Fall (VIP 3)

Right now, it’s totally gone, stripped away with a few test results. I have never judged others based on their past sexual history. One of my mentors contracted HIV in the late ’80s. He survived, and I find that brave as hell. Then why can’t I stop from feeling as though I’m coated in sticky dirt? I’m ashamed. It’s there, on my skin, this dirty, wrong sensation of failure.

The sense of loss is there as well. But it isn’t as strong. It‘s been getting harder to lose myself with sex lately. My brain keeps pushing its way into the equation.

The last time I was with a girl, I’d barely started when I’d suffered a crisis of conscience. Did she have any hopes? Any dreams? Did she think I’d call her the next day? And when I didn’t, would it hurt? My dick had deflated with the speed of a dart to a balloon. I ended up going down on her just so she wouldn’t ask questions, and I left feeling dirty and cheap and pissed at myself.

God, that had to have been the girl in question. I’d avoided sex and gotten chlamydia instead.

A laugh huffs out of me, but there is no humor in it. I have to tell this woman, and I can’t remember her name. I can’t remember anything about her other than she had hot-pink hair and waxed downtown.

“Shit.”

So, no, I’m not going to go searching for a quick hookup anytime soon. Which leaves me here, alone. And that is never a good thing for me.

Picking up the phone again, I call Killian. It rings and rings, and I have no idea what time it is on Killian’s end. Doesn’t make me hang up, though.

He answers and sounds awake. “’Sup, J?”

“Explain to me again why you and Libby had to move to Sydney for four months, because I’m not buying this whole we want to see the toilet flushing backward excuse.”

Killian laughs. “Libby fell in love with the place when we visited Scottie.”

“Visited being the key word. Hell, Scottie’s back in New York, and now you’re there.”

I’m not trying to feel let down by this. But I am.

“What can I say? Libby and I want to explore the Southern Hemisphere, and I’m trying to not have to take twenty-four-hour flights back and forth to do it. Makes more sense to just hang out here for a while.”

Such is our life—the ability to run away for months and have fun without worries. Kill John just came off a long world tour, and we’re not writing anything new at the moment but “recharging,” as Whip would say. What this means is that the guys are all fucking around and having fun so we don’t kill each other when we finally settle down to do it all over again.

It seems petty to brood. Yet here I am, brooding. “I’m just saying, you finally convince me to move out of my perfectly good apartment—”

“Granny apartment,” he cuts in.

“I inherited it from my Gran.”

Killian snorts. “And you didn’t change a damn thing in that place. I swear, every time I walked in there, I got flashbacks of the watery tea and bland biscuits your gran forced on us when we paid her a visit.”

“You loved those biscuits.”

“Yeah. Good times.” He sighs happily. “Do you like the place?”

I glance around as I walk to the couch. Killian will be horrified when he sees that a lot of my grandmother’s old furniture made its way here. He’s always giving me shit over my decorating style. What can I say? Gran’s stuff was comforting and familiar. “It’s really … light.”

“Light?” He sounds confused.

“Lot of windows. High ceilings.” I miss my old place with its dark walls and smaller windows. It was a nice, soothing cave instead of all this … openness.

“John,” Killian drawls with a long sigh, “light and airy is a good thing.”

Sure, if you like being exposed. Nothing here grounds me. “The acoustics are good,” I mutter, because I know he’s waiting for some praise.

“They’re great,” he adds. “Try playing the Gretch. You won’t be disappointed.”

I snort, half smiling. I can play my guitars all hours of the day. It won’t matter if I can’t come up with new material. Like the Beatles, Kill John has two front men, Killian and me. We both sing, we both play guitar. Some songs, Killian takes the lead. Some songs, I do. But we write them together.

Whip and Rye usually come up with beats and the overall rhythm, but Kills and I are the cornerstones of the process. Since the Incident, as everyone calls it, Killian has been taking the brunt of the job, writing songs with his wife, Libby. And that’s fine, but it isn’t our sound.

I need to man up. Two years is more than a dry spell; it’s an empty well.