Jcs Hitchhiker

Obligatory warnings and disclaimers:

1. If reading this is in any way illegal where you are or at your age, or you don't want to read about male/male relationships, go away. You shouldn't be here.

2. I don't know any of the celebrities in this story, and this story in no way is meant to imply anything about their sexualities, personalities, or anything else. This is a work of pure fiction.

Questions and commentary can be sent to "writerboy69@hotmail.com". I've enjoyed hearing from all of you.

Look who came back after all! Welcome to season 4, but just like last time, be prepared for something different. As a special note, I was having a lot of trouble with this, and almost walked away. This season would not have happened if not for a discussion I had with Clive, who is generous enough to cohost this story on his site. Stop and tell him hello at www.authorclive.co.uk. I'd also like to point out that, while Clive is to thank for giving me that extra little kick to keep going, he's not to blame for any of the plot. That's all my fault.

On with the show!

"Justin, have you seen Jack?"

I turned and saw Josh blinking at me. He didn't look really upset, not yet, just perplexed. I gave the girl I was dancing with a quick hug, which she seemed kind of reluctant to release me from, and I let Josh pull me off of the dance floor. His eyes were wide, his hair curly from dancing and sweating, and his silver ring, which he and Jack referred to as their wedding bands, even though they hadn't actually had any sort of a ceremony and didn't intend to, glinted softly under the colored lights as he pulled at my arm. I glanced at my watch.

"Not for about an hour," I answered, shrugging.

I wasn't sure how Josh could lose Jack. In the five weeks since Josh had given Jack the rings, the two of them had been practically inseparable. Jack came to the studio almost every day with us, reading quietly in the bubble or working on other stuff. Sometimes he just sat and watched Josh through the glass, for hours. Josh was my best friend, and, granted, he was pretty attractive, but I wasn't sure that there was that much there to stare at. The depth of their love for each other surprised me sometimes, but sometimes it also gave me a little twinge of something else, a little shiver of something my therapist and I agreed might be jealousy. The two of them loved each other in a way that Britney and I didn't, in a way that left them completely connected, and sometimes I envied it. It might have been because the two of them were completely honest with each other, and Britney and I usually weren't, but there was also something else, this burning fire between the two of them, like they were made for each other. Some day I wanted that, too, wanted a person who was made for me, and would love me for who I was.

I shook myself out of these thoughts as Josh stood before me, his mouth set in a worried line, the little furrow between his eyebrows deeply creased. Like I said, I had no idea how he could have lost track of Jack, even in a club this big. The two of them didn't even go to the bathroom without informing each other, for God's sake.

"He said he was going to the bathroom, and he'd be right back, and that was like a half hour ago," Josh said, and I almost laughed at hearing him voice my thoughts.

The look on his face stopped me, though. Josh still looked more perplexed than worried, but I could tell that he was starting to get wound up inside, starting to let himself think that something could actually be wrong. I needed to help nip this in the bud, so I took his arm, feeling how tense he was through his thin sleeve. All of his muscles were bunched and knotted, and he ran his hands through his hair like he tended to do when he was nervous. When Josh gets upset, he gets one of two ways, and I've seen them both. He can be icy polite and dismissive, pretending whoever is upsetting him doesn't exist, isn't speaking, isn't even a person. Until the past few months, I would have said he would never have treated me like that, but I did a few things I'm not proud of, and don't really want to get into, and it caused Josh to freeze me out. Right before he proposed to Jack, though, we started to reach out to each other again, and we spent a lot of time in the past few weeks reconnecting with each other, and reaffirming the bond we'd had since the day we met.

As disturbing and frightening as Frosty Josh could be, though, the other way he got when he was upset was even worse. Josh has a tendency in everything he does to throw himself into it, to get carried away by his enthusiasm, and being upset was no exception. Josh could let his emotions go completely, and he would be not only upset but wildly unpredictable. This was the Josh who drove his car into other vehicles, or punched people in the face, or tried to drown them in one of the Great Lakes. Watching Josh run his fingers through his hair, tensed up in front of me, his face twisted and worried, I realized that Really Upset Josh was on the verge of making an appearance if we didn't find Jack soon. It couldn't possibly take Jack more than a few more minutes to come back from wherever he had wandered off to, so all I really needed to do was keep Josh calm and distracted until then, and Jack could come back, the two of them could kiss and laugh, and everything would be ok.

"Did you try sending a text message to his phone?" I asked. Jack and Josh were practically joined to their cell phones. We all were, really.

"Yes!" Josh said, holding his phone out to me. Did he want me to check the outgoing calls, to prove he had tried? "I tried calling him and sending him a message, Justin, and he hasn't sent one back, or answered the phone. Why isn't he answering the phone, Justin? Where is he, and why isn't he answering the phone?"

I didn't think it was possible for Jack to not answer the phone. He always waited past the first ring, because, you know, that's just common social skills, but immediately picked it up on the second. I'd even seen him answer other people's phones when he was in our apartments, because he just couldn't let a phone ring somewhere unattended.

I put my hands on Josh's shoulders to steady him, and realized he was trembling.

"Josh, what's wrong?" I asked. Jack had only been gone for a half hour. It wasn't like Josh to be this upset about him not being back yet, not even with their level of codependency.

"Justin, I don't know," Josh said quietly, shaking his head back and forth. His eyes were wide, and even under his warm brownish tan he looked pale. "Justin, I don't feel right. Please, help me find him."

Josh and Jack have a connection, a real actual bond that you can see, and that we've all witnessed. They love each other so much that they tend to mirror each other, not even consciously, and they also balance each other. If Jack is down, Josh somehow knows before he gets home to stop and pick up a present for him. If Josh is having a bad day at the studio, Jack is already working on his favorite food when he gets home. If one of them is happy, the other's happy, too, and when one of them is sad, the other one gets down, too. It's almost like being friends with a hive mind, but instead of sharing a brain they share a heart. If Josh didn't feel right, and suddenly felt worried about Jack, that was all the convincing I needed to help him start looking around for him, even though it was probably nothing.

"Maybe he went to go get another drink," I suggested, looking around. "Which bar was he using?"

Jack is a creature of habit. He gets lost easily, so much so that he still wouldn't drive himself anywhere in the city even after spending an entire summer here. Every time he needed to go anywhere he called Hank, not just because he needed a bodyguard, but because he lived in an almost pathological terror of not being able to find his way. Because of this, whenever we went out, especially to a club this size, where there was more than one bar, Jack would always go back to the same one, even if there was huge line. It was an odd personality quirk, but at least it made him predictable.

"The one on the first floor by the downstairs DJ," Josh answered. We were up on the third floor, so I turned Josh toward the stairs.

"Come on," I said, shrugging. "He's probably downstairs at the bar, waiting for a drink."

"Yeah, probably," Josh said, following me. "But he didn't ask if I wanted one."

I shook my head, chuckling softly. The fact that Jack hadn't asked him if he wanted a beer was, for Josh, almost incontrovertible proof that Jack wouldn't be at the bar. Still, I wanted to check it out, regardless. If nothing else, maybe we'd see Jack on our way downstairs. When we got to the bar, though, we didn't see him anywhere. I left Josh standing fretfully on the edge of the crowd while I pushed my way through to the bartender. He had recognized us earlier, when we first came in, so I was hoping he'd remember Jack.

"Hey, we're looking for our friend," I said, leaning in as some girls made room for me. One of the good things about being us is that people tend to clear a path if they see you're trying to get somewhere. "Have you seen him?"

"Your friend?" the bartender asked, raising his eyebrows.

"The guy we came in with?" I asked, mentally kicking myself for what I was about to add. "JC's boyfriend?"

If Jack heard me refer to him in public as "JC's boyfriend" he'd probably break a bottle over my head. He and Josh had more or less given up on correcting people, but I knew that it still irked Jack a little that every single time his name showed up in print somewhere, it was always listed as "Jack, JC's boyfriend". Most of our fans didn't even know his name, or at least not his last name, and when we were out there was always someone who would point him out. "Look, it's Justin! And Chris! And JC's boyfriend!" Still, it was the easiest way to get someone to recognize him, and sure enough it worked.

"Oh yeah!" the bartender said, his eyes lighting up as he grinned in recognition. "I saw him on the Barbara Walters thing."

Everyone saw Josh and Jack on their Barbara Walters interview. The two of them had done it maybe the week after Josh "proposed", and it did a lot to clear up a bunch of the misconceptions about them. They told a fairly abridged version of their story, although Josh did emphasize that he was the one who pursued Jack, rather than Jack being some sort of gold digger. Barbara spent a lot of time exploring who Jack was, who Josh was, and how the two of them were dealing with their new, suddenly public relationship. Barbara, canny journalist that she is, asked about their rings, and whether they were married or having a ceremony.

"We're not planning one," Josh said, holding Jack's hand tightly as they smiled at her. Jack told me later that they were both so giddy at actually talking to the real Barbara Walters that for half the interview all they could do was stare glassily at her.

"Maybe someday, when we can," Jack said, suddenly morphing into Gay Poster Boy for the new millennium.

"There is that Vermont thing," Josh said, looking at him.

"Yeah, but I'm already in a union at work," Jack said, shaking his head. He grinned at Josh and turned back to Barbara. "Maybe someday when we actually can get married, we will. For now, this is enough for us."

I'm sure Jack just meant it in his offhand, mildly sarcastic Jack way, but everyone jumped on that comment the next day. Suddenly JC from Nsync, and JC's boyfriend, were proponents for gay marriage. The press jumped all over it again, and rather than back down the two of them stood by their comments when it came up in their print interviews. Afterward Josh made it clear that the band was his main focus, but Jack had responded to invitations to go speak to three or four gay and lesbian type groups. He was becoming a lot more comfortable in the public eye, which also meant that he was a lot more recognizable, as the bartender was demonstrating.

"No, he hasn't been here for a while," the bartender said, shaking his head.

"How long, would you say?" I asked, glancing back to see Josh's eyes widen as the bartender shook his head. Damn it, I needed to head off this panic attack quickly, and when I found Jack I needed to smack him upside the head for wandering off.

"Maybe an hour," the bartender said, shrugging.

"Thank you so much," I said, grabbing a pen from by the register to sign a napkin for him. I dropped a fifty on top of it. "If he stops back, can you tell him we're looking for him?"

"Sure!" the bartender said, scooping the fifty and the napkin off the bar.

I walked back to Josh and saw him glancing around, as if he might spot Jack in the crowd somewhere. I put my hand on his shoulder, trying to focus his attention.

"Josh?" I asked.

"What did he say?" Josh asked, his voice a little higher. Great. That was a bad sign. "Has he seen him?"

"He said not for about an hour," I said, shaking my head.

"That's the last time he went for a drink," Josh said, squeezing my arm convulsively. I felt his fingers digging in. "Justin, where is he? Do you think he's ok?"

"I'm sure he's fine," I soothed, gently removing Josh's hand from my bicep. "Did you check the bathroom?"

Josh blinked at me, and I realized that, once again, he'd overlooked the obvious. This was typical for Josh, actually. He was an idea guy, a concept guy, but he wasn't a detail guy. That wasn't a bad thing, of course. We'd followed some of his musical impulses to some damn good songs, but in real life, outside of our work, he needed someone to ground him sometimes. As much as Josh anchored Jack, Jack balanced Josh, too. Josh might want to fill the bedroom with flowers, but Jack was the one who thought of calling the florist. I led him toward the bathroom, and we both walked in.

"Jack?" Josh called.

"Jack, you in here?" I called, as we glanced around at the closed stalls. A couple guys glanced at us, but Jack didn't answer. I motioned for Josh to bend down a little. "See if you see his shoes."

I wouldn't recognize them, but Josh surely would. Josh glanced down, bending a little, his tight suede pants stretching across his thighs, and then he stood and shook his head, his face filled with worry.

"OK, well, let's check the other bathrooms," I said, knowing already that it was futile. Jack would use the same damn bathroom all night, too. Where the hell was he?

Our trip to the other floors to check the other bathrooms proved equally fruitless, and we paused on the second floor, in a quiet spot near the pool tables, to try to figure out where he could be. The club was enormous, so I suggested we start at the top and work our way down, checking the dance floors, the side booths, the other bar areas, and the game rooms, because he was bound to be in there somewhere. Josh agreed that this was the best idea, but I could see that he was becoming increasingly upset.

"Maybe he's dancing," I suggested, as we climbed the stairs back up to the third floor.

"He wouldn't go dancing without me," Josh said, shaking his head. The defeatist attitude wasn't going to be of any help to us.

"Well, maybe he's talking to somebody," I suggested, slowly scanning the dance floor. It was packed with people, and Josh and I began to walk carefully through it, smiling and nodding at people as we glanced back and forth through the crowd.

"Who?" Josh asked, looking around anxiously.

"Josh, look who we're talking about," I said, smiling and shaking my head.

Jack will talk to anyone who talks to him, and he's got that kind of open, friendly face that makes people want to talk. Wherever we go, no matter the time or place, people just start talking to him, and he always talks back. Chris says that Jack should have been in sales, or public relations, because people always feel like he's their friend, and that they can tell him anything. It would be just like Jack to have someone recognize him, or ask him something, and for him to completely lose track of the time while chatting away in a corner somewhere.

Jack wasn't on the third floor, and he wasn't anywhere on the second floor, either. As we walked through the crowds of sweaty dancers, the clusters of people around the pool tables, the lines by the bathrooms, and the laughing minefields of barely clasped glasses near the bars, I began to get a little anxious as well. I could have just been feeding off of Josh's anxiety, since he was becoming increasingly fretful, but it really wasn't like Jack to be gone this long, especially when he knew we were flying out in the morning for Orlando. This was supposed to be our last night out in L.A., and Jack was always the one who wanted us up and ready to go hours before we had to be at the airport.

On the first floor, we settled into a side booth on the edge of the dance floor, finding one open where we could see both the front entrance of the bar and the stairs to the second floor. I didn't expect Jack to come down the stairs, but maybe we'd missed him in our sweep of the upstairs somehow. People glanced at us as they walked by, but thankfully most of them left us alone, rather than crowding around the table. I went to the bar and grabbed another beer for Josh, dropping the bottle in front of him as his eyes ticked back and forth between the door and the stairs continuously.

"What's this for?" Josh asked, staring at it.

"For you," I answered. "You need to calm down, because any second now we're going to see Jack, and you're going to realized you've done all this worrying for nothing."

"Justin, what if we don't?" Josh asked, clasping the beer with both hands. His phone sat next to him on the table, and he glanced at it as if willing it to ring. "I just, I have a bad feeling, Justin, like something's happening. I feel like we're missing something."

"Did you try to call him again?" I asked, glancing at the phone.

"Yes, while you were at the bar, but it just rings and rings," Josh said, shaking his head. He took a long sip of beer. "Why isn't he answering?"

"Maybe he forgot to set it on vibrate, and can't hear it," I suggested logically. "Josh, did you guys have a fight or something? Would he have gone back to the hotel?"

We had been staying at a hotel for the past week, because our lease had finally ended at the apartment complex. We only kept it for the time we had rented the studio for, and then we had to move out and send our stuff back to our real houses. The day we moved out, Joey had bid us all farewell to go spend time with his family, and then Chris had flown out the day after. Lance and I still had other things to wrap up before we left L.A., and Jack had been committed to talk to a group of high school students in Oakland, so Josh stayed, too. Lance and Howie had left yesterday, flying back to Florida to finally tell the Backstreet Boys that the two of them were dating, and that it was kind of serious.

I was happy to see Lance find someone, I really was. He and I had been very carefully rebuilding our friendship, but it was hard for both of us. Sometimes if I said something in a certain tone Lance jumped, or flinched away, and I had to apologize. Still, as bad as it was for him, it was worse for me. Every time I looked at Lance, and even, to a lesser extent, at Josh, I felt guilt twisting through me, like a knife in my stomach. For my whole life I've always had problems with other people, with being who I am, and I always wanted to be something else, somebody who mattered, because I've always felt like I was nobody, and I convinced myself that I would do whatever I had to in order to get what I wanted. I told myself so many times that it didn't matter who I hurt, and eventually, as the band got bigger and bigger, and people began to focus on me more and more, I just ate it up. I started to treat everybody like they were my personal playthings, and I still told myself that it was ok. The truth, of course, is that it wasn't ok, but before I realized that I had pushed all four of my best friends away, and done damage to Lance that he'll probably carry for the rest of his life. There isn't any way I can ever atone for that, not really, and no matter how many times he says he's forgiven me, and he pretends that everything is ok, it's always going to be there at the back of both of our minds.

I couldn't ever let myself forget what I'd done, or I might do it again.

"No, we didn't have a fight," Josh said miserably, breaking into my train of thought again. "I don't know why he'd go back to the hotel."

"Just in case, why don't you call your room there, and I'll call Hank to see if Jack called him for a ride," I said, pulling out my own phone.

Hank hadn't heard from Jack, though. I thanked him, and asked him to stay on standby to come get us, and to call us if he heard from Jack. Josh smacked his phone down onto the table, taking a long swallow off of his beer.

"He's not there, Justin, he's not anywhere," Josh said, his face crumpling as his head sank into his hands. I got up and moved around to the other side of the booth.

"Josh, don't do this to yourself, please," I said, rubbing his back. "I'm sure there's a perfectly logical explanation for this. Jack's probably right upstairs or something, and any second now he's going to come back downstairs, and think about how he's going to feel if he comes down and finds you crying into your beer."

Josh lifted his head, sniffling, and turned to look at me. His eyes were wide, and now very watery, but they were the same bright blue eyes I'd looked into so many times before, hovering over his cheekbones, long lashed and bright beneath his delicate eyebrows. Wait, why was I looking at Josh like that? Why was I suddenly hyper aware of how attractive he was?

It's not like I hadn't noticed that before, of course. I had been friends with Josh for my entire adult life, best friends. We been around each other almost continuously for months at a time, and we loved each other like brothers. We cheered each other up when we were down, and had even shared a bed a few times in the early days, falling asleep holding onto each other because I was homesick or he missed his family, or one of us was just scared about being in a strange face so far from home. We'd seen each other naked, had raced through the shower together when we were running late, had seen each other in the morning with hardons that we never commented on because, you know, every guy gets those. The two of us worked out together, and I was as familiar with the strong curves and contours of Josh's body as I was with my own.

The two of us had been as close as two guys could be without being lovers. I knew, during that whole year after Josh met Jack, and was trying to figure out what was going on inside of him, that Josh was in love with me. I knew that was why he wanted to spend time with me, and he thought that I had only done it because I was afraid to be alone, but that wasn't the whole truth. Sometimes when I looked at Josh, I felt something stirring inside me, some kind of longing, a yearning to be even closer to him, but I always pushed it away, because I was afraid. Eventually I knew that I had to do something, so I turned to the other person I love, Britney, and I committed to her. The night that I told Josh I remember how his face fell, how hurt he looked inside, but how quickly he covered it, and said he was happy for me, and I think he really was happy to see me happy, too.

I never told Josh how I felt about him, not even when he and Jack had confronted me at Josh's family's house in Chicago. I tried to, tried to explain that it wasn't all the way that Josh thought, that I wasn't just using him like I used everyone else around me, but he hadn't wanted to listen, and I hadn't wanted to say it. What good would it have done? Josh loves Jack, and I love Brit, and whatever might have had a chance of happening between us was a feeling that it was best we both let go of. We'd never faced it, and never acted on it, except for that one night with Jack, that one night when we had all surrendered to what was inside of us. Even now, just thinking about the things we'd done, I felt myself getting hard, throbbing hard, under the table at the bar.

That night was the first time I ever let a guy touch me that way, and the first time I'd ever done anything with another guy. Sure, there had been guys along the way who had crushes on me, and wanted that from me, too, but I had never delivered. I'd always led them on, offering the possibility, but never following through. I did anything I had to in order to get what I wanted, but I had never done that, not until that night. And God, had that been hot. Sure, sex was hot with Britney, too. She might claim to be a virgin, but I think we all knew that wasn't true. She was about as far from virginal as anyone could get, and she could do things to me that I've never even heard other people mention, but that night with Josh and Jack was different. Everything that should have felt familiar, a chest, shoulders, a hard cock, everything that I'd felt on my own body a thousand times, had been different somehow.

Afterward, though, I realized that I was coming between the two of them. I realized that what we had done would drive a wedge between them, would split them apart, and I didn't want that. I was Josh's best friend, and the two of them seemed to love each other. They seemed like they were made for each other, even if it was a little rocky, and so I pushed my feelings aside again. I went back to Brit, and patched up whatever stupid fight we were having, and for a while it seemed like everything would be ok. There had been that thing with Lance, but that wasn't really about sex. Jack had called that one dead on. That was all about hurting Lance for hurting my friends, and sex was just the weapon I used. After my night with Josh and Jack, I had thought a lot about how I felt, and what I realized was that, like most guys my age, I like sex. Who doesn't? The other thing I realized was that I didn't care if it was sex with a guy or with a girl, because for me sex about being close to someone I love, and I care more about who that person is than I do about their equipment.

Besides, both ways are hot. Why limit yourself to just one, if you love somebody else?

Even if I did love Brit, though, every once in a while I caught a little flash of Josh. Every once in a while I caught myself looking at him the wrong way, and I had to push it aside, because we both love other people. Forcing myself not to notice again how widely expressive his eyes were or how every shirt he owned stretched across him like it was painted on, I took Josh's hand.

"It'll be ok, Josh," I said, patting the top of his hand. "We'll just wait right here, and wherever Jack is, he'll be back in a minute."

"Are you sure?" Josh asked, sniffling.

"As much as I can be," I said, withdrawing my hand before I had time to think about how soft his was. I didn't want to lie to him, but I didn't want to tell him I was sure when really I wasn't. Maybe I was just feeding off of Josh, but I was starting to get a little worried, too.

We waited all night for Jack, actually, and he never came back to the club. Josh kept slowly nursing beer after beer, but I switched over to soda, figuring that one of us might need to be clearheaded. We waited in the booth all night, watching people come and go, seeing everyone pass, nodding at the few people we knew. When all of the lights came on we made no move to get up, and when the manager came over I explained to him that we had lost our friend, and would like to stay until everyone had left, so we could be sure he wasn't inside somewhere that we had missed. If we had been anyone else, I think the manager would have said no, but sometimes there are perks to being who we are. Eventually, though, it became obvious that Jack wasn't inside anywhere. I called Hank to come get us, thanked the manager and gave him a large tip for letting us stay as the waitresses began collecting glasses and bottles, and I walked with a very withdrawn and morose Josh out to the curb to wait for our car.

"Is he out here on the sidewalk anywhere?" I asked, looking around.

"No," Josh answered, looking down at his shoes. "I already looked."

I grabbed Josh and hugged him tightly.

"It'll be ok, Josh," I promised, soothing him. I felt his heart racing in his chest, thumping against mine through our thin shirts. "Maybe he went back to the hotel."

"I hope so," Josh answered weakly, squeezing me tightly. I could tell he was scared, but didn't know what to say, or how to comfort him. "Justin, what if something happened to him?"

"Josh, don't talk like that," I said, running my hand in a circle over his back. This usually settled him down a little, as Josh had always been a very tactile person. He and Jack were very touchy-feely, because Josh always needed some kind of contact. I saw our car pull up, and Hank climbed out to open the back for us. "Come on, Josh, the car's here."

Josh and I climbed into the back, and rode back to the hotel in silence. Josh stared out the window the entire time, as if scanning the sidewalks, with his phone out and clutched in his hand, waiting for it to ring. I stared at Josh, noticing how pale he looked, how withdrawn, and prayed that Jack would be waiting for us at the hotel, with some long complicated Jack type of story about how he had run down the street for coffee and gotten lost or mugged or buying meals for the homeless or something. I might find time to get a little mad at him later, but right now I just wanted us to find him, for Josh's sake.

When we got to the hotel, I thanked Hank, and told him we probably wouldn't be going out again that night. He wished us a good night, and good luck locating Jack, and told us he'd see us in the afternoon tomorrow for our ride to the airport. Josh and I crossed the lobby and checked at the desk for any messages, but none were waiting for either of us. We walked over to the elevators.

"Justin," Josh asked quietly, not really looking at me. "Will you, um, come to my room with me?"

"Sure," I said, hoping like hell that I'd just be dropping him off to a waiting Jack.

When we got to their room, though, none of the lights were on, and the suite was quiet. Josh flicked on a lamp, glancing around, but it didn't look as if anyone had been here since we had left earlier. The suitcases were still packed and ready by the door, and Jack's book sat on the couch, the bookmark peeking out of the top from between the pages. Josh turned to me with panic on his face, and I grabbed his shoulders.

"Josh, maybe he's in the bedroom, sleeping," I suggested, knowing it couldn't be true.

Jack wasn't here, but Josh still had hope. He pulled away from me and walked quickly to the bedroom, throwing open the door and flicking on the light. I walked over behind him, and he turned, throwing himself against me. I wrapped my arms around him and held him as he buried his face against my chest, sobbing.

"Justin, where is he? Where's Jack?"

"I don't know, Josh," I answered, holding him. "But we'll find him, I promise."

Josh sobbed incoherently against me, dropping his phone, and I walked him over to the bed, sitting down on the edge with him. As I held him against me, feeling him tremble, I could only think of one thing.

Where the hell was Jack?

So, for everybody who wanted a season 4, welcome back. And for everyone who wanted a peek inside Justin's head in seasons 2 and 3, here it is. Get ready for a bumpy ride, everyone.