblivious, started telling a story about something he had seen on the hike yesterday - a hawk or something. Dom wasn't really listening. He felt like the most blatantly lovesick fool in the world, but nobody on the tour seemed to have noticed. Or maybe they all knew and were just pretending otherwise, to spare him the embarrassment; but he was sure that he would have at least gotten an earful from Gavin if that were the case.

     The way that Holly was looking at him was going to give him a hard-on right there at the breakfast table, and with his luck he would end up traumatizing a grandmother, or someone's child.

     "-so next year, maybe Yellowstone," Tom said.

     "Yellowstone is great," Holly said. "I definitely recommend it. We drove through there on tour one time, and it was packed with tourists, but it's such a weird and awesome place that i didn't even mind at all. Seeing Old Faithful erupt was really cool."

     "Yeah, and there's that prismatic hot spring," Tom said. "I read something about how the most common technique in gene sequencing is based on extremophile microbes that came out of that hot spring."

     "Nerd Alert," Dom said. Tom was really sort of a dweeb at heart, tattoos and extreme sports notwithstanding. 

     "I think it's interesting," Holly said, blatantly sucking up, looking like butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, and trying to play footsie with Dom underneath the table again. 

     He was really in all sorts of trouble.

     After breakfast, Holly went off with Gillian to do mysterious girl things, and Dom took a walk along the Strip. It was the middle of the week, and the middle of the morning, but there was still plenty of action: packs of tourists with their cameras, tour busses with loudspeakers rolling along the road, people dressed up like they were ready to party, or like they were still partying from the night before. Dom liked Vegas - the lights, the excitement - but in small doses. It could get overwhelming after a while. He didn't gamble, because who knew how deep the rabbit hole went.

     He walked along and looked at the casino lights and thought about what he was going to so after the tour was over. They only had a couple more weeks on the road, and then he was free until they headed to Europe in mid-October. He would probably go back to England for a week and visit his parents, and then maybe fly to New York to see one of his old friends, but other than that, he wasn't sure what he would do. He still owned a condo in Chicago, but he was on the road so much that it didn't feel much like home anymore. He had no plans, no obligations, nothing tying him down, and he had enough money to life modestly for the rest of his life, or outrageously for a handful of years. So he could go anywhere in the world. He could ride elephants. He could learn to scuba dive.

     Maybe he could go to L.A. and spend some time with Holly.

     So there it was: he was making plans to see her again. It wasn't just a tour thing. Maybe they would get sick of each other after a month, but maybe they wouldn't; and either way, he wanted to find out. He didn't want her to get on a plane at the end of the tour and disappear from his life.

     It was so strange to have something to look forward to again. He'd spent so many months bracing for some Michael-related calamity that he'd forgotten the simple joy of anticipating a good event.

     And Holly was good. The best.

     Their show went well that night. They were all a little tense after the disaster in Salt Lake City, but the crowd in Vegas was on fire, screaming the entire time like they couldn't get enough. The energy was through the roof, and partway through the second song Dom decided there was nothing to worry about. It would be a good night. 

     The atmosphere in the dressing room afterward was celebratory. Dom went to take a shower as soon as he left the stage, and by the time he made it back to the dressing room, everyone was drinking and eating pizza and yelling excitedly about how awesome the show had been.

     "The man of the hour!" Michael hollered when Dom came into the room.

     He froze beside the buffet table, caught in the act of lifting the life of a pizza box. "What did i do?"

     "He's been saying that to everyone," Tom said. "I would ignore it."

     "Right," Dom said. Michael's ritual post-show exuberance. He lifted a slice from the box and drifted toward where Holly was standing and talking with Gillian, both of them with beer bottles in their hands. 

     He was halfway across the room when Gavin came in from the hallway, grinning and holding a piece of paper. He waved his arms above his head, the paper flapping, and shouted, "I have good news!"

     Everyone quieted down and looked at him. Tom said, "Don't keep us in suspense."

     He cleared his throat and said, "I just got off the phone with the label. The album has just been certified triple platinum."

     Nobody reacted for a long, silent second. Then Tom let out an ear-piercing girly shriek, caught Gavin up in his arms, and spun him around while he squealed and kicked his feet. "Vegas, baby!" Tom yelled. "We're going to Vegas!"

     "We're already in Vegas, dumbass," Michael said, grinning, and he raised his beer bottle in a toast. "To YungBlud!"

     It was a good night.