There was this spot named Barcode that the guys had taken to hanging out in whenever they were in New York. Chris and Paul were sitting at the bar, ignoring the hipper-than-thou people who came in and out and having short, casual conversations with people more their flavor. Chris didn’t have the personal familiarity of the place that Paul did, but he was quickly gaining cred with people since he had those clear-as-a-bell eyes, was adorable, and was quietly charming. Plus he was with Paul, that can’t hurt anybody. “Hey, hey, drummer boy,” Nicole, the bartender that worked on Wednesday nights, said to Chris. Somehow Chris and Paul always found their way to Barcode on those nights. She leaned on the bar in front of him, her low cut shirt gaping as she did so. “Good to see you back again,” she finished.
“This place really fills up late, hunh?” Chris said, as someone almost spilled their drink on him as they squeezed through people to get by.
She shrugged. “More close to the holidays.” The New Year had just passed, and there were still a lot of people in town with their relatives, a lot of people looking for a cheap escape, if only for a few inebriated hours. “What about you? You’re not with your folks now?”
“They’re in Salt Lake,” Chris said, looking down into his rum and Coke. “I saw them for Christmas, but we had a gig here on New Years.” He looked over at Paul. “I think it went okay, except we played outside and my hands were really freakin’ cold.”
Paul agreed. “Seriously. Why couldn’t we get the inside show?”
“Cuz we’re not Avril Lavigne,” Chris finished.
“What I wouldn’t give to see her catch a beat down,” Paul said, downing what was left of his whisky sour. A woman walked up behind the two guys, standing between them, leaning on the bar and ordering three drinks from Nicole. She glanced down at Paul quickly and politely smiled.
“Hey, girl. You know, I’m good with my hands,” Paul said to her, speaking over the din. “I’m a bassist.” She frowned, not amused at all, drumming her fingers on the bar as she waited on her order. “Phat beat,” he said. “You know, my friend here is a drummer.” Her eyes casually glanced Chris’ direction.
“Hi,” he said. She rolled her eyes and grabbed her drinks from Nicole when she returned and walked away from the bar. “That went well,” Chris laughed, tapping the bar for a refill on his drink. Paul laughed as well and put an arm around Chris’s neck, giving him a quick, alcohol-inspired hug. Goddammit, if he didn’t like the hell out of this guy. He just hoped that the grueling nature of their touring schedule, along with the paltry amount of glory they received wouldn’t run him off like it had too many others. Because that seriously would suck.
Joel kicked open the door to their flat and walked into the kitchen area to get himself a beer. Billy responded to the sound of him coming out of the stairs and into the flat by coming out of his room. “Hey Joel, what’s doin’?”
Joel popped off the top on his Rolling Rock and leaned against the counter. Despite having extra cash he still had a propensity for cheap beer, Rolling Rock his favorite. It seemed best that beer should look and taste the same going in as coming out. “Not too good, dude,” he replied to Billy.
“The VMA thing go okay?” Billy held a Zippo in his right hand and a plastic Tang container in the left.
“Oy.” Joel rubbed the condensation off of the outside of the bottle. “The actual show thing went fine… you know, for a crazy-ass MTV show.”
Billy put the Tang container on the counter and packed down the contents with his fist, then went over to the miscellaneous drawer and started shifting things around. “So, did something happen with Benji’s girlfriend?”
“She’s not his girlfriend,” Joel shot back on instinct. “Well, she’s not anymore,” he added after a long pause.
“What happened?” He set the Elmer’s glue on the counter, then found a ball of string in the drawer and lifted it out, disentangling it from a few other things.
“I dunno exactly. But she pissed Benji off something fierce and now he’s out there getting plastered over that bitch.” Billy shook his head, making a tisk tisk sound with his tongue as he used a paring knife to cut off a short length of the twine. “The thing is…” Joel took a long, slow swig of beer. “I don’t have any idea what to do for him. In reality I just wanted to smack him in the face with an ‘I fucking told you so.’ Plus I know he’s gonna do something like this again.”
Billy laughed. “No shit. Porn star, anybody?” He rolled a small ball of putty between his finger and thumb and stuck it to the inside of the Tang container.
“But when he comes home all wounded, what the fuck am I supposed to do?” Billy looked up from what he was doing, blinking at Joel, wondering if that was some sort of a rhetorical question, or if he expected an answer. “I can’t ignore him,” Joel continued, taking a cue from Billy’s silence. Billy rolled the twine in glue and took a small pinch of powder from the Tang bottle. He sprinkled that on the counter top and rolled the twine in it. “That’d be cruel.”
“Yeah, he hates that,” Billy agreed, eyes back on his creation as he drilled a small hole in the packed contents of the container, then guided the twine down into it until he felt it slowly going through the goo at the bottom.
“So I guess I just have to humor him until he gets over it.”
Billy stuck the twine to the putty and pulled the excess length out to fall over the side of the container, almost to the counter top. “I’m just glad you two have your own room so you can have your heart to hearts without waking me up.”
Joel lifted the bottle and downed the rest of the beer, the cold building in his stomach so quickly that it made him shiver. “Billy, a bomb couldn’t wake you up.”
A grin spread across Billy’s face at that as he gripped his creation and capped it with a clay plug he had made earlier in the evening. “I better get my coat,” he said to himself and ran back to his room, leaving the container on the counter. Joel dropped the beer bottle in the recycling can and went in for a closer look at Billy’s… thing. “Hey, don’t touch it, man,” Billy called, knowing that Joel’s curiosity would have carried him close to his creation in his absence. Billy reappeared in his black, thick winter jacket and gloves. “I’ma go set this off. You wanna come?” His eyes sparkled like a kid that just got his Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas.
“Oh, shit, are you still doin’ that?” Joel asked, laughing out loud, not at all as annoyed as he tried to sound, generally amused at Billy’s recent pyromania. After the MTV New Years Eve bash, there had been a huge stock pile of fire crackers that had gone unused because of the wet conditions. The snow that had fallen earlier in the day had gotten to a large batch of fireworks and they had been set aside to be thrown out. But Billy figured that a huge waste and got his hands on a good number of them, letting them dry out in his room and out on the fire escape, then cracking them open and mixing the powders in various containers so he could set them off later. The last few nights he had skipped out around two or three at night to set the little bombs off. With the amount of powder he put in, the thing often would fizzle and snap for a few minutes before going out, like a prolonged orgasm after an evening of carefully adding this and that powder, trying to find the perfect combination of charm and flare. “Have you figured out how to make that big peace sign firework yet?” Joel had seen those on The Mall on the 4th of July. Strangely enough he had been standing on the roof of a frat on George Washington University campus to watch the show. That is, before the roof caved in, taking a couple big-necked football guys with it.
Billy actually looked very disappointed as he shook his head “no.” “I haven’t figured that out yet.” He scratched his head, then pulled on a hat. “So, you coming?”
Joel looked down at the half empty beer bottle that had magically appeared in his hand and decided that it probably would be best if he got out of the house. “Yeah. Let me go grab my coat.”
Paul and Chris were just hitting their stride at 2:15 am, just drunk enough and willing to keep the drinks going to maintain the buzz. Three girls were standing and talking to them while they waited on their drinks. “So this guy just walks up and grips this girl by the wrist and bodily tosses her out of the tour bus,” Chris said, pointing at Paul.
He laughed. “Yeah, dude. She was annoying as fuck.”
“I didn’t know they didn’t know her. She told me everybody in the band knew her.”
Paul put a hand on Chris’ shoulder. “Ah, the blunders of the new and gullible.”
“I felt so bad after that,” Chris mumbled, shaking his head and covering his face as he blushed. The girls all cooed at his reaction.
“Get over it,” Paul said, not really indicating if he was talking to Chris or to the ladies as he took a sip of his whiskey. Someone pushed through the adoring semi-circle to get to the bar. His head was down and he leaned far across the counter-top to relay his order to Nicole without raising his voice. He looked over and saw Chris, then Paul.
“Benji,” Chris said welcomingly. Benji’s face darkened and he turned his eyes back to Nicole as she set to getting his order together.
“Well, howdy-fucking-do to you too, buddy,” Paul said. The women dissipated with the first harsh words spoken.
“Where’s your date?” Chris asked. When Benji visibly winced at the question, Paul playfully smacked Chris in the head and gave him a look like “d’uh.” “Oh,” Chris sputtered, backtracking. “Oh, uh, do you, um, you wanna sit down?” He hopped off his barstool. “You can sit in mine.”
Benji shook his head, still not looking at them. “Nah. Thanks, though.”
“Are you seriously going to get wrecked again over Aguilera?” Paul asked. He had met her on many different occasions, and despite all the prompting in the world he refused to call her anything but Aguilera – outside of bitch or slut when he was outside of Benji’s company.
Benji looked down at his hands as they rested on the edge of the bar. “Yeah, I am.”
Paul and Chris simultaneously shook their heads. “Not gonna let you do it,” Paul said. “She’s not worth it, man.”
“I’m just going to get drunk and start some fights with people I know I can beat up. Nothin’ major.”
Chris reached out and put a hand on Benji’s shoulder. “You have very bad judgment when you’re drunk,” he said, referring to the fact that Benji basically thought he could beat any and everyone up after a few rounds. From the look of his hands he had been in a scrape tonight all ready. That or punching brick walls again. “We can’t just let you go like this,” Chris finished. Benji shrugged the hand off his shoulder without looking at his friends and reached into his pocket to find some cash. He dropped a crumpled twenty on the bar and turned around.
“Then I’m going to another bar.”
“C’mon, dude. Wait-” Paul started, but Benji wasn’t in the mood to listen, and he was on his way out directly. His eyes didn’t leave the floor of the bar as the crowd parted for him on his way to the door. There was only one thing that made him stop short.
“Benji fucking Combs!” The voice came from his left, floating above the noise in the room. Benji turned with the sound and saw a friend he hadn’t seen in years.
“Sessie Gaines,” he breathed. He hadn’t seen her since high school. She looked about the same: light brown skin, black, curly hair and brown eyes. Despite both of her parents being Black, she had somehow jumped out looking like a mulatto. He had figured it was a Case of the Mail Man until he had met her dad and saw that she got her tiny frame from him. Mr. Gaines had actually been shorter than Benji, and that didn’t happen very often. He remembered her as having longer hair, but she now wore it very short, and somewhat spiky.
“Oh, holy crap,” she said, weaving through the crowd, sprinting up the last few steps to jump into Benji’s arms, wrapping her legs around his waist and hugging him about the neck. She put her mouth against his neck as she hugged him and kissed the skin there, as had always been her custom. She leaned back to look at him as he still held her up. “It’s so good to see you, Benj. I can’t believe it.”
“It’s been forever,” he mused, looking at her like she’d come out of a dream, but there she was, breathing on his face, her black nails idly scratching against his shoulder. She let her legs drop, her toe just touching the ground before he lowered her down. She was still quite small, in all dimensions, height and build, but she dressed like she was twice as large. Her presence filled up what she lacked in stature.
“How the hell are you?” She grasped his hand for a moment before letting it go when she spotted Paul. She gasped, then made her way up behind him, tapping him on the shoulder. He turned around slowly, not expecting to see anyone he actually knew. His face lit up and he embraced her, sliding off the stool as he did so, engulfing her small frame with his. His grip was amazingly strong, but soft at the same time. “It’s good to see you, too, Paul.”
He uttered a few remarks on how she looked, how it’d been too long, how it could never be this long between visits again, then he remembered to introduce Chris. “Oh, yeah, Ses, this is Chris.”
“You must be the new drummer,” she said.
“That’s me,” Chris said, extending a hand to her. She took it, pulling his arm out and looking at his sleeve of tattoos, then up into his eyes for a prolonged moment.
“Impressive.” Chris took his hand back as he dropped his gaze from hers. Benji walked up behind her and stared down the guy in the stool next to Chris so he could sit down. “You know I used to drum.”
“You quit?” Paul asked, disappointed.
“Yeah. I can’t haul those things around with me. They’re still at my folk’s house. I can only play them when I go back home.”
“Hey Mohawk,” Nicole called to Benji from down the bar. “Your drink’s up.” She slid two shot glasses down to Benji.
She watched the golden liquid filled glasses slide to a stop in front of Benji. “Who you drinkin’ with?” Sessie asked.
He looked over at her and shook his head. “Nobody.”
“Do you want my seat?” Chris asked her, as he was sitting in between Paul and Benji now.
“Nah. I like to stand.” She looked over at Paul. “So you guys are still together. Good Charlotte, I mean,” she said, a touch of incredulity in her voice.
“What? You haven’t kept up with us on TV?” Paul asked her, grinning.
“I don’t have a TV in my apartment yet.”
“The twins got a show on MTV,” he told her.
Sessie’s jaw dropped and she looked over at Benji. “How’d you two big nerds get a show on MTV?”
He swallowed his first double shot of tequila and frowned. “Epic backs us like crazy. They know we’re willing to really work hard-”
“AKA, ‘whore ourselves out on a regular basis,’” Paul clarified.
“-So they get us on MTV a lot with confidence we won’t seriously fuck up,” Benji finished, not even giving pause for Paul’s comment.
“They hosted TRL for a week,” Paul added.
“We played on TRL, too,” Chris said.
“Yeah, yeah, that was cool. I actually got to show my fat ass on MTV.”
“Well, I’m hob-nobbing with superstars, then, am I?” Sessie asked, putting her hands on Chris and Benji’s backs. She leaned closer to Benji and lowered her voice, reaching towards Benji’s hand as he fingered the rim of the other shot glass. “So with all this great stuff, what’s got you bent out of shape?”
Benji looked down at his other shot, then slid it away from him. “Girl troubles.”
“You’ll never guess who he’s going out with,” Paul said quickly, pointing at her. Sessie grabbed Paul’s hand and pulled it out so the long sleeve t-shirt rode up his arm and she could see the peace swallow tattoo around his wrist. It was interesting to see all this color on these significantly white young men. “Was going out with,” he corrected.
“Is it someone I would know?” She asked, smiling at the artwork.
“I think you would…” Paul said, laughing into his drink as he pulled his arm back.
“Hey Paul, you wanna shut up for once?” Benji said to him.
“Unless you live in a cave…” Paul continued.
“Paul-” Benji warned.
“… under a rock, with your fingers in your ears…” Sessie and Chris looked between the two of them as they spoke, the familiar volley music to Sessie’s ears, making her laugh the way it always had. She motioned Paul over to her and he obeyed. She hugged him and Benji at once, grinning from ear to ear.
“Oh my God, I missed you guys.”
“So you knew them in high school?” Chris asked. “Did they sing then?”
Sessie thought back on it. “Uh huh, yeah. I never got to see them in a show, though. I always had sports and stuff so I never had the time, but they would tape performances for me sometimes.”
“Do you have the old album?” Paul asked. She shook her head no. “You should get it, dude. Listen to the songs and how we progressed. That one had Aaron on the cover and stuff, too, you might like that.”
“They changed that, dude,” Benji said softly.
“Oh, right.”
“Oh yeah! Aaron! I saw him, like, two months ago, in Georgetown,” Sessie said.
“For Thanksgiving?” Paul asked.
“Yep.” She saw Benji reaching for the Tequila again and snatched it before he got his hands on it. She downed it.
“God, I wish we coulda gotten home for Thanksgiving,” Benji said as he tapped the bar for another double shot of tequila. “I think anything would have helped me out right about then.” Paul leaned in and told her that Benji and Christina had been in a spat then as well. This wasn’t their first break-up and it probably wouldn’t be the last since neither of them seemed willing to break the cycle. She nodded, understanding the situation, snatching the next tequila shot before Benji drank it.
“I dunno how many more of those I can take before I get really sloppy, so we should stop playing this game,” she said to Benji.
He looked up at her, smiling for the first time since she had showed up. “Always looking out for me, hunh?”
She touched his face, pressing a finger to the eyeliner that was streaked down his pale cheek, then giving him a light smack. “Always, Benj. Especially when you don’t know I’m watching,” she said softly, trying to sound as creepily stalker-ish as possible. He smiled again, touching her lower back gently, pulling her closer towards him. Chris thought it was interesting, how forward, crass and callous Benji could be with some women, but how gentle he was with this one. He had never really seen him and Christina interact much, outside of being stuck between one of their heated screaming matches, punctuated by a sexual encounter of equaled fervor that ran him out of the tour bus. He couldn’t imagine the two of them acting the way Benji and Sessie were acting now, talking close with affectionate touches, and generally enjoying each other’s company on merit of compatible personalities and pointed conversation. It was a bit of a shame that Benji looked for a different type of personality in his friends than in his lovers when his friends seemed only to build him up and his lovers seemed only to serve in bringing him down.
Joel sat on a low, half broken down wooden fence and watched as Billy built up a mound of dirt to set his fire-bomb on top of. He made sure that the top was flat and he set the creation on top of it. Joel jammed his hands in his pockets and tucked his head down to try to block out some of the frigid air as he waited for his friend to bring his baby to life.
They had chanced taking the subway over to this area. It was obviously illegal to bring this little bomb around, especially post 9-11, but Joel for goddamn sure wasn’t going to walk. He had been spoiled by the easily available and cheap mass transportation in DC and surprisingly never got used to having to walk places. Billy had scoped out this place before hand and it was perfect, an abandoned lot without any business establishments around, just government and low rent apartment buildings. Truth be told, Joel felt most at home here, as this was where he spent the most memorable, albeit painful, part of his adolescence. Billy looked over at Joel, his eyes sparkling in anticipation. “Are you ready?” He asked.
Joel grinned at his enthusiasm. “Yeah, dude, light it up.”
“Okay.” He flipped open his Zippo and lit the very end of the wick and then he ran back over and sat down next to Joel, the left side of his body leaning up against his friend. They attempted to block out some of the butt-cold wind for one another. Joel usually found Billy’s reaction to his firecrackers more amusing than the light show itself. The string burned in a deep orange glow, the tip crumbling off in black ash. The inside of the canister burst bright for a moment when it hit the putty, actually a low-grade plastic explosive, like C4, and Billy’s face brightened with it. His leg began to bounce in eagerness. Then the wick hit the powder, beginning in a blast of pink, with a bit of green tingeing the edges. The container spit out a continuous fountain of colorful sparks in a fierce sizzle, white smoke beginning to hang low around it. The pink shifted quickly to all green and then faded so slowly into blue that Joel hardly even noticed it. It seemed that it was all of a sudden a radiant blue fountain, shifting without warning, though something in his memory precluded him from believing that completely. The red began in a blast, the fiery bubble rising to dissipate above them, then shooting up into the night sky in angry bursts, like lava. Billy had grasped Joel’s arm when the fireball had been thrown, an audible sound of surprise leaping from his throat. Joel could barely feel the contact through his puffy jacket, but he could feel the slight tugging on his elbow as he attempted to keep his hands warm in his pockets as well as maintain his perch on the fence next to Billy. “I added a thin film of nitro glycerin just before the red,” Billy said into Joel’s ear. “I didn’t know it’d do that!” Joel turned to look at Billy at the mention of the high-grade explosive, but he was already back engrossed in watching his creation unfurl. Joel nudged him and raised his eyebrows in an inquisitive fashion. “Oh,” Billy said, looking at Joel only a moment. “Um, yeah, I was afraid the red wouldn’t catch. The blue was chunky and not sitting right with the red, so I had to kinda glue them together.”
Joel chuckled inaudibly. “Oh, right,” he said, as though that had explained everything. “Okay.” After a few moments Joel began to notice that the commotion was bringing the attention of people in the neighboring buildings, many of them still in their night clothes with just a coat thrown on over them as they staggered sleepily from their houses, looking eerie in the fiery light, coming to stand mesmerized at Billy’s crowning glory. Joel would have rathered leave then, because if some shit like this had awakened him at three in the morning, somebody’s ass would have paid the price. But he was willing to let Billy stay, until he saw the red and blues of a cop car bouncing off of the sidewalk and buildings. “Billy, we should go.”
“But it’s not done yet,” he whined.
“I know, but the Po-Po say we gotta go.” Billy looked back behind them and saw two uniforms getting out of their squad car to look up at the sparkling display. They didn’t flip on the siren for a second and make everyone scatter the way they normally would, but they simply watched. Perhaps the magic faded after the first few times you watched one of Billy’s fun-bombs, but Joel just wasn’t as engrossed as all these other people.
“Oh, crap,” Billy murmured. “I’ll go take care of it. You stay here, okay? And tell me what I miss.”
“You mean, like, if some naked chicks pop out of it or something?”
Billy grinned, the light casting his teeth to look like they were filmed in blood. “Yeah, if that happens, definitely let me know.”
“Okey-dokey,” Joel said, mockingly enthusiastic and giving Billy a double thumbs up. After Billy was gone for a little while and he had begun to get cold again without someone to block the wind, he looked back to see what was going on. He saw Billy and the two officers looking up at the fireworks as Billy slipped a folded wad of cash into one of their breast pockets. Then he shook hands with the both of them and started back over to sit down again.
“What’d I miss?”
“Uh, sparks. Lots of ‘em. Did you just bribe those guys?” Billy cocked his head at the yellow display, apparently disappointed or unsure of the color.
“Looks like piss,” he mumbled.
“Did you?” Joel repeated.
“What?” He looked over at Joel. “No, no.” He waved his hand to dismiss the notion. The yellow fizzled low and eventually went out, it being the last in the mix. Billy bounded over to the container and found it charred black and melted into a flat disk, some of the dirt beneath it melted into the mass. “Cool. Hey Joel,” he called. “Do you want this?” He held it up.
Joel shook his head. Billy was an odd kid. “Nah, man. You keep it if you want it, though.” He knew he did. The crowd dissipated in low murmurs and no trouble, the police squad car pulled away to cruise down the street just then as well. Billy tossed the plastic disk into the air and caught it.
“This is so damn fun.”
Joel stood up and stretched before they started the walk back to the subway, putting a hand on Billy’s back to goad him to move faster. “Yeah, Billy. It’s a freakin’ laugh riot.”
“You didn’t enjoy it?” Billy actually looked hurt that Joel might not have enjoyed the fun as much as he did.
“No, no,” Joel said. “I had a great time, Billy. I’m just cold now, and I want to go home and drink some coffee to warm up.”
“Irish coffee?” Billy asked. Joel didn’t have to look up at him to know that he was smiling, because he could hear it in his voice. The kid was still flying on that experience. You don’t need drugs when you have a brand spankin’ new passion.
“Is there any other kind?” Joel laughed.
Sessie had settled into the stool next Benji as he had promised to begin to sober up. Chris took a table nearby and Paul sat with him to keep him company. She bounced between the two parties to try to keep up on everyone’s conversations. “So you wanna talk now?” Sesie had just been talking to Paul and Chris for the last half hour or 45 minutes, letting Benji stew in his mood. He had downed a couple double JD’s in her absence.
“Yeah, Ses,” he said quietly. “Let’s talk.”
“So what’s the deal with your girl? You aren’t together anymore?”
Benji shook his head. “I dunno. We got a tough relationship.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Nobody supports us.”
She touched the top of his multicolored Mohawk to find it very stiff. She also remembered back when he’d stripped his whole head to be able to dye it pink, then ended up dying most of it black to cover it up. “The guys don’t support you?”
He looked over at her, his eyes glassy from drink and cheeks ruddy from the same. “Nope. They hate her. They hate me when I’m with her.”
“Your mom?”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“Her friends?”
“No.”
“Cash?” She looked over at Paul a moment. He had told her all about the dog that Benji cherished so much, and likened it to the dog she’d had in high school (that she still had now) named Messy.
“He’s bitten her twice.”
She whistled. That was a lot of opposition. “Well, your new mouth jewelry looks good,” she threw in.
He smiled. “Thanks, Sessie.” She always could make him smile, and vice versa.
“Seriously, though, it sounds like she’s bad news because Paul doesn’t hate people for no reason. Remember how I thought he hated me when we first met?”
Benji nodded. “Yeah, I just told you he actually liked you, in reality he really did hate you.” Sessie stared at him, not sure what to say. “I’m just kidding,” he assured her, putting a hand on her forearm.
She threw a shelled peanut at him. “Anyway, knowing Joel and Billy, they’re not gonna hate her unless she sucks. Maybe you should reevaluate your feelings.”
Benji shifted at that suggestion, and looked away from Sessie, down at his hands as he picked apart the shell of a peanut. “I know what I’m feeling,” he said. “I really care about her, that’s what sucks. Every time I see her I hear… you know that song ‘God Only Knows What I’d Do Without You’?”
She squinted at him. “Uh, no.”
“I hear that, but, like, a hardcore version, but the refrain’s still really soft and sweet, just like the original, with the stupid piano behind it and everything.” Sessie blinked at him. “That’s how our relationship is. Loud and painful and intense, but down at the core of it all she and I just want something perfect and gentle… I just… it’s like a bowling ball to the chest when we’re like this.” He rubbed his face, removing what was left of the smeared eyeliner so he looked more like Sessie remembered him. He slumped over the bar, his head down on his arms. “I don’t know.” Sessie got off her stool and draped an arm across his shoulders and spoke softly into his ear about how only he could know what he was feeling, nobody else could possibly know he felt the way he did. That he had to do whatever he thought was best. Then she hugged him around the chest from behind, putting her head on his back as he rested.
“Aww, come on, Benj,” she said. “You really care about her that much? Enough to tell me something as freaking cheesy as that… song thing?”
After a deliberate pause he replied. “I guess so,” speaking as if it was news even to him.
Sessie picked his head up off the bar. “Well then, Benj, I guess I gotta ask. Since when in hell did you start giving a fuck what other people think?”
Okay, here’s where this installment’s gonna end. I got more coming though. I might even write it fast enough so I can post both chapters at once.