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semiflux
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Semiflux
many, many thanks to Elizabeth. semi - prefix. [2] to some extent : partly : incompletely; /semicivilized/
*** The thing Britney liked most about Justin was that he always seemed to have an easy time with convincing himself she was a good person. Occasionally, she thought that might be a bad basis for a relationship, but then again, he actually put effort into believing in her. It was more than she got from most people. *** When they were young and energetic and the worst thing in the world was the producers bitching about low ratings for MMC, Britney always thought Justin was sweet. He told really bad jokes but sometimes struck a gem, and when people laughed his smile was blinding. She didn't know if he liked the attention or liked making people feel good. She didn't really care. She was eleven and he was twelve and nobody could tell her this wasn't just a blip in the radar, her fifteen minutes of fame before returning to a normal life. Nobody could tell her that when they finally grew up, it would be sparkling under the scrutiny of millions. She thought he was sweet and she was right and one day she'd learn to regret it. But then... then she was just the kind of girl who fell asleep remembering what it felt like when he kissed her just one time. The kind of girl who kept that kiss in mind when he was launched to the top and she was on the way to join him. *** JC was always old. Eighteen seemed impossible back then, an age or quality or... *something*, just out of reach. When MMC ended he hugged her good-bye, quick and brief like the acquaintance he was. She liked him, sure, but he was on the outer edges of her reality. She didn't think of him much in the years until she saw him again, and then she didn't really remember most of his "You remember when...?" stories. But she always smiled, and nodded. That was what professional meant to her that year, nodding and smiling and opening for them, getting more than vaguely tired of executing dance moves for an audience of girls who hated her for being her. Her voice was the least of their animosity, and the fame. She was pretty and she could already afford the stylists to make her beautiful, but most of all, she was close to them, to men she had stumbled across in driven ambition. It was all accident; she wanted to scream that into her microphone for everyone to hear. She'd never meant to know them, never meant to love any of them. Sometimes, in fact, she hated JC for his own accidental fame. He hadn't chased MMC, but had gotten it, and everyone loved him after that. She saw him with fans, with cameras, with the rest of the guys; all he had to do was smile and talk about passion and they belonged to him. She hated knowing how fame had fallen into his lap at an early age. She sat still in her makeup chair and she let the women in wardrobe dress her up. She listened when girls and critics and magazines called her a slut. It made her wonder if JC would still be so passionate if anyone said anything worse than that he made bad music. It made her wonder why she still bothered with any of it. JC was old and she resented it so long as she thought that age only mattered for little girls who wanted grown-up things too much to wait. JC had waited for accident and fame to find him. She'd never been so lucky. *** More often than not, Justin would stop by her dressing room on his way to the stage and smile at her. "Sweat's a good look on you," he said once. "You gonna hang with us tonight?" She looked at him, a shining example of exactly what she'd always wanted to be, and she knew why she always remembered his MMC stories, why she'd always liked him. He was just like her; he knew how they'd gotten to where they were. "Not tonight. I'm exhausted." But when he knocked on her hotel door, she let him in even though it was late and she let him tell her bad jokes and old stories. She laughed a lot; he kissed her and she laughed even harder until it was more important to be quiet and taste him and touch him and breathe. And she finally, finally felt like she was growing up. Growing into something. She always figured she fell in love with Justin that night, when things started seeming worth the trouble again. *** Justin would come to her video shoots whenever he had the time and was actually in the right city; he would stand to the side and watch as she went through the motions and the words. He would smile at her. And then he would wait. He would wait until she changed into her own clothes, until she scrubbed herself clean of glitter and makeup and the residue of work. She asked him why, the time she had missed him too much to wait and burst into his arms straight off the set, the time his arms had seemed tense and cautious around her. "Can't see you there," he said simply. "This is what they make you. Itıs not you." She stared at him and suddenly hated him, hated him for putting into words the dichotomy that was her life. And more than that, she hated him for making that inevitable distinction at all. *** JC tousled her hair sometimes and said she looked great, no matter what she wore, no matter how she looked. After she pierced her navel and let it heal, he slumped against her on a couch while she was visiting Justin and fiddled playfully with the ring. It rotated inside its thin pocket of flesh; she could just barely feel the gliding friction of metal and skin, the warmth of JC's thumb on her exposed belly, the press of his thigh against hers. The barest of sensations, and she wasn't all that surprised at it seeming somehow right. "Did it hurt a lot?" She shrugged. "No more than it was worth. The fate of women, you know. We suffer for our appearance." "And reap your rewards justly." JC grinned. "I kinda like when they have to use a little hot wax on me. Makes a man proud." "Want me to name you an honorary girl?" she laughed. "Nah. We've got enough critics doing that." Chris appeared in the door and stood there, watching them, and JC smiled, a different smile. He gave the ring one last flick and stood up. "Looks good, Brit." Justin didn't really like it. She didn't care as much as she thought she should. *** She had learned to like watching JC, watching how he worked his peculiar blend of shy and confident, careless and deliberate, absent-minded and utterly focused. He made everything look natural, but could turn around and make it all seem like the pained culmination of grueling work. Youthful resentment faded and she was curious, obsessed, enchanted; whatever she was, JC was tied up in it, him and his warm smiles and casual grace. She watched how Justin knew every single line he couldn't cross with JC, watched how JC and Chris just seemed to quietly understand each other, watched how JC tailored his attentions to everyone and always had numerous shoulders to lean on. He juggled everything and nothing much juggled him. She liked that. Part of growing up, she supposed, learning not to hate the things she was finally old enough to understand. *** It got so she was desperate to make Justin see her in the singular, as one real person who had grown up and grown into something that he didn't seem to want to recognize. It got so she just wanted him to understand that she had learned to love being beautiful, had learned to be the girl she sold herself as. It got so she just wanted some validity to the balance she found. And eventually it got so that she didn't need to cry the night she stood in a hotel suite and said it wasn't really working, that they wanted different things, that they made different sacrifices and that he was never going to understand her. When it went well, and he left silently, his eyes intense but his words revealing none of it, she didn't understand why he hadn't fought. Justin fought for the things he loved, or wanted, or just felt like he could have if he pleaded and argued and demanded in just the right way. She felt like a lost cause, and realized that's what she'd wanted to be all along: the girl Justin couldn't drag through the years unchanged. This particular success wasn't feeling all that sweet. *** She sat for awhile after he left, picked at her fingernails and chewed the inside of her cheek. He wouldn't be back, she knew; he'd sleep in someone else's suite and she would be gone by morning, and they'd work out the public details later. She could feel the finality of this. Justin was as done with her as she was with him. Realizing that made her want to cry, at last. Instead she went in search of JC. She knew he would hug her and confirm that she'd probably done the right thing, because one nice thing about JC was how his loyalty to friends never seemed to get him into trouble; he would tell her it was all going to be okay, and that the important things wouldn't change, and later he would probably tell Justin that sometimes things really just didn't work, and that nobody would blame him for this failure. JC was a master at finding a quiet middle ground. JC liked to keep things normal. So when she walked in, she was surprised. Surprised at how quickly everything could change, all in one night, how quickly her assumptions skewed off into new territory. Surprised to see Chris, stretched on the couch in JC's room, one leg taut and extended, bare toes digging into the carpet in a struggle for balance, for leverage. But she was more surprised to see who he was with. She couldn't see JC's face, not with the way Chris's head blocked it so she could only see ear and a flash of tongue across it, but that was JC. His long fingers in streaks across Chris's shoulder blade, his leg drawn up and wrapped around. There was a glimpse of the same pink sequin spirals that had flashed on JC's hip that afternoon when he nudged her and asked, "Are you okay?" She must have gasped slightly. She must have, and it must have been loud enough to hear over JC's mumbling -- "there, th- no, no, yeah" -- because Chris looked up and into the soul she didn't believe in but talked about for the sake of pleasant interviews. "Britney," he said. His voice was nearly toneless, but not quite; it was hesitant and wary and yet *not*. He didn't want her to tell anyone. But part of him hoped she would, she could see it. She might have to reevaluate her beliefs about souls and eyes and windows. JC focused his gaze on her, too, all over-heated skin and glistening patches of wetness that could have been sweat, could have been saliva, but were most certainly caused by Chris. And the initial shock passed and it *all* made sense and seemed right, somehow, seemed to be exactly what she should have known all along. And Chris was sitting, standing up, stepping close to her and watching carefully. Chris who had always just been there, background static, Justin's friend who seemed more amused by her than anything else. "Justin doesn't know," she said softly. His shirt was unbuttoned; she looked elsewhere, forced herself to. "no." "Anyone?" "Nope." It all felt surreal, she thought wildly, the way JC was still sprawled and smiling faintly at her and the way Chris's palm touched the soft skin under her chin and made her look at him. "You gonna tell?" She felt her head shaking, felt the scrape of a callus against the curve of her jaw. "Okay," he said slowly. "Where's Justin?" "He left." The words fell from her, and she'd expected them to hurt but this was relief. "We broke up." Chris blinked, and started to button his shirt. "Brit, are you-- did he-- " She stopped him. She extended a hand and caught the cloth before his fingers could work any higher, said, "don't." And he looked surprised but she glanced at JC and he was watching, she'd known he was watching, and he was smiling. Always a smile for her, and she wondered when the day would come that she would finally be able to do some wrong in his eyes. She once thought she knew the limits: betrayal, dishonesty, selfishness. Now she wasn't so sure what constituted any of those. But she could test it, once and for all. More than anything, she wanted to know where she stood, apart from Justin. "Don't," she said again, and undid both buttons Chris had managed to do. A whim, really; she felt dizzy and unfocused and some small part of her screamed that she needed to leave. She couldn't. Not yet. "Don't talk about him. Don't ask me to cry. Don't. don't tell me to leave." "Brit," he started, but suddenly looked away, behind her. And she really thought she might as well just go ahead and die when she felt JC there, felt his lips on her shoulder with the accompanying scratch of beard, felt his hand slide up her neck and cover the side of her face. He had large hands, like Justin, but these were more careful, more graceful, didn't feel like they could break her in the briefest moment of carelessness. She let him press her cheek, turn her face to the side and he kissed her and she knew what Chris would taste like. Alcohol and defiant independence. When he pulled back she felt even more dazed, barely understood that his face was only moving because she was swaying. "Is this what you want?" he asked softly. "I want," she started, and glanced at Chris, who just raised an eyebrow and watched JC, not her, and suddenly edged around them both and went to sprawl on the sofa again. "I want.. I want to not disappear for you guys. Not because of Justin." JC tipped her face back towards him. "Justin thinks he has a lot of sway with us," he teased. "He doesnıt have that much." And suddenly his words were close, his breath and lips moving lightly across her nose and lips. "You're good, Brit. You can do whatever you want, and you'll be good with us. You've been more than his girlfriend for a long time, now." Too many things changing, and fast. She was thinking things that were far from being good ideas, but that was the kind of thing she'd needed to hear for years and JC had warm hands and smelled like alcohol. She was wearing a lot of makeup and showing a lot of skin but he was touching her anyway, saying things were her choice and not to *worry* so much, and she loved him for that because he'd been doing it in little ways all along. He was the only one to ever do it. And it was like feeling something crack inside her, feeling something snap that had been out of place and bent and *wrong* for years. Brief, hot tears finally pushed to the surface and she laughed, bitter and glad and relieved. JC rubbed her back and kissed the top of her head when she slipped her arms around him and just hugged. "I think that's what I needed to know," she whispered. "That I'm good being me." *** She left them quietly, minutes later, and Justin was walking down hall. She smiled at him slowly and went to pack her things. She was ready to go. **end** |