It’s just Murder, the evil ring leader of Kirby’s collection of misfit cats.
“I’ll be in soon, baby,” Kirby calls softly. “Go inside.”
I grunt. “He’s probably out here looking for me. Fangs bared. Ready to take his pound of flesh.”
“Probably,” Kirby agrees with a chuckle. “He hates you so much.” She nudges my shoulder with her smaller, pointier one. “But don’t take it personally. He’s just jealous that there’s another creature on earth I like nearly as much as him.”
“Nearly, huh? Thanks,” I say, a smile in my voice. But I’ve been smiling pretty much nonstop since we took the stage earlier tonight.
There’s nothing like a hometown show—the energy, the excitement, the noise, and best of all, a crowd packed with people who dreamed an impossible dream with you until the dream came true.
A lot of the greater Bangor, Maine area fans have been with us from the beginning, when Lips on Fire was just a bunch of high school kids playing all-ages venues on weekends—when Cutter wasn’t grounded for getting caught smoking pot and Shepherd didn’t have to babysit his herd of little siblings. In other words, they knew us way before our lips had ever set a girl on fire.
The people around here are more than fans. They’re family, tribe, and I refuse to let them down. The new album is going to come out on schedule, even if it means I won’t be coming.
At all.
Not a single orgasm until the songs are written, recorded, and in the bag.
Fuck…just thinking about it is enough to drive me to drink.
I take the flask from Kirby. Her skin is so white it’s easy to find her hand, even in the midnight shadows. “When was the last time you were out in the sun, Larry? You’re glowing in the dark.”
“Don’t call me that,” she says in a tone that makes it clear she still loves it when I call her that. I might only see my best girl a few times a year, but we talk on the phone almost every night. I know her better than anyone, including her snot-nosed whiner of an ex-boyfriend, Peter, who I can’t say I’m sorry is no longer in the picture.
The dude was a dud. If personalities had colors, his would be puce.
“I’ve been on deadline,” she adds with a sigh. “And the sun stifles my spooky muse.”
“Maybe you should write a children’s book, instead,” I tease.
Kirby Lawrence, KJ Lawrence to her legions of horror-loving fans, is about as child-friendly as a rusty razor blade. Sure, with her pale blond hair, bright blue eyes, and permanently pink cheeks, she looks sweet, but Kirby is a dark horse. Emancipated from her craptastic mother at seventeen and supporting herself and her little sister, Bridget, purely with her fiction skills two years later, she’s a legend around Hidden Kill Bay. If it weren’t for the phenomenon that is Lips on Fire—at last count, we’ve sold eight million records worldwide—she’d be our Bangor suburb’s most famous export.
But Kirby doesn’t care about fame. She plies her trade for the sick and twisted thrill of scaring people to death and the cash to support her cat adoption habit. At last count, she had four of her own and was footing the vet bills for at least a dozen other local felines.
I used to tease her about having Early Onset Cat Lady disease, but then she went down to the DMV and got a tragically dorky vanity plate that reads MeowUDoin, and I stopped. I didn’t know what she’d do if I continued to yank her chain. She threatened to have whiskers tattooed on her cheeks, and even though I was 95 percent sure she was kidding, I wasn’t willing to risk that 5 percent.
Kirby’s too cute to go full-on weirdo just yet. We have to get her hooked up with a non-snot-nosed dude who will worship at her love altar, first. She can be a prickly pear sometimes, but beneath her Wednesday Adams demeanor beats the heart of a sweet lady any dude would be lucky to call his own.
“And maybe you should pass the flask before you break the two-sip rule,” she says, invoking one of our many adolescent rules of honor. Never hang on to the flask for more than ten minutes, and never, ever take more than one sip at a time. “And maybe you can explain to me why you can’t bang and write at the same time?”
“I’m a man. I’m bad at multitasking.” I pass the flask, adding in my 70s porn star voice, “And when I’m focused on my lady, that’s all that’s on my mind, baby.”
Kirby snorts. “So focus on your lady for two minutes, or however long it takes rock stars these days, and then get back to writing songs. I’m pretty sure that still leaves several hours of your day free.”
“You wound me, Larry. I’m a ten-minute man. Sometimes twelve, if I’ve eaten my Wheaties and think of my grandmother’s underwear.”
She snorts again, and I feel unreasonably proud of myself for making her laugh twice. Kirby isn’t an easy mark. Either I’m getting funnier, or the whiskey is starting to make her feel as fuzzy around the edges as it’s made me, a fact for which I’m grateful.
Having a killer case of writer’s block is less scary after the buzz sets in.
Though, pretty soon, that’s going on the shelf, too—no alcohol, no sex, no nothing that might mute the muse.
“But seriously,” I add in a softer voice. Kirby had her place reinsulated last year, but it’s still an old cottage with thin walls, and I don’t want any of my bandmates knowing how far behind I am. “I’ve got to do something. We’re going into the studio in August to record, and I’ve got one song, dude. One. After a hundred hours in the writing cave.”
“Fuck,” she says, clearly feeling my pain. But she would. As a fellow career creative, she knows all about the strain of making art on demand.
“Yes. That. So I’m going to quit fucking before I’m any more fucked.”
“You seriously think it will help?” She shifts my way, passing over the flask. “I thought only meathead jocks believed their power seeped out of them with their seed. Remember when Coach Brewer made the wrestling team stop jerking off senior year, and they all kept getting hard-ons during the meets?”
“I do remember,” I say with a laugh-shudder. “It’s not like that for me. It’s just…” I shrug. “My best songwriting years were before we blew up, back when I was a kid right out of high school, writing songs and dreaming of a day when getting laid would be something that happened to me more than once or twice a year.”
It’s her turn to shudder. “Sounds torturous.”
“It was pretty miserable,” I agree, “but great for the creative muscles. Yes, I’ve written good songs since then, but never so quickly or with such consistent quality. You know?”
Kirby hums beneath her breath. “Okay. I can see your point. But what if it was a timing thing? I mean, maybe back then you were just full of that early fire. I used to write a lot faster, too. Five thousand-word days used to happen all the time. Now I get two thousand, and I treat myself to ice cream.”
I take a long swig of whiskey, chest burning as I swallow. “You could have a point. But I prefer to believe that I’ve been distracted and can course correct, not that I’m washed up at twenty-nine.”
“Aw, there, there.” Kirby’s hand lands on my shoulder for a series of awkward pats. “Don’t have a quarter-life crisis. It’s going to be okay.”