Well -- here's chapter ten. And for those of you who have been suggesting that a few more "naughty bits" might be kind of fun, this is the chapter for you. We're talking definite NC-17 here, and I hope you like it. And, of course, if you DO like it, I sure would appreciate hearing from you. The address is denis141@hotmail.
DEDICATION: This chapter is dedicated to James at (JelloNnice) and Robert Matos, because they wrote really nice feedback on the last chapter, and because -- well, just because. So, this one's for you guys.
DISCLAIMER: I don't know any member NSYNC, and what follows is fiction -- i.e., I made it all up based only my wicked imagination. Be forewarned, this story also involves sex between boys (although probably not as much as some people would like), and if that is not your thing, or if you are not old enough to read such things, you should stop reading now.
ALONE/TOGETHER
CHAPTER 10: When A Journey's Ends.
"My child, the heart in my breast is lost in wonder...I cannot find a word to say to him; I cannot ask him anything at all; I cannot even look him in the face. But if it really is Odysseus home again, we two shall surely recognize each other, and in an even better way; for there are tokens between us which only we two know and no one else has heard of." [Penelope to Telemachus, Homer, Odyssey 23.105]
Lance had not imagined it would be like this -- a house full of nothing but empty rooms, and objects that did nothing now except cast shadows. Driving here, Lance had tried hard not to imagine the house being any one way at all, knowing that if he allowed himself to imagine it, he would imagine it how he wanted it to be, and how he needed it to be, instead of how it had really ended up being -- a house still defined by what was absent and missing, first him, and now JC.
This morning, when Lance had pressed the button on the intercom, all he'd heard was a flat and frustrating buzz, like the noise that a radio makes when it's stuck between stations. Maybe he's at the store, he'd thought at first, staring at the button, and trying to decide whether to press it again. But then Lance remembered the gate's entry code, and he punched it in: THREE -- ONE -- ONE -- NINE -- EIGHT.
After it had finally swung open, Lance had driven the Land Rover through the gate and parked it in one of the spaces located at the bottom of the driveway. He wanted to walk to the house, not drive.
The house was a half-mile up a gently sloping driveway paved with pale concrete flag-stones. Lance walked past a stand of eucalyptus trees that grew near the bottom of the hill, and then over the short timbered bridge that crossed a rock-filled arroyo. The drive climbed more steeply on the other side of the bridge, but Lance did not slow his pace. He could smell the ocean, and the scrub oak and dessert willow and false indigo and wild mock orange and canyon sunflowers that grew on each side of the driveway as it winded its way to house.
When he crested the hill, and Lance finally saw it sitting there, Lance stopped to catch his breath, and to stare at the house. He had seen it hundreds of times before, but he was still surprised at how simple and small it always seemed at first glance. It was modern and low-slung, constructed of unpainted concrete blocks, with a nearly flat corrugated metal roof that seemed to hover in mid-air because it rested on a narrow band of clerestory windows.
From the driveway, most of the house's mass was obscured by a wall of torrey pines, black cottonwoods, and wild mock orange trees, so that all anyone saw at first were two small, uncurtained windows, and the red door that Lance had found in an antique shop in Tijuana. The house looked almost like a small shack or tool shed; it was only after people were inside that its true scale was revealed -- the fact that it had three- stories, and the main level had fourteen foot ceilings, and that the other side of the house was built almost entirely of glass so that the house seemed always full of the sky.
Lance found his keys in the bottom of his duffel bag, unlocked the front door, and stepped inside. The air conditioning was not turned on, and the air inside the house was stale and warm. Lance had left the door open behind him, as if still unsure whether he intended to stay. His duffel bag lay on the floor in a small crumpled pile next to his feet. Standing there now, looking at the vast expanse of the morning sky, Lance knew JC was gone; he didn't need to look, because looking would not tell him anything he did not already know. JC was gone.
When Lance went downstairs to look through the boxes stored in the basement, he'd gone there mostly out of boredom, a tense and anxious boredom borne of waiting for JC to come home, just like Lance had come home on December 31, the day before the New Year was set to begin, and the day that Lance had realized he could no longer stay away, and could no longer pretend that a hotel room was a home, and realized too that the only place that could be a home, that could be his home, was this house -- their house, the one that he and JC had built together, if not with their very own hands, at least with their stubborn and imagining hearts.
Lance had known that JC liked to keep stuff, but he'd never expected to come downstairs and find over seventy boxes filled with all manner of things -- most of them related, in one way or another, to the years that he and JC had been together. There were at least nine boxes of photographs, and four or five boxes of newspaper clippings and magazine articles. Lance had spent the first night looking at photographs, and arranging them in chronological order, and then putting them in several empty photo albums he'd found on a shelf above the washing machine. On his second night, Lance had looked through the boxes stuffed with newspaper clippings, stopping to laugh at the ones where JC had underlined some wildly inaccurate assertion about himself -- like the one where it said that JC had married a nineteen-year-old model from Portugal.
Each night, Lance came downstairs after trying to fall asleep, and failing. It was easy during the day to keep his mind off the fact that JC was not there with him, and thus to keep his loneliness at bay. Mostly he worked in the yard, first picking up the avocados that had become overripe, and fallen from the tree, then spending an entire day mowing and edging the lawn, and then another day weeding all the flower beds and planting bulbs for spring -- dahlias, gladiolus, tulips, crocus, daffodils, and hyacinth. Lance had also spent two days painting the gazebo that sat on the very edge of their yard, and overlooked the ocean, being careful not to damage the wisteria that had taken so long to grow.
Lance had by now been home eleven days and eleven nights, each one different, but also the same. It had felt good to establish a familiar pattern, undisturbed by others. He knew he was alone, but Lance also knew that being alone was what he had to do in order to wait for JC to return, and so not be alone anymore. Looking through the boxes did not bother him much; it did not make him sad, or even nostalgic. The objects that filled the boxes were relics of things that had already occurred, events that had happened and were now past. What Lance wanted was a future, a future with JC, and he knew that a future was not something he could expect to find in any box.
It was three o'clock in the morning now, and Lance was still not tired enough to sleep. He looked through the box that sat in front of him without really noticing what it contained, mostly prodding at the stuff on top so that he could get a glimpse of what lay beneath. There was a program from the No Strings Attached tour, two all-access press passes, and several of the T-shirts that had been sold during the tour. Just as Lance was about to put the lid back on the box, and return it to the shelf from where he'd retrieved it, Lance noticed a large Zip-loc bag that seemed to contain something wrapped in tissue paper. He didn't recognize what it might be, so he pulled the bag out for a closer look.
Lance pushed the box to one side and stretched his legs out in front of him. His left leg had nearly fallen asleep, and he shook it while he inspected the bag more closely. Unable to see what was wrapped in the tissue paper, Lance opened the bag and pulled out its contents. It was soft, and not heavy; fabric of some kind; but not a blanket or a towel, because it wasn't heavy enough for that. Lance tore off the tissue paper and saw that it was a set of bed sheets -- pale white sheets, thin, and cool to the touch -- with a folded slip of paper sitting on top of them. Laying the sheets carefully to one side, Lance opened the folded slip of paper. It was a check-out receipt for a hotel dated June 30, 1998.
"Oh my god," Lance whispered, grabbing the sheets off the floor and standing up.
They were the sheets from the bed on which he and JC had made love for the first time. JC had stolen them, and had kept them all this time. Lance marveled at the audacity of it; not just the fact that JC had stolen the sheets, but the fact that he had thought to do it at all.
Lance closed his eyes, feeling the memory now, not seeing, but feeling only, as he held the sheets to his face, breathing in, and letting his tongue steal a quick taste—was it semen, or starch, or what; it didn't matter. Lance slipped one hand inside his shorts; it ws cold, and he shivered as squeezed his penis, knowing the squeeze would make it harden and swell, and thicken too, as his fingers formed a fist around it, and gripped it, yes, and slid up over the wet-slick head, and then jammed back towards his body, his hand warm now, and pressing his balls down, and back, tugging them, tugging them, balls not so big or low-hanging or smooth-shaved as JC's, but yes.
Feeling the memory of it, not seeing it, not remembering it, but knowing it still, somehow, feeling again the way that JC's hand had led Lance's hand that first time into those black boxer briefs, helping Lance to pull them down, and how JC had held Lance's face cupped in those warm hands of his, and kissed him, and crawled on top of him, and the feeling of JC's erection -- bare flesh now, against bareness of flesh -- he could feel the erection rubbing against his own, and it was slick already, yes, and warm, slick-warm, and how strong he'd felt arching his back and pushing hard against him, and him pushing hard back, craving contact, yes, and Lance craved it too.
Feeling the memory of how JC had slid his body down Lance's body, slithered, really, knowingly, but not too knowingly, looking for what he already knew to be there, and finding it, yes, licking the swollen head first, yes, and licking, licking leaking liquid, and Lance arching his back, and JC saying, "My god, you taste so fucking good," and -- yes -- his mouth surrounding it, hot, hot, and making the most terrific sucking sound.
"Yes, JC... Yes," Lance hissed, tilting his shoulders back, arching, and thrusting his hips forward too.
Now JC's fingers were there too, because it was long, Lance was long, thick and long, longer than what would all fit into JC's mouth, even though he tried for all of it, and wanted all of it, greedily tried, even every time after too, even though there was always too much, too much, and he would growl, "I love how big you are, Lance. I love it," and Lance smiled in the dark -- it was dark that first time -- even though after there was always a light on, because after that first time they always wanted to see each other, yes, see where the touches were, and the tastes and probes and bites and grasps and squeezes, yes; but, in the dark this first time, Lance smiled because JC liked that it was big, yes, and JC made it big, bigger and thick so that it was almost too big, but not really, not really.
Lance kicked off his shorts, tossed the sheets carefully on top of the box, and then pulled off his t-shirt. Looking down at his erection, gripping it and squeezing it, and running his hand up and down its length, nearly eight inches, and so thick that that tips of his fingers barely touched wrapping around it.
"Yes," he said, feeling again that first night, how he'd somehow managed -- with JC's help, yes, managed to flip around, head-to-foot, with his penis not slipping from JC's greedy-hungry, sucking-slick mouth, and then JC's penis was in Lance's mouth too, and tongue found foreskin and darted beneath it, exploring, yes, and liking the sharp taste of it, and the noise his lips made, yes, rolling-pushing the foreskin back, feeling how it felt thin and rubbery and strange, but yes, yes, and how JC's penis was narrow, but longer than his own, long like an narrow-tipped arrow that curved sharply, in an arc, and its head rubbed against the top of Lance's mouth, yes, and JC's hands were on the back of Lance's head, guiding it, up and down, yes, sliding it all the way in, sneaking past his gag, yes, thinking, oh yeah, it all goes in, yes, and JC was arching his now back too, like Lance, all of it, all of it, yes, yes.
Lance spread his legs farther apart, steadying himself, and curling his toes as his fist moved more rapidly on his almost-aching-hard slick-thick penis, and his head was tilted back, as if he was staring at the ceiling, even though his eyes were tightly closed. Lance left hand moved up his thigh, across his stomach, and to his right nipple, which he rubbed and then roughly squeezed.
"Yes," he said, bring his hand to his mouth and plunging three fingers into it and across his tongue, scavenging for slickening moisture, and then trailing his fingering back down across his chest and around to the small of his back where he found the smooth cleft of his ass and ran his fingers down it, and then one finger inside, and then two.
"Yes," he said, remembering the feel of JC's foreskin slipping into him, slathered slick in hand lotion, slick sliding in, and him saying, "No, it doesn't hurt, JC, it doesn't hurt, but go slow, slow," and JC slick-sliding in, yeah, yeah, more now, put it more now, more, yes, more, more, and Lance's legs hooked over the top of JC's shoulders, and his heels digging into JC's back, as JC slick sliding in, all in, yes, all in, and now out, and then in, yes, in, deep in, and how there were suddenly tears in his eyes, and JC's eyes too, crying for how good it felt, and right, and true, and real, crying-moaning-whimpering for the truth of it all, for the obvious truth of what they were doing together, yes.
Lance swung his head forward and down, pressing chin hard against the top of his chest, gasping as the finger of his left hand probing, pushing, jamming, yes, right there, and his other hand, his other hand slowing now, but squeezing more, feeling how when JC had been in him for that first time, yes, Lance hadn't even touched himself, his hands at his sides, clenching the sheet, his head whipping from side to side, uhh, hhh, uhh, fists full of sheet, holding on, right there, yes, and Lance's eyes widening in amazement, not knowing such a feeling before, not knowing it was possible, yes, his hands at his sides, his fists full of sheet, not touching himself at all, and JC in him, and his hands clutching the sheet, fists full of sheet, uhh, uhh, uhh, and JC kissing him, kissing Lance, yes, and he was in him, all in him, right there, yes, and it happened, and Lance was coming -- how, how -- not touching himself, but still coming, right there, yes, spurting warm-hot ropes of it, splattering, splattering against his chest and his arms and neck too, pumping out of him, with nothing but the feeling of JC in him, in him, right there, right there, yes, and JC gasping, yes, filling him, yes, filling him, and not pulling out but in deeper, deeper, arching and almost yelling, no howling, yes howling, uhh, uhh, uhh, as Lance's heels pounded on JC's back, and Lance howled too.
Lance's knees buckled as his orgasm overtook him, and he yelled and opened his eyes and saw semen shoot from the swollen red end of his penis in long spurts that arced forward onto the basement's concrete floor, landing in series of audible splats as Lance tried to muffle his groans and tossed his head from side to side and then forward and back, and then sank to his knees, falling almost forward, but catching himself with his right hand, his left hand still gripping his now slowly-softening penis.
Lance smiled, exhausted but still remembering that first night, having captured the memory of it like a butterfly in a net, knowing that he would need to let it go again, for it to survive, but marveling at it still, if only for a moment more, a moment almost as delicate as the gossamer of the butterfly's wing. Lance remembered how he'd said that night, "Stay in me, JC. I want to fall asleep this way."
"Anything you want, Lance." That was what JC had said; and Lance knew that he had meant it, and he had meant it, because he always meant it.
Lance stood up carefully and walked over to the dryer and grabbed a towel from the pile of laundry that sat on top of it. He wiped the sticky still-warm semen off his hand and penis, and then dropped the towel on the splatters he'd shot on the floor, pushing the towel back and forth with his bare foot and then leaving it there to soak up (or just cover) whatever remained.
Pulling on his shorts, Lance looked once more at the sheets he'd discovered in the cardboard storage box. The sheets looked no different than hotel sheets always looked; and Lance knew that he might never have given them another thought had JC not also kept the hotel receipt, and slipped it in the plastic bag too. Lance understood now what JC had had obviously known: that all meaning is context. The sheets would have had no meaning to Lance without the receipt. The receipt had provided the context that allowed Lance to understand what the sheets had meant to JC, and now to him.
Thinking about this now, Lance realized that, for as long as he could remember, JC had provided context to his life, and thus given it a depth and breadth of meaning it did not otherwise possess -- at least not by itself. It was not that his life was meaningless without JC; it was just that his life meant something completely different without JC in it, something so different, in fact, that Lance did not recognize it as his own.
Lance picked up the sheets, and the hotel receipt, and then headed back upstairs. It was past four in the morning now, and he was tired. Once upstairs, Lance closed the door that lead to the basement stairs, and then headed for the guestroom where he'd been sleeping -- or trying to sleep -- since returning home. Lance entered the room, turned on the overhead light, and stared for a moment at the bed. Then, without even knowing why, Lance turned and ran up the stairs to the second floor, and down the hall to his and JC's bedroom. This was only the second time he'd been in this room since coming back.
Without giving himself any more time to think about it, Lance pulled the duvet and pillows off the bed, and then the sheets too. He wasn't sure whether the hotel sheets would fit, but he wanted to try. Taking a deep breath and exhaling it slowly, Lance unfurled one of the sheets into the air, holding tightly to one end while giving the fabric a sharp snap so that it would extend evenly across the length of the bed. Lance watched as the sheet descended -- slowly, like a parachute falling to ground.
"It fits," Lance said, as he busily folded and tucked-in each corner so the sheet tautly encased the mattress.
Lance did the same thing with the second sheet, unfurling it across the length the of the bed, folding and tucking-in the two bottom corner, and then folding the top of the sheet a quarter of the way down -- just like at a hotel. Pausing a moment to inspect the job he'd done, Lance then replaced the pillows and the duvet. The bed was now ready -- ready for JC's return; and even though Lance knew it would not -- could not -- be like the first time again, if they made love here, he knew that, if JC returned, it would be a first time of sorts, and that was enough for him.
Lance gathered up the sheets he'd removed from the bed, and walked out of the room and down the hall. He didn't want to sleep upstairs, not until JC came home again. He didn't care how long it took; he would wait however long was necessary -- six weeks, six months, six years -- it didn't matter. Lance knew that JC's journey would have to end someday, just as his had ended; and he would be here when it did, waiting for him, still in love, still here, still home.