Want Your Design
Title: Want Your Design
Author: Ninalyn/technicolornina
Fandom: Adam Lambert
Pairing/Characters: Adam/Brad (past), Adam/Sauli (present), Adam, Brad
Word Count: 2740
Spoilers: I don't think this really counts unless they're on tour, does it?
Story Rating: PG-13 for Brad's mouth.
Story Summary: He was just a little too late to change his mind. Now all he can do is be there when Adam needs him.
Disclaimer: Tweet this to the people whose fictitious avatars are involved and I will so disown/cut/block you so damned fast. If you are one of the people whose fictitious avatars are involved, it's all in fun and I don't think anybody believes a word of it (including me), so don't hate me, please?
Notes: Here there be angst. Also, even though Sauli is a huge presence in this fic, he never actually appears as a physical character. Take that as you will.
Feedback: I really do appreciate it when I get it, so if you care to make an author happy, please do.
Special Thanks/Dedications: For glamneko. ♥
I want your drama, the touch of your hand
I want your leather-studded kiss in the sand
I want your love, love, love, love
I want your love
--"Bad Romance," Lady Gaga
Adam is staring up at a jet contrail when Brad sets foot on his new back porch for the first time.
"See something interesting?"
Adam points to the knife-straight white line across the sky with the hand not holding his beer. "International flights have a three-hour waiting time," he says. "It's forty minutes between here and the airport once you get out of that fucking labyrinth they call short-term parking and I stopped for coffee on the way. I waited half an hour there in case they gave him shit about changing his ticket and I got home about an hour ago." He turns his face to watch the jet's progress. "So if I did my math right, he's flying over us right now." And suddenly, like a little kid, Adam raises a hand and waves at the plane, like the people on it will be able to see them from two miles up. There's a something that's not quite a nothing in the way he lowers it again, and Brad sits down on the porch swing.
"You miss him already, don't you?"
Brad knows the choked sound that's coming. He's heard it before, although then he was on the other end of a phone line and it was followed by Jesus, Brad, what if they kick me off for this?, and Brad was trying to deal with the guilt of knowing Adam still had those pictures and having not thought to call him and ask him if they were offline.
This time it's followed by an armful of Adam, who buries his damp face against Brad's neck and stays there, arms around Brad's waist while Brad raises his arms to stroke Adam's hair and rock with him like he's holding a small child. He doesn't say anything. The only commiseration he can offer will take them back to another painful time Adam doesn't need to think about right now, and so Brad stays silent.
Finally Adam's crying slows, and it might even stop, but Brad's neck is dewy-wet with Adam's breath and the tears he's already cried, and Brad can't really tell.
"Better?"
Adam nods and sniffles and swipes his shirtsleeve across his eyes. "No. Yeah. Kind of. I'm sorry, it's stupid-"
"It's not stupid," Brad contradicts. "You love him and he had to leave. That's not stupid, sweetheart." I know what it's like, he thinks to say, and doesn't. Much of Brad's past is a run-down road blocked by a sawhorse reading DANGER DO NOT ENTER in bright red letters, and while he could push aside the blockade and go back, if he really wanted to, he has no intention of doing so right now. Not today.
"I've only known him for a month," Adam points out. "You know, face to face."
"And that makes your feelings less valid how?"
Adam stays silent. Then he lets out another huge sniffle. Brad finds a Kleenex in his pocket and hands it over. Adam gives him a watery smile.
"Thanks."
Brad wants to say anytime, or maybe everytime. Instead he says, "I'm sorry I couldn't make it to your party. I wanted to meet him."
Adam shakes his head. "I know you were busy."
"I should have made the time." And then, trying to be light, "It's not every week you drag home some Swedish boy. Just every other."
"Finnish," Adam corrects absently. "Don't call him Swedish to his face, he'll throw a fit."
"Finnish, Swedish, same thing," Brad dismisses him. "It's not every week you drag home some European boy, better?"
Adam's smile this time is less teary and more sheepish. As far as Brad's concerned, it's an improvement. "Better."
"I looked him up on YouTube," Brad says at last. "It's pretty bad when he speaks better English than you do, sugarboy." And he didn't mean to say that, didn't plan to let it slip that way, but it's out, and if Adam calls him on it all he can do is fess up or try to lie. But Adam doesn't-just chuckles in a way that's not quite a snicker and shakes his head.
"You've never heard him-"And he breaks off, but Brad sees the faint pink flush where Adam's ears meet his face and it doesn't take a rocket scientist, as the saying goes, to figure out what the rest of that sentence was.
"Let me guess, in bed?"
The pink turns red, and Brad giggles. "Oh god. Details."
Adam shakes his head, but he's really grinning now, really grinning, and even though Brad can see traces of homesickness for his new boy in it it's mostly a silly grin. "It's not a big deal, I just can't pronounce anything dirty in Finnish-"
"That's because Finnish people are all born with double-jointed tongues they mutilate with little bits of metal in the hopes of improving their blowjob technique," Brad interrupts, as Adam reaches for his beer. "I'm sorry, keep going."
The red creeps down Adam's cheeks. "He's pretty good at English but he was kind of distracted-"
"Funny, I wonder why."
"-and by the time I figured out what 'I'm going' was-"
"He'd already come and gone?" Brad asks brightly. Adam chokes on his sip of beer. Brad thumps him on the back.
"Already-fuck you, Brad," Adam manages to wheeze between coughing fits. He's trying to laugh and swallow what little of his beer didn't try to get into his lungs at the same time, and it's not working so well.
Have to bend me over first, he thinks of answering, and doesn't. Instead he thinks, almost wonderingly, We used to joke like that about each other. And usually ended up in bed again. What happened? The answer, of course, is that life happened, life and human imperfections, and by the time Brad came to realise even the best man has his faults there were those roadblocks between then and now. The heavy kind with concrete-filled feet that can't be moved fast or easily, he thinks. And sometimes by the time you've moved them, it's too late.
Adam finally manages to get his beer where it belongs and takes a deep breath. "I needed that." He pauses. "Maybe without the trying to kill me on my own beer part."
"It's what I do best," Brad answers, and looks out over the backyard. "It's nice back here."
"Yeah," Adam agrees. He points at one of the trees, and the fading blush reappears on his face. "I was thinking I could hang a baby swing there . . . you know, those little plastic things with the buckle . . . ?"
Brad giggles at him. "Listen to you, getting all domestic with your boyfriend and your baby swing. I would've never called that one in a million years." And that's half the problem. "I hope he knows he's got serious competition for most important boy in your life."
"He lost that competition in the hospital," Adam says. Then he smiles, and this time there's more of that homesickness in it. "I think he's cool with it." The smile fades. "Does it always keep hurting this much?"
And there-it's out, and all Brad can do is watch his step to make sure he's not tripping over loose blacktop on his forced stroll down the part of Memory Lane he tries never to touch.
"Not exactly," he answers, and thinks back to a staticky radio in a one-room apartment where the smell of incense competed constantly with the Mexican food from the people who lived across the hall, doing his breakfast dishes because there was no room in the sink to do the dishes once a day, and Adam coming in smelling of exhaustion and the dust of that shitty little found-space theatre he couldn't drive fast enough to get away from. He remembers handing Adam a glass of water to wash away the taste of Debbie Does Dallas and thinking I could do this forever as Adam hid his tired face against Brad's neck, and it's all he can do not to scream why couldn't you wait for me for just six more weeks? Instead he says "It gets easier. After awhile. It never really goes away. But you learn to live with it."
"And other people help," Adam says, looking down at his beer. Brad finds himself wishing he'd grabbed one out of the fridge on his way through, because Adam isn't really sure. He's trying to reassure himself without actually saying he needs to know he won't always feel like some important part of him is on a Boeing bound for New York and London. He's being the Adam who'd rather drive around half of Los Angeles than stop and ask for directions, and Brad could shake him where he sits right now, he really could, and ask him why he puts himself through this kind of hell, what ever possessed him to make some kind of commitment to a boy-a very nice boy, Brad is sure, Adam's a fantastic judge of character, but that's beside the point, really-from halfway around the world, a boy Adam will never move to because his family is here and who can never move to Adam because of the fucked-up ideas of this ass-backward country and its green card system. Instead he just tells Adam what he wants to hear.
"Other people help," he agrees. "Sometimes if it's been awhile you get so busy between the people around you and the things you've got to do you go to bed and realise you haven't thought about each other for most of the day. It's not like your life turns into some kind of gaping black hole."
"I'm supposed to go to Sweden in May to do some writing," Adam spits out, and Brad feels a pang. Once upon a time, in another life, the other half of that statement would have been do you want to go with me? Without it, the sentence feels painfully incomplete, and Brad has to scramble to find something appropriate he can fill the space with.
"You're going to see him then?"
"He's coming here again before that," Adam says, and Brad remembers wondering how dangerous it would be to hitchhike to Lake Tahoe and bites the inside of his lip. "But probably."
Brad finally reaches for Adam's bottle and takes a drink that stops just short of a gulp. "Don't get so wrapped up with loverboy that you forget you've got to get some work done before you come home," he suggests, and Adam shakes his head.
"I've got too much here to forget about," he points out. "Mom, Riff, my friends, I finally got settled into a house. You."
Brad tries not to think too hard about what it might mean that Adam deliberately separated him from the phrase "my friends." Part of him wants to believe Adam's mantra about it not being that deep, but another part isn't so convinced, and he tries to cover that insecurity.
"Sugar, you'll get two days into Sweden and forget all about me," he says, and he means it to come out teasing, but there's an edge on it that shouldn't be there. "It's the rest-"
It's the rest you should keep your eye on is how he means to finish, but then Adam has him in one of those nearly bone-crushing Adam bear hugs, lips pressed to Brad's forehead. Brad lets him cling and wonders if his new boy knows this about Adam too, knows that sometimes for every reason in the world or possibly none at all Adam feels the need to reach for the nearest person and not let go.
"I'd never forget about you," Adam whispers into his hair, and just when Brad thinks he's going to have to push away for air or pass out from lack of it Adam lets go. "You're too important to forget about." He reaches for Brad's hands, pauses, takes the beer and puts what remains of the bottle on the wood planks under their feet before reaching for that hand again. The left hand, Brad can't help noticing. The one that used to wear a blue and silver ring he still has tucked away somewhere.
"He's coming back in April," Adam says, and when he smiles this time it's the warm, open grin Brad fell in love with the first time. "You can scrape out a couple of hours by then, right?"
If he's still coming, sure, Brad thinks, but it's mean and small-minded and he hates the thought as soon as it forms. Instead he hears himself say "wouldn't miss it for the world" while he thinks of a truth Adam never sang: wishing only wounds the heart. If it shows in his eyes, Adam misses it-he just smiles.
"You'll love him," he promises. Then he glances up at the sun. Adam's a California city boy through and through and couldn't tell time by the sun if his life depended on it, but even he can tell the difference between early and late afternoon. "I'm supposed to go over to Mom's for dinner, she's still all worried because I dropped three sizes on tour. Wanna come?"
For a minute Brad is overcome by complete and total recall of a time when "dinner at Mom's" was an all-day drive they never actually completed on time because of this one little "observation point" mostly hidden by bushes that nobody else ever visited, and he can't answer. Then reality sets back in: it's three years later and they're sitting not in a crappy little WeHo apartment but outside Adam's home in a quiet part of town where most of the neighbours would probably be shocked to discover that amenable young man in the middle of the street with the wind chimes on his front porch-the one said neighbours, most of whom look like they've been here since 1960 or so, probably actually call "queer, but nice enough"-is actually a world-famous rockstar. Brad shakes his head.
"If you're heading out I should get back," he says, and hopes his smile looks at least mostly real. "I'm supposed to have a webcam conference with Liz at seven."
"Damn," Adam murmurs without any kind of real force, and Brad wants him to follow it with can't Liz wait?, but of course he doesn't. "Next time, yeah?"
"If I'm not in the middle of filming something, definitely," Brad agrees. He stands up and looks out over the yard, eyes drawn to the place where Adam, the boy he was almost ready to give up his dreams of half a dozen kids for, wants to hang a baby swing for a little boy Brad will probably never sing to sleep. "I'm sorry I couldn't stay."
Adam stands up and hugs him. This time it's not desperate or homesick and it's completely as though between friends, and Brad has to dig his fingernails deep into his own palm when he hugs back to keep from trying to make it more before there can be any merit to the suggestions that he's trying to be Adam's other man. An indecisive idiot he might be, but without self-respect he is not. "I'm glad you came anyway," Adam tells him. "I've missed you." He pulls back, and when he does he looks sheepish. "I wanted to show you the place, not bawl on you."
"Another time," Brad says. "You know I'm around if you need me." Not when you need me anymore, and possibly never again.
"Another time," Adam agrees. "Let me know if you need anything. I know I'm not gonna be around a whole lot, but I've always got my phone."
"I won't have to call you, I can just ask your fans where you are," Brad teases. The sane ones, anyway. Some of them are outright brutal, and Brad has to wonder why they're beating the shit out of their own karma to throw accusations and insults at someone they've never met and don't know a thing about. Adam groans.
"You can probably track my breathing patterns by the fans," he says, and this time they both laugh. Adam slides open the screen. "After you."
Brad glances back once at the backyard, at the place where the late-afternoon sun is casting Adam's choice of swing spot into a gorgeous spring-golden light. Above the house the jet contrail is almost gone.
Brad steps into the house.
Author: Ninalyn/technicolornina
Fandom: Adam Lambert
Pairing/Characters: Adam/Brad (past), Adam/Sauli (present), Adam, Brad
Word Count: 2740
Spoilers: I don't think this really counts unless they're on tour, does it?
Story Rating: PG-13 for Brad's mouth.
Story Summary: He was just a little too late to change his mind. Now all he can do is be there when Adam needs him.
Disclaimer: Tweet this to the people whose fictitious avatars are involved and I will so disown/cut/block you so damned fast. If you are one of the people whose fictitious avatars are involved, it's all in fun and I don't think anybody believes a word of it (including me), so don't hate me, please?
Notes: Here there be angst. Also, even though Sauli is a huge presence in this fic, he never actually appears as a physical character. Take that as you will.
Feedback: I really do appreciate it when I get it, so if you care to make an author happy, please do.
Special Thanks/Dedications: For glamneko. ♥
I want your drama, the touch of your hand
I want your leather-studded kiss in the sand
I want your love, love, love, love
I want your love
--"Bad Romance," Lady Gaga
Adam is staring up at a jet contrail when Brad sets foot on his new back porch for the first time.
"See something interesting?"
Adam points to the knife-straight white line across the sky with the hand not holding his beer. "International flights have a three-hour waiting time," he says. "It's forty minutes between here and the airport once you get out of that fucking labyrinth they call short-term parking and I stopped for coffee on the way. I waited half an hour there in case they gave him shit about changing his ticket and I got home about an hour ago." He turns his face to watch the jet's progress. "So if I did my math right, he's flying over us right now." And suddenly, like a little kid, Adam raises a hand and waves at the plane, like the people on it will be able to see them from two miles up. There's a something that's not quite a nothing in the way he lowers it again, and Brad sits down on the porch swing.
"You miss him already, don't you?"
Brad knows the choked sound that's coming. He's heard it before, although then he was on the other end of a phone line and it was followed by Jesus, Brad, what if they kick me off for this?, and Brad was trying to deal with the guilt of knowing Adam still had those pictures and having not thought to call him and ask him if they were offline.
This time it's followed by an armful of Adam, who buries his damp face against Brad's neck and stays there, arms around Brad's waist while Brad raises his arms to stroke Adam's hair and rock with him like he's holding a small child. He doesn't say anything. The only commiseration he can offer will take them back to another painful time Adam doesn't need to think about right now, and so Brad stays silent.
Finally Adam's crying slows, and it might even stop, but Brad's neck is dewy-wet with Adam's breath and the tears he's already cried, and Brad can't really tell.
"Better?"
Adam nods and sniffles and swipes his shirtsleeve across his eyes. "No. Yeah. Kind of. I'm sorry, it's stupid-"
"It's not stupid," Brad contradicts. "You love him and he had to leave. That's not stupid, sweetheart." I know what it's like, he thinks to say, and doesn't. Much of Brad's past is a run-down road blocked by a sawhorse reading DANGER DO NOT ENTER in bright red letters, and while he could push aside the blockade and go back, if he really wanted to, he has no intention of doing so right now. Not today.
"I've only known him for a month," Adam points out. "You know, face to face."
"And that makes your feelings less valid how?"
Adam stays silent. Then he lets out another huge sniffle. Brad finds a Kleenex in his pocket and hands it over. Adam gives him a watery smile.
"Thanks."
Brad wants to say anytime, or maybe everytime. Instead he says, "I'm sorry I couldn't make it to your party. I wanted to meet him."
Adam shakes his head. "I know you were busy."
"I should have made the time." And then, trying to be light, "It's not every week you drag home some Swedish boy. Just every other."
"Finnish," Adam corrects absently. "Don't call him Swedish to his face, he'll throw a fit."
"Finnish, Swedish, same thing," Brad dismisses him. "It's not every week you drag home some European boy, better?"
Adam's smile this time is less teary and more sheepish. As far as Brad's concerned, it's an improvement. "Better."
"I looked him up on YouTube," Brad says at last. "It's pretty bad when he speaks better English than you do, sugarboy." And he didn't mean to say that, didn't plan to let it slip that way, but it's out, and if Adam calls him on it all he can do is fess up or try to lie. But Adam doesn't-just chuckles in a way that's not quite a snicker and shakes his head.
"You've never heard him-"And he breaks off, but Brad sees the faint pink flush where Adam's ears meet his face and it doesn't take a rocket scientist, as the saying goes, to figure out what the rest of that sentence was.
"Let me guess, in bed?"
The pink turns red, and Brad giggles. "Oh god. Details."
Adam shakes his head, but he's really grinning now, really grinning, and even though Brad can see traces of homesickness for his new boy in it it's mostly a silly grin. "It's not a big deal, I just can't pronounce anything dirty in Finnish-"
"That's because Finnish people are all born with double-jointed tongues they mutilate with little bits of metal in the hopes of improving their blowjob technique," Brad interrupts, as Adam reaches for his beer. "I'm sorry, keep going."
The red creeps down Adam's cheeks. "He's pretty good at English but he was kind of distracted-"
"Funny, I wonder why."
"-and by the time I figured out what 'I'm going' was-"
"He'd already come and gone?" Brad asks brightly. Adam chokes on his sip of beer. Brad thumps him on the back.
"Already-fuck you, Brad," Adam manages to wheeze between coughing fits. He's trying to laugh and swallow what little of his beer didn't try to get into his lungs at the same time, and it's not working so well.
Have to bend me over first, he thinks of answering, and doesn't. Instead he thinks, almost wonderingly, We used to joke like that about each other. And usually ended up in bed again. What happened? The answer, of course, is that life happened, life and human imperfections, and by the time Brad came to realise even the best man has his faults there were those roadblocks between then and now. The heavy kind with concrete-filled feet that can't be moved fast or easily, he thinks. And sometimes by the time you've moved them, it's too late.
Adam finally manages to get his beer where it belongs and takes a deep breath. "I needed that." He pauses. "Maybe without the trying to kill me on my own beer part."
"It's what I do best," Brad answers, and looks out over the backyard. "It's nice back here."
"Yeah," Adam agrees. He points at one of the trees, and the fading blush reappears on his face. "I was thinking I could hang a baby swing there . . . you know, those little plastic things with the buckle . . . ?"
Brad giggles at him. "Listen to you, getting all domestic with your boyfriend and your baby swing. I would've never called that one in a million years." And that's half the problem. "I hope he knows he's got serious competition for most important boy in your life."
"He lost that competition in the hospital," Adam says. Then he smiles, and this time there's more of that homesickness in it. "I think he's cool with it." The smile fades. "Does it always keep hurting this much?"
And there-it's out, and all Brad can do is watch his step to make sure he's not tripping over loose blacktop on his forced stroll down the part of Memory Lane he tries never to touch.
"Not exactly," he answers, and thinks back to a staticky radio in a one-room apartment where the smell of incense competed constantly with the Mexican food from the people who lived across the hall, doing his breakfast dishes because there was no room in the sink to do the dishes once a day, and Adam coming in smelling of exhaustion and the dust of that shitty little found-space theatre he couldn't drive fast enough to get away from. He remembers handing Adam a glass of water to wash away the taste of Debbie Does Dallas and thinking I could do this forever as Adam hid his tired face against Brad's neck, and it's all he can do not to scream why couldn't you wait for me for just six more weeks? Instead he says "It gets easier. After awhile. It never really goes away. But you learn to live with it."
"And other people help," Adam says, looking down at his beer. Brad finds himself wishing he'd grabbed one out of the fridge on his way through, because Adam isn't really sure. He's trying to reassure himself without actually saying he needs to know he won't always feel like some important part of him is on a Boeing bound for New York and London. He's being the Adam who'd rather drive around half of Los Angeles than stop and ask for directions, and Brad could shake him where he sits right now, he really could, and ask him why he puts himself through this kind of hell, what ever possessed him to make some kind of commitment to a boy-a very nice boy, Brad is sure, Adam's a fantastic judge of character, but that's beside the point, really-from halfway around the world, a boy Adam will never move to because his family is here and who can never move to Adam because of the fucked-up ideas of this ass-backward country and its green card system. Instead he just tells Adam what he wants to hear.
"Other people help," he agrees. "Sometimes if it's been awhile you get so busy between the people around you and the things you've got to do you go to bed and realise you haven't thought about each other for most of the day. It's not like your life turns into some kind of gaping black hole."
"I'm supposed to go to Sweden in May to do some writing," Adam spits out, and Brad feels a pang. Once upon a time, in another life, the other half of that statement would have been do you want to go with me? Without it, the sentence feels painfully incomplete, and Brad has to scramble to find something appropriate he can fill the space with.
"You're going to see him then?"
"He's coming here again before that," Adam says, and Brad remembers wondering how dangerous it would be to hitchhike to Lake Tahoe and bites the inside of his lip. "But probably."
Brad finally reaches for Adam's bottle and takes a drink that stops just short of a gulp. "Don't get so wrapped up with loverboy that you forget you've got to get some work done before you come home," he suggests, and Adam shakes his head.
"I've got too much here to forget about," he points out. "Mom, Riff, my friends, I finally got settled into a house. You."
Brad tries not to think too hard about what it might mean that Adam deliberately separated him from the phrase "my friends." Part of him wants to believe Adam's mantra about it not being that deep, but another part isn't so convinced, and he tries to cover that insecurity.
"Sugar, you'll get two days into Sweden and forget all about me," he says, and he means it to come out teasing, but there's an edge on it that shouldn't be there. "It's the rest-"
It's the rest you should keep your eye on is how he means to finish, but then Adam has him in one of those nearly bone-crushing Adam bear hugs, lips pressed to Brad's forehead. Brad lets him cling and wonders if his new boy knows this about Adam too, knows that sometimes for every reason in the world or possibly none at all Adam feels the need to reach for the nearest person and not let go.
"I'd never forget about you," Adam whispers into his hair, and just when Brad thinks he's going to have to push away for air or pass out from lack of it Adam lets go. "You're too important to forget about." He reaches for Brad's hands, pauses, takes the beer and puts what remains of the bottle on the wood planks under their feet before reaching for that hand again. The left hand, Brad can't help noticing. The one that used to wear a blue and silver ring he still has tucked away somewhere.
"He's coming back in April," Adam says, and when he smiles this time it's the warm, open grin Brad fell in love with the first time. "You can scrape out a couple of hours by then, right?"
If he's still coming, sure, Brad thinks, but it's mean and small-minded and he hates the thought as soon as it forms. Instead he hears himself say "wouldn't miss it for the world" while he thinks of a truth Adam never sang: wishing only wounds the heart. If it shows in his eyes, Adam misses it-he just smiles.
"You'll love him," he promises. Then he glances up at the sun. Adam's a California city boy through and through and couldn't tell time by the sun if his life depended on it, but even he can tell the difference between early and late afternoon. "I'm supposed to go over to Mom's for dinner, she's still all worried because I dropped three sizes on tour. Wanna come?"
For a minute Brad is overcome by complete and total recall of a time when "dinner at Mom's" was an all-day drive they never actually completed on time because of this one little "observation point" mostly hidden by bushes that nobody else ever visited, and he can't answer. Then reality sets back in: it's three years later and they're sitting not in a crappy little WeHo apartment but outside Adam's home in a quiet part of town where most of the neighbours would probably be shocked to discover that amenable young man in the middle of the street with the wind chimes on his front porch-the one said neighbours, most of whom look like they've been here since 1960 or so, probably actually call "queer, but nice enough"-is actually a world-famous rockstar. Brad shakes his head.
"If you're heading out I should get back," he says, and hopes his smile looks at least mostly real. "I'm supposed to have a webcam conference with Liz at seven."
"Damn," Adam murmurs without any kind of real force, and Brad wants him to follow it with can't Liz wait?, but of course he doesn't. "Next time, yeah?"
"If I'm not in the middle of filming something, definitely," Brad agrees. He stands up and looks out over the yard, eyes drawn to the place where Adam, the boy he was almost ready to give up his dreams of half a dozen kids for, wants to hang a baby swing for a little boy Brad will probably never sing to sleep. "I'm sorry I couldn't stay."
Adam stands up and hugs him. This time it's not desperate or homesick and it's completely as though between friends, and Brad has to dig his fingernails deep into his own palm when he hugs back to keep from trying to make it more before there can be any merit to the suggestions that he's trying to be Adam's other man. An indecisive idiot he might be, but without self-respect he is not. "I'm glad you came anyway," Adam tells him. "I've missed you." He pulls back, and when he does he looks sheepish. "I wanted to show you the place, not bawl on you."
"Another time," Brad says. "You know I'm around if you need me." Not when you need me anymore, and possibly never again.
"Another time," Adam agrees. "Let me know if you need anything. I know I'm not gonna be around a whole lot, but I've always got my phone."
"I won't have to call you, I can just ask your fans where you are," Brad teases. The sane ones, anyway. Some of them are outright brutal, and Brad has to wonder why they're beating the shit out of their own karma to throw accusations and insults at someone they've never met and don't know a thing about. Adam groans.
"You can probably track my breathing patterns by the fans," he says, and this time they both laugh. Adam slides open the screen. "After you."
Brad glances back once at the backyard, at the place where the late-afternoon sun is casting Adam's choice of swing spot into a gorgeous spring-golden light. Above the house the jet contrail is almost gone.
Brad steps into the house.