The hallway of the hotel was empty. The cream colored walls had a stripe of ivy-green running down the middle, matching the carpet, and giving the building a supposedly classy look.

Lance looked down the hallway, his eyes focusing on the room he was about to enter, before he leaned up against one of the walls for a few moments.

He gripped the sheaf of papers that he needed tightly in his hands. Small sweat stains from his damp fingers already covered the pages giving them the look of having been sorted through many times.

It was the look he needed.

Lance used his upper teeth to bite at his bottom lip. He scraped them over the rough skin, purposefully reddening it. Then he blinked widely, looking pathetic and bringing tears to his eyes. He let go of the papers with his right hand and reached into the pocket of his jeans, pinching the delicate skin just below his hipbone through the thin fabric.

True tears came to his eyes.

"Mother *fucker*," Lance said once, practicing. He said it again. "Mother*fucker.*"

Satisfied that he looked distraught enough, Lance pushed himself off of the hallway wall, and walked down towards the room he’d eyed earlier.

Taking a deep breath and saying a silent prayer, Lance placed his hand on the knob of the door and pushed it open. Hard.

The door hit the opposite wall and Lance took that opportunity to step into the suite he shared with four other men. The door banged shut behind him.

"Mother*fucker*," Lance said. Through tear filled eyes, he saw Justin stop dancing, JC stop listening to the music he was creating on his computer, Joey stop watching the TV, and Chris stop drawing.

He willed a single tear to roll down his cheek. It did. He blinked and another tear followed the first.

"Motherfucker." More quietly this time.

"What is it?" Joey asked cautiously.

Lance shook his head. He crossed his arms over his chest and hugged himself. He flicked his fingers and the sheaf of papers he’d held so tightly in his hands fell to the ground. They scattered out around him, gently, innocently piling around his feet.

"It’s bad?" Justin asked.

Lance nodded. He crumpled to the ground and made his shoulders quiver with what would look like suppressed sobs. Really, though, he was holding in laughter.

"How bad?" Chris asked. His eyes narrowed.

"Bad." Lance’s voice was muffled, spoken into his solid knees. He continued crying and all the other guys could do was stare.

Lance didn’t look up as he heard someone—one of the guys—get up from one of the pieces of suite furniture. He willed himself to stare at the rough texture of his jeans fabric and keep bringing the tears to his eyes.

"I don’t understand," JC said.

Finally, Lance looked up and saw that JC was holding one of the pieces of paper he’d dropped.

"Tommy," Lance said. He swallowed convulsively. "The numbers don’t add up. Money’s missing." He flicked his wrist limply, gesturing helplessly.

"Motherfucker," JC said.

Then the room was silent as the other guys absorbed the information.

For a brief instant, when they were all staring at one another, Lance allowed himself a brief smirk. His eyes flashed, once, coldly, then he sobbed again, loudly, and drew the four other guys’ attention back to himself.
--

(2004)

Lance tugged the baseball hat down low over his sunglasses-covered eyes. He stared through the brown plastic lenses, looking around the airport.

All of the signs were in Swiss and Lance didn’t speak Swiss. Yet.

Finally, he saw the symbol he was looking for: the shape of a telephone handle and an arrow pointing in the direction he should go to get to one.

Lance gripped his black leather briefcase tightly in his right fist and followed the directions on the sign.

When he got to the wall of telephone terminals, he didn’t pick up the handset of one of the payphones. Instead, he pulled his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open. He pushed the small plastic numbers one at a time, carefully, making sure that he didn’t miss a single one.

He leaned forward into the area between the small silver walls of the pay phone terminal, so that to a passer-by, it might look as if he were talking on that phone.

The ringing sound, intermingled with the crackle of long distance, spun three times. Then the connection was made.

"Hello?" Joey’s voice was tired.

Lance hadn’t even bothered to convert the time difference. He didn’t care.

"Joey."

"Lance?" Then Joey’s voice was wide-awake. "I called yesterday, but you weren’t at your house. And your mom called here, wondering if you’d come down to Orlando. Where are you, man?"

"It doesn’t matter." Lance smirked. "I just called because I wanted you to do me a favor."

"Okay." Joey drew out the word slowly.

"Tell Tommy I’m sorry, okay?" Lance couldn’t help but smile and he could tell that his eyes were dancing behind their dark lenses.

"For what?" Joey asked. "He was the one that screwed you over."

Lance started laughing.

"He wishes he knew how to screw me over," Lance said. He wiped a spot of wetness out from underneath his sunglasses. It might have been a tear of laughter.

"But the money," Joey said.

"The money, Joe." Lance chuckled. "He took money, but the reason the business was failing. That was all me. What Tommy took was mere pennies."

"But he confessed—" Joey started.

"I know," Lance said. "It’s wonderful, isn’t it? He didn’t even know what he was confessing for."

"But—" Then Joey was silent.

"Listen, Joe," Lance said. "Don’t tell Tom I’m sorry, actually. Tell him that he should have known better than to take advantage of me. Because I fuck back ten times harder."

"Lance," Joey said.

"There’s a letter in my house that explains it all," Lance said. "If you really want to know. It’s boring, though, so don’t say I didn’t warn you."

He turned slightly, so that he was looking out at the airport terminal walkway, at all the people moving—some rushed, some slow—and the children playing. He turned back so that he was looking at the black plastic phone in front of his nose.

"It should tell the police everything they want to know, too," Lance said softly. "It should let Tommy off the hook for the things he didn’t do, too."

"Lance," Joey said again.

"Goodbye, Joey," Lance said. "They won’t find me, so this is goodbye."

He ran his left index finger over the smooth silver metal of the pay phone front. A smudge of moisture stayed behind. "Have a good life." He paused, then spoke again. "You were a good friend."

He pulled the phone away from his ear and was in the process of shutting it, when he heard Joey say ‘Lance’ for a third time. With a definitive snap he closed the phone fully, cutting off all sound.

Lance pushed himself away from—out of—the phone terminal. He walked out of the alcove where the phones had been located and into the main hallway of the airport. At the first trashcan he passed, he dropped the phone in among the crumpled up papers.

Then he disappeared into the milling crowds. When they parted a few moments later, he was gone.

-The End-