Taste Me

by Tamara Hogan

  “The wine?”

  “The hug,” she replied with a smile. “It’s good to be home.”

  “Glad to have you back. And don’t think I don’t notice how bony you are under that floppy sweatshirt. Are you okay?”

  No. I’m not. “Just tired,” she responded instead. And other than a raised eyebrow, he didn’t call her on it, thank the universe—not that he’d hold off for long. But she couldn’t explain how she felt to herself yet, much less to someone else.

  “Hey, Flynn!” a disembodied voice hollered from the club’s back office. “Are you going to close out the tills here or what?”

  Flynn hesitated.

  “Go count some money,” she said, shooing him with one hand and picking up the bottle he’d set beside her with the other. “You’ll have all the time in the world to browbeat me.”

  As Flynn departed, Michael, the band’s incubus lead guitarist, said something that made the group guffaw once again. Clangs and curses echoed from the industrial kitchen as the last pots and pans were washed. Plastic cups and bottles clacked as one of the closers pushed a huge broom across the darkened dance floor. Behind the bar, backlit liquor bottles gleamed like rough-cut jewels, and glasses clinked as everyone’s drink orders were filled. Sound bounced off every surface, hitting the back of her skull with the subtlety of a nail gun. She wanted to plug her ears. Put on her headset. Scream for silence.

  But if she let herself scream, she wouldn’t stop. So she breathed deeply, tried to push the noise, the panic, into the background. Focus on something else, anything else. Her eyes cruised over the plum-colored walls, nearly black in the shadowy light, and locked on to the most dominant thing in the room: the sculpture that surrounded the stage and formed most of the club’s west wall. Steel, aluminum, and pewter undulated three stories to the ceiling, in a functional piece of art that cleverly directed sound from the stage out into the performance area. It was gorgeous, and both Architectural Digest and Audiophile had featured it in their magazines.

  “Toasts!” Tansy, their valkyrie bassist, called from the far end of the table with a glance at her watch. “Let’s get this show on the road, people!”

  Scarlett smirked. Tansy’s bondmates, gorgeous twin vampires, were probably waiting up for her. Naked, in bed.

  “Stephen, here’s your—where’s Stephen?” Flynn asked as he strode from the back carrying the bottle of absinthe the drummer preferred.

  “He didn’t feel well and went home awhile ago. He’ll meet us at Crackhouse for brunch before sound check,” Scarlett said, referring to the other business housed in the Sebastiani Building. Her best friend Sasha Sebastiani managed both Underbelly and Crackhouse Coffee, and they also shared one of the building’s penthouse apartments with Scarlett’s sister Annika. “But he left me his toast.” She waited for the table to quiet down, for Flynn to fill a delicate glass with the glowing green liqueur. Scarlett raised it. “To groupies.”

  The toast was so like Stephen, and so not like Scarlett, that laughter rolled.

  “He’s the reason the tour bus smelled like sex all the time,” Tansy grumbled. “On the next tour we need to have a ‘no sex on the bus’ rule.”

  “You can’t be serious,” one of their roadies said. “Good luck with that.”

  “You and your rules,” Michael said with a roll of his eyes. “You’d have to wallpaper it from stem to stern to cover all the places Stephen’s had sex on that bus. And then he’d just find places no one had thought about yet.”

  “Those damn socks of his. Jesus, he’s got some foot funk,” Joe, the vampire who played rhythm guitar and keyboards, chimed in. He raised his creamy Guinness. “Here’s to clean socks.”

  “To 3:00 a.m. greasy spoon breakfasts!”

  “To room service!”

  “To Nessie, who got us here safely!” “Nessie” was the band’s nickname for their workhorse tour bus, which had covered over 50,000 miles on this last tour, with only one stop for repairs outside Calgary.

  A cheer went up. “Hear, hear!”

  “To the next tour!” someone called. Everyone groaned again. Scarlett laughed as she was expected to, but her gut bubbled in warning. “Let’s finish this one first, okay?” she said. “We do have one more show to go.” And she was dreading it.

  Flynn appeared at her elbow again and lifted the bottle of wine, but she put her hand over the top of her glass before he could pour. “Nope, I’m cutting myself off.”

  He peered at her. Too closely. “Good call. Ready to call it a night?”

  “Yes, yes, yes.” A yawn escaped, and she shivered through her layers. “Brrr. It was freezing when we left the hotel in Chicago this morning, and when we pulled in tonight, it was hot enough to steam rice. Now I’m cold again.”

  Flynn nodded in agreement. “Fall in Minnesota. Why do we live here again?”

  “So we have something to bitch about, of course.” Scarlett snagged her purse off the floor and stood.

  Accusations of “party pooper” rained over her as the others noticed she was leaving. “I’m following Stephen’s lead and getting some sleep. We have one more show, boys and girls, and I, for one, need my beauty sleep.”

  “Scarlett, what’s your toast?” Tansy called.

  Shit, the last toast was hers. She paused and closed her eyes. “To…” To silence, to solitude. To hibernating until the snow melts next spring. When she opened them, everyone was looking at her expectantly. No way could she say what she really felt. She picked up Stephen’s absinthe and raised the glass. “To our homecoming. To sleeping in our own beds tonight—whether alone or with company—and to a great show tomorrow night,” she finally said. A cheer went up as she drained the shot of glowing green liquor.

  She responded to the calls of “Good night” and “See you tomorrow!” with a wave and almost sagged against Flynn as he walked her through the unmarked door leading to the back of the house.

  “Want to raid the refrigerator, have a bedtime snack?” Flynn said as they passed the noisy kitchen.

  “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”

  Flynn eyed her. “You look like you haven’t been hungry for a while. You sure? How ‘bout a Milky Way milkshake?”

  Scarlett’s stomach lurched. “No thanks, I just want to go to bed.”

  They stopped at the private elevator leading to the penthouse apartments. Scarlett stood there blankly, blinking when Flynn pulled a card out of his pocket and swiped it. The elevator doors opened with a swish. Flynn bundled her in and smacked a kiss on her temple. “Welcome home, darlin’. Get to bed. Sleep well.”

  “Good night,” she called as the elevator doors closed. “Thank you, Flynn.”

  The butter-smooth ride to the tenth floor started, and she turned her back to the elevator’s smirking mirrored walls. She didn’t need an up-close-and-personal view of the damage the road had wreaked, thank you very much. Her weight loss and the condition of her skin had had Jesse, her bodyguard-cum-stylist, tsk-tsking for the last month or so. With no makeup on, her green eyes were the only shot of color on her face, and her red hair was wilted and limp. While Tansy had recently started complaining that her favorite leather pants were getting too tight— “too many damn Hot Pockets”—Jesse had had to alter some of Scarlett’s performance clothing. But on the plus side, shopping had been required. What woman didn’t get a zing out of buying her jeans a size—okay, two sizes—smaller than usual?

  The elevator drew to a stop, and the doors opened onto the dimly lit foyer for the two penthouse units on the top floor of the Sebastiani Building. Scarlett forced herself to move before the elevator doors closed on her and took her back downstairs.

  The foyer was blissfully silent. On the table directly across from the elevator, a Tiffany lamp burned in welcome. A trio of pictures of the aurora borealis still hung on the wall above the table, greenish blue magnetic sheets coating the night sky. A single, exquisite orchid stood in a crystal vase, its petals a pink so pale they seemed white. She picked up the small la
vender note card leaning against the vase, and read. “Welcome home, darling. Love you, Mom.” Smiling, she touched the flower’s delicate petals with her forefinger, and then tucked the card in her back pocket.

  Elliott Sebastiani’s stately apartment was off to the right. She veered left, to the four-bedroom unit.

  Key, key… where was her key?

  It was a sign of everything that was wrong with her life that she didn’t know where her own damn house key was. When was the last time she’d unlocked anything other than a hotel room door for herself? She wearily opened her landfill of a purse, pawed through candy wrappers, pens, matchbooks from the clubs they’d played, enough tubes of lip gloss to stock a cosmetics counter, a stray tampon. Her wallet. She found the right card, slid it into the slot underneath the doorknob, waited for the light to turn green, and opened the heavy door. Closed it softly behind her.

  Home. She was home at last. Away from the incessant attention that made her feel like a wild animal pacing behind bars at the zoo. Alone. At least for a few hours. No autograph seekers, no star fuckers, no paparazzi. And, love ’em dearly, no band mates, no roadies, no crew. They were all overdue for some time to themselves. It had been months since she’d slept in her own bed, and it was just fifteen strides away. She just… had to convince her feet to move.

  She took a step in the dim light and promptly stumbled over a suitcase. “Damn.” Had she wakened Sasha and Annika? It had been so long since she’d been home that her roommates would be more apt to think a robber was opening the door than her.

  Nah. No robber would ever reach this door, because with his sister living here, and his father living across the foyer, Lukas Sebastiani had used every bit of his legendary skill to ensure the place was locked down tight.

  Her own safety? Just a happy coincidence. Lukas avoided her like the plague. She sighed. Yeah, okay, the avoiding was reciprocal, but occurred for completely different reasons. Lukas didn’t care about her, and she… cared too much. Hurt too much. But that was going to change. Once she felt better rested, she would deal with Lukas, once and for all.

  Scarlett made her way to her bedroom without turning on the lights or waking her roommates. She shut the door behind her, flipped the switch, and flooded the room with light. Though the turquoise walls glowed and there was no dust, the room felt a little sterile after such a long period of disuse. For a few minutes, she simply puttered, reacquainting herself with her things. A faint scent of rain permeated the room from a candle that someone—Sasha, most likely—had left burning in welcome on her bedside table. Passing the sound system, she unclipped her iPod—facetiously named Sigmund in honor of the psychiatrist Sigmund Freud—from the hip pocket of her jeans, docked it, and pressed Play. She barely blinked when the shuffle feature queued up Michael Jackson’s “Scream.”

  It just figured.

  As the music throbbed softly into the room, she trailed her hand over the intricate contemporary quilt covering her maple four-poster bed. Priceless, too precious to take with her on the road. The faerie quilt swirled with all the colors of the ocean: teal, turquoise, tanzanite. Indigo and midnight blue tipping to nearly black, the occasional flash of lime green. She’d commissioned it the day she’d turned eighteen, the youngest age the faeries would consider such a request—her illustrious lineage be damned—because in addition to providing warmth and beauty for a lifetime, faerie quilts catalyzed dreams, and such things could not be trusted to youth. During her hypnotic blur of an interview, Scarlett had apparently described her favorite childhood fantasy: She was a mermaid, swimming through the bath-warm tropics, caring for the creatures feeding near the towering kelp forest.

  Not a siren singing men to their deaths, thank you very much.

  Her eyes were drawn to the plum-framed Annie Leibovitz prints lining the walls, pictures of the musicians she respected, some of whom she’d been lucky enough to collaborate with and now counted as friends. Her own photograph by the famed rock photographer hung around the corner, tucked in the alcove which held her desk and computer—part of the collection, yet not. Hers was a matted pair of prints: first, the staged shot which had appeared in Vanity Fair about a year ago as part of a story on emerging female songwriters, Scarlett presented as a majestic siren luring ships into the cliffs with her voice, standing strong and sinuous on a bluff overlooking the pounding Irish Sea near dusk, barefooted on the rocks, arms stretched to the elements. Power pulsed off the picture, and Scarlett stared at it in amazement. Who was that? Was even a fraction of it real, or was it all smoke and mirrors?

  She looked at the second print and smiled. She and Annie were hugging after the shoot, Annie seemingly impervious to the weather, but Scarlett bundled into an ugly, ankle-length, down jacket, UGGs on her feet, knit cap on her wet hair, her hands wrapped around a steaming mug of tea. Bedraggled, runny nose, blue lips and fingernails.

  This Scarlett she had no problem recognizing.

  The bed called to her, but she checked for messages first, and then quickly flipped through the piles of mail someone had deemed important enough for her to see, but not urgent enough to deliver to her on the road. How did Garrett receive her mail? How had he delivered her latest house key when he was on the road with them most of the time? She’d never thought about it before. She’d gotten used to being hustled and bundled from location to location, conserving her flagging energy for the next performance. The road was a bubble in which real life fell by the wayside. An escape. Just like she’d wanted, had asked for.

  But now it was time for real life again. She wanted to sort through her own mail. She yearned to sort laundry into colors, choose which temperature to wash them in, turn the knobs. To go to the grocery store and choose her own fresh oranges, shop for her own damn tampons—not just have them magically appear when she needed them.

  Her face blazed with heat. Garrett even managed her period.

  She looked up to the picture of The Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde, met her wise, kohl-rimmed eyes. Would Chrissie let some man manage her menstrual cycle? Hell no.

  She had to make some changes—starting with confronting her pitiful feelings for Sasha’s lunk of a brother.

  She made herself think back to Annika’s Succession Ceremony late last summer, the day her sister had officially become the Siren Second, a member of the Underworld Council. The weather that day had been hot and gorgeous, drenched in history, laughter, and sunlight. Held at Annika’s choice of venue, The Calhoun Beach Club in Minneapolis, the Succession Ceremony itself had taken place in one of the smaller private ballrooms, its French doors thrown open to the lake and the adjoining private beach which was theirs for the day. Though “succession casual” had ruled the day, the simple and moving rite had played out as it had for hundreds of years, with Wyland carrying the Council Tome to the front of the room where a candle-laden, white-clothed table had been set up on a riser. Valerian, resplendent in his black, grey, and white tapestry robes, had stood behind the table facing them, with Annika and her mother positioned on each side. Scarlett herself had been seated in the front row, hyper-aware of Lukas’s big body shifting uncomfortably in his chair at the end of the row. Even after Valerian had intoned the final emotional words of the ceremony—“All that was. All that is. All that shall be”—as he’d scribed Annika’s name underneath her mother’s with his flashy Mont Blanc pen, she’d been fine. But when each Council member had approached Annika, ceremonially kissing her forehead, heart, left cheek, right cheek, lips… Scarlett gulped.

  Admit it. Watching Lukas place his lips on her sister’s mouth, even platonically, had fractured something inside of her. And she’d ducked out of the after party, dialing up Garrett and setting tour plans in motion before she’d even left the Calhoun Beach Club parking lot.

  What had ever made her think that touring for over a year would be a viable solution, would anesthetize her useless, pitiful feelings? All she’d accomplished was burning herself out. The year swirled through her brain: sold out shows. Music and merch s
ales through the roof. Hundreds of thousands of hits to the band’s website, spiking when Scarlett herself posted in their online road journal. Yes, the tour had been successful beyond Garrett’s wildest dreams, but she’d been going through the motions for months. She couldn’t write for shit, and looked even worse. About halfway through the tour, she’d started singing other artist’s songs more frequently than her own because… it was easier. It hurt less to interpret the emotions in songs other people had written, and she did it very, very well. Wildly popular, Scarlett’s Web cover shows had become epic events, guaranteeing an emotional roller coaster ride one would never forget.

  But no one knew the sense of failure she felt every single night the band performed. It was bad enough she wasn’t writing her own music, but she was also too much of a chickenshit to sing her own backlist.

  She couldn’t think anymore, couldn’t focus. She lost her temper more easily than she used to. Her life felt like it was happening to someone else. And that was going to change, she affirmed as she undressed. She needed to feel her own feelings again, not run from them, no matter how painful they were. And she couldn’t move on until she confronted her feelings for Lukas Sebastiani.

  The bastard.

  Yes, it was time to get her life back on track. Scarlett climbed into bed naked, pulling the puffy quilt over her bare shoulders. Please, no dreams tonight. Because in her dreams, she tumbled in the sheets with a rock of a man, with the incubus who’d kissed her, devoured her, initiating her into womanhood so deliciously that she’d… screamed.

  Ruining her for anyone else.

  Chapter 3

  The night sky was brightening, about to tip over to dawn, and the lobby of Memorial Hospital was filled with people who never expected they’d be making a pit stop at the emergency room. The sharp taste of iron spurted under Lukas’s tongue as yet another ambulance screamed to a stop at the entrance. Adrenaline pumped as the medical staff jumped into action like football players, choreography he’d become familiar with during the hours he, Jack, and Krispin Woolf had been waiting for Andi Woolf to come out of surgery. First, a medical response team trotted out the door and onto the field. They opened the ambulance door, listened to the EMT squatting like a coach in the back of the vehicle beside the patient. The sleepy resident quarterbacking the play then rapped out a jargon-filled stream of orders that Lukas sure as shit hoped made sense to someone. Snap goes the gurney. Gurney and passenger were quickly wheeled to the end zone.