Elfie’s phone tweeted in her purse at its usual time, which was just a few hours after she had gone to sleep. She grabbed it and squeezed it all over to silence the stupid thing. She glanced behind her in the bed, but Tryp was still sleeping hard, his arms and legs flung all over the sheets. His bare chest rose and fell softly, the ink on his skin moving like illustrations. A fine sheen of black hair velveted his chest and down his abs, and a thin happy trail started below his navel.
He must, ahem, manscape.
All those tattoos had cost a lot of money, probably tens of thousands of dollars, so it made sense. You wouldn’t drive a Porsche through town with the dust cover on it.
She held her hand above his chest, wanting to touch that fuzz, and kind of wished he was dead drunk so she could explore him a little, but that was creepy, right?
Yeah. It was. She still kind of wanted to, just because she hadn’t ever really seen so much gorgeous man up close.
But Tryp had had enough hangovers. She didn’t want to see him hurt anymore.
Elfie crept out of the bed, sliding off the mattress so she wouldn’t wake him up, and went to shower. Afterward, she pulled on her crew tee shirt and cargo jeans and knotted her hair out of the way. She patted her pockets, counting the pyro effects she had in there. Three. She might want to stick in a couple more. An even dozen sounded right.
When she came out, Tryp was just waking up. His fingers curled on the sheets, and he looked at her outfit. “Where did Elfie go?”
She glanced down at herself. Yep, work clothes, just like she always wore. “I have no idea what you mean.”
“The baggy pants, the oversized shirt, your hair yanked back like that. You look like a guy.”
“It’s comfortable, and I need lots of big pockets for my explosives.” She patted her thighs, showing him where she carried bombs and tubes that emitted ten foot-long plumes of blue fire.
“‘My explosives.’ You scare me sometimes,” he said, grinning.
“Yeah. You like that.” Wow. She was all flirty today. Better tone that down before she got to work. There, she only spoke the language of fire.
He grinned. “You bet I do. Come over here.”
“Tryp, honey, I feel like I need to make a disclaimer or give you an escape clause. Last night was—” words failed her, “—incredible. Amazing.”
His smile turned sultry, and he leaned back against the headboard, his rippled abs crunching together. “This morning can be, too.”
“But you’re a rock star.”
“That’s such a weird term, rock star.”
“And I’m not a rock star, and I’m not a waify model, and I’m not an award-winning actress, and I’m not anybody. You’re not going to be interested in me for very long. We’ve gotten to be pretty good friends. Let’s stay friends, okay?”
Tryp picked up his drumsticks from the nightstand and twirled them around his fingers. “Ride on the tour bus with me tonight.”
If she ditched work and spent the five-hour overnight trip to L.A. on the band’s bus with him, everyone would know, and it would prolong this weird affair-thing and might hurt them both. “Oh, Tryfon. I can’t. I have to work.”
“I’ll clear it with Jonas.”
She sat on the bed beside him. “I like my work. I want to go to college and be an engineer. Then I’ll get to blow big things up.”
He chuckled. “College, huh?”
“Yeah. Did you have time to go to college at all?” She was still trying to put together the timeline of his life.
“I went to the Colburn School music conservatory for a semester, but then some mutual friends introduced me to Xan and Cadell, and they convinced me that I wanted to be a real musician instead.”
“I imagine Xan can be persuasive.”
“Very, but I wasn’t going to do it. When Xan went to take a whizz, Cadell told me that he’d dropped out of Juilliard for Xan, and I was all, whoa. He said that Xan was a fucking genius and he was going to drag a band to be bigger than Bon Jovi and U2 and The Beatles and anybody else I could name all put together, if he could find the right musicians, and if they could survive what Xan was going to put them through. It sounded like a challenge.” His devilish grin almost made her laugh. “It sounded like marching off to war, but with groupies.”
“So you never went back to college.”
“Theoretically, I’m on sabbatical, but I can’t go back. It is a war, and I’ve seen the fight. It’s too much. It demands too much of you. When I walk away from Killer Valentine, I’m going to get a motorcycle and ride it until I collapse or live in a cave.”
“You could probably buy a cave on a private island.”
“Maybe I’ll just drink myself into an early grave.”
“Come on. I wouldn’t let you do that.”
“Everybody else would.”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re a rock star who fucks a different woman every night and has all the drugs and booze you want. You work three hours a day and have room service deliver your food and the concierge do your laundry, when you do laundry.”
He reached out and took her hand. “Every single person I have ever loved has walked out of my life or died.”
Elfie flipped her hand over and held his fingers. “I won’t let you drink yourself to death, and I won’t let you die in your sleep.”
“Tonight, ride down to L.A. on the bus with me.”
“I can’t. The load-out tonight is a bear. This show isn’t an easy one to strike in most theaters, but the loading docks here are weird. The L.A. theater is worse. We have to disassemble most of the lighting battens, and those as such a pain in the ass to reassemble. I have to be there to help. I’ll see you in L.A.”
“At least we’ll be in L.A. for a few days. We’ve done twenty-seven single-night shows in a row. That’s batfuck insane.”
“Besides, where would I sleep on that bus?”
“In my bunk.”
She mentally calculated his shoulder-width and the span of his long, long legs. “Dude, I don’t think you have room in that single-wide for a teddy bear.”
“You’d be surprised how many people can fit into one of those bunks.”
She clapped her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to know. I’ll just concede the point. But I need to work tonight. I’ll see you tomorrow in L.A.”