Groupie (Rock-Hard Beautiful Book 1)

by C. M. Stunich

  When Muse appears in the VIP lounge with a soggy wet girl under his arm, I find myself rising to my feet.

  “The hell did the cat drag in?” Paxton asks with a smirk. I turn my dark glare on him, and he returns the favor. There's no love lost there, between Paxton and me.

  “Don't be a tool, Pax,” I whisper because there's never much point in screaming—unless you're onstage. Things that are screamed, those tend to get lost in translation.

  I move around the silver sofa, past a sea of rich teenage punks that paid for the 'VIP experience', some stupid fan get-together thing that usually brings pretty girls our way. Not tonight. Tonight, it's all middle-aged housewives and college age assholes.

  “I'll get you a towel,” Muse says, giving me a look over the girl's ducked head. She must've been out there a long time, since it's been at least an hour since she ran away. She's shaking and her eyes have that glossy, vacant look that I recognize so well.

  “What happened?” I ask, but I'm not talking to her; I'm talking to Muse. He gets a stack of white towels from a roadie and drops them on the leather seat next to us, grabbing one and tossing it over the girl's red hair. In typical Muse fashion, he doesn't give a crap about personal space or boundaries and starts scrubbing at her head, drying her off with skillful caresses of his fingers, like he's giving her a scalp massage or something.

  “Some assholes broke into her car, smashed all the windows, slit the tires.” Muse gives me a long, lingering look, like maybe there's a lot more to this story than he's saying aloud.

  “What do you have there?” I ask softly, putting my hand on Muse's to stop his vigorous drying motion. I know he's only trying to help, but he never does anything in half-measures; it's all out, all of the time. I think he's scaring the poor girl.

  I reach out and try to uncurl her fingers from whatever's clutched in them, but all I succeed in doing is making her drop her red heels to the floor.

  “Sorry,” she says with a sigh, tucking the object against her chest and finally lifting her head. In her eyes, I see that she wants to be strong but really, all she feels is weak. That, too, I recognize, that feeling. Fuck. “I …”

  “You want a drink?” Pax asks and I turn my head to glare at him. What a fucking asshole. He's just leaning back on the sofa in his stupid suit, a woman on either side—the housewives that he definitely won't be fucking tonight because his standards are fucking ridiculous—and smirking.

  “A drink,” the girl says, and then she slides into the leather chair next to Muse like her legs can't hold her up anymore. After a moment, she unhooks the pink purse from her elbow and unzips the top, digging out a cell phone. Looks like the leather of the purse protected that at least. “I'd like a drink.”

  Pax lights up a cigarette and glares at me; I glare back.

  “I need to call my stepmom,” the girl says, starting to stand up. She doesn't even make it a full inch off the leather before she collapses and decides to stay. She tucks her bare feet up on the chair and curls into a ball. Seeing her vulnerable like that, it makes me want to … no. It doesn't make me want to do anything.

  I turn away as Pax orders some bourbon for the redhead and ashes his cigarette in a silver tray on the table between us.

  I'm wearing my hoodie again, and it takes a lot of effort not to throw the hood up and hide myself away from the world. I hate these VIP things, even when there are beautiful girls to choose from. Doesn't matter anyway, I guess. There'll be some waiting around outside, near the buses—even with the rain. I don't have to go to bed alone tonight; I never have to go to bed alone.

  Just the thought of it makes me shiver with dread.

  “Here,” Muse says, reappearing beside me and handing me a full glass of Jägermeister. I don't realize my hands are shaking until I reach out to grab it. A few sips later and I'm feeling better, like there's a blanket over all the rage and hatred and fear I keep trapped inside.

  I sit down on the arm of the girl's chair and try to listen to her phone conversation while Paxton drones on across from me and Michael sits next to him, pretending he gives a shit.

  “Susan, please,” the girl pleads. I glance down at her and decide that even if she's wet, if her lashes are dripping with rainwater, she's also crying. I reach out and sweep some hair behind her ear, drawing big green eyes over to my face.

  “Don't cry, sweetheart. We'll figure this out.”

  “She just hung up on me,” the girl says as Copeland appears and pauses at the edge of the lounge area, on the platform above the small staircase. He just rests his hand on the banister and stares at the wet creature trembling on the seat next to me. “My dad died today.” Her words echo around my head as she stares at her phone like she's just been betrayed in the worst way.

  I slide down the arm of the chair until I'm sitting next to her, and then I pull her wet body onto my lap. It's a stupid thing to do because it attracts Pax's attention, rivets his grey eyes on the girl's shivering body. Now he's interested. Whoever I look at, he fucks, just to prove that he can do it. Again, and again, and again.

  “Do you need me to call somebody, honey?” I ask as I brush her hair back with the long black sleeve of my hoodie. I like to wear them oversized like this, makes me feel eighteen instead of twenty-five. Eighteen was a much better age for me; my mother was still alive then.

  “There's nobody to call,” she whispers, blinking rapidly, like she's just realized she's curled up on some strange guy's lap. I move my hand so she can sit up and lean over to grab the bourbon Pax ordered for her. When she does, her wet jeans drag low and her top rides up; I can see the enticing line of her ass crack. I want to run my finger down it, especially with her legs slightly spread, her warm cunt balanced precariously on my knee.

  I suck in a breath and look away, noticing that Pax is smirking at me.

  Jesus.

  The girl sits back, tosses her drink down like it's water and then stands up. Without saying anything, she moves to an empty chair as the punks from the love seat next to me start to check her out like crazy. Fuck, I hate teenage boys.

  Copeland comes down the stairs and sits; Muse does the same.

  And Pax, he orders the poor girl another drink. I watch her swallow this back, too, and wonder if she knows what she's really getting into here. She's wet and clearly upset about her dad. Where the hell is her boyfriend? Family? Friends?

  “Listen, baby, do you want me to call you a cab?” I ask as the girl sweeps red hair from her face and looks over at me. She's ridiculously gorgeous in this old school pinup sort of a way. Curvy and feminine, with a large chest, white skin, big eyes and this crazy red-purple hair that I can't tell is real or not.

  I want her then. Just like that. Instantly.

  “My name isn't baby or honey or doll,” she tells me firmly, “it's Lilith.”

  “Ignore him,” Pax says, his accent slurred with alcohol, “he never uses people's names. It's always sweetie or gorgeous or something of the like.”

  I don't know why I do that, but he's right. I never use people's names.

  “Shut the fuck up, asshole,” I say quietly, hoping he can hear the hidden menace in my words. The last time Pax and I got in a fight, I gave him ten stitches in his beautiful face and he broke my wrist. That was years ago, but still.

  “Can I get another drink?” Lilith pops up when the waiter approaches and clears away the empty glasses.

  “Bring me one as well, yeah?” Pax asks as our manager appears on the stairs with a professional smile fixed firmly in place. She thanks the teenagers and the housewives for paying an exorbitant amount for tickets that got them sloppily scrawled signatures on their t-shirts, pictures with the band, and two hours of sitting here listening to Paxton ramble on.

  “I'm heading back to the bus,” Michael says as soon as they leave, his signature leather jacket slung over his shoulders even though it's a hundred damn degrees in here. He stands up, doesn't acknowledge the sad girl with the red hair, and disappears up the platform C
opeland came down.

  “Are you sure there's nobody I can call for you, sweetheart?” I ask Lilith one more time, but she just shakes her head and looks up at me with this defeated expression in her eyes that gives me the chills. I look at her and wonder if I should step in and do something other than repeat the same question over and over.

  “I'm fine,” she says, but she doesn't sound fine at all, “really.” Her gaze locks with mine and in the end, I just do what I always do and get out a cigarette, lighting up as I drift the way Michael left, towards the exit and the rain and the buses.

  Usually, there are groupie girls waiting around for us here. New ones in every city, regulars that glom onto the tour and follow us like puppies. Tonight, there's no one. It's the first night of the tour, and we had bus troubles so we were late; we pulled into the venue about an hour before the doors opened. With the storm and the delay, it looks like we're shit out of luck when it comes to girls.

  Fuck.

  My throat gets tight and my hands start to shake.

  I really, really don't like sleeping alone.

  Glass after glass, I slam the burning alcohol down my throat and try to wash all the pain away. Of course, pain isn't like dirt, something you can just scrub off. It's like a fishing lure, all those sharp barbs stuck inside your skin. The more you slap and pull and tug, the deeper it gets embedded until eventually … you just bleed to death.

  I think I'm bleeding to death now.

  “I should go,” I announce suddenly, cutting off Paxton's, Derek's, and the roadies' combined laughter. The guy with turquoise eyes stares at me from across the silver table. I have nowhere to go, but how can I tell these people that? They won't care. They're rich; they're rockstars. And I'm just … a girl with no daddy.

  The room swirls with pot and cigarette smoke as I pick up my red heels from the floor and stumble through the empty lounge toward the front doors. By now, the crowd's cleared out completely. It's just the band, their employees, and the venue staff.

  I feel completely out of place here.

  I walk all the way to the glass front doors before it really hits me. I stand there then, staring at the driving rain outside and wondering if I should call Kevin, the cheating piece of shit that dragged me all the way down here in the first place with promises of a perfect life. Instead, he fucked so many girls that he gave me an STD; it had to be him. I was only sleeping with him. I've only ever slept with two guys in my entire life. I lost my virginity at fifteen to a boy from school and we did it all of two times before his family moved away. Then I met Kevin. And it's been Kevin and only Kevin for five years straight.

  I sit down on the shiny floor and put my heels and purse in my lap, watching the rain pound against the pavement, turn the surface of the parking lot into a small lake. I pull my phone out next, scroll to his number and then pause, my heart flickering with pain and betrayal.

  The asshole gave me syphilis. Fucking syphilis. Luckily I caught it early enough, but it can literally kill people, cause brain or heart damage. That's how I knew he was cheating—because I got sick. I'm completely cured now—a single dose of penicillin will take care of it if you catch it early—but that kind of betrayal … it's bone deep. Bone fucking deep. I trusted him and loved him and all he gave me was disease.

  I unzip my purse and dig through it until I find the results from my last STD panel. I keep it in there out of some fucked-up PTSD or something. If I don't have it, I start to panic, to worry that I might get sick again. But there it is, printed plain as day. Clean, clean, clean. I'm clean.

  But looking at this, I know that no matter how desperate I get, I can't and won't call Kevin.

  “Thought I might find you down here,” Paxton Blackwell says as he swaggers down the steps, clearly drunk. Slightly drunker than I am, I think. He moves over to stand next to me, tall and imposing in his fancy suit. Even intoxicated, he has this apathetic look, like he just doesn't give a fuck about anything.

  Right now, that sort of expression's appealing to me.

  “I thought you might like to come back to the bus with me, party a little more?”

  I stare up at him, his tattooed hands tucked in the front pockets of his black slacks. His hair is combed and perfect, like he's getting ready to head to Wall Street in the morning, broker billion dollar deals or something. It's just the tattoos that give him away, peeking out above his starched white collar, crawling out from under his sleeves and washing his fingers with ink. When he holds his hands still like that, it's easy to see the dark tree line, the night sky, tattooed across his fingers.

  I glance back at the rain, down at my phone where the only names plugged into the contacts that I care about are dead. I look back up at Paxton, the leader singer for Beauty in Lies.

  “Okay,” I say as I get to my feet; he doesn't offer a hand to help me up.

  “Right this way,” he tells me, starting off down the dark hallway.

  He doesn't wait to see if I'll follow after.

  My fingers trail across the wet metal surface of the tour bus as I stumble along behind Paxton, trudging through the rain to the door and waiting for him to open it. He's so drunk, it takes him a couple of tries to get the handle to work right. The security staff standing near the door don't even look at us.

  I climb up behind him, the world spinning slightly around me, and find what looks to be a fairly normal RV sized living room—albeit a really, really nice one. When I was a kid, Mom and Dad used to take me on trips around the country in a rented RV. I was obsessed with that old movie, the one with Lucille Ball in it, called The Long, Long Trailer. I made my parents help me pick out a new rock from every city we visited and stored them in a drawer under my bunk.

  This is … like that, only bigger, edgier, much more luxurious.

  A black leather sofa sits directly across from me, two smaller leather swivel chairs facing it. To my right, there's a partition with a glass window. Through it, I can see a captain's chair where the driver must sit next to a matching passenger seat currently occupied by boxes. To my left, there's a slender galley kitchen and a sliding door that must lead to the bunk beds.

  “Want a drink?” Pax asks as I sway and drop my heels and purse onto one of the leather chairs. In the other, the guy from the gas station sits watching us.

  “Are you okay?” he asks me and Paxton curses under his breath, trying to pour two tumblers of bourbon and spilling it all over the counter instead. I don't look at him, focusing instead on the bright eyes of the boy looking over his shoulder at me. He seems genuinely concerned.

  “I'm fine,” I promise. I'm a little drunk, but I don't care. I want to be drunk right now. “Thanks for the gas money,” I add, in case he doesn't realize how much that actually meant to me.

  “It was nothing,” he says, watching as Paxton appears behind me and offers a glass over my shoulder.

  “Drink up, love,” he tells me, smelling like cigarettes and soap. It's this filthy clean combo that starts up a tender ache between my thighs. The feeling is as surprising as it is shocking. For months I haven't been able to masturbate, haven't been interested in sleeping with anyone because of what Kevin did to me. And now, today, the day my father dies is the day my libido decides to come racing back?

  I feel sick, but I drink the alcohol Paxton gave me anyway.

  “Maybe you've both had enough to drink, Pax?” the guy from the gas station—Copeland—asks, setting aside a book and standing up to face us. I see that he's reading Fifty Shades of Grey. Even I've never read Fifty Shades of Grey. It makes me want to read it to see what all the fuss is about; it makes me want to like him.

  “I'm twenty-six years old,” Paxton says, the slur in his voice disappearing in a rush of contemptible admonishment, “I will drink what and when I damn well please.” He nods his chin at me. “And she's an adult, aren't you Lilith Goode?”

  I blink, surprised that he remembers my full name.

  “I'm twenty-one,” I say, in case there was any real question.
>
  “Twenty-one,” Paxton says, looking cold and bored and apathetic again. He swigs his drink and then watches as I finish mine. Collecting our glasses, he sets them aside and starts to pull me towards the back of the bus.

  The door opens and Ransom Riggs appears, swallowed up by his black hoodie, his nostrils flaring as he glances from Paxton to me, this strange, feral look on his sleepy bedroom-eyed face.

  “You're never going to stop, are you?” he asks in a voice so quiet, I'm not sure I'm even meant to hear it.

  “Never,” Paxton drawls and then he's shoving Ransom aside with his shoulder and pulling me down the hallway. The other two guys are here, too. The silver haired one is sitting on the edge of a bunk with headphones around his neck, raising his eyebrows at me as I pass by. The other one, Michael according to the internet, is lying on his back, clearly having a private conversation on his cell.

  Pax pulls me past them both and pushes open another sliding door. There's a room behind it, swallowed up almost completely by a king size bed. There's not even room to walk on either side of it, just a small narrow bit of space at the foot.

  Pax doesn't bother to squeeze us both in there and close the door.

  Instead, he steps close to me and puts his tattooed right hand up to the side of my face. It reminds me sharply of how he was onstage, resting his hands and his face on my knee, singing like he actually gave a crap about me. Just goes to show how talented he really is; clearly, we don't even know each other. In fact, when I first met him, I didn't think he liked me much. He probably doesn't like me much now either, but it doesn't really matter.

  I don't need someone to like me tonight; I need someone to fuck me.

  Paxton curves his fingers around the back of my wet head and pulls me close, hovering his warm lips above mine. He pauses there for what feels like forever, making me realize how much I want this kiss, how much I want it to taste like oblivion, drag me under and drown my pain.