Say You're Mine (J2, NC-17) 6/7
So he takes Allie’s advice. He thinks about it as he packs up his things. He thinks about it the entire subway ride home. He thinks about it as he goes about the motions of making dinner. But when he looks down at the sandwich he made for himself and realizes it’s a combination of turkey and peanut butter with some leftover mashed potatoes, he comes to a conclusion. And not a conclusion about what he should do about this Jensen thing, unfortunately - a conclusion about himself.
It’s like Allie said - some people are just incapable of keeping secrets. And Jared? Jared is incapable of the kind of calm, logical all-consequences-considered thinking-it-through decision-making. He can think about it until he’s eighty-five, and he’ll still come to the same result: that on the one hand, it’s Jensen - the guy he’s been head over heels for since day one, the perfect combination of everything he wanted in a boyfriend - and on the other, it’s Michael - the sweet, funny guy that cooks him dinner and listens to his stories about work and wants to make their relationship work any way he can, even if that means long distance from DC to NYC.
And no matter how many lists he makes or questions he asks an 8-ball or petals he plucks, Michael-loves-me or Jensen-loves-me, he’s not going to come to an answer. That’s just not the way his brain works. He’s been going by his gut feelings all his life, and that’s not going to change.
So he looks down at his failed sandwich and listens to his gut. And what his gut says (besides that the sandwich could actually be sort of okay, if he could scrape off the peanut butter and add some gravy) is that he needs to talk to Jensen. Now.
So Jared sends Allie a silent apology, sticks the sandwich in the fridge for later contemplation, and grabs his coat and keys before leaving the apartment.
*
He doesn’t get far. Whether it’s fate, destiny, coincidence or just plain luck, Jared happens to glance inside O’Toole’s as he’s leaving his apartment building. And there, at a table alone, is Jensen.
He looks tired, like he hasn’t been sleeping much - his face is drawn and his chin is resting in his hand and he’s staring at the beer in front of him like it’s the most fascinating thing he’s seen all day - but he’s still the most gorgeous man Jared’s ever met, and he’s surprised by a fierce surge of affection for Jensen.
He wants to go over there, wants to see Jensen’s face light up, wants to make Jensen smile. He wants to touch him, to be close to him, to have him - to be the one that’s allowed to do those things, to be the one that Jensen wants to do those things. To be able to look at Jensen and think mine in that possessive little place in the back of his brain, because, as he’s suddenly realizing, there’s never been a time that he didn’t belong to Jensen. He’s been happy with Michael, he cares about Michael, but it’s never been like this. It’s never made his chest ache or his stomach do crazy cartwheels. And with Jensen, that’s the way it’s always been. He may have wanted to pretend it was gone, but given the way it’s all rushing back now, just looking at Jensen, it never left.
His feet are moving before he can think about it, and then he’s in front of Jensen’s table and Jensen startles, looking up suddenly from his contemplation of the beer bottle.
“Hey,” Jared says.
“Uh, hey,” Jensen says. He doesn’t look angry or pissed, just surprised.
“Um. Can we - I really need to talk to you,” Jared says through a suddenly dry mouth. “Please?”
Jensen blinks, then shrugs. “Sure,” he says, gesturing at the chair across from him.
“Upstairs.”
Jensen shrugs again. “Okay.”
He gets up from the table, all lean grace, and takes a final sip from his beer. Jared’s eyes are glued to his throat the whole time, following the movement as he swallows, and it’s only when he realizes just how much he wants to taste that skin that he starts thinking about what’s going on.
Because when they get up to Jared’s apartment, once they get past this mess of who feels what and who was with whom when, if there’s even the slightest chance of a favorable outcome, Jared is going to take it. He’s going to kiss Jensen and touch Jensen and not even think about letting him go. And since he’s still with Michael, that poses a problem.
This, Jared realizes, is why that whole thinking-it-through thing can sometimes come in handy.
“Uh,” he says when Jensen looks at him expectantly. “I have to - I need a minute. Can I meet you up there?”
Jensen shrugs, taking the keys Jared holds out, and heads for the stairs.
Jared pulls out his phone and goes outside. He knows this is a sucky way to do this, and it’s sort of a crazy thing to do this spur-of-the-moment, but there isn’t really another way. And then Michael, who always answers his phone, picks this one moment, of all times, to let it go to voicemail, and Jared feels like even more of a jerk. But it’s not fair to let this go on when he’s realized that his heart isn’t totally in it, so Jared sucks it up and leaves an awkward voicemail. He doesn’t come out and say, “Hey, I’m breaking up with you,” because he can’t quite make himself be that horrible, but he’s pretty sure it’s evident in his tone.
And honestly, it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise - he and Michael have barely talked since Michael got out there, and they only agreed to do this long-distance thing as a sort of test. So he cringes the whole time he’s saying “We need to talk,” and “Please call me as soon as you can,” but it still feels right. He feels like an ass when he’s done, but he also feels relieved.
And knowing that Jensen is waiting for him upstairs? That helps. Jared takes the stairs three at a time on his way up, and Jensen looks a little surprised when Jared bursts through the door, breathless. But Jared’s tired of waiting and hoping and getting hurt, and he just wants this all out in the open so they can do something.
“So, Allie told me,” he says, straight off.
“Yeah, I know,” Jensen says.
“Oh.” Well, that’s unexpected. “You do?”
“Yeah. She called me to tell you that she told you.” Jensen smiles a little. “She really sucks at keeping secrets.”
“Yeah, I know.” But Allie isn’t really what Jared wants to talk about. “So,” he says, searching for the words to ask what he desperately wants to know. “You really - um. You have - I mean…for me?”
It doesn’t make any sense, but Jensen gets it. He meets Jared’s gaze, not bothering to hide anything, and Jared has his answer before
Jensen says, barely louder than a whisper, “Yeah.”
And Jared can’t just stand there when Jensen says that, admits to having feelings for him. He’s across the room in a second, reaching out before he even knows what he wants, but when he ends up with his hand cupping Jensen’s face, one thumb stroking along his cheekbone, it feels right. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks. He has a million other questions, but that’s the biggest.
Jensen closes his eyes. “Because you’re with Michael.”
“I’m not,” Jared says. When Jensen’s eyes open, surprised, he repeats it. “I’m not anymore.”
“How - “
“Don’t,” Jared says. “Don’t ask. It’s not important.”
Jensen blinks. “Okay, but - “
“But what?”
“I’m not - are you sure that you - I mean, is this - “
Jared waits for some sort of concrete question to emerge, but Jensen gives up with a frustrated sigh, like even he doesn’t know what to ask. And Jared - Jared is ready to be done with questions.
“Jensen,” he says. “Do you want this? Me?”
Jensen takes a slow breath. “Yes.”
“Then I don’t care.”
Jared steps closer, using the hand on Jensen’s face to tilt his chin up, and lets their mouths meet in a gentle kiss. He doesn’t take it any further, pulling back after a second and waiting a beat in case Jensen has some objection, but Jensen just makes an impatient noise, wrapping a hand around Jared’s bicep to drag him closer, and kisses him back.
And then they’re really kissing, and Jared kind of can’t believe it, that they’re here and both on the same page and this is finally, finally happening.
Which, of course, is when he hears a key in the door. And he turns around, ready to tell Allie or Adrianne or Mike (who doesn’t have a key, but might have learned lock-picking by now) to get the hell out and stop ruining his moment with Jensen, but all the words on the tip of his tongue dry up when the door swings open and it’s Michael there.
Behind him, Jensen sucks in a breath and takes a step away. Jared just gapes.
There’s a moment of dead silence, where no one says or does anything, and then Michael tries a cautious smile. “Um. Surprise?”
“How did - I mean, what are you doing here?” Jared asks, maybe a little more sharply than he should.
“I came to surprise you,” Michael replies, like it should be obvious.
And okay, maybe it should, but Jared is still completely in shock, and things are taking a long time to make sense. “Surprise me?”
“Yeah,” Michael says. “I know we haven’t gotten much time to talk, and I missed you.” He flicks a glance at Jensen, like he’s not sure how much to say, then goes on anyway. “In fact, I really missed you. DC’s a great city, it’s just…not that great without you. I don’t know if this move was such a great idea.”
Jensen makes a noise, some kind of strangled laugh, and Jared spends a moment in sheer disbelief over just how incredibly un-fucking-lucky this is. The universe seriously must have it out for him.
“So,” he says awkwardly. “You, uh. You haven’t checked your voicemail, huh?”
“No,” Michael says, bewildered. “I had my phone off for the flight. Why? What’s going on?”
Jared doesn’t know how to begin explaining, or if he even could, but before he can come up with some kind of reply, Jensen does it for him.
“Nothing,” he says flatly. “Nothing’s going on.” And then, without looking at Jared or Michael, he leaves the apartment.
Michael watches him go with a confused frown on his face. “What - is he - ?”
Jared sighs. “We have to talk.”
*
“And then Michael walked in,” Jensen says, “and I walked out. End of story.”
“Wow. Is there a possibility that either you or Jared are or have been cursed in the past?” Adrianne asks. “Because seriously, there’s no other explanation for how much bad luck the two of you seem to have. It defies logic.”
They’re having lunch on Saturday, and trading details on the whole fiasco. Adrianne came home just in time to overhear a good portion of Jared’s breakup fight with Michael, so she’s filling him in on all the bits he missed. And while Jensen’s glad to know that Jared broke up with Michael anyway, he’s not sure that hearing the gory details is really helping.
“I guess we’re just special like that.” Jensen sighs. “I don’t know, maybe it’s some kind of cosmic sign. The universe is trying to tell us that we just don’t belong together.”
“No offense,” Adrianne says with a small smile, “but I kind of hope the universe has bigger things to worry about than you and Jared and the way you keep failing to get together.”
“Hey, don’t underestimate my importance in the cosmic scheme of things. I’m pretty damn awesome.”
She rolls her eyes. “And so modest, too.”
And okay, even if hearing about Jared’s messy breakup with Michael isn’t the best thing for Jensen’s mood right now, being out with Adrianne is helping considerably. If he spent one more hour in his apartment going over the whole mess, he’d go crazy. It probably says something unflattering about him that he finds being mocked by his friends soothing, but he doesn’t really care.
“So,” Adrianne says, dragging a spoon through the remains of her lemon drop soup. “Have you talked to Jared since all of this happened?”
“Not really.”
“And are you going to?”
“Eventually.”
“Eventually? As in…?”
Jensen sighs again. “As in, at some yet-to-be-determined point after I stop being…whatever.”
“I hate to break it to you, but “whatever” is not an actual emotion,” Adrianne points out.
Which, yes, Jensen knows. But right now, it’s pretty accurate. He’s not sure how he feels about the whole thing. At first he was furious with Jared, because Jared went and dangled everything he’d been so desperately wanting in front of him and yanked it away. And then he was angry at Michael, for managing to pick the least opportune moment ever to walk in. And then he was mad at himself for being so stupidly in love with Jared, because he knew, he knew he shouldn’t let himself get that tangled up in someone, and then he went and did it anyway.
And when all that anger died away, sometime hours later, he just felt…exhausted. Numb. Kind of like he was stuck, just waiting for the universe to serve up a giant told you so.
“Ah,” Adrianne says, “So you are mad at him.”
“I don’t know,” Jensen says. “Well, all right, a little. He could have waited to actually break up with his boyfriend before jumping me. I don’t even like Michael, but that’s a shitty way for things to go down.”
Adrianne rolls her eyes. “You don’t like Michael? I totally missed that. It’s not like you made entire lists of things about him that drove you crazy. Oh, wait.”
She’s totally exaggerating. Jensen only made one list, and it was on a series of pink post-it notes after he’d had way too many rum and cokes. And it was about why Michael was totally and completely wrong for Jared. “He doesn’t like dogs! And he lied about it! Anyone would feel compelled to start a list after that.” He threw it away the next morning, anyway.
“Whatever,” Adrianne says. “I told Jared that stuff, by the way. If it makes you feel any better.”
Okay, so maybe Jensen didn’t quite forget that list, even after he threw it away. And maybe he tried to convince Allie and Adrianne that, as Jared’s loyal friends, they should tell him how wrong Michael was for him. If they’re too principled for their own good, that’s not Jensen’s fault. A little part of him is perversely glad they told Jared now, though. He’s not going to admit it, but it’s true.
“I was actually trying to make him feel better about the breakup,” Adrianne goes on. “But I think I just made it worse.”
Jensen shrugs. “I don’t know if the situation could actually get worse. It was pretty much one giant mess to begin with.”
“True,” Adrianne sighs. “Well, anyway.” She pushes her plate away and leans back in her chair. “I guess that means you don’t want to come to shameless teen-centric movie night at our apartment tonight.”
“Can’t,” Jensen tells her. “Chris and Steve are staying in the city tonight, and since they actually gave me a week’s notice, like civilized people, I should probably hang out with them at least a little while before my date.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Date?”
“Yeah. Mike’s attempt at cheering me up. A blind date with some guy he knows.”
Adrianne looks like he just told her he was going to try skydiving without a parachute. “Um, Jensen. You know that’s a really bad idea, right?”
“What, going on a date right now? Or trusting Mike’s judgment?”
“Both, pretty much equally.”
“Yeah,” Jensen says with a sigh. “But it’s sort of that or get incredibly drunk all by myself, and that’s just too depressing. And clichéd.”
“You can’t get drunk with Chris and Steve?”
“They’ll try to go beat up Jared to defend my honor. Or I’ll end up drunk-dialing Jared and saying something truly pathetic. I’m not sure which one’s worse.” He shrugs. “Honestly, I think it’ll be better if I just go out with this guy and try to forget about all the other crap for a while.”
“Well,” Adrianne says. “All right. Good luck with that. Try not to feel too sad that you’re missing Mean Girls and Sixteen Candles.”
“Thanks. It’ll be tough, but I think I’ll survive.”
Adrianne fidgets a little. “So. Want dessert?”
Jensen looks down at the collection of plates and bowls between them that are all that’s left of the giant portions their favorite Greek place serves. “No, thanks.”
“Coffee?”
“Uh, that’s okay.”
She still doesn’t move to get up, and Jensen raises an eyebrow. “Are you stalling, or something?” He looks around at the tiny restaurant. “We’re not having another surprise intervention, are we? Because I think you know why I’m cranky this time.”
“No, no interventions,” Adrianne says with a sigh.
“Then is there a reason we’ve been talking about Jared for almost two hours and you still don’t want to leave?” Jensen tilts his head. Come to think of it, even the fact that they spent that much time talking about it is kind of weird. Allie’s usually the one who wants the gossipy details.
“Can’t I just enjoy hanging out with my friend?” Adrianne asks, but she looks a little hunted.
“Nice try. Did you have a fight with Allie?”
Adrianne sighs again. “There might be a stack of shower thank-you notes that I was apparently supposed to be writing last night,” she admits grudgingly. “Which, since I didn’t even know about them, didn’t get done. And there may have been some words exchanged over that that were less than rational.”
Jensen tries to be sympathetic, he really does, but it’s just a little bit funny. “So now you’re hiding?” He can’t smother a grin. “Real mature.”
“Oh, whatever,” Adrianne snaps, throwing a straw wrapper at Jensen’s head. “You’re going out on a blind date with one of Mike’s friends. Like you can talk about sensible decisions.”
Jensen laughs. “Touché. No judging here.”
“Thank you.” Adrianne lets out a breath, massaging her temples. “It’s just all the stress, really. All those little details piling up. I swear, getting married is actually designed to drive a person crazy.”
“Maybe it’s a test.”
“Right now, it seems like something out of Gladiator,” Adrianne says heavily. “I just hope we both make it out alive.”
“You will,” Jensen tells her. “And if you need help, you know you just have to ask.”
“Yeah,” she says, smiling at him. “Thanks. Same goes for you.” She takes a deep breath, pushing her chair back. “Okay, I’m going to go brave the apartment and the thank-you notes. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” Jensen says. “Wish me luck on my blind date.”
“Yeah,” Adrianne says. “I hope Mike has awesome taste in men. You know, that he’s been hiding all this time. Or that spontaneously developed.” She puts a hand on his arm, meeting his eyes. “And I wasn’t kidding. Anything you need, just let me know.”
Jensen really just wants to forget about the whole thing for a while, but he nods.
“And good luck,” Adrianne says, grinning.
“Thanks,” Jensen says. “I think I’m going to need it.”
*
As it turns out, Mike’s taste in men is remarkably similar to his taste in women. Which is partly a good thing, because Tom’s one of the most beautiful people Jensen has ever met. He’s model-gorgeous, head to toe, and Jensen spends a good part of their date baffled by the sheer, flawless perfection of his cheekbones. But it’s also mostly a bad thing, because Tom’s crazy cheekbones end up being the most interesting thing about him. He’s a nice enough guy, he’s just not much of a conversationalist. Or a good listener. Or interested at all in ninety percent of what’s going on around him. It’s a good thing Mike sent them to a pretty lively piano bar, because otherwise Jensen’s pretty sure they would have spent the night being bored or boring each other by turns.
But it does accomplish his goal of getting his mind off things with Jared, even if it’s only because he’s trying to figure out what in the hell Tom could possibly be finding so fascinating about the label he’s painstakingly peeling off his beer bottle. It also has the added bonus of taking Jensen’s mind off the fact that he left Chris and Steve at his apartment under the dubious supervision of Mike, because that’s one of those decisions that could lead to a cold sweat if Jensen let himself consider the possible consequences. Mike plus alcohol is only one step away from disaster at the best of times, and throwing Chris and Steve into the mix only increases the likelihood of certain doom.
But when Jensen finally gives up on Tom and comes home around two, the apartment is quiet and still has four walls. Steve, Chris and Mike are all asleep in their own clothes and appear to have all their limbs, so Jensen counts it as a miracle and heads off to bed himself.
It’s only when he wakes up at noon the next day to his phone ringing that he starts to think something’s going on. And when he answers and Steve says, “Hey, I have to tell you something,” the vague dread stirring in his stomach only gets worse.
“Uh, okay,” he says, rubbing his eyes and sitting up. “Where are you?”
“On the road. We had to leave early.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I just have to - okay. You remember the time we all crashed at that insane house party in college, right after senior year started? The night with all the jello shots?”
Jensen blinks. “Uh. Vaguely?”
“And there was that stupid crappy futon, and Chris and I ended up both sleeping on it, and in the morning we were all squished together?”
“Oh, yeah.” Now Jensen definitely remembers. “We called it the Cuddle Couch after that. Didn’t someone take pictures?”
“You did, asshole.”
“Oh, yeah.” Jensen grins. “It was just so adorable.”
“Fuck you,” Steve growls. “Okay, so. Anyway.”
“…yes?”
“All right, so we blamed it on the couch, because the stupid thing was so saggy that you couldn’t help rolling to the middle,” Steve says. “And you were still in danger of getting dumped off every time you moved, so it was only logical that you needed to get an arm around that other person.”
“Uh huh.” Jensen’s heard all of these excuses before. “Whatever you need to tell yourself, man. Is there a point to this story?”
There’s a long silence, during which Jensen seriously considers hanging up and going back to bed and figuring this out later, but then, all of a sudden -
“I like cuddling with Chris,” Steve blurts out.
Jensen’s pretty sure he didn’t get drunk enough last night to be hallucinating this kind of shit. “What?”
“We said it was an accident and blamed it on the couch, but I actually like it,” Steve says, in a rush. “He smells good. Sometimes we take naps together, and it’s like, the most restful sleep I’ve ever had. I don’t know, man. It’s weird.”
“Uh, understatement,” Jensen manages to say.
“Yeah,” Steve says. “Okay, well. I just wanted you to know that.”
“You…did? I mean, really?”
“Yep,” Steve says. “And you can use that against me anytime you want. No retribution. I’d kind of like to keep the pictures off the internet, since I have a reputation to uphold and all, but as far as mocking for the rest of my life? Totally open season.”
“I’ll…keep that in mind,” Jensen says. He gets out of bed and pulls up the shades, but there are no pigs flying or apocalyptic warning signs that he can see. “Um. Is there anything else you need to tell me?”
“Nope!” Steve says cheerfully. “That’s it. Thanks for letting us stay last night. See you in another month or so.”
Then he hangs up. Jensen actually checks the caller ID, just to make sure that was really his friend calling, but barring some crazy scenario where someone out there kidnapped Steve and forced him to say all that stuff (or Chris won one hell of a bet, which is a likelier possibility), those words just came voluntarily out of Steve’s mouth.
Jensen tries to think through some kind of plausible explanation for the sudden share-and-care, but it just makes his head hurt. In the end, he gives up and goes back to bed. Hopefully when he wakes up again, this will all have been a crazy dream.
*
Jared thinks the universe may be out to get him. At the very least, it’s trying to prove just how many fun, twisted ways Murphy’s Law can come true (preferably simultaneously), and Jared, to be quite honest, is not impressed.
He’s kind of more like depressed. He thought his life was going pretty good - awesome friends, job he loves, city he loves, awesome boyfriend - and then, within a matter of minutes, it all went completely to hell. Michael’s pissed at him, Jensen’s pissed at him, and even though Allie and Adrianne are doing their best to stay completely neutral, Jared can sense the disappointment there. Mike isn’t pissed (or if he is, he’s doing a really good job hiding it), but that’s not much consolation. Mike doesn’t really do pissed. He says it wastes energy he could be spending elsewhere.
And the worst thing is, as good as his life was going before that stupid fight with Jensen, it actually got better, right before things got worse. Because even when Jared felt like an ass dumping Michael over his voicemail and had absolutely no idea what he was doing or if it was the right thing, there was a part of him that was glowing with the knowledge that Jensen had feelings for him. Jensen, the person Jared would have given anything to be with.
And when he dragged Jensen up to his apartment and heard Jensen say that, heard him admit that he wanted Jared, it was like he didn’t know exactly how much he’d wanted it. Waited for it, hoped for it, but never thought in a million years he’d get it. And then they were kissing, and it was amazing.
And then - well. Then Michael came out of nowhere, and Jared got to watch as Jensen’s face shut down and things got even more fucked up than they’d ever been.
And now it’s been more than a week, and he hasn’t seen or spoken to Jensen. He’s heard a few things - he knows Jensen’s spending time with his friends when he’s not around - but he has no idea what Jensen is actually feeling. Adrianne and Allie aren’t saying anything, and Jared only had the guts to make one call to Jensen, which turned into a rambling voicemail explanation/apology. Jensen hasn’t returned it.
And the stupid thing is, Jared doesn’t know what to do. He knew what to do when Jensen left the apartment - he knew what he had to say to Michael. He knew how to explain things to his friends. But Jensen? He doesn’t have the first idea about how to make that okay. Or even if he can.
Which is why he’s so fucking relieved when Jensen basically does it for him.
It starts with a phone call. It’s a random Tuesday night, and Jared answers without thinking. When Jensen says a hesitant hello and awkwardly asks if they can meet at a bar around the corner, Jared agrees without even pausing to consider.
And then he’s sitting next to Jensen at a liquor-sticky wooden table in a dim bar, wondering how the hell to start this conversation, but he only gets as far as, “Jensen, man, I’m really - “ before Jensen holds up a hand, stopping him.
“Can we just - I didn’t come here to talk about that,” Jensen says. “About - whatever, with us.”
That wasn’t what Jared was expecting to hear. “You didn’t?”
“No. It’s - look,” Jensen says, scrubbing a hand through his short hair. “We only have a week and a half until Allie and Adrianne’s bachelor/bachelorette party, and there’s no way we can plan it if we can’t even talk to each other. And that goes for everything else, too - you can’t have a decent wedding when half the wedding party is doing the awkward avoidance thing.”
“Okay,” Jared agrees cautiously. “What are you saying?”
Jensen leans back in his chair, sighing. “Our friends are getting married in two weeks, Jared. I know that there’s a hell of a lot of unresolved stuff between us at the moment, but these are our friends - our best friends. I think that, for now, we should put aside our issues and focus on them. Don’t you?”
Jared’s first instinct is to say no, because how can they act like this huge, tense thing between them is nothing, especially when their friends know exactly what’s going on? But then he thinks about Allie and Adrianne, and the looks on their faces when he and Jensen had their big fight, how they were torn between the two of them and trying to make it right however they could. He thinks about Allie and how she said she didn’t want either of them to get hurt any more than they already were. He thinks about what it would do to their wedding if he and Jensen had another argument or spent the whole day avoiding each other or not speaking.
They’re his best friends. The people closest to him in the whole world. They deserve he and Jensen getting along and acting like actual human beings on what’s supposed to be the happiest day of their lives.
“We can still talk later, if we have to,” Jensen says. “I just think we should concentrate on making the wedding as awesome as possible.”
And Jared still isn’t even sure that’s possible - he isn’t missing how tense Jensen is right now, the taut line of his shoulders and the stiff way he’s holding himself, and no matter how much they act like everything’s okay, it’s very definitely not. Even if they were the best actors in the world, they couldn’t sell a sudden mend in their relationship.
But even as chilly and closed-off as Jensen is right now, they’re talking. They’re getting along. And even if things aren’t fixed between them, even if he doesn’t know if Jensen is angry or hurt or hates him or still has feelings for him, he can wait. He learned his lesson last time - jumping head-first doesn’t work. Maybe it’s time to put this aside and think it through before he does anything else.
“Yeah,” he says, finally. “Yeah, definitely.”
He takes a deep breath, forcibly pushing aside everything he’s been obsessing over for the past week, and tries to focus on the issue at hand. “Um, did you have any ideas about how to throw a good bachelorette party for two bachelorettes? Hopefully one that doesn’t involve strippers?”
Jensen’s mouth quirks with a shadow of a smile. “What, you think it’s tacky to hire strippers when both the people getting married are going to be at the same party?”
“I was more worried about Mike’s reaction to women taking off items of clothing in front of him, actually,” Jared says. “He’s bad enough around women that are fully dressed and intelligent enough to say no. Get him in the same room with a woman in her underwear who’s paid to be there, and he loses the two brain cells that normally function around attractive women.”
Jensen arches an eyebrow. “Sounds dangerous.”
“There’s a lot of drooling and caveman-like grunting,” Jared tells him. “It’s not pretty.”
“Okay, then,” Jensen says, grabbing a pen and a napkin off the bar. “No strippers, check. Anything else to cross off the list right away?”
“Pretty much all the standard bachelorette party stuff, I think,” Jared says. “I mean, cock-shaped confetti is great and all, but relevant at a lesbian party? Not so much.”
Jensen frowns a little. “So, basically, you and I are the worst possible people to be planning this party.”
Jared can’t hide a grin at that. “Let’s just stick to finding somewhere we can have a few drinks, listen to some good music, and celebrate our friends getting married.”
Jensen nods, pulling the napkin toward him and beginning to write down ideas. “That, I think we can do.”
*
Jared’s not sure he did the right thing. He knows putting the party planning above his personal problems was the right decision, but he can’t shake the feeling that he should have grabbed Jensen when he had the chance and talked this out, come to some sort of conclusion. He’s a man of action, and waiting is not his style at all.
He’s even less sure when he walks into the bachelorette party and sees that Jensen brought a date, some tall gorgeous dark-haired guy that’s no doubt another of Jensen’s asshole specials.
But Mike’s there to distract him, and after a few drinks and watching Mike totally fail to hit on women (because “if you were a hamburger, you’d be the McGorgeous,” is possibly the worst pickup line Jared’s ever heard, and that’s before Mike adds on the parts about buns and special sauce), Jared feels better about any relationship decisions he’s ever made.
And there’s also karaoke going on, which means Jared gets to watch people who’ve had a bit too much to drink get up and slaughter their favorite songs. And sometimes even learn new and amazing songs - the guy who gets up and does "She Thinks my Tractor’s Sexy," complete with ass-waggling, makes Jared feel slightly better about his life. (Well, and hope that someone got that on camera and can mock the hell out of that guy when he gets over his hangover tomorrow, because damn.)
And when the end of the night rolls around and Allie and Adrianne are dancing together as the party winds down, Jared looks at them - happy and laughing - and knows that he did the right thing.
It doesn’t make it any easier to watch Jensen parade Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome around the room, introducing him to everyone they know, though. Jared’s unreasonably glad when the guy makes some excuse about work in the morning and takes off before the night ends.
And then, just when Jared’s thinking the party is pretty much over and they can count it as a success, it turns out there’s a finale.
It starts with Allie and Adrianne getting into a stupid fight. Jared misses how it starts, busy talking to Genevieve, but when he catches a snippet of it - Allie saying, “I never lost them in the first place!” - he groans.
Jensen, who’s wandering by with a fresh drink, pauses. “What?”
“Sunglasses and sequined top,” Jared replies.
“Oh, fuck,” Jensen says with feeling.
“What?” Genevieve asks with interest. “What do sunglasses and sequined tops have to do with anything?”
“It’s the stupidest fight in creation,” Jared explains. “Adrianne swears that Allie borrowed her sunglasses and lost them. Allie swears she returned them safe and sound.” He gestures toward the two of them.
“Then where are they?” Adrianne demands.
“I don’t know, I gave them back to you,” Allie shoots back. “Where did you put them?”
“I never got them back!” Adrianne yells.
Genevieve frowns. “Okay, so that explains the sunglasses. What about the - “
“Just wait,” Jared advises.
Sure enough, it’s only a few seconds later that Adrianne says, “You’re the one that’s always losing things.”
“That is so not true.”
“Oh, yeah? So you didn’t lose that sequined top like, two days after I gave it to you, then.”
“No, in fact, I didn’t!”
“Then where is it?” Adrianne asks again.
“Somewhere in the apartment, obviously,” Allie says. “Maybe you put it somewhere during one of your obsessive cleaning raids.”
“Oh, so cleaning is obsessive now?”
Jensen sighs. “It just goes around and around from there.”
“Wow,” Genevieve says. “The fact that you guys have a name for it is kind of disturbing.”
“Didn’t we already have an intervention for it, too?” Jared asks. “I thought I remembered that.”
“No, I think that was for the never-ending argument over who put a red scarf in the load of whites.”
“Oh, yeah.” The Battle of the Scarlet Scarf is even worse than Sunglasses and Sequined Top - Allie and Adrianne only break that one out when they’re really pissed. SaST is more of a bickering argument that comes up when they’re tired or stressed.
“Either way,” Jensen says, looking over at the girls, “Clearly, we need to have another. Soon.”
“In the meantime, though, how about a distraction?”
“Sounds good,” Genevieve says. “Mike could probably help.” She glances around. “Where is he, anyway? I haven’t been subjected to a bad pickup line in nearly an hour. I’m starting to feel unattractive.”
Jensen shrugs. “Haven’t seen him for a while.”
“Well, that’s troubling,” Jared says. A bored Mike often leads to a scheming Mike, which often leads to things he’ll need long years of therapy to suppress.
“He’s been acting weird all day,” Jensen says. “Every time I see him, he grins at me like a total idiot.”
“Maybe he likes you,” Genevieve suggests.
“It’s a little more sadistic than that,” Jensen replies. “Like he knows something we don’t.”
“Entirely possible,” Jared points out. “And if that’s the case, we probably don’t want to know, anyway.”
“True.” Jensen shrugs. “Steve’s been acting weird lately, too.”
Genevieve tilts her head. “Awkward drunken hookup?”
“I hope not,” Jensen replies. “Because Steve called to tell me he likes cuddling with Chris. It’d be sad if he was cuddle-cheating already.”
Jared doesn’t know Jensen’s friends all that well, but he still has to give that revelation a moment to sink in. “Is that some kind of code?”
“For something other than his sudden homoerotic tendencies?” Jensen shrugs. “Beats me.”
“Were you playing truth or dare?”
“Long distance? No. Besides,” Jensen says, “I didn’t even ask. He just called me up and volunteered it. And then he said I could use it against him. Like free blackmail.”
“Huh,” Jared says. The only reason he can think of for volunteering something embarrassing about yourself is if you feel guilty for spilling someone else’s secrets. “He didn’t tell anyone else one of your secrets or something, did he?”
“He’d better not have,” Jensen says automatically. “Besides, who would he tell? Pretty much the only person in the city he knows well enough is - oh, no.”
“What?”
Before Jensen can answer, the DJ over at the karaoke stage grabs the mike and says, “And for our last song of the night, we have a very special request. Allie and Adrianne, are you out there?”
Adrianne’s in the middle of retorting, “Not knowing where something is is the definition of lost!” but she cuts herself off when the DJ calls their names.
“Ah, there you are,” the DJ calls. “Okay, so I hear you two crazy kids are getting married. Congratulations and all that. One of your friends wanted to give you a bit of an early present.”
“Oh, no,” Jensen says again, in a low voice.
“He’s not going to sing,” the DJ goes on. “But he promised me one of your other friends would. And apparently he’s a big fan of nineties pop.”
The music starts up then, and a screen descends behind the stage, showing what’s obviously the music video. Jared vaguely recognizes the tune - some one-hit-wonder boyband from the early nineties - but it’s obvious that Jensen isn’t a fan.
“Oh, fucking fuck,” he’s muttering. “I’m going to kill that motherfucking - “
“Jen, what the hell?” Jared asks. It’s a crappy song and a stupid prank on Mike’s part to get Jensen to sing it, but it’s not that bad. “What’s going - oh.”
Because that’s when he looks from Jensen’s murderous face to the screen where the music video is playing and notices a certain similarity between his friend and one of the teen boys bopping around singing “Send it during dinner, send it during class, let me know how much you love me every time I ask.”
“Oh my god,” Jared says faintly. “Jensen, that’s you.”
Right at that moment, mini-Jensen steps to the front of the formation of boys and belts out the idiotic chorus - “Page me, page me, page me your heart” - while doing some sort of bizarre dance involving a bulky pager hooked on his belt.
“You were in a boyband?” Genevieve demands.
“You sang a song about pagers?” Jared demands.
"Is that Jessica Simpson in your music video?" Allie asks incredulously.
“Girl, you push my buttons,” baby Jensen says onscreen, running a hand through his frosted hair.
“Come on, get up here and sing!” the DJ yells.
“I’m going to kill that son of a bitch,” Jensen says.
*
It’s not clear whether he meant Steve or Mike (or even the obnoxious DJ), but either way, Jensen’s secret boyband past provides endless fodder for jokes over the next few weeks. After Jensen finally agrees not to harm Mike or Steve (who swears Mike got him trashed and hypnotized his secrets out of him) and starts laughing at some of the jokes himself, it gets even funnier.
Because Jensen, it turns out, has a multitude of horrifying stories from his short boyband days. And even though he still gets cranky when people mock the frosted tips and bizarre pants (“It was the nineties,” Jensen says a million times. “Everyone looked kind of twinky!” “But not everyone had brick pants,” Mike points out, earning himself a kick to the shin), he does eventually spill some details. Like how the band - named Fall 2 F8 - was known in the industry as “All Jailb8,” and how they were doomed from the start - “Everyone was getting cell phones by the time it came out,” Jensen says. “And they still thought we might be okay, since we were cute and we had a dance, but then the Macarena came out and no one cared about pager dances.” He sighs. “It was tragic.”
In any case, the revelation that a guy he spends a lot of time with was once a member of a boyband (and therefore has his awkward puberty years documented in teen magazine photo shoots) does a lot to take Jared’s mind off the fact that things still aren’t quite good between them.
And then the wedding’s coming up in a week, and there are a million and one things to be done at any given time. Allie and Adrianne ended up picking a picturesque little B&B upstate to have the wedding at, so there’s also the added element of travel - everyone has to have everything they need ready and packed by the morning of the wedding, so that they can make the trip up there. In the flurry to coordinate the efforts in the city and at the inn, there isn’t much time to worry about his love life.
Even working with Jensen isn’t awkward, because it’s all business, all the time. Even if they had time to talk about their horrendous luck or bad timing or Jensen’s asshole boyfriend, it’d still get lost under the frantic efforts to make sure the flowers are delivered on time and the chef’s making enough meals and everyone who needs a room has one.
Adrianne only bakes when she’s nervous, so when Jared wakes up before dawn on the morning of the wedding to an apartment that smells like yeast, he knows that he can’t just roll over and go back to sleep. Instead, he hauls himself to his feet, throws on a t-shirt, and heads out to the kitchen. When he finds Adrianne elbows-deep in flour, rolling out dough, he doesn’t say anything, just wraps his arms around her from behind.
She sighs, hands stilling on the rolling pin, and leans back into him. “Hey.”
“Morning,” he says, resting his chin on her shoulder. “What’re you making?”
“Cinnamon rolls,” she says, smoothing the dough with floury fingers.
“Mm. You okay?”
Adrianne laughs a little. “Yeah, fine. I do bake for emotionally healthy reasons sometimes, you know.”
“Hey, I’m not complaining,” Jared says, releasing her and stepping up to the counter. He knows by now that he’s going to have to wait her out. “Show me what I can do.”
Adrianne sets him up with a knife and some walnuts, and Jared chops them into neat pieces for about two minutes before he gives up and starts crushing them with the flat of the blade to speed up the process.
“Okay, so I’m a little nervous,” Adrianne says finally, as Jared’s scraping nuts into the bowl of filling mixture. When he looks over at her, she shrugs. “Not bad nervous, just…I don’t know. There’s so much planning that’s gone into this day, and it’s all kind of sinking in. And the stupid part is, I don’t really care.”
She catches his surprised look and hastily corrects herself. “I mean, I do, obviously I care, but it’s just…out of everything that happens today, the stuff we spent so long planning isn’t that important to me.” She stirs cinnamon and sugar into the bowl. “Even if everything goes horribly wrong and I spill wine all over my dress and the flowers never come and half our relatives end up sleeping on the floor, at the end of the day, if I’m married to Allie?” She smiles down at the counter. “Then it isn’t going to matter.”
She knocks Jared’s hand away and starts sprinkling the filling onto the dough. “I kind of just want to fast forward to that part and skip all the stress. Is that horrible?”
Jared licks sugar off his finger. “Of course not.” When Adrianne looks over at him, he gives her the best smile he can manage at this unholy hour of the morning. “It’s sweet. At the risk of my guy card getting revoked, I’d even go so far as to call it adorable.”
Adrianne rolls her eyes. “That’s not going to be the one thing that puts your man card in jeopardy, trust me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I’m very manly.”
“Please,” Adrianne says. “I’ve seen your closet. You wear enough pink to warrant three X chromosomes.”
Jared glares at her, flicking a raisin at her arm. “Pink is a good color on me. It goes with my complexion.”
She smacks his hand. “You’re proving my point, you dork. Now, be quiet and help me roll this up like a good little kitchen helper.”
They’re quiet as they carefully roll the dough and pinch the edges. Jared thinks about how many times he’s done this over the years he’s known Adrianne - how many times he’s woken up to find the light on in the kitchen, the room warm with the heat of the oven and the counters covered in ingredients - and how it’s come to be just another part of their friendship. He hasn’t thought much about how things will change once Allie and Adrianne are married, but he hopes this will stay the same.
He’s not worried about Mike - Mike’s pretty constant, no matter what else is going on around him. This Genevieve thing is throwing him for a loop, but he’ll be okay. Things might be royally messed up with Jensen, but Jared hopes that eventually they can work something out. Go back to being friends, at the very least, because he likes Jensen too much to let him walk out of his life. It’s not what he wants, not really, but if it’s all he can have, he’ll take it.
Adrianne must be thinking along the same lines, because she pauses after handing Jared a sliced roll and says quietly, “I’m sorry things didn’t work out between you and Jensen.”
Jared shrugs, setting the roll in the pan. “It’s okay. I guess sometimes things just aren’t meant to be.”
Adrianne works the knife through the dough. “Yeah, maybe. But you guys seemed like you could be really good together.” She hands Jared another roll. “Besides, since when does Jared Padalecki give up that easily?”
Jared snorts. “That easily? Have you been paying attention at all? Easy is not the word I’d use to describe any of this.”
Adrianne sets the knife down and turns to face him. “Maybe. But you know what? The good things - the really good things?” She looks steadily at him. “I don’t think they’re supposed to be easy.”
Jared looks back at her, the roll forgotten in his hand, and remembers a night what feels like eons ago, when he thought almost the same thing.
His train of thought is interrupted a second later when Allie stumbles into the kitchen, rumpled and bleary, and Adrianne goes over to kiss her good morning. One little kiss turns into a few more, and pretty soon Jared’s highly-attuned senses alert him to possible we’re-almost-married sex coming on, so he finishes arranging the rolls in the pan, covers them to rise, and heads back to his room.
He means to think about what Adrianne said, but when he crawls back into his bed, he falls asleep almost as soon as his head hits the pillow.
*
Part Seven
It’s like Allie said - some people are just incapable of keeping secrets. And Jared? Jared is incapable of the kind of calm, logical all-consequences-considered thinking-it-through decision-making. He can think about it until he’s eighty-five, and he’ll still come to the same result: that on the one hand, it’s Jensen - the guy he’s been head over heels for since day one, the perfect combination of everything he wanted in a boyfriend - and on the other, it’s Michael - the sweet, funny guy that cooks him dinner and listens to his stories about work and wants to make their relationship work any way he can, even if that means long distance from DC to NYC.
And no matter how many lists he makes or questions he asks an 8-ball or petals he plucks, Michael-loves-me or Jensen-loves-me, he’s not going to come to an answer. That’s just not the way his brain works. He’s been going by his gut feelings all his life, and that’s not going to change.
So he looks down at his failed sandwich and listens to his gut. And what his gut says (besides that the sandwich could actually be sort of okay, if he could scrape off the peanut butter and add some gravy) is that he needs to talk to Jensen. Now.
So Jared sends Allie a silent apology, sticks the sandwich in the fridge for later contemplation, and grabs his coat and keys before leaving the apartment.
*
He doesn’t get far. Whether it’s fate, destiny, coincidence or just plain luck, Jared happens to glance inside O’Toole’s as he’s leaving his apartment building. And there, at a table alone, is Jensen.
He looks tired, like he hasn’t been sleeping much - his face is drawn and his chin is resting in his hand and he’s staring at the beer in front of him like it’s the most fascinating thing he’s seen all day - but he’s still the most gorgeous man Jared’s ever met, and he’s surprised by a fierce surge of affection for Jensen.
He wants to go over there, wants to see Jensen’s face light up, wants to make Jensen smile. He wants to touch him, to be close to him, to have him - to be the one that’s allowed to do those things, to be the one that Jensen wants to do those things. To be able to look at Jensen and think mine in that possessive little place in the back of his brain, because, as he’s suddenly realizing, there’s never been a time that he didn’t belong to Jensen. He’s been happy with Michael, he cares about Michael, but it’s never been like this. It’s never made his chest ache or his stomach do crazy cartwheels. And with Jensen, that’s the way it’s always been. He may have wanted to pretend it was gone, but given the way it’s all rushing back now, just looking at Jensen, it never left.
His feet are moving before he can think about it, and then he’s in front of Jensen’s table and Jensen startles, looking up suddenly from his contemplation of the beer bottle.
“Hey,” Jared says.
“Uh, hey,” Jensen says. He doesn’t look angry or pissed, just surprised.
“Um. Can we - I really need to talk to you,” Jared says through a suddenly dry mouth. “Please?”
Jensen blinks, then shrugs. “Sure,” he says, gesturing at the chair across from him.
“Upstairs.”
Jensen shrugs again. “Okay.”
He gets up from the table, all lean grace, and takes a final sip from his beer. Jared’s eyes are glued to his throat the whole time, following the movement as he swallows, and it’s only when he realizes just how much he wants to taste that skin that he starts thinking about what’s going on.
Because when they get up to Jared’s apartment, once they get past this mess of who feels what and who was with whom when, if there’s even the slightest chance of a favorable outcome, Jared is going to take it. He’s going to kiss Jensen and touch Jensen and not even think about letting him go. And since he’s still with Michael, that poses a problem.
This, Jared realizes, is why that whole thinking-it-through thing can sometimes come in handy.
“Uh,” he says when Jensen looks at him expectantly. “I have to - I need a minute. Can I meet you up there?”
Jensen shrugs, taking the keys Jared holds out, and heads for the stairs.
Jared pulls out his phone and goes outside. He knows this is a sucky way to do this, and it’s sort of a crazy thing to do this spur-of-the-moment, but there isn’t really another way. And then Michael, who always answers his phone, picks this one moment, of all times, to let it go to voicemail, and Jared feels like even more of a jerk. But it’s not fair to let this go on when he’s realized that his heart isn’t totally in it, so Jared sucks it up and leaves an awkward voicemail. He doesn’t come out and say, “Hey, I’m breaking up with you,” because he can’t quite make himself be that horrible, but he’s pretty sure it’s evident in his tone.
And honestly, it shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise - he and Michael have barely talked since Michael got out there, and they only agreed to do this long-distance thing as a sort of test. So he cringes the whole time he’s saying “We need to talk,” and “Please call me as soon as you can,” but it still feels right. He feels like an ass when he’s done, but he also feels relieved.
And knowing that Jensen is waiting for him upstairs? That helps. Jared takes the stairs three at a time on his way up, and Jensen looks a little surprised when Jared bursts through the door, breathless. But Jared’s tired of waiting and hoping and getting hurt, and he just wants this all out in the open so they can do something.
“So, Allie told me,” he says, straight off.
“Yeah, I know,” Jensen says.
“Oh.” Well, that’s unexpected. “You do?”
“Yeah. She called me to tell you that she told you.” Jensen smiles a little. “She really sucks at keeping secrets.”
“Yeah, I know.” But Allie isn’t really what Jared wants to talk about. “So,” he says, searching for the words to ask what he desperately wants to know. “You really - um. You have - I mean…for me?”
It doesn’t make any sense, but Jensen gets it. He meets Jared’s gaze, not bothering to hide anything, and Jared has his answer before
Jensen says, barely louder than a whisper, “Yeah.”
And Jared can’t just stand there when Jensen says that, admits to having feelings for him. He’s across the room in a second, reaching out before he even knows what he wants, but when he ends up with his hand cupping Jensen’s face, one thumb stroking along his cheekbone, it feels right. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks. He has a million other questions, but that’s the biggest.
Jensen closes his eyes. “Because you’re with Michael.”
“I’m not,” Jared says. When Jensen’s eyes open, surprised, he repeats it. “I’m not anymore.”
“How - “
“Don’t,” Jared says. “Don’t ask. It’s not important.”
Jensen blinks. “Okay, but - “
“But what?”
“I’m not - are you sure that you - I mean, is this - “
Jared waits for some sort of concrete question to emerge, but Jensen gives up with a frustrated sigh, like even he doesn’t know what to ask. And Jared - Jared is ready to be done with questions.
“Jensen,” he says. “Do you want this? Me?”
Jensen takes a slow breath. “Yes.”
“Then I don’t care.”
Jared steps closer, using the hand on Jensen’s face to tilt his chin up, and lets their mouths meet in a gentle kiss. He doesn’t take it any further, pulling back after a second and waiting a beat in case Jensen has some objection, but Jensen just makes an impatient noise, wrapping a hand around Jared’s bicep to drag him closer, and kisses him back.
And then they’re really kissing, and Jared kind of can’t believe it, that they’re here and both on the same page and this is finally, finally happening.
Which, of course, is when he hears a key in the door. And he turns around, ready to tell Allie or Adrianne or Mike (who doesn’t have a key, but might have learned lock-picking by now) to get the hell out and stop ruining his moment with Jensen, but all the words on the tip of his tongue dry up when the door swings open and it’s Michael there.
Behind him, Jensen sucks in a breath and takes a step away. Jared just gapes.
There’s a moment of dead silence, where no one says or does anything, and then Michael tries a cautious smile. “Um. Surprise?”
“How did - I mean, what are you doing here?” Jared asks, maybe a little more sharply than he should.
“I came to surprise you,” Michael replies, like it should be obvious.
And okay, maybe it should, but Jared is still completely in shock, and things are taking a long time to make sense. “Surprise me?”
“Yeah,” Michael says. “I know we haven’t gotten much time to talk, and I missed you.” He flicks a glance at Jensen, like he’s not sure how much to say, then goes on anyway. “In fact, I really missed you. DC’s a great city, it’s just…not that great without you. I don’t know if this move was such a great idea.”
Jensen makes a noise, some kind of strangled laugh, and Jared spends a moment in sheer disbelief over just how incredibly un-fucking-lucky this is. The universe seriously must have it out for him.
“So,” he says awkwardly. “You, uh. You haven’t checked your voicemail, huh?”
“No,” Michael says, bewildered. “I had my phone off for the flight. Why? What’s going on?”
Jared doesn’t know how to begin explaining, or if he even could, but before he can come up with some kind of reply, Jensen does it for him.
“Nothing,” he says flatly. “Nothing’s going on.” And then, without looking at Jared or Michael, he leaves the apartment.
Michael watches him go with a confused frown on his face. “What - is he - ?”
Jared sighs. “We have to talk.”
*
“And then Michael walked in,” Jensen says, “and I walked out. End of story.”
“Wow. Is there a possibility that either you or Jared are or have been cursed in the past?” Adrianne asks. “Because seriously, there’s no other explanation for how much bad luck the two of you seem to have. It defies logic.”
They’re having lunch on Saturday, and trading details on the whole fiasco. Adrianne came home just in time to overhear a good portion of Jared’s breakup fight with Michael, so she’s filling him in on all the bits he missed. And while Jensen’s glad to know that Jared broke up with Michael anyway, he’s not sure that hearing the gory details is really helping.
“I guess we’re just special like that.” Jensen sighs. “I don’t know, maybe it’s some kind of cosmic sign. The universe is trying to tell us that we just don’t belong together.”
“No offense,” Adrianne says with a small smile, “but I kind of hope the universe has bigger things to worry about than you and Jared and the way you keep failing to get together.”
“Hey, don’t underestimate my importance in the cosmic scheme of things. I’m pretty damn awesome.”
She rolls her eyes. “And so modest, too.”
And okay, even if hearing about Jared’s messy breakup with Michael isn’t the best thing for Jensen’s mood right now, being out with Adrianne is helping considerably. If he spent one more hour in his apartment going over the whole mess, he’d go crazy. It probably says something unflattering about him that he finds being mocked by his friends soothing, but he doesn’t really care.
“So,” Adrianne says, dragging a spoon through the remains of her lemon drop soup. “Have you talked to Jared since all of this happened?”
“Not really.”
“And are you going to?”
“Eventually.”
“Eventually? As in…?”
Jensen sighs again. “As in, at some yet-to-be-determined point after I stop being…whatever.”
“I hate to break it to you, but “whatever” is not an actual emotion,” Adrianne points out.
Which, yes, Jensen knows. But right now, it’s pretty accurate. He’s not sure how he feels about the whole thing. At first he was furious with Jared, because Jared went and dangled everything he’d been so desperately wanting in front of him and yanked it away. And then he was angry at Michael, for managing to pick the least opportune moment ever to walk in. And then he was mad at himself for being so stupidly in love with Jared, because he knew, he knew he shouldn’t let himself get that tangled up in someone, and then he went and did it anyway.
And when all that anger died away, sometime hours later, he just felt…exhausted. Numb. Kind of like he was stuck, just waiting for the universe to serve up a giant told you so.
“Ah,” Adrianne says, “So you are mad at him.”
“I don’t know,” Jensen says. “Well, all right, a little. He could have waited to actually break up with his boyfriend before jumping me. I don’t even like Michael, but that’s a shitty way for things to go down.”
Adrianne rolls her eyes. “You don’t like Michael? I totally missed that. It’s not like you made entire lists of things about him that drove you crazy. Oh, wait.”
She’s totally exaggerating. Jensen only made one list, and it was on a series of pink post-it notes after he’d had way too many rum and cokes. And it was about why Michael was totally and completely wrong for Jared. “He doesn’t like dogs! And he lied about it! Anyone would feel compelled to start a list after that.” He threw it away the next morning, anyway.
“Whatever,” Adrianne says. “I told Jared that stuff, by the way. If it makes you feel any better.”
Okay, so maybe Jensen didn’t quite forget that list, even after he threw it away. And maybe he tried to convince Allie and Adrianne that, as Jared’s loyal friends, they should tell him how wrong Michael was for him. If they’re too principled for their own good, that’s not Jensen’s fault. A little part of him is perversely glad they told Jared now, though. He’s not going to admit it, but it’s true.
“I was actually trying to make him feel better about the breakup,” Adrianne goes on. “But I think I just made it worse.”
Jensen shrugs. “I don’t know if the situation could actually get worse. It was pretty much one giant mess to begin with.”
“True,” Adrianne sighs. “Well, anyway.” She pushes her plate away and leans back in her chair. “I guess that means you don’t want to come to shameless teen-centric movie night at our apartment tonight.”
“Can’t,” Jensen tells her. “Chris and Steve are staying in the city tonight, and since they actually gave me a week’s notice, like civilized people, I should probably hang out with them at least a little while before my date.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Date?”
“Yeah. Mike’s attempt at cheering me up. A blind date with some guy he knows.”
Adrianne looks like he just told her he was going to try skydiving without a parachute. “Um, Jensen. You know that’s a really bad idea, right?”
“What, going on a date right now? Or trusting Mike’s judgment?”
“Both, pretty much equally.”
“Yeah,” Jensen says with a sigh. “But it’s sort of that or get incredibly drunk all by myself, and that’s just too depressing. And clichéd.”
“You can’t get drunk with Chris and Steve?”
“They’ll try to go beat up Jared to defend my honor. Or I’ll end up drunk-dialing Jared and saying something truly pathetic. I’m not sure which one’s worse.” He shrugs. “Honestly, I think it’ll be better if I just go out with this guy and try to forget about all the other crap for a while.”
“Well,” Adrianne says. “All right. Good luck with that. Try not to feel too sad that you’re missing Mean Girls and Sixteen Candles.”
“Thanks. It’ll be tough, but I think I’ll survive.”
Adrianne fidgets a little. “So. Want dessert?”
Jensen looks down at the collection of plates and bowls between them that are all that’s left of the giant portions their favorite Greek place serves. “No, thanks.”
“Coffee?”
“Uh, that’s okay.”
She still doesn’t move to get up, and Jensen raises an eyebrow. “Are you stalling, or something?” He looks around at the tiny restaurant. “We’re not having another surprise intervention, are we? Because I think you know why I’m cranky this time.”
“No, no interventions,” Adrianne says with a sigh.
“Then is there a reason we’ve been talking about Jared for almost two hours and you still don’t want to leave?” Jensen tilts his head. Come to think of it, even the fact that they spent that much time talking about it is kind of weird. Allie’s usually the one who wants the gossipy details.
“Can’t I just enjoy hanging out with my friend?” Adrianne asks, but she looks a little hunted.
“Nice try. Did you have a fight with Allie?”
Adrianne sighs again. “There might be a stack of shower thank-you notes that I was apparently supposed to be writing last night,” she admits grudgingly. “Which, since I didn’t even know about them, didn’t get done. And there may have been some words exchanged over that that were less than rational.”
Jensen tries to be sympathetic, he really does, but it’s just a little bit funny. “So now you’re hiding?” He can’t smother a grin. “Real mature.”
“Oh, whatever,” Adrianne snaps, throwing a straw wrapper at Jensen’s head. “You’re going out on a blind date with one of Mike’s friends. Like you can talk about sensible decisions.”
Jensen laughs. “Touché. No judging here.”
“Thank you.” Adrianne lets out a breath, massaging her temples. “It’s just all the stress, really. All those little details piling up. I swear, getting married is actually designed to drive a person crazy.”
“Maybe it’s a test.”
“Right now, it seems like something out of Gladiator,” Adrianne says heavily. “I just hope we both make it out alive.”
“You will,” Jensen tells her. “And if you need help, you know you just have to ask.”
“Yeah,” she says, smiling at him. “Thanks. Same goes for you.” She takes a deep breath, pushing her chair back. “Okay, I’m going to go brave the apartment and the thank-you notes. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” Jensen says. “Wish me luck on my blind date.”
“Yeah,” Adrianne says. “I hope Mike has awesome taste in men. You know, that he’s been hiding all this time. Or that spontaneously developed.” She puts a hand on his arm, meeting his eyes. “And I wasn’t kidding. Anything you need, just let me know.”
Jensen really just wants to forget about the whole thing for a while, but he nods.
“And good luck,” Adrianne says, grinning.
“Thanks,” Jensen says. “I think I’m going to need it.”
*
As it turns out, Mike’s taste in men is remarkably similar to his taste in women. Which is partly a good thing, because Tom’s one of the most beautiful people Jensen has ever met. He’s model-gorgeous, head to toe, and Jensen spends a good part of their date baffled by the sheer, flawless perfection of his cheekbones. But it’s also mostly a bad thing, because Tom’s crazy cheekbones end up being the most interesting thing about him. He’s a nice enough guy, he’s just not much of a conversationalist. Or a good listener. Or interested at all in ninety percent of what’s going on around him. It’s a good thing Mike sent them to a pretty lively piano bar, because otherwise Jensen’s pretty sure they would have spent the night being bored or boring each other by turns.
But it does accomplish his goal of getting his mind off things with Jared, even if it’s only because he’s trying to figure out what in the hell Tom could possibly be finding so fascinating about the label he’s painstakingly peeling off his beer bottle. It also has the added bonus of taking Jensen’s mind off the fact that he left Chris and Steve at his apartment under the dubious supervision of Mike, because that’s one of those decisions that could lead to a cold sweat if Jensen let himself consider the possible consequences. Mike plus alcohol is only one step away from disaster at the best of times, and throwing Chris and Steve into the mix only increases the likelihood of certain doom.
But when Jensen finally gives up on Tom and comes home around two, the apartment is quiet and still has four walls. Steve, Chris and Mike are all asleep in their own clothes and appear to have all their limbs, so Jensen counts it as a miracle and heads off to bed himself.
It’s only when he wakes up at noon the next day to his phone ringing that he starts to think something’s going on. And when he answers and Steve says, “Hey, I have to tell you something,” the vague dread stirring in his stomach only gets worse.
“Uh, okay,” he says, rubbing his eyes and sitting up. “Where are you?”
“On the road. We had to leave early.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I just have to - okay. You remember the time we all crashed at that insane house party in college, right after senior year started? The night with all the jello shots?”
Jensen blinks. “Uh. Vaguely?”
“And there was that stupid crappy futon, and Chris and I ended up both sleeping on it, and in the morning we were all squished together?”
“Oh, yeah.” Now Jensen definitely remembers. “We called it the Cuddle Couch after that. Didn’t someone take pictures?”
“You did, asshole.”
“Oh, yeah.” Jensen grins. “It was just so adorable.”
“Fuck you,” Steve growls. “Okay, so. Anyway.”
“…yes?”
“All right, so we blamed it on the couch, because the stupid thing was so saggy that you couldn’t help rolling to the middle,” Steve says. “And you were still in danger of getting dumped off every time you moved, so it was only logical that you needed to get an arm around that other person.”
“Uh huh.” Jensen’s heard all of these excuses before. “Whatever you need to tell yourself, man. Is there a point to this story?”
There’s a long silence, during which Jensen seriously considers hanging up and going back to bed and figuring this out later, but then, all of a sudden -
“I like cuddling with Chris,” Steve blurts out.
Jensen’s pretty sure he didn’t get drunk enough last night to be hallucinating this kind of shit. “What?”
“We said it was an accident and blamed it on the couch, but I actually like it,” Steve says, in a rush. “He smells good. Sometimes we take naps together, and it’s like, the most restful sleep I’ve ever had. I don’t know, man. It’s weird.”
“Uh, understatement,” Jensen manages to say.
“Yeah,” Steve says. “Okay, well. I just wanted you to know that.”
“You…did? I mean, really?”
“Yep,” Steve says. “And you can use that against me anytime you want. No retribution. I’d kind of like to keep the pictures off the internet, since I have a reputation to uphold and all, but as far as mocking for the rest of my life? Totally open season.”
“I’ll…keep that in mind,” Jensen says. He gets out of bed and pulls up the shades, but there are no pigs flying or apocalyptic warning signs that he can see. “Um. Is there anything else you need to tell me?”
“Nope!” Steve says cheerfully. “That’s it. Thanks for letting us stay last night. See you in another month or so.”
Then he hangs up. Jensen actually checks the caller ID, just to make sure that was really his friend calling, but barring some crazy scenario where someone out there kidnapped Steve and forced him to say all that stuff (or Chris won one hell of a bet, which is a likelier possibility), those words just came voluntarily out of Steve’s mouth.
Jensen tries to think through some kind of plausible explanation for the sudden share-and-care, but it just makes his head hurt. In the end, he gives up and goes back to bed. Hopefully when he wakes up again, this will all have been a crazy dream.
*
Jared thinks the universe may be out to get him. At the very least, it’s trying to prove just how many fun, twisted ways Murphy’s Law can come true (preferably simultaneously), and Jared, to be quite honest, is not impressed.
He’s kind of more like depressed. He thought his life was going pretty good - awesome friends, job he loves, city he loves, awesome boyfriend - and then, within a matter of minutes, it all went completely to hell. Michael’s pissed at him, Jensen’s pissed at him, and even though Allie and Adrianne are doing their best to stay completely neutral, Jared can sense the disappointment there. Mike isn’t pissed (or if he is, he’s doing a really good job hiding it), but that’s not much consolation. Mike doesn’t really do pissed. He says it wastes energy he could be spending elsewhere.
And the worst thing is, as good as his life was going before that stupid fight with Jensen, it actually got better, right before things got worse. Because even when Jared felt like an ass dumping Michael over his voicemail and had absolutely no idea what he was doing or if it was the right thing, there was a part of him that was glowing with the knowledge that Jensen had feelings for him. Jensen, the person Jared would have given anything to be with.
And when he dragged Jensen up to his apartment and heard Jensen say that, heard him admit that he wanted Jared, it was like he didn’t know exactly how much he’d wanted it. Waited for it, hoped for it, but never thought in a million years he’d get it. And then they were kissing, and it was amazing.
And then - well. Then Michael came out of nowhere, and Jared got to watch as Jensen’s face shut down and things got even more fucked up than they’d ever been.
And now it’s been more than a week, and he hasn’t seen or spoken to Jensen. He’s heard a few things - he knows Jensen’s spending time with his friends when he’s not around - but he has no idea what Jensen is actually feeling. Adrianne and Allie aren’t saying anything, and Jared only had the guts to make one call to Jensen, which turned into a rambling voicemail explanation/apology. Jensen hasn’t returned it.
And the stupid thing is, Jared doesn’t know what to do. He knew what to do when Jensen left the apartment - he knew what he had to say to Michael. He knew how to explain things to his friends. But Jensen? He doesn’t have the first idea about how to make that okay. Or even if he can.
Which is why he’s so fucking relieved when Jensen basically does it for him.
It starts with a phone call. It’s a random Tuesday night, and Jared answers without thinking. When Jensen says a hesitant hello and awkwardly asks if they can meet at a bar around the corner, Jared agrees without even pausing to consider.
And then he’s sitting next to Jensen at a liquor-sticky wooden table in a dim bar, wondering how the hell to start this conversation, but he only gets as far as, “Jensen, man, I’m really - “ before Jensen holds up a hand, stopping him.
“Can we just - I didn’t come here to talk about that,” Jensen says. “About - whatever, with us.”
That wasn’t what Jared was expecting to hear. “You didn’t?”
“No. It’s - look,” Jensen says, scrubbing a hand through his short hair. “We only have a week and a half until Allie and Adrianne’s bachelor/bachelorette party, and there’s no way we can plan it if we can’t even talk to each other. And that goes for everything else, too - you can’t have a decent wedding when half the wedding party is doing the awkward avoidance thing.”
“Okay,” Jared agrees cautiously. “What are you saying?”
Jensen leans back in his chair, sighing. “Our friends are getting married in two weeks, Jared. I know that there’s a hell of a lot of unresolved stuff between us at the moment, but these are our friends - our best friends. I think that, for now, we should put aside our issues and focus on them. Don’t you?”
Jared’s first instinct is to say no, because how can they act like this huge, tense thing between them is nothing, especially when their friends know exactly what’s going on? But then he thinks about Allie and Adrianne, and the looks on their faces when he and Jensen had their big fight, how they were torn between the two of them and trying to make it right however they could. He thinks about Allie and how she said she didn’t want either of them to get hurt any more than they already were. He thinks about what it would do to their wedding if he and Jensen had another argument or spent the whole day avoiding each other or not speaking.
They’re his best friends. The people closest to him in the whole world. They deserve he and Jensen getting along and acting like actual human beings on what’s supposed to be the happiest day of their lives.
“We can still talk later, if we have to,” Jensen says. “I just think we should concentrate on making the wedding as awesome as possible.”
And Jared still isn’t even sure that’s possible - he isn’t missing how tense Jensen is right now, the taut line of his shoulders and the stiff way he’s holding himself, and no matter how much they act like everything’s okay, it’s very definitely not. Even if they were the best actors in the world, they couldn’t sell a sudden mend in their relationship.
But even as chilly and closed-off as Jensen is right now, they’re talking. They’re getting along. And even if things aren’t fixed between them, even if he doesn’t know if Jensen is angry or hurt or hates him or still has feelings for him, he can wait. He learned his lesson last time - jumping head-first doesn’t work. Maybe it’s time to put this aside and think it through before he does anything else.
“Yeah,” he says, finally. “Yeah, definitely.”
He takes a deep breath, forcibly pushing aside everything he’s been obsessing over for the past week, and tries to focus on the issue at hand. “Um, did you have any ideas about how to throw a good bachelorette party for two bachelorettes? Hopefully one that doesn’t involve strippers?”
Jensen’s mouth quirks with a shadow of a smile. “What, you think it’s tacky to hire strippers when both the people getting married are going to be at the same party?”
“I was more worried about Mike’s reaction to women taking off items of clothing in front of him, actually,” Jared says. “He’s bad enough around women that are fully dressed and intelligent enough to say no. Get him in the same room with a woman in her underwear who’s paid to be there, and he loses the two brain cells that normally function around attractive women.”
Jensen arches an eyebrow. “Sounds dangerous.”
“There’s a lot of drooling and caveman-like grunting,” Jared tells him. “It’s not pretty.”
“Okay, then,” Jensen says, grabbing a pen and a napkin off the bar. “No strippers, check. Anything else to cross off the list right away?”
“Pretty much all the standard bachelorette party stuff, I think,” Jared says. “I mean, cock-shaped confetti is great and all, but relevant at a lesbian party? Not so much.”
Jensen frowns a little. “So, basically, you and I are the worst possible people to be planning this party.”
Jared can’t hide a grin at that. “Let’s just stick to finding somewhere we can have a few drinks, listen to some good music, and celebrate our friends getting married.”
Jensen nods, pulling the napkin toward him and beginning to write down ideas. “That, I think we can do.”
*
Jared’s not sure he did the right thing. He knows putting the party planning above his personal problems was the right decision, but he can’t shake the feeling that he should have grabbed Jensen when he had the chance and talked this out, come to some sort of conclusion. He’s a man of action, and waiting is not his style at all.
He’s even less sure when he walks into the bachelorette party and sees that Jensen brought a date, some tall gorgeous dark-haired guy that’s no doubt another of Jensen’s asshole specials.
But Mike’s there to distract him, and after a few drinks and watching Mike totally fail to hit on women (because “if you were a hamburger, you’d be the McGorgeous,” is possibly the worst pickup line Jared’s ever heard, and that’s before Mike adds on the parts about buns and special sauce), Jared feels better about any relationship decisions he’s ever made.
And there’s also karaoke going on, which means Jared gets to watch people who’ve had a bit too much to drink get up and slaughter their favorite songs. And sometimes even learn new and amazing songs - the guy who gets up and does "She Thinks my Tractor’s Sexy," complete with ass-waggling, makes Jared feel slightly better about his life. (Well, and hope that someone got that on camera and can mock the hell out of that guy when he gets over his hangover tomorrow, because damn.)
And when the end of the night rolls around and Allie and Adrianne are dancing together as the party winds down, Jared looks at them - happy and laughing - and knows that he did the right thing.
It doesn’t make it any easier to watch Jensen parade Mr. Tall, Dark and Handsome around the room, introducing him to everyone they know, though. Jared’s unreasonably glad when the guy makes some excuse about work in the morning and takes off before the night ends.
And then, just when Jared’s thinking the party is pretty much over and they can count it as a success, it turns out there’s a finale.
It starts with Allie and Adrianne getting into a stupid fight. Jared misses how it starts, busy talking to Genevieve, but when he catches a snippet of it - Allie saying, “I never lost them in the first place!” - he groans.
Jensen, who’s wandering by with a fresh drink, pauses. “What?”
“Sunglasses and sequined top,” Jared replies.
“Oh, fuck,” Jensen says with feeling.
“What?” Genevieve asks with interest. “What do sunglasses and sequined tops have to do with anything?”
“It’s the stupidest fight in creation,” Jared explains. “Adrianne swears that Allie borrowed her sunglasses and lost them. Allie swears she returned them safe and sound.” He gestures toward the two of them.
“Then where are they?” Adrianne demands.
“I don’t know, I gave them back to you,” Allie shoots back. “Where did you put them?”
“I never got them back!” Adrianne yells.
Genevieve frowns. “Okay, so that explains the sunglasses. What about the - “
“Just wait,” Jared advises.
Sure enough, it’s only a few seconds later that Adrianne says, “You’re the one that’s always losing things.”
“That is so not true.”
“Oh, yeah? So you didn’t lose that sequined top like, two days after I gave it to you, then.”
“No, in fact, I didn’t!”
“Then where is it?” Adrianne asks again.
“Somewhere in the apartment, obviously,” Allie says. “Maybe you put it somewhere during one of your obsessive cleaning raids.”
“Oh, so cleaning is obsessive now?”
Jensen sighs. “It just goes around and around from there.”
“Wow,” Genevieve says. “The fact that you guys have a name for it is kind of disturbing.”
“Didn’t we already have an intervention for it, too?” Jared asks. “I thought I remembered that.”
“No, I think that was for the never-ending argument over who put a red scarf in the load of whites.”
“Oh, yeah.” The Battle of the Scarlet Scarf is even worse than Sunglasses and Sequined Top - Allie and Adrianne only break that one out when they’re really pissed. SaST is more of a bickering argument that comes up when they’re tired or stressed.
“Either way,” Jensen says, looking over at the girls, “Clearly, we need to have another. Soon.”
“In the meantime, though, how about a distraction?”
“Sounds good,” Genevieve says. “Mike could probably help.” She glances around. “Where is he, anyway? I haven’t been subjected to a bad pickup line in nearly an hour. I’m starting to feel unattractive.”
Jensen shrugs. “Haven’t seen him for a while.”
“Well, that’s troubling,” Jared says. A bored Mike often leads to a scheming Mike, which often leads to things he’ll need long years of therapy to suppress.
“He’s been acting weird all day,” Jensen says. “Every time I see him, he grins at me like a total idiot.”
“Maybe he likes you,” Genevieve suggests.
“It’s a little more sadistic than that,” Jensen replies. “Like he knows something we don’t.”
“Entirely possible,” Jared points out. “And if that’s the case, we probably don’t want to know, anyway.”
“True.” Jensen shrugs. “Steve’s been acting weird lately, too.”
Genevieve tilts her head. “Awkward drunken hookup?”
“I hope not,” Jensen replies. “Because Steve called to tell me he likes cuddling with Chris. It’d be sad if he was cuddle-cheating already.”
Jared doesn’t know Jensen’s friends all that well, but he still has to give that revelation a moment to sink in. “Is that some kind of code?”
“For something other than his sudden homoerotic tendencies?” Jensen shrugs. “Beats me.”
“Were you playing truth or dare?”
“Long distance? No. Besides,” Jensen says, “I didn’t even ask. He just called me up and volunteered it. And then he said I could use it against him. Like free blackmail.”
“Huh,” Jared says. The only reason he can think of for volunteering something embarrassing about yourself is if you feel guilty for spilling someone else’s secrets. “He didn’t tell anyone else one of your secrets or something, did he?”
“He’d better not have,” Jensen says automatically. “Besides, who would he tell? Pretty much the only person in the city he knows well enough is - oh, no.”
“What?”
Before Jensen can answer, the DJ over at the karaoke stage grabs the mike and says, “And for our last song of the night, we have a very special request. Allie and Adrianne, are you out there?”
Adrianne’s in the middle of retorting, “Not knowing where something is is the definition of lost!” but she cuts herself off when the DJ calls their names.
“Ah, there you are,” the DJ calls. “Okay, so I hear you two crazy kids are getting married. Congratulations and all that. One of your friends wanted to give you a bit of an early present.”
“Oh, no,” Jensen says again, in a low voice.
“He’s not going to sing,” the DJ goes on. “But he promised me one of your other friends would. And apparently he’s a big fan of nineties pop.”
The music starts up then, and a screen descends behind the stage, showing what’s obviously the music video. Jared vaguely recognizes the tune - some one-hit-wonder boyband from the early nineties - but it’s obvious that Jensen isn’t a fan.
“Oh, fucking fuck,” he’s muttering. “I’m going to kill that motherfucking - “
“Jen, what the hell?” Jared asks. It’s a crappy song and a stupid prank on Mike’s part to get Jensen to sing it, but it’s not that bad. “What’s going - oh.”
Because that’s when he looks from Jensen’s murderous face to the screen where the music video is playing and notices a certain similarity between his friend and one of the teen boys bopping around singing “Send it during dinner, send it during class, let me know how much you love me every time I ask.”
“Oh my god,” Jared says faintly. “Jensen, that’s you.”
Right at that moment, mini-Jensen steps to the front of the formation of boys and belts out the idiotic chorus - “Page me, page me, page me your heart” - while doing some sort of bizarre dance involving a bulky pager hooked on his belt.
“You were in a boyband?” Genevieve demands.
“You sang a song about pagers?” Jared demands.
"Is that Jessica Simpson in your music video?" Allie asks incredulously.
“Girl, you push my buttons,” baby Jensen says onscreen, running a hand through his frosted hair.
“Come on, get up here and sing!” the DJ yells.
“I’m going to kill that son of a bitch,” Jensen says.
*
It’s not clear whether he meant Steve or Mike (or even the obnoxious DJ), but either way, Jensen’s secret boyband past provides endless fodder for jokes over the next few weeks. After Jensen finally agrees not to harm Mike or Steve (who swears Mike got him trashed and hypnotized his secrets out of him) and starts laughing at some of the jokes himself, it gets even funnier.
Because Jensen, it turns out, has a multitude of horrifying stories from his short boyband days. And even though he still gets cranky when people mock the frosted tips and bizarre pants (“It was the nineties,” Jensen says a million times. “Everyone looked kind of twinky!” “But not everyone had brick pants,” Mike points out, earning himself a kick to the shin), he does eventually spill some details. Like how the band - named Fall 2 F8 - was known in the industry as “All Jailb8,” and how they were doomed from the start - “Everyone was getting cell phones by the time it came out,” Jensen says. “And they still thought we might be okay, since we were cute and we had a dance, but then the Macarena came out and no one cared about pager dances.” He sighs. “It was tragic.”
In any case, the revelation that a guy he spends a lot of time with was once a member of a boyband (and therefore has his awkward puberty years documented in teen magazine photo shoots) does a lot to take Jared’s mind off the fact that things still aren’t quite good between them.
And then the wedding’s coming up in a week, and there are a million and one things to be done at any given time. Allie and Adrianne ended up picking a picturesque little B&B upstate to have the wedding at, so there’s also the added element of travel - everyone has to have everything they need ready and packed by the morning of the wedding, so that they can make the trip up there. In the flurry to coordinate the efforts in the city and at the inn, there isn’t much time to worry about his love life.
Even working with Jensen isn’t awkward, because it’s all business, all the time. Even if they had time to talk about their horrendous luck or bad timing or Jensen’s asshole boyfriend, it’d still get lost under the frantic efforts to make sure the flowers are delivered on time and the chef’s making enough meals and everyone who needs a room has one.
Adrianne only bakes when she’s nervous, so when Jared wakes up before dawn on the morning of the wedding to an apartment that smells like yeast, he knows that he can’t just roll over and go back to sleep. Instead, he hauls himself to his feet, throws on a t-shirt, and heads out to the kitchen. When he finds Adrianne elbows-deep in flour, rolling out dough, he doesn’t say anything, just wraps his arms around her from behind.
She sighs, hands stilling on the rolling pin, and leans back into him. “Hey.”
“Morning,” he says, resting his chin on her shoulder. “What’re you making?”
“Cinnamon rolls,” she says, smoothing the dough with floury fingers.
“Mm. You okay?”
Adrianne laughs a little. “Yeah, fine. I do bake for emotionally healthy reasons sometimes, you know.”
“Hey, I’m not complaining,” Jared says, releasing her and stepping up to the counter. He knows by now that he’s going to have to wait her out. “Show me what I can do.”
Adrianne sets him up with a knife and some walnuts, and Jared chops them into neat pieces for about two minutes before he gives up and starts crushing them with the flat of the blade to speed up the process.
“Okay, so I’m a little nervous,” Adrianne says finally, as Jared’s scraping nuts into the bowl of filling mixture. When he looks over at her, she shrugs. “Not bad nervous, just…I don’t know. There’s so much planning that’s gone into this day, and it’s all kind of sinking in. And the stupid part is, I don’t really care.”
She catches his surprised look and hastily corrects herself. “I mean, I do, obviously I care, but it’s just…out of everything that happens today, the stuff we spent so long planning isn’t that important to me.” She stirs cinnamon and sugar into the bowl. “Even if everything goes horribly wrong and I spill wine all over my dress and the flowers never come and half our relatives end up sleeping on the floor, at the end of the day, if I’m married to Allie?” She smiles down at the counter. “Then it isn’t going to matter.”
She knocks Jared’s hand away and starts sprinkling the filling onto the dough. “I kind of just want to fast forward to that part and skip all the stress. Is that horrible?”
Jared licks sugar off his finger. “Of course not.” When Adrianne looks over at him, he gives her the best smile he can manage at this unholy hour of the morning. “It’s sweet. At the risk of my guy card getting revoked, I’d even go so far as to call it adorable.”
Adrianne rolls her eyes. “That’s not going to be the one thing that puts your man card in jeopardy, trust me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I’m very manly.”
“Please,” Adrianne says. “I’ve seen your closet. You wear enough pink to warrant three X chromosomes.”
Jared glares at her, flicking a raisin at her arm. “Pink is a good color on me. It goes with my complexion.”
She smacks his hand. “You’re proving my point, you dork. Now, be quiet and help me roll this up like a good little kitchen helper.”
They’re quiet as they carefully roll the dough and pinch the edges. Jared thinks about how many times he’s done this over the years he’s known Adrianne - how many times he’s woken up to find the light on in the kitchen, the room warm with the heat of the oven and the counters covered in ingredients - and how it’s come to be just another part of their friendship. He hasn’t thought much about how things will change once Allie and Adrianne are married, but he hopes this will stay the same.
He’s not worried about Mike - Mike’s pretty constant, no matter what else is going on around him. This Genevieve thing is throwing him for a loop, but he’ll be okay. Things might be royally messed up with Jensen, but Jared hopes that eventually they can work something out. Go back to being friends, at the very least, because he likes Jensen too much to let him walk out of his life. It’s not what he wants, not really, but if it’s all he can have, he’ll take it.
Adrianne must be thinking along the same lines, because she pauses after handing Jared a sliced roll and says quietly, “I’m sorry things didn’t work out between you and Jensen.”
Jared shrugs, setting the roll in the pan. “It’s okay. I guess sometimes things just aren’t meant to be.”
Adrianne works the knife through the dough. “Yeah, maybe. But you guys seemed like you could be really good together.” She hands Jared another roll. “Besides, since when does Jared Padalecki give up that easily?”
Jared snorts. “That easily? Have you been paying attention at all? Easy is not the word I’d use to describe any of this.”
Adrianne sets the knife down and turns to face him. “Maybe. But you know what? The good things - the really good things?” She looks steadily at him. “I don’t think they’re supposed to be easy.”
Jared looks back at her, the roll forgotten in his hand, and remembers a night what feels like eons ago, when he thought almost the same thing.
His train of thought is interrupted a second later when Allie stumbles into the kitchen, rumpled and bleary, and Adrianne goes over to kiss her good morning. One little kiss turns into a few more, and pretty soon Jared’s highly-attuned senses alert him to possible we’re-almost-married sex coming on, so he finishes arranging the rolls in the pan, covers them to rise, and heads back to his room.
He means to think about what Adrianne said, but when he crawls back into his bed, he falls asleep almost as soon as his head hits the pillow.
*
Part Seven