Rock N Soul (33 page)

“This is bullshit,” Chris said. He lowered his hand. “I don’t know if I can do it and if I try and it doesn’t work, I’m going to lose my chance with you.”

“You lost your chance with me when you made me give you your teary fucking reunion with your ex-boyfriend without warning me first.” I dropped my own hand and then wrapped my arms around my stomach again. “That was just cruel, Chris. Especially after last night. You can’t be so thick that you didn’t realize what last night meant.”

He was silent for a second, then nodded slowly. “I knew what it meant.”

“Then fuck you,” I said. “For leading me on when you knew what was going to happen today.”

His eyes flashed. “You know what? This isn’t all about you. I’ve been in love with that bastard since I was fourteen years old and I’ve had to watch him fucking girls right in front of me and I’ve had to sit with him while he was drunk and weepy after breakups and I’ve had to make myself get over him time after fucking time and it’s
exhausting
. And let me tell you, Tyler, he’s not blameless in all this. He knew what he was doing and what I wanted and how much it fucked with me and he didn’t care. But I was so head over heels for him that I let him do it because the alternative was losing him altogether, and I’d already lost my family and I couldn’t lose him too.”

He glared at me, both eyebrows raised and his jaw set. I decided to let the challenge slide and just nodded curtly.

“I’m not blaming him for everything,” Chris continued. “My choices were my own and I think I’ve fucking paid for them. And I don’t think he was doing it to be a jerk. But I do know that it hurt, all the time, and I couldn’t even look at him for a long time without wanting to throw myself off a bridge. And then I met Jerri and I popped my first pill and suddenly I just didn’t give a shit anymore. I could get on stage with him and let girls blow us in the tour bus and watch him flirt with all the groupies and not feel like he had a switchblade in my gut, and after years of feeling like every single day was a huge miserable struggle with wanting to burst into tears like a fucking pussy every time he looked at me, it just felt good not to care. Okay?”

He ran a hand through his hair, grabbing on to the ends of the strands and tugging at it hard enough to make himself grimace. “And I didn’t care about how my sister hated me or how my mom didn’t know me or how disappointed my dad would have been in me. And I didn’t care that my girlfriend didn’t love me or that she was using me for fame and money and I didn’t care that everyone stopped returning my phone calls. Everything just felt fine and I felt okay with everything and I could function. The heroin made me feel
human
again.”

He paused for a moment, sucking in a deep breath and letting it out slowly through his nose. “And maybe I shouldn’t have done it. Maybe I should have gotten clean. But every single morning I decided to give it up and then every afternoon I decided that instead of quitting cold turkey I deserved just one more night of oblivion before I went back to the knife in my gut. And you don’t understand that. Nobody understands that. And so you can take your judgment and shove it.” He clamped his mouth closed and shot me the darkest glare I’d ever seen, on him or on anyone else.

After a few seconds it became obvious that he expected me to respond. I had no idea what to say, though. I finally settled on, “I’m sorry.” It seemed like a safe choice.

“I know you’re pissed at me and I guess you have a right to be,” he said, speaking a little less like a pit viper now. “But for fuck’s sake, Tyler, it’s not like I
want
to feel this way about him. I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to get over him. But he’s my best friend too, and this is probably the last time I’ll ever see him, and so let me have this, okay? Let me say good-bye the way I want to so I can at least get one thing in my entire relationship with Eric right.”

And that was true, and I’d already decided to keep going with the stupid good-byes even though I hated seeing the two of them in the same room together. But he didn’t deserve a free pass on this one, lengthy ranting explanations aside. “You still should have told me.”

“I know,” he said, deflating. “I know. I shouldn’t have kept it from you. That was a dick move.”

“You think?” I raised a sarcastic eyebrow at him. “I just—” I thought for a second. “Just tell me
why
. Why didn’t you warn me? You had a shitload of opportunities to give me a heads-up about this and I want to know why you didn’t.”

He ran a hand through his hair again, more gently this time, and looked at the floor. “I just . . . at first I didn’t want to out myself. You thought I was totally straight and I thought
you
were totally straight and I didn’t want to make things weird. And then when you found out I was bi and you were okay with it, I wanted you to think I was cool and so I didn’t want to come across like a sappy pining teenager. Then things started to get . . . you know. More intense. Between you and me. And it just got harder to tell you because I hadn’t
already
told you, and . . .”

He shrugged. “And also, like I said, I’ve been dealing with it for twelve years and I thought I could hide it when I saw him. I’d gotten good at hiding it. And since after today I’ll probably never see him again, I didn’t think it would matter anymore. So, yeah. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. For the apology.” It wasn’t
okay
, but he seemed sincere. It would have to do for now.

“You can tell him to leave if you want,” he said. “I figure I’ll have to finish talking to him before we leave so that the whole trip wasn’t a waste of time, but you can tell him to fuck off for tonight. And we can see another movie, or just hang out, or something. Just us.”

I seriously considered that for a few seconds, then shook my head. “Might as well get it over with,” I said. “You have unfinished business with him, and I’m cool with helping you wrap things up.” I paused. “Well, mostly cool. Kissing him will piss me off. And no more singing love ballads while you stare into each other’s eyes.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Um, ‘Houses on Fire’ is not a love ballad.”

“It is the way the two of you were singing it,” I said, frowning at him and trying not to relive the scene in too much detail.

He had the decency to look sheepish. “It wasn’t meant to be. I’m sorry about that too.”

“Well, okay, but it was sort of bullshit.”

“I know,” he said, sighing. “I’ve never known how to act around him. We were best friends, we really were, but things were always . . . weird. Like we were dating but we weren’t romantic. Or sometimes it felt like we
were
romantic but we weren’t physical. Or . . . Jesus, I can’t even describe it. I fucked up that relationship right from the beginning and never figured out how to fix it.”

I wasn’t really sure how to respond to that. “From what you said a few minutes ago, it seems like it’s his fault too,” I mumbled finally.

He heard me, though, and the corner of his mouth quirked upward. “Thanks.”

My eyes had snapped to his cheek when I’d seen his mouth move and then snagged there, waiting for a dimple that never showed up. “Thanks for what?”

“For taking my side,” he answered. “Nobody does that anymore. I’m an easy scapegoat.”

“Well, to be fair, I didn’t say that
none
of it was your fault,” I clarified, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear some of the bantering quality sneak back into my voice. That was one thing I liked about Chris, the easy conversations we’d fallen into like flannel footie pajamas. It was nice to know we hadn’t lost that.

Which reminded me. “By the way,” I said, turning away from him and shoving the last of my clothes in my backpack so I could be sure to look nonchalant as fuck, “you haven’t lost your chance. With me. If you still want, you know, a chance. Whatever that means here.”

A beat of silence, then he let out a breath. “I have no idea what it means. But I’ll take what I can get.”

I nodded slowly. “Okay. Well . . . we should go back downstairs. He probably thinks we’re fucking. We’ve been up here long enough.”

“I don’t give a shit what he thinks about you and me.” Chris smiled. “We are what we are and this is one part of my life that he has no control over, and I like it that way.”

“Did you know that you have dimples?” The words were out before I’d had a chance to vet them, and the cheek-burning started up.

“Did you know that you blush?”

“Fuck you.”

He grinned at me and my pants suddenly felt a lot tighter than they had been a few moments before. “Stop that.”

“Stop what?” Chris asked, his eyes wide and ridiculously innocent.

“You know what, you crotch-nugget. The smiling. The grinning. The general aura of sexy rock star. It’s unfair and I have to go out in public now.” I crossed my arms.

Chris raised an eyebrow. “Did you just call me a crotch-nugget?”

“Fuck you,” I said again.

He laughed. “You keep me on my toes. That counts for something.”

I stuck my tongue out at him and zipped up my backpack. “I guess we should go down, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “Tell me, what exactly
is
a crotch-nugget?”

“Shut up,” I said, even though he’d never obeyed that command before. And I didn’t even
want
him to. “Let’s go.”

Chris was determined to have one last drive in his car, so Eric drove us out of LA and past the thickest of the suburbs and then pulled over at a gas station. He climbed out of the car and we all congregated in front of it. Chris leaned against the hood and stared off into the distance.

“Are you sure you can drive?” Eric asked Chris.

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure,” he said, looking back at Eric but not quite looking
at
him like he’d done before. His eyes seemed to be pointed at Eric’s forehead. It was a small gesture, but it grounded me a little.

“Okay,” I said after I repeated Chris’s answer. “Well, I guess we’ll just see how it goes?”

“Less talk, more engine revving.” Chris walked around and got in the driver’s seat. He cranked the car and Eric and I walked back over to the passenger side. Without asking, Eric opened the front passenger door and held the seat forward for me to slide into the backseat with a pout on my face.

Chris caught my eyes in the rearview mirror as Eric pushed the seat back and climbed into the front. “You can tell him to move.”

“It’s fine,” I said. It wasn’t, not really, but I didn’t really feel like getting into a cock-swinging contest with Eric Painter. And besides, just the fact that Chris was giving me the go-ahead to kick Eric out of the front seat made not sitting beside Chris better. I could deal with it.

Eric rummaged around in the glove compartment and produced an Incite the Masses CD—which seemed a little egotistical to me, but whatever—and popped it in the car’s stereo system. The music came on, and Chris grinned and stomped on the gas, sending us flying out of the gas station parking lot and tearing down the road at a speed that would have ripped my Grandma’s Taurus to shreds.

The music was too loud to talk over and no one made a move to turn down the volume, so I just leaned against the window and stared out at the desert speeding by outside. After a few minutes, “Houses on Fire” came on and I couldn’t listen to it without hearing the slowed-down acoustic version in the back of my head. The album version was almost completely different from what I’d listened to earlier during the impromptu jam session, which was nice because I’d always liked this song and that would keep the acoustic version from ruining the album for me forever.

I caught Chris’s eyes in the rearview mirror again. He smiled at me, and I was caught between wanting to scream in sexual frustration and wanting to dissolve into his eyes. The only safe course of action was to look back out the window and keep my eyes there, imagining the scorching heat we’d be feeling if it were summer.

I wondered if by the time it actually
was
summer, I’d be single again.

My backpack was in the seat beside me, and I reached over to fish out my headphones, then plugged them into my phone and pulled up the recorded version of “Houses on Fire” that I’d made earlier. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until the song reached the part where Chris had started harmonizing with Eric and I didn’t hear his voice. Both guitars were audible, but only one voice. I couldn’t decide if that was better or worse.

But there was no need to torture myself like that, so I switched to my phone’s music storage and pulled up a random track, which turned out to be a drum-heavy hipster song. Fine by me. Really anything that didn’t feature Eric on vocals was a pretty good choice. I cranked up the volume so I could hear it over the Incite the Masses CD and put my cheek against the cool glass of the window.