“So what’s going to happen now?” Justin asked, and Ken smiled a bit, settling down onto a bench and looking hopefully up at Justin until the smaller man sat down, too. Carefully, Ken slid an arm around Justin’s shoulders, and Justin, by some miracle, didn’t pull away.
“I guess we’ll get a new manager. Hopefully someone who is a little bit less of a dick.” Ken shrugged and then grinned at Justin, who was glaring at him. Yes, Ken knew very well what Justin had meant, and he had deliberately avoided the question, but he had some mercy now. “I imagine, when the smoke clears, Lara is going to need to make a phone call to very humbly ask you back.”
Ken intended to make that happen, anyway, and he knew that the rest of the band, even Aaron, was on board with that.
Justin let out a soft breath, not quite a sigh, just a release of tension, and he rested his head on Ken’s shoulder, and somehow it didn’t matter that they were in such a public place. Anyway, no one was paying the slightest bit of attention to either of them.
“Is it my turn now?” Justin asked, and there was even less tension in his voice. Hopefully, what he’d just told Justin would clear some stuff up for the older man, and it certainly did seem like it had.
“No. I have one more thing to say,” Ken informed him and then held up his cell phone. “I want to call Luna. I want to tell her to make space for you and Jade at her wedding. She’ll bitch about it, but she’ll do it.”
He hadn’t quite meant to ask that way, but that was just how he was. Words tumbled over themselves, rushing from his mouth in a torrent, something that he could barely control at best.
“Is it too late?” Ken asked, and he pulled Justin closer against him and gazed down into his eyes. “Or will you come to my sister’s wedding with me? My family is crazy, but I really want them to get to know you …”
Justin’s body flexed a little, and he straightened up, and it turned out there was a way to stop the flow of words which so easily slipped from Ken’s lips. Justin had the hang of it, stealing them with his own mouth, tongue slipping sweetly, if all too briefly, into Ken’s mouth.
When the kiss was over, Ken was panting, but he was silent, and he just looked at Justin, waiting for his response.
“It’s not too late. We’d love to come,” he said, and that was all that either of them had time to say before they were kissing again. There were probably still more things to say, things to work out between them, but the most important ones seemed to be out of the way.
Or were they? Ken pulled away again, looking down at Justin, suddenly nervous.
“Wait, you needed to talk to me, too,” he remembered, and Justin grinned at him, one of those real, sincere, all too rare grins that lit up his whole face and seemed to sparkle even in the depths of his stormy eyes.
“Yeah,” Justin murmured, reaching up to touch Ken’s face, his fingers grazing lightly over his stubble to the softness of his lips. “I just wanted to tell you that I love you.”
And when it came down to it, Ken thought, that pretty much said it all. They fell into each other’s arms, and it was like the separation between them had never happened at all.
