by Elle Greco
“Shut it, Rafe,” she hissed. “Missy, look at me. Did you agree to it?”
“Yes,” she snapped. Coquettishness gone.
“Dion and Rafe?” Jett tried again. “Like, the two of them?”
“My God, yes!” Now she sounded annoyed. “I got on this bus to party. With both of them. Obviously, I shoulda gotten on The Monsters’ bus when I had the chance. They don’t tour with prudish shrews. It’s like you guys are on tour with your grandmothers.”
There are a lot of rules on the road, and one of the top ones is don’t egg on the drunk groupie. The younger they are, the less likely they can handle their liquor. The result is either projectile vomit or belligerent drunk.
Seeing as how Jett was watching this girl’s back, that she was doing the right thing, that she was being the best kind of woman, and this chick was going to insult her?
I tossed out the groupie rule book.
“That’s some tough talk coming from someone in her Underoos.”
Missy shot out like a bolt from the bunk and lunged herself at me. Her tackle took me by surprise, and I toppled onto my back. She was on top of me in a second, her nails clawing into me.
“Sweet!” Rafe said, jumping out of his bunk and nearly losing his sheet in the process. “Girl fight!”
The moving bus jerked to a stop, lurching our bodies forward. Missy lost her balance. Using that to my advantage, I bent my legs and got both of my feet under her chest. I kicked her off of me and scrambled to my feet. She came at me again, but this time I was ready. I bear-hugged her, pinning her arms, and dragged her to the front of the bus.
“What the hell is going on back here?” Devlin yelled, coming down the aisle from the front. “Oh, shit!”
He scrambled back when he saw me steaming forward. My hand slapped at the button to open the door, and Missy and I stumbled outside and onto the gravelly shoulder of the road, illuminated by a lone streetlight directly above us. We wrestled by the side of the road, hands slapping, hair pulling. A lone car whizzed by us on the four-lane highway, horn blaring as it went. Not my finest moment, I’ll admit. Devlin, Rafe, and Dion followed us out onto the pavement, Rafe with the sheet still bunched around his waist.
“How the hell did this bus get a stowaway?” Devlin yelled at Dion and Rafe while I tried to untangle Missy’s fists from my hair. Devlin grabbed me from behind, and when he finally pried us apart, clumps of my hair were snarled around her fingers.
“Aw, hell, Devlin,” Rafe said, not meeting the old man’s eyes. “You know how this tour shit goes.”
“Is she even legal?” Devlin asked.
Missy came at me again. Still wrapped in Devlin’s arms, I kicked out, landing a satisfying one to her solar plexus.
She made an “oof” sound, dropped to the pavement, and then upchucked the rum.
“For crying out loud,” Devlin groused. “How much did she drink?”
Dion held up his thumb and index finger to show a measurement. It was not insignificant.
“Oh, balls,” Devlin muttered. He released me to hold back Missy’s hair. “Hey there, easy now, kid. You’ll be okay.” His fatherly attempt to soothe her was cut short as she heaved up more of the rum. And possibly nachos. Maybe a burger. It was hard to tell. Poor Dev’s face was twisted in anger and revulsion. “We haven’t even been on the road for forty-eight hours, and first you assholes spray-paint the bus and now this shit happens. What in the ever loving hell is wrong with you boys?”
“The spray paint was all Dion,” Rafe pointed out. Dion flicked him behind the ear with his finger.
Presley stomped off the bus. “This is why we should be on airplanes. We’d be in hotel rooms. Our own hotel rooms. You can screw whatever you want in private.”
“This is tour life,” Rafe said. “You don’t like it? Don’t tour.”
“Get your head out of your ass,” she snapped. “That was tour life ten years ago. Musicians have evolved. We’re more civilized now.”
“Now you’re talking serious crap, Presley,” Devlin said. He was holding back Missy’s hair while she continued to puke. “Good Lord, how much can possibly come up? I’m too old for this shit.”
“I knew touring with chicks would suck,” Dion said. “Don’t like it, stay home.”
Rafe high-fived him. Epic side-eye came from both me and Presley.
“You two are morons,” I said.
“She’s right. Morons, both of you,” Devlin said. “What the hell do we do with this one now? We’re hours from San Francisco, boys. How’d you expect her to get home?”
Dion and Rafe exchanged glances. Rafe cleared his throat. “Bus fare?”
“Not only are you both fools, but you have no sense of honor,” Devlin snapped. “Get me something to cover this girl up with. She’s got to be freezing in this getup. And let’s call her a car.”
“Jett, toss me a blanket,” Presley yelled into the bus.
“A car? To San Francisco?” Dion asked. “She can’t afford that.”
“No, but you can,” Devlin said.
“That’s…” Rafe said. His eyes rolled back into his head while he tried mental math.
“That’s a piss load of money,” Dion interjected.
“It won’t bankrupt you,” Devlin said, covering Missy with the blanket Jett brought from the bus. “Now go pack up her clothes and get your credit card ready. And let this be a lesson to both of you to keep the groupie escapades off the damn bus.”
“Chicks on tour,” Dion muttered as he walked past me, his eyes molten with anger. “This is some epic-level bullshit.”
8
“That was killer!” Presley enthused, shaking out her long hair from its ponytail.
Jett hid her huge grin behind a hand towel as she wiped her face. “No doubt. Almost made me forget about missing this semester.” She dropped the towel from one eye and added another “almost” for effect.
“Did you hear that crowd?” I asked, just as giddy as the two of them. “And they aren’t even here to see us!”
“They wanted a freaking encore,” Presley said, practically jumping up and down. “From an opener.”
“Portland loves us,” I said. “Good call on ‘Rhiannon.’”
“Thank God I remembered the words,” she said with a laugh. “They were, like, the only lyrics I could remember. I was in such shock.”
“Yeah, but punking it up was all you, Nik,” Jett said. “That crowd would never have given us a pass on classic rock.”
I hummed out the lyrics. “That can go hard-core totally.”
“Well, it was fierce,” Presley said.
“Thanks,” I said with a grin. Presley didn’t hand out many compliments. I’d take what I could get.
Devlin slipped into the greenroom. Yellowed band posters, edges ripped from age, covered its gray cement walls. A few Anthem posters peeked out from behind the ones of newer bands. The room was sparse, save for an ancient couch and a coffee table littered with beer cans and old magazines. Band stickers were peeling off its worn wood surface.
“Impressive set, you three,” he said.
“Are they ready for me?” I asked, swapping out my sweat-soaked wristbands for a dry pair.
“You got at least ten minutes,” he said, chuckling. “The boys are nervous about following your set. I think Dion is in the bathroom barfing.”
“Don’t you think we’ve had enough of that?” Presley muttered.
I wrinkled my nose. The bathrooms were in worse shape than the greenroom. A heavy smell of urine blanketed the air. What looked like black mold crawled from the waterline to the rim of the toilet. I didn’t even want to pee in there, never mind put my head that close to the bowl. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“The nerves? No. But the competition does both him and Rafe some good. Rogue Nation’s a good band, but they could be a great band. The boys are lazy. They need to work harder.”
I nodded and pulled back on my hands, stretching the muscles of my forearms. We had a
killer set, but it went way longer than expected. I still had at least seventy-five minutes to go with Rogue Nation. “So, are you just hanging out until it’s time for the set?”
“Arms okay?” he asked, eyes flicking from my face to my forearms and back.
“Just keeping nimble,” I said. “Don’t want to stiffen up before Rogue takes the stage.”
His nod was sharp. “I’m always good for a hang with you three, but I’m just delivering a message, then I have to get back to Dion.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and whipped open the web browser. “You know Alice, that crazy PR rep at the label?” He made a face when he said her name. Everyone knew Alice, and, truth be told, everyone was kind of afraid of her. “She sent me a link to that what-you-call-it ends-with-a-z website. You know, that gossip one? It looks like the little groupie the boys smuggled on the bus last night talked some shit. You don’t mind me saying, those boys are idiots.”
“We don’t mind,” Jett said.
Presley peered over Devlin’s shoulder to get a look at the screen. “What’d they write?”
“Well, for starters, some bullshit that Nikki and Dion had a thing, which is how Nikki ended up drumming for Rogue.”
That son of a bitch. Heat crept from my neck into my cheeks. Was Dion telling tales? To that groupie?
“I’m going to rip his dick off,” I said.
“Get in line, kid,” Devlin muttered, scrolling on his phone. “She said Dion said you’re still pining for him.”
“Pining for him?” Jett asked.
Devlin’s eyes swung to Jett. “Her words, not mine.”
Presley’s arms crossed over her chest. “Fucking Dion.”
“Then she said that he said you were ‘freaky’ in bed—that’s why he agreed to you drumming with them and going out on tour.”
I groaned at the same time that Jett snorted.
“What?” she asked when I shot her a dirty look. “Freaky? Come on.”
Devlin cleared his throat. “Finally ‘Satan’s Sisters’ and ‘hellcats’ were used in a sentence together.”
“Shit,” I said, dropping onto the musty couch. I wrinkled my nose as a plume of dust puffed up on impact.
“According to Alice, not shit,” he said. “She said that once the story popped, she started getting inquiries from journalists about when your album was dropping.”
“Rogue’s album?” Jett asked. “They just cut one.”
Devlin cracked a grin. “No, your album.”
“No shit?” Presley asked, eyebrow cocked up.
“I shit you not,” Devlin answered.
“But there is no album,” Jett said, always the voice of reason.
“Exactly. Been kind of fun catching that woman with her pants down,” he said, not even bothering to hide his enjoyment. “Damn woman’s been the bane of my existence since Anthem was first signed. Nice to see her with nothing to say for once.”
Presley, Jett, and I shared knowing looks. Alice Monroe, VP of PR for Grimm Records, was a tough-as-nails, no-bullshit banshee. With wild curly black hair and cat-eye glasses, she was about four foot ten and one hundred pounds soaking wet. At well over fifty years old now, she made her bones when she was still at UCLA, promoting some of the top hair metal acts playing on the Sunset Strip. Grimm snapped her up before she graduated, and she broke a bunch of bands for the label—from hair bands to grunge to post-grunge, even thrash metal and hard-core rap. Alice heard it all, saw it all, and likely took part in most of it. The Anthem guys were extra careful not to toss out pussy jokes in front of her, she was that terrifying. And she was damn good at her job.
“So what does this mean?” Jett asked. “For us? Without an album?”
“Alice wants you to cut an EP. Preferably now. She suggested you record a few gigs live—”
“But we’re not signed to Grimm,” I said.
“No, you’re not. But if Alice wants Grimm to release your debut EP, the old man will say yes. He doesn’t tell Alice no very often,” Devlin said.
See? Terrifying. Even Grimm was afraid of her.
“Oh, hell no,” I said.
“Really?” Presley said. “Is your word final? Because this is not a monarchy and you are not Queen Bey.”
“You mean dictatorship,” Jett corrected.
“Whatever,” Presley said, waving her hand in Jett’s direction. “The point is, it’s not Nik’s decision to make. It’s all of ours.”
“Collectively,” Jett added.
“I am not signing with Grimm Records,” I said. “Case closed.”
Presley opened her mouth to argue, but Devlin’s phone pinged.
“It’s her again,” he said, swiping at the phone, his mouth tight. “She said someone from KEXP radio just saw your set and wants you in their studio tomorrow for an interview.”
“Fuck me,” Presley said as the color leached out of her face. She dropped onto an armchair so ancient that sections of upholstery foam puffed out from around the torn fabric. Her head dropped between her legs, and she sucked in air to keep from passing out.
“What’s KEXP radio?” Jett asked, rooting around in her backpack.
Devlin’s eyes widened. “What’s KEXP radio?” His buggy eyes darted from me to Jett and back to me. “Did she just ask, ‘What’s KEXP radio?’”
Jett shrugged and pulled out a book that was at least five inches thick. “Is that a hard question to answer?”
“KEXP radio is only, like, the most influential alternative radio station in Washington state,” I told her.
“Hell, I’d say in the Pacific Northwest, if not the entire west coast,” Devlin said.
“It started at the University of Washington,” I added, hoping that would pique her interest. “It’s a huge get for alternative acts.”
“Especially unsigned ones,” Presley added, her voice muffled, since her head was still between her legs.
“Oh.” Jett’s eyebrow curved up in interest. “That sounds kind of cool.”
“It’s definitely kind of cool,” I said, excitement dancing in my chest. “Presley’s right. They don’t do unsigned acts. Like, at all.”
“So should I tell Dragon Lady you want to do it?” Devlin asked.
“Devlin, you tease,” Presley squeaked from between her legs. “Of course we want to do it!”
“Hang on,” I said. “Why is Dragon Lady fielding this? We aren’t on any label’s artist roster, especially not Grimm’s.”
“You are on tour with a Grimm act,” he said.
“And Grimm is paying the bills,” Jett reminded me.
“Don’t worry,” Devlin said. “You have to sign a contract for Grimm to own your life. And your music. As long as you sign nothing, you’re cool.”
“Right,” I muttered, apprehension still building despite his assurances.
“I’ll get the details,” he said. “I know I don’t have to tell you three, but no hard partying tonight. We’re going to hit the road early so we can make it up to Seattle for the midafternoon interview. You need to be on form tomorrow. This is a big deal.”
“We know, Devlin,” I said.
“Cool. I’ll come and get you when the boys are ready.” On his way out, Devlin smacked right into Jordan, my EMT roadie savior. “And what the hell are you doing in the greenroom? You get Rogue’s shit set?”
“Hey, Jordan,” I said, jumping up from the couch.
Devlin leaned against the doorframe, blocking Jordan from entering the room. “Well, now, hello, Jordan. Want to explain why you two are so chummy?”
“Come on, Dev,” I said, grinning at Devlin’s papa-bear act. “Jordan patched up my knee after I fell at Outside Lands. He’s the default EMT on the tour, right?”
Devlin’s hard eyes hit Jordan, who shrunk back. “Just wanted to check in and see how the knee was doing,” Jordan said, stepping back to keep plenty of space between him and Devlin.
Devlin’s arms folded across his chest. “Your knee okay, Nik?”
I bent and str
aightened it a few times. “Perfect.”
“No pain?” Jordan asked, craning his neck around Devlin’s imposing body. “Inflammation? Any heat around the wound? Want to make sure it doesn’t get infected.”
I wrinkled my nose. I didn’t think it was infected, but… “Maybe you should take a look?”
He lifted the pack that contained the medical supplies and waited for Devlin to step aside. Jordan hustled past our brooding tour manager while I repositioned myself on the couch. Luckily, I was in cutoffs—again—so the wound was easily accessible.
Devlin scowled at his phone. “You three gonna be okay? I need to deal with Alice. She’s blowing up my damn phone.”
“We’re good, Devlin,” I called to his back as he stormed out the door, phone pressed to his ear.
Jordan dropped his ass on the pile of magazines cluttering the worn coffee table, and a not-quite-empty beer can toppled to the floor. The sour odor of stale beer wafted up from the puddle. He ignored this and pulled my leg toward him with a gentle tug. “You guys played a hell of a set.”
“Thanks,” Presley said, standing up and extending her hand. “I’m Presley. Thanks for looking out for my baby sis.”
“No problem,” he said, shaking her hand. Presley beamed. I wanted to crawl into the nasty couch cushions.
Jett didn’t even look up from her book, which she was marking up with a pencil. “Yup, that was righteous.”
He pulled out a pair of latex gloves from his bag and yanked them on. “So, KEXP, that’s major.”
“How long were you eavesdropping?” I asked.
“Pretty much the whole time,” he said, his lips forming a shy smile. He pulled the bandage away from my knee in one gentle motion. “Dragon Lady.”
“Don’t you dare breathe a word of that,” I said, pushing out a breath when the cut hit the air. Damn, stupid cut still stung.
Jordan chuckled. “I’ve met Alice. She’s a shoot-the-messenger sort of woman, so…”
I kept my eyes on the cut but smiled.
“So, Jordan,” Presley started, “how long have you been on the road with Grimm?”
“This is my third tour, I think,” he said, dabbing on antibiotic ointment with a cotton swab while I gritted my teeth. “I’ve been working in the studio for a few years though.”
