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Nana’s hands are pale; her wrists are thin, much thinner than his, thinner and more fragile than the neck of a guitar. Still, they’re strong enough to pull on him, to squeeze a microphone, to keep going and keep trying when she can’t play a handful of simple chords right. He doesn’t remember the mechanics of learning to play, has never taught anyone else, and she hates accepting help; it feels like, with this, that they’re a match made in hell.
It only makes him want her more. She tries again; the chord rings out, pure, no buzzing in the strings, balanced the way it should be. Her brief surprise settles into a conqueror’s smirk. Ren leans over the bed to kiss her, his hand cupping her face; she’s going to push him away in a second, but--until then, for this brief moment, he lets the feelings flood through him all the way down into his fingertips.
“Perv,” she says, pulls out a cigarette to light it.
“I didn’t say it was foreplay,” Ren says. “But if you’re suggesting—”
“Shut up and let me concentrate!”
He falls asleep to her awkward rhythms and wakes up to light flooding in through the window, calluses on Nana’s fingers pressed into his chest, her legs tangled in his. Fuck.
Being with Nana is like making it through a jam session totally improvising for the first time. It’s like playing a difficult riff that he’s seen other people try and fail at. It’s like keeping a bassline steady when he’s got a shitty drummer (which is never with Yasu, typical of him to be a fucking machine on the instrument that allows the least room for mistakes, he’d probably hold steady while blackout drunk if he let himself get that way) and dragging them forward through the song and back into the right beat so that the whole thing doesn’t collapse. Except it’s not really that difficult, so it’s not that; it’s like having a cigarette when his knees are starting to shake because it’s been too long, like the first time he’d played a show and felt everyone’s eyes on him and kicked ass, basking in the euphoria and relief and singular adoration.
Rapture, maybe. Ren does not worship at the altar of perfection; he’s good at what he does and he works at it but it is in pursuit of nothing higher, of pleasing no one but himself. But, Nana--if he can play the bass well enough he can elevate her voice and range, peel back her technical limitations and let the emotion ring through, striking as a skeleton in an x-ray. If he can kiss her hard enough he’ll taste the bitterness of nicotine and beer and the sweetness of whipped cream and the salty way she flavors all her cooking, baked in a crust underneath, and blood red like that dress she’d worn the first night he’d seen her. But the way it feels, to be with her, is like performing, like being high, the trite cliches of the standard rock music catalogue, but it’s there for a reason. There is nothing better, nothing more true, nothing more universal, nothing more ordinary.
Since when has he been allowed anything ordinary?
Ren’s biggest secret--not a secret, not really, but no one’s bothered to ask, only to assume otherwise--is that he wants nothing more than the ordinary things that lie just beyond his grasp, the things he won’t snatch at from below because he knows his hands will come away empty and he’ll end up scratching his palms. Good parents, but people like Yasu’s parents don’t deserve a son like him, would end up knowing that he’s more trouble than he’s worth, regretting that decision. Yasu’s so stupidly afraid of that himself, that he will not be enough, but it’s obvious that he’s more than they could have asked for. So what kind of act is that to follow? Even if they’d allow him to fuck up, that’s just pinning more pressure on Yasu to be the one who doesn’t fuck up, who does everything extra-perfectly. And he wants a wife who cooks for him, an apartment to come home to every night, bratty children, a steady income. And performances every night, all the time in the world to play the guitar, things that are fundamentally incompatible with that. He’s not yet even twenty-five; he has time to do everything before settling down, and time to do it afterwards, too, probably, if his hands still work and Nana can still sing at all. If she wants it. And there is so much standing in his way of that ordinary life, that the egregious and the extraordinary and the rapturous is all he has.
He’s glad to have that much, at least, his hands and the way instruments fit into them, the crowds that Yasu knows he’s already outgrowing, the opportunity that’s come with Takumi’s cold hand barely extended, soon to outbalance everything else. He and Nana only have so much longer, so many numbered kisses, so many times she can pull on his chain and twist it, leaving indents in his neck. It’s like being outside in the cold with no gloves and knowing his hands need him to get inside soon, like the scuffed steel toes of his boots teetering over the edge, nearly falling into the sea, like needing a second cigarette to ease his anxiety because the first is no longer enough.
That’s the thing about something so singularly perfect. It doesn’t last; you become aware of it and it drops, like a rock from a bridge, like snow from the sky coating everything in a harsh reflective light. It’s not too good to be true (there is nothing Ren knows to be truer), but it’s built in a way that the form can’t last and it breaks, becomes something else, fades away. Maybe, someday, they’ll be able to piece something back together, back in that apartment, when they are too old to make the kind of music that they’re satisfied with, when their bratty children are adults, when they become, somehow, ordinary. And when that’s enough, and all they have.