Page 25 of Echoes of a Muted Song

But wasn’t that what community was supposed to be about? A collection of people, stories, history, culture, all coming together to learn about one another and make their tiny slice of the world a place where everyone had space to belong and something to contribute. Hadn’t they ever wondered how badly they wrecked the places they lived, when they started legislating who could live there and who could take part in the dream? Maybe if they took a moment to really see what people could accomplish when they worked together, pooling their strengths for a common goal, they’d realize that when you take away jobs, when you stomped out dreams, when you removed art and music and shop from the schools and kept kids who mightnot have been good with books and tests from accessing the things that they could excel at, was when communities and cities fell apart. That’s when people turned against one another and to unhealthy means of coping. Because they were drowning in the sap of the tree of life, waiting for someone to extend a hand to pull them out.

Chapter 15

(Johnny)

Darkness still clung to the room, broken by silver slashes of moonlight seeping in around the edges of the curtains and blinds. With all the money they made on room charges, hotels could more than afford to have full blackout ones installed, but no, they always opted for the cheapest shit imaginable. Maybe they were secretly in business with the sleep mask company, vowing to ruin people’s rest unless they invested in the damn things. They had to know that the bright lights in the parking lot would keep people awake, but like most corporations, they didn’t give a damn about the customer once they had their money.

The only nice thing about this time of morning was the stillness of the world outside. Most people were still in their beds and the night shift folks still had an hour or two of work before they trudged home, tired and frustrated, to sleepmost of the day away.

“Why are you awake?”

Draven’s voice rumbled low in my ear as his fingers started carving through my hair.

“’Cause my brain won’t shut off and there’s light in the room.”

“I keep telling you to pick up a sleep mask.”

“And I keep telling you that the damn things make me feel like something is crawling on me. Why do you think I braid my hair back every night? I don’t want the strands on my face when I’m trying to sleep, either.”

“There’s a story there.”

“Maybe,” I murmured. “Isn’t there a story to everything?”

Draven’s chuckle sent a shiver down my spine as he swept my braid aside and kissed up the back of my neck while I sighed, my hate of the light temporarily forgotten. There was another reason I loved this soft time between night and dawn. Well rested, his voice wasn’t strained from all the time he tried to use it throughout the day when he should have been using his device. We’d all started pointing to his pocket whenever it seemed like he was straining, not to be cruel, but to save him from doing further harm to himself.

“Yeah, there is,” Draven replied as he drew his fingertips in lazy circles along my hip. “So when are you going to tell me the rest of yours?”

“What’s there to tell? You’ve known me for years.”

“No, I’ve hung out in the same circles with you for years,” Draven murmured. “I’ve watched you kick ass onstage and party like every one will be the last one, but I don’t know you the way I want to. So tell me something, Johnny, anything.”

“L-like what?”

He was silent for a moment, while I snuggled deeper into the blanket’s folds, sighed and felt my body going lax beneath his touch.

“Why music? Why’d you choose this life?” he asked, each word pressed to my skin, the movement of his lips sending a lazy wave of pleasure through my brain.

He found the pressure point where my neck met my shoulder and nuzzled it before sinking his teeth in, not biting so much as exerting a steady, rolling pressure that morphed into an endorphin rush.

“I don’t think I ever had a choice,” I explained. “From the time I was a little kid, people told me that my voice was a gift. I didn’t get it then. I was just a little kid, ya know? I just knew that entertaining people made them happy. It felt good to see people smile. That’s all it was about for me. Their smiles. The way my songs would make hushed conversations stop. I could always tell when something bad was happening, because the adults in my family would huddle together in the corner of a room or someone’s backyard, keeping one eye on us and ordering us to go play if we wandered over.”

“Good for them,” Draven murmured. “I wish the adults in my family had kept their bullshit to themselves instead of broadcasting it in the hopes of rallying more troops to their side.”

“I always loved that about my family,” I said. “The way they protected us kids and not just from whatever was going on with them but from the outside world, too. I know my uncle listened to the news on the way to work every morning, but if one of us kids was in the car, he always popped in a CD or kept turning the dial so the radio played only music. When my oldest cousin was a kid, there was a riot at the jail, with smoke pouring out the windows after some of the inmates set it on fire. He didn’t even know about it until some reporter did an exposé on the twentieth anniversary amid recent complaints that conditions at the jail were as bad as they were back then. He came home from working at the docks talking about it, confused about why the guys he worked with remembered it and he didn’t. Wanna know what our uncle said?”

“Yeah, I do.”

“He told my brother that he didn’t know about it because he didn’t need to.”

I felt as much as I heard Draven chuckle, his breath blowing out in hot puffs along my skin. Somehow, I’d gone from restless and glaring at the light, to boneless putty beneath his fingertips, as he kept drawing circles on my side.

“There are pictures of me at four years old,singing and dancing with a great big smile on my face,” I told him. “My grandfather says I was the hit of every family gathering and that everyone indulged and encouraged me.”

“That’s pretty cool. The only thing my grandfather encouraged was silence,” Draven grumbled. “His glare could silence a room in less time than it would have taken him to tell everyone to shut up.”

“The only time anyone encouraged silence in my house was in the last two minutes of a close Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup finals,” I said. “And even then, it was only if the Bruins or the Patriots were playing.”

Another chuckle and I rolled my shoulders and wiggled my ass back until it was firmly pressed to his groin. His cock gave a little twitch against my behind, right before he smacked me on the thigh, not hard enough to leave a mark, but not exactly light, either, like a warning for me to stop trying to turn this early morning conversation into sexy time.

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