20. Emory
Emory
“Can I try something?” Gerard asked him the following night after they’d both eaten and cleaned up the dishes.
Their roommate duties had begun to bleed into one another, so it was less like a conscious split of chores and more like an ebb and flow of domestic tasks.
Gerard’s jacket rubbing arms with Emory’s lab coat on the rack by the door made the space theirs.
Not to mention neither of them had made a move to swap out the sheets between sleeping shifts over the last several days, which conjured intimacy that neither of them dared name.
“You are going to need to be more specific than that,” Emory said, even though he’d probably agree to anything Gerard Wells asked of him. His hazel eyes were hypnotic like that.
Gerard fetched a paper bag with the pharmacy name stamped on the side. He pulled out a package of medical bandages. “Would you let me wrap this around your head?”
“Have I suffered an injury I’m unaware of?” Emory asked.
“I want to get a sense of your head,” Gerard said, then quickly added with a blush, “shape! Your head shape! If I wrap you in this, when you smile or cringe or whatever, the bandage will move with your muscles. I can at least attempt to read your expressions. Not that that has ever been a strong suit of mine, but still.”
Emory shrugged because, again, those hazel eyes. “If it would please you.”
“I’m going to have to touch you. Is that all right?” Gerard asked.
Emory gulped as quietly as possible. “Fine.”
Gerard appeared excited as he positioned Emory on the love seat.
He crouched down in front of Emory and got close.
Really close. Almost straddling Emory’s lap as he unfurled the soft, semisheer bandage.
Immediately, he was confronted with the fragrance of grapefruit and aloe vera, a soothing and intoxicating combination wafting up off Gerard’s freshly showered skin, which looked supple, though he didn’t test that assessment. “I might need your help guiding this.”
Shakily, Emory held the end of the bandage at his temple.
Gerard first pulled the bandage around like a crown before snaking to the nape of Emory’s neck and around under the chin, creating an unnecessary sling for his jaw.
Part of him wanted to complain, but he liked the sensation of Gerard’s fingers so near to his transparent skin.
The gauze went over his nose before it got fastened tightly so it wouldn’t fall off. “There.”
“How do I look?” Emory asked.
“Like a mummy,” Gerard said, stepping back and tilting his head to the side. “But in a good way!”
“Because there is a good way to look like a dehydrated corpse without any internal organs?” he asked.
Gerard retrieved a pair of gloves from the depths of the drugstore bag. “Now you can point and gesture.”
Slipping the gloves on, Emory couldn’t help but feel like a dress-up doll. When Gerard stood back, he said, “Much better. Now you at least look like a person and not clothes on a transparent mannequin.”
“I look more like a person?” he asked, growing hot under the wrap already. “Like this?”
“Sure. Like a person who had surgery.”
“At least that’s a step up from mummy.”
“Not a life-threatening surgery. An elective surgery!” Gerard said.
“You’ve spent too much time in LA,” he said, growing self-conscious about his looks, which was ridiculous, given he was the barest hint of a human at that point. “Not everybody can afford to get elective surgery.”
The previous night, he’d snuck out again since he’d finished his Physiology of Music book and needed more literature on the topic, but his true intentions were known as soon as he beelined right for the computer section.
After searching for Anderson and coming up empty again, he typed in a new query: Toby Stark.
He should’ve known the image section was only going to hurt his feelings.
Toby was Black, athletic, handsome, and supremely talented.
From the “LA? Okay!” music video alone, he could tell why Gerard had fallen for him; he had so much charisma and energy.
Though through the whole video, Emory’s eyes always pinged right back to Gerard in every frame.
Sitting there now, wrapped in a bandage, hands bound in gloves, he was almost grateful Gerard couldn’t see him. At least this way, he could maintain the illusion that he might be the kind of person Gerard would associate with were their circumstances different.
“Shall we listen to the second half of Overload?” Emory asked.
Gerard simply shrugged and set up the album. A handful of songs in, he asked if there were more cookies. Emory pointed him to a Tupperware container on the counter.
Gerard munched while Emory listened, but his attention waned faster than he expected. A yawn formed in the back of his throat. He tried to tamp it down, but it escaped during a lull between tracks.
Brushing his shirt free of crumbs, Gerard asked, “Is this putting you to sleep?”
“Of course not,” Emory huffed, attempting to sound his usual self. He was not sure he could sleep with all the production elements going on. Every few seconds a new instrument or synth was introduced or a new chant of na-na-na or wahoo-wahoo.
“I wouldn’t blame you if it were.” Gerard sighed to himself. “These songs are pretty formulaic.”
Emory sat up straighter, piqued by a word in his own wheelhouse. Formula. “Say more on that.”
Gerard teetered in his chair, seemingly surprised by the request. “Songwriting, like any other craft, has its tried-and-true structures. Songs usually go intro, verse, prechorus, chorus, verse, prechorus, chorus, bridge, chorus, outro.”
“Sounds a bit like the scientific method,” Emory said, inching forward.
“It totally is. You have this guide to follow. Some songwriters use it as a jumping-off point. Others treat it like gospel,” said Gerard.
A contemplative look fell across his face, which Emory couldn’t quite parse out.
“With the success of our first album, the label wanted to ensure we were going to ride our upward trajectory into the stars, so this whole project was about hooks and arena anthems and producers with really rigid standards about what a pop song should and shouldn’t be. ”
“What shouldn’t a pop song be?” Emory asked. If baking was mostly a science, maybe art was, too. Music appeared more complex than he’d ever given it credit for.
“It shouldn’t be over three minutes and thirty seconds.
It shouldn’t use more than six chords. It shouldn’t pile on sounds all at once.
It shouldn’t have lyrics higher than a cumulative fourth-grade reading level,” Gerard spouted, using his fingers to count off these principles.
“Some people in the industry refer to it as melodic math.”
“That’s funny, when they all sound more like psychological tricks than mathematical equations.” Emory considered this further. “No more than six chords?”
“Easy chords, too. Anyone could play them.”
“I doubt I could.” Emory had never had cooperative, nimble hands.
“A monkey with a ukulele could play them.”
“You highly overestimate my musical abilities,” Emory said. “All the literature says it’s significantly easier to learn an instrument, much like a foreign language, at a young age.”
Gerard raised an eyebrow. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“You’re plenty young!” Gerard got up and retrieved his hard-shelled carrying case from beside the door.
The acoustic guitar he produced from inside took Emory’s breath away.
The body was painted a shade of green that reminded him of the Chesapeake Bay, and above the sound hole, a plump chameleon sat happily, almost but not quite blending into the background, with its pink, sticky tongue unfurled.
“What an instrument,” Emory mused, eyes locked on it.
“You think so? It was the first big purchase I made after we signed our record deal.” He glanced down at the guitar with pride in his eyes. Emory wondered how many of the songs he’d heard so far had been written on that beauty.
Emory stood to inspect it closer. “Why a chameleon?”
“When I was a kid, my parents took us to the zoo in Baltimore,” he said.
“There was this boardwalk with a bunch of species from Africa. They had a chameleon exhibit, or at least that’s what the sign said.
There was this short, spindly tree with green leaves on it toward the front, but I didn’t see any reptiles moving around in it.
The employee stationed there saw how excited I was.
He told me all about chameleons, including that they changed colors based on the temperature, light, and their moods.
I thought that was the coolest thing since I had a lot of trouble communicating my wants and needs when I was a kid.
If only humans could project their emotions on their skin like that. ”
“Maybe that’ll be my next bio invention,” Emory said, wanting to smile, but his facial wrap made it too hard to move.