voice could be more prominent and I wouldn’t have to screech so much. I could even cover “How Can We Be Lovers.” Suffice it to say it didn’t last, and afterwards, I decided it just wasn’t the right time in my life for a relationship. I was just going to be a nun of rock ’n’ roll, only with more hand jobs.
I was with Josh when I first met Travis. Travis lived down the hall from me in Demarest dorm when he was a sophomore and I was in my first semester of my freshman year. I’d heard him playing out of a little Princeton Reverb amp every day for two months before I got the nerve to walk down the hall and ask him about it. He’d just done a flawless “Back in Black” solo, his door was open, and I walked in and asked him what year his Les Paul was. He handed it right to me and I started playing “Starpower” by Sonic Youth and we started talking about the album EVOL, and the next thing I knew, I was half an hour late to Spanish. We were friends from then on. A month later when he joined Soft and we first jammed, it was fucking magic. It really was. Not just that he was good, but he knew when to layer it in heavy, when to pull back, when he needed more growl in his tone from the Tube Screamer, less bite from the MXR. When to get out of my way and when to take over. He clicked with Cole right away and he put up with Joey, which is all Cole and I could have asked of anyone.
He was just right, is what he was. He still is, if we could just stop being awkward and weird.
Rehearsal ends abruptly when a storm rolls in overhead and the lights flicker. We stop playing just in time to hear the loud crash of a lightning strike, somewhere way too damn close for me, and I get antsy because oh shit, do I hate lightning. My house got hit by lightning when I was fourteen and although we were all perfectly fine, I’ve never gotten over my fear of it. Travis and Cole and Joey know this about me. I will not rehearse during thunderstorms and luckily, if there’s a storm while we’re playing a show, the music is normally so loud I don’t even notice. But if I do notice? Oh hell no. I unplug and curl up in a ball somewhere.
I’m frantically unplugging my amp, the PA, and everything in the basement now.
“Emmy, it’s fine,” Joey says, exasperated. “It’ll be over in just a few minutes. We really should take another pass through ‘Fire in the Empire’ before we quit for the night.”
Another lightning strike nearby sounds like two eighteen-wheelers just had a head-on collision upstairs in the living room. I jump so high I nearly hit the crappy drop-ceiling tile over my head.
“We’re done for tonight,” Travis says. He turns and puts his hand on my arm. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, trying to stay cool. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”
I start to calm down as we’re packing up and it sounds like the lightning is moving farther away. Travis asks me if I want a ride home, hands all shoved in his pockets, biting his lower lip, trying to look nonchalant but failing as he waits for me to say yes, but I don’t say yes. Then Travis leaves, all pissed off. Great.
The truth is, I’m not ready to be alone with Travis because (see above) if I’m alone with him I’m pretty sure I’m going to blow him and that’s just not going to help anything right now. I’m trying to wait until I get over this temporary compulsion to hump him until his legs are numb, but I really can’t do it yet because I can’t stop thinking of his fingers in me, his tongue up in me as I’m coming all over it. His face when he finally gets his dick into me all the way. I can’t stop thinking about how much I want to see that again.
I can’t describe how much it hurts, now that I know what I’m missing.
***
It’s Friday night now and we’re wrapping up our set at the Melody. We’re playing upstairs where the live room is, just to the left of the bar. Tonight we’re playing between Hanna Octane and Red