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CHAPTER 1
There are eight thousand nerve endings in the clitoris, and this son of a bitch couldn't find any of them. Billie Shelton had definitely picked the wrong guy tonight.
It was almost over. She could tell by the rapid breathing and the slight body shudder. Anyone who thought nineteen-year-old boys possessed serious stamina should be introduced to Robbie Shamblin.
"Oh, fuck!"
Billie rolled her eyes. Is that what this was? At least he had the optimism of youth.
Robbie shot a look at the computer monitor, where two cheap blondes with implants and multiple body piercings were getting it on. "Shit, that was awesome." He jumped up and carelessly flung his condom to the floor. Then he sat down and started up a street racing game on Xbox 360.
Billie had been with her share of lame assholes, but this guy was a shoo-in to make her greatest hits list. "Well, I guess we're done here."
Robbie glanced back at her for a fraction of a second, causing his digital Shelby GT500 to skid onto the make-believe sidewalk. "Motherfucker!" He focused on the screen for several long, obsessed seconds. Finally, he spoke. "I could eat you out, if you want. But most girls say I suck at that."
Billie began to search for her clothes. She'd gone for the lean, funny guy on the main stage, the one who'd brought down the house at the Comic Strip. Big mistake.
And right now the choice was slowly killing her. To think she'd opted for this idiot over the hot marine. God, what a waste. The military man would've fucked her all night. And he wouldn't have needed to diddle around with his computer to get hard, either.
That insult bugged her more than the bad sex. Jesus Christ. She was Billie Fucking Shelton, a goddamn indie rock star. But that wasn't enough anymore. Not in the age of Internet porn. Guys had become desensitized by streaming smut on demand. Women today had to compete with super-sluts like Jenna Jameson. And for what? Fifteen minutes of awkward groping followed by a jizz spill? Men were lazy shits.
Billie sat on the edge of the futon and slipped on her shoes. From the TV, engines roared. From the computer, XXX whores moaned. Whatever. Chalk it up to another lost night. It wasn't the first. It wouldn't be the last.
"You heading out?" Robbie asked without so much as a look in her direction.
"Yeah."
"Do me a favor. Knock on the door across the hall and tell my roommate he can come back in."
Billie laughed. At least this loser could make her do that much. "I haven't heard that kind of shit since college. Is this your apartment or your dorm room?"
"Huh?"
"Forget it," Billie said. Starting out, she went straight for the stairwell, then doubled back to grant Robbie his little favor. Hell, maybe she'd get lucky and end up doing herself one instead. After all, the last place she wanted to go was home. It was still too early. She was still too horny.
A hot guy answered the door. Better face than Robbie's. Better body, too. In the background, another man with a nasty bruise under his eye smoked a joint. He looked like a young Al Pacino from the first Godfather.
Without exactly being invited, Billie walked inside. "Your roommate doesn't know how to fuck ..."
When the telephone blasted her awake hours later, Billie groped for it, if only to stop the shrill ringing from its relentless attack on her brain. "Hello?"
"You sound like shit." It was Amy Dando, her manager.
"I feel like shit. Call me later. I need to sleep."
"There is no later," Amy barked. "We're supposed to be in Todd Bana's office at eleven."
Billie groaned, craning her neck to get a look at the alarm clock. It was almost ten. "I can't. I'm all fucked out. Reschedule."
"No way."
"Come on. Today's not the day. Trust me."
"This is bullshit, Billie. You need this meeting. Todd is close to dropping your ass altogether. Just get in the goddamn shower. I'm coming over there." And then Amy hung up.
Billie was dripping wet and staring at herself under the harsh bathroom light when she heard Amy let herself inside her apartment. "I'm up," Billie called out. The reflection in the mirror had startled her. She looked shockingly bad.
Amy appeared in the doorway, very glamour-puss in a jewel-tone satin/chiffon number, a bulky Christian Dior ID bracelet blinging on her slim wrist. "If I had to guess right now, I'd swear you were thirty-eight."
"Fuck you." Billie puckered her lips, dramatically emphasizing her cheekbones. "I don't look that old." She peered closer. "But maybe I should get some injections. You know, Botox. And maybe laser resurfacing for the sun damage. I hear Dr. Parikh at the Tribeca Skin Center is a miracle worker."
"Maybe you should just get some sleep and stop drinking and smoking so much."
Billie rolled her eyes. "Why don't you save the speech and just leave the pamphlet on the coffee table?"
Amy opened up her snakeskin Gucci bag and pulled out a makeup case. "I've got my tools. I'll do what I can. But that hair is your problem."
Billie gave her an up-and-down glance. "You must've seen Nick last night."
Amy's face revealed nothing, which revealed a lot. "Why do you say that?"
"Because you always dress extra pretty the day after." Billie started to giggle. "So ... did he use the strap-on?"
Amy had it bad for a twenty-two-year-old named Nicole. In lesbian culture, Nicole was what they called a boi — young, masculine, and ready to party. She worked as a Federal Express courier, took testosterone supplements, and recently spent $7,500 on surgery to remove her breasts.
Billie couldn't keep up. The dyke world was so much more than bad haircuts and box-shaped asses these days. Nicole dressed in NBA jerseys, oversize jeans, and baseball caps flipped to the back, while insisting that everyone call her Nick. And here stood Amy, ridiculously girly and runway stylish, every straight man's fantasy lesbian.
"Your situation with Nicole is so fucked up," Billie said. "Don't ever try to talk about my life."
"Nick," Amy corrected. "And FYI — as your manager, it's my job to talk about your life, especially when it interferes with your work." She sighed and began using a small white sponge to apply foundation to Billie's face. "In a perfect world, this would be a shade lighter."
Billie grinned. "I bet you used to say that to all the girls."
Amy cracked a smile. "It was a great way to meet women."
A few years ago, Amy had spent her days as a makeup artist, working the Chanel counter at Bergdorf Goodman on Fifth Avenue. By night, she hit the Manhattan bar scene, trolling for musicians who just might be eager enough to sign a management contract with a novice. Billie was the first to take the leap. Every good firm in the city had already turned her down flat, and Amy was promising to manage Billie's career away from after-midnight acoustic sets in crappy bars.
"So how did you meet this freak anyway?" Billie asked.
"Craigslist," Amy said. "And Nick's not a freak. She's just different."
Billie couldn't believe that classy Amy frequented the online meat market. "Craigslist? Seriously?"
"I think her headline read, BOI SEEKS GIRL." Sifting through the makeup bag, Amy smiled at the thought. "There was a photo." She shrugged. "What can I say? I was hooked."
"I don't get it. She had her tits removed, she dresses like a guy, and she uses a strap-on. Why not save yourself the trouble and just find a man?"
"It's not the same," Amy insisted, making two quick sweeps over Billie's eyelids.
"I guess everybody's got their kinks."
"Your skin looks awful," Amy said. "You should go in for one of those lunch-hour chemical peels. I'll set up something with my dermatologist." Amy glanced around the bathroom. "I don't see any skin-care products. What are you using these days?"
"Hot white cum," Billie said, trying to keep a straight face but losing the fight. "You should try it sometime."
Amy's mouth tightened. "You've been blessed with beauty and talent, Billie. But you have to nurture those gifts. Otherwise, you'll fuck it all away." As she made her speech, she carefully lined Billie's eyes and lips. "Your hair's a mess, your skin's a wreck, and your body's seen better days." She reached for the underside of Billie's upper arm. "Look at that jiggle. When's the last time you saw the inside of a gym?"
Billie's first internal impulse was to lash out, but something deep inside told her to resist. Amy dished out the tough love for good reasons. At the end of the day, Billie Shelton was a corporation, and Amy Dando owned 20 percent of it. The relationship between artist and manager was intense. It ranked up there with husband, boyfriend, and parents, none of which Billie had presently. Amy was the only person in Billie's life truly looking out for her best interests.
"I've been working," Billie murmured, finally.
"On what?" Amy demanded. "You haven't done any shows. You haven't written any new music."
"I've got some great songs in my head. I just have to get them down on paper."
Amy dipped a skinny brush into a gloss pot and began to paint Billie's lips. "You make me crazy. If you had the killer drive of a Madonna, there's no telling where you'd be today."
"What about my third CD? I worked my ass off to finish it, and Todd's been sitting on those tracks for months."
"The label wants a hit single," Amy said matter-of-factly. "Can you blame them?"
"There were at least —"
"Billie, that album was shit, and you know it. I don't think you spent one sober moment in the studio. Now shut up, so I can finish."
Billie stole a glance in the mirror. Amy was applying an explosive Mardi Gras red, making her lips pop with inevitable sin. They were Billie's best feature. Especially her lower lip. It was naturally, impossibly, decadently plump, with a deep gully carved down the center.
Men loved her mouth. Sometimes she could hear the horny gears churning in their stupid heads as they wondered what it would feel like to have her lips wrapped around their cocks. Onstage she took full advantage of this, practically fellating the microphone. Her fans went wild for it every time. Christ. The fucking fans. They conjured up alternate feelings of gratitude and rage.
Billie had left Dartmouth with a degree in government and a six-song demo recorded in the bathroom of her college apartment. The last thing she wanted to do was enroll in law school or work for some tight-ass politician. So she moved to New York and began making the rounds with her music.
In the beginning, she was a walking cliché. Girl with guitar. A Michelle Branch wannabe. A poor man's Jewel. All the rejection had been slow murder on her soul. And she made quite a spectacle of herself at management firms and record labels, telling bitchy receptionists to fuck off and refusing to leave until someone who made decisions turned up to give her a chance.
Luckily, she found Amy before causing this scene at Olympic Records. BMG Entertainment had just acquired it, and the buzz on its founder, Todd Bana, was deafening. He'd gone from producing concerts on his college campus to launching his own independent label with an all-girl punk band called Menstrual Cramps. The group had gone on to sell over a million copies of their first release, That Time of the Month. Now Todd was a multimillionaire and the president of a major label. And the bastard wasn't even thirty yet.
The first meeting Amy set up for Billie had been with Todd. He signed her right away, even though he thought her demo was weak. He told her to write songs that would grab listeners by the throat and squeeze hard. She dug deep, and the result was Dick Magnet, a crude collection of sexually charged anti-love songs that spoke to men and women of her generation. The breakout track was "Make Me Laugh and Make Me Come and I'll Fucking Marry You." College radio went ballistic. Rock critics went apeshit. They said that she had more to say than Sheryl Crow, that her vocal chops outranked Alanis Moris-sette.
Sales were so-so. The CD got halfway to gold, about a quarter of a million copies. But her first tour did boffo business. She sold out small venues and wowed the fans. Word of mouth began to build that Billie Shelton could deliver a live show that kicked ass. A fifteen-date trek became thirty, then sixty. Ultimately, she stayed on the road for more than a year. It was exhilarating. It was exhausting, too.
Touring life could be a real bitch. It was boring, monotonous, and lonely. Musicians put up with so much shit just for that ninety-minute orgiastic rush of performing before a crowd. And it was easy to be seduced into the never-ending rock-and-roll cycle. Getting drunk, getting laid, getting to the next gig.
Billie turned the old double standard upside down. Male rockers who banged every groupie in sight were studs. Well, what was she supposed to do after a show — sit around doing a BLESS THIS HOME cross-stitch? Fuck that. She had groupies, too. College guys. They were young, they were hot, and they made up for a lot of lost time.
In high school, Billie had been the depressed ugly girl with bad skin. Mommy died of ovarian cancer. Daddy killed himself over the loss. She got shipped off to live with a bitchy aunt. But a few years later, Billie blossomed. The acne went away. Once awkward features chiseled into exotic good looks. A new confidence to explore her artistic side materialized. It sounded like a bad Lifetime movie, but it was her fucking life story.
Before the whole rock chick thing, she'd only slept with two guys in her entire life. Now she couldn't even begin to count how many men there'd been. Online message boards crackled with I-Fucked-Billie-Shelton stories. Of course, most of them were far from the truth. "She gave me a blow job after her show in Birmingham!" But she'd never once set foot in Alabama.
Billie hated the hypocrisy. The way people worried about a woman who went out there and fucked like a man. Nobody speculated that Adam Levine of Maroon 5 had been molested by his Uncle Charlie. A guy who enjoyed sex and balled his way across the country was a cocksman, but a woman who did the same had to be damaged goods, acting out some past violation. What bullshit.
Still, the dick parade was growing tiresome. For every mind-blowing session that made her toes curl (a rugby player from Trinity College came to mind), there were always several encounters that did nothing at all for her. Like last night's interlude with Robbie, the comedian. Maybe one day he'd figure out that his funniest joke was dangling between his legs.
When would the boy train stop and let her off? All the college dudes. And other musicians. Oh, God, the musicians. Even if they were twenty years older, they were still boys. Where were the real men? Not listening to her music and showing up at her concerts. That's for goddamn sure.
Billie's core base of support skewed younger — primarily eighteen-to twenty-four-year-old males, but some females, too. And here she was inching closer and closer to twenty-nine. The thought was sickening. Her true die-hard fanboys called themselves Billie Goats. They waged online wars to see who could build the most lavish Internet shrine dedicated to the worship of Billie Shelton. Depending on the day, this could make her feel grateful, dismayed, or just creeped out.
It didn't help that her first album had been so fucking awesome. Dick Magnet was widely regarded as a masterpiece. And nobody let her forget it, least of all the Billie Goats. They wanted another one just like the first.
Pussy Power sure as hell wasn't. That had been her follow-up, or, as the industry commonly referred to it, her sophomore slump. Sales on the set dropped 30 percent from her debut. It contained no buzz tracks, either. The only silver lining was the concert revenue for her second tour. That remained strong. But it was the old music that triggered passionate crowd responses. The new songs just didn't excite them.
Billie could see the writing on the wall, and it terrified her. She didn't want to be one of those new artists whose best work was already behind them. Maybe that's why she'd stayed drunk throughout the recording of her third CD. After all, alcohol dulled fear. And if worse came to worst, it was something to blame failure on, too.
Suddenly, Amy broke her free of the reverie, guiding Billie's head to face the mirror directly. "See ... you're almost pretty again."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Tan Lines"
by .
Copyright © 2008 J. J. Salem.
Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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