Softer Than Steel (A Love & Steel Novel)

Titles by Jessica Topper

Love & Steel Series

Deeper Than Dreams

Louder Than Love

Much ’I Do’ About Nothing Series

Courtship of the Cake

Dictatorship of the Dress

Softer Than Steel

Jessica Topper

InterMix Books, New York

AN IMPRINT OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE LLC

375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014

SOFTER THAN STEEL

An InterMix Book / published by arrangement with the author

Copyright © 2015 by Jessica Topper.

Excerpt from
Louder Than Love
© 2013 by Jessica Topper.

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eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-19228-7

PUBLISHING HISTORY

InterMix eBook edition / September 2015

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Penguin Random House is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

For my father, Sanford—the original Banana Louie.

You are the smartest man I know.

Riding the Wave

Seventeen thousand fans can’t be wrong.

Rick Rottenberg clipped his mic into its stand, lifted his face to the spots and hazers shining high above the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy stage, and threw his head back, exalted.

Sweat-soaked ringlets grazed the middle of his slick bare back. It had taken four years to grow his hair back out to acceptable headbanging, rock-and-roll length. Running a hand through the dark, unruly mass of curls, he smiled. Sometimes he forgot it was there, even dreamed his head was still shaved clean. He had kept it shorn like a Buddhist monk for so long, first in solidarity for Simone, then for years after for no reason he could ascertain.

Simone’s gone.

Gone.

Even in a sea of thousands, you’re alone.

Grimacing, he hoisted his guitar by its neck, high overhead.

The crowd’s response was visceral. A rolling current of fists raised, eyes squeezed shut, and a collective hoarse roar emanated from their throats. Rick ripped out his in-ear monitors by their cords, letting the sound hit his eardrums full-force. Like bracing himself for a hard wave, he took a wide stance in his black leather boots and steeled himself.

I was born to do this.

It was less a thought and more like a full-on sensory experience, as his eyes adjusted to the raised house lights and his ears welcomed the cacophony of applause. Dry ice from the fog machines burned his nose, and the ten-gauge steel of the guitar strings cut into his palm as he used his instrument like a conductor’s baton to whip the French crowd into a frenzied cyclone.

And he tasted victory.

It had taken four years. But Riff Rotten was back.

Because seventeen thousand screaming, rabid, shining, elated metal fans can’t be wrong.

Right?

He flicked a look side-stage toward the large digital clock sitting on top of the monitor engineer’s board. There was still a good eight-minute block for the band to get one last song in before the venue’s strict eleven p.m. curfew. But as he turned to his right to suggest it to Digger, he noticed his bandmate exiting the stage. The only encore that interested his lead guitarist was the one waiting for him in the wings.

Kat.

Rick turned away as Adrian grinned like she was the winning lottery ticket and swung her around in a gravity-defying hug.

From his place at center stage, Rick had barely noticed Kat down in the pit tonight, but Adrian obviously had.
He’s always been the one to care about the details,
Rick reminded himself.
You’re about the big picture.
That’s how they’d always functioned.

Or how we malfunctioned, as the case may be.

Corroded Corpse was now back and at the top of their game as the Rotten Graves Project. And Digger Graves was more interested in picking china patterns than tremolo picking his guitar and melting the fans’ faces off.

His timing was certainly crap, wasn’t it?

The neck of Rick’s Gibson slipped through his fatigued and sweaty fingers. In a burst of pent-up energy, he gripped it close to the headstock with both hands and pinwheeled the axe through the air. Sam froze to his left. The bassist had at least had the decency to come downstage for a bow. Now he took a step back and cast a wary glance at Jim, who was leaning over his drum kit.

Guitar met stage floor with a loud crack, like a gunshot. Wood flew and guitar strings popped as Rick pulled it high overhead, sliced it through the air, and smashed it down again and again, to the left, to the right. Jim popped back behind his kit and provided a rising crescendo of cymbals to accompany each upward move and kicked his double bass drum in perfect pace each time Rick’s guitar made contact: with the floor, the riser, the amps behind him, and the wedges in front of him. Sam did a little hop as the entire body of the Gibson Memphis guitar separated from the neck and slid toward him.

The kids in the crowd had lost their bloody minds by then.

* * *

Rick clicked the pause button on his laptop and dragged the bar of the video back so he could watch himself lift the jagged broken neck of his guitar like a conquering hero wielding his sword victoriously—eyes wild, bare chest heaving—while tonight’s crowd screamed its approval. Judging from the dozen or so fan-shot videos that had hit YouTube by midnight, his little spectacle had looked pretty damn good from the audience’s point of view.

Leaning back in the hotel’s desk chair, he twisted his lips into a sardonic smile, shook his glass to loosen up the ice, and took a sip. The single malt’s buttery burn was welcome in his whiskey tonight. Subtle notes of orange peel, burnt caramel, and clove teased his tongue and promised to bring the noise in his head down to a dull roar.

The trill of his room phone summoned him. Padding barefoot across the lush carpeting of his Mandarin Oriental suite, he silenced it by placing it to his ear.

Isabelle needed no salutation to get the conversation going. The band’s publicist launched into her tirade unprompted.

“So what was with that little hissy fit on stage tonight, huh?”

“Bonsoir,
Isabelle
. Comment vas-tu?”

“Don’t play cute and French with me, mister.”

Rick picked out brash notes of trash talk, Salem Ultra Lights, and Brooklyn in her voice.
Not nearly as smooth as whiskey on the palate,
he thought, wincing as she doused his ear with her version of twenty questions. And label expectations. And SoundScan numbers. And ticket sales. And who’s not returning her calls, and who needs to do some serious ass-kissing now that payola bribes were no longer in style.

Rick drained his whiskey glass, but felt completely sober. What had happened to the promise he and Digger made four years ago under the roof of Madison Square Garden?
Of doing things our way,
he asked himself,
this time around?

He should’ve known better. This was the music business, after all. Emphasis on
business
. You could have all the talent and drive, but you needed that army behind you. The minute the two of them had buried the hatchet and agreed to play that reunion show, the armies had assembled and performed a coup d’état. The booking agent, the record label, groupies, and hangers-on had all awoken from what appeared to be an enchanted slumber, as if the last twenty years had passed for them in the blink of an eye. Business as usual.

Only their former publicist/self-appointed interim Queen of Everything had awoken crankier than a disturbed hornets’ nest.

If she hadn’t been Simone’s best friend since childhood, Rick probably would’ve called the exterminator to fog Isabelle out of his life ages ago.

“Behave yourself, finish the goddamn run, and get your ass back to the States in one piece,” Isabelle commanded. “We’ve got the one-offs in L.A. and Chicago, your Rock and Roll Hall of Fame appearance, and the Northeast leg to get through yet. Then we have two months of lockout booked in the studio. Oh, and the mayor’s office has finally given us the green light for the outdoor video shoot.”

“Relax, Isabelle. We’ve got it under control.”

We. The bloody band. Not you.

“Says the guy who just broke a three-thousand-dollar guitar on stage? Yeah. Okay.” There was a forced exhale, and Rick bet the bank she was standing on her penthouse balcony, flicking ashes down on the heads of the plebs who dared troll her Upper East Side neighborhood. “And where the hell is Adrian? Would it kill him to return a phone call once in a while?”

“Indisposed.”

Rick rubbed his temple, contemplating another glass or the five hours’ sleep he could catch before the bus came to pick up the band. He didn’t care to contemplate what Adrian and Kat were up to in their fancy hotel suite down the hall at this hour.

“Yeah? What’s his drug of choice these days?”

Would you believe me if I said a widowed librarian and her eight-year-old daughter?
“Nothing.”

“I wasn’t born yesterday, Rick.”

“And neither was Adrian. In fact, he was born forty-five years ago, this day. It’s his birthday. So let’s all leave him the fuck alone, shall we?” The sarcasm did a number on his throat, way worse than the whiskey.

“Let me guess.” Isabelle gave a dignified snort. “Kat showed up at the show tonight to surprise him?” She barely paused to let Rick respond before throwing out her “Tell me you’re not jealous?” card.

Even though he was an ocean away, Rick kept a poker face and his own hand close to his chest. Whatever the answer was, he sure as hell wouldn’t find it in this long-distance phone call, or in the melting ice at the bottom of his whiskey glass.

“Don’t ask him to choose,” she warned. “You will lose.”

“Isabelle. As much as I’d love to listen to you recite more poetic words of wisdom to me, I’m going to—”

“
He
never asked
you
to choose between the band and Simone.”

“I’m going to hang up now,” Rick finished quietly.

Whether Isabelle responded or not, he’d never know. The roaring in his ears had come back full force. But it wasn’t the hordes of screaming masses this time around. It was the roar of the ocean, back home in Hawaii.

He reeled back to 1988, standing with Simone on Kauai’s Polihale Beach on the westernmost shore. Miles and miles of deserted sand, mostly due to the fierce currents. He had stood on that beach for what seemed like hours, staring at the incredible sand dunes and the cliffs of the Na Pali.

And had experienced his first, full-blown panic attack.

“It’s the kind of place that makes one realize how insignificant one really is in the grand scheme of things,” he liked to tell people. “Pulled my ego down a few pegs and got my priorities in line straightaway.” With the band just a smoking wreck of its former self, he and Simone had relocated to the island with the children shortly after, and family became his number one priority.

Rick was hobbled by the memory, and his legs threatened mutiny as he careened to the bathroom.

“He didn’t have to ask me,” he said aloud to the mirror, as if he needed to convince the somber dark eyes staring back at him. “I made the choice myself.”

His reflection grimly broke the news:
Too late.

Simone was dead within six years.

He gripped the vanity in front of him as the blackness of the memory washed over him, like it always did.
Keep your head,
he commanded himself now, although he remembered going totally off his nut at the time. The locals had talked about the powerful Polihale heiau, a sacred site believed to be one of the points from which the souls of the dead departed the island into the setting sun. It sounded so beautiful, so peaceful. He had wanted to go and die there, to travel with her. The kids had been the only things holding him back.

The thought of his boys buoyed and anchored him still. All three were now grown up and out in the world on their own. Armed with five college degrees among them, they’d each flown the coop upon graduation without ever looking back.

And what would they have seen had they even bothered?

Rick pulled back his curls from his face with one hand and splashed cool water across his heated cheeks. Face dripping, he let his hair drop into place and contemplated what he saw in the mirror before him. Rangy limbs, their muscles lean from swinging eight pounds of guitar night after night. The strong jut of his jaw, with its dark bristle of five o’clock shadow emerging. Sharp angles where cheekbones met the hollows under his tired eyes. Under his wild mane of charcoal hair, a heavy, determined brow just starting to show the weathered lines of a worrier, aged forty-four this spring.

Father.

Widower.

Rocker.

Empty nester.

His dark brows lifted at that preposterous thought.
How could that be?
The contradiction in terms describing this current phase of his life brought him back to the present, all threats of his usual, full-blown panic attack abated. He hadn’t had one since leaving Hawaii three weeks ago.
So much for that track record.
But the tension eased and a strange sigh of relief blew through his lips.

The storm had passed, for the moment.

Now what?

Sleep. Bus. Show. Repeat. He had no problem jumping through the hoops of the rock and roll traveling circus.

It was the looming prospect of time off the road that terrified him.