this is going to ruin the tour

by skatingsplits

Summary:

He resents the idea that he needs anyone else in his life to hold his hand. One more person who knows nothing about music telling him what to do…

in which Trevor Lefkowitz is a music label's PR nightmare, and Hetty Woodstone is the uptight crisis manager sent to clean up his mistakes.

Notes:

this fic happened because I literally could not get the idea of Trevor saying Justin Timberlake's iconic "this is going to ruin the tour" out of my head. That's it, that's the reason. I know nothing about the music industry or pop music in general, so beware.

Chapter 1

“Trevor, are you paying the slightest bit of attention to me? Do you even realise how serious this is?” 

He is, actually, and he does, but he also has a hangover the size of Mount fucking Rushmore.  Which makes it kind of hard to concentrate on Steph's very shrill voice. 

“No, I do get it.” Sitting forward, he really hopes she can't see the way his hand shakes as he reaches for his water glass. Not because he cares what she thinks, he totally doesn't, he's not a kid in the principal's office. Why would he care that this authority figure who's been one of the only stable people in his life since he was nineteen is disappointed in him? He just can't deal with her bitching about it. “And again, I'm sorry. Didn't want to cause a problem for you. But if I'm being real, I don't see what else I can do.” 

Stephanie Button gives him a long, long look. If she had glasses, he's pretty sure she'd be looking over them to really nail the whole schoolmarm vibe she's trying to go for. And, y'know, technically she is kind of in charge of him or whatever, but she's not his teacher, she's not his mom, she's not his older ex-girlfriend who could sexually manipulate him into buying her vintage cars by telling him she wasn't mad, she was just disappointed. 

“In this situation, we would normally push for a public apology and at least a six week treatment programme.” 

Oh, he knew that was coming. No fucking way. You get photographed snorting coke off a yacht girl's abs one time and it's “You're an addict, you have to go and sit in a white room full of junkies and talk about your feelings for two months”. 

“Right, but… Steph, I don't know how to say this without sounding like a huge cliché but I don't actually have a problem. Yeah, that's what I'd say if I did have a problem, but... I'm strictly a party user, I feel like you know that.” 

He's not lying. Sure, he likes coke. Everyone likes coke. What's not to like? If it wasn't awesome, it wouldn't be illegal. But it's not like he needs a bump to get up in the morning. He doesn't do it every day. Never before a gig. Like, he would if it helped, probably, but Trevor isn't someone who needs to be keyed up any higher before he performs. It's just something he does because… because everyone else does it. Like nearly every other fucking thing in his life. 

Lips pursed, Steph is still looking at him like she's worried he's going to bolt and do a swandive from the- what are they on? Like, the 41st floor?- if she takes her eyes off him. 

“I've discussed the matter with Susan and she is under the impression that your… habits haven't reached an alarming level,” she admits reluctantly. Inside his head, Trevor punches the air. Flower always has his back. Not that it wouldn't be insanely hypocritical of her to criticise his occasional wild night out when she manages to do her super complex job totally fine while high as a fucking kite. But then, he's not sure he's ever met a tour manager who didn't work better stoned out of their mind. 

“She agrees that your substance use is not impacting your performance on stage or your relationship with your bandmates,” Stephanie continues. Trevor snorts, not inside his head this time. Duh, he could have told her that. Thor would also have to be a major hypocrite to give a fuck, given that he'll usually have a bit of whatever Trevor is having and a hit or two from Flower. But then, does it count when you're the size of a mountain? It's probably not even reaching his bloodstream. And true, Sass doesn't usually partake but some semi-regular drug use has gotta be way, way down on the list of things he enjoys judging Trevor for. Why bitch about coke and molly when you could be telling your best friend that he dresses like 00s Justin Bieber and pulls girls like 00s Weird Al. He keeps a list in his notes app called Zingers, Trevor has seen it with his own eyes. 

“And she's right,” he says defiantly. “Seriously, you put me into treatment and I'm just gonna dick around for six weeks. And you'd have to cancel a bunch of shit, you know that.” 

They both know that he's right. But, as always, the thing that really fucking gets to him, is that that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how right he is, it doesn't matter how well he argues. It doesn't matter, ultimately, what he wants. Trevor Lefkowitz hasn't made a real decision for himself in twelve years. No wonder he likes to dabble in designer drugs every so often.

“There is another option.” Stephanie's talking slowly but she doesn't look pissed anymore. Just kind of cautious. Worried, maybe even about him. Probably more about the headlines. “We issue the public apology, make it clear that you just made one bad decision and don't have real substance abuse issues. And I get someone in here to clean up your act.” 

“Clean up my act?” There's that familiar stiffening at the bottom of his spine, and he can feel his lip threatening to curl. Every time someone talks to him like he's still the kid he'd been when he first sat in this office, with nothing to his name but a shitty demo, his fists start to clench. As if he hasn't made literal millions of dollars for these people in the last decade, as if he isn't the reason that Steph's boss has a second home in Acapulco and can afford to pay three ex-wives’ alimony. “I don't need a fucking babysitter.” 

“Well, first of all, I'm not sure that's true. And second, not like that. More like… a crisis manager. A PR expert. Someone who can make everyone forget about yesterday's pictures.” 

“Isn't that what you pay Isaac for?” Trevor frowns, arms crossed. The band's publicist can be a pain in the ass and uptight as hell, but he's a good guy who sure as shit doesn't deserve to be fired for Trevor's mistake. “Because it's not his fault that those-” 

“No, no,” Stephanie hastens to assure him. “Isaac is going nowhere. But the label has a few specialists on hand, consultants who'll come in for a couple of months after a screw-up like this. They'll join you on the road when the tour starts, massage the public's perception of you, be on hand to put out fires.” 

He resents her calling it a screw-up, as if it's not something everyone in the industry who isn't already sober does on a Saturday night, but not as much as he resents the idea that he needs any more people in his life to hold his hand. He's got a manager, agent, tour manager, publicist, stylist, trainer, nutritionist, enough lawyers and accountants to fill out the Giants Stadium (R.I.P). One more fucking person who knows nothing about music telling him what to do… 

But it's gotta be better than six weeks at The Meadows. 

“Okay, whatever. As long as they don't get in the way.” 

Even as he says it, a little voice rings in the back of his head, a voice that might be Isaac, might be Sass, or might be his mom.

Famous last words, it says. 

Chapter 2

Summary:

It makes a change, the execs sending a woman to do their fuckery, instead of the usual old dude with a grey face, grey hair and grey suit. This one is wearing a suit, sure, but it's a rich blue colour and her hair is the furthest thing from grey. And yet, he's sure the fuckery is still on its way. 

Notes:

Discussions of drug use and addiction here, but they'll be pretty present throughout!

The band name was hacklesacademy's suggestion, I take no credit nor blame.

Before the meeting even starts, Trevor is in a shitty mood. 

His mom had gone crazy about those pictures and, yeah, sure, he's 31 and has 3.6 million Instagram followers, but he's always gonna be a mama's boy. That had not been a fun phone call. 

This morning's mandatory drug test hadn't been fun either. It's complete bullshit, any random sound tech in the studio is just as likely to be on something as Trevor is, but he's the only one who had to pee in a cup. As far as he knows, anyway. It's demeaning. 

And now he's got to sit and listen to some random stiff in a suit kvetching about behaviour that would barely get any normal guy a slap on the wrist. Like he’s in fucking detention or something. Not to mention the fact that the guys are kind of pissed at him too, because he’s not the only one who got dragged in for this Breakfast Club shit this morning. 

“If Thor can freebase with Imogen Heap in the bathroom at Sushi Park without getting caught, I feel like you should be able to cover your back at some random yacht party,” Sass had snapped at him. It was only supreme self-control that had stopped him from asking if the last party Sass went to was one his mom had thrown with jello and balloons. Which, might have felt good in the moment, but really not helpful long-term. And wouldn't be fair either. Sass gets as many bullshit invitations to shitty parties as the rest of them, he just doesn't go. He doesn't feel the same fear Trevor does, the worry that if he says no too many times, the invitations will stop coming. He isn't endlessly looking for a distraction, a new good time that's even better than the last, a higher high, a hotter girl, a wilder party. He's just… fine. Which might make him the only musician Trevor knows who isn't desperately clawing for external validation everywhere he turns. If it wasn't for Sass, he'd think it was just part of the job description. 

Inner peace or not, Sass is clearly still mad. He’s clutching his reusable coffee cup like it’s a security blanket and he’s barely looked at Trevor in the last ten minutes. Thor is shifting around aimlessly, pretending he can't feel the tension in the room, pretending he hasn't noticed nobody's talking, and pretending that he's not also at least a little pissed at Trevor. Which you've gotta love him for, but God. Bro avoids emotional conflict like Trevor avoids taxes. 

“You know, if the teacher doesn’t arrive in fifteen minutes, we’re legally allowed to leave.” It’s a weak joke, and probably doesn't even deserve Thor’s equally weak laugh. 

“Oh, now you're concerned about what we're legally allowed to do?” Sass snipes. Honestly, obvious physical differences aside, sometimes Trevor wonders if his bandmate is secretly a Lefkowitz. Some of the things he says sound like they could have come right out of his mom's mouth. 

“You're telling me it's the legality that bothers you? Because you didn't say shit when Flower bought that sugar glider on Craigslist and we all got to pet it.” 

“No, Trevor, it's not the legality that bothers me. It's the fact that you never learn your fucking lesson. You know that when your shit gets blown up, people come after all our shit. You think my dad wants photographers trying to break into his house again? Because I sure as hell don't.” 

That was a low blow. It's not like it was directly his fault and he's apologised a hundred times, but it's still one of the things he thinks about when he's lying in bed at night, unable to sleep, wondering if he's a terrible person. It was nearly seven years ago, but it's never far from the top of his mind. He'd just bought his house in the Adirondacks, a fucking huge place with a wraparound balcony and a forest's worth of trees surrounding it. He was young, stupid and, yeah, high, and he hadn't thought twice about celebrating his purchase by spreading his girlfriend at the time over a table on said balcony and eating her pussy like it was the only thing he'd packed for a picnic. Butt naked. Both of them. Obviously, they got papped and, obviously, everybody went crazy. It didn't help that his girlfriend was 39 to his 24, inspiring a lot of cougar-related headlines she'd eventually broken up with him for. 

The press had gone crazy about the band after that. Good for ticket sales and monthly listeners, less good for… basically everything else. For a solid year, Trevor couldn't even glance at his Instagram without a new notification that someone had tagged him in a repost of the pictures. Worst of all, some fucking TMZ vultures had actually smashed a window at Sass’ family home trying to get stupid pictures of a totally normal duplex. Nobody got hurt, but Sass’ grandma had been home and got the fright of her fucking life. It's not like Sass mentions it all the time or anything but whenever it comes up, it's clear he's a long way from forgetting or forgiving.

“I wasn't trying to get caught,” he mumbles, shame-faced. “It was just a stupid mistake.” 

“Yeah, it always is.” In true Esther Lefkowitz fashion, Sass doesn't even sound mad. He just sounds like he never expected any better. They sink back into uneasy silence and Trevor pretends to be checking his emails for a minute before he sinks into an Instagram reels hole, mostly centred on hot girls demonstrating pigeon pose, with the occasional devoted dog greeting a homecoming veteran, normal stuff. 

When Steph eventually comes in, she looks totally exhausted. If he should feel guilty about that, he doesn’t. It’s not his fault the label have decided to make a mountain out of a tiny fucking molehill, a molehill for teacup moles that could pop their heads out of a Birkin like Paris Hilton’s chihuahua. There's another woman trailing along behind her, although trailing does not describe the way this chick is walking. Her spine is as straight as a Russian gymnastics coach, and her heels click purposefully on the floor. She's a decent five inches taller than Steph with them on, probably pushing six foot, which. So is he. She's not special.

It makes a change, the execs sending a woman to do their fuckery, instead of the usual old dude with a grey face, grey hair and grey suit. This one is wearing a suit, sure, but it's a rich blue colour and her hair is the furthest thing from grey. And yet, he's sure the fuckery is still on its way. 

“Morning, boys.” 

He hates that. Always has, even when they were nineteen. He knows that Steph doesn’t mean anything by it, it’s just what everyone calls them, but it’s goddamn infantilising. He’s 31, for God’s sake. His back hurts when he hasn’t been to the gym in a couple of days, he knows exactly where he was on 9/11. He’s not a kid, none of them are. 

“This is Hetty Woodstone, she’s… well, you know why she’s here.” 

The other woman gives them a tight smile, and that's already pissing Trevor off. Sure, he doesn't like it when these bastards pretend to be the biggest Chekhov Chill fans in the world and crawl right up their asses, but a happy medium is okay. Not acting like she's doing them a fucking favour. 

“I'm going to leave you to chat, but please, please…” Steph fixes her eyes on all three of them in turn but they definitely seem to linger longest on Trevor. “Cooperate.” 

He just gives her a shit-eating grin that he knows she hates, but can't reasonably say anything about. It's one of his favourite tricks. 

Not a trick that's going to work on this other chick, he thinks. She looks kinda… hard. Like she doesn't really care if the members of Chekhov Chill live, die, or get caught in a scandal that blows Chappaquiddick out of the… well. Out of the water. And he could almost respect that, being here for a paycheck, if the smell of old money wasn't dripping off her the way that Thor always reeks of that Frédéric Malle shit he loves. You don't get posture like that at public school. 

“So.” Immediately, she pulls a tablet out of her little satchel thing and starts tapping on it with one of those styluses, like she's 105 instead of… what? 45, maybe? A little older. Apart from, y'know, the whole music thing, Trevor is pretty sure his greatest skill is being able to accurately age a MILF within a couple of years- some people can do a wine's vintage, he can tell when the Botox has stopped being preventative. She's late forties, he'd say. 

“As Stephanie said, I'm Hetty Woodstone, and I'm here to clean up the complete and utter clusterfuck you've managed to find yourselves in,” she continues coolly, looking at her screen. Trevor's hackles rise straightaway. Condescension from Steph is bad enough but at least she's actually known them for over a decade. Being treated like a stupid kid by some woman who hasn't even said hello is not on the agenda for today. 

“It's not ourselves,” he snaps. “It's my problem, my pictures. If you want to give a “just say no” lecture, leave the guys out of it.” 

She looks up then, giving him an appraising glance that might be hot if he'd just offered to buy her a drink at Marquee, but right here and now is just fucking infuriating.

“I'd hope that three grown men don't need a lecture of any kind, actually, but be that as it may, I'm afraid your problem is everybody's problem, Mr Lefkowitz.” 

“It always is,” Sass chimes in. 

“Yes, from the material Stephanie sent me, I'm getting a sense of that,” she agrees, completely ignoring Trevor's outraged gesture. “I've gone over everything on the, hmm, recent issue, and it seems there's a whole back catalogue here for me to dive into. But beyond that, I’m going to need more information about the other aspects of your lives that don't make the papers; your daily schedules, your activity on socials, your friends, your spending habits.” Her eyes suddenly flicker up again. They’re very blue. “Knowing a little more about the music wouldn’t hurt either- what kind of music exactly do you play?”

As a group, they all gape at her. Sure, they’re not the fucking Beatles. But Trevor doesn’t think he’s being a delusional dick to think that if you’ve had the radio on in your car for more than half an hour in the last ten years, you’ve probably heard a Chekhov Chill song. And even if you haven’t… 

“Wait a second.” He’s bubbling up with anger before he can stop himself, even though he can sense Thor bracing himself and Sass’ intake of breath. “You’re about to be dictating our entire fucking lives from now on, and you don’t have the decency to even pretend you’ve spent ten minutes on Spotify?”

Her eyes flash with irritation but her voice stays calm and cold when she replies, like he’s the one being ridiculous. 

“It’s nothing personal. I’m afraid I don’t listen to much music.” 

“Maybe get a different fucking job then,” he mumbles, but Sass’ response covers him. 

“I mean, I feel like listening to the album we're about to tour would be a pretty good start,” he says with just as much irritation as Trevor had. Rusty over there doesn't glare at him, though, just nods.

“You're right, I'm sorry. This was as last minute for me as it was for you, I haven't had time to prepare in the way I would usually. I will, of course, listen to your no-doubt excellent music later this evening. In the meantime…” 

She trails off, and it takes Trevor a few seconds to realise she’s still waiting for an answer to her question. For some pithy, digestible description of their sound so that she can put them in a neat little box, fill out some neat little form- 

“Indie pop-rock,” Thor says succinctly. To be totally fair, he says everything succinctly, but this time it really pisses Trevor off. 

“I think that’s a little simplistic-” he starts to say but the thorn in his side is already nodding and making a note on her stupid fucking iPad. 

“That’s about what I thought, thank you, Thorfinn.” 

Teacher's pet. 

“So as I said, I'll be spending the rest of the day- the rest of the week, I imagine- going through everything in the company's files. The other things I mentioned, the day-to-day, you can have PAs or managers send over to me. What I need from you specifically is the stuff that isn't written down anywhere. The unofficial stuff. Anything you think might get out one day, anything you're terrified will. If one of you Ted Kennedy-ed a cocktail waitress in 2012 and you're sure nobody else on the planet has a clue, I promise you. It's better that I know.” 

What follows can only be classified as an uncomfortable silence. Trevor just isn't sure whether his discomfort stems more from the upcoming forced intimacy with a woman he already knows he doesn't like, or the fact that they've both made the same 60 year old reference in the space of five minutes. Not a niche one, sure, but not exactly topical. Weird. 

Orrrrr from the fact that he's worried that Thor's discomfort might come from him actually having Ted Kennedy-ed a cocktail waitress in 2012. Not likely, but not impossible either. Big man can really keep a secret. 

“But I'll arrange individual meetings to go over all of that,” Hetty Woodstone ploughs on, either not noticing or not caring that the temperature of the room has plummeted (and it was already at just about freezing). “In case there's anything you don't want to share with the class.” 

The idea of her knowing anything about his boys that he doesn't know has Trevor half-out of his chair, frustration rising up in him so strong he can't sit still. 

“Oh, you're trying the old divide and conquer? Nice. You think we're going to fuck each other over for you? A lot of people have given that a go, lady, pick another one.” 

To his even greater frustration, the demon clearly isn't moved. She just looks him up and down, the faintest flicker of her eyes, and sighs.

“I do this a lot, you know, and people are rarely happy about it to begin with. They rant and rave and complain and put maple syrup in my gas tank. But do you know what everyone eventually comes to realise? That there’s nothing they can do about it. Whether you like it or not, this is happening. The sooner you get used to it, the better.” 

It's how totally unbothered she looks when she says it that really gets to him. He knows she's not wrong; this is just one thing in a long, long line that he can't do anything about. But she could at least have the decency to have a real argument with him about it. 

“Well, I don’t like it. I don't like being told what to do by someone who knows nothing about-” 

“And I don't like divas,” she says primly. “They make my job much harder.” 

“Divas?!” 

“Is she wrong?” Sass looks like a kid on Christmas morning. Or, you know, the eighth night of Hannukah. Or the winter solstice, he's pretty sure that's what Lenape peeps actually do, but given that Sass loves Christmas more than 90% of Jesus freaks Trevor knows, the first thing was probably more accurate. 

“I don't think it makes me fucking Mariah to say that I don't like being treated like a kindergarten kid who can't be trusted not to gulp down a whole tub of paste if the teacher takes her eyes off him for a second!” 

“Let's just-” Thor starts to say, always the peacekeeper, but their new best friend interrupts him straightaway. 

“Given what you do when the teacher's eyes are on you, I don't feel that's an argument with much weight. Let me guess, you were the child who stuck his hand into plug sockets just to see what would happen? Or were you more the setting ants on fire with a magnifying glass type?” 

“Okay, first of all, I would never.” He points at her for emphasis, and gets the distinct impression that she's two seconds away from just biting his index finger off. “And second of all, you think you know me from your little filofax but you fucking don't. You don't know anything about me.” 

“And that will be corrected when I see you for our one-to-one tomorrow morning,” she says with the tiniest, smuggest, most irritating little smirk he's ever seen in his entire life. And he's had dinner with Clooney and Whalberg. “How public-spirited of you to volunteer to go first.” 

She puts her tablet back in that stupid bag and gives them all a blatantly fake smile. 

“Trevor at 9, Thorfinn at 10, Sasappis at 11, please. If you have anything to tell me that's so bad it's going to take over an hour, then…” She lifts one elegant shoulder in a parody of an unconcerned shrug. “Well, I'm not saying I can't handle it but I'm afraid you're going to have to be the ones to tell the C-suite I'll be needing an extra zero on my bonus.” 

Trevor scoffs but he's pretty sure that Sass actually laughed like it was funny. Which, no. They are not finding the soulless PR hack funny or charming. That is not on the table, shouldn't even need saying. Especially not when she's this fucking annoying. Especially not when he hasn't laughed at one of Trevor's jokes like that in weeks.

“Maple syrup, huh,” he mutters as she goes to the door. Quietly enough that he doesn’t expect her to hear, but she looks back and gives him the first real smile he’s seen today. 

“Unfortunately for you, I took a cab this morning,” she says sweetly, and turns on her heel to leave. 

He arrives at 9:04, just late enough that she'll have started to think he's not coming, started salivating over getting to tattle on him to Steph. Feels good to deny her the opportunity to be a megabitch. Not as good as another hour in bed would have been, but sometimes you've gotta take what you can get. 

Her suit is white today, and it makes Trevor wish he was wearing the biggest, dirtiest, muddiest working boots his cousins in construction had ever owned, just to leave a huge footprint on all that blindingly clean lineny stuff. Not that he wants to kick her, exactly, that feels too far, but what if she took her jacket off and it fell on the floor and in his haste to be a gentleman and pick it up for her, he accidentally trod all over it? Who could reasonably blame him for that? 

Apart from her, obviously. She'd know exactly what he was doing but she wouldn't be able to say shit. The thought of that is sweet. 

Unlike her fucking temper. 

“Can you sit down, please, we only have so much time and I really need to get the ball rolling.” Again, she's looking at her iPad while she talks to him and the rudeness of it makes his eye twitch. 

“Yeah, I bet you're really looking forward to this, huh?” He taunts her, putting his travel mug down on some of the paper she's got scattered about her. Doesn't leave a ring, which is kinda disappointing. “Getting to know me better. Don't tell me, it's all a front, right? The whole “I don't listen to music, I don't own a TV, I don't feel joy” thing you're trying to project. You're secretly a crazy groupie. You got a CC t-shirt on under that thing?” 

In his defence, he isn't thinking it through. He genuinely doesn't mean to just… stare at her tits. It's where a t-shirt would be! And yet it's hard to look away because even though the jacket is buttoned up, there's the tiniest hint of some kind of lacy fabric peeking out of the top- 

“I'm afraid not,” she interjects sharply. “And given what I was reading at 2am about the factories that you use for your merchandise, I'm not sure anybody else should be either. That's another headline waiting to happen.” 

“Yeah, that's not really my side of things. I do the music bit, you know? Strum strum, sing sing?” 

“So I've heard.” 

“You listened to the album, huh? Did you love it?” 

He's interested to know what she's gonna say to that, actually. Everyone else in the building, from the janitor to the CEO, would pretend that the latest album is the best thing they've ever heard in their fucking life, Revolver and Hunky Dory and Nevermind all rolled into one. When in reality… it's fine. He knows it's fine, Sass and Thor know it's fine. Serviceable. They had to get it done by June so they got it done by June and it's fine. Taylor Swift cockblocked them from the number one spot but they've been in the Billboard top ten for the last six weeks. It's fine. 

“It was fine,” she says absently. “From my side of things, the music isn't actually that important.” 

Of fucking course it isn't. 

“I'm more interested in the story.” She nods at the chair opposite her and he flops into it, exaggeratedly lazy and careless. “You three met in college and dropped out to focus on music, that's the party line- is it true?” 

It mostly is. They had met in college, freshmen at UPenn. Well, he and Sass were freshmen. Trevor still isn't 100% sure how long Thor had been there, what he was studying or actually how old he is, but he'd been around. He'd met Sass in the dorms, first week, and it wasn't long before they started fucking around with some music. Mostly just wailing covers of Smiths songs for a while, but it had been fun. He honestly doesn't even remember where they picked up Thor, but a drummer had kinda cemented things. Made them a band, instead of just three idiots dicking around in a practise room. And then suddenly it was taking up all his time, all his concentration.

He'd been planning on majoring in economics and getting his MBA, but not because he was passionate about it. The only thing 18 year old Trevor Lefkowitz was passionate about was success. Success, and not ending up like his dad, doing some meaningless job nobody gives a fuck about and playing golf with his high school buddies at the weekend. When he realised he was better at playing the guitar than he was at writing essays about business cycles, he'd just switched track. And it fucking worked. He's a success, and he's nothing like his dad. 

Of course, the last few times he's been home to New Jersey, he's had to wonder if that's a good thing. 

“Yeah,” he says, unhelpfully. “Y'know, last time I checked, everything on Wikipedia was pretty much right. What do you need me for?” 

“Of course you read your own Wikipedia page,” she scoffs. 

“Okay, everyone with a Wikipedia page reads it, if they say they don't, they're lying. Just because you don't have one…” 

It's just so hard to stop himself trying to rile her up. He wants to see her actually mad, not all this icy cold superiority. What happens when she snaps? 

“You may find this difficult to believe, Trevor, but I am inordinately glad that I do not, in fact, have a Wikipedia page. Not everyone craves the limelight quite as badly as you do.” 

Looks like he's not going to find out any time soon.

“I don't crave the limelight any more than any other musician,” he says, and yeah, he sounds defensive. It's her fault, she keeps putting him on the back foot. All the better to enact her evil schemes, probably. Not that he knows what evil schemes she's planning, exactly, but there must be some. Look at her; she's not actually petting a white cat in a huge wingback chair, but spiritually, she definitely is. 

“No? I'd argue that you crave it far more than either of your bandmates, or surely you wouldn't keep winding up in this position.” Even now, she's not raising her voice or anything. He wishes she would- just one little sign of her losing her composure. “You all enjoy the same level of fame, of media attention, and yet you're the only one who keeps running into this kind of trouble.” 

“That's because I'm the only one who knows how to have fun.” He puts all the braggadocio he can into it, gives her a smirk that he knows most people want to slap, even leans forward into her space. Nothing. Just a slightly judgemental raise of the eyebrows. 

“I suppose that is how you see things, isn't it? And I suppose most people would never dare to tell you differently. But allow me to tell you how I see them…” 

She pauses, as if she's waiting for him to flip the fucking table or something, but two can play the “I don't give a fuck what you have to say” game, so he just waves a hand and stifles a fake yawn. 

“I see a man who is far closer than he realises to pushing away the most important people in his life. It took me five seconds yesterday, less, to realise that Sasappis is at the end of his tether. And I don't think tensions are usually improved by three months on the road, are they?” 

Okay, now he's actually thinking about flipping the fucking table. 

“I don't think you're getting paid stupid money to be our fucking marriage counsellor,” he shoots back. “What does this have to do with our image?” 

“Quite literally everything,” she deadpans. “Trevor, you've been branded as a trio since day one. Your man Isaac has spent thousands of hours and thousands more dollars pushing how close you three are, it's your primary selling point. People connect to that, and lonely teenagers with no friends will spend an obscene amount of their parents’ money on your merchandise if it means they feel close to you too. Which means that, if you keep doing idiotic things that make Sasappis want to murder you, you're unlikely to be able to keep making music for much longer. Because, while I could probably paper over murder, all the spin in the world can't do anything to disguise genuine animosity between people who were once so close they spent Christmas Eve baking cookies together in matching Die Hard hoodies and Grinch slippers.” 

God, he would really love it if she was wrong. If he could turn around and laugh and tell her no, she can't read a room, he and Sass are just as tight as ever. Show her their text thread, full of inside jokes and live reactions to House of the Dragon episodes, make her feel like such an idiot that her cheeks flush pink. But he can't actually do that, because she's not wrong. Their messages are drier than Dorne these days, and he can't remember the last time they just hung out somewhere that wasn't the studio. Trevor's known for a while that Sass is getting increasingly sick of his shit, but he can never pull it back. There's some streak of fucking stubborn stupidity in him that just eggs him on, makes him go bigger, trying to prove some fucking point. It's not sustainable. One day, he knows, he's going to tip his best friend in the world right over the edge. 

“Stalker,” he hits out weakly, because that Christmas thing was like 2015, and although he doesn't get the angry reaction he wanted, he does get a smile. 

“It's my job. I have to know these things. And, speaking of things I have to know…” 

Hetty eyes him with a certain amount of what looks like actual interest, and he senses that Telling Off Trevor Time might be over for now. Although he's very fucking sure that there's going to be an encore. 

“From my conversation with Stephanie, I was led to understand that you don't consider yourself to have a substance abuse problem,” she continues abruptly. Real fucking sensitive. Trevor bites the inside of his cheek to quell his irritation. 

“Yeah, that's not a question.” 

“Alright. Do you consider yourself to have a substance abuse problem?” She asks, unconcerned. 

“Obviously not.”

“Now, I’m not here to judge, Trevor.” The corner of her mouth flickers, as if she’s trying to stop herself laughing because even she knows she’s the judgiest bitch whose ancestors ever crawled off the Mayflower. “But I feel I ought to tell you that if you’re more dependent than you’re admitting, you are not going to be able to hide it from me. I know every sign, every lie, every little twitch.”

“I’m not a fucking cokehead,” he snaps. “How many times do I need to say it?”

“I'm not saying you are. I'm simply saying that if you are, I'll know about it.” 

This chick clearly thinks she knows everything about everything, but there's something in her voice that's got his ears pricking up. 

“You got family with problems?” 

He doesn't feel bad about asking. Not when she's going to be digging into every dirty detail of his personal life for God fucking knows how long. He deserves to get a little back. 

“I am family with problems,” she says dryly. “Or so my sister tells me, anyway.” 

He doesn’t get it for a sec, and when he does, his face must do something stupid because she laughs a little. 

“Uptight bitches can love coke too, Trevor. A little too much, evidently.” 

“You’re in recovery?”

She shrugs one shoulder.

“I can’t say I really considered myself to have a problem either. When I was in college you couldn’t even walk into a dressing room at Barney’s without a sales assistant trying to sell you something that was not on the rack, if you know what I mean. My first job, my boss kept a filigree coke spoon out on his desk, those were the days. But I…” 

She pauses, as if she isn’t sure he deserves to hear what she says next. 

“After my divorce, it became a daily thing. Not to mention the diazepam, the klonopin, your regular Upper East Side pill popping. I thought I had it under control, I did have it under control, but my sister disagreed with me, so four months under the loving eye of Betty Ford it was.”

“Betty Ford, old school,” he muses, and she does actually smile. 

“Anyway, all this to say, if it seems like the party is going on a little too long, I will notice. And… you can talk to me.” 

Now, that, he wasn’t expecting. And he's definitely not gonna do it. She'd probably use the emotional leverage to blackmail him into one of those shitty Vogue “7852 Inane Questions” videos or some other appearance he's always flatly refused to do. 

“But, if what you say is true and you aren’t concerned about getting a bump if isn’t lined up on a stripper’s ass, then fine. All I need is for you to. be. discreet.” 

“Yeah, I got that,” he grumbles. “And she wasn’t a stripper, not that anyone seems to care about that. She was doing bottle service and she’s working her way through her bachelors degree and-”

“They all are,” Hetty says airily. “Fine, I don't think we're going to get anywhere else this morning, are we? You can go.” 

She talks like the fucking queen of England, dismissing some servant from her presence, like she expects him to walk backwards out of the room, bowing. Like his success isn't paying her fucking salary. So entitled. 

“Although perhaps it's best if you don't leave the studio,” she calls after him. “Maybe you and Sasappis could have lunch?” 

So entitled, and so fucking annoying. As if it's any of her business who he has lunch with. So annoying. 

So annoying, because as he rakes back over their conversation in his mind, he can't think of a single thing she said that wasn't right on the fucking money. 

Fuck. 

That's going to make her so much harder to ignore. 

Chapter 3

Summary:

Prepping a tour is always stressful, Trevor knows that. He's always edgy, nervy, always feels like the world is out to get him. So it's probably unfair to blame Hetty Woodstone entirely for how shitty his life is right now. Unfair, but he's still gonna do it. 

Prepping a tour is always stressful, Trevor knows that. It never brings out his best self, no matter how much time he spends doing all the mindfulness deep breathing shit Flower taught him, or how much time he spends furiously cranking one out to Kate Hudson interviews on YouTube. He's always edgy, nervy, always feels like the world is out to get him. So it's probably unfair to blame Hetty Woodstone entirely for how shitty his life is right now. Unfair, but he's still gonna do it. 

First, she went right into his socials and made him delete his finsta and unfollow a bunch of very hot yoga instructors for no reason whatsoever. She also made him unfollow Susan Sarandon, Elvira, Kathy Ireland and Famke Janssen, which just seemed like deliberate salt in the wound. And then she did something fucked with his explore page so now it's all inspirational quotes and salad recipes instead of tits and videos of people hydraulic pressing Lego. Isaac and the marketing department have always approved the stuff that went out under his name, but he used to be allowed to at least look at what he wanted. No more, apparently. 

And then there's the fact that he hasn't had any substance stronger than coffee in a month. Nothing coke-level or higher, he gets. That's fair. But no mushrooms? No balloons? No alcohol? She'd even side-eyed his Ritalin, which is fucking prescription. 

“But weed's fine, right? I can smoke?” He'd basically begged her. 

“Not until the tour is over.” She'd been wearing a pencil skirt and some silky blouse thing that day, looking and acting like a really strict teacher. “I don't care if you think you're completely alone, in the middle of the Sahara, after a worldwide apocalypse. Always assume there is someone with a lens on you.” 

Not the worst advice in the world, necessarily, but Trevor doesn't see who's gaining by him not being able to have one beer alone in his apartment. 

Still, he hasn’t done it yet. He hates the fact he hasn’t done it yet. It’s not because he wants to obey her instructions or do what she tells him or follow the rules, obviously. Rules are for people who’ve never been on the cover of GQ. It’s because a non-small part of him is sure that she would just know. Not because she’s got spies or hidden cameras or fucking supervision, just that she’d know . 

Those aren’t even the worst things, though. The very, very worst thing about Hetty Woodstone is that other people seem to like her. Nobody else has realised that she's some kind of demon in a Cucinelli pantsuit (and what he's pretty sure is usually La Perla underneath. Not that he's looking but he's gotten glimpses and he's pretty good at identifying a bra at thirty paces). 

It started with Isaac, which didn't bother Trevor too much. He likes the guy, but they've never been best buds. Understandable, given that he’s probably caused Isaac a sleepless night or two over the years, but it’s not just that. They’ve never really gelled. He’s pretty sure that Isaac has bought into his own publicity machinations so hard that he thinks Trevor is nothing more than the good hair and nice voice they’ve always sold him as. And, look, it doesn’t get to him that much- Isaac thinking he’s basically a cute (money-making) himbo is kind of funny, really, because he knows it isn’t true and the boys know it isn’t true, and that’s all that’s ever mattered to Trevor. But it does mean they’ve never gotten very close, so when he first noticed Isaac talking to Redhead Lex Luthor a lot, he didn’t think too much of it. Their jobs overlap, obvi, it was probably necessary. They were probably talking about the best ways to blackmail junior staffers at TMZ or something. It ramped up, though. They started going for coffee together, coming back with matching cups from the pretentious hipster place down the street from the studio that does all those gross lavender lattes and overpriced matcha. It made Trevor nervous. He’s known Isaac for almost ten years, why didn’t that count for anything? Why wasn’t he on Trevor’s side?

(He knows that if he actually said that out loud to anyone, they’d look at him like he was crazy and point out that, technically, everyone in the building is on the same side, the side of the massive media conglomerate that owns it.) 

They were clearly getting on way too well, having little dinners at each other’s places and giggling in corners. Well, giggling is overstating it. One of them occasionally cracked a smile. 

“It doesn’t bother you?” He’d been unable to stop himself asking Isaac one day in rehearsals, when he was actually alone for once. “That they’ve basically brought in a ringer and now you’ve gotta dance attendance on her?”

Isaac had looked at him the way he often looked at him, like he was a puppy who couldn’t manage to fetch a stick that had only been thrown a couple of yards; irritated, but in a pitying way, like it was on him for expecting anything different. 

“Weirdly, Trevor, no, it doesn’t bother me that my boss has hired an expert in our field to help me with an extremely challenging client. Should it? Should I decide that my nose has been put a little bit out of joint and start ranting and raving about it? Or just deal with it by going on an entirely unnecessary bender?”

Okay, now, that was pure Hetty Woodstone. He knew it. He could practically see the puppet strings. But he’d just given Isaac the finger and drifted off. If he wanted to take a flying leap into Hetty’s pocket, that was up to him. Trevor hoped they’d be very fucking happy together. 

When it comes to Thor, though, that’s different. Thor is his buddy, his pal, his bro. Thor has been to the Lefkowitz house for a Rosh Hashanah seder and barely even hit on his mom. Thor was there when he had to get his stomach pumped at Northwestern Memorial, giving the admit staff fake names in the hope that none of them would call the paps. Thor has seen him in every state of being; high as a goddamn kite, despairingly depressed after a bad break-up, in the middle of such an awesome fit of creativity that he’d only eaten graham crackers for three days, too inspired to stop for food. Thor is his, one of his people. So why is he going for a salad with the devil queen when he could be using this time to octuple-check the setlist with Sass and Trevor? 

Surely there are no two people on the planet less likely to enjoy each other’s company than Thor and Hetty. Thor is loud, brash, over the top in all aspects of his life; he drinks too much, he fucks too much, he spends too much money, but he’s also got the biggest heart of anyone Trevor has ever met. He does everything by extremes. Trevor can admit that he doesn’t know Hetty so well but from what he’s seen so far, she’s some kind of PR robot. He’s never seen her slouch, slip her heels off, eat sugar. From what she’d said, she hasn’t always been this self-denying saint, but the Hetty he sees in front of him now clearly doesn’t put a foot wrong. Even when she’s being sarcastic, she doesn’t raise her voice. But she doesn’t flinch when Thor does, doesn’t do that thing where she wrinkles her nose like she does whenever Trevor makes a joke that’s slightly more risque than something Elmo might say. She doesn’t even seem to mind when the big guy puts his arm around her in a weird bro hug and crumples her white linen, but Trevor does. Trevor minds very fucking much. And he’d bring it up to Thor, he really would, if it weren’t for the fact that Thor and Sass are evidently still kind of pissed off with him. He doesn’t want to poke the bear.

Well, he doesn’t want to poke one of the bears. The other one… let’s just say there’s a sharp stick lying around with her name on it. 

“So, you and Thor are best buds now?” He asks her with no preamble on their first morning in the big warehouse rehearsal space. The two of them had looked mighty cosy over the buffet table in the corner and he’d noticed that Thor picked up a bowl of fruit granola instead of his usual bacon bagel with extra bacon. Devil magic. 

“You know, just because you don’t like me, doesn’t mean that none of your friends are allowed to like me either, Trevor. Or it shouldn’t. We’re not in grade school.” Hetty’s hand is on her hip and she looks unimpressed, but then, he doesn’t actually think he’s ever seen her look impressed. 

“You’re definitely not,” he says with a big, totally fake smile. “Did they even let women go to school in your day?”

“I imagine you’d prefer they still didn’t. The stupider a woman is, the more likely it is she’s going to fall for your horrible pickup lines, no?”

“I don’t need pickup lines, babe, not when I’ve got this.” He gestures to his face smugly, and takes a lot of satisfaction in seeing a muscle in her jaw jump. She’s pissed, and she’s not allowed to show it. 

“Don’t call me babe,” she says shortly. “And can I help you with anything else, Mr Lefkowitz?”

“Yeah, you didn’t answer my question. Since when are you and Thor such good friends? Can’t imagine you two having a lot in common.”

She waves her hand, one of the several little gestures she has in her back pocket to show him that she thinks this conversation is beneath her or something. Or that Trevor in general is beneath her, which she doesn’t need the gestures to show him. It’s dripping from every Miss Porter’s-y pore. 

“Not that I can see that it has anything to do with you, but Thorfinn and I have plenty in common. A deep appreciation for a good Chateau Margeaux, for one thing. He was showing me pictures of his wine cellar just yesterday, it's very impressive. And I've always enjoyed Norwegian culture, I've spent some very enjoyable vacations there. Alt for Norge .” 

She raises her coffee cup at him in a little toast and he grimaces. Of course she loves Norway, it's dark and cold and they've got witches coming out of their ears, she'd fit right in. 

“You speak Norwegian?” He knows he sounds sceptical, bitter. It's just that, no matter how fucking egotistical it is, he feels like it's totally possible that this woman could have become fluent in a foreign language in the last month just to grind his gears. 

“Enough to call a cab or get a coffee,” she says dismissively. “I'm more surprised that you don't. Over a decade of friendship with Thor and you haven't picked up anything?” 

Okay, not everybody gets horny for the Duolingo owl. 

“I mean. He taught me how to say “blowjob” once, but I can't actually remember it.” 

“Of course,” is all she says, but she stretches it out like she's talking to a stupid five year old. 

Conceding that Hetty might have gotten the best out of that conversation, he leaves it alone after that. If everyone else wants to be a total fucking traitor, that's on them. He can handle whatever weird little game she’s playing. He’s Trevor Lefkowitz, he’s the goddamn frontman, he’s the reason that she even has a job. She’s never gonna beat him. 

And then she comes for Sass.

Okay, so Trevor was already on his guard. Every time he’s noticed them talking, he’s been alert, scrutinising them for every sign of extra friendliness. At least with Thor, the big guy likes everyone, talks to everyone. Sass is more selective, more reserved- if he was getting all buddy buddy with Hetty, it would mean something. 

It would mean she was winning. 

So when he comes to rehearsal one morning and walks in on the two of them yapping away like childhood friends, he’s basically straining at the leash to herd her away. Manages not to, because the way Sass is with him at the minute, they’d both just snap at him and he’d only manage to herd his best friend right into the wolf’s den. 

But when she’s gone, he can’t help himself.

“What was that about?” He asks Sass the second she’s out of earshot, prompting a slight curl of the lip.

“What? Hetty? Literally nothing, she was telling me about the fancy bullshit restaurant she went to with her son over the weekend, why?” 

“You can’t seriously tell me you enjoy hanging out with her?”

Sass shrugs, looking at Trevor like he’s the crazy one. 

“Yeah, I guess? She’s funny. What’s your issue, man?”

“My issue is she’s a psycho robot who wants us to be having as shitty a time as possible so she can turn us into corporate pop drones-”

“We’re already corporate pop drones,” Sass interjects with a bitter little smile. “And, let’s be real, Trevor, you’re the whole reason she’s here. If you weren’t so insistent on making a fool of yourself in public, they’d have never called her in. Blame yourself.” 

It sounds as if he’s got the blaming Trevor thing covered well enough for the both of them. 

“It’s just not fair,” he bursts out, like a goddamn toddler throwing a tantrum in the middle of Walmart. “You’re meant to be on my side, all of you, we’ve all known each other forever and you can’t back me up against the wicked witch of the west?”

“Whoa.” Sass puts his hands up defensively, and the look on his face says that Trevor is definitely giving crying two year old right now. “Take a breath, man.” 

He tries. He really does. But it’s hard to take a breath when you’re this frustrated, when nobody else gets it. 

“Okay, first of all, there are no sides, there’s nothing to back you up against. Being on Hetty’s side is being on your side, it is her literal job to help us, make us look good. Like, sure, you don’t have to be best buds but this weird rivalry thing? 100 percent in your head, Trev.” 

For once, Sass doesn’t sound mad. He hasn’t gone all cold and sardonic, he’s actually almost smiling. 

“I’m just trying-”

“Look, I get that you’re stressed. And for someone who loves to socialise so much, you’ve never really liked bringing new people into the inner circle. You thought Flower was a Russian spy for, like, the first three months she worked with us. And I know that Hetty is not only a new person, but she’s a new person who’s taken all your toys away, all that shit that you’d normally be using to distract yourself from tour nerves. Not that I’m a psychiatrist but I am-”

“Always right,” Trevor finishes for him with a nod. Not always, but about what’s going on in Trevor’s head? Usually. And it’s really, really annoying. 

“And I know that the mean scary sexy lady said you couldn’t do molly to get through a Tuesday afternoon rehearsal, and that’s probably bringing up a lot of confusing feelings for you, what with how much you like being told what to do and how much you don’t like not doing molly.”

Rude, but undeniable. 

“But I think she’s okay, you know. She definitely knows what she’s talking about, and she’s dedicated. Just because you’ve had dirty dreams about her brandishing a cigarette holder, doesn’t mean she’s actually Cruella de Vil.” 

“I have not -” he starts, but Sass is grinning at him so wide that he just shuts up and takes it. 

“You’ve gotta try to chill out a little, Trevor. If you can’t make an effort with Hetty, ignore her. I feel like you’re a couple of bad rehearsals away from Buffalo Bill-ing her in your basement. But honestly, you should try. I actually think you two have more in common than you’d-”

“Okay, that’s insulting.” Trevor claps his friend on the arm. “But, sure, I get your point.”

And he does. While Hetty might be really fucking annoying, he does know she’s not actually a supervillain, if only because she doesn’t have the resources. And he also knows she’s not going anywhere. Maybe Sass is right, maybe he does need to make an effort. Not because he believes they have anything remotely in common, but just to prove that he can. That he’s not a spoiled kid. That he can get along with anyone, no matter how much they remind him of the mean, haughty mom from Gilmore Girls. 

Easier said than done, obvi. 

He tries normal shit at first. Like, watercooler shit, stuff that his dad might say to people at the office. Because they’re colleagues, right? Normal, chill colleagues. It does not go amazingly well. 

When he says “hot enough for ya?” on a summery morning, she looks at him like he’s crazy and doesn’t lower herself to respond. 

When he asks what she’s reading as she sits in on rehearsal, not paying the band any attention (is he the only one who thinks that’s really fucking rude?), she does actually answer, but it doesn’t lead to what he’d call friendly conversation. 

“The Seagull,” she says coolly, eyeing him like she thinks he’s not house-trained. “I suppose you inspired me.”

When all he can give her is a blank look, she gets the pleasure of rolling her eyes at him. 

“It’s Chekhov, Trevor. You know, the man whose name is plastered all over the polyester sweaters that paid for your beach house.”

“Oh, sure.” Unconcerned, he swings himself into the chair next to her, vaguely craning his neck to glance at the pages. “Sass was the lit nerd, not me.” 

“You shock me.” 

He should be getting points for trying here because she is not making it easy. Clearly whatever cosy little chats she's having with Thor and Sass aren't going to carry over to him. But Esther Lefkowitz didn’t raise a quitter. 

When he comes across her hiding away with her Airpods in a few days later, he almost doesn’t bother. He’s not in a good mood- they’re balls deep in rehearsals, they’re moving to the practice stadium with all the sets and sound tomorrow, his nerves are jangling and he could really, really use a cold one. Trying to be polite to Hetty isn’t going to make him feel any better. But it feels so good to be in Sass’ good books again, feeling like they’re back on the same team, so he doesn’t want to let his buddy down. He’ll give it a go. 

“Listening to something good?” 

She jumps a little, and when she takes one earbud out, he’s pretty sure he’s in for a haranguing about leaving a lady in peace.

“I doubt you'll think so. An NPR podcast on income inequality and market concentration.”

So just a little jab at his intelligence today. In fairness, she is completely right- he zoned out halfway through that description, there’s no way he could make it through a minute. 

“Oh. From the way you were kinda shimmying your shoulders, I thought it was music.” 

To Trevor’s mammoth surprise, Hetty’s cheeks flush. 

“The host made a good point about coercive monopolies that I very much agreed with,” she says stiffly. Damn, she’s embarrassed that he caught her acting like a human being. 

“Oh, sure, I love to shoulder dance when I think about coercive monopolies.” Hetty gives him her habitual glare as he sits down beside her but it’s only, like, a level 2. Nowhere near as bad as the time he swapped her and Flower’s coffee cups so instead of black jet fuel, she got a mouthful of extremely sugary hazelnut spice. “Should have known better, anyway. You don’t like music, right?”

“I’ve never said that, “ she corrects him. “But if that’s what you’d prefer to believe because I’m not a Chekhov Chill fangirl …”

“Don’t say fangirl, it doesn’t sound right coming out of your mouth. You should say… admirer or aficionado or something.”

“I’m 49, Trevor, not 149.” 

Most of the time, you could have fooled him. 

“So what kind of music do you like?” He presses her. “I’d love to get a look at your Spotify. I bet it’s either like, Megan Thee Stallion or the hardest techno known to man.” 

Honestly, that joke would have probably landed better if there were other people there to hear it, because he would bet his bank balance that Hetty doesn’t actually know what either of those things are. 

“I like normal music,” she says, normally. “Music that everyone likes.” 

“That is the most PR bullshit answer I have ever heard in my life. There is no music on this planet that everyone likes, Hetty. Do you really not have a favourite artist, a favourite song? Come on, like, what was your first dance at your wedding?” 

Immediately, he knows he's said something fucking stupid. Hetty stiffens up like he just jabbed her with a loose electric wire. She’s divorced, he knew that. 

“We didn't do that,” she says, face serious. “It's a little… declassé.” 

“Of course it is,” he sighs. “But come on. I have never met a human being who doesn't like some kind of music. If you were trapped in a record store for the rest of time and music was your only form of entertainment, what would you choose?” 

She makes this kind of helpless gesture, which is the only sign of helplessness he's ever seen her make. It’s almost like they’re having a real conversation. 

“Etta James,” she says, like she's resigned herself to some kind of torture. “Julie London, Sarah Vaughan. That kind of thing.” 

“Okay, okay, I can work with that.” He suddenly realises how wide he's smiling and dampens it right back down. “Oh, hey, you like Alberta Haynes?” 

Hetty screws up her face a little, and she does not look at all like some kind of cute Disney woodland creature, no sir. 

“Rings a bell, did she perform for Dionne Warwick's Kennedy Center Honors ceremony?” 

“I have no idea but it seems on-brand.” 

He whips his phone out and in two seconds, he's got a video of a woman who's held his hair back while he vomited up a pint of Fireball and three White Russians (2015 was a time ) belting out I'll Never Fall in Love Again for the president.

“She's one of my best bros,” he says proudly. 

“She's very good,” Hetty sounds surprised and he’s about to get a little offended on Alberta’s behalf before he realises why.

“Better than me, you mean? Yeah, she is. Her voice is crazy, and she’s always had this drive to just… do exactly what she wants to do, the kind of music she likes. She’s awesome. You really didn’t know who she was?”

Hetty shakes her head, unconcerned by her apparent lack of knowledge of anything that happened after 1960. How she manages to do what he’ll admit is a pretty good job of controlling popular opinion when she’s so supremely disconnected from pop culture, he cannot understand. 

It comes up again a couple of days later when he’s teasing her about scaring the living daylights out of a runner who’d forgotten to bring her decaf after 4pm. 

“If I did that, you’d go crazy,” he points out, and earns himself a roll of her eyes.

“Nobody is waiting desperately to twist my behaviour into something they can sell to Page Six,” Hetty hits back. 

“It wouldn’t matter if they were. You couldn’t stop yourself, all this Miranda Priestley shit, it’s baked into you. You could no more be nice to a runner or a waiter than you could sprout wings.” And usually that would piss him off more, but it’s just kind of… Hetty. She is what she is. 

“I don't know Miranda Priestley but that's not sounding like a compliment,” she says flippantly, and Trevor’s head explodes. 

“You must be kidding.” This is worse than her not knowing any music written after the fall of the Berlin Wall. “You’ve never seen The Devil Wears Prada? Ever?”

Unknowing and uncaring, Hetty shrugs. 

“I've never even heard of it. It’s a movie?” 

“Yes!” He all but screeches. “What the fuck, man! It’s an excellent movie. Everyone has seen that movie, definitely every woman. Are you actually an alien? Because if you are, I think it’s cop rules, you have to tell me.” 

The eyes roll again. 

“If I were, how would I be bound by the rules of a human police force? You never think these things through, Trevor. And clearly not every woman has seen this movie, I haven’t. I’m sure most of my friends haven’t. It’s a favourite of yours?”

“I mean, not like a top ten,” he admits. “But probably, like, top thirty, if that’s a thing. It’s iconic. Some awesome needle drops. And Meryl Streep, that’s Miranda Priestley, is a bad bitch in it.” 

A hot bad bitch, he doesn’t say. From the flicker of her eyelids, he thinks he probably didn’t need to say. 

“You know who Meryl Streep is, right?” He teases. “She’s been enough Oscar jerk-off movies to have caught your attention?”

“Yes, Trevor, I know who Meryl Streep is.” Third eye roll of the conversation, he’s really raking them in. “Have you seen the film adaptation of Dancing at Lughnasa? I enjoyed that.”

“I think you know that I have not.” A grin tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Sophie’s Choice, though, right? You must have seen Sophie’s Choice.” 

“I have seen Sophie’s Choice,” Hetty acknowledges with a slight grimace. “If I remember rightly, my ex-husband rented the video when I was around eight months pregnant. Not what I’d call the ideal viewing experience.” 

“Oh, fuck, wow. No.” Not for the first time in their acquaintance, Trevor thinks that Hetty’s ex-husband sounds like the dick to end all dicks. 

“Meryl’s pretty good in it, though, right?” He says encouragingly, like he’s trying to get a nervous cat to play with the yarn he brought it. Hetty just gives him one of her patented hand waves. 

“As far as I remember, yes. I suppose you’ve got some sort of sexual fixation on her, as she’s old enough to be your mother.” 

Little T kind of stirs a little, lazi ly, and Trevor wills him to go back to sleep. Not when he’s finally getting somewhere. 

“Okay, number one, I do not have a sexual fixation on women old enough to be my mother, I just don’t rule them out. I’m an equal opportunities guy. And number two, not everything is about sex, Hetty.” He fixes her with a look that he hopes mirrors the one she always gives him when she thinks he’s being a pig. “Get your mind out of the gutter. I was just making conversation, indulging in a little cinephilia.”

She shoots him a glare, but it’s pretty mild as her glares go. 

“Well, I’m not much of a cinephile.” 

“No? You don’t sit around watching all that silent black and white Swedish shit everyone gets their rocks off over? What’s your favourite movie?”

Hetty makes a face, evidently fazed by the question, which is insane. Everybody knows what their favourite movie is, even people who haven’t been ambushed into doing their letterboxd top four on a red carpet. 

“Probably something horribly cliche. The Women, maybe, or Grand Hotel, I like those large ensemble pieces.”

“Okay, well, I don’t think I need to tell you I haven’t seen them. Maybe we should do movie night.”

He isn’t looking right at her, so he only catches her little flinch out of the corner of his eye, and it takes a second to realise how that might have come across. 

“If everyone picks their favourite,” he adds hurriedly. “And we can vote for a top three or something, or stagger them over the tour. I’m warning you now, though, Thor is into some weird shit. It’s either 13 Going On 30 or disgusting Hungarian slashers with him.”

“Well, don’t let it be said that I'm not open-minded,” she says, and then she walks off, leaving Trevor breathing a sigh of relief that she didn't actually take it as… not that she'd really think he was hitting on her or anything. She'd just think he was mocking her, and that doesn't feel any better. It’s not like she’s suddenly his favourite person or anything but she is a person. He wouldn’t want to make her feel like that. 

And it’s kind of embarrassing that it took him so long to realise that. That, even if she is a weirdo control freak who’s never heard of Doja Cat, she’s not evil. She’s just trying to do her job, probably harder and more conscientiously than he’s trying to do his. And she’s kinda one of the gang now; she calls Flower Flower, instead of Susan, she knows about Thor’s whole pre-gig superstition of eating a different groundfish every day for a week (eyes and all), she’s heard all the stories about the disastrous European tour that got cut short by the pandemic. All the new-person awkwardness is gone, and Trevor is man enough to admit that he was the last holdout. Things could have probably gone smoother if he’d gotten a grip a little earlier, but hey. He’s going through a difficult time. 

And he still doesn’t feel like he can have a sneaky beer in his apartment without her finding out. Maybe she is a witch after all.

Notes:

Trevor: these fucking mind games, man, she’s trying to draw me in to her spider’s web

Hetty: hello, I have arrived at work to do my job

Chapter 4

After ten years, you might think that the boys of Chekhov Chill would be used to this shit. You'd be wrong. If it was just the rehearsals, that would be fine- mind-numbing as they got closer to the actual gigs and went over each transition more times than Ozzy had shown up buzzed on late night talk shows, but fine. It's never just rehearsals, though. It's full days of rehearsals topped off by bullshit press appearances in the evenings, or ridiculous industry parties where everyone's too worried about the calories in a vodka cranberry to have any fun, or staying late at the studio and fantasising about a man-sized bottle of Tylenol and a very fat blunt while some operations guy from management drones on about how imperative it is that they get straight on the jet from their second night in Arizona to get to Texas on time. Not to mention the usual spate of nightmares he has about getting up in front of thousands of people and just straight up forgetting how to play guitar. Literally none of it is fun or glamorous or exciting, but he's still gotta act like he's having the time of his life 24/7 so that nobody sends a shitty message to Deux Moi about a certain scandal-ridden musician not being grateful enough that he's got a career at all. 

Trevor doesn't feel very fucking grateful right now. A little push in the right direction and he swears he'd Jenna Rink this shit, go home to New Jersey and curl under the covers in his childhood single bed and never come out again. Of course, if he did actually do that, his mom would just slap his head and drive him right to the MetLife stage door, just like she used to in middle school when he wanted to sleep in instead of going to football practice.

And, you know, he'd be letting the guys down big time, which he'd rather die than do. Letting the label down, which at this point he cares a lot less about. And he’d be… well, not letting Hetty down, exactly. Just proving that he’s the exact kind of selfish, careless dipshit she’d assumed he was at first, and he’s trying to do that a lot less these days. 

The whole no illicit substances thing she insisted on has been a drag, but he's stuck to it and now… it's not that he doesn't miss it, because he does. But it's a casual kind of missing it, not like a bone-deep craving, and that's honestly good to know. In the back of his mind, he'd always been worried that if he ever wanted to stop, he wouldn't be able to. That he'd been lying to himself and everyone else and he did have a real, serious problem and he was gonna end up John Belushi-ed in some hotel room before he was 40. This has given him reassurance he'd have never acknowledged he needed, and though he knows that Hetty’s intention hadn't been that altruistic, it's still ultimately down to her. 

Even the thing with his socials was kind of a blessing in disguise. Easier to break away from a scrolling hole when all your algorithm wants you to see is bullshit about mindfulness instead of smash or pass polls about 90s TV stars. He's actually felt inspired to write some tunes, which almost never happens these days, and literally never happens when they're going on tour. Turns out that, even though the PR Bot is only motivated by the good of the company, a lot of her shit has turned out to be good for Trevor too. 

Not that he’s on his best behaviour all the time. After all, if he can’t have any actual fun, he’s gotta get his kicks in a new way. And it turns out, that new way is to toy with Hetty. Y’know, tease her, in a bro-y way, he does it to Thor and Sass too, it’s just that Hetty’s new and shiny and not used to all his jokes yet. It’s exactly the same, no matter how many comments Sass makes about pulling pigtails. 

She's just so fun to mess with. At first, she'll pretend that she doesn't care or she doesn't even hear him, but if he persists (and he always persists), she'll start pursing her lips or getting these little pink patches on her cheeks or rolling her eyes. A few times, he's gotten her to the point of putting her fingers to her temples to try and massage away a tension headache, which feels like a real win. Considering how professional and above-it-all she prides herself on being, getting her to crack is an achievement. He almost feels productive afterwards, like he can tick something off the to-do list; run 10k, sign his tax returns, make Hetty do the thing where she scrunches up her nose instead of letting herself tell him to fuck off. 

It doesn’t always work. 

He just aims it wrong this time, that's all. It backfires a little, it happens to the best of them. It’s no big deal.

It's Thor's fault, anyway. They’re in the van on the way from the music studio to a TV studio, because apparently they don’t exist if there isn’t a microphone in front of them, for some stupid late night talk show, and Trevor is on his last nerve. Usually before shit like this, he at least gets to shower in his own home, do stupid little rituals that make him feel more confident. Today, they’ve been in the studio since 9 in the morning and Trevor is sweaty, rumpled and so far from confident he couldn’t see it with a paparazzo’s zoom lens. 

Thor, on the other hand, appears not to have a care in the world. Thor looks exactly the same as always, unruffled and cheerful and just… Thor. Thor is evidently so unbothered by their shitty day and their shitty schedule and their shitty lives that he’s in the mood to get all hot and heavy with Flower on the back seat. Trevor doesn’t want to look too closely in case one of them takes it as some kind of request to hop in there, but he’s pretty sure that Thor’s hand is right up Flower’s shirt, and (as she tells them all at least weekly) Flower does not believe in bras. 

It’s not like it’s the first time, obviously. Thor has never been what you’d call shy and Flower doesn't seem to recognise that there's any difference between shit you do in public and shit you do in private. She'd once asked him without a trace of irony why he used his drapes in winter when it was already dark at night. Not that they go crazy, Trevor is 98% sure he's never actually seen them fuck. Just a little hand stuff. And they’re not even going that far now, just far enough to give him the opportunity to take his bad mood out on his seat partner. 

He’s never asked her but he’d bet money that Hetty thinks anything beyond a peck on the cheek is going too far outside the bedroom. A peck on the cheek included, probably. She’d definitely never start making out with someone on the back of the bus, or get down and dirty in a dark corner at a club. Which is fine, obviously, he’s not lack-of-kink-shaming, but it does mean that it’s probably the perfect way to get her the other kind of hot under the collar.  

“That bothering you?” He needles her, swinging his head in his friends’ direction. Hetty glances up from her tablet like she didn’t realise there were any other people on the planet, let alone in the van, but still. Now she’s looked.

“As usual, I have no idea what you're blathering on about, Trevor,” she says coolly, and he bites the inside of his cheek to keep his grin at bay. 

“All the PDA. I bet they tell you that's a no-no at finishing school, right?” Meanwhile at Franklin High, Trenton, NJ, the bus driver would have been majorly freaked if there’d come a day when there wasn’t a herd of kids turning his vehicle into an enclosure at the zoo in mating season. 

“I hadn’t noticed until you drew my attention.” They’re not at pink splotches yet but she does look kinda irritated. He’ll take it. “But tattling and trying to get the other children into trouble is not becoming.”

Oh, so she’s going the patronising route today. Good to know. 

“Hey, I just wanted to get your thoughts.” He raises his hands in mock surrender. “You know, you've got a take on everything. Not famous for your fence-sitting.” 

Hetty gives him a sarcastic little smile, head tilting to the right. 

“I have no takes on heavy petting. It's not behaviour I would emulate but it doesn't bother me.” She has this way of drawling sometimes that makes him feel like the clumsiest footman on staff who just smashed a duchess's Ming vase. “I imagine you think that at any sign of human physicality, my circuits will short and my interface will fail.” 

“Something like that,” he agrees with a grin. “I mean, it's not proper, is it? I know the windows are blacked out but we can still see every time Thor gets a tit squeeze in.” 

Hetty makes a face but switches her iPad back on like she's done and Trevor isn't done, not by a long shot. 

“And, you know, there's a power dynamic there.” He leans in and lowers his voice a little, because he doesn't want anyone behind them to think that it's a power dynamic he actually gives a fuck about, he just wants to mess with Hetty. “I know Flower's technically employed by the label, but if those two ended things, Thor could have her out of here with a click of his fingers.” 

When she turns back, Trevor can see that she's distinctly unimpressed. 

“I think I have a higher estimation of your friend's character than you do. Besides, in this industry, I'm just grateful that the woman Thorfinn is sleeping with is over eighteen.” 

It must be his turn to make a face, because Hetty arches the iciest eyebrow in response. 

“It's hardly a given. A little exhibitionism with someone over thirty is a godsend compared to some men I've had to work with in the past.” 

Well, he's got nothing to say to that, because it isn't funny and he knows it's true. They lapse into silence, which only gives Trevor more opportunity to dwell on how nauseous he suddenly feels and the way that his palms are sweating and he's speaking before he can stop himself because he can't just let that go…

“Hey, you know that I'm not… that I'd never… right?” 

Hetty's eyes do this weird thing where they seem to kinda get softer and he knows that because he's looking right into them, desperate to not find judgement or derision there. 

“I didn't think that you did, Trevor. Believe me, if I thought you were that sort of man, we would not have developed the friendship we currently enjoy.” 

Okay, now his palms are really sweaty. She thinks they're… she really… fuck. Thawing aside, he'd really thought she saw him as someone else's overeager, untrained puppy she wasn't allowed to kick in the rear. This is what she thinks having friends is? 

“Besides…” Hetty continues before he can trip over his own tongue trying to reply, her voice dropping. “I don't think that's what we have to worry about with you, is it?” 

He doesn't know why she suddenly sounds like Kathleen Turner and he doesn't know why he likes it. 

“What do you mean?” He asks with a little croak in his voice. She probably didn't notice. 

“I mean, we don't have to worry about you taking a fancy to someone inappropriately young, Trevor.” If he didn't know any better- and he does, he totally does- he would say that Hetty's tone of voice was bordering on flirtatious. Obviously he does know better, obviously. Obviously. But Little T does not seem to have got that message; he's perking up like someone just put on Bull Durham. 

“I mean, no, you don't.” The weird croak is not going away. “But I don't know what you-” 

“Trevor.” Hetty gives him an admonishing look. If she had glasses on, he's pretty sure she'd be peering over them at him and why did he decide to think about that, is he a fucking idiot? “Be serious. At this point, I know more about you than you do. And when your dating patterns are put down on paper… tell me, after all your talk about films I ought to have seen, I take it you've seen The Graduate?” 

“Uh huh,” he confirms unwillingly, trying very hard to think about anything except Anne Bancroft's legs. 

“At a, uh, formative age?” 

He's not getting hard, he's not getting hard, he is not getting hard in the middle of a van with all his friends in, a van he's going to have to get out of really soon, all because… because what? A hot older woman is mildly teasing him about wanting to fuck hot older women and he's reacting like she put her hair up in a scrunchie and dropped right to her knees. Oh, and that mental picture is really fucking helping. 

“Not especially.” Maybe she wouldn't look so smug if she knew that by the first time he saw The Graduate, he already had a big fat crush on Sally Field in Legally Blonde 2. Or, you know, maybe she would. 

“If you say so.” Looking like the cat who got the fucking cream, Hetty switches her stupid little machine back on, clearly convinced that she’s won this round. And, you know, she’s not wrong, because he’s having to try really hard to quell the stirrings of his erection so he doesn’t end up having to clamber out of this van fully pitching a tent. Devious bitch. 

Pleased with herself as she is, by the time they reach the tv studio, he’s no longer half-hard and his face is a normal, non-tomato red colour, so no harm done, it’s not a real victory. Except the harm done to his psyche; after the show, instead of sinking straight into sleep like he usually would when he’s had such a shitty, stressful day, he has to jerk off twice to get the image of Hetty smirking at him out of his head. His head isn’t focused enough to actually fantasise about her in any particular way he can feel bad about, but there are definitely flashes of her in there along with Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger and the hot couple who used to live in his building and his vague half-imagined thoughts about soft, wet flesh and loud, obscene noises. Not that he should feel bad anyway, he reasons with himself; she knew what she was doing. She wanted to stir him up and turn him on, for evil reasons. She knew he’s basically on lockdown and she leant in close and smelled like expensive sexy toasted marshmallows and magnolia and teased him about getting hard for milfs, so he got hard for a milf. Occam’s fucking razor, or something. Put your head in the lion’s mouth, all that shit. 

And sure, he knows that she wasn’t doing it because she wanted to do anything. Because she’s into him or interested in any way in the contents of his boxers. She just wanted to make it clear that if he pulls her pigtails, she can pull- no, bad metaphor. She can mess with him too, that’s all. And she’d said they were friends, right? They’re messing with each other like friends. 

No matter what Sass says. 

 

S🍑: Soooooo, what was that about?

T💸: 👀👀👀

Leif Erikson: more words little man

S🍑: Yesterday, on the bus?

Leif Erikson: …….

S🍑: Not you. Trevor and his arch-nemesis getting cosy. From where I was sitting, you could almost call it necking. 

T💸: pretty sure you told me I wasn't allowed an arch nemisis 

T💸: and also you're full of shit

T💸: I had to sit next to Hetty because you said you were saving the seat next to you for your ancestors

S🍑: Yeah, I don't like the way you can't sit still for 0.2 seconds. 

S🍑: Doesn't explain why you were basically kissing Hetty's neck. 

S🍑: Been typing for a while there, buddy. 

T💸: i am trying to respond with dignity

T💸: am I not allowed to have a normal, chill conversation with someone that you literally told me I had to be nice to? 

S🍑: Of course you are. And I guess you’re also allowed to pant after her like Bugs Bunny panting after… what’s the girl rabbit called?

T💸: Lola

T💸: AND I WAS NOT 

T💸: there is literally no difference between the way I was talking to her and the way I talk to any of you

Leif Erikson: if true, threesome Flower always pushing for would have happened long time ago

T💸: NOT YOU TOO

Leif Erikson: u look at Hetty like Thor look at fresh caught walleye in Lake Vermillion

T💸: thats just disturbing

T💸: i know you’re both just trying to mess with me

T💸: you don’t actually think this is a thing

T💸: I’m rising above it. I’ve risen. 

S🍑: Okay Trevor 

Leif Erikson: Okay Trevor

 

 

Bastards. Just trying to stir shit to blow off some steam. Hetty’s hot but so are a lot of people. Honestly, almost everyone Trevor knows is hot; it’s like the more famous you get, the less likely you are to run into ugly people, it’s one of the pros. One of the only pros. 

One of the cons is your own life not actually belonging to you anymore, so that fascist executives and their admittedly-pretty-and-funny-but-still-kinda-evil henchmen can just command you to do whatever and you have to do it. Which is why, three days before their first tour stop, when what Trevor really wants to be doing is chilling, sleeping, and spending time with his dog, he’s at yet another stupid industry press party bullshit thing at one of Manhattan’s many characterless, would-be-bougie beige hotels. Obviously, Trevor loves parties, but he hates this kind of party. Even if the Commandant would let him drink, they're never any fun. The people who would go to them willingly are boring as shit and either try to crawl up his ass or try to trip him up so he says something dumb they can pitch a NME feature about. The people who don’t want to be there- the cool people- are usually keeping one eye on their Vacheron so they can bolt out by midnight to somewhere better like coked-up Cinderellas, which doesn’t really make for what Trevor considers a party atmosphere. 

He’s skulking- or sulking, both are applicable- around the bar, keeping a wary eye out for that chick from Pitchfork he’d accidentally slept with after an ill-advised night out at 1OAK and obviously never texted, when some claps a hand on his shoulder from behind.

“Come with me if you want to live,” whoever it is murmurs in a decidedly shitty Arnie voice behind him, but before he has a chance to either turn round, roll his eyes, or elbow them in the gut, they burst into unmistakable, uproarious laughter and Trevor finds himself grinning too. 

Alberta’s clothes are always awesome but she looks particularly cool tonight- she’s wearing some mermaidy orange dress with a yellow leather jacket- and Trevor feels like a basic bitch in his little silky shirt and jeans. He can’t tell her that, though, because she’d just call him Tan France or something for the rest of time.

“Thank you for scaring the living shit out of me,” he grumbles as he pulls her into a hug that is possibly tighter than it needs to be. It feels like ten years since he’s seen one of his friends that isn’t in some way connected with the fucking tour. Alberta just laughs louder. 

“I meant it though!” She protests with a huge grin. “I was here pretty early so I took two bottles of the good shit and put them in this place’s fucking sixteenth ballroom or something before all the freelancers started tearing out the corks with their teeth- you know those poor bastards can’t afford their own booze, they go feral at the free bars. So, you know, come with me if you want to live.” 

She’s already dragging him off and that’s good, because it means she won’t be looking at his face when he says what he needs to say next. He just doesn’t want it being made into a bigger deal than it is, that’s all. 

“I’m kinda not drinking, actually,” he slides in, breezily. Or as breezily as he can. “But I’d rather hang with you than stay out here, even if we’ve gotta hide in the cleaning closet.”

“Wait, like really not drinking?” Alberta doesn’t stop in her tracks but she looks round at him like he just announced a terminal diagnosis. “Or is this like when you said you were only gonna stay for a glass at my last launch party and then ended up going home with- wait, was it Ashley or Mary K-”

“No, I am for real not drinking,” he interrupts her. “Tour starts on Friday, you know, so…”

“Uh huh. And? Since when has that ever made a difference? I mean, you do you, baby boy, if you’re off the sauce that is your business and nobody else’s, just say no, but it is kinda a departure.” 

She draws him into this little empty salon thing with the drapes shut that they’re definitely not meant to be in and ducks down behind the bar to pick up her stolen hooch, looking way too pleased with herself for double-fisting Moet. 

“I feel like if you’re that surprised I’m not drinking, it’s probably a good thing I’m not drinking.” It takes him a second to realise what he’s said and he groans aloud. “Fuck. 

“What?” Alberta is looking at him like he’s got two heads. “You got withdrawal symptoms? You seeing crazy shit? That happened to my Aunt Sally, twenty four hours without pinot and she thought the toucans on her wallpaper were doing the macarena and-”

“No!” He interjects before she can get into full flow. “No, I just… you know when someone is really smug about something and then they turn out to be right about it? And it’s like, even more annoying than the original smugness?”

“Sure,” Alberta says wisely, and even though she’s pouring herself a very generous measure and not him, she’s kind of giving emotionally intelligent barkeep who wants to listen to all his problems. “Let me guess, Sass?”

“Not this time. Our new PR chick. The one that got hired after the, uh. You know. The incident.”

He could be more specific, but she knows. She’d sent him a terrible meme with one of the photos from the incident and Elmo burying his face in powdered sugar pasted onto that “they’re the same picture” thing from The Office, because she’s a dick. 

“Oh, sure. The incident. What, she’s the one who made you quit?” 

“Yeah. The rules were basically nothing fun until the tour is over or… honestly, I don’t even know, no alternative. I think she might kill me. She’s pretty scary, way, way scarier than Isaac.”

To his surprise, instead of commiserating or making a joke about Horrible Bosses or something, Alberta just gives him an almighty side-eye. 

“Okay, if you could try and say that without popping a boner about it, I’d feel a whole lot better.”

“What do you mean?!” He yelps, way louder and higher than is either sensible or manly. “I just said she’s scary!”

“Which is Trevor talk for “I wonder if she’d let me feed her grapes and rub her feet”, don’t play with me, you little simp.” 

He can only gape at her. Why is everyone yanking his chain about this?! 

“Okay, no! You are so off-base, why does everyone- oh my God, did Sass text you?”

“Not about this. Why, does Sass also think you’re a simp?” 

“I mean, he didn’t say those words,” he grumbles. “But he was teasing me about… well, about Hetty generally. It’s so dumb, you all rip me for loving When Harry Met Sally but apparently I’m the only person on the planet who thinks that men and women can be friends. It’s 2025, Alberta.”

She rolls her eyes and yeah, when she does it he doesn’t feel all pleased and triumphant like when Hetty does it but so what? He’s just more used to it.

“We are literally friends, bitch. It’s obviously not that, it’s your goddamn heart eyes. And the fact that usually you act like anyone in a suit is a commie spy and you’re Joe McCarthy.”

She’s got a point. 

“Hey, don’t look at me, Thor and Sass started it. They were cozying up to her, I was the last man standing. But yeah, she’s not actually that bad. I don’t think that’s popping a boner about it.”

“You can’t see your own face. I feel like you’re about to burst into Anyone Who Had A Heart.” Cackling a little at her own joke, Alberta jabs him lightly in the arm. 

“I am not,” he whines. “You’re all so mean to me. I’m just, like, a laughing stock to you people.”

“That’s right, babe,” she says encouragingly. “But hey, that doesn’t mean you can’t have feelings. I’m not judging. Well, I am, but only in a fun way! At least this one has a job, not like the middle-aged influencer chick you picked up in Austin and dated for six fucking months before you realised she was brain-dead and bleeding your bank account dry.”

“She wasn’t brain-dead,” he protests, but only half-heartedly. Maria hadn’t exactly been a Mensa candidate. Hot as fuck, though, tits like Jennifer Tilly. “And Hetty definitely isn’t. Not that that matters, because she’s not my fucking girlfriend.”

“Methinks the lady doth act like a little bitch too much,” Alberta says smugly. “She here? I wanna see what’s got you all verklempt.”

He makes a face and she laughs even louder than before. 

“It doesn’t work when you just shoehorn it in,” he complains, because she’s way too pleased about her “Yiddish word of the day” app. “But yeah, here somewhere. Or she was gonna be, I haven’t actually seen her.”

“Ooh, if you gimme like thirty seconds to make a dent in this, we should go and find her!” She says, all excited, like he’s going to agree with the worst idea in the world. 

“In what universe would I say yes to deliberately putting you in a position where you can embarrass me in front of-”

“In front of?” Alberta crows, delighted. “In front of yourrrrrrr?”

“Oh my God, you are so annoying.” Running his hand over his face, Trevor tries to think up an alternate plan, any alternate plan, that will allow him to get out of this. Short of just telling her to look over there and running away, he's got nothing. “Look, if we go back to the party and-” 

“Oh, yeah, boy!” She manages to break into her patented happy dance while also swilling two-thirds of a glass of bubbly, which is admittedly impressive. “Meeting the in-laws, your girl doesn't know what she's in for.”

“She is not my- fuck it, why am I bothering?”

It's probably fine, he thinks as Alberta sinks the rest of her drink and stashes the bottle back under the counter for later. No big deal. It’s better, actually, than letting them just run into each other organically. If Alberta got talking to Hetty without him there, God only knows what she might say. At least in front of him, she might keep her cool a little. Not tell Hetty he has a picture of her above his bed that he kisses every night before he goes to sleep or whatever other weird shit she’s made up in her head. 

He can’t see her anywhere, though, genuinely, and he’s starting to internally rejoice at the idea that maybe she didn’t show up when he catches a glimpse of a pile of red curls and then the side of Isaac’s head and steels himself. It’s gonna be fine. Alberta isn’t going to ruin his entire life right now. Probably. 

Only when they’re about ten steps away, too late to change course even if Alberta would let him, a little gaggle of women heads for the buffet table and now he can actually see Hetty. 

He can see a lot of Hetty. Her bare arms, shoulders, collarbones, a whooooole lot of her back. She's wearing some drapey deep blue thing that's cut down to Argentina at the back and kind of falling off her shoulders at the front and, fuck, does it suit her. 

“Hey,” he manages as he approaches. He even manages to look at Isaac as well as Hetty, no matter how much of a wrench it is. Nobody would ever know that it feels like his tongue has swelled up to three times its usual size and that he's just gotta let it hang out of his mouth while he pants. Shit. This does not count as Sass being right, because this is new, this is happening after, and Sass is not a prophet, so this does not count. “You guys having fun?”

Hetty eyes him up suspiciously, but Alberta’s presence obviously stops her saying whatever she actually wants to say. 

“This is Alberta Haynes,” he jumps in quickly. “I showed you that video of her singing, right? She’s one of my oldest friends. Alberta, I think you’ve met Isaac before and this is Hetty, she’s from the label too.” 

The two women shake hands and Trevor deliberately does not look at Alberta’s face. He doesn’t want to see whatever “you are so fucking predictable, little man” look is on her face. He already knows. 

“Of course,” Hetty says warmly. Or, you know, as warmly as you can get when you got the WASP ice queen brain chip implanted at birth. “Trevor talks a lot about you.” 

“I’ve heard a lot about you too.” Why does Alberta sound so fucking suggestive? It isn’t even true, he had literally never mentioned Hetty to her until ten minutes ago. Luckily, Hetty just shoots him a wry smile. 

“All bad, I imagine.”

“Oh, not at all-” Alberta begins but he interjects as fast as he can. 

“You enjoying the party?” He says loudly, looking at Isaac and not at Hetty. Isaac does his best “I’m deigning to be here when I could be having dinner at the restaurant in Streisand’s underground mall” shrug. 

“If you’ve been to one of these things, you’ve been to them all, as you know, but we’ve spoken to one or two interesting new people. Can you say the same?”

“Alberta is probably the most interesting person I know,” Trevor protests. 

“I’m sure. But you just said she’s your oldest friend, I wouldn't call that networking. And now you're talking to us, which you can do any day of the week.” 

He gives Isaac an eye roll Hetty could be proud of. 

“I don't need to network. Everyone in this room has already formed an opinion of me, for better or worse. Can't change their mind. Might as well talk to you and stay out of trouble, right?” 

“Goodness, Trevor, that might be the first time in ten years I've known you to make a good point,” Isaac says snippily. It's weirdly hard to fight the urge to just stick his tongue out, but apart from general upkeep of maturity levels, someone would probably snap a pic and say he'd been waiting for Alberta to put a pill on it or something. And then Hetty would straight up murder him, and he's pretty sure they'd never find the body. 

“I always make good points.” He takes the full champagne flute from Isaac's hand instead, knowing that Mr Publicity isn't going to risk making a scene by protesting, only to be stopped in his tracks by Hetty's glare. “Come on, I can't have one glass?” 

He doesn't whine. He totally doesn't. 

“I think you know that you cannot,” she says coolly, and Alberta’s face journey would make him laugh if he wasn't so concerned about what might come out of her mouth. 

“So I guess you're responsible for Trev's new leaf?” She asks Hetty with a grin. “Crazy. I didn't think it could be done.” 

“Trevor is responsible for Trevor's new leaf.” He knows he's deluding himself into thinking she sounds a little proud of him. Obviously she doesn't. He's just fucked in the head. “Do you think it's an improvement?” 

“Hard to say,” Alberta muses. “Not as entertaining for me if he's less likely to try to convince Michael Bloomberg to do jello shots with him, but his eyes look kinda sparkly and cute when they're not bloodshot so you win some, you lose some.” 

“You are a public menace,” he tells her firmly, only for Hetty to tsk at him. 

“Trevor! Aren't you the person who's always saying that I ought to be kinder?” 

“Yeah, to strangers and service people,” he snorts. “It's not the same.” 

“He's called me a lot worse,” Alberta agrees. “And vice versa. I can think of at least three really good insults off the top of my head right now-” 

“Let's not and say we did, yeah?” It's not that he's worried about her hurting his feelings or anything. It's more that he's worried that any or all of her insults might be cougar-based. 

“As long as you’re having fun.” Isaac sounds, as he often does around Trevor, like the only adult looking after a room full of screaming toddlers, desperate for a smoke break. It would be easier to feel sorry for him if he didn’t make Trevor feel like the worst-behaved toddler, sitting in the corner with a dunce cap on his head. 

“We should circulate,” Hetty says to Isaac. 

“It was very nice to meet you,” Hetty says to Alberta. 

“Do try and stay out of trouble, won’t you?” Hetty says to Trevor. Hetty purrs to Trevor. Hetty hints to Trevor, giving him a wink and leaning in to kiss him on the cheek and slip her room key into his back pocket at the same- no, obviously she doesn’t but in this dress, he can see her doing it. Shit, she could be ten minutes away from doing it to someone else. It’s not like he’s the only person in the place with a working milfdar. She could probably have anyone she wanted. He hates that that thought makes him feel like someone just poured a glass of the ice cold champagne he can’t drink over his head. 

“Okay, she’s hot!” Alberta says very fucking loudly when Hetty and Isaac walk off, and he’s gotta pray they got far enough away. “Very hot. But, uh. How do I say it nicely? She doesn’t seem like she’s in the market for some Trevor big brown eyes bullshit, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” he says grimly. “And again, I would remind you that she is not my girlfriend and I haven’t for a single second said that I want her to be-”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Alberta dismisses him. “Unfortunately for you, you have some of the most ridiculous facial expressions I’ve ever seen in my life, so you almost never need to say what you’re thinking. It’s just there. And you were basically on your hind legs begging her to think you were a good boy just there.” 

He isn’t going to think about that image for a single second more than he has to. 

“You are full of shit,” he announces cheerfully, and wishes with all his heart that he could finish the sentence with “and let’s get drunk”.

He could, of course. He didn’t sign anything. He’s not gonna get slapped with a fat fine or some shit for drinking so many Moscow Mules his liver starts crying. It’s just that Hetty would be mad. Hetty would be disappointed. So he’s pretty sure that even if he brought a glass to his lips, his body wouldn’t let him take a sip. The urge to not disappoint Hetty has seeped into his bones. Which sucks because, apart from anything else, it’s not like she’s gonna be around forever. She’s like an even more uptight Mary Poppins; when her job is done, she’s gonna leave and he’s not gonna have any more chances to win her approval. And like Alberta said, she’s not exactly super susceptible to the T-Money charm. She’ll probably forget he even exists. 

Which is fine. It’s fine. Even if he did have as big a crush on her as his friends are insisting he does, he’d get over it. He’s gotten over them before. Not every single girl he likes likes him back, pop star or no. It’s not life-ruining. 

And it’s not like he doesn’t have other things to worry about. 

 

Chapter 5

Doing shit that you know is going to be on your Wikipedia page someday will never not feel weird. The added layer of pressure, to make sure no nerd in Wisconsin ever has to add “On the morning of what would have been the first performance of the band’s Run of Fun tour, Lefkowitz tripped on a banana skin and fell down 17 flights of stairs” to the Death section. The fact that there’s even going to be a Death section… the fact that there’s already a Controversies section, even if most of it is stupid and drug-related, which. Taking drugs isn’t exactly controversial, they’re popular for a reason. He’s just glad there’s nothing really bad on there, like nothing in the Alec Baldwin screaming at his daughter line, or Alec Baldwin calling paparazzi slurs, or Alec Baldwin- look, he doesn’t want anything in the Baldwin area on there at all. Which is entirely within his control, obviously, but it can be stressful if he lets himself think about it too long. Especially on big days. Days like today. 

They’re in Philly for the first stop, which is a city that Trevor kinda likes, usually. He used to come here with his dad sometimes as a kid, when Lenny had to travel for work, before he'd given up on ever convincing Trevor to follow him into the lighting business and before he’d started using work trips as opportunities to break his marriage vows. Not that either of his parents acknowledge that Trevor has the slightest idea that their relationship is anything but perfect, obvi, because that would mean having a conversation where they treated him like an adult, and clearly that’s impossible. 

They’d both said they would come, his parents, to the first show, but they’d said it in a way that made it clear they didn’t want to and he’d shot them down, suggested they wait til the NJ shows, laughed at himself as he swore they weren’t missing much. Not because he doesn’t want them around, but because it’s getting clearer and clearer that they don’t really want to be around each other. On nights where he can’t sleep, where he thinks about the increasingly long list of bad shit he’s done in his life, something that always eventually pops up is his certainty that if it weren’t for him, his parents would be happily divorced by now. Maybe even with other people, people they actually wanted to be with. Because he’s known for a long time that it’s only for him and his career that they stay together. It’s kind of a thing, in the press, in the CC fanbase; the Lefkowitz family. As much as he tries to avoid that shit, he’s seen the pictures where people have edited flower crowns onto photos of his dad, scrolled through creepily long twitter threads of fangirls’ favourite Lefkowitz family moments where they’ve posted home videos he doesn’t even remember himself. It’s his redeeming feature in the media, gets way more airtime than any of the stuff he does for underprivileged kids or flood victims. They don't need to have the adult conversation for Trevor to know that neither of them would ever want to fuck that up for him. 

And because he's a coward he's never brought it up either. He can't bring it up. Because what if him bringing it up is the thing that makes it happen, and then what if it's not better? What if they're not happier? What if it's just one more thing Trevor has fucked up? He can't. He knows he never will. 

Separated or together, he really wishes they were here. It would give him something to do with his morning, apart from anything else. Sass’s whole fam are here (it wouldn’t shock him if they came to every single city, honestly) and yeah, if he asked he could probably join them and they’d pretend he wasn’t intruding, but he would be. Ditto Thor’s plans for this morning- he’ll be hanging out with Flower and the crew, fitting right in like he always does. It’s not that they wouldn’t make him welcome, but they’d be standing on company manners. He doesn’t have that skill Thor has of just being comfortable everywhere. 

Trevor, on the other hand, has the skills of being able to eat a lion-sized breakfast in approx 10 seconds and to flirt with pretty waitresses just enough to stay on the right side of charming without tipping over into “calling TMZ and telling them Trevor Lefkowitz was perving on me in my place of work”. Both of which he's planning to employ when he steps into the hotel restaurant, before he sees a flash of red hair at a table near the window and stops thinking about anything else. 

“Hey,” he says casually, swinging himself down into the chair opposite her without being asked. Hetty doesn’t look up from her paper, even though she must have sensed him walking over. “Keeping the physical press alive, I see.”

“Yes, it’s just me and a bunch of survivalists living off the grid in Indiana,” she quips. He’s not sure he’s ever seen anyone who looks less like a survivalist in his entire life; she’s so fucking put together he wouldn’t be surprised if a makeup and wardrobe team popped up from behind the potted ferns to dab some of that subtle lipstick back onto her lips between each sip of coffee and straighten her crisp white blouse every time she shifts in her seat. “You don’t have anything better to do this morning?”

Ouch. 

“I mean, no, not really. We don’t tend to rehearse day of, and the guys are both out already. You don’t have anything better to do this morning?” 

She looks up, smiling a little, and with the light streaming in she looks like something he could write a song about. Or, something he could write a song about if he hadn't been burned too many times before by getting his material from real life women and having to perform it for years after they stomped on his heart. Not that Hetty and his heart- oh, fucking forget it. 

“No, not really,” she parrots.

“Just you and me then,” he says, because apparently he's turned into a dumb high school nerd trying to flirt with the pretty girl. 

“It looks that way,” Hetty agrees, not seeming to pick up on what he shouldn't have put down. “Tea?”

Trevor wrinkles his nose, lounging in his chair in a way he knows will annoy her, because he can’t stop wanting to provoke a reaction. 

“Like, brown leaf water tea? No thanks.”

He suspects she's on the verge of making some devastating comeback about him being uncultured Jersey trash when a waitress scurries over, notepad in hand, hearteyes firmly at the ready. 

“I'm so sorry for your wait, Mr Lefkowitz,” she says in a kinda breathy voice that sets his alarm bells ringing and has him desperately avoiding Hetty's eye. She probably thinks he loves it, and yeah, sometimes he does. The girl is cute and if she caught him at a low, lonely moment, he'd be trying to hit that, stupid to pretend to himself he wouldn't. But this isn't a lonely moment, not now Hetty is here. 

“No problem,” he says breezily, studying the menu and not her tits. “Can I get the scrambled eggs with sausage, toasted rye, grilled tomatoes, fried potatoes and bacon?” Another thing to never tell his mother about. “And a double espresso and a pineapple juice. Thanks.” 

When the waitress is gone, swinging her hips, it’s Hetty’s turn to wrinkle her nose. 

“You’re not going to perform very well if you’re in bed with dyspepsia.” Once, that would have pissed him off. Why does he find it just kinda endearing now? 

“Okay, number one, that is a light breakfast if anything. If I was hungover, I’d have ordered pancakes too, but you’ve put a stop to that.”

“Yes, I’m terribly sorry that I’ve prevented you from feeling ill, Trevor, it’s unforgivable,” she says dryly. “What was number two?”

“Number two was, who the fuck says dyspepsia ? You look like Katharine Hepburn, doesn’t mean you have to talk like her.”

In Trevor's defence, he thinks that has all the makings of a sick burn, translated into Hetty-speak. Except, she's tilting her head to one side, a little grin on her face, so clearly he's using the wrong fucking dictionary. 

“You think I look like Katharine Hepburn?”

Fuck. Oh God, and she looks so smug about it. 

“Hair,” he mumbles. “You know. Red hair.”

And cheekbones that could kill him and her thing for silky button-downs. But he’s not gonna say that, he’s not an idiot. 

And it’s not like he ever really had a thing for Katharine Hepburn. He’s got no time for any movie made before Back to the Future, and when he has caught some black and white shit that his mom or a more intellectual than average girlfriend has been watching, he’s paid more attention to the bombshells with big tits or the brunettes with pistols or any happy combination of the two. But he can see Hetty riding a horse or something with a transatlantic accent she’d barely have to exaggerate, ordering him around with a riding crop in her hand, hair down and all wavy… the comparison works. That’s not his fault. 

She doesn’t press it, thank God, just makes a little noise of acknowledgement and flicks her eyes back to her paper. He’s half-tempted to ask if he can have the sports section, partly to see what she’d say and partly to act out some stupid, unrealistic fantasy of domesticity where they read the Times together every Sunday morning in bed, him pretending he doesn’t wish there were comics and her scathingly contradicting rave reviews of plays she didn’t like or some shit like that. Luckily, she speaks again before he can. 

“So are you looking forward to this evening?” She asks.

“Looking forward to it? No. Looking forward to it being over? Absolutely.”

“It's inspiring, how much you love your job,” she says in that drawly little voice. 

“And you love yours?” He cracks back. “When you were a little girl, you dreamed about bribing tabloid journos to kill sex scandal stories?” 

“Not exactly. But I find my job very fulfilling.” She's all serious and pompous as she says it, like she's a fucking ER doctor saving lives left, right and centre, but it doesn't annoy him in the way it might have a month ago. 

“Yeah? I’ve wondered, actually. I mean, why you do it. It’s not like there’s a lot of other shit you couldn’t have done, you majored in poli-sci and-”

He cuts himself off way too late. Yeah, he knows that Hetty has a summa cum laude undergrad degree in Political Science from Yale even though she has never told him that and she has exactly zero social media he could have learned it from. Yeah, he’s done a lot of late night online stalking of Henrietta Woodstone. And yeah, now she knows that he’s a total fucking weirdo. 

“I did.” She looks up at him, but her face is still kind of lowered to her paper and her eyebrows are quirked and it’s all coming together to give her the most “I know you’ve jerked off in the shower thinking about me sitting on your face, you dirty little boy” expression it’s possible for a person to have. But then her expression softens, gets all think-y. “And after I graduated, I was being pulled in all directions. My thesis adviser had been pushing me to do a doctorate in International Relations, my father wanted me to go to law school, my boyfriend, as he was then, wanted me to get married right away. And I had no real idea of which of those things I actually wanted to do- none of them, looking back, but at the time I felt very confused. So I decided I was going to get a job in the city for a year, and then I would decide. Only, my father got me a job with a friend of a friend who owned a publicity company and…” 

She does a Hetty hand wave, a tiny smile on her face. 

“I liked it, clearly. Far more than I would have liked law school. And I didn’t end up getting married until the ripe old age of 26.”

She rolls her eyes, on the verge of closing back up, but he doesn’t want that. He presses. 

“And you’re good at it, I wasn’t saying otherwise, it just seems off-brand. That you would want to spend all your time digging trashy musicians and actors out of trouble they’ve made for themselves.”

“I can see why you would say so,” she admits, instead of getting mad at him. Surely before, she would have gotten mad at him. “But I’ve always had… well, I wouldn’t exactly say people skills.”

Neither would he. 

“But I’ve always been rather good at getting people to do what I think is best, and it turns out, that’s quite a marketable skill. You don’t have to be a Beatlemaniac to know what the press and the public were thinking of Yoko Ono, you know?” 

Her face is crinkled, contemplative, like she actually gives a fuck what he thinks. 

“Always so topical,” he teases gently. “But yeah, I get you. And you are, y’know, super organised and all that shit.”

“Mm, it was this or wedding planning,” she quips, and he can tell just from the way she raises her eyebrows that the door has closed again. Still, that was the most open conversation they've ever had. That's gotta count for something. 

“I think you’d be good at that too. Little clipboard and a headset, shouting at your minions to release the doves.” 

“You can make the strangest things sound as if you’re talking about a weekend in Amsterdam with a bevy of call girls,” she tells him, and the image of Hetty in black lingerie, ordering a bunch of (clean, healthy-looking; not always a given) hookers to please him flashes into his mind. 

“It’s a gift.” 

She rolls her eyes at his lechy tone of voice, but there’s a little smile playing round the crinkly corners of her mouth. It’s kind of hypnotising. When the pretty waitress brings his food, he doesn’t even glance at her. 

And, disgustingly huge breakfast or not, he does feel better after. Like he didn’t just waste his day watching porn or bumming around or feeling guilty about not writing. Like he doesn’t have to wait around for Sass or Thor or Flower to have time for him, like he’s got other stuff in his life, that maybe everything didn’t actually just stagnate forever when he was nineteen. He can meet new people. He can make new friends. He can have new experiences, he can change his mind about his first impressions, he can do all kinds of shit, that therapist he’s supposed to go to would be so proud. 

Some things never change, though. All the new experiences in the world can’t lend a different edge to the tightening anxiety in his chest as the day wears on and the night gets closer, or mellow him out when he snaps at his driver for not running a red light. It’s always there under the surface, the fear that the next time he steps on stage everyone is gonna realise he’s a talentless hack- it’s just that sometimes he can hide it under parties and sex and booze and all the other shit. When he’s up there in front of an actually sickening number of people, there’s no hiding. 

And tonight isn’t an exception, no matter how stupidly zen he was feeling earlier. There’s the same sickening thud of his heart as he steps on stage, for one. The same certainty in his head that he can’t remember a single word of a single song or the positioning for the simplest chord. The same way his body kicks into overdrive to make up for his stupid, scared mind and muscle memory takes over. It’s always a complete fucking blur, a mess of noise and sweat and adrenaline. A hundred minutes feels like five, like he goes into a fucking trance up there. Thor feels the same, he knows- they’ve teased him a thousand times about going Berserker, even if he’s never done anything worse than break a couple of drumsticks. Nobody teases Trevor about going completely thoughtless, but then most of them don’t think he’s got a single thought in his head at the best of times. 

They’re wrong, though. When he steps offstage, dripping with sweat, eyes aching, legs still shaking, he’s got exactly that- one single thought in his head, just one. 

It’s not like he saw her watching in the crowd or anything dumb like that. For one thing, he’s pretty sure she was watching on the screens backstage with other people from the label- for another, he didn’t have enough fucking consciousness to pick out a single person in the crowd, he couldn’t have told you if there were people dogfighting or doing backflips out there. But as his mind clears and his heartbeat levels out, the only thing he’s thinking about is Hetty. 

It’s not… it’s not that deep, it’s not the fucking crazy romcom moment Alberta or Sass would try to spin it as. He just wants to know if she liked it. If she thought he did a good job. 

The way these things go, though, he doesn’t get a chance to find out. The crazy fucking tidal wave sweeps him up and there are no branches to grab at; it’s the same as always, the back-slapping and the champagne everywhere he looks and the people he’s sure he’s never met telling him what a great job he did and the people he wishes he’d never met telling him they overran twelve minutes and the journalists and the roadies and the suits and not a glimpse of those specific red ringlets anywhere. 

He’s not gonna spin out about it. It’s not like a fucking cosmic sign, he’s not Flower. She probably just got taken along to the party with everyone else in Aquazzura shoes, that’s all, it’s not like she’ll have hated it so much she just upped and left completely. She wouldn’t do that to Sass and Thor, anyway, even if she didn’t… even if she wasn’t… 

Okay, so he’s entirely fucking pathetic. So what? Is that a crime? Should he go to jail for liking a girl? A woman. A woman who probably doesn’t- fuck. It’s not like he can help it. He didn’t ask for this. He didn’t say a prayer and ask God to send him a milf in a pantsuit to ruin his life and take his drugs away. It just happened. The universe thwacked him on the head with the simp stick and now he’s wandering through his own afterparty like a man possessed, ignoring the many, many hot people who would be happy to give him a “great gig” blowjob, trying to find the bane of his life who, even if she ever wanted to suck his dick, probably doesn’t even swallow. And he doesn’t mind , that’s the thing. He’d take no oral at all, ever, if it meant-

There. He’s been tripped up a couple of times by rogue redheads, but this time he’s just sure, in his bones sure. Her height, her fucking curl pattern. Yeah, he's memorised how tight her curls are. He should just have it stamped on his forehead, “Stupid For Hetty”. Stupid enough to go right up to her and touch her shoulder, like he's allowed. Like he's her fucking boyfriend or something. 

There’s a glass of red in her hand that he side-eyes a little bit- one day, he’ll work up the courage to ask her why it’s one rule of sobriety for her and another for him- but mostly his eyes are busy looking at her outfit. It’s the most casual thing he’s ever seen her wear, by a long shot. She’s in jeans, for fuck’s sake, jeans and a silky little cami thing that wouldn’t be slutty if anyone else wore it but on Hetty, it looks like she’s practically ready for a night on the pole. Would it be totally unreasonable for him to ask her to turn around so he can see how tight- no, okay, keep it together, T-Money. 

It's loud as fuck in here and his “hey” gets lost, so he moves closer. That's the only reason. So they can hear better. 

“So what did you think?” He asks, simple as that. He can’t help it. He needs to know more than he needs to keep breathing, probably. It’s not like she’ll pull any punches, he doesn’t think she can. 

Her only answer is a shrug and for a second, his stomach drops like an anchor, but then the glimmer of a smile starts playing around her mouth, a sexy little smile, a naughtier version of her usual “having fun at Trevor’s expense” smile, and now it’s like his stomach has six million fireworks inside it, only in a good way. 

“You enjoyed it, don't deny it,” he half-shouts into her ear over the loud thump of the music. All that hair probably muffles the sound anyway. 

“I wasn't going to deny it!” It's her turn to press her mouth up against his ear and. Well, if he just shifts to the left, she's not going to feel Little T getting excited at the heat of her breath. “You were good! Very, very good, much better than I expected.” 

He can't tell if she's serious so he pulls back to look at her face and her eyes are fucking dancing. Huge grin splitting his own face, Trevor shakes his head. 

“I'm gonna just take that as a compliment,” he insists, and Hetty shakes her head, putting her hand up to her ear. Nah, if he has to bury his face in all that hair again, Little T is going to become a big problem. Grabbing her by the hand, Trevor doesn't think twice before pulling her through the throng of people, out into the hallway and along until they get to the venue's empty, dark kitchen, not letting go even when the crowd has thinned all the way out. When he flicks the switch, the lights that come on are harsh but Hetty still looks… Like Hetty. So. Good. She looks good. 

“I said, I'd just take it as a compliment,” he says softly. 

A perfectly plucked eyebrow flickers up for just a second. 

“And that was worth dragging me out here to repeat?” 

“Oh, sorry, you wanted to grind on the dance floor?” He shoots back, and then he hears himself. “I didn't mean- not with m-” 

Just like she always does when he puts his foot right in his mouth about how bad he wants to bang her, Hetty waves her hand dismissively. 

“Yes, I know what you meant. But what did you actually want?” 

“I just wanted to talk to you.” It sounds pathetic, like some fucking high school geek asking a cheerleader to the prom, even though he was cool in high school and he'd bet his ass that Hetty was definitely not a cheerleader. She's always disrupting his patterns. “You've never seen us before, right? I wanted to know if we've converted you. Chekhov Chill fangirl for life.”

There's a little smile on her face, and he's pretty sure she doesn't know it. 

“I told you, it was very good. I haven't been to an arena concert since I was a teenager.”

“Yeah? What was that?” Way too eager, Lefkowitz. But who could blame him, the woman keeps biographical detail under lock and key like he hid his dad's old Playboys under his mattress as a teen. 

“You'll laugh.” 

“All the more reason to tell me,” he coaxes her. “You know I could use a laugh.” 

“It was Madonna,” she admits. “At Madison Square Garden. My sister was desperate to go, and she was only fifteen so our father wasn't going to let her go alone. It was… educational.” 

“I bet it was,” he purrs. “Wait, so, Blonde Ambition? Or the Erotica tour?” 

Hetty shrugs, helpless. 

“I haven't the faintest idea. I was seventeen, I think, maybe eighteen. I don't particularly remember the songs, more the… imagery.” 

“Okay, so was she a dominatrix or a nun?” 

Hetty fixes him with a look. 

“A dominatrix,” she says crisply. Hearing her say that makes his balls throb a little bit, but that's probably normal. She'd be a good one. “I didn't realise you were such an expert.” 

“I do happen to know a thing or two about pop music,” he says mildly. “And you saw The Girlie Show, the Erotica tour. In case you ever needed to flex about it.” 

He was kinda hoping he could get her to say Erotica, but nah. 

“And was tonight better or worse than seeing Madame X writhing around with a riding crop?” He's pushing her, he knows that, but she doesn't seem to be going anywhere. If anything, unless he's totally fucking delusional, he thinks she's actually shifted a bit closer. 

“Better, on the whole.” No, he's not crazy. She's closer. He's leaning against the wall and now so is she, practically slouching , which he didn't even think Hetty Woodstone's body could do. “Much better, in fact.”

“Yeah? You liked the music?” Unlikely, but you never know. 

“I liked seeing you like that,” she admits. “Happy. No matter how grumpy you were this morning. You can always tell, I think, when an artist really loves perf-” 

She doesn't finish the sentence, he doesn't give her the chance. The rest of her words are swallowed up by the hard, hungry kiss he presses on her, so hard that he has to force himself to ease up after a second, but he can't bring himself to stop. When was the last time someone called him an artist? When has she ever given any indication of thinking he's anything other than a pretty plastic prop? 

But when he pulls back, he could kick himself. There's no way she's into it. She's just gonna think that she was right about him all the time, that he's a sex-addicted idiot who can't talk to a woman without coming onto her. She blinks at him slowly and then… leans in for another one. Her tongue flickers against his bottom lip, both her hands go to his neck, she's into it. 

Oh God. She's into it. Hetty wants him, Hetty wants to kiss him, Hetty kissed him . His tongue is in Hetty’s mouth and she really does not seem at all mad about it. His hands are sliding over her hips to her tight little ass and she's not pushing him away, slapping his face, telling him he's a pervert. She's sucking on his bottom lip and pressing her body into him like she thinks she could crawl inside his ribcage. He's gonna lose his mind. He's losing it, actually, because he doesn't really remember moving, doesn't know how he found the strength to pull away from her but now his mouth is on her neck, his hands grabbing onto her way too tight as she makes these crazy little whining noises in his ear.

“You're so fucking hot,” he mumbles inarticulately into her neck between frantic kisses. “Like, fuck , so hot, wanted you since day one, honestly, wanted to slide my hand into your panties under your little pantsuit and-” 

She interrupts him by pulling him up for another kiss. By the hair. Pulling his hair so he moans into her open mouth, and his body surges forward, crowding her into the wall so he can grind his rapidly-hardening dick against her because god fucking damn. Usually a third date thing, the hair thing, but he likes a girl who can move fast. 

“You talk too much,” she manages to say after a minute. Her voice is all thick and deep in a way he's never heard it before and that would have him throbbing even if she wasn't actively rubbing herself against him. 

“Famously, gorgeous.” He fixes her with what he hopes is the trademark T-Money grin and not a desperate smile that says “please don't go away before I've felt at least one tit.” “You wanna shut me up, you've gotta give me something else to do with my mouth.” 

Hetty groans with frustration and where was that noise when he was trying his best to piss her off? He'd have jerked himself off thinking about that until he went blind. 

“We're in the kitchen ,” she protests. “Twenty feet away from a huge, drunk gaggle of people, half of whom are most likely already looking for you.” 

Sure, you could consider going down on someone in those circumstances a PR issue, he can't argue with that. But if she keeps moving her hips like this, tiny frantic movements, he's gonna have to do something . 

“That's what dressing rooms are for,” he coaxes her. “Yeah? With nice, sturdy locks on the doors? I guess someone might see us on the way, though, and there's a noise issue…”

If he stops to think about how incredibly insane it is that he's calmly discussing the best place to secretly nail Hetty Woodstone with Hetty Woodstone, either the top of his head is gonna blow off, he's gonna come in his pants, or he's gonna lose his nerve. He can't stop to think. 

“The hotel's ten minutes away.” Damn, he sounds cool and collected, like the monkey throwback in his brain isn't screaming at him to just sweep all the shit off one of the counters and destroy this kitchen's hygiene rating. “If people are looking for me, they'll just think I left because my boss said I'm not allowed to party anymore.” 

Hetty narrows her eyes at him but the effect is kinda ruined (or enhanced, depending on how you feel about it) by her grinding against his leg at the same time. He hopes the seam of her jeans is pressing right against her- nope. 

“But if people see us leave together… God, don't you have some kind of procedure in place for this? What would you normally do?” 

“Normally do?” Damn, she's actually trying to fuck herself on his thigh, how can he be expected to have a conversation under these conditions? His slowness earns him a little Hetty handwave. 

“If you were going to seduce some girl after your concert. Where would you take her?” 

With a considerable amount of willpower, Trevor stops kissing her perfect neck. With even more, he puts his hands on her hips and stills her rocking motions. 

“Okay, first of all, I don't do a lot of “some girls”.”

The words “serial monogamist” have been used in the past, which he's not saying don't come with their own set of problems but he's not fucking every groupie who tries to break into his apartment.

“Second, if I do throw someone a bone every now and then, it's not usually someone who cares about being seen.” 

And it's never someone he wants to treat as well as he wants to treat Hetty, he doesn't add. Not that he's bad to those girls, he's not. He can go down with the best of them and he tries to always keep the customer satisfied. But in that kind of moment, the one night thing with a girl he knows just wants the clout, he's mostly thinking about what he and Little T are going to get out of this. He's not thinking about inflicting (and inflicting is the right word, he's ready to be fucking merciless) as much physical pleasure on them as possible, as much as they can stand before they have to actually beg him to stop. But that's all he can think about doing to Hetty, and he needs the time and space to do it. 

“Okay,” he says slowly. “Baby, if you can stop pushing your hot little pussy against my leg for one second, I can think.” 

Unabashed, Hetty slows her movements, but does nothing to put any distance between their bodies. 

“If you go back to the hotel now,” he muses. “I can try and slip out in a half hour. Tell the boys the party's too much temptation if I'm gonna stay at least California sober.” 

“If you can wait that long,” Hetty purrs, running her nails over his scalp and making his eyes practically roll back in his head. He doesn't tell her that he's seriously thinking about jerking off in the car so he's got the stamina to keep her satisfied; he's already way too excited. 

“Hey, one of us has to be responsible,” he teases her. “Take my room key and let me in?” 

He doesn’t say that he’s scared that if she goes to her room, she’s gonna get cold feet, because he knows he shouldn’t think it, that her feet are allowed to get as cold as they want. He just really, really hopes they don’t. 

The next half hour feels like ten thousand years, at least. People clap him on the back and hit on him and try to press drinks on him and talk shit to him and his body is going through the motions but his brain is nowhere to be found and everything is dragggggging. Like biblical time. When he finally gets to his car, he wouldn’t have been surprised if the ice caps had melted and the driver was rowing a boat instead. 

The whole way back to the hotel, he doesn’t look at his phone, because if he doesn’t look at his phone, he can’t see the inevitable text from Hetty saying she’s changed her mind and it was a stupid idea and he’s stupid and she doesn’t know what she was thinking letting a guy like him even kiss her, she certainly isn’t going to sully her body by sleeping with him. Or something like that. If he doesn’t look, he can stay in the version of the world where it’s still possible. Where she might. 

Except when he’s got his hand raised to knock on his own hotel room door, he can’t keep thinking like that. He’s got to prepare for failure, for once, so that he doesn’t actually fucking cry or something when it comes. He’s got to imagine that there’s nobody on the other side, that if he looks at his phone she’ll say she left his key at reception and she’s sorry, and then he’ll have to do a whole humiliating walk back downstairs like a fucking idiot and that’s going to suck. It’s going to suck, but he can take it. Hell, if he wanted to, he could go right back to the party and nail the first redhead he sees. He's not gonna, realistically- if she's not there, he's gonna watch at least the first hour of Two Weeks Notice and cry- but he could . However this goes down, he'll be just fine. 

The three seconds after he knocks are the longest of his life. He thought time was dragging when he was at the party? Nothing compared to this. This is like geological time. Mountains have eroded while he's standing waiting for Hetty or waiting for nobody or- 

“Hello.” 

Damn. Four months, and he's never seen Hetty Woodstone look shy before. Her cheeks are a little pink and her eyes are soft and he wants to kiss her breathless. A movie kiss, like he’s… no, he can’t think of any black and white Hollywood guys who would have laid one on Katharine Hepburn, but he’ll learn, if that’s what she likes. 

“Hello,” he repeats. “Can I come in?” 

“It's your room,” she says with a tiny half-smile that goes right to his dick. Everything she does goes right to his dick. 

“Yeah, but you're kinda blocking the doorway, gorgeous.” 

She rolls her eyes and steps back, giving him room to step inside and a great view of just how tight those jeans are. Still, having a perfect ass doesn’t necessarily mean you want some guy to squeeze it, and he only wants this the right way. 

“Look, baby, you've had a while to cool down, if you've changed your mind or you just wanna-” 

The door closes behind him and in the same microsecond, Hetty jumps on him, backing him up against the door, kissing him soundly. 

Okay then. 

He's not gonna fucking argue.

Chapter 6

Summary:

Trevor has never felt this present, this in his body. Hetty’s teeth nipping at his bottom lip is amplified by a thousand, he's hyperaware of the bead of sweat running down his back. And as for being tired… famous last words but, fuck, he's pretty sure he could go all night. He'd better hope he can, because from the way he's feeling now, he might not have Michael Phelps-level stamina the first time.

Notes:

Please pretend it has not been three and a half months since the last chapter. Please pretend that this chapter isn't just smut and advances the story in some way. Thank you in advance.

 

Post-concert sex can be kinda disappointing sometimes. Like, it should be better in theory, if the gig’s gone well and he’s riding that high, but sometimes he’s just too fucking tired, sometimes it’s too far past the adrenaline spike, sometimes being all rumpled and sweaty feels gross instead of sexy. Sometimes he’s not that interested in the girl, sometimes his brain can’t stay in the moment instead of picking over everything that might have gone wrong with his performance. It’s a minefield, honestly, even if it’s a minefield he willingly dives headfirst into at every opportunity. 

None of those things apply to this. Trevor has never felt this present, this in his body. Hetty’s teeth nipping at his bottom lip is amplified by a thousand, he's hyperaware of the bead of sweat running down his back. And as for being tired… famous last words but, fuck, he's pretty sure he could go all night. He'd better hope he can, because from the way he's feeling now, he might not have Michael Phelps-level stamina the first time. Hetty's tongue is in his mouth and Hetty's hands are in his hair and the mindless part of him, the part that's all dick, just wants to rub against her like this until he comes like a teenager. He won't, because the part of him that needs to have her melting like strawberry ice cream from pleasure he gives her is stronger, but maybe one day… if she wants to do this again, if he gets more than a night with her, maybe he can see if she'll let him just grind on her, her fingers in his hair, telling him how good he is… fuck. 

But he's gotta be good first. Gotta make this good for her. 

“Shouldn't like you calling me baby,” she mumbled against his mouth, into his mouth. “Infantilising.” 

“But?” 

“Arousing.” Of course. Not hot or sexy or a turn-on, none of those have a high enough scrabble score.

“Oh yeah?” He growls, grabbing her ass and using it to rub her against him. He's getting rock fucking hard and there's no way she can't feel it. Good. He wants her desperate for it, all that poise gone as she rocks against his dick. “You aroused, sweetheart? Nice and wet for me?”

Suddenly, with a change of heart so severe he might need a transplant, he decides he hates her jeans. Yeah, her ass looks amazing in them, but if she had a little skirt on, he might be able to feel her better, know how wet she is for himself. 

“I swear to God, Trevor-” she starts, and then shakes her head, making a frustrated noise. 

“What? What's wrong?” He tries to coax her. He'd be worried, only she's still trying to rub herself off on his body so it doesn't seem like she's got strong objections. 

“I was going to say, if you keep on being so smug, I'll walk right out of that door, but we both know it's an entirely empty threat.” 

He wouldn't have really known that, actually, so it's good to get the confirmation. 

“That's good, baby, because I don't think I'm gonna be able to stop being smug any time soon. Not when I know Hetty Woodstone wants my dick.” 

“You're unbearable,” she sighs, threading her fingers through his hair. Kissing her again, he tries to put everything into it. How fucking hot he thinks she is. How glad he is she came walking through that door that day with her sharp suit and sharper tongue. How he's thought about this over and over, but that the real thing is still better.

“You wanna go to bed?” He asks her, keeping up a steady stream of soft kisses. When she shakes her head, his stomach drops like a fucking stone.

“Your bedroom is at least ten feet away. The couch is four. You do the math, Trevor.” 

He'd rather spread her out on his comfy hotel bed but whatever the lady wants. For a sec, he thinks about trying to pick her up and carry her but it's really not worth how embarrassing it would be if he dropped her. Instead, he tugs her by the hand and makes sure she settles in his lap. He wants an armful of her, and he wants her tits in his face, and now that he's not kissing her it feels fucking painful. He should be kissing her, just all the time. 

And he's content to do just that for a while, suck on her bottom lip as he gently gropes her ass, but clearly Hetty has other ideas. Clearly Hetty can't wait, which. Fuck. She pulls his hands to the hem of her top, encouraging him to pull it over her head, and it's not like he needed a lot of encouragement. 

He’s so eager, desperate to get to that La Perla, that his hands kinda shake and he’s gotta hope she doesn’t notice. Only, when he actually gets it off, his brain stops hoping anything, stops thinking. 

“Oh my God,” he says urgently, and she blinks down at him, slow and heavy, her hair messed up so she looks like every fantasy he's ever had of falling into bed with some rich bitch who's never had it so good. And he’s had more than a few. 

“What's wrong?” She's a little more alert and he shakes his head, wanting her to sink back into it. When her eyes were all heavy and kind of sleepy with what he’s assuming is lust, she might have been the best thing he’s ever seen. 

“No, nothing, I swear, it's just, uh. I, um.” There’s no other way to say it, really. “I didn't realise your tits were this big.” 

It doesn’t sound great, but doesn’t he get a little credit for telling the truth? They're not, like, bolt-ons but they're a very, very reasonable handful, and he's always been a boob guy. 

“Excuse me?” She's not mad, he's pretty sure, just amused, but the habitual raised eyebrow still makes his pulse jump. 

“Well, you cover them up a bunch!” He protests. “And I guess when I pictured them, I thought they were smaller. But you're kinda… stacked.” 

He doesn't whimper on the last word, he does not. 

“And is that an issue for you? Can you only get it up for tiny tits?” 

Hearing her say tits in that low, teasing voice… oh, yeah.  

“Nope,” he promises earnestly. “Nope, no, not an issue, I'm good, Little T and I are doing fine. We were just surprised. Can I… uh.” 

He gestures towards them, stopping shy of any actual touching. Even though her nipples are all pebbled and hard, not all chicks are really into-

“Don't get shy on me, Trevor.” Hetty curls her hand into the hair at the nape of his neck, eyes dark. “Just do it. And maybe kiss me so you don't say anything else deranged while you do.” 

Oh, he doesn't need telling twice. 

Groping her greedily, he can feel himself sliding further and further towards animal mode, his whole body desperate to give Hetty the kind of fucking where neither of them are going to remember their own names because they're too deep in the slap of flesh on flesh. And he hasn't even seen her cunt yet. 

“These are fucking perfect,” he mumbles, barely pulling back from her mouth to do it. He doesn't wanna pull back at all, as much of them should be touching as possible, all the time. “You come from having them played with? Because I'm so willing to put the work in.” 

Nasty little smirk playing on her lips, Hetty shakes her head. 

“Never have. Not that it's been really attempted. But that's not where I want your attention, Trevor.” 

“Where do you want it?” He breathes, still rubbing his thumbs over her nipples. It's kinda scary, the realisation he'd do anything she told him to. There is almost nothing he can think of, even stuff he's never ever been into, that he wouldn't do if Hetty wanted it. 

“I want you to devote that limited attention span of yours to fucking me so hard I can't see straight.” She says it as calmly as if she's asking him to pass over her purse. It's not her attempting to titillate him; that really is just what she wants. “I haven't had sex for two years, Trevor. I imagine you would say I need it bad.” 

No fucking pressure, then. God, that's a crime. The way she's all responsive and squirming- she's really had nothing but her hands and what he's gotta hope are some really heavy-duty vibrators? It's just not okay.

He kisses her again, his hands sliding into all that hair. 

“I know you don't like it when I brag,” he murmurs seriously. “But I don't think you could have picked a better option to break that streak, babe. T-Money has got the goods.” 

And T-Money is fucking great with sex-starved cougars, but he isn't gonna say that. 

“Oh, I don't mind you bragging. As long as you can back it up.”  

And then she… fuck. God. Fuck. Fuck.

Then she slides her hand up his thigh and palms his dick through his pants and he nearly fucking howls with how crazy he feels. Is this even real? Maybe he slipped into the deepest k-hole known to man and this whole thing is just his brain imagining something that'll torture him forever when he comes out of it, maybe Hetty isn't even real. Maybe he's in a coma, maybe he's slipping out of the world John Belushi-style and his real body is spread-eagled on the floor at the Chateau Marmont-

"Trevor?" Hetty's watching him closely, her eyes heavy.

"Yeah, gorgeous," he breathes. "Sorry, my brain shorted the fuck out, you're just too… you're so…"

"Heavens, he's finally run out of words." She gives him a sardonic little smile that's almost as sexy as the way she's running her nails over his aching erection.

"Never," he promises her with his best attempt at the trademark T-Money grin. "Told you before. Only thing that's gonna stop me talking is your pussy smothering my face."

To his surprise, Hetty drops her head down a little, just for a sec, letting her hand still.

"Can you- after?" When she looks back up, there's that shy look again, the one that he shouldn't like but kinda does, because he's pretty sure it's a small fucking handful of people who get to see it. "I'm not opposed, I'm really not, but right now I just want… I just want to fuck."

Well, how the fuck could he ever say no to that?

He kinda launches himself at her, kissing her fiercely (if a little sloppily) as he fumbles with the button on her jeans.

"You wanna stand up, baby, let me get you out of these? Love them, by the way, so hot, thought I was gonna pass out when I saw 'em."

Hetty rolls her eyes as she wriggles out of them, but he's barely paying attention because- obviously- he's looking at her underwear. Matching set, of course, she probably doesn't have anything that's not, dark green and silky and gorgeous, and this is not Trevor's first rodeo. He knows that when redheads want to look super hot, they wear green.

"You put these on for me?" He asks her seriously, stroking her hip and dipping his thumb just underneath the thin waistband. "Did you come out tonight thinking I might get to see them?"

He can see her sigh ripple through her body, now that so much of it's exposed to him.

"In one sense, no," she tells him. "I didn't seriously think that tonight- well, I didn't seriously think this was going to happen tonight, no. But in another sense…"

Hetty groans, putting her hand over her eyes.

"In another sense, I think every time I've gotten dressed in the last month, I've thought about the possibility of you undressing me. Is that what you want to hear?"

"If it's true, then it's the only fucking thing in the world I want to hear." It basically comes out as a groan as he runs his hand down her bare thigh. He thinks she means it and the top of his head might just rocket off. God, they could have been fucking for a month? A month ago, he still thought she barely even liked him. She was already thinking about this?

"It's true," Hetty sighs, eyes closing as he strokes her, takes his time just feeling her skin, in the least Silence of the Lambs way possible.

"Could have made you come, like, eighty-thousand times in an extra month," he tells her, nostalgic for a sex-fest that never happened.

"You haven't even managed once yet." She says it all faux-sweetly, clearly recovering some of that rock-solid composure, and he grins back up at her.

"Okay, taking the hint. But just for the record, your legs are insane. Like… fuck."

"So articulate," Hetty purrs.

With a noise he hopes comes off as playful and not aggressive- although, does he? Maybe she likes aggressive?- he grabs her ass and uses the leverage to pull her back down to the couch. Not beneath him, exactly, not yet, but positioning her in a way that makes it clear she's gonna be. As much as he wants Hetty riding him, on top and playing with her own tits and leaving him a whimpering wreck, he doesn't want it this time. He wants to be the one driving her crazy, wrecking her. Two years. Two years. He needs to deliver the goods.

He starts to pull her panties off but she makes a disapproving noise that has him jumping back like her perfect skin just turned into an electric fence.

"Shit, I'm sorry, is that not-"

"Clothes, Trevor. Off."

Oh shit, yeah. He got so caught up in Hetty's perfect body that he forgot about his own. Not bothering to be sexy or suave or whatever, he pulls his t-shirt over his head and flings it away. And this is how he knows he's totally fucked- it doesn't even occur to him that she might want to stop and admire the Model T until he feels her fingers on his abs. Usually he takes it for granted that a girl is going to spend a couple of minutes cooing over him, but he was just focused on getting naked and getting back to Hetty's body as soon as humanly possible.

"I don't want to stroke your ego by talking about how much time you spend in the gym…" She looks almost fascinated by his muscles and although it does feel good, he can barely concentrate on it. His body just feels so much less important than hers right now. Especially as she's wriggling her panties off herself and he's having to try so fucking hard not to just spread her legs and stare at her pussy.

"Nah, stroke something else instead," he leers at her as his belt joins his t-shirt somewhere on the floor.

"Incorrigible pervert," Hetty sighs but, hey, he's not the one staring openly at the bulge in someone else's pants.

"Just the way you like me, baby."

So weird to feel like that's actually true. Even weirder to feel nervous as he strips. It's not that he thinks she's gonna have anything to complain about, he knows he's a prime specimen. But normally when he's taking his clothes off in front of a girl, it doesn't feel so… intimate. There isn't so much pressure. When was the last time he actually worried about living up to someone else's standards?

He presses back down to kiss her as he slides his boxers off and her hand is sliding down at the same time because she's greedy for it- actual, real Hetty Woodstone is greedy to wrap her hot little hand around his cock. Wrap her hand around his cock and explore.

"Mmm," is the only sound she makes, but it's a smug little sound and when he pulls back to look at her, she's got a wicked smile on those pretty lips. He can't believe how naughty she is. God, if he'd known this was what was under all those power suits… well, he'd probably have spontaneously combusted weeks ago and none of this would be happening. He's pretty close to it now and fuck knows what he looks like- he can feel how heavy his eyes are, his own lips feel kiss-bruised, and he can't control the probably-dopey expression on his face.

"Yeah?" He pants, his eyes screwing shut as she uses her thumb to just tease at the- fuuuuuuck.

"Yeah what, Trevor? Yeah, I like your cock? Or yeah, I want you to put it inside me?" How does she sound so calm, so fine, when she's destroying him with his fingers and he doesn't even feel like a human anymore?

"Both," he croaks. "Anything, all of it, I don't know."

Hetty makes a sympathetic noise, almost cooing at him, and he can't take that, not this first time, can't handle her all dommy-mommy comforting him for being too horny, he might actually die.

“Need you so bad,” he pants, pressing his face right into her neck, trying to inhale as much of the scent of pure Hetty as he can. There's expensive perfume, yeah, but he can get something human there too, and just the edge of something smoky, like she put out a cigarette just long enough ago that it's lost its bite and turned into something almost sweet. Reminds him of his mom's friend Rhoda who'd probably been on a pack a day; huge, soft tits, long nails and big hair, your classic Jersey housewife, but she'd always had a real smile for him. Very, very formative for little Trevor. 

“I know you do,” Hetty coos, her fingers in his hair, and he kisses her as he starts to guide himself into her wet little pussy so that she doesn't say anything else that's gonna make him go insane. 

Fu-uck, he'd actually underestimated how badly he needed it. Or how good it would be. He can hear himself gasping as if he's outside his own body, loud and fucking needy, knows he needs to control himself so he doesn't just clumsily fuck into her a handful of times and come moaning her name. 

“So hot, baby, so fucking hot,” he mumbles into her neck, his hands full of her peachy fucking ass. “You feel so good, gorgeous, it's a fucking crime that you haven't been getting this little cunt filled.” 

“Tell me about it,” Hetty gasps. Her nails are digging hard into his neck and he's gotta wonder if she guessed he likes that, or if she just always brings her claws out, cougar that she is. “Fuck, Trevor…”

“Could be doing this in my nice big bed,” he groans. “But you wanted it rough and ready. You want me rough and ready. You like to slum it, baby?” 

Her eyes heavy, her nails digging into his neck, her mouth wet and red and open, he doesn't think she's ever looked more cock-twitchingly gorgeous. 

“Don't… don't you have three houses and a stock portfolio to rival-” 

“Doesn't matter.” He pulls her bottom lip between his teeth, lets go, does it again. “You're still slumming it. Taking dick from a barely middle-class Jewish boy from Jersey- what would Daddy say?” 

She gasps and her cunt squeezes him, and he doesn’t care that his grin feels rough and feral on his face. She wants rough and feral, she likes rough and feral. 

“If all your fancy friends knew you were begging to get split open by a trashy little toyboy, would you be embarrassed, gorgeous? Or is the dick so good you don’t care?”

“I don’t care.” Her breathing is deliciously heavy and he doesn’t know if she’s saying she doesn’t care full stop or she doesn’t care because she likes his dick so much but he doesn’t want to waste breath asking when he could be using it to fuck her harder and kiss her like he’s starving. Which he is. It’s not enough, this isn’t enough, being balls deep inside her with his tongue in her mouth isn’t enough, he wants more, he should be able to fuck her and eat her out and suck her tits and have her mouth on his cock and make her grind herself on his thigh all at the same time, the world isn’t fucking fair. 

The noises she's making are fucking crazy but he doesn't know if it's enough, he should have made her come first, should have made sure because this is… he's not gonna last, he's gonna be a quivering wreck before long.

"Touch yourself," he demands. "Show me how you like it, baby."

It's easier to demand she does stuff, tell her what to do, than it would be with anyone else, feels safer, she's so totally in charge that it doesn't matter what he says unless it's something she wants too, he has no fucking power over her, she's got it all, he's her bitch… no, fuck, wrong line of thought if he doesn't want to just let go and fill her the fuck up…

Her fingers brush his dick as she starts to rub her clit and he nearly howls, tugging her leg up tighter around his waist so he can really slide home, deep inside, right there, where he always wants to be. He'd wanted a lesson on how Hetty gets herself off, but he can't concentrate on anything, his brain is melting.

"Never pulling out," he hears himself groan. "Never, ever, you're gonna have to do your fancy fucking job wrapped around my dick, didn't you know what you were getting into? Never getting rid of me, baby, gonna be on you all the time-"

Hetty makes this nasty fucking noise but he can't even stop himself talking for long enough to appreciate it.

"Won't be able to turn around without me coming up behind you and fucking you like that, grabbing your perfect ass, all that hair. Made such a big mistake, gorgeous, got yourself a toyboy who won't leave you the fuck alone, obsessed with you, obsessed with this pussy, should have never let me in it…"

"Filthy little boy," Hetty tells him, the hand that's not busy with her swollen little clit sliding into his hair, tugging just a little, making him gasp, pant, moan. "All this big talk, Trevor, all this filth, better keep your promise, harder…"

Harder might kill him but he's a good boy, he's Hetty's good boy, he'll always do what he's told, he will, and the way her body is tensing, arching, he knows he's being really good, good enough, her moans and the way her pussy is going fucking crazy, he did that, she likes the way he fucks her, she likes him, she does.

"Please, please, please," he whines while she's still clencing around him, and she just breathes her yes before tugging on his hair to pull him into the clumsiest, messiest kiss he's ever given anyone because he can't control himself anymore, he's not even a person, just some extension of Hetty's perfect body, their pulses are beating at the same time and he's gotta just… he has to…

When his thoughts are clear enough to be words and not just the general concept of "Hetty", he's slumped half-over her with his face buried in her hair, panting like he's just finished a sprint, his spent cock resting on her thigh and his… shit. He hadn't given protection a second thought. She hadn't given protection a second thought, which seems fucking wild. He wouldn't have been surprised if she'd made him double wrap it. But then, has anything they've done in the last half hour been something he would have expected Hetty to do?

"You good, gorgeous?" He manages to mumble into the side of her face, even though he kinda feels like he's just been hit by a Boeing 747 and talking is so much effort.

"Mm," Hetty sighs, gently scratching the base of his neck like she's petting a big dog. He likes it. "Reeling a little."

With willpower he didn't know he possessed, Trevor manages to prop himself up on one elbow and look at her. His brain is telling him to search for signs that she's regretting it, didn't like it, hates him, but she meets his eye with a heartbreakingly sweet little smile.

"I'd almost… not forgotten, precisely, but… I don't want to sound horribly sentimental but it really is so different with another person as opposed to…"

A vibrator and a video of shirtless Harrison Ford, is what he thinks she means.

"Depends on the person," he says with his best attempt at a dirty smile, although it feels like it's coming off less suggestive and more sappy.

"That's certainly true." Fuck. Sex makes Hetty agree with him. He'd always known his dick had magic powers. "You know I'm loathe to flatter you…"

"Yeah, I'd got that." That sounds sappy too, not snarky. Well, if he's got a magic dick, clearly she's got a magic pussy- she's stolen his ability to tease her. Worth it.

"But the idea that that falls under the same label as my ex-husband coming to bed smelling like stale cigars and someone else's Miss Dior, and…"

She wrinkles her perfect nose, her face going all disgusted. Not for the first time, Trevor wants to feed Thor a dozen Red Bull and lock him and Hetty's ex in a very small closet.

"Always better when you're with someone you… when you're with someone who's not a total fucking douchebag," he agrees. "Which, y'know. Some people might think I am."

He's not being needy. He's not asking her for reassurance that her opinion on him really has changed and that she wasn't just so desperate to get laid she'd have jumped into bed with anything vaguely man-shaped. He's not- oh, who the fuck is he kidding, yes he is.

"They might," Hetty says softly, playing with his hair. "If they hadn't taken the time to get to know you properly."

God, she's so gorgeous. Half her makeup's come off, she's getting panda eyes, he's pretty sure they're about six hours past her normal regimented bedtime, and she's the hottest thing he's ever seen in his life. But he doesn't want to scare her off by telling her that, so he leans in for a kiss instead. It's one thing to mumble a ton of horny filth while you're actually fucking someone, it's a whole different ball game to just look into a woman's eyes and tell her she's perfect. Especially when he can't even blame it on the booze. Especially when their whole situation means that Hetty's already a flight risk. 

Despite what his bandmates, his managers, and the entire editorial staff at Rolling Stone think, Trevor isn't fucking stupid. He knows that they can't stay in this bubble, and he knows that Hetty wouldn't stay this calm and soft and happy even if they could. Tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that, she's going to freak out. And even if he manages to keep her so well-fucked the freakouts fade into the background, there'll be other complications. The tour, the label, the guys, the press, their families, whatever. There'll be something, there always is, he knows that. But tonight- this morning, if he's accurate- all he wants to do is snuggle up beside a scorching hot woman, go to sleep, and dream about doing it every night for the rest of his life.