Games Boys Play (3 page)

“What about when you do have privacy? A hotel room by yourself—or a few hours of a hotel room by yourself, at least.”

“Like I’m going to do that when I think you’re going to be back in a couple hours? You could come back earlier than planned. You
have
.”

“Definitely not on the tour bus, then,” Dylan said.

Heat licking at Brian’s jaw spread upward. He managed to say, “Right,” through tightened throat muscles and throw back a swallow of beer.

“Wait,” Dylan said. “Seriously?”

Shit
. This was what happened when you spent so many hours living within inches of someone.

“On the
bus
?”

He wasn’t getting out of it, so he gave it up in a low tumble of words: “Just, like, my belt around my wrists in my bunk when everyone else was asleep.”
I was fucking desperate.

“Buckled?”

He nodded, his head feeling like the red, throbbing bulb of a cartoon thermometer.

“How’d you get it buckled?”

Lifting the back of one wrist toward his mouth, he demonstrated. “Same way I get it unbuckled.” He dropped his hand and drank from the bottle. It was a new game: reveal an embarrassing bit of trivia about yourself; take a drink. Take enough drinks, you could get drunk enough to forget this ever happened.

“Huh.” Dylan tapped his cigarette against the counter again. “So you just hung out in your bunk with your wrists tied up?”

A fresh flush prickled his cheeks.

“Just lying there?”

Oh Jesus, quit it
. “I was scared shitless I was going to wake everyone up. You know, the jingling of the buckle, the way everything sounds so loud when you’re trying to be quiet.”

Dylan nodded.

“So yeah, I buckled it and just laid there.” With a boner.

“What was the story for that one?”

Brian cleared his throat, trying to recall. “The bus had been boarded by these guys with AKs, I think. They’d tied us up and hijacked the bus.”

“Why’d they do that?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t have to know. They wouldn’t sit us down and explain who they were, if it were real. They just forced the bus driver to pull over, then came on board pointing their guns and ordering us around.”

“So what happened?”

What happened was he’d pretended terrible things were being done to everyone on the bus, things he could hear from his bunk but couldn’t do anything to stop. What he said, with a shrug, was, “I got bored after a while, undid the buckle, and went to sleep.” After jerking off in the closet-sized bathroom. “Don’t you have somewhere pressing to be?”

Dylan grinned. “Nothing I can’t be late to.”

“Great.”

“Relax. There’s nothing wrong with it, you know. Some people play golf; some people paint landscapes.”

“I should have taken up painting.”

“C’mon, man.” The grin seemed to be threatening to spread again. “You’re fine.”

“Definitely should have taken up painting. You know, you’d make me feel a lot less like a freak right now if you told me something horrible and embarrassing about you.”

“Not if I can help it.”

“I see what kind of friend you are.”

“You know what kind of friend I am.” He reached across the counter to clink the bottom of his glass against the side of Brian’s beer bottle. “But I’m still not telling you my darkest secrets. Not today, at least.” He downed the last swallow of water and banged the glass on the counter as though it had been a shot. “Well. This cigarette isn’t getting smoked with me standing here, and I actually was on my way someplace.”

“Thanks for stopping by,” Brian said, the sarcasm light but not absent.

“It’s been interesting, I’ll give you that. Kinda glad I stopped by.”

“That makes one of us.”

Dylan shot him a two-fingered salute. “Catch ya around.”

When the door closed behind Dylan, Brian slipped down the front of the refrigerator until he was sitting on the floor with his arms pressed against his face.
That did not just fucking happen.

Chapter Three

“I’ve been thinking,” Dylan said, the words a little slow, cautious. They were standing in front of the low strip building the band’s accountant had her office in, traffic chugging by on the far side of the parking lot.

“About?”

With the shrug of a shoulder as he dropped his cigarette on the ground, Dylan said, “That thing from last week that we’re pretending didn’t happen.” He ground out the butt with the toe of his boot.

Brian swallowed and leaned back against the brick wall, hands in his pockets, gaze trained somewhere in the distance ahead of him. “And?”

“Since it’s not about sex—”

There was an extended pause, during which Brian had time to watch a bird fly past, its body black against the faded blue sky.

Finally Dylan said, “There’s no reason we couldn’t do it together.”

Brian’s throat clamped shut. He had to force it open before he could respond. “You and me?”

He sensed more than saw Dylan’s answering shrug.

“Why?”

“Why not? It sounds like fun.”

Brian pushed his hands deeper in his pockets, his heart hammering.

Dylan half turned to him, a shoulder pushed against the brick wall. “You know, planning it. Pulling it off. The other night, I was watching TV, and I remembered the whole terrorists-on-the-bus thing of yours.”

“I’m not sure they were terrorists.” Brian talked toward the ground, his voice low. “Criminals of some kind or other, at least.”

“They were terrorists on the TV show. Anyway. Maybe I’m crazy, but I think we might have, you know…intersecting interests.”

The phrase made a short laugh hitch up in Brian’s throat. “‘Intersecting interests?’” He toed a pebble on the pavement, turning it onto a side. God, just strike him down right now and save him further embarrassment.

“Something like that,” Dylan said.

Brian didn’t know if they did in fact have intersecting interests, or if he dared take Dylan up on it even if they did, but the conversation was interesting. Mortifying but interesting. He looked up to see Dylan studying him, squinting against the sharp orange light of the setting sun.

He nudged the pebble with the toe of his boot again. “Okay, tell me about these intersecting interests.”

He heard Dylan’s back drop against the bricks, the rustle of a cigarette pack, the sharp
crack
of a match being struck. “I just think it’d be fun. Like playing cowboys and Indians. Cops and robbers.”

Brian pressed down on the edge of the pebble until it skittered out from under his foot. “Yeah, but…I don’t get what you’d get out of it.”

“You weren’t around for cowboys and Indians, were you?” Dylan said with a smile. “Damn, I liked playing those games when I was a kid.” He took a hit off his cigarette while Brian dragged the pebble back to where it had started.

Then Dylan said, “There’s the safety angle too.”

Brian looked up.

Counting on his fingers, the cigarette smoke curling lazily up from between two of them, Dylan said, “David Carradine. Michael Hutchence. Albert Decker—he was in
The Wild Bunch
. We saw that together, didn’t we?” Back to his fingers. “A musician named Kevin Gilbert. A British politician. A Baptist preacher in Alabama. I read up on this. In Los Angeles County, four or five people die every year doing what you’re doing.”

“Let’s not move out west anytime soon, then,” Brian said pointlessly, his head feeling like someone had hooked a distortion pedal up to it. Were they really standing here discussing this?

“Funny,” Dylan said.

“How many motorcycle deaths do they have?” Brian asked. “Probably more than four or five. Should I start following you around with my car every time you take your bike out?”

“As long as you’re not the one running into me.”

Toeing the pebble again, Brian shook his head.

“Listen,” Dylan said. “Not only do I not want to lose, you know, technically half the band”—while they took hired guns on the road with them and brought session musicians into the studio from time to time, Attack from Space really came down to the two of them, cowriting, corecording, sharing vocal duties—“there’s also the fact that you’re limited with what you can do if it’s just you. Because of safety. You said that yourself. No gag, because you can’t be sure you’d be able to get it off in a hurry if you needed to. But, you know, if I was there… Or what if there was a fire? You live in an apartment building full of people you have no control over.”

Brian’s pulse thudded, everywhere: wrists, neck, eardrums. He took his hands out of his pockets, crossed his arms, and pushed his fingers under his armpits, where his rushing blood beat a tattoo against the tips.

Dylan said, “There’s a lot—”

A door opened farther down the building. A head poked out, looking one way, then their way. “I am
so
sorry about the wait, guys,” Lynn, their accountant, called. “You can come on in now.”

Dylan nodded at her. “Just a sec.” He took another quick drag.

Eyes focused on the tops of the buildings across the road, Brian said, low enough so anyone standing even three feet away wouldn’t hear, “Listen, it’s not about sex, but there’s still…”

“Still?”

“Something. There’s still a thrill to it. That would make it…really fucking uncomfortable.”

Dylan pegged the cigarette butt at the ground. “So you’re saying you jack off afterward?”

Brian bounced the back of his head lightly against the bricks, his hands pushed into his pockets again.

“Well.” Dylan started strolling toward the door. “As long as you don’t do it in front of me, what do I care?”

His face prickling with heat yet again, Brian pushed off the wall and followed, studying his cousin from behind, trying to fit this new piece into what Brian already knew of him. Jesus, what
did
he know of him? Everything? And nothing.

Cowboys and fucking Indians.

Chapter Four

Leaving Lynn’s office forty-five minutes later, Brian had only a vague idea of where the band’s finances stood. His brain had no ability to focus on numbers this afternoon. He’d probably have to shoot her an e-mail with questions at some point. Like an idiot.

He and Dylan walked side by side toward their cars in the growing twilight.

“So,” Dylan said. “I could break into your apartment again.”

“You don’t think that’s…like, weird?”

“Are you sure you want to get into a conversation about what’s weird?”

“Point taken.”

“It’s just an idea. You know? Think about it. If you don’t want to, you don’t want to. It’s not gonna kill me either way.”

Brian nodded, his throat tight, dry.

“I’ve gotta get over to Patty’s,” Dylan said. “She’s threatening to burn everything of mine that’s in the basement if I don’t sort it through and haul it out.”

“Say hi to Aunt Patty for me.”

“Will do.”

Brian watched him cross over to his car, a ’67 Oldsmobile Cutlass hardtop he’d rescued from concrete blocks in someone’s backyard and managed to get running during downtime after the second and third album tours, thanks to a fair amount of help from an uncle on his dad’s side.
I could use more productive hobbies
. He unlocked his own car and dropped his butt into the driver’s seat. He clasped the steering wheel and stared at the cement block wall he was parked in front of. It took approximately seven seconds for the air in the car to become stifling. He cranked his engine, turned on the AC, and backed out.

He’d been planning to stop for a sub on the way home, and despite now not being the least bit hungry—a tightness stretched across his abdomen that no amount of shifting or deep breathing was loosening—he still swung by the sandwich shop and picked one up.

The sub was under his arm as he fought his key back out of his apartment’s lock, just as his cell started ringing. He slipped it out of his pocket. The picture of Dylan looking up at him from the screen made his stomach clench even more. Leaving the key ring hanging from the door, he thumbed the screen. “What’s up?”

“You remember those old
Easyriders
paperbacks I had?” Dylan asked.

The first year he’d known Dylan, Brian had read all three a good four or five times, his head propped on the arm of the scratchy old couch in Dylan’s bedroom at Patty’s. He hadn’t seen them in years, had forgotten all about the “fun, wild, and brutal world of a chopper rider.”

“Yeah,” he said, setting the sandwich on the counter.

“Patty’s got them on the kitchen table with a note on top that says ‘kindling.’”

Brian smiled. Dylan’s stepmother wasn’t one to keep her opinions silent—or subtle.

“You want ’em?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“All right, I’ll toss ’em in the trunk,” Dylan said. “If you think of anything else that might be down here you want, just drop me a text. I’m gonna be here all fucking night. I might just give up and load it all in the back of one of my dad’s trucks.”

“And take it where?”

“There’s a Morage Storage not far from my place. The more I think of it, the more I like that idea. Better than sitting here till four in the morning making
trash
and
keep
piles. Just shove it in a storage unit, and let someone else deal with it after I’m gone.”

“Need help?”

“Nah. I’m making it sound worse than it is.”

“If you change your mind…”

“Sure. Well, I’ll let—”

“Hey,” Brian said.

“Yeah?”

He chewed his lip.

“What is it?” Dylan asked.

“Yeah. I was just…I was wondering what you were thinking we could do. Regarding, you know, what we talked about.”

Patty’s voice cut in—not close enough to make out what she was saying but close enough to recognize.

Dylan, his voice angled away from the phone, said, “No, Brian says he’ll take them.” Patty’s voice came again. Then Dylan: “Yeah, burgers are fine. I’m on the phone now, okay?”

To Brian he said, “This isn’t really the time to get into that.”

“No, it doesn’t sound like it.” What it did sound like, through the phone’s speaker, was heavy boots galumphing down wooden steps.

Dylan said, “Listen, I’ve got half a basement of crap to go through.”