Lance was the kind of person who could admit, at least to himself, that he liked to feel needed. He loved it when his friends went to him for advice or support.Having said that, there were times when he had to wonder if his friends needed him so much because they were lacking in all basic common sense.Like right now.

Lance had walked into Joe’s, the bar his close friend Luke owned, to learn that Luke was struggling with what to do for his boyfriend Adam’s birthday. Luke’s fantastic, romantic, stellar idea?Goddamn laser tag, like they were twelve or something.

Lance frowned at the cell phone that Luke had thrust into his hands. “No.”

“What?” Luke frowned as well, but in confusion. “Why not? Laser tag is fun.”

Leaning on the bar top next to them, Matthew snorted. Lance handed the phone back to Luke. One of the perks of Luke being close friends with most of the people who hung out at Joe’s was that he could do things like fiddle around on his phone and talk about plans for his boyfriend’s birthday and nobody would mind.

“Because,” Lance replied, “it’s something fun for us to do as a group on a random Saturday. It’s not something you want to do for Adam’s birthday. Take him out to dinner.”

“But we do that all the time,” Luke pointed out. “I want it to be something special.”

“All right,” Lance conceded. “What’s something you two love to do together but don’t get to do very often?”

Luke thought about that for a second. “We’ve only done it once, back when we first met, but we were in the city and ended up at this place, and danced together for a while. I really enjoyed it—”

“Of course you did,” Lance muttered, unable to stop himself. Luke was, or had been, the party animal of the group.

“—Adam enjoyed it, too,” Luke added, defensively. “But between starting up the new firm and all I’ve got going on here, and Seth, we haven’t really had time to do it again.”

“Then do that,” Lance said. “Take him out somewhere in the city, a nice romantic dinner, then you two can dance it up at a club afterward.”

“Jake and I can watch Seth if you want,” Matthew added.

“Thanks,” Luke said, some of the tension draining out of his face. “You guys have no idea how much I’ve been freaking out about this.”

“I think the fact that your idea was laser tag shows how much time around a thirteen-year-old you’ve been spending,” Lance pointed out, referencing Luke’s younger brother, Seth. After a tragic accident took Luke and Seth’s parents, Luke had been raising Seth, and the change in Luke’s perspective on things was noticeable, although not negative.

“You’re pretty good at this whole being a boyfriend thing,” Matthew noted. “Any reason why you’re still single?”

Lance scowled at him. Matthew was the newest addition to their friend group, although ‘new’ was stretching it a bit since he’d been around for over a year now. But Matthew, aside from Luke’s boyfriend Adam, was the only one of the core group who hadn’t grown up with them and gone to high school with them, which meant he didn’t always understand some of the deeply-ingrained group dynamics.

“Lance here is a little… shy,” Luke said, grinning conspiratorially.

“Funny, you didn’t seem shy when we first met,” Matthew said. It was a reference to the fact that when he’d first moved into town, Matthew had slept with a few people in rapid succession—Lance being one of them.

“You seduced me, that’s different,” Lance protested. “I didn’t have to think about, you know, what to talk about on a date. We just had a quickie in the back office.”

“In where?” Luke yelped.

“Oh, did we not ever mention that?” Matthew said with fake innocence.

“No, you failed to mention that when you two had sex, it was in my office—Jesus Christ!” Luke yelled.

“Relax, you’ve renovated it into a kitchen now, all traces of our tryst are completely gone,” Matthew replied, waving a hand nonchalantly.

“What tryst?” Jake asked, sidling up to them.

Matthew put his arm around Jake and said, “Your boy Lance here needs to find a boyfriend.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Jake said, happily accepting the change of subject—and thank God for that, because while they’d been dating for a while now and Matthew was clearly besotted with Jake, Jake didn’t take too kindly to being reminded that Matthew had been a major player when he’d first come to town.

“I’m perfectly fine with the way my life is now, thanks,” Lance replied, rolling his eyes even as discomfort settled in the pit of his stomach.

He’d always been uncomfortable talking about dating. Even in high school when Luke had smashed his heart (but then, what boy’s heart hadn’t been?), he hadn’t wanted to talk about it. Not during the first rush when he’d realized that handsome football captain Luke was flirting with him, and not when Luke had broken his heart and told him it was just a fling and moved on to the next guy. The only person he’d ever discussed any of his dating with was Travis—but Travis was different. Travis was… Travis.

“Nah, don’t give us that,” Matthew replied. “You are one of those guys that is happiest when he’s in a relationship.”

“Thank you, Matthew, for that patriarchal notion that someone is only complete when they have a romantic partner,” Jake said dryly. Despite their deep love for one another, nobody was more willing and ready to poke fun at Matthew than Jake was.

“I don’t mean that,” Matthew replied mildly. He never rose to Jake’s taunts. Lance couldn’t see how someone could be so patient with somebody else that way. “I just mean that Lance likes having someone to take care of, and he likes it when someone is taking care of him. Just look at you and Travis.” This last comment was directed at Lance.

“That’s different,” Lance protested, ignoring the way that his stomach clenched.

He’d long come to terms with the fact that he was stupidly in love with Travis. Travis wasn’t interested in anything resembling a proper relationship though, and besides, it would just ruin their friendship. Travis was his best friend. Lance wasn’t going to risk that for anything, especially when he knew that Travis didn’t even think of him that way.

“I’m just saying,” Matthew went on.

“Cut it out,” Lance growled, perhaps a bit more angrily than he had intended. He didn’t want Matthew or anyone else to see how he’d gotten under Lance’s skin with the topic of conversation. “I just—I have a hard time talking to people I don’t know, okay? I want to… get to know them first. You know, be friends with them. But there’s not really—I can’t really do that, easily.”

“Your line of work probably doesn’t help,” Luke conceded.

This was fair. Lance hadn’t really thought about how his opportunities to date the way he wanted to—friends first, some flirting and such, and then an actual intention of feelings—were disappearing until they were already gone.

High school, and then college, were the best environments for that sort of long courtship that Lance liked. You saw people in classes or dorms every day, or at sports practice, or whatever. You got used to them just as a teammate, or your classmate, or the guy in the dorm room down the hall. Then you gradually became friends, and then eventually they could ask you out and you already knew so many important things about them. You felt comfortable around them.

It was similar at work—or at most people’s work places, anyway. Luke, as a bartender, and Matthew, as a chef, both had ample opportunity to meet people.

Lance, on the other hand, was a website developer and graphic designer. He worked from home, doing freelance or as an independent contractor. He had various bosses, people for whom he did regular work, but he didn’t go into an office. He didn’t have coworkers. Now that he was out of school, there was no regular place to really meet people where he could get that slow, getting-to-know-you relationship. It was all either zero to sixty or nothing.

And Lance, well, Lance was bad enough with people without adding the pressure of a date into the mix. You had to be perfect on a date. You were striving to be your best self, to show yourself off to someone else, and that pressure was awful when mixed with Lance’s natural shyness. Hell, it had taken him four months to work up the courage to make small talk with the baristas at his favorite coffee shop.

He tried explaining this to Matthew. Fortunately, Jake and Luke backed him up.

“It’s true,” Luke said. “Lance has always been the quiet one.”

“Well, you know what they say about the quiet ones,” Matthew replied, grinning.

“You have this great way of setting people at ease,” Jake said dryly, taking in Lance’s face, which Lance figured was probably betraying his growing turmoil.

Jake elbowed his boyfriend out of the way so that Jake was now in between Lance and Matthew. “Look, Lance—and I hope it’s okay that I’m speaking up on your behalf—is a shy person who needs to take a lot of time to get to know someone before romance is really on the table. It’s not how most of the world works, but that’s no reason to needle him about it.”

“This is why Jake is my favorite,” Lance declared.

“At least until he gets drunk,” Luke muttered. Lance glared at him, feeling his face heat up as he remembered, distinctly, several times when Jake had gotten drunk and inevitably accused Lance of having a stick up his ass.

“Drunk Jake is the Hyde to my Jekyll,” Jake intoned. “Do not listen to a word he says.”

“When you start referring to yourself in the third person, you know you’re losing it,” Luke quipped.

Lance rolled his eyes but was glad that the conversation was turning more towards some good-natured ribbing of Jake, and away from Lance’s lack of a love life. He suspected that Luke knew about his unfortunate crush on Travis. There wasn’t a whole lot that Luke didn’t know, being the bartender and the only sober one at the end of the night. None of the others did though, and that suited Lance just fine. Between his own shyness and his slow courtship preference and his stupid crush on his best friend, he knew he was screwed. He didn’t need everyone else reminding him about it.

Jake and Matthew were arguing about something and Davis was now wandering over, undoubtedly to talk about his latest date that was absolutely, for real this time, The One, while Luke was taking care of some customers and Bill and Nancy were arguing over what song to play on the jukebox. Lance let it all wash over him.

This was his home—in a way, more of his home than his actual home. He was stuck at his house all day doing work, and it was lonely, just being all by himself. Maybe if he had someone to come home to… but that didn’t bear thinking about. The point was that Lance was content here. He had his friends goofing off and joking good-naturedly around him, he was pleasantly buzzed and not too tired—his life was good. Here, at Joe’s, he had friends and warmth and honestly, it was stupid of him to ask for more than that, wasn’t it?

The front door opened, and Lance turned automatically to see Adam enter. “Sorry, sorry, sorry!” he said, hurrying through the bar to reach Luke. They didn’t kiss, to Lance’s surprise. Luke was a rather possessive boyfriend, rather like Jake, and would openly kiss and touch Adam as much as his boyfriend would let him.

Instead, however, Luke pulled Adam around until Adam was behind the bar. It was an amusing contrast: Adam in his fancy lawyer’s suit, the bespoke ones he had made because he might have moved to the Midwest but he was still—as they all called him affectionately—an east-coast snob, standing behind the bar of Joe’s, a down-to-earth honky-tonk bar if there ever was one. Despite the major renovation that Luke had given it, Joe’s still had that relaxed, small town backwoods feel to it. If you asked Lance, that was a huge part of its charm and popularity.

Once Adam was behind the bar, Luke pulled him into a hug. Lance could see all of this tension that he hadn’t even realized Luke was holding seep out of him as he wrapped his arms around Adam, nosing into Adam’s neck and breathing him in. Adam returned the hug without a second thought, instinctively, and Lance could see the stiffness in Adam’s body fading away as well.

Lance swallowed around the sudden lump in his throat and looked away. That—that was what he wanted when he let himself think about being in a relationship. Luke and Adam just looked so happy, sinking into one another, drawing relaxation and strength from each other. It made envy burn in Lance’s throat like a sickness and he had to think about something, anything else.

“Oh, God, you two are making me sick,” Jake declared, most likely at Luke and Adam. Lance still kept his head turned away, not wanting to think about it, hoping for a distraction.

Luckily, Travis was Lance’s best friend for a reason, and part of that reason was his uncannily good timing because at that moment the door burst open and Travis entered.