On Saturdays, they go out to the country house. It's been a tradition since Lance was tiny. Back then, Grandmother was still alive, and it was her house, meticulously clean and always smelling of fresh bread and lavender.
Father has his computer with him, and is typing up a report to the mayor. Lance drives. Mother's smile gets wider and wider the further away from the city they get. Even though her mother's gone, she still loves the old house.
After dinner, Lance sneaks out behind the house to have a cigarette. That's also sort of a tradition. He doesn't actually smoke, just out here. When he lights up, standing in the rose garden, huddled under a warm pink cascade of Constance Spry, he wonders why he bothers sneaking around. He does enough of that. In comparison, sneaking out to smoke and sneaking out to see an outlaw aren't really the same ballpark. Or even the same sport.
The heavy myrrh fragrance of the roses is strong and doesn't even fade when he smokes the cigarette down to the filter. When he was little, he sometimes hid under the golden-white overhangs of Mountain Snow, curled into a little ball, dizzy from the perfume of the garden, the carefully planned patterns of scent and colour that his grandmother had created over forty years. She never planted a rose without scent. She wouldn't have approved of smoking in the garden.
She wouldn't have approved of JC, either. But then, nobody does, and Lance feels like a rebel every time he thinks of him. He breaks a flower off the bush behind him, to bring along tomorrow. Then he realises that he'll have to explain the flower if he wants to take it with him back into town, and drops it on the grass.
They leave in the evening, and before he gets in the car, he runs back to the garden and tears a handful of petals off the Constance Spry and stuffs them in his pocket. He feels ridiculous, but he keeps his hand in his pocket, touching the petals, and he thinks he can smell them on his skin even long after he's wrapped them in a tissue and stuck them in his drawer, under his socks.
"Did you have a good time, Lance?" Father asks him at dinner.
"Yes," Lance says. He's eating his veal on autopilot. He's thinking about the petals in his drawer, and the photocopied pages of police records underneath them. There's a blurry mugshot of a young man on them, and Lance almost didn't recognise him, even though he's actually met Justin. They've shaved the floppy golden-brown curls off him, and he looks exactly like every other prisoner in the camps. Lance remembers his brief meeting with Justin, just a quick, "hi, man" and a bright grin, and Justin was gone again, trailing after JC's friend Chris like a puppy. JC blushed and looked down when he asked Lance if there was any way, any way at all Lance could, possibly maybe, just for a friend, and he'd understand if it wasn't a good time, but...
Father smiles at him, a stern, restrained Father-smile, and Lance smiles back. "Perhaps we could look at your project tomorrow, son," Father says.
"Sure," Lance says, but he bites his tongue with the next mouthful of delicate meat and blackcurrant sauce. He's pretty sure he'll be done by nine-thirty, but sometimes Father gets excited by science and talks Lance's ears off, and then it could easily stretch into the night, and JC will stand by the old pump house and wait, alone.
As it turns out, he's only half an hour late. He had to climb out through his bedroom window with the rose petals in his pocket and the papers carefully folded and stored inside his undershirt. JC stands where he always stands, in the shadow, nothing but a vague outline against the dirty grey brick wall.
"I found some stuff," he says at first, because he figures JC is worried about Justin.
"Chris will be glad," JC says. "Thank you." He stuffs the folded papers into his pocket without looking at them. His eyes glitter with reflected sodium light.
"I missed you," Lance says.
They have a mattress inside the pump house, hidden under a staple of crumbling terracotta bricks. Lance rests his head on JC's bony chest and listens to his heart tick off the seconds.
JC always smells strange, a little stale, a little dirty and smoky. His hair is long and never really clean, because they don't have enough soap down there. Lance sometimes gives him pieces of soap, but he doesn't want to do that too often, because he worries that JC will think he's being condescending.
Lance doesn't mind the smell. It's not like JC has a choice about what he smells like.
"I brought you these," Lance says, remembering. He digs the rose petals out of his jacket pocket. They're crushed and tattered, but the sweet, heady scent rises like smoke in the air, and Lance watches JC's eyelashes flutter. His chest heaves slowly as he takes deep breaths.
"Oh," JC says and picks the petals from Lance's hand.
Lance feels half-ridiculous, half-proud. "I picked them in my grandmother's rose garden," he says. JC's eyes look black because the only light in the pump house is the trickle of streetlight that sneaks in through the kudzu growing over the small windows, but Lance pretends he can see the blue. He's not sure why he knows that JC's eyes are blue; they've never met in daylight, have they?
JC kisses him, and he remembers the first time they met, suddenly. JC knocked him over, literally, came running into him like a startled deer, and they tumbled into a heap of knees and elbows on the gravel path that went between Maple and Third, rolled into the brambles growing along the dun concrete wall of 34 Maple Street, and Lance ended up on his back with JC's trembling weight pushing him painfully into the gravel and JC's frightened breath fanning hot and damp over his face.
It was a very romantic way to meet someone, Lance thinks. All he had to do was lie still under JC and not call out to the patrol marching past along Maple. He could tell even then that JC came from the sewers. The patrols would stop anyone in clothes that were noticeably worn, and JC's hair was far too long already, growing in tangled tresses of dirty brown over his ears, almost reaching the collar of his patched leather jacket.
He lay there for five minutes, at least, until JC scrambled to his feet and looked around with frantic eyes. Then he looked down at Lance and reached out a hand to help him up. "Are you okay?" he asked nervously. "I'm so sorry."
"It's okay," Lance said, and on an impulse, he added, "I'm Lance."
"JC," JC said, and looked around again. "Thank you."
"Do you want a cigarette?" he says now, and immediately wonders why he's thinking about smoke. JC smiles and shakes his head. His hand is folded in a loose fist around the petals, and Lance realises that the smell of roses is making him crave cigarettes. Years of conditioning. Strange.
"I don't smoke," JC says. "I used to, I guess. But we don't have cigarettes now. Or roses."
Lance has known JC for six months, and he's never asked why JC is living in the sewers. It seems somehow rude to ask about it, and JC has never volunteered anything. And now it slips out: "Why are you down there?" Maybe it's because of the roses.
"Because of Chris," JC says. "He liberated me."
Lance doesn't know what that means, really, but he doesn't ask. JC's eyes are hooded and distant. He tries to figure out what would be more horrible than living in tunnels under the ground. What would be so horrible that the tunnels would be liberation?
"Justin came because of Chris, too," JC says, suddenly. He sounds tense and uncomfortable, as if he's not used to talking without being prompted. He doesn't, usually. "But he didn't have to. He just came."
"Why?" Lance asks.
"He's in love with Chris, I guess."
"Wow," Lance says. "How-- When did that happen? Like, where did they meet?"
"Chris was doing some kind of sting ... thing. I'm not sure what he was doing. He has these projects. Maybe he was stealing something--" He breaks off and frowns. "Look, I shouldn't be telling you. Um. It's sort of."
"It's okay," Lance says and feels like the outsider, even though JC is the one living in the dark, stinking tunnels.
"No, it's just. Well, they just sort of ... saw each other, or so Chris tells me, and Justin followed him home." JC looks away, and Lance thinks about that day, lying flat on his back on the gravel under the brambles. Why didn't he just follow JC home?
Later, when he climbs back into his warm room and showers off the grime that JC leaves on his body, he tries to pretend that he still doesn't know the answer. He left JC standing by the open manhole, clutching the drying petals. He didn't even want to look down into the thick blackness of the sewer. He can't imagine what it's like to live there.
"There are more outlaws than ever," Father says over breakfast. "We're having problems."
Lance feels like a rebel again.
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