Thirty Four

"Which movie, baby?" AJ called out to me as I thanked the delivery guy and carried our bag of Chinese food into the bedroom of our suite.

"I don’t care… whatever you want," I smiled and sat down next to him. I began unloading the food cartons and plastic forks. "Here’s yours…"

"Thank you…" he smiled and took his food. "How about… uh…" he flipped through the pay per view options with the remote. "We’ve seen most of these…"

"Well either pick one you’d like to see again or that we haven’t seen…"

"You’re not going to help at all are you?"

"Nope, cause I’m the one who found the late night Chinese delivery place and ordered dinner. You get to pick the movie…" I smiled at him and he groaned then giggled. "Honey, we can watch the Cartoon Network for all I care. As long as I’m with you…"

"We watch cartoons too much," he laughed. "People our age shouldn’t know as much about kid shows as we do."

"Yeah, well… we’re special. People our age also don’t typically pull in the kind of money that you do and travel around the world on an eleven month tour either."

"Good point…" he nodded and flipped to the Cartoon Network. "Powerpuff Girls it is…"

An hour later we’d scarfed our food down and were lying on our stomachs with our heads at the foot of the bed watching television. Our knees were bent and feet were in the air occasionally swaying toward each other to play footsies while we watched Dexter’s Laboratory.

"I say we make a point to do this at least once a week."

I smiled and turned my head to look at him, "Our weekly date… I love it."

"Good… you’re in a better mood."

"I feel better," I smiled and kissed him. I wasn’t lying, I did feel better. I hadn’t thought of Nick all night and he’d steered clear of me after I’d confronted him earlier that day. I’d decided that until he came to me to discuss things that I wasn’t going to let him get to me. I’d always babied Nick because he was the youngest, but the truth was that he was an adult and needed to act like one. I was on tour to do a job, to be a friend and to be a girlfriend. I wasn’t there to make Nick pull his head out of his ass and talk to me. I’d been so wrapped up in worrying about him that I’d nearly forgotten about the amazing best friend and boyfriend that I had by my side. I wasn’t going to let that happen anymore though.

"Well I’m glad. You’ve seemed pretty up and down lately. I figured that you were going through the transition of getting used to being on tour again."

"Yeah. That and Nick. He’s been really weird around me again. I had to yell at him today."

"I noticed that you two haven’t been real chummy since his birthday. Want me to talk to him?"

"No…" I said shaking my head and looking down at the bedspread. "He’ll come around sooner or later. I don’t want to force the issue unless I have to."

"Well you know that if he needs some pushing around all you have to do is say the word."

I smiled, "That was such a boyfriend thing to say."

AJ laughed, "Yeah it was wasn’t it?"

I rolled onto my back and looked up at him, "Do you ever have those moments of clarity where you stand back and think about us?"

"All the time," he smiled.

"I just had a ‘Wow… AJ is my boyfriend’ moment."

"I have those… Like when we’ll be at a venue doing something and someone will say your name. My heart kind of fills up and I smile and think, ‘God I love her…’ Or the other day you were taking pictures of Nick and Brian wrestling on stage and one of the venue security guards was standing with Marcus and me watching. He was totally watching you though and gawking at you. Then he asked about you but said something like, ‘Damn who is she? Tell me you don’t get to tour with that and see her every day.’"  I laughed and rolled my eyes. "Yeah nice, huh? But anyway I just looked at him and said, ‘Actually she’s my girlfriend, and yes she is touring with us.’"

I smiled and played with the cross dangling from AJ’s neck, "Did he freak out?"

"Not too bad, but he kept apologizing. After he left I must have stood there watching you for a good twenty minutes. Just watching you load film into your camera, or talking to a roadie. Anything that you do just pulls me in and I can’t look away. I’ve never been so into someone. It’s amazing. I can’t even explain it cause it’s so strong. I mean, you know I’ve loved you for years.  But since we’ve gotten together as a couple it’s just gotten stronger. I didn’t think that I could love you any more than I already did, but I do every day." I stared into AJ’s eyes as he watched me and then I smiled, "What?"

"I think I just fell a little bit further in love with you…"

*****

AJ and I are so much alike at times that it’s pitiful. We are practically the same person in two bodies most of the time. I’m sure it has a lot to do with why we’d always been such close friends and then when we became lovers things just intensified. Despite our similarities in personalities though, there were still some things though that we just didn’t have in common.

Take for example food. I’m pretty open about what I eat. I’ll try almost anything once and I’m into eating weird things that a lot of people wouldn’t eat. AJ on the other hand is not one to try new foods easily. On many occasions I’d been known to get Kevin to help me hold AJ down while I force fed AJ something just so that he’d try it. Call it the sick and twisted side of me, but I found joy in torturing him like that.

Another way that we were different though was sleeping. AJ and I both loved to sleep, and I was notorious for over sleeping. AJ was pretty good at doing that too, but on a regular basis would wake up before me. The exception to the rule though was after sex sleeping. When AJ and I would have sex all night I would almost always wake up before him. Sometimes hours before him. We’d both crash and have that great comfortable sleep that you could only get after mind-blowing love making and then while he’d continue that sleep, I’d wake up totally revived pacing around waiting for him to wake up.

The morning after our first "AJ & KJ Date" of the tour was no exception to the rule. I woke up bright and early, full of energy and hungry. AJ meanwhile was so deep into sleep that even my kissing his neck didn’t make him flinch. He loved when I kissed his neck.

I sighed and sat up in bed looking around the room not knowing what to do with myself. I snapped a few pictures of AJ unable to resist capturing the moment on film noting that those pictures would go into my "Kel’s Eyes Only" file with a smile. When my hunger took precedence over my boredom I finally got dressed and scribbled a note to AJ leaving it stuck to the television screen for him. I headed up to the top of the hotel where there was a restaurant and asked for a table near a window so that the artist in me could take in the view as the sun moved high into the sky. I ordered a huge coffee, orange juice and more food than I needed, then focused out of the window.

I loved watching a city wake up. Wondering where people were rushing to in their taxis and busses. Watching the colors change as the sun slowly moves high enough to move around the shadows cascading over the buildings. I’d spent many a sunrise and sunset on the roof of my building in New York taking pictures of the scenery. Just watching out of the window of the hotel made me long to be watching the sunrise from my roof back home in New York. Not that I didn’t want to be on tour, or be with the guys, I would have just loved to be home for a bit. By the end of the week we would be in New Jersey, and a few days later would be in Nassau, New York, but that was still over two hours away from my cute little apartment that I loved so much. I was going to have to wait to be back there until the first leg of the tour ended in March.

"Excuse me…" the waiter said quietly pulling me from my gaze out of the window.

"Yes?"

"Sorry to interrupt you, but I have a message from you and I’m supposed to wait for an answer from you."

I shot him a confused look, "Oh yeah?"

"Yes… here," the waiter handed me a note and I opened it up.

It’s Wednesday, I was supposed to pay for breakfast this week. I promise not to be an ass if you give me another chance…

I looked up at the waiter and smiled. I then looked around the quiet restaurant. There were only a few other customers, and none of them of the twenty one year old blonde superstar persuasion. "He’s hiding isn’t he?"

The waiter nodded and smiled, "Won’t come in unless you give him the okay through me."

I chuckled and flipped the note over, "Can I borrow your pen?" The waiter handed me his pen and I scribbled a note and gave it to him, "You can take this to him. Thank you…"

"No problem…"

I waited for a few minutes and then smiled as Nick came in and sat down across the table from me. He held the note up with a questioning look on his face, "Boxers or Briefs?"

I laughed, "The waiter… not you. I know what you wear."

"Oh…" he chuckled.

I smiled, "Remember when we used to sit around wasting time trying to figure out what people wore to bed and what kind of underwear they wore?"

"Yeah, that was fun. Always used to get us into trouble though. Kevin didn’t enjoy it when we’d be laughing like fools while he was getting interviewed off in the corner."

"He was a little paranoid back then…"

"Just a little…"

"So, what do you think?"

"About what?"

I rolled my eyes, "The waiter… boxers or briefs?"

"Oh… uh…" he looked across the large room and then looked at me, "Briefs… bright purple ones with pink polka dots."

We both giggled and the waiter eventually came over to take Nick’s order, which just ended up with us laughing even harder. We goofed off for a while and when my food came we ate together sharing like we had the week before. I looked up at him noticing the fading bruise on his cheek and felt a familiar pain in my heart. He must have caught the look on my face though because when he finished taking a drink from his glass he smiled, "It doesn’t hurt anymore…"

I nodded and bit my lip, "That’s good…"

He shrugged, "Yeah, I guess. But when it did hurt it was just a reminder for me how much of an ass I was and how much I must have hurt you. I’m so sorry. I should have never said the things that I did. And yesterday I shouldn’t have pulled that shit with you. Thank you for calling me on it."

"I hated doing that…" I said quietly looking down at my food. "But you pissed me off…"

"I know." He chuckled, "I definitely know. Trust me, when you’re pissed off it shows. I’ve known for a long time that I never wanted to be on the wrong end of your temper."

I cracked a slight smile and nodded, "Yeah… I get pretty heated. I don’t even remember what I said to you. I just remember going off and trying not to yell so that the others wouldn’t hear me."

"Well you were effective. I was up half the night thinking about it all…"

I looked at his eyes, "You look tired…"

"I’m always tired on tour."

"Yeah but not like this."

He sighed and ran his hand through his hair, "This has been a rough month you know? I mean so much has happened in just a few weeks that it’s crazy…"

I nodded, it was strange to think that everything that had been going on had started less than a month before. I’d flown down to Florida to visit AJ in part way into January and a few weeks later there I was on a world tour, in a relationship and I’d not only told Nick, but also Kevin about what I’d felt for Nick over the years. "Nothing like catching up for lost time huh?" I smiled.

"That what this is? We went for three years without hanging out much and now we’re trying to catch up and squeeze all of the drama that we missed back into our lives?" he smiled and laughed.

"Could be… but I’m thinking that we should give up on that plan and just kind of chill out for a while. Drama will find us on its own, no reason to make it worse you know?"

He nodded, "Sounds good to me… And Wednesday mornings are still mine right?"

I smiled, "Sure thing… on one condition."

"Name it…"

"Total honesty. When you’re having a problem, even if you think it might upset me… talk to me. Don’t hold it in so that it comes out one night when you’re drunk. I don’t want to fight with you, Nicky. I’m still your friend despite everything that we’ve revealed to each other in the past few weeks. And I’m still here to listen even when it’s about me."

His finger drew a line down the condensation on the side of his glass and then looked up at me and nodded, "Okay. Same goes for you too though. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t talk about AJ around me anymore because of what I said on my birthday. I really do think that you guys are good together. What I said that night, and yesterday for that matter, was me being jealous. I see how happy the two of you are together and I wish that I had it too. But really, if you ever need to talk about AJ, I’m always willing to listen."

I smiled and reached across the table and took his hand, "Thank you…"

He smiled and nodded, "Thank YOU… for not killing me for being such an ass."

I laughed, "I don’t kill, I just torture…"