by Milly Taiden
“I didn’t want to wake you.”
“It’s okay. Go ahead and watch. Do you have insomnia a lot?”
“No.” He didn’t reach for the remote on the nightstand. “I generally try to book rooms on the lower floors, but they were all taken.”
She ran her palms up his back, scrunching the tee shirt fabric in her fingers. It almost felt like she was trying to take it off of him, which would have been a fantastic development if he had any damned condoms.
She asked, “You afraid of heights?”
“It’s not that. The upper floors sway.”
Rhiannon’s hands on his back stilled, and she held her breath for three heartbeats. She said, “Oh, yeah. I can kind of feel that.”
“They make taller buildings elastic, so in case of an earthquake, they flex rather than crumble.”
“Are we having an earthquake?” He could feel her swing her legs around to evacuate.
“No. It’s just windy out there. I think there’s a storm rolling in.”
“That is kind of freaky. Now that you’ve mentioned it, I can feel it moving.”
He reached back and found her arms, pulling them around his waist, and tucked her under his arm. He breathed a little easier. “Have you ever been in an earthquake?”
“I only moved to southern Cali four years ago. Just some little temblors. Nothing big.”
He leaned back, resting his cheek on the top of Rhiannon’s head. Her thick hair still smelled like herbs and mint. “I was in a really bad one.”
Her arms tightened around his waist.
In the dark, it was easier to say. He couldn’t see the pity in her eyes. “I was fifteen. Our house fell in. My parents and little sister were killed.”
“Oh, Jonas. I’m sorry.” Her hand stroked his arm. “Were you in foster care?”
“Yeah.” He had lived in a series of group homes for a year, but the pissing contests had become an outright brawl for alpha male dominance. He had already been over six feet tall and muscular from sports, but knowing he could beat their scrawny, angry asses didn’t mean that he wanted to. Those teenage packs were not normal life. Integrating into the dysfunction would have meant losing hope, so he had run away and couch-surfed with friends, orbiting around their families, breathing in the second-hand care. “It wasn’t too bad.”
The Show Must Go On
At the next night’s concert, Rhiannon danced on the riser, singing into the microphone, trying to hear herself above the shrieking audience.
Xan Valentine prowled downstage near the footlights that lined the edge of the stage like a row of white-hot ball lightning, invoking the wildness of the crowd around him and blasting one of their most vocally demanding songs, “Standing on the Mountaintop.” The fiery lamps burned the dust floating in their beams to cinders that stung Rhiannon’s nose when she breathed.
Rhiannon stood upstage near Tryp, who was battering his drum kit. Every time he snapped the tip off a drumstick, he dropped it on the floor and plucked a new one from his can. At his last curtain call, he would throw the broken sticks into the crowd.
Xan’s tenor voice and Cadell’s guitar licks played through Rhiannon’s monitor speaker. The huge towers of speakers were directed to blast the music over the audience, so the monitors and Tryp’s drums beside her were all that she could hear over the crowd’s roar. The song neared the crescendo, the third refrain, and she drew a breath between lines to get ready to blast the third line of the chorus with Xan.
She sang the first line with him just fine, their voices blending, “Standing on the mountaintop.”
The second line, “Sing it from the mountaintop,” Rhiannon heard a little bobble in Xan’s voice, and she took her eyes off the audience to watch him. He strode over the stage, gesturing to the people in the cheap seats on the balcony like he was gathering their screams and scooping them toward the floodlights above. They shrieked.
The third line, “Shout it from the mountaintop,” as they reached for the higher notes at the end, Xan threw his arms to the sides, fists clenched, like he was battling the blazing white spotlights that all swung around to illuminate him like a solar flare.
At the apex, Xan Valentine’s voice failed.
Rhiannon held her note, waiting for him to suck in a breath and chime in.
The bright white wall of the stage lights silhouetted his body, broad across the shoulders with his frock coat flowing behind him like a cape, and he pulled his arms in, crumpling.
Rhiannon kept to her line, singing the harmony notes.
She glanced up at Tryp but he was wailing on the drums with headphones covering his ears, and he didn’t seem to notice that Xan was in trouble.
The guitarists were looking at their instruments, and Rade was slamming his hands on the keyboards, oblivious to Xan doubled over, holding his throat.
Rhiannon pushed her microphone stand aside and ran to him.
Xan fell to one knee, his long coat draping around him.
Rhiannon skidded beside him, her high heels nearly sliding out from under her. “Xan? Are you okay?”
“I can’t breathe,” he gasped. He glanced up at her, his brown and blond hair curtaining his face, and his blank expression belied the terror in his eyes that closed up her own throat. Sourness crept over her tongue because Xan might have really hurt himself.
Rhiannon took his hand. “You probably just need some water.”
“Get me off the stage.” His voice cracked, and he wheezed like he was choking.
Silence swept through the crowd.
Out of the corner of her eye, Rhiannon saw Cadell sling his guitar to the ground and run across stage toward them.
“Come on. Let’s go.” Rhiannon reached down and picked up one of Xan’s hands from the wooden boards of the stage.
Xan managed to keep his balance, and he held Rhiannon’s hand as she led him. Cadell caught up to them and ducked under Xan’s other arm, coming up with his arm over his shoulders. Xan leaned on Cadell, who murmured something that Rhiannon couldn’t hear.
Behind them, Tryp’s drumbeats stuttered off time, then died away, and she heard him ask, “What the fuck?”
The other band members had stopped playing, and the auditorium rumbled with thousands of whispers and shifting feet.
Jonas ran onto the stage and met them as they walked through the blazing stage lights toward the wings. Xan still had his hand pressed to his throat.
Jonas took Xan’s other arm out of Rhiannon’s grasp, helping him. “What the hell happened? Did he break a cord?”
Xan shook his head.
“Okay,” Jonas said. “Then it’s not serious. It’s just a set-back. It’ll be okay. Come on, buddy. Let’s get you to the cars.”
“No. The show.” Xan’s voice cracked and failed again. “Can’t cancel.”
Cadell said, “Let’s sit you down in the hallway, then. Let’s call Leena.”
Xan croaked, “She’ll tell me to cancel concerts. Can’t do that.”
Rhiannon said, “Xan, you need to warm down before you talk.”
He threw a grateful glance at her and started to hum.
They made it off the stage and to the chairs set up in the stairwell. Rhiannon grabbed her pitch pipe out of her backpack laying on the floor and blew a note through it. She hummed a scale, and Xan hummed with her.
Rhiannon blew the pitch pipe again. She sang a very gentle middle-C scale, and Xan managed it, too.
Cadell ran back on stage and grabbed his mic off the stand. “Folks, we’re going to take a break for a few minutes.”
Booing hooted from the cheap seats, but for the most part, the crowd quieted farther. Blue light lit the audience as everyone pulled out their phones to tweet about the weirdness, or to search for other reports of an impromptu intermission during a Killer Valentine concert, or to update their social media status as sitting in a dark auditorium, watching nothing. #badconcert
Rhiannon ran through the warm-down exercises with Xan while Jonas leaned ag
ainst the cinderblock wall, watching. His measured breathing suggested that he wanted to ask a flurry of questions but was repressing.
Out in the auditorium, footsteps clattered on the stairs as people began to leave.
The house lights brightened to half, lighting the tunnel where they all were sitting. With so many people in the aisles, the house techs needed to prevent accidents.
Xan shook his head, pain creasing his eyes, but Rhiannon touched his hand and hummed the next scale. He caught the notes and hummed it with her.
Xan’s assistants arrived, and the man began rubbing Xan’s neck. His efficient massage seemed impersonal, like a therapist working muscle spasms out of a race horse’s leg. He drew on the muscles of Xan’s neck, careful not to move Xan’s neck and thus his throat while he ran the scales with Rhiannon.
Xan’s other assistant, a whip-thin woman, pulled a cell phone from somewhere out of her skin-tight skirt suit and asked Jonas, “Are we leaving? Did you cancel the show?”
“Not yet,” Jonas said. “There are only two songs left, anyway. I think we should bag it.”
Xan shook his head and sang the scales with Rhiannon some more.
“Rhiannon?” Jonas asked.
She startled at someone asking her opinion as to whether they should cancel the rest of the concert, but she said, “If there are only two songs left, you don’t want to break a cord, Xan. You don’t want to bruise them or start a sore that’s going to turn into a vocal nodule or a polyp, either. This is just dangerous.”
Xan hung his head.
“Up!” Rhiannon said, and Xan lifted his head. He shouldn’t crunch down on his larynx like that.
Cadell had been hovering. The rest of Killer Valentine had followed them off the stage, and Cadell punched Tryp in the arm. “Come on. Let’s go debut ‘Eruption.’ That’ll give these guys a few more minutes before they have to call the ball.”
The guitarist and the drummer walked into the bright light at the end of the tunnel while Rhiannon ran scales with Xan. His voice still sounded so terribly constricted. He had such an open, ringing tenor most of the time, but his tones sounded like he was swallowing his voice.
As Tryp and Cadell trotted onto the stage, the crowd roared.
She heard Cadell announce, “We’re not sure about the rest of the show, but if you’ll bear with us, this is something that Tryp and I have been working on. We’re going to play ‘Eruption’ by Eddie van Halen, as arranged for guitar and drums.”
The crowd cheered, and the house lights dimmed.
Notes fluttered out of Cadell’s guitar like a flock of birds lifting from a lake. Tryp started a discreet drumline, just keeping time while Cadell played notes so fast that the music sounded like a hard rainstorm.
While the audience was occupied, Rhiannon said, “Okay, Xan, let’s hear a few lines.”
He sang one of their softest ballads, “Alwaysland,” and managed to get through a verse and the refrain. She tapped out a rhythm line on his knee, keeping the time signature while Xan sang, just to participate in the music and support him. He nodded with her tapping fingers.
On the stage, Cadell’s guitar floated a series of chords, and the drumbeats picked up, clattering the same cadence that Cadell had been playing.
At the end of “Alwaysland,” Xan said, “I’m okay. I can finish the show.”
Jonas said, “You can cut it short. Just go out and do that one, just like it’s the last encore.”
Xan shook his head. “Those people who are still out there, they stayed. They deserve the whole show.”
Jonas turned his back and slapped the wall, but he didn’t say anything more.
So after Tryp and Cadell finished ‘Eruption,’ the rest of the band trooped back out on the stage, and the spotlights caught them as they came out. The audience roared, though only half of them hadn’t hit the exits.
Xan shouted to the band, “Let’s take it from “By the Numbers.”
Rhiannon flinched. She had hoped that he would go straight to “Lay Your Ghosts to Rest,” the last song and a quiet ballad, but Xan wanted to sing every song on the set list. She smiled big at him, and he nodded.
He was halfway through the song, gearing up for the higher sequence on the bridge, when his voice failed again.
This time, Rhiannon jumped off the riser and was right beside him. “Come on, Xan. Stop the madness.”
The band stopped playing their instruments quicker this time. Tryp launched into a drum solo worthy of Neil Peart as Rhiannon tugged Xan’s hand, and he followed her.
This time, the lighting crew evidently had prepared for various contingencies and doused the stage lights except for huge spotlights on Tryp. He glistened with sweat as he wailed on the drums, pounding mercilessly on his kit.
Rhiannon charged off the stage to where Jonas was already holding her backpack. He shoved it into her arms and another bag at Xan, then held her hand as she ripped her high heels off her feet.
Jonas told her, “I’ll wait for Tryp. Can you stay with Xan?”
Xan said, “I’m not going to cancel—” but he choked again, coughing this time.
Rhiannon nodded to Jonas. “I’ll stay with him.”
“Good,” Jonas said. “Get him out of here.”
They ran with the security staff to the waiting SUVs.
In the garage, Xan pointed her toward the lead car. “Take that one.”
He dove into the second SUV alone, slamming the door behind him.
Rhiannon pulled herself up into the lead SUV, scrambling for the seat. A trace of skunky cigarette smoke lingered in the car like the driver had tried to blow it out his window, and Rhiannon rolled down her window before she took deep breaths down her already-sore throat.
Cadell jumped into the SUV after Rhiannon, slapping the front seat. “Home, sir.”
“Yes, sir,” the driver said.
Cadell turned to Rhiannon, who was still shaking from adrenaline and nerves. “It’s not you. Xan will need to be alone for a while. He’s not going to deal with this well.”
“Will he be okay?” She grabbed a bottle of water and drank some, wetting her dry mouth and throat.
“I hope so.” Cadell pulled an iPad out of his backpack and clicked a couple times, then spoke to the tablet, “Xan? I’ve got Rhiannon here. Why don’t you guys cool down together?” He handed the tablet to her, saying, “Just run though those scales and hums that you guys do.”
Still shaking like crazy, Rhiannon found her pitch pipe in the bottom of her backpack, propped the tablet up on her knees, and blew the pipe for their starting note. They sang scales, softly, barely passing air through their vocal cords, while watching each other on the tablet. Xan stared at her with dark eyes so wild that she worried that the pressure might have finally gotten to him and he might start raving, but with the quiet scales, with the humming, he slowly calmed until he was breathing normally between runs.
At the end, she asked him, “Does your throat feel all right?”
He glanced at her though the tablet, appraising her reaction. His brown eyes were more wary then if the police had been asking Rade if he had any illicit drugs on him. “Yes,” he said. “I’m fine.”
Xan Valentine didn’t sound fine. He was as hoarse as if he had been screaming in madness in the middle of a sandstorm with parched air scouring his throat, but she didn’t argue.
Beside her, Cadell had been working on something on his phone, and he leaned in so the tablet’s webcam picked him up. “You need to call Leena.”
“I don’t need Leena,” Xan said from the tablet, glancing out the car window beside him. His clipped British accent came out more when he was tired.
“Suit yourself,” Cadell said and leaned out of camera range.
More loudly, Xan said, “It’s just going to be the same rubbish about canceling concerts and appearances.”
“Maybe she’ll say something else this time.” Cadell tapped his phone with a stylus but didn’t lean in, as if he were entirely unin
terested.
“She won’t. She’s always harping on protecting your fucking instrument.”
“It’s up to you.”
“Fine. I’ll call her.” He stopped, and something in him readjusted as he saw Rhiannon on the screen. His expression smoothed. “Thank you, Rhiannon.”
The screen cut to black, and she handed the tablet back to Cadell. “Is Leena his wife?”
Cadell snorted. “Xan, married? Oh my God, the poor woman. Uh, no. Leena was our vocal professor at Juilliard.”
“You went to Juilliard?”
He laid his hand over his chest. “You wound me.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said quickly, but Cadell was already smirking at her. “I’m just surprised that anyone has ever, really gone to Juilliard.”
“Yeah. I majored in guitar. Big surprise, there, huh?”
“What was Xan’s major? Voice?”
Cadell returned to his tablet. “Um, you should know that Xan is a very private person. He doesn’t talk about stuff like that. You might not want to ask him about anything that happened more than five minutes ago.”
“Okay, then.” She looked out the tinted window at the dark city rushing by.
“That’s good.” Cadell smiled at her. “Just keep that up and you’ll be fine.”
The drive to the tour busses lasted half an hour, and Xan’s SUV pulled up seconds after the vehicle that had driven Rhiannon and Cadell had taken off. They waited for him before they climbed the stairs onto the bus.
Xan stepped out of his SUV, and his tired shoulder slouch hurt Rhiannon just to look at him. He swallowed hard. “We should cancel Reno tomorrow.”
Rhiannon licked her lips and took a deep breath. “Okay. Are we canceling just the one show?”
“Yes. Only the one show.” Xan said. His British accent strengthened. Probably a stiff-upper-lip thing. “We’ll play Las Vegas the next day as scheduled.”
Rhiannon knew how this went.
One cancellation became two.
Two cancellations turned into a week.
A week off without music meant far too much time for mischief-prone musicians to stay out of trouble, and the band disintegrated.
