At least, I supposed, he couldn’t say he was sleeping with my brother.
Still, I shook off my nerves and went for it.
Maybe I was mistaking the situation. Maybe his unhappiness wasn’t even about me. As much as we all forgot it sometimes, the whole world didn’t revolve around us.
“Hey,” I said softly, sliding onto the chair next to him.
He lifted his head from where he’d been staring into a pint of golden beer. “Hey. Sorry, I didn’t see you come in.”
“Not very predatory of you,” I sort of joked, trying to lighten the mood. It earned me a weak smile that fell away almost immediately.
So yeah, I wasn’t imagining that, whether it was about me or not. Best to bite the bullet and get to it right away. Just in case. “What’s up?”
His gaze had drifted off behind me somewhere, and snapped back. “Huh?”
“You—”
“Hey what can I get you?” the bartender asked, popping up next to us in an impressive display of the worst timing ever.
“I’ll have the same as him,” I answered by rote, even though I didn’t really love light beers. It was just easier to go along, so I had spent too much of my life doing it.
And yet, I didn’t stop him and tell him not to bring me that, just crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.
Once he’d pulled a beer and set it in front of me, he moved off and we could get back to what mattered. “You look sad,” I told Dean. I was not going to jump to conclusions. I was not going to jump to con?—
“Oh,” he gave an unsteady smile, then sighed. “Craig, my bassist. He’s having another kid. It’s not... it’s not sad. It’s just that he’s leaving the band.”
At that, all the air went out of me.
And there I’d been worrying about selfish crap, when Dean was having a real crisis. “I’m so sorry, Dean. I know how important your music is to you.”
He ducked his head, giving another little smile, then shook his whole body, like he could shake off the crap life was throwing at him.
His lost boyfriend, I realized, had also been in the band. So the band was down to half its complement, since I doubted they had replaced him either. That made it just Dean and Riley, and from talking to Riley at pizza night, I had the feeling Riley wasn’t especially invested in the band either.
Not that they didn’t like the band, or care about it, but it had never been their first consideration in anything. They’d talked a lot about their job, and about going back to school, but not much about the band.
Not that there was anything wrong with that. Everyone was allowed to have their own priorities, but it seemed that everyone else’s priorities were different from Dean’s, and as a result, he was getting left behind.
What would he do without a band? Well, probably what other musicians had done without a band. Lots of incredible solo artists had started out as part of an ensemble, and only later become the artists everyone knew by name.
I didn’t doubt for a minute that Dean could do the same, but also... I couldn’t just say that to him. It would be like dismissing his current feelings, and maybe he wasn’t ready for such a huge leap. Even if he would be ready tomorrow, he was sad now, and that was allowed.
Everyone was allowed to mourn the things that left their life, even if it was time for those things to go.
So we sat there quietly for a while, then I figured the best way to get through this with Dean was to go through it, so I decided to wade in. “Tell me about the band. How did you get started?”
At that, he gave a bittersweet smile, turned toward me, and started to talk.
CHAPTER 14
DEAN
It was weird, talking to Landon about the band.
About music? Sure. A poetic twist of some specific lyric? Absolutely.
Fuck, most of the time it seemed like he’d gotten more out of those than I did. He was able to draw connections that had never occurred to me before.
