Author: Anna Martin
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/anna-martin/page,16,529683-the_lost_boy.html
Tone raised his hand.
“This is album four,” he echoed. “They put out a greatest hits or an acoustic album for number five, and we’re done. We’ve got a shitload of unreleased material, they can do something with that.”
“We still need to tour it, though,” Jez said. “And I really don’t like the idea of half-arsing our last album.”
Stan nodded. “I think you might need to lay it all out for them in a meeting. Sit down and put together a proper proposal, one that you’re all on board with. Look, Jez, you know I don’t know the music industry. I’m not going to pretend to. But I do know about influence.”
He looked around the room at them all, the ragtag group of musicians whose careers had been born in the back room of a bar in Camden.
“If your record label thinks the options are losing Ben from the band and having to deal with the fallout from that, or keeping you all together and letting you do things your own way, well, I think they’d be willing to listen.”
“The Spice Girls were never the same after Geri left,” Tone said sagely.
Summer snorted a laugh. “And One Direction broke up after Zane quit,” she added.
“Great,” Ben muttered. “I get to be fucking Ginger Spice.”
Stan smiled at him across the table.
Summer held her hand up and waited for Stan’s nod, even though it wasn’t really necessary any more, not now they were communicating like actual adults.
“I want to keep making music with you guys,” she said. “I honestly don’t care if that’s writing songs in the basement of some shitty shared house or in a recording studio in LA. You’re all my family now. As long as we’re all together, that’s what’s important.”
Geordie wrapped his arm around her shoulder and fixed Jez with a stare. “Could you give it all up?” he asked bluntly. “I know you like working out in the States.”
“There’s no reason why we can’t all work on other projects too,” Jez said with a shrug. “I think it would be good for us.”
“Ben’s been working on an EP,” Tone said.
“Fuck off,” Ben said and shoved him off the barstool.
“Have you?” Summer asked.
“Yeah,” Ben grumbled. “It’s just for me, though. I’m not releasing it or anything.”
“But that’s good,” Jez insisted. “Why can’t we go and do those projects, work on other things, but still come back together to do the Ares stuff as well?”
“We can,” Tone said. “There’s nothing stopping us. Except the label.”
“Geordie wants to go to do his DJ house music bullshit—”
“Hey,” Geordie complained, but Jez kept going.
“There’s always been stuff we’ve written that wasn’t right for Ares, but we liked it anyway.”
“Can I say something?” Stan asked. Jez nodded and the group fell silent again. “I think it would be good for you all to go away and write down on your own what you want from the next five years. For your personal life, and for the band, and the types of projects you want to do. Going back to that influence thing… if you’re able to go to your management team and say look, this is what we have planned, then you’re the ones driving those conversations. You’re in control.”
“Yeah,” Summer said. “That could work.”
“Good.” Stan chugged the last of his water. “I need a fucking nap.”
Ben followed him out of the kitchen and silently followed Stan upstairs, back to their old bedroom.
“Can I hug you now?” he asked when Stan shut the door behind them.
Stan gave him a tired smile and curled in on himself as he leaned into Ben’s embrace.
“I missed you,” Ben murmured against the top of Stan’s head. “I know it was only a few days, but I missed you.”
“I missed you too.” Stan turned his head so he could kiss the underside of Ben’s jaw. “I’m sorry for telling you about meeting Marcus when we were on the phone. That was a shitty thing to do.”
“You don’t need to apologise.”
“No, I do.”
It had been grating on him ever since—not the guilt from meeting Marcus for coffee; he didn’t think there was anything wrong with that. But telling Ben when they were so far away from each other, when Ben couldn’t do anything about it and Stan couldn’t reassure him in person.
“I just worry about you. If anyone’s going to ditch on this relationship, it’s not going to be me.”
Stan stiffened. “I’m not going to ditch either,” he said. He stepped back, out of Ben’s arms.
“You’re the one with a whole world out there, Stan,” Ben said. “I wouldn’t blame you if you decided you wanted to go out and explore it.”
“Ben, I literally just got home from moving my whole life back to London again so I could be with you. I’ve left my job, my roommates, things that are important to me. Because you’re more important than all of that.”
“Are we fighting?”
Stan blew out a hard breath. “I’m tired. I’m sorry. We should probably not talk about this for a while. At least until I’ve gotten over the jetlag.”
“Are you going to go home?”
“Can I stay here?”
“Yeah.” Ben swallowed, like he was nervous. “Course you can.”
Stan held his hand out and Ben took it. They didn’t go to the sofa, which was fine for one person to nap on, but not big enough for two. Stan kicked off his shoes and curled up on the bed, on top of the covers. A moment later, Ben shuffled in close behind him, his arm coming tight around Stan’s waist.
Stan took his hand and brought it up so he could kiss across his knuckles.
“Sleep for now,” Ben said, like he could read Stan’s thoughts.
After all this time, maybe he could.
Chapter Eighteen
Someone at Ares’s management company managed to get Ben a recording slot at a studio that had been used by pretty much every major rock band that had ever come out of the UK. Which was awesome. For years, Ares had recorded at the rehearsal space in the house at Belsize Park, or more recently, in LA. The producer who’d worked on their first album had moved out to California, and they wanted to keep working with him, so it made sense to be where he was.
Ben would have just sat down at the house to record, but he really needed professionals to give him some feedback. Having Tone around helped. Even though Tone’s part in the recording process had been tied up ages ago, he knew the songs as well as Ben and could give better direction than the sound techs.
Sitting in a booth with a guitar again was nerve-wracking.
“Need anything?” Tone asked, sticking his head around the door.
“Can you get someone to get me a Coke? A really cold can of proper Coke.”
Tone rolled his eyes. “I’m sure we can manage that, yeah.”
He shut the door and Ben slipped the headphones on.
Jez had arranged for everything they had recorded in LA to be sent to London, so Ben could work with that while laying down his part.
They worked solidly through the morning, getting far more done than Ben had anticipated. As it happened, he was good at getting back into the flow of working when he had to. He thought it probably helped that he’d had a really good session with Dr Greg the day before where they’d discussed professionalism and how to segment his process.
As Jez had promised, the music sounded good. Listening to it again after almost four months was weird. Ben recognised that he was in a different place now than where he’d been when he wrote those songs, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
When Tone reappeared with his Coke, Ben beckoned him in.
“We need another track for the album,” he said without preamble. “Maybe two.”
“You think?”
Ben nodded. “It’s not done. It’s not ready.”
“Ben… they want to see it pretty fucking soon. We don’t have a lot of time to write new material.”
“We
can round up the guys,” Ben said. “Have a jam session in the studio like we used to. There’s something missing.”
Tone sighed and scratched his beard. “We need a banger and an eleven o’clock number.”
“You know what a fucking eleven o’clock number is?”
Tone had never struck him as a musical theatre fan.
“I’m not a fucking Muggle, Ben.”
That made Ben laugh. “I know, I know. You’re right, though. This record is going to blow their fucking socks off, but there’s nothing on there for people to scream back to us, you know? I love those songs. That’s why people like our music.”
“Yeah. We need another ‘Forget Me Not.’”
The single that had truly propelled them into the spotlight. Those kinds of songs only came around once in a lifetime, if they were lucky.
“We can try,” Ben said. “You get where I’m coming from, though?”
“Yeah. I’ll set something up.”
Ben nodded. “See you back at the house.”
“Yep.” Tone shut the door behind himself as he left.
While Ben was in the right mood to work, he ploughed through, working on as many of the tracks as he could, until his fingertips started to go numb from the strings of his guitar. He knew it was late, and the sound techs probably wanted to leave. If they were in LA, Ben would have kept going with cocaine and Red Bull, but he was trying to break both of those habits.
“You ready to call it quits?” the tech said through the headset.
Ben nodded. “Yeah. Save that last version for me? I want to listen to it back tomorrow.”
“You have tomorrow off.”
“Fuck.”
That made them laugh.
He carefully packed up his guitars—he’d brought three of them for this session—and filled his backpack with his notes.
One of the techs, Shane, held the door for him. “We’re going to grab a beer, if you want to join us?”
“Nah, I’m good, thanks, man,” Ben said.
“Are you sure? It’s all industry people, and we’re going to James’s house, so you don’t need to worry about anything.”
Ben hesitated for a moment, thinking about the empty bed he had to go home to. Stan was at an industry event, so he couldn’t go back to the flat. And it wasn’t particularly late, only just gone 9:00 p.m.
“Okay,” he said. He probably needed more friends other than his bandmates if he was going to be living in London full-time again. And these guys were cool. “Let’s go.”
He knew as soon as he turned up that there was something off. It wasn’t just a couple of guys hanging out at someone’s house, drinking a few beers and smoking weed. There was a full-blown house party going on, with people already spilling out onto the front garden and the entire street buzzing with activity. Ben got the impression it wouldn’t be long until the police got called, even if this was mostly a student corner of Hackney.
Shane had taken another cab over here, so Ben followed one of the other guys inside and stepped around a girl who was almost passed out in the hallway. These parties were painfully familiar, and Ben decided he’d slip out as soon as he could. Maybe he should text Dr Greg.
“Ben, man, you made it!” Shane slapped him on the back.
How the fuck was he wasted already? And how did he get here before Ben?
Shane pressed a beer into Ben’s hand and steered him through the house to the kitchen. Where there were lines of coke laid out on the marble countertop.
“Help yourself,” he said, waving a hand at it.
“No, thanks,” Ben mumbled. He pretended to take a sip of his beer to cover how much he wanted to say yes. God, he ached for the bittersweet high, the blankness, the opportunity to let everything just fucking go and breathe, for a while.
It was never just one line with Ben, though. One line would turn into two, then six, then he’d find himself waking up at a train station at dawn not knowing how the hell he got there.
“Aw, come on, man. We know you like to party.”
“Gotta work tomorrow,” he said, pasting a fake smile on his face. Because that was a more socially acceptable answer than ‘I’m a drug addict and this is a bad idea.’
“Nah, it’s Sunday.”
“We’ve got two more tracks to write for the album.”
“Can’t believe I’m mixing for fucking Ares.” Shane shook his head. “That was like, the dream, you know?”
In the past few weeks, Ben’s gut instincts had come back online. Now that his brain was pretty much clear of the influence of drugs—he was sober, for now—he found he could scope things out a lot better than before.
What he couldn’t control was how his eyes kept tracking back to the cocaine, and he knew he was angling himself towards it while they talked shop. He couldn’t avoid it, couldn’t stop looking at it. Couldn’t stop wanting it.
“Kevin!” Shane yelled at a guy who was helping himself to the coke. Ben fidgeted, shifting his weight from side to side, but Shane didn’t notice.
“Ben, this is my mate, Kevin. Kev, this is Ben. From Ares.”
“Nice to meet you,” Ben mumbled.
Kevin grabbed Ben’s hand—though Ben hadn’t offered it—and shook it enthusiastically.
“Oh my God, man, when Shane said he was mixing for you guys, I thought bullshit, you know? But you’re really back in London?”
Ben looked at him then, really looked, and saw the restless enthusiasm of a junkie. He didn’t want to think about how often he’d looked like that. Probably a lot. Probably most of the last three years.
“For now, yeah,” Ben said.
When a girl with her septum pierced and bright pink eyebrows grabbed his arm, Ben went with her. Shane probably thought he was going to hook up and whatever—that definitely wasn’t the worst thing that anyone had ever thought about him. He let her take him as far as the hallway before he shook out of her grasp.
“Where are we going?”
“I thought you wanted to get out of there.”
“I did.” Ben set his awful beer on a shelf. “Look, I don’t want to make any assumptions here, but I’m gay.”
She rolled her eyes. “And I’m a Capricorn.”
He decided he liked her and followed her up the stairs, relieved to be out of the kitchen.
It was more mellow up here, with some classic Ibiza chillout tunes coming from a DJ set up in one of the bedrooms. Ben recognised this situation too. Outside in the hot tub later, there would be a tripped-out orgy… and in here, someone would probably overdose.
“Not everyone wants to do it in front of a crowd, you know?” the girl said, and gestured to a bathroom that was set up with rigs and needles as well as lines of coke on a mirror balanced on the toilet. She raised a pink eyebrow at him and slipped into one of the rooms.
Ben closed the bathroom door behind himself.
He pressed his back to the closed door, breathing too fast and his heart beating too hard in his chest. There were a lot of things he probably should do in this situation, and like many times before, he felt like he was watching himself from above, making one bad decision after another.
Facing down the inevitable, he leaned over and snorted a line.
He sat back and leaned against the bath, heels of his palms pressed against his eyes, and rode the soft tingling that tripped and fell into a blissful high.
“Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuck.”
Someone banged on the bathroom door, and Ben yelled for them to come in. A tall, hulking guy loomed in the doorway.
“My turn,” he growled.
Ben pulled himself to his feet and stumbled back downstairs, not entirely sure where he was going or why. It didn’t matter, really. People were watching him, looking at him, and Ben fucking hated it when they did that. He wasn’t a fucking zoo animal.
He was on his way out to call a cab when he spotted the blue lights at the end of the road, screaming up towards him. He turned, planning on walking the other way,
head down to look uninvolved, but there were police coming from that way too. He was pretty well trapped.
Shane stumbled out of the house and jogged over to him, looking pissed.
“Where did you get to, man?” He spotted the police coming up the road and turned back to Ben, a furious look in his eyes. “Did you call the fucking cops?”
“No, I didn’t call the fucking cops,” Ben said, shrugging his shoulder to dislodge Shane’s hand. “This isn’t me.”
“It looks like it’s you. You’ll take our drugs but you don’t want to party with us?”
Ben stepped away, not wanting to get into this. Not with the police parking up and calmly walking down the street towards them.
“They say you should never meet your heroes,” Shane said. “They’re only ever a fucking disappointment.”
“I never asked to be your hero,” Ben said. He turned away from Shane again, prepared to walk off and leave this whole night behind him.
“Hey, asshole,” Shane called, and Ben should have ignored it, he knew he should have ignored it, but he turned around.
“What?”
He saw the fist swinging towards his face and he ducked, still more sober than Shane even with a line of coke in him, and retaliated with a punch of his own. His landed, a satisfying smack across Shane’s face.
“Hey!”
Of all the stupid ideas he’d ever had, punching a guy in the face when he knew the police were looking right fucking at him was probably one of the worst.
Ben sat down on the garden wall and closed his eyes, and wished that for once, he’d trusted his fucking instincts.
Chapter Nineteen
Stan was already awake and halfway through his morning yoga workout when his phone started to buzz. He seriously considered ignoring it, but he got over himself pretty quickly and kept moving as he picked it up and answered Tone’s call.
“Hello?”
“You’re awake? Good. I’m on my way over.”
“What’s going on?” Stan said. “Is Ben okay?”
“No, he’s fucking not okay.” Tone sounded furious. “He was fucking arrested last night at a house party in Hackney. And the motherfucking wanker didn’t call any of us.”