by Neve Wilder
But he started strumming his guitar again, and when I tried to speak, nothing came out. I leaned back against the couch, listening to him caress sound from the strings, the progression smooth and soothing and nothing like the electric feel of his bare skin under my palm when I reached out to touch his arm.
“Come to bed.” I left it open to interpretation, because if he got up to come, I knew I’d take his hand and pull him into my room, and though I didn’t know what would happen after that, it was frightening how much I wanted just the touch of his hand and the feel of him at my back.
He shook his head resolutely. “Gonna practice a little while longer.” And when I stood up, he said, “You’re right, though. We should just stick to the original plan. Messing around was a stupid idea.”
It should’ve made me feel better. A decision had been made. We were in accordance, on the same page. But it didn’t. Not at all.
You’ve talked before about the writing process and a certain cabin you travel to when you’re in the final stages of planning an album. Do you plan to continue that?
Evan: It’s kind of a superstitious act now, I guess. So yeah.
Les: We work on new stuff constantly while on tour, but the cabin is where we really try to lock it all down and nail it to the wall.
Evan: [laughing] You make it sound so… murderous.
Les: That’s what weeks in a cabin with you drives me to. Murderous intent.
Do you two get cabin fever? Stir-crazy?
Les: Evan doesn’t. He’s secretly a hobbit. Me? Sometimes.
Chapter 29
We hadn’t done any advertising, but the turnout for our secret show at Grim’s was overwhelming, which I guess should have been encouraging. That was the Southern grapevine for you. Dan had to turn people away and call in a couple of his local contacts for extra security. He usually hosted a few small shows a year for local artists, so he had the organization down to a science. Porter & Graves had only ever played at the main store in Nashville, but I was impressed by how Dan had transformed the Gatlinburg satellite. The displays were all rearranged to create the effect of an open glen amid a forest of records and CDs. He didn’t bother with chairs; people just packed in to the central pit. At the front, our equipment was set up on a barebones platform that mimicked the one at the main shop. It was only about a half foot off the ground, but on either side, two burly biker-looking dudes watched over it.
My heart thumped with a mixture of excitement and anxiety the same way I used to feel when I was playing in bars. When you’re that close to your audience, you can watch their expressions, which always psyched me out as much as it was rewarding. I could see them wince if I hit a note wrong as well as I could see their faces light up at their favorite song.
Evan and I waited in the storage area at the back of the store while Dan took the small stage, giving a rundown of the show to the audience, talking about how it was all about the music. I knew he was trying to keep the show focused, considering all the publicity we’d been getting lately, and I appreciated that, but it did nothing for the nerves darting through my system like fireflies.
“All right?” I asked Evan, mostly to distract myself. He’d been fiddling with the tuning knobs on his guitar for the past five minutes and looked up at me now distractedly. We’d been careful around each other for the past few days. There was a sense of tension underpinning everything, but it was different somehow than it was on the tour. More potent, it teetered between us, lingering in every glance we exchanged. But we were both stubborn as hell, and I only excelled at playing along because I’d had so much prior practice ignoring my impulses where Evan was concerned. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my usual fallback of booze and sex to distract me, so I figured I was only good for another couple of days before I’d end up doing something stupid and messing things up even more.
I was totally regretting the whole fake boyfriend thing because instead of curing me of my Evan obsession, it’d just made it worse. I’d had a taste of him now, and I wasn’t ready to let that go anytime soon. Pushing back the other night when he told me to come to bed had been a Hail Mary play to collect myself and go on about business as usual. I was trying.
“Nervous as shit.” Evan laughed, and just the sound of it after so much thick silence flooded me with relief. “Isn’t that stupid? How many hundreds of shows have we done?”
“Yeah, but none since we agreed to this dumb charade.”
Evan rolled his shoulder through a wince and nodded. “It’ll be fine, though. They won’t care.” He sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “Shit, there are whole fandoms devoted to AU pairings. If we were fiction, we’d have been one long ago.”
“Like Spock and Captain Kirk.”
“You’re giving me that stupid smirk because you’re thinking of me as Spock, aren’t you?”
“Yep. And those ears.” I snapped my teeth at him, and his laughter hit me like spring air.
Dan walked off the stage and into our impromptu backstage area, giving us the thumbs-up. “You’re good to go. Any funny business and I’ll chuck ’em.”
The show was off from the get-go. The sound was great, and the audience was enthusiastic, but Evan and I were out of sync.
We ran through some of our older hits first. The first two songs went fine, but when he started “Chanteuse,” I lagged behind a half beat and had to leap to pick up, which threw off the opening verse. We stopped and laughed through it, Evan cracking a joke about vacation making us lazy to smooth things over. Then it happened three more times, and this time it was his fault. He was too mired in his head. I could tell because he wasn’t doing his usual thousand-yard stare over the heads of the audience, but was focused hard on his guitar, instead, as if it had wronged him. We barreled through without stopping again or calling attention to our fumbles, but Evan kept glancing over at me, so then I started to become all too aware of my timing and psyching myself out.
We played the next batch of songs, cutting in some of the new stuff we’d been working on. The crowd seemed to like it—heads were nodding, they were dancing, there was plenty of applause. I watched faces the way I watched the slot machines in Vegas, scrutinizing expressions with my stomach in a knot, waiting for that perfect combo that meant a jackpot. Just before we took our first break, I did my ask-the-audience bit and, no surprise, the dude I’d pointed out asked for “Blue.” Fucking “Blue.” I had zero interest in playing that damn song right then.
I shook my head and chuckled. “Aww come on, man. It’s been done to death. Pick something different.” The whole room got eerily quiet, and Evan’s mouth dropped open like I’d committed the ultimate faux pas.
The guy I’d singled out darted a nervous gaze between the two of us, clearly uncertain of how to reply. Evan strummed the opening chords of “Blue,” leaning into the mic. “He’s fucking with you. We’ll—”
“We’ve got something new,” I blurted without turning my head to the side so I wouldn’t see the daggers Evan was undoubtedly shooting at me for veering off course. I felt it anyway.
“So you pick. ‘Blue’? Or something virgin no one else has heard, yet? Not even… Evan.”
The audience exploded at the prospect, cheering and pumping their fists, and it was only then that I dared a glance at Evan in time to see a brief flash of horror he masked quickly with a smirk. Evan hated surprises, but I was willing to bet he’d hate giving that fact away to the audience even more.
“How fresh are we talking here? Fresher than yesterday?” he asked, trying to suss it out.
“Fresh as last night.”
Evan let out a low whistle, and there was scatter of laughter through the audience. Behind his loose smile, I could sense his anxiety. “Keeping me on my toes, huh?”
“I like to watch you dance.” Someone catcalled as I winked at Evan, then turned back to the crowd, strumming the opening notes. I’d had the basic melody stuck in my head for days, but it was only in the small hours of the night before that the
lyrics had come:
I am smoke and fire
And you’re the coming rain
The thunderhead in the distance
That will wash me clean again.
The chord pattern was simple enough that Evan would be able to pick it up after a single verse, and he did, weaving in a basic harmony when I hit the second.
The audience loved it, and I had to admit it was a decent song, especially once Evan got involved. I could tell the moment he fully settled into it and got comfortable. It was hard to explain, but it was as if I could hear it click into place for him by the way his fingers started running wild over his guitar strings, pulling out notes that wrapped around my score and squeezed it until the sound spun out into beautiful chaos. On the final chorus, Evan’s voice came in high over my rich baritone, and the last few bars haunted the air like ghost notes hovering over the crowd.
A prolonged silence followed, and for a second I thought I’d misjudged the reaction, then they went apeshit. The volume of applause in such a small place was crushing. I basked in it for as long as I could and then disappeared backstage with Evan for a break before it stopped, sweaty and high with the residual adrenaline of absolutely nailing it. In an hour I’d have the musician version of a hangover, but I didn’t care. It felt so damn good in the moment.
Evan was another story.
“What the fuck was that?” He tore his guitar off and dragged me out of earshot of Dan and the few other people backstage.
“Improv?” I ducked my head into the hole of my T-shirt to mop at the sweat on my brow, “They loved it. God, you killed it, and when you twisted your voice up there at the end? Ugh, it was brilliant. I’ll never get how you do that shit.”
“Why didn’t you mention the song before, though? We could’ve worked on it this afternoon.”
“I was just going to save it and then—Ev, we were flailing up there. It felt like the set was about to come apart.”
“You flubbed our first opening, and yeah, I screwed up the next few parts but—” He threw his hands up, then raked them through his hair and I had to curl my hands into fists to resist reaching out to straighten the disheveled strands.
“I was trying to get you out of your head and me out of mine. And it worked. Perfectly in fact, if you were listening.”
Evan paced alongside a bunch of old amps and record crates and rubbed a hand over his eyes irritably. “What if it hadn’t, though? Because that could’ve easily been a disaster.”
I caught him by the arm and held him still, putting my hands on his shoulders as I spoke, trying to counteract the edginess I could feel under my fingertips with the softness of my voice. “I can’t tell you how I knew it would work, but I did. You’re brilliant under the gun even if you think you’re not. Even if you think you need all this time to work shit over. Fuck, I—” I paused, wanting to make sure what I was about to say didn’t come out wrong. “I guess maybe I just wanted some proof that we still had it on stage after everything that’s happened lately. And we do, Ev. That was the proof.”
He sighed, his expression softening, and when he leaned forward and rested his forehead against my shoulder, it felt so fucking good to bear his weight. But it was brief. He took a deep breath and then a step back, shaking out his hands like he was casting off extra energy. “Okay. I’m good. Let’s finish this.”
It happened near the end of our last set, and despite Dan’s assurances, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Every one of our shows came with its fair share of commentary and shouts from the crowd, and this one was no different. All night we’d been bantering back and forth with the audience, joking around between songs. Usually what came from the crowds was flattering stuff, and a lot of times related to music. Other times it was off-the-wall shit from a random troll or someone who was fucked up that we’d ignore until it faded to background noise of squealing fans and random cheering. But sometimes someone would say something loud enough and at just the right time for it to reach us onstage clear as a bell. Some chick once yelled out that she hated my haircut. It came at this really weird lull between songs at a smaller venue, and I’d had no idea how to respond. “I’m sorry?” I’d said, and everyone had laughed, the girl included, especially when Evan tacked on, “I don’t know if you know this, but his hair actually has a fan page. You should lodge your complaint there.” My hair actually did have a fan page at one point. I thought it was defunct, though, now.
Crowd dynamics were weird, and they were especially noticeable tonight when Evan and I were only about five feet away. So when some dude about seven heads back yelled out, “Who’s the catcher?” everything got eerily silent again the way it had when I’d refused to play “Blue” earlier. I didn’t have to glance at Evan to know he was scowling, and I was readying a light quip back when someone else shouted, “What the fuck does it matter?”
The security guards beside the stage glanced at me, and I shook my head.
“I’ve got this,” I said. I had a great speech for such occasions because the question was universal and annoying as hell, not to mention fucking personal. I didn’t ask someone what position their girlfriend liked it best in. That shit would get you looked at weird. Okay, maybe I’d asked it a couple of times, and I understood the curiosity. But still.
Evan cut in before I could get started. “No you don’t. I do.” He glared at the guy. I could see his pulse hammering at his throat. “That’s the stupidest fucking question we’ve ever been asked in all our years of making music together. Congratulations. Now get the fuck out.”
I stared in shock as he spoke. He sounded so matter-of-fact as he said it, but there was a poisonous lilt to the words I’d never heard from him before, and the way he was standing, with his hand strangling the neck of the guitar and the slight tremor that passed along his jaw, told me he was furious. He’d never snapped on stage before. I relaxed slightly as the guy started through the crowd for the door when he saw the security guards heading in his direction. Then he fucking piped up again. “I guess that answers that.”
Nice. Power dynamics. I had a speech for that, too, but I didn’t get the chance because, quicker than I could comprehend, Evan wrenched his guitar over his head and took off, barreling through the swarm of people on a mission to… I didn’t even know what. A ripple ran through the crowd, and the security guards at both ends of the venue started pushing toward the center. Chaos exploded and I couldn’t tell what the hell was happening. Everything became a tangle of limbs and motion mixed with a lot of yelling and scuffling. I lost track of Evan, and when I started to rush into the fray, a strong pair of hands latched around my shoulder and dragged me backward.
“I’ll find him, go out the back,” Dan growled. I ignored him and started forward again only to be yanked back roughly by my T-shirt. “Don’t make it worse. Go on.”
The front doors crashed wide, and the fire alarm went off as someone shoved the side exit open. People poured out in droves as I snagged our guitars and jetted backstage.
Evan had a thin cut on the corner of his mouth, a goose egg on one temple, a scrape on his cheek, and the knuckles of his right hand were swollen. He wore a scowl a mile wide as he slumped into a chair at the back of the shop, plopping the ice pack Dan brought him against his temple before he let his head fall back against the wall and closed his eyes. Security had pulled him from the melee. Dan had talked the other guy, who was in equally rough shape, out of pressing charges by mentioning the words “inciting a riot.” I had no idea if that would really fly, but it seemed to have worked, because the dude had stumbled off without another word when his friends collected him, or so Dan had said. The guy had clearly been on something.
Dan had apologized profusely, and I’d apologized in return because shit, I knew the last thing he needed was a stampede where someone got hurt in his shop. Luckily, security had managed to break up the fray, and most people had stayed out of the way and pushed for the exits as soon as the fighting broke out.
“What the hell kind
of Jekyll and Hyde bullshit just happened?” I didn’t say it angrily, but it was forceful because Evan’s reaction was so uncharacteristic.
His head snapped toward me, and he gave me a slow blink, like I was an idiot.
“That? That was exactly why this whole charade was a stupid fucking idea in the first place. From now on we’re going to be fielding dumbass questions like that, and guess what, when it ‘leaks’ that we’re not a couple anymore, it’s going to be a whole other set of questions.”
“Yeah, well, it’s kind of what we signed up for.” I wasn’t disagreeing with him, but it was what it was.
“No. I signed up to make music, not to be asked whether or not I’m taking it in the ass. I don’t even know why they care.”
I slid down the wall to sit next to his chair. “Because you’re you, Porter. You put out music that resonates, that people feel to their core. They want to know what makes you tick and how you fucking do it. It’s fascinating to them. Getting all the little details, they can share in that. It reminds them you’re a human, too. Because otherwise? You’re an enigma. You rarely talk about anything personal, so it’s exciting to feel like they’ve been let in. Why do you think I air all my laundry in public? It’s not just because I don’t give it a shit. It’s about counterbalance, too, and it’s part of why we work so well, I think. Tonight will get spun however it will, and we can just let it. Because none of it fucking matters as long as you and I know the truth and know what we are.”
“Yeah, well, I’m starting to question that, too.” He let out a rough exhale and dragged the ice pack over his eyes.
My breath felt as if it’d been sucked from my chest. I reminded myself that he was just reacting to the situation and he’d cool off. But before I could do anything else, he tossed the ice pack aside, launched off the chair, and cut out the back door into the night.