Who Knows When (Joger/Dealor)

Chapter 54

"Hey, are you sleeping?" a voice tickled my ear as the bed dipped down beside me and a hand fell on the small of my back. I knew it was John by his touch and the timidity of his question.

"I was," I groaned, my voice muffled by the blankets I'd bunched underneath my head as a makeshift pillow. "Why? What do you want?"

John didn't answer me immediately, admiring the soft features of my face as I began to doze off. He hung his head in shame and ran his fingertips over my skin in a thoughtless kind of way, tracing different symbols across my back and trying to find the right way to vocalize what was on his mind.

"Nothing," he finally settled on, a reluctant quivering to his voice as he made himself comfortable, lying down beside me and looking at my feet that rested on the pillows beside his head. Neither he or I could recall how I'd ended up facing the other way, but there we were, lying opposite one another, heads to feet and feet to heads. A brief look of disgust appeared on his face before he pulled himself into a sitting position, his back to the headboard and his hands clasped together in his lap.

Silence consumed the room, disturbed only by the crickets outside and the whir of the fan that spun at its highest setting above us. The noises began to blur together for me, and just as I was about to fall back asleep, John blurted out, "I've been working on my song."

"That's great, John," I muttered, his words going in one ear and right out the other.

He stared at me with a growing smirk on his face, waiting for me to fully comprehend what he'd just said. However, when a soft snore slipped past my lips—his remark not having the effect on me that he wished it had—he pinched my foot and elicited a shocked gasp out of me, earning a swift kick to the arm. "What the fuck?" I snapped, my fuzzy vision slowly focusing on the bassist behind me who was clutching his slightly aching bicep and laughing. "What do you bloody want?"

"I said, I've been working on my song."

I stared at him for a little longer, attempting to process what he was saying to me in my groggy state, but when it finally clicked for me, my eyes doubled in size. I'd forgotten about the damn thing, it had been so long, but that didn't stop me from being any less excited. So, using all the strength I could muster, I pulled myself up and crawled across the mattress, holding myself over his legs on my hands and knees and replying incredulously, "You're lying." John shook his head. "Come on, there's no way you finished that song. I haven't even finished my song yet."

"I didn't say I finished it," he retorted, flashing me a cheeky grin, "I said I've been working on it."

"Well, show me what you got," I insisted, tumbling over on my side to the empty half of the mattress and resting my head in my hand, looking up at the bassist with a wide, eager smile. He rolled his eyes and dragged himself over to his bag, shuffling through its contents in search of the notebook he'd mapped the song out in. I could already feel the laughter building up inside of me as I contemplated what lyrics he could've come up with for such a...risqué topic.

Once he found what he was looking for, he jumped back on the bed and rejoined my side, doing as I'd asked him but with great hesitation. I extended my unoccupied hand out for the notebook, which he protectively held close to his chest. "You're not going to make fun of me, are you?" he inquired, a blush rising in his shadow-cast cheeks. We only had a few hours before the sun began to rise, and as soon as we'd washed ourselves up—getting rid of any evidence left behind from last night's excursions—we'd be off to London with the rest of the band.

I scoffed. "Of course not, John." Sure, I was. I mean, how could I not? He wrote a song about coming too quickly, for fuck's sake. "Don't be stupid, hand it over."

A look of skepticism appeared on his face before he relinquished the notebook to me. I greedily took it into my possession and began to skim it over, each line tugging the corners of my lips more and more upward and making it increasingly more difficult for me to hold back the laughter that wanted to escape my throat. I couldn't take the piece seriously, but deep down, I knew I had to. He wanted to be appreciated for his talents, and although I wasn't sure songwriting was one of his strong suits, that didn't mean he couldn't work on it. He just needed the encouragement, and if it was going to come from anyone—excluding Humpy Bong—it should come from me.

"So, what do you think?" he wondered, the weighted silence in the room becoming too agonizing for him to bear. "Does it make sense to you?" I met his worried gaze.

I shifted my attention back to the notebook, getting another stifled laugh out of the words scrawled across the page, weakened by pencil erasures and cross-outs, before glancing back up into his anxious eyes and answering, "Maybe it did when you wrote it."

John smirked before snatching the notebook out of my grasp and taking a look at it for himself, murmuring, "That's the kindest thing anyone's said to me in months."

"Kind?" I repeated, dropping my jaw and bringing my hand up to my mouth to disguise the yawn that ripped through me.

"Yes, kind," the bassist simply replied, too invested in his song to bother looking over at me.

Again, the crickets and the fan took over the conversation, filling the gap that grew with each passing second. It was in this near silent moment that I noticed John's withdrawal. Although he was lying right across from me, our elbows that held our heads up practically touching, it felt as though he was on the other side of town; the other side of the country. Hell, it seemed like he was in a whole other country, and despite my ability to reach out and touch him, caress his cheek, and run my fingers through his hair, a part of me knew I couldn't bring him back. He was too far gone, but I'd be damned if I didn't try.