LGBT Fiction Event Day 17 : Zoe Rider interviews her rock star characters & offers a giveaway

 

The news broke over the weekend: musicians Brian March and Dylan Denault, founding members of Attack From Space, are “together.” Fans have had much to say about it—not surprisingly—but the guys themselves have until now given a “no comment” to the press.

I’m not sure what to expect when I arrive at their rehearsal space. It’s not Brian or Dylan who answer the door but Dylan’s sister, Kelsey. She points to the other end of the room, where a few cast-off chairs and an old, scratchy couch with duct tape over one of the cushions are gathered, all of them empty. She’s in the middle of a call. I imagine there are a lot of calls right now. Taking a seat on one of the chairs, I run through my notes again, raising my head when the door opens and Brian and Dylan come through, Brian smiling like Dylan’s just told him a joke. Dylan, on the other hand, looks a little wary, like he’s about to face a visit with a proctologist.

As we make small talk, catching up the since the last time I spoke with them, I realize Brian’s just as nervous. He seems unable to figure out what to do with his hands. One moves from his back pocket to his hair, then the back of his neck. His other hand stays in his pocket until we take our seats.

“So,” I say, clasping my notepad, “I think it’s safe to say that the recent news took just about everyone by surprise. The two of you are in a relationship. Living together, going home at the end of the day together, sharing a bed…. What’s the response to that been like?”

“Um.” Brian rubs his chin, thinking. “I got a pretty upset an email from an old girlfriend recently. She was worried that Dylan and I had been together all along, that I’d used her as, you know, like a front. She was really upset.”

“Had you?” I ask.

“No. We’d dated, what, like—” He looks to Dylan. “Five or six years ago?”

Leaning forward to push a guitar pick away from the edge of the coffee table, Dylan says, “Neither of us was seeing anyone when we got together.”

“I’m pretty monogamous anyway,” Brian says. “I think we’re both….”

“Yeah,” Dylan says.

“Yeah, we’re both pretty monogamous.”

“What about your families?” I ask. “Did they know before the news broke?”

“They did,” Brian says. “Not, um—not long before, and I really kind of wish we’d known it was going to come out so we could have said, ‘Hey, this is coming,’ but at least we got to tell them ourselves, rather than having them see it for the first time on the internet.”

Dylan brushes invisible lint off his knee. “It was a little tense.”

“Because you’re cousins,” I say.

“Dylan’s step-mom is my aunt. So it’s not…. I mean, people—family—took that seriously. You know, to them we were cousins, so it was still…. But to us—”

“We didn’t even really meet till we were teenagers,” Dylan says.

“Yeah, when my family moved from California.”

“When they moved here….” Dylan props his elbows on his knees, rubbing his palms together. “We’re two years apart, but we were going to the same high school, and he’d come over to my house whenever his mom came over. We just started hanging out. He couldn’t play bass for shit, but I’d been playing drums, and I’d started picking up guitar, and he had a bass at least. So we’d hang out and play. We’ve just been friends since we met.”

“And we kind of met late enough that we didn’t feel like, you know, actual cousins,” Brian says.

“How has your family been with this? Are they adjusting, or has it hit them pretty hard?”

“I don’t think it’s fair to… I mean, they’re private people. They’re not in the public eye,” Brian says. “They get to keep that privacy. I’ll just say some adjusted more quickly, but, you know…it’s family. They’re going to be there no matter what. We’re both fortunate that we’ve always felt that from our families. No matter what fucked up thing we do—you know, starting a band instead of going to college or whatever—no matter how upset they get, at the end of the day, it’s still family, and we can always go there.”

“Dylan, your sister works for the band,” I say.

“Well, as an independent contractor. “ He laughs, relaxing a bit, settling back on the couch. “She wouldn’t let us hire her. She likes being her own boss.”

“So I take it everything’s okay there, with her and your relationship?”

“Yeah. She gives us shit, but that’s nothing new.” He laughs again, looking to Brian, who smiles as he picks at a frayed edge in the hem of his T-shirt.

I say, “Brian mentioned an email from an ex-girlfriend. Were both of you straight going into this? Had either of you been with a guy before this, or was this just an all-new thing on every level?”

Brian drags his fingers through his hair. “That’s another area I consider kind of off-limits. You know, this relationship is here and now, and the news broke, and fans had questions, and we’re willing, to an extent, to open up somewhat and talk about this relationship, but we’re not really interested into getting into ‘what are you?’ and ‘what were you?’ and ‘who’d you sleep with before?’ and all of that. It’s not really pertinent. If we’ve slept with you, then, you know, maybe you know part of the answer, and if we haven’t, then I don’t even see how it’s relevant.”

Dylan says, “I’m not sure it’s relevant even if we have.”

“Right,” Brian says. “And just so all past lovers know: I wasn’t sleeping with anybody else while I was sleeping with you. That’s probably the only thing that really matters.”

“You’re really not cut out for the rock-star stuff are you?” Dylan says to him with a hint of a smile.

“No, I’m a huge disappointment to groupies.”

Dylan laughs. I imagine he’s an ever huger disappointment to them now, and I say so.

Brian says, “Yeah, well, you know. I was always more likely to sit around talking with fans till the sun came up anyway.”

“You said you wish you’d known the news was going to come out so you could give your family a head’s up,” I say. “Do you know now how the news got out?”

“We have a pretty good idea,” Brian says, “but it’s…I mean, we’re not going to talk about it. Things happen, people make decisions. It’s tempting to have a piece of information and think you can gain something by using it, but you can only worry so much about what people will do.”

“What questions have fans been asking?”

“They want to know how long it’s been going on, which is…. It’s been maybe a year and a half?” He looks to Dylan.

“Yeah, since last fall. I mean, the fall before this last one.”

“Yeah, after that last leg of that tour. Um, the fans….”

“Are you getting inundated with messages?” I ask.

“Thank God Dylan’s sister handles that. She has our responses to the most common stuff and sends them out. When we have time, we read through them ourselves. But if we tried to read through them all, we’d  never get a chance to work on our music. She forwards us anything she thinks we should see, though, and like I say, we try to look at some of the others when we can find time. We don’t answer a lot of them, but we try to read them.”

“What are you seeing, in general, in those messages?”

“Some people are pissed off, you know about the cousin thing, or the ‘gay’ thing.” He puts quotes around the word with his fingers. “Or the gay cousins thing. It is what it is. We’re both guys, that’s just how it is. We met because Dylan’s dad married my mother’s sister. That’s just how it worked out. Some people meet because they work in the same place, or they go to the same bar on the same night, or they hang out on the same forum online. It’s just how it is. But we get nice messages too. We get people who understand, or try to. And we get messages from people who don’t give a fuck what we’re doing in our personal lives, they just care about the music. Which is what we care about too, so, we’re happy there are people out there who are still willing to listen to it.”

“Have you taken a hit in sales that you’ve noticed?”

“These things are up and down anyway,” Brian says. “If someone owns all our albums and decides they’re never going to buy anything we put out again, we’re not going to see that until the next album comes out. And then there might be people who never heard of us before this, and they got curious and started listening, and when that next album comes out, they’ll buy it, and that’ll offset the people who walked away. We hope, at least.”

“Even if no one buys another album,” Dylan says, “we’re still going to do it. We don’t know how to do anything else.”

“Well, I don’t know how to do anything else,” Bryan says. “Dylan can work construction.”

“I do that just to clear my head to do music. If I have to do it because I don’t have music, I’m not really going to enjoy it. So even if we wind up touring in broke-down cars and playing bars again, you know, trying to get the three drunks in the room to pay attention, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll just keep doing it. Because even if our hands can do something else, our souls are all about music.”

“Was there any fooling around when you were teenagers?” I ask.

“With each other?” Dylan says, his eyes widening. “No.”

“You didn’t have an inkling at all that you might want to be together?”

“Let’s just say we were to slow recognize what was staring us in the face,” Brian says, and Dylan adds, “We were looking everywhere else for it. And one day, we looked at each other, and there it was.”

They look at each other now, just a quick look, and they laugh when they realize what they’re doing.

“I think it’s safe to say,” I say, “you two hit on some people’s worst fears, that their son, husband, brother, coworker, whoever, could just look at his buddy one day and realize he’s in love with him.”

“You know,” Dylan says, straightening, “it never stops amazing me how people say they ‘just want you to be happy,’ but it only if it fits their world view. They want you to be happy, but on their terms. If someone you care about falls in love, and the person—or, fuck it, people—he or she loves, loves with them back, and they’re happy, and they’re not hurting anyone, why can’t you just say, ‘Good. I’m glad you’ve found something that makes you happy’?”

Smiling Brian reaches over and clasps Dylan’s hand, giving it a squeeze.

Dylan looks at him and says, “Right?”

Still with that almost private smile, Brian says, “Right.”

Read the story you won’t find in any interview—how Brian and Dylan, best friends, bandmates, and cousins by marriage, got all tied up in each other—in Games Boys Play, an erotic BDSM romance, out now from Loose Id.

To celebrate the release of my first novel (woohoo!), I’m giving away three copies of my erotic romance short, “Skin in the Game,” about two other musicians who get all tied up in each other. To enter, just tell me in the comments who your favorite band is.

Brian and Dylan have been best friends for years. They have no secrets between them—except for the ones they’re keeping from each other.

When Dylan walks in on Brian engaging in self bondage, Brian’s mortified, but Dylan’s intrigued—to the point of offering to help Brian out next time he gets an urge to be tied up.

No. That’s all Brian can think. No way. But the idea of someone else being in control overwhelms his thoughts, and self-bondage is suddenly a pale substitute for the real thing. He gives Dylan permission, on a trial basis, and comes face to face with a side of Dylan he’s never seen before. A really hot side.

As their games pick up steam, so does their relationship, along with Brian’s courage to go after the things he wants. Like, Dylan.

It might be happily ever after, but there’s one secret left, and it could ruin everything.

For the Grand Prize Giveaway, I (Nix) will be giving away ten of my top LGBT books. These books will be gifted via All Romance as the books are available to readers on all the types of eReaders (you just need to sign up for a free account to access the books and you can send them directly). If you have any of the books and you win the prize, speak to me and I’ll see what else I can do. All of the posts have prizes atatched and a list of these can be found here

The books are (and there are substitutions available for people who have copies)…

• With a Kiss by Kim Dare (MM)
• Hot Head by Damien Suede (MM)
• By the Book by Scarlett Parrish (MM)
• The Dom With a Safeword by Cari Silverwood (FFM)
• Starfish and Coffee by Kele Moon (MM)
• How Sweet it is – Melissa Brayden (FF)
• Fatal Shadows – Josh Lanyon (MM)
• Faith and Fidelity – Tere Michaels (MM)
• How to Love – Kelly Jamieson (FMM)
• Cut and Run – Abigail Roux (MM)

Recently added

• Paperback Tread Marks & Trademarks by SA McAuley

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