Picture Perfect (3 page)

I was thirteen
the first time I heard Flynn sing, and I was hooked from the first.  MTV was still playing music videos back then, and Jess and I never missed a countdown when Renegade Saints were on the charts. 

All of t
he Renegade Saints guys are smoking hot.  Cole Hayes is the lead guitarist, an Adonis with fingers like Eddie Van Halen.  The drummer for the band, Gavin Wilde, has a buzz cut and an attitude that screams, "I'm here to dominate you."  Bassist Tyson Allen is one of the hottest rockers alive.  He plays the bass like it's a drum set, all wild and crazy, but his face looks like it should be on the cover of Vogue. 

And then, there's Flynn Rand.  Even a decade later, I still know his sta
ts by heart.  He's six feet tall with shoulder length black hair, wild amber eyes, lips like a dream and a body that doesn't fucking quit.  The first time I ever masturbated, I was fifteen and I'd been listening to Flynn's voice while staring at a picture that a fan had taken of him.  He was shirtless, sweaty and singing to the crowd.  As long as I live, I'll never forget staring at the V cut of the muscle that led to his groin as I came.  The bulge on display in the jeans he wore in that picture got me off for months. 

Hell, who
am I was kidding?  It was still getting me off today. It’s a crying shame that no one has ever gotten me as turned on in real life as the fantasy version of Flynn did.  It only got more intense after the night of the infamous ‘
Flynn Rand sang TO ME’
concert.  That was number one in my fantasy file, the remembered intensity of his gaze on me a guarantee that I’d get off.

Other than that one night at the concert, life had handed me a shit sandwich where arousal with men who were
in the room was concerned.  Did that sound bitter?  What the hell… I guess I
am
bitter. I was still dealing with the after effects of my break up six weeks ago from the world’s biggest asshole, and it’s totally coloring the way I look at men.  I’d been dating Lee for two months when I made the decision to have sex with him. I’m twenty-three, and was dog ass tired of being a virgin.  I kept waiting for someone to turn me on as much as pictures of Flynn used to, but it never happened.  It’s my own fault that I compromised and wound up having sex with someone who sucked in bed. To say it was a big disappointment is an understatement, but I figured I’d come around… hopefully literally. 

I
really thought that Lee was a decent guy, but I couldn’t have been more wrong, something I found out in the most humiliating of ways.  Six weeks ago, we’d gone to a wedding with a bunch of his friends.  The wedding was held in Jersey City, and we’d stayed up there.  We rented a series of rooms that were connected, and we all had a great time at the wedding.  I’d had a little too great of a time, and when we got back to the hotel room, I started puking.  I puked a few times and then fell asleep, waking up a few hours later dehydrated and thirsty as hell.  As I was making my way across the room to the mini bar, I’d heard the telltale screams of some loud sex. 

A quick glance around our hotel room indicated that Lee wasn’t
there.  I don’t remember if I walked to the open door because I was looking for Lee because I was suspicious or not, but what greeted me when I looked through the door was a nightmare.  There was literally a pile of bodies on the two queen beds and the floor, all completely naked and engaged in different sexual acts.  When my eyes landed on Lee, my jaw dropped.  He was flat on his back with his “best friend” Mary sitting on his face and his friend Ben’s wife, Hillary, riding him.  It was like a scene from a bad porno movie… or, my worst nightmare.

What happened after that was a disaster.  When I yelled, Mary climbed off Lee’s face so that he could see me.  He didn’t bat an eyelash
and I struggled not to vomit in disgust at how disrespectful it was that he was looking at me like I was a fucking idiot while his face was covered in Mary’s juices.  I fully expected him to apologize, but that didn’t happen.  Instead, he yelled at me for interrupting and told me to loosen the fuck up and join in, or keep the stick up my ass and get the fuck out.

I was
mortified.  It was embarrassing to be treated that way, and it didn’t help that I heard people laughing when I slammed the door shut.  I was packed and out of the room within five minutes, needing to put as much space between me and the deafening sounds of the pile of bodies in the room having wild sex. 

The front desk took my appearance in their stride, and quickly had me checked into a new room.  Once I was in the new room I called Jess and woke her up, laying the whole story out for her.  We made plans for her to get me the following morning, and once I was off the phone, I curled up in the bed and cried.  Not because
I was sad about my relationship with Lee coming to an end- in truth that was a relief. I was crying because I was angry and humiliated that I was such a chump that I gave away my virginity to someone who turned out to be the worst kind of person.  It killed me that I was so gullible that I’d fallen for what was clearly his charade.

Unbelievably, Lee called, texted and emailed me pretty steadily for
the first few weeks after the break-up, even though I had made it abundantly clear that I would never touch him again. 

He even had the nerve to tell me that it was somethin
g he and his friends did all the time and that he’d hoped that by getting me drunk enough I’d loosen up and join in.  “I was actually trying to help you.  You’re a beautiful girl Tessa, but you’re about as sensual as a Dr. Seuss book.  I hoped I could fix that for you.”

Yeah, talk about
a slap in the face. Being told I was a dud on top of everything else made me feel like a giant loser in addition to having shit taste in guys.

I’d never been very loose a
round Lee; he was right about that much.  Just like every boyfriend I’ve ever had, he didn’t measure up to the sexual feelings that Flynn Rand had evoked in me when my hormones started coming to life.  The only difference between Lee and the others was that I was dumb enough to have sex with him.

M
y problem had always been Flynn and people not measuring up to how hot I could get just looking at him.  I know that Flynn is dangerous to my libido, and I'm going to need to quickly get my shit together and perfect my poker face before I meet him in person.  As things stand now, I'd dissolve into a puddle of liquid at his feet and beg him to touch me, just so I could see if the reality was even in the same neighborhood as the fantasy. That would be a horrible idea because in all likelihood, the problem is mine. 

There are people who don’t enjoy having sex, and I seem to be one of them.  I do just fine by myself, but when I do anything sexual with anyone else, it’s just a letdown.  The only person I’ve ever felt sexually charged by is Flynn.
My taste in men being what it is, I’m betting he sucks in bed.  I started to laugh when I told myself that the bulge I’ve lusted over for years is probably nothing more than a few tube socks rolled together. 

I hadn’t stopped thinking about the photographer since I saw that picture of her with The Chaps.  When I got back to my hotel that night, I’d spent hours on her website looking at all of her photos.  She had an incredible eye, and each picture told a story.  Had I seen her work without seeing her as well, I’d still have wanted to hire her.

I’d
been to the site an embarrassing number of times since the first night that I bookmarked it.  She had a series of black and white self-portraits that I just couldn’t stop looking at.  She was beautiful, no doubt about that, but she also looked familiar.  I could never quite shake the feeling that I’d met her before, but I was positive that I hadn’t.  I would have remembered a girl like that.  She seemed different, more authentic than what I was used to. I saw incredible depth in her self-portraits, and I wanted to know more about her.  What was her personality like?  What did her voice sound like? 

In just a few hours, I’d
have my answer when I finally got to meet her for the first time.  I was pumped for the tour general because this is a huge deal for us, but I was also ridiculously excited about seeing
her
in the flesh. Still, I needed to keep my eye on the ball so that I was professional and on point because there was so much to focus on with the band in the coming months.

Since
this will be our last tour, we agreed to let it be filmed as a documentary.  We’ll also have a biographer with us who will be compiling information for a band autobiography that will be released in conjunction with the film and a live CD.  It’s a big goodbye, and it will take just over a year from start to finish. Four months on tour, then six months putting the CD, documentary and book together followed by two months of publicity.  After that, we’re free.

I don’t know what
normal life will look like, but I’m excited about it.  We’ve all spent the last six years getting our shit back together, and now it’s time to move forward.  For a long time, each of us went completely off the rails. Tyson had gotten heavily into drugs, and the rest of us were drinking, fucking, and taking risks with our personal safety.  We sold CD’s by the million, but the quality of our work definitely suffered.  Out of the ten songs on our third CD, there are three that we willingly play today.  The rest is pure crap. We were totally phoning it in.

I was the first to start to get my shit together after an epic blackout in Philadelphia.  The next day I’d woken up with a new nickname and the certainty that I
had to be better than I was. At the end of the tour, our manager sat us all down and told us that if we didn’t ALL get healthy, there wasn’t going to be a band left. Three of us went to ground in our hometown while Tyson went to rehab. We all got our shit under control before coming back together six months later to record our fourth album.  The difference between the third and fourth CD’s is like night and day.

It was during the making of that CD that the four of us started talking about getting out of the game.
  The whole rock star thing is an experience that we've both loved and hated, but fame isn’t what any of us care about.  Each of us wants a real life.  We all agree that we didn’t make all of this money to spend the rest of our lives anchorless and miserable.

The other
thing we all agreed on is that we didn’t want to quit the music business entirely.  We got started on this ride because we love music, and now we’re going to take what we’ve learned in the past decade and put it to work with our own label.  The contract with our first act was signed yesterday.  They’ll be in the studio in a few weeks, and then they will be opening for us on the last leg of the tour.

Everything is moving forward perfectly
, at least professionally.  As usual, I haven’t been successful finding anyone I want to spend a significant amount of time with.  At the beginning of our ride to the top, I fucked everything that walked- and even a few that couldn’t.  I liked enjoying myself with women, but I would never let myself go inside of one.  I'm like a fucking machine, there to make them come like crazy, but I don’t come myself until they’re gone. My biggest fear is that it’s become such an ingrained pattern that I’ll never be able to have a normal sex life.

I know
people think that it's weird that I don’t come with chicks, and I guess it is.  I’ve never found anyone that I wanted to share that part of myself with, not that I didn’t enjoy the sex. I give enough of myself away without offering that up too. The sexual portion of touring life has always been insane, and I definitely enjoyed it in years past, orgasm or not.  The world was a sexual buffet, and the entire band ate from it daily, sometimes many times a day with different people each time, for years.

We stopped doing crazy shit with multiple groupies at a time when
we all came back together after the six months off.  These days our tours are cleaner, healthier and less debauched.  That's not to say that we don't all still dip our wicks into hot women, including some groupies, but it isn't a thrice-daily occurrence anymore.  I like to think that although I'm highly sexed, my palette is being refined with time. 

I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I have no idea what a relationship would look like.  My
only girlfriend was Mary Stevenson back in high school and that didn’t count because it was a nightmare.  Yeah, we were together for two years, but I still fucked other girls, she fucked half the football team, and it wasn't like we were going to get married.  I often wonder if I'm capable of being in a real relationship.  I feel like I've totally missed that experience, and sometimes it seems like it's not destined to happen for me.

What I’m looking for is
an actual connection.  I haven’t found anything like that yet, and I don't know if it's possible, but I keep hoping.  I can’t help but wonder if the little photographer and I will have any chemistry. I now know that her name is Tessa, and I think it suits her.  It’s a beautiful name, just like her. My dick certainly likes the look of her, because I’ve spent the last few weeks jerking off with images of her in my mind. Until I meet her, there’s no way of knowing if she’s the real deal. For all I know, she has a high-pitched voice, a boyfriend and she loves to crochet dog sweaters. 

I can’
t wait until tonight when I get to meet her and see what she’s really like.