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nansenseTITLE: "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side"
RATING: PG-13
WARNINGS: Original slash, music!kink. And, uh... Britishisms? Excuse the slang, but it's nice to write the way I actually speak once in a while.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Yesterday I found myself rifling through some of my old, original fiction, and I came across this story I wrote/started back in 2005. Yeah, I know. But I actually didn't hate it, which surprised me, and now I'm compelled to finish it. Any feedback would be appreciated; it's nice to get people's thoughts on something not SPN-related. Who knows, maybe I'll grow a pair, finish this, and submit it to a journal or something. Enjoy!
The Boy with the Thorn in His Side by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nanoochka
It was Matt who started it, or started Dylan thinking about it, but that was the way these things went. As much as anyone could be, he was sure that Matt deliberately enjoyed throwing him off-balance like this, with his unexpectedness, his eccentricity, his goddamn… borderline personality. Matt wasn’t the type to just throw curveballs; rather, they came at Dylan with the eerie precision of a guided missile, for all that Matt was small and quiet and supposedly uncalculating, anyway.
“Come to the gig. I’m a bit short on groupies tonight, follow?” he teased over the phone. His voice was its usual husky drawl before following up with a short bark of laughter that drove Dylan crazy, because for someone as cheeky as Matt, his laughter was about as devious as a three-year-old’s.
That was the first Dylan ever heard of Matthew playing guitar—about Matt even knowing how to hold one, really—and the prospect alone was a little unsettling, for various reasons Dylan discouraged himself thinking about as he checked his trouser pockets for pint money and house keys. Things were a bit off-colour already, what with the night he’d been having and the London weather in revolt, which was usual, but hardly conducive of charitable feeling, which was also usual. It was damp and groggy out, and a weird moody greyness hung in the air that made Dylan feel like he was being shaken awake from a nap that had been going badly anyway. However pleasant the spring afternoon had been, it was chill out now, and you could still smell the lingering stench of the Thames from where it had started to heat up too quickly during the day.
As a non-native, Dylan had a theory that it was the weather that put Londoners in such piss-poor moods all the time. It was frightening how contagious it was, though, because before he’d moved from Kent into the city four years ago, he’d been a happier person. Now a stinky river was all it took to make Dylan want to tell the world to fuck off. Currently it was because all of his previous plans for the night—backups included—had fallen through, and the only option left to him was to stay at home getting pissed watching reruns of The Office. Before Matt called, Dylan had looked upon this idea quite resignedly, if not favourably, and was actually the teeniest bit drunk already.
But. Matthew.
There he was, asking a certain amount of effort of Dylan, of setting aside the comfort of his warm beer and messy flat and venturing into another part of town. Such exertion, and he hated, hated, hated the Tube on a Friday night. Especially to dirty, trendy Soho. Dylan had enough sense to be annoyed at how easily he’d accepted Matt’s invitation, but he couldn’t squash the rich tingle of curiosity that propelled him off his couch and into the shitty London night. Matt wasn’t likely to care what kind of shape he showed up in, but then again, Dylan thought, with Matt you were daft if you ever really thought to expect anything. At all.
Here was the story.
They weren’t friends. If they had ever been, that friendship had long disappeared beneath an indiscernible mess of tension and superiority complexes, but the official line was that they were nothing. Dylan knew Matt from a shared music elective they had as seniors down at Middlesex University—Dylan reprising years of cello training, Matt seeming like he’d come from the womb playing piano sonatas—where Dylan was finishing a half-hearted undergrad in Philosophy and Matt was doing whatever it was that he didn’t like to talk about (he was a Psychology major; Dylan had stolen a glance at his timetable). He wasn’t the type of person that Dylan ever made a point of hanging out with. Admittedly, he was cool in the way that Thom Yorke had made it okay for people to be eccentric nowadays, but mostly you just wanted to leave Matt in the corner by himself. That was usually where Dylan found him when he walked into class every Monday, poring over a music score they’d been asked to transpose, or else reading Sci-Fi trash that led Dylan to believe he was a Scientologist before he ever spoke to him. Matt was a weird-looking bloke, too, small and so thinly-built that his fingers were like long twigs the colour of skin. His hair was painfully straight and hung limp to his ears, so that he was always having to swish it out from his saucer-like blue eyes, but it changed frequently—blue to brown to blonde to electric red, a variety of lengths and textures—sometimes several times in a matter of days. Maybe it was all horrible, but with his symmetrical features and enviable bone structure, he managed to make it work.
With the exception of his girlfriend, Isabelle, most of Dylan’s real friends had never met Matt; she’d come across them on campus by accident, a chance encounter never to be repeated. Isabelle was the wealthy sort, and a little bit of a cow, if Dylan was honest about it, and at the time she’d looked at Matt, with his unusual presence and stupid hair, like someone had just pissed on her shoe. Afterwards Dylan could not even mention Matt’s name in conversation without Isabelle referring to him as “The Freak”, and as it so happened Matt seemed to react to mention of Isabelle’s name like you’d react to a surprise rectal scan. From then on, it was a rule that Matt and Dylan didn’t hang out together with other people—at least, this was what Dylan decided and Matt never bothered to question. Sometimes it made Dylan ashamed of himself, because he and Isabelle had more in common than he cared to admit. It wasn’t that he sympathized, because he didn’t lack for friends or charm or good looks himself, but you could tell that Matt had never managed to outrun the label of “class weirdo”, even at the age of twenty-two.
Perhaps Matt had earned it, but he left Dylan feeling rather unoriginal. No one else seemed to share the sentiment. Dylan probably would have ignored him, too, had Matt not spoken first and with a clever remark of the sort that he’d had to respond, and conversation had progressed from there. Matt was intelligent and deathly sharp, when you got down to it: you could spend hours talking to him without getting bored, but not necessarily unharmed. Usually they sat around campus and talked about music, a subject in which they were almost like soulmates for their obscure tastes, or else playing games of poker that Matt always won, on the grass or in quiet cafeterias if it was cold out. When school ended, they went their separate ways. Dylan liked how he could hang out with Matt, or not, as he pleased, with Matt hardly seeming to give a shit either way. And that was that.
Suffice to say, the halting invitation out to a Friday-night solo acoustic show came as a bit of a surprise. Despite all appearances to the contrary, Dylan hadn’t immediately accepted. “This isn’t really our thing, like,” he tried. “I’ve got the trouble and strife round the flat now, I’ll see you afters.”
“The fuck you do,” Matt answered. There was a barely discernible tinge of anger in his tone that might have been because of Dylan’s lie or just the mention of Isabelle. Matt spoke in rapid phrases and a sleepy Devonshire accent that gave him the impression of slurring his words, but for all that he was intimidatingly articulate. More than once, it had given Dylan cause to regret starting a battle of wits with him. “You’re sitting round on your sorry arse doing bugger all, don’t tell me you aren’t. Maybe you ought to think about something other than your sodding high-society image for five minutes and get yourself down here.” He ignored Dylan’s sputters. “Find a pen and take down this address, you twat.”
“You don’t even play the guitar, mate.”
“Right. Shows what you know.”
In a roundabout way, all of this led up to Dylan being stuck on the smelly Tube that Friday night, on his way to the gig. He moped all the way to Tottenham Court Tube, only to emerge aboveground into a sudden downpour that soaked him through and plastered his dark hair to his head like a chocolate helmet. A teenaged girl, clearly a better Londoner than he because she’d remembered her brolly, smirked at him when he found the place Matt had told him about. Dylan’s mind helpfully gave her the finger, as he did his best glower and ducked inside. Immediately, he was assaulted by the hot crush of bodies crowding the bar from the front almost to the stage at the back. All he could smell were fags and alcohol, and the strange odourlessness of a hundred people together in a closed space. Before he got too far, a middle-aged woman with a knot of blonde dreadlocks asked if he was there for Matt York and charged him fifteen quid—something Matt had conveniently neglected to mention. Amateurs never charged more than five or six, tops, but apparently Matt and his phantom guitar had gone pro. Fingering his ticket, Dylan tried to crowbar his way further into the crowd to get a better look around.
It was no Wembly, but the place wasn’t shabby, either. The owners had done it up in the retro style with so-tacky-it-was-cool animal print and good lighting. Comfortable booth seating lined the walls and left room for a dance floor that led up to the stage, which was itself spacious and hung with bolts of crimson velvet from the ceiling, amidst the lights. The crowd was young, mostly female and trendy to an extent that was nearly irritating, marking the bar as one of the many bastions of chic that had popped up around the city in recent years. Dylan wondered why they were all here. For Matt?
He didn’t entirely buy it, even then. Matt was a terribly gifted pianist, a fact that he proved each time he touched his fingers to the keys, but he was just too at odds with himself to have anything resembling stage presence. He wasn’t shy so much as very self-aware, and he avoided attention if he could, whether that meant sticking to the sidelines or hiding behind the upright lid of a gleaming grand piano. Dylan liked him for his unusual qualities—he was the outcast friend that generated an endless supply of funny and strange anecdotes for him to share with his regular crowd—but in the same way that parents carry the constant fear that their children will find some new and outlandish way to publicly humiliate them, Dylan was a little worried that Matthew was going to destroy himself alone on that stage, and afterwards he’d have to deal with being seen with him.
And to think that he wasn’t at all a selfish person.
Hitting the bar with this thought buzzing distractingly inside his head, soon it was nearly an hour later, Dylan’s time lost to gulping pints like water and hitting on anything with breasts. He waited with a perfectly acceptable amount of impatience for the stage managers to get their collective act together and decide whether Matt was up next, or if there was more angry chick rock to suffer through. By the time the lights brightened the stage just enough to reveal a stool and microphone sitting starkly centre, Dylan was good and knackered and Matthew’s stringy, guitar-wielding form was striding forwards to a wave of cheering applause. He looked like he always did, fey and angular in a wide-necked black shirt and jeans, perma-bedhead dyed to an uncharacteristic, sombre brown that drew out the shadows of his high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. Dylan hadn’t seen him in a couple of days; a growth of dark stubble shaded the skin around his reddish mouth and dimpled chin.
Sometimes, Dylan thought, you wonder how the fuck you end up where you do, separate from yourself as though time somehow up and deposits you in random spots so that you’re left trying to figure out how to get home. He didn’t know why he was standing drunk in a bar filled with pretentious hipsters, waiting for someone he barely liked to get on with it and self-destruct; but he didn’t know that he wanted to leave, either. A large part of Dylan wanted to escape the noise and the heat and the five-plus girls he’d drunkenly tried to pull prior to Matt’s set—this was true. And yet, he was curious in that same way the proverbial cat was always accused of fucking itself for a good look. He certainly wasn’t the right choice to play the supportive mate Matt was desperately in need of on the night of his big show—he was the nervous, excitable sort, and at right then Dylan was anything but a calming influence—but the moment Matt’s gaze swept over the room and found Dylan out in the crowd, his eyes issued such a firm challenge for Dylan to run that he downed the last of his beer and stayed.
Dylan took in the careful details of Matt as he introduced himself to the crowd in a low voice: the subtle but telling fidgeting of his long fingers against his knee, a shimmer of sweat along the exaggerated ridge of bare collarbone above the neckline of his jumper. Under the harsh stage lights, he looked edgy in a way that Dylan hadn’t noticed before, sort of… sexy. Feline, in that way, black shirt moulding itself to his slim torso, jeans low and unbelted on his narrow hips. Something went undiminished by Matt’s lack of height and unusual features; rather, the clinging shadows exposed the lithe, elegant proportions of someone taller, and a razor-sharp handsomeness about the face. The crowd recognized it too, and Dylan smiled as a girl next to him muttered something to her friend about hot geeks.
Then, of course, Matt started to play, and they all fell a little in predictable love.
Most performers tended to sing to the floor or their fingers, but Matt—with his guitar confident on his knee and opening the first song with his graceful fingers an impressive blur on the strings—did neither. Amidst the unceasing background chatter and clinking of glass that Dylan badly wanted to silence, Matt strummed a powerful, flamenco-inspired rock beat with such driving rhythm that the noise started to lessen as people took interest. It seemed like the crowd knew enough to be impressed at the skill behind the music and clever lyrics.
For once, there was not a remark or snotty rejoinder that Dylan could think of that could compete with the showstopper of Matt’s voice. It carried the same tenor singing as speaking, but awe-inspiring didn’t even cover it, didn’t even scratch the surface. He matched the strength and passion of the song with tender ruthlessness. You could tell when a singer knew what the hell he was doing, and though Matt didn’t sound like he had to try very hard to hit the notes that he did, he exercised iron-gripped control over his voice that made even Dylan jealous, and Dylan couldn’t sing to save his grandmother. Matt didn’t sing the words so much as he drew them out in a sensuous moan, and that had to be illegal right there, the raw, unrestrained texture of his voice grazing the air like nails down Dylan’s back, building chills on top of chills.
A shiver ran down Dylan’s neck like he hadn’t felt in months, and he blinked in shock. He’d spent so long ignoring it that the tiny shudder, the tightening in his gut, was like a gust of hot water erupting over his head. He inhaled a sharp breath through his nose as he realized that the rich tingle of Matt’s voice was making him hard. The rush of sensation nearly winded him, and he looked on at the stage, wide-eyed. What was worse, though, what was actually worse than all that and Dylan so turned-on that he could have died, was Matt playing on without the barest glance at what he was doing, but rather, at where Dylan stood shaken on the floor, eyes wide open and smiling.
Smiling, in that way, because he knew.
When had anything felt as real as that, ever?
Dylan hadn’t grown up in hard-as-nails London like most of his friends, living as he did with his parents and three sisters on a large estate near Canterbury, but he’d been no stranger to the edifying dangers and delights of that great city in his adolescent years. That’s what London was, if you wanted it to be, madness and mayhem and pure joy together in one convenient location.
There were the serious parts in Dylan’s life, like music and getting the grades for a good uni, but there were also girls and going down the pub and his mates, among other things. Dylan was an exceptionally good-looking young man, and maybe if it had always been that way, he might have been less self-aware; but that wasn’t so. Put mildly, his prepubescent appearance had been unfortunate, and had it not been for his family’s money and Dylan’s own talent for winning popularity in spite of his physical shortcomings, his youth might have gone very differently. As it was, he’d managed to find a place in the hierarchy of public school that allowed for a well-adjusted childhood. Before he knew, he’d outgrown his alien-like gangliness and exaggerated features and was suddenly capable of winning favours on his own. Unused to the newfound interest of pretty girls and hotshot ringleaders who’d never had more than remote tolerance for him, Dylan spent the first few years of adolescence assuming all this attention was directed at the person standing behind him.
For however much he felt embarrassed of Matt in public, Dylan got it—he did. It was shit to feel like a certain number of opportunities were closed to you because of poor genes and a few years of poor sartorial choices. Perhaps if he were less self-conscious, less worried about fucking it up by association or a bigger person all around, Dylan would have extended the olive branch to Matt and invited him into his regular circle, rather than perpetuating the vicious circle of social exclusion that never seemed to progress beyond a schoolyard level.
As it turned out, though, Matt didn’t need his help to be cool or admired or respected; there was a whole roomful of people who were perfectly willing to shower him with those things in spite of how Matt tended to ramble on about government conspiracies or alien lifeforms, or how absolutely cracked he sounded when he laughed.
Dylan didn’t know what to do make of it. He should have felt proud, or relieved, or something, but aside from the weird stiffy Matt’s playing had given him, he wasn’t remotely either of those things.
He highly doubted Matt would care to even remember his name, if he knew the half of it.
TBC.
nanoochka
RATING: PG-13
WARNINGS: Original slash, music!kink. And, uh... Britishisms? Excuse the slang, but it's nice to write the way I actually speak once in a while.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Yesterday I found myself rifling through some of my old, original fiction, and I came across this story I wrote/started back in 2005. Yeah, I know. But I actually didn't hate it, which surprised me, and now I'm compelled to finish it. Any feedback would be appreciated; it's nice to get people's thoughts on something not SPN-related. Who knows, maybe I'll grow a pair, finish this, and submit it to a journal or something. Enjoy!
The Boy with the Thorn in His Side by
nanoochka It was Matt who started it, or started Dylan thinking about it, but that was the way these things went. As much as anyone could be, he was sure that Matt deliberately enjoyed throwing him off-balance like this, with his unexpectedness, his eccentricity, his goddamn… borderline personality. Matt wasn’t the type to just throw curveballs; rather, they came at Dylan with the eerie precision of a guided missile, for all that Matt was small and quiet and supposedly uncalculating, anyway.
“Come to the gig. I’m a bit short on groupies tonight, follow?” he teased over the phone. His voice was its usual husky drawl before following up with a short bark of laughter that drove Dylan crazy, because for someone as cheeky as Matt, his laughter was about as devious as a three-year-old’s.
That was the first Dylan ever heard of Matthew playing guitar—about Matt even knowing how to hold one, really—and the prospect alone was a little unsettling, for various reasons Dylan discouraged himself thinking about as he checked his trouser pockets for pint money and house keys. Things were a bit off-colour already, what with the night he’d been having and the London weather in revolt, which was usual, but hardly conducive of charitable feeling, which was also usual. It was damp and groggy out, and a weird moody greyness hung in the air that made Dylan feel like he was being shaken awake from a nap that had been going badly anyway. However pleasant the spring afternoon had been, it was chill out now, and you could still smell the lingering stench of the Thames from where it had started to heat up too quickly during the day.
As a non-native, Dylan had a theory that it was the weather that put Londoners in such piss-poor moods all the time. It was frightening how contagious it was, though, because before he’d moved from Kent into the city four years ago, he’d been a happier person. Now a stinky river was all it took to make Dylan want to tell the world to fuck off. Currently it was because all of his previous plans for the night—backups included—had fallen through, and the only option left to him was to stay at home getting pissed watching reruns of The Office. Before Matt called, Dylan had looked upon this idea quite resignedly, if not favourably, and was actually the teeniest bit drunk already.
But. Matthew.
There he was, asking a certain amount of effort of Dylan, of setting aside the comfort of his warm beer and messy flat and venturing into another part of town. Such exertion, and he hated, hated, hated the Tube on a Friday night. Especially to dirty, trendy Soho. Dylan had enough sense to be annoyed at how easily he’d accepted Matt’s invitation, but he couldn’t squash the rich tingle of curiosity that propelled him off his couch and into the shitty London night. Matt wasn’t likely to care what kind of shape he showed up in, but then again, Dylan thought, with Matt you were daft if you ever really thought to expect anything. At all.
Here was the story.
They weren’t friends. If they had ever been, that friendship had long disappeared beneath an indiscernible mess of tension and superiority complexes, but the official line was that they were nothing. Dylan knew Matt from a shared music elective they had as seniors down at Middlesex University—Dylan reprising years of cello training, Matt seeming like he’d come from the womb playing piano sonatas—where Dylan was finishing a half-hearted undergrad in Philosophy and Matt was doing whatever it was that he didn’t like to talk about (he was a Psychology major; Dylan had stolen a glance at his timetable). He wasn’t the type of person that Dylan ever made a point of hanging out with. Admittedly, he was cool in the way that Thom Yorke had made it okay for people to be eccentric nowadays, but mostly you just wanted to leave Matt in the corner by himself. That was usually where Dylan found him when he walked into class every Monday, poring over a music score they’d been asked to transpose, or else reading Sci-Fi trash that led Dylan to believe he was a Scientologist before he ever spoke to him. Matt was a weird-looking bloke, too, small and so thinly-built that his fingers were like long twigs the colour of skin. His hair was painfully straight and hung limp to his ears, so that he was always having to swish it out from his saucer-like blue eyes, but it changed frequently—blue to brown to blonde to electric red, a variety of lengths and textures—sometimes several times in a matter of days. Maybe it was all horrible, but with his symmetrical features and enviable bone structure, he managed to make it work.
With the exception of his girlfriend, Isabelle, most of Dylan’s real friends had never met Matt; she’d come across them on campus by accident, a chance encounter never to be repeated. Isabelle was the wealthy sort, and a little bit of a cow, if Dylan was honest about it, and at the time she’d looked at Matt, with his unusual presence and stupid hair, like someone had just pissed on her shoe. Afterwards Dylan could not even mention Matt’s name in conversation without Isabelle referring to him as “The Freak”, and as it so happened Matt seemed to react to mention of Isabelle’s name like you’d react to a surprise rectal scan. From then on, it was a rule that Matt and Dylan didn’t hang out together with other people—at least, this was what Dylan decided and Matt never bothered to question. Sometimes it made Dylan ashamed of himself, because he and Isabelle had more in common than he cared to admit. It wasn’t that he sympathized, because he didn’t lack for friends or charm or good looks himself, but you could tell that Matt had never managed to outrun the label of “class weirdo”, even at the age of twenty-two.
Perhaps Matt had earned it, but he left Dylan feeling rather unoriginal. No one else seemed to share the sentiment. Dylan probably would have ignored him, too, had Matt not spoken first and with a clever remark of the sort that he’d had to respond, and conversation had progressed from there. Matt was intelligent and deathly sharp, when you got down to it: you could spend hours talking to him without getting bored, but not necessarily unharmed. Usually they sat around campus and talked about music, a subject in which they were almost like soulmates for their obscure tastes, or else playing games of poker that Matt always won, on the grass or in quiet cafeterias if it was cold out. When school ended, they went their separate ways. Dylan liked how he could hang out with Matt, or not, as he pleased, with Matt hardly seeming to give a shit either way. And that was that.
Suffice to say, the halting invitation out to a Friday-night solo acoustic show came as a bit of a surprise. Despite all appearances to the contrary, Dylan hadn’t immediately accepted. “This isn’t really our thing, like,” he tried. “I’ve got the trouble and strife round the flat now, I’ll see you afters.”
“The fuck you do,” Matt answered. There was a barely discernible tinge of anger in his tone that might have been because of Dylan’s lie or just the mention of Isabelle. Matt spoke in rapid phrases and a sleepy Devonshire accent that gave him the impression of slurring his words, but for all that he was intimidatingly articulate. More than once, it had given Dylan cause to regret starting a battle of wits with him. “You’re sitting round on your sorry arse doing bugger all, don’t tell me you aren’t. Maybe you ought to think about something other than your sodding high-society image for five minutes and get yourself down here.” He ignored Dylan’s sputters. “Find a pen and take down this address, you twat.”
“You don’t even play the guitar, mate.”
“Right. Shows what you know.”
In a roundabout way, all of this led up to Dylan being stuck on the smelly Tube that Friday night, on his way to the gig. He moped all the way to Tottenham Court Tube, only to emerge aboveground into a sudden downpour that soaked him through and plastered his dark hair to his head like a chocolate helmet. A teenaged girl, clearly a better Londoner than he because she’d remembered her brolly, smirked at him when he found the place Matt had told him about. Dylan’s mind helpfully gave her the finger, as he did his best glower and ducked inside. Immediately, he was assaulted by the hot crush of bodies crowding the bar from the front almost to the stage at the back. All he could smell were fags and alcohol, and the strange odourlessness of a hundred people together in a closed space. Before he got too far, a middle-aged woman with a knot of blonde dreadlocks asked if he was there for Matt York and charged him fifteen quid—something Matt had conveniently neglected to mention. Amateurs never charged more than five or six, tops, but apparently Matt and his phantom guitar had gone pro. Fingering his ticket, Dylan tried to crowbar his way further into the crowd to get a better look around.
It was no Wembly, but the place wasn’t shabby, either. The owners had done it up in the retro style with so-tacky-it-was-cool animal print and good lighting. Comfortable booth seating lined the walls and left room for a dance floor that led up to the stage, which was itself spacious and hung with bolts of crimson velvet from the ceiling, amidst the lights. The crowd was young, mostly female and trendy to an extent that was nearly irritating, marking the bar as one of the many bastions of chic that had popped up around the city in recent years. Dylan wondered why they were all here. For Matt?
He didn’t entirely buy it, even then. Matt was a terribly gifted pianist, a fact that he proved each time he touched his fingers to the keys, but he was just too at odds with himself to have anything resembling stage presence. He wasn’t shy so much as very self-aware, and he avoided attention if he could, whether that meant sticking to the sidelines or hiding behind the upright lid of a gleaming grand piano. Dylan liked him for his unusual qualities—he was the outcast friend that generated an endless supply of funny and strange anecdotes for him to share with his regular crowd—but in the same way that parents carry the constant fear that their children will find some new and outlandish way to publicly humiliate them, Dylan was a little worried that Matthew was going to destroy himself alone on that stage, and afterwards he’d have to deal with being seen with him.
And to think that he wasn’t at all a selfish person.
Hitting the bar with this thought buzzing distractingly inside his head, soon it was nearly an hour later, Dylan’s time lost to gulping pints like water and hitting on anything with breasts. He waited with a perfectly acceptable amount of impatience for the stage managers to get their collective act together and decide whether Matt was up next, or if there was more angry chick rock to suffer through. By the time the lights brightened the stage just enough to reveal a stool and microphone sitting starkly centre, Dylan was good and knackered and Matthew’s stringy, guitar-wielding form was striding forwards to a wave of cheering applause. He looked like he always did, fey and angular in a wide-necked black shirt and jeans, perma-bedhead dyed to an uncharacteristic, sombre brown that drew out the shadows of his high cheekbones and deep-set eyes. Dylan hadn’t seen him in a couple of days; a growth of dark stubble shaded the skin around his reddish mouth and dimpled chin.
Sometimes, Dylan thought, you wonder how the fuck you end up where you do, separate from yourself as though time somehow up and deposits you in random spots so that you’re left trying to figure out how to get home. He didn’t know why he was standing drunk in a bar filled with pretentious hipsters, waiting for someone he barely liked to get on with it and self-destruct; but he didn’t know that he wanted to leave, either. A large part of Dylan wanted to escape the noise and the heat and the five-plus girls he’d drunkenly tried to pull prior to Matt’s set—this was true. And yet, he was curious in that same way the proverbial cat was always accused of fucking itself for a good look. He certainly wasn’t the right choice to play the supportive mate Matt was desperately in need of on the night of his big show—he was the nervous, excitable sort, and at right then Dylan was anything but a calming influence—but the moment Matt’s gaze swept over the room and found Dylan out in the crowd, his eyes issued such a firm challenge for Dylan to run that he downed the last of his beer and stayed.
Dylan took in the careful details of Matt as he introduced himself to the crowd in a low voice: the subtle but telling fidgeting of his long fingers against his knee, a shimmer of sweat along the exaggerated ridge of bare collarbone above the neckline of his jumper. Under the harsh stage lights, he looked edgy in a way that Dylan hadn’t noticed before, sort of… sexy. Feline, in that way, black shirt moulding itself to his slim torso, jeans low and unbelted on his narrow hips. Something went undiminished by Matt’s lack of height and unusual features; rather, the clinging shadows exposed the lithe, elegant proportions of someone taller, and a razor-sharp handsomeness about the face. The crowd recognized it too, and Dylan smiled as a girl next to him muttered something to her friend about hot geeks.
Then, of course, Matt started to play, and they all fell a little in predictable love.
Most performers tended to sing to the floor or their fingers, but Matt—with his guitar confident on his knee and opening the first song with his graceful fingers an impressive blur on the strings—did neither. Amidst the unceasing background chatter and clinking of glass that Dylan badly wanted to silence, Matt strummed a powerful, flamenco-inspired rock beat with such driving rhythm that the noise started to lessen as people took interest. It seemed like the crowd knew enough to be impressed at the skill behind the music and clever lyrics.
For once, there was not a remark or snotty rejoinder that Dylan could think of that could compete with the showstopper of Matt’s voice. It carried the same tenor singing as speaking, but awe-inspiring didn’t even cover it, didn’t even scratch the surface. He matched the strength and passion of the song with tender ruthlessness. You could tell when a singer knew what the hell he was doing, and though Matt didn’t sound like he had to try very hard to hit the notes that he did, he exercised iron-gripped control over his voice that made even Dylan jealous, and Dylan couldn’t sing to save his grandmother. Matt didn’t sing the words so much as he drew them out in a sensuous moan, and that had to be illegal right there, the raw, unrestrained texture of his voice grazing the air like nails down Dylan’s back, building chills on top of chills.
A shiver ran down Dylan’s neck like he hadn’t felt in months, and he blinked in shock. He’d spent so long ignoring it that the tiny shudder, the tightening in his gut, was like a gust of hot water erupting over his head. He inhaled a sharp breath through his nose as he realized that the rich tingle of Matt’s voice was making him hard. The rush of sensation nearly winded him, and he looked on at the stage, wide-eyed. What was worse, though, what was actually worse than all that and Dylan so turned-on that he could have died, was Matt playing on without the barest glance at what he was doing, but rather, at where Dylan stood shaken on the floor, eyes wide open and smiling.
Smiling, in that way, because he knew.
When had anything felt as real as that, ever?
Dylan hadn’t grown up in hard-as-nails London like most of his friends, living as he did with his parents and three sisters on a large estate near Canterbury, but he’d been no stranger to the edifying dangers and delights of that great city in his adolescent years. That’s what London was, if you wanted it to be, madness and mayhem and pure joy together in one convenient location.
There were the serious parts in Dylan’s life, like music and getting the grades for a good uni, but there were also girls and going down the pub and his mates, among other things. Dylan was an exceptionally good-looking young man, and maybe if it had always been that way, he might have been less self-aware; but that wasn’t so. Put mildly, his prepubescent appearance had been unfortunate, and had it not been for his family’s money and Dylan’s own talent for winning popularity in spite of his physical shortcomings, his youth might have gone very differently. As it was, he’d managed to find a place in the hierarchy of public school that allowed for a well-adjusted childhood. Before he knew, he’d outgrown his alien-like gangliness and exaggerated features and was suddenly capable of winning favours on his own. Unused to the newfound interest of pretty girls and hotshot ringleaders who’d never had more than remote tolerance for him, Dylan spent the first few years of adolescence assuming all this attention was directed at the person standing behind him.
For however much he felt embarrassed of Matt in public, Dylan got it—he did. It was shit to feel like a certain number of opportunities were closed to you because of poor genes and a few years of poor sartorial choices. Perhaps if he were less self-conscious, less worried about fucking it up by association or a bigger person all around, Dylan would have extended the olive branch to Matt and invited him into his regular circle, rather than perpetuating the vicious circle of social exclusion that never seemed to progress beyond a schoolyard level.
As it turned out, though, Matt didn’t need his help to be cool or admired or respected; there was a whole roomful of people who were perfectly willing to shower him with those things in spite of how Matt tended to ramble on about government conspiracies or alien lifeforms, or how absolutely cracked he sounded when he laughed.
Dylan didn’t know what to do make of it. He should have felt proud, or relieved, or something, but aside from the weird stiffy Matt’s playing had given him, he wasn’t remotely either of those things.
He highly doubted Matt would care to even remember his name, if he knew the half of it.
TBC.
© 2005, 2010,
nanoochka
