Disclaimer: I don’t own Four Brothers or “Snowbirds and Townies” by Further Seems Forever.

"This winter is lasting forever, at least for tonight..."

This was the lamest party ever.

Jack could hardly admit it to himself, but it was true. He shifted his weight on the beanbag chair and absentmindedly patted down his jacket feeling for his smokes. There were five people besides himself wandering about the dilapidated loft, making slush puddles on the warped wood floors, smoking, and drinking warm beer. Jack scowled at the can in his own hand - free beer wasn't even a perk at this social event.

The music was too loud, and it sucked. Some nu-metal band, he didn't know which. A bunch of pussies who were probably picked on in high school and were exacting their revenge on mankind for letting it happen by making horrible music. A girl with a platinum mohawk and lazy eye laughed too loudly, her guffaw grating against Jack's nerves. He stood, lighting a cigarette and pressing his forehead to the cool glass of the window. For being so high up, the view was shit.

New York was a fucking disappointment, and this party felt like the last goddamned straw.

Six months he'd been here, and what the hell did he have to show for it? He'd lost his first job by blowing it off for band practice, and lost the second one when he blew it off for a show. He was hocking things left and right to make rent, selling a little weed here, a few pills there to keep food in his stomach. He had a job as a courier, but the work wasn't steady and the pay was shit when they did have a run for him.

Spares had pretty much fallen apart. Eddie had gotten a girl knocked up, and she had insisted on having the kid - a baby boy, who Jack referred to as 'Rockstopper Harris', - and Eddie had eventually given in to fatherhood, leaving the band to go be responsible. They had barely replaced the rhythm guitarist when Seth blew out of town for no reason. Jack and Jonas found a new drummer, and just when things were looking as though they'd fall into place, Jonas and Jack were butting heads over bringing in a keyboard and an iBook. Jack didn't know what the fuck 'shoegaze' or 'math rock' was, but he wasn't fucking playing it. Practices were tense and awkward.

His nights were spent bundled up in his shitty studio that he couldn't afford to heat, shivering in bed and missing Detroit. He couldn't admit that he was homesick out loud, but he was. He missed the warm home of Evelyn Mercer, he missed his brothers - Jerry had just had a little girl, making Jack an uncle. An uncle to a kid he'd never met, although Evelyn had sent pictures in the mail. He kept his phone calls to her limited. Her innate ability to see through bullshit was too powerful for his fragile ego. It took a lot more energy than Jack could harness these days to keep up the enthusiasm it required to assure his mother that he was good and life was good and New York was the best and boy, oh boy! He had toyed with going home, with the idea of just saying 'fuck it' and hopping on to the first Greyhound he saw and leaving New York and his studio, and his pussed-out band that wanted to play shitty cutter music and had no integrity left.

"Hey Jack. Got a light?"

He turned away from the window and tossed his lighter to the petite girl in front of him. Tiny redhead, with freckles on her nose, big brown eyes with just a little too much black eyeliner rimming them, and a perfect smile. She flashed him one of those perfect smiles when she caught his lighter. "Does this party fucking suck or what?"

"It wasn't worth the token it took to get me here, or the money I spent on beer."

She studied him for a moment, taking a long drag off of her smoke. "So grab your beer and lets go back to your place. I've got that new Vincent Gallo movie if you wanna watch it."

He wasn't sure he wanted to. He scanned the room, taking inventory of the people who had showed up while he was staring out the window, realized the party hadn't gotten any better, and at least if he took Chelsea home, he'd get laid. Jack did the math quickly and jerked his head toward the door in consent.

Chelsea wasn't Jack's girlfriend. She wasn't Jack's consideration, or even Jack's steady piece of ass. She was just a girl he knew that was on the prettier side of cute who could fuck you within an inch of your life, and knew when to go home. Aside from that, she was smart, a musician, and easy to be around.

He liked sleeping with her because she didn't need things the way other girls did. She didn't care where his head was or what he was feeling, or if he thought she was pretty. She was simply satisfying her animal urges, and didn't need the Hallmark moments to go with it. It was a simplicity Jack could appreciate.

It wasn't something he talked about - ever - but he was still learning to enjoy sex. It embarrassed him that he still had hang-ups about sex. He knew that there were things that happened to him growing up, things that were out of his control, but he never spoke up later. He was offered therapy, several times, and was pushed into it a couple times, but he never took it seriously. It was times like these when he wished he had.

His first time had been a nightmare. He'd separated his mind from his body and found that he was enjoying himself as long as he didn't let his mind wander off to where it could think. The girl, Stacy... something... couldn't let him be. She kept grabbing his face, pulling it toward her own.

"Jack... Jack... look at me. Jack, where are you? Jack, I want you to be with me. What are you thinking about?"

Too annoyed to finish, he pulled out and slid his jeans back on to his hips. Snatching his shirt up off the floor, he stalked to her bathroom, where he fought the rising panic attack and splashed his face with cold water until he calmed down. Once he the walls stopped closing in on him, he walked straight out the front door and avoided contact with Stacy by any means necessary.

Almost every girl he'd been with had been like Stacy. They always wanted that emotional connection, pestered him for it, ruined sex over it. It was just not something that he was capable of - maybe never would be.

He knew that anyone who used a kid's body was sick and fucked up. It disgusted him, but it didn't handicap him. The part that hurt - the part that never healed - was that the abuse came from the ones he let get close. His mind had released his body to the carnal urges, but it hadn't worked itself out with intimacy and trust yet.

He glanced over at Chelsea, perched up in the window in just her panties, smoking. It was cold as hell out, but the air from the open window felt soothing as it whispered across his flushed skin. "Hey, you feel like drinking the rest of that wine?" she asked.

"Nah, I've got the rest of that beer from the party."

She hopped down from the windowsill and stretched. Jack made no attempt to camouflage his appreciation of the view. She had a killer body and she knew it. She gave him a crooked grin as she pushed curls away from her face and knelt to pick up her discarded clothing.

"You mind if I take a shower before I go?"

Jack rolled onto his back and lit a cigarette, letting his head hang off the bed. The world just seemed different drunk and upside down. "Go for it. You know where everything is, yeah?"

She answered him by ruffling his hair on her way to his bathroom, scraping her nails softly against his scalp. It sent little ripples of electricity whizzing down his spine.

He could hear her humming as she showered. She kept a tune alright, but she was no singer, not by a long shot. Listening to her dissonant voice, he smiled to himself and suddenly felt very close to her. She was alright, as far as girls went. She was the only girl he'd slept with more than a handful of times that he still wanted to talk to. It wasn't love, or anything close to it, but it was more than tolerance.

He fished an already-rolled joint out of his nightstand and lit up, melting into the bed while listening to the music he tried to write in his head. He was on the verge of a really excellent guitar riff, something that he knew the guys could work with. He was barely aware of his surroundings, floating into sound and feeling, evaporating into nothing but notes and chords and harmonies.

Jack was only vaguely aware of her presence in the room, roused slightly by the heat of her lips pressing softly against his own. He drifted back into the physical and buried his face against her neck, the one place he could still smell himself on her skin. He was almost tempted to ask her to stay the night, wondering how many times he could fuck her before sunrise, and to see how much it would change things to wake up next to her.

"I'm going," she said, pushing him back onto the bed and gazing down at him with half-lidded eyes. "It's late, and I've got shit to do in the morning."

"You want a walk to the subway?" he asked, hoping she didn't.

She slipped her coat on. "I'm good," she smiled. "It's only a few blocks from here. Oh hey - there's an art show next Thursday, at Brinks' gallery. I've got a couple pieces showing in it. You should come out."

"Yeah," Jack said, propping himself up on his elbow. "Call me about it. You know I forget shit."

She gave him a small salute and clomped across the room in her heavy boots and let herself out. Jack pulled his acoustic guitar off the makeshift stand and settled onto the bed with it. He relaxed back against the headboard and let himself sink back into the melodies and progressions he'd imagined earlier, letting his fingers find their way along the frets to form the sounds that engulfed his mind.

He woke up without realizing he'd fallen asleep. His cell phone was ringing and he barely cracked an eye open to see who would call him at the ungodly hour of... 1:22 in the afternoon.

"It'll have to wait Ma," he mumbled, hitting the button that would send the call to voicemail. He'd try to give her a call later, he thought, pulling his pillow over his head. Later, like spring, when he wasn't wallowing in his self-pity and defeatist attitude. He rolled over, tried to shake the thoughts and relax back into sleep.

Fucking winter.