It’s not a date. It’s just two dudes catching up. Straight guys do this all the time, although I think it usually involves beer and football.

Telling myself that didn’t help my nervousness. I’d gone through four outfits, trying to strike the right note. Overdressing was stupid; Cave would take one look at me in my Brioni cashmere suit and laugh me out of the room. He knew me back when I wore torn-up jeans and band t-shirts. On the other hand, I didn’t want to show up in rags. That just seemed like it would be insulting like I couldn’t be bothered to treat him with respect.

I finally settled on an exceedingly thin modal v-neck sweater in a deep wine color that made me look far paler than I actually am, but did interesting things with the color of my eyes.

“Getting all dressed up for your date?” asked Toby. I turned to see him leaning in the doorway.

“It’s not a date,” I insisted. I looked over my watches and decided not to wear one this time, although I did pull on a thin silver bracelet I’d gotten in Italy during last year’s tour.

“I’m glad to hear that because there would be endless trouble for you if it were.”

I sighed and examined my hair in the mirror. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, Toby.”

“I’m serious, Ransom. I need to be sure you’re not going to get any wild ideas out there. Your brand is very straight. Girls like you and you like them. If the label thinks you’re going out with guys...” He let his voice trail off, but he didn’t need to finish.

I didn’t say anything. What could I say? He was right. I grabbed my phone and stepped past him, maybe a little more roughly than strictly necessary, to get through the door. “Make sure the driver has my car ready by the time I get downstairs,” I said.

* * *

“I’m so sorry,” said Cave, letting me in. His house was set off the street, and not very well-lit, so I felt safe walking from the car to the house without any risk of being seen.

“What for?”

He looked great. He’d also chosen a v-neck sweater, although his was a heathered gray, wearing a little thin at the elbows. It was tight over his shoulders and chest.

“Oh, it’s just so chaotic right now. We just started fostering--”

Before he could finish, a white bundle of fluff hurtled towards me, bouncing at my feet with its tongue hanging out.

“You didn’t tell me you had a dog,” I said. I reached down and ruffled its fur. “What’s your name? Who’s a good boy? Are you a good boy?”

“Girl, actually. Her name is Isabel. We literally just got her from the shelter, and then I couldn’t find a sitter, so Jojo is here...I really am sorry. I should have called you back to postpone.”

I stood back up. “If it’s a bad time for you--”

“No, I was thinking more of you. I know you’re busy, and you don’t want dog fur all over you, and Jojo needs so much attention--”

“Dude, it’s fine. You should try getting ready for a show with fifty people trying to cram themselves into your dressing room, all needing something urgently from you at the same time. A puppy and a baby are relaxing compared to that.”

“Well, you’d think so,” he said, leading me into the living room. I noticed he had his shoes off, and I discreetly slid mine off next to his couch.

The baby was in a playpen, as bouncy as the dog, and equally happy to see me. I couldn’t help but smile. “Who’s the little man? We haven’t been introduced.”

Cave picked him up. “Ransom, this is Joseph, better known as Jojo. Jo-baby, this is my old friend from school, Ransom Pope.”

“Puh-puh!” said Jojo.

Ransom looked at me for translation, and I said, “I think he’s telling you about Isabel.”

“She’s a very good dog,” I said to the baby.

“So come in, make yourself at home,” Cave said. “I mean, I know your home must be like a trillion times bigger and fancier than this--”

“Cave Mathis, are you being insecure?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“You haven’t stopped apologizing since I walked in.” I sat on his couch, sinking down further than expected.

He laughed, and I could hear some nervousness in it. Interesting fact, that he was worse at covering his nervousness than I was. But then, when you’re faced with legions of people screaming their love at you, you learn not to show fear. In truth, I felt scared that I’d say the wrong thing, because...well, what do you say to a normal guy like this?

I’d been so mean to him the other day. I still felt guilty about that.

Once Jojo was back in the playpen, Cave sat in a chair near the couch. Isabel hopped up into his lap.

“I promise, no more apologizing,” he said to me. “I just can’t get over this. I honestly thought I’d never see you again. In person, I mean. I haven’t told anyone else you’re here, if you’re wondering!”

I laughed. “My turn to apologize. I shouldn’t have been such a fucking nut on the boardwalk. I was just caught so off-guard. My manager had just given me this long lecture about not being spotted--”

“That’s why you were dressed like a spy, I guess.”

“Exactly. But now that I’m here, everybody’s strategizing. There’s’ going to be an announcement about me being here, at some point.” I sighed. “Everything’s always got to be an event. On the other hand, these have been the quietest few days I’ve had in ages.”

“The calm before the storm.”

“Right. It’s so strange being back. I feel like I recognize half the town. Like, fifty percent of it is this place I’ve never been before, but then I’ll see a street corner or a line of a cliff and it all snaps into focus.”

“Things have changed so much,” Cave said.

As we were talking, I began to feel my voice fade out again. “Hey,” I whispered, “I don’t suppose you have any hot tea, do you? Maybe with lemon and honey?”

“Oh, that’s right, your throat. Yeah, give me one second, okay? If the dog is a bother--”

“She won’t be,” I said. I watched Cave leave for the kitchen. Isabel settled back in the chair and stared at me. Jojo peeped at me over his playpen.

“Ba-ba?” he asked.

I got up and walked over to the playpen. “What’s up?” I asked him quietly. “Those your toys?”

He picked up a small stuffed rabbit and held it up to me. “Baba-bah,” he explained.

“I see that,” I said, and took the offered toy.

Then he held a ball at to me. “Bah.”

“Thank you.” I took that too.

Next was a dinosaur, and I laughed. “I’m running out of hands, buddy.”

He dropped the dinosaur and lifted his arms. “Bah?” he asked.

“Up? You want up?”

Clearly, that’s what he wanted. “Um, I’m not sure about that,” I said. “I have never actually picked up a baby, see?”

Cave poked his head back into the room. “Is sugar okay? I don’t think I have honey.”

I nodded, whispering, “Yeah, that’s fine.”

He glanced at Jojo. “Do you want to pick him up? He apparently likes you. I mean, if you’re not contagious?”

“No, this is just vocal strain...but I was just telling him I don’t know how to pick up babies,” I said.

He walked over. “Basically you just lift under the arms, then let him sit in the crook of your elbow. I mean, he’s unbreakable, you’re not going to drop him or anything.”

I peered down into the playpen. Why did I feel this sudden little burst of anxiety? “Are you sure it’ll be okay?”

Cave clapped me on the shoulder. “Trust me, nobody was less prepared to pick up babies than I was, but it’s easy.”

While he walked back into the kitchen, I got my hands around Jojo. “Damn--I mean, dang--you’re heavier than I realized.” When I lifted him up, it wasn’t just his size that surprised me. He was warm. I had worried that he’d be loose like a rag doll, but no, he felt like a little bundle of muscle.

As I cradled him against me, he put his head on my shoulder. “Bah-bah,” he said contentedly.

If Toby could have seen me right then, he would have fucking freaked. The last thing my career needed was the sight of me holding a baby. I bounced a little bit on my heels, and Jojo really seemed to like that. He yawned. “Is it getting late for you?” I asked him in a near-whisper.

What would it have been like, I wondered once again, if I’d stayed in town? Would I have had a kid by now? A dog? Would it have been like this, a cozy little living room where the furniture probably cost less than some of my suits? Would someone have been so comfortable with me that they dozed off in my arms, the way Jojo was doing?

How come it felt both alien and right at the same time?

“See, you’re a natural,” said Cave, coming out with two steaming mugs of tea. He set one on the table by the couch. “You want me to take him?”

“Yeah,” I said, but I kind of didn’t want him to. As I handed Jojo back over, I said, “He smells really good. Wait, is that an okay thing to say about a baby?”

Cave laughed quietly and scooted the dog aside so he could sit down with Jojo. “Yeah, I think that’s valid. I always call it his puppy smell. Although Isabel and he smell completely different.”

“Well, they had different parents,” I offered. The tea was sweet and hot and soothed my throat as it went down.

There was a companionable moment of silence between us. I realized I didn’t know what I wanted to say to him. It felt like there was so much to catch up on, but I again had that weird sense that we simultaneously knew each other well, but had become complete strangers in the intervening years.

“What was it like to stay here in town?” I asked finally.

Cave looked down into his tea. “I’m not sure I have anything to compare it to. I finished school, then went to the community college for a few years. It was...life, you know? Janey had a rough time in school, was always getting in trouble or running away, and that seemed to take up a ton of my time. I worked for the school for a few years, then suddenly there was a baby, and pow, here I am.”

When he looked up, it was with such a humble look that I wanted to reach out and comfort him.

I didn’t, though. Famous pop stars don’t do stuff like that.

“What was it like to leave?” he said, a sort of wistfulness in his voice. “You didn’t get famous right away.”

I shook my head. “No, that was a lot of work. A lot of luck, but also work.”

“I remember you saying you were going to play your guitar out on the streets for money.”

That made me laugh; Isabel perked her ears up, and an obviously sleepy Jojo looked over at me with interest.

“Yeah, so it turns out teenaged me knew nothing about how the world works. I get to the city and...well, like you said, I didn’t have anything to compare it to. The guys on the streets weren’t sensitive artists plunking tunes for money; most of them were really scary, at least to a small-town kid who had never really seen homelessness before.”

“But you made it.”

Jojo cooed and went back to playing. The house was quiet; I heard the ticking of a clock somewhere in the next room. I’d forgotten about this kind of quiet, this Oceanside quiet, as the town goes to sleep. You don’t get that in the city; even in the most well-insulated penthouse suite, you’re always aware of the thrum of the city beneath you, the pounding traffic, a million desperate lives.

“I made it,” I said. “I found a couple of twenty-something singers who took pity on me and let me crash at their place. They helped me get gigs for a while.”

I scowled. The way I usually tell this story is, the two singers got me booked in a club that had an A&R guy for the label visiting that night. He’d hit club after club, night after night, looking for the next thing. You could barely get into the passenger seat of his car, it was so covered in demo CDs. One after another he’d listen to them on his car’s stereo system. Always looking for that special thing, someone who could be shaped and molded into a star.

In the version of the story I tell, I got up to the mic and sang a song I had written, my voice quavering with nerves because they’d told me about the guy in the back of the club, staring and listening. He liked what he heard, and asked me if I had any CDs, and the rest was history.

It felt wrong to lie in front of Cave, someone who had never been anything but honest with me. Wrong to lie in front of Jojo and Isabel.

I chuckled. “I don’t tell this story, usually, but there was this A&R guy--”

“A what?”

“Talent scout for the label. He heard me sing at a club. It was bad, man. I was so nervous I forgot the words. Stood up there all trembling, doing a lot of woo-woo to cover up the fact I had no idea what I was singing. This guy took pity on me, bought me a drink after my set. He said I had something. Said I had potential, but it needed work, and all this time, his hand is on my knee, moving up.”

Cave cast a cautious look over at Jojo. “Oh,” he said.

I took another sip of my tea. It tasted so much better than Toby’s herbal stuff. I chuckled. “That was the deal. He got a 17-year-old boyfriend, I got my foot in the door. Not gonna put that in my autobiography.”

Cave shook his head. “No, I imagine not. But...I mean, it worked, right?”

“Yeah, it did. And all I had to do was sell out my integrity for it. How’s that for a dark secret?”

That made him laugh. “If that’s the darkest secret you’ve got, you’re like the least traumatized person to ever come out of Oceanside. Man, some shit has gone down since you left.”

I smiled. “That’s the crazy thing. It wasn’t traumatic at all. The whole relationship was hush-hush, but it wasn’t bad, you know? He didn’t try to make it seem like it was something it wasn’t. I don’t know if that makes things better or worse, but I could tell myself I was still being true to my art...just taking another route to getting my music out there.”

It’s weird, how easy it was to talk to Cave. In a few minutes, he prepared a night-time bottle for Jojo, and I tagged along, watching him hold and feed the baby.

“He’s so quiet,” I said.

“You should see him when his teeth are bothering him,” whispered Cave, gently rocking Jojo in his arms while the baby took the bottle. “But yeah, he’s good. He’s so different than his mom. Janey was trouble from the day she was born. I remember being kept up nights by her crying. My mom said she had colic. Just scream, scream, scream. When she got older, it wasn’t any better, then the screams were about fighting instead of colic.”

I reached over and touched Jojo’s cheek. It was so strangely soft. Even my softest cashmere didn’t feel like this. “Maybe drama skips a generation,” I said.

“I’m doing all I can to make a drama-free life for him,” Cave said. “You mentioned dark secrets earlier, and it’s hard because all my friends have been through their own dark secrets, they’ve had trauma, bad relationships, abuse, all kinds of awful things. And if you haven’t been through that, you look back on your life and say whew, glad that wasn’t me...but then you have a baby, and all you can think is, I’ve got to protect him from a life like that.”

“No turmoil,” I said.

“I know it can be done. My dad left, and I survived. Jojo’s mom left, and he’ll survive too. I just don’t want him to hurt, you know? I cried so much when my dad left. Maybe he’ll forget Janey ever existed. Maybe he won’t even realize there was a loss in his life.”

I followed Cave and Jojo into the bedroom. I felt a strange trepidation at the doorway. There was Cave’s bed--a twin size, perfectly made, with a brick-red duvet cover. Just enough room for one person, all alone. And next to the bed there was a crib, into which a sleepy Jojo was placed. I don’t know why it felt strange to set foot in this room. There was something lonely about it. No, that was the wrong word, it wasn’t lonely at all. But it excluded anyone who wasn’t family. There wasn’t a place for me here.

That was a strange feeling. In my world, everyone rushed around to make a place for me. Crowds would split, like Moses parting the sea, so I could have a place to sit or lounge.

Not here, though. It felt almost sacred in here.

I heard the tick-tick-tick of small nails on the floor and looked down to see Isabel following them in. She hopped onto the bed and lay where she could see Jojo in the crib.

“She loves him so much, already,” said Cave. “She always wants to be in the same room as him.”

Jojo reached his pudgy little arm out through the bars of the crib, and Isabel sniffed and licked his fingers, which gave him a sleepy smile.

“Night night, little man,” said Cave. He turned off one of the lamps, but let a dimmer light stay on.

When we returned to the living room, I felt conflicted. Yes, this wasn’t a date. I’d been worried it would have that feel, but it didn’t. But nor was it just two guys catching up on old times. We’d hardly talked about high school at all. There was something else here, something I was sure that Cave wasn’t picking up on.

I was...jealous? Is that even the right word? I’m not sure it is. I didn’t begrudge Cave his strangely quiet life. Still, I couldn’t help trying to picture what it would be like, to live like this. This strange overlay, like a ghost world intersecting with my own, a vision of a possible present where I wasn’t a star, where I was just a guy doing normal things.

Was Cave’s life more honest than mine? I’d given him such a hard time during our final conversation as teens, about honesty, about living our truth and how it couldn’t happen here. Now I lived in a world of candy-colored artificiality, where every need of mine was taken care of purely because people liked me. How was that honest? How was it real?

Cave had stayed and had become solid, mature, interesting and stable. I’d become some sort of phantom.

“Can I warm up your tea?” he asked.

Tell me what it’s like, tell me how I can live like this. So many things I wanted to say to him, but instead I just handed him my mug and said thank you. It felt weird to sit in the living room alone, so I followed him back into the kitchen.

“You know, I was thinking, we should have a party,” he said. “So many of the guys from school are here. Do you remember Nat? He wasn’t actually at our school, but he used to come down with all those guys on the weekends?”

“Um...I’m not sure.”

“And Marcus, I know you remember Marcus, he was a couple years behind us.”

“He was the one who kept getting in fights?”

Cave nodded. “That’s him. Lots of guys are still here. We could get everybody together, throw a party, reminisce like we’re a bunch of old fogies--”

He paused and looked at me. His bright face darkened.

“Oh, I’m sorry, that’s a really bad idea, isn’t it?” he said.

“No, no, I mean, under any other circumstances--”

“Sorry, I just wasn’t thinking. You probably can’t just go to parties and things.” He turned away and filled my cup with boiling water, dipping another teabag into it.

“I go to millions of parties. Sometimes that feels like all I ever do. But they’re appearances, and there’s all this scheduling and figuring out who’s going to be there, and...I don’t know, it’s just kind of exhausting. Especially when it’s people who aren’t in the industry. All the questions.”

“No, I totally understand,” said Cave. He handed me the cup and offered a shy smile. “You live in a different world than me. I have to remember that. It’s just, having you here, having you back, it brings up all the old memories, you know?”

I knew. He was thinking of friends in high school, wild rides and late-night conversations and craziness, all the petty vandalism of being a teen.

Meanwhile, I was thinking of the times we’d hidden in the stands of the boardwalk. The kisses we’d stolen when no one was looking.

Cave was so handsome. But his life wasn’t structured for someone like me, and mine wasn’t structured for someone like him. There wasn’t any use in thinking about the past, or the way his smile was so infectious, or...or all the other things I had been thinking about, back in the shower. I shouldn’t have been thinking any of it, not in the same room as him.

If everyone always gives you what you want, you get used to it, really quickly. Things begin happening before you realize you want them, as your staff begins to anticipate your every need.

But suddenly I was in a world where I wasn’t getting anything I wanted. I wanted a break from my music; that wasn’t happening. I wanted to spend more time with Cave; instead, I’d be spending time with Giselle. I wanted something real...and only fake was on offer.

I finished my tea and handed back the mug. “Thanks for all this. I need to get back.”

Cave nodded and walked me to the door. “It’s so strange.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Seeing you this briefly. I mean, I probably won’t see you again, will I? Soon you’ll be out of here, off to make another album or something.”

I blinked. “No, we’ll keep in touch, you’ve got my number, we’ll--”

“You know how that goes,” he said. “What, a couple of awkward calls, and then silence?”

I didn’t want to admit that he was right. But he was. Different worlds, a universe apart. I nodded.

“I want to say something like it was nice to see you again, but that’s so bland that it misses the point entirely.” He looked hesitant.

“I know what you mean. I’m glad I got to come over, though. You and Jojo...you’ve got a good life here, Cave. In a million years, I never thought someone could stay here and be happy. But you’ve done it.”

We were standing so close together. “I’ll admit this,” he said to me. “I never thought you’d make it out there. I thought for sure you’d be back in a week, in a month. I was so mad at you for leaving. I wanted you to come back, all humbled and sorry for abandoning us. Abandoning me.”

The words were so simple, so honest. I didn’t want to leave. I knew I had to, but I didn’t want to. “I wish you had come with me back then,” I said, my voice little more than a whisper.

“If I had, you never would have met your talent scout guy. I would’ve been jealous and kept you apart. Isn’t that funny? If we’d been together, you’d still be playing in little clubs or something. I guess things worked out.”

There was something going on between us, something a lifetime of sugary pop love songs hadn’t given me the vocabulary to describe. A whole history that we hadn’t really dealt with, we’d just covered it up with a decade and a half of getting on with life.

“I guess they did work out,” I said.

His hand came up and touched my cheek. I moved closer to him. He bent forward and kissed me. It was soft, just the warmth of his lips against mine, the briefest kiss.

Then he looked at me. “Goodbye, Ransom. If I don’t see you again, I hope you have a good life out there. I hope you get your voice back.”

I was almost too overcome to speak. Finally, I nodded. “Appreciate what you have here, Cave. You’re the realest person I’ve ever met.”

The ride back to the suite was dark and silent, my thoughts clouded by memory. I touched my finger to my lips, traced where he had kissed me.

I wasn’t ready to go back yet. I wasn’t ready to return to my artificial world.