Intemperance X - the Life We Choose
Copyright© 2026 by Al Steiner
Chapter 35: Whiskey and Rye
Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 35: Whiskey and Rye - INTEMPERANCE X is the tenth and final novel in the main Intemperance series. As the band headlines its biggest moment yet, decades of music, loyalty, and hard-earned love converge on one unforgettable night—where everything they’ve built is tested in front of the world.
Caution: This Fiction Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa Fa/Fa Consensual BiSexual Fiction
Indian Springs, Nevada
March 25, 2005
The countdown timer glowed red in the corner of Jake’s vision.
1:10.
Owen stepped in close, careful and all business now, and handed him the black Les Paul like it was a loaded weapon. Jake took it by the neck, felt the familiar weight settle against his body, and nodded once as Owen bent to plug him in. The cable seated with a soft, final click. Owen gave him a thumbs-up and backed away, already moving on, already gone.
Jake rolled his shoulders and let the guitar hang where it belonged.
His ears were in. That always flipped the world sideways. The ambient chaos—voices, movement, the low mechanical hum of a hundred systems doing their jobs—vanished completely. Replaced by the curated, almost eerie soundscape fed straight into his skull. Clean. Managed. Superior. The faint wash of the crowd seeped in through the audience mics, compressed and civilized, a distant animal breathing just hard enough to remind him it was real.
They were ready. You could hear it in the noise. Tight. Anticipatory. Not screaming yet—coiled.
Jake glanced out through the crack of the stage opening. House lights up. Stage dark.
One hundred and twenty thousand people.
He did the math automatically, because his brain always did. Thirty thousand more than the biggest crowd he’d ever played. Enough to matter. Enough to register. A sea of faces and bodies stretching back into the desert, curving with the land, waiting.
And there it was.
Stage fright.
Not the cute kind. Not the pre-show jitters you joked about in interviews. This was the living thing—the heavy, cold presence that crawled up his spine and settled between his shoulder blades. The kind that reminded you exactly how high you were and that it was a long trip down if you were to fall.
It had been almost two years since he had last performed before a paying audience. Almost two years without stepping out into the lights, without that first chord ripping the world open and shoving everything else out of the way. Routine performances dulled it, made it manageable. This didn’t feel routine. This felt big. Singular. Alive.
Jake breathed through it, slow and controlled.
He wasn’t afraid of the crowd. He was afraid of the moment before the crowd disappeared.
Because once he stepped out there, once those stage lights came on, the fear would be gone. It always was. The instant his fingers hit the strings and sound exploded into the night, something ancient would click into place. Muscle memory. Timing. The body doing what it was built to do.
Dopamine. Endorphins. Flooding his brain with a high so clean and smooth that Purple T couldn’t even sketch it in its dreams. That was the part he lived for. That was the part he was born for.
Jake flexed his left hand on the neck, felt the smooth worn places under his fingers, and smiled to himself—small, private, steady. Soon, the world would make sense again.
0:45.
Owen caught Jake’s eye and flashed the devil’s horns, quick and tight. He’d learned the gesture early in his days as studio runner and embraced it. It was how musicians said “what up?” to each other, or “you rock” or “do it” or “I just had a wonderful bowel movement in the porta-shitter”. Owen’s father, had he seen his son make the gesture, might’ve cut off his hand as punishment. He was into biblical punishment. Had tried to evoke it from the bench a time or two before landing in the loony bin.
Jake returned the gesture. Owen backed away immediately, already clearing the lane, already disappearing into the machinery of the show.
The rest of the band slid in beside him at the stage left door, assembling without a word.
Matt had the Strat strapped on, worn and familiar as a limb. Coop stood loose and ready, drumsticks resting in his hands like they belonged there even offstage. Charlie’s bass hung low against his body, cable already dressed. Nerdly stood empty-handed, shoulders relaxed, eyes forward, exactly where he always was before the jump.
None of them spoke. They couldn’t. Their ears were one-way streets now—receive only. Everything human and uncontrolled had been stripped out of the world and replaced with the curated feed in their heads. No side chatter. No last-second jokes. Just the band, the clock, and the sound of a crowd growing restless.
The noise in their ears swelled slowly but surely upward. The roar wasn’t full yet, but it was climbing, rolling over itself, sensing blood in the water. One hundred and twenty thousand people anticipating, collectively, that the show they paid a minimum of $135 a ticket for (and the thirty percent that had a reserved seat had paid considerably more than that) was about to begin. At last.
Jake lifted his hand. Palm up.
They didn’t hesitate. Matt’s hand came down first, then Charlie’s, then Nerdly’s, then Coop’s—stacking weight, stacking history. The gesture was automatic, older than muscle memory. They’d done it before every live Intemperance show since that first one at D Street West in 1980. They’d done it when they were young punks who didn’t know their asses from a sound board, they did it when they were kings of the rock heap, and they did it when they were barely holding the band together during the ugliest nights of the Lines on the Map tour. Same motion. Same silence. Same promise.
Together.
They broke the stack and stepped apart, each turning inward, focus narrowing to the size of the job in front of them.
The timer ticked down in Jake’s peripheral vision.
0:08.
The house lights began to dim.
In their ears, the crowd noise surged, the sound rising fast now—ready, willing, eager to be taken somewhere loud and dangerous and alive.
Jake shifted his grip on the Les Paul and took a breath.
The timer hit zero.
Everything went dark at once—house lights, stage lights, all of it—leaving the desert sky exposed above them. Moon and stars hung clear and sharp, unbothered by the machinery below. Down in the bowl, points of light flickered to life. Lighters, yes—but also thousands of small white rectangles glowing steadily in people’s hands. Phones. Jake clocked it without judgment. First time he’d ever seen that outweigh the old fire. The world moved on. Music didn’t care.
The crowd noise sharpened. It didn’t swell so much as tighten, an edgy, expectant sound that vibrated in his ears, waiting to be given purpose.
They moved without speaking, without sightlines, guided by muscle memory and the quiet confidence that came from knowing exactly where everything lived in the dark. Jake felt the stage under his boots, the distance to the edge, the familiar geometry of cables and stands. He found his spot by feel and stopped in front of his microphone at center stage. Matt’s mic was just to his left. Charlie’s to his right.
Somewhere behind him, a cymbal gave a faint, accidental ting.
Jake looked out over the scattered constellation of lights in the audience, a living sky below the real one. The sound in his ears shifted, and Ryan’s voice cut through, calm and precise.
“Ready to start in five ... four...”
Jake reached down and rolled the volume on his guitar all the way up. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then took two steps back from the microphone. The intro would run long—eighteen seconds, burned into his bones—so he stayed back where he could play it clean and walk in when it was time.
“ ... three ... two ... one...”
The stage lights snapped on, hard and bright, flooding the five of them in white.
That was the cue.
Matt hit the opening notes of Almost Too Easy, clean and sure, pulling the intro straight out of the first record, straight out of D Street West. Jake came in with him, then Charlie, then Nerdly and Coop locking it all down together. No fireworks. No choreography. No bullshit. Just five guys playing like it mattered.
In Jake’s ears, the crowd didn’t get louder. It got denser, the sound compressing, vibrating with a new intensity that wrapped around the music instead of fighting it.
The stage fright let go.
Jake’s hands moved without thought, his body doing exactly what it had been trained to do. He knew every inch of this song, every place he could land if something went sideways, every way to cover a mistake before anyone could hear it—though he wouldn’t need to. Not tonight.
He stepped forward toward the mic as the intro wound down, heart steady now, mind clear.
The fear was gone.
He’d found himself again.
Celia stood in the SVIP with her arms folded loosely in front of her, the opening drive of Almost Too Easy rolling out across the desert and settling into her bones. She didn’t need the screens to follow it. She knew this song by shape and feel, by the way it leaned forward, by the way it refused to apologize for itself.
She remembered the first time she’d heard the song all those years ago.
She had still been living in Barquisimeto then. Twenty years old. Home. Untouched by airports and contracts and American expectations. Her world had been rehearsals, church, family dinners, and the slow, disciplined work of writing songs that came from somewhere honest and stayed there. She was a good Catholic girl back then. Actually virginal and with the belief that she would never give up that virginity until marriage to a proper Catholic boy. La Diferencia was already popular—very popular. They sold out shows in Barquisimeto and Caracas wherever they played. People sang along. People cried. It felt big without feeling dangerous.
They played original Venezuelan love songs. Serious ones. Songs about longing and restraint and wanting something you weren’t allowed to reach for. Songs about unrequited love—something Venezuelans understood deeply and sang about beautifully. Something Jake had noted many times after hearing her papa sing. No synthesizers. No studio tricks. Just drums, bass, piano, and two guitars. She played one. Her brother Eduardo played the other. The music was clean and emotional and unapologetically sincere.
All written and composed by Celia Valdez—daughter of a middle class, typical in every way, Venezuelan family who was born with an amazing voice and aptitude for music.
Back then, there had been one FM radio station she listened to late at night, volume turned low so no one would ask questions. It played only American music—Top Forty, nonstop. Venezuelans loved American pop. It sounded like freedom. Like excess. Like a place where rules bent more easily.
That was where she first heard Intemperance.
Descent Into Nothing came first. It didn’t sound like anything else on the dial. It was rougher, louder, less polite. Then came Who Needs Love?—sharper, more explicit, uninterested in restraint. The singer’s voice stopped her cold. It wasn’t pretty. It was sexy in a way that felt dangerous, like it knew things she wasn’t supposed to know yet. The lyrics were edgier than most American pop, less interested in being liked than in being true.
She’d listened to those songs sitting on her bed, guitar resting against her leg, wondering how music could sound so confident about wanting what it wanted.
Standing here now, with Almost Too Easy roaring to life under a sky full of stars, Celia felt the long, improbable arc stretch tight between that girl in Barquisimeto and the woman she had become. Between music written with care and music written with hunger. Between innocence and experience. Between listening and belonging.
The crowd surged, the band locked in, and Celia let herself listen the way she had the first time—alert, curious, aware that something in her life had shifted long before she’d ever known the names of the people onstage.
Long before she’d ever met Jake Kingsley face to face.
Celia watched Jake at center stage, watched the easy economy of his movements as he played and leaned into the microphone to sing. His voice carried clean and strong across the field, riding the band instead of fighting it, exactly where it belonged. When the chorus came around, the harmonies stacked effortlessly—voices finding each other without looking, without signaling—and she felt a quiet, familiar swell of pride.
They made it look simple.
It was anything but. Ninety-eight percent of what they were doing out there was improvised in the strictest sense of the word—not sloppy, not indulgent, but alive. They listened to one another constantly, adjusting by instinct and trust, every man locked into the same internal clock. They had natural rhythm, the kind you couldn’t teach and couldn’t fake. Watching them, you’d think they were brothers who had never fought, men bound by something older and sturdier than affection.
There was no hint of history in it. No trace of Matt calling Charlie “Freakboy.” No echo of the night Matt had stood in public and accused Jake of murdering the man Charlie had replaced. The fans knew the story. Everyone did. It was part of the mythology now, folded into liner notes and interviews and whispered retellings. But none of it existed here. Not in the sound. Not in the way they stood together.
Jake sang out the second chorus, voice lifting, and then Matt stepped forward as if summoned by gravity.
Jake and Charlie fell back in unison, shoulders nearly touching as they locked the rhythm down between them, giving Matt the front of the stage without ceremony. Matt took it and ran straight at the edge, Strat wailing under his hands, fingers moving with ferocity and precision that made Celia’s chest tighten despite herself.
You would never think, watching him, that this was a man who had survived a massive heart attack. That he’d been opened up and bypassed and sewn back together. That his heart was enlarged, weakened, permanently compromised. There was nothing careful about the way he played. No conservation. No hedging. He poured everything he had into the solo, bending notes until they screamed, wringing sound out of the guitar like it owed him something.
Already, not even three minutes into the song, sweat darkened his hair and soaked his shirt. It ran freely down his face and neck while Jake and Charlie remained mostly dry, barely flushed. That was the only visible tell, the lone crack in the illusion. The only sign that Matt’s body was working harder than it should have been to keep up with the demands of his will.
Celia felt the familiar mix of admiration and unease settle in her chest as she watched him play. He gave everything, always had. Every ounce, and then a little more, as if holding anything back simply wasn’t an option available to him.
The crowd roared, the solo climbing higher, and Celia didn’t look away.
Next to her, Laura had stood up, already moving with the song.
Not self-conscious. Not performative. Just dancing—shoulders loose, hips finding the groove, hands coming up instinctively on the chorus like she’d been born knowing where they belonged. The lights caught in her hair, turning the red warmer, brighter, and Celia felt the familiar, quiet rush of affection bloom in her chest.
She watched her for a moment instead of the stage.
She remembered the first time they’d met. How serious Laura had been then. Earnest to the point of rigidity. A musical snob in the most academic sense, convinced that anything not rooted in jazz or classical tradition barely qualified as music at all. Celia could still hear her voice from those early days—polite, restrained, faintly judgmental—as she fulfilled her hired obligation to play saxophone for a Venezuelan pop star she did not understand and did not particularly respect.
A pop star whose band was fronted by a wife-beating, coke-from-a-butt-crack sniffing, Satan-worshipping heavy metal singer.
Laura had been horrified. Morally. Aesthetically. Spiritually. Musically. She’d looked at the whole situation like it was a dare from the universe, one she fully intended to decline. They’d butted heads almost immediately. Laura bristled at the looseness, the profanity, the lack of reverence. Celia bristled right back. There had been arguments. Sharp ones. Long ones. At least one moment where Celia had been sure Laura was going to quit outright because she couldn’t bond with them, couldn’t take any of it seriously enough to tolerate it.
And yet.
Who would have guessed that she and Jake would fall in love? That seriousness softening just enough to let something wild in. That she’d marry him and bear his daughter. Who would have guessed that the cute, petite little redhead with the schoolteacher posture and the carefully constructed moral spine would be the one to crack Celia open, gently but inexorably, and show her a truth about herself she’d never had language for before?
Laura had exposed her bisexuality to her without agenda, without pressure, without drama. Had become her lover. Her co-wife. Her anchor in moments Celia hadn’t even known she needed anchoring.
Celia looked at her now—this woman who laughed easily, who leaned unapologetically into the music and the life they’d built together—and felt a swell of gratitude so sharp it almost hurt.
The Laura she’d met in 1991 would never have done this.
She would never have jumped to her feet at an Intemperance concert. Never have moved her body to a song like Almost Too Easy. Never have done it standing shoulder to shoulder with another woman she loved, in full view of the world, without apology.
Celia reached out and caught Laura’s hand as the song barreled forward, squeezing once. Laura glanced back at her, smiling wide and unguarded, and Celia smiled in return.
Some transformations were quieter than others. Some were louder.
This one had learned to dance.
Celia watched as the song eased into the bridge, felt the shift before she saw it. Jake stepped back half a pace and tapped effects pedal two with the practiced economy of someone who didn’t need to look. The tone cleaned up instantly, the grit dropping away, and the whole band followed him into the change like they’d been pulled by a tide. The tempo slowed. The air opened.
This was where Jake used his voice the way he best knew how.
He leaned into the lower end of his range, the smoky part of the tenor scale that didn’t push or shout. Soft. Controlled. Intimate. The kind of voice that carried without forcing itself, that wrapped around the melody instead of riding on top of it. Celia felt it settle into her chest the way it always did. She had loved that voice long before she’d known the man behind it—loved it as sound first, as texture, as promise.
It was a dangerous voice. The one that made women scream and throw their panties onto the stage. The one that made them lift their shirts and flash bare boobs without a second thought. Celia watched it happen now, the response rolling through the crowd in waves, and felt a flicker of amusement and something warmer underneath it. Jake didn’t play to that reaction. He simply let the voice do what it did best.
They sang the final verse, harmonies folding in tight and sure, and then slid into the outro. Celia stayed where she was, holding Laura’s hand, the two of them swaying together in time with the music. Celia moved as easily as her non-legal wife, unselfconscious, her smile bright in the spill of light from the stage. Celia danced with her, content to let the song carry them both.
The roar came at the end, loud and full, crashing back in as the last notes rang out.
The band barely paused before launching into the next song. Who Needs Love? Matt’s tune. A good one. Solid. Reliable. But a Matt tune all the same. It was about living one’s life just using women for sex and never letting emotion into the equation. Celia decided that if she needed to hit the bar for a glass of wine or duck off to the restroom, this was the song to do it on. No offense meant. Just personal preference.
She turned to Laura and caught her eye.
The music was too loud for words, but it didn’t matter. Celia tipped her head slightly toward the side of the field, the look saying everything it needed to. Backstage. Laura read it instantly and nodded.
They slipped out together, flashing their all-access passes as they moved. Unlike most of the SVIP—Tif and Barb included—they didn’t have to use the crowded and disgusting SVIP porta-shitters. Perks of being the headliner’s wives. They could use the disgusting and non-crowded backstage shitter just like the crew. The guards waved them through without hesitation, and they followed the marked path that led behind Stage 2, the crowd noise falling away in uneven chunks as they went.
They climbed a set of metal stairs, passed another guard, and stepped through a door.
Chaos greeted them on the other side—voices, radios, cables, movement, the controlled disorder that lived just beyond the lights. Celia didn’t slow. She squeezed Laura’s hand once more as they disappeared into it together.
Backstage was its own ecosystem—loud, but not overwhelming. The music carried through the structure cleanly, the low end rumbling through steel and plywood, but the stage itself blocked the worst of the speakers. It was enough of a buffer that if you raised your voice a little, you could talk without shouting. Radios crackled. Crew members moved with purpose, cables snaked underfoot, someone laughed too loudly near a stack of cases.
Laura leaned in close to Celia’s ear, grinning. “Jake is so getting laid after this show.”
Celia smiled without looking away from the side-stage monitors. “Oh, absolutely.”
The arrangements had already been made. Jake had slipped a hundred-dollar bill to one of the Band City security guys earlier in the day—quiet, discreet, understood. An empty trailer would be waiting after the encore, no questions asked. The three of them had been circling that knowledge all afternoon, each pretending not to think about it too much while thinking about it constantly. Sweaty Jake playtime was very much on the agenda, and everyone involved was looking forward to it.
Celia tilted her head toward the stage as Jake dropped back into the lower register again, his voice sliding into that soft, smoky tenor that never failed to get under her skin. “That voice,” she said, close to Laura’s ear. “When he does that. It makes my panties wet.”
Laura’s eyes lit up, mischief blooming fast. “Then why don’t we reward him?”
Celia turned to her, catching the look, already wary. “What do you mean by that?”
Laura didn’t hesitate. “Let’s flash him during I Found Myself Again. It’s coming up right after Who Needs Love? wraps.”
Celia stared at her. “Here? Now? In public?”
Laura nodded, completely unrepentant. “That’s the plan.”
“Someone will take pictures of us.”
“Probably,” Laura said with a shrug. “What of it. We both have nice tits. You in particular. Mine are small but I’m sure they’re publication worthy.”
Celia let out a soft, incredulous laugh. “No way.”
Laura leaned closer, lowering her voice just enough to make it conspiratorial. “You don’t have a hair on your ass if you don’t.”
Celia narrowed her eyes. “That’s fighting dirty.”
Laura smiled wider. “So? You in?”
Celia held the look for a beat longer than necessary, then sighed. “All right,” she said. “Even though I really don’t have hair on my ass.”
Laura laughed, delighted, and squeezed her hand. Somewhere out front, the crowd roared again as the song drove on, completely unaware of the small, dangerous conspiracy forming just behind the stage.
“Be sure to take off your bra while you’re in the shitter,” Laura said.
“What?”
“You can’t have a bra on if you’re going to flash Jake,” she said. “That’s the law.”
“It is not the law.”
“It should be,” Laura said. “Take it off, Love. If you don’t, you’ll catch your bra on something or choke yourself out with it.”
“And everyone will see my girls bouncing around out there when I dance!”
Laura gave a leering look at her chest. “You got nothing to be ashamed of on your chest, Love. Now hurry up. I gotta pee.”
Celia sighed and stepped into the foul little room.
She took off her bra while she was hovering over the toilet seat releasing her burden, pulling it out through the sleeve in that way that only women knew. She hung it around her shoulders as she wiped, pulled up her pants, and then used the hand sanitizer. She then bunched it up in her hands and stepped back out.
“What do I do with it?” she asked her evil twin.
“That’s a really good question,” Laura said. “Let me think on it while I’m peeing.”
Owen stood a little too still at stage left, hands folded around nothing, eyes flicking back to the guitar every few seconds like it might sprout legs and run away.
The red Ibanez acoustic/electric sat on its stand, cable already coiled and ready, polished to a gleam by him personally about an hour before. Soon it would matter. I See You was coming up after I Found Myself Again, and when it did, Jake would need that guitar for the chorus parts. It was a good tune—one of the better ones off Lines on the Map—and Owen had it planned out in his head down to the second. Found would close, applause would crest, and then it would be on him.
He kept watching the clock. Kept watching Jake’s hands during Who Needs Love?. Kept watching the guitar.
Found was next. Then See.
Out of the corner of his eye, he vaguely registered movement near the backstage bathroom. Teach and Celia. Talking. Laughing. Then one went in. Then the other. He filed it away without interest. People peed backstage. That was not his problem.
In the far corner, Jim sat slumped on an empty wire spool, one shoe braced against the concrete, a beer dangling loosely from his fingers. He looked half asleep, eyes heavy, posture relaxed to the point of indifference. No sobriety rule for the paramedic. He just had to be able to function if needed. Owen took a strange, sideways comfort in that—if Jim could look that bored at a show this big, maybe everything really was under control.
Then he saw Celia and Laura again.
They were heading toward him now, not the SVIP. Each of them was holding something bunched in her hands, fabric barely contained.
And then Owen understood what he was looking at.
Bras. Both of them. Gone.
The realization hit him hard enough that it almost knocked his nerves clean out of the way. He stared for a second too long, the sight of bare confidence and shared mischief doing something bright and short-circuiting to his brain as he watched their boobs bouncing freely beneath their tops. It was ... inspiring. Distracting. Utterly inappropriate.
Laura reached him first, all casual authority.
“Hey, GM,” she said, like she was asking for a bottle of water. “We’re going to flash Jake during Found because we’re feeling a little slutty. Can you stow our bras somewhere for now? We’ll grab them on the next pee break.”
Owen blinked once.
Then he nodded. “Yeah,” he said, already holding his hands out. “Of course.”
This was his job. He was the studio runner. Storing bras so the lead singer’s wives could flash said lead singer most definitely fell into his wide array of duties. Strange things happened around musicians. You handled them and moved on.
He took the undergarments carefully, folded them without thinking too hard about what they’d just been attached to, and opened Jake’s Les Paul case. The bras went in on top of the plush lining, red and black against black velvet, absurd and oddly ceremonial. He closed the case gently, like it mattered.
By the time he looked up, Celia and Laura were already moving away, hips light, heads high, disappearing back toward the SVIP as if nothing unusual had happened at all.
Owen exhaled, long and slow.
He decided that it would be good to watch the crowd during the next song. You know ... just in case something interesting happened. And I Found Myself Again was a really cool tune.
He drifted toward the stage left door, careful not to hurry. Derrick Maldonado was still posted there, shoulders relaxed, eyes scanning the crowd with the easy vigilance of someone who’d done this a thousand times and never missed anything important. The door was open now, angled toward stage left and giving a clean sightline across to stage right. All it took was a slight turn of Owen’s head to catch the audience.
Because the house lights were down and the stage lights blazing, the world beyond the apron collapsed into layers. He could see the SVIP clearly, and the first couple of rows of VIP beyond it. Everything else dissolved into darkness and noise. That was more than enough.