*

"This, I don't think," Lance said, "is such a good idea."

Greg tried another key in the deadbolt, a key that looked pretty much exactly like the last two keys he'd tried. This one didn't work either. "Shit. I know it was one of these gold ones, because I remember it was stupid that the lock was silver and the key wasn't. Don't they come sets or something?"

"I don't know. It depends if you get copies made. C'mon." Lance shoved Greg's arm with his elbow. His right hand was busy holding his beer, and Greg's was in his left. Both had originally belonged to Blake Kizer's father, but Blake's daddy wasn't the sort to wonder long if a twelve-pack of MGD went missing from his fridge. Blake thought his friends would appreciate it more. Lance, who was very appreciative, and whose mom had driven Blake home from rehearsal more than once, got two. Greg only warranted one, because even though he was two years older and didn't mind hanging out with sophomores and juniors, there was still the matter of him being a little strange. It was probably because his father was a minister. "We should go back. They were talking about getting pizza."

"They always say they're going to and then they never do." Greg shook the keyring as if the right key might fly off if he roughed them up a bit. He was right; the guys never got enough money together before Dominos stopped delivering on Sunday evenings.

Lance sipped his beer. "I thought they didn't lock churches."

"We're too close to the city, my dad says. I don't know, I guess there's stuff in the offices. Nobody's dumb enough to steal the crosses." With a smooth click, the tumblers parted for the fourth key. Grinning, Greg pushed the door into the dark recesses of the kitchen. "Ladies first."

"Shut up. This was your idea." Lance knocked the can in his left hand against Greg's knuckles until he took it back. "We were just here this morning."

"Because we were supposed to be. And you came with me, so, I did the breaking. You do the entering."

"You didn't break. You've got your dad's keys," Lance said, but he did step inside first.

It was dim and cool, even without air conditioning, just the big white enamel fridge humming over the empty countertops. Lance never came back to the kitchen unless the youth group was hosting a dinner and he was one of the servers, and then he mostly concentrated on getting the pitchers of iced tea out to the tables and not all over the floor. Behind him, Greg pulled the door shut and slipped through the room, not needing to wait for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.

They walked through the fellowship hall, single file and quiet, past the closed classroom doors and bulletin boards thumbtacked with layers of crayon and construction paper artwork. The air smelled sweet and waxy like this was a place flowers came to die. Which was, Lance thought, pretty much true.

"Okay," Lance said, leaning forward. "You were right."

"Hell of a lot better than sitting around Print's back yard. Again."

"Except Print's got a swimming pool."

"Whatever. I bet he pisses in it before we come over because he thinks that's funny."

When they got to the doors of the sanctuary, Greg found the right key on the first try. Lance offered an abbreviated golf clap.

"Yeah, see, this one actually looks like it's supposed to. Wait, what're you doing?"

Lance swallowed twice more then sat the empty can down on the floor. "I'm not going in there with that. Better finish yours, too."

"I'll finish it later. I'm rationing it." Opening the door revealed a room of wood and white walls, but Lance grabbed Greg's arm and hauled him back.

"You can't take a beer into a church!"

"Dude, we're already in a church. We have been for five minutes."

"It's not the same," Lance said, but his argument was weak. He knew it, and he was starting to feel like an idiot for drinking a stolen beer-- two stolen beers, because having one was just being polite when it was offered, but he'd had two which meant he'd wanted them-- and walking through a locked-up church then acting like a girl over details. Greg's arm flexed, and Lanced loosed his grip, fast.

Laughing, Greg pressed his can into Lance's open hand. "I don't even want it anymore. You finish it if it bothers you that much."

There was only a little bit sloshing around the bottom, but it was dumb to waste something he didn't often get. "Don't let me forget the cans on the way out." Stacking the second on the first, Lance followed Greg inside.

Eight o'clock in June wasn't late enough for the sun to have set. It was red and orange where it came through the windows and stranger shades where it hit the stained glass, making the red velvet cushions on the pews look wet and bloody. The carpet swallowed their footsteps, but the corners and vaults of the ceiling made echoes go on forever in the shadows.

As Greg vaulted over the kneeling rail, Lance let loose, in full voice, with, "Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war!"

"Jesus," said Greg, catching his ankle and coming down on his knees.

"No, it's 'with the cross of Jesus.' Pretty close, though."

"Asshole. I know the words. To the sixth verse, even."

"There isn't a sixth verse."

"Sure there is. We just never sing more than three because the basses haven't got the stamina."

With a shout, Lance lunged up the steps. Greg, who was a lousy excuse for a tenor but a starter on the varsity basketball team, jumped down into the organ pit, where he faked right and caught Lance off guard long enough to dart into the sacristy. Lance got to the door seconds after it swung shut, just in time to hear the bolt slide home.

"Manning!" The door was old and the wood cracked, but Lance wasn't going to add vandalism to his list of misdemeanors. "Open up!"

Greg laughed through the door. "What's the secret password?"

"You're an idiot who's locked himself inside a room with only one door."

The bolt slid open, and Greg's dark head poked out. "Okay, but only because you're drunk and I feel sorry for you."

"'Mnot drunk," said Lance, shoving the door as he walked past.

"I'd take any excuse I could if I moved that slow. You want to go up the steeple?"

The catwalk was cramped and rickety, and resembled a ladder more than a staircase. Lance could've rested his head on Greg's hip when he stopped to fumble with the latches on the trapdoor. When Greg reached down, Lance threw up his hand to keep from getting slapped in the face.

"Sorry," Greg said, squeezing Lance's fingers for a second before digging into his hip pocket. "I'm just looking for my lighter."

Lance's stomach twisted. He thought it might be something about this room, something about being packed into the twisty spaces behind the altar that was making him feel like that again. It was like this morning, with the choir crammed into the sacristy, struggling to get their robes on over their Sunday clothes. Greg had come up behind Lance, saying "here," and getting the zipper up the last few inches that he couldn't manage blind. He'd been turning to say thank you when he'd felt Greg's hand fall away. Except it hadn't fallen so much away as down, brushing the small of his back and a half inch lower.

Lance looked up and saw the same expression on Greg's face as this morning. No one looked that innocent except when they weren't. "Please don't burn down the church," Lance said. "Arson won't look good on my college applications."

"Like I care. Mine are already signed, sealed, and delivered. In fact--"

In the dim light provided by Greg's Bic, the trapdoor swung open with a screech, slamming flat on the landing. Greg hoisted himself up then swung around and reached down. "Here. There's, like, no room, so watch it."

He wasn't exaggerating. There was barely room for them both to sit side by side, and that was with their legs dangling back down into darkness. Digging into his pocket, Greg came up with a nearly empty soft pack of Marlboros. "I would've brought something better, but."

"No, that's okay." Beer and cigarettes were still legal, even if he was underage. He couldn't shake the feeling his mom would smell it on his clothes the instant he did anything worse.

The sun was mostly down by the time Lance finished the cigarette. Waving off the offer of another, he crushed the butt and sent over the rail. It rolled down the roof and caught in the gutter. "That was lame," he said before Greg could. "We're not really that high up."

"Nah. This isn't Notre Dame or anything."

"Still. You can see a lot." He looked over at Greg, who had a habit of smoking down to the filter. "Where'd you apply?"

"Places that I know won't let me in. Except for UM. I got the letter on Thursday."

"Hey." It was kind of redundant, sitting as close as they were, but Lance bumped his shoulder anyway. "That's great."

"Yeah, well. I'm still waiting for Virginia Tech. I just want to go away, you know?"

"Yeah, sure. You'll get in."

"Maybe." Greg flicked his butt over the rail. Arcing wide, it landed on the edge of the parking lot. "Boom."

"Practice."

"Nah. I was born talented." Greg rapped his lighter against Lance's knee. "You should start looking now. You could get out of here a year early, if you tried."

Lance rolled his eyes. He'd get out, as soon as he know where he wanted to go. "I'll think about it," he said, feeling for the top rungs of the ladder with his toes.

When his feet were on solid ground again, things started to happen very slowly: there was his hand, reaching up to Greg's shoulder to steady him, completely unnecessary and still very important. Greg hit the floor but didn't go anywhere, just shifted closer until he had one thigh between Lance's legs and Lance had one thigh between his, like he was waiting for Lance to go somewhere. Stupid, really, when Lance was the one who followed him here to begin with. Leaving wouldn't make any sense now.

Lance kissed him.

Greg was a little bit taller and a little bit heavier, but he didn't flinch when Lance worked one hand into his hair and held on. Instead his mouth fell open, and oh, his tongue. It was wetter then Lance thought it would be. Not shy about touching his, either, it made Lance forget everything he'd ever heard about how to kiss right, just when he needed to remember it most

Pulling back, he sucked in a breath and hoped it looked like he had some idea what he was doing. He hoped it at least looked like he'd just gone in too fast and not like he'd never kissed anyone before. "I'm not," Lance said, and it echoed around like a cough in the silence.

"Yeah," said Greg, "doesn't matter," and Lance wanted to tell him no, no, because he'd already known he wasn't the way he was supposed to be. He just hadn't known he was like this. It wasn't the same thing at all, and now he was shaking from it.

If he stopped, he wouldn't be able to start back up. He wouldn't dare. So he kissed him again. When Greg grunted he knew he'd done it too hard, but he didn't stop. Even when Greg's hands curled around his cheeks and Lance knew they were burning red, he kept going.

If anyone heard about this, if anyone saw him, he'd die. They wouldn't have to carry him ten yards to have the funeral.

Greg's tongue made his teeth hurt like he'd chewed on sugar. Not wanting to let it go, though, taught Lance all at once to breathe through his nose. He felt it under his ribs like he was singing. This must be what it was like for tenors who had to breathe when they could, who had to be careful not to ruin the phrasing of a melody that went on and on and didn't have measure's rest. Maybe this was why everyone wanted to be a tenor, if this was what it felt like to sing first.

Lance worked one hand under the tail of Greg's t-shirt to touch the smooth, hard small of his back just before Greg broke away, resting his forehead on Lance's shoulder.

"Shh," he said, even though Lance hadn't made a noise. Lance couldn't figure out what he'd said it for until he felt Greg's hand at the front of his pants, cinching his belt tight, then working it loose with a jangle like tin bell.

Before he could decide if he wanted to say no, he was pulling down his own zipper. Greg's hand wrapped around his cock, curling tight and not moving at all. Not until Lance lifted his head, trying to get enough air so he wouldn't fall down in the middle of this. Greg licked a wet stripe up Lance's throat and jerked his hand up and away as far as he could within the snug vee of Lance's jeans.

Lance choked. "Don't look down while you're doing it."

"Shh," Greg said again. "I want to. You look good, I want to."

"But it's," Lance said. It was an action, now. It was a deed, not just a thought. Sinning in his thoughts was wrong, but at least it was just thought, and he could tell himself he'd stop before it went any further.

Greg's back was peach-smooth under Lance's fingers. Stroking a little made Greg rock into him, pushing against Lance's hip. Greg was hard, too. Of course he was. Lance should have known he'd be able to tell when someone else rubbed a heavy cock into his hip, because it felt exactly like it should.

Touching Greg's back was nice. Touching his waist meant trying not to tickle, because Lance didn't think he could listen to Greg laugh right now, so he kept going until his fingers were down the front of Greg's jeans and tangled in tight curls.

Greg squeezed his cock, squeezed it too fucking hard, and brought his other hand down there, too. Lance never touched himself like that. He never would have thought to try it. It was good; it felt good, what Greg was doing to him, while he held on and tried to stay put. He couldn't do anything back when he was trying so hard just to stay where he was. His lips were pressed to Greg's ear, but kissing was too much to manage.

"I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm sorry," Lance said, and then he did.

Why you weren't supposed to do this made perfect sense to Lance, now that he had. He'd just done it, and already he wanted it again. For the rest of his life he might be like this, wondering when he was going to get to do it, instead of thinking about school and what he had to finish doing before class tomorrow, or thinking about rehearsal afterwards and choir practice on Wednesday.

In this church. Where he'd just.

Letting go of his cock, Greg slid his hands down the back of Lance's pants and pulled him close. "C'mon, do it. Please."

Opening someone else's zipper was very, very easy. Lance got Greg's boxers down as far as he could, trying not to stare at his cock. He covered it up by wrapping his hand around it. "Like this?"

"Yes." Greg pulled Lance even closer, until Lance's hands brushed both of their stomachs. "Do it. Do it like you'd do you."

Lance never did himself like this, standing up, having just come and still feeling it in his thighs. But he was good at it anyway, from the way Greg whispered against his neck, jerking and saying, "Shit. Yeah," when Lance got his thumb wet on the head. When Greg came in his hands, Lance kissed him because he couldn't think of anything to say.

Greg let out his breath out all at once, pulling up his boxers and tucking himself back in. "Oh. Man. Yeah, don't forget the beer cans."

"The what?" Lance felt stupid and sticky, with his jeans still undone.

"The beer cans. Don't forget them."

They left the way they'd come in, except Lance didn't look up until they were in the kitchen and Greg said, "Hey, thanks," holding the door open and touching Lance's shoulder as he ducked out.

*

Lance didn't think about it all week.

He didn't touch himself, either, because he knew that was when it would be hardest not to remember, except for when he was in the shower and he really had to. It had been days, and there was only so long he could go. It wasn't so bad to jerk off in the shower where it was something that needed to be done, like soaping up his armpits or using the washcloth between his toes, where he could think of it as just one more part of cleaning himself.

Greg had both AP biology and pre-calc with Lance, but he always sat in back of the room while Lance sat in front. Lance made sure everything was in his backpack five minutes before the bell in both classes so he could get out of the door first. It was a shitty thing to do, Lance knew, but it wasn't as shitty as saying "stay away from me," which was what he thought might come out of his mouth if Greg got too close.

Lance promised himself he'd be normal again by next Monday.

Wednesday night might have been hard, except Mrs. Bryant's twin daughters were sick. Since she was the director and also the best soprano they had word went out down the phone tree that practice was cancelled, so just show up ten minutes early on Sunday and they'd go over things then.

The plan was going fine. He hadn't thought about it once until halfway through Sunday's service.

Lance knelt at the communion rail with the rest of the choir, letting the words wash over him, calm and predictable and soothing. Pastor Elbourne paused in front of Kyle Rowe, and then in front of Kyle's father, who sang bass, too. When he paused in front of Lance and murmured, "Broken for you, this do in remembrance of me," Lance didn't think anything of looking up as he opened his mouth.

Greg sounded just like his father. Lance got hard under his choir robe because Greg sounded just like his father. He didn't breathe until Pastor Elbourne moved down the rail. He almost cried over the way his hand shook as he tried to pick up the little cup of grape juice from the tray Mr. Walters held in front of him.

When he tried to sing during the recessional, he kept hitting wrong notes. He left the sanctuary after the service was over without shaking anyone's hand.

Stacy slid into the back of the car, jostling the seat and making Lance feel like he was going to puke. "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing," Lance said, which only made his mother turn around look at him.

"I hope you're not getting sick, standing up there with Mrs. Bryant. You'd better lay down when we get home."

That afternoon, while Lance dozed in his dark, hot room, Lynn Harless called his momma.

*

The audition wasn't as bad as he thought it would be. Sure, he'd never tried out for something that was real like this, real in the way where money was involved beyond selling chocolate bars for a fundraiser and asking his dad to write a check so he could get an Attache windbreaker embroidered with his name.

But the second time Lynn Harless called, Lance got to the phone before his mother did and he could tell by the way she said, "Lance, sweetie, we would sure love to hear you sing with the other boys," that maybe his mom had been right when she said not to worry about never getting the solos. When Miz Lynn met them getting off the plane and said he must have girls calling the house all the time with a face like his, he knew enough to take it as a good sign, even if the girls at home did no such thing.

The worst part of the audition was right before, shaking the hands of the other guys. Joey was nice right away, the kind of nice that you knew would last. And there wasn't much to say about JC one way or the other. But this was before Lance figured out that Chris looked angry like that all of the time, not just when you did something to piss him off. And Justin. Justin could be hard to look at straight on, especially when Lance was nervous to begin with.

Trying to read a chapter on the causes of World War I was surprisingly difficult with Justin sitting across the dining room table, chewing on his pen cap and listening to Mr. Yerger talk about the Reconstruction. Lance had been looking at this same picture of Francis Ferdinand for five minutes, and still wasn't sure what Austria had to do with anything.

The hinges on the back door screamed in protest as the door was kicked open. "My babies! My bambinos! And my JC-- where's he at? We're gonna need him, too."

Justin's pen clattered to the tabletop before Chris finished shouting, and he was halfway out of his chair before Joey walked around the corner.

"I take it this means we'll be continuing on two continents again tomorrow." Mr. Yerger never seemed to keep up with his syllabus. "If you get a chance, Lance, finish that chapter tonight."

"Sorry. We're kind of late--" Joey started, but Mr. Yerger waved him off.

Chris' car was the perfect example of why Lance's dad historically let him borrow the S-10 instead of riding with his friends. At least his dad had a collision deductible somewhere below the state minimum. But with Chris driving and Joey riding shotgun, the other three could fit in the back as long as they put JC in the middle and didn't try to buckle up.

"We have reservations at two fine establishments, so one of them's gonna get stood up. Am I heading south of the border, or for the golden arches?"

"Taco Bell," Joey said, clashing with Justin and JC's rehearsed chorus of, "McDonald's!"

Lance checked his watch. "We're supposed to be at the warehouse in ten minutes."

"You can dance on an empty stomach if you want, but I'm not. Pick one already."

"Taco Bell," Lance sighed, bumping the fist Joey proffered over his shoulder.

"McDonald's it is," Chris crowed, taking the next two rights in quick succession.

Chris flirted outrageously with the woman at the drive-through window. She wore a manager's shirt and had a peeling sunburn on her nose. It meant they had to wait until she was done bitching about her oldest daughter's boyfriend, but they did get free apple pies, confirming the wisdom of letting Chris drive in the first place. Joey nestled the fries behind the gearshift and emptied the ketchup directly into the bag.

"So, this guy at the park," he said, throwing two honey packets at JC who caught both with one hand. "He works at Jaws?"

Chris spat a pickle into the Big Mac carton. "Yeah. Animatronics booth."

"What's his name?" asked JC.

"James? Jamie? Justin?" Justin looked up. "No, ew. I would've remembered that. No, whatever, it's J-something."

"I don't trust anyone in animatronics," Joey said, like working the controls of a ride was next-of-kin to wearing a polyester suit and selling used Buicks. "It's all this mirrors and levers shit. It's not real."

"Joey, trust me. His mouth? It was real."

Justin's mouth was open so wide Lance could see the fake cheese caught between his teeth. "Did you do it back?"

"Kind of had to if I ever wanted him to blow me again. And then, when he finished? This guy, god. I thought I was going to choke."

JC looked horrified, but in a good way. "Like, there was a lot of it?"

"Thick like this milkshake, I'm telling you." Chris pried the lid off his cup and ladled a huge glob of frozen slush into his mouth. "Like this," he slurred. "Here, open up. You try getting this down all at once."

Lance couldn't believe there were people who talked like this to people they hardly knew. Well, maybe Chris knew the rest of them okay, but he didn't know Lance. Justin shouldn't even be hearing this, much less dangling over Chris' seat as if getting closer would help him hear better. Joey wolfed down his third quarter pounder and licked salt from his fingers like this was an episode of The Cosby Show.

He finished the burger and eyed Lance. "Dude, maybe you should tone it down a bit. Lance looks like he's going to hurt something."

"I'm not!" Okay, maybe he was, but only because he had the decency not to say things like this out loud. Never in the parking lot of a McDonald's.

Chris shook his head. "Right, right, forgot we had two blushing virgins in the room. Better ice those cheeks down, Bass, because they give you away."

"I never blush!" Justin protested, just as Lance heard himself say, "I'm not a virgin. Not with guys."

Everyone turned, except Chris, who'd never looked away.

"Ten bucks," Chris said. "Fork it over, Fatone."

Wiping his hand on the seat, Joey reached for his wallet. "Goddammit. You're a fucking suck, Chris."

"A fucking suck with ten bucks. No, wait! I'm a sucking fuck with ten bucks! That's either a tongue-twister or our first hit single."

"Guys, you can't," JC said. For a moment, Lance thought he might not be the only sane one in the car, even if the other sane person was JC, who could sound a lot like someone's mom. "This isn't something you should bet on, because people have to figure this stuff out. It's not something you should rush, or like force, or anything. People have to figure it out."

"So, when you say 'not with guys,' does that mean you still are with girls?" Justin looked confused. "'Cause I've done stuff with girls, and I think--"

"I think you haven't done anything with a girl except kiss one, and you've done that with your mother," Chris said, threading a french fry through one of Justin's curls.

They made it to the warehouse only ten minutes after eight, because Chris drove like he would only kill himself if he wrecked and Joey knew which back alleys were one way in the right direction. Swearing up and down, even if it was only to himself, Lance promised he wouldn't say another word all evening. That didn't last long. JC had to go and be nice, saying, "Hey, your Coke. It'll go flat if you leave it," as he climbed out of the car.

"Thanks," Lance said. It was a reflex. He couldn't help it.

At home, 'rehearsal' meant breaking down voice parts in sectionals, but here it meant bouncing and jumping from one piece of electrical tape on the floor to the next. The sick feeling in Lance's stomach went away after the first half hour. He should stop eating greasy stuff right before he tried to dance.

Lance's pieces of tape were yellow, but by the end of an evening they'd been kicked up and scuffed and then he sometimes mistook them for Justin's orange ones. Telling them apart, Lance found, was easiest if he looked at where Justin was standing and then moved to where Justin wasn't. Justin was almost always in the right place. When he was in the wrong place, it was because he was chasing Chris around the parking lot or because he was over in the corner doing something complicated in the mirror that Lance hoped to heaven the choreographer didn't see, or it would get added to the routine the next night. Then Lance would have to figure out how to do it.

Tonight Justin spent the breaks twisting in front of the mirrors like he could braid together his own arms, but he kept looking for Lance over his shoulder between backbends. It was a little disturbing. Lance got downright worried when Justin cornered him after they finally called it quits a little past two.

"So do you, uh, still want me to get you up? For church?"

Lance ran a towel under his arms, but his t-shirt was damp through with sweat and stuck to his skin. "Um, yeah. Tomorrow's Sunday."

"No, I know. There was this producer on MMC, though, and when he came out, he said he thought it would demonstrate a conflict of belief if he kept going to church, after everything."

"I'm not-- Justin, of course I'm still going to church." He should've kept his mouth shut. If Lance had kept quiet about it, then he wouldn't have to be explaining perfectly obvious things to Justin. "Nothing's different. I'm not. It's not like I'm not going to go to church.

"I don't care or anything. I mean, whatever you're going to do."

Lance balled up his towel and chucked it into the basket by the door. "Just knock when you're done in the shower."

Sitting in the middle again on the way home, JC kept watching him with that wrinkle line over his nose, until Lance turned away to watch the streetlights.

*

Sundays were a luxury they couldn't afford after Lou sent them overseas.

"This is our day off, right?" Chris chucked pebbles at Justin's ankles as they trudged up the hillside to Nonnberg Abbey.

Justin jumped sideways, nearly taking out two little Japanese ladies making their way back down to Salzburg proper. "Hey, quit it!"

"Yup," said Joey.

"Our day of rest. Our day of no physical exertion, our day of making like unconscious lumps on hotel mattresses."

"Uh huh," said Joey.

Chris stopped dead in the roadway. Luckily, Lance had been watching where he put his feet and stopped short of slamming into his ass. He almost went down anyway when JC stepped on the heel of his sneaker.

"Ow," said JC, even though there was no possible way Lance's sneaker could've hurt his foot. "Sorry."

"So you wanna tell me how is this day different from all the other days when we wake up at an ungodly hour and run around Europe with our tour manager, three members of our band, their girlfriends, a hairdresser, and two of our moms?"

"We're not on stage," said Joey.

"Stages are flat," Chris said.

JC looked up from double-knotting his shoelace. "No, remember that one in Innsbruck--"

"C. Don't even go there."

Miz Lynn had been the one to get this Tuesday cleared on their schedule, so it seemed only fair that when she said she wanted to do the Sound of Music tour that she get the chance. It wasn't every day you were on a bus headed right past Salzburg. When Lance's mom said she'd love to see something other than hotels and backstage hallways, Lance knew what they'd be doing on their day off.

The abbey was big, and beige, and very much a proper abbey. Lance hadn't ever seen an abbey before, but thought he could've picked one out of a line-up of suspect buildings. He slouched against the wall and didn't go in with the moms and the blonder girlfriend, the one who really was very interested in all things von Trapp and not just trying to get away from the tour for a day. Justin skipped stones down the hill, and Joey sang, "How do you solve a problem like Maria?"

"God," said JC, folding himself cross-legged on the ground.

Lance waited, but JC didn't say anything else. "You tired?"

"No, not really. I mean, background tired, but not a lot. It's just beautiful."

Lance frowned.

"Not this," JC said, slapping his palm against the building. "Though it's okay. That. Those hills are just unreal. I never lived anyplace with mountains."

"I guess." Lance breathed deeply, smelling traces of the city and the cappuccino he'd drank with lunch. He'd never had something with espresso in it before, but JC said Austria was a good place to start. "It's like the sky's too clear."

"Yeah," said JC. Justin tore by, shouting, "Maria Maria bo baria banana fana fo faria me mi. It doesn't work, Chris."

Apparently, Chris had recovered from the hike. "Maria, baria. Shaneea. Shania?"

"Gonorrhea?" said Joey.

"Gonorrhea!" Chris cleared his throat, and with excessive vibrato sang, "How do you solve recurrent gonorrhea?"

Joey laughed. "Nuns don't sound like that, Chris."

Lance pushed off the wall. "I'm going back down to the cemetery," he said to Wesley, and jogged down the hill.

There were certain things in Europe that looked more real than the versions back home. Like the cemeteries. They didn't look like parks or gardens here; they looked like little choked corners filled with gravestones and flowers. No lawns, just patches of grass and cut flowers in vases. Even in the middle of March, there were flower-sellers in the streets. At night, the graves were lit with red votives, not sodium-lights, and the flames shivered in the cold. If you were dumb enough to be in a graveyard after the sun went down, you deserved whatever happened to you in the dark.

It wasn't even four o'clock. They might have time to do the tour of Mozart's house, if his mom and Justin's didn't get to talking inside.

JC picked his way between the graves, running his hands over the metal crosses. Lance wanted to make him put his hands in his pockets.

JC traced an ivy vine in the ironwork. Lance said, "You shouldn't. You can get tetanus doing that."

JC shrugged. "It's okay." He brushed a squat brown bush away from the face of a cross. "I wonder where the oldest one is."

"They're all old," Lance said. "I think one of them's Mozart's sister."

"Really?"

Lance picked at the grass, staining his fingernails with their green juice. "I read it in a guidebook on the bus."

JC circled the graveyard, reading off names and dates where they weren't overgrown with lichen. He didn't find any Mozarts. There had been a lot of churches in the guidebook, though, and the more Lance thought about it, the more he suspected he'd mixed up the names. It probably wasn't worth mentioning. JC didn't seem to mind looking for something that might not be there.

"You know," JC said, reappearing from behind an ornate angel, "just because the guys didn't want to go inside didn't mean you couldn't've. We would've waited."

Lance knew he was a dork, but he wasn't a complete moron. "I just didn't want to go in. There's not really anything there."

"I thought about telling Justin about the catacombs." JC grinned and stretched out, reaching for the sky then reaching for the ground. Even with his knees locked he could touch his toes. "You know he would've gone in to see them. Then Chris would've spent all week jumping out of nowhere, trying to make him freak."

Shuddering, Lance untangled a votive from the weeds and rolled it between his hands. Even though he wasn't going to take it with him or anything, it still felt like he was stealing. Like he was desecrating something sacred. "That's a horrible place to be buried."

"In catacombs?"

"Inside the abbey like that. Those women spend their entire lives locked up, and then when they die, they just bury them deeper inside." Lance knew he was being melodramatic, but it wasn't something he let himself be too often. He saved it up. It was kind of nice, in a selfish way, to have JC frowning at him like he was a puzzle with his pieces scattered.

"You make it sound like a prison."

"Huge compound, surrounded by walls, with a hundred rules and regulations." Shifting over to make room for JC meant Lance had to sit on a granite footstone, warm from the afternoon's sun. "No, see, that's not it. It's like it always has to be an extreme situation. Either you've made an oath to God, and you devote your entire life to him, or you give it up and go out to live in the world."

Nodding, JC said, "It's all or nothing."

"Yeah, I guess." He wasn't explaining himself well. He had these ideas, but when he tried to make them come out as sentences, they fell apart.

"When I was a kid, before moving to Florida?" JC looked over at Lance, who nodded without turning his head. "We used to go to church every Sunday. If there was something planned, like a vacation, we'd at least go to Bible study. I don't think we ever missed."

This was rich, coming from JC. JC, who loved everything about the group, but still had to be pried away from his pillow some mornings, who wouldn't ever complain, but who would let himself go limp and sink into the blankets of his bed in a textbook example of the non-violent protestor. "Not ever?"

"Almost never. Well, I guess it was mostly because of my mom. There was this one winter, and this snowstorm-- not, like, a terrible storm, just one of those ones that comes in and catches everyone off-guard, all those people who completely forget how to drive right in snow. Heather was sick, so my dad stayed home with her, but my mom thought we could make it in. We got stuck a mile from the church, me and my brother and her in the van."

Lance had never been stuck in snow in his life. It sounded like something that would happen to a character in a movie. "How'd you get out?"

"Called a tow truck. I remember it was cool because I had to sit in the middle of the cab."

Lance grinned. He didn't want to, but it was one of those things.

"And then I never went, once I started on the show."

"That's kind of abrupt," Lance said, even thought he figured people did that all the time. Either they moved, or they went away to school, or they went somewhere and then just stopped. Maybe it was inevitable.

"I thought about looking around for a good congregation or something, but I kind of went to be with my family, you know? My grandparents, they went to the same church. It wouldn't have been the same. I liked the singing, too, and the readings. No one ever called it chanting, but it was like that, the way everyone breathed together."

Or maybe it wasn't inevitable. Maybe if JC had never left, he'd still be going to the same church, still so happy to be there, never struggling with anything more than an awkwardly arranged harmony. No questions, just security. Lance remembered when it was just about the music, when he sat through the sermon and didn't hear any of it, coloring in the bulletin with an eight-pack of Crayolas. "I wanted to play the organ. I really did. I got piano lessons instead."

"We only ever had a piano, and only used it half of the time. It was just an upright."

"So you stopped. You just stopped?" It must've been easy for JC. It was always easier to do something because you wanted to, and not because you'd been forced into a corner.

JC shook his head, fierce. "No. No, I didn't. Except, well, I did, sort of."

Confusing JC was a petty, petty thing to do, because Lance wasn't this dense. JC thought he could take it all with him, all the parts that he liked best, leaving the excess behind.

If he could, that was fine, but Lance wasn't like that. Lance wasn't JC, and he didn't want to be.

JC sighed and scraped his sneaker against the footstone. "Do you think we'll have time to see Mozart's house?"

"I don't know," Lance said. "We could split up or something."

Justin chose that moment to come pelting down the hill, closely followed by Joey who had the distinct disadvantage of Chris hanging on his back.

JC sighed. "Too late."

*

That was the last time they went sightseeing together, because after that they got famous.

They had been a little famous before setting foot in Germany. Their first night in the first hotel in Frankfurt they didn't sleep at all, partially because the jet-lag trashed their internal clocks, but mostly because one of the rooms had a clock radio with decent reception. Joey had made sure everyone's cup was full of Coke while Chris rolled the dial between Unintelligible Pop Station #1 and Unintelligible Pop Station #2. When their own tinny voices came back at them through the speaker, it took Lance a minute to realize the lyrics were in English.

Then JC jumped onto the bed, spilling Coke on both pillows, and Justin was bouncing between the walls and Joey and shouting for his mom to come and listen, quick before it was over, and Chris was pounding Lance on the back which was why Lance's eyes started to water.

But that was only a little bit famous. Lance hadn't known the difference between that and seriously famous, not back then. The first time two girls convinced the front desk to give them a room on the same floor as the band, everyone just thought it was kind of funny, really, that anyone would care enough to go to that much trouble.

Chris had said, "Just you wait, meine Kinder. Just you wait." But by then Lance had figured out that a lot of what Chris said was shit he made up on the spot, so he didn't take the warning seriously.

Once Lou and the management guys started explaining to the staff in the lobby of each hotel that no, no one without a pass was to be given access to their rooms and no, they were not to send any packages up to the rooms, either, the girls started to get creative. The room service trays filled with dolls painted with their faces had been kind of cute. Joey, who was the best with voices, had made the JC doll do obscene things until the real JC had to lock himself in the bathroom or risk hurting himself laughing.

The very well-developed German girl with the sister who worked in Housekeeping who'd waited, naked, for Justin to get back to his room had not been funny. Not in the slightest. Justin had gone sheet-white, standing in the doorway without making a sound. This was according to JC, who'd gotten to the door of the room only seconds after Chris, who'd bodychecked Justin down the hallway. He'd hustled Justin into his own room, leaving someone else deal with the wacky chick.

Lance, who'd been across the hall trying to get his luggage in order, was kind of pissed he'd missed the entire incident.

"I don't know why you think he's gonna be traumatized," he told Joey. "You and Chris have been letting him watch porn since forever."

"Yeah, well." Joey dug through Lance's backpack, looking for extra batteries. "Porn's not real. That girl was."

After that they got security. From that point on, packages arrived with the tape already sliced open. Letters arrived in bundles. All together like that the clash of perfumes on the stationary smelled like a rotting fruit bowl. Stuffed animals became the weapon of choice in bus battles. Both Lance's mom and Justin's confiscated several for their personal collections.

Books, though, weren't popular gifts from fourteen-year-old girls. When Lance found a slim brown book on his side of the bed in Lucerne, in a room that overlooked a frighteningly picturesque meadow and flock of sheep, he thought about kicking the mattress to make sure it wasn't bait in one of Chris' elaborate traps.

He checked inside the wardrobe. It was generously sized, easily capable of holding Chris, Joey, and Joey's camcorder with room left over. Finding nothing more suspicious than a blanket, Lance examined the book.

Then he went to look for his mom. He found her in the empty dining room, reading near the fireplace.

"Do you know what this is?" Lance asked, holding the book out in front of him like an exam he'd flunked.

Taking it from his hand, she leafed through, back to front. "It's a psalter."

"Yes, but." That wasn't the mystery. Lance could recite a few dozen psalms from memory, the same way he could remember a lyric once he saw it written down. "It was on my bed when I got back."

Handing it back, she extracted the bookmark from her own paperback, gently cracking its spine. "I take it you didn't leave it there."

"It's not mine. I've never seen it before. You didn't leave it there?" It seemed increasingly unlikely she'd given it to him to read on their next flight across the continent.

"No, dear." She pushed her reading glasses higher on the bridge of her nose. "Maybe one of the boys did."

Lance wasn't about to ask Chris. He found Joey next and brandished the book under his nose.

"Nope. Not mine, never seen it," Joey said, yanking a red shirt over his head. The hotel was miles outside of the city, but there was a bar at the bottom of the hill that fancied itself a diskothek. Unlike Joey, Lance didn't feel like going back two nights in a row.

"Never?" asked Lance.

"Dude, I know what it is. 'The Lord is my shepherd,' I went to church. But my Bibles never came in pieces."

Lance fingered the pages. They were heavy, oily, not the onionskin he associated with a Bible. He was used to the plastic texture of his textbooks, or paperbacks that were only a step up from newsprint. "Maybe it's Justin's."

Joey fussed with his sideburns. "Don't see why Justin would've left it on your bed. You sure you don't want to come with us?"

"No. No thanks," Lance said from the hallway.

The hotel was quiet, and Lance meant to go to sleep. The high, rounded bed begged for him to sprawl out until JC showed up and poked him into shifting over.

He should sleep. He could feel every bone in his ankles when he sat down to untie his shoes. But he'd reached that point where being tired was kind of comforting, a normal state of existence. He could deal with tired, now. It was surprising how often his muscles remembered what to do when he switched off his brain.

He stripped down to a single layer and climbed under the covers. He'd forgotten to turn the lamp out, but the switch was way across the room and not worth getting up for, given how the sheets were starting to get warm.

It was a modern translation. He found the rhythm of the verse by the fourth psalm. By the twelfth, there was a voice behind the words, a hum of noise that was angry, lonely and frustrated. He wanted to peel the words from the page, paste them on walls and make everyone look. Everyone, but mostly those people who could read this, all of this, and still see only the parts they wanted to see.

He was on the fifty-fourth psalm when JC crept into the room. "Oh. You're awake."

"The light," Lance said. It was the best explanation he could offer just then. He felt like he'd been dreaming.

"I saw it, I just. You fall asleep with it on a lot." Hitting the switch as he passed, JC shucked the shimmery black fabric he wore all over and swapped it for shorts and a t-shirt.

He was climbing into the bed when he noticed the book in Lance's lap. Even in the near dark, his smile glimmered. "You found it!"

"It's yours?" Lance snapped it shut and pushed it across the bedspread. "I was going to ask you tomorrow, but then I couldn't sleep, so." He saw how JC was shaking his head, and trailed off.

"No, it's for you. Here," JC said, pushing it back.

Lance shook his head. "Jayce, you don't have to give me your books."

"Remember when we had those couple hours in Zurich? Between lunch and the show. I said I'd be back, and then I kind of got lost. Jan had told me about this bookstore this Irish guy runs, where all the books are in English, and it took longer than I thought to find it. It was incredible, though."

That had been better than a month ago. Talking to JC could be like starting at the folly in the center of a maze. "You bought this for me?"

"Um, no, not then. I looked for it, but I couldn't find what I wanted. So I called my mom and she got it from Amazon and mailed it to me." JC's neck was turning red. "I thought, Psalms. Not that we've been exiled or anything. But you're still the stranger in a strange land."

"Um, what?" Lance said. JC wouldn't laugh. He was patient like that.

"How they were written by David, I mean. Or attributed to him. He wrote them when he was in exile from Judea, so they're from the point of view of this person who was, just, removed from his community. Cut off from his familiar world, and fighting to get back to it."

Lance stared at his lap. Some of these he'd heard a hundred times before. No one had ever told him that. "I didn't know that's where they came from. I didn't-- why didn't anyone ever say that?"

JC brushed the cover of the book, then fidgeted with the hem of Lance's pillowcase. "I don't know."

"Someone should have told me that!"

"They should have," JC said, sliding closer, so close his head was in the gap between their pillows. "They should've."

Lance listened very, very hard to his own breathing. In through his nose, down to push at his diaphragm, then out though the nose, very steady, very controlled. If he opened his mouth, he might scream.

"We should sleep some," JC whispered.

It hurt to move his lips, chapped and bitten as they were, but Lance said, "Yes," and closed his eyes.

*

JC grabbed his shoulder and hissed, "They're not allowed to do that!"

Lance bobbled the visitor's brochure. He rather wished JC hadn't gone for the shoulder, since he'd wrenched it during yesterday's afternoon performance and it still wasn't quite right. Rolling it until it cracked, he continued to leaf through the pamphlet. "I know, Jayce."

Across the nave of the cathedral, two tourists snapped photos of an intricately carved altarpiece. Each time a flash went off, JC winced like they'd kicked his puppy.

JC had a look that said he'd happily narc on them if only there was a nun or a priest or anyone with clergy credentials within earshot. Lance hastily flipped pages. "Look, it says the bell changes tone with the weather, I guess because it's so huge. It's twenty tons or something." Lance turned back to the quick facts, for tourists who watched too much cable news. "Twenty-two tons."

"When we got here, it was, um." Humming to himself, JC closed his eyes.

Lance checked his watch. "It's going to ring again in twelve minutes."

"Shh," JC said. He opened his eyes and stared at Lance. "It was an F."

In the dim light, JC's eyes were startlingly bright. Lance thought about flashbulbs, and they way they could make you see stars. There was a certain type of dazed look that photographers loved to see. Justin was best at it, at giving it to the photographers whenever they wanted it, but JC was the one who told Lance to pretend like the cameras were broken when he got too nervous. Lance thought it was stupid, but it seemed to help.

Lance reread a paragraph about the cathedral catching fire in 1945 in the last days of allied bombing. "I bet we'd have to come back in the middle of summer to notice it was different."

"Or at night," JC said, heading to the right of the nave to inspect the organ. Lance followed him, shivering at the thought of standing outside, intentionally, during the small hours of a February night.

Chris and Joey were dead to the world and should be left that way, JC had explained when he'd knocked on Lance and Justin's door, considering how much they'd had to drink the night before. Joey had promised in the middle of his third Schwarzbeir to come with JC to St. Stephen's, but had forgotten after his fifth, and Chris had sworn to never have another cultural experience as long as it was in his power to avoid them.

Justin, hearing the knock at the door, had snorted and burrowed deeper under the blankets.

"I'm your third choice?" Lance asked. He was teasing. Mostly.

"No! No, it's just that you came with me to the castle in Heidelberg, and then we went to that bridge with the paintings last week. So I thought maybe you'd want to sleep instead."

Lance had left the door open. "Let me get my coat."

They'd worked out a kind of system: JC decided where to go, and Lance was in charge of the guidebook. If there was a giftshop, they got postcards for their moms, which Lance liked to send unstamped inside an envelope so they wouldn't get messed up before they made it home. JC was particularly fond of cathedrals. Lance found them soothing unless they were rococo, in which case he exercised his veto.

JC got as close to the choir stalls as possible without crossing the very tasteful velvet ropes. "I bet we'd sound incredible in a place like this, with the sound just going on forever."

"Yeah, but what would we sing?"

"Our own stuff. Well, some of it. I know it's not religious, but wouldn't it be incredible? To hear it echoing up there?"

Lance tried to imagine the chorus of Giddy Up ricocheting off the roof-truss. "I sang in a cathedral, once, with the show choir, at a competition in Washington. At the National Cathedral."

Sitting on the steps of a side altar, JC stared at him, rapt. "Oh, wow. What was it like? What did you sing?"

"It was a Christmas thing," Lance said, and tried to explain the low, dusty smell of the poinsettias, and how thrown he'd been by the way his notes lingered longer than they would in an auditorium, longer than they did in church back home. When a group of Austrian schoolkids filtered past, Lance moved deeper into the corner, sitting next JC. Remembering got easier as he went along, each detail pulling two more to the surface.

"And we were near the end, so the place was half empty by the time we sang, because a lot of the other groups were bussing home that night. But it didn't matter because it sounded full, even with all that space. It looked empty, but it sounded like it was full."

Lance rubbed the toe of his sneaker over a groove in the stone floor. His shoes weren't too bad yet, but he needed new laces something desperate.

"You look so calm," JC said. "When you talk about it. Like you can still hear it."

"I can." He was looking at JC, but didn't remember moving.

JC was going to ask what he meant when he said that. JC always wanted to know why, like why was something you could explain to someone else. He was going to ask and then Lance was going to say something horribly dumb, something embarrassing.

To stop him, Lance kissed him. One kiss, slow and quiet, before he could think about it. Before he knew he was going to do it.

When it was over, Lance looked down and saw his own hands clutching the edge of the step.

"Why'd you do that?" JC breathed.

Lance laughed, quietly so no one would have any reason to look at them. JC always wanted a reason. "Because you looked happy. It just made me want to."

*

Lance made mistakes. He told himself it was okay, though, as long as he learned from them and didn't fuck up the same way all over again.

If there was one thing he'd learned from Greg Manning, it was that he'd fucked up. He used to think the part he'd fucked up was the during part. But leaving home was good for a lot of things, and leaving home for another continent with four guys who talked about sex constantly-- including Joey, who actually managed to get it on occasion-- was good for things he hadn't thought about, not ever. Not out in the open parts of his brain.

The part he'd fucked up, Lance determined, was the after part. To make certain he didn't do anything stupid, like avoid talking to JC for a week, Lance made himself ask JC if he could borrow his Prodigy CDs the next day. Later that evening, he made up a question about his calc homework, even though he'd learned how to do integrals last semester. He even made sure Wesley put the two of them in the same room at the next hotel.

He didn't make himself fall asleep across the entire bed, not on purpose, not just so JC had to rub his shoulder for five minutes to make him shift over. That happened on its own.

Lance was feeling good about how he'd handled things until the night JC fell asleep in the back of the bus.

JC fell asleep in moving vehicles on a regular basis, particularly on the way back from two shows with an autograph session in between. This time, though, no one noticed until Joey turned around in the hotel lobby.

"Uh. Hey, guys. Lynn didn't do the head count."

Chris had a shoulder strap around his forehead and a duffel bag riding his back like a camel's hump. "I know he's easy to miss, the way he's grown three feet in six months. But Justin's the bottle blond sleepwalking in front of you."

"Oh, hell." Lance dropped his duffel on the floor. "I'll go get him."

The driver, still writing in his log book, opened the door with a smirk at Lance's knock. In the corner of the back bench, a blue-nylon lump on a pile of costume parts, slept JC.

"C. C, c'mon. Everyone's inside, hon."

Lance sat down and rubbed JC's back. It seemed like all they did was wake each other up. Alarm clocks didn't seem to do the trick for Lance; when he'd been in school his dad had knocked on the door when the shower was free. Now it took a ringing phone and a voice saying Es ist sechs Uhr, or Joey with a mug of coffee, or Justin leaping onto his bed and knocking him on the head with an elbow.

JC said, "No," then sighed. His eyelids didn't flutter.

"Yes, C. Come on, it's a short walk. Where's your bag?"

Lance found it on the floor, mostly empty, and dug around the overhead for extra clothes to fill it. When he looked down, JC was watching him, eyes crystal and unfocused.

"Are you awake?"

Slowly, like peeling a ribbon off a present, JC stood, kissing Lance when he got close. His mouth was sweet with traces of soda and sleep.

Pulling away, JC reached for his bag. "Kind of. I think." He smiled, looking dazed, and walked down the aisle.

That was when Lance decided he hadn't learned a thing, except that he was full of shit and likely to stay that way.

It happened again, in the back of an arena in England, which was the least likely place to find a moment of quiet in their very unquiet lives. Lance was doing his breathing, waiting for his watch to chirp and send him jogging to the green room. Around the corner came JC, snapping on his wristbands, saying, "Hey. Justin's got this idea for Girl and we should, really, talk about it before he just does it." As he grabbed Lance's arm, he bent his head and gave Lance's mouth a lopsided kiss, as if kissing Lance was something he had every right to do as a matter of course.

There was a moment during their flight back to the States-- the last flight, the flight with no return ticket across the ocean a week later-- when JC wouldn't stop fidgeting, wouldn't stop bouncing his leg and making the cup of ice on Lance's tray rattle. But he wouldn't turn off his reading light and try to sleep, either. Reaching up, Lance clicked it off, then pillowed his head on JC's shoulder and pressed short, quiet kisses against his throat. JC froze like a racehorse at the gate, so still he shook with it.

It was, Lance thought, a rare occasion when he managed to make JC tense, so he took his time and kept JC trembling until Lance forgot why he was drawing it out and dozed off for real.

Being back home was like starting over, except the studios were larger, the crowds were smaller, and the television shows they taped interviews for were shows they'd actually heard of. Lance's mom told him over the phone that his dad had bought a new VCR and kept a stack of blank video tapes in the den, right next to the calendar where he carefully noted their upcoming appearances in red ink.

In the middle of the night, after he'd hung up the phone, he couldn't believe how things would ever to work out. Then he'd find himself in Manhattan, high above midtown and on MTV in his carefully-coordinated-but-not-matching outfit, and couldn't see how they wouldn't.

On the day he turned nineteen, Lance bought a Pentium II ThinkPad, a paperback copy of the Oxford Study Bible, and a highlighter that claimed it wouldn't bleed through the pages. He also bought a bag big enough for all three and carried them from city to city, between the busses and hotels, into the studios and the green rooms that were never as soothing as they were meant to be.

Joey studded the bag with a pin from every city they went to, usually bought from a shop in the lobby just before they left town. In a strip mall in Indiana, he disappeared inside a Christian bookstore for fifteen minutes, then stole a box of safety pins from wardrobe and pinned medals of Sts. Cecile, Christopher, Thomas Aquinas, and Jude so that they dangled like beads from the edge of the front flap.

Lance rubbed his fingers over their faces. "Joey. Baptists don't have saints."

"Yeah, so?" Using a bulletin board as a target, Joey straightened a handful of pins and tried to play darts. "You're not exactly a Baptist anymore. Hey, we gotta get a real bull's eye for the bus. We'll get a Bop from the next 7-11 and put Backstreet photos on it."

When Chris found Lance ensconced on the couch with his presents, he kicked Lance's hip with his sock feet. "Only fags carry messenger bags, Bass."

"Yup," Lance said, and went back to trying to figure out why Winamp insisted on being a dick. "Where's yours?"

"Holy fuck! That was almost bitchy." Knocking the Bible on the floor, Chris perched on the armrest and spent the next half hour helping Lance tweak his laptop into something that didn't suck.

They got in early for a show in Kingsport, which was clear on the other side of Tennessee from Memphis, but Justin had family in the area-- a second cousin, or some such. Too worn out to visualize Justin's family tree, Lance crashed early, very early for a Saturday night. If he dreamed, he didn't remember it, waking only at the chirp of his cell.

"Uhm?"

"Sorry," Justin said. "Can't believe I beat you awake. Hey, I'm going to church with Paul and my cousins. You want to come with?"

Lance stared at the clock. Eight was obscenely early for Justin. Clearly, the hand of God was at work. "Paul from the band, or Paul from production?"

"Production. You know I'm not talking to band-Paul until I figure out how to get that shit back for fucking with my monitors. Dude. You were supposed to help me with the vengeance."

"Later, okay?" Guilt came in a rush, right on schedule, and Lance hesitated. But when he stared at the Bible on the nightstand, the thought of a good southern sermon on the wages of sin made him queasy. "Go to church, forgive Paul his trespasses, and let me sleep. Thanks, though. Sing pretty."

"Always. Later."

Tossing the phone towards the end of the bed, Lance rolled over and buried his face in the pillow. It smelled like an attic. An attic where a goose had died. Punching it in frustration, he rolled over and breathed for a slow count to twenty.

If Justin had called a year ago, he would've gone. He'd have been miserable, but he would have, if Justin had asked. Maybe six months ago, he would've said yes.

Promising himself a catnap in the quiet room that evening, Lance got up to open the shades and put on the coffee. Serving as a bookmark, his highlighter was waiting at the first chapter of Ezra.

When he'd started reading, Lance had meant to go straight through. Genesis and Exodus had been okay. The words were a little off, but he knew the stories. Leviticus, though, drove him to seek out Chris and spend the rest of the night watching him work his way through Metal Gear Solid.

He'd come back when he had a textbook or something to help. Now he was in the middle of the prophets, just leaving Babylon. Slipping into the history, he read for a full hour, through two cups of coffee and half an energy bar.

The door knob rattled. At Lance's shout of, "yeah," JC slipped into the room. He wore sweatpants hacked off below the knees and nothing else. Lance stared at the watermark in the bottom of his coffee cup.

"Hey." JC cleared his throat. His voice was husky with sleep. "You eat yet? I was thinking brunch."

Brunch would be good. Brunch would occupy his hands and his mouth, and he could pay close attention to his plate. "Just the coffee. I could eat, but I gotta shower first."

"Okay." JC slouched on the bed, pulling the attic-goose pillow into his lap. "Can I use your cup?"

Hiking up the waistband of his boxers, just because it never hurt to be sure, Lance got out of bed and poured two sugars and the last of the carafe into his mug. "Here," he said, passing it into JC's outstretched hands. "I won't be long."

JC hummed happily, smiling as he sipped.

Lance's shower was quick, efficient, and an insult to the luxury of the bathroom. Opening the basket of bath salts and moisturizers would've been asking for trouble; any hint of sensuality beyond wet, rinse and repeat would have created other problems he'd need to deal with. Normally that would've been just fine with Lance. About the time he joined the group and his shoulders started giving him hell, he'd decided hot showers were the finest achievement of civilization and should be appreciated accordingly. It didn't hurt that flushed skin could be excused as having turned the hot tap too high.

But not with JC perched on his bed less than ten yards away. He'd get clean, get dry, and get dressed, then see about feeding the both of them.

When he walked out of the bathroom, he found the mug on the Bible on the table, and JC on his side, dozing on his bed.

Lance never could remember, looking back, why he thought it would be a good idea to sit on the semicircle of white sheet just in front of JC's body. Some misplaced romantic notion, some fragment of a childhood story, perhaps, made him lean over and kiss JC awake.

Kissing JC had become something Lance did when they were late, or in the wrong place, or otherwise safely busy for the next few hours. Right now, though, Lance had nowhere to be, and JC had nowhere to be, except right here, doing this. JC's lips were soft under his, quiet and still. Then JC stirred, moving like a riptide, reaching a hand up to thread through Lance's hair and draw him down.

Lance went willingly. That was what he'd wanted, wasn't it, the first time he'd kissed JC? They could've slipped back into a dark corner, into one of the unvisited chapels, or outside and into a sheltered doorway if Lance had known what he was doing, or if he'd given JC some hint he was about to do it.

JC opened his mouth. His mouth and, oh God, his tongue, were slick and right there, asking to be tasted. He tasted like candy that didn't have a flavor, but made your throat burn and your teeth ache when sucked for too long. With JC's hand still caught in his hair, Lance pulled back to breathe.

JC wasn't panting, not yet. But he might be soon. "Hi."

"Hey. Um," Lance said, trying to think of a good way to put it. "I didn't mean to. Climb on you." He winced. That wasn't it.

"How come? I want you to, you should," JC said, his shoulders coming up off the bed as he strained to reach Lance's mouth. "You should absolutely climb on me."

"C," Lance said, but that was as far as he got. The edge of the bed was dipping, threatening to spill him onto the floor, and it was a matter of moving his legs until they were tangled with JC's or leaving the bed entirely. Lance couldn't bear to do that, not with JC touching his face and biting braille along his jaw.

"Here. C'mon," JC said, cupping Lance's hip and rolling onto his back. Lance went with him, ending up on his elbows, looking down, with one of his thighs between JC's.

JC was gorgeous. Gorgeous. Lance kissed him, licking into his mouth, so he wouldn't have to look at him. That was the problem; he couldn't look JC in the eyes and think at the same time. This deserved thinking about.

JC's hands dipped under his arms, running down his sides, making Lance shiver from the not-quite tickle. They skidded over Lance's skin where it was still damp from the shower and getting damper, because the room was cool but JC's body was hot, hard and hot, and Lance was starting to sweat. JC always gave up his heat, more than he could spare, really, and ended up looking for a jacket or a blanket, or sometimes Joey or Justin to wrap around himself.

Or Lance. Except Lance got to kiss, and that was the most spectacular thing ever. He got to nuzzle his face against the soft skin under JC's jaw where the skin was all fluttery and his throat worked up and down as JC swallowed. When Lance rubbed his tongue over JC's adam's apple, JC splayed his hand across the small of Lance's back, covering it nicely and tugging Lance close, close until there wasn't any space at all between his chest and JC's.

It hit him, screamed at him like the wall of girls at the foot of a stage: except for his towel, except for JC's sweats, they were naked, and it wouldn't be long until they were naked for real.

Lance froze. It only lasted a second, then he settled again against JC's body, but he knew JC felt it from the way he spread his fingers, stroking Lance's back with the smallest gentling motions.

JC's lips brushed his temple. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. I just." Even JC's earlobes were naked, unpierced. Lance knew there wasn't a tattoo on JC's body and there wouldn't be, Chris's best arguments to the contrary.

Lance took that naked earlobe between his teeth and bit it. It was the best way he could explain how he felt.

JC bucked, breathing hard through his nose like a bolt of electricity had shot through him. He scrabbled at Lance's waist, where the towel was twisted into itself.

"This?" Lance said, shifting his hips.

Echoing the motion, JC rocked up, catching some silent beat. "Yes. Please, yes. And mine?"

Lance struggled to his knees, petting JC's arms until he let Lance free, reaching over his head to grip the edge of the mattress instead. Lance trailed his fingers through the hair under JC's arms, making him giggle and twist.

Maybe there were people who could keep a straight face when JC laughed, but Lance wasn't one of them. "You laughing at me?"

"Uh huh," JC said, grinning. His hips wouldn't keep still. Lance pushed the sheets to the edge of the mattress and reminded himself that he was a performer, maybe, but this was JC. JC wasn't part of the audience.

The towel fell down so easily Lance wondered why it had stayed on this long.

JC's eyes were watching him, half-shut and all pupil. Automatically, Lance brushed his hand over his cock, just passing over it, out of habit like he did whenever he was naked. He wasn't expecting to see JC's eyes widen, or to see the flush creeping up his chest.

"So pretty, you're so." JC cut himself off, worrying at his lip.

Lance touched a fingertip to JC's mouth. "Shh, 'sokay. You can say whatever you want, I don't mind." He didn't. JC could say a lot of things that didn't make sense, but he never said anything deliberately hurtful. "I like hearing you, whatever it is."

JC whimpered, actually whimpered in the back of his throat, shifting on the mattress. Lance could see where he was hard under his sweatpants. He had a horrible, fleeting thought that maybe the door was unlocked, and maybe someone would come in and see this. Not him, though it was kind of stupid not to worry about that, but JC, who looked so dazed he might not be able to do anything at all if the door opened but lie there, waiting.

He touched JC's hips just above the line of his waistband, not moving when JC shuddered. He should just work his fingers under there and pull them down. He should. There was nothing wrong with this. He was gay; this was what gay boys did.

Breathing deeply, smelling the scent of JC's skin in the air, he worked down the elastic. It was so pale, the skin on JC's hips. That was the first thing he noticed: how he was seeing skin that even the sun didn't get to touch. Then there was coarse hair under his fingers, then he wasn't paying attention and jarred JC's cock, so hot and real against his hand.

JC hissed. "Sorry. Sorry," Lance said.

JC shook his head. "Don't worry." He lifted his legs, so Lance stripped the sweats off and dropped them on the floor.

Oh. Okay. What they were before, that wasn't naked. This was naked. JC's dick all flushed and lifting up was the definition of naked. Swallowing hard, Lance reached out and ran his fingers all the way up to the head.

JC grabbed his own thighs, like he didn't know what to do with his hands. "More," he said, breathless. "Not pressuring you, or anything, but yeah. More?"

"Yeah. Sure, okay." Okay wasn't the word for it. Lance took his hand away and spit into his palm, quiet and everything, but he didn't want to take the time to go looking in his backpack for something slicker. This would do fine; he did this all the time. Not to other people, except for that once, but to himself more than was strictly sufficient. That had to count for something.

JC pulled his knees up, giving Lance room to scoot forward and take JC's cock in his hand. It jumped when he touched it. All right, maybe he didn't know this as well as he thought. He couldn't fuck this up. Jayce was the only person who would talk to him about stuff, important stuff, and he wasn't going to fuck this up. Especially not when JC looked so incredible like this, here on Lance's bed. Lance was way luckier than he deserved, getting to do whatever he wanted to JC.

'Whatever he wanted' abruptly made itself known in hazy, brightly colored images, some of them pulsing and morphing into guys who didn't look anything like JC. That, Lance thought, was just plain wrong. No one in the world wouldn't agree it was wrong, if they knew what he was thinking. He stared down at JC, who was gorgeous and patient, and started twisting his hand as he pumped it up and down.

Moaning softly, JC rocked on the mattress. "Ohpleasethankyou," he said in one breath, his eyes dark and shocky.

It took a couple of awkward moments while Lance's hand seemed to insist on an incompatible rhythm, but finally he caught the right tempo. At least it seemed like it was right, the way JC's noises started rising and falling in pitch. Tentatively, Lance bore down on his next stroke. JC gasped closed his eyes.

Lance felt stupid, needing to check. "That? Again?"

"Yeah, again." When Lance did, JC shuddered and said, "Lance, please, Lance, I wanted this. You."

Lance had to shiver at that. No one had ever said his name like that before. Not in a voice he knew, not in a way that got deep into his brain where there memories of the same voice telling dumb jokes and keeping him up late on the bus, telling him he wasn't going to trip when he went onstage. It was no wonder JC didn't make any sense. Lance was getting dizzy even though no one was touching him. "You did? When?"

"On the plane, that time, when you were kissing me and, oh, I kept thinking it was so unfair that you had to do it then, when there was nowhere we could go and I had to just sit there."

"I didn't even. I wasn't thinking about that," Lance said, which was true. All he remembered was being turned on, in a sleepy sort of way, and realizing he could feel JC's pulse if he kept his lips still and kissed very, very lightly.

He brushed his other hand over JC's belly, feeling it clench and rock. "You wanted this," he said, stating it, listening to how the words sounded. If he said it enough, he might believe it. If he kept moving his hand up-twist-down-tight, if JC kept moving his hips into it, he'd have to believe it.

JC grabbed Lance's hand, bringing it to his mouth. Lance had no idea what JC wanted until he licked two of his fingers. Then Lance couldn't even think, because JC's tongue was moving, strong and wicked, making Lance's palm burn like he was sifting through coals.

Lord, if this was what it felt like on his fingers, he didn't ever want JC's mouth on his dick. He wouldn't be able to take it.

He didn't figure it out until JC tugged on his wrist, pulling his hand away and down. All JC said was, "here," as he guided Lance's hand between his legs. And then he waited.

Lance's face was burning. He knew he had to be red, but JC didn't say a word, just held his breath as Lance pushed his fingers in.

It was so much easier than Lance thought it would be. Really, having one hand one JC's cock and the other moving inside of him should've been an impossible thing, even though Lance had come to expect impossible things to happen to him. He couldn't close his eyes. He couldn't. He just watched and said "shh, shh," when JC whined. It was a scary, wonderful thing to hear.

When JC came, and the whine deepened to a groan, Lance said things like, "C, yes, go on, baby," and a dozen other words he wouldn't remember later.

Carefully, keeping one hand on JC's hip, Lance settled on his side on the mattress, trying not to bounce JC or brush against him with his dick. If he did, it might turn to full-out grinding, and Lance thought a guy deserved room to come down before the other guy on the bed started something like that.

JC kissed Lance's jaw. Turning his head, Lance met the most wonderful look ever. For a look like that, he could do whatever JC wanted. "Yeah?"

"You've got that look. Like you're concentrating," JC said. He scratched his fingers down Lance's chest until they were buried in the curls between his legs. It was so nice Lance couldn't help but scoot closer.

"I am, kind of." JC smiled, his eyes crinkling up in half-moons, and started jacking Lance's dick.

This was better. Better than everything Lance had ever felt. JC started it off slow and kept it that way, which was how Lance liked it best. Especially when he was so hard it hurt. He chewed on his lip until JC wriggled closer, petting his hair and kissing him. It was a ghost of a kiss, only the idea of it, really, but Lance liked being close like that for long, long minutes while JC touched him.

"This is nice, like this," JC breathed.

"Yeah." Lance hummed. He felt like a bell, or like the rim of a glass someone was circling with a finger.

"Those sounds you make," JC said. "You do it when you're kissing, too. It's really hot."

Ridiculous things came out of JC's mouth when he was in bed. Lance felt like he could say that now, like he was one of a privileged set of people who had the authority. "I don't make noises."

"Yeah, you do," said JC, doing this thing with his wrist that pulled a few more sounds out of Lance. Blushing was getting to be a habit, at this rate. JC licked at his mouth. "You do. I like it and it's hot. You're hot. I'll do this all morning if you want, if you want me to, if you say I can. It was so fucking good the way you were touching me, with your fingers in me, moving inside. You'll fuck me soon, right?"

"Oh God," Lance said, "God. You."

God didn't seem to have a reaction one way or another even though Lance's blasphemy was heartfelt, but JC seemed pleased by it. Whispering details, he ran his fingers over and over through the short hair at the nape of Lance's neck and pulled at his cock until Lance couldn't hold back any longer. Coming felt so good that for a moment Lance was certain he'd break.

When it was over, he though maybe he had.

Lance wriggled his toes. Sunlight was pouring through the window, climbing onto the foot of the bed. JC yawned.

"Don't you dare fall asleep," Lance murmured. There was a chair by the window. If JC sat in it, he'd be dappled all gold and white by the light.

"'Mnot," JC said. "Just for a minute."

Lance smiled into the pillow. Nothing had changed. Or maybe it had changed, but a while back, so slowly that Lance was just now noticing. "I was reading the Bible when you came in."

"Yeah?" JC was in that place where every sound out of his mouth sounded like singing.

"Yeah. I started from the beginning and I'm going all the way through. It's different this way. Good different," he amended.

He wasn't sure JC was still awake until he said, "Read it out loud. You've got the voice for it."

Turning his head into the crook of JC's elbow, Lance said, "Okay," and listened to JC fall asleep.

*

A week later, all hell broke loose. This was only a slight exaggeration of their new reality.

As the summer got hotter, bizarre things started to happen. They spent two days in August in California frolicking in fake snow and pretending it was Christmas. Chris disappeared one afternoon and came back with hair that violated the last three laws of good taste he had yet to break. Radio stations threw promo parties in their honor. Justin, severely underaged but having no problems at an open bar with his group's logo plastered all over it, sauntered up to Lance and Joey three hours into the shindig. "This is so stupid. We've been doing this for three years and they're acting like we're, I don't know. Debutantes or something."

Joey swiped Justin's chartreuse girly-drink, took a sip, winced, and handed it back. "We're like debutantes who take it up the ass and go around saying we're still virgins. That is so not a real martini."

"Is too," said Justin, licking the rim of his glass.

Lance might've watched Justin's tongue a little longer if he hadn't just had the pleasure of watching JC's that very morning, licking up the half-and-half Lance had dripped on his hand while fixing their coffees. In Lance's opinion, JC's tongue gave a better show. He was probably biased, though. He knew what that tongue felt like licking nearly every part of his skin.

Lance's initial opinion about JC going down on him still stood, for the most part. On his side, Lance had discovered a post-show JC on a hotel room couch was the perfect opportunity for him to figure out how to give a good blowjob. If he touched JC on their way to the bus-- somewhere not too indecent, like on the inside of his wrist, maybe, or right between the shoulder blades-- JC would hold off touching himself until Lance got him naked with one leg thrown over the back of a sofa. JC was usually so worked up that it didn't matter if Lance couldn't go for very long until his jaw started to ache, or if certain angles against the back of his tongue were not pleasant to take.

But they were doing a lot of shows every week, and then when they got on Janet's tour in October there were all of those back-up dancers, so it wasn't long before catching JC on his performance high was a bonus instead of a preference. The longer Lance drew it out, the more outrageous the fantasies JC would narrate. One night, just before Halloween, Lance sucked until his cheeks burned and JC talked himself hoarse telling this marzipan-solid story involving staying on his feet by locking his arms around Lance's neck while one dancer with obscenely long nails scored patterns over his back and his favorite of Janet's drummers finger-fucked his ass.

Lance had to tell it back to him later, stammering his way through the climatic parts. JC seemed to have this orgasm-induced amnesia when it came to his own fantasies.

In the meantime, when Lance wasn't singing or dancing or naked, he made it most of the way through the Old Testament. He would have got further except, well, his life was insane. It didn't help matters any that the prophets were fucking weird. He also pulled out his other copy of Psalms and read it through twice more, the second time out loud to JC, which slowed him down significantly.

They were wrapped up in a blanket on a windowseat overlooking midtown Manhattan well into the early hours of a November morning when JC, who'd been tossing Lance thoughtful looks all evening, let Lance's fingers slip out of his mouth. "Y'know, I'm saying this so you'll know if you don't already, but I'd go down on you a lot more. If you wanted."

Lance was listening, but he was pouting, too. JC'd just gotten to the stage where he'd suck like a kitten and make these needy little purring noises whenever Lance ran a thumbnail up his throat. "Um, not right now? I kind of like this finger thing. It's, ah. Working for me." Lance liked JC's blowjobs. He loved them. It was just that he thought they were best after he was kind of worn out, and less likely to buck up and grab a fistful of JC's hair. He didn't quite trust himself yet, was all.

The next morning, Lance went out to the common room for breakfast at the reasonable hour of eight a.m. and nearly tripped over his own feet when he found Joey munching on a cream-cheese coated bialy.

"Tch," Joey said. "Should've come with me and Chris last night. We would've shown you some real dancing."

"Yeah, well," Lance said. "Couldn't have been that good a time if you're up already."

"Still up," Joey said. "It was awesome. When we get rich, I'm going to buy some townhouse the fans won't ever find and come up to party on the weekends."

Lance found a normal bagel, one that didn't smell pungent except where it'd rubbed shoulders on the way up from the bakery. "When we have time to party all weekend, it'll be time to worry about our jobs." There could never be enough cream cheese, he decided, not when you were burning energy the way he was. And he wasn't even counting the sex.

"Worrying way too much about that, man. You could stand to party a little more." Joey leaned across the table and tugged at the sleeve of Lance's t-shirt. "Unless you're having private parties here. Some honey clawed you good last night."

Lance very carefully chewed his mouthful of bagel, swallowed, then turned, slow and casual, oh so casual, to look at his biceps. Oh. JC had snagged him somehow. Lance didn't want to think about it too closely with Joey peering at him, because Joe knew all of his tells. "I dunno. I think it was a zipper during the last costume change. I would've remembered a honey."

"Do you call them honeys? When they're boys, what do you call them?" Joey asked, sipping his orange juice.

Lance managed to distract him with his usual ploy of going into way too much detail about how boys did it with boys. If his details were a little less theoretical now, so much the better.

But a couple days after Christmas, on their way to some snowy state up north Lance had forgotten the name of and didn't much care to know, he wasn't so lucky. He was drifting comfortably on the couch in the back of the bus, listening to Joey and Steve argue something about some girl they both knew and suspected they'd both fucked, which freaked them out but was like a scab they couldn't stop picking. When Steve got pissed and went up front to bug Chris, Joey turned on Lance.

"It's Justin, isn't it? Dammit, Lance, I know you've had a thing for him for like, longer than Chris has had a thing for him, but I'm gonna tell you the same as I told Chris: the boy's straight. Britney barely walks past and he comes running to me asking this shit and that and trying to hide his hard-on."

Lance found it unsporting of Joey to pick on him when he was warm and not ready for it. "Okay. first? First, that's not straight, that's just, I don't know, maybe bi or maybe straight. Second, it's not Justin. I have no thing for Justin. Third, Chris? With Justin?"

"No, Chris not with Justin. I thought you were fooling around with Justin."

"Does Chris think that?" Lance was getting shrill. He hated it when he got shrill.

"No. Jesus, I don't hand crazy people ammunition so they can blow shit up. I mean, I love him and all, but I love you, too. Even when you're being a lying fuck."

"It's JC," Lance said, then bit his tongue. Hard. Too late.

"JC?" Joey said.

Lance nodded, bracing himself.

"Oh. Okay, then." Joey cleared his throat, uncrossing and re-crossing his ankles. "So is he, like, kinky and shit? He's gotta be."

Lance stared at him, digesting the fact that he wasn't about to get a beat-down for doing... whatever it was he was doing with someone else in the group. Then it dawned on him that he'd seen Joey's leg-crossing routine a hundred times before when Chris was going on about the breasts on this chick or that one, or when Joey was at a club, looking to pick up. "Oh, my lord. You think it's hot. Holy sweet-- no. No, I am not telling you details about me and JC. No way."

Joey knew how to keep his mouth shut, especially when it came to Lance because Lance remembered dirt and wasn't ashamed to haul it out in self-defense. But Lance told JC about it anyway, about how he'd gone and told Joey. Under duress, he pointed out, otherwise it would still be between the two of them.

JC didn't seem to mind. In fact, that night in the quiet room, he and Joey plopped down on a couch and started giggling like a couple of their own fans.

Lance finally had his confirmation: he was the only normal one in a quintet of perverts. He stuck his nose in his Bible and didn't come out until the ten-minute call.

JC slipped into his room that night while Lance was still brushing his teeth. Lance spat into the sink. "Were you telling him stuff?"

"Hunh?" JC asked.

Lance looked at his own reflection in the mirror, because when JC was perplexed this little dimple showed up on his chin. It was enough to make a man forget what he was embarrassed about. "Joey. Did you tell him anything that was, you know. Personal?"

"Oh, hey, no." JC came up and licked Lance's shoulder, which pretty much killed Lance's freak-out. "Nothing important, not the stuff with substance or anything. That's our stuff and it's staying between us. Anything we do, it's ours, right?"

"I'm sorry I told him. Don't tell Chris or anything, okay?"

"Well, um. I talked to Chris, while we were waiting for dinner, and. You know how Chris just knows things? Usually it's a good knowing, good for the group and all."

"Oh, lord," Lance said, for the second time in one day.

JC rubbed Lance's neck, hitting all the good places that hurt nearly constantly when JC's hands weren't on them. "I think he's the one who gave Joey the idea, actually. Which means Justin, too."

Lance turned around and drowned his sorrows in JC's mouth. It was a very good place for it. Then he stripped them both, laid himself on the bed, and begged to be fucked. JC took him at his word, kneeling astride Lance's shoulders and using his mouth to get properly hard, then crawling down and pushing his spit-wet dick into Lance's ass.

JC had Lance on his side, one leg curved around his back. He leaned over to kiss Lance's collarbone, saying, "If Justin knows, then I bet he thinks you're getting fucked right now."

Moaning, Lance pushed back as JC hit a particularly sweet spot. "No, he doesn't. He's, oh dammit yeah, jerking off over Britney." JC's cock was the best thing ever. Never having another one inside of him to compare didn't mitigate his judgment a bit.

"He's thinking about you. He's thinking about you on your back, hips rocking off the mattress, your mouth still open and slick from sucking me." JC chanted the words in time with his thrusts. "I bet he wishes he was the one fucking you."

"He's not, he's. He's. Justin." Turning his face into the pillow was the best Lance could do to get away from JC. What did he ever do to deserve this? Leaving home and running away to become a spoiled rotten pop star didn't explain why he was in a strange bed with a very, very strange man.

Hiding from JC didn't work when JC was on top. Not pulling out, JC rolled Lance onto his stomach, saying, "Oh shit, oh fuck," and ending up arched over Lance's back. Lance had to take his face out of the pillow or smother. "You could sleep with him, you so could. If you pushed him back and went down on him, he wouldn't-- fuck-- he wouldn't say no. He'd just lie there and take it, whimpering and biting the side of thumb and then you could, like, turn him over and lick him open and I bet he'd be saying please for it. Bite the back of his neck and shake him."

As soon as he could get it up again, Lance was going to do every single one of those things to JC until he was sorry he'd ever learned to talk. He worked his hand underneath his body and started jerking. "Chris won't like it. Chris won't-- what about Chris?"

"I'll get Chris, I'll, oh, Lance, Chris, fuck. Lance, you're so. You're so," JC said, coming with a shout.

That week, when they'd meet up in a lobby to go to an interview or a venue, Chris developed a habit of pole-dancing on the nearest vertical human whenever Lance and JC got within three feet of each other. Usually it was one of the bodyguards, who were not pole-like in shape but made for excellent stable climbing surfaces. Sometimes it was Justin, who would writhe back, singing, "Calling sister midnight, I'm an idiot for you."

Lance cultivated a counter-habit of wearing sunglasses and hats at six in the morning. JC told him he looked like a vampire. "You're even pale enough for it lately," he said, peering under the brim of Lance's latest ball cap.

"I'll lay out next time we're in Orlando, 'kay?" Their stylists did their best, but it just wasn't the same. He yawned, cracking his jaw. "Haven't exactly had the time even for the salon."

Which was the only downside, far as Lance could tell, to having all the sex he wanted. Getting laid took an awful lot of energy the way he and JC did it. After New Year's, they might never have seen each other at all, busy as their schedules were, if they hadn't had twelve things to do as a group every ten hours. And when the cameras weren't rolling, Lance fell asleep the moment he could stretch out on anything flat and cushioned.

He was stuck at the end of the Old Testament, which sucked, because he thought he'd be a lot farther along by now. Reading was like his study hall, his excuse for not even trying to make time and steel himself for church. Except for Christmas Eve, when he'd gone to services with his momma and Stacy. That was mostly the choirs and everyone singing, though. He'd skipped ahead and tried to read the Gospels, thinking the timing would be nice, but the story he remembered learning was all broken up and scattered. He gave up and watched Rudolph and the Grinch with Joey over the phone.

Then Johnny pulled him aside for a talk, very polite and all that, but it ended up with Lance feeling like shit and calling his Mom to ask her to get out his old address book and look up the last number he had for Danielle Fishel.

When he told JC about it, JC stared at his feet and started talking about people growing and connecting on different levels and how there was the physical and then there was the spiritual but it was all love, right, until Lance sat down and pulled JC back against his chest, saying. "Okay. Start over. Just lay it out for me."

The upshot was that they swore to use condoms for absolutely anyone else, and to say something the moment it turned serious with anyone. If it did. Lance left the room feeling pretty okay about the JC-part of the discussion. There wasn't any doubt that JC adored him beyond reason. Lance felt the same about JC, really.

It was when he thought about in the grander scheme that he got nervous, particularly when he'd look at himself in the mirror and catch a glimpse of the cross around his neck. Then again, he'd already come to terms with never cleaving unto a wife. Maybe the other half of the commandment deserved reconsideration, too.

Besides, if he picked up some guy at an industry shindig, it would not only make the evening a heck of a lot more pleasant, but JC would do whatever he wanted until Lance provided a whispered accounting of the details.

The weather got warmer and life got crazier. Lance was having trouble shaking off winter, though. He felt like a bear in a den who just couldn't wake up.

One night he walked off a stage thinking he was going to puke any second. It was the last thought he had before everything went black and stayed that way.

He spent three weeks at his parents' house doing nothing. Most afternoons he lay in the hammock out back and read while his mom brought out food that put room service at the Four Seasons to shame. Lance felt awkward, like a stranger visiting someone else's family.

He was on Philippians when JC called. He called every day, but never at the same time. "Hey, you. Your mom says you keep trying to run off and jump back into the circus."

Lance dragged his straw through the sugar in the bottom of his iced tea glass. "I lay around any longer, I'm gonna get bedsores. It'll be revolting, Jayce. You'll never want my ass again."

JC laughed. Lance thought he could live to be ninety-nine and never get tired of JC's laugh. "Gate 5B. The flight's at 3:15 and it's a domestic, so lots of time to pack in the morning."

"What?" Lance said.

"Just shorts and t-shirts. Trust me," JC said, which precluded Lance's best arguments.

When JC got off the phone without providing further hints, Lance called Joey. Joey made really lame-ass fake static noises and hung up on him. Chris, who never answered his phone, and Justin, who was a freak about checking his caller ID, didn't even pick up.

He filled out crosswords until the plane landed in L.A., then he listened to three of Chris' mix CDs during the limo ride. When the driver opened the door, Lance stepped out onto sand beside the tiniest, trimmest cottage ever.

"You came," JC said, tipping the driver with a twenty he pulled from the pocket of his cut-offs. They were the only thing he had on. He sounded so surprised that Lance was ashamed.

As soon as the limo pulled around the bend, Lance said, "You first. God," and kissed JC into the cottage.

There was a front room with a fridge, and a back room with a bed. That took care of everything Lance could think of. Citing Lance's exhaustion, JC wouldn't let him take off any of his own clothes. He'd kissed Lance's ankles, licked his thighs and his nipples, and was trying to undo the clasp on his cross pendant when Lance stopped him. "Leave it on, okay?"

"Really?" JC said. Lance nodded. If he was going to be damned, he would be damned with his head held high.

JC shimmied out of the shorts. He was bare underneath, which didn't surprise Lance but was awfully nice to have confirmed. Lance slid to the floor, pushing JC to sit on the edge of the bed, ignoring words like "hospital," and "bed rest," and, most disturbingly, "I promised your mother, Lance."

"Shhh," Lance said, running his lips up JC's cock. It wasn't even the only cock Lance had sucked anymore and it was still perfect. It was long enough to make Lance feel like a slut when he took it down his throat, but not so thick it felt like work. He breathed through his nose and drew it in with his tongue.

JC petted him and swore at him, saying the dirtiest things in a voice trained to sound like an angel's. Refusing to keep to a pattern, Lance did whatever he wanted, whatever made his own belly feel tight. Then he left JC to shiver for a moment while he rooted in his backpack.

"Please, yes, fuck me, fuck me, you don't need anything," JC said, panting high in his chest.

Lance rubbed a slick hand up and down his dick, shuddering at the sounds he was making with his own lubed hand. God, he loved doing this to JC. It couldn't be bad to make someone else get that look of bliss, it couldn't be when it was so rare, so hard to find. "Yeah, I do. Lay down, Jayce."

Wiping his hand on the sheets, he stood at the end of the bed and hauled JC's ankles onto his shoulders. He worked his cock into JC slowly, so slowly, that JC was hissing "pleasepleaseplease" by the time he started thrusting.

Lance fucked him until JC shifted on the bed and Lance had to crawl up after him to stay inside. Bracing his weight on his arms, Lance fucked him so hard his cross swung with each thrust, a metronome counting silently between them.

Staring into Lance's eyes, JC reached up and caught it in his hand, holding it to Lance's chest. "Lance," he said.

Lance snapped his hips, making JC keen like he was having visions. Lance knew he was having visions, the way JC locked his ankles high up on Lance's back and opened up so sweet, so hot, taking Lance's cock, fingering his cross like he was praying the rosary.

He'd lied. He came first.

When he could think enough to move, he curled up sideways and went back to sucking JC, fingering his hole and coaxing out little tremors. His fingers, still slick, slipped inside so gently he had four in JC before he realized it had gone that far. Rocking on the bed, JC worked himself between Lance's hand and his mouth, fucking and fucked and begging to please let him come, please now.

Lance sucked hard until he felt JC snap, then suckled until there wasn't anything left. Wiping his mouth on JC's abs, keeping his fingers tight inside, he listened to JC breathe.

"Ohhh," JC sighed. "I was going to order in dinner first."

Lance laughed. "Later. We'll eat two meals to make it up." He wriggled his fingers, feeling JC melt open another fraction. "You're so polite tonight."

"Um?"

"With the pleases. A whole bunch of them. And this place, lord." Lance promised himself real estate, lots of it, including a beach house if their next album was anywhere as good as the last. "How long do we have it for?"

"A week," JC said, reaching down to pet his own cock. "Where'd you put the lube?"

Lance bit JC's nipple and got up to find it.

*

Lance loved that cottage. He loved it so much he wanted one just like it, so he started asking questions and poking around, checking on his money. Finally he called his mother, perplexed, hoping she'd tell him he was being a goof and missing something obvious.

He wasn't. That was the problem. He was getting the paperwork together to show the other guys when Chris pulled up, slamming his car door and saying, "So you want to hear something fucked? You know that apartment I'm trying to get?"

Lance spent all autumn both desperate to run back to the cottage and hide under the blankets and pissed he'd ever seen the damned place. If he hadn't, maybe they could've gone on a little longer with their music and their shows and their luck-charmed lives. Now it was fucked, and it might be over. All of it.

Or maybe Chris would've figured it out sooner, or JC. Like in science books, it would've been one of those moments when the group mind just swelled and swelled until people on different continents were coming to the same conclusions simultaneously, like the structure of DNA and quantum theory, like the fundamental underpinnings of real people's lives.

They spent a lot of time in rooms not looking at each other. Lance thought they were each trying to break their own hearts before someone came and did it for them. It was better to do it yourself. Then you knew who to hate.

He got to the end of Revelations, read the amen, and sat in silence for a full half hour. It was the longest he could remember being alone, being quiet, since he'd left home. Then he turned the book over in his hands and opened it back up to Genesis 1:1.

The day before Thanksgiving, they put on their best dark suits. For once, it wasn't for a funeral. Then just before Christmas, Johnny called them all, saying, "Get over here and read this, soon as you can."

As they stood around the table, Joey elbowed him. "Good gift, huh?"

"Best ever," Lance said, and was the first to suggest they go out and get horribly drunk in celebration.

*

It wasn't that they got more famous. It was that they got the permanent type of famous. Even after Strings dropped people still called them a boyband, but they were the boyband. It was like getting tenure, like they knew Baskin Robbins was keeping their flavor.

People might make fun of it, but they were still buying it.

And Justin. Justin didn't walk anymore: he loped. Maybe he always had, but now it wasn't cute like a boy clomping around in his daddy's shoes. The louder they screamed for him, the more easily he moved. Lance liked being around him a lot more now that he knew how to say, "Hey. You want to hit this place?" instead of, I want to go here, now.

It got bigger and it got flashier, but it got easier, too. By the time the first leg of the Strings tour wound up, Lance was more than ready to wait out the last days of August on his parents' front porch. It would make his mom happy, which was something Lance had come to appreciate being able to do.

Chris ruffled his hair and said, "No more bambinos," when Lance tried to explain.

"Not even Justin?" asked Lance, spinning his cell phone on the formica table on the three-man bus.

"Have you seen him? No baby fat left, not even between his ears. And here I thought you had an eye for the boy-flesh. You disappoint me, Bass."

Lance slid his cell phone across the table. Chris fielded it easily, sending it skidding back. "Guess that means you won't mind if I look with my hands," he said, batting the phone back across.

Chris didn't move. The phone sailed clear across the table and landed in his lap. His face took on that snarly look, the one JC liked to wax poetic about in medias fuck.

Lance got up, reaching across to pluck his cell phone from Chris lap. He got in a good survey of the length of Chris' interest, too. "Guess that means you do," he said, heading for the back of the bus to share his findings with Justin.

So he went to visit his parents, and he went shopping at grocery stores in the middle of the afternoon, and he said hi to people who knew him because their kids had gone to school with him, not because their kids had gone to see him in concert. It was nice, but dull, so he called JC. JC said he'd be on the next flight down.

Lance gave him two days to show, because JC was JC and sometimes thought it was yesterday when it was really today.

He turned up on Sunday morning. Lance had gone to church with his parents, but had opted for roaming the cemetery instead of sitting through the service. He could kind of hear it anyway, at least when the organ started up, because the windows were wide open in faith that any breath of a breeze would surely make itself known.

Reading epitaphs proved depressing. He sat in the shade of a towering granite angel, using someone's headstone as a backrest, leaning against an old name that no one brought flowers to anymore. He must've dozed off, because he didn't know JC was there until someone kicked his foot. "Hi," JC said.

"Hey." Lance held up a hand to shade his eyes. "You didn't have to come on out here."

"I started to sweat the second I got off the plane so I figured, too late for air conditioning." He sat down next to Lance, cross-legged. "You didn't want to go inside?"

"Didn't need to," Lance said. "This works."

JC nodded like he understood. He probably did. They sat there, in the shade, flicking blades of grass at each other until even that small movement because too much in the heat.

Tipping his head back against the stone, JC eventually said, "She's a pretty angel." His hair was getting unruly around the ears, curling with sweat.

"Angel are non-gendered--" Lance started to say before JC clapped a hand across his mouth.

"It's a pretty angel," JC said, mouth quirking. "And you shouldn't believe everything you read."

JC brushed his fingers over Lance's lips until Lance opened up, licking at JC's fingertips. They tasted like salt and soap over the paper-clean smell of JC's skin. Lance ran his tongue over the pads then bit, steadily.

"Take and eat. This is my body, given unto you," JC recited.

"Jayce!" Hot as the air was, Lance could still feel the flush rising up his neck. JC pulled back his hand, bringing it to rest on Lance's thigh. "Some things are sacred! You don't. You don't just say that."

"Sacred," JC agreed, leaning in to kiss Lance lightly. "Like communion."

Lance kissed back. He couldn't stop thinking about it, though. Breaking away he said, "Did I ever tell you about Greg Manning?"

"No." JC rubbed his hand up Lance's thigh until it was between his legs, easing down Lance's zipper.

As JC lowered his head, Lance said, "I'll tell you later."

---