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Day by Day
by mars
-for evie o., closet l.j./j.j. fan, on her birthday, 2003.
(if J.J. ever gave L.J. a chance, maybe it would happen like this...)They take it slowly, day by day.
It takes a while for the reality of it to sink in, that they've finally made it big. But then the huge paychecks start arriving, the screaming fans, their names on television. They are not huge international superstars yet, but they're at least getting there, and if you turn on the radio for a couple hours you can hear "Knives^3" play at least once.
J.J. stops listening to the radio after the first week. He gets tired of hearing himself come in the tiniest bit too late on the second verse. Nobody else notices, but deep down he's a perfectionist, for all his usual devil-may-care attitude. That tiny slip feels like the half-second fumble that kept him from dreams of music school and Julliard.
The others stop listening to the radio, too; but for their own reasons, which he doesn't know, and he doesn't ask.
L.J. tells him one day, without J.J. ever having to say a word. They are sitting in the den, L.J. halfway to drunk with six empty cans of Sapporo lined up in front of him. "It's weird," L.J. says, slouched into their black leather couch, the remote dangling from one hand, "Hearing yourself coming out of those speakers, ne? Creeps me out."
"It's what we wanted, you know," J.J. replies, shrugging noncommitally. But it is weird. That someone other than their mothers and fathers would want to buy their CDs. That someone wants to throw underwear at them. That their mistakes are immortalized on the radio and played over and over like some awful, damning hell.
"Yeah," L.J. nods. "I guess it is."
Maybe they feel the same way. They probably do. J.J. wouldn't be surprised. They've only been best friends since the day they met. Lucas James Van Konigsblauw and Joseph John Kiyoshi Okita, weren't they a pair. Between the two of them they have at least enough names to take on the rich and famous.
J.J. sucks on his lollipop, sakura flavor on a long stick, long enough to poke someone's eye out with. He flops down next to L.J. and wonders for a split second if he's gonna accidentally jam that stick on his knee and spike himself through the throat someday. The thought makes him laugh because he isn't usually so morbid.
"What?" L.J. looks at him funny, and when he doesn't answer, repeats himself. "What, J.?"
L.J. calls him J., J.L. calls him Joey, L.L. calls him either or both. In his own head, J.J. calls himself Kiyoshi, because that was the name his parents called him, and for some reason his head voice always sounds like his father's. "You missed a beat there, Kiyoshi," his head voice would tell him in crisply pronounced, severe Japanese. "Music was never your talent. You are wasting your intellect."
J.J. wastes his intellect any way he can. He doesn't smoke because it makes his chest seize up good and tight, but if it didn't, he would. He eats candy like there's no tomorrow, the plain sugar and the drug laced kind; he sleeps around; he practically lives at the clubs. He parties day and night and he makes his living making music and he never looks back at the degree he got when he was just 19 and he never looks at the science page in the news and he never tries to think if he can help it.
He wastes his time writing songs and playing DDR and sleeping around.
He thinks it's the perfect lifestyle, he does.
He just can't listen to the radio anymore.
L.J. changes the channel and it snaps him back to the real world. There's something verging on softcore on the foreign channel. L.J. makes a crack about Euro soaps. J.J. feels restless. The sucker in his mouth is down to a shredding paper stick, but he sucks the sweet out of the paper, greedy for it.
The woman on the television moans. Her leg is cleverly bent to conceal any trace of the curling hair between her thighs, but her breasts bounce freely in the air, nipples hard and rouged. Her television-lover moves on top of her, kissing them, making J.J. blush as he watches. His ears grow hot, and he has to look away from the television, biting his bottom lip. He likes girls; their mouths are warm and soft, their breasts fascinating to him, their thighs strong around his waist when he presses himself into the heaven between them. But he has always liked boys a little better, with their rough edges, their arrogance, their demands. Their cocks pushed inside him, their deep voices growling into his ear, the rough scrape of stubble against his throat.
He has to adjust his shorts, which are already too tight and which Twist always teases are going to make him impotent. He wiggles against the leather upholstery and tries to tug on one vinyl leg inconspicuously, but when he looks up, L.J. is watching him, a strange light in his eyes.
"Sorry," J.J. apologizes, thinking the creak of leather and vinyl was too noisy for his friend. The lollipop stick tastes papery and sugarless in his mouth now, so he gets up to throw it away. As he walks by, L.J. reaches up with his large, rough hands and wraps them around J.J.'s waist, snagging him and reeling him in.
"What're you apologizing for?" he says softly, his voice playful. His thumb moves along J.J.'s hipbone, down the crease of hip to thigh. It's an old game between them. Friends with benefits. J.J. can't count how many times they've helped scratch each other's itches. But L.J. raises the stakes higher, his drunken words too sincere. "God, I love you, J."
J.J. starts. He's not that drunk. From somewhere upstairs, probably the shower, Twist's voice drifts down, singing Knives^3. That eerie sense of surreal surrounds him again.
Many of his lovers say those three magic words, three words that have come to have no meaning to him. They say them to get him in bed, they say them because it's the thing that comes to mind right before they come. He barely hears them any more.
But he remembers an American campus, an American school, strange white and black faces all around him. An American fraternity and a young, half-Japanese boy still figuring out where his parents ended and where he began. He lost his virginity at 13 to a salaryman with plenty of cash, but he has never considered that to be the defining point of his sexuality. It had been more about the cash and the gifts and the pretty things than the sloppy, passionless fucking, which he had enjoyed, he had to admit, but not as much as the other benefits.
In the fraternity he had stood like this, talking to one of the members, about rock'n'roll and girls and grades and the thermodynamics class they had together. They drank watery American beer and his face was red from the alcohol, and the other boy had reached out, cupped his ass, pulled him down. They boy had leaned in, whispered in his ear, whispered words J.J's certain (even to this day) that were spoken to get him in bed. But they worked. The two of them knew better than to fuck in full view of a roomful of people, so they slipped into the coatroom, and J.J. let the frat brother pull off his pants and spread his legs and fuck him, hard, into a pile of coats and backpacks and scarves.
He'd known, while doing it, that it was a bad idea. But it hadn't felt real, and he just let it happen. Still, those words seemed to have a way of crawling under his skin, and he'd had his first and worst heartbreak because of them.
J.J. lets L.J. stroke him through his shorts and he thinks back to that moment and he thinks: this is a very bad idea.
Or it could be a very good one. But he doesn't dare believe that.
J.J. holds his breath, not sure which way to gamble. L.J. has no hesitation, though, reaches up and pulls him down, and next thing they are kissing. L.J.'s mouth is soft and his kiss is a little sloppy and wet but it is eager and sexy and J.J. feels that constantly-15-and-horny part of him raging to life. Next thing he knows he is pulling his knees up onto the couch practically okay actually climbing into L.J.'s lap and not just so they can kiss better. L.J.'s hand is clutching, squeezing, feeling him through his short-shorts.
"Maybe we -- "
Maybe we should stop. Maybe we should move to the bedroom. Maybe we should get a condom, you know?
He thinks all those things, but he doesn't know how he'd like to finish his sentence. He'd like to say fuck it all, throw it to the wind, fuck L.J. without thinking about what he said. He'd like to say stop, you're taking this the wrong way, let's not take this too seriously. He'd like to say we're just friends, friends with benefits, right?
He thinks all these things, but he can't pick just one.
He's never had to stop and think before having sex. Why is he doing it now?
His heart is pounding in his ears and he feels dizzy as L.J. kisses him and he thinks maybe he should stop this, but he can't. And it's not just his constantly raging libido.
L.J. breaks apart from him. His lips are suddenly cold, lonely. He looks up, sees L.J. smiling at him, such a smile! He can't help but smile back, for all his worries. "Don't," L.J. says to him. He doesn't say more, doesn't say "don't say it" or "don't think" or "don't stop."
But J.J. knows what he means. He laces his fingers through L.J.'s, doesn't let himself worry.
They take things slowly, day by day.
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