TITLE: Short-Showered
AUTHOR: Alicia Edwards
FEEDBACK: [email protected]
SUMMARY: Five guys plus a twenty-minute water tank equals a few short showers.
SHORT-SHOWERED
It was the fastest shower he’d ever taken. Three minutes. Just enough time to shampoo his hair, wash the important parts, and hope the leftover suds would do a sufficient job on the rest until they could get to a hotel to take a proper shower. They were all so thrilled to finally have a shower on the bus that they put up with the fact that the water tank held only twenty minutes worth. Which, divided by five, gave them each a three-minute shower with a minute of leeway, which they’d all learned not to use, just in case. But inevitably, over the course of a tour, someone always got short-showered.
The first time they’d all used the shower, Chris had been the lucky one.
“Ohhhhh!!! OHHHH!!”
Lance looked up from his laptop and looked around. Justin had his headphones clamped over his ears and was happily thumping out the beat on his right thigh and JC’s back, which was tabled beside him. Until they heard that awful moan that sounded like a dying goat.
JC, who had been stretching his back from the concert, sat up against the couch, knocking Justin’s hand out of the way.
“Chris?” Joey asked cautiously around his bite of sandwich. He was leaning against the kitchenette, holding his plate under his chin with one hand, the other gripping the best sandwich known to man, so Joey swore.
“My eyes! My EYES! I’m blind! I’m friggin’ blind here, doesn’t anyone care?” Chris stumbled out of the bathroom, towel haphazardly tied around his waist, rubbing at his eyes with the back of his hands but only succeeding in rubbing the shampoo into them even more.
“Come here,” JC said, standing and grabbing a water bottle from the fridge. He picked up the extra towel Justin had tossed onto the bench at the table after having realizing he no longer sported the hair to necessitate a “hair towel,” tilted Chris’s head back over the sink, and poured.
“Holy shit, that’s COLD!” Chris screamed.
“Do you want the soap out of your eyes, or what?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Chris righted himself and took Justin’s towel, drying his face and rubbing at his hair. “Thank you. You freaks need to learn to take shorter showers.” He grumbled something else and stumbled back into the bunk area to pout and get dressed.
So from then on, they’d all learned to pay strict attention to the three-minute rule.
They rotated who went last, just in case, but somehow, Justin always managed to wiggle his way out of the last shower. He’d whine and complain until someone let him take their turn, or he’d jump up when no one was looking and slip in after Lance or Joey or whoever had gone first.
“Fair’s fair,” Chris reasoned one night on their way to Boulder, Colorado while Justin happily took the third shower. “He deserves it.”
JC looked doubtful. But the time the water had run out on him, he’d calmly stepped out, took a washcloth, and finished the job in the sink. It was a good thing the shower didn’t run on the same water tank as the rest of the bus, or someone would be very unhappy at three in the morning when they stumbled to the front to get a drink. The other guys hadn’t even known JC’s shower had run out, because he hadn’t said anything until three days later, when he’d mentioned the sponge bath in passing. JC was like that, though. Things like that usually rolled off his back.
“He deserves it,” Joey agreed, as the water in the bathroom turned off. When the water had run out on Joey, he’d had a head full of shampoo. Just to share his pain, he’d gotten out of the shower, pulled on his shorts, and had shaken his head, dog-style, in the lounge area, effectively showering everyone with bits of suds.
“Shhh, he’s done,” Chris whispered, nudging Lance, who had the next shower. “Tomorrow he’s last.”
When the shower had run out on Lance, he’d reacted more like JC had than Chris and Joey had. He’d finished up in the sink, but then he’d calmly come out to the lounge and had thanked everyone. “Hope you like my cologne,” he’d said, “because I’m going to have to bathe in it to cover up the stench from my not really showering.”
So the next night, after a hard concert in Topeka, Kansas and following Chris’s lead, they’d choreographed down to the most minute detail how they were going to keep Justin for the last shower. JC first. “Four and a half minutes,” Chris reminded him. JC, again, looked doubtful, but went along with it. He came out humming and toweling off his hair as Lance slid past him into the small, steamy room.
“Hey, J, help me with this,” JC said, hauling Justin out of the kitchen alcove and back to the back of the bus where his keyboard was waiting. “I had a great song idea in the shower, and I need you to give it a beat.”
“Now?” Justin asked, all wide, blue eyes and anxious features.
“Yes, before I forget it.”
Lance finished and Joey replaced him. Justin looked to the front of the bus, his entire body wound and ready to pounce, JC could see. “Does that sound right to you?” JC tapped out a string of notes. “Or do you think I should change that last A to a D and hold it out longer?”
“I think it sounds good,” Justin said, inching forward as Joey neared the end of his shower. He looked at JC, nodded and grinned. “Sound real good, yo. Keep working on that, k?” He patted JC’s shoulder and hurried forward.
Lance dropped his shirt off the bunk at the exact moment Justin was passing below. “Hey, Justin, could you get that for me?”
Justin looked down at the offending garment with disgust, glancing at the bathroom door as if it was going to disappear into the portal of time if he didn’t reach it now.
“Please?” Lance asked, smiling charmingly. Justin picked up the shirt and tossed it onto Lance’s bunk. “Thanks,” Lance said as the bathroom door opened and Joey emerged.
Justin dove forward just as Chris bounced up off the couch. “Ouch!” Justin and Chris both cried at the same moment, colliding painfully in the narrow aisle.
“What are you whining for?” Chris asked, rubbing his head, “You didn’t just get elbowed in the face.”
“Sorry,” Justin mumbled as Chris edged in front of him and disappeared behind the bathroom door. Justin sighed and dropped onto the couch, nursing his elbow, which really didn’t hurt that much, but gave him a reason to pout.
“And caaaaaan you feeeeeel the loooooove tonight?” Chris bellowed. “It is wheeere we aaaaaaare!” The water turned off and Chris waltzed out, gripping his bottle of shampoo like a microphone. “It’s enough for this wiiiiide-eeeeeyed wanderer, that we got this faaaaar!”
“Took long enough,” Justin muttered, grabbing his towel and soap and ducking into the tiny room. “Steamy enough in here for you?” he yelled. “Wanted to feel like you were in that rain forest, huh, Kirkpatrick?”
“They weren’t in a rain forest. Just a regular forest. Right?” Chris asked, looking around. Joey nodded. He supposed it was a regular forest, not that he’d really ever paid attention. Did lions frequent rain forests? Were there rain forests in Africa?
Joey was jolted from his thoughts when the bus was filled with a yell amplified by the smallness of the bathroom. “You jerks!” Justin screamed. He burst through the door, covered in soap, his towel wrapped tightly around his waist. “You did that on purpose.”
“Need to rinse off?” Chris asked, wielding a bottle of water fresh out of the mini fridge.
“No thanks,” Justin growled, grabbing a towel and wiping the soap from his arms. “No thanks to YOU.”
He stormed back to his bunk. Chris snickered. Then he started giggling. Lance looked up and snorted. JC was hiding his laughter behind his hand. When Joey let out with the biggest guffaw known to man, everyone lost it. They were roaring with laughter while Justin fumed behind the curtain of his bunk. He poked his head out to stick his tongue out at everyone, but when he saw JC’s bright red face and Lance doubled over and Joey leaning back on the couch, howling, and Chris’s face about to split in two with the force of it all, he couldn’t help but smile.
“Guess I deserved that, huh?” Justin said. “Just to let ya’ll know, tomorrow’s my night to take the FIRST shower.” He wiggled his eyebrows and disappeared back behind the curtains to finish getting dressed.