Loud is How I Love You (3 page)

“What?” he whispers back. Then he hands me the syrup.

“What happened last night . . .” I start to say, but I can’t continue because I am choking on the awkward.

“Was really awesome?” He finishes the sentence for me with a crooked smile and I die. Then he lowers his voice to a whisper again. “I thought so, too.”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Really?” he asks in mock surprise. “Because last night you seemed to think it was pretty awesome. That is, if all the orgasms were any indicator.”

Now I’m choking on my coffee and ready to hide my own face in my napkin. He’s got a verifiable point, though.

“Wait, you weren’t faking it, were you? For my ego’s sake?”

I shake my head no.
No, I wasn’t faking it, and no, you are not teasing me about this. No, you are not.

“Travis, I’m serious.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m serious, too. Last night really was awesome.”

“Look, this can’t change anything. We’ve worked too long and too hard to fuck everything up now by this one little moment of weakness, all right?”

Now he looks serious. Not the serious look he has when he’s trying to nail a difficult solo or when he’s negotiating with the door guy for our fair cut, though. This is more of a pissed-off kind of serious.

“Sure,” he finally says. Then he goes back to shoveling his omelet into his face. He hails Sonia and she comes and brings him a coffee refill and he asks for the check.

“You’re going?” I say. “You’ve got nothing else to say?”

“What else is there to say?” he asks.

“Don’t be mad, all right?” I plead. “I just don’t want it to be weird.”

He laughs but he’s not amused. I know that.

“Fine,” he says. “I understand completely. I really do.”

“You do?”

“Yeah,” he says. “No big deal.”

“It’s not?”

“Do you want it to be?”

I pause because it feels like a trick question, and I suck at trick questions. But even as I pause I feel my mouth make the shape of the word “no,” and before I get it out he’s nodding and his mouth is a straight, pissy-looking line.

“Should we tell the beat brothers?” I say, and he rolls his eyes and now I can almost see the smoke billowing right behind them. “Look, if we aren’t honest about it, it will turn into this big thing that we have to keep secret.”

“And we wouldn’t want the fact that we had sex last night to, you know, mean anything.”

“Exactly,” I say, and I am waiting for him to look relieved that he doesn’t have to deal with any weirdness as far as I’m concerned. That I am not some needy girl who expects things from him other than the usual. Be on time for rehearsal. Play your Goddamned guitar like you mean it. Drive me home when I’m drunk and carry my amp for me and be an integral, essential part of me pursuing my dreams. Okay, that’s a bit much but the thing is, he does it. All the time. And I can’t lose this.

This is what I would assume he also wants, for everything to just be normal and not weird and for us to not be on the brink of fucking up this very great thing we have together. I expect him to acknowledge that while last night was, in fact, awesome, it was also a mistake that could potentially kill this band we’ve worked so hard to build.

But instead of relieved he looks blank, like the Travis I know so well has crawled into a hole and what’s left is this fake Travis, the cardboard cutout that I really don’t know at all.

“I just want everything to go on as usual, okay?” I say. “We can just be grown-ups about this. It’s only sex.”

I look up and see Sonia standing next to me with the check, her mouth hanging open. Travis would be amused if he didn’t look so angry. He pulls out his wallet and takes a twenty-dollar bill out and drops it on the table. Then before I can give him any money, he walks right out.

Sonia and I stare after him in silence for a moment. I don’t look up, but I feel her eyes on me and I’d like to slink down under the table right about now.

“Wow, you finally did it,” she muses. “You finally slept with Travis.”

“Yeah, I did,” I say. “And look at how happy he is about it.”

“Oh, I doubt that’s why he’s unhappy, Emmy.”

“He’s unhappy because it’s going to fuck up the band,” I say, wringing my napkin to bits. “He knows it just as well as I do.”

“Does it have to fuck up the band?” she asks. “I mean, isn’t there any way you two could work it out?”

“Well, I don’t know, let’s ask him,” I say way more sarcastically than Sonia deserves, but that’s my mouth for you. I turn to the empty seat across from me. “Travis, do you think . . . Oh hey, look at that. He’s gone. I guess there’s our answer right there.”

“Maybe he’d still be here if he thought that’s what you wanted.”

“This is not about what I want,” I say. “It’s about not fucking up something important that we already have.”

“Oh, right,” she says, every bit as sarcastic as I’ll ever be. “Good luck with that.”

***

It’s not that I don’t have feelings for Travis. It’s really not that at all. It’s that after two years in Soft, my feelings for Travis transcend your average boy-meets-girl kind of situation. It’s not just a tingle I feel when he’s near, a bounce in my step. We’re well past that already (okay, I did feel pretty tingly when he walked in the door at Neubies today). Travis is my guitarist and there’s a thing between us that is difficult to translate for someone who hasn’t been in this kind of situation. Writing music is personal, intimate even, and you have to be pretty comfortable to be able to do it with other people. When you find someone you work this well with, it’s rare and special and it’s more than friendship. I know this sounds dumb, but it’s kind of like finding a unicorn. If you found a unicorn, you would take care of it, protect it. You’d keep it safe. You definitely wouldn’t fuck it, right?

I started my very first band, Popsick, when I was a sophomore in high school. It was my band and mine alone because I couldn’t keep anyone in it for longer than a month, usually because all my friends wanted to be lame and hang out with their boyfriends, smoke weed, and watch TV or whatever. It’s a serious pain in the ass to find girls who can play drums and bass in rural New Jersey. (Yes, rural. There’s a non-ironic reason it’s called the Garden State.) You run out of options very fast, is what I’m saying. Hell, there really aren’t “options” at all. I ended up playing with Matilda the timpani player and Betina the first chair from orchestra because I convinced them boys would pay attention to them if they were in my band. And they did, but our songs were weak, and while Tilda could keep time, she didn’t hit hard enough. Betina wouldn’t even play with a pick! Popsick was a true creative labor of love, a stiff learning curve, if you will. There were no unicorns, that’s for sure.

When we all graduated and left for college, I was determined to start a
real
band. One that would play in clubs, not living rooms and backyards. One that would even play CBGB in the city one day, and with Stars on the Floor I’ve done it several times, too. One of the crowning achievements of my career so far.

I started Soft with Joey and Cole because I’ve known the two of them forever. Joey’s mom and my mom grew up across the street from each other in Lodi, and I seriously thought Joey was my second cousin until maybe a year or so ago. Cole is from Joey’s neighborhood, and the two of them have been best friends for as long as any of us can remember. Over the years, whenever Mom and I visited or they came down to Flemington to hang out, we would jam. So when Joey and I ended up at Rutgers together, Cole moved to New Brunswick and got a job washing pots at Old Man Rafferty’s so we could start a real band.

We started up freshman year, and right away we pulled our sound together and wrote a ton of cool songs and started playing parties left and right as a three-piece. We wanted another guitarist to fill the sound out, and when Travis joined it was exactly what we were all hoping it would be. Not just because it sounded better (and wow, adding Travis’s Les Paul was a dose of magic for us), but because we all got along really well, and that’s even harder to find. It’s seriously like four people in one marriage, it’s so much like a family sometimes. There’s tons of quirk and eccentricity and hang-ups that have to be negotiated when you’re working so closely like that with other people. But we luck out because we all share the same sense of humor, the same taste in fast food, the same zealous thirst for rock, and it works. We work.

But something else happens when you spend all this time with the same three guys working on music. Something important.

For example, when Cole’s last girlfriend dumped him, Joey, Travis, and I sat up all night and watched infomercials with him and we wouldn’t let him be by himself for a week until we were fairly certain he could feed and dress himself without incident. When Joey’s dad announced he was leaving his mother for his twenty-three-year-old secretary last summer, we all went over to see him at Mama Santi’s in Lodi and got drunk on red wine and ate homemade ravioli and meatballs and cannolis and listened to her cry and curse him out all night. Joey even wrote a song about it that we still have in the set today,
“Carmen Alfredo.” When Travis’s dad had a major scare last year with his heart and Travis didn’t have enough money to fly home, we gave him everything we had in the band till to get him on a plane. I called him in Omaha every day, too. Actually, I call him every day anyway. There’s always some band business that needs to get dealt with, and if the band is a family, Travis and I are basically the parents.

When my last boyfriend, Josh the Michael Bolton fan (I know, I know), broke up with me my freshman year and I went all fetal position in my dorm room, those guys saved me, they really did. The first night when I was such a mess, they all slept on the floor of my dorm room. Two nights later when I hadn’t eaten anything but three bowls of Cheerios in two days, Joey called my mom and she came and surprised me with an entire spaghetti meal, including garlic knots and salad and meatballs that we all sat and ate right in my dorm room, picnic-style. And through all of that, Travis never left my side.

After going through the assorted travails one goes through in their later formative years with a support system like these guys, it’s damned painful to even imagine life without them around. In fact, I can’t bring myself to even try. And that bond that we’ve got going on is a part of our sound, too. You can hear it when we play. We play like we’ve been playing for ten years already and we know it. We’re good. If we just keep it together and keep working, we’re going to make it, and that’s what we all want more than anything.

And that’s why I can’t keep fucking Travis, even though part of me definitely, absolutely, and positively still wants to. I can’t deny that. In fact, I can’t stop thinking about it. But I can’t risk it.

We’ve got everything to lose.

I’m in my old bedroom at Mom’s house in Flemington, the little blue cape where I grew up, where she and Granny live. The walls of my room are still that dawn-pink color I had to have when I was eight so it would match my Hello Kitty comforter set, and I can still see old Scotch tape marks in a few spots where my Cure and Gang of Four and Smiths posters hung in high school. Mom keeps my room just how I left it, minus my favorite posters and the constant pile of laundry in the corner, but my Hello Kitty comforter is still on the bed (and yes, I did sleep with it all the way through high school because I still unironically loved it). I’m glad my room is still here, but it makes me kind of sad to think of my room without me in it. It was hard enough to move out as it was, even if I’m only forty-five minutes away.

My father died when I was fifteen and whenever I tell people this they get that sorry look in their eye and I have to decide whether to tell them not to be sorry because the man was dead to me when he walked out when I was ten. He was a guitarist, too. He played in a mid-level touring act called, ironically enough, Consequence. He died in a car accident while driving drunk, but by then we hadn’t seen or heard anything from him in five years. My mother didn’t need any more incentive to dissuade me from a career in music than that, but for better or worse I guess I was born with the bug because I got my first guitar from him the year he left and I figured out how to play it all by myself and then I couldn’t stop playing it. Much to my mother’s consternation and disappointment.

When I got to Mom’s this afternoon, I told her that I had a headache and then felt bad because I didn’t really, I was just in a shitty mood.

Now I’m lying on my bed while she gets the Advil. She comes in with a cold washcloth and drapes it over my forehead.

“How was the show?” she never asks. I’m just lying here, wishing that she would. Instead I get: “When do your midterm grades come out?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “The semester just started a few weeks ago.”

“How do you think you’re doing?”

“I’ll keep the scholarship.”

“I don’t know if you understand, Emmy. If you lose that scholarship, we won’t be able to afford your senior year.”

But I do understand. Completely. Because she never, ever lets me forget how close I came to losing it last semester when I was “too damned busy playing Madonna.”

“Kim Gordon,” I say.

“Who?”

“Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth—that’s who I want to be.”

“How about Sally Ride?”

“Mom, I’m an English major. Not a future astronaut.”

“Erica Jong?”

Nothing like having expectations to live up to, that’s what I always say.

“You’re too skinny,” she says, looking worried. “Spending too much going out to bars and not enough on food.”

This is where I shut up because anything else coming out of my mouth is going to make more things come out of hers and now I really do have a headache. She kisses my forehead like I’m five and not a grown woman, and then she leaves and tells me to rest until dinner and turns out the light. I hear the Home Shopping Network on in the living room and my grandmother on the phone with my older cousin Nick, the unabashed ’80s hair-band connoisseur with a permed mane of his own that would put any member of Winger to shame.

I crawl out of bed, lock my door, and get back under my covers. Maybe a nap is just the thing I need to clear the mental clutter of this day.

But when I close my eyes I don’t sleep because I’m still thinking about last night with Travis. From the moment I finally felt him hard between my legs, everything felt so frantic it was like we were a VHS tape on fast-forward. All I want to do now is wind the tape back and rewatch, frame by frame. I think I was trying to unbutton his jeans when he lifted me up off the desk and carried me to my bed. We fell onto it in a tangle of arms and legs and impatience, comforter and shoes and Timberlands kicked off onto the floor. His lips were everywhere, on my lips, yes, but also my neck, my collarbone. My mouth fell open and I inhaled deep breaths of that distinctly Travis cold-night-in-Nebraska scent. I begged him to hurry up and take me already.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

Of course I was sure. I was sure I was wrong, but I was still sure.

I pushed my jeans down to my knees and he pulled them the rest of the way off. I took his hand and kissed his palm and then, oh. Those fingers. Oh, God, his fingers. They are strong, lean, long, and I have watched his fingers make sounds on a guitar that have moved me to write notebooks full of lyrics. It was a total thrill to finally put my lips on them, to suck
on his index finger and savor the low growl from his lips before I put it just inside my underwear. Too bad I hadn’t had the foresight to wear something sexier. I was just in my old plain blue cotton pair. He rested his hand there on my belly before he slid it slowly down between my legs where I was so hot and damp that he groaned, like he was in pain from wanting me. I closed my eyes, but could feel how big I was smiling. His lips crashed down onto mine as I felt his finger slip over my clit, and all I could think was
Oh thank God Travis knows about the clit, because he is the first guy I’ve let touch me in a year who does
. He dipped his fingertip inside of me and pulled it out all slippery and rubbed it ever so lightly in a circle and I couldn’t believe it, but I came right there, just from that. It was a sex miracle, truly, because I’ve never come that fast in my life, not by myself or with anyone else.

“Jesus, Emmy,” he whispered into my neck as I was coming on his hand. “You are so fucking sexy.”

And I was just getting started.

I wriggled my underwear down my legs and he pulled it off as I pulled my T-shirt over my head. I flung my bra across the room and then I was completely naked under him. I’ve never felt so naked in all my life. I never wanted to feel so naked in all my life, either.

Under the covers in my old bedroom, I unbutton my jeans and slip my hand in my underwear and I am wet all over again. I wish he was here right now. I wish he was here to touch me and taste me like he did last night. I think of how he kissed me everywhere with his pants undone, the buckle of his belt digging into my thigh as he put his mouth on my breast, his teeth on my nipple, his tongue circling and teasing. He moved lower and kissed my belly and I would have been writhing from the anticipation but couldn’t because he was holding on to my hips, pinning them to the bed. He spread my legs and kissed the inside of my thigh and I tasted blood because I bit my lip so hard. Then his tongue was finally on my clit and I’m surprised I didn’t rip fistfuls of his hair out I was pulling on it so hard.

“God Emmy, you’re so sweet,” he whispered into me, and then he started to lick. “Let me just live the rest of my days right here between your legs.”

I laughed when he said it, but then he tongued my clit in rough, persistent circles and filled me with those long, accomplished fingers of his, and I came again, the hardest I ever had, calling his name so loud I am still surprised I didn’t wake everyone in the house up.

He looked so happy after I came—that’s what I think I love the most about the whole thing. He looked like he just won something. Like he’d just been signed to Matador. I pulled him back up to me and kissed him, his lips and chin all slick. The taste of myself on his tongue as he filled my mouth with it made me feel good and dirty and close to him in a way I’ve never felt close to anyone before, and right now as I’m thinking about him I’m coming again, feeling frustrated and pathetic because I realize that night with him is gone and it isn’t coming back.

Big sigh. Big, heavy, stupid sigh. I cover my head with my pillow and think about how awesome Travis smells after a gig, and how can anyone smell good at a time like that? It’s not natural, except it is, and it’s all naturally him. I wonder if he remembered to flyer the telephone poles over by the River dorms. Last time the beat brothers skipped that spot, and we always get a few folks from the River dorms if we flyer it.

“Emmy, dinner!” I hear Granny call from the hallway.

Dinner tonight is my favorite, thin spaghetti and Mom’s homemade gravy. I eat as much as I can to avoid the critical stares and then explain I have a paper due and need to leave early.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Mom says. “Being responsible.”

She has no concept that dragging three guys and a vanload of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment six hours north to Boston, playing a show to a packed crowd at the Middle East, managing to get paid your guarantee, leaving with all your stuff, and driving home all night in a snowstorm so you can turn in your paper for Modern Novel the next morning is the height of personal responsibility. I’ve tried to explain it, but she doesn’t see it that way. She sees it as “fun.” A “hobby.” And I’m resigned to the fact that that she’ll never see it otherwise.

“Any cute guys at school this semester?” Granny asks as I’m sopping up the last bit of gravy with a piece of white bread, because that’s all we’ve got in the house.

“Plenty,” I say. “But I’m too busy studying to pay attention to any of them.”

“I like that one boy in your band,” she says. “Blondie. He’s a honey.”

“You can’t date boys in your own band,” I say. “Bands have rules against that kind of thing. It’s like dating your boss.”

“Then what fun is it?” she asks, with complete sincerity. “Being surrounded by cute boys and never dating any of them?”

“I don’t do it for fun,” I say. “I’m trying to accomplish something. Did you work at Lipton for fun?”

“No, but I did meet your grandfather there,” she says with a wink, and what can I say?

She wins.

***

I know I should be home working on my poetry paper, but instead I’m standing on Travis’s front porch. I drove straight here from Mom’s because I have important, unfinished business with Travis. The way we left it at Neubies this morning isn’t
okay—things are too weird and I need to un-weird them in a hurry—so on my way home I stop in front of his house, park across the street. I see the light on in his room and get out of the car, but I can’t seem to get further than the front porch. The doorbell is right there, but I just stare at it because I have no idea what I’m going to say to him yet. I’m still working on it.

We can’t go on like this.

It isn’t you, it’s me.

Let’s just try to be adults here. It’s only sex.

Oh wait, I tried that one already and it was a dismal failure.

I’m not prepared when the door opens and there’s Travis, barefoot and his hair is all messy like he’s been napping on it.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.” There’s a long pause and then he opens the screen door and I go in.

Travis lives in an old house a few blocks from me in Highland Park with George from the local punk band Fester, but George isn’t here. He’s probably drinking at the Ale ’n ’Wich with the Rutgers women’s rugby team since he’s their coach.

The living room and the entire downstairs is dark. Travis puts on a light and offers me a seat but I don’t take it. He stands there with his hands in his pockets, leaning against the back of the couch.

“How was flyering?” I ask.

“It was fine,” he says. “I got the River dorms. I even went up to Vintage Vinyl. Picked up the Archers of Loaf album.”

“Make a tape for me?”

“Already did.”

But I don’t really care about Archers of Loaf right now. I care about how Travis’s forearms are flexing as he crosses them in front of his chest. Without realizing I’m going to do it, I let out a noisy, exasperated sigh because I’m so frustrated with myself, because I can’t stop wanting him. How am I going to rehearse with him if I can’t stop thinking about how much I want to fuck him all the time?

“Emmy, what’s the matter?” he says.

“I don’t want it to be weird,” I say. “That’s all.”

“Yeah? Well what do you want it to be?”

This is an excellent question but I don’t have an answer for him.
The same,
I think. I want it to be the same as it’s always been because it’s been so good. But I don’t say this because it’s in direct conflict with something else I want. Namely, to take the stairs three at a time and jump right into bed with him.

Travis reaches for me, tugging on the sleeve of my jacket, and pulls me into him. His arms are around me and I lay my head on his shoulder.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” I say, and I run the tip of my nose along his neck which has the Travis cold-mountain, hot-sheets scent in spades, and I seem unable to keep my lips off of him and now I’m back in the place where I’m not able to think about the ramifications, the fallout. He exhales and his arms tighten around me. I feel his hand at the base of my neck, his fingers threading into my hair, spread out and strong and careful on my skull like he’s holding a giant, priceless glass egg and it’s about to crack. This is basically how my head feels. Like it’s about to split open from the pressure of holding my dire need to keep everything the same between us and my intense desire to get Travis back into my pants.

In spite of myself I kiss him, and his lips are that amazingly odd guy-lip combination of strong and soft all at once. I remember learning in eighth grade band that there are twenty-one different muscles in your lips and I think Travis is using them all right now. He kisses my upper lip, then my lower lip. He runs his tongue along my teeth and when I open my mouth a little wider he gives it to me and I suck it lightly, wanting some part of him inside of me. He groans like he’s trying to hold himself back and I’m sure I don’t want him to. I run my hands under his shirt and feel the muscles in his back all tightly wound. I want to pull his shirt right off him. I want to tongue him all over. I want to touch him and make him come in my hand. I put my hand over him and he’s hard, fully hard, and oh, God, I don’t care, I want this again. I’m seconds from unbuttoning his pants and getting on my knees when he hesitates.

“Wait . . .” he says.

The front door slams open and George barges right in on us, with eight sweaty, muddy, drunken rugby players stampeding in after him.