by Mercy Brown
Tonight he barely says anything to me and it sucks because this cave of sound is like my padded finger-painting room. It’s your average New Brunswick basement, part faded memories, part unfinished laundry, part weed-smoking, video-game-playing emporium, but this is the Soft band basement, so there’s no weed smoking here (weed makes us sound like a jam band and fuck that). Just our gear all lined up against the wall, like shadows of ourselves that live underground until they’re released out into the wild of the greater New York City metro club scene. We rehearse across from a large mirror so we can practice not looking like dicks on stage. There are four cheap mismatched area rugs on the concrete floor that we got from Joey’s father’s warehouse and we’ve hung black packing blankets on the walls so the sound doesn’t bounce off the cinder blocks. It’s not perfect, but it works okay and we rehearse at full volume, so that’s an accomplishment. There’s even a couch for hanging out at the other end, near the washer and dryer that is always full of laundry in various stages of being folded.
The band cave isn’t much to look at (unless you like to look at amplifiers, like we do), but it’s a place I love because I can come here and let go and create whatever I want with some of my favorite people in the universe. And while Bean may be topping my favorite-people list right now, much like I wish he was topping me right now, I can’t even make direct eye contact with him. So tonight the cave doesn’t feel like my safe place at all. It’s feeling like the inside of a grenade, and I have no idea who’s holding the pin.
But the strange thing is, Travis and I are playing better than ever, like we’re in some guitar battle of wills but instead of fighting each other, our guitar riffs are having beautiful, sexy, angry sex together. Oh Jesus let me not think about beautiful, angry sex with Travis right now because if we were alone, I’d probably rather just be on my knees with my head between his Les Paul and his dick.
Why do I keep thinking like this when I know it’s fucking everything up? Stupid sex hormones, that’s why. But I’ve got a mind, I can rise above biology. I think.
Travis doesn’t say much of anything to me all night, but he gives Cole a hard time about stepping all over my short lead on “Come On Over.” Then he loses patience when Joey misses the drum fill in “Short Shrift.” He storms out of the basement when it’s over and the beat brothers ask if I know what the hell his problem is, but I can’t bring myself to tell them. I never knew Travis could be so pissy, but I guess guys can be like that sometimes, if my limited experience is any indicator.
I say “limited” because the Michael Bolton fan was the last technical boyfriend I had, and that was nearly two years ago now. I met Josh in my Shakespeare survey course. He was a graduate student who was a TA in that class and ran my discussion section. He was from North Carolina and in his first year of the PhD program, and I should have known it would never last when he confessed that Soul Provider was his favorite album to “make love” to. In hindsight, it seems so obvious now that it was never going to work, not that I didn’t try. I even let him fuck me to “How Can We Be Lovers.” More than once! Sure, now the subliminal (or conscious, overt) message is obvious. But back then I was still smoking a lot of weed, okay? (He also apparently had no idea of what a clitoris is, or its function, or where to locate it. I really hope he’s sorted that out by now or has realized he’s gay.) Josh would get really moody like Travis is now, usually when I couldn’t do something lame like go out on a Friday night because I had a show to play or to be at. He would come out with me sometimes, but he said he thought my band was “brackish” (no, really, he said “brackish”) and too loud and I’d be better off with an acoustic guitar so my voice could be more prominent and I wouldn’t have to screech so much. I could even cover “How Can We Be Lovers.” Suffice it to say it didn’t last, and afterwards, I decided it just wasn’t the right time in my life for a relationship. I was just going to be a nun of rock ’n’ roll, only with more hand jobs.
I was with Josh when I first met Travis. Travis lived down the hall from me in Demarest dorm when he was a sophomore and I was in my first semester of my freshman year. I’d heard him playing out of a little Princeton Reverb amp every day for two months before I got the nerve to walk down the hall and ask him about it. He’d just done a flawless “Back in Black” solo, his door was open, and I walked in and asked him what year his Les Paul was. He handed it right to me and I started playing “Starpower” by Sonic Youth and we started talking about the album EVOL, and the next thing I knew, I was half an hour late to Spanish. We were friends from then on. A month later when he joined Soft and we first jammed, it was fucking magic. It really was. Not just that he was good, but he knew when to layer it in heavy, when to pull back, when he needed more growl in his tone from the Tube Screamer, less bite from the MXR. When to get out of my way and when to take over. He clicked with Cole right away and he put up with Joey, which is all Cole and I could have asked of anyone.
He was just right, is what he was. He still is, if we could just stop being awkward and weird.
Rehearsal ends abruptly when a storm rolls in overhead and the lights flicker. We stop playing just in time to hear the loud crash of a lightning strike, somewhere way too damn close for me, and I get antsy because oh shit, do I hate lightning. My house got hit by lightning when I was fourteen and although we were all perfectly fine, I’ve never gotten over my fear of it. Travis and Cole and Joey know this about me. I will not rehearse during thunderstorms and luckily, if there’s a storm while we’re playing a show, the music is normally so loud I don’t even notice. But if I do notice? Oh hell no. I unplug and curl up in a ball somewhere.
I’m frantically unplugging my amp, the PA, and everything in the basement now.
“Emmy, it’s fine,” Joey says, exasperated. “It’ll be over in just a few minutes. We really should take another pass through ‘Fire in the Empire’ before we quit for the night.”
Another lightning strike nearby sounds like two eighteen-wheelers just had a head-on collision upstairs in the living room. I jump so high I nearly hit the crappy drop-ceiling tile over my head.
“We’re done for tonight,” Travis says. He turns and puts his hand on my arm. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, trying to stay cool. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”
I start to calm down as we’re packing up and it sounds like the lightning is moving farther away. Travis asks me if I want a ride home, hands all shoved in his pockets, biting his lower lip, trying to look nonchalant but failing as he waits for me to say yes, but I don’t say yes. Then Travis leaves, all pissed off. Great.
The truth is, I’m not ready to be alone with Travis because (see above) if I’m alone with him I’m pretty sure I’m going to blow him and that’s just not going to help anything right now. I’m trying to wait until I get over this temporary compulsion to hump him until his legs are numb, but I really can’t do it yet because I can’t stop thinking of his fingers in me, his tongue up in me as I’m coming all over it. His face when he finally gets his dick into me all the way. I can’t stop thinking about how much I want to see that again.
I can’t describe how much it hurts, now that I know what I’m missing.
***
It’s Friday night now and we’re wrapping up our set at the Melody. We’re playing upstairs where the live room is, just to the left of the bar. Tonight we’re playing between Hanna Octane and Red Five, and the place is jam-packed with sweaty, half-drunk bodies and we’re having a great night. We’re on our last song and the crowd is pressed all the way up to the lip of the low stage, right on us so I can’t even move. Joey is killing it behind me with the cymbals. Cole is to my left, his fingers bleeding on the bass he’s rocking so hard. God I love that guy. Travis is to my right, his hair full of sweat and in his eyes, and Millie is right in front of him, so close she can cloud up his pick guard with her horny, gin-soaked breath, but his eyes are closed, like he’s not even here.
He doesn’t even realize there are a hundred people here glued to every note he plays.
Despite the weirdness between me and Travis, we’ve hit some new level of playing together where it all just works and when I’m singing I disappear into the words and I don’t care about anything but letting it all go and being part of that feeling. I finish the last chorus of our last song tonight and look over at Travis, and he’s giving me the look. The look that says Let’s fucking do this, and I’m so here for that. I nod and he gives me the nod back. The room sways and Bean rips into some insane feedback that sounds like the world is ending, and so I turn around and crank up the gain on my Big Muff (another guitar pedal, a big Soviet-style green metal box that could probably make a pretty good weapon used as a projectile), face my Fender Twin, and my rig lets out this gorgeous, angelic howl and together with the low rumble from Travis’s half stack it’s all so beautiful in a postapocalyptic destroy-diamonds-in-the-rubble kind of way. At the end of the set, we are all high on the feeling of it. We leave the crowd begging us for an encore we won’t do because we’re already over time and we’re not dicks.
“Hey, Mickey is here,” Joey says as I’m gathering up my pedals. He points to the bar, and sure enough, Mickey Melchiondo, or Dean Ween as he’s known, is having a beer there with a few other locals. Holy shit.
Ween are heroes of the New Brunswick music scene. Dean and Gene Ween started out in the Court Tavern basement with just a boom box and each other and made it all the way to Elektra Records. They understand what it’s like to be a Jersey band (even if they’re from New Hope), to be treated like shit in New York City and Philadelphia, to work twice as hard to be taken seriously. They’re a major-label, nationally touring act now—the ones who got out of here and made it. They’re who I want to be.
“Go talk to him,” Joey says. “Maybe we’ll get that opener spot at Ag Field Day.”
I look up and feel a burning in the pit of my stomach. I’ve been introduced to Mickey before—he and Aaron come back to New Brunswick often enough to hang out and Carl from the Court is their regular sound guy when they go on tour. They’re plenty approachable, not dicks at all. This is actually a good night for Mickey to catch our set but there’s nothing I can think of to say to him without sounding like an asshole.
“Em, go see what he thought of our set,” Joey prods me.
“How can I do that without being douchey?”
“Just go sit at the bar,” he says. “We’ll get the gear.”
But I’m not going alone, that’ll look so obvious. I ask Travis if he’ll come get a drink at the bar with me.
“Why do you need me to get a drink with you?” he asks. “I’ve got gear to load.”
“Please?” I say.
Travis schleps our amps over to the gear lounge and then comes back into the room and points at the bar. I meet him there and he orders himself a Guinness and me a vodka tonic. He hands Greg the bartender our drink tickets, but Greg gives them right back.
“You guys were on fucking fire tonight,” he says. “All drinks on the house forever.”
That’s why we love this town.
Mickey is deep in conversation with Billy Broadband. We don’t really know Mickey, we’ve just met him once and he’s an actual rock star and I for one am sweating, stinking, my hair is a mess, and I’m sure my eyeliner is all over my face so I’m not going to make a point of talking to him. Bean and I drink our round in relative silence. Travis isn’t even looking at me now, but looking around like he’s searching for someone else. I hope it’s not Millie, but I’m pretty sure it is. I’m staring at his profile, the bead of sweat he wipes from his brow with a cocktail napkin. I poke him in the arm and he gives me an annoyed look, so I raise my glass to him in toast.
“For that feedback solo,” I say. “The best I may have ever heard.”
He stares blankly at me. He doesn’t raise his glass. He just finishes his beer as he levels this stern sort of look at me. Then he orders us another round and damn, we must have played really well because my drink is strong as hell.
Red Five has started to play and it’s louder than war in here. I lean over and yell in Travis’s ear so he can hear me.
“What the hell is your problem?”
“What’s my problem?” he says. “What’s yours?”
“You’re so mad at me all the time now,” I say, and then I try to take a teasing approach and punch him in the shoulder and lean in. “This is the thanks I get for letting you fuck me?”
“Letting me fuck you?” he says, and he doesn’t find it funny, that’s obvious. “Emmy, you begged me to fuck you.”
I blush, bite my lip like a fool because this is actually true. And fuck him anyway because now I am remembering fucking him all over again, in acute detail. I was so thankfully distracted by all that excellent rock we just conjured up in this joint, but now in my mind I’m right back to last weekend, when I was fully naked on my bed, on my back with Travis hovering over me. I shoved his pants down, his boxers, felt the muscles tensing in his thighs, and then he was naked on top of me, hard against my leg.
For a few minutes we did nothing but kiss, with him harder and harder against my inner thigh, teasing me with his tongue, breathing into me until I couldn’t take any more. I needed him and I told him, just like that.
“I’m here,” he said. Then he took my hand and intertwined his fingers with mine and kissed them. “I’m right here.”
“I want you now. Please, now,” I said, and then reached down and felt him in my hand the first time, and oh holy God he was so long and thick and hard I thought he was going to break me. But that only made me want him more.
“Let me get a condom,” he said, his voice low and raspy.
“It’s all right, I’m on the pill.”
That was me being stupid and horny and carried away, but I have to be honest and say I meant it. I would have let him fuck me bare. I’d already come on his fingers, his tongue and all I wanted was to see his face when he came inside of me. And it wasn’t fair, either. He went still and groaned into my neck, swearing as he fought with himself. I wrapped my hand around him and guided him between my legs and brushed the tip of him against me to get it wet and I could see him agonizing over it but he finally said, “No, come on, let’s take care of each other.” I don’t know how he was able to be so levelheaded, because I sure wasn’t, but it’s very much like him to be the careful one. To be sensible when I cannot. It’s like his job or something.
He reached down to the floor and pulled his wallet out of his jeans. There was a Trojan in there. With spermicide. And I still try not to think about why, or who he intended it for, whether that might be Millie or any other girl in this town who wants him who isn’t me. I took it out of his hand and opened it with my teeth and with one hand rolled it down his cock, and as he leaned his head down to kiss me again and I felt his hair tickle my face, I was both terrified and elated because I had wondered about this very moment for a long, long time. And I worried, What if it sucks? What if it’s not all that I imagined it would be? What if I’m not all he thinks I am? I thought about how he looks at me when I’m singing when I sometimes glance over at him on stage—the look. The one he gave me just tonight before the end of our set. He stares at me, his mouth open, tongue between his teeth, sweat in his eyes and on his hands as they glide over the guitar strings and now those hands have been all over me, those beautiful hands just last weekend were nudging my legs apart so he could position himself in between them.
“Emmy,” he said, his voice hoarse because it was so late and things were so intense. The sound of my name when he said it then lodged itself in the happiest part of my mind and decided to settle down for good and it’s still there, vivid as it was a week ago. He slid his length over me where I was so, so wet and kissed this spot I never noticed before just under and behind my ear as I raked my nails over his back, urging him to keep
going. “Are you ready?” he whispered.
“Yeah,” I said, but my voice cracked because I was near giddy with the feel of his cock against me. “So ready.”
He took a breath, locked his eyes on mine and slid slowly into me, this very sweet and total occupation. Then he covered my mouth with a deep, heartfelt kiss.
And it wasn’t everything I ever fantasized about with him. It wasn’t my dream come true.
It was so much better than that.
It was a warm fire branding its light onto a cold darkness. It was an experience, is what I’m saying. I’m no virgin, I’ve had sex before but somehow the feel of Travis inside of me was something I’ve never felt, something I never knew I could feel. I never knew anything could feel so good in so many ways at once.
We both made this sound together, somewhere between breathing and groaning, and then I said his name and he kissed me again, hard, and pushed again until he was finally all the way in. I shook with the feeling of it, there was so much feeling there and he tried so hard to be careful, to not move too fast or push too hard so he wouldn’t hurt me but I didn’t care if he hurt me, I just wanted him to move. I wanted him to lose it with me. I wanted him to fuck me, and I asked him—no, he’s right—I begged him.
“God, Travis, fuck me. Please, please fuck me,” I said and bit down on his shoulder and sucked a mark into it, digging my nails in his back. And then he did because I moved my hips and he couldn’t help it. He tried to go slow at first but as I moved beneath him, he started to really pound me and he was swearing, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, Emmy, you feel so fucking good,” and I was so gone with the feel of him I wanted to disappear forever inside that moment. I wanted to keep him there with me and never come back.