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Mark still thinks of himself as a nice boy, fundamentally.
It’s how he’s being sold, of course, yes. Cheeky, pretty, kind, the one with the floppy hair, a proper boy next door. It’s also something he’s always genuinely tried his hardest to be. He’s had a girlfriend or two before, always wanted to treat them well and end things amicably when the time inevitably comes. He’s certainly never wanted to take advantage of anyone. He holds all the hands he can when they’re walked through a crowd, kisses cheeks, smiles and winks and agrees to a photo or an autograph at every opportunity. They’re lucky! These are the people making this new, whirlwind life possible for them all.
But the thing is. The thing is. It’s there now.
And it’s there all the time.
It’s there when they play Top of the Pops and it’s there when he nips to the corner shop for bread. It’s there when he pops out for a smoke in his mum’s back garden. It is always, always on offer, and he’s 21 years old.
They all do it. Even Gary, with his holier-than-thou attitude about the music, has followed a girl or two (or three, or four or five) to a dark corner after a pounding evening that’s sent adrenaline zinging through their veins. Up against a wall, in the toilets, down a back alley that’s crawling with rats. It stopped being noteworthy a few cities ago. Robbie’s the worst of them, always rocking up to rehearsals two hours late with anecdotes about the pussy he was drowning in over the course of the evening, but each of them has a sordid story or ten by now and it’s enough to make you feel a bit shit about yourself even as you keep at it. At least if you’re Mark, it is. He thinks Howard probably loves it.
Tonight’s no different. The show is over and now they’re in the back room of some club indistinguishable from a million others, girls practically crawling all over them, and the evening is shimmering with a layer of booze that’s become standard at this point. Most of the boys have long disappeared, to drink or fuck or snort something new, and Mark is sat in a corner with yet another beautiful girl in his lap and her tongue down his throat.
He thinks her name is Natalie—hates himself a bit for not knowing for certain—and her hair is long and flickering between blonde and red. She’s wearing a bronze dress short enough to shock, riding up against him as she grinds in a manner that feels a bit too polished to be unpracticed. Not that he’s complaining. This time two years ago his sexual experience had amounted to a grand total of two handjobs and one sort-of-half-a-blowjob-depending-on-your-definition, which had been pretty good for his neck of the woods, thanks ever so much, and now the things he’s done would be enough to make even the worst of his mates back then blush. Rubbing up against a pretty girl in a room with a couple of shadowy figures in the corner hardly warrants a place on the list.
The shadowy figures in question are anonymous and he prefers it that way. Hopes that he’s just as mysterious to them, though maybe that’s naive. The fact is they’ve been number one five times by now and it’s even stopped being interesting, though the girls keep acting like it is. Natalie is certainly acting like it is. He rests a hand on her lower back and lets his fingers bunch the material there a little. It feels stiff, netlike, and it gives him goosebumps to rub between his fingers.
Maybe-Natalie is kissing his neck now and it feels good, it does. He can feel himself getting turned on, the gentle swelling wave rolling through him and making everything feel a little more dreamlike. Ah, Mark loves this part of the night. He would freeze time here for a lot longer if he’s honest about it, his earlobe in someone’s mouth and her hand just starting to creep down towards the buckle of his belt. Somehow, getting it in always feels a bit anticlimactic. He likes being kissed more than any of the rest of it, and sometimes the girls are so desperate to please they bypass that part. It’s nice, someone’s tongue gliding along his skin for the sake of tasting it instead of rushing. He shivers at the feeling and looks up to the glittering ceiling to try and stop his mind wandering, but the squares of mirror glued up there just make it harder for some reason and so he tilts his head to the side to give Maybe-Natalie better access, letting his gaze fall across the haze of the room to the nearest murky corner.
Robbie is leaning up against the wall, staring back at him.
Mark almost jumps when he realises. Rob is usually the first of them to fuck off into the abyss, a bottle in hand and a baggie of something in his back pocket unless one of the girls gets a hand in there first. He can’t remember the last time the two of them were left to their own devices after the others have disappeared - after all, none of them have been voted Britain’s Most Fanciable Male or even Best Haircut recently, at least to his recollection. No, that’s an awful thing to think. He shakes his head a little without meaning to and Rob smirks, wedging his hands into his jacket pockets.
The thing with Rob is, he’ll say whatever he thinks will get the biggest reaction in the moment. It’s already cost them, Nigel blowing up at him for saying something really stupid for a laugh when anyone with a brain could see it was a mindless joke, but the tabloids have started running with his wisecracks now and it’s stopped being as funny as it was in the beginning. He’s walked in on almost all of them in compromising situations by now and always crows like the devil about them being a bunch of slags the next day, making Mark wince a little and beg him to keep it down in case whoever had been wasting her evening with one of them was still in earshot somehow. Usually it gets meaner than it should and leaves him feeling like he should give his mum a ring, for some reason, but then Robbie always looks at him with that Cheshire cat smile and it’s alright again. Harmless and stupid and safe. Mark likes hanging out with all of the lads, all the time, but he likes hanging out with Rob best of all.
Maybe-Natalie is generous with her tongue. It’s hard to concentrate on the feeling, waiting for Robbie’s grin to turn shit-eating the way it always does, and maybe that’s why Mark doesn’t break eye contact straight away. If he’s going to get his business aired to a hungover bus tomorrow, he can at least stand his ground, and so he flashes the same trademark smile that adorns the bedroom walls of ten thousand teenage girls across the country and winks. It feels like it should be the thing that shatters the ribbon of glass hanging in the air between them and gets Rob sniggering, fucking off with a loose fist miming something obscene as he goes, but instead he just—tilts his head back against the wall and keeps his gaze steady. Takes a bit of a breath, maybe. It doesn’t feel weird, and that’s somehow not weird in and of itself.
They keep looking at one another.
Natalie has a hand pushing up against his shirt now—if you can call it a shirt, tiniest tank top that Nige could possibly fit them into without actually ripping the fabric, much—and is lifting it a little to get better access to his chest. His breath hitches a little at the feeling of her nails against his skin and he blinks hard when he realises Robbie is mimicking the movement on the other side of the room. It’s like when they’re performing, dragging a hand up and revealing a quick slither of stomach to set off a wave of screams. It’s calculated and it’s fun; they always throw each other a look of incredulous glee after, that they can do something so small and get such a ridiculous response. Right now, though, he feels like he might understand a bit more. Robbie has pushed his shirt up just high enough to reveal his belly button and his other hand is running across his abdomen, slowly, almost absently but for the look in his eyes.
He doesn’t register that Natalie’s hand is at his belt now and working at it in earnest until he sees Rob fumbling with his own. A thrill shoots through him at the sight of something genuine staying still for so long in Robbie’s stare and his sharp inhale at the first touch of a hand on him would be worryingly loud if the bass wasn’t still thumping from the dancefloor just beyond the door. He thinks Natalie’s whispering something to him but he couldn’t hear her even if he wanted to and so he just leans into the touch and feels his breath come shallowly. Across the room, Rob’s hand is pressed up hard against his crotch. His eyes are clear and glittering in the dim light, catching the reflection of the mirrors on the ceiling every so often, but then that’s nothing new. The first time they ever met, Mark had noticed the bright green of his eyes before anything else. The “anything else” had arrived pretty quickly, of course, but he remembers the sparkle came first.
Robbie is grinding into the heel of his hand in a way that’s beyond plausible deniability now. It’s so different from when he’s on stage, thrusting like he’s about to take someone’s eye out or shaking his hips to whip up the audience into an unrestrained sexual frenzy—he’s keeping his movements in check just enough that you wouldn’t know what was happening if you weren’t looking for it. The rolling throb of the music is too loud for Mark to hear anything from this far across the room, but he bites his lip hard at a particularly sweet drag of fingers and and feels rather than hears the groan that Rob lets out in response to that. It’s a weak substitute for the real thing in his ear and it’s still so good. Makes him want to know what it would sound like if there were nobody else around and the hand he was pushing into was thicker, larger—
Mark rocks his hips up a little harder when he sees Robbie slide his hand fully below the obscenely low waistband of his trousers. Distantly, he realises that he’s moving his hips in time with Robbie’s and the thought is so erotic that he lets out an involuntary whine. Across the room Rob’s lips are parted, eyes dark and dazed with the same clear realisation. He makes his movements just a bit more obvious, rolling up into his hand a little more blatantly and letting his face go fully slack without breaking that gossamer thread of eye contact. There must still be other people in this room besides the two of them and Natalie, but Mark has never cared about anything less as he feels his breath quicken. All he wants to know in this second is what Rob’s thinking, what Rob’s feeling, what Rob would say to him if his mouth were nuzzled against his ear right now. What Rob’s spit tastes like.
He sighs loudly at the thought and comes, stomach seizing with the strength of it, and Robbie’s eyes widen across the room. The intensity of his stare burns hotter as his hips move frantically and then jerk once, twice, three times in quick succession. Mark wets his lips with his tongue and doesn’t move.
Nothing changes. The thudding beat is still echoing from the other room and the neon filaments that line the walls are glowing just as they were before. Rob stays where he is, looking poleaxed, and Mark suddenly wants more than anything to kiss him, to magic him over here with a wave of his hand and pull his head down over his own to crush their lips together upside-down. Instead he feels Natalie tilting his face to press her mouth to his one last time before she shuffles back, wiping her hand gingerly on the side of the sectional and pulling her dress down as she stands. She surely can’t have been getting off to his twitching and whining and Mark lets himself feel like a terrible person about that for a second, but then she’s vanished back through the door and he is left alone. When he glances back across the room, Rob has disappeared too.
Mark stares into the fog the dry ice has left behind. It must be nearly five in the morning. He needs to crawl into bed at some point before their call at eight. He needs to rinse the spunk out of his trousers before they get sent off for cleaning. He can already feel the familiar discomfort as it starts cooling on his abdomen and he trails a finger through it absently, wondering if Robbie had the foresight to wipe his own hand off before slipping out of a back door or if he’s wandering the streets with no security team and a fistful of come. The thought makes him snort.
A conversation, weeks ago, full of knowing grins and deliberately coy answers for the magazine that’s constantly haunting their every waking moment:
“Do you know Mark, if you were a girl I’d go out with you. I would."
A sunny smile thrown over his shoulder. Sitting cross-legged and barefoot on the floor, cameras everywhere. Boyish charm dialled up to eleven all the time, no matter what. “Well, if you were a boy, I’d go out with you. I mean, if I was a girl and you were a boy, I’d go out with you. I mean…”
They say stupid things all the time and they do stupid things even more often. Ever since they released Pray, things have taken a turn for the manic, and Mark finds himself missing the days of the school assembly halls and gay club dancefloors more than he could ever have anticipated. They’ll be crammed into a security van in a few hours, and he’s already dreading his swirling head and the bumps in the road. All five of them will be feeling like death warmed up as they’re shuttled a few miles down the road to a new hotel for the night, and it’ll be awful, but then he’ll meet Rob’s eyes in the rearview mirror like he always does and that doesn’t feel like a stupid thing. They’ll be the same bright green.
That thought is good.