Big City Lights

I didn’t go into the green room until after Ozean Horizon started playing. I couldn’t face Kiia so quickly after what Tony had said. I knew better than to try to talk my way out of something when the emotions were so high, albeit avoiding Richie for almost seven years was maybe taking this to an extreme. The crowd reaction was incredible during their opening song. 20,000 screaming fans was more than enough penance for Kiia’s temporary wound.

Tony didn’t apologize for running his mouth before he left, even though it was clear he regretted saying too much. I was hoping that he was going to pitch a Beyond the Realms reunion with all of us together again. I don’t know why I wanted that. What I said to Richie was true.

After our fourth album and our sixth arena tour, Borgen took Tony and I aside with lucrative contracts to launch our solo careers, talking about how with lower costs and more artistic control, we would be able to reach a much larger audience. I didn’t want to leave BTR, but the offer of tens of millions of dollars a year and full creative control over my music was alluring. Tony had a similar offer for about half of what I was offered financially, but it was still more than ten times what we were making before.

My only regret was that we didn’t know Borgen wasn’t offering Richie a solo deal. The way the negotiations were worded, it seemed like we were all getting the same opportunity from Twilight Reverie. After we signed, and the details around the albums and tours were announced, Richie found out that his band was coming to an end from a social media post. He was helpless and fuming.

Borgen extended him an olive branch to join an established arena-level band that paid about the same as BTR. Despite ending up better off than most, the damage had been done. His trust in his childhood friends was gone, and when I jumped to playing 60,000+ seat stadiums with another emerging pop star, the envy yielded something wicked inside of him.

We never spoke about it, and that ate away at me until tonight.

I got the cue from the stage manager to make my way out to the stage. I wasn’t doing anything fancy like NYE this time. I was simply going to grab my strat and join them for the encore.

At the end of the tunnel to the stage, I saw Kiia, dressed in her typical black jeans and black shirt. The rest of the band must have gone the other way since she was alone.

“Sorry about earlier,” I said from less than a yard behind her. “We can talk more in depth about what Tony said.”

“We don’t need to,” she said, focused. “I already knew you weren’t the same person you were back then. We’re fine.”

I didn’t need to say anything more as the stage lights came back on.

I started walking out once she had made it to the center of the stage, a second roar from the crowd for my arrival.

We jumped straight into Invisible, and it felt different. They had pulled the tempo up a bit from how we had played it at the last show. I wasn’t worried about it.

After the harmonies in the first chorus, I took a page out of my old playbook as I leaned over the crowd and swung my guitar over my head; my fresh sweat spraying onto the front row. After seeing Richie and Tony, I felt like I owed OH a genuine Cy Rondeau performance. I played off of Kiia’s body language as the second verse continued before climbing the drum riser and doing a parkour flip over Nate to a massive pop from the crowd.

After we harmonized the second chorus, I caught Kiia off guard by slinging my guitar over my shoulder and taking the microphone off the stand. Seeing that she was less than six feet from me, I moved over and wrapped the microphone arm through her strumming arm, turned back to back with her, and leaned my head over her shoulder as I did the bridge as a belting run.

As we transitioned to the solo I signaled to the sound team to cut the mic remotely before tossing it to a stage hand behind the drums. I swung my guitar back to the front and continued to push into Kiia’s personal space with our faces a foot apart as we traded licks and vibrato.

The crowd was going out of their minds as Kiia was showing all kinds of new emotions they had never seen before as she tried to stay a step ahead of my provocations.

As the music died down she tried to say something to me, but it was indecipherable over the roar of the audience.

The riff to Skeletons filled the arena with sound as the whole venue kept feeding off the energy we were putting out.

I played this song a little safer, only doing a handful of interactions with the rest of the band. I gave Kiia more space to be herself this time, but I made a mistake with that.

During an instrumental break she found her way to me on stage left, getting into my personal space this time. Several tempting, diabolical thoughts ran through my mind, but I remembered we were directly in the public eye, and making a bold declaration like that would be a mistake.

As the song ended, the lights went down and the lingering echoes of the song’s fermata eventually faded out. The rest of the band had long since made their way to the green room and most of the fans had made their way out onto Causeway.

Kiia was tugging on my shirt while we were with the others, trying to find a dark corner without anyone around.

Once the rest of the band had disappeared, we were standing closer than we were on stage. I felt my heart race and my breath shorten as I let her set the pace.

She tugged again, hesitant but determined, and the quiet in her eyes told me everything she hadn’t said since Providence.

She had me pinned to the wall letting her tongue explore every crevice of my mouth. I knew there was so much we wanted to say to each other, but while our minds didn’t work we let our bodies communicate for us.

For a moment, it was relief. It was clarity. It was everything I wasn’t sure I deserved.