by Jaime Samms
When his fingers faltered and he stepped back to catch his breath, the entire band ground to a halt.
“Shit,” Clive muttered, pushing back from his kit. “Maybe shouldn’t have played that one.”
“It’s fine.” Len yanked his strap off over his head and set the guitar on a stand. “Need some air. I’ll be back.”
He all but dashed from the room and down the hall to the stairs at the far end. When he reached them, he went up instead of down. On the roof, a stiff breeze washed over him. Drawing in a breath, glad of the cool night breeze, he headed for a group of mismatched seating at the far side.
An old Adirondack someone had hauled up didn’t look too grungy, and he sat down. Pushing his hands into his hair, he focused on the gravel between his feet. His breath came in fast, shallow pants, and he thought back to so many visits to Dr. Stanton’s office when he’d been unable to breathe at all. It was like that now, and try as he might, he couldn’t pull in a real breath. He almost wished for the sticky, messy lump of emotion he’d lived with for so long. At least it had been familiar. This stinging pain deep in his gut was not.
One of the guys would surely follow him up here sooner or later, and he wanted not to be hyperventilating when they arrived.
It was Clive who eventually sat down on the edge of a lounger beside him.
“Dude, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have picked that one.”
Len snorted. “Why? Because it’s true?”
“Because—it was—he wrote that a long time ago. Just after—”
“No. He didn’t. He was working on it before I left. I wrote that music. Last thing I did before I left. I was trying to write it down one day in our apartment. He offered to help, and you know what I did?”
Clive sighed and took a pack of smokes out of his breast pocket. He lit one, and they both watched the smoke drift away.
“Same thing I always did. I was shit to him, Clive.”
Clive said nothing, but drew another puff of his cigarette and sat back in his chair.
“Times like this I sort of wish I smoked,” Len mused, picking a splinter of wood as long as his finger from the edge of the weather-beaten table beside him.
“Don’t. It’s a filthy habit.” Clive studied the end of the cigarette, drawing Len’s attention there. The glow worked its slow way down the white shaft. There was just enough light to see the paper wiggle out of existence a tiny increment at a time.
“You’re going to be a dad,” Len said.
A grin crossed Clive’s face. “Crazy.”
“You can’t smoke around a baby.”
“No shit, genius. I’ll quit. Have, mostly.” He patted his stomach. “You didn’t notice?”
In fact, Len hadn’t really thought about the weight that had accumulated around Clive’s middle. It certainly wasn’t substantial, and he hadn’t lost any of his buff build. If anything, he no longer looked like a starving musician. None of them did, really. They all looked healthy and prosperous. Except Damian. Len began to shred the bit of wood.
“I used to hide in my room after we’d….” A flush crept into his cheeks because really, the sex, or near-sex he and Damian had engaged in had never really been public, or even band knowledge. “We’d fool around sometimes, and when it got too much, I’d lock him out of my room. I was doing that a lot near the end. It wasn’t… I didn’t think what it was doing to him, ya know? Psychological warfare or something. I wasn’t doing it to hurt him. I just… he wanted more and I couldn’t.”
“And it never occurred to you not to start what you couldn’t finish?”
Len sighed. “Nothing was logical then, Clive. Makes me sound like an idiot, but no, it never occurred to me. I wrote a lot of that angry music then. Because I was angry. At everything, and taking it out on him. That was one of the pieces I wrote in the last few weeks before I left. He wrote the lyrics but wouldn’t let me see them. Said he wanted them to be done before I heard it.” The splinter of wood was nearly gone, and he dropped what was left and brushed the shredded bits off his jeans.
“Guess now I know why.”
Clive drew on his cigarette and said nothing.
“Vance took the melody and made it country, you know.”
Clive snorted.
“Not sure if it was just a thing he did because it was my music or what. Guess Stan’ll have to figure out what to do about it being the same music.”
“Wonder if it’s the first time two songs have been written to the same music. Grunge and country.” He grinned. “Sure we can work something out.”
Len hoped so. He couldn’t deny he had a personal stake in Vance’s song, after all. As much as he did in Trevor’s.
Clive shifted his weight as though he might get up. “Come back down and play ours through to the end.”
“Suppose I deserve that much torture.”
But Len didn’t get up, and Clive stayed where he was.
“It isn’t about him wanting to hurt you with this. Just come and play. And listen. You might be surprised.”
Len nodded, but wasn’t in a hurry for Clive to finish his cigarette. The companionable silence lasted until Clive butted out, but then he looked over and Len braced himself.
It took long moments for Clive to finally speak. “I want to understand this, Lenny.”
Len rolled his eyes and sank back in his chair. “You and me both.”
“I’m serious.”
So am I.
Len sighed heavily. “My entire life story is a long and shitty one that goes back beyond nasty foster parents, Clive. I don’t like to think about it.”
“Someone did something really horrible to you.”
“A lot of someones did a number of unpleasant things, yes. I learned not to fight back when I couldn’t win. When I was too small to understand what I was giving away by not fighting. And by the time Ace came along, I was too messed up to care. The first time I woke up to him fucking me and he beat me unconscious, it didn’t occur to me that I should fight back. He could choke me till I passed out and do whatever he wanted to me. There was no defense for that. He was a twisted son of a bitch.” He was playing with the ornate cuff around his wrist, turning it round and round, but he did notice he hadn’t picked at the healing scar on his wrist or made it bleed again. “Sex is so fucked up for me. I didn’t do what I did to Trev because I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to love him. I wanted not to fuck up what we had by having sex with him.”
“But you did have sex with him.”
“Sort of, yeah. I suppose. Not the way either of us wanted. But that’s not really possible.” He held up his wrist with its telltale cuff. “He and I aren’t compatible that way.”
Clive grunted.
Silence, broken only by the distant sounds of the traffic below, settled between them.
“You and Vance. You’re compatible that way?” Clive asked after a few minutes.
“Yeah.”
“How do you know it’s what you want? How do you know it isn’t just another version of everything that’s been fucked up in your life?”
How did he know? “Have you even been on your own? Done your own thing without a guy there to tell you how to live your life?” That thought was more terrifying than a thousand more nights of Ace. Lenny shivered.
“Because maybe Vance is just a safer version of not having to make your own decisions.”
That Len could latch on to, and he turned to face Clive. “Two people in my life, ever, have actually given me the freedom to make up my own mind about anything, Clive. Two.”
“And I guess you’re going to say Vance is one of them.”
“Giving me the freedom to say no to him also gave me the freedom to say yes, and Ace, my father, no one ever gave me that choice before. Well. Except—”
“Damian?”
“You.”
Clive’s mouth opened, then closed again. In the near-darkness, his bald head was a pale globe, but his features were hard to make out. Lenny could only see the ou
tline of his jaw work as he silently digested that.
“Me?” he said finally. “How the hell do you mean that?”
“At first, when you kicked me out of the band, I thought it was just another time I didn’t fight back when I should have. I could have demanded my place. I could have used the contracts to fight the decision, and for a while, I hated myself for rolling over and letting it happen. But I’ve thought about it a lot. Stan made really sure to mention the contracts. To say we all had the same one, we all knew how they worked, and when I think back to that day now, I think maybe you were hoping I’d fight you on it.”
Clive said nothing. His fists were balled on his knees, and tension ran through his arms and shoulders. His white T-shirt strained over his taut muscles. “I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”
“I know. And you used the contracts to give me a way out. I didn’t take it. I could have. I kept thinking, for days and weeks after, that I would. But you’d given me that choice, to use it to get my place back. I decided not to.”
“I don’t think I put as much thought into it as you’re giving me credit for,” Clive admitted. “I was just mad. At you and myself for not seeing. At Stan for letting me do that to you. At Vance for whisking you away and not letting you see us. Maybe because some days, I thought he was letting you get away with it all. And then others, I was worried he was isolating you. Mostly, I had no idea what to think at all.”
“When we first started talking about Firefly, way back in high school, do you remember what you told me?”
Clive shrugged. “I was an ass. I think I told you to bugger off. That you were only there because Trev kept bringing you around.”
Len smiled. “Yeah. But you also said I could be good enough if I wanted to be. You told me to stop riding his coattails and screw the dyslexia because that didn’t matter when I was playing guitar. You said it was my choice to be good enough to be in the band, your choice to kick me out if I was only there so I could stay in Trev’s shadow.”
“I was a complete shit.”
“You were right.”
“I could have been nicer about it.”
“Maybe if you’d been nicer, I wouldn’t have made the decision to get better. I wouldn’t have worked so hard to get over all my little insecurities and issues to be good enough for you.”
Clive looked at him sharply. “Good enough for me? What does that mean, exactly? Did you have some sort of crush or something?”
Len almost laughed. “Yeah right. You wish, straight boy. No. Unless a little kid wishing he had a big brother to kick all the demons out of his life counts. I wanted to be good enough for you to want to protect me.”
“And in the end, I took away the one thing you loved.”
“You did the right thing. You saved me from ruining what was left of my life. You gave me a chance to accept the help, Clive, and I don’t know that anyone else could have done that for me.”
“So. I’m confused. You’re happy that I kicked you out of the band.”
Len faced forward again, staring out over the city, watching the long line of traffic disappear down one of the main streets until it became a continuous streak of red light in the distance.
“When I needed my father to protect me, he didn’t. When I needed Ace to keep me safe, he didn’t. When I needed Damian to hold on to me, he didn’t.” He looked over at Clive and offered a weak smile in the dark. “Every time I needed someone to do the hard thing, they left me hanging. All but you. You always stepped up and made the hard call. The one that hurt. The one I needed. Maybe none of the others could. Maybe they all had shit going on that kept them inside themselves and didn’t let them see me. But if you ever did it on purpose, or only by instinct, you never took the easy route with me. I don’t know why, but the truth is, you’ve always looked out for what was best for me.”
Clive was staring at him, and he could see unnatural brightness glinting in his eyes from the light above the doorway.
“This kid?” Len said. “Luckiest kid in the world to have a guy like you for a dad.”
Clive barked a rough laugh. “I don’t know the first thing about being a father, Lenny.”
“Yeah, you do. You’ve been the best big brother a guy could ask for, and you’ll be a stellar dad.”
“You’re so full of shit.” Clive sniffed and sank back in his chair to face away from Len, gazing out over the lights below. “Such a douche,” he muttered.
“Well, yeah.” Len sat back and waited for Clive to be ready to go back down. “Maybe. But thanks, just the same.”
“Whatever.”
LEN COULD have played the lead in his sleep. He’d written it, after all, and it was ingrained in him as deeply as his own name, his sexuality, his certainty he was a musician, even though this was the song he’d stopped playing altogether to avoid. This song would forever be a bittersweet reminder that he had almost ruined the thing he loved the most. He’d written it in anger and fear and frustration, and the grinding chords reflected that. Beks’s strident keyboards did nothing to soften its edges, and the bitter words Damian had paired with the music, nothing like the plaintive ones Vance had fashioned, finished out its harsh lines.
The first verse was brutal.
If you leave, if you stay away, nothing left, nothing to save the day,
I’ll die waiting for the love you’ll never feel.
But I’ll die praying you’ll never hurt this way
Another turning of the wheel
Maybe we’ll save the world, maybe we’ll save a heart,
Maybe we’ll bleed together, die in each other’s arms.
It’s just another turning, just another breath away from nothing left.
They were desperate, and they hurt to hear. They made his heart ache. They made him want to make promises all over again, and he knew he was not hiding the effect they had on him very well.
There was a lot about chains and being held down, about bruises and scars in the chorus, and that was humiliating, because he couldn’t deny it was barely disguised truth. He didn’t dare look at anyone in the room as they played. He pounded out the guitar riffs, aggressively sawing through the pain and making the music the vehicle to get it all out.
By the end of the second verse, he’d closed his eyes and mostly turned his back so he could get through it without scrutiny from the others. Still, his hands shook, and if his fingers hadn’t known what to do without help from his brain, he would have been lost. All he could do by that point, as the chorus swung upward again with its savage lyrics, was play through. Play. Hit the strings and form the chords, and fucking play, because that was all he had to get him through.
There was no Vance to steady him, no Kilmer to tell him if he was doing it right. No Damian to glare at him or his alter ego Trevor to hold his hand. There was only his guitar, his hands, and the music, and he clung to it.
If you came back would it all change?
The voice crooning through the mic was not Christian’s. It was too throaty, too sultry.
Is there anything left to save?
Len didn’t dare turn around to see. He’d been so lost inside the music, he hadn’t noticed the door open, hadn’t seen Damian walk in. He wasn’t prepared for the wall of utter terror that slammed into him.
I’ll live waiting for the love you can’t say.
But I’ll be praying you’ll never hurt this way.
Len played on, back still turned, because all he had to ground himself was the music he’d made. The angry, hard music Damian had turned into a brutal, razor-edged love song with his words.
Another turning of the wheel
Maybe we’ll save the world, maybe we’ll save a heart,
Maybe we’ll bleed together, live for the other side.
It’s just another turning, just another breath away from
Learning to play again.
“Jesus shit!” Lenny sagged. His hands fell away from the guitar, and Christian automatically took over the rhythm, as thoug
h he’d practiced long and hard to be able to seamlessly cover for breaking-apart band members.
And maybe he had. He’d been playing pick-up sticks with his bandmates since he’d agreed to sign on. But he did take over, and the song played on without Lenny. Damian belted out the last chorus, this time with more words of healing than of hurt, though the edge remained.
Lenny stood where he was and shook and tried hard to blink back the fever of tears streaming from his eyes. He was no nearer to control when arms snaked around his middle under the guitar, and he couldn’t help but lean back and take comfort in the embrace.
“How’s that for rip-your-heart-out perfection?” Damian asked, a whisper in Len’s ear.
Len nodded. “Yeah.”
“We made that,” Damian said. “You and me.”
“When’d you get here?” Len shifted and thought about shaking him off and turning. But Damian held on, and Len was grateful, because it let him hide just a little while longer. As though it was easier to have the conversation when he didn’t have to look his accuser in the eye.
“A while ago. You were on the roof. You didn’t check your messages?”
Len shook his head.
“And I left you a voice mail and everything, so you didn’t have to read it.”
“Sorry.”
“No big.” Damian squeezed him and rested his head between Len’s shoulder blades. “You sound good, Lenny.”
“Your voice is rough.”
Damian’s weight shifted. “Yeah.” He took a breath, as though he was going to say more, but then didn’t.
“Trev, I’m sorry. You know that, right?”
A nod against his back and a long silence as the others shuffled out the door and closed it behind them.
“I have nightmares,” Trevor said, finally moving away.
“Fuck.” Len sagged more deeply into himself. “That’s my fault.”
“Don’t know. I wake up screaming sometimes. It’s hard on my throat. Stan’s there, but he can’t get into my head, especially when I’m asleep. It’s getting better.”
“I’m sorry.”