by Jaime Samms
“People who can fucking afford to not care what anyone else thinks.”
A mother passing on the sidewalk frowned at him and pulled her young son around to her far side as they hurried past.
“Oh, calm the fuck down,” he muttered as he pushed away from the wall. “Like I care about your brat.” He curled a lip, shoved his hands into his pockets, and headed toward the subway and home.
The subway ride was too short, bringing him to his stop too soon. He wasn’t sure he was up to facing Lenny, so he jogged down the subway steps and took the next train headed south.
There were always places along the waterfront to score, and it didn’t take him long to pick up what he wanted. Searching out a safe place to do it was a little tougher, but he did, and the inexorable, slow-motion rush of euphoria that overtook him once it was done carried him for the rest of the afternoon.
It was near dark when he finally came down enough to know he should get home before Lenny started to worry. Once he reached his building, though, the uncertainty assailed him again, and there were not enough endorphins left in his system to hold it at bay. He stood outside his door for a long time before finally fitting his key into the lock and easing it open.
Lenny leaned on the back of the couch glaring at the door.
“Where the hell have you been?”
Damian snarled. “Honey, I’m ho-ome!”
“Fuck you!” With characteristic swiftness, Lenny sprang from his perch and had Damian cornered. “Where. Were. You?”
“Calm down. I was home, then I went out, I had to do something.”
“What something?” Lenny advanced another step. His blue gaze was shimmering and knife-edged with fury.
“What the hell is your problem?” Damian’s shoulder blades pressed to the door. He had no more room to escape the advance of all that anger.
“You!” Lenny made one blurringly fast motion of stepping in, pinning him with an arm across his chest and slamming the back of Damian’s left hand against the door. Just as Damian figured out what he was going to do, what had his roommate so pissed off, Lenny peeled back the hem of one long woolen glove until the inside of Damian’s elbow was bare.
And dammit, if the brat didn’t have Satan’s own luck in picking the right arm too. The needle marks still showed red against Damian’s otherwise pale skin.
“Asshole!”
Damian flinched, sure for a split second he was about to get hit.
Lenny took a staggering step backward.
“Le—”
“Don’t you!” Lenny flung a hand at him, fingers splayed, to shut him up.
Damian cracked his head against the door with the violence of his flinch.
“Don’t.” Lenny took another step away and tripped over a shoe.
Damian reached out to steady him.
Lenny lunged, heaving him against the door and adding another lump to the one he’d given himself.
“Don’t touch me!” Lenny shouted. “Don’t!”
“Len, please. Calm down.”
But his friend reeled away again, so furious he couldn’t walk straight, then came back and flew at Damian, once more battering him against the door.
This time, he didn’t back away, but leaned on the arm crossing Damian’s chest, his weight crushing Damian into the unyielding metal door. “You promised. You fucking promised me,” Lenny said, voice low and throttled.
“It isn’t—”
“What I think?” Lenny asked, head tipping to one side.
“It’s just….” Damian swallowed, licked his lips, unable to bear the guilt of looking Lenny in the eye, unable to look away. “I mean it was just the one—”
He didn’t bother finishing the thought. It was a lame excuse. It didn’t erase the fact he had promised or the fact he’d broken the promise. It didn’t mean anything, and so there was no point in saying it.
“It only takes one bad batch, Trev,” Lenny said.
Damian closed his eyes and let his head fall against the door. His bumped and bruised skull began to throb. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“I hate you,” Lenny snarled, giving him one last angry shove and backing away, this time as lithe and surefooted as ever.
“I’m sorry!”
“I hate you!” He fled, back to his room behind that locked door.
Damian slipped to the floor and hid his face. He kind of hated himself too.
IT WAS Alice who did most of the legwork getting the contracts sorted out. Damian brought her the money orders and got Vance’s people in touch with her. She didn’t know who Damian’s benefactor was, and she didn’t ask. She accepted the money and made sure there was no possible way Granger could come back on them. Ever. Then she gave Damian grudging kudos for emptying his bank account to fix his screwup, but it didn’t seem to make up for the fact he had gone to Krane without her in the first place.
“It won’t happen again,” he promised.
“Right, because we all know what your promises are worth,” Lenny mumbled under his breath.
Damian flushed and sank deeper into the couch, fingers sneaking to the tender flesh stretched over the back of his skull. They were the first words Lenny had uttered in his general direction in three days. Any time Damian knocked on his door, the only response he got was Lenny’s television or amplifier turned up until he went away.
Looks were exchanged when Damian didn’t say anything.
“You know, it would be so much easier if you bitches would just do the nasty and get it over with,” Beks grumbled.
“Tell that to Mr. Cock Tease over there,” Damian snapped.
“I am so glad we’re all going to get to keep playing together,” Alice told them, voice dripping with insincerity, hands rubbing together like a crazed puppet master.
“Hey,” Jethro said, shrugging one shoulder. “I’m cool.”
“Sure. When you’re here,” Damian shot back.
“Don’t even, dude. I have not missed a practice, ever, and I don’t show up hungover or high.” He grinned. “Well. Pot doesn’t count.”
“I’m out,” Lenny said, jumping to his feet and grabbing his guitar.
“Tomorrow, Lenny!” Alice called after him. “You have Krane’s address. Be there!”
As soon as the door shut behind him, she rounded on Damian. “Why? Why do you all have to be such damn asshats around him?”
“He’s got to get over it,” Jethro said. “Going all emo every time someone whips out a joint, he is not going to last long in this gig.”
“If you even had a girlfriend, you might possibly understand one tenth of what he’s been through,” Damian said, rising to follow Lenny, but Jethro’s feet on the table blocked him.
“Yeah.” Jethro looked up and sneered. “His sugar daddy OD’d. I get it. But that was a long time ago, and—”
“It wasn’t that simple.” Damian kicked the bassist’s feet out of his way.
“Nothing ever is with him,” Jethro agreed.
“What gives you any right to go off on Jet?” Alice asked, gripping Damian’s wrist and turning it until his palm faced up. He still wore the long gloves covering the marks of his indiscretions, but he couldn’t help the heat that flooded his cheeks. She didn’t have to expose the physical evidence. Thrusting his hand away from her, she snarled and shook her head.
“Why does he even let you back in?”
Damian shrugged and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I’ll make it up to him.”
“This time. How you going to do that the time you end up like Ace?”
“I won’t.”
“Ask him how many times Ace made that promise to him, Trevor. He counts on you.”
“And I came through, didn’t I? Everyone’s contract is put away. All they have to do is show up on Friday and sign the new ones. You looked them over. You tell me. Are we better off, or aren’t we?”
She sighed. “You had better hope this means everyone starts calming the hell down, because I hate to think how
fast this band will disintegrate under the spotlight if it’s this bad already.”
“We’ll be fine. We just need to get back to work. Real work. Not the shit gigs Granger was giving us. You’ll see. Everything is going to be fine.”
10
BY THE time Damian made it to the street, Lenny had left the quieter lane on which the house was situated and reached the busy intersection a few blocks away. Damian ran to catch up with him.
“Lenny!”
Traffic zipped past, drowning out Damian’s attempt to get the other man’s attention. Scores of yellow cabs wove in and out of the less daring commuter traffic and Lenny tried to flag one of them down.
Damian reached him, stepped up close to the curb, and whistled. A wave of his hand brought one of the cabs to his side and he pulled the door open, holding it for Lenny.
“I’ll get my own, thanks,” Lenny told him, turning his back and trying to get the attention of another driver.
“Lenny, come on. We can’t keep not talking to each other. We live together, for crying out loud!”
Lenny peered at him through his bangs but said nothing.
“How many times do I have to apologize?”
“Buddy!” the cabby called, inching the vehicle forward a few inches. “You getting in, or what?”
Damian positioned himself so the cab couldn’t pull away and looked at his friend. “I’ll stand here all day, Lenny.”
“You can’t afford his fare if you do that. Not anymore.”
“You’re right.” Damian didn’t move.
“You’re an idiot.”
Gritting his teeth and sifting a deep breath through them, Damian nodded. “Right again.”
“You’re pissing that guy off.” Lenny pointed to the cab.
“I know.”
Instead of taking the offered bone, Lenny turned his back and started walking.
A spike of discomfort jabbed Damian’s insides.
“Lenny, please,” he blurted. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. I screwed up.”
Thankfully, his friend stopped walking, though he didn’t turn to face Damian.
“You should be pissed at me,” Damian rushed on. “I did it, and I can’t take it back. I wish I could.”
Without a word, Lenny shuffled forward once more, head lowered so Damian could barely see his red locks.
“Please don’t walk away from me.”
That made Lenny stop and turn. “You know what the worst part is?” he asked.
“What?” Damian held his breath, an attempt to stop the daggers of insecurity from penetrating him.
“Right there? Just now? You sounded exactly like Ace used to. Right after he’d kicked the shit out of me. Every time, he’d apologize and beg me not to walk away, and I kept going back. How idiotic is that?”
Damian sucked in a breath, gut-punched even though Lenny was three yards away.
“I’ll walk home,” Lenny said. “See you later.”
“Buddy!” The cabby shattered Damian’s fragile calm, and he found himself shaking. He stepped away from the car and swung the door closed with all his strength. The cab drove off in a squeal of tires and blaring horn. Damian threw a rude gesture after it.
“Shut you down again, did he?” Beks’s quiet voice, pitched almost too low for a girl, still cut through the hum of traffic and Damian turned to face her. Before he’d gathered his wits enough to tell her to go away, she looped her arm through his and started walking toward a nearby grassy alcove with a bench. Reluctantly, Damian allowed her to lead him in Lenny’s wake, though the guitar player was soon lost to sight, disappearing into the crowd.
“Suppose I deserved it,” Damian said after a while.
She pulled him down onto the bench, and then tucked her feet up so she could rest her chin on her knees. “What did you do?”
Damian shrugged. “Got drunk….”
Beks sat beside him in silence, still arm in arm with him, though that wasn’t remotely her style to be so girly.
“For a few days,” Damian added after a few more minutes passed.
“Who did you fuck?” she asked, as though wondering about the weather.
Damian winced. “Does it matter?”
“Apparently to him, it does.”
“Shouldn’t.” Damian kicked at a stone and watched it bounce across the sidewalk and under the wheel of a passing truck. “Not like I’m doing him.”
Beks didn’t seem to have a comment for that.
“Not like he lets me,” Damian ventured, curious what she thought of the idea.
“Good.”
Another sucker punch. “Good?”
“Yes, good. You’re bad for him.”
“What?” Damian stared at her.
She peered at him from under her black bangs and striped hat-brim. “You don’t see it, do you?”
“See what?”
“What he’s been like lately. The way he’s been acting? Talking less, not looking people in the eye, hardly ever smiling or laughing. The way he’s fused to that guitar, even though he hardly ever writes anything anymore. He carries it around like a security blanket, fiddles on it, and lets me do all the work. Which I don’t necessarily mind, because I’d do what I do anyway, but he normally loves to riff off the rest of us and lately he just sits and watches and listens and soaks it all up like a black fucking hole. Nothing ever comes out.”
Damian frowned. Had he noticed any of that? He offered a shrug, unwilling to admit that maybe he hadn’t.
“Don’t know how you could have not noticed,” Beks said, dropping her feet and swinging them.
Damian examined the cracked concrete sidewalk beneath his boots.
“This is exactly how he acted whenever things got really bad between him and Ace.”
He pulled Beks around to face him. “I have never, ever laid an unwanted finger on him, I swear!”
“Oh, honey. I know that. But you really think the only way to beat a guy up is punch him in the face?” She took his arm and twisted it to expose the bend of his elbow under its inadequate protection of thin wool. Just like Alice had earlier, she glanced at the spot where the tiny needle pricks gave him away, then looked him in the eye. He had nowhere to hide and nothing to say in his own defense. “How many times has he asked you not to do this shit?” she asked. It would have dug less if she’d sounded even a little bit angry. Her tone, though, was resigned.
“‘This shit’ is none of his or anyone else’s business.”
“You honestly believe that? Aside from the fact we’re your friends, we also need you to do your fucking job.”
“I do my job.” He twisted his arm free of her too-tight grasp. “It isn’t like I’m shooting up every other day. Once in a while. This was one time—”
“And how many ‘one times’ do you think Ace had before this shit killed him? You really going to go home and tell Lenny it was a one-off when we all know damn well it isn’t?”
“It isn’t anyone’s business!”
“You live with him, Trev.”
“We’re roommates.”
“So what? Just because he doesn’t let you fuck him, he has no right to care what happens to you? Or have you forgotten what it was like for him when Ace died?” She shook her head and sank against the hard back of the bench, crossing her arms over her chest in an attempt to contain herself on her own side of the seat. “Nobody thinks he was any good for Lenny as a boyfriend. No one liked what Ace was doing to him, but it nearly killed him when that asshole died, and you come home doing the same shit that killed him and how the fuck do you make yourself believe that’s okay?”
“You don’t know anything about him and me, Beks.”
“Apparently, neither do you, Damian. But I suggest you figure it out, because it’s starting to affect everything. These shiny new contracts are not going to be worth the paper they’re printed on if you’re dead.”
“I’m not going to die.”
“Ace probably didn’t think so eith
er.”
Silence. What could he say to that? The man’s overdose had been accidental, after all. He hadn’t searched out death, but it had found him anyway, and she was right. Lenny had been devastated.
“What good are nice contracts,” Beks asked after a moment, “if your band can’t stand being in the same room as you.”
Damian stared at her. “That isn’t how everyone feels.”
She lifted one eyebrow.
“Is it?”
For the long moment in which she didn’t respond, Damian felt everything he knew crumbling around him. Finally, she sighed and leaned her head on his shoulder. “No, Trev, it isn’t.” She petted his arm. “No more than normal, anyway. But you have to settle down. I mean seriously. How is it you are the only one of us who ever stood a fighting chance at being normal, and you’re the one going off the rails?”
“I am not—it was one weekend. Hardly a life of partying.”
“Ask Lenny how many times between when you stormed out of the apartment on him and when you sobered up and came home, he called and asked me to check the studio to see if you’d crashed there. You couldn’t call him? Let him know you were alive?”
“My phone died….” Even Damian knew that was a lame excuse.
“And not one person you were partying with had a phone you could borrow to make a quick ‘Hey, buddy, good news: I’m not dead in the gutter’ phone call.”
“Guess I didn’t think of it.”
“Guess not.” She extracted herself from him. “You know what, Trev? I didn’t like Ace. None of us did. He was a bully and very, very bad for Lenny. But Lenny loved him, no matter how awful it got, and he mourned him. He still does even though we all think he deserved so much better.” Standing, she gave him a last pat on the shoulder. “He still does.”
For the third time, words knocked him breathless.
“It isn’t like that,” he muttered to himself.
But not like what, exactly? He didn’t even know.
AFTER HIS talk with Beks, Damian didn’t feel much like company. Not even the silent company of a cab driver, so he walked home, trying very hard to shut his brain off. It took him nearly an hour to get back, his circuitous route making the trip far longer than it needed to be.