"Southside Of Heaven" (AU, Adam/Kris, NC-17, 2 of 2)
Title: "Southside Of Heaven" (2 of 2)
Author: asouthernthing
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Adam Lambert/Kris Allen
Warnings: Sex, serious non-experimental drug use, needles/syringes, language
Word Count: 18,288
Summary: AU about drugs, love, and a coffee shop called the Magic Bean.
Notes: Notes: Beta by milliejupiter, who is awesome in every way and saw what I was trying to do without even having to ask. Please read the expanded author's notes if you have further questions about the warnings above, or if you'd like to see the playlist/soundtrack. Part one is here. And check out the amazeballs movie poster that katekat1010 made here!.
- - - - -
Christmas morning breaks and Kris thinks it’s not just the tail end of the year but the end of an old life, for him and for Adam, and that maybe this time things will work out.
Except they don’t. Adam makes it all the way through an early dinner before he starts to freak out, and when Kris comes out of the bathroom he finds Adam sweating profusely and paranoid, hiding in Kris’s closet floor. “I think if I did just a little, it would take the edge off and I’d feel better and tomorrow I could go without it. Please?” he says to Kris, and the wonder is that Adam is actually asking permission. That has to mean something, right? Kris thinks.
He wants to say no, this is ridiculous; if you do this you have to leave forever, because Adam made him a promise and he fully expects him to keep it. But this has to be hard on anyone, and the look on Adam’s face says he’s in pain and Kris can’t handle that look; it fucks him up way too much.
“Just a little,” Kris relents, and Adam breathes a sigh of relief as he crawls across the floor to grab his bag. “Tomorrow it’s done, Adam. It’s really and truly done. No more.”
“No more,” Adam says, holding his right hand up as if he’s swearing it.
- - - - -
The next morning when Kris goes over to the Magic Bean to pick up breakfast, Matt does a double take when he comes through the door. “Jesus, have you even left the house since the two of you flew out of here the other night? Are you stocking up on condoms and lube while you’re out?”
“Fuck off, Matt,” Kris says, and Matt pretends to be stunned by Kris’s use of foul language.
“You’re spending too much time around Adam, my friend,” he says as he snaps lids on the usual morning order. “He’s given you a potty mouth. Just be careful that he doesn’t give you something else.”
“We’re not sleeping together,” Kris insists, and Matt shakes his head.
“Not yet, anyway. I know you, and I know Adam, and the air’s been practically crackling with sexual tension since the day I hired him and you came in with your cheesy business cards.”
“Hey, those were awesome business cards. I designed them myself,” Kris protests.
“That’s kind of my point,” Matt retorts before getting back to the original subject. “If you haven’t slept together yet, then it’s out of some sort of sense of honor on your part or some shit, because otherwise you two would have been doing it since day one. I’m just saying you should be careful. I like him just fine other than that two week freakout he had, and he can sing his ass off. But you’re my friend, probably my closest friend, and I don’t want you over at the clinic finding out you’ve got something that penicillin can’t get rid of, okay?” It’s as close as Matt is ever going to get to telling Kris to step the hell off Adam’s dick until he’s kicked his drug problem, and Kris gets that.
He leans over and pats Matt on the shoulder, then picks up his bag and his coffee carrier. “You’re a good friend, Matt.”
“I do what I can,” Matt says.
- - - - -
When Kris gets home, Adam is on the couch and his eyes look strange. He sets the coffee down on the hallway table next to the Christmas tree he hasn’t bothered dismantling yet and leans over the couch to check on him.
Adam’s eyes are rolling back in his head and he’s actually smiling through whatever this is and Kris is scared that he’s having some sort of detox crisis when he notices the syringe, needle still hanging from the bend of Adam’s arm.
“Jesus, Adam,” Kris says, and yanks it out without caring if it hurts or if it’s the right thing to do. He tries to pull Adam off the couch and wonders what to do now - put him in the shower, maybe, he thinks, like he always sees on television, but Adam is total and complete dead weight.
Then Adam groans and his eyes come into focus; he turns that strange, glazed-over smile on Kris. “Everything’s… okay,” he says, voice cracking. “Don’t worry. It’s supposed to be like this.”
”It’s supposed to be like this?” Kris repeats, feeling like he’s out of the loop.
Adam nods, practically in slow motion. “This is the way it always starts out. It’s amazing, Kris. I’m so warm.” He sits up on the couch like he’s fighting against water and pulls his shirt over his head, tossing it to the floor. “Everything always looks soft… the colors are so intense.” And then Adam is standing up on unsteady feet and taking off his pants and oh Jesus, he’s totally not wearing underwear, Kris realizes.
“You’re so intense right now,” Adam says, moving closer to touch his forehead to Kris’s. “You’re beautiful - do you know how beautiful you really are?” He kisses Kris then, soft and gentle and nothing like any of the kisses they’ve shared in the past. And then he brings their bodies together and Kris can feel him, hard again but this time without the benefit of clothing.
Willpower, Kris thinks. He repeats it in his head like a mantra, but he still has to tap every ounce of strength he has to back away. “Not like this,” he says quietly. “Why, Adam? Why do you keep doing this?”
Adam looks at the floor, scratching one arm absently. “I don’t know,” he says after a moment. “I just had to. I don’t know why.” And then he’s leaning over the arm of Kris’s couch and emptying the few contents of his stomach into an ugly bronze vase that Kris’s mom bought for decoration the last time she visited.
“I’m really tired of being sick,” Adam says after he’s finished, collapsing onto the loveseat.
- - - - -
Kris spends the rest of his morning in his easy chair, watching Adam cycle through periods of sleep. It’s not rest he’s getting, Kris realizes - Adam wakes every half-hour or so, giving Kris a look that melts his heart and turns him on all at once. This is sick, Kris thinks, but he can’t find it anywhere inside to control it.
Adam wakes up for good in the late afternoon, stretching out like Rip Van Winkle after a hundred years’ sleep, his long frame practically hanging off the loveseat. “Anything exciting happen today?” he asks between yawns.
Kris thinks of a half dozen angry replies, but nothing in him really wants to be angry at Adam. The only thing he feels at that moment is defeat. “No,” he says. “Get your clothes on and we’ll get you some food.”
- - - - -
They spend the end of the year together and Kris holds fast to his resolve that there’s no way he’s going to sleep with Adam when he’s high, but oh God does he want to. Adam has to work until eleven-thirty and Kris goes to see him sing before they go back to his place to split a bottle of champagne.
“How long can you wait?” Kris asks. They’re curled up in his bed and he thinks Adam is the beautiful one, dressed in silver and black all over; even his eye makeup is dark and glittering. Still, Kris misses the freckles underneath the careful layer of foundation.
Adam looks at the clock, then rolls over to face Kris. “Maybe another hour or two,” he says quietly. “I don’t want you to see me sick again.”
“I can handle sick. I don’t want to see you high again,” Kris tells him, but it happens anyway.
For the first time Kris watches as Adam creates the solution with water, heat, and the contents of a small plastic baggie. He sees everything as Adam soaks it up into a cotton ball, draws back the plunger and partially fills the syringe. And he’s there when Adam slips the needle into a vein behind his knee, and understands why there are so few visible track marks on his arms.
“Less convenient this way,” Adam says lazily, “but easier to hide.” And Kris is there when the euphoria sets in and Adam is tugging at Kris’s pants then, almost begging. “Let me see you,” he’s pleading, looking at Kris like he wants to devour him. “We don’t have to do anything. I just want to look.”
This is how Kris begins his New Year: completely naked in his bed, Adam’s arms heavy around him as the sun comes up, his head resting on Kris’s shoulder as he sleeps.
- - - - -
Kris knows absolutely nothing about the nature of addiction, nothing about the dark substance that Adam keeps pumping into his veins, and he spends the time between the beginning of the year and Valentine’s Day educating himself on the topic. “This is so much worse than I thought,” he tells Matt one morning as he picks up breakfast. “And it’s getting worse. When we met him, he wasn’t like this. Back then he could function like a normal person, and now it’s a challenge getting him alert enough to go to work every night.”
“Addictions progress,” Matt says. “Anything you can get dependent on works like that. At first you just need a little, and then your body starts tolerating it, and then you need more and more of it to get that good feeling back. Next thing you know you’re wearing a skirt in Tijuana trying to make some spare change for a hit.”
“Is this a personal experience I should know about?” Kris asks, raising a brow.
“Nah,” Matt says. “I hear things. Besides, I work with coffee. What’s more addictive than caffeine?”
- - - - -
“Soon.” Adam keeps saying like the word is supposed to soothe Kris and assure him that it really will happen this time. “I’ve even started doing less.” Kris believes him, not because he looks better or becomes more functional, but because Adam is sick more often. He reads that some people like to go longer, actually start the withdrawal process before shooting up again because the high is better that way.
On Valentine’s Day, Kris shows up to take Adam to lunch, and he looks like total shit. “I need sunglasses,” he groans as Kris pulls him out the door.
Kris agrees, because Adam looks like he’s been ran over by a bus one too many times, but he shakes his head. “Forget the sunglasses. You’ll live.”
The lunch itself is decent, and Adam has only a salad, and he keeps talking about quitting to the point where Kris thinks he might scream if he hears the word again. “I think I can do it now,” Adam says as he bites into a cherry tomato. “I haven’t really tried to quit before, but I think now’s the time. It’s going to happen soon.”
And Kris can’t figure it out - why now? Why now instead of Christmas, when he said he would, or months ago when he got sick at Kris’s parents house? Why start in the first place? He’s fairly sure he’ll never understand. “So when are you going to finally shut up and do it?” he says, and that’s when Adam snaps at him, tells Kris that it makes him feel nothing.
They spend the rest of the lunch in silence, and Kris doesn’t show up for Adam’s set that night like he promised he would. Instead, he spends his night at home, grading papers on famous musicians and using his laptop to reread the same pages he’s saved on the effects of Adam’s drug of choice on the body and mind.
- - - - -
The end comes slowly, but it does come.
The first thing that happens is that Adam’s voice starts to go. Kris and Matt go to hear him sing one night and it’s awful, actually - his voice cracks after the first verse of his second song, and by the time he comes off stage, Kris can tell that he’s embarrassed. He sends a text message (come home w/me tonight, we’ll wait on you); Adam comes out a half hour later dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and doesn’t say a word all the way to Kris’s apartment.
”I just need some rest,” he tells Kris the next morning. “Two sets a night, four nights a week - it’s just wearing me down.” Kris knows he’s full of shit because Adam has the kind of voice that could crumble walls night after night if he took care of it. It has nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with the fact that he needs to use three times a day now; it’s the habit that sends him running to the bathroom and losing the remnants of whatever food he’s managed to keep down that day, damaging his voice in the process.
By the end of March, Adam can’t sing at all, and he gets fired. “Los Angeles is a town with a lot of talented people,” he rationalizes; Kris is amazed at how calmly he handles it. “If I can’t do the job anymore, then of course some of the other talented people in this town should take my place.”
”Yeah, if they’d only hire those talented people,” Matt says. “Did you even hear the people that used to play before you? Really?”
By mid-April the money’s gone and Kris notices that Adam has mellowed out even more, that more often than not he’s nodding off on the sofa when he comes over for dinner; when he brings food by in the mornings, it takes him at least ten minutes to get Adam to the door.
By the first of May it doesn’t matter, because Adam can’t find another job and he was a month behind on his rent, anyway, before he got fired. He loses his apartment and Kris and Matt spend an afternoon hauling what few belongings he has over to Kris’s apartment.
”There have to be some ground rules,” Kris says after the last box is unloaded and Matt leaves. “I guess we should have talked about this beforehand.”
“I already know what you’re about to say,” Adam says, falling onto Kris’s sofa and covering his face with a cushion. His voice is muffled through the fabric. “I have to stop. I know.”
Kris stares at his shoes. “I’d like you to, yeah,” he says. “But at this point, you’ve broken so many promises… I don’t even believe it anymore, so there’s no point in asking.” Adam starts to speak, but this time Kris cuts him off with a raised hand. “Let me finish. All I ask is that you don’t endanger yourself any more than necessary and that you don’t do this without me.” Kris is terrified that Adam will end up in a building someplace where no one gives a damn and he’ll stop breathing in a hallway, or choke on his own vomit. “And I don’t know what you’ve been doing for money over the last few weeks, but it stops here. Okay?”
“I have to make money somehow,” Adam starts, but Kris stops him again.
“We’ll figure it out. You’re not going to get yourself in trouble, remember?”
Adam smiles at him then, face full of angles and lines. “I remember.”
- - - - -
The last time comes one night when Kris has to work late - the last day of school has come and gone, and all that’s left are a few inservice days before Kris can return to his Converse and jeans for the next eight weeks. Kris goes in late in the mornings and stays later at night because Adam is usually asleep and doesn’t start functioning until he gets home. Even through all the misery, Kris still loves him, still wants every possible waking minute with him. Enabler, he thinks meanly. You use your love as an excuse for the easy way. Making him change is much harder.
It’s the second week of June and the days are already unreasonably hot, but he’s grateful for the Los Angeles weather - it’ll never be totally cool here, but Arkansas is always roasting by this time each year and the idea of walking anywhere in the heat would have been insane.
The sun is going down as he opens his front door, but Adam’s never gotten up to turn on any lights. “You home?” Kris says quietly as he treads quietly down the hall.
And then he hears the laughing as Adam comes out of the bathroom, and he doesn’t know what Adam’s done this time but he knows it can’t be good. He’s got makeup on and he’s dressed in black leather pants with boots to match, but he hasn’t put on a shirt and his hair is out of place. Kris steps past him into the bathroom; there are makeup vials and tubes all over the floor, and a capped, unused syringe in the sink. The mirror attached to the medicine cabinet is shattered. When Kris looks down he notices that Adam’s left hand is cut and bleeding, red splatters on the hall floor next to him. And all the while, Adam is laughing.
“I don’t know why it’s so funny,” he says as he tries to catch his breath. “I just looked in the mirror and oh my God, Kris, have you seen the way I look now? I look like death. Walking, talking, absolute fucking death.”
“It’s gone pretty far,” Kris says carefully. He knows this look on Adam’s face -he’s not high yet, but he hasn’t used yet, either - and his moods switch back and forth so quickly when he’s in between like this. Kris isn’t willing to push it.
“It could probably go farther,” Adam says. Crazed, Kris thinks as he stares at the way Adam looks at that moment. This is what people mean when they say somebody look crazed. “I know people that shoot up five or six times a day. I used to know kids who stole from their families.” Kris flinches, thinking of the morning he took the pills from his mom’s medicine cabinet that she never noticed or never cared about because he never heard a word about it. Adam’s voice gets higher and more frantic as he continues. “I know people who spend hours at a time on the fucking nod, just flipping in and out of consciousness on strangers’ couches all the time. I’m not that bad yet, am I? Tell me it’s not gotten that bad,” he pleads, grabbing Kris’s hand and tugging at his fingertips.
“It’s not that far off,” Kris says, pulling his hand away. There are streaks of Adam’s blood smeared over his knuckles. “I keep thinking that one day I’m going to come in and find you dead, or that you’ve sold everything in the apartment for another high. Or that something else is gonna come along and make you sicker than you are now.” He thinks about what Matt implied all those months ago, about the things Adam might pick up on his quest for the next hit. Something in Kris changes then, tangled and twisted and dark, deep down inside - the idea of Adam’s mouth on some other man’s dick, or letting some guy fuck him for money or drugs makes him physically ill. He leans against the wall and slides down to the floor, letting a deep breath out. “I can’t do it anymore, Adam. Something has to give.”
Adam kneels down beside him and Kris can literally hear the pop of his kneecaps as he goes down. “One last go,” Adam promises, and he takes Kris’s face in both hands, forces him to make eye contact. “I have enough here for one last time, and then I’ll quit. Don’t give me any more money, and don’t let me out of your sight. Lock me in the apartment if you have to.”
“I’ve heard this before,” Kris says, and tries to look away, but Adam won’t let him. His eyes are brighter than usual and there’s something in them that Kris hasn’t seen in a long time: clarity. “If you want to stop, if you’re ready, then let’s flush whatever’s left down the toilet and throw out the leather case you keep in your bag. Right now. Or else it’ll just turn out like every other day, and you know it.”
Adam flinches, but he nods in agreement. “You’re right to not believe me.” He sits all the way down on the floor and drapes his legs over Kris’s lap. “I’ve fucked up a lot. But I want to try now.” His voice breaks and Kris is afraid that he’s about to cry, but Adam pulls it together. “I’ve lost my job. I’ve lost my apartment and none of my clothes fit right anymore. I haven’t talked to anyone in my family for six months. And I’m going to lose you if I don’t clean the fuck up,” he says, and shakes his head when Kris starts to protest. “We both know you’ve reached the end. And I think I’ve already lost myself, and I’m sick of that, Kris. I don’t like myself very much right now. I don’t want any of that anymore.”
There’s no trace of reluctance on Adam’s face, nothing that Kris recognizes other than regret and that fearful look that he remembers so well from Thanksgiving at his mom’s house. “If you’re sure,” Kris starts, and Adam nods.
They start to stand up and Kris has to help Adam off the floor. The night in Arkansas weighs heavily on his mind, and the question that’s been on his mind forever falls out of his mouth before he can even scramble to catch it. “You didn’t use when you were at my mom’s house in Arkansas. You had to know what would happen if you didn’t use, so why didn’t you?”
“I was afraid to carry anything on the plane with me,” Adam explains. “I didn’t think your parents would be okay with your future boyfriend getting arrested and going to prison. And I didn’t want to get high right there in your mom’s house. And there was you, of course.”
”Me?” Kris asks. “What about me?”
Adam rolls his eyes and takes Kris’s hand, pulling him toward the bedroom. “I didn’t want you to know about my problems when things were so amazing. Really, Kristopher,” he laughs. “If you haven’t figured out that I’m hopelessly in love with you by now, I may need to rethink my feelings.”
“Oh.” And Kris feels kind of dumb because no, he totally didn’t realize that the head-over-heels feeling was mutual. Maybe he doesn’t trust it yet - maybe he never thought about it because everything with Adam seems to contradict itself in a mixture of reality and haze. “Wait, future boyfriend?”
”That’s exactly what I said,” Adam says solemnly. “Still in the future at this point, yeah, but I think it’s still going to happen. You want it to happen, right?” He looks vulnerable standing there in the doorway, the only illumination on his face coming in from the last traces of daylight through the windows.
Kris nods; he picks up Adam’s cut hand and kisses it. “I always have.”
- - - - -
Kris watches as Adam flushes the rest of his supply. They throw the kit, case and all, into a garbage bag, then walk out to the dumpster behind the apartment building together. Kris goes on a midnight grocery store run for Gatorade, ibuprofen, and chicken broth and makes Adam go with him. He’s read too much on what’s going to happen next; what happened in Arkansas was only a preview. Kris sends Matt a text when they get home (gonna be MIA for the next few days, don’t get any ideas. this has nothing to do with sex, pervert), then he calls his boss and feigns a sudden onset of the flu. He and Adam go to bed relatively early.
The yawning and the agitation start around three AM. Adam doesn’t sleep and he can’t hold still, so Kris stays awake with him. They sit on the bedroom floor as Adam rocks back and forth, but he doesn’t want Kris to touch him. By the time the sun rises Adam’s nose is running and tears are streaming from his eyes, even though he’s not actually crying. Kris makes him drink a glass of water, then part of a Gatorade, and forces him into the shower.
He undresses and climbs in with him, but it’s the least erotic scenario Kris can ever imagine. Adam leans against the wall with his head tilted forward as Kris washes his hair, then helps him turn around to get under the spray and rinse. “Don’t leave me, please,” he pleads as Kris starts to give him a second to get dressed, and Kris knows he doesn’t just mean don’t leave the room.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Kris promises.
When evening hits so do the stomach pains. Adam spends two hours in the bathroom and Kris cringes every time he hears Adam retch through the doorway.
The next morning brings body aches; Kris tries to sleep but Adam’s still up, still going, and he tosses and turns and sweats through the sheets that were changed the night before. The ibuprofen he keeps feeding to Adam every three and a half hours isn’t cutting it, isn’t even taking the edge off the pain like Kris thought it would, and he’s seriously thinking about taking Adam to the hospital when there’s a knock on the door.
“It would be you,” Kris says as he answers the door. Matt has a brown bag in one hand and a green thermos in the other and he pushes into the apartment like he owns it.
“You send a cryptic text, you don’t show up for breakfast, and you don’t answer my phone calls,” Matt says, pulling a pastry out of the brown bag and forcing it into Kris’s hands.
Kris takes a bite and gets a mouthful of cream cheese. He thinks it might be the best thing he’s ever eaten, even better than his mom’s hamburger steak. “I put the phone on silent,” he says after he finishes chewing.
”Yeah, I gathered that, considering it rang and rang and you never picked up,” Matt says, rolling his eyes. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t being held hostage or that you hadn’t skipped town without confessing your undying love for me.”
”Never.” Kris takes two mugs out of the cabinet above the stove and starts pouring coffee from Matt’s thermos. The aroma is amazing. “Wow, you brought the good stuff today. No house blend when you’re making at-home visits, huh?”
“Something like that. It’s Adam, isn’t it?” Matt says, dropping the casual banter. “He’s either overdosed or he’s freaking out or he’s ran off with all your money. Or all of the above.”
“None of the above,” Kris tells him, and walks back to the bedroom door. “He’s detoxing. Come look.”
Matt peeks through the doorway and Adam raises his head. “Oh,” he says, and his head drops back on the pillow. “It’s you.”
“Why do I keep hearing that from you two? Hell yeah, it’s me,” Matt says. “You could sound a little more excited now that I’ve graced you with my presence. How many of your other friends showed up for this party?”
“How many of my friends aren’t strung out themselves, or pissed at me for being strung out for so damn long?” Adam says weakly, and raises one shaky hand in the air to give Matt the finger.
“Yeah, I can see how that would be a problem,” Matt retorts. “You sure that you don’t want to go to a hospital for this or something?”
“No,” Adam says emphatically. “They’ll just fill me full of prescriptions, and I’ll be by myself. I don’t want to be in some strange place by myself right now.” He looks over Matt’s shoulder at Kris, eyes pleading.
“This is what he wants,” Kris says softly, and puts the idea of going to the hospital aside for good.
Matt contemplates this for a second, then nods. “Okay,” he says, and pulls out a set of keys. “Take these. Go take a nap at my house. I’ll take over for a while.”
Kris starts to protest, but Matt talks over him, waving the keys in front of his face. “It’s not going to kill anyone for me to watch out for him for a while. Pack a bag, go over to my place, get a shower and take a nap.”
“It’s a lot of work,” Kris insists, but he takes the keys anyway. “He needs to get up and walk sometimes. There’s Gatorade in the fridge and soup in the cabinet. If he sweats through the sheets or gets sick, he may have to get in the shower, and then you should just call and I’ll come back right away because-“
“You act like I’ve never seen a naked dude before,” Matt says, rolling his eyes. “If he gets sick or needs clean sheets, I can handle that. Just get some rest, okay? You look like shit.”
“Thanks. That makes me feel great,” Kris says sarcastically, but he puts one hand on Matt’s shoulder and gives him his best serious look. “Really, though, you don’t have to do this.”
“Really, though, I do,” Matt returns. “You look like you’re about to pass out on your feet. Now go, and leave the coffee here for me, because I’m clearly gonna need it. There’s a fresh cup waiting for you at the store.”
- - - - -
Danny meets Kris at the doorway of the Magic Bean. He’s wearing one of the store’s usual green aprons and holding a tall Styrofoam cup with a lid in his hand. “Matt called. He said you needed this,” he says, putting the cup in Kris’s hand. “Hope it tastes okay.”
”When did you start working here?” Kris asks him.
“Not too long ago,” Danny tells him. “I spent enough time here anyway, and one day Matt was just like, ‘you need to quit moping and get a job.’ It wasn’t bad advice. And I get free coffee now, which is awesome, but Matt says it’s not fair for employees to participate in poetry nights, which was kind of a downer.”
“Listen to Matt,” Kris advises. “He’s wise about some things.”
Matt’s apartment is on the second floor of the building that houses the Magic Bean; Kris uses the inside entrance through the storeroom instead of taking the steep, rickety stairs outside that lead to the main entrance. The door opens in Matt’s hallway; his apartment smells like lemons and hardwood floor polish, which is a significant upgrade from the musky scent of sweat and sickness that permeates the air at Kris’s place right now.
The first thing he does is turn on the TV and finish his coffee; then he checks his overflowing voicemail inbox. He can tell which ones are Matt’s because they all start out with “Why aren’t you answering your phone?” so he deletes those right away. There are two from his boss, asking how he’s feeling and if he’s capable of finishing up the last bit of paperwork he needs to do at home. Kris makes a mental note to call him at home later. There’s one from his mom, and he can’t handle talking to her right now, so he saves that one and goes to take a shower.
- - - - -
“That was not a nap,” Matt says when Kris returns a few hours later. “You weren’t gone long enough to have taken a real nap. That was like, a micro nap. A power nap. Try again.”
“I couldn’t stay asleep,” Kris says, and hands him a handful of printouts. “I hooked my laptop up to your printer. Take a look at these and tell me what you think.”
Matt sits down on the loveseat and goes through the papers. “Rehab,” he says out loud as he goes through the info that Kris found, “is fucking expensive. If he can even get in, how will he pay for all this?”
“These aren’t even the most expensive ones I found,” Kris tells him. “I called around. The free places won’t have a bed open for months, and the sliding-scale places are just as bad. The last place I called gave me the names of these places.”
“Are these hard numbers?” Matt wants to know.
Kris shakes his head. “If he needs a stay longer than a month, that number goes up. I told them that he was detoxing on his own, though, and they didn’t like that and pretty much implied that we were total idiots, but it brought the figure down a little bit. I think,” he says, “I’ve got the money in savings for about half the stay, and it’ll be hard, but I can probably come up with the rest if I really use all my resources.” He thinks he might have to ask his parents for a short-term loan, and maybe max out one of his credit cards, and both of those things are really fucked up. But this is for Adam, he thinks, and he’s made up his mind. They’ve made it this far already, and Kris is ready to bank on something real.
Matt’s quiet for a long moment, then looks up from the printouts. “You’re really in love with him, aren’t you? Like, crazy in love with him, apparently. Enough to drain your savings account on something that isn’t anywhere near a sure thing. He could still relapse. He probably will relapse at some point, especially if he’s not totally ready to quit after all.”
Kris nods, then gives a little shrug. He’s thought it over so much, and it’s not the first time that it’s crossed his mind. “I think this is something I need to do. I think I kind of am,” he admits. “Crazy about him, I mean. I don’t even know how to explain it. I think he’d do it for me, too, if the situation were reversed.”
“I would, you know,” Adam says from the doorway. He clings to the frame and Kris can see that he’s shaking all over, but manages to stay standing. “But you’re not going to do this. I can’t let you sink every dime you’ve got into my problems.”
“It’s an investment,” Kris says. He goes over to Adam and puts an arm around his waist to keep him steady. “I guess there’s a chance you’ll be okay after the withdrawal ends, but there’s a better chance if you go to one of these places and get help.”
“Kris is right,” Matt chimes in, and comes to help Kris steady Adam from the other side. “This is not something that you can just wing it on, man. People spend their whole lives trying to get away from it, and it’s hard enough even when you’ve got a ton of support. We’re gonna get you through this, so don’t argue.”
“We?” Kris asks, leaning forward to look at Matt as they help Adam back in the bedroom.
”Yeah, we,” Matt says. “He means something to you, and you’re my best friend, so by default this is my problem too. I can kick in the rest of the money. Coffee’s been good to me.”
“Oh, hell no,” Adam says. “No way you’re putting money into this, either.”
“You can work it off later by washing dishes at the Magic Bean or some shit, I don’t know,” Matt says, and he and Kris carefully lower Adam onto the bed. “Or maybe when you can sing again and your voice comes back you’ll let me be your piano player when you get famous. I think that’d be even better than making you my indentured servant for the rest of your life.”
“Since when do you play piano?” Kris has never heard Matt do anything remotely musical, any indication that he does anything besides make an awesome double mocha frappucino and host bizarre poetry gatherings at his store.
Matt grins as he gathers up his belongings and puts his fedora on his head. “I am a man of many talents, Kris. You have no idea what I’m capable of.”
- - - - -
Adam is sick for another four days; Kris loses count of how many loads of sheets and towels and underwear he washes. There’s a point three days into the whole thing where Adam is practically sobbing, begging Kris to make it stop; he knows what Adam means, but Kris puts on his stone face and doesn’t back down. “We’re almost there,” he says, smoothing back Adam’s hair, even though he has no clue how much longer this can last. “You’ve made it this far. I’m not letting you turn back now.”
Matt comes over for a couple hours every day to give Kris a break, and one morning he sends Danny over with breakfast when the store is too busy for him to stop by first thing. The moment that Kris answers the door is, of course, the moment when Adam’s body revolts again, and the sounds of him crying and throwing up are too much for Danny to handle. He drops the bag on the table and pushes Matt’s thermos into Kris’s hands before turning around and practically jogging down the sidewalk.
Kris finds this much, much funnier than he should.
- - - - -
On the morning of the sixth day, Kris wakes up alone in bed.
He’s terrified for a moment, scrambling for his keys so he can go out and look for Adam - and where would you even start? the voice that opposes his internal optimist asks - when he hears the sound of something breaking coming from the kitchen.
Adam’s kneeling on the linoleum, picking up shards of a coffee cup when Kris comes into the kitchen. “I was going to try and bring you coffee in bed,” Adam says, sheepish smile on his face, and Kris sees a flash of the old Adam there on his face for the first time in weeks. “I’m still a little bit too shaky for that, I guess.”
“Here, let me do this.” Kris grabs a dishtowel to soak up the coffee spreading over the floor, then grabs the broom and dustpan from the closet and starts sweeping up pieces of mug. “How do you feel today?”
”Tired,” Adam says. “Weak. But better. More in control.”
”Good,” Kris says, and tosses the last of the coffee mug into the trash. “I’m gonna take a quick shower. Do you feel up to going over to the Magic Bean in a little while? Or we could get some real food, maybe. You need to eat something.”
“That sounds nice,” Adam agrees.
Kris decides to take his time in the bathroom; every minute of alone time he’s had over the last week hasn’t been real alone time. He turns on the hot water faucet in the shower and waits for it to heat up, then adds cold to adjust the temperature. The water on his skin feels amazing and he doesn’t realize how gross he actually feels until it all starts to wash away.
The peace is broken by the sound of a creaking floor, and then the shower curtain moves and Adam is on the other side. He’s completely naked as he pushes back the curtain and joins Kris in the stream of water. “I couldn’t do this before,” he says. “Even when I wanted to. Only at the beginning and the end of a high.” And Kris understands what he means - he thinks back, now that he understands, and realizes that every time they’ve found themselves in this situation is when Adam was on his way down or on his way back up. “I wanted to,” and Adam takes Kris’s bottom lip between his teeth and tugs gently, “but then you kept saying no or my body said no, and I guess it wasn’t the right time, then.”
Kris can tell that Adam isn’t having trouble with his body now; everything that he’s read tells him that the libido comes back with a vengeance after detox, and Adam’s body provides the evidence. Kris is hard and a glance down tells him that Adam is, too, and then there’s nothing between them other than water and skin. He can feel Adam’s week-old facial hair on his cheeks as his tongue runs over Kris’s bottom lip and slips inside his mouth.
Kris reaches up to run his fingers over the hair in surprise. “I didn’t even notice,” he whispers when their mouths part for a moment. “I kind of like it.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Adam laughs, and then his lips are on Kris’s neck, and his teeth are nipping and tugging and biting and Kris can’t do anything but groan and grab at Adam’s hips in the hopes that he can rub his cock against Adam’s and that he won’t spontaneously combust when it happens.
“Easy there,” Adam says, and steps back a bit. “If you do that it’ll be all over in like five seconds, and I don’t want that to happen.” He reaches around Kris and turns off the showerhead, then turns off the running water. “You have a perfectly good bed and while shower sex is awesome, I think this time we should aim for something softer.” Adam grabs him by the wrist and leads the way out of the shower.
- - - - -
It’s not Kris’s first time, but his experience in this department is limited to six months’ worth of occasional, fumbling attempts at satisfaction with his college girlfriend, a five-week-long welcome-to-Los-Angeles fling with a server who name-dropped all the customers he waited on like they were personal friends, and a couple of too-weird-for-words kisses with Matt. Kris wasn’t planning on spending the rest of his life wallowing in his hopeless inexperience or some misguided romanticism, nothing like that. He was waiting for something, even when he didn’t know what that something was. The right time - the right person - just hadn’t presented itself yet.
And Kris isn’t afraid this time, not like with every other missed opportunity, not even when Adam is trembling so much that he has to do most of the work. It gives him the time and the opportunity to canvass Adam’s body, a chance he hopes he’ll get again, but life gives no guarantees, so Kris plans to make the most of it.
Adam is covered in freckles everywhere - everywhere, Kris marvels, and there’s even a smattering on the inside of his legs. He finds a scar on Adam’s lower back that he’s never seen before, and runs a hesitant fingertip over it. “Tenth grade fist fight. Got pushed into a fence,” Adam murmurs, then gasps as Kris runs his tongue over the mark.
“Roll over,” he whispers, and Kris settles himself between Adam’s legs, hitches them up and pulls them around him as he leans forward. His tongue traces the head of Adam’s cock; he can hear the sharp intake of breath and the loud, desperate groan that comes out in its place. It’s absolutely nothing like Kris has ever heard before and he wants more, wants that sound and all of Adam’s other sounds on repeat, a little piece of his own hard-won heaven.
There’s only a single moment where Kris has a doubt. ”I don’t know what you like,” he says a little desperately, but Adam shakes his head and runs a hand down to cup Kris’s face.
“You,” he tells Kris. “I like you, just you. You can’t do anything wrong unless… you get up and leave or something, I don’t know, but short of that it’s fine. It’s perfect.”
It’s as close to perfect as things can be right now, anyway, Kris decides, and he opens his mouth and takes Adam in as far as he can. And at first it’s weird and he’s not really sure what to do, so he thinks back to what little he knows that he likes himself, and adjusts so he doesn’t accidentally bite down or something mood-killing that.
When he thinks back later, what stands out has nothing to do with how the slow, steady rhythm he creates with his mouth causes Adam to cry out and clutch at the sheets with one hand. He doesn’t immediately think of Adam’s other hand tangled in his hair, or the intense, surprisingly silent shape of his face when Kris pulls back and uses his hand to bring him the rest of the way home. Or how Adam takes him in as far as he can and looks up at Kris as he comes, licking and teasing even after he starts to go soft to the point where Kris is shaking, too; it’s amazing and Kris is fairly sure that every cell in his body is tingling, but it’s not the one thing that stands out in his mind, either.
The part Kris thinks he’s going to remember for the rest of his life comes when Adam starts to doze off; the circles under his eyes are dark and he looks worn out, but he still looks better than Kris has seen him look in months.
“I’m glad we waited,” Adam whispers, resting his head on Kris’s shoulder. Kris can feel the words on his skin, giving him a warmth that spreads all the way down to his toes. “I feel like…” and he trails off; Kris wonders if he’s fallen asleep for a moment until Adam takes a deep breath.
“I feel alive again,” he says, “and that’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”
“Not as bad, huh?” Kris teases.
Adam looks up at him with a sleepy smile. “Not bad at all.”
- - - - -
A spot comes open in one of the rehab centers the next afternoon.
The counselor that calls is ready for Adam to come in for an intake meeting immediately. Kris isn’t totally sure that he’s ready to let Adam go yet, now that they’re on the same page, but he knows he has to. If he doesn’t, then the little promise that things may go right after all diminishes, and he’s not willing to give that up. He helps Adam throw together the few clothes that he has that still fit.
“It’s good that this spot came open so fast,” Adam comments as they make the drive out of town. The center is two hours northeast, far enough away that old patterns and resources aren’t accessible to Adam, but farther away than Kris wishes for right now. “This is the first time in months that I’ve felt good, and not some high-induced kind of good, either.” His voice breaks and he looks out the window at the trees. “I’m kind of scared. I really, really don’t want to fuck up again. I keep thinking there’s some ways that we’re like strangers, Kris, because there’s never been a time that you’ve known me without the drugs. But underneath all that shit, it’s still me, and you know me, and I know you.”
“I know you,” Kris says quietly. “I always have.” His hand finds Adam’s and squeezes. “It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to work out.” And even though he doesn’t have any confirmation of what the future’s going to bring or if Adam can make it through the next few weeks, or what happens if he does, or even if they can survive through all this, the optimist in Kris comes out, and he really believes it. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
- - - - -
Adam can’t call or write or make any kind of contact for the first two weeks, and it’s been so long since they’ve been separated that Kris has no clue what to do with himself.
He spends an inordinate amount of time at the Magic Bean, listening to Danny blather on about faith and hope and not letting despair bring you down, and Matt’s inevitable “shut up, Danny” response to whatever speech they were hearing that day. “I should have never given him a job,” Matt grumbles one morning as he reads the paper and Kris tries to make an origami swan out of a napkin. “It’s made him positive or content or something, and I get enough of that from you. If he starts writing happy poems, I’m so firing him.”
Since he’s spending too much time there anyway, Kris decides to put the word out at the Magic Bean and before the end of the first week he’s teaching guitar again, this time to some of the greasy, hoodie-wearing teenagers that Matt warned him about. Even though they’re clearly trying to be something they’re not, they’re willing students, and Kris likes teaching to an audience that wants to learn.
The apartment has this unnatural stillness, like a void that Adam used to fill up just by being himself before things got so terrible. Kris cleans and declutters the bedroom, and when he finishes that project, he starts on the living room before moving on to the kitchen, and then finally the bathroom. By the end of the second week, the apartment is both spotless and practically empty, and Kris is on edge.
The call comes on the fifteenth day; Kris is getting a Danish and coffee to go at the Magic Bean when the phone rings. The caller ID reads “private number,” and he’s momentarily confused when it dawns on him who it has to be. He fumbles for the answer key and then Adam’s voice is on the other end. “Kris? You there?” he hears before he remembers to speak.
“I’m here,” he says.
- - - - -
”This place is strange,” Adam tells him as they start to catch up, “and kind of amazing. There’s all this talk about a higher power, kind of like this meeting I went to one time, except it’s not quite as pushy. The principles are the same, I guess. You just have to pick something to focus on.”
”So what’s yours?” Kris asks, and he’s forgotten his coffee, forgotten his breakfast, even forgotten about the guitar lesson he’s supposed to give that morning as he huddles in the back corner of the Magic Bean with one ear covered so he can tune out the awful inspirational CD that Danny is playing over the sound system.
“I thought about it, and I don’t really… there’s not a whole lot I believe in, Kris,” Adam says. “I don’t know where the universe came from and I don’t know about God and Buddha or any other spiritual being, but what I do know is that there are certain things I want that can’t be explained or rationalized or put down on somebody else’s list.”
“Okay,” Kris says, and he’s afraid of what Adam might say then, like two weeks of spirituality and eating regular meals and being detached from the world, from Kris himself, might have changed Adam to the point where he didn’t want Kris anymore. “Like what?”
“I want to sing,” he says, “sing like I used to, not this squeaky, damaged shit that’s been coming out of my throat for the past few months. And I want you to sing with me - don’t start, I know you can do it. And if you don’t want to sing with me, then you can play guitar with me, and we’ll go home each night to our house, Kris. A real house, our house, not me squatting at your apartment because I’m too strung out to keep my head above the water. And I want us to get breakfast at the Magic Bean every morning and I want us to hang out with Matt more often and maybe get, I don’t know, a goldfish or a hamster or something. Let’s start small.
“And I want you, Kris.” Adam pauses and Kris can hear him take a breath. “No more of this dancing around bullshit we’ve been doing for the last year. If we can’t be together… if the last two weeks without me has made you change your mind or made you think I’m too much trouble or if you’re freaked out by the sex and decide you just want to be friends, then that’s fine too, but that’s not what I want, and I think you should know that.”
The line goes silent for a long moment. Kris feels completely, totally inarticulate, like he’s been struck dumb, until Adam speaks up again. “Kris? Are you still there? I only have like two more minutes left before they make me hang up, so unless you say something pretty fast I’m going to take this as total rejection and go slink back to my twin bed for a nap before my group meeting starts.”
”No,” Kris finally finds, at the very least, a syllable to force out. “No. If I haven’t changed my mind so far, I’m never going to change my mind about you, Adam. I’m way too far gone for that. This apartment is so weird without you, you don’t even know. I didn’t even realize…” and he can’t finish his sentence because it’s too much to process at the moment, way too much.
“Good,” Adam says; Kris hears the relief in his voice through the line. “Good. Because when I come back, I’m not going anywhere without you for like, a week. Actually, we’re not going anywhere at all for a week, so make sure you stock up on essentials before I get back. And clean sheets. Don’t forget those.”
”Is that right?” Kris laughs.
“Oh, it’s totally right,” Adam assures him. “And don’t forget the condoms, either. I don’t even care if anyone’s listening on the line anymore. The night before I left? That was just like, an introduction to what I’ve got in mind for you. I haven’t even started yet. You don’t want to sing with me? I’m going to make you sing, but not like any kind of noises that you’ve ever made before. You’re going to be singing so loud that the neighbors are going to call and tell you to turn off the music.” His voice is low and sexy and kind of gravelly because he’s trying his best to be quiet, but he’s also trying not to laugh, which is just as hot as the way his voice sounds at the moment, Kris thinks.
“I’m holding you to that,” Kris says, and then they’re both cracking up anyway.
“You should,” Adam says. “You really should.” And then he’s gone, the phone line disconnected, and Kris is still laughing when Matt makes his way over to the table where Kris sat when the call came through.
“Is there a reason why you’re laughing hysterically and scaring the crap out of Danny?” he asks, and trades out Kris’s never-touched container of coffee for a fresh one. “Not that I mind, anyway. Scaring Danny’s always a legit activity.”
Kris shakes his head. “Singing,” he says, and looks down at his phone. “I was thinking about singing.”
-end-
Author: asouthernthing
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Adam Lambert/Kris Allen
Warnings: Sex, serious non-experimental drug use, needles/syringes, language
Word Count: 18,288
Summary: AU about drugs, love, and a coffee shop called the Magic Bean.
Notes: Notes: Beta by milliejupiter, who is awesome in every way and saw what I was trying to do without even having to ask. Please read the expanded author's notes if you have further questions about the warnings above, or if you'd like to see the playlist/soundtrack. Part one is here. And check out the amazeballs movie poster that katekat1010 made here!.
- - - - -
Christmas morning breaks and Kris thinks it’s not just the tail end of the year but the end of an old life, for him and for Adam, and that maybe this time things will work out.
Except they don’t. Adam makes it all the way through an early dinner before he starts to freak out, and when Kris comes out of the bathroom he finds Adam sweating profusely and paranoid, hiding in Kris’s closet floor. “I think if I did just a little, it would take the edge off and I’d feel better and tomorrow I could go without it. Please?” he says to Kris, and the wonder is that Adam is actually asking permission. That has to mean something, right? Kris thinks.
He wants to say no, this is ridiculous; if you do this you have to leave forever, because Adam made him a promise and he fully expects him to keep it. But this has to be hard on anyone, and the look on Adam’s face says he’s in pain and Kris can’t handle that look; it fucks him up way too much.
“Just a little,” Kris relents, and Adam breathes a sigh of relief as he crawls across the floor to grab his bag. “Tomorrow it’s done, Adam. It’s really and truly done. No more.”
“No more,” Adam says, holding his right hand up as if he’s swearing it.
- - - - -
The next morning when Kris goes over to the Magic Bean to pick up breakfast, Matt does a double take when he comes through the door. “Jesus, have you even left the house since the two of you flew out of here the other night? Are you stocking up on condoms and lube while you’re out?”
“Fuck off, Matt,” Kris says, and Matt pretends to be stunned by Kris’s use of foul language.
“You’re spending too much time around Adam, my friend,” he says as he snaps lids on the usual morning order. “He’s given you a potty mouth. Just be careful that he doesn’t give you something else.”
“We’re not sleeping together,” Kris insists, and Matt shakes his head.
“Not yet, anyway. I know you, and I know Adam, and the air’s been practically crackling with sexual tension since the day I hired him and you came in with your cheesy business cards.”
“Hey, those were awesome business cards. I designed them myself,” Kris protests.
“That’s kind of my point,” Matt retorts before getting back to the original subject. “If you haven’t slept together yet, then it’s out of some sort of sense of honor on your part or some shit, because otherwise you two would have been doing it since day one. I’m just saying you should be careful. I like him just fine other than that two week freakout he had, and he can sing his ass off. But you’re my friend, probably my closest friend, and I don’t want you over at the clinic finding out you’ve got something that penicillin can’t get rid of, okay?” It’s as close as Matt is ever going to get to telling Kris to step the hell off Adam’s dick until he’s kicked his drug problem, and Kris gets that.
He leans over and pats Matt on the shoulder, then picks up his bag and his coffee carrier. “You’re a good friend, Matt.”
“I do what I can,” Matt says.
- - - - -
When Kris gets home, Adam is on the couch and his eyes look strange. He sets the coffee down on the hallway table next to the Christmas tree he hasn’t bothered dismantling yet and leans over the couch to check on him.
Adam’s eyes are rolling back in his head and he’s actually smiling through whatever this is and Kris is scared that he’s having some sort of detox crisis when he notices the syringe, needle still hanging from the bend of Adam’s arm.
“Jesus, Adam,” Kris says, and yanks it out without caring if it hurts or if it’s the right thing to do. He tries to pull Adam off the couch and wonders what to do now - put him in the shower, maybe, he thinks, like he always sees on television, but Adam is total and complete dead weight.
Then Adam groans and his eyes come into focus; he turns that strange, glazed-over smile on Kris. “Everything’s… okay,” he says, voice cracking. “Don’t worry. It’s supposed to be like this.”
”It’s supposed to be like this?” Kris repeats, feeling like he’s out of the loop.
Adam nods, practically in slow motion. “This is the way it always starts out. It’s amazing, Kris. I’m so warm.” He sits up on the couch like he’s fighting against water and pulls his shirt over his head, tossing it to the floor. “Everything always looks soft… the colors are so intense.” And then Adam is standing up on unsteady feet and taking off his pants and oh Jesus, he’s totally not wearing underwear, Kris realizes.
“You’re so intense right now,” Adam says, moving closer to touch his forehead to Kris’s. “You’re beautiful - do you know how beautiful you really are?” He kisses Kris then, soft and gentle and nothing like any of the kisses they’ve shared in the past. And then he brings their bodies together and Kris can feel him, hard again but this time without the benefit of clothing.
Willpower, Kris thinks. He repeats it in his head like a mantra, but he still has to tap every ounce of strength he has to back away. “Not like this,” he says quietly. “Why, Adam? Why do you keep doing this?”
Adam looks at the floor, scratching one arm absently. “I don’t know,” he says after a moment. “I just had to. I don’t know why.” And then he’s leaning over the arm of Kris’s couch and emptying the few contents of his stomach into an ugly bronze vase that Kris’s mom bought for decoration the last time she visited.
“I’m really tired of being sick,” Adam says after he’s finished, collapsing onto the loveseat.
- - - - -
Kris spends the rest of his morning in his easy chair, watching Adam cycle through periods of sleep. It’s not rest he’s getting, Kris realizes - Adam wakes every half-hour or so, giving Kris a look that melts his heart and turns him on all at once. This is sick, Kris thinks, but he can’t find it anywhere inside to control it.
Adam wakes up for good in the late afternoon, stretching out like Rip Van Winkle after a hundred years’ sleep, his long frame practically hanging off the loveseat. “Anything exciting happen today?” he asks between yawns.
Kris thinks of a half dozen angry replies, but nothing in him really wants to be angry at Adam. The only thing he feels at that moment is defeat. “No,” he says. “Get your clothes on and we’ll get you some food.”
- - - - -
They spend the end of the year together and Kris holds fast to his resolve that there’s no way he’s going to sleep with Adam when he’s high, but oh God does he want to. Adam has to work until eleven-thirty and Kris goes to see him sing before they go back to his place to split a bottle of champagne.
“How long can you wait?” Kris asks. They’re curled up in his bed and he thinks Adam is the beautiful one, dressed in silver and black all over; even his eye makeup is dark and glittering. Still, Kris misses the freckles underneath the careful layer of foundation.
Adam looks at the clock, then rolls over to face Kris. “Maybe another hour or two,” he says quietly. “I don’t want you to see me sick again.”
“I can handle sick. I don’t want to see you high again,” Kris tells him, but it happens anyway.
For the first time Kris watches as Adam creates the solution with water, heat, and the contents of a small plastic baggie. He sees everything as Adam soaks it up into a cotton ball, draws back the plunger and partially fills the syringe. And he’s there when Adam slips the needle into a vein behind his knee, and understands why there are so few visible track marks on his arms.
“Less convenient this way,” Adam says lazily, “but easier to hide.” And Kris is there when the euphoria sets in and Adam is tugging at Kris’s pants then, almost begging. “Let me see you,” he’s pleading, looking at Kris like he wants to devour him. “We don’t have to do anything. I just want to look.”
This is how Kris begins his New Year: completely naked in his bed, Adam’s arms heavy around him as the sun comes up, his head resting on Kris’s shoulder as he sleeps.
- - - - -
Kris knows absolutely nothing about the nature of addiction, nothing about the dark substance that Adam keeps pumping into his veins, and he spends the time between the beginning of the year and Valentine’s Day educating himself on the topic. “This is so much worse than I thought,” he tells Matt one morning as he picks up breakfast. “And it’s getting worse. When we met him, he wasn’t like this. Back then he could function like a normal person, and now it’s a challenge getting him alert enough to go to work every night.”
“Addictions progress,” Matt says. “Anything you can get dependent on works like that. At first you just need a little, and then your body starts tolerating it, and then you need more and more of it to get that good feeling back. Next thing you know you’re wearing a skirt in Tijuana trying to make some spare change for a hit.”
“Is this a personal experience I should know about?” Kris asks, raising a brow.
“Nah,” Matt says. “I hear things. Besides, I work with coffee. What’s more addictive than caffeine?”
- - - - -
“Soon.” Adam keeps saying like the word is supposed to soothe Kris and assure him that it really will happen this time. “I’ve even started doing less.” Kris believes him, not because he looks better or becomes more functional, but because Adam is sick more often. He reads that some people like to go longer, actually start the withdrawal process before shooting up again because the high is better that way.
On Valentine’s Day, Kris shows up to take Adam to lunch, and he looks like total shit. “I need sunglasses,” he groans as Kris pulls him out the door.
Kris agrees, because Adam looks like he’s been ran over by a bus one too many times, but he shakes his head. “Forget the sunglasses. You’ll live.”
The lunch itself is decent, and Adam has only a salad, and he keeps talking about quitting to the point where Kris thinks he might scream if he hears the word again. “I think I can do it now,” Adam says as he bites into a cherry tomato. “I haven’t really tried to quit before, but I think now’s the time. It’s going to happen soon.”
And Kris can’t figure it out - why now? Why now instead of Christmas, when he said he would, or months ago when he got sick at Kris’s parents house? Why start in the first place? He’s fairly sure he’ll never understand. “So when are you going to finally shut up and do it?” he says, and that’s when Adam snaps at him, tells Kris that it makes him feel nothing.
They spend the rest of the lunch in silence, and Kris doesn’t show up for Adam’s set that night like he promised he would. Instead, he spends his night at home, grading papers on famous musicians and using his laptop to reread the same pages he’s saved on the effects of Adam’s drug of choice on the body and mind.
- - - - -
The end comes slowly, but it does come.
The first thing that happens is that Adam’s voice starts to go. Kris and Matt go to hear him sing one night and it’s awful, actually - his voice cracks after the first verse of his second song, and by the time he comes off stage, Kris can tell that he’s embarrassed. He sends a text message (come home w/me tonight, we’ll wait on you); Adam comes out a half hour later dressed in jeans and a t-shirt and doesn’t say a word all the way to Kris’s apartment.
”I just need some rest,” he tells Kris the next morning. “Two sets a night, four nights a week - it’s just wearing me down.” Kris knows he’s full of shit because Adam has the kind of voice that could crumble walls night after night if he took care of it. It has nothing to do with exhaustion and everything to do with the fact that he needs to use three times a day now; it’s the habit that sends him running to the bathroom and losing the remnants of whatever food he’s managed to keep down that day, damaging his voice in the process.
By the end of March, Adam can’t sing at all, and he gets fired. “Los Angeles is a town with a lot of talented people,” he rationalizes; Kris is amazed at how calmly he handles it. “If I can’t do the job anymore, then of course some of the other talented people in this town should take my place.”
”Yeah, if they’d only hire those talented people,” Matt says. “Did you even hear the people that used to play before you? Really?”
By mid-April the money’s gone and Kris notices that Adam has mellowed out even more, that more often than not he’s nodding off on the sofa when he comes over for dinner; when he brings food by in the mornings, it takes him at least ten minutes to get Adam to the door.
By the first of May it doesn’t matter, because Adam can’t find another job and he was a month behind on his rent, anyway, before he got fired. He loses his apartment and Kris and Matt spend an afternoon hauling what few belongings he has over to Kris’s apartment.
”There have to be some ground rules,” Kris says after the last box is unloaded and Matt leaves. “I guess we should have talked about this beforehand.”
“I already know what you’re about to say,” Adam says, falling onto Kris’s sofa and covering his face with a cushion. His voice is muffled through the fabric. “I have to stop. I know.”
Kris stares at his shoes. “I’d like you to, yeah,” he says. “But at this point, you’ve broken so many promises… I don’t even believe it anymore, so there’s no point in asking.” Adam starts to speak, but this time Kris cuts him off with a raised hand. “Let me finish. All I ask is that you don’t endanger yourself any more than necessary and that you don’t do this without me.” Kris is terrified that Adam will end up in a building someplace where no one gives a damn and he’ll stop breathing in a hallway, or choke on his own vomit. “And I don’t know what you’ve been doing for money over the last few weeks, but it stops here. Okay?”
“I have to make money somehow,” Adam starts, but Kris stops him again.
“We’ll figure it out. You’re not going to get yourself in trouble, remember?”
Adam smiles at him then, face full of angles and lines. “I remember.”
- - - - -
The last time comes one night when Kris has to work late - the last day of school has come and gone, and all that’s left are a few inservice days before Kris can return to his Converse and jeans for the next eight weeks. Kris goes in late in the mornings and stays later at night because Adam is usually asleep and doesn’t start functioning until he gets home. Even through all the misery, Kris still loves him, still wants every possible waking minute with him. Enabler, he thinks meanly. You use your love as an excuse for the easy way. Making him change is much harder.
It’s the second week of June and the days are already unreasonably hot, but he’s grateful for the Los Angeles weather - it’ll never be totally cool here, but Arkansas is always roasting by this time each year and the idea of walking anywhere in the heat would have been insane.
The sun is going down as he opens his front door, but Adam’s never gotten up to turn on any lights. “You home?” Kris says quietly as he treads quietly down the hall.
And then he hears the laughing as Adam comes out of the bathroom, and he doesn’t know what Adam’s done this time but he knows it can’t be good. He’s got makeup on and he’s dressed in black leather pants with boots to match, but he hasn’t put on a shirt and his hair is out of place. Kris steps past him into the bathroom; there are makeup vials and tubes all over the floor, and a capped, unused syringe in the sink. The mirror attached to the medicine cabinet is shattered. When Kris looks down he notices that Adam’s left hand is cut and bleeding, red splatters on the hall floor next to him. And all the while, Adam is laughing.
“I don’t know why it’s so funny,” he says as he tries to catch his breath. “I just looked in the mirror and oh my God, Kris, have you seen the way I look now? I look like death. Walking, talking, absolute fucking death.”
“It’s gone pretty far,” Kris says carefully. He knows this look on Adam’s face -he’s not high yet, but he hasn’t used yet, either - and his moods switch back and forth so quickly when he’s in between like this. Kris isn’t willing to push it.
“It could probably go farther,” Adam says. Crazed, Kris thinks as he stares at the way Adam looks at that moment. This is what people mean when they say somebody look crazed. “I know people that shoot up five or six times a day. I used to know kids who stole from their families.” Kris flinches, thinking of the morning he took the pills from his mom’s medicine cabinet that she never noticed or never cared about because he never heard a word about it. Adam’s voice gets higher and more frantic as he continues. “I know people who spend hours at a time on the fucking nod, just flipping in and out of consciousness on strangers’ couches all the time. I’m not that bad yet, am I? Tell me it’s not gotten that bad,” he pleads, grabbing Kris’s hand and tugging at his fingertips.
“It’s not that far off,” Kris says, pulling his hand away. There are streaks of Adam’s blood smeared over his knuckles. “I keep thinking that one day I’m going to come in and find you dead, or that you’ve sold everything in the apartment for another high. Or that something else is gonna come along and make you sicker than you are now.” He thinks about what Matt implied all those months ago, about the things Adam might pick up on his quest for the next hit. Something in Kris changes then, tangled and twisted and dark, deep down inside - the idea of Adam’s mouth on some other man’s dick, or letting some guy fuck him for money or drugs makes him physically ill. He leans against the wall and slides down to the floor, letting a deep breath out. “I can’t do it anymore, Adam. Something has to give.”
Adam kneels down beside him and Kris can literally hear the pop of his kneecaps as he goes down. “One last go,” Adam promises, and he takes Kris’s face in both hands, forces him to make eye contact. “I have enough here for one last time, and then I’ll quit. Don’t give me any more money, and don’t let me out of your sight. Lock me in the apartment if you have to.”
“I’ve heard this before,” Kris says, and tries to look away, but Adam won’t let him. His eyes are brighter than usual and there’s something in them that Kris hasn’t seen in a long time: clarity. “If you want to stop, if you’re ready, then let’s flush whatever’s left down the toilet and throw out the leather case you keep in your bag. Right now. Or else it’ll just turn out like every other day, and you know it.”
Adam flinches, but he nods in agreement. “You’re right to not believe me.” He sits all the way down on the floor and drapes his legs over Kris’s lap. “I’ve fucked up a lot. But I want to try now.” His voice breaks and Kris is afraid that he’s about to cry, but Adam pulls it together. “I’ve lost my job. I’ve lost my apartment and none of my clothes fit right anymore. I haven’t talked to anyone in my family for six months. And I’m going to lose you if I don’t clean the fuck up,” he says, and shakes his head when Kris starts to protest. “We both know you’ve reached the end. And I think I’ve already lost myself, and I’m sick of that, Kris. I don’t like myself very much right now. I don’t want any of that anymore.”
There’s no trace of reluctance on Adam’s face, nothing that Kris recognizes other than regret and that fearful look that he remembers so well from Thanksgiving at his mom’s house. “If you’re sure,” Kris starts, and Adam nods.
They start to stand up and Kris has to help Adam off the floor. The night in Arkansas weighs heavily on his mind, and the question that’s been on his mind forever falls out of his mouth before he can even scramble to catch it. “You didn’t use when you were at my mom’s house in Arkansas. You had to know what would happen if you didn’t use, so why didn’t you?”
“I was afraid to carry anything on the plane with me,” Adam explains. “I didn’t think your parents would be okay with your future boyfriend getting arrested and going to prison. And I didn’t want to get high right there in your mom’s house. And there was you, of course.”
”Me?” Kris asks. “What about me?”
Adam rolls his eyes and takes Kris’s hand, pulling him toward the bedroom. “I didn’t want you to know about my problems when things were so amazing. Really, Kristopher,” he laughs. “If you haven’t figured out that I’m hopelessly in love with you by now, I may need to rethink my feelings.”
“Oh.” And Kris feels kind of dumb because no, he totally didn’t realize that the head-over-heels feeling was mutual. Maybe he doesn’t trust it yet - maybe he never thought about it because everything with Adam seems to contradict itself in a mixture of reality and haze. “Wait, future boyfriend?”
”That’s exactly what I said,” Adam says solemnly. “Still in the future at this point, yeah, but I think it’s still going to happen. You want it to happen, right?” He looks vulnerable standing there in the doorway, the only illumination on his face coming in from the last traces of daylight through the windows.
Kris nods; he picks up Adam’s cut hand and kisses it. “I always have.”
- - - - -
Kris watches as Adam flushes the rest of his supply. They throw the kit, case and all, into a garbage bag, then walk out to the dumpster behind the apartment building together. Kris goes on a midnight grocery store run for Gatorade, ibuprofen, and chicken broth and makes Adam go with him. He’s read too much on what’s going to happen next; what happened in Arkansas was only a preview. Kris sends Matt a text when they get home (gonna be MIA for the next few days, don’t get any ideas. this has nothing to do with sex, pervert), then he calls his boss and feigns a sudden onset of the flu. He and Adam go to bed relatively early.
The yawning and the agitation start around three AM. Adam doesn’t sleep and he can’t hold still, so Kris stays awake with him. They sit on the bedroom floor as Adam rocks back and forth, but he doesn’t want Kris to touch him. By the time the sun rises Adam’s nose is running and tears are streaming from his eyes, even though he’s not actually crying. Kris makes him drink a glass of water, then part of a Gatorade, and forces him into the shower.
He undresses and climbs in with him, but it’s the least erotic scenario Kris can ever imagine. Adam leans against the wall with his head tilted forward as Kris washes his hair, then helps him turn around to get under the spray and rinse. “Don’t leave me, please,” he pleads as Kris starts to give him a second to get dressed, and Kris knows he doesn’t just mean don’t leave the room.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Kris promises.
When evening hits so do the stomach pains. Adam spends two hours in the bathroom and Kris cringes every time he hears Adam retch through the doorway.
The next morning brings body aches; Kris tries to sleep but Adam’s still up, still going, and he tosses and turns and sweats through the sheets that were changed the night before. The ibuprofen he keeps feeding to Adam every three and a half hours isn’t cutting it, isn’t even taking the edge off the pain like Kris thought it would, and he’s seriously thinking about taking Adam to the hospital when there’s a knock on the door.
“It would be you,” Kris says as he answers the door. Matt has a brown bag in one hand and a green thermos in the other and he pushes into the apartment like he owns it.
“You send a cryptic text, you don’t show up for breakfast, and you don’t answer my phone calls,” Matt says, pulling a pastry out of the brown bag and forcing it into Kris’s hands.
Kris takes a bite and gets a mouthful of cream cheese. He thinks it might be the best thing he’s ever eaten, even better than his mom’s hamburger steak. “I put the phone on silent,” he says after he finishes chewing.
”Yeah, I gathered that, considering it rang and rang and you never picked up,” Matt says, rolling his eyes. “I wanted to make sure you weren’t being held hostage or that you hadn’t skipped town without confessing your undying love for me.”
”Never.” Kris takes two mugs out of the cabinet above the stove and starts pouring coffee from Matt’s thermos. The aroma is amazing. “Wow, you brought the good stuff today. No house blend when you’re making at-home visits, huh?”
“Something like that. It’s Adam, isn’t it?” Matt says, dropping the casual banter. “He’s either overdosed or he’s freaking out or he’s ran off with all your money. Or all of the above.”
“None of the above,” Kris tells him, and walks back to the bedroom door. “He’s detoxing. Come look.”
Matt peeks through the doorway and Adam raises his head. “Oh,” he says, and his head drops back on the pillow. “It’s you.”
“Why do I keep hearing that from you two? Hell yeah, it’s me,” Matt says. “You could sound a little more excited now that I’ve graced you with my presence. How many of your other friends showed up for this party?”
“How many of my friends aren’t strung out themselves, or pissed at me for being strung out for so damn long?” Adam says weakly, and raises one shaky hand in the air to give Matt the finger.
“Yeah, I can see how that would be a problem,” Matt retorts. “You sure that you don’t want to go to a hospital for this or something?”
“No,” Adam says emphatically. “They’ll just fill me full of prescriptions, and I’ll be by myself. I don’t want to be in some strange place by myself right now.” He looks over Matt’s shoulder at Kris, eyes pleading.
“This is what he wants,” Kris says softly, and puts the idea of going to the hospital aside for good.
Matt contemplates this for a second, then nods. “Okay,” he says, and pulls out a set of keys. “Take these. Go take a nap at my house. I’ll take over for a while.”
Kris starts to protest, but Matt talks over him, waving the keys in front of his face. “It’s not going to kill anyone for me to watch out for him for a while. Pack a bag, go over to my place, get a shower and take a nap.”
“It’s a lot of work,” Kris insists, but he takes the keys anyway. “He needs to get up and walk sometimes. There’s Gatorade in the fridge and soup in the cabinet. If he sweats through the sheets or gets sick, he may have to get in the shower, and then you should just call and I’ll come back right away because-“
“You act like I’ve never seen a naked dude before,” Matt says, rolling his eyes. “If he gets sick or needs clean sheets, I can handle that. Just get some rest, okay? You look like shit.”
“Thanks. That makes me feel great,” Kris says sarcastically, but he puts one hand on Matt’s shoulder and gives him his best serious look. “Really, though, you don’t have to do this.”
“Really, though, I do,” Matt returns. “You look like you’re about to pass out on your feet. Now go, and leave the coffee here for me, because I’m clearly gonna need it. There’s a fresh cup waiting for you at the store.”
- - - - -
Danny meets Kris at the doorway of the Magic Bean. He’s wearing one of the store’s usual green aprons and holding a tall Styrofoam cup with a lid in his hand. “Matt called. He said you needed this,” he says, putting the cup in Kris’s hand. “Hope it tastes okay.”
”When did you start working here?” Kris asks him.
“Not too long ago,” Danny tells him. “I spent enough time here anyway, and one day Matt was just like, ‘you need to quit moping and get a job.’ It wasn’t bad advice. And I get free coffee now, which is awesome, but Matt says it’s not fair for employees to participate in poetry nights, which was kind of a downer.”
“Listen to Matt,” Kris advises. “He’s wise about some things.”
Matt’s apartment is on the second floor of the building that houses the Magic Bean; Kris uses the inside entrance through the storeroom instead of taking the steep, rickety stairs outside that lead to the main entrance. The door opens in Matt’s hallway; his apartment smells like lemons and hardwood floor polish, which is a significant upgrade from the musky scent of sweat and sickness that permeates the air at Kris’s place right now.
The first thing he does is turn on the TV and finish his coffee; then he checks his overflowing voicemail inbox. He can tell which ones are Matt’s because they all start out with “Why aren’t you answering your phone?” so he deletes those right away. There are two from his boss, asking how he’s feeling and if he’s capable of finishing up the last bit of paperwork he needs to do at home. Kris makes a mental note to call him at home later. There’s one from his mom, and he can’t handle talking to her right now, so he saves that one and goes to take a shower.
- - - - -
“That was not a nap,” Matt says when Kris returns a few hours later. “You weren’t gone long enough to have taken a real nap. That was like, a micro nap. A power nap. Try again.”
“I couldn’t stay asleep,” Kris says, and hands him a handful of printouts. “I hooked my laptop up to your printer. Take a look at these and tell me what you think.”
Matt sits down on the loveseat and goes through the papers. “Rehab,” he says out loud as he goes through the info that Kris found, “is fucking expensive. If he can even get in, how will he pay for all this?”
“These aren’t even the most expensive ones I found,” Kris tells him. “I called around. The free places won’t have a bed open for months, and the sliding-scale places are just as bad. The last place I called gave me the names of these places.”
“Are these hard numbers?” Matt wants to know.
Kris shakes his head. “If he needs a stay longer than a month, that number goes up. I told them that he was detoxing on his own, though, and they didn’t like that and pretty much implied that we were total idiots, but it brought the figure down a little bit. I think,” he says, “I’ve got the money in savings for about half the stay, and it’ll be hard, but I can probably come up with the rest if I really use all my resources.” He thinks he might have to ask his parents for a short-term loan, and maybe max out one of his credit cards, and both of those things are really fucked up. But this is for Adam, he thinks, and he’s made up his mind. They’ve made it this far already, and Kris is ready to bank on something real.
Matt’s quiet for a long moment, then looks up from the printouts. “You’re really in love with him, aren’t you? Like, crazy in love with him, apparently. Enough to drain your savings account on something that isn’t anywhere near a sure thing. He could still relapse. He probably will relapse at some point, especially if he’s not totally ready to quit after all.”
Kris nods, then gives a little shrug. He’s thought it over so much, and it’s not the first time that it’s crossed his mind. “I think this is something I need to do. I think I kind of am,” he admits. “Crazy about him, I mean. I don’t even know how to explain it. I think he’d do it for me, too, if the situation were reversed.”
“I would, you know,” Adam says from the doorway. He clings to the frame and Kris can see that he’s shaking all over, but manages to stay standing. “But you’re not going to do this. I can’t let you sink every dime you’ve got into my problems.”
“It’s an investment,” Kris says. He goes over to Adam and puts an arm around his waist to keep him steady. “I guess there’s a chance you’ll be okay after the withdrawal ends, but there’s a better chance if you go to one of these places and get help.”
“Kris is right,” Matt chimes in, and comes to help Kris steady Adam from the other side. “This is not something that you can just wing it on, man. People spend their whole lives trying to get away from it, and it’s hard enough even when you’ve got a ton of support. We’re gonna get you through this, so don’t argue.”
“We?” Kris asks, leaning forward to look at Matt as they help Adam back in the bedroom.
”Yeah, we,” Matt says. “He means something to you, and you’re my best friend, so by default this is my problem too. I can kick in the rest of the money. Coffee’s been good to me.”
“Oh, hell no,” Adam says. “No way you’re putting money into this, either.”
“You can work it off later by washing dishes at the Magic Bean or some shit, I don’t know,” Matt says, and he and Kris carefully lower Adam onto the bed. “Or maybe when you can sing again and your voice comes back you’ll let me be your piano player when you get famous. I think that’d be even better than making you my indentured servant for the rest of your life.”
“Since when do you play piano?” Kris has never heard Matt do anything remotely musical, any indication that he does anything besides make an awesome double mocha frappucino and host bizarre poetry gatherings at his store.
Matt grins as he gathers up his belongings and puts his fedora on his head. “I am a man of many talents, Kris. You have no idea what I’m capable of.”
- - - - -
Adam is sick for another four days; Kris loses count of how many loads of sheets and towels and underwear he washes. There’s a point three days into the whole thing where Adam is practically sobbing, begging Kris to make it stop; he knows what Adam means, but Kris puts on his stone face and doesn’t back down. “We’re almost there,” he says, smoothing back Adam’s hair, even though he has no clue how much longer this can last. “You’ve made it this far. I’m not letting you turn back now.”
Matt comes over for a couple hours every day to give Kris a break, and one morning he sends Danny over with breakfast when the store is too busy for him to stop by first thing. The moment that Kris answers the door is, of course, the moment when Adam’s body revolts again, and the sounds of him crying and throwing up are too much for Danny to handle. He drops the bag on the table and pushes Matt’s thermos into Kris’s hands before turning around and practically jogging down the sidewalk.
Kris finds this much, much funnier than he should.
- - - - -
On the morning of the sixth day, Kris wakes up alone in bed.
He’s terrified for a moment, scrambling for his keys so he can go out and look for Adam - and where would you even start? the voice that opposes his internal optimist asks - when he hears the sound of something breaking coming from the kitchen.
Adam’s kneeling on the linoleum, picking up shards of a coffee cup when Kris comes into the kitchen. “I was going to try and bring you coffee in bed,” Adam says, sheepish smile on his face, and Kris sees a flash of the old Adam there on his face for the first time in weeks. “I’m still a little bit too shaky for that, I guess.”
“Here, let me do this.” Kris grabs a dishtowel to soak up the coffee spreading over the floor, then grabs the broom and dustpan from the closet and starts sweeping up pieces of mug. “How do you feel today?”
”Tired,” Adam says. “Weak. But better. More in control.”
”Good,” Kris says, and tosses the last of the coffee mug into the trash. “I’m gonna take a quick shower. Do you feel up to going over to the Magic Bean in a little while? Or we could get some real food, maybe. You need to eat something.”
“That sounds nice,” Adam agrees.
Kris decides to take his time in the bathroom; every minute of alone time he’s had over the last week hasn’t been real alone time. He turns on the hot water faucet in the shower and waits for it to heat up, then adds cold to adjust the temperature. The water on his skin feels amazing and he doesn’t realize how gross he actually feels until it all starts to wash away.
The peace is broken by the sound of a creaking floor, and then the shower curtain moves and Adam is on the other side. He’s completely naked as he pushes back the curtain and joins Kris in the stream of water. “I couldn’t do this before,” he says. “Even when I wanted to. Only at the beginning and the end of a high.” And Kris understands what he means - he thinks back, now that he understands, and realizes that every time they’ve found themselves in this situation is when Adam was on his way down or on his way back up. “I wanted to,” and Adam takes Kris’s bottom lip between his teeth and tugs gently, “but then you kept saying no or my body said no, and I guess it wasn’t the right time, then.”
Kris can tell that Adam isn’t having trouble with his body now; everything that he’s read tells him that the libido comes back with a vengeance after detox, and Adam’s body provides the evidence. Kris is hard and a glance down tells him that Adam is, too, and then there’s nothing between them other than water and skin. He can feel Adam’s week-old facial hair on his cheeks as his tongue runs over Kris’s bottom lip and slips inside his mouth.
Kris reaches up to run his fingers over the hair in surprise. “I didn’t even notice,” he whispers when their mouths part for a moment. “I kind of like it.”
“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Adam laughs, and then his lips are on Kris’s neck, and his teeth are nipping and tugging and biting and Kris can’t do anything but groan and grab at Adam’s hips in the hopes that he can rub his cock against Adam’s and that he won’t spontaneously combust when it happens.
“Easy there,” Adam says, and steps back a bit. “If you do that it’ll be all over in like five seconds, and I don’t want that to happen.” He reaches around Kris and turns off the showerhead, then turns off the running water. “You have a perfectly good bed and while shower sex is awesome, I think this time we should aim for something softer.” Adam grabs him by the wrist and leads the way out of the shower.
- - - - -
It’s not Kris’s first time, but his experience in this department is limited to six months’ worth of occasional, fumbling attempts at satisfaction with his college girlfriend, a five-week-long welcome-to-Los-Angeles fling with a server who name-dropped all the customers he waited on like they were personal friends, and a couple of too-weird-for-words kisses with Matt. Kris wasn’t planning on spending the rest of his life wallowing in his hopeless inexperience or some misguided romanticism, nothing like that. He was waiting for something, even when he didn’t know what that something was. The right time - the right person - just hadn’t presented itself yet.
And Kris isn’t afraid this time, not like with every other missed opportunity, not even when Adam is trembling so much that he has to do most of the work. It gives him the time and the opportunity to canvass Adam’s body, a chance he hopes he’ll get again, but life gives no guarantees, so Kris plans to make the most of it.
Adam is covered in freckles everywhere - everywhere, Kris marvels, and there’s even a smattering on the inside of his legs. He finds a scar on Adam’s lower back that he’s never seen before, and runs a hesitant fingertip over it. “Tenth grade fist fight. Got pushed into a fence,” Adam murmurs, then gasps as Kris runs his tongue over the mark.
“Roll over,” he whispers, and Kris settles himself between Adam’s legs, hitches them up and pulls them around him as he leans forward. His tongue traces the head of Adam’s cock; he can hear the sharp intake of breath and the loud, desperate groan that comes out in its place. It’s absolutely nothing like Kris has ever heard before and he wants more, wants that sound and all of Adam’s other sounds on repeat, a little piece of his own hard-won heaven.
There’s only a single moment where Kris has a doubt. ”I don’t know what you like,” he says a little desperately, but Adam shakes his head and runs a hand down to cup Kris’s face.
“You,” he tells Kris. “I like you, just you. You can’t do anything wrong unless… you get up and leave or something, I don’t know, but short of that it’s fine. It’s perfect.”
It’s as close to perfect as things can be right now, anyway, Kris decides, and he opens his mouth and takes Adam in as far as he can. And at first it’s weird and he’s not really sure what to do, so he thinks back to what little he knows that he likes himself, and adjusts so he doesn’t accidentally bite down or something mood-killing that.
When he thinks back later, what stands out has nothing to do with how the slow, steady rhythm he creates with his mouth causes Adam to cry out and clutch at the sheets with one hand. He doesn’t immediately think of Adam’s other hand tangled in his hair, or the intense, surprisingly silent shape of his face when Kris pulls back and uses his hand to bring him the rest of the way home. Or how Adam takes him in as far as he can and looks up at Kris as he comes, licking and teasing even after he starts to go soft to the point where Kris is shaking, too; it’s amazing and Kris is fairly sure that every cell in his body is tingling, but it’s not the one thing that stands out in his mind, either.
The part Kris thinks he’s going to remember for the rest of his life comes when Adam starts to doze off; the circles under his eyes are dark and he looks worn out, but he still looks better than Kris has seen him look in months.
“I’m glad we waited,” Adam whispers, resting his head on Kris’s shoulder. Kris can feel the words on his skin, giving him a warmth that spreads all the way down to his toes. “I feel like…” and he trails off; Kris wonders if he’s fallen asleep for a moment until Adam takes a deep breath.
“I feel alive again,” he says, “and that’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”
“Not as bad, huh?” Kris teases.
Adam looks up at him with a sleepy smile. “Not bad at all.”
- - - - -
A spot comes open in one of the rehab centers the next afternoon.
The counselor that calls is ready for Adam to come in for an intake meeting immediately. Kris isn’t totally sure that he’s ready to let Adam go yet, now that they’re on the same page, but he knows he has to. If he doesn’t, then the little promise that things may go right after all diminishes, and he’s not willing to give that up. He helps Adam throw together the few clothes that he has that still fit.
“It’s good that this spot came open so fast,” Adam comments as they make the drive out of town. The center is two hours northeast, far enough away that old patterns and resources aren’t accessible to Adam, but farther away than Kris wishes for right now. “This is the first time in months that I’ve felt good, and not some high-induced kind of good, either.” His voice breaks and he looks out the window at the trees. “I’m kind of scared. I really, really don’t want to fuck up again. I keep thinking there’s some ways that we’re like strangers, Kris, because there’s never been a time that you’ve known me without the drugs. But underneath all that shit, it’s still me, and you know me, and I know you.”
“I know you,” Kris says quietly. “I always have.” His hand finds Adam’s and squeezes. “It’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to work out.” And even though he doesn’t have any confirmation of what the future’s going to bring or if Adam can make it through the next few weeks, or what happens if he does, or even if they can survive through all this, the optimist in Kris comes out, and he really believes it. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
- - - - -
Adam can’t call or write or make any kind of contact for the first two weeks, and it’s been so long since they’ve been separated that Kris has no clue what to do with himself.
He spends an inordinate amount of time at the Magic Bean, listening to Danny blather on about faith and hope and not letting despair bring you down, and Matt’s inevitable “shut up, Danny” response to whatever speech they were hearing that day. “I should have never given him a job,” Matt grumbles one morning as he reads the paper and Kris tries to make an origami swan out of a napkin. “It’s made him positive or content or something, and I get enough of that from you. If he starts writing happy poems, I’m so firing him.”
Since he’s spending too much time there anyway, Kris decides to put the word out at the Magic Bean and before the end of the first week he’s teaching guitar again, this time to some of the greasy, hoodie-wearing teenagers that Matt warned him about. Even though they’re clearly trying to be something they’re not, they’re willing students, and Kris likes teaching to an audience that wants to learn.
The apartment has this unnatural stillness, like a void that Adam used to fill up just by being himself before things got so terrible. Kris cleans and declutters the bedroom, and when he finishes that project, he starts on the living room before moving on to the kitchen, and then finally the bathroom. By the end of the second week, the apartment is both spotless and practically empty, and Kris is on edge.
The call comes on the fifteenth day; Kris is getting a Danish and coffee to go at the Magic Bean when the phone rings. The caller ID reads “private number,” and he’s momentarily confused when it dawns on him who it has to be. He fumbles for the answer key and then Adam’s voice is on the other end. “Kris? You there?” he hears before he remembers to speak.
“I’m here,” he says.
- - - - -
”This place is strange,” Adam tells him as they start to catch up, “and kind of amazing. There’s all this talk about a higher power, kind of like this meeting I went to one time, except it’s not quite as pushy. The principles are the same, I guess. You just have to pick something to focus on.”
”So what’s yours?” Kris asks, and he’s forgotten his coffee, forgotten his breakfast, even forgotten about the guitar lesson he’s supposed to give that morning as he huddles in the back corner of the Magic Bean with one ear covered so he can tune out the awful inspirational CD that Danny is playing over the sound system.
“I thought about it, and I don’t really… there’s not a whole lot I believe in, Kris,” Adam says. “I don’t know where the universe came from and I don’t know about God and Buddha or any other spiritual being, but what I do know is that there are certain things I want that can’t be explained or rationalized or put down on somebody else’s list.”
“Okay,” Kris says, and he’s afraid of what Adam might say then, like two weeks of spirituality and eating regular meals and being detached from the world, from Kris himself, might have changed Adam to the point where he didn’t want Kris anymore. “Like what?”
“I want to sing,” he says, “sing like I used to, not this squeaky, damaged shit that’s been coming out of my throat for the past few months. And I want you to sing with me - don’t start, I know you can do it. And if you don’t want to sing with me, then you can play guitar with me, and we’ll go home each night to our house, Kris. A real house, our house, not me squatting at your apartment because I’m too strung out to keep my head above the water. And I want us to get breakfast at the Magic Bean every morning and I want us to hang out with Matt more often and maybe get, I don’t know, a goldfish or a hamster or something. Let’s start small.
“And I want you, Kris.” Adam pauses and Kris can hear him take a breath. “No more of this dancing around bullshit we’ve been doing for the last year. If we can’t be together… if the last two weeks without me has made you change your mind or made you think I’m too much trouble or if you’re freaked out by the sex and decide you just want to be friends, then that’s fine too, but that’s not what I want, and I think you should know that.”
The line goes silent for a long moment. Kris feels completely, totally inarticulate, like he’s been struck dumb, until Adam speaks up again. “Kris? Are you still there? I only have like two more minutes left before they make me hang up, so unless you say something pretty fast I’m going to take this as total rejection and go slink back to my twin bed for a nap before my group meeting starts.”
”No,” Kris finally finds, at the very least, a syllable to force out. “No. If I haven’t changed my mind so far, I’m never going to change my mind about you, Adam. I’m way too far gone for that. This apartment is so weird without you, you don’t even know. I didn’t even realize…” and he can’t finish his sentence because it’s too much to process at the moment, way too much.
“Good,” Adam says; Kris hears the relief in his voice through the line. “Good. Because when I come back, I’m not going anywhere without you for like, a week. Actually, we’re not going anywhere at all for a week, so make sure you stock up on essentials before I get back. And clean sheets. Don’t forget those.”
”Is that right?” Kris laughs.
“Oh, it’s totally right,” Adam assures him. “And don’t forget the condoms, either. I don’t even care if anyone’s listening on the line anymore. The night before I left? That was just like, an introduction to what I’ve got in mind for you. I haven’t even started yet. You don’t want to sing with me? I’m going to make you sing, but not like any kind of noises that you’ve ever made before. You’re going to be singing so loud that the neighbors are going to call and tell you to turn off the music.” His voice is low and sexy and kind of gravelly because he’s trying his best to be quiet, but he’s also trying not to laugh, which is just as hot as the way his voice sounds at the moment, Kris thinks.
“I’m holding you to that,” Kris says, and then they’re both cracking up anyway.
“You should,” Adam says. “You really should.” And then he’s gone, the phone line disconnected, and Kris is still laughing when Matt makes his way over to the table where Kris sat when the call came through.
“Is there a reason why you’re laughing hysterically and scaring the crap out of Danny?” he asks, and trades out Kris’s never-touched container of coffee for a fresh one. “Not that I mind, anyway. Scaring Danny’s always a legit activity.”
Kris shakes his head. “Singing,” he says, and looks down at his phone. “I was thinking about singing.”
-end-