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Early Days
by Shine
The hotel was damp and old, with layers of encrusted dirt on the windows and cracked, stained porcelain in the bathroom. The ventilator wheezed on and off every ten minutes with the roar of an airliner taking off, and it had taken Chris almost two hours to realize that the temperature controls were fucked up so that "cold" equaled "hot." The thermostat was now set to approximately Antarctic conditions, and the room was finally warming up a bit.
Chris flopped back on the bed, the covers cold and heavy over his legs, feeling exhaustion steal over him in a hazy tide. Four days, four concerts, four different cities. Their next free day was almost three weeks off, and then a month more of touring. He was starving in his usual post-show way, but food in these places was always perilous venture--usually atrocious, and always way too greasy. Plus, the way he was feeling, he'd fall asleep hours before room service ever arrived.
Joey was already asleep, a long lump breathing quietly under the blankets in the other bed. Joey almost never woke up once he was asleep; he was the deepest sleeper Chris had ever seen. He and JC had done a Rambo marathon one night a few weeks ago, watching Sly Stallone grunt his way around jungles in scratchily-dubbed German, and Joey had slept from the cave scene in First Blood until the mine field in Rambo III without even stirring. JC and Chris had spent most of the second movie and all of the third turning the volume up louder and louder and watching Joey blithely sleep on with fascination.
On the other hand, Joey only really needed five or six hours a night, and was often the first person of all of them up in the morning. Chris, who'd never been a morning person in his life, was bemused, but liked it. Especially since Joey would sneak down to the continental breakfasts in the morning and grab all the best pastries, bringing them back up to share before anyone else was even out of bed.
JC was still in the bathroom, finishing his shower and singing. JC always sang in the shower, even after they'd performed and no one else wanted to even talk, let alone sing. Chris never knew what he'd sing, either--tonight, it had been some earlier Madonna, Tori Amos, Led Zeppelin, Beatles. Something that might have been Handel. O Holy Night, even though it was March. JC was pretty wierd.
Right now it was Elton John, The Way You Look Tonight, with the words muffled every now and then when. Occasionally he struck out on his own, adding riffs and ornamention and experimenting with harmonies to the music in his head, but mostly he stuck to the melody, clean voice soaring above the rattle-ping of the water pipes.
Chris closed his eyes and relaxed more deeply into the mattress, listening. He could just imagine him, wet and lean and still flushed from the concert, eyes closed and shampoo in his hair, water sluicing down his back and his arms raised to rinse his hair. Mouth open, singing. He licked his lips unconsciously, shifted restlessly underneath the blanket, and forced his hands to relax.
The club had been pretty good tonight, for once--warm, not filled with smoke, and with decent lighting and sound, and an audience who actually applauded instead of sitting in sullen silence waiting for the headline act to appear. Lance had managed to put in an error-free performance of Tearing Up My Heart for the first time, and all his recent working out had finally paid off--he'd flipped Chris over properly in All I Ever Wanted. The grin on Lance's face after that would have made the performance a winner even if the club was a hole.
Joey had bought him a tequila shot afterwards to celebrate when Diane wasn't looking, and Lance had spent the rest of the night drawling "heyyyy" and smiling complacently at everyone, wriggling happily when teased and cuddling up next to Joey in the van on the ride home. It was adorable, watching Lance regress to a deep-voiced five-year-old and lose some of the inhibitions he sometimes had around the guys, and Chris could barely keep a straight face watching it.
Diane was not impressed, and had looked very disapproving when she saw how dramatically her son had loosened up in the ten minutes it took her and Lynn to liberate their van from the parking lot attendant and his nonexistant English. But Chris had spotted a tolerant smile when Joey helped get Lance to bed, and figured it wouldn't be that much of a problem. It was only one shot, after all, and it wasn't like it happened every day. Lance was an easy drunk, so they were all pretty careful with him.
Justin was even worse, but none of them would give Justin alcohol yet. Chris had promised Lynn that they wouldn't let him drink until he was sixteen, and in return Lynn let Justin go out to clubs with the rest of them. Chris didn't know if he exactly liked being a babysitter, but Justin wasn't too much trouble, and was always miserable when they left him behind, so he supposed it was worth it.
It didn't happen often, though--they were usually too busy, too tired, or too broke. For instance, there was never enough money for more than two hotel rooms. JC and Chris and Joey always had one, and Lance and Justin and Lynn had the other. Diane wasn't there a lot, since Lance was two years older than Justin and Diane had a real job she needed to be at, but she usually made it at least once a month and Chris knew Lance missed her a lot when she was gone. Lance and Justin always shared a bed, except when Diane was there, and then Justin and Lance slept in rollaway cots.
Chris thought, from the way Lance and Justin always looked in the morning after nights spent in cots, grumpy and a little lost, that they liked sleeping together a little more than maybe Lynn or Diane knew, but he was the last person to object to that. And it wasn't really any of his business anyway. They knew enough to come to him when they were ready.
Tonight Lance and Justin were just next door, but that room had been quiet for a while now--Chris figured, with both their moms here at the moment, they'd gone to bed early. Diane was pretty strict about stuff like that. When Diane went back to Mississippi, Lynn usually got a bit more relaxed, and Lance and Justin would come next door to hang out and watch movies with the rest of them before going to bed.
But Lynn was still a mom, and still made them brush their teeth and pick up their socks and go to bed at a decent hour. More than once Chris had opened the door at eleven-thirty at night to Lance and Justin, dressed in striped pajamas and looking gleeful and excited, asking if they could hang out for a while now that Lynn was asleep.
Joey had almost choked to death on a potato chip laughing the first time Justin and Lance came over, wide-eyed and nervous and fidgeting in the doorway, but Chris had walloped him on the back and said in an undertone for him to shut up. Joey let it be after that, and he still laughed a bit when they weren't around, but Joey remembered what it was like to be that young, so he could sympathize. Chris liked to think he was *still* that young, as he told JC, and then had to wallop JC's back too when JC fell off the bed laughing and choked on a peanut shell.
The thing was, Justin and Lance seemed to think he and Joey and JC lived some sort of wild party adventure in The Room With No Moms. They didn't understand that, when they'd been rehearsing for seven hours straight, or had spent most of the day in interviews or photoshoots or on stage for concerts, that often the most excitement they got up to in the evenings was watching reruns of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, twenty years out of date and only slightly more impenetrable in dubbed German than in English. But Chris always let them in, even when he'd been about to go to bed himself. They were young, after all, and there was nothing wrong with encouraging rebellion in the young, in his opinion.
Particularly when half the time they fell asleep in his room within an hour anyway. Then he'd grin and roll his eyes at JC, who would grin back from his nest of the covers, and Joey would make some jokes about kids and stamina, and ruffle Justin's hair as Justin moaned in his sleep and tried to hide under the pillow.
And Chris would call up Lynn, who was always awake, and would have been ever since the door shut behind the Wonder Twins making their "escape." She'd come over and smile wryly at him, nod hello to JC drowsing in their bed and Joey sprawled on the floor watching informercials they couldn't understand, and help Chris shuffle her errant charges' sleepy feet back down the hall.
In the morning Justin and Lance never remembered what happened, and would come in to breakfast proud and pleased as punch to have gotten away with their nocturnal challenge to her authority. Chris would grin into his coffee, and JC would smile and Joey would snicker and grab Lance by the neck and noogie him, and tease Justin about his hair. Lynn would read one of the American magazines Diane brought with her every trip, sip coffee and smile, and not say a word.
Chris liked Lynn a lot.
The water cut off with an aggrieved hiss from the pipes, and there was a moment when JC's voice slid smooth and pure across the chorus, and then he was back out in the main room, footsteps light and sleepy as he moved around, humming quietly in deference to Joey sleeping. There was a rustle of canvas, the rasp of a heavy zipper, the shush of fabric on skin, then footsteps approached the bed and stilled.
"Hey," Chris said gruffly, blinking his eyes open and looking fuzzily up. JC was leaning over him, dropping a towel on the pillow to protect it from his wet hair. He was wearing a ratty MMC t-shirt, his broad shoulders stretching the thin fabric tight across his chest, and sweatpants with holes in the cuffs and a broken drawstring so they hung low on his hipbones. His eyes were tranquil and happy and sleepy, face scubbed clean of the stage makeup. He climbed easily over Chris, sliding in beside him with no hesitation, burrowing down into the blankets with a little sigh.
Chris turned as JC came into the bed, leaning close into him, and felt the shower-damp warmth of JC's body seep into him. JC pushed a sinewy thigh between his, nuzzled his face into Chris's neck, and sighed a little, relaxing almost immediately. His hair was ruffled and still wet, and Chris smoothed it down with his palm affectionately.
"Night," Chris said, dropping a soft kiss on JC's cheek, stubbly with a day's growth, and wrapped his arms around JC's muscled back.
"Mmm. Night," JC whispered back, and licked his neck casually. Chris sighed, inched closer, and the soft sound of breathing by his ear followed him into sleep.
Fin
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