by Zoe Lee
He lost focus again, drifting until the sun was up and he heard a car pull into the drive.
A minute later, the front door was shoved open two floors down, and he gauged the footfalls as the not-quite-invader made their way up the flights of stairs to his studio door.
Leda slammed into it, obviously not expecting it to be locked, then barked, “Open up.”
“No,” he answered simply, projecting to be heard across the length of the attic and through the door. “I don’t want to talk about it, and I don’t want to see anyone.”
“I’m not anyone,” she shouted, “I’m your sister and I love you, damn it!”
“I love you too,” he replied, sounding calm.
“This isn’t like you,” she kept pressing, like she always did.
“I know, but it’s okay. I’m going to be okay. I just need some time.”
“You locked yourself in your studio, Seth!” she snapped, the temper she’d worked so hard to tame over the last few years back in full force. Only now, there was something more in her voice that made it waver, something more behind it, but he was too exhausted to find out what. “We’re worried about you—”
“Please just leave me alone right now,” he ground out.
She kept shouting at him, but he didn’t answer her again, and finally after about half an hour, she cursed a blue streak at him and warned she’d be back with reinforcements.
Next it was Daisy, who was one of the sweetest people he’d ever met in his life. She came with coffee around eight and she spoke through the door, not trying to figure out what was wrong or offer up some sad story to show empathy. No, Daisy, who was a potter, patiently narrated the preparation for, and creation, of a Japanese-style teapot.
When she took a break to drink some water, her voice softer than it had been, he sat down against the wall beside the door and murmured, “Thanks for coming by, Daisy.”
“Anytime, Seth,” she murmured back. “I wish I could hug you.”
“I need to be over here right now, but I really appreciate the sentiment all the same.”
Just as he began to doze off, right there against the wall with his ass fallen asleep on the unyielding hardwood floor, Dunk came crashing up the stairs and declared, “Aden called me ‘cause I’m the big guns. Get ready for the most excruciating experience of your life!”
Then Seth heard the familiar, unpleasant low buzz of crackling feedback and then… Dunk McCoy began to sing into a microphone. It was excruciating, Dunk’s voice totally off pitch, but it also made Seth’s eyes fill up and a grateful smile just curl up at the edges of his mouth, because all of Dunk’s song choices were about friendship: ‘With A Little Help From My Friends’, ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’, and then a whole bunch of kids’ songs.
“Hey, man,” Dunk said, “this locked in, silence thing is freaking me the fuck out.”
Seth knew that he was crouched down from the way he sounded, and that he was being serious. It didn’t happen very often, but Seth had always been able to see Dunk’s big heart.
“Leda’s been frantic, she knows why that song sent you runnin’. And your old bandmates, they feel so terrible—Xavier said he… he forgot who wrote it. I know it’s a shitty excuse and it doesn’t make it better. But they’re miserable, they’re walking around town signing autographs and sitting at the bar at Wild Harts like a bunch of guilty lovesick idiots.”
When Seth couldn’t respond, Daisy whispered, “Take your time. We love you.”
“Wait,” Dunk said in a voice he probably thought was hushed, as the top stair creaked as they started to head out, “do you think that’s what happened? He really did make the whole band fall in love with him? He’s a mysterious fucker, I believe he could do it.”
A rough laugh popped out of Seth’s mouth.
“Did you hear that?” Dunk called up. “You totally made them fall in love with you!”
“They’re family like you,” Seth replied, “and no one’s in love with me, Dunk.”
“We’ll see about that,” Dunk grumbled as the stairs started creaking again and he and Daisy made their way down and out of Seth’s house, the front door rattling as it shut.
Seth got to his feet with a groan, stretching his arms and back out slowly, everything cracking, the noises pinging between the vertebrae of his spine like a cymbal. He made some tea and ate cracked wheat crackers with slices of camembert from his mini fridge, his molars grinding down the crackers into sawdust that got sticky as the cheese melted.
He dozed after that, tea cooling on the windowsill, both arms tossed over his head and the arm of the couch. When he jerked awake again, senses registering an invasion of his space, pins and needles stabbed into his fingertips and palms. Shaking them as if they were just wet and he wanted to shake off the extra water, he sat up and narrowed his eyes, cocking his head to one side, as he listened to see what had woken him up.
His heart was steadier, the memories not as present nor as haunting as they’d been earlier, but he still wasn’t ready to leave his studio or let someone else into it.
Whoever was entering his house was hesitant, slow, light-footed, trying to be silent.
With a lurch of his heart, Seth realized that there was only one person who’d do that.
There was a soft knock and then Astrid called, “Seth?”
He stood, bare feet warming the cool wood beneath his soles, his arms hanging at his sides uselessly. Abruptly he felt the grime of going on two days in one outfit, no shower, his teeth fuzzy because he didn’t have a toothbrush or toothpaste up here, his deodorant no doubt long used up, leaving him pungent and sour, stale with nerves and sweat.
But he crossed the attic all the same, the floorboards groaning every so often from his weight because he didn’t avoid the loud places, even though he knew where they all were.
“Hi, Astrid,” he said quietly.
She gave a loud sigh and he tried to imagine her, right here, in his house. Was she wearing one of her deceptively simple ensembles, or had she dressed down? Were her arms crossed over her body or were her hands set in fists at her waist? Was she smiling or frowning or were her lips compressed with annoyance or worry or determination?
It killed him that he didn’t know, but he just couldn’t unlock the door.
“Xavier convinced your brother to let me in,” she started in a brusque tone, somehow quintessentially British in that moment, making his heart trip as he realized that the other times she’d sounded like this, it had been covering up insecurity or uncertainty. “They said… they said you’ve never done this before, your siblings, and Xavier and the others said you’ve never done this before with them, on the road or in the studio or anywhere else you were with them. Are you all right—no, of course you’re not all right,” she interrupted herself with a sharp sigh. “What a silly thing to even begin to ask you.“
“I just needed space,” he said around a tightness in his throat that made his vocal cords feel too taut, as if they were violin strings about to snap beneath the onslaught of a violent solo. He heard the wood on the landing give a dismissive crack of air releasing from wood as pressure was applied to it, and he realized that she was turning to leave. “But,” he went on in a rush, for him, fist clenching when the wood went silent, “it’s… nice to hear your voice.”
There was an odd snap/whoosh noise and a click on the floor like a dog walking on hardwood with paws whose nails needed to be trimmed. While he tried to decipher it, Astrid started talking again, her tone less stiff upper lip, but still noticeably stilted. “It seemed like a good idea to accept Kayla’s offer to spend another week with Downbeat while you worked on some new material, and keep interviewing them. I had always intended to reach out to try to mend fences with you again, but I didn’t know I was coming to your hometown—”
“I already accepted your apology for the interview,” Seth abruptly interrupted her. “So unless you came all this way to apologize for evicting me from your bed…”
; “It wasn’t what it might have seemed like,” she denied angrily.
He cocked his head to one side, tucking his dried out hair behind one ear, and then walked over to his drafting table and tugged his black leather ergonomic chair behind him back across to the door, the wheels spinning and dragging unpleasantly. He dropped into it with that distinct whoosh of ass cheeks hitting leather, compressing the cushioning, and pulled up his feet so he could cross his legs, knees sticking out through the plastic loops of the arms. “It hardly ever is, darlin’,” he agreed once he was settled in properly.
She whooshed out a frustrated-sounding breath. “I want to do the story right and thought watching you all work together might be the missing ingredient, yes. But I also wanted… It’s been longer than I’d care to admit since I enjoyed someone’s company the way I’ve been enjoying yours. Not just in bed, but dancing, trading opinions, listening to each other’s stories… I have friends, not many, but enough, but we don’t see each other naked.”
Seth closed his eyes and said into the darkness behind them, “I used to have that.”
“I know you did,” Astrid said in a strangled, sad voice, “I know that you did, Seth.”
A few tears leaked out of his eyes, pooling in the surely purpled circles beneath his eyes, then spilling over onto his cheekbones before being sucked back into his dry skin.
“Once,” she sighed, “once my daughter Kerri’s appendix burst. She and I were on the road with Barnyard and Kerri was six, on summer break, and we were in Argentina. They’d played Luna Park in Buenos Aires the night before, and we were headed to a water park. I remember we were eating Fruit Loops dry out of a massive plastic baggie, and all of a sudden, Kerri screamed. She was sitting between me and Van. I can still picture the Fruit Loops exploding upwards like fireworks made out of washed-out neon cereal. God knows how long her tummy was bothering her before that, but she was always so entranced by new things, she’d forget she had to go to the bathroom until it was an emergency.
“It was a miracle that one of the sound techs at the time was an EMT, too, and figured it out right away. We didn’t know where the nearest hospital was, so we drove back to Buenos Aires with their tour manager calling our hotel. The EMT was doing what he could, and Barley was on the floor of the bus, which was disgusting, let me tell you, covering up one of Kerri’s ears so the tour manager’s freak out wouldn’t scare her more. He sang into her other ear all the way to the entrance to the hospital. I couldn’t hear it. All I could do was keep one of my hands wrapped around her ankle. It was… so tiny, and her feet were kicking because it hurt. I thought—not for the first time, nor the last—that I would rather have broken my leg, my bone stabbing properly out of my thigh, on that road instead of her hurting like that.”
Something lanced one of the places on Seth’s heart which, until that moment, he’d thought was a scar, but the way it was draining, it had been nothing but an open wound.
“Everyone assumes that Barley and I split up for rockstar reasons—an illegitimate child or a covered up stint in rehab, something of that nature,” she went on in a hushed tone, though her voice was strong and clear through the door. “They imagine it must have been something enormous and unforgivable. Well, that or something the press had finally caught, so I’d look like a fool or an evil gold digger if I didn’t divorce his sorry ass straight away. They imagine him as some hedonist who dragged a TV starlet into his rockstar underworld.”
“So he just left the toilet seat up one too many times?” Seth joked weakly.
She laughed, a soothing melody of fondness. “In the moment, it seemed like the end, at last, came out of nowhere like it was a freak tornado that uprooted my whole foundation and tossed me away from everywhere I knew. But now, so many years later, I can see all the signs. It wasn’t anything tragic. We fell in love when I was nineteen and he was barely twenty-one, and I got pregnant before we even knew how the hell to be in a relationship. It was all easy success and too much money, and it’s a miracle we all didn’t just dive off a cliff into alcoholism or drugs or unprotected sex. But instead, we were just… happy.”
“I’m a little disappointed that it wasn’t all whiskey and orgies,” Seth made himself say into the natural lull of Astrid’s storytelling, not because he was disappointed, but because jealousy stung him. An awful part of him couldn’t help but imagine if that had been how his and Hedda’s story would have gone. The heat of their lust had created the deepest, best friendship he’d ever had in his whole fucking life so far. But if she had stayed, would their musical struggle led to success, or would everything still have burned out, just later on?
But how could he regret it, how could he?
“We were quite passionate, thank you,” Astrid said crisply.
The prudishness had him cracking a hint of a smile. “Quite?”
“We were young and in love and horny,” she relented, though the words were still crisp, as if saying them in the most precise British English made it less salacious. “And, if you must know, we were more than happy to share it with others if the mood struck us.”
Seth’s jaw clenched until it was like iron, while the rest of his body shuddered and went lax against the leather chair, overwhelmed by even the vaguest, politest reference to Astrid and Barley Finn sharing someone or someones. On stage and in interviews, Barley was the sort of man whose physical size matched his oversized charisma, and his smile was sexy and knowing. God knew what it was like to be near him. And Astrid… even when they’d first met, when she was in her purely professional mode, she’d intrigued him, drawn him in, made him feel… valuable. Pressed against him, dancing with him, in bed with him, she’d been a sensual and sweet goddess, smelling like a dream and feeling like a wish fulfilled, every thought she shared interesting and enchanting. All of her called out to all of him.
“Have I shocked you?”
“No,” he said, and the syllable sounded like sandpaper to him, all of his defenses down so that he couldn’t control the way his thoughts went or where his emotions careened. He was so defenseless that he didn’t even know how to try. “Quite the opposite.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Astrid
Astrid had shocked herself, saying what she had, but one gasped, raspy syllable, just warped by the shut door between them, made Astrid shiver.
With lust.
A denial—no—wasn’t usually something that sets one shivering with lust, but there it was. Because he wasn’t denying her, he was actually confirming that he didn’t feel any shock at her declarations, and he was also confirming that he wasn’t disgusted or outraged.
A denial in that rasp… it was, really, an affirmation that her declaration pleased him.
Not that she’d said it in order to please him, because it was the absolute truth, but it was all the more powerful because he was pleased by her truth. Her truth made his voice raspy—and it wasn’t caused by anger or disgust, it was a sexy rasp, an aroused rasp.
All of the potential that had been drawing more and more taut snapped tense between them, despite the physical barrier between their eyes and their bodies at the moment.
“I had so much love then, you know,” she pushed out through a throat thick with exhilarated hope, letting desire shamelessly slide like molasses throughout her nervous system, expanding her skin cells to bring her that atomic distance closer to Seth. “I was overflowing with it; nothing made me happier than to gift it to others, even if it was only temporary. Barley’s desire was more of a hunger—not a black hole, but he took—he enjoyed every bite, of course, but was more hedonistic, a little more cynical, somehow.”
She paused for a moment, both worried that including Barley in her narrative would turn Seth off and that it would turn him on, some sort of… rockstar hard-on, though her rational mind knew that that was irrational, because he’d shown his desire for her plenty.
“And even the ones that other people might call groupies deserved it,” she went on.
The words
came from somewhere deep, as if she’d been drafting this essay in her mind, in her heart, for so long that she didn’t need to think about it before she strung the thoughts together like a strand of pearls. There was something driving her, some compulsion to tell someone after so long. Something driving her to tell Seth, specifically, to show him who she had been when she was at her freest, at her best, even though she was stronger now.
“But when it was time for Kerri to go to school, Barley couldn’t structure the band’s touring schedule around that, so they had to travel without us. It was so different. Sometimes Barley would send people to me, from his bed to ours at home, and it was enough, for a lot of years, to bridge between our bodies and our voices when we couldn’t be together physically. But as the years went by, all of it became so much harder. Barley was off basking in the love and the energy fans poured on him, but I was in Chicago shielding Kerri from paparazzi on her first day of kindergarten and trying to smile as every question shouted my way was about Barley, instead of sometimes being about me or the TV show.
“He never had to shield himself from anything, the arrogant prick. But I had to grow a shell, build some defenses, and it grew harder and harder for me to lower them instantly for him. By the time it was all said and done, he didn’t understand and we hurt each other. And the hurt only kept the defenses strong and in place, and I’ve never… I’ve never quite gotten over it. Over that. I’m definitely over him, even if people constantly misunderstand our closeness for romantic intimacy or at least sexual intimacy, present tense, not past tense. But I’ve been so discriminating, so private, that I haven’t had many lovers since.
“And I’m past wanting to share it. I don’t want to demonstrate it, or prove that it’s so big that it can breeze through societal strictures or expectations,” she said, chuckling a little at her overzealous youth when she’d thought that the way she loved could change the world, open it up, make people believe that love truly came in so many forms and hues and depths. “All I want is someone who… who has the capacity to handle all my love, all of my passion.”