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Rose Landry was twenty-one when she first met Lev Koslov. Regrettably for both of them, Lev Koslov was seventeen when he met Rose Landry. This was important, both morally and logistically, and Rose Landry was the sort of woman who respected logistics even when morality was trying to look complicated in tight jeans.
At seventeen, Kozzy was a boy in a band she had met at a Toronto bar after a show because he looked like Trent Reznor with better hair and had the bewildering honesty to ask who Trent Reznor was. He was tall, dark, pretty in a way that would become inconvenient once he figured out what to do with his face, and clearly young enough that Rose adjusted her internal settings immediately. Not a child. Not exactly. He was touring internationally, handling himself in clubs he was legally too young to be in, carrying his own gear, and looking at rooms with more caution than half the men twice his age. But young. Young enough that the difference mattered more than the instant chemistry Rose was pretending not to notice.
So she flirted lightly, because she was not dead, but she kept it where it belonged. Sharp. Funny. A little mean if he got too pleased with himself. She gave him her number because she liked him, because he listened properly, because when she told him not to be boring he looked as if she had handed him a formal assignment, and mostly because he was alone in a country that wasn’t his own and needed a friend. Rose Landry was good at friendship.
He called from Chicago.
Rose let it go to voicemail the first time because she was not in the habit of rewarding pretty boys for punctuality alone. Then she listened to the message.
“Hello. This is Kozzy. From bar. Toronto. You said not to be boring. I am in Chicago, which is not boring, but mostly because Roman almost got us removed from hotel and Anton said something I think was legally threat. I do not know if this counts. You can call back if it does.”
Rose sat on the edge of her bed, stared at the phone, and laughed hard enough to make her roommate yell through the wall.
She called him back.
That was how it started. Not with a grand romantic opening, and not with Rose making bad decisions because a Russian bassist had long hands, dark eyes, and a mouth built for dry wit and slow kisses, and no idea who Nine Inch Nails were. It started with phone calls. Tour stories at first, the kind of things people tell when they are still pretending they are not calling for the sound of each other’s voices. Bad venues. Worse hotels. Which city had fed them properly. Which city had tried to poison them with confidence and mayonnaise. Rose learned quickly that Kozzy answered questions literally unless he was embarrassed, at which point he became suspiciously literary in a way that made him much easier to catch.
He told her about Montréal and Toronto and Cleveland. He told her about Ilya becoming unbearable when crowds liked them too much, which was always. He told her about Anton being angry at monitors, promoters, hotels, coffee, Roman, and once a revolving door. He told her about Sveta with the reverence men usually reserved for saints or military technology. He told her Roman stories that were funny until they weren’t, and Rose noticed the places where Kozzy’s voice changed before he changed the subject.
Rose told him about Detroit. About the friend’s band she had come out with. About how none of those idiots could count cash, read a route sheet, remember to eat, or manage to get six people from a van to a venue without one of them losing a shoe, a wallet, or a reasonable sense of scale. She told him about work, about school she was not sure she wanted to finish in the shape everyone else expected, about her mother’s opinions, about the petty horrors of men who believed owning guitars counted as a personality.
Kozzy listened.
This was the first thing that got her, though she did not admit it at the time because Rose had morals and because he was still seventeen. He listened in a way most people did not. Not passively. Not waiting for his turn. He collected information and returned it later, correctly sorted. If she mentioned a venue had stiffed her friend’s band, he asked two weeks later whether they ever got paid. If she said her ankle hurt because she had worn the wrong boots all night, he asked the next day whether she had iced it. If she made an offhand comment about hating a particular song because an ex had ruined it, Kozzy did not make a joke. He just remembered not to mention it again.
The calls became a habit faster than either of them discussed.
Chicago. Cleveland. Somewhere in Ohio where the motel carpet looked like a crime against both hospitality and colour theory. New York. Back through Canada. Then gaps. Then calls again. Sometimes ten minutes. Sometimes two hours. Sometimes mostly silence while Kozzy ate something alarming from a vending machine and Rose folded laundry, the phone tucked between her ear and shoulder, listening to the faint movement of a touring life on the other end.
They did not say what they were doing.
People who are doing something they should not yet name often become very invested in not naming it.
Rose knew there was attraction. Obviously there was attraction. She had eyes and a working relationship with reality. Kozzy’s voice got lower when he was tired. He had a laugh that arrived slowly and then took over his whole body. He was funny in a way that never seemed prepared in advance, which made it worse. He did not perform danger the way so many young men did. Under stage lights, yes, he could look like trouble. In conversation he was something rarer and more dangerous to Rose specifically: kind without being soft, strange without being helpless, practical in ways that made no sense until he explained them and then made so much sense she was annoyed no one else had noticed.
But, she reminded herself constantly, he was seventeen. She had a younger brother who was seventeen.
So Rose kept the line clear.
Kozzy did too, mostly because Kozzy was good at lines once he knew where they were. He flirted sometimes, but never pushed. He asked questions, then accepted answers. He liked her, badly and obviously, but he did not try to make that her problem before it was allowed to be one.
This was part of why Rose kept answering.
He turned eighteen during a run of dates somewhere that was not Detroit, which offended Rose on principle. Birthdays should happen somewhere with cake, witnesses, and enough stability that a person could be properly embarrassed. The band apparently handled it by buying him a gas station cupcake, two energy drinks, and a novelty lighter shaped like a naked woman, which Rose learned about during a phone call at one in the morning.
“That is a hate crime against birthdays,” she said.
“Ilya sang.”
“That makes it worse.”
“He sang very beautifully.”
“I don’t care if he sang like a choir of slutty angels, Kozzy. That is not a birthday.”
Kozzy laughed into the phone, quiet and helpless, and Rose had to stare at the ceiling until she remembered several sensible facts in order. Age gap. Touring musician. Terrible idea. Still very hot. No, not the relevant column.
A few months later, they came back through North America with more dates, more confidence, more exhaustion, and fewer functional adults than any touring operation should legally have been allowed to contain. Kozzy called from a city Rose forgot immediately because the point of the call was not the city.
“You should come out for a week,” he said.
Rose paused with one hand in a bag of chips.
“Do you mean visit,” she asked, “or help?”
There was a small silence on the line.
“That is two different things?”
“Oh my God.”
“I mean both, maybe.”
“Kozzy.”
“I want to see you,” he said, and there it was. No elegant lead-in. No performance. No protective layer of cool. Just the thing, placed carefully between them. “Also everyone is incompetent.”
Rose closed her eyes.
“You understand those are two very different invitations.”
“Yes.”
“Do you?”
“I think yes.”
“Try again.”
He breathed out, and she could picture him exactly, one shoulder against a wall somewhere ugly, bass-callused fingers probably worrying the phone cord or the hem of his hoodie, face doing that serious thing that made him look older and younger at the same time.
“I want you to come because I am technically adult now and I want to see you in person,” he said. “And because everyone is incompetent. But mostly first thing.”
Rose was silent long enough that he added, with visible panic, “This was too much?”
“No,” she said. “It was inconveniently well-phrased.”
“That is good?”
“It is annoying.”
“Also good?”
“Possibly.”
She came out in Detroit with one duffel bag and one rolling suitcase, looking like she was already regretting the condition of several men she had not yet met in daylight.
Kozzy was waiting outside the venue when she arrived. He looked different than he had in Toronto, or maybe Rose was allowing herself to look at him differently now. Still young, yes. But eighteen now, nineteen in five months time, and not a boy in the way he had been in her head for safety’s sake. Taller than she remembered. Leaner. Dark hair falling into his eyes. Long-limbed, tired, smiling like he was trying not to smile too hard and therefore failing in a completely different direction.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
Then neither of them moved for half a second, which was ridiculous because they had been talking for over a year and had somehow failed to prepare for the practical matter of bodies.
Rose solved it. Rose solved most things.
She stepped forward and hugged him.
Kozzy went still for the smallest possible second before his arms came around her. Not uncertain. Careful. Rose felt that and, against her better judgment, liked him more.
Behind him, someone inside the venue shouted in Russian. Something crashed.
Rose pulled back. “Was that equipment or Roman?”
Kozzy listened. “Both, maybe.”
“Great. Good to know the week has a theme.”
By dinner on the first day, she had found the missing venue runner, corrected the merch cash float, bullied Roman into eating half a sandwich, and told Ilya Rozanov to stop standing in doorways being decorative and move a case if he wanted to be useful. Ilya looked delighted. Anton looked at her as if she had just presented identification in a language he trusted. Sveta handed her a coffee without being asked on day five, which Rose later understood was the closest Sveta came to issuing citizenship.
The band adopted her functionally before anyone admitted anything emotional was happening.
That helped.
Rose was not just Kozzy’s girl, which would have made her want to fake her own death by day two. She became useful. She counted money properly. She taped schedules to doors. She found two missing laminates, one missing crew member, and three separate people who had forgotten what city they were in. By the third day she had developed strong opinions about the band's relationship with planning. By the fifth, she was no longer entirely convinced they should be allowed to cross international borders without supervision.
And Kozzy watched her learn.
That was the other thing.
He did not hover. He did not puff up because she was there. He did not try to translate the band to her like she was visiting his kingdom and needed a guided tour. He watched her enter the system, identify its weak points, and start reinforcing them. His face, when she caught him looking, was not smug.
It was recognition.
On the third night, somewhere after load-out and before the bus pulled out, Rose found him sitting alone on the curb behind the venue with a cup of instant oatmeal balanced on one knee.
“With dinosaurs?” she asked.
“Obviously.”
“You know,” she said, sitting beside him, “every time I think you might secretly be cool, you do something like this.”
“I am cool.”
“You are eating children’s oatmeal in an alley.”
“It has hot water and calories. Also eggs dissolve.”
“The eggs dissolve,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“And this is important.”
“Very.”
Rose took the cup from him, inspected it, and handed it back. “You are one of the strangest people I’ve ever met.”
Kozzy considered this seriously. “Bad?”
“No.”
He looked over.
Rose sighed, because he really did listen too closely and sometimes that meant he made her tell the truth before she had decided whether the truth was ready. “No, Kozzy. Not bad.”
The silence after that was not awkward. It was worse. It was charged.
He was the one who broke it.
“I should tell you something,” he said.
Rose’s stomach tightened. Not fear, exactly. Anticipation with a clipboard.
“Okay.”
“I have not…” He stopped, then started again because Kozzy, once committed, generally preferred direct routes even when the road was on fire. “I am virgin. I have not had sex. Ever.”
Rose did not move.
“Okay,” she said.
He looked at her sharply, maybe expecting laughter, pity, flirtation, something he could categorize and manage. Rose gave him none of it.
“Okay?” he repeated.
“Yeah. Okay.”
“This is not a problem?”
“It is information.”
His mouth twitched. “Very romantic.”
“I’m not trying to be romantic. I’m trying not to be an asshole.” She turned toward him. “Do you want it to be a problem?”
“No.”
“Do you want to pretend it isn’t true?”
“No.”
“Good. Then we’re already doing better than most men.”
He laughed, but it came out unsteady.
Rose softened, not too much. Too much softness would make him feel handled, and Kozzy hated being handled almost as much as he hated wasting food. “Listen to me. I like you. I’m attracted to you. I am also three an a half years older than you, and you’re on tour, and this situation is already complicated enough without us being stupid on purpose. So if anything happens, it happens because we both want it, because we talk like adults, and because nobody is trying to prove anything. Clear?”
Kozzy’s eyes stayed on hers. “Clear.”
“And if you get weird about having to be good at everything immediately, I will leave.”
“I do not get weird.”
Rose looked at the oatmeal.
He followed her gaze. “This is different.”
“Sure.”
“It is.”
“Of course.”
“I am very normal.”
“You are eating extinct-animal porridge in an alley while informing me of your sexual history with the energy of a man filing taxes.”
Kozzy started laughing then, properly, head ducking, shoulders shaking, and Rose felt something in her chest make an unwise note for future reference.
They did not sleep together that night.
This was one of the better decisions either of them made, which is not to say it was easy. They kissed. That happened on night four, in a hallway outside a green room while Ilya was being interviewed, Anton was arguing with a sound tech, Sveta was somewhere private and therefore safe from humanity, and Roman had vanished in a way Rose did not like but did not yet have enough authority to address directly.
Kozzy kissed her like someone who had thought about it enough to become dangerous and not enough to become smooth. Rose liked that too. Smooth was overrated. Smooth was often a man trying to perform competence he had not earned. Kozzy was careful, hungry, and so obviously paying attention that she had to put a hand on his chest and push him back before she forgot several speeches she had given herself in advance.
He stopped immediately.
His eyes were dark and very close. “Too much?”
“No.” Rose took a breath. “Just enough.”
His smile was small and devastating. “That seems worse.”
“It is.”
Dating, if that was the word, began without a formal announcement. Rose stayed on for the week. Then another few days. Then went home and kept talking to him every night. Then came back for a later stretch with a slightly more official role and a lanyard she had still not technically been issued. The band, having the emotional subtlety of a van full of cymbals, treated the whole thing as obvious before either Rose or Kozzy had said anything aloud.
Ilya was insufferable.
Naturally.
“I am matchmaker,” he announced one morning, leaning in the bus doorway with sunglasses on despite being indoors.
“You are absolutely not,” Rose said.
“I introduced.”
“You did not. I met him at a bar.”
“My band created the bar situation.”
“That is not how causality works.”
Ilya looked at Kozzy. “She is very bossy.”
Kozzy, who had learned survival from watching better men fail, said nothing.
“Smart,” Rose told him.
“Coward,” Ilya said.
“Alive coward,” Kozzy said.
Sveta almost smiled.
Anton said, “Can we leave?”
This was how the relationship grew. Not in candles or speeches or anything a more decorative person might have found useful. It grew through motion. Rose learning which hotel breakfasts were safe and which ones would give Roman ideas. Kozzy texting her from gas stations with photos of alarming regional oatmeal options. Rose calling him out when he tried to avoid saying he missed her by explaining bus geography. Kozzy remembering how she took coffee and then, somehow, remembering three different emergency backup versions depending on what city they were in.
He had turned nineteen by the first time they slept together, Rose made sure they were not rushed, not drunk, not in a room where anyone might interrupt unless they wanted to die. Kozzy was nervous. He was also honest, attentive, and far less fragile than male pride usually allowed men to be. Rose did not treat him like a project. Kozzy did not treat her like an exam.
Afterward, he lay beside her staring at the ceiling with the expression of a man reassessing several working theories at once.
Rose turned her head. “Are you doing math?”
“No.”
“Kozzy.”
“Maybe.”
She laughed into the pillow. “About sex?”
“Not math,” he said, then frowned. “More like logistics.”
“Oh my God.”
“You said communicate.”
“I regret teaching you words.”
He turned onto his side, suddenly serious in that way he had, the humour dropping away without making the room colder. “Was it good for you?”
Rose could have made a joke. She almost did. Then she decided he had earned the straight answer.
“Yes.”
He nodded once, filed that somewhere, and looked so visibly relieved that she wanted to bite him and protect him, possibly in that order.
“It will be better,” he said.
Rose blinked. “That was not a complaint.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. But I learn.”
There it was again. Not insecurity. Not exactly. Kozzy’s believed that loving something meant studying it until he could care for it properly. Rose was not sure what to do with that at twenty-three. Most men she knew treated attention as something they deserved, not something they owed.
So she kissed him instead of answering. This proved effective.
The power balance never looked the way outsiders might have expected. Rose was older. Rose was more experienced. Rose was the one who could make a promoter back down by blinking slowly and repeating his own bad math to him. But Kozzy had steadiness she had not anticipated. He was not naïve. He saw the bullshit. He simply chose, with almost philosophical stubbornness, not to make bullshit the most important thing in the room. He chose useful. He chose kind. He chose warm food, clean numbers, remembered details, the better angle, the correct joke, the person most likely to need help before they asked.
Rose, who had spent a lot of her life being the person who noticed what needed doing and doing it because no one else would, found this almost offensively attractive.
Kozzy found Rose’s competence erotic in a way that probably should have been studied by science. He liked watching her organize chaos. He liked her voice when she told someone no. He liked the way she could enter a green room, identify the person lying, the person hungry, and the person about to make a logistical problem, then deal with all three before sitting down. He liked that she did not need him to explain the band’s dysfunctions. She saw them. She respected what was good. She did not romanticize what was not.
By the end of that first real stretch on the road, Rose had become part of the machine.
By the end of the second, she had become part of Kozzy’s life in a way neither of them could pretend was temporary without insulting everyone’s intelligence.
One night, very late, in a city Rose forgot because touring made geography slippery, she found Kozzy sitting in the back lounge with headphones around his neck, eating Dino Eggs from a paper cup and writing something in a small notebook.
“What are you doing?”
“List.”
“Of?”
“Things we need before next border crossing.”
Rose leaned over. “You spelled batteries wrong.”
“I spell it with accent.”
“You absolutely do not.”
He smiled without looking up.
She sat beside him, tucked one foot under his thigh because the bus was cold, and stole his spoon. He let her. That was how she knew they were in real trouble. Kozzy was generous with many things. Food had rules.
“You know,” she said, “when I first met you, I thought you were going to be a problem.”
“I am problem.”
“No. You’re weird. That’s different.”
He looked pleased. “Good.”
“You were seventeen.”
“I know.”
“I told myself I was being responsible.”
“You were.”
“I was,” she agreed. “Extremely noble. A pillar of restraint.”
“Historic restraint.”
“Songs will be written.”
“Ilya will sing.”
“Then absolutely not.”
Kozzy laughed softly.
Rose looked at him for a moment, at the dark hair in his eyes, the long hands, the notebook, the ridiculous oatmeal, the face he still did not fully understand he had grown into. He had been a kid when she met him. Not a child, but a kid. A sweet, strange, devastatingly pretty kid who had called her from Chicago because she told him not to be boring.
He was not that now.
Or he was, and he wasn’t. People did not stop being their earlier selves. They accumulated. Seventeen-year-old Kozzy was still in there somewhere, standing at a bar trying to determine whether “better hair” was a compliment. Thirteen-year-old Lev was probably in there too, choosing bass because every band needed one and nobody sane volunteered. But the man beside her had chosen her, clearly and repeatedly, across months of calls and miles of road and every sensible reason to keep things simpler.
Rose handed back the spoon.
“You’re going to be very annoying to love,” she said.
Kozzy went still.
Not frozen. Listening.
Rose did not take it back.
His expression changed slowly, the way it did when a song found its place under his fingers. Surprise first. Then recognition. Then a kind of careful happiness so naked she had to look away for half a second to give him somewhere to put it.
“Yes,” he said finally. “Probably.”
Rose laughed because she had to. Because if she did not, she might do something much worse, like cry on a tour bus next to a Russian bassist eating dinosaur oatmeal out of a paper cup.
Kozzy took her hand under the notebook, where no one walking past would see unless they were looking very closely.
Rose let him.
Outside, the highway kept going. Inside, the band slept badly, shifted, snored, muttered, survived. Somewhere near the front, Anton was probably awake out of spite. Somewhere in the middle, Ilya existed at a volume no architecture could fully contain. Somewhere, Roman was still fine enough that people could believe fine was a thing that might last.
Rose rested her head against Kozzy’s shoulder.
He adjusted immediately, not making a performance of it, just moving enough that she fit better.
That was the trouble with Kozzy, really.
He made room like it was obvious.
And after a while, despite all her better judgment, Rose stayed.