Loud is How I Love You (4 page)

“Get a room, horndogs,” George says, blowing by us on the way to the kitchen. Molly the hooker, who we’re pretty sure is banging George these days, flips on the TV and plops down on the couch, and the rest arrange themselves like drunk furniture around the living room. George comes back out with two six-packs of beer and tosses them to everyone around the room.

“Cheers!” Molly says as George tosses her a can.

“You want?” he asks me, shaking a beer can.

Travis glares at him. He shrugs his shoulders and pops the top off a can and sprays that shit right into his own mouth
before perching himself on the arm of the sofa. “We won!” he says, and the entire room breaks out into a rowdy cheer.

Travis takes both my hands in his. His eyes are heavy as he looks at me.

“Come upstairs,” he says.

“Actually, I really do have a paper due,” I say, which is true but that’s not why I’m saying it. “I should go.”

Travis makes a face and he doesn’t let go. I am beginning to squirm from the way he gazes at me.

“Call me later,” he says, tucking a strand of my hair behind my ear.

But I don’t.

It’s Tuesday-night rehearsal in the beat brothers’ basement, and I haven’t had the ovaries to talk to Travis since I almost blew him in the foyer on Sunday. I should have called him, but I’m a baby so I didn’t. I didn’t call because I didn’t know what to say because I don’t know how I should feel. It’s too many competing things all at the same time and I know I’m fucking with his head and I’m terrified he’s going to hate me. This is exactly why I never should have had sex with him in the first place, never mind mauling him the second time. I figure a cooling-off period will help. I’m probably wrong. As usual.

Tonight he barely says anything to me and it sucks because this cave of sound is like my padded finger-painting room. It’s your average New Brunswick basement, part faded memories, part unfinished laundry, part weed-smoking, video-game-playing emporium, but this is the Soft band basement, so there’s no weed smoking here (weed makes us sound like a jam band and fuck that). Just our gear all lined up against the wall, like shadows of ourselves that live underground until they’re released out into the wild of the greater New York City metro club scene. We rehearse across from a large mirror so we can practice not looking like dicks on stage. There are four cheap mismatched area rugs on the concrete floor that we got from Joey’s father’s warehouse and we’ve hung black packing blankets on the walls so the sound doesn’t bounce off the cinder blocks. It’s not perfect, but it works okay and we rehearse at full volume, so that’s an accomplishment. There’s even a couch for hanging out at the other end, near the washer and dryer that is always full of laundry in various stages of being folded.

The band cave isn’t much to look at (unless you like to look at amplifiers, like we do), but it’s a place I love because I can come here and let go and create whatever I want with some of my favorite people in the universe. And while Bean may be topping my favorite-people list right now, much like I wish he was topping
me
right now, I can’t even make direct eye contact with him. So tonight the cave doesn’t feel like my safe place at all. It’s feeling like the inside of a grenade, and I have no idea who’s holding the pin.

But the strange thing is, Travis and I are playing better than ever, like we’re in some guitar battle of wills but instead of fighting each other, our guitar riffs are having beautiful, sexy, angry sex together. Oh Jesus let me not think about beautiful, angry sex with Travis right now because if we were alone, I’d probably rather just be on my knees with my head between his Les Paul and his dick.

Why do I keep thinking like this when I know it’s fucking everything up? Stupid sex hormones, that’s why. But I’ve got a mind, I can rise above biology. I think.

Travis doesn’t say much of anything to me all night, but he gives Cole a hard time about stepping all over my short lead
on “Come On Over.” Then he loses patience when Joey misses the drum fill in “Short Shrift.” He storms out of the basement when it’s over and the beat brothers ask if I know what the hell his problem is, but I can’t bring myself to tell them. I never knew Travis could be so pissy, but I guess guys can be like that sometimes, if my limited experience is any indicator.

I say “limited” because the Michael Bolton fan was the last technical boyfriend I had, and that was nearly two years ago now. I met Josh in my Shakespeare survey course. He was a graduate student who was a TA in that class and ran my discussion section. He was from North Carolina and in his first year of the PhD program, and I should have known it would never last when he confessed that
Soul Provider
was his favorite album to “make love” to. In hindsight, it seems so obvious now that it was never going to work, not that I didn’t try. I even let him fuck me to “How Can We Be Lovers.” More than once! Sure, now the subliminal (or conscious, overt) message is obvious. But back then I was still smoking a lot of weed, okay? (He also apparently had no idea of what a clitoris is, or its function, or where to locate it. I really hope he’s sorted that out by now or has realized he’s gay.) Josh would get really moody like Travis is now, usually when I couldn’t do something lame like go out on a Friday night because I had a show to play or to be at. He would come out with me sometimes, but he said he thought my band was “brackish” (no, really, he said “brackish”) and too loud and I’d be better off with an acoustic guitar so my voice could be more prominent and I wouldn’t have to screech so much. I could even cover “How Can We Be Lovers.” Suffice it to say it didn’t last, and afterwards, I decided it just wasn’t the right time in my life for a relationship. I was just going to be a nun of rock ’n’ roll, only with more hand jobs.

I was with Josh when I first met Travis. Travis lived down the hall from me in Demarest dorm when he was a sophomore and I was in my first semester of my freshman year. I’d heard him playing out of a little Princeton Reverb amp every day for two months before I got the nerve to walk down the hall and ask him about it. He’d just done a flawless “Back in Black” solo, his door was open, and I walked in and asked him what year his Les Paul was. He handed it right to me and I started playing “Starpower” by Sonic Youth and we started talking about the album
EVOL
, and the next thing I knew, I was half an hour late to Spanish. We were friends from then on. A month later when he joined Soft and we first jammed, it was fucking magic. It really was. Not just that he was good, but he knew when to layer it in heavy, when to pull back, when he needed more growl in his tone from the Tube Screamer, less bite from the MXR. When to get out of my way and when to take over. He clicked with Cole right away and he put up with Joey, which is all Cole and I could have asked of anyone.

He was just right, is what he was. He still is, if we could just stop being awkward and weird.

Rehearsal ends abruptly when a storm rolls in overhead and the lights flicker. We stop playing just in time to hear the loud crash of a lightning strike, somewhere way too damn close for me, and I get antsy because oh shit, do I hate lightning. My house got hit by lightning when I was fourteen and although we were all perfectly fine, I’ve never gotten over my fear of it. Travis and Cole and Joey know this about me. I will not rehearse during thunderstorms and luckily, if there’s a storm while we’re playing a show, the music is normally so loud I don’t even notice. But if I do notice? Oh hell no. I unplug and
curl up in a ball somewhere.

I’m frantically unplugging my amp, the PA, and everything in the basement now.

“Emmy, it’s fine,” Joey says, exasperated. “It’ll be over in just a few minutes. We really should take another pass through ‘Fire in the Empire’ before we quit for the night.”

Another lightning strike nearby sounds like two eighteen-wheelers just had a head-on collision upstairs in the living room. I jump so high I nearly hit the crappy drop-ceiling tile over my head.

“We’re done for tonight,” Travis says. He turns and puts his hand on my arm. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, sure,” I say, trying to stay cool. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

I start to calm down as we’re packing up and it sounds like the lightning is moving farther away. Travis asks me if I want a ride home, hands all shoved in his pockets, biting his lower lip, trying to look nonchalant but failing as he waits for me to say yes, but I don’t say yes. Then Travis leaves, all pissed off. Great.

The truth is, I’m not ready to be alone with Travis because (see above) if I’m alone with him I’m pretty sure I’m going to blow him and that’s just not going to help anything right now. I’m trying to wait until I get over this temporary compulsion to hump him until his legs are numb, but I really can’t do it yet because I can’t stop thinking of his fingers in me, his tongue up in me as I’m coming all over it. His face when he finally gets his dick into me all the way. I can’t stop thinking about how much I want to see that again.

I can’t describe how much it hurts, now that I know what I’m missing.

***

It’s Friday night now and we’re wrapping up our set at the Melody. We’re playing upstairs where the live room is, just to the left of the bar. Tonight we’re playing between Hanna Octane and Red Five, and the place is jam-packed with sweaty, half-drunk bodies and we’re having a great night. We’re on our last song and the crowd is pressed all the way up to the lip of the low stage, right on us so I can’t even move. Joey is killing it behind me with the cymbals. Cole is to my left, his fingers bleeding on the bass he’s rocking so hard. God I love that guy. Travis is to my right, his hair full of sweat and in his eyes, and Millie is right in front of him, so close she can cloud up his pick guard with her horny, gin-soaked breath, but his eyes are closed, like he’s not even here. He doesn’t even realize there are a hundred people here glued to every note he plays.

Despite the weirdness between me and Travis, we’ve hit some new level of playing together where it all just works and when I’m singing I disappear into the words and I don’t care about anything but letting it all go and being part of that feeling.
I finish the last chorus of our last song tonight and look over at Travis, and he’s giving me the look. The look that says
Let’s fucking do this
, and I’m so here for that. I nod and he gives me the nod back. The room sways and Bean rips into some insane feedback that sounds like the world is ending, and so I turn around and crank up the gain on my Big Muff (another guitar pedal, a big Soviet-style green metal box that could probably make a pretty good weapon used as a projectile), face my Fender Twin, and my rig lets out this gorgeous, angelic howl and together with the low rumble from Travis’s half stack it’s all so beautiful in a postapocalyptic destroy-diamonds-in-the-rubble kind of way. At the end of the set, we are all high on the feeling of it. We leave the crowd begging us for an encore we won’t do because we’re already over time and we’re not dicks.

“Hey, Mickey is here,” Joey says as I’m gathering up my pedals. He points to the bar, and sure enough, Mickey Melchiondo, or Dean Ween as he’s known, is having a beer there with a few other locals. Holy shit.

Ween are heroes of the New Brunswick music scene. Dean and Gene Ween started out in the Court Tavern basement with just a boom box and each other and made it all the way to Elektra Records. They understand what it’s like to be a Jersey band (even if they’re from New Hope), to be treated like shit in New York City and Philadelphia, to work twice as hard to be taken seriously. They’re a major-label, nationally touring act now—the ones who got out of here and made it. They’re who I want to be.

“Go talk to him,” Joey says. “Maybe we’ll get that opener spot at Ag Field Day.”

I look up and feel a burning in the pit of my stomach. I’ve been introduced to Mickey before—he and Aaron come back to New Brunswick often enough to hang out and Carl from the Court is their regular sound guy when they go on tour. They’re plenty approachable, not dicks at all. This is actually a good night for Mickey to catch our set but there’s nothing I can think of to say to him without sounding like an asshole.

“Em, go see what he thought of our set,” Joey prods me.

“How can I do that without being douchey?”

“Just go sit at the bar,” he says. “We’ll get the gear.”

But I’m not going alone, that’ll look so obvious. I ask Travis if he’ll come get a drink at the bar with me.

“Why do you need me to get a drink with you?” he asks. “I’ve got gear to load.”

“Please?” I say.

Travis schleps our amps over to the gear lounge and then comes back into the room and points at the bar. I meet him there and he orders himself a Guinness and me a vodka tonic. He hands Greg the bartender our drink tickets, but Greg gives them right back.

“You guys were on fucking fire tonight,” he says. “All drinks on the house forever.”

That’s why we love this town.

Mickey is deep in conversation with Billy Broadband. We don’t really know Mickey, we’ve just met him once and he’s an actual rock star and I for one am sweating, stinking, my hair is a mess, and I’m sure my eyeliner is all over my face so I’m not going to make a point of talking to him. Bean and I drink our round in relative silence. Travis isn’t even looking at me now, but looking around like he’s searching for someone else. I hope it’s not Millie, but I’m pretty sure it is. I’m staring at his profile, the bead of sweat he wipes from his brow with a cocktail napkin. I poke him in the arm and he gives me an annoyed look, so I raise my glass to him in toast.

“For that feedback solo,” I say. “The best I may have ever heard.”

He stares blankly at me. He doesn’t raise his glass. He just finishes his beer as he levels this stern sort of look at me. Then he orders us another round and damn, we must have played really well because my drink is strong as hell.

Red Five has started to play and it’s louder than war in here. I lean over and yell in Travis’s ear so he can hear me.

“What the hell is your problem?”

“What’s
my
problem?” he says. “What’s yours?”

“You’re so mad at me all the time now,” I say, and then I try to take a teasing approach and punch him in the shoulder and lean in. “This is the thanks I get for letting you fuck me?”

“Letting me fuck you?” he says, and he doesn’t find it funny, that’s obvious. “Emmy, you begged me to fuck you.”

I blush, bite my lip like a fool because this is actually true. And fuck him anyway because now I am remembering fucking him all over again, in acute detail. I was so thankfully distracted by all that excellent rock we just conjured up in this joint, but now in my mind I’m right back to last weekend, when I was fully naked on my bed, on my back with Travis hovering over me. I shoved his pants down, his boxers, felt the muscles tensing in his thighs, and then he was naked on top of me, hard against my leg.

For a few minutes we did nothing but kiss, with him harder and harder against my inner thigh, teasing me with his tongue, breathing into me until I couldn’t take any more. I needed him and I told him, just like that.

“I’m here,” he said. Then he took my hand and intertwined his fingers with mine and kissed them. “I’m right here.”