JC/Lance, March 30, '05

[mandarinjazz]

It's one in the morning and Lance sprawls on his stomach, fingers tightening on his pillow in a sweaty grip. The guy's into him, gentle and yet somehow also serious, urgent with need. Kirkpatrick, he'd called himself at the bar two nights ago. They all had a name they liked to identify themselves with, but Lance doesn't care if it's the real thing or not. Now Kirkpatrick parts his legs with wide fingers, moans into his skin that he'll be delicate. They all like to say things like that. Lance shudders when Kirkpatrick comes.

"Beautiful," Kirkpatrick whispers along Lance's thigh. "You remind me of a boy I used to--" Lance doesn't want to know how that ends. Kirkpatrick's small greasy black braids get in his eyes when he blinks into Lance's stomach. He grunts, licks Lance's skin. Lance pretends this hotel room is his for the night, this fancy place with the minibar and the Jacuzzi and a long wide bed and bellhops who respectfully call him "Sir." But if he blinks it will be tomorrow and he'll be back home, staring at cockroaches and searching for fresh food in his refrigerator.

Later that dawn, when Kirkpatrick is sleeping with his arm across Lance's chest, Lance's cell phone rings. It's sitting on the nightstand next to the solid gold lampshade and it vibrates with little flashing colors. He crawls out from Kirkpatrick's arm, careful not to wake him. He takes it to his bathroom, closes the door, and sinks to the tile. Cold seeps into his bare knees.

"Make sure this one pays," JC says, smoke and bite in his voice. Lance can hear wine-buzzed noise and laughter in the background. He shivers. He clutches the phone tighter and pulls his legs into his stomach. "I don’t want to have to dock your check again, okay? My account's already bouncing."

"I will," Lance promises, his voice faint as his throat catches. He puts his hand on his mouth. But JC's already hung up.

*
It's four in the afternoon when Lance finally opens his eyes. He takes a look at the clock beside his bed and groans. For most people it's nearing the end of the workday; it will be rush hour soon. For him it's the middle of the night. He puts a hand across his face, careful not to let his freshly greased blonde hair spike up too much. He never showers before bed.

JC sits across from him, cavalier in his business suit and sunglasses, one leg balanced across his knee, foot tap-tap-tapping. He puts out his cigarette on Lance's sofa. Lance winces; there's already enough burns on that beast. JC tosses him his planner. It flaps against Lance’s chest when the pages hit him.

"Fairy named Timberlake, 8 o'clock, evening all set for an early next Wednesday," JC says, no prelude, snap in his voice. Lance blinks. The light in his eyes is unwieldy. "Your highest paying gig yet. Better not be late."

Lance opens his mouth to speak. JC is all radiant today, even in his dark swagger. Lance thinks JC should have been a romantic, a dreamer; he's certainly got the look. But something messed up in his head along the way. Lance's voice dies in his throat. JC never fails to render him speechless.

"God, I can’t believe the shit you have pencilled in that thing. Eleven night, Tuesday, do the laundry? Ten thirty, call mom?" JC lowers his sunglasses a split second. His eyes look like they are dancing. But JC replaces the sunglasses before Lance can see anything more. Lance blushes. He wishes he didn't smell so much like smoke and other men’s cologne.

"Well," JC says, and gets up. He doesn't look back before he leaves.

*

Lance was just seventeen when he was a street walker running with the wrong crowd, learning how to peddle heroine with little boulevard princes and their hoodlum brothers. He was their organizer, he was their businessman; young fellas who knew nothing but chaos their whole lives needed a cool, efficient calculator to tidy up the loose ends. They handled the clientele, Lance handled the figures.

Lance knew about figures. When he was six his daddy got a rifle shot through the brain and died on the instant, blood on the street and arms out like the chalk was around him already, Lance just a few yards away playing on the local park's jungle gym, hands sliding uncomfortably down the bars when his mother told him. He took on the family accounting. Mother too washed up, too boozed out, too gorged on coke to care, though she certainly made a show of the loving parent. He made sure the bills were paid, in his seven year old handwriting, dropped out of school because really, he already knew all the math he needed to do the accounting, to pay the IRS, to make sure the phone didn't stop and the electricity didn't black out. What else did one need to learn, anyway? Books certainly weren't important, not when the phone rang off the hook with the debt collectors and their angry voices that could be placated for a time by an eight year old whine.

He'd learned the tricks- buying the Sunday paper was an investment for the coupons, and he couldn't help it if his eyes grazed the headlines every now and then, just to know that a real world still existed outside this hovel. Bought the near-stale bread on special and toasted it to get the hard taste out. Made sure the cable bill was paid even to the expense of the baby food for his little sister just so his mother could have a smile on her face every now and then that wasn't crack induced. Yeah, those hooligans needed someone like him, someone with a head for figures and brains for survival to boot.

*

JC pulled up alongside him one October morning just after his seventeenth birthday. Big sleek fancy car, he knew what that meant, some gangster's moll. He was a fool, thinking he could have lasted this long anyway. He walked faster, but the car's tires just squealed as the motor matched his pace. He looked away, tightened his hands into his fists. He remembered Jeremy, the guy he'd been fucking just two months ago. Jeremy'd been walking down a street like this in the dark, some fancy Mercedes like that one following him, found at dawn with a bullet in his brain and the blood pouring from his neck. Everything that Lance loved had bullets inside. He knew a bullet was in his future. Sometimes he tried to calculate the number of days it would take, the number of years, in his planner, worked out the little figures in the memos section with pink felt tip pens until his head hurt.

The window rolled down. Lance had held his breath. He'd waited for the barrel, knew it was coming. But a face looked out instead, pulled away odd clunky sunglasses that shouldn't look good but somehow did. The face became a person. Lance saw the eyes change and his breath caught. There was a human in those eyes. A human with dreams. He wanted to tear away the bars of the cage, to pick the lock that held them trapped. Those eyes changed him.

"Hey, kid, you want a job?" Reality returned in rushing seconds. The voice was from the streets. Born on the streets. Trapped by the streets.

Lance never had the chance to escape.

*

Timberlake comes exactly at eight. Cocky bastard, punctual. His face is cool and sublime; his walk is tight. Lance tries not to admire his hips.

He fucked like there was going to be an apocalypse the next day, like every kiss was his last. Lance woke sweaty and cool and barely had time to breathe.

He'd hoped his cell phone would ring the next morning, when he lay in the bed awake and Timberlake tucked into a foetal ball beside him with the sheets wrapped around his elbows and knees, but it stayed silent. He wanted to hear that voice cold and deadly, "Make sure he pays." But there was nothing. Of course there was nothing.

*

Joey was his regular. Lance even got to call him by his given name. They always fucked in the room Joey rented above the bar in which he worked part time. That was just a ruse- Joey was a trust fund baby. He liked to pretend he was poor. Shag the street kids to live vicariously through their skins. But Lance was okay with it. Joey was a cool guy. Told him which NFL teams were ahead and how the economy was doing. Joey knew Lance liked stats. But Joey liked to burn cigarette butts on Lance's thighs, then kiss him there later. Nasty habit. Joey said he'd picked it up from some kid named Timberlake who he used to fuck in prep school broom closets on Sunday mornings when everyone else was at church with their mothers. Lance shuddered every time he did it, though he should have been used to it by now.

The Rams were playing the Bills on the Wal-Mart TV in the corner with the announcers’ voices on mute when Lance told Joey about his new client. Timberlake, he'd called himself, Lance said into Joey’s stomach. Joey shot up in bed so fast that his arm hooked Lance in the chest. Lance jumped and stood up, rubbed a hazily bruised elbow across his neck. The prep school kid, Lance remembered in a rather delayed reaction. So they ran in the same circles, so that was why Timberlake paid up on time. "Fuck!" Joey suddenly yelped. "Fuck fuck fuck!" He jumped out of bed with the sheet still wrapped around his ankle. Lance gazed at the steady slope of his buttocks in the pale light. Not as nice as JC's, though. JC had the perfect combination of parts.

"Well, that's what we're doing," Lance said coolly, cocking his brow. At heart he was a businessman. Pragmatic if anything else. Joey flailed his arms and kicked old beer cans and swore.

"Well, stop!" Joey yelled so loud the neighbours banged on the walls. He quieted. Lance smelled the whiskey on his breath. "Just don't, okay? Just . . . you gotta promise me. Promise me you won't."

Lance was a businessman above all things. So he promised only when Joey said he'd come back to bed and forget all about that nonsense.

*

"Thursday with the Timberlake kid," JC said at IHOP's at one in the morning on a slow night. He didn't touch his coffee. He watched Lance devour his pancakes. He'd paid for them. He paid for the whole set up. Lance tried not to look at JC's eyes without the sunglasses on. It hurt to look at them naked like that. "Don't be late. This kid is paying our bread. You know the business is going downhill. We can't take another loss, not since Ayala contracted the . . ."

JC couldn't say it. They all tried not to think about *that*.

"I know," Lance said quietly. He swallowed his pancakes. He put some peach jam on the third hotcake. Usually they didn't get peach at IHOP's, only strawberry, but tonight JC was trying to butter him up and he knew Lance liked peach, so he'd threatened the waitress until they’d begrudgingly served it. Lance appreciated the gesture, tried to ignore the motive.

"So," JC said. His fingers tap-tap-tapped on the worn linoleum table top. "Don't be late."

"You said that."

"I guess I did," JC laughed, but there was no humor in it. His smile looked sad and lost, out of place. He couldn't even smile properly, Lance thought disjointedly.

Lance wondered when JC had stopped being a dreamer.

*

Kirkpatrick came back to him on a Tuesday night. His hair was in one long dreadlock down his back. He smelled like gangs and coke when he came in Lance's mouth, cum covering Lance's nose. He apologized for the mess, gave Lance a tissue to clean it up.

"You're seeing that Timberlake kid now, aren't you?" Kirkpatrick whispered into Lance's thighs some sweaty, heaving time later. Lance held his breath. "His mother's a fat Rodeo Drive whore, you know. I used to fuck him when he was still a little trust fund angel at St. Mary's. Fucked him up. The poor baby. His mother kicked him out, but he was a sunofabitch anyway." Lance remembered how to breathe again. His voice was cold, vicious. Like a knife scraping against the edge of Lance's cock. Lance didn't respond. Then Kirkpatrick blew him until he screamed, but there was too much hate in it.

"Make sure that motherfucking sonofabitch pays," was JC's barked message on Lance's voice mail later that morning.

Kirkpatrick left a business card instead of cash. With two thin letters on the center: CK, in softly inked red.

*

Timberlake spent Thursday night in the bathroom, and not in a good way. Cuddled up inside himself, soaking his bare knees with tears. Said soft little words into his thighs: "Chris. Mother. Chris." Lance stroked his bright little blonde curls with hesitant fingers. He got paid double in the morning, thick crisp green wads of bills that JC would use to pay off his mortgage on the first of the month (which he'd started to pay off his heroine debts). He tried not to feel guilty. He was getting paid to breathe in this kid's presence, to take notes on the sidelines while he battled with some pretty nasty personal demons.

*

Lance looked at the old scratched notes in his planner. It was leather-bound, and JC had bought it for him for his nineteenth birthday. He had the old pages from his previous diary in the back. The memos where he'd forecasted his own death, endless streams of faded red calculations.

He looked at one of the figures. If his prediction had been correct, tomorrow would be the day. Pow. He tried to imagine it, the bullet in his brain. But he got a headache instead.

*

"You know," JC says. This is one of those dreams that Lance likes to remember. He puts a hand on Lance's thigh, traces his fingers lazily across Lance's skin. Makes him shiver just from the touch. "I should have told you earlier, but I've always loved you."

"Yeah?" Lance says. He puts his head on JC's neck. He kisses JC's throat, licks that make him moan and beg.

"Since that day I saw you on the streets," says JC. "So cool and foreign. I was a goner."

"Yeah?" Lance says again, all breathless, and JC kisses him like they're on fire.

But reality sinks in eventually. He's sitting with JC on the floor of some bathroom stall in some dirty club deep in the darkest heart of the inner city. JC's shaking and wet and half-naked and Lance's arms are around his shoulders, holding him close. Lance presses his mouth into his shaking spine. "Heroine," Freddie shouted as he tossed Lance his cell phone and fled. Freddie could handle math all right, but when it came to humans he was shit. "Too much. Take care of it." Lance had dialled 911 but then he'd hung up, stupidly ashamed of his rashness. Of course they didn't have enough money for the ambulance bill.

Instead he puts his head on JC's neck and lets him shake, keeping his face on his neck. At one point JC rears forward, bile in his throat, says Lance's name before he retches on the floor. "Shhh, baby," Lance says quietly, rocking him. "Shh now." He used to do this all the time with his mother. He knows what they say never means anything.

*

Timberlake lets Lance blow him the fifth time, lips wet against his cock, sucking a little bit until he moans and clutches. Timberlake doesn't let him do anything else. In fact, his face is soaked with tears when Lance finishes. Timberlake looks like he's twelve, perched in the covers and sobbing. "Chris," he says again, as if lost in another world. "When did you stop dreaming?"

Lance’s throat catches. He likes the slope of Timberlake’s neck. The curve of his fingers, the way they flutter on his skin. He tries to imagine what happened so long ago to break this kid. Tries to imagine someone hurting his round delicate face and can't. The next morning, when Timberlake is still asleep, Lance vomits in the toilet. JC never calls him.

*

"When did you stop dreaming?" says Lance in his dream to JC. They are in the middle of a desert, and hot wind caresses their faces. Lance reaches a hand toward JC, but JC flinches away. He puts his sunglasses over his eyes so Lance can't see the pain in them.

"I was seven," JC says. "My mother died. My father died. My family needed me. No time for dreams."

"We're not human if we don't have time for dreams," says Lance. "It's natural. A natural impulse."

JC looks away. He crosses his arms. "Then I'm not human."

Lance wants to touch him, but he doesn't dare. When JC frowns and removes his sunglasses, Lance almost believes it. Almost. But he doesn't want to.

He wakes, drenched in sweat, one hand on Timberlake's waist. Timberlake's eyes are open. He's watching Lance's face. Lance feels old and tired.

*

The Rams beat the 49ers. Joey drinks champagne to celebrate and fucks Lance twice. Says into Lance's neck some time later, "I heard a rumor."

"Yeah?" Lance says, careful not to let his heart beat too loudly.

"CK-" Joey starts, but he doesn't continue.

"Yeah?" Lance presses.

"It's probably nothing," Joey says in a frustrated way, and fucks Lance all over again just to make up for it.

*

Lance sees them on his way to Club Infinity one night, but they don't see him. Timberlake's face is blotched red, his eyes metal slits. Kirkpatrick is with him, and his hands are on Justin's neck. Lance tightens his fingers close to his palms. He feels a surging need in his chest to protect Timberlake, the poor baby, but he's afraid of Kirkpatrick. He's a businessman, after all; he's got to protect his assets. His body is his only asset.

Kirkpatrick's fingers are crushing Timberlake's neck, and Timberlakes's not crying even though Lance thinks he should. "What did you say?" Kirkpatrick yells. "What did you say?"

"I don't love you any more," Timberlake says, his voice so quiet. Lance is so far away that he almost doesn't hear the words.

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Kirkpatrick's hands leave Justin's face. Lance is afraid. He tries to turn away but he can't.

"I love someone else," Timberlake says back fiercely, and there is pride in his voice, no wavering. Kirkpatrick shoves the barrel of his gun in Timberlake's face. Everyone's always in love with someone (or something) else, Lance thinks distractedly.

"Say it again," Kirkpatrick yells. His finger shakes on the trigger.

Timberlake raises his chin. His eyes glint silver. Sweat pours down Lance's wrists. "Go ahead," Timberlake says with a small smile. "Shoot me, Chris, shoot me, dammit."

Kirkpatrick swears and puts the gun back. He kisses Timberlake harshly, steals the breath from his mouth, connects their tongues. But Timberlake doesn't respond.

Kirkpatrick hits him in the stomach until he doubles over, shaking, then walks away.

Lance can't move for a very long time.

*

They're at a bar. There's a crowd, but Lance doesn't notice any other people but JC. JC's sitting at the counter, watching him, smoking a cigarette. A man puts a hand on Lance's back. A boy strokes fingers against Lance's neck. Lance ignores them and approaches JC. JC smiles, small and sad. He takes a sip of his bourbon with his cigarette hand.

He stands up, the bourbon and the cigarette still in his fingers. He moves closer. Lance can smell the Parliaments on his breath. JC kisses him, soft and chaste near his mouth. Lance shivers, checks to make sure he's not dreaming. And he isn't.

"I'm sorry," JC says quietly, seductively. He doesn't pull away. "It's just that. . . You were always better at figures than I was."

Lance tilts his head. He doesn't want this moment to end. But JC turns away, walks through the thick smoke and the crowd, and Lance watches his back until he disappears.

Kirkpatrick finds him that night. The sex is sharp and nasty. He gets three hundred on the couch that morning, and the bills are streaked black with oil and sweat.

*

"Justin," says Timberlake on their seventh meeting. "You can call me Justin." He whispers it into Lance's stomach. Lance doesn't react, doesn't say anything at all. Timberlake's- Justin's- fingers flutter against his throat. Justin kisses him, but Lance doesn't kiss him back.

*

"Here's twenty," yells JC, happy for once, ball leaving his fingertips as Justin crashes into his undulating body. Lance watches from the sidelines near their cluster of water bottles, wrists hanging over his knees. They're both half naked and sweat gleams off their bodies, runs in fast rivulets like silver down their chests. Justin laughs and slaps the ball away, manhandles it. JC punches him in the stomach with his fist curled and as Justin's doubled over, JC catches the dribbled ball and swooshes it through the net. Lance cheers.

JC whoops and the humanity is strong in his eyes. Justin flicks a diamond-eyed glance at Lance and winks. He switches his eyes back to JC, back to the ball. If anything else Justin is intense. Justin always has to win. JC doesn't laugh but he's just as earnest. Lance follows the long smooth lines of his limbs. Admires the sinews of his thighs, his arms. He forgets that Justin's eyes haven't strayed from him once.

Then a long black fancy car drives slowly alongside the street. Justin yells, but his words are whipped away. JC climbs on top of him, shoves him down. They're both on the street, elbows flat on the pavement, JC's hand tight on Justin's neck as if this is a battlefield. A tinted window rolls down and a face sticks out. Lance is down too, the hot cement pricking his face, but the gun is pointed at his head- he can sense the barrel.

Justin is running, screaming, choked on his shouts. JC is reaching for his ankles. Lance doesn't hear any noise. He gets to his feet. He is thinking about Paris in springtime, what it would be like to go there when the roses are in bloom, to read poetry to JC sitting outside on chairs at a cafe and forget about the world for a while. Lance's breathing is sharp and vicious. He feels a sudden sharp shock lodge into his neck, he sees Kirkpatrick's face leaning from the window, he sees Justin's face twisted and his mouth open, he savors JC one slow last time before everything disappears.



An AU in which Lance is a hooker in love with his pimp JC. Also features Lance/Justin, Lance/Chris, Chris/Justin, and Lance/Joey.