Dedicated Page 3

  The idea of it didn’t turn me off like I expected it to. Les had a weird effect on me; we’d been playing together for so long now that it seemed impossible for him to shock me the way he enjoyed doing to others. The last prank he’d pulled off involved his nuts, an actual bag of nuts, a judiciously placed hole, and our noob-at-the-time roadie, Ed.

  “I’ve got the heart of a child,” he’d said, beaming brightly at Ed as Ed shook out his hand like it’d been doused in acid.

  “No, you’re just a child.”

  “Anytime you wanna be my Daddy, just let me know, Porter. I’ve got a Mr. Rogers fetish, though, so we’ll need Mars to supply you with some cardigans.”

  “Fucking nut job,” I muttered and waved him out of the room. The door clicked shut behind him, sealing off his laughter, and I was left alone in the graveyard quiet.

  Les had left his guitar faceup on his chair, and I plucked at a few of the strings, seeing the ghost of his fingers moving over them. He favored taps and slides, hammer-ons, plenty of percussion. I loved watching him play, and I sat there trying to figure out whether or not the fact that I was possibly mildly turned on by the idea of him jerking off bothered me. Did I want to get with Les? My dick apparently had an ambivalent opinion a few minutes ago. Maybe it was just a reflex. Or maybe we’d just been closed up too long. Judging by the population around me—which, granted, currently only consisted of Les—my libido didn’t seem on par. That wasn’t to say I didn’t have a sex drive, because I knew I did, but when it came to actual humans, it was safe to say my dick was highly selective.

  “No way that was long enough for a jerk break,” I said when Les returned a few minutes later.

  “My pump’s always primed and ready to go.” He shot me a smirk and took his seat, balancing his guitar over his lap again.

  “It’s a miracle you ever get anything done.” I watched him fiddle with his strings, long fingers nimbly making adjustments.

  “No, it’s a weird superstition, actually.” Les sobered and leaned nearer to me like he was letting me in on a secret. “I work better when my dick’s on E. Swear. All my best lyrics? They come after I blow my load.” He gave me a sly look for his own pun and picked up his notebook, which resembled a chalkboard scene torn from A Beautiful Mind: tight black, illegible scrawl all over the pages, angled in every direction.

  “So in a way, my pillow is a sacrifice to a greater cause?” I mused.

  “Exactly.” Les’s gaze flicked up to meet mine as he turned a page. “You should consider yourself honored.”

  I ran out of quip steam and changed direction, picking up my guitar up again and running through the riff we were working on before.

  “Not that one,” Les said abruptly. “Let’s switch over to that sound we were playing with yesterday.”

  “The one in drop D?”

  He nodded, so I set about adjusting my tuning.

  “I don’t have lyrics for it yet, but they’ll come. I can feel it.”

  I liked to work linearly, but Les jumped all over the place. I conceded because it was evident in the way his eyes narrowed to just slivers of bottle green that his mind was working over something that might be worth the detour. It was a habit of his I’d picked up on. One of those looks that could be called penetrating. He’d aimed it in my direction on more than a few occasions. Sometimes in frustration and sometimes with something else that was inscrutable, an undercurrent I couldn’t quite grasp the meaning of. The second I thought it was desire, I slapped the thought away.

  Shifting on my chair, I nodded, ready to see where he was taking us, then added on a whim, “We should get out of here tonight. Go to some dive and get blitzed.” I could handle a lot of alone time, especially after our last endless tour, but we’d been sequestered so long working on this new album that even I was ready for a scenery change.

  Les glanced at me, surprise showing in his expression, then muting as he looked back down at his fingers drifting over his guitar strings. “Sure. That’s a great idea.”

  I’d had no clue that my stupid idea to go out and get hammered was going to change everything.

  Favorite breakfast food?

  Evan: Les doesn’t actually know what a breakfast food is. He’s never been awake for it.

  Chapter 5

  Present day

  A half hour after I shut the door behind Jamie and cleaned myself up, I sat on the floor at the end of the bed, squaring off against a blank sheet of notebook paper. I was on the losing end, as predicted. In that half hour I’d been sitting there, I’d made a single mark on the page—a black ballpoint slash. I used to just set the pen to the paper and bleed out. That’s what it’d felt like, like everything running around in my head consolidated and flowed onto the page and all I had to do was sit there and transcribe it. I’d fill up an entire notebook, then go back later and shuffle, rearrange, mark out, rewrite. Sometimes a song would come to me all at once, and sometimes I’d have to pick it out from a bunch of gibberish. But at least there’d been something to work with.

  White space was pressure I felt in my chest like the squeeze of a fist. A year ago, if someone had told me I’d be sitting here like this, I’d have laughed. I’d felt invincible and infinite back then. I’d told People magazine I dreamed in lyrics. It was true at the time. Lately, I just fell asleep and then woke up. There was nothing in between.

  It was one thirty in the morning, but I knew Evan wasn’t asleep. One thing we had in common was that while on tour, he was nocturnal like me. He might’ve been fucking Leigh. He was probably fucking Leigh. I’d be fucking Leigh. Still, I picked up my phone and called him anyway.

  “What’s up?” His voice was alert. Not asleep, not fucking. I felt more relieved than I should have, and then anxious because I didn’t call with a plan. I just did it.

  “You said eight, yeah? Tomorrow?”

  “Yeah.” He paused. “If you’ll still be busy, don’t worry about it.”

  “Nah. I’m done.”

  His laughter came out hushed, but I thought a little derisive. “You writing something, then?” he asked, knowing how I usually worked.

  “Nope. I’m about done with that, too.”

  “Bet one was more satisfying than the other.”

  “Yeah, at least there was something I could see. I’ve been having a showdown with this fucking notebook for the last hour. It wasn’t impressed with my opening fire.” I wrinkled my nose at the page and squinted, like I could will that black mark into becoming something I could work with.

  “You get even a word out?” Evan wasn’t one to pressure me, but we both also knew that I was on the line with the next album. We needed some fucking words to sing, and I was the supposed wizard.

  “A black line. I think I made it accidentally when I looked over at the clock.” My laugh was self-deprecating. Evan laughed, too, and that time it was a little warmer with sympathy. He was having a similar problem, but at least he could still sit down with his guitar, let his fingers wander over the strings, and eventually a riff came together. He needed something to sing, though, and I wasn’t providing. And he may not have known, but I did: he didn’t actually need me. Our label had kindly reminded me of that a week ago when Evan was out of earshot.

  “It’ll come back.”

  “Maybe.” I’d started having serious doubts, which was gonna be a problem if there was any credibility to them, because I’d dropped out of college to make music with Evan, and I was hardly qualified to do anything else.

  “It will. Maybe after a good jerk session at the cabin,” he said, and I could tell he was trying to lighten the atmosphere, but the silence on the line between us after he’d spoken was palpable. I grabbed for a different subject.

  “Leigh good?” I didn’t care if Leigh was good. Leigh could kiss my ass. I had no idea why Evan was with her. Sure, they’d been friends for a while, but before they’d gotten together he’d never given any indication whatsoever that he was into her.

  “Yeah, she’s good.
Asleep.” More silence. Less palpable but still awkward, and it was like I could hear the strain for connection on both our ends. Well, maybe more from my end than Evan’s. He could be laconic and hard to read. Especially over the phone.

  “Do you think this idea of returning to the cabin is an effort in futility?” That wasn’t what I’d wanted to ask at all. What I’d wanted to ask was “Are we going to be okay? Can we fix the thing hanging over our heads?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t have a better idea anyway.” He might well have answered my unasked questions without knowing it. I heard him shift and imagined him sitting against the wall in the hall, his spine hunched, his T-shirt stretched across his broad shoulders. Or maybe he was shirtless.

  I didn’t mean my exhale to be so audible. But it was. It was definitely a sigh. “I’m gonna try to sleep.”

  “Yeah, me too.” And then he added, “Free association. Try it. Don’t throw up any mental roadblocks, just put the pen on the paper and let it go. Basically the same thing I do when I pick up a guitar and try to find the tune. I rummage through a bunch of notes until some of them start to get warm on my fingers.”

  Of course I knew what free association was. But usually what I ended up with was a random assortment of words and lyrics that somehow related to Evan. Things used to just come to me. Some move a girl would make. Or guy. The look in their eyes, how they moved, or how they made me feel. For the last year and a half, I’d had a hard time seeing anything other than Evan. The last thing I’d written that flowed onto the page like I’d bled it from deep within my consciousness was “Blue.” And it had been for Evan.

  Our biggest fucking hit was a love song I wrote for my bandmate. And he had no idea.

  If he did, it would probably ruin us.

  Chapter 6

  By 9:00 a.m., it was evident Les wasn’t coming. The other roadies stood beside the tour bus, smoking and shifting their weight, growing restless while my jaw wound tighter. I’d texted him five times, called three. No reply, no answer. Wordlessly, I extended my hand, palm up, to Mars, our tour manager, and he slapped the hotel key in it.

  We’d started giving him an extra key to Les’s room after our first tour when pretty much every other day required one of us going up to drag him out of his room because he was always late. It didn’t happen as much on our second tour, but it’d picked up again this tour, and it was still annoying. It’d been more forgivable when we had a hit record to prop him up. Back then, the world waited for us. Not so much these days. Now he was just wasting everyone’s time.

  Striding back into the hotel, I mentally ran through all of the options that might lie in wait for me behind his door: Les passed out, Les in bed with a couple of chicks, Les in bed with a couple of dudes. Les in bed with a couple of chicks and a couple of dudes. That’d been Vegas. It wasn’t a pretty aftermath, but Les had smiled for three days afterward like he’d uncovered the secret of the universe.

  “God, you should have been there, Porter. It was magic.”

  “I don’t even want to think about the mechanics involved to pull that off.”

  “It’s easier than you might think.”

  He was always trying to invite me in, to share, but I didn’t want any part of it. It threatened a level of intimacy I didn’t think should exist between us. Spending twelve hours a day in close quarters with Les for six to eight months out of the year was enough. My sex life was just fine separate.

  That didn’t mean we hadn’t crossed paths that way occasionally. And unintentionally. A month after the release of our first album, the hotel screwed up and we’d had to share a room in Tucson. I’d walked in on him fucking some girl he’d picked up after the show. Pretty and slender. A brunette. Her hands gripped the headboard like she was hanging on for dear life, and she was up on her knees as Les fucked the ever-living shit out of her from behind. I was surprised they hadn’t been reported for noise. I’d stood in the doorway, trying to decide what to do, when he tipped his head back over his shoulder and said, with a salacious grin, “Want to get in on this?” Just like that, like it was no big deal.

  I was tired and hungry and irritable, so instead of leaving like I might have another time, I’d just flipped him off, plopped down on my own bed, and turned the TV on. I thought maybe he’d take the hint, but he didn’t. He’d chuckled and gone back to banging the girl. It was one of the more awkward stalemates in my life, but I was hell-bent on sticking it out, even though I got uncomfortably hard because they were noisy as hell. And, well, peripheral vision. I quickly learned Les was a talker with a filthy fucking mouth, and try as I might to train my attention on the TV, hearing him murmur about how wet she was, how good she felt, asking her how much she liked his cock inside her in that low, sexy voice he used on stage made it impossible. All the while, the slick skin-on-skin smack of his balls against her provided an undercurrent soundtrack that overwhelmed the sitcom laugh track on the TV screen. He looked over at me once and said, “Feel free to jerk one out, altar boy, no one’s going to tell. You’ve gotta be dying over there.” And I was, but I also wasn’t going to give in.

  Once they’d finished and collapsed and I was sure they were asleep, I’d gone into the bathroom, taken my cock in hand, and blown a load in about a second flat.

  There were other times, more than I could even remember, and then there was the one that I always tried to forget. That was the fucked-up irony of memories; it was always the ones you really wanted to forget that got stuck on repeat like a shitty B-side track.

  So I wasn’t sure what I was going to find when I stuck my key card in the door. It could’ve been a menagerie of zoo animals for all I knew. I’d thought he was alone last night when he called me, but I could’ve easily be wrong, considering the guy I’d seen him with on the elevator.

  The door clicked open and cool air poured into the hallway. The smell of booze hit me immediately. The blinds were pulled tight, the room dark as Halloween. I left the door open when I stepped deeper inside, and from that angle spotted his bare foot hanging off the bed.

  The sight stoked another fear I had revolving around Les—maybe irrationally, but not without some merit—that one day I would walk in and find him dead, having overdosed on something. Because Les was reckless with everything. He might have laid off the hard drugs, but he was unpredictable that way. I broke out in a cold sweat as I stepped around the corner.

  But he was just passed out. I took stock of the nightstand—the empty beer cans, a half bottle of Jack—and inwardly rolled my eyes at the cliché. That there was no one else with him in the bed was a little surprising. He was stretched out, the covers bunched up in one corner of the mattress. I exhaled relief I didn’t know I was waiting for. Naked, he was all olive-toned curves and dips: ankles, calves, the backs of his thighs, the deep valley where his lower back gave rise to the tight, round cheeks of his ass. His face was buried deep in the pillow, dark, unruly hair spread out over the pillowcase. It was a view I’d seen on many occasions. His exploits were legion, splashed all over the internet in online groupie forums, and he loved nothing more than to share the tales that accompanied photos of him snapped in various states of undress and/or wakefulness by his hookups. He’d been deemed one of the more “generous” celebrity fucks, and when I’d asked what the hell that even meant, he’d given me a wicked grin as he said, “It means I make sure everyone’s satisfied.”

  I bent over the bed, placing my hand on Les’s warm shoulder and giving him a rough shake. He groaned and rolled onto his back, cracking a bleary eye at me. One hand flew reflexively to his hard dick, stroking up its length as I tried to ignore the salute. “Fuck.”

  “Five minutes, asshole, or you’ll be taking a cab to Cleveland.” I tossed one of the pillows at his dick, and he curled up with an oof as it landed.

  “Jerk,” he muttered and rolled over.

  I turned and walked out. At the elevator bank, I stabbed at the button repeatedly the same way I wished I could push the sight of his dick out
of my mind. That loose stroke of his hand upward, those long, strong fingers wrapped around his shaft.

  The trouble was, my mind still recalled the feeling of them on me.

  Back at the tour bus, I handed the key over to Mars, who eyed me speculatively, then said, “Cold shower?”

  I nodded, glancing at the time on my phone display. “Give him five more minutes, then douse him and drag his ass out.”

  Mars returned fifteen minutes later, laughing as Les pounded on his back with his fists. Les wasn’t small; he was six feet and wiry, not weak, but Mars was the size of a Titan. Les was soaked, naked from the waist up, goose pimples spread all over his back and dimpling the ink of his tattoos. His dark hair dripped on the pavement, and his jeans were pulled only halfway up his ass. I was sure the hotel staff loved having that paraded across their lobby for all the guests taking advantage of their free continental breakfast to see.

  Mars dragged Les’s suitcase behind him, and Les shot a bird to the roadies who were hanging out beside the bus and cracking up. We both got along with our roadies. They were our family away from home, and they loved fucking with Les because he’d fuck with them back.

  Not this morning, though. He snarled as Jimmy, our driver, catcalled at him. I watched it all unfold from the silence of our tour bus while I drank coffee. That there was no pap around to catch the drama was either lucky or a bad sign. Lately, I thought it was more the latter.

  The door swung open and Mars deposited Les on the steps in a heap. Les wobbled to a stand and yanked his pants the rest of the way up. “I’ll fire you one day,” he threatened, sticking his finger in Mars’s face.

  “You wouldn’t dare. I’m your goddamn fairy godmother.” Mars nipped at the end of Les’s finger, then smiled sweetly back at him before slamming the door so hard Les had to leap backward to avoid a crack to the nose.