It wasn't as though Lance wanted out. He didn't. He liked the guys, really he did, and the work -- well, it was music, and that was enough. He still wasn't sure about the rest of it, the sixteen-hour days, the constant feeling of never being good enough -- and wasn't that a strange sensation for the first time in his whole life -- but it would be worth it, for the music.

But his mother was right; there was only so long that he could plan on living outside the ebb and flow of real life like that, isolated with the rest of the guys, all of them working on the dream that seemed a little further out of reach each day. Objects in the rear view mirror may be closer than they appear; he wondered if that meant that objects off on the horizon, in the distant future, were further away. It felt like it should be any minute, and it had been feeling that way for so long that he was starting to forget what it had been like to live without that perilous thrill of hope.

"You're out, aren't you." The voice came from behind him, and he was somehow unsurprised to turn around and find Justin watching. Justin was leaning against the railing of the porch, elbows propped against the wood, chin resting on his folded hands. He looked like some kind of curly-headed Buddha, calm and serene. Far too young for how old he was, or maybe too old to be that young.

Lance was never sure whether or not he hated Justin at the best of times, and this wasn't the best of times. "I'm not out," he said, sharply, and looked back out over the lawn. "I'm just -- This isn't working, Justin. Not the way we're doing it."

Justin was quiet for a long minute. "Then we'll do something else," he said. For a minute, Lance heard it in his voice, the slow creeping downhill inevitability of it. He wondered what Justin meant.

They had the contract in their hands eight days later. Lance never asked Justin how.

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