Original: With the Sun in Your Eyes
I wrote this while listening to three of Slut's albums on repeat, over and over again, so much thanks to them and their wonderful music. This is also a bit of a tribute to my never ending love for The Libertines. In a way. Kinda.
Title:With the Sun in Your Eyes
Word Count: 3962
Summary: Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, baby. Four guys, trying to make it in Southern France. Both het and slash.
Author Notes: Um, remember the 'make your own album cover' meme? Yeah, well, I WROTE RPS OF MY FICTIONAL BAND. This is kind of pourtant's fault because she said she'd write about her own fictional band if I did so as well. And, well, I kinda really loved the idea, in the end, lol.
Additional notes:
1)Tonaya is this close relative of tequila, only cheaper and lamer and around here, it's universally thought to be the trashiest thing one could ever drink.
2)I am physically incapable of thinking of the French Riviera as anything else but the Blue Coast. My excuse for leaving it like that in here is that my boys speak Spanish, so they'd think of it like that as well.
3)prepa(ratoria) is, of course, our high school.
4)Manco means one-armed. It means nothing in this context, though, just that no boy gets out of high school in here without having earned himself a nickname.
5)Malinchista is a term we use in here for people that think foreign stuff is better than Mexican stuff, in general. La Malinche was this native woman, a language genious that learned Spanish in like, three seconds, and then became Hernan Cortéz's lover and sold the rest of the natives over to the Spanish. To say that she's not exactly liked around here is an understatement.
With the Sun in Your Eyes
It starts like a joke. You get a guitar for your seventeenth birthday and you play and play until your fingers bleed and your parents take it away until you promise to take it easy, stop obsessing about it. You say yes, of course, and even eat your vegetables to show what an amiable boy you are, but then you take the guitar and go to your friend Martin’s garage, the only place you won’t be bothered, and keep on playing.
When you sleep, you dream of playing. When you dream, you move your fingers into the by now familiar positions, and play chord after chord against your sheets.
Martin gets tired of being left out, and asks for a bass for Christmas. He doesn’t get it, but he gets a drumming set, even if a lousy one at that, and you learn together, practice until you no longer sound like you’re killing something.
Marco Antonio, Marco, Marc, is your best friend from primary school but you barely talk to him anymore. This is prepa, you’re so grown up; you barely think of the boy you made a brotherhood pledge with when you were both ten. He sees your bloodied fingers, says Damn, you’re gonna tear them apart like that, while outside the school, too late to go in, and he takes another drag from his cigarette, bites at the lip piercing that still hasn’t healed completely and you wonder if you really know him at all. You end up shrugging, and he ends up showing up at Martin’s place and singing to the Sex Pistols cover you’re attempting not to butcher. His voice is rough, like it’s about to break, and it suddenly stops feeling like buddies fucking around and starts feeling like a band. He continues to show up, and you wonder at the ease in which you two fall back into camaraderie.
Manco isn’t really called Manco. His name is Manuel, but everyone thinks it’s a fucking disgrace, so no one but the teachers call him that. He’s the only one that tears your cell number from the ad you tape on the school’s walls asking for a band mate. You’ve all seen him around, his too-colorful clothing makes it easy, but you’ve never actually talked to him before. He turns out to be actually decent - far better than the rest of you, actually, and he’s loud and cocky and yet too modest, too well educated, because the minute you try saying how wonderful he sounded he shrugs awkwardly and smiles shyly and then starts talking a mile a minute about some random topic.
So flash forward two years, and you’re still playing together in Martin’s dusty garage, out of school and with no university or jobs or anything recalling an actual life to brag about. You get pissed drunk with your parent’s money and write new songs with Marc while still dizzy from the cheap-ass tonaya, and it never turns out as good while sober.
Manco’s the one that gets you the deal. A bar close to his house is in desperate need of entertaining, seeing that the usual folk that play there bailed on them. So you go, and get up on the little, dingy stage, and you play like your life depended on it because in a way, it kind of does. You feel more alive than you have felt in years.
Most people ignore you, but a couple of girls clap and yell and send you drinks over. In the end, the gig’s not the worst it could’ve been, but it’s not good, either, but none of you care when you get paid and told you can come back next Saturday. Martin sings loudly and off-key in celebration, Manco keeps repeating Holy shit, man, can you believe it? over and over, and Marc just smiles and closes his eyes and puts his arm around your neck and brings you closer until he can kiss your ear loudly, messily, jokingly, and then pushes you away and orders another round of beers.
From then on, it’s bar after bar after bar, and in one memorable occasion, a quince años party.
You just can’t get tired of it, the spotlight.
----
A year later and you’re twenty and you have a fanbase.
Thomas Gilbert is a dead British politician, and it’s the first name Manco’s finger falls on when he grabs the encyclopedia and decides to leave the band’s name to luck. It sounds weird, and having a name in English in this country sometimes means you’re automatically malinchista, but you’re all drunk and just a wee bit high from the weed Martin’s sister fails to hide in her room, so it’s all right.
There are girls everywhere. They take a liking to you all, these strange creatures of post-it pink lipstick and bright eyes, giggles on their mouths as they treat the four of you to drink after drink after the show, these girls that drink the vodka out of your mouths only to get a bit of a high.
Sure, you have male followers as well, but they’re not the ones following the band as you play in a different, dingier place every week; they’re not the ones closing their eyes and dancing, swaying to your songs; they’re not the ones that follow you all backstage and laugh and dance and fuck you with their clothes still on.
They’re all the same, they’re all different, multicolor hair and too many bracelets and dresses on top of shirts on top of shorts on top of leggings and fluorescent-colored flat shoes.
It’s a Canadian girl, on Mexico in a student exchange, the one that whispers the worlds to you while high out of her mind and you steal them and shape them into the band’s demo title. Bright ideas closer together, she says, breath damp against your ear, and you ask, what? and she just snickers and says, You four, that’s what you are. It doesn’t make any sense, but nothing about this sudden success does, so why the hell not.
The band gets groupies. There’s Lorena and Carla, cousins; Sandra, rich and obstinate; Fer and Jimena and Lucía. They come to the rehearsals, distribute flyers on the street with the band’s name on it, threaten their friends into coming to the gigs.
They don’t seem to have anything else to do, but then again, neither do you.
----
The tickets come off as a surprise.
Sandra gets too close during a gig, bites your earlobe and gets her lips wet with your sweat while you’re still performing before forty people. She says, So you’ll remember me by, and slips something in your pocket. You ignore her and keep playing, keep moving under the heavy lights and your fingers ache, they always do, but you don’t stop.
Marc is getting hoarse a meter and a half away from you.
When you go offstage, still buzzing with adrenaline, the first thing you do is get a drink, then another, and then it’s time to pick your stuff up and drive back to Martin’s garage and keep on drinking, thinking yourselves invincible.
It’s not until the next day, when you wake up crammed up on the couch next to Marc’s feet, sweaty and dry-mouthed, that you feel the edge of the envelope digging into your hip and finally remember about it.
Inside, there are four tickets to Cannes.
The four of you spend the day staring at the tickets and wondering if it’s for real. Manco calls the airline, asks around, but it checks out, it’s for real, and the four of you have to drink some more just to get over the shock.
You don’t see Sandra again until four days later, three days before you’re supposed to go to the international terminal and fly away. You fuck her against a wall as thanks, and she laughs against your mouth all through it. She’s rich, you know, but this is too much, and you’re not exactly sure what to say to make it even.
You leave on a Monday, and you’re actually surprised to see Sandra, blonde hair everywhere and golden cowboy boots, standing behind you on the line to board the plane. You really didn’t think I was gonna let you get away, did you? she asks, giggling, and you fall quiet because yes, you kinda did. She brings three friends along, two brunettes and a pink-haired girl you remember from your gigs. One girl per every band member, and it feels somewhat perfect, going away while laughing life away.
----
In France, the story repeats itself. You play in bars, drink afterwards, and you develop a following made almost entirely of hedonistic girls in sundresses and chopped-up hairstyles. The only difference is that you don’t speak the language. You all communicate in basic English, but it turns out music does transcend barriers, because you don’t even need to speak all that much.
You loose Sandra after a month, or she looses you, you’re not too sure, but you suddenly find yourselves with no way back, with no way to afford the flight back. Marc shrugs, says they’re all better off in here anyway. You play a couple of times on the street until you raise enough money to buy train tickets. Manco wants to go west, get to Spain where you at least will speak the language, but both Marc and Martin are against it, so you go east. Some of the girls come along, and it becomes a moving party.
Each gig you play in a new city keeps you fed, keeps you all moving forward, and it shouldn’t surprise you when one of the girls takes her daddy’s old, cracked up van and Marc renames it as your touring bus. Martin and Reneé, one of the girls you first met in Europe, take turns driving. They take you all along the coast, too hot inside the van with everyone pressed together, sharing sweat as too much light enters through the windows and sets hair alight. All of the girls wear too-big round sunglasses, white and pink and yellow and black, and they make them look even more other-worldly, the way you hardly ever get to see their eyes. They laugh together, under the sunlight, sing in melodic French and broken English and make their bracelets clang as they crash against each other.
You’ve kissed every single one of them, all band members have, but you’ve only fucked two of them.
At nights, you take your blankets out and sleep on the beach, sand getting into your hair. You all drink and tell stories and look up into the stars, and on the mornings, as you wake up with the clothing wet from the dew, you jump into the cold sea and splash each other until it’s time to get back on the road. You clean up in rest stops, occasionally crash at the houses from the girl’s relatives and take five minute turns in the shower.
You play each night, nose smudged against Marc’s cheek, the lights blinding you and your own guitar riffs deafening you, and you’ve never felt more alive.
----
In Germany, you almost fight with Marc over a girl. Her name is Anne, and she’s short and wears glasses and has uniform brown hair and it’s strange and refreshing all at once. You think yourself in love.
You all drove down to Italy and Greece before starting the drive north, and you’d be lying to yourself if you were to say you don’t miss the Blue Coast. Anne roots you to Germany, and the band and its entourage stop there for three weeks, longest time in one place since you got off the plane. By now, you speak conversational French, and on the rare occasions you call home your mother asks you how you spent your twenty-first birthday.
Anne has a cutting mouth and an even worse temper, but you’re so blinded by her that you don’t even notice Marc sitting rather too closely to her as well. When you finally kiss her, backstage after a gig, she laughs darkly before turning your head in Marc’s direction, and lets go of you just before Marc punches you and sends you to the floor.
You don’t speak to each other in two days, while Anne sits in the middle of you and quotes Rilke. Martin and Manco pretend nothing’s happened, say it’s not their business, but it’s strained, this friendship between the four of you.
On the third day, when you finally explode and punch Marc back, Anne gets between you two, bites her lip and instead of choosing one of you, fucks you both at the same time.
It’s hotter than you ever imagined, blood boiling just below the skin and white imprints on the just recently touched limbs. Anne tastes salty all over, and her moans are high-pitched - nothing at all what you’d imagined. You bite at her earlobe, eyes locked onto Marc’s, and he groans and drags your face forward until you’re kissing over Anne’s shoulder, her delighted laugh ringing in your ears. You surprise yourself by kissing back, dragging him closer, and suddenly it becomes a threesome instead of a duet in turns.
You’ve always played rather too close to Marc.
Right before you all go to sleep Marc asks Anne who her real favorite German-speaking author is, and she says Michael Ende and swears you both to silence.
You and Marc stand together shoulder to shoulder on Anne’s threshold the day you’re supposed to leave, and ask her to come with. She laughs, says she’s not insane enough to do so. She kisses you both, Marc first and then you, and waves you goodbye as the van drives off.
You and Marc send her joint letters, and she seems to be okay with that.
----
It’s not awkward, afterwards. Not really. You touch Marc a bit too much and you take to provide backing vocals on the same mic as the one Marc uses to belt out your paradox-filled lyrics to smoke-filled rooms.
You all go on to Switzerland, then track back to Eastern Europe, lose a few of the girls on the way and gain new ones. You occasionally make enough money to stay in real hotels, and they you all drink and dance on the beds, smoke too much and wake up hoarse and sick.
You sometimes miss home - your bratty little sister and your overbearing parents and your comfortable bed and your favorite taco stand; but then you play yet another show, and you forget all about it. Manco’s the one that resents it the most. His only family is his mother, and he sends her postcard after postcard along with pictures and stories, little pieces of your life. As for Martin, his parents have never exactly cared all that much, and Marc ran away from home when he was eighteen so it doesn’t really matter in the end.
Your mom keeps mentioning your old high school friends when you call home, tells you what they’re up to, and you let her and make agreement noises and pretend to be interested, but you’re really not. It’s been almost a year and a half since you’ve been to Mexico and it feels hazy, thinking of that part of your life in which you got up early to go to school and played soccer in the recess and brought mariachis or a trio when you were out of money down a girl’s balcony just to impress her.
You think we’re getting lost in fantasy? you ask once, while incongruously sober, and everyone chuckles but it’s Martin the one that shrugs and says Fuck reality, man, and that’s the end of it.
----
Geneviève, the girl who owns the van, eventually goes back home, but Weronika’s grandfather is selling his own old Volkswagen van, and it feels a little bit like home, like a pesero, so everyone pulls their money together and you leave Warsaw like nothing at all has happened. The girls eventually convince Manco to install beads on the back, and it feels like a piece of the seventies, right there.
You keep on going.
You know that if this was a proper band, with a proper manager, you’d be screwed up already, because half of the songs are jointly composed with the girls, and if it wasn’t because you’re hardly making any money you’d have to be paying them royalties.
Anaïs is the one that writes the better. She laughs just as much as the others, but speaks four languages fluidly including your own, and is far brighter than the rest of you. She’s been with you since the beginning, and it’s been a long time since you’ve seen Martin look at any other girl but her. It made you jealous at first, because he’s been your best friend for years, but by now you can hardly think of him without thinking of her as well, and it’s all right, the way she’s almost as much a part of the band as you are. None of the other girls have achieved that.
Marc seems to continue being hell-bent on screwing his way through the European continent, and that’s fine too, because you catch him looking at you for too long, sometimes, and the way he takes to use your old, threadbare leather jacket makes you warm in a way you don’t want to look too deep into.
You play too close together, always have, but now you stand even closer until he’s singing with half of his face crushed against yours, eyes closed and wet, sweaty hair on your eyes. You feel his lips moving against your skin, mouthing your lyrics in Spanish and English and by now a little bit of French. When the show is done, and everyone’s already headed back for the bar, you press him against a wall covered in old, decaying posters and kiss him, violent enough to be considered mauling, and he kisses back and trails warm fingers across your neck. Then he lets go, looks you in the eye, and almost simultaneously you both say, Huh, and go get a beer.
It means something, but you’re not sure what. You’re still mystified with girls, their soft voices and small hands, and both you and Marc keep on writing long letters to Anne, keep calling her every chance you get. It’s not weird, just like it is at the same time, and Marc stopped being your best friend when you were twelve, but he’s still your friend even now, even if a friend that makes your thoughts go red.
You kiss him twice in the span of a month, once when you wake up, still drunk, and he’s right there. The second one after you fight over a note you missed while playing and a note he didn’t reach while singing. It’s stupid and childish but you’ve all been together for far too long, and you end up punching each other outside the bar, tousling on the dirty floor. He kisses you to shut you up, and you punch his mouth and then kiss him too and you taste blood. The next day, you both carry black eyes and the rest of the band laugh at you for being such idiots, but you smile at each other, lips swollen, and everything’s all right again.
The third time is against a bathroom stall after a gig, and you do much more than kiss this time around.
The fourth is fast and hard above the girl you’re fingering and he’s licking wide open. Then it’s months with no extra touching whatsoever, only to tell yourselves you don’t need it, and you realize you really don’t, but like it nonetheless.
When you go back to Germany for a few days you feel as if your heart is about to burst the minute Anne jumps back into your arms, and you distantly notice that the way your stomach plummets when you look at Marc feels just the same. Anne’s legs are wrapped around your waist, just outside her door, and you’re smiling and she’s smiling and when Marc comes and presses himself against her back and kisses her neck with his arms on your flanks it feels right, feels like home. She has three weeks off from university, and she grudgingly agrees to come along when Marc starts threatening to steal her away.
She sleeps between you at nights, with yours and Marc’s fingers laced over her hip.
----
The two year mark since you got off that plane finds you back in the Blue Coast, and it feels like you’ve come along a full circle.
You drive with the windows down, salty breeze and warmth getting in. The sun is too bright, and everything looks washed out in white, like an overdeveloped photograph. Manco is driving, and sitting next to him is Irene, half French half Chinese, who is sitting against the passenger door with her bare feet over the deck. Her toenails are painted purple. They’re both singing loudly to The Smiths and passing a cigarette around. Martin is playing cards with Anaïs, Pauline and Katharina, sitting face to face and toe to toe with Anaïs. He’s losing. Anne and Marc are wrapped around each other, and she’s whispering secrets to his ear. You like watching them, and long to lick both of their necks. You put your head out of the window and take a drag from your cigarette, let the wind carry away the smoke. You smile, eyes closed.
You get to the beach at four in the morning, but you still build a bonfire in celebration. You dance around it, the van’s stereo as loud as it can get. What now? Martin asks after a while, after the fire has died down. You all make ‘mmm’ noises, trying to think but coming up with nothing, and it’s Irene the one that says Why, go on, of course, and you all have to nod, because she’s right. Go on.
Anne settles against your chest, and Marc against your back and breathes on your neck. The rest of the band say nothing, but you can almost hear them thinking. The sand is warm after a day of sunlight, and it smells like freedom, like you have nothing to hold you back.
You wake up just after dawn, and when you sit down you realize that the rest of the guys are already up as well. You sit there for a while, looking at the ocean, the first glimpse of it you get since you started the journey north ten months earlier. You can hear seagulls, and the waves crashing against the sand, but nothing else.
You look at each other, these four fellow countrymen with a taste for the unknown, expatriates that miss too much of home but never enough to really want to go back. You smile, almost at once, and then you’re all running towards the water, taking your clothes off as you go.
The first moment beneath the water feels so cold it makes your lungs ache, but then you’re breaking the surface and the cold air hits your skin, and you don’t care at all. You splash each other for a while, and finally subside and just float around, arms and legs outstretched, looking up. You can listen to the breathing of the three men you trust with your life, and the little sounds far away that mean the girls that steal your breath with every look are waking up on the beach.
You look up into the gray sky, and feel completely at peace.
Title:With the Sun in Your Eyes
Word Count: 3962
Summary: Sex, drugs, and rock and roll, baby. Four guys, trying to make it in Southern France. Both het and slash.
Author Notes: Um, remember the 'make your own album cover' meme? Yeah, well, I WROTE RPS OF MY FICTIONAL BAND. This is kind of pourtant's fault because she said she'd write about her own fictional band if I did so as well. And, well, I kinda really loved the idea, in the end, lol.
Additional notes:
1)Tonaya is this close relative of tequila, only cheaper and lamer and around here, it's universally thought to be the trashiest thing one could ever drink.
2)I am physically incapable of thinking of the French Riviera as anything else but the Blue Coast. My excuse for leaving it like that in here is that my boys speak Spanish, so they'd think of it like that as well.
3)prepa(ratoria) is, of course, our high school.
4)Manco means one-armed. It means nothing in this context, though, just that no boy gets out of high school in here without having earned himself a nickname.
5)Malinchista is a term we use in here for people that think foreign stuff is better than Mexican stuff, in general. La Malinche was this native woman, a language genious that learned Spanish in like, three seconds, and then became Hernan Cortéz's lover and sold the rest of the natives over to the Spanish. To say that she's not exactly liked around here is an understatement.
With the Sun in Your Eyes
It starts like a joke. You get a guitar for your seventeenth birthday and you play and play until your fingers bleed and your parents take it away until you promise to take it easy, stop obsessing about it. You say yes, of course, and even eat your vegetables to show what an amiable boy you are, but then you take the guitar and go to your friend Martin’s garage, the only place you won’t be bothered, and keep on playing.
When you sleep, you dream of playing. When you dream, you move your fingers into the by now familiar positions, and play chord after chord against your sheets.
Martin gets tired of being left out, and asks for a bass for Christmas. He doesn’t get it, but he gets a drumming set, even if a lousy one at that, and you learn together, practice until you no longer sound like you’re killing something.
Marco Antonio, Marco, Marc, is your best friend from primary school but you barely talk to him anymore. This is prepa, you’re so grown up; you barely think of the boy you made a brotherhood pledge with when you were both ten. He sees your bloodied fingers, says Damn, you’re gonna tear them apart like that, while outside the school, too late to go in, and he takes another drag from his cigarette, bites at the lip piercing that still hasn’t healed completely and you wonder if you really know him at all. You end up shrugging, and he ends up showing up at Martin’s place and singing to the Sex Pistols cover you’re attempting not to butcher. His voice is rough, like it’s about to break, and it suddenly stops feeling like buddies fucking around and starts feeling like a band. He continues to show up, and you wonder at the ease in which you two fall back into camaraderie.
Manco isn’t really called Manco. His name is Manuel, but everyone thinks it’s a fucking disgrace, so no one but the teachers call him that. He’s the only one that tears your cell number from the ad you tape on the school’s walls asking for a band mate. You’ve all seen him around, his too-colorful clothing makes it easy, but you’ve never actually talked to him before. He turns out to be actually decent - far better than the rest of you, actually, and he’s loud and cocky and yet too modest, too well educated, because the minute you try saying how wonderful he sounded he shrugs awkwardly and smiles shyly and then starts talking a mile a minute about some random topic.
So flash forward two years, and you’re still playing together in Martin’s dusty garage, out of school and with no university or jobs or anything recalling an actual life to brag about. You get pissed drunk with your parent’s money and write new songs with Marc while still dizzy from the cheap-ass tonaya, and it never turns out as good while sober.
Manco’s the one that gets you the deal. A bar close to his house is in desperate need of entertaining, seeing that the usual folk that play there bailed on them. So you go, and get up on the little, dingy stage, and you play like your life depended on it because in a way, it kind of does. You feel more alive than you have felt in years.
Most people ignore you, but a couple of girls clap and yell and send you drinks over. In the end, the gig’s not the worst it could’ve been, but it’s not good, either, but none of you care when you get paid and told you can come back next Saturday. Martin sings loudly and off-key in celebration, Manco keeps repeating Holy shit, man, can you believe it? over and over, and Marc just smiles and closes his eyes and puts his arm around your neck and brings you closer until he can kiss your ear loudly, messily, jokingly, and then pushes you away and orders another round of beers.
From then on, it’s bar after bar after bar, and in one memorable occasion, a quince años party.
You just can’t get tired of it, the spotlight.
----
A year later and you’re twenty and you have a fanbase.
Thomas Gilbert is a dead British politician, and it’s the first name Manco’s finger falls on when he grabs the encyclopedia and decides to leave the band’s name to luck. It sounds weird, and having a name in English in this country sometimes means you’re automatically malinchista, but you’re all drunk and just a wee bit high from the weed Martin’s sister fails to hide in her room, so it’s all right.
There are girls everywhere. They take a liking to you all, these strange creatures of post-it pink lipstick and bright eyes, giggles on their mouths as they treat the four of you to drink after drink after the show, these girls that drink the vodka out of your mouths only to get a bit of a high.
Sure, you have male followers as well, but they’re not the ones following the band as you play in a different, dingier place every week; they’re not the ones closing their eyes and dancing, swaying to your songs; they’re not the ones that follow you all backstage and laugh and dance and fuck you with their clothes still on.
They’re all the same, they’re all different, multicolor hair and too many bracelets and dresses on top of shirts on top of shorts on top of leggings and fluorescent-colored flat shoes.
It’s a Canadian girl, on Mexico in a student exchange, the one that whispers the worlds to you while high out of her mind and you steal them and shape them into the band’s demo title. Bright ideas closer together, she says, breath damp against your ear, and you ask, what? and she just snickers and says, You four, that’s what you are. It doesn’t make any sense, but nothing about this sudden success does, so why the hell not.
The band gets groupies. There’s Lorena and Carla, cousins; Sandra, rich and obstinate; Fer and Jimena and Lucía. They come to the rehearsals, distribute flyers on the street with the band’s name on it, threaten their friends into coming to the gigs.
They don’t seem to have anything else to do, but then again, neither do you.
----
The tickets come off as a surprise.
Sandra gets too close during a gig, bites your earlobe and gets her lips wet with your sweat while you’re still performing before forty people. She says, So you’ll remember me by, and slips something in your pocket. You ignore her and keep playing, keep moving under the heavy lights and your fingers ache, they always do, but you don’t stop.
Marc is getting hoarse a meter and a half away from you.
When you go offstage, still buzzing with adrenaline, the first thing you do is get a drink, then another, and then it’s time to pick your stuff up and drive back to Martin’s garage and keep on drinking, thinking yourselves invincible.
It’s not until the next day, when you wake up crammed up on the couch next to Marc’s feet, sweaty and dry-mouthed, that you feel the edge of the envelope digging into your hip and finally remember about it.
Inside, there are four tickets to Cannes.
The four of you spend the day staring at the tickets and wondering if it’s for real. Manco calls the airline, asks around, but it checks out, it’s for real, and the four of you have to drink some more just to get over the shock.
You don’t see Sandra again until four days later, three days before you’re supposed to go to the international terminal and fly away. You fuck her against a wall as thanks, and she laughs against your mouth all through it. She’s rich, you know, but this is too much, and you’re not exactly sure what to say to make it even.
You leave on a Monday, and you’re actually surprised to see Sandra, blonde hair everywhere and golden cowboy boots, standing behind you on the line to board the plane. You really didn’t think I was gonna let you get away, did you? she asks, giggling, and you fall quiet because yes, you kinda did. She brings three friends along, two brunettes and a pink-haired girl you remember from your gigs. One girl per every band member, and it feels somewhat perfect, going away while laughing life away.
----
In France, the story repeats itself. You play in bars, drink afterwards, and you develop a following made almost entirely of hedonistic girls in sundresses and chopped-up hairstyles. The only difference is that you don’t speak the language. You all communicate in basic English, but it turns out music does transcend barriers, because you don’t even need to speak all that much.
You loose Sandra after a month, or she looses you, you’re not too sure, but you suddenly find yourselves with no way back, with no way to afford the flight back. Marc shrugs, says they’re all better off in here anyway. You play a couple of times on the street until you raise enough money to buy train tickets. Manco wants to go west, get to Spain where you at least will speak the language, but both Marc and Martin are against it, so you go east. Some of the girls come along, and it becomes a moving party.
Each gig you play in a new city keeps you fed, keeps you all moving forward, and it shouldn’t surprise you when one of the girls takes her daddy’s old, cracked up van and Marc renames it as your touring bus. Martin and Reneé, one of the girls you first met in Europe, take turns driving. They take you all along the coast, too hot inside the van with everyone pressed together, sharing sweat as too much light enters through the windows and sets hair alight. All of the girls wear too-big round sunglasses, white and pink and yellow and black, and they make them look even more other-worldly, the way you hardly ever get to see their eyes. They laugh together, under the sunlight, sing in melodic French and broken English and make their bracelets clang as they crash against each other.
You’ve kissed every single one of them, all band members have, but you’ve only fucked two of them.
At nights, you take your blankets out and sleep on the beach, sand getting into your hair. You all drink and tell stories and look up into the stars, and on the mornings, as you wake up with the clothing wet from the dew, you jump into the cold sea and splash each other until it’s time to get back on the road. You clean up in rest stops, occasionally crash at the houses from the girl’s relatives and take five minute turns in the shower.
You play each night, nose smudged against Marc’s cheek, the lights blinding you and your own guitar riffs deafening you, and you’ve never felt more alive.
----
In Germany, you almost fight with Marc over a girl. Her name is Anne, and she’s short and wears glasses and has uniform brown hair and it’s strange and refreshing all at once. You think yourself in love.
You all drove down to Italy and Greece before starting the drive north, and you’d be lying to yourself if you were to say you don’t miss the Blue Coast. Anne roots you to Germany, and the band and its entourage stop there for three weeks, longest time in one place since you got off the plane. By now, you speak conversational French, and on the rare occasions you call home your mother asks you how you spent your twenty-first birthday.
Anne has a cutting mouth and an even worse temper, but you’re so blinded by her that you don’t even notice Marc sitting rather too closely to her as well. When you finally kiss her, backstage after a gig, she laughs darkly before turning your head in Marc’s direction, and lets go of you just before Marc punches you and sends you to the floor.
You don’t speak to each other in two days, while Anne sits in the middle of you and quotes Rilke. Martin and Manco pretend nothing’s happened, say it’s not their business, but it’s strained, this friendship between the four of you.
On the third day, when you finally explode and punch Marc back, Anne gets between you two, bites her lip and instead of choosing one of you, fucks you both at the same time.
It’s hotter than you ever imagined, blood boiling just below the skin and white imprints on the just recently touched limbs. Anne tastes salty all over, and her moans are high-pitched - nothing at all what you’d imagined. You bite at her earlobe, eyes locked onto Marc’s, and he groans and drags your face forward until you’re kissing over Anne’s shoulder, her delighted laugh ringing in your ears. You surprise yourself by kissing back, dragging him closer, and suddenly it becomes a threesome instead of a duet in turns.
You’ve always played rather too close to Marc.
Right before you all go to sleep Marc asks Anne who her real favorite German-speaking author is, and she says Michael Ende and swears you both to silence.
You and Marc stand together shoulder to shoulder on Anne’s threshold the day you’re supposed to leave, and ask her to come with. She laughs, says she’s not insane enough to do so. She kisses you both, Marc first and then you, and waves you goodbye as the van drives off.
You and Marc send her joint letters, and she seems to be okay with that.
----
It’s not awkward, afterwards. Not really. You touch Marc a bit too much and you take to provide backing vocals on the same mic as the one Marc uses to belt out your paradox-filled lyrics to smoke-filled rooms.
You all go on to Switzerland, then track back to Eastern Europe, lose a few of the girls on the way and gain new ones. You occasionally make enough money to stay in real hotels, and they you all drink and dance on the beds, smoke too much and wake up hoarse and sick.
You sometimes miss home - your bratty little sister and your overbearing parents and your comfortable bed and your favorite taco stand; but then you play yet another show, and you forget all about it. Manco’s the one that resents it the most. His only family is his mother, and he sends her postcard after postcard along with pictures and stories, little pieces of your life. As for Martin, his parents have never exactly cared all that much, and Marc ran away from home when he was eighteen so it doesn’t really matter in the end.
Your mom keeps mentioning your old high school friends when you call home, tells you what they’re up to, and you let her and make agreement noises and pretend to be interested, but you’re really not. It’s been almost a year and a half since you’ve been to Mexico and it feels hazy, thinking of that part of your life in which you got up early to go to school and played soccer in the recess and brought mariachis or a trio when you were out of money down a girl’s balcony just to impress her.
You think we’re getting lost in fantasy? you ask once, while incongruously sober, and everyone chuckles but it’s Martin the one that shrugs and says Fuck reality, man, and that’s the end of it.
----
Geneviève, the girl who owns the van, eventually goes back home, but Weronika’s grandfather is selling his own old Volkswagen van, and it feels a little bit like home, like a pesero, so everyone pulls their money together and you leave Warsaw like nothing at all has happened. The girls eventually convince Manco to install beads on the back, and it feels like a piece of the seventies, right there.
You keep on going.
You know that if this was a proper band, with a proper manager, you’d be screwed up already, because half of the songs are jointly composed with the girls, and if it wasn’t because you’re hardly making any money you’d have to be paying them royalties.
Anaïs is the one that writes the better. She laughs just as much as the others, but speaks four languages fluidly including your own, and is far brighter than the rest of you. She’s been with you since the beginning, and it’s been a long time since you’ve seen Martin look at any other girl but her. It made you jealous at first, because he’s been your best friend for years, but by now you can hardly think of him without thinking of her as well, and it’s all right, the way she’s almost as much a part of the band as you are. None of the other girls have achieved that.
Marc seems to continue being hell-bent on screwing his way through the European continent, and that’s fine too, because you catch him looking at you for too long, sometimes, and the way he takes to use your old, threadbare leather jacket makes you warm in a way you don’t want to look too deep into.
You play too close together, always have, but now you stand even closer until he’s singing with half of his face crushed against yours, eyes closed and wet, sweaty hair on your eyes. You feel his lips moving against your skin, mouthing your lyrics in Spanish and English and by now a little bit of French. When the show is done, and everyone’s already headed back for the bar, you press him against a wall covered in old, decaying posters and kiss him, violent enough to be considered mauling, and he kisses back and trails warm fingers across your neck. Then he lets go, looks you in the eye, and almost simultaneously you both say, Huh, and go get a beer.
It means something, but you’re not sure what. You’re still mystified with girls, their soft voices and small hands, and both you and Marc keep on writing long letters to Anne, keep calling her every chance you get. It’s not weird, just like it is at the same time, and Marc stopped being your best friend when you were twelve, but he’s still your friend even now, even if a friend that makes your thoughts go red.
You kiss him twice in the span of a month, once when you wake up, still drunk, and he’s right there. The second one after you fight over a note you missed while playing and a note he didn’t reach while singing. It’s stupid and childish but you’ve all been together for far too long, and you end up punching each other outside the bar, tousling on the dirty floor. He kisses you to shut you up, and you punch his mouth and then kiss him too and you taste blood. The next day, you both carry black eyes and the rest of the band laugh at you for being such idiots, but you smile at each other, lips swollen, and everything’s all right again.
The third time is against a bathroom stall after a gig, and you do much more than kiss this time around.
The fourth is fast and hard above the girl you’re fingering and he’s licking wide open. Then it’s months with no extra touching whatsoever, only to tell yourselves you don’t need it, and you realize you really don’t, but like it nonetheless.
When you go back to Germany for a few days you feel as if your heart is about to burst the minute Anne jumps back into your arms, and you distantly notice that the way your stomach plummets when you look at Marc feels just the same. Anne’s legs are wrapped around your waist, just outside her door, and you’re smiling and she’s smiling and when Marc comes and presses himself against her back and kisses her neck with his arms on your flanks it feels right, feels like home. She has three weeks off from university, and she grudgingly agrees to come along when Marc starts threatening to steal her away.
She sleeps between you at nights, with yours and Marc’s fingers laced over her hip.
----
The two year mark since you got off that plane finds you back in the Blue Coast, and it feels like you’ve come along a full circle.
You drive with the windows down, salty breeze and warmth getting in. The sun is too bright, and everything looks washed out in white, like an overdeveloped photograph. Manco is driving, and sitting next to him is Irene, half French half Chinese, who is sitting against the passenger door with her bare feet over the deck. Her toenails are painted purple. They’re both singing loudly to The Smiths and passing a cigarette around. Martin is playing cards with Anaïs, Pauline and Katharina, sitting face to face and toe to toe with Anaïs. He’s losing. Anne and Marc are wrapped around each other, and she’s whispering secrets to his ear. You like watching them, and long to lick both of their necks. You put your head out of the window and take a drag from your cigarette, let the wind carry away the smoke. You smile, eyes closed.
You get to the beach at four in the morning, but you still build a bonfire in celebration. You dance around it, the van’s stereo as loud as it can get. What now? Martin asks after a while, after the fire has died down. You all make ‘mmm’ noises, trying to think but coming up with nothing, and it’s Irene the one that says Why, go on, of course, and you all have to nod, because she’s right. Go on.
Anne settles against your chest, and Marc against your back and breathes on your neck. The rest of the band say nothing, but you can almost hear them thinking. The sand is warm after a day of sunlight, and it smells like freedom, like you have nothing to hold you back.
You wake up just after dawn, and when you sit down you realize that the rest of the guys are already up as well. You sit there for a while, looking at the ocean, the first glimpse of it you get since you started the journey north ten months earlier. You can hear seagulls, and the waves crashing against the sand, but nothing else.
You look at each other, these four fellow countrymen with a taste for the unknown, expatriates that miss too much of home but never enough to really want to go back. You smile, almost at once, and then you’re all running towards the water, taking your clothes off as you go.
The first moment beneath the water feels so cold it makes your lungs ache, but then you’re breaking the surface and the cold air hits your skin, and you don’t care at all. You splash each other for a while, and finally subside and just float around, arms and legs outstretched, looking up. You can listen to the breathing of the three men you trust with your life, and the little sounds far away that mean the girls that steal your breath with every look are waking up on the beach.
You look up into the gray sky, and feel completely at peace.