by Meg Ripley
“I—I think I’m ready,” Fran whispered. Somewhere along the line, she’d gotten my shirt off without me noticing it. I pulled back from Fran’s chest and looked her in the eyes.
“We’re not getting naked here, right?” She blinked in confusion and then nodded.
“Yeah…if someone walks back…”
“They’ll know what we’re doing right away,” I pointed out. “But they won’t see you completely naked.”
“How are we going to do this, then?” Fran was still squirming on my lap, rubbing against me. I reached down between our bodies; she’d soaked through the fabric of her tiny little pajama shorts.
“You aren’t wearing anything underneath these?” I slid my fingers under the fabric at her thigh, inching my way up to her heat—the folds of her pussy were drenched.
“As you can see: no,” Fran murmured, her breath catching as I slid my fingers along her labia.
“Fuck, Fran,” I whispered. “We can take these off, right?” I could see the fabric of her top barely covering her hips. I glanced over her shoulder and spotted the throw that someone had left over the back of the chair next to me. “Got it,” I told Fran, reaching over and snagging the blanket off of the chair. I draped it over her shoulders, making a tent around our bodies; it would still be obvious what was going on if anyone came to the back of the bus, but I didn’t care anymore.
Fran squirmed and twisted on top of me, her legs shifting and moving alongside mine, and after a moment, I realized she’d somehow managed to take her shorts off; I reached up to cup her soaking wet pussy and rubbed the heel of my palm against her slowly. “Fuck, Jules…stop—stop teasing me,” she murmured, her head dropping to my shoulder as her hips moved under my touch.
“Well help me out, then,” I suggested, kissing her quickly on the lips. I guided her hand toward the bulge in my pants; my cock was so hard it felt like I had a rock stuffed into my jeans, so hot I thought my blood might have turned to liquid metal, pooling at my hips. Fran unbuttoned and unzipped my fly, and my dick sprung free in an instant.
“Apparently, I’m not the only one not wearing anything underneath,” Fran said, amusement rippling in her voice. Her fingers wrapped around me and I groaned, pressing my face against her chest to muffle the sound. She began to stroke me, rubbing the head with her thumb, and I almost came right then and there.
“Shit,” I muttered, straining to keep myself under control. My hips bucked as Fran continued to work me, her grip tightening. “Unless you want me to come all over your stomach…” Fran’s grip loosened, and a moment later her fingers stopped moving on me. I took a slow, deep breath, gritting my teeth until the moment passed.
“Now?” Fran’s whole body was tense against mine.
“Now,” I agreed. She guided my cock up against the folds of her pussy and I thrust into her, sliding inside inch by inch. She was so hot, so tight, it was like a silk glove around my dick, wet and slick and perfect. “Jesus, Fran…how long has it been?” I felt her muscles flex around me and groaned again, gripping her tight against my body.
“Months,” she replied, panting as she began to ride me. “Shit—fuck, Jules…”
“I know,” I murmured against her neck, bringing my mouth back up to hers. I pushed deeper and deeper inside of her, my hands moving from her hips to her tits, slipping down between us to find her clit by touch, to stroke and rub her. We both tried to keep quiet, but as we started to pick up speed, fall into a rhythm together, I could hear our moans escaping, our panting getting louder. “Shh,” I kissed Fran’s lips, swallowing down a cry of pleasure that left her throat as I started rubbing her clit harder.
I could feel the tension building up in my hips, in my balls, as Fran rose and fell on me, taking me deeper, getting wetter and wetter and tighter and tighter. All at once she began to shudder against me, breaking away from my lips to bury her face against my shoulder, moaning as quietly as she could manage. Her muscles flexed around me in erratic little spasms, tightening like a vise, and that was all it took—I was gone in moments, coming so hard I could barely hold myself together enough to keep the noise down. We kept moving until we both finished, sagging against each other, panting and gasping for breath.
“Think we woke anyone up?” I chuckled and reached for my beer, knocking back the last of it.
“If we had, they’d be in here,” I pointed out. “Those weren’t your very last two cigs, were they?” Fran giggled.
“I have two more,” she told me in a little playful whisper. “Just about perfect, right?”
“Only if you’re willing to share,” I told her.
“Oh, right—I’ll fuck you and then make you watch while I smoke a cigarette and don’t give you any?” Fran twisted around on top of me, and I grunted at the feeling of her muscles rippling around my cock with her movements. She opened the pack and showed me the last two cigarettes in it. “This, and then bed?”
“I’m game,” I told her, plucking one of the cigs from the box. “We’ll sleep good tonight, for once.”
CHAPTER SIX
“We’ve got Molly Riot here in the studio today, along with their touring mates, Juniper Woolf,” the DJ said.
“Hey.”
“Hi.”
“What’s up?”
“Morning.”
“And we’re talking about their joint tour, the EP they’ll be putting out together, and how this whole situation came about,” the DJ continued. “I think this is the most microphones we’ve ever had in the booth on this program.”
“It was hilarious to watch them set it up,” Mark said. I shifted in my chair and glanced over at Fran. We’d been on the promo tour for almost a month so far, and Fran and I had managed to screw around together about three times a week. How does she manage to look like she hasn’t missed a wink of sleep all month? It was a mystery to me—some female trick.
I tried to keep my attention on the interview; I knew I’d have to at least make a few comments over the course of it. But all I could think about was how good it would be to finally get to the damned venue. Sound check, then we’ll have a couple of hours to kill. Nick’s going to be on Skype with Olivia…the rest of them will be in town buying shit or doing laundry…we’ll have the bus to ourselves.
“So, I understand that the feud between Jules and Fran is a thing of the past, but what started it to begin with?”
“Oh brother,” Dan said.
“I’m just curious,” the DJ told us, raising his hands in a gesture of innocence. “I mean, it is kind of weird, right?”
“Well it all started when Jules came to one of Juniper Woolf’s shows,” Fran said, glancing at me with a gleam in her eye.
“She threw glitter at me,” I said into the microphone. “Got me right in the face.”
“Oh! Yeah, that will make an impression on someone—not always a good one.”
“And from there…” Fran shrugged.
“But it’s all a thing of the past now,” I added. “We’re buds.”
“It’s the fucking strangest thing, you wouldn’t believe it,” Nick said, shaking his head. “They must have hashed it out between them, I guess—two months ago, you would never have seen ‘em alone in the same room, and now they play fucking Scrabble on the bus.”
“That’s wild,” the DJ said. I barely paid attention as the rest of the interview dragged on after that; it was the same thing that it always was—even before the “partnership” with Juniper Woolf. Same boring questions, same canned laughs, same everything. I made a few more comments and told myself that we’d be at the venue soon enough, and soon enough Fran and I would get a chance to get away again.
I didn’t think anyone knew for sure what we were doing; the guys in the band would have said something about it if they did, I was sure. Alex and Nick were too wrapped up in their own sex lives—or lack of sex lives—to think about mine, and Mark and Dan were on the hunt whenever we played a show, or stayed overnight in any city.
“How much longer i
s the tour going on?”
“Two more months,” I said, forcing myself to answer so I wouldn’t come across as too quiet or too sullen.
“And then after that we’ll be putting together the joint EP,” Dan explained.
“I remember that—you guys are going to work on a song together, right?”
“One song, yeah,” Jaime said. “The rest of it’s going to be live recordings from the shows.”
“Is there a record for Juniper Woolf in the works?” I tuned out once more, thinking about the record that Molly Riot was slated to make after all of this was done. Maybe for once I’d get a chance to push more than just one song of my own onto the record.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Once again, the bus was quiet; it was always weird to me, how one minute it would be buzzing with noise—conversations, people microwaving something to eat, a game going on in the rec room, or a movie blasting through the speakers—and then all at once, everyone was in their bunks. Everyone except for me. The show had gone off without a hitch; it was our best one yet—huge crowd, screaming so much they made a wall of sound and humid, sweat-drenched air all around the stage.
Ron had called a meeting that morning, rousting us out of our beds at the ungodly hour of nine AM; at least he’d thought ahead to have coffee and donuts in the bus kitchen—he must have gotten the driver to stop somewhere before he woke us all up. He’d started out by telling us that the label was impressed with how well the tour was going, and how great a response it was getting from the fans. “Everyone at the label is pretty sure that the EP is going to sell big, and then, of course, after that your respective albums,” he’d explained.
But there was a problem; of course, there was a problem. Ron wouldn’t have gotten us up so early for a pep talk alone. We were falling off-schedule on our postings to the site. The label wanted to remind us that it was part of the deal; and if we didn’t live up to the deal, they were going to keep that in mind down the line when it came time to pay for the albums to come. “Jesus Christ, Ron,” Alex had said, nearly slamming down his coffee cup on the table. “We’re fucking musicians, not journalists.”
“If you’d wanted someone to post updates every single damned day, you should have brought Olivia on the bus with us,” Nick told him. Normally I’d have pointed out that we had a rule about girlfriends on tour; but not only would I come off like a hypocrite when everyone eventually found out about Fran and me fooling around, but I had to agree with Nick that his girlfriend—a journalist—would’ve been the logical choice for keeping the tour journal bullshit updated. She’d done it for us before, after all.
“It’s better if it comes from the band directly,” Ron had countered. “The fans love it—especially the videos. I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page, that’s all.”
“We’ve been on tour for two months, promoting the fuck out of our bands,” I’d told the manager. “We’re fucking tired.”
“I get that,” Ron had said, doing his good cop, bad cop thing to the hilt. “I’ll go back to the label and explain that. But in the meantime, I’d appreciate it if you all made just a little more effort to keep up your end of the deal. I just want to see everyone win on this.”
Which is why I was up, on my laptop, working on an update for the tour journal on my own. I sighed, tilting my head back and letting it fall against the shelf above the table. This all sounds boring as fuck, I thought, reviewing the last few paragraphs I’d written. How could I possibly make a tour sound boring? But it did. I lifted my head and let it drop again. I groaned and pulled myself up, scrubbing at my face. Take a lap, Jules. I stood, stretching against the tightness in my neck, my shoulders. There really wasn’t anywhere on the bus to walk to; not really. But I walked to the front of the bus, stopping just short of where the driver sat, past the bunks.
Everyone was asleep. I walked back the way I’d come, past the bunks once more; I was tempted to crawl into Fran’s bunk, see if she might be interested in a little fooling around. Instead, I kept going: past the kitchenette, down the little hallway where the bathroom was, and finally into the rec room. I figured I’d grab a cigarette, regroup, and get back to work.
There, seated on the couch, I saw Fran; she had an enormous pair of headphones on, plugged into her phone, and a notebook on her lap. How is it possible that she just keeps getting cuter? That was a dangerous thought, but it was true. Fran’s hair was mussed, hanging around her face. Her legs dangled off the edge of the couch, the toes of one of her feet pointing towards the floor. She looked like a doll, almost, except that she was scribbling furiously in her notebook, tapping the fingertips of her other hand on the page in time.
“Hey,” I said, pitching my voice just loud enough—hopefully—to cut through the sound in her headphones. Fran’s hand paused, and she glanced up, and started.
“Hey,” she said, tugging the headphones off of her ears. “Sorry, did I disturb you or something?”
“Nah,” I said, shaking my head. “I was having trouble with my tour journal entry and decided to walk around a bit, try and see if that shook anything loose.” Fran grinned.
“Know the feeling,” she said, stretching; the movement lifted the hem on her tee shirt, revealing a slice of her belly. “I’ve been trying to figure this song out for weeks.”
“New Juniper Woolf?” I sat down on the couch next to her, wriggling until I was comfortable.
“Maybe,” Fran said with a shrug. “I mean—I guess. Jaime came up with the beat, so I guess it has to be one of our songs.”
“What else would it be?”
“I write songs for myself sometimes, you know,” Fran told me. I saw the color creeping into her cheeks. “It’s not like I’m planning to go solo or anything…but sometimes I get ideas that just aren’t really what Juniper Woolf does, you know?” I nodded.
“Yeah, I know that—maybe a little too well,” I admitted. Fran shot me a quizzical look. “I’m a musician, too, you know. I write songs sometimes.” I nudged her with my elbow. “I get about one song per album. Alex, Nick…even Dan and Mark are kind of all on the same page about how they want Molly Riot to sound. But not everything I want to write is in that style.”
“What do you do with the rest of the material?” Fran shifted closer to me on the couch, and I had to admit: it felt good, her body pressed against mine, almost cuddling up to me.
“Record it on my own, play it for the guys sometimes.” I shrugged. “Mostly it gathers virtual dust on my SoundCloud page.”
“I’d like to hear it sometime,” Fran said. “I wanna hear what big bad Jules plays on his own time.” I snorted.
“Show me yours first,” I told her. Fran hesitated for a moment; then she grabbed her phone, unplugged the headphones, and unlocked the screen. After a few more swipes and taps, she set the phone down; the sound of a metronome came up, and then a syncopated beat, followed by a slightly faltering but pitch-true guitar run. “Is that you?” Fran nodded.
“I know what I want it to sound like,” she said, frustration in her voice. “But my playing isn’t strong enough to really capture it.” She sighed.
“That’s not a big deal,” I said. “This isn’t bad.”
“It could be better, though,” Fran said, giving me a wry grin.
“Well yeah—nothing is ever perfect. Everything can always be better.” I listened more intently; I almost thought I could hear Fran’s breathing on the recording, a soft hiss when she almost missed a note. “That’s actually really good.” The song was solid, I had to give her that; it was more complex, more developed than most of Juniper Woolf’s songs. “Do you mind…?”
“Go ahead,” Fran said, looking at me intently. I stood and grabbed one of the guitars hanging on the wall in the rec room. I caught the beat again as the song began to replay automatically. I sat down on the end of the couch, listened for the notes that Fran had put down on the recording, and found them on the neck of the guitar. Following the beat, I started to play along, adding a few
little flourishes, a few bends and twists here and there.
I came to the end of the song and looked up. Fran looked utterly rapt, her eyes almost glowing in the weird, yellow light of the rec room. “That was amazing,” she murmured. I shrugged it off.
“It was okay,” I countered. “Be better if I listened to the song a few more times.”
“Could I get you to record that?” I pressed my lips together, considering.
“Can’t see why not,” I told her. “I mean, we’re supposed to be collaborating, in some kind of partnership, right?” Fran chuckled.
“I don’t think solo material was what they had in mind,” Fran said. I shrugged.
“Material is material, right?” I put the guitar aside. “Maybe it’ll be workable into a song we can do together to fulfill that last bit of the deal.”
“You know I was against that deal at the beginning, don’t you?” I looked at Fran in shock.
“You were?” She nodded, smiling wryly.
“You were too, right?” I hesitated, but nodded. Fran took a quick, deep breath, and I wondered what was going on in her brain. “We need to talk about what’s going on between us,” she said.
“You’re all over the place tonight,” I told her, shaking my head in confusion.
“Sorry.” Fran rubbed at her face. “It’s just…the way that we’re sneaking around: it’s not going to last forever. Someone’s going to end up catching us in the act, or they’re going to figure out that we both end up missing at the same time, or something like that is going to happen.”
“Well that’s just the nature of the beast,” I pointed out. “It’s a small world on a tour bus.”
“The fact that we’ve made it two months without getting caught is…” Fran shook her head. “I’m almost suspicious of it.”
“If anyone had figured it out in my band, I’d have heard about it—I promise that,” I told her. “What about your band?” Fran thought about the question and shrugged.