The Blessed by Tonya Hurley Read Free Book Online Page B

weekly shows at the Continental as loiter around them. She drew a mixed crowd and she was proud of that. Lurking in the dingy room where a few neighborhood regulars, slumming private school students, stylists for big-name musicians who were there to “borrow” her look, cheating boyfriends, bartenders with arms folded, an overly enthusiastic gaggle of girls packed unnecessarily tightly at the lip of the tiny stage, and the four or five guys in back who’d come mostly to eye-fuck her. Lots of people had come to see her tonight, but not the one person she was hoping to see. She knew she had no right to expect he would turn up, but she was disappointed anyway.
    She looked out over the heads of the gathering, breathing the stink of her own sweat mixed with splintered floorboard marinated in spilled beer, saliva, smoke, and ash from cigarette butts long since stamped out before the city smoking codes changed. Pretty much a typical Thursday night, except for the new accessory she was sporting: The emergency room chaplet she’d been given was worn around her bicep, twisted like a tourniquet, matching her stark white ensemble with the unusual charm dangling perpendicularly from it.
    For her, the applause was beside the point. It was about communication. It was the look of adoration in their eyes she’d sought. That she needed. Their respect, not their approval, that turned her on. That’s what inspired her tobegin with, the same compulsion that had driven her musical heroes and the people she admired. To tell the truth. To reveal to people what they already knew deep inside. To shake them up.
    Sebastian was a total stranger but he got that about her. And she got the same vibe from him. She wasn’t into playing it safe. If anything, her goal was to put some risk, put the unexpected, back into music and into life for that matter.
    In the end, she just wanted to cut through the bullshit, on stage, at least, if not off, where she’d fashioned a persona that resembled both a wounded soldier and a sharp blade, but more a shiv than a rapier. The suggestion of violence, disruption, thinly veiled and always present.
    She wasn’t afraid to show her lady balls.
    To be hard.
    To be intimidating.
    The warrior queen of her own private dystopia.
    As she held fast both her dramatic pose and the audience’s attention, she looked out past the bright lights and into their eyes. It was mesmerizing.
    She took the time to stare down each and every one of them. Surveying the crowd for one in particular. Sebastian. But he was nowhere to be found. A no-show.
    She noticed all of them.
    Watching her.
    Watching for what she would do next.
    The bartenders unfolded their arms.
    The girls stood still.
    The guys, waiting. Patiently.
    For her.
    For her to make a move.
    She slowly opened her hand, keeping eye contact with the crowd, and let her guitar pick fall in front of her, off the stage. The lonely, lost eyes, out on a Thursday night, looking to her for something. Something she realized she couldn’t give them. Not tonight.
    “What the hell is going on?” a guy in the crowd yelled. “Play for us!”
    “Cecilia, play for us!” the crowd began chanting in unison.
    If I can’t play to him, she thought, I’ll play for him .
    She slyly slid the chaplet over her wrist and wrapped it tightly around her hand, the most gorgeous set of brass knuckles anyone had ever seen, the sword charm suspended just low enough for her to grip it, like a pick, between her thumb and forefinger. She cranked her guitar up and tore into a wailing solo, channeling all her feelings into a wordless maelstrom of sonic aggression, the bow of her gold charm slaying the steel strings and feeding back relentlessly into the amps and out into the audience.
    CeCe attacked the fretboard, bending notes with such passion that she nearly pulled the instrument out of tune. The pointed end of the sword charm dug deep into her hand. Drops of blood ran from her palm down her fingers to her