Rock N Soul (22 page)

Chris lost patience as soon as we arrived at the airport. I started toward the line at the check-in kiosk and he kept walking toward the special carpet of the first-class priority line. It took him all the way to the twenty-foot barrier before he realized I wasn’t following him.

He stomped back over to me. “I don’t know why you couldn’t have just sprung for a first-class ticket.”

I touched the earbud of the cheap hands-free headset I’d bought to make it look like I wasn’t just wandering around talking to myself. “Yeah, well, you saw my bank account. I can’t afford first class. Not if I want to buy groceries and keep the lights on at my apartment.”

“Eric will give you money,” Chris insisted. “He’ll reimburse you. I know he will.”

“Okay, number one, you’ve done nothing but talk about how Eric doesn’t
own
you and how he was angry with you and how he didn’t want to ever see you again,” I said. “And number two, you have to have the money up front for people reimbursing you to even be a thing that happens.” I fished out my ticket receipt and started punching my information into the kiosk.

Chris grumbled. “I guess that’s true. And yeah, Eric hated me there at the end, but it was a complicated kind of hate. He’ll forgive me if I talk to him.”

“You won’t be able to,” I said. “Unless you’ve figured out how to possess people.” I got a couple of weird looks at that one, so I laughed like it was a joke.

“I’ve tried a few times. No luck yet.” He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “I just wish I could say my good-byes directly.”

“I can get that, man.” I picked up my backpack and took the printed boarding pass from the kiosk. “I wish there was a way you could, too.”

An airport employee gave me a narrow-eyed look. “Sir, you’ll need to turn off your headset when you go through security.”

I smiled at her with my best “I am not a terrorist so please do not cavity search me” smile. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Just finishing up my call now.”

She gave me the stink eye, so I made a show of pushing the button on my earpiece.

Chris grinned at me. “So now I can just talk at you about all sorts of shit and you can’t say anything back or else the security guards will block you from boarding.”

I shifted my backpack on my shoulders and joined the line to go through security.

“Man, I’d forgotten how the common folk fly,” Chris said, looking around at the crowded queue. “I guess being famous does have its perks. They give us private security screenings so we don’t get mobbed by fans. And then we get to sit in the executive lounge and have cold beverages while we wait.”

“I’m sure that’s nice for you,” I muttered under my breath.

“I’m sorry? I couldn’t hear you over the sound of how much better it is to fly first class.” He smirked at me, and I tried very hard to be mad at him. But Jesus, the dimples. I smiled back in spite of myself.

He continued chattering all the way through security, getting a huge kick out of yelling at the top of his lungs that he could see my double-ended dildo on the x-ray scan. I blushed even though I knew that a) I didn’t have a double-ended dildo, in my carry-on luggage or anywhere else, and b) no one else could hear him. He looked triumphant at getting a reaction out of me, so I rolled my eyes in his direction as I was putting my shoes back on after the scan.

“You’re an ass,” I grumbled.

“I know,” he said, grinning. “But you still like me.”

“I have no idea why,” I said, then stood up and went to the gate to wait on boarding.

Chris got bored with trying to talk to me on the plane. I couldn’t answer him at all since I was sitting close to other people and they wouldn’t have bought my “I’m on my phone” bit for very long, especially since I wasn’t supposed to be using it during the flight. So when we started to taxi for takeoff, he went out to sit on the wing of the plane, and he stayed out there the whole flight except for one incident when he stuck his head through the side of the plane and told me about how he’d been buzzed by a goose.

We landed in Los Angeles late, at about eleven in the evening, so I put my headset back on and then told Chris I was just going to go to the hotel and then figure out how to find Jerri in the morning.

Chris scoffed. “It’s 11 p.m. The city just woke up.”

“The nightclubs just woke up,” I corrected. “But it’s 2 a.m. in Boston and besides, I’m not really that much of a clubber, so I’m just ready to go to bed, thanks.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “I kind of want to see you at a club.”

“Why?” I shouldered my backpack and went out to find my airport shuttle.

“Because I think you’d be cute dancing,” he said, winking outrageously at me.

I rolled my eyes. “You’re ridiculous.”

He shrugged, still grinning. “I’m just glad to be back in my homeland.”

“Los Angeles isn’t your homeland,” I pointed out. “You never even lived here.”

“I lived here while we were recording last time,” he said. “But you’re right. Not my homeland, exactly. But it does feel like I’m among my people here.”

“The hedonistic megalomaniac people?” I asked, shooting him a little bit of a smile. “Sure, I guess I can see that.”

He smiled back. “Well, anyway, I think you should go to a club. Maybe a gay bar. It might be interesting to see you grinding up against a dude.”

“Um, no,” I said. “That’s not going to happen.”

“Why not?” he whined. “You got to see me with a cock in my ass. The least you can do is let me see you dancing with a guy.”

“Not going to happen,” I assured him. “I’m bi, sure, but I’m not what you’d call ‘out’ about it.”

“Who cares?” Chris said. “Nobody knows you here. And besides, you said you made out with a few guys. That’s pretty out.”

“I made out with a
couple
of guys I knew pretty well in the privacy of their homes,” I pointed out. “Not with some random stranger on a dance floor in a town where if you’re
not
photographed you’re doing something wrong.”

“But it would be really sexy,” he argued.

“For you, maybe. For me it would probably be sweaty and beery and awkward.”

“Killjoy.”

“And proud to be one,” I agreed. “But seriously, maybe someday. Just not tonight. I’m exhausted and I’m probably going to be comatose levels of unconscious before I even get my blankets situated.”

“So no jerking it together tonight?”

I blushed and sputtered a little, then lowered my voice so that the other people waiting for the shuttle couldn’t hear. “We do not make a habit of jerking it together, Chris.”

“We did the other night.”

“That was
one time
, like a month ago,” I insisted. “And we didn’t do it
together
, we just sort of did it at the same time.”

“It was hot, though.”

“It was hot because we’d just watched porn,” I said, turning away from the gathered crowd slightly so I could waggle my finger at him like he was a little kid who needed to stay out of the cookie jar. “Not because of anything else.”

Chris was silent for a second, which was weird enough that I looked over at him. He met my eyes for a moment before shrugging. “No, you’re right. It was just the porn.”

I opened my mouth to say more, but then the shuttle rounded the corner and pulled up next to us. Chris wandered off to jump in and out of the other passengers while I climbed into the stuffy, slightly sweat-damp van and settled down for the ride to the hotel.

Chris sat on the hood of the van for the whole ride, which was very disorienting for me. I knew the driver couldn’t see him and so he wasn’t blocking the guy’s line of sight, but the driver had a heavy foot when he braked and every time I thought it was because he’d suddenly lost his view of the road. Chris, though, seemed to be having a good time. He was leaning back on the hood like he had been that day in Grandma’s backyard, the wind from the drive making his hair whip around his head. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew he had his eyes closed. You could just tell from his body language that this city, with all its glitz and glamour, was where he wanted to be.

Not back in Boston living in a tiny studio apartment with a bellboy. That sort of thing wasn’t big enough to hold a guy like him. That much had been obvious from the beginning.

I plugged in my earphones to try to avoid conversation with the other passengers. I’d managed to score the seat by the window, so I watched the city speed by, bright and alive like Chris had said it would be.

I only had my backpack and my laptop bag, so I wouldn’t have needed the hotel bellboy’s services even if the place had
had
a bellboy, which of course it didn’t. Chris followed along behind me as I walked into the lobby, commenting on how much nicer the hotel where I worked was from the one I was checking in to. I got my room key and went up to my room, which smelled faintly of cigarette smoke even though it was advertised as a nonsmoking room, and collapsed face-first onto the bed.

Chris sat down beside me. “You going to sleep?”

I left my face buried in the blanket when I spoke. “Yes, probably.”

“You don’t want to, like, order a pizza?”

I turned my head to the side, laying my cheek against the bed, and peered up at him. “So you can sit there and watch me eat it?”

“Yeah,” he said, “and also because you have to be hungry.”

“I’m okay.” I knew he was right—I
should
be hungry. But the adrenaline of flying and landing and being all the way across the country from my happy place, combined with the total lack of energy remaining in my body for ordering and chewing and digesting food, made it hard to care that much. “I’ll just eat a big breakfast in the morning.”

“You should eat something,” he said, frowning down at me. “All you’ve eaten today was a bagel right after check-in and your pack of airline peanuts somewhere over Utah.”

“I’m okay,” I repeated. “Seriously, it’s cool. And besides, I ate some of my in-flight meal.”

He gave me a look. “You ate one bite of the chicken, made the worst face I’ve ever seen anyone make, and then nibbled on one corner of that gingerbread cracker thing like an anorexic rodent until the stewardess took away your tray.”

I wrinkled my nose. “They prefer ‘flight attendant’ now.”

“Not the point.” He reached out to touch my arm and looked almost surprised when his hand passed through me. “I don’t want you to starve.”

“Well, I don’t want
you
to be dead,” I said without thinking. Then, because he didn’t respond immediately: “And yet here we are.”

“If I wasn’t dead, you wouldn’t have met me,” he said after a moment.

I rolled my eyes. “If you weren’t dead, I would have met you, but you would have stiffed me on my tip.”

He smiled at that (fucking
dimples
) and shrugged. “I would have given you like a dollar.”

“Don’t even lie,” I said, smiling back. There was something about his smile that just invited reciprocation, and that was annoying. It was like I didn’t have any choice in the matter. Chris smiles, I smile. Gross.

“Well, the new-and-improved Chris would have,” he said. “The one who’s slave to the whims of someone who lives on tips.”

I toed off my shoes and let them fall onto the floor beside the bed. “Well, I’m incredibly glad I’ve had a positive effect on you.”

“In spite of all my efforts to the contrary.” He stood up. “If you’re not going to eat something, you should get some sleep.”

I eyed the space where he’d been sitting. “Did you just move out of my way?”

He looked back down at the bed. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

I rolled onto my back and sat up. “I thought I might take a shower before I went to bed to get the airplane smell off of me, but fuck that.”

“You get used to it,” he said. “The airplane smell. The tour-bus smell. The smell of traveling to places you don’t really want to go. It’s all the same after a while.”

I stared at him. “Dude, it’s way too late to get so philosophical.”

He glanced pointedly at the clock on the nightstand, the glowing “12:30” in blue digits. “It’s actually way too
early
to get philosophical. Wait until you’re up with me past 3 a.m. for the first time and then prepare to bust out the Sophocles.”