Chapter Text
“Can you believe I actually thought they would be less disgusting when they finally got together?” Andy asks wryly, their hands folded behind their head, their gaze on the ceiling of the semi-stranger’s living room they’re crashing in tonight.
Jo, lying beside them, snorts. “Not one of your better predictions, Zoltan.”
From the rusting sleeping bag Pat and then Pete crawled into, there comes another bitten-off moan. Andy rolls their eyes so hard, Jo can see the whites rolling in the dark.
“Balcony?” Jo suggests. They can both hear the unfortunately familiar sound of Pat’s signature panting. “None of us are getting any sleep tonight.”
It’s cold in the night air. Jo huddles closer to Andy, who is wearing their sleeping bag like a shawl. Andy tucks one corner around Jo’s shoulders. They huddle together like Slavic grandmothers and stare out into the night.
The balcony looks out over the parking lot, other squat little apartment buildings, the run-down community pool. On a warmer night, Jo would try to convince Andy to go for a swim. As it is, she just presses closer to her friend, fighting off a shiver.
“At least one of us does not smell great,” Jo remarks. It is their third night crashing on this girl’s floor, and they haven’t showered yet, out of some attempt to be convenient (if rank) houseguests. Things are a bit uneasy with their host: Pete knows her loosely, having once been tattooed by her and then gone down on her, kneeling in the back hallway of the tattoo shop, in Pete’s words the best kind of filthy . From the look on their host’s face when they all showed up, girls and sleeping bags and Pete with her arm casual-possessive around the shoulders of adorable pink-cheeked Pat, she was not fully apprised of the situation when she agreed to this. Jo suspects she thought there’d be three girls on her floor and one girl in her bed. The point is, they’re hoping for another two nights of hospitality while they record more demos, and the sounds coming from Pat’s sleeping bag are not helping. Jo doesn’t want to push their luck by using up hot water, too. It’s way too fucking cold out here to sleep in the van.
Andy sticks their face in Jo’s armpit and inhales before Jo can smack them away. “It’s definitely you,” they decide.
Jo shoves them, but only a little. She wants the body heat. “Like your abuse of Axe body spray is helping the situation any.”
“At least I’m trying!”
They play at naming constellations and wishing on stars for a while, distracting each other from how cold their noses are. They run out of actual constellations pretty quickly, so Andy tells Jo about the Riot Grrl’s Studded Belt and Jo invents a sweeping mythology around the Showerhead Spray Way.
“And here I thought it was the Milky Way,” says Andy.
“For some girls it is!” laughs Jo. “Do you think they’ve found it yet, inside? Because I honestly can’t choose between listening to my best friends climax inside a sleeping bag and dying of hypothermia out here.”
“They say dying of hypothermia is painless.”
“Are they like this at your place all the time?” Jo asks. She watches for shooting stars, enjoys Andy’s warmth and the happy, petty pastime of complaining about her friends.
Andy shakes their head. “At home it’s more like, arguing about movies, leaving half-full soda cans everywhere, feeding each other sushi, a really excessive amount of snuggling.”
“How nice of them to save the orgasms for mixed company, then.”
Andy snorts. “What is Pete Wentz, if not considerate of others?”
“You could even call her generous.”
“From the sound of it? Yes.”
They chortle together on the balcony for a while. It is the nicest Jo has felt all week. Recording demos is not fun, exactly. Pete and Pat argue all day; Andy lays down their part flawlessly on the first try; and Jo gets increasingly flustered with everyone else’s small slip-ups, because she has high fucking standards and time is literally money in this scenario.
“How about you?” Andy asks after a few chilly minutes of snickering. “Is Mark generous ?”
Jo shifts from foot to foot, almost as if she’s uncomfortable from the cold. “Ummm,” she says. As ploys to buy time go, this is a transparent one.
Andy elbows her in the ribs. “You don’t know , do you. I thought you were going through, like, bedroom détente with this one?”
“Like, we’ve. Fooled around or whatever.” Jo admits. “But I haven’t…”
“Oh.” Andy’s voice is quiet with surprise. Jo shouldn’t be blushing this hard. At least all the embarrassment is warming her up. “But have you ever?”
“Only by myself.” Jo stares so hard at the covered swimming pool that her eyes start to water. She blinks too fast. There’s something she wants to ask. She can’t believe she wants to ask it. She’s usually fearless. She tries to be fearless tonight.
“It’s just, it’s hard to get that into it? I think the problem is he’s not very good at kissing. Unless it’s--I mean, I worry that--whatifit’smewho’sbadatit.”
“It is categorically impossible for you to be bad at kissing,” Andy says without hesitation. “You’re a girl. Trust me. He’s the problem.”
Jo lets her head rest on Andy’s shoulder. Her friend is so solid. Always has been. She closes her eyes and that makes her braver. “How do you know, though? Without trying.”
“I’m sorry, is Josephine Trohman, prude of worldwide fame and great renown, actually asking me to kiss --”
“Prude?!” Jo interrupts, her eyes flying open. “If anything, I’m famous for being sensible and like, excessively good at the guitar!”
“Mmmhmm,” Andy agrees, not like they believe it. “If you want to kiss me, Trohman, just say so.”
“It would be for science,” Jo insisted. “Not because I like you.”
“Of course.”
“Because I don’t like you at all. Like, barely even as a friend. You’re hard to tolerate.”
“If this is how you talk to Mark, I’m starting to understand your problem.”
Jo takes a deep breath and fogs the air with her heavy exhale. She turns to her friend, dark-eyed in moonlight, and asks gravely, “Andy Hurley, will you kiss me for science?”
Andy puts a hand over their heart and pretends to swoon. “Only if you promise not to fall in love with--”
Jo’s over it. She swoops in and plants a kiss on Andy’s still-speaking mouth. It’s a mess at first: lips on teeth, the surprised negotiation of at-odds chins. Then Andy’s hand cups Jo’s cheek, gentler than gentle, and their already parted lips melt beneath Jo’s. Warmth seeps through Jo’s skin, like her heart is butter drizzling gold down her center, to her core. Andy’s tongue catches Jo’s and she’s breathless, dizzy, floating away. The kiss breaks open-mouthed and firm, and this time Jo doesn’t have to look at the sky to see shooting stars.
Stunned and stupid and experiencing so many things , Jo breathes, “Wow.”
Andy laughs softly, pleased with themself, and smiles at Jo without complications. “Yeah?” they ask. Their voice is shy.
Did she mention she was stupid? Of all things that could come out of her mouth in this perfect moment, what Jo says is, “Yeah. That felt so different. It was the first time I’ve ever kissed a--”
And then she stops, realizing what it sounds like she’s almost said, and the silence is awful. The silence is a black hole. The whole moment collapses in on itself, fragile after all, and implodes into the sucking silence.
“Shit,” says Jo. “I’m sorry. I meant--”
Andy’s not looking at her anymore. Andy sheds the sleeping bag, steps away from Jo, and leans on the balcony railing. “It’s okay, you can say it.” Their voice is tight, the side of their face expressionless. They look down at the pavement below like they’re prophesizing falls. “You think of me as a girl. Lots of people probably do. It’s okay.” Andy shrugs like the whole night can just roll of their shoulder.
So Jo has no choice but to tell the truth. “No. Andy? I’m not into girls, so I don’t kiss them. I was going to say--I was going to say it was different, to kiss a person I love.”
Andy turns to face Jo with the speed of disbelief. “Wait. Really?”
“Of course really,” Jo says. Too fast, she adds, “Love like--like the best friends I’ve ever had. Like this band is my whole future wrapped up in three amazing people and I can’t believe my luck, can’t believe that I can reach out and touch you, my entire potential, every possibility wrapped in nice-smelling, tattooed, human skin. Love like too amazing for words.”
“‘ Human skin ’?” Andy mutters.
Jo, blushing harder than Pat the time she spilled a taco down Pete’s shirt, blazes on like she can somehow make this situation better by piling more words on top of it. “I love you like, I don’t know how any guy or family or office job or scholarship or anything can ever compete with it. I love you like I don’t love Mark. Not yet, anyway. Kissing you--I don’t feel that when I kiss Mark. That was like the fucking constellations. Riot Grrrl’s Belt, the Big Dipper, the whole of the known solar system. Like a rollercoaster feels, twisty in your guts, too much but you don’t want it to stop. Like--like Pete’s the fucking poet and I’m a mess who doesn’t do metaphors and forget I said any of that .”
Jo is babbling and Andy just has their eyebrow raised, leaning very casually now against the edge of the balcony, looking close and warm and steadier than anyone Jo has ever loved before.
“You usually keep it hidden pretty well? But you really are a mess,” Andy says. Their voice is full with fondness.
Jo’s pretty sure she can’t blush any harder than this and live. Time to shut it down. “Okay, well, science thanks you for your contribution and all, but I’m freezing my tuchus off. Let’s see if the orgy is over in there?”
“So you’re gonna declare wild, intense irreplicable love and then go right into playing it cool?” Andy teases.
“That is my plan, yes,” Jo replies crisply. She opens the sliding glass door. “Shall we?”
Andy leans in and pecks her cheek on their way inside. “Makes your knees go weak, doesn’t it,” Andy murmurs into Jo’s ear as they go.
“The only thing that makes my knees weak is the scientific method!” Jo grouses at Andy’s back.
But they both know it’s not true.