Page 40 of Lance
“No,” Lance said, his voice surprising even himself. He looked at both of the other men, his bandmates. The Lost Boys. Well, Lance wasn’t lost anymore.
“Huh?” Ken asked, perhaps understandably, though Aaron seemed to understand. There was actually the slightest trace of a smile on his lips. As for Lance, well, he felt like the sun had come out and like things had been illuminated which he had been ignoring, or unaware of completely.
“No. Ken, I’m done. I’m sorry. I like you, and I like being in the band, but I’m not dating you anymore,” Lance told him. “We were way better as best friends than as boyfriends, even fake boyfriends.”
Ken shrugged, and then his eyes narrowed a little bit as he looked at Lance.
“This is about Jamie, isn’t it? You’re going to get kicked out of the band because of Jamie,” Ken stated, and Lance just shrugged. That wasn’t entirely accurate, but it was close enough.
“Lester won’t like it,” Aaron warned, and then it was Lance’s turn to shrug. Let Lester not like it. He was beyond giving a damn.
“I don’t care. I want to be with Jamie, but even if he’s not interested anymore, I’m not going to fake anything.”
For some reason, Ken suddenly looked very interested in his cup of coffee, refusing to meet Lance’s eyes, and Lance looked at him thoughtfully. Ken’s face usually showed his emotions, but Ken was looking down, and Lance couldn’t see most of that face. Still, he was willing to bet that Ken knew something.
“What is it?” Lance went over to Ken, who continued to avoid his gaze, who refused even to look up from his coffee mug. “Ken, what happened?”
Ken was his friend, and slowly, the other man looked up at him, raising his eyes, his own not slippery anymore.
“I’m sorry. But Jamie … I heard him talking to someone. He called him Dom. And he agreed to go out on a date with him. That’s where he is now.”
First Amy, and then Dom. God, what a mess. Lance gazed down at the kitten who was still curled up, fast asleep in his arms and had been the whole time they’d been talking.
“I guess I’ll just have to see what happens,” he whispered, but from the looks in Ken’s eyes, and even Aaron’s, maybe he was just fooling himself. Maybe Jamie had run back to his ex, and from what Lance had heard about the guy, it wasn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility that Dom might try to get Jamie to leave the band completely.
Either way, Lance was going to do something terrifying. And he needed his friends by his side.
“Guys … can I count on you?” Lance asked, and he saw the answer in their faces before the words were even out of his mouth. Things had been weird with Ken lately, no doubt, but at the very base of it, Ken was his friend before anything else. And this friendship with Aaron might be relatively new, but it was real.
These guys had his back, and that was good because Lance was going to step out into new territory. For the first time since Amy had broken his heart, he was going to take a stand, and fight for the man that he’d fallen in love with.
Thinking of Amy, he looked down at his phone, resting on his knee, and gazed at her last message. She hadn’t even blown up his phone, he realized. Just the one message and she probably expected him to come running back to her like he’d just been waiting all of these years.
Smiling, he typed out a brief reply to her and then blocked her number. She’d had her chance. She’d given up on something which could have been good, and that was her loss, ultimately, and not his.
“Let’s do this,” Lance said, and while he waited, he pulled out the sketch that he’d done of Jamie, looking into the eyes of the sketch. He could do much better than that. Maybe he could never actually portray Jamie’s beauty, never really do him justice, he soon lost himself in the project of doing his very best.
