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Thanks go to Kel for the wonderful beta, to Lido and Megolas and undone for read-throughs, to L.C. and maggie for all the encouragement I could ask for, and to Jess, because this story wouldn't exist without her. Title comes from the Hey Mercedes song "Every Turn".

Glued to the Ground
by Hetre Z

One

Justin was pretending to smoke a cigarette, and JC smiled and licked ashes from the corner of his mouth. He stretched onto his toes to get a better angle, lips moving past Justin's cheek and the hinge of his jaw to rest up near the temple. Justin’s fingers twitched when JC brushed against them.

“Bonnie and Clyde” was playing on the tape deck and there were shadows like redwood trees on the walls. A yellow gash of electric light on the floor and the swish of breath on his hair and no, they weren’t going to do this. They’d promised. JC looked down through Justin’s eyelashes to his nose and mouth, and told himself that was the way it worked.

“We --” And that was as far as he got, Justin backing away from him and catching his heel on a pile of books in the doorway.

“Yeah, I. Yeah, we can’t. I know.” And the front door shut behind him.

The cigarette lay on the floor like a dead white snake.

Two

JC always had trouble setting things up in songs. He’d have the middle, he’d have the end, but it wasn’t exactly a story because it still needed this explosion for a beginning and he never had that. He wondered sometimes how exactly he’d gotten started with the Mouse Club, and Bobbie, and with the band, everything. Because life seemed to start in the middle more often than not, and he only ever caught onto what was happening after half of it was over.

Justin showed up at his house with laundry, the sunlight behind him bright and shocking. It was five in the afternoon; Justin’s socks smelling awful buried at the bottom of the wicker basket, and tee shirts with dirty words that he couldn’t wear in photo shoots piled on top.

“I’m not your mom,” JC said, but moved aside to let him maneuver the basket into the house.

“No, but you gnaw all the almonds out of my chocolate bars, so I figure you owe me.” The door closed. A slice of sunlight on the Mexican tiled floor got smaller and smaller, until it passed over his central lotus design like a sliver moon and disappeared. JC followed Justin into his kitchen.

“Chris eats your food all the time. Joey steals your french fries constantly.”

“Yeah, but,” He hefted the basket onto the counter and turned. “They eat the whole thing. Joey doesn’t chew the ends off my fries and hand them back.”

JC looked at the space between Justin’s track pants and the hem of his shirt. It seemed to grow larger as he watched. “Justin, I.” He took a breath. “Really don’t want you to touch my washing machine.”

Justin smiled. “So you’ll do it, and I can hover and watch.” He grabbed one of the basket handles and dragged it off the counter, didn’t seem to notice as it tipped almost over and JC rushed automatically to take the other side.

“And Chris’s washing machine is fucked, and your clothes always smell nice, so I thought yeah. JC’ll help me with my laundry, no problem.”

JC watched the fingers hooked through the basket handle and thought about how he could only deal with Justin in parts. Fingers, stomach, voice in the recording room, a corner of his sleeve in concerts, and if he looked at more than that he was stuck. Justin was at the edge of his vision all the way down the stairs, the side of his nose, or the shine of his hair under the hanging bulb in the basement.

“Listen,” JC said. Justin stopped but JC kept walking for a few seconds after.

“Yeah.”

“We said so. All of us, it’s not that I. We agreed not to, remember? Lou almost carved it into our fucking arms. You know this.” Justin looked at him. “And. I don’t want to do your laundry.” JC was holding the handle of the basket tight. He could feel the bite of wicker into his fingers.

Justin leaned down and put his mouth to the soft part of JC’s ear. White socks, shirts, and boxers all fell onto the staircase like snow. “I know.”

“Yeah, you do. So why --”

“I, it’s. Your clothes smell nice.”

The wood of the staircase flat under his legs, the scrape of cement walls, dirty clothes piled around them in little hills. Justin twined their fingers like tree roots and pushed him into the railing. There was a window, a foot above eye level where he was standing, veil of dirt over the glass and the sun shining through in wisps. Behind Justin’s head were the palm trees and bushes of JC’s backyard, and Justin’s breath sounded like rain in the flat cement echo of the room.

*

Justin was still curled up around a small pile of sweatshirts when JC started picking clothes up off the floor. He measured the detergent, set the washing machine, turned it on. His clothes and Justin’s were in the machine, soaped and soaked and it would take another hour before he could put his favorite pair of jeans back on. Justin leaned against the wall in boxers.

JC looked at him. “My clothes smell nice.”

“And you talk with your hands, and you always look fucking hot in Joey’s swimming pool. And you’ve got mouse teeth. It’s a thing. I don’t know.”

Justin didn’t help him take the clothes out of the washing machine and settle them in the dryer. He watched JC pull jeans inside out and straighten shirt cuffs, stood with his arms behind his head and one foot propped against the wall.

When they had been in MMC together, the last year before the show was cancelled, he and Justin had sung Alleluias behind the wall of sets, humming two-part harmony into the plywood for seconds, minutes at a time, before they had to go back to filming. He remembered the way Justin used to sing, head rolled back on his neck and eyes closed.

“S’okay.” JC started the dryer cycle. “I’ve had ‘things’ before. It’s just, we can’t --”

“Yeah. No more.”

“And no telling anybody.” He walked upstairs.

Three

Chris called at eight in the morning, because “I just found this thing, at one of those flea market things? They were having a display and I thought what the hell, and you gotta see this, man, this is the fucking best.” It was an hour before his alarm was set to go off, the blankets bunched down around his waist and his pillow slumped on the floor by his dresser. He squinted at it, but couldn’t imagine how it had gotten there.

“Chris, pillows can’t fly, can they?”

“What? JC, listen. I have found the greatest knickknack-toy-thingy in existence, and it can be arty so you’ll like it and you have to come over right now.”

Chris met him at the door and grabbed his arm. There was a jar of wax balls on the kitchen table, and an old seventies-style hotplate, rectangular cream white with faded orange flowers, sitting on the counter. Chris turned a plastic knob on the side and sat at the table, watching it.

“We need to wait for it to heat up.”

“And then what, Chris?”

Chris smiled. “Just watch.”

He took a single wax bead, like a drop of blood, and placed it lightly on the plate. JC watched as the wax slowly drooped, perfect sphere collapsing into itself and pooling out like all the platelets were gone. Chris reached out and spread the red melt with his finger, tracing shapes and words on the hotplate surface, and JC watched his finger moving slowly into a heart shape and devil horns. He watched Chris trace bat wings.

“Here, you try it,” and JC had both hands full of tiny translucent wax balls, bright purple and green and blue like Mardi Gras necklaces. He dropped three onto the plate and swished with his fingers, and when they were gone he built a little pyramid and watched it fall apart.

*

Chris let him borrow the hotplate. He showed JC how to scrape the wax off the surface with an exact-o-blade, and how to wipe it down with oil to dissolve what was left. There was black residue crumbled in one corner, and JC pointed to it. “What’s that?”

Chris looked. “I tried chocolate first.”

JC put the plate on his counter and looked at it. He thought of what Justin would say, watching the wax drip down, and the colors sliding into each other. JC was still looking at it while he dialed Justin’s number. His fingernails skipped off plastic where his hand was curled around the phone.

“Socrates said ‘All I know is that I know nothing’,” he said when Justin picked up.

JC heard a whoosh of air over the phone line. “Socrates. Isn’t he that guy they poisoned for being all bossy and shit?”

“Yeah. Something like that, yeah.” There was silence. “Look.”

“What?”

“Well, I know that I know stuff, so it’s not that. That’s not what I meant; I just meant that there are some things I don’t get. Chocolate in Advent calendars. Things. But, I mean, there are some things I do, and I just think that you shouldn’t think I’m doing this because I don’t know, and.” He took a breath.

“JC.”

“Come over. Chris gave me this thing, you should see it.”

Four

One in the morning by the digital clock, and Justin spread his fingers slow and warm over JC’s chest. He did it silently, as if hoping that JC wouldn’t wake up or tell him to stop, and his throat against JC’s shoulder worked in jerky movements like he couldn’t breathe.

When JC was thirteen he convinced his mother to let him play crack-an-egg on her head, his balled-up fist splitting into fingers, fragmenting, and dripping slowly down to her neck. He remembered the feeling of it, how he could feel every individual thread of hair against his palms.

“When I was younger I used to play this game,” he said, and felt Justin’s breath on his collarbone.

“When I was younger,” his hand flowed down, warm egg over JC’s sternum to his stomach, and lower, “I wanted to be a superhero. Not like, you know, Joey. But, yeah. Superjustin, of the Fantastic Four or something.”

JC watched the numbers change, one-fifteen to one-sixteen. He felt each of Justin’s fingers and how they moved. “I get Sri Lanka and Shangri La mixed up.”

“Bangladesh.” Justin said.

“Yeah.”

“Morocco, Punjab. Zaire.”

“Zaire’s in Africa,” JC said, “it doesn’t count.” Justin spread his fingers down JC’s leg until JC couldn’t make out the numbers on the clock in front of him, and then moved them up again. “Okay, yeah. Zaire.”

Five

JC was flipping pancakes, and batter dripped on his arm. There was pancake batter on everything, his fingers and the counter, the stovetop. JC had a half-cooked pancake as wide as the nonstick pan, and he flipped it with a jerk. It hit the ceiling and stuck.

When JC looked up it was like a tree frog, like clinging fungus, and he didn’t have the energy to climb onto the counter with a spatula to pry it off. He looked at the bowl of pancake batter, the syrup already set out, the white glops on counter and stovetop and skin. I’m making pancakes for Justin, he thought, and poured the rest of the batter into the sink.

For breakfast they ate kimchee out of pint jars, Justin’s breath red and sour across the table. JC’s lips stung and tiny cuts opened as he smiled. Blisters on the tips of his fingers when he wiped the kimchee sauce off. A tiny wax square he’d made for Justin, and it rested on its side by the door.

“I started in the middle,” JC said, looking at the tabletop, where his fingers traced patterns on Formica.

“Which middle? The middle of what?”

He took a breath. “I haven’t kissed you yet, you know.”

“Oh.”

Justin put the cap on his kimchee jar. JC got up out of his chair and walked over. The clock ticked, held its breath, and JC had fingers and hands but he didn’t know what to do with him. Justin smelled like apple juice and tasted like kimchee sauce, and when he put a hand to JC’s face it burned a line along his cheekbone, wet and spicy.

“Well, okay. You’re maybe not in the middle anymore.” Justin had his nose pushed into JC’s neck, and his voice buzzed the skin when he spoke.

JC looked up at the ceiling. He had known, at one time, the exact right way to twitch your wrist so a pancake didn’t end up on the floor or the ceiling. JC had thrown Justin’s batter away. “If you were over at Chris’s --”

“If I were over at Chris’s he’d let me watch cartoons.”

JC looked at him. “He’d treat you better.”

Justin smiled. “He’d let me watch cartoons,” and JC turned on the television.

Six

Justin played airplane in Joey’s yard, arms flapping and a smile like a propeller. He swooped down past JC’s head and flicked at his hair, sunlight trailing after. September in Florida, and it always felt thicker there than anywhere else. JC was reading some magazine about women who make men better men; Joey had blues and drums playing on the stereo system inside.

“C’mon,” and Justin grabbed JC’s arm and started pulling on it, dragging him up. Five seconds of skin before he let go.

“C’mon what?”

JC saw everything in instants. Sunlight on Justin’s shoulders, darker patches where the clouds covered the light. “Come play airplane with me.”

“You’re fucking five, man. Go‘way.”

“You want me to show you?” He waved his arms in pantomime. “This is how, see? Now you try it.”

“Justin.”

Justin stood up straight. Wind pushed JC’s hair into his face. “Okay. Answer this. Where was the first successful test flight of any airplane, ever?”

“Um, America?” JC sat back down on the ground.

Justin pulled up grass and threw it at him. “You’re right. You are in no way capable of being an airplane. Me’n’Chris’ll have to be airplanes by ourselves.”

“The first test flight was in Mozambique,” Chris nodded. “I know this. I am cool like Justin.” Justin tackled him.

JC stood, and he could hear scuffling noises behind him. They scraped on his arms, over his chest. Justin sounded like he was smiling, and Chris laughed, and JC stood and walked inside. He sat at Joey’s kitchen table, Justin yelling uncle outside the window. There was sunlight on the scratches in the countertop, and it filled little dips and breaks in the plastic. It spilled over.

JC had made tea and finished half of it by the time Justin came in, flushed and smiling and out of breath. JC thought of schoolboys in uniform and fights on the playground. Justin stood behind him and reached through his hair, knotting his fingers in it, and tugged slightly.

Justin said, “You know they used to rub sand on armor to get the rust off?”

JC drank more of his tea. He tried not to notice the hands in his hair, cold from the day outside and warm heat underneath. When JC was in Japan they had served fried ice cream for dessert at all the restaurants. It burned his tongue and chilled his teeth, felt inside-out and backwards and he couldn’t wait to drink his sake and feel all one temperature again. “One day I’m going to get sick of your random trivia.”

“I could beatbox instead, if you wanted.”

“Well, fine, whatever.” JC stood up. Justin’s fingers left cold spots when they fell out of his hair. “Listen, Chris is probably still out there wondering where you went, so maybe you should go back and --”

“Chris told me to come in, actually. He, like, ordered. Pointed his finger and everything,” He leaned back on the counter and looked at JC. “You think he, I don’t know, thinks something?”

JC put his cup in the sink and hot tea sloshed onto his wrist. “What would he think?”

“I don’t know, that we’re fucking, maybe? Jesus, do you just not look at what you don’t want to? Chris is my best friend, he’d know if something was up with me.”

JC watched the light edging through the windows, latticework like the design at the bottom of a pool, and he breathed through his nose. “Chris is your best friend.”

Justin walked over. “You’re my next best.”

“After Trace, you mean. And your girlfriend.”

Justin made a face. “Britney, man, you know we’re not. It’s just for publicity, you know that.”

“She’s still your girlfriend, you know. I’m still after.”

“Yeah, well.”

Justin stood there, two or maybe three inches away, and he breathed like that was all that mattered. JC looked at him, the rise and fall of his shoulders and the stretch of his shirt over them. Justin’s fingernails caught the light like broken glass and hurt his eyes.

“Okay, fine.” He took a step back. “But how do they get enough free sand in one place to make any difference, anyway?”

Justin paused for a second. “I don’t know, they just do. They were, like, Mediaeval and shit. They did a lot of weird stuff.”

Seven

The radio hummed, picking up stations randomly and leaving them in seconds. White noise filled the room, broken with patches of weather reports, Pretenders songs, newscasts. In JC’s dream, he had been in a concert and couldn’t dance. In his dream, he had turned slowly to stone, his vision going gray as “Space Cowboy” played and thousands of fans surrounded him with their arms outstretched, singing.

JC sat in the kitchen watching the walls. The first time he had picked up the phone, his fingers had found Justin’s number before he even noticed. He drank a glass of water and tried again, this time watching each press of his fingers and adding them up in his head, making sure. Joey picked up on the fourth ring.

“Joey, I.”

“Jayce? Are you okay?”

I dreamed the mechanical bulls were eating me, JC thought. He said, “I called Justin.”

Joey yawned into the phone, growling for a second. JC heard the rustle of cloth, and bed springs. His fingers felt like stones. “Were you, um, not supposed to?”

“No, I mean. It was automatic, you know? Like, I didn’t even plan it.”

“Oh, hey, that’s fine. I used to give Lance’s number as mine to, like, everybody. Did it for months. It’s ‘cause we’re all so, you know, close.”

“Yeah, I. Yeah, thanks,” he hung up and reached for his keys.

In the car, JC turned on the radio again, skipping around until he found classic oldies coming in faint over the static. With pieces of his fingers still chipping off from his dream, and the heater turned up high, the music sounded like electrified cotton. JC put on turning signals and applied the brakes without really looking.

JC punched the codes to Justin’s alarm and walked in. There were Lucky Charms in the cupboards, the lights were off and the clock on the electric oven said three. JC took off his sandals and lined them up next to the couch, using a blanket from the hall cupboard. The last thing he saw before he fell asleep, Billie Holiday from the car radio still in his head, was the little square of melted wax that sat in a frame on the mantel. He left in the morning, before Justin woke up.

Eight

JC went to the grocery store, leaving Justin in his living room with a taped episode of Farscape and a dish of animal crackers. I’m not a child, Justin had said, and bit JC’s tongue for emphasis. In the store, in front of the Lipton boxes and cake mix, JC ran his tongue across his teeth again and again, like rewinding film.

Justin stood when he walked in the door and pulled at his fingers. “I have to show you something.”

“What is it?”

“Just come look.”

He waited for JC to put the groceries away, tapping his foot and stealing a basket of blueberries out of the shopping bag. At one point he looked up and asked, “What the fuck is on your ceiling?” But when JC didn’t answer he shrugged and sat on the counter, and watched. JC’s back felt cold when he faced Justin, like all the heat had been pulled to the front, and his fingers stung when Justin took his hand again. When he followed.

Upstairs, past his Chuck Close reprints and the embroidered cushion that he couldn’t find a place for in his room, so it sat at the top of the staircase like a guard. They went into the bedroom and JC remembered the rumors. He bit the inside of his cheek because if Justin had sprinkled rose petals on the bed like he had with Britney then JC was not going to laugh, and then he looked and it was worse. There were clean sheets and new pillowcases, and hundreds of tiny wax balls spread all over, Justin smiling shyly and hooking their fingers together.

JC closed his eyes and breathed, in and out and he wouldn’t laugh, he wouldn’t laugh. Justin was waiting for him. In his mind the beads looked like jewels.

*

The beads had melted sometime during the night, not completely but enough to lose their perfect round shape. JC felt them pushing into his back before he fully woke up, each one a slick interruption to the cotton sheets. In the bathroom, he had to turn sideways to see the ones still attached, stuck with sweat and melted against him.

JC brushed his palm against the sheets, wax residue leaving yellow and green and red spots on the white. Shiny, slippery patches that his thumb slid over when he rubbed them. Justin was still asleep. His sheets were ruined.

Justin found him in the kitchen, staring up at the ceiling. “Listen, um. I’m going to go to Chris’s, to tell him about us,” he said. “You should come with me.”

“I have to get the pancake off of my ceiling,” JC pointed.

Justin looked up. “You know, you can probably call it a flapjack now.” He climbed up on the counter, “Can I?” and JC nodded. He took a butter knife from the drying rack. “And after, we’ll call Joey and Lance.”

JC sat at the kitchen table and watched him. There were slices of banana bread in a pool of sunlight on the table, chicory coffee and apples for breakfast. The wax on his back made his skin itch, and his throat ached. “I don’t want to tell him anything.”

“I want to.”

“What would you tell him? It’s not like we’re together, we’re,” he pushed his hands flat on the table. “You just keep coming over.”

“Come on, I don’t just. You know I don’t just.”

JC looked at him. He seemed serious. "Yeah, you don't.”

“Okay.” He reached out with the knife, one hand braced against the ceiling, head bent to the side and his elbows pointed awkwardly. “What the hell, man? Is this thing, like, glued on? When did this happen?”

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“It’s all dried and stuff, I can’t. How did it get up here, anyway?”

“I don’t know. Look,” JC watched him prodding the sides with the butter knife, angle all wrong. The pancake looked like a sand-dollar stuck to his ceiling. “The wax on the bed,” he said.

Justin stopped for a second and looked at him. “You like them. I saw you with that hotplate thing.”

“You know it’ll never come out of the sheets.”

Justin looked confused. “JC, you like them. What was I supposed to do?” He went back to the pancake, changing the angle of the knife. JC watched the line of his arms; he could see faint spots of red and blue where wax had stuck to him, colors like bruises. “See, sex for you,” Justin said. “It’s like rocketships; you just do it. I’m not like that. I can’t do it like that. I have to, there’s gotta be more, you know?”

JC looked at his hands. There were traces of color on his wrist, and he brushed his finger over them. “My clothes smell nice, you said.”

“Oh, fuck you. Fuck what I said.” The pancake hit the floor, and shattered.

“I’m not like rocketships.”

“All right.” Justin slipped down off the counter and stood next to him. He could hear birds out the window. “So you’ll come with me.”

JC breathed, and looked up. “Yeah, just. Let me get my shoes.”

End