Free Born Into Trouble (Occupy Yourself Book 1) by MariaLisa deMora Page A

looking to slum a bit. He tilted his head to one side, staring into her eyes. Waiting.
    Katherine smiled, full lips shining in the muted light of the bar and Ben’s dick woke in his pants as he imagined her mouth on him. Older, powerful, attractive, and into him. Yeah, there’s a lot here I could work with .
    “Spiel me.”
    Four days later, sitting in another bar on the north side of Denver, Katherine pressed close to her side, Benita signed.

Seven
    25 years old
    “Fuck!” Blake shouted, flinging his bottle of beer sidearm into the wall. Foam and glass exploded everywhere as liquid lashed across the dirty alley. “What do you mean, they’ve cut us loose?”
    Paper rustling in her shaking grip, Benita raised her hands so she could read the letter again. Delivered by courier during their set, she had waited to open it until the band was together. Ben had wondered several times over the past six months if things were souring between the record company and them, but couldn’t put his finger on what he was feeling. Nothing specific, just royalties paid more slowly than they had been, less help with the promotion side, not that the label had been much help there, anyway. Then last week they received notification the single from their upcoming CD wouldn’t be the original tune the band wanted, but a regurgitation of an at best B-side 70s song to which the label owned rights.
    Ben called Katherine when Benita hadn’t gotten anywhere with the band’s handler at the label, but Katherine said her hands were tied. Scouring the contract revealed the clause giving the label the right to make those decisions. In fact, a thorough evaluation revealed a number of terms they hadn’t paid a lot of attention to at first, all seeming so out of reach nearly three years ago that their inclusion in the obviously canned contract language was laughable.
    Now, however, Occupy Yourself had worked their asses off and was gaining traction fast. They had been touring steadily during the last eighteen months, and not just the I-70 corridor. Their van had seen miles in more than thirty states, only the far northeast and western states not yet visited. They had opened for more than twenty-five different bands, blending their sounds with whatever options were available, sometimes going from rockabilly one night to metal the next, and landing into acoustic the following. All bands called it the grind, and Ben understood exactly what they meant. It could wear you down if you didn’t have something you were working towards.
    The label organized studio time whenever they decided it made sense, seldom giving the band more than a week’s notice. The studio usually wound up being booked in the middle of a string of shows, which meant Ben had to hustle to find stolen moments in which to write. Something that had seemed effortless since he started jotting lines and words in a notebook rapidly became a chore. No less fulfilling when it flowed, but that roll became harder and harder to initiate. Oblivious to what was around him, Benny wrote in diners, in the back of the van, sitting on the floor behind stages in a hundred different venues with bands and staff strolling past, his head in the lyrics, fingers fixed to the frets and strings. He learned to capitalize on those golden times when the words came easy, writing as fast as the pen would move across the page. Between times was enough to go back and polish, tweak, change word order, find other words, develop the pacing, and find the music.
    Sometimes the music came first, and he’d pick out a tune on his six-string, an instrument of torture that, these days, seemed surgically attached. Chance phrases, half-heard conversations, hell, sometimes even road noise—these things would set up residence in his head, and the only way to get it out was to write it. When it was good, when the sound was tight and right, that was when Danny would join him, heads down, eyes closed, picking out and following the tune.