Darien let a deep, deep breath into his lungs, holding it for a moment, then letting it out slowly, bit by bit. As he did, he thought about what Lance was saying, and by the time the breath was out, he was grinning.
“Yeah. It’s worth it,” he admitted. Even with all of Noah’s seriousness, what they had was really, really good. They could at least try to work all of their issues out. Yes. For the first time in his life, it felt worth it to him.
“Then go for it, man. Talk to him. Figure shit out.” Lance was grinning now, too, just as devastatingly handsome as ever. Truth to be told, Darien had had a crush on Lance for pretty much as long as he’d known him. It didn’t matter, though, because no crush on any bandmate was going to be able to be more important to him than this very real thing with Noah.
A smile found its way onto Darien’s lips, a wide, foolish grin.
“Lance, the romantic. Who would have thought?” Darien wondered aloud. Lance was so busy dating around, Darien wouldn’t have been sure that the other man even believed in love, much less would encourage someone else to go for it.
“Hey, maybe romance isn’t for me,” Lance said, grinning back, ordering them both another round of beers, “But I can see he’s got his hooks into your heart. So do it, man. Go for it. It’s not my thing, but I can see it’s yours.”
It was like a huge weight was lifted from Darien’s shoulders, taken on by Lance so that he didn’t have to worry about it anymore. Somehow, things with him and Noah would work out. Somehow, they would make this crazy thing go, and Darien, at that moment, at least, really believed that.
He would go home, and in the morning, when he had sobered up, he would talk to him. He would sit Noah down and tell him how much he meant to him. Ask him if he was upset about Ken, and maybe tell him the whole story there. He and Ken hadn’t been together for a long time—he could honestly say that to him. If they ever had been together, which even Darien wasn’t sure about.
Difficult conversations later, though. For now, Darien felt like a celebration, so he raised his glass bottle in a silent toast to his friend, who had cleared things up for him nicely.
Lance grinned at him and raised his own bottle. The slender necks clattered together, and they both drank, grinning like idiots.
* * *
One more beer turned into several more, and Darien realized, with no alarm at all, that the world was starting to spin around him. He couldn’t stop giggling, gripping onto the bar as if he could stabilize himself by holding on. It felt like he was on a merry go round, but a very fast one, one which didn’t seem to want to slow down or stop. If anything, it was whirling faster than ever.
“Whoa, kiddo,” Lance’s face swam in and out of focus, and Darien grabbed onto his strong shoulders, finding that he couldn’t seem to stop grinning. He clung to Lance like his life depended on it, and honestly, it sort of felt like it did. Gravity didn’t seem to be working quite right, and at any moment, he half expected to spin off right up out of the earth’s atmosphere and off into space.
“Geez, you’re a lightweight. Okay. I’m gonna take you home,” Lance decided, though his words didn’t make a lot of sense to Darien. But when Lance got up, his body undulating strangely, and Darien tried to follow him, he felt the ground tilting out from under him.
All of which he found hilarious. There was a core, deep down within himself, of sobriety, one that was deeply alarmed by his own behavior, by the way the world spun around him. But mostly, he just found the whole thing funny. He couldn’t even walk without help!
Lance, who had been drinking, too, called them a cab, and somewhere along the line, Darien passed out against his bandmate’s body. He was going to be teased so much for this, but at the moment, that seemed secondary to feeling good, feeling relaxed. Feeling free. Maybe it was artificial, brought on by the booze, but he would take it.
By the time they got to Darien’s apartment, Lance was outright carrying Darien, whose rebellious legs didn’t seem to want to work properly. His arms were around his friend’s neck as he was brought into the house, and the familiar lines of his room became wavy like he’d been put under the water somehow without even noticing.
“Darien! What happened to him?” It was Noah’s voice, sounding panicked, and then the room was tilting around him as Lance set him down on his feet.
“He’s just drunk,” Lance assured Noah, and Darien giggled softly to himself at the odd quality of the words. Everything had been spinning, and now, it was slowing down, like his life, his world was all taped, and the tape had been set to slow motion.
“Drunk?” Noah came over and peered at him, and Darien grinned cheerfully at him, reaching out to touch his face, to slip his fingers over the smooth, satin cheek of his cheek.
“Not that drunk.” Darien tried to protest, and then he smirked at his lover. “You’re cute. I wonder why it took me …” He frowned as he lost his train of thought, only to get it back again seconds later. “Why it took me so long to figure that out.”
“Damn it,” Noah whispered, and he took a step away, making Darien’s fingers fall back down to his side. “You really can’t take anything seriously, can you? It’s all about sex and drinking and parties and being some sort of rock star.”
Darien frowned, trying to figure that out. Something about that struck him as pretty unfair. Then he remembered, and he pointed a finger at Noah accusingly.
“You’re the one who wouldn’t talk to me! I tried to, but you … you just wanted to screw me.” His voice came out strange—slurred and fuzzy—but filled with righteous indignation. Noah was the one who had turned it into sex, Darien was sure of it, so how unfair was it for Noah to throw that in his face like that?
“God, you smell like a brewery. Go sleep in off,” Noah said, so much disgust in his voice that it cut through the haze that beer had created in him. “You get the couch tonight.”
Was he seriously being kicked out of his own bed? Darien watched with stunned disbelief as Noah turned and left, his shoulders tight and his head held high. Just like that, Noah was gone, and Darien fell down onto the couch and rested his head back as he tried to make sense of everything.
He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t. Nothing made any sense. He had made this big decision. He had decided that he was going to be with Noah, that he was going to work it out no matter what was going on between them, only to watch as Noah judged him and walked away.
“He’s going to break up with me,” he spoke, his voice dull, his eyes not seeing much of anything. He was speaking to himself, having completely forgotten that Lance was in the room until the older man said something himself.
“You don’t know that,” Lance informed him, and Darien supposed that he was right, but somewhere, deep down, he knew that it was going to happen. He was going to lose Noah, just like he had always known that he would lose anyone that he allowed himself to love.
Lance’s arm, warm and comforting, came around him, and Darien gave himself over to it. He burrowed his face into Lance’s chest and curled close to him because Lance was here, Lance was offering comfort, and that was a hell of a lot more than Noah was doing at the moment.
With that, he let himself drift off into a drunken, uneasy, restless sleep. Lance’s body was warm, and he was large and strong and present, but he wasn’t Noah, and it didn’t feel quite right.
