Page 12 of Your Echo
Music and whiskey. Whiskey and sex. Sex and weed. Weed and music.
And poetry, I think, glancing behind me at the books stacked in precarious piles and lying with cracked spines on the floor.I used to read poetry.
That always filled the same space inside me as music did. That’s why I learned to play guitar: to turn all the words and sounds in my head into something more than a churning cyclone, because for some reason they never came out right on a page.
I break off in the middle of the C chord intro to ‘Just’ and rest my arm on the top of the guitar. I can’t remember the last time I played one of my own songs for fun; outside of rehearsals and shows, it’s always somebody else’s patterns my fingers follow on the fret board, somebody else’s words that come out of my mouth.
We’re supposed to be working on our new album right now. We’ve already got a handle on a track we’re hoping will be the first single—a song called ‘Nevermore.’ The guys are just waiting on me to finish the lyrics before we wrap up dicking around with it and start the actual production phase.
I told them I’m almost done, but I don’t even have a chorus yet. There’s this idea lurking in the back of my head, a shapeless shadow that disappears every time I turn around to corner it. I need the right bait if I’m going to trap it.
Whiskey and sex.
I didn’t sleep with anyone during the entire European tour. I had German girls pressing their tits into my face, and I didn’t even unhook a single bra or unbuckle my belt for any of them. I told myself I was just tired, that without drinking, the insane tour schedule was getting the best of me and sending me home alone to my bunk in the bus every night. The truth is, once the music started slipping away, everything else that keeps me grounded started to fade with it.
Not that I lost interest in sex completely. I stopped acting on it, but that craving to have a soft body arching under mine never totally went away. I run my fingers up the frets again, imagining a dim room and someone’s hot breath in my ear as my thighs flex between splayed legs and my teeth clamp down on a pale shoulder. I like leaving bruises. I like hearing those little gasps that are caught between pleasure and pain.
And blondes. I really fucking love blondes.
I wonder what Stéphanie would be like in bed. Would she fight back? Would she thrash on the mattress as I pinned her hands above her head? Bite down on my lip when I kissed her and leave me with bruises of my own?
She looked way too much like sunshine to not be capable of an eclipse.
I pluck the melody for ‘Nevermore’ and mutter a few lines, trying out phrases that still don’t feel quite right. They’re close, so close, like pieces of a puzzle that stay in place if you push down hard enough, but spring out of shape the second you take your hands away.
I slam my palms down on the concrete of the balcony.
“Fuck it,” I swear. “It will have to be music and whiskey tonight.”
