“What is this?”
Silence filled the darkened room and Lance shifted nervously. “It’s just, it’s just…”
“We want to help you.” JC intervened, smiling assuredly and taking Lance’s hands.
His voice poured like oil and silk into Justin’s mind. He shifted his weight in the chair, lifted his eyes to meet JC’s. “I don’t need your help.” He said coolly.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Justin.” Lance hissed, rolling his eyes. “Look at this place. Look at yourself! Drop the high-and-mighty act and for once see your life as it really is.”
Justin rolled his eyes, jumped off the chair and stalked across the room to the window, staring at the traffic below. “I like this place.” He said calmly, ignoring the disdain he could feel radiating off Lance in waves.
“Justin.” Lance said softly, and the sweet poison that was so familiar was all too apparent in his bass voice. “You have no money. You have no friends. You have no job. You never leave this building. You live on the upper floor of an abandoned warehouse. What is there to like about any part of your life?”
“Lance…” JC mumbled. “Lance, you don’t have to go there. We’re here to…”
“To get me back on my feet, to give me a hand, to be a friend to me.” Justin sneered. “You’re only seven years late, JC. Nice fucking timing.”
“I know, I know.” JC sighed. “Look, I’m trying to make it up to you, okay? I just, I don’t know how. I’m trying, Justin, this is all I can do…”
“With your money? You’re making up for your absence, for the fact that you weren’t there for me when I most needed you, for the fact that you were never a real friend to me with your money?” Justin shook his head. “You’re a fucking asshole, JC. You’re a materialistic asshole with money to burn but no heart and no soul. Now why don’t you take your goddamned money and leave me alone.”
Lance jumped to his feet. “We brought this money as a sign of goodwill, Justin. To show you that we still care about you. We knew it would be hard, we knew you would be proud-”
“Proud? Proud?” Justin’s voice cracked. “I am anything but proud of this hellhole I call life.”
“We knew you’d be pigheaded, arrogant, just like you always were but we wanted to risk it. Justin, we’re still here for you, okay? We still love you. You’re still one of us.”
“No.” He whirled, glared defiantly into Lance’s cold eyes. “No, I’m not ‘one of you’ anymore. Because even with no real apartment, and no money, and even though I can’t hold down a job, I know who I am. I’m not deluded by illusions of grandeur, I’m not surrounded by so much press and faceless people just trying to get a piece of my life that I’m not even sure what I look like anymore. No. I know who I am now. And I am never letting go of that again.”
“Justin, what you just described? Not knowing what you looked like, all that? That wasn’t fame, that was the coke.” Lance said, smirking.
“Fuck you.” Justin hissed. “Fuck you. We are done. Go.”
“We’re not done yet, Justin.” Lance said sweetly. “We have to-”
The releasing of the safety catch echoed in the room and Lance found himself staring down the barrel of a gun that shone in the sunlight, chrome-colored and lethal.
“No, Lance. We are done.” Justin said calmly. He lowered the gun and stuck it back into his waistband. “Now get out of my home. And more importantly, get out of my life.”
He could hear them screeching away, down the street, before he noticed the money still lay on the table.
“Fuck you.” He whispered, taking the money in his hands, hot tears stinging his eyes. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”
The money fell to his feet, bill by bill as he finally cried for the life he lost so long ago.
“I’m sorry…” He mumbled. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”
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