Chapter Nine #4
I sit halfway upright. “What?” I breathe.
Jonah and Marcus are asleep in the middle row, softly snoring, and I keep my voice low enough so as not to be heard by Barrett or Cain, who are talking quietly in the front seat, their voices indistinguishable over the music quietly emanating from the speakers. “No. Why would you—”
“You don’t want anyone to know.” It’s not exactly a question, but I answer him anyway, his sudden shift at the studio making so much more sense now.
“Purely for professional reasons.” I play back our conversation at the coffee shop, trying and failing to remember if I spelled that out.
Dax’s eyes widen and he nods, not needing me to explain. “So, pull my head out of my ass next time before getting offended?”
“But you love it there,” I tease. He scoffs in mock offense and I duck my head to hide my grin.
Sinking back down against him, I shift slightly higher so my head can rest on his shoulder.
I hold his gaze so he can see the sincerity of my words in the semidarkness, in case hearing them isn’t enough.
“And for the record: No, I don’t regret any of it. ”
He’s still holding my hand inside his fist, and his grip softens but doesn’t let go, bringing our hands to his mouth, brushing his lips over my knuckles.
My fingers twitch, longing to trace the curve of his lips the way they used to on long drives between cities, back when we couldn’t get enough of each other, when lying next to him on a tiny tour bus bunk felt like the height of romance, my chest so full of him that I thought it might burst.
When the road stretches out in front of you endlessly, anything feels possible, even knowing someone completely. The long conversations we’d have, with nothing else to fill our time but each other, sharing everything and nothing in our dashboard confessionals.
This feels a little like that.
He taps my fingers against his mouth, and I wait, knowing there’s more. There’s always more with Dax. The man is an iceberg. What’s under the surface… For Dax, he’s both what sinks the ship and the ship itself.
“What did you mean that I let you go with one word?”
A cringe spasms across my face. I could brush this off, try to smooth it over like I did before, but there’s something about a road trip that makes me a little too honest. “All you said was”—I deepen my voice—“Okay.”
A ghost of a grin haunts the corners of his mouth. “That is not what I sound like.” He turns to face me, dropping my hand against his chest to rearrange the sweatshirt he’s using as a makeshift pillow. “What was I supposed to say?”
I shrug one shoulder. “I don’t know,” I say slowly. I’m too tired to fortify my walls, the truth slipping out unbidden. “I guess I thought you would fight me on it.”
He twists my hair around his finger once, twice, studying my face. “I always knew you were going to leave.”
He’s not wrong, but there’s something to the way he says it that hollows me out. He studies the city flying by outside the window for a long moment, and I hold my breath, half convinced this entire conversation is a lucid dream, all the answers I’ve spent three years holding my breath for.
“Would it have changed anything?” he asks, back to studying me instead of the highway flying by outside the window. “If I’d fought for you.”
I loose my held breath, bobbing my head, not quite a nod, not quite a no.
I trace the scar on my ring finger with my thumb, remembering the pact I made with my brothers, to not give up our dreams for love like our mom did, and how that summer three years ago, for the first time, I understood how she could have thought love was enough.
How close I was to throwing all my plans to the wind when I was on the cusp of having it all—all to follow my heart, instead.
“I don’t think so,” I admit truthfully. “I don’t think I actually wanted you to change my mind, I just—” I trace the faded logo on his shirt, trying to articulate my tangled emotions.
“So much happened so quickly, so intensely, and to have it end so… like it was nothing… Our ending should’ve been something…
more.” It’s not the right word, not even close, but it’s the best I can come up with this far past my bedtime.
“Something epic,” he says, supplying the perfect word effortlessly.
“Yeah,” I murmur sadly.
Dax resumes combing my hair with his fingers, and I’m half asleep in a matter of a few shallow breaths.
He must think I’ve drifted off—maybe I have, maybe none of this is real—when he murmurs, “We were something epic, weren’t we?
” His breath ruffles the hair at the crown of my head, and I shiver, burrowing deeper into him, his arms tightening around me.
“Don’t leave,” he pleads against my brow. “I’m gonna fight.”
[Excerpt from Sloane Donavan’s Final Revelations interview transcript]
1998–1999: Really Fucking Fucked
CAIN: We recorded the Ghost [in the Gallows] EP in Barrett’s closet.
JONAH: Must’ve done something right, because we managed to book a lot of shows.
We toured around the Northeast and a bit of the East Coast. We didn’t have any money, so we were in this moving van, three of us up front in the cab and one of us in the back with all the gear.
We drove at night so the one in the back didn’t die of heatstroke.
MARCUS: I think we toured for forty days and played shows for thirty-four of them. It was the only way we could afford the van.
BARRETT: You played wherever you booked, so that tour schedule made no fucking sense. Jersey one night, DC the next, then back up to Boston. [grins] Sometimes I miss those days, the open road, the van…
CAIN: Fuck that van.
JONAH: We almost missed our Long Island show because we broke down somewhere in Pennsylvania.
MARCUS: Thank fuck we didn’t. That was the night Garage Door Records heard us play.
CAIN: They weren’t a big record company, but they agreed to front the cost for the studio and to distribute our next record.
BARRETT: It wasn’t a flashy deal, but it got us studio time and distribution. Of course we took it.
CAIN: We all skipped Thanksgiving and Christmas that year to write the album. We wanted to get into the studio first thing in the New Year. We finished the last song on New Year’s Eve, around noon. We partied so hard I don’t think my liver’s been the same since.
MARCUS: We made no money off [Sacrament], but it didn’t matter, because one of the interns at Garage Door shared our LP with their friends—and one of their friends? Was in Immaculate Conceptions.
CAIN: IC was one of the biggest names in hardcore at the time, and they were Ohio natives, so they were like gods to us.
JONAH: Immaculate Conceptions saw our set at RockFest and the next day invited us to open for them on their upcoming tour.
MARCUS: A national tour. [grins] It felt like everything was starting to happen for us. Like things were actually possible, y’know?
JONAH: But then…
CAIN: Marcus got sick.
MARCUS: Laryngitis.
BARRETT: We were on tour in the Midwest, and we tried to cancel shows, but Marcus insisted he was fine, could push through.
MARCUS: I was not fine, but I was young and arrogant enough to think I was invincible.
CAIN: He could barely speak. When he started coughing up blood, we canceled all our upcoming shows and headed home. We needed him better for the IC tour in a few months.
JONAH: We were driving back to Cleveland, only a few hours left of the drive, when Marcus broke down.
Crying. He couldn’t talk, but he didn’t need to.
We were all thinking the same thing. What if his voice didn’t come back?
What if we’d blown our chance at the IC tour because we were too stubborn to cancel a few shows at the Elks Lodge?
BARRETT: I was driving. Marcus was crying.
Jonah was stoned out of his gourd. I pulled over on the side of the road, let Cain out of the back of the van, and we all climbed on top of the cab.
It was the middle of the night, and the sky was a bruised purple that we felt in our souls.
We just sat there, watched the sun come up over this fallow field of nothingness.
And then we all got back down and went home. I don’t think we said a single word.
CAIN: There wasn’t really anything to say. If Marcus didn’t get better, Final was over.
MARCUS: I got better-ish.
JONAH: We waited until the last fucking minute to say something to the tour manager.
Like, literally weeks before the tour was supposed to start.
Which was a dick move to, like, literally everyone.
But we were so scared we’d get kicked off the tour, that Final was over.
We kept hoping a miracle would happen, and Marcus would be able to sing the way he could before.
CAIN: That didn’t happen.
BARRETT: I remember lying awake at night thinking, like, We have to replace Marcus. Do you know how fucked that is? Replacing the guy who wrote the songs? Really fucking fucked.
MARCUS: We needed a miracle.
BARRETT: [begins humming “Hero” by Mariah Carey]