Page 6 of Dedicated

His laughter came out hushed, but I thought a little derisive. “You writing something, then?” he asked, knowing how I usually worked.

“Nope. I’m about done with that, too.”

“Bet one was more satisfying than the other.”

“Yeah, at least there was something I could see. I’ve been having a showdown with this fucking notebook for the last hour. It wasn’t impressed with my opening fire.” I wrinkled my nose at the page and squinted, like I could will that black mark into becoming something I could work with.

“You get even a word out?” Evan wasn’t one to pressure me, but we both also knew that I was on the line with the next album. We needed some fucking words to sing, and I was the supposed wizard.

“A black line. I think I made it accidentally when I looked over at the clock.” My laugh was self-deprecating. Evan laughed, too, and that time it was a little warmer with sympathy. He was having a similar problem, but at least he could still sit down with his guitar, let his fingers wander over the strings, and eventually a riff came together. He needed something to sing, though, and I wasn’t providing. And he may not have known, but I did: he didn’t actually need me. Our label had kindly reminded me of that a week ago when Evan was out of earshot.

“It’ll come back.”

“Maybe.” I’d started having serious doubts, which was gonna be a problem if there was any credibility to them, because I’d dropped out of college to make music with Evan, and I was hardly qualified to do anything else.

“It will. Maybe after a good jerk session at the cabin,” he said, and I could tell he was trying to lighten the atmosphere, but the silence on the line between us after he’d spoken was palpable. I grabbed for a different subject.

“Leigh good?” I didn’t care if Leigh was good. Leigh could kiss my ass. I had no idea why Evan was with her. Sure, they’d been friends for a while, but before they’d gotten together he’d never given any indication whatsoever that he was into her.

“Yeah, she’s good. Asleep.” More silence. Less palpable but still awkward, and it was like I could hear the strain for connection on both our ends. Well, maybe more from my end than Evan’s. He could be laconic and hard to read. Especially over the phone.

“Do you think this idea of returning to the cabin is an effort in futility?” That wasn’t what I’d wanted to ask at all. What I’d wanted to ask was“Are we going to be okay? Can we fix the thing hanging over our heads?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t have a better idea anyway.” He might well have answered my unasked questions without knowing it. I heard him shift and imagined him sitting against the wall in the hall, his spine hunched, his T-shirt stretched across his broad shoulders. Or maybe he was shirtless.

I didn’t mean my exhale to be so audible. But it was. It was definitely a sigh. “I’m gonna try to sleep.”

“Yeah, me too.” And then he added, “Free association. Try it. Don’t throw up any mental roadblocks, just put the pen on the paper and let it go. Basically the same thing I do when I pick up a guitar and try to find the tune. I rummage through a bunch of notes until some of them start to get warm on my fingers.”

Of course I knew what free association was. But usually what I ended up with was a random assortment of words and lyrics that somehow related to Evan. Things used to just come to me. Some move a girl would make. Or guy. The look in their eyes, how they moved, or how they made me feel. For the last year and a half, I’d had a hard time seeing anything other than Evan. The last thing I’d written that flowed onto the page like I’d bled it from deep within my consciousness was “Blue.” And it had been for Evan.

Our biggest fucking hit was a love song I wrote for my bandmate. And he had no idea.

If he did, it would probably ruin us.

Chapter 6

By 9:00 a.m., it was evident Les wasn’t coming. The other roadies stood beside the tour bus, smoking and shifting their weight, growing restless while my jaw wound tighter. I’d texted him five times, called three. No reply, no answer. Wordlessly, I extended my hand, palm up, to Mars, our tour manager, and he slapped the hotel key in it.

We’d started giving him an extra key to Les’s room after our first tour when pretty much every other day required one of us going up to drag him out of his room because he was always late. It didn’t happen as much on our second tour, but it’d picked up again this tour, and it was still annoying. It’d been more forgivable when we had a hit record to prop him up. Back then, the world waited for us. Not so much these days. Now he was just wasting everyone’s time.

Striding back into the hotel, I mentally ran through all of the options that might lie in wait for me behind his door: Les passed out, Les in bed with a couple of chicks, Les in bed with a couple of dudes. Les in bed with a couple of chicks and a couple of dudes. That’d been Vegas. It wasn’t a pretty aftermath, but Les had smiled for three days afterward like he’d uncovered the secret of the universe.

“God, you should have been there, Porter. It was magic.”

“I don’t even want to think about the mechanics involved to pull that off.”

“It’s easier than you might think.”

He was always trying to invite me in, to share, but I didn’t want any part of it. It threatened a level of intimacy I didn’t think should exist between us. Spending twelve hours a day in close quarters with Les for six to eight months out of the year was enough. My sex life was just fine separate.

That didn’t mean we hadn’t crossed paths that way occasionally. And unintentionally. A month after the release of our first album, the hotel screwed up and we’d had to share a room in Tucson. I’d walked in on him fucking some girl he’d picked up after the show. Pretty and slender. A brunette. Her hands gripped the headboard like she was hanging on for dear life, and she was up on her knees as Les fucked the ever-living shit out of her from behind. I was surprised they hadn’t been reported for noise. I’d stood in the doorway, trying to decide what to do, when he tipped his head back over his shoulder and said, with a salacious grin, “Want to get in on this?” Just like that, like it was no big deal.

I was tired and hungry and irritable, so instead of leaving like I might have another time, I’d just flipped him off, plopped down on my own bed, and turned the TV on. I thought maybe he’d take the hint, but he didn’t. He’d chuckled and gone back to banging the girl. It was one of the more awkward stalemates in my life, but I was hell-bent on sticking it out, even though I got uncomfortably hard because they were noisy as hell. And, well, peripheral vision. I quickly learned Les was a talker with a filthy fucking mouth, and try as I might to train my attention on the TV, hearing him murmur about how wet she was, how good she felt, asking her how much she liked his cock inside her in that low, sexy voice he used on stage made it impossible. All the while, the slick skin-on-skin smack of his balls against her provided an undercurrent soundtrack that overwhelmed the sitcom laugh track on the TV screen. He looked over at me once and said, “Feel free to jerk one out, altar boy, no one’s going to tell. You’ve gotta be dying over there.” And I was, but I also wasn’t going to give in.

Once they’d finished and collapsed and I was sure they were asleep, I’d gone into the bathroom, taken my cock in hand, and blown a load in about a second flat.

There were other times, more than I could even remember, and then there was the one that I always tried to forget. That was the fucked-up irony of memories; it was always the ones you really wanted to forget that got stuck on repeat like a shitty B-side track.