This was…slow. Delightfully boring, in the best way. Nothing to do at all for hours on end but cuddle with Titus and watch movies. He had a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot built into the rig, of course, using cell signal, so he had access to all the streaming services. And he let me pick the movie, nine times out of ten—and never complained when I picked girly rom-coms or silly reality TV. I’d concede to his masculinity every once in a while, of course, and he’d pick a shoot ’em up action flick or something like that, usually an older one from the glory days of action movies. Rarely did anything we watch get steamy, because that was just playing with fire, right?
Portland, Oregon. His first show was an acoustic pop-up in a park. Just Titus, a stool, a mic, an amp, and a guitar. The morning of the show, Jeremy started posting all over Titus’s socials about it—he liked to make it a kind of scavenger hunt. He’d post hints of the location, and force the fans to figure out where it would be. By the time Titus plugged in his guitar and sat on his stool, the park was packed. People had brought chairs, blankets, picnic supplies, beach balls. There was a group of guys playing frisbee, people passing joints around…it felt like a festival.
I was sitting on a blanket a few feet away from Titus, to his right and near his feet, where I could gaze adoringly up at him as he sang love songs to me.
Which…is what he did.
“Today is gonna be different,” he said, by way of introduction, as he strummed chords and adjusted the tuning. “I may play some favorites toward the end, but hopefully you guys will be cool with this, but I was thinking I’d do some covers. I almost never play covers, if you know me, you know that.” He gazed down at me. “But I’ve got someone special with me today—my girlfriend, Laurel. So, today is about her.” He grinned at the crowd. “If anyone gets a good photo of her looking up at me like she really, really loves me, tag me in it.” He winked at me. “Okay, this one is ‘Love me Tender.’ If you don’t know this song, well…I can’t help you.”
The man could do Elvis, that was for damn sure. He did his own arrangement of it, a slow deep croon in that rough beautiful voice of his, fingers picking the melody with an occasional show-off run of fingerstyle wizardry. He did “Unchained Melody,” “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” “Wonderful Tonight” (for which he traded his acoustic for an electric, and did incredible justice to the original guitar licks by Eric Clapton), “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing”…if there was a hot, sultry, sweet, or romantic love song from the past fifty years, he covered it. And yes, his Instagram feed was overrun with photos of me, sitting on the blanket near his feet, not taking my eyes off him for a single moment.
He did end up doing acoustic or solo versions of his top five or six hits, the ones that get requested on the radio most, the ones that traditionally would be reserved for encores, since they always got the crowd pumped up and singing along.
The show ended, and we went back to his rig. I expected him to want to go out and celebrate a successful show, but the moment he got onto the rig, he kicked his boots off, tossed the shirt aside, and flopped onto the couch.
“Hold me,” he murmured.
I’d never seen him immediately post show, before—I always figured he’d be pumped up, manic.
Instead, he was…
Exhausted.
“You wouldn’t think a sitting-down acoustic show would be that draining, right?” he gazed up at me as I slid behind him, taking his head onto my lap and stroking his hair. “But it does. It’s the being on, you know?” He closed his eyes and just breathed a moment. “I’m not actually an extrovert. I’m a homebody. I like being alone, or with a small number of people.”
I hummed a small laugh. “Really? You seem so confident, so full of energy when you’re performing.”
“It’s a weird thing. I love performing. But…once it’s a real crowd, more than like a few dozen people, it kind of stops being…people. I don’t know how to put it. It’s a different part of my brain. It’s not individuals, at that point, it’s a crowd. A part of me turns on, right? I’m on, I’m not Titus anymore, I’m Titus Bright. I’m Bright Bones. I’m Tommy’s legacy, those songs we wrote together and performed every night for twenty fucking years. I put it all out there, all of me, every performance. Whether it’s fifty people in a coffeehouse, or two thousand in a park like today, I’m all the way on, putting on the best show I can.”
“I can tell,” I said. “And so can your fans.”
He smiled. “Thanks. But once I’m done, I’m just…beat.”
“I did kind of expect you to be more jazzed-up afterward.”
He shrugged. “With a full band, a sold-out stadium, fifty thousand people on their feet and screaming for two and a half hours? Yeah, there’s a rush afterward. Especially when it’s four of you all meshing, jamming, just in the zone, you know? You get this…yeah, a jazzed-up energy, you feel kinda crazy when it’s over. It can be hard to come down from it, honestly, and that’s part of why people in this industry have substance abuse problems—you crave that high when you’re not performing, but then once the high is over you can’t come down from it, so you end up using uppers and downers and all that…on top of the fame and no one to tell you no and just the lifestyle.”
“Your way seems better,” I said.
He nodded. “It’s not as crazy. You’re not in a different city every night. Not as big, not as loud, not as much pressure. I don’t get the rush quite as much, which I do miss, honestly. There’s nothing like nailing a show in a sold-out stadium. Nothing in the world. But this is better. I can manage this. The trade-off is, the energy and the pressure of the performance is all on me. And I’m just beat afterward, I guess.” A glance up at me. “Hope that’s not a disappointment.”
I continued stroking his hair. “A disappointment? Hell no, Titus.” I bent forward and kissed his forehead. “I’m a homebody myself, actually. You know how I grew up, I told you everything. Well, it meant I never really felt at home. I never had a home. Even when I was home, it wasn’t…home. It was a house where my parents lived, but they didn’t really give two shits about me, not really. I never felt safe, I never had anywhere that was mine, that was safe. So, when I got out of college, the first thing I did was buy a condo. And that was my place. I never let anyone in, not my friends, not my hookups, no one. Ever.”
He blinked up at me. “Really?”
“Oh yeah. I’m still that way. Obviously, I have the girls over sometimes. They’ve all been to my house, but very rarely do they ever go into my actual bedroom. Sometimes to help me pick an outfit, but…yeah. My room especially is…” I shrugged. “It’s sort of…sacred, I guess, I don’t know a better word for it.”
He went still. “So that day you brought me to your house, and let me into your room?”
“That was a really, really big deal.”
“And that’s why you sort of freaked out.”
“And giving me regular access to your home, giving me space in the closet, a key…”