“Fuck,” Hayes said.
“I think a long time ago,” Simon volunteered.
“And they chose to fight over ittoday? There aresixty-five thousandgirls out there who have paid good money and are screaming your names and waiting for you to go on in fifteen minutes, and this happensnow? Are youmad?”
“No,” Hayes said, his voice muffled by the towel. “No more so than usual.”
August Moon went on without Hayes. Oliver had managed to fracture a bone in his nose, which swelled quickly, efficiently rendering Hayes’s voice useless for the next several hours. The show started almost forty minutes late, the guys scrambling with their vocal coach to see who would take which solos and which, if any, harmonies could possibly be rearranged in such little time. They pulled it off. Between the fans singing along loudly to everything, and screaming in the moments when they weren’t singing, Hayes’s absence was not a total deal breaker.
“Maybe we’re just better as four,” he said.
“Don’t be silly. They need you. They’re not the same without you. This is your brainchild, remember?”
It was later that evening and we were back at the hotel, rehashing the night’s events: the hours in the hospital, the agreed-upon storythat he’d tripped and fallen during a rehearsal, the decision to hold off on realigning anything until he saw a specialist back in the States.
“Isn’t that a little excessive?” I’d asked him in the examining room, when we had a moment to ourselves, Raj stepping out for yet another call, Desmond and two other security guards directly outside the door.
“They’re taking it very seriously,” he’d said.
“Who? Management?”
“Management and…” He’d paused for a second. “Lloyd’s of London. It’s insured, my face.”
I could not help but laugh. “Of course it is, Hayes Campbell. Of course.”
But back in the hotel with his face swollen and changing colors, he’d become melancholy.
“Fucking Oliver…” he muttered for the thousandth time.
“Youdidsleep with his sister, Hayes. What did you expect was going to happen?”
He grunted in response. We were lying in bed, his head propped on a pile of pillows, a latex glove filled with ice straddling the bridge of his nose. He looked ridiculous and yet still darling to me.
“Why would she tell him?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Maybe she thought it had been so long that he wouldn’t care. Or maybe she was mad at me and it was her way of getting back… I don’t know.”
“I’m sorry.”
He squeezed my hand.
“Why didn’t you tell me it was still going on?”
“It’s notstillgoing on.”
“You slept with her last year.”
“It was before you. Does it matter?”
“You’d made it sound like it hadn’t happened in years…”
He sighed, deep. “It was once last year, Solène. Once. Over the Christmas holiday. It was before I even met you. And evidently, ‘it was no big deal.’ I don’t hold anything you did before me against you, do I? All the dicks you sucked in the nineties…”
“There weren’t many dicks…”
“Whatever. It wasbeforeme. I don’t care. Likewise, you shouldn’t care about Penelope.” He shut his eyes then, and for a moment neither of us spoke.
I lay there listening to the whir of the air conditioner. A siren rang in the distance, the pitch unfamiliar—a reminder that I was in a foreign city, far from home.
