Love on Stage (11 page)

Miles reached forward and wrapped his fist around Gavin’s dick, slippery with lube and precum, and began jerking him. They were both whimpering and yipping, and Gavin couldn’t tell who was saying what, but it didn’t matter because they were both coming, Gavin’s body shaking with the power of his orgasm, one that he felt all the way to the bottoms of his feet.

Miles slumped beside him, his head level with Gavin’s armpits. Gavin rolled off the side of the bed and carried the used condom to the bathroom. He returned with a warm, wet washcloth, which he used to clean up Miles’s chest and groin.

“I could get used to this kind of service,” Miles said, smiling lazily.

Gavin tossed the cloth toward the bathroom floor and jumped back on the bed. He and Miles rolled around, ending up cuddled together.

“We should get to sleep,” Miles said. “I have to make an early start tomorrow morning.”

Gavin leaned over and kissed the top of his head. “I know you have a lot of packing still to do. You want me to help you?”

Miles yawned. “I can manage. Just gonna close my eyes for a minute.”

“You do that,” Gavin said. He watched as Miles’s eyelids fluttered, and then his breathing became regular as he slid into sleep.

Looking at Miles, Gavin couldn’t imagine that anything could go wrong. They would work their asses off at Starlit Lake and be a big success at the Dells concert. Gavin was going to hit all the right notes—with the group and with Miles. He knew it in his heart, and his heart had never lied to him before.

The Adventure Begins

Gavin crept around Miles’s bedroom, picking up his stuff, and then stopped in the living room to scrawl a brief note. Then he let himself out of the apartment. It was after midnight, and yet the streets still pulsed with energy. Cars with neon undercarriages cruised slowly down Collins Avenue, past the bodegas where you could send money overseas, buy unlocked cell phones, and Latin delicacies made by somebody’s
abuela
in a back room.

He turned west on a side street of Art Deco apartment buildings. Heavyset women in tank tops sat in folding chairs on the lawns, and rap music competed with reggaeton. In front of one building, an elderly man held a little girl up by her hands and taught her the intricate steps of a dance.

There was construction at Alton Road, even that late at night, harsh spotlights focused on men digging up the pavement, and Gavin had to detour around the orange cones. By the time he got home, he felt that he’d walked through several foreign countries.

Manny and Larry were sprawled in the living room, watching some reality show.

“Sup,” Gavin said.

“Hey, I know you,” Larry said. “You’re Gavin. You used to live here.”

“Very funny, dude,” Gavin said. He shoved Larry’s shoulder. “Push over. You’re hogging the whole sofa.”

“Where’s your magical mystery boyfriend?” Manny asked. “You didn’t break up with him, did you?”

“Of course I didn’t. He has to get an early start tomorrow for Nashville. I’m going to meet him in Wisconsin on Wednesday.”

“Is this a record for you?” Larry asked. “How long have you been dating this guy?”

Gavin crossed his arms over his chest.

“There was that senior,” Manny said. “Our sophomore year, remember? It was our first year living at Three Lambs, and Gavin was hot and heavy with him for, like, weeks.”

“You guys are real comedians, you know that?” Gavin said. “You could go on one of those shows, do stand-up together.”

Manny was persistent. “What was his name?”

Gavin gave in. “Lazaro Hernandez. And we dated for nearly four months, until he graduated and moved to Atlanta.”

“You weren’t too broken up,” Larry said. “I remember you were humping that big football player like the next day.”

“That was charity work,” Gavin protested. “Warren Updegrove was so deep in the closet he was about to find Narnia. I helped him along.”

“That’s our Gavin,” Manny said. “Mother Teresa with a dick.”

Gavin held up three fingers to Manny. “Read between the lines.”

He got up and stalked to his bedroom. He couldn’t believe his roommates were being such assholes. Didn’t they see the change in him? He wasn’t that old Gavin—the one who slept with anybody with a dick. He was in love.

He slept in Saturday morning, and by the time he woke, there was a text from Miles. He was already on the road to Nashville; he’d call Gavin later. Gavin luxuriated in bed for a while; his shift at Java Joe’s didn’t start until noon. He thought back to the night before, to how awesome the sex had been with Miles and then to what his roommates had said.

Had he really changed? Maybe without even realizing it, he was using Miles the way he’d used so many guys before—gotten concert tickets or fancy dinners or just a real good fuck, then said sayonara.

It was an uncomfortable feeling, and he wanted to go right over and talk to Miles, confront him with the idea, see what he said.

But Miles wasn’t there. He was on the road to Wisconsin, where he had committed to spending almost three weeks with Gavin and his family, for no money, when it was obvious he had a lot of high-paying clients right there in Miami. No wonder Gavin’s father kept asking if he and Miles were dating. From the outside, it looked like a real loser proposition.

Unless, Gavin thought, sitting up. Unless Miles was right, and Gavin had talent, and there was a potential for the Singing Sweethearts and their grandkids to cut a record. Did they even call it that now that music was all digital? He got up, practiced his scales, and then went to work.

That night, Miles called to check in. “How’s your practice coming?” he asked.

“There’s an awful lot to remember,” Gavin grumbled, leaning back on his bed. “All that stuff about phrasing and emotion, on top of remembering the lyrics and getting the notes right.”

He opened his shorts and began idly playing with his dick. Just the sound of Miles’s voice gave him a hard-on.

“You get to the point where you aren’t remembering,” Miles said. “You’re just feeling, and the emotion comes through.”

Miles kept talking, but Gavin closed his eyes and focused on his dick, strumming it just below the slit with his thumb as he daydreamed about Miles.

“Gavin? Are you still there?”

He opened his eyes. “Yeah, Miles, I’m here. I was just having a moment.”

“I bet I know just what kind of moment you were having. You’re a real horndog, Gavin.”

“I’m not,” Gavin protested, sitting up. “I’m a serial monogamist. And right now, I want to be monogamous with you.”

“You will be soon,” Miles said.

They talked for a while longer, and after Miles hung up, Gavin was left in a happy, sexy haze.

Monday morning he was at Java Joe’s for his last shift before leaving for Wisconsin when Careful asked, “What are you going to do for coffee up there?”

“Suffer,” Gavin said. “There’s no coffee shop for miles around. And the only pot at the house is from like the 1950s.”

“Take one of the machines,” Careful said, nodding toward the display of cappuccino makers for sale. “Just be sure to bring it back.”

“Hey, thanks, Careful,” Gavin said.

“You remember who your friends are when you become a big star, okay?”

“I’ll never forget the little people who made it all happen.” Gavin smiled at him and then turned back to the cash register, where a woman who was max five feet was standing. “No offense,” he said to her. “What can I get you?”

He carried the machine back to his apartment at the end of his shift. He already had a plane ticket back to Miami after Labor Day, and Careful had promised to put him back on the schedule when he returned. All in all, things had worked out very sweetly.

There was something intriguing about having sex with Miles after all that time he’d spend lusting over him and then having to wait again to have some more. That afternoon while his roomies were still at work, Gavin put Miles’s playlist on his iPhone, then took off all his clothes and lay back on his bed.

He could still smell Miles’s cologne, could feel those sensuous fingers caressing his skin. He grabbed his dildo from the bedside table and slicked it up. Then, with his eyes closed, thinking of Miles, he pushed it past his anal ring and up into his channel.

He sat up on the edge of the bed and began riding up and down on the dildo, stroking his dick as he did. He imagined that was Miles’s dick plowing his ass, Miles’s hand on his dick, Miles’s lips on his.

His orgasm wasn’t as great as the one with Miles had been, but it only had to hold him for another day or two until he could sample the real thing once again.

The next morning, he was on his way. As the flight attendant made his pre-flight announcements, Gavin was reminded of the title of a story he’d had to read in college, “We Are Having an Adventure.” He sat back in his seat, made sure his seat belt was fastened, and waited for his adventure to begin.

Erica picked him up at the airport in Minneapolis for the hour-and-a-half drive home. Gavin was so eager to get started that he wanted to sing in the car, but he was afraid that without the music behind him, he’d hit a wrong note or get off-key, and that would totally suck in front of his opera-singer cousin. But when she said, “Next stop, Eau Claire,” he couldn’t resist.

He began the parody song they’d written together as kids, to the tune of a Gilbert O’Sullivan song. “
Eau Claire, the moment I met you I swear
,” he sang, not caring how he sounded.

“
I knew you were weird
,” Erica chimed in.

“
You’ve been what I feared
.”

They joined together on the chorus, and by the time they finished, they were both laughing and Erica had them on I-94 heading east.

“You sound good, Gav,” she said. “You been practicing?”

“Yeah. I told you about Miles, right? The dude who’s coming up to help us? I’ve been working with him.”

“I looked him up,” Erica said. “He has some serious chops.”

“I know. He’s pretty awesome. He told me he used to hang around with all these old-time musicians when he was a teenager.”

“Not just old-timers,” Erica said. “I read that he started working at Emilio Estefan’s studio summers while he was in music school. That he’s produced songs for Pitbull, Jimmy Buffett, Dr. Dre—I mean, all kinds of music, all kinds of artists.”

“I told you, he really knows his stuff.”

“I can see that. How did you hook up with him? In a bar? Online dating?”

“It’s not like that,” Gavin said, crossing his arms over his chest. “He comes in to Java Joe’s all the time with his headphones on, so I figured he was just some random Music Dude. A couple of days after I got back from July fourth, I was feeling happy, so I sang something to him when I handed him his latte. He said I had a good voice, and I told him about the Dells gig.”

He turned to face her. “Get this. He’d actually heard of the Sweethearts, and he digs that kind of music. So he was the one who came up with the idea to work with us.”

“Coolness,” she said. “I have to tell you I am so thrilled to escape the muck and manure for a couple of weeks.”

Erica was spending the summer with her parents on their family farm before heading off to graduate school. “If things go my way, someday I’ll be singing at the big opera houses in Europe. That is, as long as this master’s in opera opens the right doors.”

Gavin was struck by how music had been so instrumental in his family’s destiny. When the Sweethearts broke up, Grandma Frances was the first to marry, Gavin’s late granddad, who sold used cars. He had been an adoring fan of hers, a “stage-door Johnny,” she had called him. Without music, they might never have met.

Next to marry was Erica’s Grandma Ida, to a farm boy she had dated as a teenager. With the money she’d earned from singing, she and her husband had bought a farm outside Eau Claire, and she’d settled quickly into the role of a farm wife. She and her husband had four sons. Erica’s father, the second in line, had gone to the University of Wisconsin to study agriculture, where he met his wife. They had rebelled against factory farming and set up their own small organic farm on a piece of family land.

Erica had grown up milking cows, collecting eggs, and helping her family sell organic produce at local farmers’ markets. When her parents experimented with playing opera to their chickens to encourage them to produce more eggs, Erica got hooked on the music, singing along with the arias as she worked.

Gavin had always felt a kinship to Erica because both of them seemed to have been born into the wrong families. Gavin hated his small-town roots, his father’s salesman bonhomie, the way the straight world seemed to conspire against him by making him take chemistry and literature and gym class, when all he wanted to do was perform.

Gavin had been conscious as a kid that his family was wealthy, more so than his cousins, at least. Because his father owned the dealership, they always had new cars. They went on Caribbean vacations during the winter, and his mother never complained about buying him the coolest clothes. Erica’s family, on the other hand, scraped for spare change, according to his father. They “lived off the land,” eating what they grew. Erica’s mother made their clothes, and they never left the farm for vacations.

Erica pulled up in front of his family’s house, a Colonial style on a full acre in the best part of town. “See you tomorrow at the lake,” she said. She leaned over and pecked him on the cheek. “Thanks for organizing this, Gavin. I’m really looking forward to it.”

He hopped out and grabbed his duffel from the back. “Thanks for the ride. I’m looking forward to this too,” he said, though he knew he had very different reasons from Erica’s.

Saying Something

The front door was locked, and he didn’t have a key, so he had to ring the doorbell. The familiar sound of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” rang through the house, and Gavin recalled Miles’s Beethoven tattoo. It was almost like fate had brought them together when they had so much in common.

No one came to the door. There were no cars in the driveway, and when Gavin peered through the glass, he saw the garage was empty too.