by Milly Taiden
Wow, Jonas had gorgeous eyes when he looked at her like that, like he was really seeing her.
She sprinted to the SUVs and shook it off.
Watching Xan Valentine was Rhiannon’s real rock education. He was a living example of how to succeed in the music industry, by grinding harder than was human. Xan Valentine was a workaholic, slave-driving monomaniac. He had given Killer Valentine his name, his soul, and his every waking moment. He wrote all the lyrics and much of the music for every one of the hits and most of the filler songs on their albums. He did three radio interviews to everyone else’s one. During the daylight hours, he sang at charity events and did television interviews, sleeping only a few hours in the dark, early morning before his assistants woke him and shuttled him from one meeting or appearance to the next until the band meeting and bus ride to the venue for the sound check.
One time, in a shabby green room in the back of some Midwestern arena, after they finished their warm-down exercises after yet another two and a half hour show, while Xan Valentine held blue ice packs to his throat to reduce the swelling of his exhausted cords, when he finally began to speak, he told Rhiannon, “If I let up, Killer Valentine will sink.”
“Don’t you think these guys might need a vacation?” she asked him, watching his intense brown eyes to see if she was overstepping. His long hair, damp with sweat, lay lank over his shoulders and across the back of the chair. She said, “You’ve been touring for six months. Before that, you had them in the studio for months, putting together that last album. Before that, you toured for a year. They haven’t had down time for over two years.”
“I’m not asking them to do anything that I’m not doing. Indeed, I’m not asking them to do nearly as much as I’m bloody well doing. They’re living like rock stars, partying and shagging the groupies, while I’m fighting to keep this band going.”
“You and Jonas,” she said.
“Yeah, Jonas and I,” Xan agreed. “Thank God for Jonas.”
The Knife-Sharp Edge of Greatness and Ruin
On the other side of the green room from where Xan and Rhiannon were cooling down their throats, Jonas paced like a zipping target in a shooting gallery even though it was nearly one in the morning. The house manager at their next venue didn’t want to get his lazy ass out of bed before four in the afternoon to unlock the venue, but roadies needed to be in there by noon to set up, just like at every other venue on the tour. When they had booked the arena, the start time had been in the contract, and Jonas gently told the man that there was a financial penalty for the venue if they couldn’t get in there by noon, even though the guy thought that was not his problem.
Jonas ran his hands through his hair and negotiated with every weapon is his vocabulary to get the roadies inside the arena with enough time to set up the equipment and stage.
The two singers were still watching him, his friend and client Xan and the new back-up, Rhiannon, who seemed so sweet in her dealings with Rade and Grayson. They had once again been stoned out of their gourds that night and Jonas just wanted to grab them around their throats and tell them to cut it out. Directly before a major rock concert was not the time for an intervention, so once again, Jonas had coaxed them to being functional. Once again, the show had been a smashing success.
Really, Jonas had only been surprised that Tryp hadn’t been lying on the floor with them. Those three were poison for each other.
Last week, Rhiannon had helped coax Rade and Grayson from under the stage when Jonas had been at the very end of his professional wits, too, and he had wanted to hug her, but the image of her soft body in his arms had raised so many unprofessional red flags that he had refrained from even shaking her hand.
He had been “accidentally” meeting Rhiannon at noon in the gym every day and occasionally grabbing a light lunch together afterward. At first, his oversight had been professional, to make sure no one was bothering her because she was fresh, female meat among five alpha males and a swarm of roadies, but he liked hanging out with her more and more.
He liked her a lot.
Indeed, those fleeting meetings were moments of sanity in a maelstrom of tracking down drugged-out musicians and dealing with asinine obstructions.
If Jonas came on to Rhiannon and she left the tour, Xan would have his head, and rightly so. She was too good a singer and a steadying influence to fuck around with. Killer Valentine teetered on the knife-sharp edge of greatness and ruin, and Jonas meant to see them triumph, even if he had to kill them all in the process.
Rhiannon and Xan were still watching him, so Jonas grinned his everything’s-so-cool smile and gave them a thumbs-up, then went back to making sure that tomorrow wouldn’t be the clusterfuck that would snap Xan into a million pieces or drive the Terrible Threesome over the edge of addiction into madness.
Mistake
A couple weeks later, in the high desert city of Tucson, which was dusted with half an inch of dry snow, Rhiannon made a mistake.
The Tucson venue didn’t have proper facilities, not even a green room or a hospitality room or proper dressing rooms, so they changed into their costumes in the white privacy tents set up in blocked-off stairwells behind the stage and met the special guests in tunnels leading to the parking garage before the performance. This time, the guests turned out to be just the mayor and his teenage daughter, who nearly swooned when she met Xan Valentine and tried to hug him. When he bent for a quick arm-slapping, she tried to ensnare him like a hungry python. Rhiannon had feared that the teen was going to go full-scale groupie and offer to blow someone, but luckily she held it together around her father.
Afterward, because the arena didn’t have showers and sitting rooms, the band had to pull a runner to get out of the venue before the traffic of the exiting crowd blocked them in and they were stuck for hours sitting on folding chairs in the stairwells.
Everyone hated runners. The band sprinted from the stage, sweaty from the burning stage lights and heavy exertion of a show, exhausted and yet wired, and were shoved into a back seat where they couldn’t pace off the adrenaline jitters or take a whizz if they needed to and were strapped down for hours of driving.
As soon as her last set was over, Rhiannon jogged off the stage, ripped off her high heels in the first tunnel while Jonas held her hand to steady her and grabbed her bag from his hands—and every night his pale green eyes met hers just as she had to pull away,—and she sprinted in her sparkly silver dress, stretching the tight skirt with her thighs and running flat out for the back doors. Security men jogged alongside, forming a black barrier with their bodies between Rhiannon and the casino crowd. Site security lined the route.
Rade and Grayson ran ahead of her, and the pounding footsteps behind her got louder as Tryp gained on her with those long, spidery legs of his, his motorcycle boots clomping on the thin carpet.
Xan Valentine (Rhiannon still thought of him as Xan-Valentine-the-fucking-Rock-God and was too intimidated to use his given name even in her own head,) was still onstage by himself with an acoustic guitar, serenading the audience with a subdued ballad from a conjunction of blazing white follow-spots, slowly discharging the insanity of the crowd while the roadies began disassembling Tryp’s drum set in the darkness behind him. Xan Valentine would make his mad dash in four minutes.
Jonas always ran to the cars with Xan Valentine, unwilling to leave the lead singer in the center of a recently rioting crowd.
On the runner, Tryppy passed Rhiannon and held out his huge hand. She caught his fingers, and he pulled her. She sprinted to keep up, and they ran far faster than her short legs could have managed alone. His palm and fingers radiated heat from pounding the drumsticks on the skins for three hours, like he had been holding very hot coffee between his hands.
Rhiannon ran over the dirty carpets, knowing every night she was ruining her nylons but there was never time to pull on sneakers. Tryp kept pulling her faster, and she pumped her legs to keep up.
The carpeted tunnel ended, and throat-scour
ing exhaust wafted from the black SUVs waiting under the neon tube lights in the parking garage.
Tryp dropped her hand and dove in the second one.
Rhiannon dove in the first SUV in line and slammed the door behind her.
Beside her in the seat, Rade slapped the headrest. “We’re full! Go!”
The SUV jumped and sped out of the garage into the night. Ribbons of streetlights cut the dark.
Rhiannon hung onto her seat as the acceleration threw her against the door and snatched the seat belt to lock herself in.
“How far is the hotel?” Rade asked the driver.
“An hour and a half,” the man in the front seat said.
“Fuck that,” Rade said. He pushed his bleached hair out of his bright blue eyes. The purple tips floated backward in the breeze from the air conditioning. “Where’s the nearest titty bar?”
Rhiannon saw the driver’s dark eyes flick toward her in the rear-view mirror. “I have orders to take you to the hotel.”
“And I order you to fuck that! You want to go to a titty bar, don’t you, Rhiannon?”
She wanted to crash and burn in a hotel bed or on the tour bus or wherever. She had developed a habit of meeting Jonas in the hotel gym for a quick workout at noon, and she felt stronger. Not any thinner, but stronger, and the runners were kind of easier, and her voice felt better for it. “Um—”
“See? Titty bar!”
The driver asked, “Ma’am?”
Her contract was up in a month. Saying no might piss Rade off, and then he might say she was troublesome, that she caused conflict in the band. Then they would ditch her, and she would be alone and destitute yet again.
Or, she could play the funny redhead. “Hell, yeah. Let’s go see some titties!”
“You’re awesome!” Rade crowed. “Want some blow?”
“No thanks.” Anything that went up her nose eventually went down her throat.
Since they had to do a runner, Xan Valentine wasn’t even there to lead her through his warm-down exercises. She hummed scales, slowly, lightly, trying to do what he did when he cooled down, but he always listened to her and tweaked the scales they were doing, and she didn’t know why.
“Your loss,” Rade said. “More for me.”
Rhiannon assessed how high he already was and how much white powder was in that bag, and her heart clenched. Drug addicts will take all the drugs they have as fast as they can, just like alcoholics will drink all the liquor in the house before they stop. Liquor stores have long lines right before closing time as drunks stock up for the night. Rhiannon used to help her mother carry bottles home in the dark, her chubby hands clutching the lighter of the bottles, terrified of her mother’s wrath if she dropped it.
Rhiannon leaned forward to talk to the driver. “You’re going to stay, right? You’re not going to just drop us off and leave?”
He scratched his stubbled cheek. “I’ll stay, ma’am. I’m your driver until you’re at the hotel.”
At the strip club, Rhiannon followed Rade through the skunky cigarette smoke and between the crowded tables, preparing to be the awesome buddy girl, which was pretty close to her natural temperament anyway, when Rade rushed the stage with a fistful of money and started gyrating.
Well, she wasn’t going to do that.
Rhiannon found a table near the stage while Rade grabbed and was slinked on by the strippers because security won’t do anything unless the women signaled them, and they were just fine with the cash he was throwing around. When Rade whipped off his shirt, the guys around the stage cheered, vicariously living through him, and the girls molested his strong arms and rippling abs.
After Rhiannon got her drink, still humming along with the thumping music, Rade slithered like a snake back behind the curtain to, presumably, the girls’ dressing room.
Yeah, sure. Even the strip club had a dressing room.
She would just wait for him out in the audience. She didn’t want to even suggest that she might join in.
An hour passed as a procession of six girls danced and left the stage, going back to the dressing room where Rade was. Rhiannon was frugal with the watered-down drinks so she didn’t get smashed while she was all by herself in a dark room full of horndog men teased by naked women jiggling their naughty bits.
Rade still hadn’t come back.
Rhiannon didn’t want to interrupt his party, so she waited another hour, exhausted by the long concert, drinking the weak beer slowly and chewing on some crusty wings, while getting eyed by the men sitting around her. Her armpits were starting to stink like rotten eggs, and the sparkly dress stuck to her skin rather than clung to her curves. Her hair felt like a damp squirrel nest on her head when she shoved it back from her face, looking for any sign of Rade.
He might have ditched her. There had to be back doors in this place for the dancers to come and go without fighting their way through the main room and lobby.
Rhiannon stood and plucked at her sequined dress, stretching the fabric so it wasn’t plastered to her skin. The men at the tables leered at her as she walked past—and of course they did because she was obviously wearing a costume and caked-on stage makeup,—and she threaded her way between the tables to a door that some of the lap-dancers had gone through, hoping that it led to the dressing rooms or wherever Rade was.
The dark hallway had three doors leading off it. The first opened to a grimy bathroom. Rhiannon wrinkled her nose at the foulness and closed it.
Behind the next door, the darkness of a closet didn’t hide the chemical scent of cleaning solutions, which didn’t quite cover the stench of the janitor’s moldy, vomit-stinking mop bucket.
White light shone under the crack below the last door, and women’s voices were shouting inside.
Rhiannon pushed it open.
Rade sprawled on the floor like a blown-down scarecrow. The women flocked around him, patting him and yelling at him to get up. The bare bulbs glaring around the make-up mirrors cast their dipping, swaying shadows over him so that Rhiannon could hardly see what was happening.
Oh, crap.
She slid to her knees beside Rade and grabbed his throat, feeling for a pulse. His throat was so corded under her fingers that she found his heartbeat easily, and his chest rose when he breathed. He tried to slap her hand away from his throat with a limp-wristed wave.
She fumbled her phone out of her purse and called the driver. “Lester? Rade is sick or something.”
His deep voice rumbled through her phone. “Where are you?”
“In the back. There’s got to be a door to the outside.” One of the women nodded so hard that her blond wig slipped. “Yeah, there’s a door.”
“I’ll pull the car around. Open the door, and I’ll come in and get him.”
Rhiannon sent the stripper to let Lester in and held Rade’s hand to her chest. The pulse in his wrist fluttered, racing. “Be okay. Please be okay. What was he taking?” she asked the other women, who were all still hovering.
“Just some white powder,” one of them said. Mascara streaked her fashion doll face.
“And where is that white powder?”
They all shook their heads, blond and black and candy-apple red hair swishing.
So they had stolen his stash. At least Rhiannon didn’t have to worry about paying them for whatever the Hell had been going on back here.
Lester burst into the dressing room and slung Rade over his broad shoulder. He fixed one angry eye on Rhiannon. “To the hotel this time?”
“Yes, please.” She followed him out.
Rade’s arms hung down Lester’s back past his butt, and he turned his head, looking around at the upside-down world. The purple tips of his blond hair swayed with Lester’s steps. Rade muttered, “Good shit,” and went limp.
Lester dumped Rade in the back seat, and Rhiannon ran around to the other side to get in.
Once he was in the driver’s seat, Lester said, “Please use one of the bags if he vomits.”
Rhianno
n nodded.
“Do your best, anyway,” he sighed and pulled out of the dark parking lot into the night. Streetlamps lined the empty highway out the front windshield.
“I’m sorry about this,” Rhiannon said. “Thanks for helping me get him out of there.”
“I hate those places,” Lester said. “They smell like wasted lives. I’m surprised that you’re not more pissed at him for dragging you in there.”
“Oh, no. I’m not mad,” she said.
Rhiannon knew what had to be done sooner or later, so she called Jonas.
The line barely rang before he picked up. “Rhiannon? You okay?”
She had to come clean. Hiding her guilt would be worse. “There’s been a problem, Jonas, but I took care of it as best I could.”
“You did?” Relief filled his voice. “What happened?”
But she couldn’t narc. “Rade went backstage with some strippers and passed out, and I’m bringing him back to the hotel.”
“You didn’t get arrested? No one got pictures of the drugs?”
She didn’t even have to narc. “Nope to the first. There may be some pictures of him dancing on stage with them, but then he went in the back, unless the strippers took some pictures.”
“That’s great.”
Rade rolled his head to the side and mumbled something through his blond hair that lay on his face. The shaggy purple ends stuck to his tongue, and he sucked the hanks into his mouth. Rhiannon combed his hair away from his lips with her fingers.
“What’s your ETA?”
Rhiannon asked Lester and told Jonas, “We should be at the hotel in about an hour.”
Jonas said, “Okay. I’ll meet you in the lobby. I should be back by then.”
“Where are you?”
Jonas whispered, “The police station. After the show, one of the fans tried to climb up on the stage to get a souvenir, and a roadie clocked him when he got belligerent.”
“Oh, shit.” The media would love that, which was bad for the band.
