Stay Until We Break (12 page)

“I never went to prom, either,” I say. “Always felt sort of sad that I missed it.”

“Really?” she asks. “How did you miss prom? I’ll bet every girl in school wanted to go with you.”

“Oh yeah, I was a total catch,” I say and laugh. “I think I was voted ‘most likely to have a parole officer’ by my class.”

“Too bad we weren’t friends back then. We could have said we were going to prom and snuck over to City Gardens or something.”

“Oh, I would have definitely taken you to prom,” I say. “And then I would have snuck you into City Gardens after, still in your fancy dress and everything.”

“I would have worn my Docs,” she says, raising her foot up to show me. “Just to piss off my mother.”

“Well, ya can’t mosh in high heels, girl,” I say.

She’s laughing again and that’s so much better. Man, the light on her face from the streetlamp when she’s smiling makes her look like some sort of dream.

“All I’m trying to say is that I get really nervous . . .” She stops. She breathes. She looks straight ahead at the back of the Red Rose. “Look, Cole. I never even kissed a guy until I was at Rutgers. If it wasn’t for vodka, I’d probably still be a virgin.”

I don’t want to think about Sonia blasted on vodka losing her virginity because, well, I just don’t. I really don’t. But I finally get what she’s trying to tell me.

I squeeze her hand and she sort of bites her lip and looks at the ground. The pink creeps back into her cheeks and her hand goes sort of clammy in mine, and shit, when she lets her guard down and shows me this completely tender side, it’s too much. I stroke the back of her hand with my thumb, just to try to calm her down, but I can see the rise of her chest as she starts to breathe faster.

“So, what—are you nervous right now?” I ask.

“Am I sober right now?” she says with a small laugh, looking down. “Yeah, of course I am. Totally nervous.”

And she looks nervous, but in all the right ways, if you ask me.

“What if I kissed you?” I say. “How nervous would you be then?”

Her mouth drops open but no words come out, just the sound of her hushed little breaths as I bend down and brush my lips against her cheek, all warm and soft against my mouth.

“Is that okay?” I ask, kissing the edge of her ear. Hope she says yes because I really don’t want to stop.

She nods her head as she turns her face to me. I kiss her top lip as softly as I can, and now she’s breathing faster, right into me, as I pull her close and cover her mouth with mine. I swear I could do nothing but kiss this girl for hours. For days. The warmth of her sweet breath, the feel of her soft tongue is so fucking good all I want to do is eat her alive, start right here with her lips and end all the way down at her toes. Every inch of her I want to make my own.

I pull back to check in and she looks a lot less nervous now.

“Okay, so now you know,” she says. “I might be an awkward mess, but I want . . .”

She can’t seem to even finish the sentence but I really need to hear how it ends.

“What?” I ask. Her face is warm as I hold it in my hands. She takes a deep breath and looks up at me.

“You, Cole,” she says. “I want you.”

And there’s no song, no riff, no beat, no words that have ever sounded better to me than that coming out of her mouth.

Sonia

I’m sure that scenes like the Pump’s after-party at the Sheraton were the inspiration for whoever coined the term “shit show.” I’ve lived in New Brunswick for three years now and have been to some gnarly after-parties, and this night beats them all. It’s like something out of
Bachelor Party
, only with far more indie hipsters and designer drugs, and a lot less Tom Hanks and blow-up dolls. Too bad plastic Debbie and Jenny popped back in Charlottesville, because they probably would have improved the climate here, even if only by making it less stuck-up.

After I get Jason on the phone from the hotel bar, he sends Maury down for us and we manage to sneak all of us up to the executive suite on the twentieth floor where this mob is in full swing. Curtains are open onto the city, and people line window ledges while a thick crowd is dancing everywhere and anywhere they can to Nine Inch Nails. The minute we walk in the door and take in this zoo, I feel Cole’s hand in mine and everything is instantly less overwhelming. What I really want is to be in a hotel room alone with him where I can strip him bare and count every freckle on him from head to toe and memorize it for all eternity. But I don’t think I’m getting lucky tonight, if this is any indicator.

“Holy balls,” Joey says. “This is what it’s like to be signed to Geffen?”

He takes a step into the party in the general direction of the keg, and like at every party, he’s a full head and a half taller than the sea of haircuts he floats through. We follow him through the throng of dancing party people, some in various states of undress, like this chick in a backwards baseball hat who’s dancing to “Closer” in a pair of Adidas basketball high-tops, a pink lace bra, and a pair of baggy jeans being held up with a flannel shirt tied around her waist. Joey just happens to stop right next to her, and she wiggles for him, then grabs the crotch of his Levi’s like it ain’t no thing, and I don’t know what’s more priceless, the look on his face or on hers once she registers the horse-sized kielbasa he’s packing inside those happy-face boxer shorts.

“Sunny, you got that yellow bag handy?” Joey asks, never taking his eyes off the girl, whose hand is still on his dick as she dances up against him. “Like in your purse or something?”

“Um, it’s in my backpack in the van.”

“Cole?”

Cole rolls his eyes and shoves his hand in his back pocket and then in this sly sort of move shakes Joey’s hand and puts what I assume is a Trojan in it.

“You’re on tour, man,” Cole says. “You should be prepared.”

“No shit,” Joey says. “I owe you one.”

Joey starts dancing high-tops girl across the room, away from us, and Godspeed, Joey. Give her a night to write home about.

There are people doing beer funnels like it’s Tampa on spring break, and then we see Jason, sitting on the sofa next to a blonde girl in a flannel shirt and rainbow tights. He’s about to snort a line of something off his own album cover through a cut soda straw when he sees us come in.

“Hey, Sunny,” Jason says, sniffing and rubbing his nose. “Glad you guys could make it! Have a seat, girl. Tell me everything.”

I shoot Cole a look and he shrugs, like he’s being cool about the whole thing. I guess maybe he took what I said about putting up with assholes in this business to heart.

“You want a beer?” Cole asks.

“No, thanks,” I say.

“How about a soda or something?”

“If you can find something as harmless as that here, yeah,” I say. “That’d be perfect.”

I watch him follow Emmy and Travis as they wade through the dancing, drunk mob, thankful that he doesn’t stop to talk to any of the other bra-clad girls who eye him as he makes his way to the kitchen.

Jason smiles and pats the empty spot next to him on the sofa. If he’s not too fucked up, this is going to be the best chance I have, maybe ever, to make a pitch for Soft with Geffen. So I smile back and take a seat, sink into the deep cushions of the plush velvet couch. I can’t deny that it’s surreal to go from knowing Jason Foley, the preppy jock who tormented me in high school, to knowing him as this up-and-coming rock star who wants to hang out with me at his big fancy hotel suite party. Oh, how I hate that knowing him makes me feel cool.

“This is . . . wow, Jason,” I say, looking around. I’m not one for bullshit and have never been good at kissing anyone’s ass but I figure to get Soft in with Geffen, well, it’s going to be worth it. I do my best to sound impressed. “You really made it.”

“Yeah, right?” he says. “We’re a long way from Princeton.”

“How was the show tonight?”

“Fucking awesome, of course,” he says, stretching his arm out across the back of the couch, not around my shoulders but close enough. “You should have been there.”

“Sorry I missed it,” I say. “You know, I’m managing the Soft tour now.”

“Yeah?” he says. “Kinda more like a road trip than a real tour, right? Now this?” he says, gesturing with his other arm at the mad party happening all around us. “This is a tour.”

“Soft will get there one day.”

“I guess anything is possible,” he says, lighting a cigarette.

“Yeah,” I say. “You know, I was thinking maybe you could pass their single along to your guy at Geffen. It would really help me out. I’ve been sending their stuff everywhere, but you know, they could use a nudge to get it out of the pile and listened to . . .”

He takes a long drag and eyes me for a minute. Then he shifts in his seat, spreading his legs so his knee is up along my bare thigh, and he’s somehow a lot closer to me on the couch. I resist the urge to shift away from him, as much as he’s making my skin crawl.

“I don’t know. They’re more of a Matador sound, don’t you think?” he says.

What a competitive prick. Luckily, I’m also a competitive prick. I guess it’s a PDS thing. But I know how to play this.

“The response to their single and their shows on this tour has been unbelievable,” I say. “They packed the house in Charlottesville on a Sunday night and then brought it right down—all on word of mouth. I’m sure they’re going to chart in
CMJ
this month.”

“Really?” he says. I can see his wheels spinning from here.

“Think of it this way,” I say. “If you help them, you can be the super hip insider guy who got them discovered. They’ll owe you for life. It’ll be like Chris Brokaw discovering Liz Phair for Matador.”

He takes another drag off his cigarette.

“I’ll think about it,” he says, and I’m not sure, but I think he might be trying to look down my shirt. Asshole! “Where will you guys be next Thursday night? Anywhere near Georgia?”

“Yeah, we’ve got a night off,” I say, adjusting my T-shirt. “I’ve been trying to fill it with something between Montevallo and Athens.”

“You want to take a house show off our hands in Atlanta?” he asks. “We got invited to do one and Maury stupidly said yes because it was some old schoolmate of his. But can you imagine the madhouse that would be with the buzz we have right now? Better for an unknown act to take it. You’ll get a lot of new people in front of you from the rumors alone.”

“Does it pay?” I ask.

“For you guys? They’ll probably pass the hat and give you free booze, a carpet to sleep on. That’s more Soft’s speed anyway, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, we’ll do it,” I say. “Thanks.”

“Great,” he says. He picks a business card up off the album with the coke and dusts the white powder from the edge off with his finger, and then runs it along the inside of his bottom lip. Then he hands the card to me. It’s for Criminal Records in Atlanta. On the back is a girl’s name, Misty Crawford, and a date, address, and phone number. Then Jason passes me the straw he’s got in his hand. “Want a hit?”

“Oh,” I say, taking the straw, eyeing the album cover with the thick, white line across it. “Is that coke?”

“Well it’s not aspirin,” he says, taking a long drag off his cigarette, blowing the smoke out over our heads.

“Right,” I say, frozen there for a minute while some small part of me is remembering how I would have killed for Jason and his friends and their bitch-faced girlfriends to accept me back in high school. To think I was cool. Or to even just leave me alone. So now that I’m sitting here with the rock star Jason Foley’s arm draped around me like we’re old pals, it’s like hey, maybe he finally sees I’m somebody worth talking to. And I hate so much that I care. I mean, on a purely intellectual level, I don’t care. But that girl inside of me who was so desperate to be worthy of the popular kids in school—she cares. Right now I have the chance to be somebody important—to help Soft get a record deal with Geffen by making a few connections, partying with the right people. It’s who you know, right? Besides, it’s only a little coke.

I hate myself so much right now.

“Thanks,” I say, taking the album with the line of coke and grasping the straw. “That’s super cool of you. I’ve never done coke before—what do I do?”

“Oh, I’m giving you your first hit?” he says with a slick smile. “Welcome to nirvana, Sunny. Just stick this end in your nose and inhale and be prepared to have your fucking mind blown.”

“Awesome.”

I’m nervous, I can’t lie, but I nod, put the straw to the line, and start to inhale. Just as the first little bit of icy burn hits my nose, I glance up and there’s Cole standing in front of us with a bottle of water and a look of stilted coolness that stops me right in my tracks.

What the fuck am I doing?

I don’t want to do this.

I stop.

But the small bit of cocaine that’s in my nose tickles, and before I can stop it, I sneeze and the rest of the line blows everywhere, all over the album, onto the rug, onto my face.

“Fuck!” Jason says, the anger in his voice tinged with the kind of rage I recall from when we were younger and he was paying kids from Lawrenceville to beat up burnouts in the parking lot for their weed. “Goddamn it, Sunny, just . . . fuck. That was one hell of a hit you just wasted.”

“I . . . I’m sorry,” I say, but I’m looking right at Cole when I say it. “I didn’t mean . . .”

“It’s okay, Sunshine,” Cole says, and I detect the beginning of an amused grin that is directed entirely at Jason. “It’s just a little coke. Nobody died.”

“Easy for you to say,” Jason says, brushing the wasted cocaine off his pants. “You know how far I had to send Maury to find that eight ball?”

Cole reaches his hand out to me. “Come on, kitten,” he says. “We’re having a band huddle in the kitchen and your presence is required.”

I’m surprised Cole isn’t mad, but he just grins like he’s trying not to laugh. I take his hand and get up off the couch and give him the most adoring look because, yeah. I feel dumb but I’m really glad this isn’t some big major deal, either. Cole inspects me, brushes something (cocaine, for fuck’s sake) off my face, out of my hair.

“Oh, you guys are . . . are you two a thing?” Jason asks.

“Yeah,” Cole says, now completely amused as he gazes into my eyes. My heart does ten backflips and I don’t think it’s the coke. “We just got married.”

“Oh,” Jason says. “That’s cool, man. No problem.”

Sometimes I think I understand men even less than I think. Which would mean less than not at all.

In the kitchen, Anton, Miles, Emmy, and Travis are all doing shots of Jägermeister from Dixie cups, debating where the hell we’re going to sleep tonight because obviously we can’t crash with the Pumps. I’m thinking I might have to just put a room on my father’s credit card, or else we’ll all be sleeping in the van tonight. Which means we won’t sleep at all. I’m about to suggest it, when there’s a huge commotion from the other room. We run in there to see what the hell is happening, and there we find Elliot, with three lit sparklers in his fist, which he pumps in front of himself like he’s jerking off, yelling, “Fuck yeah, everybody, pump the Pumps!” The sparks fly everywhere like a fiery trail of jizz. He starts lighting more sparklers and passing them out like daisies to all the girls, causing some shrieks as sparks fly onto the carpet.

“You assholes with the fireworks again?” Jason says. “Elliot, if you set anything on fire this time, I will drop a dime and have your shit sent back to Jersey City in a box.”

Elliot turns around and gives him a wide grin. “Dude, it’s in homage to you and your success. A tribute, if you will.”

Just behind him there’s a fresh billow of smoke and then a loud whistle and a “BANG!” and everybody starts shouting and scrambling for the door.

“That’s it!” Jason jumps on top of the coffee table, clearly coked out of his mind. “Everybody get the fuck out! Elliot, I swear to Christ I will kill you if I get my hands on you!”

Elliot ducks through the crowd, cowering in front of Cole. “Hide me, dude. I think he’s serious this time . . .”

“This time?” I ask. “How many times have there been?”

“A couple,” Elliot says and looks over his shoulder where I see the remnants of hotel room drapes being doused by someone with a chemical fire extinguisher, and the smell of it is making us all cough and gag.

“What the fucking shit, Elliot,” Cole says. “What did you do?”

“It wasn’t me, I swear!” he says. “It was just a Black Cat, and I didn’t even set it off! I set it on the windowsill earlier while I was fishing my cigarettes out of my pocket. Some other asshole must have lit it.”

“That’d be me!” a redheaded girl in overall cutoffs and no shirt says with a big, drunk smile. “Fuck yeah, all hail the motherfucking Pumps!”

“Well I’ll be damned,” Elliot says, eyeing her from head to toe.

“Elliot, where the fuck are you?” Jason bellows.

“I’m right here,” he answers, his arms wide open in a “come at me, bro” pose. “Don’t be a pussy, man. Rock stars are supposed to trash their hotel rooms!”

“Not when I’m paying for it, you dick!”

“Wait, you’re paying for it?” Emmy asks. “Not Geffen?”

“I upgraded,” Jason says. “You think I’m sleeping four to a room with those assholes? I don’t think so. This isn’t summer camp, sweetheart.
This
is a fucking tour.” His arms are wide, sweeping the room when the sprinklers come on and the fire alarm starts to blare. Behind him, someone yells, holding up a small tin container filled with white-tinged water. “Jason, the coke, it’s all fucked!”