Pouring Tryp Into Bed
Tryp Areleous’s arm lay heavy on Elfie’s shoulders, and he stumbled beside her as she half-led, half-carried him down the hotel hallway. His long legs tangled as he walked, and he nearly tripped and fell. His other arm flopped by his side as she read the numbers on the doors, 506, 508, and hoped that 514 was right around the corner. His drunken flopping was going to knock her into one of the too-close walls.
“How old are you, Elfie?” Tryp slurred. He was bent nearly in half, resting his forehead on her shoulder. His black curls—big, soft curls—brushed her cheek and tickled her nose, making her want to sneeze.
“I just turned nineteen,” Elfie said. Her broad Texas twang made it sound like she said Ah.
“You’ve been on the road with us for two years.”
“I have a good fake I.D.” She adjusted his arm, which was surprisingly burly considering how rarely he exercised at the hotel gyms or did any honest work. He never got up before the radio stations called to interview, and then the shows were soon after. Maybe he was still benefitting from the effects of the Utah shock gym that the lead singer had checked them into before that Rolling Stone cover shoot where the band was all naked to the waist and ripped.
Not that Elfie had looked at it.
Not that she was any kind of connoisseur of men’s bodies.
Not that she was even inadvertently copping a feel of his very muscular back, especially his lats, that tapered down to his narrow waist as she dragged his drunk butt back to his hotel room to pour him into bed.
“You were seventeen?” Tryp asked.
He wasn’t too shitfaced to do simple math, astounding, but he was probably too messed up to remember anything she told him right now. Tryp had a lot of blackouts. She said, “I ran away from home. Long story.”
His breath smelled like fresh whiskey, a comforting scent, when he said, “When I was nineteen, I was a millionaire with a gold record.”
“Way to make me feel better about my life, buddy.” Elfie adjusted his arm on her shoulders to hold him up while she frisked him for his wallet and, not finding it because it had probably been stolen by some desperate groupie again, his hotel room keycard. She shoved him up against the wall and found it in his sock. He still had his drumsticks shoved in his back pocket. A long, blond lank of her hair dangled in front of her face, escaped from her tight braid down the back of her head. She shoved it behind her ear.
Tryp said, “I was living in a shitty hotel because my girlfriend OD’ed on heroin and was in a coma. I didn’t know how to wash the blood off the walls of her apartment.”
“That must have been terrible.” She opened his door, frog-marched him through the living room of the suite to his bedroom, and shoved him toward the bed. He landed on it like a redwood falling in the forest.
“She died,” Tryp said. “Liver failure.”
Elfie really should cut him some slack. She had been hanging around the other techs too long, verbally abusing the drunk musos. “I am really sorry about that.”
She closed the drapes, darkening the room and shutting out the bright morning sun outside. He only had five hours to sleep before his wake-up call.
“You wanna suck my dick?” Tryp mumbled into the pillow.
Elfie jumped back, nearly slamming into the wall, but Tryp was still prone on the bed, nearly comatose. She said, “Not in the slightest.”
“Why not? What kind of a groupie are you?” he kind-of whined.
She shook out her arms and started toward the door. “I’m the pyrotechnics technician, you jackass. Now go the fuck to sleep before I put a bomb in your bass drum tonight.”
“Promises, promises,” he muttered. “Where was the show today, Elfie?”
“Sacramento.”
“And where are we now?”
“Berkeley.”
“No wonder it’s so fucking cold.”
He looked cold, lying on his belly on the bed like that, even though he was dressed in leather pants and a ripped-up tee shirt, his scarlet and black tattoos visible through the slices in the fabric. Hotel rooms are always damp and cold, so Elfie flipped the other side of the comforter over him.
He said, “I hate Berkeley. We always have to do a runner.”
In arenas without backstage facilities, the musicians ran to waiting SUVs where they were cooped up and belted down, sweaty and shaking with adrenaline, sometimes for hours while they were driven to the hotel or the tour bus.
Technicians didn’t rate runners. Elfie stayed and tore down her pyro effects and the lighting battans.
“Yeah, runners suck.” Elfie edged toward the door and put her hand on the light switch.
“Don’t go.”
“I’m not going to fuck you, Tryp.”
“Just stay.” His face was half-buried in the pillow. “I’ll die and no one will know.”
“You’re just drunk. You’re not going to die.”
“I feel like I’m going to die.”
“Lay off the Jagermeister. That shit is poison.”
“Please stay.” His hand twitched on the sheet like he was reaching for her.
So Elfie sat in the chair and waited until Tryp’s breathing evened out and he went to sleep, his face mashed into the pillow, before she went and found her own hotel room to crash for a few hours while the rest of the crew struck the concert stage and lighting rig before they packed the semis and everybody trooped to San Francisco the next day.
Release Day: April 14,2015 Genre: Contemporary Romance Series: Book 2 in Six Degrees Series One look, one ...
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