Page 19 of Torch Songs

She’d taken off the clumsy gauze bandages and replaced everything with the more formfitting Band-Aids, and suddenly Tad wanted a Laura forGuthrie, who seemed to have needed one that morning far more than Tad or Chris.

Tad made his way through the crowd easily—he was no stranger to crowds, or shouldering his way through people who were expecting the biggest or the loudest to be the strongest. He met the band as they came off the stage with a nod.

“Good job, guys. Mind if I steal Guthrie for a minute to dress his hand?”

“Ooh,” said the violinist. From texting with Guthrie, Tad knew she was Roberta, but he didn’t know Neal from Owen yet. “So can you convince him that doing his own bandaging wasnota good idea?”

“Nobody else in the house to do it,” Guthrie muttered, and this close, Tad could see his face was white with pain and slick with sweat.

“God, Guthrie, you should have said something,” Tad muttered.

“I saw the news, you know,” Guthrie said. “Weren’t you involved in, like, ashootoutuntil fuck-you in the morning?”

Tad almost stopped walking. “You knew about that?” he asked.

“You didn’t text,” Guthrie mumbled, practically stumbling the last few steps to the backstage area. “I… I mean there’s ghosting and there’s being in the middle of a conversation and not replying. I had nothing but time while I was waiting in the hospital.”

“What he’s conveniently forgetting,” said the rather short young man—that was Neal who played the keyboard, he remembered now—taking Guthrie’s other side and guiding him to a big trunk near a small backstage sink, “is that he was so busy checking his phone after the gig last night, he let the mugger sneak up on him.”

Guthrie grunted and leaned his head back against the wall behind him. “Yeah, he got the jump on me. I swung my guitar case late, and the guy had a knife. We’d made good tips too,” he mumbled. “That sucked to lose.”

Tad grunted. “Sorry about that,” he said softly. “Now give me your hand.”

Guthrie sat up uncomfortably and held it out, his face fixed stoically. “Nice bruise under your eye,” he muttered.

“Look,” Tad said, setting Guthrie’s hand gently on his knee and starting with the haphazardly wrapped bandage, “I spent an uncomfortable day huddled under a patio while my lieutenant failed to negotiate a truce and SWAT waited for a good shot. Today I did paperwork, which, truth to tell, felt longer, more painful, and worse. This is different.” He got to the skin under the bandage and grimaced. “For one thing, I haven’t ripped out a single stitch.”

“Aw shit, Guthrie,” Roberta muttered. “Okay, that’s it. I’m calling it—”

“I need the tips!” Guthrie burst out, and then glowered like he wished he hadn’t said that. Tad recalled him saying that his bandmates all had better, more highly paid gigs than this one. His day job covered rent, but groceries and gas came from his performance money.

“Well, you can do vocals,” Neal said. “The rest of us screech like a barn owl. Owen can do bass line on all the songs, and if you give us ten minutes, we can put together a set that’s not so Guthrie intensive, okay?”

“There goes ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia,’” Guthrie muttered.

“Yeah, well, we can do ‘The Boxer’ instead,” Roberta told him pertly. “I’ll do the guitar intro. I’ve been practicing, and I know you know the lyrics.”

Guthrie sighed, and like having a thingtodo as opposed to something hecouldn’tdo calmed him down, he closed his eyes and let Tad settle into wiping the blood off his busted stitches, applying antiseptic, and rewrapping the hand.

“Here,” Roberta murmured, squeezing Guthrie’s shoulder. “Me and the guys will fuck off and get you some more painkillers.”

“Ibuprofen only,” Guthrie said. “No Vicodin or anything tricky like that. I can’t play as well.”

“Of course.” She pulled a few lank strands of hair off his forehead, and gave Tad a guarded smile. “We’ll be back.”

The rest of the band disappeared, leaving Tad and Guthrie in the sudden silence, the bar noises and conversation surrounding the black curtain of the backstage area like a muffling blanket.

“This is so embarrassing,” Guthrie muttered into the quiet, reclaiming his hand but keeping his eyes closed and his head tilted back.

“Why? Because you got hurt?”

He watched Guthrie’s Adam’s apple bob. “I just… if I saw you again, I wanted to, you know, not be stupid.”

His unbandaged hand lay in his lap, and Tad, taking a careful look around, tugged it into his own lap and laced their fingers. Guitar calluses, ropy veins in the back, even crooked fingers, probably from hard work, made the hand rough and capable. Not soft at all. Tad had to stroke the tender part between thumb and forefinger so he’d know Guthrie could feel it.

“You’re not stupid.”

Guthrie opened one eye. “Say that with more convict—”

---