29. Emory
Emory
By Monday, Emory was no guitar hero, but he was ready to compose. He had the chords and the confidence to set his pen to paper, for real this time.
All he needed were the right words.
Good thing his cowriter had a couple of Billboard number ones under his belt.
“How are you hearing this?” Gerard sat forward, puzzling over Emory’s most-recent draft. The pen ink was still fresh, and it tattooed itself onto Gerard’s thumbs.
Nervous now, Emory strummed several grating chords in a row while singing way off-key. “Can I have stage fright if I’m not even onstage?”
Gerard laughed. His dreamy eyes had the intensity of a packed auditorium of rapt people combined with the gleam of a powerful spotlight. “You had no trouble playing ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams.’”
“That was different. I had no idea what song it even was.” After that, their pillow talk had consisted of an oral history of Green Day, the band itself, and its importance to We the Wells.
Gerard spoke passionately but in hushed tones about musicianship and how that song had hoisted him out of hard times.
As he shared these personal tidbits, Emory inched closer and closer until they were nose to nose, heads sharing one pillow.
They kissed again until they fell asleep.
As it stood, Emory never wanted to dream without the taste of Gerard on his lips.
But that thought felt premature, much like he worried his orgasm would be if they ever finally did it.
Already, there had been times where Gerard rocked his gym-toned ass against Emory’s statuesque cock while they kissed, and he sensed an unconscious unloading that he saved at the very last second through any means necessary.
One time, he’d physically pushed Gerard off him to avoid the embarrassment of a mess.
Thankfully, Gerard took this as a hot dominant move, not a last-ditch effort to hide his overeagerness.
“You should pretend I’m not here.” Gerard leaned back as if adding distance would make his stage fright all better.
“Not possible.” Gerard’s presence was like being pelted by the fierce spray of the safety shower after encountering corrosive materials in the lab. He was soaked to the bone with awareness for the songwriter he wanted desperately to impress and undress.
As if reading Emory’s mind, Gerard said, “Pretend I’m in my underwear, then?”
“I—” Emory’s mouth went dry. That mental image was a sucker punch of hormones.
How, after flirtatious comments like this and nights of kissing and groping and writhing in their shared, squeaky bed, had they still not gone past second base?
Wait—was getting naked third base? That would mean having sex was a home run.
If anyone were to make a trading card for Emory’s sex life, his batting stats would be abysmal.
He didn’t even know the rules of the game.
Maybe they stayed clothed out of practicality.
Without clothes, Gerard wouldn’t know where Emory was.
That was an easier explanation to accept than admitting he wasn’t brave enough to ask after what he wanted.
Doing so required Emory to confess that he was a virgin and opened him to a worse possibility: rejection.
He’d had enough of that for one lifetime.
“That’s a bad idea,” Emory huffed, even as his dick grew fuller and pressed uncomfortably against the zipper of his jeans.
Gerard bore an impish smile. He clearly knew exactly what he was doing. “Well, I’m all out of ideas, then. Unless you’d like me to sing it.”
Easily, Emory conceded the guitar, because otherwise, he was going to spend the next several hours imagining Gerard in his low-cut underwear and doing absolutely nothing productive.
Over the chords Emory had chosen, Gerard improvised a static melody, which he explained meant that it didn’t move much; if he were to graph the melody, it would look a lot like a straight line.
Each time Gerard stumbled over a scientific concept presented in the lyrics, which sounded clunky to begin with, Emory played a game on a fresh piece of paper.
First, he’d write the idea out as if he were writing a true research paper for peer-reviewed publication.
Next, he’d write it out as if he were regurgitating that science for a pop news article one might find on a splashy culture website.
Lastly, he’d summarize it in a sentence with simple words like it belonged on the page of a picture book beneath a very colorful illustration of a lion wearing a tie and a pair of reading glasses.
By step two, Gerard understood most of it, but breaking it down further clearly allowed Gerard to pull it apart for the juiciest sounds in the line and trim the excess.
Hours passed as they volleyed ideas, totally keyed into their work.
Brow furrowed cutely with focus, Gerard stopped and started his strumming several times, murmuring repeatedly to himself about the “Prince theory” as shared by hit record producer Max Martin.
“By using the same melody for the verse and the chorus and then dropping a prechorus in between—oh, you’ll need to write us a prechorus—the listener automatically will think, ‘Huh, I’ve heard this before’ when the chorus with a drastically different energy comes in. Pop is almost always about repetition.”
“Familiarity, as well, I’d assume,” Emory offered. “The human brain craves familiarity as a form of comfort. From a purely evolutionary standpoint linked to our fight-or-flight responses, we’re less likely to flee from something we’ve previously survived exposure to. It draws us in.”
If he’d have blinked right at that second, he might’ve missed it, but with his vision locked, he caught Gerard pitching forward with an unfamiliar yet inviting hunger in his eyes.
Almost instantly, he snapped back and erased it from his expression, as if desire were something he could easily turn on and off like a microwave.
And it was desire. Emory felt certain of it, and he couldn’t let it pass this time without speaking up. “Why did you stop?” he asked.
“I’m not stopping.” Gerard toyed with his pick.
“No, I mean why did you stop yourself just now from…” He grasped for the words to finish that question.
Jumping my bones? Ripping my clothes off?
Even if Gerard did tear him out of his jeans and unleash the semi he’d been hiding for the better part of an hour, there’d be nothing to see underneath.
Emory would be better off putting layers on at this point.
The night before, he’d considered men’s lingerie and how he could’ve gotten his hands on some.
“You’re a virgin,” Gerard said plainly as if this explained everything. His face was impassive.
“Everybody starts out a virgin, Gerard,” Emory rebuffed.
“I know that.”
“And what if I don’t subscribe to the patriarchal social concept of virginity?” An unsubtle defensiveness burst out of him.
“Doesn’t change the fact that you’ve never had sex with another person before.”
“What are you, an amusement park attraction? I don’t see any sign stating you must have had this many sexual partners to ride this ride…” he teased darkly.
“Are you saying you want to ride me, Emory?” Gerard asked in a newly husky tone. An obvious tent had pitched in his pants, but his face remained neutral. And Emory’s mind scrambled itself so badly that he was left stammering.
“Yes or no?” Gerard asked, voice like a firecracker on a quiet night.
“I’m autistic. I’m not the best at reading social cues.
I can’t see your face. All I have are your words.
I’ve been having fun hooking up with you, but I figured you were a virgin based on the story you told about Anderson being your first kiss.
I didn’t know if and did not want to assume that you were allosexual or even interested in anything more than kissing, with me or anyone. ”
Surprised by the thoroughness with which Gerard had considered all of this—the fact that Gerard had considered it at all—Emory croaked out an utterly unsexy, “I am interested.”
A slow, sultry smile graced Gerard’s lips. “With me?”
Emory choked on how blunt this sexual conversation was.
Growing up, sex had been whispered about or written and underlined on a blackboard in health class along with lectures on abstinence.
Hell, Coach Block probably used the word abstinence more than he ever spoke the word sex aloud to that group of chuckling, immature eighth graders squeezed into scratched-up desks. “Yes. With you,” Emory whispered.
Of course with you! he wanted to shout. Did Gerard not know how amazing he was?
He was fit and sweet and intelligent and talented, and he’d bought a pair of crappy walkie-talkies just so they could keep in touch when they weren’t in the apartment together and agreed to write a song with him that might never get performed.
Emory wanted to make Gerard feel good, so good that they needed to invent a word beyond pleasure to describe the physiological sensations he’d give him.
But once again, he was getting way ahead of himself.
The fact remained that he was a virgin, a complete novice when it came to sex, so he needed to learn from a patient teacher.
Gerard had already proven himself to be one with the guitar.
Perhaps Emory could turn Gerard’s body into a fretboard and let his fingers play with something other than strings.
He fantasized about the sounds Gerard would make.
“Great, we can have sex,” Gerard said as if they’d just inked a lucrative business deal.
“We can?” Emory asked, sort of stunned.
“I want to,” Gerard said. “Once we finish the song.”
There it was. The dangled carrot snatched right back out of the rabbit enclosure. “Once we finish the song?” Emory swallowed thickly.
Gerard honked out a laugh. “Sex, drugs, and rock and roll is a cliché in my industry for a reason. They’re motivators. I write pop music, not rock and roll, and I don’t do drugs, so that leaves…”
“Sex.” Emory salivated around the word.
“Which we can have when the song is finished,” Gerard said.
“How will we know when it’s finished?” Emory asked, but in truth, it sounded more like a needy, yearnful whine.
“Trust me,” Gerard said with a mischievous smile, “we’ll know.”