Stay Until We Break (Hub City Romance, A)

by Mercy Brown

  Soft Tour—Day 6

  Guess I wasn’t expecting the Red Rose Café to be an actual café, with soup and sandwiches and coffee and the whole bit. It’s really well lit, too, like we’re playing in a deli or something. That’s cool I guess, especially since Tara, the girl working there, is a sweetheart and feeds us dinner when we show up. We’ve polished off all the band rations and skipped breakfast today, thanks to Officer Infected Dick, so we’re all starving. I tear into a grilled cheese and a bowl of tomato soup like it’s my last meal, and I’m so hungry it tastes better to me than Mom’s corned beef on Saint Paddy’s.

  Tonight we open the show, followed by Crown and then a local act, Tindermelt, three guys in matching cowboy shirts and boots playing this navel-gazing sensitive-guy shit that’s like an unholy coupling between R.E.M. and REO Speedwagon. Ultra self-conscious college-boy rock with a lot of ’80s-style synth in there, and I can’t tell if it’s meant to be ironic or what, but let’s just say I’ll be hanging outside while they play their set. Not because they’re bad (which they are), but because they’re dicks. This I know almost as soon as I meet them and the singer, Wyatt, flat-out ignores Emmy when she tries to talk to him about the mic setup, instead going right to Travis to ask if they and Crown the Robin can use our kit tonight and our amps as their backline.

  “Yeah, no, I don’t think so,” Emmy says, answering instead of Travis. Wyatt rolls his eyes at her and I feel my jaw clench.

  “Well then we’ll need to cut your set short so we have time to switch gear out,” he says.

  “Whatever you have to do,” Travis says.

  Now, we share gear all the time to help make the transitions between bands go quicker, or when there’s a problem with space. So that’s not the point. The point is Wyatt is a dick and fuck him. That’s all the point we need. Unfortunately, we’re supposed to be staying at his place tonight, so talk about awkward.

  Before we line check, Sonia sits down next to me on the bench. “Emmy is refusing to stay at Tindermelt’s apartment,” she says. “So I’m going to call Jason to see if we can crash their suite at the Sheraton.”

  “So we go from one dickhead to another,” I say, my guts twisting. “Hard to say which would be worse.”

  “Well,” she says. “I was thinking if we hang out with the Pumps tonight, maybe I can talk Jason into giving your single to their A and R guy at Geffen.”

  I can’t even hide how much I dislike the sound of that. “Come on—you really think Jason would ever do that for us?” I argue. “I thought you said you knew him.”

  “He invited us to come hang out, didn’t he? Maybe he would.”

  I’m so exasperated right now, I don’t even know what to say. I look away, out the window to the parking lot.

  “Whatever,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Cole, if you’re going to make it in this business, you have to put up with dicks—you know this. That’s the way all business is, especially the music business. It’s full of dicks just like Jason and Wyatt and way worse.”

  “Do I look like I need a lecture right now?” I ask, gripping the neck of my bass. “Really?”

  “I wasn’t . . . I didn’t mean . . .” Her face right now, hell. Sonia is never one to backpedal from an argument. She sighs and shakes her head. “Am I ever going to figure out how to not piss you off?” she says.

  “Maybe I’m just a pissed-off guy, in general,” I say. “Ever think of that?”

  “No,” she says, and Goddamn she is a glorious pain in my ass, her jaw set, her eyes unflinching. “Because you’re not. You just don’t stand for bullshit. It’s one of things I lov—it’s why we get along, I think.”

  When we get along, I think, but I have to hand it to her because with that slip of the tongue she has me smiling again.

  We start our set on nice, full stomachs thanks to Tara. Tonight, Travis is the only one who so much as cracks a beer. The rest of us are drinking Cokes on the house. We have a small crowd and Sunny sits off to the side. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the look on Sunny’s face when she watches us play. As much as I’ll miss playing with Soft like I’d miss saying my own name, I wonder if I’ll miss watching Sunny from the stage more.

  Emmy’s mouth opens on the first line of “Daylight” and my attention is pulled right into the moment, the hugeness of the song booming through the PA speakers. We get into the first chorus and now the room we’re in is no longer a well-lit café with tables and a coffee bar. Tara has dimmed all the lights and Crown flips a switch so we’re ringed with strands and strands of blue Christmas lights strung from the tops of our cabinets to the floor in front of us. It feels like we’ve boarded some kind of spaceship to another planet and we all launch this rocket together, us and the small but appreciative crowd of people who come out to see live, unknown bands on a Tuesday night in Tennessee. After thirty minutes, Wyatt tries to shut us down, saying we have to finish. Emmy looks up and the crowd demands we play more, so she gives Wyatt a big grin and we launch into another ten minutes’ worth of tunes, and finish with the crowd lining up at the merchandise table and asking how soon we’ll be back.

  I wish the answer for me wasn’t “never.”

  ***

  After our set I’m a whole different man. Calm, confident. Even cocky. Nothing can shake me now. Fuck, I love playing a good set. Crown starts to play and I go to find Sonia sitting at the merch table with Emmy.

  “Can I borrow you for a minute?” I ask her. “Or the whole rest of the night?”

  The way she looks at me is everything.

  I take her out to the parking lot and we lean against Wyatt’s car—a sparkling blue 1978 El Camino in mint condition with white racing stripes. I’m in such a good mood, I pick Sonia up, right off her feet, and sit her down on the hood of the car. She laughs, and the sound of it makes me feel like I can float.

  She looks amazing tonight. We’re in dire need of a laundromat, so instead of one of her dresses, she’s actually wearing a Soft T-shirt with the sleeves rolled all the way up, along with this moss-green miniskirt, her pink cardigan wrapped around her waist, and her Doc Martens, and she is so punk rock right now I can’t stand it. She’s wearing hot-as-fuck red lipstick, which she must have put on sometime between when we ended our set and when I brought her out here. Her eyes are rimmed in black eyeliner, making the blue of them pop like they’re lit from behind, striking against all that thick, shiny black hair of hers, pulled back into a messy ponytail, strands of it falling around her face. Gone is the meticulously primped, carefully presented Sonia Grant from Hopewell, and in her place is this perfectly seasoned, badass rock-and-roll siren. Damn, I wish I had a camera. I’d love to take a photo of her sitting on this car and keep it with me so I never forget her just like this.

  “Cole, what is it?” she asks.

  “Huh?”

  “The way you’re looking at me.” She looks down at herself, then folds her arms in front of her. “Am I . . .”

  “Drop-dead gorgeous?” I say. “Hell yeah, you are. I can’t take my eyes off of you.”

  She makes a face like she’s about to laugh, then covers her mouth with her hand.

  “Well, then I guess now’s a good time to tell you,” she says, her face slightly pinched.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Tell you that I want to . . . you know, while I’m of sound body and mind . . .” She trails off.

  “You want to what?”

  “Come on, Cole,” she says, rolling her eyes at me. “I’m trying to comply with your terms here. The least you could do is take the damn hint.”

  “My terms?” Not the best time for me to be thickheaded, but when it finally does dawn on me what she’s trying to say, swear to God my dick twitches. “Oh, yes, that’s right—my terms. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to state clearly, for the record, in your own w
ords, your clear-minded and sober intention to ride my dick. Actually, let me go get a witness, just to be on the safe side . . .”

  “Cole!” She turns bright red, laughing. My God, you’d think this poor girl was raised by a Methodist preacher. I put my arms around her, pulling her close.

  “Come on, you can’t blame me for wanting to be sure, can you? I know I look better through beer goggles, but still.”

  “You don’t look better through beer goggles,” she says. “The problem is you look way too fine without them. You’re like a damn demigod.”

  “Wait, just a demigod? I was shooting for Zeus.”

  “Ask me after we . . . you know.”

  “After you see my thunderbolt?”

  “Jesus Christ, you’re impossible.”

  Yes, I know, but damn does it feel good to make her laugh. Especially when I’m holding her like this, catching the scent of her hair. I breathe it in, gaze down at her arm, and start to absently trace the cage of her tattoo.

  “You know, most guys wouldn’t give a crap if I was too drunk to see straight. They’d see that as a bonus.”

  “What, you have a lot of experience with guys like that?” I ask.

  “Enough,” she says.

  My chest knots when I think about who the hell may have tapped her while she was blitzed. I want names. Addresses. But being as amped up as I am on my postshow high, I think better of getting specifics out of her on that topic. For now.

  “I don’t even like to drink that much,” she says.

  “Coulda fooled me,” I say.

  “No, really, it’s just that . . . oh God, this is embarrassing.”

  “What is?”

  She takes a deep breath. I give her a little space and sit down next to her on the hood of the El Camino. We’re both facing the Red Rose, watching Crown play through the big glass windows, hearing the low rumble and din as the music leaks through the cracks in the facade. I take her hand in mine, start playing with the ring on her right hand—a small, silver cow skull she picked up at a rest area gift shop on the interstate.

  “Did you know that I was only four foot ten my senior year?” she says out of the blue. “I had a growth disorder. I didn’t even start my period until I was seventeen. Can you imagine? All the guys in school called me Pediatric. That was my nickname at PDS.”

  She looks like she expects me to laugh, but there’s no way I could laugh at her. She bites her lips in a sort of mum face, her eyes darting to the side away from me. I feel the return of rage in the pit of my belly and do what I can to swallow it down.

  “That’s fucked,” I say. “What kind of an asshole would do that?”

  “It’s so embarrassing,” she says and tries to laugh it off. “I had this crush senior year, Martin Gladwell, and everyone on the soccer team started calling him ‘pedophile’ every time he would even talk to me. So I just stopped talking to him. I didn’t even go to senior prom. God, this is so stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid,” I say, but she doesn’t look like she feels any better and all I want is to find some way to remind her that this is me, Cole. I’m not some guy she just met, I’m not those assholes back at school, and I’m not going to tease her now or anything like that. I’d never do that.

  “I never went to prom, either,” I say. “Always felt sort of sad that I missed it.”

  “Really?” she asks. “How did you miss prom? I’ll bet every girl in school wanted to go with you.”

  “Oh yeah, I was a total catch,” I say and laugh. “I think I was voted ‘most likely to have a parole officer’ by my class.”

  “Too bad we weren’t friends back then. We could have said we were going to prom and snuck over to City Gardens or something.”

  “Oh, I would have definitely taken you to prom,” I say. “And then I would have snuck you into City Gardens after, still in your fancy dress and everything.”

  “I would have worn my Docs,” she says, raising her foot up to show me. “Just to piss off my mother.”

  “Well, ya can’t mosh in high heels, girl,” I say.

  She’s laughing again and that’s so much better. Man, the light on her face from the streetlamp when she’s smiling makes her look like some sort of dream.

  “All I’m trying to say is that I get really nervous . . .” She stops. She breathes. She looks straight ahead at the back of the Red Rose. “Look, Cole. I never even kissed a guy until I was at Rutgers. If it wasn’t for vodka, I’d probably still be a virgin.”

  I don’t want to think about Sonia blasted on vodka losing her virginity because, well, I just don’t. I really don’t. But I finally get what she’s trying to tell me.

  I squeeze her hand and she sort of bites her lip and looks at the ground. The pink creeps back into her cheeks and her hand goes sort of clammy in mine, and shit, when she lets her guard down and shows me this completely tender side, it’s too much. I stroke the back of her hand with my thumb, just to try to calm her down, but I can see the rise of her chest as she starts to breathe faster.

  “So, what—are you nervous right now?” I ask.

  “Am I sober right now?” she says with a small laugh, looking down. “Yeah, of course I am. Totally nervous.”

  And she looks nervous, but in all the right ways, if you ask me.

  “What if I kissed you?” I say. “How nervous would you be then?”

  Her mouth drops open but no words come out, just the sound of her hushed little breaths as I bend down and brush my lips against her cheek, all warm and soft against my mouth.

  “Is that okay?” I ask, kissing the edge of her ear. Hope she says yes because I really don’t want to stop.

  She nods her head as she turns her face to me. I kiss her top lip as softly as I can, and now she’s breathing faster, right into me, as I pull her close and cover her mouth with mine. I swear I could do nothing but kiss this girl for hours. For days. The warmth of her sweet breath, the feel of her soft tongue is so fucking good all I want to do is eat her alive, start right here with her lips and end all the way down at her toes. Every inch of her I want to make my own.

  I pull back to check in and she looks a lot less nervous now.

  “Okay, so now you know,” she says. “I might be an awkward mess, but I want . . .”

  She can’t seem to even finish the sentence but I really need to hear how it ends.

  “What?” I ask. Her face is warm as I hold it in my hands. She takes a deep breath and looks up at me.

  “You, Cole,” she says. “I want you.”

  And there’s no song, no riff, no beat, no words that have ever sounded better to me than that coming out of her mouth.

  Chapter Eleven

  Sonia

  I’m sure that scenes like the Pump’s after-party at the Sheraton were the inspiration for whoever coined the term “shit show.” I’ve lived in New Brunswick for three years now and have been to some gnarly after-parties, and this night beats them all. It’s like something out of Bachelor Party, only with far more indie hipsters and designer drugs, and a lot less Tom Hanks and blow-up dolls. Too bad plastic Debbie and Jenny popped back in Charlottesville, because they probably would have improved the climate here, even if only by making it less stuck-up.

  After I get Jason on the phone from the hotel bar, he sends Maury down for us and we manage to sneak all of us up to the executive suite on the twentieth floor where this mob is in full swing. Curtains are open onto the city, and people line window ledges while a thick crowd is dancing everywhere and anywhere they can to Nine Inch Nails. The minute we walk in the door and take in this zoo, I feel Cole’s hand in mine and everything is instantly less overwhelming. What I really want is to be in a hotel room alone with him where I can strip him bare and count every freckle on him from head to toe and memorize it for all eternity. But I don’t think I’m getting lucky tonight, if this is any indicat
or.

  “Holy balls,” Joey says. “This is what it’s like to be signed to Geffen?”

  He takes a step into the party in the general direction of the keg, and like at every party, he’s a full head and a half taller than the sea of haircuts he floats through. We follow him through the throng of dancing party people, some in various states of undress, like this chick in a backwards baseball hat who’s dancing to “Closer” in a pair of Adidas basketball high-tops, a pink lace bra, and a pair of baggy jeans being held up with a flannel shirt tied around her waist. Joey just happens to stop right next to her, and she wiggles for him, then grabs the crotch of his Levi’s like it ain’t no thing, and I don’t know what’s more priceless, the look on his face or on hers once she registers the horse-sized kielbasa he’s packing inside those happy-face boxer shorts.

  “Sunny, you got that yellow bag handy?” Joey asks, never taking his eyes off the girl, whose hand is still on his dick as she dances up against him. “Like in your purse or something?”

  “Um, it’s in my backpack in the van.”

  “Cole?”

  Cole rolls his eyes and shoves his hand in his back pocket and then in this sly sort of move shakes Joey’s hand and puts what I assume is a Trojan in it.

  “You’re on tour, man,” Cole says. “You should be prepared.”

  “No shit,” Joey says. “I owe you one.”

  Joey starts dancing high-tops girl across the room, away from us, and Godspeed, Joey. Give her a night to write home about.

  There are people doing beer funnels like it’s Tampa on spring break, and then we see Jason, sitting on the sofa next to a blonde girl in a flannel shirt and rainbow tights. He’s about to snort a line of something off his own album cover through a cut soda straw when he sees us come in.

  “Hey, Sunny,” Jason says, sniffing and rubbing his nose. “Glad you guys could make it! Have a seat, girl. Tell me everything.”

  I shoot Cole a look and he shrugs, like he’s being cool about the whole thing. I guess maybe he took what I said about putting up with assholes in this business to heart.