Page 47 of The Battle of Maddox
The crowd roared, and I even saw a few pride flags flip quickly through the air. “We’re so glad we got to play for you tonight, thanks for having us! Keep on rockin’, and keep on fighting the good fight.”
He turned, grabbed my chin, and kissed the fuck out of me.
I gasped against him for just a moment, then melted. Maddox didn’t hold back, at all. He kissed me as though I was air and he needed me to live. His tongue found mine and twisted around it, caressing, and stroking.
And when the lights went out, he didn’t stop.
He took another few precious seconds to wind down, to pull back slowly, to nip at my lip and press a small sweet kiss to the corner of my mouth when he was done.
“Did I get it right?” he whispered over my lips.
“Uh…yeah. Yeah…that was really good. Very convincing.” I was now sporting a half chub so there was absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Except it wasn’t real.
I screwed my head back on from where he had blown it off and grabbed his wrist. “Come on. The crowd is our cover. Let’s go, we have to change and make this fast.”
Coughing, he seemed to come back to himself and let me drag him down the stairs. By the time we hit the bottom, my head was back on, and so was Maddox’s. We headed straight for the dressing room.
We had just a few minutes to change, grab our stuff, and get gone. We were going to blend into the crowds leaving the Otkrytie Stadium, but we had to be fast.
Ripping off our shirts as we walked into the green room, jerking on cheap parking lot tees with badly printed Robot Servant logos and tour dates. I glanced over at him as he was adjusting the regular, non-shitkicker shoes he was slipping on.
“Your hair,” I said.
He glanced up. “What about it? I’m not cutting it.”
I shook my head and grabbed the small messenger bag I had with me. I pulled out a brush and a hair tie. “Tie your shoes. I’ll handle this.”
Quickly, I brushed and twisted his hair into a man-bun at the top of his head. I reached over him to where Holland had left me the two beanies, and yanked it down over his head. “There. Now, that face.” I tapped a finger against my cheek. “Glasses.”
“I don’t have glasses.”
“We can grab some cheapies, just outside. I’m sure the parking lot vendors have a pair.”
“Good idea.” He looked me up and down. “What about you? You’re not exactly unknown.”
Pulling out some makeup wipes, I swished them over my face, pulling off the foundation, the touch of blush, my eyeliner, and the neutral shadow I had put on. Dumping that in the trash, I grabbed my contacts case and swapped them out for a pair of glasses.
“Oh. Well. That…works.”
“Come on, we don’t have time to waste, we have to follow the crowds out.”
He nodded, shouldering his own messenger bag. We followed the tunnels backstage until we were able to pop out into one of the arena’s corridors. Lo and behold, just ahead of us was a cheap souvenir stand. I walked straight up, since most of the audience had already moved along. I plucked the lightest pair of aviator glasses that were on the display, and grabbed a bad hat for myself.
The woman behind the stand barked something at me in Russian, and I held up the largest cash bill I had. She took it and gave me change. I handed Maddox the glasses and they looked just as awful and out of place as I’d hoped. I dropped the cap on my head, and we started down the corridor.
“Crap, I don’t know if I can figure out this alphabet,” Maddox said.
“You can read Welsh and things like Llanfair-pwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysilio-gogogoch will roll off your tongue, but you can’t make out Spartek Metro in Cyrillic.”
“Wow, I’m duly impressed with your spitting out Llanfair like that.” He laughed. “And no. I can’t.”
I pointed to a sign above us. “Spartek Metro.”
??????? ?????
He looked at me and shook his head. “My brain wants that to be Greek.”
