Left Turn

((Another run! Jack this time. Hee hee.

::Kay-Lee: You DID review Right Turn! :) And now you're reviewing the next one. You're so awesome! And nah.. I stifled that Muse Babe in its crib. There WILL be a happy ending to this fic! Yay!
::Haywire: (I'm sneaking on a few days early... bad me! *L*) And no, Chance isn't Mickey! *sob* Jack goes to Peru with Mickey about two years after his graduation. At the end of last chapter we were about 13 or 14 months out from that trip. *s* I will personally deliver that boot to Jack's cute ass for you. What size tread would you like?
::Some Chick: Awe! I'm sorry! :( I miss Kyler too. I hope Chance or Jack can be almost as good as he is. Men like Kyler pop up in my stories now and again. I've a list of them, actually *L* in my head, Isn't that awful? I seem unable to forget the ones who pattern themselves in that small town, sweet heart, down home boyishness.
::kivws: *L* And that always freaks me out when something is better than another. All of a sudden my perfectionist tendencies start to crop up and make my Muses miserable. I have had to go out and put down every tendency I came across. And those things don't die easily, let me tell you! *w*

Do tell us where we will end up after we slip beyond the...))

Left Turn

Jack leaned back and swirled his wine in the bottom of his glass. It was amazing. He'd been away for one year and in that short space of time, everything had changed. His father had begun to see a hippie neo-econ from Princeton who had redecorated the house in African masks and who had insisted in a sibilant, syrupy voice that they simply must have a slide show party to show off all of his photographs. His room had been filled with her things that she'd not wanted to put into storage. He'd been forced to stack boxes with her hovering over him as he did so, just so he could get to his bed to sleep that first night upon returning.

All of his friends were gone; moved, packed off to college, married, in jail, who knew. He had a few emails waiting but he'd lapsed on his c-mails to the states some months before. No one had been aware he was returning at all, it seemed.

Hell, even his car had been put into storage and he'd had to get it out, pay the back payments on it, and then get the tires looked at because his father had been too hard pressed to put the car up on blocks.

The only light point in his homecoming was finding an old school acquaintance working at a local coffee shop and going to a community college forty miles south east of the town. Mickey hadn't been his first choice on people to hang out. He'd been a rather goofy boy back in highschool. He proved to have grown into a rather goofy looking and acting young man as well, a year later. But Jack found his tolerance for differences had grown considerably so that Mickey had worth now. He might have been goofy, but he was the good kind of goofy.

And now, with his photographs being talked about amongst friends of his father's girlfriend, all professing to have been to this place or that and wrong as often as they were right as to what they're seeing, Mickey proved to be a divergence from the depression in his wine glass.

"They're rather a droll bunch, aren't they?" Mickey asked, leaning his shoulder heavily against Jack's as the pair took up the couch at the back of the room. "I mean, your dad's dated some doozies while you've been gone. He took them to the Shoppe whenever he was first trying them out. He musta done a dating service or something. But this one.. she takes the cake." He snickered low as the woman, her name was Liza (pronounced Lee-s-za, she'd even written out the correct pronunciation so that he'd be sure to get it right), stood and with a gesture, began to talk over the overwhelming canals in Venice. She'd been there back when she was sixteen.

"So is that Venice?" Mickey whispered, his vaguely blue eyes laughing. He seemed to be enjoying the night at least. It made it easier on Jack because when Mickey found out how they were wrong, he always snorted and it was making the rest of the party uncomfortable. The adults had begun to ignore the two young men, attempting to pretend they were not the objects of ridicule though it was highly obvious they were.

"Bruge, Germany, actually. It's much like Venice, only with more trees and less water," Jack whispered back. Then he spent the next few minutes talking to Mickey about the chocolates there and the plaza with the mechanical clock, the cracks in the walls, the horse drawn carriages, and the places where tourists had begun to suffuse the original charm with their influence. It hadn't been high on my tourist lists for a good many years so it was not as badly influenced as some of the other spots Jack had visited.

"Fuck anyone there?" was Mickey's next question. He'd come to upon a great vicarious store of thrills to delve into when he'd discovered how Jack spent his first few months in Europe sleeping his way from one part of Europe to the next.

Jack nodded. "Yeah... can't remember who though. A bunch of us had bumped into some guys from France with a bag of pot and I was too lazy to open my eyes."

Mickey snickered, gripping Jack's arm and burying his nose into Jack's arm to keep from snorting too loud.

Jack caught a glance from Leeessssza and rolled his eyes, slapping Mickey and giving the woman an apologetic smile. "C'mon. We've outlived our welcome."

As his father and his father's girlfriend covered their exit by changing the next picture to be projected against the wall, Jack dragged Mickey out of the living room and into the kitchen. There he dumped the rest of his wine with a sneer. Mickey, making himself comfortable as always, dragged out a few bottles of beer and tapped Jack's arm with one.

"So, why didn't you take pictures of all of these sordid affairs?" Mickey grinned, leaning back against a counter. "I would have had the camera set up to take the pictures at intervals. More to remember that way, no matter how stoned you were."

Jack nodded with a laugh. "Well, I was allowed to choose which photographs I wanted on the photo disk they're showing. I kept the more personal ones to myself."

"Oh?" Mickey's brow rose at that. "So where are you keeping these more juicy shots?" Then he leaned forward and holding onto the counter with one hand, his beer with the other, grinned. "Any skin?"

Jack laughed. "In my room. I'll show you."

He led the way around the living room so that they wouldn't disturb the theatrics and down the stairs to his bedroom. He'd moved his things from the upper room after a week of having to contend with Liza's boxes and worried hoverings. Now he slept downstairs in the finished portion of the basement. It provided a great deal more privacy and the old t.v. room was far larger than his bedroom had been. Here, he had made himself a "den" of sorts. His few goods he'd brought home from his travels hung on walls and kept place in corners along with second hand furniture, a new computer which his father gifted him with on his return in hopes he'd use it for a college he'd not be attending, and his old guitar that he'd not touched since his graduation from high school.

Mickey lounged on the pull out bed and watched Jack as the computer was turned on and the photograph folder accessed. As the folder came up he waggled his hand toward it. "Put it on a slide show. I came for a fuckin' slide show. Then you can sit here and tell me what I'm lookin' at."

Jack did that, then settled down on the pull out bed a few feet away from the computer, sitting rather than lying. He grinned at Mickey's pout. The guy had been trying to get him into a bed since he'd returned. Granted, he hadn't been home long. He'd not taken the time, either to explain how exactly he could have gone to Europe so sexually open and returned almost repressed. He'd not felt that it was a topic he felt like explaining to Mickey. Chance was his. Somehow sharing his one night experience would cheapen what had happened.

What had happened?

Jack lay back, staring at the ceiling and letting Mickey exclaim over the pretty faces he saw on the screen. With the sound of Mickey's "Oh fuck! What an ugly girl! Please don't tell me you had sex with her! Oh, but her friend... nice!" muting into the background, Jack allowed his eyes close and to remember.

Skin, silken skin, and hazel eyes. Hair not soft, but strong, thick, filling his fingers, pressing against his palm, an auburn dusk against the gold of his hands. And the smell. Gods, the smell! Like something he couldn't ever describe no matter how hard pressed he'd be.

He'd wandered Paris with Leigh after Chance left that day. The pair of them kept the one room he and Chance had shared for two more days. Then she'd caught the train to London. Her tour was over. But he had four months yet.

He decided the last four months would be going to all of his favorite places. He spent two days in Mont Saint-Michel, A day trip to Normandy, then he'd hitched rides down to the seashore and there, rented a car. With this, he spent another two weeks getting lost in the Pyranees and stopped in Barcelona for a week. Madrid was next and then he headed back up the coast and took off toward Italy.

To say Chance was the last person he'd had sex with would be to lie. He'd met a handsome young man in the country side in Italy. The man was Czech and had blonde hair, blue eyes, had been exceptionally good looking and great in bed when they'd managed through a day's worth of flirting. The pair traveled together for four days and Jack had to say the sex then was the most masterful, skilled, damned mind blowing that he'd had his entire trip.

And it had been empty. Jack would wake up in the middle of the night and stare at the sleeping face, rugged and strong, next to his on the pillow. They didn't hold one another and there was always enough distance between them that they didn't have to stick together because of too much heat. Jack didn't mind that. But he knew, those nights, wishing the jaw across the pillow from himself was softer, the nose turned up and the eyes larger, more widely set on the face, that had it been Chance, he'd have dared to have gone far enough to annoy his partner, wanting to never let go.

It was unsettling even after returning home, to find that he couldn't get the other boy out of his mind. The Czech man, Jack couldn't even remember the man's name as he lay on his back in his room, listening to the drone of Mickey's comments, had been his last lover. He was, in essence, ruined for casual sexual escapades. He needed....

"Woah! You saw Leigh there?"

Jack's head shot up. "What?" he sat up suddenly, turning and looking at the screen. Without thinking, he leapt from the bed and sat quickly into the chair, hitting the pause button. It was a picture of Leigh. He'd managed a few of both Leigh and Chance while he'd taken pictures of other things, landmarks, the casual alleyway here or there. He'd tried not to be too obvious, though in the case of the picture that was up; he suspected he'd been caught.

It was one of those alleys, one that led to a small out of the way museum he loved in particular. Here the street was so narrow only a footpath could be seen. Bicycles leaned beside doors. High above laundry ranged across second story windows and in balconies covered in bright flowers, cages of parakeets and canaries had filled the slim roadway with song. Here, he'd paused, letting Leigh and Chance walk on. Chance hadn't looked back, but at the moment he took the picture, Leigh had glanced back and given him a wicked smile.

Jack wasn't so much concerned with Leigh's smile as he was the slender back moving away from the camera. This one picture and it all came back in a rush. The museum had been closed but Chance was so delighted with the alley that they'd walked through it a few times to humor him, one end to the other and back again.

"Yeah, Leigh. She was a transfer student the year we graduated. From London? Sexy accent." Mickey rose as well and placed both hands on the back of Jack's computer chair. "Did you know her?"

Jack shook his head, mystified. "She never said a thing."

"Well, she was actually only here a few weeks after you showed up. Or did she?" Mickey mused. "She left around January. When did you get here?"

"February. We missed one another."

"Ah, that's why. Fuckin' cool! Can't believe you saw Leigh." Mickey laughed, shocked. "Don't tell me you slept with her!"

Jack blinked. "Umm, no. No, I didn't sleep with her."

"Mm... hey, who's that?"

"Just another guy we were with," Jack clicked to the next picture and stopped. Leigh again, and again, Chance looking away, only his cheek showing, his slightly longer auburn hair tucking around his ears and against his jaw.

"Huh, well, that kicks ass, you know. Did you get her address or any shit like that? You probably didn't even know she came here. She musta not told you."

Jack frowned, confused. Had she told him? "No, I don't think she did."

The next picture was the last he'd managed to get. It was Chance and Leigh. He'd finally taken the chance that last morning to ask. It seemed worth it. After all, he'd spent some "quality time" with Chance. He deserved a bloody picture.

The pair of them sat on a bench at the park under the Eiffel tower. Chance had his arm around Leigh and she was leaning her head on his shoulder. The pair of them had been laughing when Jack told them to pose. He'd been filled with a desperate longing to have Chance looking at him through a lens, looking at him again. That morning things had been so odd. Chance, hiding his body as if he'd been ashamed of what they'd done and then acting nervous and weird the rest of the morning. He'd laughed but hadn't flirted back. But then, he'd gotten what he'd wanted, hadn't he? He'd gotten his virginity taken. That was the reason he'd gone along with Leigh's plan.

Why would he care to act any other way? As far as he was concerned, it was over.

Yet, Jack wondered, wouldn't it be something if Chance took it upon himself to look Jack up? Haveston wasn't exactly a hot spot for tourists. But if Chance knew that Jack was there...

"Shit," Mickey's hand slapped Jack's shoulder. "Now I know you didn't fuck Charlie... that's so weird. I mean, you going all the way overseas and bumping into Leigh and Charlie Solomon."

"Charlie?" Jack's surprise was plain on his face as he looked back at Mickey. "Who?"

"Charlie Solomon, dude. You know, one year behind us? The skinny redhead in the Debate Club? Did you pay attention at all while you were going to school, man?"

Jack shook his head in confusion. Charlie? "You mean Chance?"

"Well, only Leigh called him that. But yeah. Look, where's your yearbook?"

Jack turned with a frown and stared at the picture then rose. "I'll get it."

His yearbook was in a box and Jack pulled it out with a feeling of uneasiness. Something was uncertain, the past had been shaken and that could do nothing less than shake his future.

Mickey remained on the bed while he was searching. "Yeah. Charlie Solomon. He doesn't look so bad in this picture. He was a smart kid but you know, he was always so slapped together. I think he finally moved after we graduated. Heard he moved in with Barbara. She was his sister but she'd moved out on her own when she was sixteen. She was always a bitch."

Jack couldn't make the words that Mickey was saying make sense. He sat down with the book on his knees and opened it.

"Look in the clubs section under debate. And he always smelled funny. Like he wasn't bathing too often. I mean, it's kinda stupid to get to be sixteen and still not know how to take a fuckin' bath, y'know?" Mickey snickered. "There, there he is."

Jack stared at the picture. It was Chance. And then again, it wasn't. The Debate Club picture was a hoard of faces staring back at him. But Chance wasn't staring at the picture. He was turned to one side and he had glasses on his nose. A small, scared smile was on his lips and that pert nose turned up, but there wasn't any wonder in his eyes, no delight, no happiness.

"He's from here, then," Jack said slowly, wondering if Chance was the type to laugh at making a fool of someone else. Somehow, he wasn't sure that was true.

"Born and raised. His dad works with my dad. They don't get along. My dad says he's a real bastard."

Jack didn't answer, was too busy looking between the frightened small face on the book and the older, alive face next to Leigh's.

Chance had been under his nose the whole time. And maybe he still was.