Ranger Knox (Shifter Nation: Werebears Of Acadia Book 1)

by Meg Ripley

  There, seated on the couch, I saw Fran; she had an enormous pair of headphones on, plugged into her phone, and a notebook on her lap. How is it possible that she just keeps getting cuter? That was a dangerous thought, but it was true. Fran’s hair was mussed, hanging around her face. Her legs dangled off the edge of the couch, the toes of one of her feet pointing towards the floor. She looked like a doll, almost, except that she was scribbling furiously in her notebook, tapping the fingertips of her other hand on the page in time.

  “Hey,” I said, pitching my voice just loud enough—hopefully—to cut through the sound in her headphones. Fran’s hand paused, and she glanced up, and started.

  “Hey,” she said, tugging the headphones off of her ears. “Sorry, did I disturb you or something?”

  “Nah,” I said, shaking my head. “I was having trouble with my tour journal entry and decided to walk around a bit, try and see if that shook anything loose.” Fran grinned.

  “Know the feeling,” she said, stretching; the movement lifted the hem on her tee shirt, revealing a slice of her belly. “I’ve been trying to figure this song out for weeks.”

  “New Juniper Woolf?” I sat down on the couch next to her, wriggling until I was comfortable.

  “Maybe,” Fran said with a shrug. “I mean—I guess. Jaime came up with the beat, so I guess it has to be one of our songs.”

  “What else would it be?”

  “I write songs for myself sometimes, you know,” Fran told me. I saw the color creeping into her cheeks. “It’s not like I’m planning to go solo or anything…but sometimes I get ideas that just aren’t really what Juniper Woolf does, you know?” I nodded.

  “Yeah, I know that—maybe a little too well,” I admitted. Fran shot me a quizzical look. “I’m a musician, too, you know. I write songs sometimes.” I nudged her with my elbow. “I get about one song per album. Alex, Nick…even Dan and Mark are kind of all on the same page about how they want Molly Riot to sound. But not everything I want to write is in that style.”

  “What do you do with the rest of the material?” Fran shifted closer to me on the couch, and I had to admit: it felt good, her body pressed against mine, almost cuddling up to me.

  “Record it on my own, play it for the guys sometimes.” I shrugged. “Mostly it gathers virtual dust on my SoundCloud page.”

  “I’d like to hear it sometime,” Fran said. “I wanna hear what big bad Jules plays on his own time.” I snorted.

  “Show me yours first,” I told her. Fran hesitated for a moment; then she grabbed her phone, unplugged the headphones, and unlocked the screen. After a few more swipes and taps, she set the phone down; the sound of a metronome came up, and then a syncopated beat, followed by a slightly faltering but pitch-true guitar run. “Is that you?” Fran nodded.

  “I know what I want it to sound like,” she said, frustration in her voice. “But my playing isn’t strong enough to really capture it.” She sighed.

  “That’s not a big deal,” I said. “This isn’t bad.”

  “It could be better, though,” Fran said, giving me a wry grin.

  “Well yeah—nothing is ever perfect. Everything can always be better.” I listened more intently; I almost thought I could hear Fran’s breathing on the recording, a soft hiss when she almost missed a note. “That’s actually really good.” The song was solid, I had to give her that; it was more complex, more developed than most of Juniper Woolf’s songs. “Do you mind…?”

  “Go ahead,” Fran said, looking at me intently. I stood and grabbed one of the guitars hanging on the wall in the rec room. I caught the beat again as the song began to replay automatically. I sat down on the end of the couch, listened for the notes that Fran had put down on the recording, and found them on the neck of the guitar. Following the beat, I started to play along, adding a few little flourishes, a few bends and twists here and there.

  I came to the end of the song and looked up. Fran looked utterly rapt, her eyes almost glowing in the weird, yellow light of the rec room. “That was amazing,” she murmured. I shrugged it off.

  “It was okay,” I countered. “Be better if I listened to the song a few more times.”

  “Could I get you to record that?” I pressed my lips together, considering.

  “Can’t see why not,” I told her. “I mean, we’re supposed to be collaborating, in some kind of partnership, right?” Fran chuckled.

  “I don’t think solo material was what they had in mind,” Fran said. I shrugged.

  “Material is material, right?” I put the guitar aside. “Maybe it’ll be workable into a song we can do together to fulfill that last bit of the deal.”

  “You know I was against that deal at the beginning, don’t you?” I looked at Fran in shock.

  “You were?” She nodded, smiling wryly.

  “You were too, right?” I hesitated, but nodded. Fran took a quick, deep breath, and I wondered what was going on in her brain. “We need to talk about what’s going on between us,” she said.

  “You’re all over the place tonight,” I told her, shaking my head in confusion.

  “Sorry.” Fran rubbed at her face. “It’s just…the way that we’re sneaking around: it’s not going to last forever. Someone’s going to end up catching us in the act, or they’re going to figure out that we both end up missing at the same time, or something like that is going to happen.”

  “Well that’s just the nature of the beast,” I pointed out. “It’s a small world on a tour bus.”

  “The fact that we’ve made it two months without getting caught is…” Fran shook her head. “I’m almost suspicious of it.”

  “If anyone had figured it out in my band, I’d have heard about it—I promise that,” I told her. “What about your band?” Fran thought about the question and shrugged.

  “No idea. I’d think they’d say something—but they might be waiting for me to tell them.”

  “Are you going to?” Fran pressed her lips together. She shook her head after a moment.

  “I don’t want to start drama about it,” she said. “We’re going to have to deal with it at some point though.”

  “Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said with a shrug.

  “It might help if we know what to call it,” Fran said. She bit her bottom lip. “Oh god, I sound like I want to try and make you ‘commit’ or something.” She shook her head. “As far as I can recall, this is just…us having sex, right?”

  “That sounds about right,” I agreed. I looked at her face; her cheeks were pink, her eyes dark with worry. “Did you want more? I mean—obviously not, like, in the commitment sense, I guess. But do you want more than what we’ve got going on?” Fran paused for a moment and then shook her head again.

  “Not now,” she told me. “It would just make things too complicated with the tour going on.”

  “But later?” Fran took a slow, deep breath.

  “Later, we’ll figure out the answer to that question,” she said. Silence dragged out between us.

  “I should go back to that tour journal thing,” I said. “Good luck with the lyrics.” I stood, feeling awkward and heavy.

  “Good luck with your tour journal,” Fran said in return. I went back into the dining room and tried to focus on my work, but it was hopeless. You know what she wants, I thought. She wants to be with you. Not just fucking you. Actually with you. I stared at my laptop screen, deleting everything I had written. It was shit and I knew it. Do you want to be with her? It was obvious to me that Fran had been trying—in a roundabout way—to hint, to get me to say something about what we were to each other without actually asking for it. Maybe she’s scared of it, too. I rolled my eyes; it wasn’t that I was scared of a relationship. Half the band is in a relationship. It’s not doing them any harm. Alex dating Mary had gotten him on the mostly-straight and narrow; Nick dating Olivia kept him from giving us all crabs and gave him more focus since he wasn’t chasing tail all the time. Dan and Mark were kind of their
own unit in a way, going after girls or not.

  I’d never really been one for relationships of any kind; I’d had a few girlfriends but it always ended the same way: screaming at each other, unable to stand each other’s guts, and then I’d leave, or go on tour, and it would just fall apart. I’d always considered it better by far to just take what I could get in terms of sex, and not look back—not form any attachments. Deal with it later, I told myself firmly. Right now, just get through the tour, keep things from getting crazy. Get this stupid fucking blog post done and go to bed. Nothing more you can do to fix it tonight anyway. I turned my attention onto the screen in front of me and started out on a story about a mishap at the venue the day before, telling myself that at least that would be a little interesting. I kept thinking of Fran, in the rec room, working on her song; I wondered if it was all that wise for me to help her with the track—but I knew I would end up doing it anyway.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Another show had come to an end, and the rest of the band and I piled into the green room behind the stage, at the back of the venue. “We need to go out and meet with some of the fans,” Dan suggested, even as Mark and Nick cracked their first after-show beers, throwing themselves into the seats of their choice.

  “Fifteen minutes,” Alex told him. “We’ll head out after we’ve gotten a chance to clean up and cool off a bit.”

  “Yeah,” Mark said, scowling at him. “Who are you supposed to be? Ron?”

  “I’m just saying,” Dan said, shrugging. “We should probably do some due diligence on that end. We’re not just on tour to promote Juniper Woolf.”

  “We’ve done at least an hour of autograph signings after just about every show this tour,” I pointed out to Dan. “I, for one, am fucking tired.”

  “We did our turn,” Kieran said. “Besides, I just want to chill tonight. Have a few beers, listen to some tunes that won’t blast out my eardrums with volume, get on the bus and sleep until we get to Boulder.”

  “Sounds like a fucking plan to me,” Nick agreed. “Someone put on—what’s it called? Fuck.” He wracked his brain and I looked around the room until I spotted Fran. If she had already done autograph detail, then she should be game to sneak out for a little bit before everyone got back on the bus. The question would be where? Where could we have a little privacy, a little time to ourselves?

  Ever since Fran and I had talked about the possibility of getting caught, it seemed like everyone in both of our bands had subconsciously decided to make it happen; we’d only rarely had more than five minutes alone—and even on the bus, everyone seemed to be sleeping lighter than usual, making it harder to get each other off, even if we were quiet about it. Part of me thought that was actually not a terrible thing; after all, Fran obviously wanted—though she wouldn’t admit it—to talk about what we were to each other, and that was a conversation I wasn’t ready to have or even think about.

  But to go from regular sex, sometimes a few times in a row, even if it was only every other day or so, to getting turned on but not having the chance to get off, was getting on my nerves. It had to be bugging the hell out of Fran, too; she wasn’t as charmingly flirty as usual. Angelo is probably getting a workout, I thought grimly. For my part, it had been a few times now that I’d ended up curled up in my bunk, jerking myself off because Fran and I had had to pretend like we weren’t doing anything when someone came into a room.

  Everybody started to loosen up; they drank a beer or two, and even Dan seemed to give up on the idea of going out and meeting with some of the crowd that had come out. It was impossible to do autographs and pictures after every single show; the shows themselves were exhausting, and the travel between them made everyone too tightly wound to want to hang out with fans for very long, even if we appreciated the hell out of them for coming out and supporting us.

  “Julian, you always look like such a sullen asshole,” Jaime told me as he flung himself down onto the green room couch I’d claimed for myself.

  “Sorry to hear that, I guess,” I said, managing a little smile.

  “It’s your thing,” Jaime said, beaming. “You’re not a sullen asshole, of course. But you look like one from across the room.”

  “He does not,” Fran said, plucking a beer out of one of the ice buckets. “He looks pensive. Brooding.”

  “Brooding is just another word for ‘sullen asshole’,” Jaime countered. Fran rolled her eyes and shot me a glance, and I grinned.

  “Leave Jules alone,” Nick said, leaning against the wall. “He cuts loose plenty; he just has to have the right motivation.”

  “I haven’t seen him cut loose with any women,” Jaime pointed out.

  “He’s got high standards,” Dan said, chiming in.

  “Let’s stop talking about me, how’s that for a fun game?” I raised an eyebrow, glancing around at everyone who’d jumped into the conversation about whether I was, or was not, a sullen asshole.

  “Have you worked out a part for that new song yet?” I shrugged off Nick’s question.

  “I’m still working through it,” I told him. “I want it to be as good as possible before I show it off.”

  “Nothing can ever be perfect,” Fran said. “I think some smart guy I know told me that once.”

  “Not perfect,” I said, taking a sip of my beer. “Just as good as I can make it.” After another minute or two, the pressure on me—and the attention—went away, as the rest of the group started to talk about the next show, the next crowd, and all the other things that came along with the tour. I watched Fran as carefully as possible, trying to think of where we could go that wouldn’t leave us open to being caught.

  She walked across the room, laughing at something one of the crew said, letting Kieran kiss her on the cheek and give her ass a slap, and gradually working her way towards me. I probably should have felt weird about Kieran mauling the woman I was having sex with—but I know how it is with bands. There’d been a long time when most of the press coverage that Molly Riot got focused on how ambiguously gay we were around each other: kissing each other on the cheek, sometimes on the lips, piling on top of each other, hugging each other. It was something that no one could understand unless they were in a tight-knit band, and I’d come to understand that even before we’d gone on this promotional tour with Juniper Woolf.

  Fran pretended like she was only pausing on her way to somewhere else in the room, another group of people to talk to, and glanced at me. “There’s an empty supply closet behind here,” she said lowly. “We could make that shit happen.” I pressed my lips together to keep from grinning at her and nodded.

  We had a system; one of us would suggest a meeting spot to the other one, and if it worked out, we’d take turns leaving the room. Sometimes Fran would slip out first, and sometimes I would, but the other person would wait a good five minutes before following. That way—we hoped—we could keep anyone from noticing that we happened to be leaving at the same time. Why are we even hiding this? It’s not like anyone in Molly Riot would have a problem with it, and I doubt any of the guys in Juniper Woolf is carrying a torch for Fran. It’s not like we’re doing anything wrong. But somehow even though I knew objectively that no one in my band could have any real, true issue with what Fran and I were doing, the situation would become awkward. I’d have to explain things, and then guys would be talking shit to me about it. Not worth coming clean if we didn’t absolutely have to.

  I was the only one who noticed when Fran gradually made her way out of the green room altogether, talking to one group of people or another as she crossed the floor, and waiting until the group closest to the door—composed of Ron, a couple of the techs, and Nate from her band—were all involved in some story that Mark was telling them. She slipped out of the room, and I counted down the minutes until I could go out to her, find the closet she was talking about, and maybe—finally—get off the way a person truly should. Everyone thankfully seemed to be wrapped up in their own private, little world of discussion, so by the
time I was able to get out of there, no one was really paying attention to the door anymore. That’s what venue security is for: to make sure no one gets into the backstage area to piss off the talent. Of course, they would probably think the same thing about me and Fran using their supply closet to have sex, but I figured there was no way in hell that we could possibly be the first ones to put it to that use.

  I snuck out of the room and down the hall, heart pounding in my chest. It was like I was one of Pavlov’s dogs: even just the thought of having Fran to myself for even fifteen minutes was enough to make me instantly hard. I looked around, making sure that the backstage area was more or less deserted. It seemed safe enough.

  I finally found the side-hallway where Fran stood waiting, and grinned at her as I turned the corner and joined her there, right outside of a door marked with a placard saying “storage closet: do not touch!” I rolled my eyes at that and pointed it out to Fran. “Are you seriously talking about not touching things at a moment like this? I am so fucking horny that I feel like I’m about to explode.

  We wrapped our arms around each other and started kissing immediately, and after a couple of seconds, I no longer even cared if someone did walk into us. I let my hands wander all over Fran’s body, touching and teasing her, committing her curves to my memory. She was the hottest thing I’d ever seen—so good, so tight, so wet, and so delicious that I almost couldn’t resist being with her more often, or more obviously. But if she didn’t want anyone to know about what we were doing, then I wasn’t about to be the one who fucked it up.

  Luckily for both of us, Fran had opted to wear a skirt backstage; it made it so much easier for me to reach my hand up and begin touching and stroking her already-wet pussy. I loved—loved—how wet she got at the slightest provocation. It was, in my opinion, the best thing about having her as a sex partner; there were other things that were just as good about her—I knew inside—that had nothing to do with the sex.