Stay Until We Break (18 page)

“Sunny.”

“I know, I know, hurry up.”

“I don’t think it’s here.”

“Fucking Joey!” I groan. I curse myself again for not being on birth control. But oh God, I want him so bad now I’m aching inside. His skin is soft and silky and slippery and I can’t seem to stop myself from lowering down just a little more while he lies perfectly still and grits his teeth.

“Oh Christ, Sunny . . .”

“We won’t do it, I just want to know what it feels like,” I whisper. I’m not going to actually fuck him, that’s what I tell myself. But I can’t think straight and I don’t stop, like I promise. It’s like the feel of his bare cock has just shut my brain right off and my body, warm and willing and starving for him, has taken over. I push until he’s all the way inside of me and he holds my hips still and groans.

“Sonia, honey,” he says, his jaw clenched with the effort of staying still. “You’re playing a dangerous game here.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry, I . . .” I don’t mean it, do I? The way he feels, so warm and full and close, renders me speechless. I sit on top of him and roll my hips forward as he swears and holds me down on him, all the way inside of me, and I know I have to pull off and I swear I will never do this again until I’m on the pill. But then Cole starts to move, grinding into me, and the friction against my clit and the feel of his skin to mine puts my brain totally offline. There’s only one thing I care about right now, and that’s the feeling of him filling me as he slowly rocks his hips to mine. I want him to take up all the space inside of me and then to take more. I want him to take it all, everything I have, and fuck if I’m not beginning to tighten around him already.

“Cole . . . I’m right there,” I say, my voice shaking. “I’m right fucking there.”

“Christ, Sonia,” he says. “Okay, fuck, okay . . .” Then in a frenzy, he puts me on my back, pulls out, and then slams right back into me again and starts to fuck me, slow and hard and steady, and as amazing as sex has been every time with him, unprotected sex is a million times better. So much better, I’ve completely forgotten about the “unprotected” part, as in, this is how new souls are brought into the world, but it feels so Goddamn right I can see why.

“You’d better come now,” he says through his teeth, “because I swear to God I’m not going to be able to pull out if you don’t hurry, and fuck, Sunshine, you’re so wet. Fuck, fuck, fuck . . .”

I reach down and touch my clit, rubbing in circles just like I’ve done countless times imagining him exactly like this in me, but never in my wildest, dirtiest dreams did it make me feel like this. A shudder rips through me and I start to collapse around him. A sound comes out of me, feral and piercing the night. He clamps his hand down over my mouth and says, “That’s it, Sunshine. Come nice and hard all over that dick.”

My eyes roll back as my body melts under him and into the ground, and holy hell do I come. I claw at his back as I tighten and pulse around that sweet, bare cock of his. I’m so wet that it’s hard to believe he didn’t actually come inside of me, but he didn’t. I know he didn’t because as soon as my shudders subside to a tremble, he pulls out of me, pumps himself a few times with his hand, and comes all over my stomach, all hot and sticky against my skin.

I’m in shock for a minute as I look down at the pool on my belly, sliding my fingers into it. He kneels there, staring, watching me as he catches his breath, his mouth hanging open.

“Fuck, that was close,” he says, his voice shaking.

“Porn star,” I tease him.

Cole gives a small laugh, then drops so he hovers over me. He kisses me, gentle and slow, sliding his tongue between my lips.

“Don’t ever do that to me again,” he warns. “Or you really will wind up Mrs. McCormack with a house full of brown-eyed brats up in Bergen.”

I start to laugh but I can’t hide the way that one tease, packed with a whole ton of insinuation, makes my heart feel.

“There are worse things, I guess,” I say. “If I’d played my cards a little more wrong tonight, I could have wound up with a bunch of Earl Juniors.”

“Don’t give me nightmares, now,” he says.

“Well, maybe I should go on the pill,” I say, and there it is. My declaration that I want this to keep going. I admit that the way he stiffens and sucks in his breath but says nothing in response makes my stomach drop to my knees, makes me wish I hadn’t taken a perfectly incredible moment between us and made it complicated. “I mean, Emmy’s been on the pill since freshman year, just to be on the safe side. It’s just, you know . . .”

He kisses me, cutting off my nervous ramble, calming my shaky nerves and stuttering breath. He kisses me until I feel calm and relaxed under him. Then he sweeps a strand of hair out of my eyes.

“I think that’s a good idea,” he says.

“You do?”

“Yeah,” he says, and smiles in a way that claims my heart for good. “I do.”

Cole

I swear, I almost told her last night. I almost told her everything I want her to know, starting with the truth about quitting the band and ending with the reality that I’m totally gone for her, as in love as I could ever hope to be. But even so, I’m not the guy she’s going to chase her dreams with, because I can’t sit in the back of Steady Beth with her for another five years trying to break the band. And she needs to know that.

I was about to tell her, right before she started tonguing my tattoo. But when she started doing that I was fucked. Couldn’t even form coherent sentences. Then one thing led to another and the next thing I know, she’s going on the pill, and fuck, she is not going on the pill so she can hop back on Hank Hanley’s dick. Not while I live and breathe, she isn’t. She clearly thinks we’re going to be together, and while I would love for that to happen, I just don’t know if she’s still going to feel that way after I tell her what she needs to know.

But I’m going to tell her. Today.

Over breakfast at the local greasy spoon, my head feels like a rotting melon, split to the seed. We ended up sleeping in the park like a couple of hobos, and ever since we woke at sunup, Sunny has been coughing and my nose won’t stop running. Sexy, I know. Emmy and Joey also have whatever this raging tour funk is now, which I guess we deserve, given how fucking looped we’ve all been this past week, with last night being the pinnacle of dumb, drunken behavior. The only one who isn’t hacking or sneezing this morning is Travis.

“I told you guys to take extra vitamin C,” he says, like a fucking nanny. He passes out doses of some unpronounceable homeopathic thing that he swears cures the flu, and we all swallow the little sugar pellets down. Emmy pours hers into her coffee and Travis scolds her. “You have to let it dissolve under your tongue.” I’m going to call him Nurse Hatchet from now on.

Crown give us shit over biscuits this morning for being amateurs, and they’re absolutely right. They’ve been drinking and partying as hard as any of us, but they also pace themselves. “And we all had that cold last week, so consider it a gift.”

“Fuck you guys,” Joey says, sniffling into his napkin. “This isn’t a cold, it’s some plague or some shit.”

“It’s a cold, buttercup,” Miles says, sucking down an enormous glass of orange juice. “All colds feel like the plague when you’re hungover. Don’t be a pussy.”

“Leave me here to die,” Emmy says, face-planting on the table.

“Come on, tiger. We’ve got nine shows left,” Sonia answers with a stuffy nose. “Miles is right, you don’t get to be a pussy out here. Your mama is in Jersey.”

“Easy for you to say!” Emmy says. “You don’t have to get on stage when you’re feeling like shit.”

“Hey, you’re the one who wanted the spotlight,” Sonia answers.

“Girl, the spotlight was all yours last night,” Emmy says, and I know Sunny is going to gut punch me the first chance she gets but I can’t help laughing. None of us can.

“Why, what happened last night?” Joey asks. “What did I miss?”

“Sunny’s tits,” Emmy says.

Joey’s mouth drops open. I elbow him and he closes it again. “Do I even want to know?” he asks.

“Let’s just say Sonia’s tour stories are going to be legend,” Emmylou says. “That is, if this virus doesn’t kill us all before we get home to tell the tale.”

“We can only hope,” Sunny says.

“Well, if you guys would just take some extra vitamin C . . .” Travis says, and we all pelt him with our napkins, with Joey throwing in a half-eaten biscuit for good measure.

***

Next stop is Atlanta to play a birthday party. We’re all groaning about how we wish we hadn’t taken this stupid house show from the Pumps, not because we have anything against house shows—the last one we played was fucking awesome. We just feel like shit.

The party turns out to be at this insanely cool, enormous old house in midtown Atlanta. The woman who’s hosting, Misty, is probably around my uncle Patrick’s age. She’s also part owner of Criminal Records. Unfortunately, she was expecting the Pumps to play.

“You mean they never called you?” Sonia sounds annoyed.

“No,” she says. “But no matter, we’ve got you guys and Dope Double X, and maybe we’ll do some open mic. It’s my birthday and we’re going to have fun, dang it.”

We’re there early, so we hang out and play Mortal Kombat in this enormous game room in the back, which happens to be where we’re playing tonight. Sonia kicks my ass four times—girl is nothing if not competitive. And yeah, I should find a time to talk to her, but we’re all unwinding and it’s just not the right time. Later. Definitely later.

After a couple of hours of sleep and a hot shower, I almost feel human again. Or, as human as I can feel with a head full of snot. Miles and Vincent are still playing video games. Emmy and Trap are asleep in the guesthouse out back (yes, there’s a guesthouse, too, right on the other side of the in-ground pool), passed out cold and not shaking the walls with their incessant fucking, so you know Emmy is sick. Anton and Miles are freestyling a mural on the outside wall of the guesthouse while Elliot is in the pool in his boxers, floating on an inflatable raft, drinking beer. That looks pretty tempting, actually. I walk by Misty’s den, where Sonia is making more phone calls to God knows who, but this is what Sonia does while the rest of us fuck off, waiting to play sets. I decide to go hang out with her, to try to look interested or be supportive or whatever. Then when she gets off the phone she says, “Hey, Misty said we can all call home to check in.”

“That’s nice of her,” I say. “Maybe I’ll leave a message for Claire.”

“I’m thinking of calling my dad, and I know he’s going to ask me about that stupid anniversary party and I was thinking, well . . .” She pauses and gets a funny look on her face. “Would you go with me?”

“Oh,” I say, and then I choke. I never choke. But I feel like I’m under water and I can’t make any words come out.
Just say you’re a freshman at Rutgers,
I can still hear Tina saying when she took me to meet her parents for the first time.
Tell them you’re a business major and just talk about baseball—Dad loves baseball. But don’t tell him you’re a Mets fan.
Did you have to wear those shoes? Really, Cole?

“W . . . well,” I actually stammer, like my tongue has fallen asleep. “Um, when is it, again?”

“Oh, don’t worry about it,” she says, turning back to the phone, picking it up to dial. “It’s no big deal if you don’t want to go.”

I put my hand over hers to make her stop dialing the phone. She looks up at me. Her face is pink.

“I didn’t say that,” I say.

“
I
don’t want to go,” she says. “Why would you?”

“It’s not that,” I start to explain. Here’s where I tell her I’m moving to Lodi and quitting the band, right? I just open my mouth and say it, and whatever happens, I’ll deal with it. But right then, Joey comes barging into the room, blowing his nose, his eyes all watery. He complains that he can’t find the Sudafed, and Sonia leaves to go get it for him—the den mother rides again. So I sit there a few minutes, figuring I’m going to tell her I’m quitting the band as soon as she comes back so we can just hash this out.

I drum my fingers on the desk, flip through the pages of her band notebook, skimming all the notes she’s taken about contacts she’s made at radio stations, who’s playing our single, who isn’t. Snippets of conversations she’s had, names of people. There are notes on every set we’ve played, the set order, what worked well as an encore, what worked better as an opener. The crowd size and response. I look at the merchandise log. The girl is downright meticulous. But then I realize it’s been a while that I’m sitting there waiting, and she still hasn’t come back. I go to look for her and find her on top of the guest bed, curled into a little ball, still in her boots.

“Sonia?”

She doesn’t reply. I lean over the bed and see she’s out cold, still clutching a wad of tissues. I know she feels like shit, poor thing. I take her boots off and pull the blanket up over her and just watch her sleep for a little bit. I listen to her little stuffy-nosed kitten snore and try to think of how to tell her the truth.

I wish I could be the kind of guy you want.

You deserve someone who can chase your dreams with you, and I want that to be me. But here’s the thing . . .

I haven’t been totally honest.

God, oh God this sucks. I want to hold her, but I know she needs the rest and I don’t want to wake her up. I hold on to her hand and hope that it’s not the last time she lets me touch her at all.

After a little while, I decide to go call home and check in with Claire while Sonia’s sleeping. I haven’t even dropped a postcard in the mail like I promised, and by now, I’ll be home before it gets there.

I go back to Misty’s den and dial home. I hear the phone ring once, twice, three, four, five times. The answering machine picks up, so I leave a message and decide to leave the number to Misty’s house in case Mom or Claire need to call me back.

“And, Mom,” I say on the answering machine. “I had Jordan mail my last check from Rafferty’s to you, so look out for it. Cash it and put it in Claire’s account for her books. Claire, I’ll be cleaning my place out on Sunday, so plan on stopping by to see if there’s anything you want for your dorm. All right. Home soon.”

“Are you . . . are you moving or something?” Sonia asks from behind me, and I nearly jump out of my T-shirt. I turn around and it’s hard to meet her eyes, but I do. My stomach feels like I just swallowed a bucket of ice chips.

“Yes,” I say. “Back to Lodi.”

“When?” she asks.

“When we get back,” I say. “Sunday.”

She stands there making faces, like she’s still groggy and trying to process what I just told her.

“But . . . why?” she asks.

“Well, I’m covering some of Claire’s tuition to Rutgers, so I need a better job,” I explain. “I’m going to start working for my uncle’s plumbing business, and it’s up in Lodi.”

Sonia closes the door and gives me a totally perplexed look. “But what’s Joey going to do?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t told him yet.” The shock on her face reminds me of what a dick move that is, keeping my best friend of all time in the dark. “Look, I’m planning to tell him right after Maxwell’s, and I’ve already paid him the rent for September, so he’ll have some time to figure it out.”

“You’re going to commute an hour back for rehearsal four times a week? And where are you guys going to rehearse? Or are you just assuming Joey will get another roommate?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess they can always go to G&L Studios and rehearse there if they need to.”

“Don’t you mean
we
can always go rent rehearsal space at G&L?”

“No, I don’t,” I say, studying her face. She’s quick, so I know she gets it, but she just stares blankly at me. No response whatsoever. She shakes her head in disbelief.

“No,” she says. “You can’t do this.”

“I have to, Sonia,” I say. “Believe me, if there was any other way . . .”

“But you guys are going to get signed,” she says. “You can’t quit right before we break, Cole. That’s insane.”

“Getting signed doesn’t mean shit, Sonia. Most of us are not the fucking Pumps. We’re Crown the Robin—busting our asses and barely surviving. If we get signed tomorrow, it’ll still take years to make any kind of living at this, if it ever happens at all. I don’t have years. I have to make a living now.”

“But you’ve
already
worked for years for this and you’re going to quit now?”

“I have to. I’ve got obligations.”

“What obligations? To pay for your sister’s college?” she says, her voice rising. “You’re her brother, not her father! Can’t she get her own job? Take out loans?”

“Goddamn it, Sonia, just stop,” I say. I feel my heart race, my face begin to get hot. “This isn’t what I want, but I can see reality when it’s staring me right in the fucking face.”

“This isn’t reality,” she accuses. “It’s a cop-out.”

“Look, you really have no clue what reality is like for me, all right?”

“Yeah, apparently I don’t,” she says. “But how could I when you’ve been lying to me this entire time?”

“I haven’t lied to you,” I say, exasperated.

“Bullshit!” she yells back. “You let me believe you were staying in the band—that’s totally dishonest.” Fucking hell, she looks like she’s just been punched straight in the gut. “It’s like you were just pretending the whole time.”

“Come on, Sonia. What are you insinuating here, that I’ve just been fucking you and it’s meant nothing to me?”

“Then why didn’t you tell me the truth?” she demands to know.

The edge in her voice pushes all the wrong buttons in me. I don’t yell back, though. I just get mean on her.

“Do you normally ask for a resume before you hook up with someone?” I ask. “A five-year plan? What are you really mad about, here? The fact that I didn’t tell you, or that I’m not the rock star you want?”

“I thought you had the balls to go after what you want,” she says. “I thought you saw a future for us.”

“Honestly, Sonia, I did see a future for us,” I say. “And sadly, this moment right here was it.”

***

Thursday, August 24, 1995

House Show at Misty’s, Atlanta, GA

With Crown the Robin and Dope Double X

Soft Tour—Day 15

I have to spend the rest of the afternoon walking the streets of muggy Atlanta, because fuck if I can be in the same house with Sonia right now. I can hardly be in the same town. But why am I so surprised at how that worked out? It’s what I expected all along, isn’t it?

Sure sucks to be right sometimes.

A few hours later, when I walk back into Misty’s house, the first person who grabs me is Emmylou.

“Where have you been?” she says, totally hoarse from her cold.

“Shit, your voice, Em,” I say.

“We were looking all over for you,” she says. “I was half worried you weren’t coming back.”

“Why would you think that?” I snap, my stomach in knots because if Sonia told Emmylou I’m leaving instead of letting me tell them personally, I’m going to be doubly pissed. “Would I ever walk out on you guys? Seriously?”