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Pete and Patrick have a certain shtick when it comes to Patrick's birthday. A certain pattern. It goes something like this: Pete tries to get Patrick to do something crazy. Patrick resists.
Example A-- That thing they never talk about with the pool table and the lighter on Patrick's twentieth birthday.
Example B--The extravaganza with mixed drinks at his twenty-first.
Example C--The stripper fiasco at his twenty-second.
Pete's pretty accustomed to the way things go down, so it takes him giving Patrick three shots and a particularly frilly and alcohol-rich mixed drink at Patrick's twenty-third and Patrick actually drinking them to realize things aren't following type. By that point, though, Patrick is already well on his way toward totally sloshed, expansive and affectionate with everyone around him, and then he actually starts grooving in a laid-back white-boy way to the music, and well. Pete isn't going to mess that up.
He goes to see Patrick the next afternoon, because that's what he would have done before. He and Andy once made out seriously enough that both of them had lost their shirts by the end, and they were fine afterward. It's not a big deal. Though, to be fair, they'd both been trying to make an ideological point about human sexuality and strike a blow against bigotry.
Pete managed to get the hot girl in his Philosophy class to finally pay attention to him with that trick.
The point is, it wasn't a big deal then, and it won't be now. At the door, he nobly resists the urge to pound on it the way he might have if he hadn't been quite so instrumental in getting Patrick totally wasted the night before. When Patrick answers the door, he's wearing a rumpled t-shirt, boxers, and a hat pulled so low over his eyes that it's practically a face mask.
"Dude," Pete says, and the face mask tilts enough that Pete can see the corner of Patrick's glasses shining reproachfully at him.
"Yeah, laugh it up," Patrick says, shoving the hat up enough to press his fingers to his forehead, and Pete had meant to, because it's Pete's god-given right as someone who hadn't gotten drunk the night before to laugh at the hangovers, but Patrick looks tired and sick and not so much like someone who remembers having a good time the night before. He had, though, or at least, Pete thinks he had.
Pete scratches at the side of his neck, and opens his mouth to say something, then closes it. What comes out instead is, "So, did you have a good time?"
"Yeah," Patrick says. "It was awesome. Thanks for getting me trashed, by the way."
"I can't believe you let me," Pete says, bouncing on his feet, deciding to brazen it out. "And, man, I'm sorry, but you've turned into an affectionate drunk. That was fucking awesome, I'm gonna have to do it again."
Patrick squints at him, and Pete forces a laugh, then waves a hand, saying, "Sorry, sorry. No, really, I'm sorry, I didn't expect you to actually drink all of them, since when do you listen to me? You're a pretty sweet kisser, though," and Patrick winces.
"Yeah, thanks," he says. "Um, Pete, I'm kinda. I'm thinking about going back to bed, so." His body language has closed off, arms crossed over his chest, and it's such a contrast to how he'd been the night before, laughing, eyes unfocused and arm slung easily around Pete's waist when Pete brought Patrick back to Patrick's hotel room at the end of the party. Patrick slides his hand up to cover his mouth and Pete remembers, suddenly and vividly, the way it felt to have Patrick's mouth pressed against his, the lazy, lax, wet kisses Pete had opened helplessly for, Patrick's lips sliding down the line of Pete's jaw. The way Patrick had leaned in, laughing, singing, "It's my biiiiiiirthday, you gotta give me what I want," shimmying a little, easy and playful the way he was when he'd forgotten the need for self-consciousness, until Pete had needed to put a hand on Patrick's waist, reeling him in so he didn't fall.
"No, hold up," Pete says, putting up a hand. "Are you actually, like, seriously dude, it's not a big deal." He apologizes again, because that seems like what he's expected to do, and Patrick gets a little frown line between his eyebrows.
"No, that's okay," Patrick says. "I'm sorry I was a handful." He doesn't really meet Pete's eyes, and Pete fakes a laugh, saying, "Hah, handsy handful," but Patrick doesn't laugh, just squints again like his eyes are bothering him, and says, "sorry," then, "I'm gonna, I think I'm going to go back to bed."
"Sure, yeah," Pete says. "Get some sleep, Romeo." Patrick winces again and flips him off, and Pete laughs, slapping him on the shoulder before heading out the door.
They're a quiet group down in the lobby later that day. Patrick still looks like he's hiding, hunched under his hat and hoodie, and giving one-word answers to everyone. Joe, Charlie, and Dirty are all hung over.
Pete sidles over to Andy with his hands in his pockets and knocks him with his shoulder. Andy elbows him back, but it's Andy's usual automatic retaliation, not a sign of bad temper. Pete doesn't bother saying anything else, just settles in with his back against the glass window that looks out on the street. He scans the lobby again, but it hasn't changed in the second since he last looked at it, polished marble floors and black shiny counters staffed by painfully professional kids in suits, and then he's looking at Patrick again.
Patrick sniffs and rubs at the back of his nose, then wipes his hand on the back of his jeans. It's pretty attractive, and Pete shakes his head, looking down to stare at the reflection of his shoes on the floor because he means it a little less sarcastically than he should. Patrick is attractive to Pete, and Pete has always enjoyed looking at him. He's a pleasant part of Pete's internal statuary, like Joe's hands as he cradles a guitar or Andy's flamboyant back when he wanders around topless backstage prior to performances. Something Pete could look at and enjoy without urgency, pleased with his choice in best friends. But now Pete has to roll his eyes at himself, because pleasant isn't the right word at the moment.
Whatever, it's fine. To prove it, Pete pushes off from the wall and wanders over to Patrick, getting right into his personal space and bracing an elbow on the slope of Patrick's shoulder, leaning hard. Patrick shifts and takes it, but Pete catches the annoyed twitch Patrick gives before he settles, and so he leans in more and noses at Patrick's neck.
"What. Come on, Pete," Patrick says.
"What, what," Pete says. "Hey, are you still hung over?"
"No," Patrick says resolutely, and Pete straightens upright, but leaves his arm draped around Patrick's shoulders.
"Awesome," he says, and smacks a kiss on the side of Patrick's hat over his temple. "That's my best dude. All grown up and a rockstar and shit."
"Yeah, whatever," Patrick says, body warm under Pete's arm and in a line down Pete's side, and then Dan comes across the lobby toward Pete with a phone outstretched in one hand. Pete takes it and finds himself talking to the label publicist, who wants to run through a couple schedule adjustments. Pete, distracted by the voice on the other end of the line and trying to follow the woman's rapid-fire sentence structure, loosens his grip on Patrick's shoulders. By the time Pete gets off the phone, Patrick is again across the room and sitting on one of the couches grouped in an island around a coffee table with his laptop out. Pete can't tell if Patrick's actually working or just faking it. When he goes over, he sees that Patrick's jacking the hotel's free wireless to read the news headlines.
"Damn," Pete says, settling next to him. "Your birthday didn't even make the New York Times. That's a bummer."
"Shit," Patrick says. "I guess you'll just have to try harder next time."
"Oh, don't worry," Pete says. "I will."
"No property damage, no trips to the hospital, and no tattoos," Patrick says absently, and then they both read an article about a minor earthquake in Kent, England.
"Wow, that was boring," Pete says when they reach the bottom.
"So don't read over my shoulder," Patrick says.
"No, I want to see what you come up with next," Pete says, and Patrick clicks on the business section. He's got such a smug look on his face that Pete kind of wants to laugh or kiss him for real or something, so appreciative of his Patrick-ness, this dude that thinks clicking on an article about Intel processors is a witty comeback.
Instead, he reads an article about Intel processors and then another one about the Dow Jones and then Patrick apparently gives up or something because the next article is an interview with an up-and-coming hip-hop star. After that, he checks his email, and Pete has just enough time to read, "HEY SEXXXXAY-hot pictures, birthday boy," on the subject line of the top unread email and note the attachment icon before Patrick toggles to another window.
"What, I want to see those," Pete says, trying for humor, but his brain starts throwing images at him of Patrick kissing other boys and girls, and it's disturbing how easily he can picture it, like Pete's been specially saving all the times he caught Patrick and Anna kissing in back hallways and private rooms just so he can replay the confident tilt of Patrick's head and the way he always closes his eyes as he leans in.
"You've already seen me make an ass of myself," Patrick reminds him. He shifts on the couch, pulling away from Pete's encroaching elbow.
"Yeah, but," Pete says, and: "I'm going to see them anyway," and: "stop being such a lamer, man."
"Stop being such an asshole, man," Patrick says, mimicking him in a stupid voice, and gets up from the couch.
He thinks about it sometimes. His life has a lot of stops and starts and repetitions. He doesn't blame anyone other than himself for his fucked-up head, he's had enough therapy and time to figure out that Pete Wentz's biggest enemy is Pete Wentz, but he also knows enough about the way his life works to know why he constantly circles back on the same couple of things that are his obsessions of the moment.
The point is, he thinks about it. On travel nights when everyone else is sleeping and Pete is awake and listening to the whine of the road under the soundtrack of a bad kung fu movie looping through the DVD player. When they're all waiting in the green room for a TV interview and Patrick is wandering around singing his latest R&B song of the week. In between dialing numbers and texting friends and writing emails and shaking hands and signing autographs and taking pictures.
If it had just been some girl drunk and kissing him and tugging at his belt buckle, Pete wouldn't have left. He knows that. He wouldn't have, but it's Patrick, and it's different, and he knows Patrick so much better than some random girl, and Patrick doesn't do drunken one-night stands that Pete can write into songs for Patrick to sing about later.
He's been a lot of firsts for Patrick, Pete knows, but that. That's just not a first Pete's willing to be. Patrick, who only ever dated one person, and that one for four years. Pete did the right thing, no question. Pete sometimes can't help but second-guess his choices, because his track record isn't so good, but this one he knows is right. Hardcore right.
He thinks about it, though. Sometimes.
They're on their way down the hallway at their record label, and Pete goes to elbow Patrick and point out the Jay-Z record the way he always does, but then he realizes he can't, because Patrick is all the way on the other side of their little group, talking to Joe about a guitar riff and not looking at Pete at all. Patrick does elbow Joe and point out the Jay-Z record, though. Pete feels obscurely insulted. Somehow, Joe has stolen Pete's spot in the Jay-Z ritual, or Patrick has stolen Pete's, and it wouldn't be a problem if it were an accident of fate or something, except that it keeps happening. Pete, reaching for Patrick and not finding him.
He slams into the SUV scowling, and Andy gives him a sidelong look. Patrick gets into the front passenger seat while Joe gets into back and points at Pete, saying, "Hahhhh, bitch seat," and then, "whoa, down boy," when Pete glares at him.
"Fuck you," Pete says, staring at the back of Patrick's neck. Joe looks at him and then, like Andy, shifts closer to the door and turns his face toward the window, leaving Pete on a small, leather-upholstered island at the center of the bench. Pete keeps looking steadily at Patrick, and he can tell by the way Patrick holds his shoulders that he's aware of Pete's eyes on him. Patrick's used to Pete looking at him, though. Pete stared at Patrick for two hours once when he was at the tail end of a long month of sleep deprivation, just sat opposite him in the back of their shitty van, both of them sitting on the floor and slouching down against the sides, Pete's head banging on metal with each bump in the road while Patrick slept or listened to music or talked about eighties cartoons with Joe and their old merch guy. It had been soothing to watch Patrick's thoughts cross his face like weather patterns in the sky and know that none of it was very bad. Patrick thinks in music, not horrors. The closest he gets to derangement is when he's got a song half-formed that refuses to work itself out.
Pete's entire band is like that, really, criminally laid back, but Patrick is the one Pete likes to watch, maybe because Patrick makes it seem like something special. Except, Pete can't see Patrick at all, really, right now. Patrick's not letting him the way he usually does, not giving in to the demand of Pete's attention.
He starts kicking irregularly on the back of Patrick's seat.
Patrick puts up with Pete's harassment briefly, but anything out of rhythm drives him up the wall, and he snaps, "Fucking quit it, Pete, you're being an asshole," after less than a minute, not turning around in his seat.
"What," Pete says. "What am I doing?" He aims an extra-hard kick toward Patrick's hidden kidneys, already starting to laugh a little.
"Wrecking the upholstery," Patrick says exasperatedly, rotating to stare over the headrest at Pete. "What, are we trying to make rock legends, or something? Pete, come on. An SUV barely gets you a footnote." By the end, he's started to smile a little bit, shaking his head, and Pete toes the seat-back before dropping his foot to the floor, grinning back.
"Whatever, no, look." Pete jabs his chin toward their driver, a six-foot-tall burly woman with solid forearms and a no-nonsense appearance. "She's totally reaching for her cell phone, gonna call TMZ for a report. I think it'll be more than a footnote. I'm going to be a star." The driver smiles slightly, but otherwise ignores them, both hands still wrapped firmly around the wheel as they wend their way through Manhattan traffic.
Patrick deepens his voice like a corny TV announcer, saying, "Fall Out Boy bassist Pete Wentz, in an act of rockstar temper, destroyed the interior of his label's SUV on Monday morning..."
"I dunno, pretty lame, dude," Joe says, looking away from the window toward Pete. "You can do better."
"Fuck yeah, I can," Pete says, but Patrick has already turned back to face the front, and the whole thing is less fun without him. He gives Patrick's seat another kick, and Patrick aims a warning look at him over his shoulder. "What?" Pete says, and keeps doing it each time Patrick turns to face front, until Patrick finally turns all the way sideways in his seat and leans his back against the door handle so that he can keep a cautious eye on him.
"Hey, what did you think of that new producer-deal?" Pete says once he has Patrick's full attention. Patrick immediately loses the annoyed crease gathering between his eyebrows and drapes himself forward over the headrest.
"Confusing as hell," Patrick says.
"Maybe worth it?" Pete says, and Patrick shrugs.
"Better get Bob to get our lawyers to look it over."
"Nah," Pete says. He captures two of Patrick's fingers where they're looped around the metal post of the headrest and tugs a little. "I figured we'd just go for it, sight unseen. Like trusting little lambs."
"Sure," Patrick says lightly, and scissors his fingers apart to grab onto Pete's thumb.
"Mm, lambchops," Joe says.
Patrick laughs, then lets Pete's hand drop, pulling his hand back behind the barrier of the seat. "Do you remember that kid's show?" he says.
"Yo, with the freaky red-haired lady?" Pete says. He rubs the pad of his index finger across his thumbnail where Patrick had gripped him. "My brother loved that show."
"Really," Joe says, grinning evilly.
"Yeah, it had that fucking song," Pete says, looking at Patrick. Sure enough, Patrick, looking horrified, is already starting to hum it.
He breaks off long enough to say, "Pete, I'm going to fucking kill you," and they spend the rest of the car-ride singing, "This Is The Song That Never Ends."
That all feels normal, so normal that Pete starts to wonder if he'd imagined everything. Hell, it could have just been an accident of chance that Pete and Patrick's fates didn't align for a couple weeks. Pete tends to get a little paranoid after too long on the road, a little strung out and hallucinatory. He talks to his therapist about it that afternoon over the phone, who says carefully, "Have you been feeling particularly worn down lately?" and Pete has to admit that the tour's barely started. He's not even really sleep-deprived yet.
"Hey, sorry, I have to go," he says instead. "It's almost showtime."
Everything's fine, Pete thinks right before they go onstage. They all high-five. Patrick's palm is warm and rough against his for a brief, hard moment of contact and then everything is moving fast, fast, fast, and they are on.
Everything's so on, everything's so fine, and Pete can feel it pumping through his veins, making him spin and run and then grab the mic like he owns it, because he does, or if he doesn't then he deserves to and that's all that matters. He doesn't know how he could have thought that something was wrong, and then he goes over halfway through the show and leans his head into Patrick's cheek like he has a thousand times before and Patrick steps away. Patrick steps away, almost like an accident, like he didn't mean to. Pete misses his next two chords, fingers strumming gracelessly across the strings and loosening from the fret board and then they are looking at each other and Pete can see his own shock reflected on Patrick's widened eyes even as Patrick's mouth moves onward in the song on autopilot. Patrick steps back toward him, but Pete is backing up and spinning away, concentrating on his fingering like it deserves ten times the attention he'd ever given it before, like he's finding his way through a brand new song for the first time instead of something he's played too many times to count.
The rest of the concert is so shaky Pete's surprised they don't get booed off the stage. Andy and Joe are solid but Pete and Patrick are not, and by the end of the first break, Joe is eyeing everyone warily, Charlie and Patrick's guitar tech are asking in tense whispers if they need anything, and Patrick is looking a little wild-eyed.
Pete drags Patrick off to the side and boxes him in behind an equipment case. Patrick starts apologizing before they even stop moving, saying, "Sorry, sorry, I don't know what happened out there," sounding honestly baffled.
"Are we good?" Pete demands.
"Yeah-yes," Patrick says, looking down and then up, meeting Pete's eyes firmly.
"Are you sure?" Pete asks, and Patrick doesn't say anything. "Patrick," Pete repeats. "Are we good." They aren't touching, but they're standing so close they might as well be, trying to hear each other over the noise of the crowd.
"We're fine," Patrick says, and they aren't, but Pete has an internal clock counting down in his head and Charlie seven feet away on his left telling him time's up, so he reluctantly backs away and lets Patrick move past him. They do their quick change and run back out there, but Patrick stays even more anchored to his mike stand and Pete gives him wide berth for the rest of the show, walking forward a couple steps, then retreating back when he gets within Patrick's field of vision.
Afterwards, the only thing Patrick will say is, "I think you startled me," brow wrinkling like he's as clueless as Pete is.
Pete says, "Yeah, okay. The stage is still a little unfamiliar."
"Yeah," Patrick says. He has his laptop in front of him, the screen's twinned reflections shining in his glasses lenses as he scans something. It's making him hard to read.
Pete leans forward and tips the laptop lid down so he can see Patrick's face clearly. "So. This was just. An off day," Pete says, and Patrick nods. "So, yeah," Pete says. "Yeah. For me, too. I'll try not to startle you next time, Janet."
"Fuck off, Norman Bates," Patrick says mildly.
"Hey," Pete says, struck. "Maybe I should dress up for the next show."
"Yeah, maybe," Patrick says, turning his attention back to his laptop and lifting the screen.
"No, you're right," Pete says. "That would be lame. Also, I hate wearing fake boobs. It messes with my style."
He feels a little gun-shy after that, though. They're fine. Off-stage, they're fine. On-stage, they're fine, but Pete keeps his distance anyway for a couple of shows, because it's true. He doesn't need to be all up in Patrick's face all the time. Sometimes Patrick needs space. He wishes Patrick would just fucking step up and ask for it, though, instead of making Pete feel like he just got turned down in front of thirty-thousand people.
He goes down on his knees in front of Patrick, still playing his bass, but that's as close as he gets the first night. Patrick looks down at him and shakes his head and Pete shakes his head back, grinning. Patrick goes back to singing and Pete arches backward until he ends up on his back on the stage, hips tilted toward the sky, playing toward the "FOB" up in the lighting rig. He's not as flexible as he used to be, but he bets he still looks good.
He gets up and brushes into Joe as they pass each other. Joe yells, "Hot, dude," making it clear that he's spelling hot with two t's in his head, and then goes to rock out at the front of the stage, afro flying.
After the show, Pete sits on his bus with his laptop on the kitchenette table. Hemingway is sprawled across the hallway near his foot. Every once in a while, for no reason Pete can figure out, he jumps up and makes a circuit of the room, collar jangling in time with his waddling steps, before lying back down again. This last round put Hemingway with his stomach firmly on Pete's foot. Pete flexes his toes into Hemingway's fur and clicks idly from window to window on his screen. Joe and a couple of their techs are at the other end of the kitchenette, on the couch watching X-Men 2 and laughing at all the explosions, but Pete's not too interested. He's already seen it, plus he imagines it's way less entertaining without the pot.
He signs into one of his email accounts, mostly for something to do, and finds an email and attachment titled, "Patrick's bday pix" waiting for him from a friend he vaguely remembers seeing at Patrick's birthday party, an amateur photographer with higher aspirations. The first couple shots are pretty standard arty shots of the nightclub full of people that Pete skips past quickly. He smiles at the next one, which shows Joe scowling at the camera with his arm wrapping around Patrick's neck. Patrick has his head tipped back, grinning, miming panic, and Pete remembers how the next minute he'd swept in, shouting, "I'll save you!" jumping on Joe's back and spilling everyone's drinks. He flips past the next few ones of Andy and himself wrestling near the DJ booth and then another one of everyone grouped around the birthday boy, watching Patrick blow out the candles on his cake.
The next one is a close up of him and Patrick in what looks like mid-conversation, their heads bent toward each other over their little plates of cake, and then the one after that is of Pete mashing his cake into Patrick's face, laughing uproariously, while Patrick stands with his palms uplifted and eyes closed, not even trying to fend Pete off. Pete snorts, because it's still funny now a month later, but he feels stupidly wistful about the whole thing too, like he wants to be off this bus and back there at that party with all their friends and Patrick, happy and letting Pete do whatever he wanted because he knew what Pete came up with wouldn't ever be that bad.
Pete makes a face at himself, thinking, cheer up emo kid. It's Patrick.
He writes back: dude smokng hot pics bro and closes the browser window halfway through the roll.
The next morning, he's got an email back, reading, hahahahahah especially that one of you and Paitrck. but i got yr back.
Pete's not really that awake when he reads it the first time, so he doesn't think much of it until after he's had breakfast and comes back to find the email still open on the screen. He reads it again and thinks, what? and clicks on the link to the pictures again, but it's just all the same ones, Patrick, him, Patrick, random people, cake, Patrick. What you'd expect, really, from a party of their friends and alcohol. Further down, though, the subject matter changes as his friend wandered away from the party. Arty shots of empty hotel hallways, a picture of an elderly couple getting off an elevator still dressed in their evening clothes. A potted plant. Pete's been in too many empty hotels after midnight to find the pictures all that interesting.
The first picture is too far away and badly out of focus. Pete can't quite tell what it is except that there are two people at the end of the shot, tangled together, and one of them is wearing a bright yellow hat. He thinks, no one would ever know what that was, but the next picture is clearer, and the one after that is clearer still. He doesn't remember putting his hand up to touch Patrick's face, but he did, obviously he did, leaning in to Patrick and Patrick's hands on his lower back, and it looks different from this perspective than he remembers it being. He doesn't remember feeling so hungry for it; he doesn't remember Patrick looking so focused. He's not sure how he managed to stop.
He stares at those three pictures for a long time, and then he saves them on his hard drive.
whos seen these, he writes.
just you dude, he gets back. patricks a good guy.
hes an affectionate drunk, Pete writes back, and then, feeling guilty, hahahah.
Joe comes out from the bunk then, and Pete hits F11 on the keyboard so quickly he almost jams his finger, trying to clear the screen, but Joe just shuffles past him on his way to the coffeemaker. He barely has his eyes open, and hits himself in the forehead with the cabinet while looking for a mug.
"Joe, sit down, dude," Pete says, standing up and taking over coffee-making duties, shoving Joe toward the table.
Joe makes a noise that sounds like, "Glgh-urgh," and then, "I fucking hate waking up."
"Can't wake up if you never go to sleep," Pete says, but bends and gives Joe a kiss on his abused forehead when he sets down the mug in front of him.
"I love you so much," Joe says. "So much. So much."
Pete grins and settles down opposite him, then slides his laptop closed.
The thing about the pictures--those motherfucking pictures--is that Pete knows, he absolutely knows that the right thing to do is delete them, never look at them again. They're not important. Patrick would be mortified if he ever knew anything like them existed, which makes Pete feel, obscurely, like he should be embarrassed in Patrick's stead.
Pete's not embarrassed, though, and he keeps looking at them, caught by details he notices but doesn't remember. He looks at the pictures enough that he starts to forget what it was like to see the scene from an insider's perspective, so that his memory of the event gets transmuted to a four-by-six square, so that he's on the outside looking in.
It's wrong and a little dirty, even though Pete hasn't progressed to masturbating while he looks at them, and the wrongness is just heightened by the way Patrick treats him so utterly normally outside of the shows. It's like Pete has two Patricks in his head now, the one that he's known forever and who will crack jokes about bad nineties rap with him and mock the way he orders his iced coffees, and the one who backs him up against hotel hallways and makes out with him. It's fucking confusing.
Pete knows that he's doing the wrong thing every time he opens the folder, but it's not hurting anyone, he thinks. Pete doesn't have a unified philosophical code or anything, just fragments of ideas he's held onto over the years, but he thinks this one is pretty solid: it's better to do the right thing in action and the wrong thing in thought. Fewer people get hurt that way.
Let it go, his therapist's voice says in his mind. Pete's never really been able to let anything go though, he just fakes it real good. It's good, he thinks, clicking on the file folder again, that he knows that. It's like progress for the self-aware emotional cripples.
Pete's not precisely sure where they are now, other than Canada. One of their interviews had included a translator simultaneously speaking in French, though, so he's betting Quebec. It doesn't matter; the kids love the show despite Pete's geographical uncertainty, and Pete kind of loves them in return.
He runs up the steps on-stage to play toward Andy for a moment, then back down again and over toward Joe, then back, mouthing the words of the song Patrick's singing as he walks. It's a haphazard but consistent semi-circle with Patrick at its center, still just out of reach. He walks forward and then takes a step back, concentrating on his rhythm for a second. Then a step forward again, and when he does so Patrick turns away from the mic slightly, moving toward Pete for one shuffling step that could just be Patrick taking advantage of the break in the verse to lean into his guitar-playing, except for the look he sneaks over his shoulder at Pete. He has to return to the mic a beat later, but he stays angled a little bit on the front of the stage. Pete takes another step forward and leans his forehead against Patrick's back and closes his eyes, jacket fabric hot and a little damp on his skin, feeling the flex of muscles shifting as Patrick plays. Patrick's voice buzzes in Pete's head, reverberating through his chest, and he leans back into Pete just a little bit. His voice doesn't change as he sings and neither of them miss a chord or drop rhythm, but when Pete draws away at the end of the verse, he runs up the stairs and spins, taking a jump from the top of the set of stairs to capture that weightlessness and hold it for just a moment longer.
Andy says, "Good show," on their way backstage at the end, and Pete grins at him, still feeling energy sparking through his muscles like the silver confetti stuck to his skin from their final song. He shakes his entire body and scrubs his hands through his hair, sending confetti flying.
"You've got--" Patrick says from behind him, and Pete feels his fingers on the back of Pete's neck. He hands Pete a small scrap of silver foil.
"Hey," Pete says, wrapping his hand around Patrick's fingers over the foil. "Good fucking show, man."
"Yeah, I think we did all right," Patrick says judiciously, but his smile belies his tone.
"All right," Pete repeats. He shakes his head to watch Patrick's smile bloom into a grin, teeth showing, and then butts him with his shoulder, reeling him back in with their clasped hands. Patrick shakes his hand loose and then turns his palms up as if to say what do you want from me, and Pete shakes his head again. "You're a piece of work, mister."
"Okay, Grandpa," Patrick says, and they lock eyes for a moment, grinning.
"Hey, movies tonight?" Pete asks. He's pushing his luck a little, maybe, but Patrick shrugs, so Pete turns around and calls for Joe, for Charlie, for Ryland, and so now they're definitely doing it.
He lets Joe be the one to bully Patrick away from his laptop, but he slides in next to Patrick on the couch as they cue up the DVD. Patrick glances at him and then back at the screen, face in profile. Pete thinks of the pictures for a second, the fucking pictures, Jesus, the ones that he'd been trying to forget about, and looks down at his lap before he realizes what he's doing and looks back up at the TV. He covers the lower half of his face with his hand, and his cheeks feel hot to the touch, flaming. Pete thinks, hah, flaming, and wants to shoot himself, just a little bit. He looks back over at Patrick, but Patrick is still watching the opening of the movie.
In the end, Pete's the one who wanders away from the movie first, too itchy to keep sitting there. His hands keep fiddling with his phone, but they have a no-typing rule when they're watching stuff all together. He wants to get out of his own head, but he lost the plot of the movie in the first ten minutes, too distracted, and now it's just all moving pictures for him. Everyone laughs, Patrick chuckling into his hand, sweater-covered elbow jostling Pete's arm, but when Pete looks at the screen, he can't find the thread of the joke.
He gets up, ignoring the curious look Patrick tosses at him, and pauses in front of the kitchenette, saying, "Popcorn?"
"Doritos," Joe says, rolling the r, so Pete fetches a bag from the cabinet and throws it toward him, managing to bean him in the head, accepting the one-fingered-salute Joe gives him in return as his due.
He settles in the back, in his rolling bedroom, sprawling out on his stomach with his latest book. Noise from the movie filters in through the closed door, leaving Pete feeling a little abandoned even though it had been his choice to leave. His collection of short stories are moderately enthralling; they capture his wandering attention enough that it takes Joe tapping on the door to tell him the gang is going to play Pictionary for him to realize the movie has ended.
"Yeah, give me a second," Pete calls through the door, tossing his book aside. He leaves his bedroom and walks back into the front lounge loudly, saying, "How was the movie, motherfuckers?"
He doesn't bother to wait to hear the answer, though, just the jeering from Charlie and Joe, and then he slots in after Ryland and Vicky T at one of the tables. He's across from Patrick, who is sorting out the prompt cards and talking to Mike over his shoulder, but Patrick slants a look over at Pete anyway, a little sideways grin, and Pete instantly wants to tell a joke so he can get it to turn into Patrick's full-fledged chuckle. He can't think of anything, though, so he just taps the table a few times and waits for the teams to form.
In the hot and heavy Pictionary game that follows, Joe tries to depict "kosher" by drawing a pig with a circle and slash across it, but Pete foils him by guessing "no hunting" and then "no feeding the animals," "paparazzi," "bourgeoisie," and "hippies" before Joe throws the board at him. In retaliation, Pete draws "capitalism" as a shitty statue of liberty, and then an ornately-detailed stack of pennies, which makes Joe guess, "Statue of Liberty," followed by "...money? What, come on. Dude! Fucking DaVinci over here," and other various insults to Pete's character that Pete ignores while adding cross-hatching to Lincoln's beard.
Patrick is saying, "Rooster, rooster, um, cock-a-doodle--Old McDonald Had a Farm?" on the other team, and Pete scoffs loudly, but then Victoria calls time, and Joe smacks the back of his head.
"Ow!" Pete says. "What the hell, man?"
"Why the fuck I pick you on my team, Jesus," Joe grumbles.
"My sexy skills," Pete says. "Don't worry, baby, I'll give it back in trade later." He smacks a kiss on Joe's cheek that Joe accepts glumly while staring at their counter, which is almost moving backwards on the board. When Pete straightens again, Patrick is looking at him, but only for a moment before Carden tosses out the next set of prompt cards.
The evening ends at three a.m. when the fleet of buses pulls off the freeway for a gas station stop and everyone goes their separate ways. Patrick isn't the first to leave, but he's not the last either, and Pete pretends he's not trying to find significance in that. They didn't really talk at all, while he was here, and Pete realizes when he's left sitting in the dirty lounge with his dog panting at his feet that he had expected to, somehow. He'd had a good time, but the kind of good time that left him disappointed afterwards. He'd expected something else, something other than Patrick's careless wave over his shoulder when Pete was talking to Ryland about Tupak.
His sidekick beeps with a new email. It's a google alert, nothing important, but he gratefully throws aside his thoughts to read a review of Infinity in Spanish using Babelfish. The reviewer doesn't like the album, but reading a negative review in Babelfish's broken version of English is more hilarious than hurtful, especially when it tells him that: "There is a good song in her but the rest of the album will put to him to sleep."
He thinks it's worth a try and puts his iPod on, letting Patrick sing a lullaby in his ear.
They play another three shows and do two radio interviews, first Pete and Andy, and then just Pete and Patrick together, waking up early and walking out blinking sleepy eyes at the sunlight. Pete isn't fond of mornings, but he likes them better when Patrick's at his elbow, squinting behind his glasses and muttering balefully.
"It feels like something died in my mouth," Patrick says.
"Whoa, I have to check this out," Pete says, and makes Patrick breathe on his face, then staggers back three steps, clutching at his throat and gagging while Patrick pursues him, trying to breathe on him again. "That is foul," Pete finally proclaims, and Patrick settles back, looking satisfied.
"I told you," Patrick says, and only then does he pull his toothbrush and toothpaste out of his backpack, brushing his teeth over the bushes as they wait for their ride.
"You're disgusting," Pete says amiably, and Patrick makes a face at him, growling so that toothpaste froths whitely over his lips and down his chin.
Pete's actually superfluous this morning. The radio station had requested an acoustic performance, which means that only Patrick is really required, but general band consensus is that Patrick gets crabby when he's forced to do too much publicity alone, and so Pete has hitched himself along for the ride on this one, which means that he cracks jokes and talks about their tour and the album-writing process, and Patrick cracks jokes and talks about their tour and the album-writing process, and then Pete gets to lean back and watch as Patrick settles in with his guitar and the hanging radio microphone. Patrick is a natural performer; it's how Pete knows that Patrick wasn't ever going to stay behind a drum riser, even if Pete, via Joe, hadn't come along to shake up Patrick's life plan; he plays automatically to an audience, and today, that audience is Pete. Pete watches Patrick sing and play, and something in his chest tightens almost painfully tightly when Patrick grins at him, and then melts into the soft and sappy affection Pete can't ever really express except in shitty internet blogs. He just nods his head in time with the beat and lets Patrick catch his eye, again and again.
One thing none of them ever really talk about in interviews is the way that, when Fall Out Boy first started, Patrick couldn't really sing. He could sing better than Joe or Pete (or Tim or Mike or any of the other rotating collection of assholes Pete and Joe and sometimes Patrick had managed to lure in to play for them), but he still couldn't sing well. He mumbled a lot and went flat and didn't project, and none of that really mattered, because Pete couldn't play bass too well and Joe was only mediocre on guitar and they were all just figuring shit out. Their first year was about a lot of stuff and only some of it was the band, but the part that was the band was mostly Patrick, growing up.
The studio is air-conditioned all to fuck and yet still carries the scent of coffee and cigarettes from the DJ who talks like a smoker and smells like that and car exhaust from his pre-interview break. Pete huddles in his hoodie and watches Patrick. He likes to look at him. It's been years and years since their first year so he should be used to this, but he still thinks: Jesus Christ, Patrick. Jesus.
There's a long silence after Patrick lets the last note die down, his head bent over the guitar. It's one of those old songs that Pete knows Patrick enjoys singing when he can get away with it, both because it's beautiful and suits Patrick's agile voice, and because it always surprises the shit out of the radio hosts. This time is no different, if the slightly stunned silence is anything to go by, and Pete just sits back and lets Patrick enjoy it.
Afterwards, they walk out into the sunshine of another beautiful day. Patrick is already humming something else, complete with finger snaps and other vocal percussion, and Pete distracts himself with his phone to stop from reaching out and grabbing hold of Patrick's shoulder, not to do anything but just to hold on.
They get to the venue and meet up with everyone else, and Joe says, "How'd it go?" He is still rubbing sleep out of the corner of his eyes.
"Fine, you slacker," Patrick says, but Pete hooks an arm around Patrick's neck and draws him in close, his body an off-balance, solid, warm shape against Pete's, and says, "He's our miracle, man." Patrick doesn't relax into Pete's grip but stays awkwardly stiff, and so Pete lets him go.
"I'm so proud," Joe says, fluttering his eyelashes. "We raised him well."
Patrick flips them both off underhand as they laugh, and then wanders back toward his computer. Joe drifts over as Pete's watching him walk away, and comes to rest leaning against Pete's side, arm draped on his shoulder. Pete shifts absently under him, steadying the weight. "So it went good, then," Joe says. It takes a second to filter its way in, and then Pete nods. "You're spacey today, dude," Joe observes, and it could just be Joe making conversation, or it could be his gentle reminder that Pete didn't sleep much last night and Joe noticed. In any case, he smacks Pete on the ass before heading back to nap on the couch, and Pete shakes himself awake. A moment later Dirty walks in toting his air gun and a napkin full of cooked mini-wieners from catering, and then Pete doesn't have to think at all anymore, and he doesn't see any of the rest of the guys until right before they all go on.
Sometimes, when Pete can't avoid it, he has other people walk Hemingway. It makes him feel like an asshole, though, like someone who has a personal assistant to order Christmas presents for his family or something, so most of the time Pete tries to walk his dog himself.
Pete does have a personal assistant. Sometimes he has two, depending on whether the record label or Clandestine needs something particular. Pete tries to pretend that he doesn't. But, the thing is, it gets his bills paid when he's on the road, and his mail forwarded, and the dude's a nice guy. Pete doesn't mind being called a sell out. He still buys all his own Christmas presents.
He takes Hemingway out for a walk early in the morning, after they've arrived at their next venue. Everyone else is sleeping, both on the crew, and on all the band buses. Everything is still dark, and quiet, all shadows on concrete and orange sodium lights. Some of them flicker on when he and his dog pass, then stay lit for a while afterward, marking his trail. Pete thinks that Hansel and Gretel ain't got shit on him, absently, idly, already turning the phrase over in his mind and seeing how it would look as a journal entry, while he waits for Hem to stop sniffing around a metal post. The leash jingles as Hemingway turns his head to look up at Pete with an upside-down frown, beleaguered as always. It's so quiet that Pete hears every sound with distinction, the creak of his jeans as he crouches down to pat his dog, his bracelet clicking against his phone in his pocket, the soles of his shoes scuffing against the pavement when he straightens up again. It's that early-morning sort of quiet, the one that is private and his own.
He says, "What do you think of this, buddy?" and Hemingway looks back up at him, the way he always does whenever Pete talks. "Yeah," Pete says. "You always think I've got something interesting to say, don't you? Don't you?" Hemingway barks once, a sharp shock of noise, and Pete jumps and laughs.
He's got a plastic grocery bag in his back pocket, exactly like his dad used to when he took their dogs for evening walks through the suburbs of Wilmette, but the difference is that Pete's walking his dog across the hilly lawns of amphitheaters and arenas, and instead of passing houses with their neat driveways and porches, he passes cinderblock huts advertising soda and hot dogs, locked up and shut down for the night. Hem still sniffs around the edges of a garbage can with optimistic fervor, and Pete has to tug on the leash to get him to move on.
He passes their row of buses again and sees that he was wrong--one of the windows in the back lounge of Andy and Patrick's bus is shining dimly, and then he sees a shadow walk between the light and the shaded window. Patrick is up, he thinks, still awake, and on impulse he bends and scoops up a handful of gravel from the thinly covered, rutted path, tossing the stones one by one at Patrick's window for a solid minute. The shadow stops moving for a moment, then disappears, and Pete hears Patrick's steps on the bus stairs followed by the door opening. When he steps down from the bus, he's holding his acoustic guitar in one hand, bracing the door and then easing it closed with the other. His feet are bare, and he's wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and his glasses.
"Hey," he says, his voice as quiet as Pete's was earlier. Hemingway perks up and rattles the metal chain part of his leash.
"Hey," Pete says. "You working?"
"Just fooling around," Patrick says.
"It's three-thirty in the morning," Pete says, and Patrick shrugs. He walks further away from the bus until he gets to the grass, still carrying the guitar, and Pete follows him, Hemingway snuffling along in front of him.
"What is up, Mister Stump," Pete says, when they've settled on the grass fifty feet away from the buses. "I feel like I never see you anymore." He stops after he says it, caught by the truth in that statement, because he meant it as a joke but it's not. Patrick has been sequestered away with Gabe and his band, and Pete has been distracted by Dirty and Charlie and the way that everyone knows it's their last tour, but the end result is that Pete hasn't seen more of Patrick than the hour and a half they spend on-stage since that radio spot five days ago.
"Oh, I've been around," Patrick says aimlessly. He shifts the guitar around to normal playing position in his lap. "Here and there. Not tipping over golf carts."
Pete waves a hand, because this isn't the first or last golf cart he's tipped over and they both know it, and Patrick cracks the edge of a smile. His fingers move on the guitar strings, pulling a chord out of it that sings out loud in the quiet and then drifts away.
"How's the Cobra record going?" Pete asks, and Patrick shifts to playing something else, a fast-paced picked sequence of notes, before he stops and shakes out his wrist.
"I like it," Pete says, stretching out on his back on the grass. "Keep going, dude." He puts his hands behind his head as Patrick starts plucking chords, softer and slower this time. His fingers squeak over the strings as he slides from fret to fret, and it's something Pete misses a little bit sometimes, wishes didn't always get edited out of the final mixes. Patrick hums a harmony to the guitar hook, voice sliding down in opposition to the melody. Pete lets his eyes slide half-closed. Patrick's face is turned inward, bent over the guitar. He's not playing for anyone now except himself; Pete just happens to be here.
He stops after a while and lets the notes trail off. It's the sort of late that lets Pete know it'll be early soon, and he's finally starting to feel weary in his bones and not just his head. Hemingway is flopped down across from Patrick on Pete's right. Patrick is frowning down at the grass, and Pete rolls over on his side to sling his arm over Patrick's bare knee. His shirt rides up with the motion, grass tickling cold against his hip. Patrick's head shifts up as he stares at some midpoint on Pete's body. His face is in shadows and Pete doesn't think he's even really seeing Pete, though Pete could be wrong.
"It sounds good," Pete says. "Go to bed." Patrick's knee shifts rapidly, moving Pete's elbow, and then Patrick scoots back and shakes Pete off. Pete flops down onto his stomach and crosses his arms under his chin, then turns his head to stare at Patrick, faintly surprised.
"Sorry," Patrick says.
"You're touchy lately," Pete says. He doesn't mean anything by it, just a statement of fact, but it's true too. Things feel off this tour. "Short-fuse Patrick making a reappearance? Because I'll admit it, he's not my favorite guy."
"Yeah, I don't really feel like talking about this," Patrick say.
"What?" Pete says. "Why not?"
"It's late," Patrick says. "Early. Whatever. I'm going to bed." He's not looking at Pete, just gathering himself to his feet and rising until he's standing over him, looking down. Pete reaches out a hand almost automatically to snag his ankle, but misses by a mile as Patrick turns and walks away. Hemingway follows Patrick for four jingling steps before getting stopped by the leash Pete still holds in his hand.
"Hey, Patrick!" Pete calls, sitting up, but Patrick just waves a hand at him behind his back and keeps walking before vanishing back into the depths of the bus. Hemingway whines as he returns, and Pete pulls him into his lap to pet him, scratching roughly at the fur around his neck and ears. The lights go off in the back of Patrick's bus while Pete's watching, leaving Pete to wonder if Patrick is actually asleep or just sitting in the dark so Pete won't know.
"What the fuck," Pete says softly. And then, "Fuck." Eventually he gets up and goes back to his own bus. He has to restrain the urge to bang on Patrick's window when he passes it.
That night, the night of Patrick's party, it went something like this: Pete let Patrick get drunk, but not too drunk, not so drunk he couldn't mostly walk, not so drunk he couldn't have a good time. At the end of the night, Pete walked Patrick back through the corridors of the hotels, up the elevator, up to their row of rooms. He remembers saying, "Patrick. Hey, Patrick. Where's your key, man?" and then watching Patrick paw through his pockets, weaving a little, before coming up empty-handed.
"I can't find it," Patrick said, simple and uncomprehending as a child.
"Here, you lush, let me feel you up," Pete said, already dipping his fingers into Patrick's front pockets, then his jacket pocket, then his rear ones, while Patrick snickered into Pete's neck and then swayed, oblivious to Pete's muttered threats of what he'd do if Patrick had been stupid enough to leave his key in his room like the absent-minded fucker he was, before saying, "Come on, dance with me, I hear music," his arms going around Pete's neck as he tipped sideways.
"You are so fucking drunk," Pete laughed, hauling him upright.
"It's my birthday, you gotta give me what I want," Patrick said, coy, and then even looking back on it Pete can't bridge what happens next, because then Patrick was kissing him and he doesn't know why, but he knows why they stopped, because Patrick's hand was fumbling at Pete's belt and even confused and turned-on Pete knew when to stop. He pulled away with a murmured, "Hey, no," and finally finding Patrick's fucking keycard in the right-hand pants pocket that he knew he'd checked before, his fingers skirting the hot, solid bulge of Patrick's erection in his jeans while Patrick mouthed at Pete's neck.
"This, come on, Patrick," Pete said, turning and opening the door and shoving Patrick through it.
Pete's told this story to himself a couple of different ways, and all the ways make it funnier and less messy than it was, than Pete turning away from Patrick's raw desire because he wasn't in his right head, because it wasn't a good idea.
In the dark, back on his bus, Pete rubs a hand across his belly, remembering the feel of Patrick's mouth on his, and he thinks about his hand on Patrick's bare knee, thinks about the dewy grass pricking the skin of his back and the way everything had smelled damp and green in the darkness, like a summer secret. He thinks about the grass pricking at his back, about his hand sliding up Patrick's thigh and into his shorts, and he is hard and sweating in his back bedroom on the bus as he moves his hand down to cup his dick and then slide underneath the elastic waistband of his briefs. He curls a hand around his cock, rubbing, teasing, thinking about Patrick and those fucking pictures and Patrick, warm and under his hands. He bites his lip to strangle a grunt, rubbing softly and then harder until he's not thinking anything except, good. good. good.
He stays away from Patrick after that. It's not hard. Because apparently what Pete was too dumb to realize was that Patrick was avoiding him the whole time. They're on two separate buses, even, it's like they were psychic when planning this tour. It's amazing. By the end of a week they're communicating mostly through intermediaries and email, because ironically, the writing is going better than ever. Pete hates every word that he sends Patrick, but he keeps sending them, pages and pages of emails that Patrick sifts through and sends back as songs. Sometimes they're just snippets and sometimes they're whole works, and regardless, Pete sends back emailed suggestions that Patrick uses or ignores. It's the most productive they've ever been, the both of them, and when he's not writing to Patrick, he spends his time updating his blogs with sarcastic posts that no one will get but him.
"Why are you avoiding Patrick?" Andy asks one afternoon. They're waiting for an outdoor photo shoot to start. The weather is not cooperating, sending a large cloud to cover the sun right before they were supposed to start shooting. Andy is lounging near a stack of soccer balls that figures into the photographer's vision somehow. Pete has liberated one to bounce on his knees like he used to do for practice.
"What?" Pete asks, and misses his next kick when the ball misses his knee and bounces off the edge of his toe instead. "I'm not--fuck."
When he gets back from chasing the ball down and then back up the sidewalk, Andy says, "Joe and Dan and I were just wondering; I don't really care."
"I'm respecting his boundaries," Pete says. He glances over his shoulder to where Dirty and Patrick are talking, on the other side of the photographer's setup. The conversation seems to involve a lot of miming and hand-gestures. It looks fun.
But, no. He is holding out and respecting boundaries and not making things weird, and none of those things are things that Pete is naturally gifted at. He's been called invasive, annoying, obsessive, and incessantly persistent, and only the last of those is in any way complimentary, but they're all true.
"Okay," Andy says. "Why."
"Because I want to," Pete snaps, and stomps off to bother Charlie and Joe, who are fiddling with Charlie's digital camera, instead of being bothered himself.
In the photo shoot, the photographer positions Pete and Patrick in the middle, facing each other, flanked by Joe and Andy, then motions at them until they all are crammed close together, Patrick's arm bracing Pete's back, pulling Pete in toward his side. Pete pouts at the camera, then makes funny faces until the guy tells them to stop and Patrick lets him go. It seems to take a very long time.
He goes out that night to DJ at a club and comes back late and buzzed off it, brain full of strobe lights and camera flashes and couples writhing on the dance floor beneath him. He could write about it. He even sits down at his computer to do it, but he can't make himself write anything he doesn't care about, when he feels such a great choking pressure in his throat from everything that feels wrong and broken in his life.
Instead, he opens a new email and titles it, "our new songs," and writes, i hate them all, and sends it to Patrick.
He doesn't know what he's expecting, but radio silence isn't it. He spends an hour texting with Ryan about the album they're trying to record. Ryan is frustrated, and that frustration feels familiar and cathartic. Eventually though, Ryan stops responding, which is usually how their conversations go. Ryan gets artistically distracted.
Pete might have been wrong. He might have misjudged. He rattles his phone in the cage of his fingers. Patrick could honestly be sleeping; it's four in the morning; Patrick's a night owl on and off-tour, though; Pete's betting not.
The tap on his door startles him, when it does come. He'd almost fallen asleep sitting upright on the bed, and he has to lurch up to get it. Patrick is standing there, looking tired underneath his hat and glasses. Pete rubs his hand over his face and steps back to let him in.
"What's wrong with the songs?" Patrick says, face closed and guarded.
Pete shuts the door, leaving them standing in the narrow hallway that leads to the main room. "The lyrics aren't good." He stretches his arms out with the palms up, empty. See? Empty words.
Patrick's face softens. "They're not bad."
Pete shakes his head.
"What do you want me to do about it?" Patrick asks.
"I don't know!" Pete says. "Fix them."
"I can't!" Patrick shouts and Pete flinches away. "They're what you gave me. Give me something else!"
"I don't have anything else!" Pete shouts. His empty palms are clenched into empty fists now, at his sides. "I can't," he says, softer. "You and me, Patrick. We're fucking me up."
Patrick doesn't say anything for a long moment, not looking at Pete, and then he turns and walks further into the room, sitting on the edge of the couch in the corner of Pete's room near the mirrored dresser with his knees spread slightly apart, braced.
He looks down at his hands, and then says evenly, "I don't know what to say to you about that. I'm doing my best here."
Pete moves to sit on top of the mirrored dresser, not looking away from the top of Patrick's head, where Patrick is staring down at his own fingers like they're the most fascinating things he's ever seen. He thinks, look at me, because he doesn't even know what Patrick means by that, but Patrick doesn't, and the silence crystallizes into a solid thing, something with heft and shape in the room, something that'll take work to dislodge.
"I just," Pete says, "I'm tired of, like, I don't want things to be all weird."
"Yeah," Patrick says. "No. I don't want that either." He pauses, looking up and twisting over his shoulder to look at Pete, but his eyes veer away after a second to focus on the wall. "I mean, I think you should just. Accept that things are the way they are right now, though," he says, voice still even and reasonable and so fucking rational, like he's disagreeing with one of Joe's riffs in the studio.
"See, no," Pete says. "That doesn't make sense to me."
"Why not?" Patrick asks, startled into meeting Pete's eyes.
"Because just fucking accepting things never changes anything," Pete says.
"What--we're not a social regime change," Patrick says.
"No, look, I just want things to be better," Pete says, and the fact that he's having this kind of conversation with Patrick almost makes him feel a little sick with a desperate kind of panic. This is like shades of all the conversations he's ever had with every girl or boy when they're on the way out the door, or he is, and he can't, it never works. He needs this to work, though, he needs Patrick to stay, but Pete's always sucked at making people do what they don't want to, not once they know him. His bullshit only works until you can see the wires.
"I know," Patrick says, a razor sharpness under the smooth surface of his voice, "and I'm doing the best I can."
Fix this, Pete thinks, fix this, fix this, fix this, fix this, and he doesn't know if he's talking to himself or Patrick or both of them.
Finally, Patrick sighs. His shoulders curve inward, and he says, "It'll get better. We'll be okay." He looks up and gives Pete a crooked smile. "We always are, right?"
"No, yeah," Pete says, feeling something like relief shimmer in his stomach. "We are."
"I'm sorry you don't like the songs," Patrick says.
"It's not your fault," Pete says.
"No," Patrick says, but he sounds like he means yes.
"No, I mean it," Pete says. He slides off the dresser to pace the floor, nervous again, and when he turns back to face Patrick, Patrick is looking at him, following the line of his motion.
"Okay," Patrick says. And then he says, "Okay," again, and stands up with a look on his face Pete doesn't quite recognize, tense. He walks back toward the door but hesitates before reaching the hallway, then turns around.
"Hey," he says, falsely casual. "Remember my birthday?" And, yeah, Pete remembers his birthday. "Why did, uh." Patrick hesitates. "I just want to know why you kiss me back."
Pete blinks, shocked into momentary stillness. "Because you kissed me."
Patrick tilts his head and gives Pete that same rueful twist of the lips. "So, what, you have an automatic kissing reflex?"
"I—no." Pete spreads his hands again. "You kissed me."
"Yeah," Patrick says. "I did." He folds his arms across his chest. "And then you left."
"You know someone saw us?" Pete asks. "I got—Jimmy sent me pictures." He sees Patrick's expression turn horrified and hastens to add, "No, just to me. He said he wouldn't send 'em anywhere else."
"He sent them to me, too," Patrick says. "Day after my birthday." He shrugs, eyes flickering to the side, and then he says, low and vehemently, "Goddamnit, Pete, I don't know what you want, because I will be normal, I will be so fucking normal, but you have got to give me some time to get over you, because it's been a while. For me." His voice wobbles at the end and he hunches down under his hat. "But I'm sorry you don't like the songs."
Pete closes his eyes, thinks, get over you, and he doesn't know what to say. If Pete's good at being guarded, Patrick's better, and he never expected Patrick to be so naked in front of him. When he opens his eyes again, Patrick is still there, sagged against the wall. Pete puts out a hand and takes a step toward him, and Patrick's heel knocks against the baseboard trying to get away.
"Patrick," Pete says, letting his hand drop to his side, and Patrick shakes his head, spasmodically. Pete says, softer: "You were drunk. Did you really want to go down that road?" He clears his scratchy throat. "I've been hung up on those pictures for two fucking months."
"I don't know what that means," Patrick says.
"What, you need me to spell it out? You. I've been hung up on you for two months," Pete says. He edges closer. Patrick can't actually get any further away, but he doesn't try this time, either. "This is why you've been avoiding me?"
"What was I supposed to do?" Patrick says. "You said it wasn't a big deal."
"Patrick," Pete says. "I said I was sorry, and you said that's okay. I didn't think you meant it."
Patrick shrugs. "I was hung over. You'd turned me down, man."
"Try again," Pete says. "Please." He smiles down at his toes. "I'd appreciate it."
"Well, I'm not going to do it now," Patrick says. "You're exhausting."
"It's four in the morning," Pete says. "I'm going to argue pre-existing fatigue."
"Lawyer's kid," Patrick says, and the easy affection in his voice soothes an ache in Pete's stomach that he hadn't even known was there until it was gone, and he take four steps forward and doesn't stop until he has his head buried in the shoulder of Patrick's hoodie and Patrick's hand solid on his back.
"I was afraid of this," Pete says, muffled. "I mean, I was scared of doing this. You're a brave fucking dude, Patrick Stump."
"Nah," Patrick says softly. "But I do all right." He runs circles on Pete's back. Pete tightens his grip and holds on.
A night and a day and a show and another night later, Pete sprawls down next to Patrick on the bed. It's late afternoon, and sunlight is reluctantly filtering through the bus windows.
"Okay," he says. "I want to do something. Let's try, like, kinetic learning, okay?" He shifts up onto his knees to kneel on the mattress, and Patrick rolls over on his back to look up at him. He's wearing a t-shirt and boxers and is painted in shades of cream and warm yellow and umber by the light. Pete can't stop from rubbing a hand across Patrick's stomach before refocusing himself. "Right. Okay. Hitting on someone while drunk is, like, a bad scene."
Patrick rolls his eyes. "I think I know--"
"No," Pete interrupts, and covers Patrick's mouth with his palm briefly. "Okay, learn by doing."
"What," Patrick says.
"Hey," Pete says, smiling and brushing his hair out of his eyes.
"Are you seriously?" Patrick says, and Pete puts his hand on Patrick's arm, leaning over to hover above him. He grins and watches Patrick fight himself for a second before smiling back, eyes crinkling at the corners.
"I'm going to skip a couple steps," Pete says, and then he bends down, bringing his other hand up to cup Patrick's face, and kisses him. Patrick's hand settles on Pete's waist, guiding him down so that he's sprawled across Patrick's body as they kiss. Pete pulls away after a second. "I like you," he says, leaning his forehead against Patrick's cheek. "I want to date you."
"Oh," Patrick says quietly.
"See," Pete says. "Okay, now you."
"Pete," Patrick says, laughing, pressing a smile against the corner of Pete's mouth.
"Do it!" Pete demands. "No complaining! Do it!"
"Pete," Patrick says. "I like you." Pete can practically hear the eye-roll in Patrick's voice.
"And?" Pete says. "Come on, Patrick, I'm contributing to your education here."
"I want to date you," Patrick says softly, and ducks his head down into the crook of Pete's neck.
[END]