‘I was anticipating something far less flashy,’ Ash admitted.
‘Same.’ Xane idly pushed a few of the sliders on the sound deck. ‘I reckon we could record the whole of the next album here. No need to go anywhere else, we’ll just get the producer to come to us.’
‘It’s an option,’ Ash agreed.
The sound of footsteps thundering below caused them both to turn towards the stairs. A moment later Rock Giant’s head appeared, followed by the rest of him, plus both Spook and Luthor.
‘Ash!’ Rock Giant whooped. He scooped Ash off his feet and did a pirouette, holding him in mid-air, before dropping him and thumping him repeatedly across the back. ‘You’re here. You’re fucking here. Yes.’
Ash staggered and sank into the sofa behind him, whereupon Spook filled the seat beside him. ‘Good to see you in something that isn’t a granddad-style pair of pyjamas.’ Ash was wearing his favourite Danger Mouse T-shirt. It fit rather less snugly than it had the last time Xane had seen him in it.
‘We’re all here, I see,’ Ash commented, ignoring the reference to his recent hospital stay.
‘Does this mean we’re getting straight down to work?’
‘I think we ought to put our new boy through his paces first,’ Rock Giant said. He grabbed hold of Luthor and shoved him to the front of the huddle. ‘I know he did well on stage, but none of us were exactly looking out for faults. He’s a fully committed member of the gang now, so we ought to get to grips with one another’s playing styles.’
‘You just want to jam,’ Xane remarked. Luthor didn’t need to prove himself. They all knew he could play. Still, the consensus appeared to be that it wouldn’t hurt to pick up their instruments. Cases were dragged out of the corner where they’d been stacked, and amps and microphones plugged in and linked up. Ash’s beloved Gibson Les Paul was sadly no longer with them as it had smashed beneath him when he’d nosedived off the ego-riser in Karlstad, but someone, most likely their chief roadie, had procured another guitar.
Ash settled its strap across his shoulders. ‘White?’ he questioned. ‘Who thought that was a good idea for a goth band?’
‘It’s probably all the local music shop had. You can order something else. Maybe even get a custom-build,’ Spook suggested. ‘It’s not like you’re strapped for cash.’
‘What does he need to do that for? He has about fifteen other guitars at home,’ Rock Giant remarked, as he played a couple of test chords. ‘Phone your mum and get her to ship one of them out here.’
‘And what if it gets lost or damaged in transit?’
Spook nodded in horrified agreement over the possibility. His grip tightened around the neck of his purple Washburn, as if it were at risk of being torn from his hands.
Xane went to help Luthor set up the drumkit, and left the others snipping at one another. He knelt beside Luthor. ‘How’s your room?’
‘About what I’d expected when I heard it was an annex. There’s a bed, a wood stove … It’s fine.’
It sounded rather more rustic than Xane had anticipated, and Rock Giant’s sudden bellow of ‘Little House! You’re fucking not joking’ seemed to reflect that.
‘It’s not a house, it’s a chicken coop, and I’m not a fricking chicken.’ Rock Giant squared up against Spook. ‘I thought we were getting the guesthouse with the pool table and the PS4.’
‘I don’t have a pool table.’
Xane would lay money on Spook not owning a games console either. Spook might be seriously kick-ass at various assassin-style games, but he only ever played when he was cajoled into doing so. Most of the time, he was happy sticking things into his scrapbooks or shopping for yet another pair of baseball boots.
‘You don’t have a guesthouse either.’ Rock Giant flapped his arms and made clucking noises.
‘It’s specifically designed for guest accommodation. You’ll find that sort of wooden building all over Sweden.’
‘Bollocks it is.’
‘It is,’ Luthor muttered under his breath so that only Xane appeared to hear. ‘Not that I’m saying Rock Giant is wrong. Glass doors, a sloped roof and decent heating don’t change the fact that it’s basically two beds stuffed into a box.’
Xane helped tighten a particularly difficult bolt. ‘I’d offer you an alternative, but Dani wants to get settled in first.’
‘You mean she wants to keep you all to herself.’
‘Just for a bit. Give it a day or so.’
‘Nothing’s really changed, has it?’ Luthor remarked. Having finished arranging the kit, he stood and set his stool in position.
‘Everything’s changed.’ They could talk and touch and fuck without him having to feel guilty about it. Dani had accepted that, given his libido did rather rule his life and he couldn’t comprehend not indulging the disparate aspects of his sexuality, the best option was for him to have a proper relationship with Luthor in addition to the one he had with her.
‘Are you certain of that? We haven’t seen one another for weeks, but I can’t show you how much I’ve missed you because any sort of intimacy is restricted to when Dani chooses to allow it. Do you have any idea how hard it’s been, living apart from you but knowing that you were with her, fucking her? I had no idea if we’d still even be on when I returned. I’m honestly not sure now if we’re still a thing, Xane.’
‘We’re still a thing.’ He grinned. ‘And I’ve a notion or two about how I’d like to stick you with my thing.’
The remark at least raised a chuckle. Joy shone in Luthor’s mismatched eyes for a moment, before he turned away. ‘What makes you think I’m going to let you stick your thing in any part of me?’
‘Maybe the beautiful poem you sent me the other day. What was the title again? “Ode to Your Cock”.’
‘I did not send you any such thing.’
‘You didn’t? Fuck – you’re right, that was me, after I wanked myself silly for forty minutes thinking about how much fun I was going to have playing with yours once we got here. I think it went in the lyrics book.’ He took the rolled-up pad out of his back pocket and made a show of flicking through the leaves.
Luthor made a grab for the book, but Xane bolted out of reach.
‘Please tell me the first song you’ve written for the new album isn’t a ballad about his cock,’ Rock Giant sighed. He drubbed his knuckles against his forehead.
‘Nah, it’s more of a folk-metal fusion.’ God, they were easy to wind up.
‘I refuse to record a track about his drumstick.’
‘Brings a new meaning to the concept of cock rock,’ Ash said with a chuckle.
Luthor had turned pink all along the ridges of his cheekbones. It made Xane want to pin him against the wall and smooch his full, expressive lips until that wash of colour was evident in a place or two more.
‘Are we going to start?’ Spook asked.
Several shouts of ‘yes’ came in response.
‘“Hole”,’ someone proposed, prompting scattered laughter. It wouldn’t have been Xane’s first choice, but it was one of their bigger and most beloved hits, and it would give his voice a decent warm-up. It was a heck of a long time since he’d rested his vocal cords for this amount of time. He hoped they hadn’t got rusty.
He opened with a long wail.
Actually, that felt damned good.
Chapter 5
Luthor had been psyching himself up for this moment ever since he’d played with these guys on stage and won their approval. He’d been both itching to repeat the experience and shitting himself over the prospect. They were all first-rate musicians, and, while the sound was a little different without Elspeth here to play keyboard, the quality wasn’t lacking. Not for the first verse at any rate. After that, things got a bit wibbly. He was concentrating hard, following Ash’s lead since he was the main guitarist, but Ash’s timing was waltzing all over the place, with the knock-on effect of Luthor constantly having to adjust the tempo. By the time Xane had obliterated the chorus, he was focused so
hard on keeping pace with Ash that he’d temporarily forgotten about the rest of them.
Suddenly he was two bars behind and they were all so out of synch that the only sensible thing to do was stop.
‘What the hell was that?’ Rock Giant came straight at him and slammed a fist down on top of the snare. ‘You’re supposed to keep it steady, but you were all over the place, revving it up and then tootling along for the next bar.’
‘I was following Ash.’
‘You’re not supposed to follow Ash.’
He didn’t mean that literally, but a decent drummer knew how to keep a steady beat going and how to keep time for the band, while at the same time taking cues from the guitars and the vocalist.
‘Let’s do it again,’ Spook suggested. The guy was a natural mediator, always so soft-spoken and willing to hear all sides.
Xane counted them in, but they had the same problem over again, this time before they’d even reached the chorus. And it wasn’t down to Luthor. He’d done as he’d been told and hadn’t followed Ash, but Ash wasn’t with the rest of them, so it got discordant pretty quickly.
‘It’s like fucking Willows all over again.’ Rock Giant deposited his bass on the sofa. ‘What are you playing at?’
‘Paul, leave him be.’ Xane shoved the microphone stand away with such force that it toppled. ‘This is nothing like what we went through with Willows. That wanker was out to sabotage us from the get-go. Luthor’s just getting to grips with our style.’
‘He’s incompetent.’
Luthor shook his head. He knew how to play drums, and no one was about to tell him otherwise. In any case, Rock Giant being a dick about it didn’t account for the rest of the band’s behaviour. They were experienced musicians, for fuck’s sake. There was no way they could fail to realise what was going on. They had ears.
OK, so Xane realised, hence his stand-off with Rock Giant, and the pained expression on Spook’s normally composed face suggested he knew too, which only left Ash himself. Black Halo’s lead guitarist had his head bent forward so that his hair masked his face. Only his lips were clearly visible, and they were set in an irritable moue. The definitive piece of evidence, though, was the arthritic claw-like curl of his right hand. It would seem that Ash wasn’t as healed as he’d like them all to believe.
He caught Luthor looking, and two angry black eyes glared back through the curtain of hair.
‘Maybe we should try this again tomorrow,’ Luthor suggested.
Xane muttered an affirmative, Spook too, but Rock Giant stomped his foot.
‘We do it again now. And again. Until it’s right.’
‘Paul,’ Spook warned him.
‘Let’s do this.’
Ash removed the strap from his shoulders and dropped the guitar. ‘I can’t.’
‘What? Come on. Don’t let this idiot get to you.’
‘It’s not him.’
‘Sure it is.’
‘It’s me.’ He held up his clawed hand and strained but couldn’t straighten out his fingers. ‘My hand’s fucked. I can’t play. You guys are going to have to find yourself another guitarist.’
‘The hell we are, Ash.’ Spook smacked him across the back of the head. ‘We’re here for you now, and we’ll still be here for you no matter how long it takes for you to get well. The tour’s dates have already been moved forward six months, and it’s only been three weeks since you took your little dive. Give yourself a chance to heal. I expect you just need some physio.’
Hurt flashed within Ash’s eyes. ‘Yeah, right,’ he drawled. ‘’Cause time and stupid exercises solve everything. Well, what if they don’t? Have any of you thought about that? What if I’m fucked up for good? We’re not going to be all buddies in a band together then, are we?’
‘We’ll always stick by you, Ash,’ Xane claimed cautiously.
‘Had-to-think-about-it-there-didn’t-you.’ Ash seemed to realise thirty seconds after they all did that he was slurring his words. He kicked the nearest chair hard enough to make them wince. ‘Bastard-fucking-wanking-hell.’ The stream of expletives rolled off his tongue as one giant, mashed-together ‘Fuck you!’ to the world. He aimed for the chair again, but Spook sideswiped his arm and Ash turned his rage upon the nearby sofa instead, throwing the cushions from it, pummelling the heck out of its back and tearing at anything else he could lay his hands on.
‘Ash, it’ll be all right,’ Spook tried to reassure him as he darted alongside him, clearly seeking a means of restraining his friend.
‘The-hell-it-will. Iain’s-permanently-fucked-the-shit-out-of-me. I-should-have-put-him-in-the-ground-when-I-had-the-chance-instead-of-just-busting-his-nose. Now-I’m-just-screwed … completely-fucking-screwed.’ He darted for the stairs with Spook still on his tail. Xane caught the back of Spook’s shirt, dragging him to a sudden halt.
‘Let him go. It’ll do him good to yell at the universe.’
‘You can do a lap of this island in less than five minutes. What happens when he’s done two and he still can’t deal with shit? Last thing any of us need is him taking a dip in the lake. I’m not going to interfere, if he needs to let rip. I’m just going to make sure he doesn’t do himself any additional damage.’
Xane let him go. Rock Giant followed Spook down the stairs, leaving Luthor and Xane alone.
‘Sorry,’ Luthor apologised. ‘I should have just kept my mouth shut.’
‘Maybe,’ Xane responded, still facing the stairs. He turned as Luthor emerged from behind the drumkit. ‘We ought to have realised it was too early to have him in the studio. I just … He seemed OK when I was talking to him on the way over here. Sure, he’s still a bit ashen, but the slur was gone and he seemed glad to be back in the land of the living.’
As he hadn’t heard Ash speak more than a couple of simple phrases before he’d started ranting, Luthor didn’t feel qualified to comment, but Xane clearly needed some kind of reassurance that his friend was going to be fine. ‘He only started slurring once he got upset. Maybe it’s the stress that made him relapse?’
Xane chewed the notion over, while agitating the ring piercing in his lower lip. ‘No,’ he eventually concluded. ‘He was just working really hard to make sure he pronounced everything carefully before. I should have realised. Fucking Willows! Prison’s too good for him. He deserves a battering with a baseball bat, preferably one with six-inch rusty nails hammered through it.’
‘Pounding him into snot won’t make Ash better.’
‘It’d make me feel fucking good though, like I was doing something, instead of having to just sit and watch Ash suffer.’
‘He’ll get better, Xane.’ Luthor gently laid his hand upon the other man’s shoulder.
‘Will he? He’s right, you know. We’ve no contingencies in place if he doesn’t.’
‘It’ll come right. It will. Stop worrying about it. If you all get too focused on his recovery then you’re going to make things harder for him. Expectation can be a real bugger. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t need any more pressure on him than he’s putting on himself.’
‘Yeah … yeah.’ Xane sighed. ‘You’re right.’ He brushed a hand through the front of his long hair. ‘We’ll keep clear of the studio for a few days, and then Spook and I can sit down together and talk lyrics and such. There’s no need for us all to be in here until we have some actual tracks to fine-tune.’
‘Sounds like a plan.’
He was still squeezing Xane’s shoulder, and the other man seemed to notice that. Xane looked at Luthor’s hand and then up at his face.
‘So, how were you envisaging filling the next few days?’ Luthor asked.
Xane gently brushed away his hold. ‘I need to keep Dani happy, Luthor. She got upset about earlier.’
‘Is that why I got sanctioned and sent to live in the chicken coop?’
Xane smiled at the description. ‘I don’t think so. She didn’t have anything to do with the arrangements. Spook might have stuck you out there as a tactic for maintaini
ng the peace. He’s concerned about how our relationship is going to impact the band.’
‘Are you?’
‘I think Black Halo have bigger problems to worry about. Not just Ash.’
‘You mean the fact that Elspeth didn’t show.’
‘It’s not like her to bail without giving a specific reason. Elspeth might be a bitchy pain in the arse, but she’s not flaky. But I guess she can explain herself at my party, if she shows.’
Luthor nodded. He didn’t really want to dwell on Elspeth. Whenever he’d interacted with her, she’d been an outright cow.
‘What did Dani actually say about us?’ he asked, turning the thrust of the conversation back to their relationship.
‘She just reminded me that we’d agreed not to make out when she wasn’t around to grant her consent or witness it.’
‘Exchanging one kiss is hardly the same as making out.’
‘To her it is.’
Well, that was going to make things awkward very quickly. It was bad enough that they had to get her to green-light the possibility of them getting physical, without her ruling out even minor exchanges of affection. Luthor loved her to bits as both a friend and someone he’d like to be far more than that to, but expecting him and Xane to conduct a non-physical relationship was not only bollocks, it was setting them up to fail, and he could just imagine how she’d react to that.
‘There’s no way this is going to work.’ It was akin to her saying they could love one another, but only on Tuesdays, and if it was a full moon. ‘Maybe you haven’t realised it yet, but all that’s going to happen is we’re both going to end up frustrated.’
Actually, he was frustrated already. Having spent the last three weeks surviving on fantasies about what his reunion with this man would entail, Luthor wanted Xane in his bed with the desperation of a drunk shaking the last drop from a bottle of vodka. Xane remained the one man whose presence knotted him up in a truly delicious way, who raised his pulse and made his whole body hum with arousal. He’d had sex with other men, and plenty of women, but none of those times had felt nearly as right as either of the occasions on which he and Xane had made love.
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