FIC: Lambliff Big Bang Part 3
It goes like that - they sometimes watch a movie together, or go out for a drink. Tommy goes to Wicked with Kelsey, who likes it a lot more than he does. Still, it’s fun to watch Adam even if he doesn’t get a solo.
Adam takes him out on, like, dates but not-dates. Adam likes to escort him around and teach him about new things. Tommy’s happy so long as it’s with Adam. Even the Shakespeare play at the theater wasn’t bad, Two Gentlemen of Somewhere or Other. It was actually pretty funny, when he could figure out what they were saying.
Or they hang around at each other’s places, Adam singing a few songs while Tommy strums simple chords on his old acoustic guitar. Sometimes they stay over. Tommy sleeps in Adam’s bed and Adam’s a perfect gentleman, it’s totally okay. At Tommy’s place, Adam has to use the couch, though, because no way could Tommy take the mocking he’d get from the roommates. Adam looks a little sad that Tommy worries about that, but he goes along with it, tucks up under the blanket and Tommy wishes him good night and disappears into his room.
They’re becoming friends, and it’s fun. Tommy wasn’t looking for another friend but sometimes that’s when you find a good one. Sometimes he thinks Adam is still kind of interested in him, but Adam never does anything that makes him uncomfortable. Tommy gets really used to Adam’s encompassing hugs. He doesn’t mind when Adam kisses his cheek or the top of his head. Adam sometimes talks about how he believes that sexuality can be fluid, that he believes in the Kinsey scale, whatever the fuck that is. Tommy has a tendency to tune out what he doesn’t understand; Adam doesn’t seem to care, or notice, he just enjoys talking and informing people of things and Tommy’s not about to impinge on that enjoyment. There's no ulterior motive in Adam's talkativeness.
Even when Adam drags him to the Museum of Contemporary Art downtown, Tommy doesn’t voice a word of protest. Tommy’s never been much for museums. They’re too quiet and formal. He feels like he doesn’t fit in with that crowd. Still, it’s time spent with Adam. It winds up being kind of fun. He and Adam aren’t the only ones with interesting hair and multiple earrings. Adam shows Tommy his favorite painting. Tommy doesn’t get it, like, at all. It’s just white canvas and there’s a big blob of red and one long black line.
“Is that art?” Tommy asks after staring at it for a long while.
Adam laughs, and that’s a sound Tommy will never get tired of. He loves when he puts a smile on Adam’s face or gets him to laugh out loud.
“Oh honey, yes, it’s art,” Adam says.
Tommy squints at the painting one last time. “Are you sure? It looks to me like a guy with two cans of spray paint.”
Adam giggles again. “You’re such a little rebel. It’s art, trust me.”
Apparently he’s going to have to take Adam’s word for it.
In a corner of another room they find a gigantic pile of wrapped pieces of candy.
“Is that art?” Tommy asks.
Adam reads the plaque on the wall and tries to interpret for Tommy. It’s art, but they’re allowed to have a piece of candy, so they do. Apparently it’s interactive art. It’s a brave new world for Tommy; he’s learning so much he never knew.
“How come you know all this kind of shit?” Tommy asks later, when they are sitting on plastic benches at a taco stand.
“My mom is into art. Wherever we traveled as kids, she took us to art museums.”
Tommy nods and chews thoughtfully.
“So, museums aren’t so awful?” Adam asks, sounding a little worried.
Tommy swallows and nods vigorously.
The Getty Center is even better. Riding on the little monorail from the parking structure to the top of the bluff, Tommy plays smiley faces with a shy little girl sitting across the aisle. When they get out and walk to the very top, Tommy can’t stop saying “Wow.” He says it at least ten times in the first half-hour. He’s not talking about the art, he’s talking about the view. He’s had enough art for one day, but this place? He could stay here forever.
Adam buys sandwiches and drinks at the café and they find a quiet spot overlooking the gardens and Santa Monica and Century City. They sit cross-legged on the sun-warmed limestone, the fresh breeze making a mess of Tommy’s hair but not Adam’s.
“More product,” Adam explains. “I’ve got some great stuff I can show you.” He tucks Tommy’s bangs behind one ear. “Although you’re cute like this, too.”
Tommy sticks out his tongue. “I’m less girly than you, I don’t care about my hair.”
“Sure,” Adam says affably, enjoying his sandwich.
Tommy tosses a potato chip in the air and tries to catch it in his mouth. Turns out that’s harder than with M&Ms; he misses completely.
“You’re littering,” Adam says with a frown.
“A squirrel will get it.”
Adam huffs. “Do you see a squirrel? This place is pristine. A squirrel wouldn’t dare.”
“I saw a candy wrapper in one of those pool thingies.”
“Okay, then. Are you a ten-year-old?”
Tommy picks up the chip and eats it.
“Tommy!”
“What? Three-second rule.”
Adam shakes his head. “You are such a boy.”
“You love it.”
“I kind of do.”
“Stop, dude, TMI.”
Adam laughs and tousles Tommy’s hair. “Friends?”
Tommy nods. God, Adam’s a dork. Tommy leans back on his hands and sighs with enormous contentment. “I wanna live up here forever and never leave,” he says.
“Really?”
“Sure, there’s a lot of buildings. Bet there’s room for me somewhere. I wouldn’t get in the way.”
“It would be nice, wouldn’t it? You could sit up here and dream about being a rock star.”
“I’m already a rock star.”
“Of course you are.”
Tommy grins. “Come on, you know I’m gonna make it big.”
“It’s good to have dreams.”
“I don’t have dreams, I have plans.”
“I’m not embarrassed to say I have dreams,” says Adam. “I love computers, don’t get me wrong, but it would be so killer to sing for a career.”
Tommy squints up at him. “You already do that.”
“No, I mean like sing pop music, like be the headliner. I think I’m good enough.”
Tommy nods. “You’re for sure good enough. You should go for it. Can’t win if you don’t play.”
Adam scans the landscape, nodding his head slowly. “Have you seen that American Idol show?”
“I’ve heard of it. Never watched it.”
“I’m thinking of auditioning.”
It sounds weird to Tommy, but hey, whatever it takes to get noticed. He’s not going to judge someone trying to make it in the music business. “I bet you’d blow them all away.”
Adam puts his arm around Tommy’s shoulders and snugs him close. “What if we just stayed here forever and didn’t go back down to the parking garage?”
“They’ll find your car and tow it.”
“It’ll be worth it.”
“Yeah, ha. Who knew I’d like a museum?”
Adam grins. “Some day I’m going to take you a poetry slam and then an opera.”
Those threats don’t bother Tommy at all. Over the space of a few months he’s become great friends, maybe best friends, with Adam. Because Adam is just plain awesome. He feels ready to share more of himself with Adam; it’s his turn to invite Adam to something: it’s time for Adam to get to know Tommy’s awful male friends, the ones who fart and spit and belch and scratch their armpits and go to titty bars. It’s kind of a test. If Adam can put up with these guys, then nothing will chase him away.
Mike and Tommy and Isaac and a bunch of their guy friends have a tradition of going to a back-country campsite in the Angeles National Forest for a Saturday night of drinking and shooting the shit and swimming in a waterfall-fed pool. They tend not to ask their chick friends along because they assume (correctly as Sophie once made very clear) that women don’t want to hang around men drinking themselves ill around a fire pit in a place where regular showers and toilets aren’t readily available. Mike already asked Ravi to come, though, so Tommy figures anyone at all is welcome.
“Camping?” Adam looks very uncertain. “As in outdoors?”
“Duh,” says Tommy. “It’s easy and fun. No big deal.”
“My dad and brother used to go camping in Anza-Borrego but I was allowed to beg off. I don’t really like sweating that much.”
“That was a desert, this is a forest. You’ll love it,” Tommy declares confidently, while considering the likelihood of his sister letting him bum an extra sleeping bag off her. “Think Sutan might like to come?”
The hike to the campsite is grueling, at least for the one who has to carry the ice chest of beer. Other than that they have some sleeping bags, burgers to grill in a small cooler, and precious little else.
Their usual camping spot with the handy if illegal rock-lined fire pit is empty; clearly it hasn’t been used in months.
The beer drinking commences immediately. In Sutan's case, he brought a flask of martini mix. It’s late afternoon, so the mountains are still warm and bright. The campsite gets set up, with Mike barking out instructions about not pooping or peeing near the stream, and no leaving cigarette butts in the dirt.
“We’re not going to set the forest on fire, are we?” Adam asks Tommy. He looks worried.
“Naw, we know how to handle a fire,” Tommy says. “Come here, I’ll show you where we can put the sleeping bags.”
“Are there snakes?”
“Probably? They won’t bug us, trust me.” But Tommy can tell that Adam doesn’t trust him one bit.
“Are there bears?”
“I don’t think so.”
“There’s a place called Big Bear just down the road. I looked on Wikipedia before we left.”
Tommy scratches the stubbly side of his head. “Maybe the bears all live down there?”
Adam isn’t satisfied. “Is there a tent at least?”
Tommy blows his bangs out of his eyes. “You wanted a tent? You couldn’t tell me back in L.A.? I thought you said you went to that Burning Man thing in the desert?”
“We stayed in someone’s RV.”
“Lame,” says Tommy. “This is the real thing here. Your manliness will increase by three sizes today. Be a man, son.”
Adam laughs. “I’m not worried about my manliness. We don’t all aspire to be John Wayne.”
“You can just enjoy my manliness, in that case,” Tommy says. He shows Adam how to clear a spot of rocks and then they lay out the sleeping bags, keeping them fully zipped up. “I’m not gonna lie, it’ll be lumpier than your sofa, even, but a night out in the woods is totally worth it.”
Ravi shows up and tosses his sleeping bag next to Tommy’s.
“Um,” Tommy says, his eyes jerking up to Adam’s with a panicked help me look.
Adam stares wide-eyed, just as disturbed.
“Hey, Tommy,” Ravi says, maneuvering between Adam and Tommy, “how about a walk through the woods?”
Tommy gestures wordlessly.
“I’ll come with,” Adam throws in decisively.
Ravi glares at Adam. “We don’t need you.”
“Yeah, we do,” Tommy counters. “What if there’s a bear?”
Adam frowns. “I wouldn’t be any good in that situation. I’d run like a college co-ed in a horror flick.”
“You shouldn’t come. I won’t be able to save you,” Ravi says, as though Adam had even suggested requiring such a thing from him. “I’ll be busy saving Tommy.”
“Wait a minute, I’d save Tommy first and then run,” Adam adds as an afterthought.
“You’ll be half a mile away. I’ll be the one saving Tommy,” Ravi insists.
“Dude!” Tommy says. “I got this! I do not need to be saved, guys.”
He sets off fast down a path through tall trees. He only lets up when the trees open up to a small pool fed by a straggling waterfall, where several of the guys are already skinny-dipping. Ravi tries hard to entice Tommy to join them but Tommy refuses to go in the water. Ravi calls them chicken and strips down and belly-flops into the midst of the splashing.
“Sutan likes my friends,” Tommy says, grinning.
“He gets along with everyone,” says Adam. “You might not think it at first, but he’s just so cool and funny and laid back that everyone likes him.”
Tommy nods. “I like him a lot.”
“I’m kind of surprised he’s taking so well to nature, no lie.”
“You’ve been deprived,” Tommy says with a smirk. “Sutan is smart.”
“Do you like swimming? Want to go in?” asks Adam.
Tommy shrugs. “I don’t want to. But you shouldn’t stay out of the water on my account.”
Adam shakes his head. “Pass.”
Tommy shoves his hands in his pockets and rocks on his heels. “Hey, Adam?”
“Hmmm?” Adam looks up from his iPhone, which he’s been using to identify species of pine trees. Apparently he's got a special phone that gets a signal anywhere at all.
“Wanna see my favorite place?”
“Sure.”
Tommy doesn’t wait to see if Adam follows. He heads back down the path through the trees. Adam catches up pretty soon and they follow a fork in the trail for a half-mile or so until the trees open up and there’s a broad, high vista of mountains and hills and trees and boulders and sky and nothing else.
“Amazing,” says Adam, stopping beside Tommy to look over the valley. “This is so beautiful.”
“Toldya.” Tommy stands near the cliff edge, hands on hips, enjoying the waning sunlight.
Adam sniffs. “It even smells good, all fresh and piney.” He pulls out his iPhone. “I think that’s the Jeffrey pine that smells so amazing. It’s supposed to smell like a vanilla bean.”
“Put away your phone, dork,” Tommy teases. “Just enjoy it.” But he’s glad now, because he can see that Adam is really enjoying it. The sunlight on Adam’s face makes his freckles almost glow. There might be a smudge of leftover eyeliner around Adam’s eyes, but mostly his face is clean of makeup, just like Tommy’s. No point in dressing up to hang out in the forest with a bunch of men who think it’s okay to fart at will so long as no members of the fairer sex are in evidence.
“Thanks for bringing me here,” Adam says, beaming.
Tommy grins back and nods. “Wanna head back and help Mike with the burgers? That way we get first dibs.”
It’s almost dark when they find the campsite. Tommy stokes the fire that Mike started until it grows high and dances merrily. Burgers are sizzling on a small hibachi.
“Pull up a rock,” he says as others drag in, wearing dampish clothing. Mike flips the burgers until they’re half-burnt and then slams them into fire-toasted rolls and passes them around.
“Everything tastes better cooked outdoors,” announces Dalton, Mike’s crazy-ass friend who’s visiting from Austin.
“Don’t no one give their food to any bears or coyotes,” says Oracio, Tommy’s best friend who grew up on the same street in Burbank.
Adam looks at Tommy, doing that wide-eyed thing again. Tommy shakes his head minutely and says quietly, “He’s trying to get a rise out of the noobs. Hey, puta!” he hollers. “Toss me a brew.”
Oracio picks one from the cooler and tosses it. Tommy catches it smoothly and pops the top.
“We got scotch, tequila and vodka,” Oracio says. “Just in case.” He pours scotch into a plastic cup and hands it down to Sutan. “Who else?”
“Never Have I Ever!” Isaac howls.
“Oh my gawd no,” Mike says immediately.
“I want to!” Ravi interrupts.
“So we’re teenage girls now?” Mike asks no one in particular.
“Yes!” Ravi says excitedly. “Me first! Never have I ever… got blown by a drag queen.”
Isaac spits beer across the fire.
“Ew, dude,” says Tommy, wiping beer off his arm.
“Why does it always have to be about sex?” Mike whines. “Use some imagination for a change.”
Ravi flips Mike off casually. “So we’re grownup women feminists now?”
“Hey, if the foo shits -“
Ravi rolls his eyes. “Okay, try this, hotshot. Never have I ever… played with Barbie dolls.”
God damn it. Tommy tosses off a shot. “What? My cousin has two little girls, okay?” He’s glad to see that Adam also takes a drink. At least he’s not the only one who’s played with dolls.
Ravi flips Tommy off. “Your turn,” Ravi says bitchily, pointing at Mike.
“It’s rude to point,” Isaac says.
Ravi points at Isaac and then flips him off. Isaac breaks into guffaws of laughter.
Mike scrunches up his face. “Okay, I’ve never played Smoke on the Water at a live gig.”
No one drinks. “This means you have to take the drink,” Isaac says helpfully.
“Are we playing that version?” Mike groans.
“Definitely,” Isaac says. “Drink up, dick.”
Dalton raises his hand. “I’ve never read Moby Dick. ”
Sutan, Ravi and Adam are the only ones who drink.
“Aha, I knew it,” Sutan says. “We’re the only cultured ones sitting around this fire.”
“It’s a great book,” Adam says to Tommy. “Not what you might be expecting. You can borrow my Kindle and read it.”
Tommy thinks that’s pretty sweet of Adam but he couldn’t even make it through a thin book. He smiles for Adam’s sake, though.
“I’ve never lied to a priest,” Adam announces.
“You’ve never been to a priest!” Sutan says. “You’re not fucking Catholic!”
“Is a bear Catholic?” Isaac muses randomly. “Does the pope shit in the woods?”
“Unlikely,” Adam opines.
“Easy for you to say, infidel dog,” Sutan snarls.
“Haha, just drink up,” Adam says, watching him and Tommy with glee.
Tommy downs a slug of beer dutifully, belches, and says, “I’ve never been to Kentucky,” because he knows Adam has.
“What’s Kentucky?” asks Oracio.
“Just drink,” Tommy replies.
“Why? I’ve never been there.”
“Just drink. You know you want to.”
“I never kissed a girl,” Sutan says.
Adam groans. “You shit. Now you’ve outed me.” He empties his plastic cup and pours more. He winks at Tommy, who is staring hard at him.
“I’ve never stolen anything,” says Isaac.
Oh fuck, Tommy thinks. I’m going to be so drunk. Also, Adam side-eyes him. Uh oh, he disappointed Adam. “Guitar strings,” he whispers. “I never had any money when I was a kid.”
Adam still looks disappointed. Fuck, can’t please everyone, Tommy thinks. “Oracio, buddy, whatcha got?”
Oracio grins wickedly. “I never kissed a boy.”
The outing around the fire isn’t exactly earth-shattering. Ravi and Adam and Sutan are the only ones. At this point, Tommy feels drunk enough that he starts thinking about what it might be like to kiss a boy. Especially one like Adam, say.
“We could play spin the bottle,” Ravi says, spreading fear and loathing.
“What? No! We’re all guys,” Mike says.
“Some of us are gay,” Sutan says with a glare.
“So what?” says Mike. “You want to kiss your buddy? Hell, you want to kiss me?”
“Not really,” Sutan admits.
Ravi snorts. “Some of you really need to see what it’s like to kiss a guy. It’s better than girls! Here, I’ll show you.” He practically leaps across the fire and lands next to Tommy, who gets his hand up in the nick of time to avoid Ravi’s lips on his; instead he winds up kissing the back of his own hand and feels Ravi’s tongue on his palm. Ewwww!
“How many times I gotta tell you, I’m not gay!” Tommy yells, as everyone else except Adam breaks into loud laughter. Tommy crawls over to the other side of Adam so he can be away from Ravi.
“Can’t blame a guy for trying,” Ravi says reasonably.
“I’ll protect you,” Adam says, tucking Tommy under his arm. “Come on, Ravi, you have to respect Tommy’s sexuality.”
Ravi fumes. “Kinsey scale.”
Adam blinks because that’s his line.
“No harm, no foul,” Tommy says sourly. “Just no spin the fucking bottle, okay? Oracio, I need more scotch or whatever you got the most of over there.”
They get very drunk. And then they tell scary stories. Tommy recycles something from a horror movie he saw once. Dalton tells a real story about a rattlesnake that woke up in his sleeping bag with him in Texas. Adam gives a highly dramatic reading of Poe’s The Raven off his iPad and gets roundly mocked for bringing so much tech to the primeval forest, even though the poem is greatly appreciated. Ravi tells a horrifically frightening and unusually realistic story about some campers and a serial killer escaped from an insane asylum.
Continue on to Part 4 http://montmorency.livejournal.com/54746.html