It was night one of the tour, and I was already done trying to understand Devon McCall.

First he played nice with me on the bus, like we were in kindergarten learning how to share toys in the sandbox, then he got all up in my space where he had no business being, smelling nice and cracking jokes (in his weird sarcastic witty way), and just when I felt like I could actually make an attempt to get to know him, he flipped the switch and shut down again.

To make things worse, I couldn't even stay mad at him when I realized we'd pulled into a hotel parking lot when we arrived in Providence. A hotel that he'd apparently booked us all for the night.

I had sequestered myself in my bunk after our little tea encounter (which of course, he was aggravatingly right and it had done nothing to calm the jitters), scrolling through Revolve to see if I could somehow have the two new tops I'd been eying airdropped to me in a desperate attempt to derive serotonin from retail therapy. It was a little after 10 PM when the bus came to a full stop, and I wouldn't have bothered getting out of my bunk at all if Evie hadn't ruffled the little privacy curtain that I'd drawn across.

"Are you decent?" she asked before pulling the curtain aside and not actually giving me an opportunity to let her know if I was in fact decent.

"What's going on?" I asked her, taking care not to hit my head on the bunk above me as I sat up.

"We got a hotel for the night," she replied. "Unless you actually like...want to sleep in a coffin the first night we're out here."

While the mattress and pillow situation in the bunk was comfortable enough, it was definitely snug (like a college dorm room twin bed kind of snug), so an actual bed would have been the equivalent of sleeping on a cloud.

"Uh, no thanks," I shook my head earnestly as I swung my legs over the side and slid out of the bunk. "How are we...?"

My voice trailed off as I had to practically suction myself back against the wall where the bunks were to let Gareth and Clark scurry around, nearly tripping over each other as they tried to collect their things.

"I swear to god if you keep me up with that ridiculous reading light you're sleeping in the hallway," Gareth huffed as he slung his North Face backpack over his shoulder, nearly whacking Evie in the back and forcing her against the wall next to me. "Why can't you just get an e-reader like the rest of the human population?"

"They're soulless," Clark replied with an eye roll, his tone ironically monotonous and soulless, if you asked me. "I like real books."

The two boys passed us by, bickering as if we weren't even there.

"Thank god I have another girl to room with now," Evie elbowed me as she sighed in relief.

"Who'd you usually room with?" I asked as I grabbed my tote bag from the foot of my bunk, despite feeling like I already knew the answer.

"Devon."

Predictable, at least. Not that I knew either of them intimately, but they were obviously the closest of all the band members and it made me...curious, even if just for a fraction of a second. Evie was naturally pretty while still leaning into the cool alt-girl vibe that seemed like Devon's type. I quickly shook the thought out of my head as I followed Evie off the bus.

"You know, I hate to be this person, but how are we paying for this?" I asked her, stepping off the bus and into the faint glow of the Hilton sign above us. Even though the skies were clear when we left New York, it looked like it had rained in Rhode Island as little puddles dotted the parking lot between where the bus had parked and the sliding double doors into the lobby. "I mean, I was just expecting to sleep on the bus for most of the tour, that's all."

"We don't do it often mostly because it's just not time conducive," Evie explained as she swung her bag back and forth on her shoulder. "Like, if we play a show at 8, we aren't all packed up and ready to leave until at least 11. Sometimes midnight. Then we drive through the night, sleep on the bus, and are already at the next venue when it's time to unload and go through sound check and stuff. But, since it's the first night and sound check isn't stupid early tomorrow at the venue, a hotel seemed like the move."

When I went to try and let Evie know that she hadn't actually answered my question, she stopped me before I could speak.

"Don't worry, Devon took care of it already." She gave me a dismissive wave, as if Devon taking care of it was the norm. I tried not to look so sour as we walked into the lobby, where he was in fact at the desk taking care of it.

The young girl behind the desk was far too peppy for 10 PM as she smiled up at Devon, twirling pieces of her blonde ponytail around her finger. She'd clearly just started her night shift, and judging from the giant Starbucks cup behind the desk, she was all perky and ready for a pack of degenerates like us. "What's the last name of the booking?"

"It's Kato. K-A-T-O." Devon huffed out a sigh as he clearly could find no energy to match her's.

I squinted as I watched him pull his wallet out of the pocket of his black Nike shorts and hand his ID over the desk to her. Whose name had he just given her? I glanced around the dimly lit lobby at the other band members, running through their full names and trying to see if I could place the vague familiarity of it, but it didn't match any of them. Rafael Salinas, Evie Chang, Clark Hunt, Gareth McKinnon, Devon McCall. No Kato among them, and yet it didn't seem weird or off to any of them.

Devon handed Gareth a key card as he walked away from the desk. When he approached us, he outstretched a second key card to me before quickly snatching it away as I reached for it, like we were back to kindergarteners in the sandbox. He knew it too, as the corners of his lips lifted into the faintest little smirk.

"They only had two rooms available, and they're conjoining so we're all sharing a bathroom. Pick your poison, Polly Pocket."

No doubt referring to our sleeping arrangements. Despite the uptick in blood pressure from his insistence on calling me by this ridiculous nickname, my heart lurched at the thought of being reduced to a romcom trope, and he must have picked up on it.

"Before you get your panties in a twist, there's two queen beds in each room."

Before I exposed myself with the most audible sigh of relief, Evie interjected as she reached for my arm and pulled me into her. "You can sleep with me. Mostly because I refuse to share a bed with this mouth breather if I have other options."

"That works for me," I managed to breathe out.

"Great, I get a bed to myself then," he shrugged, as if that smug bastard had planned it all along.

When we followed him down the swirling carpeted hallway of the hotel, I realized I'd specifically been following his tattooed legs, drawn in step-by-step by the clutter of dark-inked scorpions that clawed up his left calf. My heart lurched in my chest again, and I had to remind myself whose leg I'd been staring at like a chaste Victorian woman who felt faint at the smallest sliver of exposed skin on someone of the opposite sex.

Absolutely not. No romcom tropes, and no losing my composure at 10 PM on a Thursday in the middle of a Hilton because this insufferable man is covered in pretty pictures of gross bug things.

When we got to our room (at the furthest edge of the hallway, of course), Devon took the far bed by the window and the large, rattling AC unit, immediately cracking it down to the coldest it could go. This was unsurprising to me - most malevolent creatures liked it cold.

Not one minute into settling into our room (Evie and I had only just picked our respective sides of our shared queen bed), the door to our conjoining bathroom with Gareth, Clark, and Raf's room swung open, and Gareth came barreling into our room like his was haunted. Clark followed shortly after, tucking a book under his arm.

"The Godfather took his melatonin and he is already snoring like a godfather." Gareth flopped back onto Devon's bed in a way I imagined a fish would when it somehow found itself on a boat - spazztic and looked like it did not belong there.

To my complete shock and awe, Devon laid himself down beside Gareth, shoulders pressed against one another's and legs dangling off the foot of the bed. Back in kindergarten again, this time on the swing set that's just a little too big for you and your friend.

I allowed myself a faint smile as I walked away to put my bag of skincare essentials into a bathroom that I was unsure could handle all six of us trying to get ready tomorrow morning before we had to leave to get to the venue. But that was not a now problem, and I took the opportunity of having an empty bathroom now to take my makeup off and apply a generous layer of my Summer Friday's jet lag moisturizer. Even though we weren't on a plane and still in the same time zone we left from, forced proximity in close quarters was a natural irritant. Bus, plane, car, it was all the same to my dry skin.

When I came back into the room, Devon and Gareth hadn't moved, Evie looked hype-fixated on a rather long text message she appeared to be sending, and Clark had taken a spot on the floor, his back pressed up against the foot of mine and Evie's bed.

"What are you reading?" I asked him as I laid down onto the stiff floral comforter, stomach down with my head at the foot of the bed.

Clark handed the book to me over his shoulder. "It's called Tender is the Flesh."

The book was thin, and as I skimmed the back synopsis I understood why. I wasn't sure how many words someone could put into a story about making cannibalism legal and commercial after all animals became poisonous to humans because of some virus. Skeeved out, I shuddered and handed Clark back the book. "What is with you guys and your interest in stuff about people eating other people?"

Clark shrugged, keeping his tone just as monotonous and even as I'd come to expect from him. I almost wished I was as unbothered and unexcitable as he appeared to always be. "In certain contexts, cannibalism is often used as a metaphor for lust. Or even love."

"Oh please," Gareth drawled from the other side of the room. "Cannibalism is a metaphor for om nom nom nom, and if you think it's anything else you're deranged."

After a beat of silence, we all burst out laughing. Except of course for Clark, who shook his head disapprovingly. He was probably a prep school English Lit teacher in a past life, constantly frustrated with his students for never grasping the abstract symbolism in books like Lord of the Flies and As I Lay Dying.

Devon sat up, and it was hard not to notice the way the layers of his hair had ruffled from laying down on the bed. It was almost endearing, as if the slightest disheveledness made him a little more human. "You know what? We should watch The Green Inferno."

I arched an eyebrow at him. "You mean, the movie you named the band after?"

Devon shrugged. "We're movie people."

"We did this last time we went on a tour," Gareth added as he sat up and slid off the edge of the bed to the floor. "We take turns picking movies to watch on our off nights."

The way Devon's lips curled up just slightly into a smirk made my skin tingle, like being shot up with static. "You're one of us now, so think of it as your...initiation."

I swallowed at the thought of having to stomach through a horror movie. I didn't know exactly what it was about, and I didn't really want to, so I'd avoided looking it up despite knowing the band was named after it. I just knew it was gory.

But I certainly wanted to be thought of as one of them. It would make my job a hell of a lot easier.

"She doesn't have to watch it if she doesn't want to," Evie chimed in, head still down in her phone with a scowl. "And god knows we've all seen it before."

"No, I'm down," I nodded. "I can handle it."

I made a mental note to update the lying skill section on my CV, because it was through my god damn teeth now.

⋆ ★

I could not handle it.

I'll admit, I was lulled into a false sense of security. The first 40 minutes of the movie were normal - hyper-idealistic Ivy league school kids hyper-focused on the external validation they got from "do-gooding." It was almost funny, until their plane crashed after broadcasting all that performative activism in the Amazon and then got captured by cannibals where - and I shit you not - they held one kid down (who'd sadly gotten friend-zoned by the clear and obvious "final girl" of the movie not 20 minutes earlier) and hacked off his appendages one at a time. While he was still alive.

"She cut his fucking eyeball out and ate it," I groaned as I slid under the covers of the bed. "What happened to cannibalism is a metaphor?"

"I said in certain contexts," Clark pointedly clarified, and in any other situation, it would have been almost funny to hear the upward pitch of attitude in his voice.

I heard Devon's wicked laughter first, and when I poked my head back out of the covers, he was already looking at me with devilish amusement glinting in his deep brown eyes.

"So you don't wanna finish the movie, then?" he asked with the kind of grin that made my stomach flip (much in the way that watching someone get dismembered did), and I was shocked to see he did not in fact have fangs.

"No."

Evie was still sitting up in bed beside me and patted me on the shoulder in a pedestrian manner. "I told you you didn't have to watch it. Besides, it's almost midnight."

Evie nodded over to Gareth, who'd fallen asleep with his back against the foot of Devon's bed, his head tilted up and his mouth agape.

This time I didn't bother hiding the sigh of relief I let out as they all dispersed to begin getting ready for bed. I stayed huddled under the covers, trying to blink out the screaming red brutal imagery I'd just seen. My stomach was still in thick knots, but I was starting to realize it wasn't just from the movie.

Evie was right - I could have just said no. But the deep, incessant need to just be liked and accepted, even by someone like Devon, was like an itch that lived under my skin, and I was going to scratch it until I drew blood. Maybe I did belong in one of those movies.

When the room quieted down, I finally managed to rouse myself and at least make an attempt to get a good night's rest while I had the advantage of sleeping in a legitimate bed. Devon had gone into Gareth and Clark's room, so I quickly slipped my pajama shorts and top on and scurried into the bathroom to finish my routine.

I had one foot through the doorway when I froze, seeing him standing at the sink in a cut-off shirt and shorts, brushing his teeth. The hum of his electric toothbrush filled the tight void of silence, and the way he glanced sideways at me, almost daring me to leave, was what ultimately unstuck my feet from the floor and pushed me forward. I refused to be out-pettied here.

So I went about my business, taking my own toothbrush out and hyper-fixating on a spot of dried toothpaste on the faded silver of the faucet. The sound of him spitting into the sink unwillingly drew my gaze just slightly sideways before I forced my eyes back down towards the running water.

My stomach rolled again, all too aware of the weird sense of intimacy in watching someone brush their teeth. The sight of his broad, tattooed shoulders out in a wrinkled old shirt as sleep began clouding his gaze felt like it wasn't for my eyes.

But I also knew I had to suck it up and get used to it, because 1 - I was stuck with him for a month, and 2 - he was still just a person. When I looked up into the mirror after spitting my toothpaste out, he was already looking back at me.

"Look, about the movie," he said as he waved his toothbrush around. "I didn't mean to like...freak you out or anything."

I kept looking at him through his reflection, as if that lessened the impact of the sight of him just slightly. I knew he was taller than me, but seeing just how much taller he was as I stood beside him was a little jarring. "Is this your way of apologizing?"

He shrugged and went back to brushing his teeth, his words muffled behind his toothbrush. "Sure. If that helps you sleep better."

I spit my toothpaste out and scoffed. "I think I'll sleep just fine."

He spit too. "Good."

"It is good."

"Great for you."

He cranked the water on high, furiously running his toothbrush under it. I waited until he was done and then did the same, tossing my toothbrush into my cosmetics bag.

When I spun back around, he'd squared his shoulders to me, looking down at me as one lock of dark hair fell gracefully onto his forehead. I wasn't sure if he'd moved closer, or if we had always been this close and I'd been blissfully ignorant of it, but it was close enough to see the flecks of hazel in his eyes illuminated by the faint fluorescent glow of the bathroom lights.

My eyes were drawn down towards his lips (very much against my will), and my pride was saved by a spot of blue in the corner of his mouth.

"You have a little uh..." I gestured towards the corner of my own mouth. "toothpaste."

The tops of his cheeks reddened just slightly as he swiped the back of his hand over his mouth. "Shit," he grumbled.

I gave him a faint, coy smirk as I backed away. I wasn't above gloating, and after all, I think I'd somehow managed to come out of this night victorious. "Goodnight, Devon."

⋆ ★

the horror media nerd in me is really showing in this one - yes i've seen the green inferno multiple times and yes i've read tender is the flesh. when you get past the subject matter, it's a beautifully written book.

anyway i had this tooth brushing scene written out for a while, hope you enjoyed a *little* more tension, as a treat!