Stashing his shaving kit on a shelf in the bathroom, Brian tried to make out what TV show Justin had settled on in the other room in the ten minutes since they'd been in the suite. There wasn't much of a selection at close to two in the morning Pacific, but whatever it was, Brian would bet good money that it was animated.

He barely noticed when he knocked over one of the many towels on the rack next to the sink and he instead settled on checking out what a grand a night was buying him. This area of the bathroom housed a rough-cut granite sink and a dressing area and Brian took note of the black marble of the counter top. They hadn't planned out this little excursion and so he'd settled on the last hotel he'd stayed in when he was in San Francisco on business. Back then he'd been here on the agency's ticket and Ryder had demanded that he save the finery for the clients. That was then and even as spur of the moment as this trip was, as a partner, Brian didn't need permission to spread his own money around.

Somewhere between pulling his t-shirt over his head and turning up the spray in the shower, it had occurred to him that an all dressed suite for two was ten million miles away from the scene at the diner just over twenty-four hours before. Having rubbed Justin's face in his own shit while their friends and curious strangers looked on in either veiled horror or outright amusement, not even Brian who was in the proverbial driver's seat of this particular interlude, would have been able to see this coming.

He stepped into the enclosure and took note of the telephone and the bench built into the wall of the structure. For some reason or another, his thoughts had been settling on the minutia of the suite as opposed to the reality of the situation. Never mind the fact that he'd just flown clear across the country in the middle of the night with his ex...whatever he was, but now they would be shacked up together in the lap of luxury for the next...however many days until this insanity wore off or settled in depending on your vantage point.

Just above the sound of the water, Brian could hear Justin come into the bathroom and he turned ever so slightly to keep his back to the entrance of the shower enclosure. He wasn't ready to deal with Justin and as long as the other man was still out of his line of sight, he could let himself happily consider the fact that the marble tile work in this bathroom went all the way up and across the ceilings.

"Would you give it a rest already? Justin will call you when they're done." Vic made his way into the small kitchen and offered Debbie yet another suggestion that she leave well enough alone.

"What do you mean, when they're done? I don't even know if Sunshine is really with him, I didn't see them go and Brian's still not picking up." Debbie replaced the receiver on the wall-mounted phone and cursed as she tried to unwind herself from the long cord. She'd given up on calling the loft and now that Justin's cell number was feeding her a prerecorded message about the customer being out of range, her profanities were becoming more and more profane by the second. "Justin could be anywhere, I mean Daphne said he's not with her. He didn't even call her to say he wasn't coming and that's where he was supposed to be tonight." Debbie brought a hand to her mouth as she channeled visions of her unpleasant discovery earlier in the year.

"Justin is with Brian. You know that and I know that. End of story, so leave them alone." Vic had rinsed his glass and he turned away from the sink to take a seat across from where his sister stood frowning. He'd anticipated her next sequence of words even before Debbie drew the breath to utter them.

"I'm going over there." She spun on her heels and grabbed for her purse even before Vic could manage a smile for his prophetic ability.

"You're not going anywhere, the sun's gonna come up in another hour or so and you've got a shift this afternoon. You wasted the entire night keeping Daphne up and keeping the telephone ringing in the loft and no one answered. That tells me that they don't wanna talk to anyone right now." Vic folded his arms across his chest and waited for Debbie to give up her intended mission. She had yet to realize that she was still wearing bunny pajamas and a Hawaiian print robe and in this state of one-track mindedness, she hadn't yet realized that she was wigless.

"Sometin' might have happened to Sunshine. It's not like him to not call if he's gonna be out all night." Debbie stuffed her purse under her arm and reached for the telephone again. She'd just thought of Ethan and she wondered if he was still in town and if Justin might have gone there.

"Who're you calling now?" Vic spoke up as Debbie searched through her handwriting in the little phone book on the counter where she was standing.

"Ethan. Only I can't find his num...would you hand me my glasses?" Debbie turned around impatiently, she'd managed to work herself into a respectable frenzy and Vic's mild amusement was now the frosting on the cake.

"You're gonna need more than your glasses to find that number. The kid doesn't have a phone, remember? You had to call Justin on his cell when he was over there. Besides, either he's already out of town, or he wouldn't take too kindly to you calling up to say Justin may or may not be with Brian, and you're calling because you'd be that much closer to finding him if you could cross 'Ethan's Bed' off the list of places he could be." Vic sat forward and watched Debbie's expression soften a little at the absurdity of her intentions.

"Well I wasn't gonna say it like that." She didn't see what it was that Vic thought was so funny about this situation. "Either way, the kid doesn't actually leave town for another two weeks. I picked that much up at the diner, so it's still a possibility."

"Sure it's a possibility, except the probability is that he's with Brian doing what all good boys do when they find themselves in Brian Kinney's bed."

"Knowing that doesn't comfort me. That's why I'm worried." Debbie pouted a little and turned to rifle through the phone numbers in the book again. "I had to tell his mother that he'd called and said he was with Daphne. That's why it's not her who's worried. After what I saw today, Brian's bed is the last place that Justin should be right now." Having found precisely what she'd been looking for, she reached for the telephone again.

"Who now?" Vic's question was predictable and in response, Debbie offered him one of the fingers that she wasn't using.

Turning her back toward her brother to assure some privacy, Debbie wasted that effort when she proceeded to yell at the pre-recorded message that greeted her from the other end of the line. "Brian, you are the only person I know who pays for a cell phone that is never on when a person tries to call it." She hung up the phone in outrage and Vic only laughed louder.

Frowning again but some of her steam gone, Debbie turned around aimlessly. She could go over to the loft if only to confirm that Justin was safe, but she was entirely sure that locating him physically would by no means guarantee that he was in fact safe.

Brian had succeeded in ignoring Justin for the entire time that it took him to wash his hair and in the instant that he shut off the water, he could tell that Justin was still in the room. Even though no sound betrayed his presence, there was always something to be said for Brian's second sight where a certain blonde head was concerned. Resigning himself to the fact that he couldn't camp out in the shower, sucking it up and facing the music sounded like a better plan.

Just outside of the enclosure now, the steam parted to reveal Justin on the other side of the room. The other man was wearing the blue sweatshirt he'd had in his backpack, having apparently packed for an overnight taking care of a sick Daphne. The fact that Justin had a change of clothes had seemed a little too convenient and too perfect considering the fact that fate would dictate this little getaway.

"Why didn't you come in?" A dumb question if Brian had ever heard one, but he asked it anyway. He could think of ten reasons why he didn't want Justin to come in and ten more different ones from Justin's perspective. It was a dumb question and although he'd never really found himself saying something just to fill the silence, this situation was one of those times.

"I didn't think you wanted me to." Justin squinted a little as he tried to figure out whether the man was serious. He'd been trying to understand how he and Brian had ended up on a plane together and now every word and every gesture had to be interpreted and evaluated against what he understood to be "Brian speak".

"That never stopped you before." Brian had unintentionally made his words a dagger enclosed challenge and Justin recoiled a little at the implication and accusation woven into that word "before".

Before what?

Before you left... before Ethan... before you fucked me over...

Brian watched as Justin swallowed down whole whatever words came to his tongue. He'd only now figured out the unintended implications of his words but he still took some pleasure in knowing that they wouldn't start this interlude off with needless rebuttals of the facts. Never mind the reality that Brian's version of the facts spoke very highly to his own blamelessness, at least Justin's silence meant that only one of them would have to submit his sins for scrutiny for the time being.

Brian walked toward Justin and reached for one of the towels on the rack next to him. The fact that the taller man's nudity was being reflected in the many mirrored panels in the bathroom wasn't lost on Justin and he settled on watching Brian's hands on the towel instead.

When Justin made no effort to move away from the proximity or to break eye contact, Brian had no choice but to deal with all the thoughts that he'd been avoiding the entire way here. He had "asked" Justin to come along...why?

"Look Brian, I'm guessing that we came here so that we could talk...see what there was to say." Justin looked down for a second or two before finding his balls again. "Two in the morning might not be talking time but I don't want to fuck for fuck's sake either."

Justin had been unaware of the fact that it hadn't been fucking that crossed Brian's thoughts in those seconds. It seemed that he was wrong about the seduction that he thought was afoot. One man's "seduction" was another man's way of dealing with the things that he couldn't help but feel.

'Saved by the bell, sort of.' This thought enfolded Brian in the instant that Justin uttered his words. It was words like these from Justin that saved him from falling into any of the mental sinkholes that he'd found himself playing dangerously near to in the last little while. When Justin said things that sounded as abrasive as Brian might have said them, it gave Brian a nice reminder to make sure that nothing that he said sounded like something that the old Justin would have said...or felt.

Now it was ironic that one man's defensive stance could be interpreted as a strong offence by the other player.

"Then go take a shower and go to bed Sunshine. I won't sully what little virtue you have left. Not tonight any way." Brian offered him a cold smile to go along with the sarcasm. He pushed off and headed toward the bedroom leaving Justin and the momentary train of thought that had encouraged him to say something else, in his wake.

"Wait. Brian wait a minute." Justin found his own shell-shocked reflection in one of the mirrors before he hurried out of the bathroom after Brian. "That wasn't what you were doing was it? I thought that you were..." He gestured toward the bathroom behind them as his words trailed off. "...but that wasn't it, was it?"

"What are you talking about?" Brian answered nonchalantly as he reached down to rub the towel across his thighs.

Having seen the expression on Brian's face change to this blank mask in those last seconds in the bathroom, Justin stepped down his questioning. It had taken pushing Brian to anger at the loft in order to get any kind of answer and Justin didn't think he had the stamina to take that on again at this point in the morning. Tomorrow, or rather later today, was another day and he turned away and went back into the bathroom before Brian could look at him again. Justin's own anger at the situation was still palpable, but he had to admit to himself that the fact that he'd agreed to come along for this ride, meant that he did indeed want something more than the anger and the resentment.

It had been Brian's shoulder just below the covers that Justin saw when he emerged from the bathroom some minutes later, but it had been Brian's voice that told him that the man wasn't asleep. Something in the way that Brian had asked him to forget what he'd said when they were in the bathroom before, made Justin settle in a little deeper against his pillow. No apology uttered from either of them and each still tip-toeing around the obvious question, at least this was something that said the people who boarded a plane together some hours before, were still here and had some intention of, like Justin had put it...seeing if there was anything else to say.

"Okay." Justin spoke to the shoulder in response to Brian's request that he forget and Brian's posture seemed to relax instantly. Brian had reached up to flick off the light next to him and he'd left the rest of the things that they could say unsaid.

Back at the loft, Justin had asked whether he still wanted him and a simple yes had gotten them here. Telling the other man that it wasn't as cut and dry as all that was another story and replaying the sequence of the conversation in his head, Brian still couldn't pinpoint the moment when he stopped throwing Justin out and started to pack to go with him. All these thoughts were postponed by the need to disappear into sleep and Brian pulled the covers higher on his shoulder and closed his eyes.

Somewhere on the other side of a vast expense of bedding, Justin decided that he wouldn't ask whether Brian wanted him to come any closer. Despite his own reservations, he'd just do what he used to do before and hope that eventually they would do whatever it was that they needed to do to come to terms with the reasons why "before" and "now" were so different. He'd slipped an arm around Brian's waist and he felt it when Brian jerked awake again. Like holding on tight to something in a sudden gust of wind, Justin held on until the muscles beneath him relaxed and Brian's breathing steadied again. He closed his eyes when Brian reached for his hand and didn't say anything at all.

~To be continued on Sunday~