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There were two shitty things about being a musician. One, Alex worked through everyone's nights off. Two, even on his nights off he had to work — he had to network at those horrible parties where everyone looked over your shoulder for someone more important to be seen talking to.
He'd always thought that last part was a myth before he got famous, and he wasn't famous enough yet to always be important.
This party wasn't bad, at least, as they went. Too many people, of course, but there was a chocolate fountain and enough champagne to get him through the night. Colin was off somewhere networking and being good publicity — he'd grown so accustomed to the spotlight that he now seemed to carry one around wherever he went, shining only on him. Alex had never quite mastered that trick. He wasn't sure whether he wanted to.
Everything went fine until the reporter showed up. Jocelyn seemed innocuous at first. She'd offered him some of the calamari on her plate, and struck up some smalltalk about bars to go to when you wanted to be seen but still wanted a decent drink. Then she'd mentioned, casually, that she'd just started at the Mirror. Would he mind terribly, she'd asked, doing a young reporter a favor and giving her an interview? Just a quick one, she'd emphasized, leaning forward. The neckline of her dress dipped lower. She'd appreciate it so, and would be sure to remember it if one day he needed a friend in the press.
By that point, Alex had had rather a lot of champagne, as well as two glasses of something that used vodka creatively. Jocelyn and her red cleavage-y dress got their interview. She asked him a few softball questions, the kind with canned answers he could give without thought or sobriety. "Where'd you meet Colin?" At university. We started the band two days later. Of course, it was just the two of us then. Etcetera. He got lulled into a rhythm, and before he knew it she was asking about David Bowie.
He had no idea how to answer. He had no idea what Bowie was supposed to have done now, for starters: it was hard enough to keep up with news and gossip on tour if you were trying, and Alex didn't try. He had no idea what the question meant, what path Jocelyn was trying to lead him down. Was she on about the less political nature of PoP!'s music lately? He hoped it was that; that was so easy compared to its alternative. Colin was flamboyant enough for three bands, and Tears for Fears were getting pissed that PoP! was starting to eclipse them in fame. Inter-band drama was probably inevitable on tours, but if anyone had figured out that Colin was actually gay —
"I'm terribly sorry, Jocelyn, I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. It's getting quite late, and we're leaving for Blackpool at nine tomorrow morning. Must dash!"
— he slinked away as gracefully as possible, which wasn't very.
Alex was truly awful at parties. He knew his tendency to drink until he didn't mind them any more was trouble, and possibly a sign of incipient alcoholism, but it made things easier and he always gave in to that temptation. Or at least it made things easier in the short term.
Two years ago he hadn't yet reached that level of self-awareness. He just knew, when Colin shoved a drink in his hand after their first gig, that he was happy to chug it down. They'd started the band five weeks before, just the two of them, and acclaim was not materializing in quite the way they'd been hoping. They'd had to scrabble to get the Paleontology Association to let them play at their mid-term party, and judging from the number of people who (hadn't) gotten up to dance, their next performance might not be for a while. Now it was time to schmooze and socialize as the canned music took over.
For Alex, at least, that meant gin, and Colin was glad to provide.
"That was a horror," he said, surprisingly calm.
"Yeah," Colin replied wryly. "I don't think they were so into the drum machine."
"Or the originals."
"Or the covers, for that matter."
"I think we can conclusively say they hated it." Alex took another large sip of gimlet.
Colin nodded. "More or less. Come on, let's try and pick up a few girls. As long as we don't mention we were with the band..."
"...we should be fine, yeah," finished Alex.
That conclusion proved optimistic: apparently, attention had been paid. They were recognized widely and negatively.
"That's it," Alex slurred, after a dozen rejections and nearly as many drinks. (He'd only been counting the former.) "This is officially the worst night in uni history."
Colin marched him to the end of the bar. "You are sitting down and sobering up."
"I am sitting down," Alex announced, summoning his last shreds of dignity. "But I am having another one of those fruity things with the lemon peels in."
Colin gave the bartender a Look. He smirked in response and began to fiddle, ostentatiously, with bottles and glasses and things.
"Colin. I am not asking for much here."
Colin rolled his eyes. "You are asking me to clean up after your vomit."
"'m not," Alex pouted.
"And you're also asking me to listen to you whine about your hangover all day tomorrow. It'll ruin the rehearsal. And your classes, but I don't care as much about those."
Alex straightened up, slightly wobbling. "You still want to play tomorrow?"
Colin looked down and halfway grinned. "Yeah. I think we really need the practice time."
"Well," Alex replied. "Twelve women agree with you."
"Fourteen," Colin said.
"Bugger. I lost count."
Colin laughed. "C'mon," he said, putting an arm around Alex. "Let's get you back to your room."
"No," said Alex. "I have a better idea. Let's practice."
Colin waited for a beat.
"No, really. We can fix all the mistakes we made."
"Are you sure we can stay awake that long?" Colin shook his head, but they did wind up stumbling towards a practice room in the blessedly-still-unlocked music building.
They didn't fix much of anything, it turned out. Colin's guitar playing, which had never been a strong point, turned ragged. It was even off-key — Alex had never realized that a mostly-tuned guitar could do that, but it apparently could. He didn't have much room to brag himself; his sense of rhythm went desperately off. Whenever he tried to sing, his voice wavered around the notes but never quite hit them.
Midway through he was struck by inspiration, though, and started to fiddle around with a new melody. After a few repetitions Colin caught on, and started singing along to it:
Watching you walk away
is the hardest thing to do
Watching you walk away
it makes me feel so blue
But when I watch you walk away
I can't help but smile
'Cause I know when you walk away
You'll return after a while
Alex thought it was fantastic, then — he was buoyed by his sense that finally, something was going right today, even if it had taken until 3 AM to do it. He started working on harmonies, sang along. The song grew verses and a bridge, and finally they ran through it completely. Colin had put his guitar down and was dancing about, which was probably what accounted for him plopping down on Alex's lap, exhausted and laughing, as they finished the song. Alex was afraid he was doomed to remain eternally fuzzy on that point.
They started kissing, then. It was horrible and sloppy and Colin was a — was a guy for Chrissake. Alex kissed back, though, with all the eagerness (and, in retrospect, all the finesse) that he'd just been using to sing. It had been a while, and Colin's mouth was soft enough, and fourteen girls had just rejected him — this might be his best chance.
After they'd kissed for a while he began to realize, uncomfortably, that there wasn't really a second base for guys. Colin's shirt had come off, sure, but shirtless guys were a staple of dressing rooms and sporting matches. Touching his back and chest, while certainly new and different, wasn't... a big deal, somehow. But things seemed to be heading in a direction that was.
Abruptly, Colin took that direction and stuck a hand down his pants. Alex didn't really like to remember what had happened next. As experiments went, it wasn't too successful.
The next morning he'd woken up, alone, in the practice room. He'd walked back to his room slowly, trying to figure out whether he was supposed to avoid Colin now or not.
Colin didn't leave him much choice there. He'd shown up, later, and said flatly: "After last night, it's obvious that we need a guitarist. A real one." It stung a bit, that Colin obviously didn't want to be alone with him any more. It was funny that it did, because he hadn't had a good time either, but Alex guessed that was just the way things were. After all, it was his fifteenth rejection in a row.
The horrible thing was, they really did need a new guitarist.
Alex had gotten used to the venues. There'd been a blurry few months where each had seemed bigger than the last, and he'd needed to take a few minutes in sound check to shake the stars out of his eyes, but then he'd realized that after the crowds reached the "sea of faces" level it was easiest to stop counting. Aside from that, all clubs and theaters were depressingly similar backstage, from the well-worn couches to the harried, clipboard-wielding blonde women.
Alex had also gotten used to the individual dressing rooms, and the way their mediocre comforts increased as the tour went on. He could pretend their battered chairs were cleaner than green-room couches, and the fresh flowers and candy dishes were a touch that he'd started to hang on to, lifeline-like, in the last month of this endless tour.
Alex, however, never quite got used to the women. They weren't a regular thing, although they weren't precisely infrequent either. In his head he'd worked out a snarky list of influencing factors: proximity to a university, venue security's sense of humor, number of impediments between stage and backstage. Usually, they showed up in his dressing room. He wasn't sure if they qualified as a perk of fame or not, albeit one his riders never touched. Sex with them always reminded him, uncomfortably, that while the greenroom couches were probably dirtier it wasn't from lack of competition.
It had been a good performance that night, and he was high on its success when he stumbled backstage. The girl in his dressing room brought him well out of that, though. She had Jocelyn's hair, and looking at her made him flash back to both his panic at the interview and his hangover the morning after.
He grabbed a flower from the vase — no need to be impolite — and told her to go the hell home.
The next morning Colin cornered him on the bus, and freaked out.
"I'm sorry, Colin," said Alex. "I didn't know banging groupies was a competition. I also didn't know that you lost it when you sent some poor drunk girl home."
Colin rolled his eyes, but there was an undercurrent of panic in them. Twenty seconds later it hit Alex, too.
Colin slept with almost as many groupies as Alex did, after all. Until now Alex had always assumed that it was some futile attempt to prove his masculinity to the world, and stay... well, not in the closet precisely, they were talking about Colin here, but at least to stay in the same room as the closet. What if, though, it wasn't about Colin proving his masculinity to the world? What if it was about proving his masculinity to Alex?
Alex wanted, desperately, to be wrong, because the next logical step was that Colin thought he was trying to prove the same. But it was Colin he was dealing with, and they'd known each other for two years, and it would explain the freakout.
After soundcheck, he pulled Colin into his dressing room, babbling something about needing to think about old repertoire they could rewrite for the next album. Once he pulled the door shut, he dropped that line of bullshit.
"The thing is, Colin," Alex said, "I don't think you have as much to worry about as you seem convinced you do. I'm still in the band, aren't I?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Colin replied, with a glare that gave away what he knew full well.
"I'm still in the band, Colin. It's been two years, and maybe that isn't much, but it's a lot more than the five weeks we knew each other before we slept together." Colin's lips were a thin line. "Maybe it isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but it should be enough to prove to you that I'm okay. Two years and I'm still here, despite all the fights about the music and our image and every single new guy we added to the band. And so are you, despite," — and yes, this would be the part that was hard to say — "despite what I can now admit was a remarkably shitty blowjob. And I guess what I'm saying is that all of that proves something. What it is, I don't know.
"But I'm okay with that, Colin. I'm okay with all of it."
"What, did you get that speech out of a movie?" Colin spat back. "It's not that easy."
"Of course it bloody isn't. But you don't need to screw a bunch of floozies to make a point to me."
Colin kissed him, quick and hard and angry. "It's not just about letting things go, you wanker. Don't lecture me so you can prove how open-minded you are."
Alex froze for a moment. The conversation had veered wildly and permanently out of his control. He knew that whatever he said next would change things between the two of them, and probably forever, and sure — that had been his goal. That had absolutely been his goal until now, but until now he'd thought he knew what the change would be. He didn't any more. His mouth gaped open slightly — like a delayed-action jawdrop, some part of his mind casually observed over his panic. Except it wasn't like that at all, because suddenly he was kissing Colin back and the part of his mind that wasn't freaking out even more now was enjoying it quite a bit. Maybe two years ago hadn't just been a failed experiment, after all.
Colin slid a hand up the back of his shirt as their hips came together. Alex had a quick Moment — Colin's hips brought Tab A with them — before he reassured himself that he had very literally been there before and dropped his mouth to Colin's neck. Colin's hands kneaded his ass as he pushed Alex onto the dressing table.
Alex pulled his shirt off and felt the mirror, cool, against his back; then, oh god, Colin was kneeling down.
"It has just been two years," Colin said, pausing. "But I hope it's proved a whole damn lot." He then began, eagerly, to make up for lost time.
There would be a lot of horrible rehearsals after it, but their first rehearsal had felt transcendent. Colin had started the band on a lark; he'd been friends with Alex's roommate Thomas and had one day spotted the keyboard case tucked almost-neatly under Alex's bed. Two days later they'd found themselves in a practice room.