FIC: "Subject to Change" 2/2
They go to Pittsburgh for Christmas. Justin’s mother has recently remarried, moved to a sprawling house in an affluent suburb with three new stepkids and a Golden Retriever. A pool and a fireplace, air conditioning. Long hedges that look anal retentive to Justin’s eyes. A husband with stubble and glasses, a therapist that charges a couple hundred dollars an hour. He’s an okay guy. His mother seems happy.
It’s no surprise that Justin ends up staying in Brian’s hotel room. Brian has been suggesting it ever since Justin first realized that staying at his mother’s would involve a twin bed in a provincial style guest room, three irrational teenage girls, and a certain amount of disapproval about Justin’s three am bedtime.
Justin said “No,” but never really meant it.
--
Justin remembers another time when he shared white sheets and minty pillows with Brian. A white toweling robe. Brian stinking like something that crawled out of somebody’s jock strap. Justin being so fucking grateful. Some of the best sex Justin has ever had.
“Justin,” his mother had said, when Justin told her of his plans to crash with Brian. “Are you sure that’s a good idea, sweetheart?”
She doesn’t know how things are, now. Justin ignores the crawling worry in her voice. He ignores the doubt that settles around her mouth when Justin tells her that he and Brian are just friends, that that’s all either of them wants.
The first morning, Justin wakes with Brian’s nose pressed against his hair, Brian’s foot tangled up in Justin’s sweats.
Sometimes Justin wonders what Brian really wants.
--
Predictably, their family thinks they are fucking.
“No,” Justin tells Emmett. “No, we are not.”
“Maybe we should be,” Brian says lightly, slinging his arm around Justin’s shoulder. “Friends with benefits.”
To Justin, Brian is already a friend with benefits. The great lighting in his apartment, the way Brian will let Justin sit by the window and paint for hours because he had to give up his studio and that is the only kind of help he can justify. Phone calls at four in the morning that Brian will receive with a yawn and a grumpy hello, calls that Brian will never hang up on, because he knows Justin just has to talk about this painting or that trick or this new monstrosity his father has enacted upon the world. A nice warm bed in a five star hotel because Brian knows there’s no way Justin can spend the night in the suburbs with Mom and still maintain his sanity.
Brian cancelled his flight and drove to Pittsburgh because Justin couldn’t afford the airfare and didn’t want to drive alone. Some people would ask why Brian didn’t just pay the airfare for him, but those people clearly did not understand the way these things worked. When they stopped for gas on the way, Brian bought Justin a book of crosswords, a tube of Pringles and a Coke, and that means more to Justin than any first class flight on Liberty Air.
“We’re just friends,” Justin maintains patiently, and Emmett looks disappointed. Justin can feel Michael watching them, feel the weight of his insecurity pressing down on their shoulders. When Justin finally gets to greet him, though, Michael smiles widely, genuinely, and hugs him awkwardly, as if he’s not sure that Justin will approve. Justin touches his shoulder briefly and moves on, leaving Michael to be engulfed in Brian’s arms.
--
They go to Babylon, and it’s nothing like it used to be. For one thing, Justin steps onto the floor and nobody seems to know who he is, though Emmett says his legend still filters through to the youngest of the twinks making their Liberty Avenue debut. The boy who lived.
Justin drinks Brian’s beer. They do tequila shots with Michael. Later, on the dancefloor, some trick tries to slide a tab of E between Justin’s teeth. Justin has had so much to drink that he almost lets him, but in the end he spits the tab on the ground, watches it under ultra violet lights, dissolving beneath his boot.
Brian shoves the guy’s arm and tells him to fuck off. He’s come from the back room, Justin thinks. There’s a flush of red rising up his neck.
“He was hot,” Justin says. He’s dancing close to Brian, can feel their cocks rubbing together, half hard. “I wanted to fuck him.”
Brian smirks and spreads his hand out across the small of Justin’s back. “So go after him.”
Justin turns around. Grinds his ass back up against Brian, feels the answering bite of Brian’s fingers into his hips. Brian’s breath is hot against Justin’s ear.
“Which one was he?” Justin asks. There is a row of five guys in black t-shirts. Justin looks at their faces, considers. “None of them are that hot.”
“Not hot enough for you,” Brian murmurs. Justin feels soft, hot lips dragging against the skin below his ear. He wants to arch his neck up against those lips, but that would be crossing some boundary they pretend doesn’t even exist. Breaking the rules they don’t talk about.
Justin turns in Brian’s arms, presses up against Brian’s chest. He throws his arms around Brian’s neck and they’re dancing and hugging at the same time, teetering precariously from side to side. Justin feels giddy and warm, like maybe he absorbed some of that E the trick tried to push on him. And happy. So fucking happy, back here where it started, dancing stupidly and hearing his friend laughing beneath the music. His friend. His best fucking friend.
“I love you,” he tells Brian, trying to yell it over the music, over the bass heavy remix of some song that was probably made before Justin was born. He’s not sure that Brian has even heard him, except a few seconds later, Brian’s hand finds his own. Their fingers twist together and Brian kisses him affectionately on the cheek.
This is, apparently, Brian’s way of saying ‘You too.’
--
Brian is passed out on the other side of the bed, and that should be much less familiar than it is. Justin rubs his hand over his mouth, feels the stickiness of drool around his lips. He was sleeping gracelessly, it seems, the way he does when he’s painfully, painfully drunk.
Apparently, he got around to fucking a trick last night, because he’s got a crusty dick and a hickey on his wrist. He remembers the rippling of brown skin beneath his pale hand, the dirty lights in the backroom, looking up and seeing Brian’s eyes. Brian getting blown by a pair of glittering twinks.
Brian wakes when Justin shifts his leg out from beneath Brian’s ankle. He stares at Justin with bleary eyes, blinking, confused.
“I dreamed I was pregnant,” Justin says, fumbling for a morning cigarette. “You owe me child support. Deadbeat.”
Brian blinks again. “You smoke too much.”
“All smokers smoke too much.”
“You’ll make our baby retarded,” Brian chides, closing his eyes. He looks like he’s going to drift off to sleep again.
Justin shoves at his shoulder. “Wake up,” he commands. “We have plans.”
Brian doesn’t open his eyes, but he groans and rolls over on to his back. “It’s lunch at the diner. It’s not like we have reservations.”
“They all think we’re fucking,” Justin says darkly. He doesn’t know why it bothers him, but it does. Maybe it’s because they think that’s all he can be to Brian, a good fuck, but he doesn’t think so. They don’t even seem to think that way. They seem to think Brian is in love with him, or something. They all stared at Justin all through dinner the night before. The way Brian poured his wine. The way Brian managed to sit next to Justin, even though he had to move his chair.
It is mostly the staring that bothers him.
“So?”
“I don’t know,” Justin says. Brian takes the cigarette away without opening his eyes. Justin bites down on his own thumbnail, glowering up at the hotel ceiling. The cooling vent needs cleaning. “It bugs me.”
“Tell them to mind their own business,” Brian advises practically. “Tell them to fuck off.”
“Like that’ll work.”
“Why do you care what they think?”
“I don’t know. Doesn’t it seem… wrong, somehow?” Justin thinks about lighting another cigarette. He remembers a time when he used to go weeks without a smoke.
Brian shrugs. Justin’s eyes slide over the silhouette of Brian’s chest in the dim light. “It doesn’t bother me.”
“It makes me self conscious about you and me and how we act. I hate it.”
“Fuck them,” Brian sighs. “Fuck it.”
“I don’t want you to think that I’ve got unrequited love issues, or some bullshit like that.”
Brian looks like Justin might be crazy. “Huh? I don’t.”
Brian’s face in near darkness. Justin feels something pounding behind his eyes.
“I have to take a shower,” he says. Turns the lights on. It all looks different under a fluorescent glow.
“’Kay,” Brian says lazily, still looking as if something odd has sprouted from Justin’s forehead. “Don’t use all the hot water.”
Justin’s face looks different in the mirror, behind layers and layers of steam.
--
Christmas Day, Justin has lunch with his mother and her family. His stepsisters complaining about make up and boys, Molly sitting quietly next to Justin, shoving her food around the plate. She doesn’t like the other kids, he thinks. Or else she’s just moody like he was when he was fifteen. He feels sorry for his mother.
Brian picks him up at 4:30. He comes inside and speaks politely to Jennifer and her new husband. Justin feels like a sixteen year old about to go on his first date. He wonders if Brian expects him to put out.
At Deb’s, Justin sits on the floor and plays trains with Gus. Brian is in the kitchen talking quietly with Michael, waiting for everyone else to show up. Justin watches Michael’s boyfriend Ben thumb through his paper, glasses perched on his nose. He was around long before Justin left for New York, but somehow, they don’t know each other. Justin knows next to nothing about Ben, except that Brian fucked him. Tied him up in a hotel room at the White Party, made him scream. Made him bleed.
He also knows Ben is positive. The thought kind of terrifies him.
He leaves Gus crashing his steam engine into a plastic brick wall, and moves towards the kitchen to get a beer. He pauses out of sight when he hears the impatient blade to Brian’s voice.
“There’s nothing more to tell, Mikey.” Justin hears the hiss of a twisting bottle cap beneath Brian’s voice. “You guys should quit it with that shit, you’re pissing him off.”
“If you weren’t so obvious about it -“
“Obvious about what?” Brian huffs.
“You’re transparent, Brian, don’t even try it.”
“I have nothing to hide.”
“Right, except that you’re in -“
Justin doesn’t stick around to hear the rest. He escapes to the front porch and sits on the front step smoking cigarette after cigarette for half an hour, when Brian comes to find him.
--
Justin avoids Brian for three weeks. He begs off dinner invitations, skips the clubs, gets laid via the backlog of business cards and cocktail napkins with hastily scrawled phone numbers on the back. He emails or calls Brian occasionally just to check in, but for the most part, he tries to disappear altogether. Busy, busy, he writes.
At the beginning of the fourth week a truck containing a collection of Justin’s paintings is totaled at an intersection downtown. They’d been on their way to a major gallery, a major show, a major milestone in Justin’s career. Thousands of hours of work is damaged beyond repair. Pieces he was really proud of. Pieces he had loved.
He lets himself into Brian’s loft at 2 o’clock on Wednesday afternoon. He curls up on Brian’s couch and waits for him to get home from work. After that, he can’t find the energy to avoid Brian at all.
--
“Brian?” Justin asks one day, stretched out shirtless on Brian’s stone floor. He took a tab of E a few hours ago, and it feels like the light is burning patches on his skin. The creases in the tile dig canals along his back. “Do you want to fuck me?”
Brian moves to stand over Justin, his bare feet settling either side of Justin’s knees. “Now?” Brian asks, amused. He’s so fucking tall. Justin follows the line of his body up over dark denim legs and his black cotton chest, the long marble column of his neck.
“In general,” Justin clarifies.
Brian stares at him for a long time, and Justin can tell he wants to from the slow movement of his fingers against his stomach. Finally, Brian gently nudges Justin’s thigh with the ball of his foot, and says, “I don’t fuck my friends. You know that.”
“I know.” He slides his hand up and around Brian’s ankle. “I was just wondering if you ever wanted to.”
Brian’s calves tense as Justin’s fingers slide under the hem of denim jeans. “You’re fucking wasted,” he laughs.
“Yeah,” Justin agrees lazily, scratching his nails around the rise of Brian’s ankle bone.
“You need some water,” Brian says, and then he’s moving away. Justin watches with idle curiosity as long legs recede. The sound of the fridge door opening and closing bounces viciously against his skull, and Justin closes his eyes to chase the sudden sound of a four piece jazz band into darkness.
They don’t mention it the next day.
--
Sometimes Justin wants to talk about how he felt when Brian first left him for New York, but he has no way to express his pain that isn’t a cliché. People talk about being so hurt they want to die all the time. Most of them don’t mean it. Some of them mean it too much.
Justin prefers to be annihilated.
He has never told Brian that.
--
“What’s the most terrified you’ve ever been in your life?”
They’re at Brian’s again, Justin lying on his stomach on the couch, Brian for some reason cross legged on the floor in front of him. Brian didn’t sleep much last night, apparently. Justin’s arrival was greeted with bleary eyed confusion and a one armed hug, a pathetic plea for coffee. They’ve been sitting here motionless for close to three hours, overflowing an ashtray, running out of matches. Justin is drinking a bottle of Sprite he found in the dark recesses of Brian’s refrigerator, beneath the peanut butter, behind the three month old Thai.
“You first,” Brian says. He leans his cheek against the leather of the sofa, lets Justin slowly trace roadmaps on his skull.
Justin has thought about this before. Once he would have said it was the night he met Brian, but he’d been too horny to really feel the fear.
“When I was twenty this guy I went to high school with held a knife to my throat at a party. Chris Hobbs.”
Brian stares at him. “What?”
“Homophobic piece of shit.”
Justin remembers the stench of cheap beer and shitty pot, the clumps of frat boys singing stupid football songs. Daphne making out with some guy in the corner. Darren, Justin thinks. She’d dated him for a while. He remembers the kitchen, the crease of the laminex benchtop pressing into his back. Bruising.
He tells Brian, “He used a fucking bread knife. With a serrated edge.”
The knife pressed against his skin and drew blood, Justin remembers. A row of tiny little shaving cuts. “I thought he was going to kill me.”
Brian is very still all of a sudden, like he isn’t even breathing. Justin smoothes his entire hand through Brian’s thick hair, and says, “But he didn’t.”
“Obviously,” Brian drawls, but he reaches up and pulls Justin’s hand onto his shoulder, holding it there. He twists their fingers together, and Justin wants him to kiss them. He feels the skin on his knuckles crawl in anticipation. “I guess for me it was when they found the cancer in my ball.”
Justin prefers to be annihilated.
It feels like he doesn’t have a brain, or a body, or lips or teeth or a tongue. Just the beating of his heart in empty air. “What?”
Brian tugs a little on his hand. “I’m okay now.”
Justin sits up, his knees either side of Brian’s shoulders, calves pressing against Brian’s long arms. Brian lets go of his hand and twines his arm around Justin’s ankle, untying the worn laces of his sneakers. “A couple years ago, now. It’s all gone. They cut it out, then nuked me for a couple months. I just have to go for check ups now and then.”
Just check ups every now and then, just doctors, just cancer, just cancer. “How is it possible that I never heard about this?”
“Never told anyone,” Brian grunts. “I guess that makes you my first.”
In Justin’s head, Brian sits alone in a waiting room, alone in a doctor’s office. He wonders where he was the exact moment they were slicing Brian open. He feels his fingers flexing against Brian’s shoulders, kneading paths of worry in his flesh.
“Stop it,” Brian says. “Don’t make me regret telling you.”
“Asshole,” Justin murmurs. If he said I love you right now, Brian would never forgive him. He leans down further, twists his arms around Brian’s neck. He’s not sure if he’s trying to hug him or strangle him, but he leaves a warm, open-mouthed kiss against the side of Brian’s face.
This is the something he occasionally sees in Brian’s eyes.
--
Brian is in London on business for three weeks, and Justin has never been so bored in his life. He vaguely remembers that he used to hang out on his own all the time. Now he receives Brian’s tinny voicemail messages that crackle with static, and it’s the best part of his day.
--
Brian gets held up in London and doesn’t get back to New York until the day Michael arrives on holiday. Justin wants desperately to go over there right away, but he restrains himself. Brian and Michael see each other so rarely. It’d be nice for them to have some time to themselves. He thinks they probably need to do all those things they used to do, though he only has the vaguest idea of what those things are.
Brian won’t have any of it.
“Where the fuck have you been?” Brian says as he settles onto Justin’s bed very early the second morning.
Justin cracks his eyes open. He almost wishes he’d never given Brian a key, but it’s so good to see him that he ends up grinning and rolling over to settle his face against Brian’s thigh.
“Hey,” he says, rumbling sleepily into the warm denim of Brian’s jeans. “Why aren’t you home with Michael?”
Then, though, Justin registers the faint buzz of the radio in the next room. Michael must be out there. Justin tries to remember if the apartment is in an at least moderately presentable state, but decides it doesn’t fucking matter. Michael won’t notice or care.
“We’re going to breakfast,” Brian says. “Get up.”
Justin’s hand finds Brian’s knee and squeezes. “How was London?”
“People there are as stupid as they are in America, I don’t care what the rest of the world says.”
“It seems to be a universal problem.” He leans up and kisses the warm inside of Brian’s elbow. “I’m glad you’re back.”
“Christ, me too. I haven’t had a decent blow job in weeks. At least here I can work from your recommendations.” Brian shoves at Justin’s shoulder. “Get up. Michael will start whining for food.”
Justin slides out from under the blankets and wanders naked to the bathroom. He knows there are marks on his upper thighs from last night’s particularly exuberant rim job.
He wonders if Brian is watching him as he washes his face and pulls on his clothes. He thinks he probably is. There’s a telltale silence in the air, this thing that pulses and breathes between them.
In the spaces between their words, something has been growing.
--
Michael and Justin seem to be competing for the title of biggest third wheel. They trade off awkward silence with fits of laughter, and alternate positions as the centre of Brian’s attention. In the old days it was so rarely just the three of them that Justin doesn’t really know how to do it.
Michael is friendly, though, and listens with interest when the focus is on Justin, when their inside jokes spill out over the conversation. Michael chuckles in all the right places, and Brian’s willful obliviousness powers them all on until things are more comfortable.
Justin wonders if Brian has ever had to juggle two best friends before. He’s not sure Lindsay counts, but probably she does. He imagines them, Lindsay, Brian and Michael sitting silently around some shitty first apartment. It makes him smile.
Between them, they have seven coffees, five eggs, nine pieces of toast and about a thousand pounds of bacon. Brian is skinnier than usual, Justin can tell. Sometimes when he’s working hard he won’t eat anything but green apples for days at a time, and by the end he’ll drop so much weight that Justin will be allowed to feed him anything he wants until he’s back to normal.
It’s always astounded Justin that someone who is so unhealthy can have such an amazing body.
After breakfast they spend the morning at the movie theater Brian likes, watching Rock Hudson pretend to be straight in some romantic comedy from the fifties. Justin doesn’t know why he insists on coming here; Brian invariably hates the films. He thinks the popcorn is shitty, the chairs are uncomfortable - yet once a month or so on Sundays Justin will wake up to a message on his machine, ordering him to meet Brian at the theatre at two. The one time he had refused, Brian had spent the next few days in a snit, and Justin had gone out of his way to be accommodating ever since.
Justin falls asleep with his head on Brian’s shoulder twenty minutes after the opening credits. He’ll never find out how it ends.
--
On Tuesday when Brian is working, Justin takes Michael to a gallery that is showcasing the artwork from comic books. They’re staring at a picture of Superman bursting out of his suit and tie when Michael says it.
“He’s in love with you, you know.”
Justin’s breath hits a trigger in his throat, but he doesn’t look at Michael.
Calmly, he says, “We’re not going to talk about this.”
Justin does know.
--
For some reason, Justin decides to start dating. The reason is probably that a really hot gallery manager offered to feed him and fuck him, and business has been slow this month. Brian sits on Justin’s kitchen bench and watches as Justin fumbles with the knot in his tie. Justin knows he doesn’t imagine the sour look on Brian’s face.
He wonders for the fiftieth time, why am I doing this?
Before Justin walks out the door, Brian kisses him softly on the lips, slips him a little tongue. “Have a good time,” he says.
Justin leaves Brian sitting on the kitchen bench. When he comes home, his entire apartment will be clean.
--
It’s not a good date, and it just makes Justin more aware of his problem. This disease that has crept inside of him, that makes his heart pound and his dick hard. He remembers feeling like this when he was seventeen. He remembers what it felt like, after. When Brian was gone.
He can’t help but call Brian and tell him all about it, though.
“I’m never going on a date again,” he says flatly. “That was the most tedious experience of my life.”
“I got blown by blond twins from Texas,” Brian says smugly. “Cowboys.”
“I didn’t get blown at all,” Justin says. “I came home without getting laid.”
“No wonder you’re so cranky.”
That isn’t why. Justin sighs and strips off his shirt. “I don’t even know why I went.”
“Either do I.” Justin wonders what Brian is doing on the other end. He imagines Brian naked in bed. Touching himself, maybe. He imagines the dirty things Brian could do to him.
“I have to go,” Justin says abruptly. “Good night.”
--
Things are tense between them, probably as a result of Justin’s date. He doesn’t expect that to change soon, almost nurtures it. If things are bad enough between them, then maybe these feelings they have will go away, and Justin won’t ever have to deal with them. It’s the only plan he has.
Brian, as usual, refuses to cooperate. After a few days of tension between them, he seems to let it go completely, and he’s back to hugging and nuzzling and groping at Justin every chance he gets. He’s laughing at Justin’s jokes and stopping by with coffee in the morning. Justin wonders why Brian Kinney insists on acting like the perfect fucking boyfriend. He wonders if that is what Brian wants now, impossible as it seems.
Justin is offered a permanent job in Berlin. He turns it down quietly, and never tells Brian.
--
The first time they have sex after nearly seven years, there is another man in bed with them. It’s his house. His sheets. He probably expected a little more attention than he ends up getting.
His name is Robert and he approached them on the dancefloor. Wound his way around their bodies, pressed them together so tightly. Justin isn’t sure how it happened, but somehow they stumbled through his door at one am, and right up into his bed.
“Why not?” Brian had said on the dancefloor, pressed up close to Justin’s ear.
It starts out evenly. Robert kissing Brian. Justin kissing Robert. The minute Brian kisses Justin, though, Robert may as well not be in the room. Later, Justin won’t remember a single thing about the guy. All he’ll remember is Brian.
He groans the first time Brian slips inside him again. They’re not being gentle, but it feels tender, feels sweet even as Brian is tearing him open. Robert sucks Justin off while Brian fucks him, but Justin wishes he’d stop so he and Brian could be face to face, like the first time.
Poor Robert. He probably could have picked a better couple to fuck.
Justin goes home in the early morning with teeth marks on his chest and no fucking clue what he’s doing.
--
That fucking woman that won’t shut up in the next apartment over moves out, and suddenly everything is very quiet. Justin almost misses her. He’s lonely, and too afraid to call Brian.
It’s been two days, and they haven’t spoken directly since it happened. Voicemail back and forth. Text messages. Emails. They’re both pretending not to pretend it didn’t happen. Justin goes through each day as usual; he draws, he paints. He watches tv.
Brian shows up in his bed at three am. They fuck until dawn, and things between them shift.
Just what they’ve shifted into, Justin doesn’t examine too closely. There is an implicit agreement between them not to label what they mean to one another. Brian fucks him every night, and Justin just knows it’s different to how it used to be. Way back when.
--
Justin has the sense that time is passing too quickly, as if the world might rotate beyond him. He has the sense that they’re both waiting for something that will come too fast.
And then it does.
“I love you, you know,” Brian says one day, when they’re lying together smoking a joint on Justin’s kitchen floor. It’s hot out. The tile is the only place where it’s cool.
It surprises them both that Brian is the first one to say it in this new context, Justin thinks. It really should have been Justin or never at all.
Justin feels it, he really does, but for some reason he can’t say so. This must be what it’s like for Brian, when he’s not stoned and pliant on Justin’s floor. This paralysis.
He opens his mouth, and he means to say something sweet, something comforting and kind.
Instead, he says, “Brian, quit hogging the fucking weed.”
Brian probably won’t say it again for a long time.
--
They spend hours making out on Brian’s sofa, on Justin’s floor. Hours and hours of swollen lips and tongues, of Brian’s hands twisting in his clothes.
Justin waits impatiently for everything to make sense.
--
The major gallery that had been set to host Justin’s first fateful show decides it is time to give it another shot. Justin has had time to create and compile some new material, and he’s had almost more inspiration than he can handle. It’ll be his first major show, and hopefully a truck won’t drive through this one.
Brian has been itching to consult with the gallery’s publicity company, Justin knows, but seems to have instead settled for personally alerting everyone he has ever met to “the most important show of the year”. If Justin’s career were a movie, the poster would be covered in little quotes from Brian, promoting the shit out of him. For a week, Justin imagines everything Brian says in quotation marks.
When they arrive at nine pm, Justin counts at least fifteen people he knows to be business associates of Brian’s, and about forty that Brian has fucked in the last six months.
The gallery owner, Amy, welcomes Justin with a beaming smile. They’d been marketing the shit out of the event, Justin knows, pushing the accident with the last show for the human interest angle. They’d set up interviews with nearly every art and design publication in the city. Justin doesn’t think he’s ever talked about himself so much in his life.
His work looks fucking amazing.
Brian slings an arm around his shoulder as they gaze around the room at all the people and Justin’s pieces on every surface. They grin at one another.
“Not bad,” Brian says, but even he can’t keep up the façade for long, and he cracks into, “You’re fucking brilliant, Justin.”
Of all the people in the world, there is no-one that Justin would prefer to make proud. Not his mother, not his father. Not Debbie or Daphne, his grandmother, Molly, Mrs. Steinbeck his first grade art teacher, Michael, Emmett, Ethan… nobody.
He thinks that making Brian proud is maybe the most rewarding experience of his life.
--
Brian has flown Debbie out for the opening, and she arrives at ten in a beautiful burgundy dress and a face full of tears.
“Sunshine!” she says, as she gazes openmouthed at a large painting of Brian, laughing with thick rough lines and vivid colors. It’s a crazy piece that Justin painted just days after they started fucking again, and it makes his heart throb every time.
There’s a little red sticker on the tag. Justin knows that Brian bought this painting as surely as he knows that Brian bought Debbie’s beautiful dress.
When Debbie walked in, she hugged Justin so hard he could feel the indentation of her necklace through his shirt.
His mother came in twenty minutes later, and she hugged him harder.
--
They go out clubbing afterward, and both forget that Debbie is staying in Brian’s guest room. Justin doesn’t remember until he gets up the next morning to make a cup of coffee, and Debbie is sitting at the kitchen bench. Justin has never felt so thoroughly busted in his life. He has the absurd impulse to creep back into Brian’s room and climb down the fire escape.
Debbie has seen him already. “Morning, Sunshine,” she says with a snap of her gum. She looks amused. Again, Justin wants to run away. “So how long has this been going on, then?”
Justin shrugs and pours two cups of coffee. “Two and a half months.”
“And what exactly is it?”
Justin shrugs again. He adds three spoons of sugar to one of the cups and sets it aside for Brian.
“Well, shit,” she says.
“Please don’t say anything to the others,” Justin says. “We don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”
Debbie stares at him for a long time, with a familiar look on her face.
“Okay,” Justin says. “It’s me. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“He’s very proud of you, you know.” Debbie looks out of place drinking from Brian’s sleek stainless steel coffee cups. Justin wishes they were back in her awful, fantastic kitchen in Pittsburgh, drinking from mugs that have pictures of clowns and elephants on them.
“I know,” Justin says.
“Michael says it’s always Justin, Justin, Justin. In that fucking Brian Kinney bullshit way. He didn’t mention this, though.”
“It’s our business,” Justin says. He would have said the same thing when he was seventeen, but she wouldn’t have listened then. He doesn’t know if she will now.
Brian gets out of bed then, and stumbles into the kitchen in a pair of sweatpants. He scratches at his chest and grabs the cup Justin left for him. He stares at them both, and Justin knows he sees the tension in his posture.
“Leave him alone, Deb,” Brian says, all sighs and longsuffering affection. He’s serious, though, and he sits down next to Justin. A united front.
“But you boys-”
“It’s our business, Deb.” Brian smiles pleasantly, but there’s a deadliness in his eyes. “And that means it’s not yours.”
--
The threat of everybody finding out makes getting their shit together seem more urgent, somehow. The threat of them shitting all over his business gives Justin some resolve.
They’re together constantly. It’s not hard to find the time to talk it out.
When Justin was eighteen, his first love left him without looking back. He’d thought he’d never love again.
He almost wishes he’d been right.
--
When he brings it up, Brian says, “I told you how I feel.”
Justin crunches his thumbnail between his teeth. They’re lying in bed, and Justin feels warm with his head tucked tight against Brian’s chest.
“I don’t know what you want,” Justin replies. “It killed me when you left last time.”
“Is that why you’ve been-” Brian cuts himself off, closes his mouth and stares up at the ceiling. Justin can feel Brian’s heart booming in his chest.
“What?” Justin prompts.
“Making me wait,” Brian says finally.
Justin sits up, facing away. He stares at the big painting on the wall, Brian’s laughing face hunched over in vivid colors and rough lines. “I guess,” he agrees. “I think I just needed to know that you could stay in the one place for more than twenty fucking seconds.”
He turns and straddles Brian’s body. He pins Brian’s wrists to the bed. “Brian,” he says. “If we do this and you leave me, I swear to motherfucking god I’m coming after you.”
“I think I’d want you to,” Brian says. He’s not fighting the bruises Justin is leaving on his wrists. “We’re not who we used to be.”
Justin thinks of the Brian that left him alone in Pittsburgh. Brian had better be fucking right.
--
It’s not like much changes. They’re not monogamous and Justin has another four months on his lease, so they’re not living together. They’re not married and Justin will never do Brian’s fucking laundry. They’re just the same as always, but now there’s a sense that they’re doing something, that they’ve got their shit sorted, and that’s enough of a change for now.
end.