“Chris, I’m gonna fucking sue you if I throw my back out,” Joey
said once he got in the door, even before JC was in with his end yet.
“Oh, for the love of mike, don’t be such a pussy. You’re a big
guy, you can do it. Exercise is good for you.”
Joey muttered something obscene under his breath, and privately JC
thought he might agree with it. It wasn’t that he didn’t recognize
that renting a sleeper sofa was one of Chris’ better ideas this week,
and it wasn’t even that he didn’t recognize that he and Joey were
the strongest of the group and the most capable of carrying the sofa.
It’s just that the damn thing was built on a frame of solid iron and
heavy as fuck, and he was well beyond reason. He just wished he had
the strength to chuck it at Chris.
The only thing that keeps JC from saying anything is that it’s as
much his stupid fault as anyone else’s that he’s stuck carrying a
piece of furniture that was obviously made with the scrap metal from
a melted-down U-boat. With just the vaguest stab at organization,
they could have called the rental place this morning when they first
discussed it, and someone would have been here to deliver it by now.
Of course, it didn’t quite happen that way. Of course, at ten
minutes until five, Joey said, “What’s up with that couch thing?” and
nothing was up with the couch thing, because they’d all been busy,
and they’d all assumed someone else was calling. This, as Justin had
been kind enough to point out, was exactly why they paid other people
to tell them where to be and when. Because on their own, they tended
to run in circles.
Especially the last few days. Having Lance in the hospital had
spun them all, and although they all handled it in their individual
ways, the common denominator seemed to be a certain amount of chaos.
They’d all looked pretty busy the whole time, but now that it was
over, JC was realizing just how much he hadn’t gotten accomplished,
and he suspected the same thing was true of everyone else. And this
party, which hadn’t even officially started yet, was already
exhibiting the sound-and-fury syndrome to the nth power.
“I’m not carrying any more furniture,” JC grumbled as they got the
couch into the spot where Lance’s futon used to be in front of the
television. “I’m an *artist.*”
“Great,” Justin said, lost in deep concentration as he tried to
eat microwave popcorn out of the bag without burning his fingers.
“Art us up some margaritas, yo.”
“I don’t think - I mean, they have me on these
anti-depressants....” Lance looked a little bit dazed; JC would have
liked to believe he was overwhelmed by their love and concern for
him, but he had a feeling that Lance was kind of picturing the mess
his living room would be by tomorrow morning.
JC wondered whose idea this was; hard to be completely sure at
this stage. It was Joey who promised Lance’s mother that someone
would stay with him for a couple of days after he got out of the
hospital, but it was Justin who insisted that they should all do it,
instead of taking shifts. Chris sort of turned it into a party when
he suggested the sleeper sofa and the movie marathon with a mental
illness theme, and JC was the one who off-handedly called it Lance’s
coming-out instead of Lance’s coming-home, which stuck, and made
everything seem like a bigger deal than just all of them falling
asleep in Lance’s living room.
Now JC was kind of regretting that he’d ever said that, because
truthfully, he wasn’t sure anymore if Lance was...out. Intentionally
out, anyway; they certainly all knew about it, but it was possible
that when Lance had confided in Justin on the way to the hospital, he
hadn’t exactly intended Justin to tell everyone who would stand still
long enough to listen.
That’s how he’d found out; Justin told them, wide-eyed and
slightly amazed, like he’d never, ever imagined. Lance is gay! He
told me so! Shock of the century. JC wanted to grab him by the
shoulders and shake, yelling, “Obviously Lance is gay - the
significant thing here is that Lance knows he’s gay!” JC had known
forever. It was just.... Obviously Lance was gay.
But it must not have been as obvious as he thought, because Chris
had looked pretty startled, too, although he got over the shock and
slid fast into raging around about society and homophobia and the
press and look what the stress was doing to Lance, why didn’t the
little fuckwit say something sooner instead of making himself fucking
sick over it? Joey had turned a little white, then walked calmly
across the hall and kicked a wall. But after that he seemed okay,
and didn’t really say anything about it one way or the other. JC
guessed he was all right with it; he’d never really seen any trace of
bigotry in Joey before. Just not Joey’s style.
That was pretty much the only time they’d ever talked outright
about the situation. The counselor who came and talked to Lance said
something oblique to them about sexual identity, and they’d all
nodded and looked at the floor, and then afterward they’d cornered
Justin. “We have to make sure everybody is okay with this,” JC told
him carefully. “We all have to be together on this, for Lance.”
Justin, sitting twisted up in the plastic hospital chair with one
leg thrown over the arm, just looked up at him with narrowed eyes and
said, “Why is everybody looking at me, yo?”
“You’re just kinda-“ Joey started.
“Thing is you’re sorta-“ Chris started.
“We were thinking that you-“ JC started.
Justin kept giving them that look, the one that caused producers
to demand raises and caterers to change careers.
“Southern.”
“Churchy.”
“Look a little pale.” On the whole, JC thought his answer sucked
a lot less than everyone else’s.
He’d never, ever seen Justin look that quietly furious before, but
he spoke calmly, with interview-grade pleasantness. “Come on, guys,
get your story straight. I really wanna know why I’m gonna pussy out
on my friend when he needs me. Is it because I’m from Tennessee, or
because I believe in God? Or maybe I’m just, I’m like, fragile or
something, is that it, JC?”
After that they’d all been profoundly embarrassed, and that was
the end of group discussion about Lance and his sexual identity.
JC didn’t know, of course, what any of them had said to Lance
privately. He knew that he hadn’t gotten a lot of alone time with
Lance; every time he went in there, Joey or Chris or both were there,
until Lance joked that they must be on the security company’s
payroll. At one point, after they took the IV out of Lance’s arm and
JC could be in the room without blood roaring in his ears and his
brain being ninety percent taken up by preventing his body from
turning around and bolting out, JC patted Lance’s chest awkwardly and
said something dorky about we’re all brothers, everything’s going to
be okay, better than ever. So that was supportive, hopefully. Lance
had smiled, at least.
But just because everybody knew now, and just because Lance
probably realized everybody knew, did that mean that Lance was...out
of the closet? Like, on purpose. That was the key. It was
different if he wanted them to know than it was if they’d just found
out because he couldn’t keep it locked down for another minute.
Until he knew that, JC wouldn’t be totally sure whether this was a
coming-out party or kind of an abject, groveling apology for being
part of the moment when the last shreds of Lance’s privacy had
disappeared.
True to his word, JC abandoned the others to figure out the exact
engineering of the couch, including its angle in relation to the tv
and speakers, and how exactly the fucking thing was supposed to fold
out. He could tell immediately by looking at the groceries piled up
on Lance’s kitchen counter that Justin had done the shopping; Justin
was the only person he knew who bought food-in-a-box, like macaroni
and cheese and instant mashed potatoes, not because it was easy to
fix but because he really liked it. But on the other hand, his
tastes in booze were not at all cheap, which somehow pleased JC. He
wasn’t all that much of a drinker himself, but there was something
satisfying about mixing drinks that you knew weren’t made from
something that Wal-Mart had anything to do with. If you were going
to do it, do it right; that was JC’s approach to margaritas, as well
as to everything else.
He made a fairly good-sized pitcher, and then a second one without
the tequila, and he found himself grinning as he blended that one.
Nostalgia trip - they used to always do it like this, one real
pitcher and one virgin, a mostly symbolic bow to how fucking young
they still knew they were. For JC and Joey it had always been
completely symbolic, but in the beginning Justin and Lance drank
without batting an eye from the legal pitcher; JC didn’t know whether
that was a principle thing, or the fear that their mothers would
notice, or maybe some kind of unconscious desire to hang on to what
they had of their childhoods. But sooner or later, Justin had
started waiting until he thought no one was looking, then sneaking
his refills out of the real pitcher. Everyone noticed, of course.
They timed him to see how long the switch-over would take, but he
still did it that way: token legal drink, then hitting the tequila.
Eventually there’d been a night when Lance looked at the second
pitcher and smiled with fond serenity at all of them, saying, “Y’all
don’t really have to make this just for me.” And they hadn’t
anymore.
It felt like a long time ago, even though JC knew it couldn’t have
been. They hadn’t really been together all that many years; he
should be nostalgic about his childhood, not about eighteen months
ago, but that was one of the many unexpected things about fame: it
compressed time, until you looked back on the last tour like your
parents looked back on their last decade. That time thing was also
maybe what made it feel like they’d been friends for life, when in
reality he’d maybe known Justin for a long time, and maybe Joey, if
you stretched the definition of know to include friendly
acquaintances, but it still was just a couple of years ago that
they’d all been virtual strangers to each other.
When he turned the blender off, JC could hear voices that sounded,
weirdly, like they came from underneath him, and he held very still,
trying to figure out what the hell he was hearing. Stairwell, he
finally realized. He was right by the stairs that led to Lance’s
basement; he’d never actually seen the basement, so it was easy to
forget that Lance had - what? Like a pantry or a washer and dryer or
something down there. Maybe a wine cellar; Lance knew a surprising
amount about wine for someone who, like JC, had never been a
dedicated drinker.
By that time, however, JC realized that he was actually listening
to the voices instead of just trying to figure out where they were
coming from. “-talked to you about it first,” Lance was saying, in a
sort of apologetic tone.
“No, no. This was important. I mean - for you. I’m glad you did
it.” Justin? No, Joey. Joey’s voice, unclear because of the
distance and the walls.
“You don’t have to.... I don’t expect you to change anything,
or...anything.”
“I kind of do have to. Because, just...they’re going to notice,
now. It’s just going to be a lot more obvious.”
“I’m so sorry. I feel like-“
“Don’t. Don’t feel like that. I just feel like - I mean -
fuck. Fuck, I didn’t know you were that freaked out about it. You
could’ve just...said.”
“I should have. I just didn’t know what you - where you were.
Mentally, you know? Like, if this was...what it was, I didn’t know
what it was. If you were....”
“I don’t know if I was, either,” Joey said. “But I am now.”
JC turned on the blender again, even though it normally went
against his do-it-right principles to over-liquify a margarita, just
to make them aware, in case they weren’t, that there was someone in
the kitchen, right at the head of the stairs. A moment later, the
door opened and Joey and Lance emerged, carrying two cartons of ice
cream. Must be an extra freezer down there.
Chris and Justin had figured out the sofa by that time and moved
on to spacing out the speakers Chris brought over, because he said
Lance’s were cheap-ass Radio Shack trash. JC picked up the stack of
movies on the VCR, and even though he hadn’t gone to Blockbuster last
night with the others, he could tell exactly who picked what. He
knew his own request, of course, which he’d almost figured Chris
would find a way not to get, considering the fit he’d thrown about
JC’s chick-flick taste in cinema. “It won an Oscar,” JC had tried to
defend. “Besides, Angelina Jolie is hot.” Chris didn’t seem to buy
it, but at least JC hadn’t been forced to admit that Girl,
Interrupted was the only mental-illness movie he could think of.
Nobody commented that it was kind of Lance’s party, and Lance wasn’t
likely to care that Angelina Jolie was hot. JC was thinking about
that now, though, and he felt like sort of an idiot. It was one
thing to think that Lance looked like an uptight little gay boy who
didn’t know what he wanted yet, and another thing totally to make the
jump to thinking of Lance as a - as a man who, what? Wanted other
men, related to men sexually? Would always be on the outside when
the rest of them talked about Angelina Jolie and Natalie Portman and
the actresses in their videos?
Chris was the Jack Nicholson fan, so One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s
Nest was probably his; besides, most people would shy away from
showing anything that fucking bleak to a friend who was being treated
for severe depression, but Chris, probably not so much. Justin
undoubtedly wanted , and Joey faithfully chooses
comedies for group-watching, although JC knew he watched a lot of
other things during his down time, so he would have been the one to
choose What About Bob?
Joey was sweet like that; he liked for every time they got
together to be fun, to be something they could talk about later and
laugh about all over again. That’s one thing that JC really loved
about Joey; they’re all predictable in their own ways, as anyone
would be if you clocked that many thousands of hours in their
company, but Joey was predictable in exactly the right kind of way.
Reliable, dependable. His goals were simple, and he took the
simplest path toward them, and JC needed that in his life. Chris was
devious for the sake of being devious sometimes; Justin had the most
perfectly innate instinct for manipulation that JC had ever seen, and
most of the time when he was setting things up he didn’t even realize
he was doing it; even Lance, lately, was more shrewd than he used to
be, all too aware of not just what things were but what they looked
like, and to whom. Joey was still the same as he’d always been,
genuine and - just sweet. Sweet, without any self-consciousness to
it.
He heard the end of that conversation again in his mind (but I am
now), and it made JC a little uncomfortable. He didn’t want Joey to
change. He just...didn’t. At all, in any way.
When everything was hooked up and ready to go, Chris sang a
trumpet fanfare that sounded eerily like an actual trumpet. “Let’s
get on the bus, ladies! We have audio-visual capabilities! And
here’s JC with the hooch, Lance with the ice cream, and Joey with the
fruit - I’m sorry, did I say that out loud?”
At that point, the issue of whether or not Lance’s homosexuality
was known-known or just known was pretty well settled. It wasn’t
exactly the way JC would have handled it, but he had to admit that
after that, the last little bit of awkwardness that had existed among
the five of them seemed to be gone.
Everyone was angling for space on the wide sofa bed, and it looked
like the festival seating approach could work out all right for four,
but five was just not going to fly. JC decided to be the nice guy
and sit down on the cushions on the floor. It was easier to pour the
drinks down there anyway.
“Are we going to have a toast?” JC suggested as he handed the
glasses up one by one.
“Give me the virgin,” Joey requested, and so of course Chris had
to say, “You heard the man, J; roll over,” and Justin kicked him in
the stomach and the virgin margarita almost got poured out all over
Lance, who was laughing so hard he almost couldn’t breathe.
It had been so long since JC had seen Lance laugh and laugh like
that. It didn’t matter anymore whose idea this was; it was *their*
idea, and it was a really good one, ten-ton sofa and food in a box
and all.
“I’m gonna toast your balls over an open fire,” Justin threatened.
“To my balls!” Chris shouted, raising his glass, and JC grumbled,
“That’s not exactly what I had in mind,” which was probably not new
information to anyone.
Order might never have been restored, except that Lance quietly
said, “I’ll do it. Can I do it?” No one was going to tell him no,
of course, and so he thought about it a minute, running his finger
around the rim of his cup, and finally said, “To...getting better all
the time?”
They toasted that with enthusiasm, and suddenly Lance followed it
up, louder and with more feeling behind it, “To you guys for -- for
giving me a chance.”
“That one sucks,” Justin said firmly. “We didn’t do you no
favors, yo; we had to fucking look everywhere to find a true bass.”
“To the true bass,” Joey said, and they all drank to that.
Chris didn’t last the whole first movie before getting too
restless to share that small a space, and he jumped ship to lay
sprawled out on the pillows next to JC. When JC got up to change the
video, he noticed that going from four to three up there had
definitely changed the landscape of the bed; with four, it had been
just a big chaotic tangle, but now - now it was like when you finally
unfocus your eyes just enough to see the picture hidden in those
jumbles of dots they print in the Sunday paper. JC stared, and
blinked, and stared harder; he could see the picture, very clearly,
but he had an idea that he didn’t know what he was seeing.
Lance was propped up with a stack of pillows, with Justin’s head
on his shoulder and his own head bent the other way so that his
forehead rested lightly against Joey’s. It was too dark for JC to
tell if their eyes were open or closed; they were either gazing at
each other, or they were just there, just being. A little light from
the hallway fell directly across Justin’s face, though, and he was
definitely awake and aware. He watched Lance avidly, almost in
fascination, with his broad hand splayed out over Lance’s stomach,
subtly possessive. JC didn’t think he’d ever seen Lance look
quite so -- well, he’d seen Lance happy before, but never
so...satisfied, is the only word JC could think of that quite
applied.
“Look at them,” Chris crowed, and JC could tell that he saw
whatever it was that JC did, too. But Chris seemed more sure than JC
about how to react. “Lance has been out of the closet for three
days, and suddenly he’s a player. They irradiated Lance’s sexual
magnetism by accident in the hospital, and now it’s gonna - gonna
take over, grow out of control and like, eat Tokyo and shit!”
JC wished he would shut up. Lance just grinned, flinging his arms
around Justin and Joey’s shoulders and squeezing slightly. “You’re
jealous. I’ve got it going on up here, and you’re wishing you
hadn’t left.”
“That bed’s not big enough for the both of us, Pimp Daddy L,”
Chris chuckled. “JC, put in your dumbass movie next; let’s get it
over with.”
“I’d be your ho,” Justin promised breezily, and nestled a little
closer to Lance.
Probably because of that, when JC woke up later that night with a
crick in his neck from sleeping on the floor and he heard a hushed
voice say, “Well, what’s wrong with tonight, then?” he automatically
guessed it was about sex. He just thought it was Justin, Justin who
took Lance’s collapse harder than any of them, whose mood has been
swinging most wildly ever since. After a second, it occurred to him
that he’d made the same mistake twice now - Joey, not Justin.
Joey.
“No, not -- no,” Lance whispered back, and vague, sleepy
assumption suddenly became cold, hard fact as JC heard the wet,
breathy sound of kissing in the silence, and he suddenly didn’t want
to be here, but he was afraid to move a muscle. This was a lot worse
than standing in the kitchen not telling anyone that he could hear
them.
“Because Justin’s asleep in the same bed--“
“Yes!” Lance hisses, and then sighs.
“Because we’re not alone, or because it’s Justin?”
“Joey-“
“I know you-“
“No, no you don’t. You don’t know. Joey, I’ve told you, it’s not
like that. It’s you.”
JC frowned. He’d been keeping half an eye on Justin whenever he
and Lance were together, because he knew Justin did some
experimenting, back when they were first back from Germany, and maybe
it’s stupid to think that Justin and Lance need a chaperone together,
but something about the two of them was really starting to unnerve JC
- something about the way they suddenly seemed to be having whole
conversations with just their eyes. It never occurred to him to be
watching for Joey, but...but, obviously, he was a moron, because - it
was Joey. The way Lance said it, maybe it had been Joey for a while
now.
“Do that again,” Lance pled, and there was the sound of another
kiss, and the iron springs in the bed creaking as it shifted.
“Joe....”
“God,” Joey gasped, with a laugh hidden inside the sound. “God,
you’re killing me. You fucking tease...fucking beauty....”
“I want -- not tonight -- oh! Oh....”
Joey made a shushing sound, and a few more creaking, metallic
sounds, and Lance whimpered, and all JC could think was, Well, they
can’t very well break up, can they? They better be goddamn fucking
sure they know what they’re doing.
Lance whimpered again. Somebody must know what he’s doing, JC
reflected wryly. He wondered if he should be finding this
disgusting, but he didn’t really. Just kind of funny, and kind of
sad at the same time. He couldn’t have explain either of those
reactions, but there they were. Joey and Lance were cute...and he
felt sad for them. He almost wished now that it was Lance and
Justin; he didn’t even know why, except that this felt more dangerous
somehow.
“You said you were tired of lying. You said you wanted to be
yourself.”
“I -- I do.”
“So this is - this is true, isn’t it? We’re not just fooling
around, here; this is an honest-to-God...thing.”
“Honest to God,” Lance repeated breathlessly, and maybe it was
just because it was Lance, but it sounded actually religious when
Lance said it.
“I just want you to do the honest thing. Both of us. And I think
that - this - us - we should do this. It’s right, it’s honest. Each
other’s first-“
“You wouldn’t be my first.”
From the sudden, kiss-free silence, JC figured that wasn’t quite
what Joey expected to hear. “Oh,” he finally says. “Well...oh.”
“I’m sorry.” It was so quiet that JC caught himself straining to
hear it, and then gave himself a mental smack. He wasn’t trying to
eavesdrop, here.
“No. It’s okay.”
“It’s not.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to me. If I’d said yes to you earlier--“
“Or maybe if you’d said no to him,” Joey snapped, just loud enough
to make Justin stir slightly, and JC tried to help by holding his
breath. It seemed like Lance and Joey were doing the same thing,
until it was obvious that Justin wouldn’t move again anytime soon.
“Was it-“
“If you ask me if it was Justin, I’ll - I’ll - just don’t,
Joey.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry,” Lance said again. “It was just a...stupid one-time
thing. I guess I was freaking out a little at the time. Are
you...not even going to kiss me now?”
JC could hear the kiss, but faintly. It seemed to go on a long
time, though, so JC assumed that Joey was starting to get over the
bad news, and then there was a tiny oof sound that seemed to be one
of them pulling the other suddenly closer. “I love you,” Lance
whispered. “I love you, I love you so much.”
JC really, really hoped the two of them knew what they were doing.
But he figured that if they didn’t, there was probably no help for
it now. Not judging by the way Lance sounded.
“No more secrets,” Joey begged him, his voice husky, and they
kissed again.
“Tomorrow,” Lance said, as though it were a response to the
request, and then his voice dipped even lower, rich and magnetic.
“I’ll think of a way to get the others out of the house for a while.
Tomorrow....”
Listening to the harsh sounds of their breathing, and the slick
sounds, and the rustling sounds, JC realized that he had every
intention of helping Lance come up with something that would keep
Chris and Justin out and about for as long as possible tomorrow; he’d
need the help, because usually neither of those two was up for much
on a tequila hangover. They’d try their damndest not to move for the
whole day, and when Chris and Justin were of one mind about
something, they were continental in their stubbornness.
JC wondered if he knew what he was doing. It couldn’t possibly
be good for the group.
But it was Lance’s party.
end
Bettythoughts: I actually own this couch. I hate it. Also, my intrepid beta-reader Mary told me
to take out the references to Girl, Interrupted, and she was quite right, because the movie and
its Oscar win are much too recent to fit with the timeframe of this story. However, I liked the
Girl, Interrupted jokes (doesn't JC seem like he has girly tastes in movies?), so sorry, Mary.
Appreciate the effort to keep me grounded in reality, but...man, I'm writing *Nsync slash. You're
so, so too late. Save yourself.