I knew it was crazy. I didn’t know his name, first or last. Still, I was thinking about giving him my cherry. Actually, I was imagining it while sitting here in the pub, with a half empty bottle of Guinness in front of me. Had I drunk more, it might have made sense.
I didn’t like to judge, but he didn’t seem like the relationship type. Nah, he seemed far too cool for that. I knew it without knowing.
If I hadn’t already known they were in a band, I would have been able to tell, I thought. It came across in their banter as much as it did in their clothes. It wasn’t quite a uniform, but it was close enough to tell that it wasn’t a coincidence.
They had a “brand.”
“Hey, sorry I’m late,” I heard someone say, from what seemed like a thousand miles away.
I shook my head to clear it, coming down from the clouds and focusing on Jake, who was now standing right in front of me.
“I had a hell of a time getting here.”
I could have punched him. Not for being late, but for choosing the exact wrong time to pop up. It would have been better if he’d never come at all. Terrible but true, at least at the moment.
“I bet,” I said, a bit too sourly.
The band members were drinking a shot and leaving as quickly as they had come in. Now I would never get to talk to Hot Guitarist.
“Hey,” Jake responded, a hurt look in his puppy-dog eyes.”
“Sorry, what happened? Are you okay?” I asked, knowing it wasn’t very nice of me to be upset with him now that Dream Boy had popped into my field of vision, when only a few moments earlier, I had been scouring the bar for any sign of Jake’s arrival.
“Yeah. I mean, I am now,” he replied. “There was an incident on the road. I wasn’t involved but I did curve too sharply trying to make sure I missed the crash, and so then I had to get my tire changed. Anyway, enough about me. We should get going or we’ll miss the show. Trust me. You don’t want that.”
“Okay,” I said, suddenly wishing Jake would disappear in a puff of magic smoke.
Or maybe I was still just too fixated on Professor Hernandez’s dragon talk earlier in class.
As I grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair, my heart was heavy. I could feel a shift in the air, a tension that was near a breaking point. Like a weight in my chest.
Having no money to waste, I downed the rest of the Guinness in a hurry. I put the empty bottle on the bar, and as we headed for the doors to the concert room, I looked back at where the hot guitarist from Loki’s Laugh had been.
But now, only space remained.
“What are you looking at?” Jake asked me, confused.
“That’s odd,” I remarked about the décor, so as to throw him off.
I could hardly confess that I’d developed an obsession for a guy who had literally walked in and then right back out in the amount of time it took for Jake to tell me why he was late in arriving at the bar.
“Yeah, it used to be a curling rink,” Jake explained. “It was all part of the same building complex the theatre is in, where the band will be playing.”
“How innovative.”
“Wait until you see inside,” he grinned, allowing a well-manicured guy to hold the door for us both.
I smirked as I caught the man eyeing Jake’s ass.
I gave him an evil wink and mouthed, “Go for it!”
Bad Ashe. Bad, bad Ashe.
Inside, The Blue Heron Theater looked like any other such venue. Whoever worked over the interior went to great lengths to bring about the authentic theater experience. It featured new floors, a ramp and lighting rigs hanging down low on cables from the half-circle ceiling.
What the theatre lacked in size, it made up for in atmosphere. All the patrons seemed happy as gang busters just to be here. The kit set up was pretty basic: traditional rock trio, aside from the extra mic at the drum kit.
My interest immediately piqued.
It was arranged so that the drummer was on equal footing with the bass and lead guitarist.
It was an arrangement I’d only seen once before, when I stumbled on a show by NoMeansNo. I was visiting a friend from high school who’d moved to Vancouver for college, when an unusual sound found me.
It was intelligent, juvenile, brutal and beautiful at the same instant and it all came together into a track known as “Victory.” There was an ironic vibe in the sound that emanated from the stage.
My hopes properly raised, I kept my eyes on the stage. My optimism was rewarded in short order with a nice dose of impossible. Loki’s Laugh came onto the stage at the call of the master of ceremonies.