Chapter 40 Folded
Folded
Gemiah
In retrospect, I should have seen it coming.
I should have recognized the warning rumbles, even muffled by the push and pull of new/old patterns in the familiar routine of launching the tour.
I know what to expect—every stop is different, and every show goes through birthing pains once it moves from concept and creation to the daily grind—but it turns out that three weeks is not enough time to reintegrate when I spent most of it feeding my Josha obsession.
It also doesn’t help that I spent the last several years attempting to raze my place in the family business to the ground.
To their credit, everyone tries. I’m included in the postshow analysis and given tasks of various importance.
But I’m not on stage, sharing the risk and the adrenaline.
As the weeks pass and the camaraderie of inside jokes and shorthand evolves among the cast and crew, my fetal sense of belonging begins to erode.
My mom fucks up her wrist when a tie-down snaps during the first weekend.
The limitations of the injury make her even bossier than usual, and though she lets me pick up some of the slack, she’s in full control-freak mode.
She declines my offer to work the concessions wagon, claiming the apprentices need the experience, and I pretend the real reason isn’t the stock of beer and wine behind the counter.
Despite both our best intentions, I can’t help being reminded of my earliest years with Big Top and the constant struggle for approval that colored them.
The only good thing to come of the accident is Josha taking her place in the knife-throwing act.
I expect him to balk—he’s always adamantly refused to let my parents bully him onto the stage, but he steps in with easy grace.
When I give him shit about it, he raises an eyebrow and says, “They put me in the show the year after you disappeared. It was mostly to distract me, but it worked, and it turns out it wasn’t as bad as I feared. ”
So now I spend six-and-a-half glorious minutes of every show holding down the fort in the tech booth with a hard-on, watching Josha sink blade after blade into the moving target—while wearing a tight tuxedo vest and a pair of slinky silver pants that are decidedly not G-rated.
After the first time, I make him fuck me in the costume backstage once the rest of the crew has gone to bed.
I don’t even mind the extra laundry the next morning.
I do a lot of laundry.
And coffee runs and lunch pickups and fetching of phone chargers and hunting down of hair ties and missing shoes. During the shows, I stay as busy as I can, taking tickets and handing out programs and bringing cushions to little old ladies.
Setup and teardown are all-hands-on-deck, and jump days are a welcome reprieve from the close quarters, when Josha and I get anywhere from two to six hours alone in the truck between towns.
It’s early enough in the summer that the nights are cool, and tempers haven’t yet flared from burnout or proximity. The first few runs are predictably messy but well-received, and spirits are high.
I should be happy.
I should be going to meetings.
As a last-minute addition to the crew, with no onstage role demanding my presence at rehearsals and two-plus performances a day, I have more idle time than anyone else on the lot. More than enough to find a local AA group in each town or city we visit.
Josha checks in with a kiss or a passing squeeze to the back of my neck every chance he gets—stolen moments of solace in the chaos that keep me from going crazy most days—but he’s too busy and preoccupied with his own responsibilities to ride me about missing meetings.
Most of the tech is held together with luck and electrical tape, and after every show, he spends half the night patching cables and putting out metaphorical fires.
Meaning all too often, he’s too busy to ride me at all.
Since I refuse to be that guy—whining about losing his undivided attention like the husband whose wife’s career takes off faster than his—I satisfy myself with exchanged blow jobs in our wagon, which don’t sully the sheets, and the back-seat quickies we sneak in during our drives.
Any shared downtime is fleeting and precious—an hour in the shade under the Airstream’s awning, with his head on my lap and my hands in his hair, or an episode of Daredevil on the laptop in our cramped loft above the ticket wagon on the rare single-show nights.
He’s my Rocket, and he makes space for me in every way he can.
It’s not his fault I lie awake at night listening to him breathe, anchored only by the warmth of his body at my back.
We’re together, but we’re not equals. Not partners the way we dreamed when we were teens, poring over YouTube videos and schematics and plotting how to get my dad on our side.
So the black-sheep insecurities are creeping back in at the corners, and though he never turns away, I’m sore from sharing him when I feel shadowy and extraneous, and from needing him so much more than he needs me.
On the lot, everyone needs Josha.
What he needs is clean laundry.
I find him in the tech booth, of course, cursing out the soundboard.
“Let me guess,” I say. “Something’s fucked up, and I’m on my own for the laundromat?”
He scrubs a hand through his already tousled hair, obviously distracted, but because he’s Josha, he turns to slip his arms around my waist. “I’m sorry.
I really wanted to get out of here with you for a while.
I can’t figure out why the bass amp keeps going offline.
Your dad is on his way back with another new audio jack, and we probably need to rewire the whole fucking line. ”
Once upon a time, I would have cajoled him into skipping out with me.
Sometimes, being a grown-up fucking sucks.
“Don’t worry about it.” I push up to plant a swift kiss on his mouth. “I’ll make sure we have clean sheets to dirty later.” When I go to pull away, he catches my hand and reels me back for another, deeper kiss.
“Maybe we can grab a few minutes before your ticket booth shift if you get back in time.”
“Sounds like permission to skip the folding.”
“Like you need an excuse. Not everyone likes digging through a pile of T-shirts to find a matching pair of socks, you know.”
“For ten minutes and a blow job, I’ll fold your socks tomorrow,” I promise. “But I better leave now if we’re gonna get that ten minutes.”
When it happens, it takes me like an avalanche.
“Farrel, you motherfucker. Where the hell have you been?”
I glance up from where I’m pulling warm clothes out of the dryer to see a vaguely familiar guy in an AC/DC T-shirt with a paintbrush ponytail that does little to disguise his thinning hairline.
I search for a name to go with the face, but all I come up with is the image of an old contact in my phone—first name: snowman emoji; last name: CD.
For the town of Cloverdale, rather than his initials.
“Seriously, man,” he continues, following me as I push the basket cart over to one of the long counters. “I haven’t seen you in ages.” His hand lands heavily on my shoulder, and sweat breaks out over my palms.
“Two years,” I mutter, shrugging him off.
“Yeah, right. Two fucking years. Too long, dude. It’s good to have you back.”
Like we’re friends. Or anything other than a dealer and junkie who occasionally partied together in his shithole apartment when I blew through town.
Darren. The name pops into my head, but I’m not sure if it belongs to this guy or his northern counterpart, Snowman UK, and I want out of this conversation anyway, so I keep my mouth shut.
He doesn’t take the hint.
“You should swing by later.” He eyes the pile of laundry as I dump it out onto the counter, then jerks his head toward the doors with a nasty flash of teeth.
“When you’re done with your chores. I’m still in the same place, and Bernie’ll be there.
You remember her? She still fucking talks about you all the time. ”
“I have a boyfriend,” I tell him, with something like relief. Call me a slur and leave in disgust. Don’t give me your apartment number. Don’t ask if I want to step out to your car.
Instead, he laughs—a crow’s caw through nicotine-stained lips. “Bring him over. Bernie won’t mind. She’s into sharing.”
“He’s—” A hysterical giggle bubbles in my throat at the thought of Josha’s reaction if I invited him to a threesome at my old dealer’s. “No thanks. Not our scene.”
Our scene was supposed to be blow jobs in the loft. But I already got the apology text explaining how the audio jack didn’t fix the problem, and Josha needed to run back out with my dad for another part, and…
Now I’m stuck folding laundry like a sitting duck for maybe-Darren with clammy hands and an itch in my gut.
“He doesn’t party, huh? Bummer.” The hand hits my shoulder again, a weighted trap with too many tacky silver rings. I’m gonna have a goddamn bruise if he keeps this up.
Or a breakdown.
“Well,” he says when I don’t reply. “The offer stands for you, if you want it. The boyfriend doesn’t have to know.” With a wink and another flash of teeth, he finally leaves me alone.
The boyfriend doesn’t have to know.
Fuck.
I fold a long-sleeved T-shirt—sleeves back, faded logo facing out so Josha can easily pick it out of a pile.
He doesn’t have to know.
I’m down to the socks, his and mine all mixed together into one big sock selection we don’t even try to keep apart.
All our clothes are hopelessly entwined at this point, stacks of jeans and T-shirts and hoodies stuffed into the single large duffel we keep in the back of the truck.
Aside from my pants, which are too short for him, everything fits us both.
I’ve discovered that walking around with a pair of his old jeans hanging low on my hips and bunched around bare feet is a surefire way to get bent over the nearest surface—when we have time and no one else is around.
Which means it’s happened exactly twice, but I’m keeping it in my arsenal for when I get him back from Big Top.
I cling to that promise as I stuff the last pair of socks in the duffel and zip it closed.
Maybe-Darren is waiting in the parking lot.
I toss the bag—clean sheets—in the back seat of the truck and slam the door.
The sun is sinking behind the yellow brick apartment building across the street, and back at the lot, Josha will be starting up the preshow playlist, and my mom will be looking for me to open up the ticket booth.
Get in and start the engine. Drive away. Go back to your boyfriend. Maybe tonight the show will go smoothly, and no one else will need him.
My reflection in the window doesn’t look like anyone’s boyfriend, and the argument happening in my head doesn’t have a winner.
My body moves through static along the tracks of habit and craving, and the roar of falling rock consumes everything except the sound of my boots on pavement.
The air smells like gasoline and bar fights, and the Edison lights of the tent are so very far away…
He doesn’t have to know. But he will.
And underneath, a small voice, selfish and starving: And when he figures it out, he’ll drop everything and come.
For me.