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  “Wait. Come out? Like out out? How would that solve anything? That would just make it worse!”

  His face said it all. Danny was scared. He’d told Elliot all along that he wanted them to be public, but Elliot thought back to the chances he’d had to confess. Elliot had to make him tell Katie, he’d never told Chelsea, and sure, a live interview wasn’t the best venue to start down that path, but Danny didn’t look like he even wanted to think about it.

  “Listen,” Danny said. “We’ll find a way to fix it somehow. Get people to leave you alone. I’ll make sure to take back what I said about things being tense. Blame it on a bad day or something. We can deal with this.”

  “But….” Elliot stopped. He didn’t want to speak rashly. “In the end, if management said they didn’t care, do you even want to come out anymore? I’m getting a big no from your face.”

  “I do, El. But so much is at stake now. Things aren’t like they were when we moved out of the Band Camp house. They’re not even like they were before the tour.”

  “Do you love me?” Elliot asked. His voice shook.

  “Of course I love you.”

  “Are you… ashamed of us?” It wasn’t the best time for questions like that, but all of a sudden Elliot had to know. He had to know if things were ever going to change or if he’d be stuck hiding forever as long as he was with Danny, pushed in a closet and dragged through the mud just to hide who he was.

  “Well, no, it’s just….”

  Elliot’s heart sank. He wasn’t an idiot. He knew why Danny was scared, but it was just too much. “It’s nothing, Danny. I’m getting to the point where I’m honestly not sure I can do this anymore.”

  “Do what?”

  “Us. Try to make this work with all the pressure and the bullshit. It’s just too hard. I understand where you’re coming from, I really do, but I don’t know if I want this to be my life, hiding like this. I’m never going to want to be with a girl. There is no easy option like Chelsea out there for me. I think I need to figure things out on my own.”

  Jesus, it hurt. It hurt like nothing Elliot had ever felt, but he knew he was right. The pressure was too much for both of them. Elliot couldn’t hide them forever. It wasn’t in him, and it wasn’t fair to keep asking Danny to do all the dirty work. Maybe if there was nothing to hide anymore the nasty articles would go away. Maybe Danny wouldn’t have to drag Chelsea around all over the place. Maybe everything would just be… easier.

  “Elliot, no. I love you.”

  “I love you too, Danny. But this? I can’t do it anymore. Not if there’s no end in sight to all the crap that goes with it. I just can’t.”

  “We’re not breaking up,” Danny whispered. He sank to the floor and put his arms around his knees. “We can’t break up.” He looked shell-shocked. Truthfully, Elliot was too. He’d been pissed as hell, but he never thought he’d come into this room to end things. He just needed to yell. It was only when he realized Danny didn’t want anything to change that he started to see where it was going.

  “I think we have to. This mess is only going to get worse until we get rid of the cause behind it.”

  “No.” Danny looked up at Elliot from where he was huddled on the floor. “What’ll I do?”

  Elliot didn’t know what to tell him. “Why don’t you go sleep in Webb’s room tonight? Tate and Reece paired up.” Elliot stopped. “We can’t make this crappy for the other guys though. How many times have we promised?”

  He let out a small, sad laugh. He and Danny were pros at hiding their feelings at that point, right? Things would just have to move on and work somehow.

  “That’s not what I meant, El. I mean, what the fucking hell will I do without you? I can’t even imagine it. I don’t want to.”

  “Well, you’ll have to go through a lot less shit, I bet.” He reached down to touch the top of Danny’s head, but he couldn’t. Even that much hurt. “It’ll be fine, Danny. We’ll get past this and be okay. Friends.”

  It was a lie. Elliot knew it. He and Danny had never been just friends. He wasn’t sure if they were capable of it.

  ELLIOT sat out on their hotel room’s balcony in the warm summer evening air. Still, even in the balmy night, he shivered. Nothing was going to be okay. He didn’t know how to solve their problems, how to make management and money and contracts and rabid fans disappear so he and Danny could just be. The truth was, they never would’ve been at all if it weren’t for all this. They’d have never even met.

  He watched Danny pack up his stuff from the balcony, watched him shuffle around their hotel room with his head down, slowly dropping things into his bag. Elliot pulled out his phone and texted Webb. He said things were cool, but he and Danny just needed some space from each other. It was another lie, but they’d gotten awfully good at those.

  Danny was gone for a long, long time before Elliot could bring himself to go back into their hotel room. Without Danny there, nothing felt right. Worse than that. It was like some big black vacuum had opened up inside him where Danny used to live. He didn’t cry. He’d gotten to some point far beyond crying. It was awful without Danny’s bright smile on the other side of that glass door. Elliot had no idea how long he could keep going without it.

  He wished he knew what the other choice was.

  MONTREAL, Calgary, Chicago, St. Louis. It didn’t matter where they were. Danny felt nothing. He smiled and laughed with the guys, and so did Elliot—they’d promised, after all, not to mess things up. Neither one of them wanted to screw with the team. But inside he was dead. The only moments Danny felt a spark was when he and Elliot inadvertently touched. When they brushed against each other in the suddenly way too small tour bus, when they managed to sit too close to each other on the couch to avoid brushing thighs. Danny hated those moments. They were the only thing he lived for. Not having Elliot but seeing him every day couldn’t have been more torture, but the other option, Elliot actually being gone? No. That was unthinkable. Danny decided that after the tour he was going to put everything he had into getting Elliot back. He had to.

  One night between Chicago and St. Louis, or maybe Indianapolis and Cincinnati—it didn’t matter, he supposed—Danny got a call. Management. They want to fly Chelsea out to show everyone was happy and cool. Another lie to smooth everything over, another opportunity for some faked happy-couple pictures that told the story management wanted to tell. The story Danny himself had grown comfortable with. He felt like he’d betrayed Elliot somehow by getting so used to the game. If there was some way to fix it, he’d do anything. But the idea of telling the truth after so many months was terrifying.

  Danny sighed.

  “What’s the point of the Chelsea show now?” Danny asked. He barely had the energy to fight. “Elliot and I are done. There’s nothing to hide.” That wasn’t exactly true, at least not if Danny had anything to say about it, but management didn’t need to know differently.

  “You guys need some positive publicity. People like you and Chelsea together.”

  Danny sighed. “I don’t want to do it. I’m not in the mood to smile.”

  “Listen, Danny,” Rebecca said into the phone. She sounded far away and more than a little condescending. He had a hard time liking her after the past few months. “The Pixies have taken off finally, and a lot of that is due to your high-profile romance with Chelsea. I know you’re friends with these girls. Don’t you want to help them?”

  Seriously low blow. “Isn’t a breakup publicity too?”

  “Not the kind we need. That interview made a lot of fans worry about the future of Static. We need to calm feathers. With the added bonus of publicity for The Pixies, it’s a win-win situation.”

  Yeah, for everyone but me. And Elliot.

  Rebecca was asking him to take one for the team… whoever the team was anymore. Danny felt that’s what he’d been doing for nearly a year. Hiding him and Elliot, dating Chelsea, making himself look like an ass. All for money. It wasn’t worth it. Elliot’s old college fantasy
was starting to sound awfully nice. Danny would gladly take Lit class and dorm rooms if it meant he got his boyfriend back—his life back.

  “Fine,” he said. Danny didn’t have the energy to care. “Bring her out. Where are we going to be next week?”

  “Chicago,” Rebecca said.

  Danny could’ve sworn they’d already been there. Didn’t matter. Everywhere was the same anyway—depressing and hot and devoid of Elliot’s kisses.

  CHELSEA greeted him with a smile and a hug in… Chicago. Yes. Chicago. That’s where he was. “Where do you want to go eat?” she asked. “I’m starving.”

  “I’m not really very hungry,” Danny said. It was true. He wasn’t ever hungry anymore. His stage wardrobe had gotten progressively looser over the past few weeks.

  “You gotta eat, silly. Can’t go wrong with pizza here. I’ll find somewhere on my phone.”

  Half an hour later, Danny and Chelsea ended up in a booth at some famous downtown pizza place. He didn’t know what it was called. Didn’t really matter anyway. Chelsea was going on and on about something. Danny wasn’t listening. He wondered what Elliot was doing. He’d heard earlier that the other boys were planning on going for burgers and checking out the town. Danny wanted to be with them more than anything, even if it was painful to be with Elliot. The near-Elliot pain was nowhere near as bad as the away-from-Elliot pain, he decided. He felt like he was about to go out of his skin.

  “Hey, D. What’s wrong, sweetie? You’ve been off ever since I got here.”

  Danny shrugged. “I’m just tired.”

  Chelsea reached across the table to cup her hands over Danny’s. “You guys have been working so hard. It’s like interview after interview and concerts and all that traveling. We’ve been watching.”

  “It is a lot.” It didn’t seem like it at first, when they were all so happy together, when he and Elliot were so happy together, but ever since Toronto Danny felt every single second weighing down on him, leaden and heavy. He just wanted to curl up in his bunk on the bus and let the vibrations of the road coax him to sleep. Half the time, all Danny wanted to do was sleep.

  Danny ate his pizza so Chelsea wouldn’t say anything and walked her back to their hotel. She had her own room, but she followed him to his. “Chels, I was just going to go to bed, to be honest.” He was sharing a room with Reece. He wanted to be asleep before Reece got back. The other guys’ searching looks were too much to deal with.

  “I wanted to talk to you about a few things.”

  Talk? What on earth do we have to talk about? Danny shrugged, though. Might as well get it over with so he could sleep. “What’s up?” He beckoned her to sit down on Reece’s bed. Danny took a seat across from her on his own.

  “I wanted to talk about this, well, whatever it is between us.”

  “Babe, you know this is just for publicity. I mean, it always has been, right? And it’s helped out a lot.”

  “It has, but what I was thinking….” Chelsea looked awkwardly at her feet. “I was thinking that we could make it more than publicity. I mean, I really like you, Danny. You’re funny, you’re gorgeous, we get each other’s situations.”

  Danny wanted to crawl out his hotel window and plummet to the ground below. He wrung his hands together.

  “Listen, about that—” Danny didn’t know how to say it. She should’ve been told from the beginning but no. Containment. “You know how there’s all that drama about Elliot and I being together and hiding it?”

  “Well, yeah.” Chelsea shrugged. “I just thought some silly kids online still thought that. You don’t really hear much about it anymore in the tabloids. They’ve dropped all the cutesy bromance stuff.”

  “Well, here’s the thing.” Danny took a long breath. “It’s true.”

  “Wait. What?” Chelsea’s mouth dropped open.

  “El and I have been together since the Band Camp house. At least we were until a few weeks ago.”

  “I don’t get it. Why? Why all the hiding?” Chelsea’s face was pink with embarrassment, but she looked honestly perplexed.

  “Money. Our managers were afraid that if Elliot and I were out as a couple the girls wouldn’t be as interested in buying our music. I mean, look at him….”

  “I feel like a jerk,” Chelsea said. “This is awkward as hell.”

  Danny reached for her hands. “You didn’t know. It’s fine.”

  “I kind of did know. I saw it back at the house, but maybe I didn’t want to.” She cringed. “Jesus, I’m worse than your fans. I guess I understand why they wanted you to keep it a secret.”

  “You didn’t want to see it?” Danny asked.

  “I already made a fool out of myself. Do I have to say it again?”

  Oh. She really liked him. Like always, not just since they’d grown closer during all the dating stuff.

  “No. You don’t have to say it.”

  Chelsea went to stand. “Listen, they told me the plan was to phase us out while you guys were on tour and then say we broke up because of time apart. Is that still what’s going to happen?”

  “I don’t know anymore. I can’t even tell you how little control I have over my life at this point.”

  “Did you say you and Elliot weren’t together anymore?”

  He hated to say the words out loud. It made everything seem more real. “Things got a little intense there for a while. We’re taking a break.”

  “I really hope you two work it out. You’re not the same guy without him.”

  Another little stab to the gut to add to the hundreds he’d felt over the past few weeks.

  “I know. Me too. Maybe I’ll see you back in LA?” Danny asked.

  “’Course, sweetie.” Chelsea gave him a long hug. “I’m going to hit the sack. I have an early flight tomorrow.”

  “Sorry you had to fly all the way out here. Good luck with everything. Tell the girls hi for me.”

  “I will.”

  THEIR last concert. Last song of the last concert even. Who would’ve believed it could all go so fast? The moment was amazing and sad, like all accomplishments and good, crazy, amazing things that have to come to an end. Elliot didn’t know what to think, so he didn’t. Instead he sang. Sang to forget how scared he was of whatever might come next and how fans would react if they knew the real him. More than anything he sang to hide how much it still hurt every time he looked at Danny, how much he wanted to give in every time Danny looked back at him.

  They didn’t touch as much as they used to—hardly at all honestly, and only enough to make things look as normal as possible. Elliot knew they both wanted to. Sometimes it felt like his hands didn’t know what to do anymore without Danny to touch. He had no idea what to do about it. Elliot hadn’t ever experienced a breakup before. He imagined most of them didn’t suck nearly as bad. How often did both people want to be with each other as much as he and Danny had but just couldn’t because it hurt too much? Elliot felt for everyone else who’d ever been in a position like his. He noticed Danny watching as he sang his solo. Still proud, still heartbroken. It sucked. And when Danny came in to sing with Elliot? That felt like little tiny knives digging into his skin. It had at every single concert since the night they broke up.

  Elliot’s heart started pounding when they got to the last verse. It was done. Really freaking done. The audience screamed and cheered as they finished “Fool for Love.” The first song they’d ever recorded. Still their biggest hit. He didn’t know how to say goodbye.

  There wasn’t any room to think over the noise from the audience, barely room to feel anything at all. It seemed so surreal. They were done, at least for the foreseeable future. They were done. And as soon as they got back to LA he and Danny were done too, even more than they already had been for the last leg of the trip. There wouldn’t be any excuse to see him outside of rehearsals. He’d have to move out of the house. Elliot’s stomach clenched.

  Why are you thinking about this right now?

  Probably because he’d barel
y thought of anything else for weeks. It was physically impossible, it seemed. They all stood in a line, arms around each other’s shoulders, and bowed to the crowd. Reece shouted out another thank you to a second round of screams before he turned and hugged all the guys.

  “Love you, bro,” Reece muttered in Elliot’s ear.

  “Love you too,” he answered.

  The rest of them joined in the hugs, one by one until Elliot was faced with Danny. Danny, who vaulted himself at Elliot and held on tight.

  “I’m still so fucking in love with you,” Danny whispered. “I’m not giving up.”

  Elliot squeezed his eyes shut hard and tried not to cry. “I still love you too,” he answered and returned the hug with everything he had until he absolutely had to let go.

  They all waved to the crowd once more, sad and happy and everything in between. Elliot couldn’t keep his eyes off Danny the entire walk backstage.

  “El,” Danny said once they were in a back hallway headed toward the dressing rooms. He grabbed Elliot’s hand and stopped him from following the other guys.

  “What, Danny?”

  “Did you mean that out there? Do you really still love me?”

  Elliot’s chest hurt. It had almost every day since the breakup. “Of course I meant it. I can’t just turn it off, as much as I might want to.”

  “Then we have to fix this before we go nuts. You and I are supposed to be together.”

  He wanted to crumple right to the floor. It was so tempting to say yes and fall back into Danny’s arms. But if he did that, how was any of it fixed? How was it better?

  “How many times can we do this, Danny? How many times can all this shit we’re in the middle of rip us to shreds before neither of us can be put together anymore? Do you want to test that? Do you wanna find out what our absolute limits are?”

  Danny drooped against the dingy old wall of the back hallway. That hallway kind of seemed like the path to nowhere, the end of… what? Elliot didn’t even know. Maybe everything.