by Neve Wilder
I didn’t sound very convincing, and she gave me a doubtful look as I leaned over and kissed her again, then pushed the hem of her dress up to expose the tops of her thighs and the lacy band of her panties. I brushed my mouth over her inner thigh. “In the meantime, other parts of me are fully functional.”
“Have you ever considered just going out on your own again? After this next album, I mean?” Leigh asked later, once we were curled in the bed together. I stroked her hair, playing with the ends. It was nice to have someone to lie next to; that part hadn’t changed for me.
The question made me edgy, though. “I don’t know. Somehow it doesn’t feel right.”
“Do you think Les has ever considered it?”
I hated that question, too, because it immediately made me bristle and panic at the same time. Les had never intimated anything of the kind, but then he wouldn’t. Les was a force you’d never see coming or going, and the way this tour was going, it seemed like a possibility.
“Probably, but he hasn’t said anything, and we still owe MGD another album.” I flipped off the light and nestled against Leigh in the darkness, resting a hand on her hip. “Guess I’m just waiting to see how it goes when we sit down to actually write it.”
Leigh found my hand and gave it a light squeeze, making a humming sound as she settled. “I just wish you wouldn’t stress over every little thing.”
She didn’t know the half of it.
Four years ago, Les and I had come out of nowhere with an album that went somewhere fast, riding the comet-tail success of the rock-folk supernova all the way to platinum. Except it wasn’t really out of nowhere, not for us. There were two years of our blood and guts in those twelve tracks that made us. A year of self-initiated touring across college campuses as Porter & Graves, playing to a crowd that could have been us if Les hadn’t dropped out to pursue music and if I’d had the money to go in the first place. It was a scary fucking risk. For me, at least. Les was happy flying by the seat of his pants, but I’d always been the level head, the calculator, the staying hand. The seat belt that kept him from flying too far out of control. It was part of why we worked so well together. Or used to.
We’d met on the circuit in Nashville. I was playing solo gigs, and he’d just dropped out of a band, where he’d been their drummer. In his downtime he’d been learning guitar, and I happened to catch his first solo gig. He was mostly playing covers, but I liked the way he twisted the sound of his guitar with a percussive rhythm. It was different. Magnetic. At the end of his gig he’d tacked on a couple of songs he’d written. The music seemed a little generic and basic, but the lyrics were stellar. I’d felt that familiar itching in my palms and stomach, that desire to tinker and fix. His voice was solid, and as he sang the words, I tuned out the guitar and laid my own melody below it and I knew we could be a good fit. I wasn’t much of a lyricist, but I was a hell of a guitar player and vocalist—that wasn’t bravado. Rolling Stone agreed. And Rolling Stone also agreed that our last album sucked despite that fact.
We’d introduced ourselves. He was a sophomore studying communication. I was a bartender trying to crawl out of the backwater mud puddle I’d been born in. I didn’t think I’d even asked what he was studying when we met, though, because a part of me knew it didn’t matter—that once we started playing, something phenomenal was going to come together. And I’d been right. People packed in to hear us play. Cover songs gave way to originals. It was a business arrangement first. Our friendship came secondary and slowly, but once we got there, it was good, too. He jerked my chain about my serial monogamy and barefoot Southern roots, and I jerked his about treating groupies like his personal smorgasbord and his penchant for black… everything. But when we got together to write and play music, there was something transcendent about it. A language all our own, instinctive and expressive. Music flowed between us as easily as conversation. Sometimes easier.
How we got to the place we were now, with a shit album behind us and a friendship that felt like it was hanging on by its bloody roots, still blew my mind. At the same time, I was pretty sure it was my fault. And I still wasn’t sure how to fix it.
How about post-show on tour? Do you guys go out a lot? Mingle with your fans. See the sights?
Evan: [laughing] …mingle with your fans…
Les: He’s laughing at me.
Evan: Yep.
Evan: Let’s just say Les excels at “mingling.”
Les: I’m really a very friendly guy.
Chapter 3
“Things always that awkward between you two? Seems completely different when you’re onstage,” Jamie said, sotto voce as Evan hightailed it down the hall.
“Sometimes. Well, no.” I’d gotten distracted watching Evan slip his key card in the door and disappear inside his room. More specifically, I’d gotten distracted by his ass in those butter-soft jeans he’d had since I’d known him. “It’s been a long tour. Months and months on the road. He’s got a girlfriend he hardly sees. Our last album…” I trailed off with my explanation as we reached the next floor and stepped off the elevator. My attention swerved back to Jamie’s patient expression as I fit the card in the lock and opened the hotel room door. Jamie was right, though: Evan and I were different onstage, cutting up and bantering back and forth. It used to be natural. Lately it felt like we were working off the memory of tours before. The script still functioned, I knew all my lines and hit my marks, but it’d probably run out of steam soon. People weren’t stupid. At the rate we were going, we were probably one tour away from going down bloody like Oasis.
“Your last album was good.” Jamie’s fingertips dusted across my wrist in passing as he walked into the room. A year ago, my penthouse would have been a suite with a foyer and a fucking view. This was a single. A very nice, single penthouse room, but a status reminder all the same.
I laughed, and it wasn’t completely bitter because Jamie seemed sincere, but the judgment had been passed on our last album both in sales and critical reviews. “It was a disaster, but that’s okay.” It wasn’t. “In a month we’ll be at it again. A lot of bands blow their load on the first album and enter a sophomore slump. We had two ringers. I’ll take a dismal third. We were due for some humbling.” I said it confidently and ignored the way the admission burned in my lungs.
Jamie took off his coat, tossing it over the back of the chair. Underneath he had on an old metal band T-shirt that stretched tight across his pecs and shoulders. It looked good. He looked good. So why was I having second thoughts?
“So you’re saying you’ve got plenty of loads left in you, huh?” He said it with a cocky grin that didn’t quite match his posture, and I knew right then that I wasn’t going to be bending him over the bed and fucking him into the mattress. Maybe it had something to do with seeing Evan on the elevator, and maybe it didn’t.
But I wasn’t necessarily giving up entirely.
“I’ve got at least one load in store for you,” I murmured. It was a terrible line. I’d found, though, that people didn’t really care. They saw the musician: the messy-haired, soulful-eyed, off-kilter lyricist—not my description; that was from an article in People. At a certain point, the men and women I brought up to my room or onto the back of our tour bus weren’t really listening to me anymore. They transposed my lyrics over my words or maybe some article they’d read about me, and that became all they saw, just the projection of me from someone else’s point of view. I’d tested the theory more than a few times. I’d once told a girl I couldn’t wait to cram my meat stick in her face hole and she didn’t bat a lash. I told a guy the same thing and he’d given me a funny look, then shrugged and got on his knees.
Jamie didn’t even wince. I found that same belt loop I’d hooked in the elevator and yanked him closer still so I could push the hem of his T-shirt up. My dick was making a comeback. That was both a pro and a con of a dick. Or at least mine. It was usually ready and willing even if my thoughts were scattered all over the map.
“God
.” He exhaled a breathy sigh as I fanned my fingers over the smooth skin of his stomach. He brought his mouth toward mine, lips parting, and I skirted it without thinking, giving him my jaw instead. His lips brushed my stubble, tongue running the ridge of my jaw lightly in a tease. Why the fuck wasn’t I kissing him?
I knew why I wasn’t kissing him. So I turned my chin and fucking kissed him, made myself do it, like it was some great feat or horrible task I had to pump myself up for. It wasn’t. His lips were warm and soft, his tongue beer tainted and slippery across the slide of mine. I sucked it, dragged my teeth across the taste of him, then lower to his throat.
“Take your shirt off,” I said, and he did so immediately. He flicked at my nipples, sending needling bursts of pleasure through me while I bowed my head to his pecs, lapping at one flat circle and then the other until the rise and fall of his chest quickened and his nipples stood up in hard points that I could close my teeth around.
“I want to suck your cock,” he rasped while working the top button of my jeans open.
“I want to pummel the back of your throat. I’m glad we agree,” I teased back, then hauled him toward the full-length mirror positioned just outside the bathroom door. I had plans. And Evan said I didn’t. Wait, why the fuck was I thinking about him again?
“I want to watch you while you suck me off.” Wanted to watch the muscles of his back ripple, the curve of his spine. Whatever momentary failure of testosterone happened back there in the elevator had been fixed: my balls were already aching for a good, hard suck. I needed this release. Evan could fuck right off.
Jamie sat back on his hands panting while I slumped down against the wall, slick hand resting limply across my thigh. His eyes were lust hazed and satisfied. A glance in the mirror showed mine were the same.
“You do this a lot, I guess. Or as much as you want to, huh?” Jamie sounded almost wistful. We were in that postorgasmic, oxytocin-fueled intimate zone. The one that loosened lips. It was my favorite time to write, and I knew in a few minutes I’d rush Jamie out of the room in favor of picking up my notebook like I usually did. Maybe this time I’d actually write something that didn’t deserve to be tossed screaming into a pit of fire, unlike the hundred nights that had come before. Optimistic. That was me.
“Not as much as you’d think. Not as much as I used to,” I confessed. I was bored and restless, and Jamie was the first person I’d brought up to my room in a while. Sitting there with him right then, already wishing he’d leave, made me think of a conversation I’d had with Evan two months ago in Chicago. We’d been at the hotel bar, post-show. He was drinking a PBR, Nashville roots on full display, his blond hair slicked back. I could smell the dried sweat on him courtesy of the blazing stage lights we played under and underneath that, generic hotel soap. I’d studied his profile while pretending to eye the bottles—the straight slope of his nose, how his lower lip sealed against the rim of his can. Completely pathetic in how much I wanted him even then. I was grateful for my poker face. Being around Evan constantly had helped me hone it.
“Don’t you get tired of it?” he’d asked. My gaze had skipped down the bar, landing first on a buxom blonde, then on a waifish brunette. I didn’t have a type, I didn’t think. I just liked what I liked. Male, female, whatever.
“Tired of what?” I’d replied, feigning bored unawareness, even though I knew exactly what he’d been asking. Was I tired of the endless parade of meaningless hookups? My sex life: an increasingly crowded kaleidoscope I couldn’t stop adding color to. I obsessed over it. But I enjoyed it, too. The world was big, and life was short. And the only person who could possibly tempt me to settle down had been treating me like an infection for weeks.
“Sticking your dick in everything like you’re on a personal mission to…” Evan was more blunt than I’d expected him to be, and he’d waved his hand instead of finishing his sentence. He actually laughed at whatever expression I made back, which must have included some surprise in spite of my best attempts to hide it. “There’s no diplomatic way to say what you’re doing. It’s not romantic. It’s like you’re out to prove a point or on a vendetta. And if it’s me you’re trying to prove it to, you can stop worrying. I already got it, all right? I got it in the first month after we left the cabin.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as his throat worked down the rest of his beer in a long draught. I’d had that skin between my teeth before. Right then it’d felt like mine was between his. How transparent I must have been. I was certain of it, but he’d looked nonchalant. Resigned. He was right. There was no romancing the way I tried to plug the little holes that’d sprung inside me by plugging everything else externally. It didn’t work as well as it used to, but it was still some kind of solution, right?
Jamie tilted his head to one side, watching me in a way that made me realize I’d checked out for a second. I swam out of the undertow of my thoughts and pushed myself up off the floor. He took the cue perfectly, God bless him.
“I should get going. Early flight and all.” Jamie stood and pulled his pants back over his hips, doing up his zipper and belt. I was grateful as fuck that he was cool, not trying to cling on or stay over and make some night of this. He knew as well as I did that we were done. Was it fucked-up that that made me like him a little more? Or at least appreciate him. Two weeks from now, his face would be a blur to me, his name forgotten, and our entire conversation boiled down to a few random key words that would make no difference in the grand scheme of things.
“‘Blue,’” he said as he opened the door. “That’s my favorite of your catalog.”
Okay, maybe I wouldn’t forget him after all.
Fucking “Blue.” Despite it being the single bright spot on our third album, I was really starting to regret writing that goddamned song.
Chapter 4
Six months ago
“Let’s take a break.”
I knew what that meant. Les took jerk breaks like some people took smoke breaks, and he got cranky if he didn’t get his fix.
“Jesus, man, you jerk off more than anyone I know.” We were in the cabin’s basement, the walls layered with egg-crate foam that kept sound cupped between us and protected from the world outside. When we wanted echoes and reverb, we crammed into one of the tiled bathrooms upstairs.
Les bounced his guitar atop his knee in a quick, restless tempo. A glance at the wall clock showed we’d been at it for hours. Felt like minutes to me.
“How do you know? You have a pie chart in your head keeping track? Shit, you probably do, obsessive bastard.” Les laughed, the sound lazy, muffled by the walls.
I played along, trying not to smile. “Not just one chart. Many. Jerk breaks, how many seconds pass before you check your phone—average is every 1.5 seconds, by the way; f bombs dropped in live interviews—too many to count; number of times you’ve tried to convince me or Byron to let you go onstage in a robe or Snuggie—at least fifteen.”
“Please, I haven’t looked at my phone in at least a half hour.”
I noticed he didn’t address any of the other things, probably because I was right. Or very close.
“What about Travis? He’s got to be a close second for jerk breaks.”
Travis had been the bass player on our last tour, when we’d taken a backing band with us, and now that Les mentioned it, I recalled him being a big fan of breaks, too. Me, I liked to hammer through stuff while in the zone, didn’t like my focus pulled away. Any more than a piss break threw me off when a new song had its hooks sunk deep into me. Not so for Les.
“Distant second, maybe.” But I set my guitar on the stand beside me, a sure signal I was giving in to his request. “Your hand’s going to fall off, one day. You don’t run out of mental fodder?” We’d been in the cabin for two weeks, making only a few trips out on occasion, sequestering ourselves like the solitude would cast some magical spell on the construction process—which was a really accurate description of how we created an album. I’d been skeptical until it appeared to
have worked pretty damn well on our first two albums. This time around we were churning out music and lyrics as efficiently as a mill, and they seemed on point. Not all of them, but enough that I felt certain by the end of the month we’d have a third album at least as good as our second. If not better. But while I was usually happy with little social interaction, Les was an extrovert with a notable, and widely publicized, appetite for… everything.
“My hand’s in great shape, thanks, and there’s always my laptop for inspiration, too.” He narrowed his eyes to catlike slits as his lips twisted in a smirk. “Of course, if I’m doing it in your room, I’m thinking about how much it’s gonna piss you off when you figure it out. I really knock one out fast, then.” A wicked grin split his lips that cracked wider still when I flicked my pick at him. “Shit, did I say that out loud? Oops.”
The pick popped him square in the forehead, and he laughed all the harder for it. He had a nice laugh, though, as uninhibited as the rest of him, like no one had ever shushed him in his life.
Of course I didn’t believe him, so I didn’t really know why I asked, “Where?”
“Where what?” His brows knit in confusion, his quick mind having already jumped to the next thing, apparently.
“Where in my bedroom?”
Les gave me a funny look that I read as disconcerted, then picked up and continued as easily as he did one of the riffs I tossed his way. “Pillow. Definitely. I lean down and sniff it first. The scent of control issues gets me hard as a damn rock. I come to the thought of my dried jizz in your neatly combed do.” He could hardly finish before the solemnity in his expression broke around amusement, but I lagged behind a few mental paces, stuck on the idea of Les coming on my sheets and pillow. He wouldn’t actually do that, would he? No, he definitely would.