Strings

aka the sandwich fic

Kris doesn’t mean to break up with Katy over it; it just happens.

The thing is, she is beautiful and she is cool and Kris has loved her for a long time, but she doesn’t understand his fascination with the new guy, and she shakes her head in an indulgent yeah, sure way that just gets to Kris whenever he talks about music. He wants to talk about music. The notes pour out of his mind and he can feel the vibration of the strings under his fingertips even when he isn’t holding his guitar. He wants to talk about the songs he is writing, the ones that don’t make sense yet, and he wants her to understand.

She doesn’t. And Kris thinks Adam Lambert would.

Adam is the new kid. He is a couple of years ahead of Kris and he is a BIG DEAL in school—everyone is talking about him.

He is gay and he dyes his hair and he wears make-up, and honestly, Kris is sick of hearing about all those things. He doesn’t care if people find it disgusting that the guy uses more product than all of the girls in school combined. How is that even interesting?

What Kris cares about is that Adam Lambert knows about music. He can sing like David Bowie, like Freddie Mercury. Kris’ fingers itch when he hears him sing. He wants to write songs for him. He wants to talk music with him. He really, really wants to meet him.

It’s stupid that Katy breaks up with him over this. He said the guy was pretty, so what? She was the one that asked. His was an objective observation. Adam is pretty. It’s not like Kris is interested in guys like that. He is interested in notes and chords and lyrics. But Katy just huffs at him when he tells her this. She throws her sandwich at his head as she leaves.

Kris shrugs and eats it.

~

“Kris Allen, right?”

Kris startles and the guitar makes a noise like a dying cat. He looks at Adam Lambert sitting right next to him and somehow manages to convince his head to nod.

“You’re really cute,” Adam states, “but you’re way too young for me.”

Kris blinks. “I’m sorry. What are you talking about?”

“The stalking,” Adam says, stretching his legs in front of him and crossing them at the ankles. “You’ve been stalking me.”

“No, I haven’t,” Kris protests, looking away and telling himself not to blush. Do not even dare. Don’t—dammit!

“Yes, you have,” Adam says. “You’re everywhere I look. And your girlfriend has been giving me these dirty looks.”

Kris cringes. “She’s not my girlfriend anymore.”

“Now, see, family dispute. Do not get me in the middle of it.”

This is ridiculous. “It’s not what you think,” Kris says.

“Then what is it?”

“I wrote a song for you.”

Adam raises an eyebrow at him. “That’s actually worse than what I was thinking.”

Kris’ hands flail a little. “Not like that!”

Adam makes jazz hands back at him. “Are you sure?”

Kris can’t even get mad over the mocking. He is an idiot; he deserves the mocking. He shouldn’t be allowed to speak without parental supervision.

He sighs in defeat. There is no way Adam will ever talk to him again. “You sing. You’re brilliant. And I write songs. That’s what I meant.”

It’s not like this is ever going to happen now.

“Hmm,” says Adam thoughtfully.

~

Two days later, Adam finds him sitting under a tree during lunch hour, half hidden behind some bushes. “So what’s the song about?”

Kris coughs, almost choking on his peanut butter sandwich. “Excuse me?”

“The song you wrote for me. What is it about?”

“Oh. Uhm.” Kris actually wrote a couple of songs for Adam, but he didn’t think he’d get to tell him about them. He didn’t prepare a speech or anything. He can feel a panic attack coming.

“Breathe, Kristopher,” Adam says, putting an arm around his shoulders.

Kris breathes. He is good at following orders.

“It’s. Uhm. I don’t…I have two songs that I was working on, but I don’t really have any lyrics yet,” Kris lies. He has lyrics. He is just too chicken-shit to sing them now.

“Well, play them, then,” Adam says looking around. His face falls. “You don’t have your guitar.”

Kris shakes his head no.

Adam narrows his eyes at him thoughtfully, and then pulls him up by the hand.

“Come on. Follow me.”

~

They end up in the music room, to which Adam apparently has the key. He just smirks and says shhhh when Kris asks him how that happened, and pockets the key with a flourish.

There’s no guitar in the music room, but there’s a piano. Kris manages to spit out that he could play the songs on the piano as well, which earns him an appreciative smirk from Adam. Kris blushes again.

“Okay, here goes.”

He takes in a deep breath and plays the first song. He almost screws up when Adam sits down next to him on the bench, way too close for it to be okay. Kris wants to move a little to the side, but he is afraid Adam would think Kris has a problem with him being gay, and Kris really doesn’t have a problem with anyone being gay. He just has a little trouble breathing when Adam is that close, that’s all.

The song is kind of mellow and lazy; Kris thinks maybe he made a mistake, going with that one first. The second song is probably more Adam’s thing. But this was the first song he wrote for Adam and it reminds him of the guy so strongly that his fingers start playing the chords on a non-existent guitar whenever he sees him around school.

He wrote the song the first week of school, after seeing Adam facing off what seemed to be the half the football team. Those guys are scary–Kris would know–but Adam didn’t seem scared that day at all. He looked like he couldn’t care less what they thought of his hair or clothes, and if they didn’t like it, they could all just fuck off and die.

“You lied,” Adam says when the last note dies down, his breath brushing Kris’ ear.

“What?”

“You were mumbling the lyrics,” Adam tells him.

“Oh.” Kris looks down at his hands.

He waits for Adam to make fun of him and walk away, but the silence stretches between them, and when Kris finally gathers his courage to look up, Adam is staring at him thoughtfully.

“You really did write me a song,” he says.

Kris looks at him in confusion. Didn’t he say that already? “Well, yeah,” he mumbles.

“Huh,” Adam says. “You do realize that’s kind of gay.”

Kris starts to protest, but then thinks about it. “Well. I guess. Kind of.”

Adam grins.

It’s infectious. Kris finds himself grinning back.

~

That day starts a whole new chapter in Kris Allen’s life, because from then on, he gets to hang out with Adam Lambert, and hanging out with Adam Lambert is kind of like living in Disneyland. Only instead of roller coasters, they have music, and instead of Mickey… Well. It’s not at all like Disneyland actually, except that it is wicked fun.

Adam sits with him under the tree during lunch hour, eating half of Kris’ sandwich and talking about anything and everything, sometimes even giving him make-up and hair tips. Kris mostly just makes faces at him for those, but there’s a treacherous part of his brain that records every stupid bit of information Adam gives him along with every detail of every encounter they have. It’s embarrassing to the point that Kris thinks he would die if someone knew what was going through his mind.

After school, they usually sneak into the music room and work on the songs. Adam likes both songs, but surprisingly prefers the first one to the second, and not so surprisingly sings them both beautifully. Hearing him sing Kris’ songs is even better than Kris could have imagined. It’s almost like winning a Grammy.

When they are not working on the Kris Allen originals as Adam calls them, Adam gives him song names and Kris tries to figure out how to play them with whatever instrument they find that day in the music room. He doesn’t always succeed, but he comes close most of the time. Adam’s singing covers his mistakes anyway, and Kris makes sure to learn the songs by the next day, even if he has to practice all night to get them right.

It is what heaven must be like, Kris thinks. Keys and strings under his fingers and easy friendship and Adam’s voice. He pictures Adam with angel wings sometimes, because he certainly does have the voice of one, but the picture he ends up conjuring is one with black wings and glittery eyeshadow every time. Kris figures maybe Adam’s heaven would have glam rock angels. It would be fitting.

Kris’ life is practically perfect, until one day, Katy offers him a sweet smile and asks him if she can sit with him during lunch.

Kris looks around to see if Adam is there yet, but he can’t see him. He can’t exactly tell Katy that the seat is reserved for Adam—for one thing, they sit on the grass under a tree, so there is no seat. For another, well, Katy would probably cry and Kris is physically incapable of watching her cry. It gives him stomach cramps.

The reason for Katy’s visit becomes clear when she tucks her hair behind her ear and says, “Kris, I’m worried about you.”

“About me? What about me?”

“I don’t think you know what you’re doing with that Lambert guy,” she tells him, her tone soft and sweet.

Kris crosses his arms over his chest. “Really.”

“Yes,” Katy nods enthusiastically. “I mean, do you even see the way he looks at you? I know you’re naïve about these things, Kris, but trust me, that boy is not—”

Kris finds himself on his feet before she can finish her sentence. He has heard enough. He feels embarrassed on Katy’s behalf, bitchy on Adam’s, and sick to his stomach on his own, and it’s a jumble of feelings he does not want to unleash on Katy right now. Because, honestly, he just doesn’t want to get the cramps.

“You don’t get it,” he says with a sigh. That was the problem with them all along.

He hands her the rest of his sandwich, there is no way he can eat anymore, and grabs his bag to leave.

“It’s turkey on rye,” he tells her. “My mom made it.”

She gapes after him.

~

Kris spends the rest of the lunch hour walking around school. It starts off as a way of letting off steam, then turns into an impromptu self-discovery session and then into a full-out hunt for Adam.

He finds Adam in the music room, which he should’ve thought to check before, playing the first part of their song on the piano haltingly. He keeps going back to the start, because Kris gave up trying to teach him halfway through. For someone who gets music like he does, Adam Lambert is surprising bad at playing the instruments.

“You want me to teach you the rest?” he asks. Adam startles, and then seems to deflate, slumping down where he’s sitting.

He turns to look at Kris, but looks away quickly, staring down at his hand on the keys instead.

“Well, I mean, I can try,” Kris says, trying to get Adam to smile.

He has no idea why Adam is so tense, but it’s like the whole room is buzzing with electricity. ‘Calm before the storm!’ Kris’ mind provides helpfully. ‘Cut the red wire!’ it exclaims. ‘Gas leak!’

Kris shakes his head to shut it up.

He sits down next to Adam on the bench. Adam doesn’t look up.

“I saw you with Katy,” he says finally, sneaking a glance at Kris. “Are you guys back together?”

Kris stares at him stupidly. ‘Jump to conclusions much?’ his mind says, clearly offended. Kris has to agree with that one.

“I mean, that’s cool.” Adam shrugs. “We can hang out after school when you’re not busy, or—”

“You’re completely stupid, aren’t you?” Kris says.

Adam looks up at that. He looks shocked and wide-eyed, nothing like the guy who faced down the jocks with the force of his glare. “What?”

Kris lets himself study Adam’s face; the freckles he knows by heart, the stupid black hair falling into Adam’s stupid black rimmed eyes, and his lips—he realizes that he must have stared at Adam’s lips before because he knows their shape to the smallest detail, and he can almost feel them against his lips—not a memory, but like something from a half-remembered dream.

He smiles to himself, because apparently he was not a good Christian boy, nor respectful of his girlfriend; he was just not interested in Katy’s lips.

Adam makes a soft sound when their lips meet and freezes for a second, but then places both hands on Kris’ face to give him a long, wet kiss. Kris feels like they are in a movie. An R rated one, even.

Kris licks his lips when Adam pulls back. They taste a bit like strawberries, like Adam’s lip-gloss.

“That was kind of gay,” Adam says, breathless.

Kris nods. It was all kinds of gay.

“Apparently I’m kind of gay for you.”

He leans in for another taste.

The End

September 7th, 2009