Five

Lance sighed as he knocked on the door. He knew it wouldn’t do any good, anyway. He looked down at the spare keycard he had finagled from the front desk, and swiped it through the reader.

Justin was still asleep, one arm thrown over his head. Lance swallowed deeply, those feelings rushing back after all the effort he gave to hide them. Regardless of how much of a jerk he was, Justin was absolutely beautiful. Lance leaned over and gently shook him. Justin opened one eye. Lance pointed to his watch. Justin sat up and yawned, looked at his clock, then went into the shower without saying a word to Lance.

Lance sighed again as he sat down on a chair and dialed a number on his cellphone. “It’s too damn early!” The voice on the other end barked.

“Hi, Johnny, it’s Lance.”

“Do you know that it’s too damn early?”

“Yes, I do,” Lance said with a smile. “It’s about Justin.”

“NOW what did he do? Hit a fan? Piss off a photographer?”

“No…actually, he’s been pretty nice the last day or so,” Lance said truthfully. “It’s just…I don’t know if we’ll be able to do that performance when we get back.”

“WHAT?” Johnny Wright yelled, and Lance could hear the sleepy voice of his wife in the background.

“Justin’s got some kind of bug, Johnny. It’s affected his hearing. He CAN sing, I’m sure, but he won’t be able to hear the harmonies or any of the cues.”

“Dammit, Lance…”

“I just wanted you to know, okay? I’ll talk to you later, if anything else comes up.” Lance hung up his phone as Justin came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist.

“Who was that?” Justin asked, going to his closet.

Lance waited for Justin to turn back around. “Johnny.”

“Did you tell him I’m some sort of asshole deaf freak?” Justin snapped.

“No.” Lance pulled out the tablet and wrote, “I told him you have some sort of bug affecting your hearing and that you might not be able to perform. He already knows you’re an asshole.”

Justin read the words and couldn’t keep the smile from his face. “Ha ha. What are we doing today?” Lance pantomimed a camera. “Good. I don’t need to hear much for that.” Justin looked at Lance and sighed. “Can you…can you help me today?”

Lance ignored the fact that he got no apology from Justin. “Sure.”

“And maybe in the car on the way over, we can try to sing,” Justin suggested. Lance simply nodded.

“So? Are we still playing mute?” Chris asked, waving a hand in front of Justin’s face as they arrived in the lobby.

“Mute would mean he couldn’t talk, dumbass,” Joey snapped. He smiled at Justin, who smiled sadly and shook his head.

“Justin wants us to try and sing on the way,” Lance said. “To see if he can do it.”

“Of course he can do it,” JC said. “Justin can do everything, remember? Justin’s so perfect that he doesn’t NEED us.”

Justin couldn’t understand JC’s words, but he could tell from the look in JC’s eyes and the shock on Lance’s face that it wasn’t nice. “I’m sorry, you know, about this. It’s not something I wanted to happen.”

JC turned to Justin and exaggerated his words so Justin could read his lips. “You…love…being…the star.” JC turned on one heel and left the hotel.

“Damn,” Chris muttered, though he felt the same way.

“Have I really gotten that bad?” Justin whispered.

“That is the first time in FOREVER that I’ve heard you apologize,” Joey wrote when Lance shoved the tablet at him. Justin blushed and followed them to the van.

“So, what should we sing?” Lance asked.

“Try This I Promise You,” Joey suggested. Lance wrote the title down for Justin, who began to quietly sing. He got a little louder as he went on, and his voice was on key, but he couldn’t hear them behind them, and he ended up singing at a different tempo than they were, as well as in a different key. One by one they faded out, and when Justin saw the look on Lance’s face, he stopped as well.

“God,” he whispered. Tears filled his blue eyes and he looked out the window. Even Chris felt sorry for him.

“Well, at least we can do this photo shoot,” Chris said. “And then tonight…”

“Tonight we’re supposed to do an interview,” JC reminded him, beginning to believe that Justin was seriously ailing. “How can he do that?”

“It’s print, though,” Lance pointed out. “We’ll cover for him. How many times have we covered for each other before?”

“Right,” Joey said slowly. He reached over and put a hand on Justin’s knee. Justin glanced at him and Joey gave him a reassuring smile. Justin smiled back, then looked out the window once more.

“Hey.” Lance put his hand on Justin’s shoulder. The photographer was working with the “three brunettes,” as he called Joey, Chris and JC, so Justin had wandered off to a corner. “You okay?”

“I can’t sing, Lance,” Justin said, his hands working over each other. “I can’t fucking SING. What else am I good for?”

“Hey, stop that,” Lance said soothingly, shocked to see tears fall from Justin’s blue eyes.

“I can’t sing, I can’t hear…apparently I’m some kind of obnoxious dickhead…”

“Not ALL the time,” Lance said, but Justin shook his head.

“Fuck…what’s left for me?”

“C’mere.” Lance gave Justin a big hug, inhaling Justin’s cologne as Justin cried on his shoulder. “It’ll be okay,” Lance said, rubbing Justin’s back, but he wondered how in the world it WOULD be okay.

Six