[JC]

I like to do it with the lights on. Better yet, lights off because the sun is shining through the open curtains, bright like we're just naked newborns with our eyes screwed up and deep little wails welling in our lungs. I like when the warmth runs from the inside to the outside and back again, and when everything's finally too warm, you fall asleep.

I don't have to fall asleep alone anymore, not if I don't want to. Sometimes I want to. Sometimes I like the pictures I paint in my head better than the all-access pass, boys and girls who do what you tell them. It's not the same when you don't know what they want other than a good story to tell their friends.

I like afternoon naps with the hotel drapes tied back, crisp cool sheets on my back. I like to think one day I'll blink and find Justin there beside me, naked and golden and not worried about photographers rappelling off the roof with telephoto lenses. He looks down through his lashes like he's not sure how he got there either, and then he just smiles and says hi, and I say hi back and kiss him.

He kisses me like wind and I stroke the ridges of his backbone and tell him how when you close your eyes and sing you can't tell how many people are in the crowd. There's something soft stuffed under the pillow, loose and bright and blue and when the scarf is knotted around his head he wants me to whisper in his ear so he doesn't get lost. We do it there, spread for all the world to see, and when he comes he screams like nobody's listening. He sleeps deep and still and sated and when he wakes up he remembers what it feels like to use our bodies without fear of what gets caught on film.

There's a look Chris gets after a long photo shoot that I've always wished someone could capture, the way he comes back into himself after hours of a dead frown, his face posed just so because they never let him smile. He's always angry, after, but he's present, he's reachable, and I think that he's maybe just conserving all that energy for something else. For someone else.

I want a stylist to paint him dark and fierce and pose him half under a car, grease smeared across his stomach where the shirt's ridden up. I come back from washing off makeup and he rolls out on his back and it's just us in the big empty warehouse, high windows set in the concrete walls, late-afternoon sun in long streaks through dusty air. He's got a wrench in one hand and a stained handkerchief in the other. I'm quiet because there's no talking to Chris when he's in a mood like this, we all know it, we've all tried before.

I step over him and lean against the corner of the hood, letting the white dress shirt I'd been buttoning fall from my shoulders instead, catching on my wrists and pooling across the base of my back. Behind me, I can hear the squeak of the dolly and feel the car sag as he pulls himself up by the bumper. Long long eternity of being quiet and watching tiny specks sparkle in suspended sunbeams and then his mouth is on the back of my neck, white hot, and I swallow a moan.

His hand slips around my waist and he pushes the dirty rag into my jeans pocket, paints my pale chest with oil, bites my shoulder. The wrench is cold steel against the tender pocket of my kidneys and he can snap me in half if he wants to. I know he knows I maybe want him to want to. In an instant, fast, because it's always going to be fast and hard with Chris, he spins me and I can taste just how recently the car's been waxed. He yanks the bandanna from my pocket and ties my wrists together so they're stretched out in front of us, bright shocking blood red against my white forearms.

He pushes my jeans down and the vast quiet is punctuated only by the sound of him fingering his zipper and me whimpering. I hope the noises I make sound louder in my head than they are because I think Chris likes it fast and hard and silent and you never, ever talk about it after. He slaps my ass once and, while it's still hot and stinging, trails the wrench up my thigh, tracing the curves like a motorcycle on an ocean road. He lets the cool metal linger between my legs like maybe he'll fuck me like that and then I do moan aloud and he slaps me again, pulls the cloth from my wrists and stuffs it down my throat. It tastes like gasoline, like how Chris smells, flammable and sweet-sour rank, and I breathe through my nose but that just makes the taste ten times stronger.

Chris puts a callused, rough-heeled palm on the small of my back and holds me down till I quiet, till I still and go slack, and then he drizzles motor oil across my ass and pushes in, slow only till he fits and then fast, deep thrusts again and again. Where my shirt still crosses my back, the scratch of his body is muffled, but where my skin peeks out it screams from heat and friction and I want to push back but he won't let me, he never even lets me come when it's like this but I'm not sure I can't, not when I remember how an hour ago the warehouse was filled with photographers and hairdressers and Chris grunts once and I come, shooting all over the chrome rims and he doubles over me, pulling my arms up so we're both bent-elbowed, pushing against the car like pistons and he digs greasy fingernails into my skin. It's hours before we can catch our breath.

I'm only ever that tired after a show, tired and wired, and post-coital cuddling never compares to the post-performance high. Or even the pre-show hype, all these years and it still starts early in the day, soundcheck through the opening act it just builds like a runaway truck down a steep grade. It's always me and Joey already hyper by four o'clock, we love the fans, love the people but man if sometimes you don't just want to get right to the real deal. The soundcheck is work but for a while Joey takes even the show too seriously, takes all of it too seriously cause there's an adjustment to be made for carrying the weight of a daughter on his shoulders all the time.

It heavies his dancing, slows his footwork and some days I just want to snag him by the sleeve before we go to test our mics. This is supposed to be fun, I remind him, and he nods but doesn't grin, and I say it again. Fun, Joe, remember what that feels like? It's all playful and teasing and when my hand's down the front of his pants, wrapped around him, tugging, I make little choo-choo train noises in his ear because if being silly is what it takes I'll do it, sure I will.

Being silly is what it takes and I tickle his ribs with the other hand till he can't help but laugh and he's lifting me at the waist, holding me up against one of the speakers and Justin's cracking jokes out there and the small crowd is screaming and it's all just on the other side of a half-million dollars worth of equipment. Don't complain if the word Bose is branded to your ass, he says, and I tell him I already checked and worker's comp covers that and he throws back his head and laughs, laughs and pushes and laughs and it's music. We make music.

That's what I tell Lance when he's nervous. We make music, honey, and the rest of it is just static on the edges. Anything they say, anything they ask, we know we get up there to sing our hearts out. He always nods, says, sure, I know, and I put a hand on the back of his neck and feel him nod a second time. One green room after another and even when he's not nervous I do that now, just so he knows. I'm always listening. I'm always there, and he knows that much.

I want it to be that simple, that I could reach out and touch him under the desk when the cameras are in our faces, touch him how I want, my hand in his lap, not on his knee. This question's for Chris and I cup Lance's crotch in my hands, hot like the soundstage lights shining down on us. He's too edgy right now to be mad, maybe too distracted to even really realize what's happening. We're always all up on each other during interviews but this isn't MTV, this is CNN, and if I close my eyes and let the VCR run and just listen to Larry's voice I can pretend that the reason Lance is calm and joking by the end is cause I jerked him off right there.

He's already hard, fifteen minutes with my hand drawing patterns on the top of his thigh, so by the time I touch him for real it's fast. Unzip during a commercial break and I've barely got a few fingers inside his fly before he comes, white knuckles clenching his coffee mug, his answer swallowed until Joey jumps in and finishes the story.

But Lance isn't, he'd never let me. Not like that. Even just my hand on his back is enough that later he won't say goodnight, just walks down the hall to his room with his shoulders hunched. I can't think of a way to touch him that will fix that. I can't imagine he'd let me try.

Of all the things I'd bend over and beg and borrow to fix, none of it really matters next to that, next to him. I just want him to let me try.