Our Love Was
by Velma
It's the grey sweatpants that do it. Chris sees Lance in them one morning, lounging in a hotel room, and he feels a longing well up in him so strong it's tangible. It's Lance's taste and his smell and the fine hairs on the back of his neck. It's the feel of those soft, worn sweatpants as Chris pushes them low on Lance's hips, then all the way off.
Those sweatpants used to be his. They aren't anymore.
**
The sweatpants became Lance's the first night they slept together. While Chris ran hot, and slept in boxers if anything at all, Lance was never without a t-shirt and pajama pants. That night, after the sweat had cooled from their bodies and they'd settled down, Lance had reached down and pulled them from a pile of clothing next to Chris's bed. They fit him better than they'd ever fit Chris.
Chris knew relationships, he'd been in and out of enough of them that he thought himself a bit of an expert. He'd even been in love, more than once. He'd loved Dani, but that had been gone long before they were over. The more he thought about it, the more he realized that his depression after she left was more because that was how he was supposed to act than because he was genuinely unhappy.
Lance must have figured that out. Lance, who sidled up to him after the Larry King interview, hot breath in Chris's ear as he murmured, "So, you're dating me, huh?" Chris had licked suddenly dry lips and nodded.
"Must be true," he said. "I saw it on TV. CNN, you know. Credible news source and everything."
Lance's eyes had sparkled and he'd kissed Chris then, quick and light in the corner of the green room. Light, but Chris had felt it burning on his lips the rest of the night. His lips still tingled with it when Lance let himself into Chris's hotel room that night.
"This isn't," Chris said, pulling the covers open as Lance crawled in. "This isn't a pity thing, is it?"
Lance grinned. "I don't do pity."
"Yeah?" Chris squeaked. "What do you do?" Lance disappeared under the covers. "Oh," Chris said. "Oh."
There was never any real discussion of dating. They were guys. Guys didn't do that sort of thing. Beyond that, they didn't really have to. Discuss. They spent most of their time together, anyway. It was easy in a way that none of Chris's other relationships had been. He already knew what Lance looked like when he was irritated, what jokes Lance found funny, what he looked like after a night of hard drinking. It was like skipping several steps in the process, being with Lance.
Chris liked it.
**
That didn't mean that there weren't surprises. Like Lance's habit of waking Chris up at three in the morning to go to the 24-hour Walmart because Lance really, really needed industrial strength cleaner right now. It became a regular thing until the night manager pulled them over one time and told them they ought to find some other place to roughhouse. Apparently she didn't appreciate shopping cart drag racing. Or Lance using the store intercom to alert Chris to a price cut on electric toothbrushes.
Chris had told her as the two of them left, grinning, that she didn't understand the meaning of fun. And that yeah, it was the middle of the night, but that didn't mean she couldn't lighten up. He'd wondered if it was possible to be banned from Walmart for life as Lance had squealed out of the parking lot, their laughter mixing with the sound of the tires as the lights of the store faded into the distance.
Lance knew the meaning of fun. Chris hadn't truly appreciated just how much.
They did stuff like that all the time. Midnight bowling and paint ball and Lance was pretty much the only person Chris could watch football with. Justin would whine about how it wasn't as fun as basketball, Joey was disinterested on principle, and JC would root for whatever team was playing the Steelers because he was a bitch that way. Lance, though, Lance would actually watch the games and he knew the stats and Chris told him once that when Dennis Miller got canned, he should audition to do color.
Lance had looked at him funny, but Chris was serious. In his eyes, Lance could do just about anything.
Then there was the time that Lance made him the mix CD. Punk rock love songs, and Chris couldn't get over it.
"I had a little help," Lance said sheepishly, "but, I mean, a few years with you and the music's in my head, too."
The two had drunken discussions about the superiority of Eric Stefani-era No Doubt, about the evolution of ska and whether the Bosstones had sold out. Lance maintained there was nothing to sell out to. Chris had bought too much into the image of Lance as a country bumpkin, even when he knew better, and it never ceased to amaze him how much the guy knew. How sophisticated he was.
The difference between Lance and most people was that Lance never seemed to feel like he needed to prove that.
**
Chris was hard pressed to remember a single bad moment.
Of course there were, there had to be, because that's the nature of love. It ebbs and changes and shifts and you evolve with it or things fall apart. They were so comfortable with each other Chris never felt like he had to work at it. He and Lance fit, skin to skin. Inside each other's skin.
Maybe, in the end, that's what did it. Because what was comfortable for Chris became suffocating to Lance. Lance, who had dreams, ambition, who was going to produce and act and hell, even go to the moon. Chris was accepting of it, but he didn't encourage it. Lance's dreams were just that. Lance's. The two of them had never really talked about collective dreams, so the "we" became "I" without too much difficulty.
**
Chris rolled over one morning and the space that was Lance's was empty. Cold to the touch.
The breakup went well because it had to. There wasn't time for histrionics. Chris couldn't mope because they had a job to do, a tour going on. So Justin took him out to a strip club, because apparently what Chris really needed wasn't Lance's sharp teeth and hard lines and easy smile. Apparently what Chris needed was teased hair, heavy makeup, and fake boobs. He left before his first lap dance.
Joey ordered pizza and beer and threw the Goonies into the VCR in Chris's hotel room, because it was Chris's all time favorite movie ever. Except the Goonies was all about the power of home, of family, and Lance was both of those to Chris. He ended up shutting the movie off a half hour in and kicking Joey out of the room. He'd finished the beer, though.
JC took him aside and told him to write a song. When Chris pointed out that the only song he'd ever written for the group had been scrubbed from the Celebrity track listing and put on the OTL soundtrack out of pity, JC suggested watercolors.
They were well meaning, but they missed the mark completely. Chris didn't want to feel better. He wanted Lance.
**
It was Joey who set him up with Michelle.
"She's cute," he said. "She's funny. She's smart. And she travels with you already, knows what kind of life this is. What more could you ask?"
So Chris went out with Michelle a few times to make Joey happy. He hadn't counted on Justin chiming in with his approval, or JC throwing an arm around his shoulder and telling him that Michelle had good energy. And really nice legs. Hell, even his mother liked her.
And really, Michelle was cute and fun and smart. She laughed at his jokes and she could talk politics with him, sort of. Not that Chris liked politics much, but Lance read the Wall Street Journal every morning and Chris had gotten into the habit of doing it, too, and since he wasn't talking about it with Lance there was no one else to talk to.
She was great in bed, Chris had no reason to complain. Except she was quiet and focused and Chris was a talker and it always seemed to distract her. When he would smile and whisper, "Yeah, baby, like that, Jesus, yeah, fuck," her jaw would tighten just a little. Which, fine, whatever, he could tone it down if she wanted.
He'd just never had to before.
When he rolled over at two in the morning, stomach grumbling, and suggested the Wendy's drive-thru window, she shook her head and went back to sleep. He got out of bed and wandered out onto the balcony, looking up at the stars. He picked out Orion easily. Lance had tried to teach him all the constellations, but Chris had a shitty memory for that stuff. Orion, though. Orion was always there, no matter what the season, alone in the night sky, at least as far as Chris was concerned.
Orion was comfortable, too.
**
Chris liked Michelle. There was no reason not to. Even though it took her an hour to get ready to go to the grocery store. Even though she only listened to hip hop and r & b. And hated football. And was soft in all the wrong places. She was good for him.
Everyone told him so.
Chris thought about Bobbie, and how she was a shield JC had used to protect himself from people. About all the contracts that had provisions about who they could date. He thought about Lance, and he thought about Michelle.
She was the closest thing he'd ever had to a beard, and he didn't have anything to hide. Not anymore.
**
He suspected if he asked, Lance would have a million reasons why they didn't work. Organized on a spreadsheet. In alphabetical order. Or maybe not. Maybe Lance was just a lot more intuitive than Chris had given him credit for.
He'd have to ask, though, and Chris wasn't prepared to hear what Lance had to say. That maybe eight years was too much difference, and Chris couldn't be what Lance needed, that Chris wanted more than Lance could give. That Lance's world was now movie scripts and potential clients and appearances where Chris was deadweight.
That they'd spent too much time being comfortable next to each other that they'd forgotten to work on being comfortable with each other.
The cliché goes that you don't know what you've got till it's gone. Chris had known. He knew now. Knew that Tommy Girl wasn't the same as Tommy. That Lance wore an Oxford better than Michelle ever could.
He knew, even as Michelle came into the room and curled up next to his side, even as Lance's latest, some hulking guy with big muscles and shifting eyes made him laugh across the room, that for the rest of his life he'd be comparing the present to the past because he'd never contemplated any other future.
Lance looked over, smiling as he hiked up his sweatpants, and Chris smiled back. He pushed the cold feeling in his gut down as far as he could and pressed his face into Michelle's hair. Pantene, not Bedhead, but the smell was almost as sweet.
If it wasn't comfortable, at least it was familiar.
Sometimes you learned to make do.
-fin-