Every person in the assembled crowd turns to look at me. Someone boos.
But Bram listens. He releases Dean like he’s throwing him away, then lets me grab his hand again and lead him down the hill and into that narrow alley, where it’s quieter. He doesn’t say anything at first, just stands stock still, staring at nothing. Then all of a sudden he reaches for me, pulling me into a tight hug.
I can feel his body pulsing like a heartbeat even through his leather jacket, the rasp of his breath, the quiver of his arms as he holds on to me for dear life. We stay there for a long time, well after the crowd gets bored with the lack of action and dissipates into the night, until it’s just us, holding each other in the darkness, my breath sending billows of mist into the night air.
‘I’m sorry,’ is the first thing he says, after a long while, muttering the words into the crook of my neck. The second thing he says, a few minutes later, is, ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome,’ I whisper back, and then he’s kissing me, gentle and needy at the same time, his thumbs stroking tracks under my jaw, down my neck.
As he pulls away, his eyes search mine. ‘Did he hurt you?’
I shake my head. ‘Just scared me. Some people helped me– it was the cover band from tonight, I think.’
‘Good.’ He nods slowly, like he’s had some kind of out-of-body experience and he’s slowly coming back into himself. ‘They’re good guys.’ He takes a deep breath and then blows it out.
‘What happened back there?’ I ask after a beat, and he nods his head and tucks a wayward curl behind my ear. I feel him steel himself before he begins to talk.
‘You remember how I told you that I was in a band when I was younger?’
I nod. ‘With Dean?’
‘That’s the one.’ The twitch of his lips stops short of a grimace. ‘What I didn’t tell you was that the third member of our band was Elias.’
‘Moreno?’ I ask, like there are a hundred other Eliases that we could be talking about here.
But Bram just nods. ‘We were twenty, and Dean and I had just met Elias in music college. Elias and Dean never really saw eye to eye, but with me as a buffer it worked, and for a while the three of us were unstoppable. After a couple of years on the circuit we were selling out small venues, catching the eyes of people in the industry. We’d just found out that a record label wanted to sign us when I got the news about Gilly.’
‘The Alzheimer’s,’ I say, more to myself than anything, and when I do, Bram looks every bit as devastated as if he were hearing it for the first time. It takes him a moment or two before he can carry on, clearing his throat before he does.
‘Honestly, I think I’d known something wasn’t right, but I never thought it could be anything like that.’ His voice is rougher now, shot through with pain. ‘She wasn’t even fifty.’
My heart sinks for him. I know how devastated I was when my grandparents first got ill, but they were much older then. It was hard, but it wasn’t unexpected. I can’t imagine how much it would hurt to be blindsided by it.
There’s a drag to Bram’s inhale, which seems overly loud in the cramped space of the alleyway. ‘I’d already lost one parent,’ he says quietly. ‘I couldn’t have lived with myself if I’d missed out on the rest of my time with her. So I walked away from the deal. Came home. Elias understood, said family should always come first, but Dean was furious.’
I frown. ‘Couldn’t they just replace you?’
‘They tried.’ He shrugs. ‘No one stayed longer than a couple of rehearsals. I can’t tell you that it was because of Dean, but I can tell you that three months later Elias replied to an ad for a singer to front a new metal band, and within a year that band had hit the charts in nine countries, so I’m not sure it was him that was the problem.’
There’s a flicker of sympathy in my chest then, regardless of what I think of Dean now. That’s a villain origin story if ever I heard one.
‘That must have been hard for Dean to watch,’ I say carefully, and his reply is a slow and solemn nod of his head.
‘I managed to stay friends with him for a while.’ He pauses a beat, his hand scrubbing at his jaw. ‘But then there was Jessica.’
There’s a strange weight to the way he says the name, a gravity to his expression that pulls at my heart. I remember thinking that someone had hurt him, and I know without a doubt that, whoever Jessica is, she was that someone. I reach for his other hand, winding my fingers between his, and he smiles lightly at me before he carries on talking.
‘Jess grew up in Whitby too. She was in our class at school but moved to Leeds the year before we did. We’d had a thing as teenagers– just an on-again, off-again kind of deal– but I saw her in town one night just after we moved to the city and we swapped numbers.’ He looks down the length of the alley, blowing breath into mist before it disperses into the night air.
‘She studied journalism, and after she graduated she got a job working for a local paper. She got in touch when our band was gaining traction and did a few pieces on us. And then we fell in love, the way you do when you’re young, you know– quickly, messily, but with that unshakeable hope, like nothing will ever go wrong.’
I nod, but in reality I don’t know. The closest I ever got to love was Jon, and that… well, the less said about that, the better.
‘We moved in together,’ he continues, the words beginning to catch in his throat. ‘I even proposed to her. She was it for me, as far as I was concerned. We were doing the long-distance thing for a while after Gilly was diagnosed, and I thought it was going well, but then I turned up for a surprise visit and found her having sex with Dean in our bed.’
I’m pretty sure I gasp out loud as my heart seizes in my chest. I can’t imagine how much it would hurt being betrayed by just one person that close to you, much less two. And then a puzzle piece clicks into place in my brain.
‘That was the night you beat the crap out of him?’