Free Musician's Monsoon by Brieanna Robertson

didn’t feel like it was enough.
    “Are you going to pass out?” he asked, his face etched with worry. “You gonna puke?”
    She looked at what he was wearing. He looked gorgeous. Surprise, surprise. He always looked gorgeous. He was in a gray shirt with some skulls and whatnot all over it and a pair of black jeans with chains hanging from his left pocket. He looked normal, like himself. She, on the other hand…
    “I don’t even know who I am right now,” she finally managed to rasp out. “What am I doing here?”
    He frowned. “What do you mean? Sophie…”
    “Look at me!” she shouted. “I look like some kind of whacked-out pirate! This is not me! Who is this person? I can’t handle this! I don’t belong here!” She noted the hysteria in her voice and wondered where her rational mind had gone.
    “Sophie!” Zane reached up and took her face in his hands. “Calm down, look at me.”
    She did so, and his lovely green eyes gave her a small measure of peace.
    “This is you, Sophie. Just a different version of you.”
    She shook her head. “No! This is not me!” She indicated her abhorrent wardrobe. “Seriously, I feel like a doll. How am I supposed to go out on stage and do anything productive if I feel like a stranger in my own body? I’m not supposed to be edgy. I’ve never been edgy.” The tears that had been threatening succeeded in cascading down her cheeks. “I’m boring, remember? I’m plain! I’m uninteresting and average. What am I even doing here? I’m going to have a heart attack!” She dissolved into soft sobs, hating her tirade of girlish insanity, but she felt more out of her element and out of control in that moment than she had in her entire life.
    Zane’s arms came around her, and he enveloped her in his comforting embrace. “How many times do I have to tell you that you are not boring?” he whispered, feathering kisses across the top of her head. “You’ve never been boring and you’re never going to be. Although, I agree with you on the outfit. It’s terrible.” He took her by the shoulders and pulled away enough to wipe her tears away. “You look like some kind of Gothic sailor vampire.”
    Sophie gave a watery laugh and wiped at her eyes.
    Zane chuckled. “I love Rhonda like my own sister, and she means well, but she doesn’t always realize that what she can wear, not everyone else can wear. Do you have your suitcase with you?”
    “I don’t have a suitcase, Zane. I was only driving down for one day to see the concert. All I brought was a backpack with a few essentials just in case. I need to hit a freaking store at some point. At any rate, it’s over there.” She pointed to the corner of the room.
    He went over to her bag, rummaged through it for a minute, then came back with her jeans. “Put these on. I won’t look.” He winked at her and went back to her bag.
    She smiled at his gentlemanly gesture, yanked off the combat boots and the hideous tights, then discarded the miniskirt and tugged on her faded pair of jeans. She sighed in relief at the familiar comfort. “Well, I feel half like myself,” she stated.
    He came back with a black shirt in his hand that he set aside. Then he reached out and lifted the black fishnet over her head. Her breath caught at the subtly intimate action, and when his hands came back down to toy with the hem of the tank top as well, electricity arced between them and made the room feel sweltering.
    “You want me to turn around again?” he murmured.
    She licked her suddenly dry lips, loving the green fire burning in his eyes. She shook her head. “It’s okay, I have a bra on. Just like a bikini, right?”
    Something dangerous flashed over his features, but he said nothing else. With painful slowness, he pulled the tank top off also. He flung it on the floor, and his fingers brushed across the bare skin of her torso for a moment. She sucked in her breath at the velvet-soft contact. His eyes grazed her in a heated way before he