Taste Me

by Tamara Hogan

  The door swung open, and one of the employees came in. He set a takeout cup on the counter, and the loamy scent of coffee filled the air. Stephen peered at the man’s name tag, written in the same faux-seedy font as the sign over the door. Padrick.

  “Hey, Stephen,” Padrick said. “Tansy asked me to bring this in, said they’d meet you next door.” He untied the black apron he wore over an equally black T-shirt and hung it on a hook on the wall. The T-shirt set off the red, orange, and yellow flame tattoos licking up his muscular forearms.

  Padrick was… really hot. And here he was, looking like he’d just rolled out of bed.

  The other man stepped into a stall and closed the door behind him.

  “Thanks,” he called over the sound of Padrick’s belt clanking. A zipper whooshed. Denim rustled.

  “Did you hear about what happened to Andi Woolf?” Padrick called from the stall.

  “Hmm?” Stephen pried the top off the coffee and sipped. Bless you, Tansy.

  “Andi Woolf. You know Krispin Woolf, the Underworld Council? His daughter.” The sound of liquid hitting the water stopped. After a pause, Padrick zipped up. “Someone attacked her at Subterranean last night.”

  As the toilet flushed, fragments of the previous evening started snapping together like puzzle pieces: the howling wolf tattoo riding low on her back. The nips on his lips as she kissed him. Andi Woolf. His Candy Girl was the daughter of the WerePack Alpha.

  Damn, he sure could pick ’em.

  The stall door opened. “Yeah, she was in surgery for hours,” Padrick said. “Someone really did a number on her.”

  The ground dropped out from beneath Stephen’s feet. “She’s still alive?”

  “Yeah,” Padrick said as he turned on the faucet and washed his hands. “I guess she’s in a coma, and her throat’s a mess, but Andi is one tough bitch.”

  Stephen was so stunned that he didn’t register how Padrick subtly brushed against him as he crossed to the bathroom hand dryer. What the hell was he going to do? Part of him was relieved that he hadn’t snuffed out the glorious energy which had lit him up like… He shook his head, hard. What the hell was he going to do if she survived? Recovered? Came out of her coma and identified him as her attacker? Had anyone seen them together? He wasn’t exactly anonymous anymore. Next to Scarlett herself, he was the band member with the most notoriety. The bad boy, up for anything.

  Damn it. It would only take a couple of questions for law enforcement to place him at the scene, for his band mates to learn that he’d blown off their welcome home celebration to get laid.

  In his pocket, his PDA vibrated again. Garrett. But Stephen met Padrick’s Irish blue eyes, read their invitation. In case there was any mistake, Padrick raised a brow and tilted his head toward the stall.

  The scratching in his chest started anew. Garrett—and worry—could wait.

  Ten minutes later, Stephen stepped into Underbelly’s cavernous performance space carrying his cooling coffee in one hand and rubbing at his sternum with the other. While his muscles were still uncomfortably tight, an excellent blow job had taken the edge off. Thanks to Padrick, he just might make it through sound check without his arms breaking off.

  Despite the scrupulously mopped floor, the slightest whiff of stale beer permeated the place. Right now, hours before a show, Underbelly was brightly lit, and bustled with pre-show industry. Up on the stage, an army of blue-jeaned, black-shirted instrument techs went about their work, tuning guitars and placing them in stands where Michael, Joe, Tansy, and Scarlett could easily grab them. Their custom rolling storage crates still littered the stage. Roadies crawled on the floor, employing their ever-present duct tape. His own drum tech, a taciturn man with an aggressive gray brush cut, was still setting up his high hat.

  He wasn’t officially late.

  A loud crash echoed through the space as a light tech dropped a bulb from three stories up. “Everyone okay?” Sasha Sebastiani called from behind the sound board at the back of the dance floor. Randy, their magician of a sound guy, huddled beside her, his tongue practically hanging out of his mouth. Knowing Randy, it was because of the sound system, not the woman.

  Still unnoticed back in the shadows, he eyeballed Sasha Sebastiani. Even if he hadn’t known who she was by name or lineage, her aura would have tipped him off immediately. Succubus. Sexual power rolled off her, and he really liked her look, especially her punk-pixie hair, black with hot pink streaks. Her chopped up T-shirt showed off collarbones that would snap at a touch, and her viciously expensive jeans looked like they’d been pulled out of a Dumpster.

  “Hey, move those tables further apart,” she hollered to the workers setting tables up along the rails bracketing three sides of the second floor, where patrons who wanted a chair, bottle service, and a little elbow room could obtain it—for a price. The workers quickly followed her orders. A vacuum moaned from one of the coveted VIP boxes ringing the third floor, each with sliding glass doors and heavy plum curtains that could be pulled shut for privacy.

  Standing at the lip of the stage wearing walking shorts, a sweater, and flip-flops, Michael noodled the opening guitar riff of Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine.” Stephen winced as the high notes shrieked through him, raising gooseflesh on his arms and back. His PDA buzzed again. “I’m here, I’m here,” he muttered, shutting the unit off. He slowly emerged from the shadowy back corner into the full light of the performance space, the jingling of his boot chains giving him away.

  “There he is. Hey, Stephen.” Joe stepped down from the L-shaped, multi-level riser where he was setting up keyboards, synthesizer, and the computers used to run them. Wires and cables slithered across the stage. As Stephen approached, Joe leaned over the edge of the stage and extended his arm to give him a boost up.

  Stephen looked at the short stairway leading up to the stage, then back to Joe’s arm.

  “You fuckin’ pussy.”

  Tansy stopped tightening the strings on her bass. “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Allow me assist you onto the stage, fine young gentleman,’” Joe called back.

  “Yeah, I thought so.” She slung her bass over her torso, settling it against her muscular upper thighs.

  Joe crouched down closer to Stephen. “Ears like a bat.”

  Stephen took a deep breath. He would look like a pussy if he took the stairs. His tendons audibly snapped as he accepted Joe’s boost up the six-foot stage. It was all he could do not to whimper.

  “Jesus, you’re tight. I thought you went home to get some sleep last night,” Joe said under his breath. “What did you really do? Orgy with the American Gladiators? Bar fight? Something I couldn’t imagine, even if I tried?”

  Those final, euphoric moments in Subterranean’s bathroom—Andi Woolf’s throat crunching under his thumbs like potato chips, the light bulbs shattering overhead like hot stinging rain—probably qualified.

  Joe scanned him for injuries, but the other man wouldn’t find anything, thanks to the wide wristbands he wore. At the very end, Andi’s fingernails had dug in to his wrists—hard. Under the wristbands, gauze-wrapped wounds still oozed blood.

  Joe glanced at his watch. “You don’t have time to loosen up with a hot shower—which, might I add, you could use anyway. Whew.” Reaching for the tight muscles in Stephen’s neck, he muttered, “If you can’t move, Garrett’s going to skin you alive.”

  Joe’s strong hands hurt like a mother, but Stephen gutted it out. Joe was right about Garrett. While sound check ran a bit more loosely than an actual performance, there was no such thing as “just” rehearsal. Every member of the band took sound check as seriously as a heart attack. If they didn’t get the sound balanced correctly now, the show would suck later.

  “Ouch,” Stephen hissed when Joe hit a particularly touchy spot.

  “Why the hell are you so tight?” Joe lessened the pressure and lowered his voice. “Must have been some night.”

  Stephen thought about Andi’s hips, moving
and swaying as the music pounded. Her candy-sweet taste. Her near feral expression as she shoved him up against the bathroom stall wall. The suction of her soft, wet mouth on his dick, pulling him up onto his toes. Her life force, slamming into him like a speedball.

  Michael’s amp shrieked feedback.

  “Jesus.” Joe jerked his hands away.

  Randy trotted the length of the wooden floor up to the stage, tool belt clanking. “What the hell was that?” He looked accusingly at one of the roadies. “Do I have to do everything myself?”

  “Hey, don’t ask me,” the guy said, eyeing the amp like it was a baby who’d suddenly filled its diaper.

  Snap. The amp crackled again. Randy looked at it, nonplussed.

  Stephen’s forearm muscles jumped and twitched like they were attached to a car battery. He hid the arm behind his back.

  “Time to saddle up, boys and girls.” Garrett’s amplified, disembodied voice filled the venue, Wizard of Oz style. Heads swiveled as the members of the band looked for their manager. They finally found him seated at one of the tables on the second floor rail, near the back.

  Randy finished his careful examination of the cords and wires around Michael’s amp, ripping off a long piece of duct tape from his own roll and slapping it over cords that were already securely fastened. “Looks okay here.” He jumped the six feet from the stage back down to the floor, and trotted back to the soundboard.

  “Ready when you are, Randy.”

  Randy put on a headset, pressed a button, and the crisp opening percussion of Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” snicked out of the massive, three-floor amplification system, bouncing off the floor and the acoustic panels on the side walls and ceiling. Stephen couldn’t help but smile—Jesus, you could practically hear the air vibrating around the notes. Thankfully, Randy could test some of the balances and levels using recorded music, and he wouldn’t have to play every damn song himself, but he only had a few more minutes to work the kinks out, and to ensure his kit was set up well enough to get him through sound check. Climbing the riser which elevated his drum kit for greater stage visibility, he dropped gratefully onto the padded stool, carefully stretching his arms out to verify the spacing of the snare, the cymbals, his high hat. He grabbed a set of 5B sticks from the bin at his feet, and made sure 5As were available. Three bottles of room temperature water, caps off, were already lined up at attention at the side of his kick drum.

  From her position at his left, he watched Tansy’s fingers twitch as she unconsciously played along to the recording. At his smile, she cursed and put on her “ears,” the custom-made, in-ear monitors that allowed each band member to hear their own voices and instruments in the amplified mix. Stephen grabbed his own headset and slung it around his neck.

  The next song queued up, segueing from new wave crispness to lush, dissonant harmonies. Michael strolled back to the drums. “Look at Randy. I think he’s about to come in his pants.”

  Randy was almost bouncing with glee as he stood next to Sasha Sebastiani.

  “Hell, so am I.” Stephen paused. “What do you think the chances are of us actually playing some originals tonight? I’m so tired of this cover song shit.”

  Michael shrugged. “It’s up to Scarlett—your guess is as good as mine. But the crowd loves it.” He walked back to his position, putting in his own ears.

  Stephen’s shoulders screamed as he slipped on his headset. Christ, the next half hour was going to be brutal. As Randy cued up “Slide” by Dido to work out the sound system’s higher range, the stage lights came on unexpectedly, bright as a supernova. Stephen winced and reached for his sunglasses as the heat washed over him. “Give us some warning, will you?”

  “Hard night, Stephen?” Garrett said laconically.

  He answered Garrett’s question with a raised middle finger, but he could feel their manager’s gaze linger on him as the song continued. Damn it. He definitely looked like he’d been on an all-night bender instead of resting at home. His hair’s bedhead style was 100 percent authentic this morning, and it showed. Putting the sunglasses on over his bleary eyes had probably tipped his unkempt look over into degeneracy.

  His abdominal muscles clenched. It would be just like the son of a bitch to choose songs with the most difficult drum parts in creation for sound check, just to teach him a lesson.

  The song ended. Michael stripped off his Argyle sweater and stretched from side to side. Joe simply stood, waiting for the abbreviated set list Garrett would call on the fly. Tansy made eyes with her bondmates standing in the wings. Devotion and lust drifted over to him, and the beast in his chest stirred.

  Shit. Not now.

  “Okay, showtime,” Garrett said, eyeing each member of the band.

  “Did Scarlett give you a set list yet?” Michael called. “Are we playing any originals tonight?”

  “Not yet, and I don’t know. So let’s be ready for anything.”

  Stephen watched Garrett’s thumb twirl over the iPod in his hand, a duplicate of the one they all carried. Every band member had to be ready to play any song stored on the damn thing, and there were thousands upon thousands of them, spanning folk to death metal. While Scarlett had a marked preference for ’80s New Wave, Garrett, being a sadist, would as likely call out a Broadway show tune as something that Scarlett might actually choose for them to play, just to keep them sharp. Stephen wasn’t about to admit that this practice had saved their asses any number of times during the last few months, as Scarlett deviated from the set list more often than not, or took requests from the crowd.

  Stephen listened as Garrett rattled off the five songs he’d chosen: “Barely Breathing” by Duncan Sheik, a medium-paced rocker to get them warmed up. “Ice” by Sarah McLachlan. Restraint and delicacy, and hardly any drums, thank gawd, but Stephen saw Tansy grimace at the thought of the vocals. Next was Duran Duran’s “Save a Prayer,” Joe’s preferred song to test-drive his synthesizers and computers. Tansy’s grimace turned to a grin as Garrett called Duran Duran’s “Rio,” with its raucous bass lines, and damn it, a drum workout too.

  There was a pregnant pause as Garrett looked directly at him, his thumb twirling slowly, a fucking Catherine Wheel.

  “Call it,” he called from his riser, stretching his arms overhead.

  The slightest smile stole over Garrett’s face. “Foo Fighters’ ‘Come Alive.’”

  The man was trying to kill him. Really, he was. The song Garrett had chosen, about how a man’s life changed forever with the birth of his child, was deceptively difficult. The drummer didn’t have much at all to do for the first two minutes of the song, but the second half was a fucking drummer’s showcase, and would tax his abilities even at full strength.

  “You suck,” he called up to Garrett, who now leaned urbanely against the rail.

  Garrett raised an eyebrow. “So I’ve been told. Ready, Randy?” he called down to the sound booth. “Nice and easy to start. Michael, Tansy, nothing fancy, just mark the vocals.”

  “Thank you,” Tansy muttered with a look to the heavens. Michael and Tansy sang harmony with Scarlett when they performed, but someone needed to handle lead vocals during sound check so Randy could verify the microphone levels and set the balance where he wanted.

  Michael counted them down. “Five, six. Five, six, seven…”

  And Stephen missed the opening cymbal riff on the second half of eight. “Sorry,” he called.

  “Again,” Garrett replied with a steely look in his eye.

  Stephen flexed his hands and wrists. His forearms and thumbs were so sore he wondered if he’d be able to hold on to his sticks. An amp crackled again, and he took a deep breath, wrestling his thoughts back to the task at hand. He met eyes with Michael and nodded.

  And they were off.

  He held it together as the band plowed through the abbreviated set list, but thankfully there were no paying customers, because he was flailing away like an eighth grader in his first garage band. “Rio” was galloping to a close, and his
stomach was already rolling, thinking about the song to come. He almost wished he didn’t have to wait out the first portion of the song, because now that he was moving a little, he felt better. It was when they stopped between songs that everything tightened up again, when everything snapped and sparked like a live wire.

  He jerked as he heard Michael’s light touch on his guitar, starting “Come Alive.” Having several minutes to wait, he moved and stretched, chose sticks, adjusted his headset and wrist bands. Took a deep breath as he joined in at about the two minute mark with a soft kick drum, then subtle snares. The song layered and built as it went on, as he supposed labor pains did. His body struggled and strained as the volume picked up, and he gritted his teeth as he crashed cymbals on every one-beat. More pounding, more fills. In the original, Foo Fighters’ front man Dave Grohl practically shreds his vocal cords screaming his daughter into the world, but Michael was not about to do that, especially just before the show.

  When they reached the last minute of the song, Stephen played like his life depended upon it. His arm and back muscles burned as he drove, flew, pounded. Sweat dripped down his neck. Okay, almost there. Just twenty seconds more. He just had to find enough strength for the final push, for that last monstrous set of rolls, riffs, and crashes.

  They arrived before he was ready, but he had no choice but to push through it. This was it. “Aah!” he groaned aloud, his body moving instinctively.