Page 26 of Lance
ELEVEN
Jamie’s words echoed through the air, and Lance took a deep breath. He had known that he was potentially delving into some dangerous territory when he’d asked, but his curiosity hadn’t allowed him just to look away from what he’d noticed.
There was so much that hadn’t been said, so much that Lance could pick up, just by context. From the look of caution, even fear, that shone in the back of Jamie’s eyes sometimes. From the way he had been so surprised, and always was, to be treated decently.
Lance struggled. He wanted to say something to show that he understood. That he didn’t think it was Jamie’s fault because there was an ugly undertone of shame on his face. But he also knew, in a similar situation, the last thing he’d want was pity. There had been so much of that when Amy …
And then he got it. It was the right thing to do, he felt it on a purely instinctive level, and he couldn’t say that it wasn’t a little scary to open himself up, but after what Jamie had just told him, he figured he could put himself out there a little, too. He just started talking, throwing himself into Jamie’s arms and having to trust that Jamie would catch him.
“There was this girl. Amy. I was dating her for two years.” Lance didn’t talk about this stuff, and the words came out very slowly, reluctantly, only drawn from him by the openness which Jamie had shown him. “And we were pretty close. I thought we’d get married someday.”
Without having to say it, he somehow hoped that Jamie knew what he meant. This was a woman who had been very important to him, but she, well, she wasn’t around now. Jamie’s nod and his silence seemed to acknowledge that.
“She just … disappeared one day. I asked her to move in with me, and she said yes. I was looking through engagement rings. Her parents loved me, and mine loved her. Everyone just assumed …”
Lance’s voice choked off, though, and he took a deep breath, letting it calm him, soothe him, before he kept going.
“What do you mean, disappeared? She left?” Jamie’s question was innocent enough, but Lance had to grit his teeth to keep himself from saying the first thing that came to mind. Snapping at this man wasn’t going to do anything.
“She wouldn’t just leave. She … I think she might have died,” Lance admitted. “That’s part of why I joined the band, to make enough money to hire a PI. But they didn’t find anything. She was just …”
Saying the words out loud, the words which had taken him so long to accept, they made it utterly impossible for him to speak at all. He looked at Jamie, who gazed back at him, a sort of solemnity on his face that Lance just plain wasn’t used to seeing there.
It was a relief to see, though. Jamie was taking this seriously. When they’d met, Lance wouldn’t have bet that the guy could take anything seriously, but obviously, he was.
Their words, their stories, hung in the air between them. Secrets, ghosts of the past, neither of them fully over it. But for the first time, Lance felt like he might be getting there. Like maybe that wound had been healing while he hadn’t been paying attention, and one of the last steps had just been taken.
Lance didn’t know what to say. It seemed that Jamie didn’t, either. So they just smiled at each other, a bit awkward, maybe neither of them knowing exactly how to deal with the exchange of highly emotional stuff that had gone between them just then.
Lance shifted off of Jamie, and finally took the condom off and tossed it away. Without comment, he wrapped his arms around Jamie and encouraged him to come close, smiling with pleasure as the other man rested his head on his chest.
Something had happened between them. Lance knew it, and he was willing to put real money on Jamie knowing it, too. A connection had been formed, and Lance wouldn’t say it out loud, but he was seriously starting to doubt that this was nothing more than sex, that it could ever go back to that, with what they knew about each other.
And the really crazy thing, to him, was that he didn’t even mind the idea. For the first time since he’d lost Amy, he felt like maybe, he was ready for this. Sure, there were obstacles in the way, but they had kept things quiet so far.
Someday, Lester would chill about the whole thing with Ken. And it even occurred to Lance that maybe Lester would go for a thing with him and Jamie. They were members of the same band, and they were both males. They would be every bit as good for their publicity as Lance and Ken were.
Maybe better, because while Ken was Lance’s friend and always would be, the way that he was coming to feel about Jamie was far more in line with what a romantic relationship should be. It would be far more convincing.
In just a month or so, Lance decided right then and there that he would approach Lester and tell him that the thing with Ken wasn’t working. That would give him that few weeks to explore this thing with Jamie, to see if it could be something that could build into something real.
He fell asleep right then and there, a smile on his face, having figured everything out quite nicely, he figured. But when he woke up in the morning, Jamie was not in bed with him anymore.
* * *
It was pretty late in the morning, Lance realized, by the angle of the sunlight which came slanting in golden beams through the window. No one had woken him up, which meant that they might be in some trouble. It meant the bus might not be fixed.
Well, they still had almost twenty-four hours to get to Portland. It was totally possible, and anyway, it wasn’t his problem. This was an unscheduled break, and he stretched out his body and then rose to his feet, grabbing a robe.
He’d go find Jamie, he figured. Talk to him about what he’d realized before he’d passed out the night before. Maybe put a name to what was going on between them, which was certainly more than just sex. Or maybe not. It might be just fine without being totally defined.
When he came out of his bedroom, though, Jamie wasn’t who he saw. It was just Aaron, who glanced up from his phone to nod briefly in greeting and then turned his eyes back to the glowing screen. Over his shoulder, Lance briefly saw that the other man was on a news website, and he smirked, amused.
Aaron seemed to take everything so damn seriously. But his smirk turned into a frown as he thought about it more because it seemed to him that Aaron would never be stupid enough to get himself into this situation in the first place. Aaron kept to himself, and that probably made him smarter than Lance.
Sighing softly, Lance flopped down onto the armchair, gazing at nothing in particular. It took him awhile to realize that his eyes were on Aaron, who was looking at him right back, a deeply thoughtful look on his face.
“What’s up?”
