Page 11 of Rock Candy

Henry stopped moving and sighed, turning me so I had to look him in the eye. “Eddy…”

He didn’t have to say anything else. I knew from his look what he was implying. Henry didn’t think of me like a friend and wanting another night of wee hour talking was going to test the limits of his temperance. But I couldn’t bear parting from him just yet so I played dumb.

“What?” I kept my face flat, innocently devoid of emotion, hoping I could will him to pretend with me just a little longer. I should have known better. Henry had made it very clear that he didn’t mince words.

“You can’t ask me to be alone in the dark with you.”

“Why not?”

He took a tiny step forward and leaned in, bringing his lips as close to my ear as he could without actually touching me. “Because I want to fuck you every minute of the day.” My breath caught, making me gasp. “Because I’ve been throbbing in my pants for hours.” The thought of him hard made me squeeze my thighs together, but he wasn’t finished. “It’s so bad that I promise as soon as you're not with me, I’m gonna take myself in my hand and stroke my cock until I make a fucking mess, thinking about the sounds you made when you clenched your pussy down and came all over my fingers.” If he slid his hands into my pants at that moment, I was pretty sure he could feel that all over again in a matter of seconds. “I can’t be alone in the dark with you, Eddy, because you asked me to be friends and I’m doing my best to respect that.”

I made a tiny needy sound and then, my voice was smaller than a whisper when I said, “Maybe we could be friends with special privileges.”

He was so close to me, so deliciously close, and he got closer, pulling me into his arms and hugging me to his chest. We stayed like that for a while, me cocooned in his massive embrace, listening to thethump,thumpof his heart beneath his rib cage. He bent down, nuzzling his nose near my neck and drawing in a deep breath, like he wanted to inhale me. For a second I was hopeful, dreaming that in just a few minutes, I’d be naked inside the nylon protection of his tent, but it didn’t go that way. Instead, he sounded strong but melancholy when he said, “I can’t be halfway with you. I already feel too much. There’s no middle ground for me. Either you're mine or you're not.”

He stilled for a second, waiting, while I said nothing. Then he kissed my cheek, his lips plush and gentle on my skin, before turning to walk away. I watched his back, the way his shoulders rolled and his hips swung. I wanted to chase after him, but my feet were like two boulders. Every girlish cell in my body screamed,chase him, that’s your prince.But I wasn’t a girl. I was a grown woman, with a big heavy life and if my fans thought I was grim now, they’d detest the woman who had and lost a man like Henry.

Because I couldn’t help myself, I called out, “Good night, sweet friend.” He didn’t turn. He just lifted his hand, waving backwards, and kept heading away from me.

WINTER

HENRY

“You’re really going on dressed like that?” slurred Rick, the front man of Tangent, the band I’d been playing lead guitar for since the summer.

We were at the Snowbound Festival in Big Sky, MT. It was February and it was a balmy three degrees Fahrenheit. Logically, I was wearing a coat, a parka really, the kind of jacket that kept a man from freezing to death. Mostly because I wasn’t a fucking idiot, but also because unlike Rick, I cared about our performances and was therefore sober. So unlike him, I didn’t have the luxury of alcohol numbing my senses and blinding me to the cold, aka I was not a fucking idiot. As he belittled my choice to stay warm, I considered the plethora of one-liners I could snarl at him. For example,You’re really going on tanked like that?OrYes, I like to avoid hypothermia when I can, but after six months on the road with Rick, I knew that antagonizing him was a waste of time. Nothing I would say would change anything. My snide comments would just irritate him and make him say stupid irate shit to me and to the audience, so I did nothing but shrug.

“You look like the caterpillar fromAlice in Wonderland.”He stumbled, grabbing hold of the metal scaffolding just to his right.

You look utterly unsound,I thought, wondering how he was going to perform. I crossed my fingers that no one would be watching. The Snowbound Festival was a big one. It wasn’t Coachella or anything, but it had four stages spread around the base of the mountain. We were playing the smallest, most inaccessible stage. Thank God. It was also eleven a.m., so I was hopeful that the crowd would be tiny. I’d reached the end of my rope with Rick, but I was trying to line up a new gig before I up and quit.

In general, I had been dreading this event. Perhaps in another lifetime I would have been excited to perform in the frozen tundra, but not only was Rick a living nightmare, but also Eddy was headlining the festival. I hadn’t spoken to her since Under the Trees, but we texted—sort of. We were writing the song we started in Martha’s Vineyard. So we sent lyrics and audio files, but we didn’t talk about anything else. Nothing. For example, even though I knew she was headlining the festival, I hadn’t mentioned to her that I was playing too. We didn’t even conform to the basic pleasantries of society like greetings and goodbyes. We sent lyrics and files, and still every time her name came across my phone screen, I grinned. I liked knowing she was out there and wanted to be connected to me.

But I also wasn’t sure I wanted to see her. Standing next to her was torture. Watching her dance at Under the Trees, the way her hips swayed, the playfulness of her moves and all the come-hither looks, I wasn’t sure I could survive a second dose of being Eddy’s buddy. A second evening as her friend was most definitely a blue balls situation. The friendliness of the situation didn’t stop me from waking up with the thought that she was probably within walking distance, all warm and cozy in some fancy suite. I was fucking jealous of her bedsheets. They got to spend hours close to her skin. Didn’t matter. A real man hears and listens to the words that come out of a woman’s mouth, and no matter what her body was saying, Eddy explicitly told me she wanted to be friends. I had been equally honest with her. She knew my position, if she changed her mind about being friendly.

So, for the time being, I needed to focus on playing my guitar in Rick’s band. I let him take the stage first. He strode out confidently, grabbing the mic, and humping the stand as he roared, “What’s up, wherever,” and laughed. Perhaps I should have been a little more concerned for him. He was definitely unsteady on his feet but after six months of him regularly being so drunk that he did shitty things like mistakenly piss in my closet because he thought it was a bathroom, I’d grown immune to worrying about his behavior.

He clamored about the front of the stage while the rest of the band and I played the intro to the first song in our set. Rick missed the cue. Sloppily, he threw his hand up, signaling to us to stop playing and start again. His mic was live, so the audience could hear him mumbling incoherently, “Whoops—fuck—songy song.”

His second attempt wasn’t any better. He started singing a measure too early, and then he tried to correct himself before turning and yelling at the band. “What the fuck? You guys suck city.” He burped. “I’m need you be good.”

Looking past him, I took in the sea of faces that made up the audience. His spectacle had shifted their purpose. They were no longer patrons of music. Instead, they had transformed into shocking news hunters. Their phones were out, and they were filming Rick’s demise. Discomfort ricocheted in my chest and my throat felt narrow. It occurred to me that before we even left the stage, there would be video of this dumpster fire performance flooding the internet and the whole world would be laughing at us.

We started the song one more time, and Rick managed the cue, but halfway through the first verse he tripped. His fall happened in slow motion for me. There was a windmilling of his arms and uncoordinated, splayed feet, and then he was down, literally, flat on his face, out cold.

One of my bandmates rushed toward him and there was a universal trend of concern. People were running onstage to hover and check that Rick was okay. That was how I should have reacted. Concern was the normal response, right? Only when a drunk bandmate hell-bent on self-destruction passes out cold ten feet from me, I don’t rush over and sympathetically kneel at his side. Nope. Not me. Instead, I stand there, angrily staring at him for a beat before I totally lose my mind and break into a fit of possessed laughter.

And that, boys and girls, is the story of how a man who basically lived a life of everyday obscurity suddenly knows the delight of being an overnight sensation by becoming a trending meme and an unemployed guitarist at the same time.

“Well,hello captain of the unemployed train,” Alice said, handing me a glass of champagne. We were at a VIP party, which I absolutely would have skipped prior to my new role as the star of countless TikToks tagged with things like “quintessential heartless bandmate” and “dude laughs as lead singer falls.”

I scowled at her. “I hated that job. You know that.” We were in a lodgy-looking cocktail venue, surrounded by stone walls and antlers, standing side by side, looking over a roomful of who’s who in the music industry.

“True.” Alice smirked. As a believer in theno press is bad pressphilosophy, she loved the exposure my reaction to Rick's drunkenness elicited. “But with this moral blunder, I’m not sure how easily you’re going to find another gig.” She took a little sip of her champagne, her eyes scanning the room, plotting and planning her targets for the evening. “People need to trust that their guitarist has their back. This situation might just make you a pariah in that sense.” I knew where this was headed. Alice agreed with Eddy that I should front my own band. She shrugged. “You may have to finally pick up that mic yourself.”

I rolled my eyes at her. “Didn’t you convince me to come to this shindig by implying that I needed to network to do some damage control so I could get a job in the future?”

“Oh, come on,” she grumbled. “You know you need to do damage control to do anything in the future. No headliner is going to want a fan pointing at his guitarist and saying,Wait, isn’t that the guy who…”

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