Prologue
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Holland
Three Years ago
I stared at the tour dates on my Savage Melody-themed calendar on the nightstand. If there was band gear for sale, I bought it. I was behind my man and his band one-hundred percent.
Most would be lucky to have me as a girlfriend. I was cute. I was fully committed. Never even thought of straying, and I’d had offers. When JB and the guys played in shitty, run-down whiskey joints in Tulsa, Oklahoma? I was there. When they started to get some radio play with their first single? I was up front and center as well. Through thick and thin, I was the one constant. Well, except for the members of the band, of course. Though the drummer, Chase, was a bit too wild, in my humble opinion. Dude did a lot of blow on the road and was itching to get kicked out for good one of these days.
Still, even if they had to up and hire a new drummer, I was behind them on that as well. Decent drummers were a dime a dozen. Excellent ones were as rare as hen’s teeth—but to be frank, that might be stretching it. Met many great drummers. Never met a chicken with a molar.
Being who I was would get them far if it came to replacing the drummer. Where open auditions could bring in maybe a few good up-and-comers with a pair of sticks, if word got out from me, I could have a dozen excellent ones calling back to find out more.
I wasn’t just the lead singer’s girlfriend. I was their PR agent. And a damn good one, too. Savage Melody wasn’t my only client, which is why I wouldn’t be going on tour with them in a week. I still had other bands I had on my plate, one of which was starting to see some air play on a few radio stations in the west. Typical. The Caustics were trying to bring back grunge, and it looked like they were almost succeeding. Stupid fucking name, if you asked me, The Caustics, but even my boss couldn’t talk them out of that clusterfuck of a moniker. It sounded like some corrosive, possibly flesh-eating material that you tried to use to get the rust off your linoleum.
Caustic. Weird.
I loved the name Savage Melody, however. Initially, they had wanted to go with just Savage, but I vehemently endorsed the use of Melody behind it, finding it endearingly ironic. Savage was...well, “savage”. It was brutal, forceful—made you want to beat your chest and slaughter a small community of local natives with its raw, primitive undertones. Melody was fluid and sweet. Together, they were paradoxical, and I enjoyed the crap out of that kind of stuff. The guys did too, and we were soon working up a logo for them and their new brand.
That was a year ago. As Savage, they got zero airplay. Once they switched it to Savage Melody, a few of the radio stations perked their ears up, already liking the sound of the name.
I’m a fucking genius sometimes.
Or, at least, I was damned good at what I did. I was part of a small PR firm based in Tucson, Arizona, close enough to the west coast for engagements in L.A., and remote enough to keep some of my more fan-wary artists happy. If you hadn’t heard, not every musician wanted groupies on their junk twenty-four-seven.
I was surprised to find that out, too. More pussy than a you could shake a stick at would seem like a dream to me if I was a guy. And I was fully committed to my man, Jamison Bettes, better known as JB. Call him Jamison and I guarantee that you’d be picking your teeth out of the asphalt until winter.
He hated the name, so of course, that’s all his mother called him. He hated his mother for up and running out on him and his father when he was only 5 years old. They’d only recently started talking again. Talking as in, she talked, and he ended up getting pissy over nothing and a screaming match ensued. Whenever you asked him what had set him off, he could never really tell you. That, or he was too embarrassed to admit to whatever it was she’d said or done.
And that could have been a lot. Her very existence was a thorn in his proverbial paw, and even chatting over email could whip up a mood so foul, it was as thick as the smog that constantly converged in a soup over downtown Los Angeles.
Not that I could blame him. If one of my parents had walked out on me over 15 years ago and all of the sudden wanted to reconnect after I’d made a name for myself, I’d find it a chore as well. It was hard for me to forgive people for crap like that. Life-altering, heart-stopping, in-your-face shit like being left at 5 years old wasn’t something everyone had to face, or even half of said people, but he had. And he had overcome it by becoming successful.
Millicent Bettes-Warner hadn’t just popped out of the woodwork when JB became a household name, though. She had decided to reach out once he got his first hit single. There’s a correlation there, I’m sure, and no one was buying the “it was time to make up for my past transgressions” schtick Millie was trying to sell. I didn’t care if she said that she was a God-fearing woman now and had Jesus Christ on her speed-dial. She was as full of shit as a port-a-potty at an Arizona Cardinals game between the tailgate and starting time. She was loaded with it. It was like that R. Lee Ermey quote: “I didn’t know they stacked shit that high.”
My dad loved that dude’s caustic wit.
Besides JB and Chase, Savage Melody also consisted of our two personal fuckboys, KT and Jett. KT played lead guitar to JB’s rhythm, and Jett kicked some serious ass on bass. I wasn’t a fan of bass guitar in general, but Jett could turn a bass solo into an orgasm-inducing melody that had women creaming their panties all throughout the stadium.
Stadium. That’s what they would be playing in from now on. Hopefully. I had high aspirations for them. This was their first big U.S. tour, and a World Tour had definitive dates set for a few months from now. Cities like Los Angeles and San Jose were already sold out, as was New York City. The southern states weren’t as enthusiastic about the new rock group, but they still sold plenty of tickets and—as the PR person for the band—I thought of giving some free tickets away to some folks who would enjoy the show and couldn’t scrape up the money. Inner city kids in New Orleans, a group home for clients with traumatic brain injuries in Birmingham. I even set up free backstage passes for that one. I’m really a big softie at heart.
And it was hella good PR, even if I do say so myself.
“Babe?”
I hadn’t heard JB come in. Usually, the front door squeaked loudly, but JB had finally WD-40’d the fuck out of it a week ago. I still wasn’t used to the silence upon entry to our shared apartment.
“In here!” I called out, letting the calendar pages fall back to the current month. May. They were doing a summer tour. Guaranteed big bucks.
Like I said, people—genius.
JB ducked into the room, his dirty blond hair sweeping down over his right eye like it always did when it was in need of a cut.
“What ya doing?” He stared at me eyeballing the calendar.
“Just thinking.”
“Anything dirty?” He grinned, strolling over to me from the door of the bedroom and next to the bed where I kept the small calendar. I woke up to a Savage Melody ringtone every morning only to look over at the clock on the nightstand and see the Savage Melody calendar snuggled up against it.
You can’t say I wasn’t completely supportive of my man and his band. No one in their right mind was as gung-ho as I was.
By the way, if you ever happen to date a rock star from a band that sells killer paraphernalia like calendars, I guarantee it’s the best way to wake up in the morning. Bar. Fucking. None.
“I was thinking how great you guys are going to do and how proud I am of you,” I told him.
JB hummed as he came up behind me and gripped my hips to jerk me back against him. (Rock hard already, by the way. The man was insatiable.) “I heard that as how you’re so proud of me, that you need to prove it somehow.” He cupped my pussy through my shorts and ground his hips against me until I felt his full length wedged between the crack of my ass.
Not that his dick was small or my ass was that big. I was plenty svelte enough, though not a bag of bones like some. I don’t see how men didn’t get cut up on the sharp angles on some women. Hip bones jutting out, a jagged, pointed chin. If they wanted to fuck something that looked like it would snap, let them have at it. JB had always appreciated a curvier figure.
Or so he assured me over and over again while I was screaming his name beneath him in bed.
“How can I prove it?” I asked, leaning back in his arms.
To be honest, I was down with proving it. For several hours, if he needed the added affirmations.
Yeah. I was just as insatiable when it came to him.
His head dipped from his six foot, one-inch frame to my modest five foot four as his breath tickled the fine hairs near my ear. They weren’t long enough to be caught in the messy bun on the top of my head.
“Why don’t you get down on your knees and suck me off, baby?” he asked. It could have been a demand. I didn’t care. I heard the words ‘knees’ and ‘suck’ and was already turning around, ready to toss a pillow on the hardwood flooring and unzip his fly.
As I was doing just that, I nodded my head back at the calendar. “I was thinking I could fly out to L.A. in July for your show,” I said, taking in the rasp of his zipper and palming his thick cock through his pants with the other hand. “I can take a four-day weekend and get Gary to cover me with The Caustics.”
JB’s sex-laden smile faltered, leading me to think that wasn’t an altogether welcome idea.
“What?” I asked, hand stilling for the moment. “Got your other girlfriend coming that weekend?” I was kidding, but his lack of smile worried me.
“I was just thinking,” he murmured. “About maybe not having you come to any of the shows at all.”
I drew back, shocked. We had talked about this in the months preceding the tour. He had already said he was okay with me flying out to see him a few times. This should have been old news. It was just up to me to tell him when I could make it and where.
“Not...not any? Why?” I rocked to standing, his fly still open.
“Well, it’s our first big tour. The guys and I thought it would be better if we all appeared to be unattached in front of the fans. It would make us seem…more approachable.”
Approachable? He was fucking kidding me. He had to be. Approachable pretty much meant fuckable to all the would-be groupies.
“You’re taking relationship tips from two fuckboys and a cokehead?” Un-fucking-real.
“I...well, not only that.”
Oh, God. What now?
“What else? You want to break up?” I asked, fear shooting down my spine like a shot of adrenaline to the heart. The heart that was currently being fisted by both of his hands and squeezing my circulatory system to a halt.
“No! Not break up,” he cried, alarmed. “Just...on a break.”
God. Not a break. Breaks were like breakups, only more tenuous. It was like walking a tightrope, never knowing which side was going to send you ass over teacup.
“What? Like a ‘Ross and Rachel’ break? I sit at home wondering what you are doing when what you are doing is actually a who-you-are-doing? No way.” I gritted my teeth, trying to rein in my anger and failing. “We take a break, it’s a breakup. You wanna know why?”
He shrugged, his tongue flicking out nervously to wet his lips.
“You want to know why?” I practically screamed it.
“Sure, why?”
“Because a break means free-for-all on the groupies. A break means that you get to go out and have guiltless sex while I wonder whose back you’re blowing out while I sit at home and wonder if the ‘break’ was really just a nice way of saying breakup!”
“I told you—”
“I’m not finished!” I interrupted loudly. Stepping back again, I shook my head. “You know what? Forget it. And fuck this! Even talking about taking a break just shows me how uninvested in us you are. Even suggesting it should make me realize that I was in this for the long-haul and you’re out to get your dick wet as many times as you can while rocking out to sold-out crowds in Cleveland and Squirrel-Fucking-Vagina, Missouri! Forget about your stupid God damn break, because you don’t need one now. It’s over.”
And with that, I grabbed my purse, my phone, keys to the beat-up old Honda that I named Shirley after drinking my weight in spiked Shirley Temples one night, and walked out the door of our shared apartment.
As I sped off in the direction of the Catalina Foothills where my best friend Mandy lived, I never looked back. And I never answered my phone for him. Not the first time, and not any of the times before I moved when I decided to change my number.
Gary took over Savage Melody for me. We traded, although I had done all the grunt work getting them to the big time. But I didn’t regret it.
And I almost believe that to this day.
