Title: The Duke and the Deadbeat
Author: Gregory L. Norris
Publisher: NineStar Press
Release Date: November 5, 2018
Heat Level: 3 - Some Sex
Pairing: Male/Male
Length: 50900
Genre: Contemporary, romance, bisexual, contemporary, pansexual, musicians
Add to Goodreads
Synopsis
Duke Donovan was born into rock royalty. Front man for the popular Goth band 3-D, Duke’s had everything handed to him his entire life—fame, fortune, flesh. The problem is he wants none of it. After staging an unforgettable concert performance meant to give him an exit from the spotlight, Duke skyrockets 3-D’s rising star past the stratosphere, making the band more popular than ever and Duke ready to crack from all the unwanted attention and pressure.Seamus Whyler is tall, handsome, and passionate about music. Seamus has had none of Duke’s lucky breaks and dreams of a rock star’s life while living out of his car between gigs. Meeting Duke is like looking into a mirror—and long last being given a shot at true stardom when the pop prince offers to switch places with the pauper. But as Duke and Seamus soon discover, leaving their real identities behind isn’t so easy a thing to accomplish while being dogged by their pasts and a ruthless celebrity music blogger who smells a ringer, and when the opportunity for true love forces them both to face the music.
Excerpt
The Duke and the Deadbeat
Gregory L. Norris © 2018
All Rights Reserved
Track 1
Maroon 5 stud Adam Levine had taken to
the stage stripped down to his black boxer briefs, black socks, and smoldering
Cheshire Cat’s smile that insured the other side of his bed would never grow
cold. The guys in Blink 182 had turned mediocre talent into megasuccess by
conveniently forgetting to put on their pants or underwear before streaking out
to their instruments, dicks swinging, hairy butts displayed for the crowd to
behold. Before them, Green Day’s handsome frontman Billie Joe Armstrong, with
his mop of hair bleached blond and dyed neon-green, had strummed his guitar and
crooned for the orgasming audience with his lush thatch of pubic curls and limp
cock hanging in clear view. After, it was the Scissor Sisters and Queens of the
Stone Age letting it all dangle. Once, live on MTV, some hairy
Wolverine-looking tool going by the name of Evil Jared Hasselhoff hopped on a
crate, whipped out his manhood, and relieved himself on the lead singer of the
band Placebo.
Duke Donovan Dalton, the driving force
behind the Goth-rock band 3-D, planned to outshine all of them. The Death Heart
Tour’s final leg, winding through Austin and concluding in Boston, would be the
ultimate musical mind-fuck.
“You can do this,” Duke said, casting a
nervous glance into the mirror.
Harley shot him a look from the other
side of the room. Duke’s trusted assistant, who also maintained the band’s
website and social media pages on FaceSpace, MyBook, and Chatter, always knew
when something dangerous was brewing, and what Duke sensed now was no
different. What would he Chit about, using that economy of a hundred and
forty-four words? Duke looking way too calm. Huge audience, eager to hear the
tunes, screaming bloody murder. What if the murder victim’s Duke Dalton? I
think he’s contemplating suicide!
Harley knew Duke, had since they were
kids touring with their dads. An uncomfortable rush of warmth bloomed in his
gut, threatening to crack the calmness staring back from the glass.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Harley
demanded. No one else would dare speak to Duke Dalton that way, not the band’s
concert promoters, the rock journalists or late-night talking heads. Not even
Duke’s dad, Jack Dalton, lead singer in the big hair juggernaut, Stage Fright.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Duke said
flatly.
“For starters, you haven’t touched the
snack bar.”
Duke swept a glance across the table.
There were plenty of bottles looming over a half dozen bowls, each filled with
colorful, tempting vice—big red disks, blue ones, green, two shades of brown,
yellow.
Duke marched over to the snack bar,
grabbed a handful of green, and crunched down.
“Mmm, peanut butter, my favorite,” he
said and then popped one of the bottles, washing the candy down with a jolt of
lukewarm soda. “There, satisfied?”
Harley watched Duke from the cut of his
eye but didn’t answer. The dude was onto him. Oh well, Duke thought. By the end
of the show, the whole world would be. And he was okay with that. Better than
okay. Every other day, some new scandal and sex tape broke on the news.
At least he wouldn’t bore them.
Shaye Floden, 3-D’s keyboard player,
grabbed a handful of red candy. He stood in the middle of the backstage
clubhouse and dressing rooms clad only in his underwear, a pair of
tight-fitting designer whites stuffed to capacity in the front. Shaye had the
second biggest cock in the band, inferior size-wise only to Duke himself, and
wasn’t ashamed to let that fact be known.
“You nervous?” Shaye asked, crunching on
candy and scratching at the meat of his balls.
“No,” Duke answered.
“Figured you must be, on account of the
fact that you look so calm.” Shaye flashed a cocky smile and groped the front
of his underwear. “Damn, I can’t wait to fuck something tonight.”
Harley, or the hotties in the makeup
team, one of the best in the business… there certainly would be enough holes to
plug after the concert. Ladies as well as dudes, depending upon where his
tastes went. Shaye’s pale blue eyes drifted toward the little blonde thing
waiting to paint his face.
“Okay, who’s ready to turn into a
zombie?” she asked.
“I’m coming to get you, Barbara,” Shaye
said in a comically sinister voice. He extended his hands. “And I’m so very
horny!”
The makeup artist—Duke doubted her name
was Barbara—giggled and waved him over to one of the chairs. There, Shaye
Floden began his transformation into “Bones.”
Bass player Arif Yusian, better known to
3-D fans as “Scalpel,” entered the room for a drink and a snack. Another makeup
artist seized him by the arms.
“Give me five, okay?” Arif said.
“Only if you tell Joe-Kev to hustle his
ass in here. We need to start early on him for the full effect.”
Joe-Kev Hallet, who went by the handle
“Autopsy,” soon made an appearance. The oldest member of the band at
twenty-seven, his body was a canvas of colorful ink. A sleeve of thorns and
roses covered one arm from shoulder to elbow. A tiger slinked down the opposing
leg, its extended paw reaching across the top of his foot. A small
constellation of five-pointed stars appeared to twinkle at his neck.
Duke knew the artistry didn’t end there.
From their tumbles together in the early days of 3-D, he’d gotten intimate with
the skull tattooed on the top of the dude’s shaft. When Joe-Kev’s bone snaked
out, thickest in the middle, the skull swelled and stretched with it, flashing
a sinister Halloween grin.
Their drummer joined Shaye in the makeup
chairs. Arif wandered back in and took his seat. The usual banter filled the
air, and a wave of nostalgia embraced Duke. By all outward signs, there had
been many blessings associated with being the son of a rock legend. And a
legend in his own right, lead singer and stud of a powerhouse coming into its
own, this generation’s U2 or Electric Light Orchestra. Bigger blessings, like
the fame, the fortune and, yes, all that fucking. But it was this little
moment, seeing the guys get painted, that he hoped he remembered best when it
was over.
And it would be over after this night.
Regret replaced the brief flicker of
happiness.
A hand touched his shoulder. Duke seized
in place. Turning, he faced Perry, 3-D’s lead makeup artist.
“Whoa, dude,” Perry said. “Didn’t mean
to spook you like that. Forgive the pun, but you look like a fucking ghost.”
“Sorry, nerves,” Duke said.
The other man aimed a thumb toward the
lone empty makeup chair. “You ready to become ‘Duke De Morte’?”
“Duke of Death,” Duke sighed,
punctuating the statement with a humorless chuckle.
His emerald-colored eyes drifted back
toward the guys, each man presently having his face painted into character. The
nostalgia was gone completely. More importantly, so was Duke’s sense of regret.
“Not yet, man,” Duke said, clapping a
hand on Perry’s arm. “Meet me in my dressing room, would you? And do me a
favor. Bring some extra paint with you.”
The gimmick sounded lame on the surface
at first but had caught on with the fans, especially the legions jerking off to
vampire romance novels. The white faces looked elegant, more so when you
factored in the crisp white button-down shirts, thin black ties, black suit
coats, and shiny black shoes. Total sharpness—and those white ghost faces sure
rocked when you shined a black light on them, picking up the phosphorescence on
four handsome 3-D apparitions gyrating on stage.
The ghostly faces of 3-D had become as
recognizable in recent years as the symbol for the Artist Formerly Known as
Prince and Mick Jagger’s lips.
Perry finished working on Duke’s visage.
Duke gazed into the mirror. The work was, as usual, artistry at its purest.
“What do you think?”
Duke studied the perfect glowing white
skull painted over his handsome face, his dark hair, a messy but intentional thatch
of cowlicks and spikes, his full lips, the lower slightly plumper than its twin
on top. Those eyes were so green in the fake skull’s sockets that they glowed
preternaturally like a wild nocturnal animal’s reflecting in a car’s
headlights.
“I’d fuck me,” Duke said.
“Yeah, you and millions of rock junkies
around the globe,” Perry said.
And Perry knew; they’d enjoyed the
occasional fuck since the night that first smear of white face paint went on.
To enhance the look, the guys’ suits
also reacted to the black light, transforming into an illusion of zombie rags
thanks to the invisible chemicals painted onto them by the band’s wardrobe
department. At intermission, 3-D did a change into kilts, black and white
tartan, thick black wool socks, combat boots, and black tuxedo jackets over
white shirts. During that fifteen-minute interlude when the opening act, some
dude who’d won Idol two seasons back, entertained the crowd, the white skulls
got a solid touchup.
The four men huddled offstage. Autopsy,
his face streaked with intricate red strips of flesh on one side, extended his
hand, palm side down. Bones clapped his hand over Autopsy’s. Scalpel tossed his
mitt onto the pile. The persona known as Duke De Morte hesitated. The other
characters, each demanding that their preconcert tradition be maintained, shot
him looks.
Duke slammed his hand onto the top of
the pile. “3-D on one… two… three—”
The four musicians barked the band’s
name and, as one, raised their hands toward the ceiling. The announcer trilled
their arrival over the speakers, and the crowd outside, some ten thousand souls
deep, collectively screamed. Duke’s cock twitched, a sure sign that he’d gotten
hard as he always did whenever the band played to a packed venue. His erections
had also become part of the 3-D lore; crotch shots and camera phone video of
his tented pants littered the Internet. At last count, according to Harley,
there were over fifty thousand amateur websites devoted solely to his dick.
The guys raced onto the scallop-shaped
stage ahead of him. More shrieks from their worshippers rose up, and he
wondered if the concerts, not the eruption of some volcano, had taken bragging
rights to the loudest sound event ever recorded in human history. His ears
would ring for days. Duke’s nuts tightened against the root of his cock in
anticipation. Once he started singing and sweating, they would loosen and spill
down his pant legs, hanging, he sometimes imagined, all the way to his hairy
ankles.
Steeling himself, Duke pursued. Fuck
Vesuvius, the voice in his head decided. The roar that rose up as he trotted
toward his Fender guitar was powerful enough to crack the fabric of time and
space, to send planets spinning out of orbit and whole constellations of stars
crashing into one another.
His cock pulsed.
The audience went insane.
That kind of power, Duke already knew,
was dangerous. It could create the universe. But it could also destroy it.
They opened with “Guillotine Romance,”
their anthem from the teen slasher flick, Spinal Column, a gore-fest about the
vengeful skeleton of a high school newspaper reporter murdered by fellow
students he’d dug up serious dirt on. Their cover of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total
Eclipse of the Heart” followed, in which hot female werewolf dancers gyrated
and slithered to the smoky, liquid melody. From there, it was a catalog of
their greatest hits.
Purchase
NineStar Press | Amazon | Smashwords | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
Meet the Author
Raised on a healthy diet of creature double features and classic SF television, Gregory L. Norris is a full-time professional writer, with work appearing in numerous short story anthologies, national magazines, novels, the occasional TV episode, and, so far, one produced feature film (Brutal Colors, which debuted on Amazon Prime January 2016). A former feature writer and columnist at Sci Fi, the official magazine of the Sci Fi Channel (before all those ridiculous Ys invaded), he once worked as a screenwriter on two episodes of Paramount’s modern classic, Star Trek: Voyager. Two of his paranormal novels (written under my rom-de-plume, Jo Atkinson) were published by Home Shopping Network as part of their “Escape With Romance” line — the first time HSN has offered novels to their global customer base. He judged the 2012 Lambda Awards in the SF/F/H category. Three times now, his stories have notched Honorable Mentions in Ellen Datlow’s Best-of books. In May 2016, he traveled to Hollywood to accept HM in the Roswell Awards in Short SF Writing.His story “Drowning” appears in the Italian anthology THE BEAUTY OF DEATH 2, alongside tales by none other than Peter Straub and Clive Barker.Website | Facebook | Twitter
Giveaway
No comments:
Post a Comment