Epilogue
One year to the day of the group’s disbanding, JC again found himself lying on cool grass watching fluffy clouds chase one another across a crystal blue sky. So much had changed in his life since that day a year ago, and the biggest of those changes was lying beside him, his head pillowed on his folded arms, watching him.
“You didn’t have to come out here with me, you know?” JC turned onto his side as he spoke, wanting a clearer view of Lance.
“I know.” Lance smiled softly and then chuckled as the breeze caught JC’s curls and sent them dancing wildly about his head. “I wanted to.”
“It’s silly, I guess,” JC shrugged one lean shoulder, “to want to do the same thing today that I did a year ago.”
“No, not silly, just…you.”
“I’m not usually superstitious.”
Lance snorted at that.
“I’m not,” JC insisted. “It’s just that it’s been such a great year and I wanted to make sure that I started this next one the same so that…” JC shared Lance’s grin. “Okay, so maybe I am a little superstitious.”
Lance nodded, “Maybe just a little.”
“But you love me anyway.”
“I do. It’s cute.”
JC wrinkled his nose at that. It wasn’t that he minded being cute, cute was good, though if given a choice’ he’d rather be seen as sexy or hot, or…
“You’re all of those things, too,” Lance assured him, reading JC easily.
Smiling happily, JC let his eyes drift shut, enjoying the contrast between the warm sun on his face and the cool breeze over his skin. It was good to be him these days, and he took a moment to count his blessings before he opened his eyes to find Lance still watching him.
“You do that a lot.”
Lance blinked, thought for a moment, and then shook his head, finally giving up. “What?”
“Watch me.”
“I like watching you.”
“Why?”
“Everyone needs a hobby?”
“You lead a very boring life, love, if watching me is your definition of a hobby.”
Lance looked back on the last six months of his life, four of which he’d spent in New York filming his movie, and thought that the time could be described in many ways, but boring would never be one.
“I have a great life.” For the most part, his mind whispered, before he quickly shut it down. He wasn’t going to think about his parents right now, they’d stolen numerous bits of happiness from him in the last eleven years; they weren’t getting this one, too.
“No regrets?”
“Well, I would have loved to have had Johnny Depp for the role of Marc, but I think Ed Norton filled in nicely.”
“That’s not what I meant,” JC scolded, “and you know it.”
“No regrets,” Lance assured him, and then quickly added. “Okay, I lied. There’s maybe a little one for how crazy we all drove Chris at J’s wedding.”
JC shook his head, a frown marring the smooth flesh of his brow. “I still can’t believe that he threatened to kill us all. Especially Justin.” JC’s eyes widened. “I mean, dude, it was his wedding day.”
“Yeah. Well, we all were a tad neurotic that day as I recall, and we did – sort of – heap it all on him, so I can’t say that I really blame him.”
Drifting back to that day, JC cringed, and thought that maybe Lance had a point, they had all gone a bit off the deep end that day, and Chris had been the one who’d had to pull them all back from the edge. Still, going so far as to find the minister and ask him if he had any rope with which to hang them all had been a little much.
“He still shakes his head at me when he sees me,” JC confessed. “I know I was nervous about singing that day, but was I really all that bad?”
Lance remembered how his stomach tied in knots each time he’d caught sight of his pale-faced boyfriend that day and nodded, “You were a wreck.”
“Hmph.” JC plucked at the grass beside him for a minute, not quite willing yet to concede that Lance and Chris were right, he had been a wreck that day. In fact, merely thinking about it was making him a bit queasy, though thankfully nowhere near as bad as he’d been on J’s wedding day. “You weren’t exactly Joe Cool, either,” he finally mumbled when Lance grabbed his hand to stop his frantic plucking.
“Well, of course I wasn’t, I was worried about you.” And Joey who’d been crazed because Justin had wanted his twins – in tux’s – as part of the wedding party and his wife had washed her hands of the whole thing, leaving Joe solely in charge of two twelve month olds who’d wanted nothing to do with bow ties and boutonnières. Lance had tried to help, but between worrying over JC and trying to calm Justin – who’d been running to the bathroom every two seconds thinking he was going to be sick – he hadn’t done all that much except succeed in having his coat wrinkled and his hair mussed by a fussy and tired Samuel.
That was when Chris had walked back in – after presumably leaving the room ten minutes before to get away from the loony bin as he’d called it – and upon seeing that nothing had changed exploded and threatened them all.
Thankfully, Erin had been right behind him, and she’d taken charge of them all, first shooing Chris off and then one by one tackling each of them until peace had once again reigned in the small changing room. Lance still wasn’t sure how she’d done it, especially how easily she’d calmed Chris, but he was thankful that she had, because frankly, he’d been a little worried about Chris following through on his threat to string one of them up as an example to the rest.
“Hello.” JC waved his hand in front of Lance’s face. “Where did you go?”
“Sorry,” Lance smiled sheepishly at his boyfriend. “I was thinking about Chris. And Erin,” he added after a minute. “I think she likes him.”
“I think the feeling is mutual.”
Lance couldn’t help but agree.
“He’s different when he’s with her, and he’s great with Riley,” Lance added, remembering how yesterday when the little boy had exploded in from school, Chris had gotten down to his level and talked earnestly with him about his day. “I think the two of them are good for him.”
JC thought so too, so much so that he’d been staying out of the whole thing, not wanting to mess anything up by playing matchmaker as he’d once thought he would. Chris and Erin had gotten together on their own while Chris had been house sitting over the four months they’d spent in New York and JC couldn’t be happier about it.
“He’s good for them, too.”
“Yeah.” Lance agreed. “Do you think they’ll eventually get married?”
“I think it’s kind of soon for that.”
“He seems so happy though.”
“He is, but he still has a lot of baggage, too.”
“I know. I hope it works out for them. I think he needs a family. Don’t you?”
JC touched Lance’s cheek, the skin cool beneath his fingers, despite the flush it carried from the wind.
“I think we all do.”
“I’m okay,” Lance assured him, knowing exactly where JC was going with this.
“Are you?” JC asked, not entirely convinced of the truth behind that statement.
Lance thought about lying. He could do it, tell one tiny fib and convince JC that he was telling the truth, but this was JC and of all the people he could and would lie to convincingly, JC wasn’t one of those people.
“Not yet,” Lance took JC’s hand, and then looked up, his clear green eyes showing JC all he needed to see. “But I will be.”