Page 1 of The Aster Valley Collection, Vol. 1

GENT

Have you ever done something so monumentally embarrassing you wish you could change your name and escape to a tiny town in northern Canada for the rest of your life? Yeah, me neither. I like snow as much as the next guy, but not being able to get delivery sushi is kind of a deal breaker for me.

At least, it was.

Before I moved to Aster Valley, Colorado, I thought there was nothing better than the convenience, energy, and anonymity of a big city.

I loved living in Los Angeles. Unlike other successful musicians, however, I did not like to party.

I barely even liked to stay up late. But I craved exercise, being outside in the sun, spending time with friends, and enjoying a good meal.

I imagined living in LA until I died, rode hard and put away wet as a single gay guy still sucking the marrow out of the city of angels until my final moment on earth.

I’d never really thought of myself as the settling down kind.

Maybe it was because the lifestyle of a professional musician didn’t mesh well with stability and settling.

Maybe it was because I had a hard time picturing meeting someone I could stand for longer than a few days at a time.

At the age of thirty-four, I wasn’t old, but I was enough of an adult to know I liked my space, my independence.

I craved being the captain of my own ship and not having to bend my sails for anyone else.

In fact, it was a problem sometimes. My manager complained about my stubborn insistence on red-lining every little detail of my contracts.

My producer rolled her eyes at my desire to direct every project.

Even my uncle Doran—who’d somehow ended up as my personal assistant—complained about me being underfoot and bossy about the way he managed my house.

So imagine my surprise when I met someone who changed everything, someone who could suddenly control me like a puppet with a thousand strings. And every single one of them was tied between him and me irrevocably. Forever.

It started with a single moment, a split-second decision, that took everyone, including me, by surprise.

We were in Denver performing a show in a club called Sweet Splits.

Our band name was GUS , but it had originally stood for Gentry’s Unlimited Sweets .

Needless to say, our PR people were having a field day with the sweets theme.

They’d arranged for specially printed shirts for the event to hurl into the crowd throughout the night and had asked us to open with our holiday song “Candy-cane Kisses” even though the concert was taking place three days after Christmas.

The organizers had hard candies to toss out to audience members during the concert which I suspected might cause some moderate injuries, but my agent had assured me we had nothing to worry about.

In other words, it was a fairly typical concert night.

My manager had booked a mountain rental property for me nearby.

I could ring in the New Year in the peace and quiet of a secluded cabin in the woods.

I had plans to spend the month writing new material, and I always preferred to hide away in seclusion when I did it.

Several other members of the band planned the opposite.

They wanted to party in the Caribbean and celebrate our time off with sun and fun.

The first three songs of the set went by in a happy blur of screaming fans and the typical ramping up of energy.

I fed off it. The dancing, the singing along…

I loved all of it. But when we started “He Said,” I began to focus on a particular face in the crowd.

The man was only a few rows back and dead center, but he looked to be all alone in the midst of a writhing crowd.

His dirty-blond hair was damp with sweat from the overly warm, crowded space, and he’d stripped down to only a white tank-style undershirt, revealing biceps that made me want to whimper and lick.

His beard shone almost strawberry blond in the lights, and his eyes were closed.

Darker eyebrows sat heavily over his closed lids, and I suddenly wondered what he was thinking.

The lyrics fell from my tongue like an age-old prayer, repeated so many times the words almost ceased to have meaning.

He said he’d stay, but those words were cheap.

He said he’d never leave, but the pain cut too deep.

As the thrumming guitar sped up behind me, I noticed the man’s plush lips were barely moving, following the words silently with a slight smile. He knew the words as well as I did, and he sang them to himself.

Why? Simply because he was a GUS fan and he knew all of our lyrics? Or did they mean something to him? Did they knock him right in the solar plexus the way they’d done to me when I’d first scribbled them down?

After the third stanza, his eyes opened and his gaze met mine. The zing of the guitar pick squeal on my right wasn’t enough to pull me out of the semi-trance I felt looking at this man in the crowd. He was mesmerizing… intense. Fucking beautiful. Unlike anyone I’d ever seen.

Why him? Why all of a sudden? I’d never been inclined to lust after a fan.

Ever. I kept my sexual liaisons casual and random—a guy in a club or a mutual friend of a friend—something I could control rather than risking a fan spilling details to the media.

I wasn’t in the closet—hell, I wrote and sang songs about loving men—but I wasn’t very public about my sexuality either.

Like many other celebrities, I simply tried to keep the personal details of my life private.

Since I hadn’t really had much time in the past ten years for more than physical encounters, it hadn’t really been an issue.

But this man? This man made me wonder if it was time to think about more than a quick fuck here and there.

He looked like the kind of man who deserved hours and hours of pleasure.

As I sang, I couldn’t help but imagine this sexy, sweating man beneath me, squeezing his eyes closed while I pressed inside him. Lying back on plush sheets as I dropped kisses over every inch of his hard body.

He said “take me” before he up and walked away from me.

I watched him so closely, I almost tripped over the mic stand between songs.

When I had to introduce the next number, I glanced back at our drummer and the other guys before looking back out at the crowd.

For a split second, I didn’t see him, but then he looked up at me and grinned.

I must have smiled like a goof because the crowd noise ratcheted up a notch or twelve in response to my expression.

We went right into “Easy Crazy” and then “Birthday Girl.” I tried not to make it a one-fan show, but it wasn’t easy.

Something about that guy kept dragging my eyes back.

My mouth sang the lyrics, but my mind scrambled through ideas of how to find this guy after the show, how to get him back to my hotel room and naked in my bed.

Maybe I’d get lucky and he’d wait for me by the stage doors with the other die-hards.

Or maybe after our final good-nights, I could send a stagehand to give him a note.

When the tempo slowed down for my acoustic solo, “Belong to Me,” I gave up trying to do the right thing.

I sang that song right to him. It was him and me, and I felt the world shift off kilter.

This was crazy. I didn’t know him. He could have been married, uninterested, straight .

But I felt it so deep in my bones. Even if he wasn’t for me, I wanted to make him feel something, make him feel seen, cared for, noticed.

If you were mine, I’d send the stars to greet you…

His hand came up and pressed against the center of his chest, and his chin began to wobble.

If you were mine, I’d bring my world to meet you…

The deep sound of my voice sounded rougher than normal to my ears, but the notes were true. I sang about wanting something I didn’t yet have—a feeling I was achingly familiar with.

A fat tear fell from his eye and caught the pink light from the stage.

If you were mine, I’d dry all your tears…

The line made them come faster, and he shook his head and laughed as if embarrassed to be touched by the words and the music.

If you were mine, I’d wish away all your fears…

We stood there, staring at each other while the earth continued to spin, and somehow I managed to finish the song. This was too much. I couldn’t keep up the level of intense connection without knowing his story.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket during the song break and took a picture of me—or maybe of the whole band, there was no way to know—and I couldn’t help but feel envious.

So I did the same.

“How’s it going, Denver?” I called into the microphone, pulling my phone from the back pocket of my jeans.

I’d done this before, we all had, on particularly crazy nights with incredible crowds.

But this time was different. I snapped as many photos as I could, making sure to capture him in most of the frames.

The crowd screamed and cheered. Phones came out everywhere to catch a shot of me doing the same.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Blondie frown at his phone and tap on the screen angrily as if responding to a text.

A mix of negative emotions ran across his face before he looked back up at me and winced.

And then he turned to leave.

“No!” I said into the microphone. “Wait!” But the man didn’t wait. He raced toward the back and disappeared into the crowd.

Bobby pushed his guitar around to the side and stepped closer to me before covering the mic. “Gent?”

I frantically searched the crowd for the dirty-blond head, feeling deep in my gut that I could not let this stranger get away. “Bobby, I need… That guy… There was a guy…”

Bobby’s confusion was no surprise. I was acting ridiculous. We had two more songs to go before the end of our set. But I couldn’t wait.

“I’m sorry. Just… hang tight.” And then I bolted off the stage. Right there in the middle of a sold-out concert. In front of everyone.

I ran into the wings, past the big security guy, and out the side door.

The frigid Denver air hit my hot skin like a gift from heaven, and the relief lasted all of five seconds before the sweat froze on my skin.

I looked every which way before heading to the main entrance of the venue.

There was no sign of him. When I entered the main doors, I was stopped by a very confused ticket-taker.

“Have you seen this man?” I asked, tapping through my phone to bring up the photo. It was blurry and hazy, but it was enough to use for an identification.

“Uh, no, sir? Are you expecting him? Does he have a ticket?”

I wanted to pull my hair out. “He would have been leaving, not arriving. Is there anyone else who might have…” I looked around at several ticket-takers, concession workers, and security personnel.

All of them eyed me like I was on some serious drugs, and none of them seemed to have any clue about a man in a white tank top.

“Thank you anyway,” I finally said, in defeat. “It’s just as well,” I muttered. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck .

After taking several deep breaths to calm my ass down, I politely explained who I was and made my way back to the stage through the crowd. The boys in the band had been riffing and playing around to stall, and I could see the relief on their faces when I made a dramatic entrance.

I hopped back on stage and took the mic again.

“Sorry, everyone. When you gotta go, you gotta go.” The crowd roared with laughter, and Bobby chuckled under his breath.

Mo on the drums made a little bah-dum-tsss on his instrument, and I couldn’t help but smile.

“No, seriously. I thought I saw someone I knew. My apologies. What d’ya say we play a new one for you next? ”

I looked around at the guys and mouthed the name of one of our new songs. We’d originally planned it for later in the night, but I knew they’d be cool with me switching it up.

As the opening notes to “Fool Me Once” began, I tried to let go of the little fantasy I’d had of the delectable man with the hot-as-hell biceps.

The sexy stranger in the crowd had simply been that: a sexy stranger.

There were plenty in every town, and many of them were mine for the taking.

All I had to do was smile and wink, and if that didn’t work, pulling out the guitar usually did.

The rest of the concert went by without a hitch.

The crowd loved it, the band did amazing work, and the managers fawned all over us afterward.

I let the guys take me out drinking until the wee hours of the morning.

It wasn’t until I got back to the hotel that I finally lost my cool and screamed out my frustration into the giant empty suite.

Other than my music career, I’d never wanted something as badly as I wanted that man. Why now? Why some random dude in a crowd?

I turned around in utter drunken confusion and punched a wall for the first time in my life.

That was all I remembered.