Page 101 of Hope & Harmony

Rock Encore

CHAPTER 1

Gino couldn’t believe the words on the paper in his shaking hands. He read the first paragraph again, a third time, before looking up at the man across the breakfast table from him.

His husband. His best friend. In the morning light, the tear tracks—old and new—glistened on Bennett’s ruggedly handsome face. A face Gino knew as well as his own after thirty years together. Had never seen in such wretched sorrow before.

Gino gulped, unstuck his tongue from the roof of his mouth, and forced out words around the lump in his throat. “You want a divorce?”

Bennett flinched. Closed his eyes and lowered his chin, face angled away. Another tear slid over the hard lines of his face and disappeared into his morning scruff. Prickly brown and silver hairs that Gino had felt under his fingertips last night when he’d kissed him goodnight.

“I don’t know.” Bennett’s voice was as ragged as Gino’s insides felt. His body looked it too, shoulders slumped beneath a threadbare band tee, nothing artful about his messy brown hair, hazel eyes bloodshot when they opened and met his again. “But I do know I’ve never been this fucking tired, G. I feel like fucking roadkill, and we haven’t even started the tour yet.”

“That’s fair,” Gino said as he tossed the divorce papers onto the table. “Rehearsals have been a bitch and the logistics for this tour are complicated. But how does that translate to divorce?”

He cut his gaze to their kitchen island covered in the arena stipulations their manager had sent over last night. “Because I can’t remember the last time I spent more than a few hours in bed with you.” Tapped the screen of his phone on the table, bringing up dozens of texts from their bandmates. “Because I’m so tired of taking care of Ellery’s serial broken heart, of the broken hearts Roscoe leaves in his wake, of Miles and Mason’s twin spat of the week, that I can’t take care of you, much less myself.” He slumped in the chair, eyes slipping shut again as he hung back his head. “Because I barely remember the taste of you, the feel of you beneath my hands. Because I barely remember me.”

“Baby.” Gino slid from his chair and onto the floor between Bennett’s spread knees, circling his husband’s shoulders and pulling him into an embrace.

Bennett fell the rest of the way off the chair and into his lap, hugging him back with the same desperation Gino felt, his grip like a drowning man’s. It scared the shit out of Gino; so did Bennett’s words. “We made it. You were right five years ago when you wouldn’t let us quit. Our shelves are decorated with awards, our walls with platinum records, but somewhere in the rise, I fell. I lost myself, and I lost you and us too.”

His last words were barely a whisper, swallowed by his quiet, tired sobs. Gino held him tighter, his husband’s hot tears seeping through his own tee, searing into his soul. Into his heart that still—would always—belong to Bennett York. “You’re right here, B. Right here with me. I’ll get us back, I promise.”

CHAPTER 2

Bennett woke sometime later in bed, the sun’s warmth on his face, a Gino-shaped space heater at his back. He eked open his eyes and stared outside their bedroom windows, watching the ocean lap gently against the horizon. God, he loved their home; their own little oasis by the sea, midway between Los Angeles and San Diego, equidistant to work and family. They hadn’t escaped here enough the past five years, gone more days than home. He missed it, same as he missed the weight of Gino’s arm over his waist and the brush of his lips on his nape.

A satisfied sigh slipped out, and Gino’s arm around him tightened, tugging him closer. “How long have I been out?” Bennett asked.

“Most of the day.”

He’d guessed as much, given the distance between the sun and the waves. Guilt snaked through him, stealing the warmth Gino and the sun had imparted. He closed his eyes and moved to roll away. “You don’t have to stay.”

Gino held him tighter, hand splayed over his abs. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Bennett’s gulp was loud in the quiet room, his “I’m sorry” scratchy and painful to his own ears.

“Don’t ever apologize for how you feel.” Using the arm around his waist, Gino shifted him onto his back. “Especially not to me. But I do need to understand it better.”

Opening his eyes, Bennett stared up into the warm brown ones that had been his world for three decades. Hurt and pain—confusion—swirled there, and he hated that he’d been the one to cause it. He opened his mouth to apologize again, but Gino’s fingers lightly skimming over his face, smoothing the lines of his forehead, stopped him.

“I get that you’re tired, that you’re burned out,” Gino said. “I heard you. But why did you think divorce was the answer?”

He tangled his fingers with Gino’s. “Handing you those papers was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.” Just remembering it made his stomach roil and his eyes refill with tears, made his breath hitch and his voice scale several octaves higher as he spoke. “I didn’t mean it as an ultimatum. I wouldn’t. I don’t want you to think I’d manipulate you like that.”

“Shh, shh, shh,” Gino coaxed, fingers squeezing his. He lifted their joined hands to his lips and kissed Bennett’s knuckles. “I don’t think that. I know you better than that.”

Bennett lowered their hands to his chest, and when his pulse was slightly less frantic, when the panic had ebbed enough to breathe in time with Gino’s calmer breaths, he started again. “It was the only exit ramp I could see. The only way to give you the freedom to go forward with the band and the music you crave while also taking back some freedom for myself, away from the band.”

“Babe, open your eyes.”

Bennett hadn’t realized he’d closed them. When he opened them, Gino’s brown ones, wet at the corners, stared back with fiery conviction. “There is no music for me without you.” The hand in his slipped lower, Gino’s thumb skating over the barely-there scars on Bennett’s wrist, the ones hidden by the tattoosthat decorated his arm from shoulder to fingertips. “And if I didn’t walk away twenty years ago, I’m not walking away now.”

Bennett’s relieved sigh wobbled as he turned into Gino, burying his face in his warm, inviting chest, his ear pressed over his pec, the rhythm of his husband’s heart steady. The music that had kept him going that awful night on the bathroom floor in a shitty Knoxville motel. So far away from home, from everyone who loved and accepted them, from who and what they’d wanted to be. Decades later, they’d drifted again, and with all the distance life had put between them, it hadn’t occurred to him that Gino still loved him like that. That he’d be willing to step backwithhim.

Gino dropped a kiss on the crown of his head. “Can we table the divorce discussion for now?”

Bennett breathed another measure easier and nodded.

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