Chapter Text
fingers gripped around the porcelain edge
who am i to tell you to stay?
when i can’t even remember myself before you
--
The condensation from the beer bottle is dripping and pooling between the glass and the top of Dennis’s fingers, making them shine on the flesh pink from the cold of the chilled liquid. His fingers lift up for half a second, letting some of the moisture escape, then he rewraps them around it with an adjusted grip and brings the bottle to his mouth. The bottle pops out of his lips and he swallows down the beer, his Adam’s apple bobbing with the motion. His lips are in view now and Mac can’t help but notice that they look dry, but not yet cracked. Mac has his chapstick in his pocket, because Dennis refuses to carry it himself. He claims that having it in his pocket is ugly, to which Mac countered that he carries his keys in his pockets, but Dennis quickly told him that that doesn’t count because chicks don’t like seeing round things in a man’s pocket, but they don’t mind car keys because it means he has a car. Mac gave up with that logic and now stuffs it in his pocket with his wallet whenever Dennis hands it to him.
He almost offers the chapstick to him, shoving his hand in his pocket and toying with it, but Dennis is talking to Dee, the stupid bird, and he thinks that if he interrupts and admits that he’s been staring at his lips, Dennis will yell at him, so he doesn’t. When Dennis notices his lips are dry, he’ll ask Mac for the chapstick, and Mac will have the pleasure of feeling the moisture on Dennis’s hand as he gives it over.
One of these days he’ll get to feel more than the simple brushes and the casual touches. He’ll get to feel Dennis’s body as if it’s his own body and not just his roommate and best friend’s body. At least that what he tells himself late at night when sleep won’t come no matter what he does.
Dennis takes another drink of his beer, licking his lips afterwards to try and stay off the dryness, but Mac knows that does nothing but make them dryer. He’s told Dennis this countless times, but either he doesn’t care, doesn’t listen, or doesn’t think about it.
“Mac, dude,” Dennis interrupts and Mac realizes he’s been staring through Dennis for who knows how long.
“What’s up?” Mac chirps, like he had just walked into the conversation. He had, metaphorically speaking.
Dennis furrows his brows. “What’s the last thing you heard me say?”
Mac thinks for too long before settling on the truth. “Nothing.”
“You don’t remember anything I’ve said all day?”
“I remember…” he trails off, thinking some more. “I remember you telling me good morning,” he says, proud of himself.
Dennis doesn’t return the sentiment. “It’s dinner time now, bro.”
“Huh,” Mac says.
“He’s been staring at you for a good half hour, you know,” Dee chimes in, and Mac is forced to remember that he and Dennis are at the bar with the rest of the gang.
“Yeah, whatever, unrequited love, blah, blah, blah—can we not change the topic?” Charlie says. Dee shrugs and brings her beer bottle to her lips in a show of nonchalonce.
“Do you even know what unrequited means?” Dennis says, forcing Mac from his thoughts once again. He’s not looking at Charlie, he’s studying Mac, and Mac has to look away.
Charlie responds, but Mac stops listening.
“Mac.” He’s tuned into Dennis’s voice. He’s always tuned into Dennis’s voice. “Look at me,” he says, so Mac does, because whatever Dennis tells him to do, he does.
Dennis is still studying him. His eyebrows are pushing down into his eyes, his lips are pursed. It’s as if he’s never caught Mac staring at him before, which he totally has. Many times. Mac can’t help himself most days.
“Come on, man, listen to me,” Charlie says, clearly irritated. Dennis doesn’t move, so Mac doesn’t.
“I’m listening, Charlie,” Frank says. Charlie mumbles a thanks.
Mac blinks. Dennis doesn’t. It’s a stare down, now, to see who can look at the other the longest with nothing coming of it. Dennis is going to win, he always does, but that doesn’t stop Mac from trying every single time it happens. It’s been happening more and more lately, Dennis trying to figure out Mac.
Mac blinks again. Dennis doesn’t. His eyes just never get dry, he’s like a cat. Mac once looked up the average number of times a person blinks per minute and found it to be twenty times, then he counted how many times Dennis blinks per minute and found out he blinks no more than five times a minute. He has yet to find a use for this information, but it is unnerving.
As the stare down continues, Mac starts to play with his fingers under the counter. Dennis can’t see it, he’s standing behind the bar, but he probably knows Mac is doing it. He always knows when Mac is picking at the loose skin around his cuticles. He grabs hold of a particularly loose piece of skin and he pulls at it, wincing when the pain is a lot sharper than he thought it would be. Dennis takes that as Mac’s defeat.
The gang had been watching them the whole time, despite not quite knowing what they were watching. Mac gets up and goes to rinse his now bleeding finger under the sink. Charlie complains because there shouldn’t be blood where they put their dirty dishes, but Mac doesn’t care. The sink never gets cleaned anyway, and he’s not quite sure the dishes get more than a half-assed rinse.
“Why do you care?” Dee asks him. Charlie spits out some response that he pulls out of his ass.
The bleeding isn’t bad, but it’s not stopping, so Mac interrupts to ask the room for a band aid. No one has one and Mac vaguely wonders what Dee has in her purse if not band aids, but he doesn’t mention it and instead wraps his fingers with a paper towel.
“We should really buy bandaids,” he suggests, putting way too much pressure on his injury-that’s-barely-an-injury.
“Go get them then,” Dee says. Mac calls her a bird in his head.
The conversation moves on, then loops back to Mac’s earlier thoughts.
“Do you have my chapstick, Mac?” Dennis asks.
“Of course,” Mac says. He uses his non-dominant and non-bleeding hand to fish it out of his pocket. As he hands over the tube, he gets to feel Dennis’s hand. He was right about it being wet with the condensation from the beer bottle. It feels nice. Dennis puts on the chapstick, then hands it back to him, this time dropping it into Mac’s hand so they don’t touch again.
Mac can’t help but swallow around his spit at the view of Dennis with wet lips.
“Why does he carry your chapstick?” Dee asks. Dennis responds with some irritation, because to him the answer should be obvious.
“Because having it in my pocket is ugly.”
Dee looks at Mac and he nods.
“You two don’t find this weird?” she says, motioning between them. They look at each other for a second before they both shake their heads.
“Who cares ?” Charlie exclaims. “You know what, if no one’s going to listen to me, then there’s no point in staying. Frank, do you want to go to the bridge?”
Mac has no idea what Charlie has been trying to say this entire time, but with how much he’s been talking, it must not be important. Important stuff comes in few words, because if they don’t, none of them will listen long enough to understand any of it.
Frank responds to Charlie, then Charlie is chugging the rest of his beer and leaving through the front door with Frank trailing close behind.
“Do you guys know what he’s upset about?” Dennis says.
“No,” Dee and Mac respond.
“But, if they get to leave, then I’m not going to stay.” She picks up her purse and speed walks out of the bar before Dennis’s protests can convince her to stay. Dennis sighs, then there’s a beat of silence before he opens another beer and muffles the sound of its fizzing with his mouth. He finishes his gulp, then puts his beer in front of Mac and makes his way to sit next to him on the barstool that Charlie had previously been on. He reaches out for Mac’s hand, Mac meeting him halfway, and Dennis takes the paper towel away from him and places it next to his beer.
It’s not bleeding anymore, but it is indented with the texture of the paper towel.
“Thought it’d be worse,” Dennis says and Mac mumbles a “yeah.” It had felt worse at first, and probably was worse while he was running it under the water, but the paper towel stopped the bleeding enough that it’s no problem now.
Dennis flips Mac’s hand over and looks at the scar there, from when he had tried to play both Charlie and the Reynold's side and did the blood oath for both of them. The cut had almost gotten infected, would have if Dennis hadn’t seen it, claimed it disgusting, and poured a bottle of peroxide on it. It hurt like a motherfucker, but it was a genuinely good idea. He traces the scar with a light fingertip, tickling Mac’s palm and making his fingers twitch. Dennis’s fingers are soft, like the rest of his hand, built with no calluses because Dennis has and never will do hard labor in his life.
Mac had a construction job once, before he started selling weed. He hated it. He didn’t stay long enough for his hands to become coarse, but it was the closest he had ever gotten.
Dennis is still running a finger across Mac’s scar, looking down at it, and Mac is looking at Dennis’s face. There’s no real expression on it, but there never truly is unless his emotions are particularly strong that day. He likes to think that after almost thirty years he’s gotten good at reading him, but sometimes he’s not so sure.
Dennis drops his hand.
Mac wants to wrap his fingers into Dennis’s.
“Let’s close the bar and go out to dinner. My treat,” Dennis offers.
“Yeah, sure,” Mac says, and he smiles at Dennis.
~~
Dennis drives them to some restaurant in the middle of the city. It’s small, half the floor is recessed in, and the lighting is dark. It looks fancy, though, it has white tablecloths and real cloth napkins and their waitress wears a bowtie. She’s gotten their drink orders already, Dennis having ordered two glasses of red wine.
“The blue cheese cheeseburger looks good,” Dennis says as he scans over his menu. Mac flips to the page that it’s on, then he realizes he doesn’t like blue cheese, so he goes to a different page. His eyes land on fried tilapia, which sounds pretty good, so he decides he’s going to get that.
The waitress comes back around with their wine and glasses of water to go with it. Her voice is pleasant and kind as she asks if they are ready to order. They order, then they hand her their menus.
Mac stares at Dennis, his chin resting on his hand as he leans over the table. Dennis doesn’t notice. He is focused on his phone, scrolling through something, but Mac doesn’t mind as long as he can watch Dennis as he does it. His finger stops moving and he starts to softly smile, still looking down at his phone.
Mac’s heart beat starts to rise, only slightly, with excitement that maybe he’s the reason Dennis is smiling, that he’s smiling because he finds Mac’s staring endearing, but then it falls and his stomach flips the moment Dennis turns his phone around to show Mac a photo of a little boy with long blonde hair and a bright, toothy smile on his long face. His son, Mac knows. He’s still so young, but the older he gets the more and more his features start to resemble Dennis.
“I asked his mother to send me photos. To keep me updated, you know,” Dennis explains. “I still want to be his father. I just couldn’t stand North Dakota any longer than I did.” He lowers his voice, as if his child’s mother is in the restaurant with them. “Or her, really. Wanted too much out of me. Needy woman, as you’d expect.”
Mac nods and looks at the photo for an appropriate amount of time even though he hates to hear about the part of Dennis’s life that he’s not involved in.
“I made a really cute kid,” Dennis says after a moment of silence where he clicks off his phone and puts it face down on the table.
Mac agrees with Dennis, because he truly does agree. Brian Jr. is absolutely adorable and Mac hates it.
Dennis picks up his wine glass. “To my adorable son,” he says and Mac clinks his own glass against Dennis’s because that’s what he is expecting him to do. They both drink about half of their glass and then Mac is back to staring at Dennis as he wipes his mouth with the napkin that Mac hasn’t even bothered to unwrap his silverware from, let alone lay on his lap like Dennis has done.
Dennis’s lips start to move. It’s only when they stop does Mac realize he wasn’t listening to a thing he said.
“What?” Mac asks.
“Did you not listen to me again ?”
“Yeah,” Mac says, sheepishly.
“Dude.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize, just listen. For once.”
“I can do that.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Mac says, nodding along with it.
“Okay, because what I’m trying to tell you is important.”
“What is it?” Mac leans in closer to truly show that he’s listening.
“I’m going back to North Dakota.”
Mac’s heart drops.
“What?”
“Not for long,” Dennis continues. “Just for a few months.”
“Why?”
“’Cause I haven’t seen Junior in two years and I miss him. I’m not even sure he remembers me.”
Mac doesn’t know what to say. His mouth feels dry so he drinks more of his wine. It’s only got a sip left.
“Do you want more?” Dennis asks him.
“No, I— I’m good,” he denies. “You were just saying you couldn’t stand North Dakota. Why are you going back?”
“I was there for over a year last time. I won’t be there that long this time. And, honestly, Mac, I can't stand you staring at me anymore. It’s been nonstop for months. You barely listen to me anymore. I figured giving you a break from me would be good for you.”
“I don’t want a break from you.”
“You need one.”
Mac takes a deep breath. This really shouldn’t be surprising. Dennis has always mentioned going back and forth between Philadelphia and North Dakota, but somewhere in the two years between him coming back and now, Mac has willingly forgotten that he was to return one day. He lets out the breath.
“When are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
Mac can’t help but feel hurt that Dennis didn’t tell him before now.
“I coulda told you earlier, but you would have freaked out like you are now, then you would have tried to make me stay,” Dennis reads his mind.
Mac can’t fight that, because he knows it’s true. Dennis puts his hand on Mac’s and it twitches. His touch is cold and foreign, but burning and similar all at the same time. He can already feel the loneliness again.
Dennis squeezes his hand then lets go as the waitress comes back around with their food. Dennis smiles and compliments how quickly it came out, a mood so different from Mac’s current dread. The waitress has already turned around when Mac blurts out, “Can I have more wine please?”
“Certainly,” she responds.
“Don’t get drunk, dude,” Dennis says.
“What do you care?” Mac snaps.
“Don’t fight with me, man.”
Mac stumbles over a sentence that he gives up on, Dennis watching him steadily the entire time, careful to not interrupt. “I’m not going to get drunk from red wine,” he settles on. Dennis gives him a pointed look.
“We’ve done it before.”
“Whatever. I’m not going to get drunk.”
Dennis makes eye contact with him, then seems satisfied with Mac’s promise, so he moves his attention to his food. Mac stares at his own food, not sure if he’ll be able to stomach eating it anymore. He focuses on the wine instead, drinking it slowly.
The dinner ticks by quietly. Dennis tries to make conversation a few times, mostly making fun of other patrons as they are par to do, but Mac doesn’t feel like responding and so he eventually stops trying. He asks for the check the next time the waitress comes to check on them and the waitress asks if Mac would like a box. He nods, not really knowing what he’s accepting, because he hasn’t been listening since Dennis told him he was leaving.
He doesn’t want Dennis to go because he doesn’t want it to be like last time. His days were monotonous; go to the gym, go to the bar, drink a little too much because no one was stopping him, get high with Charlie off of old spray paint. He’d invite the gang over for dinner almost every night and they’d only come occasionally, and when he felt truly alone, he’d show up at one of their apartments and demand they hang out and they would because they’d pity him for losing Dennis.
He was the one to find Cindy. She had put up an advertisement of her various skills (“Do you have a failing business? Do you need to bring in money quickly? Do you like to trick people in legal ways?”) outside the Wawa closest to his apartment and he thought that she could be fun. He called her and she agreed to come work with them at the bar. She was with them for about two months before Dennis unexpectedly came back, and they had fun for those two months. It was nice and new and perfectly distracting for the times he was at the bar, but, thankfully, not permanent.
And he started going to the gym because the silence of his apartment was too much. He’d spend two, three hours there everyday. And after he got buff, he asked everyone in the gang why he had done it. They didn’t know and they didn’t care, but he, deep in his gut, knew and he cared. It was all for Dennis, to impress someone not there, to distract himself from the same person.
That won’t happen again this time. None of that will happen again.
They leave the restaurant and the silence extends from the car ride to the apartment.
~~
“Get ready, I need you to drive me to the airport,” Dennis says. He’s leaning in the doorway to Mac’s room, the kitchen light on behind him and leaving him in a fuzzy glow. “I left you coffee and some toast on the counter. Get up.” He leaves the room and doesn’t bother to close the door behind him.
Mac does what he’s told without much thought. He dresses and brushes his teeth and drinks the coffee and eats the toast and Dennis waits for him the entire time, sitting on the couch. His suitcases are already packed and by the door and Mac’s chest squeezes when he sees them, sitting and waiting to be taken halfway across the country.
“Don’t go,” Mac begs, his voice soft and wanting. He can hear Dennis turn his head to look at him, but he doesn’t meet him there, too busy staring at the suitcases, willing for this to not happen.
“I have to, dude. I haven’t seen Junior in two years. I can’t let him forget what I look like.”
Mac forces out a nod as if he could ever truly understand.
“Are you ready? My flight leaves in two hours so we’ve gotta get going.”
“I’m ready,” Mac responds, but he’s lying, because he could never be ready to watch Dennis leave again.
Dennis goes to the door and grabs the car keys, throwing them to Mac in a fluid motion. He instinctively catches them by the fob. “Am I driving there too?”
“Yeah. Grab the last suitcase for me, will you?”
The apartment door opens and shuts while Mac is still focused on Dennis having him drive to the airport, and when he finally rips his attention from the keys, he sees that Dennis only left one suitcase for him to grab. He can’t bring himself to immediately follow Dennis down, his feet taking him to Dennis’s room without much thought on his own part. The room doesn’t look different, but his closet is only half full. Most everything left are all the old t-shirts that he doesn’t wear anymore, but keeps around because he thinks Mac is going to take them and cut the sleeves off, not knowing that Mac doesn’t want the shirts. He doesn’t tell Dennis, because he likes the idea of Dennis keeping things with him in mind, even if he’d never admit it out loud.
He drags himself out of the bedroom, clicking the door shut even though it doesn’t matter, and he catches up with Dennis before Dennis has enough of a reason to yell at him for taking forever.
~~
“So, what does a few months mean? Like, next month?” Mac asks. He’s gripping the steering wheel hard, taking turns to the airport that he isn’t quite sure when he memorized. Maybe he’s bullshitting it and they’ll end up in the middle of Pennsylvania thirty miles away, and Dennis will miss his flight, and he’ll yell at Mac, but Mac won’t care.
“I don’t know. I was thinking sometime in September.”
“September?”
“Yeah. Junior will have started school then. No point in staying.”
“What grade will he be in?” Mac asks, but because it seems like common courtesy, not because he cares or will remember. Judging by how long it takes Dennis to answer, it doesn’t seem like he cares much either.
“Kindergarten, I think. Doesn’t really matter.”
“Yeah,” Mac says, moving his hands on the wheel so he can make a right turn better. They’re getting closer and closer to the airport, Mac knows, and he feels impossible to stop it, no matter how desperately he wants to.
“Why am I driving your car?” Mac blurts out. Dennis looks at him.
“Because you don’t own a car. Are you looking for a different answer here?”
“You never let me drive your car if you could be driving it.”
“So I decided I’d treat you to something special today.”
Mac’s grip on the wheel tightens. He can’t feel the fingers on his left hand anymore.
“You know I don’t like driving.”
He sees Dennis shrug from the corner of his eye. He refuses to look at him.
“Don’t fucking leave, dude.” And then, pathetically, he adds, “Please.”
Dennis sighs. “Look, I know this is hard for you, man, but it’s only for a few months. I’ll be back before you know it. It’s not like last time.”
Mac doesn’t respond and so he turns his attention to the buildings outside the window. Mac makes the final turn onto the final stretch of road and then before he wants it to happen, he’s pulling into the drop off zone at the airport and Dennis is gripping the door handle and opening it and stepping out of the car.
He stops, there’s a beat of silence, and then he’s saying, “Maybe you should get a boyfriend this time. You know—instead of the doll.” Then he fully steps out and slams the door, going to the trunk where his luggage is stored. Mac doesn’t help him.
He doesn’t listen to anything on the drive back to their apartment. He tunes into the honks of the various traffic jams he drives by but doesn’t get stuck in, until he’s parking in the garage of their apartment building and he feels truly alone, again.
The silence of the apartment hurts his ears, a constant ringing that he can’t seem to knock out of his head, so he turns on the TV and leaves it at whatever station it was last tuned to. He turns it up entirely too loud, but Dennis isn’t here to yell at him. He used to do this last time, too, before the cable was turned off because he wasn’t paying attention to the bills and he decided he didn’t care enough to pay it. After that, he would play movies occasionally, but he and Dennis only owned so many, and he got sick of listening to the exact same screams and explosions all the time, so he let his ears ring and give him headaches.
He doesn’t want the cable to be shut off this time, so he makes a vow to remember to pay the bill. He jots down his vow and sticks on the fridge, but he knows he will never read it and it’ll stay there until Dennis gets home and throws it away.
He listens to Grant Anderson’s voice blast from the TV for a while before he realizes he doesn’t want to be here, so he takes the Range Rover’s keys back off the hook, still warm, and he makes his way to where he just parked it, not bothering to turn off the TV on his way out.
He’s the first one to show up at the bar and he has to go through the keys on Dennis’s keychain to remember which one is the key to the bar. He finds it on the third key he tries.
Charlie is normally the one to open the bar, sometime around eleven, and it’s only nine. He’s going to be here alone for a while, but it still feels better than it does when he’s alone at the apartment. He’s supposed to be at the bar, no matter what. He’s only supposed to be at the apartment when Dennis is there too. It’s Dennis’s apartment. It’s their bar.
He drinks beer and he stares off into space, until he becomes so restless that he starts to do crunches and sit ups and push ups until he feels like he can’t breathe anymore.
Charlie walks in on him, singing nonsense to himself, seemingly not noticing Mac. Mac gets off the floor and screams when he realizes what he’s looking at.
“Why are you naked, dude?!” he yells, turning away and covering his eyes.
“Mac? Why are you here?”
“Dennis left, dude! The apartment was empty. Why aren’t you wearing clothes ?”
“I was in the sewers.”
“That doesn’t explain anything.”
“If you’re naked when the water comes, your clothes don’t get wet. Simple math, Mac,” Charlie explains.
“I don’t care. Please put on your clothes. I did not want to see your dick.”
“You’ve seen it before.”
“Years ago! I had forgotten it.”
“Whatever. I am going to shower.”
Mac hears footsteps and then a door open and shut, and he lets out a sigh of relief. He doesn’t even want to kind of know what constitutes Charlie showering in their bathroom that most definitely doesn’t have a shower.
The smell of the sewer lingers even after Charlie is a door away. It takes Mac a while to realize that the reason it lingers is because Charlie had walked in with wet feet. For lack of anything better to do, Mac mops it with the water he finds already in the mop bucket. Unfortunately, this makes the bar smell even worse, which he really should have realized would happen. It’s enough to make him fill the bucket up with new water from the women’s bathroom and find whatever thing he can that looks even slightly like floor cleaner. He ends up mopping the entire bar, sans men’s bathroom, which Charlie is still bathing in. Or whatever he’s doing in it.
He’s at the counter working on another beer when Charlie leaves the bathroom.
“Oh, shit!” Charlie exclaims.
Mac whips around to look at him and finds him half fallen on the floor, legs spread out like he’s trying to do the splits, but his inflexible body is failing. “Help me, dude.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming, I don’t want to fall too,” Mac says, taking baby steps as he goes to Charlie. He braces himself next to him and manages to haul him up, then tells him to be careful because the floor is wet.
“No shit,” Charlie says. “You almost killed me trying to do Charlie Work.”
“I have never seen you mop, dude.”
“It’s still Charlie Work.”
“It’s only Charlie Work if you do it. You really should be mopping. The floor was disgusting. That mop water is black.”
“No one’s eating off the floor,” Charlie says. They make it back to the bar, and to make up for almost killing Charlie, Mac pops open a beer for him.
“They should be able to.”
“But they aren’t.”
Mac lets it go. He gets himself another beer, the third one for the day, and the bar isn’t even open yet. He ends up putting the beer away and getting himself some water.
“So, where did Dennis go?” Charlie asks.
“Huh?”
“You said he left. Where did he go?”
“North Dakota.”
“Oh. Did you bring the doll?”
“Does it look like I brought the doll?”
Charlie looks around with some excitement, then is disappointed when he finds no doll sitting around.
“It’s in the basement, dumbass,” Mac says.
“Good thinking. We can get it later.”
“Or not get it out.”
“No, we should get it out. We should scare the gang with it!” Charlie exclaims. Mac tries to protest, but Charlie is already running towards the basement, almost falling on the wet floor every other foot, apparently having decided against waiting before grabbing it. He comes back up after a few minutes, breathing heavily and moaning, then he stops in front of Mac and throws the doll down onto the floor.
“That thing’s hard to get upstairs.”
“I know,” Mac mumbles, staring at the doll. Its lifeless face is looking at nothing, but Mac already feels like it’s judging him. He doesn’t know why he kept the thing. Maybe because it was easier than throwing it away, or because he spent so much money on it, or it could just be because he found a space for it in the basement after practically falling down the stairs trying to get it down. Whatever his reasoning was, he regrets it now.
“How should we scare the gang with it?” Charlie questions.
“I don’t care.”
“C’mon, dude, work with me!”
“Okay, fine, just set it up on one of the barstools and put a beer in its hand. See how long it takes for them to realize it’s not Dennis.”
“ Ooooh, that’s a great idea. Help me set him up.”
Mac, reluctantly, helps. They turn him away from the back door, knowing that’s where Frank and Dee will come in shortly, they smooth out his clothes and his hair, then they put a beer bottle next to his hand after realizing they can’t put it in his hand. Mac has to admit that it does look like Dennis, especially from the door. He almost expects the doll to turn into the real Dennis, claiming that he missed his flight and couldn’t leave, in a similar fashion to how Dennis came back last time.
“Shit, dude, I forgot how creepy this thing was,” Charlie says. He’s behind the bar and he has a clear view of the doll’s face, which he is staring directly at with a weird facial expression. “Is this why you didn’t want to get it out?”
Mac goes back to the bar and sits next to it. He barely glances at it. “Yeah,” he says, but that’s not why. He had forgotten how creepy it is, but he remembers how lonely it made him last time. It made him feel lonelier than he had without the doll, made him feel like he was missing something all the time. He was, of course, but the doll only accentuated it.
Charlie shivers. “I can’t look at it anymore. It is definitely judging me.”
“We’re putting it back in the basement after this,” Mac says.
“Okay, yeah,” Charlie agrees. He’s still staring at it; Mac isn’t sure if he’s even blinked since he made eye contact with the thing.
“Look away, dude.” That snaps Charlie out of it and he rubs his eyes.
“Thanks, bro, it’s like I got hypnotized or something.”
“Yeah, yeah, can we just wait for Dee and Frank to show up? When do they normally show up?”
Charlie checks the time. “Like, now,” he says.
“Good.”
On cue, Dee comes walking in through the back door. The floor isn’t quite dry there yet, and she almost slips, scowling at the floor, then she recovers and makes her way to Charlie and Mac. She doesn’t think anything of the doll, barely noticing it, going behind the counter, throwing down her purse, and getting herself a beer.
“What’s the plan for today, guys?” she asks. Neither Mac nor Charlie have a response, so they stutter over some excuses before Charlie says something that makes no sense and Mac has to interrupt.
“Nothing! We don’t have any plans for today yet.”
She looks at them with suspicion but shrugs it off. She obviously doesn’t care that much. She puts her attention to her phone, not bothering to look up, effectively making sure she won’t notice the doll despite it sitting in front of her. Mac and Charlie exchange some looks, then decide they don’t want to point it out to her. They wait for Frank, who takes more than thirty minutes before he shows up, but luckily Dee not noticing the sex doll is entertaining enough.
Before Frank arrives, Charlie is unlocking the front door and turning off the closed sign to let the old men know that someone is tending the bar.
Frank comes in with a loud greeting. The floor is dry now, so he doesn't slip, which is slightly disappointing.
"What are we up to today?" Frank asks. Dee looks up from her phone at him.
"Nothing, apparently," she responds.
"Perfect! I bought us a new toy," he says, proud.
"Toy? Like a Woody doll or something?" Charlie says. He's back at the bar. Frank is next to the doll, unnoticing of it, and Charlie's eyes keep darting between them. At this point, it's impressive that Dee still hasn't noticed, but it also says a lot about how unobservant she is.
"No, Charlie, it's not from Toy Story . It's a grown up toy. It's strapped to the roof of my car. Dennis, you're gonna love it."
"That's not Dennis, Frank," Dee says, without missing a beat, completely nonchalant.
"What?" Charlie shouts. "How did you know?"
Frank checks out the doll, swearing when he confirms that Dee isn't lying.
"I've known the whole time," Dee says.
"How?" Mac asks, just as surprised as Charlie. Despite not wanting to get the doll out, he had gotten excited to see Dee and Frank's reaction.
"It's obvious! The thing didn't talk when I came in, and also you two wouldn't stop looking at it and trying to get me to notice it."
"Why didn't you say anything?"
"'Cause I didn't give a shit."
"You goddamn son of a bitch," Mac says. "You ruined Frank's reaction!"
"I don't care."
"Why did you two get that thing out?" Frank demands. He looks uncomfortable around it, shifting from foot to foot and refusing to look away.
"'Cause Dennis went to North Dakota again or some shit and we wanted to scare you guys--"
" Charlie wanted to scare you guys. I didn't want to get it out of the basement," Mac interrupts.
"That thing has been in the basement the whole time?" Dee says.
Mac nods.
"Ew," Dee says.
"I thought Dennis burned it," Frank says.
"No, he told me to keep it out of the apartment. But I didn't--" Mac starts.
"Oh, so he wouldn't have to listen to you bang it," Frank says, and Charlie and Dee nod.
"No! I wasn't banging it, how many times--"
"You were banging it," Frank reinforces.
"So you said Dennis went back to North Dakota?" says Dee.
"Yeah, he did. He wanted to see his son,” Mac lets the topic change, just happy to not have to try and continuously convince the gang that he wasn’t fucking the doll.
Dee pulls a face. "I forgot he had that thing."
"'That thing' is a human, Dee," Mac says, clearly offended.
"Whatever. When is he coming back?"
"I don't know. September, I guess."
"Should we bring Cindy back?"
"Who?" Charlie says.
"The girl who replaced him last time.”
"I don't remember her.”
"I don't want her back anyway. She was bossy," Franks says.
"Dennis is bossy," Dee says.
"He's a different kind of bossy," Frank argues.
"No, he's just a man."
"That's it! I don't want a woman coming in and bossing us around again."
Dee sighs, crosses her arms, and rolls her eyes, but Mac and Charlie agree with Frank.
"Anyway!" Frank says, regaining some of the excitement he had when he first walked in with. "Who wants to see what I bought?"
All of them do, so they all happily follow Frank out to his car. It's parked in the alley, and on top of it very unsafely strapped is a long metal pole with a base at the end that dangles over the trunk of the car, effectively blocking use of the back window. Mac has no idea how the thing didn't fly off while he was driving and go through the window of some poor bastard driving behind him.
"What's this?" Dee voices the question in all their heads.
" This is a stripper pole! Mac, Charlie, get it down."
Mac and Charlie make quick work of it, doing it so recklessly that they probably dent Frank's car in the process, but he doesn't seem to notice, and if he does, he doesn't care. They manage to get it into the bar, having to walk it to the front door because there's no way they can maneuver it through the hallway of the back door. They set it up in the middle of the bar, right in the walkway, because they have no idea where to place it. They all join in a line a few feet away from it to look at and study it.
Mac is the first one to break the silence. "Dennis is going to be upset that he missed this."
"Screw Dennis. We need to get some broads here to dance!"
"Frank, what women are gonna come to our bar and dance on a pole for us?" Dee says.
"Ones who want money," Frank says with a greasy smile.
The day goes by with them only discussing the pole and not much else, but Mac is okay with that. It's a distraction from having to talk about Dennis leaving again, because Mac doesn't want to think about that.
He's the last one to leave the bar. He procrastinates turning on the closed sign and telling the old men to leave the bar, so it doesn't happen until ten minutes after the legal time they're supposed to be closed. The rest of the gang left almost three hours ago, too tired to think anymore about the pole. Mac is tired himself as he drives back to the apartment, there in only five minutes without any of the usual traffic they normally have to deal with. The apartment feels empty and the TV is still on. Mac immediately goes to bed, not bothering to turn off the TV or change out of his clothes or brush his teeth. He falls asleep without any trouble.
He wakes up later than he normally does. He's dehydrated, his throat sore, and his head hurts. When he checks his phone, he has a text from Charlie that makes no sense, and another from Dee that is presumably what Charlie was trying to say. He responds, then forces himself to get out of bed and get ready for the day.
He has to stop at a craft store before going to the bar, to fulfil Charlie and Dee's request. According to Dee, they want "a shitload of fabric glue and fabric paint," whatever that's for. Mac can't see how it relates to the stripper pole and how to get chicks on it, but he buys the supplies anyway.
They tell him their plan once he gets to the bar and they snatch the bags from him, but he doesn't comprehend it. He helps with what they ask him to do, doing a shitty job because he has no personal care in the scheme. He thinks about Dennis and what he’s up to in North Dakota, if he’s living with Mandy again, how Mandy took to him coming back after two years, if she made his coffee how he likes it, if he had tea with her late last night, if he kissed her, told her he loves her—no, that’s taking it too far. Mac knows Dennis doesn’t love her. He doesn’t know anyone Dennis has loved, minus his mother. Maybe. That hasn’t stopped him from telling multiple girls he loves them, though. He’s seen it on some of the sex tapes, he’s heard it himself, he knows from stories Dennis has told him. It’s not uncommon. If Mandy has to hear that Dennis loves her in order to allow him to stay at her place, then Dennis will tell her he loves her. He never thinks about how it’s cruel to do that, never really cares when it’s pointed out to him. He finds it easier to do it, then think about the repercussions later. If there are any, that is, and if he even cares about them.
He wonders how Dennis broke the news to her that Brian isn’t his real name, that Mac was never his lover. She probably knew just from how Dennis acted, so unwilling to truly act like Mac’s boyfriend. Awkward, pulling away. Mac never quite figured out why Dennis acted that way. He had no issue acting like a couple in previous schemes. It doesn’t escape his mind that Dennis hated it because he hated being in Philly, hated being around Mac, hated what it all meant for his life, but he doesn’t let himself think about that because he doesn’t want to think about it. He’d rather Dennis was just uncomfortable with him being openly gay. That’s better; that hurts less; it explains more. Makes it all a little bit more okay.
He’s blacked out the world around him as he’s lost himself in his thoughts, until suddenly he realizes he’s out of red fabric paint and whatever he was painting on is now entirely red. He has no idea what the plan is, already forgotten what he was supposed to be doing, but he’s pretty sure painting the… jean jacket, he thinks it is, entirely red was not the plan. He makes a face at it and to himself, then points out his mistake to Charlie.
“Oh, dude,” Charlie says, clearly irritated, and it draws Dee and Frank’s attention.
“Come on, Mac, what is that?” Dee says.
“Uuuhh, a red jean jacket, I guess,” Mac responds, looking at it. The paint job isn’t even good. It’s patchy as all hell, clearly done by someone who’s not paying attention in any way. The other three look irritated, and he supposes they have every right to be. “I don’t really know what we’re doing,” he admits. He doesn’t want them to know that all he’s thinking about is Dennis, that that’s the only thing he’s going to be able to think about.
“We can tell,” Charlie says.
“I’m just gonna—” he points towards the bar “—gonna get a beer, I guess,” he says, then gets up. Charlie lets him, then immediately grabs his jean jacket and starts to paint something over it. Mac doesn’t find it rude, doesn’t really care, if he’s being honest.
“You do that, bro,” Charlie says, then much quieter, “This jacket is awful.”
Mac gets himself the beer, then he leans over the bar and watches them work. Frank is going at it with a bunch of glitter, on his second decently sized jar, and every once in a while he’s picking up his jacket and kicking off all the loose glitter onto the floor, making Mac cringe when he thinks about just how awful all of that is going to be to clean up. Charlie is desperately trying to fix Mac’s jacket, which looks practically impossible, and Dee is painting stripes on the pockets of jean booty shorts, for some reason. Mac then looks to the pole where it’s been moved out of the middle of the bar and into the back, near the pool table, trying to will it to give him the answers to this scheme, but it tells him nothing. It’s still only a pole. As long as they don’t ask him to help again, he doesn’t care enough to get them to re-explain it all. He doesn’t think they care either. It doesn’t feel important. Only Dennis’s schemes feel important. Besides, he couldn't care less about chicks pole dancing. Not anymore.
The rest of the day goes by and the setup for the scheme is still not finished. Seeing it come together just proves to confuse Mac more.
He leaves at the same time as everyone else. The old men seem disappointed, so he sends them off with a free beer to make up for it. He's not sure any of them actually have a home outside the bar. Maybe when they first started coming, but through the years they've all started to look more and more rough, less groomed, less happy. But they don't cause trouble, they pay their tabs, and they keep to themselves. Charlie knows their names, but he doesn't.
The TV is still on. It's been on for close to two full days now. He debates turning it off, but he's not paying for the electricity, so he doesn't care. He mutes it, though, as he makes himself a mug of tea. Dennis likes tea, not him, he had come back from North Dakota talking about this small town tea shop five minutes from where he lived and had obsessed over it enough until he made them both tea and Mac drank it all because Dennis expected him to, not because he liked it. After that, they got into the habit of drinking it every night. Dennis would never fail to buy organic shit with leaves in the bags, the shit that's way overpriced with no difference in taste, that Mac can tell, at least. He’s desperate for the familiarity.
He looks at his honey lemon tea, the type he likes the most, still steaming in his hands, and he puts it down. He finds a lemon in the fridge, somehow still okay, and slices it as thinly as he can before sticking it on the rim of his mug. He takes the tea and sits on the couch, the TV still on mute, subtitles skirting across the screen. He skims them, but doesn’t bother actually reading them. Family Fight is playing and he distantly wonders when it’s not playing because it always seems to be on when he’s here. But he still watches it and he reads the subtitles until his tea is cold, undrunk, and he leaves it on the coffee table and he goes to bed. Without Dennis, there’s no one to yell at him for leaving dirty dishes around.
He gets up at a normal time, goes through his morning routine, and takes care of the mug, watching the liquid pour into the kitchen sink, cold and disgusting. The lemon isn’t dried out, but it plops into the sink and floats on top of the drain, unwilling to go down, but it’s for the best, because he doesn’t want it to clog the sink. Still, he leaves it, telling himself he’ll take care of it later when he makes his tea tonight, tea he’ll drink because he says he’ll drink it tonight. He thinks about how Dennis would react if he were here to see Mac not drink his tea, because he knows Dennis would yell at him for wasting the expensive organic tea and Mac would pretend he cares, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t care about nearly as much as Dennis thinks he does, but he purposely does it that way. If Dennis thinks he cares about more than he actually does, he’ll like him more. He wants him to like him, to give him approval, to love him. Sometimes he can feel the love when Dennis calls him needy and desperate, in Dennis’s own messed up way. Those words feel easy, predictable, deflectable, common, known. Dennis likes to feel needed; Mac doesn’t mind being needy. It works out.
He turns off the sink, the lemon slice thoroughly soaked but still stuck over the drain, and he decides he doesn’t care to grab it and throw it away.
When he’s leaving the apartment, positive that the Range Rover’s keys are in his pocket, he realizes that his question from last night has been answered. The TV is playing Cash Cab . He also realizes that it doesn’t actually matter.
Dennis’s chapstick falls when he takes the Range Rover’s keys out of his pocket and it rolls under the car. He had forgotten it was still in his pocket, because normally Dennis takes it from him once they get home from the bar. He hadn’t thought about it when they got home from dinner and Dennis hadn’t asked about it before he left to catch his flight. Still, despite Dennis being gone and already without it, he gets on his belly and searches underneath the car for it, straining to see in the blocked light. Eventually, he sees it, having to scoot a few inches under the car in order to grab it, scraping his fingers across the cement in the process. With the chapstick safely in his hand, he gets into the car and puts the tube into one of the cup holders. When he picks up Dennis from the airport in September, it’ll be there, ready for him, ready for his lips. He only has to wait.
~~
“You’re not helping today. I still can’t fix your jacket,” Charlie says, the moment he walks into the bar. He’s leaning over the red jacket, looking at it as if it’s the worst thing to ever be put in front of him. It looks considerably different from when Mac last had it, but it’s still ugly.
“I don’t really know what’s going on, so whatever,” Mac responds.
“We explained it to you multiple times yesterday. It’s really not hard. Why aren’t you listening?” Dee says. It irritates Mac, but he doesn’t snap. There’s no pay off to it when Dennis isn’t here. He learned that last time.
"Dennis isn't here," Charlie says.
He wants to argue, but his jaw clenches and he can't. He swallows, thickly.
~~
He makes more tea around midnight and he drinks it while he sits at the dining table. It’s green this time and he can’t stand green tea, but it’s what Dennis likes. It has the most health benefits or some shit.
When he brushes his teeth afterwards, it's mostly to get the taste out of his mouth.
He takes all the tea into work the next day and offers it to the gang under the claim that it's going to go bad while Dennis is gone. While that's partly true, it's mostly because he doesn't want to drink it and he feels like it teases him, one of the constant reminders that Dennis left again.
Frank and Charlie don't want any. Frank calls it gay, which is homophobic and doesn't make much sense, but Mac lets it slide. Dee takes some, but not many, because she says she won't drink a lot either and if she takes the whole thing it'll sit in her cabinet for years. Mac is slightly relieved, because halfway through offering it to them he realized that Dennis would yell at him for giving away the tea. He won’t notice missing tea bags, but he will notice a missing box. Dee takes what she wants, then Mac puts the box on the bar and forgets about it for the rest of the day.
Charlie has him help. Not with the painting, which is apparently done, but with hanging up banners and ribbons and Mac still has no idea how any of this will get people on the pole. He thinks it’d be more effective to just post an ad on one of the cork boards in a market. Maybe run a newspaper ad. Except none of them are going to pay anyone to pole dance for them, except Frank, and Frank can be gross, so he guesses an ad is a lost cause. This whole thing seems like a lost cost to him, but he supposes he’s gay, so it would feel like that for him. He looks over to Dee, who is arguing with Charlie about where to hang up a blue ribbon. Charlie is becoming increasingly angry the more Dee argues with him and Mac doesn’t understand why Dee is putting as much of a stake in this scheme as she has been. She gains just about as much as he does from it. It doesn’t make much sense, but nothing about this pole business has made much sense. It would if Dennis were here.
“How does the banner look?” he asks Frank, who’s standing next to him, judging his work. For some reason Dee and Frank let Charlie write the banner. It looks horrible and makes little sense, but Mac isn’t going to mention it.
“It needs to be more to the right. It’s not center,” Frank says after a moment of staring at it. Mac judges it himself, then shakes his head.
“No, that’s center.”
“No, it ain’t.”
“Yes, it is, Frank.”
“Nope.”
“Frank, that is absolutely in the middle of the bar.”
“It’s not supposed to be in the middle of the bar.”
“What?”
“Yeah, it’s supposed to be in between the wall and the counter. That’s center.”
“Since when is the middle not the center?”
“Since I told you to move it.”
Mac gives up. He goes up the ladder, the one they rarely take out of the basement because it’s almost impossible to get it up the stairs, but they managed today just for this stupid banner, and he starts to climb back up. The ladder wobbles underneath him as he pulls at the staples he used to get the banner to stay on the support beam, letting it drift to the floor the moment it’s free.
“Woah, don’t let it get dirty!” Charlie freaks out, coming to pick it up in a rush. Mac steps off the last step of the ladder and takes the banner from Charlie, Charlie only reluctantly handing it over.
“Who cares? It doesn’t make sense anyway.”
Dee shows up. “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask about that. I think we should change it,” she says.
“No way,” Charlie fights, trying to take it back from Mac, but Mac doesn’t let him.
“Come on, bro. No one can read this. It’s nothing personal.”
Dee doesn’t wait for Charlie to respond before she’s walking off and saying something about how she’ll make the new banner. Charlie snatches the banner from Mac, almost ripping it in the process, and walks away with it.
"This is ridiculous, guys. None of this is gonna work," Mac says.
"You
still
don't even know what we're doing," Charlie says, now scribbling furiously on his rejected banner.
"Yeah, but how is any of this gonna get girls in here?"
"Girls? This isn't for girls."
"What? Doesn't this have to do with the pole?"
"Oh no, we gave up on that. We're just gonna wait until Dennis comes back," Charlie says.
" If Dennis comes back," Dee adds.
"Shut up, Dee," Mac snaps, then the anxiety comes out. "He's coming back."
"All I'm saying is he's lied before," Dee continues.
"He came back last time."
"I just don't want you to be surprised if he never comes back." She holds up her banner and studies it, then puts it back on the ground and starts erasing something. She's not even focused on Mac, she doesn't know what she's saying, she doesn't care what she's saying. She just wants to get on his nerves. It's working. He decides he's going to ignore her for the rest of the day.
Except he can’t ignore what she said. He tries, tries his dammest, and it doesn’t work. He keeps going back to the idea that Dennis really won't come back--that his plan this whole time was to never return. Before, it made sense he came back. He left in a rush. He hadn't taken any of his clothes nor any of his toiletries. He had been upset when he came back to find his expensive face cream chemically malformed, unusable. He had to throw out a lot of his things, including clothes, to make room for the clothes he bought in North Dakota. He doesn't have to do that this time. He said he would come back, but he doesn't have to. There's no reason he has to. He has his dream life over in North Dakota. The wife, the child, a dead-end but decent paying job. Well, maybe all he truly has is the child, but it's closer than what he has in Philadelphia. It'd make sense why he wouldn't want to come home. Mac doesn't know why he came back in the first place. He never asked and Dennis never told him. The closest they got to talking about it was when Dennis asked where his car was.
He hates Dee for pointing it out and spiking his anxiety. Dennis had told him he’d be back, but Dennis’s words can only mean so much, and if Dennis doesn’t come back, he doesn’t know what he’d do. He’s done it all. He got buff, he found his pride, he annoyed the shit out of the gang, even got a new member into the gang and annoyed her too. The anxiety nags at him and makes him unable to think of anything else until Dee is suddenly in front of him, handing him the new banner and directing him to put it up. Frank gives him instructions again and he moves it around until Frank is convinced that it’s in the center, and then Mac gets off the ladder and looks at it. It doesn’t look any better because Dee has no creativity, but at least it’s actual english.
When he’s back in his apartment for the night, he changes the TV channel and he unmutes it. He has green tea again, but he doesn’t know if he’ll drink it. It was a habit to make it, the process halfway done before he even realized what he was doing, and then he shoved the tea to the back of the cupboards so he wouldn’t fall into the habit again. He spends his time on the couch doing nothing but switching through channels, finally stopping at one of the basic cable channels playing some sitcom. The main characters are interacting, talking about going somewhere, and Mac is immediately confused, but he keeps it on the channel anyway. He tunes out shortly, staring at the TV but hearing nothing, not caring to hear anything, until he’s half asleep and somehow two words that a male character says make it through the fog in his brain and it’s kicked into high gear.
Gay bar.
He has to go to a gay bar.
He needs to get himself a boyfriend.