Page 55 of The Invisible Roommate

Suddenly, two warm hands cuffed his wrists and gently guided him. “Open your palms,” Emory said. “Slowly. Don’t poke me in the eye!”

“I’ll try not to.” Gerard willed his hands not to shake from nerves.

When the pads of his fingers hit skin, incandescent heat flared through him.

He’d claimed he wanted to see a semblance of Emory, but maybe this was all one big excuse to touch Emory. It gave him permission to swipe his fingers over every contour of the man’s face.

That night, his tentative fingers proved he was no practiced makeup guru, but he was an enthusiastic cartographer sketching a broad map. He roved and recorded the hills and valleys of Emory’s cheeks and nose and chin, trying to summon a picture in his mind.

As Gerard worked in the primer and the silky F2 foundation with Emory’s hands still locked to his wrists as guides, a porcelain visage took shape out of thin air.

When he uncapped the concealer, he chuckled.

“What’s so funny?” Emory asked.

“Nothing. It’s silly.” He stared at the plastic bottle.

“What is it?” Emory asked again, words dispensing from the outline of a wide, mostly flat mouth with a deep Cupid’s bow.

Gerard shook the applicator. “It’s a bit ironic. I’m about to put something called ‘concealer’ on you when I’m trying to uncover you.” Emory sucked in a shuddering breath, which Gerard ignored, afraid of reading too much into it. “I’m adding more layers to see what’s underneath. I told you it was silly.”

Emory’s grip tightened, a comforting restraint. “Words matter a lot to you.”

It wasn’t a question. Not even close. And it pried a can open in Gerard’s head.

Gerard had begun his journey into music through playing instruments, but lyrics rapidly became his passion. Writing lyrics was a way to process and understand the world and his emotions, both of which were often volatile and confounding. “They do,” Gerard said, after which he remembered the music they had playing in the background.

His own voice on All’s Well swirled around them. The track was called “Face the Facts,” with lyrics like History’s recorded for a reason / All you need to do is go flip back / If you wonder why I’m leaving / I think it’s time to face the facts.

“This sounds more lived-in than the material on the last album,” Emory observed as Gerard grabbed for the eyebrow pencil.

After the success of Overload, the label loosened the leash a bit. They gave the brothers more freedom to explore new collaborations and take interesting risks. Gerard had written this about Toby, but nobody else knew that, and he winced to think of the misplaced anger he’d felt when he penned these lyrics. He’d gone down an internet rabbit hole of closeted celebrities whose success scattered to the wind upon coming out.

“That’s bullshit,” Toby had said to him when he tried to express his anxieties in a hotel suite in Tokyo. Neon lights bled in through the sheer, rippling curtains creating sad, distorted shapes on the plush carpet, which looked too inviting in that moment. If Gerard could’ve lain down on the floor for a minute or two, let gravity press against him, he’d have been able to explain himself better. “You have no idea what will happen.”

But he did have an idea. There were thousands of ideas right there on his phone in black-and-white text. Cautionary tales. Harrowing tales. Tragic tales. He liked Toby, but he didn’t think he could risk losing everything for something he wasn’t even sure was love.

In hindsight, it was love. The worst part of traveling all over the world was that when he was not doing press or playing a show, he had a lot—a lot—of downtime to replay the tapes, set them to slow motion, and dissect what went wrong.

“Lived-in is one way to describe it.” The song seemed to speak to his present self. If he flipped back, reread his own history, then it was his job to learn from it. Feelings weren’t facts. Fear was what had clouded his choices then, and despite the self-proclaimed “monster” sitting in front of him currently caked in makeup, he hadn’t felt fearful at all over the idea that he could see himself falling in love with Emory Griffin.

“Are you proud of this?” Emory asked.

“I’m not done yet,” Gerard said.

“I was talking about the album.” The song had switched by then to a ballad with a lot of warbling strings.

Oh. Without stopping what he was doing, he thought about this. Using the most natural color in the small palette, he swiped the eye shadow brush along Emory’s lids, giving them proper depth, the sort of depth this album had in comparison to the last one. “I am,” he declared. “There are glimmers of the songwriter I want to be in this one if you listen between the production.”

“How do you mean?”

“Don’t move.” Gerard sounded a lot like Ravina when he’d sat in her chair backstage at some awards show, and she’d get him going about one of his special interests. The talking she didn’t mind; it was the enthusiastic gesturing that got in the way of her work. “Like this makeup I’m doing on you, songs have layers. If you stripped away some of the more radio-friendly elements, I think the songs here would sound closer to the way I envisioned them. I gravitate toward the acoustic, the folksy, the simple. I always have.”

Emory gave a closed-mouth sound of assent.

As he finished up with the blush, lipstick, and setting spray, it occurred to him that he didn’t care all that much what Emory looked like, which was inconvenient timing. A person’s looks could draw you in, but they couldn’t often keep you hooked. In most ways, Gerard was already wriggling in wait inside Emory’s tackle box.

But, well, he’d had a hypothesis, had done the experiment, and at least needed to go over his results.