“Did you hear?” I can hear the grin in John’s voice.
“What?” I ask, strumming a few chords on a guitar, humming to myself.
We’re in the studio, taking a break from recording, although John and I are still playing. George and Ringo went to look for food somewhere, so we’re alone.
“Apparently we’re queer for each other.” He grins, thinking it’s the funniest thing.
“What’re you talking about?” I ask. It is a bit funny, admittedly.
“Some guy on the radio spewing bullshit, as usual,” he says. “Because we don’t have girlfriends or something, even though we could get nearly any girl we want.”
“John Lennon, you are getting cocky,” I grin.
He throws me a look and strums a few chords on his guitar, riffing off the song we’d just been working on.
“I’m in love with Paul McCartney!” he sings so loud, I swear the whole studio must hear.
I can feel my face turn hot.
“His face is going red, he must love me, too!” He’s still strumming, but he has stopped singing.
“Shut up,” I say, but I can feel laughter bubbling in my throat. “Someone’s gonna hear you.”
“I don’t care who bloody hears me,” John says. “It’s just a joke anyway.”
John’s abrasive attitude is sometimes annoying, but at times like these, I admire the way he is so able to say what he wants. I guess I’ve always admired it, even when it does piss me off. We strum a little more for a while. An awkward silence has washed over us as it sometimes does, filled only with the noise of clashing chords. There’s a tension in between us that wasn’t there before. I can tell he’s thinking about something, hard, and my own mind begins to wander. At first, I simply wonder what he’s thinking. But then . . . Why did he bring it up? Why did he tell me? But most of all . . . I wonder why, in the radio, they even assumed John and I were –
“Let’s do it,” John says suddenly, breaking my train of thought.
“What?” I ask, utterly confused. “Do what?”
“Let’s just kiss to see what it is these people think we’re doing,” he says, face straight. He’s serious.
“John, it’s illegal,” I say, startled. Did he really just suggest . . . ?
“Didn’t stop us from doing other things in the past,” he points out.
He’s right. We’ve taken drugs without blinking. But this is entirely different. It feels . . . Wrong. And I can’t explain why. I don’t know why drugs were so easy to take, and yet, it feels so wrong to express this sort of love. All I know is that my insides have frozen. I have frozen. Did John ask me because he . . . has feelings for me? Or does he just want to experiment? Is it truly an innocent curiosity? Part of me is suddenly curious, too.
“No,” I say firmly aloud, even though the thought isn’t so firm in my head, and John doesn’t persist any further, something that shocks me. Maybe he’s just as uncertain as I am, for once. And yet, right now, this decision seems right. I let out a breath, trying to relax.
“I’m going to go see if George found any food,” I say.
It’s only when I’m far away from John that I realize my heart is pounding in my chest.