Above the Noise (8 page)

“That’s what we’re here for.” I didn’t try to make nice. He could tell by my flippant attitude that I was pissed. I knew he was going to pick a fight with me before this whole tour ended.
Whatever. Bring it, bad ass.

Max smirked and shook his head before he counted them off. They played their single encore song then started packing up their stuff.

The guys and I got the space set up while Max continued to antagonize Frank about their encore. It felt so good to be playing again. Just a couple days without amps and mics and I felt like a part of me had been amputated. I loved acoustic, but there was nothing like a hard riff through an amp to bring your soul to life.

“You guys wanna do all five songs in the order we picked for the set?” My sentence was barely finished when Spider’s eyes flashed to something behind me. I turned just as Max walked up to me and shouted.

“Five songs? This isn’t your concert. You’re just the opening act. You get three songs. Got it?”

“Yeah, cool. Three songs because you don’t want us to show you up, we get it.” I turned to walk back to my mic.

“You fuckin’ with me? You wanna start somethin’?” He followed me, and when I stopped walking, he slammed into my back. I turned, and we were eye-to-eye. The size of his pupils told me he’d puffed up his attitude with some illegal substances, so I decided to give him a break.

“Look, man, I’m not trying to start anything. We just wanna play.” I rubbed the back of my neck just to give my right hand something to do so I didn’t take a shot at him. This guy was such an ass.

“Three songs.” He turned and flipped his coat like it was a fucking cape. What a tool.

They hadn’t left the studio when we started to practice our set. They grabbed a couple beers and took up one of the seating areas like uninvited guests. We planned to play two songs from our
Fallen
album and one new one we were working on. It was so new we hadn’t even titled it, yet. That was Bones’s thing. He usually picked our titles.

“Hey, Cal, what do you think of this for the bridge in the new song?” Manny played something that had a bluesy twang to it but kept a rock tempo. I loved it.

“Dude, that’s –”

“What?! You’re still
writing
the songs you’re performing for the tour? Are you kidding me? Where did we get these guys? Come on. Fuck!” Just Max’s voice alone grated on my nerves. Add his inflated ego and I couldn’t help but fantasize about beating the shit out of him. I’d knocked out guys twice his size before.

I tried to speak without clenching me jaw, because all I really wanted to do was throttle him. “Listen, Max, you worry about your music, and we’ll worry about ours. Last I checked, you don’t have a say in what we play.” I shoved my hands in my pockets to control the urge to bust his face wide open. Not many people could even see the small vicious thread that hid deep down inside me, but Max was picking at it, and it was just a matter of time.

“Then you didn’t read the fine print, hair boy.”

Hair boy?
That made me chuckle a little. “Come on, man. Let’s not do this. We’re gonna be spending a hell of a lot of time together. You really need to bring it down a notch.”

“I read the fine print, Max.” Becki’s voice came out of nowhere, and she said his name like it burned her tongue. “And I assure you there is nothing in the contract that gives you any say in what songs Alternate Tragedy plays for their set.” She slowly sidled over to where Max and I stood.

Holy shit, she was hot. Immediately, my mind was thrown back to earlier that day when I was between her legs. My stomach rolled, and my dick swelled. I had to put those thoughts out of my head if I was going to stay connected to the conversation that played out in front of me, because if he pulled his condescending attitude with her, I’d take him down.

“Well, well, well. And who do we have here?”

“Hi, Max, Frank, Ben, Troy, Steve.” She smiled and tipped her head to each of them as she said their name. “I’m Becki Mowry, Alternate Tragedy’s manager. All contracts and deals go through me. We had a long chat with Mr. Barnes about the details of our contract, and I can assure you, they can play what they want.” Becki walked up to Max without an ounce of hesitation. Her balls were huge.

“So, Becki, you wanna talk about this over dinner tonight?” Max raised an eyebrow, and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I shoved my hands in my pockets again and looked over at Manny. He winked and nodded his assurance that Becki had the situation under control, which helped me breathe a little deeper.

Becki smiled and took two steps toward Max. She reached up and put her hand on the lapel of his fuck ugly leather coat. “Max, I will let you take me to dinner, under one condition.”

My fists clenched inside my pockets. What the hell was she doing?

“And what’s that, beautiful?” He reached up toward her face. She took a step back and calmly blocked his hand with her forearm.

“You can take me to dinner tonight if you get down on your knees and blow Calon.”

“WHAT?!” Max and I yelled in stereo. The visual in my head made me want to puke. I had no doubt Max felt the same way.

“No fucking way!” Max acted as though he actually thought she was serious.
Idiot.

“Well, sorry, Max, but our deal’s off. And I guess
I’ll
just have to do it for you.” She winked and walked toward me. Gene Krupa would have been proud of the
badum-ching
Bones banged out on Spider’s snare drum, signaling Becki’s score over Max. The guys all lost it! Even Max’s guys laughed.

Becki’s hands came up to my face and held me still. My jaw still clenched, I glared at Max over Becki’s head. I was ready to rip his throat out.

“Calon, down here.” Her voice was so calm and sultry, almost like she got off on putting Max in his place. “Calon, take your eyes off him and put your lips on mine this minute.”

She didn’t have to ask twice. She kissed me deep, and my mind went somewhere else. We could have been standing in the middle of a busy intersection, and I wouldn’t have noticed. Becki Mowry stole my heart right out from under me. Her hands went to my ass, and she squeezed and pressed me into her.

“Come on!” Bones yelled and threw Spider’s sticks. “This is getting ridiculous!”

“Bones, grab Spider’s sticks. Let’s practice our set. You stayin’, Max?” I looked at him while still inside the loop of Becki’s arms. He scoffed and shook his head. Frank, Troy, Ben, and Steve shook all of our hands, and they all headed out.

“Well, look at me, won’t ya.” Becki fell back onto the black leather couch that sat about six feet from my mic. “Private show by the hottest guys in LA.”

“You think I’m hot?” Bones’s chest puffed out. “Cal! Your girl wants me.” Bones had himself so excited he tripped over the cord to his bass and fell on his ass.

WE PRACTICED FOR
over two hours and then decided to head out to the nightclub we’d be playing on Friday to check out the vibe, see the stage and introduce ourselves to the management.

The line outside Paisley almost wrapped around the building. Bones drooled as his eyes raked over all the bare legs in line. There were definitely more women than men, which was good to know. Playing to a mostly female audience was very different than playing for a bar full of dudes.

“Dammit, Cal. We’ll never get in here.” Manny was the partier of the group. Bones could drink like it was an Olympic sport, but Manny loved everything about the nightlife. The dude didn’t need sleep.

“Hang on, guys.” Becki dove into the big hobo bag she always carried, pulled something out and spun on her heel. She looked back at us and smiled. “I got this. Hang tight.” But before she walked toward the front of the line she adjusted her bright blue top to show just a little more cleavage and shimmied her form fitting black skirt further up her thighs. The gait she took off with was sexy and every guy in line thought so, too. I made a mental note to talk to her about that technique when we got back to the room later.

She returned in less than five minutes fanning herself with five bright blue cards on lanyards. She got to us and handed us each a V.I.P pass for the celebrity lounge on the second floor of Paisley.

“How’d you do this, Becki?” Spider asked.

“Well, while you guys were having a pissing contest with Max, I was at the printer having some business cards made up. The guy at the door recognized the band name from the posters hanging inside. He was happy to let you guys in.

As we followed her to the front of the line, I reached down with both hands and pulled her skirt down to a more acceptable length.

“Prude.” She giggled, grabbed my hand, and snuggled into my side.

The entrance was a tubular hallway of neon lights. We made our way through, only getting stopped a couple times by people who knew who we were. The flashing tunnel opened up and the quiet hum grew louder and louder by the second. By the time we got to the bar, there were girls all around us. We were used to girls digging our music. We used to hang out with our female fans on our breaks at Mitchell’s. They were fun girls we could laugh and joke with. Don’t get me wrong, we’d been propositioned more than once, but we always respectfully declined. Well, except for Bones.

The term
groupies
always seemed seedy and dirty to me. I, personally, didn’t like the word. But the girls at Paisley, yeah, they were closer to the groupie end of my measuring stick. We were being touched and groped and, as far as we knew, not one of them had ever seen us play. They were all over us, I assumed, just because our faces were plastered on the walls of the entryway.

“Cal, I feel like a piece of meat—and I love it!” Bones was grabbing and groping right back. He, of course, then followed a couple girls away from our group.

Spider and I both called, “Not it!”

“Shit!” Manny was always slow at that game. We all knew there had to be a chaperone assigned to Bones, or we’d lose him. It’d happened one too many times that we left a bar and headed to the van only to realize we were one man short. We’d eventually find him in someone’s back seat, or he’d call from someone’s apartment, but it always dragged the night out longer, and, quite frankly, it got annoying.

“You must be Calon.” A beautiful blonde stood before me in a skin tight black tank and boobs that held their own zip code. I felt awkward because Becki was right next to me with her hand in my back pocket. I didn’t want to flirt back, but at the same time I knew blowing off fans wasn’t a good idea for any musician, especially an up and coming band. Becki’s hand slowly slid out of my back pocket, and she slapped my ass.

“Go get ‘em, rock star.” She winked and linked arms with Manny. “Come on, Manny, we’ve got a bandmate to babysit.” She was so fucking cool.

“Dude, I’ll get us some pitchers.” Spider headed to the bar.

I looked back down at the blonde, smiled and winked. “I am. And you are?”

“Adrienne.” She whined her name then leaned in toward me and stood up on her toes. Her face was just a couple inches from mine, and I could smell about twelve tequila shots on her breath.

“Who are you here with, Adrienne?” I’m sure she took it as my way of finding out if she was available, but I truly just wanted to know who to drop her off with when I was ready to end our conversation.

“Just a couple friends of mine, but I’d like to go home with you.” She winked and fell into my chest. I steadied her with my hands on her shoulders.

“Well, darlin’, I really don’t think that’s a good idea.” I felt like a dick, but, even if I wasn’t madly in
something
with Becki, Adrienne wasn’t my type. As old fashioned as it sounded, I wasn’t made for one night stands or a quick fuck in the coatroom, and nothing, not even Adrienne, was going to change that about me.

She started to say something, but I noticed a head full of messy black hair out of the corner of my eye. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end even before I turned to see who it was.

Max had one hand on each of Becki’s shoulders as if he was trying to hold her still. There were too many people crowded around Adrienne and me to see Becki’s face, but I worried. My fists clenched and released then clenched again at my sides. I was more concerned about Becki’s reaction to me stepping in than I was about taking a few hits from Max.