Beautiful (part 2, Chris/Eminem)
2
October 5, 1999 - Los Angeles, California
Marshall stared at the computer screen silently. Chris Kirkpatrick’s face stared back at him and Marshall’s heart was pounding like a jackhammer. Behind a locked door, in complete privacy and he still couldn’t let himself relax enough to really take it all in.
The guy was in his head like a melody and there was no shaking him. Now, here he was trying to be stealthy so that he could find out more about him and for what? Marshall sat back in his chair and sighed. There was no way that he could do anything about this…attraction or obsession or whatever the fuck he was feeling.
He’d seen them around. The entertainment world was like a small town, everybody knew everybody. Every stylist had worked with another stylist who had worked with ‘N Sync. Or every director had lunch with another director who was working with ‘N Sync. Still, Marshall hadn’t had the opportunity to talk to Chris again and he doubted he ever would.
The bottom line was that as small as their worlds were, they were on two very different pages and Marshall couldn’t even fathom how the two could mesh. And that was a good thing. Because he didn’t have as much self-control as he wanted to have when it came to Chris Kirkpatrick. He shouldn’t even be on this computer, dialing into the Internet and scouring links for any pictures he could find, but he couldn’t exactly walk into a store and pick up a copy of Tiger Beat without looking like a fucking idiot. And wanting to see the other man was eating away at him.
Marshall moved the mouse to close out the internet browser, but stopped short. Chris’ eyes stared back at him. Deep, brown and thick-lashed. Entrancing. Fucking beautiful. Marshall sighed.
+++
December 12, 2000 - Hollywood, California
Proof was drunk as hell and Marshall propped him up in a chair on the fringes of the party and sat a bottled water in front of him.
“Drink this shit, man,” Marshall said quickly. “I’m not fucking carting your ass home like this. Kim will be all over my case and I’m not trying to fight with her, we just got back together.”
“Shit,” Proof mumbled and Marshall sat down across from him, watching as he drank. He hadn’t signed up to the designated anything for the night and it pissed him off that Proof was pulling the fall-down drunk game again. They were in Hollywood, but they didn’t have to act like total motherfucking rockstars. Especially when their movie studio execs at this party that he halfway wanted to impress.
Marshall looked around the party for a glimpse of the producer he was working on pitching an idea to. The man had gone off with a skinny brunette a few minutes before and Marshall scoured the dance floor for him. He came up short when he spotted Chris Kirkpatrick with said brunette, instead. Marshall swallowed hard and stared. Somehow, she had gotten away from the producer and latched on to Chris, who was obliging her nicely by freak dancing with her in the middle of the dance floor.
Marshall’s gut churned with a mixture of desire and jealousy as he watched the two move closely together, gyrating hips, armed entangled. His little infatuation with Chris had gone on for longer than he cared to admit. There had been parties, awards shows, and performances dotting the landscape of their lives that caused their paths to intersect, but Marshall had been right in his thinking over a year before. The opportunity to actually talk to Chris Kirkpatrick had never dropped into his lap again.
It was a fucking good thing, too, because Marshall had spent many, many late nights envisioning exactly what he wanted to do with Chris Kirkpatrick should they ever have the opportunity to be alone together and one of the first things he envisioned was getting the little guy on his knees. Marshall closed his eyes at the thought and looked away from the writhing pair.
Proof was staring straight at him, the water bottle empty on the table in front of him.
“What’s wrong with you?” Proof asked slowly, the barest hint of sobriety threading through the words. Marshall shrugged, opened his mouth, and then closed it. He narrowed his eyes and glared at Proof.
“DeShaun, man, have you ever met anybody -” Marshall began roughly.
“What?” Proof asked.
“Have you ever met anybody that you just fucking had to have?” Marshall asked. “Even if it might fuck everything up?”
Proof stared at him for a long time.
“Why the fuck didn’t you just let the divorce go through, Em?” Proof asked. “Especially when you got this on your chest?”
Marshall shook his head and scrubbed a hand over his face tiredly.
“I don’t know,” he admitted.
+++
June 13, 2001 - Los Angeles, California
Marshall’s head bobbed to the beat of the music coming through the headphones and he started rapping the third verse for about the twentieth time.
“A-tisket a-tasket, I go tit for tat with anybody who's talkin this shit, that shit,” Marshall spat into the microphone. “Chris Kirkpatrick, you can get your ass kicked worse than them little Limp Bizkit bastards. And Moby? You can get stomped by Obie, you thirty-six year old baldheaded fag, blow me. You don't know me, you're too old, let go. It's over, nobody listen to techno.”
“That’s it, that’s it,” Jeff Bass called out through the sound system and Marshall stopped, stepping back from the mike and grabbing his bottled water. He downed nearly half of the bottle, eyeing Jeff, Obie and Dre on the other side of the glass as they listened to the playback. After a few minutes, Dre gave him a thumbs up and Marshall grinned.
That was it. There it was. Out of his head, out of his notebook and on the track. He was calling Chris out and he knew it. Everybody would take it to be a slight against boybands and part of the usual Eminem diatribe, but Marshall knew better. It was about Chris Kirkpatrick being in his head. It was about the fact that he wasn’t going to be tied to down to Kim anymore. It was about the fact that he had to have Chris…and if that meant, he had to call him out an album, then that’s what it meant.
Continued