The next few weeks flew by rather quickly. Things started to fall into their routines once I finally “recovered” from the tour. The biggest change was that I begrudgingly started to hit the gym with my personal trainer on a daily basis once again. That cougar left me aching and too tired to move for the first few days. All I could do was go home and plop down on my couch afterwards as I tried not to grimace at every last motion my body had to make. But, my body began to catch up to the punishment soon enough, and by the end of the first week I was starting to get back into shape.

Andy and I kept up our normal gym time on Wednesdays and Sundays as well. He was getting back into the swing of things just as I was, slowly but surely. After a few sessions he was running just as long as I was once again which made me happy to see. And I rewarded him one day for his hard work with a quick screwing after the gym. I still had a little energy left from my ‘day off’, and I figured he at least earned a quickie for his hard work. And, I hadn’t really been seeing anyone that week since I hurt so much, so I was a little backed up.

It was nice spending time with someone who wasn’t part of the band again. Not that I didn’t miss the guys I suppose, but after seeing them continuously for more than a year straight we were all totally up for a break. And Andy was so different from the rest of my band mates that it was a rather welcome change. Then again, there were still some times that I could still pass on his company.

I felt a little bad for not going to his big disc golf tournament and “supporting” him one weekend. It was just SO boring… like watching actual golf. So much dead time, so much staring at nothing… and so much watching other people I didn’t care about throw frisbees into trees. I’d gone before, but even the nice outdoors couldn’t sway me this time. So, I kind of lied a bit and said I had a meeting with my agent at that time. I said that he was only in town for this Saturday and needed to meet with me face to face. I didn’t feel great about if of course, but I knew I’d be much happier telling a little white lie to get out of this if I could.

Andy was obviously disappointed, but I told him I’d be there in spirit and gave him a kiss on the cheek for good luck. That seemed to hold him over at least until he left. That left me free to call up another fuckbuddy of mine. And, since I said I was gonna be heading out anyway, I was ready to pay someone like him a nice little visit.

But, of course, after I sedated myself with the hard sex we had I was back at the bunny’s place right before he showed up to welcome him back with open paws. He hadn’t won this time though, and that kind of bummed him out. He took me through just about every hole of the game, and got into intense detail about how he could’ve done better. But, I dunno, a 5th place finish in such a big tournament certainly didn’t seem too bad to me. Then again, if my band was just opening up for a few bigger acts instead of headlining… I could see his disappointment. But, I made sure to comfort him as we snuggled up and watched a movie for the rest of the night. And, by the end of it all he seemed okay. We even went out to the same course the next day and he shot a much better round, beating me by… well… a lot.

As much as I loved not having to think about music or keep my voice in shape for touring, I knew it was going to be coming back soon enough though. And when Rob called me up one day wanting to discuss a few song lyrics he penned while he was going through some tour drug withdrawal, I knew it was time to get into gear once again. After meeting with him and going over a few songs worth of material I was starting to feel the itch to get back to writing something myself. It wasn’t long before I strapped up my guitar on a slow day and started to pull out those old riffs and melodies I’d stored away.

They were still rather rough and unrefined, so I took a few days worth of time to really iron out a few kinks and start to put a song or two together. Of course, once my ideas met the band they were bound to get shifted around, altered, and probably even deleted outright. I’ve learned to have a bit of thick skin when it came to such edits though. MOST of the time they were for the benefit of the band, and we did come up with something better sounding and more together at the end. And, of course, I was quick to rearrange and skewer Dennis’ and Tommy’s ideas as well, so the feeling was mutual.

But, I still needed to have something show them when we finally met up for band practice once again. Of course, I could just sit there in a room all by myself and hammer out the details, which I did for the most part. But, come the weekend, when Andy was over, I welcomed the help. It was nice to bounce ideas off someone else at least, and he really helped out on the drums as I was getting the tempo of songs settled away.

Andy was no Rob when it came to drums. Hell, he wasn’t exactly what I’d call a decent drummer at all to be rather blunt about it. But, as his instrument of choice, he did the best he could at it. And it was usually enough to at least get the job done for what I needed. Nothing fancy, no frills, just a nice little beat to go along with the music.

People don’t realize just how important the drums and tempo are to a song. You can write the greatest riff in the world, but playing it with a snare hit on every fourth beat, every second beat, or every single beat changes the feel of it drastically. That was the main focus today as I locked both Andy and myself in my small basement studio until we could iron out the details of the 4 or 5 songs I had on my plate.

It was a good plan in theory, but the thing about music is that it can get rather… frustrating when things don’t come together like you hope they will. And, with me and the rabbit in the small room, with his limited skills on the drums, the frustration was quickly bubbling up as we did take after take.

I stopped my playing for probably the tenth time with a heavy huff, hitting the body of my guitar with a softly clenched paw as the rabbit missed his mark again. I turned to him with a little glare and he soon stopped playing as well. He knew quickly what he’d done as he gave me a little sorry look back.

“I said, we’re gonna go with that beat from before until we hit the fill,” I added in, clearly getting annoyed. I spat out a bit of drummer talk to represent the fill as I waved my arms, representing what the rabbit should be hitting. “And THEN we’re going to switch it to that slower beat for the pre-chorus. You know, the one with that double bass thing you were doing earlier…”

Andy just lets out a soft sigh as he slowly twirls one of the sticks around in his paw, nodding gently as he looks up at me. “I was just kinda messing around for that double bass thing… I don’t think I can really do it that fast and keep up…”

I let out another heavy frustrated sigh at that, slowly walking over to the computer mic and opening a new file on the computer to record it in. I gave the mic a test before saying quickly, “Song 3 pre-chorus drum beat…” Once I was rolling I did my best to beatbox what Andy played earlier while doing my best to play guitar over it. It all came out rather sloppy and mismatched, but at least the idea was down so I wouldn’t forget it.

Once I was finished I listened back to it, figured it would be good enough, and gave the rabbit another annoyed look. “Next time, if you can’t do something, tell me after the first take before we have to do it twelve times in a row with no hope of getting it right.”

There was a firm bit of anger in my tone at this point as the rabbit just shrunk down into his drummer’s stool a little bit. His face went flat and his ears flattened to be even more floppy on top of his head. “Sorry Rick,” he says back with another weak twirl of the drumstick in his paw. But, his paw fumbled the stick as he tried to do it again, dropping it down into the drum set's maze of chrome plated hardware. He bends down to slowly pick it up, and as he comes back up his own normally quite quiet and submissive voice seems to have a little edge to it as well. “I’m just trying to help out you know…”

I let out a frustrated grumble as I stared back at the rabbit. My only thoughts at this second are all his screw ups to be honest, and not really the things he’s actually been helping me with. And that was a long and ever growing list. We had five songs to go over, and we were only on the third one after at least three hours of being trapped in this tiny room. Songwriting was a slow process, sure, but for something simple like the tempo it shouldn’t take THIS long.

“Yes, I know,” I finally said back, not quite believing it myself as I shifted my weight onto my other foot and put both paws on top of my guitar. “Just would help more if you stopped fucking up every take is all.”

Of course it came out a lot rougher than I had intended it to. The tone on my voice even making the rabbit flinch a good bit as those words hit his large ears. I felt a little bad as those words hit my own ears too, but it did feel REALLY good to get some frustration out like that. And that refreshing feeling quickly covered up my tiny and whimpering conscience as I stood there and took a few deep breaths to try and relax just a bit.

“Man, you don’t have to say it like that,” he adds back, his own normally soft and subby voice quickly getting an edge to it as well as he gives a firm hit against the rim of the snare drum with a stick. “You can be kind of a dick for a boyfriend, ya know?”

I don’t know exactly what it was, but everything just kind of came together right at that point as I felt my frustration, anger, and every other negative emotion I could think of bubble up and merge into one intense flow of rage. The rabbit knew that the word ‘boyfriend’ was a tense topic between me and him. Most of the time we just kind of glossed over the fact and didn’t bring it up. I let Andy believe whatever he wanted to believe, and I believed what I wanted to believe. Whether he brought it up just to get under my skin again, or it was just an off the cuff add in I wasn’t sure. But, I don’t think either of us were really expecting what came out of my mouth in response to it.

It burst forth from my head and out of my lips before my mind even had time to catch up. The rest of my body followed up behind it as I quickly took a few powerful steps over to the drum set. I stared the rabbit in the eyes the whole time as my lips snarled a little bit while I shouted out, “I’m NOT your boyfriend! I’ve never been your boyfriend! And I’m never gonna BE your boyfriend! So get that shit out of your head and just play the fuckin’ drums half way decently so we can get the fuck out of here!”

I’m not exactly sure what I really expected the bunny to do as I sat there breathing deeply, the adrenaline still surging through my veins as my eyes focused firmly on his face, waiting for a reaction. Perhaps I was just expecting him to do what he does normally. Just sit there and take it - not having enough balls to stand up for himself. But, I could tell something finally snapped inside of him too at that point. His eyes starting to glare firmly back up at mine as he slams the sticks down hard into the snare drum and stands up, knocking the drum stool back and over. He narrows his gaze at me even more as he quickly yells back, “You know what? Fuck you Rick. After all the shit I do for you… after all the effort I put in… after all that time waiting for you to get home… and all you do is treat me like shit. You think I don’t know what the fuck you do most of the time? You think I really believed you had to meet your agent last Saturday? I knew you were off fucking some bitch instead of just fucking showing up and supporting me for SOMETHING for a change…”

At this point the rabbit had pulled himself from behind the drums. He didn’t exactly come up chest to chest with me to confront me - his sudden dominance only going so far. But he wasn’t done yelling though as he pushed past me a bit, almost tripping over a cable on the ground before catching himself and spinning around right by the door. “Well fuck you. I’m done waiting, I’m done pretending then. I thought things might be different this time after such a long tour and time apart, but you’re still the same dick you’ve always been. You don’t want to be my boyfriend? Fine. Then I guess you can fucking go to hell!” He suddenly twists his back to me before quickly turning the knob on the big soundproofed door and stepping out, slamming it shut nice and hard behind him.

The echo of the slam, even in the tightly sound controlled room I was in, was still loud as it rang in my shocked and surprised head for a good few moments. Soon though it was taken over by the ambient hum of the guitar amp as I just stared back at that door like an idiot, frozen in what I’d just seen and heard from the rabbit.

He’d flipped out before, but never quite this badly. I’d never quite seen him go so far and say so much, so it took my mind a few moments to actually catch up and process everything. But, when I did I felt another heavy surge of anger rush up through me. I pounded a fist on my guitar body and gripped my other paw hard around the neck. It would’ve been absolutely perfect just to take that guitar, slide it off my neck, and slam it down hard into the floor at that point, beating it to a woody pulp until I could get this burst of rage out. But, me and this guitar had been through a hell of a lot, and I wasn’t gonna let something like this come between me and it. Using some restraint, which I usually don’t do, I let out a few loud yells in the soundproof room to get my initial surge of anger out. And then, I more or less gently placed my guitar in it’s rack after sliding it off my shoulder. I didn’t even turn the amp off before storming back out of that room and slamming that same door the rabbit had slammed only a few moments ago.

I’m not quite sure what I was going to say when I caught up to him. My thoughts were a good bit disjointed at the moment. I’m sure whatever flew out of my mouth was going to be terrible, but I was never really one to think things through before acting. Tommy and Dennis kept me more or less in line for the more important things in the band’s life. That kept me out of trouble band-wise, but on my own… well, anything could happen.

Thankfully for everyone involved I didn’t get that chance though. By the time I had actually decided to make my move out of the studio room and made my way back upstairs I could see the lights of the Pontiac flash by my window. And, with a little squeal of the tires, it drove out of my driveway and down my road faster than I think it ever had before.

That left me standing in my living room frozen again for the second time. All my quickly pasted together rebuttals to what the rabbit said now kind of started to mix and merge into one big burst of anger again. He didn’t even give me a chance to shout back, just taking off and running away before I could get my blows in. That just left me all the more frustrated as I let out a few angry garbled yells in that large living room, almost feeling like I was shaking the walls with my voice.

I quickly felt my claws extend a bit out of my paws, knowing that something was going to get broken here in a second. I was too pent up NOT to hear the unfortunate demise of something fragile and breakable to calm me down. That pillow never saw it coming as I tore into it with a few rough slashes, and then proceeded to rip it apart once the structural integrity was compromised with a rather satisfying ripping noise. It wasn’t exactly the breaking crash and smash sound I kind of wanted, but it still sent a nice shiver down my spine as those strands of expensive fabric started to rip and pop apart.

I proceeded to destroy the rest of the pillows on my couch, doing my best to avoid the couch itself in the process. But those pillows had it coming as I left the floor a mess of stuffing and torn fabric before too long. And, to top off all the mindless destruction, I took my TV remote and spiked it hard through the glass surface of my coffee table, finally giving me that loud glass-breaking crash I really wanted to hear to calm me down just a bit.

Thankfully none of the sharp glass shards flew all too hard against any exposed part of my body as they crashed around on the floor. Most of them just landed in a big glass pile along the base of the table, with a few shards spreading out in all directions a few feet. But, as I stood there panting hard and looking at the mess I’d just made, I suddenly spotted something brass glittering back at me in the sea of broken glass - something that I wasn’t expecting to see, and didn’t think I had on my coffee table before I smashed it.

I reached down a paw and carefully brushed aside a few of the glass shards, digging out the set of keys from the wreckage. It took me a second to realize that they were my keys… at least, the keys to my house. My mind wasn’t firing on all cylinders at first, but after a few blank seconds of staring at them I figured out just where they’d come from. They weren’t my set, they were Andy’s.

That realization left me staring further at the dangling pieces of brass, frozen for a third time as my mind was once again stuck in some kind of endless processing loop. We’d fought before, but Andy had never left his keys after a fight. That yanked my mind down to a slightly more serious place as I continued to stare as those softly dangling keys. But, my mind caught up with me after a few moments, and I closed my paw firmly around those keys. With a wind up a professional baseball pitcher would be proud of I tossed my paw behind my head, and chucked the keys down my hallway as fast as I could.

I heard another crash of glass as the keys disappeared into the darkness. My ears shot up and I tried to look down the hallway, wondering what I broke this time. But after a second I realized I didn’t care. I let out a few loud curses shoot out of my mouth until I was panting from all my heavy lung usage, and then I just slowly let myself tumble back onto the couch with a thud and a frustrated sigh.

I lay there for a good while as my mind raced - slowly feeling any remaining anger start to turn to a few serious thoughts as I replayed the events over and over in my mind. What could I have done better? What would’ve made things work out how I wanted them? How could I have made Andy suddenly flip a switch and walk out on me? Why did he leave his keys? Was he serious about what he said? Was I serious about what I said...?

He did bring up a good point. I knew he wanted a boyfriend, and he had seen me as a boyfriend for a good long time. But I… I just couldn’t bring myself to call him that. I just didn’t have my heart in it, and I didn’t really want to be attached to something like that. Sure, I liked to fuck guys, but that was just for sex. For a primal release of lust. A warm hole is a warm hole, and that’s all there is to it. But, to actually LOVE another guy? Like, really love one… more than just a good friend? Could I do that? Would I do that? DID I do that?

I didn’t know, and I found it very hard to think about such things and come up with any good answers. So, instead of worrying about that, I took the easy route and started to think up all the things Andy was throwing away by “breaking up” with me. It might have been a little ahead of the curve, but if he didn’t come back then it would’ve been his loss, not mine. All the things I gave him and got for him, all the time I spent with him, all the fancy food and opportunities that I let him be a part of… could he really just walk out on all of that?

I mean, I got what I wanted out of it when I wanted it. I got the sex, and I got the occasional company. But, I knew PLENTY of people who’d love to give me both sex and company. My phone was full of them. So really, why did I need the bunny in the first place?

But, if I didn’t really need him, then why did I find my eyes watering just a bit at the thought of never seeing him again? I told myself it was just my rush of emotions in the past hour or so, that’s why. It wasn’t just for him, it was for the roller coaster ride. And that’s what I tried to make myself believe as I felt them getting a little worse, a tear soon leaking out of my eye and down my cheek. I quickly brushed it off with the back of my paw though, pretending like it never happened, and then squeezed out the rest of those tears with a firm clench of my eyes and a blotting of my paw again. No, I wasn’t going to cry about it. It wasn’t worth it. I just… I just needed some sleep. I needed to recharge, relax… something. But, I wasn’t tired. So, instead, I slowly turned myself up on the couch, gave off a heavy sigh, and picked up a controller.

A few rounds of killing people certainly helped me to feel a bit better about things, their bloody screams as I blew them apart with a rocket launcher even making me smile a little bit. It was just the kind of venting I needed, and I kept at it for hours upon hours. But, as my ass started to feel sore from all that sitting, I finally gave it up and looked down at the mess I’d made around the living room floor. I sighed again, brushing away the slowly bubbling up rush of emotions once more before getting up and getting a broom and dust pan.

Took me almost as long to find them as it did to clean up the glass. I don’t think I ever used them myself, so I wasn’t even sure I had a set anywhere. But, Andy had a set stashed away in a rarely used closet along with a whole bunch of other cleaning stuff I had no idea existed. So, as ironic as it was, I pulled out the broom and dust pan and started to make my way carefully back to the sharp mess.

It was almost therapeutic to clean up the glass and stuffing as well, almost as if I was sweeping away the incident with each pan full I managed to dump into my trash can. But, before I got out the vacuum to finish things off, I remembered about the hallway as well.

I flipped on the lights and strolled in to see one of my large wall-hanging picture frames shattered - a framed concert poster from one of our first tours now defenseless against the elements. I just sighed softly and figured I could go get it re-framed tomorrow morning, sweeping up the glass from everywhere I could find in the mean time. This one was more like work than anything else as the broken glass was all my fault. It wasn’t really brought on by Andy’s sudden shit storm, it was because I thought it was a good idea to launch a heavy set of keys blindly into a dark house. But, when I found the keys, I sweeped them up into the dust bin at the same time and dumped them into the trash as well without a second thought. It might not have been the smartest idea, but it felt the best at the time at least. Another almost therapeutic moment as I heard those keys jingle down to the bottom of my trash can.

A quick vacuum run to gather up any last sharp and tiny pieces of glass still floating around and I was finally done. I put the cleaning supplies back into the closet and crashed myself down onto the couch again. I was going to have to get some new pillows while I was out as well, but that was a small price to pay for feeling better - much better than I had only a few hours ago. I considered going down and finishing the songs I was working on in the studio, but I just didn’t have the heart at the moment. What I did have the heart for though was a few lyrics.

I flipped open a notepad and got a pencil to go with it, quickly starting to jot down anything that came to mind. And there was a lot was coming to mind for sure as the recent events were still fresh in my memory. I jotted down whatever flowed out, whether it rhymed, made sense, or anything really. Just a jumble of words, phrases, and ideas that I could begin molding into coherent song lyrics over time. Everything from my frustration and rage at the rabbit, to the feeling of whether or not I could love another guy all came down onto the page, mixed together, then separated once again with a little bit of each still stuck to the other. I kept up with a the writing until a good few pages were filled in the book. Only when I felt myself yawn and my paw started to get tired from all the writing did I finally stop and put everything down.

I went downstairs once again to at least shut off my amp and the computer, leaving the lyric book there in the room as I would have to start merging ideas tomorrow or the next day. We had scheduled our first band practice in a few weeks, so that didn’t give me much time to work and get this all done. Plus, a burst of emotion was just what I seemed to be needing to get my creative juices flowing. Idea after idea flashed through my head, even as I was getting ready for bed. And, with another notebook seated by my bedside, I made sure it got a good bit of use before my brain finally had enough. I felt it shutting itself off the moment my head finally hit that soft, comfortable pillow… alone once again. But, strangely comfortable by the concept, at least for now.