Playing the Pauses

by Michelle Hazen

  He shakes his head. “Kate, I’m not asking for forever. I’m just saying we should be honest. I care about you, and I don’t want to hide that.”

  Even though I knew how he felt, something like shock tingles all the way up to my scalp that he said it, just like that. This incredibly complex man, with the way he loves the few people in his life so quietly and completely...he cares about me.

  “I don’t want to have to name it, or give it some bullshit end date. I’m just saying, I’m happy. If you’re happy...” He shrugs, but I don’t miss the flash of uncertainty in his face. “Then can’t we just go with it until we’re not?”

  I let our hands drop into my lap so I can take his palm between both of mine, every other person in the airport meaning nothing to me as long as I can see all the colors of his eyes. “I’m happy,” I admit.

  The truth feels terrifying to say out loud, and no matter what Danny says, it changes everything.

  Chapter 21: 3 A.M. in Munich

  Europe sucks.

  Every show is bigger than the last, which means huge foreign audiences watching the many fuckups we’re trying to deal with as a result of throwing this together so fast. We’re traveling every night except tomorrow, and the lack of privacy is killing me. Even though the crew has been surprisingly cool about our relationship, we can’t talk—or anything else—on the bus where everyone can hear. As the days wear on, the bubble of peace I always find at his side is increasingly precarious, wavering under the knowledge of how little time we have left together.

  My hands are shaky tonight, my chest fluttery and unsafe as I sit on the bus, trying to finish some paperwork. I don’t know if it’s the overload of emotion lately or the lack of sleep. Or maybe it’s that it’s 3 a.m. in Munich, this bus should have pulled out fifty minutes ago, and nobody can find the lead singer.

  “Danny’s not answering now, either.” Jera clicks off her phone and whirls to look at me.

  Okay, make that two for the M.I.A. list. My stomach twists as I consider all the screwed up situations Jax might have dragged Danny into. What if someone got out of hand? What if they had a weapon? There’s nothing Danny would back down from if his friend were in danger.

  I force a smile for Jera and offer, “He probably can’t answer because he’s too busy prying Jax out of some party.” Or out of some girl. “Happens all the time. Boys get carried away with the after-show glow and forget they need to catch their ride to the next gig.”

  “It’s not like that.” Jera shoves a hand through her hair, which is still tangled with sweat and styling product from being onstage. Wincing, she pulls her fingers free, her eyes flitting from the windows on one side of the bus to the other. “Jax and Danny both partied pretty hard when we were opening for Abyss. But lately Jax’s been less confetti and more dirty syringes in an alley.”

  “Is he shooting up? Have you seen him?” My legs tighten and I nearly come off my seat before I remember I need to be calming her down, not freaking out with her. Except if Jax just graduated to needles, there’s a painfully good chance he misjudged his dosage and Danny’s staring down at his bandmate’s body right now.

  Jera paces up the lounge aisle, past the handful of crew members doing their best to ignore our conversation. “No, but you’ve seen how he’s been. God, I thought last night had to be the worst of it.”

  From the other couch, Ruben shoots me a quick glance I pretend not to see.

  The approaching end of the tour may be making me crazy inside, but the lead singer’s crazy has been painted all over his outsides. Last night, he was still spun out of his mind as he mounted the stage, and when he ducked into the bathroom at mid-set break to do another line of coke, Jera burst into tears. I barely patched everyone back together to limp through the end of the show.

  The door to the bus crashes open, and I jump to my feet as Danny shoves Jax inside. The lead singer is soaking wet, wearing a pink glittery cowboy hat too small for his head, and with three colors of feathers sticking to his hands.

  “Kate!” He grins, grabbing me in a damp hug that smells like black licorice booze and something...sticky.

  “Hi, Jax.” When he releases me, I tip my head toward the bunks. “There are a couple towels in the cupboard by the bathroom.” I look toward the driver. “Hey, we’re ready to go!”

  Ruben and Jayna get up and head for the back of the bus, their eyes avoiding Jax even as he bounds after them. He throws the cupboard open with a bang and snatches out a towel, toppling the rest of the clean linens onto the ground and kicking them to the side.

  I steal a glance at Danny. He’s not limping, and I don’t see any bruises or blood. It’s a damn good thing because I don’t know if I could stay professional with Jax if Danny got hurt cleaning up after his friend’s screw ups.

  “We still gonna make it on time?” Rex asks in a low voice, and I give him a nod. It’ll be damned close, but we can still make load in if the driver doesn’t mind nudging the speed limit. Next to Rex, Clancy shifts in his seat and keeps reading his book, even though 3 a.m. is well past his bedtime. Danny touches my arm, his thumb caressing my skin in a way that usually settles my pulse. I lift an eyebrow and he gives me a nonchalant shake of his head, but I can sense the worry seeping out of him.

  “No thanks to somebody,” Jera grumbles.

  I sit back down at the table where my work is waiting, trying to concentrate on the numbers and words that blur across the page, but my thoughts won’t quiet enough for me to focus. With some stars, you’ve got to cram cocaine up their noses to get them onstage, others you have to hide the Jack Daniels if you want them to sing a note. I’ve had to bring in priests, prostitutes and exotic pets, and the show has always gone on. But I have to admit, I’ve never watched somebody I truly care about start to lose his personality to a cocktail of back alley pharmaceuticals. It makes every drug I’ve ever passed out suddenly feel less like a job requirement and more like a sin.

  Danny claims the couch on the other side of me, leaning his head back against the window and closing his eyes. Briefly, I squeeze his knee. I wish he’d go back to his bunk and get some sleep, but I know he won’t. Despite those lowered lids, Danny is watching over everything that happens on this bus.

  Jax leaps up onto the couch across the aisle from me, bouncing on the cushions as he starts to play a guitar whose E is out of tune.

  “I want to rock!” One of his feathers is stuck in the strings of the guitar. “Who’s gonna jam with me?”

  “Are you serious right now?” Jera rubs her eyes, the muscles in her arms tight. “Give it a freaking rest.”

  I tilt my head up and smile, keeping my worry and impatience stuffed down deep. “Jax, play me that U2 song I love so much. Come on, nobody covers it like you do.”

  The lounge has emptied out except for the band, Rex, and Clancy, the old man’s scowl growing as he pretends to be engrossed in his paperback.

  “I don’t want to play somebody else’s tired crap.” Jax hops back and forth between the couches, his boots sinking deep into the leather in a way that makes me cringe and calculate our cleaning deposit. “I want to write something new, light the world on fire!” He screams the last word, jamming a discordant bunch of strings. The bus driver shrinks toward the window, subtly ducking his head so he can plug his ear.

  Jax leaps from his couch onto the table in front of me, his foot ripping a contract for our final show. I flinch, and the table creaks dangerously.

  “Watch it,” Danny’s voice whips out.

  Clancy puts his book down, and Rex’s thick fists tighten. They’ve both broken up more fights than I’ve ever even seen, but no stagehand likes to get into the middle of a band brawl. We’ve been living like dorm roommates with the musicians for weeks now, and yet, we’re the employees here. It pays never to forget that.

  Even as I’m thinking it, Rex shoots me a questioning look and my eyes skitter away. If he’s looking to me for permission, it’s because I’m more band girlfriend than staff these da
ys, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. I give Rex a quick shake of my head, trying not to recoil from Jax.

  Jax pivots and drops off the table. “I want a song so great that the next time we’re on tour, we’ll be in a plane with our names down the side—not in this glorified Greyhound piece of shit.”

  What’s he talking about? This is the nicest bus I’ve ever toured on, and they got it on their first round as headliners. I force my gaze back to my paperwork, struggling to keep my face smooth.

  “We’re already in the middle of three new songs.” Jera slumps farther, the circles under her eyes startling without any stage makeup to cover them. “And we can write when we get home, when we’ve had five seconds to chill and regroup, okay?”

  “Not any of that pussy crap that’s keeping us stuck in the middle of the pack. Something to make us into rock gods!” He jams another fuzzy chord and bounces up onto the couch again. Danny snaps to his feet.

  “You’re done.” Danny jerks his head toward the bunks. “You don’t fucking speak to her that way.”

  Jax shrugs off the guitar and drops it to the ground with a crash. I wince and peer over the table to see if it cracked. The lead singer steps off the couch, his pupils blown wide into a satanic black as he lands inches from Danny’s toes.

  I don’t like him so close to Danny, not when Jax’s mood is a pendulum that swings by the second, and both men are on edge from days filled with more hours of performing than sleep. I stand and move in front of the table I was working on.

  “Hey, Jax.” I smile. “Come hang out with me. I’m bored and I want to learn a couple chords like you promised me.”

  He doesn’t seem to hear me, twitchy energy ratcheting through his whole body in stark contrast to the poised control of Danny’s sleek form. My boyfriend is a single line of black standing between Jax’s bulkier silhouette and the rest of the passengers.

  Shit, this is bad. I signal the driver to pull over and touch my pocket to be sure my phone’s in place, already calculating how fast we can detox him in a hospital, and if there’s any way in hell we can get through this and only cancel one of the last two shows.

  I’ve nursed musicians through crashes, divorces, and even ODs, and only had to cut one tour short, but this is Jax. He would hate that he was treating his friends this way, and it’s scary to see how much he’s changed in just the few short weeks of the tour. He’ll never live through a music career at the rate he’s going.

  “You need to chill and let it pass,” Danny says.

  “You think you get to tell me how to behave?” Jax starts to laugh, long and loud enough that Jera cringes away from the sound, throwing me a wide-eyed look. “You? Well fuck you, Saint Danny, because every drug that’s ever gone up my nose has been up yours, too. For every girl I’ve been in, you’ve had twice as many, and you think because you don’t talk that nobody sees your shit?”

  “Leave him alone!” Jera leaps up and—thank God—Clancy catches her before she catapults right into the middle of them. “You’re the one killing yourself with this crap, Jax, not Danny.”

  Jax stabs a finger into Danny’s chest, and my pulse goes through the roof. I grit my teeth and look to Rex, who stands and starts to edge closer.

  “I see through all your bullshit.” Spittle flies from Jax’s lips, and still Danny doesn’t flinch. “You even have your dick in the damned tour m—”

  “Jax!” I shove closer, praying there’s enough of him left in there that he’ll stop before he hurts me. I’ve been punched by a cokehead before. They hit inconceivably hard, as if they don’t realize their knuckles will be the first thing to take the impact.

  “And they all love you best anyway,” Jax chokes out, a sheen glittering over the endless black of his dilated eyes. “Jera, the fans. Kate and every other girl. Every other fucking girl.”

  “Lay it down for today, man.” Danny stands steady. “I don’t give a shit how you have your fun, but you’re way past that now. If we need to have words, we’ll have them in the morning.”

  The brakes squeak as we start to coast into a truck stop. I glance away for an instant to check our progress and it happens: Jax snatches the guitar off the floor and swings it like a bat.

  “Danny!” Before I get out both syllables, Jax’s face is pressed to the floor with the broken guitar cracking even more under the weight of his chest. Danny holds him pinned in a vicious submission hold, his every muscle straining as his friend bellows and thrashes.

  “Stop it!” Jera shrieks. “Oh my God, both of you, please, please just stop!” She fights against Clancy’s restraining arms until he pants with the effort. Rex jumps to help Danny, but it’s already over.

  Jax goes slack, and his cheek falls heedlessly onto the ruined strings of the guitar as he sobs. Danny shifts his grip, not letting go as he lays his forehead on the back of his friend’s head, looking as miserable as Jax even as he holds him down. Adrenaline screams at me to grab Danny and steal him away somewhere safe, but I force myself to take a breath and kneel, trying to clear the pieces of the guitar away before Jax hurts himself any more.

  “Two more gigs. Then we walk off the stage and back into our lives and nobody cares anymore.” Jax doesn’t lift his head. “Two more shows and I’m nothing again.”

  My eyes sting with tears, but when I reach to put my hand on Jax’s shoulder, Danny looks up, his eyes furious as he jerks his chin for me to get back. He drops his head close to his bandmate’s ear, and I’m the only other one who hears what he says next.

  “Listen to me.” His voice is a growl that rakes stark chills over my skin. “If you stop today, this will be the lowest you ever have to go. But if you keep this shit up, you’re not even going to believe how deep you’ll dig your own hell.”

  I get up, pulling my jacket tighter around me. I don’t want to see Jax like this, and it’s taking everything I have to keep all that horror hidden so it doesn’t show on my face. The bus driver watches me for a cue, and I gesture for him to wait—I’m still not sure if we’ll need the cops or an ambulance.

  Danny stands up and holds out a hand to his friend. I suck in a breath, waiting to see if he’ll come up swinging.

  Jax pushes slowly off the wreckage of the guitar, ducking his head as he lets Danny pull him to standing. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, man.”

  “Never happened.” Danny’s face is smooth again. “Sleep it off, brother.”

  Everyone clears a path as Jax slumps past us, moving as if he’s bruised in every muscle.

  Tears streak Jera’s pale face, her gaze pleading as it fastens on Danny, but he just shakes his head like he doesn’t have any more answers than she does.

  I expect her to collapse into his arms, but instead, she goes to the back of the bus, climbing into Jax’s bunk where he lies curled toward the wall. She lays her head on his shoulder blade and doesn’t say a word as she wraps her small arms around him.

  “We can go,” I say to the driver, my eyes on Danny and his trained on the disaster that used to be a beautiful acoustic guitar. There are so many damn people on this bus and nothing I can say to him that will be private.

  I hate that whenever anybody’s upset, it’s Danny who does the holding.

  I take a step closer and press up onto my toes so I can hug my arms around his tight shoulders, nestling my face into his neck as I remind him of the words he once gave to me. “You can’t fix everyone, Danny. Sometimes, you just have to keep yourself steady and let that be enough.”

  He exhales, his arms coming around me. But in this moment, neither of us are anything like steady.

  Only two days remain until I’m scheduled to leave them. Jax is breaking, and I’m afraid Danny will turn his own life inside out trying to save his friend. And I can’t help but wonder how long Jera will get to keep both of her fairy tales before either the wife and mother or the free-spirited rock drummer has to give. I don’t know how to let their story go on without me, because it’s not just Danny I’m addicted to. It�
��s his friends, his apartment, the way the air settles around us when he finally smiles. I want into his life and I know I can’t do that without giving up my own.

  Danny’s arms lock around me almost desperately. I can tell he’s feeling it right along with me: Jax’s guilt and grief, Jera’s fear, and beneath it all, our last two days slipping away with no idea what comes next.

  When I shut my eyes, two tears break loose and run down my cheeks, one for each of us.

  Chapter 22: Your Answer

  “God, I’m so lame!” Jera groans and leans her head against Danny’s shoulder as we wait for the hotel elevator to arrive. “At the start of the tour, I was ready to dance for days after every show.” She tosses a rueful glance at her combat boots. “Actually, I think I might still have blisters left over from that. But now...” She mimes snoring.

  I laugh. “Once you’re back home and not playing a full set every night, you can dance all you want. For now, better to enjoy the bed. You’ll be back in a bunk by tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow’s venue is only a couple hours’ drive and a single international border from here—gotta love Europe—so we can afford one night in a hotel to rest the crew before we leave in the morning. After the last show tomorrow, we’ll get a scanty five hours of naptime before we have to be at the airport. My fingers squeeze on the straps of my purse and I fight to keep from glancing over at Danny.

  Jera makes a face. “Back on the floor of the bus aisle, more like. It was hard enough not to roll myself out of the bus bunks in the States, but the beds here are about as wide as the average second grader.” She waves a hand down her body. “I mean seriously? If I’m too big to fit?”