frustrated I feel guilty. He takes a deep breath and walks away from me, away from all of us down the block.
“What’s wrong with Trap?” Joey asks, all out of breath from dancing. “Aren’t we going?”
“Yeah,” I say, averting my eyes because I know they can’t see my boner, but I definitely still have one. If they were looking for it, they could probably see it all over my face but by some miracle they don’t seem to suspect a thing. “I’m going to use the bathroom and then let’s hit the road.”
“Homeward bound!” Cole yells, jumping into his seat up front. He starts rifling through the band CD collection. “We’ve got an English exam to kill!”
I come back out of the club and climb into the van, in the back behind Travis. I pick Travis’s jacket up off the floor and drape it over myself because now the band blanket is covered in bar-floor funk and I have no idea if there’s any Toby kidney-stone-passing residue on there, but I know at this point the van blanket should probably just be burned. Travis pops the Misfits CD out of the CD player over Cole’s protests.
“Driver picks the music,” he says.
“You always drive, though,” Cole argues.
“Yep,” he says as he pushes play and the sound of Mazzy Star’s “Fade into You” fills the van. He knows that I fucking love this song. I sing quietly along to it and catch him glimpsing up at me in the mirror, his eyes all happy.
“Come on, Trap, we’ll all be asleep before the slide guitar comes back around,” Joey complains and then yawns into his arm.
“Well then good night, sweetheart,” Travis says, but as he’s saying it, he looks up in the rearview mirror at me and smiles.
What I’d really like to do right now is curl up in Travis’s strong, amp-carrying arms and the end. That’s it. I could end this whole story right here if I could just figure out how to handle everything I’m feeling. But if I were good at handling powerful feelings, I’d be an accountant, not a musician. I’m good at feeling things like a hypodermic full of adrenaline to the heart, nice and strong and all at once and thrilling and painful, too. (I actually have no idea what a hypodermic needle to the heart would feel like. I just saw John Travolta stab Uma Thurman in the heart like that in Pulp Fiction like everyone else.) I can feel the big, overwhelming feelings, yes. But handling them? Not so much. This is what guitar is for, but guitar just gives you a place to put those things. To feel them without feeling like they’re going to break you. Writing an awesome riff is not really the same as making good decisions about how to treat other people.
We roll out of Baltimore, happy and high from another great night, and as I close my eyes I can still feel his lips on mine, the soft feel of his tongue in my mouth. Now my stomach is all fluttery and I can tell you exactly why they call that feeling butterflies: it’s because new love is a beautiful, wild thing and if you keep it trapped inside of you, it will rail at that imprisonment until you let it out there into the world. It feels a little like that out-of-control feeling you get right before you orgasm. Or vomit.
I pull Travis’s jacket tighter around myself even though it’s not cold. I just like breathing under it because it smells like him. I am in love with him, I know that I am. I’m feeling it, full fucking on.
And I am terrified about everything I am about to fuck up in my life because of it.
***
A loud clang jolts me out of an awkward sleep. I open my eyes and we’re not moving, and nobody else is in the van. I’m disoriented for a minute, like maybe I just woke up inside a space capsule and the guys are out spacewalking or something. I hear more clanging, so I squint and look out the windshield and all I can see is the raised hood of the van and oh fuck. Oh no. Oh fuck no. I look at my watch. It’s two a.m.—we can’t even be out of Maryland yet.
Van problems among bands are second only to drummer problems in terms of how common and what a royal pain in the ass they are, but among all