[fic] And Our Time, And Our Blood - 2/3
Title: And Our Time, And Our Blood
Author:
garnetice
Part: Two of Three
Pairing: James/Logan, James/Kendall, minor Kendall/Jo
Rating: M
Word Count: 23,549 - (8,160 Part One)
Warnings: Bad words, love traingles, angst, sex, underage, barebacking, unneccessary metaphors
Summary: She
whispers, so soft that she probably thinks James can’t hear it. “Maybe it’s better not to love anyone at all.” Those are the words James learns
to live by.
Author's Notes: This is the companion piece to A Song You'll Regret (Found Here: Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3). I use the word companion lightly here, because obviously it's nearly twice as long. It uh...kind of got away from me. I owe a million thanks to
jblostfan16 for being my truly awesome beta on this. She has listened to me gripe for over a month and calmed my nerves and basically been the most fantastic person on earth. This story would not have seen the light of day without her. Title is from the song Virgin by Manchester Orchestra.
---
“Where’s your dad?” James asks, plopping down beside Kendall at the kitchen counter. “Isn’t he supposed to be back from the-“
“Fuck the marines,” Kendall says resolutely. “Fuck them and fuck my dad.”
His eyes are steel.
James knew something was wrong the second that Kendall asked him to come home today, of all days. His dad was supposed to be making one of his triumphant returns, but instead it looks like he’s left Kendall with an empty door frame. Again.
“Dude.” James squeezes his shoulder. He doesn’t know what to say.
He never seems to know the right thing to say.
Kendall buries his face in his arms, and James can see exhaustion in every line of his body, in the muscles that make up his shoulders and arms. He is defeated, and that’s not a state of being that James is used to seeing Kendall in.
“I worry about him all the time,” Kendall mumbles into the table, the hard wood bouncing the words up out of the crevices between his face and his arms. “I shouldn’t worry about him, because he left us, but- all the time.” His voice cracks. It’s still full of steel, but there is also pain.
James isn’t sure why he does it. It’s stupid.
Maybe it’s the kitchen counter.
Maybe he’s just horny. It’s been a year since Logan, and half a month since the last girl he fucked.
Maybe it’s that he best knows how to fix things with his hands and his mouth and his body, because they are the only tools he’s ever had to use.
Maybe it’s a combination of all of those things, but James wants to see if he can melt all the metal behind Kendall’s gaze. He reaches out, stroking a finger down the side of Kendall’s face. Kendall leans into it, and for a moment it’s this thing that stretches electric between them.
Then Kendall snaps, “What are you doing?”
It’s like he’s rearranging the contents of his brain, tucking away all the sloppy bits right in front of James until he’s rigid, composed, the leader.
God forbid that Kendall ever loses control.
“I don’t know. You’re throwing the word fuck around like you actually wanted to do something with it.”
Kendall recoils, his chair skidding back against the kitchen tile. “Are you hitting on me?”
“Fuck yes,” James breathes, because seriously, it’s been too long since he got his dick in anything. It’s not like Kendall’s going to take him up on it anyway. He’s just so damn angry, and joking and flirting are the easiest ways to defuse a situation. James is like the sexual fucking bomb squad.
Except maybe Kendall doesn’t know that he’s supposed to turn James down, because for a beat all James can see is the hue of his gray-green eyes, and then Kendall scoots his chair forward again. James barely has a second to process it, because Kendall is kissing him, hard and deep. It doesn’t take very long at all for the kissing to turn into stripping. The next thing James knows, he’s bent over the side of the Knights’ kitchen counter. Kendall’s hands are a rough bruise on his hips, but his tongue is pressing soft against the notches of James’s spine.
Kendall works his way down, his mouth sloppy and soft from the back of James’s neck until he’s so low that he has to drop to his knees, pressing a kiss above the curve of James’s ass. A groan escapes from James’s throat when Kendall’s tongue darts out, licking down until he’s got slick wetness pressed up against his asshole.
Sex with his friends is a terrible idea, and James knows that like he knows not to touch a hot stove, but he has always had trouble with things like rules.
He doesn’t put a stop to it.
Kendall doesn’t seem all that concerned with stretching James. His dick is an insistent, uncomfortable press until James forces himself to relax, opening up enough that Kendall can thrust all the way inside of him. James stares at his hands, gripping the counter. His knuckles are white, like Logan’s knuckles were white that night when everything was lightning and magic.
The shape of Kendall’s cock inside of him is strange, heavy weight and amazing heat. It makes James feel like he’s burning up from the inside out. Except Kendall’s not moving. James can hear the tiny sucking breaths he’s taking, can feel the power of Kendall’s hands on his hips, the trembling of his thighs where they’re pressed against James’s. He’s completely still. James tests it, rocking back, and he hears Kendall suck in sharp, can almost hear words form in his mouth, like he wants to ask James if this is really okay.
The idea of it pricks at James; he doesn’t want Kendall to be sweet to him. He wants to be fucked.
“Move already,” James hisses, rocking back. Kendall’s grip is steel on his waist. He doesn’t get far. It doesn’t matter, because Kendall gets the hint. He presses a kiss to the back of James’s head that’s entirely too gentle for what James wants, but then he obeys, slamming forward so fast and so deep that James shouts out his name. And it’s good; it’s so fucking good. None of that messy emotional crap that James is sick of trying to deal with. Kendall’s skated beside him through years of broken bones and bruised ribs. He knows James isn’t delicate, and he’s not about to treat him that way. He fucks into him, and it is not gentle, and it is not kind, and somehow it’s exactly what
James has been looking for.
It’s the first time in a year that he comes without Logan’s name a whisper on his lips.
“Why?” Kendall asks against the back of his neck, and somehow that’s not the question that James expects.
James groans into the counter. “What do you mean, why? You’re hot. I’m hot. What we just did? That was pretty hot.”
“But why me?” Kendall asks.
What is he, a girl?
“I’m not picky,” James says, because at this point he’s really not. It only occurs to him after he says it that Kendall’s one of his best friends, and maybe he should be trying to spare his feelings.
Kendall pulls out of him, not making any attempt to be nice about it, and James likes that too. He’s a masochist, apparently. He listens as Kendall, pissed and a little bit confused, asks, “I thought you were-“
He actually bites his tongue. James turns around and he can see Kendall’s teeth digging into the muscle.
“What?” James asks, impatient.
“I thought you were with Logan.”
“What?” He repeats dumbly, eyes nearly popping out of his head.
“You fucked him. The night of his grandma’s funeral. I assumed-“
“How- how did you know about that?”
“Um, I went to get some water in the kitchen. I got a show instead.” Kendall wiggles his fingers tiredly. He’s naked and shining with sweat, but every nuance of his posture suggests exhaustion. James doesn’t like it. “Surprise.”
“That was once.” James grinds out.
“Are you sure Logan knows that?”
“It’s been a year, Kendall. I’ve been with a ton of people since then.”
“I know, but.” He bites his lip. “I thought you guys had like, an open relationship. ‘Cause you’re kind of a whore.”
“Oh yeah?” James shoves him, chuckling, but he doesn’t really find it funny. Talking about Logan is wiping away all the afterglow of what just went down. It’s making him feel mopey.
Maybe Kendall gets that, because he leans over and captures James’s lips in a kiss, insistent, until James opens his mouth to him.
---
“I’m so proud of you, son,” is his dad’s response, all gruff and masculine, when James tells him about the move to California. It’s a far cry from the beaming smile and crushing bear hug that his mom gave him, but James can’t fault his dad for it. After all, James is calling him from the airport. Everything’s happening so fast that James feels like he’s on a roller coaster, speeding down the tracks at a million miles an hour.
“Thanks,” he says, swallowing the lump in his throat.
“What else have you been up to?” What else? Like becoming a popstar isn’t enough? “Any new girls?”
James sighs and tells him about the latest chick he’s been banging, a brunette with a tight little body and some great moves in the bedroom. His dad makes a pleased noise and says, “Good for you. You’re not going to keep it up, right? None of those long distance relationships for you, buddy?”
As if. James rolls his eyes. “No. Whole new state. So many new girls.”
It’s what his dad wants to hear. James can tell he’s said the right thing by the lilt of his dad’s laughter. Behind him, Logan squeezes his shoulders and says, “We’re boarding in ten minutes.”
“Dad, I’ve got to go.”
“Hang on, hang on, your stepmom wants to talk to you.”
“Dad, no-“
“Hi, Jamie-baby! Your father and I are so proud.”
Her voice grates on James’s ears. Oblivious to his time constraints, she prattles on and on about the places they’re going to go on their family vacation. If his dad’s female inquest wasn’t enough to kill his good mood, this is. All he can think is if it’s a family vacation, why isn’t he invited?
“James, hey!” Kendall yells across the terminal, a bright red-blue mark half apparent beneath the collar of his shirt. It’s the result of the thank-you-for-making-my-dreams-come-true sex James gave him. Not that James needs any reason to bang Kendall anymore, other than that he’s willing and there. Kendall smiles, wide open and happy. “Come on!”
Carlos is standing by Kendall’s side, waving James towards the gate. He can feel Logan’s hands at his back, pushing him forward. All three of them are watching him with a mixture of pride and exhilaration and excitement.
James doesn’t even bother saying goodbye. He hangs up his cell. These boys are his family, and they will take him more places that his dad and his bitch ever will.
“You ready?” Logan asks, squeezing James’s arm.
Is James ready to leave behind things like curses and dads who don’t care enough and moms who care too much? Is he ready to have an adventure with the people he loves most in this world?
What kind of question is that? Of course he is.
“Let’s do this.”
---
Being wanted is like a drug.
When James has Kendall’s mouth hot on his throat or when he’s buried so deep inside Kendall that he thinks he can come without even moving, he feels powerful. He feels like conquering the earth is not so far out of reach.
When they’re apart, he feels hollow and empty. He feels like he is turning to ash, crumbling away.
The problem is, he needs that first feeling; the adrenaline and the strength like steel in his bones. He yearns for it. It is a twitch in his fingers and an itch across the surface of his skin. It’s an addiction. He recognizes, in this muddled place in the back of his mind, that he’s digging himself a hole. He’s fucking with a friendship that he’s spent too many years nurturing. He recognizes that he’s making a huge mistake.
It’s almost a relief when Kendall finds Jo.
James thinks that Kendall’s relationship with her will be the end of things. He should have known better. Kendall hoards people like material possessions. He doesn’t gather them in surplus; instead he clutches every person he gains close to his chest, like precious metals, like king’s gold.
The same night that Kendall and Jo start dating, Kendall yanks him into the bathroom. He entwines James in his long limbs, an octopus pulling him beneath the surface of the ocean, and that’s what it feels like. Drowning.
Right then, James knows that he should quit. He doesn’t.
Kendall isn’t the only person James gets with, of course. He dates and he fucks and he develops carefully crafted rules that apply to everyone, except the people who matter the most.
They don’t apply to Kendall.
They wouldn’t apply to Logan, if being with Logan was anything like possible.
Logan makes James laugh and Kendall makes him crazy, and James knows which one he’d choose if he could. But Logan isn’t interested in him that way, and Kendall is; Kendall kisses the skin inside of James’s knee and murmurs that he wants him when James doesn’t even really want himself, and he thinks that could be enough.
It’s not like what he feels for Kendall is the kind of thing they write songs about, or that people go to war for. This is just- it’s fun, is what it is.
It’s fun and it’s comfort, for both of them. James looks at Kendall and sees a boy who is already king of the world. He is meant to be something bigger than the leader of a silly boy band. He is meant to slay dragons.
He is meant to leave.
Friend or lover, it’s inevitable that Kendall will one day walk out of James’s life the same way that he walked in. And James thinks that maybe, having that knowledge now, he can prepare himself for it. He will build walls around his heart, a fortress that Kendall will never be able to penetrate, and when he goes it will not leave a scar. Until then, James can kiss him. James can love him without being in love with him.
Kendall is safe.
Kendall is supposed to be safe.
As the time they spend in California wears on, he has trouble separating the things that he actually feels for Kendall from the things he wants to feel for Kendall. There is passion and there is hurt and there is friendship and there is anger, and James has trouble telling where one ends and one begins. He still knows that Kendall is going to leave, because Kendall likes girls. He has a father to impress, a father who stands tall in the midst of deserts and jungles made of concrete, who is swathed in red and white and blue. The man raised Kendall in camouflage, like a chameleon, and it worked. Kendall changes the colors of James’s heart with every second of every day, and James is beginning to think that he can’t handle it. But he sticks with Kendall anyway, because the sex is good and the hate is better; the resentment that simmers in his blood for his best friend and for himself.
It’s easy to let his whole body come to a boil, to let himself believe that this maybe is what being in love feels like. It is a catastrophe threatening to crush him.
The only time James feels like himself anymore is when he’s with Logan, when he can breathe and smile and mean it, all of it. Because of course he is already in love with Logan. He’s known that for years now, since the taste of lightning and sadness on his lips.
Logan fills the places in James he never knew were empty while Kendall hollows them out, his hands claws that tear at James’s insides. If James was brave, he would tell Logan everything. He would tell him about the secret thing that may or may not be love that lives in his chest and in his memory, the thing that has a life of its own. And then he wouldn’t asphyxiate himself beneath Kendall’s secret tragedy and his own fucked up commitment issues and the weight of the curse pressing in behind him.
The curse; the stupid fucking curse. It followed him to Hollywood. James has seen it in the eyes of the girls he’s dated here, girls who never have any trouble leaving him behind. Or maybe they’re just flighty. James isn’t sure he believes that there is a curse, because he’s at the age where he’s creating his own beliefs, spinning them from thin air and stardust, but he does believe a simple truth. People leave.
People always leave.
If Kendall leaves, James knows he will be wrecked, but he’s prepared for that eventuality since forever ago. If James does something to fuck it all up with Logan? He won’t survive. It’s an eventuality that can never come to pass. Whenever James thinks about it, he feels fear like ice on the back of his neck. He doesn’t know how he would live with himself if he didn’t have anyone to jam out with in front of his mirror or to teach him arithmetic and politics and the names of all the galaxies. He doesn’t know what he would do without the boy who has always believed in him when James can’t spin together enough self confidence to be himself. So he doesn’t tell. He lets things carry on and on and on, and he acknowledges that he does feel something big and scary for Kendall. He lets it consume him when he wants to fight against it.
The things Kendall makes him feel are like the distortion on a record player; the places where the track goes scratchy or skips or warbles.
There are times when their strange relationship is music and sound and times when it is nothing but white noise. James likes it best when Kendall marks him all over with fingertip bruises and tongue-lavished hickeys and he doesn’t have to think about the static.
All he wants is to be owned, to lose himself in the sex and the roughness. Sometimes Kendall fucks James with his hands wrapped around his throat, and that’s good. It’s so fucking good to let everything go except that. James likes the idea of ownership, and it’s not right; no one should want to be a possession. But James does. There is comfort in belonging to someone other than himself.
The problem is that Kendall will never actually belong to him in return. He can’t ever belong to anyone, really. Not when he spends all of his time chasing an ideal of a man from one Middle Eastern country to another, from ports in Seoul to harbors in Hawaii. The only real person who manages to capture his attention for any length of time is Jo, and it gets to be so that James hates her.
He absolutely despises her. So he treats her like he treats most girls he doesn’t plan on dating; he ignores her. Some of it is misplaced resentment that she chose Kendall instead of him, of course, but most of it is that he can’t stand seeing her all over him.
It makes him feel bad, because there’s nothing wrong with the girl, per se. Her only real flaw (other than the fact that she didn’t give James the time of day) is that Kendall wants her. She fits into his perfect American dream more than James ever can. And he knew that, going in; he knew that this thing with Kendall was a bad idea, and that it was going to backfire right in his face.
Somehow the knowledge that he was right doesn’t make him feel better.
---
Kendall sits on the edge of his bed on a sunny day, hands shoved deep in his pockets, an awkward tilt to his shoulders. Except it’s not James’s bed at all; it’s Kendall’s. James is naked beneath the sheets, and he tries not to feel vulnerable as he sits up and meets Kendall’s eyes.
Kendall stares at the sunlight streaming through his window and says, “You need to talk to Logan.”
“About what?” James’s voice cracks with sleep.
“I thought he was over you, James. You said he was over you.” Now Kendall’s voice is the one that is cracking.
“There’s nothing to be over. Logan and I- we weren’t-“
“He doesn’t know that. He came to me and basically called me a homewrecking whore.”
James has to stifle the instinct to laugh. Automatically, he says, “Those words would never come out of Logan’s mouth.”
Kendall glares at him. “Logan’s not a saint.”
Yeah, well. None of them are. James bunches the sheets up around his middle, sitting up. “Where were you, anyway?”
“Pool. Clearing my head.” Kendall is speaking in terse sentences, which mostly means he’s restraining himself from punching James in the jaw. What right does he have to be mad about anything? James wants to tell him to get the fuck out, but it’s Kendall’s room.
He doesn’t stop to think that Kendall’s worried about Logan’s feelings, or anything. Logan doesn’t have feelings about James, and if he did, it’s not Kendall’s business. He doesn’t get to be a territorial asshole when he spent most of the previous day wrapped up in his girlfriend.
Even if he did spend most of the night letting James fuck him into the mattress.
Logan’s totally right. Kendall is a homewrecking whore.
Idly, James thinks that Kendall doesn’t to have a room in his mental-dream-mansion. He doesn’t want to have to clean the sheets every time he comes over with some girl.
“I’ll talk to Logan. Is that what you want to hear?”
Kendall gives him this expression that could almost be described as pouting. James grabs hold of his hand, sucking one of Kendall’s fingers into his mouth. He curls his tongue soft around the tip and murmurs, “Your face is going to stick that way.”
Kendall yanks his hand away. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” James asks, confounded.
“Don’t treat me like I’m one of the puck fucks back home or some stupid actress. You can’t make this better with sex. Talk to Logan.”
“Fine.” James slumps back down onto Kendall’s pillows. “I was planning on it.”
Talking to Logan is great in theory, but in reality James has to work himself up to it with a series of practice sessions in the mirror throughout the day. When he finally gets around to it, he plants himself on the couch for nearly an hour, trying to still the trembling in his fingers.
It shouldn’t be this hard. Logan is his best friend. But Logan is also a constellation of fears and hopes, a pattern of stars that form the picture of a boy. He has so many different layers and aspects and James doesn’t want to disappoint any part of him; not the brainy boy-genius or the childhood best friend or the amazing singer who dances beside him on stage. Logan is just so…complex.
James wishes he could be like that. He thinks when someone puts all the pieces of himself together, there is no picture to be found; only holes and gaps like an abstract painting gone wrong. There are days when he’ll look in the mirror and expect to see something different; a failed Picasso. A monster. A maneater, maybe? He’s always disappointed. His reflection is hazel eyes and a sweet smile and the tan he’s been trying to build up since he stepped foot off the plane. There’s only ever him; nothing more, and nothing less. Nothing complex at all.
He tries not to let that get to him.
Logan stomps through the door near eight, a funk like a storm cloud hovering around his head. He’s been out of it all day. James noticed when they were in the studio, but he was too distracted by his own personal drama to do anything about it.
Logan’s gaze falls upon him, and James feels like the room is beginning to go dark. He folds his hands together and tells his fingers to stay still already, damnit. The quaking is getting to be a little much.
“Kendall told me that you, uh, talked,” James says, uncertain of the words. Kendall exaggerates a lot more than most people give him credit for, and James doesn’t know if he’s leaping onto a wild accusation or if something more is going on here. He doesn’t know what, exactly, but it wouldn’t be the first time he’s been completely obtuse.
“He did?” Logan sounds guilty. He clears his throat and says, “I mean, yeah, uh. We did.”
There’s a weight in those words that James isn’t sure how to process. He makes this vague gesture in the air that could mean anything at all. He’s using his traitorous fingers to talk because he’s abruptly forgotten how to speak.
“How do you feel about Kendall?” Logan asks, and there’s accusation in his voice. James isn’t so stupid that he misses it. He wants to lie, to denydenydeny, but why should he? He doesn’t owe Logan anything. Logan’s the one who shot him down that night three years ago.
Logan’s the one who didn’t want the things that James was prepared to offer him. This is obviously just his paternalistic instinct, or something. Logan’s always tried to father him, or mother him, like James hasn’t been doing well enough on his own.
James looks away so that Logan won’t see how much that pisses him off. He tries to focus on the good things, on the idea that Kendall planted; a seedling of hope in his chest.
“I think-” James takes a deep breath, needing to inhaleexhale. “The important question is how you feel about me.”
He knows how Logan feels. He knows that they will never be anything more than this, friends sharing the same space. He’s mad at himself for thinking there could ever be more. He’s jealous of what he can’t have.
Logan doesn’t answer, and it’s as good as a confirmation. He doesn’t want to hurt James’s feelings. Of course he doesn’t. He’s too good, too kind for that. James forces himself to gather up the last of his courage so that he can go back to Kendall and say, definitively, that he’s got nothing to worry about.
Though why Kendall would worry is an entirely different grab-bag of questions.
“Logan. Do you- have a thing for me?” He has to force the words out. They feel like glass scraping his throat.
Logan is the one looking away now. James has to grab his face, to force him to meet his eyes because these are words he needs to hear.
Maybe if Logan rejects him, straight up, he’ll be able to let the ever present ghost of him go.
Except Logan meets his eyes, honey-molasses irises dark and sad. He says in the softest, sweetest voice, “I wish you could love me instead.”
Logan yanks his face from James’s grip, straightening. He turns to go down the hallway, and James is still feeling that plea like the kidney shot it is. He has to catch his breath and practically growl, “Logan, wait,” because words aren’t his friend right now.
This is some awful practical joke. It has to be. Logan can’t want him because nobody can ever want him, not the way they talk about in books and fairytales. That’s why he has to be hot, why he has to be sexy and desirable physically, because at least then people won’t dismiss him immediately. They have to get through the shiny façade first.
Logan stops in his tracks, and James doesn’t care what this is. Logan would never purposely try to hurt him. James knows that the same way he knows that skinny jeans emphasize his package in a way that makes girls swoon. But what James doesn’t know is why Logan would be into him. Is this a crush, a phase he’s going to grow out of? Is he just looking for sex without strings? He knows about Kendall. Love me instead, he’d asked, but that can’t be what he wants, because love hurts and Logan would never intentionally hurt James.
Maybe he is trying to give James a way out of this thing with Kendall. Maybe he just needs someone.
James can be that someone. The reasons don’t even matter. He’s got a hex on his head, a family curse that feels like a chain, pulling him down into the earth every time he dares to try to shake it. But Logan is Logan; the smartest guy he knows, his best friend since forever. He is the boy who laid on sun warm rocks with James when they were small, who would look at him over text books with whole galaxies in his eyes, planets that James would never be able to touch in his wildest dreams.
He is a single ecstatic moment in James’s memory where he thought maybe.
He is a dream crusher.
He’s Logan.
James can’t turn this opportunity down. He will take what Logan gives him until he isn’t prepared to give it anymore.
“Do you- want to come to my room? Just for tonight?”
Logan doesn’t say anything, but he waits for James there in the hallway, expectant. James leads Logan back to his room, kissing him breathless. His hands fumble inside of Logan’s clothes, his dorky sweater vest and the denim of his jeans. There’s this moment when James thinks it won’t happen, when Logan is hovering over him, hesitant, and James reaches out. He strokes a finger down his cheekbone and says, “We don’t have to.”
Logan shakes his head, vehement. He’s watching James like he’s a present that he gets to open on Christmas morning, and James doesn’t know what to do with that. He doesn’t know how to be something that is cherished. Logan’s obviously just confused. He doesn’t know what it is that he wants, and he’s come to James because he’s the most comfortable. They’ll fool around, and then Logan will get over it.
That’s what James is telling himself when Logan fucks back on his dick, but after that, he can’t concentrate on anything but Logan, silvered by moonlight, saying his name over and over again.
---
James has to pee. He climbs out of bed and makes it to the bathroom without any incidents. But on the way back, he runs into a problem.
That problem is nearly six foot, with blond hair and blazing green eyes. James glances at the door to his room. Logan is in there, sleeping comfortably in his bed.
Logan is in there, and Kendall probably knows it.
“Morning,” James says, as bright as he can muster.
Kendall just crosses his arms. “What are you doing?”
“Going back to sleep? We don’t have to be at the studio for a while yet…”
Kendall shakes his head and turns to go. In that moment he looks so small and so sad.
Logan’s supposed to be the indecisive one. James knows what decision he would make if he could. He knows who he would want to be with if nothing at all was on the line. If there was no curse and no social restrictions, no hurt and the chains of friendship weren’t wrapped around his neck like a noose.
But it is not a perfect world, and James cannot weigh the value of one heart against another.
“Stop,” he pleads. He can’t take the concave curves of Kendall’s shoulders. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. James wants to give peace a chance. Why do relationships even have to be so hard? He’s so scared that someone is going to end up hating him. If he was stronger, it
wouldn’t matter.
James is not strong.
Kendall turns, agonizingly slow. “Look. Logan’s my best friend too. Don’t mess with his head.”
“I’m not messing with his head.”
“Do you like him?”
“Of course I like him.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. We can’t keep doing this if you’re thinking about fucking Logan too-“
“Why the hell not? It’s not like I’m in love with either of you,” James snaps, barely processing that oh, Kendall doesn’t actually know that James has already crossed that line. “It’s just sex. Dude, don’t try to fix me. Just fuck me.”
He means the last part to be sexy, but mostly he just sounds tired. Kendall gives him this completely inscrutable look, and it’s not fair. He has a girlfriend and a family and a perfect life. He shouldn’t be able to make James feel guilty about having a bad day, but something in that
look does.
It makes James think that he knows every tiny nook and corner of his mind.
But he doesn’t. He can’t.
Kendall probably won’t even care if James ends it. All he gets out of the deal is sex, whenever he wants it. But it is not Kendall’s heart that James is weighing against Logan’s.
It’s his own.
James, above all things, is a narcissist. He needs to come out of every situation looking daisy fresh. He needs to be in control. If he were to end it with Kendall and find out what he already suspects; that it doesn’t even matter to him? No. He can’t. He can’t be the one left standing in the shadows, heart in his hand. Even if Logan could swoop up and pick up the pieces. Which won’t happen either way. No really. James doesn’t let the warm glow of them sleeping together trick him into thinking anything will change.
There is no such thing as happily ever after. James is confident in a million other superficial things. He’s confident in his ability to get another human being into bed and that he’ll always look amazing in a tux and that his voice deserves to be heard by most of mankind. But there are other things that he knows aren’t set in stone, like the things his voice has to say or the idea that anyone will ever be able to accept him forever. He never says it out loud because he doesn’t want anyone to look at him like he’s pathetic, like he’s broken. At the same time, he knows the truth of those words.
Maybe it’s better not to love anyone at all.
Kendall takes a step forward, his hand hovering over James’s hip. “What are you doing, James?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really?” Kendall’s face is closer, his breath sweet across James’s lips. “What are you playing at? No ideas?”
That’s when Logan stumbles out the door.
Kendall snatches his hand back. He looks between Logan and James and breathes, “Oh.”
James doesn’t want to hurt anybody, but he has hurt Kendall. He can tell by the places where Kendall’s eyes crinkle, his mouth going thin. There is a crease between his eyebrows as he turns to leave.
“Kendall, wait,” James says, trying to physically stop him with a hand at his elbow. He hasn’t seen that expression on Kendall’s face since the last time his dad stood him up.
James shouldn’t be able to make that face appear out of the blue.
He shouldn’t have that kind of power.
Something aches in his stomach.
Kendall is looking at James like the idea of touching him would be worse than death. In that moment, James is not a wish that fate granted. James is a curse.
“Dude. Just- no. It’s not. It’s not anything, okay? I’ve got a pool date with Jo.”
James winces away from the words. It’s like Kendall knows that’s the thing that would hurt James the most. He watches Kendall leave the apartment before spinning, apologies on his lips. “Logan, I-“
“It’s okay.”
What? No it’s not. It’s not even close to okay. All of this is crushing him. It’s a weight on his chest, and why is it that Kendall and Logan are still able to stand so straight and tall? Why is it that they can’t see the two of them are slowly sucking away his soul?
“You sure?”
“Yeah. It’s fine,” Logan says, voice neutral.
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
It would be so much easier if Logan was solid ground, if James could just look at him and see the friend that he’s grown up with his whole life. Instead he looks at him and sees lightning and sky, electricity and his name turned to a whisper, to a prayer, to something simultaneously as soft and as loud as thunder.
“I want-“
Maybe Logan doesn’t know what he wants, because Logan is kissing him, sloppy and soft.
“Logan,” James tries to pull away, but he can’t.
Logan won’t let him.
---
Kendall forgives him, eventually. He shouldn’t, because James has fucked up, big time. He’s aware of that.
He’s also aware that he has no idea how to fix this. Sometimes he thinks he can get away with what he’s doing forever.
Sometimes he thinks that it’s all going to end like a shoot off at the O-K Corral.
His insides feel paper thin, like the lightest breeze could tear right through him. He is a shadow of the person he is supposed to be, and he doesn’t care.
He will change himself for Kendall, and he will change himself again for Logan. He will bend over backwards and sideways and twist in on himself like a contortionist to keep both of their affections, to maintain their desire and their trust. When they watch him with eyes filled with lust, it’s the only time he thinks he is real, anymore. It’s the only time he doesn’t worry that he is going to fade into nothingness. He can ask for it harder and faster and rougher.
It’s the after part he can’t handle. When he’s lying prone next to Kendall or Logan, listening to their soft exhalations and the beat of their hearts, the question comes to him, unbidden.
What kind of person only defines themselves by merciless love?
And it is merciless. A person has to be ruthless to interchange one lover for another, like they are casual fucks instead of the only people in the entire world who make him feel like he actually exists.
James doesn’t have an answer, and he doesn’t search for one. The future is a distant, hazy thing, and James doesn’t want to do anything to force it closer. So he keeps doing what he’s been doing. He fucks Kendall. He fucks Logan. Sometimes he even fucks a girl on the side. Some nameless random. He figures when things get really bad, he’ll put an end to it. He’s got time until then.
He’s got nothing but time.
---
He is wrapped up in Logan, sucking soft on his neck, when Logan rubs at the newly formed hickeys and asks, “Must you mark your territory like that?”
James laughs, high and sharp, because he’s never once thought of Logan as something he can own until this moment. Possessiveness rears in his chest, but it is not what he feels for Kendall; the desire to pillage and conquer. This is different. This is something like fierce delight, like a gift freely given.
Logan takes it for granted that he is James’s, and instead of being pleased by it, James is frightened. This family is cursed, he thinks.
James doesn’t exactly know how to process it, so he nips at Logan’s throat, working his way up to his lips until he is kissing him, hard and filthy. He murmurs, “What can I say? My mouth looks good all over you.”
This is his fallback plan whenever he is bewildered; ignore the problem until it goes away. Logan rucks up his shirt, fingers tapping like he’s playing a piano against James’s ribs. He groans into the kiss when James starts to use tongue.
The plan works.
The problem doesn’t go away.
---
James has nights that blur into golden days that blur into nights of indigo and silver, midnight and charcoal. He learns the contours of his best friends’ faces in a million different settings, in the quiet hush of dawn and beneath the hum of fluorescent lights at a crowded party. He can no longer remember all the places and he has been with Logan or Kendall, but he can perfectly visualize the things he has done.
For instance, there are the scars on Kendall’s knuckles as his hand coaxes an orgasm from James’s cock or there is the pale play of shadows against Logan’s thighs as he fucks inside of him. There is the pool, where there are currents of light and darkness that make James feel like they are living inside a star field, Logan hot and tight around him but no-
He is in a bed, beneath a fort of blankets and pillows, Kendall’s guitar a stiff protrusion in his back as he is getting fucked-
He’s in the soundbooth, the mixer a dim silhouette in glowing green and red as Logan’s hands squeeze his ass-
He’s in the janitor’s closet, the scent of Clorox in his nose with Kendall pressed hard and ready against him-
The strobe lights of the club are fast flickers like heat lightning over Logan’s face as James licks the inside of his thigh-
The sun highlights the freckles on Kendall’s back while he sucks James off beneath the overpass outside of In ‘N Out-
Logan screams his name in the middle of the night, in the middle of the apartment, and the sound is as high and raw and breathy as a song lyric-
Kendall kisses the corners of James’s lips in the shower, soft and tender and sweet-
He is in the Pacific Ocean, with his best friends bobbing beside him, their feet tangling with his, or no-
He is in the studio, or no, the car, or no, the park, or-
He is everywhere.
He is nowhere.
He is in hell.
---
“What do you talk about with Kendall?” Logan asks, his fingertips dancing over the sheets, tracing a wrinkle in the fabric.
“I don’t know. We don’t talk a whole lot.” James squeezes his eyes shut so that he doesn’t have to see Logan’s reaction to that. It doesn’t help. He hears the hitch of his breath. He can feel his judgment like a palm pressed to the back of his neck.
“You guys write songs,” Logan prods. And that’s true. Sometimes, they’ll be in the middle of some primetime cop drama and there will be a commercial for the ten o clock news. It will have a clip of a soldier or a pilot or a man with medals clipped to his chest. After everyone else goes to sleep, Kendall will camp out on the couch, eyes glued to the TV for something like a secret message on the screen.
When James sees alarm building behind Kendall’s eyes like a scream, the edges of his ever present wolf grin crumbling, he takes Kendall to do the one thing that always makes him feel better. James has always kind of resented Kendall’s easy grace when it comes to music. It’s like he was born speaking a language that James has had to work at his entire life. But days like those? He locks them up in his room with Kendall’s battered old guitar, a relic his dad left in the rush between the divorce and the time they stationed him in Seoul or Dhaka or Kandahar or Karachi. He coaxes Kendall into playing, into channeling everything he feels into that stupid guitar and the newer bass perched on his own lap.
Sometimes they craft lyrics, words like puzzle pieces slowly forming a whole thing, and sometimes they don’t. But they don’t stop. Not until Kendall’s solid and real and not this pale shade of the boy he’s supposed to be, filled with worry and fear.
It’s not anything special; it’s just what friends do for each other. Except for some reason, James doesn’t want to tell Logan that. He feels like saying any of it out loud would be a betrayal of Kendall’s trust. Which makes no sense, ‘cause- it’s Logan.
“We talk about his dad,” James says quietly, a half truth. It’s not a secret that Mr. Knight is career military, or that he visits his mistress more often than he visits his kids. It’s not even a secret that Kendall worries about him every second of every day.
What is a secret is that Kendall can’t contain all that worry and fear.
What is a secret is that Kendall ever loses control.
“Oh. Kendall, um.” Logan’s teeth worry over his lip, and James wants to kiss him. So he does, because it’s something that’s allowed now.
When he pulls away, Logan continues, “He never talks to me about that. I guess you guys have a lot in common.”
James snorts. “Not really.”
His dad tours seedy nightclubs and promotes other bands with James’s blonde bimbo of a stepmother pressed into his side. His dad’s got a comfy little house in the suburbs, and the most James ever worries about is that he’ll get into a car crash after downing too many Jaeger bombs. Back when they still lived in Minnesota, James spent every weekend he wasn’t with the guys at his dad’s. It’s not even close to the same thing. Except, in a way, it is. James will never understand what it is like to fear for his father when he’s backlit by a war, but he will always know what it is like to be a kid who isn’t good enough to stay home for.
It bothers him that Logan sees that, like he’s cutting through the carefully crafted walls that James has built, the I-don’t-care-that-my-parents-split façade.
“Yeah. You do,” Logan says, and it looks like it troubles him.
Why? Does he want a father who prefers doing anything else to spending time with his son?
James buries his head into Logan’s side, knowing that’s not fair at all. James would never wish that on Logan. At the same time, he doesn’t like the knowing look that Logan is giving him, like he can ever understand what it means to be rejected by your own parents. Logan is a great many things, but no one ever leaves him.
James wouldn’t leave him, if he had anything like a choice.
“Love me,” James whispers against Logan’s skin, so low that he can’t hear it.
“What?”
“I said fuck me,” James murmurs into his ribs, flicking his tongue out to emphasize his point. Logan groans, digging his fingers into
James’s shoulder and hauling him up so that they’re eye to eye.
“You’re changing the subject.”
“You don’t want to fuck me?” James asks innocently, palming a hand over Logan’s bare cock. It twitches with interest.
“You’re lucky you’re hot,” Logan retorts, hauling him closer still.
Something inside James twinges.
---
James tries to break it off with Kendall. They’re in bed, curled into each other’s bodies the night before the biggest awards show of their famous lives so far.
“Kendall?”
“Yeah?” he asks, all sleepy and open.
“I want-“ James stops himself, biting his tongue.
“What do you want?” Kendall asks earnestly. His eyes are so green. His bangs fall across his eyebrows, and James can’t help reaching out to brush them back.
Maybe Kendall won’t care if he ends it, but can James really give this up?
No. Nononono.
He kisses him, soft and chaste.
---
They’re at an awards show, and Logan is sucking him off in the fancy pants bathroom.
And James isn’t enjoying it.
Okay, he is. A lot. But even with Logan on his knees in front of him, James thinks that he doesn’t really know what this is. Logan doesn’t really want James.
He wants the idea of a boy he lost his virginity to.
He wants the person who exists in the sunlight, when he is singing and dancing and putting on an act.
He wants the boy that James was at fifteen, and not the boy he is now; broken.
Logan licks soft along the shape of his dick and James can’t think about that anymore. He can’t think about the way that Logan looks at him every time they discuss Kendall.
He can’t think about the revulsion he sees in his eyes.
---
Three people are thrown into a hole, blindfolded.
Each knows that the other is there, but each has to dig their own way out if they want to survive.
What happens?
James has that dream over and over again. He’s not the brightest, but he’s not stupid either. He knows that people will chew off their own leg to get out of a bear trap.
Love is closing around all three of their necks.
Take three teenage boys and confront them with the overwhelming idea of commitment? They will trample each other to try to escape asphyxiation, no matter what their hearts say.
James glances over at Kendall, naked and prone and asleep beside him. He rubs at his throat and tries to remember how to breathe.
---
Author:
garnetice
Part: Two of Three
Pairing: James/Logan, James/Kendall, minor Kendall/Jo
Rating: M
Word Count: 23,549 - (8,160 Part One)
Warnings: Bad words, love traingles, angst, sex, underage, barebacking, unneccessary metaphors
Summary: She
whispers, so soft that she probably thinks James can’t hear it. “Maybe it’s better not to love anyone at all.” Those are the words James learns
to live by.
Author's Notes: This is the companion piece to A Song You'll Regret (Found Here: Part 1 , Part 2, Part 3). I use the word companion lightly here, because obviously it's nearly twice as long. It uh...kind of got away from me. I owe a million thanks to
jblostfan16 for being my truly awesome beta on this. She has listened to me gripe for over a month and calmed my nerves and basically been the most fantastic person on earth. This story would not have seen the light of day without her. Title is from the song Virgin by Manchester Orchestra.
---
“Where’s your dad?” James asks, plopping down beside Kendall at the kitchen counter. “Isn’t he supposed to be back from the-“
“Fuck the marines,” Kendall says resolutely. “Fuck them and fuck my dad.”
His eyes are steel.
James knew something was wrong the second that Kendall asked him to come home today, of all days. His dad was supposed to be making one of his triumphant returns, but instead it looks like he’s left Kendall with an empty door frame. Again.
“Dude.” James squeezes his shoulder. He doesn’t know what to say.
He never seems to know the right thing to say.
Kendall buries his face in his arms, and James can see exhaustion in every line of his body, in the muscles that make up his shoulders and arms. He is defeated, and that’s not a state of being that James is used to seeing Kendall in.
“I worry about him all the time,” Kendall mumbles into the table, the hard wood bouncing the words up out of the crevices between his face and his arms. “I shouldn’t worry about him, because he left us, but- all the time.” His voice cracks. It’s still full of steel, but there is also pain.
James isn’t sure why he does it. It’s stupid.
Maybe it’s the kitchen counter.
Maybe he’s just horny. It’s been a year since Logan, and half a month since the last girl he fucked.
Maybe it’s that he best knows how to fix things with his hands and his mouth and his body, because they are the only tools he’s ever had to use.
Maybe it’s a combination of all of those things, but James wants to see if he can melt all the metal behind Kendall’s gaze. He reaches out, stroking a finger down the side of Kendall’s face. Kendall leans into it, and for a moment it’s this thing that stretches electric between them.
Then Kendall snaps, “What are you doing?”
It’s like he’s rearranging the contents of his brain, tucking away all the sloppy bits right in front of James until he’s rigid, composed, the leader.
God forbid that Kendall ever loses control.
“I don’t know. You’re throwing the word fuck around like you actually wanted to do something with it.”
Kendall recoils, his chair skidding back against the kitchen tile. “Are you hitting on me?”
“Fuck yes,” James breathes, because seriously, it’s been too long since he got his dick in anything. It’s not like Kendall’s going to take him up on it anyway. He’s just so damn angry, and joking and flirting are the easiest ways to defuse a situation. James is like the sexual fucking bomb squad.
Except maybe Kendall doesn’t know that he’s supposed to turn James down, because for a beat all James can see is the hue of his gray-green eyes, and then Kendall scoots his chair forward again. James barely has a second to process it, because Kendall is kissing him, hard and deep. It doesn’t take very long at all for the kissing to turn into stripping. The next thing James knows, he’s bent over the side of the Knights’ kitchen counter. Kendall’s hands are a rough bruise on his hips, but his tongue is pressing soft against the notches of James’s spine.
Kendall works his way down, his mouth sloppy and soft from the back of James’s neck until he’s so low that he has to drop to his knees, pressing a kiss above the curve of James’s ass. A groan escapes from James’s throat when Kendall’s tongue darts out, licking down until he’s got slick wetness pressed up against his asshole.
Sex with his friends is a terrible idea, and James knows that like he knows not to touch a hot stove, but he has always had trouble with things like rules.
He doesn’t put a stop to it.
Kendall doesn’t seem all that concerned with stretching James. His dick is an insistent, uncomfortable press until James forces himself to relax, opening up enough that Kendall can thrust all the way inside of him. James stares at his hands, gripping the counter. His knuckles are white, like Logan’s knuckles were white that night when everything was lightning and magic.
The shape of Kendall’s cock inside of him is strange, heavy weight and amazing heat. It makes James feel like he’s burning up from the inside out. Except Kendall’s not moving. James can hear the tiny sucking breaths he’s taking, can feel the power of Kendall’s hands on his hips, the trembling of his thighs where they’re pressed against James’s. He’s completely still. James tests it, rocking back, and he hears Kendall suck in sharp, can almost hear words form in his mouth, like he wants to ask James if this is really okay.
The idea of it pricks at James; he doesn’t want Kendall to be sweet to him. He wants to be fucked.
“Move already,” James hisses, rocking back. Kendall’s grip is steel on his waist. He doesn’t get far. It doesn’t matter, because Kendall gets the hint. He presses a kiss to the back of James’s head that’s entirely too gentle for what James wants, but then he obeys, slamming forward so fast and so deep that James shouts out his name. And it’s good; it’s so fucking good. None of that messy emotional crap that James is sick of trying to deal with. Kendall’s skated beside him through years of broken bones and bruised ribs. He knows James isn’t delicate, and he’s not about to treat him that way. He fucks into him, and it is not gentle, and it is not kind, and somehow it’s exactly what
James has been looking for.
It’s the first time in a year that he comes without Logan’s name a whisper on his lips.
“Why?” Kendall asks against the back of his neck, and somehow that’s not the question that James expects.
James groans into the counter. “What do you mean, why? You’re hot. I’m hot. What we just did? That was pretty hot.”
“But why me?” Kendall asks.
What is he, a girl?
“I’m not picky,” James says, because at this point he’s really not. It only occurs to him after he says it that Kendall’s one of his best friends, and maybe he should be trying to spare his feelings.
Kendall pulls out of him, not making any attempt to be nice about it, and James likes that too. He’s a masochist, apparently. He listens as Kendall, pissed and a little bit confused, asks, “I thought you were-“
He actually bites his tongue. James turns around and he can see Kendall’s teeth digging into the muscle.
“What?” James asks, impatient.
“I thought you were with Logan.”
“What?” He repeats dumbly, eyes nearly popping out of his head.
“You fucked him. The night of his grandma’s funeral. I assumed-“
“How- how did you know about that?”
“Um, I went to get some water in the kitchen. I got a show instead.” Kendall wiggles his fingers tiredly. He’s naked and shining with sweat, but every nuance of his posture suggests exhaustion. James doesn’t like it. “Surprise.”
“That was once.” James grinds out.
“Are you sure Logan knows that?”
“It’s been a year, Kendall. I’ve been with a ton of people since then.”
“I know, but.” He bites his lip. “I thought you guys had like, an open relationship. ‘Cause you’re kind of a whore.”
“Oh yeah?” James shoves him, chuckling, but he doesn’t really find it funny. Talking about Logan is wiping away all the afterglow of what just went down. It’s making him feel mopey.
Maybe Kendall gets that, because he leans over and captures James’s lips in a kiss, insistent, until James opens his mouth to him.
---
“I’m so proud of you, son,” is his dad’s response, all gruff and masculine, when James tells him about the move to California. It’s a far cry from the beaming smile and crushing bear hug that his mom gave him, but James can’t fault his dad for it. After all, James is calling him from the airport. Everything’s happening so fast that James feels like he’s on a roller coaster, speeding down the tracks at a million miles an hour.
“Thanks,” he says, swallowing the lump in his throat.
“What else have you been up to?” What else? Like becoming a popstar isn’t enough? “Any new girls?”
James sighs and tells him about the latest chick he’s been banging, a brunette with a tight little body and some great moves in the bedroom. His dad makes a pleased noise and says, “Good for you. You’re not going to keep it up, right? None of those long distance relationships for you, buddy?”
As if. James rolls his eyes. “No. Whole new state. So many new girls.”
It’s what his dad wants to hear. James can tell he’s said the right thing by the lilt of his dad’s laughter. Behind him, Logan squeezes his shoulders and says, “We’re boarding in ten minutes.”
“Dad, I’ve got to go.”
“Hang on, hang on, your stepmom wants to talk to you.”
“Dad, no-“
“Hi, Jamie-baby! Your father and I are so proud.”
Her voice grates on James’s ears. Oblivious to his time constraints, she prattles on and on about the places they’re going to go on their family vacation. If his dad’s female inquest wasn’t enough to kill his good mood, this is. All he can think is if it’s a family vacation, why isn’t he invited?
“James, hey!” Kendall yells across the terminal, a bright red-blue mark half apparent beneath the collar of his shirt. It’s the result of the thank-you-for-making-my-dreams-come-true sex James gave him. Not that James needs any reason to bang Kendall anymore, other than that he’s willing and there. Kendall smiles, wide open and happy. “Come on!”
Carlos is standing by Kendall’s side, waving James towards the gate. He can feel Logan’s hands at his back, pushing him forward. All three of them are watching him with a mixture of pride and exhilaration and excitement.
James doesn’t even bother saying goodbye. He hangs up his cell. These boys are his family, and they will take him more places that his dad and his bitch ever will.
“You ready?” Logan asks, squeezing James’s arm.
Is James ready to leave behind things like curses and dads who don’t care enough and moms who care too much? Is he ready to have an adventure with the people he loves most in this world?
What kind of question is that? Of course he is.
“Let’s do this.”
---
Being wanted is like a drug.
When James has Kendall’s mouth hot on his throat or when he’s buried so deep inside Kendall that he thinks he can come without even moving, he feels powerful. He feels like conquering the earth is not so far out of reach.
When they’re apart, he feels hollow and empty. He feels like he is turning to ash, crumbling away.
The problem is, he needs that first feeling; the adrenaline and the strength like steel in his bones. He yearns for it. It is a twitch in his fingers and an itch across the surface of his skin. It’s an addiction. He recognizes, in this muddled place in the back of his mind, that he’s digging himself a hole. He’s fucking with a friendship that he’s spent too many years nurturing. He recognizes that he’s making a huge mistake.
It’s almost a relief when Kendall finds Jo.
James thinks that Kendall’s relationship with her will be the end of things. He should have known better. Kendall hoards people like material possessions. He doesn’t gather them in surplus; instead he clutches every person he gains close to his chest, like precious metals, like king’s gold.
The same night that Kendall and Jo start dating, Kendall yanks him into the bathroom. He entwines James in his long limbs, an octopus pulling him beneath the surface of the ocean, and that’s what it feels like. Drowning.
Right then, James knows that he should quit. He doesn’t.
Kendall isn’t the only person James gets with, of course. He dates and he fucks and he develops carefully crafted rules that apply to everyone, except the people who matter the most.
They don’t apply to Kendall.
They wouldn’t apply to Logan, if being with Logan was anything like possible.
Logan makes James laugh and Kendall makes him crazy, and James knows which one he’d choose if he could. But Logan isn’t interested in him that way, and Kendall is; Kendall kisses the skin inside of James’s knee and murmurs that he wants him when James doesn’t even really want himself, and he thinks that could be enough.
It’s not like what he feels for Kendall is the kind of thing they write songs about, or that people go to war for. This is just- it’s fun, is what it is.
It’s fun and it’s comfort, for both of them. James looks at Kendall and sees a boy who is already king of the world. He is meant to be something bigger than the leader of a silly boy band. He is meant to slay dragons.
He is meant to leave.
Friend or lover, it’s inevitable that Kendall will one day walk out of James’s life the same way that he walked in. And James thinks that maybe, having that knowledge now, he can prepare himself for it. He will build walls around his heart, a fortress that Kendall will never be able to penetrate, and when he goes it will not leave a scar. Until then, James can kiss him. James can love him without being in love with him.
Kendall is safe.
Kendall is supposed to be safe.
As the time they spend in California wears on, he has trouble separating the things that he actually feels for Kendall from the things he wants to feel for Kendall. There is passion and there is hurt and there is friendship and there is anger, and James has trouble telling where one ends and one begins. He still knows that Kendall is going to leave, because Kendall likes girls. He has a father to impress, a father who stands tall in the midst of deserts and jungles made of concrete, who is swathed in red and white and blue. The man raised Kendall in camouflage, like a chameleon, and it worked. Kendall changes the colors of James’s heart with every second of every day, and James is beginning to think that he can’t handle it. But he sticks with Kendall anyway, because the sex is good and the hate is better; the resentment that simmers in his blood for his best friend and for himself.
It’s easy to let his whole body come to a boil, to let himself believe that this maybe is what being in love feels like. It is a catastrophe threatening to crush him.
The only time James feels like himself anymore is when he’s with Logan, when he can breathe and smile and mean it, all of it. Because of course he is already in love with Logan. He’s known that for years now, since the taste of lightning and sadness on his lips.
Logan fills the places in James he never knew were empty while Kendall hollows them out, his hands claws that tear at James’s insides. If James was brave, he would tell Logan everything. He would tell him about the secret thing that may or may not be love that lives in his chest and in his memory, the thing that has a life of its own. And then he wouldn’t asphyxiate himself beneath Kendall’s secret tragedy and his own fucked up commitment issues and the weight of the curse pressing in behind him.
The curse; the stupid fucking curse. It followed him to Hollywood. James has seen it in the eyes of the girls he’s dated here, girls who never have any trouble leaving him behind. Or maybe they’re just flighty. James isn’t sure he believes that there is a curse, because he’s at the age where he’s creating his own beliefs, spinning them from thin air and stardust, but he does believe a simple truth. People leave.
People always leave.
If Kendall leaves, James knows he will be wrecked, but he’s prepared for that eventuality since forever ago. If James does something to fuck it all up with Logan? He won’t survive. It’s an eventuality that can never come to pass. Whenever James thinks about it, he feels fear like ice on the back of his neck. He doesn’t know how he would live with himself if he didn’t have anyone to jam out with in front of his mirror or to teach him arithmetic and politics and the names of all the galaxies. He doesn’t know what he would do without the boy who has always believed in him when James can’t spin together enough self confidence to be himself. So he doesn’t tell. He lets things carry on and on and on, and he acknowledges that he does feel something big and scary for Kendall. He lets it consume him when he wants to fight against it.
The things Kendall makes him feel are like the distortion on a record player; the places where the track goes scratchy or skips or warbles.
There are times when their strange relationship is music and sound and times when it is nothing but white noise. James likes it best when Kendall marks him all over with fingertip bruises and tongue-lavished hickeys and he doesn’t have to think about the static.
All he wants is to be owned, to lose himself in the sex and the roughness. Sometimes Kendall fucks James with his hands wrapped around his throat, and that’s good. It’s so fucking good to let everything go except that. James likes the idea of ownership, and it’s not right; no one should want to be a possession. But James does. There is comfort in belonging to someone other than himself.
The problem is that Kendall will never actually belong to him in return. He can’t ever belong to anyone, really. Not when he spends all of his time chasing an ideal of a man from one Middle Eastern country to another, from ports in Seoul to harbors in Hawaii. The only real person who manages to capture his attention for any length of time is Jo, and it gets to be so that James hates her.
He absolutely despises her. So he treats her like he treats most girls he doesn’t plan on dating; he ignores her. Some of it is misplaced resentment that she chose Kendall instead of him, of course, but most of it is that he can’t stand seeing her all over him.
It makes him feel bad, because there’s nothing wrong with the girl, per se. Her only real flaw (other than the fact that she didn’t give James the time of day) is that Kendall wants her. She fits into his perfect American dream more than James ever can. And he knew that, going in; he knew that this thing with Kendall was a bad idea, and that it was going to backfire right in his face.
Somehow the knowledge that he was right doesn’t make him feel better.
---
Kendall sits on the edge of his bed on a sunny day, hands shoved deep in his pockets, an awkward tilt to his shoulders. Except it’s not James’s bed at all; it’s Kendall’s. James is naked beneath the sheets, and he tries not to feel vulnerable as he sits up and meets Kendall’s eyes.
Kendall stares at the sunlight streaming through his window and says, “You need to talk to Logan.”
“About what?” James’s voice cracks with sleep.
“I thought he was over you, James. You said he was over you.” Now Kendall’s voice is the one that is cracking.
“There’s nothing to be over. Logan and I- we weren’t-“
“He doesn’t know that. He came to me and basically called me a homewrecking whore.”
James has to stifle the instinct to laugh. Automatically, he says, “Those words would never come out of Logan’s mouth.”
Kendall glares at him. “Logan’s not a saint.”
Yeah, well. None of them are. James bunches the sheets up around his middle, sitting up. “Where were you, anyway?”
“Pool. Clearing my head.” Kendall is speaking in terse sentences, which mostly means he’s restraining himself from punching James in the jaw. What right does he have to be mad about anything? James wants to tell him to get the fuck out, but it’s Kendall’s room.
He doesn’t stop to think that Kendall’s worried about Logan’s feelings, or anything. Logan doesn’t have feelings about James, and if he did, it’s not Kendall’s business. He doesn’t get to be a territorial asshole when he spent most of the previous day wrapped up in his girlfriend.
Even if he did spend most of the night letting James fuck him into the mattress.
Logan’s totally right. Kendall is a homewrecking whore.
Idly, James thinks that Kendall doesn’t to have a room in his mental-dream-mansion. He doesn’t want to have to clean the sheets every time he comes over with some girl.
“I’ll talk to Logan. Is that what you want to hear?”
Kendall gives him this expression that could almost be described as pouting. James grabs hold of his hand, sucking one of Kendall’s fingers into his mouth. He curls his tongue soft around the tip and murmurs, “Your face is going to stick that way.”
Kendall yanks his hand away. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” James asks, confounded.
“Don’t treat me like I’m one of the puck fucks back home or some stupid actress. You can’t make this better with sex. Talk to Logan.”
“Fine.” James slumps back down onto Kendall’s pillows. “I was planning on it.”
Talking to Logan is great in theory, but in reality James has to work himself up to it with a series of practice sessions in the mirror throughout the day. When he finally gets around to it, he plants himself on the couch for nearly an hour, trying to still the trembling in his fingers.
It shouldn’t be this hard. Logan is his best friend. But Logan is also a constellation of fears and hopes, a pattern of stars that form the picture of a boy. He has so many different layers and aspects and James doesn’t want to disappoint any part of him; not the brainy boy-genius or the childhood best friend or the amazing singer who dances beside him on stage. Logan is just so…complex.
James wishes he could be like that. He thinks when someone puts all the pieces of himself together, there is no picture to be found; only holes and gaps like an abstract painting gone wrong. There are days when he’ll look in the mirror and expect to see something different; a failed Picasso. A monster. A maneater, maybe? He’s always disappointed. His reflection is hazel eyes and a sweet smile and the tan he’s been trying to build up since he stepped foot off the plane. There’s only ever him; nothing more, and nothing less. Nothing complex at all.
He tries not to let that get to him.
Logan stomps through the door near eight, a funk like a storm cloud hovering around his head. He’s been out of it all day. James noticed when they were in the studio, but he was too distracted by his own personal drama to do anything about it.
Logan’s gaze falls upon him, and James feels like the room is beginning to go dark. He folds his hands together and tells his fingers to stay still already, damnit. The quaking is getting to be a little much.
“Kendall told me that you, uh, talked,” James says, uncertain of the words. Kendall exaggerates a lot more than most people give him credit for, and James doesn’t know if he’s leaping onto a wild accusation or if something more is going on here. He doesn’t know what, exactly, but it wouldn’t be the first time he’s been completely obtuse.
“He did?” Logan sounds guilty. He clears his throat and says, “I mean, yeah, uh. We did.”
There’s a weight in those words that James isn’t sure how to process. He makes this vague gesture in the air that could mean anything at all. He’s using his traitorous fingers to talk because he’s abruptly forgotten how to speak.
“How do you feel about Kendall?” Logan asks, and there’s accusation in his voice. James isn’t so stupid that he misses it. He wants to lie, to denydenydeny, but why should he? He doesn’t owe Logan anything. Logan’s the one who shot him down that night three years ago.
Logan’s the one who didn’t want the things that James was prepared to offer him. This is obviously just his paternalistic instinct, or something. Logan’s always tried to father him, or mother him, like James hasn’t been doing well enough on his own.
James looks away so that Logan won’t see how much that pisses him off. He tries to focus on the good things, on the idea that Kendall planted; a seedling of hope in his chest.
“I think-” James takes a deep breath, needing to inhaleexhale. “The important question is how you feel about me.”
He knows how Logan feels. He knows that they will never be anything more than this, friends sharing the same space. He’s mad at himself for thinking there could ever be more. He’s jealous of what he can’t have.
Logan doesn’t answer, and it’s as good as a confirmation. He doesn’t want to hurt James’s feelings. Of course he doesn’t. He’s too good, too kind for that. James forces himself to gather up the last of his courage so that he can go back to Kendall and say, definitively, that he’s got nothing to worry about.
Though why Kendall would worry is an entirely different grab-bag of questions.
“Logan. Do you- have a thing for me?” He has to force the words out. They feel like glass scraping his throat.
Logan is the one looking away now. James has to grab his face, to force him to meet his eyes because these are words he needs to hear.
Maybe if Logan rejects him, straight up, he’ll be able to let the ever present ghost of him go.
Except Logan meets his eyes, honey-molasses irises dark and sad. He says in the softest, sweetest voice, “I wish you could love me instead.”
Logan yanks his face from James’s grip, straightening. He turns to go down the hallway, and James is still feeling that plea like the kidney shot it is. He has to catch his breath and practically growl, “Logan, wait,” because words aren’t his friend right now.
This is some awful practical joke. It has to be. Logan can’t want him because nobody can ever want him, not the way they talk about in books and fairytales. That’s why he has to be hot, why he has to be sexy and desirable physically, because at least then people won’t dismiss him immediately. They have to get through the shiny façade first.
Logan stops in his tracks, and James doesn’t care what this is. Logan would never purposely try to hurt him. James knows that the same way he knows that skinny jeans emphasize his package in a way that makes girls swoon. But what James doesn’t know is why Logan would be into him. Is this a crush, a phase he’s going to grow out of? Is he just looking for sex without strings? He knows about Kendall. Love me instead, he’d asked, but that can’t be what he wants, because love hurts and Logan would never intentionally hurt James.
Maybe he is trying to give James a way out of this thing with Kendall. Maybe he just needs someone.
James can be that someone. The reasons don’t even matter. He’s got a hex on his head, a family curse that feels like a chain, pulling him down into the earth every time he dares to try to shake it. But Logan is Logan; the smartest guy he knows, his best friend since forever. He is the boy who laid on sun warm rocks with James when they were small, who would look at him over text books with whole galaxies in his eyes, planets that James would never be able to touch in his wildest dreams.
He is a single ecstatic moment in James’s memory where he thought maybe.
He is a dream crusher.
He’s Logan.
James can’t turn this opportunity down. He will take what Logan gives him until he isn’t prepared to give it anymore.
“Do you- want to come to my room? Just for tonight?”
Logan doesn’t say anything, but he waits for James there in the hallway, expectant. James leads Logan back to his room, kissing him breathless. His hands fumble inside of Logan’s clothes, his dorky sweater vest and the denim of his jeans. There’s this moment when James thinks it won’t happen, when Logan is hovering over him, hesitant, and James reaches out. He strokes a finger down his cheekbone and says, “We don’t have to.”
Logan shakes his head, vehement. He’s watching James like he’s a present that he gets to open on Christmas morning, and James doesn’t know what to do with that. He doesn’t know how to be something that is cherished. Logan’s obviously just confused. He doesn’t know what it is that he wants, and he’s come to James because he’s the most comfortable. They’ll fool around, and then Logan will get over it.
That’s what James is telling himself when Logan fucks back on his dick, but after that, he can’t concentrate on anything but Logan, silvered by moonlight, saying his name over and over again.
---
James has to pee. He climbs out of bed and makes it to the bathroom without any incidents. But on the way back, he runs into a problem.
That problem is nearly six foot, with blond hair and blazing green eyes. James glances at the door to his room. Logan is in there, sleeping comfortably in his bed.
Logan is in there, and Kendall probably knows it.
“Morning,” James says, as bright as he can muster.
Kendall just crosses his arms. “What are you doing?”
“Going back to sleep? We don’t have to be at the studio for a while yet…”
Kendall shakes his head and turns to go. In that moment he looks so small and so sad.
Logan’s supposed to be the indecisive one. James knows what decision he would make if he could. He knows who he would want to be with if nothing at all was on the line. If there was no curse and no social restrictions, no hurt and the chains of friendship weren’t wrapped around his neck like a noose.
But it is not a perfect world, and James cannot weigh the value of one heart against another.
“Stop,” he pleads. He can’t take the concave curves of Kendall’s shoulders. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone. James wants to give peace a chance. Why do relationships even have to be so hard? He’s so scared that someone is going to end up hating him. If he was stronger, it
wouldn’t matter.
James is not strong.
Kendall turns, agonizingly slow. “Look. Logan’s my best friend too. Don’t mess with his head.”
“I’m not messing with his head.”
“Do you like him?”
“Of course I like him.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. We can’t keep doing this if you’re thinking about fucking Logan too-“
“Why the hell not? It’s not like I’m in love with either of you,” James snaps, barely processing that oh, Kendall doesn’t actually know that James has already crossed that line. “It’s just sex. Dude, don’t try to fix me. Just fuck me.”
He means the last part to be sexy, but mostly he just sounds tired. Kendall gives him this completely inscrutable look, and it’s not fair. He has a girlfriend and a family and a perfect life. He shouldn’t be able to make James feel guilty about having a bad day, but something in that
look does.
It makes James think that he knows every tiny nook and corner of his mind.
But he doesn’t. He can’t.
Kendall probably won’t even care if James ends it. All he gets out of the deal is sex, whenever he wants it. But it is not Kendall’s heart that James is weighing against Logan’s.
It’s his own.
James, above all things, is a narcissist. He needs to come out of every situation looking daisy fresh. He needs to be in control. If he were to end it with Kendall and find out what he already suspects; that it doesn’t even matter to him? No. He can’t. He can’t be the one left standing in the shadows, heart in his hand. Even if Logan could swoop up and pick up the pieces. Which won’t happen either way. No really. James doesn’t let the warm glow of them sleeping together trick him into thinking anything will change.
There is no such thing as happily ever after. James is confident in a million other superficial things. He’s confident in his ability to get another human being into bed and that he’ll always look amazing in a tux and that his voice deserves to be heard by most of mankind. But there are other things that he knows aren’t set in stone, like the things his voice has to say or the idea that anyone will ever be able to accept him forever. He never says it out loud because he doesn’t want anyone to look at him like he’s pathetic, like he’s broken. At the same time, he knows the truth of those words.
Maybe it’s better not to love anyone at all.
Kendall takes a step forward, his hand hovering over James’s hip. “What are you doing, James?”
“I don’t know.”
“Really?” Kendall’s face is closer, his breath sweet across James’s lips. “What are you playing at? No ideas?”
That’s when Logan stumbles out the door.
Kendall snatches his hand back. He looks between Logan and James and breathes, “Oh.”
James doesn’t want to hurt anybody, but he has hurt Kendall. He can tell by the places where Kendall’s eyes crinkle, his mouth going thin. There is a crease between his eyebrows as he turns to leave.
“Kendall, wait,” James says, trying to physically stop him with a hand at his elbow. He hasn’t seen that expression on Kendall’s face since the last time his dad stood him up.
James shouldn’t be able to make that face appear out of the blue.
He shouldn’t have that kind of power.
Something aches in his stomach.
Kendall is looking at James like the idea of touching him would be worse than death. In that moment, James is not a wish that fate granted. James is a curse.
“Dude. Just- no. It’s not. It’s not anything, okay? I’ve got a pool date with Jo.”
James winces away from the words. It’s like Kendall knows that’s the thing that would hurt James the most. He watches Kendall leave the apartment before spinning, apologies on his lips. “Logan, I-“
“It’s okay.”
What? No it’s not. It’s not even close to okay. All of this is crushing him. It’s a weight on his chest, and why is it that Kendall and Logan are still able to stand so straight and tall? Why is it that they can’t see the two of them are slowly sucking away his soul?
“You sure?”
“Yeah. It’s fine,” Logan says, voice neutral.
“I don’t know what you want from me.”
It would be so much easier if Logan was solid ground, if James could just look at him and see the friend that he’s grown up with his whole life. Instead he looks at him and sees lightning and sky, electricity and his name turned to a whisper, to a prayer, to something simultaneously as soft and as loud as thunder.
“I want-“
Maybe Logan doesn’t know what he wants, because Logan is kissing him, sloppy and soft.
“Logan,” James tries to pull away, but he can’t.
Logan won’t let him.
---
Kendall forgives him, eventually. He shouldn’t, because James has fucked up, big time. He’s aware of that.
He’s also aware that he has no idea how to fix this. Sometimes he thinks he can get away with what he’s doing forever.
Sometimes he thinks that it’s all going to end like a shoot off at the O-K Corral.
His insides feel paper thin, like the lightest breeze could tear right through him. He is a shadow of the person he is supposed to be, and he doesn’t care.
He will change himself for Kendall, and he will change himself again for Logan. He will bend over backwards and sideways and twist in on himself like a contortionist to keep both of their affections, to maintain their desire and their trust. When they watch him with eyes filled with lust, it’s the only time he thinks he is real, anymore. It’s the only time he doesn’t worry that he is going to fade into nothingness. He can ask for it harder and faster and rougher.
It’s the after part he can’t handle. When he’s lying prone next to Kendall or Logan, listening to their soft exhalations and the beat of their hearts, the question comes to him, unbidden.
What kind of person only defines themselves by merciless love?
And it is merciless. A person has to be ruthless to interchange one lover for another, like they are casual fucks instead of the only people in the entire world who make him feel like he actually exists.
James doesn’t have an answer, and he doesn’t search for one. The future is a distant, hazy thing, and James doesn’t want to do anything to force it closer. So he keeps doing what he’s been doing. He fucks Kendall. He fucks Logan. Sometimes he even fucks a girl on the side. Some nameless random. He figures when things get really bad, he’ll put an end to it. He’s got time until then.
He’s got nothing but time.
---
He is wrapped up in Logan, sucking soft on his neck, when Logan rubs at the newly formed hickeys and asks, “Must you mark your territory like that?”
James laughs, high and sharp, because he’s never once thought of Logan as something he can own until this moment. Possessiveness rears in his chest, but it is not what he feels for Kendall; the desire to pillage and conquer. This is different. This is something like fierce delight, like a gift freely given.
Logan takes it for granted that he is James’s, and instead of being pleased by it, James is frightened. This family is cursed, he thinks.
James doesn’t exactly know how to process it, so he nips at Logan’s throat, working his way up to his lips until he is kissing him, hard and filthy. He murmurs, “What can I say? My mouth looks good all over you.”
This is his fallback plan whenever he is bewildered; ignore the problem until it goes away. Logan rucks up his shirt, fingers tapping like he’s playing a piano against James’s ribs. He groans into the kiss when James starts to use tongue.
The plan works.
The problem doesn’t go away.
---
James has nights that blur into golden days that blur into nights of indigo and silver, midnight and charcoal. He learns the contours of his best friends’ faces in a million different settings, in the quiet hush of dawn and beneath the hum of fluorescent lights at a crowded party. He can no longer remember all the places and he has been with Logan or Kendall, but he can perfectly visualize the things he has done.
For instance, there are the scars on Kendall’s knuckles as his hand coaxes an orgasm from James’s cock or there is the pale play of shadows against Logan’s thighs as he fucks inside of him. There is the pool, where there are currents of light and darkness that make James feel like they are living inside a star field, Logan hot and tight around him but no-
He is in a bed, beneath a fort of blankets and pillows, Kendall’s guitar a stiff protrusion in his back as he is getting fucked-
He’s in the soundbooth, the mixer a dim silhouette in glowing green and red as Logan’s hands squeeze his ass-
He’s in the janitor’s closet, the scent of Clorox in his nose with Kendall pressed hard and ready against him-
The strobe lights of the club are fast flickers like heat lightning over Logan’s face as James licks the inside of his thigh-
The sun highlights the freckles on Kendall’s back while he sucks James off beneath the overpass outside of In ‘N Out-
Logan screams his name in the middle of the night, in the middle of the apartment, and the sound is as high and raw and breathy as a song lyric-
Kendall kisses the corners of James’s lips in the shower, soft and tender and sweet-
He is in the Pacific Ocean, with his best friends bobbing beside him, their feet tangling with his, or no-
He is in the studio, or no, the car, or no, the park, or-
He is everywhere.
He is nowhere.
He is in hell.
---
“What do you talk about with Kendall?” Logan asks, his fingertips dancing over the sheets, tracing a wrinkle in the fabric.
“I don’t know. We don’t talk a whole lot.” James squeezes his eyes shut so that he doesn’t have to see Logan’s reaction to that. It doesn’t help. He hears the hitch of his breath. He can feel his judgment like a palm pressed to the back of his neck.
“You guys write songs,” Logan prods. And that’s true. Sometimes, they’ll be in the middle of some primetime cop drama and there will be a commercial for the ten o clock news. It will have a clip of a soldier or a pilot or a man with medals clipped to his chest. After everyone else goes to sleep, Kendall will camp out on the couch, eyes glued to the TV for something like a secret message on the screen.
When James sees alarm building behind Kendall’s eyes like a scream, the edges of his ever present wolf grin crumbling, he takes Kendall to do the one thing that always makes him feel better. James has always kind of resented Kendall’s easy grace when it comes to music. It’s like he was born speaking a language that James has had to work at his entire life. But days like those? He locks them up in his room with Kendall’s battered old guitar, a relic his dad left in the rush between the divorce and the time they stationed him in Seoul or Dhaka or Kandahar or Karachi. He coaxes Kendall into playing, into channeling everything he feels into that stupid guitar and the newer bass perched on his own lap.
Sometimes they craft lyrics, words like puzzle pieces slowly forming a whole thing, and sometimes they don’t. But they don’t stop. Not until Kendall’s solid and real and not this pale shade of the boy he’s supposed to be, filled with worry and fear.
It’s not anything special; it’s just what friends do for each other. Except for some reason, James doesn’t want to tell Logan that. He feels like saying any of it out loud would be a betrayal of Kendall’s trust. Which makes no sense, ‘cause- it’s Logan.
“We talk about his dad,” James says quietly, a half truth. It’s not a secret that Mr. Knight is career military, or that he visits his mistress more often than he visits his kids. It’s not even a secret that Kendall worries about him every second of every day.
What is a secret is that Kendall can’t contain all that worry and fear.
What is a secret is that Kendall ever loses control.
“Oh. Kendall, um.” Logan’s teeth worry over his lip, and James wants to kiss him. So he does, because it’s something that’s allowed now.
When he pulls away, Logan continues, “He never talks to me about that. I guess you guys have a lot in common.”
James snorts. “Not really.”
His dad tours seedy nightclubs and promotes other bands with James’s blonde bimbo of a stepmother pressed into his side. His dad’s got a comfy little house in the suburbs, and the most James ever worries about is that he’ll get into a car crash after downing too many Jaeger bombs. Back when they still lived in Minnesota, James spent every weekend he wasn’t with the guys at his dad’s. It’s not even close to the same thing. Except, in a way, it is. James will never understand what it is like to fear for his father when he’s backlit by a war, but he will always know what it is like to be a kid who isn’t good enough to stay home for.
It bothers him that Logan sees that, like he’s cutting through the carefully crafted walls that James has built, the I-don’t-care-that-my-parents-split façade.
“Yeah. You do,” Logan says, and it looks like it troubles him.
Why? Does he want a father who prefers doing anything else to spending time with his son?
James buries his head into Logan’s side, knowing that’s not fair at all. James would never wish that on Logan. At the same time, he doesn’t like the knowing look that Logan is giving him, like he can ever understand what it means to be rejected by your own parents. Logan is a great many things, but no one ever leaves him.
James wouldn’t leave him, if he had anything like a choice.
“Love me,” James whispers against Logan’s skin, so low that he can’t hear it.
“What?”
“I said fuck me,” James murmurs into his ribs, flicking his tongue out to emphasize his point. Logan groans, digging his fingers into
James’s shoulder and hauling him up so that they’re eye to eye.
“You’re changing the subject.”
“You don’t want to fuck me?” James asks innocently, palming a hand over Logan’s bare cock. It twitches with interest.
“You’re lucky you’re hot,” Logan retorts, hauling him closer still.
Something inside James twinges.
---
James tries to break it off with Kendall. They’re in bed, curled into each other’s bodies the night before the biggest awards show of their famous lives so far.
“Kendall?”
“Yeah?” he asks, all sleepy and open.
“I want-“ James stops himself, biting his tongue.
“What do you want?” Kendall asks earnestly. His eyes are so green. His bangs fall across his eyebrows, and James can’t help reaching out to brush them back.
Maybe Kendall won’t care if he ends it, but can James really give this up?
No. Nononono.
He kisses him, soft and chaste.
---
They’re at an awards show, and Logan is sucking him off in the fancy pants bathroom.
And James isn’t enjoying it.
Okay, he is. A lot. But even with Logan on his knees in front of him, James thinks that he doesn’t really know what this is. Logan doesn’t really want James.
He wants the idea of a boy he lost his virginity to.
He wants the person who exists in the sunlight, when he is singing and dancing and putting on an act.
He wants the boy that James was at fifteen, and not the boy he is now; broken.
Logan licks soft along the shape of his dick and James can’t think about that anymore. He can’t think about the way that Logan looks at him every time they discuss Kendall.
He can’t think about the revulsion he sees in his eyes.
---
Three people are thrown into a hole, blindfolded.
Each knows that the other is there, but each has to dig their own way out if they want to survive.
What happens?
James has that dream over and over again. He’s not the brightest, but he’s not stupid either. He knows that people will chew off their own leg to get out of a bear trap.
Love is closing around all three of their necks.
Take three teenage boys and confront them with the overwhelming idea of commitment? They will trample each other to try to escape asphyxiation, no matter what their hearts say.
James glances over at Kendall, naked and prone and asleep beside him. He rubs at his throat and tries to remember how to breathe.
---