Page 19 of Sunshine Boy

Julian’s gaze lingered past the point of decency. A platonic friend would have looked away by now. A platonic friend wouldn’t tilt his head down to look at him from under his long, dark lashes, or bite at his lip again so it turned vivid pink between his teeth. They’d been having a lot of moments like this since the night of the double date. He wasn’t sure what it meant, or if it meant anything, or if Rahul was simply seeing things that weren’t there. Julian had been a mirage for so long that he’d long given up hope he was real.

Rahul was the first to break the heated line of eye contact. He cleared his throat and reached across Julian to retrieve his book. Julian didn’t move out of the way, so when Rahul’s arm extended it brushed across the warmth of his chest. Within his own chest, his heart somersaulted.

“Hey, you know, speaking of glittery ponces,” Julian began, his voice uncharacteristically rough around the edges. “The new Cure’s finally come in.”

“Has it?” Rahul replied, voice uncharacteristically squeaky.

“Yeah. Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. Brilliant title, eh? NME says it’s tops.”

“Good for them,” Rahul said, already tuning out as he tried to find his page in the novel.

“Only I was thinking -- and you can say no if you and Henri are busy or whatever -- but I was thinking you could come over and have a listen to it with me.”

Rahul nearly dropped the book in his lap. “You want me to come over? And listen to a record with you?”

“Yeah,” Julian said, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly, two spots of colour blossoming on his cheeks. “If you’re not busy or anything. It’d be like old times or whatever. Or like, when you came over with Bête Noire. So I guess not like old times, but like recent times. Or all the times? I dunno. You don’t have to. Just thought it’d be nice. You should say something ‘cause I could go on all day if nobody stops me. Honest. I once had a teacher put gaffer tape over my mouth just to --”

“Yeah, all right.” It all came out of Rahul in one, exhilarated breath, like a ghost frightened out of his body.

Julian’s head snapped up. He narrowed his eyes at him suspiciously. “Did you say ‘all right’?”

“You can hear me mutter ‘speed demon’ under my breath from across the room but suddenly you can’t hear me say ‘all right’ when I’m right next to you.” Rahul rolled his eyes even as his heart was hammering a tattoo onto the inside of his ribs.

“So you did say ‘speed demon’,” Julian said, grinning like mad.

“Tosser,” Rahul grumbled, burying his nose in his book once more as he pretended to ignore Julian’s cackling.

“So I’ll see you Sunday, then? Five o’clock at mine?”

“Whatever.”

“Whatever or all right?”

“Fine. All right. I’ll see you there.”

“Good.”

“Great.”

“… Speed demon.”

Rahul kicked the leg of Julian’s stool out from under him and sent him sprawling. He was laughing so hard he couldn’t get up and Mel had to actually come out of her office to tell them both to shut the bloody hell up or she’d beat them to death with their own bollocks.

Rahul wasn’t sure why the prospect of being alone with Julian again, with a record playing between them, filled his gut with skittish butterflies. Maybe it was because the last time they had, he could have sworn there’d been a moment. A single, charged moment where nothing but Julian’s lips had existed and he’d felt -- no, he’d known -- they’d been a hair’s breadth away from… something. Something extraordinary. Or maybe it was the fact he knew that his mission to get over Julian was, if not stalling, then actively failing, despite the fact they both had perfectly wonderful partners. Or maybe it was because Julian was looking at him like that. Looking at him in a way that suggested he saw him and wasn’t merely looking at him. It was the way he’d looked at him that one hot, sticky afternoon in Rahul’s room in 1975 before he’d kissed him. It was the way Rahul had been wishing he would look at him every day since then.

Chapter Ten: Tarzan Boy

They were on fire. Not literally, obviously. They were on stage at the Mango Club, just like they were every Saturday night. But tonight… oh boy, tonight they were on fire.

Mel couldn’t remember them ever having played like this before. They’d been brilliant that night when Julian had introduced them to Michael. But that was nothing compared to how they were playing now. That night, they’d been following Julian’s lead, but tonight Rahul and Julian were together at the head of the pack, keeping pace with one another, daring each other forwards. The electricity between them infected Mel and Kwambe, got in their veins and made their blood vibrate to the rhythm of the music.

Julian, looking exceptionally camp tonight, sparkled and shone as he belted and hollered, the light reflecting off his sequined getup becoming a living, writhing thing on stage, just as much a member of the band as the rest of them. Rahul soared deftly from one instrument to the next. One moment he was making the metal strings of his guitar scream and the next he was swinging it onto his back and hammering away on the keyboard. Sweat streamed down his face, making him glisten just as much as Julian. In the middle of a verse their eyes would meet and they would break into maniacal grins as though lost in their own private joke. When Rahul was on keyboards, Julian would lean over the keys to sing into Rahul’s microphone alongside him. When on guitar, Rahul would round the keyboard stand and strum at Julian as if beckoning him. Beckoned, Julian would approach on his towering platform boots and lewdly hump Rahul’s Stratocaster. The music swelled, it took on a life of its own and fled, soaring over the heads of the feverish crowd.

Mel and Kwambe exchanged looks. Kwambe’s smile was blinding white in the shadows behind the drums, his forehead shiny with perspiration. The drumsticks blurred in his hands as they swept through the air. His infinite dark eyes, crow’s feet already forming in their corners from his constant, easy smiles, told her he understood as well as she did that the moment they occupied, as fleeting and ephemeral as it was, was one of the most important moments of their lives. They had to find a way to hold onto this speeding train and enjoy as much as they possibly could before it fizzled like a match. Mel’s pulse sped a mile a minute, an odd fear in her chest that this would all pass by too fast.

She looked at her brother and Rahul, backlit by the alien red, blue, and purple lights that swept the stage dizzyingly. Julian was screaming some lyrics about teenage melancholia and Rahul was screaming the words right back. They seemed to Mel to be screaming in time with her speeding pulse. She could feel the reverberation of the guitar’s heavy distortion deep in her gut, the throb of the bass she played in her bones, the crash of cymbals in her temples. Under it all was Julian’s voice, mutable as the sun: rising high before falling low and repeating it all over again. His movements were at odds with his voice -- kicking high when he sang low, collapsing to the stage when he cried high -- yet somehow were perfectly in sync. Rahul had once said that his body was an instrument just as much as the guitar or bass, and that was clear to Mel tonight as she watched her brother. There was a trick of the light that made the motions of his limbs seem impossible, almost sinister, like some sort of insect or monster from a child’s nightmare. Arms bending in directions they shouldn’t be able to, legs extending beyond physical reason. He seemed to twitch convulsively before transitioning fluidly into a hypnotic dance. And hypnotic he was. There wasn’t a person in that club who could take their eyes off him. The music was resplendent, consuming, haunting, but Julian… was beautiful.

Mel was overcome with love for her brother in a way she hadn’t been since they were children. She was proud, she realised. Under the pounding of her adrenaline-fueled heart, her chest tightened with the knowledge that this was why this moment was perfect. And with the hope that it wouldn’t be the last.