Heartstrings (18 page)

C
al wasted
no time getting back to work. He showed up an hour early, waiting out back to meet a delivery truck. Yanmei was coming in later for inward goods, but Cal offered to do the physical unloading alongside the dispatch guy. Something about lifting heavy shit made him feel useful.

He and the brewery’s distributor had unloaded half a truck’s worth of cases and kegs when Cal’s phone went off. He couldn’t imagine Yanmei needing him when she was due at work in a couple of hours anyhow. And his dad was at sea. That meant there was only one person it could be. Apart from a fleeting thought that he could stand to make more friends, Cal was suddenly overwhelmed with emotion.

It had to be Blake. Texting him to say that Nashville sucked without him, that he was miserable, that he needed Cal to join him because being apart this long was awful.

“I’ve gotta get this,” he said, holding up a finger to the delivery guy. The man shrugged and kept unloading crates on his own.

Cal stepped just inside the back of the bar, then fished his phone from his pocket.

Blake’s text was only two words long.

So Cal did.

Blake answered on the first ring.

“That was quick,” he said.

“I was hoping to hear from you.”

He heard a quick intake of breath, almost like a sigh in reverse.

“Tour’s canceled,” Blake said, flatly. “Rhett gets his way, mostly.”

“Define ‘mostly.’”

“We can’t play songs from the two Sinsationals album without paying him statutory royalties. The label says it’s too expensive for us to pay those royalties every concert. The fans paid to see the Sinsationals, not Keys To The Old Horse, so the tour’s dead.”

“What about the suing you for breach of contract stuff?”

“Ongoing. I signed an affidavit saying he attacked me, which my camp says should be enough to get Rhett’s guys to back off on that so long as I don’t press charges.”

Cal grunted.

“You should have. Pressed charges I mean.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Blake’s voice was flat and disaffected, as if he’d already checked out of the conversation. Or checked out of the band. Cal tried to reel him back in, gently.

“So we’ll write some new songs,” he said. “In case you forgot, we’re actually good at that.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Is there any
good
news?”

“Oh. Yeah. We don’t have to pay the royalties for the last show. So you’ll get paid a bit more. Rhett needed to like, legally inform us that he was withdrawing before he could do that. Or something.”

“That’s... yeah, okay, that counts as good news.”

Cal restlessly toyed with the band of his watch, running his thumb along the braided leather. He wanted to tell Blake to just get his ass on the next plane to Denver, but was that what Blake even needed right now? Cal wasn’t sure he could actually help. He
wanted
to help Blake more than anything in the world, wanted to gather him up in a ridiculously sappy cuddle-hug and just stroke his hair and promise him that everything would work out.

But Cal had no experience with this sort of thing. He’d never reached such dizzying heights, never found such success only to have the rug pulled completely out from under him.

“Are you still in Nashville?” he asked, trying to address the subject in an oblique way.

“Yeah.” Blake said. There was a hesitation, a soft sound on the other end of the phone line, as if he’d started to say something else but didn’t quite get there.

Come on,
Cal thought.
Grow a pair and reach the fuck out to him. Remember, you’re doing things differently now. If you want a second shot at this, you have to work for it.

“Do you
have
to still be in Nashville?” he asked.

“No.” And was that a hint of a smile in Blake’s voice? A vaguely hopeful note? Was Cal reading into something that wasn’t there?

He took a deep breath, glanced over a shoulder into the empty storeroom, and spoke into the phone, calm and clear:

“Blake. Come home.”

A lengthy sigh whooshed across the connection, a hint of laugh at the very end of it.

“I wondered if you were ever going to ask,” Blake said. The relief in his voice was practically palpable.

* * *

C
al finished unloading the truck
, true to his word. He barely felt the weight of the heavy boxes he lifted. His back and shoulders didn’t feel strained at all. Despite the fact that Blake’s entire world was crumbling around him, Cal felt light as a feather. Because Blake was coming home.

He immediately felt guilty about that.

Perhaps the Sinsationals being dissolved—were they officially dissolved?—hadn’t hit him quite so hard because he’d only had the briefest taste. Hard to miss something that was never really his.

He worked through the evening shift with a smile on his face, even as Yanmei briefed him on the plumbing drama. And there was a
lot
of plumbing drama, she assured him. But she’d handled it, paid the contractors’ deposit, and she’d even organized a new health and safety inspection, as that was legally required upon replacement of a fire sprinkler system.

“And I found that out just by reading the book all by myself!” she joked, giving him a huge thumbs up.

Once the last of their patrons had finally left for the night, Cal locked up the front doors. The promise of Blake’s arrival the next day lingered on the horizon like light at the end of a tunnel.

Cal needed a drink to settle his nerves. And he needed to tell his manager what a damn good job she’d done. So while Yanmei collected glassware and packed it all into the dishwashers, Cal grabbed a couple of copper mugs from behind the bar. They hadn’t been used recently, so he gave them a quick dust-off before popping open a bottle of ginger ale. Muddling some sliced jalapeño in ice, he poured half into each glass, then topped it with the ginger ale and a couple shots of tequila, then a squeeze of lime.

The Mexican Mule, a spicy Southwestern take on the Moscow Mule, was one of the few cocktails Cal bothered to make for himself. He waved one shiny mug in the air to catch Yanmei’s attention.

She strolled over to the bar and accepted the drink with a slivered grin, her dark eyes narrowing.

“You’re not about to ask me to come in on my days off, are you?”

“This is a thank you, not a bribe,” Cal said. They clunked their cups together. It sounded like cymbals.

“You’re very welcome then.”

Cal took a gulp from his drink. The lime and tequila burned pleasantly down his throat, the jalapeño tickling his tongue. Yanmei did likewise.

“You did an amazing job while I was away,” he said. “I never once doubted you.”

He’d felt sweeps of guilt at his own absence from the family business, sure. But never because he doubted she could handle it.

“I think it was good for you.” She sipped her drink, considering him. “You seem... dare I say it, happier?”

Cal couldn’t fight the hint of red that crept up his cheeks. He took a deeper gulp of his drink and cleared his throat, chewing on an ice cube.

“Yeah. It was something I needed to do.”

Yanmei hiked up a slender eyebrow. She leaned against the polished bar, then levered herself up so she was sitting atop it, legs dangling.

“Is there something you’re not telling me? You got all flustered.”

“I did not.” Cal staunchly rebutted that statement, but at the same time couldn’t quite meet her eyes. Because he knew it was true: his excitement at Blake coming home was written all over his big dumb face. It had been all night.

“Calvin, did you meet someone?” Yanmei’s eyes were huge now. “I’ve never seen mancrush-Cal before so I don’t know how you act.”

Cal deigned to not respond to that. Instead, he took another sip of his drink, then realized it was almost empty. He sucked another ice cube into his mouth.

Yanmei squinted at him like he was an optical illusion she was trying to figure out.

He could tell the exact moment when she figured it out. First her mouth twitched, then she just
glared
at him.

“No,” she said. “I cannot believe it.”

Cal strolled around behind the bar and started to fix himself another drink.

“See? He did not tell you the whole story,” he said.

“You ran off to go on tour and fuck Blake Bradley.” She sounded more fascinated than anything. “Is that like the grown man’s equivalent of running off to join the circus?”

Cal kept his hands occupied with muddling more peppers and ice. He side-eyed her while doing so.

“So is it serious?” she asked, edging a little closer.

Cal contemplated telling her to mind her own business, but on the other hand, who else did he have to talk to about this stuff? And wasn’t he trying to be better about being open with his feelings anyway?

“I hope it is,” he said. He dashed ginger ale over the ice and jalapeño in his mug.

When he looked up, midway through squeezing the lime, Yanmei was regarding him with a surprisingly tender cast to her eyes.

“He uh, he and I are giving things another shot.” Cal gave the whole thing some context. “We broke it off years ago. We were dumb kids. And hopefully we’re not now.”

“Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret, dumb-dumb. Travis and I used to fight all the time. When we first started dating, I kicked him the hell out of my house once.”

Now it was Cal’s turn to be bug-eyed with surprise. “Seriously?”

“Of course. It took us way too long to realize that we fight so much because we care so much about each other. We have strong feelings about dumb shit because we care about our future. Opinionated people swept up in their feelings are always going to fight about shit. You just have to figure out when it’s minor versus when it’s not.”

“That’s... surprisingly wise.”

“I’m not allowed to be wise about relationships?”

Cal rolled his eyes at her and took a swig of his new drink. The tequila buzzed pleasantly through him, warming him from the inside out.

“I only meant because you’re younger than me. Jerk.”

Yanmei quizzed him about his rekindled relationship for the next twenty minutes, nudging him for anecdotes and explanations and a timeline and the whole nine yards. He felt like he was prepping her for a best-man speech at a wedding.

When they were both borderline drunk and Yanmei had exhausted her supply of questions, Cal closed up the bar. He left his truck in the parking lot and opted to walk the short few blocks home. The stars were out and the air smelled like spring and it wasn’t twenty degrees anymore and Blake was flying in soon, all of these things conspiring together to leave Cal in a tipsily pleasant mood.

N
ormally
, Blake loved flying. But the plane from Nashville to Denver felt like a prison. He’d never empathized with the phrase
like a caged animal
more, couldn’t shake it out of his mind. Cal offered to pick him up at the airport, but as much as Blake would have loved the romance of it, he wanted to rent a car. He’d let his folks take his beloved Ford Transit when they moved out west and Denver was the sort of city where you needed wheels.

In that moment, he wished he hadn’t. Something familiar to drive around in would have been nice. Anything to dull the throb in his heart, which hadn’t eased up since his final meeting at Carousel Records.

The Sinsationals, in their current incarnation, were no more. Palmer, Patty, and Blake’s representatives were going to work on drafting a new agreement, but who knew when that would be finished. They’d have to double-check with everyone else in the band and see how they felt. Then they’d have to record some new material, without Rhett, and try out for their record contract all over again.

Which Blake knew they could do. His band was resilient. They were good people. People who cared about the music.

But it all seemed so far out of reach. The more he dwelled on it, the more he felt like some great hole had been excavated in his chest and there was no way anything could ever fill it in. Even going home to Cal felt like putting a Band-Aid over a bullet wound.

Blake grabbed the keys to his rental, a 2016 Jeep Cherokee with so many automated features he didn’t know where to start. There were cameras that helped him back up, steering wheel controls that helped him stay in his lane, speed regulators that already knew the speed limits to all the local roads, locks that unlocked as soon as he walked up to them, and more.

He didn’t even have to turn a key to start it. He just had to have the keyring in his pocket. Then he pressed a button.

Every last aspect of Blake’s life had spiraled out of his control and he barely even felt like he was driving his fucking rental car.

He started off en route to his house, but what was waiting for him there? Empty rooms and furnishings aplenty all covered in sheets?

No. That wasn’t what he came back to Denver for. Not this time. He was kidding himself if he tried to put anything between the airport and Cal.

He texted Cal for his address, then plugged it into his GPS. He knew Denver well enough, but Cal lived on the southwest side of town, a neighborhood Blake wasn’t entirely familiar with. In a moderately borderline area, if Blake was remembering right. But he got to the complex just fine and even managed to find a visitor’s spot to park his car.

Leaving his bags for now, he stepped out of the Jeep and peered up the two buildings on either side of the fenced-in courtyard. Cal emerged from a door on the top floor of one of them. A grin broke out across his face as he looked down to Blake, waving invitingly.

Blake trudged up the five flights of steps with his hands in the pockets of his peacoat. Cal met him on the front step.

“Sorry,” Cal said. “It’s not the Mandalay Bay.”

Blake snorted, almost offended. Like he’d care. Cal had always been far more conscious of the class divide between them than Blake was, but he hoped they’d gotten rid of that back when they were kids.

“Want me to grab your bags?” Cal asked. He opened the door, inviting Blake in.

Blake’s mouth was having difficulty. Words were hard. He stood in the doorway for a second, throat awkwardly tight, trying to formulate some combination of words that would reassure Cal he was okay. Even a simple
sure thanks
or
no, I got it
would do. But he couldn’t manage that.

When Cal saw his face, he stepped past Blake and out onto the front stoop.

“Keys,” he said. “You sit down. I’ll get your stuff.”

Blake passed the keyring over with numb, slow-moving fingers. He trudged into the apartment, which was solidly built, if low-ceilinged and a little chilly. It looked like a 1970s special, stippled asbestos ceiling and all. That stuff was supposed to be completely safe so long as it wasn’t punctured, right?

He was intrigued, being in Cal’s apartment all alone. But there wasn’t a whole lot to see. It appeared his lover led a simple life. His furnishings were few, though heavy wood and high quality. The guitar Blake had gifted him hung proudly from the wall, over a small electric keyboard. A turntable lurked in the corner along with several boxes of sleeved vinyl records.

Cal had grown up, but he hadn’t
changed
that much.

Blake sank down onto the black leather sofa and hunched over against himself, on the verge of tears. He barely heard Cal return, the door slamming shut somewhere behind him. He heard twin thumps as his bags hit the ground.

“Hey,” came a soft voice from above him. “Welcome home.”

Blake lifted his head, meeting Cal’s eyes. Cal’s brow creased in concern, the smile vanished from his face.

“It went that good, huh?” he asked. Then he stooped down and collected Blake up into his arms, smoothing his fingers over the fabric of Blake’s coat.

Cal wore a leather jacket, the beat-up biker-looking kind that was probably a thousand years old. It smelled like some sort of woody resin, and underneath it a hint of that unmistakable musky maleness. Cal smell. Blake buried his face in Cal’s shoulder and inhaled, burrowing into the coat somewhat.

“I feel like this was my chance,” Blake mumbled, helpless. “This was my one chance at my dreams. And I blew it.”

Cal was silent for a long while.

“First off,” he eventually said, “Rhett’s the one who blew it. Not you. And second off, I... know that feeling pretty well.”

A heavy sigh gusted out of Cal, rippling over Blake’s hair. He felt the arm around his shoulders tighten.

“Blake,” Cal murmured, stroking his fingertips along the side of Blake’s jaw, no longer swollen but still a little bruised. “You hear yourself? The one chance at your dreams? You dream bigger and work harder than any person I’ve ever met. I know it doesn’t feel that way now, but this is just a roadblock. You’re meant for better things.”

Then Cal tenderly kissed Blake’s hairline.

A short sob forming in his throat, Blake clenched his eyes shut and clung to Cal for dear life. This was the one thing nobody could take from him, not anymore. Life could take his record contract, take his band, take his songs, take his money, but now that he had Cal back he was never, ever letting him go.

Emotional though Blake could be, he wasn’t one who cried for very long. A few token tears slid down his cheeks, his teeth clenched tight, but the worst waves of grief passed before too long.

He still felt wretched. But holding on to Cal gave him strength. Or at least gave him access to strength he couldn’t quite get to before.

“You can stay here as long as you like,” Cal said, kissing Blake’s temple.

Blake drew in a sniffly breath, then explained the current situation to Cal. The Sinsationals had scattered back to their homes for now, awaiting word from their various legal representatives. The accountants were looking into cutting final paychecks from the aborted tour. Blake apologized over and over about Cal’s cut of the pay, until Cal shut him up by putting a finger to his mouth.

“I don’t care,” he said.

“I know. It’s not a
care
thing,” Blake stammered. “It’s just—it pisses me off because out of all of us, you’re the one who could actually use this money, you know?”

Cal tapped Blake’s mouth again, audibly shushing him.

“Blake.” His voice was calm and flat, like a parent talking to a child mid-tantrum. “I don’t care about the money. I don’t need the money. I know this apartment doesn’t look like much, but I don’t live here because it’s all I can afford.”

Blake hiked in a deep breath, some of his anxiety easing off.

Cal’s words genuinely surprised him. Blake had seen the state of The Garage. Which, granted, had never been a pretty place. But between the dumpy quality of the bar and the decidedly working-class nature of Cal’s accommodation, Blake had assumed his finances weren’t great.

Maybe he was wrong about that, too. He’d been wrong about a lot in regards to Cal.

Cal turned his head, taking the room in. Blake followed his gaze, shifting so that he rested against Cal’s chest on the couch.

“I know this place isn’t much to look at, but I don’t live here because of some dire financial need.” Cal smirked, a lopsided curl of his mouth. “I live here because this is what I’m used to. This is what’s comfortable to me. You might be used to eight-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel rooms. I’m used to concrete porches and chain link.”

Blake couldn’t help but ask, now.

“And the bar?”

“Jeez, the bar looks the way it does because that’s its whole...
thing.
It’s a renovated garage people drink beer and play pool in. The same crusty old weekend warrior Sunday bikers have been drinking there since I was born. If I took it out of Dad’s hands and turned it into some hipster craft-beer joint, that’d be like ripping the soul out of it.”

Blake rubbed at his nose with a thumb. He’d barely heard Cal say that many words all at once before.

Then it dawned on him: this was how Cal got when he was
passionate.
He talked about the bar the same way he talked about making music. It wasn’t just some job to him. He genuinely cared. He said it had a
soul
for hell’s sake.

Blake got choked up all anew.

“I love you,” he blurted.

Cal blinked several times, his eyelashes fluttering rapidly. For a split second he was quiet, then he hugged Blake against himself with renewed vigor.

“... Love you too,” he said, inhaling deep against Blake’s hair.