"What?" Chris said. "What'd I do?" He crawled to the edge of the bed, peering over. Justin peered up at him from a mess of blankets, his eyes wide.
"That--that--" He pointed at the twin ornaments dangling from Chris's hand. Chris looked at them.
"What's the matter? I think they're cute."
"Yeah, well, you try waking up with one on either side of your nose, see how cute they look then." Justin slid back into bed, scowling. "Whoever painted those faces, man, they're fucking *demonic.*"
Chris pulled him close and tugged the blanket up. Justin made an indignant 'hmph' but snuggled up, sliding his cold toes up and down Chris's legs. "I don't think they're demonic," Chris said. He held the ceramic Chris and Justin up for perusal. They were both dressed in green elf suits. The Chris figurine was grinning micheviously. Its arms were crossed behind its back and it clutched a candy cane in each fist. The Justin ornament was beaming a toothy smile, offering forth a giftbox wrapped with an enormous red bow. It had very, very large hair, and seemed to be wearing eyeliner.
"You're not putting those on the tree," Justin said. Chris hummed innocently. "You're *not."
The Chris ornament started making out with the Justin ornament. "I think," Chris stage-whispered to Justin, "he's got something in mind for those candy canes."
Justin narrowed his eyes. "Okay, first of all, no more Kevin Smith for you *ever,* and second of all--" He broke off with a strangled meep. Chris grinned and slid his foot back down.
"Second?"
Justin blinked at him and meeped again.
"I'll just go hang these up, then," he said, and started to get up. He made it just far enough to drop the ornaments on the bedside table before Justin tugged him back and yanked the blankets over his head.
"I'm gonna wake you up with a bobblehead in your face, you fucker, see how you like that," Justin growled, before dissolving into sporadic meeping.
(Me and Hetre, at one point, had a beautiful epic idea for Lance/Tim McGraw. This is...the short version.)
"I should turn the cellphone off," Lance says. "Chris keeps calling."
"Well," Tim says, "we did steal his RV."
"It's for a good cause," Lance says. He pauses, thinking. The desert rushes by outside the window, because they're taking the long way, through Arizona. Lance has never been in the desert before. He expected more cactuses. "I don't think he'll understand, though."
"No? He seems the kinda guy who can appreciate a quest." Tim is in the back, on the lumpy mattress. Chris always forgets he has money, he doesn't have to live with bad mattresses.
"He wouldn't understand." Lance snorts. "I don't understand. I need to get drunk again."
"It'll make more sense," Tim agrees. "Stuff involving Elvis makes a lot more sense when you're drunk."
"And you should sing to me."
"We'll do a duet."
Lance laughs. "Nobody'd buy it."
They sing old country songs--nothing of Tim's--until the sky starts creeping up desert-pink around the rim. It's Lance's turn to get the mattress, which is awful but better than lying back in the car seat. He lies on his back in the peculiar desert cold, and when it's completely dark outside, he asks, "When you find Elvis, what are you going to ask him?"
He half-expects Tim to be asleep, but the answer comes right away. "I'm not gonna ask him shit," Tim says. "What does he know?"
"I thought you wanted to seek his wisdom," Lance says. "That's why we stole the RV."
"Elvis--and Marilyn Monroe--are the stupidest people of the century," Tim says. "I just want to hear him sing."
Chris wakes up on the couch, muzzy and sticky-mouthed, because he always feels vaguely flu-ish when he sleeps in the middle of the day, and at first he thinks he's hallucinating the showtunes. He shuffles into the kitchen, yawning and scratching, and discovers JC chopping garlic and rotating his hips as he sings something Chris vaguely recognizes. Then JC pop-locks his hip and coos,
"Roxie," and Chris remembers. JC looks up from the cutting board and grins, not missing a beat. "Who says that murder's not an art?" His voice is good for it, Chris thinks.
"Should I be worried?"
JC holds up the knife. "You pop your gum?" Chris shakes his head. "You sleeping with my sister?"
"What, right this second?" He grins and crosses the room, slides his arms around JC from behind. The back of his neck smells like garlic, so Chris licks it and JC shivers. He sets the knife down next to the cutting board. The noises JC makes are always musical, little three-note sighs and harmony lines, so it takes Chris a minute to realize he's humming, by which point he's holding on to JC's thighs as he sucks him lazily through his shorts, leaving dark spots of wetness on the cloth.
Chris sits back on his heels and looks up suspiciously. "If you're singing the Mama song, I am never having sex with you again."
JC meets his gaze with innocent wide eyes. "Who's singing?"
So Chris tugs the shorts down to his knees and takes JC in. The taste of him mixes with the smell of garlic hanging in the air, and it's good, the salt and the thickness sliding over his tongue. Chris rubs a hand across his own dick, feeling it stiffen, and he starts to fall into a rhythm, his mouth and his hand and his other hand rubbing heavy circles on JC's ass. Garlic, salt, the warm sleepy soreness in his jaw, and he's startled when JC kicks lightly at his hand, the one inside his pants.
He pulls off and looks up. "What," he starts, but JC cuts in.
"There's a lot of favors, I'm prepared to do..." He grins through the lyrics. Chris rolls his eyes.
"Don't finish that."
"Don't finish that," JC says, and strokes his foot between Chris's legs, firmly enough to make his eyes shiver in his head.
"Yeah. Okay." He lowers his mouth again, and when the singing starts up again--back to Roxie's number, now--he hums along, right up until JC's voice breaks.
JC decides one day he should read Shakespeare, and gets a massive brown box the next morning. He almost coos when it's handed to him and sets it neatly at the foot of his hotel bed, just smiling when Chris asks him for the fourteenth time what's in it, and JC just says, "books." He doesn't open the box until they're back on the bus, because he wants to be able to concentrate. The stacks of slim blue paperbacks are shiny and stiff, the spines still smelling faintly of glue.
He starts with Hamlet. It takes about four pages for him to completely lose the thread of the plot. He sighs and flips back to the beginning, his eyes jumping from the text to the footnotes. Maybe he's missing something, he should see it onstage or something. Maybe it makes more sense with the accents.
"Chris is gonna be so disappointed," Lance says. JC looks up and sees him smiling, flipping through one of the blue books. "He thought you'd ordered a blowup doll or something."
JC feels vaguely affronted but isn't sure why. "I said books."
"That's a big box for just books, man. Did you get every single play?"
"I want to read them." He shrugs. "I feel like it's something I should do."
"How's it going so far?" Lance looks amused and JC realizes he was watching him read. He bites his tongue and looks back down at the book.
"It's going fine." And then it started like a guilty thing, Horatio says. Upon a fearful summons. The words make sense. The couch rolls up under him when Lance sits down.
"Don't start with Hamlet," he says. "It's way too hard. Try, try--" He tugs the box over and digs through it. "Here. Read Othello." The book he hands JC has a drawing of a white scarf on the cover. JC thinks he remembers the story, a little.
"What, are you an expert on Shakespeare?"
"We read a lot of the plays in school," Lance says. "Romeo and Juliet in middle school, and don't read that one, either, it's awful. And then Othello and Macbeth and Hamlet. I love them, Othello's my favorite though. We put on scenes and I got to be Iago."
"Isn't he the bad guy?"
Lance grins. "Well, sure, that's what everyone else says. You should read it, you'll love it. Oh, but you know what, we could rent the movie, the one with Kenneth Branagh. It helps a lot, like with understanding the plot and everything." He's practically beaming with excitement and JC thinks that from anybody else he'd take that to be an insult. He smiles back and closes Hamlet, slides it back into the box.
"I didn't know you liked Shakespeare so much." JC takes the proffered Othello and flips the pages back and forth in front of his face so he can sniff the book-flavored breeze.
"It's no fun reading it by yourself," Lance says. "Anyway I didn't bring my copies with me. I didn't think I'd have any time."
JC says, "you can read with me," and gets the biggest smile yet in return. On an impulse, he leans forward and brushes a kiss across Lance's cheek. He smells nice, like somebody's pillow.
"What?" Lance says, half-question. His eyes are wary.
"You're so sweet," JC tells him. Lance laughs and ducks his head.
"Man, shut up. I've already compromised my manhood by liking Shakespeare."
"You can read it to me," JC says, "and I'll let you be all the bad guys."
Chris comes to see him the sixth night he's on and Joey silently thanks him for having the good sense not to show up on opening night. He presents himself, with his own accompanying music, in the dressing room two hours before curtain, and says, "I'm gonna be watching you, Joey Fatone. So don't fuck it up."
"Oh, thanks, man," Joey says, and throws a box of tissues at his head. "That's fucking great luck." Chris catches the tissues easily and smirks.
"I promise we'll still love you, even if you do forget all your lines. And go flat on all your high notes. Which I'm sure you won't!" he adds, ducking another flying box.
Joey scowls at him. "You suck," he says. "Now we're all--gonna get struck by lightning, or something."
"Well," Chris says, "I'll burn to death with the leading man. Worse things could happen."
"You fucker," Joey says, laughing, "get over here and hug me already."
"Didn't wanna mess up your makeup." Chris squeezes him tight. He's good at hugging like he's bigger than he is. "I'm taking off, man, you've got stuff to do. See you after the show?"
"If you leave," Joey says, "I'll kick your ass back down the coast."
At a state fair once Lance saw a man selling aliens in jelly jars. He was twelve and the jars were disgusting and so he had to look. The jars were stacked in pyramids and the midday sun shining on the glass made the pale jelly inside glisten and seem to move. They could almost have been normal jelly jars except that in each translucent blob something dark hung suspended.
"Alien baby," the man said. He talked with one side of his mouth, like he was telling Lance a secret. "Put it in the oven and it'll hatch. Grow legs. All hairy like a spider." Lance looked at the jars and nodded because he could see the legs, he could see where they'd be. They'd move with a chittering noise, like the click of his mom's high heels on the sidewalk or the rustling of roaches when the light flipped on. "Buck fifty," the man said, and thrust a jar at him.
Lance ran. His feet hit the ground thump thump thump thump and that night he dreamed about long jointed legs at the edge of his shadow.
"What are you scared of?" Chris asks, reaching for the bottle because he doesn't think Lance is going to answer. He closes his own mouth around it first, though, and his teeth click on the glass like frantic moths against the window at night.
"Aliens," Lance says. Behind him, in the dark blue of his shadow, he hears the rustle and whisper of legs unfolding.
"What's a fritter?" Justin asked when Joey plunked the box down on his stomach. The heavy sweet smell of fat dissolved over him like a second blanket and he swallowed, suddenly hungry.
Joey didn't answer him but opened the box, plucked out a piece of fried dough, and hold it up to Justin's lips. Justin raised his eyebrows. Joey poked his mouth with the presumably-fritter until Justin snickered and opened up. He bit off a piece, smearing glaze all over his mouth.
"Oh," he mumbled around the mouthful, "it's a donut. But, flat?"
"Don't talk with your mouth full," Joey told him, and bit into his own fritter, smiling while he chewed.
JC wants to put Joey in an old-fashioned red wagon and run down the streets with him in tow, racing from block to block until his shoulder hurts from holding onto the black handle and he has to put his hands on his knees and gasp for air. Joey, JC thinks, is a little red wagon kind of guy.
Joey fucks with him sometimes by curling up real close after they have sex and whispering, "I wanna have your babies," right in JC's ear. He keeps a straight face, too, and the first time JC froze and blinked very slowly and said,
"Uh--" and he must have sounded even panickier than he thought because Joey immediately cracked up, laughing till he coughed. JC shoved him off the bed and growled, "you fuck," but he couldn't help laughing too.
It's Joey's favorite joke now, to catch JC when he's post-coital and fuzzy in the head and tell him all about the beautiful babies they're going to have. Once JC found a pair of hand-crocheted booties under his pillow. He held them up silently when Joey walked in. Joey just shrugged and said,
"Oh, man, one of Chris's lesbians is learning to knit," but his mouth stretched steadily into a grin as the pink-and-green woolen confections dangled from their string on the end of JC's finger.
That night, JC tied the string around Joey's wrists and fucked him with his arms stretched up above his head, nipping the soft inside of his elbows until he begged.
Chris brings him crullers in bed one morning, just as Justin's starting to wake up enough to notice he's alone. As soon as he thinks it, the bed dips and the smell of sugary grease rolls over him like a truck. A tasty, deep-fried truck. He pushes himself up to sitting. "Food?"
"The finest store-bought crullers in all the land," Chris says, and doesn't give him the box. Justin is still sleepy but he knows that's not right.
"Food," he says again, reaching for the white box full of, apparently, crullers. Whatever crullers are, they smell like donuts, and that's enough to convince Justin they need to be eaten immediately. Chris pulls the box away--pulls it away! Justin glares at him, quivering with indignity. "Give it here," he demands, making a futile snatch at it. Chris scoots back on the bed.
"I want us to be clear, first," he says, "that this is not going to be a regular occurrence. The food, I mean. Not the sex. I plan on instituting that as a sort of tradition. A ritual, even."
"Shut up and feed me," Justin says. He opens his mouth wide, then quickly adds, "Feed me a cruller," and as soon as Chris can breathe again, he does. They finish half a dozen between them and have very glazed sex.
Justin doesn't like mincemeat because no reasonable person likes a pie that sounds like a casserole. Also, it smells funny.
"You know there's no actual meat in this, right?" Chris waves a fork under his nose. "I mean, you do know that, right?"
"I'll believe that when you stop calling it a meat pie," Justin says, and licks another layer of pudding from his spoon.
Chris sighs and finishes his slice alone. "I can't believe you've never had mincemeat pie, man," he says mournfully. "It's a Christmas tradition. All the way back to the Vikings."
Justin squints. "Vikings didn't have Christmas."
"But they had mincemeat pie," Chris counters, at which point Justin gives up and goes back to his second bowl of pudding.