Chapter 11
Shawn’s after-hours parties weren’t on the official schedule, but they were reliable, and Keith knew that if he didn’t show up to at least the first couple of nights, his brother would be pissed, and when Shawn got pissed, he got mean.
It wasn’t worth it. Even when they were kids, it had been too much.
Shawn had spent half of elementary school sitting in the principal’s office.
Not Keith. He’d been well behaved at school and with their parents.
Dr. Robert used the word codependent, and the way Keith understood it was this: Shawn took all the anger so Keith didn’t have to.
Keith could sing because Shawn couldn’t.
They had shared a room for their whole lives, and it was like they could only put things on one side or the other.
Shawn’s side of the room got this; Keith’s side got that.
They were both limping unless they were together.
The disco was dark, with only a few roving red lights illuminating the deep pleather banquettes.
The dance floor was dense with bodies but not nearly as crowded as the lido deck.
It took a day to adjust to one’s cruise lifestyle—for the first few cruises, Keith had gotten horrible hemorrhoids from all the standing, but now that he knew that he had to exercise and take breaks, it didn’t happen so much.
He drank water all day long. He stretched.
Steffani would have laughed at him, doing stretching exercises on an app on his phone in his cabin.
One of the therapists he followed on Instagram said that the reason you were attracted to someone in the first place was the same thing that would drive you away.
Keith didn’t know if that was true, but it was definitely true that Steffani had been mean to him in the start in a way that felt refreshing.
Teasing! No one knew how to tease famous teenagers.
They hadn’t gone to real school; they’d never really learned how to flirt like normal people.
Everyone was in love with them all the time, except for the people who thought they sucked.
Steffani rolled her eyes at his bad jokes, and it made his blood pressure spike in a way that had felt like love.
In recent years, when Keith complained that he thought she didn’t actually like him very much, she said, “Well, okay.” It wasn’t a denial.
Steffani wasn’t the kind of person to put on a show.
This was the VIP section of the Boy Talk cruise: some of the guys’ friends or family members who’d come along; the Miami weather girl and other D-list celebrities, of which there were occasionally a few; all the Talkers who were all-time cruisers; women whom Terrence thought were cute and had a bodyguard slip a wristband to; all the men with waxed eyebrows on the ship who knew Scotty in some fuzzy way; a few women in tiny dresses who looked too young to be Talkers; a handful of fans who spent so much money on Boy Talk that Keith felt guilty every time he looked at them.
Bobby didn’t usually come, but he was there tonight, standing by the bar, scowling into a short glass of whiskey.
Looking around, Keith understood why he was there—Shawn’s weird new coach, Jonathan, was dancing around the perimeter of the Talkers, moving his feet to some internal rhythm that had nothing to do with the music playing, his enormous beard swaying back and forth.
At least with Bobby, Keith understood the appeal—Bobby was solid, reliable, devoted. This guy wasn’t Shawn’s usual type.
Terrence and his wife had already gone to bed, and Corey wouldn’t come to this, not in a million years, not since the time when he might have gone home with some Talkers.
They all had, even sometimes without realizing that was going on, like when a woman asked for an autograph after giving a blow job.
Keith was glad that Corey thought he was above these parties—it meant that Shawn would actually pay more attention to Keith, in theory, if the glittering object was taken away.
It was easier to compete with Corey when he wasn’t there.
Scotty was still going and delivered two more drinks to the table, his furry jumpsuit abandoned in a terrifying pile in the corner of the booth.
Keith wasn’t sober sober. He wasn’t even California sober, which Scotty said was just smoking weed.
It was true that he drank on the cruise but not until they were offstage.
Not that they were ever truly offstage while they were on the boat.
“Why didn’t David come?” Keith asked. David was the manager of a gym in Los Angeles and not yet thirty, with a sweet smile and enormous biceps. He was the latest in a string of nearly identical boyfriends and had been on the last two cruises.
Scotty took a sip of his drink and set it down on the table in front of them. “We broke up,” he said. “C’est la vie.”
“I’m sorry,” Keith said. He patted Scotty on the back and gave him a brief nuzzle on the shoulder. “What happened?”
Scotty waved a hand. “Nothing. Everything. You know how it goes. He wanted a dog.”
“Uh-huh.” Dogs were the pathway to houses, to weddings, to children.
Scotty had never wanted any of that. Keith got it—while the rest of them were having sex with every girl they could, girls they met in hotel lobbies and backstage meet and greets, girls who appeared everywhere they went, Scotty had been going on chaste dates with famous girls to give the teen magazines something to write about.
He hadn’t kissed a boy until he was twenty-two and didn’t have an actual boyfriend until he was twenty-five. There was so much lost time, even now.
“How about you? How’s Stef?” Scotty asked.
Scotty was the one in the group whom Steffani actually liked.
Sometimes Keith thought about how much happier Steffani might be to be married to Scotty—they liked the same TV shows and liked going to the spa and liked talking shit.
If they never had sex, it wouldn’t be that much less than Keith and Steffani.
“She’s good,” Keith said, because he couldn’t say what he was thinking.
Maybe she would have been happier if they’d had more children, or maybe they would have been happier for a little bit longer.
Maybe she would have been happier if she’d gone back to work, or if they’d traveled more, or if he’d been a different person.
Somehow the more miserable they got, the better Steffani looked, like all their suffering only showed on his face.
She’d had a breast lift, her chest now high and tight like Honeycrisp apples, though he rarely saw her naked.
She’d had her eyebrows tattooed on and had lasered off the fairy tattoo she’d gotten when she was sixteen.
She wanted to redo their kitchen with money from the cruise.
There was too much to tell, and none of it felt like his to say.
They hardly ever even fought anymore—that seemed like the most damning thing of all.
“Tell her I say hi,” Scotty said, and clinked his glass against Keith’s.
Some of his drink spilled onto the floor, and Scotty shrugged.
“So, what do you think of that guy?” He pointed his chin toward Jonathan, who was swaying side to side near the door with his eyes closed, stroking his beard, as if what was playing was something other than “I Want to Sex You Up” by Color Me Badd.
“I don’t know,” Keith said. “He seems harmless, but I don’t know.”
“The vibes are not good,” Scotty said. “He looks like he probably has good drugs, though.” Scotty gestured to the dance floor. “Can you believe this shit?”
It looked like last call at a karaoke bar at a convention center—people were getting sloppy.
Everyone but Shawn, who was still pogoing up and down on the light-up dance floor.
If he struggled to find the boundaries of his person and his persona, Keith had never seen it.
He could be mean in real life, he snapped at people, which he would never do in front of the Talkers, but the energy was always the same.
Full throttle. Shawn’s security guard, a former college football player, was parked by the entrance, ready as always.
There were a few clumps of Talkers dancing, and Keith watched as their eyes kept darting over to Shawn.
As long as he was up, so were they. The women didn’t even look tired—they had clicked into some deeper source of energy, one that Keith thought he actually understood.
They gave it to each other, back and forth, like a game of hot potato.
Steffani called it “feeding the beast,” when Keith needed it, the ego boost, but here on the ship, the beast was feasting at all hours.
Most of the time, Keith was embarrassed about the beast, but on the cruise, there was no need.
It made everyone happy—a bonus, not a deficit.
He pushed himself up to stand and jogged over to the women, his hands pumping along to the beat of the song.
They screamed and opened up their circle wide enough for him to enter, and then he was surrounded by them, their rapturous faces, and for a little while, he wasn’t even tired anymore either.
Shawn smiled as wide as the ocean, and Keith pretended it didn’t make him happy to see it.