JC leaned in and kissed Lance, right
on his Adam’s apple, an open-mouthed, soft, but not wet, kiss. Lance leaned his head back even further
until it touched the wall, and sighed.
“I love it when you do that,” he
said, softly.
JC leaned in and gently encircled
the protrusion in Lance’s neck again with his lips.
Three months earlier, rehearsal for
the “Celebrity” tour had been kicking everybody’s ass. They had barely finished cutting vocals in
the studio, and Wade already had them in a converted garage in Orlando, in
front of a mirror, almost ten hours a day.
New songs and a new stage meant new choreography, which meant long days
of heat and the sound of rubber soles on the floor and the smell of six men in
a tightly enclosed area. It was like
boot camp. Without the perks. Whenever one of the band members dared to
even think a complaint, Wade would say, “Look, I had to come up with
this shit AND teach it to you all. I
got the worst end of this deal, so fuck off.”
Secretly, no one thought but Wade
thought he had the worst deal at all.
Even in Orlando, the five of them
could barely be separated. Between the
studio and rehearsal and planning the tour and the shows, the five members of
*NSYNC saw each other all day, every day.
And even when by the Grace of Wade they were let go for the day, they
still gravitated towards each other’s houses, or towards various activities
with each other—Justin and Chris shooting hoops in the deserted lot at the end
of Chris’ street, Joey making everyone dinner, sneaking Justin into bars for
beers. It was a little dangerous, JC
thought, that they spent all this time together even when they weren’t on tour;
they should be having some time apart.
When they’d get that time, though, JC didn’t know. As much as he loved his fellow group
members, he was wary of them spending as much time together as they were before
the tour: he didn’t want them to be
sick of each other before they even set foot on a bus.
Strangely, though, they never did
seem to get sick of each other. Which
isn’t to say there weren’t problems, or that they didn’t fight, or that there
wasn’t intra-band politics sometimes, but no one held any grudges. They all just carried on, day by day,
singing together, eating together, watching t.v. together, dancing
together. They’d go to visit each of
their families for a little while, but always ended up back in Orlando soon
enough, arriving to banners and welcome home signs and Justin’s mom’s special
Death by Chocolate cake that one of them had made.
It took JC a while, even after six
years, to figure out that they were a family.
A family who loved each other.
They were their very own five member, all-male family, and all the rest
was just filler by comparison.
It was a Wednesday, hot for the time of year, and
a little hazy. During the lunch break,
while lying on the floor of the new stage they were practicing on, JC decided
once and for all that in spite of all the “he’s one of us” rhetoric they were
shilling to the public, Wade was certainly NOT a member of the family.
Chris was sitting on the edge of the
stage, bumping his feet against the side—and probably doing thousands of
dollars worth of damage, JC thought—saying in time to his feet: “Fucking catwalk.” Thump. “FUCKING
Catwalk.” Thump. “FUCKING CATWALK.” Thump.
Lance threw a ham sandwich up at
Chris from the floor by the catering table.
“Chris, you know Johnny’ll have your ass if you ruin that stage. Knock it off.”
Chris stopped swinging his feet, but
he kept muttering around his bites of sandwich.
Green eyes and blond hair appeared
over JC’s face as Lance stepped over to him and looked down on him from a
standing position. “Egg salad?” he
asked.
“You bet.” JC sat up and took the proffered sandwich from Lance’s hand.
No one did much talking while they
were eating.
When they were done, Chris piped up
first:
“I HATE that little prick.”
“Chris . . .” Lance started to
placate.
“I want to take that microphone away
from him and shove it down his throat.
‘Watch the knees, Kirkpatrick.
You’re off cue, Kirkpatrick.
Chris, that move isn’t in your muscle memory, now is it?’ ” Chris pulled
off a startling good imitation of Wade.
“He’s not that bad,” Justin said.
“Oh, yeah?” Chris looked at Justin who had sat down next
to him.
“Yeah. He’s not Lou.” Justin
hated Lou; he’d felt overwhelmingly betrayed by Lou, and had never quite
recovered. It was like the part of
Justin who could trust anyone completely and unconditionally had died, fallen
away, and it made JC sad to think about it.
Joey, whom Wade had worked over
hard, and even called “fat” three days ago, was uncharacteristically
silent. JC, sitting next to him, rubbed
his shoulder a little. Joey grunted his
thanks.
Lance was practical, as usual. “Look we can vent all we want, but we can’t
do anything about it. He’s hired, he’s
contracted, he’s ours—and he’s going to make us looking fucking AWESOME, and we
all know it.”
JC sighed. Chris grimaced and grit his teeth. Justin went to run his fingers through his hair, and then
remembered he couldn’t because he didn’t have much hair left. His hands fell folded into his lap.
Lance was right, and they all knew that.
“What if we went on strike?” Chris asked.
JC laughed. “Strike?”
“Yeah. Refused to work until he changed his attitude. Or quit yelling at us. Or put the goddamn microphone away, for
chrissakes.”
Joey actually laughed, for the first
time JC could remember in days. “We’d
have our own little union. We could
picket outside.”
“Exactly!” Chris yelled. He got to his feet. “Boy bands of the world, unite!”
“Not gonna happen, Chris,” Lance
admonished, but he was laughing, too.
“Rise up against the oppression of
19 year old choreographers and tour managers who spill our blood to make their
money . . .”
“I’d carry a ‘Justin for Justice’
sign,” Justin said.
“We could say you wouldn’t wiggle
your hips again until we got a fair deal,” Joey added. Justin stuck out his tongue.
“Give us your poor, your tired, your
hungry . . .”
“That’s what’s on the Statue of Liberty,
you idiot,” JC laughed.
“Give me liberty or give me death!”
Chris shouted and pumped his fist in the air.
“For God’s sake . . .” JC started.
“We could play hooky instead,” Lance
spoke, his voice soft.
“That’s from the American
revolutionary . . .”
“I have a dream . . .”
“What did you say, Lance?” Joey
asked from beside JC.
Lance cast his eyes down to the
floor. “I said, we could play hooky.”
Chris stopped shouting.
They all stared at Lance.
“I mean,” he stumbled. “We could, um, uh—take an afternoon off or
something.”
“Just like that?” Justin asked.
“Well . . .”
“Not tell anyone where we were
going. That we weren’t going to be
here.” Chris said.
“Um . . .”
“What gave you that idea?” JC almost added, “Mom,” but Lance looked so
serious at that moment that he just couldn’t do it.
“Um. We’ve all been working hard.
And. Having a tough time and
all. So. I thought—why don’t we just take off for a while. Nothing big. It’s a stupid idea, I guess.”
Lance shrugged.
The rest looked at each other.
“No it’s not, Lance,” Joey said.
“I think it’s one hell of a
blockbuster idea,” Chris admitted.
“When can we go?” Justin asked.
“What about right now?” Lance looked at each band member in turn.
“But, we’ll get in trouble,” JC
said.
“So what? What are they gonna do, fire us?” Chris said.
“And you’re really okay with
this?” JC looked at Lance.
“It was my idea, wasn’t it?” Lance met JC’s eyes with his own.
JC looked hard in Lance’s eyes
looking for an answer to his question.
He found it.
“I’m in,” he said.
They had to move quickly in order to
leave before Wade got back from his lunch break (“Motherfucker actually leaves
the set to go eat,” Chris had said), so they did, not so much sneaking past
Lonnie as telling him directly what was happening and getting solid slaps on
the back for it.
They took Lance’s Jeep to a small
lake about an hour away, that had lots of grass, and a cheap hotel on the
property where they took rooms, in case they wanted to sleep the afternoon
away, or take a shower, or just watch t.v.
Freedom to them meant the ability to waste their time if they wanted to.
The place was deserted. Joey and Chris went immediately to shower,
while Justin said the lake was all the bath he needed. He had stripped down to his boxers while JC
and Lance were still walking up, and was in the water already by the time they
had settled on the grass underneath one of the tall trees by the lake. They watched Justin splash around for a long
time, laughing at his antics.
Lance turned to JC. “Are we sure he knows how to swim?”
JC shrugged. “Beats me,” he said, and laughed.
For a long time there was silence,
punctuated only by Justin’s splashes.
Finally, Lance said, “I can’t
believe you haven’t asked me yet.”
“Asked you what?”
“How I got this idea. Why I suggested it.”
JC just waited.
Lance sighed, a deep sigh that made
his chest heave and his throat rumble.
He leaned his head back on the tree, tipping his chin up, exposing his
throat. “I guess. I guess . . . well, I know we’ve all been so
stressed out about the tour, and working so hard . . . maybe I thought we
needed a break.”
“Maybe you needed a break, too,
Lance.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
They were silent as ducks started to
pass by Justin, far away from his foreign presence.
“Do you ever just want to give up?”
Lance didn’t look at JC when he said it, his eyes closed, his chin still
pointing upwards.
“Yes.” JC answered.
That made Lance open his eyes and
look at JC.
“Really?”
“Sure. Sometimes I get sick of it.
Sometimes I feel like a puppet—even without Lou around. I could go to college, have a normal
life. I guess,” he shrugged.
“So why don’t you? What keeps us together? Keeps you from quitting?”
JC hesitated, but not by much. “You.”
He gave a simple answer, and his most honest one.
Lance blushed and looked away. “You mean the guys. Me, too.”
JC rubbed the back of his finger
against Lance’s nearest cheek. “No, I
mean you. Don’t misunderstand—I love
the other guys. I don’t know what my
life would be like without them, and I wouldn’t want to know. You all are my family. And most of the time, I love what we
do. It’s fun. But the reason I never give up is because of you.”
Lance was silent, still turned away.
“I love you too much.”
Green eyes flickered up at JC at
that.
“Wow,” came out rich and low.
JC chuckled. “Yeah.”
All JC could hear was Justin’s
splashing and the pounding of his own heart.
When Lance shifted on the grass, JC had a moment of panic in which he
thought Lance was going to get up and walk away, flee the scene.
When Lance shifted on the grass,
though, it was so he could put a cool hand on JC’s right cheek. “We’re gonna
make it through this, aren’t we?”
JC nodded under Lance’s hand. “The tour?
Hell, yeah, and we’ll have a blast doing it.”
Lance smiled, a small, slightly
wicked, smile. “I wasn’t talking about
the tour.” He leaned in and brushed his
lips lightly against JC’s other cheek, and then against his lips. When he pulled back he was smiling.
Joey and Chris started to round the
path up to the tree. Lance must have
seen them coming over his shoulder, JC thought. Lance’s hand dropped casually into his lap.
“You all want a break from
babysitting duty?” Joey asked when they
were within earshot, pointing a thumb at Justin.
“I heard that, you prick,” Justin
screamed from the water.
JC and Lance exchanged glances.
“Yeah, a shower and a nap would be
nice,” Lance said, getting up and brushing his hands against his jeans in order
to remove any dirt or grass from them.
JC sat looking up at him for a
minute. “Yeah, that does sound good,”
he agreed.
Chris mock saluted them. “Then carry on, men. We’ll take over duty from here.”
Lance saluted him back. “Later, then, officers.”
As soon as Lance and JC rounded the
path out of Joey and Chris’ sight, Lance took JC’s hand in his. And squeezed it. Hard.
JC finished his second kiss of
Lance’s neck, and looked at Lance, who was a little breathless.
JC was a little breathless himself,
and not from the concert.
“We have to be back out there in,
like, a minute and a half,” Lance said.
“So, we could play a little hooky
and buy some more time.” JC grinned.
Lance’s smile reached all the way to
his eyes as he leaned in and kissed JC for almost the whole minute and a half.
Then they joined their other band
mates and burst onto the stage.
