Chapter 1
Tears curtained my eyes. My stomach churned. Raw emotion nearly doubled me over as I stumbled back out into the busy corridor at the Verizon Theatre, my arm thrown protectively across my waist.
Don't be sick. Walk away don't run. Exit the venue with your remaining dignity intact.
“Raven.” I jerked upright at the sound of his voice. His lying cheating voice. No lead singer croon at the moment, just ‘I got busted’ conciliatory whine. “It's not what you think. Come back inside and we'll talk it out.”
“It is exactly what I think." I threw a long length of my hair back over my shoulder pretending to be indifferent, amazed that I was able to string together coherent words while my mind kept replaying the scene of that two timing bastard doing another woman doggie style on the dressing room floor. I would never be able to Clorox wipe that image from my memory.
“It's over." My voice warbled. We had been through so much together. I had begun to nurture hopes of a future for the two of us, though I hadn't shared them with him. Thank God, I was spared that humiliation. "We're through." I threw a hand on my hip brandishing sass I didn't feel. “Don't bother calling. I sure won’t."
“C'mon, baby. Don't be like that.” Ivan Carl, the frontman of Heavy Metal Enthusiasts leaned his tattooed forearm against the dressing room door while holding up his unbuckled jeans. "Come join the fun. Expand your horizons. Try a little spontaneity for once, instead of planning every single thing you do down to the nth degree."
“I don't.” I huffed.
“Oh yeah you do,” he retorted. “It’s that way with everything. Especially sex. It's the same position, the same two damn days every week when I’m home. Maybe I need more. Maybe I just wanted to shake things up a bit. Rattle your cage. Get back the girl I knew at the beginning, the one who knew how to relax and have a good time, the one I started out with a year ago."
That girl was gone. She wasn't ever coming back. I thought he understood. He had been so patient while I had regrouped and tried to put the shattered pieces of myself back together. I thought that he had loved me. I believed that he had been faithful. But who the hell knew after something like this? Maybe he had been cheating on me all along. My world careened on its axis. The blood drained from my face. Forget my mind. I suddenly wanted to sanitize my entire body.
"How many other women have there been?" My fingers clenched into fists, my nails biting into my palms.
“Only Clarissa. Honest to God.”
I glared at him. So doggie had a name. The knife already lodged in my abdomen twisted in so deep that it seemed to sever my spine.
“I can't believe you're being like this.” He sighed, his dark brown eyes shimmering with emotion. Regret, perhaps. Too freakin’ late for that. He ran a hand that visibly trembled through the chestnut strands of his medium length hair. I think he was beginning to see how this was going to play out. The ‘that's-all-folks’ had been pretty clear to me from the moment I had caught him fucking someone else.
"So help me Ivan. If you gave me a venereal disease I'll lop off your dick with a pair of hedge trimmers.”
He winced. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. I wore a condom. Besides, it was only this once.”
“And it didn’t mean anything.” I cut him off, finishing his sentence for him.
“Exactly, baby.” Biting down on his silver hoop lip ring, he stepped closer to me, his hips hitching with the cocky swagger I had once found so irresistibly sexy. But his hand holding up his pants reminded me yet again that his cock had just been inside someone else. That sobering fact negated the I'm-so-sorry pleading expression. It negated all the hopes and dreams I had built for us. I straightened my shoulders, not all that impressive, but it was the best show of strength I could manage at the moment. I would build stronger defenses later. For now, I stood up to his bullshit rock star charm. I recognized it for what it was. Cheap pyrotechnics and lyrical subterfuge. I should have known better. I should have listened to my father, my best friend, and even my brother. They had all seen through him. Why hadn’t I?
“Don't touch me.” I backed further away when he reached for me. His big brown eyes glistened like melted chocolate, but I ignored the temptation, spinning on my Steve Madden heels and running smack into a cart stacked with amplifiers.
“Sorry, Raven,” Peter apologized. I knew all the roadies by name, even fashioning Navajo dreamcatchers for them as Christmas gifts. “I didn't see you." He moved toward me. “Hey, why are you crying?” He frowned. “Did I hurt you?"
“No.” I shook my head.
“What's wrong then?” Peter pressed while Ivan’s presence loomed behind me.
“It’s nothing,” I mumbled. “I gotta go.” I slid my cell out of my bag to call my best friend. I had her number dialed before I hit the metal bar and opened the door to the blast of heat from the parking lot. "Marsha, it's me,” I said as soon as she picked up. “You were right. Ivan is an asshole. I need you and tequila stat."
Chapter 2
I squinted at the shot glass. Glasses. Plural. My vision had gone blurry about two hours into the marathon of tequila. My chapped lips burned with every bite of lime and shake of salt. But I wasn't through. I was on a quest for oblivion. I needed more to erase the memory of Ivan and Doggie Girl from my mind. I just needed to figure out which glass on the bar in front of me was the real one. I reached for the one on the right. It seemed the more solid of the two.
My hand went right through it. A mirage. Just like Ivan had been with his music, his thoughtful words and his mind blowing kisses.
Left, then. The only other choice I had. My fingers closed around the thick glass. I licked the salt from the back of my hand, plucked the lime from the rim and lifted the measure of tequila toward my mouth.
“I think maybe you've had enough.” Marsha West, my bestie and partner in too many crimes to count, seized my wrist. Her grip only tightened when I turned to glare at her. Both of her. Duplicate gorgeous blue eyed blondes. Each with identical frowns. Lips pursed, I tried to mentally merge them into one person again.
"Just a more couple,” I begged them, batting my lashes.
The two heads of Marsha shook their denial.
“Ok, maybe just this one.”
“Maybe none. You're cross-eyed drunk. You can't even focus. You’re gonna be sick.”
“Please, Mars. It's already poured.”
She sighed. “Ivan wasn't all that. You didn’t even really notice him until I pointed him out to you. He's certainly not worth hurling over. Not after what he did.”
I narrowed my gaze. “You’re the one who said, and I quote, ‘Ivan Carl is the hottest frontman I've ever seen. I want to have his babies.’ End quote.”
“So I exaggerated. But he does look good in jeans. And he does have that soulful singing voice.”
My expression must have turned wistful or pained because she added, “But that was before I found out what a lying, cheating, arrogant prick he is. Now I say good riddance.” She let out a weary breath. “Oh alright. Stop giving me that kicked puppy look. Have your one last shot. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She released my wrist and twisted in her stool. “Bartender,” she called, knocking annoyingly on the wood. Or maybe it was my pounding hangover headache kicking in early. “Pour me a double and fast. Can't you see I need to show some solidarity here?”
Through my alcohol induced haze, I saw a blur of movement and heard the slide of glass on polished wood.
“Here's to getting over Ivan.” Marsha clicked her glass with mine, and I drained the double shot in a big gulp that washed down my throat like liquid fire. The room immediately started spinning in a dangerous way.
“Raven?”
“Yeah, Marsha?” I slurred.
“You're looking a little pale.”
“I'm always pale.”
“Paler than usual.” She lifted my fringe of thick bangs feeling my forehead with the back of her hand as if she were checking for fever. “You gonna be ok bestie?” She searched my eyes.
“I've got you, haven't I?”
“Always,” she said gently. “No more tequila, ok?
“Ok.” I would have nodded but I thought better of it. The less motion, the better. In addition to my buzz and blurry vision I was nauseated now. “But do you think maybe Ivan's right? Am I too uptight? Am I boring?”
“Who cares,” a male chortled. “You get a pass because you're smokin’ hot.”
“Shut up, Joey.” Marsha shot a glare toward the other end of the bar before she took and squeezed my hand reassuringly. “Don't listen to that idiot. You're alright. So you've had a couple of bad breaks recently. It's understandable that you're a tad OCD now.”
“She's a walking talking Rain Man.”
“Joey, so help me if you don't stay out of this, I'm not sleeping with you ever again, no matter how drunk I get.”
“Don’t baby her so much.” Joey tossed his bar towel over his broad shoulder and turned away from me and my drama to wait on another customer.
I dropped my head to the bar. The wood didn’t yield but the cool glossy surface soothed my tequila flushed skin. “I'm a mess,” I mumbled from beneath the black curtain of my hair. “I'll never be right again.”
“You'll figure it out, honey.” Marsha stroked my hair back from my face. “You’ve had a shock. Give yourself a little time to bounce back.”
“Maybe,” I allowed. “Or maybe I never will. I'm tired of being on the losing side. I'm tired of trying to do the right thing. It just doesn’t matter. I'm never going to be able to undo the mistakes I’ve made.”
“Raven, what happened to Hawk was an accident. It’s not your fault. You need to stop beating yourself up about it.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. A wave of soul crushing loss engulfed the pain of Ivan’s betrayal. My brother’s beloved face flashed inside my mind. The way his eyes crinkled when he smiled. His positive life force. His steadying influence. All gone forever because of how utterly I had failed him.
I had tried to atone. I had reordered my life. I had buried my wilder self alongside him. I had forced myself to go forward telling my reflection in the mirror each morning that everything would be ok somehow. But my tight grip on my life kept slipping. Bad things kept happening. I felt like an overwound spring, all that repressed energy begging to be released. This thing with Ivan was the catalyst for what was about to become a chain reaction.
“Why do guys like Ivan always get a pass?” I slapped my hand on the bar. “Why are women expected to be monogamous while guys get pats on the back for sleeping around?”
“Yeah,” Marsha agreed. “Talk to me sister.”
I lifted my head and managed to focus on her. The red light on her GoPro video camera flashed in my eyes. It was almost always on. She filmed most of the stupid shit I did. She submitted the more amusing stuff to film contests, even placing in a few of them. She might have settled on a career as a legal transcriptionist because a film degree had been too expensive for her father to afford on his cop’s salary, but like me and my music her passion lay elsewhere.
“Keep going,” she encouraged, making a rolling gesture with her finger. She wasn’t the kind of friend who would talk me out of doing something crazy. She more often than not had a hand in helping me plan it. “Get it all out. You're speaking some major truth.”
I obliged her, raging against the injustice of it all, ranting about the double standards for women. I had an outlet for my anger. A balm for my pain. I had lost too much. My mom. My brother. I couldn’t get them back. But I could take back my pride. I could avenge the affront to my womanhood. I straightened in my seat. I’d paid my penance this past year. I was done with that. A heavy dose of insanity was what the present shitty reality demanded. "Why do chicks always have to be the ones to take whatever a guy wants to give us? Why can’t I point out what looks good to me, crook my finger and get what I want for a change? Why can't I get some cute rock star ass without it having to mean anything? Why can't we fuck ‘em then leave ‘em? It's time to turn the tables on the guys with guitars who seduce us with their soulful lyrics and twist our hearts with their lying bedroom eyes." I lifted my shot glass and pointed to it for a refill, nodding my thanks to Joey as he sloshed in more golden elixir. "Tonight marks the end of boring Raven." Fresh pain gripped my heart as I recalled Ivan’s accusations but I powered through it. “From this day I vow to be uptight no longer. I'm going to ‘Kumbaya’ and give into my wild side, and you're going to document it. It's time to shake things up. It's time for a new way of doing things. It's time for women to be the ones in control.” I held up one finger. "We say when."
“When,” she echo, echo, echoed as if she had shouted the word into an empty concert hall.
“We say how.” I held up two fingers.
“I vote dirty.” She grinned. “Filthy dirty.”
I returned her grin, appreciating her enthusiasm but giving up on the finger counting thing. I was too drunk to go any higher anyway. “We'll hit the concert scene in ten different cities and rank the rock stars we fuck along the way for the betterment of all womankind so the sisters who follow us don't waste their time on losers."
Marsha guffawed. She was used to my drunken grandiosity. She put her fist up in the air, and I managed to bump mine to hers to seal the deal on the second try.
"We'll call ourselves the Rock Fuck Club."