Collaring Chaz (Dante's Infernal #2) - Joel Abernathy Page 0,81

to retire completely, I wouldn’t have blamed him, and he was free now to do whatever he wanted.

Whatever he chose, I was good with it, as long as I got to be a part of it. And if he didn’t want that, either, I’d just spend the rest of my life convincing him. He’d cave eventually. He owned a timeshare in Ohio because it was too awkward to keep ignoring the agent’s calls, so I thought I stood a pretty good shot.

The door opened, and the guy who had moved up a few notches on my least favorite person list walked in.

“We’re in luck,” Drake announced, shrugging out of his jacket since the venue’s AC was iffy at best. “I found a bassist willing to fill in with zero notice.” He shot me a scolding look. “If you manage to chase this one off, we’re going to have to have a talk.”

“No promises,” I said, grabbing my guitar to follow the others out on stage. I saluted Drake on my way past, and he just rolled his eyes.

The crowd was smaller than we were used to playing, but the energy was great from the moment we walked out, and I found myself slightly back in the mood to perform. It wasn’t the same without Chaz, and it never would be, so Drake was right. If he decided he wasn’t coming back, I needed to just accept it and stop taking it out on the new guy.

We played the first couple of songs and I had a solo toward the end of the second, so I got lost in my head. When I finally turned around and glanced over at the new bassist, deciding to at least acknowledge his presence, my world turned on its head.

“Chaz?”

The feedback in my mic brought everything to a halt, and when I looked at Cash and Dante, they were just grinning at me, proving I was the one who hadn’t gotten the memo.

Chaz gave me a smile he’d given me a million times before, but it was almost like the first, except that now, I appreciated it for the work of art it was. Before I could even stop myself, or come up with a reason to, I slung my guitar around to my back and closed the distance between us. I grabbed him hard enough that when I pulled him in to kiss him harder than I ever had before, he gasped against my lips before he melted into my arms and returned it.

In that moment, we weren’t on stage, and the giddy screams of a crowd hyped up on rock and the unexpected PDA disappeared. So did the rest of the band. There was just him, and me, and that alone was too much to get my head around, so I did the only thing that came more naturally than breathing, and I kept kissing him until he pulled away. He looked up at me with his lips slightly parted in a flushed, breathless expression that made it hard to remember why I couldn’t just fuck him right here on the stage, and a familiar glimmer of amusement in his eyes.

“You treat all the new bassists this way?” he teased. “I’m surprised they keep quitting.”

“Just you,” I said with a hoarse laugh, taking his face in my hands because I was still having a hard time believing he was actually here.

Dante cleared his throat. “If you’re done molesting the new guy, can we get back to playing?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I muttered, still hesitant to pull away.

There was so much I wanted to ask him, and so much I needed to tell him, but fuck, I’d missed this, too. Playing alongside him. Looking over and seeing the cute little way he bit the tip of his tongue when he was really focused on a riff. The way he threw his head back with his hair flopping into his eyes and his skin beaded with sweat that reminded me of the far more intimate performances he put on for me in the bedroom.

And on the couch… and in the kitchen…

Fuck, we had a lot of lost time to make up for.

The rest of the set went by in a haze, and I kept fucking up because I couldn’t stop looking at him, which Cash seemed to find hilarious and Dante considerably less so. The crowd was too buzzed to notice, and we must have done an okay job in spite of me, because by the time