Rock N Soul (7 page)

“If I do, will you take me up in the service elevator?” He seemed ridiculously excited by the prospect, so I nodded and then grabbed one of our shiny gold luggage carts and wheeled it out to the taxi. Mark was busy juggling the purses and backpacks of a woman and her two teenage daughters while her husband eyed him suspiciously.

Even though it was really Mark’s job, I went ahead and opened the trunk of the taxi to get the luggage while he handled the ladies’ things. Chris stood back close to the hotel doors, clearly trying hard to be quiet and still. Apparently, though, the prospect of riding in the service elevator only appeased him for about seventeen seconds. Then he trotted over and leaned in beside me as I pulled a large pink polka-dotted suitcase out of the taxi’s trunk.

“Do you ever rifle through their stuff while you’re taking it up?”

“No,” I whispered. “I need this job, dude. That would get me fired so fast that Einstein would have to rethink relativity.” I put the suitcase on the luggage rack. “Now shut up before they hear you.”

“They can’t hear me,” Chris pointed out, smirking so obnoxiously that I would have been tempted to punch him in the teeth if he’d had corporeal teeth to punch.

“Yeah, well, you can’t hear
me
unless I talk to you out loud, so it doesn’t do you any good to talk because I can’t answer you while they’re in earshot.” I smiled and waved at the family belonging to the pink suitcase and hefted the other luggage onto the cart while Chris, shockingly, wandered away from the taxi.

Then I had a thought.
So . . .
can
you hear me?
I mentally projected at Chris.

He continued stalking an unsuspecting pigeon that was strutting its way down the sidewalk. That answered that question, then.

I pushed the cart back toward the door and then stopped and smiled at the family again. “I’ll have your belongings up in your room in just a few minutes,” I said, offering my best “I’m a nice guy who isn’t going to steal your shit” impression.

“You sound so earnest!” Chris called from behind me, where I assumed he must be ghost-petting the oblivious pigeon.

I didn’t dignify him with a response. Which was probably a good thing, since the man of the family already seemed very distrustful and likely wouldn’t have appreciated me talking to invisible people right in front of his kids. After a moment of awkward silence, though, the man just nodded and shepherded his family inside and up to the reception desk.

Mark had his face set in an expression I knew too well. It was the “fuckers didn’t tip me” look. Which could only mean . . .

“Booked online?” I asked him.

“Yep,” Mark said. “And not only that, but some
discount
site.”

I groaned in sympathy. “So I shouldn’t expect anything, then, huh?”

“Who knows? They might surprise you. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up.” He touched his hand to his earpiece. “They’re in 419.”

“All right. I’m off, then.” I saluted and pushed the cart toward the service elevator. Chris caught up with me.

“What’s wrong with booking hotels online?” he asked. “I thought that was the way of the future. Everybody books online.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But people who book fancy hotels online are usually getting some kind of special deal pricing, so they’re getting hotels that they normally couldn’t afford.”

“Which is terrible. How dare they.” He rolled his eyes.

“Well, it’s great for them,” I admitted. “But people who don’t stay in luxury hotels very often don’t realize that they’re supposed to tip. So they don’t. Or they tip badly.”

“You’re really hung up on this tip thing.”

I pushed the button to open the service elevator and then shrugged. “It’s my living, man. They don’t pay me worth shit here because they assume I’m getting tipped.”

Chris just stared at me blankly. I sighed. “You wouldn’t understand. You have money and you don’t have to wonder how you’re going to pay the bills.”

He narrowed his eyes. “I can still understand it.”

“Yeah, right,” I scoffed. “You probably have all your bills on auto-pay.”

He stared at me blankly again.

I laughed. “Dude, you don’t even understand what a luxury auto-pay is. You can only be on auto-pay if you’re sure the money will be there when the day rolls around.”

“How much do you make?” he asked, peering at me.

I made a face. “That’s none of your business.”

“It’s my business,” Chris said. “Everything about you is my business.”

My eyebrows shot up so far they almost got lost under my bellboy cap. “
How
is everything about me
your
business?”

“Well, you’re my ride. So until we figure out how I can move on, I’m at your mercy and so I need to know what I’m dealing with.”

“I have a hole-in-the-wall apartment and a beat-up TV that has a weird green spot in the top-right corner,” I said. “So clearly I’m not rolling in the dough.”

“You have a nice suit, though.”

“Company-provided,” I told him. The elevator stopped on the fourth floor, and I wheeled the cart out and down the hall to room 419. I paused in front of the door and eyed Chris. “Please be quiet. I’m begging you.”

“I was quiet,” he said. “I was playing with a pigeon and I was very well-behaved.”

“True,” I admitted. “But still. Quiet.”

“Fine, fine.” He crossed his arms and poked out his bottom lip.

I knocked on the door and was immediately greeted by the father of the family, who gave me a very sour look.

“About time,” he grumbled. “Mary was about to call down to the desk.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “The service elevator can be a little slow. I have your luggage. Where would you like me to unload it?”

The man scowled at me. “Just inside the door. We’ll put it where it goes.”

“Yes, sir.” I unloaded the heavy suitcases just inside the door and stepped back outside, but before I could even turn around, the door slammed unceremoniously shut behind me.

Chris raised an eyebrow. “Wow, he was a dick.”

“At least he didn’t collapse and get blood all over the carpet,” I pointed out. “So he’s better than
some
people I could mention.”

“Blood?” he asked. “There was blood?”

“Yeah.” I turned the empty cart around and headed for the service elevator. “Well, I mean, not a ton of it. It wasn’t a murder scene or anything. But I don’t think you were terribly careful with the needle jabs there at the end, is what I’m saying.”

“There at the end,” he repeated, his voice going scary soft again.

“Don’t do that,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. “I’ve had a rough day and I really can’t deal with you getting weepy over your entirely preventable death.”

He glared at me. “Thanks for being so supportive and reassuring.”

“You do the smack, you pay the price,” I said. But then I felt sort of bad, because it’s not like addiction means you
deserve
to die, so I sighed again and continued, “But like I said, lots of people miss you. So I guess there’s that.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s good. You’ll have to show me the fan sites.”

“Oh, I’ll show you the fan sites.” A grin spreading across my face as I remembered coming across extremely interesting fan art of him and Eric. “I will
definitely
show you the fan sites.”

“What does that creepy little voice mean?” he asked, folding his arms across his chest.

“It means I’m going to show you some very special fan sites,” I said. “Just wait. It’ll be worth it, I promise.”

When my shift was over, I got my coat from the employee closet and put it on, then wrapped a scarf around my neck and pulled on gloves and a knit cap. Chris watched me intently.

“Why are you bundling up like that?” he asked.

“It’s November now.” I headed for the front door, and Chris followed. After pushing open the heavy doors and stepping outside, I immediately shivered and pulled my hat down to cover my ears. Chris stared at me like he was having an epiphany, and I sighed and started walking toward my apartment.

“I’m never going to feel cold again,” he said after following me for a few seconds. “I’m never going to feel hot again, either. I’m never going to sweat. I’m never going to . . .” He stopped walking. “I’m never going to have
sex
again,” he said, clearly just noticing this problem.

I stopped too and turned to face him, trying to look like I was admiring the buildings instead of staring at nothing on the sidewalk. “You don’t know that,” I said. “You might end up finding a nice ghost lady and settling down to have ghost babies.”

He grimaced. “That sounds even worse than celibacy.”

“What?” I smirked at him. “Not the family-man type?”

“Oh, God no,” he said, wrinkling his nose. “I would be a terrible dad, anyway.”

“Yeah, with the drugs.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “You know, I’m more than the drugs, dude. I’m a person.”

“I know you’re a person,” I said, looking down at a candy bar wrapper on the sidewalk at my feet.

“Really? Because so far, you’ve mostly just ragged on me about overdosing and told me that people like my music.”

He had a point. I could have been nicer to him. But truth be told, he wasn’t being terribly awesome himself, and I felt the need to mention that to him. “Well, all you’ve done is distract me at work and tell me I’m an idiot for expecting tips.”

He considered my words then nodded. “All right. Let’s just agree to be nicer to each other while we figure out what to do about this.”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said. “I’m not nice to anybody, really. I’m kind of an ass. That’s just me.”

He laughed. “I get that, man.”

I turned around and started walking again. Chris kept pace with me, and we continued in awkward silence for a few minutes, then I cleared my throat. “So, um, where are you from?”

“You don’t know? I thought all the fans knew.”

I did know, honestly, because apparently every sentence of the stupid band biography was burned into my memory banks, but I didn’t really want him to know that I knew even
more
about him. “I probably knew at some point. I’ve forgotten. Enlighten me.”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I tell everybody that I’m from Cincinnati.”

Which was a huge opening, so huge that I almost refused to take it on principle. But I was curious, and I’d just promised to try to stop being an ass. “But you’re not?”

“Yeah, I am,” he said. “Or I’m from there as much as anywhere else.”

More awkward silence.
This
hadn’t been in the biography. Really there wasn’t much about Chris’s early life in there—most of the stories started at the time when he and Eric met. Which I hadn’t realized was weird until now. “So . . . military?”

“Missionary,” he said. He stared off down the street and let his eyes focus somewhere far away. “I don’t talk about that much. It made reporters ask a lot of questions about religion and shit I didn’t feel like answering. So I started just saying Cincinnati and moving on with the interview.”

I wondered why he was suddenly being so open, with me of all people. About things that he didn’t advertise. “So . . . can I ask about it?”

He looked at me out of the corners of his eyes. “I guess so, if you care. You’re the exception to the rule right now.”

I couldn’t help but ask. “Why’s that?”

“Because without you I don’t have anybody to talk to.” He shrugged, still staring off down the street. “And I figure I should try to keep you interested in talking back.”

“Okay, fair enough.” I turned down another, less trendy street and kept walking. “So. Missionary. Like in the Congo and shit?”

“No, more boring than that,” he said. “At least then I would have had awesome stories to tell. Nope. We were church planters.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Church planters.”

“Yeah,” he said, rubbing his neck and staring at the ground as we walked. “We went to places in the United States that didn’t have enough churches, started one, and stayed just long enough to get it established before moving on to somewhere else.”

I chuckled. “I didn’t know there were any places in the United States that didn’t have enough churches.”

“Well, ‘enough’ is relative,” Chris pointed out. “Dad thought that any town with fewer than one church per hundred residents was woefully lacking in religion.”

“Okay,” I said. “So why did you pick Cincinnati, then?”

“It’s where I was born. That much is true. And it’s where we ended up when Dad died. Mom had family there. We buried him there.”

“What happened to your dad?” I paused and thought about what I’d said. “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”

“Heart attack,” he said, his voice kind of short and clipped. “He was hanging up some pictures of Jesus in the new church, and then that was it.”

I didn’t say anything at first to give him the chance to keep talking if he wanted to. Then I turned to look over at him. “That’s terrible. How old were you?”

“Fourteen.” He bit his bottom lip, then shrugged. “And I wasn’t . . . sad. I was just relieved that we could stop moving around and I could have friends and girlfriends and not have every moment of my life dominated by talk about church and God and Jesus.”