Fic: Road to Somewhere
Title: Road to Somewhere
Pairing: Kris/Katy, Kris/Adam
Word count: 9800
Rating: R
Summary: The thing between them that just is. (AI tourfic)
Warnings: Angst, weed
Author's note: Thanks to cathalin for her inspiring comments on sexual compatibility. ;) Title borrowed from Goldfrapp's song of the same name.
Disclaimer: Pure imagination. No disrespect intended.
Road to Somewhere
March
They talk about it freely. It, the thing between them that just is.
“Openness is always best,” Adam says in their room at the mansion. Adam has a thought-out response to every situation, it seems to Kris. It’s one of the things about him that makes Kris feel safe. “Who needs the complication of having to deny shit to yourself and put up a front for other people?”
“Simple is good,” Kris agrees sleepily, burrowing under the covers. Their bedtime confessionals, as Adam calls them, are a wind-down routine they both look forward to, but Kris tends to wind down much faster than Adam does.
“Besides, why wallow in angst when you can laugh about it?” Adam sounds alert enough to philosophize for hours. “It’s not that deep.”
Kris doesn’t think it’s a joke, exactly, that his roommate finds him distracting. It’s nice, in a way he doesn’t need to analyze. And his reciprocal . . . noticing, that’s only natural. Adam’s personality attracts everyone, plus he’s objectively six feet tall and a row of cherries on the genetic slot machine and a walking advertisement for sex when he chooses to be.
“Crushes are fun,” Kris summarizes with a yawn.
“I’m about to be talking to myself here, aren’t I? That’s my Kris. Don’t let the presence of the big, scary gay dude in the next bed keep you awake.”
“Pretty sure you’re just waiting me out so you can pounce. I can’t stop you, but be quiet about it, OK?”
“Goodnight, cute straight boy.”
April
There’s no question of awkwardness when Adam’s sexuality makes headlines. Not between the two of them, anyway. Kris is sure it’s plenty awkward for Adam to check his Google Alerts and find a dozen blog entries titled, “Is Adam Lambert Gay?”
“Lots of room for speculation here,” Adam says dryly, studying the photo of himself with his tongue in his ex-boyfriend’s mouth like he’s never seen it before. Which isn’t the case. “I put these pictures online,” he tells Kris. “I would’ve taken them down if I’d remembered. But it’s not like I have anything to be ashamed of. Except maybe the hair.”
He’s trying for his usual breeziness, so Kris follows his lead. “I don’t think purple is your color,” he agrees.
“That’s more of a lavender, honey,” Adam shoots back, deliberately camp.
“I like the blue on . . . Brad, right? He’s pretty hot.” Kris maintains his bland expression under Adam’s suspicious gaze. He’s perfectly aware of his own striking resemblance to Brad--same coloring, face shape, and jawline. He looks more like Brad than his own brother. “You have really good taste,” he adds, and snickers at Adam’s unspoken You little shit.
It’s different when the pictures turn up on Bill O’Reilly’s show--cropped, to protect Middle America from the commingling of male mouths. Adam shrugs in resignation, but Kris can’t help bursting out, “He’s the one who should be embarrassed, that-- ” His upbringing intrudes to veto the words fucking asshole. “People suck sometimes.” He tackles Adam in an impulsive hug.
“Thank you, Kris.” Adam’s voice wavers just a little. He holds on tight.
--
To balance their show-and-tell, Kris offers pictures of himself and Katy. In the earliest, a beaming blond cheerleader snuggles up to the bowl-cut band nerd who was Kris at age sixteen. The most recent is their wedding portrait.
“It must be amazing to have that long-term connection with someone,” Adam says, a little wistfully. From their late-night talks, Kris knows that his relationship with Brad hadn’t been all makeouts and trips to Burning Man. “When I met him, all the love songs suddenly made sense,” Adam had confided. “At the end, I learned to relate to all the heartbreak songs.”
Much as he loves his wife, Kris can’t hold up their relationship as some sort of ideal. What does it say about him, he wonders, that his notion of love is comfortable and easy? He flashes on the pictures of Adam and Brad, the obvious passion. Their dynamic verifies certain conclusions he’s already drawn about Adam, and that is a little awkward--you don’t picture your friends having sex, even if they happen to be really good-looking.
“Yeah, I’m lucky to have her,” is all Kris says. If you don’t propose after six years together, it starts to look like you’re never going get around to it. That doesn’t make the six years--now seven--less of an accomplishment. So what if he doesn’t have newlywed stars in his eyes? He’s written some of those songs himself, the love songs and heartbreak songs. He can be proud of his more restrained brand of passion.
June
A month after the finale, Adam gets to test his policy of openness on his own terms. He gives an interview to Rolling Stone “in rare form--no filter,” as he puts it. Privately, Kris disputes the “rare” part, but he listens patiently as Adam bemoans his runaway mouth.
“It’s embarrassing,” Adam complains during a break from tour rehearsals.
“Since when do you get embarrassed?”
“OK, not embarrassed. But uncomfortable. Isn’t everyone supposed to pretend to be shocked by recreational drug use? No one but my mom even cares about that part.”
An exaggeration, maybe, but it’s true that the public is more interested in Adam’s disclosures about Kris. “Pretty, nonchalant, and totally my type,” he’d dished to the magazine, launching a thousand unwelcome follow-up questions. Adam fields them with a polished spiel about the harmless, flattering nature of a crush. Outwardly, he remains cool and mildly amused, but Kris knows he dislikes being put on the defensive.
The reporters ask Kris about it too, with avid eyes and a commiserating tone he doesn’t get. It is flattering. He’s supposed to be freaked out, just because Adam is a guy?
Kris’s fluency with lyrics doesn’t translate to interviews, but he tries. “It’s not like he was trying to make out with me or anything,” he hears himself say to Ryan Seacrest, and winces. Still, he relishes the role of defender. Through the months of competition, Adam had stood at his back, his support and sounding board. Now, if the subject of Adam animates Kris the way his win and his tour setlist don’t, if he tends to ramble on about how much he values their friendship, it’s no less than Adam’s due.
Katy professes to find it “sweet,” in a tone that prompts Kris to ask her how she really feels.
“But?”
“But the show is over. You don’t want people to keep associating and comparing the two of you. It’s time to move past that bromance stuff, the Kradam stuff.”
“I don’t think it’s ever going to go away completely. It was the two of us standing on that stage at the end. I don’t mind.”
“Well, you should.”
It’s a variation on a well-worn argument. If it progresses, she’ll accuse him of taking the path of least resistance, and he’ll accuse her of being all too happy to run his life. To preserve the peace of their remaining days together, he changes the subject.
His departure will be a relief for both of them, he suspects, a vacation from accomodation and compromise. But they’re just getting started on the hard work of being a couple. They’ve got plenty of time to learn.
July
A week into the tour, the wrangle over DVD selection is already a post-show ritual. As they claim their usual spots on the overstuffed couches, Matt and Danny arguing James Bond vs. Ron Burgundy, Kris breaks out the jumbo bag of Twizzlers a fan had given him that afternoon. “These rode around in the back of my pants for about an hour, but don’t let that stop you.”
Matt makes an eager grab. “Aw, strawberry. I like the red ones better.”
Anoop looks at him in disbelief.
“I know strawberry is red,” Matt says defensively, tossing the bag back to Kris. “I meant the plain red ones. Like you get at the movie theater?”
“Dude, red is not a flavor.”
Kris turns to Adam, whose smile is both indulgent and resigned. “Eight of us living together in this glorified RV for how long?” Adam whispers.
“That’s what headphones are for, man.” Kris gives him an encouraging nudge. “Have some Twizzlers.”
Adam wrinkles his nose. “Yum, candy disguised as plastic. Or is it the other way around? I’ll pass.”
“Delicious plastic. C’mon, we can share one. Like the dogs eating spaghetti, you know, in Lady And The Tramp?” Kris sticks a red rope in his mouth and dangles the other end at Adam suggestively.
After a moment of deliberation, Adam plucks it away and bites down on Kris’s end. “Mmm,” he says with exaggerated pleasure, to a catcall from Matt and a loud “Gross!” from Danny. “Tastes better than I remember.”
With the satisfaction of the born instigator, Kris nudges Adam again, harder this time, before turning his attention to Quantum of Solace.
In the corner of his eye, Adam smirks.
--
“Do you miss Arkansas?”
The question comes up nearly as often as “What was it like rooming with Adam?” No one asks Matt if he’s pining for Kalamazoo. Only Adam’s L.A. friends offer sympathy for his extended absence from home, because there’s no convincing them that L.A. isn’t the center of the universe. (Adam, who holds the same view, doesn’t try.) But Kris can’t escape his hometown, whether he’s in Little Rock or Sacramento or Glendale.
It’s how celebrity works, Kris is learning. You’re defined by a handful of easily digested details. For Kris, the keywords are small town, Arkansas, Christian, and married. Together, they suggest a package that includes a lot of things he isn’t. Conservative, for one.
The media’s version of Adam is the opposite--sparkly and superficial, the sum of his stage persona and his wardrobe. They‘re already eyeing him for diva tendencies.
“He’s ridiculously nice,” Kris tells the journalists, knowing he’s powerless against the soundbite, but determined to put the truth out there anyway. “I’m proud of him.”
“Kris is open-minded and liberal,” Adam says in turn. “He’s so talented, but even more than that, he’s a really good person.”
--
The notorious Rolling Stone cover shows up daily at the autograph tables. Familiar as it’s become, the image still registers, unlike his own face on the official glossies Kris signs by the dozen. He can’t help but notice Adam spread out and smoldering on rumpled sheets.
Inspiration strikes in Salt Lake City. With all the subtlety of a third grader pulling the hair of the boy he likes, he scrawls his Sharpie across his best friend’s crotch. He takes a second to admire the way the python poised at Adam’s thigh appears to be reading his name.
“Thank you so much, Kris!” The owner takes back her prize with a barely contained glee that says unmistakably, This will be on the internet within ten minutes.
Kris doesn’t have to track her progress down the table to know when she reaches Adam. He only has to turn to intercept the look boring into the side of his head. The intensity of Adam’s eye contact can be unnerving even when he’s at his friendliest, but Kris is immune. Mostly.
You’ll pay for this later, those eyes promise now.
Kris’s innocent smile broadens. I’ll hold you to that.
Retaliation is slow to arrive, but in San Diego, Kris wakes from a midmorning nap to find a haphazard monogram on his left arm, Adam’s felt-tip initials. He wears it with a sneaking, ridiculous sense of pride: He likes me back.
--
From his vantage point at the side of the stage, Kris notes the tweaks in Adam’s set: an extra ounce of vocal testosterone in “Whole Lotta Love,” new choreographic flourishes in the Bowie medley. He recognizes the craft, but the power of the illusion holds.
Adam is a quick study when it comes to wielding that power. The shedding of his elaborate studded coat has evolved into an equally elaborate seduction. Tonight, heavy-lidded, he lets his head fall back in a sensuous loll as the leather slides from his shoulders. Kris stares at the long line of his offered throat without judging his own reaction, which is, after all, the one the visual is meant to elicit.
He’s not the only one susceptible. Adam has gauged his audience well; the volume of their screams rises to drown him out every time his hand wanders below his rhinestone-flashing belt buckle, or slides with graphic intent up and down the mic stand.
“That’s rock ’n’ roll for you,” Adam agrees later. “Sex magic.” Scrubbed free of heavy stage makeup, his face looks guileless and young.
“Yeah, but it’s also you.”
“Well, of course. I’m the second coming of Freddie Mercury, haven’t you heard?” Adam piles on the irony, as if Kris is in danger of taking him seriously.
“And Elvis,” Kris reminds him. “David Bowie, too, probably, and he’s not even dead.”
Adam’s laugh can only be described as a giggle.
--
Kris doesn’t expose himself in well-timed flashes of skin and suggestion and soul the way Adam does. He picks up his guitar and lets instinct guide him to the core of a song.
Yearning is the key. The moodiness of “Ain’t No Sunshine,” the wounded cry of “Heartless”--it’s his instinctive language. A counterbalance to the settled side of his life, he supposes. Mostly he takes it for granted, that unquiet space that opens up in him when he performs, the one he can make listeners feel in themselves. The Idol stage had taught him the depth of his evocative gift. I don’t know you, but I want you all the more for that . . . Eyes shut, he’d channeled the poignancy of lovers destined to part, and felt the audience’s answering sigh.
“Humble” is a label Kris gets a lot, and it’s not entirely misplaced. The title of “your American Idol” strikes him as faintly ridiculous, like a paper crown worn after the birthday party’s over, so he pretends it’s not stuck on his head. (“That’s why it looks so good on you,” Adam says.) But when it comes to the music, his element, he’s anything but self-effacing.
These are the details, he reflects, that really define him.
--
En route to Tulsa, the group crowded into the small galley area is sullen, sleep deprivation in full effect. Matt glowers into the middle distance, his hair sticking up straight on one side and flattened on the other. Anoop hunches over his beloved iPhone; Scott meditatively chews a banana. The scenery outside--flat acres of parched grass--is barely more appealing.
Crunching cereal, Kris glances toward the front lounge, where Adam has retreated to take a call. He’s absorbed in conversation, phone wedged between his ear and shoulder, cup of coffee sitting untouched in front of him. For some obscure Adam-reason, he’s wearing his rings, all four of them, with his faded t-shirt and drawstring pajama pants. As Kris watches, he absently twists the thick silver bands on his fingers, clockwise, counterclockwise, then pulls them off one by one.
Self-preservation kicks in, a little late, and Kris becomes aware that the pre-caffeine bleariness surrounding him has sharpened to alert interest. Even Scott is lifting his head curiously, as though sensing a charge in the air around Kris.
“Just. Shut up,” Kris says halfheartedly. He busies himself with his spoon.
The silence lasts for three seconds, then, “Hey, Kris, want to play poker?” Matt deadpans.
--
Kris can laugh at himself, because it belongs to both of them equally.
There’s an elusive quality to Adam despite his sunniness, his willingness to befriend everyone. It’s the almost daunting self-possession, the ability to charm the press, melt a crowd, and take a compliment, all without visible effort. When he stumbles, it’s almost unnoticeable--and always because of Kris.
He’s never embarrassingly transparent, the way Kris can be. There’s nothing of pursuit in his manner, nothing more than an occasional flustered note in his banter and a softness in his expression. Kris has no defense against his subtle vulnerability--the bitten lower lip, the gaze that gravitates to the exposed hollow of Kris’s neck and darts away.
If he’s honest, Kris wants no defense. He wants pursuit. He wants to say, Look. His increasingly unbuttoned shirts say it for him.
--
Memphis brings, blessedly, a hotel room. “Just the scores,” Kris promises as he checks the channel listings and flips to ESPN.
“I’ve heard that before.” Adam is reclining against the headboard, lighting a joint he’d conjured from somewhere. He passes it over as Kris settles next to him, and after a few inhales Kris loses interest in the TV and gives himself over to contemplation of the ceiling sprinklers, the smoke detector, and the cottage-cheese bumps of plaster that remind him of his first apartment. Discontent intrudes. He doesn’t want to go back there.
A happy epiphany: He can take inventory of Adam instead. Adam is looking particularly alien tonight, his eyes not just heavily lined in black but shadowed in turquoise and half-ringed with crystal points. Comet trails of blue glitter streak his precariously upswept dark hair. The effect is designed to be projected to the seats of a large auditorium; up close, it’s startling. In contrast, his freckled arms are human, approachable.
“If it just . . . happened, it wouldn’t be our fault,” Kris blurts. There’s being open and then there’s yanking the door off its hinges. He blames the weed.
Adam tucks a hand behind his head, not at all shocked. “Like, I say something to make you absolutely furious-- ” he snorts at the idea of Kris in a fury “ --and you slap me across the face, and then-- ” He waves the joint to indicate a passionate clinch, a soundtrack crescendo, and the ripping of clothes. The smoke is an excess of drama, but then, Adam has always wanted a fog machine.
“Or we could wrestle, you know, just a couple of bros-- ”
Adam snorts louder. “I think I saw something like that on Xtube once.”
“ --and get all tangled up. Sexily. If that’s even a word.” Kris reconsiders. “On second thought, one of us might end up with a knee in the balls. Or fall off the bed and get a concussion.”
“And I’d have to settle for holding your hand in the emergency room.”
“Am I the one with the concussion?”
“No, no.” Adam leans down to brush his lips against Kris’s forehead. “No injuries allowed. I don’t want you to be hurt, ever.”
Kris is too fogged to figure out why this makes him sad, so he lets it go as he lets himself fall forward. “Yeah, well, don’t expect me to slap that beautiful face of yours, either,” he mumbles into Adam’s chest.
--
A few days later, Kris gets an e-mail: Like this? “Courtesy of Neil,” Adam’s message reads. “My brother lurks in some strange corners of the internet.”
Kris opens the attachment, which turns out to be a detailed colored-pencil sketch. Fan art, Kris supposes it’s called, though it’s a far cry from the well-meaning portraits pressed into his hands at the barricades.
There’s no mistaking the moment captured. He’d lived it inside his own skin, then seen it replayed over and over--the release after the tense height of the finale. His victory, Adam’s enveloping hug. Except that in the artist’s version, Adam is bending him back in an extravagant kiss.
“I think we blew Ryan’s mind.” Angling Kris’s netbook, Adam points a black-painted fingertip at the screen.
“No kidding.” Seacrest's rounded, staring eyes remind Kris of that YouTube staple, the Dramatic Chipmunk.
“Whatcha looking at?” Matt calls from the opposite couch, obviously hoping for an antidote to boredom.
“Graphic dude-on-dude porn,” Adam returns without missing a beat.
“Awesome.” Matt moves to get up, but subsides at some nonverbal warning from Adam. “Fine, keep your secrets.”
Kris clears his throat. “Yeah, that’s how it should’ve gone down.” His tone is as casual as he can make it. “Heat of the moment. Who could blame us?”
“About eighty percent of the people who voted for you, is my guess,” Adam says dryly.
“You’re probably right.” Kris stares at the screen, at alternate-reality Kris and Adam.
--
“And how are you getting along with everyone?” Katy asks on the phone. He’s been telling her about life on the bus--the late bedtimes and the unrelenting schedule, the moving landscape and the piles of laundry and the hours of waiting. Summer school days and summer camp nights.
“Great,” Kris answers honestly. “Matt’s always after us to make those videos, and he and Danny get loud sometimes. It bugs Anoop more than me. I just go hide out in my bunk for a while if I have to.” He casts around for more innocuous details. “Mike’s been a bit moody lately. I think he’s-- ” Kris aborts the words missing his wife with a sense of narrow escape. “ --going through a rough patch.”
“It sounds a lot like college.” As Katy starts to reminisce about her U of A dorm, Kris scans the parking lot, empty now that the early autograph seekers have scattered. He’s sitting on the steps of the bus. Chilled air spills out around him, dissipating instantly against a wall of July heat. The venue, a modern glass box, looks abandoned under the cloudless blue sky of midafternoon.
“So,” he says, with determined enthusiasm. “When are you coming out to see for yourself? Are we still aiming for the first week of August?” His gaze drops to his feet.
“Shanna’s cousin is having her shower on the fifth, but Atlantic City might work.”
“That’d be good. We’ll be staying in a hotel that night. You don’t need the full bus experience.”
A pair of snakeskin boots joins Kris’s Converse in his field of vision. Adam. Kris looks up with a quick smile to say This’ll only take a minute in their wordless way. Adam just shakes his head, his expression oddly flat, and maneuvers past him.
Kris recognizes the collapse of something precarious. The moment he hadn’t seen coming only because he’d refused to look. There’s a surreal sense of himself as a double image, Katy’s Kris and Adam’s Kris, the mechanical-sounding voice belonging to one and the accelerating heartbeat to the other. He knows he should ask Katy about her upcoming auditions and her mother’s planned visit to L.A., knows he should care about the answers, but he’s incapable. In full fight-or-flight mode, he shoves his phone into his pocket and hurries up the steps.
Adam doesn’t bother to look up as Kris enters the lounge. “It’s nothing, OK?” He’s scrolling through playlists, too fast for actual browsing. The unspoken message is clear: Go away. “I’m just in a shitty mood. It’ll pass. Ignore me.”
Kris sits down, pointedly not going anywhere. He waits until Adam pulls out his earphones with ostentatious reluctance. “I don’t want to do this either. Or maybe I do. All I know is that I’m freaking out because I just told my wife I loved her and felt guilty. Toward you.” He rubs his palms against his thighs and can practically see sparks of tension. “How’s that for open? So I think we need to have this conversation.”
Adam’s eyes are wide and stunned. “OK.” He puts down his phone in slow motion. “I don’t-- I’m not sure what to say. I’m sorry, Kris.”
“Sorry? You think you caused this, with your dangerous crush? Do you think I can’t take responsibility for my own feelings?” Kris stops himself. Anger is just a convenient outlet. “Forget that. I didn’t mean it.”
Adam takes the questions seriously. “I don’t think that of you, not at all. But God, Kris. You were a newlywed when we met. Those pictures of you and Katy-- How can I not feel like an attempted homewrecker?”
“Fine, we both deserve to feel like crap. But we didn’t mean for it to happen. I know it sounds like an excuse, but shouldn’t it count for something?” Kris isn’t even sure himself.
“I’m not trying to make this about me, Kris, but I have to be honest. I let myself forget you were married. Not all the time, and not enough to cross certain lines.” Adam is holding himself stiffly apart, as if it's not too late. “But pretending, even for a minute, that it wasn’t impossible--that was just setting us both up to be hurt. This was never supposed to hurt.”
“You think I wasn’t doing the same thing? All those times we-- We were always going to end up here.” Kris slumps into the cushions. It’s exhausting, pulling the truth out of himself and hearing Adam do the same. “You know what’s worse? I don’t regret it. Us. Even though I feel horrible. Part of me wonders if it was meant to happen.”
“I’d like to think so,” Adam says softly. “But even if the universe opens up a path, there’s always a choice of whether or not to follow.”
“There’s still a choice.” The words are a step into the unknown, exhilarating and terrifying. “The one I have to make now.”
The silence stretches on long enough for the white noise of the air conditioning to seep into the foreground. Finally Adam says, “I think you should make sure Katy comes for that visit,” and Kris has to look away from his face, from the bravery written there, and the cost.
“Neither us has really pushed for it. Things haven’t been great between us for a while. And not just because of you and me.”
“That’s understandable--all the time you’ve spent apart, all the adjustments you’ve had to make.”
“Yeah, and . . . I thought getting married would make more of a difference,” Kris says in a rush. “Make us more, somehow. But after all the fuss, the wedding and all that, it’s pretty much the same, the good and the bad. My mom said . . . She wanted us to wait a year.”
“Oh.” Adam exhales quietly, and they avoid each other’s eyes.
“I‘m just really confused right now.” And a really bad person for wanting to crawl into Adam’s lap and hide. “Like I’m arguing with myself inside my head.”
“Say some bad words,” Adam suggests, in a flash of his normal self.
“Dang. Crap. Frickin’ heck,” Kris obliges, and they manage to laugh.
There’s one thing left to say. “Adam, can we just keep going on the way we were? I don’t care if it’s the right thing or not. I want to have this summer with you, even if . . . ”
“We can have that.”
August
Choice aside, Kris knows there had been no decisive moment, no signpost saying Stop or proceed, just a steady deepening of what had existed between them from the start. Now, with the path marked Resist or not, he yields. It’s so easy to let the feeling carry him, to talk for hours with Adam, to teach him how to hold a guitar, to exchange looks that withhold nothing.
It’s just as easy to postpone introspection. Necessity carries him, too, from meet-and-greet to interview to stage to recording studio. At the end of each packed day, he’s usually too tired to think beyond the few seconds it’ll take to crawl into his bunk. His rare inklings of clarity amount to no more than jotted lines in the notebook where his songs get their start.
“Who knew playing at stardom was a real job?” Adam sighs. Kris knows he’s not talking about performing. They thrive on the energy that rebounds from the crowds--their own, magnified to euphoric levels. But the unending parade of expectant faces and extended hands, the extreme love that verges on hysteria, is a drain. Adam has started wearing earplugs in conspicuously bright colors, a statement in neon foam: See what you’re doing to my unflappable nerves.
Kris, always the mellower one, is only taken aback when a fan in Baltimore tries to shove her tongue in his mouth. “It‘ll make a good story,” he shrugs afterwards, when Adam is making noises of disgust and urging Listerine on him.
Maybe he’s just too worn out to care. Backstage, during a late-afternoon lull, they find a room with a couch long enough for Kris to stretch out on. Adam settles for pulling off his boots and propping his feet on the low coffee table. Folding his arms over his chest, Kris resolves that nothing short of a fire alarm is going to budge his head from its comfortable rest on Adam’s thigh.
His eyes stay stubbornly closed when he’s roused by voices. Anoop’s, at least, is considerately pitched. “This one’s already occupied by the Ambiguously Gay Duo.”
“I see no ambiguity here.” Matt.
The smack of a palm--Allison’s, no doubt--and a muffled “Ow!” accompany the receding of three pairs of feet. “Probably because you don’t know what it means,” faintly reaches Kris’s ears.
“A door with a lock,” Adam mumbles above him. “And a deadbolt. And a Do Not Disturb sign. That’s all I ask from life at this point.”
--
On the bus, the complaints usually return to a different theme.
“This is the summer of sexual frustration, am I right?” It’s Matt’s nightly refrain. Wired from the stage, they’re trying to sedate themselves with junk food in the absence of alcohol, another popular grievance. With Goldfrapp, in Adam's case.
“Yeah, it sucks,” Kris agrees around a mouthful of chips, mostly out of solidarity.
“Not so much for you,” Anoop points out. “You've got a wife. And you just got a conjugal visit.”
Some visit. Two days of forced cheerfulness, one round of tepid lovemaking, and constant undercurrents. By the end, Kris had noticed an ache in his facial muscles, as though he’d been holding a smile for an endless series of pictures. Adam had kept to himself, pleading a migraine.
“I thought you were going to say he's got Adam,” Matt cracks.
The volume on Adam’s phone must be low, because he stirs next to Kris and opens his eyes. “Like he said, Kris has a wife. But you don’t, so . . . What do you say? Help a brother out?” He raises a suggestive eyebrow.
Matt grins, unperturbed. “Hey, I’m not ruling anything out. If it gets too bad, I might come knocking on your curtain and beg you to make a man of me.”
“I don’t know about that, babe. Even I can’t work miracles.”
--
“Kris, I’ve been thinking,” Adam says abruptly. “I’m a guy.”
They have the lounge to themselves. It’s the middle of the night, “somewhere in America,” as Matt likes to say with a grand flourish toward the windows. Behind the half-raised shades, the huge panes of glass are dark.
Not sure where Adam is heading, Kris falls back on their old flirtation. “It’d be hard not to notice.” He lets his gaze drift blatantly down the length of Adam’s body. Halfway up again, he stalls, because, well. The fist-sized silver belt buckle isn’t needed for advertising. For scale, maybe.
Adam, clearly preoccupied, declines to see and raise Kris’s innuendo. “Purely hypothetically-- ” He grimaces. “This is going to sound like I’m trying to get in your pants. It’s just another one of those necessary conversations, OK?”
“Why don’t you just go ahead,” Kris encourages. “I’ll keep an eye on my zipper.”
Adam takes a deep breath. “You’ve talked about being attracted to guys before, but that’s a long way from actually having sex with one.”
“I’m not concerned about it. Squeamish, whatever. If that’s what bothering you.” Of all the whys and why-nots, this is one Kris can brush aside.
“A fantasy is one thing,” Adam persists. “You’re in total control. Not that you would be giving up control to me--shit! The point is, a fantasy is hazy and harmless and a long way from the reality of a-- ” He breaks off, like he’s borrowed Kris’s PG-13 filter. Kris has no difficulty supplying the words, even though he’s not going to say a cock in your ass either.
“The hard reality?” he says instead, unable to resist. “I’m taking this seriously, I swear. I wouldn’t get weirded out.”
“But you might not love it. I could make sure you liked it,” Adam says with a beguiling touch of arrogance. “But that’s not good enough, no matter what kind of connection we have out of bed. What if we turned our lives upside down for the sake of something that’s never going to work?”
“Is this that ‘100% straight’ crap again? I told you, I’m not even-- ”
“How can you be sure, Kris? It’s like those deli platters we have backstage. You always take the strawberries--you say they look so good, but then you complain that they’re not sweet enough and make me finish them. Stupid example, and no fruit jokes, please-- ”
“Adam. Gay sex is not strawberries.” Kris infuses his voice with all the certainty he can muster. “Believe me, I know, all right? The same way you knew, back in the day.”
At that, Adam smiles wryly. “Lucky you, you’re not a confused, chunky adolescent.” A hint of reservation lingers. It’s Kris’s turn to worry--that Adam envisions some lengthy, patient initiation, a gradual acclimation process, like teaching a timid novice to swim. Kris would rather throw himself into the deep end and let the water close over his head.
As long as they’re putting cards on the table, Kris decides he might as well slap this one down. “I would want you to-- There’s nothing I wouldn’t be ready to do.” It’s either shut his eyes or stare at Adam’s lap, and now he’s seeing it so clearly, the two of them-- “Because I think it would be more like Twizzlers, and you know how I feel about those.”
Adam is covering his face with his hands. “Why did I think this was a good idea?”
“No, you were right to put it out there. Communication prevents complications, et cetera.”
“I guess wanting to fuck you is uncomplicated. Except for the part where I have to walk to my bunk, which I think I’d better do right away.”
“You sure? If you’re still not convinced, we can put it to the test.” Enjoying himself, Kris casually moves a hand to his upper thigh.
“Goodnight. Cute, aggravating, not-so-straight boy.”
--
“I watched the GMA concert videos.”
Kris makes a noncommittal sound. Something tells him Katy isn’t leading up to an appreciation of David Cook’s Fleetwood Mac cover.
Sure enough, she continues, “You have to consider how it looks, you and Adam always sticking so close together. I don’t think you were more than a foot apart the entire time. And the way you kept staring at him, you’d think the two of you are . . . ” She pauses, leaving Kris to wonder, Do you think we are? “Blowing off a little steam is one thing-- ”
“Blowing off steam?” Kris repeats fatalistically. Denial would only make him sound guilty. He doesn’t delude himself that he’s not.
“I know you’re not actually doing anything,” she says hastily. The faint uncertainty might exist only in his imagination. “I know you wouldn’t. You’re just having fun. But people are going to get the wrong idea. They already have, Kris. You should see what some of the fan sites are saying.”
A reprieve. “People are going to say stuff no matter what. That’s part of this whole deal. We can’t let it bother us.”
“Your image matters, Kristopher. I talked to Gina-- ”
“You what?”
“I talked to Gina, and she agrees that this could harm your career.”
He would've preferred anger and accusations. “Katy, you know it bugs me when you do that. Go behind my back to PR like that. You’re supposed to be my wife, not my manager.”
“I’m not conspiring against you! Good grief. This is about what’s best for you, what’s going to help you sell records and be successful.”
“What’s the point, if I get locked into this script that other people are writing for me?” Small town, Arkansas, Christian, married. "If I can't be who I really am?"
"Who are you these days, Kristopher?" The question isn’t challenging, but subdued and a little sad. It weakens him. Here he is, the one who’s slipping away, wishing she would take the initiative and reach out to him. If I stay, will you fight for us? Can you see that we're losing?
“Katy . . . ”
“No one is saying you and Adam can’t be friends. Just . . . don’t call so much attention to it. Spend more time with the others. Matt and Anoop are your friends too, aren’t they?” Her tone is placating.
Kris can picture her pacing the living room of their L.A. apartment, girlish in one of her loose summer dresses, her bare shoulders smooth and pale and deceptively fragile. If he could put his arms around her now, nuzzle into the familiar clean scent of her hair, maybe they would fall into each other the way they once had, the way a married couple was supposed to.
“Look, I have to go.” It isn’t even a lie. He has soundcheck in ten minutes.
“Think about it, all right? The tour’s going to be over in a month, and then everything will be different.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Love you.”
“Me too.”
That night the music fails him, or he fails it. The notes are intact, the words in key, but he can’t summon the conviction that gives them life. For the first time, he feels ordinary on a stage.
Alone in his hotel room afterwards, it’s either throw something at the wall, or . . . He heads directly for the shower, yanking at his clothes and letting them fall to the floor.
He’s hard before he steps into the stall. The water streams hot over his skin, and he imagines it’s Adam’s hand on him, merciless, imagines Adam’s voice in his ear, Let go, take it . . . His eyes are squeezed shut and it’s himself he’s throwing at the wall, breaking almost immediately in a spill of words. “Adam, Adam, Adam . . . ”
Slumping against the tile, Kris settles for feeling empty.
--
He falls in line. How can he take a stand when he’s so conflicted about what he owes Katy, Adam, himself?
“What’s Adam really like?” the reporter from the local paper asks.
“He’s easy to be around.” He says he’s an open book, but he’s not, really--except to me. He reads me just as well. All we have to do is look at each other to say, “Danny is an ass,” or “We’ll make fun of this when we’re alone.” He sings all the time, like life is a Broadway musical. He’s the most fun person I’ve ever met, but he’s serious about all the right things.
“Would you say he’s your closest friend on the tour?”
“I get along great with everyone. We’re all pretty close.” The first time I saw him, he was wearing a blue shirt. His hair was falling in his eyes--it made you notice them, how piercing they were, but so warm at the same time. I heard his laugh, this genuine, happy laugh. I wanted to hear it again.
Adam receives his own call from management. “They suggested I start dating,” he reports, heavy on the air quotes. “What am I supposed to do, pick up somebody on Twitter? They seem to think I can go out and acquire a boyfriend the way I’d buy a pair of boots.”
“Guess they don’t know how serious you are about boot shopping,” Kris manages to say, instead of something vehement and un-Kris-like. “What did you tell them?”
“To fuck off, of course, in a way that gave them the impression I was considering it. You didn’t actually think I would, did you?”
“No, not really. Just a second of-- Sorry.” You have a wife, idiot, he reminds himself. Mine, counters his jealousy, unmoved.
--
In the dark, Kris listens.
The depth of his turmoil, revealed one scrap of melody and lyric fragment at a time, surprises him. He has a poker face after all. “Wake up, put my poker face on,” he sings silently, plucking notes in the air.
He’s slept soundly with only a thin bedroll between him and a dirt floor on the other side of the world. Now, exhausted as he is, he lies awake on cool hotel sheets, his notebook open across his chest and a pen between his fingers. Since he allowed the unthinkable word divorce to form in his mind, he’s gained greater access to the ambivalent territory where he works best.
It's been less than a year. If he and Katy are estranged now, it’s only to be expected after so much separation and upheaval. Looking back over those eleven rocky months, he can’t claim to have given his marriage a fair chance. What kind of person is he, to consider discarding something without first trying to fix it? So much they share is irreplaceable: the common history, the firsts, the familiarity of years.
I’ll lose him. He and Adam hadn’t molded themselves to fit one another. They hadn’t grown to be complementary. They just did; they just were. There was no need for Kris to discard any piece of himself, vital or insignificant. If he tried, Adam would pick up that piece and put it securely back into place. He's shamed by how much he wants to give this insight to Adam as a gift. I recognized you. You’re the first, in the ways that really matter.
It all goes into the music instead. Flat on his back, he mouths lines like a prayer. Maybe he’ll record them like this, prostrate and imploring.
--
“I keep asking myself,” Kris says haltingly, “whether this is from God.” His spiritual vocabulary is different from Adam’s, but he knows Adam will understand.
Adam answers in Kris’s language. “Maybe you should ask Him directly.”
“I have. If there’s an answer, it’s not getting through. Too much in the way.”
“Guilt?” Adam asks quietly.
“Guilt. Guilt because I don’t feel as guilty as I should. Being busy and tired all the time. Lust,” he finishes Biblically.
A long pause. “I wish there was something I could say to make it easier, but we both know there isn’t. I’m not going to pressure you-- ”
Kris interrupts with a mirthless laugh. “Yeah, that doesn’t help.” Maybe it’s proof of a character flaw, Katy’s charge of passivity, but he would welcome the undue influence. Especially when the alternative is to fight his own battles armed only with a notebook and a guitar. But he knows Adam will do nothing but wait, enduring his own struggles with the powerless role.
“I don’t expect you to figure it out right away.” Adam’s tone draws a new line, a non-negotiable one. “But there has to be some kind of resolution in sight.”
---
Kris’s Boston hotel room is distinguished by a spongy mattress that dips in the middle when he plops down, remote in hand. Thanks to the boredom of the bus, he’s already seen the movies on all the premium channels. An old episode of Law & Order holds his interest for less than a minute before he mutes Sam Waterston’s righteous indignation.
Adam joins him, and the sides of the mattress lift off the box spring. Caught unawares, Kris rolls up against him like a window shade. He’s content to stay.
As usual, Adam is wearing a tangle of silver around his neck. Kris reaches out to play with a pendant shaped like a T with a loop on top. An ankh, he thinks it's called. “Do you remember that picture you sent me, the fan art?” This is tricky ground, not necessary conversation. He wonders when he became the one without a filter.
“I still have it saved. Don’t tell Neil. He keeps threatening to send me the porny ones.”
“And that would be bad because-- ?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It seems inappropriate.” Adam lifts an eyebrow in ironic acknowledgment of his presence on Kris’s bed.
Kris ventures further, past inappropriate and into reckless. “If that had really happened, it would all be settled by now.” He releases the pendant and meets Adam’s wary eyes. “Did you know? Then?”
Adam looks at him as though seeing the Kris of three months ago. Winner to his runner-up, but never his rival, not on that night or any other. The memory of conspiratorial joy lifts the corners of his mouth--that full, expressive mouth. “Yes.”
“Me too. I always knew.” Reckless to wrong, but I’m going to anyway.
Adam goes rigid with surprise when Kris kisses him. In the next moment, he’s levering himself off the bed. “It’s too late for that, Kris. Or too soon.”
A single imperative, Now, drives Kris after him. He crowds Adam against the door, feeling all the way down to his gut how much bigger Adam is. It’s different, having to reach up; it’s exciting. It has the potential to answer all his questions and satisfy all his doubts, if only he can get Adam to cooperate.
“Come on,” he says against Adam’s unresponsive lips. His hips push in, trying to crush resistance with need. Not like this, objects the observing part of his brain, but he’s desperate enough to force it, to take whatever he can get.
“Kris, don’t-- ” Adam uses his strength for the first time, restraining Kris with a hard grip on his wrists. Game over. But then one hand lets go to slide up under Kris’s chin and Kris opens his mouth and there, that drowns out any rational thought.
He can’t believe it when Adam breaks away for the second time. “How can you stop, how can you not want this too much to stop?” Kris is disoriented, blinking like he’s just come off a darkened stage directly into a too-bright room. They’re both breathing hard.
Adam grabs Kris’s hand and presses it to the front of his jeans. He drags it up and down once, roughly, before shoving it away. “That’s how much I want to stop.”
The shape of Adam’s cock burns in his palm. God. “Then-- ”
Adam explodes. “Do you think I’m trying to be your conscience here? Do you think I give a fuck about your marriage right now? I care about us. Whatever the future of us is going to be. It’s not worth one night of taking the edge off. You’re not going to get through this by using your dick as a battering ram.”
In Kris’s short career of provocation, he’s never succeeded so spectacularly. He pushes, and Adam pushes back; those are their rules of engagement. But their skirmishes aren’t meant to be won, let alone to draw blood. “I know, God, I know, but I-- ”
Adam clearly has no intention of staying to survey the damage with him. “I really don’t think we can handle being around each other right now. We’ll talk tomorrow, OK?” Without waiting for a response, he reaches for the doorknob.
“Goodnight,” Kris says to the closing door.
--
Adam doesn’t avoid Kris the next day. He’s polite, which is worse. Polite and subdued. My fault, Kris thinks, watching him respond to Matt and Danny’s improv routines with a strained smile. Then, caustically, I almost cheated on my wife. Maybe I should at least try to feel bad about that.
He considers calling her. Not to confess; he’s not ready for that, or for where it might lead. Just to bring her into focus, along with a sense of his own betrayal. It’s the right thing to do. But Adam can always tell when he’s been talking to Katy, just as Kris can tell Adam is trying not to mind.
Later, maybe.
I’m kind of a jerk, aren’t I? Well, he'd never believed his own press anyway.
He gives Adam his space until he can’t stand it anymore. Pulling out his phone, he texts, A battering ram, huh?
They’re sitting in their customary places on the couch, with a two-foot buffer between them--two feet more than usual. Still close enough for Kris to read the words as Adam’s thumbs work over the touch screen. I have a way with words when I’m mad. Which I still kinda am btw.
“You have a right to be,” Kris says out loud. “I messed up.”
“We’ve always had an understanding, Kris. ‘This far and no farther.’ That’s why we can be--whatever we are. And last night-- ”
“I broke it, yeah.”
“Like a champagne bottle against the side of a cruise ship,” Adam agrees.
It startles a laugh out of Kris. “You really do have a way with words.”
Perversely, Adam has nothing to say to that. But he scoots a foot closer.
--
It’s a night like any other--the bus rumbling, the air slightly stale, Kris’s practiced sideways roll into his bunk a solid nine out of ten. Switching on the tiny reading light, he opens his notebook and confronts the four words of his mantra: I need to know.
To Kris, they doesn’t look like the beginning of a song, or the beginning of anything. The harder he strains to glimpse the ending, the more lost he feels. How can he write the next line when he’s not the writer at all, but the song itself? Inert on the page, waiting vainly for direction.
The words recede, blurring into a smear of ink. So this is what it’s like to fall apart.
He fumbles for his phone and types blindly, You still awake?
The uninflected question must somehow convey distress, because thirty seconds later Adam is climbing in with him, long arms and legs graceful. “Everyone’s asleep,” he says low, considerately pretending that Kris isn’t past the point of caring.
There isn’t enough room for them to lie side by side. They fold themselves together, bodies aligning familiarly despite all the lines they haven’t crossed. Adam reaches up to turn off the light, and the enclosing darkness brings relief, like a cool cloth on Kris’s forehead, like the slow circles of Adam’s hand on his back. Falling apart isn’t so bad once he stops resisting.
When he trusts his voice, he says, barely audible, “There’s no way out of this without hurting someone.” As always, his mind rejects the truth, veering off toward a compromise that doesn’t exist. He wishes again, selfishly, that Adam would lay out the arguments for him, or at least plead his own case. But Adam is too scrupulous and too self-respecting to do more than hold Kris tighter.
The warmth of his arms replaces the chill Kris hadn’t noticed until it started to ease. Kris times the rise and fall of Adam’s chest, counting beats, until his own takes on the same steady rhythm. “Goodnight,” he whispers into that safest of places, the curve of Adam’s neck and shoulder.
The first thing he sees in the morning is his notebook, half tucked under the pillow. Beneath his single line is a paragraph in Adam’s bold printing.
Whatever choice you make, it’s the right one. This isn’t me letting you go. I could never distance myself from you, not even to protect myself from getting hurt. This is me believing in you, Kris. I wouldn’t give back a minute of our summer or the months before. No matter what happens, I’ll always be your friend.
Instead of a signature, there’s one of Adam’s occasional doodles: Kris’s guitar, curvy and cartoon-cheerful.
Kris sets aside the reassurance and looks for the goodbye between the lines. He imagines Adam taking a step back--not walking away, but putting up the boundary that separates even close friends. Their lives shared only in phone calls and texts and the infrequent overlap of two busy schedules. His own colorless PR quotes becoming a reality.
Adam is strong. If Kris breaks his heart, he’ll cry, without bitterness, then put it back together and eventually give it to someone else. Kris will be there to see it, if he chooses, from his side of their invisible wall.
Kris turns the page.
--
Backstage at the venue, Kris finds a table in a quiet corner. He’s about to reach for his guitar case when a plate appears at his elbow. He glances over the tidy pyramid of raw vegetables, then up at Adam. “What, no strawberries?”
Adam smiles in acknowledgment. “Today’s snack is symbolism-free. That cherry tomato? Just a cherry tomato.” He’s wearing the ankh necklace, Kris notices. There’s no detail of Adam he doesn’t want to memorize, down to his pale toes in the flip-flops Kris likes to borrow. “Don’t want to disturb your muse. I’ll see you later.”
“Wait.”
Adam turns expectantly.
“Do you mind if we don’t hang out tonight?”
Adam’s face shows only acceptance. “That’s fine.”
Kris can’t claim to be renewed. Nothing so dramatic as that. But today he's humbled, not because he isn't equal to his choice, but because he is. It's hard, as it should be; it's bittersweet. As strong as the regret is the gratitude for his answer: Take a leap of faith.
He says, firm, “I’ve got an important phone call to make.”
September
The days of summer had run out in Manchester, with tearful hugs and Silly String and promises to keep in touch. Forty-eight hours later, Detroit is a coda. No arena, no waiting crowd of autograph seekers. No efficient machine shepherding them from bus to meet-and-greet to dressing room. Just the two of them, a single handler, and a private acoustic gig scheduled for the next day.
After months in motion, the sudden standstill feels disconcerting, like stepping off one of those moving walkways at the airport. “Moving walkways,” Kris sings, trying it out. He misses his friends and the windows that frame a constantly changing view. He’s changed with it, forgotten how to have a home.
One last hotel room. The light of a single lamp lends it the softening depth of shadows. He and Adam lie down on the chaste white sheets, facing each other but not touching. As he has so many times before, Kris contemplates the paradox of eyes both gray and bright. Eyes that see through to parts of him he’s still discovering for himself.
He has a million questions, but only one he needs to ask tonight. “Why did you draw a picture of my guitar?”
Adam frowns a little, thinking. “Because it’s you, I guess. Your instinct, and your voice.” He reaches out to trace the line of Kris’s jaw. “Falling slowly, sing your melody, I’ll sing along . . . ” He draws out the last word with a tenderness that makes Kris’s throat ache.
Voice thick, Kris says, “I couldn’t let us end up like the couple in that movie, going our separate ways. Saying goodbye . . . I think I could’ve done that part. It would only take a minute to rip my heart out. But I couldn’t live without it afterwards.”
“But you had to be the one to write that ending. You had to decide what kind of story this is, the story of you and me.”
“What if I say,” Kris takes a deep breath, poised on the verge of everything, “that it’s a love story?”
“Then I’ll say, I love you, Kris.”
There’s a yielding streak in Kris that Adam brings out effortlessly, and never more so than now, with his deep, possessive kiss and the guiding weight of his hand at the nape of Kris’s neck. Kris breaks free only to say it back, over and over, and each time Adam captures him and swallows the words from his mouth.
In a far corner of his mind, Kris had feared he might get the performance, the teasing swagger and control of stage Adam. But there’s no calculation in the needy searching of Adam’s hands, or in the thrust of his hips that wrings a helpless groan from Kris. It’s the same intuitive knowledge that flows between them as comfort, turned with a touch into heat.
“I want to suck it,” Kris says, drunk and deliberately a little dirty, as soon as he gets Adam’s jeans off and a hand around him. He strokes and wonders how this is going to work, wanting enough to believe in the impossible.
“Oh, God, Kris. Yes, next time. Let me . . . ” Adam slides down Kris’s body and slides his mouth down Kris’s cock, all the way, nothing gentle about it except the repeated brush of his hair against Kris’s stomach. After a while, Kris stops trying to tell him how good it feels. He arches his back in demand, Hold me down, and the bite of Adam’s fingertips is as sweet as the strokes of his tongue. He stops trying not to come.
“Everything,” he reminds Adam, still panting. Adam only steals his hard-won air and gives him back a sharp and dizzying taste of himself. He’s talkative even without words, eloquent with kisses. His cock swells insistently against Kris’s thigh, but he lingers, drawing Kris into a long conversation, still so much to say.
Finally Adam stops to tell him out loud, “I haven’t forgotten, Kris. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since that night.”
“Show me. Please.”
Adam’s voice eases him into it, reassuring, as his sliding-wet fingers begin their work. “There’s no hope for me now. I won’t be able to think of anything but that look on your face.” So delicately slow. “I’m going to want this more tomorrow, and even more the day after that.” Faster, there, and Kris cries out for him. They can be obsessed together.
“Now,” Kris pleads, no idea if he’s ready, but he’s harder than he’s ever been in his life, and he needs Adam closer, and he can’t go any longer without finding out. “No, don’t kiss me again!” He laughs in his desperation because he’s just that happy, and because Adam’s face is glowing with love. “I mean, kiss me after.”
If it’s brand-new and a little strange and a lot overwhelming, that just means more room for Kris to get lost. Sinking into a song is a solitary exaltation, but here Adam is with him, heavy and good on top of him, shockingly full inside him.
“Like this,” Adam breathes, not a question. Kris pulls his head down as the music starts to build, perfect harmony on the inarticulate chorus, Yes.
--End--
Note: The fan art is trufax and awesome.
Pairing: Kris/Katy, Kris/Adam
Word count: 9800
Rating: R
Summary: The thing between them that just is. (AI tourfic)
Warnings: Angst, weed
Author's note: Thanks to cathalin for her inspiring comments on sexual compatibility. ;) Title borrowed from Goldfrapp's song of the same name.
Disclaimer: Pure imagination. No disrespect intended.
Road to Somewhere
March
They talk about it freely. It, the thing between them that just is.
“Openness is always best,” Adam says in their room at the mansion. Adam has a thought-out response to every situation, it seems to Kris. It’s one of the things about him that makes Kris feel safe. “Who needs the complication of having to deny shit to yourself and put up a front for other people?”
“Simple is good,” Kris agrees sleepily, burrowing under the covers. Their bedtime confessionals, as Adam calls them, are a wind-down routine they both look forward to, but Kris tends to wind down much faster than Adam does.
“Besides, why wallow in angst when you can laugh about it?” Adam sounds alert enough to philosophize for hours. “It’s not that deep.”
Kris doesn’t think it’s a joke, exactly, that his roommate finds him distracting. It’s nice, in a way he doesn’t need to analyze. And his reciprocal . . . noticing, that’s only natural. Adam’s personality attracts everyone, plus he’s objectively six feet tall and a row of cherries on the genetic slot machine and a walking advertisement for sex when he chooses to be.
“Crushes are fun,” Kris summarizes with a yawn.
“I’m about to be talking to myself here, aren’t I? That’s my Kris. Don’t let the presence of the big, scary gay dude in the next bed keep you awake.”
“Pretty sure you’re just waiting me out so you can pounce. I can’t stop you, but be quiet about it, OK?”
“Goodnight, cute straight boy.”
April
There’s no question of awkwardness when Adam’s sexuality makes headlines. Not between the two of them, anyway. Kris is sure it’s plenty awkward for Adam to check his Google Alerts and find a dozen blog entries titled, “Is Adam Lambert Gay?”
“Lots of room for speculation here,” Adam says dryly, studying the photo of himself with his tongue in his ex-boyfriend’s mouth like he’s never seen it before. Which isn’t the case. “I put these pictures online,” he tells Kris. “I would’ve taken them down if I’d remembered. But it’s not like I have anything to be ashamed of. Except maybe the hair.”
He’s trying for his usual breeziness, so Kris follows his lead. “I don’t think purple is your color,” he agrees.
“That’s more of a lavender, honey,” Adam shoots back, deliberately camp.
“I like the blue on . . . Brad, right? He’s pretty hot.” Kris maintains his bland expression under Adam’s suspicious gaze. He’s perfectly aware of his own striking resemblance to Brad--same coloring, face shape, and jawline. He looks more like Brad than his own brother. “You have really good taste,” he adds, and snickers at Adam’s unspoken You little shit.
It’s different when the pictures turn up on Bill O’Reilly’s show--cropped, to protect Middle America from the commingling of male mouths. Adam shrugs in resignation, but Kris can’t help bursting out, “He’s the one who should be embarrassed, that-- ” His upbringing intrudes to veto the words fucking asshole. “People suck sometimes.” He tackles Adam in an impulsive hug.
“Thank you, Kris.” Adam’s voice wavers just a little. He holds on tight.
--
To balance their show-and-tell, Kris offers pictures of himself and Katy. In the earliest, a beaming blond cheerleader snuggles up to the bowl-cut band nerd who was Kris at age sixteen. The most recent is their wedding portrait.
“It must be amazing to have that long-term connection with someone,” Adam says, a little wistfully. From their late-night talks, Kris knows that his relationship with Brad hadn’t been all makeouts and trips to Burning Man. “When I met him, all the love songs suddenly made sense,” Adam had confided. “At the end, I learned to relate to all the heartbreak songs.”
Much as he loves his wife, Kris can’t hold up their relationship as some sort of ideal. What does it say about him, he wonders, that his notion of love is comfortable and easy? He flashes on the pictures of Adam and Brad, the obvious passion. Their dynamic verifies certain conclusions he’s already drawn about Adam, and that is a little awkward--you don’t picture your friends having sex, even if they happen to be really good-looking.
“Yeah, I’m lucky to have her,” is all Kris says. If you don’t propose after six years together, it starts to look like you’re never going get around to it. That doesn’t make the six years--now seven--less of an accomplishment. So what if he doesn’t have newlywed stars in his eyes? He’s written some of those songs himself, the love songs and heartbreak songs. He can be proud of his more restrained brand of passion.
June
A month after the finale, Adam gets to test his policy of openness on his own terms. He gives an interview to Rolling Stone “in rare form--no filter,” as he puts it. Privately, Kris disputes the “rare” part, but he listens patiently as Adam bemoans his runaway mouth.
“It’s embarrassing,” Adam complains during a break from tour rehearsals.
“Since when do you get embarrassed?”
“OK, not embarrassed. But uncomfortable. Isn’t everyone supposed to pretend to be shocked by recreational drug use? No one but my mom even cares about that part.”
An exaggeration, maybe, but it’s true that the public is more interested in Adam’s disclosures about Kris. “Pretty, nonchalant, and totally my type,” he’d dished to the magazine, launching a thousand unwelcome follow-up questions. Adam fields them with a polished spiel about the harmless, flattering nature of a crush. Outwardly, he remains cool and mildly amused, but Kris knows he dislikes being put on the defensive.
The reporters ask Kris about it too, with avid eyes and a commiserating tone he doesn’t get. It is flattering. He’s supposed to be freaked out, just because Adam is a guy?
Kris’s fluency with lyrics doesn’t translate to interviews, but he tries. “It’s not like he was trying to make out with me or anything,” he hears himself say to Ryan Seacrest, and winces. Still, he relishes the role of defender. Through the months of competition, Adam had stood at his back, his support and sounding board. Now, if the subject of Adam animates Kris the way his win and his tour setlist don’t, if he tends to ramble on about how much he values their friendship, it’s no less than Adam’s due.
Katy professes to find it “sweet,” in a tone that prompts Kris to ask her how she really feels.
“But?”
“But the show is over. You don’t want people to keep associating and comparing the two of you. It’s time to move past that bromance stuff, the Kradam stuff.”
“I don’t think it’s ever going to go away completely. It was the two of us standing on that stage at the end. I don’t mind.”
“Well, you should.”
It’s a variation on a well-worn argument. If it progresses, she’ll accuse him of taking the path of least resistance, and he’ll accuse her of being all too happy to run his life. To preserve the peace of their remaining days together, he changes the subject.
His departure will be a relief for both of them, he suspects, a vacation from accomodation and compromise. But they’re just getting started on the hard work of being a couple. They’ve got plenty of time to learn.
July
A week into the tour, the wrangle over DVD selection is already a post-show ritual. As they claim their usual spots on the overstuffed couches, Matt and Danny arguing James Bond vs. Ron Burgundy, Kris breaks out the jumbo bag of Twizzlers a fan had given him that afternoon. “These rode around in the back of my pants for about an hour, but don’t let that stop you.”
Matt makes an eager grab. “Aw, strawberry. I like the red ones better.”
Anoop looks at him in disbelief.
“I know strawberry is red,” Matt says defensively, tossing the bag back to Kris. “I meant the plain red ones. Like you get at the movie theater?”
“Dude, red is not a flavor.”
Kris turns to Adam, whose smile is both indulgent and resigned. “Eight of us living together in this glorified RV for how long?” Adam whispers.
“That’s what headphones are for, man.” Kris gives him an encouraging nudge. “Have some Twizzlers.”
Adam wrinkles his nose. “Yum, candy disguised as plastic. Or is it the other way around? I’ll pass.”
“Delicious plastic. C’mon, we can share one. Like the dogs eating spaghetti, you know, in Lady And The Tramp?” Kris sticks a red rope in his mouth and dangles the other end at Adam suggestively.
After a moment of deliberation, Adam plucks it away and bites down on Kris’s end. “Mmm,” he says with exaggerated pleasure, to a catcall from Matt and a loud “Gross!” from Danny. “Tastes better than I remember.”
With the satisfaction of the born instigator, Kris nudges Adam again, harder this time, before turning his attention to Quantum of Solace.
In the corner of his eye, Adam smirks.
--
“Do you miss Arkansas?”
The question comes up nearly as often as “What was it like rooming with Adam?” No one asks Matt if he’s pining for Kalamazoo. Only Adam’s L.A. friends offer sympathy for his extended absence from home, because there’s no convincing them that L.A. isn’t the center of the universe. (Adam, who holds the same view, doesn’t try.) But Kris can’t escape his hometown, whether he’s in Little Rock or Sacramento or Glendale.
It’s how celebrity works, Kris is learning. You’re defined by a handful of easily digested details. For Kris, the keywords are small town, Arkansas, Christian, and married. Together, they suggest a package that includes a lot of things he isn’t. Conservative, for one.
The media’s version of Adam is the opposite--sparkly and superficial, the sum of his stage persona and his wardrobe. They‘re already eyeing him for diva tendencies.
“He’s ridiculously nice,” Kris tells the journalists, knowing he’s powerless against the soundbite, but determined to put the truth out there anyway. “I’m proud of him.”
“Kris is open-minded and liberal,” Adam says in turn. “He’s so talented, but even more than that, he’s a really good person.”
--
The notorious Rolling Stone cover shows up daily at the autograph tables. Familiar as it’s become, the image still registers, unlike his own face on the official glossies Kris signs by the dozen. He can’t help but notice Adam spread out and smoldering on rumpled sheets.
Inspiration strikes in Salt Lake City. With all the subtlety of a third grader pulling the hair of the boy he likes, he scrawls his Sharpie across his best friend’s crotch. He takes a second to admire the way the python poised at Adam’s thigh appears to be reading his name.
“Thank you so much, Kris!” The owner takes back her prize with a barely contained glee that says unmistakably, This will be on the internet within ten minutes.
Kris doesn’t have to track her progress down the table to know when she reaches Adam. He only has to turn to intercept the look boring into the side of his head. The intensity of Adam’s eye contact can be unnerving even when he’s at his friendliest, but Kris is immune. Mostly.
You’ll pay for this later, those eyes promise now.
Kris’s innocent smile broadens. I’ll hold you to that.
Retaliation is slow to arrive, but in San Diego, Kris wakes from a midmorning nap to find a haphazard monogram on his left arm, Adam’s felt-tip initials. He wears it with a sneaking, ridiculous sense of pride: He likes me back.
--
From his vantage point at the side of the stage, Kris notes the tweaks in Adam’s set: an extra ounce of vocal testosterone in “Whole Lotta Love,” new choreographic flourishes in the Bowie medley. He recognizes the craft, but the power of the illusion holds.
Adam is a quick study when it comes to wielding that power. The shedding of his elaborate studded coat has evolved into an equally elaborate seduction. Tonight, heavy-lidded, he lets his head fall back in a sensuous loll as the leather slides from his shoulders. Kris stares at the long line of his offered throat without judging his own reaction, which is, after all, the one the visual is meant to elicit.
He’s not the only one susceptible. Adam has gauged his audience well; the volume of their screams rises to drown him out every time his hand wanders below his rhinestone-flashing belt buckle, or slides with graphic intent up and down the mic stand.
“That’s rock ’n’ roll for you,” Adam agrees later. “Sex magic.” Scrubbed free of heavy stage makeup, his face looks guileless and young.
“Yeah, but it’s also you.”
“Well, of course. I’m the second coming of Freddie Mercury, haven’t you heard?” Adam piles on the irony, as if Kris is in danger of taking him seriously.
“And Elvis,” Kris reminds him. “David Bowie, too, probably, and he’s not even dead.”
Adam’s laugh can only be described as a giggle.
--
Kris doesn’t expose himself in well-timed flashes of skin and suggestion and soul the way Adam does. He picks up his guitar and lets instinct guide him to the core of a song.
Yearning is the key. The moodiness of “Ain’t No Sunshine,” the wounded cry of “Heartless”--it’s his instinctive language. A counterbalance to the settled side of his life, he supposes. Mostly he takes it for granted, that unquiet space that opens up in him when he performs, the one he can make listeners feel in themselves. The Idol stage had taught him the depth of his evocative gift. I don’t know you, but I want you all the more for that . . . Eyes shut, he’d channeled the poignancy of lovers destined to part, and felt the audience’s answering sigh.
“Humble” is a label Kris gets a lot, and it’s not entirely misplaced. The title of “your American Idol” strikes him as faintly ridiculous, like a paper crown worn after the birthday party’s over, so he pretends it’s not stuck on his head. (“That’s why it looks so good on you,” Adam says.) But when it comes to the music, his element, he’s anything but self-effacing.
These are the details, he reflects, that really define him.
--
En route to Tulsa, the group crowded into the small galley area is sullen, sleep deprivation in full effect. Matt glowers into the middle distance, his hair sticking up straight on one side and flattened on the other. Anoop hunches over his beloved iPhone; Scott meditatively chews a banana. The scenery outside--flat acres of parched grass--is barely more appealing.
Crunching cereal, Kris glances toward the front lounge, where Adam has retreated to take a call. He’s absorbed in conversation, phone wedged between his ear and shoulder, cup of coffee sitting untouched in front of him. For some obscure Adam-reason, he’s wearing his rings, all four of them, with his faded t-shirt and drawstring pajama pants. As Kris watches, he absently twists the thick silver bands on his fingers, clockwise, counterclockwise, then pulls them off one by one.
Self-preservation kicks in, a little late, and Kris becomes aware that the pre-caffeine bleariness surrounding him has sharpened to alert interest. Even Scott is lifting his head curiously, as though sensing a charge in the air around Kris.
“Just. Shut up,” Kris says halfheartedly. He busies himself with his spoon.
The silence lasts for three seconds, then, “Hey, Kris, want to play poker?” Matt deadpans.
--
Kris can laugh at himself, because it belongs to both of them equally.
There’s an elusive quality to Adam despite his sunniness, his willingness to befriend everyone. It’s the almost daunting self-possession, the ability to charm the press, melt a crowd, and take a compliment, all without visible effort. When he stumbles, it’s almost unnoticeable--and always because of Kris.
He’s never embarrassingly transparent, the way Kris can be. There’s nothing of pursuit in his manner, nothing more than an occasional flustered note in his banter and a softness in his expression. Kris has no defense against his subtle vulnerability--the bitten lower lip, the gaze that gravitates to the exposed hollow of Kris’s neck and darts away.
If he’s honest, Kris wants no defense. He wants pursuit. He wants to say, Look. His increasingly unbuttoned shirts say it for him.
--
Memphis brings, blessedly, a hotel room. “Just the scores,” Kris promises as he checks the channel listings and flips to ESPN.
“I’ve heard that before.” Adam is reclining against the headboard, lighting a joint he’d conjured from somewhere. He passes it over as Kris settles next to him, and after a few inhales Kris loses interest in the TV and gives himself over to contemplation of the ceiling sprinklers, the smoke detector, and the cottage-cheese bumps of plaster that remind him of his first apartment. Discontent intrudes. He doesn’t want to go back there.
A happy epiphany: He can take inventory of Adam instead. Adam is looking particularly alien tonight, his eyes not just heavily lined in black but shadowed in turquoise and half-ringed with crystal points. Comet trails of blue glitter streak his precariously upswept dark hair. The effect is designed to be projected to the seats of a large auditorium; up close, it’s startling. In contrast, his freckled arms are human, approachable.
“If it just . . . happened, it wouldn’t be our fault,” Kris blurts. There’s being open and then there’s yanking the door off its hinges. He blames the weed.
Adam tucks a hand behind his head, not at all shocked. “Like, I say something to make you absolutely furious-- ” he snorts at the idea of Kris in a fury “ --and you slap me across the face, and then-- ” He waves the joint to indicate a passionate clinch, a soundtrack crescendo, and the ripping of clothes. The smoke is an excess of drama, but then, Adam has always wanted a fog machine.
“Or we could wrestle, you know, just a couple of bros-- ”
Adam snorts louder. “I think I saw something like that on Xtube once.”
“ --and get all tangled up. Sexily. If that’s even a word.” Kris reconsiders. “On second thought, one of us might end up with a knee in the balls. Or fall off the bed and get a concussion.”
“And I’d have to settle for holding your hand in the emergency room.”
“Am I the one with the concussion?”
“No, no.” Adam leans down to brush his lips against Kris’s forehead. “No injuries allowed. I don’t want you to be hurt, ever.”
Kris is too fogged to figure out why this makes him sad, so he lets it go as he lets himself fall forward. “Yeah, well, don’t expect me to slap that beautiful face of yours, either,” he mumbles into Adam’s chest.
--
A few days later, Kris gets an e-mail: Like this? “Courtesy of Neil,” Adam’s message reads. “My brother lurks in some strange corners of the internet.”
Kris opens the attachment, which turns out to be a detailed colored-pencil sketch. Fan art, Kris supposes it’s called, though it’s a far cry from the well-meaning portraits pressed into his hands at the barricades.
There’s no mistaking the moment captured. He’d lived it inside his own skin, then seen it replayed over and over--the release after the tense height of the finale. His victory, Adam’s enveloping hug. Except that in the artist’s version, Adam is bending him back in an extravagant kiss.
“I think we blew Ryan’s mind.” Angling Kris’s netbook, Adam points a black-painted fingertip at the screen.
“No kidding.” Seacrest's rounded, staring eyes remind Kris of that YouTube staple, the Dramatic Chipmunk.
“Whatcha looking at?” Matt calls from the opposite couch, obviously hoping for an antidote to boredom.
“Graphic dude-on-dude porn,” Adam returns without missing a beat.
“Awesome.” Matt moves to get up, but subsides at some nonverbal warning from Adam. “Fine, keep your secrets.”
Kris clears his throat. “Yeah, that’s how it should’ve gone down.” His tone is as casual as he can make it. “Heat of the moment. Who could blame us?”
“About eighty percent of the people who voted for you, is my guess,” Adam says dryly.
“You’re probably right.” Kris stares at the screen, at alternate-reality Kris and Adam.
--
“And how are you getting along with everyone?” Katy asks on the phone. He’s been telling her about life on the bus--the late bedtimes and the unrelenting schedule, the moving landscape and the piles of laundry and the hours of waiting. Summer school days and summer camp nights.
“Great,” Kris answers honestly. “Matt’s always after us to make those videos, and he and Danny get loud sometimes. It bugs Anoop more than me. I just go hide out in my bunk for a while if I have to.” He casts around for more innocuous details. “Mike’s been a bit moody lately. I think he’s-- ” Kris aborts the words missing his wife with a sense of narrow escape. “ --going through a rough patch.”
“It sounds a lot like college.” As Katy starts to reminisce about her U of A dorm, Kris scans the parking lot, empty now that the early autograph seekers have scattered. He’s sitting on the steps of the bus. Chilled air spills out around him, dissipating instantly against a wall of July heat. The venue, a modern glass box, looks abandoned under the cloudless blue sky of midafternoon.
“So,” he says, with determined enthusiasm. “When are you coming out to see for yourself? Are we still aiming for the first week of August?” His gaze drops to his feet.
“Shanna’s cousin is having her shower on the fifth, but Atlantic City might work.”
“That’d be good. We’ll be staying in a hotel that night. You don’t need the full bus experience.”
A pair of snakeskin boots joins Kris’s Converse in his field of vision. Adam. Kris looks up with a quick smile to say This’ll only take a minute in their wordless way. Adam just shakes his head, his expression oddly flat, and maneuvers past him.
Kris recognizes the collapse of something precarious. The moment he hadn’t seen coming only because he’d refused to look. There’s a surreal sense of himself as a double image, Katy’s Kris and Adam’s Kris, the mechanical-sounding voice belonging to one and the accelerating heartbeat to the other. He knows he should ask Katy about her upcoming auditions and her mother’s planned visit to L.A., knows he should care about the answers, but he’s incapable. In full fight-or-flight mode, he shoves his phone into his pocket and hurries up the steps.
Adam doesn’t bother to look up as Kris enters the lounge. “It’s nothing, OK?” He’s scrolling through playlists, too fast for actual browsing. The unspoken message is clear: Go away. “I’m just in a shitty mood. It’ll pass. Ignore me.”
Kris sits down, pointedly not going anywhere. He waits until Adam pulls out his earphones with ostentatious reluctance. “I don’t want to do this either. Or maybe I do. All I know is that I’m freaking out because I just told my wife I loved her and felt guilty. Toward you.” He rubs his palms against his thighs and can practically see sparks of tension. “How’s that for open? So I think we need to have this conversation.”
Adam’s eyes are wide and stunned. “OK.” He puts down his phone in slow motion. “I don’t-- I’m not sure what to say. I’m sorry, Kris.”
“Sorry? You think you caused this, with your dangerous crush? Do you think I can’t take responsibility for my own feelings?” Kris stops himself. Anger is just a convenient outlet. “Forget that. I didn’t mean it.”
Adam takes the questions seriously. “I don’t think that of you, not at all. But God, Kris. You were a newlywed when we met. Those pictures of you and Katy-- How can I not feel like an attempted homewrecker?”
“Fine, we both deserve to feel like crap. But we didn’t mean for it to happen. I know it sounds like an excuse, but shouldn’t it count for something?” Kris isn’t even sure himself.
“I’m not trying to make this about me, Kris, but I have to be honest. I let myself forget you were married. Not all the time, and not enough to cross certain lines.” Adam is holding himself stiffly apart, as if it's not too late. “But pretending, even for a minute, that it wasn’t impossible--that was just setting us both up to be hurt. This was never supposed to hurt.”
“You think I wasn’t doing the same thing? All those times we-- We were always going to end up here.” Kris slumps into the cushions. It’s exhausting, pulling the truth out of himself and hearing Adam do the same. “You know what’s worse? I don’t regret it. Us. Even though I feel horrible. Part of me wonders if it was meant to happen.”
“I’d like to think so,” Adam says softly. “But even if the universe opens up a path, there’s always a choice of whether or not to follow.”
“There’s still a choice.” The words are a step into the unknown, exhilarating and terrifying. “The one I have to make now.”
The silence stretches on long enough for the white noise of the air conditioning to seep into the foreground. Finally Adam says, “I think you should make sure Katy comes for that visit,” and Kris has to look away from his face, from the bravery written there, and the cost.
“Neither us has really pushed for it. Things haven’t been great between us for a while. And not just because of you and me.”
“That’s understandable--all the time you’ve spent apart, all the adjustments you’ve had to make.”
“Yeah, and . . . I thought getting married would make more of a difference,” Kris says in a rush. “Make us more, somehow. But after all the fuss, the wedding and all that, it’s pretty much the same, the good and the bad. My mom said . . . She wanted us to wait a year.”
“Oh.” Adam exhales quietly, and they avoid each other’s eyes.
“I‘m just really confused right now.” And a really bad person for wanting to crawl into Adam’s lap and hide. “Like I’m arguing with myself inside my head.”
“Say some bad words,” Adam suggests, in a flash of his normal self.
“Dang. Crap. Frickin’ heck,” Kris obliges, and they manage to laugh.
There’s one thing left to say. “Adam, can we just keep going on the way we were? I don’t care if it’s the right thing or not. I want to have this summer with you, even if . . . ”
“We can have that.”
August
Choice aside, Kris knows there had been no decisive moment, no signpost saying Stop or proceed, just a steady deepening of what had existed between them from the start. Now, with the path marked Resist or not, he yields. It’s so easy to let the feeling carry him, to talk for hours with Adam, to teach him how to hold a guitar, to exchange looks that withhold nothing.
It’s just as easy to postpone introspection. Necessity carries him, too, from meet-and-greet to interview to stage to recording studio. At the end of each packed day, he’s usually too tired to think beyond the few seconds it’ll take to crawl into his bunk. His rare inklings of clarity amount to no more than jotted lines in the notebook where his songs get their start.
“Who knew playing at stardom was a real job?” Adam sighs. Kris knows he’s not talking about performing. They thrive on the energy that rebounds from the crowds--their own, magnified to euphoric levels. But the unending parade of expectant faces and extended hands, the extreme love that verges on hysteria, is a drain. Adam has started wearing earplugs in conspicuously bright colors, a statement in neon foam: See what you’re doing to my unflappable nerves.
Kris, always the mellower one, is only taken aback when a fan in Baltimore tries to shove her tongue in his mouth. “It‘ll make a good story,” he shrugs afterwards, when Adam is making noises of disgust and urging Listerine on him.
Maybe he’s just too worn out to care. Backstage, during a late-afternoon lull, they find a room with a couch long enough for Kris to stretch out on. Adam settles for pulling off his boots and propping his feet on the low coffee table. Folding his arms over his chest, Kris resolves that nothing short of a fire alarm is going to budge his head from its comfortable rest on Adam’s thigh.
His eyes stay stubbornly closed when he’s roused by voices. Anoop’s, at least, is considerately pitched. “This one’s already occupied by the Ambiguously Gay Duo.”
“I see no ambiguity here.” Matt.
The smack of a palm--Allison’s, no doubt--and a muffled “Ow!” accompany the receding of three pairs of feet. “Probably because you don’t know what it means,” faintly reaches Kris’s ears.
“A door with a lock,” Adam mumbles above him. “And a deadbolt. And a Do Not Disturb sign. That’s all I ask from life at this point.”
--
On the bus, the complaints usually return to a different theme.
“This is the summer of sexual frustration, am I right?” It’s Matt’s nightly refrain. Wired from the stage, they’re trying to sedate themselves with junk food in the absence of alcohol, another popular grievance. With Goldfrapp, in Adam's case.
“Yeah, it sucks,” Kris agrees around a mouthful of chips, mostly out of solidarity.
“Not so much for you,” Anoop points out. “You've got a wife. And you just got a conjugal visit.”
Some visit. Two days of forced cheerfulness, one round of tepid lovemaking, and constant undercurrents. By the end, Kris had noticed an ache in his facial muscles, as though he’d been holding a smile for an endless series of pictures. Adam had kept to himself, pleading a migraine.
“I thought you were going to say he's got Adam,” Matt cracks.
The volume on Adam’s phone must be low, because he stirs next to Kris and opens his eyes. “Like he said, Kris has a wife. But you don’t, so . . . What do you say? Help a brother out?” He raises a suggestive eyebrow.
Matt grins, unperturbed. “Hey, I’m not ruling anything out. If it gets too bad, I might come knocking on your curtain and beg you to make a man of me.”
“I don’t know about that, babe. Even I can’t work miracles.”
--
“Kris, I’ve been thinking,” Adam says abruptly. “I’m a guy.”
They have the lounge to themselves. It’s the middle of the night, “somewhere in America,” as Matt likes to say with a grand flourish toward the windows. Behind the half-raised shades, the huge panes of glass are dark.
Not sure where Adam is heading, Kris falls back on their old flirtation. “It’d be hard not to notice.” He lets his gaze drift blatantly down the length of Adam’s body. Halfway up again, he stalls, because, well. The fist-sized silver belt buckle isn’t needed for advertising. For scale, maybe.
Adam, clearly preoccupied, declines to see and raise Kris’s innuendo. “Purely hypothetically-- ” He grimaces. “This is going to sound like I’m trying to get in your pants. It’s just another one of those necessary conversations, OK?”
“Why don’t you just go ahead,” Kris encourages. “I’ll keep an eye on my zipper.”
Adam takes a deep breath. “You’ve talked about being attracted to guys before, but that’s a long way from actually having sex with one.”
“I’m not concerned about it. Squeamish, whatever. If that’s what bothering you.” Of all the whys and why-nots, this is one Kris can brush aside.
“A fantasy is one thing,” Adam persists. “You’re in total control. Not that you would be giving up control to me--shit! The point is, a fantasy is hazy and harmless and a long way from the reality of a-- ” He breaks off, like he’s borrowed Kris’s PG-13 filter. Kris has no difficulty supplying the words, even though he’s not going to say a cock in your ass either.
“The hard reality?” he says instead, unable to resist. “I’m taking this seriously, I swear. I wouldn’t get weirded out.”
“But you might not love it. I could make sure you liked it,” Adam says with a beguiling touch of arrogance. “But that’s not good enough, no matter what kind of connection we have out of bed. What if we turned our lives upside down for the sake of something that’s never going to work?”
“Is this that ‘100% straight’ crap again? I told you, I’m not even-- ”
“How can you be sure, Kris? It’s like those deli platters we have backstage. You always take the strawberries--you say they look so good, but then you complain that they’re not sweet enough and make me finish them. Stupid example, and no fruit jokes, please-- ”
“Adam. Gay sex is not strawberries.” Kris infuses his voice with all the certainty he can muster. “Believe me, I know, all right? The same way you knew, back in the day.”
At that, Adam smiles wryly. “Lucky you, you’re not a confused, chunky adolescent.” A hint of reservation lingers. It’s Kris’s turn to worry--that Adam envisions some lengthy, patient initiation, a gradual acclimation process, like teaching a timid novice to swim. Kris would rather throw himself into the deep end and let the water close over his head.
As long as they’re putting cards on the table, Kris decides he might as well slap this one down. “I would want you to-- There’s nothing I wouldn’t be ready to do.” It’s either shut his eyes or stare at Adam’s lap, and now he’s seeing it so clearly, the two of them-- “Because I think it would be more like Twizzlers, and you know how I feel about those.”
Adam is covering his face with his hands. “Why did I think this was a good idea?”
“No, you were right to put it out there. Communication prevents complications, et cetera.”
“I guess wanting to fuck you is uncomplicated. Except for the part where I have to walk to my bunk, which I think I’d better do right away.”
“You sure? If you’re still not convinced, we can put it to the test.” Enjoying himself, Kris casually moves a hand to his upper thigh.
“Goodnight. Cute, aggravating, not-so-straight boy.”
--
“I watched the GMA concert videos.”
Kris makes a noncommittal sound. Something tells him Katy isn’t leading up to an appreciation of David Cook’s Fleetwood Mac cover.
Sure enough, she continues, “You have to consider how it looks, you and Adam always sticking so close together. I don’t think you were more than a foot apart the entire time. And the way you kept staring at him, you’d think the two of you are . . . ” She pauses, leaving Kris to wonder, Do you think we are? “Blowing off a little steam is one thing-- ”
“Blowing off steam?” Kris repeats fatalistically. Denial would only make him sound guilty. He doesn’t delude himself that he’s not.
“I know you’re not actually doing anything,” she says hastily. The faint uncertainty might exist only in his imagination. “I know you wouldn’t. You’re just having fun. But people are going to get the wrong idea. They already have, Kris. You should see what some of the fan sites are saying.”
A reprieve. “People are going to say stuff no matter what. That’s part of this whole deal. We can’t let it bother us.”
“Your image matters, Kristopher. I talked to Gina-- ”
“You what?”
“I talked to Gina, and she agrees that this could harm your career.”
He would've preferred anger and accusations. “Katy, you know it bugs me when you do that. Go behind my back to PR like that. You’re supposed to be my wife, not my manager.”
“I’m not conspiring against you! Good grief. This is about what’s best for you, what’s going to help you sell records and be successful.”
“What’s the point, if I get locked into this script that other people are writing for me?” Small town, Arkansas, Christian, married. "If I can't be who I really am?"
"Who are you these days, Kristopher?" The question isn’t challenging, but subdued and a little sad. It weakens him. Here he is, the one who’s slipping away, wishing she would take the initiative and reach out to him. If I stay, will you fight for us? Can you see that we're losing?
“Katy . . . ”
“No one is saying you and Adam can’t be friends. Just . . . don’t call so much attention to it. Spend more time with the others. Matt and Anoop are your friends too, aren’t they?” Her tone is placating.
Kris can picture her pacing the living room of their L.A. apartment, girlish in one of her loose summer dresses, her bare shoulders smooth and pale and deceptively fragile. If he could put his arms around her now, nuzzle into the familiar clean scent of her hair, maybe they would fall into each other the way they once had, the way a married couple was supposed to.
“Look, I have to go.” It isn’t even a lie. He has soundcheck in ten minutes.
“Think about it, all right? The tour’s going to be over in a month, and then everything will be different.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Love you.”
“Me too.”
That night the music fails him, or he fails it. The notes are intact, the words in key, but he can’t summon the conviction that gives them life. For the first time, he feels ordinary on a stage.
Alone in his hotel room afterwards, it’s either throw something at the wall, or . . . He heads directly for the shower, yanking at his clothes and letting them fall to the floor.
He’s hard before he steps into the stall. The water streams hot over his skin, and he imagines it’s Adam’s hand on him, merciless, imagines Adam’s voice in his ear, Let go, take it . . . His eyes are squeezed shut and it’s himself he’s throwing at the wall, breaking almost immediately in a spill of words. “Adam, Adam, Adam . . . ”
Slumping against the tile, Kris settles for feeling empty.
--
He falls in line. How can he take a stand when he’s so conflicted about what he owes Katy, Adam, himself?
“What’s Adam really like?” the reporter from the local paper asks.
“He’s easy to be around.” He says he’s an open book, but he’s not, really--except to me. He reads me just as well. All we have to do is look at each other to say, “Danny is an ass,” or “We’ll make fun of this when we’re alone.” He sings all the time, like life is a Broadway musical. He’s the most fun person I’ve ever met, but he’s serious about all the right things.
“Would you say he’s your closest friend on the tour?”
“I get along great with everyone. We’re all pretty close.” The first time I saw him, he was wearing a blue shirt. His hair was falling in his eyes--it made you notice them, how piercing they were, but so warm at the same time. I heard his laugh, this genuine, happy laugh. I wanted to hear it again.
Adam receives his own call from management. “They suggested I start dating,” he reports, heavy on the air quotes. “What am I supposed to do, pick up somebody on Twitter? They seem to think I can go out and acquire a boyfriend the way I’d buy a pair of boots.”
“Guess they don’t know how serious you are about boot shopping,” Kris manages to say, instead of something vehement and un-Kris-like. “What did you tell them?”
“To fuck off, of course, in a way that gave them the impression I was considering it. You didn’t actually think I would, did you?”
“No, not really. Just a second of-- Sorry.” You have a wife, idiot, he reminds himself. Mine, counters his jealousy, unmoved.
--
In the dark, Kris listens.
The depth of his turmoil, revealed one scrap of melody and lyric fragment at a time, surprises him. He has a poker face after all. “Wake up, put my poker face on,” he sings silently, plucking notes in the air.
He’s slept soundly with only a thin bedroll between him and a dirt floor on the other side of the world. Now, exhausted as he is, he lies awake on cool hotel sheets, his notebook open across his chest and a pen between his fingers. Since he allowed the unthinkable word divorce to form in his mind, he’s gained greater access to the ambivalent territory where he works best.
It's been less than a year. If he and Katy are estranged now, it’s only to be expected after so much separation and upheaval. Looking back over those eleven rocky months, he can’t claim to have given his marriage a fair chance. What kind of person is he, to consider discarding something without first trying to fix it? So much they share is irreplaceable: the common history, the firsts, the familiarity of years.
I’ll lose him. He and Adam hadn’t molded themselves to fit one another. They hadn’t grown to be complementary. They just did; they just were. There was no need for Kris to discard any piece of himself, vital or insignificant. If he tried, Adam would pick up that piece and put it securely back into place. He's shamed by how much he wants to give this insight to Adam as a gift. I recognized you. You’re the first, in the ways that really matter.
It all goes into the music instead. Flat on his back, he mouths lines like a prayer. Maybe he’ll record them like this, prostrate and imploring.
--
“I keep asking myself,” Kris says haltingly, “whether this is from God.” His spiritual vocabulary is different from Adam’s, but he knows Adam will understand.
Adam answers in Kris’s language. “Maybe you should ask Him directly.”
“I have. If there’s an answer, it’s not getting through. Too much in the way.”
“Guilt?” Adam asks quietly.
“Guilt. Guilt because I don’t feel as guilty as I should. Being busy and tired all the time. Lust,” he finishes Biblically.
A long pause. “I wish there was something I could say to make it easier, but we both know there isn’t. I’m not going to pressure you-- ”
Kris interrupts with a mirthless laugh. “Yeah, that doesn’t help.” Maybe it’s proof of a character flaw, Katy’s charge of passivity, but he would welcome the undue influence. Especially when the alternative is to fight his own battles armed only with a notebook and a guitar. But he knows Adam will do nothing but wait, enduring his own struggles with the powerless role.
“I don’t expect you to figure it out right away.” Adam’s tone draws a new line, a non-negotiable one. “But there has to be some kind of resolution in sight.”
---
Kris’s Boston hotel room is distinguished by a spongy mattress that dips in the middle when he plops down, remote in hand. Thanks to the boredom of the bus, he’s already seen the movies on all the premium channels. An old episode of Law & Order holds his interest for less than a minute before he mutes Sam Waterston’s righteous indignation.
Adam joins him, and the sides of the mattress lift off the box spring. Caught unawares, Kris rolls up against him like a window shade. He’s content to stay.
As usual, Adam is wearing a tangle of silver around his neck. Kris reaches out to play with a pendant shaped like a T with a loop on top. An ankh, he thinks it's called. “Do you remember that picture you sent me, the fan art?” This is tricky ground, not necessary conversation. He wonders when he became the one without a filter.
“I still have it saved. Don’t tell Neil. He keeps threatening to send me the porny ones.”
“And that would be bad because-- ?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It seems inappropriate.” Adam lifts an eyebrow in ironic acknowledgment of his presence on Kris’s bed.
Kris ventures further, past inappropriate and into reckless. “If that had really happened, it would all be settled by now.” He releases the pendant and meets Adam’s wary eyes. “Did you know? Then?”
Adam looks at him as though seeing the Kris of three months ago. Winner to his runner-up, but never his rival, not on that night or any other. The memory of conspiratorial joy lifts the corners of his mouth--that full, expressive mouth. “Yes.”
“Me too. I always knew.” Reckless to wrong, but I’m going to anyway.
Adam goes rigid with surprise when Kris kisses him. In the next moment, he’s levering himself off the bed. “It’s too late for that, Kris. Or too soon.”
A single imperative, Now, drives Kris after him. He crowds Adam against the door, feeling all the way down to his gut how much bigger Adam is. It’s different, having to reach up; it’s exciting. It has the potential to answer all his questions and satisfy all his doubts, if only he can get Adam to cooperate.
“Come on,” he says against Adam’s unresponsive lips. His hips push in, trying to crush resistance with need. Not like this, objects the observing part of his brain, but he’s desperate enough to force it, to take whatever he can get.
“Kris, don’t-- ” Adam uses his strength for the first time, restraining Kris with a hard grip on his wrists. Game over. But then one hand lets go to slide up under Kris’s chin and Kris opens his mouth and there, that drowns out any rational thought.
He can’t believe it when Adam breaks away for the second time. “How can you stop, how can you not want this too much to stop?” Kris is disoriented, blinking like he’s just come off a darkened stage directly into a too-bright room. They’re both breathing hard.
Adam grabs Kris’s hand and presses it to the front of his jeans. He drags it up and down once, roughly, before shoving it away. “That’s how much I want to stop.”
The shape of Adam’s cock burns in his palm. God. “Then-- ”
Adam explodes. “Do you think I’m trying to be your conscience here? Do you think I give a fuck about your marriage right now? I care about us. Whatever the future of us is going to be. It’s not worth one night of taking the edge off. You’re not going to get through this by using your dick as a battering ram.”
In Kris’s short career of provocation, he’s never succeeded so spectacularly. He pushes, and Adam pushes back; those are their rules of engagement. But their skirmishes aren’t meant to be won, let alone to draw blood. “I know, God, I know, but I-- ”
Adam clearly has no intention of staying to survey the damage with him. “I really don’t think we can handle being around each other right now. We’ll talk tomorrow, OK?” Without waiting for a response, he reaches for the doorknob.
“Goodnight,” Kris says to the closing door.
--
Adam doesn’t avoid Kris the next day. He’s polite, which is worse. Polite and subdued. My fault, Kris thinks, watching him respond to Matt and Danny’s improv routines with a strained smile. Then, caustically, I almost cheated on my wife. Maybe I should at least try to feel bad about that.
He considers calling her. Not to confess; he’s not ready for that, or for where it might lead. Just to bring her into focus, along with a sense of his own betrayal. It’s the right thing to do. But Adam can always tell when he’s been talking to Katy, just as Kris can tell Adam is trying not to mind.
Later, maybe.
I’m kind of a jerk, aren’t I? Well, he'd never believed his own press anyway.
He gives Adam his space until he can’t stand it anymore. Pulling out his phone, he texts, A battering ram, huh?
They’re sitting in their customary places on the couch, with a two-foot buffer between them--two feet more than usual. Still close enough for Kris to read the words as Adam’s thumbs work over the touch screen. I have a way with words when I’m mad. Which I still kinda am btw.
“You have a right to be,” Kris says out loud. “I messed up.”
“We’ve always had an understanding, Kris. ‘This far and no farther.’ That’s why we can be--whatever we are. And last night-- ”
“I broke it, yeah.”
“Like a champagne bottle against the side of a cruise ship,” Adam agrees.
It startles a laugh out of Kris. “You really do have a way with words.”
Perversely, Adam has nothing to say to that. But he scoots a foot closer.
--
It’s a night like any other--the bus rumbling, the air slightly stale, Kris’s practiced sideways roll into his bunk a solid nine out of ten. Switching on the tiny reading light, he opens his notebook and confronts the four words of his mantra: I need to know.
To Kris, they doesn’t look like the beginning of a song, or the beginning of anything. The harder he strains to glimpse the ending, the more lost he feels. How can he write the next line when he’s not the writer at all, but the song itself? Inert on the page, waiting vainly for direction.
The words recede, blurring into a smear of ink. So this is what it’s like to fall apart.
He fumbles for his phone and types blindly, You still awake?
The uninflected question must somehow convey distress, because thirty seconds later Adam is climbing in with him, long arms and legs graceful. “Everyone’s asleep,” he says low, considerately pretending that Kris isn’t past the point of caring.
There isn’t enough room for them to lie side by side. They fold themselves together, bodies aligning familiarly despite all the lines they haven’t crossed. Adam reaches up to turn off the light, and the enclosing darkness brings relief, like a cool cloth on Kris’s forehead, like the slow circles of Adam’s hand on his back. Falling apart isn’t so bad once he stops resisting.
When he trusts his voice, he says, barely audible, “There’s no way out of this without hurting someone.” As always, his mind rejects the truth, veering off toward a compromise that doesn’t exist. He wishes again, selfishly, that Adam would lay out the arguments for him, or at least plead his own case. But Adam is too scrupulous and too self-respecting to do more than hold Kris tighter.
The warmth of his arms replaces the chill Kris hadn’t noticed until it started to ease. Kris times the rise and fall of Adam’s chest, counting beats, until his own takes on the same steady rhythm. “Goodnight,” he whispers into that safest of places, the curve of Adam’s neck and shoulder.
The first thing he sees in the morning is his notebook, half tucked under the pillow. Beneath his single line is a paragraph in Adam’s bold printing.
Whatever choice you make, it’s the right one. This isn’t me letting you go. I could never distance myself from you, not even to protect myself from getting hurt. This is me believing in you, Kris. I wouldn’t give back a minute of our summer or the months before. No matter what happens, I’ll always be your friend.
Instead of a signature, there’s one of Adam’s occasional doodles: Kris’s guitar, curvy and cartoon-cheerful.
Kris sets aside the reassurance and looks for the goodbye between the lines. He imagines Adam taking a step back--not walking away, but putting up the boundary that separates even close friends. Their lives shared only in phone calls and texts and the infrequent overlap of two busy schedules. His own colorless PR quotes becoming a reality.
Adam is strong. If Kris breaks his heart, he’ll cry, without bitterness, then put it back together and eventually give it to someone else. Kris will be there to see it, if he chooses, from his side of their invisible wall.
Kris turns the page.
--
Backstage at the venue, Kris finds a table in a quiet corner. He’s about to reach for his guitar case when a plate appears at his elbow. He glances over the tidy pyramid of raw vegetables, then up at Adam. “What, no strawberries?”
Adam smiles in acknowledgment. “Today’s snack is symbolism-free. That cherry tomato? Just a cherry tomato.” He’s wearing the ankh necklace, Kris notices. There’s no detail of Adam he doesn’t want to memorize, down to his pale toes in the flip-flops Kris likes to borrow. “Don’t want to disturb your muse. I’ll see you later.”
“Wait.”
Adam turns expectantly.
“Do you mind if we don’t hang out tonight?”
Adam’s face shows only acceptance. “That’s fine.”
Kris can’t claim to be renewed. Nothing so dramatic as that. But today he's humbled, not because he isn't equal to his choice, but because he is. It's hard, as it should be; it's bittersweet. As strong as the regret is the gratitude for his answer: Take a leap of faith.
He says, firm, “I’ve got an important phone call to make.”
September
The days of summer had run out in Manchester, with tearful hugs and Silly String and promises to keep in touch. Forty-eight hours later, Detroit is a coda. No arena, no waiting crowd of autograph seekers. No efficient machine shepherding them from bus to meet-and-greet to dressing room. Just the two of them, a single handler, and a private acoustic gig scheduled for the next day.
After months in motion, the sudden standstill feels disconcerting, like stepping off one of those moving walkways at the airport. “Moving walkways,” Kris sings, trying it out. He misses his friends and the windows that frame a constantly changing view. He’s changed with it, forgotten how to have a home.
One last hotel room. The light of a single lamp lends it the softening depth of shadows. He and Adam lie down on the chaste white sheets, facing each other but not touching. As he has so many times before, Kris contemplates the paradox of eyes both gray and bright. Eyes that see through to parts of him he’s still discovering for himself.
He has a million questions, but only one he needs to ask tonight. “Why did you draw a picture of my guitar?”
Adam frowns a little, thinking. “Because it’s you, I guess. Your instinct, and your voice.” He reaches out to trace the line of Kris’s jaw. “Falling slowly, sing your melody, I’ll sing along . . . ” He draws out the last word with a tenderness that makes Kris’s throat ache.
Voice thick, Kris says, “I couldn’t let us end up like the couple in that movie, going our separate ways. Saying goodbye . . . I think I could’ve done that part. It would only take a minute to rip my heart out. But I couldn’t live without it afterwards.”
“But you had to be the one to write that ending. You had to decide what kind of story this is, the story of you and me.”
“What if I say,” Kris takes a deep breath, poised on the verge of everything, “that it’s a love story?”
“Then I’ll say, I love you, Kris.”
There’s a yielding streak in Kris that Adam brings out effortlessly, and never more so than now, with his deep, possessive kiss and the guiding weight of his hand at the nape of Kris’s neck. Kris breaks free only to say it back, over and over, and each time Adam captures him and swallows the words from his mouth.
In a far corner of his mind, Kris had feared he might get the performance, the teasing swagger and control of stage Adam. But there’s no calculation in the needy searching of Adam’s hands, or in the thrust of his hips that wrings a helpless groan from Kris. It’s the same intuitive knowledge that flows between them as comfort, turned with a touch into heat.
“I want to suck it,” Kris says, drunk and deliberately a little dirty, as soon as he gets Adam’s jeans off and a hand around him. He strokes and wonders how this is going to work, wanting enough to believe in the impossible.
“Oh, God, Kris. Yes, next time. Let me . . . ” Adam slides down Kris’s body and slides his mouth down Kris’s cock, all the way, nothing gentle about it except the repeated brush of his hair against Kris’s stomach. After a while, Kris stops trying to tell him how good it feels. He arches his back in demand, Hold me down, and the bite of Adam’s fingertips is as sweet as the strokes of his tongue. He stops trying not to come.
“Everything,” he reminds Adam, still panting. Adam only steals his hard-won air and gives him back a sharp and dizzying taste of himself. He’s talkative even without words, eloquent with kisses. His cock swells insistently against Kris’s thigh, but he lingers, drawing Kris into a long conversation, still so much to say.
Finally Adam stops to tell him out loud, “I haven’t forgotten, Kris. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since that night.”
“Show me. Please.”
Adam’s voice eases him into it, reassuring, as his sliding-wet fingers begin their work. “There’s no hope for me now. I won’t be able to think of anything but that look on your face.” So delicately slow. “I’m going to want this more tomorrow, and even more the day after that.” Faster, there, and Kris cries out for him. They can be obsessed together.
“Now,” Kris pleads, no idea if he’s ready, but he’s harder than he’s ever been in his life, and he needs Adam closer, and he can’t go any longer without finding out. “No, don’t kiss me again!” He laughs in his desperation because he’s just that happy, and because Adam’s face is glowing with love. “I mean, kiss me after.”
If it’s brand-new and a little strange and a lot overwhelming, that just means more room for Kris to get lost. Sinking into a song is a solitary exaltation, but here Adam is with him, heavy and good on top of him, shockingly full inside him.
“Like this,” Adam breathes, not a question. Kris pulls his head down as the music starts to build, perfect harmony on the inarticulate chorus, Yes.
--End--
Note: The fan art is trufax and awesome.