WIP Amnesty, woot!
So I usually can't bring myself to do wip_amnesty, because YOU NEVER KNOW. I MIGHT finish them! I really might. And there are indeed still a lot that I'm hoarding for my own use, but the chances of me getting to this one in the next ten years are vanishingly small, so -- Go with God, little AU! You would have been lovely when you grew up!

Easy Rider
the great unfinished AU
Chris/Justin, Lance/Nick, various other pairings

(note: I think some of the last scenes may not be ordered in the way I planned for them to be. It's hard to remember what I was up to, now, but I think I was in the middle of a lot of cutting and pasting)



::May::


"You got a light?" the kid in the parking lot asked Lance. Apparently that knit cap of his was pulled a little too low over his eyes, keeping him from noticing that Lance was trying to get a tray of coffee out of his car and into the store without bending the cardboard tray and losing any of the cups. Before Lance could say anything snide, though, the cardboard started to buckle, and the guy's hand was under it, lifting it safely to the roof of Lance's car before Lance could even react.

"Good reflexes," Lance said, fumbling in the pocket of his coat for a lighter. He didn't smoke, but since every other gay man in the world seemed to, Lance learned early that it never hurt to keep one on you. "Thanks."

"No problem." Lance got his first close look while he lit the kid's cigarette -- not as much of a kid as Lance first thought, his face fine-boned under the stubble, his body lean but not scrawny under his baggy clothes, the kind that were chemically treated to make them look naturally distressed and worn; Lance could guess at some of the labels. There was something familiar about him, too. If he'd just look up, instead of glaring at the pavement with his pretty mouth set in a frown, maybe Lance could place him. Nobody Lance had slept with, he didn't think; not his usual type, but even more tellingly, Lance couldn't imagine that he'd had that mouth on him and then forgotten about it.

He almost laughed aloud when he realized. Hell, no, nobody *he'd* ever slept with. Nobody he'd ever seen at all, except here and there, still glimpses in the glossy pages of People, in motion as Lance flipped past VH-1. Personally, Lance didn't care much for pop music, and his own radio dial rarely budged off Pittsburgh's one decent country station, but ever since Justin Timberlake had seemed to appear out of nowhere, sometime last winter, it was hard not to know who he was. Lance couldn't name any of his songs, but he did remember seeing that one video where he wiped his long-fingered hand deliberately across his mouth, and he remembered lazily fantasizing about what exactly he might be wiping off. Not Lance's usual type, but still, still.

"That's probably not good for your voice," Lance commented, gathering up his coffee carefully.

"Fucking *Pittsburgh!*" he burst out, which seemed like a strange response. Lance quirked his eyebrow. "Is there anyone in this goddamn town who doesn't want to tell me what to do? Because, yeah, I don't take enough orders in my line of work. I'm *always* looking for more people to fucking *tell me what to do.*"

"Hey, do whatever you want," Lance said.

"No, see. Look." He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket by its chain and opened it up for Lance. Sure enough, the driver's license said Justin Timberlake, state of Tennessee. Justin pushed on a card with his thumb so that it slid far enough free of the leather to show Lance the AmEx logo. "I'm making, for the first time in my fucking life, I'm making *money,* I can *buy* things if I want them, right? This is me, this is my card, there's a hundred grand limit, I could put a fucking *house* on this card, but all I want is a damn bike, you know? All my life, I didn't care about the money, you know, but this was the one thing I wanted for myself. And I did all this research, and I wanted to buy a really good bike at a decent price, and everybody said that this Kirkpatrick guy is the big fucking expert, and I come all the way out here, and he won't fucking sell me one! And I don't mean to be arrogant, but *hello!* I *have* the money, right, and what's *with* him, anyway? He acts like I'm not -- what, like I'm not *good* enough to even be in his little store, and...." Justin broke off and turned his head away sharply, squinting as if the sun were in his eyes, even though it was rainy and overcast. Lance had a horrible fear that he was about to start crying or something.

"You look very Julia Roberts right now," Lance said, which made Justin stop looking like he was going to cry and start looking like he was going to strangle Lance. "Well, not -- you know, in Pretty Woman, when she has her hands full of cash, and she's like, 'I have all this'-- Jeez, okay, I'm *sorry.* Here, you want to buy a bike?"

"Yes!" Justin yelled. "I want! To buy! A bike!"

"Good, okay, good. Look, I don't know what Chris said to you, but let me talk to him, okay? Obviously there's been some kind of misunderstanding, because you buy bikes, Chris sells them, and this should all really go a lot more smoothly than apparently it's going so far. He hasn't had his coffee yet. That's probably the only problem."

Justin looked at him suspiciously, as if he'd like to believe that Lance could solve his problems, but he'd been burned before. "You work here?"

"Yes. No. Well, no, sort of. I help with his books and stuff. I'm an accountant." In actual fact, he was probably the only person who'd touched Chris's accounts since the shop opened, and the person best suited to realize just exactly how stupid it was for Chris to be turning away customers. Small businesses never made money the first year, but Tricky's was going on five, and no further away from the edge of the financial cliff than ever before. "Here, can you...? I know he probably said something stupid to you, but you have to know Chris, he doesn't mean nine-tenths of what he says. I'm sure he didn't mean any harm, and I know -- he really *is* the best, he knows everything there is to know about things with motors in them, I swear. So if you want to just take -- please, take my card, and call me back this afternoon, and we'll get all this straightened out. He does custom work, he can put you on any kind of bike you want, the exact one you've always dreamed of. I promise. Just call, okay?"

"Okay," he said dubiously, but he put Lance's card in his wallet, right there behind his license. Lance wasn't normally a star-struck kind of person, but *seriously,* his card, right there in Justin Timberlake's wallet. Joey would flip when he heard about this.

"What the hell is the matter with you?" he said as soon as he got inside with the coffee.

Chris didn't bother to ask him what he meant. He didn't even look up from whatever delicate piece of gears and bolts he was disassembling on his work-table. "The boy does not need a bike."

"Well, of course he doesn't. He's rich and famous, he doesn't *need* anything. He's got nothing better to do with his life than buy diamond earrings and expensive motorcycles, and you're fresh out of diamonds around here. Hey, *listen* to me," he ordered, slapping Chris upside the head. Not that there was any point to that; Chris' head was built like an engine block.

Chris spun around on his stool, and Lance was startled by the lack of sparkle in his eyes; he looked as deadly earnest as Lance had ever seen him. "Think of it like this, Bass. In your neck of the woods, back in the day, a gentleman of quality would have a horse, right? And what would the neighbors think if he didn't know how to treat a fine, thoroughbred horse? They'd think he wasn't as much of a gentleman as all that."

"Okay, what are you talking about, Chris, seriously? These aren't horses, they're just machines."

"And that," Chris said, pointing between Lance's eyes, "is why I would never sell you a bike."

"I don't want one of your damn bikes. People get killed on those things."

"Good, because you can't have one," Chris said blithely, spinning back around to focus on his work. "Night and day, I work on these beautiful animals. The finest parts, the best quality service, I love them like members of the family. I'm not gonna just sell one to some shiny-toothed pretty boy who wants a toy for show-and-tell. He's just gonna ride it too fast, tear it up, and then get bored and leave it rusting out in the garage of the summer house."

Lance pressed the heels of his hands to his temples. "Fine, I don't care. I don't even care. It's your business, Chris, you're the one who supposedly loves the place so fucking much. Run it into the ground if you just have to, I don't *care* anymore. It's not my heart that's gonna be broken when it's gone and you have nothing left, including these thoroughbreds of yours."

"He's not ready. I can't do business with someone who isn't ready."

Lance opened his mouth, and closed his mouth, and thought about bludgeoning Chris' head in with a ratchet wrench, and thought about life without Chris, and sighed. Chris was the one who wasn't ready; Lance had known that since the very beginning, since against his better judgement he'd agreed to help Chris draw up a business plan for a bike shop. Chris didn't want to own a business, didn't want any responsibility or really any risk of failure. Tricky's was his Never-Neverland, his refuge from the real world, where somehow Chris Kirkpatrick -- who was whip-smart and funny and kind and handsome and genuine and loyal -- had never quite managed to fit in. There was just some vaguely off-kilter thing about him that people never seemed to *get.* It was pretty fucking unfair, as far as Lance was concerned.

And, more unfairness right on top of that, if Chris didn't batten down and start thinking about his bottom line, Tricky's was going to be one more thing that seemed like it was going to make Chris happy, right up until it let him fall hard. "Okay," Lance said. "Here's your coffee."

"Thanks, Bass, you Georgia peach, you."

"Mississippi," Lance reminded him, like always, and there was way too much sadness in Chris' dutiful little smile. Impulsively, Lance bent down and kissed his cheek, and Chris put up with it for a second, then leaned sharply away and wiped his cheek like a little kid. "I shouldn't have to be here long. I just want to go over a few invoices in the office."

The desk in Chris' office was the same one that had Lance's parents had bought for his first apartment, when he moved out of the dorms in his junior year, not too sturdy, but real oak, not plastic or fake, pressed Wal-Mart wood like most of the other furniture Lance had owned. Chris had helped his dad and Lance carry it up to the third floor, and all three of them ate Arby's and drank grape Gatorade among the boxes and the half-assembled furniture while the sun set right outside Lance's curtain-less living room window. When Lance walked his dad down to his car and hugged him goodbye, his dad said, "I like your friend."

"Chris is cool," Lance said. Chris painted houses for a living, and he had Steelers season tickets and a huge collection of classic rock on vinyl, and he was pretty much the only person Lance had ever met in a gay bar who turned out to be actually fun to talk to. Lance thought he was wasting his life, and wasting himself on his very hot and very not faithful younger boyfriend, who happened to be in Lance's astronomy lab and cut class a lot to go out tricking while Chris thought he was stargazing.

"You know you could bring him home to visit any time you want," his father said. "Your momma and I want you both to feel comfortable."

"Dad, he's not my-- " Lance began, and then found himself stuck and feeling ridiculous, because they didn't talk about this, they'd never talked about this. It didn't surprise him that his parents knew, of course, because they didn't miss much. Except that it *wasn't* like that with Chris. "Chris is just a friend. I just asked him if he'd mind helping me move."

"Oh," his father said, and then, "*Oh.* God. I'm sorry, I thought he -- that you were -- "

"*I* am," Lance said quietly, clenching his fists tight in his pockets. "But we're not. We're just friends."

"Well," his father said, and gripped his shoulder tight for a minute. "Well, you be careful on your own here. Study hard. Your momma and I love you."

"I know," Lance said. "Tell her I love her, too."

After that there had been real boyfriends, ones Lance did take home to meet his parents, and some fabulous fucks that he didn't. Chris finally broke up with his loser boyfriend, and for him there was a string of computer nerds with great senses of humor that Chris always dumped when they started asking when he was going to quit painting houses and start doing something he didn't hate for a living, and a string of pretty young things who always, always lied or cheated or drained Chris's bank account for as long as Chris would let them get away with it, and a married man or two, and a girl or two. Through it all, Lance thought their common bond had basically been furniture: all the times they'd helped each other move into better apartments, the time Chris had helped Lance sell off a deadbeat boyfriend's stereo system at twice the price they told deadbeat boyfriend it went for, all the nights Chris had spent on Lance's couch and the nights that Lance had crawled, sick of love or half-dead in tax season, into Chris's bed for the company, for the wonderful, sensual way that Chris would stroke his scalp and his throat like Lance was his overgrown pet until Lance fell asleep. The college desk that Lance offered him when he opened the shop.

Lance ran his hands over it and fantasized again about beating Chris to death. He was so goddamn sick of watching Chris screw up every chance he had to change his life, just to further cement whatever weird idea Chris had of himself as a maladjusted misfit. This was just the quintessential example of Chris being Chris -- a sale, a bona fide sure thing, walking in off the street with more money than sense, and Chris couldn't close it. Wouldn't close it. Chris was thirty-five years old, and he didn't seem to get any smarter as he got older, just more set in his ways, more wedded to his single life and his weird habits and his failing business. If Lance had any sense he'd just write the man off, but clearly when it came to Chris he didn't have much.

When this place closed, it was going to break Chris's heart. Just thinking about that came pretty damn close to breaking Lance's.

He tried to ignore it when the back door opened and closed again, because it -- just -- it wasn't a good idea for him to get in the way of Chris's employees, or for them to get in his way, of course, except he was almost done and that didn't matter so much, but still, routine and Lance didn't want to interrupt -- anyone. Anything. Work.

"Oh," Nick said quietly. He tended to speak quietly in the office, as if it were a library and Lance was doing his homework. "Hey, I. Didn't know you were here."

"I'm just leaving. There's, uh. I brought some coffee. It's out front."

"I got you something." Nick wiped his palms on his jeans a couple of times, and then picked up a stapler and moved it across the desk, setting it directly in front of Lance. "It's. I was at OfficeMax. For printer ink, for my brother? And I saw, I mean, it's no big deal. It was on sale, though, is the thing. Electric."

"Oh," Lance said. "Y'all have a stapler already, though."

"No, I know, but. It's electric, so I thought it would be good. Better. See, look." Nick slid the two pieces of paper nearest to him into the mouth of the stapler, and it spat out a staple automatically. Nick held up the pages.

Lance took them out of his hand and began to pick the staple out. "That's great, Nick. Y'all have no money, you'll default on your loan in February, and Chris won't sell a damn motorcycle, but you bought a second stapler, so that's fucking terrific."

"I. Chris didn't buy it, I did. I just thought it was better than the old one. Nobody owes me for it or anything."

"Listen, I don't mean to be-- " Lance began, standing up. They were both cornered in by the desk, and the office was none too roomy to start with. He tried to move away, but only managed to hit his knee on the chair. "Fuck," he spat. "This place is a fucking-- "

Nick put a solicitous hand on his back, and Lance didn't have any time to stop himself before his hands went up to Nick's broad shoulders. Nick's arm around his waist pulled him closer. He smelled like motor oil. Nick always smelled like motor oil. "No, don't," Lance murmured, but when Nick kissed him anyway, he slid his hands up into Nick's soft hair and held him there.

Nick pushed him back against the wall, and Lance groaned into his mouth. They always did it like this, fast and rough -- always except for one time, but every rule had an exception. Usually it was like this, with Lance's fingers scratching futilely against Nick's t-shirt, Nick's deft mechanic's hands undoing his belt without needing to look at it and working inside his loosened pants. Lance jerked his hips up, pushing his cock against Nick's dry palm. Nick's teeth scraped his tongue painfully, his fingers were too cold from being in the chilly garage behind the office, and his knee was pressed hard into Lance's thigh, but it didn't matter. Nick wasn't somebody that he went to for long, sensual lays, for exploring each other's bodies, for teasing and tasting each other. With Nick it was awkward and hungry and no time wasted getting comfortable when what they really wanted was to get off.

"Fuck," Lance said, muffling it against Nick's shoulder, because the last thing he needed was for Chris to walk in. He would pretend it didn't matter, but secretly he'd be pissed off with Lance for ages because he hadn't been told, and he wouldn't believe it when Lance promised him there was nothing to tell. There wasn't, though. There was nothing between Lance and Nick Carter, except...this, occasionally. Lance didn't even know why he kept going along with it, because it wasn't like he was so hard up for sex, but there was something about the rough, needy way that Nick thrust against Lance's hip, something about the way his dumb, friendly puppy-dog smile disappeared and he glared down into Lance's eyes when Lance tipped his head back against the wall. Lance licked his lips and let his eyes fall mostly closed, mouthing, "Yeah, yeah, come on," with barely any voice behind it.

With Nick pulling hard and relentless on his cock, his chest pressing Lance tightly against the wall, Lance had to keep rising up until he was standing almost on his toes. His knees trembled when Nick put a particularly vicious twist into the rhythm of his hand at the same time that he pressed three hard kisses down the side of Lance's face, the smell of Juicyfruit gum and oil and yesterday's bitter leftover coffee right there against Lance's skin, and Lance twisted his arms around Nick's neck and panted his way through a dizzy, disorienting orgasm. He stayed there afterwards, afraid to try supporting his own weight, just shifting around enough to give Nick his inner thigh to grind against, his big hands fitted tightly to Lance's ass, until he went abruptly still and motionless, then slumped down with his forehead on Lance's shoulder, utterly relaxed. Lance waited just a moment, then pushed him gently away and reached for the box of Kleenex on the desk so he could clean himself up just enough to tuck his cock back into his pants.

Nick stepped back and braced his hands and his ass on the edge of Lance's desk, letting it support his weight as he watched Lance with a goofy little smile. "Quit that," Lance warned, balling up the Kleenex and tossing it into the trash. He gestured toward the faint dark stain on the crotch of Nick's jeans and said, "You're all sticky."

"I have other clothes in the garage."

"We can't keep doing this," Lance said, and then realized how much it sounded like exactly what you say when you're absolutely going to keep doing this, so he changed it to, "We're not going to do this anymore. It's really just -- it's messy and stupid, and it's unprofessional. This is a business, it's not the back room of some, some leather bar." Nick always wore a wrist full of leather, buckled and snapped and tangled up with chains. Sometimes Lance thought that he wouldn't even be attracted to Nick at all without those bracelets. Sometimes.

"Okay," Nick said, still smiling. "Let's not do this anymore."

"Right," Lance said, feeling much less sure than he tried to sound. Nick said that, but he didn't really mean it. That was the difference between them: Lance always *meant* it. Or at least, he meant to mean it.

"Go out with me."

This again. "Nick, no."

"Yes. Let me take you to dinner-- "

"Where, at the Sizzler?" Lance snapped, and he felt one slight twinge at the way Nick's smile dimmed and went out for a second. But still, this was the point. This was what Nick had to get through his head. They had nothing in common, nothing to build a dating relationship on, let alone anything more.

Nick smiled again, a little softer and warmer this time. It made Lance's stomach drop, short and sharp, because good Lord, Nick might not be much of a catch in most ways, but he had that smile, and those blue eyes and those blonde lashes, and this was the reason that they could and did keep doing this. "Wherever you want. I'm good for Red Lobster, even."

"Nick...."

He reached for Lance, who didn't pull himself together to move quickly enough. Nick's hands were warm and firm on his waist, pulling him closer, and Lance braced one knee on the desk, tucked against the outside of Nick's firm thigh, slid his hands up Nick's neck and brushed his lips over Nick's upper lip, opening his mouth when Nick did.

"One date," Nick pled with him when Lance pulled back. "Dinner, this Friday, and if you don't have fun-- "

"I can't," Lance said gently. "I already have a date this Friday."

"Oh," Nick said, and leaned away slightly, just enough to cue Lane to step back. "Oh, well. That's cool. With who?"

"Just this guy. This guy Joey knows from the museum."

"Oh. So, is he an artist?"

"No, I think he does PR or something. Something with money. But there's an opening, and we're going to that and then a late supper with JC and Joey and some of the other museum people. Mostly a wine and dessert kind of thing, at Petruccio's." Nick looked down at the floor, and Lance put his hands into his pockets, digging his fingernails into his palms to keep from reaching out and petting him reassuringly. But this was the point, this was exactly what Nick needed to hear. Lance already had a life that he liked, where he could get tables at nice restaurants and make conversation with people who knew things about art and politics and where his friends set him up with men who were going somewhere. Chris was -- Chris, and they had a history together and Lance loved him, but there was a reason that Chris mostly had his own circle of friends, including Nick, and Lance had his.

"Cool," Nick said. There was an awkward pause while Lance tried to figure out how to say that Nick was sitting on the invoices he needed to file, until Nick said, "Oh, hey. You'll never believe who was here this morning."

"Oh, yeah. I know. Justin Timberlake."

"Chris told you?"

"No, I, actually I saw him in the parking lot when I came in. I gave him my phone number-- "

"He might be a little out of your league," Nick said, his voice as close to sharp as Lance had ever heard it.

"Not like that. I told him I'd talk to Chris. You guys really need to sell him that bike. You need the money, and maybe if we play our cards right we can get some buzz out of it. This could be really good for Chris, if we can get him past this pointless bike-snob bullshit he has going. I don't suppose you said that to Chris, did you?"

Nick shrugged. "I just got his autograph for Angel. I leave the money stuff to Chris."

"That's your first mistake." Lance sighed and rubbed his eyes. "Sorry, don't mean to be an ass about all this. I'm just worried about Chris. I don't know why he can't admit how great an opportunity this is for the shop."

"Maybe he was just thrown for a loop. Justin comes on pretty strong."

"What does that mean, comes on strong?"

"You know. Flirty and everything."

Lance raised his eyebrows, amused in spite of the fact that the situation wasn't really funny at all. "Justin Timberlake came in here and flirted with Chris? Our Chris?" He hadn't even heard that Timberlake swung that way. Before he was the breakout star of the year, he'd been one of Britney Spears's backup dancers, and apparently her jilted boyfriend, too, or at least that's how the story went. Built-in drama went a long way in terms of free publicity, though, so Lance could see how being the guy who picked the world's most famous cherry got you farther than just being another glorified gay chorus boy.

Nick shrugged. "Looked like it to me. I don't know, Chris didn't bite, so maybe it was all in my head or something. Maybe he's just a friendly person. That, or Chris is pretty stupid."

"Either one is possible," Lance said morosely.

*

Chris lived in a studio apartment that was barely an apartment. The ad said "loft," but really it was an attic, and they jacked the price up for charm. Chris figured he was paying a hundred bucks a pop for each of the little windows in his low, slanted ceiling that made him feel like he was living in a fucking submarine.

"We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine," he sang to himself as he took a pair of pliers to the thermostat -- the lever that you used to adjust the temperature was broken. Chris had always thought he had a pretty good voice, even if it was kind of weird and high. Of course, Justin Timberlake had kind of a weird, high voice too, all those freaky falsetto notes in that big hit of his, so hell. Maybe if Chris were tall and ripped and square-jawed, he could have been America's It Boy, too.

But whatever. He'd already wasted too much time today thinking about his brush with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Chris put on some Rancid and fed his fish, checked the fridge and ordered a pizza, poured himself a scotch. Just another day.

Except that maybe he had a new thing to obsess over. He was pretty sure it wasn't going to be any more fun than the old thing, though.

"Ain't nothing but biology, right?" he told the fish, who waggled their tails knowingly. Chris wondered what got a fish hot. Shiny fins? Nice, plump sides? Actually, he thought maybe fish didn't get it on, per se. They laid eggs, then some other fish came along later and tossed off on them, or something like that. Which sounded an awful lot like Chris's sex life. He'd be the mack daddy of the goldfish world.

Chris sat down on his futon, trying to remember the last time he'd had anyone else up here -- other than the pizza guy, and not in a cool porno way. Just because he hated grocery shopping. He thought it was Joel, and that wasn't anything to brag about, being so fucking stupid that you fell for it *again.* It was only the selfish guys who knew how to flash those sensitive-boy eyes. Chris didn't know why he kept believing it. He wasn't even sure why he kept wanting to believe it. Like a real sensitive boy would last a week with Chris's big mouth and his intimacy problems. Christ, he wasn't even emotionally available enough for Howie, and Howie would go out with a serial killer if he brought flowers.

Chris wasn't much for flowers. He did have a thing by his futon, a metal vase filled with sharp, iron lilies, all cutting edges and rivets and scorch marks from a blowtorch. Chris was doing better welding in tenth-grade shop class, but it was art. Lance gave it to him, so he knew it was, like, actual *art.* It might have been some kind of statement, too, although Chris didn't usually give Lance credit for that kind of subtlety.

His whole fucking apartment, Chris thought in a sudden flare of directionless anger, looked like Lance -- all that black metal and trendy minimalism that Lance kept foisting off on him, because the idea of an apartment as just the place you crash at night was totally foreign to Lance. There was nowhere for Chris to look that didn't make him -- and usually that was okay but -- you know, sometimes even he got sick of wallowing in his own dysfunction.

The heat was finally kicking in, and much as Chris hated to, it was time to take off his jacket. He'd managed to avoid that all day, but he couldn't spend the rest of his life without looking at his own arm.

As aware as Chris had been of the numbers all day, something kicked hard inside of him when he pulled the jacket off and finally saw them, not at all faded from rubbing against the lining of his sleeve all day. He could almost feel the heat of Justin's palm laying across his, holding his hand down to the desk more by suggestion than strength. The slow, blunt dig of the pen against the soft inside of his forearm. The way Chris's whole universe had narrowed to the shape of Justin's mouth as he murmured, *my private number* and *in case you change your mind.* He'd been so sure, from the way he angled his head, from the intensity of his eyes on Chris, that Justin was about to kiss him, and he'd stood there like a fucking idiot, too terrified to shove him away and too turned on to grab him and be the one who threw the first kiss.

Chris poured the glass of scotch over his arm, clenching his fist as if the alcohol were cleaning out a wound instead of just washing over ink and making it blur and run, slowly becoming illegible and dripping off his skin.

In his whole life, Chris had never wanted anything that he could actually have.

*

Joey's whole apartment was lit by nothing but Christmas lights, running strings around the picture window and clusters knotted above the breakfast bar, dangling from the track-light fixtures that normally lit the paintings on the walls, crawling up the legs of the tables and the piano, all of them blinking in clusters of color. "And me without my gay apparel," Lance said. It seemed like just that morning it had been May. Right; that morning it *had* been May.

"Scary, isn't it?" Joey kissed his cheek as he took Lance's coat, and he was grinning foolishly even before he pulled his lips away. "There's nothing I can do. He bought it all at Big Lots; he loves it." For the first time in Joey's life, there was only one *he.*



Chris flipped the lights off on Nick, but for all he knew, the kid didn't even notice. Nick worked better with his hands than his eyes anyway; he owned a pair of glasses he wouldn't wear, and somehow he was still the best mechanic Chris had ever had, like he had eyes in his fingertips, like he knew everything there was to know about a bike just by cracking it open and putting his hands inside it. "Five o'clock," Chris said, even though it was practically nine. "Quitting time."

"I'm cool," Nick said.

"I don't pay you overtime."

"I know. I'm just, I'm cool, I'm doing my thing."

He thought about leaving; Nick could lock up on his own, and Chris didn't like to interfere with other people's lives too much. People were better off fucking up in their own special way, the way Chris figured it. But Nick was a good kid, and as employees went, he was definitely above and beyond. It could only be to Chris's advantage to look out for him, at least until he figured out he could be making a lot more money somewhere else. "Come on," he said. "I'm buying."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Let me see you," Lance ordered, taking Joey by the shoulders and angling him one way and then the other. "It's not rented, is it?"

"No! It's vintage. I had it tailored."

"Did you take where I told you to?"

"I do everything you tell me to, don't I?"

The tux had a little bit of satin on the lapels, but Lance could let that go. He smoothed the jacket and brushed his hands down Joey's shirt, then gave Joey a sly look up through his eyelashes as his hands settled on Joey's cummerbund. "Looking more like your dad every day, aren't you?"

"Yeah, well," Joey chuckled, pushing his hands away. "After twenty years of carrot sticks and Stairmasters just to be able to get into the good clubs, it's nice not to have to give a damn how I look in leather pants."

"You have not been clubbing since you were nine years old."

"Feels like it. I've been looking for a good man since I was nine years old, anyway."

"Didn't you ever find one?" Joey had sure as hell perfected the art of the search, at any rate.

"Oh, a couple." He kissed Lance's forehead softly and said, "I'm not gonna blow it with this one, I promise."



"I'm not dressed for it." Nick wiped his hands on his shirt and then grimaced down at them, lined with apparently permanent stains. He tried to push the hair back off his forehead with a clean patch on his forearm.

Chris started out the door, but when he turned back to pull it closed behind him, he couldn't help but see Nick with his arms wrapped around his knees. He'd probably sit in the dark all damn night if Chris left him there.

"We'll go to Styx," Chris suggested. "It's pretty kinky; maybe they'll think you're trolling for someone with a power tools fetish."

"You just like going there because you sleep with the bartender."

"What? No." Chris hadn't slept with a woman in... God, three or four years, at least. He seemed to have decided to give them up, although he didn't really remember making that decision. "She's just a friend. I mean, I slept with her one time, when we first met. Did you ever...." Chris had no idea why he was doing this, why he was standing here in the dark talking to Nick about his sex life, but shit, the kid was just so...pathetic. Chris had this stupid way of wanting to entertain anyone who looked like they were having a worse Friday night than he was. "Did you ever see a girl after she rides a Harley for the first time? They're either totally freaked out and terrified, or else they're.... They sort of glow. They're all sweaty and, and glowing, and if you put your hands right on this certain spot over their hips, you can still kind of feel the engine. Like aftershocks. Like it got inside them somehow. I don't know. It's hot."

"I had a girlfriend once," Nick said. "She was, uh. She didn't really have a job, and she changed her name like three times while we were together. I don't know, it was weird. I don't really know why we ever.... Her hair smelled good, though. She had this long hair that smelled really good, and she played guitar. She'd sit on the floor in front of the stereo and play along with my old Chicago albums. She was.... I don't know. I liked her, I guess. No, I mean. I did."

"So we should go out and, like, pick up chicks or something," Chris said, and it must have worked, because he got a laugh out of Nick.

"Right," Nick said. "That's what we should do."



Joey knocked on the bedroom door and spoke directly into it, saying, "Baby. Are you almost done yet or what? We have to go." Whatever response he got must have been good enough, although Lance couldn't hear a thing. Joey shook his head helplessly and walked back toward the kitchen, grabbing a bottle of wine from a brass wine-rack that had Christmas lights climbing it like electric blue ivy. "We're gonna be late; we might as well have a drink."

Lance bellied up to Joey's breakfast bar, reaching over his head for one of the wine glasses that hung upside down above it. "Am I going to want to be drunk for this date?"

Joey paused in mid-corkscrew long enough to look up at Lance with shocked and wounded eyes. "Lance, Lance, Lance. This is me you're talking to. Would I set you up with seconds and irregulars?"

"I don't know," Lance said. "Used to be, if the guy was worth anything you'd snap him up for yourself first, and now I'm your pathetic single friend, and you'd probably fix me up with whatever had a pulse and a dick so we can all double-date and be adorable together."



They always went to Styx when Chris was buying, because he didn't have to buy at all; he'd sold his very first Harley to the bartender there, for eight hundred dollars and free drinks until the end of time. She never would have been able to afford it if he'd charged her what it was worth, and he knew how bad she needed it, because he saw her before her first ride on one and he saw her after, and Chris knew how it felt, to be free for the first time in a long time. He fucked her that night, too, but not because it was part of the sale or anything, just because she was all sweaty and glowing when she swung off the seat, the sexiest thing Chris thought he'd ever seen.

She still was, and if Chris were just a little bit more into chicks he might be all kinds of fucked up over her, but as it stood, he was just enough into them to make the view a nice one, the metal in her tongue flashing in the neon light from in between her slick black-inked lips, her vinyl top buckled so tight around her that Chris could see the shape of her nipple rings outlined underneath. "Four Heinekens," he said as he bellied up to the bar. "And what are you wearing under that skirt?"

"I'll give you three and a water," Xtina said. "And wouldn't you like to know."

"Now, you know Howie's not underage; he's just immature."

"He's also here with AJ, and the last time I saw AJ in here, he stopped by to make amends, so. Mooch for your other friends."

Chris glanced back at their table, eyes narrowed. He gave Howie a lot of shit, but they went way back, and Chris tried to look out for the guy. He had no survival skills when it came to men, just throwing his heart away on any loser who was nice to him for two seconds. He'd already abandoned his chair and moved into AJ's lap, his arms laced around AJ's neck, smiling giddily at him. "Every time you think he can't get stupider," Chris said, shaking his head. "Howie's whole social life involves drinking, so of course it makes perfect sense to date an alcoholic. Sometimes I wonder how he musters up the brainpower to keep on breathing."

"Real nice," Xtina said. "I thought you were his best friend?"

"I am," Chris said, and gave her a shark-like grin. "What does *that* tell you?"

"You should take Nick home." The music was so loud out on the floor that Howie couldn't really whisper into Chris's ear; he had to put his mouth there and then speak in a normal voice. "You should take him home and *keep* him. Then we could do this all the time, the four of us."

"Nick works for me."

"You don't know what you're missing," Howie sang into his ear.

"Not really my type," Chris said, trying to shrug with Howie's hands on his shoulders. "Nice kid, great mechanic, but that's it. Anyway, he's got this huge, pathetic crush on Lance Bass."

"Mmm," Howie murmured, and when the music cut off he slipped out of Chris's arms. "Imagine that."




"You're not drunk already, are you? Because you're being weird."

"No, I'm not drunk." But that wouldn't be too hard to fix. Lance downed half his glass of Chardonnay in one swallow. "It's just been a hard week."

Joey made sympathetic clucking noises and refilled his glass. "Well, you'll like him, I promise. And he's strictly a publicist, knows fuck-all about art, so he'll need lots of care and guidance at the show."

"Even I can impress him, huh?"

"Would you stop? This is so not like you, kiddo. I meant, you know a ton about art, and even if you don't hit it off right away, you can talk him through the show and that'll give you a good way to break the ice and come off all sophisticated and sexy. Which you are, and you know it, too."

"Indeed I am," Lance said. "You make a convincing argument."

"Indeed I do. And for your information, Mr. Suspicious, if I were single I would *totally* snap him up for myself. Wanna tell me about your hard week?"

"Not really. It's just -- some boring work stuff, and some stuff with Chris. It's not even really... It's not a big deal. Thank God it's Friday, that's all. Also," he added lightly, "Justin never did call me back. So our torrid affair has been nipped in the bud." Joey purred sympathetically and clinked his glass against Lance's.

"Who didn't call you back?" Lance tried not to jump at the unexpected voice; one of the annoying things about JC was that he went everywhere on silent little cat feet, and he couldn't help but sneak up on you even when he wasn't trying. That, and also how Joey worshiped and adored him and would never, ever dream of cheating on him and had never once in all the years Lance had known him been half as happy as he was with JC. That was a tiny bit annoying, too. "Justin Taylor?"

"Justin Timberlake," Joey corrected. "Baby, you can't wear that. It's black-tie."



"No!" Howie said shrilly, and AJ absently wiped the foam off Howie's upper lip. "The real Justin Timberlake?"

"No," Chris said dryly. "His stunt double."

"I've heard sometimes they do that," Nick said. "Like, Eminem, he has a body double. I guess he needs one for a decoy or something, so he can get away from the paparazzi."

"Saddam Hussein had one of those, too," AJ added, smirking.

"It wasn't a fucking body double," Chris said impatiently. "And it was no big deal. He came in, he looked around, I didn't have what he was looking for. Call the fucking nightly news -- pop star goes shopping."

Howie leaned forward, his elbow jostling his fourth, mostly full glass of beer and sloshing it onto the table. AJ leaned forward with him, just enough to sniff at Howie's hair, which he was wearing long and blown-out these days, in spite of Chris's persistent mockery. "What was he like?" he asked breathlessly.

Chris leaned back in his chair, nursing his own third beer against his chest. "About like you'd think."

"Cute," Nick said easily. "Kind of regular, you know, but cute. I don't know, he looked more regular than he looks in pictures."

"Nick has the poster," Chris said nastily.

"I'd fuck him," AJ said.

"Nice," Chris snapped. "Real nice, with your boyfriend sitting right here. Guess the honeymoon's over, huh?"

"It's okay," Howie said lazily. "I'd fuck him, too."



JC looked down at his black flocked pants and the sea-green silk shirt that clung to his skin except for where the top three and bottom three undone buttons allowed it to fold softly away. "But this is really nice. It's designer. Joey, I bought it just for this show, I can't take it back."

Joey looked helplessly at Lance, who held up his hands. "And you look great," Joey said, "but they just won't let...."

JC smiled and hopped up on the barstool next to Lance's. The Christmas lights flickered over his silk shirt and his pale gold skin and his smile, and he was disgustingly beautiful. He leaned across the bar and kissed Joey sweetly, and when he pulled back he said, "Sure they will. Everyone at the museum knows me; they won't mind."

"Yeah, I guess not," Joey said, dazed. "It's okay." JC put one knee up on the edge of the bar and boosted himself up to get an arm around Joey's neck and kiss him deeper, staying crouched low so that his wayward curls just brushed the glasses hanging above him and made them swing gently. Lance tried to find someplace interesting to look, but it was just Joey's apartment, and it looked maybe a little different with the new lighting scheme, but not much. He was even used to JC's piano now. JC had only been living here for two months, but it was starting to feel normal, and even inevitable, instead of like the insane mistake Lance was sure it was when Joey announced that the unemployed art-groupie that he'd been fucking for a grand total of three hundred and thirty-two *hours* was moving in with him. Lance still wasn't sure what would happen when they got out of that stage where they were having sex all the time, even with their clothes on, even when they weren't touching, but he had to admit that Joey, who'd slept with every man in Pittsburgh, had never looked at even one of them the way he looked at JC. Maybe, after all, that counted for something. Maybe.

"Why would Justin Timberlake call you?" JC asked, startling Lance. He looked back over in time to see JC sliding with boneless grace back down to his stool. "I mean. Not in a mean way, but...."

Lance waved away his apology. "No, I just ran into him when he was in town earlier, and I was going to put him in touch with Chris. He was wanting a motorcycle. I don't think it's going to work out, though."



"No, no, I want to," Nick said, and dropped his wallet when he tried to open it. It was a good thing Chris *wasn't* running a tab for the evening, because it wasn't even ten o'clock yet, and Nick was trying to break him. "I'll just -- kick in -- "

Chris bent down to retrieve the wallet; if Nick bent down, he'd probably hit the floor. "Fucking shut up about it, Carter. I've got it."

"I have -- I'm not *broke,*" he said, and something flared in his eyes, even hotter than the flush in his cheeks. "I can pay my own way sometimes. I'm not rich, but I'm not...broke."

"Yeah, I know," Chris said quietly. The wallet at the end of Nick's chain was full of photos, cramped group shots of kids that all looked vaguely like Nick.

"I have a lot of expenses," Nick said. "I have people to take care of. But I do okay. I could...buy things. I could go places, not Petruccio's, but *places.*"

Fleetingly, Chris covered Nick's hand with his own. "Kid, you're a keeper," he said gruffly. "Don't let anybody say you're not. Even him."

"I love him," Nick blurted, and raised big, sad eyes to Chris, like he was waiting for Chris to tell him why that wasn't as bad as it sounded like it was. "I mean, I know he's a fucking snob."

"He's not," Chris sighed. "He just wants to be."

"But I love him anyway. And he has feelings for me, too, if he'd just -- if he'd just fucking *admit* -- if he'd even give it a chance. If he'd just give me a *chance.*"

"You and me should hook up," Chris said, and he meant it kind of sarcastically, like it was his own stupid way of saying, I know exactly how you feel. But Nick looked up at him, soft, blurry eyes and floppy hair and everything laid bare and childishly unsubtle on his face, and Chris felt his fingers tighten so hard around his beer glass he thought it might break.

"Okay," Nick said, and Chris thought, *Shit.*

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

JC frowned a little, the way he always did when Chris' name came up. Lance hadn't managed to pry the whole story out of either of them yet, but when he'd told Chris that Joey had fallen for some guy he'd met on a museum tour who looked like Orlando Bloom and thought modern art was the most exciting career a person could have, better than being a heart surgeon or the President of the United States, Chris had rolled his eyes and said, "Oh, well, that would be JC Chasez, then." And when Lance first mentioned Chris' name around JC, JC started to fiddle with his hands behind his back, and said, "Tell him I said hi," while looking at the carpet. Lance didn't pass that on. Pittsburgh was, in all too many ways, too small a town for Lance's tastes.

To break the tension, Joey said, "Lance is having some blind-date nerves. Tell him everything's gonna be good, will you?"

"Oh, yeah, we're going to have fun!" JC said brightly, reaching out to squeeze Lance's forearm. "Wade is fabulous! And he's totally your type."

"And what is my type?"

"You know," JC said, making a complicated gesture with his hand. "He's -- tall."

"He's *tall,*" Lance repeated. And people called *him* the shallow one.

But JC nodded seriously, as if he'd just said something terribly instructive. "He's very tall, and he's kind of -- intense. You know, driven. Like, he can overwhelm you, just because he knows himself so well, he knows exactly what he likes. That's what made it not work with you and Joey, you dig? Because you loved each other so much, but Joey hasn't ever known what he wants." It was a cruel and ridiculous thing to say, but JC leaned back with a wide, sweet smile, his cheek next to Joey's cheek, and they made it look romantic somehow, the way Joey's big hands came up to circle JC's arms, the way Joey rolled his eyes and how their smiles touched each other at the corners.

"I know I want *you,*" Joey growled playfully, and shook JC like a dog worrying at his favorite toy until JC was squirming and laughing. "Who loves you, honey-bunny, huh?"

"You do," JC breathed out, and his smile seemed improbably to grow even wider.

Lance looked away, staring at the door as if he could make his date knock on it *right now.*



He didn't know what it made him feel, kissing Nick. It made him feel -- drunk. Short. Confused. A little bit turned on, yeah, because Nick had these huge hands that were constantly tugging on him, wrapping into his hair or pressing on his thighs and the small of his back like he couldn't pull Chris close enough to him, and that was...nice. Just the feel of someone else's body against his, someone else's warmth, was so unusual lately that it was a relief.

*Sex,* some part of his brain was repeating urgently. He could get *laid* tonight, and wasn't that worth whatever awkwardness he was feeling now, whatever embarrassment they might have to deal with tomorrow morning? Chris hooked his fingers in Nick's wide belt and slid his other hand up Nick's sweat-damp side and tried not to think anything except *sex, sex, sex, sex.*

"Come on, come on," Nick mumbled into his mouth as he tugged on Chris's clothes. "Let's go."

Chris pulled back enough to breathe, and to ignore Howie waving excitedly out of the corner of his eye. "Come on," he repeated, keeping his fingers anchored around Nick's belt. "If we're gonna do this, let's do this. Fuck it."

Styx didn't have a back room, but Chris had never let that stop him in the past. Nobody stopped them as they ducked around the bar and opened the door to the wine cellar. The single bulb over the stairs was already lit, and with Nick standing a step below him, Chris at least didn't feel quite as short anymore, although drunk, confused, and turned-on were all elbowing each other, jockeying for that extra space in his head. He put his hands on Nick's face, and Nick groaned as he opened his mouth wider under Chris's, his big hands spreading across Chris's ribs.

"No," Chris heard as he worked Nick's belt open, and dimly it occurred to him that Nick sounded pretty girly.

"Shit," Nick whispered, in an entirely different voice, and Chris pried his eyes open. All he could see was the smooth skin of Nick's cheek, so he closed his eyes again and pressed Nick against the wall, biting softly at his jaw even as his brain was processing. Oh, okay -- not Nick's voice. Someone else.... "We have to," Nick whispered into his ear again. "Stop..."

"Shut up," Chris whispered back. The button on Nick's jeans didn't seem to fit through the buttonhole, so Chris just lowered the zipper instead and pressed the heel of his hand against the thin fabric of the underwear covering Nick's cock. This was the worst idea Chris had ever fucking had, and it was too late to take it back now, so what the hell. What did it matter anyway? The way things were going at the shop, Nick wouldn't even be his employee for much longer.

"I won't," another voice said -- definitely a female voice, sharp and bitchy, strained. "I won't, you don't mean it."

"I do mean it." Xtina's voice -- Chris recognized it now, although he'd never heard her sound so rattled. So frightened. "Go away, get out of here. You can't be here-- " Her voice cut off suddenly, and Chris had to turn his head to confirm his suspicions. Nick didn't object, maybe because he wasn't slackening the pressure of his hand against Nick's hard-on.

Chris didn't think he knew the chick. She wasn't tall, but taller than Xtina, and he couldn't see either of their faces through the curtain of her long hair, ironed flat to within an inch of its life. He glanced back at Nick, who was watching the women in the wine cellar too, and he flashed a bemused smile at Chris. Chris shrugged; there wasn't usually a crowd down here. How could he have known?

"You can't tell me where to be," she said when she pulled away from their kiss, pushing her hair back roughly. She looked like she belonged at Miss Fit's or one of the other dykier bars on South Liberty, with her combat boots and her camouflage pants and her buffed arms bared by a blue and black tiger-striped tank top, and there was a backpack by her feet -- not at all the kind of girl you usually found in Styx, the kind who paid quite a lot to look as cheap as they did in vinyl and tiny strips of miniskirt. "You can't tell me what to do, and don't give me that for my own good crap, you're not my fucking mom. You wanted me to come, don't act like you didn't want to see me again."

"God, shut up," Xtina said, and her voice cracked badly, nothing like the cool bitch on a bike that Chris knew. Nick began to fidget restlessly against the wall, and Chris made another attempt at the button on his jeans without being able to tear his eyes away from the scene going on below him. They were kissing again, silent and frozen in place but leaning into each other at the lips as if it would kill them to separate. But they did, and Xtina put her hands over her eyes and said, "You're just a stupid little girl, okay? You don't know what I want. You don't know anything. We could lose our fucking liquor license just for you being in here right now, did you know *that*?"

The girl grabbed Xtina by the arms and spun her around, so that she had to put her hands up and grab one of the wine shelves for balance. Two bottles slipped off the edge and shattered on the floor, drowning out the sound of Nick's startled gasp. "I do know," she said, alternating her words with rough, open-mouthed kisses against her spine, the smooth skin on her back, the dusting of freckles over her shoulders. "I know, we both want, and you know I'm not, not a little girl, how good it was, I wanted to see you, I didn't care."

"That's the problem, Avril," she said, almost managing a stern tone even as the girl ran her hands up the front of Xtina's thighs and underneath her skirt. "I do care. I'm not seventeen, I don't get the luxury of not giving a shit about the future."

Chris let his kiss trail off, so they were standing quietly, pressed against each other with Nick's lower lip between his teeth and the words thundering through Chris's whole body. The luxury of not giving a shit, which was exactly what he was looking for right now, but how stupid, how fucking stupid. He was thirty-three years old, old enough to know what *morning after* meant, old enough to know that adding new regrets didn't erase the previous ones, old enough for more than this.

"I can't leave," the girl said, and it sounded like she might be crying, unless it was just the way her voice was muffled against Xtina's shoulder. "I can't, I'm out of my mind whenever I go away from you. I know I don't mean shit to you and it doesn't even matter, you're still all I think about."

Chris watched them for a minute, the way they rolled their hips in the same rhythm, the way they raked their palms over each other's clothes. It was graceful and raw and sexy, and most of all it was something to look at besides the desolate expression on Nick's face. He didn't deserve to have Chris prying into his emotions even accidentally, the poor bastard.

Another wine bottle smashed on the floor while Nick was fastening up his pants, and he glanced up at Chris with a weak smile. Chris reached up and cuffed him on the side of the face to show no hard feelings.