A/N: It's actually Friday this time! (I checked)
This one is a little short, but the next one is very long.
Tommy calls Lorena on the fourth day of Jude ignoring his text messages. They meet for drinks, but they're barely finished with the first round when she says "Let's get out of here." and they head to his apartment. Of course he knows it's wrong to try and use Lorena to get Jude out of his head, but it actually sort of works, if only temporarily.
"Damn, Quincy." Lorena says afterwards. "I missed that."
Tommy smirks. "I aim to please."
"I forgot you're a cocky bastard." She rolls her eyes, but laughs too. Her laugh is beautiful, and it makes him smile. They lie there for a minute before Lorena breaks the silence. She turns to him and props herself up on one elbow. Her voice is serious as she says, "Can I ask you something, Tom?"
Oh, here we go. Tommy thinks, groaning internally. She's going ask about his mom, he just knows it. He glances over at her before sighing heavily and saying, "okay…"
"What is this?" Lorena asks. "What are we doing?"
He lets out a surprised laugh. "That's your question?" She raises her eyebrows, looking a little insulted, and he clarifies. "Sorry, the way you said that I was just expecting a lot worse. I thought you were going to ask me about my fucked up childhood or something."
Lorena looks surprised. "Oh, no, not at all." She sits up next to him, her long hair falling around her shoulders. "If you want to tell me, I'm happy to listen, but trust me, I… I have my own fucked up childhood, okay? I don't like to talk about mine, so I don't ask other people about theirs." She sighs. "You're avoiding the question, though. What is this, Tom? Is it just casual? Because you and I were getting kind of serious before you left. Not serious enough for the long distance thing, obviously, but we were headed in that direction, weren't we? So what are we doing now? Are we picking up where we left off?"
Tommy groans a little and sits up too. "I don't know, Lor. I didn't have a plan, okay? I got back into town, I called you…" He tries not to sound frustrated. "Can we not just see where it goes?"
"Frankly, no, we can't. I want…" She runs a hand through her hair. "Look, I'm almost 25, okay? I'm just in a place in my life where I don't want casual. There's nothing wrong with it, but I want something real. If you don't, that's fine." He must look freaked out, because she adds "Okay, I'm not talking lifetime commitment, Quincy, I'm just asking for a step above casual sex."
"What does that even mean?"
She shrugs. "Well exclusive, for one thing. And with… I don't know. The understanding that we're progressing towards something more serious, I guess. We can take it slow, that's fine, but I want a relationship, not just sex." When he doesn't respond, looking down at the bed, she says, "You can say no. You're great, Tom, and I like you, but it won't break my heart if we don't want the same things."
He glances up at her. "I like you too, okay? But…" He sighs and looks down again, rubbing a hand along his jaw.
"If you're not sure, then it's probably a no."
She sounds disappointed, and he looks up at her. "Look, it's just that there's a lot of stuff going on right now, okay? I just got back into town…"
"I get it." she insists. "It's fine, really. No hard feelings, but I'm also not going to wait for you to decide you're ready." She smiles and reaches out to put a hand on the side of his face. "Thanks for a great time tonight." She kisses him before pulling back and getting off the bed to retrieve her clothes from the floor.
His heart sinks as he watches her prepare to leave. He knows why he's hesitating, and it isn't because he doesn't like Lorena, or even because of his long-standing avoidance of commitment. It's because of Jude. He thinks of her sitting right here on the edge of his bed and shouting at him that she loves Jamie. Waiting for Jude is just about the stupidest thing he could do, especially now that they're not even speaking. As Lorena is buttoning her jeans, he says "Wait."
She turns, surprised, eyebrows raised. "Yes?"
"I… I can do exclusive."
Lorena sighs. "If you don't want to, you don't want to. Don't say yes to something you don't actually want."
"But I do." he insists. "I hesitated because… Okay, full disclosure, relationships are not my forte."
"I get it." she nods. "And I'm letting you off the hook." She turns to the mirror, combing her fingers through her hair.
Tommy gets up from the bed and walks up to her. He grabs her waist and turns her towards him, threading his fingers through her hair and kissing her. She's surprised for half a second, but then kisses him back, wrapping her arms around his neck. When he pulls back he says, "I don't want off the hook, Lor. I want you."
"Jesus Christ, Quincy." she laughs breathlessly.
"I'm in this, if you are."
Lorena laughs again. "How can I say no to that?"
… ... ... ... …
The sexual tension in the studio is truly out of control. Jude can't remember a time when her attention has ever been so fractured at work. It's the secrecy, the fact that they can't dare do anything while they're at G Major, and it makes every look and touch and innuendo a thousand times more intense. Tommy's aware of it too, she can tell, and she's pretty sure he's intentionally torturing her. He keeps touching her, mostly little touches, resting his hand on her back as he looks over her shoulder at the music, casually picking invisible lint off her clothing… Once, as they sat together at the sound board, he ran his fingers lightly up the inside of her thigh, never moving his eyes from the screen, chuckling softly when she let out a gasp.
She's sure the music quality is suffering, it must be, but she's having trouble focusing enough to listen critically. She knows there's a breathiness to her voice in some places in the recording, caused by the look Tommy gave her through the glass while she sang.
It's not that they're not getting anything done, because they actually are making pretty good progress, and they'll hit their deadline easily. It's just that by the end of the work day she's so distracted and frustrated that she can barely remember anything they've done all day. Worse, it follows her home. More times this week than she can count, she's broken her cardinal rule of not letting herself think about Tommy while she and Jamie are together.
But there are also moments of focus, moments where the music takes over, where it pulls them both in and everything else fades. Part of her thinks that's worse than the sexual tension. In these moments they're in sync and she can predict his suggestions before he makes them. There's a look of his she's loved for years, one he gets when he's totally focused on the music. He gets a crease between his eyebrows and bites the side of his lower lip just a little as he plays the same section of the music over and over, his fingers making little changes on the mixer. When he gets it right, his face breaks into a smile. She watches him and the feeling it evokes in her isn't fire, isn't electricity. Instead it's the same rush she gets when her favorite song starts in her headphones, the same exhilaration of the moment on stage after the final cutoff and just before the applause. It's not sexual at all, not any kind of attraction. It's something deeper than that, maybe deeper than anything she's ever felt for Jamie, and that scares the shit out of her. Somehow she's been justifying the cheating to herself by claiming it's only sex, and what she has with Jamie is real love. If she still has feelings for Tommy—real, deep feelings—then even that feeble and twisted justification goes up in smoke.