Stryker's Desire Read online

  “Someone snapped a picture of us apparently, leaving the shower together,” Fran explained. “And now it’s on TMZ with some stupid article about us.” I groaned, scrubbing at my face.

  “Fuck.” I took a deep breath. “What’s the verdict from them?”

  “That we either faked hating each other all along or something-something-something fine line between love and hate,” Fran told me bitterly. “It’s pretty bad.”

  “Oh man,” I agreed. I took another deep breath; I was definitely not going to be staying in bed much longer. “What do you want to do about it?”

  “Mostly I wish I could tell them to delete the thing,” Fran admitted. “But obviously, we’re ‘out’ now. I’ve been getting calls since eight this morning.”

  “I should check my phone,” I said. “Later. Now…do you want to meet up and talk about this over coffee or something?”

  “What’s there to talk about?” I thought about that.

  “We keep putting off that conversation about what we are,” I pointed out. “There’s no sense in putting it off now that everyone at least knows we’re something.”

  “I guess,” Fran said, and I heard her sigh. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “Enriqueta’s,” I said after thinking about it for a second. “I can be there in like…twenty minutes.”

  “Probably the same for me,” Fran said. “I’m fucking pissed about this, Jules.”

  “You know if we go anywhere together, they’re going to get pictures of us, right? I’m not saying we shouldn’t meet up—I’m just saying to be prepared for it.”

  “Yeah,” Fran said, sighing again. “I might as well look on point. See you in twenty?”

  “Twenty,” I agreed. I ended the call and turned onto my back to stare at the ceiling of my bedroom. It had gone yellow over the years—the popcorn looked grungy and kind of gross after people had smoked in the room long before I’d ever taken the apartment, and some of the texturized bits had flaked off, but it had a certain homey feeling I liked. I scratched at my face again, thinking I should at least shave, even if I didn’t have the energy or the enthusiasm for a full shower before I went down. Fuck. Ron is going to have a fit, and the label is going to be pissed, too. I closed my eyes and sat up in my bed, throwing my legs over the edge to climb out. It was going to be a shit fest and I knew it.

  But then—why should it be? Obviously, me hooking up with Fran had gotten some attention. Wasn’t that what the whole collaboration bullshit had been about? I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth, rubbing at my stubbly cheeks and debating taking the time to shave them. Fuck it—just get it done. You’ve got another fifteen to get dressed and get over there. If a handful of paparazzi were going to snap pictures of me and Fran, I didn’t want to look like a bum who’d just rolled out from under an overpass. I shaved, put on some clean clothes, and found my car keys. I figured we might as well get it over with.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “You put your phone on silent?” I nodded my answer to Fran’s question. We’d made it to Enriqueta’s and grabbed some food before retreating to a shady spot about half a block away where we could smoke and enjoy our meals.

  “I had about thirteen missed calls or texts, apparently,” I told her, twisting my lips into a wry grin. “You?”

  “Still coming in,” Fran told me. She shook her head, putting her purse down to take a sip of coffee.

  “What do you want to do about the situation?” I took a bite of an empanada and chewed on it while I waited for Fran to consider the question.

  “I just want to let it blow over,” she said after a moment. “It can’t be that big of a story, can it?”

  “It’ll be as big or as small as we end up making it,” I said with a shrug. “If we don’t really talk about it they’ll lose interest eventually.”

  “Which I guess brings us around to whether we want to actually…you know…be together.” Fran took another sip of her coffee.

  “Did you not want to be together?” I set my half-eaten empanada aside. “I mean, I won’t exactly take it hard if you decided that you wanted to be single, but I’d like to know.”

  “The thing is…” Fran took a deep breath and put her cup of coffee down. “I don’t want to be single. I want to be with you. I just…” she shrugged. “I don’t want it to be a marketing gimmick, or for people to think that I’m just doing it to get more attention.” I snorted.

  “Well, unfortunately, people are going to think that,” I told her. “Some people, anyway. Nothing you can do about that situation.” I pressed my lips together and considered.

  “Do you think I only hooked up with you for attention?”

  “Of course not,” I said, shaking my head. “If you were going to hook up with someone to promote the band, you’d have gotten with Nick or Alex or someone.” Fran laughed.

  “Okay, that’s a decent point,” she said. “So, what do you want to do about…” I shrugged.

  “I want to keep seeing you,” I said, taking a sip of my own coffee. “What you want to call it—that’s just window dressing. I want to keep seeing you, and I want to work on music together.”

  “You do?” Fran raised an eyebrow.

  “That song you showed me before—it’s a good song. It deserves to come out. It deserves to be heard. I want to help make that happen.”

  “You don’t think it’ll just get bashed as a John and Yoko thing?” I rolled my eyes.

  “If anyone was going to get bashed as a Yoko figure, it’d be Mary,” I said, shaking my head. “Alex is closer to being John Lennon than I am. I’m more…” I shrugged. “I don’t know. But if people want to talk shit about us, why should we even fucking be bothered?”

  “What’s the label going to say?” I shrugged again.

  “I don’t really care. They don’t have a lock on our personal lives, for one thing. It’s not like we’re in contract with them all of the hours of all of our days. We make records for them and we do promotion for the records. We tour. That’s the only hold they have on us—on you, for that matter.”

  “The label sent Alex to rehab, didn’t they?”

  “The band sent him to rehab, with Ron and the label backing us,” I told her. “That was a whole separate deal. Besides, Alex came out of it with a girlfriend and a big reputation. So, he won out in the long run.”

  “Do you think they’re going to think you’re trying to go solo if you do this with me?” That was a good question. I finished off my empanada while I considered it, and lit a cigarette.

  “They know I’ve got a bunch of music I’ve written on my own,” I told Fran. “I can do both. I can work with you on stuff and work with the band.”

  “But can you do both while our bands are working together?” I smiled.

  “It’ll make it easier that way, won’t it? We’ll work on our stuff in the off hours—we’re going to be renting the studio for like two weeks. There’s no way there’s not going to be time for us to do our own thing in it.”

  “I’m actually kind of more excited by that than by the fact that I can fucking date you openly now if I want to,” Fran said. We both laughed and, acting on impulse, I leaned in and kissed her. If someone took a picture of us, I didn’t give a single fuck.

  “We’ll make it work,” I told her. It was the first time that I had actually said that to a woman; I had always been the person to hear it. I could only hope that I would be better at making it happen than any of the women I’d been involved with who had said those words to me. I kissed Fran again. “Eat your damn sandwich before I do,” I told her, taking another drag of my cigarette and another sip of my coffee. “Then let’s go back to my place. It’s actually clean for once.” Fran laughed.

  “Now that we don’t have to sneak around?” I nodded.

  “We’ll just do whatever we feel like, won’t we?” Fran took a bite of her Cuban sandwich and her eyes gleamed. I knew it was going to be an uphill battle with the label—but she didn’t know that,
and I didn’t intend to really tell her. She’d find out soon enough.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was late. Half the band had gone home—or in Mark’s case, out to a bar—and the other half, save for me and Fran, was packing up. Our weeklong break had ended, and we were in the studio, ostensibly working on our EP together.

  “You guys hanging out?” Alex gave me a dubious look from the door. I shrugged.

  “Fran had something she wanted to work on for a bit, and I’m not tired,” I said. No one—in either band, as far as I could tell—had said anything about what had happened in the tabloids regarding Fran and I being discovered. We hadn’t said anything about it either; just gone about our normal lives. I knew a lecture from Ron was coming, but as long as I took care not to be alone in a room with him, I was pretty sure I could stall it out. For a while, anyway.

  Alex gave me another long look, but then turned and left; he had Mary waiting for him anyway. I glanced at Fran, seated at the studio’s piano. “You ready to work on this?” Fran met my gaze and half-smiled.

  “Is it weird that I feel nervous?” I shook my head.

  “Not at all. I still get a little nervous the first couple of tracks I try to record with the band,” I said, picking up a guitar and checking the tune. “And it’s not like you’ve recorded with me before.”

  “No virgin jokes,” Fran told me quickly. I snorted.

  “None,” I promised. I looked up through the window into the control room. Les, the sound engineer, had stayed behind because I’d asked him to; Dave had gone home.

  “Okay,” Les said over the intercom. “How do you guys want to do this?”

  “You’ve got the demo track, right?” I sat down in a chair next to the piano, made sure I was still plugged in.

  “Yeah, I’ve got it,” Les confirmed.

  “Can you play it back?” Fran glanced from Les to me. “We’ll use it as a scratch track I guess.”

  “Sounds good,” Les said levelly. “Give me about a minute and I’ll do a count-in.” I looked at Fran and smiled to myself; I could tell she was almost as nervous as she’d been the first night out on tour, when she’d been preparing to go out to one of the biggest crowds that Juniper Woolf had ever played to.

  We’d spent about half the day setting up, making sure everything was the way it was supposed to be for both bands. The way the label wanted it was that we’d record six songs: two each by Juniper Woolf and Molly Riot, and then two that we did together. If it seemed to do well, there would be videos to make, but only one for each kind of song—hopefully. And then, both my band and Fran’s could get to work on separate albums. No one had said anything about Fran and me working on side projects together—but then, no one had said that we couldn’t.

  I put my headphones on and listened for the count in. I’d shown Fran the night before what I’d worked out for the song—and she’d told me that she’d worked out a piano part to go with it. Now we’d see how our ideas meshed together. It was a damned good thing, in my opinion at least, that there were no stakes in recording it; a few times the guys and I had tried a similar approach and it had been a hot fucking mess.

  But when the track counted in, I started on my part, and I heard Fran’s piano playing coming through the headphones at the same time. I almost stopped—stunned—but made myself keep going. It actually sounded really, really good together, over the drum machine and the acoustic she’d already laid down. It was more melodic than anything I’d ever done with Molly Riot, more structural and flowing at the same time.

  We got to the end of the demo and stopped—first me and then Fran—and I felt that pit-of-my-stomach lurch of not knowing whether what I’d just played was genius or shit. The intercom—patched in through the headphones—crackled. “Sounds good, you two,” Les said, and Fran and I looked at each other with grins. “Let’s do it one more time and then we can talk about what else you want to do with it.”

  We played it through again; I knew what Fran was going to do, and adjusted my part to hers just a little, adding some emphasis to the fills that looped around her piano part. It was like a conversation between us, and I grinned to myself as we came to the end of it.

  “Fucking nailed it!” The recording had ended—I was pretty sure I was in the clear. Fran started giggling and turned on the piano seat to face me.

  “We did, didn’t we?” I nodded.

  “Come on in here and listen to the playback,” Les suggested. I set my guitar aside and Fran leapt up from her stool, and we practically raced each other to the control room to listen to the track we’d just recorded. “I’m going to strip out the acoustic in the demo, since I don’t think you actually need that at this point to get the idea,” Les told us, pressing buttons on the board and adjusting levels. “You might want to re-record that bit later, with better equipment and microphones, but for now, let’s just listen to the drums and what you two laid down.”

  The music flowed through the speakers and I had to admit it was a big departure from anything I’d ever done in my life before. I looked over at Fran as the song progressed; it was quieter than her usual stuff, more melodic. I could hear the lower-quality recording of her voice, but it wasn’t jarring—it sounded pretty good still, even wrapped around with the better guitar and the piano part. It was pretty amazing, when I really thought about it.

  “What do you two think?” Les turned to face us and I took a breath.

  “It’s her song,” I said, gesturing in Fran’s direction.

  “Right, because I totally wrote that guitar part you just played,” Fran said, making a face. “I think we can agree at this point that it’s our song.”

  “Is it?” I raised an eyebrow. Fran gave me a slightly nervous look and bit her bottom lip. She’s so fucking cute when she does that. I wasn’t sure when all the little things that used to annoy me about her had become so damned endearing, but somehow, they had—I couldn’t wait to get her alone again.

  “I think…” Fran licked her lips and exhaled sharply. “I think I want you to do the vocals with me.” I stared at her. I’d done a few backing vocal bits with Alex on Molly Riot songs, but never really did anything that could be called a duet.

  “You sure?”

  “We can try it, right?” Fran looked at Les.

  “We have the set up, since you and Alex were supposed to be working together on vocals for the EP,” Les said matter-of-factly. “So it wouldn’t be hard.”

  “I don’t even really know the lyrics,” I pointed out.

  “Do you want to do vocals on it? If you don’t that’s one thing.” I shrugged.

  “I just…” the thought of bringing the song to either of our bands—especially as unsettled as things had been since TMZ had posted about Fran and me being together—gave me a bit of a pause. It was one thing to record my own stuff on the side and post it to SoundCloud. I’d never really taken it seriously. But in helping Fran with a song of her own, building a part for it and her handing joint control to me, it felt like I was doing more—it felt like it was something I couldn’t quite dismiss. “Let me think about it.”

  “Take your time, but we’re only in here for another week or two,” Fran pointed out. “Want to work on one of the songs you showed me?” I rolled my eyes.

  “It’s not going to be as good as that,” I said, shaking my head.

  “If you’ve got the recording, I can throw it up and we can play with it,” Les suggested. I hesitated.

  “Come on, Jules—you worked with me on something. Let me work with you on something,” Fran said, giving me a flirty grin. “It’s only fair, right?” I took a breath and exhaled.

  “Let’s get a beer and a cigarette and then we can do it,” I said, looking from Fran to Les.

  “I’ll take a break,” Les said, shrugging. “Shoot me the track in an email and I’ll pull it up on here.”

  He left the control room and I walked over to the mini fridge. Normally we didn’t drink all that much when we were recording—it
tends to make everything sound like shit—but I definitely needed a beer. “You okay?” I looked over my shoulder at Fran. I shrugged and grabbed two beers out of the fridge and opened them before I plunked down in the seat I’d left a moment before. Fran handed me a cig and I handed her a beer and thought about the situation.

  “I just don’t want either of our bands thinking that we’re like…going off on our own,” I said.

  “You mean you don’t want Molly Riot to think you’re going off on your own with me,” Fran told me, lighting up her own cigarette. “You didn’t have a problem with working on my song.”

  “I did a guitar part,” I pointed out, taking a sip of my beer. “I’ve done that with other acts, too.”

  “But doing vocals…or working on one of your own songs with me; those things make it different somehow?” Fran raised an eyebrow.

  “Of course, they do!” I wasn’t even sure why I was irritated about it, but I was. “It makes it more…” I shrugged. “It makes it seem like I’m not satisfied with the band.”

  “You’ve been writing your own songs for what—years?” Fran set her beer down and gave me a level look. “If you weren’t satisfied with the band don’t you think they’d have figured that out by now?”

  “It’s different doing my own songs in a studio like this instead of at home,” I told Fran. “You’re the lead singer of your band. They fucking expect you to have other irons in the fire.”

  “You’re a talented goddamn musician and you obviously have other things that you’re capable of doing,” Fran said, scowling at me. “What the fuck does it matter if you record something off hours with me?”

  “It matters, okay?” I took a quick breath and downed about a third of my beer. “It matters because ever since Alex took up with Mary, we’ve all been a little…” I shrugged. “It’s been weird. And what’s weirder is that no one is fucking talking about what happened between you and me.”

  “I thought you said that Mark or whoever gave you shit about it? Wasn’t there a betting pool?”