Author's Notes: Alright, so for those of you that checked out the first chapter of my first BTR published fanfic, and actually read the author's notes, you'll have noticed that I said I don't like to work on one story at a time. And here's the proof. Also, I have a huge collection of half worked on BTR pieces that I've been dying to share with all of you so there could be several in the works at once. But the other reason why I wanted to get this story out there is probably because this is one of the ones I've been working on for the longest amount of time and because it doesn't hold as serious of a nature as The Taste of Water. I wanted to put this out there and kind of get a feeling for what you guys prefer so enjoy. Oh, and click that review button down there.
Almost Three Years Ago…
James stood there, once more wringing his hands together. His eyes were scanning the large crowd, searching desperately for a body that would be barreling through the mass at full speed to reach him. He began to worry his bottom lip between his teeth as he would push up onto his toes every now and then trying to see over the mass of people.
"James, you can't wait any longer…you'll miss your flight," Logan said, speaking up from the side of him.
Daring to take his eyes away from the entrance to the airport, he looked over at his shorter friend, the look in his eyes consumed with desperation like he was trying to ask his genius friend to find a way to freeze time.
"No, I-I can't. He wouldn't let me leave without saying goodbye. …He'll be here," James said, although his voice rattled and shook, and it seemed as if he was trying harder to convince himself than anything.
A hand from the other side touched his shoulder and the pretty boy jumped slightly a look of excitement and relief beginning to stretch across his face, but when he realized it was just the other friend that had shown for his departure, the look instantly fell.
"Kendall's not coming James," Carlos told him, his face, in one of its rare calm moments, expressing sympathy for one of his best friend's.
James looked at Carlos and then back over at Logan, both of whom had mirrored looks of disdain for their friend, and his chest heaved with a big sigh. They were right. Kendall wasn't coming to see him off. One of the biggest things to ever happen to him and one of his best friend's was a no show. With a sigh he gave each one another hug before heading for the security gates, pulling out his ticket and I.D. from his back pocket, looking over his shoulder every other step he took.
Carlos and Logan were standing there, watching him, both of them giving him a small wave and an encouraging smile even though they both knew that James wasn't looking back for them. But no matter how slow James made his pace, Kendall never came.
Two cities over and across town at the closed ice rink – it didn't open until noon on Sundays – a single person was inside. The blonde had lined pucks up along the center line yet again since he had been there before gliding across the ice to the first one he had set down. Bringing the hockey stick down, his eyes looked at the goal and then down before raising his arms and slapping the puck towards its intended target.
Kendall repeated this process again and again, each slap shot more vicious than the last. He was coming up on the last few when a voice from the stands grabbed his attention. "Where are your friends?"
Halting in his tracks, spraying a thin sheet of ice into the air, Kendall's eyes fell on the man, the owner of the ice rink. At first a wave of panic swept through him, thinking that he was going to get in trouble for sneaking into the ice rink, despite the fact that he, Carlos, James, and Logan had been doing it for years and they had never gotten caught before.
The owner, Buddha Bob as he had been nicknamed, noticed the slight flicker of fear in the boy's eyes and chuckled as he stood. "I've known about the four of you sneaking in here since you started," he said as he made his way down to the wall that encompassed the ice, "if I really cared I would have busted you for it a long time ago. But I've never seen four boys love the ice as much as you did. …Which brings me back to my question Kendall: where are your friends?"
Now that he knew he wasn't going to get into trouble, Kendall had been able to relax, yet as the mention of his friends came about again, he noticeably tensed up again and turned back to the remaining pucks on the ice. "Airport," he grunted sourly before bringing his stick down and making an almost sickening crack ring out through the arena as he slapped the puck towards the goal.
"Ah," Buddha Bob said, "bidding James good bye; I heard about his spontaneous discovery. Why aren't you there?"
As he got to the last puck, Kendall looked over at the man, his eyes narrowed, and his lips tightened. Anyone would have read that look at pure anger and hatred, but Buddha Bob knew that the fueling emotion behind that look was hurt. However, he said nothing as the teenager turned back and lined up the last shot, turning away as the loudest connecting crack yet sounded.
Present
It was the car that caught the attention first of students littered around the school. Now, nice cars weren't anomalies to the people of the small Minnesota town, but for a sleek, obnoxiously red, Lamborghini to pull into the parking lot of the high school was definitely not something they saw every day. Nobody had seen the car around town before today and they were all curious as to who could possibly be behind the wheel of that car. In ten minutes, the entire school would know exactly who it was.
James, however, was more concerned with the reception of his friends than the reception of the entire school as he climbed out of the car that his parents had given him to apologize for missing his sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth birthdays. In fact, he wasn't sure how the other kids would react, because while in the time he had been away, his name had blown up all over the country, these were still the people he grew up around his whole life.
He was used to being bombarded by a rush of fans, but instead, here, at home, they just stared. Everyone was just staring at the boy that had climbed out of the car shouldering a back pack, and it seemed that at the same time, all of the spectators went into action to inform whoever it was beside them or in their contacts list on their phone that James Diamond was back.
Ignoring all of the stares, James began heading to the building, shooting smiles every now and then towards a few people he recognized. As much as the confident James Diamond hated to admit it, he was a bit nervous about his first day back at school. He hadn't seen any of these people since he had left, much less spoken to them. …Well, there were a select few that he tried to keep in touch with; three to be exact. Carlos wasn't as good at Logan about checking his email so they stopped talking sooner than he and Logan, but in his last few months in L.A. he had only heard from Logan once and even then it had been a short email. Kendall never responded to anything that James had sent him, but he tried, at least once a month since he had left, to get a hold of him, because what worried him was that too quickly in both Carlos and Logan's replies did they stop mentioning the blonde. He didn't understand. Did Kendall really hate him that much that he wouldn't even allow their best friends to talk about him to James? Well, whatever the reason was, now that he was back, James was determined to find out.
Trying his best to remember the halls of the school, James was barely on time to his first class of the day: Senior Seminar. And as he stepped into the classroom, he was surprised to find the two of the very people he had been dying to see since he returned. However, what perturbed him the most was that they weren't together.
Logan was off in a seat by the window, his nose buried in a book, while Carlos was in the back of the room sitting on top of a desk with a few other guys around him as he animatedly told some story. The class had been a tad obnoxious with all of the students reuniting after a summer away, but two things silenced them. The first was the bell, and the second was that they noticed the familiar body standing in the doorway.
James offered all of them a dazzling smile as his eyes darted back and forth between the two boys that he had once called his best friends, both of whom seemed frozen in place. So this wasn't going to be as warm of a welcome as he had desired.
He cleared his throat, ready to speak in an attempt to break the awkward silence that had been created by his classmates, but before he could get out the "hey guys," he had wanted to start with, the sound of laughter floated behind him and he turned and looked over his shoulder just as a brunette bumped into his shoulder as the two boys split to walk around James.
"Mr. Knight, Mr. Zevon," the teacher addressed curtly and rather sarcastically, "how nice of you to make it to your first class of the school year on time."
"Not a problem Miss C.," Dak said as he and Kendall dropped into two seats at the back of the room still laughing about whatever they had been conversing about before they had entered the room.
Miss Collins rolled her eyes and began to turn back to the board when she noticed that James was still standing in the doorway. "Are you going to take a seat Mr. …," she hesitated slightly as she looked at the boy for the second, trying to recognize him from a class he may have previously had with her, however, when she realized who was standing in front of her the realization dawned on her face. "James Diamond," she breathed slightly, it almost sounded like a whisper as if she couldn't believe that he was there.
But James found it more amusing how the woman ran a hand through her hair and smoothed out her skirt. She may have been a teacher, but it seemed she was a fan, and considering James didn't recognize her, he figured that she had joined the staff after he had left. Simply sending her a charming smile, he headed for the last empty seat in the class and settled down, his eyes looking to the three friends. It seemed as if they were each sitting in different areas of the room, away from the other, and to his dismay, every single one of them seemed intent on keeping their eyes ahead or down, anywhere but him.
James tried desperately to pay attention to what the teacher was rattling off about, but his mind was still reeling from the fact that he had yet to be greeted by any of the people he once called his best friends. It hadn't even been three years; had everything really managed to fall apart just because he left? This consumed his thought process for the entire class period as the teacher explained to them their senior project.
The time had flown by and the next thing that James knew the bell was ringing and the teacher was calling out to remind them to have an idea for an author they wanted to focus on and that she would be randomly assigning partners tomorrow. He hurriedly got out of his seat and tried to make an instant beeline for one of his former best friends, but it seemed as if every female in the class had a different idea as he was suddenly bombarded by their attention. Most of them were girls that he had grown up just down the street from, but it seemed a three year absence and fame no longer made him the boy next door. And while this was always the attention he had wanted from his music and good looks, the disappearance of the people he was most desperate to talk to made it bittersweet.
James next couple of classes dragged on. Only one of them he shared and that was Carlos in his Algebra class and he had managed to arrive late to that class – being flocked by fan girls and all – to get a chance to take a seat by his old friend. He didn't expect to have any classes with Logan as he was undoubtedly in all AP classes. But there was still the chance that he would run into Kendall or Carlos after lunch, and they would all be forced to be in the same lunch as it was specifically for seniors. However, when he arrived in the cafeteria James was once more perturbed by his friends.
The only comfort from his three friends that he saw was that at least Kendall and Carlos still sat at the same lunch table, albeit opposite ends, but it was a start. Their table was filled with what James suspected to be the hockey team, along with a few of their scattered girlfriends. Whatever the case was, he knew he wasn't going to be able to wedge his way in there just yet. Logan, though, sat alone at a table in the corner by the window. His sack lunch sat off to the side, the food pulled out, ready to eat, but the brunette sat with his nose buried in his book.
Once the pop star grabbed a tray of food, and politely declined the several choruses of girls offering him a seat, he stalked to the empty table that was occupied only by Logan. Swallowing, James dropped onto the bench across from him. Apparently, the movement of someone joining him pulled Logan's interest away from his textbook.
"Hey," James said before Logan could speak, although he didn't figure it would happen considering the baffled look on his friend's face.
Logan's mouth gaped open for a second before actually forming any sound, "h-hey there James," he said awkwardly.
James gave a small chuckle as he cracked open the seal on the bottle of his ice tea. "Please do not tell me that you, of all people, are going to act like a star struck fan."
"Pff, no, not at all, never," Logan bumbled as he set his book onto the table and began to finger the edges of the corner. He sighed and then brought his eyes up to settle on James. "I mean, no. I'm just surprised. People don't sit with me. Especially not people that could sit at any table they wanted. I mean, c'mon, you're James Diamond, platinum recording artist and teenage heartthrob."
He rolled his eyes. "Really, Logan? When did I stop being just James to you?" However, looked at the bemused look on the nerd's face he narrowed his eyes playfully, "you're messing with me aren't you?"
Logan chuckled and nodded as he snatched up his apple. "Of course I am. You're James Diamond, the pretty boy who got shoved into the arena glass during freshman hockey tryouts because he was too busy staring at his own reflection."
This caused James to laugh. "I thought we weren't ever going to talk about that." But still, this was nice. It almost felt normal. This was an inkling of the reception he had expected from his friends upon his return. Not the cold shoulder that he had been receiving from most of them.
As the two of them sat there and talked, James tried to gingerly nudge the topic towards Kendall or Carlos, but it seemed as if Logan had been suspecting that and he cleverly dodged the questions by constantly asking James about things in L.A. and if it was true he had dated Aubrey Stewart. The list never ended. Eventually, James just got frustrated and bombarded Logan with the question.
"Why don't Kendall and Carlos sit with you anymore?"
But of course, Logan was given the courtesy of being saved by the bell and he rushed a quick "see you later," to James before darting from the lunch room as fast as he could leaving behind a frustrated James.
And unfortunately for him, the next few classes didn't give him one of his other friends to sort out the details. Just more fan girls.
For James, his last class of the day was physical education, unfortunately. Now, at their high school, it was mandatory to take two years of P.E., with athletes being exempt if they didn't wish to take the course. But since James had missed sophomore and junior year, and only had half of freshman year, he had to take it. Of course, he didn't really mind. James was a typically active person, but he knew that the class would be small consisting of only seniors who had waited to take their last year or of jocks who wanted another excuse not to be in class. He saw only one good thing about this when he walked into the boy's locker room: Kendall.
The blonde, though, didn't bother to acknowledge his presence when he walked in, but James figured that cornering Kendall in the locker room after nearly three years of not speaking wasn't the best plan anyway.
While it may have been the first day of school, the one class that everyone could always count on doing something in, it was P.E., but they were going to be fair and let the kids decide what to play. There was an overwhelming vote for dodge ball. Yeah, this class was definitely flooded with jocks.
James ended up being on the opposite team of Kendall's and his team seemed to have the scrawny ones that looked a little frightened at the prospect of this game. Yet, they soon found that they had a few good players, one of whom being James which they shielded behind while he took out a few of their opponents.
The group of seniors managed to get in a few rounds before one of the teachers told them that they only had time for one last round. Throughout the games, James had noticed how whenever he moved to one end of the court, Kendall would move to the other. It seemed as if his former friend was making a conscious effort to avoid being in his line of sight. Well, the pretty boy was determined to change that this round.
Rather than play shield or protector to his teammates, James allowed them to be picked off while he took out some of the stronger opponents allied with Kendall, trying to narrow it down so that Kendall and himself were some of the last strong competitors. About halfway through the game, James noted that Kendall had figured out his plan, because suddenly, the blonde was doing everything he could to take shots at the pop star from as far away as he could. Several times, Kendall nearly took James out, but he always managed to dodge just at the last second, even doing an impressive back bend in the process.
By the time it came down to it, there were four left on Kendall's side, and three on James'. By no means were they evenly matched as it was just a few of the lucky ones on James' team, which he figured meant he was going to have to dodge balls left and right. But the only one taking shots at him was Kendall; apparently, his teammates had gotten the hint that James was a claimed target.
He managed to take down two of Kendall's teammates while his other two were picked off, and while he still had a chance, James knew the odds weren't in his favor. But there was no way he could get a shot in at either of them. Kendall's teammate, the Dak character that he had walked in with that morning, was fast and occasionally shot a ball towards James, but Kendall was relentlessly grabbing every ball that he could reach and whipping it at James. He was being forced to dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge without rest. And then it happened.
It was probably the hardest throw that Kendall had shot his way, and it nailed James right in the face. Now, anyone could take a face hit in this game, but no one could take a face hit like that and have it not be personal. The blow was so hard that it had, in fact, knocked James back on his ass and filled his mouth with blood, from biting his tongue.
The only things that could be heard were the mixture of panting breathes from those that had tried throughout the games, and the sound of that very last ball bouncing away into a steady roll until it hit the wall. Some of the kids in the class were staring, others were already dissipating back to the locker rooms, but James and Kendall's eyes were locked on each other. James was trying to figure out what the hell had just happened, whereas, Kendall's jade eyes were challenging him to do something about it.
What in the world had happened since he had left?
James thought they were going to be locked in this staring match until the death when Dak clasped Kendall's shoulders to inform him that they needed to go back to the locker room and change. Hesitating in drawing his eyes away from James, who was still on the gym floor, he gave a stiff nod, pushed his sweaty bangs out of his face and turned away from the person he had once called his best friend.
And even though their teacher was telling James that he needed to get up and head back to the locker room himself, all he could do was stare at the place that Kendall had been standing.
James had figured out, all those years ago, on the plane ride to Los Angeles that Kendall wasn't too thrilled with him leaving, but he figured that it would eventually pass, even if he refused to respond to any means of contact from James over those years that he was gone. But this instance here today told James that Kendall wasn't just mad at him. No Kendall hated him, and James just couldn't believe it.