fic: all i need is next to me, 2/3
Part I
They somehow manage to keep it a secret from the rest of the tour. It helps that they aren't really close with most of the T's or with the Dashboard guys; if De'Mar notices that Jon has suddenly become a recluse and spends a lot less time out and about bullshitting with him or with The Cab guys, or that Panic suddenly doesn't take kindly to unexpected visitors to their bus, he doesn't say anything to Jon about it. Jon likes that about De'Mar, although he does have to field one very ridiculous phone call from Nick demanding reassurance that Jon is okay and doesn't require an intervention of some sort.
"Like you'd even know how to stage an intervention," Jon tells him.
"Tommy and I could figure it out," Nick says confidently.
Jon snickers. "Yeah, that's a real recipe for success, right there."
Then they move on to talking about grilled cheese and what Empires is up to lately-Jon keeps missing Tom's calls, because Tom calls at odd hours or inopportune times and never picks up his phone when Jon calls back, so at this point their friendship basically consists of one never-ending marathon game of phone tag-and everything is fine. Some things are more than fine, actually; his beard stopped growing when his dick disappeared, so he doesn't have to shave or trim it anymore.
And yeah, he even gets used to the boobs, or at least he stops feeling himself up first thing every morning to see if he spontaneously switched back overnight. Whatever, it's progress.
It takes him kind of an embarrassing amount of time to figure out that staying in the binder for too long always gives him that weird ache in his chest and back, so he has to limit the amount of time he spends in it. This of course is completely at odds with his desire to pretend that everything is normal and he hasn't suddenly become a 36B, but he deals with it.
He has to restrict himself-and oh, that pun is awful-to a few hours a day in the thing, and by the end of the night he's pretty eager to get out of it. Going out to sign after shows becomes a practical impossibility; he likes meeting the fans, really he does, but the choice between taking awkward photos with jailbait and getting to lounge around the bus without the binder on is no choice at all. But he still misses it, and it upsets him more than he lets on that the fansites are pretty much equally divided between wondering if he's sick and thinking he's an asshole for letting the fans down.
After the show in St. Louis, Ryan, Brendon, and Spencer dump their stuff in the front lounge and immediately go out to sign without Jon, which bums him out; one of them-usually Brendon-has been staying back to keep him company each night. But then they come back almost as quickly with armfuls of stuff, CDs and t-shirts and at least one pair of mismatched shoes and a stuffed cat. Brendon has a stack of bracelets three inches wide on one wrist.
"What the hell?" Jon asks.
"This stuff," Brendon says, deftly managing to catch a copy of Pretty. Odd. that he almost drops, "is for you."
Spencer nods. "We told the girls you weren't feeling well, and some of them had presents, so we said we'd take them back to you, and then a couple of others asked if I'd mind taking something in for you to sign, and, well." He looks meaningfully down at the pair of tote bags he has slung over one shoulder. "They really miss you."
Jon plucks the stuffed animal from Brendon's arms-it's a nice one, with really soft grey-tabby fur and big green eyes-and looks up at them, grinning. "Well, I am pretty awesome," he says.
Ryan shrugs. "I thought the kitty was cute."
"Yes," Jon says, tucking the cat under his arm. He fumbles around the couch cushions for one of the myriad Sharpies they have lying around the bus, still smiling as he takes the first CD. "The kitty is very cute."
When Jon has run through the stack of CDs-including a couple of copies of Fever, which never ceases to amuse him -he watches as Brendon takes off the bracelets one by one, saying, "Apparently all the girls think you're sick, so they thought you could use some bling. What the fuck a bracelet is going to do for you when you're sick, I don't know."
"Ryan, I will never forgive you for your stupid bracelet fetish," Jon says, picking up one that says "REINVENT ♥" on red and black beads.
"Hey," Ryan says, affronted. "I do not have a fetish."
"Yes, you do," Spencer says. "You definitely do."
"I don't know, I think it's kind of cute," Brendon says.
Jon snorts. "Ryan, or the bracelets?"
Brendon sticks out his tongue and snaps an elasticized "J♥N WALKER" bracelet at Jon's head.
After Jon signs the last t-shirt and the last of the shoes-there were three of them, actually-Spencer says, "We should probably take their stuff back soon, huh?"
"Yeah." Jon pauses for a long moment. "Thanks, guys," he says.
Ryan and Spencer both insist that it's nothing, but Brendon just gives Jon a secretive little half-smile. "Anything for our adoring public."
Cassie shows up to the venue in Chicago during soundcheck. One minute Jon is bopping along with Spencer's beat on "That Green Gentleman," and the next he looks up and she's standing right there at stage right, a VIP pass dangling from a neon lanyard around her neck.
Jon feels a surge of hope. He was going to call her to remind her that they were playing tonight, that she was on the all-access list, but it seems she didn't need the reminder.
"I need five," he says into his mic, still looking at Cass and grinning like a moron, and he doesn't even notice the rest of the guys as he scampers across the stage in bare feet, nimbly avoiding the unsecured cables and set-up detritus all over the stage.
"Hi," she says when he reaches her.
"Hi," he says, a little breathless. He stands in front of her for a moment, not really knowing what to do with his hands, and then she leans in and brushes her mouth over his, hello and I'm sorry and missed you in that simple kiss. Jon makes a sound low in his throat and wraps his arms around her, burying his face in her hair. "Hi," he says again.
Cassie hugs him back cautiously, like she's afraid he's going to break. He thinks he feels her stiffen a little when she feels the edge of the binder at the small of his back, but she's here. She's here, and everything is going to be okay.
Jon spends the entire set playing directly to Cassie, who is standing up in the VIP section along with his parents, smiling and mouthing along with the words and generally looking like the best thing he's ever seen.
After the show, he weighs the risk of showering at the venue against his need to get home as soon as possible, and decides to chance it, calling first shower before Brendon gets a chance.
"But I'm gross and disgusting, Jon," Brendon wheedles. "I'll be quick, I promise."
"You're always gross and disgusting," Ryan says.
Spencer flicks Ryan's ear, and then Brendon's when Brendon sticks his tongue out at Ryan. "Bren," he says, "just let him go home to his girlfriend, alright?"
"Oh, right, girlfriend," Ryan says, and wanders over to the corner to text Keltie.
By the time Jon can strip out of his stage clothes, shower, and slip into the clean binder and his street clothes, it's just past 11; by the time he's kissed his parents and his brother and his sister-in-law hello and goodbye and let Cassie drag him out to the car it's 11:30, which means that they get home at midnight, and bus call is at six.
Six hours is all the time in the world.
Cassie sets down her purse, kicks off her shoes, and hangs up her coat next to the door and then turns to face him, smiling softly. It makes him want to kiss her, so he does.
"Missed you," he mumbles against her mouth, "missed you, missed you, missed you-"
"Shh," she says, sliding her hands into his hair and kissing him back with her tongue sweet against his lower lip. "I missed you, too."
Want makes Jon shudder helplessly, groaning, and he tries to keep them from falling over or tripping over the cats (and he'll have to make it up to them later, he knows) as they stumble down the hall on the way to their bedroom. And it's still their bedroom, his shitty thrift-store nightstand next to the nice bed he bought when he had the money, one of his old guitars in the corner and Cassie's schoolbooks scattered over the floor. But he can't concentrate on his surroundings when he's got Cassie in his arms, when she's pressing herself against him and making pleased little sounds as he tumbles her backwards onto the bed.
"Hey, you," she says as she wraps her arms around his shoulders.
"Hi," he says, nosing against her cheek before kissing her mouth again. He missed her so much, and these days and days of not knowing have been hell, but he has his answer now, with her warm and arching up under him, sliding her legs apart so he can fit between them. It's enough to make him ache with want, heat rushing through him and centering between his legs.
Her hands slide down to play with the hem of his shirt. "Jon," she says, "can we-"
"Yeah, yeah," he says quickly, and sits back on his knees so he can pull his t-shirt over his head.
He feels rather than hears her sharp intake of breath when she sees the binder. "So you're still," she says, even though she knows the answer.
Jon refuses to blush in front of his girlfriend of four years, but he can't meet her eyes. "Yeah, I'm still."
Cassie touches the bottom of the binder, sliding her fingers underneath to touch the taut muscles of his stomach. "Does it hurt?"
"It-sometimes," he admits, looking down at her again.
"Do you," she starts, and then bites her lip, hesitating. "Do you want to take it off?"
"Not if you don't want me to."
She makes an exasperated noise. "Baby, it looks uncomfortable. Take it off."
He leans down and kisses her again, grateful, and then sits up again so he can shimmy out of the binder, and he kicks off his jeans while he's at it. She slips out of her clothes, too, and then they lie down facing each other in their underwear. Jon hasn't felt this shy about sex since high school, although he thinks that under the circumstances, he's entitled.
She gets a determined look on her face and nudges forward to kiss him again, and he settles his hand on her waist, feeling the warmth of her skin under his palm. She mirrors the gesture, fingers lingering on the red marks the binder left on his hip but studiously avoiding his chest, even when Jon moves his hand to cup her breast through her bra.
Jon still wants, feeling himself throb in his boxers in a familiar-but-also-not kind of way. "Can we," he says, and then pushes her onto her back again, crawling on top of her and sliding one thigh between hers, pressing down against her so they can both get a little bit of friction. And this is familiar territory, this is good, especially when Jon pulls down the cups of her bra and leans down to graze his teeth over her nipples the way he knows she likes, and she groans in that way that he likes.
Her fingers tangle in his hair again, insistently pulling him upward, and that just makes the ache between his legs worse-he's always had a thing for having his hair pulled.
Cassie sucks in a nervous breath when he settles his weight on top of her, their chests pressing together, and he knows she can feel his breasts against hers. He distracts her by kissing her again, deep and demanding, and rocking his hips down, his thigh pressing hard against her clit.
"Oh, shit," she moans. Her nails rake down his back so she can hold his hips in place, grinding up as he grinds down, and then she slips one hand between them, knuckles brushing against the curve of Jon's belly. Her fingers just graze Jon's clit through his boxers and he cries out, but she goes rigid under him when she realizes that she's reaching for something that's not there, as if she could have somehow forgotten when they're pressed together from neck to knees.
Then she's pushing him away, rolling off to the side, turning her back to him as she chokes back a sob.
"Cass," Jon says. "Cass, come on, tell me what's wrong."
She draws in a shuddering breath. "I-Jon, I can't, I can't do this."
He puts his hand on her hip, distraught, trying to reassure her, but that just makes her breath even shakier, the way she always sounds when she's trying not to cry. "Babe, it's fine, it's only-"
"I tried," she says, and then she does start to cry. "I just want my boyfriend back."
Jon makes an anguished sound. "I'm right here."
She turns half over, hugging her sides, and looks pointedly at his tits, which makes Jon frown in embarrassment and cross his own arms protectively over his chest. "Why did you-I thought we were okay. You came to the show and I thought we were okay." And if they weren't okay, she should have had the decency not to show up and then take him home and take him to bed before deciding that she couldn't deal with him. "You said you needed time-"
"There's never going to be enough time," she says, crying harder, curling in on herself again. "I tried, I swear I tried, but I can't."
It becomes really hard for Jon to breathe all of a sudden, like he's been in the binder for too long, like something is pressing down on his chest and trying to suffocate him. He hates watching Cassie cry, and he hates his stupid body and he hates whatever did this to him in the first place. He just wants everything to go back to normal.
But maybe this is normal now.
He rolls off the bed and starts gathering up his clothes. "Fine," he says, yanking up his jeans, looking at the binder for a second before deciding to throw on his t-shirt without it.
She sits up and watches blankly, still sniffling, as he gets dressed. "I don't want you to go," she says.
"Could have fooled me," he says, trying not to sound bitter, picking up the binder and folding it so he can shove it in his overnight bag on the way out the door.
"I don't want you to go, I just don't want-" You, she doesn't say. "-this."
Jon stops short and gives her a long, pained look. "But I still do," he says simply, and then leans over her-sitting on the edge of the bed now, still in her underwear-and kisses her forehead. "I love you, Cass."
He doesn't look back as he walks out.
This is Tom, leave a message-
Jon savagely punches 1 and says, "You'd better be home, motherfucker, because I have a serious need to get fucked up and you are my only hope. Don't fucking make me call Nick."
The trip up the Blue Line to Wicker Park takes exactly as long as it always does, and the walk from the station to Tom's place goes quickly, Jon's flip-flops sounding loudly on the pavement with each step.
He rings the bell for Tom's apartment and Tom's voice sounds scratchy through the intercom when he says, "What?"
"Let me up, Tommy, it's fucking cold out here," Jon says, even though it's not cold at all; Jon's sweating in his coat.
"Pussy," Tom says, but he buzzes Jon up.
"You really need to learn to answer your fucking phone," Jon says when Tom opens the door, unzipping his coat and pushing past him into the apartment.
"And hello to you, too, Jon Walker," Tom says, locking the door again. He turns around just as Jon is draping his coat over the arm of the couch, and then he goes very still. "Jon. You have tits."
"I hadn't noticed," Jon says flatly. "Less gawking, more drinking."
Flailing a little, Tom says, "It's not every day your best friend shows up to your house with fucking tits, dude."
"Happens to girls all the time," Jon says, and then goes to the kitchen to dig around the fridge for beer.
"I am not a girl," Tom says, and then he pauses. "So I guess this is what all those voicemails were about, huh?"
Jon snorts. "You think?" he says, and then hands Tom an open beer. "I said you need to learn to answer your phone."
"I'll work on that." Tom gives Jon a hard look as he takes the beer. "So is there any particular reason you're here drinking my hard-won alcohol, or am I just lucky?"
"You've got the worst fucking luck in the world." He takes a long pull from his beer and then goes quiet. "Cassie and I-she just. Can't take it."
Tom's face falls. "Fuck," he says. "Fuck, Jon-"
"Less talking," Jon orders. "More drinking."
After another long pause, during which Tom opens and closes his mouth several times, like he's trying to decide on something to say that won't make Jon punch him, Tom finally asks, "When's your bus call?"
"Six," Jon says around the mouth of his beer. He's already thrown back half the bottle.
"Oh, well then," Tom says. "That's all the time in the world."
Jon doesn't explain why he feels the sudden need to shotgun the other half.
He catches a cab in the morning and shows up to the bus at 5:57 wearing a pair of douchey oversized sunglasses that Danielle made the mistake of leaving at Tom's apartment, drunk enough that he can't walk straight. The binder is still stuffed in his overnight bag.
Nobody asks him how his night went, and nobody stands in his way when he just stumbles back to the bunks to crash.
The show in Detroit is probably the most painful of his life, heartbroken and epically hung over as he is, but Jon grits his teeth and plays through it, focusing once again on the texture of the carpet under his feet and the hum of the music in his monitors. He's a professional. He can do this.
He curls up miserably in his bunk afterwards, both of the hateful binders shoved down with the rest of his dirty laundry. He didn't even have the energy to shower; he's really going to regret that in the morning when his bunk smells even more like unwashed boy than usual, but right now he hurts too much to give a fuck.
When the rest of the guys get back to the bus, Brendon's sunny, "Jon Walker!" just makes him grit his teeth and shove his head under his pillow. He wishes he'd thought to find his iPod before going to sulk. Amazing, really, how much easier a pair of earbuds makes ignoring everything and everyone else.
Brendon comes to the back and knocks softly on the wall next to Jon's bunk. "Hey," he says. "Come on, we're going to watch Best in Show and we're not doing it without you."
Jon shakes his head behind his curtain. "Leave me alone. You should go out and sign, or something."
"Not tonight," Brendon says, and then he softly adds, "Please, Jon."
Drawing in a shuddering breath, Jon says, "I just want to go to sleep."
"You can sleep after the movie," Brendon says, doing his best to sound reasonable. "Come on, we're not going to start it without you, and then we'll just be sitting up front doing nothing all night."
Jon pushes his curtain open and glares at Brendon with his head still under his pillow. "Blackmail? Really?"
Brendon shrugs. "Whatever works."
"Why did she even come?" Jon asks the world at large, when the movie has long since gone to the menu screen on repeat, the volume turned off. "If she-but no, she just..."
Ryan hits the bong hard and then sets it carefully back on the table. "It's kind of a lot," he says as he exhales. "She probably thought she could-" he makes a completely nonsensical hand gesture "-and then she couldn't."
"At least she tried?" Brendon says, still trying to be helpful, even when he's as high as a kite.
"She didn't try hard enough," Spencer says darkly, reaching for the bong.
"She tried," Jon says. "And she was so-fuuuuck." He draws out the vowel, thinking about how beautiful Cassie looked spread out on their bed, how good it felt to have her under him and moaning into his mouth, shivering a little at the memory of how turned on he was just to be with her again. "Am I that ugly a girl?"
"You have a beard," Ryan points out, and then reaches out to skritch his fingers through it, just in case Jon forgot.
Jon did not, in fact, forget. "I know I have a beard. I love my beard."
Brendon yawns. "We love your beard, too, Jon."
"Beard buddies," Spencer says, solemn as he reaches out to bump Jon's fist.
"I just-" Jon pauses to take a hit. "Do you think she'd love me again if I shaved? Maybe she'd like a boyfriend with boobs as long as he didn't have a beard."
"I don't know," Brendon says uncertainly. "Would you like a girlfriend with a dick as long as she didn't have a beard?"
"Yes," Ryan says without hesitation.
Spencer pokes him in the side. "He wasn't asking you, douchebag."
Jon waits a long time before answering. "Cassie could have a beard and I would still want her," he says softly.
Brendon scoots closer to Jon on the couch, almost upsetting the bong on the table but stopping just before he knocks it over. "It's okay, Jon," he says, snuggling up to Jon's side. "Maybe she'll come around."
"She won't," Jon says, despondent. He hides his face in Brendon's hair so nobody sees how much the thought of that makes him want to cry. But probably they know anyway. They know him pretty well, after all. Not as well as Jon knows Cassie, but that didn't seem to matter to her.
There's a long, depressing silence, and then Ryan says, "I think you make a pretty girl, Jon. Even though you're, y'know, not a girl."
Spencer and Brendon are quick to agree, and then Ryan has to ruin it by adding, "You have a really nice rack," and Spencer reaches up and pulls his hair and calls him an insensitive prick.
But insensitive or not, once he says it, Jon can't stop thinking about it.
An hour later, he excuses himself by declaring that he is, in fact, going to shower tonight.
"Bus shower," Ryan says, wrinkling his nose.
"God, Ryan, shut up," Spencer says.
"Don't take too long," Brendon says, yawning.
"I won't," Jon promises.
With great difficulty and no little regret, he extracts himself from Brendon's extremely comforting snuggles and stumbles down the aisle to the bathroom. He sits down to pee-and that by far is the worst thing about having girl parts, if he discounts the whole loss-of-girlfriend thing-and then stands up and looks at his reflection in the warped, spotted mirror.
Jon takes a deep breath, and then pulls his shirt over his head so he can take his first good, hard look at his tits.
They're just the right size for his shoulders and chest, round and upturned at the tips. His nipples are larger than they used to be, lighter, but they're just the right size, too. When he reaches up to cup himself, the weight of his breast is solid and comforting in his hand, his palm curving just right around the bottom. He slides his other hand up to hold the other, and he watches his nipples contract in the chill of the AC compared to the warmth of his hands.
Ryan was right; he really does have a nice rack. If Jon were going to tailor-make himself a pair of breasts for some unknown, totally insane reason, these are the ones he'd choose.
He thinks about his breasts on some faceless, nameless girl with a tiny waist and round hips and long, slender legs, and feels the now-familiar pull of want between his legs.
One of his hands is halfway to his cunt before he realizes what he's doing, and he watches his reflection blush crimson, one hand splayed over the slight curve of his belly, one cupping a perfect, gorgeous breast.
If he ignores the plaid boxers riding low on his hips and everything from his neck up, it's a really fucking hot sight.
"God," he says aloud. "I am a fucking hot girl."
He remembers half a second after he says it that his band is just outside the door, and lets go of his breast to clap his hand over his mouth; the motion makes his tits bounce attractively, mesmerizingly, and Jesus, he is a fucking hot girl.
If only Cassie had thought so.
Jon frowns at his reflection and then picks up his shirt from the sink where he dropped it, pulling it on again so he can rejoin the guys in the back.
They're all fast asleep when he gets there, Ryan half-lying on Spencer and Brendon curled up on his side in the place where Jon was sitting. He debates waking them up for a long, stoned moment, but then decides against it, because all of them have slept worse places in less comfortable positions, and they'll probably wake up on their own in a few minutes anyway. Stoned power-naps are the best power-naps.
Instead he goes to his bunk and crawls in, shutting his curtain and staring up at the low, carpeted ceiling in the dim light, because he didn't bother turning off the overhead light.
Fucking hot, he thinks again, and the thrill of desire it sends through him that time is so strong that he unconsciously presses his thighs together, and that-oh, fuck, that.
It takes him all of thirty seconds to decide to shuck off his clothes and lie down naked on his rumpled sheets, spreading his legs as far as he can without poking a knee out into the aisle. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and then curls one hand around a breast and spreads the other across his belly, the exact same pose he made in front of the mirror before he freaked himself out.
He doesn't feel like freaking out now.
Jon doesn't look down between his legs-he's not that brave, not right now-but he inches his hand down below his navel, following the thin trail of hair that used to lead to his cock. Now it only leads to, well.
Hesitantly, he slips two fingers between his legs, brushing the callused pads over his clit, and his eyes widen at the intensity of the sensation. He presses down harder, circles his fingers a little, and that's too much, so intense that it almost hurts.
"Fuck," he bites out, and then lets his fingers wander lower, just feeling the texture of the skin, silky-wet and hot. He slides his fingers up and down the space between his inner and outer lips, and he even feels that on his clit, the flesh moving around.
"This is so messed up," he mumbles just as he pushes a finger inside, and fuck, he's wet. Not, like, floodgates-have-just-been-opened wet, but wet enough that it's an easy slide, his muscles eagerly gripping his fingertip. It feels fucking weird, but not weird enough to keep him from sliding his finger in a little deeper, or from pulling it out and going back with two.
Two, it turns out, are a tight fit, his skin feeling uncomfortably tight just at his entrance, and he realizes with a start that he's a fucking virgin in this body, in physical as well as literal terms. He can only get two fingers halfway inside before the stretch becomes too uncomfortable, and he pulls back instead of trying for more, not wanting to risk bleeding on his sheets, because some girls bleed, right?
Cassie didn't bleed. He didn't hurt Cassie at all.
And that thought is enough to make him bite his lip against the suffocating feeling in his chest again, his arousal ebbing so suddenly that he almost wishes he hadn't tried this at all. He wipes off his fingers on his sheets and flails around until he finds his boxers, pulling them on and curling up on his side with his back to the aisle.
He thinks it will take him a long time to fall asleep, but he's snoring after barely two minutes.
Jon wakes up with cottonmouth and sticky fingers, and spends a full minute blushing up at the ceiling of his bunk before he rolls out of bed.
Brendon is sitting in the front, looking like he spent the night crashed out on the couch, raptly watching coffee brew. He looks up when Jon steps into the front lounge and then makes an odd sound and quickly averts his eyes.
"What?" Jon says, looking down, and only then does he remember that he slept without a shirt on last night. "Oh, uh. Sorry."
"It's fine," Brendon says.
"I'll get a shirt," Jon says.
"You don't have to," Brendon says too quickly. "I mean, I'm, like. I can't very well tell other people that they have to put their clothes on, can I?"
Jon gives him an odd look. "No, you really can't," he says, "but I think I'm going to get a shirt anyway."
"Okay," Brendon says. "Whatever."
When he gets back to his bunk and digs around for a shirt, two things occur to him.
One: Brendon definitely stared at Jon's tits for a full three seconds before he made himself look away.
Two: Jon never actually got around to taking a shower last night.
Well, at least one of those is something he knows how to deal with.
After he gets out of the shower and into clean clothes-no binder yet; the bus is still moving-he goes back to the front and helps himself to a cup of coffee. Spencer is sitting at the kitchen table nudging a barely-conscious Ryan with his foot.
"How long until we hit Toronto?" Jon asks, because Spencer always knows these kinds of things.
"Few hours," Spencer says.
"Huh." Jon taps his foot. "Wake and bake?"
Spencer grins. "I like the way you think, Walker."
Ryan stirs a little and then looks up blearily at Jon. "I'm sorry I said you have a nice rack last night," he says.
Jon smiles. "It's okay," he says. "I do have a nice rack."
The look on Spencer's face is absolutely priceless.
Jon stops expecting to change back the day they play in DC. It isn't a big deal or anything; he just realizes that he didn't check first thing that morning to see if his breasts had magically disappeared in the night.
He misses Cassie like a physical pain, but he knows there's nothing he can do. If he got his dick back, sure, but since he doesn't think that's going to happen, he knows he's lost her for good. There's some sort of peace to that, to knowing, the opposite of all the fucking awful uncertainty he felt in those days leading up to the show in Chicago. It sucks, yeah, but at least he knows where they stand.
Things have changed for me, Jon sings into his mic that night, and that's okay, I feel the same.
He doesn't quite believe it yet, but he thinks that maybe he could, and when Brendon comes over to ask him if he's doing okay, like he has at every single show since the change, Jon's answering smile is wide and genuine.
On their night off in New York, Jon goes looking for Spencer only to find him staring at the wall behind the hotel bar.
"Hey, there you are," Jon says. "Brendon and I are going out, do you want to come?" Ryan, of course, has ditched them for Keltie, not that Jon blames him.
Spencer looks morosely at his beer. "Haley called," he says.
"Yeah?" Jon says, sliding into the seat next to him. "What did she have to say?"
"That she's going back to Illinois and not coming back," Spencer says, slurring his words a little.
Oh, shit, Jon thinks. "Shit," he says. "Jesus, Spencer, I'm so sorry."
"I know," Spencer says. He turns to squint at Jon through drunken eyes. "Is it supposed to hurt this much?"
Jon thinks about his thrift-store furniture piled high with Cassie's things, thinks about never seeing his cats again because it's always been better for them to stay with her. "Yeah," he says, "I think it is."
"Well, that fucking sucks," Spencer says.
"Yeah, it does," Jon says, and flags down the bartender so he can buy them a round.
Jon wakes up to the sound of Spencer humming softly in the shower. He's dressed in a t-shirt and boxers, and when he sits up he sees his binder folded neatly and set on top of his overnight bag.
He remembers Brendon finding them last night when they were both stupidly drunk and somehow getting them back to their room without any disasters occurring, but he absolutely does not remember getting out of his clothes. Weird-welcome, but weird.
At breakfast Spencer thanks Brendon profusely for making sure they didn't die.
"Yeah, thanks," Jon says. "I can't imagine sleeping in-in that."
Brendon looks away, his cheeks coloring a little. "Don't worry about it," he says. "I was just worried when you disappeared on me."
Jon looks down. "Sorry about that."
"Don't worry about that, either," Brendon says, recovering his usual sunny expression. "I'm sure you'll make it up to me later."
"Absolutely," Jon says solemnly, and then they shake on it.
Part III
They somehow manage to keep it a secret from the rest of the tour. It helps that they aren't really close with most of the T's or with the Dashboard guys; if De'Mar notices that Jon has suddenly become a recluse and spends a lot less time out and about bullshitting with him or with The Cab guys, or that Panic suddenly doesn't take kindly to unexpected visitors to their bus, he doesn't say anything to Jon about it. Jon likes that about De'Mar, although he does have to field one very ridiculous phone call from Nick demanding reassurance that Jon is okay and doesn't require an intervention of some sort.
"Like you'd even know how to stage an intervention," Jon tells him.
"Tommy and I could figure it out," Nick says confidently.
Jon snickers. "Yeah, that's a real recipe for success, right there."
Then they move on to talking about grilled cheese and what Empires is up to lately-Jon keeps missing Tom's calls, because Tom calls at odd hours or inopportune times and never picks up his phone when Jon calls back, so at this point their friendship basically consists of one never-ending marathon game of phone tag-and everything is fine. Some things are more than fine, actually; his beard stopped growing when his dick disappeared, so he doesn't have to shave or trim it anymore.
And yeah, he even gets used to the boobs, or at least he stops feeling himself up first thing every morning to see if he spontaneously switched back overnight. Whatever, it's progress.
It takes him kind of an embarrassing amount of time to figure out that staying in the binder for too long always gives him that weird ache in his chest and back, so he has to limit the amount of time he spends in it. This of course is completely at odds with his desire to pretend that everything is normal and he hasn't suddenly become a 36B, but he deals with it.
He has to restrict himself-and oh, that pun is awful-to a few hours a day in the thing, and by the end of the night he's pretty eager to get out of it. Going out to sign after shows becomes a practical impossibility; he likes meeting the fans, really he does, but the choice between taking awkward photos with jailbait and getting to lounge around the bus without the binder on is no choice at all. But he still misses it, and it upsets him more than he lets on that the fansites are pretty much equally divided between wondering if he's sick and thinking he's an asshole for letting the fans down.
After the show in St. Louis, Ryan, Brendon, and Spencer dump their stuff in the front lounge and immediately go out to sign without Jon, which bums him out; one of them-usually Brendon-has been staying back to keep him company each night. But then they come back almost as quickly with armfuls of stuff, CDs and t-shirts and at least one pair of mismatched shoes and a stuffed cat. Brendon has a stack of bracelets three inches wide on one wrist.
"What the hell?" Jon asks.
"This stuff," Brendon says, deftly managing to catch a copy of Pretty. Odd. that he almost drops, "is for you."
Spencer nods. "We told the girls you weren't feeling well, and some of them had presents, so we said we'd take them back to you, and then a couple of others asked if I'd mind taking something in for you to sign, and, well." He looks meaningfully down at the pair of tote bags he has slung over one shoulder. "They really miss you."
Jon plucks the stuffed animal from Brendon's arms-it's a nice one, with really soft grey-tabby fur and big green eyes-and looks up at them, grinning. "Well, I am pretty awesome," he says.
Ryan shrugs. "I thought the kitty was cute."
"Yes," Jon says, tucking the cat under his arm. He fumbles around the couch cushions for one of the myriad Sharpies they have lying around the bus, still smiling as he takes the first CD. "The kitty is very cute."
When Jon has run through the stack of CDs-including a couple of copies of Fever, which never ceases to amuse him -he watches as Brendon takes off the bracelets one by one, saying, "Apparently all the girls think you're sick, so they thought you could use some bling. What the fuck a bracelet is going to do for you when you're sick, I don't know."
"Ryan, I will never forgive you for your stupid bracelet fetish," Jon says, picking up one that says "REINVENT ♥" on red and black beads.
"Hey," Ryan says, affronted. "I do not have a fetish."
"Yes, you do," Spencer says. "You definitely do."
"I don't know, I think it's kind of cute," Brendon says.
Jon snorts. "Ryan, or the bracelets?"
Brendon sticks out his tongue and snaps an elasticized "J♥N WALKER" bracelet at Jon's head.
After Jon signs the last t-shirt and the last of the shoes-there were three of them, actually-Spencer says, "We should probably take their stuff back soon, huh?"
"Yeah." Jon pauses for a long moment. "Thanks, guys," he says.
Ryan and Spencer both insist that it's nothing, but Brendon just gives Jon a secretive little half-smile. "Anything for our adoring public."
Cassie shows up to the venue in Chicago during soundcheck. One minute Jon is bopping along with Spencer's beat on "That Green Gentleman," and the next he looks up and she's standing right there at stage right, a VIP pass dangling from a neon lanyard around her neck.
Jon feels a surge of hope. He was going to call her to remind her that they were playing tonight, that she was on the all-access list, but it seems she didn't need the reminder.
"I need five," he says into his mic, still looking at Cass and grinning like a moron, and he doesn't even notice the rest of the guys as he scampers across the stage in bare feet, nimbly avoiding the unsecured cables and set-up detritus all over the stage.
"Hi," she says when he reaches her.
"Hi," he says, a little breathless. He stands in front of her for a moment, not really knowing what to do with his hands, and then she leans in and brushes her mouth over his, hello and I'm sorry and missed you in that simple kiss. Jon makes a sound low in his throat and wraps his arms around her, burying his face in her hair. "Hi," he says again.
Cassie hugs him back cautiously, like she's afraid he's going to break. He thinks he feels her stiffen a little when she feels the edge of the binder at the small of his back, but she's here. She's here, and everything is going to be okay.
Jon spends the entire set playing directly to Cassie, who is standing up in the VIP section along with his parents, smiling and mouthing along with the words and generally looking like the best thing he's ever seen.
After the show, he weighs the risk of showering at the venue against his need to get home as soon as possible, and decides to chance it, calling first shower before Brendon gets a chance.
"But I'm gross and disgusting, Jon," Brendon wheedles. "I'll be quick, I promise."
"You're always gross and disgusting," Ryan says.
Spencer flicks Ryan's ear, and then Brendon's when Brendon sticks his tongue out at Ryan. "Bren," he says, "just let him go home to his girlfriend, alright?"
"Oh, right, girlfriend," Ryan says, and wanders over to the corner to text Keltie.
By the time Jon can strip out of his stage clothes, shower, and slip into the clean binder and his street clothes, it's just past 11; by the time he's kissed his parents and his brother and his sister-in-law hello and goodbye and let Cassie drag him out to the car it's 11:30, which means that they get home at midnight, and bus call is at six.
Six hours is all the time in the world.
Cassie sets down her purse, kicks off her shoes, and hangs up her coat next to the door and then turns to face him, smiling softly. It makes him want to kiss her, so he does.
"Missed you," he mumbles against her mouth, "missed you, missed you, missed you-"
"Shh," she says, sliding her hands into his hair and kissing him back with her tongue sweet against his lower lip. "I missed you, too."
Want makes Jon shudder helplessly, groaning, and he tries to keep them from falling over or tripping over the cats (and he'll have to make it up to them later, he knows) as they stumble down the hall on the way to their bedroom. And it's still their bedroom, his shitty thrift-store nightstand next to the nice bed he bought when he had the money, one of his old guitars in the corner and Cassie's schoolbooks scattered over the floor. But he can't concentrate on his surroundings when he's got Cassie in his arms, when she's pressing herself against him and making pleased little sounds as he tumbles her backwards onto the bed.
"Hey, you," she says as she wraps her arms around his shoulders.
"Hi," he says, nosing against her cheek before kissing her mouth again. He missed her so much, and these days and days of not knowing have been hell, but he has his answer now, with her warm and arching up under him, sliding her legs apart so he can fit between them. It's enough to make him ache with want, heat rushing through him and centering between his legs.
Her hands slide down to play with the hem of his shirt. "Jon," she says, "can we-"
"Yeah, yeah," he says quickly, and sits back on his knees so he can pull his t-shirt over his head.
He feels rather than hears her sharp intake of breath when she sees the binder. "So you're still," she says, even though she knows the answer.
Jon refuses to blush in front of his girlfriend of four years, but he can't meet her eyes. "Yeah, I'm still."
Cassie touches the bottom of the binder, sliding her fingers underneath to touch the taut muscles of his stomach. "Does it hurt?"
"It-sometimes," he admits, looking down at her again.
"Do you," she starts, and then bites her lip, hesitating. "Do you want to take it off?"
"Not if you don't want me to."
She makes an exasperated noise. "Baby, it looks uncomfortable. Take it off."
He leans down and kisses her again, grateful, and then sits up again so he can shimmy out of the binder, and he kicks off his jeans while he's at it. She slips out of her clothes, too, and then they lie down facing each other in their underwear. Jon hasn't felt this shy about sex since high school, although he thinks that under the circumstances, he's entitled.
She gets a determined look on her face and nudges forward to kiss him again, and he settles his hand on her waist, feeling the warmth of her skin under his palm. She mirrors the gesture, fingers lingering on the red marks the binder left on his hip but studiously avoiding his chest, even when Jon moves his hand to cup her breast through her bra.
Jon still wants, feeling himself throb in his boxers in a familiar-but-also-not kind of way. "Can we," he says, and then pushes her onto her back again, crawling on top of her and sliding one thigh between hers, pressing down against her so they can both get a little bit of friction. And this is familiar territory, this is good, especially when Jon pulls down the cups of her bra and leans down to graze his teeth over her nipples the way he knows she likes, and she groans in that way that he likes.
Her fingers tangle in his hair again, insistently pulling him upward, and that just makes the ache between his legs worse-he's always had a thing for having his hair pulled.
Cassie sucks in a nervous breath when he settles his weight on top of her, their chests pressing together, and he knows she can feel his breasts against hers. He distracts her by kissing her again, deep and demanding, and rocking his hips down, his thigh pressing hard against her clit.
"Oh, shit," she moans. Her nails rake down his back so she can hold his hips in place, grinding up as he grinds down, and then she slips one hand between them, knuckles brushing against the curve of Jon's belly. Her fingers just graze Jon's clit through his boxers and he cries out, but she goes rigid under him when she realizes that she's reaching for something that's not there, as if she could have somehow forgotten when they're pressed together from neck to knees.
Then she's pushing him away, rolling off to the side, turning her back to him as she chokes back a sob.
"Cass," Jon says. "Cass, come on, tell me what's wrong."
She draws in a shuddering breath. "I-Jon, I can't, I can't do this."
He puts his hand on her hip, distraught, trying to reassure her, but that just makes her breath even shakier, the way she always sounds when she's trying not to cry. "Babe, it's fine, it's only-"
"I tried," she says, and then she does start to cry. "I just want my boyfriend back."
Jon makes an anguished sound. "I'm right here."
She turns half over, hugging her sides, and looks pointedly at his tits, which makes Jon frown in embarrassment and cross his own arms protectively over his chest. "Why did you-I thought we were okay. You came to the show and I thought we were okay." And if they weren't okay, she should have had the decency not to show up and then take him home and take him to bed before deciding that she couldn't deal with him. "You said you needed time-"
"There's never going to be enough time," she says, crying harder, curling in on herself again. "I tried, I swear I tried, but I can't."
It becomes really hard for Jon to breathe all of a sudden, like he's been in the binder for too long, like something is pressing down on his chest and trying to suffocate him. He hates watching Cassie cry, and he hates his stupid body and he hates whatever did this to him in the first place. He just wants everything to go back to normal.
But maybe this is normal now.
He rolls off the bed and starts gathering up his clothes. "Fine," he says, yanking up his jeans, looking at the binder for a second before deciding to throw on his t-shirt without it.
She sits up and watches blankly, still sniffling, as he gets dressed. "I don't want you to go," she says.
"Could have fooled me," he says, trying not to sound bitter, picking up the binder and folding it so he can shove it in his overnight bag on the way out the door.
"I don't want you to go, I just don't want-" You, she doesn't say. "-this."
Jon stops short and gives her a long, pained look. "But I still do," he says simply, and then leans over her-sitting on the edge of the bed now, still in her underwear-and kisses her forehead. "I love you, Cass."
He doesn't look back as he walks out.
This is Tom, leave a message-
Jon savagely punches 1 and says, "You'd better be home, motherfucker, because I have a serious need to get fucked up and you are my only hope. Don't fucking make me call Nick."
The trip up the Blue Line to Wicker Park takes exactly as long as it always does, and the walk from the station to Tom's place goes quickly, Jon's flip-flops sounding loudly on the pavement with each step.
He rings the bell for Tom's apartment and Tom's voice sounds scratchy through the intercom when he says, "What?"
"Let me up, Tommy, it's fucking cold out here," Jon says, even though it's not cold at all; Jon's sweating in his coat.
"Pussy," Tom says, but he buzzes Jon up.
"You really need to learn to answer your fucking phone," Jon says when Tom opens the door, unzipping his coat and pushing past him into the apartment.
"And hello to you, too, Jon Walker," Tom says, locking the door again. He turns around just as Jon is draping his coat over the arm of the couch, and then he goes very still. "Jon. You have tits."
"I hadn't noticed," Jon says flatly. "Less gawking, more drinking."
Flailing a little, Tom says, "It's not every day your best friend shows up to your house with fucking tits, dude."
"Happens to girls all the time," Jon says, and then goes to the kitchen to dig around the fridge for beer.
"I am not a girl," Tom says, and then he pauses. "So I guess this is what all those voicemails were about, huh?"
Jon snorts. "You think?" he says, and then hands Tom an open beer. "I said you need to learn to answer your phone."
"I'll work on that." Tom gives Jon a hard look as he takes the beer. "So is there any particular reason you're here drinking my hard-won alcohol, or am I just lucky?"
"You've got the worst fucking luck in the world." He takes a long pull from his beer and then goes quiet. "Cassie and I-she just. Can't take it."
Tom's face falls. "Fuck," he says. "Fuck, Jon-"
"Less talking," Jon orders. "More drinking."
After another long pause, during which Tom opens and closes his mouth several times, like he's trying to decide on something to say that won't make Jon punch him, Tom finally asks, "When's your bus call?"
"Six," Jon says around the mouth of his beer. He's already thrown back half the bottle.
"Oh, well then," Tom says. "That's all the time in the world."
Jon doesn't explain why he feels the sudden need to shotgun the other half.
He catches a cab in the morning and shows up to the bus at 5:57 wearing a pair of douchey oversized sunglasses that Danielle made the mistake of leaving at Tom's apartment, drunk enough that he can't walk straight. The binder is still stuffed in his overnight bag.
Nobody asks him how his night went, and nobody stands in his way when he just stumbles back to the bunks to crash.
The show in Detroit is probably the most painful of his life, heartbroken and epically hung over as he is, but Jon grits his teeth and plays through it, focusing once again on the texture of the carpet under his feet and the hum of the music in his monitors. He's a professional. He can do this.
He curls up miserably in his bunk afterwards, both of the hateful binders shoved down with the rest of his dirty laundry. He didn't even have the energy to shower; he's really going to regret that in the morning when his bunk smells even more like unwashed boy than usual, but right now he hurts too much to give a fuck.
When the rest of the guys get back to the bus, Brendon's sunny, "Jon Walker!" just makes him grit his teeth and shove his head under his pillow. He wishes he'd thought to find his iPod before going to sulk. Amazing, really, how much easier a pair of earbuds makes ignoring everything and everyone else.
Brendon comes to the back and knocks softly on the wall next to Jon's bunk. "Hey," he says. "Come on, we're going to watch Best in Show and we're not doing it without you."
Jon shakes his head behind his curtain. "Leave me alone. You should go out and sign, or something."
"Not tonight," Brendon says, and then he softly adds, "Please, Jon."
Drawing in a shuddering breath, Jon says, "I just want to go to sleep."
"You can sleep after the movie," Brendon says, doing his best to sound reasonable. "Come on, we're not going to start it without you, and then we'll just be sitting up front doing nothing all night."
Jon pushes his curtain open and glares at Brendon with his head still under his pillow. "Blackmail? Really?"
Brendon shrugs. "Whatever works."
"Why did she even come?" Jon asks the world at large, when the movie has long since gone to the menu screen on repeat, the volume turned off. "If she-but no, she just..."
Ryan hits the bong hard and then sets it carefully back on the table. "It's kind of a lot," he says as he exhales. "She probably thought she could-" he makes a completely nonsensical hand gesture "-and then she couldn't."
"At least she tried?" Brendon says, still trying to be helpful, even when he's as high as a kite.
"She didn't try hard enough," Spencer says darkly, reaching for the bong.
"She tried," Jon says. "And she was so-fuuuuck." He draws out the vowel, thinking about how beautiful Cassie looked spread out on their bed, how good it felt to have her under him and moaning into his mouth, shivering a little at the memory of how turned on he was just to be with her again. "Am I that ugly a girl?"
"You have a beard," Ryan points out, and then reaches out to skritch his fingers through it, just in case Jon forgot.
Jon did not, in fact, forget. "I know I have a beard. I love my beard."
Brendon yawns. "We love your beard, too, Jon."
"Beard buddies," Spencer says, solemn as he reaches out to bump Jon's fist.
"I just-" Jon pauses to take a hit. "Do you think she'd love me again if I shaved? Maybe she'd like a boyfriend with boobs as long as he didn't have a beard."
"I don't know," Brendon says uncertainly. "Would you like a girlfriend with a dick as long as she didn't have a beard?"
"Yes," Ryan says without hesitation.
Spencer pokes him in the side. "He wasn't asking you, douchebag."
Jon waits a long time before answering. "Cassie could have a beard and I would still want her," he says softly.
Brendon scoots closer to Jon on the couch, almost upsetting the bong on the table but stopping just before he knocks it over. "It's okay, Jon," he says, snuggling up to Jon's side. "Maybe she'll come around."
"She won't," Jon says, despondent. He hides his face in Brendon's hair so nobody sees how much the thought of that makes him want to cry. But probably they know anyway. They know him pretty well, after all. Not as well as Jon knows Cassie, but that didn't seem to matter to her.
There's a long, depressing silence, and then Ryan says, "I think you make a pretty girl, Jon. Even though you're, y'know, not a girl."
Spencer and Brendon are quick to agree, and then Ryan has to ruin it by adding, "You have a really nice rack," and Spencer reaches up and pulls his hair and calls him an insensitive prick.
But insensitive or not, once he says it, Jon can't stop thinking about it.
An hour later, he excuses himself by declaring that he is, in fact, going to shower tonight.
"Bus shower," Ryan says, wrinkling his nose.
"God, Ryan, shut up," Spencer says.
"Don't take too long," Brendon says, yawning.
"I won't," Jon promises.
With great difficulty and no little regret, he extracts himself from Brendon's extremely comforting snuggles and stumbles down the aisle to the bathroom. He sits down to pee-and that by far is the worst thing about having girl parts, if he discounts the whole loss-of-girlfriend thing-and then stands up and looks at his reflection in the warped, spotted mirror.
Jon takes a deep breath, and then pulls his shirt over his head so he can take his first good, hard look at his tits.
They're just the right size for his shoulders and chest, round and upturned at the tips. His nipples are larger than they used to be, lighter, but they're just the right size, too. When he reaches up to cup himself, the weight of his breast is solid and comforting in his hand, his palm curving just right around the bottom. He slides his other hand up to hold the other, and he watches his nipples contract in the chill of the AC compared to the warmth of his hands.
Ryan was right; he really does have a nice rack. If Jon were going to tailor-make himself a pair of breasts for some unknown, totally insane reason, these are the ones he'd choose.
He thinks about his breasts on some faceless, nameless girl with a tiny waist and round hips and long, slender legs, and feels the now-familiar pull of want between his legs.
One of his hands is halfway to his cunt before he realizes what he's doing, and he watches his reflection blush crimson, one hand splayed over the slight curve of his belly, one cupping a perfect, gorgeous breast.
If he ignores the plaid boxers riding low on his hips and everything from his neck up, it's a really fucking hot sight.
"God," he says aloud. "I am a fucking hot girl."
He remembers half a second after he says it that his band is just outside the door, and lets go of his breast to clap his hand over his mouth; the motion makes his tits bounce attractively, mesmerizingly, and Jesus, he is a fucking hot girl.
If only Cassie had thought so.
Jon frowns at his reflection and then picks up his shirt from the sink where he dropped it, pulling it on again so he can rejoin the guys in the back.
They're all fast asleep when he gets there, Ryan half-lying on Spencer and Brendon curled up on his side in the place where Jon was sitting. He debates waking them up for a long, stoned moment, but then decides against it, because all of them have slept worse places in less comfortable positions, and they'll probably wake up on their own in a few minutes anyway. Stoned power-naps are the best power-naps.
Instead he goes to his bunk and crawls in, shutting his curtain and staring up at the low, carpeted ceiling in the dim light, because he didn't bother turning off the overhead light.
Fucking hot, he thinks again, and the thrill of desire it sends through him that time is so strong that he unconsciously presses his thighs together, and that-oh, fuck, that.
It takes him all of thirty seconds to decide to shuck off his clothes and lie down naked on his rumpled sheets, spreading his legs as far as he can without poking a knee out into the aisle. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and then curls one hand around a breast and spreads the other across his belly, the exact same pose he made in front of the mirror before he freaked himself out.
He doesn't feel like freaking out now.
Jon doesn't look down between his legs-he's not that brave, not right now-but he inches his hand down below his navel, following the thin trail of hair that used to lead to his cock. Now it only leads to, well.
Hesitantly, he slips two fingers between his legs, brushing the callused pads over his clit, and his eyes widen at the intensity of the sensation. He presses down harder, circles his fingers a little, and that's too much, so intense that it almost hurts.
"Fuck," he bites out, and then lets his fingers wander lower, just feeling the texture of the skin, silky-wet and hot. He slides his fingers up and down the space between his inner and outer lips, and he even feels that on his clit, the flesh moving around.
"This is so messed up," he mumbles just as he pushes a finger inside, and fuck, he's wet. Not, like, floodgates-have-just-been-opened wet, but wet enough that it's an easy slide, his muscles eagerly gripping his fingertip. It feels fucking weird, but not weird enough to keep him from sliding his finger in a little deeper, or from pulling it out and going back with two.
Two, it turns out, are a tight fit, his skin feeling uncomfortably tight just at his entrance, and he realizes with a start that he's a fucking virgin in this body, in physical as well as literal terms. He can only get two fingers halfway inside before the stretch becomes too uncomfortable, and he pulls back instead of trying for more, not wanting to risk bleeding on his sheets, because some girls bleed, right?
Cassie didn't bleed. He didn't hurt Cassie at all.
And that thought is enough to make him bite his lip against the suffocating feeling in his chest again, his arousal ebbing so suddenly that he almost wishes he hadn't tried this at all. He wipes off his fingers on his sheets and flails around until he finds his boxers, pulling them on and curling up on his side with his back to the aisle.
He thinks it will take him a long time to fall asleep, but he's snoring after barely two minutes.
Jon wakes up with cottonmouth and sticky fingers, and spends a full minute blushing up at the ceiling of his bunk before he rolls out of bed.
Brendon is sitting in the front, looking like he spent the night crashed out on the couch, raptly watching coffee brew. He looks up when Jon steps into the front lounge and then makes an odd sound and quickly averts his eyes.
"What?" Jon says, looking down, and only then does he remember that he slept without a shirt on last night. "Oh, uh. Sorry."
"It's fine," Brendon says.
"I'll get a shirt," Jon says.
"You don't have to," Brendon says too quickly. "I mean, I'm, like. I can't very well tell other people that they have to put their clothes on, can I?"
Jon gives him an odd look. "No, you really can't," he says, "but I think I'm going to get a shirt anyway."
"Okay," Brendon says. "Whatever."
When he gets back to his bunk and digs around for a shirt, two things occur to him.
One: Brendon definitely stared at Jon's tits for a full three seconds before he made himself look away.
Two: Jon never actually got around to taking a shower last night.
Well, at least one of those is something he knows how to deal with.
After he gets out of the shower and into clean clothes-no binder yet; the bus is still moving-he goes back to the front and helps himself to a cup of coffee. Spencer is sitting at the kitchen table nudging a barely-conscious Ryan with his foot.
"How long until we hit Toronto?" Jon asks, because Spencer always knows these kinds of things.
"Few hours," Spencer says.
"Huh." Jon taps his foot. "Wake and bake?"
Spencer grins. "I like the way you think, Walker."
Ryan stirs a little and then looks up blearily at Jon. "I'm sorry I said you have a nice rack last night," he says.
Jon smiles. "It's okay," he says. "I do have a nice rack."
The look on Spencer's face is absolutely priceless.
Jon stops expecting to change back the day they play in DC. It isn't a big deal or anything; he just realizes that he didn't check first thing that morning to see if his breasts had magically disappeared in the night.
He misses Cassie like a physical pain, but he knows there's nothing he can do. If he got his dick back, sure, but since he doesn't think that's going to happen, he knows he's lost her for good. There's some sort of peace to that, to knowing, the opposite of all the fucking awful uncertainty he felt in those days leading up to the show in Chicago. It sucks, yeah, but at least he knows where they stand.
Things have changed for me, Jon sings into his mic that night, and that's okay, I feel the same.
He doesn't quite believe it yet, but he thinks that maybe he could, and when Brendon comes over to ask him if he's doing okay, like he has at every single show since the change, Jon's answering smile is wide and genuine.
On their night off in New York, Jon goes looking for Spencer only to find him staring at the wall behind the hotel bar.
"Hey, there you are," Jon says. "Brendon and I are going out, do you want to come?" Ryan, of course, has ditched them for Keltie, not that Jon blames him.
Spencer looks morosely at his beer. "Haley called," he says.
"Yeah?" Jon says, sliding into the seat next to him. "What did she have to say?"
"That she's going back to Illinois and not coming back," Spencer says, slurring his words a little.
Oh, shit, Jon thinks. "Shit," he says. "Jesus, Spencer, I'm so sorry."
"I know," Spencer says. He turns to squint at Jon through drunken eyes. "Is it supposed to hurt this much?"
Jon thinks about his thrift-store furniture piled high with Cassie's things, thinks about never seeing his cats again because it's always been better for them to stay with her. "Yeah," he says, "I think it is."
"Well, that fucking sucks," Spencer says.
"Yeah, it does," Jon says, and flags down the bartender so he can buy them a round.
Jon wakes up to the sound of Spencer humming softly in the shower. He's dressed in a t-shirt and boxers, and when he sits up he sees his binder folded neatly and set on top of his overnight bag.
He remembers Brendon finding them last night when they were both stupidly drunk and somehow getting them back to their room without any disasters occurring, but he absolutely does not remember getting out of his clothes. Weird-welcome, but weird.
At breakfast Spencer thanks Brendon profusely for making sure they didn't die.
"Yeah, thanks," Jon says. "I can't imagine sleeping in-in that."
Brendon looks away, his cheeks coloring a little. "Don't worry about it," he says. "I was just worried when you disappeared on me."
Jon looks down. "Sorry about that."
"Don't worry about that, either," Brendon says, recovering his usual sunny expression. "I'm sure you'll make it up to me later."
"Absolutely," Jon says solemnly, and then they shake on it.
Part III