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It wouldn’t be fair of her to blame her current, hm- 'issues' solely on Luke. Julie knows that it’s not really his fault, and that he’s just Like That, but it’s a little hard not to be salty when Alex and Reggie are holding silent conversations over her head, and she’s definitely not drooling thank you very much. She’s just… appreciating his um, performance. Nothing else. She can admit to herself that he’s drop dead (ha) gorgeous, especially in his element like this, she’s secure enough for that at least. A conversation with Flynn comes to the forefront of her mind, “cute air” she’d called him back then. But that in itself was part of the problem, he wasn’t just cute air anymore. Ever since the Orpheum performance, she’d been consistently able to interact with her boys as if they were alive. They were tangible , to her at least, and it felt like a blessing, until her feelings came charging in full-force. See, the thing about Luke was, once he trusted you, that was it. A switch flipped in his brain and he turned into a human backpack. She shouldn’t be so surprised because she’d seen the way he hung off of Reggie, and Alex when he’d allow it (grumbling the entire time but allowing it just the same. She said he was fond and he called her a goblin) but she thought it was a Sunset Curve Thing™ (note the capitals, she was sure it deserved that distinction) but the more she got to know him, she began to realize that it was really just a Luke Thing™. Even before the Orpheum, she would notice him reaching out to her, before realizing who and what he was and pulling away. She was always quick, in those moments, to flash him a wide smile and reassure him but she knew that it fell flat sometimes.
In their post-Orpheum world, it wasn’t a problem anymore. But Julie was half-way convinced that she’d just traded one problem for another, but that wasn’t really true either. This was strictly a Julie problem, not a Luke problem. He was just acting like himself, and she was just acting weird . What a cliché it was, the lead singer falling for the guitarist. But he made it too damn easy, she rationalized. She was so deep in thought that she almost didn’t realize that they had finished the song, she was working on auto-pilot and she knew their songs like the back of her hand, she could sing them in her sleep so that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that Reggie was waving his hand in front of her face and presumably had been for at least a few seconds and she hadn’t noticed.
“Earth to Jules!” he said, still waving his hand. He looks over at Alex “Can she even hear me?”
“Yes, she can hear you, Reg” Julie responds, shaking the thoughts out of her head, for now.
“Y’alright, Boss?” Luke calls from her other side, looking at her curiously.
For a second, she was sure that he’d gained the ability to read her mind, probably some weird ghost shit that none of them could explain, but then she saw the genuine confusion in his eyes.
“Yeah, I’m, um, all good! Just distracted, I have a calculus test in the morning,” and that uh- wasn’t really a lie, she did have a test in the morning, but it was the farthest thing from her mind at the moment.
Luke accepted her answer easily enough, it almost made her guilty how much he trusted her, but she saw Reggie and Alex share a conspiratorial look over her head and that, that worried her a little.
She let herself forget about her apprehension while they finished their rehearsal set, and it wasn’t ‘till Luke left to visit his parents, that she remembered why she was nervous.
She was packing her mic, and the cords attached to it when she felt a prickling on the back of her neck like she was being watched. She turned slowly to see Alex and Reggie looking at her expectantly. She tried for a casual approach.
“What’s up? Do you need anything?”
Alex gave her a flat, unimpressed look, so much for casual and opened his mouth probably to deliver a sarcastic answer, but Reggie beat him to the punch.
“Weknowyouhaveacrushonluke,” he blurts out in a rush, and if she wasn’t so well-versed in Reggie’s tendencies, she wouldn’t have understood him at all. But she did.
Alex wheels around to look at him, muttering about having tact and being gentle, all the while Julie’s face is quickly heating up. It’s at that point that she thanks her mamá and God in that order for her golden complexion, because if she were pale like Reggie, she would be bright red by now. Her braincells have obviously deserted her at this point, so all she says is,
“Uh, what?” and because her body hates her, she opens and closes her mouth again, like a fish, looking for literally anything else to say.
This interruption is enough for Alex to stop whispering at Reggie and focus his attention on her, which is the opposite of what she wants.
“Jules, chill out” and that's admittedly not what she was expecting him to say.
She lets out a puff of air, swallows the lump in her throat, and forces her face to cool down. Rearranging her posture, she squares her shoulders and holds her head up like she’s heading to battle, it’s a little dramatic, sure, but it makes her feel braver.
“Okay, okay,” she says, mostly to herself, as she makes her way to sit on the weathered couch. She may as well be comfortable if she’s gonna have this conversation. She sits in the middle, and lets them sandwich her in like they always do, like this is just any normal day.
It almost feels normal, until Alex levels her with a stare (much less intense than the last one but still) and says
“Welcome to the club, kid.”
She bristles at being called ‘kid’, like she does every time (she’s only one and a half twenty-five years younger than them!), and that’s when her brain registers what he actually said.
“Wait, club? What club?” she tilts her head to the side.
“The ‘In Love With Luke Patterson Club’!” Reggie supplies happily, “We’re still working on the name,” he adds as an afterthought, shrugging nonchalantly.
She kinda wants to laugh, and kinda wants to strangle them both. She does neither. Instead, she takes a deep breath and repeats what her mother always said before Julie did something impulsive. Respira y ten paciencia, florecita . Even now, she can hear her mother’s voice, and it calms her.
She has a hundred-thousand questions that she wants to ask, but she settles on a simple one, with what should be an easy answer that hopefully won’t make her wanna throttle them any more than she already does.
“Why does this club-” she hesitates, picking her words carefully, “-if you’re calling it that, exist?”
“Because Luke is a charming dumbass,”
“Because we all are, or were, in love with Luke,”
Alex and Reggie answer at the same time, both looking like their answers are the most obvious thing in the world. She can’t even fault them, because Luke is charming and a dumbass, but it’s Reggie’s comment that makes her pause.
“Wait,” she says, holding up her hand, “What do you mean by ‘we all’?”
They both have the decency to look a bit sheepish, and they share another meaningful look between themselves, a full conversation in seconds. Seriously, how do they do that?
“We thought you knew,” starts Alex, shrugging
“Yeah, or we at least thought Luke would have said something,” Reggie adds
She fixes them both with a look of curiosity, not anger or even frustration anymore, they’re too genuine for that.
“Me and Luke dated when we were fifteen,” Alex supplies simply.
“I’m pretty sure Luke’s made out with the whole band at one point or another. We were like, a unit. He’s just-”
“Like That,” Julie finishes Reggie’s sentence, starting to understand.
They both smile at that. They share another quick look, then they’re shaking their heads at her solemnly.
“It’s The Patterson Thing, or at least that’s what we all called it back in the day,” Alex explains
Is this really what my life is now? She thinks. She has about a fifth of a second of peace before she realizes the implication of what they’re telling her.
“And when you guys say ‘we all’, you’re talking about Sunset Curve?” she clarifies, a little hysterically, as her brain is working faster than she can put a stop to it.
“Uh yeah, and now you, why?” Alex asks, sounding confused
“And Trevor, or uh, Bobby , was in Sunset Curve?”
“Yeah, we kinda established that with the whole stealing-our-legacy business.”
“And you’re not seeing any issues with that?” she asks, straining with the implication.
“Yeah, he was a total dick after we died, but he was still in our band and we loved him,” Reg says, a little defensively.
“Just to clarify, Sunset Curve, your band, was in some sort of poly relationship in the 90’s, and Trevor Wilson was part of Sunset Curve. So realistically, Luke, and possibly you two, have at least made out with him.” she says, frantically gesturing between the two boys.
“That’s the gist, yeah” Alex responds, a bit impatiently, flushing at her words.
Her brain breaks.
She’s not angry, not in the least, it’s just so strange, because they’re her band , and she knew that they were friends with Trevor, no, Bobby when they were alive, but that was always easy to push aside. This though, she never in a million years wanted to imagine Carrie’s father kissing Luke. But when she actually takes a second to think about it, it does explain a lot. Her mind easily fills in what she knows of Trevor with what she sees in her boys every day. It explains why they were all so affected by his betrayal, and even the start of their relationship makes sense if she puts Luke at the center of it. He’s always been, for lack of a better word, magnetic , drawing whatever he desired into his atmosphere subconsciously. Him being the fulcrum of not only the band, but their relationship with each other just fits.
Reggie and Alex look like they’re bracing themselves, waiting for her to go off on them, and she suddenly feels very guilty. They trusted her enough to tell her this huge part of their lives, and while she knows her shock was justified, she still feels like she shouldn’t have put them through that, after everything else. More than guilty, she feels protective of them. Who had dared to hurt them in a way that they were expecting her to be angry- and not just angry, but violent- with them. When she figures it out, there will be Hell to pay, she silently swears.
“Okay, cool.” is what she settles on. She says it calmly, more calm than she actually feels, but these are her boys, and she’s not going to hurt them anymore than she unintentionally has.
They both look sorta dumbfounded at her words, and it would be adorable if it wasn’t so goddamn sad. She decides then and there that she would do anything for her boys, it had always been an unconscious thing, but she’ll be damned if she ever lets herself, or anyone else, hurt them again intentionally or not.
“Well, that was easier than I expected,” Reggie says, absolutely no tact as usual, and God if it doesn’t make her love him more.
“Yeah, it just took me a second to wrap my head around it, I’ve known Trev- Bobby my whole life. But it actually makes sense and I can kinda picture him fitting with the way you guys are.” she shrugs casually.
Before they can say anything else, she starts talking again.
“So, The Patterson Thing, huh? Is he at least a good kisser? Or like, is he really bad and you guys just love him anyway?”
Their faces screw up as they both bark out startled laughs, and the tension from before is completely gone. They both immediately launch into different stories about Luke, and what he and the band got into in the 90’s, talking over each other the whole time.
And yeah, she loves her boys, all in such different ways, and if she can blame that on The Patterson Thing, then she’s perfectly content with that.