Touched
by Cecilia
JC and Justin were always draping themselves all over the others, even
from the very beginning. It was about the first thing Lance noticed, when
he walked in the door the day he came from Mississippi: Joey sitting on
the couch, feet on the coffee table in front of him (Lance's mom would
have killed him; Lance keeps his feet on the floor to this day) and
Justin, lounging back against Joey's shoulder as he talked to JC across
the room. JC was on his own that day, but in the weeks that followed, when
they spent nearly every waking minute together, intoxicated with some
indefinable rightness, JC was on somebody all the time. He was jumping on
Joey's shoulders and demanding a piggyback ride, or curled up practically
on Chris's lap, or stroking Justin's hair. Honestly, it had kind of
freaked him out, because didn't they know how they looked?
When he came into the living room one day after about six weeks and
found JC kissing Chris, Chris's tongue in JC's mouth, JC's hands under
Chris's shirt, he figured that JC probably did.
But Justin: Justin just didn't understand. He didn't get it at all,
probably, Lance thought, didn't even notice when people at record
companies and dance studios and restaurants looked a little askance at him
wrapping an arm around Lance. Lance noticed, though, and always pulled
away, and wasn't sure how to explain when Justin looked at him, hurt; how
he could say without upsetting Justin totally that in Clinton you got
called names if you did stuff like that too much. Names his mother didn't
even want Lance to know, though he'd heard them from the time he was a
little kid. He came back to Orlando from their first vacation walking a
little stiff on the left side, and almost fell over when Justin bounced up
in the airport and leapt on him, tried to push Justin off, without a lot
of success, felt like crying with relief when JC took Justin by the scruff
of his neck and put him in a headlock, knocking him to the floor, and
Justin forgot about Lance in his quest for revenge, which lasted all the
way down the terminal to where Joey was waiting with the van. Later on JC,
looking very serious, pulled Lance into the bathroom of Chris's apartment
and made him take his shirt off, bit his lip at the bruise. Lance sat
miserably on the closed toilet while he rooted around in the cupboard for
the liniment they used after dancing. "Does your mom know?" he offered
neutrally, back still turned.
Lance shrugged, then remembered that JC couldn't see. "Nah," he said.
"It's just. um. kids I know. From the neighborhood. not a big deal. Isn't
the first time, won't be the last."
JC turned around then and tipped Lance's chin up, made him look into
clear blue eyes. "Hey," he said. "Not the first time, but maybe the last.
Pretty soon nobody's gonna be touching us."
Lance nodded, because he seemed to be expecting something, and also
because it did feel weirdly safe back with the other four, felt like life
opening up right in front of his feet.
"I wanna talk to you about Justin," JC said a few minutes later
when he was kneeling on the tile floor, rubbing the salve into Lance's
side. He was concentrating hard on the bruise. Lance didn't say anything,
so after a couple of seconds JC went on. "I mean. I notice you pushing him
off, you don't want him to touch you, and I know why you're doing it, but
I thought. Like, Justin had a really different childhood, you know? I
mean, right from when he was practically a baby he was in show business.
And then on the Club, it was like everyone was brothers and sisters, just
hugging and cuddling and stuff all the time, because we were the only ones
that really knew what it was like. Some of our parents were around, some
of them weren't, and we took care of each other, and nobody was afraid to
show it. Nobody. cared. Justin, he doesn't even think it could ever be any
other way, he's like really innocent in some ways, and he's really young,
and nobody wants to tell him about it, and he. doesn't mean it the way it
comes off. So don't, you know, let him get to you, OK?" He finished
working the stuff in and looked up anxiously, still crouched on the
floor.
Lance gave him a little smile and nodded, got up and pulled JC to his
feet too, put his shirt back on. JC leaned against the door and watched
him, a tiny frown still creasing his forehead, and finally said, "I can't
really tell Justin to lay off. But. I don't have to touch you if you don't
want me to. And Chris and Joey, I can tell them too, if it would make it
easier." And even though it was what Lance wanted, not to feel so
damn self-conscious when they were around other people, other people who
frowned at them and whispered, he found himself shaking his head and
practically flinging himself towards JC. It was maybe the first time he'd
ever initiated anything like this, and JC, although his eyes widened, just
wrapped his arms around Lance and hugged back hard, rocking them gently
from side to side. Kissed his forehead. Took him back out to the others.
In the end the conversation in the bathroom didn't change anything, but
it made everything better. It was gradual, but Lance learned to smile and
let it happen, though he never quite believed that photographers and even
Lou not only accepted but begged for it, begged for them to do what Lance
wanted to so much, what he knew perfectly well it was dangerous to
try.
After the No Strings tour was over, Lance went back to Mississippi for
two months and didn't see any of them the whole time. He bought a house
and decorated it himself and moved in, complete with state of the art
security system because he had vowed to himself when he was twelve that
he
was not going to be driven away from his hometown, that one day he would
live there and not only be safe but feel it, and it was time to keep the
promise because God knew when he'd next be able to try. And though he
missed them terribly, he enjoyed it too, the peace and quiet he couldn't
remember ever having had in Clinton, a silence broken only by the friends
he invited over, who never touched him unless he asked.
When he went back to Orlando it was frankly shocking, to walk into
Justin's mother's living room and see Justin on Chris's lap.
They hadn't changed as they got older. It was like, sealed in their
unhealthy hermetic little bubble of bodyguards and stylists and spin
doctors, they'd simply ceased to age, not in body but in mind. Lance
thought he was maybe the only one who'd even noticed, as if missing the
last two months had jolted him out of something crucial, an endless amber
timewarp where their minds were perfectly preserved.
It was all right for JC, who had started small at nineteen and at
twenty-five was positively fragile, to go on as he always had, napping
against Chris's chest or making the trip from dressing room to stage slung
over Joey's shoulder; against their stockier bodies he still looked
perfectly natural, in fact except for the longer hair mostly just like he
really always had. The six years of carbohydrates and dancing that had
taken Justin from fourteen to twenty, though. He was outsized now, the
giant sitting on Jack, arms and legs dangling off Chris's compact body.
Lance thought it looked really uncomfortable, for both of them, but
neither of them seemed to have noticed. Later that evening, when they all
settled down to watch TV in silence while they melded Lance back into the
group, Justin got up to get drinks, and when he came back he flopped
backwards over the sofa to land partially across Lance's shoulders, and it
wasn't actually so much that it was uncomfortable, it was just that he was
too big. Nobody ever expected Backstreet to jump all over each other all
the time, Lance thought as he tried to shove Justin off gently. Justin
just pressed back though, and Lance could feel the new stubble on his head
against his hand.
It wasn't that Justin wasn't different, actually, Lance thought; he
was, he just didn't understand it. The touching had subtlely changed. He
used to do things that could only be described as snuggling; Lance
remembered JC whispering to Chris, once, when Justin was curled up asleep
against his side in some limousine, that he wished he'd been as easy to
love when he was sixteen. And it had been true; Justin was easy to love,
had always been so, and that was why nobody had ever wanted to tell him to
quit touching Lance. Nobody wanted him to get less sweet.
It had happened, though, just the same. When Justin draped himself
across Lance now, at a photo shoot or watching a movie or at the sidelines
of a basketball game, he smiled with the same open sunniness he'd always
had, but the heat that used to be random adolescent energy had alchemized
into something tenser, something that made Lance wild to get away, so that
he practically vibrated with the effort of keeping the harsh words in. He
caught JC looking at him every now and then and remembered the talk in the
bathroom, the bruise they'd never mentioned again, and tried to regain the
equilibrium he'd had for years now. It didn't work very well, especially
since JC and Chris kept kicking Justin off their bus, and Joey was almost
always either asleep or on the phone to Kelly and Brianna. That meant that
Lance had to spend a lot of time losing game after game on the Playstation
with Justin, because when he sat down at the kitchen table with his laptop
it usually only took Justin about ten minutes to get bored on his own, and
he would slither up Lance's side from the floor and hang over his shoulder
and want to know what he was doing until Lance went to sit with him in
front of the TV. Back to back, Justin insisted, because it was always cold
on the bus, and Lance counted the minutes until he could be alone at the
hotel.
He could still remember the first time that the touching had come
completely naturally. They had been served with the papers for the lawsuit
on a rainy Friday in November, and three weeks later
Chris had ordered
pizza. Lance and JC had been sitting in the hallway, JC gripping Lance's
hand until the bones ground together, but they'd gone in to the living
room when Chris called to find a scene of desperate normalcy. Justin had
been wrestling Joey on the floor, tussling for control of Joey's slice,
both of them panting and laughing and JC had shot a quick look at Lance
and dived in, pulling Justin's curls and getting red sauce on the end of
his chin. Lance had just dropped onto the couch, watching, but two minutes
later when Justin reached out and grabbed his ankle, he'd gone right ahead
and slid onto the floor.
He knew exactly why his comfort zone had changed again. He wished he
didn't. When Justin walked by him in the quiet room one day and ruffled
his hair, he almost punched him; and when Justin lay across him watching
movies late at night like they were little girls at a slumber party, the
other three piled together on the opposite bed, Lance felt something
coiling deep inside him and he wanted to die.
When the tour was over, though, no matter how much he'd thought he
wanted to, he found he couldn't face going away again. He'd meant to do
it, to hole up in Mississippi at least until the movie premiered, but at
the last minute he found himself inviting them all back to Clinton for a
week of late-September weather. He'd never had them there before; six
years and they'd never been to his home.
They invaded every corner of his house, which suddenly seemed a lot
smaller than it had when he'd bought it, even though Chris and JC were
sharing a guest room. He spent three days making sure people had enough
beer and towels and, since he hadn't had either the time or the desire to
come back in the last eight months, that the cleaning people hadn't made
off with his signed Michael Jackson CDs. On the fourth day they went into
town and walked along the main street, looking in the shop windows, and
when Justin draped an arm over his shoulder to point out a nice jacket in
one of them, Lance felt eyes on the back of his head and remembered
vividly every reason why he'd never had them here before.
"Get off," he hissed, and shook Justin away, walking ahead
quickly to catch up with JC and Chris, who by some unspoken agreement
were
standing with a good two feet of space between them in front of the music
store. He didn't look back to see if Justin was following.
That afternoon he found JC eating red Jell-O in the kitchen.
"Gross, JC," Lance said, standing in front of the open cabinet. There
wasn't anything there he wanted. "I mean, boiled horse's hooves. yuck." JC
smiled beatifically. The stuff was staining his lips a deep red color,
like lipstick but less waxy. Lance sighed and dug a spoon out of the
utensil drawer.
"So," JC said, when they'd been sitting there in silence for a while,
methodically going through the Jell-O. Lance raised an eyebrow.
"Justin?" JC prompted.
"What about him," Lance said, but the Jell-O felt slimy in the back of
his throat. He hadn't thought JC had seen.
"He's not fifteen anymore, Lance," JC said. His eyes were slanted
towards the window; Lance knew Justin was out there making Joey watch
him
practice his free throw, but he refused to look.
"I know that," he said. "I was beginning to think I was the only one
who did."
"No," JC said. "He knows too."
"Oh," Lance said.
"I think I'm going to sell the house," he added after a minute when
they'd finished the Jell-O. JC sucked on his spoon and got up to rinse the
bowl out.
"That's probably a good thing," he said. "Time to move on, y'know."
On the fifth night they went down to watch a movie in the theater in
the basement and Justin, apparently, didn't like his seat, because when he
came back from a bathroom break he sat half in Lance's, too big to really
share so his feet wound up on JC's lap two seats down, and suddenly Lance
had had enough, that was absolutely it, and he half stood up and
dumped Justin on his ass on the floor.
"Fuck," Joey said, scrambling up to see. Lance didn't pay attention to
him, though; Justin's eyes were big and hurt from the floor. Lance didn't
care.
"Fuck, Justin," he said, and thought distantly that he never
raised his voice. "You're too big for this. You're just - grow up,
OK? You're too old." He was breathing hard.
Justin held his eyes for a moment longer, then shook his head and
gathered himself up neatly, uncoiling to his full height. "Guys," he said,
but JC was already half out of the room, Chris with him, Joey half a step
behind and looking anxiously over his shoulder. Lance dropped back again
into his chair and closed his eyes so he couldn't see Justin anymore,
half-blocking the movie that was still blaring on in full color behind
him. There was silence suddenly and his eyelids got dark; when he opened
his eyes Justin was only a shadow in the half-light from the hall, but the
highlights in his hair were flickering gold.
"Justin," he said, painfully.
"Lance," Justin said, seriously, quietly. "You're not sixteen. Nobody
you know anymore would care."
"You think," Lance said grimly, but he could feel tears pricking at the
back of his eyes. He shut them again to keep the wetness back, and after a
moment felt a hand on his hair, fingers twisting slightly, Justin stroking
over and over again. He didn't move, just pressed his head up a little bit
into Justin's hand, and a short time later there was a heavy weight in his
lap, holding him down in the chair, and lips on his hair instead of
hands.
With thanks to Emmy and Dacey