Page 30 of Hamartia

“Who pissed in his fucking cereal?” Crawford says, unbothered.

After the meeting, which continues without Mason, Crawford and I head back to his place and pick up his truck, then drive out to Malibu to a restaurant with good reviews and an all-day sushi buffet. It’s busy, but after filling our plates we manage to find a seat by the windows, which look out at a choppy pacific. I order a beer and Crawf gets a lemon Kombucha and we eat in an easy silence for a bit, until he feels the need to talk.

“Did Cleo know he was doing porn?” he asks, before swallowing a piece of nigiri whole.

I shrug. Cleo was one of the most private people I knew—we knew she’d run from a super religious family, that Asher had followed her out when he turned eighteen—but she was closer to Zeke than she was the rest of us, so was unlikely to offer this kind of information had she known it. I’d known her five years but I still knew nothing about this part of her.

“How old is he again? Seemed like a kid the last time we met him?”

“He’s like four years younger than Cleo, I think, so, twenty-one? Two?”

“Hardly a kid.” Crawford points out. “The fuck does it matter what he wants to do?”

“It’s a non-issue, yeah.” I wash my seaweed salad down with a gulp of my beer.

“So, what about Mase? You gonna call him?”

“No. Fuck him,” I spit, angrily. “What even was that?”

Crawford shrugs. “The same shit he’s always doing. Question is, why are you surprised by it?”

I frown at that. “What are you talking about?”

Crawford laughs a little, shaking his head. “Mason. He’s always coming out with shit like that. Fuck, remember when they tried to put eyeliner on him for that shoot we did for Dark Sound? He nearly hit that makeup artist.”

“Are you serious?”

I cast my mind back to that shoot. It was over a year ago, just after Cam and I came back from Costa Rica when we got engaged. I remember Mase was in a shitter of a mood most of the day, but I just assumed he didn’t want to be there. He hates photoshoots and anything like it. Always says it has nothing to do with music.

“It was a dude, don’t worry. But I think he thought the guy was coming onto him or something. Fuck, and remember that club in Berlin, no, Frankfurt, with the dancers in cages and this guy grabbed his ass and he head butted him?”

Now that, Ididremember. We’d all got thrown out after that.

“Yeah, but that wasbecausethe guy grabbed his ass, Crawf. That’s something else.”

Crawford shrugs. “I’m just saying. Not the first time he’s overreacted about this shit. You and me? We’d laugh off a guy grabbing our ass. Zeke too. Mason just…he can’t fucking handle it.”

It feels shameful somehow that I hadn’t noticed any of this before. The latent homophobia living and breathing inside one of my best friends. Then I do remember something, the night in Paris when Jae walked into the bathroom. All three of us were there that night though, and we were all fucking disgraceful, but Mason had been the loudest. I think about him saying the word faggot about Jae and my fists curl, violence humming through me.

“Well, he’d better work on it because the next time I so much as sniff that shit from him, I’ll give him more than a black eye.”

Crawford eyes me for a minute, then nods, and focusses back on his plate.

We spend the rest of lunch talking about last night, about the blonde influencer he’s planning on meeting up with in New York, about a few of the songs he’s been working on that I agree to come back to his place to listen to.

He’s in the bathroom when I pull out my phone and send the message I’ve been debating over all day. I pull up our conversation which ended with his picture and his words about another friend not being so bad and hit reply. Settling on:

Maybe it’s me who doesn’t need any more friends. Let me see you in New York.

There’s no immediate response, no ‘seen’ notification below it. So, I put my phone back in my pocket and resolve not to check it again for a few hours.

Hours later, I’m stoned and sitting on the floor of Crawf’s living room replaying the bridge from what I’m convinced is the best song we’ve ever written together, when my phone rings. It’s not the first time it’s rung tonight, it’s not the first time I’ve ignored it either—Cam had tried calling me, sent a few texts too, all of which I’d ignored—but this time some unknown force makes me reach across for it. It’s a number I don’t recognize. I’d never answer those. No exceptions. But that same force urges me to make one this time. Crawford is downstairs picking up the pizza we ordered, so I’m alone.

“Yeah,” I answer.

There’s a small pause. “Raphael,” he says.

I must be asleep or hallucinating or something because it sounds like him. How much did I smoke?