1996, 1.45 AM
There are no hotel keys anymore. These days the young lady behind the counter will snap a soft plastic pouch down on the desk, efficient and clipped and with a practiced, pleasant smile on her face. Inside the pouch are two plastic cards emblazoned with the hotel logo on the front and the number of a local restaurant on the back.
“Mexican,” Rick says, flipping his cards out with his thumb. “Want we should check it out?”
Joe shoulders his duffel bag. The straps bite into his shoulders and down his sides, settling over his ribs. At last count, it’s now been at least fifty-four days of shouldering the duffle bag. It happens. You head out on the road and suddenly most of your life whittles down to onto the bus out of the bus on stage down off the stage back into the bus then back out of the bus into the hotel out of the hotel back into the bus we go, boys. That’s at least seven more times shouldering the duffel bag.
“I’ll pass,” he says. “Knackered.”
Rick squints at his face. “And how. You look like the losing side of a boxing match.” He throws a mock punch at Joe’s cheek, then makes his way toward the lifts. His own duffel bag bounces off his hip. It looks heavy. Rick shoulders it as if it has a ton of feathers.
Joe rolls his shoulder under the strap. He holds his plastic keys up to his face and wills them into focus. Room 925. He taps the keys against his nose. They don’t make much sound.
Used to be a time he would rattle them all the way up the lift.
His footsteps trail behind him on the carpet like muffled heartbeats. They follow him to the lift and out onto the 9th floor and up to his door. Phil is standing in front of his own door, across the hall from Joe’s, hands on his hips. He turns to look at Joe.
“We stayed here once before,” he says. “And bloody ’ell if I didn’t get the exact same room number again.” He looks at the door as if it should be ashamed of itself. “Only they had keys then. Proper keys. This,” he holds up his own plastic twins, “this just feels like science fiction, you know? Like the door should speak as I walk through it.”
“That’ll be the day. Maybe they’ll rig ’em up to read minds.” Joe slides his card into the thin metal slot bolted to the door. “Welcome, Joe Elliott. Your bath has already been drawn. Water temperature 24º Celsius and rising.”
“Planning on boiling yourself then?”
“The way I feel, I’ll drown in the tub instead.”
He nudges open his door. The room inside looks exactly like every other hotel room he’s ever stepped into, with the twin beds and the writing table between them and lamps that are bolted to the walls. Table and two chairs by the balcony, mini-bar by the far wall, uncomfortable looking couch. It’s all there. He tosses his duffel bag inside.
“Can you?” Joe says. “Really?” Phil’s eyebrows knot together. “Remember your hotel room numbers?”
“Ah, nah. No such gift. But I remember this one. Mostly because I remember what happened in yours. 9-2-5. ”
“What happened in mine?”
Phil nudges a smile up next to a puzzled frown. “You taking the piss?” His smile hovers on his lips for a moment before it drops away and Phil mouths out a silent oh. “Well that explains it, then.”
“Explains what?”
“Guess you were drunk.”
It’s the last thing he says. Then his door is clicking shut and Joe stares at the gold numbers that glint against the dark wood. 9-2-6. His brain wants to march right into Phil’s room and drag some answers right out of his balding head. Maybe kick him for good measure. The fuck he thinks he is, tossing vague shite like that around? What could he ever have done that would make Phil so vague? Downright bloody mysterious.
“Tosser,” he mutters.
His body pulls him out of the hall and into the room and, before he’s even formulated the idea of pulling off his shoes, he’s face down on the mattress. It smells like every other hotel mattress he’s ever fallen into and it feels like any other hotel mattress he’s ever fallen into and that thought gives him a strange sort of comfort.
It pushes Phil aside and wraps Joe in a dark cocoon of exhaustion finally acknowledged and released.
As his eyes drift closed his mind remembers a different scent. It’s an echo, a faint, frantic flutter in the back of his head, a taste in his mouth from years ago. For a few seconds his mind attempts to place it. It’s important. It means something to him. His limbs tense once, remembering, hoping to grasp the memory.
Darkness silences his mind and scent and taste and sensation fall away.
1989, 6.37 AM
“It snowed,” Jon murmurs.
Joe’s eyes flutter open. Blue light slides in from the sides, framed by a ghost sense of bright white covers and the warm, heavy weight that is Jon’s body. Next to him. Murmuring because he’s still groggy and not quite awake. Neither is Joe.
His head is pounding.
Joe opens his mouth. “Why?” That’s all he can say. He knows there’s more to the thought. Why are you in my bed? But his voice croaks out and his temples feel as if someone’s tightened a clamp over them.
“I’m gonna be sick,” Jon says.
The bed creaks and shifts and bounces beneath Joe and then the warmth next to him is gone. Good. Good riddance to it. It’s puking into the toilet and Joe just wants to burrow his head right through the mattress so that it’ll stop spinning.
And he wants to know how Jon got into his bed.
1996, 9.15 AM
“Would it kill someone if it snowed?”
Rick sounds peeved. He spreads jelly onto Joe’s discarded piece of toast and tosses an accusatory glance out at the balcony and the cold, grey; leafless, sombre yet snow free December outside.
“Sod snow,” Sav says. He works his fingers in a steady motion over his temples. “I’m getting a headache from all this cold. Can you imagine playing an arena covered in snow?” He drops one hand on his lap, blinking his eyes at nothing in particular. “God. Just. No. Sod snow.”
“They snowplough it all right off, y’know,” Rick says. He’s still sending accusatory glances out at the balcony. “One measly flurry. That’s all I ask.”
Joe is looking across at Phil. Not saying much, Phil. He keeps taking nibbles from his toast, then setting it back down. He catches Joe looking at him. His eyebrows shoot up. What? Leave me alone. I’m not gonna talk about it.
“You ever gonna tell me what happened at 9-2-5?” Joe says.
“It weren’t important, right?” Phil ignores the way Rick and Sav fall silent, even as they continue to gaze out the windows. “Some groupie. You were very loud. I couldn’t sleep, what with all the racket.”
“You were across the hall, Phil. How do you get to hearing a racket from over there?”
Phil shrugs. “You were very loud.” His thumb and index finger hover over the edge of his toast. “You were drunk. Both of you were drunk.”
Joe tips back on his chair. Outside, the world is silent and grey. The knuckles of one hand rise to hover over his lower lip.
“I guess I was,” he says. “Drunk.”
1989, 9.54 PM
“It’s like marbles,” Jon says. He shakes his head, eyes closed and eyebrows knotted together. His eyebrows shoot up at the end of the motion. “Marbles. Yeah. You try it.”
It is rather like marbles. Only not really. There’s a heave to it as well, like the ocean. Joe can almost feel the jelly glop that is his brain sloshing about in water.
“It’s like pebbles,” he says. “Pebbles in a glass jar.”
“Oh that’s good. Good one. Put that in a song.”
“Full of water,” Joe says. He shoots his bottle of vodka a puzzled frown. He’s this close to suggesting someone slipped something into it. He swirls what remains of it inside the bottle, then knocks it back. “Pebbles. Aye.”
“Which are kinda like marbles.”
“But not in water.”
“Yeah.”
Jon slides onto the floor from his place on the hotel room couch. His legs fold up first, then spread out in an untidy heap. He smiles at his own bottle of vodka. “Told ya this was good shit. They had this all over Russia. Couldn’t walk a mile without hitting some cheap liquor spot. You could build directions offa it. Just turn left at the fifth liquor store.”
Lips are queer things. They lift and fall and gather into shapes and slide off teeth and Jon’s tongue keeps darting out to wet them before he speaks. He rubs his lips together, licks them once more, then wraps them around the tip of the bottle. He runs the edge of his hand over them after he’s done.
And Joe knows he’s leaning closer.
Jon’s leaning closer.
Joe’s leaning closer.
It’s anybody’s guess.
But somebody’s moving. Or maybe it’s the floor that’s moving, or the room, or maybe just the carpet. Maybe it’s the vodka that’s moving them. Joe’s lips hover over Jon’s nose, and he can feel warmth radiating from Jon. It settles between his eyes, his eyelids drooping as he inhales first then exhales and inhales and he can feel almost pin point the exact same moment when Jon realizes what’s happening.
Only by then Joe has already closed the gap.
Only by then Joe has already kissed him.
1996, 10.02 AM
Joe sits at the edge of his bed. He places one hand over the mattress and in his mind’s eye he can see the curve of Jon’s cheekbone as it looks as their lips press together. He rubs his thumb into the covers and it’s as if Jon were behind him again, pulling off his shirt even as he says—
What? What did he say?
He said, “Don’t do anything funny, man. Just…”
“Just?”
“Just shut the fuck up and kiss me.”
Not just once, but for minutes that seem to stretch out into hours even as they’re never long enough. Jon’s lips slide beneath Joe’s, warm and soft yet hard and cold all at once, until Joe can’t even be bothered to describe what they feel like exactly. Jon’s lips are pulsing right down between his legs.
“Bloody Hell,” Joe mutters. He snaps open the buttons of his jeans so that his cock can lie freely over his thigh. He knows Jon must be doing the same. He almost, almost looks. But he knows what he’ll see. Just a cock, engorged and lying over Jon’s jeans.
He just wants to kiss him.
And kiss him.
And there’s a sticky, grey darkness that begins to gnaw away at the memory. The vodka flows hot and sharp along his veins and it covers his eyes so that there is only black and no sound and no taste and no memory of anything.
Out of the darkness, he can hear Jon as he sounded hours ago, in the lobby.
“925, huh? Gonna work 9-2-5. They still give extra keys to any room?”
“Aye, I’ve got two.”
“Great, ’cause I recently got back from Moscow, and I’ve got a present for you guys.”
“You get anything just for me?”
“You betcha, buddy. You betcha.”
1989, 7.03 AM
Jon is sitting on the toilet. In between stumbling off the bed and puking, he’s somehow managed to pull on his boxer shorts. They bunch into a heap below his belly as he rubs the side of his head and blinks at the shower to his right.
“Hey,” Joe says. He leans against the bathroom door jamb. “What happened last night…?”
“Vodka.”
“Did it?”
“Yeah. Should be pretty obvious.” Jon nudges at an empty bottle that has rolled up to the toilet. He rolls it away. It rattles across the tiles in a straight path before it begins to fall back in lazy circles. “Vodka. Lots and lots of vodka.”
“You were in my bed.” He gazes down at Jon’s feet. Flat, white. They look unnaturally bony in the blue light coming from outside. “Naked.”
“You’re naked too, you know.”
Joe nods.
Then he pushes away from the door jamb. He turns his head to gaze at the slow, thick snowflakes drifting past the sliding glass doors that lead to the balcony. The snow has already blanketed the table and chairs set up outside.
In the blue, ghostly light, Jon’s eyes are almost painful.
Joe pads out across the room and picks up a new bottle of vodka from the case Jon brought up. He peels back the label and screws open the cap. He takes one quick pull, shaking his head as it smashes right into the place where his headache is.
He knows what he wants.
He just doesn’t want himself to know.
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