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You’d be forgiven for not hearing the discordant, fumbled strum over the loud, frustrated sigh of defeat that immediately accompanied it, the faintest wisp of air catching between the gap in Ches’ teeth.
“Your finger placement is correct, but you aren’t applying even pressure along the strings,” Glam observes pointlessly. The concern behind his words is only thinly veiled. The lack of agitated impatience that he might’ve offered in the past when watching Ches play poorly is utterly absent.
It’s from pity.
“You need to quit hesitating in your motions.”
Ches’ fingers tighten along the neck of the guitar, strings vibrating infinitesimally as his digits tremble with agitation. The furrow in his brow showcases how he’s sincerely considering just dropping the instrument to a heap on the ground and storming out of the room, leaving this alone just like he’d always intended.
But he doesn’t. Instead, he lets the guitar lay in his lap, a dull tone sounding. When he looks at it, the thinly scratched surface of the wood reflects his face back at him, and it only makes his face contort further with ire.
Glam doesn’t address the building tensions directly. He always did prefer to let him burn himself out and pick up the pieces after. “Well, for a first attempt–”
“It’s not a first attempt,” Ches spits back with dampened fury, hunching himself over the offending item as if he could intimidate it into working with him. Or maybe in the misguided hopes Glam wouldn’t also see the patheticness Ches saw in the reflection of himself shown on the face of it. “Not even the first time since…” The beads of his bracelet clattered against each other as he gestured his hand vaguely in the air, face scrunched, seemingly unwilling to even speak the words. “I’m not a kid gettin’ my first guitar lesson, Glam.”
The sentence hangs. Glam’s smile twitches a bit. He might not have been with Ches when it happened, but he knew well enough what he was struggling to say himself.
It was abundantly clear the moment they reunited that something had changed. The fact he’d deigned to return to Glam as though nothing had happened after their fight said enough. There was no need to wag hospital discharge forms in Glam’s face to spot the consequences of their time apart. Ches might as well have been a shell of his former self, even if he refused to acknowledge it.
But Glam did find the forms, of course. It was hardly the first time he’d accessed confidential records in their time together. It came naturally enough when you were an unceremoniously emancipated band member. “Victor Stoltz”, a high-risk patient taken into the emergency room for a supposed drug overdose early one morning in September 1992, made a miraculous recovery seconds after being declared dead.
‘Patient suffers from traumatic brain injury caused by a combination of toxic leukoencephalopathy and cerebral vasculitis. Discharged against medical advice’.
He was also dodging a hefty bill for multiple units of heptral. Emphasis on was. It would be in the hospital’s best interest to shore up the cybersecurity of their financial records keeping.
Glam clears his throat, the pleasant edge to his words seeming cloyingly sweet in the present circumstances. “It is your first time trying to properly learn again, yes?”
Ches only returned a huff of acquiescence.
It was impressive they’d even managed to get this far. Little puzzle pieces had slotted together over the past half-decade they’d been reunited that elucidated the shameful truth. Glam had quickly severed Ches’ ill-begotten contract with Paul after he’d admitted to it shortly after their reunion. The process required a level of treachery and dubious legalese that Ches, frankly, still did not understand. But Glam managed to get his meager few possessions back.
Ches, naturally, was in disbelief when Glam presented it all to him again. He’d long since accepted that the clothing he’d had the majority of his life, “hand-me-downs” that were a few decades too big for him, were lost to his own miserable life decisions. That much wasn’t a surprise for Glam.
The look of confusion and fear he offered at the sight of the cherry red guitar he’d owned the entire time he’d known him, however, was.
Ches didn’t vocalize it then, and Glam didn’t press. But he had made note of it until he could have a solid case that Ches couldn’t brush off.
And now they are here.
“I shouldn’t have to learn again,” Ches huffs, seemingly unaware of just how petulant the remark sounds. “If it isn’t still there, what’s the point? Not like I plan on gettin’ back on a stage. What’s another washed up rockstar in a sea of ‘em?”
Glam leaned back on his stool, humming a noise of polite disagreement. “If not being able to play anymore didn’t matter to you, you would not have hidden it.”
Chipped nails fiddle idly with the newly replaced strings of the guitar. The noise is, decidedly, disconcerting, echoing on the empty walls of the barely furnished office. “Didn’t know fatherhood came with a complimentary psych degree.”
Glam just smiled at him, considerately not lingering on the snipe. “Maybe you’d do better with a different song.”
The look Ches shot him was withering. “I’ve been playing Paranoid since I first picked up a guitar. If there would be anything I still knew, it’d be that.”
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Glam suggests. “You could have suffered damage in the section of your brain that held your long term motor skills, leaving newer, fresher things you learned before your accident intact.”
It was clear Ches’ patience with this endeavor was rapidly decreasing with the more medical jargon Glam spat at him, feet scuffing against the floor as he shifted. “So, what? I should play a Green Sperm Whales song instead? That stuff’s all derivative garbage. If that’s all I can play, I’d rather stay like this.”
Glam chuckled a touch harder than he would normally allow himself at that, freshly painted black nails pressing to his sternum to calm the spike of amusement. Before their time apart, Ches had never expressed distaste towards any form of music, finding it all equally valid. He’d seemingly grown disillusioned since.
And, at any rate, Glam had checked the shortly lived band’s songs before inviting Ches to try and learn again– he wasn’t lying. Glam had seen infants with more inventive song structures.
“No, no, of course not. I wouldn’t subject myself to memorizing those to guide you. But…” Ches’ eyes track Glam’s free hand with dull interest as it moves behind him, hoisting up one of the only items in the room to his lap. The very same purple guitar Ches had swiped for him all those years ago. It was already plugged into an amp tucked away into the corner of the room. “We do share a discography together. And maybe it’d be easier if you had a visual aid.”
Ches’ face fell into his hand, grey pupils poking between the spaces between his ringed digits impatiently. “You think I don’t remember the hand placements for songs I wrote? Wasn’t that the one thing you told me I did correctly–”
He’s cut off before his spiel can continue by a handwave. “Humor me. The last song we finished. You remember, right?”
“Yeah. The Light. The one we were gonna pitch to Paul.” Ches’ voice was strained, jaw set. There was a distinct level of discontentment he was leaving out. It didn’t take much effort to know exactly what he left unsaid.
“Yes. I think I have the sheets for it in my desk. Would you like them?” Ches stared at him as if he’d grown another head. Gears in his brain shifted rapidly, struggling to process why he’d have something like that on hand in a room that could barely even be considered an actual office. Why was that a priority?
“I’ll take that as a no.”
And without further preparation, Glam’s fingers found the fretboard.
Ches startled into awareness belatedly as Glam begun, letting himself feel the familiar melody before hesitantly mimicking his motions.
His fingers pressed down so slightly, his strumming so light, that for a time it seemed as though Glam was playing alone. It didn’t seem to bother him, though, his long, slender fingers moving with a practiced precision regardless.
Maybe the confidence was infectious, because Ches felt his fingers move with more fluidity than they had in years. His eyes remained fixed to Glam’s digits all the same, though, a bead of sweat rolling from his brow. Slowly, his strumming became more certain, their performance creating a pleasant harmony. Glam still said nothing, his smile deeping almost imperceptibly.
Eventually, reluctantly, he found his eyes closing, no longer needing the visual guidance. He knew this song by heart. He didn’t need Glam to show him.
Time passed in a blur, notes and rhythm slowly etching itself back into the weathered synapses of his mind. His heart skipped a beat when his hand faltered on the fretboard, finding himself unsure of what came next, before realizing he’d reached the end of the song.
When he opened his eyes again, he was greeted with Glam’s guitar resting flat on his own lap, hands folded atop it. The wire to the amp had been disconnected.
Goosebumps sprung up over his arms, feeling as though he’d been struck by lightning. “You stopped playing along.” There was something like betrayal tinged into his words.
“Sorry!” Glam offered sincerely. “I figured you didn’t need it anymore, since your eyes closed. Like taking off training wheels!”
Ches’ eyes flicked down to his lap. He spotted the faint red lines marring his fingertips from pressing into the strings, the lifetime of callouses having worn down in the years apart. Felt the pleasant buzz still resonating in his strumming fingers. The slightest ache in his arm where it craned over the side of the guitar still pressed tightly against his body.
It was alright.
He’d never lost anything at all.
He couldn’t help the toothy smile that spread across his face. “Your teaching methods could use some work, martian.”