When we’ve run through it about fifteen times, Alan springs to his feet. He takes away the guitar, then grabs my hand and pulls me to my feet. He puts the headset on me.

“This will be one take, Ian, if you don’t fuck it up,” he says into the intercom. “And then we can call it quits for the day.”

His long fingers gently message my shoulders. He smiles. “It will be perfect, Chrissie.”

There is so much on his face, in his voice as we do this. For some reason, it flows through me, and my voice flows from me deep, throaty and powerful. He looks so beautiful when he lets the emotion run freely on his face.

When we are done it is quiet.

“Give me a minute and I’ll play it back.” Ryan’s voice echoes from the intercom.

Nervously I wait, but Alan is reclined beside me, long limbs relaxed. I don’t know how I sounded. I couldn’t hear myself, as absorbed I was with his haunting rasp and the feel of him. I pray that it wasn’t awful, and I’m more worried than I let on, since I’ve never heard myself on tape. I’ve never permitted Jack to record me, not even for shits and giggles. And I know the natural voice, the recorded voice, and the voice in your head are all different voices.

I have some natural talent, no training and, cords I rarely exercise, and for the life of me I can’t understand what Alan hears when he listens to me sing that would make him want to record with me. Then the playback starts and the tight curl of my body grows anxiously tighter. It is my voice with Alan, but it is not a voice I’ve ever heard. I sound like a female version of my brother, throaty and pure and wispy, woven with emotion.

Halfway through the playback Alan touches my cheek. “Perfect,” he murmurs. He stands up, pulling me with him. “And no, baby. That’s not your brother you think you hear. It’s a little bit of Jack and all the things you don’t ever let show that are Chrissie.”

* * *

In the bedroom, I curl on my side, on the bed, while Alan draws a bath for me. I am a touch panicky about what I just did, since now that it’s done I can’t take it back.

I recorded a song with Alan Manzone. Our voices will be linked forever on vinyl. Even if no one ever hears the song, it will always be a piece of me forever connected with a piece of Alan.

My limbs feel like putty and I am weak. I am not used to letting so much emotion to the surface.

Alan takes me to the bath and he undresses me. It is the first time I notice that neither of us has spoken since we left the studio. He puts me in the tub. Why are we both silent? What is this I feel?

Alan starts undressing and my eyes round. He climbs into the water and eases me back against his chest. I relax and close my eyes. I feel my head move with the rhythm of his breath. My hair is all around us. The steam and dampness makes it puff out and cling. Those long fingers are gently washing me. Up and down my arms very slowly, and then everywhere. And by the time he is done, I am languid and aroused and I can feel his erection.

I want him. I want him now.

“Close your eyes.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

I close my eyes.

“Don’t open your eyes until I tell you.”

I feel him touch me between my legs. My hair is lifted from my shoulders and his lips are on my neck. He turns me in his arms until I’m straddling him and he is devouring me with his mouth, the kisses are deep, greedy, ragged with unspent adrenaline, and I want him in me, but he keeps us separate.

There is something different in me. I can feel something different in Alan. My fingers curl in his hair as his mouth moves to my breasts. I am impatient inside in feral way, and I don’t know where this urgency comes from. It is as if I can’t get close enough to him, that nothing I do, not even sharing my body, will get me close enough to him.

Alan lifts me from the tub and carries me back to the bed. He spreads me on my stomach. He lies down beside me and we are both damp. He starts touching and kissing me. The back of my body, up from my feet, down my back. When his tongue touches at the base of my spine, I feel his fingers between my legs and then in me. As he cups my sex with his fingers expertly teasing me, his tongue and kisses are in a different orifice of my body, since I am on my stomach, and I am mildly disgusted and incredibly hot. He is kissing me there. Around it. Near it. In there. All the while, his hands are cupping my sex and filling me with his fingers. As intense as my muscles have clenched during sex, they have never clenched in anticipation this way.

Why am I letting him do this? It’s disgusting and wrong and I don’t know why he wants this. He knows he is driving me crazy, and I can feel his excitement as he makes me more and more frantic.

He turns me on the bed and I can feel his damp, naked body surrounding me. I am breathing hard. And I am pulsing there. My eyes are still closed because Alan has not said I can open them, and for some reason I am raging in this in a way unlike any other time before.

Alan is all around me, totally consuming my body. His lips are against my ear. “The opposite of death is not life, Chrissie,” he roughly breathes into my swirling senses. “The opposite of death is you. You are my opposite of death.”

Oh god…and I am afraid. I am desperately aroused. I want him and Alan is in me.

Chapter Twelve

I am exhausted. I want to sleep. I don’t know how Alan manages the pace. Every hour he gets more energetic. Every hour I just want more to hide beneath the covers and sleep. The last forty-eight hours have been grueling. Hours in the studio. Sex. Sleep. Then the cycle all over again.

I don’t even know what day it is. Time has lost the feel of realness. I have lost the feel of realness. We have only been together for seven days and so much about me has changed. I think of the lying to Jack, ignoring Rene’s mountain of messages, the singing, the sex, and that I am all but living with a guy. I am lost in Alan and I have no feel of realness without him.

Alan made me sing three more tracks with him. I don’t know how he got me to do it. Maybe I just did it not to fight with him. He asked. I did. Maybe it is as simple as that. Alan asked me. Maybe that’s all there is to it.

The sex is only getting more intense and more frequent. I thought it would calm with time. I thought I would calm with time. I want him more. I am willing to do more.

The adrenaline-fueled intensity while he works is frightening and a turn-on. I feel something new, something different in him. I haven’t figured out what to label it in my head yet.

I curl into the blankets. I need sleep. Tomorrow I will think about how to slow this down.

* * *

When I wake, it is mid-morning and I am surprised to find Alan in bed with me. He worked the entire night and I slept, really slept, for the first time in days, until he woke me up in the early morning to make love to my drowsy, hot body. Once we were done I went immediately back to sleep.

He is sitting beside me reading. Panicking, I realize what it is he is reading. I grab for my black journal that I must have forgotten to put back into my duffel.

“Give me that.”

Alan looks up. “Why? It’s very good. I didn’t know you write song lyrics.”

Song lyrics? I make a face at him. “I don’t write song lyrics. That’s just a journal. Fragments of nothing. Thoughts. Dreams. Sort of streams of consciousness, James Joyce type shit. And it is my personal shit. Do you always just invade people’s privacy and read their personal thoughts?”

He ignores me and continues to read.

I push my hair back from my face and sit up, tugging the blankets with me to cover my nudity. I hold out my hand. “Please, give it back.”

He continues to read. Hyper-focused Alan. He turns a page. He looks at me. “Chrissie, these are song lyrics. Look at how you’ve put them together. You even have chord notations on some of the margins.”