Santa, Baby

by Blair Babylon

  Raji tried to shut up. She really did. It just didn’t work. “He’s not like that. He’s not a typical rock star, or at least not a stereotypical one. If anything, he’s a preppie, and he will totally undo my hard-won reputation as edgy and exotic. He’s never done drugs. No one in that band does any recreational pharmaceuticals. Evidentally, a couple of their band members had a problem with that last year. One is dead. The other is in rehab. Nobody in KV does anything like that anymore.”

  “Well, I’m sure he drinks too much,” Beth said. “He’s probably a free-love hippie and smokes and drinks and screws groupies every night. You don’t want to pick up something.”

  Free-love hippie? Most cardiac surgeons had a stick up their asses, but Beth’s butt-stick seemed unusually thick today.

  The OR nurses were staring at Raji, waiting to hear if Beth was right or wrong.

  Raji sighed. “He’s not like that. First of all, he’s from Connecticut. He’s, like, an Old Money Connectikite. I looked up his family. They made their money privateering during the Revolutionary War. He’s a trust-fund baby and went Juilliard for classical piano performance. And seriously, nobody in that band has relations with groupies.” She would have said fucking, but there really was a policy about swearing around anesthetized subjects. “Evidentally, the only way that groupies can get backstage during a concert is by doing something,” a world of innuendo lived in that emphasis, “with a roadie, one of the technicians. The band members know that. They don’t touch the groupies.”

  “Oh, baloney. He’s probably as promiscuous as any of them and lying about it.”

  “He actually seems like a sweetie.”

  “But you said—”

  “I know what I said. Everybody does stupid things. I think he’s a good guy.”

  “But you aren’t going to see him again, right? If you do, I might have to march in there and drag you out before you do something stupid. I have to look out for you, you know.”

  “I’m not going to see him again. Besides, when would I? He’s touring in a rock band, traveling all over the world. I never leave L.A., and I work all the time. I’ll probably get to sleep for three hours tonight, but then I have a forty-eight-hour call. Heck, right now, I don’t think I’m going to get to sleep again until Thursday, maybe Friday. I don’t have time for any relationship at all, let alone one with a high-maintenance musician.”

  Being A Rock Star Sucks

  PEYTON hadn’t scored Raji Kannan’s phone number.

  She’d had several opportunities to hand it over when he’d asked. It was certainly deliberate.

  That must mean she didn’t want him to call her.

  So he tried to forget her.

  After concerts, when Peyton was dehydrated, exhausted, and amped on testosterone and adrenaline, he showered and walked up to the VIP bar in each of the lookalike hotels where the band stayed.

  All the hotel bars looked the same after a while. Rows of jewel-toned bottles lined glass shelves that were lit from below like a dragon’s hoard of jewels. Tasteful dark wood furniture covered with bland leather provided appropriate seating for the dozen or so business travelers who haunted the dim room. Air freshener splashed by the bucketful on the carpet overwhelmed the sour cigarette smoke from furtive smokers and the stale smell of business suits worn one day too many by people who refused to check in luggage.

  In Atlanta, Peyton talked to a woman he’d assumed to be in her middle thirties, maybe only a decade older than he was, and definitely possible spending-the-night material.

  When he mentioned that he just graduated with his masters in performance from Juilliard, she’d settled back in her chair a little and asked how old he was.

  “I’m legal, I assure you.” He rattled the ice in his drink at her. He’d gotten carded.

  “You’re at least twenty-nine or thirty, right?” Her pale eyes examined his face and torso, scrutinizing.

  “I’m twenty-three,” Peyton said. “That isn’t a problem, right?”

  The woman crossed her arms over her chest. “Twenty-three. Of course, you are. Look, darlin’, you’re a lovely young man—”

  As soon as Peyton heard her emphasis on young, he knew she was a lost cause for the evening, and he went up to his hotel bed alone, again.

  She wasn’t looking for a bit of fun for the evening. She was looking for either someone to spend the rest of her life with or someone who at least wouldn’t end up in the tabloid pages and get her caught cheating while she was away from home on business.

  In Hartford, Connecticut, which was perilously close to where Peyton had grown up, he recognized a guy whom he had known from the Greenwich Yacht Club. They reminisced for a few hours about great boats and great dinners at the yacht club, which meant Peyton had gone back to his hotel room alone, again. He’d been so intent on talking with the guy, hearing a familiar voice, and remembering his teen years that he hadn’t even gotten around to hitting on any of the women in the bar.

  That night in his hard hotel bed, he’d felt even lonelier for having talked to a familiar face about home things. He had thought about going to visit his parents since the show was so close to Greenwich, but they’d had a country club dinner booked for that night. Not that they would have come to see him at a loud rock and roll concert, anyway.

  Sometimes he went out to dinner with Tryp and Elfie, or Cadell and Andy, or very rarely, Xan and Georgie.

  You know what the most pathetic three words in the English language are? Table for three. Obviously, one of them is a straggler whom the couple had taken pity on.

  Sometimes Peyton hit the dive bars with the roadies for cheap beer after they struck the set, which happened very late at night. They usually had early call the next morning or rode the advance busses to the next venue, so Peyton didn’t get much of a chance to become a lonely alcoholic.

  He spent mornings in the gym with the other band guys.

  They were making sure they stayed healthy and looked good for the magazines.

  Peyton was working off a hell of a lot of frustration.

  Yes, Raji had not given Peyton her contact information, but she had evidently not warned her friend Andy, Cadell’s new wife, not to tell him.

  That was practically an invitation, right?

  It had taken a bit of wheedling, some jollying, and timing his seemingly offhand questions when Andy had been a little tipsy from an unusually intense after-party, but eventually, Andy had looked on her phone and texted Raji’s phone number to him.

  Andy warned him, though, even as she was thumbing the number into her phone, that Raji was married to medicine and wouldn’t want any kind of a relationship, not even a friends-with-benefits arrangement. Raji was obsessive about her career and would be a world-class cardiac transplant surgeon someday.

  Andy looked straight at Peyton. “So don’t fuck it up for her, okay?”

  And that’s how Peyton acquired Raji’s phone number.

  He stared at it a lot.

  Christmas came and went. He saw his parents for a few days.

  His old country club and yacht club had parties where he saw many of his high school friends who had gotten engaged or married to each other, bought houses, and joined the clubs on junior memberships until they were thirty.

  They were all coupled off, too.

  No other singles to even hook up with.

  Peyton could have sworn that he heard his biological clock ticking as he slept in his childhood bed and then rejoined the tour to sleep in more cold hotel beds. Why were hotel rooms always set at sixty-three degrees? No one liked that.

  The Killer Valentine tour went on, mostly up the Eastern Seaboard, but there was one excursion to California because Killer Valentine had been invited to play at the Whisky a Go Go, the famous club that had discovered The Doors and so many more bands.

  So that’s how the rock star Peyton Cabot came to be standing backstage at the Whisky in January, the pinnacle of many band’s careers, sweating over calling a woman.

&
nbsp; Xan Valentine was still on the stage. They were all going to pull a runner after his last encore.

  Peyton’s phone screen glowed, and he held his thumb over the send button, staring at the number on the screen.

  It was just a phone call.

  Maybe Raji might want to get a drink or something, since he was in town anyway.

  This was not a stalking situation.

  Stalking would be if he had been spying on her through social media or been talking to her friends, gathering information. He’d only done a little of that, just some casual, amateur stalking. Nothing weird.

  Chatting with Andy about her wedding to Cadell wasn’t stalking. The subject of Raji just happened to come up, and Andy had been tipsy enough to tell him some silly stories from when they were in high school and medical school together.

  On her pages, Raji posted pictures of herself in the midst of professional accomplishments or soberly participating in charitable events like the hospital’s annual Christmas party and springtime masquerade ball. She used social media as it was meant to be used: to make her high school frenemies jealous of how successful and accomplished she was.

  In the pictures, Peyton noticed that Raji never stood next to the same man twice and referred to the other people as “colleagues.”

  They’d had a nice time at Cadell and Andy’s wedding. Since Peyton was in town, it was perfectly normal for him to call Raji.

  He let his thumb drop on the green dot on the phone’s screen.

  Behind him, a cell phone rang.

  A Groupie Gets Backstage

  RAJI stood in the dark backstage, holding her ringing phone in her hand. Fog from the theatrical effects coasted through the cones of light onstage and smelled like rotten eggs.

  Peyton Cabot was turned away from her, staring at the stage and Xan Valentine, who was still singing in a spotlight with just a guitar, but he whipped around when he heard her phone.

  It had been easy to think of Peyton as the safe, Old Money Connecticut preppie from Andy’s reception. He’d been wearing khakis and a white Oxford shirt.

  This guy—his hair wild and his skin glowing with heat, a bass guitar still slung over his back, his white tee shirt sticking to the hard, rounded muscles of his chest and shoulders and the braided ropes of his abs, his jeans slung low on his slim hips—looked like a dangerous, out-of-control rock star.

  Her phone was still ringing in her hand.

  “Oops, I guess I’d better take this.” She held the phone up to her ear. “Hello?”

  Peyton lifted his phone and growled, “I’m sorry. I can’t talk right now. I’m talking to the sexiest woman I know.” He tapped his phone screen and looked down at her.

  In the light streaming between the long, black curtains that fringed the stage, his eyes looked darker, more emerald green than the teal Raji had been picturing the last two months when she thought about him. He asked, “So how did you get backstage?”

  Raji lifted the plastic VIP pass hanging from a lanyard around her neck. “I know the band’s doctor.”

  “Good,” he said.

  She laughed, but she said, “I’ve had seven patients die since the last time I saw you.”

  He stepped closer, his body a hard wall of muscle that rose in front of her. “Did it affect you, my little lizard-hearted surgeon? Do you need the hard comfort of a rock star to fuck all your sadness away?”

  His voice was hoarse from singing backup for hours, deep in his throat, and his green eyes glittered.

  Raji took a breath and said, “Nope, it didn’t affect my cold, dark soul at all. But yes, fuck me like you can make the whole world go away.”

  Peyton grinned at her, and his smile was the wild grin of an uncaged rock musician whose heart still pounded an adrenaline-fueled drumbeat, manic from the stage.

  He stepped closer to her, crowding her backward against a brick wall.

  As aggressive as he had been in bed at Andy’s wedding, this driving her against a wall was a whole new level of dominant behavior. Raji’s heart beat faster in her chest. She had seen many actual, living human hearts, and it had made her acutely aware of her own pumping inside her ribcage and muscle.

  Peyton grabbed her wrists and pinned them to the rough bricks above her head. His mouth crashed down on hers. His tongue forced her lips open and slid against hers.

  Her heart beat faster.

  Her mind whipped through the biochemical pathway of the adrenaline response, but his warm mouth on hers and the subtle taste of whiskey on his tongue made her moan even though everyone could see them necking.

  Peyton jerked sideways.

  The drummer, Tryp Areleous, was standing there, his black hair curling around his face like a dark flame. He yanked on Peyton’s arm again. “Come on, man. The cars are waiting. Time for the runner.”

  Raji glanced past Peyton’s shoulder.

  Xan Valentine was sprinting off the stage, holding Georgie’s hand and nearly dragging her into the wings as he ran. He roared, “Come on!”

  Peyton grabbed Raji’s hand and ran, pulling her along the brick corridor behind him.

  Raji ran hard to keep up.

  They sprinted through the back halls, past security people waving flashlights to mark their path, to a line of cars waiting just outside.

  Peyton shoved her into a back seat, dove inside after her, and pulled the door closed behind him.

  The tires squealed as the car shot out of the alley and into traffic.

  Peyton was thrown back in the seat and jammed his legs against the floor. He was laughing, but in the light from the overhead street lamps, his eyes were wild.

  “What was that?” Raji asked.

  “A runner,” Peyton said. “To get out of the venue ahead of the crowds, we dash off the stage and jump into cars. Otherwise, you can get caught in traffic. These windows are tinted darkly enough so that shouldn’t be a problem, but you don’t want to get caught in a standstill traffic jam with a thousand screaming fans around you. They probably wouldn’t tear you apart like vicious wolves, but you never know. Xan’s gotten his shirt ripped up a couple of times.”

  “That’s awful!” Raji exclaimed.

  Peyton shrugged. “Part of the gig.”

  “I’ll bet classical musicians never have to worry about that.”

  He laughed. “Well, hardly ever. A few of them, maybe.”

  The trip to his hotel took barely ten minutes, which was good because after the first turn, Peyton grabbed Raji around the back of her neck and kissed her hard.

  By the time the car pulled under the bright lights at the hotel lobby, she was writhing against him and wishing that self-driving cars were a thing. That poor chauffeur up there was probably uncomfortable with all the wet, lip-smacking sounds coming from the back seat.

  Peyton led her through the lobby, into the elevator, and shoved open the door to his hotel room.

  Raji walked past him into the room, pulling her shirt off over her head as she walked and dropping it on the floor. “Okay, rock star—you over there with your hot muscles and gorgeous, green eyes—fuck me up the ass and then come on my face.”

  Peyton slammed the door. “I’ve never really been into that face thing,” he said. “How about I eat you out until you’re screaming my name—you over there with your curvy, luscious ass and your sexy tattoos—and then I’ll come on your chest, and you can watch.”

  Raji bounced on the bed like she was testing the springiness of the mattress. “Somehow, that sounds even dirtier. Come on, Peys. Do me.”

  In a moment, he was across the room and on her, his body hot from the stage lights. When he grabbed her cheek to hold her while he kissed her, his fingers smelled like the steel of the bass guitar’s strings, and under his shirt, when Raji ran her hands over his body, his chest and ab muscles were pumped like he had worked out in the gym for hours.

  He was a stronger, wilder version of Peyton, and though he kept the first part of his promise, he didn’t jack off on her chest. Instead, h
e flipped her over and fucked her until her arms collapsed from the sheer power of it. His hips slapped her ass over and over as he fucked her hard until she came yet again, screaming into a pillow at the pleasure roiling through her body.

  Noise

  RAJI held her cell phone in her hand and blinked at the screen, trying to make sense of what she saw there.

  Darkness filled the on-call room where she had been stealing a fifteen-minute nap in the bunkbeds. The air smelled like sweat and old French fries. Grime clung to her skin, but she wasn’t going to get a chance to shower for at least another twelve hours. She had been awake, mostly, for the last forty-four hours, and the end of her forty-eight-hour call was almost in sight.

  But her phone.

  It kept making noise.

  Noise.

  Raji blinked her bleary eyes harder, trying to focus on the screen.

  The screen read Peyton.

  A picture of a guitar glowed in the semi-darkness.

  Oh, yeah. Peyton. That guy. The one who she had hooked up with a couple of times when she had been awake, unlike now.

  She swiped her thumb on the screen to answer the call. “Yeah?”

  Peyton’s tenor voice said, “Hey, Raji! Sorry for calling at two in the morning. We just got off the stage in Las Vegas. I figure if I catch a flight or rent a car I could be there by morning. Do you want to have breakfast with me?”

  “Um, yeah.” She yawned and rubbed her eyes. “I think I get off at six. I could probably have breakfast.”

  “So I’ll pick you up? I know a restaurant that makes the best brunch.”

  “No, no. Just meet me at my apartment. We’ll eat breakfast there or something.”

  “Yeah, or something.”

  Raji felt her heart thump harder in her chest. Her skin flushed at his raw voice. “Yeah, okay. See you then.”

  Raji tapped her phone with her thumb to hang up and fell back onto the pillow, trying to sleep for several more minutes before someone needed her to save their damn life or something.