Worry Rock

Travis pulled the large door open that lead into the incredibly large entryway of his house. He didn’t seem surprised in the slightest, but instead he managed a smile to the older rock star. Wordlessly, he stepped aside to let an overly-tired Billie Joe into the large house and led him through.

The moonlight lit up the water outside Travis’s home which caught Billie Joe’s eye as he walked through. He had never seen so many damn windows built into a house. They were all arched windows, making it so that there was more window than wall to open up the house as if it wasn’t big enough. To be outside, you didn’t have to be outside at all.

For a moment, Billie Joe became jealous of the man’s home. He now understood why his wife loved it so much.

Travis led Billie Joe up a long staircase and down a pretty long hallway to a closed door. He opened it slowly and quietly and looked over his shoulder to make sure that Billie was still there. He stepped into the large room and Billie Joe followed closely, his eyes immediately falling upon his sleeping wife’s figure underneath the blanket.

He smiled.

I pressed my hand to my forehead, my head spinning with confusion. I knew for a fact I had fallen asleep in Travis’s home last night, yet from the moment my senses came back to me that morning I noticed that I was, in fact, home and in Billie Joe’s and my bed. The only sound that seemed to be throughout the house that moment was the sound of the shower water running and hitting the body that was in the shower.

A large part of me expected to see Travis step out of the bathroom a few minutes later, however none of me expected to see my husband step out of the bathroom with steam billowing out behind him. He didn’t seem to expect to see me awake, either. I wasn’t sure if he had known if I was there at all to begin with.

Billie Joe smiled softly to me as he held the towel around his waist and grabbed a pair of boxers. He backed into the bathroom and shut the door lightly for a moment before coming back out, this time drying his hair with the towel. When he came back out I could feel my body tense as he ran the towel over his damp hair once again before discarding it on the foot of the bed.

He hesitated for a moment while gently patting his naked stomach and then sat down next to where the towel was. I bit my bottom lip as hard as I could without drawing blood and waiting for something, anything to be said. “Good morning,” he finally managed out.

I had forgotten how much I had missed his voice. I had forgotten how much I missed the way his lips moved as he spoke, the way he laced his fingers together all the time when he didn’t know what else to do. The way he always avoided eye contact when he was nervous. The completely awkward moments that somehow made our marriage so much better.

I missed my husband, my complete asshole of a husband. And I loved him.

“Good morning,” I croaked.

A silence spread throughout the bedroom as my husband and I sat awkwardly at opposite sides of the King sized bed. I subconsciously played with the bed sheet while my husband picked at the fabric of his boxers. I wanted desperately to ask him how the hell I ended up at home in our bed when I knew for a fact that I had fallen asleep in Travis’s.

I had woken up the previous night while hearing Travis yelling at someone on the phone. After he had hung up on them when I had gone to see what was up, Travis ushered me back to bed. I had drifted off back to sleep within a matter of moments, my body still terribly tired.

Now, however, I had woken up back in my bedroom while Billie Joe was in the shower.

Had I been dreaming?

No, because if I had been, Billie Joe wouldn’t be acting so incredibly awkward around me. He probably would have been on top of me asking for sex or downstairs eating food while yelling at Charlie.

I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to talk to my husband now that it became clear that everything that had happened lately wasn’t a dream. “Billie,” I called hesitantly.

Billie Joe’s head snapped up and he forced a weak smile. “Yeah?” He questioned.

I slid my hand up to the back of my neck to scratch it—a habit that I had enquired from my husband over the past 15 years from being with him. “This, uh, this may sound real stupid but—how am I here?” I shook my head slowly while looking down at my covered legs. “From what I remember, I fell asleep at Travis’s house.”

And why are you suddenly playing the shy card with me?

I suddenly felt incredibly stupid for asking such a question, as if I should have known why I was home and how I had gotten there. I expected to get a ridiculous look from my husband and have him roll my eyes at my ignorance, perhaps even get up and walk out without answering me. Like I had expected, he stood up. However, instead of walking out of the room as I had expected, he went to his side of the bed and sat down next to where I had propped myself up with my elbows. “You don’t remember waking up last night?” He asked.

I shook my head. “I remembering waking up and then Travis bringing me up to a spare bedroom, but nothing that has to do with me ending up here.”

“Oh.” Billie Joe chuckled and I couldn’t figure out if it was out of disgust or actual humor. “I—uh, well I picked you up last night and brought you home. You woke up when I was putting you in the car and asked me what I was doing, but then fell back asleep. You slept the whole way home and even when I carried you up here,” he explained.

I nodded slowly. Knowing that Billie Joe had picked me up and brought me home had cleared a few questions in my head, but it also caused more to form. How the hell did he know I was at Travis’s house? I hadn’t spoken to him at all since I had yelled at him for going through my things and that was before I had left, of course. “Oh,” I said simply. My hands fell limply into my lap and I could feel his eyes on them. “How did you know I was there?”

Billie Joe cringed. He didn’t want to go telling his wife that Travis basically forced him to come over and get her, but after all the shit that had gone down within the past week or so, he wasn’t about to be a bigger hypocrite than he already was and lie to her face. “Travis called me at two this morning,” he stated, “he, uh, asked me to come get you.” Once seeing my confused expression he shrugged, “he’s a good guy--,” it killed him to say that, “he wanted me to stop being an asshole and talk to you.”

He decided to leave out the part that he had said no and had almost went back to sleep until jealousy got the best of him and he stormed out of the house like a brat.

When he had returned home later that night or later that morning, depending on how you looked at it, it was hard for him to fall back asleep. Instead, when Billie Joe had laid his wife down after carrying her up the stairs, he watched her for a moment. Once laying his sleeping wife on the bed, he slid down the hall and quietly checked on Sydney once again and then returned back to the room. After a bit of hesitation he slid into the large bed next to her and slid closer to the warm body that had been missing lately.

He had stayed up for another fifteen or twenty minutes and just watched me sleep, his thoughts running endlessly through his tired mind. It felt as if it had been forever since he was finally able to cuddle with another warm body other than Charlie, who was much too small and much too hairy to pass as an actual human.

“Oh,” I murmured and smiled softly. I knew then that he was the one that Travis was yelling at. I felt my throat tighten at that thought, but decided not to say anything.

It occurred to me then that Billie Joe had probably not wanted to pick me up. And though it hurt, I forced myself to be thankful that he did. Billie Joe Armstrong’s pride was almost unbearable, and it amazed me that he had managed to ignore it to come pick me up. Because of that, I decided to not give him the cold shoulder.

And well, of course because he was actually talking to me without snarling.

Because he was actually talking to me.

Billie Joe sighed softly and moved slightly closer to me. I cocked an eyebrow and then looked down at our hands feeling his brush mine. Upon seeing me look down I could feel him smile at me and I smiled back as he leant closer. Oh-so softly, his lips ghosted over mine. Nearly touching, but not actually doing so.

And so I decided to make the move before he decided to change his mind and not forgive me.

I pressed my lips against his smoothly and waited for him to react. He seemed to freeze for a moment before reacting.

And it felt so good.

It felt so amazing to finally feel this man’s lips against mine again after all the time. It felt fantastic to feel his lips move against mine and to be able to kiss him, to finally be able to do something familiar. To sense the same tastes, smells, the feeling, everything that had been familiar to me for the past fifteen years of my life.

After a moment of both of us sitting there, our lips together yet only feeling like feathers, I decided that I had had enough. I took my hand from his and slid it up his arm to his shoulder and pulled him back on top of me as I fell onto my back on the bed. “Joe,” he hissed against my lips, “Oh—oh god, Joe. I can’t. I want to—so bad, but I can’t. I p-promised Mike I’d—I’d be there. The studio, I promised I’d be there.” By the end of the sentence his words were nothing but slurs.

It killed me, absolutely murdered me, but I let him go.

A little too easily for my own liking.

+++

Surprisingly, when Billie Joe got home that night we hadn’t continued where we had left off.

Instead, I ended up falling asleep around ten after being sure that Sydney was sound asleep in her room while Billie Joe ended up stumbling into the bedroom at quarter to twelve. I won’t lie and say that it didn’t bother me that he had obviously had a few to drink, because it had. However, I let it slide because as soon as the drunken fool climbed into bed next to me, still fully clothed, he tried to wake me by kissing the back of my neck and shoulder. They were wet, sloppy and for the most part his lips more or less dragged against my skin instead of the individual kisses he had meant to present, but it was adorable and completely harmless.

The next few days in the Armstrong household were a lot less tense than they had been in the past week or two, but they still weren’t the same. It was still 100% obvious that even though Billie Joe tried to ignore them, there were still hard feelings about the taking of the birth control pills behind his back.

Billie Joe would now talk to me, touch me, be around me, and even sat at the dinner table with Sydney and I the nights he was home, but there was still something there. There was still no cuddling in bed or on the couch, no more of him holding me at all in any way. We slept in the same bed, but it felt miles apart. There was no sex, no cocky attitude that he usually had. It was almost as if Billie Joe was there because he had to be, and it hurt.

But I had to learn to move on with it.

Though, the thought of it being like this forever scared the shit out of me. I never realized how much I had missed Billie Joe’s annoying antics and habits until he had stopped them. For crying out loud, I was ready to beg him to beg me for sex already.

But he spent so much time downstairs in the studio in the house for me to be able to. He wasn’t avoiding me, he was just working—a lot more.

I missed my husband and I really wasn’t sure how much more of it I could take.

For a while I began to want him to come home drunk, because the intoxicated Billie Joe wanted to do nothing but cuddle. The completely and terribly intoxicated Billie Joe Armstrong seemed to forgive me quite a while before the sober one began to even think of it. If Billie Joe were to be Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I almost would have preferred the Mr. Hyde.

It was really starting to get to the point where I was going to sit Billie Joe down and talk to him, and actually consider a break. I couldn’t do it anymore.

However, Billie Joe seemed to beat me to it.

I had been lying in bed with my eyes closed on my side, my back to where Billie Joe usually lay. He hadn’t been home. I had been half asleep with the TV on a sleep timer, though I was trying my best to stay awake till he got home. It was only about ten thirty, but I had been tired. Sleep didn’t come easy.

I had started to feel myself drift off to sleep until I was woken by the shuffling of clothes and the click of the bedroom door being closed. I lifted my head slowly, but the darkness that the room was engulfed in made it impossible to see anything. “Billie?” I called out softly.

Instead of receiving a verbal answer, I felt the bed sink down next to me. After a moment I felt a pair of lips press themselves upon the back of my neck as he usually did when he was drunk, only the kiss wasn’t in any way sloppy or wet. And instead of his lips being dragged over my skin, they were placed on the back of my ear, on my earlobe, on my neck just below it, on my chin, my cheek, nose and then finally lips.

I felt my body freeze in shock for a moment as I felt his arms wrap around my body and he sighed contentedly into my hair. He lifted his body by propping himself up with his elbow and continued to kiss me.

After I realized that he was, in fact, very much sober, I decided to take as much advantage of it as I could. And so I kissed back.

I turned over to face my husband and slid an arm from the back of his leg to his waist, up his naked torso so the back of his head where I threaded my hand through his dark hair, curling pieces around each finger. Within only a matter of minutes, the bedroom temperature seemed to rise about ten degrees. “Joe,” he finally whispered as we removed each other’s clothes. “Oh—oh god, Joe. I’ve missed you. I need you.”

And that was all it took.