Strings (6 page)

Jinx lifts her head and meets my eyes from
the corner of the barn. The beginnings of a smile curve the sides
of her mouth. The snarl in Kate’s upper lip softens a tad.

Tempers simmer down and my sap meter rises
with the flicker of a memory from when we were naïve and hopeful
dreamers, before reality jaded us. “Do you guys remember our first
rehearsal? The promise we swore to each other and to The Rock?”

(For those of you not in the know, The Rock
is the presence in the universe that gives art its form, its power,
and its immortality. Praise The Rock!)

Kate mumbles, “Light up the night with
music.”

“
Shake the walls ’til they
crumble to the ground,” I say.

“
Give the fans a reason to
remember us,” Jinx adds softly.

“
And always leave them
wanting more,” Jillian finishes.

We all focus on Kate, who scowls at the dirt
and smatterings of hay beneath her feet.

“
What do you say, oh great
bitch guitarist goddess? Will you join us in our quest to honor The
Rock by putting Killer Dixon to shame on stage for the next few
months?”

Kate jerks her head to the side and pops her
neck. “I’d like nothing more than to knock those fucknuts down a
few decibels. Especially Rax.”

“
Is that a yes?” Jillian
puffs on her cigarette casually, like her panties never even
thought
about getting in
a wad. Her bad ass probably goes commando to avoid the possibility.
She’s a fucking drill sergeant with an attitude problem.

“
I need some time to think
about it.”

Jillian checks her watch. “Will five minutes
do?”

The sound of car wheels crunching over
gravel brings up our heads, and we all turn to the door.

“
Make that thirty
seconds,” she says.

A bomb drops in my
gut.
Please tell me you didn’t invite them
here, Jillian. Please.

“
I invited Killer Dixon
over so we could talk about the tour.” Jillian flips her cigarette
into the silver can and ambles to the door. “Must be them
now.”

Tick-tock.

Kate’s lips smash together, and she shakes
her head. “Son of a bitch.”

Tick-tock.

I join Kate and beckon to Jinx. Fingering
her bottom lip, she slinks over. I toss my arms around my
bandmates’ shoulders and say, “We’re better than them. We’re
stronger than them. And we’re gonna rock harder than them. We have
nothing to worry about. Let’s just play nice, use the guys like the
tools they are, and pluck tiny violins for their broke asses on our
way to the bank. There ain’t nothing they can do to put us
down.”

Tick-tock.

“
Ladies, you know Rax and
Toombs,” Jillian calls. “And this is Killer Dixon’s new
singer-bassist, Todd Armstrong.”

Tick-tock.

I look past Jinx to the three dudes
darkening the doorway. The one in the middle takes off his
sunglasses and hooks them on the front of his shirt beneath a black
pea coat. His pouty lips settle into an amused smile when his gaze
collides with mine. One pierced brow arches.

KA-BLAM!

If I had nuts, they’d have crawled so far up
my ass, my breath would smell like cum.

My heart chokes on its own blood as the guy
I fucked last night steps up and says, “You can call me
Shades.”

Man Pasties and G-String
Banana Hammocks

The motherfucker I butt-plowed last night is
with Killer Dixon? No fucking way.

And he’s
rich
? I guess I
should’ve known when he took me to the fancy hotel, but I just
assumed he was really horny and desperate to get his kink on. Who
would’ve guessed a loaded dude like him would be into that sort of
shit?

Kate winds her arms over her chest with a
loud sigh. Fury rolls off her like heat waves over hot Georgia
pavement in August.

I suppose Shades’s sexual proclivities are
the least of my worries at the moment.

I turn my head to the
ceiling and say a silent prayer:
Sweet
Baby Jeebus, if you’ll have mercy on me and not let Kate find out
what I did with Shades, I won’t masturbate in confessional anymore,
I swear. Amen.

Jillian walks
Shades—
Todd
—Rax
Wrathbone, and Toombs Badcock over. The smell of leather beats the
hay into submission and shits on it. The male specimens blocking
our path look us over top to bottom.

“
Kate, Letty, Jinx.”
Jillian gestures to each of us in turn.

Shades smiles and nods.

“
How’s it going, Kate?”
Rax stuffs his hands in his jacket pockets and notches his head. He
takes in her boobs with a long, unapologetic ogling.

At about six feet, he’s the shortest of the
three. The top layer of his chin-length black hair is pulled into a
topknot. Shrewd, blue eyes. The tattooed head of a cobra poises,
fangs ready to strike his neck. The rest of the serpent’s body
disappears under his black coat collar.

Kate told me Rax’s tattoo winds around his
back, down his stomach, and the tail ends at the head of his cock.
I’ll believe it when I see it.

Rax is the “brains” behind the Killer Dixon
operation. Songwriter/thief, guitarist, sex emperor. Or so I’ve
heard.

Kate makes a show of raking her gaze down
him, a mockery of his greeting. “I’d be a hell of a lot better with
a million bucks in my kitty. Thanks to you, that’s not happening
anytime soon.”

“
I missed you too. Thought
this tour might be an opportunity for us to reignite our love.” He
licks his doubly pierced bottom lip, loudly sucks the spit off, and
blows her a kiss. The two thick silver rings near the corners of
his mouth look like snake fangs.

“
I’m all outta love for
you, big boy. The rent on you is
way
too high for a broke-ass girl
like me.” She thumps his dick through his jeans.

Rax grins.

Toombs’s creepy silver-gray eyes shift to an
empty wall as if he’d rather be testing out gasoline body lotion
next to an active volcano than standing here in Jillian’s barn.
Like his bandmates, he’s slathered in tattoos, but his ink follows
a vivisection theme: a simulated slit throat with gaping stitches,
burnt acid holes along his neck, peeled flaps of skin.

Pieces of barbed wire—like, from an actual
fence—twine through his ears. Dried blood streaks his neck where
the wire appears to have cut him.

Wow. I swallow hard.

Toombs is the scary one. The dark loner you
hear stories about. They say once he finishes with a girl, she
walks away changed. One touch of his cock leaves behind a shell of
a woman with mental and emotional scars. Like a sexual vampire or
some shit. Naturally, he’s the only one of the guys in Killer Dixon
I ever considered tapping like a maple tree. Well, until
Shades.

I glance at him. He starts to say something.
I blink three times in quick succession, and barely shake my head.
If he spills what we did, Kate will walk.

His grin widens, but only around the eyes,
which I can actually see now. In daylight or darkness, Todd
Armstrong is the hottest piece of ass I’ve ever pleasured.

Wait a second.

Armstrong…
Where have I heard that
name recently? It’s fairly common, but…

Shit. It can’t be. It’s a coincidence,
surely.

I never saw him pay for
the room at
Armstrong
Suites…

Does his daddy own that hotel chain? If so,
then I buggered a multimillionaire’s son last night. Holy anal
mishaps, Batman.

My head is dizzified. I can’t even blame it
on liquor tonight.

I quickly face Toombs for a distraction.
He’s staring at Jinx like he wants to eat her, barf her up, and
save the cud for leftovers later.

Uh…Dude makes me more than a little
uncomfortable. I shake myself free of the playback running through
my head and inch over to Jinx.

Jillian lays a hand on Shades’s arm. “Todd,
where did you say you were from?”

“
Boston most recently. I
grew up all over the place.”

I cover my snort. I’ll bet. With a rich dad,
the little prince probably spent his youth jetting around the globe
with a royal live-in tutor. I can’t fucking believe this shit.

“
Well, since you’re new to
Georgia, let me show you a little Southern hospitality. Let’s go to
the house where it’s warmer. We can talk about specifics for the
tour.” Jillian heads to the door. Everyone follows except Shades
and me.

I shake my head again and murmur, “Don’t say
a word.”

“
Wouldn’t dream of it,
Lucky.”

Green eyes. He has beautiful green eyes. The
cooter engine revs. Pretty sure she sprung an oil leak.

Down, girl.

I zip away from him and rejoin Jinx,
positioning myself between her and Toombs.

We get inside, and Jillian ushers us to the
quaint, country-style living room. I make a point of sitting with
Kate and Jinx on the couch.

Once everyone’s seated, Jillian shakes the
graying blond strands of her bob out of her face and surveys her
minions. “Can I get anyone a drink? I’ve got beer and wine. I also
made up some snacks.”

“
Not hungry.” Rax waves
her off. “I got a couple of bitches begging for a banging at home.
Can we get on with this?”

Toombs cuts his gaze to Rax and leans back
in his chair. A scuffed black boot crash lands on his knee.

Jillian’s expression hardens. “Okay, let’s
not fuck around. We all know there are…tensions between you. What
happened in the past is over. I have a few rules I expect to be
followed. If you break them, I walk.

“
You don’t have to like
each other. You don’t have to respect each other. You don’t even
have to talk to each other. But when we’re in public—on stage, in a
restaurant, or in a goddamn alley—you will
pretend
to get along. Sing
‘Kumba-fucking-ya’ in your head if you have to, but outside the
tour bus, you’d better smile like you all have matching best-friend
necklaces.”

Kate scowls. Jinx fiddles with her
fingernails.

Rax’s lip twitches. Toombs doesn’t move an
inch.

And Shades? He’s grinning at me. Most likely
to the tune of Joan Jett’s “Do You Wanna Touch Me?” The
bastard.

My twat churns out a fresh batch of batter
in my drawers.

Did he know who I was when he picked me up
last night? What if he plotted our little romp from the get-go?
Sneaky, devious motherfucker.

I wriggle and straighten. This whole thing
stinks. My long-awaited chance to break out, and all it’ll take is
one slip of the lip for Shades to ruin everything. If Kate finds
out about us, it’s over.

Worse, what if he decides he likes me? The
last thing I want is a guy hanging all over me, blackmailing me
into sex with him every night.

I sneak a glance at him, relaxed into the
chair like he owns the fucking world. With his dad’s money, he
probably owns a nice chunk of it. Smug, self-assured, cocky. Only
thing he’s missing is a smoking jacket, a pipe, and a bevy of
Playboy Bunnies surrounding him.

But God
damn
, he’s a fine piece
of ass. And he certainly knows his way around the female body.
Maybe fucking him every night wouldn’t be
that
bad.

Shut up, Letty.

“
My other rule is that
while you’re on tour, you’ll work a forty-hour week like real
people do.” Jillian studies the girls on one side of the room, then
the boys on the other. I feel like I’m getting chewed out by the
coach in high school gym class for flushing maxi pads down the
toilet. She crosses her arms over her chest. “That means during the
day, you’re either rehearsing or writing music.”

“
Oh right, so I can have
my tunes ripped off by a thieving asshole again?” Kate bares her
teeth at Rax. “Fuck that.”

Rax sneers back.

Jillian bitch-slaps Kate
with a scowl. “That’s what monitor headphones are for. And there’s
plenty of room on the bus for you to spread out. If you want to
make it, you gotta be in constant production mode. The more songs
you have, the better the chance you’ll get picked up when a record
exec stumbles upon you. This is a
business
. You have to treat it as
such.
Both
bands
have been screwing around, waiting for shit to happen for too long.
Shit doesn’t happen. Professionals
make
it happen.”

“
Sounds like a challenge,”
Rax says, his gaze targeted right between Kate’s eyes.

“
I do love a challenge.”
Her upper lip twitches with a Billy Idol snarl.

Jillian butts in, “Good. Here’s one for you:
by the end of the tour, I want twelve new songs out of both
bands.”

“
Too easy. I say we up the
stakes with a friendly wager.” Rax the snake coils into the couch,
ready to strike. “Something that’ll prove beyond a shadow of a
doubt which is the better band.”

Toombs shifts the side of his mouth upward
in what must be his version of a grin.

Jinx’s head pops up, but as usual, she
doesn’t say anything.

“
First band to score a
record deal wins a prize.” Rax’s hypnotic eyes almost
swirl.

Kate puffs out her chest. “Writing an album
is a piece of piss. But what if neither band gets a deal? I’d hate
for a draw to stop me from publicly humiliating you assholes. Give
me something more tangible to shoot for. Something fan-based.
They’re the ones we’ll be playing for over the next few months.
They’re the ones who really matter.”