Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Tim
THE TOUR STUMBLES NORTH. And I do mean stumbles. It isn’t just me who’s off after the debacle in Baltimore. The mood spreads through the whole tour like a poisonous cloud, infecting everyone’s performances, even throwing the crew off-balance. When Kevin drops an amp on his foot one night and has to go to the hospital, it nearly ends the entire tour. Everyone is shaken and quiet, not because injuries never happen — tours are long and everyone tends to get run-down eventually — but rather because that particular injury is the most tangible, physical proof any of us could receive that the vibes are all wrong.
I’m certainly not helping matters myself. Ever since the night Keannen overheard that phone call with my parents, I’ve been caught up in my own head. Even Cameron, our token broody boy, notices how quiet I’m being, but when he attempts to ask me about it, I brush him off. I don’t relish the idea of talking about being a dumb virgin with a bruised heart, especially not with a guy who’s basically married to the man of his dreams.
I sulk in silence, and I play like shit, but so does everyone else so it doesn’t matter as much as it should. We get through our shows, at least. Erin’s voice is so powerful it allows me to hope that maybe no one but us notices.
Until, of course, Emmett calls us and asks what the hell is going on.
“We’re just tired,” Erin says on the bus one day.
“You don’t have time to be tired,” Emmett says.
Kelsey rolls her eyes, but Erin shoots her a look that dares her to speak her sentiments aloud.
“I get it,” Erin says, “but everyone is run down. We’re in the back half of this thing. It happens.”
“You can’t afford for it to happen,” Emmett says. “The reviews aren’t bad, but they aren’t what they should be. This is a sold out tour, a chance to get yourselves to the next level — and Baptism Emperor too.”
I cringe at the mention of Keannen’s band. I’ve been doing my best not to think about them, and him especially. We’ve managed to mostly avoid each other, or at least avert our eyes when we end up in the same room. Unlike during the beginning of the tour, it really is like we’re strangers now. Certainly, two people who were so close in high school wouldn’t be sneaking around pretending they don’t know each other as adults.
Yeah, if only.
I can’t shake our conversation from that night in front of the hotel. It was so stupid of me to say those things I said. Sure, I’d been thinking them, but I knew he didn’t feel that way about me. I knew he never will. Yet I opened my big, stupid mouth anyway.
I’m tempted to blame it on my parents. After how cruel they were to me on the phone, I was looking for some sort of comfort. Seeing Keannen there looking horrified, possibly on my behalf, offered an opportunity my aching heart couldn’t deny, but somehow it made things worse. It made this all hurt more. I understand Keannen only paid attention to me on this tour in order to mess with me, but it was starting to feel like more than that. The night we snuck into his tour bus didn’t feel like a mean trick to me. His desire was real — and so was mine. I’m some kind of idiot to think it would ever be more than desire, though. We can’t go back in time to when we were kids falling in love. I ruined that when my parents ripped me out of Baltimore and sent me away, and apparently there’s no fixing it in Keannen’s eyes.
Someone nudges my shoulder. I blink and find myself staring at the fold-out table on the bus. Erin and Kelsey are gone, and Emmett isn’t yelling at us on speaker phone anymore. Shit. When did the call end and most of my bandmates leave? I didn’t even notice.
Cameron is beside me on the bench seating. He leans close, even though I don’t see the girls anywhere in the main cabin, and whispers, “Hey, man, you okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, of course.”
Cameron stares at me with dark, piercing eyes. Suddenly, I pity his boyfriend, Julian. That guy must get this look all the time. It’s the gaze of a hard-boiled detective in a crime novel, a gaze that pries your secrets out of you.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Kind of.”
“Kind of?”
Cameron raises one eyebrow, making it clear I’m not getting out of this so easily.
“Kind of,” I say. “Sort of. I mean… Okay, not really.”
“I could tell,” Cameron says. “Do you care to elaborate?”
I squirm on the bench, but there’s nowhere to go on a tour bus. They’re big, but I can’t exactly leap off while we’re doing seventy on the interstate. One more East Coast stop, then we turn west and start heading for home. I can’t freaking wait. This side of the country has never meant anything good for me.
I sigh out an exhale as I surrender. “I tried to call my parents when we were in Baltimore.”
Cameron’s frown deepens. I don’t tell the band much about my family or my past, but they’ve gathered that I never visit my folks, and they never visit me. No one has pried into why, but I’m starting to think it’s not as big of a mystery as I might have hoped.
“That’s where you’re from, right?” Cameron says.
I nod. “I thought maybe…” I shrug as though flicking my whole life off my shoulders. “I thought we could get dinner or something while I was in town.”
“I’m guessing that didn’t happen.”
I can’t look at Cameron. Suddenly, a lump clogs my throat. I shake my head instead of replying. I guess you never really get over your parents flat out disowning you, no matter how many years they’ve hated you.
Cameron doesn’t ask more questions. In perhaps the most shocking moment of my life, he puts an arm around my shoulders and pulls me in against him. He holds me without a word, and it’s like having an older brother for the first time in my life, someone who’s in my corner no matter what. My sisters would never do something like this for me, yet I don’t need to explain the rest to Cameron; that arm around my shoulder says more clearly than words that he understands.
“I’ll never be good enough for them,” I say, “because I’m…”
I’ve never told him this, even though he’s queer. I’ve never told anyone. Only Keannen ever knew I wanted to kiss the boys at band practice and not the girls, but the words trip past my lips, and they’re not as heavy as I always thought they’d be .
“Because I’m gay.”
“I know,” Cameron says.
I jerk out of his hold to sit up straighter. “You know? How do you know?”
Cameron shrugs. “A hunch.”
“But…”
“It’s nothing you ever said or did,” Cameron says, “but I know you. We all know you. Kelsey and Erin suspected too, but we all thought we should let you tell us in your own time.”
After the one-two punch of rejection that was my parents and Keannen, I’m not sure what to do with this. I gape at Cameron, floundering for words.
“We’re family,” Cameron says. “Family knows shit about each other.”
That’s such a Cameron way of putting it that I can’t help laughing. He relaxes and squeezes my shoulder.
“Don’t let your parents tell you you’re worthless,” Cameron says. “You aren’t worthless to us. You still have a family, and it’s us. We’re going to love you no matter what, and if someone says you deserve any less than that, we’ll make sure they know exactly how wrong they are.”
Emotion clogs my throat. All I manage is a nod. Cameron releases my shoulder and scoots off the bench. It seems that was enough emotion for him, as well, but I don’t mind. I watch the highway roll past the window a bit more calmly than I did an hour ago, Cameron’s words echoing in my head.
His voice is still rattling around in my brain when we make our final East Coast tour stop in Boston. By the time I step onstage, I feel like I can actually play. I remember that I’m here for me and Erin and Kelsey and Cameron — not my parents, and definitely not Keannen.
I don’t know how his set went tonight. The crowd seemed to like it, but for once I wasn’t clinging to the side of the stage to listen and stare hopelessly at him. I focused on myself, putting on headphones and going through our set in my head.
Erin glances at me before we begin. For the first time in many stops, I’m able to smile and nod in return.
The whole crowd feels it the moment we start. This isn’t the band who stumbled through the past several tour stops. Everything clicks into place tonight. I don’t so much perform as sit back and let the music happen to me, every beat thumping through my hands perfectly on time.
Some piece of me keeps replaying Cameron’s words about being a family, about mattering, about deserving better even when other people say I don’t. Who the hell is Keannen to tell me what I do and don’t deserve? He’s been pushing me around this entire tour, trying to trip me up, trying to ruin my band’s shows. Now he wants to act like he had no idea what he was doing? Yeah, sure, innocent bully Keannen, who just happened to lure his ex-boyfriend onto a tour bus and whisper all those filthy promises into his ears .
No way. He knew what he was doing, and he wanted it. It wasn’t a game for him. Otherwise, he could have given me blue balls and walked away. I may not be experienced, but I know you don’t give someone an orgasm that good for nothing.
I want more.
I think he does too, but the stubborn ass is going to fight it to the bitter end simply to prove a point. Him and my parents are both hung up on the version of me who existed when I was seventeen, but I’m not a child anymore. The young, innocent part of me died when my mother ripped me out of that car and started shipping me around the country to cure me of my sexuality.
I crash through the set, but it isn’t frustration propelling me through the music this time around. It’s desire. I want another chance with Keannen, even if it’s dirty and bitter and loveless. I want him to touch me, and I don’t give a shit about the consequences.
Cameron said I deserve more. He said I should demand more. As the final notes of the set echo through the venue and the crowd roars, I finally dare to believe he’s right. I do deserve more than the scraps Keannen has been teasing me with. He wanted to get a rise out of me? Well, he’s succeeded. Now, he needs to deal with the consequences.
I stand with my band and wave and bow for the crowd. A wall of sound washes over me as the lights go down and the curtain closes. Emmett will get a better review of this performance than the previous ones, but he’s not the man I’m thinking about tonight.
Screw my parents. Screw Keannen. Screw our whole painful, convoluted past. I’ve spent twenty-five years trying to be good enough for other people to want me. It’s about damn time I do something selfish.
Keannen doesn’t have to love me. Tonight, he only has to want me.