Chapter 11: Sunset Sessions
The London rain had seeped into his bones. Back in Los Angeles, the relentless, sterile sunshine felt like a lie. Matthew’s house, a monument to curated calm and professional success, was suddenly a cavern of echoes. The silence here was different from Robert’s chaotic flat; it was accusatory, filled with the ghost of a decision he could no longer take back.
Platinum discs gleamed from the walls. A sleek, dustless grand piano dominated the living room. This was the empire he’d built after Fusion4, after Ryan. It was all he was supposed to want. He stood before the blank space on the wall, the one where the four of them, frozen in neon and denim, used to smile. He’d taken it down years ago, a symbolic burial. Now, he was digging the coffin back up.
Kelly had moved with predatory speed. Contracts were being drafted. A first rehearsal was scheduled. A press release timeline glowed on his iPad, a countdown to a past he’d tried to forget. His only task now, before the circus began, was to deliver a demo for a new Fusion4 single. A “reunion anthem.” The words tasted like ash.
He sat at the piano for hours. His fingers, which could coax heartbreak from a minor chord for Robert’s rock ballads, found only trite progressions. Everything he played sounded like a derivative of their old stuff, or worse, a hollow imitation of current pop. He tried to write lyrics. “Coming back together” sounded like a glue commercial. “Second chance” made him think of Ryan’s mouth, which was entirely unhelpful.
The professional part of his mind, the cold, analytical producer, was locked in a cage. All he could hear was the whisper of rain in London, the finality in his own voice saying “I’m in,” and the spectral echo of a laugh from twenty years ago.
Frustration was a tight coil in his chest. He poured a whiskey, neat, and watched the amber liquid catch the afternoon light. He thought of calling Sara, but he couldn’t bear her effusive gratitude. Marie would just demand a club banger. Robert… he’d sent Robert a breezy text about landing safely and gotten a heart emoji and a photo of the band in the studio. The distance felt continental, and of his own making.
His thumb hovered over his contacts. It found the name before his brain could veto it. The text was professional, a lifeline thrown from a sinking ship.
Matthew (4:18 PM): Hitting a wall with the new track. Can’t find the tone. Any chance you’re free to brainstorm? Like old times.
The three dots appeared, vanished, reappeared.
Ryan (4:19 PM): Old times? You mean with cheap vodka and Sara’s shitty vegan snacks?
A faint, real smile touched Matthew’s lips.
Matthew (4:20 PM): I have proper Scotch. And real chips.
Ryan (4:20 PM): Be there in 20.
The next nineteen minutes were an exercise in manic tidying. He wasn’t sure why. He straightened already-straight magazines, adjusted the angle of a remote control, emptied and re-filled the ice bucket. He changed his shirt. Then changed it back. The doorbell rang, a soft chime that sounded like a verdict.
Ryan stood on the step, the Hollywood sun haloing his blonde hair. He wore a simple grey henley and jeans, a canvas gym bag slung over one shoulder. He looked like he’d just come from a run, or maybe a scene on the soap where his character comforted a grieving lover. The easy, accessible charm was turned all the way up.
“Hey,” Ryan said, that familiar, slightly lopsided grin on his face. “Rescuing you from creative doom. Just like old times.”
“Just like old times,” Matthew echoed, his voice a bit tight. He stepped aside. “Come in.”
Ryan walked in, his eyes scanning the room. “Whoa. Okay, this is different. The Fusion4 crash pad was literally falling apart. This place looks like a spaceship that sterilizes things.” He put his bag down by the sofa. “Nice, though. Very you.”
“Very me,” Matthew said, closing the door. The click was deafening. The spacious room suddenly felt like the interior of a car. “Drink?”
“Scotch. You promised.”
Matthew busied himself with glasses, ice, the deliberate ritual of pouring. He could feel Ryan’s presence behind him, a warm, solid disturbance in the cool, controlled air. He handed Ryan a glass. Their fingers brushed. A static shock, or maybe just memory, jumped between them.
“So,” Ryan said, leaning against the kitchen island. “The wall. What’s it made of?”
“Nostalgia. And fear of being irrelevant,” Matthew said, taking a fortifying sip. “I can’t find the sound. It can’t be 2003. But ‘mature pop’ just sounds boring.”
Ryan nodded, swirling his drink. He wasn’t looking at the piano or the view. He was looking at Matthew. “What did we sound like, back then? Really?”
Matthew met his gaze. “Youthful. Terrified. Horny as hell. We were singing about emotions we barely understood.”
“And now we understand them?” Ryan asked, a wry edge to his voice.
“Now we’re just better at hiding them.” The words hung there, too true, too heavy for a writing session.
Ryan pushed off the island. He walked to the piano, set his glass on the lid. He tapped a single key, a middle C. The note reverberated in the quiet. “We wrote ‘Upside Down’ on a beat-up keyboard in Sara’s garage. You had that chord progression, and I just started humming that dumb, soaring melody over it.” He played the first four notes of the iconic hook. Da-da-da-dum. “It worked because we were just… exuding it. The song was already in the room.”
Matthew remembered. The garage smelled of motor oil and damp concrete. Ryan had been wearing a white tank top, sweat at the hollow of his throat. The crush was a physical ache. He’d poured it into the lyrics, a code only they would ever know.
“The room is different now,” Matthew said softly.
Ryan turned to face him, leaning back against the piano. “Is it?”
The air compressed. The professional pretense, the ‘like old times’ safety net, frayed and snapped. There was only the space between them, charged with every unspoken thing from the beach, from the bedroom, from two decades of silent wondering. Matthew saw the flicker in Ryan’s eyes, the same shift from casual to concentrated that he remembered from a hundred stolen moments.
Matthew’s glass found the countertop with a thud he didn’t hear. He crossed the room in three long strides. He didn’t kiss him. He didn’t speak. He grabbed the hem of Ryan’s henley and in one rough, decisive motion, pulled it up and over his head.
Ryan’s breath hitched, a sharp intake. The fabric caught for a second on his chin, then was gone, discarded on the polished floor. He was just… there. Chest bare, skin tan and smooth over defined muscle, a faint dusting of blond hair. The boy was still there in his eyes, but the man’s body was a revelation.
No words. Ryan’s hands came up, cupping Matthew’s face, his thumbs stroking his cheekbones with a tenderness that broke something open. Then his mouth was on Matthew’s, hot and hungry and knowing. It wasn’t the frantic, secret kiss of kids in a supply closet. This was a claiming. A homecoming to a place Matthew had tried to forget ever existed.
Matthew fumbled with the button of Ryan’s jeans, his usual dexterity gone. Ryan laughed, a low, breathy sound against his lips, and helped, shucking them and his briefs down in one push. He stepped out of the puddle of denim, gloriously, unabashedly naked in Matthew’s pristine living room. The afternoon light gilded the lines of his hips, the long muscle of his thighs.
“You’re thinking too much,” Ryan murmured, his own hands pulling Matthew’s shirt apart, buttons pinging and skittering across the hardwood. “Stop producing. Just feel.”
He pushed Matthew back towards the large, low-backed sofa. Matthew’s knees hit the cushions and he tumbled down, Ryan following, a warm, heavy weight settling over him. Skin met skin, a shocking, seamless heat. It was an electric catalog of familiarity and newness: the remembered scent of him, deeper now; the specific texture of the scar on his shoulder from a long-ago stage fall; the power in his back under Matthew’s palms that the teenage Ryan hadn’t possessed.
Ryan kissed his neck, his collarbone, his chest. His mouth was everywhere, leaving a trail of fire. Matthew arched up, his fingers tangling in Ryan’s hair, a groan torn from his throat. It was messy, and urgent, and devoid of the performative quality that had poisoned his last night with Robert. This was raw, unprocessed need, two decades in the making.
Ryan sat back on his haunches, looking down at Matthew, his eyes dark. “Tell me what you want.”
“You,” Matthew said, the word stripped bare. “Just you.”
Ryan reached for the gym bag he’d dumped by the sofa. He pulled out a small bottle of lube. “Came prepared,” he said with a ghost of the old grin. “Optimist.”
The laugh that burst from Matthew was half-sob. Then Ryan’s slick fingers were on him, at him, and thought dissolved into sensation. The stretch burned, a bright, clarifying pain that erased every other doubt. He was present, fully, devastatingly anchored in this moment, on this sofa, with this man.
Ryan entered him slowly, his face a mask of intense concentration, a vein throbbing in his temple. “God, Matt,” he whispered, forehead dropping to Matthew’s shoulder as he sheathed himself completely. “Still… still so perfect.”
They found a rhythm that was both foreign and innate. It wasn’t polished. It was clumsy with passion, their hips snapping together, the sofa creaking in protest. Matthew wrapped his legs around Ryan’s waist, pulling him deeper, wanting to erase all space, all time. He watched Ryan’s face—the flutter of his eyelashes, the parted lips, the sheer, unguarded ecstasy—and felt a terrifying power. He had done this. He had put that look there.
The climax built not as a slow wave, but as a sudden detonation. It started deep in Matthew’s gut and ripped outward, tearing a ragged cry from his throat. His body seized, convulsing around Ryan, pulling his own release from him. Ryan shouted, a raw, unfiltered sound, his body locking and shuddering as he buried his face in Matthew’s neck.
The silence that followed was thick, swimming with the smell of sex and sweat and Scotch. Ryan’s weight was a boneless, comforting heap. Matthew’s hand came up, stroking the damp skin of his back, feeling the frantic beat of his heart begin to slow.
Ryan finally shifted, pulling out with a wince and collapsing beside him on the couch. They lay there, tangled, breathing in the ruin of the afternoon. Sunlight had moved across the floor, now catching the discarded clothes.
Ryan turned his head on the cushion. He looked dazed, satiated, young. “Well,” he breathed, a puff of air against Matthew’s cheek. “That’s one way to break writer’s block.”
Matthew closed his eyes. A laugh, watery and weak, escaped him. The tension was gone, replaced by a liquid, heavy warmth that seeped into his marrow. For the first time since Kelly had mentioned the reunion, the frantic, scattered feeling was gone. He was, horribly and wonderfully, in one piece.
He felt Ryan’s finger trace a line from his sternum to his navel. “Seriously, though,” Ryan said, his voice soft. “I think I heard a melody.”
Matthew opened his eyes. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. In the… timing. The breath. Right at the end.” Ryan propped himself up on an elbow, looking down at him. His expression was open, creative, alight. “It was… urgent. But happy. A release.” He hummed a fragment, a simple, ascending line. It was good. It was them.
Matthew reached up, pulled him down for a kiss, slow and deep and tasting of salt. The demo, the tour, Robert, Jonathan—it all receded, a distant storm on the horizon. Here, in the warm wreckage of his living room, there was only this: the press of Ryan’s lips, the seed cooling on his stomach, and a terrifying, glorious sense of having finally come home to a house he’d spent twenty years building without a door.
Here, in the warm wreckage of his living room, there was only this: the press of Ryan’s lips, the seed cooling on his stomach, and a terrifying, glorious sense of having finally come home to a house he’d spent twenty years building without a door.
Ryan’s humming fragment lingered in the air between them. “You hear it?” he asked, his voice rough.
“I hear it,” Matthew whispered. He caught Ryan’s wandering hand. “Studio. Now. Before we lose it.”
They disentangled, a slow, sticky separation. Matthew pulled on his boxer briefs. Ryan stepped into his own, the grey cotton sitting low on his hips. They left their shirts and jeans in a pile on the floor, a monument to the interruption. Padding barefoot down the cool hallway, they were two shadows in the fading afternoon light, guided by the faint, magnetic pull of a melody.
Matthew’s studio was a sanctuary of dark wood and soft grey foam. He woke the system with a touch. The monitors glowed to life. Ryan gravitated immediately to the old MIDI keyboard in the corner, the one modern piece among vintage outboard gear. He tapped out the sequence he’d hummed. Da-da-da-dum-dum.
The simple notes connected something in Matthew’s brain. He sat at the main console, his hands flying over the controls. “Okay, transpose it up a third. Add a sixteenth-note pulse underneath. Like a heartbeat.” A low, synthetic thump filled the room. Thu-thump. Thu-thump.
“Yes,” Ryan said, his eyes alight. He began to improvise a harmony over the top, his voice clear and sure. “Feels like coming up for air… after years down there…”
Matthew recorded the vocal snippet, looped it. The room began to vibrate with a skeleton of sound. It was exhilarating. This was the alchemy he remembered from Sara’s garage, the silent shorthand where a glance communicated a key change. Ryan would lean over his shoulder to point at a level on the screen, his bare chest warm against Matthew’s back, and the scent of him—sex and soap and familiarity—would short-circuit Matthew’s concentration completely.
“That drum fill is crap,” Ryan laughed, his chin hooked over Matthew’s shoulder. “You’ve gone soft.”
“Says the soap opera heartthrob,” Matthew shot back, but he was grinning. He deleted the fill. His fingers found Ryan’s thigh, resting there.
They worked for twenty minutes, maybe thirty. It wasn’t terribly productive. Every correction led to a touch. Every good idea was celebrated with a kiss. Matthew would turn from the console and Ryan would be there, mouth waiting, hands framing his face. The track played on a loop, their nascent anthem, as they rediscovered the taste of each other’s shoulders, the line of a jaw, the softness behind an ear.
Finally, Matthew spun his chair around, catching Ryan by the hips. The music was a percussive throb around them. “Stay,” he said, the word leaving him as a command, not a question.
Ryan stilled, his playful smile softening. “What about Jonathan?”
“What about him?”
“He’s at a silent yoga retreat in Topanga. No phones until Sunday.” Ryan’s thumbs stroked Matthew’s hip bones. “So I’m… theoretically free.”
A wave of something dark and possessive surged through Matthew. He pushed it down. He stood, pulling Ryan with him, away from the blinking lights and the looping track. “Then stay.”
They migrated to the bedroom, a quiet procession. The frantic energy of the living room and the studio had burned away, leaving a deeper, quieter current. The sheets were cool and crisp. This time, there was no hurry.
Matthew mapped the territory of Ryan’s body with a reverence he hadn’t allowed himself earlier. The silver scar on the knee from a music video mishap. The faint line across his abdomen from an appendectomy. Ryan, in turn, was achingly gentle, his touches lingering, his kisses landing like promises. When they joined, it was with a slow, deep certainty that carved a space inside Matthew far more profound than any physical act. This wasn’t about breaking a wall. It was about building a bridge, fragile and new, over a canyon of years.
Afterward, Matthew rested his head on Ryan’s bare chest, listening to the strong, steady rhythm of his heart. The ceiling fan turned in a lazy circle above them. Ryan’s hand stroked his hair, his fingers occasionally catching in the sweat-dampened strands.
Matthew’s gaze drifted to the nightstand. A silver frame held a photo of him and Robert on the cliffs of Dover, windswept and laughing. Robert’s arm was thrown around his neck, pulling him close in a headlock of affection.
Ryan’s hand paused. “He’s handsome,” Ryan said quietly. His tone was careful, neutral.
Matthew closed his eyes against the photo. “He is. He’s brilliant. When he’s in a room, he owns the air in it. He makes me feel… exciting. Like I’m on tour with him even when I’m just doing taxes.”
“But?”
Matthew let out a long, slow breath. “But he’s always leaving. Or I am. The longest we’ve lived in the same city was four months while I produced Chiaroscuro. His home is the tour bus, the green room, the adrenaline. Mine is this.” He gestured vaguely at the quiet, ordered room. “I want a partner. He wants a spectacular port in the storm.”
Ryan resumed stroking his hair. The rhythm was soothing, hypnotic. “You deserve someone who sees you as the destination, Matt. Not a pit stop.”
The words hung in the dark, precise and devastating. The unspoken part vibrated between them: I see you. I am here. I am the one who stayed, even though I left first.
Matthew knew it. He heard it in the silence, felt it in the steady hand on his head. He didn’t reply. He just turned his face into Ryan’s chest, breathing him in, as the ghost of Robert smiled whitely from the bedside table, oblivious to the fracture growing in the foundation of his world.
He just turned his face into Ryan’s chest, breathing him in, as the ghost of Robert smiled whitely from the bedside table, oblivious to the fracture growing in the foundation of his world. Sleep, when it finally came, was a deep and dreamless void.
Morning arrived as a sharp blade of sunlight cutting between the blinds. Matthew awoke to cold, empty sheets. The scent of Ryan—a mix of his shampoo and skin—still clung to the pillow. A hollow thump echoed in Matthew’s chest. He heard the faint clink of china from the kitchen.
Pulling on a robe, he found Ryan at the counter, already dressed in last night’s clothes, nursing a mug of coffee. He looked like a beautiful intruder.
“Hey,” Ryan said, his voice morning-rough. “Made coffee. Didn’t want to wake you.”
“You’re leaving.” It wasn’t a question.
“Jonathan’s retreat ends tomorrow.” Ryan wouldn’t meet his eyes, focusing instead on the steam rising from his mug. “I should… you know. Be there when he gets home.”
The domesticity of it was a small, precise slap. Matthew nodded, busying himself with his own coffee. The silence stretched, thick and awkward, a stark contrast to the seamless intimacy of the night.
“So,” Ryan finally said, putting his mug down with a decisive click. “Last night.”
“Yeah.”
“It wasn’t just breaking the block, was it?”
Matthew looked at him then. Ryan’s expression was unreadable, a professional mask slipping into place, but his eyes held a desperate hope. “No,” Matthew said, the word simple and absolute. “It wasn’t.”
Something in Ryan’s posture softened. He crossed the room, stopping a foot away. He didn’t touch him. “Good. Okay. That’s… I’ll see you at rehearsal next week, then.”
“Rehearsal. Right.” The professional reality descended like a gate.
Ryan leaned in, quick and final, brushing his lips against Matthew’s cheek. The touch was feather-light, agonizingly chaste. “Bye, Matt.”
The front door closed with a soft, conclusive sigh. Matthew stood in the sunlit silence of his kitchen, the ghost of the kiss burning on his skin. He listened to the sound of a car engine starting, fading, disappearing into the hum of the city.
He washed the two coffee mugs by hand, slowly, methodically. He showered, the water scalding. He dressed in fresh clothes. The house felt cavernous, each room echoing with the memory of Ryan’s laughter, his humming, the rhythm of his breath. He bypassed the living room, with its rumpled sofa, and went straight to the studio.
The track from last night was still on the screen, the looped vocal snippet repeating. Feels like coming up for air… He sank into his chair, put on his headphones, and pressed play.
The music flooded in, but now it was just a skeleton. It needed flesh, blood, a nervous system. He closed his eyes, and instead of searching for chord progressions, he searched for sensations. The specific weight of Ryan’s body pinning him to the sofa. The shocking softness of the skin at his hip under Matthew’s thumb. The low, wrecked sound he’d made as he’d fallen apart.
His fingers moved to the synth, pulling out a warm, pulsing bassline that mimicked a heartbeat. He layered it with a shimmering, crystalline arpeggio that felt like the Los Angeles sun catching the dust motes in his living room. The hopeful part. Then he added a lower, dissonant counter-melody on a muted guitar patch—a subtle, throbbing undercurrent of doubt. The uncertainty.
He wasn’t writing a Fusion4 song. He was writing their song. A secret confession in a major key. Ryan had always been the silent partner in his greatest hits. The aching, yearning bridge in that ballad for the indie folk singer? That was the hollow left when Ryan walked away. The defiant, soaring chorus of Robert’s biggest single? That was the armor he’d built to survive it.
He worked for hours, lost in the viscosity of memory and music. He didn’t think about Jonathan’s silent yoga, or Robert’s unread texts piling up on his phone. He thought about the freckle just below Ryan’s collarbone. The way his voice cracked on a high note when he was tired. The feeling, twenty years ago and last night, of being utterly, terribly known.
By late afternoon, he had it. A three-minute-and-forty-second panorama of feeling. It started sparse and tentative, built to a euphoric, danceable drop that felt like a racing heart, then broke down into a vulnerable, stripped-bare bridge before rallying for a final, glorious chorus that was more question than statement. He titled the file AIRLOCK.zip. A sealed environment. A transitional space between two worlds.
He attached it to an email for Kelly. The body was one line: First pass. Thoughts?
He hit send. The whoosh sound was like a lock clicking shut.
His phone rang barely ninety seconds later. Kelly’s name flashed on the screen.
“Matthew Scott, you beautiful bastard,” her voice crackled, loud enough he had to hold the phone away from his ear. “What is this? What did you do?”
“I did my job,” he said, his own voice feeling scratchy from disuse.
“This isn’t a job. This is a goddamn resurrection. It’s fresh, it’s got that old-school melodic hook, but it doesn’t sound like a museum piece. The label is going to lose their minds. I’m forwarding it right now.”
He could hear her typing furiously. “So we’re on?”
“We are so on. Studio time is booked at Capitol starting Monday. The whole gang. Get ready to make a very loud, very expensive noise.” She paused. “You sound weird. You okay?”
Matthew looked out the studio window at the purple-orange smear of sunset over the hills. He thought of Ryan walking into Jonathan’s house, of Robert on a stage in Munich or Madrid, of a photograph in a drawer. The hopeful bassline thumped in his memory, intertwined with the dissonant guitar of doubt.
“I’m perfect,” he said.