Wild Licks (16 page)

“I am under the impression Ford will play anything with strings,” I said seriously. I had never seen him with a mandolin before, but I can't say I was surprised.

“He showed me a little while we were on tour,” Killian said. “Perfect for the kind of rootsy vibe we're going for tonight.”

So that is how it turned out that our quiet blond bass player was tabbed to get onstage with Breakwater to do a punk-folk acoustic rendition of one of their songs. Which meant we had to stay for the set. I suppose it would have been rude to leave before it regardless, but I especially did not want Ford to think I was being dismissive of his talent. I'd known him the shortest amount of time compared to the others in the band. We'd first gelled when Axel and I had met Chino, and the three of us had recorded a demo album where Axel and I had traded off dubbing in the bass and keyboard parts. Thank goodness most of those original tracks were binned. After Marcus signed us, he'd played matchmaker, hooking us up first with Samson, and after we'd auditioned a few bass players and hated them, Sam had suggested he knew a guy and, voilà, along came Ford.

Ford was the son of a well-known rock-blues musician and I was still unsure about his true ambitions. Or maybe it was Ford who was unsure. Like with that song he'd brought us a couple weeks back, sometimes he seemed hesitant about us actually playing what he wrote. Granted, the last thing we needed in the band was another strong ego vying for expression, but I sometimes wondered if he didn't yearn for a little more time in the spotlight. If so, it was good that tonight he would get some.

I made my way back into the main room to try once more to find Gwen and deliver her now-somewhat-lukewarm drink. Amazingly, I managed to find her near the poorly lit entrance to the restrooms. I caught sight of her blond head and made a beeline for her. The mere sight of her sent my emotions simmering.

She saw me coming and bit her lip for a moment before she composed her face into a neutral, friendly look. “Thank you,” she said as she took the plastic cup from my hand, a small, bemused smile bending her lips.

“You're welcome.” Now that I had found her and she seemed unhurt, unscarred, I gave vent to the annoyance that had been brewing in the back of my mind since I'd seen her the first time: “I don't appreciate being stalked.”

The smile disappeared. “Stalked? Who's stalking you?”

“Y-you,” I sputtered, trying to say more. “You're…you're…What are you doing here, anyway? I don't appreciate you using your sister's connections to create opportunities to run into me.”

Her eyebrow was sharp as she frowned. “Mal. Hate to break it to you, but I'm not here to stalk you.”

“What are you—”

“In fact, Ricki wasn't even invited so far as I know. My agent invited me. I didn't know
you
would be here. Why are you here, anyway?”

“I…because…” I forced myself to slow down or my explanation was going to come out defensive and angry. How had she put me on the defensive so quickly? “We're friends of Breakwater.”

“Ah.” She sipped her drink through the tiny red straw and continued to regard me critically. “Well. That was pretty low of you to sneak out the other night.”

“It was pretty low of you to deceive me,” I said, but I could feel myself losing ground. That cannon had already been emptied.

“We have a saying in America—
Two wrongs don't make a right
. Do you know it?” She looked…disappointed. “If you think you're doing the ‘mature and responsible' thing by breaking things off, maybe you should think about that.”

“So noted,” I said, and looked around for an escape from the argument. “Perhaps that's merely another tally in the evidence against my suitability. Since I clearly am no judge of what counts as mature and responsible.”

“So you should just stay home like a monk or something?”

“Just so. Now if you'll pardon me, this monk needs to answer the call of nature.” I hurried past her into the men's room, my head a maelstrom of thoughts and feelings.

She's right, you're right, you're no judge of these things and that is exactly why you shouldn't even try. But you know you're going to…How long until you give in to the Need? How long until you go on another search for a woman who will let you have your way?

You are deeply, deeply, deeply fucked up, my friend, if you truly believe the only women you should be allowed to fuck are those you'll never have to look in the eye again.

“Hey, big guy,” came a familiar voice behind me. “You okay?”

I realized I was leaning against the wall with my head on my arm above the hand dryers. I looked up at Chino, who was giving me a wry smile.

“I'm fine.”

He shrugged and looked around the restroom. “Coulda fooled me.”

All right, I conceded it looked bad to be hiding in the men's room. “Female trouble,” I admitted, hoping that would put an end to it.

“Isn't it always?” he said with a shrug. “You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“I don't mean now. Let's grab a bite to eat later. Something other than this rabbit food. Just you and me.” He gave a vague wave toward the door. “I get the feeling Axel's getting sucked into an after-party with the Breakwater guys and I'd rather eat than drink.”

I considered this plan of action.

“Come on. I heard you complaining there's no good food in this town. You just don't know where to go.”

Chino knew LA; there was no doubting that. “All right. After the set, we'll go.”

He grinned and smacked me on the upper arm. “Now you're talking.”

The set was mercifully brief, four songs, including Ford's mandolin jam, which brought the house down. I was glad about that. Gave me something to talk to Chino about besides myself.

“I sometimes wonder if being our bass player is going to be enough for him,” I said as Chino pulled his SUV out of the parking lot. He had what I assumed was a rosary hanging from his rearview mirror but on closer inspection I realized it was a figurine of Elvis on Mardi Gras beads.

“I know what you mean. Ford's a cool caterpillar now, but one day he might butterfly on outta here.” He turned on the car stereo and the orchestral sound of a movie soundtrack filled the car. “Ah, you young'uns.”

I snorted. Chino was the eldest of the group by about five years, and he often lorded it over us as if he were a different generation just because he was closer to thirty than we were. “So, you promised me good food.”

“What are you in the mood for? Seafood? Best tacos on the West Coast? Thai food so spicy it'll leave a stump where your tongue was?”

“How does one judge the best tacos on the West Coast?”

“By how little English they have on their menu,” he said seriously. “Really, though, there's a crab shack up the coast. They'll have fresh Dungeness—”

“No, no, you've intrigued and challenged me with this best tacos idea.”

“All right, but you gotta promise me none of your gringo bullshit.”

“Which would be what exactly?”

He laughed. “Just play it cool. If anyone gives you a dirty look or whatever, you know? It'll be okay. You're with me.”

“You know I have Spanish ancestry, do you not?”

He laughed again. “Boyyy, that won't get you far in this crowd. Trust me. Let me do the talking. You know how no matter what kind of restaurant you go into around here, you'll find Mexican busboys and cooks? This is the place all of
them
go to eat.”

The place was the very definition of a hole in the wall, a former Chinese restaurant in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere. They'd boarded over the old restaurant sign but left the neon dragon in the window.

The menu was written in magic marker on pieces of paper taped to the wall. I could read many of the words thanks to a few years spent trying to teach myself Spanish as a teenager, but that didn't mean I knew what they
meant
. “Old clothes?” I asked. “Is three Marias a religious reference I'm missing?”

Chino's startled look was deeply satisfying to me. “You can read it?”

“Only a little,” I admitted. “And my pronunciation is atrocious.”

“Well
ropa vieja
is called ‘old clothes' because it's a stew with shredded beef in it, so it's like when your clothes shred in the laundry. No really!” He waved his hand emphatically. “I'm not making this shit up just to get back at you for the explanation of what ‘spotted dick' is.”

I held in a chuckle. On the tour one of the shows had been in Victoria, British Columbia—the one place on Earth I've been that tries to be more British than Great Britain—and while eating in the hotel pub I'd had to explain much of the menu. “Spotted dick is a pudding,” I reiterated, as if he still doubted it. “You can Google it.”

He shook his head. “I guarantee you Jell-O has no ‘spotted dick' flavor pudding.”

A waitress came over and had a rapid-fire conversation with Chino that I could not really follow except for the English words peppered throughout. I gathered he was ordering an assortment of food. And beer.

She brought us two glass bottles of beer and plastic cups. Chino merely wiped the mouth of the bottle with a paper napkin and drank directly from it. I did the same.

“Okay, so you said female trouble,” Chino said, settling back in his chair with his beer in one hand. The general hubbub around us was in Spanish, and no one was listening to what we were saying. “I thought you had a foolproof system for avoiding exactly that?”

I leaned against the wall. “I did. And if I had stuck to it, I wouldn't be in the mess I'm in now.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You sound skeptical.”

“Mal, I love you like a brother, but you know we all think your tactic of only ever fucking a woman once is whack.”

I took a pull from my beer before mounting my defense. “The entire problem is with inappropriate emotional attachments. My tactic prevents that.”

“You mean you do it so you don't get attached to them?”

“You have it backwards. It's that I don't want them getting attached to me.”

“Hmm. I guess I can understand that with groupies, but with a woman like Gwen? This is Gwen we're talking about, right?”

There was little point in denying it. “Yes, Gwen, who I wasn't supposed to get involved with emotionally, you might recall. The rule isn't only for groupies.” I tried to decide how much to tell him. Chino knew me fairly well, but only Axel really knew much of my past. “I've had a few serious attempts at relationships. All have been disastrous, more so for the women I was involved with than for me.”

“Disastrous, how?” He had a concerned look on his face, so unlike his usual wry smirk.

Perhaps that's what convinced me to tell him. “I have this tendency to be attracted to submissive women,” I began.

“That's not news,” Chino said, “and you're hardly alone there.”

“It's not just that. It's things like—” I broke off with a shake of my head. “It never works out well.”

“It's okay, Mal. You can tell me whatever it is.”

“Well, there were a few clingy ones to begin with when I first started exploring dominance and submission, and then I'd have to explain I wasn't recruiting a slave, I was just sowing my wild oats. I began to make that part of the negotiation up front—the no repeats thing—and that cut down the clinging on a lot. But then I—” The specter of my failure with Risa hovered in the back of my mind. So many things had gone wrong there. So many. But my worst mistake had been in thinking love justified all. “I met a woman—not through the scene. Someone my father arranged for me. I thought, well, I'll scare her off with my whips and chains.”

“Let me guess,” Chino said, his beer completely forgotten now. “She wasn't scared off.”

“Indeed, she was quite excited and more than willing. In fact, she begged me for more and more extreme treatment as time went on. She was…the first submissive that I let love me.”

Chino nodded as if he heard what I implied but couldn't bring myself to say aloud, that she was also the first one I'd loved, truly loved.

I tried to explain it as simply as I could. “She wanted to ‘serve me,' to ‘be mine,' so very much that any small fault I found with her crushed her self-esteem, and she would beg me to punish her to ‘make it right.' No, that's not even the right way to put it. She wanted me to hurt her, to do terrible things to her, to damage her.”

“Physically? Mentally?”

“Yes and yes, and emotionally.” I couldn't even separate the tangle when it came to Risa. “This was the woman who very nearly talked me into branding her labia.”

Chino's mouth hung slightly open. He tried to play devil's advocate. “Some people like the extremes.”

“It wasn't a matter of ‘like.' At first I thought she was a perfect match for my sadism, but I eventually came to see she was using me as an elaborate form of self-harm. I put my foot down about the branding.” The burn on my palm seemed to throb in time with my heart as I remembered her fighting with me. “She accused me of not loving her enough to give her what she needed. When I wouldn't give in, she showed the scars to her father and told him I'd not only ruined her, but I'd also been torturing her.”

“What! Did they go to the police?”

I made a dismissive noise. “Of course not. A man like that fears scandal more than he fears having his daughter violated. Her father and mine then agreed to keep us apart.”

“Man. Real Romeo and Juliet stuff.”

“Quite.” I set my bottle on the table and rotated it slowly, seeking out the cool condensation with my fingertips. I had to tell him the final piece. The story wouldn't be complete without it: “She tried to kill herself shortly after.”