by Anna Martin
The bus was leaving from the pub, which made sense because Tone kept his drum set there, and it was empty in the mornings, and the pub had space to park the beast of a vehicle. No one in the band, and pretty much no one associated with the band, was a morning person.
Except Stan.
Stan hadn’t slept the night before, too aware of the open suitcase in the corner of the room with piles of black clothes shoved into it. Even with Ben’s arm around his waist and Ben’s soft snores at his back, Stan couldn’t find the soft slip into sleep. He was grieving already.
“Have you got a minute?” Stan asked as Ben finished hauling some big case into the tour bus’s underbelly.
“Of course.”
They slipped around to the other side of the bus, where no one could see them, and Stan slipped off one shoulder of his leather backpack.
“This is kind of stupid. But I got you something.”
“Yeah?” Ben’s face lit up with the prospect of a present, and the raw sickness in Stan’s belly rolled again.
“Here,” Stan said, pulling the red-tissue-wrapped package out of his bag. It had been hidden under his bed these past few weeks.
Ben kissed Stan’s cheek, then tore into the paper. When he pulled the rabbit out, he laughed.
“Aww.”
“It’s because… because you like holding something when you sleep,” Stan said quietly, hoping his voice didn’t crack.
“Jesus, I love you,” Ben murmured as he hauled Stan in close. The bunny was trapped between them, and Stan pressed his face to its fur, wanting the comfort it offered as much as Ben’s arms.
“I got you something too,” Ben said and reached into his pocket. For a moment, Stan was confused, and then his breath caught in his throat. “I can’t offer you much,” Ben said, “but I can promise you a lot. I want you to know that when we figure out whatever this is”—he waved his hand between them—“I’ll make it happen. When we figure out what our family and our future will look like, I’ll do whatever it takes to make that real for us.”
He held out his hand, the thin gold band sitting in the centre of his palm. “Would you wear it?”
“Yeah. Yes. Of course. I don’t understand, though….”
“I wasn’t sure if you’d like diamonds,” Ben said with a smile. “I know they’re a girl’s best friend and all…. I’ll buy you diamonds one day. Until then….”
“Okay,” Stan said, understanding now. He took the band—it really was incredibly delicate—and slipped it onto his finger. Suddenly his throat felt thick and there was a stinging behind his eyes. Stan wasn’t a crier, never had been, and he ducked his head to hide the emotion that was surely just singing out from his face.
“It suits you,” Ben said.
“I wish you didn’t have to go.”
Stan threw himself back into Ben’s embrace, letting the familiarity of being held soothe his frazzled nerves. He hadn’t expected anything, least of all this, and it was a little overwhelming.
“Me too, baby,” Ben said softly and buried his face in Stan’s hair, holding him close so they could both disguise their tears.
“Ben?” someone yelled, making Ben squeeze Stan harder.
“What?” he yelled back.
“Need help with these fucking amps.”
Ben silently pressed a kiss to Stan’s temple and slipped away.
Stan sniffed, straightened up, and told himself to shake it off. When he followed Ben’s steps back around the bus, Tone was leaning against the wall with a cigarette dangling from his fingers.
“What was that Ben had?” he asked. “He just took something into his bunk.”
“You can’t say anything mean to him, Tone,” Stan said in his sternest voice. For some reason, his accent sounded thicker like this. “Please. I bought it for him, and I don’t want it to be hidden away because he’s too scared you’ll make fun of him.”
“What is it?” Tone asked, the edge of mischief dancing in his eyes.
“I’m not telling you,” Stan said. “This is important to me, Tone. Do it for me?”
The burly Bristolian leaned down and enveloped Stan in a surprisingly gentle hug. “Ben has my back, and I’ve got his,” Tone whispered. “I’ll look after him for you. And don’t worry—whatever your secret is, it’s safe with me.”
“Thank you,” Stan said and squeezed Tone a little harder. “That means a lot.”
“You got it.”
Tone kissed Stan lightly on the cheek before pulling away and wandering off to check how the loading was going. When Stan looked up, Ben was standing on the steps of the bus, watching him with a curious expression.
“You want to see inside?” Ben asked.
“Yeah. Yes, please.”
“Come on,” Ben said, offering his hand.
The tour bus was long and narrow, with the sleeping area mostly upstairs and a line of couches on either side downstairs. There was one more fold-out bed at the back of the bus. Apparently this was Summer’s area—she had claimed it as the sole girl on the tour. Stan didn’t blame her for not wanting to sleep with the boys.
The bus had bunk beds upstairs, for both the band members and their small crew. They looked narrow to Stan, especially considering how tall Ben was.
“This is mine,” Ben said, stopping at the bunk at the top of the stairs. A small curtain encircled the bed. “I already put Hades in there.”
“Hades?”
“Yeah. That’s what I named him.”
Stan pressed his lips together. “You named your bunny rabbit after the Greek god of the underworld?”
In response, Ben kissed him hard. They walked back outside in silence.
“It’s a nice bus,” Stan said as they emerged in the bright sunlight again. He nudged his sunglasses back down onto his nose.
“Yeah. Sherrie saw the one we had hired to start with and said there was no way she was going to let us loose in that death trap. So she paid for an upgrade.”
“I like Sherrie.”
“Me too. You should stay in contact with her while we’re away. She’ll be worrying about us, so you could keep her company. I’m sure Geordie would appreciate it.”
Stan heard the subtext—that Ben wanted Sherrie to keep Stan company too—and didn’t call him out on it. Sherrie was nice. He could spend some time with her if it kept everyone happy. It wasn’t a chore.
“I’m going to miss you so much,” Ben said, wrapping his arms around Stan’s shoulders.
“Please,” Stan murmured. “Please don’t. I don’t want to cry in front of your friends.”
They kissed instead, finding a shady spot to hide and make out until Jez started yelling about the fact they needed to go if they were going to get to Brighton in time to set up and sound check, and Ben was torn away from him, off for weeks of fun on his own.
Stan didn’t cry; he rubbed his thumb over the ring Ben had given him and thought of Hades and didn’t cry. He watched the bus disappear down the road and walked back to the Tube station and made it all the way back to the flat and onto the bed, with its sheets that still smelled like his lover.
Then he cried.
Chapter Eleven
While Ben and the band went from Brighton to Bristol to Birmingham, Stan threw himself into his work. He’d always kept long hours at the office anyway, and he was getting obsessive and ridiculous until Sherrie called him and said Ben had called her and he was worried.
That was enough to make him stop, to take stock and wonder exactly what he wanted. He still had weeks more until Ben came home. It would be too easy to work himself into the ground, rising up through the ranks at the magazine, but where would that leave him when Ben got home? He couldn’t just abandon it all again as soon as his boyfriend moved back to London.
There was the small matter of his blog, too.
He had started it when he was still living in New York with his aunt, and even though he was only a teenager, back then he was already honing his sense of style and what m
ade him tick. At school, he didn’t dare dress nearly as fashionably as he did now. Being Russian, not speaking English at all well, and being a slight, slim boy who was very definitely not heteronormative was hard enough, even in New York. He wasn’t about to wear a dress to prom and wreck the thin veil of normality he draped over himself each morning before school.
The one place he’d felt free to let go and be himself was in his own room, alone, with the computer he’d saved and saved and begged for. It was his prized possession, his window into a community where he was assured people like him existed all around the world.
He wasn’t a freak, or a disaster, or a fag, or any of the other names that got hurled at him at least once a week.
The blog started as Stan’s outlet, his way of trying to piece together the things he knew about himself and the possibilities of what he could be in the future. It had grown, over the years, and when Stan started working in the fashion industry, he found himself in a place where he could talk, with real knowledge and passion about a hobby and a love that had become a career.
Even though his job at the magazine demanded long hours, Stan still spent a few hours every week putting articles together and releasing them on a semi-regular schedule. His following was growing, and while Ben was away, he’d started to experiment with making video-blogs along with his written and photography posts. His sketches, too, made their way online, when he had the time to do them. Stan had always loved experimenting with designing clothes on paper. He was a disaster at the sewing machine though, so his designs always remained purely hypothetical.
“Tea run?”
Stan looked up from his desk to where Kirsty was hovering in the doorway to his office, wearing what looked like last year’s menswear shirt over a very short dress. He decided he liked the look and grinned at her.
“Yes, please. Peppermint. That colour is good on you.”
She glanced down at the dark red and smiled back at him. “Thanks. I’ll be about half an hour, okay?”
“No worries.” He rummaged in his bag—okay, it was more than a bag; it was a Chloe, but he got it on sale and no one needed know—and handed her a ten pound note. “Can you grab me a salad too, please? Anything without meat in it is fine.”
“Got it,” she said with a nod.
“Thank you,” he said again, and Kirsty ducked into the next office along.
It was weird, now that they were friends, asking her to run errands for him at work, even if that was her job. One of the reasons Kirsty was so good as the departmental assistant was that really, she had little interest in fashion. She saw it as an industry, like any other, and her job was to make everyone else’s lives easier.
If Stan sent her a layout to check, she’d look at it with a critical eye, spot any typos, correct his grammar, and suggest amends to the placement of the photographs if necessary. She didn’t try to rewrite his work or change his style, which was, admittedly, pretty unique. Her no-nonsense attitude meant things got done, instead of debated or picked apart or critiqued.
She was everything he’d never bothered to demand in an assistant before.
His mind was full of florals and menswear when Kirsty returned with his peppermint tea and salad with falafels, which was just perfect.
“Did you get anything?” he asked as Kirsty turned to leave.
“Uh, yeah.”
“If you want to eat lunch in here, you can,” he said, leaning away from his computer for the first time in what felt like hours.
“Or you could leave,” Kirsty said, teasing. “It’s a beautiful day out there.”
“If I leave, I’ll never want to come back,” he said with a small groan. “I’d prefer to work through and leave earlier.”
“Fair enough. I’ll be back in a bit.”
Stan opened his salad and took a bite.
This was hell.
He needed a distraction.
The thumping bass of the preshow music throbbed through the whole building as Stan silently contemplated his reflection in a mirror in the ladies’ bathroom. The walls were painted red, giving the whole room a womb-like feel, and other girls chattered and fussed around him.
With a practiced hand, Stan fluffed his hair, then carefully checked his eye make-up and smudged the dark powder on his eyelids with the pad of his pinkie finger. The other girls didn’t even register to him.
Ben didn’t know he was in Manchester. Tone did—Tone had helped Stan figure out what trains to get and how to make his way to the gig venue from the station. He’d also helped Stan find a reasonably nice hotel, which was only a few doors down from the venue, giving him space to be alone with Ben for a few, precious hours.
“’Scuse me, love,” a girl said, and Stan obligingly moved aside to let her use the sink. He threw his head back, shaking the sweaty hair away from his neck, and ducked back into the venue.
Ben’s band had already been on—they were the support act. Stan had watched from the side, Ben’s side, entranced by the man he adored thrash around on a guitar like some kind of rock star. It was driving Stan mad to know Ben was backstage somewhere right now, possibly only feet away, not knowing Stan was here.
The main act wasn’t due to start for another ten minutes or so, so there was a huge rush at the bar, and Stan couldn’t bear to wait for it. He didn’t have a bag with him, just a wallet and his phone stuffed into the back pocket of his achingly tight black jeans.
He startled when a hand landed on his shoulder, then almost leaped into Tone’s arms.
“Hello,” he said, then kissed Tone lightly on the cheek.
“Alright, my lover?” Tone growled, and Stan laughed. He hadn’t realised quite how much he’d missed this big bear of a man. It had felt like forever since he waved them off.
“You were really good,” Stan said. “So much better than in London.”
“I’d say. Come on. I’ve got you a backstage pass.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” Tone said with a grin. “Ben’s going to shit his pants when he sees you.”
“I think I am too.”
Tone took Stan’s hand and led him down the side of the venue to where a couple of large security guards stood by the door that would take them backstage. Tone leaned in and exchanged a few words, gestured back to Stan, and they got let in.
“It’s a bit of a maze back here, so don’t wander off,” Tone said, letting go of Stan’s hand when they were safely past the barriers. “The dressing rooms for the big bands are on this floor—we’re upstairs.”
Stan only nodded. Suddenly he felt sick.
Nearly two months had passed since Ben went off on tour. They had added more dates after the initial reviews had been so good, and Stan had heard rumblings of taking the whole thing on to Europe. There was interest in Ares; people liked them, responded to their music. That kind of publicity couldn’t be bought.
“How’ve you been, then?” Tone asked. He didn’t get a response, though.
At the top of the stairs Stan caught sight of a familiar mop of dark hair. Ben was wearing his glasses, which told Stan he was tired, and his chest was sweaty and shirtless. Gorgeous.
“Never mind,” Tone mumbled affectionately.
“Stan?” Ben said, the word barely audible from the other end of the corridor and the sudden rush of noise from the stage below them. Stan dropped all pretences and sprinted down the hallway to throw himself into Ben’s arms.
“Oh my God,” Ben murmured.
Stan wrapped arms round Ben’s neck, his legs around Ben’s waist and clung. His cheek still fit perfectly on Ben’s shoulder, and he took deep breaths of slightly sweaty skin and felt like crying.
“I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” Ben said, his voice thick with emotion. “How did you get here?”
“On a train,” Stan said, smiling as he slowly sank to his feet. “Tone helped. I wanted to surprise you.”
“I’m surprised,” Ben said. Any more words were forgotten as Stan clos
ed the space between their lips and kissed like his heart was breaking. Ben’s fingers ran softly through his hair, untangling and messing at the same time.
When Ben flicked his tongue into Stan’s mouth, Stan pressed forward, aligning their hips and making a silent promise of more.
“Oi, get a room,” someone yelled, and Stan pulled away reluctantly. Ben’s hands still clutched at Stan’s hips, keeping him close enough to disguise their combined arousal.
Stan turned his head enough to see Geordie leering at them from the doorway to a dressing room and elegantly flipped his middle finger at the man he considered a friend. Geordie laughed delightedly and went back into the room.
“I have a hotel room,” Stan said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s not far away. If you want a night off the tour bus—”
“Oh, do I want that,” Ben said with a groan and a laugh. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
“I also thought that maybe we can go out later.” It was only just nine in the evening—plenty of time for them to enjoy the city. “To Canal Street. I want us to go and have fun.”
“Yeah. I want….” Ben kissed up the side of Stan’s neck. “I need to get you alone first, though. Give me ten fucking minutes, Stan. That’s all it’s going to take.”
“A little longer than that, I hope,” Stan said on a breathless laugh.
“No promises.”
Ben grabbed a bag out of the dressing room while Stan stood in the doorway and waved lamely at the rest of the band, who were stretched out over sofas drinking whiskey. He blew a kiss to Tone before they left and others laughed at that.
“I need to grab a few things off the bus,” Ben said as they approached the venue’s stage door. “It won’t take me a minute.”
“Okay.”
More security guards loitered back here, although the area behind the venue was quiet for now, while the main act were playing. Ben ducked onto the bus while Stan stood outside and quickly smoked a cigarette, only now able to ease his fractured nerves.
