Riot Guitar
The first time I saw Riva Chen again was backstage at that godforsaken Berlin festival, three years and a lifetime after we’d torn each other apart. The air in the green room vibrated with the muffled thump of some generic Europop act bleeding through the concrete walls. I was tuning my Gibson, the familiar weight of it solid in my hands, when the door creaked open.
She stood framed in the doorway, backlit by the harsh fluorescent lights of the corridor. For a second, my fingers froze on the fretboard. Riva looked exactly the same – that messy dark bun, the sharp line of her jaw, the way her faded band tee hung off one shoulder. Like no time had passed at all. Like I hadn’t spent the last three years trying to forget the way her hands felt on my skin.
“Well, fuck me sideways,” I said, the words out before I could stop them. My voice sounded rough, unused. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
Riva’s lips twitched, almost a smile. “Still charming as ever, Zola.” She stepped into the room, letting the door swing shut behind her. The noise from outside dropped a notch. “Heard you were tearing up Europe. Thought I’d see for myself.”
I set the Gibson down carefully on its stand, buying myself a second. My heart hammered against my ribs like a snare drum. Three years. Three years since she’d walked out of my life, taking the best parts of me with her. And now here she was, cool as you please, like she’d just popped out for cigarettes.
“You’re a long way from LA, Chen,” I said, leaning back against the rickety dressing table. Its mirror was smeared with some previous occupant’s makeup. “Slumming it with us mere mortals?”
“Something like that.” She crossed the room, her boots silent on the worn carpet. Up close, I could see the new lines around her eyes, the faint smudge of exhaustion beneath them. She looked tired. Beautiful, but tired. “Heard you were down a sound engineer.”
News traveled fast in this incestuous little industry. Our last sound guy had quit in a spectacular meltdown after I’d thrown a monitor off the stage in Prague. Couldn’t handle the “creative temperament,” apparently. Prima donna bullshit.
“You angling for a job?” I kept my voice light, casual. Like my palms weren’t sweating.
Riva shrugged, that infuriatingly noncommittal lift of one shoulder. “Maybe. Depends on the offer.”
The silence stretched between us, thick with everything we weren’t saying. The Berlin crowd roared beyond the walls, a surge of sound that vibrated in my teeth.
“You look good, Zola,” Riva said finally, her gaze sweeping over me. “Fame suits you.”
I snorted. “Fame’s a bitch.” I pushed off the dressing table, closing the distance between us. Her scent hit me – vanilla and sandalwood, the same as it always was. It sent a jolt straight to my gut. “You should know. You walked away from it.”
Something flickered in her eyes. Hurt? Regret? It was gone before I could pin it down. “I walked away from a lot of things,” she said softly.
The air crackled. Memory hung between us – tangled sheets, hushed laughter in the back of the tour bus, the way her breath hitched when I kissed that spot just below her ear. The way it had all gone to shit when the label started sniffing around, when the pressure started building. When I’d chosen the Riot Girls over her.
I cleared my throat. “We’re leaving for Paris tonight. Bus departs at midnight.”
Riva raised an eyebrow. “Is that an offer, Moriconi?”
“It’s a lifeline,” I said, holding her gaze. “Take it or leave it.”
She studied me for a long moment, her expression a closed book. Then she reached out, her fingertips grazing the new tattoo on my inner wrist – a jagged lightning bolt, inked after our last breakup. A shiver went through me at the contact.
“Okay,” she said, her touch lingering. “I’m in.”
And just like that, Riva Chen was back in my orbit. Back on my tour bus. Back in my fucking bloodstream. I should’ve known it would end in fireworks. I should’ve known it would burn us both to the ground.
But in that moment, with her standing so close I could see the gold flecks in her brown eyes, all I could think was: *Let it burn*.
The tour bus became our pressure cooker, a rolling confessional hurtling through the dark heart of Europe. Paris bled into Brussels, Brussels into Amsterdam, each city a blur of stage lights and screaming crowds that dissolved into the low hum of the engine and the scent of stale cigarettes. And Riva? She was the eye of my hurricane.
She’d taken the cramped sound booth at the back of the bus, her fortress of knobs and sliders, and turned it into a sanctuary. While the rest of the band crashed out in their bunks after shows, buzzing on cheap beer and post-gig adrenaline, I’d find myself drifting towards the blue glow of her monitors.
“Can’t sleep?” she’d say, not looking up as I slid into the booth beside her. Her fingers danced across the mixing board, tweaking levels on the recordings from that night’s show.
“Sleep’s for the weak,” I’d grunt, stretching my legs out under the console. The truth was, the silence in my bunk was too loud. Too full of old ghosts. Out here, with Riva, the noise in my head quieted.
We’d talk. Or not talk. Sometimes she’d play me snippets of the show – a drum fill she’d particularly liked, a vocal harmony that had given her chills. Sometimes I’d pull out my acoustic and play her fragments of new songs, rough and unpolished. She’d listen with her whole body, head tilted, a small frown of concentration between her brows. No judgments. No pressure. Just… Riva. Solid, steady, real.
“You ever miss it?” I asked one night as we rolled through the German countryside, the autobahn a grey ribbon under a fat moon. “Being on stage?”
She leaned back in her chair, considering. “Sometimes. The energy. That moment when everything clicks.” She glanced at me, a wry smile playing on her lips. “But I don’t miss the bullshit. The egos. The label breathing down your neck.”
“Present company excluded, I assume,” I drawled.
“Obviously,” she said, deadpan. “You’re a fucking delight, Moriconi.”
I snorted, but her words warmed me anyway. We were dancing around the edges of it – the history, the hurt, the thing that had always crackled between us. It was there in the way her knee would brush against mine in the cramped booth, in the way her breath would catch if I leaned too close to look at something on her screen.
The stolen moments came later. In deserted venues after soundcheck, the stage empty and echoing around us. Behind the amps during load-out, the roadies shouting orders outside. In the narrow corridor of the tour bus when everyone else was asleep, the only light the dim glow from the emergency exit sign.
It started with a look. A held gaze across a smoky club in Berlin after the rest of the band had stumbled off to find an afterparty. We’d stayed behind, nursing beers at the bar, the house music thumping low in our bones.
“You’ve changed, Zola,” Riva said, her finger tracing patterns in the condensation on her glass. “Softer edges.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Don’t let the press hear you say that. They think I eat nails for breakfast.”
She smiled, a genuine one this time, warm and unguarded. “I know better.” Her hand found mine under the bar, our fingers tangling. A simple touch, but it sent a current through me.
Later, in the alley behind the club, the brick wall rough against my back, her mouth was hot and hungry on mine. Three years of missing her poured into that kiss – the ache, the want, the memory of how perfectly we fit. She tasted like cheap beer and something sweeter, something that was just Riva.
“Zola,” she breathed against my lips, her hands fisting in my shirt.
“Shut up,” I muttered, pulling her closer. “Just… shut up.”
After that, the floodgates opened. We became reckless, sneaking touches backstage, sharing loaded glances during soundcheck. She became my anchor in the chaos, the steady beat beneath the noise. When the tour grind started to wear on me, when the pressure of being ‘Zola Moriconi, Rock Goddess’ threatened to crack my skull, I’d find her. She’d ground me with a look, a touch, a quiet word.
“You good?” she’d murmur, her hand a warm weight on the small of my back as we navigated the press gauntlet outside a venue in Copenhagen.
“Better now,” I’d say, and mean it.
She never pushed. Never demanded answers about why I’d chosen the band over her all those years ago. She was just… there. A constant in my spinning world.