You remember almost hating Lance at first, hating the fact that you -- all of you -- were so desperate for a bass that you were reduced to having auditions, and finally flying in a total stranger. This kid who in his picture looked like every freshman nightmare -- who, despite being sixteen, reminded you of you when you were thirteen and you'd had to make a name for yourself when your size failed you. This kid who had said,

"um, I gotta go -- you're gonna have to talk to my mom,"

and whose mother had hemmed and hawed over the phone, saying "well, I don't really know," in her slow Mississippi drawl, "he's got all his friends and family here, and... is he gonna be able to finish school on time, if he does this?" while you tried to placate her without sounding desperate because fuck, you needed this kid. You'd heard his audition tapes and knew that his bass had the reach you'd been looking all over for, that Joey couldn't manage. Jason had been good; he'd been fine, but he'd bailed out and now you had three weeks until your demo showcase and you needed. this. kid. You didn't have anyone else to call if this didn't work out.

They'd flown down two days later, he and his mother, and you'd looked at him, taking in his shy, nervous smile, and tried to put him at ease. You'd invited him to hang out with the rest of the guys in the pool. You'd put your arm around him and noted that he was mousy and not really that blond and was about your size, maybe a little taller because he slouched, and that made you like him a little bit more. But then you also noted his bowl cut and plaid shirt and Wranglers and large green eyes that darted about like a startled deer, and you remembered that you didn't like him that much and maybe wouldn't for a while.

He fucked up dancing a lot.

You tried not to be too upset with him, because he was here to sing and not so much to dance, and because he was obviously trying. But when he was up against two Mouse Club alumni and you and Joey, who were professionals used to having to pick up routines quickly or lose your jobs, he was clearly out of his league. It was a lot of things; he was slow to pick up the routines, and then once he had them down, the littlest thing would throw him off -- losing count, a skip on the CD, a bee in the room, anything -- he didn't learn routines so much as he learned counting sequences. You didn't know how to get him out of that, and with a week and a half left until the showcase, you didn't have time.

His mom always had to be with him, and they'd moved into your apartment with you and Justin and Lynn, so it was like having two mothers around. It was having two mothers around; you could feel them each trying not to offer guidance when all you had for breakfast was Kool-Aid, while Justin hunched over his soup bowl of cereal and Lance nibbled on egg sandwiches. He, like Justin, accepted motherly displays of affection without bristling, and you half-expected Diane to pull you aside at any moment and insist that you stop torturing her baby after a hard day of rehearsals. But to Lance's credit every time she came around and leaned over him, speaking in hushed motherly tones, he shrugged and nodded agreeably to whatever she said, and you didn't think he was complaining.

The day of your showcase performance you don't think any of you ate anything, you were all so nervous. Justin cried a little, you were positive you'd throw up, and Lance was taking such huge gulps of air that Joey told him to put his head between his legs so he wouldn't start hyperventilating and pass out. He still fucked up on the dancing, but when it was all over, Lou gave you kudos, and the rep from BMG said that he was interested in signing you. You were so excited that you grabbed everybody and kissed them, and Lance had blushed tomato red; and you made it a point to tell him how well he'd done, because sometimes you didn't think you did that enough.

You didn't like him, you thought, because you couldn't figure him out.

You'd always prided yourself on your ability to read people and situations, and the thing about Lance was that you couldn't pin down what made him tick a lot of the time. You didn't like it, and you spent a lot of time trying to ruffle him, to unpredictable results. He was just off of center in so many ways; you were sure he was gay, like absolutely sure he had to be, yet he made nice with a fair number of girls in the area, got a lot of phone numbers. He hadn't seemed to mind the bowl cuts his mother gave him, or the clothes, but when Lou suggested he go for a tint and cut and some new clothes he'd been enthusiastic, and giddily modeled everything for them when he and Diane got back from the mall.

He couldn't play most sports well, but he liked to watch, and to try; he just didn't seem to have the control over his limbs that gave people like you an edge in sports like basketball and football, which pretty much explained the dancing thing, but you'd grown up doing almost everything and were pretty good at most of what you tried, so you didn't have much sympathy for him on the court. But you explained hockey to him and he seemed interested, and you two got one thing to bond over during playoffs; he was one of those people who needed the TV to track the puck for him, though, and you couldn't stand that.

You'd pegged him as a crier at the start, thinking him too pretty, too wide-eyed innocent, too Mama's boy to be anything else. You thought you'd caught him coming close a couple of times when you were rehearsing and he was being picked on to give that extra ten percent, but so far he hadn't delivered. Then you went to Europe and found out that homesickness made criers of you all, though Lance and Justin tried to hide it the most, lest their mothers swoop down on them for embarrassing public comforting. Justin would sulk, curled into himself, and order everyone to stay away from him, and that was how you knew he was fighting tears off. Sometimes you'd all be hanging around watching some lame German show, and Lance would stand abruptly and head for his room, and that was how you'd know with him.

That was also how you realized that Joey and Lance were getting closer, because Joey would almost always beg off soon after Lance had left, and they'd both come back after maybe an hour. Lance would be red-eyed but subdued, and laughing at something Joey was saying.

It bothered you more to know that, because it seemed that the others were falling into their niches with Lance -- or he with them -- and you still couldn't figure out what to make of him except that he was a nice, pretty sort of a geek who sang well. JC and Lance got along because they each had this quiet intensity thing, and sometimes took things way too seriously, and could say things without opening their mouths, and stare at you unsettlingly for long moments, and you were sure that they'd bonded over that. Justin and Lance were the youngest and had the moms and the South and being underage to keep each other company when the rest of you wanted to go to clubs and pick up women. But Lance was laid back where you were hyperactive, and intense in a studious way where you were intense in a sharp, observing way, and his jokes were slow and sarcastic where yours were rapid-fire and biting, and he was focused where you were random, and fuck, but you couldn't figure him out.

When you asked Joey why he liked hanging out with Lance, he shrugged. "I dunno, man," he said. "He's funny. He's a lot of fun when he stops being self-conscious and stuff."

"So, what," you said, folding your arms across your chest. "You're saying he's self-conscious around me?" and Joey merely shrugged again, but you didn't think that could be the case, because who were you? It would be stupid to be self-conscious around you, because you'd known the kid for what, seven months already? There had to be more to it than that.

So you decided to initiate him -- death by humor. You'd get a reaction out of him or die trying.

You knew your sense of humor could be mean. You'd learned a lot of lessons the hard way, and you didn't care what anybody said; humor was just like everything else -- it was either kill or be killed, and it had served you well so far. The kinds of people who couldn't handle you were the kinds you didn't want around anyway, and even if you pushed your friends too far, they were the type who would tell you to fuck off so that you knew to back down, and that was fine, too.

The thing was that Lance never told you to fuck off. He would play along with you sometimes, humoring you, or show his annoyance, drawing his mouth into a fine line, or deliver a subtly stern "c'mon, Chris, quit it," or leave the room in irritation. But he never really reacted to anything you did. And the bigger the group got in Europe, the more you got recognized, and the more insults you had to endure from the naysayers, and Lance never reacted to them, either. People frequently speculated that he was gay; he was the least favorite of the fans, and you teased him about it all, and he never said anything. You knew that if you were him, you'd probably have gotten the group kicked out of more than one establishment for telling reporters and fans off alike. As it was, you almost did on more than one occasion, in his defense. "Just let it go, man," he always said to you quietly, after.

You started to wonder if he was quite human.

Then things started to work for you back home in the States, and you guessed that Lance had indeed stopped being so self-conscious around you because he was funnier; laughed more, you thought. Management wanted him to be "more blond," they said, which meant they wanted to lighten up on the red in his hair, but he said "why do they get to decide what I do with my hair all the time?" and bleached it platinum. You thought that was something, even though management didn't give him hell the way they'd gotten mad at you for getting dreads, and Joey for getting the eyebrow ring, because if Lance didn't stand up for himself a lot of the time, at least he did fight management when he could. And the kid you'd thought was kind of boring and didn't know where he fit into the group, the kid who'd been the first to ask "why?" when you'd had to record Euro-pop for your first album and gotten a stern talking-to from Lou for forgetting his place, started up a management company of his own.

You still hadn't gotten a reaction out of him yet, though. He seemed more inclined, the more time that passed, to ignore whatever you offered, to brush off comments with a "yeah, whatever, Chris," or to sling back a retort -- the last of which was better than nothing. Well, it was better than that, actually, because it meant you two could banter sometimes -- which is what Lance would call it, not you -- and it was almost like you had a relationship beyond the "yeah, we sing together and get along" thing.

Somewhere along the line, too, he started changing, and you couldn't put your finger on it for the longest while. You just knew that he made you uncomfortable sometimes, when you got too close; like sometimes when he gripped your hands for the flip in "I Want You Back" and you could smell the perspiration of hard work on him and it distracted you. Or when he bulked up a bit and you could see the muscular line of his pecs through his shirts. He started tipping his hair with blond, and it was a good look for him, one of those cases where the bottle gave you what nature hadn't dealt you first, and he stopped being so girl-pretty and started being more... sort of... beautiful, in an unconventional way.

You started thinking. Things. About him.

And you didn't like it, seeing Lance as a sexual being, not because you didn't find men attractive, but because you'd just started dating Dani seriously, and that was going well, and also because he was... Lance. A kid, more so than Justin in some ways, more naive, less eager to grow up and prove he was as much a man as you were. He wasn't your type. He was the kid who needed help tracking the puck, who was useless at basketball, the kid you could barely even banter with, for God's sake, who used words like banter to describe it.

You think you might have gotten a little more mean than you'd meant to around then, and eventually Lance stopped with the banter, stopped talking to you at all, actually, even started avoiding you. It was just made that much worse by the fact that you were looking at your contracts and finding out that hey, yeah, you were being screwed and how were you gonna fix that? so everybody was a bit stressed with the initial shock of finding that out, but also, you knew, you were just being mean. One day when Lance's eyes were dark-rimmed with exhaustion you told him his eyeliner wasn't on straight and he got up and left the lounge wordlessly for his bunk; and Joey punched you hard in the arm and said "hey, you think you might wanna stop treating Lance like you're trying to run him out of the group?" and you did feel pretty bad about that.

You felt worse when he ended up getting sick, because none of you really knew how bad it was, including him, probably, for a long time. You all thought he'd get over it, because the flu happens, and you'd all had it, and wasn't he being such a good sport about it? And he handled it better in a lot of ways than you might have in his place, when he was throwing up between songs in rehearsals and fighting to keep it down during performances; you might have taken out a roadie or two for getting mad at him for sitting down just behind the curtains during costume changes.

You were really worried by the time he collapsed, when he couldn't even stand up when the camera wasn't on him and he kept his head down, and when he did look up the bags under his eyes made his thin face look almost translucent. You'd asked the water boy if he'd be okay because you were afraid to ask Lance yourself, but you knew as well as Lance and everyone else that it didn't really matter by that point; the show was going to go on with or without him. It was the first time you'd all cried together since your first tour in Europe, though Lance was too weak to do much more than sob quietly, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes, as you all held his hand in a group clutch before they took him to the hospital.

The shows you did without him sucked, were absolutely awful, and you were reminded, again, of how much you needed him, and not just because he was the bass now, but because fuck, you really missed the kid and his geeky, beautiful, sexually burgeoning self. You swore you'd lighten up on him because Lance was an all right kid, really, and maybe brute force assassination by humor wasn't the best way of dealing with him after all. You told him you loved him before he got out of the hospital, and meant it.

He came out to you all before you left RCA, sat you down solemnly and told you, because "we're gonna be going through some serious shit in a second, and I just. You guys deserve to know." You'd suspected all this time, of course, but suspecting wasn't the same as knowing, and the fact that he was finally comfortable enough with himself and the rest of you to come clean about it meant something. The others didn't mind either, and you hadn't expected them to.

The knowledge that Lance was gay did not ease the frequency with which you looked at him and saw a purely sexual being, with long, sleek body lines on a body more compact and sturdy than it looked at first glance; didn't stop you from noticing what a beauty he really was and had become, when he bent over contracts in Johnny's office, asking muted questions of the lawyers, pointing out this phrase or that with slender fingers. It didn't stop you from catching him sprawled out on a sofa, arm thrown over his eyes in sleep, and wondering if he might look like that after a night of sex, when he'd been drained of all energy and finally conked out in exhaustion. You and Dani had a lot of sex, those days.

"Do -- did you do a lot of fooling around?" you'd asked him once, while you boarded the bus. "You know, like before you came out to us. Or, like, now?" You'd just wanted to tell him to be careful; it wasn't like you were picturing him in various stages of sexual activity with faceless men, members of the crew, you. No, not at all.

He'd simply shrugged. "I've fooled around enough to know for sure, I guess," he'd said, and gone in ahead of you, and you wondered how much was 'enough' for him. And you realized he hadn't said anything about now, though you'd seen him in action at the parties he threw, seen him cozy up to men and women alike when he knew they could help him in the Hollywood scene, and you thought -- feared -- that maybe he was still fooling around, a bit. "See that guy right there," he'd say, pointing. "With the wannabe tweed jacket? You don't wanna know what I had to do to get him to throw in his support for A Happy Place." You hoped he was just exaggerating when he said stuff like that.

Dani said it was because of the business and the spotlight and the pressure and you not being able to put her first, and all of that was true. But you also thought she was breaking up with you because you were.... distracted.

Lance, ironically, was really good about the breakup. "Come out to my party," he'd urge, and you'd go, because he did throw really good parties, even if he was just networking. You still joked about it, about "Mr. Hollywood," but it was usually more good-natured than mean-spirited, and Lance got a kick out of most the jokes, too, which was something new. So you went to the parties, and got drunk, and he spent more time with you on nights like those.

You didn't understand the niceness, the generosity. You were known to be generous, too, loyal to your friends to a fault, and you supposed the two of you had that in common; but sometimes you tried to think of a time when you had done something, something really genuinely kind and out of the way for Lance, and you couldn't think of many. So to see him going to such seeming lengths, inviting you to his parties when the other guys didn't like to go because they thought he'd sold his soul to the Hollywood machine, made you think about things like that.

There was also something infuriatingly sexy about seeing Lance so obviously in his element, carefully assembled into the figure and image he'd blossomed into, leather pants and skin-tight button downs, doing what he was gifted at. And that made you think, too, that maybe that was part of why you were there. As though there were something he wanted you to notice, be aware of. Yet he'd keep just out of your grasp all evening, moving from room to room, working the joint; look but don't touch. Okay, you'd noticed. You got the message.

"Hey, Chris," he'd say, putting a hand on your shoulder and looking around the cluttered damage to his living room after the guests had left, raising his eyebrows and smiling. "Wanna help me get this stuff cleaned up?"

Or maybe you were just there for that.

"So, Lance," you say casually one evening, sweeping a napkin with a squeezed lime and a phone number on it into the garbage bag you're holding, "how many new associates did you do tonight--" you widen your eyes in mock shock. "Make tonight, make. Make tonight. My bad." It's something you might have thrown out innocuously on the bus or during soundcheck, or off the record in an interview, and it's easy enough to laugh off. But then you were never very good at keeping bitterness out of your voice, and it comes out sounding sort of mean-spirited.

Lance pauses in lifting an ashtray to dump its contents out, and deliberately sets it back down and straightens, dusting his hands off. "Okay," he says slowly, and low, lower than you expect to hear from him, and you aren't sure what's going through his head, but what else is new there? "Okay," he says again, and holds his arms out to his sides, as though inviting you to hit him. "I give. You pushed my button. Is that what you wanted?"

Well, yes, and it's about fucking time, you think, but also, you've been trying to goad him for so long that the goading has become the end itself and you haven't thought about what it would mean when you finally hit the target. "What're you talkin' about, man," you mutter, and shake your head, and swipe an ashtray into the bag without realizing you're supposed to empty it. "It was a joke. I was kidding."

He keeps looking at you, and folds his arms, and rubs his thumb over the knuckle of his forefinger repeatedly like a cricket might. "Yeah," he says. "'Cause it's not like you're tryin' to, um. What? Get a rise out of me? Or somethin'?" He sounds eerily calm, accent heavy, and you're trying to think of when, when was it that he's sounded like that? You've heard that tone before. When?

"I'm not trying to do anything, Lance, God, man--" you sigh and drop the bag and the ashtray clatters noisily from inside of it against the base of the table. "Just. Do you want me to get you another drink? 'Cause I like it more when you're drunk and not taking things so fucking seriousl--"

"My God," he laughs harshly, shaking his head and throwing his hands up in exasperation. "How fucking dense," he says incredulously, walking around the table to your side, "can you get?" He reaches out for you -- for your shirt? your throat? you don't know, but you've been in enough fights to know better, and before thought registers instinct kicks in and you've stepped back, suddenly catching his wrists in your grip.

Biting his lip, he twists both hands down, which might have successfully freed both wrists from your grasp except that your hands are big enough and his wrists small enough. You can feel the bones shifting, grinding together under your fingers, and soon enough he stops struggling; he pulls back and stares at you, undisguised anger blazing behind his eyes but face impassive, as though trying to size you up. You stare back, trying to size him up yourself, but your failure to do that all this time is what got you into this mess in the first place, isn't it?

So, yeah, the head-butt catches you off guard.

You both stumble back, the back of your head cracking against the wall and your eyes rolling a little, sparks shooting behind your lids. You feel the shift of his bones beneath your fingers again as he takes advantage of your loosened grip to squirm free, and shit, didn't he feel that sting against his forehead? "Fuck," you say, angry now, "what the fuck is the matter with you," and he looks mad enough to spit at you, but his eyes are tearing up so you figure that maybe he felt that head-butt, too. And then you feel his hand against the back of your neck as he brings your face to his and kisses you brutally, your lips mashed against each other and caught between the painful pressure of your teeth, and he holds you there for a beat before pulling away as violently as he'd started.

"That," he pronounces slowly, startlingly subdued, and it's his pissed-off manager voice, that's what it is; when he needs to be polite but is angry as hell and will hurl throw-cushions around his suite once he gets off the phone, "is what's the matter with me. Do you need a billboard now, or do you finally fucking get it?"

Yeah, you think, yeah, you do. That, you get. "How, um." you swallow, bringing a hand up to rub at your forehead gingerly. Kid has a fucking hard head. Not so much a kid anymore, though. "How long have you. I mean. shit. You do know there's better ways to tell me these things, right?"

Lance tilts his head and looks at you. "You used to hate me," he states matter-of-factly. "And I could never figure out why -- I just. People... not liking me for no reason just. It drove me crazy."

I didn't hate you, you want to say, because Lance seems to be reminiscing, a lost hurt look coming into his eyes, but it's not as close to the truth as you'd like.

"All my life," he goes on, his hand brushing over his own forehead unconsciously. It looks red. Definite bruise tomorrow. Makeup'll be pissed. "I've been good at not letting things get to me. And that meant you, too, and if it meant you'd hate me forever, then so be it, but I'd never," and suddenly the anger is back again, there behind his eyes, "let you get to me. And that," he finishes, raising an eyebrow. "Drove you crazy."

Fuck; he'd had-- what, he'd had a plan? He'd known that his non-reaction pissed you off? He'd. Shit. He'd had it together the whole time you were trying to figure him out? "Okay," you allow warily, "I don't know about crazy, exactly--"

"It's fascinating, isn't it," he says intensely as his eyes rake over your face, cutting you off like you haven't even spoken. "Trying to figure a person out, when they don't want you to know what's going on in their heads?" He licks his lips, searching your eyes with his, and there's something vaguely erotic about it and you feel blood leave your head and head for your crotch. "It's hard to keep it up, studying someone like that, without getting attached after a while, isn't it?"

It is; it definitely is. "It's because I'm so irresistible," you say, and he smiles wryly and does reach out and grab you by the shirt this time, and you let him, when he says

"Then what's your excuse?"

before his mouth closes over yours again and you keep your eyes open, staring at the slivers of green beneath his half-shut lids, thrusting your tongue into his mouth and meeting his. "I didn't know," you say, gasping it against his lips, sucking on his tongue, "I. God, Lance. I didn't know."

Something hits the wall by your head, and you tear your mouth from his wetly, startled, but it's just the side of his hand, thrust there for support. His wrist is red where you'd gripped it, and you wonder, idly, if he'll have bruises there tomorrow, too; then you kiss him again, hand slipping around his waist and grasping the fabric of his shirt in your fist. You take a little flesh with it, and he growls into your mouth.

"You have any idea," he's muttering, too, in perfect counterpoint to your words, "how long I've wanted you to fuck me," thrusting his hips against yours, making you even harder, "you're so," he gasps, "dense," and he balls up the hem of your shirt in both hands and yanks it up to your neck. You break apart long enough to pull it over your head before you bow your head to his neck and inhale deeply, latching on to the skin there and sliding your hands up under the back of his own shirt. He smells like the unisex cologne he wears, and heat, and the slight musk of perspiration, the scent of being cooped up indoors all evening, stale and warm. His back is smooth under your hands, and your fingers scramble for a hand-hold as you inch the shirt up, him fumbling with the buttons in the front until he gets it off.

You spin him abruptly, then, his back to your front, and sink your teeth into the juncture between his shoulder and neck, and he hisses, hands fisting and hips bucking back into you, you unable to stop thinking that you both do things the hard way, don't you? You lap at the red marks left by your teeth while you move your hands down and forward around his belly, to the fly of his pants, and dig in with the heel of your palm, provoking a sigh. He's half-hard, but grows harder under your hand as you rock your hand with an insistent pressure, and harder still as his hips begin to undulate between the hardness of your dick and the grip of your hand, taking in deep breaths through the nose.

You rock your hips against his ass, desperate for a little pressure of your own, and unzip his fly, fingers delving inside, seeking heat, and begin to jerk him, thriving on the little breathy gasps he's starting to make. You bite him again, and thrust forward hard, and his legs give, stumbling forward with his hands outstretched for the back of the couch, you falling up against him and making the couch slide along the carpet until it collides with the coffee table. Something topples and falls, but you can't see what it is and don't care, with your fingers curled around Lance's dick and your own erection rubbing against your zipper painfully.

There's an awful scraping sound you realize is Lance's fingernails against the couch fabric as he struggles to gain a grip. "Can you," he sighs, jerking harshly into your hand, "I need you to-- can you just. shit," he stops and drops his head down to rest between his arms, elbows taut, and just breathes.

"Yeah," you murmur, and let go of him long enough to unfasten your jeans, so tight across the crotch you can practically feel the teeth of your fly where it digs into you, "gimme ten seconds, man, I'm--" you stick two fingers into your mouth, wetting them, Lance shuffling his precious leather pants down, down past his knees, and you place a hand on the small of his back both to steady and stop him. "Okay," you whisper, gliding one slick finger down the crack of his ass, and he folds over smoothly, like he knows just how to make it feel right; then you realize that he probably does, and your dick twitches at the realization.

"You ever done this before?" you ask, leaning over him and speaking into his ear as you push forward with one finger, sliding it inside of him, and he growls long and low, arching his back and his knees buckling again so that you have to hold him up around the waist before he sinks to his knees on the floor. You add the second finger before he answers.

"Not... this," he breathes, his arms trembling so much that you can feel the tremors down on the small of his back. "Not like. This. I don't fuck my. Sponsors. Chris," he gets out, in jagged gusts of air.

"I know," you say, kissing the bumps of his spine, stroking him from the inside and loving the way he shoves back onto your hand with his hips. "I know. I was being a jerk; I didn't think you'd do that, I know. I'm sorry," you say, thinking this is the oddest situation you've ever apologized in.

Lance nods, his head still down, and lets go of the couch with one hand to touch himself, and you figure you need to get going yourself. You pull both fingers out smoothly and line yourself up, fighting the urge to grip his hips steady and drive yourself in to the hilt, remembering what it had been like that first time with the guy -- Scott -- who hadn't known you were a virgin. You figure that right now you owe it to Lance to make him feel pretty damn good if you can help it.

You rock your hips forward, nudging the head past the initial resistance, and Lance gives a choked startled gasp, brings his hand up again to clutch at the couch, and begins to sink to the floor. No, wait, you want to say, but your teeth are clenched together and all you can manage is a grunt, sweat starting to drip from your sideburns as you sink with him, and when his knees hit the ground it drives you in further, wrenching a strangled sound from him and a groan from you. "Okay?" you manage to say, meaning is Lance; he doesn't respond, lowering his head and forcing his ass up, and you guess that's as good an answer as any, so you grip his hips with both hands and continue to thrust yourself inside, slowly.

You finally bring a hand around to start jerking him again, as you make shallow jabs with your hips into that incredible, tight heat, and his breathy pants start up again, the small of his back growing damp under your palm. You taste pure sex and sweat when you kiss his back now, burying yourself inside him again and again, and when he comes he comes hard, lets go of the couch and throws his arms out, rises up and rests the back of his head against your shoulder as he gasps it out. It's the most wanton thing you've seen in a while. You look very much forward to seeing it again.

"I never hated you," you tell him later, curled up behind him there on the carpet because you're both too tired to move just yet. You know, now, that it's true. "I never did. I just. You were such a mystery to me, and I don't... I dunno. Deal well with those."

He shrugs blissfully, like he doesn't much care. You think he probably doesn't.

"I think," you go on, "probably for a long time, I've actually loved you or something. You know, looking back."

"I've loved you since, like, forever," he says, and leaves it at that.

"I love you now," you say.

He nods. "I know."

"We tellin' the guys about this?" he asks you one night, his head on your chest, fingers curled up by his mouth like he could start sucking absently on a thumb at any moment. He looks fifteen years younger, and you can't believe, looking at him now, that you were sucking his dick an hour ago. He looks a little like an angel. A mousy, not quite blond angel.

You sweep an arm up and over his shoulders, gently petting down his mussed hair. "You wanna tell the guys about this?" you ask, leaving the choice to him. You want to tell the guys about this. You want to tell everyone about this; your mom, who thinks you lost your soul mate in Dani, the fans, who are great and all, and worried about how unhappy you'd seemed lately, and would be thrilled to know how happy you are right now but probably not so much with the reason why.

He nods. "Yeah," he says, and closes his eyes, and you feel like you two are finally of one mind on something.