Hayley trudged back down the alley from the fields towards the road, wanting to do nothing more than lock herself up in her room for the rest of her life. The things she had just witnessed had completely shattered the dreams she had had for the last couple of years, and now it felt as if her entire life lacked purpose.

As she walked, head down, she virtually strode straight into a man carrying a silver flight case. Not thinking anything of it she carried on a few paces until she realised the footsteps behind her had stopped. Cautiously, she looked round and saw the man looking back directly at her.

"Uh, Hayley, isn't it?" asked the man.

"Do I know you?"

The man smiled a well-practised 'I'm completely innocent, honest' smile and walked a couple of paces back towards her.

"No, but I have to admit I know a fair amount about you."

"Huh?"

"I'm an freelance investigative journalist. I'm presently doing a piece about Taylor Hanson."

Just the mention of his name brought Hayley's momentarily forgotten anger back to the foreground.

"Really?" she asked, her scheming mind going into overdrive. If she played her cards right, this could be mutually beneficial to the both of them, and suitably damning to a certain Mr. Jordan Taylor Hanson's career. "Well, in that case, I think you may want to hear what I have to say."

"Oh I may, may I?" smiled the journalist.

"Cut the crap. Can we go somewhere a little more private?"

Seeing Hayley take such a direct line struck a chord with the journalist. She meant business, and if that business was anything groundbreaking to do with Taylor Hanson, he damn well needed to know.

"Sure. You hungry?"

"D'you wanna know what I know or not?"

Hayley was getting impatient as she steadily chomped on the less- than-satisfactory burger this guy had shelled out for. Hell, she was expecting a full three-course dinner for what she was about to tell him! However, material gain was not what she was after for once, so she graciously let it slide.

The reporter sloppily grabbed the straw of his Fanta with his tongue and guided it into his mouth.

"Sure," he said between noisy slurps and the stirring of ice cubes.

"Taylor is gay."

A mouthful of Fanta-diluted half chewed burger was projected across the counter top as he lost all concept of the method of consuming food.

"He... He's what?" he stuttered, still not sure that he had heard correctly, or that the girl actually knew the meaning of what she was saying.

Hayley tutted and cast her eyes heavenward for divine inspiration. How could someone this dumb actually make a living?

"He is GAY! Homosexual! Queer! Bent! How many other ways do you want me to put it?"

Gathering the few nerves he had, the reporter took a deep breath and tried to follow this through logically, and with a degree of logic. Tay Hanson being proved as Gay would be one of the top news stories on MTV, and even the big boy networks might be interested too. But he had to make sure that his source wasn't just playing him.

"How do you know?"

"You know that guy that he brought back from England and is practically attached to?"

"Yeah, uh..." he thumbed through his notebook. "...Dean Lidster."

"That his name? Geez he sounds like a dork."

In fact to Hayley, he sounded WORSE than a dork. It was him that had come storming in and upset everything. Bastard.

"So how do you know he's... Er..."

"A fucking queer?"

"Yeah."

"I saw them."

"What, holding hands?"

"No, they were..."

"Hugging? You saw them hugging?"

"Would you let me finish already? They were makin' out!"

Had the reporter been Jim Carrey, his jaw would've punched a hole in the table he was leaning on.

"You actually saw them?" This was getting rather deeper than he had anticipated.

"I did better than that."

How could anything possibly be better than an eye witness?

Hayley shoved her hand into a pocket and produced an unlabeled 8mm videocassette, placing it in the centre of the table.

"You filmed them?" UN-BEEEEE-LIEVABLE! He moved his hand out to take the cassette, but Hayley had been waiting for that and quickly snatched it back.

"You ain't getting that for a burger and fries."

The reporter smiled a thin, knowing smile.

"How much?"

"Five hundred bucks." Hell, it could be worth ten times that, but she wasn't in it for the money. Well, not a LOT of money, anyway...

"FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS?" he almost screamed, provoking a couple of disapproving glances from other patrons.

"Take it or leave it. I am not budging. I'm sure there are PLENTY of networks who'd pay way more than that to get a hold of this," she said, waving the plastic rectangle tantalisingly back and forth.

Thing was, he knew she was right, and besides he would easily make that back by licensing it out to other news companies. He fished around in his jacket pocket and pulled out his chequebook.

"Ohhh no, cash."

"How can you actually find something worth watching?" I asked, flicking through channel after channel, most of which seemed to be occupied by wall-to-wall commercials.

"You can't." replied Zac, lounging against one of the beanbags between Gareth's legs. "That's why we do our own stuff."

"Huh?"

"We make our own films," explained Tay, sheepishly. "They're not, like, Spielberg or anything, but I guess they're better than this daytime shit. You wanna see some?"

"Sure!"

Tay got off me and sauntered over to a large safe-like cabinet and opened the heavy metal door with a clunk. Inside were hundreds of Mini DVs, DATs, Beta SPs, quarter-inch and two-inch open reels, along with a set of CD-Rs and a few CDs.

I scrambled up and walked over to him to get a closer look. "Bloody hell! What's all this?"

"This, Mr. Lidster, is practically a complete record of our lives - hence the fire safe! Our folks have always been into filming us and shit, and I guess it kinda rubbed off on us."

He picked up one of the huge 2" Ampex reels and handed it to me. "That is one of the studio masters of 'Middle of Nowhere'," he grinned. I looked at the label: "MMMBop, Thinking of You".

"You gotta listen to that," laughed Ike. "Tay makes THE most monumental fuck-up on one of the takes."

Tay smiled and reached to take the spool off me, but I wanted to hear the perfect Tay Hanson mess up. I smiled at him and turned round just as his fingers touched the cold metal spool, and walked over to the mixing desk. "Wanna give me a hand, Ike?"

Tony groaned his disapproval as Ike prised himself from his vice- like grip, and gave Tay that "Nah nah" look.

He took the spool from me and dumped it on the Tascam multitrack and looped the brown tape through a maze of rollers and pulleys, finally fastening it to the empty take-up spool.

He punched fast-forward, causing the tensioners to bob up and down wildly and then hit play once the tape was about halfway through. The speakers burst into life as a very raw-sounding version of "Thinking of You" began to play. Ike moved over to the mixing desk and adjusted the levels slightly so that the instruments didn't drown the vocals.

"I bet you don't notice it," grinned Tay

"Just let the kid listen..."

"...be thinking of you the whole time: Ride with the ding of a beagle, ride along with something, nah nah nah nah nah nah, I'll be thinking of you!"

"What was THAT?" I asked as one of the triple voice harmony deviated quite impressively from the lyrics.

"That," grinned Ike, loving the rare position when he could embarrass the hell out of Tay, "is a fuck-up. Listen to this:"

Ike rewound the tape again, but this time hit the "Solo" button on Tay's vocal channel, removing every other sound bar him.

Tay visibly cringed as he heard himself singing a load of bullshit, and more than a little off-key. I still thought his voice sounded sexy, though!

"I was concentrating on my fingering..." protested Tay.

Zac and Gareth immediately looked at each other and burst out laughing at the innocently said but pervertedly interpreted double entendre.

"The hell you were!" retorted Ike as he smiled as he realised what the other two were laughing at, desperately trying to keep a straight face. "That was because you had been given some shit by the producer and you'd gone all mardy."

"She was a bitch! Besides, I do mardy." he said, frowning.

Ike turned to me. "See?"

I couldn't sleep. The fact that I was four-and-a-half thousand miles away from home didn't seem to matter. Hell, as long as I was with Tay it wouldn't matter if I were four-and-a-half million miles away. What did matter was that there was a finite time left until we had to part company yet again, and this time there was no official way I could either get him over to the UK, or me over here. There was no way my parents could afford to send me to the states even semi- regularly, let alone as often as I wanted to go. I knew Tay would very willingly pay for the flights, but that really wasn't fair on him. OK, so if our roles were reversed and I was the pop star and he the unknown British lad from rural Derbyshire, I knew that I would do whatever it took to stay with him.

I sighed and decided to think realistically. Option one: Tay moves in with me back at home and goes to my school. Problem: Hanson dissolve. Option two: I move in with Tay here in Tulsa. Problem: I'd miss my family so much it'd be stupid, and I'd crack.

Option three: I didn't want to think about option three. Not ever. It shouldn't be an option, but right now it seemed there was no alternative, conducting a relationship via phone and e-mail being the only viable solution and from what I had seen on line, no way would that work.

I sighed and turned slightly, pulling Tay's smooth arm over my chest, his breath playing on my neck. He stirred slightly in his sleep and hugged me closer to him oh-so-gently. Yet another tsunami of emotion blasted it's way over me and I wanted to yell out with the frustration and anger I felt, but I couldn't. Fate had brought us together those many moons ago in the bedrock under the English Channel, and now she was just as easily going to tear us apart with no pity or remorse. A force in the universe that can not be reasoned or bargained with.

I quietly cried myself to sleep.

"NO!" yelled Tay, sitting up sharply in bed and whacking his head on the plywood underside of the bed, scaring me half to death in the process.

"Shit Tay are you alright?"

He was breathing heavily and the light of the moon reflected clearly off the thin film of sweat covering his face and chest.

"Y... Yeah," he said, rubbing his forehead. "It doesn't matter."

"What? What was it?"

"Nothin'," he smiled, but the smile did little to hide the anguish that was so present in his beautiful face. If I knew him as well as I thought I did, I knew what was wrong.

"You thinking about what we're gonna do after this exchange thing is over?"

Tay's sharp eyebrows dived into a deep frown as he screwed his eyes tightly closed. He nodded. He opened them again and as he did so, his long eyelashes flicked one of his tears onto my face.

The look of pleading and dependence was so vivid that I realised it simply didn't matter what fate had in store for us. The love we shared could defeat fate just by looking it in the eyes. We would never be apart again.

"Tay. Taylor, look at me." I took his head in my hands and look straight into those pools of emotion. "I don't care what I have to do to be with you, I will do it. You are so, so special to me that you have become a part of me. I don't think I could go on without that part, Tay... I love you so damn much!"

We collapsed into each other's arms, crying harder than either of us could ever remember. I had mis-read fate. She wasn't tearing us apart, she was pushing us closer together.

Across the room, Zac slowly lay back down and looked at the sleeping figure of Gareth next to him. The thought that he might loose Gareth surprised him - he hadn't even given the concept the time of day and found himself biting his bottom lip to try and hold back his tears. His parents would have to do something about this - like hell would he back down on this account.

"Quit poking me!"

"Shhhh! You'll wake them up!"

Ike, still dressed in just his boxers, tiptoed into the room armed with his camcorder. Tony was almost directly behind him and whenever Ike stopped, he would run straight into the back of him. Ike carefully avoided the squeaky floorboard and quickly pointed it out to Tony who was just about to step directly on it, and breathed yet another sigh of relief.

It was morning and, as usual, Ike had been given the task by his mom of rousing the cohorts from their slumber. He had strode into our room just about to yell a load of obscenities and insults at the top of his voice when he saw how we were lying. It was nothing too revealing (to his eyes) but it just looked so damn cute he had to capture it on tape. He carefully nipped back to his room and grabbed the camcorder.

Gently, he knelt down so that he was on the same level as the lower bunk, and pressed the REC button under his thumb. The camera whirred quietly to itself as it began immortalising the scene in front of it. He knelt forward slightly to get a little more height, and gently pressed the "Telephoto" side of the zoom control, gently allowing the image of our unconscious forms to fill the frame.

I was lying on my side and Tay, as he had done the night previously, had his arm draped over my chest, his fingers interlaced with mine. He was a lot closer than he had been the night before though, and had his nose just behind my right ear, the wonderful sensation of his hot, moist breath making me smile slightly in my sleep.

The sight of us lying like that - completely peacefully - sent a twinge of guilt through Ike as he thought about what they were just about to do, but justified the action with the thought that his mum had asked him to get them up.

"Now?" whispered Tony, a suitably evil grin on his face. Ike pulled his head back from the camera's viewfinder and nodded, keeping the camera pointed at us.

Tony held a very battered cymbal that had belonged to Zac's original drum kit (the one Kieran had "grown out" of) out in front of him with his left hand, and belted it one with Zac's baseball bat sending both cymbal and bat crashing to the ground with such volume it'd wake the dead: It consequently had the desired effect on us. Tay leapt up vertically and once again bashed his head on the bunk above whilst I leapt out of bed like a scalded cat and tripped over the discarded baseball bat and landed directly on top of Zac and Gareth producing a stereophonic "OOOF!" from under the covers.

Ike stood up and surveyed the chaos they had caused. "Breakfast is served," he announced, then broke out laughing and ran down the hall with Tony in tow.

Tay crawled out of bed and poked his head round the door. "YOU'LL PAY, IKE!" he yelled groggily, and used the bunk post to drag himself to his feet, his boxers tented out lusciously with his morning hard- on.

"What day is it?" I asked, completely disoriented with the strange surroundings combined with the effects of a supersonic flight over the Pond.

"Uh, Sunday, I think. School tomorrow."

"You wish!" laughed Zac.

"Huh?"

"It's Monday today, Tay."

"Hmmph."

"So who has the 'honor' of getting to teach you?"

"Miss Malcovitch," groaned Tay, collapsing in a heap on the floor.

"Also known as Malcobitch."

"Or just plain 'Bitchy."

"So what's so bad about her?" asked Gareth, a suitably worried look on his face.

"No, Gareth, you see you got that question slightly wrong," corrected Zac. "It's 'what's good about her'".

"Oh,"

"She isn't that bad," said Tay, seeing Gareth's visibly worried look. "She's only paid to bitch at us - you should get off fairly lightly. Then again, she may just decide to give you a free trial and bitch at you anyway. Thing is she is quite a good teacher. Actually it's a miracle she manages to teach us anything - she has to be good to pull that off!"

"Yeah, I guess so - what was her greatest achievement? Getting you to tie your shoelaces?"

A pair of pillows promptly clobbered me to death.

"Good morning, boys," smiled Diane as we all ambled, stretching and yawning, into the kitchen.

"Morning, mom," replied Tay, giving her a hug and a kiss before falling into his place at the table next to Tony. Gareth and I were just about to sit down when she cleared her throat, hands on hips.

"Ground rules," she smiled, "include giving your host's mother a hug and a kiss in the mornings, or she'll refuse to feed you."

I smiled and gave her a bear hug and a peck on the cheek before re- joining Tay at the table.

"What time's Miss M. arriving?"

"Oh no," said Diane in mock annoyance. "Looks like I forgot to call her to say you were back today."

Tay, Zac and Ike looked at each other in utter disbelief. The Hanson household had very few rules, but the ones that existed were non-negotiable. One such rule applied to the schooling: at least twenty hours a week plus homework - any missed due to gigs etc. (bar tours) had to be made up, one way or another. This was very unusual.

"Are you serious? You really didn't call her?"

"Well, your father figured seeing as you had done six hours a day in England, you had worked off the next week or so."

"Dad said that?"

"He reasoned that your grades were good enough for you to have a break. He's taking you out somewhere today."

"He's HERE? MOM!"

"Don't wake him up just yet, Tay - he got back very late last night."

"Where's he taking us?" asked Zac, practically bouncing out of his seat.

"He wouldn't say. He told me I'd worry too much if I knew, so you're bound to enjoy it whatever it is!"

"Oh cool!"

"Now eat your breakfast before it gets cold! I'm gonna go see the little ones."


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