Page 25 of Broken Chorus

“Maybe he’s just grown on me, you ever think about that?”

“Or maybe he’s done more than grown on you. I’ve heard all about him being your new running around town buddy now that you’ve gone back to haunting all the places that got us into so much shit in the first place?”

“I’m not haunting anyplace,” Aaron remarked, rubbing the back of his neck. “I haven’t been out near as much as when the band was partying together.”

“Uh-huh, we can come back to that later.”

Aaron’s hand dropped to his side, fingers curling into fists as he stopped pacing and glared. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

“My best friend back, for one, and an honest fuckin’ answer as to why you treated Micah and Declan like shit,” Kelly snarled, looking for all the world like he wanted to shake the hell out of Aaron, especially when he grabbed his sleeve, putting a halt to some of his restless movements.

Pulling away from the hold wasn’t enough to free him, but it did stretch the hell out of his shirt. “I didn’t do fuck-all to them!”

“Not directly, but Declan overheard what you said to me.”

“And that’s supposed to be my problem?” Aaron grumbled, though his annoyance waned a bit as a surge of guilt hit. He’d had no intention of that conversation becoming public. All he’d ever wanted was to get Kelly to hear him and maybe meet him halfway and let him have Kazzy if Kelly was hell bent on having Micah play guitar for them. Kazzy would at least have been a buffer and an ally when it came to keeping the music from shifting into the realm of Christian rock.

“No one told him to eavesdrop,” Aaron muttered, knowing he sounded lame, but what the fuck else was he supposed to say under the circumstances. He sure as hell wasn’t about to apologize for something that hadn’t been his fault in the first place. He’d had more than enough of that shit to last a lifetime.

“No one told you to be a dick, either and look what happened there.”

There was a stalemate for a moment and a bit of a stare down too, until Aaron glanced away and busied himself with studying his shoe. “Yeah, coming up here was a mistake.”

“Why? Is it ‘cause I’m not heaping praise all over your lackadaisical apology.”

“Whatever. See you around, I guess.” With that Aaron tried to turn away, only to find himself physically yanked back around to face Kelly.

“That’s what you do best, isn’t it! Bail and make up bullshit excuses as to why! You act like you’re better than Ethan but at least he said his piece honestly before he turned his back on us. You can’t even give me the courtesy of the truth.”

“Maybe it’s cause I don’t know what the truth is!” Aaron bellowed, flinging the stress ball he’d been kneading at the wall beside Kelly’s head. It bounced off and dropped to the floor with a soft splat.

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“It’s a bunch of things, okay,” Aaron said. “Everything changed too fast. One moment I knew what the end goal was and what we were all working towards, and the next half of us were somewhere phones have apparently not been invented and you wanna turn around and just replace them like…like it doesn’t matter that they’re not coming back.”

Aaron felt tears shimmering in his eyes and brushed them away angrily. “We were family. That should matter for something.”

“Of course it matters, but I can’t roll out a time machine and fix where shit went wrong,” Kelly said. “All I can do is pick up the pieces that aren’t broken and see if I can forge new ones to fill the holes. Now if that means doing it without you, well, it’s going to suck and I don’t want to stay that course, but I will, if that’s the only choice you leave me with.”

Aaron wanted to tell him to go ahead, but that wouldn’t prove the point he was trying to make and would likely piss Hawk off in the process, something he was desperate to avoid at all costs.

“Can we have this conversation inside?” Aaron asked as he knelt to retrieve his stress ball. “At least then you’d have some coffee to mellow you the fuck out.”

“If you wanted me mellow, you should have just brewed some and brought it with you. At least then I could have had a cup in me by now,” Kelly said even as he backed up to let Aaron in.

They headed for the kitchen, Aaron perching on a stool while Kelly reached for a k-cup box only to discover it was empty.

“Son of a bitch! God dammit,” Kelly cursed, shaking the box like that would magically make another pod appear.

Aaron couldn’t resist snickering, at least until Kelly whirled and turned a furious glare on him. “Hey man, I’ve got nothing to do with your little coffee crisis, that’s all on you. I’m just sorry that mellow is off the table.”

“You could always put it back on the table by going downstairs and grabbing some from your place.”

“Or I could remind you about the box of triple caffeinated you stashed behind the Coco Pebbles so you wouldn’t be tempted to drink too much of it.”

Nothing could have held his laughter back at the way Kelly’s eyes went wide before he whirled and reached for the cabinet door, nearly smacking himself in the face with it in his haste to find his precious caffeine. Watching him snatch the box down, hug it to his chest, and dance across the kitchen to the coffeemaker left him doubled over and gasping for breath, having seriously missed this side of his friend. In difference to Kelly’s mood, Aaron waited until he was blowing on a freshly brewed cup, to actually address some of the issues between them.

“I’m not trying to make this band sound like a carbon copy of our last one,” Aaron said as he ran his fingers through his hair. “I just want us to sound enough like ourselves that the fans will stillwant to hear us…especially if, well, we still have that invite to Rocktoberfest, and time enough to decide if we can do it or not.”

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