Mike
Two weeks ago
Being at the bar before it’s filled with people, and the noise moves in and covers everything else, is sort of eerie.
Feels like something you shouldn’t be able to see.
I drop my guitar case down onto the makeshift stage and pull my guitar over my head, tuning the strings while Damon sets up his kit behind me.
Zara is already plugged in and ready a few feet away, her hair sticking up in two buns on top of her head, scrolling through something on her phone.
And it wouldn’t be a Chaos Riot practice if we weren’t waiting around for his majesty, Trent, to show up.
“Did you have a good time with your mom yesterday?” I ask Damon, adjusting my strap.
“Yep. Brought some leftover dessert if you want some.” He hits the bass pedal a few times. “You doing okay?”
“Yeah.” I play a chord, letting it ring out in the empty room. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
His raised eyebrows say I’m being an idiot. But I know he’s not going to push it. That’s why Damon’s been my best friend since we met in freshman algebra. He lets me be fucked up without having to try to fix me.
And I’m fine.
Honestly.
I just miss Alex.
I don’t sleep well when he’s not here. The house gets too quiet, and I start thinking so much that my trusty bowl doesn’t do enough to help. But he’ll be home soon, and everything will go back to normal.
There’s nothing like getting fucked by your big sexy boyfriend and then him holding you in the most perfect arms known to man to get you going to sleep, head completely empty.
At least his bed still smells like him.
I might be a creep, going into his room and stroking my cock until I’m burying my face in his pillow and coming all over his sheets. But hey, it helps. And he wouldn’t care anyway. Maybe tonight I’ll send him a video, make him regret ever leaving—
“Mike!”
I look up to find Zara with the annoyed essence of someone who’s had to say my name multiple times to get my attention. It’s not my fault. I have things to think about.
“What?” I ask, matching her tone because she interrupted my thoughts by talking.
“I said, are we doing the new one tonight?”
“Oh.” I adjust my tuning again for something to do with my hands. “I don’t know. I sorta wanted Alex to be there when we play it live for the first time, and he doesn’t get back until New Year’s.”
Zara shrugs and looks back down at her phone.
“You’re really gonna hold our best song hostage until your roommate gets back?” Damon questions, but I know he doesn’t really give a shit. He just wants to screw with me.
“I wrote it for him.”
I wrote it in the middle of the night three weeks ago when I laid awake in his arms. Every time I looked at his face, relaxed with sleep, there was this feeling in my heart that I didn’t know what to do with yet.
So I wrote it down.
It seems only right that he hears how I feel before everyone else does.
The door at the back of the bar swings open, and Trent walks in with his shiny new guitar, wearing a tank top that shows off his tattooed arms even though it’s fucking freezing outside.
Why do we put up with this dude again?
“You started without me,” he says, hopping up onto the stage.
“You’re late,” Zara says.
“Traffic. What are we starting with?”
“Let’s warm up with the new one,” Damon suggests.
“The love song?” Trent makes a face.
“It’s not a love song,” I say automatically.
“It’s about Alex. Who you looove.”
“Shut up, Z.” I shove her, starting a shoving match that ends with her threatening to hit me with her bass and my subsequent surrender.
We run through our set twice.
We’re tighter than we were a few days ago, even after the changes. Damon and Zara are always locked in together, and I hate to admit it, but Trent sounds good, too. That’s the only reason we keep the insufferable asshole around.
I’m great, as always.
We stop while Damon grabs a new drumstick, and I’m supposed to be tuning to drop D, but I’m still staring down at my phone when the guys are ready. “Hang on, let me reply to this text Alex sent—”
“Seriously?”
I pause typing to look up at Trent. “What?”
“Can you give it a rest already?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Alex. He’s literally all you talk about.”
“That’s not—”
“I mean it, man.” He shakes his head. “We’re tired of hearing about this dude.”
I look at Zara for backup, but she’s staring at her bass. Damon’s twisting a drumstick between his fingers, avoiding my eyes. “Come on, guys,” I say, feeling attacked all of a sudden.
“It’s not going anywhere,” Trent says, as easy as anything, like it wouldn’t break my heart if it were true.
“You don’t know that.”
He shrugs, ticking his points off on his fingers. “He doesn’t want to come to our shows. He won’t be with you in public. He goes home to his family for the holidays, and you don’t get an invite. What exactly do you think is going on?”
“It’s complicated,” I say, and even I can hear how pathetic it sounds.
“Sure. Complicated.”
“Trent,” Damon speaks up, a hint of warning in it.
“I’m serious.” Trent looks at me and, underneath the condescension he wears daily, I think he might mean it this time. “It’s kinda messed up to watch. Seeing how much you like this guy.”
“Alex is a sweet guy, genuinely, but—” Zara chimes in, and I think I see pity in her eyes. “You deserve to be with someone who’s proud to be with you.”
“He’s going through stuff,” I say, even though it’s not an excuse. “He has reasons.”
“I don’t want to see you getting hurt,” she says, with a sad smile.
“He’s not using me.”
Trent scoffs. “Why wouldn’t he? Look, I’m not trying to be a dick. I’m just saying. You wanna fuck somebody who’s not gonna ask too many questions.” He shrugs. “You go to Mike. Everybody knows that.”
“Face it, Mikey. All you are is a hole to him.”
I don’t say anything at all because what if he’s right?
What if that’s all I am to Alex?
“Trent,” Damon starts, standing up from his drums, in all his intimidating glory. “Not cool, man.”
“Hey, I’m being honest. Somebody had to.”
“You’re being an asshole.” Damon sets his sticks down, ready to fight.
Trent raises his hands in surrender.
I look at Zara, who’s watching me with wide, concerned eyes. And Damon, who shakes his head in disapproval and picks his sticks back up. “From the top?”
“Yeah,” I agree, anything to move on from this conversation.
We play the song again. I play it well. I’ve been playing for as long as I can remember, and my hands know what to do even when I’m not able to think about it.
When my heart feels like it got ripped out of my chest and stomped on for good measure.
Because yeah, Trent’s a dick. We’ve established that. But this time, I can’t say, with complete certainty, that he was wrong.
Now
The ball goes up in the air again.
Up. Down. Catch. Up. Down. Catch.
Damon got here ten minutes ago, and he looked at me and looked at the ball and sat down in the armchair without saying a word about it.
His freshman of the month is in his lap.
I don’t know her name, but she’s pretty, with brown hair and tan skin. She seems nice enough, laughing at a video on her phone, Damon’s chin on her shoulder.
When I look at them, all I feel is hot jealousy.
I know that’s fucked up.
But that could be Alex and me.
Zara’s on the armrest by my feet, while Trent, who’s already on thin ice, is standing in the corner by the window like he doesn’t even want to be here.
The ball goes up.
“You know what the funniest part is,” I say to no one in particular.
“I thought he might have been the real deal.” I catch the ball. Throw it back up. “And I don’t say that lightly. I wasn’t exactly looking for love.”
“I know,” Zara says, patting my foot.
“And then this dude moves in, and he’s so—” I wave my hand holding the ball. “He’s so quiet, right, but when he talks, he always says something funny. Or smart. Or hot. And he’s so good. He’s such a genuinely good person, and he has these dimples—”
Up.
Down.
Up.
Down.
“I thought I meant something to him.” I laugh even though there’s nothing funny about it.
“And then god forbid, I try to switch it up in the bedroom one time, and that’s enough for him to completely abandon me.” Nobody says anything, and I feel like such a fucking loser right now, but my eyes are prickling with tears over that asshole.
“I came home and—” my voice cracks.
“Mike,” Damon says.
I sit up, swinging my legs off the couch, letting the ball fall to the floor so I can run both hands through my hair. “It’s fine. He’s allowed to leave. He’s not my prisoner. I just think it was objectively, a pretty fucked up way to do it.”
I stand up to pace in front of the coffee table. “Like, if you’re gonna break my heart, you could at least do it to my face. Basic human decency and all.”
“Maybe he’s going through something,” Zara starts, standing up to put a comforting hand on my arm that I shrug off.
“Everyone is going through something.” I turn toward her. “Do you think I’m not going through something every single day? I still don’t pack my shit and ghost the person who—” I stop, before I cry in front of everybody, pressing my hands over my eyes, with a frustrated growl.
“Fuck you, Alex Wesley!” I shout to the ceiling.
Damon’s girl looks up from her phone, tuning in for the first time since I started talking. “Wait,” she says, with an odd look on her face. “Sorry, I’m not trying to—” She pauses. “Did you say, Alex Wesley?”
I stare at her, no idea where this is going, but I nod. “Yeah.”
“He’s the roommate you were seeing? Please tell me you didn’t try to fuck Alex Wesley.”
“Uh…,” I say slowly. “Why?”
She looks at Damon and then back at me, shifting in his lap, visibly uncomfortable. “We went to school together,” she starts, pausing until I wave at her to get on with it.
“I was a year under him,” she continues, choosing each word carefully. “So I didn’t know him personally. But it was a big deal. His brother is the football coach, won the state championship that year. And I think that’s why they covered it up. Out of respect for him or whatever.”
“Covered what up?” I ask, a dread I haven’t felt since I woke up without my parents, settling into my heart before she even says the words.
“Alex was—” She pauses. “He was in the hospital. It was really bad.” She looks down at her manicured nails, at Damon, anywhere but me. “It was a guy from the football team.”
“He like— raped him.” She whispers, the word too big to say out loud.
I hear them.
I understand what they mean. But I stand in the middle of my own living room, my hands hanging limp at my sides, staring at my best friend’s girlfriend, and I cannot, for the life of me, make the words connect in my brain.
“What?” I croak out. Hoping and praying this is some kind of fucked up joke, my friends decided to pull. Why they would do that, I have no idea, but the alternative—
“You didn’t know,” she says, giving me a sad smile and turning to Damon to apologize, and he says it’s okay, and I don’t answer her.
Someone raped Alex.
He was in the hospital.
My Alex.
Who couldn’t stop looking at me that first day, who slept next to me every night, who looked at me like he couldn’t believe I was real.
Who was going to—
Who said—
I’m not gonna let you rape me again.
Again.
He said again.
It was right there the whole time. He was terrified, and I thought he was being dramatic. I was angry at him for acting like it was a big deal when—
Oh god.
I pushed him. I told him he wasn’t giving me enough. He never said a single word about what happened to him.
Oh my god.
“Mike.” I can hear them all talking, Zara saying something to me, Damon’s girlfriend saying she figured we knew—
He was shaking so hard, and I assumed it was some sort of hot blonde guy that should be straight complex he had, and he would get over it once he felt my dick inside him.
He got on that fucking bed because I asked him to. He trusted me, and I let him down.
He thought I was going to hurt him.
“Yo.” Damon’s voice comes from directly in front of me, but I don’t even see him. “Mike. Hey. You alright, man?”
Trent is still leaning against the wall by the window with his beer, watching me with a bored expression, and I feel a simmering rage building in my body that I have no control over whatsoever.
All you are is a hole to him.
You wanna fuck somebody who’s not gonna ask questions, you go to Mike.
Trent has half a second to register that I’m moving before my fist connects with his face, the rings on my right hand landing on his nose with a crack as the half-empty bottle hits the floor, beer going everywhere.
“What the fuck?!” He shouts, holding his nose, spilling blood.
I grab him by the shirt and shove him against the wall. He’s bigger than me and should be able to fight me off, but I’m running on pure rage. All I see is red, and his fucking face that I want to—
“Mike!”
“You did this! You said that shit about him and—”
I hit him again.
Trent gets his hands up this time, punching me across the jaw. I barely feel it. My knuckles connect with his face again, and I can’t stop, I can’t, it’s his fucking fault—
Damon’s arms come around me from behind, both of them locked across my chest, hauling me backward with his full weight, and I fight it for a second, pushing his arms and kicking my legs, before they stop working right and I realize that tears are streaming down my face.
“I got you,” Damon says, against my ear. “Everything’s okay.”
I don’t know when I started crying, but I am. I haven’t cried like this since my parents died, but now that I have, I can’t stop. Damon keeps his arms around me, pulling both of us down to the floor, holding me against him while he tries to soothe me, but it makes it worse.
Trent is across the room with his hand to his face, blood everywhere, while Zara moves toward him with a dish towel from the kitchen, that he smacks away.
“I didn’t know,” I hear myself say, through ragged breaths. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know—”
“None of us did,” Damon says, rubbing my back.
“He never said anything. Why didn’t he say anything?”
His answer doesn’t matter because the fact is, Alex never told me a thing. He let me believe he was fine until he wasn’t, and I hurt him.
And now he’s gone.