After I finished the lyrics, I held out the “be” and shouted my “yeah” just as Mace came unstuck from my spel and started to push through the crowd, making his way toward the stage.
The band played behind me with a power and certainty that made it sound as if we’d played the song mil ions of times rather than just this once. The chords I played sounded angry, as if sliced from my guitar. Floyd’s fingers were pounding out the notes on the piano, notes to a song I didn’t even know he knew.
The crowd was stil silent, stunned, watching, enthral ed.
I let the final words to the song rush out of me, hoarse and fil ed with scratching despair, just like it rushed out of Eddie Vedder on Pearl Jam’s world-rocking, genre-defining album “Ten”.
As I sang, Mace was nearly at the stage when I closed my eyes to shut him out as if closing my eyes could shut him out of my life forever.
Stil playing, my head dropped and I rested my forehead on the mic, the vision of Mace, eyes never leaving me, pushing through the crowd toward me, was burned on the backs of my eyelids.
I played lead, Floyd’s piano thundering around me, matching the same notes that came from my guitar. The band began singing their “da-do-do-do, do-do-do’s” and before my fingers could strum the angry riff and I could shout my anguish like Vedder, I was pul ed roughly from the mic.
My eyes came open and I stared, frozen to the spot in disbelief.
Mace was there, onstage, right in front of me, right in front of five hundred people.
I stayed frozen as his hand wrapped around the neck of my guitar; he yanked it over my head and then jerked me forward so that my body slammed against his.
His free arm sliced at a slant around my back, crushing me to him. His head came down, his mouth finding mine and he kissed me, right there, right onstage, right in front of five hundred people, open-mouthed, hard, wet and ful of everything.
His body bent forward, pushing mine back so I was His body bent forward, pushing mine back so I was arched over his arm, my torso and hips pressed deep into him.
He kissed me and kept kissing me as the band played around us, pushing the song longer, longer…
I heard the cheers, the shouts, the stamping feet, the applause, the crowd was wild, my subtle edge as a possible lesbian was forever obliterated.
And through it al , Mace kept kissing me.
When he final y tore his mouth from mine, he didn’t move away. He kept me bent over his arm, his face less than an inch from mine, our eyes locked and we were both breathing heavily. My heart was beating like a hammer, I could feel it in my chest, in my throat and, dear God, I could feel his too.
“You didn’t get it,” I whispered.
I could taste the acid of tears in my throat, the sting of them at the backs of my eyes.
I real y, really needed him to get it.
But he didn’t understand that he turned my world to black and he didn’t get it that I couldn’t go through that again.
“No, Kitten, you don’t get it,” he whispered back.
My hands were clutching his shoulders. I started to try to push but I realized I couldn’t. I couldn’t push and keep control of my tears and my terror and my shaky belief in the fact that what I was doing was right. Not al at the same time.
So I just held on.
“Let me go, Mace.”
He didn’t let me go.
Instead he spoke.
And what he said with the background soundtrack of the repeating end notes of a soul-destroying rock song changed my fucking life.
“I can’t be the star in your sky when you’re the only star left shining in mine.”
This time, my breath took the Concord out of retirement and shot to Paris.
That was right before the gunshots rang out.
And the gunshots rang out just seconds before Mace and I went down, Mace’s big, hard body landing on mine like a dead weight to the sickening, discordant sound of the strings of a crashing guitar.
Chapter Nine
Sex Wax
Jet
I was smiling at Daisy, stil high from Stel a and The Gypsies’ “Ghostriders” which always lasted at least ten minutes (if not more) and, no matter how many times we heard it (which was every time we saw them play), they made it fresh, ful of energy and it always brought the house down.
But tonight, it was more. The band was on fire and that fire blazed through the crowd, white-hot. It was enough to make us forget our troubles, the danger again confronting us and just enjoy some good ol’ rock ‘n’ rol .
Daisy grinned back at me and shouted, “Yippee kay yay!”
So, of course, I shouted it right back at her.
Over Daisy’s shoulder, I saw Annette and Roxie doing a high five then they bumped hips and, seeing that, I giggled.
It was great being a Rock Chick.
Only thing better was being Eddie’s Woman.
Lucky for me, I was both.
My eyes slid through the crowd, looking for Eddie (not finding him, by the way) and coming to stop on Tex.
Like he had been al night, Tex was sitting at a stool, his back to the bar. But now, his narrowed eyes were locked on something as if that something was something he did not like.