Another night, another nightclub.
More flashing strobes spraying bubbles of light over a boiling crowd of semi-drunk dancers.
More speakers pushed beyond their capacity such that Elfie could hear the unintended distortion from the inadequate wiring and the badly designed venue acoustics that bounced the sound everywhere except at the dance floor.
Amateurs. Elfie could have redesigned the sound plot in there in an afternoon.
The nightclub was called Club Danz, as was apparent by the enormous LED sign flashing its name in a Helvetica lettering straight off an IKEA store. The neon-plastic Tuscan-country decor appeared to cater to expat Euro-trash, except that everyone was gabbling in English with a native Western American accent.
Elfie clambered up on a wobbly barstool that Tryp held steady for her while he ordered her a Diet Coke and a Scotch and water for himself. Her tight skirt—a blue dress this time—hampered her but she made it up there. After they had gotten Tryp all fixed up, it took her about fifteen minutes to shower, slather on some make-up, and slither into the new dress that she had stuffed in her backpack for stalking Tryp that night.
She had yanked a comb through her long hair, brushing the ends over her shoulders and almost to her waist.
Tryp had asked from the couch, “Why don’t you leave it loose?”
“It gets in the way,” she said, twisting it into a French braid down the back of her head.
“Yeah, it must be a pain in the ass.” He went back to doing something on his phone.
Now, at the bar, she could feel her hair pulling on the back of her head, and she realized that it was Tryp, idly tugging on her braid. “Hey. Stop that.”
“Hmmm? Oh. Sorry.” He glared at his hand like it had done something wrong.
“How about those two girls over there?” Elfie pointed at two gorgeous women, a matched pair of brunettes, both wearing skin-tight LBDs.
“They’re okay. Let’s look around for a while.” Tryp thanked the bartender for their drinks and tugged his wallet out of his back pocket to pay him.
He leaned down and whispered near Elfie’s ear, “I’ve been up in the VIP section with running tabs for so long that I almost forgot to pay the guy.”
His breath, still mint-sweet, trickled over her neck.
“How about those girls?” Elfie raised her Diet Coke at a threesome of girls who had been, as far as she could tell, sprayed with red, white, and blue latex paint in the shape of dresses.
“Let me have a drink first,” Tryp said. “I want to loosen up.”
“I just want to get this over with.” She stared at the ice floating in her overpriced soda.
“The putty on my nose itches.” He reached for his face.
“Don’t scratch!” Elfie hissed. “You’ll take a big gouge out of it and people will think you have leprosy.”
Tryp dragged his hand down his stomach, drawing Elfie’s gaze back to his chest and where his form-fitting shirt rippled over his abs. He insisted, “It itches.”
“Drink enough of that whiskey and you’ll go numb all over.”
“Good idea.” He gulped it and signaled the bartender for another.
Elfie sipped her Diet Coke, looking around. Club Danz seemed like a target-rich environment, as the other technicians would have said, and considering how many women bunched around the bar, it must be ladies’ night or something. If a hottie like Tryp couldn’t score tonight, then she was truly hopeless as a wing woman.
“How about that enormous herd of chicks in the corner?” she prompted.
He glanced over. “Bachelorette party.”
“So?”
“The bride is the only one who’ll be hot.”
“Nuh-uh. I’d take at least three of them to bed.”
“So you’re a closet bi, are you? Which ones?” He looked over with more interest.
“The girl in the black and white dress is cute.” Her long, black hair curled over her shoulders.
He turned to casually survey the room, twiddling a straw between his fingers like a drumstick, then turned back to Elfie. “She’s okay.”
“And the tall one looks nice. She smiles a lot.”
“She looks like a guy. Not my type.”
“Oh, she does not.”
“Um, Elfie? I’m not being an asshole. Look at how broad her shoulders are, and her Adam’s apple,” he touched the bump on his own throat above the vee of his shirt, where just a tendril of tattoo slipped past his collarbone, “and the stubble on her chest. Really not my type.”
Elfie scoped out the bachelorette party again. “How about the one in the sapphire blue dress?”
He looked down her own body. “Yeah. How about her?”
“Oh, stop. You are such a flirt, Tryp. The whole front row thinks they’re going to get in your pants every night. And this is not a sapphire blue dress. It’s Zenith Blue. Remind me never to let you sort my lighting gels. I meant the brunette to the left of the bride.”
“She’s okay. Let’s just chill for a few minutes. It’s only one o’clock. There’s plenty of time to pick up some chicks.”
“Okay, fine.” Elfie yawned. “How about the blond twins in the corner?”
He sighed into his fresh glass of whiskey and soda. “Okay. Where are they?”
“Check your nine o’clock.”
He swiveled, still with the nonchalant gaze, and said, “Okay, fine. You go play wing woman.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, that’s the whole point of having a wing man,” he sipped, “or a wing woman. If I walk up to them, I’m hitting on them and I’m a scammer. They feel uncomfortable saying no to my face, which makes them uncomfortable, so they definitely say no.”
Elfie nodded. “Like that guy last night.”
“But if you go tell them that your friend likes them,” Tryp said, “then they don’t feel like some jackass is hitting on them, so they feel comfortable. Then you talk me up, and then you motion me over and I come join you.”
“Oh! So that’s how this works? It’s like junior high?”
“I suppose so.” He frowned.
“I didn’t go to many bars before I joined the show.”
Tryp bowed his head so other people couldn’t see his lips moving. “Because you were seventeen?”
“That seriously put a damper on my clubbing.”
“I suppose it did. Now get over there and procure me some ass.”
“Just don’t ask them if they want to suck your dick. That’s so gross.”
“It’s just a joke. No one actually wants to suck dick, right?”
Elfie slipped off the bar stool and threaded through needle-eyes in the crowd to the table where the two blondes were standing. As she got closer, she realized that they weren’t actually twins, just dressed similarly and wearing their hair the same way. “Hi!”
They smiled at her and inclined their heads to the same tilt. “Hi?”
Okay. They were psychic twins. “I’m Elfie, and my friend, um, Tryfon, over at the bar thinks you’re cute.”
“Does he?” they asked and leaned to look through the crowd at him.
“Are you sisters or something?”
“Nope,” the left one said and threw her blond tresses behind her shoulder. She really had tresses, too. Like shampoo-commercial tresses.
“But we’ve been friends since we were eight,” the right one said, also tossing her blond tresses.
“You have really thick hair,” Elfie said, fascinated by the floaty, silky strands. Her own hair felt like straw most of the time.
They smiled at each other, a coy smile on their matching pink lips, and leaned forward.
“We use a silicone treatment,” Right Blonde said.
Yeah, they’d had several kinds of silicone treatments. Twin silicone treatments. Elfie crossed her arms over her waify chest.
Left Blonde scribbled something on a napkin and held it out. “Get this stuff. It’s good for blond hair.”
“My hair could never look as gorgeous as yours,” but she took the napkin. Her phone buzzed in her purse, vibrating up the strap to her wrist.
“Try it,” Left Blonde said.
“I will. Thanks.” Elfie fished her phone out of her purse. A text from Tryp read, Don’t get their phone numbers. We’ll be in Monterey tomorrow night.
“Oh, I’m supposed to be hitting on you for my friend,” Elfie told them. “He really is nice, and he’d like to meet you.”
“What does he do?”
Elfie licked her lips. “He’s a professional scuba diver.”
“What did he do to lose his amateur status?” Right Blonde asked, evidently still sober enough to be logical.
“We’re on a tour,” Elfie said, lying fast, “with a scuba diving equipment company. We’re here for a conference.”
“Scuba diver, huh? I wonder if that means he likes to go down,” Left Blonde said to Right Blonde.
“Or maybe he goes really deep.”
“Or maybe he gives you the bends-over.”
“Or maybe he only likes dark blue holes.”
Elfie realized that her mouth was actually hanging open, so she shut it before the flies got in.
“Are you his girlfriend?” Right Blonde asked.
“Me? No,” Elfie said. “Just a friend. Work associate, really. Just playing wing woman for the night.”
“He’s cute,” Left Blonde said, still leaning and looking.
You should see him without the fake nose. “Yeah, and he’s got a great sense of humor.”
“Oh, really?” Right Blonde leaned, and they were two blond, slanting, parallel lines.
“Yep, and he’s fun.”
“Is he good in bed?” Left Blonde asked.
Elfie’s mouth fell open again. “I—I wouldn’t know.”
“Just checking,” Left said. “Sometimes guys want a threesome—”
“Or a foursome,” Right added.
“—and they get their girlfriend to pimp them out.”
Right Blonde said, “We’re not into guys who are taken. We’re not sluts.”
“Oh, well, he’s not taken,” Elfie said. “He just wants to meet you two.”
“Which one of us?” Left asked.
Elfie paused, trying to remember. “He didn’t say.”
They looked at each other. “Good.”
The money that Rock had given Elfie for a cab was tucked in her purse, and a cab was looking exceedingly likely. She longed to put highway miles between herself and this conversation. “So I’ll text him to come over?”
“Sure,” they said.
Elfie texted Tryp, and they watched him stroll through the crowd to them, guiding people away from himself like he was bending saplings out of his path in a thick forest. His head stuck out of the crowd most of the time, and Elfie wondered just how tall he was, because he seemed really tall in this crowd.
Now that she thought about it, all the guys in Killer Valentine were really tall, and Tryp looked normal among them. That was why she hadn’t realized that he stood at least six feet.
He passed the last person separating them and lounged beside her bar stool, and she looked up.
Maybe more than six feet.
His hair around the nape of his neck was beginning to curl.
If that gel gave out, he was going to snap back to being Tryp Areleous, the Killer Valentine drummer, real quick.
The crowd pressed around them, jostling Elfie’s bar stool. “Um, ladies, I’d like to introduce my friend, Tryfon.”
Tryp glanced down at her out of the corners of his eyes, and his sly smile warmed her to her toes. Some of the white mascara was flaking off his eyelashes, and his eyes already seemed more exotic.
He extended his hand across the table to shake the twin blondes’ hands. “Tryfon Diavolos.”
“Nice to meet you,” they said. Their voices had raised half an octave into the soprano zone.
“I’m Lara—”
“—And I’m Mia.”
They had names. Conveniently, Lara was Left Blonde.
The blondes asked, “Want to dance?”
Tryp grinned. “Sure!”
Elfie stirred her Diet Coke as the blondes slid off their bar stools and walked into the crowd toward the dance floor.
Tryp turned back. “Aren’t you coming?”
Elfie shook her head, embarrassed. “You should take it from here, right?”
He held out his hand. “Come on. Come dance with us. It’s just dancing.”
Evidently, wing women had lots of duties. “Okay, sure.”
She held his hand to hop off her bar stool, and he held her hand for a minute longer while she unbunched her dress around her hips, teetering on her heels.
“Okay now?” he asked.
“Sure thing. Let’s go.”
They followed the blondes through the crowd toward the flashing dance floor.
Elfie smiled at the two blondes and shrugged as Tryp led her through to where they were already gyrating, and Elfie joined in. She didn’t want to cock-block Tryp again, so she mainly danced with whichever girl he wasn’t dancing with, like a good wing woman. Lara and Mia picked up that she wasn’t trying to be competition pretty fast and warmed up, using tiny little Elfie as a prop to wiggle around, and she wiggled back.
Elfie glanced up and nearly gasped.
Tryp’s fake nose was still adhered properly. Enough of his white mascara and guyliner was still in place that his appearance was intact.
But damn it, he danced like a rock star.
That megalomaniac confidence that allowed him to play the drums like a madman in front of thousands of screaming fans rolled off him in waves. Lara and Mia danced less with Elfie and more with him, again not competing with each other, but because there was more than enough rock star to go around.
As they were slithering up against him, Tryp looked up, caught Elfie’s gaze, and smiled, holding her there with just his grin. For a second, the blond twins vanished, and everyone vanished, and he was dancing only with her.
No wonder he was a freaking rock star. Elfie bet that he did just that from inside the fortress of his drum set and that was how he captivated the whole front row with one sultry glance.
But he still watched her, and when he held out his hand again, she danced closer.
It seemed like every time she turned around, Tryp’s dark eyes were still on her eyes and her body, and she danced hard with him because she couldn’t fathom doing otherwise.
Years of dance lessons surged in her body. While this wasn’t the place to pop up on her toes, she’d had enough crump and beat classes that she could writhe with the best of the dancers in that club.
The music filled her, and Tryp’s admiring eyes encouraged her. Elfie released all the anger and stress from the last couple years, and she danced.
A couple songs later, the Blond Twins excused themselves to go to the ladies’ room, and they started to walk away, leaving Elfie alone with Tryp. A ballad started playing over the improperly focused speakers.
Tryp cocked his head to the side and smiled at her.
Elfie called out, “Wait up, girls! Hey, Tryp, why don’t you grab us some drinks? They were drinking cosmopolitans. Pink ones.” She stepped closer to him, close enough to whisper to him, “Don’t blow it!” before she ran after Lara and Mia.
In the bathroom, Elfie examined her wild reflection in the mirror while she waited for Left Blonde and Right Blonde. Her own blond braid was fraying, and flyaway strands waved around her head under the harsh neon lights like angry, pale spider legs.
Lara’s voice echoed from her stall, “So Elfie, why are you pimping out your boyfriend?”
“I’m not. I told you already. He’s really not.” she said, wetting her hands and trying to smooth her hair. “He really is just a friend.”
“You aren’t into him?” Mia asked from her stall.
“No.”
“Why not? He’s not your type? Are we your type?” Her carefree tone wasn’t jarring.
“No,” Elfie said, “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” they both repeated back, their unison voices bouncing off the brittle teal tile. The acoustics sucked everywhere in this club.
Elfie said, “But you two are really pretty. If I were into girls, I would totally be into you guys.”
“You, too,” they said together.
“But no,” Elfie clarified. “I’m into guys.”
“So why are you ignoring Tryfon? He’s totally into you,” one of them said. They flushed simultaneously.
“He is not.” Elfie’s damp hair stayed mashed down on her head, which was an improvement over the wild child look. Actually, more like the burr-matted, stray cocker spaniel look.
“He is,” Mia came out and washed her hands.
Lara used the middle sink. “Totally.”
“To the point where we’re going to seek greener pastures,” Mia said.
“I told him to order you some cosmo’s,” Elfie said. “At least come drink your cocktails.”
“He doesn’t have to do that.”
“You should let him,” Elfie said.
“How much could a professional scuba diver make?” Lara asked. “I mean, he looks ripped, but he’s probably strapped, too.”
Lara and Mia stood in front of her, their hands on their voluptuous hips. Reflected in the mirror, four gorgeous, tall blondes stared down at Elfie in the bathroom, which was how outclassed she felt. Tryp had looked perfectly at home dancing with the two of them, like a rock star.
“He’s not a professional scuba diver,” Elfie said.
“Yeah,” Mia said. “No kidding. What the fuck would a professional scuba diver do, anyway?”
Elfie pulled her phone out of her purse and pulled up the Rolling Stone cover from a couple month ago on the browser. She glanced around the bathroom, and three of the other stall doors were shut. “Don’t squeal.”
“Why would we—” Lara squinted at the phone. “No shit.”
“Yeah,” Elfie said. “I put stage make-up on him. He’s wearing a fake nose.”
“That’s—what’s his name—Tryp? The drummer?” Mia looked up at Elfie over the top of the phone, her brown eyes angry. “And you’ve got some sort of an arrangement? Like an open relationship?”
“No,” Elfie insisted. “I’m the pyrotechnics engineer. I’m a—” she couldn’t believe that she was going to say the much-despised word, “roadie. I’m just making sure he doesn’t get into too much trouble, partying like a rock star. I’m nothing to him.”
Lara looked at Mia, and the twins in the mirror faced each other, too. Lara said, “Something’s wrong with this.”
“Yep. Would have been nice to fuck a drummer, but there is something messed up here.”
Elfie sighed and put her phone away. “There are two overpriced cosmopolitans out there with your names on them. Come have a drink with the sexy rock star before you turn him down, okay?”
They followed Elfie over to the table, where Tryp sat with their drinks plus two empty shot glasses and a squat, manly drink with ice cubes in front of him.
Elfie caught Left Blonde and Right Blonde staring at him, mentally stripping off the make-up, and then nodding to each other. They slugged down the cocktails, and Elfie saw a psychic signal pass between them.
Selfie attack!
They jammed their heads up next to Tryp’s face. Flash. They kissed him on each cheek. Flash. They giggled, and Tryp kissed each of their cheeks while their phone flashbulbs pasted them with silver light.
They bid “Tryfon” a very good night and left Tryp and Elfie sitting at the table together.
The DJ put on Semisonic’s “Closing Time,” and everyone on the dance floor groaned at the last call.
“So you told them,” he said.
“Yeah. They were going to ditch us earlier if I hadn’t.”
Tryp chuckled. “People are starting to stare, and it’s late. We might as well head out.” He texted the car to come pick them up.
Elfie mashed the lemon wedge into her Diet Coke ice. “I’m sorry, Tryp.”
“Don’t be.” He reached over and covered her hand with his. Warmth seeped into her bones. He grinned. “I’m a fucking rock star. If I want to bust a nut, I’ll pick someone up.”
“That doesn’t seem to be working out for you, or else I’m the worst wing woman ever.”
“It’s fine.” He kept holding her hand as he stood and then switched his fingers under hers to help her down off the high stool. “I had a good time. You’re a good dancer.”
“After twelve years of lessons, I should hope so.”
“Twelve years, huh?”
“Three to five times a week, depending on the season.”
Tryp shoved a path through the crowd for them to the alley where their driver was waiting with the car. “You crump well.”
“Great. I can crump, but those eight years on pointe? All wasted.”
“I’m sure your ballet is very nice. If we go to a ballet bar, you can dance for me.”
“Hah. Ballet barre. That’s funny.”
He laughed at her joke, and it was embarrassing how stupidly proud she was that she made him laugh. He said, “I used to play the piano for my mom when she taught ballet class.”
“Wow. Live piano. Must have been an advanced class. Was it with a company?”
“No. Other reasons.”
The driver opened her car door for her, and she scooted in. Tryp gathered himself and stepped in the other side.
“Back to the hotel?” the driver asked as he slammed his own door.
Elfie was trying to hide a yawn behind her hand, but it got away from her and her jaw popped. When she managed to open her eyes, Tryp was watching her, his dark eyes laughing.
“Yeah,” he told the driver without looking to the front seat. “I think we should go back to the hotel. Does this thing have a privacy screen?”
“No, sir. It’s just a town car.”
The car pulled into the night. The long streets were almost empty of other vehicles except for the couple dozen leaving the nightclub parking lot and scattering into the dim night.
Tryp turned in the seat so that his knee was touching her thigh. “So you took ballet, huh?”
“Yep, standard middle-class upbringing. Mother. Step-father. Nothing out of the ordinary. You?” A dull ache was radiating from her temples down the back of her neck, and she rubbed the side of her face, trying to dispel it.
Tryp glanced at the driver, who appeared to be concentrating on the road pointing to the horizon far ahead of the car. “I had a step-father, too. Absolutely normal. Just like you. Normal.”
His flat tone rang false in Elfie’s ears. She examined his face in the shifting planes of lights from the streetlights flowing past the car, but his expression was so still, so blank, that she couldn’t read anything except that he was lying his ass off. His deadpan look was so obvious that she kind of suspected he wanted her to know it.
Elfie’s braid pulled on the top of her head. She grabbed her hair and shook it to confuse the nerves and relieve the pressure, but the tension squeezed harder around her temples.
Tryp sat back a little. “But that’s just history. I had a good time tonight,” he said again, for at least the second time.
Elfie shook off the weirdness. “You know, you look good when you’ve taken a shower and you don’t reek of whiskey and stuff.”
“I’m not a rock star tonight. If I’d’ve gone in there as myself and grungy from the show, the girls would have been climbing all over me. Chicks dig the dirty rocker. When some actress wants a date with me, I get in the bottom of my suitcase and drag out a pair of leather pants that haven’t been cleaned in months and a ripped-up tee shirt that shows off the tatts, then I put on some chains and shit.” Anger rasped in his voice. “They don’t want a person. They want the someone who is so far gone into sex, drugs, and rock and roll that they pulverize societal norms. They want a hard, dirty fuck, so that’s what I give them.”
He looked so dejected that she almost wanted to hug him, but he would probably shake her off. She pressed her fists to her temples instead and pushed, trying to mash the headache out of her head. “That’s pretty gross, Tryp.”
He was watching her as she rubbed her head. “If I showed up in an ironed shirt and clean hair, they wouldn’t know what to do. They’d think I was a sellout. Are you okay?”
“I’m just getting a headache. Too much caffeine late at night.”
“It’s your hair.” He picked up the end of her braid and rolled the elastic off the end. “Your hair is so thick that your braid is too heavy. My sisters used to say that they had a hair-ache.”
“I’m fine,” she protested, but he was already working his fingers through her hair, combing the plaits out. When his hands reached the back of her neck, the tight band around her temples eased, and the gentle pressure from him combing her hair with his fingers chased the pain further.
“Your hair is all the way down to your waist,” he said, holding the ends taut.
“I never have time to get it cut off. Sometimes I think about attacking it with fingernail clippers.”
He lifted her hair, smoothing it down her back. “Don’t do that. My sisters all had long, long hair. I didn’t realize how much I missed it.”
“You miss your sisters’ hair?”
“Seeing girls who look like girls.” His tone lightened, but he kept stroking her hair, running his fingers over her temples and down the back of her neck. “It’s just what I was used to.”
This was all weird. Tryp was weird. Maybe she was so used to how he was when he was wasted that she didn’t know what he was really like. “How many sisters do you have?”
“A lot.”
“You lost count?”
“Something like that.”
His dad must have gotten around or something. He probably wouldn’t want to talk about that.
“That fake nose must itch,” she said and turned on the cramped car seat. His hands fell away from her hair. “Here, let me pull it off.”
He leaned toward her and seemed to take up three-quarters of the back seat with his long legs and broad shoulders. She reached over and scratched between his eyes, lifting the edge of the putty with her fingernails. It stretched like rubber cement as she pulled.
Tryp closed his eyes, and his dark eyelashes brushed his cheekbones. Almost all the pale mascara had flaked off, and in the darkness, she couldn’t see if any of the guyliner was still there.
When he opened his eyes again—those dark, dark eyes like falling into space,—he seemed even closer, like their lips were closer.
Elfie’s breathing felt light in her chest, like she couldn’t get enough air.
The nightclub had been only a few blocks from the hotel in San Jose, and the car pulled under the lit awning by the lobby doors. The driver got out to walk around and open their doors.
Tryp said to her, still gazing into her eyes like he was trying to telepathically force something into her head, “Come to the hotel bar with me for a few minutes.”
Everything that Lara and Mia said rang in her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“It’ll be empty at this time of night. There’s a piano there. I wrote a song. I haven’t shown it to anyone.” The car door opened behind him, but Tryp didn’t move.
“All right, Tryfon,” Elfie said, still breathless. “Just for a few minutes.”