He’d thought he was totally gone for Skyler when the guy sat down next to him and told him his pants fit him good. But then he’d finally heard Skyler sing, andthatwas it. Totally. Fucking. Gone.
He was so screwed. He couldn’t sit here lusting after his new bandmate. Once he’d found out they’d both been selected for the band, he’d tried to rein in his hormones. Because seriously, he’d never even been with a guy before. What was he doing?
The problem was, he wasn’t simply attracted to the guy. No. Helikedhim. There was something about Skyler that seemed to pull everyone around him into his orbit. He gave Trevor so much of his attention, and yet Trevor found himself getting jealous whenever Skyler talked to someone else for more than two minutes.
Skyler was different from anyone else he’d ever met. He didn’t understand the concept of playing it cool. He got excited over everything, he shared whatever he was thinking, and his laugh…
Skyler’s laugh was loud and obnoxious, but he let it out so unabashedly that Trevor found it the most endearing thing ever.Ugh.He was hopeless. He kept saying dumb shit he wouldn’t normally say just to get a laugh out of him. He'd never considered himself particularly funny before. But Skyler made him feel like he was Jimmy Fallon.
Skyler made him feel a lot of things. Most of them confusing.
Like now, as they sat beside each other in two deceptively uncomfortable armchairs waiting for a meeting to start, and Skyler reached over to squeeze Trevor’s thigh and whine, “I’mboooored. Entertain me.”
Trevor’s first thought was to drag him out into the hallway, shove him up against the wall, and jam his tongue down his throat. That would keep him entertained, right?
Fuck.
“The meeting’s about to start,” he told him instead. “Be good and I’ll buy you a milkshake after.”
They’d already discovered this diner right across the street from the studio lot that made the best milkshakes and pies, and Trevor had learned Skyler had the biggest sweet tooth.
Skyler laughed, not his full-bellied one, but still a nice sound. “Okay, fine,” he agreed, before turning sideways in his seat, legs swinging wildly across the arm of the chair so they dangled over Trevor’s lap. They shared each other’s space so naturally.
Trevor wrapped one hand around Skyler’s ankle to prevent himself from being kicked in the face when Skyler inevitably started flailing around. He didn’t think he’d been such a tactile person before, but Skyler was always touching him, which hereallydidn’t mind, so he found himself always touching Skyler too.
When the door to the conference room opened, he nudged Skyler’s legs off the chair and urged him to sit up properly. A stuffy looking man in a suit—one of the label guys—sat down across from them and introduced himself as Adrien, even though Trevor was pretty sure they’d already met him before. But truthfully, they’d met so many people in the last couple weeks that he couldn’t keep anyone straight anymore. A woman on their management team sat next to him.
“So here we are,” Adrien said, adjusting the knot on his tie. “Boys Will Be Boys. Now we obviously expect all of you to recognize this as a job, and to take it very seriously. But we don’t want you tolooklike you’re taking things too seriously. We want you to look like you’re having fun. The time of your lives. Boys being boys.”
“We don’t want fans to just fall in love with your music,” the woman from management said. Trevor couldn’t remember if her name was Molly or Maggie. “We want them to fall in love withyou. Each of you individually, and all of you together as a group of close friends. That’s the image we’re trying to project.”
“You each have a personality to fill,” Adrien told them.
“A personality to fill?” Skyler muttered disbelievingly under his breath, only loud enough for Trevor to hear him.
“Yo, we’re not the freaking Spice Girls,” Trevor interjected loudly. Partly to make Skyler laugh, and partly because fuck that.
“If we are, then I get to be Baby,” Oliver chimed in good-naturedly from his right. At sixteen, he was the youngest of the five of them.
“What if I want to be Baby?” Jermaine asked.
“Come on, you know I’m the baby,” Oliver insisted. “You can be Sporty.”
“Fine,” Jermaine relented. “But you have to put your hair in the pigtails.”
“I’d like to see him try that,” Noah jumped in.
Molly or Maggie cleared her throat as Adrien scowled, clearly annoyed by the derailment of the conversation. Trevor leaned back in his seat and gave Skyler a satisfied smirk. He was rewarded with Skyler’s dimples in return.
“Now as I was saying,” Adrien continued. “Oliverisgoing to be seen as everyone’s little brother and the jokester of the group.”
At that, Oliver preened and shot them all a pleased grin.
“Noah will be the leader, the responsible one.”
Trevor frowned. Since he was the oldest, shouldn’t that behisrole? Then again, Noah did seem to be taking all this more seriously than him, considering Trevor’s interruption just now, so whatever.
“Jermaine is the mysterious bad boy.”
