Elfie was packing her gerbs, metal tubes the size of her index finger that fountained sparks into the air, when Tryp walked on stage. His motorcycle boots stomped on the planks and thundered up the empty rows of seats. No technician would wear clompy boots like that because the audience would hear them. Techs were engineering ninjas, sliding silent and unseen in the darkness behind the stage.
She abandoned her pyros, grabbed his hand, and hauled him into the wings, which was another tunnel blocked off at the ends with black tarps so the audience couldn’t see in. “What are you doing here?”
Tryp must have managed to shower because his black hair curled soft and glossy again, so he hadn’t regressed too far down the alcoholic stoner street. His pallor still seemed gray, and he didn’t quite meet her eyes. With his fingers still holding hers, he said, “Sound check.”
“Oh. Yeah. I guess it is four o’clock.” She cringed inside.
He still held her hand. “I should get out there.”
She didn’t let go of his hand, either. Their tangled fingers didn’t make her panic, and she felt warmth flush her cheek. “Okay.”
He looked down at her, a sultry tilt to his eyes. She bet he didn’t even know he was doing it or else he didn’t know how to stop. “After the show,” he said, “we need to talk.”
“Yeah,” she admitted. She watched his plush lips as he spoke, thinking about him kissing her last night, but if he did that here in the dark tunnel, she would just die if she freaked out again. She hated being afraid of how she might react. Fucking hated it.
“Did I do something wrong last night?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It wasn’t you.”
“Are you all right?”
Her whole body locked up like she was rusted, and she stared at their fingers twined around each other in the semi-darkness of the tunnel.
“Elfie?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” she croaked.
“You’re not, but I have to get through the show.” His fingers firmed around hers, and he pulled her to her chest. “Is this okay?”
She nodded, and her arms clasped his waist. His rippled torso warmed her cheek, and a whiff of clean linen and something sweet, like some sort of white flower, wafted out of his clothes. She turned her face into his shirt, and Tryp stroked he back of her neck.
His reached around her. “Don’t cry anymore. I can’t stand to see women cry.”
She nodded against his chest. Her eyes weren’t leaking, which was good.
An announcement split the air. “Sound check, drums?”
Tryp rested his chin on her head. “I’ve got to go. After the show, take the runner with me. I won’t try anything. I swear to God, I won’t.”
“I can’t. I’ve got to get my pyros cleaned up, at least some of them.”
“I cleared it with Jonas.”
Trust Jonas the Machinator to have cleared that. She nodded. “Okay.”
Tryp detangled himself from her, even though Elfie found it hard to let go of his lean torso. “Tonight,” he said.
He walked through the tarps hanging at the end of the tunnel. Sunlight flashed into the dim cement bunker for a second, but darkness clapped around her again.
Chairs lined the sides of the tunnel, and Elfie let her knees go out and sat.
She was okay, see? Tryp was different.
If she kept thinking that, maybe she would be okay.
Light cut through the darkness again, and Xan Valentine appeared at the far end of the tunnel. He was leaner than the other guys, and his silhouette looked like a stretched shadow after seeing Tryp. His personal security guys skulked behind him like a cadre of black-suited shadows at the far end of the tunnel.
Xan held his guitar by the neck and carried a notebook in his other hand. “Who’s on for sound check?”
His British accent always out of place to Elfie, like he should be on the television, reading the news. Mitch did a devastating impression of it. She told him, “Tryp just started.”
“Running behind again.” Xan collapsed in the chair across from her. He stretched his long legs halfway across the tunnel, propped his guitar against the wall, and flipped open the notebook, glaring at it.
“What’re you working on?” she asked.
“Songs,” he said.
“For the next album?”
He nodded, the blond ends of his long hair waving in the dim air. “Some people can write a dozen songs in a few days or weeks. I’m not a quick writer. I like to think the quality improves, but I’m positive that the quantity suffers.”
“You write lots of singles,” Elfie said.
“There have been in the past.” His dry tone made Elfie raise her eyebrows. Xan looked up at her. “How’s Tryp doing?”
“He’s okay.”
“All right,” Xan clicked a pen and went back to his notebook, obviously dissatisfied with her answer.
Elfie wouldn’t sell Tryp out to ingratiate herself with Xan, and his songwriting problems were sad but not sufficient to make her narc.
But the song that Tryp sang for her was really, really good. It had broken her heart and mended her, at least some, and he seemed too secretive about it. It needed to be out there. It should be out in the world.
She said, “You should ask Tryp if he’s been writing.”
Xan glanced up at her, his brown eyes evaluating what she had said. “He’s been writing?”
“I don’t know.”
“He hadn’t mentioned it.” He snapped the notebook closed. “I’ll be discreet. Thank you.”
He strode off toward the end of the tunnel, leaving Elfie alone.
Elfie made her way back to the stage and resumed working on her pyros. Too many special effects packs littered the stage, and she couldn’t remember which ones she had repacked. The long row of the gerbs stretched around the edge of the stage, some packed, some not, some recorded, some not.
She angled herself on the edge of the stage so she could watch him. Tryp beat a long roll on his tom-tom, then leaned into the mic, spinning a drumstick between his knuckles. “How’s that?”
Elfie flinched as the sound engineer’s voice blasted through the arena, “Fine. Try the crash.”
A cymbal smash rang through the air, and Elfie almost ducked and covered that time.
She needed to finish these pyros, but her notes on her tablet made no sense. She had entered at least one of the RFID tags twice, and she couldn’t seem to keep the numbers in her head because her mind kept flashing back to Tryp’s dismay when she started crying, and his kindness, and the feeling of his lips on hers and the rich scent of his body around her, and things farther back that she didn’t want to think about but which rose like razor-sharp spirals of concertina wire that she couldn’t reach through.
Elfie entered another RFID tag into the spreadsheet on the tablet and realized that she had no idea what she’d written.
Damn it, concentrate, Elif. People could get hurt.
Behind her, the bass drum thrummed through the air, and Elfie packed pyrotechnics that would shoot up around Tryp and Xan and the rest of them during the climax of the second set.