FOURTEEN
THE SONG OF DOOM
SEBASTIAN
It only tookus half a day to get in sync.
At first, Alex still held back a little. When we stepped inside, he timidly asked if he could play me a song. He stared at me in awe when I picked it up halfway through, already singing along by the second chorus.
Half an hour later, we were huddled in front of his laptop, browsing through folder after folder of songs he had written, until he finally loosened up enough to ask if we could jam on a couple of his sketches he had never been able to turn into full songs on his own.
By noon, we had turned a supposedly dead idea into something worth recording. A minute after noon, our hands and mouths were all over each other.
When he touched me, he held nothing back. His body explored mine, demanding and taking what it wanted—and I gave it to him willingly. He fucked me on the floor with a vigor worthy of a week called spring break. When we were done, we chuckled for a minute, and then kissed for another, unable to take our eyes off each other.
We had the best sandwiches for lunch, and afterward, we fed the cows together. In the afternoon, we made more music,fucked again, showered together, cooked pasta together, and wrote another song together until we were so tired that we snuggled under his blanket, clinging to each other as if we had never experienced human touch before. Maybe we truly hadn’t—at least not like this.
When we first got to know each other through our phones, this was exactly what I had hoped it would be like if we ever got the chance to spend more time together. And I couldn’t have been happier that we took the risk.
The next daywas exactly the same, except that we didn’t bother getting dressed in the morning. I just stayed in my shirt and underwear, and after we fucked before lunch, Alex did the same.
Throughout the day, we became more focused and worked on more songs. The more progress we made, the livelier Alex became.
It was about four o’clock when he sat in front of his laptop while I was strumming some chords on the guitar, feeling him sneak glances at me.
“You know we already have six songs?” He turned back to the track he was adjusting. “Four more and we could call it an album.”
I knew we would have to have that conversation eventually. When we first met, I was so set on never singing again that, even when I agreed to sing for him, I told him he could never show it to anyone, which definitely clashed with his own ambitions. Of course, my stance has done a complete one-eighty in the past few weeks—his music had become my music too, and even though nothing was fully finished yet, it was something I wanted the world to hear—we just hadn’t talked about that yet.
“I bet at this pace we could have a full album by the end of the week,” I replied, pressing the guitar strings down to keep them from ringing. “Is that something you’d want to do?”
“Only if you want it, too.” He clicked on his laptop, not looking at me. “Although I have to admit… if we made it to ten songs, I’d kind of want to put them out somehow.”
“That goes without saying.”
He glanced at me. “And… you’d be fine with that?”
“I mean, we’re in a band. It would make sense for me to be okay with it, wouldn’t it?”
Holding the guitar with my right hand, I reached out with my left and took his. He let me hold him, gazing at our fingers as they brushed against each other.
“Are you sure?” he said softly. “Because it’s okay if you don’t want to after… everything.”
“Can I tell you something?” I put the guitar aside and scooted closer. “The night we met, you taught me a valuable lesson that I only realized after I left.”
“Me?”
“Yeah.” I chuckled. “I know you didn’t mean to, but you did.”
“What lesson?”
“That I can’t hold on to my past.”
I interlaced my fingers with his and rested our hands on his leg before leaning my head against his shoulder.
“When we jammed that evening, and I let go of all those things I told myself for a moment, I finally enjoyed myself again for the first time in a long while. It didn’t hit me right away, but the next night, when I was alone with my thoughts, I started wondering… Why did I give up something I loved so much? Just to stick it to all of them?” I shook my head. “That was just stupid, wasn’t it?”
I took a breath.
