Come Together

by Madelynne Ellis

  ‘This really isn’t a good time.’ And even if it had been, he didn’t want to spill his guts to her. He wasn’t ready to talk to anyone about it. So far, he’d only allowed his emotions to run unchecked while composing. If he let reality sink in, he’d be overwhelmed. There’d be no tour, no Black Halo, and probably not a lot of himself left. Steve had been his life support for a heck of a long time. He’d loved him more than anyone else. And he missed him every single minute.

  He was not doing this. Not with Elspeth, and definitely not now, because now he was on the verge of losing the one person in his life who really mattered.

  ‘I know I hurt you, and that I stole him from you, Xane. I wish you’d believe me when I say I’m sorry for that. I –’

  ‘Elspeth, not now. If you genuinely give a damn about me, move. I have to talk to Dani.’

  Elspeth squeezed against the wall as he dived past her. ‘But … she’s not on the bus.’

  ‘What?’ Xane grabbed the metal pole at the bottom of the stairwell and juddered to a shaky halt.

  ‘She got off before we left the festival. I thought you knew. I figured she’d decided to ride in the van with Ulf.’

  ‘Did she take anything with her?’

  ‘Just her purse.’

  Fighting hard to suppress the urge to howl and punch walls, Xane instead forced himself to think. It sort of made sense that she’d go and ride with Ulf in the van. Dani wasn’t confrontational, nor was she prone to rash actions. She’d take herself off somewhere to think about how to deal with him and let him stew while she did so.

  Xane didn’t want to be apart from her for several hours. He wanted to explain now. Make this right now.

  Where was the van – ahead or behind them? If behind, then he could get Cave Troll to pull over, and then Ulf would automatically stop too.

  He couldn’t see the equipment van on the road ahead of them, so he charged through to the downstairs bedroom to look out of the rear window.

  Four figures lurched upright on the bed when he burst in, Iain, Rock Giant and a couple of chicks, which explained why Elspeth wasn’t in here. Xane couldn’t be bothered to scold them, as the girls squealed and the guys started muttering apologies. Whatever! Like he gave a damn at this minute.

  Ash emerged from the bathroom and followed him to the window. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘I’m looking for Dani.’

  ‘She’s not in here,’ Iain called from the bed, while making a performance of checking underneath the cover. The two girls giggled.

  ‘Did something happen?’ Ash asked. He looked grim, and squinted at Xane like he had a killer hangover.

  Xane didn’t answer. He stuck his nose to the glass instead. The Black Halo equipment truck was in the same lane, about five vehicles back from the tour bus. From this distance, he couldn’t make out who was sitting in the front seat, only that the whole of it was occupied and at least one of those passengers had long dark hair.

  ‘Dani.’ He stretched his fingers across the window.

  ‘She’s in the van, I take it.’ Ash planted a hand against the wall and started making queasy noises, the sort that were generally a prelude to throwing up.

  Xane had no idea where the next stop was scheduled to be, possibly not until they reached the stadium in Gothenburg. He rarely paid much attention to the distances between venues. He paid other people a shedload of money to work out the logistical crap.

  Ignoring Ash, he left the bedroom and hurtled towards the front of the bus. ‘Pull over,’ he yelled at Cave Troll.

  ‘Why? Are we on fire?’

  ‘Just do it, I need to talk to Dani. I think she’s in the van.’

  ‘So use the phone,’ Spook suggested, rising from one of the sofas in the roadies’ bunk room. ‘We’ve a gig to get to and a tight schedule.’

  ‘Do I look like I have my phone on me?’ He was still in his budgie smugglers and nothing else.

  ‘Then find it. We’ll help. Keep driving, Troels. What’s so goddamn important anyway?’

  ‘I screwed up,’ he muttered. A gnawing gripped his guts, leaving him nauseous. What if she wasn’t in the van?

  ‘Here.’ Ash found him his phone, and Xane dialled. Dani’s phone bleated into life on the seat by the window.

  ‘Try Ulf,’ Spook suggested. How did he always manage to sound so calm?

  Xane scrolled through his saved numbers. There weren’t many, but he found the one he wanted and called Ulf, while the rest of them stood around waiting, except Iain, who’d tumbled back into bed with his playmates. Xane closed the door on him. ‘Ulf’s not answering,’ he complained after the phone had rung about thirty times.

  ‘Probably because he’s driving,’ Spook said. ‘He’ll call back when he’s able.’

  ‘I want to talk to her now. Stop the fucking bus!’

  ‘Xane.’ Rock Giant and Spook strong-armed him into a chair, a process that involved them all throwing punches. ‘You’re just going to have to be patient,’ Spook insisted. ‘Now chill the fuck out. We can’t just stop in the middle of a motorway anyway. I don’t know what this is about, and I’m not sure I want to, but whatever it is, she’ll talk to you when she’s ready. Believe me, forcing a conversation before that point is a bleeding dumb idea. I know. I have sisters.’

  ‘Chill, buddy,’ Rock Giant added, holding him in the seat like a ten-ton press.

  ‘Maybe tell us what you’ve done, so we can advise you.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ Luthor appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

  Xane jacked out of the seat and went straight for him. It didn’t matter that this was his fault as much as Luthor’s, because Luthor was the reason why everything was screwed up. He’d been the one pushing and pushing things … Dani had been on edge since the start of the tour because of Luthor. She’d never entirely trusted Xane not to give in to him, which he guessed she’d been right about, as he had shared one or two moments with the guy that oughtn’t to have happened.

  What if she decided to finish with him?

  Learning the truth about her father had made her less sensitive about his sexuality, but it wasn’t going to help him explain why Luthor had been groping his cock.

  ‘You need to tell her there’s nothing between us,’ he snapped at Luthor.

  ‘Why? What?’

  ‘Is there something between you?’ Spook eyed them both warily.

  ‘You stupid fuck,’ Ash muttered. ‘You went near him again after yesterday. I’m surprised she hasn’t cut your prick off, never mind walked out.’

  Xane drummed his head against the wall. Rock Giant still refused to let go of him.

  ‘Shit, I’m really fucking sorry, Xane,’ Luthor apologised, coming close enough that Xane was tempted to kick him. ‘I guess this means the deal’s off.’

  ‘Back off,’ Ash warned Luthor, before making a frantic dash to the sink, where he promptly emptied his guts.

  The stench of fermented alcohol and whatever toxic meal Ash had consumed last night wafted across the aisle. Nausea welled up in Xane’s throat too. His guts were in knots.

  Ash sank to the floor with his back against the cupboards and a tea-towel clasped to his mouth, groaning.

  ‘Next time pass on the homebrew,’ Elspeth advised. She sat at the bottom of the stairs, watching them all as if they were children making pointless amounts of noise and her troubles were the only ones that involved genuine emotions.

  ‘I wasn’t on the ‘friggin’ homebrew.’ Ash moaned between more gagging sounds. ‘Ginny and I were both drinking Southern Comfort.’

  ‘Serves you bloody right then, for drinking such shit.’ Her gaze flicked across to Xane, and she shook her head. ‘As for you, you’ve always been crap at grovelling, but I suggest you master the art before you see her again, and if you’re lucky she might give you a second chance. She’s about dumb enough to imagine you’ll change, which is presumably why she’s dating you. Because, honestly, Xane, even I could have told you that she’s not the sort that�
�s going to be open to you shagging other people. She’s never going to get off on watching you with another guy.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, I haven’t bloody shagged him,’ Xane bellowed, while struggling to shake off Rock Giant’s grip. ‘Leastways not any time in the last three years. Will you all stop assuming the worst?’

  ‘He hasn’t. We haven’t,’ Luthor confirmed. ‘It’s never gone that far.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ash drawled into the cloth of the tea-towel. ‘Same as Ginny never actually had sex with Iain. He just had his fingers in her knickers. Stop splitting hairs, guys. What you’ve been doing behind her back is shit. You deserve to stew for a few hours.’

  Chapter 37

  She ought to have known that Xane wasn’t the sort of man to settle for a single lover for the rest of his life, or in fact for longer than a few minutes. Having left the bus, Dani didn’t look back. Right now, she needed to put as much space between them as humanly possible. Several of the festival-goers cast curious looks in her direction as she stomped away from the Black Halo pitch, but Dani kept her head down and ignored them. She didn’t want their sympathy. She wanted Xane’s love. He’d been the one constant through all the dark times in her life, the one person she believed she could trust – and he’d cheated.

  Not only had he cheated, he’d lied to her face.

  In fact, both Xane and Luthor had lied to her. God, they must think she was so damn stupid. They’d probably been making out and sharing moments together since the start of the tour.

  She saw them again, in her mind’s eye, entwined within one another’s arms, looking so goddamned crazy for each other, and a sob welled up in her throat and exploded. She’d feared he’d stray, ever since the moment she’d realised that he was not only bisexual but inclined towards polyamory too. Her instincts had told her that he was never going to be content with only her, but she’d refused to listen to them and had listened to Xane instead. Maybe she’d believed him when he insisted that his sexuality didn’t make him any less trustworthy. In a sense, that was true. It wasn’t his sexuality that made him untrustworthy, but his actions.

  ‘I don’t want to be a third of something or a fifth or a quarter,’ she said aloud. She wanted a relationship built on solid foundations with someone who cared about her with every ounce of their being. She didn’t want to be in constant danger of being overlooked.

  Bottom line, she guessed, they simply weren’t right for one another, but God, it hurt to admit that, let alone begin to consider a future without Xane in it. Xane and Black Halo were her world. They were all she had. If you took that away, what was left? Only a strained relationship with a mother who’d branded her a whore, and a shadowy image of a father she hadn’t seen since she was eleven. She had no other family, no real friends besides Ginny. No job, no home, no money. Weighed up in that way, sticking with him, despite what he’d done, didn’t seem such a dire prospect.

  And she loved him. Despite this, despite everything, she did love him.

  ‘Xane.’ She finally stopped marching. ‘Why?’ She turned to look back the way she’d come. ‘Was my love really not enough?’

  To her horror, the Black Halo tour bus was no longer there, nor were any of the band’s other vehicles.

  They’d left without her.

  Trembling, she searched the faces of the people she’d passed, but Xane wasn’t among them, nor any other familiar face.

  Dani bit her lip. Everything she owned was on that bus, other than what she held in her hands and the box of gifts from her father, which was still in the Denna Rädsla camper van.

  Hadn’t he realised? He would soon, surely, and then he’d come back to find her. Wouldn’t he?

  Dani stood a long time watching the spot where the tour bus had been, half expecting it to magically materialise again, like Doctor Who’s Tardis, and for Xane to come racing towards her. It never came, and as she waited the wind dried the salty tracks of her tears on her cheeks, making her face feel stiff.

  * * *

  ‘Ginny? Is it OK if I hang with you for a while?’

  Dani strove to make the question sound normal as she crawled into Ginny’s tent, pitched next to Denna Rädsla’s camper van. The acrid smell of vomit assailed her nostrils as she entered the tiny dome. ‘Ginny?’

  Her friend didn’t stir, even when Dani gently shook her shoulder. ‘Gin?’ She was desperately pale, and, even taking into account the effect of the green canvas, she looked as if she probably ought to be hospitalised. Her desperate groan when Dani again tried to rouse her suggested so too. It was not the sound of a well woman. It took Dani forty minutes to persuade her to crack an eyelid, let alone mutter anything approximating sympathy.

  ‘With Luthor?’ Ginny repeated, obviously needing clarification over that particular point. She still looked like shit, though the hot spots in her cheeks and the stippling of broken capillaries around her jawline at least gave her some colour. ‘God, I’m sorry, Saint.’ Ginny made another gagging noise, prompting Dani to reach for the washing-up bowl she’d commandeered from the camper van. Ginny heaved but didn’t bring anything up. Probably there wasn’t anything left inside her. ‘What an utter scumbag. Of course you can hang with me.’ She stretched an arm out to offer a feeble hug. ‘Sorry I’m not feeling more with it. It should be me looking after you.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ Dani mumbled. Having something else to think about was helping. Her heart might have snapped into two, but it was Ginny who looked like death.

  ‘No, it’s not.’ Ginny let her hand fall and patted Dani’s knee. ‘I know how into him you are, and I’m being next to useless at the moment.’

  ‘All I want to know is if I did the right thing. I should have said something, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Move over and let me be in the middle?’ Ginny suggested, offering a weak smile, but Dani didn’t reciprocate. ‘OK. I’m sorry. Bad joke.’

  ‘He’s been fooling around behind my back, Ginny. It’s not funny. Just because it’s with a guy instead of a girl doesn’t make it right.’

  ‘I know. I said I’m sorry.’ She attempted another conciliatory smile that was quickly overtaken by a grimace. ‘You know what I’m like. Unrepentant bad girl. Always inappropriate. Plus my head is totally fucked.’ It almost made for a passable excuse, until she added, ‘And boy, do I love guy-on-guy stuff. I’d totally sign up for a three-way with Xane and Luthor.’

  Irritated, Dani folded her arms across her chest, while her mouth formed a tight moue. ‘I doubt you’d be saying that if it’d been Ash you’d discovered in a clinch with another guy.’

  ‘You’re joking, right? I’d be cussing him for not having invited me to watch. You know I had a thing with Ash, Spook and Rock Giant the night I first met them. Not that any of them got it on together, more’s the pity. And in any case, Ash doesn’t swing that way.’

  She couldn’t help it. Dani sniffled. She felt so goddamn alone again, like she was back at St Agatha’s sitting in her pitch-black room after they’d striped her with another set of sin marks for her behaviour. It’d been Xane that she’d talked to in those moments, or at least her fantasy version of him. She didn’t even have that imaginary friend to talk to now.

  ‘Damn, I’m sorry, girl.’ Ginny patted her knee again. ‘I just don’t have the same sensitivities as you do. I’ve been with two guys a couple of times. It can be great fun.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Dani spat. It wasn’t what she needed to hear right now. Or ever, in fact.

  Sex was supposed to be between two people, not several, and it was disloyal to imagine engaging sexually with Luthor while she was seeing Xane. No matter how much she wanted to hate him right now, she’d never betray him like that. When you made a commitment, you had to stick to it.

  ‘Are you girls coming out? We need to get packed up,’ August called from outside the tent. ‘We’ve a gig in Halmstad tonight, home turf. That’s a couple of hours’ drive.’

  ‘We’re coming.’ Ginny pitched forward onto all fours, and bega
n throwing her possessions out onto the grass. Once the tent was clear, she crawled out after them. Dani turned to follow, only to frown in alarm as her friend recoiled, vampire-style, from the sun.

  ‘Christ, Ginny, what the hell were you drinking last night?’ She found Ginny’s sunglasses and handed them to her. ‘Were you dropping tabs or something?’

  ‘No, I wasn’t. I was with Ash. I didn’t even drink much. We …’ She climbed to her feet, swayed alarmingly and collapsed into a deckchair that Hanne shoved beneath her. August handed her a mug of black coffee. ‘Actually, I don’t remember what we did. We were going to make out in the tent, but I don’t know if we did or not.’

  ‘You don’t know if you did it in the tent, or you don’t know if you had sex at all?’ Lykke enquired. She was binding her Cruella-style black and white hair into bunches. ‘What is it, blurred or something?’

  ‘Blank,’ Ginny admitted. ‘The last thing I remember is wrapping my arms around Ash as he came off stage.’

  ‘You don’t remember spin the bottle?’

  Ginny shook her head and winced. ‘Did I do something bad?’

  ‘You don’t remember whooping like a maniac when Ash was snogging Xane and they used tongues?’

  ‘Shit, I missed that!’ She shot an uneasy look at Dani over the rim of her camping mug. ‘Sorry.’

  Dani slumped in the second deckchair, feeling incredibly weary.

  ‘Wow, you look fucked!’ August hefted Ginny’s rucksack and threw it into the rear of the camper van, while Hanne and Lykke started taking down Ginny’s tent.

  ‘What else did I do?’ Ginny asked Dani quietly, while the others worked.

  ‘I don’t know. I think you went off with Ash and Iain to watch some band from Belgium play. I didn’t see you after that.’

  ‘Right. Band from Belgium. Iain …’ She shook her head, clearly unable to recall any of it.

  ‘It sounds like you were spiked.’ Lykke took a break from pulling up tent pegs to peer knowledgeably at her. ‘It happened to my cousin. She ended up being hospitalised. It was awful stuff they’d given her. Roh … rope … I’m not sure. It made a complete mess of her, and of course she wasn’t sure what had happened, because she was kind of sore and bruised in a few places.’