I like this, but then I’ve always been a communal creature. Mom used to swear that I was a puppy in a previous life, all curled up in a warm tangle of bodies, comfortable in silence. It’s not until I’m up on stage that I need to run and bounce and disturb the stillness. Now, with our last gig behind us and our next gig hours away, I’m pretty good with the quiet, thanks. It lets me think, and listen, and watch. I’m good at seeing things, like Danny’s so close to cracking that you can see the fracture lines and that if Sam doesn't stop with the fucking metaphoric poking he’s going to catch all the shrapnel, or that out in the distance there’s a farmer burning leaves at two in the morning, or that Vatos has crashed out and is oblivious to the rising pointless debate over distortion pedals, or that the driver thinks we’re all on crack. Some of us are, habitually, but not tonight.

It’s been a month of this, and I’m starting to think that I’m the only one with the temperament for touring. I don’t need to think to know not to say that little nugget of wisdom out loud. It’s not always true, anyway. Tomorrow Danny will be all bloody-minded cheer and Sam will lose that ever-present ‘tug his pigtails and run’ instinct and breakfast will be a loud morbid mess that’ll get us kicked out of yet another chain restaurant. I’d say we’ll run out, but they keep springing up all the time, and our brief surge of fame means that they’ll eventually forgive everything.

I’d like to say it’ll last, but it won’t, and we all know it. I think everybody resigned themselves to cult status a while ago, and the Weird Science thing was just a collective delusion. It’s probably for the best. After about a week, Danny started to look a touch caged, and the bright lights were starting to burn.

But hey, I still got a tape of my ugly face on MTV. How about that.

Something creaks to my left, and I glance up to find Steve’s rueful smile. If you just saw the smile, a little vague and a lot gentle, it’d be easy to breeze past him. It’s the eyes that go with it that’ll get you, the quiet knife-sharp humor. Sometimes I think the best thing that ever happened to me was deciding to humor Vatos. Apparently 3 weeks of being trapped together in a bus with a sharp-tongued bitch qualifies me for seeing the real Steve. Go, me.

Tipping his head down, still smiling that crooked smile, Steve passes me a steaming plastic cup wrapped in napkins. It doesn’t really muffle the heat, but coffee is coffee and it’s freezing in here anyway. “Driver,” he says with a shrug, by way of explanation, then slides into the chair next to me. There’s a matching drink in his hand. Steve’s the only one the driver even pretends to tolerate. Sometimes I think that’s Steve’s unofficial job in the band, to slide in after us and soothe the ragged edges that we (particularly two of us) tend to carve. Kind of a bad job, but Steve seems to like it.

I offer him a smile and murmured ‘thanks’, cupping my hands around the mug. As there’s nothing else to say, we say nothing, just listening to the snap and snarl of Danny and Sam. After a while, Steve lets his arm relax and it rests warm against mine.

“So,” he says, out of the blue, and I have to tilt my head back to look at him.

“So.”

“How’re you doing?” Steve keeps his voice low, just another subvocal thing winding around the hum of tire on road. It’s the same way he sings, adding structure without breaking pattern. Reinforcement. Nodding to the ongoing discussion in front of us, which has degenerated into name calling more quickly than most, he adds for clarification, “With all this. Sick of us yet?”

“Nah, not all of you. Just somebody, off and on, and the identity of the somebody rotates.”

Steve nods sagely, like that made some sort of sense. But then Steve’s been doing babble translation since Boingo was an underpaid, underfed theatre troupe with a musical director who had to be propped up on furniture.

Rubbing at my arm, which has started to throb a little, I keep talking. “But the music is good, and I never stay sick, and… it’s nice, you know? To be somewhere so weird that I don’t have to pretend to be normal, singing songs about pedophilia for cash. Singing songs I helped write, and not bad 70s covers. Good songs. Good people.” And now that I’ve wandered into the realm of ‘shut the fuck up now, you sentimental ass’, I latch on to the coffee like a lifeline and laugh a little. “Yeah, it’s good.”

“Good.” I’m tempted for a minute to point out that we’ve found a new word of the night, but Steve clears his throat pointlessly and shifts. His laugh matches his smile. “Y’know, I’ve never asked anyone that before? Not Ribbs or Kerry or, hell, even Miriam.” Smile turning rueful again, he scrubs at his face with his hand. “Not exactly nice of me, I guess, but it just didn’t occur to me until you showed up how very fucked up this all is.”

“It adds a darker tone, you dickless son of a bitch,” Danny’s voice interjects almost pleasantly, for emphasis. Steve kicks the back of his chair, but apparently not hard enough to get his attention, then settles back with a sigh.

“Well.” I roll the cup between my hands, and it occurs to me that I’m fidgeting. There’s a little itch of excess energy between my shoulders. “I… I’m the first strictly new guy you’ve had in a while, I guess.”

“Nah. It’s not that.” Steve tips his head back for a moment to think, a little knit of lines between his eyes like the one he gets when he’s puzzling over the latest complex bit of music. Finally, he lets out a low sigh and leans back into the seat, which creaks under his weight. “It feels like everybody who needed to go left, and everybody who needed to stay is staying, and with everyone else I know them well enough to tell that they’re not going anywhere.” Another crooked smile touches his mouth, exactly where I get the growing sense I shouldn’t look. His arm is very warm now, and I’m getting the temptation to follow up on a very bad idea. Aw, fuck, not here… “Everybody except you, anyway.”

My mouth feels dry, my hands are shaking, and it’s not the coffee. I rub my palms against my thighs and set the coffee in the holder, which is just begging for third degree burns. Still, it gives me something else to fidget with, enough time to conjure up my very best reassuring and heterosexual smile. This is easier in LA, where everybody is still willing to excuse away any number of telling behaviors that’re a little harder to miss in a bus that’s only 8 steps wide.

“I’m not going anywhere. Here is good.”

“Well. Great.” And for a moment, I almost think I’m safe, because Steve shifts again and clears his throat. Any degree of safety is blown away in the second it takes for him to turn his head and look at me. We keep passing lights along the highway, flashes of it spilling in gold through the windows before being yanked back, like a flashbulb in slow motion. “You’re, uh. Important. Here.” Another flash, and maybe it’s my imagination, but it seems to linger for a moment longer than it should. Maybe it’s because the world’s slowed down. Shock can do that, I’ve been told. Steve glances away, down into his fidgeting hands. “To me.”

Okay. Even for LA, that’s pretty damned… clear. Pointy, even.

I take a minute too long to say anything, scrounging for words to wedge in places where non-verbals have served for too long. Steve sits up, shadowing half of his face where the brief supernovas of light can’t touch. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have-“

“No. S’okay.” Understatement, maybe, but I’ve never been good with words. So, that in mind, I reach out and grab his hand instead, twining fingers together and tugging him back out of the aisle. It doesn’t occur to me until he’s plunked back into the seat, looking startled, that he has very nice hands. Warm. Big. I glance up from our fingers and manage a smile. “It’s okay.”

A moment passes, a hesitation, and then Steve lets out a long breath and his hand relaxes in mine. He glances down, at the floor, but his smile is warm enough to heat the bus. Maybe warm enough to thaw the frozen wasteland out there.

“I,” he says. “Well, then.” The pads of his fingers press into my knuckles, the softer place between them.

“Well, then,” I agree. Seems like a rather harmless thing to agree to, after all, and it saves me from having to say anything else. Hard enough to hear anything, with my heart pounding in my head. I manage a weak smile. “Any ringing declarations you want to make?”

Steve considers that for a moment, then leans forward and touches his mouth to me. His lips are warm, firm, dry, and the inside of his mouth tastes like rust and coffee. A long, slow kiss, the kind to make your toes curl and everything briefly okay, the kind to make insanity seem utterly reasonable, and that seems to be a recurring theme in my life. Maybe I ought to give up on that whole sanity thing.

The kiss breaks off, quietly as it started, and Steve tips his forehead to rest against mine. We breathe, slow and ragged, lost under the ever-present white noise of Sam and Danny’s collective bitching. I can feel Steve smile, suddenly. “Iowa,” he muses out loud, his breath like another kiss.

“Fucking Iowa,” I agree, and hold his hand that much tighter.
***
End.