A couple of guys, about twenty years older than me – not quite old enough to be my parents but damn close – got up and did a bunch of 90’s songs that I’d heard people play over the years and listened to on 90’s rock stations. It was that deep, growly, kind of shadowy beat from Seattle. The grunge music the guys could growl out nice and easy, around here their throats scarred from nearly thirty years of smoking, and beer, and construction, and the harsh reality of just breathing in and out in a place that could get stifling if you couldn’t leave.

They were good – Trevor whispered so a couple times in my ear and I thought, but you’re better.

Finally, I moved Mike out of the way and went over to Steve and said, “Hey, I’ve got a friend over here who’s a professional musician. Can we borrow your guitar?”

Steve was this tall, lanky, geeky kind of guy. He reminded me of Josie in a way, and I hope to God he got enough of a scholarship to get out of town and leave. That’s how it worked these days – you hoped that the people who brought you the most joy got the hell out.

“Sure,” he said, twisting his baseball cap back around to the front of his head. “Just make sure that he doesn’t break it.”

“Oh, I’ll make sure. By the way, Steve,” I nudged him, “you might want to stay and watch this.”

I walked back to the table triumphantly and held the guitar high over the gnawed remnants of our dinner like a trophy from battle. “Ha ha,” I said and Trevor looked up and just shook his head but with a grin that told me he’d do it.

Joe leaned back, stretched out, patted his stomach and said, “Whipped!”

“Oh, now you have the balls to say it aloud?” Trevor said. “You’ve only been mouthing it for the past thirty minutes.”

Mike moved again, his great, lumbering body like a boulder in action, moving in shifts. Trevor scooted out and I looped the guitar over him and then stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

Joe

I was going to get a contagious disease from this place, wasn’t I? Could I get away with asking for a straw for my beer? Putting my mouth on anything in this place made me shudder – and trust me, I’d put my mouth on some pretty scary people before. You date some of those Art Institute bitches in Boston and you find out, very quickly, just what your boundaries really are.

Trevor kicked me under the table, or maybe it was Darla. Hell, it could have been her giant uncle, Mike, who looked like – still – Al from Al’s Toy Barn. When he talked, when he laughed, he had the same mannerisms and it was like watching one of my kid movie characters come to life. All he needed was a Woody and Buzz doll and he’d have the trifecta of a Cracked.com article, a combination so bizarre you couldn’t turn your face away, couldn’t help but watch the wreckage.

Darla was saying something to Trevor about open mic night. Thank God I wasn’t the singer. I could play bass and guitar if I had to, but I wanted none of this. No way I was getting up on a stage in front of a group of guys who, back home, would have beaten the shit out of me at a Patriots tailgate party for looking at them funny.

Trevor seemed to be persuaded though, and as the waitress delivered the food and I dug in, starving from deprivation and distraction, I just shook my head slowly. “Whipped,” I mouthed to him.

He flipped me off in response.

We ate happily.

Darla nudged Mike and suddenly the great lump of a man was standing and she scooted out of the bench and walked off toward a sign that said ‘restrooms’. Absolutely uncertain what to say to this guy, I figured my car was a good start.

“Darla says you can help me with my car. Thank you,” I said, tentative and hating myself for it.

He looked up from his wings, his fingers coated in barbecue sauce and said, “Yeah, I’ll try,” then bent his face down.

If he’d snarled while chewing he couldn’t have appeared more beast-like. People like him made me uncomfortable. I didn’t know how to act or what to talk about or how to be around them. There was a cultural disconnect that made me just want to get away from them.

Trev, on the other hand, seemed relaxed and confident, turning to Mike and saying, “So, you come here often?”

Mike let out a choked chuckle. “Yeah, you know, when I’m not on a Carnival cruise or hanging out at Starbucks drinking a coffee bigger than my head.”

The two shared an easy laugh and I was instantly green. Not that I cared about Mike’s opinion or wanted to be his friend or anything, it was just so what the fuck? to see Trevor able to shift like that, to go from our world to this world and move with a kind of understanding of how to talk to these people, of what to say and how to connect. How did he do that? How did he do everything?

It made me hate him and like him even more. Even if I tried, even if I de-stressed and let my body go loose, my mind raced, trying to figure out what to say to someone so different from me. Mom and Dad had spent so much time and money on tutoring and lessons and music appreciation and cultivating two languages, but as I sat here watching Trevor joke with this guy, the two talking football now, I felt like the uneducated one.

And then Darla found a guitar and Trevor got to claim his place on stage.

Darla

Joe and I locked eyes as Trevor walked away and the crowd parted as he sauntered over. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, now in the periphery as I focused on someone completely different. There was a line, Trevor was third, and he patiently waited while someone else got up to do karaoke.

“Excuse me,” I said, looking at Uncle Mike, breaking the gaze with Joe. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

I took off, my heart thumping in my chest, my stomach twisted into a sickly knot, and my clit swollen and needy for a man who wasn’t about to get on stage. I did my business in the bathroom, taking care to clean everything as best as possible, anticipating that there might be one last chance with Trevor. With Joe, I thought. Why was my mind doing this to me? It was all so comfortable, so easy, with both of them around. Was I the unwitting part of some threesome I didn’t realize was forming? Were these two already in some kind of relationship? The thought seemed so outlandish that it nearly turned me crazy because Lord knew I was known for my crazy, whacked out thoughts. Mama had said for years that I could take a piece of dirty string, two sticks, and a cherry tomato and turn it all into a chocolate palace with nothing but my raw imagination as a tool.

I had reading to thank for that one. Mrs. Humbolt at the library had turned me onto books in a way that had made them my first love. Josie’s dad had been the town librarian and Mrs. Humbolt took us both in after our parents…well, after the accident. Mama had needed rehab for her foot and Aunt Marlene well, what she went through was a whole other story.

So the reading, two, three, four books a day had filled my subconscious with so many worlds, and with pictures and facts and emotions and glimpses of the ways that people interacted with those worlds. Since then I’d always lived in my head, using it as my tool of escape. But as I washed up, dried my hands on the towel rack and just took a deep breath, staring into my own eyes in the filthy, cracked mirror I realized that my head was never going to really get me out of this place.

That was going to take my heart.

My reflexes were a little dulled by the beer I’d chugged a few minutes ago, so I wasn’t expecting Joe to be right outside the restroom.

I made a chirping sound of surprise and he said, “Whoa, sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“What’s up?” I asked.

We were in the narrow hallway where the bathrooms and an ancient cigarette machine sat, one of the last few left in any of the bars in town. A couple of kids’ high chairs were stacked, the wooden kind with the straps that never seemed to work, and serving trays were on stands, covered in clean glasses.

“You really think it’s a good idea for Trevor to sing?” Joe asked, coming close, speaking in a hushed voice.

The air between us crackled with a vibration that made me want to reach across and just kiss him, touch him, to know what it felt like to commune with that perfect body and that sculpted face. I licked my lips and swallowed, widening my eyes, doing anything to take my internal state from the humming arousal that quickly pervaded me. It was like sticking your tongue in a light socket and getting zapped, except I wanted to stick my tongue in Joe.

“What are you doing, Joe?” I asked, knowing damn well what he was trying to do.

“I don’t know,” he answered simply. A smoky, dusky look in his eyes obscured whatever he was feeling and at the same time transmitted enough for me to know that we were definitely thinking the same thing. He reached out and within seconds his arms were around me and I was kissing the face of a god. That he’d been such an asshole to me faded, not because I was some kind of whipping girl – although…hmm, there was a thought – but because he seemed so needy, confused and in shambles on the inside using anger to cover it all.

His mouth was more demanding than I’d expected, thinking him tentative and a bit too OCD for my tastes. There was a wild man inside Joe and it was coming out inch by inch through his tongue, through his hands and the way his thighs pressed into mine, hips pushing me against his obvious arousal. As he parted my lips, my surrender nearly complete, my betrayal well under way, we heard the faint clearing of a throat.

There stood Trevor, the guitar slung around his neck, hanging down and covering his clothed body. It seemed incongruous, as if the only reason he should be wearing a guitar was as a piece of covering, redundant, the instrument now hung as his hands went limp and loose at his sides, his face questioning – not angry, not pissed like he had every right to be, just…curious.

“I didn’t know they offered CPR classes here at Jerry’s,” he said quietly.

Joe didn’t let go of me and that felt surprisingly OK. Joe didn’t pull away, his hands stayed firmly in place on my back, my ass, his head only turning to look at Trevor. He didn’t answer the obviously rhetorical observation, and Trevor looked at me, a puzzled expression making him frown.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, the words a gasp, astonished as much at my own behavior as I was at being caught.

His eyes burned over the two of us, covering every square inch from head to toe and then a sickly grin followed by, “You don’t have to apologize.”

He reached out and put a hand on Joe’s shoulder. Joe flinched but Trevor held steady.

“I don’t know why,” he whispered, “but it really doesn’t bother me.”

My whole body had gone numb from fear and humiliation. I wasn’t one to cheat on people; that had never been my style. Some sort of supernatural force pulled me to Joe and not in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer kind of way or that stupid Twilight movie but more like soul mates drawn together in another lifetime. Trevor, too – it was as if standing here, the three of us touching, were creating an entity more powerful than each of us separated, individuals who were lesser when we weren’t connected and together.