ONE

 

“This is the biggest pile of crap,” Ken commented, glancing over at Lance. His teal eyes were annoyed and clearly expected Lance to be, too. Restless, Ken twisted around in his chair, its confines not even close to enough to hold his irritated energy.

“Chill, Ken,” Lance commented, draped over a chair of his own but sitting somewhat more still than Ken was. But then, that was Ken. The guy couldn’t sit still if his life depended on it, and his mouth tended to run away from him just as much. Sometimes it drove him pretty insane, but Lance had to admit that it was sort of nice to have Ken around, at least most of the time.

“I’m not gonna chill,” Ken retorted, squirming as he seemingly tried to get comfortable on the chair. “It’s crap, and you know it’s crap. Some asshole is going to try to take Darien’s place. He thinks he can just audition and walk in and we’ll all just be okay with it …”

Lance smirked, letting his amusement come out. Ken got so worked up about stuff. Not Lance’s style, even if he could understand Ken’s annoyance on this particular subject.

Darien had been his friend, too.

“Look, Darien’s gone. He’s not going to leave his boyfriend and come back to the band,” Lance explained patiently. “So we need to replace him. And how else are we going to do that other than by auditioning people?” He caught Ken’s eyes with his own. “I mean, we both had to audition, right?”

“Yeah, that’s different, though,” Ken protested. “We auditioned at the beginning. This guy coming in, he’s some loser who thinks he can just stroll in and have us accept him. I don’t know why Lester won’t just let us be a trio. You, me, and Aaron, we got this.”

Lance frowned a little as he thought that over, listening for one moment to the shrieking diva on the stage. The guy couldn’t sing, but he was attractive, and sometimes it seemed like that counted for more. Surely Lester wouldn’t do that to them, though?

“Eh, what are you gonna do,” Lance asked, stretching out his long body, stretching his legs out as much as they could, given the confines of the area. They were sitting in a theater, with rows and rows of seats, and Lance always found such areas cramped.

Ken sighed and finally stopped twitching around, resting his head against the back of the seat as he slouched down on the red velvet, which had been worn smooth by the passage of time. They weren’t exactly the most comfortable seats in the world, which probably wasn’t helping Ken’s mood.

“I say we talk to Lester. Get Aaron on board, maybe. Tell him we’ll do this alone,” Ken proposed, and Lance stared at him with bemused wonder. Ken really did live in a fantasy world a lot of the time, it seemed, but this was something else.

“You want us to tell Lester what to do?” Lance asked, and Ken made a bit of a face but nodded to accept the point. That wasn’t how this relationship went. Lester told them what to do, not the other way around.

“Okay, so maybe we try things his way.” A crafty, sneaky look appeared on Ken’s face, and Lance wanted to laugh. Of all the people he’d ever met, Ken might just be the least suited to subterfuge of any of them. “And we give this new guy a chance. Only once he’s in …”

Lance rolled his eyes.

“Seriously?” he asked. “You want to haze the new kid? That’s pretty low.” Lance peered at his best friend, then shook his head. “Count me out, man. I don’t like this whole thing any better than you do but that’s just …”

Ken frowned, storm clouds gathering on his face, especially in his eyes. He was the sort of guy who wore his heart on his sleeve, who was terrible at holding back what he was feeling. Lance could respect that, even if he couldn’t understand it to save his life.

“Okay, but … I don’t want someone coming in and trying to take Darien’s place,” Ken whispered, and Lance looked at him thoughtfully. What exactly had happened there? He might not know all of the details, but he could tell that Ken and Darien had been more than just friends, which had to hurt when the guy had run off with someone else.

“No one can,” Lance told him, which was maybe a mistake, because Ken immediately brightened up, the sun coming out from behind those clouds to illuminate him. He’d cheered his friend up, clearly, but what exactly had he gotten himself into?

“So you’ll help me?” Ken asked, and Lance sighed and shrugged. He didn’t even know this newcomer, whoever he was going to be. And Ken was right about a couple of things.

More importantly, Ken was his friend. Ken and Aaron were the closest friends he had since he’d moved completely away from New York. He knew some people here in Los Angeles, but he wasn’t going to turn his back on his friend, maybe his only real friend, for some guy he hadn’t even met.

“Let’s just see how it goes,” Lance suggested, attempting to defuse the situation a little bit. But Ken just grinned at him and winked, then rose to his feet, stretching his stocky, muscular body out and giving it a little shake.

“I’m out of here,” he announced. Not really a surprise, since Ken didn’t like to spend too much time sitting still. Lance shrugged and rose to his feet, too. He could use a smoke, and he was getting a little tired of hearing terrible singers and thinking about the nightmares that they’d cause if they got into the group.

“Boys, a word?” Lester commented, and Lance jumped, turning abruptly to glare at their manager.

“Don’t do that,” he complained. “Seriously, it’s creepy how you just come out of nowhere like that.”

Lester, unsurprisingly, ignored his comment. He just looked at them both, eyeing them up and down like he was measuring them for their coffins. That was how ominous it felt, and not only that, it seemed like he was actually enjoying the mental image. Which only made it about a thousand times freakier.

“We gotta talk,” Lester announced, still with that look on his face. Only now it looked grim, too, and Lance mentally fortified himself against whatever the guy was about to say.

“So talk,” Ken commented, crossing his arms over his chest and glowering. Lance got the distinct impression that Ken didn’t like Lester, but then, who did? They didn’t have to like the guy to work with him.

“Lance …” Lester turned to him and handed him a cell phone, and Lance instinctively looked down at the screen, then frowned.

“It’s me,” he pointed out, feeling a little bit like someone had been spying on him as he changed. Yes, he was fully clothed in the picture, with his arm around a pretty blonde woman, but the picture had been taken without his knowledge, and he didn’t like that much at all.

“Keep looking,” Lester said, his tone tight and not even a little bit repentant. Hardly able to believe this, Lance swiped his finger over the smooth glass of the screen and winced when he saw himself with another girl. Another swipe, and yet another girl.

He was starting to think that he might have some idea what this was about, and he forced back a guilty wince. Surely Lester hadn’t actually been serious about that whole crazy thing …

Only clearly, he was, because soon enough, Lance’s suspicions were proven correct. Lester’s finger poked at the screen with far more derision than a simple movement should even be able to muster.

“You signed the contract, Lance. You signed it.” Lester’s voice took on a whole new intensity, and Lance dropped his gaze, trying to fight off the guilt and not doing that great a job of it.

“I didn’t …” he mumbled, only for Ken, who was peering at the screen, too, to interrupt him.

“Oh my God, Lance. Learn to keep it in your pants,” Ken commented, though he, at least, seemed more amused than pissed off. The same couldn’t be said of Lester, who was glaring now. It was probably a good thing humans didn’t have the ability to kill just by looking, or Lance would have been in trouble.

“I was just …” Lance tried again, and this time, it was Lester who cut him off.

“You were just thinking with your dick, not your brain,” he said, his tone dripping disdain. “And if you don’t knock it off, I could fire you for breach of contract. Sue you, too, if I felt nasty.”

And from the look in his eyes, he would be inclined to feel nasty. Lance swallowed, his hands clenching nervously at his sides.

When he didn’t speak, Lester continued on.

“It doesn’t have to go like that. Right now, rumors are going around, and my ass is on the line. People are saying that they don’t even think Lance is bi, let alone gay. They’re questioning everyone else because of it. This could be a PR nightmare, but we can still turn it around.”

Lance wanted to roll his eyes. He wasn’t bi just because he had been on some dates with women? That was pretty much a giant pile of crap, as far as he was concerned, but he supposed he wasn’t really in a position to say much about it.

The truth was, he had always been more comfortable dating women. It wasn’t until he’d auditioned for this group that he’d actually even acknowledged that he was bisexual. And being out like that, for the first time, and having it be to the world, it was a lot to take.

So maybe there was some truth to the complaint.

“Look, I’ll just be more careful,” Lance commented and winced when he saw the dirty look that Lester shot his way. It had been a weak attempt, and clearly, it wasn’t enough.

“If you want to keep your job, you’re going to let me play matchmaker,” Lester informed him, his dark eyes glittering coldly. Lance didn’t doubt—not even for a moment—that Lester meant what he said. This wasn’t a bluff, no matter how badly Lance might want it to be.

Lance could feel Ken shifting behind him awkwardly, and he could understand how it had to feel strange to listen to this. Truthfully, Lance wasn’t sure why Ken was here at all, but Lester had very clearly stopped them both.

“That’s where you come in,” Lester’s frigid eyes turned to Ken, who froze in place. “The two of you are going to fix this. Together.”

Ken frowned, stirring uneasily beside Lance. Lance could tell that Ken was feeling strange because this was the most relatively still that he’d seen Ken stay for quite a while. Clearly, this was bothering him, too.

“Sure, okay, great,” Ken was close against Lance’s side, and Lance took some comfort from that. At least he wasn’t in this alone. “But how …”

Lester reached out, and he took Lance’s hand in one of his, and Ken’s in the other. With a strange smirk on his face, Lester put their hands together, and Ken’s felt burning hot, his palm against Lance’s.

“Oh my God,” Lance whispered, feeling shaky and uncomfortable as he held his best friend’s hand. He looked over at Ken and saw the discomfort on the other man’s face, how pale his friend had gone under his tan.

Ken could be pretty damn oblivious at times, but even he got where Lester was going with this. It would have been pretty hard not to, with that little smirk on their manager’s face.

“No way,” Ken stated baldly. “There has to be some other …”

“We need this,” Lester informed them. “Darien screwed us over, but I saw how the people loved him hooking up with Noah. We need a romance in the band, and it’s going to be you two unless one of you wants to try to convince Aaron to do it.”

Ken and Lance exchanged looks because they both knew very well that it would be more likely for a whole flock or herd of whatever you called it of pigs to fly by them on silver swan’s wings than it was for Aaron to sign up for some sort of fake relationship.

“Ken shouldn’t have to … he didn’t do anything wrong,” Lance protested, and while Ken looked faintly sick, he shook his head in denial.

“No. It’s fine. I’ll do it, if you help me out with the … the other thing,” Ken told him, and Lance winced. He knew exactly what Ken meant. He was talking about freezing the new member of the Lost Boys out, some poor man who hadn’t even been chosen yet.

“Look, I don’t want you to leave, too. Not when Darien just left a couple of months ago,” Ken admitted, his green-blue eyes emotional. “So let’s just do this. I know we’re friends, and it’s weird, but it’s just an act, right?”

Lance took a deep breath and nodded slowly. Belatedly, he realized that he was still holding Ken’s hand, and he softly laughed as he squeezed it. The idea freaked him out, more than a little, not only because it was his friend but also because it was going to be his first public gay relationship, but he was lucky that Ken was willing to go along with it at all.

“Fine. It looks like we’re dating,” Lance said, shooting a smirk Ken’s way, feigning a sentimental gaze into his best friend’s eyes that had them both convulsed with laughter after a few seconds.

They were probably going to have to work on that. It wasn’t going to be a very convincing relationship if every time they tried to do something romantic, they went off into gales of near hysterical laughter.

Ken was a beautiful man, and Ken was a good guy, but that was as far as it went. Lance had never had any interest in him romantically, and he would swear that the same could be said for Ken, but they could do this. They could make it work.

They had to, or Lance was going to have to peddle his papers elsewhere.

“One more thing, boys,” Lester told them, smug satisfaction pretty much radiating off of him in a way that made even Lance have to grit his teeth to keep from saying anything. “No one can know that this relationship isn’t real. No one. Not Aaron, not your friends, not your families. The secret stays between the three of us.”

Lance shrugged. Honestly, that didn’t seem like such a big deal to him, not once he’d accepted that he had to do this at all. And Lester was right, anyway. Three people might be able to keep a secret, but any more than that and it was bound to get out. That would probably end up doing more harm than good.

“Fine,” Lance agreed, and Ken nodded, somewhat terser. Maybe he was realizing what he was signing up for, poor guy.

Finally, Lance dropped Ken’s hand, trying to comfort himself. So he couldn’t date women. Whatever. It wasn’t like that had been hugely fulfilling anyway. None of them were Amy, anyway. None of them had been able to compare to her, no matter how ready Lance had felt to move on.

Deep in thought, he spun away from both Ken and Lester, a frown on his face and his eyes fixed on the floor. He would go out for a smoke. Clear his head a little. Try to figure out how this was going to work, and not ruin his friendship with Ken at the same time.

So he wasn’t watching where he was going, and he literally bumped into someone, or rather, almost plowed him over. Raising his eyes with apologies on his lips, Lance steadied the guy with hands on his slender shoulders and looked into the most brilliantly, crystalline blue eyes that he had ever seen.