Epilogue
Nick
A couple weeks passed since I took that midnight drive to Georgia and the plane Lauren and I were on was just touching down in Los Angeles. I gripped the arm rest between us tight, my fingers curling around it, knuckles turning white, braced for the bump of the landing gear on the tarmac. I took a sharp inhale and the plane skid to a stop. Lauren looked over at me, an encouraging smile on her lips as she ran her fingers over mine.
I swung our bags onto my shoulders as we exited the plane and made our way down the concourse of LAX, headed for the luggage claim. My eyes scanned the crowd around us. We were collecting our luggage at the carousel when I heard him.
“Hey Frack!”
I turned around and felt my mouth break into a smile. This little part of me had worried that, when we’d made these plans, he wouldn’t be here after all. But there he was, wearing one of the t-shirts Leighanne had designed and those big stupid pink shoes of his and I felt so much better. Just like that.
“Hey!”
He stepped up and we slapped each other’s hands in a pattern that we hadn’t done since I was a teenager, our fingers wiggling and wrists limp.
“Are you going to help me with these bags?” Lauren asked pointedly.
“Oh yeah. Right, right. Sorry.” I quickly dove after a bag that had passed us by as she was dragging one of the others off the belt.
“Basically he’s useless for that,” Brian teased, a grin flickering across his face.
Lauren sighed, shaking her head.
I hauled the bag back to where we were standing, “I just get distracted is all,” I defended myself.
Brian laughed.
I caught the next two bags without anyone telling me to and we added them onto Brian’s trolley and rolled our way out into the lot where we had a car waiting to take us to the house. Brian was coming, too. We only had one night before taking off on the tour, there was no point in him getting a hotel room so he was staying with me and Lauren.
At the house, I helped Lauren unload the luggage from the cab and drag into the foyer of the house, then kissed her cheek. “We’ll be back in a couple hours,” I said.
“Okay,” she answered. “You’re so not getting out of unpacking, though,” she said with a sly smirk.
“I wasn’t trying to,” I lied. But I could tell by the way she laughed that my face had given me away.
Brian and I piled into my car and I pulled out of the driveway. He was quiet beside me, staring down at his hands. I glanced over at him as we drove down the freeway toward Kevin’s, where we were having a band meeting. “You okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he answered, nodding. “I’m okay.”
“You’re quiet,” I pointed out.
Brian took a deep breath. “I’m nervous, I guess.”
“Nervous why?”
He shrugged, “I mean, I never told the guys about the contract, either. I didn’t even come out to LA to explain it to them after the email went out. What if they all hate me?”
“They don’t hate you,” I answered.
“I know that deep down,” he replied.
Kevin’s house loomed big and clean in front of us as I pulled into his driveway a few minutes later. Everyone else was already there. Brian led the way up the walk to the door. We weren’t even all the way there when the door burst open and AJ, Howie and Kevin spilled out into the yard around us.
“Thank fuckin’ God,” AJ barked as he jumped down the steps and wrapped his arms around Brian, “Don’t you ever do that shit again, ‘Rok, don’t you ever.”
“Nice to have you back, welcome,” Howie said, much more straight-laced than AJ had been.
Kevin looked like he might cry. Figures. Kevin cried over everything. “Welcome back, cuz,” he said, pulling Brian into an awkward half-hug, patting his back with a couple heavy thumps.
“Yo Nick,” AJ said, waving at me as we moved to go inside.
“Yo,” I answered.
Inside, Mason rushed by with Max, carrying a bag of oversized Legos, and Kristin greeted us all and promised to bring some drinks in a few minutes. Kevin led us into the same dining room we’d sat in the last time we’d done this, when we’d all agreed to let Brian go if we had to, and we fell into the same seats except for one major difference. Brian was sitting to my right, and AJ bumped a seat further down on the other side of Brian.
Kevin pulled his glasses out of his shirt pocket, where they’d been folded, and he settled himself down into the chair at the head of the table, glancing around at us as he adjusted the chair itself in distance from the table. He had a folder sitting down there already, which he opened and stared down at a document sitting in there. “So here we are,” he said, looking around at us. “Here we are.” He cleared his throat. “I had a new contract written up,” he said, “One that states Brian will, in fact, be staying with us, despite prior contracts.” He put the papers down on the table and pushed it to the middle, as though to tempt us all into signing it.
“Give me that shit,” AJ said, standing and reaching over Brian to grab for the contract.
I shook my head, “Uh uh. I sign it first,” I said, grabbing a pen from the middle of the table. I flipped the pages to the back and quickly scrawled my signature across the line next to my name with a flourish. I looked at Brian and slid it to him. “Your turn, Frick.”
Brian took the pen I was offering from my hand and added his name to the contract, too, before finally allowing AJ to have his turn with it. He looked up at me and I had a feeling that we were both thinking the same thing - about how important and symbolic it had been that, if even for just a moment, that contract had held both our signatures and ours signatures alone.
After Howie had scrawled his name, he slid it to Kevin, and Kevin’s scrawling name finished the contract. He flipped the pages back down to close the contract and he nodded, looking around the table. “There we go,” he said. Kevin lowered the glasses from his nose and looked at me and Brian, shaking the frames at us like parent might do to kids they were scolding, “You two --” he said.
“We’re good,” Brian replied.
And it was true. In the past couple weeks, Brian and I had done a lot of talking on the phone. We’d even Skyped so we could do his therapy exercises together in the morning, just like I’d promised I would do. He was getting better and the two of us hadn’t been so strong in decades. Maybe even ever because for the first time ever I didn’t see Brian as some kind of god, he was just a guy who was my best friend. I didn’t have unreal expectations - something he’d confessed in me had always put pressure on him. Finally, for the first time in a long time, we were really, truly good.
Brian
Thirty-something hours later and we were overseas, backstage and changing from one set to the other, our clothes flying every which way in the dressing room. We were almost done with the show already, and I could hear the fans’ voices echoing through the halls. I just stared around at the four other guys, in various stages of getting ready to get back out to the show. I couldn’t believe that I’d really thought that I could leave this life. Just being back here, just breathing in the smell of the sweat and the stage, I knew there was no way I ever could’ve been contented without it.
Nick was leaning against the door, tugging his pants on, cussing because they were a little tighter than he remembered them being. Maybe all that bacon on the promo run had caught up to him after all.
We went back out on the stage and the lights came back up and shone on us. They were warm, which was good because it was an outdoor arena and the night air had cooled it down quite a bit. I had chills, too, that had nothing at all to do with the nip in the air, but everything to do with how close I’d been to letting go.
Nick came bounding over to me, flinging his arm around my shoulders. They had played a clip from the movie while we’d been under the stage changing our clothes. He grinned as he let his arm dangle across me, his microphone practically touching his teeth, as he said, “BRok. BRok. I’m so glad you’re here. AIN’T Y’ALL GLAD BRIAN’S HERE, Y’ALL?” he shouted this last part and I shook my finger in my ear, pretending he’d deafened me with his yelling. He laughed and tugged me into him so my face was pressed against his chest in a headlock. “I fuckin’ love you, man,” he said.
“I love you too man,” I said, holding the mic up to my mouth, which was dangerously close to Nick’s arm pit at this point.
He snickered and released me and I waved my hand in front of my face, “Dawg you need some… some deoderant or somethin’ up in there, cos…” I pretended to pass out, throwing myself onto the floor of the stage so my legs flailed. The fans cracked up as Nick buried his nose into his own under arm.
“I don’t smell, Frick, don’t you be startin’ no false rumors.”
“That ain’t a rumor son,” AJ intoned from across the stage.
“You ain’t smellin’ like no damn roses yourself, ‘J,” Nick retorted as I scrambled back up to my feet.
It felt good, freeing, to be engaged in this on stage banter again.
Then the strains of I Want It That Way came from the speakers, breaking up our silly chat, just as AJ and Nick were about to force Howie to sniff both their armpits in a who’s-smelliest competition, Kevin giving the lot of them the Dirty Brow from the side of the stage where he was busy touching palms to every fan he could reach.
I looked up, my eyes catching sight of the thousand of flash bulbs going off all over the arena. There seemed to be millions of them. “Back. STREET. Boys! Back. STREET. Boys!” They were chanting. And suddenly, I was so vividly reminded of my own dreams that I felt frozen, standing there in the center of the stage, my fingers curled around my microphone, afraid that it would happen again, like it always did…
But Nick came running back as the strains echoed towards us and he flipped his stinky arm over me once again, leaning in close so he could hold his microphone up to my mouth, too, a big ol’ grin on his face.
“You are…. my fire, the one… desire…”
Not a single crack.
Or maybe lots of cracks.
Just repaired with gold.
“Believe… when I say…” I smiled back at Nick. “That I want it that way.”
There's Us by Pengi
