by Lee, Corri
The Roses looked a lot like a small backstreet theatre, boasting a grand stage with rich red curtains that drew across by old fashioned pulleys. In fact, it had been at one point. The building had been renovated roughly fifteen years earlier, keeping the exterior's old world charm of the street facing ticket windows that often sat vacant. But inside, the auditorium itself had been rebuilt with a few mod cons like mismatched ultra-modern chrome bars fully stocked with all manner of spirits, and seating booths towards the rear similar to those in Esme's.
As one of the first businesses Henry had started, it was one of the roughest around the edges and that was why I liked to go there. It lacked the archaic yet still super-sterile air of Tudor blood-money and graced the least of his attention. Bands played there the most, seconded by independent theatre groups. Esme liked to hire out the building for her annual winter ball and knew exactly how to glamorise it to greatest effect. It didn't attract the highly polished crowd Henry aimed for, instead enticing bohemians and alternative-rockers through it's doors. The kind of people we were here to see.
But The Roses had a dirty little secret. Technically, it was mine. The club had been gifted to me after Henry saw how keen I was on the place, and that had immediately dulled it's appeal. Designed as a ploy to brighten my mood and draw me into ruling his empire, the idea of being responsible for anything or anyone was horrendous to me, and I'd shied away as soon as the gesture had been made. There would undoubtedly come a day when I'd regret throwing all the benefits and privileges Henry had granted me back in his face, but that day wasn't in sight.
Instead, I stood in front of it's doors with a man who suited the demographic of any power hungry mogul, groupie or sycophant, tugging at the leash to cash in my backstage pass like a hyperactive teenager.
"I can see where your backside meets your legs. That hot little crease just below your buttocks..." Blaze grabbed me and spun me around, catching my bottom lip between his teeth then sucking it gently, groaning lowly against my mouth. "I changed my mind, let's go back to bed."
"But it's Monday's Miracle! You can't drag me out like this, full of your cum because you denied me my right to shower, then change your mind when we're right outside. It doesn't work like that."
"The hell it doesn't." He cupped himself through the seam of his jeans and shook his head at me. " 'Full of your cum'— Your dirty mouth might be the death of me, Emmeline." Pulling me up close to him, he reached behind me and traced the ridge between my backside and my thigh. "I can see this."
"You know, from the way your lips have swollen and reddened, your pupils have dilated, and that vein in your neck is pumping away, I'd say you're crushing on me pretty hard, Blaze."
"I daresay I am, cupcake. And I daresay that you know exactly how hard."
I knew because I felt it too— the way that nothing else had mattered that afternoon because I'd been with him. The air became heavy and humid around him, suffocating me in a way that was almost erotic because it was so safe. He was a talisman that protected me from the world, and more importantly myself. I was the most level I'd been in years and it was down to nothing more than the fact he was in my life, even if he wasn't in the same room. Stupidly, I'd put him up on the same pedestal as Hunter but found myself placated by the fact that he gave me what I'd needed for so long.
Still, I hated it when he got that look in his eye, that wild, inflammatory look he got when he spoke of how he felt for me. "I'm sorry."
"You keep saying that," he laughed, pulling me into an embrace and rocking me playfully, "but you wouldn't be if you understood. My heart aches for you sometimes, for the worldly things you don't know because the world has been cruel on your young mind."
"Hey!" I pushed back to look at him and scowled. "I'm not so naive! I might have had a pretty shitty adolescence, but you must only have a couple of years on me. Three at most."
"You think so?" Looking almost embarrassed, he cocked his head at me and pursed his lips. "I turn thirty next February." What? There was no way this guy was in the twilight of his twenties, putting a little over seven years between us. My birthday had been a few weeks before we'd met— I was barely in my twenties and he was fast approaching his fourth century of life. He'd had so much more time to define his parameters, wants and goals, so what the hell did he want with a kid like me?
And then I thought of the twelve year difference between Daniel and Jonathan, the illicit student-teacher affair that had turned into a fairytale. They'd met in college, Daniel as a student and Jonathan as our graphics professor, and the heat wave that moved between them from the first moment had been palpable. The number of years that separated them had been irrelevant and unimportant, less of a factor than their professional positions or lack thereof. Who was I to grumble at the sex god's age when he wore it so well?
"I must make the most of us both being vicenarian's before you stagnate."
"You been reading the dictionaries at work, cupcake?"
"My life has recently become quite a boring slog of staring at doors waiting for my favourite non-enabler to arrive. It was the dictionary or one of Esme's overtly feminist 'women's interest' magazines."
"Tough call."
I murmured in agreement and turned my attention towards the boom of music that radiated outward from within The Roses like a shockwave. They were inside, and I was practically vibrating with excitement to meet them. It may not have been a big deal to Blaze after being one of the group's founding members but the experiences of fame I might have experienced as a privileged teenager or student had been lost to illness, obsession and convalescence. In a way, this opportunity made up for the wild-child I never was and had decided not to be when unwillingly submerged into a world of popularity with Henry. Not paying much interest in those who sat around me at A-list functions and dinner parties, I'd blocked out the famous faces when I might have stared in awe.
But if I'd taken it all in my stride then, maybe I might not be so convincingly anxious and star struck now. I might have known Blaze already and looked like less of an attractive prospect had I not spent years cutting my nose off to spite my face.
"Why did you leave the group? All the respect in the world to him, but you'd have made a much better frontman than Chase-bloody-Garret."
"The tours." Blaze answered flatly, obviously a little sore over the subject. "As much as I hated it, my responsibilities kept me tied to London. My opportunities to leave are restricted to weekend trips and overnight red-eye drives. It was too much strain on the guys and an impossibility with international tours." Wistfully, he shook his head and rested it against mine.
"That was a long time ago."
"It was. Six years." I felt his frown before I got a blurred, up close look of his eyes darkening. "I thought life might have changed by now. I thought I'd have more freedom."
"Do you regret it?"
"In some ways. I still got a lot of media attention, what with my face already known as their singer, so I didn't lose out there. It led to a lot of work, the work you know. But as much as I loved the music, I couldn't hold them back. Chase is a good guy, I knew he'd do me proud, even if he does act like a bastard around pretty women." He shot me one firm, very pointed glance. "You'd do well to remember that."
"He'd stir another man's broth?"
"Not if he enjoys being attached to his genitals..." The humour was there but tainted by possessive vehemence I couldn't help but smile about. Blaze sighed and rolled his eyes at me, trying to look annoyed and failing miserably. "Alright then, let's introduce you to some rockstars."
MONDAY'S MIRACLE WERE an award winning collaboration of four far too attractive men who sang far too angry songs. Even after a generous dose of bad publicity after a particularly nasty case of blackmail, they were still one of the biggest UK bands to grace the industry.
And I was sitting with them in a club nobody knew I owned, drinking and talking movies. What were the chances? We sat on the stage itself in couches and chairs dragged up from the base leve
l, surrounded by their equipment and using an overturned crate as a table for the drinks we'd swiped from the bar. The band made comments that the owners would probably kill them for helping themselves. I casually said that I thought the owners might be particularly forgiving. I may not have taken the offer to have jurisdiction over the business, but Henry would know that I'd been there and be lenient.
I easily could have gotten away with calling Chris, Esme, Daniel and Jonathan down, but for once in my strange life, I was selfishly enjoying the limelight from being sat with incredible company that were honestly looking at me like I was the amazing spectacle in the room.
Pictures didn't do Chase Garret justice. He looked to be on top form that night, blonde hair combed back over a face that boasted bright blue eyes and an attractively angular jaw line. He had a foul reputation, but that didn't seem like the man who sat on the other side of Blaze, who was territorially obstructing our conversation by hovering backwards and forwards while we tried to talk around him. Chase was the kind of gorgeous one-time-only lay I enjoyed in Blaze's absence and I think they both sensed it.
"So you seem way too hot to be a nerd." The drummer, Jordan, forced a ceasefire with his observation. He was quieter but sharper, with keen brown eyes and long hair that fell to his shoulders. A pussy cat by nature without a doubt, and shy in bigger crowds. I could relate. "Hot and smart don't really mix."
"What can I say?" I pouted at him sarcastically. "I'm the whole package."
"I'm not convinced. I think you hide your lies in your boobs."
Blaze sat up poker straight and glared in his direction. "Why are you looking at her rack, Jord?"
He laughed back awkwardly, clearly not knowing where to put himself. It was strange seeing Blaze so on edge when he was usually such a gentle soul, so cool and collected in spite of his name. It was a revelation almost, seeing a crack in his composure.
The unease was contagious. Was he having second thoughts about introducing me to his friends like this?
"Before you humiliate yourself by acting like a complete idiot..." I warned him in a quiet but strong voice that might have seemed like a whisper if it wasn't so audible. It was the hostilely sweet tone I'd learned after years of watching my mother berate Henry for telling racist jokes in public. "... remember what I chose to wear before you strolled into my life and took a rather large, spectacular crap on all that I know. You picked this outfit out and dressed me into it, commenting on said rack as you did so. Therefore you have no rational excuse to expect others to not notice too. Unless of course you're embarrassed to see me showcasing the assets I thought I understood you were quite partial to." Patiently, I turned back to Jordan, who regarded me with utmost respect, sparking the suspicion that anyone rarely spoke down to Blaze. "Try me. Challenge my inner geek."
He stammered and shook his head, sagging back into his bowl seated arm chair. Obviously, I had him at a loss by putting him on the spot.
"Permission to antagonise?" Matt, their bassist raised a hand and shrugged at me, standing forth as the only one with the guts to take me on. I nodded my assent and smiled politely. "Ironman was the best hero DC came up with."
"Wrong. Ironman was one of the best heroes Marvel came up with. Stan Lee would fuck you up for blurring that line."
"She's good. Though not too riled..." I bared my teeth like a dog and faked a snarl. "Okay, okay. Jar Jar Binks was the greatest science-fiction character to rise from the brain of the god of everything— James Cameron."
I grabbed my drink, inwardly seething and leaned back coolly into my corner of the couch. He'd not so much antagonised as picked at the very sore point for all of nerdkind and done it in style. "Maybe Stan Lee won't fuck you up. Maybe I'll save him a job."
"Yeah, she's a nerd alright." Matt grinned across at me, tipping his glass towards me as an apology. "Sorry I had to put you through that, Emmy. We're kind of a big deal, you know. We have to know that we're not dealing with fakers."
Secretly, I glanced across the room and clenched my jaw. I was a club owner, a mess, and technically a billionaire dressed in sheep's clothing. Albeit a pretty slutty sheep, but I was possibly the biggest faker they would have hoped to find. "Yeah, yeah. Your mouth is moving but all I hear is 'did you feel that just then? That was me killing a piece of your soul with my sick, twisted mind games'."
The light-hearted banter was disturbed by guitarist, Scott, emerging from a dressing room and laying a hard slap on the backside of the girl who came with him— him looking pleased with himself and her not so much, rubbing at the smudged line of her lipstick. She looked younger than me, barely out of school. Assumptions were drawn. I presumed Scott had taken over Chase's role as mouthpiece after his tiny 'indiscretion' last year and flaunted the position of power to rope in groupies. Whoever he was, I didn't feel the same sense of familiarity with him as I did with his bandmates. He was undeniably 'off' in comparison.
"You must be 'the artist'." His breath stank of hard liquor, detectable even at a distance. I wasn't really sure what I'd expected from them, but maybe I should have had a more realistic view that at least one of them would be more than a little narcissistic. Scott was it, probably what you'd now call the Monday's Miracle pretty boy, and he damn well knew it. "How are you tolerating his bullshit?"
Figuring he was talking about Blaze, I cleared my throat and leaned over the back of the couch to look at him deadpan. "I was fine until he brought me out in public. Are you my enemy, fool, or my way out? Will you reel me in or cast me free? Am I leaving here with you tonight, or the idiot I brought with me?" Apparently baffled by my knowledge of their song lyrics, a stunned silence spread across the stage before it was fractured by raucous laughter and the unexpected shower of glitter from a large, spontaneously popped balloon hanging from the light rigging overhead. "Oh Jesus, close your mouths! If you swallow too much of this you'll be shitting it for days."
"How in hell would you know something like that?"
"I have a friend who tried to cheer me up with glittery space cakes when we first met." It was a fond memory I had from the early days of my friendship with Chris, back when he thought that he could storm in like a white knight, fix me and take the rescued damsel in distress as his prize. He couldn't stand to see me so miserable on my eighteenth birthday, so let himself into my flat while I was at work and waited in the dark for me. He scared the hell out of me, and I laughed with him through the haze of the cannabis, but I was no closer to recovery then than I was at that moment in The Roses. It took a long time to accept that I'd always be 'in recovery'— Daniel liked to call it my remission. It just meant a lot that he'd tried.
"What's with the glitter anyway, seems kind of misplaced."
"Glitter," Chase started, rolling his eyes when Scott flounced off with his plaything, uninterested in the conversation, "lost a lot of credibility when the whole 'sparkly vampire' thing became pop-culture. We're trying to prove that you can rock it without being queer about it."
"You're trying to prove that one of the campest decorations in existence isn't queer?" I pulled a face and mumbled into my glass. "Your logic is flawed."
"Precisely!" Their faces seemed to light up, leaving me confused and needing an explanation. "It's totally fucking flawed, that's the beauty of it. It's a direct contradiction of itself and still, we're doing it proudly. Everyone is flawed, no matter how much they want to deny it, but flaws should be embraced and celebrated. We'd all be pretty boring without our fucked-up-ness— no interesting tales of woe to rivet people or any sour experiences to shape us. Think of someone 'normal' who's never suffered at the hands of negativity, then think of someone who's a mess. Who's more interesting?" Immediately, I thought of my sister, Tallulah, who never paid much attention to the fact her little sister was trapped in her own personal hell. She lived the high life everyone else could only wish for, and she was boring as sin. That was her flaw, that she was flawless.
"I get it," I nodded, and I did. Blaze's philosophy of appreciating how screwed
up I was wasn't as exclusive as I'd first thought. There were a whole host of people out there who wore their quirks almost proudly on their sleeves, and after years of feeling like I was the most damaged person in the world, it wasn't until I was sat in the company of an ex-blackmailer reliant on psychostimulants to not be a complete bastard that I realised that my life could be so much worse.
I WAS ALREADY drunk when we were ushered off the stage so the roadies could do their last minute checks and open the venue doors, swaying slightly on purpose to make the light cast off the silver sparkles on my skin. A sense of warm euphoria filled me instead of the usual intoxicated haze, along with the vague sense of guilt that I should have been sharing the experience with my friends. Still, I'd heard that when life hands you lemons, you should make lemonade, and while I didn't have the necessary equipment to start a production line for carbonated beverages at my disposal, I did have some sort of alcoholic lemon cocktail in my hand. It seemed like a fair compromise.
"So where are we sitting?" I wandered between the seats, running my free hand over the soft suede fabric of the seats as I walked. "Or standing? Are we standing?" Blaze grunted quietly and jerked his head towards the stage. He'd been unusually quiet since his telling off, speaking only in response to a question. "You're freaking me out."
"What?" As much as he tried to make it look like he had, he didn't snap out of his bad mood. "I'm sorry, I'm just distracted."
"No shit. Do you wish I'd stayed at home?"
"Yes, but not for the reason you think." Sighing, his chin dropped to his chest. A sign of defeat. "I like having you to myself. I like being centre of your attention and it's not that way tonight."
"Don't be ridiculous." Setting my drink down on a table, I cupped his face in my hands and forced him to look up at me. "Just because I'm not looking at you doesn't mean I'm not caught up in analysing how you feel. You're driving me fucking crazy with your silence and making question why. I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong and what big mistake is going to stop you from going home with me tonight."