59. Phoenix St. Pierre #2
“You’re going to have to,” Birdie tells me.
“Because you wear your emotions on your fucking face. Tom is going to ask what happened. And I will push you into the ocean if you lie to him.” He grinds his teeth, his voice tight as he tries not to cry again.
“So you have to go tell him you caught your brother burning himself—and I would rather be buried alive than be around for that conversation.”
I love my brother. I love him so much. I don’t know what to do.
“Can I hug you at least?” I ask him.
“No,” he tells me. “You are disgustingly sweaty, man.” I’m already going in for a hug anyway, gripping the back of his skull.
He lets out a deep exhale against my chest. “I’ll be with Steffi. Please try not to fucking worry.”
He’s really asking for the impossible.
Birdie was right. I couldn’t hide the emotion on my face, even if I tried. Tom immediately questioned what was wrong like I’d been plowed down by a steamroller. We walked a few yards from our bus to the edge of the peninsula, beside a park bench and an oak tree.
The full moon casts enough light to see in the darkness. Water laps at the shoreline. The heat, surprisingly, I’ve gotten used to.
It barely fazes me now.
Tom’s chest caves. “Fuck, dude.” His hands splay on his head. “He’s been burning himself since he was fifteen?”
“Off and on. Yeah.” I lean back up against the oak tree, arms crossed stiffly.
“I caught him the first time in our bedroom. But I’m telling you, this is different.
He’s always held onto the hope that one day he could focus solely on rock music.
One day he’d make our parents proud enough that they’d stop pushing him toward the cello.
” My face breaks in pain. “Pretty sure that hope evaporated. I don’t know how he pulls himself up this time. I don’t know if he even wants to.”
Tom edges closer, and the oak tree blocks anyone near the tour buses from seeing us together. Only the ocean has eyes on us. His gaze lassos me in and makes it easy to talk.
I continue, “And we’re going on different tours in a month. I won’t know if he’s taking his meds, burning himself in a bathroom, or roadkill on the side of the fucking highway—and that’s the hardest part. I don’t know how to be okay with not knowing.”
Tom nods over and over. His eyes reddening. “I know. I get that. Why do you think I keep going home every Wednesday?”
I wipe at my eyes. “The tea parties, of course.”
“Those, yeah.” His smile is soft and slanted.
He reaches up to wipe away the tear streaks on my jaw.
“Dude, I’m terrified my brother will just vanish again.
I need eyes on him every week. Maybe it’s fear.
Maybe it’s me knowing I can’t handle it if he goes.
So I need to be the reason he stays.” Tom plants his hands on my bare chest, his fingers brushing over the tattooed rose, the inky-bloomed petals.
“I love how much you care about your brother. Like I love that about you so much it honestly scares me that I found someone like you.”
I sniff hard, my nose running now.
Tom adds, “And he’s all you’ve got, Phoenix. There aren’t three more brothers waiting in the wings for him.”
That cracks open something vulnerable in my chest. My throat swells so badly it hurts to talk now. I manage some words. “I don’t know what to do.”
Tom has no hesitation. No confliction. Like there’s already a clear solution in his head.
“We’re going to take a hiatus—”
“Tom.” I can’t breathe.
He cups my face with his hands. “You’re going to go on tour with Nothing Personal, with your brother—”
My world is spinning. I shake my head. “No. No. The Carraways—”
“Will be fine.” Tom nods over and over with the confidence of someone who’s seen the future. Is he just constructing this wall of strength for me? To get me through this?
“You’re talking about cancelling the World Tour,” I tell him. “Tom, listen to yourself. Really take that fucking in. Okay? Because a month ago, you were on Adderall so that you didn’t miss a single opportunity.”
“And that was fear, dude. It’s always been fear,” he says. “But I know I’m more scared of you not being there for your brother than I am of The Carraways disappearing into irrelevancy.” He drops his hands to my shoulders. There’s not a single ounce of uncertainty in his powder-blue eyes.
But this is killing me.
In ways he does not understand.
“The Carraways can’t go on hiatus,” I tell him. “Because I don’t know if I can survive destroying another band. Okay?” My stomach knots. My breathing labors. “Not after Sophomore Summer.”
I have to tell him.
There’s no way we can make this decision without him knowing everything.
The night of my arrest. I explain there’s a video of me climbing into the concert pit and assaulting a heckler. How I accidentally broke my singer’s jaw.
But I go back farther this time. I tell him where the pain started. “I got so drunk that night,” I say. “More drunk than I’d ever been in my life. And I was angry. So fucking angry…”
Tom’s holding me around the waist. He just listens, and I wait for the moment I scare him off. But it hasn’t come.
“Chase.” The name is pure acid on my tongue. “You remember him?”
“The songwriter ex from college.” Tom stiffens, and his mouth parts in sudden realization. “Did he do something to you? Like sexua—”
“No,” I cut him off. “He just emotionally eviscerated me. I thought I loved him.” I run my tongue over my molars. Breathing becomes hard because what the fuck. How could I have ever thought I loved that guy? I know what love is now.
I know it’s standing right in front of me.
My eyes burn. “He stole my journal,” I tell Tom. “All the songs I’d written in college, he sold every one of them to his contacts in the industry. Passing them off as his own.”
Tom’s chest rises and falls heavily, his face contorting into a wounded grimace. “Phoenix—”
“When I found out, I drank myself under. I’d never felt rage like that. Never been that devastated. I wanted to destroy everything I touched. And I did. And it cost me…everything.”
The band I created with my brother.
My dreams.
My future.
Emotions pool through me. “At least, I thought it did. Because I met you, and I started to feel like maybe I could have more than nothing.” I lean forward, running my hand against the back of his neck.
I pull him closer to me, and more emotion surges when I see that he’s not drawing away.
“In a three-minute song, I was already at your mercy.”
This chokes him up more. “Which…which song?”
“What do you think?”
Tom has to look away, his breath coming out like a fist is in his chest. “‘Fire You Feel.’” He swings his overcome, earnest eyes at me. “For that long?”
“For that long,” I rasp out. “You’ve had me, Tom.”
He’s not boastful or smug. His blue eyes skate affectionately across my features.
“Being loved by you has been the greatest pleasure of my life.” He steadies the tremor in his voice.
“And I hope being loved by me will be yours. Because I’m not going anywhere, Phoenix.
I love you too damn much to let this all fall apart now. ”
I’ve understood his love for me, even without words. I’ve felt it like a bellowing, unstoppable melody inside me. But I think he knows I need the words now.
I need them so fucking badly that I feel myself hanging on to each syllable. I hold him so close, our foreheads pressing together. Until I kiss him gently, achingly, painfully. His fingers dig into my back.
When our lips break apart, he takes a breath and says, “It makes perfect sense now—why you’d give up being in a band after that. Art isn’t just words on paper. The person you trusted most stole the most vulnerable parts of you, then sold them to the highest bidder. He robbed your soul.”
Christ. I pull back and pinch my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he apologizes quickly. “I’m making it worse.”
“No, Tom.” I shake my head and bring my lips to his in a softer kiss. “You’re making it better. I’ve never had anyone put it in those words. But that’s exactly how it felt. Like he took me and just…”
Buried me.
Rubble inside tunnels.
Tom nods. “I know. I know.” He looks me over in a deeper sweep.
“The Carraways isn’t Sophomore Summer. We will survive a four-month hiatus.
I know this because what we created together isn’t fused together by just rhythms and melodies.
It’s your flesh. My bone.” His reddened, passionate gaze punctures the tender parts of me.
I pull him into a tighter embrace, our jaws skimming, our lips a desirous distance away. We share a quiet moment where I just listen to the soft beats of his heart. I want to stay like this forever. But that’s not how this is going to go.
Tom draws back to look up at me. His resilience is so clear. It tries to reinforce mine. “The right choice is for you to be with your brother,” he says. “I think you know it too.”
I do, but my face cracks anyway. “Both options suck.”
“This one sucks the least,” Tom tells me. “And maybe it’s a blessing in disguise. I haven’t been around Ben as much. It could be a sign I need to be home with my brother, too.”
That’s how we start making a game plan to tell Jeremy that we’ll finish out the last four shows of our U.S. tour, and we’ll try to work on the second album in August, but after that we’re done for a while.
Cancel the World Tour.
Become a long-distance couple.
We start discussing whether we’ll see each other during Nothing Personal’s tour. Tom offers to fly to me, but we realize it’ll just be more painful every time he has to leave. He needs to be home with Ben anyway.
We both agree that we’ll meet up whenever I’m back in New York. I don’t have the schedule, but I’m sure I’ll have a week off here-and-there between legs.
“We can do this,” Tom says after we’ve mapped out the next several months of our lives.
That’s the thing about Tom—he makes me believe we can do anything.
That nothing has ever been out of reach.