“You don’t do drugs anymore.” Colin’s brow furrowed as he took in the half-empty whiskey bottle resting on the picnic table next to Jesse.
Jesse rolled his eyes.
“You did something a couple years ago, when we signed with Matty. You don’t talk about it, but you cleaned up your act. You started making us come up here to write.”
Jesse didn’t confirm, but he didn’t deny.
“We got better after that,” Colin said. “That’s when everything started to happen—after you made all those changes. And now you’re going to become a pothead?”
“Jesus Christ, Colin,” Jesse snapped. “I just asked you if you had a joint.”
“Why are you reading books about Syria?”
“Why do you think?” he shot back, growing increasingly pissed. He almost regretted telling the guys about Hunter’s deployment, but they needed some explanation for why he suddenly wasn’t around. They’d all accepted it without comment—except Colin. Not that he was commenting, but he was . . . needling. Colin and Amber were the ones who had seen him with Hunter that morning. Amber had tried to talk to him, right around the time Ms. Crisis Communications had him rehearsing his fake Q&A. He had brushed Amber off. Colin, though, seemed unable to let the matter rest.
“You know I’m only a dick because I care about this band,” Colin, apparently tonight’s king of non sequiturs, said.
That took some of the piss out of Jesse, because it was true. Colin took the music more seriously than the others. He sighed. “I know.”
“But I think maybe I made a mistake. I think maybe we both made a mistake.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means some things are more important than success. Than money. Than fame.”
“Will you quit speaking in riddles?” Jesse said. “If you have something to say, just fucking say it.”
“Do you love him?”
And there it was. The real question. He considered not answering. He considered a lot of things actually: punching Colin, getting up and going inside, running into the lake. But he was so tired. So scared for Hunter. So he told the truth. “Yeah.”
Colin nodded. “And that’s what’s wrong with the video, right?”
Jesse stared at the fire unblinkingly, letting the smoke burn his eyes. “That song is about him.”
“All right,” Colin said, pulling his chair closer to Jesse’s. “So what are we going to do about it, then?”
“Thank you all for coming,” Jesse said to the crowd assembled in the same boardroom they’d met in a little over a month ago. It was strange to be at the head of the table, to be the one running the meeting.
Matty was going to lose his mind. The label might drop them.
This might be the end of Jesse and the Joyride.
He took a deep breath and looked at the guys. They were all looking back at him encouragingly. God, he was a lucky motherfucker. Hell, if he’d known how supportive they would be, maybe he would have come out of the fucking closet months ago.
He had to correct his earlier fatalistic thought. No matter what happened, this wasn’t going to be the end of Jesse and the Joyride. They’d assured him as much, that night when Colin had hauled them all out of the lake and they’d stood around the fire dripping and shivering while Jesse told them he was in love with Hunter. Colin, to Jesse’s shock, had then announced they were trashing the video for “When You’re Mine” and starting over.
“Dude,” Billy had said. “So you like dick. Big deal. I wish I liked dick. I feel like it would be so much easier to get laid.”
And then they’d stayed up all night, hatching their plan.
“You all know Ian Logan,” Jesse said. Ian had directed the original “When You’re Gone” video, so the suits all nodded. Smiled at him. Turned out Ian had been totally on board with their new plan, excited about the buzz the new video would no doubt create. He had been happy to huddle with Jesse and the guys to work out a new strategy.
A strategy they were now going to blindside the team with.
“There’s no easy way to say this,” he said, trying not to fidget, “so I’m just going to say it.” He straightened his spine. “We’re going to do some reshoots for ‘When You’re Mine.’”
“That’s it?” Matty said. “Jesus, you scared me with this big formal meeting. You know we always want to hear your feedback on videos and stuff.”
Ha. They had no idea.
And, fuck, he was scared.
He looked at Colin, who nodded down at the pictures lying upside down on the table in front of Jesse.
“All right,” Jesse said. “I don’t want Kylie in the video. I’ve talked to her. Explained it all. She understands.” And, amazingly, she had. Add another name to the list of people who had been nothing but supportive of Jesse’s news.
Matty sighed. “Jesse, I’ve told you the strategy behind using Kylie.”
“The rest is good,” said Jesse, talking over his manager. “The rest is great. The concept remains unaltered. We just want to replace Kylie with someone else.”
Matty started to object, but Peter from the label waved his hand. “Let’s hear him out. Who do you want?”
Here it was. Jesse lifted the top picture. “I want this guy.”
There was stunned silence from the men around the table and a gasp—a happy one, Jesse thought—from Amber.
“The song is about someone very specific,” Colin said calmly. “It’s important the video reflect that.”
“What the fuck, Jesse?” Matty’s quiet tone was at odds with his harsh words. It would almost have been easier if he’d yelled. Jesse had been prepared for that. He had not been prepared for quiet, contained rage. He . . . didn’t know what to do with that.
“Jesse likes dick now,” Billy said.
Jesse had never been happier to have Billy on his team.
“I’m pretty sure Jesse has always liked dick,” said Rob, contemplatively.
Rob too. All of them. Their unwavering show of support, delivered with their own personal flourishes, was exactly the bolstering he needed here.
Matty looked like his head was going to explode. “We’ve talked about this. We talked about this on day one, for Christ’s sake.”
“I’m bisexual, Matty, and I’m done hiding.”
“You can’t just put your boyfriend in the video,” Matty shot back.
“It’s not him,” said Jesse. “It’s a model who looks a little like him.” They’d all decided it was best to evoke Hunter in the video, but not cast a carbon copy of him. The latter seemed a little too creepy, given that Hunter basically didn’t want anything to do with him. “Anyway, he’s not my boyfriend. He took off because I was too chickenshit to call him that.”
It felt good to say those words out loud, as painful as they were.
“Regardless, it’s not about him. It’s about me. About standing up and saying, ‘This is who I am.’”
Did a small part of him hope that somehow, irrationally, Hunter would see the video and come home to him?
Hell, yes.
But that wasn’t the point.
Billy turned to Matty and made a surprisingly—for Billy—smart argument. “You were willing to put his actual ex-girlfriend in the video. So who cares about a dude that sort of looks like a guy he likes?”
Hope started to swirl in Jesse’s chest. As the guys had been reminding him, they didn’t need the label to make the video. They didn’t need Matty. They had cash, and they had a director. They could reshoot the whole thing and put it on YouTube themselves if they wanted to. But it would be so much easier not to get dropped by the label.
Peter turned to Jesse. “Look. You gotta do what you gotta do. I’m, uh, all for that. I’m going to level with you. We’ve been dedicated to Jesse and the Joyride. We’ve done good things together, I think.”
Jesse nodded his agreement.
“But this business is ultimately about money. I can’t promise anything, but I think the label will be fine wit
h this direction as long as the next album does as well as the last. Deliver the goods, and I don’t care who you sleep with, is what I’m saying.” He raised his eyebrows. “Hell, seeing the numbers after last month’s so-called crisis, I’m not convinced this won’t boost sales.”
“Thank you,” Jesse breathed, his legs going so weak with relief he had to sit. He surveyed the table. Peter was packing up to go—onto his next meeting no doubt—and the guys and Amber were smiling at him.
Which left Matty.
“I need . . . time to absorb this, Jesse.”
“That’s fine.” Jesse didn’t need Matty to run out and join PFLAG. “But you should know that—”
“No.” It was Billy, standing as he spoke. “You’re either with us, or you’re not.”
Jesse blinked. They hadn’t talked about this, about what would happen if the label was on board but Matty wasn’t.
“That’s right.” Rob popped up next to Billy, the Roberts of the rhythm section providing a united front that took Jesse’s breath away. “It’s not that complicated. And, frankly, you’d be an idiot to let Jesse Jamison go. He’s made you a shitload of money. But if you don’t want us, we’ll have no trouble finding someone who does.”
Then it was Colin’s turn. “Anyway, it’s not like anything is going to change. We’ll make this video, everyone will freak out, but then we’ll still be making the same music. He’s still Jesse.”
And finally, Ash: “And we’re still the Joyride.”
Amber stood too, tears running down her cheeks. She didn’t say anything, but her message came across just the same.
“Thanks, guys,” Jesse croaked, swallowing the lump in his throat. “Why don’t you give me a call next week, Matty?”
And then he stood up too, grinned at his ragtag little army, and walked out of the conference room.
He had shit to get done.
Time to face the music.
Three Months Later
Hunter wasn’t expecting to come home early.
Even so, that didn’t explain why, when he stepped into a taxi at the airport and the driver said, “Where to?” he had no earthly idea what to say.
He’d had plenty of time to think about it, first in Germany, where they’d sent the team when they evacuated the hospital in Syria, then on the long flight home.
So why hadn’t he? Why was he back on Canadian soil with no plan and nowhere to go? Maybe he should have asked them to reassign him.
He was so tired, though.
It wasn’t just the long flight. It was . . . existential tiredness.
He’d left Toronto wanting a change, and he’d gotten one. Life in northern Syria had forced all the Jesse-related drama out of his mind. The past several months had been about pure survival—that of the people he’d treated and, during the airstrikes that had prompted the evacuation, his own.
At one point, he’d wished he could click his heels like Dorothy and be home. But what had he really meant by that? Where was home?
He could call Beth. He could show up at his apartment, and she would no doubt make room for him. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t called her already. Hey, I’m coming home early, and I’ll need my place back. How hard was that?
Too hard, apparently, for his tired brain.
He could go to a hotel for a few nights. That might be the best thing. He was having trouble wrapping his mind around the fact that he was back. That it was autumn in Toronto. That regular life here had been cheerily unfolding as it always did. Maybe a few days in a hotel, a big downtown one where he could get a room high above the city, would function as a decompression chamber of sorts. Like one of those air locks on spaceships that astronauts go through to transition between outer space and the controlled environment inside.
He pulled out his phone—a brand-new, unfamiliar one, as he’d lost his in the evacuation—to book something, and opened his mouth to tell the cabbie to take him downtown.
What came out instead was Jesse’s address.
Jesse would rather be at the cottage, but, all things considered, a party at his house in the city wasn’t a bad way to pass an autumn evening.
All the guys were here. A bunch of staff from the tour. Amber. Beth. Kylie. A couple of his neighbors, even. It was a motley crew.
But it was his. And they were here to celebrate the fact that the video for “When You’re Mine” would drop tomorrow night.
Avery had sent her good wishes too. He’d emailed her the video and sworn her to secrecy. She’d responded with a string of emojis and slang he was pretty sure was an enthusiastic endorsement of the idea of him and Hunter together.
His motley crew did not contain Matty. Jesse still felt the sting of that blow, but they had moved ahead and signed with a new manager. And it felt like a coup that they’d snagged Tony Spencer, who was megastar Emerson Quinn’s manager.
Emerson, with whom Jesse had had a little flirtation a few years ago, was another person who’d offered her support when he’d come out to her. He’d reached out to her because he’d read in the industry trades that she’d recently made a management switch, dumping her established management company in favor of Tony. So far, Tony seemed good. They’d taken a bit of a risk on him, given that their sound was quite different from Emerson’s, and Colin had freaked the hell out over the prospect of having an “American bubblegum-pop Svengali” overseeing their careers, but the guy really seemed to get them.
And more importantly, when he’d given Tony a variation on the directive Matty had given him, he hadn’t blinked.
“You do the business stuff, and I do the music stuff,” he’d said. Then he’d added, “I also do the personal stuff.”
So on paper, things were looking up. It felt good to be actively taking charge of his future. To be the one giving the orders instead of the one taking them.
It was starting to feel like a moot point, though. All of it—the management change, the video, the coming out. Because he was pretty sure he was never going to actually be with another man again.
Or a woman, for that matter.
No one measured up.
He had tried to move on. He wasn’t obsessively checking the news anymore. His heart didn’t feel like it was going to shatter every time he went to the hospital, where he was still visiting kids. But it felt like he was only going through the motions of having a life without Hunter in it. Without him around, even just in his capacity as best friend, the world was . . . less. Less interesting, less bright, less imbued with possibility. The idea of falling in love again, with anyone? Impossible. The idea of going back to his old womanizing ways—even if now they were officially “personizing” ways—seemed so far off as to be laughable.
But, regardless, onward he went down the path he had committed to.
Because even if he never saw Hunter again, the only thing Jesse could think to do was to make himself into the kind of person who might be worthy of a man like Hunter.
Maybe in the process he’d also become a worthy man, full stop.
“Is this a bedbug bite, do you think?”
Billy was showing Beth his elbow.
Jesse laughed. He did have his army of weirdos. That wasn’t nothing.
It was getting dark, and the party was ramping up. It was a video-release party, so they should probably watch the video? Except for a couple of his neighbors, everyone in the room had seen it, but what the hell. He moved through the room toward the TV, picking up empty beer bottles, moving one of his guitars, which had migrated to the center of the room, into a safe corner.
He was about to start fiddling with the TV to get it to mirror his phone so he could play the video, when the doorbell rang.
He reversed direction and threaded his way through the crowd, trying to think who it might be. Maybe Avery and her family had shown up to surprise him? He had invited them, but Avery’s mom had nixed the idea, as it was a school night. He kind of hoped it wasn’t Avery, frankly. There was nothing untoward about the party, but it was get
ting loud, and the booze was flowing. Gavin was with a babysitter, and that was for the best.
He stooped to pick up another stray half-drunk beer bottle from the floor in the entryway, and swung the door open as he stood back up.
The bottle slipped right out of his hands and shattered on the wood floor.
He didn’t recognize the sound that came out of him then. It wasn’t a sob, not really—that word was too anemic.
It was the sound of reprieve, of deliverance. Of his worst fear—Hunter being killed in Syria—the fear that had dogged him so intensely for so many weeks, just . . . evaporating.
Hunter looked terrible. His face was ashen, and there were circles under his eyes.
“I was in Syria.” Hunter’s eyes were wary, like he was unsure of his welcome. “With Doctors Without Borders.”
Jesse was frozen, the beer he was standing in seeping into his socks and his breath coming out in short, desperate pants. He felt like he was floating outside his body, but somehow he managed to force himself to nod. He tried to say, I know, but he couldn’t get any sound to come out.
“There were airstrikes,” Hunter went on, probably to fill the silence that had been created by Jesse’s inability to speak or move. “They pulled us out. I’m not supposed to be back yet.” His sentences were short and clipped. He broke eye contact and ran his hands through his hair. “I didn’t know where to go,” he said to the pavement, his voice small in a way Jesse never wanted to hear again.
It unstuck Jesse. He reached out and pulled Hunter over the threshold and into his arms.
“You come here. That’s where you come. You come here.”
This was what Hunter had been looking for, without realizing it, what he’d been casting around for restlessly, unable to settle on any particular course of action.
Home.
Jesse’s arms.
They banded around him—hard and strong and steady, like they were gathering all the disparate pieces of him that had started to float away. He knew he could never have Jesse, not the way he wanted. But this Jesse—any Jesse—was better than nothing. He’d missed his best friend so damn much.
Infamous Page 23
