More Myself with You

aka the bff fic

Funny how I feel more myself with you

Than anybody else that I ever knew

2009

The first ever package Adam sends Kris arrives at his parents' house in Arkansas on a cold November morning. It's a yellow envelope; generic and simple enough. Kris signs for it, fondling it to see if he can tell what's inside. It's unmistakably paper. The recipient's name is written as "Kristopher Neil Allen" on the package in neat block letters, which is unusual since the whole world calls him Kris Allen now, short and simple; no one bothers with whole names once your name turns into a brand. (Kris wonders what people write on envelopes they send to Madonna. Does FedEx make deliveries to a Madonna, no last name?) He turns the envelope over and notes the sender's name as he tears it open; it says Ed Wood, with no address underneath.

A magazine comes tumbling out of the envelope; Kris has to fumble to catch it. It's the latest issue of Billboard, the one with Adam on the cover; he has seen it before, though he didn't read the interview. He is sick of interviews to tell the truth, his or anyone else’s; he doesn't read them anymore unless he really has to. There's a pink Post-It sticking out from one of the pages, so he opens it, taking in the shirtless picture of Adam on the page and the signature on it. He’d know Adam's signature anywhere, he's seen him sign thousands of things, CDs, photos, napkins and, on one memorable occasion, a bra. This one is a lot neater than the ones he gives the fans though; those are usually nothing more than some scribbles that resemble his name. Looking at the other side of the page Kris sees that a part of the interview is circled with a red sharpie.

  

I guess you and Kris don't get to see each other a lot these days?

We talk. We text. We email. He is actually on my speed dial.

What number?

5.

Is it still a distraction, the cute guy thing?

Oh, no, I'm way past the cute guy thing. Now that I know him really well, I'm like his biggest fan. Not just his music; I'm a fan of the whole Kris Allen package.

  

Adam has written 'I'm a fan of your package!' next to it. Kris smirks. Katy will not let him live this down.

That night, he sends Adam a text: Katy loves the shirtless pix. Sends her love.

Adam's reply comes in the form of a picture that makes Kris blush as it opens bit by bit. It's a picture of Adam sleeping, tangled with sheets, but obviously naked. Idiot, Kris texts him, and deletes the picture quickly. It's just what Adam's career needs, his bare ass all over the Internet. Kris would die if something like that happened because of him. It would also be kind of hard to explain why he had that picture in his phone in the first place, but he is used to making embarrassing fumbled explanations when it comes to Adam. Their friendship is hard to explain.

~

Not a lot of people get why they are friends.

Kris' parents love Adam, because Adam is the most unexpectedly respectful person when he is around them, and also because Adam's parents have been so awesome in welcoming the ever so slightly dazed Allen bunch into the fold, they couldn't help but fall in love with the whole Lambert clan. That, combined with the fact that they truly trust Kris to make good choices, is the reason Kris' parents have been supportive of their friendship from day one. They even told him once that they are okay with Adam being who he is. Kris has to admit, that took even him by surprise.

Katy doesn't understand at all. When she sees them together she smiles that overindulgent smile of hers, like he and Adam are two kids playing in a sandbox, and she doesn't think there's any substance there, like once the sandbox is gone, the friendship will be done and forgotten. He tried before, but it seems there is no way to make her understand, because even though Katy knows him like no one else, the American Idol experience changed a lot in Kris and he doesn't think anyone who wasn't going through that with him could possibly understand. He and Adam know things about each other that no one else does, and Kris thinks that that's what makes theirs a solid friendship. And of course it helps that they like each other kind of a lot.

Kris was the one who started the interview thing, but it was in part Adam's fault.

Kris gets nervous during interviews, he still does, but it was even worse those first couple of months; he stammered and blushed and generally made no sense whatsoever. When they talked about it one night before bed, Adam told him that he had to learn to deflect, divert the conversation when he felt uncomfortable, pick something familiar to talk about when it got tough. So the next time Kris was being interviewed, he took that advice and ran with it, and the easiest thing to talk about at that moment for him was Adam. He lived with Adam, sang with Adam, had his meals with Adam, goofed around with Adam. And people didn't mind hearing about Adam. It was the obvious subject. And surprisingly it did help. He made it through the interview without once stammering or having to make a face instead of answering a question. It felt good. Adam made fun of him for days afterwards, but his smile said it was cool, and since the interview turned out to be the best Kris had given yet, he felt free to make a habit of it.

Adam, of course, had to retaliate.

It turned into a game of tag. In every interview they kept talking about each other, about how great and talented the other was, how awesome it was to be going through this together. At least this way they didn't have to answer inane questions about the experience and the fame, but the completely unintentional result of their little experiment was that their friendship suddenly became the talk of town. People actually started calling them kradam. (Kris laughed over that for ten minutes straight. It was the funniest thing he'd heard since glambert.) The interviewers caught on quickly and started asking prodding questions about their relationship, because even though some of them seemed truly nice, they were all vultures in the end, and that was what sold papers these days. As if that wasn't enough of a circus, then Adam had to go and push the envelope by calling him a distraction, making Kris field thousands of questions on Adam's sexuality and his little crush, which made him start blushing during interviews all over again and made him want to strangle Adam for doing that to him.

Kris remembers Adam's voice on the phone when he told him what he did. Anyone except Kris would probably have read it as cocksure, but Kris knew that particular timbre of his voice, he was obviously wondering if he'd gone a little too far this time. Kris wasn't really mad. What was the point of getting mad at Adam for being Adam? Kris was just embarrassed. Again. (That was kind of like Adam's job now. Embarrassing Kris at uneven intervals.) But the permanent blush on Kris' cheeks aside, it was all good in the end. Kris knew Adam liked pushing the envelope, knew he'd keep pushing until it finally gave way. That seemed to be the way things were destined to be.

Though Kris did thank God for being married, or who knew what the blogs would have made up about the two of them.

~

Kris chooses his personal assistant almost at random. The woman comes highly recommended, and it's not like Kris knows anything about assistants and what they are supposed to know or do. They tell him that he needs one, they give him a bunch of resumes, so he picks one that seems okay. After all, how important can that one person really be when he now has dozens working for him, doing he doesn't even know what most of the time.

Turns out it's very important.

Her name is Mildred. Maybe that should have clued Kris in that she is just not his kind of person. She is not what he had imagined a personal assistant would be like. She is more like a drill sergeant. No one can say she doesn't keep track of everything, but Kris thinks maybe it can be argued that she keeps track of a little too much. In weeks, she takes over his life and learns anything and everything there is to know about him, including his underwear color at any given time. Kris is not a prude, far from it, but he is just not comfortable with Mildred going through his underwear drawer. He has nightmares of her scheduling the times he can have sex with his wife. It is just not working for him. But Kris is not comfortable with firing people. That's the only reason Mildred stays for as long as she does. When she finally does get fired, it's because of Adam.

Everyone who knows Kris knows that Adam is always to be put through whenever he calls, texts, emails or sends smoke signals. Everyone in the world actually kind of knows that. But Mildred decides with her infinite wisdom that Kris is not to be interrupted while working and ends up cutting Adam off for a whole week. Kris is always busy these days. If he stopped talking to people while he was busy, he'd only be talking to interviewers and show hosts and Mildred. (And that would be a miserable existence for sure.) When Adam does finally reach him, he says one thing: Can the bitch.

So Kris does. Well. He gets someone else to do it for him, since he has people for firing people now.

Kris decides to be more picky with his new assistant. He interviews a bunch of people, asks around, goes through the resumes again and again, but can't decide on who to hire. No one seems worthy enough of his underwear drawer. Not that he will let them get into his underwear drawer this time, but experience says it's always a possibility. In the end he gives up and decides to make do for a while. That's when fate intervenes and he meets Josephine.

Kris has been traveling for what feels like forever. He stopped trying to keep track of the cities during the Idol tour, and now, months later, he just boards whatever plane they tell him to board and slides into whatever car they arrange for him to take. There is a certain freedom to waking up somewhere new every time he opens his eyes, but it is also tiring on an emotional level, not being able to go home at night. It's near impossible some days to remember to call Katy and ask intelligible questions about her day when he can't for the life of him remember what day it is.

One of the things he enjoys the most about the constant travel is the weather. It's crazy to be wearing shorts one day and boots the next. He has traveled before to different climates and loved the experience, but this is something else altogether. Traveling almost daily makes the weather act in disjointed, capricious ways. Kris' body can't make sense of it, but he loves it all the same.

He is in New York that day and there's fresh snow on the ground. Kris figures that in the city, it won't last the night without turning into brown mush, so he decides to enjoy it while he can. He has places to be, but he is in no hurry, he can walk to his meeting just as easily as he can take the car. The snow makes crunchy noises under his boots, and he smiles at the few people walking on the sidewalk with him, donned in colorful winter gear as if going on an Arctic expedition. Kris has never been one to be scared of the elements. He thinks feeling a little rain or snow on his face is good once in a while.

Halfway to the studio, Kris sees a Starbucks up ahead and crosses the street to get a cup of coffee. He is not particularly cold, but his fingers can use something warm to hold on to. Before he can go in however, the door opens, and a woman comes tumbling out, crashing right into him. She is shorter and smaller than Kris, and bounces right back when she hits his chest. Kris grabs her shoulders when she loses her footing, and they do a fumbling little dance before they can settle.

"Oh, my God," she breathes, taking in his coat and her arm all covered in coffee.

Kris grabs her wrist to check her hand, the coffee was quite hot. "Are you okay?" he asks, worried.

She looks up and her eyes grow wide. "Oh, God damn it," she states in a resigned tone, stumping one foot on the ground. "Today is not my day."

"It's okay. Did you burn your hand?"

"No, no, I don't think so," she says looking at her hand, then adds, "I did however manage to botch two job interviews, lose my cell, and dump coffee all over Kris Allen, all in one day."

Kris smiles at her. She is one of those people he likes at first sight. A tiny ball of sarcastic fire, kind of like Allison. "No harm done," he says. "It's just my coat. Come on, you can buy me a latte."

They sit down to clean up his coat with napkins and end up talking for fifteen minutes, Josephine telling him about the disastrous job interviews in a colorful language and then blushing upon realizing how much of his time she has monopolized by talking about herself. He doesn't mind knowing more about her. There's a thought, a wild, wild thought forming in his head that maybe he shouldn't give voice to, but knows he inevitably will. She is a business major and she actually wants to get into the music business. The interviews she told him about were both with record companies. She is clever and funny, and she seems like a normal human being. Kris thinks she is perfect for the job.

Her reaction when he asks her is a dropped jaw. "For real?"

Kris nods and shrugs. "You'll have to travel a lot, but it will get you into the business."

"But I don't know anything about being an assistant. I have no experience."

"That's kind of better actually. I don't have a lot of experience having a personal assistant, so I figure we can learn together."

She looks at him, blinking.

"You can think about it," Kris says, backtracking a little bit, but she wakes up from her daze to protest.

"Oh, hell no. I'm in. Where do I sign?"

That's how Kris hires Josephine Kelly. Almost everyone thinks it's a mistake, Katy says he'll regret the decision because of her lack of experience, because who is going to teach her Kris, you know nothing about these things, but Kris is adamant, he wants to try and see.

Three days after Josephine starts work, Kris gets a text from Adam: Josie ftw! Love her.

Kris grins. He knew it was the right choice. You cant have her, he texts back. He knows how many assistants Adam has gone through already. There is no way Kris is letting him steal his now. He and his underwear drawer need Josephine.

~

Josephine learns the job slowly but surely. She doesn't pester Kris, but she also doesn't wait for anyone to teach her anything; she takes in everything that's happening around her and asks intelligent questions about every detail. Her first priority is to get a hold of Kris' schedule and learn the everyday routine and details of his life. (She never does get into his drawers, he appreciates that.) But after that, she continues to poke and prod at everyone's jobs, learning every aspect of everything they are doing and somehow managing to teach Kris some of it as well. Kris finds himself learning more about the ins and outs of the business in just a couple of weeks with her than he did in the months since he first got involved with Idol.

His parents love Josephine. His mother conspires with her on matters she deems important, such as the less coffee more orange juice campaign they start out of nowhere. Josephine doesn't badger him about it too much, but Kris finds himself holding a cup of freshly squeezed orange juice he doesn't know where he got from whenever he is thirsty these days.

Katy is still not a fan, and Josephine doesn't push the issue; she keeps her distance and treats Katy with respect and deference which Kris appreciates. When he mentions the invisible wall between them, Josephine tells him that it's inevitable. "A woman will always have reservations about any other woman in her husband's life," she says. When he looks doubtful, she reminds him that she sees him twice as much as Katy does. Kris has to grudgingly accept the possibility.

~

"How did your parents meet?"

Adam doesn't use pleasantries when on the phone with Kris. Kris knows he is capable, he has heard him say hello and how are you to many people many times, both on and off the phone, but for whatever reason, he makes an exception for Kris.

"They were neighbors."

"Hmm," Adam says, sounding thoughtful. "You and Katy met in school, right?"

"Yeah. What's this about?"

"Nah. Nothing. Nothing," he says dismissively. "I just wondered."

"How did your parents meet?"

"College."

"Hmm." Kris has no idea what this all means.

"It's just... people seem to meet significant others early on. How does that work?"

"Well. I think you need more test subjects to say something like that. A lot of people who marry young also get a divorce afterwards." Not that Kris is a cynic. Those are just the facts.

"But the good marriages, the real kind, the ones that last, I think that's mostly of people who met young and knew each other for a long time," Adam says.

"I don't know," Kris says. He never really thought about it.

"Have you ever heard of two people staying together, like, a decade, who met at a club? That just doesn't happen."

Kris has a bad feeling about this. "How did you meet Drake?"

"At a club."

Yeah, that's what he thought.

"That's a stupid theory," Kris says. "Even if you didn't meet the love of your life yet, it doesn't mean you won't."

"Maybe I did, but I didn't know it. Maybe I missed my chance."

"Adam, that's almost as stupid as believing in fate and destiny and stuff."

"Maybe I do believe in fate."

Kris would have laughed at him any other time, but Adam sounds so sad, Kris can't bring himself to make a joke of it. They stay silent for a while. Adam does that a lot too; he calls and doesn't talk sometimes. Kris doesn't really mind, but he also doesn't mention it to anyone else. It would be yet another thing that's hard to explain about them.

"Are you okay?" Kris asks after a while.

"Yeah," Adam says. Kris can tell he means not really.

~

Kris hears the news a day late. He is not keeping up with the Internet like he used to. His working hours are crazy and he has a publicist for these things now. Josephine is the one who shows it to him, hovering at his shoulder as he reads, waiting to see if he'll ask anything of her. It's on a gossip blog, with a blurry picture of Drake underneath, holding hands with a blond guy.

  

Adam Lambert is finally single.

We can already hear the cheers of all the gay men in the country. There have been rumors, but we refused to pay them mind, because Lambert has been such a good boy since he came onto the scene, we honestly didn't believe them. But then last night, his boyfriend Drake something-or-other was seen out clubbing with a new man. Lambert's people couldn't be reached for comment, but we have a feeling that he has been dumped.

Drake whatever-the-hell-his-last-name-is surely must have a few screws loose. Oh well. His loss.

Check out the pictures to see who he's replaced Lambert with, you'll see what we mean.

 

Kris considers calling, but it’s not like Adam is shy about these things. He would have called if he wanted to talk. Kris can't just sit on it and do nothing though, so he sends Adam a text: Wanna talk?

Not now, says the reply. Before Kris can decide on what to answer with, his phone vibrates again. Will call when I do. Dont worry. Im ok.

~

You never did talk publicly about your recent break up, never even issued a statement. People have been curious about what went wrong.

I don't really want to talk about that. It's a private thing between two people, I don't think it should be up for public discussion. But I’ve heard some truly ridiculous things about who dumped who and who cheated on who, so I'll tell you this much. I was not the one who ended things. That's not to mean it was a sudden thing. It wasn't. We knew it was coming. But I just tend to cling to things. So Drake, being the more practical one between the two of us, had to put the final nail in that coffin. It wasn't an ugly break up, we don't hate each other, so people can just stop speculating about that.

When you first came out, everyone thought you'd be a player. You just seemed the type, you know? But you seem to prefer long-term relationships.

That just goes to show how much the stage persona of an artist differs from who the person inside really is, I guess. I'm not a casual relationship kind of guy. My lifestyle may not be the family approved kind, but when I am in a relationship, I'm in a relationship, you know? It's not because I think it's the right thing to do, or because I think people will approve, it's just what I feel comfortable with. I do what makes me happy.

 

2010

"I'm having costume problems."

Kris pauses the recording he was listening. "And you called me," he says blankly.

"Well, you never have costume problems?" Adam offers. It's weak. Really weak.

"That's because I always wear the same thing." Kris leans back in his chair, getting comfortable. "You don't see Simon having a crisis over which t-shirt to wear, do you?"

Adam sighs. "I envy women sometimes."

Kris tries but fails to see the relevance of this to the problem at hand.

"You can do a lot with skirts, you know?" Adam explains after a second.

"I'm sure you can do a lot with a skirt right now if you wanted," Kris says, and then thinks better of it. "But please don't."

"You stifle my creativity, Allen," Adam says, chuckling. "But seriously. No cross-dressing. I promise."

Kris sighs in relief. Adam will do it one day, Kris is pretty sure. Once he is secure enough in his place, he will go up on a stage in a dress and high heels, and sing the whole set in falsetto just to say fuck you to the entire world. Thankfully that day hasn't come yet though. Kris has some time still to prepare his heart for that eventuality.

"I should just go with plaid, right? They'll think it's a cool new style," Adam muses.

Kris gets a picture in his mind of Adam in plaid. It's missing something. "You can bedazzle one of my shirts," he offers.

"Don't tempt me!" Adam warns him. "But I don't think they'd fit anyway. You have scrawny arms. Maybe if I cut the sleeves out."

"My arms are perfectly fine, thank you. And you'd look like a gay Tarzan in that outfit."

There's a moment of silence. "Tarzan. That's an idea."

Adam sounds like he is having an epiphany. Kris is afraid to ask.

"Tell me you're not thinking about leaves. Please."

"No leaves," Adam promises. "I'm thinking something raw. Masculine. Like Tarzan."

"But not naked, right? America is not ready to see you naked, Adam."

Kris doesn't really think they'd let him go naked, but everything about Adam is unique, and everything he touches sells, so people are letting him get away with a lot of shit he shouldn't be able to. Kris is never sure what's coming next.

"Don't be ridiculous. It's fucking cold out. Topless, maybe. With a jacket. It should work." He sounds dazed, lost in thought. "See," he says after a contemplative silence, "You did help."

Kris rolls his eyes. "Yes. I should get into fashion."

Adam laughs. "That'll be the day."

~

Since his album release, Kris has been on every TV show known to men, and most of them twice. He doesn't particularly mind the ones he sings on, but the chatting and the interviewing is killing him. He doesn't think he'll ever get used to the inanity of his life as a celebrity. When it comes to his ineptness on TV, he has learned that it's not just about him being a bumbling idiot; it depends on the host as well. Experience has taught him that some hosts are better than others. He prefers Conan O'Brien to almost any other, because the guy is really funny and talks a lot, and guides the conversation in a way that lets it flow naturally and not get awkward as Kris would let it inevitably become. This time, Kris is there to promote his new video, so they talk about that for a while, Kris telling stories about the shoot and his inability to act. Conan asks him about what it is like to watch himself on TV, if he's gotten over the embarrassment phase yet, and in turn tells him about his first days in front of the camera. Kris lounges on the couch comfortably, all joking and laughing, it's easy stuff.

They go into the second commercial break with Conan announcing that he has a surprise and he actually refuses to tell Kris what it is until they get back on. When he finally says, "I found an old friend of yours hanging around the studio and kidnapped him for the show," and the curtain opens to reveal Adam, Kris jumps to his feet, smiling wide, surprised and incredulous and just plain happy.

They hug once, pull back to look at each other, then hug once again, Adam pulling him up until he is on his tiptoes. Kris knows he probably looks goofy with that huge grin on his face, but he can't help it. It's been so long.

"It has been literally forever," he tells Conan. "Thank you, man, really. You have to kidnap this guy, or you just don't get to see him at all."

"Call me whenever you miss him, I'll kidnap him for you," Conan says with a wink. "But seriously," he says. "It's been crazy for both of you. New albums, new lives. Rise to stardom and all that. Hard to keep track of friends when you focus on work so much."

"Oh, we keep track," Adam says. "I mean I call him all the time, about every stupid thing. I'm sure he gets sick of talking to me. It's just that when he's in New York, I'm in LA. When he's in LA, I'm in Chicago. And when we're in the same city, we don't even know it. Like today."

"I don't know myself which city I'm in most of the time," Kris admits. Adam gives him a huge grin, and Kris has to bite the inside of his lip to turn down the wattage of his own. The whole grinning at each other thing must be getting old for the audience.

"You should get something like a GPS locator," Conan offers. "It'll go BEEP! whenever you get in a 50 mile radius of each other."

"Not a bad idea," Kris nods.

"No, really, I forget what you look like, dude," Adam says, putting a hand on Kris' knee to get his attention. "It's like, when I think Kris these days, I get a picture of my phone in my head. We should start video conferencing or something. This is getting weird."

"I wonder," Conan interjects, "with all the craziness, how much do you guys get to see your families? Can you make time? Is it like, it's either Mom or Conan, so sorry Mom." The audience laughs. "What?" Conan says, turning to them. "Of course they pick me!"

"I try," Adam says, "and they have been very understanding. They come visit me wherever I am, but of course they have their own lives to get on with, so sometimes I find myself missing home at 1:00 in the morning and calling them from across the country. I mostly call my brother though, because my dad gets bitchy when I wake him up."

"He'll get even more bitchy, now that you've called him bitchy on TV," Conan says.

"Oh, he's used to it by now," Adam says, waving it away. "Neil calls him worse things on his blog."

Conan turns to Kris. "And you, Kris, you're married. How is that working out right now?"

"Katy has the patience of a saint. That's how it's working out." He chuckles. "She stepped into this crazy world with me, she moved, left her friends behind, and she supported me and supported me and supported me. It's really remarkable. I am very lucky to have her."

Conan makes an awww face at him. Kris cracks up.

"So cute," Conan says, batting his eyelashes at the camera.

It takes another ten minutes for them to be done with the show, then Kris finds himself hugging Adam all over again, this time in the relative privacy of the backstage. Adam hugs back just as tight, and Kris wonders at how extraordinary a friend Adam is. He did not expect this when they met. He didn't think a guy like Adam would be this open and honest and affectionate, more importantly he didn't think he would want to be friends with a guy like Kris. And after all this time, with all the opportunity to let this friendship drift away from them, it's amazing to Kris to find Adam still holding on. He knows now that this is a friendship to last a lifetime.

They pull back to grin at each other, Adam's hand warm on Kris' shoulder.

"Do you need to be anywhere?" Adam asks.

Kris does, actually, but it’s nothing he can’t cancel. He shakes his head no.

"Come on, then."

They end up in Adam's hotel room, ordering room service. Eating out is a chore these days, with paparazzi everywhere and people staring left and right. Kris is used to being cooped up in hotel rooms now. As scary a thought as it is, he is actually beginning to like them. Adam's room is—well, it's more than a room, it's a suite. That's the way their lives work now; they are getting comfortable with the success and all the luxuries it brings. Kris thinks the whole fame and fortune thing looks a bit awry on him, but Adam has taken to it like a duck to water. When he mentions this to him, Adam smirks and says, "Baby, I was born to be famous."

Kris thinks no one can dispute that.

They lounge on the bed and talk for hours. Kris finds himself complaining about the hectic life he is leading these days. He never gets to see anyone, never even has time to stop and enjoy the success, take it all in for a moment. He blushes when he realizes how much he's been whining, but he can't stop the words from coming out, they've been waiting there, ready to burst out for a long time now. Kris can't let himself voice these things to other people, certainly not to his parents and not even to Katy. He'd been the one to go after this after all. It was his dream. They made sacrifices so he could be where he is right now. What would they think of him if he started to talk so ungratefully, so soon?

Adam just nods. He knows what it's like to occasionally be weary of the thing he loves the most. What he doesn't know he can guess, Kris is sure, because Adam's empathy knows no bounds when it comes to Kris. It feels like Kris could still be selling shoes in a mall and Adam would understand exactly what he lived through every day.

"There's the music," Adam says, pushing a hand under his pillow. "You can't deny that it's worth all this. You make music, and people listen to it, and they like it. And there's the validation. You're good. You knew it. And now everybody knows it."

"Of course it's worth it. I'm just not sure if it will still be worth it ten years from now. I don't mind the work or the tiredness, I'm just afraid that I'll start letting things slide and one day I'll wake up and I won't have anything else."

Adam stares at him with a scary intensity, like he is boring holes into Kris' mind. "You're talking about Katy?"

Kris nods. "Among other things, yeah."

"Don't let that happen," Adam says, all serious. "You're not the type to be alone, Kris. In this commotion, it's easy to lose things without noticing. You should make time."

Kris smiles at him. Adam is a big softie inside.

Adam reaches over to prod his arm. "You're the fucking American Idol, dude! You're not begging for work anymore. Let the fuckers wait for you!"

The conversation moves in odd directions as it often does with Adam. Kris finds himself imparting wisdom on the topic of body paint at one point and has no idea how he found himself there afterwards. Adam makes him laugh like he hasn't laughed in a long time, and what's even more incredible is that he somehow makes Adam laugh in return, and it's not even the fake laugh he gives strangers or the polite laugh he offers Kris' parents, it's the all out, stupid laugh Kris has never seen on TV. Kris wishes they could work together, or live closer, or just find a way to see each other every day. As nerve wrecking as the competition was, it's impossible not to miss the closeness and the camaraderie of their American Idol days.

Kris wants to stay up all night talking to Adam, because God knows when they'll get to see each other next, but he got up early that morning and had to travel halfway across the country, so no matter how much he fights against it, sleep is winning out. He can feel his eyelids falling shut despite his protests. He vaguely thinks he should get up, take off his shirt maybe, but he can't make his limbs move. He can hear Adam's deep breaths, and as absurd as it sounds, he thinks he actually recognizes the pattern of his breathing from when they shared a room all those months ago. He thinks he hears Adam say, "I missed this," but maybe it's him, he can't be sure. He lets the rhythm of their combined breathing lull him to sleep.

~

On February 13th Josephine hands him a package along with his morning coffee. "From Adam," she says when he looks askance. Taking a sip of his coffee, Kris turns it around in his hands. He has to bend it to the light to read the sender's name, it's written in what appears to be a sparkly pink pen. It says Ziggy Stardust. He smiles as he opens it.

It's a small, gothic looking teddy bear, dressed in a black hoodie with small wings at the back, holding a red heart that says be my valentine. It's surprisingly cute. He shows it to Josephine who rolls her eyes and holds her hand out to take it.

"You're late," she states.

"Slave driver," he says, putting his coat on. He ignores Josephine's hand and stuffs the bear in his coat pocket. He has two radio interviews that day. He can use the company.

~

Kris takes Katy to a fancy restaurant on Valentine's Day.

Josephine picks the place, because Kris is clueless about these things and to be honest he has no wish to learn. It's a small, quiet restaurant and they give them a table at the back where they won't be bothered much. Josephine probably arranged for that too. The menu isn't in French and their waiter doesn't have a stick up his ass, both of which makes Kris very grateful and allows him to relax a little.

Katy is wearing a pink dress, her hair up in a bun with a small flower on one side, her neck and shoulders bare. Kris knows she loves being dolled up like this. His wife is not shallow by any means, but every woman Kris knows enjoys these things once in a while, and Katy is no different. Tonight she is wearing the earrings Kris bought her after he got his check from Idol. It was the first thing he did. He can still remember the relief of having all that money in the bank, not having to think about where he was going to work next. Katy always told him not to worry about those things so much, that they'd find a way together, but even before they got married Kris used to spend nights awake trying to figure out a way. He couldn't not take care of her. But he also couldn't give up on his dream. The two things had seemed mutually exclusive back then.

Katy tells him about her day while they wait for their food. She tells him all about what their parents are up to, down to the smallest detail. Kris doesn't know what difference it makes for him to know which one of his parents mowed the lawn this week, but Katy insists on telling him these things. Maybe she misses home or maybe she just wants Kris to remember; he doesn't think it'd be tactful to ask. Kris doesn't get to speak to his parents a lot nowadays, he mostly just hears about them from Katy since she speaks with them more often, so aside from being tediously boring at times, the updates don't really bother him that much. Kris learns that Katy's father is due for a dentist appointment tomorrow and is thinking of ways to get out of it, but that his wife wouldn't let him. She says her sister is thinking about getting pregnant again, and mentions her mother's request for more grandchildren with teasing eyes, and laughs when he chokes on his wine.

She is beautiful when she laughs. When she is shining like this, ten times more striking than any other woman in the room, Kris can't believe she actually married him. He was penniless, he had nothing but a guitar and she still married him. She is an amazing woman. Kris has no idea what he did to deserve her.

(Karma, Adam would probably say.)

Kris doesn't have a lot of stories to tell her in return and he empathically doesn't want to share the details of his day. He had two meetings that morning with suits from the label and they were both excruciating. The numbers and the pie charts are not his thing, he gets a headache just looking at those spreadsheets, he wants them to just let him be and do his thing, but he also doesn't want to be that guy that knows nothing about how his business actually works. He is an artist, he makes music, that's his job, but the music business today does not run with just art. He needs to know things to be able to understand what those guys in suits tell him. He doesn't want to blindly trust anyone. He thinks that's a good attitude at this point in his career, but it's also a pain in the butt.

The food is delicious, and Katy is having the time of her life. They don't get to spend a lot of time together, so Kris wants to assume that her good mood is all about being with him tonight, but he has a feeling that it's partially because of the wine. Either way, he doesn't mind, it's a joy for him to see her like this.

He is eating dessert when his phone vibrates in his pocket, signaling a text message. It's from Adam. Have a new boyfriend. Had to share.

Kris chuckles. His phone vibrates again in his hand and this time he gets a picture of the new boyfriend. Cute, he texts back.

The word youre looking for is hot, Adam's reply says.

He shows the picture to Katy when she asks what's so funny. "Adam has a new boyfriend," he explains

"Well, thank God for that," Katy mutters, rolling her eyes and going back to her dessert. Her tone sounds almost snide, but Kris doesn't ask.

She has been dropping hints here and there, and generally acting like she dislikes Adam for a while now, which makes Kris somewhat uncomfortable, because he doesn't really understand why. She doesn't even know Adam, and the few times they did meet, Adam was very well behaved. Kris can't make sense of it. But he certainly doesn't want to open that particular can of worms and spoil the mood tonight. Tonight he wants to take his wife home, take that pink dress off of her and make love to her. Then he wants to do it all over again in the morning, because for once he has time to enjoy being with her. He doesn't have to worry about work until noon tomorrow and he is determined to make the most of that time.

~

During the whole month of March Kris feels like he has spent more time with his agent Wally and the various tour organizers than he has with himself. It may be a physical impossibility, but that's what it feels like to him. It's not to say that he is not excited about the tour, because he is. He is positively psyched about it. He is the one who wanted to be included in every aspect of it, to see the plans, the details, how it all comes together. The organization of an event that big blows his mind. It's ridiculous to him that he's smack in the middle of this when just a couple of years ago he'd thought his wedding was the biggest organization he could possible be involved with.

He has this one song he's been working on since January and whenever he is home (or in a hotel, or stuck in a car) he finds himself tinkering with it, trying to make it sound right. He loves the song, that's why he hasn't scrapped it somewhere along the way, but it is driving him insane. While the idea and the feeling behind the song have been solid since day one, the lyrics evolved into something entirely different than what he started with and the sound just refuses to work. It's not bad, Kris thinks he can use it like this anyway, but it's just not perfect yet. And he wants this one to be perfect.

He has tentatively titled it Almost Yours, but who knows what it'll be called when he is done. If he is ever done, that is.

One night when he has gone so beyond tired that he can't even sleep anymore, he finds himself calling Adam from his hotel room. When he answers, Adam sounds even worse off than he is.

"Sorry," Kris says. "Go back to sleep, I didn't mean to wake you up."

Adam groans and Kris can hear sheets rustling in the background. "It's 3:00 AM, what did you think I was doing?"

Kris checks the time. He didn't realize it was that late. "Sorry," he says again.

"It's okay. I'm awake now." He yawns. "What's up?"

"I need you to listen to something."

"Okay," Adam says, audibly stifling another yawn.

Kris puts the phone on speaker and places it on the bed. He gets his guitar and starts playing.

He includes the change he made the day before to the bridge, where he added a bit to make it longer, and tries to keep his voice low as he sings so as not to disturb anyone. When he’s done, he pulls the guitar tighter against his chest to get the phone.

"So, what do you think?"

There's silence on the other end of the line. Kris thinks for a moment that Adam hated it and is trying to find a way to say that without breaking Kris' heart. But then he listens closely and hears Adam’s breathing. It sounds like he's asleep.

"Adam?"

Adam snuffles.

Kris chuckles and shakes his head.

"Sweet dreams."

~

"I liked the intro, but I didn't hear the rest," Adam admits the next day.

"It's okay. It's not like it can't wait."

"Come on, play it again," Adam says. Kris hears him close a door and the background noise cuts off.

"Where are you?" Kris asks, curious, because it sounded like he was in an office or something a moment ago.

"In a storage closet."

Kris' brow furrows in confusion. "Whose storage closet?"

"CBS Studios."

Kris chuckles. "Adam Lambert back in the closet. Up next, on CBS News!"

"Oh, shut up!" he says, and Kris hears something plastic hitting the ground, followed by a series of crashes. "The things I do for you," Adam mutters.

Picturing Adam fumbling with cleaning supplies in a closet, Kris snickers.

"Just play it, Allen!"

Kris has nothing better to do, he is at home, and has been lying about and waiting for the last two hours for Wally to finish up a meeting (any second now, Kris) so they can meet up to discuss the appearances he's lined up for the rest of the month. His guitar is in its usual place by the door, so Kris grabs it and starts playing.

(He’s been working on this song for so long, his fingers automatically start playing it as soon as he touches the guitar now. He is kind of afraid he’ll forget how to play his other songs.)

This time when he is done, Adam is thankfully still awake.

"What's the name of the song?"

"Almost Yours, I think. I mean it's not done yet or anything. I keep changing the bridge, it still doesn't feel right."

"I like it," Adam says. "It's good. You should leave the intro like this when you record, just bare strings. It'll make the melody sound more powerful. And the bridge is fine. Stop playing with it."

Kris lets out a breath he's been holding for months now. "You think so?"

"No, I'm lying," Adam deadpans. Kris can tell he is rolling his eyes. "I like that it's—it's about love, right? Like the kind of love that doesn't leave you even when it leaves you?"

Kris nods stupidly, then remembers he's on the phone. "Yeah, yeah. That's it."

"But it's not a love song, waxing poetic or anything. It's not a let's cry over our broken hearts song. It's simple and to the point. I think it's beautiful."

"Huh." Kris doesn't even know what to say to that.

Adam laughs. "Don't you just feel like you're on American Idol all over again? Not good enough Kris! Where's the artistry?"

"You'd be Paula," Kris says.

"Oh, I’d definitely be Paula. Only prettier."

~

Josephine is sitting in the living room, drinking coffee and reading her emails on her laptop when Kris wakes up. Josephine is always there these days, so Kris now knows better than to leave the bedroom before putting on something decent. He knows this is pushing Katy's boundaries a little bit, this whole bringing work into their home thing, and of course he is not overjoyed about it himself, but it’s necessary right now and he thinks it will get better soon. Once the tour is over, he can take a break and not have his assistant follow him around all day. They can take a vacation maybe, go somewhere warm. As it is right now, he doesn't know what he would do without Josephine. He'd probably only make it to ten percent of his appointments, answer two emails a day and have no time at all to actually work on his music. Josephine creates miracles.

"Coffee," Josephine says, handing him a cup. Kris cups his hands around it and takes a deep breath. Josephine creates miracles with coffee too.

She shuffles her papers while he drinks. "Wally has emailed you the updated tour dates, but there’s nothing big there, nothing you have to worry about anyway. Your mother's birthday is next Friday, so you need to talk to Daniel about the present soon; he was thinking jewelry I think. I got that suit you're going to wear tonight and Adam asked me to tell you that the shirt you were wearing last night on MTV was atrocious and that your hair looked lopsided." She makes a face. "His words, not mine."

"My hair wasn't lopsided," Kris scoffs. "Was it?"

"How should I know? And what do I care?" Josephine says. She hands him a piece of paper. "He gave me his stylist's phone number though, if you're interested."

Kris pictures himself with Adam's hair for a moment. He is so not interested.

~

"We need to talk about the new boyfriend," Kris says. He is in the car, stuck in traffic, and this has been in his mind all day. He might as well just get it out.

"What about him?" Adam asks, aloof.

"How about the fact that he is not Jason? Let's start from there."

"That's kind of why I'm dating him, Kris,” Adam says, patiently, as if talking to a five year old. “If I wanted to date Jason, I'd still be dating Jason."

It sounds all logical when he says it like that. "I didn't know you broke up with Jason. Last time I checked you still liked him."

"I did. Now I don't."

"Just like that?"

Adam sighs. "Of course not just like that. We had problems. But I don't want to whine about them. It’s over. We’re done. I’m moving on."

It’s not like Kris is Jason’s cheerleader. He never even met the guy. The thing that bothers him is that Adam, who talks about anything and everything with him, did not even mention that he was having problems with his boyfriend. What’s up with that, really? What does that even mean?

"You never told me." Kris doesn’t mean to be whiny, but he is a little bit hurt about this.

"You're not my therapist, Kris."

"I know I’m not. And it’s not like you have to tell me or anything. I just thought you'd at least mention it if you were thinking about breaking up with a guy you dated for months.” Kris doesn’t like it when TMZ knows these things before him. That’s just wrong.

"I just didn't feel like bringing all the bad shit into the conversation. You know."

Adam sounds apologetic and Kris can just picture the face that goes with that tone. How can he possibly stay mad?

"But you do know you can talk to me?"

"Of course I can talk to you. Who else am I going to talk to?"

~

Who else are they going to talk to?

Kris finds himself considering the question that night. He can't sleep; he hates to admit it, but he has insomnia. He has notes and dates and details flying before his eyes every night, and he finds himself working things out in his head and forgetting all about sleep. It's not a good habit he is forming, but he is helpless to stop it.

Kris has never been much of a talker and even though people make him talk a lot these days, he doesn’t talk much about the really important stuff.

He talks to Daniel almost every week. They have that effortless intimacy only siblings can have; Daniel knows his every embarrassment, every hurt and every joy since the day he was born. That’s not something anyone else can even come close to. So Kris picks up the phone some days just to hear Daniel’s his voice.

Daniel makes him laugh; Kris appreciates that most of all. He has a stupid sense of humor and not even their parents get their jokes, but that's what's so great about it at the end of the day. Kris knows that people look at them like they’re crazy when Daniel says something completely meaningless and it makes Kris spew his coffee out all over the place, laughing, but that’s what happens when you share a room with someone for as long as they had. They fought like cats and dogs back then, but they’ve also developed a secret language without really meaning to.

Katy is of course someone else Kris talks to on a daily basis. It’s all just meaningless stuff these days though. It's mostly 'Hi, honey,' and 'I'm gonna be late sweetheart,' and 'Did Josephine bring over that suit?' Kris remembers the never-ending conversations from before they got married and thinks maybe this is how it is supposed to be with your wife. You learn every habit, every thought, every feeling and then you enjoy not having to talk anymore. The idea has a certain feel of peace to it.

Kris has friends back home he catches up with whenever he is there. But their lives are so different now; it’s hard to find common ground. They don’t call him anymore and Kris would have kept trying from his end, but he gets the feeling that it’s more uncomfortable for them than it is for him, so he lets it go.

He has made a lot of new friends over the last year and a half. They are mostly musicians which Kris thinks is just plain awesome. He has always felt that musicians were the only kind of people that ever really understood him. They speak the same language; he can talk music with them all day and not get bored. Those friendships feel solid to him, but they stay just short of getting personal. Kris' reserved nature probably stops people from getting too close, or maybe that’s how things work around these parts? Kris doesn't mind it either way. There are different kinds of friends, and he thinks he has a good selection of them.

Kris doesn't talk a lot about personal matters; he never has, not to anyone. If he had to talk about heartbreak, he thinks Josephine would probably be the first one he'd go to, by virtue of her proximity. Adam would be a close second. And if he needed some pampering after an incident like that, his mother would be his first choice. Adam, again, is a close second.

Kris thinks if Adam was actually within touching distance at any given time, he wouldn't need anyone else there to support him. Adam is literally a rock; he has a way of making Kris feel safe and comfortable and at home in his own skin. It was due to him that Kris stayed relatively sane until the end of American Idol, when week after week people kept telling him he just didn’t quite cut it.

Kris has a feeling that Adam feels something along those lines about him as well. He doesn’t know who Adam goes to about the goings on in his life right now, but he thinks it’s a safe bet that Kris is a close second to whoever it is. Kris is okay with being second, as long as Adam knows he is there.

~

Adam is kind of particular about the people who he works closely with. He has been through over a dozen assistants already. Most of them were incompetent according to Adam, two of them just felt wrong, and one particular girl got fired because she dressed just horrible. Kris is afraid to ask why he fired this last one; Kate, or Kayla, something with K anyway.

"She was mousy."

"Mousy? Explain." Kris is shopping and talking. He is all about multi-tasking these days.

"She literally squeaked every time I raised my voice. I raise my voice a lot, Kris. I can't have her squeaking all over the place."

Kris grins, browsing the cereals looking for that bland and boring thing Katy eats.

"Yeah. I can see how that would be a problem with you."

"If that is your roundabout way of calling me a drama queen—"

"I don't need a roundabout way, man. You're a diva. It's what you do."

"Damn right I am." Adam sounds proud.

Kris chuckles. "Tell me you don't ask for fresh picked strawberries or something in your dressing room?"

"With perfectly chilled champagne and M&Ms," Adam says. "But I get them to pick the yellow ones out. It's not my color."

"I'm kind of afraid of turning into one of those people," Kris admits. "I mean, they don't even sound human anymore."

Kris gives a polite smile to the lady who does a double take when she recognizes him, and goes in search of the next item on his list: cream cheese.

"Don't worry. I don't think you're physically capable of it,” Adam tells him. “Me, I'm personally trying to keep those little mousy sycophants as far away from me as possible. I don't need any more cheerleaders. I need people who can think and talk and not be intimidated, you know?"

A stupid smile spreads across Kris’ face. He is so proud of Adam it's ridiculous.

"I’d probably get my head bitten off if I asked for champagne in the dressing room. I asked Josephine if she could get me a Coke Zero the other day; she handed me a Pepsi and told me to go fuck myself."

Adam laughs. “My sweet little Josie,” he says in a saccharine voice.

"No seriously. That time of the month or something, man, I don't know."

"PMS,” Adam says. “That's what you get for working with women."

~

Adam Lambert vs. the Paparazzi

Adam Lambert does not hit like a girl and we have the footage to prove it.

Things got a bit out of hand last night as Lambert exited a restaurant with boyfriend Noah Summers in tow. The paparazzi waiting outside swarmed the couple and in the commotion Lambert lost his footing and was separated from Summers.

Lambert is usually a paparazzi favorite, but now we know that he can and will kick ass if pushed too far.

The witnesses say Lambert tried his best to get away without hurting anyone, but the paps refused to let him through. And when a photog grabbed his shirt to keep him from getting into his car, Lambert turned and swung a fist.

It's not clear at this point if any legal action will be taken.

See the video after the jump.

~

With the end of May comes the tour and Kris finds himself moving into the cramped quarters of a bus, being lulled to sleep by engine noise.

Life on the road is a whole different creature. Kris is glad he’s had the Idol tour experience, so he knows what to expect from this. This time he’ll be even more lonely since there aren’t a bunch of other singers with him. There’s the crew, but they inevitably spend all day every day loading and unloading and setting up and breaking apart the equipment, so they are a busy bunch. Without the hustle and bustle of other people on his bus, it’s actually quite boring. It’s mostly just hurry up and wait. At least he’ll have plenty of time to work on his new songs on the bus; so that’s something.

He will be on the road for 3 months at least. He has a couple of weeks free in between, and he and Katy have planned a vacation for the last week of August, but after that he'll fly back for a couple more shows and there's always the possibility of more if the sales go well, so from where he is standing right now, it seems like this tour is going to last forever.

He and Adam compared notes on their tour schedules, but since Adam's tour started earlier than his, they don't overlap much. There's a few days they'll get to spend in Virginia together in July, but that's about it. Adam tells him to keep up with the video updates on YouTube; his stage show is apparently going to be kickass.

The first concert of the tour reminds Kris why the whole misery of the road is worth it. There are thousands out there, screaming his name; a tech hands him his guitar and he finds himself standing in the middle of the stage, grinning stupidly and feeling at home. It's where he belongs, he and his guitar, they should live right there on that stage. He sings until his throat hurts and plays until his fingers go numb, and when he walks off that stage, dripping sweat, he feels like he is walking on clouds. It's what he thinks getting high would feel like.

He has a text from Adam waiting for him when Josephine hands him his phone.

Awesome show.

Kris grins. Josephine points another phone at him mouthing Katy and Kris forgets to send Adam a reply.

~

Adam does deliver as promised on stage. Not one of his shows is the same as another. Kris can’t exactly say he is surprised, because he knows what Adam means when he says ‘I have some ideas.’ Adam’s ideas are wild and crazy and all over the place, and people always think they won’t work when he mentions them, but then of course they do.

Kris finds himself checking for YouTube clips almost daily, sending Adam emails about his favorite bits. So far, the top spot is shared between the tango and the feather boa, but Adam is just warming up, and knowing him he’ll probably save the best for last.

Adam does not stop once when he hits the stage. He runs, he jumps, he dances; there's so much energy in every show, Kris feels tired just watching bits of them. He doesn't know how Adam hasn't been hospitalized from exhaustion yet.

(Kris is a worrier. He wants to ask Adam if he is eating right, if he makes sure to stay hydrated, but then Adam would call him a mother hen and he’d never hear the end of it. He needs a spy in that corner. He makes a note to meet the assistant Adam hires next and test the waters for a possible ally.)

~

Kris' mom sends him care packages. Kris has no idea how Josephine arranges to have them delivered to the bus when they keep moving around so much, but he is not complaining. He rips into the latest box as soon as Josephine hands it to him, smelling the homemade chocolate chip cookies through the wrapping before he can even get to them. When he does finally get his hands on one, he doesn't lose a second before he chows it down in two bites. It's the best thing he's had since—well, since the last batch she sent ten days ago.

Josephine moves to take one only to have her hand slapped away.

"Mine," Kris growls at her.

She pouts at him sadly. She is good at the pout. If he didn’t know her better, he would definitely buy it. Kris carefully picks one of the smaller ones and gives it to her. That one was weirdly shaped anyway.

"Adam called," she says, munching on the cookie. "He said to call him back."

Kris gets his cell phone from his jacket pocket and moves to the back of the bus, taking his box with him. He doesn't trust the roadies with his cookies. Or Josephine for that matter.

"Hey!" Adam greets him with a cheerful voice. "What's up?"

"Not much. Josephine said you called."

"Ah, yes. My dear José."

"Don't call her that, for God's sake. I'm the one who has to put up with her after you wind her up, you know. I live on a bus, I have nowhere to run."

Adam makes a hmm sound, clearly saying I’m sure your mouth is moving, but I’m not hearing anything.

"What are you eating?" he asks.

Kris swallows. Busted. "Cookies."

"Chocolate chip?"

"Mmmhmm. Mom sent them."

Adam knows all about the chocolate chip cookies. They used to share them when they were roommates, even though Adam was constantly trying to lose weight back then. He’d eat the cookies and then moan about carbs.

Adam groans. "I hate you, Allen."

Kris hums happily. It’s not like he can share them when Adam is in another city.

"Your mom should teach my mom how to cook,” Adam says wistfully.

Kris has seen Mrs. Lambert trying to cook. She can burn a salad. “I don't think that'll work. Maybe if she taught your dad instead."

"I won't hold my breath," Adam says, unhappily. "Anyway. I hired a new assistant. Wanted to give you a heads up."

Kris drops the cookie back into the box. "That's awesome."

"Yeah. I think this one is gonna work out. His name is George, he's like this mountain of a man; I won't even need a bodyguard with him around."

"You hired a guy?" Kris sputters. "For real?"

Adam chuckles. "Yeah. I decided to go with something a little unorthodox this time."

Kris makes a no really? face to his box of cookies, Adam being unorthodox, how shocking.

"I think he'll be good. He looks kind of like Michael Clarke Duncan, 6 foot 5, deep voice, you know. He's scary. I like him."

Hiring a scary assistant does not make a lot of sense to Kris. But then again, most things Adam does don’t make sense to Kris unless he puts his Adam goggles on.

"You want him to scare away all your contacts?"

"No, see, I have this whole thing under control,” Adam explains. “I hired this cute, bubbly girl to keep track of the appointments, contacts, what have you, and I hired George to keep track of her, along with all those other people who organize things and be annoying in my general vicinity all day. It may seem a bit convoluted, but it'll work, I'm pretty sure."

"So your assistant has an assistant?" Kris asks.

"Yeah," Adam says. "Kinda. I mean, I know he is not the assistant type, but we met and I was like—I wanted someone who gets me, you know? He’ll deal with all the craziness and I’ll only deal with him. Much easier for me.”

Why Adam can’t do that with a proper assistant, Kris has no idea. But he thinks maybe the paparazzi thing spooked Adam off a little bit. He can’t blame him for wanting some extra muscle around.

“He doesn't talk a lot, but he is seriously the coolest guy ever,” Adam continues. “He has like this aloof, sarcastic thing going on. Reminds me of George Clooney."

"Thought he was black.”

"He is. I didn't mean he looks like him. He just has that same smile George Clooney has, you know, like he's saying you amuse me small person."

Kris smirks. Of course Adam would like that. He has a smile that says that exact same thing himself. "You'd like that."

"You know I actually met George Clooney a couple months back? I was at a movie premiere and he comes over and says ‘Lambert, right?’ and I'm like he knows my name!"

Kris cracks up at Adam's voice. He would have loved to see that.

"I had to stuff my hands in my pockets to keep them from flailing, I was so excited."

"You know you've made it when George Clooney knows your name."

Adam snickers. "I can now die a happy man."

~

Kris is in Kentucky the day he turns 25. He has a concert scheduled there the next night, but he is free and thankfully not mobile on his birthday. Josephine buys him a cake, (a pink cake, granted, but it’s the thought that counts) and they have an impromptu birthday party at the hotel room. His parents call to wish him happy birthday, Daniel following close behind them and singing stupidly over the phone. By noon, Katy is there and Kris is having the best birthday ever.

He and Katy decide to have a quiet dinner at the hotel restaurant and spend the night in the room, because Kris has a room and it's not moving, if they want him out of it, they are going to have to drag him out. Before they can head down to the restaurant Kris' phone rings.

"Kris," Adam says solemnly, his tone serious.

"Adam, where the hell are you?" Kris asks; there's this weird acoustic, a muffled background noise.

"Kris, listen," he says, and then Kris hears about a million people singing the birthday song.

He grins so hard, his face feels like it’s splitting in two. Adam cannot be doing what he thinks he's doing.

The song ends with cheers and applause, and Adam's voice comes through a microphone. "Thank you! You're all my favorites!"

Kris is grinning like a mad person, with a hand over his mouth like he is trying to hold something in, and Katy is watching him with worry. Adam comes back to the phone to say, "Happy birthday, Kris!"

"You're insane," Kris informs him. He can almost see Adam shrug. Whatever.

"Someone's at the door," Adam says.

"What?"

"Open the door, Kris,” Adam says again, patiently.

Kris shares a look with Katy, who is still looking at him like he's suddenly lost his mind, and opens the door. Josephine is standing right outside. She smiles and hands him a piece of paper.

"What's this?" Kris asks, to Josephine and Adam both, but Josephine just shrugs and makes a gesture to say she's leaving.

"It's a coupon," Adam says, and sure enough, it says 'Coupon For One Song From Adam Lambert' on the paper in purple ink. Underneath there's a cartoon of an Elvis-like figure holding a microphone.

"Go on,” Adam says. “Pick a song."

Kris wants to protest; this is really not necessary, the call itself was enough. Adam is obviously in the middle of a concert; you don’t go around turning concerts into birthday parties, not when there are thousands of people there who paid to see an actual concert. But he knows Adam has made up his mind and won’t give in no matter what he says. And these are all Adam Lambert fans anyway, Kris figures they’d be used to the craziness by now.

"Okay. Sing Feeling Good for me."

"An old favorite," Adam says, approving, and then there's a clatter of what Kris thinks is of Adam placing the phone somewhere, and Kris hears him talking to the crowd.

Adam sings, and Kris looks around him in wonder as he listens. Katy is gone, Kris can hear her puttering in the bathroom, and he is all alone in the room with a huge smile on his face; he doesn’t even have anyone there to pinch him. He hopes someone uploads this to YouTube tonight, because he needs to see it to believe it.

Adam takes the phone when he is done, doing something to muffle the cheers.

"Feeling good, Kris?" he asks, his smile evident in his voice.

Kris doesn’t even have the words.

"Yes, Adam," he says. "I’m feeling good."

~

The vacation Kris planned for him and Katy falls through when the tour dates start changing somewhere around mid-August. They keep adding new shows and before Kris knows it, it’s the middle of September.

He has to run straight to the studio from the last concert of the tour for a soundtrack album he wants to work on. It’s for a great movie called Maybe Tomorrow, about friendship and love. They sent him an early copy, and Kris loved it. But even if he hadn’t, he couldn’t possibly say no, because there are such great musicians working on the album. It’s an amazing opportunity for him to meet and work with people he has admired his whole life.

He and Katy start fighting around that time. Kris doesn’t know if it could be called fighting when he is mostly just listening to her vent, but it feels like fighting to him. It’s never about anything serious, but that somehow makes it worse, because he can’t really tell what it’s actually about. He is pretty sure what it’s not about; it’s not about the coffee maker, or his shoes, or the carpet he bought without asking her. He thinks maybe it will get better now that he has time to settle down and get back to something that resembles a normal life, but he’s not sure what they’ll do if it doesn’t.

~

Kris fumbles for his phone and hits the speed dial 5 without looking away from the laptop screen. He is not sure if he can look away from it. Josephine is standing next to him, wringing her hands nervously.

“Tell me there is no sex tape.”

Adam doesn’t miss a beat. “There’s no sex tape.”

“Okay,” Kris says, taking a deep breath. “Now tell me the truth.”

“It’s not exactly a sex tape,” Adam says this time, slowly and enunciating the words carefully.

“What does not exactly mean?” What kind of weird sex is this guy having? How can there be a sex tape that’s not exactly a sex tape?

“There is a clip, a short one, and it’s not really porn-like, I mean, not hardcore anyway. It’s of me and Jason kissing. In bed. Naked. So, you know, not exactly a sex tape.”

Kris lets out the breath he didn’t realize he was holding. “Okay. What are you gonna do?”

“Oh, I have a plan.”

Kris is against Adam’s plans on principle. Adam’s plans suck. “Adam. Your plans suck.”

“Oh, this one is good. Trust me.”

~

Adam Lambert Sex Tape Scandal: Yes, the One You’ve Been Waiting For

Jason Sutter, ex-boyfriend of his highness the Glambert, is rumored to be in the market to sell a sex tape starring the singer. A couple of websites are trying to outbid one another for the tape at the moment, and if things go as they do in this business, we’ll be seeing it by the end of the week and Mr.Sutter will undoubtedly be a couple million bucks richer.

Adam Lambert’s reps are silent on the subject.

~

Kris gets a text that night from Adam telling him to go and check his website. He is having dinner with Katy, in a rare comfortable silence for once, but he can’t wait until they are done. He rushes to the computer.

The website has a black background with a black and white picture of Adam. It’s a new layout; Kris lets himself admire it for a second. It’s much better than the previous pink and neon thing.

There’s a video on the main page with a title that reads: Adam talks about the sex tape.

Kris clicks play.

“Hey guys, Adam here.”

Adam is perched on a neatly made bed, which Kris thinks must be in a hotel somewhere, because that particular shade of green on a bedspread is not something Adam would allow in his home. He has a piece of paper in his hands, but he is not playing with it nervously or anything. He looks calm. Kris breathes a sigh of relief.

“I’m sure you’ve heard by now that my dear, dear friend Jason Sutter is trying to sell something he calls a sex tape. Well, let me set you straight on that one.”

He smiles.

“So to speak.”

The mischief in his eyes, while very inappropriate given the severity of the situation, makes Kris smile.

“It’s not really a sex tape. It’s much more innocent than that. But either way, it’s intimate and it’s private, and I don’t think it’s particularly tasteful to try to sell something like that. But I have no way of stopping it, so I’ve decided that if something that tasteless is bound to happen, it should be for a good cause.”

He unfolds the piece of paper in his hands and shows the camera a check, carefully covering the amount.

“TMZ has been very generous to the Children’s Wish Foundation in exchange for the mentioned recording. So, now I want you all to click that link down the page and go to TMZ dot com and watch my not-sex tape. Don’t be all noble and chivalrous. I don’t mind. And they deserve the traffic. They paid handsomely for it. It’s all for a good cause.”

Adam starts to get up, but then sits back down.

“Oh, and, one more thing. Jason, sweetheart. The donation is in your name.”

~

Kris likes cooking. Granted, he is not very good at it, but he is persistent. Katy has suggested that they hire someone for it, but in Kris' head cooking is intertwined with family, and it just doesn't sit right with him to have someone else do it. He has memories of his mother's cooking all through his childhood and teenage years; pancakes for breakfasts, homemade cake for birthdays, chicken soup when he is sick. He still gets cookies from her occasionally. Kris wants to have children one day and thinks they should know these smells too. So he works at it whenever he has time; he figures he will learn eventually, one burned pancake at a time.

Kris has been awake since 5:00 AM and somewhere around 7:00 he got tired of tossing and turning and decided to try baking cupcakes instead. The first batch didn’t turn out so well; overdone at the top, underdone at the bottom—though he’s been nibbling at some of the better ones and they are not that bad around the middle. The second batch is already in the oven and he is busy trying to clean up the mess he made when Katy wakes up.

She gives him a sleepy smile and Kris motions for her to sit as he gets her a cup of coffee. He gets out the bland cereal-thing she eats and the skim milk that goes with it, grimacing at the thought of eating something that flavorless.

“What are you doing today?” he asks her as he puts the bowl of cereal in front of her.

She shrugs. “Got something I need to drop in at work, and then I’m going out with the girls.”

Kris has met the girls. At least he assumes these girls are the same girls he met. Katy makes friends a lot easier than he does, she always has. Back in high school everybody knew her, and almost everybody loved her. Kris himself was kind of invisible. He was that kid everyone knew but couldn’t remember the name of. People thought they were an odd couple, but Kris figured they were a good fit; they complemented each other.

Kris has a lot of acquaintances now, more than he ever thought he would have, and everybody knows his name and his face, but he still feels invisible sometimes. He calls Katy when he feels like that, or his mom, or Adam. It makes him feel better to remember that there are some people who have seen him from the start.

Katy is reading the paper and his cupcakes are almost done when his cell rings. He has to run to the bedroom to get it, so he’s a bit out of breath when he answers.

“Don’t tell me you started exercising,” Adam says instead of hello.

Kris doesn’t exercise, he doesn’t work out, he doesn’t do yoga or pilates or whatever weird-named thing is fashionable these days. He used to run occasionally, but now that his time is so valuable, he let that go as well.

“Would I do that?”

“Nah,” Adam drawls. “Stupid question.”

Kris chuckles. “What’s up?”

“I’m in Vegas!” Adam says, sounding excited suddenly. “It was a last minute thing. Noah was here with friends, and I had some free time, so we’re taking a mini vacation.”

“Awesome,” Kris says, checking on his cupcakes.

“I was wondering if you’d like to come too?” Adam asks, sounding slightly nervous. The tone makes Kris stop in his tracks, one mittened hand in the air. It’s not everyday Adam sounds tentative when asking him something.

“Sure,” he says. “I’ll check with Josephine to see if I can clear a couple of days.”

“Okay,” Adam says, relieved. “Bring Katy. It’ll be fun.”

“I’ll ask. What brought this on?” Kris aims for casual, but probably fails. He can’t help it; it makes him nervous to hear Adam being so cautious with him.

“I just—I want you to meet Noah,” Adam admits. “I think it’s time. I think this is serious. And I want you to meet him. That’s all.”

Kris smiles. This is unexpected to say the least. He doesn’t want to make a big deal out of it and make Adam even more uncomfortable, but this is—this is big. And Kris feels ridiculously honored.

“Sure thing, man. I’ll let you know as soon as I talk to Josephine.”

~

Katy doesn’t come with him.

They have a huge row over it, their biggest yet, and Kris thinks about it over and over on his way to Vegas, retracing his steps, trying to see things from her perspective, but still can’t understand what the problem is. She says she already made plans and that she can’t drop everything for Adam, but it’s not like Kris has ever asked her to change her plans for something like this before. And her plans aren’t anything that can’t be rescheduled. She can do ‘brunch with the girls’ some other day. What’s the big deal?

It’s not even that she doesn’t want to come. She doesn’t come out and say it, but Kris feels that she doesn’t want him to go either. Up until now, Kris thought their problems stemmed from the fact that their life together revolved mostly around Kris and his album and his fans and his concerts. It is too much Kris and not enough Katy, and Kris understands that. That’s a problem he thinks they’ll get over in time. It’s too soon to expect things to settle in his career, but given time they will. But this fight makes no sense in that context. Kris isn’t canceling on something they planned together. He isn’t leaving for a job. He is visiting a friend he hasn’t seen in months. His best friend. What’s there to discuss about this, let alone fight over?

The only thing that would explain Katy’s behavior is that she doesn’t want him to be friends with Adam, and that, Kris doesn’t even want to consider. There’s no rhyme or reason for that. Kris doesn’t need anyone’s approval for his friendships, and even if he did, Adam never did anything to deserve this treatment from Katy.

Kris decides to put all this behind as soon as he sees Adam’s beaming face waiting for him at the airport. He shakes his head. This is the kind of friend Adam is. He makes time to pick Kris up even when he knows he’ll have to sign a million autographs while waiting. Whatever her reasoning is, Katy is wrong.

~

“Go easy on him, he’s so nervous,” Adam whispers, steering Kris into the private room he got for them at the restaurant with a hand on his back. Kris’ brow furrows in confusion. Why would Adam’s boyfriend be nervous about this?

Turns out, Noah is so nervous even Kris, who has never once talked to him before, can tell with one look. Kris thinks it’s probably Adam’s doing. Adam says Noah met his parents a while back, but they saved Kris for last. That’s not the exact wording he uses of course, he talks about scheduling conflicts, but Kris can tell what he means. Kris is flattered, but he doesn’t understand why he is the boogeyman in this scenario. When has he ever vetoed any of Adam’s boyfriends before? To be fair, he was never introduced to any of them with a ceremony like this, but still, he never really said anything bad about any of them. He remembers thinking Drake wouldn’t last, but he never uttered a word to Adam about that. And when Adam started dating Jason, their lives were so hectic, Kris never found the time to meet the guy. Now he wishes he had, maybe he could have prevented some of the heartache, but that’s all done and in the past. Now there’s Noah, about whom Kris has never heard anything bad, from anyone. What is there to be nervous about? Unless he is a drug addict, of course Kris will pat Adam in the back and say he’s awesome.

And Noah really is kind of awesome. He is a bit shy, but that might be because he doesn’t feel comfortable with Kris yet—Kris will be having words about this with Adam later. He is a dancer, so of course he looks gorgeous, which is one thing you can always count on with Adam’s boyfriends. But he isn’t vain, like Kris would have expected; he’s actually a pretty down to Earth guy. Kris likes him.

Adam watches Kris for reactions all night, but when he is not looking at him for reassurance, his eyes are riveted on Noah. He keeps touching his hand, kissing his cheek, smiling at him. He looks downright smitten, and Kris thinks that’s amazing considering how long they’ve already been together. It’s like they are still at the honeymoon phase. Since his own marriage is going in right the opposite direction, Kris can’t help but feel a little bit jealous of that.

At some point, Adam leaves for the bathroom, leaving Kris and Noah alone, smiling awkwardly at each other.

“Sorry I’m kind of silent tonight,” Noah says. “I’ve been waiting for a while to meet you, and Adam just sprang this on me all of a sudden, so I’m sort of—You know.”

“Oh, come on,” Kris says, making a face. “If Adam likes you; I like you.” He shrugs. “I don’t know what he said, but I’m not that difficult a person.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Noah says, sounding alarmed, like he is afraid Kris is going to take offense. “It’s just—What you think matters a lot to him. That’s all.”

Kris doesn’t know what to say to that. Would Adam break up with someone just because Kris didn’t like them? In a way it’s possible because he doesn’t think either of them would say something negative about the other’s significant other on a whim. It’s just not something they’d do lightly. And Kris would like to think that Adam would take his advice seriously if he ever chose to give it. So yes, in a way, he thinks Adam would break up with someone if Kris didn’t like them. Noah has every reason to be afraid after all.

~

Kris has a little more than 24 hours to spend in Vegas before he has to fly out for a photo shoot he couldn’t reschedule, and he spends almost all of that time with Adam and Noah. Adam also introduces him to George, which is one of the best parts of this visit for Kris, because he has been curious and impatiently waiting for this. Adam has been gushing about George since he hired him, and Kris got the impression that they grew close in a way he hasn’t seen Adam get close with a lot of people before. To be honest, he doesn’t know what to expect when he meets the guy, and aside from a hesitant feeling of kinship, he doesn’t know what to make of him after.

There’s nothing to find fault with him, Kris is just instinctively cautious of the people Adam trusts. It’s not like Adam has made a lot of bad choices in the past, but just the possibility is enough for Kris to be slightly paranoid, especially after Jason.

George is cool and aloof and respectful during the time they spend together; he is everything Adam has told Kris that he is, down to that small George Clooney smile. And Kris can tell that George honestly likes Adam; there’s a long-suffering look in his eyes when Adam orders ice cream and coffee for breakfast, and Kris catches him surreptitiously slipping Adam some fruit which Adam eats without question all the while telling a story about his hairdresser Julie and her dog.

By the time breakfast is done and they are parting ways, Kris has tentatively started to think of George as an ally, and as they shake hands he asks if George has his number and tells him he can call about anything anytime. The look George gives him tells Kris he knows exactly what that means.

For lunch, Adam makes sure they are alone, just the two of them, so they’d have time to talk. Kris is grateful because who knows when they’ll next see each other.

The first thing Adam asks of course is what Kris thought of Noah.

“He’s awesome,” Kris says, and he doesn’t even have to lie.

Adam lets out an exaggerated sigh and settles deeper into his seat. “So. Are you gonna tell me what’s wrong with you?”

Kris drops the lettuce he was about to eat. He didn’t know it was that obvious.

“Just stuff,” he says, picking the lettuce from his lap. When he looks back up, Adam is giving him a knowing look.

“Katy stuff?”

“We’re having problems.”

Adam gives him a prodding look, spearing a carrot with his fork.

“I don’t know,” Kris says, shrugging helplessly. “I can’t even tell what the problem is. She doesn’t talk to me about it. She’s just—tense. Constantly. Keeps picking fights about everything.”

Adam is silent, which Kris finds a bit unnerving.

“It’ll get better with time, I’m pretty sure,” he says to fill the silence. “I just hope I survive until then.”

Adam doesn’t match Kris’ smile for once, but Kris isn’t surprised, because he is pretty sure the best smile he can come up with right now is a sorry excuse for the real thing anyway. Adam looks worried and sad, and all Kris can do is give him a nod to acknowledge that yeah, he is worried and sad too, but that’s life for you. No matter how much they want to fix each other’s lives, it’s not always possible.

~

The Vegas trip leaves a warmth in Kris’ chest that survives the photo shoot and follows him home only to die a tragic death at the doorstep. An echoing silence greets him when he opens the door, and Katy doesn’t even offer a smile to go with the compulsory nod she gives him.

Kris makes himself a sandwich, sends Adam a meaningless text and goes to bed alone.

~

Adam is shooting a video in the Bahamas for a song he collaborated on with Allison of all people and he is ridiculously excited about it. Kris thinks it’s more about being in the Bahamas with Allison than the song itself, but he lets Adam have this one without comment. He kind of wishes he was there with them himself.

Adam sounds drunk when he calls and Kris can hear Allison giggling in the background. He smiles; those two always get up to no good when they spend time together.

“Kris!” Adam says, sounding excited. “We watched your concert last night!”

“You’re in the Bahamas. You had nothing better to do?”

Kris tucks the phone between his ear and shoulder to make himself a sandwich. He offers to make one for Katy, gesturing to the bread wordlessly, but she shakes her head and goes back to her laptop.

“It was awesome, man. What’s better than a Kris Allen concert?”

Allison shouts “Aweeesomeeee,” from the background.

“Well. Glad you had fun, then.”

“We decided that you should always wear black,” Adam announces, referring to Kris’ black shirt, black jeans combination the night before. Kris kind of liked it himself to tell the truth.

“That would get boring pretty quick.”

“No, no!” Adam protests. “It was hot! You looked hot!”

Kris smiles. “We all know you think I’m hot.”

Katy arches an eyebrow at him; Kris mouths ‘Adam’.

“I never said hot. I said cute. There’s a difference.”

“He is hot!” Kris hears Allison say, before Adam shushes her.

“Okay, okay,” Kris says. “Black is hot, plaid is cute. Got it.”

“Yeah. Okay. We’re gonna go dance now. Allison says she loves you. I’ll talk to you later.”

Adam hangs up. Kris takes a bite from his sandwich. Katy shuts down her laptop and leaves the room.

~

Things get a little better, just a tad, and Katy starts talking to him again. Her main topic of conversation is the baby girl her sister is expecting, but Kris takes whatever he can get at this point. He knows what color they painted the nursery (pale green), what they plan to name her (Natalie) and how often the mommy-to-be goes to pee these days (too often). This renewed spirit may be about the baby, but Katy seems better in general too; she smiles more, holds his hand from time to time, and Kris thinks maybe they can have a baby too, maybe that would make things even better.

Katy leaves for Arkansas a week before her sister is due to give birth. Kris takes her to the airport, kisses her goodbye, and feels a weight lift off his shoulders when she smiles at him, her eyes shining with happiness. Kris holds her hand a little tighter than necessary and gathers his courage to say “Can we talk? I’ll be there on Friday. Can we talk a little bit then?”

She seems to consider something before she nods. “Yeah. Yeah. We’ll talk.”

Kris has to hug her because he feels like his Katy is finally back. The look in her eyes is finally one he recognizes, and seeing that after so long takes his breath away. He didn’t realize he’d missed her that much.

They let go of each other a little teary eyed, and Katy waves goodbye to him from the gate.

That’s the last time he sees her before the accident.

~

Kris is in the checkout line at the grocery store when he gets the call. They tell him Katy was in an accident. A truck swerved on the frozen road and collided with her car, they say. They tell him she is in surgery right now and they don’t know when she’ll be out. They talk about broken bones and internal injuries. He hears himself ask if she’ll be okay, but of course they say they can’t tell for sure before she is out of the surgery.

Kris doesn’t remember what he does with the groceries afterward. He doesn’t remember how he makes it to the car; whether he runs, or walks, or crawls, he has no idea. It’s all a blur until he finds himself sitting in a plane and looking at his phone, not wanting to turn it off. What if something happens and they can’t reach him?

He makes himself press the button anyway; what is he going to do even if they do reach him? It’s all out of his hands now.

~

“Hey, I tried calling you a couple hours ago but your phone was off,” Adam answers the phone with his usual chatter. Kris opens his mouth to say something, anything, but his chest is closed up tight, it lets no sound out. His breathing is so loud and the tremor of his hands so severe, he thinks they must be audible through the lines, because Adam turns serious suddenly. “Kris. What’s wrong?”

“I—Katy was in an accident.”

“Is she okay? Are you okay? Fuck. Where are you?”

“I’m at the hospital, in Arkansas. She is—I don’t know. She made—She made it out of the surgery, so I guess that’s good. They are not letting me see her yet.”

“Kris. I can be there in—Fuck.” Kris hears Adam fumbling with the phone, and then he must drop something, there’s a muffled thud. “What time is it? I’ll call George, find out if I can get a plane—”

“You don’t—Don’t come here. My parents are here. Katy’s parents are here. I’m not alone. I have—I have people with me. Don’t worry.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Yeah. I just—They are all looking at me like I’m going to fall apart, and I don’t know, maybe I am,” he chuckles nervously. “I don’t know. I just wanted to talk to you. Get away from them for a second.”

“Sure. Yeah. I’m available for talking. Anytime. What do you wanna talk about?

“Anything,” he sighs. “Tell me about your day?”

Adam does.

~

Katy sleeps for days. Doctors say it’ll probably be okay, her body needs to heal and readjust, but they can never promise anything, and Kris prays day and night for her to open her eyes. He goes over every smile, every touch, from that first day she held his hand on the way home from school to that last hug at the airport, he goes through every tear, every fight, and just prays for a chance for more.

After three long days, Katy wakes up, bruised and battered but alive. Kris thinks a layer of ice breaks and falls off his face when he smiles at her, his first smile in days, and his voice sounds rusty to his ears, almost as bad as hers when he talks. But none of that matters; Katy is alive, so everything will be alright now.

It will be months before Katy returns to normal, they say she will spend at least two weeks in bed, and after that there will be physical therapy for her leg, so Kris tells Josephine to cancel everything; they will be staying in Arkansas indefinitely.

Kris feels that maybe this is what they needed anyway, not the accident of course, but this time together, uninterrupted, where they first fell in love. They’ll recharge here, remember what they liked about each other all over again, and remember why they chose to be together. His parents and his friends don’t leave him alone, and even though it gets tiring at times, he is grateful for the support. There are so many people that love him and care about him there, it’s humbling. He belongs in the studio, on a stage, with his guitar, but them, he and Katy, they belong here, with these people, and there must be a way to balance that out. They’ll find it somehow.

Kris has never spent so much time at hospitals. Doctors and nurses and the smell of medicine make him sick now. He offers to rent a place for them, maybe even buy a house there, but Katy says no, so they settle at her parents’ once she is released from the hospital. Kris thinks she probably wants to be spoiled a bit, and agrees without question.

Katy gets better every day, and Kris finds himself at a loss about what to do. Wally keeps calling, his worried tone starting to become more about Kris than Katy, and Kris keeps putting him off. He is putting everything off. It’s not time yet. Even though Katy is well enough to travel now, she is happy here, and Kris doesn’t want to disturb that. They’ve become friends all over again, if not husband and wife, and it’s good, it’s great. Given enough time Kris thinks it’ll be just like it used to be; they’ll forget the cold war they somehow found themselves in before the accident and be a couple again. Then life can go on the way it should have the first time around.

But then Katy speaks up and what she says is not what Kris has been expecting.

“Maybe you should go.”

Kris startles at the tone. It’s soft and tentative; he knows that tone. Katy uses that tone when she is about to say something he won’t like.

“I don’t have to go. Work can wait.”

“I don’t mean about work,” she says, sitting next to him on the bed where they first made out all those years ago. Kris thinks it’s even the same bedspread. “I think I want to stay for a while, and you should go.”

Kris looks at her face; it has changed so little since high school. Maybe she has though. Maybe they have. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve been seeing a doctor,” she says, looking away and changing the subject suddenly. Kris thinks of course she has been. Their lives have been like something out of a medical drama. “A psychologist,” she explains when he stays silent, and Kris feels himself recoil unintentionally.

“A psychologist. Why?”

“I was unhappy. It’s been—you know how it’s been.”

Of course Kris knows how it’s been, but— “Why didn’t you say anything?”

She shrugs. “I didn’t even know what to say. But the thing is, it’s been helpful. It helped me put things in perspective.” She touches his hand and laces their fingers together. “I love you. I will always love you. But we’ve changed.”

Kris can feel his heart beating like it’s trying to make its way out of his chest. “I know things haven’t been perfect. And I know I should have made more time—”

“It’s not about time,” she shakes her head. “It’s not just you changing, or your life. I know I made you feel like this was your fault before, and I’m really sorry for that. I was hurt. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t talk to you. I couldn’t explain it. It didn’t even make sense in my head.” She squeezes his hand. “I changed too. We changed in different ways, and I don’t know how to make us fit together anymore.”

“We can’t give up when the going gets tough. We made vows. We chose this.” There’s something in her eyes he can’t quite place, but it seems to him like she has already made up her mind about this. “Is there someone else? Is that why—”

“No! No. There isn’t—”

That’s an honest no, Kris can tell that at least. He can still read her that much.

“Then what? Why are you just giving up?”

“This isn’t giving up. It’s not sudden. You know it’s not. But life is short, Kris. If this last month proved anything, it’s that we have to be honest to ourselves. I have to be honest. There is no one else, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t the idea of something else.”

Kris nods, swallowing the lump in his throat. “You don’t want me anymore.”

“That’s not true. You know it’s not. Before the accident, when we talked at the airport, I really thought we could do it. I thought we could talk things over and try again and maybe make it work. But that’s just—it’d be stopgap. I still want this, but—”

Katy sniffs, holding back a sob. He wants to hold her and tell her everything will be alright, but that would be a lie now, wouldn’t it?

“I don’t know how to let go either. A part of me wants to just hold on and never let you go, but that’s not going to work. It’s not realistic. And if I doubted for a minute that this would be the best thing for both of us, I would never even suggest it. For both of us, Kris. Not just me.”

She is the one deciding though, isn’t she? She is saying it’s best for Kris, and Kris thinks, more than a little meanly, that she is probably just saying that to make herself feel less guilty, to feel like she is doing right by him. He could tell all that to her, scream it at the top of his lungs, but what would it help? He can’t make it work by himself if she doesn’t want it.

They sit there holding hands, tears sliding down Katy’s cheeks, and stare at the pale pink wall of her childhood room, eyes unfocused and looking at separate futures.

   

2011

The papers arrive at his house in Los Angeles one morning in a plain white envelope and even though Kris knows what’s in it, been expecting it for weeks now, he finds himself looking to see a stupid movie character name as the sender, so it would be yet another magazine with a funny interview or a custom drawn comic book with Kradam! in the title or something. But the sender’s name is Rick Dawson from Dawson & Clark Law Group, Katy’s attorney, the one she said would help her draw up the divorce papers, and that is not something Adam could possibly know or would ever joke about.

Knowing that it’s coming and actually holding it in his hands are two very different things. Feeling the weight of the papers in his hands now, he realizes he never really thought it would happen. Call it stupid, call it naïve, Kris is a firm believer of miracles. Bad things happen every day, but there are some things that could never happen to him, his mind refuses to acknowledge the possibilities. His marriage ending is one of those.

He places the envelope on the kitchen table and walks around avoiding it for a couple of hours. It doesn’t really work. His fingers won’t stop playing with his wedding ring; he knows Katy hasn’t been wearing hers for a while now, but he couldn’t make himself take it off, thinking it would be bad luck. It’s made a dent in his finger; he can feel it even when it’s not there anyway. What good is it going to do to take it off now? What good is it going to do to sign those papers when in his heart he is still married?

He tears open the envelope and takes out the papers, noting Katy’s signature on the dotted lines. He doesn’t want to read it. Katy wanted to talk about what to do with the house, the furniture, the cars, but he didn’t let her. He told her whatever she wanted to do was fine. And it is. He doesn’t care about the stuff or the money. Katy is talking about erasing something he thought would forever be a part of him, and if he can’t make her change her mind about that, he would feel better if she took everything when she left anyway. Even if he never makes another dime again, it wouldn’t matter to him. His parents are comfortable and taken care of now. The only other reason he ever wanted to make money was Katy. It was always about Katy and the family they would have one day. What is Kris supposed to do with the money if that is never going to happen?

Katy’s handwriting on the papers reminds him of the blue binder she had back in high school. He remembers the first time he saw his own name inside that binder, where she wrote Katy loves Kris and circled his name with a heart. He remembers how she blushed when he saw it and how he thought he would marry her one day and write their names everywhere together. It’s a stupid thing to remember. It’s a stupid memory to hold on to. But it’s not like he can make himself forget all those stupid memories and hopes and dreams; he has accumulated so many of them over the years, so much of his life has been built on and revolving around Katy. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t love her.

The pen doesn’t refuse to write when he puts it to the dotted line, the sun doesn’t go supernova, the world doesn’t stop turning. He leaves them where they are when he is done and goes to the bedroom to pack his things. He can’t stay in that house anymore. He would leave his own skin if he could. He needs to call someone, tell them where he is going, what he is going to do, but at that point he doesn’t even know himself. He should call Josephine at least. He should tell Adam and Daniel and his parents about the divorce; they shouldn’t find out from the papers. And then he needs to hide and bury his head in the sand, because he can’t handle their disappointment or their pity. He doesn’t want anyone to be understanding or helpful when no one can understand and nothing can help. He needs to be away.

Packing is something he does without thinking these days; shirts, pants, underwear, toiletries. His guitar is by the door, dutifully waiting for him. He drops his keys in the mailbox, he won’t be back anyway, and takes a cab to the airport, thinking he’ll decide where to go when he gets there.

~

When Kris calls Josephine from the airport to tell her about the divorce and that he’s going to Indiana (it’s the first flight out) and will be out of touch for a while, she tells him to stay put and finds him a place to go in fifteen minutes. So he boards the plane, picks up the rental Josephine arranged for him, and follows the directions she emailed. She tells him not to trust the GPS and follow her directions to the letter instead, and he does, driving without letting his mind stray from the road and the signs.

The last three miles are a county road and they take him to a log cabin. By the look of it, it’s at least 100 years old. It looks old and tired. Kris can sympathize.

An old woman is sitting on the steps, waiting for him. She babbles on and on about hiking and trekking and golf and fishing, but he doesn’t even listen, because he is not there for a vacation. Not the kind she is talking about anyway. He sends her away and sends a text to Josephine to thank her. He turns his phone off afterwards, leaving her to deal with the press and his parents and friends, and doesn’t even feel guilty about it. All his life he tried to please people. For the first time he can’t find the energy to be polite.

~

It is so quiet in the woods, he thinks the squirrels can probably hear his thoughts at night. His insomnia is worse than ever; he can never shut his mind down now, the whole world weighs in on him every time he closes his eyes. Being away from the circus he left behind doesn’t mean he stops thinking about it. How disappointed must his parents be? What everyone must be thinking and saying about him now? How is he ever going to be able to face his life again?

LA will probably welcome him with open arms, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to go back to Arkansas now. He is the guy who found fame and left his marriage in ruins for it. He is every Behind the Music episode ever aired. He is a living, breathing cliché now.

He didn’t buy any alcohol when he went shopping the first day and he regrets that choice every time he greets the dawn wide awake, but a part of him is glad in a way that he still has some principles. No matter what people think and whatever they might be saying in the papers and the blogs, he still knows himself to be the same Kris Allen. He doesn’t know how he’ll ever be able to accept that the Kris Allen who dated the same girl for seven years and never once strayed even in his thoughts is now a divorced man, but at least he knows he won’t be turning to the bottle or to drugs or to sex to cope, ever. He feels less somehow, but knows that he is not exactly different.

~

He tries writing songs the first couple of days; it doesn’t go as he expects it to.

He always had his guitar; it’s an even older friend than Katy. Ever since he taught himself how to play it, he’s been coming up with notes and chords, good or bad, every time he placed his fingers on the strings. Now, for the first time in his life, he can’t play anything that doesn’t sound like an accusation. His fingers pluck the strings and shame pours out. A week in, his guitar ends up in pieces in the living room; he doesn’t even bother dealing with the remains, thinks they look good where they are, appropriate.

Kris had that guitar for a long time. He wishes he could cry over it, but can only feel numb instead.

~

It’s not exactly a surprise when he hears the engine noise outside. Only Josephine knows where he is and he told her not to tell anyone, but it was only a matter of time before she caved. He opens the door and promptly starts shivering. It is cold out; he thinks maybe snow is coming. He goes back in to wear something warm. He can guess who is at the door anyway.

Adam walks in without a sound and closes the door behind him. Kris turns around swaddled in a thick sweater, wishing they could avoid this awkward moment, hoping Adam would pretend it’s just another friendly visit. That’s not meant to be though; he can tell the minute he sees the determined set of Adam’s jaw and the bags under his eyes. It looks like Kris hasn’t been the only one suffering from insomnia. He feels a brand new wave of shame hit him. He fails everyone these days.

“You shouldn’t have come all this way.”

“Shut up,” Adam says, dropping his bag and kicking it away for good measure. He closes the distance between them in two steps and wraps his arms around Kris before he can say a word in protest.

Adam is always warm. And he smells familiar, like leather and make up and mint. It smells like home to Kris, a different kind of home, not the flowery smell of Katy, or the fresh bread smell of his mom, but just as treasured anyway. Kris finds himself clinging, a sob breaking out of his throat involuntarily. He shuts his eyes tight. He hasn’t cried yet; he was beginning to think he wouldn’t. He certainly doesn’t want to do this with someone else in the room, but it’s impossible to hold it in when Adam’s hands card through his hair and pull his head in, letting him bury his face in his shoulder, and Adam clings back just as tight, like he is hurting with him, like his world is coming apart too.

“It’ll be okay,” Adam promises, his nose buried in Kris’ hair, and even though he doesn’t believe the words, Kris is glad someone is saying them.

~

Kris sleeps a million years after crying a whole river worth of tears into Adam’s shirt. When he wakes up, his eyes feel like someone poured lemon juice into them. He kicks the blanket off and lies on the bed spread like a starfish, listening to the silence. It is past time, he thinks, and sighs as he holds his hand up to look at his wedding ring, still nestled comfortably into the dent it made in his flesh. With a deep breath he makes himself take it off, but then he doesn’t know what to do with it, where to put it. He can see there is snow outside through the window, so he gets up, opens the window a crack and throws the ring into the fresh snow on the ground. It sinks into it and he nods like that was exactly what it was supposed to do.

He goes into the kitchen to see if the oven is working. He feels like baking something.

~

Adam has been cleaning. The guitar pieces in the living room are gone, (though Kris can still see the dents it made where it hit the wall) and the dishes piled in the sink are now clean and in their rightful places in the cupboards. The oven seems to be in working order, so Kris turns it on before checking to see what ingredients they have. There isn’t much, nothing fresh except a couple of oranges, so he decides on an orange bread pudding. It’s an easy one.

It takes him half an hour to assemble the pudding. He places it in the oven, rinses the bowls he used, and grabbing himself a cup of coffee, heads to the living room.

He finds Adam sleeping on the couch in his clothes. There’s a perfectly good guest room, but Adam is always weird about his sleeping places. He falls asleep wherever, whenever, and it’s a bitch to get him to go to bed afterwards.

Kris pushes Adam’s feet aside to sit down and turns on the TV to some channel with morning cartoons. It’s Captain Caveman, not a favorite of his, but the oldies are always better than the new Japanese stuff anyway. Adam grumbles when his feet fall off the couch and sits up, his eyes still half closed. His hair is all going to the left rebelliously and he has pillow creases on his face. Kris hides his smile in his coffee cup.

“What—” Adam mumbles, looking around, before putting his feet up where his head used to be and resting his head on Kris’ shoulder, jostling the coffee.

“Watch it,” Kris warns him, licking the drops running down the side of the cup. Adam makes a noncommittal sound.

They watch Captain Caveman and Scooby Doo and Tom and Jerry, sliding down slowly with every passing minute. The oven dings, telling Kris the pudding is done, and he knows he should take it out before it dries in there completely, but he is so comfortable where he is, he can’t make a move.

Adam is awake now, but they are both drowsy and slow, it’s one of those mornings where time slows down and flows like honey, rich and thick. It’s the warmest and most at peace Kris has felt since he left Arkansas almost two months ago; he wishes time would stop completely and he wouldn’t have to move at all.

Adam is the one that moves finally, pushing up with a groan. He pulls the still warm coffee cup in Kris’ hand towards himself and takes a big gulp from it, rubbing his eyes.

“Something smells good,” he says, giving Kris a groggy smile.

Kris smiles back. He feels like thanking Adam for being there, for being himself, for being exactly what Kris needs, but holds it all in instead. Adam knows. They wouldn’t be what they are to each other if he didn’t. He gets up and pulls Adam with him, and they go into the kitchen to check on his pudding.

~

Adam doesn’t ask him how long he’ll be staying in the cabin, and doesn’t offer any explanation as to when he’ll be going back himself. They spend days aimlessly watching cartoons and CSI reruns and playing guess the motive, Adam coming up with the most hilarious motives for murder possible, and every night Adam finds some old movie playing that Kris just has to see, so it’s mostly them sitting on their asses on the couch, wearing nothing but pajamas, and Kris cooking them something from time to time so they won’t starve.

(Kris has missed seeing Adam in pajamas, in a completely normal, non-weird way. It’s just so different when Adam is out of his tight clothes and metallic accessories and layers and layers of make up. Kris thinks maybe if they hadn’t shared a room when they first met, he never would have found the courage to become friends with Adam at all. It sets him at ease to see Adam with freckles and bed head, lounging on the couch in threadbare t-shirts and too large, faded grey sweats.)

They’ve shared slightly burned lasagna for dinner and are watching West Side Story when Adam grabs Kris’ hand to stop him from playing with the nonexistent ring on his finger. Adam doesn’t say anything, just holds his hand, but Kris can still feel himself blushing.

“Habit,” he says. “I keep expecting it to be there. I feel—” He doesn’t know how to describe that feeling. It’s like he is lighter somehow and not in a good way. Like gravity doesn’t apply to him like it used to and he’d just float into space if he gave himself a good push. He shrugs. “It’s like losing your anchor.”

Adam looks at him for a minute, then releases his hand to get up and walk into the guest room. When he comes back, he is holding a chain. He hands it to Kris.

“Until you find another anchor,” he tells him.

The chain is silver and has three charms hanging on it; a Chinese dragon with tiny green stones in his eyes, a sword with a black hilt and an electric guitar with a small star adorning its black studded body. It’s not something Kris has seen Adam wear before, but it is unmistakable his style. He puts it on and runs his fingers over the charms. The weight of it feels foreign around his neck.

“I don’t think you’ve lost Katy,” Adam says, sitting next to him. “I think you guys will get over this and become friends again. But even if you don’t, you need to remember that you’re not alone. I know it’s not the same, but you have a lot of people who love you. You should remember that.”

Kris smiles and looks down, feeling unexpectedly shy suddenly. Adam puts an arm around him and settles closer next to him, disregarding all those unspoken rules about personal space and common courtesy, and goes back to watching the movie as if nothing has happened.

That night, Kris pours Adam into his bed and doesn’t even turn on the lights as he makes the way to his own. He lets his limbs sprawl all over the large bed, throws the extra pillow down to the floor, tangles his ring finger in the chain around his neck, and goes to sleep with a faint smile on his face.

~

Being back home is anticlimactic to say the least.

He and Adam part ways at the airport and Adam flies to New York to his much neglected boyfriend, leaving Kris feeling like a fish out of water, nervous and paranoid, seeing camera lenses where there are none. Kris finds himself touching the pendant every ten minutes like a nervous tick and tries to stop it before he goes to LA and some weirdo with a camera gets pictures of him clutching at his bosom like a chick out of a romance novel.

He gives his phone to Josephine when she comes to pick him up from the airport, so he won’t have to look at all the messages that have undoubtedly piled up. He has considered just dumping the phone in the toilet and getting a new number, but that would have been unnecessarily childish, so he tells her to erase everything and let him know if there was anything important afterwards. That’s not childish at all, he reasons, that’s what assistants are for.

He doesn’t go to the house; instead he settles in a hotel that is so posh it makes him want to wear suits just to fit in. Josephine tells him to shut up and suffer in silence, or just suck it up and go to the house already. He chooses to shut up about it.

His publicist wants to have a talk with him, Wally has a million offers he wants to go over, and Josephine wants a raise. Kris puts them all off in favor of house hunting. He is not ready for anything else yet.

He starts looking online, and after a week of clicking on pictures and virtual tours, he decides that he wants to move to San Francisco. Josephine starts gathering data for him, but she keeps going for the fancy stuff, big houses with more rooms than he’d know what to do with and neighbors he probably wouldn’t feel comfortable talking to. He tells her to lower the standards, but she says he wouldn’t fit in with what he thinks he wants now. Kris thinks he’d fit in just fine in an average apartment building, but when she mentions the paparazzi and the stalker-fans, he has to admit defeat.

He considers buying a whole apartment building just to feel normal again; he could live in a small two bedroom place and use the rest for storage or something, but he discards the idea for being quirkier than he has any right to be at his age.

Two weeks in, he starts personally looking at the places. The realtor Josephine finds is an old lady who is not impressed by his fame and is kind of funny in a sarcastic way. He can’t always tell whether she is making fun of the situation or him personally, but he doesn’t mind it either way. His ego can always use being pulled down a peg or two.

The houses all seem too large, too rich, too movie star for him to feel comfortable with. They are also too expensive. He can’t justify spending all that money on rooms and bathrooms and a sauna he will probably never use. The realtor starts getting antsy around day six, and that’s when Kris starts seeing the good stuff. The price range hits a reasonable level, and the houses start getting smaller.

Adam insists on being kept up to date, asking for links and photos, and calling every night to go over the places Kris has seen that day. He agrees with him on the large houses; they both know Kris isn’t the party type, or the showing off type, or for that matter having a staff in his house type. Adam says he would feel lost in a large house like that; he’d never have anything to fill it with. “Besides,” he says, “you’re kind of tiny. It’d be like overcompensating.”

Kris bursts out laughing. “Did you just make fun of—”

Adam apologizes, sounding horrified. “That did not come out right.”

Kris never mentions it to him, but during the whole house hunting thing, he seriously considers moving to New York so he’d be closer to Adam. But Adam is living with Noah now, and it would be odd for Kris to move all the way over there when he has no good reason aside from being closer to his best friend. Best friends take a back seat when you have someone special in your life, Kris knows that. And even though Adam acts like that’s not how it works, Noah would probably take exception to Kris ignoring that particular unwritten rule.

When Kris finally finds what he is looking for, the realtor is almost ready to give up. (And here Kris thought they were physically incapable of doing that.) It’s a two story house, three bedrooms, one he thinks he can turn into a studio, a roof deck, and a kitchen he falls in love with. The place feels warm the moment he steps into it; the woodwork pulls him in and the garden out back seals the deal. There’s a tree there, almost as tall as the house itself, and its leaves are gleaming bright red in the afternoon light; it looks like it’s on fire.

He takes a picture of the tree and the marble counters in the kitchen and emails them to Adam right away. The title of the email says ‘This is it.’

~

Turns out Katy didn’t ask for the LA house in the divorce, so Josephine is the one to pack it up, sending Katy’s stuff back to Arkansas and selling everything that’s not personal. Kris does the shopping for the new place himself; he doesn’t want to be the single guy whose home is nothing more than boxes and generic furniture. He has never really been single, he’s moved in with Katy the moment he moved out of his parents’ home, and he doesn’t think that that particular lifestyle would fit him. This house feels like the first step of building his own life, because Kris needs a home, whether it has people in it or not.

The first thing he gets for the house is unsurprisingly a piano. It looks beautiful in his newly painted (and still completely empty) living room. The second is a gift from Adam. It comes in a large box with a huge red bow on it. The sender’s name reads Clark Kent, and inside the box lies an acoustic guitar, very similar to the one he smashed in Indiana, but with a small rhinestone star tattooed on the body of it. The star is not large enough to draw attention to it, but Kris can feel it against the inside of his arm when he plays.

Kris has other guitars and Adam knows that. But he hasn’t touched one since he came back from Indiana and this one feels right in his arms. He thinks maybe he can start working again.

He thanks Adam with a text. I’m naming her Stella.

~

Kris starts working on new songs around the same time Adam starts recording his new album. It becomes an almost daily ritual for them to analyze that day’s work at night, Adam making him listen to version after version of the same song, and bitch about his producer who he thinks is a genius that creates miracles, but not every miracle is me, Kris, I can’t make him see that. Apparently they have some artistic differences.

Kris’ songs mostly come out depressed, depressing and/or suicidal. They are not fit for human consumption, that’s for sure, and Kris hates that every night Adam whines at him until he gives in and plays what he’s been working on that day, and then gets all quiet like Kris is doing drugs instead of writing bad songs.

All the bad songwriting aside, Kris is okay. He is in much better shape than he thought he would be. He is just not in a place where he can write hopeful love songs yet. But he can see the light at the end of this tunnel now. And he has hope. He’ll get there somehow.

~

Kris has too much time in his hands, which makes him cook more stuff than he (or the population of a small third world country) could possibly eat and read things no one in their right minds would ever read.

“Did you know that they call you fat in this week’s Us Weekly?”

The magazine is right there on the counter, open to the page with Britney’s pregnancy scare and Adam’s weight problem. The picture they have of him is not very flattering. It’s better than Britney’s though, that’s for sure.

“Like I give a shit,” Adam says, sounding very much like he gives a shit.

“They say you’re chubby,” Kris needles, trying to keep the smile out of his voice.

Adam does look chubby in that picture, but Kris finds that pretty awesome. If it wasn’t for the occasional spotting of love handles, Adam’s image would be completely untouchable, and that’s a crying shame considering how much of a marshmallow the man really is.

“Yeah, well, I have it on good authority that I am pretty just the way I am.”

“Oh, they say that, too,” Kris says, taking a bite of his cranberry muffin. It’s not bad. “They just don’t think you’re cutting edge enough with the cheeks.”

“Fuck you, Allen.” Adam exhales loudly. “Since when do you read Us Weekly anyway?”

“Since when do you smoke?” Kris asks, almost dropping the muffin. “I thought you quit.”

Adam stays silent for a minute. It’s not like you’re going to be able to lie, Kris thinks at him meanly.

“I just bummed one from a friend. It’s been a shitty day.”

“Yeah, well, cancer wouldn’t make it any better,” Kris says, trying not to sound too much like he is judging him. He is not his mother or anything. Adam can smoke if he wants to.

“I put it out,” Adam says. “Happy?”

“Ecstatic.”

~

Kris says no interviews after the divorce, but Josephine can hold everyone back for only so long. Wally keeps telling him that people will forget him; that it’s better to be in the news with a divorce than to not be anywhere at all. Kris knows he can’t hide forever anyway. So he decides to start small, with a simple magazine interview.

His publicist gives him pointers, what to say, what not to say, and how to say what he wants to say, but in the end, this is something so private he has to use his own words and his own judgment.

   

No one thought you’d get a divorce. No one actually believed the rumors until the papers leaked out.

I didn’t think I’d get a divorce. I don’t think anyone expects something like that.

You mean it came as a surprise to you too?

No. No. It wasn’t sudden. It was very gradual actually. Sometimes you lose track of a relationship and you don’t even realize it until it’s completely gone. We were headed that way, Katy and I. I’m glad we realized, well, she realized, that it would be better to give it another direction before it expired completely.

You two are still friends then?

I think we will be.

 

That first interview opens a door, and Kris finds himself saying the same things over and over in every channel and every magazine. The media loves the newly single Kris Allen, people start talking about him even more than they had when his album first came out. His publicist starts throwing women at him, models and starlets; he keeps telling everyone that it’s not going to happen, but they don’t seem to tire of it at all.

The paparazzi are also very curious about who he might be dating, so they follow him everywhere from the market to the studio, and make up stories about every woman he ever smiles at. They even come up with a story about him and Josephine. Kris thinks it’s hilarious, Josephine doesn’t agree.

“Like I’d ever date you,” she scoffs.

“Ouch,” Kris says, hand over his heart.

When he tells Adam of his broken heart, he gets another earful from him.

“You should start dating, you know. It’s not a good image, being the guy who is still hung up on his ex-wife.”

Kris must have made a noise, because Adam rushes to explain.

“I’m not saying that’s what this is. I know you, don’t be such an idiot. It’s just the image, that’s what the public will see, and you know they’ll make their own stories. Some of them will be romantic, I’m sure, but in most of them, you’ll come off as the pathetic divorcee.”

“I am kind of pathetic,” Kris agrees.

“Fuck off. You’re not pathetic. You’re just scared to date after all these years. Don’t you have PR people for God’s sake? Why am I doing their job here?”

“’Course I do. They are mean and ugly.”

“As well they should be,” Adam says, approving. “Don’t they tell you that you should be dating some nice girl from the next blockbuster or something?”

Kris shrugs. “I don’t listen to them.”

Adam sighs. “Of course you don’t.”

The resigned tone is completely unnecessary, Kris thinks.

“I’m not ready for anything yet. And I’m not dating some girl as a publicity stunt. That’s just lame.”

He even discussed this with Josephine. For once, she agreed with him.

“You wanted to be famous. Famous people are lame.”

“Yeah. Well. I wanted a lot of things.”

~

Kris does not get sick very often, but when he does, it’s epic.

The thing is, he likes the red tree out back. He likes sitting under it with Stella and working on songs, he likes climbing it, he likes just lying down on the grass and looking up at the sky through its leaves. And sometimes it gets cold. But Kris is a trooper, he doesn’t get sick very often, so he wears his favorite grey sweater, the one that’s soft enough to sleep in, and goes back out anyway.

Josephine warned him. She said this would happen. Kris thanks God she is in Arizona at her Mom’s, or he would have never heard the end of this.

Thankfully his schedule is wide open these days and he doesn’t have to cancel anything because of this. He doesn’t think he could have gotten out of bed to call anyone anyway. Like, right this minute, he thinks maybe his phone is ringing, and it sounds like Adam’s ringtone, but he can’t find it to save his life. It should be somewhere around the bed if not in it, he didn’t get up at all after he talked to Josephine last night, but it feels like his arms are floating and his legs are made of lead and his head is full of cotton. The combination is not very conducive to movement.

The phone turns out to be under the pillow.

“Hey.”

“Woah. What the hell happened to you?”

Adam sounds so alive. Kris feels even worse hearing that chipper tone.

“’m sick.”

“You certainly sound it. Did you take anything?”

Kris makes a negative sound.

“Tell Josie to get off her butt and get something for you, or better yet, get you a doctor.”

Kris licks his lips to get rid of the cotton feeling. “She’s in Arizona. Home.”

“Crap,” Adam says, sounding worried. “Kris. You should get up. Go to a doctor.”

Kris’ arms are trying to float again and it’s getting tiring to hold the phone to his ear. He wants to bury his head under the covers and not talk to anyone alive or chipper. It would be awesome if he could just sleep until this thing passed.

He makes a noncommittal sound to Adam. “I’ll do that.”

“Did you eat something? Do you even have anything to eat?”

Kris yawns. “I’m gonna sleep. I’ll talk to you later. ‘Kay?”

He thinks maybe Adam is saying something when he hangs up, but it’s probably nothing important; they can talk later. Kris needs to sleep for about a century now, and hopefully when he wakes up his arms won’t be on their way to the Stratosphere.

~

Kris’ doorbell is annoying. It’s one of those buzzing ones that gives you a headache in two seconds flat, and Kris already had a headache when it started ringing five minutes ago. It’s not easy walking with legs of lead and he gets dizzy every two steps. Kris is a pacifist normally, but he will kick ass if someone got the wrong address.

He opens the door, leaning heavily against it, to see a small black woman standing outside. She has grey hair tied up in a bun and wire rimmed glasses perched low on her nose. She smiles at him like she is there for a tea party.

“You must be Kristopher.”

Kris thinks he must be, but he can’t be sure with all the cotton clogging his brain. “I’m—Sorry, what?”

She steps inside, puts a hand on his forehead, and tuts at him, sounding a bit like his grandma. “You’re burning up. Did you take anything for this?” She gives him an assessing look and shakes her head. “Never mind. Of course you didn’t.”

“Um.”

“Let’s get you into bed,” she says, taking a hold of his arm.

“Um,” Kris says again, following her lead meekly. “Who’re you?”

She smiles at him. “I’m Abigail.”

~

Kris checks his phone when Abigail tells him to, to see twelve missed calls and three new messages, all from Adam. The last message reads: Hang in there. Sending reinforcements.

“Are you a nurse?” Kris asks Abigail, thinking she doesn’t look like a doctor, and who else would Adam send as reinforcement anyway?

But she says no. “I’m a mother. That’s even better.”

Thankfully, seeing his inability to put two and two together at the moment, she stops being cryptic long enough to admit that she is George’s mother and Adam called and asked her to check up on Kris. Kris thinks for a moment that she can’t possibly be George’s mother, because George is huge and she is so tiny, but that’s kind of stupid, because George probably didn’t come out fully grown.

Abigail herds him into the bathroom for a shower and changes his bed while he is in there. Kris tells her that she doesn’t have to, Adam probably just meant for her to check if he was still alive when he didn’t answer the phone, but she tells him to butt out of her business and do as she says. Kris obliges. It’s not like he has the energy to argue.

Adam calls and talks to Abigail for fifteen minutes about Kris’ condition which Kris thinks is just rude, because hello, he’s not a kid, he can talk for himself. When it’s his turn on the phone, he is pretty sure he sounds spoiled and petulant, but he is sick, so that’s probably his prerogative.

“I hate you,” he tells Adam. These things shouldn’t be kept bottled up; Kris is releasing his hate to the world.

“No, you don’t,” Adam says. “You love me. And you love Abigail. Admit it, she is brilliant.”

She is kind of brilliant. There are amazing smells coming from the kitchen. Kris’ stomach grumbles in appreciation.

“She is brilliant. But I still hate you.”

~

Adam got addicted to watching TV in bed when he moved in with Noah. That’s inconvenient for Kris, because Adam keeps calling him in the middle of the night, telling him to turn the TV on, because you have to see this movie, Kris, seriously, and then Kris has to grab his blanket and trod his way to the living room, since he steadfastly refuses to buy a TV for the bedroom.

This particular night they are watching Wizard of Oz, Adam comfortably lounging in his Egyptian cotton sheets, the bastard, and Kris camped out on the couch in the living room, wrapped up in his blanket.

Kris doesn’t like using the speaker phone, so he squeezes the phone between his ear and the pillow, which creates a whole different kind of acoustic; making it sound like Adam is singing the songs right inside his brain. And of course Adam sings the songs, that’s the best part of watching musicals for him. He knows all the lines too, but he doesn’t do that so much since Kris threatened to hang up on him that one time.

It’s kind of like a lullaby, listening to him sing softly like that. Noah is not home, so he can sing as loudly as he wants, but the hush of the nighttime is over them both and Kris kind of feels like he should be whispering too.

He is just about to nod off when Adam says “I wish I had ruby slippers.”

Kris tries to blink the sleep away. “You are already home.”

Adam sighs and doesn’t reply. They watch the rest of the movie in silence.

~

In hindsight, it’s not that much of a surprise that Adam shows up at his door with a duffel bag in hand. He had stopped mentioning Noah a couple months back and if Kris hadn’t been so wrapped up in his own misery he would have noticed that something was seriously wrong with the two of them. He knows from boyfriends past that when Adam stops talking about someone, it means he probably gave up on them.

He opens the door wide and steps back to let Adam in, taking in the defeated look and the greasy hair. Adam’s hair being greasy is one of the sure signs of the apocalypse, so Kris is pretty sure something terrible must have happened; either Adam broke up with Noah or MAC is no longer selling his favorite black eyeliner.

Adam drops his bag on the floor and opens his arms. “Can I have a hug?”

Kris wraps his arms around him.

~

“I wasn’t in love with him anymore. But—I can’t believe he dumped me for that skinny bastard.”

Kris switches his tub of ice cream with Adam’s; he is not a fan of the nutty ones.

“I’m homeless now too. I should never have moved in with him. What was I thinking?”

Kris makes a face. This one is even worse. Banana ice cream should be banned.

Adam lets his head fall onto the kitchen counter.

“I’m ugly, and homeless, and I’m going to die alone.”

Kris pets his hair.

~

Adam is not as depressed as he should be. Kris thinks that probably means this relationship was over long before it was over. Adam gives himself two days to mope, (which turns into a week, and then two) and during that time he refuses to shower or get off the couch, does not wear anything but sweats, whines at Kris until he cooks for him, and eats everything in sight. After that he whines some more about being too fat, too ugly and having bad skin. Kris takes it all in stride.

“Told you I missed my chance,” Adam mumbles, his head buried in Kris’ thigh, feet propped up on the armrest of the couch, slippers just barely holding on to his toes.

“Your chance for what?” Kris asks, wiggling to get the feeling back in his right leg.

“It’s too late to find the love of my life now. I’m too old,” Adam mumbles in his familiar, whiny post-break up tone.

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Adam turns around to lie on his back and face Kris. “That’s what you said last time. And here we are. Life is proving me right.”

“If I recall correctly, your theory was based on shining examples such as me and Katy.”

Adam huffs. “So no one finds the love of their life! That’s not exactly better.”

Kris rests a hand on Adam’s chest. “You can’t plan life. I was supposed to have kids by now, and look at me; I don’t even have a dog.”

“You’ll have kids,” Adam says, switching roles suddenly to console Kris. “You won’t be alone forever. Not like me. I’m going to grow old and be that fat and ugly guy who wears too much foundation.”

Kris smiles at him. “We’ll move in together then. I don’t care if you wear too much foundation.”

Adam sighs and melts a little deeper into the couch cushions. “We can adopt penguins.”

“Penguins?”

Adam nods. “Yeah. You’ve seen that thing with the penguins and the eggs? Only time I wanted to have kids, I swear. I cried my eyes out watching that.”

That’s that then. Adam wants penguins. Kris never thought his kids would have flippers, but what the hell.

“So we’re moving to Antarctica?” Kris says. “Cool.”

~

“Is he there?”

Kris looks over at Adam who is busy butchering a Beatles classic with Kris’ guitar. Adam never said anything about not telling George where he was.

“Yeah.”

George lets out a longsuffering sigh.

“Tell that little fucker to text me if he decides to break up with you too.”

George is probably the only person in the world who would call Adam little.

“Will do.”

~

Kris gives Adam the spare key he had in the kitchen drawer and tells him he can move in if he wants to, but Adam gets that determined look in his eyes that says if he is going down, he will be going down fighting. He has unfinished business in New York, or at least some posturing to do, and this was a nice vacation and all, but he has to go back eventually. It doesn’t help that Noah and his new—skinny—boyfriend show up at a premiere hand in hand, setting the blogosphere on fire. Where is Adam Lambert, everybody wants to know; and Kris can tell Adam is biding his time and recharging for his great comeback.

“You know you can just stand alone and still be strong, right?” Kris says, trying to sound nonchalant. He doesn’t want Adam to be hurt once again by a choice he makes in haste. Adam doesn’t need to have a pretty guy on his arm to show that he is okay.

“I wanna be that,” Adam says, pointing at the TV.

MTV is on with the sound on mute, and there’s a girl singing, must be someone new, it’s no one Kris recognizes. She has honey colored skin, glittering golden, and she’s wearing a tight dress with a slit going high up her thigh.

“You wanna be a woman?” Kris hazards a guess. It’s probably not that, but he is not ruling anything out at this point.

“Not a woman. I’m fond of my dick, thank you very much.” He points at the TV again with a weird gesture this time, which Kris would translate as Adam wanting to pull the girl’s skirt up, but yeah, that’s probably not it either. “Look at her. She is feral and powerful and sexy. I don’t want to strut around with a boy-toy to feel secure. I wanna be that instead.”

Kris is taken aback. He certainly doesn’t have the hips, but— “You don’t think you are?”

“Do you think I am?” Adam asks, honestly curious.

Kris chuckles. “Oh, I think you stayed away from the arenas too long. When you’re on a stage, you are the fiercest fuck that ever lived.”

Adam arches an eyebrow at the profanity, lips slightly curving up. Kris doesn’t swear a lot, but that only makes it all the more powerful when he does.

“That girl,” Kris says, pointing at the TV, “is a cheap imitation of you. Stop being ridiculous. Humility doesn’t become you.”

Adam beams at him.

~

George finds Adam a new place, and tells him to get his ass down there, so Adam leaves for New York, forgetting almost half his stuff scattered around Kris’ house. Kris has enough non-depressing songs to tentatively start working with a producer, and his days slowly begin to pick up pace. He finds himself running from meeting to studio to another meeting; projections and plans and slideshows and pie charts begin to occupy his mind all over again. It’s good; he is definitely happier busy.

People stop asking him questions about Katy and his marriage, and though he is still one of the hottest bachelors on the market, the throwing of women on his way start to lessen. Then of course he meets one he actually likes.

Her name is Claire. She is a lawyer. They meet through Wally. It surprises Kris that he not only finds her attractive, but actually likes her personality too, because she is nothing at all like Katy. She is a brunette who wears dark suits and high heels, and she has a son from a previous marriage that she plays baseball with on the weekends.

Kris doesn’t ask her out at first; they just go out for coffee while waiting for Wally and get to talking. She is not impressed by him at all, makes fun of him at every turn actually, but it’s not annoying; she makes him laugh. Kris decides that this must be it, this must be the sign he was waiting for.

For their first date Kris takes her to a baseball game. Seeing her in casual clothes sets him a little more at ease and watching the game with her is fun. They get along great. It’s easy talking to her. She is confident and sure of herself; she doesn’t leave a lot of room for awkwardness.

She kisses him goodnight when he hesitates, and smirks a little afterwards because he freezes like a teenager instead of kissing her back.

Kris goes back to his hotel room that night, feeling dizzy and disoriented, and calls Adam.

“Good, bad or horrifying?” Adam asks.

“I don’t know,” Kris mumbles, hugging a pillow to his chest. “This is all weird. I don’t know how to be single.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

It’s hard to explain to someone like Adam. “When you’re married, you meet people, and it doesn’t have to be anything. Because you’re already taken. Everything doesn’t have to have a double meaning, you know? I’m used to that.”

“You went on a date with her. There’s no double meaning there.”

“No. No. But it’s like—I don’t know if I like her like that. I mean, she is great, don’t get me wrong, and I’d love to hang out with her, but maybe that’s just it. Maybe I just want to be her friend.”

“You don’t know?” Adam asks, incredulous. “That can’t be a good sign.”

“I’m not sure! And now we can’t be friends, because it’s weird,” Kris whines. “She kissed me and I didn’t kiss her back.”

Adam laughs.

“Don’t laugh at me! It was traumatizing.”

Adam doesn’t even pause. Kris thinks he needs some new friends. Supportive friends.

“I don’t think I can do this. It’s too much work. I dated Katy for seven years. I don’t even know how to get to know someone when you’re not in high school with them, you know?”

“No,” Adam says, still obviously making fun of him. “I really wouldn’t know. I didn’t date anyone in high school. But you can try passing notes during meetings. They’d probably think it’s charming.”

“You’re no help at all,” Kris sighs.

Adam is still faintly laughing when he hangs up.

~

Adam’s album drops like a bomb and Kris starts getting busy signals from him. He vaguely remembers what that was like, the whirlwind of trying to be everywhere at once, so he cuts him some slack. And Adam does call whenever he has time, so aside from having some unexpectedly boring nights, Kris doesn’t really mind being pushed aside a little bit. He has fun watching clips of Adam’s shows and reading the interviews in his spare time anyway.

It’s a bit like going back in time, because people start asking things about Adam to him during interviews again, and Kris finds himself enjoying the old game of tag; it is much better than them prying into his personal life anyway, because really, the stupidity of those questions was killing him. But then again, some people can apparently ask stupid questions on any topic.

   

What I really wonder is how you relate to each other on a personal level. You’re a guy’s guy, plaid shirts and all, and he is exactly the opposite. Isn’t it hard for you to connect when he has such a different, shall we say, feminine approach?

Feminine? Are we talking about the same Adam Lambert? He is a bit too much at times, but I never saw him as feminine. And compared to me—I mean, I’m not exactly Rambo, here. [ laughs ] But seriously. Adam has a personality, and it’s unique, it’s hard to categorize. When he is on a stage, he is not masculine or feminine, he is just Adam. He stands ten feet tall. It’s something else entirely.

 

Two days after that interview hit the stands Adam sends him a text that says: My hero. Kris blushes like an idiot and refuses to send a reply.

~

“Kris!”

Adam is giggling in his ear, and it’s—Kris looks at the bedside clock—it’s 2:00 AM.

“Adam, what the hell?”

“Kris, I’m a slut. I thought you should know that.”

Adam is slurring his words in a way that has become familiar to Kris. This is the third time in two weeks Adam has called him completely wasted.

“You’re not a slut,” Kris says, sighing, and runs a hand over his face to wipe the sleep away.

Self-hatred is where Adam always ends up when he drinks himself stupid. And he calls Kris because a part of him wants Kris to say ‘that’s enough, Adam, stop this nonsense’. Kris won’t, though. Adam knows right from wrong, he should stop it himself. This is like emotional blackmail in reverse or something. Kris refuses to play into it.

“Yes. Yes, I—” Kris hears him drop the phone and puke. He hopes Adam was in a bathroom of some kind or the maid will dunk his toothbrush in the toilet again.

“Adam?”

“I’m—oh, God. I drank a bit too much, I think.”

“Yes,” Kris agrees. “You probably did. Where are you right now?”

“I’m—I’m at that club. Keops or Kiosk or Coops? I don’t know.” His voice turns into a whisper. “I’m locked in the bathroom.”

“That’s wonderful,” Kris says, rolling his eyes. Adam’s life is so glamorous.

“It is wonderful, Kris. It’s so wonderfully cool in here. I was so hot.”

Kris gets a picture of Adam lying on the floor of a club bathroom. He is not going to ask; he doesn’t even want to know.

“I think I puked on some guy’s dick tonight,” Adam says, sounding thoughtful.

“That doesn’t make you a slut.”

Kris can’t really be sure, but when he thinks slutty behavior, puke somehow doesn’t make the list.

“I slept with a loooot of guys, Kris. I can’t even remember how many.”

“Okay, that’s kind of slutty,” Kris admits. “But I think being a slut and acting slutty are two different things. You’re not normally a slut. You’re just going through something right now.”

If only Kris knew what that something was; even if he couldn’t do anything about it, he’d at least sleep better at night.

“I love you, Kris.”

That’s a drunk classic for Adam. He says it when he is sober too, especially when Kris cooks for him, but he has to say it when he is drunk.

“I know you do,” Kris says, placating. Not that Adam needs a reply from him. He’d probably talk himself hoarse to voicemail when he’s this far gone.

“I’m so glad you were married when we met.”

Kris freezes for a second, then shakes himself awake. That’s a new one.

“Why?”

“I would have screwed it up. You were so cute. I would have made a mess of everything and you wouldn’t be my best friend and I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t my best friend.” He takes a deep breath that turns into a sleepy sigh. “Thank God there was Katy. She was so pretty. She had pretty hair. I wonder what she’s doing now. Pretty, pretty Katy. Whatever happened to her?”

Adam trails off and there’s a loud knock on the door.

“People need to pee,” Adam says, and hangs up on Kris.

~

At first it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just something stupid Adam said while drunk, and Adam says a lot of stupid things while drunk. Kris doesn’t mean to dwell on it. But then he does, because it’s like a splinter under his skin; it’s small and unimportant, he could go on just fine without thinking about it at all, but he keeps touching it, keeps messing with it. Inevitably, it starts bleeding.

Adam doesn’t lie to Kris. That’s a fact of life. Sober or drunk, it doesn’t matter. Adam never lies. So Kris knows that when he says he would have screwed things up between them if Kris hadn’t been married, that’s exactly what Adam thinks. And that means, what—that Adam would have made a move on him? Even knowing Kris is straight? That makes no sense.

Another fact Kris knows about Adam is that despite the recent slutty behavior, Adam is not the kind of guy to hit on just anyone. He takes it as a personal affront to be considered easy. He chooses his dates carefully (when he is not out getting drunk and puking on people’s privates that is) and he never makes a move unless he is absolutely sure about what he wants. Oh, he’d flirt, he is a huge flirt, but he flirts with everyone, girls, boys, studio execs included, so that doesn’t mean anything.

If Kris hadn’t been married, if Katy hadn’t been there, and if Adam had—Kris can’t even finish that sentence. If Adam had hit on Kris? That sounds ridiculous, even in his head.

But what would have happened if he had, a traitorous voice in his head whispers.

Kris had thought Adam was impressive from the moment he saw him, much earlier than Adam ever noticed Kris, Kris is pretty sure. But Kris would probably have run screaming if Adam had even insinuated anything back then, because what made Adam impressive at first glance also made him intimidating and alien. Men don’t walk around with blue hair and make up in Conway; Kris was just not used to seeing a guy like that in real life. And Adam was so comfortable in his own skin, like the guys without make up were the different ones and Adam was exactly the way he was supposed to be. Now Kris knows that as the truth, Adam is exactly the way he is supposed to be, but back then it was like a slap in the face.

But what if…

Kris can’t make sense of what Adam said. Adam didn’t even notice him for a long time. They would never have become friends if they hadn’t been sharing a room; Kris is pretty sure about that. And after they started getting to know one another, it snowballed into a friendship real quick. And it was just a friendship; Kris can’t see how it could have been anything else for Adam. There’d been no tension like he’d expect from an attraction. It was comfortable and natural and solid. Kind of like it is now, maybe with less affection. He thinks the affection came with time.

But what if…

What would Adam have done? Touched him on the arm, maybe? But that wouldn’t have been anything new. Kris was the one to break down the personal space barrier between them when he realized why Adam kept such a respectful distance from everyone. Kris never wanted anyone to be uncomfortable with him for such meaningless reasons. Adam caught on quick and the hugs and the pats started pretty early on with them. Actually they were so comfortable with each other in just a matter of weeks, Adam would have had to plant one on Kris for him to notice that he was being hit on, and even then Kris would probably have expected some kind of joke afterwards.

Kris can’t even imagine Adam kissing him; really, seriously kissing him. He tries to picture it, with the two of them in their room at the mansion, Adam touching him with purpose. It’s funny. He has to laugh. Because that makes no sense.

There are constants in life. Facts no one can change. And Adam being his friend is one of those facts. Like gravity. Like the sun. There’s no two ways about it.

Kris decides to stop thinking about it.

~

Adam didn’t want to deal with a whole tour this year, but he still had a bunch of concerts all over the country for about three weeks. Nowadays he does about one concert a week and seems to be having fun while doing it.

“I liked the wings, I’m not saying anything about the wings,” Kris says, referring to the black wings Adam wore at a concert a couple of weeks ago. It was done tastefully, he has to admit, looked quite impressive with the light show. “But the blue body paint, I’m not so sure about.” It reminded Kris of the traditional henna tattoos he’s seen in Africa. Only in blue.

“I look good in blue,” Adam says, chewing what Kris thinks is probably sesame chicken, since Adam said he had ordered Chinese before he called.

“Blue jeans, sure. Blue skin? I don’t know, man.”

“Come on, it was fun. Aquatic.” He giggles.

“Were you drunk? Seriously. You can tell me.” That would at least be a rational explanation.

“Slightly tipsy, maybe. You know I wouldn’t go out there actually drunk.”

Which is a lie as far as Kris can tell. He has searched ‘Adam Lambert drunk’ at YouTube. There was plenty of concert footage there. He is not going to mention that though. Adam can ask for it all he wants.

“Well, whoever said it was a good idea must have been drunk then.”

“Oh, don’t say that about Luke. He takes pride in his work.”

“Luke,” Kris says, unimpressed. “Don’t tell me you have someone on staff to paint you blue.”

Adam slurps his probably-sesame-chicken. “Not just blue!” he objects. “I’m pretty sure he’d paint me pink too if I asked. He doesn’t like green though. So maybe not that.”

Kris makes a note to ask Josephine about the job descriptions of his own staff. What if he has been paying for someone for potential body paint situations as well? It would make sense, since he has a lot more employees than he thinks he could possibly need.

“Daniel is getting married,” Kris says, remembering that he hasn’t shared that bit of news yet.

“Really!” The tone says it all. Adam loves weddings. “When’s the wedding and what are you wearing?”

“January. Black suit?”

“Hmm,” Adam says, sounding thoughtful. “We’ll see about that.”

“So you’re coming?”

“Sure thing. Just let me know when and where. Actually tell Josephine to tell George, because I’m pretty sure I have the memory of a goldfish these days.”

Kris chuckles. “I see how it is. My people will talk to your people.”

Adam chokes on his food laughing. “I’m way too important for you,” he says, loftily. “Did you by any chance see that thing at the National Enquirer?”

“About your lovechild with Dita Von Teese? Yes. Very interesting. I am going to be the godfather, right?”

“Funny,” Adam says. “Actually I meant about the one that says you are not dating anyone, because you are still trying to get back with Katy.”

Kris harrumphs. “It’s the National Enquirer,” he points out.

“It’s your public image,” Adam counters. “You have to start dating. I know you don’t really care about that crap, but it’s only going to get harder the longer you put it off.”

“I know. I know.” Kris does know. But he likes his life the way it is. Why fix something that’s not broken?

“I’m not saying go look for a wife. Just go out. Have fun.”

“I’d be doing it if it was fun.”

Adam snickers. “Then you’re probably doing something wrong.”

“Everyone’s a comedian,” Kris mumbles. “Look, I gotta go. I’ll see you on Friday, okay?”

“Yup. Later!”

~

That Friday Adam has a concert in San Francisco. Kris is ridiculously excited about it; it’s been forever since he’s been to one of Adam’s concerts. The moment Adam walks onto the stage, Kris remembers what it was like to be there with him, and he feels a smile quirking his lips up. If he’d known back then how much he’d miss being on a stage with Adam, he would have savored the experience more. As it is, the concerts during the Idol tour are all jumbled in his head, the adrenaline rush making them bleed into each other and turn them into one big festival of lights and screams.

Kris is very proud of Adam’s new album. He has helped shape the songs quite a bit, but that’s not why he likes it; he likes it because it’s so Adam, more so than the first one, which in hindsight Kris thinks was a bit too much. Adam isn’t so eager to impress anymore. He is not trying to be the best or showing off now. He is simply doing what comes natural to him, and Kris loves every note of every song.

Adam winks at him before starting things off with one of Kris’ favorite songs. He has to smile, because For All Seasons is a ballad, with violins and everything (Kris’ idea), and Adam never opens with that, he always chooses to start things off with a bang. But having known Adam for as long as he had, he should have expected that. The man likes his gestures.

If watching the recordings and the clips of Adam’s concerts was tiring, being there in person and seeing the sweat and the tears is completely draining. It is amazing though, the screams almost match Adam’s voice, and that’s no easy feat. By now everyone expects Adam to do something unexpected, but it is still shocking when two guys dressed in all white somersault their way across the stage, leaving white doves in their wake. The crowd eats it up, and Kris has to admit, so does he.

The lights go out and the last song of the set begins with a low drum beat Kris recognizes as belonging to a more eccentric song from Adam’s first album. He can’t recall the name, but knows how the music goes, soft African tones working up to a punk-rock sound. The beginning however, is not supposed to be this soft.

Adam is wearing black jeans with chains around his waist and a loose, shimmery shirt. He places a hand low in his belly and looks up with a small smirk. Kris’ mind goes uh-oh at that look. Adam is up to something.

The hand moves up slowly, taking the tails of the shirt with it and baring Adam’s stomach. The crowd goes wild, cheering and whistling, and Kris feels himself blushing, thankful for the protection of the dark. Adam starts moving slowly, a barely noticeable wave hitting his hips and working its way up his chest, and Kris has no idea what the hell that is, a bastardized hip hop move or maybe something Adam learned from the belly dancers he was so cozy with during his last tour, Kris can’t tell, but it hits him like a sledgehammer and he suddenly forgets how to breathe. It’s just a moment in time; Adam looks up to the audience with a raised eyebrow and then the music explodes and so does Adam, jumping around and singing his lungs out. But even with the lights back on and the guitar sounds filling the air, Kris has to concentrate on his breathing, in and out, nice and calm, because that was—that was unexpected.

They catch up after the show, Adam giving him a bear hug, sharing the hard earned sweat, and it should be as it always is, but it’s not. Something inside Kris is aware of Adam in a way he never was before. Adam was always sexy; he was seductive and sultry and beautiful from day one, but as impossible as it seems to him now, Kris never really noticed. And now he does.

“I’m gonna grab a shower and then we can go,” Adam says, taking off the poor excuse for a shirt he is wearing, and walks away with chains jingling around his hips.

Kris shuts his eyes tight. When he opens them again, George is standing next to him, giving him a knowing look.

“What?” Kris says, trying for aloof, but ending up somewhere between scared and tired.

George smirks and hands him a bottle of water.

~

Kris doesn’t remember when he last felt this awkward. He tries to look at things from an objective point of view, and yes, nothing has changed between the two of them, but Kris has changed, suddenly and out of nowhere he has changed, and no matter how much he wants to, he can’t change back.

Thinking objectively also brings forth a barrage of facts Kris never thought to question before. Adam is his best friend. Adam is who he calls when he is sad or happy or angry or bored. Adam is the one he wants to hug when he is sad or happy or angry or bored. Adam is the most important person in his life.

Adam is gay.

Adam is sexy.

Kris can’t breathe when he thinks the words ‘sex’ and ‘Adam’ in the same sentence.

“From Adam,” Josephine says, thrusting a small box into his hands, and making him jump. She goes back to her spot on the carpet, mail scattered all over it. She has a system, Kris is pretty sure, but no one has been able to crack it yet.

Kris opens the box, sent to him by a Lloyd Dobler, with his heart beating madly in his chest. A piece of paper is tucked inside, along with a key.

I’m not giving back yours, so it’s only fair.

Under that is Adam’s new address.

Kris takes deep breaths and attaches the key to his key chain.

~

Kris has seen gay porn before; he vaguely remembers finding it boring. But then again, Kris thinks straight porn is boring too most of the time, so that’s not much of a sign. He thinks maybe he should watch Adam’s not-sex-tape—for educational purposes only, but he can’t make himself click on the link. Adam had made fun of him when he said he wouldn’t watch it back when it first hit the internet, and now it seems more of an invasion of privacy than it ever would have been back then. Now there’s intent.

Kris is determined to not jerk off to his best friend.

Part of him wants to embrace this idea wholeheartedly, because who else could be better? Adam is everything he could ever ask for and more. It’s an exciting new idea. But another part of him recoils from it, because a relationship with a man is not something he could ever do. He gets that everybody is bisexual to a certain extent, that makes sense to him, but when life comes into it, society, family, fans—he doesn’t think he can do it. Hiding wouldn’t be an option, not for him, especially not with Adam, so it doesn’t matter how perfect it would be, because it can’t be.

Kris hits the x to close the browser and signs off. He needs to get his mind off this, and everything will eventually be back to normal.

~

Kris is tossing and turning in bed when he gets a call from an unknown number. As a rule he screens his calls, but ever since Katy’s accident, he began to fear that he’ll miss an important call if he doesn’t answer. So bracing himself for a rabid fan or bad news, he answers the phone.

“Hey.”

“Hey, Kris.”

It’s Adam. And he is drunk. Kris is beginning to hate that slur.

“You’re drunk.”

“Yes, yes, yes.”

At least this time he sounds cheerful.

“What are you doing, Adam?”

Kris is tired of this. He is tired of being pulled in more directions than he can go. It’s hard enough trying to find his footing in this friendship right now. He can’t handle Adam being a mess on top of it.

“I was dancing!” Adam says. “But then I had to call you, so I commandeered this phone!”

“You stole somebody’s phone to call me?” Kris translates.

“I’ll give it back,” Adam says, whining. “I think I called their mother though. Did you know that you’re not speed dial 1 in this phone? That’s a shame. They should do that. Built in speed dial Kris in every phone.”

“I thought I was speed dial 5?”

Kris can almost see Adam’s grin. “You’re moving up in the world!”

“That’s—that’s wonderful, Adam. Thank you. Why did you have to call me?”

“I don’t—I don’t remember. But I don’t need a reason. Do I?”

Kris sighs. “No. No, you don’t need a reason. You can call me anytime.”

“You’re the best, Kris. I love you.”

“I know you do.”

“It’s—Woah. I need to sit down.”

“Are you okay?” Kris asks, not really worried. They’ve done this before. “Where are you?”

“Sunset. Bathroom. And it’s dancing,” Adam says, sounding nauseous.

“What’s dancing?”

“The room.”

Kris has a bad feeling about this. This is not Adam’s usual drunk and puking voice. He sounds sick. Alcohol poisoning, Kris thinks. Or maybe he hit his head to the toilet bowl or something, the idiot.

“Adam. How much did you drink?”

“I—I don’t know.” Adam’s voice gets low, sounding small and scared. “I think I took something I shouldn’t have.”

Kris feels the muscles in his body tighten all at once. The phone in his hand creaks in protest.

“What was it?”

“X, I thought. But now I’m not so sure.”

Kris swears under his breath and goes into the living room to get the other phone. George sounds like he was awake and waiting for him to call when he answers, and he doesn’t even sound surprised when Kris tells him to go and pick Adam up from a club bathroom. That can’t possibly be a good sign. How many times Adam called George instead of Kris? What about the times he didn’t call anyone? Kris curses himself for not keeping better track of Adam. He knew it was getting out of control. He should have done something.

“Kris, are you still there?” Adam whispers.

“Yes, yes,” Kris says, hanging up on George. “I’m here.”

“Don’t hang up, okay?”

“I’m not hanging up. I’m here.”

“Okay.”

~

It takes George half an hour to get to where Adam is and another forty-five minutes to get him home and checked over by a doctor. Kris bakes two batches of cookies as he waits for news, they are burnt on the edges and doughy in the middle; he dumps them all in the trash when George tells him that Adam is going to be okay.

Kris makes George promise to call him if anything happens and goes to bed only to stay awake until dawn staring at his phone, trying to come up with something to say to Adam. You hurt yourself and I will hurt you, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, and Kris doesn’t want to sound like someone’s mother. He ends up sending two texts around 6:00 AM.

You need to stop.

Do you want me to be there?

Kris’ album is coming out in a week and he is booked for a solid month at least, but if that’s what it takes, he will drop everything and go to New York. He can make another album. He can afford this one doing badly. He cannot afford to lose Adam.

~

Adam is not an addict. He is just stupid and inexplicably messed up. He tells Kris not to worry, and for God’s sake don’t come here, and even though Kris trusts Adam’s promise to get clean, he makes sure to get periodic updates from George and keep up with the blogs. It’s all just cautionary measures, things he probably should have done before Adam lost control. But it’s better late than never.

One afternoon he comes across Adam’s not-sex-tape again. He is not looking for it; it just pops up in the search results while he is snooping around, looking for suspicious activity involving Adam and clubs and little white pills. His mouse hovers over the link for five minutes before he finally clicks on it with a jerk of his finger.

It starts with a close up of Adam’s face, ghosts of black eyeliner on his eyelids, and freckles covering his skin. It must be morning; there’s sunlight in the room and Adam looks like he just woke up.

“Get that thing off my face,” Adam says, playfully swatting at the hand holding the camera.

The image is shaky and all he can see is a tanned arm as the camera is placed on top of a dresser, but then the arm pulls back and the lens is looking directly towards the bed where Adam is lying on his back covered only by Jason’s body. Kris can see his thighs and hipbones and chest, and as he tries to take all that in, frozen in his spot, Adam’s hands grab Jason’s head and he starts kissing him.

The video is about 3 minutes long. Kris doesn’t think he breathes at all during that time. Jason’s bare ass is possibly the most sensational thing about the scene, but Kris doesn’t ever look that way. His eyes are glued on Adam’s hands, how they card through Jason’s hair and caress their way down his back, and his lips, full and red when Jason finally releases them, and the noises he makes when Jason kisses his neck, how he throws his head back and closes his eyes.

If Kris had any doubts, they are all gone now. There is no denying it. He wants that—wants it so much he is jealous of Jason, who hasn’t even been in the same city as Adam since they broke up. There’s no way around it anymore; no rational explanation except that Kris wants Adam, more than he thought he could want anything.

He slumps in his chair, trying to get himself to calm down. His heart is racing and he is still quietly gasping for breath. He has no idea what he is supposed to do about this. This is not the way he expected his life to go. He thought he’d find another woman attractive eventually; get to know her, maybe get married again and have kids. That was what getting over Katy meant in his mind. Katy might have chosen not to come along on the journey with him, but Kris didn’t feel the need to alter his life plan drastically in her wake; he just gave himself more time to reach the final destination.

He didn’t think he’d be sitting in front of his computer almost a year after Katy left him and hyperventilating over a video of his best friend kissing another guy.

He has no roadmap for this particular trip.

~

Kris completely forgets about the pendant until Giuliana Rancic asks him about it. She is a fun girl, but Kris thinks she is a bit too comfortable touching other people. They are doing a very short interview for E! News, and he is wearing what he grabbed from the closet that morning when he left for the studio, a black t-shirt and blue jeans. His sneakers are a bit too old, frayed around the edges. He never really considers the possibility of being fondled in front of cameras while getting dressed anyway, but if he did he probably would have worn something with a collar.

“People have been wondering about this,” Giuliana says, hooking a finger into the chain around his neck and pulling the pendant free of his t-shirt, her nail scraping his skin. “You’ve been wearing this for a long time now. What’s that about?”

Kris doesn’t remember ever taking it off. It’s a bit darker now than it used to be, possibly due to his habit of showering with it, but he is not wearing it for its prettiness anyway.

“It’s a gift,” he says.

A perfectly plucked eyebrow rises up doubtfully. “Who is it from? We’ve been curious.”

Kris’ hand goes to clutch at the pendant, his finger scraping over the tiny star on the guitar. “It’s from a very good friend,” he says. “But it’s private. So I’d rather not say who.”

Giuliana pouts. “Okay, keep your secrets,” she says, and thankfully moves on to less ridiculous topics, like his new album and its first single.

That night he gets an email from Adam. It says ‘not like it’s a secret’ on the subject line, and there’s no explanation inside, just a link. Kris turns on his laptop to check out the link, because he hates viewing web pages with the tiny screen of his phone, and finds himself on a page with a lot of pictures of him and Adam. There’s at least twenty pictures there, arranged by date. The pendant is visible in all pictures, starting with when it was with Adam and soon moving on to Kris—Kris shopping, Kris singing, Kris driving. Their fans are very thorough.

Kris tucks the pendant back inside his t-shirt protectively. His fingers linger on the warm chain.

~

The idea for the charity comes to Kris one day out of nowhere. He probably didn’t think of it sooner because his life was too full with so many new and wonderfully exciting things already. But now that he is a single guy with nothing better to do and nothing except music in his life, he realizes that he misses helping others. He misses having that connection with people and the contentment that comes with helping them. Plus, since he won’t be having children of his own anytime soon, he thinks that would be the perfect way to get rid of those protective instincts bubbling up inside of him from time to time. (He is considering the penguin idea as a back up plan.)

Kris believes in believing in things. He believes in being a part of a community, in caring about people and places, and in being aware of what's happening around him. He can’t sit comfortably on a ten thousand dollar couch when he knows there are children out there who won’t be able to afford to eat that night. Church was a way of connecting with those people for him back when he had no other way to do so. But there are other ways. He may not have the same power as the church, but he does have a certain amount of influence now. He can use that, and build something on it.

They name it the Kris Allen Foundation for Children and Peace. At first he almost refuses to use his name, but then has to agree that his name would probably be the driving force behind the whole thing. If he is going to use whatever influence he has, he will have to be smack in the middle of it.

It doesn’t take as long as he thinks it would to find volunteers to run the organization. As his mother says, where there’s a will, there’s a way; and in this case, Kris thinks where there’s money, there are a lot of ways to make things work. He puts in the starting capital and gets to work on finding other contributors.

He may not have been in this business for long, but one major thing Idol gave him was recognition not only by his peers, but by basically the whole country. And he may not have been everyone’s favorite, but no one really disliked him. That sympathy people have for him works in his favor as he tries to get together a solid group behind the charity.

A lot of people agree to contribute in a surprisingly short amount of time, starting with Paula who is eager to help as always, and it snowballs as soon as the news of it starts to hit the media outlets. Kris finds himself in front of the camera and behind a microphone more often than not these days, but when he looks back on what he already accomplished, it’s worth every excruciating interview.

The interviewers keep asking him why he is doing this at all. What’s the push behind this dream? After all, he doesn’t have a recently deceased wife to explain it. Josephine won’t let him say it’s simply because he is making way too much money, instead she gives him a line about giving back and sharing. But in the end, that is what this is about. He is making too much money. Even with half his earnings from the first album gone to Katy, he has more money than he knows what to do with. The second album is doing better than anybody dared to hope for, and he is getting so many offers he has to pick and choose these days. His only remaining responsibility is to his parents, and they don’t need anything; his mother almost cried when he suggested they move to a bigger place. They belong in Conway, in their home where they raised two kids and are hoping to raise grandkids. Aside from a few renovations here and there, there’s not much else they will ask for.

So Kris donates his time and money, and in turn the foundation helps him forget his own problems and focus on someone else’s for a while. Adam is busy, and Kris is busy, so there’s not much time in there to contemplate anything deeper than the phone calls they make every other day. Kris thinks maybe, if things go as well as they have, he might forget about those couple of weeks where he completely lost his mind and thought he had a crush on his best friend. He simply had too much time in his hands and not enough people in his life. He’ll get past this thing, easy as pie.

Adam is behind the foundation idea from the start. He was actually the first person Kris shared the thought with when it was nothing more than a flicker in his mind. He helped work so many of the kinks out, Kris thinks of him as co-founder even though Adam has never done anything for the foundation on paper. And when they decide to do a benefit concert to fund their very first project in Southern Africa (providing the children of Botswana with basic necessities like food and clean drinking water and medical supplies) Adam is the first one he asks.

“You waited months and you picked the only date I was scheduled to be out of the country?” Adam says, sounding seriously put out.

“Geez. I didn’t plan it that way. Jane got us the Shrine Auditorium for free; I can’t very well ask for them to change the date now. No way am I giving them a chance to change their minds about it.”

Adam huffs. “I’ll see what I can do.”

What Adam can do, apparently, is to be there in image, if not in person. He pulls some strings and manages to arrange to perform from Madrid via satellite feed. Kris doesn’t know how Adam gets the deal with the channel in Spain, but he is not going to complain about it. Instead he worries about the set up on their end, which he eventually gets 19E to spring for. By the time the tickets go out in sale, he has the lineup of eight singers, two comedians and three bands, and the sponsorship of a major production company.

As Josephine says, all in all, it’s not bad for a first try.

~

Kris doesn’t sleep at all the night before the concert. There is so much to do; he gets twitchy just thinking about them. He has survived on coffee for a lot longer than this before, so he keeps a travel mug handy and works through the night, checking and rechecking everything, trying to make sure the whole thing won’t end up a disaster.

When the show time finally comes and the auditorium fills with people, he has gone past sleepy and come out the other end. He feels hyper and can’t stop moving, Josephine has to literally sit on him to make his jittering stop. When he goes out on the stage to make introductions and start the concert, he keeps his elbow close to his side to keep the hand that is holding the microphone from shaking.

He watches the whole thing from side stage, feeling a bit like a proud parent at a school recital, clapping along with the audience. These people might have paid for the ticket just to see the concert and spend a couple hours having fun, but with everyone that takes the stage, they learn a little bit of something about those children in Africa, and that’s what Kris wanted to do, not just get people to donate a couple dollars here and there, but get them to care, to be aware. Maybe next time they’ll contribute without a concert to go with the donation.

Adam is the last one to sing, mainly because that was the only time slot he could get from the studio in Spain and the satellite feed, but also because he is the name that sold the most tickets. He is the hottest thing in town, as he would say. It’s only natural to save the best for last.

Kris knows the program by heart. He helped write the speeches, decide on the songs, tweak the lighting and the background images. He knows what is supposed to be next: Adam on the screen, greeting the audience with a speech about the dire medical needs of the children in Botswana. But instead the disembodied voice of Adam singing For All Seasons fills the room over the image of fireworks going off on the screen. Kris makes a move to get up in a panic, someone should have told him if they were having problems with the satellite, but before he can move there’s a roar in the audience, followed by claps and cheers, and suddenly Adam is standing on the stage in all his glory, waving at the crowd and singing.

Kris sits back down, all air leaving his lungs in a whoosh. Fireworks seem very appropriate for this.

~

“Surprise,” Adam says afterwards with a shrug, opening his arms for a hug.

Kris’ voice refuses to cooperate, so he finds himself flailing at Adam until Adam pulls him in by the lapels and hugs him tight. Kris lets himself lean on his chest for a minute. He can’t hold his head up anymore.

Josephine greets Adam with a slap to the arm, and rolls her eyes when he calls her Joseph. It’s been a while since he last managed to get a rise out of her with the name thing.

“For God’s sake, take him away and dump him on a bed,” she says, pointing to Kris where he is smooshed against Adam.

Kris tries to shake his head, there’s so much work to do still, but Adam nods for them both.

“I’ll take him off your hands,” he says, tucking the coat Josephine hands him under his arm and grabbing his own bag. He manhandles Kris towards the exit.

They take a cab to the hotel and ride up the elevator to the top floor where Kris has to empty all his pockets to find the keycard. Once inside the room, he collapses on the bed.

“I feel—dead.”

Adam puts his bag down, throwing Kris’ coat over a chair and walking into the bathroom. Kris hears him turn on the faucet and take off his rings; they make soft clinks on the marble.

Adam comes back to drop down on the bed beside him. He kicks his shoes off and sighs as he lets his body relax. A sock clad foot prods Kris’ calf. “You awake?”

Kris groans. “No.”

“Liar.”

Kris heaves himself up on his elbow to turn around and face him. His body must weigh a couple tons at least. It feels like he is going to make a dent in the bed if he lets himself go.

“Hey,” he says, looking at Adam. There’s a small smile on Adam’s face.

“Hi,” Adam says, conversationally. “Been a while.”

“Yeah.”

Adam looks happy and content lying there; the corners of his eyes slightly crinkling, lines around his mouth soft. Kris feels his heart skip a beat. Not now, he thinks. Not again. But there it is; a golden flutter inside his chest. His hands want to move, touch that face, it’s a beloved face, and he wants to make Adam smile even wider, then lick those smiling lips and taste his happiness. A voice in his head says you shouldn’t, but why shouldn’t he, really? What if Adam feels that way too? What if this is the way it was always supposed to be? What if it makes them happy—what if it makes Adam happy?

Wouldn’t it be worth it?

“Adam—” he says, but closes his mouth when he can’t find the words to describe what he is thinking.

Adam stares, waiting.

Adam, I think I—No, that’s not—Adam, do you think we should—No, no—Adam, what if we—

“You okay?” Adam asks, leaning close, blue eyes wide open and concerned.

Kris’ left hand is a traitor, it moves before he can decide—he doesn’t feel heavy anymore, he is light as a feather—and lands on Adam’s cheek. Kris pushes himself closer to Adam, and then he is kissing him, his lips over Adam’s, like he’s pictured a million times before. Adam makes a surprised sound, but kisses him back softly, keeping it slow and delicate. Then he pulls back, holding Kris away with one palm against his chest. Their lips part with a faint wet sound.

“What?”

Adam looks shocked, his eyes big as saucers. Kris bites back a groan looking at his lips, red and wet, all because of him. He doesn’t want to stop and talk; he wants things to just work out magically, so they can continue kissing and touching and go to sleep together.

“I—wanted to do that for a while,” Kris says.

“Okay,” Adam says, licking his lips and looking away.

Kris isn’t sure what he expected, but this is certainly not the best case scenario. He also has a worst case scenario (Adam walks away and never talks to him again) but he has no clue what happens in between.

“You said—you were drunk, but you said you would have. If I hadn’t been married.”

“Kris.”

That’s not a good tone and that’s not a good look. Adam is saying don’t do it. But it’s too late to take it back now.

“What about now?” Kris asks.

Adam doesn’t say anything.

Kris bites his lip nervously. “If I asked—would you?”

“That’s not fair,” Adam says, shaking his head and looking away sadly.

Kris knows it isn’t fair to bring that up. That was a long time ago. Besides, Adam was drunk when he said that. It doesn’t really count. “Okay. You’re right,” he says softly. He is too tired; he can’t think straight. This was not the best time he could have chosen for this. He never wants to make Adam sad.

“You haven’t dated anyone since Katy,” Adam says. “You haven’t slept with anyone since—what, a year? More?”

Kris glares.

“It’s the truth,” Adam says in defense. “You said it yourself; you don’t know how to get to know new people.”

“What’s that got—”

“I’m convenient, Kris.”

Kris jerks back as if he was slapped. “That’s ridiculous. I know you. I know what I—” What he feels—right, he is not going to get into feelings now. This is obviously not happening, no point dragging it out. “Okay. You know what, we should sleep.” He tries to turn his back to Adam, but a hand on his shoulder stops him.

“You are not going to get weird over this, or I swear to God Allen, there will be blood.”

Kris smiles.

“We will talk about this,” Adam says, and makes Kris take off his jacket before he gets them both under the covers.

~

Adam wakes Kris up around noon, looking refreshed and ready to face the day. Kris feels like a truck went over him last night. A big one. Full of heavy things.

Shower makes him feel a little bit more human and changing his clothes helps—his suit is shot to hell after sleeping in it, but he couldn’t care less about it. He checks in with Josephine and Jane as he and Adam make their way to the hotel restaurant for breakfast, and gets an earful from both women about being a worrywart. They make him promise to rest until he has to fly back home that afternoon. Apparently they don’t need his help.

He is on his second cup of coffee when what happened last night hits him finally. He looks up at Adam to see if he can tell whether it was a dream or not, but Adam is busy with his pancakes. Kris’ heart rate picks up; Adam is a little too busy with the pancakes.

Adam stops playing with his food after a couple of minutes and looks around the room, sipping at his cooling coffee. Kris doesn’t know what’s showing on his face, shock perhaps, or panic, but Adam’s mood changes the second their eyes meet. He puts down his coffee with a sigh, running a hand through his messy hair.

“So we do need to talk about it.”

Kris doesn’t particularly want to talk, but ignoring it and acting like it didn’t happen doesn’t sound that appealing either.

“You don’t believe me,” Kris says, because that’s what it came down to last night. “Or you don’t trust me.”

“Don’t be an idiot, you know I do. I just think you’re confused. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Kris snorts. “Obviously. I’ve never been with a man before.” He has never even said something like that out loud before. This is all very new and confusing for him, and Adam isn’t helping.

Adam looks around to see if anyone’s heard him. He gives Kris a disapproving look. “You’re not taking this seriously,” he says. “This,” he gestures around them in general, “is a media frenzy waiting to happen. What do you think will happen if something like this gets out?”

Kris rolls his eyes. He has learned not to take the media seriously a long time ago. He can’t live his life according to their rules.

“Fine,” Adam says, “What about our friendship? You think it’s that easy? You think you can just try this and then go back, just like that?” He shakes his head, looking down at his plate. “It’s not a good idea, Kris.”

Kris leans back in his chair and crosses his arms over his chest. “I’m not hearing you say you don’t want to.”

“Oh, no, no, no. We’re not even getting into that. This is messy enough already.”

Kris doesn’t push him. He is pretty sure that means a yes anyway. “This didn’t just occur to me, you know,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about it for a couple of months now.”

That gets a surprised look out of Adam, but he shakes it off quickly. “Kris, Katy was your best friend before she was your girlfriend. You’re just trying to replicate that. I’m the next best thing.”

Kris has to hold back an incredulous laugh. There’s nothing comparable about the two of them. “That’s like apples and oranges,” he says.

Adam isn’t discussing it. “You need to date,” he says. “Date girls, date guys, I don’t care. But you need to get out there and get to know other people. Don’t tell me you know what you want after pulling yourself away from everyone for almost a year.” He stops Kris’ protests with a look. “This friendship is important to me. There’s my family, and then there’s you. Do you get that? I need you to be okay. I need for us to be okay.”

Kris feels his resolve crumbling. Adam is right. Their friendship is too important to risk. Looking back now, he would have taken Katy’s friendship over their brief marriage any day. It’s easy getting lost in romantic ideas, but it’s not always the right thing to do.

His eyes linger on Adam’s lips, but he makes himself nod. “Okay.”

Adam gives him an approving little smile.

~

Even though Kris feels kind of awkward the first couple of times, Adam doesn’t allow their phone calls to taper off. And it’s surprisingly easy to morph their friendship to include that as well. They are best friends who possibly could have been more but chose not to. They don’t blatantly mention it, but they don’t act like it didn’t happen either. Kris thinks there’s little they won’t be able to adapt to, and when that thought makes him start to hope for something else again, he squashes it immediately.

“I’m thinking about dying my hair purple.”

“Why?” It’s not like there can be a proper reason for that, but Kris thinks it has to be asked.

“I need to do something with it. It’s always same old, same old. I wanted a crown, but that’s so Freddie Mercury.”

“We can get you a tiara,” Kris offers. The oven dings, telling him his apple pie is done. “A purple tiara even.”

Adam ignores him. “I always thought they should have given you a crown. It would have been awesome. What are you supposed to do with a fake microphone?”

Kris doesn’t point out that a crown wouldn’t have been more useful. Not to him anyway. “I have people coming over. I gotta go.”

“What kind of people? A date?” Adam sounds curious. Kris wouldn’t have minded if he sounded a little jealous. It would have been good for his slightly bruised ego.

“Not really. It’s my neighbor Nicole and her daughter.”

Kris met them a couple of weeks ago and they’ve been very friendly to him. They ran into each other at the deli the other day and Kris found himself offering pie and cartoons if they ever felt like dropping by.

“Oooh. Okay. Good luck.”

They’ll hang out and watch Stitch, there’s nothing that requires luck in this situation, but Kris isn’t in the mood to argue.

~

It’s 2:00 AM and Adam woke him up to watch Funny Girl with him. Kris didn’t bother saying no; he just grabbed his blanket and grumbled.

“I’m a bagel on a plate full of onion rolls,” Adam says, reciting the line along with Fanny.

Kris smiles. Adam is more like a cupcake. With sprinkles.

“You know what I like about this movie?” Adam asks.

“That you’re prettier than everyone in it?”

Adam preens quietly. Kris likes that he can tell the difference between Adam’s silences. (They are many and varied.) “That’s not what I was going to say, but yeah, now that you mention it—”

Kris chuckles. Adam joins him with an easy laugh.

They are both sleepy and mellow, and in the quiet of the night, the meaningless conversation feels more intimate. Kris knows they’ve done this before, this is what they always do, but he can’t ignore the difference. He gets a slight tingle when Adam’s voice rasps in his ear now, it’s in his fingertips and his toes, makes him feel a little bit like a schoolgirl with a crush. Adam moves in his bed, rustling the sheets, and Kris has to cover the mouthpiece to keep the change in his breathing from Adam. He wants to be in that bed, share Adam’s warmth and have the right to touch him.

It’s not even the sex, he made himself stop thinking about the sex; it required a ridiculous amount of cold showers, but it worked to an extent. This right now is about being more. He wants more of everything now. The friendship, the love, the affection; they have it all, but it can be more.

Kris closes his eyes, focusing on Adam’s breathing in his ear. He also has to keep in mind the possibility of less and maybe even none. Because if they try and it doesn’t work out, he won’t have even this. They’ll get awkward with each other, maybe resent one another. Maybe they’ll even drift completely apart. Kris doesn’t know what he’d do if he didn’t have this at all.

No more Adam. That doesn’t even bear thinking.

Adam yawns softly, moving in his bed again, and Kris bites his lip. This is not helping him get over the schoolgirl crush at all.

“I’m going to sleep,” he says, trying to sound sleepy, but sleep is so far away from him now, he can’t even pretend.

Adam doesn’t say anything for second, but then he sighs. “Are you getting weird? You are, aren’t you?”

“No,” Kris says, lying through his teeth. “I’m not weird. I’m tired. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”

“Okay,” Adam says reluctantly, and Kris hangs up before he can change his mind.

   

2012

Kris flies to Conway a week before Daniel’s wedding. It’s not like he has anything better to do, and to be completely honest, he feels the need to spend some time with his mother. He feels stretched thin these days, trying to keep his relationship with Adam on just the right temperature, not too hot, not too cold, perfect warmth.

It doesn’t feel right at all for Kris, but if this is what he has to do to keep that friendship afloat, he’ll bite his tongue and do it. He just wishes that Adam was a bit more sensitive about it and didn’t call Kris every night, sounding warm and sleepy and making him think impossible things.

Home is home. Kris’ room is still the same, the Beatles posters, blue checkered bedspread, glow in the dark stars and all. It even smells the same. Actually Kris thinks Conway smells the same. Everything is just like he left it, down to the neighbor’s kids drawing pictures with multicolored chalk on the sidewalk.

Most of his friends are married now. He goes out with the boys, and listens to their tales of marriage woes, looks at the tiny baby pictures in their wallets, and it’s cool, it’s fun. Kris is grateful that they don’t get all tense when they mention their wives around him. That probably means it shows that he is over Katy now. He didn’t even think of it in those terms before. Katy and Adam are always so different and separate in his head, it didn’t occur to him. He is over Katy. His marriage is completely over now.

He has dinner with his parents almost every night that week. It’s not the same without Daniel, but Daniel has plenty to do, so they don’t ask him to join. Kris remembers what it was like to put together a wedding. There are so many details you want to get right, even with a small one like this. It has to be perfect, or it’ll be a disaster. No one wants to get their bride sad (or mad) before the honeymoon. Kris is glad he won’t have to do that ever again.

The thought stops him in his tracks.

He gave up on marriage now? What is he going to do, pine away after his best friend for the rest of his life? He needs a good shaking up, Kris decides. Things certainly can’t go on the way they have.

It is two days before the wedding when his mother pulls him into the kitchen with the promise of chocolate chip cookies. When he goes in, there’s a bowl full of flour waiting on the counter.

“You haven’t made the cookies yet?”

His mother smiles at him. “You’ll be making the cookies today. I’m just here for moral support.”

Kris has tried to replicate his mom’s chocolate chip cookies before; it always ended in disaster. It’s been a long time since he gave up on mastering that particular recipe. This time, he lets her guide him through every step, correcting all his mistakes, and he takes extensive notes in his head so he can bake them for Adam later. He’ll be so excited.

“You have to use real butter,” his mother says. “Don’t use margarine. And most recipes say you can use the butter in room temperature, but I always melt it first. It’s better that way because it helps dissolve the sugar.”

She makes him melt the butter in a double boiler. “You can also use the microwave,” she says wrinkling her nose at the thought, “But you have to be careful not to let it burn. Use the lowest setting.”

She makes him put in twice the amount of vanilla extract he remembers using, and cautions him against using vanillin. “It’s not the real thing. If you want it to taste right, you need to use the real thing.”

Kris doesn’t remember ever being this attentive to anything he’s ever baked before, and he loses himself so completely in it that by the time the cookies are ready to be placed in the oven, his arms are covered in dough up to his elbows. His mom swats at him with a towel when he licks the dough off his wrist, and tells him to go shower.

Half an hour later the cookies are ready. They taste like love.

~

Kris’ relationship with his mother is very different from his relationship with his father. His father is the one that taught him how to play baseball and to drive and took him to church and introduced him to beer, but his mother is the homemaker, the support, the love, the family, and Kris loves family.

In some ways his mother knows him better than even Daniel does. Daniel doesn’t get the part of him that needs to take care of the people he loves and build a nest for them and keep them close; his mother does. They’ve always been alike that way. When Kris worried about not being able to afford Katy’s dream life, his mother was the one who encouraged him to keep trying and do the best he can. She didn’t say it’s not that important, or don’t worry about it; she just said a roof don’t make a home. She said you love her right and the rest will happen eventually.

They didn’t talk about Katy since the divorce, she never asked because she knows him well enough to know he will pull back when forced to talk about something he is not ready to share, so Kris isn’t surprised when she pulls her chair close, the plate of cookies between them, and hugs him to her side. She kisses his cheek, a big, warm kiss, and asks him how he is doing.

“I’m good,” Kris says honestly. “I’m doing better than I expected.”

“Of course you do,” she says, kissing him again. And that’s all they need to say about it.

~

Daniel’s wife-to-be, Melanie, has three sisters, and they’ve taken over the planning of the wedding, so Kris isn’t needed for anything. When the day of the wedding comes, he wears his suit, fixes his tie and hangs out with Daniel and the groomsmen, making fun of his brother for being a nervous wreck.

He doesn’t let himself question his own nervousness until he sees Adam standing outside the church, standing out from the crowd—and not only because of his height. Adam is wearing a tux, which Kris opted not to, since he thinks they look ridiculous on him, but of course Adam pulls it off. He looks like he was born in that tux. Black always makes Adam look sexy, but the purple-ish vest and the tie make him look even more suave, like something out of one of those old movies he likes so much. And his hair is so proper, slicked back like that, it makes Kris want to muss it up, the schoolgirl crush be damned.

“You are so vanilla, Allen,” Adam says, looking up and down his black suit and smirking at him.

Kris rolls his eyes and pulls him into a hug. “At least I’m not wearing a purple vest,” he says.

“It’s not purple, it’s maroon,” Adam objects, fixing his perfectly knotted tie.

They smile at each other good-naturedly, and if Kris has a little more fire in his eyes than he should, neither of them mentions it.

Kris doesn’t want to draw attention to himself during the ceremony, so he chooses to hide with Adam instead of greeting guests with his parents. Adam looks a little worried, because they both know Katy will be there, and he probably thinks Kris is hiding from her, but he should know better, really, and Kris is not telling him if he can’t guess how much a problem that is not.

The ceremony itself is familiar; it brings back memories for Kris. He and Katy got married right there in that church and apparently not a thing in it has changed since then. The guests are the same, the priest is the same, so it is no wonder it feels like déjà vu to Kris. The memory of it doesn’t hurt though, not like he thinks it should. It’s just a pang in his chest, nostalgia for something that meant so much to him a long time ago. He never would have thought he’d be able to sit there and think that a year ago. Time really does heal all wounds.

Adam joins him and his parents on the way to the party afterwards. His parents seem to expect for Kris to break any minute now, and they don’t know what to do with that, but Adam fills the uncomfortable silences and draws them out of their funk with tales of his parents and Neil and New York. They exit the car in a better mood than they entered, and Kris can’t help but grab and squeeze Adam’s hand in thanks.

It’s not a shock to come face to face with Katy soon after. She is pretty as always, but the time doesn’t slow down when their eyes meet. Her hair looks soft, but Kris doesn’t want to touch it. She looks beautiful in a blue dress, but Kris doesn’t wish she was his.

They look at each other and smile, like they both know what the other is thinking, like friends who know each other too well. When they hug, it’s not tentative or awkward, and they both let out sighs of relief at that. It feels familiar and comfortable; this is proof enough that they won’t be losing each other.

“I can’t believe how long it has been,” Katy says, offering her plate to him. She knows how much he loves the little tartlets.

“Yeah. You should call me. We should hang out,” Kris jokes, licking the cream off his finger and startling a laugh out of her.

They ignore the looks thrown their way and talk about the friends they ended up unintentionally splitting between themselves after the divorce, sharing news and gossip. They work their way up to talking about their lives, work and dates, and Katy doesn’t even ask about his sorry excuse for a love life; she doesn’t need to, she knows him too well. She also knows the reason he isn’t dating is not about her, it’s about Kris. Katy is probably the only person in the world who understands his romantic habits.

Kris smiles when he sees Adam dancing with his mother, and Katy follows his gaze. Kris instinctively braces himself for a cutting remark, a year is not long enough to forget how she felt about Adam, but Katy just looks at them fondly.

“Are you and Adam—” she says, not finishing her sentence, and looking straight at the people dancing, not meeting his eyes.

Kris flinches. “What? You think—”

Katy blushes softly. “I know you weren’t, I just wondered if after the divorce—”

Kris takes in the look, the words, and comes up with “You were jealous?”

Katy blushes a little more. “I wasn’t—Not exactly.” She looks at him, abashed. “I knew there was nothing between the two of you. He was just—I was your best friend until you met him. So I resented that a little bit.”

Kris looks at her with new eyes, so many little pieces and memories fitting together in his mind. He touches her hand. He should have seen it before.

“I’m sorry.”

She smiles at him.

~

The party drags on, his tie trying to strangle him, girls looking in his eyes to get him to ask them for a dance; Kris prays for it to end. There are so many people there, and even with him pulling himself back, refusing to sing, refusing to be center stage, they find him. This day is not supposed to be about him; people can be so crass when it comes to celebrities.

Adam hovers around him for a while after his talk with Katy, but Kris refuses to talk about it. There’s nothing to say. It was cathartic, it was necessary, and now it’s over. Now he and Katy can be friends again, and that’s the best thing that could have happened today. That’s not to say it wasn’t emotionally harrowing, it was, so Kris has to shoo Adam away, not feeling fit to handle his feelings for him on top of everything.

He loses track of Adam for a while, and when he finds him, he has to rub his eyes and look again, because Adam is dancing with Katy. A soft huh escapes Kris’ lips. They were never very fond of one another; he can’t see them voluntarily touching each other. Yet there they are, dancing, and looking politely comfortable while doing it.

Katy looks all wrong in Adam’s arms, too short, too blond, too female. But they are both beautiful people; of course they look good together. Kris’ eyes keep going to Adam, the way his hands are resting on Katy. There’s nothing untoward there, it’s all very chaste and polite, but he feels jealous all the same. Anyone who looks at him can probably read the jealousy on his face, and they’ll assume it’s because of the wrong person, but Kris doesn’t really mind. It’s been a long time since he cared what other people thought of him.

He is contemplating what Katy and Adam might be talking about when his mother wraps an arm around his waist and settles close to his side.

“You’re looking at him differently,” she says, soft and tentative, like approaching an easy to scare animal. The tone doesn’t help much though; Kris feels his body going taut with panic all the same.

“Oh, come on, don’t look so scared,” she says with a smile, fingers tightening their hold in reassurance.

Kris considers denial, but that would accomplish nothing except making him look like an ass. So after a long pause, he says “He is not looking at me any differently.” He thinks that sums up the situation nicely, without going into details. He doesn’t mind that his mother knows, it’s hard for him to keep things from her anyway, but he doesn’t feel up to sharing the gruesome details here.

“Yes,” she says, giving him a knowing look. “He’s always looked at you the same.”

~

His parents join the bride’s parents after they see off the happy couple to their honeymoon, and Kris doesn’t wait long enough for Adam to put on his seatbelt before he is speeding home. He loosens his tie one handed and ignores Adam’s mock warnings about reckless driving. They make it there in fifteen minutes.

They are both leaving that night, so they have decided to drive down to the airport together. To use what little time they have efficiently, Adam heads into the bathroom to shower and change while Kris is packing his bags. The bathroom is right across the hall from Kris’ room, so he sings to himself as he packs in order to not hear the distinct splashing sounds and picture Adam in there, wet and naked.

The singing doesn’t really work, but he keeps trying anyway.

When Adam comes out, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, wet hair messy and dripping, Kris’ voice stops working and the song stops mid-word.

When Kris finally accepted that this thing wasn’t meant to be, he planned to make it go away by pretending it doesn’t exist and by not giving it room to grow. Cut off the oxygen supply and it will die, he thought, and tried to shut his mind off to all thoughts about being with Adam. But that approach does not seem to be working. The wanting isn’t going away, it is getting worse every day. His heart is racing, his knees are weak, he has butterflies in his stomach; he is going through every cliché known to men. He is in love, and falling deeper by the minute. He closes his eyes and takes deep breaths; he doesn’t know what to do anymore.

“You got everything?” Adam asks casually, bumping shoulders with him. A drop of water slides down his hair and lands on Kris’ neck. Kris can almost hear it sizzle where it lands on his heated skin.

That is the last straw. The strand of want in his chest, already taut like a piano wire, finally snaps.

He turns around and grabs Adam’s face, cupping it between his palms, letting his fingers stroke the freckles. Adam starts to say something, but stops and shuts his mouth when he takes in the look in Kris’ eyes. Kris can’t hold anything back anymore, the dam has broken, and he is pretty sure everything he’s ever felt for Adam is written on his face.

The kiss when it comes isn’t as rough as Kris fears it would be. With the way he is feeling, it could have been a disaster; instead it is one of the most intense kisses he’s ever shared with anyone. It keeps getting deeper and faster, because Adam is kissing him back, matching him lick for lick, breath for breath. Hope springs inside him and he doesn’t try to hold it back for once. This is going to work. It has to work. Kris doesn’t know what he’d do if it doesn’t.

He is on his tiptoes, arms around Adam’s neck to pull himself up and keep his balance. Adam tastes like toothpaste and mint, and he smells like Kris’ soap. Kris’ hands move, touching his hair, his skin, all so familiar, and Kris can picture this, picture them, in his house, in his bed, sharing all this and more. His hands grab Adam’s t-shirt with the thought of more (more skin, more warmth) and their hands tangle in their haste to pull it up. Adam pulls back for a second, but comes back with renewed vigor once he takes it off and throws it over his head.

Kris has never touched so much of Adam’s skin before, and he can’t give it the attention it deserves now as he gravitates back towards Adam’s lips. His hands map Adam’s back, the warm, smooth skin, there’s so much of it, and Kris wishes he could look and see the freckles under his fingertips. Their lips part when Kris feels himself start to get dizzy from lack of air, and he nuzzles Adam’s neck as he tries to catch his breath.

He drops a kiss to the skin under his lips. It doesn’t feel real. He has pictured it so many times, thought about it so much; this feels like yet another dream. Vivid and colorful, but a dream nonetheless. He hears himself moan softly as his lips move down to Adam’s chest without his say-so. It should be unfamiliar, chest hair and muscles, but it feels like going back to something he knows. Adam’s chest is solid and masculine and everything Kris shouldn’t want, but it is perfect. Kris settles his arms around Adam’s waist, forehead pressed against his skin.

“Kris…” Adam sounds cautious, a soft warning, and Kris doesn’t want to hear it. He makes a negative sound.

“Kris, we said—”

“Hugging,” Kris says. “We’re just hugging.”

Adam chuckles nervously. “Naked hugging.”

“I like naked hugging,” Kris says. His lips move to the side a little bit, and Adam’s nipple is right there, pink and small. Kris licks it experimentally, and hearing Adam’s gasp, takes it between his lips.

“Kris, no,” Adam says, and Kris makes an unintentional, broken sound. He lets his lips part, releasing the nipple, and holds Adam even tighter, hiding his face in his chest. It feels like he’ll fall apart if he lets go.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Adam says, out of breath. His hands are still and steady on Kris’ waist. “We said we wouldn’t. We have good reasons not to.”

Kris wants to say to hell with the reasons and go back to kissing Adam, because he can’t think about anything else when Adam’s breath is brushing his cheek so hot and close, but Adam said no, there is no way around it. No means no. Kris may not agree with the reasons, but he has to respect the decision.

He has to pull back, move, fix this mess like all the other messes before it, but he can’t make his feet move. He goes back a year, to an old cabin in the woods, where he cried against this chest over the loss of a marriage, and he feels like repeating it now. It’s almost the same feeling. He is ruining something just as big here.

Adam doesn’t push him back. He is being careful with him. A hand settles on his shoulder carefully. “You had a tough day,” he says, “what with Katy and all. It’s—”

That makes Kris find the strength to pull back. “Will you stop making excuses for me? Jesus Christ! I’m not a child. You don’t have to protect me. I know what I want.”

Kris wants to rant and rave and take his frustration out of Adam, but he can’t do that when Adam seems so closed off and sad. “I’m sure you do,” Adam says carefully, looking tired and worn out. “I’m just not willing to bet on it when the stakes are so high.”

Kris looks at him long and hard. There’s nothing he can say to that. Adam doesn’t think it will work. Adam doesn’t want to try to make it work. What more can Kris do about this when Adam keeps stopping him at every turn? A quiet panic wells inside him; how is he going to get over this? Adam seems okay with just saying no, so maybe he doesn’t feel this as strongly as Kris does, and that hurts, but Kris has to accept the possibility. Adam doesn’t have to match Kris’ every weakness; apparently Adam is not weak-willed enough to fall in love completely without realizing, and that’s fine, that’s okay, but that leaves Kris with a problem he doesn’t know how to deal with. They tried keeping in touch, they tried ignoring it, they tried talking it out, nothing worked. The only thing he can think of is to stay away from Adam from now on and he doesn’t know how to do that. (He doesn’t know if he can do that.)

In any case, there’s nothing left to talk about. Kris nods at Adam meaninglessly and goes into the bathroom to shower. He has to sit down on the cold tiles for a moment to gather his wits and make the shakes stop, and hears Adam berating himself outside (That was stupid! Stupid!), but he pulls himself together eventually, and manages to take a shower and get dressed.

He’s been through worse, he reminds himself as he exits the bathroom. He’s done things he didn’t think he could. He grabs his bags and heads out, head held high, collecting Adam from the living room. He has gotten over Katy, something he thought was impossible, so surely he can get over Adam somehow. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, he repeats to himself. He’ll make this happen too.

Adam avoids his eyes as they head to the car, and it’s a silent ride to the airport. Kris gathers all his courage to say what’s on his mind as they are parting ways to get to their respective gates.

“Maybe you shouldn’t call me for a while. We should stay away. Until—”

Adam nods and refuses to meet his eyes.

~

Adam doesn’t call.

Kris spends weeks staring at the phone, and ends up giving his cell to Josephine and unplugging his home phone so he won’t keep waiting for them to ring.

He doesn’t feel like going out and stays home for two weeks, telling Josephine he is working on something, which is the excuse he also used for the phone thing, so he doesn’t think Josephine buys it.

The pendant keeps reminding him of Adam. Every time the cold metal touches his skin, or the charms jingle, he gets a picture of Adam; Adam offering him the chain, Adam snuggling against him on the couch, Adam making a snow angel outside the cabin in Indiana, snowflakes on his eyelashes. He almost unhooks it once, standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, but can’t bring himself to do it in the end. He feels like it would be losing Adam completely, friendship and all, and what would be the point of all this misery if the end result is going to be what Adam feared from the start?

He watches musicals, singing along with the actors. He plays old Beatles songs, hugging Stella to his chest. He bakes twelve batches of chocolate chip cookies, all perfect like his mom’s, and gives some of them to Nicole’s daughter Judy. The rest, he considers sending to Adam, but throws away instead. He writes a song on the piano. It’s short and slow. Kris privately calls it Longing; the official title is Pieces.

~

When Kris tells Josephine to call his publicist to arrange a date for a party he has to go to, she gives him a look. It’s a look that says what the fuck do you think you’re doing, and Kris doesn’t feel up to answering that even in the privacy of his own head. He is doing what he has to do. Thinking or talking about it will not help. So he says “Just do it,” and walks away.

The girl they set him up with is a 21 year old called Amanda. She is tiny, shorter than even Katy, and she is very pretty, but Kris can’t help but feel like he is taking out somebody’s little sister. She has a new movie coming out, a comedy of sorts, and she needs to be out and be seen. But she says she doesn’t want to deal with a real date, because she simply doesn’t have the time for the drama. Kris is grateful in a way that they are not pretending that it’s real, but he also feels kind of sick to his stomach when they end up making a deal that he’ll take her to an event he has to go, and she’ll take him to one she has to, and they’ll see if they want to keep doing this afterwards.

“We’re just friends is the official line,” she says, “which is totally not a lie.”

Kris thinks calling them friends would be stretching it a bit. She is a fun girl, but she is also just a kid. She talks a bit like Allison, and dresses like Angelina Jolie, all sexy and dark, and he doesn’t know what to do with her. She is comfortable enough for the both of them, touching him constantly, never overstepping her bounds, but making it casually obvious that just friends is only a line. (Which it is, but not in the way she implies it to be.)

After attending the record label’s party with her, he comes home and grabs the phone to call Adam, to talk to an adult, but then he remembers they are not doing that anymore. He doesn’t let himself wallow over it; he calls Josephine instead and talks her ear off about the ridiculousness of pretend-dating a child, but she hangs up on him mid-sentence, telling him to call someone who cares. She can be a bitch when he does something she doesn’t approve of.

The second event they attend, the one Amanda chooses, is a movie premiere. It’s not a movie Kris particularly wants to see, something about college kids, and he is also feeling rather surly, because Amanda made him change out of his plaid shirt, because apparently their outfits didn’t match.

He spends the hour and a half inside the theater writing a song in his head instead of watching the movie. It’s such an inane one he doesn’t even feel distracted by what’s happening on the screen. Afterwards there’s a cocktail party, which Amanda promises will be short, they don’t have to stay long, she just wants to find the director and have a chat with him, but Kris doesn’t know why she wants to talk to the guy, because he tunes her out the minute they step inside the room.

Adam is there. He is standing in the corner, talking to a guy with red hair, his hands flying around as he tells his tale. Kris’ eyes meet George’s over Adam’s shoulder and he quickly looks away, as if he was doing something forbidden.

Kris feels himself blush and tries to act natural. He didn’t come here for Adam, he couldn’t have known Adam was in San Francisco even. And he has a date. There’s nothing there that goes against their agreement at all.

Amanda gives him a warning look when he unintentionally holds her arm a little too tight. “Sorry,” he mumbles, and she grins at him, totally fake, and gives him a kiss on the cheek. She probably saw a camera, Kris thinks.

He stands still and tries to act like he is listening attentively as Amanda talks to a bearded man about some scene in the movie, but his eyes keep trying to go to that corner where he saw Adam. He shouldn’t look, he shouldn’t acknowledge him; it’s better if they don’t talk at all tonight, but he can’t stop himself for long. His head turns, his eyes meet Adam’s—he shouldn’t be able to tell what color they are from this distance, there is no way, but when they meet his, they are a piercing blue.

Adam isn’t even pretending not to stare. It jars Kris to see the look in his eyes. He doesn’t know what that look means; it’s not one he’s ever seen before, but it’s intense and powerful and hits him like a tidal wave. Adam doesn’t move towards him, doesn’t nod or greet him in any way. Kris finds himself staring right back, unable to pull away and not having the courage to go forward.

Amanda pulls him out of his daze, introducing him to a producer, her smile showing all her unnaturally white teeth, making her look like a predator. She snakes her arm under his jacket, holding onto his belt. Kris keeps himself perfectly still and pointedly does not flinch.

He doesn’t look back at Adam, and half an hour later Amanda says they are finally done. She has to visit the lady’s room before heading out to face the press, and Kris ends up waiting for her in the hallway, staring idly at an ugly painting of a horse.

He jumps when someone grabs his hand, and pulls him down a corridor to his right. Kris opens his mouth but shuts it without a sound seeing the back of Adam’s head in front of him. Adam tries the first door and curses when it turns out to be locked. The second one opens.

Kris is manhandled inside the room. It’s small and dark and musty. Once the door is closed, Adam pushes him against a wall, and grabbing his hair in one hand, kisses him. Kris is stunned, but that doesn’t stop him from kissing back just as vehemently; it’s too wet, too much, but still not enough. Kris makes a needy sound in his throat, trying to make his hands let go of Adam’s shirt, but he has missed this so much, more than he thought he did, more than he thinks should be possible considering how little he’s had to experience it. But he remembers Adam’s taste, remembers every detail of their previous kiss, the warmth, the smell, the feel of Adam’s lips, his tongue. And he lets himself go completely this time, putty in Adam’s hands, because that is what he is, that’s what he has always been. He has been offering and offering everything he is and all that he has, and has been willing to settle for however much of it Adam accepts. It’s always been in Adam’s hands.

It’s too dark to see inside the room, but Kris can imagine the look on Adam’s face when he suddenly pulls back and slaps a hand against the wall.

“Shit! Shitshitshit!”

Adam paces in the small room, kicking things and muttering to himself while Kris works on keeping himself upright. He runs a hand over the wall to find something to hold on to, but ends up hitting the light switch instead. A dim light comes on, making Kris blink, and stopping Adam in his tracks.

Adam looks at him, hair in disarray and eyes wild, breathing hard and looking like he is about to cry. Kris takes a step towards him.

“Adam—”

“I wasn’t going to do this,” Adam says, shaking his head. “I wasn’t.”

“It’s okay,” Kris says, taking a couple more steps to stand in front of him. “Come on, it’s okay.”

“You’re on a date,” Adam says, chuckling, palming his forehead like he can’t believe what he has done.

“Adam.” Kris pushes Adam’s chin up to see his face. How did they let things get so complicated—so out of hand? There’s panic in Adam’s eyes when he looks up. It’s something Kris doesn’t remember ever seeing before.

Kris pushes closer and moves as close as he can with Adam’s right hand resting against his chest; limp but still there. He takes it in his own and laces their fingers together. Then he kisses Adam softly, trying to quell the panic. He means for it to be chaste, but Adam lets out a faint moan against his lips and suddenly it’s not so chaste anymore. Adam’s body tries to move back, but his lips keep kissing him, and Kris realizes he isn’t the only one that’s all messed up over this thing. Though he has to give it to the guy, Adam certainly puts on a good front.

“Tell me something,” Kris says, leaning his forehead against Adam’s and letting their noses kiss. “Do you really think it won’t work?”

Adam opens his mouth, but before he can answer, the door opens, flooding the room in bright light. Kris pulls back from Adam stiffly, untangling their hands, ready for a camera flash, but finds George standing in the doorway instead. All air leaves his lungs in a whoosh.

George gives them the eyebrow. Adam clears his throat nervously.

“Guard the door?” he pleads in a small voice.

George rolls his eyes and closes the door, presumably to stand guard behind it and glare at anyone who comes near it. Kris hopes that’s the case anyway. He turns back to Adam, to find him slumped against the wall, looking like he just aged a hundred years.

“Kris, we said—” he begins, but Kris is not going to let him give him the same excuse again. He’s left this up to Adam for far longer than he should have.

“I know what we said. Just tell me, do you really think it won’t work?”

Adam looks scared and shaken, staring at Kris like he wants to run away, but doesn’t think he’ll make it. That’s not really an answer, but it’s enough to make Kris smile. He places a peck on Adam’s lips. His hands stroke the sides of his face.

“It will work,” he whispers against Adam’s lips. “Adam, it will work.”

Kris takes the kiss he receives in response to that as affirmative. He realizes that if he thought he’d seen Adam passionate or excited before, he was very much mistaken. Adam wraps himself around Kris, arms and legs going around him, and pulls Kris tight against his chest as he inhales his breath right out of his lungs. Kris tries to gentle it for a couple of minutes, calm him down, but gives up and lets himself get lost in the kiss in the end. He gets dizzy and his knees want to buckle, but Adam keeps him up, holding onto him with an iron grip.

Adam reverses their positions, frustrated with the way he is trapped against the wall, and rasps “You’re not allowed to change your mind about this,” before nuzzling his way up Kris’ neck, working on giving him the biggest hickey he ever had. Kris makes an indignant sound in reply, because really, did he stray once since he first kissed Adam, but the sound turns into a groan as one of Adam’s legs move between his, and he loses his train of thought.

Kris doesn’t know how much time they spend making out in that room, but he comes crashing back to the real world when George knocks on the door and says “If we don’t leave now, Perez Hilton will have photographic evidence of the two of you coming out of this closet. And he’ll make awful puns about it.”

Kris considers staying there until the morning, but Adam pulls back, probably sick of Perez Hilton drawing things over his pictures and not wanting to risk more, and starts fixing up Kris’ clothes. Kris stands around and enjoys the attention.

~

Kris has no idea where Amanda is and he honestly couldn’t care less. Adam pushes him towards his limo, and Kris walks over to it dutifully, trying to look casual and not like he has just been ravished in a closet of some sort.

The driver opens the door and Adam slides in, pulling Kris after him like Kris would maybe run away if he gives him the chance. The door closes and they sit next to each other, breathless like they ran a marathon and so hungry they don’t know where to begin.

George opens the door and slides into the seat across from them. “No sex in the limo,” he says to Adam gruffly.

Adam snorts in reply and grabs Kris’ hand, caressing his fingers absentmindedly. “You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this. At this point, I really don’t care if you watch.”

There’s a staring contest between the two, which Adam seems to win, because George opens the door to leave before the limo can move. Kris is not all there though, he got stuck at the how long thing.

Adam turns toward him with a giddy smile.

“How long?” Kris asks, before he can censor himself. He is not sure if he really wants to know, but he can’t not ask.

Adam’s face goes soft. He leans forward to place a small kiss on Kris’ bottom lip.

“Too long,” he says.

“As in—before I was divorced?”

Adam looks uncomfortable at that, but he nods. Kris keeps staring at him, like a deer in headlights.

“Before Noah,” Adam says. “Before Jason. Before—”

Kris pushes him back down on the seat and climbs on top of him. They are definitely having sex in the limo.

~

Baking calms Kris down. It’s a way to keep his hands busy and his mind occupied without him having to think about anything more important than where did I put the butter?

The house is completely silent, but turning off his mind apparently also means turning off his hearing, because Kris doesn’t hear the footsteps at all and startles when Adam’s arms wrap around him.

Adam kisses his neck. “Cookies?” he asks, sounding sleepy. “At 4:00 AM?”

Kris can’t very well tell him he woke up at 2:00 and watched Adam sleep for an hour and a half before he started to creep himself out and had to get up and keep busy. Instead he says “It’s my mom’s chocolate chip cookies. Are you saying you don’t want them?”

Adam moans against his neck, making him think—not of food certainly. “Mmmm. I love you,” Adam says.

Kris’ heart speeds up, but he tells it to quit it. That’s what Adam always says when Kris cooks for him.

“I know you do,” Kris says, because that’s what he always says in response.

Adam bites his neck. “Would it kill you to say it back for once?”

“What?” Kris says, heart pounding and blood rushing in his ears.

“That you love me,” Adam says against his ear, one hand going up to rest high on Kris’ chest, right over the pendant.

“You know I do.”

“Maybe I want to hear it.”

Kris turns around in Adam’s arms. One of his hands buries itself in Adam’s hair as it always seems to do, and the other crawls under the waistband of his sweats, caressing the soft skin. “I love you,” he says, feeling his face heat up and something low in his stomach flutter.

Adam smiles, biting his lip like he does when he wants to keep his smile from getting too big. Kris kisses the lip he is biting.

The oven dings.

~

Media Plays Matchmaker

Kris Allen and Adam Lambert have finally succumbed to the pressures of the media. In a shared press release on Monday, the couple announced that they have been together for ‘some time’. They are not forthcoming about the length of that time, and apparently there will not be any interviews anytime soon. All they will say on the matter is that they want to keep their private lives private.

For those of you living under a rock these last few years, Adam Lambert and Kris Allen were likened to a couple by the fans and the media alike when they became fast friends during the 8th Season of American Idol. Even though Allen was married back then, the fans, the blogs and the magazines refused to let up on the subject. With Allen's insistence on continuing to show how comfortable he was with Lambert, their "bromance" became legendary.

Here's some of the highlights from that time...

~

Though I know I'll never lose affection

For people and things that went before

I know I'll often stop and think about them

In my life I love you more

The End

July 23rd, 2009