Page 47 of Going Solo (The Brent Boys #2)

Chapter Twenty-Four

T wenty-four hours earlier, if you’d have asked me for the definition of hell, this would have been it. I was bombing down the M74 towards Manchester at fifty miles an hour in PureFM’s knackered old broadcast van, trying not to get blown off the road by crosswinds, with Cole Kennedy sitting beside me in the passenger seat. Cole was bouncing around like a kid on Christmas morning, excited for what he kept calling “our road trip.” I hadn’t wanted to agree to this, but how could I say no to Cole after what I’d witnessed that morning? I had one condition—that he travel incognito.

“Will you pull that hat over your face a bit more,” I said, reaching over and yanking the peak down.

“Stop it!” Cole batted my arm away. “You’re in the slow lane, no one is going to recognise me all the way over here.”

“This isn’t one of your SUVs with blacked-out windows.” Even I could hear the frustration in my voice. “This is an ancient mobile home, it’s ninety per cent glass, and it’s covered from arsehole to breakfast in the Pop Review logo. People are going to stare. Everyone stares.”

I knocked the cap down further over Cole’s face.

“Careful, this is a new hat!”

“I know, I dug it out of the merch bag and gave it to you less than five minutes ago.”

Cole pulled out his phone to take a selfie.

“Woah, what are you doing?”

“Posting an Insta story in my snazzy new hat.”

“Oh no you don’t!” I tried to snatch Cole’s phone, the van swerved, and the front wheel went over the rumble strip. I grabbed the wheel and nearly over-corrected, swerving back into the inside lane. Shrieking tyres and honks pierced the air.

“Jesus, Toby! OK, no selfie. Just… don’t get us killed, will you?”

In the wing mirror, I could see the three black SUVs of Cole’s security team behind us. Mitch was flashing his headlights at me. I hit the hazard lights, letting him know everything was OK. The last thing I needed was to piss off a guy whose pronouns were speed, surprise, and violence.

Cole laughed at a message on his phone.

“Look at this,” he said, holding the screen up for me to see. It was a selfie of Nick and Fiona, sipping champagne in Cole’s private jet. It seemed Nick had adapted to the high life quickly. And here I was, getting high on diesel fumes and babysitting my ex for the next four hours. A lorry thrummed up beside us, overtaking.

“Selfie for Fiona,” Cole said, shifting around so we were both in the frame.

“No selfies!” I was concentrating on not getting blown off the road as the lorry passed us.

“Smile!” Click . “Wait, you can’t see my snazzy new Pop Review hat.”

“Stop saying snazzy .”

“Let’s go again.”

“Cole!”

“Smile!” Click .

“Aw, you look grumpy in this one.” Cole flashed me the pic, but I was too focused on the road. “Hat looks great, though,” he said. “Very snazzy.” Swoosh! The image had been sent.

“Don’t post that!”

“I didn’t. It’s for Fi only, I promise. And for me. A memento of our road trip… and this magical time we’re spending together.”

He was boiling my piss now. “Reborn” came on the radio, and I reached over and switched it off.

“Hey, I love that song.”

“What is this all about, Cole? Why are we here?”

“Because the M74 is the best route to Manchester.”

“You know what I mean. Why did you pay a million quid for Pop Review to come on this tour? Why take me to the hospital this morning? Why are you in my shitty van instead of twenty thousand feet above my head in your private jet, getting wanked off by Hire-a-Twinks, or whatever it is you do up there? Is this genuinely all because you found out Felicity Quant lied to you? Because, if so, this feels like an apology that could have been an email.”

Cole pointed at a sign up ahead.

“Ooh, there’s a motorway services. Can we stop and get some snacks?”

“Stop avoiding the question!”

Cole went quiet. When I looked over at him, he’d finally pulled the hat down but was staring doggedly out the side window, avoiding eye contact. I swear I could feel his heartbeat through the van’s bench seat. We sailed past the exit for the services. Cole’s shoulders slumped.

“Do you know the day we met was the best day of my life?” he said.

“Well, you aced your audition. The judges loved you. Even the woodlice eating the floorboards knew you were going to be a star. So, that’s hardly a surprise.”

“You know that’s not what I mean,” he said, turning to face me. I glanced over at him. His eyes were red.

“You better not have the audacity to cry right now?—”

“You were smart, funny, confident?—”

“Shut your lying mouth, Cole Kennedy. I was none of those things. I was a fat, spotty, awkward, orange?—”

“Orange, I will concede, but you weren’t even remotely fat. That was all in your head. You still had a bit of puppy fat in the face, that’s all.”

“Puppy fat? Mum once said I was ‘cherubic,’ and Aunty Cheryl asked how many cherubs I ate in an average sitting.”

Cole laughed. “Do you think Aunty Cheryl might have been responsible for some of your body image issues? Everyone has puppy fat at sixteen.”

“Why are we talking about puppy fat?”

“I wasn’t. You were. I was talking about the fact I met this amazing boy who charmed me with his brains and his wit, and who saved me from the Hallelujah Curse, and who filled a pair of skinny jeans in the most… delicious … way possible.”

I roared in frustration. “You’re doing my nut, Cole.”

“You wore your sexuality loud and proud at a time when I was still coming to terms with mine. That was so sexy. The instant I laid eyes on you, I knew I wanted you. Within half an hour, I swear, I thought, ‘I could fall in love with this guy.’”

I closed my eyes, blinking away the frustration, hurt, and rage, giving myself a moment to find the right words. But when I opened my eyes, the tail lights on the lorry in front of me were shining bright red, and we were speeding towards them way too fast. I slammed on the brakes. We lurched forward. Cole put his arms out to avoid smashing into the dashboard. The tyres squealed. I closed my eyes, waiting for the sound of crunching metal and shattering glass.

We stopped just in time.

“Jesus, are you OK?” I said, my heart thumping like a coked-up jackrabbit having a wank.

“I’m fine,” Cole said. He put his hands on his head. “The hat’s OK. We’re fine over here. Are you OK?”

“I’m OK.” I looked in the mirror. Cole’s fleet of SUVs, no doubt with better brakes than the van’s, had safely stopped. I craned to look up the road ahead. The traffic was at a standstill, with red tail lights as far as I could see. “I think there might be an accident. I don’t think we’re going anywhere for a while.”

“I knew we should have got snacks. How amazing would a doughnut be right now?”

I looked out the window at the vehicle directly to the right of us. It was a minibus full of teenage girls. They were jumping about excitably and pointing at the van and the Pop Review signage. One girl mouthed the words “taking… pop… seriously.”

“Get down!” I said, hitting Cole on the arm. “For God’s sake, keep your hat down.” I slapped it over his face. “Here, lie down. Do not look out the driver’s side window.” I explained about the bus and the girls. Cole was calm. He appeared used to this sort of situation. He lay down along the bench seat of the van.

“This is cramped,” he said after a minute. His legs were folded hard up against the passenger door. He shuffled back, resting his head on my lap. “That’s better.”

“That’s assault,” I replied. But he didn’t move.

I sat there in disbelief. Cole’s head was warm against my leg, the smell of cinnamon and hair shampoo filling the air. His face was right by my dick. Like, if he turned his head to the left, his lips would brush the zip of my jeans and I’d feel the warmth of his breath against my groin. And for all I hated him, all my cock knew was that there was a fit guy with his face in my lap, and it would not ask my brain for permission to launch. This was too intimate, too uncomfortable. But I had no choice but to put up with it because the alternative was a busload of schoolgirls recognising one of the most famous pop stars in the world and then bedlam . We were trapped. Trapped by the traffic, by a busload of teenagers, and by the things we used to feel for one another. I looked down at him. Cole smiled.

“This, by the way, is why I always take the jet.”

Twat. “I didn’t ask you to be here.”

“I wouldn’t have missed our road trip for the world.”

“Because you fell in love with me instantly?” My words were ripe with disdain. “When we were kids?”

“To be fair, that’s not quite what I said. The only person I fell in love with instantly that day was Gaston.”

I rolled my eyes.

“How is Gaston, by the way?”

“Barking at the great postman in the sky.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Cole’s phone beeped. “That’s Mitch, asking if we’re OK.” Cole texted something back. “I’ve asked him to send the chopper for me. You’ll be OK if I bail, won’t you?”

“Are you serious?”

Cole laughed. “Of course not. But I find it reassuring that apparently you don’t want me to leave. Because, honestly, you were giving off some pretty frosty vibes.”

“You don’t say?” Cole was buried in his phone. I reached over and turned on the radio. It was a Jocasta Rose track. “Oh, it’s your ex-girlfriend,” I said. “Is this too painful for you? Do you want me to turn it off?”

“She was never my girlfriend. We’re mates.” Cole pointed at his face. “Big homo, remember?”

How could I forget?

“You know we had the paparazzi camped out in our street for a month when you came out,” I said. “Outside both the house and the salon. I couldn’t open a door without reporters asking me if we were getting together.”

Cole didn’t look up but stayed buried in his phone. “Sorry about that. It’s the price of fame, I’m afraid.”

“I wasn’t famous. I was a hairstylist who’d said something stupid on the telly once.”

“I’m sorry.” He looked up. I glanced down, caught his eye, and looked away again.

“To be honest with you, it was the first time I truly understood I couldn’t control my fame. That I would never escape it.”

“You finally decided to leverage it, like you always said you would,” Cole said, his eyes finally meeting and holding mine.

“You know what, I bloody did. And I ain’t sorry about it.”

“Yeah, I was dead proud of you for that.”

Cole smiled, returning to his phone. His head was hot on my thigh, and I could feel sweat soaking into my jeans. Jocasta started singing the chorus, and Cole joined her. His voice was deep and mellow and beautiful, and it vibrated through my leg like he was trying to rouse me. I was transported back a decade, to moments like this—lying on each other’s laps at the Pop Star hotel, debating which nineties boy band had the most cultural impact, or singing along with the radio, harmonising with each other, playing with our musicality. As Cole sang, I started to sing, too—playing with the harmony, as I’d always done, while Cole sang the lyrics. It had been a long ten years since we’d heard our voices together. His baritone was richer, more mellow. My tenor was rusty, out of practice. Our voices weren’t the same anymore, but then, we weren’t the same boys we’d been back then either. There was too much water under the bridge for whatever this was. I stopped singing.

“Why did you come out, in the end?” I asked, when the song finished.

Cole paused. “It was when Mum got sick.” He moved his phone to look up at me. “She told me life was short and I had to live my truth.”

I met his eyes. “And Felicity let you do it?”

“Oh, not for ages, and she didn’t want to,” Cole said, disappearing back behind his phone. “Things might have turned out very different if she had. But eventually it was contract renewal time. And I’d been so, so unhappy. I said I’d leave the band unless I was allowed to come out.”

“That was ballsy.”

“Thank you. I also told them I wanted to write a song for the next album.”

“How’d you swing that? I thought everything was focus-grouped by the sausage factory.”

“Fiona,” he said. It was all the answer I needed. “It still got sausage-factoried, though.”

I thought about hearing Cole sing “Genevieve” “the way I wrote it.”

“I prefer your version,” I said.

“Thank you.”

The driver of the lorry in front of us got out of his cab and went for a piss in the bushes. The busload of girls whooped, hollered, and catcalled.

“So, Jocasta was never your girlfriend,” I said. “But did you ever have any boyfriends?”

Another silence. Cole’s face stayed hidden behind his phone.

“One,” he said, and something in his voice sounded broken. “I don’t want to talk about it. Can’t, in fact. NDA. Pop star stuff. You know how it is.” He emerged from under his phone, his big chestnut eyes searching mine.

“What about you? Have you had any boyfriends?” He waggled his perfectly trimmed eyebrows.

“Since you?”

“Yeah.”

“No, I’ve been sitting out on my widow’s walk this entire time, quietly stitching my hymen back together and waiting for you to return from the sea.”

Cole snorted. “Come on, there must have been someone special. You can’t have been single this whole time. Look at you. You’re still gorgeous, even without the puppy fat.”

I rolled my eyes and looked away but felt the rush of heat go to my face like mission control had fired up all burners and was preparing for lift-off.

“No one serious,” I said, watching a random stranger shake off his drips. “I’ve been going solo for a decade.”

I could have told him about the hook-ups and the endless arrangements with various “down-low” lads who had more to lose than I did, but why should I? I didn’t owe him that.

Cole looked baffled. “Was I your last boyfriend?”

“You try sitting in a bar or going on GayHoller when you’re me,” I said, annoyed. “Every arsehole thinks he’s the first guy to ask if he’s ‘marriage material.’”

Cole burst into laughter.

“It ain’t funny,” I said, shifting my leg to make his head accidentally-on-purpose bump into the steering wheel.

“Ow!”

“And those are only the ones who didn’t straight-up rinse me for ever thinking I was good enough for you in the first place.”

“Come off it, no one does that.”

“A lot of people hate me because of you, Cole.”

Cole’s thumb was scrolling urgently through his phone. “Not everyone hates you. I know for a fact plenty of fans were desperate for us to get together. Did you never read any Colby fan fiction?”

“Someone wrote fan fiction about us?”

“A lot of people wrote fan fiction about us.” Cole was still scrolling. “Wattpad is a wild place.”

“When do you get the time to read fanfiction?”

“Seventy-five per cent of being a pop star is sitting around bored out of your mind, waiting for something to happen. People don’t appreciate that,” he said. “Anyway, a lot of the stories are quite good. You should definitely read some. In fact, we should read some now.”

“I don’t think?—”

“ Toby stood naked before him. ” Cole was reading, his voice breathy and mocking. “ As naked as the day he was born. Only six shades more orange. Exactly how Cole liked him. ”

“Wait, did you already have that open in your phone?”

“ Toby was as hard as notorious East End gangster Reggie Kray (or whichever one was the gay one) after a particularly satisfying kill .”

“You cannot be serious.”

“ Cole beckoned him over, eyes devouring him. His hole burned with desire to feel Toby inside him—burned with an intensity he hadn’t known since that time he accidentally got Veet up there ? — ”

I laughed. “You’re making this up!” I said, pushing Cole off my leg, so he had to sit up.

Cole shook his head. “I swear to you, every word is real. It’s right here.” As he held up his phone for me to see, the busload of schoolgirls began to scream—and my worst nightmare was realised.

“Get down!” I tried to push Cole back onto the seat, but he was already waving at the girls.

“It’s too late, they’ve seen me,” he said, trying not to move his lips. “Stay calm.”

Not only had they seen him, but they were also now hanging out the windows with their phones out, filming him.

“I do not want to be seen with you!” I snatched the hat off Cole’s head, put it on, and lay down across the seat—unavoidably, right across Cole’s lap. My chest was tight. I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt the familiar fear grip my body. “Oh God.”

“Relax,” Cole said, lips still taut. “Mitch is already on it. The footage will all be deleted. No one will ever see it.”

“I can’t breathe.”

Cole looked down at me, his eyes wide with concern.

“Toby? What is it?”

“Panic attack,” I choked out.

“What can I do? How do I help?”

I shook my head. Cole put a hand on my chest, firmly, and looked into my eyes.

“Toby, you’re safe. Nothing is going to happen to us. This is a standard Code Blue. Look, Mitch is offering them all free backstage tickets to tonight’s concert and the meet-and-greet afterwards on the condition they delete everything. It’s going to be fine.”

“What if they don’t delete it?”

“Would you argue with Mitch?”

I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing, trying to calm my body. After a few minutes, Mitch knocked on the van window to give us the all-clear. The girls would cooperate.

Ten minutes later, my panic attack had subsided and traffic started moving. The girls in the bus waved. Cole smiled and waved back. “See you tonight!” he called out, nearly deafening me in the process. I pulled the hat further down over my face.

“So, I’m sensing you really don’t want to be seen with me, huh?”

“You think?” I turned on the ignition, and the van rumbled into life.

“Do those… happen a lot?”

“Not as often as they used to.”

Cole was quiet for a moment. “They’re my fault, aren’t they?” he said softly. “I’m sorry.”

I remembered my first ever panic attack, the day I ran home from school. There had been so many more over the years. Always to do with Cole. I put the van in gear, checked the mirrors, and slowly moved off.

“This is incredibly stressful for me,” I said.

“I see that now. That was scary. I’m sorry.”

I changed gear.

“I’ve spent ten years trying to separate my narrative from yours. It feels like you’re unpicking all that hard work. Stitch by stitch. Deliberately.”

“Well, yeah,” Cole said. “Of course.”

“Are you serious?” I looked over at him in disbelief.

“That’s… why I’m here.”

“To ruin my life?”

Cole’s eyes glowed with sincerity. “To heal.”