Author: Anna Martin
Category: LGBT
Go to read content：https://onlinereadfreenovel.com/anna-martin/page,20,529683-the_lost_boy.html
He would have walked to Belsize Park—the weather was mild, an Indian summer settling in after their washed-out August—but he’d put on heels and didn’t feel like dealing with the blisters. So he got into another cab and fiddled with his bracelets all the way there.
The front door was unlocked, again, and Stan was going to have to have a conversation with them about safety. He locked it once he’d let himself inside and went back to the kitchen to put the desserts in the fridge.
Someone, and Stan guessed it was Tone, had left the huge pot of chilli on the stove on low, and a note next to it to say they were all back in the recording studio.
Stan folded the note up and put it in his pocket—the skirt had pockets—and went back to the studio. The band had had it built not long after they’d moved in and it became clear that they would need somewhere because the basement was fine for rehearsing, but the sound quality was nowhere near good enough to record. The studio had been built on the foundations of the old garage, which no one needed because who the fuck had a car in central London?
It was a wooden structure, because Jez had been reading about the old Motown studios in Chicago where all the greats had recorded. The space wasn’t huge—the size of a double garage, funnily enough—but they didn’t need much more than that.
Stan checked for the red recoding light above the door, which was off, so he let himself inside.
Maybe unsurprisingly, he walked into an argument.
“Stan,” Summer said, bringing the racket to a halt.
“Hi. Should I come back later?”
“No, stay,” she said, so he went and hopped onto one of the tall stools near the sound desk.
“You look nice,” Tone said from behind his drum kit.
“Thanks. I went shopping.”
Ben put his guitar down and came over to give him a kiss on the cheek. “You look incredible,” he murmured against Stan’s ear, too low for the others to hear.
Stan wrapped his arm around Ben’s waist to keep him close.
“What’s happening?”
“Not much,” Geordie grouched.
“We’re trying to write Tone’s eleven o’clock number,” Summer said.
“That sounds like a terrible idea,” Stan said brightly.
“Why?”
Stan shrugged and took Ben’s bottle of water from his hand and took a sip. “What was it that Tone always used to say? Music’s like a fart—if you force it, it’s probably shit.”
Tone gave him a ba-dum-tish! in appreciation.
Stan had been part of enough jam sessions and recording sessions now that he knew the drill. They’d usually fuck around for an hour or two, then realise they were running out of time and pull something out of thin air at the last minute. By the shared looks of frustration on Jez and Geordie’s faces, they’d been at this for a while already.
“This is normally when we’d break out the booze and weed,” Tone said, not altogether helpfully.
“Don’t give it up for my sake,” Ben told him.
“Ben,” Stan admonished.
“I’m addicted to prescription painkillers and cocaine,” Ben said. “I think that’s fairly well documented by now. Weed is less addictive than tobacco.”
“Great,” Tone said and vaulted over his kit. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Pee break.” Summer followed him back into the house. There wasn’t a toilet in the studio.
“Is this a good idea?” Stan asked Ben. He shrugged.
“I can’t get any shit even if I want it. I figure this is a good test environment.”
“I really don’t know what to do with you sometimes,” Stan muttered.
Ben pressed their foreheads together. “I’m not going to smoke,” he said, too low for the boys to hear. “I don’t want any.”
“You can do what you want.”
“And what I want,” he murmured, “is to see what you’ve got on under that skirt when we get home later.”
Stan kissed him on the nose. “Behave and you will.”
When Tone got back he immediately began skinning up, and Summer arrived a few minutes later with a cool box full of beers and fancy sparkling water, and bowls for the chilli that she sent Geordie back to collect.
Stan helped himself to the sparkling water and noticed Ben stuck to his water instead of taking a beer. He also passed on the joint the first time it was passed around.
Stan went through to the store room part of the studio and grabbed the two big beanbags that he’d bought many years ago, secretly pleased they were still there. They were far comfier than the tall stools.
He kicked back in one of them, and Ben took the other, angling it so he was facing Stan rather than next to him.
“You want food?” Summer asked, holding out a bowl full of the chilli.
“Yes, please.” He sat up properly to eat it, burning his mouth on the first bite. “This is good,” Stan told Ben. “Thank you.”
“It’s one of only three things Tone knows how to make,” Ben said with a grin. “It usually turns out good, though. He learned how to make it from a roadie from Texas.”
Ben had unplugged his guitar and played little riffs on a loop while they ate.
“I like that one,” Stan said absently. He could, and had, watched Ben play guitar for hours.
“Hmm?” Ben tried it again, adding a new little flair to the end.
Stan grinned at him encouragingly.
“Plug it in,” Geordie called from across the room.
Instead of doing it himself, Ben waved the end of the cable in Summer’s direction until she came over and did it for him. She rolled her eyes, but she did it anyway before going back to her conversation with Jez. Tone was too busy concentrating on his food to pay much attention.
Stan was watching closely, though.
Ben and Geordie kept eye contact as Ben picked up the riff again and Geordie worked on figuring out the bass line to go underneath it.
“No, go back,” Ben said, playing something again.
“Gotcha.”
It was fascinating. These guys could be at each other’s throats one minute and making actual magic a few minutes later.
“Tone, give us a beat,” Geordie said.
“Uh….”
“Oh, give it here,” Stan said, hauling himself up off the beanbag to go and collect the spliff and the ashtray. He hadn’t smoked in a really long time, but like all of Tone’s weed, this was smooth and sweet.
“Cheers, babs.”
Tone picked up his drumsticks and found a thumping, earthy beat that gave the tune Ben and Geordie were working on some depth.
When Summer plucked the joint from his fingers, Stan grabbed a notebook from his bag and started scribbling his thoughts down.
He’d never been a creative writer. Not in the sense of poetry, or lyrics. Stan was very good at painting a picture with words, describing something real and making concepts easy to understand. More importantly, he enjoyed that far more than trying to write something that was a reflection of himself.
He wasn’t aware there was something bubbling under the surface, apparently needing to burst out of him in what Stan could only describe as an exorcism. It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t nice, but the God-damn relief he felt from being able to scrawl his thoughts onto a piece of paper left him almost shaking.
“Hey,” Ben murmured, knocking his ankle against Stan’s. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Stan blinked. Tone’s weed was apparently as strong as it was smooth.
“Can I see?”
“It’s not for you,” he said, only realising that truth when he spoke it. “It’s for Summer.”
She looked over at the sound of her name. “You’ve got something for me?”
“I don’t know.” Suddenly self-conscious, Stan closed the notebook. “Never mind.”
“Nah, come on. We have a very serious circle of no judgement in here.”
Stan huffed a laugh and reluctantly handed her the n
otebook. “Well, I hope I’m included in that.”
She read through his messy scrawl while the others went and got more drinks from the cooler. When she looked back at him, she was wearing an expression Stan couldn’t read.
“You sure?” she asked.
“No. It’s up to you.”
“This is incredible,” she said sincerely. “Holy shit, Stan, I didn’t know you could write like this.”
“Neither did I,” he said with a laugh, and reached for his water for something to do with his hands.
“Jez, can you give me the melody?” Summer asked, taking the notebook over to the keyboard where Jez was programming the chord progressions into an app.
Stan watched as Summer figured out how the words fit to the music, and Stan was pretty sure they didn’t in places, but Summer was better at this than he was and made it work. She came back to crouch next to him a few minutes later and carefully plucked the pencil from his fingers.
“We need to put a break in here,” she murmured, marking it on the paper so he could see, “and there’s a few beats here that are missing.”
Stan helped her put it together, feeling less like a fool with her open enthusiasm for his lyrics. Not that he’d known they were lyrics when he wrote them.
“It doesn’t rhyme.” Stan pushed his hair behind his shoulder.
“It doesn’t need to, not with something like this.” Summer closed the notebook and tapped the pencil against it. “If you don’t want me to share it, we keep it right here, okay? Just for me and you.”
He loved her then, in that moment. “You sing it. Not Ben, or anyone else.”
“You just wrote our banger,” she said, a grin spreading across her face.
“Oh God.”
“We’ll credit you.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
Summer looked horrified at the suggestion. “We give credit where it’s due,” she said emphatically.
“Oh God,” he said again.
Summer leaned over and kissed his cheek. Then she straightened up. “Come on, boys. Let’s give this a go.”
Stan listened for the next hour as the song came together in a way he could never have imagined. By the time they were done, Summer had scrawled the title “Girl Things” across the top of the page and underlined it three times.
Until then, Stan hadn’t realised how much he’d been struggling with himself over the past few years. It was almost like now that he had his anorexia under control—not cured, but in a better place—he’d let himself believe that his outward expression didn’t matter so much. The little rituals that he’d always loved, from the small things like getting his hair done and painting his nails, to taking the time to put on makeup in the mornings and wearing clothes that had been designed to be worn by women, had somehow fallen away.
He wasn’t so oblivious that he hadn’t noticed this change in himself. It had been a gradual thing, though, over a number of years, rather than switching it off overnight.
In the past few weeks, Stan felt like he’d been given permission to turn it all back on again. And he’d felt truly comfortable in his own skin for the first time in a long time.
“Girl Things” was his battle cry, a vicious defence of femininity, of empowering the things that were derided and scorned in a patriarchal society. When Summer gave voice to his ramblings, they started to make sense, and Stan started to understand that this empowerment wasn’t only his own. It could belong to women anywhere.
He was desperately proud and deathly afraid of anyone else hearing it.
“Pub,” Tone declared after a while.
“You know what,” Summer said, “I’d normally tell you to fuck off, but for once I actually agree with you.”
“I’ll power down,” Jez said. He didn’t trust anyone else to do it properly.
“I’ll book a car.”
Stan helped Ben pick up all the dirty dishes from dinner and cart them back to the kitchen. Someone would either load the dishwasher before they went to bed, or a cleaner would pick it up in the morning. No one was looking at it tonight, either way.
When they were done, Stan ducked into the downstairs bathroom to fix his lipstick. A moment later, Ben came in behind him.
“I could have been peeing, you know.”
Ben rested his hands on Stan’s hips and kissed the side of his neck. “I checked. Couldn’t hear anything.”
Stan shook his head and concentrated on his lipstick.
“Are you okay with the song?”
“Yes,” Stan said. He carefully blotted the lipstick dry, then turned around so he could look at Ben properly.
“It’s fucking amazing.”
“I think so too.”
“Why didn’t I know you could write lyrics like that?” Ben asked, and rubbed his thumbs across Stan’s lower back.
“I didn’t know myself,” Stan said with a laugh. He fixed Ben’s hair, then reached back into his bag and found his black kohl eyeliner. It only took a moment to smudge some around Ben’s eyes. He’d always looked good like this.
“Perfect,” Stan said, and kissed him lightly on the lips.
“Car’s here!” Tone yelled.
Ben tried to kiss Stan again, but Stan just laughed and ushered him out of the bathroom. The front door was open and the minibus-sized cab was idling outside.
“You two need to stop canoodling whenever we leave you alone for two fucking minutes,” Tone grouched as he locked the door behind them and set the alarm.
“Canoodling,” Stan repeated, and giggled.
“We also need to remember what you’re like when you smoke weed,” Ben said and wrapped his arm around Stan’s waist as they headed to the car.
“Where are we going?” Stan asked.
“We should go to the Dublin Castle,” Summer said. “They’ve got a band playing tonight.”
“Are you sure?” Ben wriggled to one side to let Stan buckle his seatbelt. “Won’t it be crazy?”
“It’s Tuesday, and they close in about two hours,” Tone said. Then he leaned over to the driver. “The Dublin Castle.”
“If it’s mad, we’ll just go around the corner to Buck Shot,” Geordie said, throwing his arm around Summer’s shoulder. “They’ll either kick everyone out for us or stay open late.”
It only took a few minutes to drive down the road to the pub, and as promised, the streets were fairly quiet. The doorman looked vaguely surprised to see them all pile out of the car and silently held the door open to let them all in.
Inside, most of the patrons were older men nursing pints of whatever decent local brew was on tap. Stan had always felt like this pub, with its red walls and deep red leather booths was particularly womb-like. The walls were plastered with posters of gigs from years gone by, and the sound of live music thrummed through the air from the back room.
“Ooh, grab a table, Stan,” Summer said, gesturing to one of the booths that was big enough for all of them.
“Sure.”
“Vodka soda?”
“Okay. Just a single though, yeah?”
She nodded, understanding that he didn’t want to drink more than that, and went to deliver his order to Tone, who seemed to be organising. Typical of Tone, of course. Completely unable to organise anything except a round of drinks at the pub.
Jez came over first, while the others were still arguing over flavours of crisps, and slid into the booth next to him.
“You’re good for us,” he said, grinning as he knocked his shoulder against Stan’s.
“You think?”
He nodded. “Yeah. All of us. We always get our shit together a lot quicker when you’re around.”
That made Stan laugh. “I should start charging you.”
“No need,” he said. “You’ll be raking it in with your royalties from the song writing credit.”
“Ugh.” Stan pulled a face. “You really don’t need to do that.”
“Collaborating is good,” Jez said. Tone came over with
a tray of drinks, and Jez quickly picked up his pint of Guinness. “We don’t do it much because there’s enough of us that we’re usually pretty good at bouncing ideas off each other.”
“We can get stale, though,” Tone added. He passed Stan his drink. “It’s good sometimes to have someone else’s perspective. Cheers.”
Stan nodded slowly. “Cheers,” he echoed.
Chapter Twenty Two
Ben felt electric. Something had clicked tonight in a way that hadn’t felt right for a long time. It was good to know they could still write incredible music without drugs, without separating themselves so they didn’t get into a row, without emailing riffs and lyrics back and forth like they were strangers instead of best friends.
It meant something that it had been Stan who tied it all together again too. He’d felt like an integral part of the band for such a long time, and no one had wanted to talk about losing him when Ben and Stan broke up.
Ben leaned over Geordie and poked Stan in the ribs.
“Hey,” Stan grouched.
“Do you want to go dancing?”
Stan raised an eyebrow at him. “You sure?”
“Yes. I want to go out.”
At any point over the past three years, if he’d been feeling like this, Ben would have gone and gotten high. Drugs for the good times, drugs for the bad times, drugs as the answer to everything. Not right now, though. For once he wanted to go and live life, not hide from it.
He was drinking Diet Coke too, nothing mixed in it, mostly to prove something to himself. He could get through all of this without alcohol or weed or anything else.
“Okay,” Stan said with a grin.
“You should go to KOKO,” Tone offered. “There’s a DJ playing there tonight you’ll like.”
“You’re not going to come, Tone?” Stan asked.
“Nah. I know when not to gatecrash,” he said with a wink.
It was almost like the old times, drinking at the pub, then going out with Stan so they could be together just the two of them. Even Geordie ribbing them about getting some later didn’t bother Ben. That was like old times too.