Always Attract

Alex can’t remember how it had all started. He knows that it was the beginning of tour, but other than that? Not much.

Well, no. That’s actually kind of a lie. He can recall having just gotten out of one of the shower cubicles in some venue and glancing over towards the mirror hung up on the wall behind a row of sinks as he dried himself off. He wasn’t concerned about one of the other guys seeing him considering the fact that he and Jack had been dating for quite some time, and Zack and Rian had their fair share of naked Alex—they’d all seen each other’s dicks at least a hundred times at that point.

Normally when looking in a mirror, it’d be a quick once over, a mental ‘Damn, I’d fuck me hard,’ and then back to business. That time, however, he couldn’t look away. Not because he’d somehow gotten impossibly more fuckable since last seeing his reflection or a bruise from one of his and Jack’s recent sexcapades caught his attention. It was his slight gut that kept him glued in place.

His first thought was, “When the fuck did that get there?” before moving onto “That’s not me, who is that?” then, of course, it was, “Well… I guess I’d still fuck me, but not as hard.”

And that last thought? Yeah, that wasn’t very comforting. If he wouldn’t fuck himself like he used to—figuratively speaking—then why would Jack? Surely he’d notice next time Alex walked by without a shirt on, and then he’d not be as attracted to Alex, and then they would begin to drift apart, and it would all be because Alex had gotten lazy and put on too much weight.

That’s where it started.

After that day, Alex was a determined man. He ate a little less than he’d usually at every meal, he worked out a bit more, and he tried to eat healthier (which is kind of a hard thing to do, what with basically only being able to get your hands on fast-food while on tour).

No one really noticed at first. Sure, it was probably because Alex always did little, different, weird things like that, especially at the beginning of tours, but still. If he wanted his little, weird, different thing to be suddenly transforming into a health-crazed freak, who was gonna stop him? It’d only last, like, a month, tops.

Then, however, Alex realized he hadn’t lost any weight and god damn it, he was just going to have to try harder. Even less food was eaten and every spare second was spent using all of Zack’s work-out equipment. He was going to get the body he had when he was seventeen back if it was the last thing he ever did.

Still, no one really cared. Zack thought it was awesome as fuck, finally having someone around with him during his exercises every single day instead of maybe once a week, and he certainly wasn’t about to complain. Rian and the crew didn’t put much thought into it, but that was because they were generally so busy, what with the fact that Jack had no one to occupy his time.

Jack saw the issue. He even tried to tell the others about the issue.

“Alex has been acting really weird lately,” he’d say to Rian.

“Alex is always acting weird,” Rian would retort.

“I think something’s wrong with Alex. He hasn’t exercised this much in, like… Actually, no, he’s never exercised,” Jack would say from about fifty feet away from his boyfriend and best friend as Vinny and Evan unloaded the back of the trailer with all of their instruments and other various, necessary items.

“There’s nothing wrong with him that wasn’t there before, now either help us out or go away,” both crew workers would sigh, rolling their eyes and shaking their heads.

“Does it seem like Alex has lost weight to you?” he’d inquire as their tour manager wrote their schedule for the day on a white board that hung on the wall in the front lounge.

“Why don’t you just go ask him yourself?” Matt would suggest, not paying anything more than an ounce of his attention to the young guitarist.

It’s not that Jack hadn’t thought about that before because he really had. And it’s not like he hadn’t tried, but every time he’d work up the courage to talk about Alex’s new ‘hobbies,’ Alex would simply give him a chaste kiss and shoo him away, saying something along the lines of, “We’ll talk later, angel, but I’m busy right now.”

That right there was his main issue. Jack didn’t mind that his boyfriend wanted to work out more, but it was the fact that Alex spent little to no time with him anymore. Wasn’t he worth more than a few weights? Didn’t he deserve some form of attention from the person who claims to love him?

It was a Saturday night, about a month and a half into tour, where they all got hotel rooms. Jack had everything planned: they’d go out to dinner, maybe catch some shitty movie and try to avoid fans (not because they don’t love them but because they still kind of need some time to themselves every now and again), and then they’d get back to the hotel to spend some time alone together; they hadn’t been truly intimate since the night before tour started due to the ‘no sex on the bus’ rule.

But, as he’d started to do more often, Alex rejected the idea.

“I would love to go out with you, baby,” Alex assured as he flopped face-first down onto their bed, “but I’m so god damn tired right now. Let’s just go to sleep, alright? We’re not gonna get another chance to sleep in a real bed for another week or two, at least.”

That was when Jack had finally had enough. Not once in their entire relationship had Alex been ‘too tired’ to spend quality time with Jack, and the blatant rejection was finally starting to catch up with the taller man.

“What the hell is up with you lately, huh?” he snapped, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring at Alex’s back. “Why am I now fucking second best to sleep and exercise? Did I do something wrong? Are you trying to tell me something?”

Alex rolled over with that, eyebrows scrunched together on his forehead as he attempted to figure out what he’d done wrong. “When did I say you were second best? You know you’re my number one,” was his response when he couldn’t come up with a logical explanation to the outburst.

“You don’t fucking have to, I can just tell!” Jack exclaimed. “You never have fucking time for me anymore, you hardly look at me, every time I try to fucking talk to you it’s, ‘Not right now, babe, I’m busy.’ Are you trying to avoid me? Do you not love me anymore?”

Alex sighed and allowed his eyes to slip closed for a moment before he worked up the energy to stand from the bed and move towards his boyfriend. Jack backed up, but that didn’t stop the elder, who continued to step closer until Jack had bumped into a wall and had nowhere else to go, letting his hands curl around the taller’s thin frame.

“Angel, of course I still love you. I don’t mean to ignore you, but I ju—”

“Then don’t! Don’t make excuses! If I did something wrong, then by all means, tell me! I’m sick of this, Alex, please,” Jack all but begged, eyes morphing from cold and hard to gentle and pleading. Uncrossing his arms from over his chest, Jack’s hands moved to grip at Alex’s forearms, holding just a little too tightly.

“You haven’t done anything, baby,” Alex assured. “You’re perfect, y’know?” The slighter man leaned in for a kiss with that, but Jack was turning his head away.

“Something’s wrong, and I know it,” he stated deadpan. “You’ve been acting weird since the beginning of tour, and then you went all out with this ‘working out’ thing, and I want to know what happened. Why won’t you spend time with me anymore? I just wanna be able to lounge around and eat junk food while watching shitty movies like we used to do every day, and we haven’t done that in weeks. Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?” Jack left out the whole ‘you’ve lost a lot of weight’ part, wanting Alex to admit it himself.

“I promise you, nothing’s wr—”

“Don’t fucking lie to me! What happened, huh? Did someone say something to you? Have you finally gone crazy? Tell me the truth or I’m spending the night over in Matt’s room.”

Silence enveloped the two, Jack waiting for an answer and Alex searching for a way to say ‘I noticed I was getting fat’ without sounding like a teenage girl who felt the need to constantly compare herself to anorexic models.

“Alex, I will start counting if I have to,” the younger warned, and he realized there really was no decent way to say how he’d felt.

“Well… Remember that first shower we took this tour? Back in, like, Massachusetts?”

And, honestly, Jack couldn’t remember such a trivial thing, but he nodded all the same.

“After I got out, I kinda, y’know, looked at myself in the mirror, and then I just… I don’t know; it’s not important. I’m sorry I’ve be—”

“No, finish what you were saying,” Jack prompted, leaning forward the tiniest bit. When Alex shook his head, he drew his own (correct) conclusion. “Were you getting self-conscious?”

The ‘It’s not important’ Alex mumbled let Jack know that he was right.

“Why were you… Did Zack call you fat or something? Was it Jeff?”

“No one called me fat at the time,” Alex assured, slipping his arms completely around Jack’s torso, the younger’s hands moving up his arms until they were wrapped around his neck, both male’s foreheads pressing together. “I just put on a few pounds and had to get rid of them, but they weren’t going away no matter how hard I tried, so I had to put in more effort so that something like this wouldn’t happen…” He trailed out at the end, voice no more than a gentle whisper, but due to the close proximity, Jack didn’t fail to catch it.

“You put on a few pounds?” he inquired a little incredulously. When Alex hummed, he continued on. “So you felt the need to ignore me and work yourself to death?”

“I wasn’t working mys—”

“Why would you do that?” Jack cut him off, his tone light so he wouldn’t come off as being judgmental or rude.

Alex was reluctant to give an explanation because it sounded so fucking stupid. It sounded stupider the more detail he put behind his reasoning, and once it was all complete, it would just be too much.

“I knew if I didn’t do something about it, you’d leave me,” he eventually muttered. They were silent again, and Alex could only hold his breath as he awaited the sound of laughter to fill his ears. Nothing of the sort happened, though, and then Alex was being pushed away from his boyfriend. He expected that to be it, really, the end of them, until he was being maneuvered over towards the bed.

Once Alex was laying on the mattress, Jack moved to straddle his thighs, deciding that he needed to say something to make his boyfriend feel better about himself—he never would’ve thought that the elder would go to such extremes just to keep him around.

“Baby,” he started, hands cupping Alex’s face as he leaned in for a quick kiss. “You know I’ll always love you. Who else is gonna have me, right? I don’t care how much you weigh, and you shouldn’t either. As long as you’re not in any sort of health-danger where you absolutely need to lose weight, then it shouldn’t be important. Beauty isn’t judged by the size of your jeans, and even if it was, you’d still be gorgeous. Besides, it was only a few pounds. I hadn’t even noticed a change in your body until you started losing the weight. That’s scary to think about, y’know? I don’t want you to, like, continue on with this until you’re labeled anorexic—which is going to happen no matter how much you think it won’t. I’ve noticed you eating less, too, so on top of all the exercise? You’re almost as skinny as I am now, and you gotta stop. This happens to me naturally; you don’t wanna be this thin on purpose.”

He stopped there, not really knowing what else to say before he sat up straight again and began to push Alex’s shirt up his body. “And, think about it like this,” he murmured, scooting back on his boyfriend’s legs and leaning down to kiss along Alex’s stomach. “It’s all just more of you for me to love. Not that I love you any less now than I did before, but… you know what I mean.”

Jack finally looked up then, chin resting in the small dip just below Alex’s ribs, and his hands curled over the defined bumps of the elder’s hipbones.

“I’m always gonna be attracted to you, even if you gain, like, two hundred pounds.”

“Yeah? Two hundred?” Alex questioned, smiling cutely. Usually he was the one giving people the inspirational speeches, and it was nice to be on the receiving end for once.

“Yeah, dumb ass, so don’t go and starve or work yourself to death because I kinda wanna keep you around, too.”

“So I can stop working out with Zack? And I can eat junk food and gain all that weight I had before back, and you wouldn’t care?” Alex pushed, wanting to be sure that he was hearing right. He was just starting to lose his gut, and now Jack was saying that he shouldn’t do that? Seemed just a little off, in his opinion.

“As long as you don’t take up something else that causes you to ignore me, then yeah, I’d really prefer that,” Jack assured, crawling his way back up Alex’s body to press their lips together quickly.

“Why didn’t you tell me that before I started all this?” Alex asked once they parted, and the younger scoffed.

“I would’ve, if someone had paid any attention to me. But how about I order room service, and we find a shitty movie on TV, and we get nice and fat together?”

Alex could only grin and lean forward to connect their lips again, the corners of his mouth still curled up in the kiss before he pulled away to bump their noses together. All he could think to say was a soft, “I’d like that; I’d like that a lot.”