Games Boys Play (2 page)

And something he hoped his bandmate never brought up again for the entire rest of their lives.

“Forget it. I’m the one who should be apologizing.” Dylan torqued one of Brian’s wrists the other way, twisting the handcuff on the D ring so he could slot the key into the hole.

Brian leaned farther forward.

“I’m the one who let myself into your place,” Dylan said, matter-of-fact like he was about most things. “I just happened to pick up the check and figured on my way home, I’d swing it by.”

The handcuff swung loose. One of the D rings slipped free. The other caught on the cuff’s hinge, and Brian had to lean there, using his free hand to start picking at one of the knots that bound his legs while Dylan wrestled with the D ring for what seemed like another eon. And then that arm was free too, an ache in his shoulder making itself known as he pulled his arm in front of his body for the first time in a couple hours.

When Dylan slipped the handcuff bracelet off the back of his belt, Brian was free to pull away from the door—but first he needed to get his legs untied. He wasn’t going to add to the vat of hot shame by wriggling around on the floor like a landed fish.

“Promise me,” he said, trying to work a stubborn knot free with his fingernails, “that you won’t let the press know I died from embarrassment. Or why.”

“Your secret is my secret.” Dylan slid backward alongside Brian’s legs and started working the knot at Brian’s ankles.

The tips of Brian’s fingers thrummed with the aftershocks of adrenaline as he loosened the coils of rope above his knees.

“Ice?” Dylan asked, his gaze darting to the sock hanging from the top of the door and the water streaking down the door’s veneer, while his hands made quick work of unwinding rope.

“Uh…yeah.”

“Huh.”

Brian pulled free the knot below his knees. As he loosened those coils, Dylan gathered the rope he’d removed from Brian’s ankles.

“Pretty clever,” Dylan said, matching the ends of the rope together in order to chain it, like it was one of the band’s extension cords he was putting away.

“Yeah, well, I can’t take credit.”

“No?”

“The Internet’s a vast and resourceful place.” Brian tossed aside the last of the rope. Dylan, finished with his length, pulled Brian’s rope toward him and paired those ends together too, using the back of his arm to swipe an errant lock of dark hair away from his eyes.

“You can leave it.” Brian put a hand on the cool tiles, got a foot under himself finally, and started to stand up. His muscles were shaky. He must have hesitated for a split second, because Dylan dropped the rope he was chaining and grasped Brian’s arm to steady him, the whites of Dylan’s eyes showing around his irises as he looked up with concern.

“I’m good.” Aside from the residual shocks of mortification. On his feet, Brian braced a hand against the wall. “I could use a fucking beer, though. You?”

“I could go for a water.” He was on one knee, gathering everything Brian had taken off, organizing it into a neat pile. It was like a nightmare that threatened to never end. Brian yanked the keys off the ice with enough force to nearly punch himself in the jaw. The luggage locks rattled against the buckles on the leather cuffs that still hugged his wrists.

As he shoved the key into one of the locks, a fresh bead of sweat tickled his ribs. He backed up as Dylan got to his feet. They stood there, Brian popping the lock open and waiting for Dylan, closest to the door, to turn and lead the way out, and Dylan—

Dylan gave a subtle nod of his head toward the john, which Brian was blocking the path to.

“Right. Yeah.” Brian’s face grew hot all over again. They moved past each other, Brian not bothering to pull the door shut as he walked out.

Chapter Two

Wincing at the dents and black smudges on his wrists from the cuffs he’d tossed on the counter, Brian hooked a bottle of beer out of its cardboard carrier. The first place the bottle went was his forehead, his hand gripping the top of the fridge door as he rolled the glass across his brow. Cool air spilled from the refrigerator, chilling his damp shirt. The fever of embarrassment was easing away—until the toilet flushed. He stepped back, knocking the fridge door closed, and reached into a cabinet for a glass for Dylan’s water. He had it sitting on the counter by Dylan’s motorcycle helmet when Dylan stepped out of the bathroom.

“Thanks,” Dylan said.

Brian popped the top off his beer and pulled a long, frigid swallow off it.

His shirt
had
to go. His armpits were swimming in sweat. “Back in a sec,” he said, skirting past Dylan. He had the beer with him, pounding another few swallows as he hung a left into his bedroom.

He wrinkled his nose at the smell as he hauled his T-shirt over his head. He was used to coming offstage with sweat pouring from him, but humiliation smelled like a whole different animal than hot lights and hard work. He dropped the shirt in the laundry basket and snatched another from the dirty pile to mop the sweat off his chest and underarms. After dropping that too, he pulled a clean shirt out of a dresser drawer and slipped it over still-sticky skin.

What he really needed was something to do with himself so he didn’t end up doing shit like this. That was a problem Dylan didn’t have; whenever they were home for more than, say, a week, he’d pick up slack on one of his dad’s crews. The physical labor, he’d said once, helped keep his head on straight. Plus it kept the bill collectors away, the same way guitar students and the occasional engineering work in the studio for other bands did for Brian. Trouble was, it was easier for Dylan to wake up after two or three days at home, head down to a job site, and just start working than it was for Brian to build up a student base. Some came back after the tour interruption, but most moved on, and he had to start at square one, having Kelsey throw up ads for him on Twitter, Facebook, and craigslist.

When Brian came back to the kitchen with his beer more than half-gone, Dylan had his elbows on the counter, the tips of his fingers tapping a rhythm against the water glass between his hands. He patted an envelope lying by his hand. “Your check.”

“Thanks.”

“So.” Dylan—cousin by marriage, bandmate for the past nine years, and best friend since just about the day they met—picked up his water and turned to lean his hip against the counter. He really hadn’t changed much since they’d met. Two years older than Brian, he’d already done all the growing he was going to do when they met at ages fifteen and seventeen, which left him almost an inch shorter than Brian once Brian’s last growth spurt ended. He’d had the same long sideburns the day Brian had first knocked on the door of that basement bedroom too. The same unruly hair—and probably the same shirt, Dylan not being one to throw things out just because they got a little threadbare. “New hobby?” Dylan asked, lifting the glass toward the bathroom.

“Not… Um. No.” With one hand shoved into a back pocket, Brian swirled the beer bottle, thinking about taking a drink. Not sure. Sure about only one thing: his face had to be as red as the bass leaning in the corner of the living room. Dylan was and always had been the coolest person he’d ever known. The standard by which he lived. And now…Dylan knew his creepy secret.

“Not new?” Dylan asked. “Or not a hobby?”

“Not new.” He wondered if a person could break a beer bottle just by clutching it.

Dylan nodded. Took a sip. Brian’s gaze fastened onto the heart on the inside of Dylan’s wrist, exposed when he raised the glass. Not a love heart but an anatomical one. It had been done in one color, plain India ink like Dylan’s other tattoos. The heart’s veins and arteries weren’t cut off, like in technical drawings, but continued on into Dylan’s skin, as if they connected to his blood supply.

When Brian realized Dylan was looking at him, he took another pull off the beer, started to lower it, changed his mind, and tipped it back up, his eyes closed, the beer like river water going down his hot throat, till the river ran dry.
Damn
. He walked around the counter—around Dylan, a weird frisson breaking over his skin as he made his way past—and dropped the empty bottle into the trash bin under the kitchen sink.

Dylan knew his shameful secret.

“So for how long?” Dylan asked. “I mean, how far back?”

“I don’t know,” he said to the inside of the fridge, hooking the neck of a fresh beer with two fingers. “A long time.”

The bottle cap skittered across the counter. Dylan caught it on its way over the edge and set it down.

Brian’s fingertips thrummed against the glass bottle. “Since before I knew how to tie a knot, I guess.” He had a memory of a jump rope one of the girls in the neighborhood had left lying in the lawn, of taking it into the cool darkness under the back porch, wrapping it around his ankles, twisting the ends together, lying there in the musty smell of dirt and spiderwebs, pretending he was really tied up. He’d probably been four at the time—five tops.

“Huh. I never knew.”

“Yeah, I never mentioned it.”

Dylan grinned. “No, I guess it wouldn’t have come up.”

“Nope.”

“I mean, it’s not like you’re tying yourself up for— Is it always you tying yourself up?”

“Huh?”

“You know, just you.”

“Um.” He didn’t want to get into the occasions he’d tried it with girlfriends. He didn’t want to get into
any
of it, really—but at the same time, he kind of did. If he could get past himself enough to actually talk about it. “Yeah. For the most part.”

Dylan latched on. “For the most part? So you tried it with other people?”

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“I mean, like, you tried it
once
, or—”

“Dyl.”

Dylan put his palms up, the simple outlined circle on the inside of his other wrist showing now too, a symbol that had some private significance to him. Brian always imagined it had to do with his mother, who’d died before Dylan was old enough to form a memory of her, the hollow circle signifying that emptiness perhaps. It was a theory bolstered by the fact that he’d sometimes catch Dylan pressing his thumb or fingers to the circle, sometimes with his eyes closed. And that image, of Dylan contemplating with his head slightly bowed, his eyelids uncreased—that was one of those images that made him feel like he was home, however foreign their surroundings. It was like taking your couch on the road with you, or your battered Chuck Taylors from high school. Dylan, touching his fingers to his tattoo with his head bent.

As Dylan dug into his shirt for his cigarettes, he said, “You know, after I walk out that door, we’re probably going to spend the rest of our lives pretending this never happened.”

“If I’m lucky.”

Dylan stuck an unlit cigarette into his wry smile and pushed the pack back into his pocket.

Brian gave in. “I tried it a few times, with a couple girls. It was just… I don’t know how to explain. You have the conversation, right? ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be fun,’ and they think they know what you mean when you say it, and next thing you know, you’re tied spread-eagle on the bed with no clothes, and it’s all about ice cubes and feathers…”

“And it’s not supposed to be?”

He turned away to hide the flush prickling his face again. It would be much easier if it
was
supposed to be about ice cubes and tits in his face. More normal. And in a way, it was absolutely about sex, but…obliquely.

Digging at the label on the beer bottle with the edge of his thumbnail, he said, “For me it’s more about burglars and hostage situations. Turkish prisons, POW camps. Not, like…scarves and feathers.”

“And fur-covered handcuffs?”

A corner of his mouth hitched up in a smile. “Or those.”

“So, what, you can’t just say, ‘Hey, let’s pretend you kidnapped me for ransom and don’t actually give a shit about me’?”

With a sigh, Brian turned, letting the fridge support his weight. “You make it sound easy, but that leaves me with a girlfriend going, ‘Uh…what’s in it for me?’”

“A free afternoon shopping? Maybe you can suggest she kidnap your credit card out of your wallet after she ties you to a chair.”

“Yeah…I’m not sure I want to be ‘fucked’ that way either,” he said.

Dylan laughed. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and leaned on the counter again, tamping the filter end against its surface. “Okay. So. You just do it yourself. Judge, jury, and prison warden.”

“Right.”

“So what was going on today?” Dylan gestured with the cigarette toward the bathroom. “In your head, I mean.”

“Um. Break-in. I hadn’t really figured out where it was going yet. I just make up stories. It’s not like I have anything better to do while I sit there.”

“Break-in. They didn’t gag you?”

“Too risky. What if my nose gets stuffed up? Or I get sick and have to hurl? It hasn’t happened, but…”

Dylan nodded, rolling the cigarette across the backs of his fingers. “You said you got the ice idea from the Internet. Are there a lot of people into this?”

Brian shrugged.

“Do you talk to them?”

“Unh-uh.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t really want there to be a day, you know, when someone figures out I’m one of the Attack from Space guys. I mean, we’re not Justin Bieber—”

Dylan laughed.

“We’re not even Kings of Leon, but I want people talking about our music, not what a freak the bass player is.”

“Gotcha.”

“Plus…what am I gonna say?” He didn’t have any urge to share details about his tie-up sessions with strangers online. He got that some people did; it was part of their thrill. It wasn’t where he got
his
thrill, though. If he and Dylan had anything in common, outside of a love of music and the outsize personality of his aunt Patty in their lives, it was an almost pathological inclination toward privacy.

“So, how often?” Dylan asked.

“Um…” Brian pushed a hand into his hair. “I don’t know. Sometimes kind of frequently, and then, for long periods, not at all. You know, I’ve just got other things going on or whatever. The band—recording, rehearsing, putting promotions together, spending half a week prepping and mailing shit, planning tours, being on tour… I can’t get two minutes to shit alone some days; I’m definitely not thinking about…you know.” He waved a hand in the direction of the bathroom. As if the bathroom were the epicenter of his weird hobby.