| |
Crash!
Ty looked up at the noise of the door slamming open to see Inya standing in the doorway. He had left her sleeping in the bus. They hadn't seen each other in a couple of weeks and three hours ago they had been all over each other, as soon as she got to the bus and the door closed behind them. Now Ty was hanging out backstage with the rest of the guys, as well as Elena and Kathy who were in for the weekend.
"What the hell is this?" Inya was clearly furious and she was holding a pair of panties.
Ty was confused. She was obviously talking to him, but he didn't know whose underwear it was or where they had come from. He looked around the room to see if anyone else knew what was going on, but all he saw was everyone watching intently to see what happened next. Helplessly he raised his hands in what he hoped was an "I don't know" type of gesture.
"Seriously, Ty!" Inya was getting madder by the second. "You screw some groupie behind my back at least own up to it."
"I didn't," Ty said and it was the truth.
"Then why the fuck did I find these in the bus then?"
"I don't know," Ty said. Also the truth.
"Fuck you Ty, fuck you and your fat pig groupie. I mean, Jesus, look at these things."
To illustrate her point Inya yanked the panties on over her skin tight jeans. On her they were enormous.
"I didn't screw anybody, Inya."
"Oh, so what, just a blow job then?"
"No. Absolutely not."
"Well. explain these then," Inya said, ripping off the panties and chucking them at Ty. The underwear was too light to hit its mark and instead drifted peacefully to the floor between them.
"I can't."
"You're an asshole. A fucking lying cheating ass—"
"They're mine," said a voice behind Ty. Kathy spoke firmly, but softly. Loud enough so everyone in the room heard it though.
Ty was flooded with relief. It made sense. Inya wasn't the least bit mollified though.
"You slept with her? With that fat—"
"Inya," Ty practically roared at her and she stopped, but the damage was done. Ty didn't dare look at Kathy, or Connor.
"She didn't sleep with, Ty," Connor said, walking in front of Inya. He bent down and picked up the underwear. "Ty let us use the bus a couple of weeks ago. Kathy must have left these behind. Here," he said, passing the panties to his wife.
"Sorry," Kathy said, as she took her underwear from her husband. Then she fled.
"Kathy," Elena called as she leapt out of her seat and raced out the door down the hallway, after her friend. She didn't say anything, but the look on her face as she glanced back at Inya on the way out made it plain what she was thinking.
Ty wanted to say something to Connor, but he had no idea what. He had plenty of things he wanted to say to Inya, but he wasn't doing it with an audience. Instead he strode out of the room and headed back to the bus. He stopped just short of punching the door on the way out. He had to go on stage in about twenty minutes and bruising up his hand was not an option. He settled for storming up to the bus and slamming the door behind him, which was not the least bit satisfying.
Inside the bus he sat down then got up and paced back and forth a few times. He was staring intently at the microwave clock when he heard the door to the bus open and Inya's tiny footsteps come up the stairs. Ty focused his gaze on the two blinking dots between the hours and minutes and decided to act like he hadn't heard her come in.
"Ty," Inya said and waited for him to respond. When he didn't, she came over to him and wrapped herself around his arm, grabbing onto his shoulder. "Ty, please."
Ty extracted himself from her grasp carefully, a lot more gently than he felt like doing, but he knew if he pushed her away he'd likely send her flying across the room. Partly from his anger and partly from the fact that she barely weighed anything. He took the two steps it took to get him across the width of the bus and threw himself into the bench seat for the table. Then he folded his arms across his chest and glared at Inya.
"I'm sorry, okay," she said. "But what was I supposed to think?"
Ty didn't say anything. Given the situation Inya's assumption wasn't completely irrational. The fact of the matter was if she had confronted him in private Ty still would have had no clue where the underwear had come from. He probably wouldn't have guessed it was Kathy's or thought about mentioning that he had lent the bus to Kathy and Connor for a weekend. So who knows how that would have ended up?
"I never cheated on you," Ty said. "I've never cheated on anybody I've been with, ever."
It was true. He had on several occasions broken up with a woman to pursue someone else, but he had never cheated on anyone. That wasn't the real problem here. It was that Inya had basically called Kathy a fat pig to her face, that was the problem. Kathy wasn't fat, she was obviously in good shape, but Ty had known enough women to bet that Kathy probably thought of herself as not thin enough. They all did. Ty couldn't remember ever knowing a woman who was okay with her weight. Even Sara who had never said a word about it had, at least once a month, chucked a pair of pants or shorts back into the closet muttering about her stupid period and had been known to roll her eyes, a little bit, sometimes, if Ty told her she was beautiful or gorgeous.
"I believe you," Inya said. "And I'm sorry, really."
Ty didn't say anything. Inya came and knelt down in the floor in front of him.
"Ty?" she said.
Ty fixed his gaze on the ceiling.
"Come on, I said I was sorry. I am sorry," Inya's voice was coy, like she knew Ty couldn't stay mad at her, but he was and it wasn't just about the latest incident. Inya just didn't treat people very nicely sometimes and Ty was tired of it. "Look, you're tired. The tour is wearing you out. I understand, it will be over in what, a month and a half?"
"Fifty-four days," Ty said.
He had counted. He was sick of being on the road and spending every waking minute with the same people. It had begun to feel like a jail sentence or at least what he imagined a jail sentence to feel like. He still enjoyed going out on stage and performing, but the thrill of that was basically over the minute the last song of the set was done. Ty was grappling with the conclusion that after spending twenty years trying to get to this point it just wasn't for him. The record company was pressuring him to sign a contract for the next album and he wasn't sure he wanted to do that.
"Okay, so just hang on for fifty-four more days and then we'll go back to LA and chill out for a while. I cleared my calendar. Nothing on it for six weeks after the tour, except the awards show that is," Inya said, smiling.
The buzz was that Ty was going to be nominated for song, album and artist of the year. They would know in a couple of weeks, when the nominations were announced.
"We could go somewhere on vacation. How about Fiji? What do you think?"
"No."
"Oh, you don't like Fiji," Inya made a face, like she couldn't believe that was possible. "What do you like Hawaii better or something? I mean, Hawaii's so...commercial."
The way she said it made it obvious she had strong feelings about it.
"I don't know," Ty admitted, hating how she made him feel completely ignorant on yet another topic, yet knowing it was somewhat irrational. The bulk of the American population probably had never had the opportunity to vacation in both Hawaii and Fiji and so would be highly unlikely to have an opinion on which was better. "I think I just want to go home for a while," he finished, which was true, although technically he didn't have a home, not one of his own anyway, but at least it saved him from having to admit his lack of knowledge on the subject.
"Okay, we'll just go home then and figure it out there," Inya smiled and popped up. She sat on the bench seat next to Ty and curled up next to him.
Ty put his arm around her and looked down at her smiling up at him. He realized they hadn't really talked about what she had done and said. He was debating whether or not to tell her she needed to apologize to Kathy and to Connor, to everybody really, when someone started banging on the bus door. Ty and Inya both jumped. The banging stopped and started again a second later, this time accompanied by someone yelling.
"Ty, what the fuck, man? You got to get miked up. Do you know what time it is?"
"Fuck," Ty said and jumped up.
He raced out of the bus and headed backstage with roadie, who was insisting into his head set that they were on the way. Inya trailed more leisurely behind them. Backstage he noticed MC hanging around, which further darkened his mood. During the set he glanced over to the wings, several times, and noticed, to his great annoyance, that MC was by Inya's side the whole time. Another reason he couldn't wait for the tour to be over. Ty had confided in Connor his concerns about the situation, but Connor had told him Rich was convinced if they banned MC the guy wouldn't take it well, possibly going to some extreme measure to make them sorry for banning him and Rich didn't want that on his conscience.
Ty figured that a guy who was potentially willing to hurt himself, or someone else, to make a point, was not someone he wanted to be around and definitely not someone he wanted around his girlfriend, but Rich's mind was made up. Ty had heard Rich speak enough times about the lousy resources available to help people with mental health issues to figure out no one was going to change Rich's mind. "It goes back to his dad, I think," Connor had said once. "Don't fuck with it."
After the set, Ty used what little pull he had to get MC a seat at the sound board. Once MC was on his was out to the arena, practically skipping with glee and away from Inya, Ty went looking for Connor. He was hoping to talk to Connor alone, but Connor had a great hand in the candy poker game and wasn't willing to fold. Kathy and Elena weren't there and Ty assumed they were hanging out on the bus.
"I don't know what...Inya said to Kathy," Ty started awkwardly.
Everyone in both bands, except for Steve, naturally, was staring intently at their cards, but obviously listening.
"I could tell Inya to apologize," Ty said, realizing how it sounded. He wasn't her father, for Christ-sake. She should apologize, she should want to apologize. But from the little Ty had seen of Inya after his set she seemed perfectly content to just forget the whole thing. Ty was the one having trouble forgetting the image of Kathy as she raced out of the room before the tears her eyes were plainly brimming over with spilled down her face.
Connor made Ty wait, while he and Nate piled candy into the pot, outbidding each other. When he won the hand, with his four queens, beating Nate's four tens handily, he took his time,raking the huge pile of candy into his pile. Finally he turned to Ty.
"Apologize for what?" he said cooly.
Ty looked at his friend and wanted to offer to go out back and let Connor take a swing at him, if it would make things right. But he knew Connor wouldn't do it, Connor couldn't risk hurting his hand any more than Ty could. And technically Ty hadn't done anything wrong.
"Never happened," Rich said. "Ante up."
Everyone started sliding candy into the middle of the table, except for Nate, who had busted on the last hand. Nate helped himself to a pile of candy from the bank, peeled open one and popped it in his mouth.
"You eat too much of that stuff, man," Dale said. "You're getting fat. "
Mack nodded in agreement. Nate took his time chewing and swallowing and made a big production out of peeling a second candy.
"Hell, I was fat before the tour, man. Now I'm a fucking pig," he said. Then he popped the candy in his mouth and smiled broadly.
And that, by almost unspoken agreement, was the end of it. Except Ty noticed that Kathy and Elena were very careful to stay as far away as they could from Inya for the rest of the weekend.