Paint It Black

by Amy Lane

  “So you were, what? Fourteen when you met Blake Manning?”

  Oh God. Cheever knew where this was going. “Yeah, he was just one of my brothers’ friends for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Until this May. I was going through a rough patch, and Blake helped me through it.”

  “So you and Blake didn’t explore your romantic feelings for each other until you were at least eighteen?”

  Fucking Jesus. “We didn’t have any romantic feelings for each other until I was twenty-two. I was away at school a lot of that time. Like I said, just sort of part of the background.”

  “So what made you turn your sights on him?”

  Oh. This narrative. Fun. “He’s kind,” Cheever said passionately. “And funny. And smart. And talented. Isn’t that enough?”

  Then the kick to the balls. “So you’re serious?”

  “Yes,” Cheever said, and let Blake debate it. “He’s a part of my family—not blood related of course. But he’s a part of my family, and you don’t start shit with someone like that unless you know it’s going to be for real.”

  “So if you’re so serious, why aren’t you with the band on tour right now?”

  “I had to finish up some schooling,” Cheever said. “Technically I graduated in May, but I had a workshop class that I needed to take.” He hoped Professor Tierce would forgive him for that, but he wasn’t telling this asshole that he almost flunked out of school because of razor blades and blow.

  “And your degree is in…?”

  “Art. I did the cover art for Blake’s next solo album.” Cheever stuck his tongue out at the phone. The guy had mentioned Blake’s album in the interview—hopefully this wasn’t too much information.

  “So you’re not going to try to join the band?” The comment was half snark and half sour grapes—he’d been hoping for some dirt, and Cheever hadn’t given him any, but it hit a chord in Cheever’s stomach.

  “Don’t you get it?” he taunted. “We’re all in the band. That’s my family up on the stage. My brothers, my lover. My sisters got left here at home this time around. We’re a part of each other’s hearts. They’ve been asking me to join the band since I was a little kid. I just finally realized it was my destiny, that’s all.”

  “Oooh…. That’s a good line. I’m gonna use that.”

  Oh hell. “You do that,” he said sourly. “Can I go now?”

  “One more thing. How does it feel to know your destiny is in the hands of a former prostitute?”

  Cheever almost swallowed his tongue before he could hang up. “Briony!”

  BRIONY’S FIRST course of action was, of course, to call Trav. Cheever would have rather not, but then, he was fully aware he was in over his head.

  Trav called him back directly. “Did he say anything else?”

  “No. Because I hung up on him.”

  “Good boy.” There was a pause. “I’m going to assume Blake told you about his past.”

  “Yessir. But this—this was what? Fifteen years ago?”

  “A little longer. He was barely sixteen when he ran away. I’m not sure what the reporter’s source is, and I need to find out. Look….” And Trav’s military crispness softened. “Look, he’s going to get weird about this. You know he is. Just… just don’t let anything he says while he’s a thousand miles away be locked in stone, okay?”

  Ugh. “Yeah. I know. Gah! Does he know this is floating around yet?”

  “Nope. And try not to mention it, okay?”

  Oh right. “Are you shitting me? I know you’re absolutely shitting me, because that works in this family never.”

  “Look, just… just hold on to it until I can get some background, okay? Man, I could give a fuck what the fucking press says, but someone’s trying to hurt my boys with this, and until I have a target and a baseball bat, I don’t want them to see me swinging.”

  Cheever had to take some deep breaths. This was Trav—he should have known. Trav would have Blake’s back.

  “Roger that,” he muttered. “Just… I’m not gonna lie to him.”

  “Understood. Just don’t go there unless he asks. Please?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And good call on the hang up. That was not on the approved list of questions.”

  “Well, the guy was trying to make Blake out to be kind of skeevy. He kept asking me how old I was when we got together, like he’d been hitting on me since I was a kid. I set him straight, but, you know….”

  “Yeah. They’re off the approved list no matter what. Thanks, Cheever. Good job, son.”

  Cheever felt himself preening a little. Well, Trav was the ultimate father figure, so it wasn’t a mystery. “Thank you, sir. Uhm… you know. Take care of him, okay?”

  “It’s my job.” And he hung up.

  Cheever rested his head against his fist for a moment and thought that yeah, it might have been in Trav’s job description, but he defied anybody to say Travis Ford didn’t take his work to heart.

  “What’d he say?” Briony asked from his side.

  “Said it sounds hinky. He’s gonna look into it, and we should maybe not tell Blake until he knows something solid.”

  “Fuck,” Briony muttered. “Fuckity bugger. I’ll tell you what, Cheever, you better fasten your seat belt. It’s gonna be a fucked-up ride.”

  CHEEVER MADE it through his phone call with Blake that night, pacing in the kitchen, but his stomach ached with anxiety as he waited for everyone else. Marcia was helping the kids get ready for their baths as the wives had serious convos with their husbands, and he actually raided his cupboard for Oreos since there was nobody there to see him eat.

  “Oh, you bastard,” Briony muttered as she emerged from down the hall. “Give me.”

  Cheever handed her the pack—she’d been modeling good eating habits for the kids, but every mom needed a vice.

  “I hear sugar,” Shelia snapped, stalking from the same direction. “Give me!”

  Briony took a handful and handed Shelia the rest. She’d had an ultrasound that afternoon. The biggest thing on her agenda was supposed to be telling the twins she was expecting twins.

  “What’s our sitch?” Cheever asked, when everybody had downed at least three double-stuffs.

  “Trav had an emergency meeting with the guys while you were on the phone with Blake,” Briony said. “He asked them if anybody had heard from Blake’s mom.”

  Cheever held his hand to his mouth. “I’m gonna puke,” he muttered.

  “Don’t you fucking dare,” Shelia snarled. “You go, I go. I go, Briony goes. Nope—you suck it up and hold your nausea like a woman! Jefferson told me Trav was calling a lawyer who specialized in extortion. He mentioned something about somebody trying to blackmail the band.”

  “Trav’s not gonna like that,” Briony said.

  “None of the guys will like that,” Shelia agreed. “The only reason the guys would agree to it would be to….”

  They both looked at Cheever furtively.

  “To protect Blake,” Cheever said, those Oreos not sitting any easier.

  “Okay, this sucks.” Briony groaned and rested her head on her fist. “And it sucks worse ’cause we’re far away. But maybe we should wait to see what Trav says before we panic, okay? I mean, we can’t panic.”

  Cheever nodded and held out his hand. “One more Oreo,” he promised. “I won’t panic until I puke.”

  HE DIDN’T sleep that night. At one in the morning, Marcia came into his room wearing baby-doll pajamas and Hello Kitty slippers, as casually as if they were still in rehab.

  “Look, if you’re going to toss and turn, you should at least be considerate about it and do it quietly.”

  “Augh!”

  “Look, Cheever, what’s the worst that can—”

  “He will break up with me,” Cheever said, because even Shelia and Briony knew it was true. “He will say, ‘Oh, Cheever, you are young and have your whole life ahead of you, and I am just weighing you down.
’ And then he’ll find an apartment, let the twins and Shelia have the studio house even though it’s a dumb idea, and just sort of fade out of everybody’s life until they have to get back together for the next tour.”

  “Yikes!” Marcia made herself comfortable at the foot of his bed, and he was just so damned glad she was there. “Don’t you think he’ll fight for you at all?”

  Cheever dragged a hand through his hair. “You don’t get it. It’s not that he’s afraid to fight for me—it’s that… God, Marcia. He’s been told his whole life that he’s not worth it. And he loves me. Don’t you see the logic? If he’s not worth it, then the best thing he can do for me is cut me loose.”

  “But he is,” she said softly. “We both know it. What can you do? I mean… if you guys were in the same room, you’d just sort of will him into submission. We’ve all seen you do it. But how do you… I don’t know. Fight that? I mean, painting him didn’t do it. He hates to look at himself.”

  “I wrote him a song,” Cheever said softly, resting his cheek against his knees. “The band’s working it up live, but it’s already recorded. He wrote me…. God. I mean, he’s written me some really gorgeous love songs, right? But there’s this one—I’m not even supposed to know he wrote it. But there’s no hope at all in it. It’s about the world self-destructing around him and he’s alone in an empty room. And my brothers are right. If I had to hear him sing that, it would kill me.”

  “Well, you should play it for him,” Marcia muttered, scowling. “See how he feels hearing it. Too bad you couldn’t.”

  Cheever stared at her. “I could, though,” he said thoughtfully. He reached for the guitar—one of Blake’s old ones they kept at the house—that rested by the bed. “Want to hear it?”

  “Sure,” she said, sighing. “You’ve been getting really good.”

  Cheever grinned at her. “Not good enough for the band,” he said, finding his fingers on the strings and tuning.

  “Who says? I mean, we’ve all heard their first album. They weren’t good enough for their band. The only one who could play was Mackey, really.”

  Cheever thought about it and worked his way through the opening chords. “That’s true. I mean, you know. Maybe I could….” He bit his lip and repeated the chords—right this time. “Maybe I could show up for a couple of songs.” This part was tricky. He finished and breathed a sigh of relief. “I’d give anything to be there right now.”

  And there. He was in the place where the music came from. It was the same place his art came from, but a little harder to get to—less practiced. It had been getting easier these last months, every time he picked up the guitar.

  He launched into the opening lines of “Empty Room” and became lost in it. It was a beautiful song—but a brutal one—and he wanted to do every note justice.

  He finished, and Marcia let out a quiet sob and wiped her face on her knees.

  “Okay,” she said, voice clogged. “That was gorgeous. Now play me something with hope, you bastard!”

  Cheever laughed a little and launched into “Cement Ragdoll,” the one he’d written on the plane. He finished that, and Marcia flipped him the bird.

  “I said hope.”

  “Seriously,” Briony said, yawning from the doorway. “Play a love song.”

  Cheever played the beautiful one Blake had written about him, the one about him painting and Blake accepting. It was delicate—almost too delicate for rock and roll, but when he’d finished with the final notes, he looked up for approval.

  “Now do the coffee shop one,” Shelia said, and Cheever wrinkled his nose, but still kept riffing.

  “You should be in bed.”

  “I need something to make me not cry. I’m pregnant, dammit. Give me hope.”

  Cheever thought about it and then played the song Blake had written about Kell. And the song fell in place—it wasn’t about Kell at all, really. It was about hope. It was about loving someone so much that how they took that love didn’t matter. The love itself was the thing.

  He finished, and Shelia and Briony both wiped their eyes on the insides of their sleep shirts.

  “It’s perfect,” Briony said. “So, here’s what we’re going to do tomorrow, after we get the kids to school.”

  She launched into a rather gutsy plan, leaving Cheever breathless. “But wait—”

  “Look,” she said bluntly, “even if he doesn’t use this opportunity to bolt like a jackass-rabbit, you still need to do this, you understand? This is one-hundred-percent commitment. Not just to Blake, but to the band. To the family. You showing up at their next stop—”

  “Which is where?” Shelia asked.

  “Portland.” Cheever hadn’t forgotten.

  “Portland’s a nice place,” Shelia said. “Lots of coffee shops. Briony, you bring that up to Trav, okay?”

  Briony nodded. “Good idea. So Cheever, you show up in Portland while this shitstorm is breaking, and you do this, and you’ll make fucking history.”

  “I don’t care about making history,” Cheever said, feeling a little overwhelmed. “I just want Blake to be okay.”

  “And that’s why it must be done,” Briony said with satisfaction.

  Cheever chewed on his bottom lip and had a thought. “If that’s true, then we need one more thing,” he murmured. “Briony, I’m gonna need your help on this too.”

  HE WAS in the tattoo parlor when Blake called the next day, death metal thundering through the speakers, a forty-something woman with a platinum mohawk inking his right bicep with precision. It felt like the sting of one persistent bee, over and over again, and Cheever was doing lots of Lamaze breathing to keep from twitching. When he saw the name on the phone, he looked at his tattoo artist and wrinkled his nose.

  “Please?” he begged, and she rolled her eyes and yelled across the store.

  “Hey! Toad! Fuckin’ music!”

  Toad—a scrawny kid barely Cheever’s age but covered with black ink on his practically green-pale skin—nodded and lowered the volume.

  “Blake?”

  “Hey, baby boy.” Oh, that wasn’t a good sign.

  “How’s Portland?”

  “We leave this evening, get there tomorrow morning. I hate sleeping on the bus.”

  Cheever grunted in appreciation, and Blake continued.

  “You gotta know—I mean, Trav said you might know something about it, but we’re gonna have a press conference tonight before we get on the bus.”

  Oh God. “How bad is it?”

  Blake’s voice was practically breaking, and Cheever’s heart just fucking hurt. “It’s bad. Someone got hold of my mom and gave her proof of what I did to make rent when I was a kid. She’s threatened to just tell before, but now she’s got pictures.”

  Cheever closed his eyes and swallowed. Oh, Blake. “How bad—”

  “In the photos, you can see my face and the coke mirrors, and you can tell if I’m circumcised,” he said grimly. “And she apparently tried to get hold of Trav back in May, right after Mackey fell off the fucking amp, but she couldn’t. Anyway, my mother’s trying to blackmail us—me. If I don’t pay up, she’s going to the press about me… you know. Bein’ a fuckin’ whore.” Cheever closed his eyes against the self-loathing practically dripping from the phone.

  “Baby—”

  “Anyway, Trav and the boys ain’t havin’ it. They told Trav to fuckin’ announce it to the world and they’d back me, which is really kind. I don’t want that shit hanging over my head. But it’s gonna come out, Cheever. It’s gonna come out, and it’s gonna be ugly. And I just told the whole world we were together. So, you know, I’m calling to say that when shit breaks, you can tell people you didn’t mean it. Tell ’em I was a phase or something. Tell ’em I tricked you or—”

  “Fuck that, Blake Manning. Fuck that, and fuck you for even thinking I would do that.”

  “Cheever,” Blake pleaded. “You don’t want any piece of this. Man, the shit she’s got on me—I don’t know who I blew, but
she’s got the pictures, she’s got dates and times—”

  “And I don’t fuckin’ care,” Cheever snapped. “You think I don’t want a piece of it? I want all of it. I want her to wave that shit in my face and see what I have to say to her. You were sixteen fucking years old and living on the goddamned street, and you managed to do it for years. I fucking dare her to come at me with that shit. I fucking dare her to come at any of my family—”

  “You don’t have to do this!” Blake snarled, feral, in pain.

  “I want to! You think you’re breaking up with me over this? Fucking bullshit. Don’t you dare break up with me over something you were straight up about from the very beginning.”

  “Cheever!” There was the break, the complete crumbling of his voice, and Cheever’s heart with it.

  “We’re not broken up,” Cheever said, hard and without mercy. “You’re not a defenseless kid. You’re not alone. You got my brothers backing you. And their lovers. And our mother. And me. You just hold on until tomorrow. In fact, tell Trav not to have that press conference until tomorrow afternoon, you hear me?”

  “What in the—”

  “Look, you tell him or Briony will. You put off the fucking press conference until I get there.”

  “You’re not coming up here—”

  “The fuck I ain’t.” Cheever let some softness seep into his voice. “Blake, have some faith. A little bit of hope. Some joy in us. I know you got that. So use it. Be strong, baby. You don’t ever got to be alone again.”

  “I gotta go,” Blake mumbled, his voice clogged.

  “I love you. Don’t ever forget it again.”

  There was a long silence, and Cheever wondered if he was going to deny it. But Blake was strong—stronger than he knew. “I’ll never forget it. Love you too.”

  And then he was gone.

  Cheever ended the call and looked up at his tattoo artist, who’d been holding off with the needle until Cheever stopped gesticulating wildly to make his point.

  “Blake Manning?” the woman said, not blinking.

  “Yeah.”

  “Your boyfriend’s Blake Manning.”