“Well, we’re ninety-nine percent certain to win a few of the awards we’re nominated for”—which was seven—“so it’s a pretty big fucking deal. Besides, you barely speak to Marko, so how come you’re lecturing me about family?”
“But this isn’t my brother we’re talking about, it’s your Maw Maw. Last I knew, the two of you didn’t have the same rocky history Marko and I do. Go do your thing. We’ve got the awards covered. Besides, you’ll regret it if you don’t go, and the worst happens. “
“Yeah, you’re right.”
“Don’t sound so surprised about that. It happens.”
“I know it does. I’m just... are you sure you’re going to be okay? I mean, it’ll be your first...” He looked past me, eyes unfocused.
“My first sober event? I’m well aware. I’ll be fine, and if I’m not, which I will be, then I’ll have Quincy. I don’t need two motherfucking chaperones. Don’t make me drive you to the airport myself.”
As if on cue, a car horn beeped outside.
“Saved by the bell.” I gave him a brief bro shake and hug. “Give Virginia and David and everyone else my love. And hug Maw Maw for me.”
“Thanks man. And for the plane.”
“Fuck off. As if you wouldn’t have done the same and more for me. Get out of here.” I headed to my room so that he and Quincy could say goodbye to each other in private.
“You’re fucking killing me in that dress. Stone. Fucking. Dead.” Quincy laughed quietly, but kept her eyes facing forward. I brought my lips to her ear, lowering my voice, and doing my best to keep the showbiz smile plastered on my face as we worked the red carpet outside the Sonata Awards. “I’m serious. My balls are already aching, and we haven’t even made it inside yet.”
She kept the fake smile plastered on her face also. “So inappropriate, Rome.”
“And since when have I ever given a flying fuck about being appropriate? You’re the hottest, most fuckable woman here by a long way, and that dress totally hits the spot. Several spots actually.”
It was true. Quincy was outrageously beautiful when she was mooching around at home with bare skin, freshly-fucked hair, and wearing nothing but a dirty t-shirt, let alone when she was professionally made up, styled, and poured into a low-backed, figure-hugging dress that left very little to the imagination, especially for someone like me, who knew first-hand exactly what lay beneath it.
“The fact is, if you weren’t with King—or even if you were, but he wasn’t my best friend—I wouldn’t make it through tonight without being inside you, and you know it.” Her sharp intake of breath turned my smile from fake to real in an instant.
I slipped my hand down her back, enjoying the feel of her silk-like warm-brown skin across my palm—letting it settle on the low dip of the dress, just above her butt—and turned up the wattage of my smile, as the press went wild, snapping us from every angle.
As we walked away, and I pressed my hand harder into Quincy’s lower back, I didn’t miss the look her best friend Deone shot me. She’d come along to the ceremony, as we had a spare ticket, because King couldn’t come, and despite joining me in ensuring that we’d be fine without him, I strongly suspected that Quincy wanted Deone there for moral support in “managing” me.
In fact, I wouldn’t have been surprised if King had been the one to insist on her tagging along—that was totally his MO—because I was pretty certain he didn’t think that Quincy could handle me alone, and he sure as shit didn’t think that I could handle myself.
Well, Deone could stick her disapproval where the sun didn’t shine. I just needed to get through the night, and I didn’t care what she thought of me while I did it.
At the table, it wasn’t long before it dawned on me that I’d made a huge mistake in going to the ceremony, or thinking that I could handle the situation without losing my damned mind, and/or falling off the wagon epically. Though in theory I’d realized that this was be the first real test of my sobriety—an environment where alcohol, and “the rest”, was flowing like water from a faucet—I hadn’t anticipated exactly how hard that would be in practice.
Having never been sober for one, I had also failed to take into account just how long and boring awards ceremonies were. It was like watching paint dry in the rain. That alone would have been bad enough, but even worse was that sitting at the table surrounded by people having a good time, but bored out of my mind, made me fidgety and angsty, and without a drink or smoke, I had nothing to do with my hands.
I’d been warned about that aspect of quitting—that addicts often found it hard to cope with being empty-handed, because the physical habits associated with our addictions were as much a part of our lives as the chemical dependency was.
It hadn’t been an issue up until that point, because I normally had a cello in my hands, or I was sitting at the piano, keeping my fingers busy that way. If all that failed, and I was at home, jerking off or fucking kept me occupied until I could grab some sleep.
The urge to reach for a bottle, any bottle, was so strong, my palms actually itched. Just as I’d given up trying to resist, Quincy slipped her hand into mine under the table. I looked her way, quizzically, and she leant forward to speak directly into my ear.
“I’ve got you. Let’s just make it through the announcements and we can get out of here. You got this.” She squeezed my hand. The relief that she knew, and she got it, flowed over my body like a tropical waterfall. I squeezed her hand back and did my best to stay calm and wait it out, just like she said.
It turned out that we’d been right to suspect that we would walk away with some hardware, but we could not, and did not, predict that we’d clean up to the extent we did. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to be happy, or to pretend to give a fuck. Normally in those kinds of situations I could just get wasted, and I had King by my side to make us both look good. Thank God I had Quincy this time, or else I would have either gotten blasted out of my mind, or bailed, and then gotten blasted elsewhere. That would have been the better of the two bad options.
If I was going to fall from grace, it would have been better to do it in the comfort of my—or more accurately, King’s—home, or in some seedy bar out of sight of prying eyes and camera lenses, than to screw up spectacularly at a televised event on the industry’s night of nights, and in the presence of just about every showbiz paparazzo in the world.
As it was, I didn’t need to worry about either occurrence. Quincy said she had my back, and she did. Each time we got on stage, I stood there like window dressing while she did the honors, never letting go of my hand once. On the last award of the clean sweep, after she finished with all the usual thank yous to the label people, and the fans, she just about floored me.
“Wow. I’m blown away. As this is the last time we’ll be up here tonight, I think it would be remiss of me not to take a moment to properly thank my partners in crime on this album, King and Rome…” She squeezed my hand again as she said my name. I squeezed right back.
Chapter 5