I can’t remember how it started. It was this slow, creeping thing that I didn’t comprehend until it had fully taken hold of me. It happened in little moments, the kind that would pass you by if you weren’t already a little depressed and a little twisted – quick glances, secret smiles and touches that lingered too long.
Maybe Taylor didn’t even know what he was doing at first. I don’t know. I don’t think either of us could have known what we were headed for. We were both so young, even though he was older, and everything around us was in flux. We clung to each other, I suppose, for protection against it all.
He was my shelter against the storm at first. When I couldn’t sleep in the tour bus bunk, he would hold me and rock me to sleep. His arms were always the place I felt safest. Back then, it was innocent like that. No one batted an eye to see me sleeping in my older brother’s lap; we were only children thrown into a crazy world.
Then I was his shelter. He loved everyone too much, and I could have told him that if he’d ever asked, but he didn’t. He just gave himself to everyone and clung to me when it all went wrong. I held him when he wept and couldn’t even said the word – pregnant. I held him even though I knew he wouldn’t be mine much longer. I thought if I held on hard enough, I could stop the world from spinning him away from me.
But I couldn’t.
I’m not a fool; I know he was never mine. He was a lot of things to me – brother, mentor, lover – and not all of them were things he should have been. But mine was the one thing he could never truly be.
Everyone still talks about how close we are – too close, they say, it’s not normal – but they don’t really know. They don’t know the invisible wall I feel between us. When Taylor holds my hand on stage, I can feel him trying to pull away. I know what he’s thinking. He’d give anything to be normal, to dig these feelings out of his soul and through them away for good. He’d give anything to be free of the unnatural longing for me, the unnatural need for our bodies pressed together in the dark.
I know, because I would, too.
It’s something you can’t just turn off, though. It’s something woven into the very fabric of the two of us, pulling us together all the time, whether we want it or not. It happened over time, so slowly we didn’t realize we were falling, but there’s no escape now. There’s no way to claw and scrape our way out of this thing.
I still can’t sleep on the tour bus. I lie awake in my bunk, listening to the sound of the road flying by and try to count the many ways my life has gone wrong. I could count to a thousand and still I’d be awake, trying to convince myself how it could really be wrong to hold Taylor in my arms and kiss him like our lips were made for that and nothing else.
Much as I try, the truth is, I’ll never convince myself, not fully.
My cell phone says it’s four in the morning, and I’m still not asleep. I can’t remember the last night I actually slept, but I know that when I did, Taylor was the last thought on my mind, the last picture I saw before I finally drifted off. His face is always burned into my mind and tonight it only keeps me awake. I pull my aching bones from the bunk, cringing at the thump my feet make against the floor. I’m not graceful like him.
I didn’t expect Taylor to be sitting on the couch, but there he is, staring into the distance. He looks up at me like he’s expected me, and I guess he has. I don’t say a word to him and he doesn’t say a word to me, but we don’t need words. I sit down on the couch and curl up in his lap the way I did when I was a child.
He runs his fingers through my hair and I swear that for the first time in years, I feel like I’m home. Maybe it’s wrong, but in this moment, I can think of no reason not to be close to Taylor. He doesn’t have to say a word for me to know that he feels the same. In the morning, it will all change. We’ll be thrown back into the world and have to keep our distance, but for now, we don’t have to worry about any of that. We don’t have to think about how wrong it is. We can just be together like this, holding each other together before everything tries to tear us apart again.