A/N: Here's another tour bus tale, this time with slightly less sleep deprivation, but it's definitely still there. This section follows the first two and is set right after "Presidents & Problems," though there's one minor detail from "Beach Clubs & BFFs" that I included even though the timing is off, but I changed the detail so much that the timing doesn't really matter. You'll see. Thank you so much for your reviews! Please read and leave some more :D

Austin couldn't remember a time he'd been this tired, hungry, and embarrassingly turned on all at once. His bangs still held flecks of gristle, his swollen feet propped on a pink beaded pillow, his chest against the gauze of Ally's upper arm. Between them, on his tour bus bunk bed, his laptop played some black-and-white movie about a guy in an overcoat and a girl who liked to wear hats, and sometimes they were kissing. It was about as boring as his eight AM Algebra class last semester.

One of the few things he had paid attention to was how often the girl's facial expression changed. It only reminded him of these last two weeks on tour and the changes happening that somehow felt like whiplash and the most inevitable detour at the same time. While he didn't need a pro/con list or some serious one-on-one talk (stuff he thought she lived by), he did feel pretty messed up and one hundred percent confused when Ally was acting completely normal around Trish and Dez, but was all lips and hands and hips when they were alone. And just like the black-and-white close-up of the innocent, closed-mouth smooch of her movie, there had been no dialogue. There was no mention of their not-so-innocent shower choreography or how they slept in his bunk most nights or that lingering good luck, full-body hug she'd given him backstage in Connecticut that made him almost too excited to go on stage, especially in a stadium filled with twelve-year-old girls and their moms.

A random, tap-dancing musical number started with the two leads on a giant staircase. He felt horrible. Here was an innocent expression of joy, and he was lying next to his best friend in an empty bus in broad-nine-in-the-morning-daylight wanting to smear kisses all over her. He hadn't slept in thirty odd hours, eaten in nine, and he swore there was an almost visible haze of delicious bacon fog hovering somewhere in the general direction of her conservative pastel pajamas.

He self-consciously repositioned his arms on the bed, careful not to move the cushion from under his feet. The open blister on his heel scraped against a sequined flower, and he hissed through his teeth.

"Austin?" Ally's doe eyes were all round and worried, and it made him feel like a total wimp.

"I'm fine," he said. He pretended to focus on overcoat and hat-girl's conversation in a newsroom as they both smoked cigarettes by a window overlooking the most fake backdrop of New York City he'd ever seen.

"Are you sure? Your feet look like two slabs of raw meat."

He surveyed his blistered toes, wondering if he could ever watch The Wizard of Oz again. After running around the Smithsonian, dodging tour guides, and attempting to dance for the President, those silver-not-ruby slippers had torn his feet to angry pink shreds of pain.

The blisters had even thrown off his balance, which wouldn't have been a big deal since the tour was over. But, the combination of his hobbling and Dez's midnight bacon ended in a mess of tripping bodies, flipping frying pans, and flying pig grease. And it would have been funny if the end result wasn't a first-degree burn that spanned most of Ally's left arm and reached all the way to her collarbone.

Despite the degree of the burn, which made little sense to him anyway, Austin insisted Ally go to the hospital. He carried her inside, stepping as carefully as possible because the floor was wet and he was wearing Dez's tiger paw slippers. Trish was more than happy to let him know #AustinTigerSlippers was trending on Tweeter. That wasn't really a surprise considering all of the cell phone pics taken during their four freakin' hours in the waiting room.

When they did leave with a prescription for some over-the-counter burn ointment, Dez and Trish said they wanted to walk to CVS while he and Ally rested up in the bus. That was two hours ago, and neither of them had slept at all.

Ally closed his laptop and leaned over him to place it carefully on the carpet. The ends of her hair swept across his neck. "Austin, what's wrong?"

Taking a good five seconds to decide just how stupid he was going to sound, he stared at her and sighed. "Honestly, you smell like bacon, and all I want to do is devour you."

With that as some sort of half-sensible warning, he leaned upright and pushed his face into her hair. When her fingers stroked his back and tugged at his shirt, he wondered how exactly she was taking his use of the word "devour." Bare-chested, he kissed her above the bandage, then her earlobe, then her mouth.

He hesitantly slid his hand under her tank top, stopping at her ribs when he noticed she wasn't kissing him back anymore. Opening his eyes, he could see hers were avoiding him.

"Austin…you don't think I'm a trollop, do you?"

He squinted. "Is that like a kind of cookie or pastry?" It sounded tasty.

"No. A trollop is…well…you know." She made a vague gesture with her hands. "A wayward woman."

He shook his head. "I'm not following."

She scrunched her mouth to the side, and whispered, "Skank."

"No! That's ridiculous. You're like the last person I'd ever call that." He fiddled with the closed curtains of his bed. "You don't think I'm like, well, like man candy, do you?"

She frowned. "Is that candy that only men eat…or a man made from candy?"

"Neither. I don't really know what man candy is. I think I meant to say bus candy."

"So," she said, lips pursed. "Are you trying to tell me you found Dez's hidden stash of Starbursts?"

He pressed his palms against his eyelids, realizing that he was lame and he did want to talk about this. "I mean…are you…are we…just having fun, and we've been so close on the bus because we're around each other all the time and my bed head is adorable?" He shot her a nervous grin. "Or is this…do you like me?"

She smacked his chest, hard. "Austin! Of course I like you. Were you not there when we had that whole everything-is-better-when-you're-around conversation? We were in Seattle? You stopped your concert three times? Trish had to pull us apart? Any of this familiar?"

He rubbed the spot on his skin and rolled his eyes. "Yes, I was there. But, we said that stuff when we were friends all the time. You know, there's no way I can make it without ya, do it without ya, be here without ya…stuff like that."

"Did you just say 'were' friends? Like were in the sense of an action or state of being occurring or existing in the past?"

This Ally sounded just like pre-tour, mostly rested Ally. Hearing her talk like a dictionary, sitting between his legs, hand casually on his thigh, was making him uncomfortably agitated again.

He coughed. "Yes, 'were friends' as in now we're not really friends, like maybe you're my girlfriend…if you want to be."

She mockingly shrugged her shoulders. "I guess so."

"Don't get too excited." He laughed.

He wasn't sure if anyone could blush as quickly as Ally, because her cheeks lit up like a clap-on lamp. Her gaze was lower than he wanted, and then the ghost-like pressure of her fingers was there, barely there, but there. "I think you're excited enough for the both of us."

He'd always thought if this ever happened with her, he'd be smooth and cool, not choking, literally choking, like a goof. Did he just call himself a goof? Was he in the third grade? He cleared his throat. "I was trying to hide that."

"That seems kind of hard." She jostled her head back and forth with a cheesy smile. "The Queen of Puns strikes again."

He would have at least chuckled, if her hand didn't press against him. She hesitated, flexed her fingers, slowly moved up, down, up, then up some more until her palm slid down past the elastic of his pajama pants.

Her eyes widened. "You are not wearing boxers. 'Are' as in the present tense describing what is happening in the present. Why?"

He grunted, trying to concentrate. "I ran out of clean ones yesterday. Dez ran out too. He suggested I go commando."

"Okay! I'll now agree whenever you say you and Dez are closer than Trish and I. Trish and I do not talk about stuff like that. Well, there's guy stuff, and sometimes…"

"Ally!" He knew whining was losing him cool points, but she'd been lingering on his pelvic bone for what felt like fifty-thousand minutes, and he was about to lose his mind.

"Oh, right, sorry. Back to the task at hand." She beamed. "And I thought I'd be bad at dirty talk. Here we go point A to point B."

Point B was an awesome place to be, a place he wanted to live forever, or at least until a point C was reached. Or however that lettering worked.

She was working at an extremely gentle, leisurely pace. "Is this alright? Am I hurting you?"

He bucked into her hand, moaning. "Yes, no…I mean….yes, amazing and no, not hurting. Faster would be even better."

Her grip tightened, rubbing harder. He groaned in , he noticed her expression of determination, tongue poking out of her mouth.

Seconds later, her goal was reached as he shivered and shuddered like he was locked in a walk-in freezer. A few tissues and some repositioning after that, they were lying down again.

Kissing her shoulder, his hand was creeping north when she held him by the wrist. "What's wrong?"

She chewed the corner of her mouth. "Can we pick this up later? I'm starving."

"I could eat my weight in bacon right now," he said.

She winced. "Can we not talk about the food that violently melted my skin off?"

He pulled his shirt on and gingerly stepped out of bed. "You make bacon sound like a gremlin or something. Ooh, we should make sandwiches and watch Gremlins!"

She brushed past him in a hurry. "Let's focus on the sandwiches first."

He could hear her opening and closing drawers from the kitchen area when his phone vibrated. He picked it up from the floor, realizing he had eight unread texts. Seven were from Dez, the first letting him know they got the ointment, and the other six describing a squirrel he watched gnaw on a huge slice of pizza by the Lincoln Memorial. Trish's was sent fifteen minutes ago, asking him to text her back when they were decent, and that subs and chips were waiting for them on the table.

He walked into the kitchen, hoping he wasn't blushing, pretty positive he was ready to go back to Miami where walls and privacy existed. And he could tell everyone that Ally was his girlfriend. Tweeter was going to explode.