Page 55 of Going Solo (The Brent Boys #2)

Chapter Thirty

N ick and I were holed up in the broadcast van in the car park out the back of the Cardiff International Arena, doing our live show. Outside, hundreds of Pop Review fans and Kenneddicts milled about. So did the paparazzi. My hands shook like that glass of water in Jurassic Park . I’d thought about nothing but Cole and that bloody kiss for days.

“Showtime,” Nick said.

A string of black SUVs rolled up into the arena car park. My T-Rex had arrived. The fans went wild. As the cars stopped, photographers shouldered and elbowed each other to get the best shot. The crowd mobbed Cole’s vehicle. Mitch’s spectacular bulk emerged from the car, pushing the fans and photographers back. I could hear the screams, even through my headphones and the van’s soundproofing. I couldn’t see Cole—just the swirling, chanting crowd, and a placard that read: “I’m not a nurse but I’ll check that bruise for you!” As the mob lurched and surged, the sign spun around. On the other side, it said: “I’m marriage material!” I stared at it. The words seemed to drown out all the noise, and I felt myself get smaller, folding in on myself, shrinking.

“You OK, pal?” Nick’s voice in my headphones shook me out of my stupor.

“Fine,” I lied. I checked the clock—a DJ’s reflex.

Then suddenly Cole’s tall, confident figure—dressed all in black, swoopy hair flicked back—leapt over the barrier and strode across the car park towards the broadcast van with a wide smile across his face. The fans screamed. Cameras clicked and flashed, sparkling like stars. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. In the mellow early-evening sunlight, Cole was absolutely stunning. But then, Cole would be stunning in no light at all. You could blindfold someone, stick them in the back of a wardrobe in a house with no electricity in the middle of the woods in the middle of the night, and their head would still turn if Cole Kennedy walked past. Twenty seconds later, he was standing in the doorway of my studio, eyes twinkling. His fingertips held the door frame above his head, and the angle lifted his shirt to expose a sliver of honeyed flesh above his beltline. A vein divided the taut skin of his obliques and plunged down into his jeans.

“Hey,” he said through plump lips that, last time I’d seen him, had been pressed against mine. “Something smells incredible in here, is that you?” He swooped into the room, reached across to rest a hand on my shoulder, and pulled his face close to mine. I recoiled.

“Cameras!” I said. Cole stopped, nodded, and let his hand drop. His chestnut eyes, glinting with flecks of amber, betrayed disappointment.

“Not even a peck on the cheek?”

I shook my head. “Not even.”

“Brutal.”

Cole sat in the guest chair to the side of the desk. This allowed him to stretch his right leg down the gap between my desk and the wall—blocking my exit from the doughnut of my desk. I’d set up everything expecting him to sit opposite me, as he had before. I swung the microphone around and asked him to speak into it so I could check the audio level.

“I still can’t stop thinking about that kiss, about how good it was to taste you again,” Cole said.

My heart spluttered and misfired like a clapped-out motorcycle. “OK, level’s fine. Thank you.”

“You…” Cole paused. “Kissed me back, Toby. Right up until you slapped me, you kissed me back. And it gave me so much hope.”

“I did not!” I glanced through the glass at Nick and Fiona, who were pretending they weren’t listening in. Every microphone is a live microphone, if your producer knows what they’re doing—and Nick absolutely knew what he was doing. Cole brushed his foot playfully against my outer thigh, and I swivelled my chair out of his reach, scanning the windows to make sure no photographers were close enough to see what was happening.

“Quit it!”

Cole withdrew his foot, and as the relief washed over me, so did a feeling of something else: regret. I wanted his foot there. I wanted to feel Cole’s body against mine. I wanted his playful touch. I wanted to feel connected to him like that again, the way we used to be. I wanted to launch myself over the desk and wrap my arms around him and feel his body underneath mine and his hot breath in my mouth. I wanted Cole Kennedy. And that terrified me. I was clenched like clenching was the only thing holding in my internal organs.

“Thirty seconds,” Nick said through the studio speaker, rousing me from my thoughts. I slipped my headphones back on. Cole sat up straight, and I did the same. Then he leaned forward and gently slid the can back off my right ear, as tenderly as a lover tucking in a lock of stray hair. The intimacy of it took my breath away.

“I forgot to say thank you,” he said.

“What for?”

Twenty seconds on the clock.

“Your advice for dealing with the paps was… awesome.”

“I saw the photos. You really committed to the bit.”

“Oh no, that wasn’t acting. I absolutely slammed into that lamp post. I was too busy talking to a cute boy on the phone and wasn’t looking where I was going.”

I blushed with the intensity of a steam burn. Why was it so hot in here? Was my skin falling away in sheets?

Ten seconds.

“And the fall was real,” Cole went on. “The damage to my phone was very real. But getting my arse out… That wasn’t for the cameras. Not really. Although it made great press. No, that was all for you.” He winked and unleashed that trademark sexy smirk. “Because… it’s all yours, Toby. Whenever you want it.”

On the other side of the glass, Nick’s jaw was on the floor. Fiona’s eyes were as wide as the eyes of an owl that had done a line of cocaine shortly before receiving a nasty surprise.

Zero seconds.

Silence.

Nick wound his finger in the air frantically, pleading with me to start talking, but I couldn’t speak.

“Toby!” Nick’s voice barked in my cans. The fog lifted. Tap. Our microphones were live.

“Cole Kennedy, welcome to Pop Review !”

The list of questions Nick and I had prepared for the interview were up on the screen, and for the first few minutes, I worked my way through them. As we chatted, Cole’s foot found its way around the desk and pressed against mine. With every new question, he pressed a little closer to me—first his foot, then his ankle, then our calves pressed against each other. Despite this—or because of it, I don’t know—the conversation was flowing. We were deep into a discussion about Cole’s music, and soon the list of official questions had been abandoned and Cole and I were doing the exact thing that had brought us together in the first place: talking about music.

“This is essentially a soft rock album,” I said. “Why the orchestra?”

Cole’s eyes lit up. “Don’t you love the richness? The strings make the music soar.” Cole was in his element. Journalists never asked him this stuff, yet this was his genius. “I was listening to Revolver , the Beatles album, and I had this epiphany…”

Nick’s voice came through my cans. We had two minutes left with Cole. I gave him a thumbs up. Nick’s voice came again. “Go back to the list of questions, you daft bawbag.”

I waved him off. I was letting Cole be Cole. The heat of Cole’s calf muscle was electric against my leg.

“There’s no doubt the orchestra elevates the sound—” I said.

“Right? Imagine ‘Eleanor Rigby’ without the strings. Make it a straight pop song, or rock song, and it’s got nowhere near the drama or the urgency?—”

“But ‘Eleanor Rigby’ has no traditional rock instrumentation at all. That’s not the approach you took for ‘The Flame.’ You mixed the two…”

Nick was waving frantically on the other side of the studio glass, pointing at the screen.

Cole continued. “No, that’s right, the cello, double bass, viola, and violin provide the dramatic sweep you might expect from keys, but in ‘Reborn’…”

Nick was in my ears again. “For fucksake. Ask him why he called the album The Flame !”

I waved Nick away. Cole was effusive, gesturing wildly. The passion was dripping from him, and I wasn’t going to interrupt. This was what the fans wanted. This was Pop Review taking pop seriously. But, more than anything, there was an intensity in Cole’s eyes that I recognised from the sixteen-year-old boy I had loved—and it filled my soul to the brim, the way a gospel choir fills a church until the roof lifts. All the while, Cole’s leg was against mine, the heat of him travelling up my body. Occasionally, his hand would reach across and rest on my knee or cup the underside of my thigh, and I never wanted it to end.

“The theme of the album is the idea of being reborn,” Cole said. “I wanted to give the music a feeling of taking off, you know? This sense of a grand arrival, or of your spirit being lifted by angels…”

Nick was pointing doggedly at my computer screen. He mouthed the words: “Ask him, you melt.”

Again, I ignored him. I turned to look out the window at the hundreds of fans watching our interview. Tap . I faded up the outside mic. “What do we think, guys, does the album feel like being lifted by angels?” I gestured for them to make some noise, and they roared. Cole waved at the crowd and clapped his hands together in a gesture of prayer and gratitude. He tapped his chest over his heart and blew the Kenneddicts a kiss. They went wild. I slowly faded the exterior mic back down. One minute left. Nick’s eyes were pleading. I looked down at the screen. Oh, yeah, that question. Sure, why not?

“If being reborn is the theme of the album,” I said, “why did you call the album and the tour The Flame ? Isn’t ‘Reborn’ the perfect name?”

Nick looked to the heavens and threw his hands up into the air.

Cole’s hand tightened on my thigh. That famous smirk lit his face, and his eyes sparked with mischief. I knew that spark. It was the spark he got when he teased me.

“Why do you think, Tobias?”

“Um…” I was stumped. “Has it got something to do with fire being cleansing? Perhaps it still represents a fresh start but with less, um, placenta?”

Cole laughed. “Tobias, have you even listened to the song?”

“Of course I have.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s a break-up song…”

Nick was in my ear. “Twenty seconds. Wrap it up.”

“Tell you what,” Cole said. “You go away and listen to the lyrics. I think if you listen a little more closely, it’ll all become clear.”

Nick’s finger was giving me the wind-up. He was shaking his head, like he was disappointed in me. I wrapped up the interview. Outside, the Kenneddicts cheered, and I fed the audio through before hitting the button to fire off “Reborn.” Tap . Our microphones were off. The interview was over. Cole sat there, leaning towards me. His shirt billowed open, and I could see the neatly clipped hair of his chest and the tattoos he’d acquired in the years since we’d been together. A gold pendant swung hypnotically from a chain around his neck.

“Did I muck that up?” I asked, confused.

Cole reached a hand over and grabbed mine. “That was the best interview I’ve done in years.”

“So, why do I feel like I’ve failed a test?”

“You didn’t fail anything,” Cole said. His finger brushed along the seam of my jeans. “Keep pulling at that thread, Toby.”

Fiona’s head popped through the door. “We gotta scoot.”

Cole let me go and stood up. I felt his absence, the warmth of his body leaving my personal space. I wanted to rush towards it, cling to it, follow it.

“You’re still coming to the show tonight, right?” he asked, tucking his hands into the back pockets of his jeans.

“Of course.”

“Come backstage afterwards?”

I couldn’t say yes quickly enough. The chance to spend more time alone with Cole was suddenly the thing I wanted most in the whole world. Fiona handed me a backstage pass, then grabbed my neck and pulled me down to her for what I thought was going to be a peck on the cheek.

“Much better,” she whispered in my ear. “Thank you.”

As she turned and left, Cole pointed a finger back and forth between his sister and me.

“No kiss for me, though, right?”

“Absolutely not,” I said. There were at least two dozen photographers outside with their lenses trained on us.

“See you tonight.”

“Of course,” I said, knowing every second until I could get him alone was going to be agony.

“Good. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

“Last time you said that, you took me to an oncology department.”

And with that, Cole turned and disappeared from the studio and into a swarm of security guards.

My phone pinged.

Denzil: Much better bruv.