Chapter 4
(Draven)
I could breathe a sigh of relief now that he’d relaxed and opened up to me, but it broke my heart a little to know that I’d been the cause of so much anxiety for him that he’d feared losing my friendship. It was a failure on my part, being so wrapped up in my own worries over not knowing how to please him when I finally got him in my bed, that I’d never considered that he might hold back because of the way I’d constantly pulled back from him over the years. It honestly hadn’t just been my questions about my own sexuality that had led to my restraint, but his open and in your face approach to sex in general.
Our industry had practically been built on the worship of sex, drugs, alcohol and music. Modern day Dionysianism at its finest, only we were all gods in the eyes of the fans, and some of the most fervent ones would worship whatever body part we offered them. It was easy to lose whatever morals you started out with, especially when you’d been in the industry as long as we’d been in it. Relationships were for people with stationary homes that they saw for more than a handful of days every month, if that, when a tour was in full swing. After so much time spent hopping from city to city and flying all around the world, many of us had adopted a get it where it was offered mentality, which had left me leery of giving in to my desires. I hadn’t wanted to be a notch on Johnny’s bedpost any more than I wanted him to be a notch on mine. I wanted him to be the last person I ever took to bed my bed and the first person I saw every morning we woke up, though that was going to take some logistical planning.
And maybe expanding my management beyond my own band, if his was open to it. I knew they didn’t have one. If I booked for both of us, there were a wealth of possibilities, from shared venues rotating headliners, to simultaneous shows in the same city. It was something I’d been thinking about heavily during Rocktoberfest, when I’d heard Rebel, Johnny’s guitar player, complain about the shitty mess their ex-manager had left their booking situation in. It was definitely worth talking to them about after our vacation was over. Right now, I was second guessing my decision to derail his trip to the pool. A swim might do us both some good, and not just in cooling us off a little so we didn’t hop right into bed.
I wanted to.
Damn did I want to taste him and feel him writhing beneath my hands, but what Johnny had said, about needing to settle his thoughts down, kept ringing through my mind, even while awakening a bunch of protective feelings. He’d expressed a need, and now I felt an urge to make sure it was met. That was no new feeling for me. Wanting to see to every aspect of my partner’s needs and desires had always been an urge of mine, but that whole no time for a relationship thing meant I rarely got to indulge in that.
Now there Johnny was, sitting on the edge of the bed in board shorts and a tank top, feet in colorful canvas beach shoes with tiny pride flags all over them, still looking a little lost and emotional.
“You know what, a swim might not be a bad idea at all,” I conveyed through my device, feeling far more confident about using it after how patient he’d been, even when I could tell he’d wanted to bolt.
“Right on!” Johnny replied, face splitting into a grin.
“Perfect, give me a few minutes and I’ll be ready.”
I let the device read the words to him, while I sought out the swim trunks in my bag, trying to remember how far down I’d stuffed them.
It had taken courage for him to stand there in silence with me tapping away. My anxiety had damn near shot through the roof when I’d feared I’d have to chase after him and somehow get him to listen to what I needed to say. I should have known he wouldn’t, though. Like my bandmates, he’d encouraged me to use my device rather than straining and taxing my voice, insisting that anyone who couldn’t be patient enough to wait wasn’t someone we wanted to be involved with in the first place.
I’d worried about that with the guards we’d brought in, but Sully had never once tried to rush me when I was explaining our itinerary for the day or talked over me and assumed he’d known what I was going to request before I had the chance to say it. I’d already met too many people who thought doing that was helpful , and that they were saving me the effort of explaining things in detail when many times the situation called for very specific instructions or shit went wrong.
I should have kept them on.
Now I hoped they wouldn’t be too booked to join us on the tour and in a more permanent capacity, as my emails had been blowing up since Rocktoberfest and Damaged Saints was once again in high demand.
Okay, so maybe Johnny wasn’t the only one who’d benefit from something to settle their thoughts down. I needed to leave my manager hat in my bag until the end of our trip, despite how tempting it was to dive right in and ride the wave of interest their performance had unleashed. I’d proposed this retreat for a reason, and dammit all, I needed to get with the program.
Ahh, there were the damn trunks.
It only took me a few minutes to pull them on and fish out a t-shirt I’d cut the sleeves off of years before. Unlike him, I hadn’t considered beach shoes so sneakers would have to do until I could pick some up or snag a pair of Crocs.
Nah. No Crocs.
Well.
Maybe.
Those charms were a game changer. I’d come across a badass planchette stone charm in a little shop in Massachusetts, and a creepy ass nun charm, too, both of which I’d purchased despite not having a pair of shoes to put them on. If I could find a pair in black, the potential was limitless.
He stood when I was ready, and I grabbed his hand, giving it a little squeeze as we headed for the door. The way he strutted down the hall with me was like watching him when he was up on stage, head held high with a whole lot of swagger that didn’t stop all the way to poolside, despite some of the looks we garnered as we headed through the lobby. If anything, he just added a bit of sway to his step to go with the swagger and damn, I started trailing just a half step behind so I could check out his ass.
He knew it, too. That flirtatious smirk was back on his face when we sat across from one another on deck chairs to remove our shoes. He even winked when he caught me watching him.
“We turned some heads, didn’t we?” he remarked, giggling as he glanced back over his shoulder toward the door we’d just exited through. “Betcha half of them wanted to be you and the other half wanted to do you.”
I’d left my device back in the room so it wouldn’t get damaged, not that I had a comment to follow that up with. Snorting, I just doubled over and let rough, guttural chuckles roll up my throat and pour out. It made getting those sneakers off difficult, but man it felt good to laugh. I’d spotted two people in the pool when we sat down, but they were already out and heading for the hot tub several feet away by the time we headed down the steps and into the water.
“Ohh man, this is nice,” Johnny purred as he lay back in the water, floating as he stared up at the stars.
I happened to agree and sprawled on my back beside him, thrilled when he laced his fingers with mine while we floated.
Johnny did silences with a beautiful tranquility that I envied sometimes. It hadn’t been until my accident that I’d really come to appreciate how peaceful and soothing silence could be. I’d always felt driven to fill a space with sound. Humming, tapping, and singsongingly murmuring words as they reformed into song lyrics had been a part of my life for so long that at first, I’d feared that the accident had done something to my hearing as well as my voice, until I realized what I was hearing was the sound beneath the sounds I’d always made.
Talk about enlightening.
In the year since the event, I’d discovered the beauty of bird song and how rhythmic the plop of snow against snow could be during a heavy fall. The hush that came with it had been startling, too. A different kind of silence, it was almost like it could muffle thought.
Sometimes that was startling. In my darkest moments, when I really struggled with what had happened to me, it proved to be a true blessing and even a comfort.
“Have you ever wondered how many more there were, when the world first formed?” Johnny asked.
I turned my head to see his deep, honey-hued gaze studying me, and nodded, because I had thought about it a time or two. It didn’t surprise me for the conversation to end right there. In just one sentence, Johnny had clued me in about the mood he was in and what he was thinking about. I could already hear the melody in the words and wondered if they were part of the song he was determined to untangle. I hoped so, I was curious to see where he was going with it.
The universe had a way of putting things into perspective and reminding us of how small we really were. It helped narrow my focus down to the moment and how freeing it was to just be a person enjoying a night with another person, free from the personalities we donned when we were onstage.
“Music, the stars, and Jagger were what saved me when I was a kid,” Johnny said as we drifted across the center of the pool. “We’d climb up the side of the balcony onto the roof of my aunt and uncle’s house and lie up there for hours, dreaming together because everything else in our lives sucked.”
Knowing what had happened to Jagger’s brother, I knew what he’d been looking to escape, but over all the years that I’d known Johnny, he’d hardly ever shared anything about his childhood. I hoped he would now, though.
Funny, but back when I could use my voice without limitation, I’d have been tempted to share one of my own stories of growing up. Now I found another benefit to silence. It allowed others the opportunity to fill it if they chose.
Hell, it dawned on me that I didn’t even know if he was an only child or if he had a passel of siblings hidden back in the Whaling City. I knew nothing of his life before I’d met him. I’d just been drawn to the man I’d seen on the stage .
“The roof was the only place it was ever silent and even then, there’d be a whisper of sound from someone’s TV show drifting out of an open window in summer, but in winter, it was the quietest place in the world, especially when it snowed.”
Sputtering, I sank beneath the surface, the image of him scaling a slick, snow-covered roof had left me itching to drag him over my knee so I could swat the hell out of that perky ass of his.
“You okay?” he asked, slipping an arm around me as I wiped the water from my face and scowled down at him.
“Yeah, I know, wasn’t the smartest place to be, but we were kids, and every kid thinks they’re invincible,” he murmured.
Narrowing my eyes, I had to concede the point. I’d have been up there, too. Hell, I’d been in so many trees, and fallen out, that it was a good thing I’d never wanted to learn an instrument. With how frequently the casts went on and off I’d have forgotten everything I’d learned by the time I could play again, and created a vicious, frustrating cycle that might have made me give up on music completely.
“We only had a couple close calls,” Johnny rambled, throwing my concession right out the window.
I held up my hand, slowly counting down on my fingers until he shook his head and pointed up. Growling low, I raised the finger I’d just lowered only to have him point upward again. Even adding them all back wasn’t enough, and I raised an eyebrow at him as I brought my other hand up in a fist. We were adding numbers this time, enough with that counting down bullshit. If there were more than two additional incidents, it was over with I tell ya, he was going across my knee right there in the pool.
One.
Grinning, he nodded, easing my frazzled nerves a little.
“Yeah, well that’s five too many,” I gritted out and sent a wave of water his way.
I should have known I was opening the door to the water fight to end all water fights, after all, I’d seen firsthand how devious Jagger could be in the midst of a game. This was his best friend and favorite playmate, I should have expected the same underhanded tactics out of him.
Not only did he send waves back in my direction, as in half the fuckin’ pool, but while I was blinded and staggering around, trying to figure out what damn direction it was all coming from ‘cause he seemed to be everywhere, the little fucker dove beneath the surface and yanked my trunks down around my ankles so I tripped on them the moment I moved.
I came up expecting another drenching while I wrestled to pull them up again, only he took pity on me, and when my vision was finally free and my trunks back to mostly covering me, I realized why that was. He was lounging against the side of the pool, one arm hooked over the edge, laughing his ass off while he watched me struggle.
I’d get him for that.
Just as soon as I figured out a way that wouldn’t involve being so severely outmatched it would take weeks to live this defeat down. Now that he’d reminded me that he played as hard off the stage as he did on it, I was eager to strap in for the wild ride ahead.