Big Bang: Miss Too Much if You Stop to Think (2/2)
Part One | Fanmix | Fanart
After a day during which no music gets written, Spencer and Ryan nearly come to blows over the drum parts for a new song, and Brendon stops talking to everybody, including Shane for some reason, Jon declares that they're all getting up early in the morning the next day and spending the entire day at the beach.
Everyone is finally ready to go by two in the afternoon.
Ryan has a grand announcement to make once they're all at the beach.
"We have electricity for another month, because I remembered to pay the bill." He sounds about as excited as he ever does.
Spencer and Brendon give a golf clap.
"This is an important moment in a young man's life. Maybe you can work on the running water next," Brendon says.
"Eric paid the water," Ryan mumbles, digging around his backpack for sunglasses. "I just have to remember the garbage." He lays back on one of the rickety lawn chairs they had brought down with them. Brendon, Shane, and Spencer take the opportunity to get up and run towards the water, surfboards in tow.
Jon sits on the beach towel, taking pictures of everything around him. A family passes by, the little girl screeching in delight as her father chases after her. A woman in too much spandex for the relatively hot weather jogs by. Jon focuses back on his friends just as the three of them are coming out of the water, with Brendon standing in the middle and looking tiny and silhouetted with the sun at his back. His head is thrown back in laughter and he's turning away from Shane to look at Spencer. Jon knows he'll end up using the picture for something.
"Are you going to start taking pictures of Spencer again now?" Ryan asks, startling him, and Jon jumps and nearly drops his camera.
"I didn't stop taking pictures of him. I take pictures of everything."
"Yeah, you really don't, though." Ryan frowns at him before tilting his head and considering Jon. "But whatever, you guys aren't hanging out so much, but you're fucking again, right?" he asks.
Jon nods tightly in response. Only among his friends would that seem like a neutral question.
"Well, that's something at least. Gotta work that tension out somehow." Ryan picks up a book from his backpack and settles back into his chair, curling his legs under him.
"This is why I always go home after a while. It's like living in a sorority house with you people." Jon shuts up as Spencer comes back and drops down onto the towel next to Ryan, stretching out his arms and legs and then curling back up like a cat.
The probably say less to each other now than they have at any point in the few years they've known each other, Jon thinks. They're fumbling back towards each other, yeah, but Spencer still dodges his calls sometimes and Jon's still stuck awkwardly dragging Ryan over to their house more often than he would like. Jon doesn't even wear shoes, a voice in the back of his head reminds him, there is no way a dynamic in which he's the caretaker can work.
With Eric around the bills get paid and things get done, so he's a little bit lower down on the responsibility hierarchy, which is a relief. But looking over at Spencer and watching him smile up at Ryan while they throw sand at each other, he can't shake that feeling that Spencer handed off the primary care and feeding of Ryan Ross to him, and then spent the next year blaming him for it.
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He rarely stayed over at Spencer's, probably because it was easier to never leave Ryan's place, moving from the kitchen to the backyard to the living room and leaving a trail of instruments and papers everywhere they went. If Spencer was there, he would usually be the first to give in around five in the morning and kick Jon until he and Ryan disengaged from whatever they were talking about, dragging Jon by the hand behind him and crawling on top of him until he stopped moving enough to fall asleep.
"Are you staying here tonight?" he asked Spencer, who followed Jon in to his room and maneuvered him down onto the bed in front of him. Jon turned over on to his back and watched as Spencer kicked the door closed behind him, letting it slam closed. Jon knew for a fact that Ryan was going to freak out about that. For someone who couldn't remember to lock his front door half the time, Ryan could be stupidly fastidious about his house.
Spencer unbuckled his belt and dropped his pants unceremoniously. They were going to have to work on the romance aspect of this. As soon as Jon stopped finding the whole lack of finesse thing hot. There was possibly something wrong with him.
Spencer looked at Jon expectantly and Jon undressed, rolling his eyes. Spencer laughed and took off his shirt before he pulled Jon towards him and kissed him.
"I'm trying to get you to the point where you're Pavlovian with it. I should be able to unbuckle my belt and have you drop your pants without thinking about it," Spencer said, grinning.
"I'm happy you have your dreams, but yeah, no, that's not ever going to happen."
Spencer narrowed his eyes at him before he pulled at the hair at the nape of Jon's neck and Jon arched and moaned involuntarily. Spencer laughed, delighted, and kissed his way down Jon's chest, stopping to bite at a nipple just to hear Jon hiss.
They had started doing this lazy blowjob thing recently, when it was late and they were high and exhausted and the aim seemed to be mostly to get off as easily as possible so they could talk about producers and instruments and studios. It made sense, considering the situation: Ryan’s most egregious intrusion had been the time he had knocked on the door just to ask Jon the name of a blues guitarist from the 40s. Jon will take Things I Never Thought I'd Be Focusing On With A Dick In My Mouth for $1000. But it was comfortable, and Jon was kind of worried that being too comfortable to care about getting fancy with the sex was as high on his relationship fantasy list as Spencer's issues with the Pavlovian nudity.
"Hey, I'm not sucking your dick for my health, Jon," Spencer said, and Jon's attention snapped back to him. Spencer's eyes were wide and tired, but happy. It seemed kind of ridiculous to worry about the state of things at the moment, when they certainly had a bunch of other issues to deal with. He'd think about it later.
Spencer had this down to a routine by now, and Jon came probably far more quickly and easily than he should have been comfortable with. Spencer crawled back up his body, sprawled on top of him and started to thrust against his hip.
Jon reached up and ran a hand through Spencer’s hair, pulling his head up slightly from where Spencer had fastened his teeth onto Jon’s shoulder.
“You need me to do anything for you there?” he asked, smiling.
Spencer leaned up and nipped at his chin. “Just don’t fall asleep on me, I’ll take care of the rest of it.”
Jon brought his other hand up and scratched his nails lightly across Spencer’s shoulders, watching him go completely still as he sighed and came. He let Spencer come down for a few moments before rolling him over to the other side of the bed and grabbing a t-shirt to clean them both up.
He walked on his knees across the bed after tossing the t-shirt over into the corner of the room and turning off the light and dropped down on top of Spencer, who grunted in protest. Jon’s eyes had just started to close when Spencer spoke.
"Hey,” he paused and cleared his throat, “so there's this question I always wanted to ask you. But I didn't know if I should. And I kept thinking about it, like, all of the last week."
"I think we've passed the embarrassing questions stage, man."
"No, not like that." Spencer rolled over and looked at the dark ceiling. "What would you have done if we hadn't been there? Or if it hadn't worked out with us?" It was quiet, and Jon realized that Spencer had probably asked himself the question before, freaked himself out over the possibilities.
"I would have run away and joined the circus, Spencer." Jon turned onto his side to avoid the punch that Spencer aimed at his ribs. "I would have kept on teching. And then I would have gone home and maybe back to school, and started another band, and seen all the Elks Halls and community centers in Illinois again. I think they missed me."
"You would seriously just pick up and completely start over? No looking back, no hard feelings," Spencer said, incredulous.
He had never really consciously thought about it, but somewhere in Jon's head there was always that knowledge that not only did none of the rest of them know how to do anything but this, they didn't know how to do anything but be successful at this.
"People do it all the time. We can't all count on those multiplatinum royalties." It had taken about a year, but he'd learned to sound nonchalant about that. "I would have made it work."
"You're just lucky we wanted your ass." Spencer turned Jon over onto his side and threw an arm over him.
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The gazebo is still sitting placidly in its constituent parts when Jon makes it out to the backyard. Ryan has been talking about replacing the finials with something fancier, maybe brass, but Eric has convinced him that perhaps they should assemble the thing before they start discussing bells and whistles.
It's not actually going to be that difficult a job, Jon thinks, once they get started. The lumber's going to be the hardest part, because, Eric's arms included, they're all kind of ill-equipped for this shit. If they can manage to lift any of it, they're going to need everyone they know to come over and hold things in place so they can hammer them together.
Ryan ambles out into the backyard behind him and plops down onto the ground next to him, looking at the gazebo carnage.
"It was a really great idea, Jon. I had high hopes for it." Ryan makes it sound like they're holding a wake for the gazebo.
"We'll put it together eventually," Jon assures him. He just sounds so sad, and Jon's uncomfortably reminded of Clover mewing sadly about not being fed and cuddled every hour on the hour. The pain that Ryan is going through is just about as serious, Jon thinks.
"No, it's just, you know how you think you're going to start something and it's going to be awesome, it'll be the best thing ever, and you set up everything in your life around it? And you rearrange your hobbies and cancel appointments and ditch your friends because it's such a great thing, and it will mean so much to you once you get into it? And then you just keep finding new and interesting ways to fuck it up.
"And it's not that you don't want that great thing that you've brought into your life, you've never wanted anything as much as you want this! It's just that you weren't really ready to build it. So it just sits there, in pieces, waiting for someone to come along and make sure that it gets put together properly and paid attention to and appreciated for the important role it plays in your life."
Ryan nods to himself and then smiles at Jon encouragingly.
Jon gapes for a moment, before his brain catches up.
He leans over and puts his head in his hands. "Dude, please stop talking to Spencer about me."
"How do you know I'm talking about you and Spencer? I could be talking about me!" Ryan protests.
Jon picks his head back up and stares at Ryan. "You've never been that self-aware in your life! You only know that could apply to you because people have told you."
"Fine, whatever," Ryan huffs. "And I didn't talk to Spencer. Brendon and I were talking about it." Ryan looks up at him. "We had a really good conversation about it actually. It was kind of cathartic." Ryan lies down on the ground and smiles up at the night sky.
Jon can't help but be amused. "The gazebo is a shitty metaphor and I'm ashamed of you for using it for my thing that's not a relationship. And if you do it again I'll beat you to death with one of the finials."
Ryan sighs. "That sounds fair. Just promise me you'll take care of the gazebo."
Jon smirks. "If there's one thing I can promise you, it's that I will do everything in my power to ensure proper treatment of the wood."
Ryan smiles back and hits Jon in the leg.
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It's furtive, for the first time. They had given up pretty quickly on hiding anything the last time, especially since the longer it went on, the more it seemed like there was nothing to hide. But now, with Spencer alternating between being his nonchalant buddy and pinning him against walls, Jon has no idea what he would tell anyone if they asked.
Living fairly separate lives from each other is helping. Not stumbling across the person you're having "dirty, secret sex" with (as Brendon has taken to calling it these days) makes it a lot easier to pretend you're not having the dirty, secret sex.
"But my question," Brendon says over dinner out one night, "is why you're still having the dirty, secret sex." Which is a really good question that Jon does not feel especially inclined to ponder at the moment.
"I know what you guys are up to. So does Ryan. And Eric and Shane, and Regan, and I think Spencer mumbled something about Ginger calling all excited and asking if you two had patched things up. So the whole secret thing where you only kind of talk to each other as friends, and then have a lot of sex? I don't see exactly what purpose that's serving. Unless you're into that, like as a thing. Which is fine, and I could totally see why you would be." He spears a piece of broccoli on his plate in a manner that's kind of disturbing in context.
It's mortifying in that particularly Brendon way where he'll just start prattling on as if he has nothing of importance to say until you realize you're pinned.
"We just don't have any reason to be hanging all over each other. It was different before; we were together all the time. But you guys are doing your thing and me and Ryan are doing ours, and it's not like we need dates to hold hands or something." Jon looks carefully at his drink as he takes a sip.
"Yeah, you and Ryan are awfully busy," Brendon says, sounding like he's seriously considering the topic. "That's understandable." Brendon turns to look at him. "And I'm sure that has nothing to do with you and Spencer at all."
"It doesn't. We dealt with that, and we're fine now," Jon says.
Brendon raises his eyebrows almost comically and reaches to take a carrot off Jon's plate.
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It would always start off in the most innocuous of ways, with Ryan and Jon working on something, late into the night. By the time they had gotten deep into the writing for Pretty Odd, they had developed their own language, not stopping to figure out if a song would work or if someone should try and go in a different direction with it.
Invariably, Spencer would wander by and flop down in Ryan's backyard, dissecting whatever they had come up with and pointing out the flaws in it. Jon came to enjoy it after a few stumbles, torn between protecting his own ideas and liking that sense of approval from someone wanting to work on something he had come up with.
They had never really discussed what they were going to tell anyone before coming back from the cabin, but the first time Spencer spent the evening in Ryan's backyard with them, blazed and brainstorming ideas, the whole relationship thing was kind of hard to deny.
Spencer was never particularly tactile until he was smoking, crawling on top of Jon and leaning in to his face to explain things.
"Jon, this is amazing. What you and Ryan are doing is going to change everything, okay?" Spencer eyes widened. "It's like, you're saying everything that people want to say, but don't ever get to. I'm so happy I'm in this band, dude."
Spencer bounced happily on his lap and looked like he might cry from joy.
"That's what I've been trying to tell Jon, man. It's important shit, okay?" Ryan said from somewhere behind them.
Jon couldn't really look at him because Spencer was busy nuzzling his neck. Spencer was a lot bigger than he was, and Jon was afraid that if he kept moving like that, he might break something. Spencer never believed him when he tried to explain that he was too big for that to really work that well without some sort of support beneath them.
Spencer pushed him flat against the ground. "I'm going to tell Brendon all about it tomorrow, okay? He needs to know." Then Jon was too busy attempting to get Spencer off of him and into the house to really figure out how their new game of songwriting telephone was going to work exactly.
It was hilarious in theory, but it developed into a strangely circular way of communicating. Ryan and Jon passed ideas to Spencer who worked things out with Brendon who came back around to lay songs down with Ryan. Sometimes, when the four of them were working together from the beginning and it all seemed to come so easily, Jon wondered if a lot of problems would have been solved if he could have nipped that particular chain in the bud before they got used to it.
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The more work they get done, the more Jon realizes that they're much more aligned now, letting things get worked out in the group, and feeling a lot more free to have ideas traded back and forth. Before, Ryan and Brendon hadn't really gelled together until they were in the studio, practically on top of each other, but there's an ease there now where there wasn't before. Ryan and Jon are still working in different ways and places than Brendon and Spencer are, but it doesn't feel as separate.
Maybe it's the freedom of feeling like he can work any way he wants to, but Jon finds himself a lot more open to going wherever he and Ryan decide is best at the moment. It's not that their process is complicated. They tend to lay around the house, surfing the internet, or wander out on strange hiking paths they find, making up whatever melodies come to them along the way. They make their way out onto unpaved roads with guitars on their backs and have conversations with the aging hippies who live in the houses around them. There's a woman in her sixties, with a house about a ten minute walk away, who Jon thinks is about two weeks away from proposing to Ryan.
But Jon likes the ease of it all, that he can turn to Ryan and throw out a comment about Saturn or mountains or optimism and then they'll have a song.
Sometimes Ryan will flip through his pictures, finding the little images he likes, the everyday things that become more important when you record them. Jon feels like Ryan gets it, how it's not about what things look like when you first start with them, it's how you make people pay attention to them in the end.
They go driving one day, east into the suburbs, taking pictures of the little towns piled on top of each other. They ride past the office parks and auto rows, stopping to buzz through college towns and little, deserted bedroom communities.
In Pomona, Jon makes Ryan stop in front of a strip club that is actually named "Strip Joint" so he can take a picture.
"We have to bring Spencer back here, just for the name. You know he loves this shit," Jon says, turning to look at Ryan who is sitting on the hood of the car.
"You do realize we're sitting here loitering in a strip club parking lot. I'm pretty sure a bouncer is going to come out at some point and ask us what we're doing here."
"They're closed, man. We can hang out and be creepy all we want to until," Jon looks up at the sign, "three o' clock. And then we could come back and see the fine Miss Capri dance, if you were into that sort of thing."
"I've been trying to cut back. I have enough trouble paying my bills," Ryan says, deadpan.
Jon comes back to the car and sits on the hood next to Ryan. "We should go into the studio for real soon," he urges, trying not to rush him. Ryan will invariably clam up if you push too hard.
"Maybe if my band could work together we could get into the studio." He takes Jon's camera gently out of his hands and flips back through the shots. "Is my band working together these days?"
"Everything's fine, man. I'm still taking pictures of stupid shit just because he'd enjoy it, so everything must be fine, right?"
Ryan smiles at him. "Well, you just interpreted 'band' as 'Spencer', so I don't know." He rushes on when Jon opens his mouth to speak. "No, man, it's fine, I'm not sure I even want to know the details."
They lay out on the hood, making references to Wayne's World and talking about how they should stop and bring back souvenirs from the picturesque Inland Empire until the parking lot actually starts to fill with cars. Jon worries that they might actually get arrested and hustles them back into the car.
Passing by West Covina, Jon speaks up. "So, the me and Spencer thing. Just to be clear, you know we're not writing about this, right?" Jon says.
"Okay," Ryan says mildly. He looks out the window and Jon can hear the suppressed laughter in his voice. "But you're hampering my creative process."
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Jon was never sure why they chose his room to crash in at the cabin the first time, but he ended up being happy about it in the long run, since it meant he hadn't had to move when they ended up staying there.
They had stumbled into the room, after coming down off the roof, half-assedly dodging questions from Brendon and Shane. Jon kicked the door closed behind him as they came in.
"Is this -" Jon had no idea how to broach the topic: it was kind of a minefield no matter how he phrased it.
"What, my first gay experience? Dude, have you met the guys on this label? I'm lucky no one's teabagged me while I was passed out so they could take a picture and post it to MySpace." He pushed Jon down on the bed and sprawled on top of him, pinning him to the bed. Sometimes the size difference between them was a bitch and a half. "You're going to play guru in this too? How many guys have you fucked, Jon?"
"One." This was a discussion that could end badly.
Spencer smiled delightedly and settled his ass more firmly onto Jon's crotch. He took his shirt off and dropped it somewhere off the side of the bed. "Please tell me it was Tom. I have money riding on it."
He shuddered. "It really wasn't Tom. There's no way it would ever be Tom. I don't think we'd know what to do with each other."
"I can't tell you how sad that makes me. So, Pete? Tony? Carden?" Spencer ground down again, and Jon took a moment to consider how to break the news.
He slapped Spencer's ass. "Butcher."
Spencer's eyes glazed a little. "Dude, that's just not fair. You should at least have to have Sisky fight you for that."
"There's actually a story there."
Spencer's eyes lit up and he leaned forward, bracing his hands on either side of Jon's head. "One day, you're telling me. The whole story, every detail."
They grinned stupidly at each other and before Jon could say anything, Spencer had attacked his jeans, reaching inside.
It wasn't the smoothest of experiences and Jon had definitely been with people with better technique, and he spared a fleeting thought for that two year age difference. Which was kind of uncharitable, he knew, but it cropped up at the weirdest times, talking about TV shows and remembering songs played at junior high dances and apparently skill in giving a handjob, of all things.
"Is this-?" Spencer trailed off, and Jon struggled to catch up to reassure him.
"No, it's good." He pulled Spencer's head down towards his, their noses bumping and teeth clacking against each other at first, and Jon spared a moment to think that he was usually smoother than this, some sort of bleedover from Spencer's hesitation making him halting and hesitant, almost like he was waiting for Spencer to do what he usually did and take over, even though that was clearly not happening here.
Spencer choked out a moan against his lips and Jon could feel him hard against his thigh. He reached down, his hands bumping into Spencer's on the way, taking a moment to tangle and realign, clumsy until they got everything worked out.
He palmed Spencer's cock gently, letting Spencer roll his hips against him, the full-body shudder almost too much with Spencer's weight on top of him. Spencer's hand went lax around him as he thrust against Jon's hand. He let it go for a while, watching Spencer's mouth fall open and a flush rise up into nearly to his hairline.
Spencer seemed to realize what he was doing after a moment, burying his face into Jon's neck, and mumbling a "Sorry," before tightening his fist around Jon's cock again.
"It's fine, just don't stop," Jon said, trying to sound as encouraging as possible without getting demanding.
Spencer looked down again, seeming to concentrate more on what he was doing, his eyes focused almost uncomfortably on Jon's cock, and Jon found himself oddly turned on by the sight. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been with someone who seemed that genuinely interested in him having as good a time as they were.
"Hey, Spence," he pulled Spencer's face up to meet his, kissing him lightly. Spencer surged against him, pushing him back onto the bed, and Jon found himself pinned under the weight, Spencer's hips lazily jerking against his.
Spencer moved back from the kiss, running his tongue along Jon's collarbone before biting him. Jon tightened his hand around him and jerked him off faster, watching as Spencer stiffened above him and then came against his stomach.
Jon brought his other hand up to pull Spencer into a kiss, gasping when Spencer ground down against him. He let go of Jon's cock and urged up to ride the ridge of his hip. Jon broke away from the kiss, hissing as he came.
He patted Spencer's hair gently as he came down, watching Spencer settle on top of him with his arms folded across Jon's chest.
"So, hey, that went pretty well," Spencer said, slightly hesitant still catching his breath.
Jon kept carding his fingers through Spencer's hair, trying to reassure him without seeming to do so. "Yeah, it did."
Later, nearly asleep with Spencer tucked in close to him, Jon broached the subject.
"Hey, so you never told me who your first big gay experience was."
Spencer laughed. "No, I didn't."
"You're not gonna tell me, are you?"
"Nope." Spencer leaned in closer and rested his mouth against Jon's chest.
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"Jon Walker! We're going instrument shopping," Brendon says grandly as he enters the room.
Jon's got his phone out, flipping through recent pictures (Ryan sleeping; Eric at a keyboard; Ryan's disapproving look down, with his hands on his hips, at the gazebo's roof still on the ground; Spencer's kit with Spencer nowhere to be found behind it; Ryan grinning and grabbing for the camera) when Brendon drops down next to him on the couch.
"We buying anything in particular? And don't you already own everything?" Jon asks.
"Dude, of course not. So, Ryan and I were listening to Pet Sounds and we had the 'needs more theremin' conversation again, and then it was all Mellotron this and Moog that, and by the end of it I thought, dude, I really want a suitcase piano. So I found a guy who's going to sell me a vintage Fender Rhodes."
Jon snorts, and looks up to find that Brendon is looking down at Jon's phone.
"I always wondered why you stopped taking pictures of Spencer," Brendon says out of nowhere. "You did it all the time when you were first with us, but it was like the minute you started sucking his dick, no more pictures." Brendon turns perfectly fake earnest eyes on him, and Jon can only respond in kind.
"Maybe they're just a seduction tool and I didn't need them anymore."
"Maybe you didn't want keepsakes of your boyfriend." Brendon's eyes go comically wide. "Unless you're serious with the seduction. Does Ryan know? What do you think his first clue will be? Probably the dick sucking. He tends to catch on after that. Not that I speak from personal experience."
"It's not like that," Jon says.
"Oh, I know. I'm pretty sure Ryan knows what a blowjob means."
Jon punches him in the side. "We've never been like that. Spence and me. No matter what I think, we won't ever be like that. If he wanted to, he would have let me know and we would have been, like, a year ago."
"Yeah, that's true. Because if there's one thing you are, it's clear and forceful about what you want." Jon opens his mouth to respond and Brendon speaks over him. "Come obscure instrument shopping with me. Maybe we can pick up a Chapman Stick for you while we're there!" He makes inept jazz hands in Jon's face. "The possibilities are endless."
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Everyone's pretty much aware that meeting up in the studio isn't as fraught as it was on the last album. Jon is pretty sure that sense of teams aligning is keeping it from being so, when by rights it should increase the problem. Jon thinks that there's something to be said for the way they're doing it now. Brendon seems happier, writing with Spencer in a way that reminds Jon of himself and Ryan the last time. It works.
They're deep into one of Brendon and Spencer's songs, today, something closer to chamber-pop than things they've done before and a million miles away from the old school blues vibe Ryan and Jon have been feeling lately. He has no idea how they're going to work it, but it's good, the blend of them all together, trying out something new and seeing what works.
He's busy looking at Eric and talking about how they're going to incorporate the keyboards on another of the songs when he notices that the conversation that Brendon and Ryan have been having about arrangement has moved from friendly to heated, in that way that only they can get, where Ryan's voice gets progressively flatter and Brendon sounds more and more accommodating until one of them is stalking out of the room and slamming the door behind him. He and Spencer used to place bets on who would snap first.
"I just think that if you're going to commit to going this route then you might as well do it as accurately as you can. You're just shooting yourself in the foot if you pull back before you even get started." Ryan sounds as if this is a matter of personal integrity and Jon wishes he had been paying attention before it got to this point.
"Dude, I know what I was thinking of when we were writing it, and that's not it. Maybe you should just trust me to know what I'm doing," Brendon says, smiling tightly. He's looking down at his guitar as he gives a little laugh. "I'm sure it'll be fine if we do it my way."
Jon looks up at Shane, who is filming in the corner, for some clue as to what the hell they're talking about. Shane has to mouth the word three times before Jon can decipher glockenspiel. And for fuck's sake, this is what they're really going to argue about?
"But how can you know if you don't at least try this?" Ryan says, exasperated. "Spencer, don't you think we should at least try it my way?"
Everyone in the room turns to look at Spencer for confirmation. Spencer looks down at his kit, quiet for a moment before crossing his arms. He speaks up softly.
"I don't know, Ryan. Maybe we should just wait and see if it works."
No one says anything for a moment.
Jon finds himself speaking up before he can help it. "I don't see why it wouldn't work. We might as well do it. Right?" He throws it out as a possibility to the whole room, easily contested, but he knows he's directing it to Spencer.
Spencer looks at him mutinously, and Jon turns to look at Ryan for confirmation.
Ryan's smiling, not at either of them, but at Brendon who's smiling back. They look like they're near laughter.
"No, Spencer's right. It's just a fucking glockenspiel, dude. We'll figure it out as we go," Ryan says.
They go back to playing.
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Ryan's cycling through the seventies these days, and he's currently easing into a prog rock phase. He's found Low Spark of High Heeled Boys on vinyl somewhere, and they're into minute seven of the second track, listening to Steve Winwood's piano, when Ryan asks him what's up with Spencer.
"Spencer and I have a 'don't ask, don't tell' thing about you so you have to tell me," Ryan says very earnestly. They're lying on the floor on their backs, an area rug they found in a store in Santa Monica under them. The ceiling has really nice wood beams.
"You have a policy about it?"
"Well, we didn't used to. It was more like, 'hey, are you fucking our bassist? Because I really want to keep this one.' But then you guys stopped doing whatever and neither of you talked about it, so you know, I figured we weren't talking about it.
"And you know he won't answer anything if you ask him directly, so I didn't bring it up again. But I want to know, so you have to tell me." Ryan flails out a hand at him, narrowly missing his nose, until Jon grabs it and holds on. The tattoos are always interesting up close. He holds Ryan's wrist close to his face, watching the skin change, first solid black when it's right up against his nose then resolving into actual words the farther away he pulls it. Ryan yanks his wrist against Jon's hold after he does it a few times, and Jon remembers that there was a question.
"There's nothing to tell." Jon thinks about the day when he first got back and the lightning-fast switch from easy understanding to frosty silence as soon as he brought up Ryan. It's not fair to drag Ryan into it.
"You know, I don't need a keeper, and the two of you fighting over who's going to hold my hand to cross the street is kind of insulting." He sounds huffy, in the bruised maidenly dignity way that only Ryan can pull off.
Jon turns onto his side, resting his head on one fist. "Who paid your bills this month, Ryan?"
Ryan closes his eyes pointedly. "I figured out autopay."
Jon laughs out loud. "I'm happy it only took you a few years. Maybe we can tackle tying shoelaces next." He lies back down flat on the floor. "We're not fighting over you. We're not fighting. We're just not not-fighting."
"It's great that you've come to some sort of understanding. So, are you still fucking?"
"Sometimes."
"That's good. I'm happy for you."
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They were sober enough that the slope of the cabin's roof didn't feel dangerous, and the decision to come out here to talk continued to look like a good one. Spencer had developed a bad habit of bumming cigarettes off of Jon and Ryan, smoking them only occasionally and in certain, unpredictable situations. Apparently a tour through everything Jon didn't know about Panic's early days was a smoking situation.
"We were pretty much on our own, and I was already used to Ryan crashing at my house and Brendon sometimes making it to practice and sometimes not, and they just had a lot of shit to deal with. Like, they grew up a hell of a lot earlier than I did."
Jon nodded and passed his cigarette to Spencer, looking down over the lawn and seeing Ryan lying on his back on the grass, plucking something out on the guitar slung across his chest. Jon smiled down at him, sure that Ryan couldn't see them.
"They just deserved a break at some point, you know? Like, my biggest responsibility up to that point was making sure my sisters did the dishes after dinner. In my house, if I fucked up, no one was going to be really pissed at me; I could always go home. But they couldn't yet. So I couldn't really fuck it up." He ashed and passed the cigarette back to Jon. "I don't know, it was just like, at some point I had to pretend to be the grownup. Brent wasn't going to, because it was still his high school band, you know? And it was never that for them. If it ended up being that they would have seriously fucked up their lives for nothing. So I just, like, picked up the slack. They could do their serious, crazy artist thing and I could make sure we ate something other than Doritos every day."
Jon could remember cruising down the highway in vans, feeling like the world was totally open to him and he could see it all at once. It didn't even occur to him when he was that age that he was only seeing three states, playing tiny community center auditoriums, because the charm of it seemed to hit everyone around him as much as it did him. He couldn't imagine his parents doing anything other than asking for more stories and making sure they had enough money to eat on the road.
"Did you even tell them you were taking over?" Jon stubbed out the cigarette and pulled Spencer closer to him. It was strange: they had been up in each other's personal space pretty much since they met, but something about the isolation of the cabin made it sharper, suddenly something to pay attention to.
"They caught on pretty quick. I mean, it was one of the things that I could do that they couldn't. And I was way too distracted to see it completely then, but Brent was never going to going to be comfortable with this as more than the coolest after-school hobby ever, so I just did it. We were driving in vans all the way across the country and none of us had ever been away from home, and then we were making way too much money and trying not to be douches on national television, and it was just - a lot."
He went quiet for a moment. "I mean, we had help. Pete's dad called my parents and talked some stuff over with them, and things went a lot smoother after that, but that just made me notice it more, you know? Like, my parents were getting a crash course in being my safety net." He laid out against the roof and threw his arms above him into the air, stretching his fingers out one by one like he was counting them. "If nothing else, I can bullshit and say I have some actual music management experience when you guys inevitably fuck up my career somehow and the royalties run out."
Jon leaned in and tickled Spencer along his sides until he flinched away from his fingers, breathless with laughter and trying to the cling to the roof's shingles.
"At least you have royalties to count on. I still have to count on you guys to be pretty enough to sell for at least one more album."
Spencer's face sobered. "Hey, you know you're in this for as long as you want it, right?" He looked away for a moment. "You're the only one Ryan's listening to right now anyway, so we have to keep you around for that."
He smirked. "Although, if it really comes down to it, I could always get you some hot pants and let you entertain me by my pool for a living. Maybe we could even get you a little bowtie. I'd expect you to work off the beer belly first, though. Can't have you embarrassing me."
Jon pointedly dug his fingers into the softness at Spencer's stomach. "Thanks, Spence. It's great that you're thinking about my future."
Spencer rolled towards him and stopped on his side for a moment, looked at Jon, and then kept leaning in. Jon leaned up into the kiss, letting Spencer set the pace first before pulling him down on top of him. Jon had the sudden, grateful thought that they both tasted like cigarettes. It was slow at first, and then Spencer licked Jon's mouth open, nudging at his head to get a better angle. Jon thought that they probably shouldn't move too much, being where they were, but he couldn't stop himself from putting a hand against Spencer's neck, encouraging him.
When Spencer turned away to bite at his neck, Jon felt like he had to question it.
"I'm making a token protest right now. Just so you know."
Spencer laughed into his neck, the sound vibrating against his skin and making him shudder.
"I'm considering it and deciding that this is a good idea anyway." He pulled back and smiled at Jon. "Okay, let's go inside before we roll off the roof and kill ourselves."
|
"So, you're going home," Jon says. "For a week. To be somewhere without me."
"You go home for weeks at a time and I manage not to bitch." Spencer looks up and smiles at him. "I always appreciate it when people cry over me, though. Feel free to let it all out."
Jon pinches him in the side.
It's just that they're finally getting to the point where they should actually maybe be mentioning to each other when they disappear for a week. They have actual conversations that don't end in silences, and Spencer has stopped getting that awkward twitchy look when one of the other guys walks into the room and sees them together. It's almost like they're really dating.
Spencer looks up and notices Jon considering him and then pushes his backpack out of the way. He presses a hand against Jon's chest, guiding him backwards onto the bed and straddling him.
"My parents aren't expecting me until tonight. That gives us at least an hour until I have to get on the road," Spencer says, grinning down at him.
Jon grabs his ass and pulls Spencer more fully onto him.
"So, why are you leaving me this time?" he asks.
"Family vacation," Spencer says, twisting against Jon's grip on his ass, "I don't think we're actually going anywhere, though, just corralling all the kids at home so we can sit and look at each other for a week." He pushes back against Jon's hands.
Jon thinks it might just be Spencer's parents missing him and Spencer not wanting to say that.
Spencer pulls on Jon's shirt until he can get it up far enough to bare most of his chest, grinding down on him as he unbuttons his jeans and reaches inside.
"I'm going without for a week, and the best I'm getting is a handjob?" Jon asks, teasing.
"Hey, next time maybe you can come home with me for family vacation and we can christen my old bed. We never did that last time, did we?" Spencer asks, bringing one of Jon's hands up to his mouth and biting down on a finger. His pupils dilate and Jon watches intently.
"So, uh." Jon stops for a second and then tries again. "Why didn't we ever do that? We had the time."
"Dude, do you have some kink I don't know about? How is that possible by now?" He's teasing, but for some reason it hits Jon the wrong way.
"Maybe I've developed some new ones in the time we've been apart," Jon says, sitting up. Spencer leans back, and sits on his heels, looking at Jon like he’s not sure where Jon is taking this, which just bothers Jon more.
"No, okay, you know what I've never been able to figure out? That last day before Honda Civic started, when you pulled away and went off to room with Brendon, what was that?" Jon can feel his voice rising, and it's always kind of alien to him when this happens. He's rarely this angry.
Spencer leans back far enough that he's nearly falling off the bed. "Do you really want to do this now. Of all times?"
Jon's feeling strangely defiant. "Yeah, I really want to do this now. You never said anything to me about it after that. We were just kind of done doing whatever we were doing."
Spencer clambers off of him, all unwieldy limbs and jerky movements, and determinedly goes back to packing. "Hey, you never seemed particularly interested in 'whatever we were doing' to start with," Spencer retorts.
"What the hell, Spencer? We were together just about every night we saw each other for a year. I don't know what else you could want me to do."
"You remember that conversation we had, way back at the start, about being everybody's best friend? Maybe you could have given me some sign that you were doing more than just accommodating me." Spencer continues to pick things up off the floor and throw them in his backpack.
"And this isn't even getting into all the Ryan stuff," Spencer continues.
"Oh, for Christ's sake, fuck Ryan. I'm sorry I agree with him a lot. I'm sorry he needs more pats on the head than you do. I've never slept with Ryan though, which should tell you something," Jon says.
"It's not about that. I know it's not like that with you guys. But the fact that I have to defend myself to you about him? That sucks. You're sitting here saying you want to have some sort of real relationship and you can't even meet me halfway on that. Because right now Ryan needs someone to hold his hand and make it all better more than I do, so he gets priority. And that won't work."
"It's not -" he tries, and he doesn't know where he's going with it, so it's a good thing Spencer cuts him off.
"It just got to a point where it was clear that you just got bored because I stopped looking at you like you knew more than I did. Sorry I realized you're just as much of a fuckup as the rest of us."
Jon doesn't say anything, waiting for Spencer to continue.
"Seriously, you spout all of this fake Zen bullshit about just letting go and releasing, and really you're scrambling around trying to make everyone's relationships work the way you want them to the whole time," Spencer says. He stuffs a t-shirt in his bag, one of Jon's. They're always too short and tight on him and he never seems to care. Jon doesn't even know how it ended up in here, and it seems like a bad idea to mention it now.
"You always pull this shit, like you've lived and seen so much so you know how to just relax and take it all in. You're just as clueless in this as I am.
"I'm fucking surrounded by people who pretend that they're just waiting for shit to come to them so they don't have to take any sort of responsibility. And it shouldn't come as a surprise that I put up with that from you for so long, because I've been doing this with Ryan my entire life." He tosses his backpack on the floor and paces to the other side of the room. He's practically vibrating with tension and Jon stays as far back from him as he can, not wanting to make the situation any worse.
"And now you won't get mad, because you don't do that. You understand why that might piss me off, right?" Spencer stops and looks at him. "And I actually spent the past year thinking, 'at least Jon's taking control of things, so I can sit the fuck down and relax for a while,' and it was great. So great that I thought that maybe we could see if our whole thing could work out this time. But I guess we were all just a little too needy, because it worked too well, and you're too busy managing everybody now."
"Hey, you're the one who wanted me to do this. Which one of us exactly passes on interviews so that I'll do them? Who ends up making sure Ryan doesn't fall into a hole somewhere?"
Spencer stops what he's doing and looks down at his backpack before speaking.
"Hey, I'm happy about whatever works best for all of us. I mean, you and Ryan have your crazy thing together, and that's great. It works for you and it works for the band, but it's not like that happened on accident," Spencer reminds him.
Jon's head snaps up at the bitterness in his voice.
"I know, you love to write. But you don't love to write with me or Brendon, do you? What am I supposed to think about that?"
Before Jon can say anything, he feels himself frowning involuntarily, and tries not to do it, because 1) it's a bitch move, and 2) he knows Spencer hates it, but Spencer launches in before he can say anything.
"Really? You're just going to pout at me over that? That's the best I'm going to get from you?"
Jon pushes past him and slams the bedroom door behind him as he leaves.
|
Jon gives Brendon some credit for letting him sulk in his living room for a day after Spencer leaves for his parents’ house. Brendon's apparently got a sulking time limit, though.
Six hours in, he throws a Nerf ball at Jon's head. "Okay, let's be honest: you've set yourself up as his best friend's protector. From him. I think he has a right to be pissed," Brendon says.
"I'm not trying to be his protector. It's just that Ryan expects him to be there and then he isn't and someone has to be."
Brendon laughs at him. "I love Ryan, but he wouldn't be half the bitch he is if you guys didn't coddle him and let him pull that temperamental artist bullshit. I used to be scared that if I said word one to him about something everyone would jump in to make sure he didn't pitch a fit."
Jon opens his mouth to defend Ryan and then remembers all the princess jokes he's made over the past couple of years. It's a fair point.
"Cut Spencer some slack, dude. We put him through a lot at the beginning, you know. And he acts like we don't remember how much we asked him to take care of, but we do. So if he flakes on stuff or doesn't put up with our bullshit, I'll give him a pass.
"And that doesn't even touch on your freaky relationship issues, which you have somehow managed to mostly shield me from," Brendon continued. "So if he wants to take a break and needs to say, 'fuck you, leave me alone for a week,' then that's understandable."
"But he's wrong," Jon protests.
"And the fact that you think that doesn't really matter at this point, does it? Because he's not here to listen to you."
|
They had been on the roof of the cabin, which had kind of become their place. Not officially, until Shane came up one weekend and drew a "Drama Queen-Free Zone" sign to hang on the window leading out to their perch. Brendon didn't forgive him for that for about a day.
It was kind of nicely regulated, Jon thought, because they couldn't get fucked up enough to actually be in danger of toppling off the roof, but they tended to ease into a happily honest space where Spencer would let loose with really unfair shit that he probably wouldn't say around other people and Jon felt surprisingly okay about laughing at it. It was pleasantly different from just about anywhere else in the world.
"I used to hate that thing you and Ryan do," Spencer started off, and it took Jon a second to catch up to the change in topic: they had been talking about one of Ryan's LA friends and her awesome tits.
"Like, it used to take him forever to actually have a real conversation with anyone not on the internet so I was shocked as hell when he just brought you home like a new puppy that first time. And then you were there all the fucking time: on our bus, at our sound checks, hanging out after shows." Spencer smiled ruefully. "And everyone loves you, so it's not like I could say shit about it." His eyes tracked up to Jon's quickly. "Don't get me wrong, I love you, too, dude. Like, you know, a lot. But you were there every day, and if you weren't getting Brendon and Brent fucked up and then getting forgiven for it, then you and Ryan were off giggling together, and it's like," he paused and looked out on the trees below them before turning sharply back to Jon, "you don't have to be everybody's best friend."
"I can't help it if I'm charming, Spence." He knew he was hedging.
"Dude. Brent still tells people that you're an okay guy. You can dial it back a little."
"I'm not, like, trying to -"
"No, you don't do it on purpose, I know. I think you're just wired to, like, bullshit people until they like you." Spencer smiled brightly. "It's totally a talent. You should be proud! Most people can't do that shit convincingly."
Jon burst into laughter. "You're such an asshole."
Spencer looked down at the cabin's backyard, suddenly quiet. When Jon looked down, he could see Brendon doing backflips on the grass with Shane filming.
"Hey, one of us has to be, and it's not going to be you, right?"
It was said wistfully enough that Jon knew he wasn't supposed to answer.
|
One night, about an hour after one of them decides that shots of Jose Cuervo are a really good idea, Eric and Jon get to work on the lumber for the gazebo's floor. It's a huge job, and Jon's pretty sure someone's going to get hurt, but it's been sitting there taunting them for weeks on end, so it's about time.
Dragging the planks from the pile by the deck, they manage to get it all laid out in something resembling the manner the DVD described, Jon assumes. He hasn't watched the DVD as often as Eric and Ryan have. The gazebo DVD has become a source a great entertainment when stoned. Brendon says it's a life-changer.
Ryan directs traffic from a lawn chair with a glass of white wine in one hand. He had given up on even the pretense of lifting anything heavier than one of the finials about a month after Jon got back.
"If you don't lay the planks out straight, then we'll never get the walls around it right. And then the roof won't fit. And we won't have a gazebo. It'll just be a bunch of pieces of wood sticking out of the ground. But with a floor." Ryan sounds increasingly alarmed at the possibilities of bad gazebo construction.
And it's not that he doesn't have really good points, but it's late, and the strings of Christmas lights aren't the best illumination for construction. Jon thinks they might have a flashlight somewhere, but he can't be sure and he doesn't know where he would start looking.
Ryan sounds contemplative from his lawn chair. "You guys. I think that maybe Spencer was right and we should have gone with the palapa instead of the gazebo," he says, with a note of wonder in his voice.
Jon turns to glare at him. Ryan could well be glaring back, but Jon can't tell because he has his douchey sunglasses on at, Jon checks his watch, two in the morning.
"Really, Jon. We could have just gotten a giant thatched umbrella and stuck a table under it. Same basic principle."
"You couldn't mention this before now?" Eric asks, wrestling with one of the planks.
"Everything was already laid out. And we knew how to put it together from the DVD," Ryan replies, offended.
Two hours later, having finally assembled everything into a configuration that looks something like a circle, they curl up and fall asleep in the backyard on top of the slats.
When he wakes up in the afternoon, stiff from sleeping on the wood, Jon stands up and looks at the wreckage, before deciding that it's about time to let somebody else take charge of the damn thing. He staggers inside and takes out the phonebook to find a builder who can finish it. Ryan will thank him in the end.
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When Jon comes out onto the front porch the next morning, Spencer is waiting, sitting silently and holding his bag from his trip to see his parents. He apparently hadn’t stopped to drop it off first before coming over.
Jon sits next to him on the stoop, not saying anything. They look at the neighbors passing by for a while.
"So, in the past, I was maybe kind of an asshole who wasn't ready to do this relationship thing," Spencer says, watching Mrs. Logan from down the road walk her King Charles Spaniel past them. She waves to them and Jon and Spencer both wave back politely.
"Yeah, I kind of caught that," Jon says.
"But you're also an asshole, who expects me to just know when you're pulling a self-sacrificing martyr tantrum."
Jon concedes, "This is also true."
Spencer looks at him out of the corner of his eye, "And the Ryan thing is maybe a separate issue. That we don't have to talk about."
Jon lets out a breath. "Yeah, dude. I think I've talked enough about Ryan to everybody. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have nightmares about Kerrang! calling to ask me how Ryan feels about us."
"So, in lieu of more discussion and apologies all around, I'd like to remind you that I owe you a handjob," Spencer says when they've looked at the street and the ground and everything but each other for a few minutes.
Jon laughs. "I'd like to remind you that you owe me a blowjob from about a year and a half ago."
"That's a fair request. I'm happy you brought it back to my attention," Spencer says, smiling.
Jon bursts into laughter and invites Spencer inside.
Bonus Tracks/Enhanced Content
Fanart:
The Gazebo Is a Metaphor by brille
Fanmix:
These Games We Play by wishfulclicking
Both art and mix are wonderful, go check them out!
And nota bene, you can totally order a Gazebo in a Box off the internet.
After a day during which no music gets written, Spencer and Ryan nearly come to blows over the drum parts for a new song, and Brendon stops talking to everybody, including Shane for some reason, Jon declares that they're all getting up early in the morning the next day and spending the entire day at the beach.
Everyone is finally ready to go by two in the afternoon.
Ryan has a grand announcement to make once they're all at the beach.
"We have electricity for another month, because I remembered to pay the bill." He sounds about as excited as he ever does.
Spencer and Brendon give a golf clap.
"This is an important moment in a young man's life. Maybe you can work on the running water next," Brendon says.
"Eric paid the water," Ryan mumbles, digging around his backpack for sunglasses. "I just have to remember the garbage." He lays back on one of the rickety lawn chairs they had brought down with them. Brendon, Shane, and Spencer take the opportunity to get up and run towards the water, surfboards in tow.
Jon sits on the beach towel, taking pictures of everything around him. A family passes by, the little girl screeching in delight as her father chases after her. A woman in too much spandex for the relatively hot weather jogs by. Jon focuses back on his friends just as the three of them are coming out of the water, with Brendon standing in the middle and looking tiny and silhouetted with the sun at his back. His head is thrown back in laughter and he's turning away from Shane to look at Spencer. Jon knows he'll end up using the picture for something.
"Are you going to start taking pictures of Spencer again now?" Ryan asks, startling him, and Jon jumps and nearly drops his camera.
"I didn't stop taking pictures of him. I take pictures of everything."
"Yeah, you really don't, though." Ryan frowns at him before tilting his head and considering Jon. "But whatever, you guys aren't hanging out so much, but you're fucking again, right?" he asks.
Jon nods tightly in response. Only among his friends would that seem like a neutral question.
"Well, that's something at least. Gotta work that tension out somehow." Ryan picks up a book from his backpack and settles back into his chair, curling his legs under him.
"This is why I always go home after a while. It's like living in a sorority house with you people." Jon shuts up as Spencer comes back and drops down onto the towel next to Ryan, stretching out his arms and legs and then curling back up like a cat.
The probably say less to each other now than they have at any point in the few years they've known each other, Jon thinks. They're fumbling back towards each other, yeah, but Spencer still dodges his calls sometimes and Jon's still stuck awkwardly dragging Ryan over to their house more often than he would like. Jon doesn't even wear shoes, a voice in the back of his head reminds him, there is no way a dynamic in which he's the caretaker can work.
With Eric around the bills get paid and things get done, so he's a little bit lower down on the responsibility hierarchy, which is a relief. But looking over at Spencer and watching him smile up at Ryan while they throw sand at each other, he can't shake that feeling that Spencer handed off the primary care and feeding of Ryan Ross to him, and then spent the next year blaming him for it.
|
He rarely stayed over at Spencer's, probably because it was easier to never leave Ryan's place, moving from the kitchen to the backyard to the living room and leaving a trail of instruments and papers everywhere they went. If Spencer was there, he would usually be the first to give in around five in the morning and kick Jon until he and Ryan disengaged from whatever they were talking about, dragging Jon by the hand behind him and crawling on top of him until he stopped moving enough to fall asleep.
"Are you staying here tonight?" he asked Spencer, who followed Jon in to his room and maneuvered him down onto the bed in front of him. Jon turned over on to his back and watched as Spencer kicked the door closed behind him, letting it slam closed. Jon knew for a fact that Ryan was going to freak out about that. For someone who couldn't remember to lock his front door half the time, Ryan could be stupidly fastidious about his house.
Spencer unbuckled his belt and dropped his pants unceremoniously. They were going to have to work on the romance aspect of this. As soon as Jon stopped finding the whole lack of finesse thing hot. There was possibly something wrong with him.
Spencer looked at Jon expectantly and Jon undressed, rolling his eyes. Spencer laughed and took off his shirt before he pulled Jon towards him and kissed him.
"I'm trying to get you to the point where you're Pavlovian with it. I should be able to unbuckle my belt and have you drop your pants without thinking about it," Spencer said, grinning.
"I'm happy you have your dreams, but yeah, no, that's not ever going to happen."
Spencer narrowed his eyes at him before he pulled at the hair at the nape of Jon's neck and Jon arched and moaned involuntarily. Spencer laughed, delighted, and kissed his way down Jon's chest, stopping to bite at a nipple just to hear Jon hiss.
They had started doing this lazy blowjob thing recently, when it was late and they were high and exhausted and the aim seemed to be mostly to get off as easily as possible so they could talk about producers and instruments and studios. It made sense, considering the situation: Ryan’s most egregious intrusion had been the time he had knocked on the door just to ask Jon the name of a blues guitarist from the 40s. Jon will take Things I Never Thought I'd Be Focusing On With A Dick In My Mouth for $1000. But it was comfortable, and Jon was kind of worried that being too comfortable to care about getting fancy with the sex was as high on his relationship fantasy list as Spencer's issues with the Pavlovian nudity.
"Hey, I'm not sucking your dick for my health, Jon," Spencer said, and Jon's attention snapped back to him. Spencer's eyes were wide and tired, but happy. It seemed kind of ridiculous to worry about the state of things at the moment, when they certainly had a bunch of other issues to deal with. He'd think about it later.
Spencer had this down to a routine by now, and Jon came probably far more quickly and easily than he should have been comfortable with. Spencer crawled back up his body, sprawled on top of him and started to thrust against his hip.
Jon reached up and ran a hand through Spencer’s hair, pulling his head up slightly from where Spencer had fastened his teeth onto Jon’s shoulder.
“You need me to do anything for you there?” he asked, smiling.
Spencer leaned up and nipped at his chin. “Just don’t fall asleep on me, I’ll take care of the rest of it.”
Jon brought his other hand up and scratched his nails lightly across Spencer’s shoulders, watching him go completely still as he sighed and came. He let Spencer come down for a few moments before rolling him over to the other side of the bed and grabbing a t-shirt to clean them both up.
He walked on his knees across the bed after tossing the t-shirt over into the corner of the room and turning off the light and dropped down on top of Spencer, who grunted in protest. Jon’s eyes had just started to close when Spencer spoke.
"Hey,” he paused and cleared his throat, “so there's this question I always wanted to ask you. But I didn't know if I should. And I kept thinking about it, like, all of the last week."
"I think we've passed the embarrassing questions stage, man."
"No, not like that." Spencer rolled over and looked at the dark ceiling. "What would you have done if we hadn't been there? Or if it hadn't worked out with us?" It was quiet, and Jon realized that Spencer had probably asked himself the question before, freaked himself out over the possibilities.
"I would have run away and joined the circus, Spencer." Jon turned onto his side to avoid the punch that Spencer aimed at his ribs. "I would have kept on teching. And then I would have gone home and maybe back to school, and started another band, and seen all the Elks Halls and community centers in Illinois again. I think they missed me."
"You would seriously just pick up and completely start over? No looking back, no hard feelings," Spencer said, incredulous.
He had never really consciously thought about it, but somewhere in Jon's head there was always that knowledge that not only did none of the rest of them know how to do anything but this, they didn't know how to do anything but be successful at this.
"People do it all the time. We can't all count on those multiplatinum royalties." It had taken about a year, but he'd learned to sound nonchalant about that. "I would have made it work."
"You're just lucky we wanted your ass." Spencer turned Jon over onto his side and threw an arm over him.
|
The gazebo is still sitting placidly in its constituent parts when Jon makes it out to the backyard. Ryan has been talking about replacing the finials with something fancier, maybe brass, but Eric has convinced him that perhaps they should assemble the thing before they start discussing bells and whistles.
It's not actually going to be that difficult a job, Jon thinks, once they get started. The lumber's going to be the hardest part, because, Eric's arms included, they're all kind of ill-equipped for this shit. If they can manage to lift any of it, they're going to need everyone they know to come over and hold things in place so they can hammer them together.
Ryan ambles out into the backyard behind him and plops down onto the ground next to him, looking at the gazebo carnage.
"It was a really great idea, Jon. I had high hopes for it." Ryan makes it sound like they're holding a wake for the gazebo.
"We'll put it together eventually," Jon assures him. He just sounds so sad, and Jon's uncomfortably reminded of Clover mewing sadly about not being fed and cuddled every hour on the hour. The pain that Ryan is going through is just about as serious, Jon thinks.
"No, it's just, you know how you think you're going to start something and it's going to be awesome, it'll be the best thing ever, and you set up everything in your life around it? And you rearrange your hobbies and cancel appointments and ditch your friends because it's such a great thing, and it will mean so much to you once you get into it? And then you just keep finding new and interesting ways to fuck it up.
"And it's not that you don't want that great thing that you've brought into your life, you've never wanted anything as much as you want this! It's just that you weren't really ready to build it. So it just sits there, in pieces, waiting for someone to come along and make sure that it gets put together properly and paid attention to and appreciated for the important role it plays in your life."
Ryan nods to himself and then smiles at Jon encouragingly.
Jon gapes for a moment, before his brain catches up.
He leans over and puts his head in his hands. "Dude, please stop talking to Spencer about me."
"How do you know I'm talking about you and Spencer? I could be talking about me!" Ryan protests.
Jon picks his head back up and stares at Ryan. "You've never been that self-aware in your life! You only know that could apply to you because people have told you."
"Fine, whatever," Ryan huffs. "And I didn't talk to Spencer. Brendon and I were talking about it." Ryan looks up at him. "We had a really good conversation about it actually. It was kind of cathartic." Ryan lies down on the ground and smiles up at the night sky.
Jon can't help but be amused. "The gazebo is a shitty metaphor and I'm ashamed of you for using it for my thing that's not a relationship. And if you do it again I'll beat you to death with one of the finials."
Ryan sighs. "That sounds fair. Just promise me you'll take care of the gazebo."
Jon smirks. "If there's one thing I can promise you, it's that I will do everything in my power to ensure proper treatment of the wood."
Ryan smiles back and hits Jon in the leg.
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It's furtive, for the first time. They had given up pretty quickly on hiding anything the last time, especially since the longer it went on, the more it seemed like there was nothing to hide. But now, with Spencer alternating between being his nonchalant buddy and pinning him against walls, Jon has no idea what he would tell anyone if they asked.
Living fairly separate lives from each other is helping. Not stumbling across the person you're having "dirty, secret sex" with (as Brendon has taken to calling it these days) makes it a lot easier to pretend you're not having the dirty, secret sex.
"But my question," Brendon says over dinner out one night, "is why you're still having the dirty, secret sex." Which is a really good question that Jon does not feel especially inclined to ponder at the moment.
"I know what you guys are up to. So does Ryan. And Eric and Shane, and Regan, and I think Spencer mumbled something about Ginger calling all excited and asking if you two had patched things up. So the whole secret thing where you only kind of talk to each other as friends, and then have a lot of sex? I don't see exactly what purpose that's serving. Unless you're into that, like as a thing. Which is fine, and I could totally see why you would be." He spears a piece of broccoli on his plate in a manner that's kind of disturbing in context.
It's mortifying in that particularly Brendon way where he'll just start prattling on as if he has nothing of importance to say until you realize you're pinned.
"We just don't have any reason to be hanging all over each other. It was different before; we were together all the time. But you guys are doing your thing and me and Ryan are doing ours, and it's not like we need dates to hold hands or something." Jon looks carefully at his drink as he takes a sip.
"Yeah, you and Ryan are awfully busy," Brendon says, sounding like he's seriously considering the topic. "That's understandable." Brendon turns to look at him. "And I'm sure that has nothing to do with you and Spencer at all."
"It doesn't. We dealt with that, and we're fine now," Jon says.
Brendon raises his eyebrows almost comically and reaches to take a carrot off Jon's plate.
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It would always start off in the most innocuous of ways, with Ryan and Jon working on something, late into the night. By the time they had gotten deep into the writing for Pretty Odd, they had developed their own language, not stopping to figure out if a song would work or if someone should try and go in a different direction with it.
Invariably, Spencer would wander by and flop down in Ryan's backyard, dissecting whatever they had come up with and pointing out the flaws in it. Jon came to enjoy it after a few stumbles, torn between protecting his own ideas and liking that sense of approval from someone wanting to work on something he had come up with.
They had never really discussed what they were going to tell anyone before coming back from the cabin, but the first time Spencer spent the evening in Ryan's backyard with them, blazed and brainstorming ideas, the whole relationship thing was kind of hard to deny.
Spencer was never particularly tactile until he was smoking, crawling on top of Jon and leaning in to his face to explain things.
"Jon, this is amazing. What you and Ryan are doing is going to change everything, okay?" Spencer eyes widened. "It's like, you're saying everything that people want to say, but don't ever get to. I'm so happy I'm in this band, dude."
Spencer bounced happily on his lap and looked like he might cry from joy.
"That's what I've been trying to tell Jon, man. It's important shit, okay?" Ryan said from somewhere behind them.
Jon couldn't really look at him because Spencer was busy nuzzling his neck. Spencer was a lot bigger than he was, and Jon was afraid that if he kept moving like that, he might break something. Spencer never believed him when he tried to explain that he was too big for that to really work that well without some sort of support beneath them.
Spencer pushed him flat against the ground. "I'm going to tell Brendon all about it tomorrow, okay? He needs to know." Then Jon was too busy attempting to get Spencer off of him and into the house to really figure out how their new game of songwriting telephone was going to work exactly.
It was hilarious in theory, but it developed into a strangely circular way of communicating. Ryan and Jon passed ideas to Spencer who worked things out with Brendon who came back around to lay songs down with Ryan. Sometimes, when the four of them were working together from the beginning and it all seemed to come so easily, Jon wondered if a lot of problems would have been solved if he could have nipped that particular chain in the bud before they got used to it.
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The more work they get done, the more Jon realizes that they're much more aligned now, letting things get worked out in the group, and feeling a lot more free to have ideas traded back and forth. Before, Ryan and Brendon hadn't really gelled together until they were in the studio, practically on top of each other, but there's an ease there now where there wasn't before. Ryan and Jon are still working in different ways and places than Brendon and Spencer are, but it doesn't feel as separate.
Maybe it's the freedom of feeling like he can work any way he wants to, but Jon finds himself a lot more open to going wherever he and Ryan decide is best at the moment. It's not that their process is complicated. They tend to lay around the house, surfing the internet, or wander out on strange hiking paths they find, making up whatever melodies come to them along the way. They make their way out onto unpaved roads with guitars on their backs and have conversations with the aging hippies who live in the houses around them. There's a woman in her sixties, with a house about a ten minute walk away, who Jon thinks is about two weeks away from proposing to Ryan.
But Jon likes the ease of it all, that he can turn to Ryan and throw out a comment about Saturn or mountains or optimism and then they'll have a song.
Sometimes Ryan will flip through his pictures, finding the little images he likes, the everyday things that become more important when you record them. Jon feels like Ryan gets it, how it's not about what things look like when you first start with them, it's how you make people pay attention to them in the end.
They go driving one day, east into the suburbs, taking pictures of the little towns piled on top of each other. They ride past the office parks and auto rows, stopping to buzz through college towns and little, deserted bedroom communities.
In Pomona, Jon makes Ryan stop in front of a strip club that is actually named "Strip Joint" so he can take a picture.
"We have to bring Spencer back here, just for the name. You know he loves this shit," Jon says, turning to look at Ryan who is sitting on the hood of the car.
"You do realize we're sitting here loitering in a strip club parking lot. I'm pretty sure a bouncer is going to come out at some point and ask us what we're doing here."
"They're closed, man. We can hang out and be creepy all we want to until," Jon looks up at the sign, "three o' clock. And then we could come back and see the fine Miss Capri dance, if you were into that sort of thing."
"I've been trying to cut back. I have enough trouble paying my bills," Ryan says, deadpan.
Jon comes back to the car and sits on the hood next to Ryan. "We should go into the studio for real soon," he urges, trying not to rush him. Ryan will invariably clam up if you push too hard.
"Maybe if my band could work together we could get into the studio." He takes Jon's camera gently out of his hands and flips back through the shots. "Is my band working together these days?"
"Everything's fine, man. I'm still taking pictures of stupid shit just because he'd enjoy it, so everything must be fine, right?"
Ryan smiles at him. "Well, you just interpreted 'band' as 'Spencer', so I don't know." He rushes on when Jon opens his mouth to speak. "No, man, it's fine, I'm not sure I even want to know the details."
They lay out on the hood, making references to Wayne's World and talking about how they should stop and bring back souvenirs from the picturesque Inland Empire until the parking lot actually starts to fill with cars. Jon worries that they might actually get arrested and hustles them back into the car.
Passing by West Covina, Jon speaks up. "So, the me and Spencer thing. Just to be clear, you know we're not writing about this, right?" Jon says.
"Okay," Ryan says mildly. He looks out the window and Jon can hear the suppressed laughter in his voice. "But you're hampering my creative process."
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Jon was never sure why they chose his room to crash in at the cabin the first time, but he ended up being happy about it in the long run, since it meant he hadn't had to move when they ended up staying there.
They had stumbled into the room, after coming down off the roof, half-assedly dodging questions from Brendon and Shane. Jon kicked the door closed behind him as they came in.
"Is this -" Jon had no idea how to broach the topic: it was kind of a minefield no matter how he phrased it.
"What, my first gay experience? Dude, have you met the guys on this label? I'm lucky no one's teabagged me while I was passed out so they could take a picture and post it to MySpace." He pushed Jon down on the bed and sprawled on top of him, pinning him to the bed. Sometimes the size difference between them was a bitch and a half. "You're going to play guru in this too? How many guys have you fucked, Jon?"
"One." This was a discussion that could end badly.
Spencer smiled delightedly and settled his ass more firmly onto Jon's crotch. He took his shirt off and dropped it somewhere off the side of the bed. "Please tell me it was Tom. I have money riding on it."
He shuddered. "It really wasn't Tom. There's no way it would ever be Tom. I don't think we'd know what to do with each other."
"I can't tell you how sad that makes me. So, Pete? Tony? Carden?" Spencer ground down again, and Jon took a moment to consider how to break the news.
He slapped Spencer's ass. "Butcher."
Spencer's eyes glazed a little. "Dude, that's just not fair. You should at least have to have Sisky fight you for that."
"There's actually a story there."
Spencer's eyes lit up and he leaned forward, bracing his hands on either side of Jon's head. "One day, you're telling me. The whole story, every detail."
They grinned stupidly at each other and before Jon could say anything, Spencer had attacked his jeans, reaching inside.
It wasn't the smoothest of experiences and Jon had definitely been with people with better technique, and he spared a fleeting thought for that two year age difference. Which was kind of uncharitable, he knew, but it cropped up at the weirdest times, talking about TV shows and remembering songs played at junior high dances and apparently skill in giving a handjob, of all things.
"Is this-?" Spencer trailed off, and Jon struggled to catch up to reassure him.
"No, it's good." He pulled Spencer's head down towards his, their noses bumping and teeth clacking against each other at first, and Jon spared a moment to think that he was usually smoother than this, some sort of bleedover from Spencer's hesitation making him halting and hesitant, almost like he was waiting for Spencer to do what he usually did and take over, even though that was clearly not happening here.
Spencer choked out a moan against his lips and Jon could feel him hard against his thigh. He reached down, his hands bumping into Spencer's on the way, taking a moment to tangle and realign, clumsy until they got everything worked out.
He palmed Spencer's cock gently, letting Spencer roll his hips against him, the full-body shudder almost too much with Spencer's weight on top of him. Spencer's hand went lax around him as he thrust against Jon's hand. He let it go for a while, watching Spencer's mouth fall open and a flush rise up into nearly to his hairline.
Spencer seemed to realize what he was doing after a moment, burying his face into Jon's neck, and mumbling a "Sorry," before tightening his fist around Jon's cock again.
"It's fine, just don't stop," Jon said, trying to sound as encouraging as possible without getting demanding.
Spencer looked down again, seeming to concentrate more on what he was doing, his eyes focused almost uncomfortably on Jon's cock, and Jon found himself oddly turned on by the sight. He couldn't remember the last time he'd been with someone who seemed that genuinely interested in him having as good a time as they were.
"Hey, Spence," he pulled Spencer's face up to meet his, kissing him lightly. Spencer surged against him, pushing him back onto the bed, and Jon found himself pinned under the weight, Spencer's hips lazily jerking against his.
Spencer moved back from the kiss, running his tongue along Jon's collarbone before biting him. Jon tightened his hand around him and jerked him off faster, watching as Spencer stiffened above him and then came against his stomach.
Jon brought his other hand up to pull Spencer into a kiss, gasping when Spencer ground down against him. He let go of Jon's cock and urged up to ride the ridge of his hip. Jon broke away from the kiss, hissing as he came.
He patted Spencer's hair gently as he came down, watching Spencer settle on top of him with his arms folded across Jon's chest.
"So, hey, that went pretty well," Spencer said, slightly hesitant still catching his breath.
Jon kept carding his fingers through Spencer's hair, trying to reassure him without seeming to do so. "Yeah, it did."
Later, nearly asleep with Spencer tucked in close to him, Jon broached the subject.
"Hey, so you never told me who your first big gay experience was."
Spencer laughed. "No, I didn't."
"You're not gonna tell me, are you?"
"Nope." Spencer leaned in closer and rested his mouth against Jon's chest.
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"Jon Walker! We're going instrument shopping," Brendon says grandly as he enters the room.
Jon's got his phone out, flipping through recent pictures (Ryan sleeping; Eric at a keyboard; Ryan's disapproving look down, with his hands on his hips, at the gazebo's roof still on the ground; Spencer's kit with Spencer nowhere to be found behind it; Ryan grinning and grabbing for the camera) when Brendon drops down next to him on the couch.
"We buying anything in particular? And don't you already own everything?" Jon asks.
"Dude, of course not. So, Ryan and I were listening to Pet Sounds and we had the 'needs more theremin' conversation again, and then it was all Mellotron this and Moog that, and by the end of it I thought, dude, I really want a suitcase piano. So I found a guy who's going to sell me a vintage Fender Rhodes."
Jon snorts, and looks up to find that Brendon is looking down at Jon's phone.
"I always wondered why you stopped taking pictures of Spencer," Brendon says out of nowhere. "You did it all the time when you were first with us, but it was like the minute you started sucking his dick, no more pictures." Brendon turns perfectly fake earnest eyes on him, and Jon can only respond in kind.
"Maybe they're just a seduction tool and I didn't need them anymore."
"Maybe you didn't want keepsakes of your boyfriend." Brendon's eyes go comically wide. "Unless you're serious with the seduction. Does Ryan know? What do you think his first clue will be? Probably the dick sucking. He tends to catch on after that. Not that I speak from personal experience."
"It's not like that," Jon says.
"Oh, I know. I'm pretty sure Ryan knows what a blowjob means."
Jon punches him in the side. "We've never been like that. Spence and me. No matter what I think, we won't ever be like that. If he wanted to, he would have let me know and we would have been, like, a year ago."
"Yeah, that's true. Because if there's one thing you are, it's clear and forceful about what you want." Jon opens his mouth to respond and Brendon speaks over him. "Come obscure instrument shopping with me. Maybe we can pick up a Chapman Stick for you while we're there!" He makes inept jazz hands in Jon's face. "The possibilities are endless."
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Everyone's pretty much aware that meeting up in the studio isn't as fraught as it was on the last album. Jon is pretty sure that sense of teams aligning is keeping it from being so, when by rights it should increase the problem. Jon thinks that there's something to be said for the way they're doing it now. Brendon seems happier, writing with Spencer in a way that reminds Jon of himself and Ryan the last time. It works.
They're deep into one of Brendon and Spencer's songs, today, something closer to chamber-pop than things they've done before and a million miles away from the old school blues vibe Ryan and Jon have been feeling lately. He has no idea how they're going to work it, but it's good, the blend of them all together, trying out something new and seeing what works.
He's busy looking at Eric and talking about how they're going to incorporate the keyboards on another of the songs when he notices that the conversation that Brendon and Ryan have been having about arrangement has moved from friendly to heated, in that way that only they can get, where Ryan's voice gets progressively flatter and Brendon sounds more and more accommodating until one of them is stalking out of the room and slamming the door behind him. He and Spencer used to place bets on who would snap first.
"I just think that if you're going to commit to going this route then you might as well do it as accurately as you can. You're just shooting yourself in the foot if you pull back before you even get started." Ryan sounds as if this is a matter of personal integrity and Jon wishes he had been paying attention before it got to this point.
"Dude, I know what I was thinking of when we were writing it, and that's not it. Maybe you should just trust me to know what I'm doing," Brendon says, smiling tightly. He's looking down at his guitar as he gives a little laugh. "I'm sure it'll be fine if we do it my way."
Jon looks up at Shane, who is filming in the corner, for some clue as to what the hell they're talking about. Shane has to mouth the word three times before Jon can decipher glockenspiel. And for fuck's sake, this is what they're really going to argue about?
"But how can you know if you don't at least try this?" Ryan says, exasperated. "Spencer, don't you think we should at least try it my way?"
Everyone in the room turns to look at Spencer for confirmation. Spencer looks down at his kit, quiet for a moment before crossing his arms. He speaks up softly.
"I don't know, Ryan. Maybe we should just wait and see if it works."
No one says anything for a moment.
Jon finds himself speaking up before he can help it. "I don't see why it wouldn't work. We might as well do it. Right?" He throws it out as a possibility to the whole room, easily contested, but he knows he's directing it to Spencer.
Spencer looks at him mutinously, and Jon turns to look at Ryan for confirmation.
Ryan's smiling, not at either of them, but at Brendon who's smiling back. They look like they're near laughter.
"No, Spencer's right. It's just a fucking glockenspiel, dude. We'll figure it out as we go," Ryan says.
They go back to playing.
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Ryan's cycling through the seventies these days, and he's currently easing into a prog rock phase. He's found Low Spark of High Heeled Boys on vinyl somewhere, and they're into minute seven of the second track, listening to Steve Winwood's piano, when Ryan asks him what's up with Spencer.
"Spencer and I have a 'don't ask, don't tell' thing about you so you have to tell me," Ryan says very earnestly. They're lying on the floor on their backs, an area rug they found in a store in Santa Monica under them. The ceiling has really nice wood beams.
"You have a policy about it?"
"Well, we didn't used to. It was more like, 'hey, are you fucking our bassist? Because I really want to keep this one.' But then you guys stopped doing whatever and neither of you talked about it, so you know, I figured we weren't talking about it.
"And you know he won't answer anything if you ask him directly, so I didn't bring it up again. But I want to know, so you have to tell me." Ryan flails out a hand at him, narrowly missing his nose, until Jon grabs it and holds on. The tattoos are always interesting up close. He holds Ryan's wrist close to his face, watching the skin change, first solid black when it's right up against his nose then resolving into actual words the farther away he pulls it. Ryan yanks his wrist against Jon's hold after he does it a few times, and Jon remembers that there was a question.
"There's nothing to tell." Jon thinks about the day when he first got back and the lightning-fast switch from easy understanding to frosty silence as soon as he brought up Ryan. It's not fair to drag Ryan into it.
"You know, I don't need a keeper, and the two of you fighting over who's going to hold my hand to cross the street is kind of insulting." He sounds huffy, in the bruised maidenly dignity way that only Ryan can pull off.
Jon turns onto his side, resting his head on one fist. "Who paid your bills this month, Ryan?"
Ryan closes his eyes pointedly. "I figured out autopay."
Jon laughs out loud. "I'm happy it only took you a few years. Maybe we can tackle tying shoelaces next." He lies back down flat on the floor. "We're not fighting over you. We're not fighting. We're just not not-fighting."
"It's great that you've come to some sort of understanding. So, are you still fucking?"
"Sometimes."
"That's good. I'm happy for you."
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They were sober enough that the slope of the cabin's roof didn't feel dangerous, and the decision to come out here to talk continued to look like a good one. Spencer had developed a bad habit of bumming cigarettes off of Jon and Ryan, smoking them only occasionally and in certain, unpredictable situations. Apparently a tour through everything Jon didn't know about Panic's early days was a smoking situation.
"We were pretty much on our own, and I was already used to Ryan crashing at my house and Brendon sometimes making it to practice and sometimes not, and they just had a lot of shit to deal with. Like, they grew up a hell of a lot earlier than I did."
Jon nodded and passed his cigarette to Spencer, looking down over the lawn and seeing Ryan lying on his back on the grass, plucking something out on the guitar slung across his chest. Jon smiled down at him, sure that Ryan couldn't see them.
"They just deserved a break at some point, you know? Like, my biggest responsibility up to that point was making sure my sisters did the dishes after dinner. In my house, if I fucked up, no one was going to be really pissed at me; I could always go home. But they couldn't yet. So I couldn't really fuck it up." He ashed and passed the cigarette back to Jon. "I don't know, it was just like, at some point I had to pretend to be the grownup. Brent wasn't going to, because it was still his high school band, you know? And it was never that for them. If it ended up being that they would have seriously fucked up their lives for nothing. So I just, like, picked up the slack. They could do their serious, crazy artist thing and I could make sure we ate something other than Doritos every day."
Jon could remember cruising down the highway in vans, feeling like the world was totally open to him and he could see it all at once. It didn't even occur to him when he was that age that he was only seeing three states, playing tiny community center auditoriums, because the charm of it seemed to hit everyone around him as much as it did him. He couldn't imagine his parents doing anything other than asking for more stories and making sure they had enough money to eat on the road.
"Did you even tell them you were taking over?" Jon stubbed out the cigarette and pulled Spencer closer to him. It was strange: they had been up in each other's personal space pretty much since they met, but something about the isolation of the cabin made it sharper, suddenly something to pay attention to.
"They caught on pretty quick. I mean, it was one of the things that I could do that they couldn't. And I was way too distracted to see it completely then, but Brent was never going to going to be comfortable with this as more than the coolest after-school hobby ever, so I just did it. We were driving in vans all the way across the country and none of us had ever been away from home, and then we were making way too much money and trying not to be douches on national television, and it was just - a lot."
He went quiet for a moment. "I mean, we had help. Pete's dad called my parents and talked some stuff over with them, and things went a lot smoother after that, but that just made me notice it more, you know? Like, my parents were getting a crash course in being my safety net." He laid out against the roof and threw his arms above him into the air, stretching his fingers out one by one like he was counting them. "If nothing else, I can bullshit and say I have some actual music management experience when you guys inevitably fuck up my career somehow and the royalties run out."
Jon leaned in and tickled Spencer along his sides until he flinched away from his fingers, breathless with laughter and trying to the cling to the roof's shingles.
"At least you have royalties to count on. I still have to count on you guys to be pretty enough to sell for at least one more album."
Spencer's face sobered. "Hey, you know you're in this for as long as you want it, right?" He looked away for a moment. "You're the only one Ryan's listening to right now anyway, so we have to keep you around for that."
He smirked. "Although, if it really comes down to it, I could always get you some hot pants and let you entertain me by my pool for a living. Maybe we could even get you a little bowtie. I'd expect you to work off the beer belly first, though. Can't have you embarrassing me."
Jon pointedly dug his fingers into the softness at Spencer's stomach. "Thanks, Spence. It's great that you're thinking about my future."
Spencer rolled towards him and stopped on his side for a moment, looked at Jon, and then kept leaning in. Jon leaned up into the kiss, letting Spencer set the pace first before pulling him down on top of him. Jon had the sudden, grateful thought that they both tasted like cigarettes. It was slow at first, and then Spencer licked Jon's mouth open, nudging at his head to get a better angle. Jon thought that they probably shouldn't move too much, being where they were, but he couldn't stop himself from putting a hand against Spencer's neck, encouraging him.
When Spencer turned away to bite at his neck, Jon felt like he had to question it.
"I'm making a token protest right now. Just so you know."
Spencer laughed into his neck, the sound vibrating against his skin and making him shudder.
"I'm considering it and deciding that this is a good idea anyway." He pulled back and smiled at Jon. "Okay, let's go inside before we roll off the roof and kill ourselves."
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"So, you're going home," Jon says. "For a week. To be somewhere without me."
"You go home for weeks at a time and I manage not to bitch." Spencer looks up and smiles at him. "I always appreciate it when people cry over me, though. Feel free to let it all out."
Jon pinches him in the side.
It's just that they're finally getting to the point where they should actually maybe be mentioning to each other when they disappear for a week. They have actual conversations that don't end in silences, and Spencer has stopped getting that awkward twitchy look when one of the other guys walks into the room and sees them together. It's almost like they're really dating.
Spencer looks up and notices Jon considering him and then pushes his backpack out of the way. He presses a hand against Jon's chest, guiding him backwards onto the bed and straddling him.
"My parents aren't expecting me until tonight. That gives us at least an hour until I have to get on the road," Spencer says, grinning down at him.
Jon grabs his ass and pulls Spencer more fully onto him.
"So, why are you leaving me this time?" he asks.
"Family vacation," Spencer says, twisting against Jon's grip on his ass, "I don't think we're actually going anywhere, though, just corralling all the kids at home so we can sit and look at each other for a week." He pushes back against Jon's hands.
Jon thinks it might just be Spencer's parents missing him and Spencer not wanting to say that.
Spencer pulls on Jon's shirt until he can get it up far enough to bare most of his chest, grinding down on him as he unbuttons his jeans and reaches inside.
"I'm going without for a week, and the best I'm getting is a handjob?" Jon asks, teasing.
"Hey, next time maybe you can come home with me for family vacation and we can christen my old bed. We never did that last time, did we?" Spencer asks, bringing one of Jon's hands up to his mouth and biting down on a finger. His pupils dilate and Jon watches intently.
"So, uh." Jon stops for a second and then tries again. "Why didn't we ever do that? We had the time."
"Dude, do you have some kink I don't know about? How is that possible by now?" He's teasing, but for some reason it hits Jon the wrong way.
"Maybe I've developed some new ones in the time we've been apart," Jon says, sitting up. Spencer leans back, and sits on his heels, looking at Jon like he’s not sure where Jon is taking this, which just bothers Jon more.
"No, okay, you know what I've never been able to figure out? That last day before Honda Civic started, when you pulled away and went off to room with Brendon, what was that?" Jon can feel his voice rising, and it's always kind of alien to him when this happens. He's rarely this angry.
Spencer leans back far enough that he's nearly falling off the bed. "Do you really want to do this now. Of all times?"
Jon's feeling strangely defiant. "Yeah, I really want to do this now. You never said anything to me about it after that. We were just kind of done doing whatever we were doing."
Spencer clambers off of him, all unwieldy limbs and jerky movements, and determinedly goes back to packing. "Hey, you never seemed particularly interested in 'whatever we were doing' to start with," Spencer retorts.
"What the hell, Spencer? We were together just about every night we saw each other for a year. I don't know what else you could want me to do."
"You remember that conversation we had, way back at the start, about being everybody's best friend? Maybe you could have given me some sign that you were doing more than just accommodating me." Spencer continues to pick things up off the floor and throw them in his backpack.
"And this isn't even getting into all the Ryan stuff," Spencer continues.
"Oh, for Christ's sake, fuck Ryan. I'm sorry I agree with him a lot. I'm sorry he needs more pats on the head than you do. I've never slept with Ryan though, which should tell you something," Jon says.
"It's not about that. I know it's not like that with you guys. But the fact that I have to defend myself to you about him? That sucks. You're sitting here saying you want to have some sort of real relationship and you can't even meet me halfway on that. Because right now Ryan needs someone to hold his hand and make it all better more than I do, so he gets priority. And that won't work."
"It's not -" he tries, and he doesn't know where he's going with it, so it's a good thing Spencer cuts him off.
"It just got to a point where it was clear that you just got bored because I stopped looking at you like you knew more than I did. Sorry I realized you're just as much of a fuckup as the rest of us."
Jon doesn't say anything, waiting for Spencer to continue.
"Seriously, you spout all of this fake Zen bullshit about just letting go and releasing, and really you're scrambling around trying to make everyone's relationships work the way you want them to the whole time," Spencer says. He stuffs a t-shirt in his bag, one of Jon's. They're always too short and tight on him and he never seems to care. Jon doesn't even know how it ended up in here, and it seems like a bad idea to mention it now.
"You always pull this shit, like you've lived and seen so much so you know how to just relax and take it all in. You're just as clueless in this as I am.
"I'm fucking surrounded by people who pretend that they're just waiting for shit to come to them so they don't have to take any sort of responsibility. And it shouldn't come as a surprise that I put up with that from you for so long, because I've been doing this with Ryan my entire life." He tosses his backpack on the floor and paces to the other side of the room. He's practically vibrating with tension and Jon stays as far back from him as he can, not wanting to make the situation any worse.
"And now you won't get mad, because you don't do that. You understand why that might piss me off, right?" Spencer stops and looks at him. "And I actually spent the past year thinking, 'at least Jon's taking control of things, so I can sit the fuck down and relax for a while,' and it was great. So great that I thought that maybe we could see if our whole thing could work out this time. But I guess we were all just a little too needy, because it worked too well, and you're too busy managing everybody now."
"Hey, you're the one who wanted me to do this. Which one of us exactly passes on interviews so that I'll do them? Who ends up making sure Ryan doesn't fall into a hole somewhere?"
Spencer stops what he's doing and looks down at his backpack before speaking.
"Hey, I'm happy about whatever works best for all of us. I mean, you and Ryan have your crazy thing together, and that's great. It works for you and it works for the band, but it's not like that happened on accident," Spencer reminds him.
Jon's head snaps up at the bitterness in his voice.
"I know, you love to write. But you don't love to write with me or Brendon, do you? What am I supposed to think about that?"
Before Jon can say anything, he feels himself frowning involuntarily, and tries not to do it, because 1) it's a bitch move, and 2) he knows Spencer hates it, but Spencer launches in before he can say anything.
"Really? You're just going to pout at me over that? That's the best I'm going to get from you?"
Jon pushes past him and slams the bedroom door behind him as he leaves.
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Jon gives Brendon some credit for letting him sulk in his living room for a day after Spencer leaves for his parents’ house. Brendon's apparently got a sulking time limit, though.
Six hours in, he throws a Nerf ball at Jon's head. "Okay, let's be honest: you've set yourself up as his best friend's protector. From him. I think he has a right to be pissed," Brendon says.
"I'm not trying to be his protector. It's just that Ryan expects him to be there and then he isn't and someone has to be."
Brendon laughs at him. "I love Ryan, but he wouldn't be half the bitch he is if you guys didn't coddle him and let him pull that temperamental artist bullshit. I used to be scared that if I said word one to him about something everyone would jump in to make sure he didn't pitch a fit."
Jon opens his mouth to defend Ryan and then remembers all the princess jokes he's made over the past couple of years. It's a fair point.
"Cut Spencer some slack, dude. We put him through a lot at the beginning, you know. And he acts like we don't remember how much we asked him to take care of, but we do. So if he flakes on stuff or doesn't put up with our bullshit, I'll give him a pass.
"And that doesn't even touch on your freaky relationship issues, which you have somehow managed to mostly shield me from," Brendon continued. "So if he wants to take a break and needs to say, 'fuck you, leave me alone for a week,' then that's understandable."
"But he's wrong," Jon protests.
"And the fact that you think that doesn't really matter at this point, does it? Because he's not here to listen to you."
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They had been on the roof of the cabin, which had kind of become their place. Not officially, until Shane came up one weekend and drew a "Drama Queen-Free Zone" sign to hang on the window leading out to their perch. Brendon didn't forgive him for that for about a day.
It was kind of nicely regulated, Jon thought, because they couldn't get fucked up enough to actually be in danger of toppling off the roof, but they tended to ease into a happily honest space where Spencer would let loose with really unfair shit that he probably wouldn't say around other people and Jon felt surprisingly okay about laughing at it. It was pleasantly different from just about anywhere else in the world.
"I used to hate that thing you and Ryan do," Spencer started off, and it took Jon a second to catch up to the change in topic: they had been talking about one of Ryan's LA friends and her awesome tits.
"Like, it used to take him forever to actually have a real conversation with anyone not on the internet so I was shocked as hell when he just brought you home like a new puppy that first time. And then you were there all the fucking time: on our bus, at our sound checks, hanging out after shows." Spencer smiled ruefully. "And everyone loves you, so it's not like I could say shit about it." His eyes tracked up to Jon's quickly. "Don't get me wrong, I love you, too, dude. Like, you know, a lot. But you were there every day, and if you weren't getting Brendon and Brent fucked up and then getting forgiven for it, then you and Ryan were off giggling together, and it's like," he paused and looked out on the trees below them before turning sharply back to Jon, "you don't have to be everybody's best friend."
"I can't help it if I'm charming, Spence." He knew he was hedging.
"Dude. Brent still tells people that you're an okay guy. You can dial it back a little."
"I'm not, like, trying to -"
"No, you don't do it on purpose, I know. I think you're just wired to, like, bullshit people until they like you." Spencer smiled brightly. "It's totally a talent. You should be proud! Most people can't do that shit convincingly."
Jon burst into laughter. "You're such an asshole."
Spencer looked down at the cabin's backyard, suddenly quiet. When Jon looked down, he could see Brendon doing backflips on the grass with Shane filming.
"Hey, one of us has to be, and it's not going to be you, right?"
It was said wistfully enough that Jon knew he wasn't supposed to answer.
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One night, about an hour after one of them decides that shots of Jose Cuervo are a really good idea, Eric and Jon get to work on the lumber for the gazebo's floor. It's a huge job, and Jon's pretty sure someone's going to get hurt, but it's been sitting there taunting them for weeks on end, so it's about time.
Dragging the planks from the pile by the deck, they manage to get it all laid out in something resembling the manner the DVD described, Jon assumes. He hasn't watched the DVD as often as Eric and Ryan have. The gazebo DVD has become a source a great entertainment when stoned. Brendon says it's a life-changer.
Ryan directs traffic from a lawn chair with a glass of white wine in one hand. He had given up on even the pretense of lifting anything heavier than one of the finials about a month after Jon got back.
"If you don't lay the planks out straight, then we'll never get the walls around it right. And then the roof won't fit. And we won't have a gazebo. It'll just be a bunch of pieces of wood sticking out of the ground. But with a floor." Ryan sounds increasingly alarmed at the possibilities of bad gazebo construction.
And it's not that he doesn't have really good points, but it's late, and the strings of Christmas lights aren't the best illumination for construction. Jon thinks they might have a flashlight somewhere, but he can't be sure and he doesn't know where he would start looking.
Ryan sounds contemplative from his lawn chair. "You guys. I think that maybe Spencer was right and we should have gone with the palapa instead of the gazebo," he says, with a note of wonder in his voice.
Jon turns to glare at him. Ryan could well be glaring back, but Jon can't tell because he has his douchey sunglasses on at, Jon checks his watch, two in the morning.
"Really, Jon. We could have just gotten a giant thatched umbrella and stuck a table under it. Same basic principle."
"You couldn't mention this before now?" Eric asks, wrestling with one of the planks.
"Everything was already laid out. And we knew how to put it together from the DVD," Ryan replies, offended.
Two hours later, having finally assembled everything into a configuration that looks something like a circle, they curl up and fall asleep in the backyard on top of the slats.
When he wakes up in the afternoon, stiff from sleeping on the wood, Jon stands up and looks at the wreckage, before deciding that it's about time to let somebody else take charge of the damn thing. He staggers inside and takes out the phonebook to find a builder who can finish it. Ryan will thank him in the end.
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When Jon comes out onto the front porch the next morning, Spencer is waiting, sitting silently and holding his bag from his trip to see his parents. He apparently hadn’t stopped to drop it off first before coming over.
Jon sits next to him on the stoop, not saying anything. They look at the neighbors passing by for a while.
"So, in the past, I was maybe kind of an asshole who wasn't ready to do this relationship thing," Spencer says, watching Mrs. Logan from down the road walk her King Charles Spaniel past them. She waves to them and Jon and Spencer both wave back politely.
"Yeah, I kind of caught that," Jon says.
"But you're also an asshole, who expects me to just know when you're pulling a self-sacrificing martyr tantrum."
Jon concedes, "This is also true."
Spencer looks at him out of the corner of his eye, "And the Ryan thing is maybe a separate issue. That we don't have to talk about."
Jon lets out a breath. "Yeah, dude. I think I've talked enough about Ryan to everybody. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have nightmares about Kerrang! calling to ask me how Ryan feels about us."
"So, in lieu of more discussion and apologies all around, I'd like to remind you that I owe you a handjob," Spencer says when they've looked at the street and the ground and everything but each other for a few minutes.
Jon laughs. "I'd like to remind you that you owe me a blowjob from about a year and a half ago."
"That's a fair request. I'm happy you brought it back to my attention," Spencer says, smiling.
Jon bursts into laughter and invites Spencer inside.
Bonus Tracks/Enhanced Content
Fanart:
The Gazebo Is a Metaphor by brille
Fanmix:
These Games We Play by wishfulclicking
Both art and mix are wonderful, go check them out!
And nota bene, you can totally order a Gazebo in a Box off the internet.