Page 5 of Dedicated
“No, you’re just a child.”
“Anytime you wanna be my Daddy, just let me know, Porter. I’ve got a Mr. Rogers fetish, though, so we’ll need Mars to supply you with some cardigans.”
“Fucking nut job,” I muttered and waved him out of the room. The door clicked shut behind him, sealing off his laughter, and I was left alone in the graveyard quiet.
Les had left his guitar faceup on his chair, and I plucked at a few of the strings, seeing the ghost of his fingers moving over them. He favored taps and slides, hammer-ons, plenty of percussion. I loved watching him play, and I sat there trying to figure out whether or not the fact that I was possibly mildly turned on by the idea of him jerking off bothered me. Did I want to get with Les? My dick apparently had an ambivalent opinion a few minutes ago. Maybe it was just a reflex. Or maybe we’d just been closed up too long. Judging by the population around me—which, granted, currently only consisted of Les—my libido didn’t seem on par. That wasn’t to say I didn’t have a sex drive, because I knew I did, but when it came to actual humans, it was safe to say my dick was highly selective.
“No waythat was long enough for a jerk break,” I said when Les returned a few minutes later.
“My pump’s always primed and ready to go.” He shot me a smirk and took his seat, balancing his guitar over his lap again.
“It’s a miracle you ever get anything done.” I watched him fiddle with his strings, long fingers nimbly making adjustments.
“No, it’s a weird superstition, actually.” Les sobered and leaned nearer to me like he was letting me in on a secret. “I work better when my dick’s on E. Swear. All my best lyrics? They comeafterI blow my load.” He gave me a sly look for his own pun and picked up his notebook, which resembled a chalkboard scene torn fromA Beautiful Mind: tight black, illegible scrawl all over the pages, angled in every direction.
“So in a way, my pillow is a sacrifice to a greater cause?” I mused.
“Exactly.” Les’s gaze flicked up to meet mine as he turned a page. “You should consider yourself honored.”
I ran out of quip steam and changed direction, picking up my guitar up again and running through the riff we were working on before.
“Not that one,” Les said abruptly. “Let’s switch over to that sound we were playing with yesterday.”
“The one in drop D?”
He nodded, so I set about adjusting my tuning.
“I don’t have lyrics for it yet, but they’ll come. I can feel it.”
I liked to work linearly, but Les jumped all over the place. I conceded because it was evident in the way his eyes narrowed to just slivers of bottle green that his mind was working over something that might be worth the detour. It was a habit of his I’d picked up on. One of those looks that could be called penetrating. He’d aimed it in my direction on more than a few occasions. Sometimes in frustration and sometimes with something else that was inscrutable, an undercurrent I couldn’t quite grasp the meaning of. The second I thought it was desire, I slapped the thought away.
Shifting on my chair, I nodded, ready to see where he was taking us, then added on a whim, “We should get out of here tonight. Go to some dive and get blitzed.” I could handle a lot of alone time, especially after our last endless tour, but we’d been sequestered so long working on this new album that even I was ready for a scenery change.
Les glanced at me, surprise showing in his expression, then muting as he looked back down at his fingers drifting over his guitar strings. “Sure. That’s a great idea.”
I’d had no clue that my stupid idea to go out and get hammered was going to change everything.
Favorite breakfast food?
Evan:Les doesn’t actually know what a breakfast food is. He’s never been awake for it.
Chapter 5
Present day
Ahalf hour after I shut the door behind Jamie and cleaned myself up, I sat on the floor at the end of the bed, squaring off against a blank sheet of notebook paper. I was on the losing end, as predicted. In that half hour I’d been sitting there, I’d made a single mark on the page—a black ballpoint slash. I used to just set the pen to the paper and bleed out. That’s what it’d felt like, like everything running around in my head consolidated and flowed onto the page and all I had to do was sit there and transcribe it. I’d fill up an entire notebook, then go back later and shuffle, rearrange, mark out, rewrite. Sometimes a song would come to me all at once, and sometimes I’d have to pick it out from a bunch of gibberish. But at least there’d been something to work with.
White space was pressure I felt in my chest like the squeeze of a fist. A year ago, if someone had told me I’d be sitting here like this, I’d have laughed. I’d felt invincible and infinite back then. I’d toldPeoplemagazine I dreamed in lyrics. It was true at the time. Lately, I just fell asleep and then woke up. There was nothing in between.
It was one thirty in the morning, but I knew Evan wasn’t asleep. One thing we had in common was that while on tour, he was nocturnal like me. He might’ve been fucking Leigh. He wasprobablyfucking Leigh.I’dbe fucking Leigh. Still, I picked up my phone and called him anyway.
“What’s up?” His voice was alert. Not asleep, not fucking. I felt more relieved than I should have, and then anxious because I didn’t call with a plan. I just did it.
“You said eight, yeah? Tomorrow?”
“Yeah.” He paused. “If you’ll still bebusy, don’t worry about it.”
“Nah. I’m done.”