Cockbert Big Bang - Displace
Title: Displace
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Adam/Neil (with mention of every other ship involving them ever)
Warnings: incest
Summary: Neil hates how Adam is always better than him, and he hates how Adam always dates such losers, and he especially hates realizing that it isn't about what he hates at all.
Disclaimer: Distinctly upsetting stalkerish libel again. I'm on a roll!
Beta'd by vlredreign, thank you so much bb!
Art by glambini, main art post here. Go leave her effusive comments for her amazing art!
One of Neil’s earliest memories was of crawling into his mother’s lap, crying because Adam could do something he could not. He’d long forgotten what it was he couldn’t do, but the memory of the scene remained vivid, holding on tight to his mother’s shirt and covering it with snot and tears, saying that it wasn’t fair.
“It’s just because he’s older, sweetie,” their mother had said. “When you’re his age you’ll be able to do it too.”
“But then he’ll be older too, and he’ll do other things!” Neil cried even harder.
“Well, eventually you’ll both be grown all the way up and it’ll be even.” Their mother petted his head, smoothing out his hair. “Adults don’t change as fast as kids. Once you’re all grown up it’ll be even.”
That was encouraging. He looked up at her, sniffling. “You promise?”
“I promise.” She ruffled his hair back up, then hugged him and sent him to play with Adam some more.
When Neil was twenty, her promise seemed to have come true. As with many promises, it wasn’t as fun now that it had come true as it had seemed when he was looking forward to it. Adam seemed to be having a lot more fun failing in LA than he was having succeeding in college, and Thanksgiving seemed to be a lot more fighting about how Adam was screwing up than it was congratulating Neil.
Also, Adam had brought this Brad guy along. Neil had probably hated someone more than Brad, but he couldn’t recall it at the moment. Who moved to LA after high school instead of going to college? Adam, obviously, but Adam was different. Adam was different from everyone. This Brad guy wasn’t anyone special, just some kid, just like Neil, except with an obnoxious phony smirk and an obnoxious phony voice and an obnoxious habit of hanging on Adam’s arm all the time like he’d die if they didn’t touch.
Neil jabbed at his turkey and focused on pretending it was Brad’s flesh, in an attempt to distract himself from what was no longer a sniping match between Dad and Adam, but a real fight. It didn’t work. “I am advancing my career! This is my career, and this is me doing everything I can do for it.”
“You and everyone else in that city. How many ‘famous singer’ jobs do you think are out there, Ad? “ Their dad flung his fork down, not even pretending to be eating dinner anymore. “What exactly do you think the odds are that you’ll ever be able to so much as pay your own rent doing this?”
“So I’m not good enough, is that what you’re saying?” There was no denying that Adam was really good at this acting stuff. He wasn’t yelling, no one could accuse him of yelling, but some special actor trick still allowed him to be loud enough that Neil could have sworn his ears hurt.
“It’s not about being good enough!” Dad didn’t add ‘you idiot’, but everyone could hear it anyway. Neil stabbed at his green beans and didn’t pretend they were anything at all. “The competition’s too fierce for it to be about being good enough, it’s pure luck. You shouldn’t be basing all your hopes on luck!”
“You just think that because you’re not in the industry. There’s a lot I can do to make it happen, and I’m doing it, it just takes time.” Neil thought Adam was getting a bit close to actually saying ‘you idiot’ there, but it wasn’t like anyone could make things worse here.
“Because you’ve got so much time.” Neil wondered if his dad was rolling his eyes. It wasn’t a very dad thing to do, but he sure sounded like it. The cranberry sauce sort of looked like blood, splashed across the mashed potatoes like that.
“Gosh, look at that, we’re all out of wine!” said Brad in a bright, extra-phony voice. “I think I’ll go get some more. It’s in the kitchen?” He headed out of the room without waiting for confirmation.
“I should show him where it is,” Neil muttered, and raced after him.
The wine was sitting out on the counter, ready for the party, so Brad was already getting a new bottle open by the time Neil shut the door between the kitchen and dining room, muffling the argument. The pop of the cork sounded loud in the quiet kitchen.
Brad eyed the bottle in his hand. “We should have brought our glasses along, shouldn’t we?”
“It’s fine, there’s more.” Neil felt happy to be helpful, and disgusted with himself for getting excited about it, and hated Brad some more for it all. He grabbed two more wine glasses out of the cabinet and set them down a little too hard.
“Excellent.” Brad filled them both up much too high.
Drinking in silence together sounded like a great idea, but when they were just standing there with nothing but their wine glasses to focus on, Neil could make out the words drifting through the door. Adam was saying something about the importance of not giving up on things, but you wouldn’t know anything about that. “So, where are you from? Originally?” Neil asked, too loud.
“Texas.” Brad spat the word out and left it there.
Of course. Of course he was from Texas. No wonder his voice sounded so fake, he was probably covering up a horrible accent. How could Adam date a guy from the south? And now what were they supposed to talk about? Neil was pretty sure he’d just heard one of them say the word ‘divorce’ in the dining room.
Thankfully, Brad came up with something else to add. “Makes me feel better about the whole night, now that you mention it. This is way better than going back down there for the holiday.”
“Very funny,” said Neil, and took a larger sip of his wine. More like a swig.
“It wasn’t meant to be.” Brad, who was apparently a competitive little shit in addition to all his other issues, took an even larger swig.
“I can’t believe this is better than anything,” said Neil, with a punctuating glance towards the door.
“Honey, my family are Baptists.” Brad delivered this with an aloof finality, like it was an ultimate smackdown.
Maybe it was. Neil groped for a comeback, but a mental image of pretty, swishy Brad at a table full of cross-wearing rednecks intruded, and Neil pushed it away before he could imagine the things they’d say. “Don’t call me honey,” he said instead.
“Mm.” Brad could really drink a lot of wine in one go. “So, how’s college?”
“Good,” said Neil, glad to be asked, and wasn’t that fucked up, that fucking Brad was the one to finally ask him. “My grades are awesome, all my professors are impressed with me. I’m thinking about majoring in poli-sci. It’s really interesting, and you can get great jobs with that kind of degree. Important, influential ones.”
“Sounds cool. I always wanted to be influential.” Because of course this was all about Brad. “So what’s poli-sci?”
Neil sighed. He couldn’t believe he was spending his Thanksgiving stuck in the kitchen avoiding his family with his brother’s asshole southern boyfriend who didn’t even know what poli-sci was. Then he poured some more wine in his glass, because it was going to take a while to explain.
Two years later, Neil gave up on ever catching up in the middle of a taping of American Idol, which was not a time when he would ever have expected to have an epiphany. But Adam was sitting in front of thirty million people, drowning in blue light, doing something so beautiful Neil couldn’t even hate him while one of his primary life goals crumbled and died in his chest. He clapped for his brother and smiled for the camera and felt like he was floating. It was probably those weird lights.
But it lingered, even after the lights were gone and he was in the chaos of post-show backstage, hugs and congratulations and bemusedly despairing looks on several of the contestants’ faces that made Neil weirdly compassionate.
Adam had his cell phone to his ear when they found him. “Yeah. Come on, that’s a bit-yeah, he did, but still. Fine, I give up. Can’t wait to see you, baby!”
Ah, there it went, the nice familiar feeling of loathing shooting through his gut. Something to hold on to. The only person Adam called ‘baby’ was that goddamned hopped-up friend-with-benefits who had been suddenly promoted to boyfriend the moment Adam had started in on the 24/7 Idol grind that prevented him from actually having time to have a boyfriend, for reasons that Neil could only guess at.
No, he was pretty sure he knew why. Because Adam knew that tonight was going to happen months ago, and had wanted something to hold on to. He’d gone on a frenzy in the lull between Hollywood Week and the show proper, collecting anchors; boyfriends and tattoos and moments with people he loved.
He’d invited Neil over to hang out for an afternoon and it had been two days, like standing in the eye of a storm, feeling alone together even when they were in rooms crammed with people. It had felt like tonight, floating and strange. Unsettling, no matter how much Neil tried to tell himself it wasn’t.
Adam spotted them, and his face lit up, even though he was already smiling so much it looked like it hurt. “Talk to you later, baby.” He shoved his phone in his pocket, took a handful of huge strides, and wrapped Neil up in a tight hug.
Neil hugged back even harder. “Congratulations, asshole.” It was muffled by the scarf, and a little bit by Adam’s neck, where the corner of his mouth hadn’t landed on the scarf.
“Thank you,” Adam said, sweet and earnest as if Neil hadn’t felt compelled to tack a little-brother insult on the end. Which was how he’d meant it to be taken, secretly, but there was no way anyone wouldn’t see through that secret. His stomach felt weird, as if he’d swallowed all the blue light. He clung to Adam, and Adam held on to him, held him in place.
Then Adam let him go and turned to hug their mom, and left Neil to stand there and work on not feeling bereft.
Someone punched him in the shoulder. “Hey dude.” Kris slung an arm around his shoulders. It was an awkward angle, not to mention gesture, since they so did not know each other well enough for touching. Maybe it was a red-state heartland thing, Neil had heard they were into touching there. “Nice brother you got there.”
“I don’t think I’ve got him.” Well, that came out more vulnerable than Neil ever wanted to sound in his life. Where the fuck was all this whiny emo shit coming from? He actively wanted to hug Kris back. He wasn’t doing it, but the urge was there.
“You do. Trust me.” Something in the tone made Neil look down at Kris’ face. It made him feel better about the vulnerability thing, since everybody was apparently doing it. “Must be nice.”
Adam was holding on to one of their mom’s hands, and cuddling Allison in close to his side with the other. The sense memory of the heat of his skin lingered on the corner of Neil’s mouth, exaggerated in the memory, burning hot. Also, there was a strand of wool in his mouth. He tried to spit it out, but it wasn’t happening. “Yeah. I guess it is.”
For the last few years, the elaborate extravaganzas Adam had set up for his birthdays as a child had been dwindling and quieting. This year, he seemed determined to make up for every bit of the recent lack. It was working pretty well. Neil had just gone to the bar to get another drink and motherfucking Slash had talked him into trying some fancy brand of whiskey.
It tasted like whiskey, to Neil’s unsophisticated palate, but Neil’s palate was also on its fifth drink. He might have had more luck at the beginning of the evening.
He’d lost track of Adam. Last he’d seen him was…some lengthy length of time ago, could have been half an hour, could have been an hour. Could have been a fucking lifetime ago, in the middle of a crowd of people, with Danielle pretending to try to pour champagne over his head. He’d laughed his head off, initially dodging with that startling speed he could achieve when he really thought he might get champagne on his carefully styled hair, then calming down and pretending to hide behind skinny-ass Tommy to make everyone laugh.
Neil would have laughed, but he was pushed out to the edge of the circle by the constant tide of people moving closer to Adam, and the stupid jokes Adam laughed at weren’t really funny once you were too far away from him and his stupid laugh.
Whatever. It was, like, his thing now, losing his grip. On his brother, on his life. On his brief chance at outshining his brother. Now Adam was a star shooting up to the A list, and Neil wasn’t even in college anymore. He wasn’t in the career he’d planned on stepping into the instant he stepped out of college. He wasn’t anything, except drunk at his famous brother’s birthday party in front of all the other celebrities.
Oh, and he was out of whiskey. He moved to get up and get more, but before he’d struggled out of the giant man-eatingly soft couch’s embrace, someone flung themselves down next to him so hard the entire couch bounced, and wrapped their arm around his shoulder.
His body realized who is was before his brain did, hair standing on end while he was still floundering to stay upright and figure out who the asshole was who was trying to knock him over. He shouldn’t have worried. Adam held him up easily with the one arm, and gave him a big sloppy kiss on the cheek. “How’s my favorite baby brother?”
Neil stopped struggling as soon as he realized who it was and leaned into Adam instead. It nearly made him fall into Adam’s lap. “Sucky.”
“Aww.” Adam kissed him again, leaving spit on his temple. Adam’s breath was full of alcohol, too, sugary stuff instead of Neil’s efficient liquor shots. “What’s the matter? C’mon, tell me, bet I can fix it!”
Adam’s cheer and bulletproof confidence was infectious, and Neil had to grab it with both hands and throttle it to keep it from infecting him. He curled into Adam and, as grouchily as possible, said, “I’m a drunk unemployed loser and I’m gonna get compared to your fabulous ass for the rest of my life, so it looks twice as bad as it is. Infinity times as bad. Fix that.”
He was sort of slipping inside Adam’s jacket. He wasn’t sure how that was happening, but had a sneaking suspicion it meant he was in Adam’s lap. Whatever. It was nice.
Adam laughed, because he always fucking did. “Easy. Work for me!”
“For you?” Neil struggled up, which was fucking hard. This couch was the devil. He ended up with one hand on Adam’s thigh and their foreheads together. “What the fuck do you need a poli-sci major for?”
“Diplomacy?” Adam laughed again, right in his face, and there was no fighting it like this, at point blank range. It settled into Neil’s blood, champagne replacing the heavy whiskey of self-pity. “Fuck if I know. You can, like, carry my lip gloss.”
“Great, just what I wanted to do. It’ll look fantastic on my resume.” Shit, he was smiling. He couldn’t help it. He was going to put ‘lip gloss porter’ on his resume and be happy about it, and there wasn’t a power on earth that could stop it.
Adam shifted his grip on Neil from an arm under his shoulders to a hand on the back of his neck, and his hair stood on end again, all over his body, prickling like it was trying to escape. “We’ll call it something better. I’ll make my marketing department come up with something. Grand Poobah of Cosmetics Transportation.”
“Oh yeah, that’s way better. That’s a ticket right into any think-tank in the country, there.” He couldn’t breathe. He’d had too many drinks and he hated touching people and the world had narrowed down to Adam. He needed to be someplace else. He didn’t want to be.
“Awesome!” Adam let him go. Getting out of the couch turned out to be no problem for Mr. Midori and Champagne breath, and Neil was sprawled back across the arm of the couch. “I’ll go tell Lane. You can come on tour with me! This is going to be the best summer ever!”
“You talk entirely in exclamation points these days, did you know that?” Neil decided to lie there for a minute, until he could catch his breath. He’d regained the ability to breathe, and now he was gasping, struggling to make up for the last minute’s deficit of air.
Adam answered with a laugh, leaned down, and kissed Neil on the forehead. Then he disappeared.
The ceiling was painted a golden-yellow color, unless that was the lighting, and it was white. Neil’s heart was pounding. He was never going to drink again. Wait; he was going on tour this summer. He was going to drink a lot. He started to laugh.
Tour was awesome, even when he was sober. Adam got him a job with a marginally better name than ‘lipgloss porter,’ and once he’d been P.A.-ing for a few weeks he was willing to argue any potential employer into the ground about it being good work experience. He was pretty sure he’d never even heard of a job harder than attempting to organize artists.
They were great, though, the artists. Adam had picked people as crazy as him, but as sweet as him, too, and all spilling over with creativity.
They all wanted Neil to be creative, too. One day Monte shoved an acoustic guitar into his hands and started explaining how to tune it, and persevered in spite of every Madonna joke Neil could come up with. Sasha insisted he try to copy the rare dance move she decided he was capable of achieving, and after laughing until he thought she was going to throw up, she’d even give him a decent explanation of how to do it.
Tommy played more instruments than Neil had ever picked up and was quickly learning how to put eyeshadow on without looking like he’d had a startling accident with a fireplace flue, but when he joined in on the ‘find Neil’s well-buried creative streak’ game, he offered up someone else’s talents.
“It’s not even just about being hot, either. Like, the zombies wouldn’t be zombies without makeup!” He gestured at the TV across from the foot of the hotel bed he, Neil, and Sutan were lying across. Tommy had acted like they were sinning against god and nature and apple pie when he’d found out they hadn’t seen the movie, but now they were watching it wouldn’t give anyone a chance to so much as figure out what the damn plot was. Neil was fairly confident that is was ‘zombies are eating everyone’, but he’d have liked to know for sure.
“Do me a favor and only promise I’ll do stuff I can do, all right?” This was the first objection Sutan had put up to the plan, which did not exactly fill Neil with confidence, given that it was the first time Tommy had come up with an angle he’d be interested in even holding still for, much less learning to do himself.
“Dude, you could totally make someone a zombie!” Tommy lunged halfway across Neil’s back to pound Sutan encouragingly on the shoulder, and Neil was not laughing. He was not. It was a coughing fit from having a guy leap on his back. “You make anyone look like anything you wanted!”
“Yeah, and as soon as you guys had me drugged and duct-taped into the chair you’d make me up as hooker clown Adam like you want. Don’t try and fool me, I know things.” Neil shoved Tommy off his back, and he flailed excessively trying not to fall off and concuss himself on the carpet.
“Bitch, I would make you look like hot photoshoot Adam.” Sutan flipped his bangs out of his eyes even though they weren’t in them, and grabbed one of Tommy’s wildly flailing arms, dragging him easily back up onto the bed.
“You can’t, because I don’t have the face to do it with. I have the funny looking version of the face and he has the hot version, and if you put his makeup on me I will be hooker clown Adam.” It came out with a vein of bitterness that Neil hadn’t meant to allow in.
“No no no, that’s not how makeup works. Your face is the canvas, ok? We paint on what we want to be there, and it’s there. Because we know how to fucking paint.” Sutan kind of sounded like he was explaining basic addition to a failing calculus student, but he sounded like that when he ordered coffee, so Neil didn’t take it personally.
“You have seen your brother without makeup on, right? At some point in your life?” Tommy jabbed him viciously in the ribs, which was apparently what counted for friendly tickling in the feral emo metal prettyboy crowd. “He looks like a normal person, remember?”
“Like a normal gorgeous successful LA pop star, maybe.” This wasn’t getting any better. Now he was muttering stupid shit directly into his folded arms and looking so pitiable that Sutan was patting him comfortingly and trying to sound encouraging.
“I could paint you up nearly as hot as him, seriously. A little contouring, a little eyeliner, you’ll look fine!” Oh god, that was the extra-nice voice he used when some fool asked his opinion on their outfit. Neil had never felt more pathetic in his life.
So of course the door chose that moment to creak open and admit Adam. “Hey guys, is this the room the orgy’s in?”
Tommy laughed so hard he nearly fell off the bed again, and Sutan said, “Yeah, but I’m afraid our Lambert quota’s been met. You’re only allowed to participate in the same orgy as your brother if you’re identical twins.”
“Fuck that, I participate in whatever I want.” Adam bounced onto the bed and worked himself into the nonexistent space in between Tommy and Neil, which, no fucking way. This bed was too crowded.
Neil got up and scrambled backwards, sitting against the headboard. “You can have the orgy quota spot, I’m going to sit up here and actually watch this movie that was supposed to be the best thing ever.”
“Oh, yeah, totally!” Tommy grabbed the remote and followed him. “Shit, we missed the scene with the blood-pressure cuff, let me rewind.”
“I missed all the scenes with all the things, obviously we should go back to the beginning.” Adam settled between Neil and Tommy again, and now they were resettling there was almost enough space for him, as long as Tommy was half in his lap and his leg was pressed up against Neil’s all the way along the length of it, tight together. Neil was intensely aware of the open space on the other side, but didn’t move.
“Nuh-uh.” Sutan snatched the remote away from Tommy. “We’re rewinding to the beginning of the last scene and that’s it.”
“I was only gonna go that far!” Tommy complained, leaning over Adam and trying to grab the remote back. The grab was remarkably ineffective, so all he managed was to put himself entirely in Adam’s lap. Adam laughed his head off like he did at every stupid thing and wrapped an arm around Tommy’s waist, and Neil wanted to hit one of them in the face.
“Sure you were. I saw your finger on that button.” Sutan settled himself comfortably in the entire half of the bed he had to himself and got them back to the beginning of the scene precisely.
Neil didn’t register much more the second time through than he had the first. Adam’s leg was perfectly aligned with his, hip to ankle, and when he kicked off his flip-flops their toes knocked together. Neil spent the rest of the movie intensely focused on the heat seeping through his jeans, and on controlling the urge to shove Tommy off Adam’s lap. The screen was small and over-bright and far away; Neil’s head had nothing in it but body heat and visions of Tommy’s head cracking against the hard marble corner of the bedside table.
After that night, things were a little weird between Neil and Tommy, but who knew if Tommy even noticed. It was easy to hide it in Neil’s normal sullenness, and it was nothing, just a sharp, unsettling crack in the smooth surface of their marvelous summer that he was sure would go away.
Until the day he caught Tommy with his mouth full of Adam’s cock.
It was only a split second before Neil slammed the dressing room door closed again, but it was enough to sear the image into his retinas, Tommy’s big brown eyes wide, an obscene lump in his cheek because he’d turned his head to look at the door, Adam’s hands in his hair making bits of blond stick out all over the place. Adam hadn’t had time to react. His face was still scrunched up with pleasure, and that was the part Neil couldn’t get out of his eyes, half-blinding him so that he stumbled as he fled back down the corridor.
A strong hand grabbed his shoulder and pulled him into an alcove, both of them tripping over mops and buckets, and he was shocked when it was Adam. In his head Adam was still in the dressing room, tugging at Tommy’s hair and saying ignore him baby, it’s his own fault, do that again.
The real Adam peered into his face and said, “Shit. Um. Look, Neil…”
That didn’t seem to be going anywhere, so Neil decided it was the time to cut in with a response. Namely, he shoved Adam so hard they both bounced off their respective walls of the mop alcove and rasped, “Fuck you!”
Adam, who trapped crane flies and spiders and hideous centipede things with a cup and piece of paper and carefully ferried them outside, shoved back, so hard that Neil’s head bounced off the wall this time. “Fuck you, too! What the fuck is your problem?”
“The fuck is my problem? The fuck is your problem!” Neil couldn’t see. He was still blind with it, the rage and the look that had been on Adam’s face, all he had was the slick fabric of Adam’s stage vest gripped in his hands and the ache on the back of his head.
“Nothing!” Adam had him by the shirt, too, and shook him hard, just once. “I was just getting my dick sucked by a hot guy after a successful concert and having a fantastic time, so the only fucking problem I have is my fucking baby brother, who’s been biting everyone’s heads off all week, and can’t even find a civil word for the nice guy who was giving me the nice blowjob, and freaks out too much for me to even apologize! What is your problem lately?”
“If you don’t have a problem, what were you going to apologize for?” That struck home, Adam’s face fell and he went pale, but Neil was too hysterical to stop and press his advantage. “How long has he been sucking you off, anyway, all week? Or is it longer and you were hiding it from me? What the fuck, he’s not even into guys!”
“He’s into getting me off, why do you care? Why should I keep you posted? I can do whoever I want!” Adam’s voice had gone weird, strangled, and Neil was certain he wasn’t saying what he wanted to say. Wasn’t apologizing for what he wanted to apologize for. Even though there was no one to hear them, even though the hallway was empty of people, they were half hidden in a fucking utility closet with their legs twisted together, not saying the things they wanted to say. Unless it was all in Neil’s head, and Adam was normal and sane and trying to be nice to the crazy person. In which case Neil was fucked, because he didn’t have any normal or sane or nice left in him.
For a moment he was swamped with doubt, as certain now that he was going crazy all by himself as he had been a moment before that he’d heard the same craziness in Adam, but then Adam lowered his voice to a whisper and said, “Please let me go.”
There. That was it. Neil felt like a balloon whose string had just been cut, floating up and up into the sky. “You first,” he said, and kissed him.
It was wet and intense, tongues and teeth and bruising finger grips, and almost immediately over. They hit the walls again in their hurry to get away from each other, and if anything had ever hurt as much as the horror on Adam’s face, Neil didn’t want to remember it. He knocked a mop over in his hurry to get out of the alcove and ran.
The hell of it was how much better Adam was at hiding things than him. People had already been walking on eggshells around Neil, but after that they acted like the eggshells were on top of landmines. While treating Adam normally, because Adam was acting normally, because Adam was better at this just like everything else.
As far as he could tell, Adam had told everyone that they’d had a fight and asked them to be nice to Neil about it because he was a sensitive kid. Adam had even gotten Tommy not to bring up the whole blowjob-setting-it-off thing, because no one was treating him as oddly as all that. Except for Tommy, of course, who Neil kept catching staring at him with serious expressions and deep eyes.
Neil would hate him for it, except awful fantasies like the one on the bed were still flashing into his head unbidden. They’d walk down the street to get coffee and his mind would be full of an image of shoving Tommy into traffic, so strong he could almost feel his arms move to do it, or picking up the heavy mike stand sitting right there while everyone tuned up for soundcheck and hitting Tommy with it as hard as he could. It was terrifying, and Neil couldn’t pretend it had anything to do with Tommy anymore. He couldn’t pretend much of anything, anymore.
The fantasies were only flashes. Most of his mind was filled with the kiss.
He lay in his bunk with the too-thin covers gripped tight and felt the kiss in his mouth as strongly as the ache in his knuckles from the strength of his grip. He staggered down to the complimentary continental breakfast in the hotel lobby and the scrape of Adam’s teeth on his lower lip replayed over and over, staring at his bagel instead of eating it because the sensation of it touching his lip clashed too weirdly with the memory. He lost track of half the people he was supposed to be keeping on schedule while trying to figure out why Adam had kissed him back.
There was no reason for Adam to kiss him back.
He had every reason to kiss Adam, every fucked up reason in the world, but why would Adam kiss him back? Adam, who had everything he’d ever wanted, who could form an actual line of people around an actual block who wanted to fuck him if he wanted, who had an angry, funny-looking kid brother instead of a sweet, graceful older one. And yet Neil had this memory that he could taste, of being licked and held onto and wanted.
It didn’t make sense. He stared blankly at the barrier being set up a few feet away from the stage, yellow and black striped like police tape, until the stripes looked to his tired eyes like they were moving. Maybe they’d move into a fucking answer. Adam’s hair had left a fine residue of styling gel on his fingers, and he knew it was long washed off, but he rubbed his fingertips against his jeans again anyway.
“Hey, Ne-whoa!” Tommy shouldn’t have tapped him on the shoulder like that; for an instant grabbing Tommy’s arm and flinging him off the side of the stage and seeing him crack his spine on the barrier was as vivid as the memory of pomade on his fingers, and then he shook loose of it and was just standing on the stage next to Tommy. Holding onto his arm.
“Shit.” Neil dropped Tommy’s wrist like it had gone white-hot. “Shit, shit, I’m sorry.”
“Dude, it’s fine. You’re gonna have to do more than that to leave a bruise.” Tommy gave him this concerned, almost pitying look and then earnestly said, “you know, if you want to talk about it, or anything, maybe I could-“
“No.” That was the last fucking thing he needed, talking about it. He didn’t even want to think about it in words inside his own head. “No. Thanks, but I can deal with it.”
“Okay.” Tommy only looked more worried now. He gave off a general atmosphere of being two seconds from calling Neil’s mom, and wouldn’t that be the worst thing ever. “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure!” He did not need pity from the person he was struggling not to murder. He didn’t need to be having this conversation at all. “Seriously. Look, don’t you guys have to, like, soundcheck? Get to work. I’ll talk to you later. Thanks, though.”
He fled to the least populated corner of the backstage he could find, which nearly landed him in another broom closet because nothing was empty backstage during a show, and he had to make do with sitting in the corner of Adam’s dressing room and looking prickly. Which was not itself a great spot. When the strains of Twentieth Century Boy started to filter through the walls, he fled to the buses.
Hiding in his bunk, listening to everyone else in the world talk and laugh and scream and generally have fun, fighting to keep memories of Adam’s mouth and visions of Tommy being crushed by falling stage lights out of his head and failing, he decided it was time to do something about this.
Four hours after the show they were already in the next city, barely bleary-eyed when they trooped off the buses and into the hotel lobby. It was easy; he told Lane that she worked too hard and he’d talk to the concierge tonight, and before he handed out hotel keys, he slipped the extra key to Adam’s room into his pocket.
The only variable in the plan was Tommy, but luckily he faceplanted into bed the instant he walked into the room he, Neil, and Sutan were all crammed into together because Neil’s millionaire brother was a cheapskate. Neil dropped his duffle, double-checked Tommy (hiding under the covers and swearing at Sutan when he made a comment about civilization and how it related to showering and brushing your teeth), and snuck out of the room, unnoticed in the chaos.
Neil nearly passed out from hyperventilation and adrenaline on the way over to Adam’s room, his hands shaking so badly that it took him three tries to get the card reader in the door to operate and let him in. So of course Adam was in the shower, singing something rendered unrecognizable from all the wandering around the melody he got up to when he thought no one else was listening.
His rage briefly spiked up to scream-and-bash-head-against-wall levels, but a wash of relief cooled it as soon as it came. He could go. He could turn around and walk out this door right now and no one would ever know he’d nearly done this.
The attempt was abortive; he couldn’t even pick his feet up when he turned to go. Part of it was how much he wanted this, but part of it was pure unwillingness to back down after he’d decided to do it. It was probably sick, but he felt proud of that. It made him feel brave. It made him feel like Adam.
Even so, it was nice to have a few minutes alone in the room, to adjust to the hair-raising excitement in his blood, to get settled enough to make it hard for Adam to bodily fling him out the door the second he suggested this, to just be alone. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been properly alone.
The shower turned off, and another jolt of excitement shivered through him. Time was counting down. He definitely had no more than half an hour before Adam finished posing in the mirror or applying seven different creams or plucking his arm hair or whatever the fuck it was he did in there. Neil was laughing, giggling hysterically, struggling to keep it silent. But Adam was about to come out of there.
Neil started stripping, not letting himself think about it, focusing as hard as he could on the mental image of Adam making his stupid model faces in the mirror. It didn’t work; when he got down to his underwear he couldn’t do it, his hands rested on the waistband of his boxers and he just couldn’t, so he left them on and flung himself facedown on the slippery hotel bedspread.
It certainly felt like half an hour before the door opened, the song going from echo-y and distant to muted and immediate before abruptly cutting off. “What…oh no. No no no.”
The thick carpet muffled any footsteps. Neil had to see. He was too terrified to look. He had to. He rolled over.
Adam was standing next to the bed already wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, with an expression on his face that Neil could hardly stand to look directly at, that he wanted a picture of to keep forever. As long as he found a place to hide it that no one could ever, ever find. He wished he’d ditched the underwear, too. He made himself meet his brother’s eyes.
“Why are you here?” Adam’s beautiful, clear voice came out harsh and half-whispered.
“Don’t fucking ask me that.” Neil wanted to look away, wanted to wriggle, wanted to roll back over on his stomach because even now, at this point, he was ashamed for Adam to see him getting hard.
“Don’t fucking ask me this!” The bed creaked when Adam put one knee on it, almost falling, then with far more control got to his hands and knees and crawled up the bed, crawled up Neil’s body, dislodging the towel but not losing it entirely. “Please don’t ask me for this.”
“Why not?” Neil’s voice strained almost to the point of breaking and crying, but not quite.
“Because I’ll give it to you.” Adam rested his forehead against Neil’s, and Neil felt like his blood was about to turn into electricity and take the rest of him with it.
He grabbed the back of Adam’s neck hard and tilted his head up a little bit and they were kissing again, hard and hungry and perfect again, all his nerves and fear and logical nausea at the thought of fucking his own brother steamrollered by how good it felt. He wrapped his arms and legs around Adam and didn’t think about anything.
Adam pulled away sooner than Neil wanted him to, but after his lips had started to numb with exertion, leaving a sticky trail of kisses down his chest until Neil realized they weren’t just wet with saliva and put a hand to Adam’s cheek, more gently than he’d meant to. “Hey, hey, don’t cry.”
“How am I not gonna cry? I-I did something, I fucked you up-“ He turned his face into Neil’s hand, tears smearing across his palm, surprisingly hot.
“No. It’s not your fault I’m fucked up. I’m an adult, I’m no one’s fault but my own anymore.” He’d started talking just trying to make Adam feel better, but as the words came out of his mouth they felt true.
Adam huffed out an irritated breath, skidding along Neil’s palm and making him shudder. The corner of Adam’s mouth quirked up at that, and he grabbed Neil’s hand and did it again deliberately, shooting a wicked little look up at Neil even as he blinked the last tears out of his eyes. Neil let his head fall back against the mattress. “Shit.”
“Mmm.” Adam placed a chaste kiss in Neil’s palm, then a more open one on his wrist, mouthing down his arm. When he hit the elbow it got a whimper out of Neil, so of course he had to do it again, and Neil wouldn’t feed him the reaction he wanted except he couldn’t help it, he was wrapping his legs tighter around Adam’s hips and squirming and the asshole had barely even done anything yet. No one’s dick had even been touched, there was still a thick layer of terrycloth in between their hips.
“I think the real reason most people don’t sleep with their hot relatives is because it’s too fucking embarrassing.” The towel thing was a real issue. It wouldn’t be hard to move it, though, easier than Neil’s underwear, he could just grab it and toss it and there’d hardly be any barrier between them. Except then there’d hardly be any barrier between them.
“I can’t really torture you forever about being bad in bed.” Adam gave him another one of those wicked smiles and leaned up to kiss his mouth again. “People would ask how I knew.”
“Fuck you, I’m not bad in bed!” Maybe he was, though. He was lying there petrified, letting Adam do whatever he wanted to him. Adam was never going to want to do this again, not that they were ever going to do it again. Were they?
“Hey, I’m the older one, I totally get to fuck you.” Adam sounded almost normal, which did not argue in favor of Neil’s skill here. Fuck that.
“Okay,” he said, and pulled the towel out from between them. It was interesting, he was close enough to Adam’s face to see his pupils blow out wider, and close enough to his dick-it was right there up against his, oh god oh fucking god-to feel him get harder.
“Oh.” Adam squeezed his eyes shut, then laughed, not his normal bubbly giggle this time, but low and tinged with desperation. “I didn’t realize how much I wanted that.”
“Not really the kind of thing you let yourself think about.” Neil smoothed his hands down and back up the broad expanse of Adam’s back, then got a good hold on his hair and kissed him hard. The desperation in Adam’s laugh was in his kisses, too, strong and biting, and he dropped one hand down to the back of Neil’s thigh, slipping it up into his boxers, dragging another whimper out of Neil.
Adam drew back, gave Neil a shaky approximation of a smile, and climbed off of Neil and the bed. Neil barely had time to lie back and wonder where the hell that noise he kept making had come from-he’d never made it before, and it had to pick the most embarrassing time possible to show up?-before Adam was back with, yep, that was a condom and a tube of lube. This was happening. His brother was pulling off his underwear and crawling up between his knees and Neil had never felt so exposed in his life.
“Shh, it’s okay.” Adam hooked one of Neil’s knees up over his shoulder and kissed the inside of his thigh. Neil managed to bite down on the embarrassing whimpering noise this time, he was very proud of himself.
“Changing your tune, huh?” He hated this part, this anticipation, lying there and listening to the tube’s cap go click. It might have helped to be looking, instead of squeezing his eyes shut and tilting his head back, but he couldn’t seem to do it.
“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to toss you out of bed and send you back to your room unfucked.” Adam tapped his fingers emphatically against a part of Neil’s ass that Neil didn’t even think about existing most days. It made muscles twitch and jerk all through his body, and left sticky spots behind.
“No you won’t.” He hoped Adam would assume he was rolling his eyes, because he couldn’t manage it. He could barely manage to breathe.
“You’re right.” Another kiss on the inside of his thigh, quick and comforting. Neil was almost getting used to fingers in spots he didn’t even think about. He wanted to tell Adam to just go ahead and do it, but he couldn’t draw in enough breath to say it. “I won’t.”
He should have been looking, because the finger slipping inside him was a shock. It made his spine arch, which made the finger shift inside of him, which-shit shit shit that did not feel how he expected. Or it did, but, more so.
“Okay?” asked Adam, which was a good question. He hadn’t thought about it from that angle.
“Yeah. Fucking weird, but yeah.” That had better not be trembling he was feeling in his muscles. How were they supposed to get Adam’s whole dick in him again?
“Good.” Then there was some shifting that Neil didn’t understand until his cock was engulfed in warm wet heat and fuck, forget the finger up his ass, forget that he was in bed with his brother, forget the whole fucking world because there was a grade A blowjob happening to him.
He’d actually already known his brother gave good head; he’d always been sickly fascinated when Adam’s friends had mentioned it, and egged them on in their descriptions even as he protested about how grossed out he was. It should have been an early tip-off, frankly. But the reality of it was totally different, hands and mouth and fingers everywhere, and oh god damn, he was going all the way down wasn’t he? No one had ever deep-throated Neil before, maybe he wasn’t packing as much as Adam but he was still pretty intimidating, and Adam fit his whole cock down his throat like it was nothing. He was pretty sure the fingers up his ass were making it better, and hey, that was a lot of fingers. Maybe this was going to work.
“Adam?” he said, and Adam was pulling off and out of him immediately. Neil curled forward and kissed his red, used-looking mouth. “Can we, yet?”
“You think you’re ready?” Adam’s fingers slipped back inside of him, easy, rubbing at a spot that made his insides go warm as lava.
“How the fuck should I know, I’ve never done this before. C’mon, I want your dick in me, let’s go.” He lay back down and pulled Adam down on top of him.
Adam put his free hand out to prop himself up over Neil. “Wait, never? At all?”
“Uh, no. When would I have?” Cold worry cut through the haze of arousal. “Is that not okay?”
“No, I mean, it’s fine, I just…don’t people experiment at college? Isn’t that what you do?” He kissed Neil hungrily, starting to really thrust with his fingers, and he was melting-hot, buzzing. “No, it’s good. It’s really good. If someone else had fucked you I’d have to beat them up, I think.”
That made Neil laugh. “You couldn’t beat someone up if they were a card-carrying puppy-kicking Nazi.”
“Well, I’d pay someone else to do it, I’m rich now. Fuck, I can’t believe…” and he pulled Neil’s leg back up on his shoulder and then Neil was getting a cock shoved up his ass.
It was a lot more than fingers, and not just because Adam had missed his calling in the porn industry. Having Adam leaning over him and staring into his eyes like that was almost too much to take, and it left him shaking and inventing whole new categories of embarrassing little whimpering noises, and he couldn’t even care.
Adam certainly wasn’t going to notice now. “Oh my god.”
Neil groped for words and came up with, “Fuck me fuck me fuck me!”
His brother kindly obliged, slow and dragging sweet instead of the pounding Neil wanted but he wasn’t in any position to object, clinging to Adam again and falling apart. Every thrust was a little easier to take, physically and mentally, until Adam was sliding easily in and out of him, and he was almost able to feel the sensations without thinking anything at all. Then Adam made a sound encouragingly close to Neil’s embarrassing whimpery sound, dropped his head down to Neil’s shoulder, and went for it, hard and fast.
Perfect. Neil’s brain cracked into pretty glittery sparkles and blew away, and there was nothing but sex and sensation, heat and sweat, the body in his arms and inside him, the rhythm pounding through him and echoing in his ears as the bed frame hit the wall over and over and over again.
Neil barely realized he was reaching for his dick until Adam grabbed his wrist and pinned it to the bed over his head. They stared at each other for a moment, until Adam managed, “Let me do it. I’ll take care of you. I promise I’ll take care of you.”
“Yeah.” Or something that sounded like it, anyway, Neil had seriously lost his grip on language.
It was enough to satisfy Adam, though, who got a hold of Neil’s other wrist and pinned it next to the first for good measure, then went back to fucking into him, faster this time, and Neil wished he wouldn’t stare like that, he hated being stared at, hated it hated it hated it and oh god he could almost come just like this, so close so close until Adam relented and switched to pinning his wrists with one forearm across them, which brought Adam down so close to his face he could feel Adam’s breath across his lips and as soon as Adam’s free hand wrapped around his dick he was coming. Before the last shudders of pleasure had left his body Adam was losing his rhythm and curling down over him and making the most gorgeous, hurt sound he’d ever heard in his life.
And then he was lying in bed with his brother’s dick softening in his ass, sticky, ears full of static in the too-quiet room. The air conditioner kicked on.
Adam pulled out of him, carefully, then got up and went into the bathroom. Neil rolled over on his side, then curled up around himself and tried to will himself out of existence.
The bed creaked like it had when Adam had crawled over him and begged him not to ask for this, and a damp hand touched his shoulder. “Hey, let me clean you up.”
As soon as he uncurled there was a washcloth on his stomach. He instantly grabbed Adam’s wrist. “Don’t, I can do it.”
“No, let me-“ Adam stopped and made a face.
“Take care of me?” Neil forced himself to let go and allow it, even though it made his face burn. “I think I was hoping I could get it out of our systems.”
Adam’s laugh had no humor in it at all. “Wouldn’t it be nice, if things were that easy.”
Yeah, that was plenty clean. Neil shoved Adam away and got off the bed to go find his clothes. The headrush made him dizzy.
“Where are you going?” The strain in Adam’s voice made Neil’s heart twist in his chest.
“I don’t know. Back to my room, I guess.” The thought was actually kind of horrible. He hadn’t been gone all that long. Sutan was probably still up reading. Maybe he’d wander around the city instead. Nothing like wandering the streets of an unfamiliar foreign city in the middle of the night while seriously upset.
“I’m not going to sleep.” Adam pulled one leg up and rested his chin on his knee, wrapping his arms around it. “I mean, if you don’t want to be around me, I understand, but I’d rather not be alone.”
Neil stared at his boxers in his hand, trying to force his swirling thoughts into some kind of order. It wasn’t that hard a question, though, really. There was one person he always wanted to be with. “Okay. I’m gonna go take a shower.”
The shower emphasized what a good idea it was to stay. Even being alone for a few short minutes sucked harder than Adam in a blowjob competition. Which was the kind of thought he could not stop having. The swirling glitter haze of thoughts in his head was coalescing back together, into self-recrimination and sarcasm and vivid images of the things they’d just done. He got back out as soon as he could.
So of course Adam decided he had to take a shower, too. Neil spent the time indecisively taking his shirt on and off and hating his life.
Once they were in bed together with the lights off, things felt a little better. In the dark, the little voice in his head laughing at him was quieter. Even more so when he let Adam cuddle him close. He curled into Adam’s chest and tried to focus on the moment he was in, like he’d managed for a few minutes when they were having sex and he’d managed to be happy.
“I never thought you’d want me.” He hadn’t planned to say it; he hardly even knew where it came from, but there it was.
The arm Adam had slung over him tightened a bit. “Well, I shouldn’t. I mean, I’m not supposed to. You’re totally worth it. You’re awesome.”
“Shut up,” said Neil. “You’d be into me if I were the worst person alive. It’s all your own over-clocked protective instincts fucking with you.”
“It’s not, though.” Adam had this knack of putting emotions into his voice that Neil assumed was one of the things he practiced alone in the bathroom, for sensible career-related reasons. The quiet earnestness still made his heart break a little. “I love you.”
“Shut up.” Neil cuddled in closer.
A long time later, when Neil wasn’t even sure if Adam was still awake, he said, “I’m glad it’s both of us. It’d be lonely, y’know, alone.”
Adam’s arm tightened around him in response.
No one looked askance at them when they came down to breakfast the next morning, because no one in their right mind would have imagined they were doing what they did. Neil had to borrow Adam’s hideous plaid button-up to wear over his t-shirt, because there were hickeys all down his fucking arm.
“So,” Tommy asked quietly, when Neil sat down next to him because the only other seat available was next to Adam, “you guys work it out?”
“What?” Neil said, a little too panicky, mind crackling with paranoia. Tommy might guess, if anyone could, he was the only one who knew what had set Neil off in the first place.
“Whatever you were fighting about. You talked it out, right?” Tommy’s pretty face was open and guileless, and smudged with leftover makeup.
“Um.” Neil studied his bagel closely. The onion pattern was suddenly fascinating. “I guess. Some things you never entirely work out, you know? Especially with family.”
“Yeah.” Tommy sounded so sad and sympathetic. It made Neil want to punch him. “But you seem, like, more relaxed this morning. So it helped?”
Neil started to laugh, and got it under control very quickly, because he could hear the hysteria in it. He glanced up from his bagel, but no one looked concerned, not even Tommy. Well, Adam did. “Yeah. Yeah, it helped.”
Two days later, Neil wandered into the big bedroom at the back of the bus looking for a DVD and accidentally woke Adam up from a nap. In the twilight that came through the smoked windows and the haze of sleepiness and boredom, there didn’t seem to be anything stopping him from leaning down for a kiss, and he was almost there, with Adam’s fingers threading into his hair, before he had the sense to pull back. He nearly tripped and concussed himself scrambling out of the room.
The next afternoon, Adam cornered him after soundcheck. “Sauli’s coming to Paris with me.”
“Who?” That was a weird fucking name. Who had a name like that? It was like begging for a punch in the jaw.
“The guy I met in Finland.” Adam his hands jammed deep into his pockets, and for once was not staring into Neil’s eyes like he had the recipe for the philospher’s stone written across his retinas. He wouldn’t even look at him.
Oh, yeah, that guy. Neil had totally wanted to punch him in the jaw. “You’re taking a drunken one night stand to Paris for a week? Who even agrees to something like that?”
“We’ve been emailing!” Adam said defensively. He dropped his voice almost to a whisper. “Look, I can’t-I need this, I need someone. To distract me. I need to stop thinking. I need this.” Now Neil wanted to hit Adam in the face. “You need this.”
“I need you getting fucking murdered in your sleep because you whisk people you barely know off to romantic vacations alone together?” Neil wanted to hit himself in the face. He knew Adam was right. That was what made it so awful.
“Don’t be like that.” Also, Adam knew he knew it. One of the many, many things that sucked about being in love with his brother was that his brother knew every fucking thing about him. It was like being married for two decades but with only one night of awesome honeymoon sex.
“If I could stop it, I would!” He flung out his hands, not sure what he meant to do with them, turned it into a ridiculous dramatic gesture, and stomped off before it could get any worse.
Adam was right, though. After several hours of sulking, he even felt like he could cope with that. Their little ‘conversation’ really had helped. He was spending a lot more time jerking off and hating himself, but the bile-spitting rage had cooled way down, and the involuntary violent daydreams had nearly stopped. He wouldn’t admit it if asked, but he could probably even be pleasant to this Sauli asshole. It wasn’t fair of him, anyway, it wasn’t like Adam was the only one meeting interesting people on tour.
It only took a minute of searching to find Kate’s email. They’d been talking a lot, earlier in the summer, before Neil had slipped so far inside his own head. Before things got so drastically out of hand. She took the explanation of tour fatigue easily, and was even more psychotically excited about lengthy vacations with people she hadn’t spent nearly enough time with than his brother. Although, to be fair, she clearly hadn’t wanted to go to Asia alone in the first place. Neil could certainly sympathize with people who set themselves up to do exciting things they weren’t equipped to handle.
He could have told Adam in public, like Adam had told him about Paris, but he didn’t. He waited until they were in another hotel in the middle of the night, and Adam wasn’t supposed to have his own room this time, but Sutan had met up with some friends and evaporated.
Sutan had the other room key, though, so Neil had to knock this time. Adam opened the door and immediately developed an apprehensive look, but when he opened his mouth no sound came out. He let Neil in silently, instead, then edged around him to sit down on the bed. His face was flawlessly controlled when he looked up, smooth and slightly expectant, like Neil was about to start asking questions about what it was like to meet Madonna.
“I’m going to Korea.” He hadn’t meant to come out with it so baldly. “With Kate. That girl, you know, that I met.”
“I remember her.” There was a twitch in the mask, a movement in Adam’s forehead, the corner of his mouth quirking down. Then he smiled, broad and sunny. “That’s great! You’ll have so much fun!”
“Yeah.” Neil shoved his hands into his pockets. He knew he was mimicking Adam’s body language from a few days ago, but he couldn’t make himself stop. “Should be educational. We’ll probably see some other countries in Asia, too.”
“Yeah?” Adam leaned forward, friendly and excited. “Which ones? That’s so cool, I’ve never been to Korea!”
“I know. We don’t know which ones yet, it’s not all planned.” He took his hands out of his front pockets and shove them in his back ones, then took them out of those and hooked his thumbs in his belt loops, then unhooked his thumbs, grabbed Adam’s chin, and kissed him.
Adam kissed back, but no harder than Neil kissed him. He didn’t put his hands in Neil’s hair.
When Neil pulled back, he could see Adam’s hands, still on the bed, the covers so bunched and twisted in them that the pillows were starting to come uncovered at the top of the bed.
“Sorry,” he said.
“No, it’s.” Adam swallowed and tried again. “No, I.” He finally let go with one hand, and reached out for Neil, but his fingertips barely skimmed along Neil’s cheek. “Have fun. In Korea.”
“I’ll do my best,” Neil promised. They stared at each other for a long moment, and Neil realized he didn’t have anything else. “I will.”
Adam nodded, and Neil turned and walked out the door.
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Adam/Neil (with mention of every other ship involving them ever)
Warnings: incest
Summary: Neil hates how Adam is always better than him, and he hates how Adam always dates such losers, and he especially hates realizing that it isn't about what he hates at all.
Disclaimer: Distinctly upsetting stalkerish libel again. I'm on a roll!
Beta'd by vlredreign, thank you so much bb!
Art by glambini, main art post here. Go leave her effusive comments for her amazing art!
One of Neil’s earliest memories was of crawling into his mother’s lap, crying because Adam could do something he could not. He’d long forgotten what it was he couldn’t do, but the memory of the scene remained vivid, holding on tight to his mother’s shirt and covering it with snot and tears, saying that it wasn’t fair.
“It’s just because he’s older, sweetie,” their mother had said. “When you’re his age you’ll be able to do it too.”
“But then he’ll be older too, and he’ll do other things!” Neil cried even harder.
“Well, eventually you’ll both be grown all the way up and it’ll be even.” Their mother petted his head, smoothing out his hair. “Adults don’t change as fast as kids. Once you’re all grown up it’ll be even.”
That was encouraging. He looked up at her, sniffling. “You promise?”
“I promise.” She ruffled his hair back up, then hugged him and sent him to play with Adam some more.
When Neil was twenty, her promise seemed to have come true. As with many promises, it wasn’t as fun now that it had come true as it had seemed when he was looking forward to it. Adam seemed to be having a lot more fun failing in LA than he was having succeeding in college, and Thanksgiving seemed to be a lot more fighting about how Adam was screwing up than it was congratulating Neil.
Also, Adam had brought this Brad guy along. Neil had probably hated someone more than Brad, but he couldn’t recall it at the moment. Who moved to LA after high school instead of going to college? Adam, obviously, but Adam was different. Adam was different from everyone. This Brad guy wasn’t anyone special, just some kid, just like Neil, except with an obnoxious phony smirk and an obnoxious phony voice and an obnoxious habit of hanging on Adam’s arm all the time like he’d die if they didn’t touch.
Neil jabbed at his turkey and focused on pretending it was Brad’s flesh, in an attempt to distract himself from what was no longer a sniping match between Dad and Adam, but a real fight. It didn’t work. “I am advancing my career! This is my career, and this is me doing everything I can do for it.”
“You and everyone else in that city. How many ‘famous singer’ jobs do you think are out there, Ad? “ Their dad flung his fork down, not even pretending to be eating dinner anymore. “What exactly do you think the odds are that you’ll ever be able to so much as pay your own rent doing this?”
“So I’m not good enough, is that what you’re saying?” There was no denying that Adam was really good at this acting stuff. He wasn’t yelling, no one could accuse him of yelling, but some special actor trick still allowed him to be loud enough that Neil could have sworn his ears hurt.
“It’s not about being good enough!” Dad didn’t add ‘you idiot’, but everyone could hear it anyway. Neil stabbed at his green beans and didn’t pretend they were anything at all. “The competition’s too fierce for it to be about being good enough, it’s pure luck. You shouldn’t be basing all your hopes on luck!”
“You just think that because you’re not in the industry. There’s a lot I can do to make it happen, and I’m doing it, it just takes time.” Neil thought Adam was getting a bit close to actually saying ‘you idiot’ there, but it wasn’t like anyone could make things worse here.
“Because you’ve got so much time.” Neil wondered if his dad was rolling his eyes. It wasn’t a very dad thing to do, but he sure sounded like it. The cranberry sauce sort of looked like blood, splashed across the mashed potatoes like that.
“Gosh, look at that, we’re all out of wine!” said Brad in a bright, extra-phony voice. “I think I’ll go get some more. It’s in the kitchen?” He headed out of the room without waiting for confirmation.
“I should show him where it is,” Neil muttered, and raced after him.
The wine was sitting out on the counter, ready for the party, so Brad was already getting a new bottle open by the time Neil shut the door between the kitchen and dining room, muffling the argument. The pop of the cork sounded loud in the quiet kitchen.
Brad eyed the bottle in his hand. “We should have brought our glasses along, shouldn’t we?”
“It’s fine, there’s more.” Neil felt happy to be helpful, and disgusted with himself for getting excited about it, and hated Brad some more for it all. He grabbed two more wine glasses out of the cabinet and set them down a little too hard.
“Excellent.” Brad filled them both up much too high.
Drinking in silence together sounded like a great idea, but when they were just standing there with nothing but their wine glasses to focus on, Neil could make out the words drifting through the door. Adam was saying something about the importance of not giving up on things, but you wouldn’t know anything about that. “So, where are you from? Originally?” Neil asked, too loud.
“Texas.” Brad spat the word out and left it there.
Of course. Of course he was from Texas. No wonder his voice sounded so fake, he was probably covering up a horrible accent. How could Adam date a guy from the south? And now what were they supposed to talk about? Neil was pretty sure he’d just heard one of them say the word ‘divorce’ in the dining room.
Thankfully, Brad came up with something else to add. “Makes me feel better about the whole night, now that you mention it. This is way better than going back down there for the holiday.”
“Very funny,” said Neil, and took a larger sip of his wine. More like a swig.
“It wasn’t meant to be.” Brad, who was apparently a competitive little shit in addition to all his other issues, took an even larger swig.
“I can’t believe this is better than anything,” said Neil, with a punctuating glance towards the door.
“Honey, my family are Baptists.” Brad delivered this with an aloof finality, like it was an ultimate smackdown.
Maybe it was. Neil groped for a comeback, but a mental image of pretty, swishy Brad at a table full of cross-wearing rednecks intruded, and Neil pushed it away before he could imagine the things they’d say. “Don’t call me honey,” he said instead.
“Mm.” Brad could really drink a lot of wine in one go. “So, how’s college?”
“Good,” said Neil, glad to be asked, and wasn’t that fucked up, that fucking Brad was the one to finally ask him. “My grades are awesome, all my professors are impressed with me. I’m thinking about majoring in poli-sci. It’s really interesting, and you can get great jobs with that kind of degree. Important, influential ones.”
“Sounds cool. I always wanted to be influential.” Because of course this was all about Brad. “So what’s poli-sci?”
Neil sighed. He couldn’t believe he was spending his Thanksgiving stuck in the kitchen avoiding his family with his brother’s asshole southern boyfriend who didn’t even know what poli-sci was. Then he poured some more wine in his glass, because it was going to take a while to explain.
Two years later, Neil gave up on ever catching up in the middle of a taping of American Idol, which was not a time when he would ever have expected to have an epiphany. But Adam was sitting in front of thirty million people, drowning in blue light, doing something so beautiful Neil couldn’t even hate him while one of his primary life goals crumbled and died in his chest. He clapped for his brother and smiled for the camera and felt like he was floating. It was probably those weird lights.
But it lingered, even after the lights were gone and he was in the chaos of post-show backstage, hugs and congratulations and bemusedly despairing looks on several of the contestants’ faces that made Neil weirdly compassionate.
Adam had his cell phone to his ear when they found him. “Yeah. Come on, that’s a bit-yeah, he did, but still. Fine, I give up. Can’t wait to see you, baby!”
Ah, there it went, the nice familiar feeling of loathing shooting through his gut. Something to hold on to. The only person Adam called ‘baby’ was that goddamned hopped-up friend-with-benefits who had been suddenly promoted to boyfriend the moment Adam had started in on the 24/7 Idol grind that prevented him from actually having time to have a boyfriend, for reasons that Neil could only guess at.
No, he was pretty sure he knew why. Because Adam knew that tonight was going to happen months ago, and had wanted something to hold on to. He’d gone on a frenzy in the lull between Hollywood Week and the show proper, collecting anchors; boyfriends and tattoos and moments with people he loved.
He’d invited Neil over to hang out for an afternoon and it had been two days, like standing in the eye of a storm, feeling alone together even when they were in rooms crammed with people. It had felt like tonight, floating and strange. Unsettling, no matter how much Neil tried to tell himself it wasn’t.
Adam spotted them, and his face lit up, even though he was already smiling so much it looked like it hurt. “Talk to you later, baby.” He shoved his phone in his pocket, took a handful of huge strides, and wrapped Neil up in a tight hug.
Neil hugged back even harder. “Congratulations, asshole.” It was muffled by the scarf, and a little bit by Adam’s neck, where the corner of his mouth hadn’t landed on the scarf.
“Thank you,” Adam said, sweet and earnest as if Neil hadn’t felt compelled to tack a little-brother insult on the end. Which was how he’d meant it to be taken, secretly, but there was no way anyone wouldn’t see through that secret. His stomach felt weird, as if he’d swallowed all the blue light. He clung to Adam, and Adam held on to him, held him in place.
Then Adam let him go and turned to hug their mom, and left Neil to stand there and work on not feeling bereft.
Someone punched him in the shoulder. “Hey dude.” Kris slung an arm around his shoulders. It was an awkward angle, not to mention gesture, since they so did not know each other well enough for touching. Maybe it was a red-state heartland thing, Neil had heard they were into touching there. “Nice brother you got there.”
“I don’t think I’ve got him.” Well, that came out more vulnerable than Neil ever wanted to sound in his life. Where the fuck was all this whiny emo shit coming from? He actively wanted to hug Kris back. He wasn’t doing it, but the urge was there.
“You do. Trust me.” Something in the tone made Neil look down at Kris’ face. It made him feel better about the vulnerability thing, since everybody was apparently doing it. “Must be nice.”
Adam was holding on to one of their mom’s hands, and cuddling Allison in close to his side with the other. The sense memory of the heat of his skin lingered on the corner of Neil’s mouth, exaggerated in the memory, burning hot. Also, there was a strand of wool in his mouth. He tried to spit it out, but it wasn’t happening. “Yeah. I guess it is.”
For the last few years, the elaborate extravaganzas Adam had set up for his birthdays as a child had been dwindling and quieting. This year, he seemed determined to make up for every bit of the recent lack. It was working pretty well. Neil had just gone to the bar to get another drink and motherfucking Slash had talked him into trying some fancy brand of whiskey.
It tasted like whiskey, to Neil’s unsophisticated palate, but Neil’s palate was also on its fifth drink. He might have had more luck at the beginning of the evening.
He’d lost track of Adam. Last he’d seen him was…some lengthy length of time ago, could have been half an hour, could have been an hour. Could have been a fucking lifetime ago, in the middle of a crowd of people, with Danielle pretending to try to pour champagne over his head. He’d laughed his head off, initially dodging with that startling speed he could achieve when he really thought he might get champagne on his carefully styled hair, then calming down and pretending to hide behind skinny-ass Tommy to make everyone laugh.
Neil would have laughed, but he was pushed out to the edge of the circle by the constant tide of people moving closer to Adam, and the stupid jokes Adam laughed at weren’t really funny once you were too far away from him and his stupid laugh.
Whatever. It was, like, his thing now, losing his grip. On his brother, on his life. On his brief chance at outshining his brother. Now Adam was a star shooting up to the A list, and Neil wasn’t even in college anymore. He wasn’t in the career he’d planned on stepping into the instant he stepped out of college. He wasn’t anything, except drunk at his famous brother’s birthday party in front of all the other celebrities.
Oh, and he was out of whiskey. He moved to get up and get more, but before he’d struggled out of the giant man-eatingly soft couch’s embrace, someone flung themselves down next to him so hard the entire couch bounced, and wrapped their arm around his shoulder.
His body realized who is was before his brain did, hair standing on end while he was still floundering to stay upright and figure out who the asshole was who was trying to knock him over. He shouldn’t have worried. Adam held him up easily with the one arm, and gave him a big sloppy kiss on the cheek. “How’s my favorite baby brother?”
Neil stopped struggling as soon as he realized who it was and leaned into Adam instead. It nearly made him fall into Adam’s lap. “Sucky.”
“Aww.” Adam kissed him again, leaving spit on his temple. Adam’s breath was full of alcohol, too, sugary stuff instead of Neil’s efficient liquor shots. “What’s the matter? C’mon, tell me, bet I can fix it!”
Adam’s cheer and bulletproof confidence was infectious, and Neil had to grab it with both hands and throttle it to keep it from infecting him. He curled into Adam and, as grouchily as possible, said, “I’m a drunk unemployed loser and I’m gonna get compared to your fabulous ass for the rest of my life, so it looks twice as bad as it is. Infinity times as bad. Fix that.”
He was sort of slipping inside Adam’s jacket. He wasn’t sure how that was happening, but had a sneaking suspicion it meant he was in Adam’s lap. Whatever. It was nice.
Adam laughed, because he always fucking did. “Easy. Work for me!”
“For you?” Neil struggled up, which was fucking hard. This couch was the devil. He ended up with one hand on Adam’s thigh and their foreheads together. “What the fuck do you need a poli-sci major for?”
“Diplomacy?” Adam laughed again, right in his face, and there was no fighting it like this, at point blank range. It settled into Neil’s blood, champagne replacing the heavy whiskey of self-pity. “Fuck if I know. You can, like, carry my lip gloss.”
“Great, just what I wanted to do. It’ll look fantastic on my resume.” Shit, he was smiling. He couldn’t help it. He was going to put ‘lip gloss porter’ on his resume and be happy about it, and there wasn’t a power on earth that could stop it.
Adam shifted his grip on Neil from an arm under his shoulders to a hand on the back of his neck, and his hair stood on end again, all over his body, prickling like it was trying to escape. “We’ll call it something better. I’ll make my marketing department come up with something. Grand Poobah of Cosmetics Transportation.”
“Oh yeah, that’s way better. That’s a ticket right into any think-tank in the country, there.” He couldn’t breathe. He’d had too many drinks and he hated touching people and the world had narrowed down to Adam. He needed to be someplace else. He didn’t want to be.
“Awesome!” Adam let him go. Getting out of the couch turned out to be no problem for Mr. Midori and Champagne breath, and Neil was sprawled back across the arm of the couch. “I’ll go tell Lane. You can come on tour with me! This is going to be the best summer ever!”
“You talk entirely in exclamation points these days, did you know that?” Neil decided to lie there for a minute, until he could catch his breath. He’d regained the ability to breathe, and now he was gasping, struggling to make up for the last minute’s deficit of air.
Adam answered with a laugh, leaned down, and kissed Neil on the forehead. Then he disappeared.
The ceiling was painted a golden-yellow color, unless that was the lighting, and it was white. Neil’s heart was pounding. He was never going to drink again. Wait; he was going on tour this summer. He was going to drink a lot. He started to laugh.
Tour was awesome, even when he was sober. Adam got him a job with a marginally better name than ‘lipgloss porter,’ and once he’d been P.A.-ing for a few weeks he was willing to argue any potential employer into the ground about it being good work experience. He was pretty sure he’d never even heard of a job harder than attempting to organize artists.
They were great, though, the artists. Adam had picked people as crazy as him, but as sweet as him, too, and all spilling over with creativity.
They all wanted Neil to be creative, too. One day Monte shoved an acoustic guitar into his hands and started explaining how to tune it, and persevered in spite of every Madonna joke Neil could come up with. Sasha insisted he try to copy the rare dance move she decided he was capable of achieving, and after laughing until he thought she was going to throw up, she’d even give him a decent explanation of how to do it.
Tommy played more instruments than Neil had ever picked up and was quickly learning how to put eyeshadow on without looking like he’d had a startling accident with a fireplace flue, but when he joined in on the ‘find Neil’s well-buried creative streak’ game, he offered up someone else’s talents.
“It’s not even just about being hot, either. Like, the zombies wouldn’t be zombies without makeup!” He gestured at the TV across from the foot of the hotel bed he, Neil, and Sutan were lying across. Tommy had acted like they were sinning against god and nature and apple pie when he’d found out they hadn’t seen the movie, but now they were watching it wouldn’t give anyone a chance to so much as figure out what the damn plot was. Neil was fairly confident that is was ‘zombies are eating everyone’, but he’d have liked to know for sure.
“Do me a favor and only promise I’ll do stuff I can do, all right?” This was the first objection Sutan had put up to the plan, which did not exactly fill Neil with confidence, given that it was the first time Tommy had come up with an angle he’d be interested in even holding still for, much less learning to do himself.
“Dude, you could totally make someone a zombie!” Tommy lunged halfway across Neil’s back to pound Sutan encouragingly on the shoulder, and Neil was not laughing. He was not. It was a coughing fit from having a guy leap on his back. “You make anyone look like anything you wanted!”
“Yeah, and as soon as you guys had me drugged and duct-taped into the chair you’d make me up as hooker clown Adam like you want. Don’t try and fool me, I know things.” Neil shoved Tommy off his back, and he flailed excessively trying not to fall off and concuss himself on the carpet.
“Bitch, I would make you look like hot photoshoot Adam.” Sutan flipped his bangs out of his eyes even though they weren’t in them, and grabbed one of Tommy’s wildly flailing arms, dragging him easily back up onto the bed.
“You can’t, because I don’t have the face to do it with. I have the funny looking version of the face and he has the hot version, and if you put his makeup on me I will be hooker clown Adam.” It came out with a vein of bitterness that Neil hadn’t meant to allow in.
“No no no, that’s not how makeup works. Your face is the canvas, ok? We paint on what we want to be there, and it’s there. Because we know how to fucking paint.” Sutan kind of sounded like he was explaining basic addition to a failing calculus student, but he sounded like that when he ordered coffee, so Neil didn’t take it personally.
“You have seen your brother without makeup on, right? At some point in your life?” Tommy jabbed him viciously in the ribs, which was apparently what counted for friendly tickling in the feral emo metal prettyboy crowd. “He looks like a normal person, remember?”
“Like a normal gorgeous successful LA pop star, maybe.” This wasn’t getting any better. Now he was muttering stupid shit directly into his folded arms and looking so pitiable that Sutan was patting him comfortingly and trying to sound encouraging.
“I could paint you up nearly as hot as him, seriously. A little contouring, a little eyeliner, you’ll look fine!” Oh god, that was the extra-nice voice he used when some fool asked his opinion on their outfit. Neil had never felt more pathetic in his life.
So of course the door chose that moment to creak open and admit Adam. “Hey guys, is this the room the orgy’s in?”
Tommy laughed so hard he nearly fell off the bed again, and Sutan said, “Yeah, but I’m afraid our Lambert quota’s been met. You’re only allowed to participate in the same orgy as your brother if you’re identical twins.”
“Fuck that, I participate in whatever I want.” Adam bounced onto the bed and worked himself into the nonexistent space in between Tommy and Neil, which, no fucking way. This bed was too crowded.
Neil got up and scrambled backwards, sitting against the headboard. “You can have the orgy quota spot, I’m going to sit up here and actually watch this movie that was supposed to be the best thing ever.”
“Oh, yeah, totally!” Tommy grabbed the remote and followed him. “Shit, we missed the scene with the blood-pressure cuff, let me rewind.”
“I missed all the scenes with all the things, obviously we should go back to the beginning.” Adam settled between Neil and Tommy again, and now they were resettling there was almost enough space for him, as long as Tommy was half in his lap and his leg was pressed up against Neil’s all the way along the length of it, tight together. Neil was intensely aware of the open space on the other side, but didn’t move.
“Nuh-uh.” Sutan snatched the remote away from Tommy. “We’re rewinding to the beginning of the last scene and that’s it.”
“I was only gonna go that far!” Tommy complained, leaning over Adam and trying to grab the remote back. The grab was remarkably ineffective, so all he managed was to put himself entirely in Adam’s lap. Adam laughed his head off like he did at every stupid thing and wrapped an arm around Tommy’s waist, and Neil wanted to hit one of them in the face.
“Sure you were. I saw your finger on that button.” Sutan settled himself comfortably in the entire half of the bed he had to himself and got them back to the beginning of the scene precisely.
Neil didn’t register much more the second time through than he had the first. Adam’s leg was perfectly aligned with his, hip to ankle, and when he kicked off his flip-flops their toes knocked together. Neil spent the rest of the movie intensely focused on the heat seeping through his jeans, and on controlling the urge to shove Tommy off Adam’s lap. The screen was small and over-bright and far away; Neil’s head had nothing in it but body heat and visions of Tommy’s head cracking against the hard marble corner of the bedside table.
After that night, things were a little weird between Neil and Tommy, but who knew if Tommy even noticed. It was easy to hide it in Neil’s normal sullenness, and it was nothing, just a sharp, unsettling crack in the smooth surface of their marvelous summer that he was sure would go away.
Until the day he caught Tommy with his mouth full of Adam’s cock.
It was only a split second before Neil slammed the dressing room door closed again, but it was enough to sear the image into his retinas, Tommy’s big brown eyes wide, an obscene lump in his cheek because he’d turned his head to look at the door, Adam’s hands in his hair making bits of blond stick out all over the place. Adam hadn’t had time to react. His face was still scrunched up with pleasure, and that was the part Neil couldn’t get out of his eyes, half-blinding him so that he stumbled as he fled back down the corridor.
A strong hand grabbed his shoulder and pulled him into an alcove, both of them tripping over mops and buckets, and he was shocked when it was Adam. In his head Adam was still in the dressing room, tugging at Tommy’s hair and saying ignore him baby, it’s his own fault, do that again.
The real Adam peered into his face and said, “Shit. Um. Look, Neil…”
That didn’t seem to be going anywhere, so Neil decided it was the time to cut in with a response. Namely, he shoved Adam so hard they both bounced off their respective walls of the mop alcove and rasped, “Fuck you!”
Adam, who trapped crane flies and spiders and hideous centipede things with a cup and piece of paper and carefully ferried them outside, shoved back, so hard that Neil’s head bounced off the wall this time. “Fuck you, too! What the fuck is your problem?”
“The fuck is my problem? The fuck is your problem!” Neil couldn’t see. He was still blind with it, the rage and the look that had been on Adam’s face, all he had was the slick fabric of Adam’s stage vest gripped in his hands and the ache on the back of his head.
“Nothing!” Adam had him by the shirt, too, and shook him hard, just once. “I was just getting my dick sucked by a hot guy after a successful concert and having a fantastic time, so the only fucking problem I have is my fucking baby brother, who’s been biting everyone’s heads off all week, and can’t even find a civil word for the nice guy who was giving me the nice blowjob, and freaks out too much for me to even apologize! What is your problem lately?”
“If you don’t have a problem, what were you going to apologize for?” That struck home, Adam’s face fell and he went pale, but Neil was too hysterical to stop and press his advantage. “How long has he been sucking you off, anyway, all week? Or is it longer and you were hiding it from me? What the fuck, he’s not even into guys!”
“He’s into getting me off, why do you care? Why should I keep you posted? I can do whoever I want!” Adam’s voice had gone weird, strangled, and Neil was certain he wasn’t saying what he wanted to say. Wasn’t apologizing for what he wanted to apologize for. Even though there was no one to hear them, even though the hallway was empty of people, they were half hidden in a fucking utility closet with their legs twisted together, not saying the things they wanted to say. Unless it was all in Neil’s head, and Adam was normal and sane and trying to be nice to the crazy person. In which case Neil was fucked, because he didn’t have any normal or sane or nice left in him.
For a moment he was swamped with doubt, as certain now that he was going crazy all by himself as he had been a moment before that he’d heard the same craziness in Adam, but then Adam lowered his voice to a whisper and said, “Please let me go.”
There. That was it. Neil felt like a balloon whose string had just been cut, floating up and up into the sky. “You first,” he said, and kissed him.
It was wet and intense, tongues and teeth and bruising finger grips, and almost immediately over. They hit the walls again in their hurry to get away from each other, and if anything had ever hurt as much as the horror on Adam’s face, Neil didn’t want to remember it. He knocked a mop over in his hurry to get out of the alcove and ran.
The hell of it was how much better Adam was at hiding things than him. People had already been walking on eggshells around Neil, but after that they acted like the eggshells were on top of landmines. While treating Adam normally, because Adam was acting normally, because Adam was better at this just like everything else.
As far as he could tell, Adam had told everyone that they’d had a fight and asked them to be nice to Neil about it because he was a sensitive kid. Adam had even gotten Tommy not to bring up the whole blowjob-setting-it-off thing, because no one was treating him as oddly as all that. Except for Tommy, of course, who Neil kept catching staring at him with serious expressions and deep eyes.
Neil would hate him for it, except awful fantasies like the one on the bed were still flashing into his head unbidden. They’d walk down the street to get coffee and his mind would be full of an image of shoving Tommy into traffic, so strong he could almost feel his arms move to do it, or picking up the heavy mike stand sitting right there while everyone tuned up for soundcheck and hitting Tommy with it as hard as he could. It was terrifying, and Neil couldn’t pretend it had anything to do with Tommy anymore. He couldn’t pretend much of anything, anymore.
The fantasies were only flashes. Most of his mind was filled with the kiss.
He lay in his bunk with the too-thin covers gripped tight and felt the kiss in his mouth as strongly as the ache in his knuckles from the strength of his grip. He staggered down to the complimentary continental breakfast in the hotel lobby and the scrape of Adam’s teeth on his lower lip replayed over and over, staring at his bagel instead of eating it because the sensation of it touching his lip clashed too weirdly with the memory. He lost track of half the people he was supposed to be keeping on schedule while trying to figure out why Adam had kissed him back.
There was no reason for Adam to kiss him back.
He had every reason to kiss Adam, every fucked up reason in the world, but why would Adam kiss him back? Adam, who had everything he’d ever wanted, who could form an actual line of people around an actual block who wanted to fuck him if he wanted, who had an angry, funny-looking kid brother instead of a sweet, graceful older one. And yet Neil had this memory that he could taste, of being licked and held onto and wanted.
It didn’t make sense. He stared blankly at the barrier being set up a few feet away from the stage, yellow and black striped like police tape, until the stripes looked to his tired eyes like they were moving. Maybe they’d move into a fucking answer. Adam’s hair had left a fine residue of styling gel on his fingers, and he knew it was long washed off, but he rubbed his fingertips against his jeans again anyway.
“Hey, Ne-whoa!” Tommy shouldn’t have tapped him on the shoulder like that; for an instant grabbing Tommy’s arm and flinging him off the side of the stage and seeing him crack his spine on the barrier was as vivid as the memory of pomade on his fingers, and then he shook loose of it and was just standing on the stage next to Tommy. Holding onto his arm.
“Shit.” Neil dropped Tommy’s wrist like it had gone white-hot. “Shit, shit, I’m sorry.”
“Dude, it’s fine. You’re gonna have to do more than that to leave a bruise.” Tommy gave him this concerned, almost pitying look and then earnestly said, “you know, if you want to talk about it, or anything, maybe I could-“
“No.” That was the last fucking thing he needed, talking about it. He didn’t even want to think about it in words inside his own head. “No. Thanks, but I can deal with it.”
“Okay.” Tommy only looked more worried now. He gave off a general atmosphere of being two seconds from calling Neil’s mom, and wouldn’t that be the worst thing ever. “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure!” He did not need pity from the person he was struggling not to murder. He didn’t need to be having this conversation at all. “Seriously. Look, don’t you guys have to, like, soundcheck? Get to work. I’ll talk to you later. Thanks, though.”
He fled to the least populated corner of the backstage he could find, which nearly landed him in another broom closet because nothing was empty backstage during a show, and he had to make do with sitting in the corner of Adam’s dressing room and looking prickly. Which was not itself a great spot. When the strains of Twentieth Century Boy started to filter through the walls, he fled to the buses.
Hiding in his bunk, listening to everyone else in the world talk and laugh and scream and generally have fun, fighting to keep memories of Adam’s mouth and visions of Tommy being crushed by falling stage lights out of his head and failing, he decided it was time to do something about this.
Four hours after the show they were already in the next city, barely bleary-eyed when they trooped off the buses and into the hotel lobby. It was easy; he told Lane that she worked too hard and he’d talk to the concierge tonight, and before he handed out hotel keys, he slipped the extra key to Adam’s room into his pocket.
The only variable in the plan was Tommy, but luckily he faceplanted into bed the instant he walked into the room he, Neil, and Sutan were all crammed into together because Neil’s millionaire brother was a cheapskate. Neil dropped his duffle, double-checked Tommy (hiding under the covers and swearing at Sutan when he made a comment about civilization and how it related to showering and brushing your teeth), and snuck out of the room, unnoticed in the chaos.
Neil nearly passed out from hyperventilation and adrenaline on the way over to Adam’s room, his hands shaking so badly that it took him three tries to get the card reader in the door to operate and let him in. So of course Adam was in the shower, singing something rendered unrecognizable from all the wandering around the melody he got up to when he thought no one else was listening.
His rage briefly spiked up to scream-and-bash-head-against-wall levels, but a wash of relief cooled it as soon as it came. He could go. He could turn around and walk out this door right now and no one would ever know he’d nearly done this.
The attempt was abortive; he couldn’t even pick his feet up when he turned to go. Part of it was how much he wanted this, but part of it was pure unwillingness to back down after he’d decided to do it. It was probably sick, but he felt proud of that. It made him feel brave. It made him feel like Adam.
Even so, it was nice to have a few minutes alone in the room, to adjust to the hair-raising excitement in his blood, to get settled enough to make it hard for Adam to bodily fling him out the door the second he suggested this, to just be alone. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been properly alone.
The shower turned off, and another jolt of excitement shivered through him. Time was counting down. He definitely had no more than half an hour before Adam finished posing in the mirror or applying seven different creams or plucking his arm hair or whatever the fuck it was he did in there. Neil was laughing, giggling hysterically, struggling to keep it silent. But Adam was about to come out of there.
Neil started stripping, not letting himself think about it, focusing as hard as he could on the mental image of Adam making his stupid model faces in the mirror. It didn’t work; when he got down to his underwear he couldn’t do it, his hands rested on the waistband of his boxers and he just couldn’t, so he left them on and flung himself facedown on the slippery hotel bedspread.
It certainly felt like half an hour before the door opened, the song going from echo-y and distant to muted and immediate before abruptly cutting off. “What…oh no. No no no.”
The thick carpet muffled any footsteps. Neil had to see. He was too terrified to look. He had to. He rolled over.
Adam was standing next to the bed already wearing nothing but a towel around his waist, with an expression on his face that Neil could hardly stand to look directly at, that he wanted a picture of to keep forever. As long as he found a place to hide it that no one could ever, ever find. He wished he’d ditched the underwear, too. He made himself meet his brother’s eyes.
“Why are you here?” Adam’s beautiful, clear voice came out harsh and half-whispered.
“Don’t fucking ask me that.” Neil wanted to look away, wanted to wriggle, wanted to roll back over on his stomach because even now, at this point, he was ashamed for Adam to see him getting hard.
“Don’t fucking ask me this!” The bed creaked when Adam put one knee on it, almost falling, then with far more control got to his hands and knees and crawled up the bed, crawled up Neil’s body, dislodging the towel but not losing it entirely. “Please don’t ask me for this.”
“Why not?” Neil’s voice strained almost to the point of breaking and crying, but not quite.
“Because I’ll give it to you.” Adam rested his forehead against Neil’s, and Neil felt like his blood was about to turn into electricity and take the rest of him with it.
He grabbed the back of Adam’s neck hard and tilted his head up a little bit and they were kissing again, hard and hungry and perfect again, all his nerves and fear and logical nausea at the thought of fucking his own brother steamrollered by how good it felt. He wrapped his arms and legs around Adam and didn’t think about anything.
Adam pulled away sooner than Neil wanted him to, but after his lips had started to numb with exertion, leaving a sticky trail of kisses down his chest until Neil realized they weren’t just wet with saliva and put a hand to Adam’s cheek, more gently than he’d meant to. “Hey, hey, don’t cry.”
“How am I not gonna cry? I-I did something, I fucked you up-“ He turned his face into Neil’s hand, tears smearing across his palm, surprisingly hot.
“No. It’s not your fault I’m fucked up. I’m an adult, I’m no one’s fault but my own anymore.” He’d started talking just trying to make Adam feel better, but as the words came out of his mouth they felt true.
Adam huffed out an irritated breath, skidding along Neil’s palm and making him shudder. The corner of Adam’s mouth quirked up at that, and he grabbed Neil’s hand and did it again deliberately, shooting a wicked little look up at Neil even as he blinked the last tears out of his eyes. Neil let his head fall back against the mattress. “Shit.”
“Mmm.” Adam placed a chaste kiss in Neil’s palm, then a more open one on his wrist, mouthing down his arm. When he hit the elbow it got a whimper out of Neil, so of course he had to do it again, and Neil wouldn’t feed him the reaction he wanted except he couldn’t help it, he was wrapping his legs tighter around Adam’s hips and squirming and the asshole had barely even done anything yet. No one’s dick had even been touched, there was still a thick layer of terrycloth in between their hips.
“I think the real reason most people don’t sleep with their hot relatives is because it’s too fucking embarrassing.” The towel thing was a real issue. It wouldn’t be hard to move it, though, easier than Neil’s underwear, he could just grab it and toss it and there’d hardly be any barrier between them. Except then there’d hardly be any barrier between them.
“I can’t really torture you forever about being bad in bed.” Adam gave him another one of those wicked smiles and leaned up to kiss his mouth again. “People would ask how I knew.”
“Fuck you, I’m not bad in bed!” Maybe he was, though. He was lying there petrified, letting Adam do whatever he wanted to him. Adam was never going to want to do this again, not that they were ever going to do it again. Were they?
“Hey, I’m the older one, I totally get to fuck you.” Adam sounded almost normal, which did not argue in favor of Neil’s skill here. Fuck that.
“Okay,” he said, and pulled the towel out from between them. It was interesting, he was close enough to Adam’s face to see his pupils blow out wider, and close enough to his dick-it was right there up against his, oh god oh fucking god-to feel him get harder.
“Oh.” Adam squeezed his eyes shut, then laughed, not his normal bubbly giggle this time, but low and tinged with desperation. “I didn’t realize how much I wanted that.”
“Not really the kind of thing you let yourself think about.” Neil smoothed his hands down and back up the broad expanse of Adam’s back, then got a good hold on his hair and kissed him hard. The desperation in Adam’s laugh was in his kisses, too, strong and biting, and he dropped one hand down to the back of Neil’s thigh, slipping it up into his boxers, dragging another whimper out of Neil.
Adam drew back, gave Neil a shaky approximation of a smile, and climbed off of Neil and the bed. Neil barely had time to lie back and wonder where the hell that noise he kept making had come from-he’d never made it before, and it had to pick the most embarrassing time possible to show up?-before Adam was back with, yep, that was a condom and a tube of lube. This was happening. His brother was pulling off his underwear and crawling up between his knees and Neil had never felt so exposed in his life.
“Shh, it’s okay.” Adam hooked one of Neil’s knees up over his shoulder and kissed the inside of his thigh. Neil managed to bite down on the embarrassing whimpering noise this time, he was very proud of himself.
“Changing your tune, huh?” He hated this part, this anticipation, lying there and listening to the tube’s cap go click. It might have helped to be looking, instead of squeezing his eyes shut and tilting his head back, but he couldn’t seem to do it.
“If you don’t shut up, I’m going to toss you out of bed and send you back to your room unfucked.” Adam tapped his fingers emphatically against a part of Neil’s ass that Neil didn’t even think about existing most days. It made muscles twitch and jerk all through his body, and left sticky spots behind.
“No you won’t.” He hoped Adam would assume he was rolling his eyes, because he couldn’t manage it. He could barely manage to breathe.
“You’re right.” Another kiss on the inside of his thigh, quick and comforting. Neil was almost getting used to fingers in spots he didn’t even think about. He wanted to tell Adam to just go ahead and do it, but he couldn’t draw in enough breath to say it. “I won’t.”
He should have been looking, because the finger slipping inside him was a shock. It made his spine arch, which made the finger shift inside of him, which-shit shit shit that did not feel how he expected. Or it did, but, more so.
“Okay?” asked Adam, which was a good question. He hadn’t thought about it from that angle.
“Yeah. Fucking weird, but yeah.” That had better not be trembling he was feeling in his muscles. How were they supposed to get Adam’s whole dick in him again?
“Good.” Then there was some shifting that Neil didn’t understand until his cock was engulfed in warm wet heat and fuck, forget the finger up his ass, forget that he was in bed with his brother, forget the whole fucking world because there was a grade A blowjob happening to him.
He’d actually already known his brother gave good head; he’d always been sickly fascinated when Adam’s friends had mentioned it, and egged them on in their descriptions even as he protested about how grossed out he was. It should have been an early tip-off, frankly. But the reality of it was totally different, hands and mouth and fingers everywhere, and oh god damn, he was going all the way down wasn’t he? No one had ever deep-throated Neil before, maybe he wasn’t packing as much as Adam but he was still pretty intimidating, and Adam fit his whole cock down his throat like it was nothing. He was pretty sure the fingers up his ass were making it better, and hey, that was a lot of fingers. Maybe this was going to work.
“Adam?” he said, and Adam was pulling off and out of him immediately. Neil curled forward and kissed his red, used-looking mouth. “Can we, yet?”
“You think you’re ready?” Adam’s fingers slipped back inside of him, easy, rubbing at a spot that made his insides go warm as lava.
“How the fuck should I know, I’ve never done this before. C’mon, I want your dick in me, let’s go.” He lay back down and pulled Adam down on top of him.
Adam put his free hand out to prop himself up over Neil. “Wait, never? At all?”
“Uh, no. When would I have?” Cold worry cut through the haze of arousal. “Is that not okay?”
“No, I mean, it’s fine, I just…don’t people experiment at college? Isn’t that what you do?” He kissed Neil hungrily, starting to really thrust with his fingers, and he was melting-hot, buzzing. “No, it’s good. It’s really good. If someone else had fucked you I’d have to beat them up, I think.”
That made Neil laugh. “You couldn’t beat someone up if they were a card-carrying puppy-kicking Nazi.”
“Well, I’d pay someone else to do it, I’m rich now. Fuck, I can’t believe…” and he pulled Neil’s leg back up on his shoulder and then Neil was getting a cock shoved up his ass.
It was a lot more than fingers, and not just because Adam had missed his calling in the porn industry. Having Adam leaning over him and staring into his eyes like that was almost too much to take, and it left him shaking and inventing whole new categories of embarrassing little whimpering noises, and he couldn’t even care.
Adam certainly wasn’t going to notice now. “Oh my god.”
Neil groped for words and came up with, “Fuck me fuck me fuck me!”
His brother kindly obliged, slow and dragging sweet instead of the pounding Neil wanted but he wasn’t in any position to object, clinging to Adam again and falling apart. Every thrust was a little easier to take, physically and mentally, until Adam was sliding easily in and out of him, and he was almost able to feel the sensations without thinking anything at all. Then Adam made a sound encouragingly close to Neil’s embarrassing whimpery sound, dropped his head down to Neil’s shoulder, and went for it, hard and fast.
Perfect. Neil’s brain cracked into pretty glittery sparkles and blew away, and there was nothing but sex and sensation, heat and sweat, the body in his arms and inside him, the rhythm pounding through him and echoing in his ears as the bed frame hit the wall over and over and over again.
Neil barely realized he was reaching for his dick until Adam grabbed his wrist and pinned it to the bed over his head. They stared at each other for a moment, until Adam managed, “Let me do it. I’ll take care of you. I promise I’ll take care of you.”
“Yeah.” Or something that sounded like it, anyway, Neil had seriously lost his grip on language.
It was enough to satisfy Adam, though, who got a hold of Neil’s other wrist and pinned it next to the first for good measure, then went back to fucking into him, faster this time, and Neil wished he wouldn’t stare like that, he hated being stared at, hated it hated it hated it and oh god he could almost come just like this, so close so close until Adam relented and switched to pinning his wrists with one forearm across them, which brought Adam down so close to his face he could feel Adam’s breath across his lips and as soon as Adam’s free hand wrapped around his dick he was coming. Before the last shudders of pleasure had left his body Adam was losing his rhythm and curling down over him and making the most gorgeous, hurt sound he’d ever heard in his life.
And then he was lying in bed with his brother’s dick softening in his ass, sticky, ears full of static in the too-quiet room. The air conditioner kicked on.
Adam pulled out of him, carefully, then got up and went into the bathroom. Neil rolled over on his side, then curled up around himself and tried to will himself out of existence.
The bed creaked like it had when Adam had crawled over him and begged him not to ask for this, and a damp hand touched his shoulder. “Hey, let me clean you up.”
As soon as he uncurled there was a washcloth on his stomach. He instantly grabbed Adam’s wrist. “Don’t, I can do it.”
“No, let me-“ Adam stopped and made a face.
“Take care of me?” Neil forced himself to let go and allow it, even though it made his face burn. “I think I was hoping I could get it out of our systems.”
Adam’s laugh had no humor in it at all. “Wouldn’t it be nice, if things were that easy.”
Yeah, that was plenty clean. Neil shoved Adam away and got off the bed to go find his clothes. The headrush made him dizzy.
“Where are you going?” The strain in Adam’s voice made Neil’s heart twist in his chest.
“I don’t know. Back to my room, I guess.” The thought was actually kind of horrible. He hadn’t been gone all that long. Sutan was probably still up reading. Maybe he’d wander around the city instead. Nothing like wandering the streets of an unfamiliar foreign city in the middle of the night while seriously upset.
“I’m not going to sleep.” Adam pulled one leg up and rested his chin on his knee, wrapping his arms around it. “I mean, if you don’t want to be around me, I understand, but I’d rather not be alone.”
Neil stared at his boxers in his hand, trying to force his swirling thoughts into some kind of order. It wasn’t that hard a question, though, really. There was one person he always wanted to be with. “Okay. I’m gonna go take a shower.”
The shower emphasized what a good idea it was to stay. Even being alone for a few short minutes sucked harder than Adam in a blowjob competition. Which was the kind of thought he could not stop having. The swirling glitter haze of thoughts in his head was coalescing back together, into self-recrimination and sarcasm and vivid images of the things they’d just done. He got back out as soon as he could.
So of course Adam decided he had to take a shower, too. Neil spent the time indecisively taking his shirt on and off and hating his life.
Once they were in bed together with the lights off, things felt a little better. In the dark, the little voice in his head laughing at him was quieter. Even more so when he let Adam cuddle him close. He curled into Adam’s chest and tried to focus on the moment he was in, like he’d managed for a few minutes when they were having sex and he’d managed to be happy.
“I never thought you’d want me.” He hadn’t planned to say it; he hardly even knew where it came from, but there it was.
The arm Adam had slung over him tightened a bit. “Well, I shouldn’t. I mean, I’m not supposed to. You’re totally worth it. You’re awesome.”
“Shut up,” said Neil. “You’d be into me if I were the worst person alive. It’s all your own over-clocked protective instincts fucking with you.”
“It’s not, though.” Adam had this knack of putting emotions into his voice that Neil assumed was one of the things he practiced alone in the bathroom, for sensible career-related reasons. The quiet earnestness still made his heart break a little. “I love you.”
“Shut up.” Neil cuddled in closer.
A long time later, when Neil wasn’t even sure if Adam was still awake, he said, “I’m glad it’s both of us. It’d be lonely, y’know, alone.”
Adam’s arm tightened around him in response.
No one looked askance at them when they came down to breakfast the next morning, because no one in their right mind would have imagined they were doing what they did. Neil had to borrow Adam’s hideous plaid button-up to wear over his t-shirt, because there were hickeys all down his fucking arm.
“So,” Tommy asked quietly, when Neil sat down next to him because the only other seat available was next to Adam, “you guys work it out?”
“What?” Neil said, a little too panicky, mind crackling with paranoia. Tommy might guess, if anyone could, he was the only one who knew what had set Neil off in the first place.
“Whatever you were fighting about. You talked it out, right?” Tommy’s pretty face was open and guileless, and smudged with leftover makeup.
“Um.” Neil studied his bagel closely. The onion pattern was suddenly fascinating. “I guess. Some things you never entirely work out, you know? Especially with family.”
“Yeah.” Tommy sounded so sad and sympathetic. It made Neil want to punch him. “But you seem, like, more relaxed this morning. So it helped?”
Neil started to laugh, and got it under control very quickly, because he could hear the hysteria in it. He glanced up from his bagel, but no one looked concerned, not even Tommy. Well, Adam did. “Yeah. Yeah, it helped.”
Two days later, Neil wandered into the big bedroom at the back of the bus looking for a DVD and accidentally woke Adam up from a nap. In the twilight that came through the smoked windows and the haze of sleepiness and boredom, there didn’t seem to be anything stopping him from leaning down for a kiss, and he was almost there, with Adam’s fingers threading into his hair, before he had the sense to pull back. He nearly tripped and concussed himself scrambling out of the room.
The next afternoon, Adam cornered him after soundcheck. “Sauli’s coming to Paris with me.”
“Who?” That was a weird fucking name. Who had a name like that? It was like begging for a punch in the jaw.
“The guy I met in Finland.” Adam his hands jammed deep into his pockets, and for once was not staring into Neil’s eyes like he had the recipe for the philospher’s stone written across his retinas. He wouldn’t even look at him.
Oh, yeah, that guy. Neil had totally wanted to punch him in the jaw. “You’re taking a drunken one night stand to Paris for a week? Who even agrees to something like that?”
“We’ve been emailing!” Adam said defensively. He dropped his voice almost to a whisper. “Look, I can’t-I need this, I need someone. To distract me. I need to stop thinking. I need this.” Now Neil wanted to hit Adam in the face. “You need this.”
“I need you getting fucking murdered in your sleep because you whisk people you barely know off to romantic vacations alone together?” Neil wanted to hit himself in the face. He knew Adam was right. That was what made it so awful.
“Don’t be like that.” Also, Adam knew he knew it. One of the many, many things that sucked about being in love with his brother was that his brother knew every fucking thing about him. It was like being married for two decades but with only one night of awesome honeymoon sex.
“If I could stop it, I would!” He flung out his hands, not sure what he meant to do with them, turned it into a ridiculous dramatic gesture, and stomped off before it could get any worse.
Adam was right, though. After several hours of sulking, he even felt like he could cope with that. Their little ‘conversation’ really had helped. He was spending a lot more time jerking off and hating himself, but the bile-spitting rage had cooled way down, and the involuntary violent daydreams had nearly stopped. He wouldn’t admit it if asked, but he could probably even be pleasant to this Sauli asshole. It wasn’t fair of him, anyway, it wasn’t like Adam was the only one meeting interesting people on tour.
It only took a minute of searching to find Kate’s email. They’d been talking a lot, earlier in the summer, before Neil had slipped so far inside his own head. Before things got so drastically out of hand. She took the explanation of tour fatigue easily, and was even more psychotically excited about lengthy vacations with people she hadn’t spent nearly enough time with than his brother. Although, to be fair, she clearly hadn’t wanted to go to Asia alone in the first place. Neil could certainly sympathize with people who set themselves up to do exciting things they weren’t equipped to handle.
He could have told Adam in public, like Adam had told him about Paris, but he didn’t. He waited until they were in another hotel in the middle of the night, and Adam wasn’t supposed to have his own room this time, but Sutan had met up with some friends and evaporated.
Sutan had the other room key, though, so Neil had to knock this time. Adam opened the door and immediately developed an apprehensive look, but when he opened his mouth no sound came out. He let Neil in silently, instead, then edged around him to sit down on the bed. His face was flawlessly controlled when he looked up, smooth and slightly expectant, like Neil was about to start asking questions about what it was like to meet Madonna.
“I’m going to Korea.” He hadn’t meant to come out with it so baldly. “With Kate. That girl, you know, that I met.”
“I remember her.” There was a twitch in the mask, a movement in Adam’s forehead, the corner of his mouth quirking down. Then he smiled, broad and sunny. “That’s great! You’ll have so much fun!”
“Yeah.” Neil shoved his hands into his pockets. He knew he was mimicking Adam’s body language from a few days ago, but he couldn’t make himself stop. “Should be educational. We’ll probably see some other countries in Asia, too.”
“Yeah?” Adam leaned forward, friendly and excited. “Which ones? That’s so cool, I’ve never been to Korea!”
“I know. We don’t know which ones yet, it’s not all planned.” He took his hands out of his front pockets and shove them in his back ones, then took them out of those and hooked his thumbs in his belt loops, then unhooked his thumbs, grabbed Adam’s chin, and kissed him.
Adam kissed back, but no harder than Neil kissed him. He didn’t put his hands in Neil’s hair.
When Neil pulled back, he could see Adam’s hands, still on the bed, the covers so bunched and twisted in them that the pillows were starting to come uncovered at the top of the bed.
“Sorry,” he said.
“No, it’s.” Adam swallowed and tried again. “No, I.” He finally let go with one hand, and reached out for Neil, but his fingertips barely skimmed along Neil’s cheek. “Have fun. In Korea.”
“I’ll do my best,” Neil promised. They stared at each other for a long moment, and Neil realized he didn’t have anything else. “I will.”
Adam nodded, and Neil turned and walked out the door.
