40. Chapter 29
If You Wanted a Song Written About You, All You Had To Do Was Ask
Dallas
There’s still no sign of my brother or Rain. I only know because I’m woken by Cohen stomping around swearing.
“Where the fuck are they?!”
I pull back the curtain surrounding my bunk and, after a quick look around, confirm he’s right. They aren’t here.
“Well, Co, knowing my brother, either he found Rain, and they’re off somewhere together.” He grimaces at that. “Or, he hasn’t found her yet, but he won’t stop looking until he does. So there’s no point stressing about it.”
He ignores my statement and watches me.
“Did you sleep?”
The question catches me off guard, but I acknowledge, “Actually, yeah!”
We’re both right to look surprised. It’s been a long time since that happened. Then again, it’s also been a long time since I had an orgasm strong enough to put me in a fucking coma. Not to mention, sometime around 4 a.m. I rolled over and found Kitten stretched out against me.
Without Rain here, she sticks to me like glue. The first thing I do is feed her, then grab some food for myself. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve socked away enough snacks and shit that there’s plenty to scrounge from. I manage a bowl of cereal sans milk.
It tastes disgusting, like cardboard, but I’ve had worse things in my mouth.
Besides, without my brother or Rain here, the bus is actually peaceful.
No one is arguing or exchanging resentful glares.
I let that unusual calm wash over me, helped along by Kitten, who, now with a full belly, seeks out my lap so she can curl up and go back to sleep.
Well, I suppose, it’s mostly peaceful if you can ignore the way Cohen stomps around, though even he gives that up pretty quickly and settles across the table from me.
“You know, we don’t have to stay on this stupid bus. We could go home?”
I concentrate on chewing rather than answering him at first. Of course, my silence doesn’t deter Cohen, and even though I don’t bother to look up, I feel the pressure of being watched like heat blowing on my face.
Finally, I choke down the last bite of my food and scoff, “What home, Cohen? Do you even know where I live?”
“With Dutch,” he replies, but there’s a sliver of doubt in there. “I’ve been there with you.”
I reply, pushing that on that little sliver, “Oh yeah? And where is it exactly? How many times have you been there? You claim I’m your best friend, so tell me, Cohen, how many times have you been to my place?”
He swallows because my questions have widened that sliver of doubt into a full-on canyon. I’m not sure why I’m so annoyed with him this morning, maybe because I got a taste of what I can’t have last night.
“Besides, I’m not leaving Kitten, at least not until Rain comes back.”
I scratch the tiny thing between the ears and am rewarded with a gentle rumble that only reaffirms my decision.
“What if she doesn’t come back?”
“She wouldn’t do that. She wouldn’t just leave Kitten.”
“You sure about that because—”
He means because she left us. He doesn’t need to finish that sentence, and I don’t let him. I finally meet Cohen’s green-eyed stare.
“I’m dead sure.” My certainty surprises even me, but somehow, I know I’m right.
Not just because Rain loves this little cat, but because I know Cohen is wrong.
Rain didn’t leave the band. It was the three of us who practically shoved her out the door, slammed it closed and then locked it behind her so she could never come back.
I’d have left too. Hell, I kinda did in my own way.
“Fine. Have it your way,” he huffs.
“You’re free to go, Cohen. Go back to your pool house at Mommy and Daddy’s. I won’t stop you.”
He huffs again, pouting like a child, but stubborn as ever, he folds both arms across his chest and hunkers down into the booth. Making it clear he’s staying, at least for now.
Although I’m perfectly comfortable sharing the silence with Kitten’s small snores, it doesn’t take long for Cohen to get bored.
The signs of it are all there. He pulls his phone out, checks it, and stuffs it away.
He gets up and paces, then plops himself down again and pulls his phone out a second time.
He types out a brief message to someone, then takes a pause followed by more typing.
I don’t ask, but it’s like he can’t bear to not tell me.
“God!” he whines, “this job is so boring! Christ, it’s boring! I can’t believe I’ve survived doing this for the past five years.”
He turns his phone off, then chucks it over his shoulder.
There’s a crack when it hits the bus’s floor, then it slides under the bench of seats that serves as our only couch.
It’s so childish that I admit, I take the bait: “Then why have you? Stayed in that job, I mean, if it’s so fucking boring?
I’m sure Kira and Zander would have supported anything you did? ”
It takes everything in me to keep the resentment out of my voice.
Because I know that it’s true. Kira and Zander Brady love their son so goddamn much.
They, along with Grams, were always, always the ones to bail us out of trouble.
They gave Cohen everything they could. You’d think having three friends with fuck all in the way of moms and dads would have made him see how privileged he is.
“You could have stayed in the music scene,” I continue to vent, “Hell, you probably could have gone solo!”
I can picture it. Cohen Brady. Rock God. Claiming the whole stage for himself.
“Hmmmm,” he murmurs.
Cohen is not one to feign humility. It’s not even like I’m the first to suggest he went solo. The press spread their fair share of rumours about it right after news of The Pistols’ break-up went public. I always thought it was bullshit, so I’m shocked when he confesses, “I tried.”
He says it under his breath. So quietly that it takes a moment for the words to register, like a silent bomb going off. He gets up, turning his back to me as he repeats it, slightly louder the second time. There’s no way for me to read his expression, but I can read his movements.
Cohen reaches for his guitar. It’s poking out from one of the spare bunks where he’s been storing it between sound checks and performances, even though it’s not the one he usually plays on stage.
That one is famously purple, the same deep purple as Rain’s hair, while this one is acoustic.
It’s used for writing rather than stadium performances.
Yet, it is almost always somewhere nearby, on this bus, in his dressing room, side stage.
Like a musical security blanket he carries around.
He drops down on the small couch and brings the guitar to rest across his knees. He doesn’t strum or play a note, but his knuckles are white from how tightly he holds the neck.
“I tried…to go solo, but I was a mess.”
I scoff, “Yeah, I remember the mess part. You weren’t the only one, Co. We were all six different kinds of fucked up back then. Some of us still are.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t long after…” The break-up, I mentally fill in the blank. “Lou came to me, told me he was starting his own label and that he wanted me to sign with him.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Just me, Dax. He said just me.”
Awareness dawns.
“So, what, ditch the Kelly brothers and you can keep all the money and fame for yourself? Was that the offer?”
He nods, avoiding eye contact. His fingers brush the strings, letting the thrum of notes bridge the silence that follows. Ever the king of ignoring his own shit, he eventually continues like I never said a damn thing.
“I tried. But everything I wrote sounded like dog shit. Without your help, the notes wouldn’t come. Without the three of you, I couldn’t do it. And that only made me spiral even more. Until I fucked things up so bad that Lou cut me loose.”
“Join the club,” I spit bitterly. “Difference is some of us didn’t have parents and a pool house waiting in the wings.”
We relapse into mutual silence for a while after that. Or mostly silence. Periodically, the odd note emanates from Cohen and his guitar. What starts as a single G chord drifts to C, then he adds a D.
Kitten meows from my lap. It’s a frustrated little squeak that interrupts my listening and makes me realize that somewhere along the line, I joined in.
Subconsciously, I’d started humming a low baseline and using my fingers to drum out a beat on the table.
Poor cat was tired of getting jostled, enough that she jumped off my lap and stalked off to Rain’s bedroom in a huff. Like mother, like Kitten.
Her departure makes Cohen’s fingers still. Only briefly, however, and once she’s out of his line of sight, he repeats that same chord progression. This time, though, my ear is more finely tuned to it, appreciating the patter he keeps repeating until his fingers falter again.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” he replies. His shoulders are curved. His whole body adopts a defensive posture since I called him out for being a kept boy.
“It didn’t sound like nothing,” I prod.
It sounded like so much more than nothing.
Enough to get me off my ass. I retrieve my bass from that same extra bunk.
I sling the strap over my shoulders and then approach Cohen.
After a small nudge, he shifts into the corner, creating enough space for me to sit too.
It’s a tight squeeze. Our knees knock together.
He eyes me, under his dark lashes, with so many questions written all over his beautiful face.
“Play it again, Co.”
And play, he does. Somewhere after the third time, I join in. My bass adds depth, an underlying current of something darker that I can’t name, yet the juxtaposition of the lower bass notes and the high, more pop-friendly ones coming from Cohen create a great sound.
“Again,” I challenge when our current rift ends. We play that same riff over and over, adding pieces each time.
Side by side, the afternoon slips away. It isn’t until a ray of evening sun temporarily blinds me despite the bus’s tinted windows that I pull the guitar off my lap.
Not because we’re done. But I need a notepad or a phone or something, anything, where I can write our composition out.
I’m halfway to my bunk when Kitten dashes through my legs.
Her magic cat-hearing trumps ours, and she’s nearly at the door before I even hear it open.
My faith in Rain from earlier today is validated.
She strides onto the bus first, and behind her I can just make out the top of my brother’s twists.
Rain’s ready and manages to catch Kitten when she jumps into her adoptive mom’s arms. Rain nuzzles her face into Kitten’s fur, and both girls seem to sigh with relief.
“I’m sorry I was gone so long, sweetheart,” Rain coos. “I’ll always come back for you. We’re a team, you and me.”
The cat presses in closer against Rain’s chest, but the woman herself lifts her gaze and captures mine. “Thank you, Dallas.”
My name on her lips sounds exactly the way it did when we were kids.
When she’d take my hand. A familiar vice tightens around my heart, only this time I’m glad it’s there.
For a brief moment, we’re caught up in that vortex of past and present, of the two sad kids grateful to have found someone else who gets it.
But like I said, brief, because Cohen, as usual, is the one to snap us both out of it.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me?!”
That’s when I look closer beyond my Rainy-girl’s face.
I take in her clothes, or should I say Dutch’s clothes on Rain’s body, and the way my brother’s hand is nestled at the curve of her ass and for another brief second, I could almost be happy for them.
Until Cohen’s expression registers too and I watch his heart fracture in real time. For Rain. Again.
“Fuck this. I’m outta here.” He shoves between the two of them and storms off the bus.
All three of us watch him go, but I’m the only one who knows that he could have left hours and hours ago and instead chose to stay.
Like the naive, ever-hopeful idiot I am, I thought he stayed for me.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. He stayed for her.
It was always for Rain. It always would be.