brandywine28 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brandywine28) wrote2012-02-15 11:52 pm
brandywine28) wrote2012-02-15 11:52 pm
Entry tags:
Anti-Valentine's Day Challenge Entry
This is my (slightly late) submission for the Anti-Valentine's Day fic challenge over at the popsoundboard lj. Special thanks to Lara, for convincing me not to set my laptop on fire and run screaming through the streets of Queens.
The couple at the other end of the bar were doing a conspicuous job of enjoying themselves. The girl’s posture looked almost painfully rigid, a pose designed to thrust out her chest and elongate her neck, and she was laughing dutifully at everything the guy said, a clear, high-pitched sound that carried all the way across the room; the whole thing might’ve resembled a particularly chummy job interview, if not for the watered down cocktails and just-verging-on-too-trampy outfit. A first date, then. Lance could spot the signs from a mile away.
A first date on Valentine’s Day. Jesus. He wondered whose brilliant idea that had been.
“Earth to Lance. Come in Lance.” Joey’s voice, from somewhere to his right. “Are you happy yet?”
“Mm”, he intoned into his fruity, overpriced drink. It didn’t count as a lie if he didn’t actually verbalize it, right?
“Don’t lie to me, Bass. You still look miserable. You’re miserable, aren’t you?”
The girl was blandly, blondly attractive, in a way that probably took a lot of effort to maintain. She had kind eyes, though. Lance decided he liked her, despite the desperation radiating off of her in waves. The guy, on the other hand – not so much. A fake tan didn’t usually bode well for a person’s inner beauty, he’d found.
Joey sighed. “You know you don’t have to keep me company all night, man. You should go dance, mingle a little – you never know, you might meet someone.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively when Lance looked over at him.
Ugh. Doubtful. Even if it weren’t too soon for that kind of thing, which it totally was, and even if this weren’t the kind of uber-trendy, pretentious place where his particular brand of boyband fame was unlikely to raise eyebrows, which it totally was, today was VALENTINE’S DAY, for Chrissakes. Didn’t Joey know what kind of people hung out in bars on Valentine’s Day?
“Uh, losers like us, I guess?” Joey answered when Lance asked him that very question. Lance shook his head in disgust and downed the rest of his glass. He hated it when Joey was right.
“Even you, Joe, with your infinite capacity for love and your enormous generosity of spirit, even you have to admit that picking someone up at a bar on Valentine’s Day is just asking for trouble.”
Joey inched over and the next thing Lance knew he was enclosed in a friendly, slightly drunken death grip. “Seriously man, I love you, you’re my best friend, but why do you have to overcomplicate everything all the damn time? You and your grudges and your hang-ups—life’s too short, Lance, is what I’m trying to say here. I wanna see you loosen up, have a little bit of fun—I’m telling you, life isn’t nearly as hard as you seem to think it is.”
“So says the man with the most amicable divorce in history” Lance drawled. It was true, Joey and Kelly were a sight to behold; they still had family dinners together and hugged and smiled at each other as if they weren’t secretly wishing ruin on one another. It was unnatural. To Lance, a breakup wasn’t really a breakup until someone’s tires had been slashed. “Our situations aren’t even remotely alike and you know it. I bet you even sent Kelly flowers today, didn’t you?”
“Sure, why not? Women like flowers.” Joey shrugged as if it were really that simple. Lance briefly thought about throttling him.
He settled for another drink, instead.
The couple at the other end of the room were still at it—the guy going on and on about something or other, the girl listening intently, with periodic hair flips thrown in for good measure. The guy hadn’t shut up this whole time, Lance realized. He gesticulated and Lance caught a flash of something—a thumb ring; he felt his irritation rise. He could see he’d been right to dislike the guy--he was like a cheap dime store version of the guys Lance usually wound up dating.
Joey must have followed his line of sight, because he chose that moment to lean over and say, in a comically deep voice, “oh baby, I can’t tell you how happy I am you answered my ad. Your photo is gonna look so great sitting on my desk at work, and then my boss’ll stop trying to fix me up with his nephew, the nude street juggler.”
Lance grinned. This was an old game, one they hadn’t played in years and it brought back a whole host of memories: five exhausted boys killing time in unfamiliar airports and on planes, making up outrageous stories about their fellow passengers. It felt like an impossibly long time ago, when he thought of it now.
He cleared his throat and, getting into the spirit of the thing, tried to make himself sound as squeaky and vapid as possible. “Teehee, you really know how to charm a girl!” He swatted at Joey’s shoulder in what he hoped was a coquettish manner. “And your career sounds so fascinating! Tell me, what’s it like being a walking billboard for Ed Hardy?”
Joey didn’t miss a beat. “Well, babe, the perks are pretty awesome: I get a forty percent discount on tool hoodies and trucker caps. But best of all is the satisfaction that comes from knowing I’m introducing a new, impressionable generation to the magical world of douchebaggery.“
With that, Joey’s game face crumpled and they collapsed against the bar, shaking with laughter. This, this right here, was why Lance had agreed to come out tonight. He would have turned down the offer, had it come from Chris or JC, but Joey? There wasn’t a whole lot that Joey couldn’t make better.
Some movement at the other table caught his attention. The guy had excused himself, presumably to use the restroom, and the second he was out of sight the beatific mask slipped from the girl’s face. The change was startling; she – there was no other word for it – schlumped - down in her seat, looking drawn and weary and Lance could see the memory of one hundred bad dates, one thousand disappointments reflected in her expression. He knew that look.
He could tell from Joey’s lowly murmured “oh, man” that Joey had noticed it as well. Of course he had. Joey was a very perceptive guy.
“She looks the way I feel”, Lance quipped, and then, when Joey didn’t laugh, just looked at him sharply, he chuckled, an awkward attempt to smooth over an even-more-awkward moment. Stupid. Joey would never let him get away with a move like that.
And apparently he was drunker than he thought because the next thing he knew he’d been wordlessly wrangled out the side door and into the back of a town car speeding uptown.
He closed his eyes against the sudden quiet, and against Joey’s gaze, which he knew would be fixed on him. Joey would wait for him to speak first. He always did, the bastard. The driver was humming some old standard, one of those songs that everyone just knew, somehow. “yadda, yadda, yadda…each day is Valentine’s Day…” Lance shuddered. What a godawful thought. One day a year devoted to tackiness and forced gaiety was more than enough, thanks.
“It kills me to see you so unhappy”, Joey said quietly. Lance cracked one eye open in surprise. This was Serious Joey. Serious Joey didn’t show his face very often. “You keep getting involved with these fame whore-types, practically the same guy over and over again. I don’t know why you think you can’t do any better. Now this last one, what’s-his-name –“
“Jerry”, Lance supplied. It was understandable that Joey couldn’t remember. They’d only gone out a few weeks.
“Yeah, Jerry. Is he really worth getting so upset over? What happened between the two of you, anyway?”
Lance mulled it over for a minute. “He used the word ‘radical’. Like, unironically. Also, he said my teeth were too white.”
To his credit, Joey didn’t laugh, although a moment later Lance felt a jovial hand clamp down around his left knee. He didn’t mind. He knew how idiotic the whole thing sounded. If he had really been invested in the relationship, those things wouldn’t have mattered at all. Lance knew that; and what’s more, he knew Joey knew it, too. The hand on his knee tightened and Lance smiled and let his head loll backward.
There had been a time when physical contact with Joey hadn’t been limited to platonic hugs and brotherly claps on the back. Way back in the beginning, when Lance had still resembled a gawky teenage Ellen Degeneres and making out with a tall Italian boy from New York City had been the most exotic thing he could imagine. There had been long, lingering looks, a lot of unsubtle leaning, they’d even held hands once or twice; Lance had spent his first few months in the band absolutely certain that he and Joey were on the cusp of…something. And then it had all stopped. Later, Lance would wonder if some suit hadn’t taken Joey aside to privately stress the importance of his reputation as ‘the womanizer’ of the group, because not long after that the parade of nameless, faceless women into and out of Joey’s hotel rooms had begun. Meanwhile, Lance spent the next couple of years perfecting the art of masturbation. Before graduating to morons like Jerry, that is.
Now here they were, over a decade later, roomy backseat, no significant others, no image to uphold, and unless the liquor was screwing with his head that hand on his leg was getting friendlier by the minute.
And no one had ever compared to Joey, no one had even come close, so leaning over and kissing him seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
And it was funny, he knew Joey had outdrunk him by a wide margin yet when he licked into his mouth and their tongues tangled together, hot and slippery, all he could taste was spearmint toothpaste. It was even funnier, that he had known Joey for so long – centuries, it felt like – without knowing how soft and yielding Joey’s mouth would feel against his own, or about the gentle, almost worshipful way his fingers would feel sifting through Lance’s hair, or running up and down his back, slowly but with purpose. Yeah, funny.
What wasn’t funny was the anguished noise of protest he heard himself making as Joey pulled away. He sounded like a kitten being strangled and under normal circumstances he’d have been embarrassed by that, but there were more important matters at hand right now.
“Something wrong?” he asked, wiping the back of his hand across his wet, raw mouth. He was panting, he felt like he’d just run a marathon, but Joey just sat there, cool as a cucumber. Despite the darkness, Lance could see the look Joey was leveling in his direction – bemusement, it was unmistakable. Which was weird, but at least it was better than regret or disgust.
“As a matter of fact, yes.” He actually had the nerve to smile, the bastard. “Less than an hour ago you were educating me on the folly of randomly hooking up on Valentine’s Day. And I wouldn’t want you to discard your beloved principles, just for the sake of little old me.” The expression on his face was nothing less than angelic.
Lance sat back. He didn’t know wether to laugh or cry. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Joey’s eyes twinkled, but his expression didn’t change. He wasn’t budging.
Fuck. Lance had known Joey to take a joke too far once or twice in the past, but this was fucking ridiculous.
Lance craned his neck until he could see the digital clock the driver kept on the dashboard. 11:56pm. Four minutes til tomorrow, the fifteenth of February. Well. If Joey didn’t think he could wait four measly minutes…
He looked back at Joey, at his kiss-bruised mouth, at his eyes, so full of love and happiness and – just everything. He realized his hands were shaking, and one of his knees was bouncing up and down.
“Oh, to hell with it”, Lance said, grabbing him by the lapels and roughly pressing their mouths together.
The couple at the other end of the bar were doing a conspicuous job of enjoying themselves. The girl’s posture looked almost painfully rigid, a pose designed to thrust out her chest and elongate her neck, and she was laughing dutifully at everything the guy said, a clear, high-pitched sound that carried all the way across the room; the whole thing might’ve resembled a particularly chummy job interview, if not for the watered down cocktails and just-verging-on-too-trampy outfit. A first date, then. Lance could spot the signs from a mile away.
A first date on Valentine’s Day. Jesus. He wondered whose brilliant idea that had been.
“Earth to Lance. Come in Lance.” Joey’s voice, from somewhere to his right. “Are you happy yet?”
“Mm”, he intoned into his fruity, overpriced drink. It didn’t count as a lie if he didn’t actually verbalize it, right?
“Don’t lie to me, Bass. You still look miserable. You’re miserable, aren’t you?”
The girl was blandly, blondly attractive, in a way that probably took a lot of effort to maintain. She had kind eyes, though. Lance decided he liked her, despite the desperation radiating off of her in waves. The guy, on the other hand – not so much. A fake tan didn’t usually bode well for a person’s inner beauty, he’d found.
Joey sighed. “You know you don’t have to keep me company all night, man. You should go dance, mingle a little – you never know, you might meet someone.” He waggled his eyebrows suggestively when Lance looked over at him.
Ugh. Doubtful. Even if it weren’t too soon for that kind of thing, which it totally was, and even if this weren’t the kind of uber-trendy, pretentious place where his particular brand of boyband fame was unlikely to raise eyebrows, which it totally was, today was VALENTINE’S DAY, for Chrissakes. Didn’t Joey know what kind of people hung out in bars on Valentine’s Day?
“Uh, losers like us, I guess?” Joey answered when Lance asked him that very question. Lance shook his head in disgust and downed the rest of his glass. He hated it when Joey was right.
“Even you, Joe, with your infinite capacity for love and your enormous generosity of spirit, even you have to admit that picking someone up at a bar on Valentine’s Day is just asking for trouble.”
Joey inched over and the next thing Lance knew he was enclosed in a friendly, slightly drunken death grip. “Seriously man, I love you, you’re my best friend, but why do you have to overcomplicate everything all the damn time? You and your grudges and your hang-ups—life’s too short, Lance, is what I’m trying to say here. I wanna see you loosen up, have a little bit of fun—I’m telling you, life isn’t nearly as hard as you seem to think it is.”
“So says the man with the most amicable divorce in history” Lance drawled. It was true, Joey and Kelly were a sight to behold; they still had family dinners together and hugged and smiled at each other as if they weren’t secretly wishing ruin on one another. It was unnatural. To Lance, a breakup wasn’t really a breakup until someone’s tires had been slashed. “Our situations aren’t even remotely alike and you know it. I bet you even sent Kelly flowers today, didn’t you?”
“Sure, why not? Women like flowers.” Joey shrugged as if it were really that simple. Lance briefly thought about throttling him.
He settled for another drink, instead.
The couple at the other end of the room were still at it—the guy going on and on about something or other, the girl listening intently, with periodic hair flips thrown in for good measure. The guy hadn’t shut up this whole time, Lance realized. He gesticulated and Lance caught a flash of something—a thumb ring; he felt his irritation rise. He could see he’d been right to dislike the guy--he was like a cheap dime store version of the guys Lance usually wound up dating.
Joey must have followed his line of sight, because he chose that moment to lean over and say, in a comically deep voice, “oh baby, I can’t tell you how happy I am you answered my ad. Your photo is gonna look so great sitting on my desk at work, and then my boss’ll stop trying to fix me up with his nephew, the nude street juggler.”
Lance grinned. This was an old game, one they hadn’t played in years and it brought back a whole host of memories: five exhausted boys killing time in unfamiliar airports and on planes, making up outrageous stories about their fellow passengers. It felt like an impossibly long time ago, when he thought of it now.
He cleared his throat and, getting into the spirit of the thing, tried to make himself sound as squeaky and vapid as possible. “Teehee, you really know how to charm a girl!” He swatted at Joey’s shoulder in what he hoped was a coquettish manner. “And your career sounds so fascinating! Tell me, what’s it like being a walking billboard for Ed Hardy?”
Joey didn’t miss a beat. “Well, babe, the perks are pretty awesome: I get a forty percent discount on tool hoodies and trucker caps. But best of all is the satisfaction that comes from knowing I’m introducing a new, impressionable generation to the magical world of douchebaggery.“
With that, Joey’s game face crumpled and they collapsed against the bar, shaking with laughter. This, this right here, was why Lance had agreed to come out tonight. He would have turned down the offer, had it come from Chris or JC, but Joey? There wasn’t a whole lot that Joey couldn’t make better.
Some movement at the other table caught his attention. The guy had excused himself, presumably to use the restroom, and the second he was out of sight the beatific mask slipped from the girl’s face. The change was startling; she – there was no other word for it – schlumped - down in her seat, looking drawn and weary and Lance could see the memory of one hundred bad dates, one thousand disappointments reflected in her expression. He knew that look.
He could tell from Joey’s lowly murmured “oh, man” that Joey had noticed it as well. Of course he had. Joey was a very perceptive guy.
“She looks the way I feel”, Lance quipped, and then, when Joey didn’t laugh, just looked at him sharply, he chuckled, an awkward attempt to smooth over an even-more-awkward moment. Stupid. Joey would never let him get away with a move like that.
And apparently he was drunker than he thought because the next thing he knew he’d been wordlessly wrangled out the side door and into the back of a town car speeding uptown.
He closed his eyes against the sudden quiet, and against Joey’s gaze, which he knew would be fixed on him. Joey would wait for him to speak first. He always did, the bastard. The driver was humming some old standard, one of those songs that everyone just knew, somehow. “yadda, yadda, yadda…each day is Valentine’s Day…” Lance shuddered. What a godawful thought. One day a year devoted to tackiness and forced gaiety was more than enough, thanks.
“It kills me to see you so unhappy”, Joey said quietly. Lance cracked one eye open in surprise. This was Serious Joey. Serious Joey didn’t show his face very often. “You keep getting involved with these fame whore-types, practically the same guy over and over again. I don’t know why you think you can’t do any better. Now this last one, what’s-his-name –“
“Jerry”, Lance supplied. It was understandable that Joey couldn’t remember. They’d only gone out a few weeks.
“Yeah, Jerry. Is he really worth getting so upset over? What happened between the two of you, anyway?”
Lance mulled it over for a minute. “He used the word ‘radical’. Like, unironically. Also, he said my teeth were too white.”
To his credit, Joey didn’t laugh, although a moment later Lance felt a jovial hand clamp down around his left knee. He didn’t mind. He knew how idiotic the whole thing sounded. If he had really been invested in the relationship, those things wouldn’t have mattered at all. Lance knew that; and what’s more, he knew Joey knew it, too. The hand on his knee tightened and Lance smiled and let his head loll backward.
There had been a time when physical contact with Joey hadn’t been limited to platonic hugs and brotherly claps on the back. Way back in the beginning, when Lance had still resembled a gawky teenage Ellen Degeneres and making out with a tall Italian boy from New York City had been the most exotic thing he could imagine. There had been long, lingering looks, a lot of unsubtle leaning, they’d even held hands once or twice; Lance had spent his first few months in the band absolutely certain that he and Joey were on the cusp of…something. And then it had all stopped. Later, Lance would wonder if some suit hadn’t taken Joey aside to privately stress the importance of his reputation as ‘the womanizer’ of the group, because not long after that the parade of nameless, faceless women into and out of Joey’s hotel rooms had begun. Meanwhile, Lance spent the next couple of years perfecting the art of masturbation. Before graduating to morons like Jerry, that is.
Now here they were, over a decade later, roomy backseat, no significant others, no image to uphold, and unless the liquor was screwing with his head that hand on his leg was getting friendlier by the minute.
And no one had ever compared to Joey, no one had even come close, so leaning over and kissing him seemed like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
And it was funny, he knew Joey had outdrunk him by a wide margin yet when he licked into his mouth and their tongues tangled together, hot and slippery, all he could taste was spearmint toothpaste. It was even funnier, that he had known Joey for so long – centuries, it felt like – without knowing how soft and yielding Joey’s mouth would feel against his own, or about the gentle, almost worshipful way his fingers would feel sifting through Lance’s hair, or running up and down his back, slowly but with purpose. Yeah, funny.
What wasn’t funny was the anguished noise of protest he heard himself making as Joey pulled away. He sounded like a kitten being strangled and under normal circumstances he’d have been embarrassed by that, but there were more important matters at hand right now.
“Something wrong?” he asked, wiping the back of his hand across his wet, raw mouth. He was panting, he felt like he’d just run a marathon, but Joey just sat there, cool as a cucumber. Despite the darkness, Lance could see the look Joey was leveling in his direction – bemusement, it was unmistakable. Which was weird, but at least it was better than regret or disgust.
“As a matter of fact, yes.” He actually had the nerve to smile, the bastard. “Less than an hour ago you were educating me on the folly of randomly hooking up on Valentine’s Day. And I wouldn’t want you to discard your beloved principles, just for the sake of little old me.” The expression on his face was nothing less than angelic.
Lance sat back. He didn’t know wether to laugh or cry. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Joey’s eyes twinkled, but his expression didn’t change. He wasn’t budging.
Fuck. Lance had known Joey to take a joke too far once or twice in the past, but this was fucking ridiculous.
Lance craned his neck until he could see the digital clock the driver kept on the dashboard. 11:56pm. Four minutes til tomorrow, the fifteenth of February. Well. If Joey didn’t think he could wait four measly minutes…
He looked back at Joey, at his kiss-bruised mouth, at his eyes, so full of love and happiness and – just everything. He realized his hands were shaking, and one of his knees was bouncing up and down.
“Oh, to hell with it”, Lance said, grabbing him by the lapels and roughly pressing their mouths together.
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I usually prefer old-school, slightly jailbait-y jola over contemporary jola, but the idea of each of them secretly pining over one another for fifteen years is just about torturous enough to appeal to me!
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(I may have fangirled just a little bit when I first read your comment; your Lambs epic is one of my all-time favorite Lance stories!)
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I seem to have been bitten by the jola bug sometime in the last few weeks. I don't know where this is headed, but I'm just gonna run with it and see what happens. :)
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(I thought your entry was lovely, too! I really enjoyed reading a piece in which the main character's anti-Valentine's Day views actually ended up being justified, for a change. Poor Kevin.)
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