Confounded: Part III - 17. Interlude

--==Tom’s POV==--

There’s no better feeling in the world than waking up with someone holding you. Like; none. I’ve always liked being held while I sleep; it makes me feel at home. Safe. Loved. Yeah, yeah, I know; I’ve become the very sap I always claimed to hate. Well, at least when I was younger.

When I woke, we were in the same position as when we’d gone to sleep and Mitchel held me all night, not turning away; he remained exactly where he was. He’d pushed a leg between mine and his chin rested on top of my head. Which meant that extricating myself without waking him was going to be somewhat of a challenge; I didn’t know if he was a light sleeper. Apparently he was not.

At first I slowly moved his arm off, very carefully, so I didn’t wake him. Lifting it up, then letting it fall also didn’t wake him. Hmm…okay, so what if I scooted away, what would he do? Roll onto his stomach is what he would do. Then he sighed deep and contendly, and let out quite a loud snore, as if me laying there had actually kept him from laying the way he actually did want to sleep.

Dude! You’re an asshole!

He couldn't roll onto his back? Gimme some chance to wake him in what I was told was one of the best ways to be woken? And yes, guys with loose shorts? I can get to em via the leg. I know this very well. Or the top, which actually slides down very easily. And of course the convenient opening at the front. But the man rolls over? Seriously. Really? Ugh! Denying me in his sleep.

Men! Bah.

Glancing at the alarm, I was right on cue; 5:54am. I always wake right before it goes off.

Sighing, I got up and silenced it before it started blaring, then visited the bathroom to relieve myself. Then I went to dress into my running clothes and silently tiptoed downstairs, peeking around Silver’s door; finding Her Majesty already awake and looking up at me from behind the door with her tail swaying.

“Hi sweetie. No, you stay here.” Giving her a cuddle, I checked her food and water, then closed the door and got my airpods, grabbed a bottle of water and headed out.

**********

Running has always made me feel relaxed. It clears my mind of anything and everything. I don’t think about anything but just running. Run, Forest, run!

Other runners don’t really talk to you, they just nod or say ‘hey’; there’s one guy I meet every single morning and all we do is nod to each other, then go on. He comes from the north, I come from the south and we pass near my place, like clockwork. Turn here, run about one mile; yep, there he was. I nodded, he nodded, and I’m alone again. I’ve never seen his eyes; they’re shaded by glasses like mine. He's never stopped, nor have I. Wonderful!

Music blaring on the pods, I quickly get into a rhythm, staying on the sidewalks as much as I can. I don’t like running on the beach, I’ve tried it and it just doesn’t agree with me; I can’t get a good flow there, it’s too heavy.

I deliberately take a different route, timing it so I’ll be back around 7am. I get into a flow pretty quickly, my feet pounding the pavement, and just let go of my mind.

But somehow, this morning was different. As I said, I normally relax into the run and my mind clears of whatever occupies it. But now, the past invaded and my thoughts wandered to last night.

It began with a chuckle as I thought about the conversation in The Vault, about Taylan and his influence on me, and for the next half mile, scenes from the past invaded my brain. The ‘parking lot’ episode, which I’d spoken about; trying to get my car to start at my parents’ house. Oh Christ, that’d been funny, in hindsight. And from there my thoughts went to Kit.

Aaaahh…Kit. I stopped then, panting and drinking some water, looking out over the marina.

Kit. In all the world, and apart from John, my best friend. A friend who was, right at this moment, probably also running before the boys woke up, somewhere up in the hills of Bevery Glen.

If someone had asked me years ago where we'd both end up, I'd say he's exactly where he was meant to be: in a beautiful home, with a husband who adores him, and blessed with a couple of kids. Yes, that life suits him perfectly.

Me, not so much. My path has been meandering, searching, looking for an outlet to pour my being into. For Kit, his future has alway been clear to him. He always wanted to follow his dad, to be the CEO and have the life that went with that, combining family life with it. A life he’d always wanted, and had made no secret of it.

Maybe that’s what set us apart in the end; the goals we had. Kit had his from a young age. Mine had never been clear to me. I worked at BSL for a while, a long while, actually, and I really enjoyed being there, but it never really satisfied me. I grew antsy, always looking but never finding a way out; knowing that the office crowd wasn’t going to be my be all, end all.

When we started out at UCLA, Kit found his groove right away. The things he learned there were what he needed to grow into his future role; for me, that didn’t happen. Arts and music felt like they wanted to box me in; do this specific thing and you’ll be respected, successful. That wasn’t my goal. My goal, which I realized much later, was expressing myself through my music. Not someone else's. Mine.

That began with converting happy songs into really depressing ones. Well, more like taking the tune of a happy song, then toning it down to what I felt the song should be so I could relate to it. Through music, I achieved some of it; only changing the notes of existing music, arranging them in different ways. I didn’t touch the lyrics, I didn’t know anything about writing those yet; I did know how to express them through music. Make it sound what I thought it should be. And what came out was quite depressing to some. Certainly to my teachers.

Somehow, my clumsy efforts reached John’s ears, and I really should ask him how that happened. I never asked. But it was enough to intrigue him to come out here to California.

“You the guy that rewrote ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ into the most depressing anthem for the 80’s?”

“Depends; you the guy who thinks it was written by Cindy Lauper?” I returned. A friendship was born, right on that spot that day.

That song was not written by her. Most should know that. Many don’t. But he knew. He knew a lot that I also knew. And he latched on to my love for Jim Steinman.

I spent an afternoon with him in some studio space he had rented and we wrote two songs; the first of which had been ‘Moonshock’, a song with a lyric in there that went ‘The machine goes down, down down, the gold comes rushing up, up. I don’t care about your frown, who cares about a small town, Wall Street can’t go belly up’? A reference to big oil companies ruling the world; a topic John felt passionate about. It was kind of a crap lyric, but it worked in the song because it was a protest to what would come next for us as a people? Where do we get our money from when we deplete the Earth? Do we go to the moon? And why do we let the dollar rule us? When is it enough?

John made his offer the next day; ’Come to New York, work with me. I’ll show you the ropes; learn and we’ll write songs to sell.’ He’d written dozens of hits for a great many stars and had the deets to prove it. And that’s what I wanted. To express myself, to be who I was, who I wanted to be. Screw education. They wanted to mold me into what I was not. I didn’t need requiems, fuck that!

By then, I’d already felt a distance growing between Kit and me. Where he’d been focused more and more on the business world while I was just flailing, trying to gain a foothold somewhere, anywhere. So when John made his offer, it spoke to me. I accepted.

To let go of Kit, to end it, had been less hard than I had thought it would be. By that point, we had been going through the motions; living together but not really ‘living’. Wake up, have sex, go to school, come home, eat, work, have more sex. Sleep, sex, school, home, wash, rinse and repeat.

So when I ended it, using the actual words; oh my, had he been angry. I could still hear him yell ‘you walk out of that door, and it’s over!’ and, apart from it sounding quite dramatic and overly used in movies or TV shows, it was still something that, when you hear it, it gives you pause. It gave me a long pause too, to be honest, and I did return and hugged him with all I had. But I did walk out. And it did force us both to grow.

Y’wanna know what was harder? Hearing my parents say I made a mistake; that I disappointed them. My dad uttered the word selfish. And, to be honest, that had been selfish. But also something I felt I needed to do? But to stick to your guns and throw their caution into the wind? Hardest thing I ever did. After all they did for me to, in their eyes, ‘throw it away again’? Yeah, that didn’t feel good. It felt horrible, and I felt guilty. I felt I fucked up.

I smirked, emptying the water bottle and throwing it into the trash.

Things had turned around when Moonshock became a hit, and Stowaway after that. Before their release, I’d never sung. It had always been me playing the piano, programming synths and percussion, but never singing until one night, at some bar, I’d gotten drunk as a skunk and took to a piano they had, and sung a rendition of Moonshock, which hadn’t been sold yet. Then some requests from the audience for Joe Cocker songs, which were easy to play and even sing, especially ‘Unchain My Heart’ and ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On’. About halfway through, John had come in during ‘Unchain…’.

He wrote the beginning of our second song, Stowaway, on a napkin during the last song and that was the very beginning of my own career. Right there, drunk and high on audience response. The next day, he’d cornered me.

“You’re the new Rod Steward, man!”

“Fuck off!”

“Have you even heard yourself? You didn’t tell me you could sing!”

“I can’t!”

“Damn straight you can! Listen! Close your eyes and just listen! Don’t think of it as you, think of it as someone else.”

And then he showed me a vid someone posted on the internet. And I did sound pretty good, even if I said so myself.

So we started trying stuff, with me singing (and he sent me to a voice coach), far too self-conscious at first, beginning with Moonshock, then Stowaway. I never had the ambition to become a singer, but the songs we wrote for me definitely sounded like me. And once I got over the awkwardness of hearing myself sing, and got far better at breathing and using my vocal chords, we steered the process towards me. What I liked to hear; what I wanted to convey. John was right there with me, championing me on. And once there, things began to roll.

Moonshock went platinum in Scandinavia first, then Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark, then went all the way over to Japan and other parts of Asia. When Stowaway came out, Australia and Oceania came into the mix.

I signed with a record label, made the first record, and toured. By then, I was in a steady relationship with Alex which was already failing (but I had no idea of that happening); I was riding on cloud nine of success.

Then, in the late summer of 2014 while doing a show in Lyon, at the Le Transbordeur, I reconnected with Kit. He’d been in the area and had come to the show. We hadn’t met in person since the breakup, but we had begun speaking again, on the phone and occasionally email. It was tentative at first. I’d sent him the tour schedule when he asked for it and the French dates coincided with his being there and he came.

Those turned out to be some of the best days on an otherwise miserable tour. Not miserable because I had a bad experience with it, I loved it! But it was the damn heat, man! 2014 turned out to be the hottest on record. Ah, but since I had about a week before the next show, somewhere in the Netherlands, we spent the next few days on the French Riviera; driving scooters past steep cliffs and spending lazy days at the beach.

Aww, those days were amazing. We really reconnected! He told me how life had been for him up to then, and we had some…ehr…let’s just say ‘discussions’ about the way things ended between us, but all in good fun and lots of snickering at the stupid stuff we’d done then. Not an inkling of feelings between us, in the romantic sense; just fun memories.

And then he’d told me about Mischa, this new man he met in Monaco. He was the son of a French business connection. Kit had initially planned for a long midweek stay but had since extended it to two weeks. He somehow couldn’t bring himself to return home. He felt that if he did, he was going to regret it for the rest of his life.

I remember how his face lit up as soon as he spoke about Mischa. He seemed very much in love by then, even after only two weeks. In turn, I told him about my Alex, gushing really, and we could both point out so many differences that it almost felt funny, and silly, the way we had been together before them.

“God, we were stupid, weren’t we?” I said.

“Yeah, we kinda were,” he admitted, smirking. “You wanna know how long it took me to get over you? About a week or two.”

“Oh thanks,” I huffed. Asshole.

“Yeah, that was so weird. I had a good cry, right after you left, then called Tay, who came over. We got roaring drunk, agreed that you were a fool and a total dickhead. Good riddance. Well, his words. I just wanted to kill you.”

I chuckled. Ahuh. And similarly, I’d called Tay the next day, who told me he supported my decision. Pffft! Duplicitous jerk!

“Felt sorry for myself for a few more days, didn’t attend classes and then started over. That faded so fast!”

“Ahuh. Great to hear, man. Wonderful.” I sent him a thumbs up, sarcastically. “Awesomesauce, knowing you’re just a passing fancy.”

“Nah,” he grinned, “you were more than that, I’m just messing with your head. You deserved it; you walked out on me.”

Fair enough.

“But I’m glad we’re here, now, talking about it. I missed you, Tom. And god, did I miss talking to you. Can we just make a deal, right here, that we’ll call each other every week? I wanna know what’s going on with you.”

“Deal!”

We toasted on that.

I met Mischa and Kit the next day and oh my; I could see the fireworks between those two. Seeing them together; they had so much more going there. It was so easy to see that what Kit and I had, had been nothing more than youthful infatuation. To see him completely going for Mischa? Beautiful. Wonderful. Mischa didn’t take any of Kit’s crap; nor did Kit take any of his. They were fire and fire yet also finishing each other's sentences, with Mischa’s sort of singsong English (he speaks it much better these days, almost fully Americanized) and Kit, making a complete fool of himself, trying in his best French (and failing miserably) to help Mischa express himself. But then they’d look into each others’ eyes, and I was completely alone. You could wave your hand between em, it wouldn’t do you any good. I called it them ‘having eye-sex’, they had that happen the whole bloody time. As a couple, they were awesome together.

Ever since we’ve kept in contact and became good friends, calling every week as promised, meeting up when we could, usually stateside. And when Alex and I broke up, they were the first to call, offering help and sanctuary. I didn’t take them up on the offer but it was nice to have such friends.

Unfortunately I wasn’t there when they married (in the Bordeaux region of France, at some vineyard), but I was in town when Noah was born in 2017, and babysat him two years later when his little brother Julian was born, a few months before Taylan passed.

I hadn’t seen much of Mitchell then. A glimpse at the crematory, but he understandably wasn’t all there and was mostly shielded by Kit and Mischa, basically shaking their head at anyone who approached to express their condolences.

“Huh,” I said, to no one in particular. I hadn’t even gone up to him, then. And we’d all been sitting together: Mitchell, my parents and aunt Gemini, Alia, India and myself. Only now did I realize I never had given him my condolences or even shaken his hand.

Weird.

I glanced at my watch. Shit. I’d better get a move on!