Collision Course

by Anne-Marie Flemming

  The situation there hadn’t changed. The bus driver was still doing a little housekeeping, and the one lone crew member listened to music. I sat down on the same couch where I’d sat with Rhys for a few minutes the night before, and tried to keep my mind occupied.

  Maybe Oz and Angus would be able to help me out a bit, I hoped, since I’d gotten along with them so well the night before. However, I wasn’t sure what the two of them would think of me suddenly being attached to Rhys. It was possible they would not be enthusiastic about having facilitated this odd sort of tag-along.

  It made me wonder whether Rhys had done this before, or whether this was the first time he’d spontaneously invited some guy along on the bus. I was pretty sure he'd been in a relationship a while back – a boyfriend? - but obviously, he wasn’t with him any longer. The question was, how wild or tame had he been living ever since that last relationship had ended?

  I wasn’t expecting to be replacing a former boyfriend. Hell, I wasn’t expecting much of anything out of this little trip. I knew better than to delude myself into thinking that Rhys liked me for any other reason than the fact that I gave good head. Anything beyond that would have been just arrogance on my part. The man was a rock star. I was someone completely random. The goal was simply to get him to keep me around for a little while.

  A few days, he’d said, asking me along, and I intended to make the most of them. It was, after all, an opportunity that didn’t come along every day.

  I’d been staring into space and out the window for the better part of half an hour before more people began to arrive. The first few men climbing up the stairs I didn’t know, and they barely looked at me anyway.

  Then, finally, Oz climbed into the bus. I gave him a smile, because that seemed polite, even though he didn’t look at me at first. Then his eyes scanned the room and I saw him taking notice, and recognition spread across his features just a moment later.

  “Oh, hey,” he said, smiling slightly. I thought he sounded a little surprised, but not in any way confused.

  “Hello again,” I said cheerfully.

  “Are you coming with us?” he wanted to know, still sounding polite, and soft-spoken as always.

  “It would appear so, yes,” I replied, wondering whether he would be able to figure the rest of the story out from here. He only smiled, gave me a sincere nod, and walked past me.

  Oz was an alright kinda guy, I thought. Little seemed to rattle him, and he had an air of dependability about him that I’d never generally associated with any member of a rock band before. I resolved on the spot that he was the one to go to if I ever had any sort of trouble while on this trip.

  It was another half an hour or so until the other band member I already knew appeared on the bus. Angus was accompanied by a stout man with long, dark hair in a ponytail and a full beard whom I was certain I had never seen before.

  “Heeey!” Angus said towards me, almost as soon as he spotted me, sounding glad enough to be seeing me again and looking the part too.

  “What’s up?” I greeted him. The long-haired man frowned at me.

  “You know him?” he asked Angus, who nodded. “Well, what the hell’s he doing here?”

  Angus shrugged, and I promptly despised Rhys for putting me into this situation, which, if I read it all correctly, was about to make a full tilt for the awful. I had no idea how to explain myself. About six or seven people around us were shamelessly listening in.

  “I was invited along,” I said, trying so, so hard to sound confident. It was difficult with this guy glaring down at me, obviously wanting to kick me out as fast as humanly possible.

  “By who?” he demanded to know, unveiled hostility in his voice.

  My answer was a little more timid than I might have wished for. “Rhys.”

  I watched Angus’s face. The guitarist didn’t look surprised, but turned to watch the long-haired man’s reaction.

  “For fuck’s sake,” the man was muttering, and nodded at one of the crew members. “Go check with Rhys about that.”

  I couldn’t really blame him for being skeptical, but I wished he’d had a slightly more tactful way of expressing it. While the crew guy he’d spoken to moved towards the stairs to the top level of the bus, long-haired guy also made his way further back, albeit more slowly, and ignoring me now as though I’d never existed.

  “Alright. Who’s missing?” I hear him ask, but couldn’t catch an answer.

  I only just managed to see Angus’s head turning back towards me, and then the guitarist was already moving to sit besides me. I wanted to hug him.

  “Don’t take it personally,” he advised me, giving me a bit of a scrutinizing look. “It’s sort of his job to question everything.”

  “He’s your tour manager?” I asked, pretty certain I was right.

  “Yeah,” Angus confirmed. “Dave. Big D, we call him.”

  I nodded. I was insanely thankful that Angus had taken pity on me and engaged me in conversation to make me feel a little less awkward and a little more welcome amidst all these strange faces.

  “So you’re coming along for a bit, huh?” Angus asked. I nodded again, deeply. He was classy enough not to comment on how I’d gotten Rhys to invite me. I was pretty sure it wasn’t hard to figure out.

  “Sweet,” was all he said in response. Next thing I knew, the bus shuddered to life.

  “We’re actually leaving on time for a change,” I heard one of the roadies comment, glancing at his phone.

  Then we started moving, turning into the road, and I realized belatedly that I hadn’t a clue how long the drive would take, or what would happen once we got to Kansas City. I didn’t know how far along this trip I would be allowed to come. It was all adding up to one decision I tried hard to be proud of.

  For a while, I listened to the chatter around me. I didn’t know anyone down here apart from Oz and Angus, and them just barely, so it wasn’t a wonder nobody had much of an interest in talking to me. Instead, I tried to get the measure of the people I would be traveling with for the next few days. Also, I didn’t have a clue what else to do, so sitting and listening was pretty much my only option. During the time I did that, I also tried my hardest to look confident, which wasn’t the easiest job in the world for me. I was sorely lacking in that department.

  The downstairs crowd began to disperse after a while. A couple of the guys started drinking, but more of them went upstairs, or to the other lounge at the very back of the bus. Early afternoon turned into late afternoon turned into evening, and I began to feel a little more comfortable navigating the bus as I went to the bathroom repeatedly, accepted a beer from Oz, went to join Angus and some other guys watching TV in the other lounge. The alcohol was all that had been in my stomach all day, and even though Oz told me there were granola bars and fruit in the cupboard, I was beyond thankful when we rolled to a stop in order to, as Big D put it, get some grub in us.

  Even Rhys appeared downstairs for the first time since he’d left me by myself before we had even started driving. It had been hours, and he looked a little tired.

  “Jerking off been fun?” someone asked.

  “Songwriting,” Rhys corrected him seriously.

  We stepped outside the bus, Big D telling us to “keep it to half an hour, please, folks”. Darkness had already fallen, so we navigated by illuminated signs, advertising McDonald's, Hardees, Wendy’s, Subway and various other fast food chains. There was even a Chinese place wedged in there somewhere. The crowd broke into small groups soon, each steering into a different direction, and as I eyed the food chains, I realized with ultimate dread that I’d left my billfold in my backpack on the bus.

  Brilliance was almost certainly my real middle name.

  I felt too stupid going back now and then trying to find everyone else again. But I was also too shy to ask someone to lend me money. Instead I hooked my thumbs into my pockets and followed a group at random, this one containing Angus, Rhys, and two more guys whose names I hadn’t had a chan
ce to learn yet, all headed for Subway.

  I liked the food there too, which made it even worse for me to stand there and know I wouldn’t be able to have any. Gritting my teeth as everyone else got in line, I realized that Rhys was looking at me. I was surprised to see it. He was the last person I would have expected to be concerned.

  “Aren’t you going to get any?” he asked.

  “I’m not hungry,” I lied blatantly. That drew several more stares.

  “Cone on, you gotta eat something,” Angus protested.

  I just shrugged and realized more lying was in order, because quite frankly, I was way too frightened to fess up.

  “I’m not used to traveling like this, it kinda messed with my stomach,” I informed them. “I haven’t been really hungry all day. It’s fine, really.”

  Angus looked as though he half wanted to force-feed me something. Even Rhys was still looking concerned.

  “You need to eat something,” one of the crew guys joined the chorus.

  “I didn’t even bring money,” I shrugged, still waving it away as though it was all no big deal. “Seriously, it’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay.” Rhys had gotten out his billfold and was pointing to the place in line directly in front of him. “You're too thin. What do you want?”

  I hadn’t meant for that to happen. I felt myself blushing, but in order to avoid a reputation as either weird of difficult, I obediently stepped in front of him.

  Angus was still peering down at me. “Are you blushing?” he asked, amused.

  I looked somewhere to the left of his feet.

  “I’m not really used to people buying me food,” I muttered, giving him an embarrassed half.-smile before turning to Rhys. “I’m paying you back,” I told him.

  “Okay,” was all he said. His tone indicated he had expected me to do so anyway.

  My face was still heated when I eventually ordered. I waited by the register for Rhys to pay for both of our meals, trying not to look at my sandwich as though I wanted to devour it on the spot – which is, to be precise, exactly what I wanted to do.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He nodded once. We stood in silence and waited for everyone else’s orders to be filled, and I found myself wishing that he wasn’t so difficult to talk to. I felt comfortable enough with Angus by now to strike up a conversation, or at least, I wouldn’t have felt any silence to be an uncomfortable one. With Rhys, it seemed like he carried an aura of disapproval with him wherever he went.

  I wasn’t happy with how the Subway trip had turned out. Needy and irresponsible were not the attributes I wanted to display, and I doubted Rhys found it attractive in the slightest that I hadn’t wanted to eat. I really, really wished I would have had an easier time being myself. The guy who said “fuck it” and had no problems admitting he’d forgotten his money, the same one who’d been so opinionated and comfortable talking to Angus and Oz, had gotten lost somewhere between Rhys' hotel room and this first rest stop. I was regressing to the chronically shy, self-doubting shadow of a boy I'd been in high school.

  I thought about it for the entirety of the walk back to the bus, wondering how I could fix this. Rhys was bound to lose interest faster than I could blink if I kept acting this way.

  I sat back down at the table in the downstairs lounge once we got back to the bus and on the road. The sub smelled so damn good I wanted to inhale it, but instead I forced myself to pick at it, to lend credence to my cover story of not having an appetite. Everyone else was taking chunks as big as my fist out of their food. Even though I’d only gotten a small portion, I forced myself to stop eating after the worst of the hunger pangs in my stomach had gone away, and wrapped up the rest of the sub.

  I had been looking for an excuse to walk around the bus a bit, so I wedged the sandwich into an empty spot in the fridge and ascended the stairs to the bunk area. Within the depths of my bag, I found my billfold, and in there a ten dollar bill. I grabbed it, shoving a couple of twenties into my pocket so this wouldn’t happen to me again, and went to find Rhys.

  He was what basically amounted to being camped out in the far front lounge. The large TV was running silently, displaying a football game, and the ashtray in front of Rhys was getting dangerously close to overflowing. When I knocked gently onto the door frame, he simply frowned and told me “Hold on” before shifting a notebook aside and laying down his acoustic guitar.

  “What’s up?” he wanted to know, turning towards me.

  I held out the money. He looked at it as though he had no idea what it was.

  “For the food,” I explained.

  He shook his head, still frowning. “That’s fine. You can just get mine next time.”

  That sounded sensible enough, so I shrugged and shoved the ten into my pocket. I tried to find at least one thing to say that wouldn’t make me sound stupid, and failed.

  “Could you get me a drink?” he asked.

  I wasn’t about to turn down something to do. “Sure,” I replied. “One of your thingamajigs?” I’d forgotten the name of them but I had noticed by now that Rhys drank that one certain brand of energy drink like it was water. Nobody else touched the cans in the fridge.

  “Yeah,” he said, and I caught a small smile.

  I nodded towards the ashtray. “You want me to empty that for you?”

  “Yeah, would you?” He seemed absurdly pleased that I had offered.

  Maybe, I thought as I grabbed the ashtray and went to find a trashcan, he simply missed being taken care of. He’d had a boyfriend - or girlfriend? - for quite a while, after all, who might have done this same sort of stuff for him. Either way, doing it appeared to score me points, so I resolved to keep doing it and to check in on him every once in a while.

  Like a damn butler, I thought, shaking my head at myself, and wondering where my sense of self-worth had ended up.

  I emptied the ashtray in the kitchen trashcan and grabbed a drink from the fridge. I might have continued to berate myself for volunteering to do this if not for the fact that I had literally nothing better to do, along with the knowledge that everyone on the bus except for me did have an actual, literal job to do, and I was just sort of hitching a ride for free. Faced with this fact, I might as well clean out some ashtrays.

  On the way back up, I reminded myself forcefully that I shouldn’t stick around in the upper lounge for too long. Rhys probably wanted to be left alone, and even if he didn’t it couldn’t hurt to play a tiny little bit hard to get. I wasn’t usually very good at that game, but I was willing to make an effort.

  “Here you go,” I said cheerfully as I placed the empty ashtray and the drink onto the table, gave him a smile even though he wasn’t looking, and backed towards the door. He did the hectic double take of someone utterly preoccupied, called out a “Thanks!” after me, and went back to his music just as I moved to close the door.

  I spent the rest of the evening sitting around with the roadies and listening to them talking, watching TV with them and trying to come to terms with the fact that I was where I was. It occurred to me that I had just missed work and probably should have called in as well, but I’d been too preoccupied, and to be honest, my job was shit anyway and I had been wanting to quit for a good long time.

  Despite me trying to concentrate on what went on around me instead of the sudden, nagging fears of coworker disapproval, I couldn’t stop predicting my friends’ possible reactions to the news of what I’d done. Not many of them were positive. Nonetheless, I couldn’t stop my imagination.

  I’d rarely spent so many hours sitting there, listening and thinking. The roadies were an interesting crowd, so I wasn’t bored, exactly, but now that I finally had time to think instead of making decisions at a moment’s notice, I was feeling a little uncomfortable. What the fuck had I gotten myself into?

  Eventually, as the clock ticked closer to midnight and the first group of people headed upstairs, I found myself thinking about bed as well. I promptly realized that I had yet an
other problem.

  Rhys had never told me where he expected me to sleep. It was possible that there was an empty bunk, but he hadn’t pointed one out to me. If there wasn’t, would I have to sleep in his bed? Did he want me to camp out on the couch? Once more I found myself unable to ask a question that should have been simple, and I hated myself for being so goddamned shy all of a sudden. I already felt stupid because of the Subway incident, and had no desire to repeat that kind of experience. Finally, when I was beginning to yawn, I collected what fragments of bravery I possessed, and turned to Angus.

  “Hey,” I said, and he gave me his attention at once. I hadn’t said much during the evening, but I might have imagined the slight look of surprise in his eyes. “This might be a really stupid question, but I was wondering where I’m supposed to sleep tonight.”

  “Uh,” he said, then laughed, looking a little flustered. I supposed I’d set myself up for this one. We were, after all, moving into slightly awkward territory if the answer to this was indeed ‘Rhys' bunk’.

  “I would imagine with Rhys,” he said only a moment after I’d thought this. “We haven’t got any extra bunks, so…” He tilted his head meaningfully.

  “Right,” I said, and nodded possibly a little too hard. “And that’s fine, I just had no idea whether, you know…” I couldn’t find the words, making airy hand gestures instead to imply me lacking the knowledge of how things functioned around here.

  Angus nodded, still smiling. He reminded me a little of a kind older brother just now.

  “Yeah, you definitely wanna ask. Ah, I know Rhys has probably not been real forthcoming with information as to how things happen here. You’re doing fine though. Just don’t forget to eat again, dude.”