Sushi
by Cecilia
JC hated it at the beginning, maybe even as much as Lance.
Actually, Joey liked it before anyone else, which was a little weird at
first for the rest of them, to find that Joey was suddenly the
sophisticated one. But after all he had grown up in New York, so maybe it
was only to be expected one night a year in, when it was his turn to pick
the restaurant, instead of voting for hamburgers or Italian or even Greek,
he said, "Sushi." And they had a rule about picking restaurants, so within
an hour Chris, who was the only one old enough since the moms were there,
was coughing on sake, and everyone else was staring at the menu with
expressions ranging from curiosity to despair.
"But what am I supposed to eat?" Lance whispered under his breath,
while
Justin was asking Joey things like what unagi was, and Joey was telling
him it was eels. JC heard him, even though he wasn't supposed to, and
grinned helplessly across the table.
And half an hour after that, Joey was happily tossing back strips of eel
and sea urchins and rice rolls dusted in tiny orange balls that the
waitress said were fish eggs, "like caviar," which JC knew Lance probably
wouldn't eat either, while Justin nibbled delicately at a platter of
sashimi and Chris worked his way methodically through a clear soup with
pieces of fish in it. JC didn't eat very much, but he didn't need very
much, and he figured that Lance would be up for pizza later that night.
They did it again a few weeks later (after Justin had had a fight with
Lance about something dumb, like who got the bathroom first in the
morning; Justin was fifteen) and again a few weeks after that, because
they were in New York and staying only a couple of blocks away from Joey's
"favorite restaurant ever, I mean, they have the best stuff, and the guy
will make it right in front of you and tell you all about where it came
from," and then it was sort of a habit, a tradition. If something happened
more than twice they tended to hang on to it, even if nobody liked it very
much, because at least it was a regular thing.
Justin and Chris both liked it soon anyway. They both liked pretty much
all kinds of food, though in different ways and for totally opposite
reasons, JC thought. Chris ate what you gave him and liked it, just
because, and he wasn't going to turn down a meal because it wasn't what he
was used to. Justin was precocious; he actually appreciated food, like
Joey did. He'd try almost anything once, no matter how weird, and the odds
were that he'd like it and do it again. He kept a list in the back of a
notebook with good restaurants in different cities. Justin was
sophisticated at fifteen in ways JC thought he might never be.
That was mostly why JC liked it, in the end. He felt like a stupid kid,
sitting in Japanese restaurants every three weeks watching Justin and Joey
— Joey, for God's sake, and Justin who had skinnier legs than he did —
comparing the merits of yellowfin and bigeye and scooping up rice neatly
with their chopsticks. And that was another thing, the chopsticks, he kept
dropping things with them, and it didn't help that Justin had barely
needed to be taught. It wasn't fair, he thought to himself, struggling
with a pickle in the appetizer dish; in Bowie Asian food was Chinese,
covered in iridescent orange sauce, and it came with little plastic forks.
He would bet his entire salary that not one person on his block could
define "kappa maki," if pressed, or find Japan on a map.
But when it became clear that it was three to two, and Japanese was going
to be a tradition, and that he had a choice between doing what Lance was
doing (essentially, sticking to tempura, asking for forks, and glaring
resentfully at whoever had actually picked the restaurant that night) or
learning to live with it, he figured he'd better take the latter. Lance,
after all, had the advantage of being just seventeen, and he was twenty,
and he couldn't sulk forever, though his resolve nearly failed the first
time a waitress whisked away his miso soup and replaced it with things
that looked, unsurprisingly, raw. But he reminded himself that if he could
play the piano he could use goddamn chopsticks, and if he'd been eating
fast food all his life his system could probably handle this, and just
kind of went for it without thinking about it too much. That turned out to
be the trick, really; don't overanalyze and it works out fine. He could
probably apply that to a lot of things about his life, he thought, and he
couldn't tell whether the edge on the thought was bitter or amused.
It sort of surprised him when after a while he started to actually enjoy
it, when he realized that his reaction to Justin's excited announcement of
a new sushi bar in town was anticipation and not resignation. He guessed
he might catch up after all, and for his twenty-first birthday he gave
himself the present of the shocked look on Lance's face when he ordered
baby octopi. He liked the slide of it at the back of his throat. He said
as much that night in the hotel room they were sharing when Lance, who had
been unusually restless in the other bed, finally turned over and asked
him how he could eat...that.
Even after a year and a half of it, once or twice a month, Lance still
hated sushi night. He'd stopped complaining about it pretty soon after JC
had taken the plunge, which didn't surprise JC too much because Lance
wasn't, typically, a whiner; especially without JC backing him up, he'd
sucked it up and dealt. He even smiled at the waitresses, although it was
a pinched smile, and he carefully averted his eyes from everyone else's
food. As if to make up for it he would sometimes pick Ethiopian or
Malaysian or something equally exotic when it was his turn and they were
in a city big enough; as long as there was no seafood and everything was
cooked. JC suspected him of not really liking those either, mainly because
of how happy he always seemed after a vacation, when he told them about
the barbecues and church suppers he'd been to at home, but at least he
usually finished everything on his plate.
JC figured that for the rest of his life he might think of it as The Year
of the Lawsuit, capital letters blazing in Miami-colored neon lights. It
wasn't only that for that time the case loomed large in everything they
did, the first thing on their minds in the morning and the last at night,
taking over their lives until fine grey print swam in front of their faces
even during meals, and behind their eyelids when they tried to sleep. It
was...it was...it was that afterwards, although Justin still told
reporters that his favorite color was baby blue, he now owned three shirts
in a deep burgundy red, the color of decades-old wine. It was that Joey
went out one night in early November and came back with a girl who wasn't
Kelly, and after that, although he laughed as much as ever and was
basically the very same as always, he started making excuses when JC
wanted to go to Mass on Sunday mornings. It was that Chris sanded down
his
rough edges, let Justin win the occasional video game, no longer caught JC
offguard at the worst possible moments and tickled him viciously until he
cried. And on the day they settled Lance came to him, twenty years old and
spiky blond, and asked him how he'd learned to eat sushi.
He shrugged when he did it, eyes as lost as they'd been the first night in
Seattle's cheapest Japanese restaurant, or wherever the hell they'd been,
said something about you couldn't be a kid forever, reached out to fiddle
with the molding on the door. JC looked at him and thought no, guess
not
and said "Yeah, sure," because not knowing how to use chopsticks, and
watching Justin eat raw salmon with gusto, had sucked. And Lance was as
old now as he had been, then.
They went out to lunch by themselves, not in New York where they couldn't
have gotten away with it, but in LA where every third person at the sushi
joint was a celebrity anyway, and nobody would bother them. They got a
private room anyway, took off their shoes and sat next to each other, even
though there was plenty of space on the other side of the low table, so
that JC could put his hands over Lance's on the chopsticks, holding his
fingers carefully in place two-thirds of the way down.
Lance attacked liking sushi with grim determination, the same way he
tackled new dance routines. The immersion method was familiar to JC from
years of long pre-tour weeks spent in studios, in basements, in kitchens,
in clubs, in green rooms, by the pool, behind the couch while they all
watched TV, any place Lance was for more than three minutes, really, and
he would get up and start walking through the latest choreography. Before
they got the bus, he'd sat in the front seat of the van, and JC, who'd
done a lot of the driving, could hear feet tapping out rhythms on the
floor behind him.
So when Lance dragged him out again two days later for dinner, even though
he'd been planning to plug the keyboard in and then, for once, get a full
eight hours, he wasn't really surprised to find them in front of a place
whose facade featured enormous carved kanji. Lance held his own chopsticks
this time, although he still occasionally dropped bits of rice, and JC
found himself wishing that Lance hadn't learned to use them quite so fast,
months faster than he had, and wondering if it was jealousy, or something
else.
He called Lance up at the end of the week and they went out again, and
again when Lance got home from a quick side-trip to New York, and again
one day when Chris was taking Dani out for lunch and Justin and Joey were
laying down a complicated set of harmonies, and before he could make the
right turn for the cafeteria Lance grabbed the back of his t-shirt and
pulled him down the stairs to the garage instead, saying "If I never see
the fucking canteen again it will be too soon." They were twenty minutes
late getting back to the session. Chris raised an eyebrow when they came
in, and JC overheard him asking Justin later where the fuck those two were
always going off to, these days. He winced and refused to go out for a
week, but Lance twisted his arm behind his back outside the rehearsal room
one day, laughing at him and telling him he needed to work out more, and
he couldn't say no, so he went.
Pretty soon he was almost sick of it, almost ready to tell Lance to give
up, they could switch to Indian or something, or at least get bowls of
noodle soup, whatever. But although Lance got a hard look in his eyes just
before he closed them and stabbed the menu blind to see what he was going
to eat that day, his mouth pursed less and less every time he saw what it
was. And it was kind of worth it, anyway, worth that he felt a little
queasy himself at the sight of yet more jewelbright fish, just because he
was the only one who got to watch as Lance used the chopsticks more and
more competently to lift it to his lips.
He could feel a new way of seeing Lance pushing at the inside of his
skull, a little Athena who'd been hiding there for months or years and now
was pressing the boundary, searching for a weak spot, wanting to be free.
In the meantime he settled for half-articulated dark cliches which held,
after all, a grain of truth, while he waited for what was behind them to
flower, watching the way the tips of Lance's hair caught the artificial
sunbeams of a photographer's lights.
There was a mini-tour in March, interviews and charity appearances and
photo shoots while they geared up for the real thing, and they were no
longer allowed to actually go out to eat in New York unless it was planned
a couple of days in advance. No time really, anyway. So for lunch Joey
called up his favorite restaurant in the world and a little later a kid
came over on a bike with an enormous box in an insulated container, and
they all sprawled on JC's bed and ate until they were stuffed, all except
Lance, who was meeting with an MTV exec about a country special they
were
planning for mid-summer.
JC's phone rang an hour later, piercing through his headphone fog. Lance
needed a shower "desperately, JC, I feel like I have half of the concrete
in Manhattan painted all over me, and I know that you have the leftovers,
and they're all gone to that — thing — press conference, you know, at the
Ritz, so bring it on in like twenty minutes, OK? I need the practice and
you need the break. Get Dre to let you in."
Lance was already dressed when JC knocked, though, bare feet and a tshirt
with something dirty in German on it that Joey had gotten him for his
seventeenth birthday, and khakis because Lance hated jeans. His eyes
actually lit up when he saw the box in JC's hands, and he grabbed it away.
"I'm fucking starving," he said, tearing at the tape that JC had carefully
reattached to keep it as fresh as he could. "They didn't have anything but
fruit and coffee, they're always such cheap bastards there, I need some
protein — ah." Joey and Chris had really done a number on the
sashimi
earlier, but there were still a few pieces left, and a lot of California
and Philly rolls, and some vegetarian stuff. JC had gotten hungry again,
too, so he pulled the chopsticks out of his back pocket and they settled
onto the bed in companionable silence.
JC's room had been dark, the heavy curtains drawn against the screams from
outside that floated all the way up to the twenty-second floor. Lance had
a room on the west side of the hotel, though, away from the street, and
the late-afternoon sun was streaming through the windows. One of the
bodyguards must have made a joke in the hallway, because there was
laughter, a rumble even deeper than Lance's, but it was so far away that
it only really registered as background noise, though JC could feel the
residual happiness wash over him. The room was still and quiet, and he was
warm and slow and liquid like a cat from the pool of sunlight on the bed,
and he was so peaceful, the play of muscle as a California roll moved from
box to mouth just at the corner of his vision, so relaxed and that was
when he slipped, when everything clicked into place, and he felt so
stupid, clueless, but Buddha had pulled the veil aside and oh.
So he must have been watching a little too intently, just then, because
when Lance looked up he wasn't quite fast enough to jerk his gaze away,
back to the picked-over box beside them, and their eyes met like a shock,
and that was when Lance actually lost his grip, the roll falling onto the
bedspread between them. It was closer to JC's knees, though, and he was
still slow, drugged from the sunlight and the heat and the motion of
Lance's arms, just a split second too slow, just long enough that it still
seemed so natural to pick it up with his own chopsticks, lean over a
little to hold it out to Lance.
Natural, anyway, til he'd done it, and the piece of maki was hovering near
Lance's lips, and Lance was staring at him, and he thought "oh shit, oh
fuck, what the fuck?" although really it was more incoherent than that,
more a blur of panic at the back of his head, though just behind his eyes
there was a space thick and quiet and sunlit, as still as the room. His
cheeks were burning so hard they were cold and he imagined little red
spots like clown makeup. Lance's gaze slowly shifted down to the maki in
JC's chopsticks, though, and after a long moment he brought his own up and
delicately plucked the roll away, put it in his mouth, chewed, swallowed,
his eyes still focused somewhere near JC's chopsticks. The back of JC's
throat was dry. He was still leaning forward.
Their mouths were so close.
"I was thinking," Lance said abruptly, breaking into the silence. "I read
this thing somewhere. That you're not really supposed to eat sushi with
chopsticks, it's just an American thing. Japanese people just use their
hands." He wasn't meeting JC's eyes anymore.
"Oh," JC said, wondering what the fuck that was supposed to mean, and if
Lance would try to come after him if he left, and if Lance would hit him
if he tried to move closer instead.
"So," Lance said. He put down his chopsticks and picked up a piece of
kappa maki in his fingers and ate it, his eyes firmly on JC's shoulder;
picked up another, his eyes flickering up to JC's and over to the door and
up again, and placed it against JC's half-parted lips, and then, and then,
as JC opened them and took the roll into his mouth, his eyes locked on
Lance's and his hands reaching out and the front of his brain starting to
catch up to him, trying not to think too much, then, then Lance reached
out his other hand and picked a translucent slice of ginger from the box,
put it on JC's lips and dragged it down his jaw and down his neck, let it
glide to rest on the bone at the neck of his tshirt, and JC gasped a
little, watching, mesmerized, as Lance rubbed the ginger across his skin,
right in the hollow between bone and neck, he would smell like it all
night, and Lance brought it up to his mouth. "Oh," he said, caught halfway
between a statement of fact, and a sigh.
"Mmhm," Lance said, and ripped the piece of ginger in half with his teeth,
resting part of it over JC's lips until he opened them and rolled it
delicately around the back of his mouth. It left a sweet taste everywhere.
JC thought he might have smiled, then, half-smile at the ceiling and eyes
on Lance's eyes, trailed a finger across the short hair at the back of
Lance's neck, and Lance leaned down and licked his collarbone, where the
ginger had been before.
At that point there was a confused burst of sound and light and touch, and
then "lube," Lance panted, hanging half off the bed and digging through
his bag. He was breathless but laughing when he said, slicking up a
finger, "cause if you think I'm gonna, like, put wasabi inside you or
something, no," and a little later no longer laughing but still breathless
as he whispered, right against JC's ear, "I could learn to love this
stuff."