“Justin, we are cleaning this up.”
“Caaat,” I whine, frowning in annoyance and stomping my foot. “Do we have to?”
“Yes,” she answers simply, bending down to pick up a box. “This place is absolutely covered in crap.”
“It is not,” I defend, placing my hands on my hips and surveying the boxes of junk scattered around the floor of my loft. “I need all this stuff.”
She takes the lid of the box she’s holding and takes out a book. “The Pocahontas Sticker Book.” She turns to me with an eyebrow raised. “Oh yeah Justin, essential. And did I mention masculine?”
Rolling my eyes, I snatch the book off her. “That’s not mine.”
She doesn’t reply, but keeps her eyebrow raised, before bending down to sift through the rest of the contents of the box. “Justin, this stuff is crap. Just pure, crap.”
“It is not!” I defend. “Here, look, this is important,” I point out, crouching down beside her and taking out a magazine with a picture of myself and the rest of Nsync on the front cover.
“Madchen Schwatz. What the hell?” she asks, frowning at the magazine.
“This,” I begin to explain, sitting down properly as she kneels and shuffles closer to me, to read over my shoulder. “Is the first magazine I was ever in.”
“Did you even know what it said?” she asks, eyeing over the various German slogans plastered across the front page.
Grinning, I turn to her and shake my head. “But seeing pictures of myself gave me enough to look at.”
“Oh yeah, you’re quite the babe,” she mutters sarcastically, her eyes landing on the very bleached picture of yours truly.
Rolling up the magazine, I lightly hit her on the head with it. “Hey, it was the fashion at the time.”
She smiles. “I can’t really talk. I was no High School beauty either.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, looking over the picture of the guys and myself with a hint of nostalgia.
“I was just a little fat girl with glasses,” she says, laughing, brushing the dirt off her pant leg. “Not much has changed, as you can see.”
Rolling my eyes, I look up from the magazine. “Cat, you are not fat. And you don’t even wear glasses.”
“I’m chubby and it’s called the miracle of contact lenses.”
“Cat, you’re gorgeous, okay?” I say decisively, making it clear I want to hear no more on the subject.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see her blush and tuck her hair behind her ear. “Really?”
“Yes,” I answer truthfully, as silent pleas start to form in my head.
I didn’t see it at first, and for that I’m sorry. I can’t believe I was once again clouded by what was on the outside, rather than actually looking beneath the surface to see how perfect you are. But I do now Cat, dear God I do, and I hate myself for not realizing the second I met you how wonderful you are. I love you.
Oblivious to the silent war raging in my head, she gets off her knees and crosses her legs, linking one arm through mine and resting her head on my shoulder as she looks at the magazine.
I try my hardest to ignore the sudden intimacy and lack of distance between us by concentrating on the pictures. I’m slowly beginning to notice that whenever Cat touches me, intentionally or not, my senses are suddenly shocked into life and my whole body reacts. I’m so scared that one day she’ll notice the way that one hug from her will make me stutter, or that when she links her arms with me, my voice starts to go shaky, or that whenever she jokingly slips her hand into mine, I stare at our conjoined fingers, and think how well our hands fit together.
I can’t think of anything worse than her one day noticing. I’m beginning to grow used to this whole unrequited love thing. I stare at her and avert my gaze whenever she looks back. I play nice with Sean but as soon as he turns his back it takes all my might not to slap him on the upside of his head. I’ve even learnt how to pretend to everyone my feelings to Cat are purely platonic, and that the crazy meaning of ‘love’ never crossed my mind. I have them all fooled.
Except myself.
“Let’s see,” she says, reaching out and tracing the words on the cover. “Girl Gossip…you allowed the world to see you for the first time in a magazine called Girl Gossip?” She bites her lip, and I can tell she’s holding in a laugh. “How cool,” she mutters under her breath, giggling slightly.
“It is a good title,” I point out, making her laugh. “I didn’t know you spoke German.”
“You don’t know a lot of things,” she mumbles, before grabbing the magazine from me and shuffling away until she’s opposite me, breaking out contact. Her fingers quickly skim through the pages until she sees our article.
I frown, surprised by her sudden change in attitude, before grinning. “So sinister, Miss Saunders.”
She shrugs and doesn’t return my smile, staring at little harder than necessary at the page and blinking rapidly. “Ah, it says you’re the baby of the group,” she says, managing a smile, wiping away the torn look that had been in her eyes a second ago.
“That I am,” I say, tilting my head to the side as she chews at her bottom lip, something I’ve noticed she does when she’s thinking hard, while she tries to translate the article.
“Hey, I didn’t know your middle name was Randall.”
“You don’t know a lot of things,” I say, grinning at her as I repeat her earlier sentence.
She rolls her eyes at me before smirking. “And you, Justin Randall Timberlake, are scared of spiders,” she adds, a smile creeping onto her face. She lowers the magazine and raises an eyebrow. “Is that true, ‘Bounce’?”
“Lemme read that,” I mutter, snatching the magazine from her and looking at the page. Of course, it doesn’t mean anything to me, but I have no doubt it’s filled with the same fluff those teen magazines usually are.
“Who came up with the name Bounce?” she asks curiously.
“Chris.”
“Who’s Chris?”
“You really don’t know much about my career, do you?”
She shakes her head. “Nope. I was more into angry chick music and regular old slit your wrists stuff when I was a teenager.”
“Me too,” I add jokingly.
She giggles and shrugs. “I mean, half the time I don’t even think of you as this superstar, you’re just my lazy bum of a friend who never works at all.”
“Oh, thanks,” I laugh. “It’s always nice to hear me, the great Justin Timberlake, be bumped down a few notches to lazy bum.”
She laughs. “Gotta keep that ego in check. So, who is Chris?”
I point to the dread-locked one with a hint of a smile. “What the hell is on his head?” she says bluntly, staring at the black and white dreadlocks covering the face of my band mate.
I throw my head back to laugh. “He used to love those braids.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Mmm, I can clearly see why…”
Smiling at her, I recline until I’m lying down and rest my head on her lap. I don’t miss the look of confusion that passes over her features, but she doesn’t stop me as I relax on top of her thighs.
“Why is the car so god damn foggy?” she says quickly, trying to hide her surprise at my sudden invasion of her space.
I take a glance at the picture, which has me in a steamed up car putting on what I clearly thought was a sexy face. “Oh, yeah. Well, you know how when you have sex in a car, it gets really steamy?”
“No,” she says, looking down at me with a mixture of disgust and confusion on her face. “I don’t often engage in tacky activities such as sex in cars.”
I blush slightly. I wish I could say the same thing. “Well, anyway, it’s sort of supposed to look like that.”
“In a magazine for teenaged girls?” she says in astonishment.
I laugh. “Teenage girls are surprisingly dirty.”
“Yeah, no thanks to you,” she says, shaking her head as she closes the magazine. She gives me a quick smile to show me she’s not being serious, before quickly ruffling my hair. “Come on, Randall, lets get this place cleaned up.”
Lifting my head off her lap, my groaning already begins to pour out. “But I don’t want to!” Her silence tells me she cares about as much as she does bonus tracks on the No Strings Attached album. “How come Trace doesn’t have to help?”
“Because I saw you first,” she replies simply, struggling to shift a box towards the corner. “And stop whining. It’s not attractive.”
Begrudgingly, I help her move it. I hate being a gentleman.
“Justin, it isn’t even that much. All we have to do is rearrange these boxes and try to have some order up here.” She puts her hands on her hips and scrutinizes the room. “God, it’s just a pigsty!”
“You sound like my mother,” I mumble as I reluctantly kick at a box of Christmas decorations.
“Well, according to the prestigious Girl Gossip, she’s the most important person in your life, so I’ll take that as a compliment,” she says smugly, sticking her tongue out at me.
“How much of that did you translate?” I mumble huffily, aware that I was once again the grumpy ten-year old who didn’t want to clean his room.
“Enough of it to know you spent your teen years talking like a premenstrual woman asked to talk about her feelings,” she retorts quickly, bending down to pick up some stray photo albums.
“Hey, that kind of talking got me laid, okay?” I defend, holding my arms up in defense.
“Ugh, Justin, I don’t wanna know,” comes her fairly distant voice from the other end of the loft as she bends down to pick up some photo albums.
“I was the only kid my age to be having regular sex when I was fifteen…”
“Do you want me to come over there and kill you?”
Grinning, I don’t stop. “It all started with my first girlfriend Danyelle. She was gorgeous, great body, great kisser…perfect. Anyway, the first time we had sex, I was really worried I wasn’t going to last and that--”
Suddenly, my ramblings are met with the clamping of Cat’s hand over my mouth. Her cheeks have gone a deep rosy red, whether it’s from the moving of the boxes or from her embarrassment I don’t know, and her eyes have narrowed.
She’s pissed. It’s hilarious.
The only reason I’m so persistent in sharing my sexual history is because it makes her so uncomfortable. For what I assume is a relatively experienced twenty one year old, she has a very immature, ‘this is too embarrassing to talk about’ attitude to sex. That’s why I always talk about. That’s why she’s taken to calling me Timberbitch. That’s why I love her.
Grinning behind her hand, I poke my tongue and lick the soft skin on the palm of her hand. Needless to say, she retracts is quickly, a look of revulsion on her face.
“Justin, what the hell was that for?” she squeals, rubbing me on the chest to get rid of what I think we once called ‘cooties’.
“It was your fault for having your hand over my mouth,” I say, shrugging and grinning foolishly.
“Yeah, remind me to never do that again,” she mutters, examining the underside of her hand.
“Chill Cat, it was just a little tongue action.” She begins to turn away from me to continue cleaning up, before the wicked grin on my face causes her to look back. “Speaking of tongue action…my second girlfriend, Hilary, she was even better than Danyelle because she had a mouth that could….”
“Justin, please!” Cat exclaims, torn between amusement and disgust.
“Guess what my nickname was for her.”
“Daddy’s Bitch,” she says sarcastically.
“Nope. Hoover.”
Cat groans and covers her ears, looking so adorably cute and childish it takes all my strength not to reach out and hug her. “Justin, I don’t. Want. To know. Got it?”
Laughing, I swing an arm around her shoulder and pull her towards me, in a strange sort of side hug. “Oh Catsy my darling, you’re so deliciously cute.”
She pulls away from me, squinting at me suspiciously. “Are you high?”
“Nope, just reveling in your immaturity.”
“My immaturity!” she exclaims, her eyes widening with indignation and her hands immediately going to her hips. “This coming from the man who finds joy in making me want to tear my own ears off.” She pauses and I see her struggle to keep the smile off her face. “So, how am I immature?” she asks after a bored sigh, as though she doesn’t want to have this conversation with me.
“You can’t talk about sex,” I reply with a shrug of my shoulders.
She rolls her eyes. “Justin, that’s not about being immature, that’s about my human nature being naturally repulsed by your vivid stories,” she points out.
I tap my chin thoughtfully. “Mmm, no, I don’t think that’s it….I think you’re…”
She crosses her arms and sighs. “Come on Justin, enthrall me with your cross examination.”
Slowly walking towards her, I bend my head until it’s level with hers. Her breathing quickens slightly, and an almost scared look enters her eyes, and for a second I wonder if she can read my thoughts and knows I want to kiss her. We’re close, forehead to forehead, nose to nose….almost lips to lips.
If I moved forward just one inch, I could kiss her. I could have what I most wanted in the world. I could have her.
A sudden silence fills the room, the joking air between us immediately sucked out and replaced with a thick stillness. I don’t want to move, because I know this is the closest I’ll probably ever get to her. Just for a moment, I want to pretend. I pretend there’s no Sean. I pretend the guilt of Natasha doesn’t still lie with me. I pretend we’re in one of my unrealistic fantasies where she looks up at me with adoring eyes, filled with love and promising a lifetime together with me, before I swoop down and capture her lips with my own. I pretend we’re two lovers, stuck in a bubble with only each other, our entire entities full with love and passion for the other person. Not two friends stuck in a dusty attic, throwing playful insults at each other.
“Yes, Justin?” The world I was in slowly melts away, and I back to reality. Back in the loft, back to being unhappy, and back to being Normal Justin, the friend and roomie of Cat Saunders.
“Uh oh, you’ve spaced out. Let me guess, you’ve suddenly remembered a fantastic story about you and some hoe in a parking lot?” she says blandly, waiting for me to come back down to earth and tell her whatever I was going to say.
Trying my hardest to wipe away the feelings that are still churning up my stomach, I grin at her. “Like you’ve never had sex in a parking lot.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Amazingly Justin, I haven’t,” she mutters.
“See? That’s exactly what I mean.” My voice drops to a whisper. “You, Miss Saunders, are sexually repressed.”
“How am I sexually repressed?” she scoffs, rolling her eyes and pushing me away, breaking the close proximity we were sharing.
“You can’t talk about sex. Even as a joke, it makes you uncomfortable.”
“So? A lot of people don’t like to talk about sex. Are they all sexually repressed?”
“Yes.”
Another roll of the eyes. “Justin, just because we don’t all have sex with twenty different people a week and then write a song about it, does not conclude that we are repressed.”
“But if I told you I wanted to have sex with you right now, I bet you wouldn’t,” I say bluntly.
I know it’s exactly the kind of weird, forward thing to say that gets people arrested, but I can’t stop myself. It’s wrong to test her like this. It’s wrong to assume there might be some deeply hidden feelings inside of her for me. I don't even know what I want her to say. Yes, I would sleep with you? No I wouldn't? Either way, she's still with Sean and there's no signs of us crossing that bastard friend boundary.
But I have to do it. I have to know.
Shock brushes over her face before a blush spreads across her cheeks and her eyes drop to the floor. “Of course I wouldn’t,” she mumbles.
“Exactly. You wouldn’t like to have sex in such an unorthodox place as an attic--”
“No way!" she exclaims, looking around her. "Have you seen it up here? It’s filthy!”
Ignoring her, I continue. “You wouldn’t want to do it if it didn’t lead to a relationship--”
“That’s about self respect, not sexual repression,” she defends.
“And you simply wouldn’t want to have sex with me,” I finish.
Her face is suddenly sobered of jokeyness. "No, I wouldn't."
"Why not?" I instinctively demand, knowing this was exactly the type of behavior that was going to get me found out.
"Because it would be very difficult for me."
What? What the hell does that mean? Am I that repulsive?
"Even if it would lead to a serious relationship? And you weren't seeing Sean?" No answer. "Would you ever have a relationship with me?"
Her face remains set in the same stony expression. She has no response.
“Well, would you?” I ask calmly, my heart beating wildly against my chest as I wait for her answer.
“I don’t think you should ask me that,” she says steadily, without a trace of laughter in her voice or her face.
She turns on her heel, and walks out of the attic, leaving on my own. Cold, lonely, and confused.
As always.
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