Page 70 of Conquest

“I’m not quite done yet.”

Jesse sat back down with a thump.

Greg paced behind the couch opposite Jesse. “I was looking over the final documentation of everything last night and I noticed your address looked familiar. Is what you put down your official residence?”

“Well yeah.”

“So you and Evan are living together now?”

“We’ve been living together for the past few weeks.”

Greg stopped pacing. He rested his hands on the back of the couch and looked down at Jesse. “You do know that you’re not going to be able to acknowledge your relationship with him publicly, don’t you?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“You don’t? Then you must be living in a country other than the one I’m in, because in the one I’m in, there’s still a hell of a lot of discrimination against homosexuality. Do you believe that you can come out as an openly gay singer with one of the most popular artists in the world as your partner and everything will be fine?”

Jesse shifted on the couch. “Well, I know it would probably be a big scandal, but we’d get through it. It’s better than lying to everyone.”

“No, Jesse, it’s not. Lies are what this business is, and if you want to make it, you better wise up and learn the game. Not to mention, what about Evan? After all this time, he’s decided to make a comeback. I never thought I’d see the day when he would step foot in a recording studio again, but now he is, and you need to think about how something like this could affect not just your career, but his as well.”

Jesse gazed at him for a moment, then slowly lowered his eyes. “I guess I haven’t thought about how it could affect his career. As far as my own, I just never worried about it. I figured I’d be who I am, and people could either take me or leave me. But the last thing I would want would be to hurt Ev’s career.”

“I know that, and I also know you probably hadn’t thought about it, so that’s why I wanted to talk to you about it now. If this were a perfect world, then this wouldn’t even be an issue. You and Evan could be out in the open, holding hands, and doing all the things straight couples do without having people sneering and passing judgments. But this isn’t a perfect world. In fact, it’s a pretty damn shitty world sometimes, but it’s the world we live in.”

“Yeah,” Jesse said softly.

A heavy silence filled the room for several moments. Jesse finally broke it by drawing in an audible breath and asking, “Is that it?”

“There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.” Greg walked around the couch and sat down across from Jesse. “This is about Evan personally,” he said, his words hesitant. “He’ll probably be upset knowing that I talked to you about these things, but I think they’re things you should know, and I don’t think they’re things he would tell you on his own.”

“If you’re going to tell me about Brian Carney, he already did. I know the whole story about their affair, and we’ve moved beyond it together.”

“He told you about Brian?” Greg paused in stunned disbelief. “Did he also tell you about Ethan, his father?”

Jesse nodded. “He told me he passed away from cancer right before his first tour started.”

“Did he tell you that all throughout Ethan’s illness, he had been the one who cared for him?”

“No,” Jesse said, surprised at the new information.

“Well, he probably didn’t want to evoke pity from you. It’s not an easy thing, caring for and watching the person you love most in the world slowly fade away, and that’s what Evan did. His loyalty and love for his father was so deep, it broke my heart watching him. But if there was any man in the world worth admiration, it was Ethan Arden. I first met him when I went to their house to discuss bringing Evan under Phoenix. You see, after his performance at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, a lot of labels were after him, but he refused to meet with representatives anywhere other than his home because Ethan was too ill to travel around the city and go to meetings, so right from the start, Evan set the precedent that if someone wanted to deal with him, they did it on his terms.”

Greg leaned against the back of the couch. “I arrived at his family’s home early and an A&R rep from another label was still meeting with Evan and Ethan, but Evan’s mother, Sophia, let me in and put me in the den. I was sitting there when all of a sudden there was a huge crash and yelling. I jumped up and ran to see what was going on, and there was seventeen-year-old Evan dragging a man three times his age and twice his size through the house and out the door. He literally threw the man in the street, then faced me with those eyes of his and said, ‘I guess we’ll take your appointment now.’”

Jesse exhaled a shocked breath. “I can’t believe he did that.”

“You probably haven’t seen it from him yet, but Evan can have a very nasty temper. Not that it was uncalled for that day. I learned later the man was upset by the slow meeting since at that time, Ethan’s larynx had already been fully removed and he had to write down all the questions he wanted to ask. The rep asked if Ethan would mind sitting out of the meeting and that was all the provocation Evan needed to throw the man out. Ethan scolded him lightly for it, but even I could tell he wasn’t upset. It took sitting in a room with Ethan for about five seconds to realize there wasn’t much Evan could do to raise anger in him, if it was even possible for him to get angry. He was the most peaceful, gentle man I had ever met, and he absolutely adored his son.”

Jesse absorbed every detail of what Greg told him. Evan spoke of his father quite a bit in the past couple weeks, but it was always sharing good memories. This was all new to him, and to hear someone else’s opinion of Evan’s father captured his full attention, but with it came a pang that he would never get to meet this man who sounded so kind and who had been so dear to Evan.

“When Evan began recording, Ethan was steadily declining,” Greg continued. “Evan actually started out his career in debt to the label. Did he tell you that?”

Jesse shook his head.

“He blew through his advance money to pay off medical bills and take his father to various specialists. And he spent a small fortune when he bought a restored original ’67 Mustang Shelby GT500 for Ethan, because Ethan had always dreamed of owning one.” Greg turned his head. “But by then, Ethan was too weak to drive it, so Evan would lift him in and out of it, and take him for rides, until the time came when Ethan didn’t have the strength for even that anymore.”

Jesse glanced away from Greg to give him a moment to regain his composure. From their very first night together when Evan told him the Mustang had been his father’s, he knew the car was special. Even though Evan didn’t care if he drove his cars and had never told him he couldn’t drive the Mustang, something inside him had known it was off limits.