American Love Songs (30 page)

“Youll have to excuse him,” Jake said into the mike when he finally found his voice. “He just recently suffered head trauma to the part of his brain that controls social conscience.”

That got a bigger laugh, though Chris flipped him the finger. The PAs and techs off to the side of the stage were starting to look edgy.

“At exactly midnight?” Chris was saying. His voice was all… Jake didnt know if it was the microphones, but hed known Chris for years, and hed never heard that tone. “Thats awesome.”

Jake and Parker exchanged a look from closer up this time; Jake was pretty sure Parker could read the confusion on his face all too clearly. He checked back with Jimmy again, but Jimmy just rolled his eyes at them like they were the ones with brain damage.

Then Chris said, “Whats her name?”

Jakes mouth dropped open again, and he reached for his phone, seeing Parker scrambling to do the same. He had gotten one new text message, and he knew exactly whom it was from. After all, Newfoundland was an hour and a half ahead of New York.

“Charlotte Grace,” Chris repeated, his smile enormous. “Its beautiful. Ive got to go, the natives are getting restless, but kiss her from me, okay? And Allanna?”

There was a pause; the entire audience was holding its breath. Chris said, “I love you.”

Jake damn near dropped his phone, but he recovered the fumble in time to check out the text message. It said simply,
It’s a girl!
He got close enough to Parker to slap him a high-five.

“Can we get a camera zoom in here?” Chris requested, holding up his cell phone. “I want you guys to meet someone.”

Jake directed his attention to the huge monitors, but there was a tug on his arm that distracted him, and Parker was there, holding out his hand. “You sure you want to see this?” he asked.

Parker smiled. “Wouldnt miss it.”

Jake handed him his glasses, and they looked up at the giant image of Chriss squalling, red-faced baby girl dominating Times Square. “This is completely surreal,” Parker said to him, eyes huge behind his dorky lenses.

“I hear that,” Jake agreed, sure that if he took one step to the right he was going to reach out for Parkers hand. He just wouldnt be able to stop himself. It was that kind of moment.

“This heres the brand new love of my life,” Chris told a hundred million people. His voice cracked suspiciously, and Jake realized with a dawning horror that there was no way he was going to be able to sing after this. “Oh, shit, I gotta call my mom.”

The audience laughed, and Jake saw the harried-looking PA flag down a coordinator as Chris ran off backstage, so he stepped up to Chriss mike. “Sorry for the interruption, guys,” he said with a real amount of chagrin. “Thanks for understanding. Since our times almost up anyway, the three of us are gonna finish up the set.”

Jimmy leaned forward into his microphone. “As a special reward for your patience, I think Jake and Parker should sing a song from the new album. What do you guys think?”

Jake thought,
Parker’s going to fucking kill you, you fucking moron
, but to his surprise, Parker just grabbed his mike stand and moved it up closer to the front of the stage. “A little sneak preview couldnt hurt,” he said, voice just loud enough to be picked up by the microphone.

Then Parker plucked out the opening bars of his masterpiece. And a sudden thought occurred to Jake. “Youre gonna make me sing the girl part, arent you?”

Parker just gave him a hot, knowing smirk and looked out at the audience, unfaltering. Jake didnt know what the hell had gotten into him, but he liked it.

He didnt have time to wonder about it, because Parker had dug his fingers into the frets and it was time for Jake to come in with the bass line, and there wasnt much he could do but hang on for the ride.

Without Chris on rhythm guitar the song was different, not quite hollow, but more of a frame for what went inside it. When Parker opened his mouth to let out the first verse, goose bumps rose on the back of Jakes neck, and it had nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with the way Parkers voice just slid into that space between the bass and the lead guitar and held them together. Jake was really fucking glad he had a huge guitar slung in front of his hips right now, because Parkers voice on this song had never once failed to give him an absolutely raging hard-on.

Okay, so lately Parker gave him a raging hard-on about a hundred and ten percent of the time. Jake really should not be thinking about that on stage, but he couldnt help it. With Parker wailing his siren song, he was helpless to do anything but trip into the melody after him.

It wasnt the first time theyd sung this song together, but it was the first time since they started… “dating” was the wrong word, but Jake was damned if he knew what the right one was.

And for the first time, Jake got it. The words coming out of Parkers mouth hit him straight in the gut.

“Its hard to breathe when youre watching every move, and its hard to see when you take up the whole room.” Eyes closed as he made love to the microphone, Parker was a vision of every tortured emotion evoked by the song. “I wish that I was someone else, I wish I could control myself. I wish I had the courage to believe.”
⁴⁸

Singing a duet youd just realized was written about you was more than a little awkward, as Jake was just now discovering, especially when youd sung it before and apparently missed the obvious. He tried not to stare too blatantly at Parker out of the corner of his eyes, but it was next to impossible, more so after he noticed Parker blushing. It felt like theyd just confessed their clandestine affair to the entire world, though logically Jake knew very few people would notice and even fewer would care.

Still: awkward.

They finished out the last chorus to thunderous applause, and Jake glanced up and checked the countdown; they were only a few minutes away from midnight.

Parker was sweaty and grinning, hair sticking up in clumps, and his glasses had slipped down his nose. He looked totally energized, completely at peace with himself on stage for the first time since that contact high back before they even had an album.

⁴⁸
Yeah, Jake was feeling a little slow.

It was the sexiest thing Jake had ever seen in his life, the stuff the very best wet dreams were made of. Jake was so in love it was actually stupid—but it felt great.

Thankfully for Jakes sanity, Chris chose that moment to reappear on the scene, and they all bid a fond farewell to a city full of New Yorkers and retreated to the staging area. A PA brought a bottle of champagne and some glasses back for them to share as they watched the ball drop, but the part Jake would remember for the rest of his life was the taste of Parkers champagne kiss at midnight.

Postlude
“
S
HESstill not asleep?” Chris asked desperately. One of the dozens of

makeup people backstage had spent ten minutes covering the bags under his eyes, but there was just no disguising the exhaustion in his voice.
⁴⁹

Jake exchanged a glance with Parker, then casually leaned forward and slid Parkers glasses off his nose. Parker gave him a bleary, pointed look, and Jake shrugged. “For old times sake.”

“Two minutes,” one of about seven hundred PAs announced, and Jake, Chris, and Parker all simultaneously quadruple-checked their tuning, Chris while holding the phone to his ear with his shoulder.

“Okay. Kiss her for me. Ill be home as soon as I can.” Jimmy twirled a drumstick. “Ready?”
It didnt matter. Ready or not, the curtain was going up.

As the first loud, wailing notes of Parkers intro screamed into the auditorium, Jake forgot to be anxious and let the music carry him.

After a multimedia long-distance debate that had lasted a week, Chris and Parker had finally come up with a compromise that had taken another two weeks to work out: a mashup of “Closer” with Hendrixs “Angel,” with Chris singing “Angel,” and Jake and Parker countering. It was the most difficult five-minute long bass piece Jake had ever attempted.

It also had the biggest payoff.

 

⁴⁹
Only Chris. He had boarded a plane to Canada early in the morning on January 1
^st
and come home to LA two weeks later with a wife and kid. Jake was surprised by how much he wasnt really surprised.

Jakes mike was on the opposite side of the stage from Parkers, but he could feel his presence as if they were shoulder to shoulder. Jimmys driving drumbeat reverberated through the stage floor and set up residence in Jakes molars, and Chris and Parkers voices crawled across his skin like lightning and dug in, dragging music from his fingers and harmonies from his throat.

When Parkers guitar sang out the last note, the auditorium was quiet and then suddenly, deafeningly loud. Chris thanked the audience, someone took Jakes guitar, and then somehow they made their way back to their seats.

Well, Jimmy, Jake, and Parker went back to their seats. Chris went out a door backstage somewhere and got in a car to go home to Allanna and Charlotte. The kicker was that he wasnt even upset about it.

The usual rush Jake felt after a good stage performance was being bolstered by anticipation, and the endorphin rush had him so high that the whole thing seemed like a dream.

Best Music Video went to a thought-provoking pop tune, and Jake didnt get too bent out of shape about it. He hadnt expected “Crossing State Lines” to win that category. An hour or so later, Best Rock Performance went Springsteen. Jake
would
have been upset about that one, except that someone somewhere thought they were in the same league as Springsteen, and it was hard to be disappointed by a compliment of that magnitude.

Still, he felt himself deflating a little. Beside him, Parker cast him a glance, then reached his left hand down between their seats for Jake to hold and squeezed a little.

Who needed a Grammy, anyway?

Just when Jake thought hed made his peace with losing out— probably to
Live at Madam Tussaud’s
—the announcer said, “And the award for Best Rock Album goes to the Wayward Sons for
American Love Songs
.”

People all around them turned to look, to smile, to offer their praise, some of them songwriters Jake had unknown, some of them musicians and

idolized all his life. Jimmy gave him a congratulatory pat on the knee. A camera zoomed in on the three of them, and their faces went up on one of the giant television screens nearer to the stage.

Jake missed all of it. The second their name was announced, Parker tightened his grip on his hand. Half a second after that, his lips were covering Jakes in a long, warm, furiously ecstatic kiss. Jake put his hands on Parkers face and drew him closer and didnt let go until he felt Jimmy tugging on the back of his jacket.

Then he was being led up to the stage, pulling Parker behind him by the hand until he had to let go to be congratulated, and someone handed Jimmy a little gold statue, which he held up for the audiences approval.

Jake didnt realize the mike could pick up his words until he said, “This is so awesome,” and everyone laughed.

Half a second after
that
, he realized he hadnt written any kind of acceptance speech, and odds were kind of slim that Jimmy or Parker were prepared to say anything.

Crap.

Luckily, at that moment, his phone rang with a text message. Jake was mortified—hed turned off the ringer, but the stupid microphone was picking up the vibrations—until he realized, “Its Chris.” He held up the phone and opened it, explaining, “He wishes he could be here, but hes got a sick kid at home. Oh.” He read the message. “Its an acceptance speech.”

“Cheeky,” Parker commented. He was flushed bright red to the tips of his ears. Then: “I dont actually think you can say that.” “So Im just going to say thank you,” Jake said. “Broadly. To our manager, Mike, our awesome road crew, the sound guys at MERI—” “Resident baby mama,” Jimmy put in.

 

“Yes, definitely, Allanna, as well as our sisters, Becca and Mickey, for not letting our heads get too big—”

 

“
Your
mamas,” Parker interrupted.

Jake stopped mid-sentence. His mom. Who was probably watching this live. Whom hed never actually told about Parker. “My mama,” he said faintly, his voice echoing larger than life throughout the huge room, “is going to kill me.”
⁵⁰
He was in for the biggest I-told-youso of his
life.

And that was all the time they had before they were ushered off stage so someone else could be as stupidly, deliriously happy as Jake was.

Well, maybe not
quite
so happy.

“Hey,” Parker said before they could get back to their seats. Jake watched as Jimmy passed them by with a look that was somehow simultaneously knowing and long-suffering.

“Hey yourself, Grammy winner,” he said, grinning as Parker pulled him aside. “Whats—”

Parker hushed him with a finger to his lips, then kissed him again, slow and purposeful and sweet, his hands curled in the back of Jakes jacket. When their lips finally parted, Jake couldnt keep the corner of his mouth from twitching up. “Are you trying to make the tabloids?”

“Trying
something
,” Parker murmured, kissing him again, barely more than a brush of lips this time.

 

“Youre being very mysterious,” Jake told him, resting his hands on Parkers hips.

“You like it.”
Quietly, Jake confessed, “I love it. Parker—”

Parker put a finger to his lips. “I know,” he said, very softly. “Lets go home. Lets go home, and you can tell me whatever you want, and Ill believe you.”

And as it turned out, he did.

PRODIGAL: OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE WAYWARD SONS Date: Friday, February 18, 2011 Author: Jake

⁵⁰
Jake had failed to learn from Chriss mistakes, although, to be fair, he hadnt been allowed to tell.

 

(continued from this post)

And there you have it: the whole story. Im sorry if its not the grand romance you were expecting, but apparently we are just two ordinary guys who couldnt or wouldnt get a clue. Those of you who suggested, ages ago, that I declare my undying love for Parker and take a road trip to Canada to make an honest woman out of him, well, Im not sure that would have worked, but you might as well say, “I told you so.” Its not like I havent heard that a lot in the last week or anything.