Acknowledgements: Warm thanks to habu for giving me a firm hand and warm encouragement.
I was so stunned I don't think I said anything. Him kicking me out without even attempting to get off with me was the last thing I'd expected given how easily I'd succumbed to his seduction—if you can even call it that—and that, added to my embarrassment at coming so quickly, and my confusion over what I'd just done caused a chemical reaction that melted my brain and turned me into a zombie. I barely remember leaving the loft, except I do remember he walked with me to the door. I don't remember the drive home, either. I suppose my head was just churning with images of what we'd just done, and the downtown streets, the cruise down the 10—traffic flowing steadily at that hour—the last leg of my commute into Culver City just didn't register, as if I'd beamed home in a transporter instead of driven.
In the lingering euphoria of that unfathomable, over-the-roof intense experience, high on an adrenaline buzz of having transgressed a line I'd never dreamed of crossing, that night I felt stupidly proud of myself for being so adventurous, and was 70 percent sure that I would call Dario the next day and arrange to come back to his house to pick up where we'd left off, if nothing else, at least to see what it would be like to kiss him, who knew, maybe even to stroke each other off. But when I woke up in the morning I had the sickening feeling of having turned myself inside out, like I'd done something that had completely warped who I was, or who'd I'd thought I was, and I was actually afraid I wouldn't be able to find the courage to ever go back there, which would mean quitting the band because how could I explain to the guys that I wanted to walk away from the ideal rehearsal space (acoustically excellent and free to boot) and the only steady and lucrative weekend gig on offer? The next day after that, my view of things changed drastically about five times an hour, from feeling like I had no option but to quit the band and maybe leave the city, to being about to call Dario and ask if we could talk, not even pretending to myself that that idea wasn't really about setting up a situation where we could hook up again, to a rational but cautious decision that I would call Dario, tell him that I hoped my never-to-be-repeated impulsive behavior wouldn't hurt our friendship or working relationship, and try to carry on with the rehearsals and the gigs as if nothing had happened.
In the end, I did nothing. Just kept vacillating back and forth between every possible course of action and every possible outcome—punctuated once or twice a day by jerking off frantically or else slowly and gently, trying to recapture the feeling of being touched by Dario—until the weekend came and it was too late to tell the guys I couldn't make it to the gig. I showed up at the last possible second, so there wasn't a minute to spare before our set and I had no time to mix and say hello to the people I knew, but just barely had time to set up my amp and tune my guitar, and our set started. Up until that night, I realize now, I'd kind of been phoning it in when we played—during rehearsals, when we had a paying audience—I'd long since written off the beautiful dream that had sustained me from age fifteen until I was twenty-six or twenty-seven, that our music, my music, was special. Extraordinary. But that night, playing, and especially singing, I fell under the spell of the music the way I had when my whole heart had been in it, when singing felt almost as good as fucking. Well, depending on the song, on the girl, maybe even better than fucking. And, at moments, worse than dying, but dying a gorgeous, soul-expanding, mind-blinding, poetic death. And now and then, or maybe the whole time, woven into that pleasure and pain the hope that he was watching and feeling the music the way I was feeling it, that my voice was moving him the way it had moved him that night when I'd sung practically a-Capella, practically a serenade. But with the lights in my eyes and the crowd filling that huge space almost wall-to-wall, I had no idea if he was there amidst that dense chaos of bodies undulating like leaves in a storm, listening and watching, or up on the roof terrace or hidden away in his sleeping loft where he sometimes escaped the throng for an hour or two.
When we finished our set, when the music stopped pumping through me like my own blood flooded with adrenaline, the anxiety that had crashed over me a thousand times in the four days since it had happened was suddenly drowning me. I hurried to stash my gear away and get out of there as fast as possible, before I inevitably came face to face with Dario and had to figure out how to act with him, what to say, even though I hated the sickening feeling seeping into me, displacing the high of the music, that saying nothing and fleeing without even saying hi to him was a very clear message, a message which I wasn't sure at all reflected what I wanted to convey to him.
But that's what I did.
During the brisk walk to my car—parked almost a mile away because I'd shown up so damn late and there was so little parking in that area—I felt elated, as if I'd successfully escaped from prison or eluded a school bully during recess. But the moment I was on the freeway I felt like shit. Like a coward and the most ungrateful asshole in the world, after Dario had been so great about letting us use his space, how effusive he'd been about my voice and my music, after he'd basically saved me from my own recklessness when he could have probably convinced me to go a fair bit further that night. By the time I got home I realized, well, that was it. We'd keep rehearsing and playing our gigs at the loft, and for however long all that might last, to Dario I'd always be the immature jerk who couldn't just be a man and say, "Hey, man. It was fun but I'm not queer, so let's just be friends," even though I was dead certain he would have been absolutely cool about it.
I spent the next three days pretty much hating myself. To the point where I skipped our next rehearsal, as if I was relishing being as big an asshole as possible and not only treating Dario badly, but my bandmates as well. To the point where, when later that night when the intercom buzzed, and I knew Tom was down at the entry ready to give me an earful, I almost didn't answer. The next day I'd tell him I'd been asleep, perfectly in accord with my lie about being sick, which was perfectly in accord with my lie about not feeling well which I'd used as my excuse to flee the loft the second we'd finished our set on Saturday night. But I was already getting so sick of myself and my petty betrayals that I made myself pick up the receiver. I don't know whether it was a thrill of excitement or terror that hit me when I heard Dario's voice, but whichever it was, it ripped all the air out of my lungs and I barely managed to say, "I'll buzz you in."
Waiting for him to mount the five flights of stairs (why hadn't he taken the elevator?) felt like twenty minutes, even though the beat of his footfalls were rapid and, by the tempo and the breaks I could tell he was taking the steps two at a time. And then he was standing on the landing, just outside my open front door, barely winded. Holding my guitar.
So, this really was it. He'd forgotten the amp, but Tom would bring that to me later and either I'd be out of the band, or the band would be out of the collective and that vivid, difficult, productive, creative community I'd been taking for granted all those months wouldn't be part of my life anymore.
He peered past me into the apartment, then met my eyes, smiled (a little sadly, I thought) and said (in a strangely loud voice, I thought), "I got your text about getting your guitar. I'm on my way to meet some friends at a restaurant nearby, so I thought I'd just bring it to you since I was in the neighborhood."
It took me a minute, but I finally got it. He was saying that in case there was someone else in my apartment. Handing me a pretext so I wouldn't act weird about him dropping by. "There's no one else here," I finally said, trying to give him a friendly smile. "Want to come in?"
I was afraid he was going to more or less throw my guitar at me, tell me I'd been a dick, and leave. But he smiled his warm, confident smile, strode into my living room, carefully set the guitar by the wall, then stood there, gazing at me, looking so at ease I half wondered if all the craziness of the past week, from the handjob to my mad getaway from Saturday night's gig to skipping rehearsal that night, had been fabricated by the onset of some kind of mental problem.
"I'm guessing you're not actually sick," he said in that quiet, intimate tone he'd used with me that one night (so no, I hadn't imagined any of it).
"I'm sorry," I said. "I know I'm not handling this very well. I've been a total asshole."
"I'm the asshole." He perched on the arm of my sofa and nervously ran his fingers through his hair. It was slightly surreal seeing him so ill at ease. "I never should have pulled that with you the other night. I'd always told myself not to fuck things up with you like that, but the way things worked out that night, Tom canceling, but you showing up anyway, you playing that song just for me—I mean, not for me, but with no one else there, and then . . . well, fuck, then you reading my story—I just got caught up and I did what I did, even though I knew better." It was the strangest thing, but him saying that, the way he said it, I almost wanted to cry. And then everything crystallized into incredible clarity for the first time since the moment that night when he'd said, I want you to stay. Do you want to stay, Martin?
I said, "Please don't regret it. It was one of the nicest things that ever happened to me." A very bad job expressing what I was thinking and feeling, but even so all that rigid awkwardness so utterly alien to his character melted away before my eyes, and he looked at me with an incredibly tender, sad expression. "Just so there's no misunderstanding," I said, which was ridiculous because there'd already been a twenty-car pile-up of misunderstandings, "I've been jerking off every day, thinking about that night." He looked like he was holding himself back from laughing, and possibly from crying. "It's just that I've been confused about what that means, what I want. And I'm doing a shitty job of being normal around you and the whole loft scene while I do that."
After a while he gave me an absolutely endearing smile, stood up, and said, "Well, as aroused and just absolutely charmed as I am by the image of you getting off to pictures of the two of us in your head, I'd still take the other night back if it's going to wreck what you and the band have going at the loft. So know that you're still as welcome as ever, that I'm not going to do or say anything to embarrass you. And that I know very well that it was a one-time thing, so it's not like I'm going to be lurking in the corners waiting to pounce on you. My slightly stalkerish appearance at your door tonight notwithstanding."
"I'm a little disappointed to hear that," I said, trying to be more earnest, more like him, but I know it came out like a joke.
That irresistible smile. "Even so." He went to the door. "You won't miss another rehearsal." It sounded like a statement of fact that I had no hope of evading, until he tacked on a, "Will you?"
