Girls Who Play Guitars

•tighter than Bon Scott's jeans•

~BACKSTAGE, AFTERBLAST CONCERT~

~MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA~

Ellie left the stage with a buzz in her head and the roar of the crowd throbbing in her ears.

She'd done it.

They'd done it.

Without Jessie.

An entire show.

And the crowd loved it. They'd gone sick for it. And they were Afterblast's crowd. The dirge driven psychedelic masters that were Afterblast had recently taken Australia by the balls and ripped them off. But Slider had not only ripped off this crowd's balls, they'd severed their whole meat and potatoes and tossed them to the dingoes.

Meg grabbed Ellie's arm as they hustled off stage into the wings where earlier they'd worried that Jessie wouldn't show. None of that mattered now. The three of them had been a work of art. Up there. Together.

"That was epic!" Meg beamed, her dark hair wet and tangled and stuck around her sharp cheekbones. "Totally mental!"

"Did you feel it?" Kim breathed, a gleam in her eyes as she met them at the side of the stage. "Something clicked. Something big. Did you feel it?"

Ellie did indeed feel it. She felt the music in her more than ever. The world had shifted as she'd worked alongside Kim and Meg like a machine. Like a row of cogs. All in sequence, churning together, moving and thinking as one. Playing those songs that meant so much to her with such angst; making them sound exactly the way they needed to sound, the way Ellie heard them in her head.

And Ellie had never let loose like that either; never realised she could sound like that. Never realised her voice was so big; her playing was so wild and intense. She'd never known Meg and Kim to launch themselves so fervently into every note. It was like dawn had come and the sun had risen on, not just a new day, but a new era.

A new start.

Ellie wiped at the sweat on her forehead with her wrist and rubbed the back of her neck with her t-shirt collar. "We seriously rocked it!" she grinned. "Holy fuck!"

Afterblast's crew pushed past onto the stage as they headed back to their dressing room. Ellie knew they only had a few moments to regroup before they had to go back and help pack their gear. She followed Meg and Kim down the darkly lit stairs wanting to get back to the dressing room and find Sam. Talk about the future.

As she got to the last step and Kim and Meg hurried to the dressing room in front of her, someone shoved into her from the side.

"What the—"

Jessie bulldozed her against the wall, pinning her against the rough bricks gripping her shoulders and throat with arrow-like pincers..

"You fired me!" Jessie snarled, her breath in Ellie's face, stinking of booze and cigarettes. Waves of auburn hair billowed around Jessie's face like a shroud of flames and her dark eyes were blazing needles as she stared Ellie down.

"Yeah! I did! You're gone!" Ellie tried to yank Jessie's wrists away from her shoulders but Jessie didn't budge. She was bigger; stronger.

"You can't do that!"

Clenching and twisting Jessie's wrists, Ellie tried to drive her off again. "If you'd bothered to turn up, I could have done it in person."

Jessie's long fingernails dug into Ellie's skin through her t-shirt; thumbs pressing hard into her throat. "You never wanted me in the band, did you?"