Chapter Twenty-One Always
Rahul spent every night at Julian’s. Within a week, he’d managed to bring over all of the few, meagre possessions he owned to the flat.
The first night after his encounter with Michael, Julian woke Rahul in the middle of the night with a violent nightmare.
That was the night Rahul discovered that Julian could no longer abide being held, lest he break into a full panic attack which could be cured only with whiskey and a half-hour-long shower.
Rahul was woken three nights out of the week by Julian’s nightmares after that.
He refused to say what they were about but Rahul could tell by the way he seemed to thrash in his sleep, desperate to get a larger, malicious body off of him.
Helpless, Rahul could do nothing but offer banal platitudes and his presence and hope it was enough.
Julian assured him it was. Rahul hoped he wasn’t merely saying that to placate him.
What seemed to concern Julian far more than this unaddressed trauma was his hair.
Mel and Kwambe came round again after a respectable wait.
Julian hadn’t been out of the flat in a couple of weeks, not even to the shop, leaving Rahul to run the errands, and expecting Mel to continue paying his salary out of charity (which she did).
On their visit they broached the subject of their cancelled gigs at the Mango.
“Jugs is gonna chuck us out on the street if we keep putting him off,” Mel explained in her trademarked monotone -- which was rather comforting considering their recent turmoil. “You need to at least tell us when you’re gonna be ready to get back on stage.”
Julian had sniffed and hugged his kimono closer around his middle. “As soon as my hair’s been sorted,” he’d said. This was met with groans, eye rolls, and head shaking.
This is what he said, yet Rahul frequently found him staring blankly into space when once he might have otherwise been found vamping in a mirror or singing quietly to himself without realising it.
The sunshine part of him seemed to have vanished.
His once electric blue eyes were cold as glaciers in moonlight, with no sign of the night’s end.
Rahul tried to joke with him or keep his daft fancies going, but the jokes were met with tight-lipped smiles and the fancies fizzled in moments.
Rahul saw him once, sitting in front of his vanity, hairspray in hand, and he just sat there, staring at his own reflection until Rahul could no longer bear it and left to put the kettle on.
Yes, it was his hair. It was his smile. It was his sunshine.
Then one day Rahul emerged from the bathroom, steam heralding his entrance, and Julian looked up from his magazine where he lay in repose on the bed and did an almost comical double-take, big eyes widening even further. He rose and approached Rahul cautiously, as though he might be a mirage.
“Rahul… You didn’t…” He breathed, voice torn between awe and horror.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir. I always look like this. I woke up like this.”
Julian lifted a reverent hand and brushed his fingers along the stubble of Rahul’s half-shaven head, equal parts black and silver. “You’re fucking mad,” he said, but it was heartbreakingly tender.
Rahul caught his hand like a bird in flight and brought it to his mouth, lips grazing his knuckles. “If I’m mad then you’re a bloody lunatic.”
Julian laughed, an honest laugh that crinkled his eyes and brought a light out into his wan face that Rahul could’ve sworn was sunshine. Then Julian kissed him.
Rahul froze. They hadn’t kissed, not really, since it happened.
He wasn’t sure he was allowed. He wasn’t sure he’d earned it.
But Julian pressed, tongue darting out to flick against his lips, and Rahul was powerless against it.
He opened for him like a flower to the sun, accepting him gratefully.
He was wary about touching him, daring only to hold onto his shoulders as Julian freely wrapped his arms around Rahul’s middle.
Rahul had been so starved for Julian that he could have cried.
He hadn’t even realised how much he’d been missing him, missing this, their closeness, the intimacy that had been so hard-won.
He steeled himself and reached up to stroke Julian’s cheek, thrumming as his thumb grazed the hint of stubble there.
Encouraged, Julian deepened the kiss, tongue plunging deep into Rahul’s mouth, chest pressing hard against his.
Rahul felt it keenly as his blood plummeted southward, his excitement taking a tangible, hard form in his trousers.
He growled with need into his boyfriend’s mouth, hands lowering to that wonderful, tight arse of his and bringing their pelvises flush.
Julian whimpered, a vulnerable, wanton noise.
And no sooner had he made it than he broke abruptly apart from Rahul, leaving the latter cold and confused.
Julian’s own eyes were confused, wide and lost, as he hugged his arms around himself. “I --” he began, voice too high. “I’m sorry. I can’t,” he finished and flung himself into the bathroom, door slamming behind him.
Rahul didn’t see him again until after he returned from an hour-long cooldown pacing around Shepherdess Walk Park.
And even then he only came back to the ambiguous lump of Julian’s form in bed, pretending to be asleep.
This had only made Rahul bristle. They’d known each other since they were eleven years old.
He knew when Julian was pretending to sleep.
It was another two weeks before Julian emerged, fully formed like a butterfly from a cocoon, draped in animal print and a feather boa, and said he was ready to perform.
Their iconic return to the stage was, much to Rahul’s surprise, highly anticipated.
Their disappearance had somehow added to their mystique and a kind of cult following had evolved since their last live performance.
Jugs had even had the opportunity to sell advance tickets, something he’d never before needed to do, and for him it more than made up for their extended absence.
The club was packed, wall to wall, their demo tape sold out before they’d even taken the stage.
Backstage, there was a preternatural sense of calm that had Rahul strung tighter than one of his Fender’s strings.
He kept throwing anxious glances in Julian’s direction.
Yet Julian appeared to be the picture of peace, face serene and demeanour lofty.
He was wearing the shaved side of his head proudly, though it could hardly be called shaved at this point.
Grown into the masculine standard length and dyed the same ebony black, it was notable only in that it wasn’t as long as the rest of his gloriously long mane.
Rahul’s half-buzz cut was, on the other hand, now practically indistinguishable from the rest of his sensibly cut hair, its slightly shorter length now the mere memory of a gesture of solidarity.
At his elbow, Mel cocked her head like a sage listening to the shift of the wind. “It’s time.”
Julian nodded once before walking out onto the stage on sequined platform boots.
The rest of them were left to follow, as they always had.
There was a comfort in being led by him.
A divesting of their responsibilities. Like returning to childhood and letting your parents take over.
All you needed was to be told what to do.
The stage was a neon nightmare. The roar of the fans was a wave that crashed against them and broke into the surf of adrenaline.
Rahul’s entire being recoiled from it while at the same time being inevitably drawn to Julian’s magnetism at the front of the stage.
He stood silhouetted against the radiant spotlights like a New Wave idol, one that lesser men would fall to their knees to worship. Lesser men like Rahul.
“We’re Electric Blue,” Julian said into the microphone, its amplified echo pinballing around Rahul’s skull. “Go fuck yourselves.”
Kwambe’s drums launched into the first song like a spaceship into the atmosphere, heating up and exploding before Rahul was even remotely ready. His fingers only found the keys out of muscle memory, saving his sluggish brain before it’d even remembered what song they were opening with.
He’d only just begun to focus on what his fingers were doing when Julian’s crooning broke out over the mass of gyrating bodies below them like ice breaking under a ship’s bow.
He couldn’t help but let his attention waver from the keyboard up to the backlit form of his friend as it swayed and reeled.
Rahul was lost in the thrust of his hips, the spell of his hands, the fan of his hair as his head flung back.
Every jab at the keys was done in tempo with the gyration of his arms. Every shift in tempo born of the flick of Julian’s wrist.
The crowd ate him up. It wasn’t just as if they’d never been gone, it was as if they’d magically woken up one day to find themselves cult leaders, messiahs.
There was a fever pitch within that club which was contagious.
It built up the libido, it massaged the ego.
It made one believe one was invincible. Rahul felt ten -- no, one-hundred feet tall.
Before him, Julian was the Mary to Rahul’s Jesus.
They were bringing salvation to these people.
Musical rapture. It could never have been any other way.
They were destined to be beside one another.
At the zenith of one of their more traditionally pop songs, Rahul’s fingers thrummed over the strings of his Fender on a delectable, soul-nourishing solo.
The faceless mass of humanity beneath him hungrily lapped it up, swinging their arms and screaming.
He was heady with it when he felt fingers grab the back of his hair painfully and lips close suddenly on his.