The Devil's Metal (15 page)

“You’re used to ducking out, right?” he
asked.

I didn’t understand. “You mean from
class?”

That made him pause, his eyes searching mine
in wonder before he let out a hearty guffaw.

“You’re kidding. Oh, Rusty, Rusty, Rusty.
Ducking out, man? You know, with ludes? Soapers? Motherfucking
Lemon Sevens?”

“Yeah, I get it,” I snapped.

“Well that’s what these are, Redwood. Ludes
for me and ludes for you. Let’s get lewd and rude together.” He
opened up my hand and placed the pills in them.

I didn’t do drugs and I certainly didn’t do
drugs with rock stars. Rock stars who certainly didn’t need
drugs.

“This shit is going to get you too fucked,
Robbie. You have a show tonight.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking
about,” he said lazily. He popped one pill in his mouth and
swallowed it down dry. “You drink. You toke. Loosen up. Join the
band.”

“I’m not with the band and never will be
with the band,” I admitted. It came out more bitter than I would
have liked. “And I need to stay sharp. And so do you.”

“Oh, come on. I need fun!” He sounded like a
little boy who didn’t get his way, and actually started to look
like it when he stamped his feet a few times. “I thought you were
different from the rest of them.”

“Them?” I cocked a brow at him.

“Everyone,” he said exasperatingly. “You’re
a fan. You’re supposed to be fun. We feed you and you feed us. It’s
a two way street, groovy mama.”

I sighed. I was never a pushover when it
came to peer pressure, but I hadn’t dealt with Robbie Oliver
before. My willpower was powering down. Fast.

“Fine. I’ll do it.”

He let out an amusingly girlish yelp.

“But,” I warned him, raising my finger in
the air. “You have to promise me that this isn’t going to royally
fuck me up. I’m a virgin…at this sort of thing. I can’t be making a
fool of myself. I really, really can’t.”

He picked the pill off my hand and ran his
fingers along the bottom of my lip until it tingled. “Don’t worry
now. You won’t be worrying later.”

He placed the pill on my tongue and I
swallowed it.

CHAPTER NINE

Robbie wasn’t kidding when he said I
wouldn’t be worrying about it. It was a slow start and it didn’t
really kick in until we were back at the tour bus and the band was
just finishing up soundcheck. But when it finally hit me, it was
with a delicious bang.

I was hanging out in the backstage area
where all the drinks and food had been set up, all fold-out tables
and metal chairs, picking at some vegetables and dip that tasted
like it had been left out in the sun for too long. Suddenly I felt
immeasurably…good. The top of my head started to tingle and pretty
soon my fingers felt too numb to even grasp the carrots properly. I
gave up on them and sat back in the chair that earlier felt hard
and uncomfortable and now felt like it was crafted from a
marshmallow cloud.

“Rusty?” a Cockney accent rang out.

I slowly eased my head in its direction and
saw Jacob standing there, staring down at me with apprehension.

I couldn’t speak but that was okay. I gave
him a lopsided smile.

“Oh dear,” he muttered to himself and looked
around. The rest of the band was who knows where. In fact, all I
could remember was carrots and dip—who knew how long I’d been
sitting alone.

Finally, Jacob said, “Robbie put you up to
this, didn’t he? That cunt.”

His harsh words shocked me but didn’t stop
the flood of warmth through my numbed limbs. It was the weirdest
sensation. Wonderful.

“It was Quaaludes, wasn’t it?”

I found myself nodding.

“How many did you take?”

I held up a finger and finally managed to
say, “I’m okay. I feel good.”

“Of course you feel good. That’s not the
point. You need to have your wits about you, Rusty. That’s why
you’re here.”

You always said I should loosen up
, I
thought lazily to myself.

“How can you protect yourself when you’re
just sitting here, staring stupidly at the wall like some
ignoramus?”

“No one will hurt me,” I told him peacefully
and gave him another smile. I wasn’t afraid of his boys. I wasn’t
afraid of anything. I told him so.

“I don’t think you understand…it doesn’t
matter,” he said. “You just sit tight and don’t go anywhere.”

I did as he said. At some point later, as
people passed me in the hall as clouds of dust, Jacob appeared
again, soaring above me like a rough angel. He grabbed me by the
arm and hauled me to my feet. I couldn’t feel my feet! They were
gone and I had to look down to make sure they hadn’t been chopped
off by an invisible goblin.

“Easy now,” he told me. His strong grip on
my arms felt good too.

He brought me through a heavy door to the
side stage, and to my stupid surprise, I was met with a blast of
sweat, heat, and noise. There were fans screaming at the band—they
were already playing. The music hit my ears in a weird delay, but
once it found them, the notes wiggled their way into my brain like
a happy little worm.

I leaned against Jacob, minding his weird
smell of mothballs and coffee, but loving the feel of his large
firm body beside me. It was hard keeping my eyes focused, but when
they did, they went to Sage and Robbie. Speaking of Robbie, there
he was, fine as anything. He wasn’t as manic as usual, but he was
sensual and slow and I wanted a part of it.

Time was behaving badly, and within what
seemed like minutes, the show was over and everyone was heading
back to the dressing rooms. I loitered outside, splayed on the
chair while strangers ignored me and drank the band’s beer. The
effects started to wear off, but only enough so that I was able to
stand on my own two feet without collapsing to the ground in a pile
of mush.

I felt both bored and content and was making
my slow saunter over to the dressing room when the door opened and
Robbie emerged. His face lit up like a light bulb when he saw me
and it made me giggle.

“My rust-colored woman,” Robbie said,
ignoring a few pretty girls who had been hanging out in the corner
of the lounge waiting for him. He grabbed my head between both his
hands. “You must come with me.”

He took me out of the venue and outside,
where we spilled into the gated parking lot like a walking river of
bones and blood. The stars were high above, looking heavy in the
moisture-laden heat. We walked over to the tour bus. It was empty
and waiting, sitting like a metal beast.

It was a blur what happened next. I was
pressed against the bus, the cool chrome setting my bare skin to
tingles, and Robbie’s hands were in my hair and on my arms. It felt
good, too good, and all I could think of was sex. My sex. His sex.
All the sex in the world.

Then his lips were on mine and his tongue
was in my mouth and I had a horrible feeling deep in my gut that
this was wrong. Even my brain tried to shout rational things like,
“This is a mistake. You’re both on drugs. You’re a journalist. He’s
Robbie Oliver,” but my body wanted him. The drugs wanted him. And
from the way his hands were unzipping my jeans right there in
public in that open, dark parking lot, he wanted me too. What
Robbie wanted, Robbie got, and I was suddenly no different from any
of the other girls.

His tongue slid over my neck like honey and
I leaned back against the bus, letting that honey trail trickle
down into my shirt where he pulled my breast out with one hand and
started swirling around my nipple. I moaned loudly, not caring,
only feeling, and didn’t bat his other hand away when it slid
between my open pants and my stomach. His fingers reached for me,
playing with the soft hair between my legs, before they found my
clit and started rubbing. I moaned again until he brought his head
up and shoved his lips against mine. I couldn’t ask for the feeling
to end. I couldn’t ask him to stop.

But someone else would.

One aching second he was there at my mouth,
the next there was nothing but air on my lips and tongue. My eyes
flew open and saw Sage’s hand pulling Robbie back at the
shoulder.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Sage growled.

Robbie tried to push him away weakly.
“Whatever man, you cock-blocker.”

Sage shot me a look, sussing me out. I was
suddenly aware that my breast was popping out of my shirt and that
my pants were undone. Somewhere in the back of my head I knew I
would be embarrassed later on. I made a slow attempt to cover up
while Sage gave Robbie a shake.

“You can call me a cock-blocker all you
want, but getting the journalist high and taking advantage of her
isn’t usually in your repertoire.”

“She’s fine, she wants me,” Robbie said
casually and with a few slurs.

“She’s not. And you’re not,” Sage sniped and
pushed him away toward the venue. “Go find Jacob, he wants to talk
to you.”

Robbie stumbled off like a fawn just finding
its footing. I watched him go, trying to gather my thoughts and
senses. Things were wrong. I had just done a very bad thing and my
brain was too slow to catch on.

Satisfied that Robbie was on his way to
Jacob, Sage set his sights back on me. His eyes glinted like a
silver leaf in the night.

“You said you wouldn’t run away,” he said,
his voice low and husky. The sound of it made my nipples hard and I
knew his eyes flew to them for just one instant. Forget Robbie, if
Sage had wanted me right there and then I would have been all
his.

He tilted his head to the side, thinking
things over. I wondered if he knew what I was feeling; he must have
known that the drugs had me ready and willing. But whatever he
thought, he didn’t say. Not about that.

He took a step closer to me, putting one
hand against the bus and leaning on it, like the school stud
against a locker. My lips parted as I watched his, the wicked curve
of his mouth that led to dimples that sometimes appeared.

You could make love to me against this
bus
, I tried to say.
I won’t mind.

But somehow, I didn’t say it. What he had
said earlier was just coming around in my lude-addled brain.

“I’m not running away,” I said throatily.
“I’m still here.”

He smirked. “Are you, Dawn?”

He patted the top of my head gently with his
hand, his expression melancholic. “Are you here? Right now? There
are different ways to run away and I know them all. Whatever you
run from will always find you.”

I couldn’t make sense of it. “I took some
Quaaludes.”

“I know you did,” he cooed like a father
calming a crying baby. Then his face grew serious. “But here’s the
thing, Dawn. This band is my family. It’s pretty much the only
family I have and it’s my job to keep them functioning as long as
possible. When I fail, they fail and we all fail. There is no
later. There never was. Later is something that’s used up with the
lazy belief that there’s always a tomorrow. I do what I can now,
while I can. And this includes keeping everyone in line. Robbie
doesn’t need this complication in his life. The last thing this
band needs is for one of us to get mixed up with a journalist.
We’re all given a certain amount of time and all I ask is for my
time, our time, to go smoothly. Do you understand?”

Somehow, I did. I nodded meekly.

“You know I don’t want you here,” he
continued, the rolling wave of his voice balancing the harshness of
his words. “It’s nothing personal. And I also know you aren’t about
to go anywhere. You’re tougher than that. Or maybe just damn
stubborn. I’m making as much peace with this as I can. So if you’re
going to be here, with us, you’ll need to function too. This isn’t
a great start.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my eyes breaking away
from that dusky green. Whatever sexual, sensual urges the drugs had
been piling up in my loins were now dissipating fast.

He leaned back and removed his arm from
above my head. “Don’t be sorry. Just work with it. I don’t care who
you screw or when you screw them, but I think
you
do. You
just don’t remember.”

I nodded again and tried to pull myself off
the bus. He put his hands on both my shoulders and brought me up
straight. He kept them there, warm and strong, and leaned down a
little to look at me at eye level.

“Are you going to be okay?” he asked.

“I think I need to go to bed,” I said.

“All right, hold on.”

He kept one hand on me to keep me steady,
and with the other he pulled a pair of keys from his black pants
and stuck it in the bus door. After a few twists and turns of the
stubborn lock, there was a click and the door opened with a loud
groan. He gave me a quick smile.

“In case you’re wondering, if Bob’s still
sleeping at his hotel, I always have an extra set of keys.”

He came over to me and guided me up the
stairs, one step at a time. I leaned a little into his body and was
overcome by his smell of fresh ocean and pipe tobacco and the
immediate urge to sleep.

“Come on, you’re almost there,” he said as
my eyes began closing. I walked a few steps more and began to fall
toward the lower bunk. He caught me in his arms and they wrapped
around me with strength.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,
especially when Robbie comes back on. I love the bugger, but when
he’s on ludes, he’s going to try and hump everything, even the gear
shift. No offense, of course.”

None taken
, I thought.

“Do you need to go to the bathroom before
you pass the fuck out? I can hold you up but if you want me to do
anything else, you’re on your own.”

If I wasn’t fucked up out of my tree, I
would have thought Sage was trying to be funny. But I shook my head
no
, and the next thing I knew, Sage was lifting me in his
arms and somehow depositing me up on the top bunk. He did it
effortlessly and I felt like I was sinking down into a warm mass of
feathers.