Sweaters

Chapter One

                                                                                Chapter 1

                “Ty! Get your shit in the back!” Ah, a loving scream from my comrade. My band mates aren’t always the sensitive types. For us, it’s more of a, “We love you, but in secret so no one thinks we’re fucking pussies,” type of affection. I can’t complain, though. They take my shit, I can take their shit. Sure beats a lovey-dovey love fest where we make shit music and appeal to teenage girls. Oh, wait. That’s exactly what we do, minus the shit music part. We’re actually pretty rad.

                “TYSON! Head, out of ass. Now. Let’s go.” Jesus, who said lead singers are pampered too much? My band mates treat me like shit. I love them.

                “ALRIGHT! FINE!” As I stand up to get off of the couch, a sharp pain shoots up the arm I was leaning on, and I fall back down. “AGH, FUCK!” Fucking stupid ass tendinitis stupid ass fucking shit.

                “Ty? You okay?” I turn around to make eye contact with our guitarist, Nick. Giant, concerned, stupidly adorable puppy eyes stare me up and down, curious. He clasps his hands, and places them in front of him. He has a sub-conscious tendency to protect his stomach/hip area by wearing giant shirts or sweaters, to avoid any type of ridicule from others. His skinny frame adds to that insecurity, I suppose. He’s not the type to always be confident about things one hundred percent of the time. I care about him, a lot, though that may just be my motherly instinct taking over. I do, though. I really do.

                “…Ty?” I realized I’m lazily staring at him, and shake my head in an effort to wake myself up. His concerned eyes grow wider, it seems, as he takes a step closer to me.

                “What? Yeah, I’m fine, Nick. “ He comes over in small strides. Timidly, I might add, which is weird because he trusts me the most out of the rest of our band. It doesn’t make much sense to me, but I guess that’s because I’m the only one who didn’t try to fuck with him upon first meeting him. The others drew sharpie dicks on his forehead while he was sleeping and hid a spider in his bed. Since he’s a giant fucking arachnophobe, you can see that our band mates are the stereotypical rockstar assholes media depicts us to be. Big surprise, huh?

                Nick lays himself on top of my chest, giving me almost a semi-hug. I wrap one arm around his waist, right under his ribcage, and the other one I use to scruff his hair. I feel him smile on my chest, and I smile to myself, too. 

                “Ty, Nick! Get the fuck out here!” Our drummer, Chris, steps into the room and looks at us. “Oh… Guys, come on, we gotta go.” By now, our band mates are pretty used to us doing shit like this. I’m not sure they think it’s a gay thing, more of a brotherly thing, I suppose. They know very well that I’m bisexual, and Nick is.. well… he’s not too open with it. We all assumed he was gay, because of how shy and closed up he is. But saying that every shy dude on earth is gay because of how he acts is a pretty shitty accusation, so now we’re waiting for him to just be a little bit more open with us.

                “Guys! What’s going on?” Mike stumbles into the room, and sees the same thing Chris saw. His face sinks to the same expression as Chris’, too. “Oh. Well, lets go!”

                “Yeah,” I sit up, wrapping both arms around Nick as he sits up with me. “We’re getting there. Hold your shit.” We stand and stretch a bit, then walk out into the living room of our tour bus. Somehow, over the past view weeks, both my energy and care for certain things has decreased quite a bit. I don’t know how, honestly I don’t. But, I do know it’s caused me to be an unbearably lazy pain in the ass for the rest of my band.

                “You two love-birds finished fucking around?” I groan, leaning on the table beside us. John, our tour manager, crosses his arms and stares at me with an anal fucking stare. The type of stare that makes you feel both in danger of shitting yourself and like punching the person giving you that stare. Maybe I’m just over exaggerating.

                Nick looks between us, arms crossed, and sees the tension between me and John. He quickly extends his hand, looking at me. “Hey, Ty, come on. Let’s go join the others. We still have some stuff to pack in the bus.” He looks as if he’s eager to break the tension between us. I rip my stare away and force myself to look at Nick. His eager, somewhat scared eyes tell me not to go too far with this. I walk over and grab his hand, walking away towards the door of the bus.

                “Oh, shit. Wait.” I reach over and grab Nick’s oversized, grey hoodie. Poor thing looks like it’s been to hell and back. I hand it to him. “It’s cold out, Nick.” He smiles at me, putting it on, and running out the door, with me following him.