They hadn’t talked about the other night, when Stan got back from the club with Tone. Like everything else in Ben’s life, he didn’t want to talk about it. Big surprise.
Stan, at least, seemed to have figured that out and wasn’t pushing him.
“Why did you come?” Ben blurted. Then he wished he could pull the words back into his mouth and swallow them.
“To LA?”
“Yeah. Tone called you?”
“Yes.”
Stan rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. He was wearing his hair loose today, falling down his back in a soft, gold waterfall. Laying on top of his white T-shirt, it looked almost transparent.
“Tone said he needed my help,” Stan said. It sounded like he’d picked the words carefully. “I figured, if he was asking me—of all people—for help, then I should go.”
“Really?”
Stan nodded at him. “Really.”
Three, almost four years after they’d broken up, Stan had dropped everything on the back of a phone call from someone he wasn’t even friends with any more. Ben was having a hard time interpreting what that meant.
Would he have done the same for Stan? Sure. But Stan wasn’t the one who’d fucked up.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Stan said. His voice was gentle but serious.
“Not really.” Ben finished his salad and got up to put the container in the bin and stick his fork in the dishwasher.
He went and sat down on the sofa, which was still in sight of the kitchen, and tucked his feet up underneath himself. Stan came over to join him, silently taking a seat at the other end of the sofa and not commenting when Ben turned on the TV.
Once he’d picked something, Ben turned the volume down low and turned to face Stan. Maybe the therapy was making him brave.
“I don’t want to go back to LA,” he said.
Stan nodded seriously. “Okay. Are you going to tell the others?”
“I’m going to have to, I suppose,” Ben mumbled. “I don’t want to stay here, but not in the same way. This is your home, and I want to be somewhere where I don’t feel like I’m imposing.”
“You’re not imposing,” Stan said immediately, which was what Ben had expected him to say.
“I kind of am. Not just in your home, but in your life. You should be able to go back and do what you do, not be forced to babysit your addict ex-boyfriend.”
“I’m going to tell you something now, Ben, and I’m serious.”
His tone made Ben look over. Stan didn’t talk like this very often.
“If you and Tone decided you were going to move out tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t go back to New York.”
Ben frowned at him. “Oh.”
“At some point I need to go back there and pack up my things, figure out what to do for my roommates, all of that stuff. I’d really like some of my clothes back. But being in London has changed something for me too. I’ve lived in a lot of places in the past ten years, but nowhere has felt like home like London does.”
“Yeah,” Ben said, because he understood.
“So, you can stay here for as long as you like. As for babysitting you….”
Ben looked away again, his heart thumping hard in his chest.
“There’s nowhere else I’m going to be, for as long as you need me.”
“You shouldn’t have to.”
“That’s not what I said.” He got up then, and Ben frowned, watching as Stan went to the small cloakroom by the front door. After a moment of rummaging around, he pulled out a familiar black case and brought it back to the sofa. “Here.”
Ben took the guitar case and immediately set it down. “What’s that for?”
Stan shrugged. “It’s yours. I just realised we put it away when we got back here, and you might not have known where it was.”
Ben hadn’t known, but he hadn’t particularly wondered either.
“Is this, like, some kind of message?”
Stan laughed. “No? I thought you might want it.”
“Oh.” Ben felt stupid. “Okay.”
He got up, took the guitar case to his room, and set it on his bed so he would have to touch it again later. On impulse, he opened the case. It wasn’t just his guitar in there. Someone—likely Tone—had picked up Ben’s notebook too and stashed it in the inside pocket.
Ben wrote music everywhere—in blank emails on his phone, in notebooks or sheets of paper, on the back of receipts, on his arm with a Sharpie if there wasn’t a better option. But he tried to keep most of his big ideas in the notebook. It happened too often—when they were trying to put a new song together, the hook they needed happened to be scrawled in there.
Having the notebook as well as the guitar was a relief Ben didn’t know he was looking for.
He closed the guitar case and went back out to the living room.
“Did I ever tell you about the time Tone nearly chopped his own cock off with a guitar case?”
Stan looked up from his phone with an expression of horrified fascination.
“No. But please do.”
Ben sat back down on the sofa.
“We were playing Bestival,” he said. “A couple of years back now. It’s a nice festival, good vibes. Anyway, because we were headlining Sunday, we had a nice setup in the backstage area with access to showers and stuff, even though they were in a block rather than in our trailer.”
“Luxurious.”
Ben grinned. “Right. We’d just gotten off stage, and it had chucked it down with rain, and Tone ran for the shower before Summer could get in there. She was so pissed at him, she went and nicked all of his clothes and the towels. So he had fuck all.
“You know Tone—it’s not like he’s exactly afraid of wandering around naked. But one of the DJs from Radio One was around, and he had a thing for her, so when he got out, he grabbed an empty guitar case to cover himself up. It was still raining at this point, so he was going to have to get back in the shower to wash all the mud off his feet so he wasn’t best pleased.”
Stan shook his head, clearly trying to hide his smile. “I can see where this is going.”
“He was yelling at Geordie—for some reason, Geordie got the blame—and at that point the case fell open. Nothing was in it, but Tone was annoyed so he went to snap it shut again and almost got his cock caught in it. I think he pinched one of his balls, actually.”
“Oh my God,” Stan said. Then he started to laugh.
Stan’s laughter was infectious, and Ben giggled too as he kept telling the story that was part of Ares legend now.
“So there’s Tone, standing bare-ass naked in the middle of a field, up to his shins in mud while it was chucking it down with rain, screaming his head off because he’s hurt his balls. And me and Geordie were sitting in our trailer killing ourselves laughing at him. I wish we had pictures.”
“I wish you did too,” Stan said. He clutched at his stomach. “Poor Tone.”
Ben leaned back and let himself laugh at the memory, spurred on by the memory of Tone’s expletive-ridden rant and how Geordie had gotten hiccups from laughing so hard.
“Oh my God,” Ben gasped. He’d needed that.
Stan was still laughing, pushing tears from the corner of his eye. “So, there’s that.”