Rock N Soul (38 page)

Chris leaned over again and whispered, “He’ll be a few minutes. Bathroom?”

I scoffed, but the shiver that his voice gave me kind of ruined the sarcasm. “You’re such a horndog.”

“For you, yeah,” he said, then ducked his head to nip at my neck.

I slid out of the booth. “Bathroom break,” I mumbled to Eric, then scurried toward the restroom as quickly as I could so as not to traumatize any children.

As soon as I got inside and locked the door, Chris threw me against the wall and started kissing me, wasting no time in shoving his tongue in my mouth and fumbling at the fastenings of his jeans with one hand. “Open your pants,” he growled, biting at my lower lip.

“Jesus, you’re pushy all the sudden,” I managed to say between assaults on my mouth, but I reached down and pulled my cock out of my pants.

“You’re mine,” he said, his voice low and rough. “I want to make damn sure you know it. I want to show you.”

I knew he wouldn’t hurt me, that he would stop if I told him to, but this lack of control wasn’t what I wanted to remember from our last day. Today wasn’t supposed to be desperate and fatalistic, even if that was how we felt. So I pulled away as much as I could with the wall at my back and concentrated on bringing him back to me.

“Chris,” I said, and I put my hands on his cheeks and held him far enough from me that he could see my face. His dark-brown eyes were dilated, and he seemed almost like he couldn’t focus on me for a second before I whispered his name again. Then his eyes locked on mine and he looked utterly lost.

“I’m here,” I said softly. “Okay? I’m here and I’m yours. You have nothing to prove to me. I know I’m yours, okay?”

“You’ll forget eventually,” he said, but he relaxed and sagged against me.

“Never.” I tucked my head into his neck. “Never. I promise.” I slid my hands around his back and held on to him tightly. “I promise, Chris.”

He let out a ragged breath. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I said, then I glanced behind him into the mirror, and couldn’t see him. I looked like a hunched-over crazy person petting the air with my cock hanging out, and I couldn’t help but laugh at the visual.

“What?” he asked, a little humor evident in his voice.

“I look like a psycho in the mirror,” I told him, and he pulled away and turned around to see. I smiled at him and took his hand, lacing our fingers together.

“I have a lot of things I want to say—” Chris started, and I cut him off quickly.

“I know. Me too. But not here. Not in a restaurant bathroom, okay? We’ll talk. I promise. We’ll say everything we need to say. Just not here.”

He nodded, and we tucked ourselves inside our pants and went back to the table. I picked up my phone and put it in my pocket but didn’t sit down. “I guess we’re ready to go,” I told Eric. “Want to go outside to say good-byes?”

Eric nodded, and we went to the parking lot and stood by the car. “So,” he said.

Chris took a deep breath. “Tell him I’m happy,” he said. “Tell him I’m sorry I didn’t listen to him, but I’m happy now and I’m going to be okay.”

I repeated his words to Eric, forcing myself to think of it as reciting lines in a play instead of something that was really happening to me.

Eric nodded. “I shouldn’t have given up on you,” he said. “I’m sorry. I should have tried harder to get through to you.”

Chris answered, and I repeated after him as unobtrusively as I could. “I was stubborn and there was nothing else you could have done. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t ever be what you wanted me to be.” Eric gazed down at the concrete, and Chris took a step forward and put a hand on his shoulder. It didn’t cause my gut to clench like it had the day before.

“You were my friend,” he said. “You still are my friend. You always will be.”

Eric nodded. “I miss you,” he said after a beat of silence.

“I miss you too,” Chris said. He took another step forward and put his arms around Eric. Eric slid his arms around Chris too, and it wasn’t romantic but it
was
intimate enough that I averted my eyes.

“Okay,” Eric said after a moment. “I’ll take you to the airport.”

They hugged again when Eric dropped us off, and then Eric surprised me by giving
me
a quick bro-hug too. He pressed an envelope containing a couple hundred dollars and a check with a rather unsettling number of zeroes on it into my hand right before he jumped in the car and then drove off before I got my eyes back in my skull. I thought about tearing the check up and throwing it away on principle, but the poor side of me balked at that and after a few seconds of indecision, I slipped the envelope in my backpack.

Chris got flustered and unhappy at the mere suggestion that I might hand his guitar over at the check-in desk as a checked bag, so I carried it with me into the line at security. This time he didn’t talk about double-ended dildos or harass me about how much better rock stars had it when they flew. As a matter of fact, he didn’t say much of anything as we waited in line, which was nice because I wouldn’t have been able to answer him without getting weird looks from the people around me, and if there’s any place you don’t want to come across as crazy, the airport security line is it.

He stayed close by my side, though, and at one point he stood behind me and slid his arms around my waist, holding me to his chest and putting his cheek against the side of my head. We stood like that for a long time, breaking apart for a few seconds now and then to move forward in the line, but eventually the lump in my throat reached critical mass and I had to step away from him so I wouldn’t start bawling like a newborn in the middle of the airport.

We got up to the metal detectors, and I heaved his guitar up onto the conveyor belt and took off my shoes to put in another bin. Then I reached for one of the little bowls for jewelry and pocket change and slowly pulled the necklace with his ring threaded on it over my head and dropped it in the bowl.

Chris stared at it, and the look in his eyes made me wonder if ghosts could cry. “Tyler . . .” he started, like he had in the restaurant, but the TSA line at the airport wasn’t really the time to start the discussion either, so I turned quickly and went through the metal detector. He followed me and didn’t try to finish the sentence.

They started boarding almost immediately after we got to the gate, so there wasn’t much of an opportunity to talk until we got on the plane. They insisted that I gate-check the guitar, which made Chris frown, but he let it go.

For then, at least. Once I found my row, he plopped down in the aisle seat beside me and started grumbling. “If anything happens to that guitar, I’ll bust some heads.”

Eric had gotten us a first-class ticket and the seat next to us seemed to be empty, so I didn’t worry too much about being overheard, but I put my earpiece in anyway. “I’m sure it will be fine,” I told him. “People gate-check things all the time.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but it’s not like I can just go out and buy another guitar if they lose this one or break it or whatever.”

“True,” I admitted. “But still. Don’t worry about it.” He put his arm around my shoulders, and I relaxed into him. “It was your first one?”

He nodded. “I got it right after my dad died. We weren’t rich or anything, but Dad had some life insurance and Mom was pretty focused on using the money to make me and Allison happy, so she didn’t put up a fight when I asked for a guitar. She even paid for lessons for a while, until I decided I didn’t need them anymore.”

“Wait,” I said, “I thought your mom got Alzheimer’s when you were twelve?”

A flash of something unpleasant crossed his face. “No, that didn’t happen until later. After we signed with the record label and started actually making money off our music,” he explained. “It was just that when it happened, she regressed back to the year before Dad died. I guess that was her safe place. That’s what the doctors told us, anyway.” He tightened his arm around my shoulders, and I leaned in a little. “I want to tell you so much, you know. Everything. But I feel like that’s weird, to unload everything on you at once. And I want to know everything about you too, but there’s just not . . . time.”

“We’ll go back and forth, then,” I said. “You ask a question and I’ll answer, and then I’ll ask you one. No secrets and no lies, though. Everything has to be true.”

He hesitated for a second. “Even the Eric stuff?”

I thought about that, weighing my personal distaste at talking about how awesome Eric was against my desperate need to know all Chris’s stories before it was too late, and eventually I nodded. “Yeah, even the Eric stuff. But let’s keep it at a storytelling level and not a waxing-poetic level, yeah?”

“That seems fair.” He reached up and ruffled my hair, laughing when I wrinkled my nose. “Well, let’s start with a small one. Are you a cat person or a dog person?”

I shrugged. “I’ve never really had either one. I had a ferret once. His name was Lorenzo.”

“A ferret, huh?” He paused, tilting his head. “I guess I can see that.”

“He was a handful, but I liked him.” I leaned against Chris a little more. “I had to get rid of him when I went to college. He wasn’t allowed in the dorms, and I didn’t want Grandma to have to take care of a ferret while I was gone. They’re a lot of work, you know? So I gave him to this dude I went to high school with. He was a good guy who would give Renny a good life.”

Chris started to say something, but the plane doors closed and the safety video came on, and he seemed to want to watch it. So I took off my earpiece and put my hand on his thigh, then experimented with pressure. He was a lot more solid now than he’d even been earlier in the day—solid enough that I had to put forth a little effort to put my hand through him. Not
much
effort, but enough to show that we might actually be able to have full-on sex if we were careful about it, which was such a nice thought that I had to stop thinking it. I had no idea if we were ever going to have the chance, and
that
made my gut clench and my mouth go dry.

Funny how on the plane out to Los Angeles we were just a couple of guys and I was sure I could let him go when he finished up his business, and now, on the plane back from LA, I was legitimately worried about how I would manage to get out of bed tomorrow if he wasn’t there harassing me to tell my streaming service that yes, he was still watching.

Jesus, I was going to need therapy after this. And to make the whole shitty situation worse, I wasn’t going to be able to talk to anyone about it.
Yeah, Richard, I’m upset because my dead boyfriend got a lot deader over the weekend.
Gemma and Chad would talk to me, but they’d probably get sick of listening to me moan about said dead boyfriend really fast, and that just left Eric, and fuck Eric. I didn’t know if I could stand talking to
Eric
about Chris. It would just feel . . . awkward. At best.

“Tyler,” Chris said, using the arm around my shoulders to jostle me a little bit. I gazed up at him with a question in my eyes, and he kissed my forehead. “You seemed like you were somewhere else for a minute there.”

I considered lying, but I’d been the one who said that everything had to be true. “I was just trying to figure out what I’m going to do without you.” And then quickly, because I didn’t want to sound
too
pitiful: “I’ll definitely have to redecorate.”

He laughed. “Yeah, we’re going to have to redecorate either way. It’s super weird to have to look up and see myself on the wall all the time.”

“Carmen hung that shit up,” I pointed out. “I keep telling you that.”

“Yeah, but Carmen doesn’t live there anymore and you left it up,” he argued. “So that says something about it.”

“I told you, I was just too lazy to redecorate.”

He made a
tsk-tsk
noise at me. “No lies, you said.”

I laughed a little, snuggling in even more and not caring how odd my posture must look to the flight attendant. “Okay, well, part of it was laziness.”

“And the other part?” he prodded.

I rolled my eyes. “I
might
have been a slightly bigger fan than I said I was.
Slightly
.”

He smirked at me like he’d fucking known it all along, and my stomach did a flip at the way his mouth curved. “Did you think I was sexy?”

“Hell yes,” I told him. “I mean, I didn’t give it
too
much thought because it wasn’t like I was ever going to meet you. But yeah, I thought you were hot.”

“If I’d been alive when you got there with room service and I’d invited you in, would you have taken me up on it?”

I considered that for a few seconds. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I totally would have. Richard would have fired me, but it actually would have been worth it.”

“That’s pretty serious,” he said, smiling at me. “You admitting I would have been worth losing your job over. You, who never ever bones guests, ever.”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t let it go to your head.” I looked past him at the woman in the window seat across from us, who had headphones on and was staring out the window and, most importantly, not watching us. I put my hand on Chris’s cheek and pulled him around for a kiss that was supposed to be brief and hard but quickly turned velvet, soft and warm and so slow that it made my toes curl and my throat ache. It took all my willpower to break the kiss after a few seconds so that the flight attendant wouldn’t notice.