Easy Little Lick (Copperline #3)

  Copyright 2015, Sibylla Matilde

  Photo by: Sara Eirew Photographer

  Cover models: Jonathan Dumas and Valérie Benoit

  ISBN: 1514312336

  ISBN-13: 978-1514312339

  Distributed by Amazon

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy.

  Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. With the exception of the original material written by the author, all songs, song titles, and lyrics contained in this book are the property of the respective songwriters and copyright holders.

  For my Brit Ho, Bethy boo. Here’s your Mofo.

  Love you… even if you do listen to K-pop.

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Songs that inspired Easy Little Lick

  Acknowledgments

  Other Novels by Sibylla Matilde

  About Siby

  Stalk Siby

  Lick:

  A cool drum trick; a short and commonly repeated musical motif; something a drummer can nail whenever… wherever…

  …even in his sleep.

  I’d been home for about an hour when the yelling started. The neighbors were fighting.

  Again.

  My dad usually stepped in, trying to calm the man down while my mom called the cops. That’s just the kind of guy he has always been, tough and protective. Always looking out for those who needed help.

  And she needed help. Badly.

  They tried to get her to leave so many times. They tried to bring charges against him on her behalf.

  But her responses were always the same.

  He’s not normally like this.

  He’s just drunk.

  He doesn’t mean it.

  So nothing was done. You can’t really help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.

  My dad would intervene and protect her until the cops got there. The guy might get hauled off to the drunk tank or something. The fucker would sober up, and she would always take him back. Abuse can fuck with a person’s mind so badly.

  From my open window, I heard the crash of broken glass. Things were escalating.

  A heavy thud and another scream.

  Fuck. My mind raced. I didn’t know what to do. My parents weren’t home. I was stoned out of my gourd after I’d toked up in the park with my buddy Brannon while my brother’s band played for some society wedding.

  Now, though, I wished I’d stayed sober. I wished I knew what to do. That dude next door was a big fucker and a violently mean drunk. I was a lover, not a fighter. Even more, though, the pot had me paranoid.

  Not so much of the guy himself, since I wasn’t exactly a little fella. I was more worried that the cops would show up and bust my ass for drugs.

  Fuck, I had to do something, though. I reached for my cell phone.

  “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?” the dispatcher asked.

  “My neighbors… they’re fighting. I think the guy is beating up his wife.” My voice hitched as I heard another scream. Another crash. “Shit,” I breathed, “someone needs to help her.”

  “Stay with me, sir. What is your address?”

  “Nine-oh-three Daly Street, and they’re in a blue house next door. Hurry,” I urged, peeking through my curtains. “It’s really bad.”

  The shouting increased as the man raged on. A sharp crack, like broken wood, rang through the air. I heard the woman’s anguished pleading. Sobbing.

  “Should I go help her?” I asked. “My dad would help her if he was here.”

  “I’ll get someone there right away, but stay with me,” the dispatcher said, maintaining her calming tone. It sounded surreal and far away, especially with the panic and terror floating through my open bedroom window. “Do not engage.”

  The buzz I still felt coursing through my veins and the fear I heard in the woman’s voice twisted inside me. Suddenly, I didn’t care if I got in trouble. I wanted to help her. I wanted to stop him.

  “I have to go,” I gasped frantically when I heard another loud crash. “I have to stop him.”

  “Sir, stay with me. Law enforcement officers are very close. They will only be a minute or two.”

  It was more like three. Just over three of the longest motherfucking minutes of my life. I watched the clock, my panic growing as each scream echoed in the night air.

  And then… silence. Eerie and cold in the darkness.

  I shot out of bed, barreling down the steps out the door just as the sheriff pulled up. Right behind him was an Ophir PD car.

  It had been just over three minutes, but it was still too late.

  By the time they arrived and subdued the abusive, angry man, he’d already done what he’d come so close to doing many times before. What my dad and mom had told her would happen if she didn’t leave him.

  What I could have stopped if I’d only intervened. If I hadn’t hesitated because I was stoned, selfish, and paranoid.

  I watched as they carried the woman’s body from the house, zipped up in a black bag. The guilt crushed me. It cut me deep and festered in my conscience.

  It haunted me.

  It changed me.

  I still drank. I even still toked up a little now and then, but I always kept a tight hold on it. I always made sure it wouldn’t fuck with me too much. I made sure I could and would still man up whenever needed.

  I would never hesitate again.

  Five years later…

  “But it’s a sex party, Cody,” Justin groaned as he picked up his bass to prepare for the show that night. “A sex party. When’s the last time you were laid, anyway?”

  I only laughed. A wild orgy was Justin’s version of heaven and, really, a rare event for small-town Montana. To me, though, while it did sound pretty fuckin’ hot, it also sounded kind of… empty. I’d done the random hookups, not a ton of them, but enough to know that something was just missing there.

  Maybe it was because I was younger than the other guys in the band, something they gave me shit about all the time. I was the baby of the group. I’d lived my whole life in the small town of Ophir, just outside of Butte, and even Butte wasn’t huge by any standards. My buddies, mostly the other Bangin’ Mofos, lived much more vicariously than I did.

  The thing was, I just kinda knew there was someone out there who would come along, hit me like a ton of bricks, and that would be it. Forever. Sort of a chickish view on life, so I didn’t really share it with my manwhore friends, even though they were settling down one by one, getting all domesticated.
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  Justin, though… he was a bit stubborn about it. He’d always been the wildest of the bunch, always on the lookout for something hot and dirty. Always seeking a new twist. Voyeurism, exhibitionism, threesomes, foursomes… moresomes. He truly couldn’t understand where I was coming from.

  He figured my parents’ idealistic marriage had ruined me for casual hookups.

  Maybe he was right.

  I’d grown up listening to my mom and dad go on and on about the moment they met. How they knew right then and there it would be forever. It was a summertime street dance and the band started to play my mom’s favorite song. She had exclaimed that she wanted to dance, and the crowd had practically parted to lead directly to my dad. My mom always told the story to my brother and me with a sappy, sweet grin on her face. She said it was like a scene in a movie, and my dad would throw her a little wink as he smiled at the memory.

  Two decades later, things were smooth sailing in the Driscoll home. I could see how they loved each other more and more every day. They still flirted like teenagers even after kids and bills and years of water under the bridge.

  So I just couldn’t settle for quick and dirty. Not when I knew something like that was possible.

  I had no shortage of offers with the girls that hung around our band. Over the past couple years, I’d touched and tasted more than a few, but nobody really seemed to fit. None of the girls I’d had really felt right. The sparks didn’t ignite. I never really experienced the burn.

  They saw the outside me. Tall and pretty fuckin’ buff from all the time I spent on the drums, more or less every waking moment that I wasn’t working my day job as a mechanic for my buddy Brannon. I had ocean-blue eyes and sandy light brown hair. The chicks that flocked around the Mofos took one look at me and went all rainbows and butterflies thinking I could be the one.

  But they never really scratched beneath the surface. They didn’t take the time to get to know me. They saw muscles and heard the words ‘drummer in a band’ and that’s all they needed. Everything was always so superficial, and there was no depth to their attraction.

  I started feeling like I had unrealistic expectations. I had my heart set on that perfect girl who would come along and rock my world.

  But maybe that perfect girl didn’t exist.

  “Fuck,” Justin continued, “I need a wingman, desperately, and Drew already said no.”

  Drew nodded as he tuned his guitar. “Maggie’s out of town.”

  “Dude,” Justin pleaded, “if she was here, she’d be begging you to go. She lives for that shit.”

  “Yeah,” Drew laughed back, “but she’s not, and I can’t go without her. That’s cheating, you fucker, and she’d kick my ass.”

  “Fuuuuuuuck,” Justin snorted in exasperation. “Why the fuck is Cody the only other single Mofo? The fucker is pure relationship material with all his nice guy shit. If any of you bastards wound up getting pussy-whipped, it should have been him. But nooooo.” He turned to Denny, our Dublin-born front man, who was testing the mic. “Wait, you and Felicity are into exhibitionism, right? What was that thing you did back in Ireland? Dogging? Why don’t you—”

  “Feck off,” Denny replied, grinning slightly at Justin’s desperation, but exuding an underlying possessive vibe that said he really wasn’t joking. “I’m not sharing Fliss.”

  “Maybe Brannon and Sophie,” Justin thoughtfully murmured. “The three of us have gotten busy before.”

  “And I’m pretty sure Brannon told you never again,” I said. Brannon was a friend of the band and became my boss when we’d graduated from the automotive program at the local community college. He and his girlfriend Sophie had a rather adventurous beginning to their relationship, fulfilling all the things on her naughty bucket list. Since then, though, they had settled pretty concretely into monogamy.

  “Fuck,” Justin muttered, turning back to me. “See, you fucker? There isn’t anyone else but you.” His mouth dropped open with an epiphany. I could almost see the light bulb appear over his head. “Maybe you’ll meet your dream girl there, that perfect woman you've been saving yourself for.”

  “Yeah, right,” I laughed. “Nobody meets their soulmate at a sex party.”

  Right about then, we heard footsteps on the stage stairs.

  Doug, the owner of the Copperline, came up first, followed by a girl who appeared pretty close to my age of twenty-three. She stood slightly hidden by him. From what I could see, she had long dirty-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and was wearing a T-shirt and jeans. All in all, her appearance seemed fairly nondescript.

  “These guys are our regulars on the weekends, the Bangin’ Mofos,” Doug was saying as he led her up to the stage, coming to pause beside my drums. “Hey guys, I want you to meet Ilsa. She’s a new waitress who will be starting tonight. Ilsa, that wanker over there is Denny, there’s Drew on lead guitar and Justin on bass, and this big fella behind the drums,” he motioned over to me, “is Cody.”

  “Ilsa…” I murmured to myself, “like on Casablanca.”

  I hadn’t really meant to say it out loud. I had the tendency to spout out things without thinking more often than not, usually things that didn’t make a lot of sense to most people. That was the only place I’d heard the name, though… Ilsa Lund, Bogie’s star-crossed lover from the old black and white flick. Brannon’s grampa always had WWII movies playing in his garage, and Casablanca had sorta stuck with me after all those years.

  When I spoke, Doug stepped aside, and Ilsa looked right at me with the most beautiful hazel-brown eyes. Even from where I sat a few feet away, I could make out the amazing color framed by long, thick lashes. Drawing me in and holding my attention. Hypnotizing me.

  I pushed back my beanie hat and just sort of stood there staring at her, taken captive by her gaze. Rendered speechless.

  “So, be nice to her,” Doug continued, “but I don’t want any of you guys to fuck her, got it?”

  At that remark, her eyes went very wide, and the most tantalizing shade of pink colored her cheeks. She quickly looked up at her new boss, somewhat alarmed, but more in a question.

  “It’s kind of a ground rule I've started,” Doug explained to her with a shrug, then looked back at us. The guy was an old biker, grew up in Sturgis, all leathery and really badass looking, so his menacing glare tended to be sort of boner-shriveling. “I go through waitresses like crazy with these manwhores. I’m tired of that shit.”

  With those words, Ilsa looked back at me with her eyebrows furrowed.

  So much for a good first impression.

  Over the next couple weeks, she avoided us. I wasn’t sure if it was Doug’s warning, or if she was just naturally shy.

  She reminded me of a shadow. Silent. Moving around the outskirts where nobody would notice her.

  I could barely keep my eyes off her, though.

  The other barmaids often came to our parties, breaking Doug’s cardinal rule over and over, generally with Justin, sometimes with Drew and Maggie. They gossiped about who had done what in little groups at work. At every after party we had, I wondered if Ilsa would show up.

  But she never did.

  She didn’t dress like the bar skanks either. Much like that first time I met her, she wore jeans and loose-fitting T-shirts. Her hair was usually just pulled back in a simple ponytail.

  She made her rounds at the tables each night, giving slight smiles to the customers. Shy, but sweet. She seemed to fade in and out of the background. Because she shrank away from the limelight, because she didn’t wear super short skirts and have cleavage down to her navel, she seemed to fly under the radar.

  The band and, for the most part, the crowd at the Copperline treated her almost like furniture. Like she wasn’t a living, breathing woman with beautiful eyes who blushed the most stunning shade of pink when I once spoke to her.

  Yet, she seemed to appreciate their lack of interest. She mechanically went about her business, clearing tables and taking orders, showing as little of her true s
elf as she could. She was remote. Watchful and wary, avoiding interaction whenever possible. If someone tried to pull her into conversation, she quickly shut it down. She was just shy of rude, carefully making herself seem almost flat and boring, and that interest would fizzle and quickly fade away.

  Except in me.

  There was just something about her. She was just unlike anyone else I’d ever known. A mystery.

  Every night when the bar closed, she quietly slipped out to her car and drove away… towards Butte, I noticed one night as I watched her leave.

  After a couple weeks of zero interaction, I started putting myself in her path as she worked, trying to catch her eyes as she moved around me. Most often, she evaded me, thwarting my attempts to be social. Every now and then, though, I managed to catch her eye. Little things I did to make it difficult for her to ignore me. Using my body to block her path until she had no choice but to tap me on the shoulder and murmur a quiet ‘excuse me’ to get me to move. Handing her something to hear a quiet ‘thank you’ accompanied by the slightest of shy smiles.

  My tactics didn’t always work, but sometimes they did.

  It was crazy, really. I was crazy. I could have had my pick of the bar on any given night. The Bangin’ Mofos were practically celebrities in the area, and I had been pegged as the one with massive relationship potential. A big fuckable teddy bear.

  But when I could get her to actually look up and focus on me, her eyes said more than her words and her motions.

  I saw sadness, loneliness, and a little fear. I saw a fragile soul who appeared alive, but not really living.

  It was the strangest feeling. I wanted to hold her. To comfort her. To protect her. To take the sadness inside her and replace it with something beautiful. Those moments between us, rare and short as they were, made me want to know more about her. They made me feel like maybe I did know her a little, like I was privy to some kind of secret.

  Most often, she would shutter the emotion behind thick lashes. Every now and then, though, I managed to say something just right, something that made her eyes sparkle with a faint glimmer of amusement.