Chapter Text
When Johnny turned up at Kerry's show that night, he'd gone there meaning to surprise him.
It'd been a while since they'd spent more than a handful of minutes in the same room together - knowingly or willingly, at least - and frankly that was pretty impressive for two guys whose list of acquaintances overlapped in the ways that theirs did. Johnny had his mercs and his edgy-ass edgerunners, Kerry had his semi-celebrity musician crowd, and in the middle was everybody else that they'd both known for the past fifteen years. The only difference in the whole latter group was who exactly each of them had pissed off, how bad it was and why, but Johnny knew they'd done at least some of that together. Some of it because they'd had each other's back. Some of it just because they'd wanted to, and when they'd asked themselves why not? they hadn't had an answer. Fuck, sometimes Johnny really missed that shit. Sometimes, while he was messed up in one way or another, booze or blow or blood loss, he wondered if that meant he might miss Kerry, too. It was a question he'd tried real hard not to ask himself, and tried even harder not to answer.
He'd meant to surprise him. He was in Atlanta to meet some old choom of Rogue's, some nervous guy who sold guns and other semi-useful crap of the armament persuasion, and he'd heard that Kerry had a show lined up someplace nearby. He'd seen a poster pasted to a wall outside a bar and while he'd still been spitting blood into the gutter from some stupid fight he hadn't even meant to start, he'd cracked the fuck up to see the dates all lined up perfectly. The label Kerry had signed with however many years before kept offices there in Atlanta as well as back out in NC, and Johnny was pretty sure they'd figured on killing two songbirds with one stone: they'd dazzle Kerry with all their corpo bullshit over contract renegotiations, and they'd set up a show or two to make him feel all fucking special. Kerry probably saw through it, though, even if he'd never been as cynical as Johnny was. Kerry would've called it cynicism, anyway, and he'd done exactly that a whole bunch of times that Johnny could remember; Johnny had called it realism, or pragmatism, and they'd agreed to disagree. The times they hadn't just bitched at each other for hours on end, at least.
Kerry probably knew the score, but that didn't mean he didn't like to play whenever he got the chance to, and so Johnny had called in a couple of favors to get himself a ticket just so he didn't have to pay. Could've found a way in, he thought, probably, maybe, but fuck it: the risk of getting thrown out on his ass before Kerry even played a single note somehow didn't quite seem worth it. Not all the way, even if he was kinda spoiling for another fight. It was late August then and it was too fucking hot; the way the sweat kept on trickling down the whole length of his spine always made him want to punch something, and he really didn't care too much what that something was.
So, he went inside. He showed his ticket at the door, and he bullshitted his way backstage - surprisingly goddamn easy, he thought, but he guessed he talked the talk. Kerry had to be around there someplace; the dreadful fucking warm-up act was already mid-set back outside in the club, the bass too loud and the guitars all shrill, so it thumped in his chest like an arrythmic second heart. Kerry had to be around, but Johnny couldn't find him, and no one he asked had a clue where he was. So he figured he'd head outside and smoke till the din on stage went quiet, then he'd go grab a drink and he'd settle in to watch. He hadn't seen Kerry play in months, maybe a year, or maybe two, since some semi-political benefit thing for army vets that Johnny had been asked to play but had found he couldn't stomach. Maybe playing fanboy in some dumb Atlanta club was far from his ideal situation, but at least he wasn't the lone deserter in a sea full of veterans. And if he hadn't left then, he sure wasn't leaving now.
He headed for the back door, one that regulations likely told them to keep closed in case of fire but who actually listened to that shit? Then he came a little closer to the final corner on the corridor and he heard Kerry's voice floating back from around it, clear as a bell and real obviously him. Johnny stopped there. He paused there. He leaned against the wall there, almost right beside the corner, still tucked safely out of sight. He listened, too, though he was pretty sure that he'd regret it in short order: the fact that Kerry wasn't alone there was also pretty obvious.
"So we're really not gonna fuck now?" said the guy that Kerry was with. He sounded local, not that Johnny was an expert on accents of the Americas, but the idea tracked 'cause Kerry had always liked to sample a little of the local atmosphere. Of course, if Johnny had switched out atmosphere for dick, it would've meant the same thing where Kerry was concerned.
Kerry laughed, kinda rough and kinda wild, a sound that Johnny knew real fucking well. It couldn't've been anybody else, Johnny thought. It made him feel a little homesick, kinda like the weather did, just in a different way. He was used to the heat 'cause Night City was hot, but the humidity was killing him.
"Pretty sure that's what I said, yeah," Kerry told the guy, with a tone to his voice like he was smiling. "No sex till after the show. I'm trying to figure out if all that pent-up sexual shit affects the way I play." He paused. Johnny imagined him tilting his head. "You do want me to play well, right?"
The guy groaned. Not the disappointed kind of groaning - the other kind of groaning, the one that said Kerry had just done something that Johnny didn't want to think too hard about but had probably seen him do at least a dozen times. The one that said the guy was doing more than thinking hard.
"Is this some fucked up way of getting me to stay to see you play?" the guy asked, a second or two later. His voice sounded strained and his breath had gotten louder. Jesus Christ, Kerry could be a world-class tease sometimes - Johnny couldn't've said he was surprised to find that hadn't changed.
"Nah, but you should go ahead and stay anyway," Kerry replied. "I'm actually pretty fucking good. And I'm pretty good at fucking, too."
"Yeah, well, you'd better be good if I'm waiting around."
Kerry scoffed. Johnny almost did, too, 'cause the guy sounded like a petulant asshole. He guessed either Kerry thought the guy was hot as hell or else he had a dick the size of a twenty storey building, though Kerry usually preferred that both those things were true.
"C'mon, don't pout," Kerry said. "Not that that's not cute as hell."
There was another pause then. If Johnny knew Kerry, and he was pretty sure he did, was pretty sure he'd seen this scene a hundred times before, he was kissing the guy. He'd be doing it slow and wet, his tongue in the guy's mouth and one hand in his hair, convincing as all hell. It'd worked like a charm on maybe ninety percent of the guys Johnny knew Kerry had dated, when he'd pissed them off or they'd needed a little persuasion, while Johnny had stood by and rolled his eyes. He'd never been sure if Kerry was just that good with his mouth or if guys were that much easier than girls, but then he'd never tried too hard to find out.
God, though, if he listened hard enough, he could even hear it - their breath just a few feet away as he leaned back against the wall, the sound of the kiss, the sounds Kerry made, high and tight and fucking needy. He'd known what he sounded like but he'd never been so close to it before. And when he looked down, looked toward the corner, he saw Kerry's fingers wrapped around the edge of it, like his right arm was stretched out by his side as he held on there, fingertips pressing so hard they'd gone white. Johnny almost wanted to touch them, him - he wouldn't've even needed to reach far before his chrome fingers brushed Kerry's ganic ones, like he'd done a hundred times before except okay, so maybe not like that. Once upon a time, though, he bet Kerry would've let him do it. No matter what else he'd been doing at the time.
Then he heard Kerry hum under his breath, kinda pensively, so he must've pulled away again. His hand moved, too. Thank fuck, 'cause Johnny's eyes had been glued to it.
"Hey, I tell you what," Kerry said. "I've got an idea."
The guy didn't speak; Johnny could imagine why, and if the kinda raspy note to Kerry's voice was anything to judge by, it had something to do with him sucking hickeys into Kerry's neck. Fuck, Johnny would've liked to've pulled the guy away from him, maybe shoved him around a little, maybe fucked up his face a little, busted his lip so he couldn't keep on marking Kerry, at least not with his mouth. He'd always kinda hated that, some shit about how it felt like the guys who marked Kerry up really wanted to own him, and something inside Johnny took exception. No matter how much Kerry liked it. No matter how hard Kerry really didn't complain, or that he looked at Johnny like he knew exactly how he felt about that shit but let them do it anyway. Maybe because he knew. Maybe just because they would and Johnny wouldn't.
"I've got a dressing room to myself tonight," Kerry went on, after a moment, interrupting Johnny's fantasy of smearing some anonymous guy's face across his fist. "Give me ten minutes when I get off stage then come find me, okay?"
"Yeah, and why should I?"
Johnny could imagine Kerry rolling his eyes at that, so clearly that he could almost see him doing it. Obviously the guy was a dumbass 'cause the answer was right there: it was a three-letter word that started in S and ended in X, the one that didn't involve a meandering jazz solo, Jesus fucking Christ. But Kerry must've had a whole lot more patience in that moment than Johnny had, because he went on.
"'Cause if you give me ten minutes, I'll be ready to go when you get there," Kerry said, with his voice dropping down all low and seductive. Johnny had heard him do that a hundred times before, with a hundred different guys, so it wasn't like he thought this one was special, but somehow it made his chest feel kinda tight inside in a way he really did not like. "So, y'know, come find me, yeah? There's a table at the back of the room. I'll be the one bent over it with my ass hanging out. All you have to do is get it out and wrap it up and put it in and abracadabra, we're fucking." He paused. Johnny could imagine the smile spreading over his face, bright and sharp and wicked, because he'd smiled at him that way so many times. "C'mon, you're not telling me that doesn't sound preem?"
The guy groaned again after that; Johnny was pretty sure Kerry had just applied his pick hand to the guy's dick and Jesus Christ, for a second it felt kinda like he'd done the same damn thing to him, too. Johnny felt his dick twitch against his zipper and his pulse picked up a little, almost like he was nervous, like he was anxious, jittery, messed up as that was. He really hadn't gotten enough pussy since his plane had landed if the thought of Kerry pawing at some guy's clothed cock was getting to him the way it was. Probably he needed to go find a girl to paw at his.
"Think you can do that for me?" Kerry asked, while Johnny closed his eyes and clenched his fists and told his dick he wasn't talking to him.
The guy mumbled something Johnny couldn't hear and Kerry made him say it louder, fucking bossy about it but then again most of the guys that Kerry liked seemed to get off on that. The guy said, "Yes. Fuck. Yeah, sure, I can do that for you," like Kerry had already gotten him hard just to toy with him. Probably he had, one hand down his pants or over them, didn't really matter which. He was halfway to getting Johnny there, too, sudden and stupid and fucking unfathomable as that was.
Johnny had come there to see Kerry, to talk to him, try to make nice with him, not to start an argument the way they always seemed to. He for damn sure hadn't come there to get his rocks off listening to Kerry fuck another guy, but then he heard the guy in question walk away, open the door and head outside. He knew it wasn't Kerry because Kerry was still right around the corner, tapping the rhythm of one of his songs against the wall the way he did sometimes before a show, just to give his hands something to do that wasn't smoking, drinking, jerking off. Fuck, Johnny wanted to smoke. And he wanted to see Kerry. That was why he was there, after all, not in some dive bar picking up a girl he could take back to his shitty hotel and fuck in the shower, long enough that all the hot water ran out. Cold might've felt better, he thought, with the messed up late summer humidity that was hanging in the air like a fucking curtain, and the AC that sometimes did and sometimes didn't work. Cold might've felt better than the way his sex-starved dick throbbed in his too-tight pants, and he really didn't need that crap. So he turned and he went back out into the club's main room, to go find a place where he could see but not be seen and will away the dumbest hard-on of his life.
Kerry was pretty fucking great once he got on stage. The band was...fine, Johnny guessed. Adequate, and maybe they'd caught just a fraction of Kerry's passion for the songs they played, but he wasn't gonna sing their praises. And after, once the show was done, encore achieved, bow taken, shit concluded, while Johnny was pretty sure Kerry was backstage lubing his own asshole so that whiny goddamn guy could fuck him in it, Johnny left. Some jackass in a Quadra almost ran him down as he was crossing the street, so he punched a fucking hole straight through the hood. He reached down as far as the engine block and yanked out the first important thing he came to, then he tossed it at the windshield just hard enough to crack it while he flipped the guy off and stalked away. Made him feel better. For a while. Just not for long enough.
He went back to his cheap rented room. Alone, unless you counted the bottle of scotch he picked up on the way, from a liquor store two doors down that saw a lot of traffic from the hotel's hard-drinking patrons. And when he jerked off later, sitting there still mostly dressed on the end of the bed he hadn't bothered making, too hot, skin so sweaty that his shirt stuck to it, halfway drunk and all the way pissed off...the fact he hadn't even seen the guy that Kerry was with just made it so much easier to put somebody else there in his place. He knew what Kerry looked like; all he had to do was think his name and close his eyes and there he was. He just really didn't need to be thinking about fucking him while his dick was hard and in his hand. Not after all this time, saying that he wouldn't do it, saying that he didn't want to. Not when the only reason it was even in his head was the fact he knew Kerry was fucking someone else. Someone else had Kerry's attention. Johnny had always been a real petty son of a bitch when it'd come to that.
When he came, sticky and hot and kinda disgusting, he told himself what he was thinking about was some girl he must've had once. He told himself it was some girl he'd never had, or some fucked up mix of every girl he'd ever had, or every girl he'd ever thought he should've had, 'cause it didn't even matter. Not when he was straight-up lying to himself.
When he came, cock in hand and muscles jerking, he was thinking about Kerry. He just really wished he weren't.