I’ve seen everyone in the room once before except the lead guitarist, Les Wilson. They were part of Neil’s gang at Peppers the night we met and later, part of the upstairs party we went to for Kurt. Old friends. A Santa Barbara mob. It makes the tension in the room that entered with Neil a doubly odd thing.

Nate Kassel, drumsticks in hand, gives Neil a wraparound arm pat and then a lift of his chin toward me. Pat Larsen is a little friendlier in greeting Neil, but not much. And Les, their new lead guitarist, isn’t really a part of this tight knit group from Santa Barbara, so he’s sort of just here, like I’m.

I sink down onto an old, dirty couch pushed up against a wall of shelving and, for once, I’m grateful I’ve been rapidly forgotten in a room. The strain between the guys is palpable. It almost looks like none of them know how to act around Neil. So strange. Calm, smiling Neil is the awkwardness in the room.

It isn’t long before they’re plugged in, playing and really gelling. Neil started with this band. That’s the way they’re playing, like musicians who have played together forever. And there’s definitely something in the music they create. Something raw, powerful, uniquely their own.

Four hours later, they’re still jamming. I move to lie on a pillow. My lids drift open and closed, over and over again. Sleep tugs at me even though I’m emotionally messy. It doesn’t matter what shit Neil brought with him to Seattle; Neil’s band is a band again.

~~~

I am exhausted. Our six days in Seattle have moved at a grueling tempo. Hours in the rehearsal space. Sex. Late nights in the thriving music scene here. Sleep. Then the cycle all over again, numbing me until I can’t feel, too tired even to sleep.

The band played their first live gig together in an old theater that looked as though, at one time, it had been scarred by fire. The corridors, the performance area, everything had been packed. Normally this kind of nightmare I would avoid—new places, new people—but it wasn’t a difficult thing for me. And I’m glad I went. Neil and the guys were amazing live, on stage.

It feels like everyone here is sort of different, an outsider probably everywhere but here. By extension it makes everyone belong.  Being strange, being different, is normal in this underground world of hungry and creative musicians. It’s a surprisingly good feeling to feel I belong simply by being here. The easiness of it all is seductive. I understand why Neil loves life here. It’s so different from what my life has always been in the judgmental world of money and pretty rich girls.

In spite of the first day’s tension, everything else has rolled in an easy flow. Neil is subjected to the occasional jeer about having fucked-up Andy. Good-humored taunts about his jail thing always flitter through the air wherever we are. But for the most part, it’s the music and the scene everyone focuses on in this alternate universe of not normal.

There is only one moment I would label bad if I had the strength to write in my journal today. In the corridor after Arctic Hole’s fist live gig—Arctic Hole, the name of Neil’s recreated band, was lifted from a joke he made about jail being an arctic hole—I came face-to-face with Andy. He just showed up out of nowhere and was there; cocky, long blond hair, an unattractively small and thin guy with blues eyes, always staring with a glint that makes it obvious he’s an asshole. He didn’t seem at all like a guy who would have ever been a friend of Neil’s.

I didn’t really want to talk to Andy. There is something in the way he looks at me that puts my nerves on edge. But he started talking to me and I didn’t know how to get away from him.

When Neil spied us from across the room during the after performance party, something changed on his face. Jealousy over me? Hatred of Andy? I couldn’t tell for sure. The mixture of anger and other emotions was something new and strange on Neil.

I thought they were going to come to blows right there in front of half of Seattle. It was an ugly scene. Neil snarling in Andy’s face for him to stay away from me. Then dragging me, like a caveman, from the party, barking at me: You don’t talk to him. You don’t look at him. You don’t go near Andy.

Neil’s nerve in ordering me had my temper fully lit by the time we got back to our hotel room. We would have had an enormous fight, except Neil had me on the bed the second we stepped into the room. The sex was pounding, emotionally void, rough, and painful. It was messed up, but it made my blood boil; the unrestrained acts of his body.

I curl into the blankets. It’s been an intense week. Tomorrow we’re supposed to return to Berkeley. It’s our last day here. I wonder when Neil is going to tell me we’re over and he’s not leaving Seattle with me.

CHAPTER TEN

I zip closed my duffel bag. My last final of summer session is done. I’m out of here for three weeks.

The phone rings. I click on the cordless. “Hello.”

“Hey, Chrissie. You got everything arranged to come up here?”

Neil. I smile. “Yep. Bag packed. Ticket booked. Are you ready to meet me at the airport tomorrow?”

“More than you know,” Neil says in a husky growl. “You can count the new calluses on my hands when you get here.”

I laugh. Neil staying one extra week after me in Seattle slipped into all summer in Seattle for Neil. But it wasn’t as awful as I feared it would be, being alone in the condo for eight weeks.

There was a weird sense of relief, getting a breather from both Rene and Neil. A loss of tension in the air. A loss of tension in me.

I lay back on the floor, curled around the phone. “Have you missed me at all?”

A long sigh. “You know I have.”

“I’ve missed you, too.”

A pause. “Chrissie?” Neil’s voice has changed.

“Yes?”

“You don’t just sit around down there alone in the condo without me, do you? You should be having fun. Going out.”

“You can be such a conceited jerk at times, Neil,” I say flippantly, though the emotion running through me is uncomfortable.

I wonder if Neil has just told me, in a guy roundabout way, he’s fucking around. And I’m pissed off with myself because I realize I’m pretty much just sitting around when I don’t have classes.

“What time is your flight?” Neil asks, ignoring my jibe.

“I get to Seattle at 3:30.”

“Are you staying the whole three weeks until fall semester begins? Or are going to go to Santa Barbara also?”

“Nope, the entire three weeks you’re stuck with me.”

“Good. You’re not going to get out of the apartment for days,” he whispers.

“I’m counting on it, Neil,” I whisper.

I try not to let clearly form in my head the shabby apartment Neil is living in, unpleasantly located in a cheap-rent neighborhood of Seattle. He shares it with Josh Moss and Les Wilson.

A two bedroom rat hole above a store, with walls so thin that knowing the guys are in the next room when I visit Neil definitely doesn’t put us, sexually, at our best. I wish Neil would come to Berkeley instead of me always going to him.

I hear the guys in the background calling for Neil. “I’ve got to run, Chrissie. Night.”

Click.

I take the cordless phone to the kitchen and drop it into the receiver. I wander to my glass patio doors. I stare across the Bay to the city. Alan is there. Blackpoll’s San Francisco concert date of his world tour. It’s the closest we’ve been to each other for over a year. I wonder if Alan is standing across the Bay thinking of me.

~~~

When I wake, I’m on my couch and the living room is filled with cruel morning light. My head hurts. My mouth is dry. I can feel that I drank too much last night. I fell asleep without making it to the bedroom.

I roll over, stretching and yawning, trying to rally my muscles into action. I definitely need more than my share of coffee today. I look at the clock on the wall. Crap, it’s midmorning. I’ve got to get to the airport for Seattle by one.