Page 45 of Going Solo (The Brent Boys #2)

Chapter Twenty-Two

I hated that I couldn’t fault Cole’s show. But I had no time to process it anyway. As soon as it ended, Nick and I dashed around, recording reaction interviews with fans outside the arena. The audio would be sent back to Tarneesha in London to package up, ready for us to play during the next night’s Pop Review Special from Manchester. We were sitting in the outside broadcast van getting ready to send the files when I got a text.

Denzil: Kennedy’s team are sending a car. Get in it.

Toby: U must b joking.

Denzil: You two need to sort this out. We can’t afford a repeat of tonight’s Joan Crawford v Bette Davis pissing contest. Disaster bruv!

Toby: No way u know who those 2 women R!

Denzil: Googled ‘Cardi v Nicki but super gay’ to find beef you would understand.

Denzil: Listen fam, if the Kennedys pull their sponsorship, whatever happens with the board is all on YOU. Our jobs are on the line here. Real deal. You got that?

Denzil: FIX IT!

I had told Denzil about Ludo’s efforts to convince his dad to buy the Pure Network. As he’d pointed out, it was an outrageous long shot—the kind of thing drunk people say to each other in a pub. And we couldn’t even be sure that if the Sentinel Group did buy us, we’d all keep our jobs. The best thing to do, he said, was to put the whole idea out of my head and focus on ensuring the board didn’t put the station up for sale in the first place. Annoyingly, that meant playing nice with Cole Kennedy.

A black SUV with heavily tinted windows rolled up. It was well intimidating. Nick and I stared at it, not moving. A massive security guy, built like a Navy SEAL who’d been created Transformers-style using eight other Navy SEALs, got out of the driver’s door. He had black aviator sunglasses on, even though it was nearly eleven at night.

“If I never see you again, it’s been great, pal,” Nick said.

My legs were jelly. “Come with me?”

“Absolutely not. Dav is back at the hotel. If he’s finished writing his review, I’m going to bury my face between his sweet brown arse cheeks and devour him like a pair of Tunnock’s Teacakes.”

“That’s… a lot of information, Nicholas.”

“To be clear, I will not be taking calls, answering text messages, or rescuing your useless orange bahookie. I have had enough Toby time for today.”

“You think about the colour of people’s butts a lot, do you know that?”

“Go!”

* * *

It was a mansion. There was, thankfully, not a paparazzo in sight. Fiona ushered me in, deposited me in a sitting room, and left. Between her coolness, Nick’s annoyance, and Denzil’s “fix it,” I really was in the naughty corner. The room was colour-drenched in a deep blue, with tan leather couches, dark wood furniture, and brass lamps. It felt like one of those high street barbershops that look flash through the window but, when you get inside, smell like toxic masculinity and aggressively stale smegma. I could hear Cole’s voice up the corridor but had no idea who he was talking to. Security, maybe? Smart to keep them around. There was less chance of me murdering him with witnesses about. Especially given his driver and security guy, Mitch, was built like a bomb shelter. I checked my reflection in the mirror above the fireplace and realised my hands were shaking. I’d spent a decade imagining what I’d say to Cole if I ever got him alone again. Having missed my chance to go for his throat in the green room the day before, it felt like the moment was finally here. But not only was I required to be on my best behaviour, I was trembling so much my voice had all the resonance and authority of Tiny Tim singing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” after half an hour trapped in an industrial freezer.

The door opened, and Cole stuck his head through. I spun around to face him.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I squeaked, and cleared my throat. “Hey.”

For a moment I thought Cole was going to hug me again, but he must have thought better of it.

“Thanks for coming.”

“Of course.”

The tension in the air was so thick, it got held back a year and its parents had to cough up for a tutor. My heart was thudding. A wave of emotions washed through me—hate, fear, residual first-love vibes, contempt, awe.

“Can I get you a drink?” Cole asked. “Are you hungry? Marcel is doing his mac and cheese if?—”

“Mac and cheese again? The guy has a Michelin star.”

“I know, but it’s, like, really good.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask “Does Marcel also say ‘Here comes the aeroplane,’ or are you old enough to shovel it in for yourself now?” but I stopped myself. I was under strict instructions to fix things. And I was hungry.

“Sure, why not?”

Cole smiled and shouted up the hallway for Marcel to bring two servings. He offered me a drink. My choices were water or a zero per cent IPA. I took a sparkling water. Cole indicated for me to sit, and I sank, gratefully, into the tan leather armchair. It had the patina of age and smelt the way cologne ads tell you real men should smell—like dead cow. Cole drifted over with our drinks and sat down on the end of the couch nearest my armchair, under a massive painting I suddenly realised was an actual Hockney.

“Who are you renting this place from, Noel Coward?”

He passed me my water. “Isn’t it cool?”

“Great show tonight,” I said. “Genuinely.” If I was there to fix things, a complimentary truth was a good place to start. Star pupil, me.

Cole’s face lit up. “Really?”

“I can’t fault it. It was everything the fans deserved.”

“Thank you, that means a lot to me. I know you take this stuff as seriously as I do. It makes your praise more worth earning.”

I rolled my eyes and leaned back in the chair. “Fame has made you a smarmy creep, I see.”

Cole edged forward, elbows on his knees, looking earnest. “Listen, could we start over? Clear the air, at least, before we head to Manchester in the morning? I don’t want this energy hanging over us the whole tour.”

“I’m more than happy to leave the tour right here and now, mate, I ain’t bothered,” I snapped. “I didn’t ask for this. I don’t even know why I’m here.”

Denzil was going to kill me. Cole didn’t rise to it.

“You’re here because I wanted you to be here. I asked for you, specifically. You must have seen the contract. You must know I set this whole thing up.”

I leaned forward, putting my water down heavily on the coffee table. “Why, though? Is it revenge? Because you’re petty? Do you want to hurt me?”

“It’s because I’ve spent a long time wishing you were still in my life,” Cole said.

I scoffed. “That explains all the missed calls on my phone, the birthday party invitations, the Christmas cards.” I slumped back into the armchair. “You must think I’m an idiot, mate.”

Cole had the grace to look sheepish. “I was scared to call. I thought you hated me.”

“Did you work that out all by yourself, Poirot? Well, hold on to your knickers because, you ain’t gonna believe this, I still hate you.”

“We were kids, Toby.”

I spluttered, struggling to find the words. “Are you joking me? You abandoned me to become a national punchline while you went off to live my dream.”

“But look at you,” Cole said. “You wanted to be famous, and you are famous. You’re part of the cultural fabric of this country now. People love you. You leveraged it, like you always said you would. You made it happen.”

I was fuming. “Famous? Do you know what I’ve been through? Did you hear the ‘marriage material’ jokes? Read the articles? Did you even know your ‘beautiful Kenneddicts’ graffitied the salon in homophobic slurs? Do you have any idea how traumatic that was? I dropped out of school. I lost all my mates. It ruined my life. Mum had me on suicide watch.”

“Toby, I’m so sorry, I?—”

I got to my feet, finger pointed squarely at Cole’s face. “Over and over again, I was humiliated. Every time you hit the headlines, they’d drag the pathetic ‘marriage material’ kid into the story for another kicking. It never ended. My whole life since I met you has been a cheap punchline.”

“Toby, I’m so sorry.” Cole’s brown eyes looked sad and sincere. “I didn’t realise. But… I want to hear about it.”

Something hot was burning my face, and I realised it was tears. I wiped my cheeks on my sleeve. Cole grabbed a box of tissues from the mantelpiece and handed it to me.

“Please, Tobes, sit down.”

I sat, plucking half a dozen tissues from the box.

“When you came out, it all went into overdrive,” I continued. “Photographers outside my house. Abuse from strangers in the street. You know there are entire subreddits devoted to how I turned you gay. Like I’m an infectious disease. Like being gay is contagious.”

“The fans do get a bit wild sometimes,” Cole said. “Teenagers can be… intense. I’m sorry.” He reached across and squeezed my knee, and I ripped it out of his hand.

“That’s bang out of order, mate.”

Cole held up his hands in surrender. “I can see this has all had a negative impact on you, and I want to say I’m genuinely sorry about that. If I could go back and change it, I would. It sounds like you had all the downside of fame without any of the advantages, and that’s shitty. Please, give me a chance to make it up to you. I want us to be friends.”

I laughed. “We are never going to be friends.”

For a moment, Cole looked crushed. Then he seemed to rally, like he didn’t believe that was possible.

“Fine, we don’t have to be friends, although I think that would be sad.”

“Boo-fucking-hoo.”

“I see age has made you rich with maturity.”

I opened my mouth to fight back.

“Sorry!” Cole said. “I didn’t mean that. Old habits. Turns out spending a decade in the sausage factory makes you incredibly sarcastic. It’s something I’m working on with my therapist.”

“Is that what this is about?” I asked. “Am I here because your therapist says you need some kind of closure?”

“Closure? No. But Summer—that’s my therapist—has taught me a lot about healing, and about the energy we choose to carry. She’s helped me let go of a lot of stuff and tune in to a more positive energy.”

“How lovely for you.”

“You know, I was angry with you for a long time,” Cole said.

“You were angry at me ?”

“Yes. Unfairly. And I owe you an apology for that. I should have trusted you. But I was lied to, very convincingly, by the label. And I held on to that energy for far too long?—”

It twigged. “Is this about our texts?”

Cole looked uncomfortable. He ran his fingers through his hair.

“I never leaked them!”

“I know that now ,” he said—and our eyes met. “But at the time, as far as we knew, no one else had those messages. You were the obvious suspect.”

“Well, The Bulletin was hacking everyone back then?—”

“We weren’t hacked,” Cole said, certainty in his voice. “If we’d been hacked, they’d have printed the whole conversation. But they didn’t. Did you never notice they left out the fact that I was gay? If The Bulletin had the complete messages, they’d have known that, and there’s no doubt that would have been the headline.”

He was right. But in all this time, I’d never noticed it. The leaked texts were so obviously our texts, I’d never thought to check how accurate they were.

“Which means I’m in the clear, because if I was out for revenge, surely I’d have included that detail.”

Cole shook his head. “That was the bit that convinced me it was you. Queer Code 101, remember? You promised me you’d never out me.”

“So, who leaked it, then?”

Cole sighed. “Felicity Quant.”

“Are you joking me?” You could have knocked me over with the Wi-Fi signal. “How did she even get hold of them?”

“You remember they took our phones off us and gave us new ones? Turns out they went through our old phones looking for kompromat to use whenever it was convenient.”

“And you stayed in the band after she did that to you?”

“It was years before I found out,” Cole said.

“What did she have to gain from throwing you under the bus like that?”

“Huge wave of free publicity. Lots of sympathy for me. Plenty of juicy detail for the fans. Tabloids onside. Most importantly, she knew I’d think it was you. She did it to keep us apart, Toby. She didn’t want us finding our way back to each other.”

I was shaking, again. Cole reached over and held my fingertips in his—despite the snotty tissues in my hand. The warmth of his touch was instantly familiar, like slipping on a favourite old hoodie when the evening chill comes in. This time, I didn’t pull away.

“Why?”

Cole smiled. “You were a threat to the band.”

I laughed.

“You were. You were a threat to me and my bankability. You had a gun held to my head, remember? You wouldn’t sign the NDAs. Felicity needed girls screaming for me, dreaming about marrying me.”

I let Cole’s fingers drop, putting my head in my hands. “How’d you find out it was her?”

“Robbie Johnswagger.” Cole sipped his water. “He told me about it over lunch one day. I was going through a rough patch. Truthfully, I was off the rails. This was ages after he’d been sacked from Pop Star . He’d cleaned up his act by this point. He was worried about me. He pulled me aside and explained a few things, and this was one of the things he told me. It made me so sad because I’d been angry at you for so long. And I was so upset that Mum had died thinking you’d done that to me, to her, to all of us.”

We sat in silence for a moment. When you spend a decade of your life living with an injustice, it coils around your gut like a rope, tying in all this rage. When the truth comes out, the ropes are cut, and suddenly, you’re freed from the tension, and it’s a physical relief. I felt like I could breathe, finally. But while I knew an injustice had been done to me, and what I’d been through because of it, I’d been so angry I never stopped to think about what it had done to Cole. If his boss could do something so evil to him, what had he gone through during the past ten years? Even thinking about it wound me up.

The door opened, and Marcel Dupont walked in. I recognised him from the telly. He put a silver tray on the coffee table.

“Macaroni au gratin, messieurs,” he said, lifting the silver lid with a flourish. There were a few green things on the side, and he ran through them, pointing his finger at each in turn, announcing something in French. I didn’t understand a word, but I know asparagus when I see it. We thanked him. He waved a hand and disappeared back out of the room.

“Don’t let it get cold,” Cole said, grabbing a bowl. “It’s best piping hot.” He sat back, cross-legged on the sofa, put a big cushion between his thighs to use as a table, and began to eat.

“Ooh, ibs hob!” he said, trying not to burn the roof of his mouth. “So, wob dib you thin ob the new Zara Larssob albub?”

* * *

For two hours Cole and I chatted about music—who we liked, who was overrated, who was the next big thing. It felt like old times, like the kinds of conversations we used to have late into the night, chatting on our phones in our bedrooms, or at the cheap motorway hotel where the Make Me a Pop Star producers had put us up. We dissected lyrics, compositions, and production choices. For ages, we talked about the healing nature of music. It was the most stimulating discussion about pop music I’d had in years. It felt good. I was disappointed when there was a knock at the door and Fiona stuck her head in.

“I’m sorry, Cole. It’s America.”

“Jerry?” he said.

She nodded. “I know you said no calls. I tried to put him off.”

“It’s fine. I’ll be right there.”

Fiona disappeared up the hall. Cole turned back to me and apologised.

“This call might take a while,” he said. “Will you wait for me?”

I looked at the time on my phone. It was after two in the morning.

“I should get going. We’ve got the drive down to Manchester in the morning.”

Cole looked disappointed. “OK,” he said. “Mitch will drop you back at your hotel.”

I smiled my thanks.

“Hey, I know this is late notice, but I have a thing at eight tomorrow morning, and I’d love it if you would come with me.”

“Like a public engagement? Absolutely not.”

“Why not?”

“Did you listen to anything I said tonight? I can’t be seen with you in public. My life would be hell.”

“We were seen in public together this afternoon. Photographed. Filmed, even.”

“That was an interview. I’m not going with you to whatever breakfast TV interview you’ve got. The press will think we’re dating, and I’ll be hounded by paparazzi for months.”

“It’s not an interview. It’s a private engagement, and Fiona’s already had everyone sign an NDA. No one will even know we’re there.”

Exhaustion was starting to wash through my body. It was late. I wanted my bed, and I needed a sleep-in. “Nick and I have got to hit the road by ten, so?—”

“I’ll have you back by ten, I promise. Please say you’ll come.”

Cole looked at me with those soulful puppy-dog eyes. For a moment, I was sixteen again, falling hopelessly in love with the first boy who’d ever flashed me a bit of ankle. I could feel myself caving.

“What is it, though?”

“It’s a surprise,” Cole said. “I don’t want to spoil it.”

My curiosity was piqued, and I felt my resistance wavering.

“Cole!” Fiona’s voice echoed up the hallway.

“There’ll be no press, no photographers, no waitstaff sneaking pics on their iPhones?”

Cole smiled. “Promise. It’s all totally on the down-low.”

“Fine,” I said. Cole fist pumped the air. “Do I need to dress up?”

“Come as yourself. You’re perfect as you are.” He wrapped me up in a farewell hug that smelt of cinnamon and leather. “It’s been so good to see you. We’ll pick you up at seven forty-five.”

With a trademark smile, a cheesy double finger point, and a theatrical swivel on his heel, Cole was gone.