46. Interlude 14
Stay Together for the Boy
Things have been fucking ugly ever since Rain and Cohen broke up. Really fucking ugly. We’re supposed to be leaving for the Deviant Dreams tour in just two weeks, and rehearsals have been…shit, frankly.
Rain shows up and does her job, but her voice doesn’t sound right, and she looks like a fucking ghoul. Her long hair is greasy; it hangs in her face, and she walks like she’s half slumped over all the time. She won’t look any of us in the eye.
That doesn’t do anything to stop the carnage.
Yet another of our band practices seems set to end in a screaming match.
We have our final pre-tour show in one week, and we can hardly hold it together to get through a practice.
As if on cue, Rain’s voice falters during the first chorus of 'Lightspeed' and Cohen goes ballistic. He kicks the mic stand out from in front of her. He smashes his guitar into one of the amps. Cursing her for ruining everything and restarting the same fight they’ve had at every practice since it happened.
Rain claims over and over again that she didn’t cheat on Cohen, that she didn’t know what was happening, and that she tried to fight them off. She claims multiple times that there were three people in the room, not just Blue. That she was helpless.
Cohen’s unbridled rage gets worse and worse each time she says it.
He screams and hurls vitriolic accusations at her, calling her everything from a liar to a whore.
Each awful name inflicts the damage he’s looking for.
Rain’s response to them is visceral, as though each one is a knife cutting deeper and deeper.
Dutch, normally the calmest of us all and the one who, before the events of the party, would have done anything to keep Rainy from harm, stands there and says nothing.
I can’t say for sure, but I think he always assumed that if she and Cohen ever called it quits, he’d be her next choice.
Finding out he wasn’t broke the levy on my brother’s seemingly infinite patience. He’s lost himself to his jealousy. Me?
I’m just lost. I struggle to believe that Rain would cheat on Cohen, though he’s been adamant. He claims he’s seen “the proof,” as he calls it, but he won’t say what that supposed proof is. Not even to me. Meanwhile, Rain cries and cries and Cohen refuses to listen.
I long to go to her. To comfort her the way she’s done for me so many times. I know all too well what she’s experiencing. The shame, the confusion, the disgust. The knowledge that you will never be at home in your own skin ever again.
Though I bear physical scars of what my so-called mother did to me, those are just masks for the ones that must run up and down inside of me.
They’re the only way I know that what happened to me was real, because otherwise it’s just snatches of a child’s memory.
Of hurt, of dark, of monsters under the bed.
That confusion is reflected back at me in Rain’s violet eyes. She doesn’t have outside scars to cling to, just the few hazy memories she tries to explain. And I want to listen. I want to hear them because I believe her.
I want so badly to reach for her like I could be her lifeline. Watching her cry like this is torturous. Two big steps, and I could wrap her up in a hug. I could hold her hand and tell her how one day, maybe long from now, it will be a little bit okay again.
One step toward her and my way is barred.
“Are you fucking serious, Dax?” Cohen darts between Rain and me, grabbing me by both arms. His touch, something I’d normally welcome, is biting and painful. “You’d pick her over me?” he asks.
I splutter and shake my head, because how could he think that?
“You’re abandoning me? For her?”
Panic stifles my words, and I search for my brother to help me answer. All I get is the slamming of the studio door. Dutch is gone, leaving me stuck between the two people I—we—love the most and one impossible choice.
“No!” I blurt, because of course I’m not choosing Rain over him. I’m not choosing. I could never. I want us to stay together. All of us. But that’s an explanation I never get to offer because Rain interrupts.
Her cracked and broken voice splinters completely on my name, “Dallas—I—never mind.”
One gasp, one breath, and she’s gone too. Running from the studio and, of course, without Rain here to see it, Cohen no longer cares to demand my attention. He tosses me aside, brushes off his hold on me and gives me a single, angry shrug.
“You might as well go after her. Although since she won’t fuck Dutch even though he’s gagging for it, I doubt she’ll pick you either.”
Those words sting worse than anything he’s ever said to me. Because all they do is remind me how fucking hopeless, how fucking pathetic I am. I have loved the angry, unflinching bastard in front of me for just as long as he’s been in love with Rain.
In all that time, I have not once abandoned him. And I won’t now, which makes me ever more pathetic, I guess.
Except Cohen makes that choice for me. He grabs his guitar and storms out too. I’m the last Pistol left standing, alone in an empty studio that should have been filled with love, friendship, and music. Instead, it’s just ugly silence.
I need something to fill that hollow space, that emptiness where they should be. So I seek out the only comfort I know capable of replacing it with euphoria, however brief.
Drugs aren’t that hard to find in The Neck.
Nor is the other thing I’m searching for, especially not in Calder’s underground queer scene.
The first time I found myself in The Clubhouse was after that night out with Cohen.
I woke up in the hospital with a craving so deep in my bones, for the high, for him, for more that I couldn’t resist.
That craving became a burning jealousy every time I had to sit there and see Cohen and Rain together. But, of course, I was too chicken shit to actually tell my friends where I went or what I did. This club became my secret. A refuge.
Tonight, the dance floor spills over. The lights are strobing, and the synth and beat of the music are driving everyone into a slow frenzy. Men grind together. In one corner, a woman is on her knees, a collar around her neck and on the other end of the leash is another woman.
I forgo the bar and race straight to the toilets at the back.
Neon and blacklight graffiti cover the walls here.
But there’s no disguising what this bathroom gets used for the most. Leaning against the back wall is a man in tight leathers.
His eyes aren’t green. But his curls are almost right.
I found him that first night, and I’ve sought him more than once since because he’s a perfect stand-in.
Because he can give me both the things I need.
“Sweet lips,” he greets. And okay, I cringe at the nickname, but needs must. And now that I’m here, I’m fucking starving.
“Give me some,” I demand.
“Always so fucking desperate,” he chides, but he pulls a small bag of powder from out of his denim jacket.
That first visit, I’d come looking for sex or something like it, and found out that I could get it and get my hands on that same euphoric, beautiful drug I’d done with Cohen back at the Kitty Kat Club.
“Just fucking give it to me.” I try to reach for the bag, but he jerks it back.
“You know the deal. Cash upfront or…”
He lets the word dangle. I choose ‘or’. I always choose ‘or’ because even though I have the cash, probably, since you know, I’m in a pretty fucking famous band and all that shit. I need this.
I need the hit I’m offered. I need to find myself on my knees in the toilets with this stranger’s cock in my mouth.
And when a soft voice caresses me, pets my hair, and laces a rubber tube around my upper arm so that my veins are primed for whatever shit they are about to hit me with, I try to pull away.
This is bad. Bad. Bad for me, and I don’t want it.
Yet still, I’m so blissed out from the first hit that I’m powerless to fight off the next one, just like Rain was from the drinks.
We’re exactly the same, my Rainy-girl and I. Powerless.
End Interlude