It wasn't that JC slept too much. He just slept at the wrong times.
When he woke in the hotel room he knew from the color of the light leaking through the bathroom doorway that it was too early. He'd fall back asleep, but not until right before lunch when he was in makeup for the second time that day because no one could stay camera-perfect for more than thirty minutes in the New Jersey heat and the New Jersey humidity, not smack-dab in the middle of a New Jersey July. Not for all the air conditioned rooms MTV's beach house had to offer.
Maybe he was becoming a morning person.
The second thing he knew was that he had to get his right arm out from under Justin, who might be fluid and motion and grace when he was awake, but not when unconscious as lead at five thirty in the morning.
As he twisted free, his wrist grazed Justin's head. "What? Okay," Justin said, his eyes still closed.
JC winced. Justin rolled away, his expression blank in sleep.
JC slid into his jeans and a t-shirt that probably wasn't his, because it had the name of a bar on the front that he was pretty sure he'd never been to, and walked out into the hall. Lonnie sat in an overstuffed chair in front of the bank of elevators, folding a newspaper into thirds.
"Going for a walk," JC whispered.
"Why are you whispering?" asked Lonnie.
JC could tell his cheeks were flushed even without looking at his reflection in the elevator doors.
The back of the hotel opened to the oceanfront, the boardwalk tracing the long edge of the deck, the pool, and a shuttered cabana flanked by two sickly palm trees that had no business surviving so far north, all ringed by a chain-link fence. JC knew why the fence was there, but thought it would be nicer if you could be in the pool and look right out across the sand and over the ocean. The salt breeze coming in from the shore clung to his face, a million tiny droplets of gray-green water different from the postcard-blue of a Florida beach, or of the Gulf, but just exactly like Ocean City, or Bethany, or any of the places his family had driven to when he was little.
The boardwalk was damp from the air and creaky, like it was supposed to be. The hotels got smaller and shorter and tended to be painted a pink with greater frequency the further walked. Under an awning on his right a guy was renting bicycles from the ground floor of a motel. He wore a red baseball cap, bright red all over including the mesh part in the back which was actually at the back of his head, with the brim at the front, lined up and everything right over his eyes. JC decided to rent one for an hour. Then he changed his mind because he hadn't planned on riding a bike when he'd dressed, so he was wearing sandals, the kind without a strap across the back. And he had on jeans. Then he changed his mind again, because the only things above sea level around here were the hotels and the roller coaster at the end of the boardwalk. He'd probably only have to pedal once every half mile or something.
"Help you?" asked the guy in the red cap, walking over with a clipboard clamped under his armpit.
JC worked a handful of change and a creased twenty dollar bill out of his pocket. He put the change back. "I wanted to rent a bike."
"I need to see an ID."
"I, um." JC drew back the hand that held out the twenty. "Just for a bicycle?"
The red-cap guy nodded.
"Oh. I didn't bring any," JC said. "I have my room key and all, but not. Not my license."
"Sorry," the guy said, but not meanly, which JC thought was pretty decent of him, even considering JC felt like he was nineteen again and had got caught attempting to buy a six-pack. Except when he'd really been nineteen he'd never been brave enough to even try. Plus you had to factor in that it was six in the morning, and there weren't too many people who were nice to anyone that early. "The rules say I've got to see an ID."
JC slid his hands into his pockets. "Oh. Okay. Sorry."
He walked two more blocks and then used part of the twenty on a strawberry-banana smoothie. The girl working the blender had seven hoops down the rim of her ear, alternating gold and silver except for the last one which was plastic and black. He sucked on the smoothie until he gave himself a headache and had to hold his tongue against roof of his mouth, unaccustomed to making it more than halfway through one of these before Justin leaned in to take a drag off the straw, or Chris stole it from him outright. He shouldn't have gotten the extra-large cup just for himself.
He kept walking until he made it all the way down to the end of the boardwalk where the sky-tram turned around, counting the gondolas sitting in the storage shed, waiting for whatever repairs a broken gondola needed. There were eight blue ones and two red ones and no green ones, which either meant the blue ones broke more often, or their paint just faded faster in the salt air.
Getting back to the hotel took longer than walking down because he kept stopping to study the empty arcades. Video games never looked right when they weren't lit up. He paused to read a couple of the menus outside the pancake houses, too, in case he decided to wake Justin up tomorrow morning and try the bike thing again.
When he got back to the hotel, he sat on the edge of the deck and leaned back against the chain-link fence to watch the people walking by. And the dogs. There seemed like there were a lot of dogs considering there weren't a lot of people. Maybe dog people liked to get up earlier than regular people as a general rule. Or maybe having a dog changed your biorhythms somehow. Pets were supposed to be good for relieving stress and everything, so it seemed reasonable. Except then there was Chris, who was a dog person but who had never been a morning person, especially not an early-morning-in-the-middle-of-the-summer-at-the-beach person, when there were plenty of things for him and Lance and Joey, after he'd said goodnight over his cell to Briahna, to go out and do after dark.
A bit of yellow crept into the white of the sunlight. JC slid his feet out of his sandals and scrunched his toes. He could stay out here until one of the guys came to find him for breakfast. That would take a while. His toes might even get tanned.
A lady who didn't have a dog but did have an ironed-on decal of a dachshund on her sweatshirt turned and smiled at JC as she power-walked past. It was kind of nice, sitting and watching people, instead of being the one who was watched.
There were two guys in wetsuits paddling belly-down on bodyboards out in the surf. The one guy might have been a girl, but JC wasn't sure from this far away. Further up the beach, another guy repeatedly swam a short ways out and then rode the swells back in. His elbows flashed in the light with his strokes like a metronome clicking out beats. It had stormed yesterday afternoon, one of those afternoon thunderstorms that lasted long enough to irritate the crew filming at the beach house, but it hadn't been fierce enough to kick up the surf. The only breakers were the ones really far out and the ones right where the water met the sand.
The swimming guy stopped swimming and got out of the water, waves slapping hard against the back of his knees. If that had been JC, he would have tripped. It was hard to predict things like the timing of waves with your back turned.
The guy walked towards him and JC saw it was Justin.
He waved, grabbing the little white cairn his towel made on the sand and jogging up to the pool. "Hey," JC said.
"Hey." Justin scrubbed at his head. It wasn't very wet to begin with. "Lonnie said you got up crazy early."
"Sort of. I was going to rent a bike."
"Did you?"
"No. I didn't have any ID."
Justin swiped at the sand on his thighs. "For a bike? That's dumb. You're like an adult and everything. What're you gonna do to it?"
JC shrugged. "Steal it? I don't know. Was the water cold?" The dark hairs on Justin's forearm were goose-pimpled. JC touched them with two fingertips.
"Nah. It's Jersey, not Florida. But it's still July." He spun the towel until it knotted up. "Here, hold this."
"Why?"
"'Cause I'm sandy," Justin said, walking around the corner of the deck. JC followed.
A showerhead sprouted from an upright pipe, the kind that was galvanized and battleship gray even though the hotel itself was pretty nice. The faucet squawked when Justin turned it on, water raining down his upturned face and his shoulders and the rest of him. It splattered against the concrete under his bare feet.
Justin shifted his weight so smoothly that JC didn't remember him turning, only knew that first he was looking at him from the front, and then from the back, and then after long minute from the front again. Gentle tan lines sliced down his shoulder blades, dividing the skin with freckles from the skin without. When he turned in profile, JC stared at the cross curving around the swell of his arm. He wondered why Justin'd had it done on his left side and not the right. Justin always had a reason for everything he did with his body.
"You should go upstairs," JC said.
Justin leaned down, stripping water from his calves, then stood and rubbed his nose on the back of his hand. "What? Here, give me that."
JC stepped back, the towel still in his hands. "I don't think you want this."
"C, you're crazy. Give it here."
"No," JC said. There was a short pink scrape low on Justin's belly. JC couldn't remember if he'd made it with his teeth or with his nails. "I don't think you need it, either."
"I kind of do."
"You kind of don't. Go upstairs and go to our room. It's okay. You'll be dry again before you make it to the bed."
Water beaded on the tips of Justin's eyelashes. It needed to evaporate and get it over with. "I was just getting the sand off," Justin said.
JC wasn't a morning person. He wasn't a morning person and he wasn't a dog person, and he wasn't a nice-to-strangers-before-seven-o'clock person or even the type of person who went biking on the boardwalk before it got crowded with tourists. "I don't care about the sand," he said.
He walked past Justin, up the plank steps and around the pool and up to the hotel. As the automatic doors parted, he felt wet fingers on the small of his back, and then wet lips on the nape of his neck, and then all of Justin's wet skin nudging him towards the elevator.