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Sean's just settled with his book and his music again, barely pressed play on the Walkman, when he knows he hears something out in the hotel hall.
It's EJ, halfway to the stairs, and Astin's got him in a headlock, Dom and Billy egging him on. Orlando's leaning heavy-eyed in one of the doorways, and Astin hisses at them even as he claps a hand over EJ's mouth.
"People are sleeping," he says indignantly before turning one of his sunny smiles on Sean. "Are you listening to it?" he asks, seemingly oblivious to the way EJ's wiggling in his grasp.
"I'm not sure I like it," Sean admits.
Astin does this, notices what Sean's reading or listening to, and he figured out a couple of years ago that Sean tracks a path from one thing to the next in his quest for self-taught knowledge, wandering from mention of a composer in a book to the music the man had written or from the plot of an opera to the mythological texts it was based on. He's taken to dropping things in Sean's lap in green rooms and hotel lobbies, sometimes a tattered book or more often a homemade cassette tape like the one Sean's listening to ... or was listening to. It came in a case with Astin's neat block letters on the spine: Benjamin Britten, War Requiem (prem. 1962). Sean's not sure he approves of classical music that's younger than him, although that may say more about himself than the music. But once the tenor dropped in, it set him rummaging through his bag for his latest book and flipping through the pages of WWI poets - past e.e. cummings and Ford Madox Ford and Herbert Read - until he reached Wilfred Owen, and yes, that was "Anthem for Doomed Youth."
Three interruptions later, Sean and the tenor now have reached "Futility," which is nicely ironic. Or something.
He should have called hotel management and complained about the girls who made it as far as this floor, where the group and its entourage have taken over for the next two days, but there's only so much even he and his guys can do, and they're trained for this sort of thing. He long ago stopped getting satisfaction out of yelling at hotel flunkeys for the ingenuity of teenaged girls. Now it's the lads, themselves, and Sean almost wishes they didn't have so much energy. Staying in shouldn't be a problem, not on the tail end of three shows in four days in three towns and two states, but that doesn't stop him wondering when one of them is going to get a sudden urge and take off down to the bar or out to a takeway stand somewhere - and it looks as if he wasn't wrong to consider the possibility.
He looks at Jed, who's stationed by the elevator with a clear look down to either end of the hallway. Jed shrugs philosophically.
"Sala can go," he says.
"Give it a couple of tries," Astin says, reclaiming Sean's attention as he tightens his hold on EJ. The kid wiggles again, muttering something about porn and chocolate. "There's a movie, too, based on the requiem, but I don't know how easy it is to get ahold of. It's kind of strange, too. We're staying in tonight."
Sean blinks at that final non sequitur, lost until he realizes it was directed at EJ, and then he tries not to laugh.
"Yes. In," he says, putting on an appropriately stern face and pointing from EJ to the door of one of the rooms, any of the rooms, it doesn't even matter. "The hotel has chocolate, and I'm sure someone around here has some porn you can ... borrow."
He's also pretty sure the kid's had a little too much to drink, and he's pretty sure, looking at Dom and Billy giggling with each other, and the flush that accompanies Astin's guileless smile, and the languidness of Orlando - who never really could hold his ale - that EJ's not the only one. But that's none of his business. It's a strangely dissonant frame of mind required for his job - he's got to care, but he's got to not care. He can't afford to judge what they do, not if they're going to trust him to watch their backs through whatever it is. He can't have them trying to shake him or any of his guys. So it's none of his business.
Not as long as they stay in their rooms.