by Lux, Vivian
Of course, by that time, I had fallen madly in love with Keir Wilder.
Music and love boiled through my veins in equal measure, leaving me frustrated and restless, not knowing what the hell to do with myself. Suddenly, not just the house, the block, but the entire city of Buffalo was too small to contain me. I needed to get out.
Keir was my ticket out.
I set my pen back down again, appalled at what I had just written. This was too raw, too personal to allow it to be splashed all over the pages of Auteur.
I thought for a moment, then scratched everything out and started over again.
Chapter 15
Keir
Once you're in the groove of touring, when the roadies know their jobs through and through, and there are no guest performers to rehearse with and no more surprises to contend with, then it's okay to skip sound checks.
But this early in the tour, they were necessary. There were still a few kinks that needed to be ironed out.
Like the shit setlist, to start. Our opener was a snoozefest and I had insisted we rehearse something else, as a back-up.
"Let's run through it again from the top," Rane said. Those were the first words I had heard him say all day.
Twitch tapped out the count, and we tore into Black and Blue Bedlam, a cut from our first album we'd never played live before, with fresh verve. I mouthed most of my vocal parts, trying to preserve my voice for as long as possible, but hit my guitar for the rhythm portions like it had offended me.
Well, something had offended me, anyway.
The whole ride here, Rane hadn't said a word to me. Neither had Scarlett. Neither, really, had anyone. In such close quarters, this became very apparent, so by the time that we rolled up to Phoenix's Talking Sticks Resort Arena, the tension on the bus was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Twitch tiptoed around like a scalded cat, and Balzac looked like he wished he was anywhere else.
It was not an auspicious start to the tour.
I needed to fucking fix it, but I had no idea how. Other than break as many guitar strings as I could.
I tore into the bridge, trying to fade out everything but the sound of the music.
Then my monitor blasted me with an earful of piercing static, and I snapped.
"Are you fucking shitting me?!" I bellowed, ripping the piece from my ear and hurling it out into the empty arena.
"What the fuck!" Rane called across the stage.
"This piece of shit system can't handle our equipment!" I said. "We sound like fucking shit!"
There were a few nasty clicks, followed by the squeal of feedback as Rane tore the power cord from his guitar. "Well, of course it sounds like fucking shit," he said, as calm and measured as if he were talking to a mental patient. "We haven't rehearsed this one since we played it in the studio. Why the hell are we doing things last minute here?"
"The setlist needs a better opener," I insisted. It was a point I'd been trying to make from the very very beginning. The audience wasn't here to listen to our new stuff; they wanted the big, loud, crowd-pleasing jams we kicked out in the beginning of our career. Black and Blue Bedlam fit the bill, as far as I was concerned, provided we could remember how to fucking play it.
"We've worked the setlist backwards and forwards. I don't know why the fuck you're trying to introduce new shit at the last minute here." Rane shook his head. He was angrier than he was letting on. "Let it go."
"Let it go?" I laughed. Somewhere out in the arena, Scarlett was watching this. We had arrived right in the midst of load-in, and our roadies got right to work. There had been no time to hash out the Scarlett situation.
Well, no time like the present, anyway.
"That's fucking rich, coming from you, you know that, Rane? You love to say let it go, but you hold on to shit just as tightly as I do."
Rane's eyes flashed. "What are you saying?"
"You know exactly what I'm saying. Fucking deal with it."
"Deal with it? That's your solution? Since when?"
I stood with my feet planted shoulder width apart and raised my fists. "Since now," I said, beckoning with my left hand.
Rane nodded, planted his feet…and then leapt towards me, wrapping his arms around my waist and knocking me flat onto my back, driving the breath from my lungs.
"I'm not letting you do this!" he snarled, closing his fingers around my throat and shaking me. "You're not doing this to yourself again! Send her home, get her out of here, get her away from us!"
He punctuated each word with a savage shake that made my teeth rattle inside my skull. Three times, the back of my head hit the stage floor, and I was starting to feel woozy.
"You don't get to make that call," I choked.
Then I landed a solid right hook across his jaw.
My brother was bigger and bulkier than me, but I was quicker and leaner. I knew how to fight him from years of experience, and he knew the same. At this point, our fights were more like a choreographed dance. He tried to overpower me, I ducked and clocked him.
But this felt different. This felt…desperate.
Something was changing.
"Don't be an idiot, Keir!" he yelled, right as his fist caught my ear. For several seconds, I could hear nothing but a deafening ringing.
"Don't be an asshole, Rane!" I said, shouting over the static in my ears as I landed a solid punch to his gut.
I could feel eyes on me. Balzac, Twitch, Pepper… And somewhere out in the audience, Scarlett was watching too. What was she thinking? Was she writing all of this down? Did she even know that this was all about her, her? Her? Did she care? Did she care at all that I was fighting to keep her here, even when I knew it was bad for both of us? Why was I fighting for her at all?
"Stop!" a voice rang out, high, female.
Hers.
I turned, and goddammit, I smiled.
Chapter 16
Scarlett
I’d covered the rock and roll beat since joining my university's paper when I was a sophomore. Since then, I'd sat in dive bars, cheered in arenas and watched live music everywhere in between. If you counted my time in the Wilders' garage, I'd been to more shows in five years than most normal people would see in a lifetime.
I'd seen it all. And not much impressed me by this point.
But I had never seen anything like Ruthless's setup.
Some bands thought that big stacks of amps were what they needed for big sound. But those of us who covered music, who lived and breathed and worshiped music, knew that all those giant walls of speakers did was impress the people who didn't know any better. The real skill was coaxing giant amounts of sound out of a much more modest setup.
Ruthless's setup was tight, not an ounce of wasted space or splash anywhere. I watched the roadies and techs loading in around the band, delivering a bewildering array of amps, pedals and effects boards. I counted seven different guitars in Keir's kit alone, and his tech sat tuning each of them expertly, precisely, during sound check. He seemed to anticipate when and which guitar Keir would reach for even before Keir stretched out his hand.
I sat in the back of the arena, trying to take it all in. Trying to reconcile the band in the garage with the band in front of me doing their sound check with as much enthusiasm as if they were playing a live show.
"You must be Scarlett."
I turned, startled to be noticed all the way back here, and saw two men with smiles on their faces and guns in their holsters.
The larger of the two, clearly the one in charge, was an imposing black man with the swaggering demeanor of an ex-cop. He wore his past like a badge, right down to the mirrored shades he was wearing indoors. The house lights glinted off the shiny skin of his shaved bald head.
Next to him stood a man who could not have been older than I was. Baby-faced and smiling boyishly, he looked no older than sixteen but for the gun at his side and the badge around his neck.
"Rick Dalton, head of security," the first man said.
"Scarlett Sawy
er," I faltered, rising quickly, only to fumble and drop my notebook.
"Hey, don't freak out. I know he's an ugly one, but he doesn't bite," the boyish one reassured me.
Rick growled something under his breath that made the second man laugh out loud.
"I'm Caleb Hawkins," he said, stepping forward and reaching out his hand. "U.S. Army, retired."
"Thank you for your service," I squeaked.
Caleb laughed, showing a dimple and rows of straight white teeth. "If you can call it that. I spent my whole deployment in an air-conditioned bunker watching bombs fall on people hundreds of miles away. Kinda like a video game."
"Oh," I said in a whisper.
"My boss here thinks I fought hand-to-hand combat, so don't tell him otherwise, okay? It'll be our little secret."
The corner of Rick's mouth twitched once.
"Okay," I choked, looking back and forth between the two of them. Authority figures made me nervous.
Rick stayed stony-faced for the entire duration, but Caleb suddenly burst out laughing. "I'm just playing with you. We just wanted to come over and see that you’ve got everything you need."
"Well, I'm fine. You know, I'm just here to write a story about the band. Keir invited me…"
Caleb held up his hand to ward off my frantic explanations. "We know. We already did your background check, Scarlett. You're cool."
I let go of the breath I was holding. "Well, thank heavens." I smiled. "I would hate to find out that I've led a completely boring life for nothing."
Caleb laughed again, and even Rick broke a smile.
Just then, a shout came up from the front of the house. All three of us turned to see Rane tackle Keir, the two brothers toppling over backwards and slamming into the stage floor.
"Is anyone going to stop them?" I asked, frantic.
Both Rick and Caleb had their hands shoved in their pockets. "It's in our contracts to provide their safety from outsiders," Caleb drawled. "Never said nothing about keeping them safe from each other."
"Don't worry about it, ma'am," Rick said in his clipped, no-nonsense speech. "Doubt they're really trying to hurt each other."
But from my vantage point, that's exactly what it looked like they were doing. The two brothers, equally matched, grappled wildly, throwing punches that—to my eye, anyway—looked like they were designed to draw blood.
Rick and Caleb watched impassively, as did the rest of the band. I tapped my foot anxiously, wondering when they were going to stop. I had seen Rane and Keir fight before, of that, there was no question. But it was always friendly grappling, the usual brotherly spars for dominance. This resembled an all-out brawl. And when Rane somehow managed to roll Keir over, straddling his chest and raising his fist high above his head, I screamed before I could stop myself.
"Stop it!" I shouted across echoing arena. "Stop it, both of you!"
Both turned their heads to stare at me. The sight of Keir's lip, split and bleeding, made me gasp in horror, and then I was angry.
"Get over it!" I called, charging down the center aisle. "Whatever it is you guys are messing around about, just let it go." My voice sounded much stronger than I felt.
I reached the gate that separated general admission from the stage and leaned over. A trickle of blood was oozing out of a split above Keir's eyebrow, and Rane wiped a smear of blood from his lip up his cheek.
Then, to my eternal surprise, Rane grinned. "You're right, Scarlett," he called, louder than he needed to be. "What's done is done."
Those were the first words he had spoken to me in five years, but for some reason, it felt like the continuation of a conversation we had only put a pause on.
It felt right to pick it back up again.
I smiled at him. He didn't smile back.
But Keir's smile was wide enough for both of them. "You got it, Scarlett," he said, crawling out from under his brother and staggering upright.
He planted his feet and smiled again. "Thanks for talking some sense into him."
"You guys wouldn't know sense if it smacked you in the face," I scolded. "It's true, and you know it."
"And you know it, too." He nodded. "No one knows more than you."
I bit my lip and turned away from the look in his eyes. The look he used to give me from across the room. The one he used to let me know that he was focused only on me. I remembered that look. I loved that look. To have him give it to me now was bringing up something I wasn't expecting.
I wasn't expecting to feel so relieved.
****
That night, I stood in the VIP section, watching with my mouth hanging open. All around, girls as young as twelve cheered next to women as old as fifty, every single one of them crying out for the man I had once called mine. The push-pull of jealousy, resentment, and old love that never really truly died made it difficult to concentrate on the words he was singing. But I watched. That's what I did. I watched Keir bring down the house, shimmying like Mick Jagger and then headbanging like David Lee Roth, creeping under the mic like Steven Tyler to growl like Eddie Vedder. He was everyone who had come before him made better.
When the last throb of the encore passed through me, I shivered down to the soles of my feet. The beer I had guzzled to work up the nerve to watch him buzzed through my veins. I felt high. I felt alive. I felt like I needed to tell him how high and alive I felt.
Caleb nodded to me and stepped aside, letting me backstage before I could think about what I was doing. I didn't know what I was doing. I just wanted to see him. He was this giant on stage, but I needed to remind myself that he was Keir. The Keir that used to be mine. I just wanted to touch him, feel him solid under my fingers.
See if he felt the same.
Chapter 17
Keir
There was no greater rush than the rush of performing. If you sat me down, put a gun to my head and told me to pick my poison...well, I'd choose Bourbon first. But it would be one hell of a choice.
The rush of starting a tour, that was a different thing entirely. All of the work, all of the planning, all of the backups and contingencies and last-minute decisions seemed to come together in a perfect swirl of accomplishment. For a person like me, the kind that likes to see a plan come together, touring was like heroin.
So that was my excuse. I was high as fuck.
Scarlett came dancing up to me, eyes shining unnaturally bright. I grabbed a towel from Glenn, my tech, and wiped the sweat away from my face. When I pulled the towel away, she was close. So fucking close.
"Keir!" She lifted her arms as if to hug me, catching herself at the very last moment and bringing them together in front of her chest in clumsy applause. "Keir, Oh my God, you guys are good. You guys are so fucking good!"
"I'll tell you what's good," I growled.
This was not how I wanted to do it. On the bus, I had been thinking of her, coming up with a plan, dreaming up ways to fix this and bring her back into my life again.
This was most definitely not according to my plan.
But kissing her, right here, right now, seemed like something that would kill me if I didn't do. Like an addict jonesing for the next high, I moved from the rush of performing to the rush of pressing my lips against hers.
I was rough, too rough. The noise she made, maybe it was protest, but I'll say this—she did not pull away. Not as I moved my lips against hers, parting them with a rough stab of my tongue so that I could taste her, taste her as deeply as I had tasted her when we were young.
She tasted exactly the same.
That was the real high here. The high of having her, her body against mine. I swear it was muscle memory, kissing her, touching her, moving my lips down, down, down that long neck, licking and grazing the pulse point that beat rapidly under my lips. "Stop," she said, only once, and I did. I did what she asked, but then she undulated her body so that her breasts brushed my chest, and when I kissed her again, she didn't protest anymore.
Maybe I would have kissed her forever. There in th
e subterranean warren of passages that ran under the stage, I would spend the rest of my life with Scarlett Sawyer backed up against a wall, held immobile by my hands while I poured out five long years of turmoil into kissing every inch of her exposed skin. I would have, I know this.
But my brother had impeccable fucking timing.
It was Scarlett who noticed him first, placing her hand in the center of my chest to push me away from her. I pulled back, a little angry, then I saw where she was looking.
"You know," Rane said, flicking his fingers casually like we were all just chilling, "I've had some pretty bad ideas in my life. But this?" He flicked his fingers again to point directly at Scarlett. "This is the worst idea I've ever seen."
And then before we could respond, he turned on his heel and stomped down the hallway to the green room.
"You shouldn't have done that," Scarlett hissed.
"Well, you didn't exactly stop me,” I shot back.
"I did! I did say stop."
"And then started kissing me again," I pointed out.
Even in the low light of the hallway, I could still see the pink in her cheeks. She was pissed, really pissed. But I liked to think I knew her well enough that I could tell she was pissed at herself as much a she was at me.
"Keir…" she began.
I stepped back further. "Spare me the lecture."
"We should just… Let's be smart, okay?"
I had to laugh. "Honey, whatever it is we are to each other, it is definitely not smart."
Chapter 18
Scarlett
Old feelings. The kind that stick around, building up in your muscles like lactic acid after a run. What was left of the love I once had was still there.
That's why I kissed him.
That's what I was telling myself.
He shouldn't have kissed me.
I was telling myself that too.
From Phoenix, we rolled out, on the road again. When I moved out to the West Coast, it was by air, the great expanse of land underneath me like a carpet. Back then, I was like a giant striding across the earth, taking no notice of my surroundings. Now, I was down at ground level, and every little feature and change in the landscape fascinated me.