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Easily definable boxes had never appealed to him.
Few of his relationships were clean or simple, and the lines between friend and bandmates and brother had always been blurred, by choice.
Sometimes even the lines between those and lover.
Contrary to what the world might have believed of him, he’d never been one for a vast multitude of lovers. No kind of multitude at all, really.
It was one of the things that repelled him from his current lover, who treated women like a common commodity, and himself like a wildly successful, risk-taking broker.
Chicks were too precious for that. Which wasn’t to say that he hadn’t had his fair share, but more than half who had gone to bed with him had never done more than chat and share a few kisses.
Talking was essential. He refused to bed a woman without knowing her, without sharing a laugh and feeling something more than the type of lust his hand could just as easily extinguish.
Perhaps, as Mick liked to imply, it was nothing more than gross sentimentality. Still, he preferred that to the idea of a mindless fuck.
Truth be told, he did relentlessly crave something sentimental and steady. The kind of dead suburban dream Doris and Burt (but mostly Burt) had been unable to act out for the sake of his childhood.
Someone to kiss and hug and call his own. Someone to cook for. Someone to bring out for Friday night dinners, to gift flowers in expectation of a pleasure in return. Someone to curl up with on the couch, with a dog or two, and watch old movies with until the sun rose. Someone who would let him lay a Chet Baker album on the record player and gamely twirl around the room ‘til two.
A painfully normal existence, when he could swing it. Between the tours and the recording sessions, and the nights he needed alone.
Anita hadn’t wanted it. He’d clung for the kids, and because, however difficult it may have looked from the outside, he did love her.
That was a decade in the past, now.
There’d been another, for a few years, and he’d seen the glorious future which could have lain before them, but he also saw her parents, and the possibility that making what they had permanent would cut her off forever from the family she adored.
He’d ended it last September.
◑ ◐
Which left him here, in Mick’s house, gazing out the window of the relentlessly air-conditioned room at the waxing moon and the abandoned beach and the water made pitch black by night, dotted with the reflection of stars.
Much as he prided himself on being unsurprisable, Mick’s words had shocked him.
‘You saying you don’t see it?’
The answer was an emphatic no, he had seen it, for years if not from the very beginning, but the idea of actually admitting to Mick that he found the man handsome - the emotions of the moment still roiled in his stomach even hours later, leaving him sick with a strange combination of certainty and doubt.
More than once, he’d been teased for the way he looked at Charlie. By Mick and Ronnie and Bill, not to mention a number of girlfriends and even a groupie or two. He’d shrugged it off, declaring that he saw nothing different in the way he looked at his drummer to the way he looked at his singer or his bass player.
It wasn’t strictly true.
There had always been a little edge of something else, since the first time he met Charlie. Hell, since the first time he’d seen him play. A sort of puppy dog infatuation, with the man as much as the musician. Everyone then had pegged him as painfully shy, and he was, but the moment he’d started to talk to Charlie, it was like nothing he’d experienced before.
Within a minute of hearing him, he’d wanted him to be his drummer, and within a minute of talking to him, he’d wanted him to be his friend.
The feeling had not, as he’d expected, faded with time.
If anything, he was more besotted (not that he’d allow anyone to use that word, he’d yelled at Mick for it just this afternoon) than ever.
Everything about him was easy to fall in love with. The personality, odd but with such a depth of sweetness and all the better for being anything but commonplace. The sense of humor, dry and cutting and so clever it could make him cry. The mind, sharp and sly and full of a million facts he never would have thought to expect. The looks.
Christ, he had not been prepared for what Charlie going gray would do to him.
◑ ◐
In no way had he been prepared, but he could see pretty well where it could go.
He was a strange combination of things, hopelessly prone to addiction but relentlessly disciplined at the same time.
Cliche as it might have sounded, he knew how easily and quickly he would become addicted to having Charlie in his life that way.
One taste, and he’d be totally unable to give it up. It was, however, Mick objected to the sanctity of marriage and the idea of lifelong commitment, a simple and definite reality of the future.
Until Mick had said those words, lazy in the late summer heat, it hadn’t occurred to him that somewhere he’d blurred a line with Charlie.
The dreams he’d had, on and off over the decades, were more than just a product of continued proximity.
Kissing him on the lips, when he was drunk or they were young, was more than just facetious transgressiveness.
Tucked away in the back of his wallet, the picture he carried of him, a candid he’d bribed out of a talented tour photographer for a little blow, was more than just a memento of a musical bond.
Along the way, he’d gone from loving to in love.
◑ ◐
Sick of the room, stifling despite the lack of heat, he stepped out onto the porch and off, down to the empty beach.
That confined space was too small to hold every future he could imagine, beautiful or tragic or somewhere in between.
Chief among his fears was the easiest to picture, that Charlie would reject them.
The possibility twisted painfully in his chest, and his throat ached with the thought that Charlie would never see them in the same light again.
Their drummer was fully aware of the relationship he and Mick shared, of course, insofar as it could be called that, but the idea that they would welcome him into it was outlandish.
Men weren’t his metier (not Keith’s either, truth be told, other than him and Mick), and at best he’d laugh it off, shooting a slightly disgusted look at him.
At worst the band would be over, and the friendship he relied upon as one of the foundations of his life would crack and crumble away.
But there was another one, cruel and insidious, less obvious.
The path in which Charlie did, against every expectation, say yes. Where they had home together, and time beyond recording sessions and tours. A whole life, in each other’s arms. And a relationship borne anew, the marriage he’d always wanted from Mick, and, deep down, from Charlie, stable and real and true.
An enduring future.
And an enduring future which would end the moment they lost him.
He did his best, most of the time, to ignore the very concept that any of his friends or bandmates could go before him. In regards to Mick and Charlie, he forbade himself from thinking about it at all.
That didn’t stop the fear from coiling in his chest, the picture of himself as some almost widower bleeding into his brain, making everything hurt.
Already, he was unsure if he could survive in a life without Charlie.
Were he to take this step, to allow himself to take a stab at every dream and half-baked fantasy he’d had since he was a kid, he was sure he wouldn’t live to see more than one day without the man.
◑ ◐
Mick was coming.
He had an hour, if he was lucky, before the singer arrived on his proverbial doorstep, and took him by the hand to walk to Charlie’s room, forbidding in a way it had never been before.
A decision would have to be made, one way or another.
In a sense, he could kill the whole thing in its cradle and hope that Mick’s disappointment would fade fast, but it was his own that he had greater doubts about.
Living with the fact that he’d been within reach of a totally new relationship with Charlie, a new element of depth and a time not promised to them on its face, would haunt him.
So would rejection, and, worse, the future specter of loss.
It had been his unspoken motto, for years untold, to do what Charlie would in any given situation.
Charlie had shrugged off his comfortable life, his steady gig and his sure employment, to join them, once upon a time.
Taking one last deep, steeling breath, he went to go find Mick himself.