SIX

 

Well, that hadn’t quite gone as he might have hoped. Jamie had been keeping it to himself as best he could, but part of him had wished that Lance would argue with him. Would tell him that they could keep it secret.

Jamie was no virgin, but the truth was, he couldn’t remember a time in his life when a sexual experience had been this intense with someone that he’d just met. Truthfully, he didn’t usually have any sort of sexual contact this soon, but the connection to Lance had just been too good to resist.

For him, anyway.

Jamie was settled on the tour bus, on their way to their first stop in San Francisco. For him, it should have been a big deal. He was rolling away from the only city he’d ever known, watching through the rear window of the bus as the skyscrapers faded into the pearly mist behind him.

And it was a big deal. It was just that he had other things on his mind. Like how it had been two weeks since he’d fallen into bed—or onto the floor, anyway—with Lance, and how it still stung a little bit that Lance hadn’t even been trying to fight him on the no more sex thing.

He felt like he’d been almost begging for it. He would have kept it a secret. He would have happily snuck around for something that felt as good as that had. Sure, a relationship was out of the question, but maybe they could have done some sort of tension release thing with each other.

But Lance hadn’t even questioned it when Jamie had stated that they couldn’t. So, they couldn’t. It wasn’t a big deal, or so he told himself over and over again as he lay in bed, in his shabby, crappy little apartment. The poverty all around him told him that Lance was right. That neither of them could afford to lose this sweet deal they had going on.

Still, it would have been nice if Lance had been willing to try. But really, what should Jamie expect? Some sort of big sacrifice from someone that he just met? He knew better than that. He just wasn’t the sort who inspired big sacrifices, which was fine.

It would have been easier, Jamie was convinced, if he didn’t have to spend so much time with Lance. Hours and hours, what with Jamie’s catching up practices as well as regular band rehearsals. He could barely get away from the guy, and the only way he had found that worked was to keep Lance at a distance, to treat him like he wasn’t anything, like nothing that they’d done together had meant anything to him.

“Are you done with that?” A deep voice that was only sort of familiar to Jamie spoke, and Jamie glanced up, head tilted with surprise when he saw who it was. He was pretty sure that he’d heard the enigmatic Aaron say perhaps ten words, at most, since he’d met him, and he’d certainly never actually addressed Jamie before.

Aaron tilted his head to the side and gestured at the music magazine that Jamie had picked up out of sheer boredom. Not that he was reading it, his eyes had been skimming over the pages just for something to fix on. Staring out the window got old, and it was getting increasingly awkward inside the cramped confines of the bus.

Aaron, for all of his prickly distancing, was actually safer to look at than anywhere else. Maybe it was his paranoid imagination, but he felt like he always felt Ken’s eyes boring into him, and he knew for a fact that whenever he caught the other man’s gaze, he was glaring at him.

Like right now, for instance. The back of Jamie’s head crawled with the sensation of being stared at. Ken, almost certainly. Which was weird because the last time he’d been paying attention, Ken hadn’t been behind him. He’d been up near the front of the bus, hanging out and playing some video games on some of the really, truly cool old arcade style games that were up there.

The whole tour bus was pretty ridiculous, actually. For such a small space, they packed a lot in there. There were even beds, for when they had to spend the night on the road, though mostly they’d be in hotels.

It was the most luxurious thing that Jamie had ever seen, though. Maybe to the rest of them, it was nothing. Maybe they were all used to it. But Jamie had never had enough money to even think about living like this before.

“Uh…” Jamie looked at Aaron, who was waiting patiently for him to respond, and then looked past him as he handed the magazine over. Truth was, Aaron scared him a little bit. But the really weird thing was that, yes, he’d been correct. Ken was still up near the front, and Jamie could hear the beeps and boops from the game he was playing.

Which meant that it could only be one person staring at him, he stole a peek, just one, over his shoulder, and he took a deep breath when he saw a pair of lovely emerald eyes shining back at him. It was Lance. Lance was staring at him, and there was a strange intensity in his gaze, a tenseness in the seductive curve of his lips that Jamie wouldn’t have expected to see.

Aaron took the magazine, and then, to Jamie’s surprise, he sat down beside Jamie on the lush, deep, comfortable couch where Jamie had sprawled himself. In seconds, Aaron was lost in the magazine, but every time Jamie looked over, Lance was staring at them, his phone dangling, apparently completely forgotten, from his hand.

It was almost like he was jealous or something? That was how Jamie would read the look on that handsome face of his, but it didn’t make any sense. But as Jamie settled back, pretending not to look at Lance but stealing looks at him out of the corner of his eye, he could swear it was true.

What was he, back in high school? With how he was acting, with the paths that his brain was taking, it almost seemed like it. Lance was a grown man. He wasn’t going to be jealous because someone that he wasn’t even with was sitting beside someone else. The idea was ridiculous.

Though to be honest, it was also one that Jamie sort of liked. It made him feel a bit stifled, yes, but if Lance could care that much, that would be shocking but delightful.

And then Lance was walking over, flopping down between Jamie and Aaron, his thigh pressed cozily close against Jamie’s. Lance shot him a little smirk, and there was something deeply seductive about the tilt of his head, something flirtatious in his eyes and in the fullness of his slightly parted lips. In the way he inclined closer to Jamie.

“Hey,” Lance murmured, as Aaron looked up, a slightly annoyed look on his face, before those strange eyes of his dropped back down to the magazine. He shifted over a little on the couch, so he was as far from them as he could be, and then went back to reading.

Whatever Lance seemed to think, Jamie was fairly certain that Aaron hadn’t been hitting on him. Asking for a magazine was hardly the same as declaring that he wanted to take Jamie to bed, or whatever. But even if he had, that wasn’t any of Lance’s business, was it?

“Hey,” Jamie returned, glad when he heard how casual his voice came out. None of the emotions he was feeling, nothing that was whirling through his mind like a hurricane, made it into that one word. But then, he was pretty good at hiding what he was feeling—lots of practice.

“Come play a game with me or something. I’m bored,” Lance informed him, and Jamie stared at him. Lance had worked with him over the last few weeks, but they were hardly at the point where they hung out for fun. They had both kept it professional, strictly business, and there hadn’t been any sign that Lance wanted it any other way.

“Okay,” Jamie tossed off, as casually as he could, and then rose to his feet. There was a little table that had been fixed to the side of the bus, where they could use their laptops. There was also a cupboard with a glass front, packed full of board games. That was his destination.

Only things didn’t go quite as he had envisioned, because just as he was standing, the bus hit a pothole and Jamie, still slightly off balance as he rose, was knocked sideways.

The world tilted and spun around him as he was pushed toward the back of the bus, but just when he was completely sure that only a wall was going to stop him, there was a strong arm around his waist, and he was being pulled, guided down toward the couch again.

No, not just toward the couch. Toward Lance. Toward his lap, where Jamie landed heavily, staring with astonishment at the other man. He wanted to say something, something no doubt trite and pathetic. You saved me, or something equally stupid.

Instead, he just smirked, fighting off the really ridiculous urge to press a kiss to the tip of Lance’s gorgeous, straight nose. Instead, he patted his shoulder and scrambled up out of his lap because it was that or get far too comfortable perched there. It would be so easy to just stay there, completely content, wrapping his arms around Lance and the rest of the world could go to hell.

But Ken was right there, and yes, he seemed pretty fixated on his video games, but that wasn’t going to last forever. Besides, no matter how much of a jerk Ken was being to him, he didn’t actually want to hurt the guy.

So, once the bus had steadied, Jamie pushed himself to his feet again. He patted Lance a little bit awkwardly on the shoulder and then made his way, more carefully this time, over to the table.

When he glanced back to see if Lance was following him, though, he met Aaron’s eyes, instead. Those odd eyes so deep and dark a blue that they almost had a purple tint to them, and those eyes were slightly narrowed as they looked deep into Jamie’s soul, or so it seemed. Like Aaron could see everything.

Well, that just meant that Jamie had to be careful around him. Not that Aaron seemed to be the talking type. But at that moment, Jamie worried that Aaron knew. That somehow, just by that short interaction, Aaron had deduced more than either Jamie or Lance wanted him to.

What was that they said about still waters and running deep? That was Aaron, Jamie was pretty sure about that, and he shifted in his seat and did his best to avoid Aaron’s eyes. Seconds later, Lance joined him at the table, and it was a relief to turn away from those soul penetrating eyes. Aaron was intense—there was no doubt about it.

The guy barely talked, but he seemed to see everything. And Jamie had too many things that he didn’t want to be seen. He should probably stay away from Aaron, which was a shame because not only was the guy beautiful, but at that moment, he seemed like someone who was alone. Maybe it was by his own choice, and that was something that Jamie could understand, but it was still a bit sad.

“What do you want to play?” Lance asked, which Jamie thought was a reasonable question, though it was odd, now that he thought about it, that Lance hadn’t suggested a specific game.

Probably just his imagination. Or Lance had wanted to get him away from Aaron.

Jamie’s eyes skimmed over the board games, most of them a little bit childish for the mood he was in. They fixed on a chess board, and he gave a soft sigh as his lingered there.

“You know how to play chess?” There was a rather unflattering tone of surprise to Lance’s voice, and Jamie gave him a bit of a look.

“Why shouldn’t I?” he snapped, stung by that comment, but more by the shock in Lance’s eyes. He wasn’t an idiot. He knew how to play the game, and the assumption that he didn’t sort of annoyed him.

“Oh,” Lance gave him a bit of a smile, one which made Jamie’s stomach do strange things. What was it about this man, that could have him so upset one moment, and so ready to forgive him the next? “Uh, well, it’s been awhile since I played. I might be a bit rusty. But let’s do it.”

Jamie returned the smile, and the prickles that he had felt forming on his skin, the ones that he so easily pulled close to him when he felt threatened or judged, they just fell away. Just from a smile. It was incredible, if not a little terrifying.

He pulled out the chess board and focused on setting up the pieces, rather than thinking about the strange things going on in his heart. The draw he had to this man. The fact that he was playing chess again, even though he had been so sure, once he left Dom, that he would never play it again.

There were a lot of things that he had been so sure he would never do again, and even though he’d really just met Lance, he already knew that the guy was going to challenge that like no one else ever had.

It had been so much easier to keep himself on guard when he didn’t have to worry about Lance giving him that sweet, seductive, sultry smile.