Sentimental Journey 22

by Ian McDuff

Cheers and jeers - and suggestions I may or may not take - gladly accepted at armylad@gay.com. A kudos apiece to all who have written already. Warm fuzzy feelings and all that. Seriously, thanks for the egoboo, guys.

NOTE: This series is kindly mirrored at the Nifty Archive and by the lovely Gabriella at http://railwayshoes.net/hosted/index.html. Bless 'em both.

Standard Disclaimer: If descriptions of same-sex acts, feelings, &c are held to be - by any governmental entity asserting jurisdiction over you, or by your religion or moral framework - illegal, immoral, unethical, or fattening, read no further. If you are underage according to your local laws, read no further. If you have somehow managed not to notice until now that this is a slash site, read no further (and look into either corrective lenses or remedial English classes, because you've managed to miss about a dozen different warnings to get here at all). I need hardly say that the events and personalities depicted in this story are wholly figments of the author's rabid imagination, and in no wise should be taken to imply that any actual member of any boyband, or any celebrity known to mankind, or any real person, is or conceivably could be gay - least of all the members of 'N Sync and of the Backstreet Boys, all of whom are of course straight, well-dressed, intelligent, articulate, cultured, sweet-natured, and kind to their mommies.

No celebrity so much as mentioned here should be construed as having these assigned fictional habits, preferences, personality, or wine cellar. Major Lee also of course does not and cannot possibly exist - and I am certainly not he. (In fact, bits of him are borrowed from a lovably pompous writer pal of mine who has no idea he's gay....)

Equally, it should be evident that I have no contact with or knowledge of any of such musicians, pop stars, their agents, associates, staff, or families. Nor am I turning one red cent off this. Obviously, intellectual property rights - to the fiction, people: not any real persons, bands, logos, &c - are held by me, and no cross-posting to any site that charges any fee for entrance or activity is allowed without prior written consent from the author. The other warning is that this series is not going to move urgently into hot monkey sex - though, yes, we're getting there: patience; it will build, and it will I hope be something more than quick stroke-lit. Now enough prologue: let's get to the tale....

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Sentimental Journey: Chapter Twenty-Two

In Our Last Episode: Thrown together by Amtrak, the members of BSB and 'N Sync fell in with dashing young military historian and lawyer, the Virginia aristocrat Major Custis Lee. The Major soon found himself their father confessor and an integral part of their joint 'Amtrak - VIA whistlestop tour.' In a move that backfired severely, the boys, playing Cupid, dragged the reluctant object of the Major's unrequited affections, Luke deMaria, along. Now, in the train of several other revelations, Justin ’fesses up to some confusion:

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He wasn’t ready for this, seeing threats where only love was, and panicked, startling, poised to fight and flee. I grabbed him and pinioned him and we were both borne down in a group hug that he suddenly relaxed into with a sob.

When they all let him go, James and Josh and D and Howie still, with me and – oddly – Luke, holding and supporting him, he looked shamefacedly at the Basses and Loftons.

‘You poor thing,’ was all Diane had to say before he crumpled, and she moved in to hold and mother him as we all stepped back. ‘Now, now, hon, it’s all goin’ to be just fine....’

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And now, Today's Episode:

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Ever afterwards, Nick would look back on that time as a ‘learning experience.’ He even called it that, talking with Howie as they snuggled fairly chastely on a couch one midnight: ‘a, like, learning experience, and, y’know, I normally avoid that like the play.’ One of the differences between Nicky and JC was that while both thought in clichés, it was Nick who had a genius for mangling them. And D, who alone of all of them never laughed at Nick, and had not done so even before they found love with one another, did what he always did, correcting his boyfriend without letting on that he was doing so.

‘The plague you really want to avoid,’ he’d said, ‘is wasting a chance to learn when it does come along.’

Nick remembered that, too.

He remembered it when he found out there was more to the N Sync backstory than anyone had known.

He bore it in mind when they saw the heights to which the Major could rise – and saw too that the man was anything but perfect after all.

He rejoiced in it as he and D learned more and more about each other, as they progressed towards the full and fulfilled relationship they both wanted.

And after New York City, he found an astringent comfort in it.

__________________________________

The backstory no one knew…. Someone – Nick was certain it wasn't him, but someone – casually mentioned Lance and JC’s first giving in to each other, and asked idly if it had really been love at first sight.

‘I mean, C? When Lance first walked into the audition?’

‘I understand the doubt,’ James said dryly. ‘I’ve seen the pictures of what I looked like then, too, okay?’

‘Not what we meant –’ that had been an equally curious Brian chiming in.

‘But all y’all are off base anyway,’ Justin grinned. He was gloating. He knew something they didn’t.

‘It was love at first sight,’ Josh protested. ‘Right there in that gritty-floored, top-of-the-upright-piano-layered-with-dust, grimy-staged high school cafetorium in the Memphis ’burbs that they were doing that recital in.’

‘Memphis?’ ‘Memphis?’ ‘Memphis!’ The chorus broke out: the Backstreeters simply confused, but Joe and Chris looking as if they had just figured out the last piece of a puzzle that had gnawed at them for years. Chris pretty much confirmed that when he looked at JC, affronted and shaking his head, and muttered, ‘You sneaky, Poofu-trained, Poofu-sneaky sonofabitch – you damn ambushing graduate of your lover’s Stealth School of Sneaky Skulking … you – aaargh, I shoulda oughta known it –.’

JC was laughing so hard he could barely catch his breath.

_________________________

Orlando was wretchedly muggy, wretchedly still, the air breathless. Chris was doing his bag-of-fleas routine, grinding his imperfect teeth – teeth that so embarrassed him he’d developed a thousand ways not to smile – gnashing them in excitement to the point Joe was wondering if the little elf was on X. If he was, it was a natural ecstasy. It was as if God His Own Self, as Miz Lynn sometimes still phrased it in her Tennessee way, had set things up. As if his whole life had been coalescing to this: a dream realized, fulfilled, that would make up for so much of his harsh realities. Not all, of course. Not the ‘father thing,’ as he acidly called it to himself. Not the ‘stepfather thing,’ as he forced himself to call it, to leach away the pain and guilt by minimizing it to the same level as his birth father’s abandonment. But it would be recompense for so much, for his mother’s bitter years and his own (though if the years had been bitter to Beverly as they had to her son, she – unlike Chris – had not responded in kind with bitterness of her own. Chris was merciless with himself as much as with anyone else, and had never kidded himself that he had an ounce of her guts or grace. That was, he admitted in brutal self-analysis, precisely why this dream mattered so, and why he would stop at nothing to make it work).

But truly. It was as if it were preordained. That he and Howie had been at school together, in choir together, and had been able to talk each other into their respective ambitions, to persuade one another they could each go out and do this. That Big Joe knew this JC kid, the one he called (and only he was allowed to call) Josh. That JC in turn was the absolute idol of his fellow ex-Mouse, little Justin Timberlake, who had been the first call Chris had made when he set this whole wondrous show in motion. It was pre-freakin’-destined, Chris repeated to everyone who would listen, and several who wouldn't. And in just the same predetermined way, he had the perfect bass to complete them. His dream, his group, and all connected through him – him, Chris Kirkpatrick, whom the world had damn well better never underestimate again. The Six Degrees of Chris Kirkpatrick.

Apparently he managed to mutter that conceit loudly enough that Joe heard him. ‘Ow,’ he whined, rubbing the back of his head, though his big pal’s meaty paw had been fairly gentle.

He looked over at JC, though, as far as apologetic looks went. ‘Man, C, I was just riffin’. I know you – and J, I guess – had this other guy in mind you met in Memphis, and I ain’t saying your input don’t matter because, y’know, it does, man, it’s just –’

‘It’s okay, Chris.’ JC seemed to mean it. ‘This is your baby, you don’t have to apologize for that.’

___________________________

‘So all along the bass you wanted to suggest was Poofu,’ Chris muttered as the train cleft the darkness. ‘Man, are you sure you didn’t bribe Jason to blow us off? Threaten to off his family or something?’

‘Nope,’ JC grinned. 'But damn was I glad it worked out the way it did.'

‘Wait wait wait,’ AJ interjected. ‘I wanna hear about this affair in Memphis.’

‘Some affair,’ Justin said, rolling his eyes. ‘I didn’t notice and I was there. Hell, Lance didn’t notice either – y’all’ve all heard the “breakfast table fight turns into dumpster make-out session” story by now.’

‘All I said was that’s when I fell in love,’ JC protested. ‘Never said there was an affair. Jesus, James here was barely fourteen and I was still sixteen, about to turn seventeen.’

‘But how did it ever – I mean, why then and there – I thought everyone first – in Orlando –’ By his own standards, Nick was being reasonably coherent.

‘The hints have been staring us all in the face, haven’t they,’ D marveled. ‘Even the label and the Official Story admit the facts, just not the inferences. I mean, the world knows that after Mouse Club, C went to LA, got his head handed to him on a plate, and came back via spending some time in Nashville and Memphis with Justin-and-Family…. Same time, Lance and Justin are sharing a vocal coach…. And no one has ever done the math?’

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D hadn't been being insensitive. That was the phrase – having his head handed to him on a plate – that JC used about the LA episode that otherwise he wouldn't discuss, mostly. Even as a teenager, licking his new wounds, in Tennessee, that was what he said repeatedly, and all he would say.

He said it that very day in 1995, talking quietly to the vocal coach Justin worked with, a quiet, un-temperamental gentleman whose itinerant coaching work seemed to make sense in the South: it was a sort of circuit-riding, and while the coach was not a preacher, he did act as a visiting music minister for not a few churches, from Vicksburg to Corinth, Memphis to Clarksdale to Tupelo to Pine Bluff, Arkansas; El Dorado, Natchez, and Alexandria, Louisiana. Not that he did all this at once, nor that he drove the four hours between Jackson and Memphis every day of the week as he had done the evening before: mostly, he would spend a week in one place, then in another, then two weeks home in Greenville, where his private students came to him then. The idea, the concept of such a life, fascinated JC.

‘Oh, dear boy, I’m just the forerunner, John the Baptist to Bob Westbrook's musical Messiah. The ones I don’t cull or the music doesn’t scare off go to him once a month, and I assure you, they go to him. None of this circuit riding for Bob Westbrook. And Justin I have already handed off to him. This recital is his swan song, worth the two of you coming back to his hometown from over in Nashville … and worth driving all over four states for.’

‘Why were you down in Jackson, sir?’ JC was still processing the whole idea of living this way, a sort of evangelist for music. Up on the stage, Justin was vocalizing, running scales.

‘Clinton, actually – one of its nice little suburbs, dear boy, a carefully manufactured bit of rural artificial reality, country living but with a Starbucks handy and no horrid manure piles, and as white as the bread shelf at Winn-Dixie.’ The man twinkled and chortled. ‘One of my most promising students lives there, and I was picking him up.’

‘Wowie. You not only drive all over the area, you chauffeur the kids?’

‘Rarely. But yet another of my students lives an hour and a half further south, on the Louisiana line – actually across it, in Tangipahoa Parish.’ JC should have tumbled to it then, but he was a shade too slow, and the coach was burbling genteelly along too quickly for JC to process a half-memory. ‘My dear young man, I sometimes think, when all this driving finally kills me off, they can just scatter my ashes all up and down I-55. Honestly. It’s too too much. But – there it is, part of the life. And at least it was convenient this way: her mother drove her to Clinton and I picked them both up from there for this recital – and Lance’s mother, of course, to keep things proper,’ he chortled.

‘Lance?’

‘Yes, my student from Clinton. The boy is simply amazing. Justin of course is oh so talented, and – he knows it. But the oblivious young Lance … my dear child, imagine, not so very older than Justin, but a basso, and oh my Lord, what a basso he is! He – but here they are!’

JC slewed around and the memory he’d striven for earlier hit him first, followed in a second by its source, as he found his arms suddenly full of a giggling girl with newly blonde hair.

‘Brit? Little Bitty-Bit?’ He was stunned to see her: who would have expected a Mouse Club reunion here? He was rocked on his feet by the surprise, then nearly knocked off them by a whooping Justin, who had leaped from the stage and hurtled into them both.

Before Justin dragged her away, giddy with excitement, she asked JC, ‘I thought you were off to LA. What happened?’

His face closed. ‘I survived.’

The vocal coach looked at him, speculatively, in a way that suggested he was dwelling on what this teenager might have had to have done in LA to survive on his own. Diane Bass, still standing at the door with her son, was confirmed in her determination to continue chaperoning these junkets, and felt a first pang of maternal feeling for this young man Britney and Justin both seemed to idolize. Perhaps he felt her concern, for he broke off and looked towards the Basses. ‘And these are?’

Britney blushed and gasped. 'Oh my Lord, Miz Diane, I am so sorry, I don’t know where my manners went to! I swan, people ever hear about this, they’ll never ever let me into the Junior League.’ Diane gave her a level look that just did not quite say, As if they ever would, dear. ‘Miz Diane, may I present JC Chasez, he was with Justin and me on MMC; JC, this is Miz Diane Bass, and this is her son, Lance. Lance, darlin’, meet JC.’

Josh did his best to greet them correctly, this slim, auburn-haired lady with steely eyes and a sweet smile, who had ‘schoolmarm’ written all over her, and her son. Her son.

‘Um, hi,’ said JC, surprised to find his voice huskier than usual. And the quiet young man spoke for the first time, in a voice that seemed to rattle JC's bones within him: ‘H’lo, JC, ’s awful nice to meet you. Justin’s spoken of you mighty often.’

JC vaguely heard himself stammer a comeback, something lame about how he hoped it was all good and anything else was a fib. Whatever reply he made was purely mechanical, rote. This boy. This – Lance. Lance Bass. He had had a few of these feelings before, God knew: Tony and Dale and, for that matter, the very first time he’d ever questioned himself, for his best bud Joe back in Orlando. He’d thought that some of the things he had seen in LA, things he had resolutely refused to be a part of even though the refusal had slammed every door in his face, had burnt that ‘phase’ out of him in sheer disgust.

Apparently not.

This porcelain boy, like a Dresden shepherd on a great-aunt's chimneypiece, at once fragile and earthy; this shy creature with the voice of thunder; this reddish-gold-haired summer peach with fathomless eyes that changed with every mood and slant of light from aquamarine to turquoise to jade…. He had to sit down. He was sitting down, he realized, with the Basses and the vocal coach, and trying desperately not to breathe as if he had just run a marathon. From – it seemed – very far away he faintly heard Brit and Justin on the stage. From almost as far and as faintly he heard Mrs Bass ask him about himself.

_________________________

‘So Diane took to you at once?’

‘Oddly enough, yes. I think what clinched it was the math.’

__________________________

‘… But the numbers didn’t add up. I mean, my best course was Accounting –’

Miz Diane's head snapped up. Brit had rejoined them by then, as Justin got ready to perform, and shuddered, delicately.

‘Math,’ she said, with distaste. Diane, every inch the teacher, looked coolly at her.

JC swung around and spoke with a great earnestness. ‘But music is math.’

‘Pythagoras,’ Lance rumbled, softly. JC startled, and looked at him with wide eyes. ‘Yes,’ he breathed. ‘You’re into philosophy, Lance?’

‘Um, well. Not to where I’m … I mean, if there’s a grand unified theory of everything, it exists only in the mind of God.’

JC was lost. Growing up in the suburbs, even in a Border State, he had absorbed some of the national prejudice against the South, and his months in Nashville – a place that seemed, behind its genteel and cornpone facades, to operate on the same principles, or lack of principle, as LA – had not made him any fonder of Dixie. Until now – until Lance – he would never have imagined wisdom could be expressed in a Southern accent: not even though his father’s roots were in Louisiana.

‘What school do you follow?’

And Lance had known what he meant, without prompting. ‘I don’t know that I do. I mean, I’m a Southerner, so I’m automatically a Stoic,’ he grinned, ‘but …I don’t believe in systems so much. Natural philosophy, as they used to call it, intrigues me, but then, Momma’s a math teacher and Daddy’s a scientist.’

‘Don’t let him fool you, JC,’ Diane said. ‘He’s a pragmatist in every way.’

‘Ah. Not much interested in the Big Fuzzy Questions, like Good and Evil?’

‘I dunno ’bout that,’ Lance said, with a sidelong grin that JC suddenly wanted to see daily for the rest of their lives. ‘My favorite writer’s Elie Wiesel.’

JC gaped at him. The abyss, the darkness, these should never touch this angel before him. He shivered, hoping he had not said that aloud. Apparently he hadn’t: no one was screaming.

‘Wow,’ he said.

‘What about you, JC?’ Diane was carefully watching the interplay between the boys.

‘Um, gosh. Ma’am. Kierkegaard. All the Inklings. Plato, a little. I mean, I’m not a genius or anything, I struggle with a lot of it, but –’

‘Right smart for a young man who claims to have “had his head handed him on a plate” in Los Angeles. I think you don’t do yourself enough credit,’ Diane smiled, with a faint glint of steel.

JC gathered himself to speak, coherently, he hoped, when the accompanist came out from backstage and the moment was lost.

__________________________

‘Damn,’ Nick said. ‘And here you are.’

‘Ridin’ on a railroad –’ Brian intoned with a smirk; and Joe chimed in, ‘Singing someone else's song –.’

‘Enough with the James Taylor,’ James smiled. ‘Nick had something to say.’

Nick flushed, then paled. He wasn’t used to being taken seriously by anyone except D, and – sporadically – Bri. ‘I, I … well, I just mean, here you are, after all. And it’s, like, obviously gonna – last?’ It wasn’t really a question, merely an unexpected gosling squeak, the result of nerves still adolescent, not yet caught up with the body’s own years.

‘Like Rosie Clooney’s singing. No matter what, even battered, it will last. It will,’ Josh said firmly.

‘Um. Uh….’ Nick was exquisitely uncomfortable. ‘About that….’

D smiled, softly. ‘She’s had a long road, and a hard one. Yeah, the pipes aren’t what they were, but –.’

Nick was glowing rose-red with embarrassment. ‘I’m not being mean, I just – and then – and I thought maybe no one else, and it was just me –’

Kevin, of all people, took pity on him. ‘Like Bri an’ I’d say anything about another Kentuckian. No, though: Nick. Look. That’s exactly why JC said what he said, way he said it. Her range is gone, so much is gone, but … the rich experience, the technique, the style, man, the style. That’s what lasts. Hope we all do as well and last as long – literally, and metaphorically the way JC says.’

‘It’s all a learning experience,’ D smiled.

‘What is?’ Justin asked sleepily, from where he was sprawled across three pillows and a stuffed koala.

‘Life.’

__________________________

The Major was relentless in providing them learning experiences. His opinion of the boys’s previous, haphazard wakeup system was low, and his soul was regularly affronted by gaps in their musical knowledge (though most of them knew as much music out of their own genre as he did: it simply wasn’t music the Major thought was worth knowing). These two convictions of the Major’s coalesced the next morning they were in a hotel, breaking their journey before entering New York City. They’d had a triumphal entry into Ithaca, the whistlestop momentum growing exponentially; and being slated for an overnight stop in a college town, they were fatally able to go clubbing.

They were not prepared for the morning’s perverse reveille.

James, of course, was awake when it started, though still in bed, reading his email from his laptop, wrapped up in JC-the-Human-Anaconda, who was, of course, still sunk profoundly in sleep. D was up, doing crunches, the idolatrous rites he sacrificed daily to his own abs. Brian was half-awake, pottering around with coffee. Doctor Keyes and Dimi were already down at breakfast, of course, and Lenore had gone for an early swim. The rest of them were all as fast asleep as fast living, ages in the twenties, and slight hangovers after dancing all night could make them.

Even the wakeful ones, though, were unprepared.

The Major, Jake, and Big John had taken a leaf from the prank Chris, Joe, and AJ had misplayed earlier in the trip. Before James could think to start rounding up his own troops, before the hotel wakeup calls could begin to drag such as Justin and AJ (and Luke), kicking and flailing and cursing, into wakefulness, the Major and his noncoms struck.

They’d set the speakers strategically. There was no one else on the floor to complain. At the Major’s word of command, Jake and Big John hit the START button, and then hit the ground running.

The long roll of the drums caused James to sit bolt upright, his glasses sliding, heart pounding. The initial drone snapped D’s head around as he paused, unnerved, in mid-crunch. And then Brian dropped his styrofoam mug of coffee when the first skirling notes hit, and every band member and staffer was blood-chillingly wakened by the massed Pipes, Drums, and Band of the Highland Division playing The Black Bear / Loch Duich / Scotland the Brave.

As the bagpipes keened like the souls of the damned (as AJ, of all people – he being, after all, a Maclean – put it later, still bitching well into the dinner hour), Big John and Jake flung open doors in a coordinated assault, bellowing, ‘Rise and shine, move move move, get out of those racks and FALLLLLLL IN!’

Nick damned near wet himself. Justin was just short of hyperventilating. Kevin stumbled to the door in a blind rage and not a stitch of clothing, blood thundering in his temples.

Through the outrage and alarm, and the mad music of the pipes, they heard the Major, at full parade-ground levels: ‘Let’s move, ladies, now now now, I want to see nothing but assholes and elbows!’

Half an hour later, sulky but sorted out and all together in one place for an orderly breakfast, Nick looked at Howie and snorted, with deep disgust, ‘“Learning experiences,” shit.’

__________________________

It took them a while to forgive the Major for the wakeup call – partly because they were now reasonably certain that similar methods would be employed at unpredictable and defenseless moments through the rest of the trip. But even AJ had gotten over it by dinner that night: a dinner marked by a pleasant thrum and thrill of tension. Part of the tension proceeded from the fact that they would spend another night in Ithaca, then travel to Manhattan for the VMAs. Part of it, though, was a tension generated, almost unknowingly, by D and Nick. Whether or not it was obvious to the two of them, it was clear to everyone else that there was that in the air that night that whispered, these shall soon be fully lovers.

James and Josh exchanged glances full of memory and fondness as they observed the two. It was a bittersweet moment for Justin, but the sweet overlaid the bitter: he was rooting for them. The others in their turn kept hiding smiles and refraining, by sheer will, from repeatedly saying, ‘Awwww,’ as Howie and Nicky grew steadily more rapt in each other.

It was a relief to everyone when they sidled out, blushing.

Once they were safely gone, hilarity swept the others, who grinned at Lance and JC, Jamesanjosh, and nudged each other, giggling like schoolgirls.

‘God,’ snickered AJ, ‘Mister Ro-mance and Mr Raw, Slam-Bam, Nothin’ But Mammals. I can see it now: D’ll be all, “Sweetheart, I give you, with this one perfect rose, my heart,” and Nick-ay’ll be all half-jackin’ it through his damn pants, snarlin’, “Yeah, okay, neat, D, c’moooonnnn, let’s fuck, me so horny….”’

‘And all the time,’ Kevin drawled, ‘Nick’ll actually be worrying if he measures up, and will this make him look ridiculous, and what if he isn’t perfect –.’ He paused, noticing Justin’s wince: one, clearly, of dismayed self-recognition.

James and Josh had seen it too.

So had Chris, who forestalled them, laughing. ‘No, J, really, shit, you have to be able to laugh at yourself, I mean, when Dani and I first got together…. I mean, she was the sort of girl scared me shitless in high school, and even now, when we started it was like, “Okay, if I weren’t one-fifth of a really big pop group, would you even be seen with me?” And … fuckin’ Joe, I remember the first night Dani and I were gonna, um, take it to the next level, and I’m tearing around the room trying to turn myself into, like, you or C or someone sexy, and Joe tells me I’m good and I only need one thing –’

Joe started laughing.

‘Yeah, fucker, like I’ve forgiven you yet – anyways, he says to calm down, I’m fine, only one thing missing, and I’m freakin’, have I forgot to shave or is my hair sucky or what, and the bastard smirks and hands me a fuckin’ stepladder he’d bummed off housekeeping –.’

__________________________

Well, as Nicky would later admit, when perspective was possible, it was a learning experience.

__________________________

James and Josh were laughing gently. They’d all adjourned from the table, and were having coffee in the lounge of the suite, Justin on the couch between James and Josh by their firm insistence, cocooned in love, beginning to settle down. The Major was smiling: ‘Sometimes, lads, it is what the old English duke said of it: “The expense is considerable, the pleasure transitory, and the position ridiculous.” And yet, who would say that when it is a part of a true and honest love….’

‘I know,’ Josh beamed. ‘Even when things go so completely wack it’s like Abbott and Costello. I remember –’

James started chuckling and blushing at the same time. ‘Oh God.’

‘What?’ Justin asked.

‘You ever see that Inspector Clouseau movie when he gets the Russian girl at the end –’

Several of the others obviously had, and started laughing, even as they winced in sympathetic embarrassment.

__________________________

There was a marked tremor in D’s hands, avid as they were upon his body; and Nick himself was so excited he wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to be sick all over both of them.

__________________________

James was laughing, but he wasn’t looking anyone in the eye, any more than Josh was. ‘That was the least of the disasters, first time ’round. Um. You know how when you drink too fast out of a straw or something….’

‘You burp,’ AJ said flatly, perplexed. ‘I can really go for depth and volume when I do that stunt.’

‘Well, um, same principle when, um, there’s, ah, pistoning, and some air … and….’

Justin looked at his friends in horror, which set everyone else laughing, even as they again shared in the embarrassment James and Josh were recollecting.

‘Oh my God,’ AJ wheezed.

‘That’ll ruin an afterglow,’ Chris panted, sides heaving from laughter.

‘And you two especially,’ Joe snorted, ‘all cuddly and sated when – which of you was it, anyway, ripped one? Who, um, bottomed the first time?’

Josh’s blush was more than adequate answer.

‘Oh GOD,’ Chris howled, tears streaming, ‘the ever-refined Mister Schah-say, who don’t even know how to fart, trumpeting one like Joe on Tex-Mex night!’

__________________________

Nick was about to sob in frustration as he tried furiously to un-stick his stuck zipper. Worse still, he was leaking so copiously it shamed and disgusted him, and he dreaded that he would shoot off in these damned unremovable jeans before they so much as got to the damn bed….

__________________________

‘Let me get this straight – pardon the term –’ Kevin grinned. ‘First you can’t get naked….’

‘Fell over twice trying to get out of my pants,’ James confirmed, ruefully. ‘I was way over-eager. Hell, I’d even worn button-fly trousers so as not to have a zipper problem.’

‘I was flattered by the eagerness,’ Josh said. ‘Pissed that James was smarter’n I was, though: we had to cut my jeans off me with freakin’ desk scissors, I kid you not. I was afraid James would decide it wasn’t worth the effort, or that it’d take so long it was time to get up and go do press before, well, I got out of ’em.’

__________________________

Nick couldn’t believe the pain and still more the embarrassment of having had to shimmy out of his hopeless trousers like Houdini out of a straitjacket. And of course it had been his brilliant idea to go commando, so his flanks were scraped from the struggle. He was so humiliated he was about to blow up when D took his chin – thrust forward in Deep Pout – and forced his face up, their eyes locking. The wisdom and love and depth of Howie’s eyes wiped the slate suddenly clean: Nick found himself falling forever into those limpid, chocolate pools. When his Sweet D lowered himself onto Nick, Nick never even felt the scrape of stubble against his neck, nor yet the scour of D’s chest hair upon his own smooth flesh. The mental and physical scrapes of the past were wholly forgotten and there was nothing but D in his arms, D’s heat against his, D’s cock, like hot steel wrapped in shot-silk, against his own. He gasped, and moaned, and stopped thinking.

D’s hands, nimble and gentle. D’s tongue, his lips, his oh-so-talented mouth. Nick was unaware of his own bucking response. He never heard himself begging, babbling, whining. It was as if he was five years younger and a virgin again. It didn’t even shame him when he writhed and came all over the both of them the minute D’s gentle finger touched the outermost ring of his anus.

Time became elastic as D gently, tenderly, patiently prepared him, finger by finger. His pain receptors almost broke through the haze of lust with a message, almost caused him to freeze and tighten, but Howie was a step ahead of him, and before the news could get through to his desire-clouded mind, D tapped his prostate with a searching digit, and pain was forgotten.

It came back to the edges of his consciousness as Howie entered him, causing Nick’s recrescent erection to wilt and his breathing to become shallow. But again D prevented him, a hand on his cock, a hand on his left nipple, D’s mouth covering his in a passionate kiss, and suddenly, there, there, D was back to the center of all Nick’s sensations, was hitting Nick’s prostate perfectly, and Nick’s mind locked up and wouldn’t reboot as the conflicting sensations became a single indescribable feeling and he came, mindblowingly, again, with the super-orgasm that proceeds only from the linkage of two hearts – and simultaneous pressure on the prostate.

__________________________

‘I hope for their sake,’ Brian mused, ‘it’s going better for D and Frack.’

‘You don’t get it,’ Josh smiled, his tone taking all the sting from the contradiction. ‘It is so worth it you can’t know until you’ve been there.’

__________________________

Sore, stretched, appalled by his body’s post-coital spate of flatulence, then soothed and gentled by D’s unflagging lovingness; tired, sated, spent, sweaty, tangled in the sheets; pushed to the furthest reaches of incoherence by successive orgasms and by Howie’s incredible talent for slow, soulful blowjobs: Nick looked over at the man he loved, now curled against him, still with a sheen of sweat from their lovemaking, and drifted off himself, knowing that, yes, whatever ludicrous things had happened on this journey, he was Home, safe, and it had been so worth it that no one who hadn’t experienced it could imagine. He closed his eyes, and slept.

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Join us next time for another thrilling installment of Sentimental Journey. Will the path of true love run smooth? Are the VMAs going to get melodramatic? Who knows what evil lurks - um, never mind. This exciting drama is brought to you by the Penn Central Railway, a proud part of our war effort. We now return you to our studios for the Pepsodent Hour.