Conquest (34 page)
Evan answered him with a silent stare.
“Y-you’re not serious,” Jesse stuttered. “You can’t be.” Evan spun for the bedroom door. “I’m going into the city
“Ev, no! There’s no reason for this! Fuck your career! Fuck my career! I don’t give a shit about any of it if it means I can’t have you!”
Evan paused in the doorway. He kept his back to Jesse and closed his eyes again. He swallowed hard, forcing resolve into his waning willpower. “That’s easy for you to say. You’ve never stood under the burning glow of stage lights with thousands of people screaming for you. It’s easy to give up what you’ve never known.
“If you need to use the Cayenne to move your crap, that’s fine. But don’t play any stupid games like leaving something behind as an excuse to come back over and get it.” On his last word, he walked out of the bedroom.
Jesse leaped out of bed and ran after him. At the bottom of the stairs, he caught him and threw his arms around him from behind. “Please, Ev, don’t do this. We can explain those pictures. It’ll be easy. Just don’t break this off. I love you.”
“Let go of me,” Evan snapped. He pried Jesse’s arms from around his waist and flung them away. “Try to be out by nine o’clock tonight. That should give you plenty of time. You don’t have shit of your own, anyway.”
Jesse stood frozen, watching Evan walk away. He heard the access door to the garage open, then slam close. A moment later, the 612 squealed out of the garage. His legs trembled under him, his strength beaten from him by Evan. He felt like he was going to either pass out or be sick. His head spun, and he dropped to the ground, his body, his mind, his spirit, drowning in loss.
Jesse sat tucked in a corner of the couch in the chill-out room, his back to everyone. Kenny, Julian, and Trish huddled at the table in the kitchen area making small talk with each other in muted voices in an attempt to keep a neutral atmosphere. Their delicate demeanor made him want to escape from them even more, but since Kenny had shown up at Brandon’s that morning and practically carried him out the door to bring him to the studio, he knew even if he did leave someone would come chasing after him. He understood what they were trying to do. They all believed if they could get him playing music again he’d feel better. The problem was, he was waiting to run into Evan at any second.
When Evan left him, he sat on the stairs for half an hour in blank shock. Finally he got to where he could move, but the only thing he found himself able to do was pace from one room to another, not knowing what to do with himself. At one point, he had revitalized by deciding he wasn’t going to lose Evan, he would fight for him, he would force Evan to believe they could be together and everything would be as perfect as before. Then in his mind he saw Evan’s cold eyes, heard his harsh words, and his battle spirit retreated. As that happened, he came to the hardest realization of his life; as his final act of respect for Evan, he had to leave.
Having nowhere else to go, he called Brandon. He knew he could have called Kenny, or Julian, or even Trish, and any would open their doors to him, but only Brandon would truly understand, and at that moment, he wanted to go to the one person he knew would never walk away from him, the one person who had always protected him.
Brandon had been in the middle of rehearsal, but claimed a family emergency and left to come to him. To his surprise, Brandon didn’t push for details. Quietly, they collected his belongings, which true to Evan’s words were meager and mostly clothes, and crammed it all into the Cayenne. As for the F430, taking so expensive a gift not only felt wrong, how could he keep it? Every time he’d drive it, he would think of Evan, of the places they’d gone in it, the things they had done.
After they unloaded his belongings at Brandon’s new apartment on North Dearborn, he drove the Cayenne back with Brandon following on his Suzuki. When they left the mansion for the final time, he sat behind Brandon on the motorcycle, punching the code into the keypad to close the gates. As they shut, the finality of it made it seem all his and Evan’s time together had been nothing more than a surreal dream.
That night, Brandon didn’t make pathetic efforts to cheer him up. He sat beside him on the couch in his apartment, not saying a word. Maybe it was the silence that did it, but he broke down. Brandon had wrapped him in his arms as he cried and told him what happened.
The next day, he couldn’t bring himself to go into the studio, there wasn’t anything important to do besides going over tour stuff and rehearsing, and rehearsing he felt was pointless until they would be able to get into the Auditorium Theatre where their kick-off concert was going to be held, so he ended up calling Kenny, told him everything, and that he wouldn’t be coming in.
Wednesday morning came, and once again he refused to go into the studio. In the evening, Kenny showed up at Brandon’s apartment with Julian and Trish, but to his relief, Brandon blocked them at the door and spared him from having to deal with the cheer-up brigade.
Thursday, he didn’t get out of bed except to go to the bathroom and take a long shower, where he stood under the water more than washed. Brandon brought him a pizza from Uno’s, but he only managed to get down half a slice before feeling like he would be sick.
Unfortunately, that morning after Brandon left for the theatre, Kenny came pounding on the door. He had no choice but to answer it and didn’t have the will to fight him when Kenny demanded he come to the studio. Evan hadn’t been
ONQUEST
287
there when they arrived, but he knew without seeing him he was there now.
Evan tossed the Ferrari F430 keys on the couch beside Jesse. “I thought I told you not to leave anything behind.”
“I don’t want it,” Jesse mumbled. “Keep it.”
“What do I want with it? It’s your little toy, it’s not my style. It’s parked near the guard booth in the garage.” Evan turned to walk away.
All his anger, all his pain, rose faster than Jesse could control. He leaped up and whipped the keys across the room. They crashed into a picture hanging on the wall, shattering the glass. “That’s all you care about, isn’t it? Your fucking image! What’s the best car to drive! The best clothes to wear! The best fuck buddy to have in your bed!”
Evan walked over to the broken picture, picked up the car keys, and walked back to Jesse, stopping inches from him. “Is that what you think? That you were just some fuck buddy?”
Evan grabbed Jesse’s upper arm, his grip firm, but careful to not hurt him. “Don’t ever…EVER…mock the feelings I have for you!”
He threw the keys down on the couch and spun for the door. Greg, JJ, and Jeremy stood by the door, looking trapped by what they had witnessed. Evan rammed his shoulder hard against Greg’s as he passed.
Jesse stared at the floor for a long moment, the phantom of Evan’s rough touch lingering on his arm. He picked up the car keys with trembling fingers and walked toward the door. His shoulder brushed lightly against Greg’s as he turned down the hall and headed toward Studio B, alone.
Jesse glanced up at the clock in the control room. He had been at the studio all day, all night, refusing offers to go to his band members’ apartments or out to dinner with them. Now the studio was empty save for the security guard. He turned off his music and sat listening to the silence.
He felt numb. It was as if all his emotions, all his desires, had shut down. He didn’t want to eat. He didn’t want to drink. Most of all, he didn’t want to feel. The thought of smiling or laughing seemed a concept beyond his reach and he didn’t want to try and grasp it. The only thing that sounded halfway decent was going back to Brandon’s, crawling into bed and lying in the dark bedroom. Thinking about it gave him just enough energy to push away from the control desk and leave the studio.
Walking out to the night shrouded city, he headed across the street to the parking garage. He stepped inside and stumbled to a halt. His eyes locked on the F430, its dark blue paint seeming black in the dim yellow garage lights. He clutched the keys and walked toward it. When he climbed in, he wasn’t sure if it was his imagination, but he thought he caught the faint scent of Evan’s cologne lingering in the car. Despair closed his throat from air, his eyes began to burn. He pressed his forehead against the steering wheel, his body shaking with tears.
Jesse locked Brandon’s apartment door behind him and walked down the hall to the elevator. Almost a week had passed since he’d seen Evan when they had their confrontation at the studio, and during that time, he only went to the studio once to rehearse and found himself mobbed by paparazzi. Studio security held them at bay until he got in, but he found little sanctuary when he ran into JJ, who told him Evan had changed his session times and now didn’t come in until seven o’clock at night and recorded well into the early morning hours. JJ gave him the information as if it was something he should care about. He saw it as one more slap in the face from Evan, telling him Evan didn’t even want to be in the same building at the same time as him. That information pushed him over the edge.
For the past week, he spent his evenings staring blankly at the TV until the sound of it would get on his nerves and he would turn it off. But without having the images flickering in front of him to keep him still, he would pace around Brandon’s apartment. He tried reading
The Iliad
again, but couldn’t concentrate on it and put it down. Brandon caused some distraction when home, but rehearsals for
Phantom
were getting more intense, so Brandon wasn’t there much.
Tonight, he couldn’t take it anymore. He came to the conclusion that he needed to snap himself out of his depression, to force himself to forget about Evan, and there was only one way he knew of to do it.
The elevator stopped at the ground floor garage. He walked toward the F430, the smell of his body spray wafting around him. He disarmed the car alarm, climbed in, and swung it out of the parking garage, aiming it toward the Lakeview area. If Brandon knew where he was going, he’d choke him, but he was long past the point of needing Brandon to watch over him. He didn’t need
anyone
to watch over him.
A rainbow-striped flag hanging under a lit streetlight added color to the night and announced he had reached Boystown. He eased off the gas, cruising past clubs and bars, restaurants and stores, many places familiar from times when he and Brandon would come there. With it being a little after nine o’clock and a Thursday night, a fair number of people wandered the streets, making their way to favorite clubs or places to eat. Men eyed him from the sidewalk, some called out for him to stop, but he continued drifting. To him, they all looked the same. Blond hair or black, blue eyes or brown, tall, short, built, scrawny, they were all nameless faces.
He stopped at a traffic light, his eyes fell on a couple walking hand in hand. The two men laughed with each other, playfully shoving and grabbing. Jesse clenched his teeth and faced forward. The light turned green. He smashed the throttle to the floor. The Ferrari roared; tires screeched as it launched through the intersection. Jesse rocketed away from Boystown, not knowing where to go, but not wanting to stay there or go back to Brandon’s.
He coasted aimlessly through the city, past multi-million dollar condos to neighborhoods where he all but begged to have the flashy Ferrari jacked. He found himself going past every restaurant he and Evan had eaten at, every store they had shopped. He drove to the studio and stopped in the street, wondering if Evan was inside, but not wanting to look in the parking garage to check for his car. If he wasn’t there, his mind would flood with thoughts of all the things Evan could be doing, things he couldn’t bring himself to face. It was easier to pretend he stood at the mic working on his next masterpiece, his beautiful voice floating over his perfect lips.
Jesse drove away from the studio and continued his directionless quest. The skyscrapers loomed overhead, the lights glowing through the windows of the structures. A twinge of claustrophobia closed in on him. He felt as though he was being swallowed into a great cave. He looked up at the night sky peeking down between the mammoth buildings. Instead of the infinite space above calming him, the blackness increased his anxiety.
He looked down at his cell phone on the passenger seat. He had turned the volume off, but saw three missed calls; Brandon he figured, since it was a quarter past three in the morning. With a sigh, he headed back to Brandon’s.
When he got there, he unlocked the apartment door as quietly as possible and stepped in. The apartment was dark save for the TV, the soft light dancing over Brandon’s sleeping face. He had fallen asleep on the couch with his cell phone in hand. Jesse turned off the TV and pulled an afghan off the back of the couch to cover him.
Brandon shuffled in, looking half asleep, and collapsed face down on Jesse’s bed. “You were dressed too nice to have just gone for a drive.”
All semblance of sleepiness vanished from Brandon. He bolted half up on his elbows and snapped his head toward Jesse. “What!”
“Settle down. All I did was drive around. I didn’t even get out of my car.”
Brandon stared at him for a long moment. Jesse glanced at him and had to restrain himself from pushing Brandon off the bed at the pitying look he gave him.
Brandon turned his head away and lay back down. He was quiet for several minutes before mumbling, “You shouldn’t try to force it, Jess.”
Jesse flipped over, putting his back to Brandon, and gave the covers an irritated tug toward his side of the bed. “Why don’t you go to your own bed and get off the blankets, asshole.”
Jesse waited for him to respond and when Brandon didn’t so much as twitch, he sat up and craned his neck to look at him. Brandon’s back rose and fell in deep, relaxed breaths, his face peaceful with sleep. Jesse sighed and folded the comforter over to cover him. He laid back down, his eyes closing on their own.
Three hours later, he woke practically clinging to the edge of the mattress so he wouldn’t fall out as Brandon had taken over almost the entire full-size bed. He contemplated kicking him to get him to move, but decided even if he did gain a few more inches, he was too awake to go back to sleep. He sat up, glowering resentfully at his brother who slept in serene obliviousness.