Kane’s walk-of-shame up the stone path to their grandmother’s house had been done naked and in a wind brisk enough to curl up their burgeoning manhoods. They’d played a match of rock-paper-scissors to see who would get their clothes, and Kane lost. Squaring his shoulders, he’d marched down the lane, undeterred by his nudity, and strolled casually into the parlor. After pleasantly greeting the priest and his assistant who’d come for tea, he headed upstairs and went straight for a hot bath, leaving his brother and cousin to shiver in the cold outside.
“None of this all for one and one for all shite with the Morgans and Finnegans,” Sionn’d chuckled. “It was cover your tackle, head on in, and take no prisoners. The bastard wouldn’t even throw us down a pair of sweats from the upstairs window. Connor and I had to face God’s men with our knickers off and our asses bare.”
He and Miki nearly died there on the couch, first from laughter then from Kane’s ominous threats to shut them up if they didn’t stop chortling. Once dinner was over, Damien’s skin began to feel too tight, and he’d bumped around the room until Sionn captured him in a hug and told him it would be okay if he fled.
Holed up in their bedroom, Damien spread out a few of the notebooks he’d taken from Miki’s stash. Most of the pages were covered in notes, lyrics, and half-scribbled passages his best friend had floating around in his head. Every once in a while, an illustration popped up, a curl of smoking skulls or zombie cats chasing giant lizards scrawled across rows of blue lines.
Damien turned on the small amp he seemed to be dragging from one room to the next, plugged in his old Fender, and listened to its familiar hum when he touched its strings with the tips of his fingers. Connecting a pair of Beats Pro headphones into the amp’s audio, Damien used his other hand to slide them over his head, then grabbed a pencil and began to read.
It was hard going. So much of Miki’s loss was fractured, his thoughts too edged with pain and grief. Working forward, Damien saw the roller coaster of Miki’s emotions, dipping down into a depth of worthlessness he’d never wanted for his friend and then soaring up in the later books when he recalled happier times for the band. One of the newer notebooks, a red moleskin thumbed to a thick bloat from ink and finger oils, held a softer time for Miki’s heart. And a whisper of a lover pushing his way into a darkness Miki never could quite escape.
“Yeah, I know how you feel, Sinjun,” Damie murmured, wiping at his face. Miki’s words echoed the resonant thrum in his soul when Sionn was near, and damn his best friend for finding the words to the music he could hear in his lover’s Irish rumble.
Damien picked up the Fender, found the beginning in Miki’s words, and began to spin out the notes tucked in between their lines.
IT WAS nearly midnight when Sionn ventured into the bedroom he shared with Damien. The space was bare of any excess furniture, holding only a dresser and a bed with a pair of side tables that held mostly lube and a phone charger. Despite a designer’s intent to fill the warehouse with elegant furnishings, neither Damie nor Miki liked having too much around them. A dresser held some of their clothes but the majority of Damien’s things remained boxed up in a small room Miki’d left them in.
He paused at the doorway, taking in the beauty of the man sitting on their unmade bed. Damie’s dark hair was held against his head by a pair of studio headphones, a long black fringe brushing down his forehead to cover the deep blue eyes Sionn had fallen into more times than he could count. Damie’s bottom lip was chapped, chewed away to near blood in one spot, and his teeth worried at the mark as his fingers flew over an electric guitar’s strings muted by the headphones Damie wore.
Dressed in torn jeans and an old Sinner’s Gin T-shirt, his shoulder blades pushing the fabric up into small wings on either side of his spine, Damien took Sionn’s breath away.
And as if sensing his lover was there, Damien looked up, his face open and vulnerable, with his soul peeled back by the music he’d found inside of him. Sionn knew he’d be lost without him.
The moment lingered, a soft, whispering thread tangling between them as Sionn padded into the room. Pulling the headphones off, Damien tilted his head back for a kiss, and Sionn tasted the wild of his lover’s spirit in the fierce touch of their lips. Damie set the guitar down on the floor next to the amp and looped the headphones over the amp’s handle, then gave Sionn a lopsided grin.
“You taste like beer.” Damien stole another kiss, smacking his lips as if Sionn were a fine wine. “And more of your uncle’s pork rinds. Did you and Kane save us any, or are they all gone?”
“Nope, there are at least four more bags,” Sionn promised, climbing onto the bed. He pushed Damien back onto the mattress and covered his lover’s body, pinning him down. “Is that why you love me? Because my uncle Donal makes you chicharrónes, Damie boy?”
“Well, yeah.” Damien sneered playfully, reaching down to cup Sionn’s sex through his jeans. “And this. This is a big incentive.”
“Big, huh?” He crooked an eyebrow up, wrinkling his nose at Damie’s play on words.