Rock N Soul (18 page)

Chris was his old self on the train ride back home the next morning, gleefully jumping through people and climbing under the bottom of the train to see the tracks rushing along underneath us. It was still reasonably warm for Boston in late December when we got back, so I stuffed my gloves in my coat pocket and walked home a little more slowly than usual, taking in the sunshine.

Chris seemed to enjoy it as well. I wondered if he’d get used to being out in the sunlight or if it would always seem strange to him after his rock star routine.

“So,” he said as we walked along the red brick line in the pavement that marked the Freedom Trail. It wasn’t strictly on our way home—actually, it wasn’t on the way home at all, if you wanted to be honest about it—but there was some human interest in watching the tourists taking pictures and pretending to knock on Paul Revere’s door. “Do you like it here? In Boston?”

I paused to let a group of tourists get farther ahead of us so that they wouldn’t hear me. “Yeah. I love it here. It’s my spirit city.”

Chris looked over at me. “Your spirit city?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You know, sometimes where you are is just a place where, you know, you are. Or a place you grew up. And you like it okay, or you hate it, or whatever. And then you go somewhere else and suddenly you have this rush of
home
from it, even if you’ve never been there before. You feel the rhythm of the place and it seems like . . .” I thought for a moment, but couldn’t come up with another way to say it. I shrugged. “Well, it seems like home.”

“I can understand that, I guess.”

“Haven’t you ever felt like that? You’ve traveled all over the world. Surely there was someplace that felt right to you.”

He seemed lost in his own mind for a few seconds. “Denver.”

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Denver?”

“Yeah,” he said. “First time we did a show there. When we were leaving, I made Brent give me the window seat because I wanted to watch while we flew away from it. That was about the only time I really wished we had a few days between gigs.”

“Seriously?” I asked. “Denver?”

He glared at me. “What’s wrong with Denver?”

“Nothing,” I assured him. “I just thought . . . you’ve traveled the entire world and instead of choosing, like, Paris or Moscow or Bora Bora, you pick Denver.”

He shrugged. “You asked me if anywhere felt right. Denver felt right.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sounds legit.”

He looked away. “But I never wanted to
move
there. It was just a really great city.”

“I knew the minute I stepped out of the car here,” I said. “Granted, I thought what I was feeling a connection to was Harvard. But turns out it was the city in general.”

“You went to Harvard?” he asked, sounding surprised enough that it sort of annoyed me.

“No,” I said, then decided to brag a little. “But I got accepted to it.”

He stopped walking and stared at me. “You got accepted to Harvard and you didn’t go?”

Which was a perfectly normal follow-up question to what I’d said, but somehow I hadn’t expected it and it just annoyed me more. I shrugged my shoulders and avoided his gaze. “I got a full ride to Emerson. And Grandma said she’d figure out some way to pay for me to go to Harvard if I got in, but I couldn’t ask her for that. They probably would have worked with me on the tuition and if I hadn’t had a full scholarship somewhere else I could have figured it out, but . . .” I shrugged again. “It seemed selfish to make her struggle to help me pay when I could go somewhere else for free. And they had a pretty cool degree in political communication and social advocacy that I was really interested in, so I signed up.”

“So . . . wait. You’re not in school now?” He crossed his arms. “You haven’t been skipping class to work, have you?”

“No,” I said, frowning. “I’m not in school. I did four semesters and then I just . . . never registered for more classes.”

“You gave up a full-ride scholarship.”

“Yes.”

“You had a full-ride scholarship and you gave it up.”

“You already said that,” I pointed out.

“
Why
?”

I wrapped my arms across my chest. “Grandma went to the doctor, and they said it was cancer. They did like a thousand tests on her and found out that the tumor was benign, so they just removed it and she was fine. But the time between when the doctor first said the
c
-word and when they said she was going to be okay was, you know, stressful. And I missed my registration date because I was pacing outside the surgery unit, and then when I went to register, this one class I really needed was full. The professor said he’d put me on the waiting list, but I didn’t get in because nobody dropped. So I figured I’d sit out a semester and then go back in the spring. And then I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Because just working was the path of least resistance, I guess.”

“You bitch constantly about how poor you are,” he said. “I mean,
constantly
. And you just walked out on college because you didn’t feel like getting your ass to the registrar’s office?”

“It wasn’t like that,” I snapped. “I always intended to go back. It wasn’t a conscious decision. It just . . . never happened.”

“I see,” he said, then angled his body away and started walking again. I trailed along behind him for a while, feeling pretty ashamed of myself, before he slowed down his pace significantly to let me catch up with him.

“So anyway,” he said, way too brightly, “do you want to see what Evie Tellerman looks like naked?”

I raised both eyebrows at him. “You have nude pics of Evie Tellerman?”

“Nude
video
,” he corrected. “Of me boning her.”

My mouth dropped open. “You’re shitting me.”

He grinned. “Not kidding. Of course, this was before she got her Oscar. She was less pretentious back then.”

“You boned Evie Tellerman.”

“
Hard
,” he said, still smirking. “And I know, pics or it didn’t happen, so I’ll show you the pics.”

I thought for a minute. “Isn’t that, you know, unethical? Showing me video of her without her permission?”

He shrugged. “She knew I was videotaping it. And she told me not to sell it to the paparazzi or leak it online or give it to the media. She never said I couldn’t show my friends.”

“That seems . . .” I thought about it. “I don’t know. Still seems skeevy.”

“The way I see it, since it’s only you, it’s basically personal use,” he argued. “And besides, I know you won’t leak it.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because you could have taken pictures of my corpse and gotten reasonably rich off of selling them,” he pointed out, “and you didn’t.”

“That’s true, I guess.”

“So if you promise me you won’t let the videos get out, I’ll show you.”

I probably should have said no, but curiosity apparently kills both cats and bellboys, so instead I just nodded. “I promise.”

“All right.” He waved in the direction of my apartment with a flourish. “Then let’s get home.”

I walked a lot more quickly after that. Chris was practically bouncing on his heels as we walked, and I was alternately turned on by the thought of seeing an A-list actress doing the horizontal tango and weirded out that it was
Chris
she was going to be doing it with.

When we got back to my apartment, I made Chris wait while I changed into lounging-around-the-house clothes and fixed myself a glass of water, mostly because I enjoyed listening to him whine about how slow I was going. Then I settled myself on the couch with my laptop in my lap and pulled up my internet browser.

He gave me the website, and I typed it into the address bar. It was one of those mass cloud storage sites where you could upload your files and access them from anywhere. I clicked on the username box and Chris told me what to type.

“I still can’t believe you saved your porn stash on the internet,” I told him as the page loaded.

He rolled his eyes. “It’s not
just
porn. It started out as nonsexy pictures and things I was writing. I only put the porn in there later, when I got paranoid that people would steal my computer.”

“So you uploaded it to the hackable internet,” I said as I typed in the password.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he grumbled. “Anyway, it’s good for you that I did. Because you wouldn’t be able to see it if I hadn’t.” He motioned at the screen. “It’s the Vids folder.”

I opened the folder. There were a good many videos in the file, all titled with initials and dates. He pointed to one about halfway down the list. The file name was “CR_ET_091611.” I opened it.

The video was of decent quality, but it was obviously a home video. It started out with the usual amateur porn Awkward Talking About How We’re Going to Bone. I slid the time bar ahead, and Chris and Evie went from Awkward Talking to bed-shaking sex immediately.

“Wow,” I said. “I mean . . . wow.” I tilted my head at the screen.

“She was fantastic,” he breathed. “I mean, really amazing.”

“She’s so . . .” I tilted my head even more as if that would let me get a better angle on the scene. “Flexible.”

“Wait until you see the part where she sits on my dick and spins around,” he said, smirking. “I thought my head was going to explode.”

And sure enough, after a few more seconds, they switched positions and she started bouncing up and down on his cock, then did something with her legs that made her spin around on him. It seemed like a move that you shouldn’t try at home, at least not without a spotter and some sort of pulley system, but she made it seem graceful. Well, as graceful as sex ever is.

“Get a load of those tits,” Chris said, sighing softly. “They tasted like apples. She had some edible body butter or something on.”

“Jesus, dude,” I said. “I know you told me this was a sex tape of you and Evie Tellerman, but . . . this is a sex tape of you and Evie Tellerman.”

“Sure is,” he said, beaming and looking ridiculously proud of himself.

“Who else do you have?” I said, closing the screen and going back to the file list.

He scanned over the list and then pointed at “CR_VN_070111.” I clicked on it.

“Oh my God,” I said. “Is that Valerie Nobles?”

“Sure is,” he crowed. “I didn’t actually fuck her, but she spends like half an hour deep-throating me. It was mind-blowing. Here, skip forward a little.” He pointed to a spot on the time slider, and I moved the video there.

Valerie was deeply involved in the cocksucking by that time. Video-Chris had his head thrown back and his hands tangled in her hair. The noises he was making were . . . well, very interesting. I glanced over at him without even meaning to.

“Don’t watch
me
,” he said, not making eye contact. “Watch the video.”

I turned my eyes back to the screen. Valerie pulled her mouth off of Chris’s cock to lick the tip of it, which made us both shiver and made Video-Chris moan loudly.

I cleared my throat. “I’ve jacked it to her before.”

“Yeah, me too.” Chris’s voice was a little gravelly, but as per the Bro Code of watching porn with other dudes, I very tactfully didn’t mention it. “And I have since, actually.”

I laughed at that, the sound coming out almost as much a gasp as a chuckle. “I can definitely understand.”

Chris—the one sitting on my couch—was hard by that point, which answered the question I’d never asked myself about whether or not ghosts could get erections. But the Bro Code covered that too, so I didn’t say anything. After all, the only thing keeping my own interest from being totally obvious was the laptop pinning me down.

But still, I had to ask. “So . . . can you jack it now?”

He turned to me, eyebrows raised. “You want me to jerk off on your couch?”

“No,” I said quickly. “I just mean . . . can you? As in, do you have the ability to, or are you just . . . stuck?”

He looked down at himself, and my own eyes flicked to his pants before I caught myself in total violation of the Code and snapped my eyes back to the screen.

“I don’t know,” he said after a moment. “I haven’t tried it, surprisingly enough. I mean, I can feel it when I touch my arms or my hair or things. So I guess I can?” He chuckled, a little breathily. “Doesn’t seem like the most prudent time to try it, though. I’ll report back later.”

“Deal,” I said. “It doesn’t really matter. I was just curious.”

He laughed again at the same time as Video-Chris started vocally encouraging Valerie to go faster and take him in deeper. My dick twitched at that, and I told myself it was totally in response to Valerie.

I clicked away from the video quickly.

Chris gave a tiny whimper. “Why’d you click away? It was almost over.”

“I don’t really want to see a money shot from a guy who’s sitting right beside me,” I explained. “That shit’s awkward, bro.”

“Fair enough,” he said, “but you might have to excuse me to the bathroom if you keep doing that.”

I laughed nervously. “Yeah, we might have to do that anyway.” He gave me a strange look, so I tried to clarify. “Seeing these A-list chicks naked would give a hard-on to a monk.”

He rolled his eyes. “You must not watch much porn.”

“As much as the next guy, I guess,” I said. “But usually it doesn’t star people like this.” I scanned the list. “Who’s G. S.?”

“Who?” He peered at the list, then rushed into a dismissal. “Oh, nobody. Just a groupie. Why don’t you click on the M. R. one? That’s somebody you’d know.”

I hovered my mouse over the M. R. file, then glanced back up at the G. S. one. “If it’s just a groupie, then why would you care if I clicked on it?”

He frowned. “It’s boring. You’d hate it. I should have deleted that one before, actually.”

“Uh-huh.” I moved my mouse back up to CR_GS_080410.

“Don’t you dare, Tyler,” Chris said. His boner had totally gone away, not that I noticed.

“Well, now you’ve got me curious,” I said, grinning.

“I mean it,” he growled. “Just step away from the file.”

“Yeah, dude, there’s no way I’m not clicking on it now.” I clicked on the file and immediately slid the timer about halfway into the video, then pressed Play.