In My Hour of Need

Chapter 22

Oh my god, I thought, did we seriously just do that? I was lying on the bed with Junior next to me, both of us breathing heavily. I wiped some sweat off of my forehead. Our relationship turned out to have come a lot further than I thought. Junior looked at me, looking all worried. "I hope we didn't ruin anything", he said. Uh, excuse me, what did I miss? What was there to ruin? "Huh?", I replied. "You know", he said, "Like... our relationship". I didn't understand what he was talking about. I turned to him. "What do you mean ruin our relationship?", I asked, confused. "Uh...", he stuttered, "With having-" Yeah, I'm going to cut him off right there. "Yeah, yeah", I said, "I don't think that's gonna be a problem, I mean, unless I weren't good enough for you". He laughed. "Oh", he said, "And I thought I wasn't good enough for you". I smiled at him. "You don't have to worry about that", I said, and kissed his forehead, "Good night, honey". I turned out the lights.

The next morning, I got up about an hour before Junior, only to make breakfast before he woke up. The date was ‪October 5th‬, so it was three days until Megadeth's concert. Last time we played together on stage, I had just found out Junior was gay, so I felt a lot more prepared this time, without having to think about that. Well, except the fact that apparently now I was gay too. Oh, god, we still had to tell Jeff and Chuck. I mean, they were our friends, right? Our band mates as well, they deserved to know. "Morning", I heard behind me. I turned around. "Morning, hon", I replied. He chuckled. "Is that my new nickname now?" I smiled. "If you don't prefer 'babe'", I laughed. "No thanks", he said, laughing too. "I made breakfast", I said, putting down a plate full of misshapen pancakes; I couldn't cook. He laughed at the half-burnt pancakes. "How romantic", he joked. "Yeah, don't tell anyone", I answered. "So what's on our schedule for today?", he asked. I sighed. "I know I promised we'd do something fun today", I said, "But I can't come up with a better time to tell Jeff and Chuck about... uh, our situation". Junior almost choked on my gross pancakes. "Our situation?", he laughed, "Is that what you call our relationship?" I laughed too. Yeah, it's not like he expected me to call it our beautiful, passionate love for eachother, did he? If he was that girly, I swear to God, I would also choke on the pancakes. "But we don't have to tell them today...", Junior said, dropping the very obvious hint. "Yes, Junior, we do", I said, "We've basically delayed it as much as we possibly could. We should do it now, before suddenly three months have passed and we're into kinky bunny costumes". Junior burst out laughing. "Oh my god!", he exclaimed, "If that happens, I'll fucking bail on you". I laughed too. "You don't think I would have bailed first? Trust me; I won't go that far with you, we would have had to cross the line a million times before that happened". We tend to get a bit off topic, but hey, what did you expect? Anyway, after forcing the pancakes down, we were on our way to Jeff's hotel room.

"How do you think he'll take it?", Junior asked me, worried sick that anybody with a working brain would judge him. "Probably fine", I said, "I don't think Jeff's a homophobe, not Chuck either". I was about to knock on Jeff's door, when I saw the most utterly disturbing thing walking down the hallway. I stopped completely. It looked like somebody had turned me to stone. That somebody would in this case be the thing walking down the hallway. "What's wrong?", Junior asked, "Who's that?" Oh, it wasn't a question about whom, it was rather what. "Hey, isn't it Metallica's singer – oh, now I see the problem". Yeah, that was right; it was James Hetfield, walking down the hallway. What the fuck was he doing here? And at the worst possible time he could have ever appeared. I didn't want to talk to him. If he started talking about Cliff I was going to strangle him. Go away, James! I don't want you here!