I ran my hand through my hair one final time, testing to see if I had brushed all the concert-necessary gel out of it. I was still surprised by its new length, though I had been growing it with purpose, and it was fun to play with. Or so I had been told. I smiled into the dim bus light and set my brush on the couch next to my thigh.

The sway of the rocking bus floated up my spine and I leaned against the wall behind me, enjoying it. Of course, at that moment the bus took a nasty lurch as it jolted into a parking lot and my head smacked sharply causing me to hiss and brace myself. The bus came to a gradual shuddering stop and I leaned over to the window to check where we were. Seeing the large red sign of the store I hopped out of my seat, eager to start on the little side trip I had asked our driver to make. Two of the guys blinked up at me sleepily and then out the window while the others remained oblivious.

"Um, Target? Why're we stopping, Jayce?" Justin was uncurling himself from around a beanbag chair and Chris to kneel up and get a better view of the store. He poked at Chris. "Chris, Chris," he chanted. "We're here."

Chris grunted, his hands flapping. "No way in hell, Jussin," he muttered thickly. "Driver said six more hours." He rolled over causing the grains of styrofoam to shift underneath him with a sliding whisper and squeezed his eyes shut as if that would make Justin go away.

"Seriously. Yo," Justin was saying as he tried to find an unprotected place to poke at Chris, his mission now less to get Chris up than to be an annoyance.

It looked like Justin had foregone figuring out why the bus was stopped early in favor of continuing his never-ending game of trying to get Chris to pay attention to him. I gave up on them and started walking down the aisle towards the exit. Lance struggled out of his seat to walk with me. "Hey," he said softly, rubbing one tired eye and stretching.

I smiled and stopped. Of course. "Hey, sleeping beauty. Wanna come with?" I reached out and touched his shoulder lightly.

"Sure," he sighed and swayed his body against mine for a gentle moment. I leaned into it, happily remembering that I got to do things like this now, at least in private. Now that we weren't pretending, weren't acting, weren't avoiding anything anymore. Sometime last week we'd both finally cracked. We'd paused in our post-show makeup removal and started kissing between "pass me the Noxema" and "where'd my socks go?" Very smooth if I do say so myself though the other guys had seemed a little shocked. This is understandable seeing as they were standing right there watching us at the time with costumes half off and towels around their necks. Management had begged us to please, for the love of God, not to kiss or grope in anymore public or semi-public places. So even if only a dozen or so people in the whole world would ever know the truth, Lance Bass was mine now. We were taking it slow, too. Very slow. As in, pants-had-yet-to-be-removed slow. Still, I felt silly forgetting sometimes how things were now, what he seemed eager to let me do to him after years of sneaking looks and dreaming. I kissed him then, to remind myself, slowly, lightly, briefly, and we both smiled into it, lips bumping sweetly. He pulled his head back before shaking it as if to clear his mind and then leaned away. "Uh, where are we going?"

I grinned and started walking down the aisle again. "I asked Ron to stop here. Well, not here specifically, but I told him I needed music."

"Josh, music you've got," he said and laughed.

I hummed at him and then sang loudly, "Feel it when your body starts to rock! And baby you can't stop!" I heard a loud groan from my waist level and felt a hand start to whack at me. "And the music's all you got!" I did a little spin in the narrow space. The whacking continued and then I couldn't sing at all as a soft lump hit me in the nose. "Joey!"

"Shut. The fuck. Up!"

I scowled and picked up the pillow that had been flung at me. Lance took it and bent down to pass it back into Joey's bunk.

"Joey," I moaned theatrically, throwing my hands in the air. "Don't you like our new single?" From the back of the bus I heard Justin's enthusiastic voice adding, "Pop! Pop pop pop!" and then Chris yelling somewhat less enthusiastically. Scuffling noises and grunts came next, floating through the partition door and I thought Chris might've been trying to smother Justin under a beanbag chair, but what else was new. We didn't get anything but another groan from Joey and some pointed rustling sounds that let me know he now had his back to me.

Lance ran his fingers through my hair reassuringly. "Hey, he'll get his sense of humor back soon. The antibiotics are almost out." I nodded and rolled my eyes. Only doctor-enforced prescriptions could have affected Joey's perpetual good mood. We knew Joey was stubborn all right, but this time he had really overdone it. He insisted that his leg injury was healed enough to dance, so we let him. Unfortunately, this time he had pushed himself right into an infection before the staples had been able to be removed. Nasty business. He was almost completely healed now and all of us were really looking forward to getting our old Joey back.

Lance and I made our way up to the front of the bus finally and ducked through the curtain. Ron, the bus driver, smiled cheerfully. "I was beginning to wonder if you'd changed your mind," he chuckled. "Believe me, stopping at a Target at midnight is not my idea of a good time."

"Man, you just don't know how to shop. Midnight is the best time to do it. No crowds!"

"That's because no one's stupid enough to shop then." He and Lance both laughed as I pretended to punch at him. "Besides, it's not like crowds are a life-threatening hassle to me, ya know?" He leaned over to open the bus doors, only half-joking. Lance and I nodded and got off quietly because we did know. Crowds really were life threatening to us. No joke.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw two bulky shapes hop down from another bus near the back of the small line of them that had joined us in the nearly deserted parking lot. Protection for the unlikely event of hysterical teenage crowds forming at midnight in aisle seven near the Clearasil body wash. Sometimes I felt silly for causing such a commotion when all I wanted was a stack of new cd's so I wouldn't go stir crazy between Memphis and Topeka, but I'd learned to live with it. Amazon.com didn't exactly deliver to a moving target like us and I had finally decided that it was ok to make demands occasionally. I didn't think I asked for too much and I know that I didn't ask for it often. Besides, I was sort of the one paying them all to be here (well, one of the five who did), so when I wanted to shop in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere they could all just suck it up and get paid to wait for me.

Lance and I were nearly to the door of the store when I heard scuffling and quiet shouts behind me and saw three blurry looking shapes falling out of the bus I had just left. I blinked and then realized that they looked blurry because 1) my eyes weren't getting any younger 2) they were sleep mussed like I was, hair brushed out of gel and floppy, except for Justin the cue-ball of course, and their clothes wrinkled and 3) Chris was buzzing around, limbs flailing, alternately trying to help Justin get Joey off the bus and making his unhappiness at being awoken known. "What the fuck!? Justin, get that...no that. Midnight, shit. Whose idea was this? Joey, just wait, I'll get it already. You could've just, hold on, um..." and then he dove to catch the warm up jacket that was trying to blow off in the late-night breeze that had sprung up. "Gotcha!" He grabbed it and loped up to us, holding the jacket to his shoulders like a cape. "I'm gonna kill you both," he sing-songed, sounding entirely too cheerful to be making death threats. Justin must've finally managed to relay between beatings where we had stopped

"Freak," Lance said, and we turned to enter the store once we made sure that Joey wasn't going to seriously injure himself or others by joining us.

I smiled to myself then because I had just known that none of the guys would be able to miss a chance at shopping in relative anonymity, no matter how tired or sore they were. It's not like we had to shop or anything. I was pretty sure that we had at least four people currently on staff who included "personal shopper" in their job description. But come on. How unreal can you get? I happened to like spending forty-five minutes combing for cd's to buy that I could probably have gotten for free. Call me crazy. But the other guys liked getting a chance to run around a store occasionally, too.

Chris grabbed a cart and shoved off, using it as a kind of scooter. I slung an arm around Lance and gave him a suitably manly squeeze that made him grunt before I grabbed a hand basket and swung away to the cd aisle. I glanced back and saw Lance waiting for Joey before my view was cut off by a backpack display.

I found the cds fairly easily. The long walls and shiny wrapping were a sea of plastic against the beaches of clothing racks. Once found, though, the rows were easy to get lost in. They came up just high enough that I couldn't see over into the next one and they all looked the same, distinguished only by small black-lettered labels saying things like "Soft Rock," "World Music," and "Hip-Hop/Rap." Labels that didn't make me happy because, really, why label such a shifting, organic thing as music? And also because each store seemed to have it's own idea which artist to put under which label.

I visited the discount bins first. It was usually interesting to see who got dumped off the shelves of microsecond popularity this month, although it could be devastating when the dumpee was someone I cared about. Or even, Lord save me, me. Us. Whatever. 'NSync.

The bin proved to be a gold mine this time. I happily tossed a copy of Peter Gabriel's "So," a couple of old Neil Diamond's, a Fine Young Cannibals, a Billy Joel, Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians, and score!, Britney's first album all into my hand basket. I pawed through until I thought I had found all of the copies that were left of Britney; there were four. I had some of these already, especially Britney's because Justin had passed out copies like cigars after he and Brit had decided to date. Funny, though, I don't remember seeing any of them lying around lately, now that Britney was focusing on "career" again and Justin had gone back to being more interested in group activities. But anyway, I don't think that I'd ever paid only $2.97 each and who could ever pass up a deal like that? Besides, there was a certain amount of humor at finding "Hit Me Baby One More Time" in the last chance bin next to Debbie Gibson and Tiffany. I couldn't wait to tell the guys.

I gazed happily at my haul and decided that I had to show the other guys what treasures were hidden in the bowels of Target. I could come back and find some more later.

Unsure where the other four would be shopping, I started off on a random direction through the clothes. I was in a really good mood now so I hopped along, occasionally spinning around, throwing dance moves into a sort of shuffling cha-cha, and mumbling out whatever lyrics popped into my head. "Baby we could do all that you want, Mm-hmm," spin, grab my hips, thrust, "Yeah!" I felt good and it was so rare that I got to act like the complete goober that I knew myself to be at heart. "When we are apart I feel it tooooo." Once, I passed an old woman trying on flip-flops and had to pause and stare for a moment. The store had seemed so deserted that it hadn't occurred to me that other shoppers might still be lurking around. After that I tried to tone down my exuberance, but only half-heartedly. There's a reason I've been called Spazz.

I jogged along and stopped suddenly, allowing myself to slide along the slick linoleum when I spotted a familiar crowd of tousled bed-heads. I changed direction and skidded up to Joey who was lounging in a lawn chair with his leg propped up and watching Chris and Justin play on the floor. "Wassup?"

Joey leaned his head back and peered at me through a pair of store sunglasses. The tag was hanging down over his nose. "Oh, JC. Man, sorry 'bout earlier. I didn't know you were going to spring a surprise like this for us. I should remember this and be nicer to you." I shrugged and smiled, always ready to forgive Joey. He just was not a mean guy under ordinary circumstances. "Look, Chris found toys."

"Well, duh." We were in the toy section, naturally. I should have known to start looking here first. "What's he doing?"

"He found out that Justin never finished his US History class 'cause we were busy recording 'No Strings Attached.' He took it as a personal affront that Justin doesn't know much about the Cold War."

Chris yelled from his place on the floor, "He doesn't know shit!"

"Hey," protested Justin. "I know shit."

"The Cold War," I said, just to be sure.

"Yup." We both stared at the back of the messy dark-haired head.

Chris turned and glared at us over his shoulder. "You two are, like, the perfect example of the ignorant, unwashed masses. You have no appreciation for living in the shadow of certain nuclear holocaust. You are not that much younger than me." He heaved a sigh that was redolent with the burden of putting up with friends as dumb as we were. He turned back and started opening another package of jacks. By now he was surrounded by wrappings and opened toys. I hoped that the store employees wouldn't get mad. I knew Chris would pay for it all eventually.

I turned to Joey. "And this came up how?"

"Vodka."

I nodded, trying not to have to ask. Oh hell, who was I kidding. "Vodka?"

Joey sighed. "Justin was wondering if Target sold any alcohol and Chris started making cracks about what a lush Justin was going to be by the time he actually turned twenty-one and that he was going to personally be supporting an entire region of Russian potato farmers. And then of course Justin wanted to know what Russian farmers had to do with his wanting a drink and then Chris called him bourgeois."

"Um, I didn't even know Chris knew that word."

Joey nodded, scratching at his eyebrow and bumping the glasses down his nose. "I didn't even know Chris could pronounce that word. Anyway, I don't really remember what happened next but I think Chris is trying to recreate the Cuban Missile Crisis. Like, a diorama. Or something." He leaned over the side of his chair and picked up a Snapple, twisting the top off with a loud pop.

"I sometimes forget that Chris went to college."

"Don't we all."

"I can hear you guys, you know."

Joey and I laughed and said together, "So?"

Joey peered over the top of his glasses, squinting at the older man on the floor and asked, "Chris how did you get into that school anyway? Isn't Rollins a pretty good school?"

"I applied, Joe. I'm obviously very qualified."

Joey snorted.

"Fuck you, Joe."

I wandered over to see the supposed re-creation. Chris was hunched over laying out jacks side by side and Justin was sitting cross-legged at the end of the aisle watching him with glittering blue eyes that actually appeared interested. Amazing. As I looked on I could sort of see what Chris was getting at with his model. The jacks were forming vague borders of countries. A roundish blob off by itself must have been Cuba and he had most of the southeast of the US framed out. A little to the right was what could have been the western edge of the former USSR. A pile of GI Joe weapons sat on Cuba pointing at the US and another was on the USSR area. There was a Chris Kirkpatrick puppet doll sitting about halfway up the US coast. "Chris, why do you have yourself sitting over here?"

Justin grinned and Chris ducked his head a little but kept working. "He's pretending that he's Kennedy," Justin offered helpfully. Joey snorted again. "Kennedy got all the hot chicks, I guess."

"Oh yeah. Marilyn Monroe, baby."

"Shut up, Joe. You're not helping me here. I'm trying to ed-u-cate the youngster." Justin threw a jacks ball at Chris and it went bouncing down the aisle.

I looked around some more. "If you're Kennedy, then who do you have to be Castro?"

Justin held up a Backstreet Boys pencil.

"Ok, so Chris Kirkpatrick is one of the greatest leaders of the free world and the Backstreet Boys are communist thugs?"

"Well, just Nick Carter. I like Howie."

"Chris, you are amazing."

He beamed up at me. "Why thank you."

"If only the press could see us when someone's acting smart like this. I don't think we'll ever shake our paddle-ball playing, noogie-giving reps, though."

Chris nodded. "Yeah. I say, 'why fight it?' Pass me the Barbie jeep."

Then he and Justin started arguing over whom got to drive the submarine/jeep around the Atlantic Ocean and I suddenly remembered why I was here. I showed Joey my cds and he expressed proper appreciation for my haul. Justin heard and got defensive about Britney, as usual. "Dude, shut up. She's a good singer, ok?" And then I missed Lance. Joey helpfully told me that Lance had set him up with the chair and beverage and then claimed to be heading over to buy a lamp. A lamp?, I wondered. I left them to their historical pursuits and went in search of my furniture-buying...boyfriend? Significant Other? Friend with possibilities? Whatever. I missed him.

Lance was indeed looking at lamps when I caught up to him. I stayed hidden around the corner of the aisle for a moment, just watching him. His hair was darker now than it used to be, but that only made shadows give his face more depth. His eyes, as he squinted at a price tag, looked hooded and deep. I sighed and tried to get a peek at his ass from where I was but it was no good because I was looking at him in profile. His jeans were too baggy anyway. I resolved to take him shopping immediately to rectify that and popped around the corner.

"Hey you."

Lance started and fumbled at the lamp, nearly knocking it off the shelf. "Fuck, Josh!"

"Sorry," I said with no sorrow.

"No you're not." I appeared to be forgiven, though, as he beamed at me. "I'll get you for that, don't you worry." Or maybe not.

"Whatcha doin'?" I scooted over and laid my palm against his back, peering over his shoulder.

"Um, getting you a present?" It was definitely a question.

"Am I supposed to answer that?" I leaned over and rested my chin on his shoulder, my palm moving to his waist. "I have no idea."

He sighed and leaned back a little. "No. I just, well it's really. I thought it could be for both of us." He pressed his lips together and rubbed at the base of one of the lamps on the shelf.

"You're getting us a lamp. That's, uh."

He jumped in. "No, just...You know how hotel rooms are always so dark? And we both like to work sometimes. At night. Like, you write songs and I have FreeLance stuff. And I thought, if I got a cheap Target lamp that we could. That we could have Lonnie, or somebody, set it up for us when they bring our luggage in. And. And since it's a Target lamp we won't worry if it gets broken. Or left behind. And...you know. And maybe we could work together, you know, if you want." His hands moved nervously over the edge of the shelf and his head bowed down a little.

I pondered this. Lance wanted to buy me ("us!" my mind shouted) a cheap lamp. So we could have enough light to work together in a dark hotel room late at night. It was, perhaps, the sweetest thing I'd ever had done for me. My mind filled in the things left unsaid, like how we could have some more time alone together, some quiet time that we so rarely got, like that Lance was trying to think of a way that we'd be together more often. My heart simultaneously jumped and melted.

I glanced around the aisle and didn't see anybody lurking around. I closed my eyes and pressed my lips to the back of Lance's neck where his short hair brushed skin and the collar of his shirt. "Thank you," I whispered.

He shivered and nodded, pressing against me a bit more.

"Have you decided which one?"

"Yeah, I think. Like this one?"

I eyed the small, nondescript, green metal lamp with its small yellow shade. It looked fine to me. The best little lamp ever. "Perfect." I squeezed Lance's waist and stepped back. "Now get your lamp and come along, dear. Chris has toys out and he's all in 'you're all ignorant bastards' teacher mode." Lance snorted, picked up the lamp and followed me out of the furniture section.

I was showing him my cds and telling him about the ones that I hoped to find still when we heard the shouting. We picked up our pace and trotted into the aisle where I had last seen the rest of the guys. The relatively peaceful scene I had left had been replaced by an outtake from a 'Toy Story' movie. Jacks and plastic weapons were scattered everywhere. Joey was standing and brandishing a whiffle bat at Chris's head. Justin was rolling on the ground with laughter and Chris. I blinked. I didn't know what the hell Chris was doing but it looked like it involved something mildly obscene with a Joey Fatone doll.

"Guys! What the fuck?"

Justin gasped when he saw our faces and started laughing harder. Lance moved in next to Joey and put a hand on his arm. "Joe?"

"Tell him to Knock. It. Off." Joey growled.

Curious, I walked over to see what Chris was doing. He had the Joey doll in one hand with one of its shoes off and in the other. It looked like he was trying to arrange one of the doll's hands so that it was holding the shoe. It made no sense to me, but it looked really...odd.

"Um, wanna explain yourself, Kirkpatrick?" I asked tentatively.

Chris glanced up and laughed at the angry man with the bat. "Sheesh, Joey. Lighten up. It's not like the doll even looks much like you." He knocked the whiffle bat away from his head with the hand holding the shoe.

Joey still looked annoyed but lowered the bat. "I ain't no communist."

Chris regarded him with tolerant eyes. "We know, Joe."

"You coulda used a Ken doll."

"I know, Joe. This way is more fun, see? I'm Kennedy, Nick Carter is Castro and you're Krushchev. An all boyband world power stage. We'll reenact the speech where Krushchev pounds his shoe on the podium. It'll be fun, you'll see."

"I'm Italian, Chris."

Chris blinked. "Yeah?"

Joey rolled his eyes but he seemed to have calmed down considerably, perhaps seeing the ridiculousness of the situation. Perhaps his medication was just wearing off. "So I don't even look Russian. And neither does my doll."

Chris regarded the Joey toy critically. "Hm, well. The Italians did side with Germany in World War II and they attacked Russia. Maybe one of your long lost relatives stayed behind. Whatever. Close enough. Besides, it's not like Nick Carter looks like he and Castro were separated at birth or anything." He laughed then, amusing himself yet again. "Just go with it. We're all one world, right? No colors, no boundaries." And then he started singing "It's a Small World After All" and the conversation was effectively ended.

Joey threw his hands up and flopped back in his chair, not even bothering to ask what Chris meant by any of that. We all knew better than to argue with Chris most of the time. The man could convince himself of the oddest ideas and explain away all arguments that were contrary. He should have been a lawyer, though I had doubts about a judge accepting "Just go with it" as a legal argument.

Lance kicked at some of the toy debris littering the floor. "So what was the lesson today, Mr. Kirkpatrick, sir? Better living through mass nuclear destruction?"

"Ha ha, Bass. You're not funny." Chris scooted around and looked over at Justin who was trying to sharpen the Backstreet Boys pencil with the plastic edge of the Barbie jeep. "What do you think, Justin? Did anything I said before Joey turned violent sink in past the bleach and curls and gel? What do you think the Cuban Missile Crisis taught us historically?"

Justin brushed at the paint flakes on his pants. "What do I think? I think that I could have figured this all out without the diorama. Um, not that it wasn't nice." He flashed Chris one of his genuine smiles, peeking through his lashes. "But it's like, kind of obvious when you live the life we do. We learn it over again every night, every time we get on stage. Like, if there's not something real behind the noise and confusion, nobody's going to listen. You know? Like, if we didn't really have good music and something to pay attention to, and if we didn't really, truly care about how it all comes out, no one would come to our concerts or buy our stuff. So, that Castro guy and all them, they needed to have something to scare Kennedy with. For reals. But whether he really meant that he'd nuke us all, that's what we had to figure out. So, whether or not you believe what you see depends on the truth of the feeling behind it."

We were all silent until Joey spoke from his position back in his beach chair. "Yo, Justin, dude, that's kind of deep."

Justin shrugged. "That's our life." He squinted over at me standing by Chris, "You guys taught me that."

I squeezed Chris's shoulder and smiled over at Lance. The feeling behind what you see.

Seeing that things were mellowing somewhat, I left Lance to help the guys scoop the toys into Chris's basket and clean up what they could. I wanted to see if I could find anymore cds before we left.

I found my way back to the music section and mentally reviewed the list of cds that I wanted in my head. I got most of the new stuff as soon as it came out. We all did. I took advantage of trips like this to try and round my collection out some. I poked through the classical section and tossed a Rachmaninoff into my basket, chuckling quietly. I cruised through the Jazz and Blues and found a Nina Simone that I didn't have. I made my way to the contemporary music and decided to look and see which Stevie Nicks they had. She was making a comeback again and I wanted to remind myself of what her older stuff sounded like.

I walked down the alphabetical rows and turned into the one that I thought the N's were in. I hesitated for a second when I saw a woman already in there. She looked young, but not that young. Christ, it was almost 1:30 in the morning; she had to be at least over eighteen, I reasoned. I didn't particularly want to be recognized and I'd found that the older the female, the less likely that was. Besides, I looked like anything but a pop star now with my hair falling over my forehead and in old jeans and a pullover. I wandered down the row checking the lettered sections. I got nearer the woman and noted distractedly how short she was. Her head didn't come up to the top of the racks.

I was nearing the end of the row and was almost on top of the other shopper who was studying the back of a cd case with great concentration. I realized that she was standing right next to where the Stevie Nicks cds would be kept and paused behind her. She tossed a distracted look over her shoulder and shuffled sideways as if she knew I wanted something she was near. I glanced up and noted with a mild horror that there was an 'NSync display near the top of the rack we were standing in front of. They had our new single in the center with our other cds splayed out around it. Oh my god.

For some reason, at 1:30 in the morning, that struck me as almost surreal. I stifled a choked giggle and forced my attention to the task at hand. I scanned the artist names before me and reached out to a Stevie cd right at the same time the other shopper reached for the same one. Our hands collided and we both jumped a little.

"Sorry!" we said at the same time and then smiled at each other. I gestured at her to take the cd in front and then I picked up the one behind it. We glanced at each other again and then bent our heads to look at the cd. It was "Belladonna," which I remembered liking but couldn't remember if I owned.

Once again we both moved simultaneously as we dropped the cd into our hand baskets. I finally laughed because it looked like we were choreographed, talking and moving at the same time. She laughed a little too and we both relaxed.

"You like Stevie Nicks?" Ok, so it wasn't the most original thing I could have said seeing as she had just made a move to buy the cd, but I felt like I should say something.

"Yeah. She's great. I like all her stuff, and Fleetwood Mac's stuff too. I really admire chicks who can rock like that."

I nodded because I had to agree. Chicks who rocked were cool. I'd always thought so. We chatted for a few minutes about music. I relaxed when she treated me like a normal guy, not someone she recognized or someone she was flirting with. We talked about the long and rocky history of Fleetwood Mac, then about other bands from around that time. Jefferson Starship. CCR. The Eagles. She seemed to know a lot about music and I always liked that.

Then I felt a twinge of apprehension as her eyes started squinting at me like she was trying to figure something out. Shit, I thought. Please don't...

"Do I know you from somewhere?"

I shuffled my feet and dropped my eyes, regretting this moment. Knowing that my little music chat interlude was coming to a rapid end. "Um. I don't think..." I'm terrible at this, I know it.

I was standing with my back to the entrance of the aisle, facing my acquaintance when I heard the deep beloved tones of my Lance coming from behind me. "JC? Josh? There you are." I froze and then felt two arms come around my waist as Lance pressed his face against my shoulder and inhaled deeply. It was a very intimate move and normally I would have reveled in it. But right then...Right then I was considered screaming at him but I couldn't seem to move. "We were wondering where you--" He stopped abruptly.

He had looked up and noticed that we were most definitely NOT alone. That this was NOT a private place. That, yes, we HAD just fucked up. He had probably not seen the short woman as he was walking up. Her head didn't go above the racks. I had probably just looked deeply enthralled with my music, as usual. Shit.

And right at that moment the woman's eyes just flew wide open. They darted from our shocked faces to the garish display at the top of the rack. It's just my luck that 'NSync would be filed right next to Stevie Nicks. We were standing by the N's, after all. It's that damn store music filing system again. I really hated that.

"Um," I said. "Uh." I'm not good at lying about my identity and I royally suck at coming up with excuses. It didn't help that Lance's arms seemed to have frozen into two ice blocks around my middle.

He seemed to shake himself then and shifted smoothly away from me. The boy does smooth well, at least in public. I liked that about him. He could be Mr. Suave in the camera light and then an awkward Southern boy around me. It's adorable.

He opened his mouth to speak but the woman cut him off by thrusting out her hand towards me. "I'm Kara, by the way. Kara Mathers."

I blinked, still flustered, but put my hand in hers. "Josh Chasez. JC."

She shook and offered her hand to my group mate. "Lance Bass," he said as he shook. For the moment he didn't seem to know what else to say.

She paused then and seemed to gather her thoughts. "It was really nice to talk to you, JC. You know a, um, a lot about music."

"Yeah, you too." Like Lance, I didn't know quite what to say.

She nodded. "I think I should be going now. It's really, really late. Later than I thought, even." I was madly trying to think of a way to ask her if she was going straight from Target to the nearest tabloid without being tacky. I didn't think there was a way to do that.

She moved to leave. Rather than walking past me, though, she took a step nearer to me, rose up on her toes and started talking near my ear. "You don't have anything to worry about. I promise. And JC? You guys make a really awesome couple. I can tell." And when she stepped back and met my eyes I could see that she was honest. What a nice fucking relief. "Really awesome." She smiled and looked at Lance and then back at me. I really, really liked this woman.

And then she was gone.

We stood in silence for a moment, just thinking there, by the N's.

"She won't talk?"

"She won't talk." I put my hand on Lance's shoulder again and turned him towards me. "We are one totally awesome couple."

His grin was a mixture of sappy and relieved. "Yeah."

"We need to work on our definition of public places."

His eyes dropped sheepishly to the floor. "Yeah."

"But I'm still going to kiss you now."

"Yeah?" And then his hand was in my hair and his lips were on mine and I could have sworn that I had just said that I was going to kiss him but instead he seemed to be kissing me and oh, it was nice. Awesome, even. And then he stepped back after just a few moments because, as we had discovered, Target at midnight or even 1:30 in the morning was not a private place. We glanced around, both blushing a little.

I looked at his hands. "Where's my lamp?"

"Oh, come on. We gotta go 'cause the guys are checking out. Chris is buying it for us. Says it's a 'congratulations, you've caught a clue' present. Whatever that means."

"Um, babe? I think I know."

"Yeah, I know too." He sighed. "Six years," he said almost mournfully. All I could do was nod. I felt the same way. It had taken us six years. Clue bus, consider yourself caught.

And then we walked to the registers together, closely, but not too close. We could wait until we got to the privacy of our bus. In fact, we were awesome at waiting. We had waited six years after all, but that was ok, actually, because we had waited until the feeling behind all the words and passion was real. This whole night had brought that lesson home to me, there by the N's.

~end~