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When Pete boards the red eye from Los Angeles to Barcelona, he’s not thinking about anything in particular. It’s not that he’s not thinking at all because, despite what his tour manager says, that’s actually surprisingly difficult. He’s idly queuing up a Spotify playlist. He’s wondering if he left the front door unlocked. He’s hopeful that that’s his passport in his back pocket and not a napkin from Taco Bell. Pete is thinking generally. Pete’s thoughts are vague.
But, for example, Pete is definitely not thinking about ubiquitous music journalists as he scans the seat numbers for the one that matches his boarding pass. Music journalists are the furthest thing from his mind as he slings his headphones around his neck — which proves he did, in fact, pack them in his carry on — and shoves his bag into the overhead storage locker.
“Hey,” he says to his companion for the next eleven hours, “hope you don’t mind if I…”
Pete looks down.
Patrick fucking Stumph blinks back up at him.
“Um — Hello,” Patrick mutters, although it looks like it might be difficult for him to speak. Like he’s experiencing rigor mortis of the limbic system. He gestures vaguely in the direction of the nearest person wearing a uniform. “Uh — I — Uh…”
With that, he slips by and into the aisle.
Not one to knowingly waste an opportunity, Pete thinks ‘in for a penny,’ and drops into Patrick’s window seat. Claiming all of this glorious airplane real estate for himself, Pete does a very decadent and, if he says so himself, sexy lounge, pulling out a paperback copy of Infinite Jest and settling in. He hopes Patrick fucking Stumph gets lost on his way back to the seat and spends his flight in economy. He hopes they’ll eject him from the plane for crimes against pop culture. He hopes, if they do, that they do it at cruising altitude and invite Pete to watch and take pictures.
Patrick Stumph – a ridiculous little name for a ridiculous little man – is the bane of Pete’s musical career. He is the pebble in Pete’s shoe. The thorn in his side, if he may be permitted to quote Annie Lennox. If forced to describe Patrick generously, Pete would choose adjectives such as sarcastic and vicious and mean where Pete is charming and laidback and generous. The only reason that Pete would hesitate to describe them as polar opposites is because music journalists are not, as far as he knows, magnetic.
Furthermore, Patrick is stupidly adorable. Facially at least. This is unfair because his personality is bitchy, egoistic and self-important and it would be nice if the two could match up.
The omnipresent written voice of Patrick fucking Stumph has haunted Pete’s nightmares for the past ten years. From a high school newspaper review of a basement show in Barrington to Rolling Stone’s one-star critique of Arma’s latest album Hold This Like a Thought, there’s no escape from that asshole. Eight years ago, after the first ten or so dismissive, petty write ups, Pete started to think Patrick might hold a teeny, tiny grudge against him. Thirty-two awful reviews later, not that anyone’s counting (aside from Pete who is totally fucking counting) he’s upgraded this to a fully formed, tinfoil hat conspiracy theory.
The biggest problem with Arma Angelus, Patrick wrote in his latest missive, as though there were many problems and he had no hope of listing them all in one review, is that they don’t so much make music as punish their instruments for three minutes at a time, as if they can unify the sound of their ineptitude and Wentz’s cacophonic shrieking through sheer force of will. Then they repeat this process. Ten to thirteen times per album. Though they claim to be political in nature, the only clear way I can see of them influencing an upswing in left-leaning representation in the Senate, is if they stand outside the polling booth and offer to stop playing if everyone promises to vote Democrat.
Pete may lose the memory of his loved one’s faces to vascular dementia one day, but he’ll never forget that quote.
It takes twenty minutes for Patrick to reappear, his face very red aside from the parts that are very grey, his hands bunched into defensive fists inside the sleeves of his cardigan. There’s a smiling flight attendant right behind him.
“I’ll go in coach,” he whispers to her desperately. “Anywhere you can squeeze me in is absolutely fine.”
“Sir, don’t be silly! This is a wonderful seat!”
“I’ll fit in your carry on locker. I don’t take up a lot of room, I mean, look at me!”
“Sir, if you could just…”
“All I’m saying is—”
“Mr Stumph,” she says, herding him towards his seat like a border collie, “the seatbelt sign is very clearly illuminated, so if you could just sit down...”
“Patrick!” Pete says brightly. “You’re back!”
Patrick slithers his way into his seat – Pete’s seat, technically, but no one needs to think about semantics – and eyes Pete warily. “Yes,” he agrees. “I am.”
To the flight attendant, Pete says, “Don’t you worry about him a bit, I’ll make sure he follows the rules.”
“Really,” Patrick says, and he looks like he wants to the ground to open up and swallow him whole. “You don’t have to — Honestly. It’s fine.”
Because he’s an asshole, Pete begins to fuss in Patrick’s lap, pulling at his seatbelt.
“Let’s get you strapped in, sweetheart,” he says with good cheer.
“Get off of me!” Patrick, cheerful not at all, slaps his hands away, very rudely if anyone’s asking.
“I can see why he’s causing you trouble, ma’am,” Pete says.
And she beams at him because Pete’s handsome and charming and he looks very sincere even with two arms covered in ink and a muscle tee that says Suck My Richard. And maybe she can sense that Patrick is the kind of dick measurable on the Saffir-Simpson scale, because she smiles at him so coldly that he cowers back into his seat and allows Pete to finish fussing with his lap belt.
“Mr Stumph, stay,” she says, like Patrick is an annoying Pomeranian.
Pete smiles, his toothiest and most disingenuous press release smile, and leans across the aisle seat. Patrick jerks back and eyes Pete’s hand like it’s coated in something unpleasant.
“I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself,” Pete says. “Pete Wentz; Arma Angelus, bass and vocals.”
At this point Pete’s just being cruel, but so is saying ‘someone ought to sit Wentz down and tell him 2002 called and they want their self-aggrandizing LiveJournal poetry back.’
“I know who you are,” Patrick says, and leans dramatically into the aisle in an effort to put distance between the two of them.
“And you’re Patrick Stumph,” Pete continues blithely, oozing into the space them, his hand entirely unshaken. “Rolling Stone, right?”
“You, uh... you don’t pronounce the ‘h.’ Just, like… to rhyme with bump.”
“Stump,” Pete rolls it around his mouth, lets the ‘p’ snap against his lips, and nods sagely. “Noun or verb?”
Patrick looks mildly terrified. “Uh… excuse me?”
“You know, stump as in ‘tree’ or as in ‘to stump.’”
Patrick furrows his brow. “I don’t — I mean, I never really—”
“Like a tree, I guess,” Pete says. “See, I don’t know these things because I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced.”
“No,” Patrick agrees, like it pains him very much to agree with anything Pete has to say, “I don’t suppose we have.”
“That’s because I’m a musician,” Pete says, like Patrick is an idiot. Which he is, because he doesn’t like Arma Angelus. “And you’re press and I tend to stay away from people like you because anything I say has a habit of showing up on Dlisted.”
“Suits me just fine,” Patrick mumbles. “The lack of association, so we’re clear, I don’t actually care about you at all.”
“You’d like me if you got to know me,” Pete says with great insincerity. “I bet if you got to know me, you’d think I was awesome.”
“What a shame, then,” Patrick says lightly, “that I’m literally never going to do that.”
Because it’s so very clear that Patrick wants him to stop talking, Pete resolves to never shut up. He’ll talk for the rest of the flight to Barcelona. He’ll follow Patrick Stumph through baggage claim and ride the carousel with his suitcases. He’ll trail him into arrivals and all the way to the stupid car that’ll no doubt be waiting for him. He’ll camp in the foyer of his hotel like a groupie and fill every elevator ride and generic hotel breakfast Patrick takes with endless chit chat until he drowns him in pointless conversation. If Patrick thinks everything Pete has to say is vapid and only half as intelligent as he thinks it is, he’ll suffocate them both with banality.
Starting now.
“You ran off kind of quickly there,” Pete observes, still leaning all the way over the armrest, staking his claim on Patrick’s personal space. “Everything okay?”
“Everything is absolutely fine,” Patrick says, sinking into his seat like he can defy the first law of thermodynamics and teleport himself someplace else. “You can go back to listening to music if you want. I was just going to – I was going to work.”
He’s dressed in a black and white striped crew neck under his cardigan, tight jeans and Buddy Holly glasses like he wants to be Elvis Costello. He looks just the way a Rolling Stone journalist on his way to cover the first of the European summer festivals is supposed to look; sanctimonious, self-important, rude. He looks like someone who chose what ASOS told him to wear over not getting deep vein thrombosis.
He crowds a little further over Patrick’s armrest. “Were you trying to switch seats?”
Patrick glares at the entertainment screen in front of him, as though he hopes it might blow up and electrocute him and he’s angry that it’s not complying. He sighs deeply.
“Yes. I was trying to switch seats,” he says.
“Don’t you want to sit next to me?” Pete asks. “I’m an amazing person to sit next to. I don’t snore, my legs aren’t super long and I always go to the bathroom to fart. You should be glad you get to sit next to me; you could do a lot worse.”
Patrick doesn’t answer, which is annoying and stuck up. Instead, he shrugs and pulls his phone out of his pocket and begins tap-tap-tapping on the screen with a great deal of grandiose. It’s obvious that he wants to appear both busy and important.
This is Pete’s opportunity to take the hint, to lean back in his own illegitimately acquired window seat and watch Los Angeles disappear beneath them. He could pull on his headphones and his eye mask, pop a couple of Xanax and wake up in a new time zone with a downer headache and an amusing anecdote to share with the rest of his band.
But what’s a media magnet supposed to do? Behave like a mature and reasonable adult? That sounds like no fun at all.
The deep, black depths of his mischief will know no bounds on this particular flight. By the time the wheels hit the tarmac in Barcelona, Patrick will rue the day he wrote his first article. He sits back, gives Patrick just enough space to lower his defences, relax his shoulders, possibly stop dwelling on the memories of the bullies who no doubt flushed his smug, know-it-all head down the toilet in high school. Then, as the safety briefing starts, he pounces.
“Sooo,” he draws it out across four or five syllables and brings his cheek very close to Patrick’s. “What’cha doin’?”
“Nothing!” Patrick snatches his phone back. Pete thinks he sees his own Wikipedia page for half a second before it’s hidden against Patrick’s chest. “Look, could you just, like, steal my lunch money and tape the ‘kick me’ sign to my back and then leave me alone? I tried to move; I don’t want to sit here anymore than you want me to.”
“I don’t want you to move,” Pete smiles charmingly. “I’m just taking an interest in your work, Rickalicious.”
“Patrick. Just Patrick is fine.”
“Don’t be like that, Hacktrick, if you don’t let me give you cute nicknames then we’ll never become best friends.”
Patrick makes a noise like he just licked a live battery.
“That’s why I’m seducing you platonically,” Pete continues blithely. “So you’ll become my best friend. I always wanted a music critic as a best friend, you guys are the best. What are the rules again? No bright lights, don’t get you wet, and no feeding you after midnight or you turn into Perez Hilton?”
Patrick continues to glare at his phone and makes a low, non-committal hmm through his nose.
“I’m thinking a big picture deal: Enemies to besties at 35,000 feet. Everyone in LA’s got a movie deal these days. This is how we’re gonna make it rich, Rick-ta-life.”
Patrick sneers. “Well, you’re sure as shit not getting rich off of your music.”
As soon as the words leave his mouth, he looks as though he’s attempting to bite through his own tongue. His existential crisis, his overwhelming desire to recall them immediately if not sooner, plays out in glorious real time as Pete watches. Pete is the worst kind of asshole. He enjoys every nanosecond of it.
Then, he smiles. This time it’s wolfish.
“Don’t you like my band, Pat-a-cake?” he asks.
“I neither like nor dislike your band,” Patrick says, as neutral as Switzerland. “You’re just a band, like all of the other bands I’ll review. I don’t come into this sort of thing with preconceived ideas about anyone’s musical ability,” he pauses for a perfect beat, “or lack thereof.”
Clearly, Patrick is not done poking this particular bear.
“That,” Pete says, clutching his hand to his chest, “was a sick burn. Do you have any ice? I think I need some ice for that sick, sick burn.”
“God, would you drop the bully from a high school movie thing you’ve got going on,” Patrick says, gesturing irritably with his phone. That’s definitely Pete’s wiki page. “It’s not particularly mature.”
“Are you looking at my Wiki page?” he asks, his mouth very close to Patrick’s ear.
Patrick lets out an undignified shriek and attempts to stuff his phone into his pocket and hold it out of Pete’s line of sight. Instead, he throws it at the woman in the seat across the aisle, which must be horribly embarrassing for him. “Ow!” she says, handing it back with a glare.
“Sorry ma’am,” says Pete cheerfully, “he gets weak in the presence of beauty.”
Pete is actually in the presence of witnesses. Which is good. Because otherwise, he’s almost certain there’d be a gap in his front teeth and blood on Patrick’s elbow. It is so very, absolutely worth it.
“You shouldn’t look at someone’s Wiki page when you’re sitting right next to them. It’s, like, totally weird. It’s a thing weird people do,” Pete informs him seriously.
“I wasn’t looking at your Wiki page,” Patrick snaps, shoving his phone into his pocket so hard that there’s a risk he’ll tear the stitching. “That’s not an accurate representation of what was happening at all.”
“Prove it.”
“I can’t, it’s in my pocket now,” Patrick grouses and folds his arms. He’s adorable when he grouses and folds his arms. “But, please, let me assure you that I’d rip out each of my pubic hairs — one by one — before I spent any time at all looking at your Wiki page.”
“That,” says Pete, “is very unkind, especially coming from a journalist.”
He says ‘journalist’ to sound synonymous with ‘douchebag.’
“Could you stop talking?” Patrick asks irritably, as they begin to taxi down the runway. “Seriously, I’m not — Flying is so not my favorite thing, so if you could just shut up, that would be awesome.”
“You’re afraid of flying?” Pete asks with glee. This could well be the greatest day of his life.
Patrick scowls. “I’m not afraid. I’m just… anxious. I’m an anxious flier, that’s all. It’s not a big deal, plenty of people fly anxiously.”
Rule number one of dealing with an asshole is that you never reveal your weakness to the asshole. Particularly if that weakness is air travel and you’re trapped on a plane next to someone who has a vested interest in making your life hell. Clowns, spiders, enclosed spaces, none of those would’ve been viable material. But flying? Oh, Pete can work with flying. The plane begins to pick up speed.
“Have you ever seen Final Destination?” he asks conversationally, as the front wheels lift and they shudder into flight.
“No,” Patrick says shortly. “I have not, in fact, seen Final Destination. So, there’s no point in you talking about it, because I don't know what you mean.”
It is painfully obvious to Pete that Patrick has definitely seen Final Destination.
He continues, cheerfully, “The opening scene with Devon Sawa on the plane? You know the bit, right? Where the plane explodes and everyone’s getting sucked out of their seats and — Oh! Remember the fireball?”
Beside him, Patrick begins to whimper.
“They say take-off and landing are the two most dangerous points of any flight, you know,” Pete says.
“Hnngh,” Patrick says, his eyes closed and his mouth a little green at the corners.
Encouraged by this, Pete carries on, “So many tiny mechanical things that could go wrong, I mean, think about it — one bolt snaps and suddenly we’re on the most intense roller coaster ride of our goddamn lives, but instead of heading back through the turnstiles at the end, it’s curtains.” He draws his finger over his throat and makes a loud crrrk in the back of his throat. “Boom! Fiery death.”
Patrick makes the sign of the cross. “Hnngh.”
“Do you think it would better to crash over land or over sea?” Pete asks innocently. “I mean, there’s more chance that the fuselage will stay mostly in one piece if we land in the ocean, but try to imagine it: bobbing in the icy depths of the Atlantic Ocean in the dead of night, suitcases and pieces of airplane and bodies drifting by...”
“I hate you,” Patrick whispers, apparently experiencing all five stages of grief at once. “I hate you so much.”
Pete does not care. “Oh, but what if it’s more like Alive? What if we crash in the mountains and no one comes to rescue us? Does this flight route go over the Rockies? Open your eyes, Tricky-dick, I need you to help me figure out who we’ll eat first!”
Patrick makes a sound like he’s dying, his knuckles very white against the dark grey armrest. Then, before Pete can do something else — and he has an awesome idea for a game called Guess Which of These Airplane Disaster Movies Are Based on True Stories — Patrick reaches out and snatches at his hand. The squeeze he inflicts is almost primal, almost savage, the callus on the side of his thumb catching the fat, green vein in Pete’s wrist. He wants to jerk his hand away but there appears to be something wrong with his central nervous system. The only logical explanation is that Patrick has caught a nerve in his wrist, a pressure point that makes him squeeze back rather than shaking him off like he ought to.
“Please,” Patrick begs, breathless.
Pete’s dick, clearly imagining other situations in which Patrick might beg, gives a hard, interested twitch in his sweatpants. Pete’s dick has terrible taste, and makes awful decisions based on aesthetics alone. Pete’s dick has got him into enough trouble for one lifetime and will not be offered the opportunity to do the same again.
Patrick shows no sign of letting go of his hand. It is, Pete thinks, like having a very pleasant, tingly heart attack. This makes him roughly as aroused as he is horrified, so he does the manly thing and bites his lip and stares out of the window and doesn’t listen, at all, to the choppy rise and fall of Patrick’s breathing.
Oh, God, thinks Pete, I think I’m attracted to Patrick Stumph.
Patrick keeps his eyes closed until LA is far behind them, breathing shallowly through his nose and swallowing like he’s going to throw up. Pete extracts a barf bag with one hand and wonders how likely it is that he’ll catch the puke before it hits his sneakers.
If he winds up covered in Patrick’s stomach acid and partially digested dinner, he’s approaching Rolling Stone with a dry-cleaning bill.
When they hit cruising altitude and the seatbelt sign dims, Patrick reluctantly opens his eyes and peels his sticky, sweaty fingers from around Pete’s fist. “I’m sorry,” he says, embarrassed, “I — I really freak out about flying and — That was inappropriate. I apologize.”
“It’s fine. Don’t mention it,” Pete mutters gruffly.
The hand Patrick abandoned feels cold. Pete tucks it back into his lap.
“No, seriously, I’m sorry. That wasn’t — I shouldn’t have—”
“I said it’s fine,” Pete snaps. “Back off.”
Patrick looks hurt which makes Pete feel guilty, but instead of apologizing he just feels angry that Patrick is making him feel guilty. There are a lot of feelings, right now. He doesn’t really want to process them so, instead, he keeps his eyes on the seat in front and digs his thumbnail into his thigh and thinks about things that are definitely not Patrick Stumph.
“O-kay,” Patrick says eventually, which does nothing to assist Pete in not thinking about him. “Well, this isn’t awkward at all.”
Then, Patrick fidgets, stretches and rummages for his bag. When he reaches up for the overhead locker, he reveals the pale softness of his stomach between the hem of his shirt and the waist of his pants, the red-gold hair that cruls around his navel and down under the button of his jeans. Pete’s dick stirs once more, like it’s desperate to win awards for inappropriate stupidity, like it’s reaching out and saying How about now? Can we touch now? Resolutely, Pete reminds his genitals that no, they cannot.
He has had to deal with the reality of his newfound and highly inappropriate crush for eleven minutes. This has to be in contravention of at least three of Pete’s constitutional rights. There’s no way he can survive this for nine hours. Not to be dramatic, but he might die.
Patrick slides back into his seat, messing with the table and adjusting the angle of his backrest. By the window, Pete convinces himself that it might be a very good idea to feign sleep — or possibly his own death — if it means he doesn’t have to look Patrick in the eye.
“You want to share?” Patrick asks quietly. “It’s Bowie.”
Pete jumps at the sound, pivoting in his seat to find Patrick holding out an earbud like a middle schooler. When he smiles, his eyes crinkle attractively, and the corners of his mouth tip up, and he looks so enchantingly happy. If they’re conjoined by earphones, Patrick’s lips tethered to Pete’s by twelve inches of cable, then the urge to kiss him will become less urge and more inevitability. This cannot be allowed to happen. This requires direct action.
“I have my own headphones,” Pete says haughtily, and rattles the Beats in Patrick’s direction in demonstration. “And my own music.”
The smiles drops from Patrick’s face. He shrugs and hunkers down into his seat and concentrates on scrolling through his iPad. “I was trying to be nice,” he mutters without looking back up. “You don’t have to be an asshole about everything.”
Pete sneers. “That’s rich coming from the man who makes a living out of being an asshole.”
“Better than making a living out of being an embarrassment.”
Pete opens his mouth and closes it again and stares at Patrick’s angry, red profile. That is… not unfair. Not exactly. But it’s definitely not an observation Patrick — the man who built a career on immortalizing celebrity embarrassment — has any right to make.
“Go fuck yourself,” he mumbles.
Patrick rolls his eyes and snaps, “Bite me.”
Schools of journalism are a chemical plant of horrible decisions and music journalists are the most toxic of all of the by-products, spewing out into the system and poisoning everything they touch. The thing is, Pete bets Patrick wanted to be in a band when he was younger. He bets Patrick would’ve given anything to switch places with someone like Pete, to trade his press pass for a performers lanyard and live in a world where people — actual people, the kind of people who matter — know his name.
Jealous, spiteful little fuck.
So, Pete sits in Patrick’s window seat and fumes silently to himself. He’s angry that Patrick hasn’t asked for it back so he can say no, angry that he’s attractive, angry that he pretends to be nice with his ridiculous little earphones and his mainstream Bowie playlist. Like he’s a real fan and hasn’t just pulled together a list based on what his professors in college told him to listen to.
Pete sits and he stews and he thinks fuck absolutely all of this. Fuck Rolling Stone, fuck Bilbao festival, fuck Island for booking him onto this flight, into this seat, fuck the great nation of Spain, because they’re at least partially responsible for this, and, most of all, fuck Patrick Stumph.
“Those who can, do,” Pete says out loud. Which is as surprising for him as it is for everyone sitting nearby.
It’s loud enough that Patrick hears him through his earphones and tugs them out questioningly, loud enough that the person in the row ahead tuts in irritation, loud enough that it makes the roots of his teeth ache a little.
Patrick frowns, confused. “I’m sorry?” He twists his headphones into a neat little curlicue on the right-hand side of the table, like an asshole. “Did you say something?”
“Those who can, do,” Pete repeats. “And those who can’t, just talk about how everyone else is doing it wrong.”
“Excuse me?” Patrick looks very puzzled. “What the fuck, pray tell, are you talking about?”
“Oh, yeah, that’s you all over, isn’t it?” Pete spits. He is too angry to breathe right now. He worries he might be too angry to live. Like the loser of all good arguments, he falls into rhetoric. “You think you’re special, don’t you?”
“Rolling Stone thinks so,” Patrick says mildly, counting off on his fingers. “And Alternative Press, Blender, Billboard, NME, Kerrang—”
“It was a rhetorical question!” Pete points out.
“I know,” Patrick says as he goes right back to staring at his tablet. “And I answered it with rhetoric.”
Pete snarls. Stupid, sexy journalists with their stupid, sexy grasp of literary devices.
There are laws that prevent him from beating Patrick to death with his own iPad, but Pete allows himself to imagine it for a moment or two. Acting on the impulse will almost definitely get him detained by the air marshal, his wrists and ankles zip tied until they touch down somewhere in Utah. He really doesn’t want to make a telephone call to his manager from Utah, to explain that he needs an attorney to defend him against an entirely unjustified charge of assault.
Saying any of that out loud would almost certainly land him in the pages of US Weekly for all of the wrong reasons. It leads to lengthy phone calls from his agent where he apologizes — and means it, because she’s really nice and she’s put up with his bullshit since the band made it big — and she sighs sadly and says things like ‘you’re going to give me an ulcer,’ and ‘I swear to God, Peter, I swear to God.’
“I’m going to sleep,” he declares, instead.
“Sweet dreams,” says Patrick, who definitely doesn’t mean it.
It’s of note that Patrick doesn’t seem like he’s really going to miss his company. This is definitely his loss.
Patrick fucking Stumph is an ass, and one day, Pete’s going to start up a magazine devoted to reviewing shitty journalists. He’ll call it Know Your NME, and Patrick? He’s getting no stars. Zero. Minus figures, if Pete can rig it. See how he likes that.
***
Pete wakes from troubled dreams, sweating, and with the blanket twisted around his knees.
It’s close to 3:30 PDT. The interactive map glows gently and informs him that they’re somewhere over the Atlantic. Around him, the plane is dim and Patrick is sleeping peacefully, whistling gently on each breath out, his tablet balanced on his chest.
Without thinking about it very much at all, Pete reaches out and carefully snags the iPad from Patrick’s chest like he’s Indiana Jones in the Arc of the Covenant. People like Patrick don’t get to keep secrets if they’re going to share the personal information of people like Pete. This is not theft. This is… a social justice. This is definitely not an attempt to prove that Patrick was looking at his Wiki page. That would be childish.
There’s no password on the iPad because Patrick is clearly either stupid trusting or he’s never lived on a tour bus with three filthy-handed thieves. The screensaver is a picture of a small, annoying dog that looks like it would be very at home with a small, annoying owner. Pete flips idly through the apps and wonders if he should delete the games and take out Patrick’s Angry Birds score, or fire off random messages to all of the people on his friends list on Facebook. The possibilities are endless.
Because Pete is an honorable asshole, he doesn’t scroll through Patrick’s emails or his photographs. Instead, he heads to Safari and the browser history. He’s motivated by nothing more than professional interest; he’s not spying, just trying to find out what makes this mysterious beast of vicious reviews and unfair critique tick. There’s no doubt in Pete’s mind that all he’s going to find are hipster blogs and thought pieces about no one producing a decent album since Hunky Dory.
This means that the Google search results hit him like a punch to the stomach.
Is Pete Wentz gay?
Is Pete Wentz bisexual?
Did Pete Wentz come out?
Pete Wentz boyfriend
Pete Wentz summer of like
Pete Wentz shirtless
Pete Wentz leaked pictures
Pete stares down at the tablet in his hands. He stares at it so hard his eyes begin to sting. His palms are sweaty. He is breathing in an unnatural, unbalanced rhythm. What he tells himself is: they are, without a doubt, deeply confusing search terms. They are not, reasonably, the sort of things that would be searched for by someone who, say, didn’t have some kind of interest in Pete’s fun, below-the-waist body parts. He attempts to clear his throat and makes a strangled, yelping noise instead.
Beside him, Patrick’s breathing stutters. Red-eyed with sleep, he blinks at Pete from the adjacent seat.
“Uh...” Patrick says, adorably ruffled and confused. “What are you doing with my iPad?”
Then, he must catch sight of the screen because he drains of that flushed-up, post-nap glow and starts looking like he might pass out. He looks guilty, which is fair, because Pete was kidding when he talked about cyberstalking but Patrick, apparently, was just taking suggestions.
Pete is surprised at how light his voice is as he replies: “Are you writing an artist spotlight that no one told me about?”
At least Patrick has the grace to blush as he stammers, “I — No. Not — not exactly.”
“Oh,” Pete says. “Are you reading up on how not to be a total bag of dicks to the next young musician who makes his way onto the scene and, like, makes a couple of bad choices and forwards some pictures to the wrong people? Is that something Rolling Stone is interested in?”
“No,” Patrick shakes his head. “That’s — No.”
Patrick is pulled taut, wire instead of muscle, focused with single minded intent on Pete’s hands. It’s clear he wants to grab at the tablet, Pete has no idea why he hasn’t. Patrick licks his lips, leaves them damp and pink and puffy from sleep.
“So, why,” Pete asks, still terrifyingly level as he tilts the screen so Patrick can see, “are you googling every unwise decision I’ve ever made? Why exactly, are you looking for pictures of my penis?”
The last word slides up into an operatic shriek. Pete may not be the world’s best vocalist, but he can project when he needs to. In the seat in front, someone stirs.
“Um…” Patrick says, his face so red that spontaneous combustion is a distinct possibility. “Could you keep it down, maybe? I think people are trying to sleep.”
“And why,” Pete asks, talking over him, “are you trying to find out if I have more than a passing, shared anatomy sort of interest in anyone else’s dick?”
“I didn’t,” Patrick insists. It’s not very convincing. “Please be quiet…”
“Do you want to know if I fuck men, Patrick?” Pete asks. “Go ahead, ask me.”
Right now, Pete has no idea if he feels angry or violated or just very, very aroused at the thought of Patrick finding those pictures of him with his dick in his hand. Did he sneak away to the bathroom while Pete was sleeping, rub one out to the thought of sucking Pete off? Oh, God. Why the actual fuck is this turning him on? There are so many things he needs to evaluate with his therapist.
Patrick looks as though he thinks a plane crash wouldn’t be such a terrible thing after all. Patrick looks as though he’s close to emotional collapse. He says, very softly, “Uh…”
“Do you want to me to fuck you?” Pete asks dangerously. "Is that it?”
Patrick lunges. “Give me back my fucking tablet, you asshole.”
Pete laughs, hard and ugly. “Give me back my fucking privacy, hack!”
“It’s not my fault your dick pics got splashed all over the internet,” Patrick objects, scrambling out of his seat and slithering over the armrest in pursuit of his tablet. Because Pete is an eldest child, he holds it out of reach like a Pavlovian response. “It’s not my fault you don’t know when to stop doing dumb shit.”
To Pete at least, it’s very obvious that Patrick is talking horseshit. “It’s your fault it finds its way onto Gawker!”
This is the wrong thing to say. Patrick stops reaching for the tablet and instead makes a lunge like he intends to wrap his hands around Pete’s throat. Ordinarily, this would be a cause for alarm but Patrick is soft and warm and sitting in Pete’s lap and he just spent an unknown number of minutes looking at pictures of Pete’s junk. Choking? Yeah, Pete could get into it.
“I don’t write for Gawker!” Patrick snarls, and makes fists in the collar of Pete’s shirt which is… disappointing. “I’ve never written for Gawker! I’m a real journalist, a critic, I’m sorry your ego can’t handle that but I’m not responsible for your poor life choices or where they wind up published.”
“Get off of me!” Pete objects, still hobbled by his blanket, a human-sized version of Buckaroo where Pete is the mule and Patrick is the tiny plastic cowboy hat. “This is a gross invasion of my privacy, my sense of self identity, and my lap!”
“You don’t even respect your own privacy!” Patrick whisper-shouts, abandoning Pete’s throat to lunge at the iPad once more. “Why should anyone else? Give it!”
Pete holds the tablet over their heads and just out of Patrick’s reach. “No! Get out of my seat, asshole!”
“It’s my seat,” Patrick snarls. “It’s my seat and it’s my tablet and you’re a fucking douche—” Patrick slips against him, falling down and forward and firmly onto Pete’s lap and, by extension, his joyful erection. Patrick’s eyes widen and he sucks in a hard breath. “Oh.”
Look, honestly? Pete was unconscious less than two minutes ago. He is not emotionally or physically capable of dealing with this in a sensible and rational manner. Plus, not to sound crass or anything, but Patrick’s got these killer thighs, and they’re currently bracketing Pete’s hips in a very sexy way. Pete’s endocrine system is going fucking haywire. He is, to put it bluntly, on the express line to Bonerville and the brake cables snapped a while ago.
Above him, Patrick goes very still and blissfully quiet. He’s no longer grabbing at the tablet. Instead, he drops his fists. His eyes dart frantically from Pete’s mouth to the outline of his very obvious erection under his sweats and back again. He doesn’t move, which is supremely inconvenient, Pete would really appreciate it if he could wriggle, just a little. He breathes quickly, his pupils blown and his teeth sinking into his bottom lip. It’s a decadent lip. Pete would like to bite into it himself, to feel it flush against the underside of his cock.
Patrick rolls back into his own seat and Pete feels the loss on a molecular level. They don’t speak for what feels like a very long time.
“Um,” Patrick says, eventually. “Huh.”
They’re both staring at the seats in front like the mysteries of life, love, and the known universe can be found within the stitching. From the corner of his eye, Pete can see that Patrick is breathing very quickly, his hands folded over his lap, his cheeks flushed but not because he’s blushing. God, he’s probably getting hard, probably chubbing up under his jeans. If Pete just leaned over and pressed his face into Patrick’s zipper, he could smell the hot, heady richness of his cock. Oh God. The amount of drool in his mouth is unforgivable.
“So…” Pete says, because one of them has to say something.
“Um,” Patrick says, again, fumbling to his feet with his hands still cupped over his crotch. He yanks his cardigan down in the front and nods vaguely towards the front of the plane. “Yeah. I’m just…”
He hurries away, which grants Pete the view of an ass that could start wars, pert and round and soft under his jeans. The bathroom sign switches from green to red. If Pete imagines Patrick shoving down his jeans, getting a hand around his dick, stroking himself off, with his head thrown back and his lip — that lip — between his teeth, he’s going to do something very juvenile and teenage in his underwear.
The airplane is quiet, the staff taking their break, the passengers sleeping. No one is paying attention to rock stars nursing inappropriate chubbies over pretty-mouthed music critics. Pete breathes in the smell of recycled air and tries his best to impartially evaluate the life choices currently available to him.
He compiles a short list:
- Leave his seat, limp to the front of the plane and demand a private audience with Patrick’s dick in a single occupancy bathroom stall, or;
- Leave his seat, hurry to the back of the plane and take himself in hand and never, ever speak of it again, or;
- Stay where he is and ignore his penis, like a rational adult.
He’s not actually an idiot and fucking Patrick in the bathroom is exactly the kind of thing his agent would strongly advise against. On the other hand, he really wants to fuck Patrick in the airplane bathroom. Which leads to his final subpoint:
3a. He has never behaved like a rational adult in his life. It seems churlish to begin now.
He climbs to his feet carefully, because maneuvering around the nervy quiver of his dick is surprisingly difficult. This erection is glorious. Revolutionary. No penis has ever been as hard as Pete’s. It could be the subject of love songs, of sonnets, of large R Romantic poetry analyzed by English majors in Ivy League universities. It would be a tragedy to let it go to waste.
No one pays him any mind as he makes his way down the aisle and towards the bathroom door. He can’t feel his feet, his toes numb, every spare blood cell rerouted and reused to fill and flush his cock. It shivers the closer he gets, a throbbing compass point, each footstep making the base of his spine ache with need. This is like a craving, like Patrick is a hit of sweet, sticky heroin, and Pete needs the heady rush of dopamine.
He doesn’t pause at the bathroom door because thinking is a dangerous thing when he’s this close. Both close to Patrick and close to coming in his sweats. He knocks — twice — then rests his feverish temple against the plastic. This is midsummer madness. There is no other plausible explanation.
“Occupied,” Patrick says breathlessly.
Pete hasn’t paid enough attention to his voice. The timbre of it shakes through him and makes his balls throb. Is Patrick breathless because he’s touching himself? His hot, red dick in his hand as he rubs and strokes and thinks about Pete. God. Pete presses the heel of his hand into the dull, aching throb at the base of his cock and forces himself to breathe slowly.
He knocks again. Patrick sounds pissed off. “Seriously, someone’s in here. Like — Go away.”
“It’s me,” Pete whispers hoarsely. “It’s just — It’s me. Pete,” he adds stupidly, because who else would be following Patrick to the bathroom? “Can I come inside? Inside the bathroom, not — not inside of you. Unless you, uh, you want me to?”
Patrick doesn’t answer.
“Should I go away?” Pete asks, like it isn’t extremely fucking obvious that that’s exactly what he should do.
“Oh God,” Patrick hisses finally, and the sound of his shoes shuffling against the floor makes Pete’s dick twitch. “‘Not inside of you.’ Seriously? Are you always this fucking smooth, or are you making a special effort?”
Sarcasm. Pete can barely think around the burning throb of his erection and Patrick has the mental capacity for sarcasm. This is another reason to dislike him, absolutely, but the dislike can wait for a minute or twenty. He waits, hips twitching, for Patrick to open the door.
Patrick does not open the door.
“Psst,” Pete hisses eventually. “I’m — Are you going to let me in?”
“You’re still here?” Patrick sounds… surprised. Which is offensive. Pete is offended. And aroused. Pete is both offended and aroused.
“Look,” Pete says, and he congratulates himself internally for how little his voice shakes, “I’m out here with the kind of hard-on you could hang a towel from, and you’re in there with one of your own, and I’m like… 89 percent certain I’m still going to hate you when we land in Barcelona but maybe we could… help each other out? What happens on the red eye, stays on the red eye, you know?”
“Only 89 percent?” Patrick asks. Because now is clearly the time for questions on mathematical probability.
Pete rolls his eyes. “I mean, there’s always the possibility we could fall in love, get married and adopt a couple of kids. But I’m willing to risk it if you are.”
Patrick’s voice is closer, like his mouth is pressed to the door, just like Pete’s. Remove an eighth of an inch of plastic and their lips might brush. He says, “What, exactly, are you suggesting, Wentz?”
Pete smiles hungrily.
“You want to join the mile high club?”
The light above his head flashes green, the door slides open and Patrick’s becardiganed arm snakes out, snags him by the collar and then hauls him inside. The bathroom is small, as airplane bathrooms are wont to be, and it smells of cleaning products and Patrick’s cologne and Patrick’s skin and — Pete glances down — oh, God, Patrick’s hard, heavy cock.
It is a gorgeous thing, curved up against his stomach, big enough that Pete aches with the need to get his mouth on it. Instead, Patrick grabs him by the ears, shoves him up against the wall and kisses him like the oxygen masks just descended and the last breath of air is deep in the bottom of Pete’s lungs. His mouth is soft, deliciously so, his tongue skilled as he licks into Pete’s mouth, past his teeth, twisting his fingers into the choppy cut above Pete’s ears. Between them, his dick rubs up against Pete’s, burning as a scald through the cotton of his sweats, and the world unlocks around them.
“Fuck, Patrick,” Pete gasps, tearing his mouth away so he can breathe.
“That’s what you came here for, right?” Patrick asks — rhetorically, but Pete’s not going to mention it — his voice husky. He can barely feel the tips of his fingers, his brain entirely fucking numb from this sudden, full-body physical onslaught of Patrick crushed up against him in the tiny airline bathroom. Now is not the time to begin parrying literary blows.
Speaking of blows…
“You should suck me off,” Pete suggests into Patrick’s throat, yanking his neckline out of shape so he can lick, kiss, bite into the hot, hollow yoke of it.
“Ha!” Patrick says. “Yeah, no. You can suck me off, asshole.”
There are two fistfuls of Patrick’s dirty blond hair twisting through Pete’s hands. The rich, ripe length of Patrick’s cock is under the hem of Pete’s shirt, the tip damp against his stomach. Pete curls his hands lower, feels the way Patrick moves against him under his clothes, hooks his thumbs into the waist of his jeans and digs deep into the plush give of that glorious ass.
He takes Patrick’s earlobe between his teeth, satiny and hot, sucks it, bites it, urges gorgeous noises from the back of Patrick’s throat as he whispers wet and breathy into his ear, “Are Rolling Stone reporters too good to suck dick?”
“I don’t know,” Patrick murmurs, head thrown back, hips thrust forward. “Are rock stars?”
“Honey,” Pete says, although it’s hard to be patronizing with his whole heartbeat trapped in his cock, “I can suck you off like a love song. I can let you fuck my mouth until you don’t remember your name, until the only words you know are ‘Pete,’ and ‘more.’ I can break the bitchy out of you, make you come until you’re hollow. I can make you fucking sing for me.”
Patrick quirks his eyebrow and takes Pete’s cotton-covered junk in his hand and squeezes slowly. If he’s supposed to be impressed — which he is — he really doesn’t look it. Pete squeaks and watches an urgent damp patch seep through his sweats.
“You should use those tricks on yourself,” Patrick says, “especially the singing part.”
“Fuck you.”
“You fuck me.”
They trip on their pants, on their own feet and on one another’s because airplane bathroom stalls were not designed with this in mind. In fact, they were probably designed specifically so that this wouldn’t seem appealing. Patrick winds up half in the sink, legs spread and jeans under his ass. Pete slithers down, down, down into the pocket of space between Patrick’s soft, pale thighs and the toilet. His nose trails along the buttons of Patrick’s cardigan, through the fuzzy scratch of red-gold hair beneath his navel, the short, salty thatch of his coppery pubic hair.
He takes a moment just to breathe him in. To smell him warm and brak and faintly citrusy. Pete thinks of golden yolks and warm summer grass and festival parking lots with gravel under his knees and phone numbers in sharpie over the pulse in his wrists. Patrick smells of recklessness, of body heat in bathrooms, of stars but not like heavenly bodies. No, it’s more like choking, like anoxic explosions and gasping for breath. Pete mouths, irrational, over the pale knobs of Patrick’s hip bones, licks his groin and feels the length of him brush against his cheek. Patrick has the most beautiful cock, a handsome, curving thickness, pink and lovely as a sunrise. It’s wasted on him.
“Are you sucking me off or making out with my balls?” Patrick asks, irritably but with a faint crack edging through it.
Pete looks up and makes his eyes very wide. “Are you in a rush?” he asks, then turns his head and fits his lips over the swollen crown of Patrick’s dick, his tongue digging down into the slit, slipping over the rigid crown of it. The taste is exquisite, not bitter at all, and Pete’s cock twinges hard in his sweatpants. When he pulls off, his lips are sticky, salted. “Do you have somewhere else to be in this lonely, insignificant tube of aluminum, hurling us through the troposphere at 600 miles an hour?”
“You have the best dirty talk,” Patrick says sarcastically. “Get on with it.”
His glasses are askew on the bridge of his nose, his hair is standing at improbable peaks and angles. He is still wearing his fucking cardigan.
He is unbelievably ridiculous. He is unashamedly lovely.
“Hold this,” Pete says, shoving a handful of t-shirt and cardigan into Patrick’s fist, sliding it up over his chest. Pete finds Patrick’s nipples pink and pebbled, set in coppery hair, and — Pete flicks his tongue over one, bites into the raised edge of it and Patrick moans — yes, impossibly sensitive. Obligingly, Patrick holds his shirt exactly where he’s told to.
“We don’t have time for foreplay,” Patrick objects. “I don’t want — You’re just supposed to get me off. That’s all.”
Pete moves to the opposite nipple, licks, and brings the swollen heat of his groin against Patrick’s leg, rubbing his dick all over his thigh like he’s marking his territory. He has a distant sense that Patrick might be right, that this is just a mutually convenient exchange of orgasms in an airplane bathroom somewhere over the Atlantic. When they touch the runway in Spain, Patrick won’t mean a thing to him. Pete doesn’t require his best moves; he has nothing to prove.
Patrick hums a breathy note, and brings his free hand to Pete’s hair. He tugs, hard. Pete hisses “Fuck,” into Patrick’s pectoral, slides his fingers along the length of his dick, all smooth and velvet and impossible heat, and no, yeah, there is so much to prove.
He’s competitive, is the thing, and if he’s going to fuck Patrick fucking Stumph, he’s going to make it so good that he remembers it every time he so much as thinks the words Arma Angelus. He wants to make the name ‘Pete Wentz’ synonymous with the throb of Patrick’s dorsal vein and a tight pull in his groin. If Pete is doomed to remember every word that Patrick writes about him then Patrick can have this: this cursed touch, this shattered glass sensation of Pete’s mouth on his nipples and his hand on his cock and he can think about it every time he types a review. Pete can be the drop in his stomach, the half-recalled dream that wakes him hard and throbbing and almost there.
Good luck repressing this, hotshot.
“Are you complaining?” He nuzzles down once more into the hot skin smell of Patrick’s groin, nosing against his balls. “Are you really complaining that I’m giving you this instead of just jerking you off over the sink?”
“Just wanted to come,” Patrick says sulkily, breathlessly, arching his back as Pete licks along the length of him. “Ah! You’re making this into a — a big deal. Fuck! I could’ve done it myself.”
Pete’s mouth is obscured as he looks up over Patrick’s pale, trembling belly and chest, but his eyes are not. Their eyes meet. He blinks slowly and full of mischief and lets Patrick feel the stretch of his mouth, the cool smooth slick of his teeth, as he grins against his cock.
“You think you could do this yourself?” he asks, huskily.
“God,” Patrick whispers, like he’s observing the rapture. “You’re an asshole.”
“I know,” Pete says, and his mouth is so close to the wet, pink head of Patrick’s cock that his breath must tickle. “You’re kind of into it, though. Admit it.”
“Asshole,” Patrick repeats, his dick twitching. “Fucking asshole.”
Pete tangles Patrick’s hand into his hair a little more firmly, makes a fist of his fingers and encourages him to tug. “Pull,” he says. “Hard.”
And then, he digs his thumbs into Patrick’s hipbones and opens his mouth and swallows him down like he was made to bring Patrick off. He licks, swallows, sucks, throat contracting around the swollen want of Patrick’s dick, the weight of it heavy on his tongue, pushing into the roof of his mouth. It’s a filthy rhythm, humming through him like his pulse, Patrick thrusting, Pete sliding his mouth along the velvet swell of him.
Lick, swallow, suck. Lick, swallow, suck.
Patrick’s hand is broad and strong, splayed out against the crown of Pete’s head, holding him steady as he thrusts his hips and fists Pete’s hair with the other. The noises he makes are operatic: gasping little mewls and desperate, broken whining. There’s every possibility someone is going to hear him, that someone is going to knock on the door and tell them to get outside before the authorities become involved. Pete can’t find it in him to care, not like this. Not with Patrick’s dick in his mouth and the taste of him on every part of his tongue, his lips stretched around him. The damp patch on Pete’s sweats spreads, his own cock jumping, desperate for pressure and friction and heat. He wraps his hands around Patrick’s thighs, digs his nails into the grooved valley between the muscles there and throws his weight forward, knocking Patrick back and into the sink
From this new angle, Patrick can’t thrust, his weight tipped back and his feet off the floor, his thighs pinned by his jeans. Oh, but he can pull, both hands twisting into Pete’s hair, dragging at his scalp until it burns as Patrick lies back and takes the sacrament of Pete’s mouth around his cock. Pete has given head to a lot of people but it’s never felt quite like this. Like a tsunami, if tsunamis were fire instead of water, his skin immolating at each point of contact with Patrick’s thighs, his hips, his glorious, molten cock sliding roughly to the back of Pete’s throat.
Pete grinds his hips in filthy circles against the sink unit and thinks he could come from this. Just this. Just absent pressure from cold, unyielding plastic and Patrick’s dick in his mouth, his balls bumping against Pete’s chin. He could come in his sweatpants like a teenager, untouched, gasping, liquid below the waist, he could, he could, he could…
… the plane lurches violently.
They stagger, knocked against the wall for a breathless moment, Patrick’s red, wet dick sliding from Pete’s mouth like poetry. It slicks, obscene, against his cheek and jaw and chin, trailing spit and pre-come as Patrick’s eyes widen and he sucks in a hard, stuttering gasp.
“The fuck was that?” he asks, panicked.
Pete thinks very quickly and says, “Uh… I made the earth move for you?”
“Idiot, we’re 35,000 feet in the air, there is no earth.”
Pete would like to stop debating aerodynamic physics and get back to the blowjob. He would really like the blowjob to be reciprocated. None of this conversation is conducive to obtaining his preferred outcome of mutually satisfying oral sex. “Can I go back to sucking your dick?” he asks hopefully. “Let’s see if it happens again. Bet it does.”
The plane shudders once more; Patrick yelps.
“See?” Pete says confidently. “Didn’t even have to touch you that time.”
A voice crackles into the bathroom via the overhead speaker: “This is your captain speaking,” says Captain Cockblock, a man Pete has decided is now his Nemesis. Previously, Patrick was his Large-N Nemesis, but things seem to have progressed on that front, so it’s convenient that the Universe has provided a replacement quite so quickly. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve turned on the fasten seatbelts sign and asked all flight attendants to remain seated. We may be entering an area of turbulence and ask that all passengers remain in their seats for safety.”
“What a dick,” Pete says with feeling.
“Oh God,” Patrick says, grey like putty. “We’re going to crash, aren’t we? Fuck, I knew something like this would happen! This is why I hate flying, it’s obvious I’ve been destined to die in a fucking plane crash. This is what Alanis Morrissette was talking about!”
Pete has never debated lyric meanings with a hard-on before, or with a face full of a bitchy music critic’s wet, red genitals, softening like they’re melting. Today is a day for new experiences
“I think that was his first flight,” Pete points out. “Is this your first flight? I’m still not sure it’s ironic, per se, but I think that was the point of the song. Nothing that happens in it is actually ironic, it’s just kind of… Rain on your wedding day? Sure, you’d be bummed out, but that’s weather patterns, not irony. So, it’s ironic that nothing ironic is mentioned in a song named Ironic. You know? Clever, really. Meta.”
“Shut up,” Patrick hisses.
“I can probably finish you off before anyone comes looking for us,” Pete says. “Come on, it’s just turbulence. No need to get, like, nervous.”
He accompanies this with his most charming smile. He has a very good charming smile. The need to get Patrick off and, more importantly, get off himself, is his highest current priority.
As if to prove a point, the plane shudders once more. Patrick makes a sound like he’s just been run over and hastily jams his dick back into his underwear. The odds of Pete attaining orgasm drop with their cruising altitude as Patrick struggles to his feet and knocks Pete back into the toilet, fumbling with the lock and bolting for his seat with his zipper unzipped and his jeans hanging off his hips.
Pete stares down at the wet patch on his sweatpants. No one has got him this worked up without laying a hand on him since he was fifteen and making out/dry humping with Eli Nowak under the bleachers before soccer practise. It takes Pete a while to drift back down and into the bathroom, to inhabit his own skin and feel it without it feeling too small. It takes a while for his dick to soften, is the main concern.
“Um, sir?” The flight attendant says from the door Patrick didn’t close and Pete didn’t lock. This is not the most dignified position he’s ever been caught in. Then again, it’s not the most undignified, either.
“I’m here on purpose,” Pete says quickly, on his knees in an airplane bathroom with a dark spot on his grey sweats. “This is... I was… practising yoga. Yogi ji is very specific about performing my stretches at the same time each day.”
The great thing about being a rock star is the credibility it gives every completely ridiculous, outlandish statement he makes. Yoga in an airplane bathroom? Sure thing. Doesn’t Tommy Lee do exactly the same? Pete hopes that the flight attendant doesn’t ask for a demonstration. The number of things he knows about yoga is low, although he did have a girlfriend who was into it once. Sadly, the only thing that really stuck with him was that she could get both legs behind her head which was awesome, but he doubts that’s going to help him right now. He strikes a weak camel pose and hopes for the best.
It is, thankfully, not the same flight attendant who removed Patrick’s phone. This one is young and suitably starstruck by the rock star sitting on the floor of the bathroom talking about yoga. He blinks at Pete a few times and looks like he’s scrolling mentally through the training manual for something — anything — that covers this situation.
He clears his throat and says, “Sir, the seatbelt sign is on. I’m — Look, this is my first flight and I don’t — I mean, I can’t— Can I help you find your way back to your seat?”
So, Pete climbs shakily to his feet and stumbles in the direction of his seat. The lights are on now, everyone is blinking, fuzzy with sleep and strapped into their seats as the plane shudders and lurches. Pete does not so much take his seat as fall into it over a green-looking Patrick, doubled over with his mouth hanging over an open barf bag. It doesn’t smell like he’s used it yet, but his hair is clumped in sweaty whorls at the back of his neck and around his ears and he’s making some frankly disturbing noises. He whimpers as Pete brushes against him, his knuckles white against the paper bag.
“Oh God,” Patrick whispers as the plane jolts violently. “Oh Jesus fucking Christ.”
If he’s looking for sympathy, he’s approaching the wrong person. Pete’s groin still feels tender and bruised, his pulse still slightly out of sync with his breathing as he stares out of the window. There’s no way he’s going to say a single word to Patrick Stumph ever again. Not one.
Immediately, his mouth sets about proving him wrong, which is his mouth’s favorite thing to do. “Well, thanks for that,” he says irritably. “Thank you so much. Thanks to you, Gawker are going to run a story on Pete Wentz performing yoga during a plane crash as soon as that flight attendant gets access to his email. Happy now?”
Patrick doesn’t look up. He makes another of those retching hnngh sounds into his ridiculous little paper bag, instead. “Please be nice to me,” he begs. “We’re going to die and I don’t — I don’t want the last thing I hear to be Pete fucking Wentz telling me I’m a horrible human being.”
That is decidedly unfair when five minutes ago, he was quite happy for Pete fucking Wentz to choke on his dick. Pete fucking Wentz is very unhappy about this regression in Patrick’s personality, although he’s not particularly surprised. Patrick is not the first person to dust off the lust and find Pete lacking, to see beyond the sparkle and realize it’s cheap glitter, not diamond. It still hurts, no easier the hundred-and-first time than the first. Pete tugs unhappily at the collar of his muscle tee and attempts to arrange himself so that no one can see the wet spot on his pants. Especially Patrick.
“That’s not fair,” he says, hurt. “You do remember that I’ve never actually done anything to you, right? Not personally, anyway. You don’t like my music, which is fine, but like, I have feelings and things. Somewhere. Somewhere, I probably have a ton of feelings. Deep ones. And you’re almost definitely hurting them.”
“I can’t…” Patrick mumbles.
“Damn right you can’t,” Pete snaps. “You should be ashamed of yourself, trashing me all the time, acting like I’m a commodity for your career. I’m a real person, Patrick, I have...” He pauses before he can say ‘feelings’ again, because Patrick looks like he may be about to die. “Hey, are you okay?”
“Can’t breathe,” Patrick wheezes, taking wet, wobbly gulps of air. “Can’t — Can’t fucking — Breathe.”
“Oh,” says Pete. “Oh.”
Pete is not a doctor. It’s the pinnacle of professional pride for parents to talk about a child who’s made it into med school and his mom dropped a lot of hints but, seriously? People would have died. However, lack of medical training aside, Pete is reasonably well-acquainted with anxiety attacks. They look a little different from this direction, like looking through a kaleidoscope the wrong way, as Patrick chokes and gasps and suffocates himself with his own panic. This is not how Pete imagined his red eye to Barcelona would play out. He sighs and reaches across their seats anyway.
“Patrick,” he says carefully, rubbing the small of Patrick’s back. “Stay with me.”
“Can’t breathe,” Patrick repeats as the plane shivers once more. “Can’t… breathe. Can’t… breathe. Can’t… breathe.”
“Here,” he leans forward and pushes Patrick’s mouth and nose into the open top of the barf bag. “Just, slow down. Nice deep breaths for me. You can breathe, you’re just having a panic attack, it’s like… sneezes. Or hiccups. It’s annoying, but it can’t kill you, it’s just a reaction, okay? Just your body responding to the fact that the plane is definitely not crashing. That’s it, keep breathing for me.”
Pete did not imagine that he’d spend the last leg of his flight from LA to Barcelona nursing Patrick Stumph through a panic attack. But then, he also didn’t imagine he’d find himself sitting next to him in the first place, stealing his iPad or sucking his dick. The cosmos has a funny sense of humor, a strange way of making things align. He thumbs gently along Patrick’s sweaty nape and feels a wave of something suspiciously like tenderness.
“You’re alright, kid,” he says affectionately.
“I think I’m going to…” Patrick groans, and throws up violently into the bag.
***
They touch down in Barcelona at five in the evening, local time. Pete’s body clock is still in LA and demands breakfast and caffeine as he staggers to his feet and convinces himself he can replace sleep with something trenta from Starbucks. Patrick is quiet as he grabs his backpack from the overhead locker. He hasn’t spoken much since he threw up. Pete wonders if he’ll demand a boat back to the states or if he’ll set up shop here in Barcelona, writing his articles from coffee shops and dodging the immigration policies of mainland Spain.
“So,” Pete says, as they join the slow shuffle from the plane and into the airport.
“Hmm,” says Patrick, examining his watch.
The jet bridge is solid glass and solid heat. Pete shuffles and shoves his hands into his pockets and wonders what to say next. He also sweats. Far more than a healthy adult male ought to sweat in test conditions. Patrick worries his lip and shoves on a fedora, his damp hair curling above his ears.
“Do you want to go for coffee?” Pete asks, because he’s very stupid and his dick is chubbed up in an interested way at the thought of Patrick getting on his knees in one of the reassuringly stationary bathroom stalls inside the airport. “I might even stretch to a danish. You know, so you can line your stomach after throwing up. It’s — I hear that’s very important.”
Ah, vomit. The great cornerstone of love language.
“Right,” Patrick pulls his phone from his pocket and frowns at it for a moment, “I mean, I have to make a couple of calls for work, so...”
“I can wait,” Pete says.
“Oh, what? No, it’s — you don’t have to do that,” Patrick says awkwardly.
“Come on, it’ll be fun. People totally go for coffee before they have amazing sex, that’s totally a thing people do. Technically, we’re going for coffee after the amazing sex, but...”
Patrick wrinkles his nose. “That was not amazing sex. Neither of us even got off.”
“That’s a very unfair assessment of the situation,” Pete says. “We were in the process of having amazing sex and then the plane nearly crashed—”
“So you admit the plane was going to crash!”
“We just had to put a temporary hold on the situation,” Pete finishes. He doesn’t answer Patrick’s interjection. “So now we go for coffee, and then…”
In the expectant silence, Patrick rolls his eyes. This is not the reaction that Pete was hoping for.
“And then?” Patrick prompts.
“And then,” Pete finishes, like it’s not obvious, “you come back to my hotel room with me and I show you how truly awesome sex with me can actually be. I’m really good, seriously. I’ve got, like, a bunch of satisfied customers.”
“You’re not a fucking toaster,” Patrick says.
“I can fuck you and I can make toast,” Pete shrugs. “I’d say that’s the definition of a fucking toaster.”
Patrick bites his lip, which is a devastatingly sexy maneuver. Pete would like to ravish him right here in the terminal, pressed up against the wall in the baggage reclaim, which is great because, although he frequently finds people he wants to fuck, he rarely finds someone he wants to ravish. He wonders if he should explain this distinction to Patrick but, before he can, Patrick looks at Pete and then looks at his phone and then shrugs.
“Okay, fine,” he says. Pete fist pumps like a dork. “Ugh, do that again and I’ll put it in print. But I want you to know that I’m only doing this for the sake of my penis. You’re still an asshole, you’re just an asshole who gives passably good head.”
“Darling, you’re charming me to death right now.”
“Right.” Patrick shakes his head with a faint smile. “But, seriously, I have to make some calls, so...”
“Starbucks? Ten minutes? In the terminal building?” Pete points in the direction of both the terminal and the Starbucks contained therein, just in case Patrick doesn’t know what a terminal is.
“Hmm,” Patrick says, which probably means ‘yes, Pete, I can’t wait until you make me come so hard you ruin me for anyone else.’ Sometimes, people get weird about saying that sort of thing out loud. Fortunately, Pete can read between the lines.
Patrick takes off with his little wheeled case and his backpack and his iPhone that matches his iPad. It’s funny how charming these assholeish things seem when Pete knows he’ll have him naked inside of an hour.
***
It takes Pete ten minutes to locate Starbucks, flirt with the pretty Spanish waitress, ponder what kind of coffee Patrick might drink, settle on two caramel macchiatos — because who doesn’t like the taste of pre-diabetes — and find a small table in a dark corner. Dark corners are Pete’s favourite kind of corner. There are many things that can happen in dark corners. The possibilities are as limitless as Pete’s filthy imagination.
He texts Joe — viva espana, motherfucker! i’m about to get laid! if the hotel room’s rockin, don’t come a-knockin unless you want to give me a hand — and waits as patiently as he can for Patrick to show up so they can get to the ravishing. He’s halfway through Patrick’s depressingly clinical LinkedIn page when Joe responds — I’d rather shit in my hands and clap. Speaking of, please don’t come back with the clap. Again. I’m not picking up your ointment if you pick up something gross.
It takes a further twenty minutes for Pete to drink his macchiato, eat his stroopwafel and then eat Patrick’s, too, because time and stroopwafels wait for no journalist. Thirty minutes is not a long time to wait. It took Pete ten minutes just to find the place, Patrick has phone calls to make, emails to send, maybe he stopped off to wash his dick in the sink of one of the bathrooms.
Pete wonders if he ought to wash his dick, out of courtesy. He eyes the Starbucks bathroom door dubiously. It would be entirely on point for Pete’s dealings with Patrick so far that he’d wander into the coffee shop during the forty seconds it would take for Pete to submerge his cock in liquid hand soap and tepid water. He stays where he is.
The minutes tick by and Pete entertains himself with Angry Birds and another macchiato and hiding under his hoodie. Every time the door opens, he cranes his neck hopefully. Every time another businessman or family or pretty girl wanders up to the counter, he collapses morosely into his seat.
He starts to suspect Patrick might not be coming. In either sense of the word.
Rock stars don’t get stood up on impromptu pre-sex coffee dates by nasty little know-it-all music critics, Pete thinks, shredding sugar packets between his thumbnails. That is definitely not something that happens in this or any other plane of reality.
An hour and ten after leaving the airplane, Pete gets up and heads for the door. He tells himself he is definitely the one walking away and that Patrick will show up in ten minutes, hard-dicked and desperate, and Pete will be nowhere to be found. He tells himself this because it makes him feel better when, really, he’s too disappointed to even give the waitress his number even though she totally gives him the eye on his way out of the door. Pete is missing out on hot Spanish sex because of Patrick goddamn Stumph. This is unforgivable, this is… inconceivable. Pete stalks his way grandly to the arrivals hall and looks for his car.
Patrick Stumph can go fuck himself.
***
It’s that part of summer where everything seems to haze on the horizon. When the air gets thick as syrup but salty instead of sweet, heavy with sweat and stink and summertime heat. It’s The Swelter and it seems like Spain experiences it just like Chicago. It’s drier here, though. Arid. There’s no humidity at all, like the dirt spends the day soaking up the heat and magnifying it, intensifying it, waiting until the evening when it can spit it right back out at the crowds moving like waves through the festival.
Pete is standing side stage. He isn’t so much warming his vocal cords as shredding them, practising low-pitched roars as the other acts and techs who don’t know him give him serious side eye and a wide berth.
“So,” Andy starts conversationally, taping up his fingers. “Joe tells me you hooked up with someone yesterday.”
“Bwooaar,” Pete roars, threateningly, “that’s none of your fucking business.”
“Can we conduct a conversation in our inside voices?” Andy asks mildly.
Andy does most things mildly. He is the drummer equivalent of store-brand salsa. The fact that he’s remained both in a band with Pete and on solid emotional terms with him for the past decade and a half is nothing short of a testament to his laidback attitude and excellent temperament. This makes him sound like a terrier which he is, only inasmuch as he will bite if provoked for too long. He looks at Andy, tips his head to one side, and then carries on screaming his best hardcore scream.
“No. I’m a professional musician and this is how I warm up.”
“So, you’re not going to stop screaming?”
“No. Bwooaar!”
“Child,” says Andy, which is fair, so Pete doesn’t argue back. “Look. All I’m saying is, isn’t that the first person since Ash—”
“We’re not talking about my divorce.”
“Seriously? You’re just going to roar this out for everyone to hear?
“No one can understand me anyway. Haven’t you read any of our reviews? This is basically incomprehensible.”
Pete is convinced that nothing Andy can say is going to stop him from screaming. Immediately, Andy proves him wrong by saying something that stops him from screaming.
“Someone’s in your head, Wentz, and no one has any business being there but you. It’s a terrifying place. Kind of… Lynchesque.”
Pete cocks his head and drops into his regular voice. “No one is in my head.” He thinks he’s sees a fedora from the corner of his eye and whips around so quickly he risks whiplash. It’s just a guitar tech. Dammit. “Absolutely no one is in my head, at all. My head is not Lynchesque, it’s just… empty.”
“On brand,” says Andy.
“Fuck you,” says Pete, because he’s all out of witty rejoinders.
“You’re on in ten,” says Henry.
Henry used to be Pete’s guitar tech until Pete got tired of the idiots the label kept shipping out and made him their tour manager. Henry is a very good tour manager because he always makes sure Pete has plenty of important tasks to keep him busy and he doesn’t say disapproving things like ‘maybe that bottle of bourbon isn’t the best idea,’ or ‘honestly, you shouldn’t hose Dirty down with hot sauce,’ or ‘seriously, if you jump out of that window I’m giving notice.’
“We’re on in ten,” Pete tells Andy. It’s a very effective way of ending their conversation. Their very stupid and pointless conversation because Patrick Stumph is not in Pete’s head. “And I don’t have an obsession.”
Thinking about someone occasionally isn’t a sign of burgeoning obsession. Pete knows this because he is an expert on obsessions. Searching for their contact details and storing them into a hidden folder on his phone isn’t a crime — Pete knows this because he’s googled it. Twice. Whatever it is, it’s definitely not an obsession. Pete has a minor crush at most, nothing more, and in a few weeks, he’ll find someone else to think about and he will never think about Patrick’s mouth or smile or fat pink dick ever again.
God, it’s such a nice dick.
“Who are you obsessing over this time?” Henry asks.
“No one,” Pete snaps. “I’m obsessing over no one. Fuck, what is this? West Side Story?”
“Hmm,” says Andy, and walks away clicking his fingers, quickly lost among the crowd.
Sometimes, Pete has this disturbing sense that Andy can read his thoughts. He stops thinking about Patrick and thinks about funny cat pictures, just in case. That’s bound to throw him off the scent.
***
There was no sign of Patrick at Bilbao and Pete is struggling to come to terms with the way he wasted his time there, scanning the crowds at the press tent, the after party, the after-after party that spilled over into Angels & Kings in Barcelona. If Patrick wanted to find him, he could’ve. He’s not a difficult man to locate. The tendons in Pete’s neck are sore from the number of times he caught sight of red-blond hair, blocky glasses, an idiot wearing a cardigan in ninety-degree swelter. The hipster movement has a lot to answer for, is what Pete’s saying. He will be sending the medical bills for his chiropractor to someone in charge. Jared Leto, presumably.
Back in the States and out on a promotional tour for Hold This Like a Thought, he puts alerts for Patrick’s name into his phone and waits for the inevitable review. He tells himself that this is the kind of thing a normal person would do. Patrick posts an article about James Taylor and Pete devours it, working through the recommended playlist and watching every video link. Then he listens to Fire and Rain on a loop for two days until Joe threatens to burn, in no particular order, the Sadness Hoodie he’s wearing, his headphones, and his iPod if he doesn’t knock that shit off immediately.
Finally, nine days after the festival and at three in the morning local time, Patrick uploads his review of Bilbao. Caught in the arterial system of highways that thread and crisscross their way across the Midwest, Pete sits up so fast that he nearly brains himself on the roof of his bunk.
“Fuck!” he yelps.
“Peter,” Joe slurs from the bunk above, “stop playing with it or it’ll fall off. Or play with it quietly, and don’t tell me when it falls off.”
It’s unclear how aggressively Joe masturbates but, since he just mistook Pete’s skull meeting the base of his bunk for self-gratification, Pete suspects Joe’s technique is not tender. Now is not the time for a comparison of methodology: It’s three in the morning and there are media-related shenanigans afoot.
“Everything is about masturbation with you,” Pete points out, heading for the far end of the bus, picking his way over the landmines of abandoned cereal bowls and dirty socks. “You’ve got a real problem.”
“I think you’ll find that you’re the one with the problem.”
“Not a problem, I’ve committed to the lifestyle.”
Joe’s hand appears from beneath his bunk curtain, middle finger raised. Pete ignores him and cradles his phone like the Holy Grail.
It’s not that Pete’s hoping for a positive review, but… Okay, so he is absolutely hoping for a positive review. He wants to know he’s inside Patrick’s head like Patrick is inside his, that they’re inhabiting opposite cells in a shared prison. He wants to know that this tête-à-tête isn’t just in his imagination, that they share some kind of connection that starts with Patrick’s fingers on a keyboard and ends with his mouth on Pete’s throat and his teeth in his skin. Which is completely fucking ridiculous because they’ve shared two arguments, one therapy session and half a blowjob. Pete’s terrible at math, which is why he became a rock star and not a rocket scientist, but he can work out the equation and the answer is that he’s being absurd, even within the parameters of his own very low intellectual standard.
He sits at the table in the tiny kitchenette and debates the wisdom of opening the link. A sensible man would ignore it. A sensible man would slip back into his bunk and move on with his life and find someone else to scratch the metaphorical itch Patrick left behind in the airplane bathroom. It is demonstrably clear that Pete is not a sensible man.
Patrick’s byline is right there in the alert. A different, much blonder Patrick with a mocking smirk creasing one corner of his distracting mouth. It’s not that he’s afraid of reading Patrick’s opinion. Not really. It’s just… Pete zooms in, rubs his thumb over those lips and inadvertently opens the link. Which solves the problem.
The title appears on the screen, Patrick’s name right beneath it. Pete chews his lip and pulls his eyes away from his phone for a second. He needs to prepare himself emotionally. He needs to be bold and unafraid.
So, he takes a deep breath and he reads it. From beginning to end. Then, he reads it backwards, starting at the end and working his way back to the top of the page. He turns his phone slightly. He glares at it from several different angles and types his name and his band’s name into the search and find function just in case he is suffering from some kind of temporary dyslexia. The review, obstinately, refuses to change. Because it’s a print article and not, in fact, the fucking Oracle.
Which means Pete is forced to accept, alone in the tour bus at three in the morning, that Patrick didn’t mention him, or his band, even once.
***
Pete sits in a temporary press lounge in the VIP area of Lollapalooza. The grass of Grant Park is scorched yellow-brown and the festival ground smells of gasoline and hot dogs and burnt earth and sweaty, salty skin. It drifts through the windows of the lounge, seeps through the plexiglass and through the flaking rubber seals. It makes Pete feel sick and woozy. He drums his fingertips against his sweating water bottle and clucks his tongue softly against the roof of his mouth.
“So,” says Patrick, chewing on the cap of a pen while Pete glares at him balefully, “I thought I was interviewing… Joe, is it?”
Pete smiles with all of his teeth and very little else. A shark, lurking in the depths and waiting for something soft and exposed to swim closer. He would like Patrick to drift into his undercurrent, to be given the opportunity to tear into the delicate underbelly of him. He’d also really like to kiss him, which is not conducive to his overarching plan of making Patrick very uncomfortable.
“Well,” Pete says lightly, “looks like you got upgraded. Lucky you.”
“Yeah,” Patrick mutters. He doesn’t look like he thinks this is particularly fortuitous. “Okay. This is… slightly awkward.”
That is something of an understatement.
“Do you think so?” Pete asks sarcastically. “Do you think this is awkward? Gee, Patrick, why do you suppose this might be awkward?”
“Um,” says Patrick, “Well…”
“Maybe this is awkward,” Pete continues, and he hopes Patrick is recording this for posterity, “because you let me suck your dick in an airplane bathroom then left me waiting in a coffee shop — by myself — while you ducked out on me. Is that the CliffsNotes for why you feel awkward, Patrick?”
“You don’t have to use my name in every sentence,” Patrick says faintly. “Besides, I — You weren’t serious about the coffee, were you?”
“I bought stroopwafels, Patrick,” Pete says, with great significance.
The corner of Patrick’s eye twitches. Pete’s glare intensifies and Patrick coughs, shuffles his notebook and stares at the table top. “Oh,” he says. “That was… very sweet of you.”
Patrick is dressed in a Misfits shirt with a red and black flannel knotted casually around his waist even though it’s triple figures outside. He’s wearing ripped jeans and Doc Martens with his stupid little fedora and heavy-framed nerd glasses. He looks like Rivers Cuomo divorced Courtney Love — acrimoniously — in 1995 and they both wanted custody of the closet. Pete does not find Patrick handsome, obviously. Pete finds him sanctimonious and annoying. Pete wants to lick the sweat from his throat almost as much as he wants to wrap his hands around it.
“You could say sorry,” Pete says, after a lengthy and awkward silence.
“Excuse me?” Patrick asks. “I could what now?”
“Look,” Pete begins patiently, but without any real patience, “I don’t care what you think—”
“As long as it’s about you,” Patrick snipes.
Something shudders in Pete’s skull, his temporal lobe leaning into it like muscle memory. His hands itch. He wants those words somewhere they can’t run away. He knows those words; he just doesn’t know why.
They glare at one another, the air between them electric like a bad storm. If Pete rubs his hands together, he swears they’ll spark. Patrick pulls his curved, pink mouth into a hard, white line and folds his fingers one over the other, locked together at the knuckles. He has no right to look so sanctimonious. He has no business pretending he’s the better man.
“Here’s the thing,” Pete says. This is definitely going to be one of his rare — but fun — rants. “I’m kind of the resident shit boy, you know? I’m the one who fucks up and everyone laughs and no one wants to be associated with me on anything you can really call a long-term basis. My life has a tendency to splinter around me. My friends outside of my band are only there if they think they can get something out of it. Then there was this whole whirlwind date—marry—divorce thing with Ashlee Simpson that you might have heard about. The truth is, I’m not good at reading what people want from me.”
Patrick sits through this diatribe and doesn’t move. He doesn’t blink or shuffle. He doesn’t appear to breathe. When it becomes apparent that Pete is waiting for a response, he opens his mouth very slowly and says, faintly, “Oh.”
Pete presses on. “So, for you, it was kind of funny to leave me sitting there like an idiot when you could’ve just said no, like a normal person and I would’ve gone about my day and that would’ve been that. But, for me? It was pretty hurtful, man. Not gonna lie to you.”
Patrick shakes his head and leans back in his seat. Pete suspects this may be what his therapist refers to as an ‘inappropriate overshare.’ He doesn’t care, he is so done with pretending that it’s okay for everyone to treat him like his smile is two dimensional, like it can’t escape from the confines of glossy magazine paper. He dares Patrick to tell him he’s wrong. He defies him.
“Fuck,” Patrick says softly. “I wasn’t expecting… that.”
Annoyingly, Pete still can’t stop staring at Patrick’s mouth. So, he makes more words come out of his own mouth, which, for the record, Patrick is also staring at. “So,” he says, “about that apology…?”
He’s still hoping that Patrick will object and say he hasn’t stopped thinking about the airplane bathroom since they touched down in Barcelona. That his world has reduced to nothing more than the way Pete’s hands felt on his skin, that he’s engaged in an unending loop of unsatisfying masturbation and cold showers in an attempt to purge Pete from his head. That’s what Pete wants to hear right now. He tips his head expectantly to the left and waits.
Instead, Patrick shrugs and says, “Okay, fine. I’m sorry you felt embarrassed.”
“That’s not an apology,” he says, raking both hands through his hair and leaning back in his chair. “That doesn’t mean what you want me to pretend it means. That is a journalistic apology, where you make enough sorry-sounding mouth noise to stop me from pushing the issue. It means you’re sorry that your unmitigated levels of dickbaggery have led to me asking you to apologize. It means, to quote Rihanna, that you’re only sorry you got caught. You mean that, hopefully, I’m too stupid to pick up on the difference. Am I in the ballpark, Patrick?”
“Uh…” Patrick says slowly. He looks as though he’s reconsidering his career in journalism entirely and might be planning a switch to something less stressful. Like shark farming, or performing open heart surgery while bungee jumping. “I mean, to quote Elton John, sorry seems to be the hardest word?”
“That was a shitty apology, and not Elton’s best work,” Pete repeats. “And you’re staring at me.”
“There’s a difference between staring and looking,” Patrick mutters. “Don’t you own any shirts with, you know, sleeves?”
“I only wear those when I’m not being interrogated by self-aggrandizing music journalists.” Pete air quotes the last word, so there can be no doubt that he’s being sarcastic. He also flexes, just a little, just so Patrick can catch the way his biceps tense.
Patrick watches his biceps tense. Score one for Pete.
“Look, if you don’t want to do the interview, that’s fine. I can just—”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do the interview. When did I say that?”
“This is less about what you’re saying and more about how you’re looking at me like I murdered your grandma. I’m just trying to do my job, man.”
“Your job involves sexual encounters on airplanes?” It’s a joke, but Patrick doesn’t smile. Instead, he scrapes a long line of ink from one side of his notepad to the other and bites savagely into his lower lip. Pete sighs. “Okay, fine, ask me the first question.”
“Right.” Patrick clears his throat and activates his Dictaphone. “So, what’s your earliest musical memory?”
“Boring!” Pete declares. “Sweetheart, if you want to keep me invested, you’re going to have to do much better than that.”
Patrick flushes, just a little. This is a victory, another checkmark on Pete’s side of the scoreboard. “Come on,” Patrick says irritably. “I didn’t write the questions; I’m just asking them.”
“What’s yours?” Pete counters.
Patrick frowns.
“I don’t… What do you mean?”
“Your earliest musical memory, what is it?” Pete leans across the table and Patrick scowls at him, tipping his fedora to the back of his head and scratching at his hairline with the cap of his pen. There’s a small mole there, darker than his pale, pale skin. Pete would like to map every mark on his body. “Do you have one? Or is all of this just robotic theory that you learned in college?”
“I’m not supposed to get involved in stuff like this,” Patrick says coolly. “So, if you don’t want to answer, that’s fine. I’ll go interview someone who wants to promote their band.”
“You’re no fun,” Pete pouts.
“I’m a professional.”
“Didn’t seem professional when I was sucking your—”
“Okay! Fine!” Patrick shoves his folding chair back from the table. This is less dramatic than he probably hoped it might be when the chair collapses and clatters to the ground and he immediately becomes tangled in the legs, tripping against the table as he reaches for his notebook and grabs at his phone.
Pete can think of a dozen different ways for Patrick to end up sprawled across the table. A hundred. A thousand. Every image is needling into his spine, an epidural of warm sensation pooling through his hips, down into his thighs.
Pete smirks. “Careful.”
“Fuck you,” Patrick hisses. “You win. You’re a fucking bastion for rock ‘n’ roll morality. You’re a better person than me and I’m an asshole, okay? I’m an asshole and — and I’m leaving.”
Pete lets him make it halfway to the door before he speaks.
“Katarina Witt, Olympic figure skater.”
Patrick pauses, his shoulders tense and his head cocked. He doesn’t look at Pete but he doesn’t keep moving towards the door, either.
“Excuse me?”
“My earliest musical memory. She wore a leather jacket and did her thing to a Michael Jackson song. Beat It, in case you were wondering. So, you know, in the spirit of the song… that’s what I did. I guess you could call it my musical awakening, all tangled up in my sexual awakening.”
“You jerked it to MJ over figure skating?” Patrick says slowly. His shoulders relax slightly. “Why do I sound surprised? Of course you did.”
“I mean,” Pete lowers his voice a little. Patrick is forced to turn around to hear him clearly. “They’re similar, you know, music and fucking? The rhythm and the beat and the way it spills out of you because you can’t keep it inside anymore. Tell me that’s not a metaphor for sex and I’ll tell you you’re lying.”
After a long pause, Patrick clears his throat.
“Wow,” he says, “that’s… not where I saw that story going.” He moves back to the table with caution, eyeing Pete warily as he spreads out his things and lowers himself back into this seat. His cheeks are flushed and lovely, Pete wonders if he’s thinking about where he fits into the analogy. “So, we’re doing this? No dicking around?” Pete nods lazily. “Alright, cool. Next question.”
Pete leans forward in his seat and brings his mouth within ten inches of Patrick’s. “No, you first. Earliest musical memory.”
Patrick doesn’t back down. He appraises Pete with those eyes as wide and blue as the Midwest sky, his pupils wide enough that they swallow up the gold around them. He licks his lips sinfully and says, “Okay, fuck it. Listening to my dad play Fire and Rain on the guitar. Are you happy now?”
Pete blinks. “Your dad is a musician? I guess that explains the James Taylor.”
“Wait, you read my articles?” Patrick’s smile is sly, hard in the corners.
“Is that an official question, or…?” Pete blusters. They both know that’s a checkmark for Patrick.
“I don’t know,” Patrick says with a shrug. “Did I ask you if your dad was a musician?”
Pete grins and nudges his knee against Patrick’s under the table. Patrick presses into the touch and, suddenly, Pete is very aware that no one has ever really touched his knees before. Surprising, really, to discover they have this molten stream of sensation that ricochets straight to his crotch. Surprising and distracting. Someone should conduct a scientific study on the erogenous capacity of the male kneecap. There’s clearly a lot to learn.
“Fine.” His voice slips out higher than he’d like, so he clears his throat and tries again. “Uh, like. Whatever. Next question.”
Patrick looks down at his iPad and bites his lip, a delicious tactic in whatever game it is that they’re currently engaged in. He laughs softly to himself and then shakes his head.
“Celebrity crush?” Patrick asks, looking at Pete with those big, blue eyes and smiling with that thick, pink bottom lip.
“Mine?” Pete shrugs. “I mean, what day of the week is it? Is Venus in the twelfth house right now? Is Tom Green relevant yet? I have changing tastes, man. Why tie myself to one crush when I can crush on the world?”
“That sounds kind of—”
“Slutty?” Pete offers.
“Chaotic,” Patrick corrects him. He has the air of someone who enjoys correcting everyone around him. “Don’t you have any brand loyalty? When you’re bored and—”
“Horny?” Pete asks.
“Lonely,” Patrick corrects once more. “Who do you think about?”
You, Pete thinks but doesn’t say, I think about you.
Pete grins crookedly and shrugs. “I don’t know, man. It changes. I could tell you I currently have a thing for Natalie Portman. Ask me in an hour and I’ll have a different answer.”
Technically, Pete isn’t lying. The rules are clear: celebrity crushes. Journalists are not celebrities.
“Was it Ashlee?” Patrick asks, sucking the air from Pete’s lungs.
“I don’t think I know you well enough to tell you that,” Pete says tightly. “And I’d like to bet that’s not on your list of questions. So, my turn. Who’s your celebrity crush?”
Patrick doesn’t smile. His face doesn’t do much at all as he looks directly at Pete and says, “Honestly? I prefer to stay away from celebrities. It comes with the day job, you’re occupational hazards,” and Pete thinks ouch until he sees it. The ghost of a smile haunting the corners of Patrick’s made-for-head mouth.
“You have to pick one,” Pete insists. It is imperative that Patrick answers, a tingling rush in Pete’s fingers and toes, a perk of an idea that has his big, dumb dick suddenly paying attention. Pete would like, very much, for Patrick to admit that Pete is his crush. He would like it more than just about anything else he can think of right now.
“You didn’t,” Patrick says calmly.
“My answers go in print.”
“My answers are private.”
“Fine,” Pete huffs dramatically. “Go ahead and remind me that I’m nothing but a soundbite to you. Next question.”
“Tell me about your ex-wife,” Patrick says.
Pete has spent an immeasurable amount of time trying not to think about his ex-wife. He has tried so hard to not think about her, that he spends most of his time thinking about not thinking about her which, he thinks, means he is actually thinking about her an awful lot. This is a fluff piece, Henry told him thirty minutes ago, shoving him into a clean(ish) shirt and hustling him towards the door. It’s not a Thought Piece, no one will ask you to think.
“That’s a very unmusical statement,” Pete observes, because then he doesn’t have to acknowledge the molten pain in his gut. “Aren’t you supposed to question me about music?”
“It’s just a filler piece,” Patrick shrugs.
“I don’t think my divorce qualifies as filler,” Pete says, his voice as tight as the ache behind his ribs. “At least, it doesn’t feel like filler when you’re the one at the loaded end of a matrimonial attorney and suddenly, instead of saying ‘your wife,’ people are saying ‘the plaintiff.’”
“Maybe I understand that,” Patrick mutters gruffly.
There is sharp and bladed pressure where Pete’s lungs used to be. He’s no longer breathing air but glass, the shattered edges of it scraping against his windpipe, into his chest, until he’s choking on his own bitter-tasting blood. This is not a divorce court. There are no legal obligations in this messy trailer half-hidden behind a bank of tour buses and silver U-Hauls in a festival ground in the Midwest. He doesn’t have to share any more of himself than he feels comfortable with. He is not under oath.
Unfortunately, for Pete, his default setting is ‘overshare’ and he promptly fills the awkward silence with so much sound that Patrick probably regrets asking.
“She’s a big subject, you know?” Pete says, with forced conversational brightness that he uses to mask the hurt. “There’s a lot of stuff I could tell you. I could tell you she loves caramel lattes, but only the skinny ones. Or I could tell you she cries when she watches stupid movies on Netflix, like, all the corny ones with Steve Lund, just bawls her eyes out because the hotshot executive falls in love with the mayor of fucking Christmastown and saves the holiday cookie factory. Loves happy endings. That kind of girl. I mean, she didn’t love our happy ending but that was probably me. It’s usually me. It took me six months from when she told me she wasn’t happy to figure out that meant she wanted to leave.” He’s breathing too hard, too fast, his fingernails tearing into his wrist until he’s almost bleeding. “I’m kind of a jerk like that. Did I mention that? Or maybe you just want to know she liked strawberry shampoo. Maybe I’m just an idiot with a big mouth. Maybe—”
“Pete,” Patrick says quietly, his hand on Pete’s wrist, protecting Pete from the scrape of his own fingernails. He appears to be bleeding. Interesting. “Stop. I didn’t — I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. This is good, don’t you feel good?” Pete says quickly, tucking his hands down into his lap where Patrick can’t touch them. “I feel good. We can keep going. Your turn.”
“You… want to know about my wife?” Patrick asks. Pete’s eyes bounce down to his third finger, left hand, where there’s no sign of a wedding ring nor the absence of one. “What, exactly, do you want to know about her?”
“You’re married?” Pete asks stupidly.
Patrick smiles like it hurts. “Was. Very briefly. It was one of those straight out of college things when I thought the world was a much kinder place than it actually is.”
“I thought you were gay,” Pete blurts out, and Patrick laughs. He can’t imagine a married Patrick, much less a Patrick with a wife. In fact, Patrick doesn’t exist at all beyond the carefully controlled parameters of online articles and airplane bathrooms. “How’d it end?”
“It was a very clichéd breakup,” Patrick shrugs and waves his hand airily. “We’d been married for like, eighteen months. I was working in Europe for the summer, interning for a magazine in London. The idea was, we’d start trying for a baby when I got home.”
Pete has a horrible thought. A truly crushing and mortifying sense of realization. “Wait, did she die?”
Patrick laughs. “Worse. She called me up after a couple weeks and told me she went to a friend’s party. She told me she fucked him. Twice. She told me she didn’t feel guilty and she knew she had to leave before we wound up bringing kids into the whole mess. We divorced on different continents and, when I got home, I had an empty apartment, no wife, and an alimony dispute at 23. She took my records, which kind of sucked.”
“Oh,” says Pete. This sounds like Ryan Adams song. “Well. Maybe you do sort of get it…”
“Maybe,” Patrick says, his mouth tipping up at the corner. “I mean, most of it was dumpster dive finds, I replaced it. She also took my dog, which was, like, way worse.”
That is, somehow, more shocking than infidelity. Pete’s always been a dog person. There are no unpleasant surprises with a dog person: They appreciate loyalty; They appreciate friendship; They appreciate… being licked inappropriately as a demonstration of affection which, looking at the curve of Patrick’s throat, is something Pete could really go in for right now. Maybe Patrick will be okay with Pete nosing around his crotch. Maybe Pete should drop to his knees and find out.
Maybe Pete should stop thinking with his ridiculous penis and start behaving like the professional Ashlee thought he couldn’t be.
“Can we agree to never talk about any of this ever again?” Pete asks. “I’d be, just, super grateful.”
“Deal,” Patrick says. “If your gratitude will be super.”
“Moving on…”
Patrick looks down at his notes and then snorts softly. Pete begins to feel nervous. “Okay,” he says, “your band: fuck, marry, kill. Who gets what?”
“Easy,” Pete declares, because he was imagining something much worse. “Fuck all of them. They all have separate things to bring to the table — or the bed, or the tour bus — like, Andy’s got that drummer rhythm, Joe’s got fingers of fucking fury, and Chris… might surprise me. I feel like he’s been waiting fifteen years to surprise me.”
It’s much easier to be this: opened, exposed, like something in Body Worlds. It’s a strange sort of safety, immolating in gasoline to avoid a sunburn. Pete’s never been a man who does things in half measures.
“An orgy,” Patrick says, wrinkling his nose. “Nice”
“It’s not an orgy. You need at least five people to make it an orgy.” He looks at Patrick. “Unless we have an outlier? What do you say, Patrick? Would you like to be the meat in an Arma sandwich?”
Patrick chokes softly on his own tongue. They’ve switched from melancholy to flirting so quickly that Pete’s dick feels like it’s got whiplash. Or maybe he’s aching from the way Patrick examines Pete’s mouth like he’s committing each curve of it to memory.
“Hmm,” he says, like he said on the plane. “Uh…”
Scientifically, Pete knows that this is nothing more than a desperation to win whatever game it is they’re playing: It’s just a reaction, that’s all. Just hormones and blood cells and everything they teach in clinical biology textbooks with pink and blue outlines of the human body because they want to strip the fun out of it. Pete has no more control over his rogue erection than he has over his need to breathe, or sneeze, or blink. And, like blinking, the more he thinks about not doing it, the more his eyes sting, the faster his eyelids flutter. The more he thinks about not fucking Patrick, the thicker his cock gets, the tighter his balls.
It’s science; a song of equations, not stories. There is no more chance of altering the physical outcome of Pete’s attraction than there is of reversing the tides or reordering the fixed stars of heaven. Why fight it?
“You okay?” Pete asks lightly, hooking his ankle around Patrick’s under the table. Patrick doesn’t resist, but he does turn a shade or two pinker, his mouth a little wetter when he licks it, his pupils flaring and swallowing up the golden center of his iris.
“I’m good,” Patrick confirms tightly. “So, moving on.”
“No,” Pete shakes his head and slowly rubs his ankle against Patrick’s calf. “My turn. Fuck, marry, kill, who are you gonna choose, Trick?”
“From Arma?” Patrick asks, breathing like he just took four flights of stairs. “I feel like I’m at an unfair disadvantage. I don’t know anyone from Arma.”
Pete slides down in his seat and presses his knee higher, until he swears he can feel the heat of Patrick’s groin through two layers of denim. “You know me,” he says lightly. “Fuck, marry, kill?”
“I don’t think I know you well enough to know if I’d marry you,” Patrick says, breathing heavily, his thighs pushed greedily apart. “That’s a big decision, I mean, what if we don’t get along? What if we disagree on politics? Or kids? Or which flavor of yogurt we should buy at the store?”
“Democrat, a boy and a girl, and lemon blueberry,” Pete says. He is slumped so far in his chair that his chest is level with the table top. If he slides forward another inch, his knee will meet the evidence of Patrick’s dick, rigid in his skinny jeans. “Am I husband material yet? Do I get to meet your mom?”
“My mom would hate you.”
“Your mom would love me. I’m totally fluent in mom.”
“I definitely don’t want to marry you,” Patrick says, slipping down in his own seat in an act of hostile territory takeover. It’s clear he wants to rut against Pete’s knee, to hump against it indecently, until he comes in his pants. Pete pulls back his leg and Patrick whines. “I could kill you, though,” he says viciously. “Kill is still an option.”
“Patrick, come on, you’re way too pretty for jail,” Pete says, grinning toothily. “Who would you fuck?”
Patrick groans and reaches under the table. The rule is that Pete doesn’t move, doesn’t look. He can’t take a peek and check if Patrick’s adjusting himself, if he’s pressing the heel of his hand into his cock, if he’s hard. Instead, Pete holds eye contact and wraps his leg a little harder around Patrick’s. He jerks back, tipping Patrick forward and across the narrow table. Now Pete can see the faint threat of his stubble, hear his labored breathing, taste the gum on his breath. Pete is suddenly, acutely, aware of how close their lips are. How easy to shift this into a kiss. How strange that he pauses and waits.
Patrick looks up through the golden frame of his lashes and says, “You. I’d fuck you, obviously.”
Pete laughs through half a Xanax and a postgraduate thesis of dubious decisions. His next question is redundant because he knows the answer like he knows his own name, like he knows why Patrick is sweating lightly and pressing his hand hard into the crotch of his jeans. He knows but he asks it anyway. There’s an asshole in the room, for sure, but it isn’t Patrick.
“Why would you fuck me?” he asks, smirking.
Patrick wets his fucking sinful lips with his tongue. Pete feels the need to have them on him — someplace, anyplace — kissing his neck, or biting his mouth, or leaving bruises on his thighs.
“That question isn’t on my list. No comment,” Patrick says, with his beautiful lips and his wet pink tongue.
And then, before Pete can think of something clever to say, Patrick slides off his seat, under the table and shoulders his way between Pete’s knees. This is good, because Pete’s whole brain is trapped firmly in the twitchy heat of his dick. There is nothing clever to say. So, Pete shifts back in his chair and watches Patrick kneel on the filthy, spot-stained carpet, watches him reach with pale, confident fingers for the button of Pete’s jeans and all Pete can say, all that is rattling around in the empty truck stop of his brain is this:
“Fuck.”
Patrick pulls down Pete’s zipper and reaches inside, making a loose fist around Pete’s dick. Pete makes an insensible sound, an embarrassing, gurgling ‘Nnnngh,’ that bubbles up through his chest and spills over his mouth. Patrick laughs, wraps his hand around the girth of Pete’s erection and squeezes like he’s checking for ripeness. This is it. This is the moment Pete’s soul ascends and he is no longer a corporeal being. His eyes roll back and his hips roll up and Patrick’s breath is hot and sticky against the wet tip of his cock and if he doesn’t suck it, or stroke it, or do something productive with it, Pete is going to seek out the person responsible and demand a fucking refund.
“Nice tattoo,” Patrick says conversationally, as though his voice isn’t muffled by the table top, as though he isn’t holding Pete’s painfully erect penis in his hand.
“Mmmph,” says Pete elegantly.
He swirls his fingertip along the linework right above Pete’s groin, scratches his fingernails gently into the dark edge of Pete’s pubic hair. Pete would like to rescind his earlier statement: this is the moment he ceases to exist. Then Patrick leans in and tongues aggressively over the head of his cock, flicks the pink point of the tip against the tiny scar under the swollen ridge of it and moans like the taste is exceptional. Pete spasms, fists his hands in Patrick’s hair and reorders his list once more. Pete suspects this list of petit morts could be endless, could be infinite, that every single thing Patrick intends to do to him will eclipse the last as the sexiest thing Pete’s ever experienced.
“Nnngh,” Pete says again, with such elegant feeling it sounds like a sonnet.
“You have a nice dick,” Patrick tells him, sounding pleased. “Honestly, I… It’s fantastic, good job” and Pete, with his liquid thoughts and solid cock, watches Patrick lean in and slowly, slowly, oh so fucking agonizingly slowly, seal his lips around the head. Pete ignites, pushing up into Patrick’s touch with a strangled groan, palming sweetly at Patrick’s face, hair, shoulders. He wriggles. He squirms. He wants nothing more than this and yet, he wants so much more.
Patrick licks him slowly, considered little ice cream strokes of his tongue, his eyes closed and his fingers sinking into the muscle of Pete’s thighs. He’s the most awful tease, sliding tongue and teeth around each sensitive ridge and flare, like he’s mapping the territory of Pete’s dick. He’s leisurely, like they have nowhere else to be, like this trailer isn’t a shared commodity, like the fucking door isn’t unlocked.
(Not that Pete minds, particularly, if someone walks in. He has an exhibitionistic streak so wide it’s recordable by low-flying spacecraft, and he’s happy to indulge. Let them see his head thrown back, his back arched, his throat exposed. Let them hear the wet noise of Patrick’s mouth on his cock. Let them figure it out.)
(He suspects Patrick won’t feel the same way, but then, Patrick is the one on his knees under the table. If they’re playing an ethical game of Battleship, then Patrick just called out B7 and hit nothing but open water.)
For some unfathomable reason, Patrick removes his mouth from the tip of Pete’s dick. This is not a tactic that Pete’s dick approves of. Given that his dick is not, in fact, verbal, it gives a furious twitch, a wet bead of pre-come pearling at the tip as Patrick squeezes absently. Pete himself is also nonverbal, his thoughts mushy and soft, all available thinking-blood trapped entirely in his dick. He taps urgently at Patrick’s head and says, again, “Nnngh? Nnngh!”
“You’re good like this,” Patrick says, the words hot and wet as they trickle along the length of Pete’s cock, chased by the deliberate passage of his tongue. He pauses again at the head and looks up and licks his lips and Pete just about fucking dies. “Maybe we’re friends when I’m on my knees.”
It’s there again. That lizard shiver in the low-functioning part of his cortical matter. That ripple of a memory of something that never actually happened.
This is way too existential for the situation.
This, most importantly, is not assisting Pete in achieving orgasm.
There is no choice but to take matters into his own hands. Pete holds Patrick’s stare, barely blinks, and untangles one hand from Patrick’s hair. He raises his hand to his mouth, licks his palm, and wraps it tight around his cock. The noise he makes is embarrassing; a low, animal snarl, the friction so good his stomach hurts. His lips purse, every percentage point of his concentration focused on the way his dick slides through his fist, wet and red and hot with blood. Masturbation is not his first choice, but, if it’s his only choice, he’ll absolutely take it. Blowing across Patrick’s face is not without merit.
Patrick is on his knees between Pete’s legs, his greedy fist stuffed down the front of his pants as he watches Pete work himself over. They bring themselves off in tandem, gripping jeans, shirts, hair, skin. Pete can hear the wet noise of Patrick’s sticky summer self-gratification and wants so much more. He wants to taste the sugary edges of the universe, to smell musk and feel heat and God, fucking God, he wants Patrick’s mouth on his cock again.
His hand feels filthy good, though, better than he thought it might, his salty bitter thumb slipping over the head and onto Patrick’s mouth on each stroke to the tip, tugging lightly through his damp pubic hair on each pull down. His pre-come smears across Patrick’s lips like lip gloss, leaves them wet and shiny and as pink as the swollen head of Pete’s dick. He likes to be watched and Patrick is watching, Patrick is rapt, Patrick is staring like this is front row at Carnegie Hall and Pete’s wet cock sliding through his wet fist is symphonic.
There must be a lyric in this, something about warm summer mouths and kissing, kissing, kissing and endless heat and the sticky good smell of sex and Patrick’s Calvin Klein cologne. His mouth is a nervy tingle, echoing up from his groin where everything is touch sensitive and bursting. His hand tightens in Patrick’s hair, takes a fistful of his fine and fluffy bangs and squeezes. It’s a demand: if Patrick won’t suck, he can kiss. Pete can learn how long he can suck on Patrick’s tongue before he passes out. He can come on the damp groin of Patrick’s jeans, rubbing friction burn into his dick against denim and brass button and zipper.
But, because he is an asshole, Patrick resists, pulling back against Pete’s hold on his hair and mouthing sloppily over Pete’s hips, the creases of his groin, nipping at his stomach as Pete pulls furiously at his own dick.
When Pete slips his hand back down to the base, Patrick ducks, opens his mouth and takes the head between his lips. Pete is so surprised by this that he almost punches Patrick in the face. The noise he makes is choked, beyond description, outside of the human vocal range, a sound like he’s dying. Patrick slides down, does something tricky and interesting with his tongue against the underside and looks up and fucking smirks. He is so smug as to defy rationality. Pete thrusts up, seeshearsfeels him gag and thinks yes, yes, that’s more like it.
Pete can feel Patrick’s throat at the crown of his cock, feel it pushing, feel it hot and wet and tight and it Is. Fucking. Glorious. Blowjobs are blowjobs (and Pete has had plenty) except when they’re not. When they’re like this, when they’re hot velvet suction and crushing liquid motion and Patrick’s unhurried, curious fingers pulling at Pete’s belt and his jeans, when Patrick’s hands slide down over Pete’s thighs with the grain of coarse hair then push back up against it, staticky and hot? When he moves his thumb down and back and brushes into the damp ditch of Pete’s ass? That’s when a blowjob becomes spiritual. That’s when it becomes fucking Godly. The blood in Pete’s lower body is fuzzy as static, buffering somewhere between his dorsal vein and femoral artery, his lungs quick with sticky summer heat.
Patrick touches Pete’s asshole. His thumb is there, an interesting pressure, slow, curious, against the tight heatand it’s almost but not quite enough. Patrick is looking at him, his eyes huge and bright as moons and his mouth wet with his spit and Pete’s dripping almost-orgasm. He’s smirking still; a smug giver of blowjobs like a smug writer of articles. There is a slow molten spill in Pete’s groin. He’s close enough to taste it at the back of his throat.
He seizes Patrick’s ears and pushes him down, pushes up his hips to meet the motion of it and thinks, babbles, knows, “Gonna come. Gonna — gonna come. Gonna come. Gonna—”
“Pete? You in there?”
Patrick jumps so hard his head cracks against the table top. This triggers a chain reaction where the table rocks and Pete curses and then, slowly, inevitably, Patrick’s iPad crashes to the ground. Pete’s hands are framing Patrick’s face; his frantic eyes, his red ruined mouth full of Pete’s dick and Patrick’s quickening breath. He can feel the urgent hardness of his own erection in the soft pocket of Patrick’s cheek. It is curiously out of body, feeling the heat and need of it from the outside and the inside. He shivers and hopes that whoever it is will go away.
Alerted by the sound of the iPad greeting the carpet, they do the exact opposite and tap at the door. “Pete? Is that you?”
Patrick pulls back and Pete’s wet, quivering hard-on pops from his mouth in a messy spill of spit and fluid that drips along Patrick’s lips, chin, throat. Like Michael Stipe, Pete is losing his religion. There is no way a caring, loving New Testament God would allow this to happen twice. He is so hard, he could cry.
In the stifling moment of fellatio interruptus, he doesn’t recognize the owner of the voice beyond the door, but knows that he hates them with an unparalleled ferocity. “Go away,” he calls, his voice wrecked and shivery. He clears his throat and tries again. “Seriously. Fuck off.”
He attempts to pull Patrick back onto his cock; a few more sucks, a couple of wet slippery bobs of his mouth over Pete’s skin, nerves, flesh and Pete can come like the world is ending. Determined to win the title of Asshole of the Year, Patrick jerks away, glares at Pete and mouths ‘Go fuck yourself,’ with aggressive sincerity. Pete wonders if that’s an insult or advice. His dick twitches between them.
“Pete. Do I have to come in there?”
Pete is now sure of two things: one) that the voice belongs to Joe and two) that Joe is in the process of unwittingly enjoying his last few minutes of existence because if Pete does not get off he is going to fucking kill him.
Pete looks sadly at his dick and at Patrick, both beneath the table. Patrick appears to be performing an energetic interpretive dance. Pete doesn’t claim to be an expert, but he thinks the furious hand gestures mean that, if Joe comes in, Patrick will remove Pete’s testicles via his nostrils.
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” he calls back dubiously. “I’m… very busy right now.”
“Doing what?” Joe asks with suspicion.
‘Patrick fucking Stumph,’ is the obvious answer which, obviously, Pete will not say. Pete wraps a hand around his dick and attempts to lure Patrick onto it like he’s fly fishing for music critics. It doesn’t work. Patrick shoves at his thigh and hisses something colorful and uncomplimentary under his breath. Pete remembers that the door isn’t locked.
“I — Sort of have my hands full right now.” With what, exactly, his hands are filled, Pete does not say.
“With what?” Joe says, because Joe is clearly a man who does not want to carry on living.
“I’m— Masturbating?” Pete tries, because he sort of is, in that he has his hand wrapped around his flagging erection and, besides, half-truth is a great lie, or that’s what Benjamin Franklin said. He’s getting desperate now and Patrick’s scowl intensifies. Apparently, that was not the right answer.
“Really?” Joe doesn’t sound convinced.
“Really. Mmm, oh God, so good, feels amazing.”
“By yourself?”
“Who else would I be masturbating with? Fuck, what is this? Twenty fucking questions? I’ll be out in a minute,” he remembers that Patrick needs to come, too, and, because he’s a gentleman, he adds, “I mean, ten minutes. Maybe twenty.”
The door handle begins to move. “This is ridiculous, I’m coming in there—”
“Don’t!” Pete howls, his wet, red junk wilting stickily, far less magnificent as the blood bleeds back into his veins and his brain. The door handle stops moving. “Just — Give me a minute.”
There is a long, skeptical silence from the other side of the door. Joe’s frown is airborne, seeping under the door and through the window seals. Between Pete’s legs, Patrick is sweating lightly, wiping his mouth and fumbling for his fedora. It’s under the chair, a dusty boot print right on the side. He is so tense as to cease fluid movement, his motions choppy, robotic, his shoulders jammed up by his ears. He needs to relax more. Luckily for him, Pete has a few excellent suggestions re: relaxation.
“Fine,” Joe says eventually. Patrick’s shoulders sag as he lets out a breath. They tense again immediately when Joe continues. “But I’m not fucking losing track of you again. You’re like a toddler, only they don’t make backpack reins big enough. Well, they do, but they’re a sex thing. Anyway. I’m waiting right outside the door.”
Then Joe stops talking and, like Tiffany, Pete thinks they’re alone now.
“Okay,” Pete whispers under the table. “Not to rush you along or anything, but I’m like, close enough that it’s actually embarrassing. If you get me off real quick, I can—”
Pete realizes he is no longer talking to Patrick because Patrick is no longer under the table. Instead, Patrick is urgently gathering his things and shoving them into his dorky little messenger bag. His glasses are sliding down his nose, his fedora askew. He is an adorable portrait of flustered desperation which would be cute, except Pete can’t think of anything but his throbbing, wanting penis. He stares at Patrick, his mouth open, his eyes imploring.
“What?” Patrick hisses, cramming his iPad into his bag with force.
“Nnngh!” Pete says, again, gesturing to his crotch and his painfully red dick. If he has to sing The Communards perennial hit Don’t Leave Me This Way, he absolutely will. Patrick shakes his head and makes an uncomplimentary hand gesture. “Dude — Come on! Are you serious?”
“Your guitarist is right outside of the door,” Patrick whisper-screams. He doesn’t look happy. He would look much happier if he allowed Pete to demonstrate the thing he can do with his wrist and a water bottle. “And you want me to suck you off?”
No matter how many times he repeats it in his head, Pete doesn’t understand how those two statements are related.
“Would you... like me to ask him to come in?” he asks thoughtfully.
“Shut up! Just, shut up!”
“We were having a nice time!”
“Well, he already thinks you’re jerking off, feel free to keep having a nice time all by yourself,” Patrick says witheringly. “Jesus Christ, if I lose my job…”
“But,” Pete says desperately, “I thought we had a connection? I thought we bonded?”
Patrick gives his (damp, visibly half-erect) crotch a derisory jiggle. “Bond with this, asshole.”
Pete’s erection, sense of self-esteem, and enthusiasm deflate in unison. Whatever magic compelled Patrick to crawl on his ripped up knees on the sticky carpet, the fleeting sense of summer madness that compelled him to take Pete’s cock into his mouth, to look at him like he was the physical manifestation of every fantasy Patrick’s ever had, it’s swept away on a warm lake breeze.
“I don’t think that window is supposed to open,” he says cattily, as Patrick fumbles with the latch. Desperate, Patrick grabs a pen from his bag and works it into the lock like he’s Colton Harris-Moore. “Look at you. The international man of journalism, illicit sexual encounters and breaking and entering. Or breaking and leaving. You should put that on your resume.”
Patrick doesn’t answer. Patrick doesn’t look at him. Patrick doesn’t watch Pete tuck his sad, wet cock back into his pants.
“Seriously,” Pete says. “Use the door, asshole.”
The window flies open and, without a backward glance, Patrick hops up onto the frame, catches his toe on the lip, and then plummets to the ground with a shriek. Pete jumps to his feet. Outside, Patrick stands, knocks the dust off his pants, and meet Joe’s astonished stare.
“Dude,” Joe says, concerned. “Are you, uh… Are you okay?”
“’S’up?” Patrick says casually, like he didn’t just fall out of a window.
Then, he turns on his heel and stalks away. Pete, aware that he needs to accept this, does not watch him leave.
***
Pete has never conducted a large scale press event with a noticeable erection before, but life is made of first experiences. He shifts in his folding chair, rests his elbows on his knees and thanks any and all deities he’s read about in American Gods that there is a trestle table between him and anyone with photographic equipment.
‘Something something Leeds something something,’ says the journalist who is definitely not Patrick Stumph.
The most compelling evidential source that this journalist is not, in fact, Patrick Stumph, is the fact that Patrick Stumph is actually sitting three rows behind him, making eye contact with Pete and slowly sliding the tip of his tongue around some kind of ridiculously pink, distinctly phallic iced confection. Pete mumbles an insensible string of vowel sounds into the mic nearest his face and presses both hands over his academically-challenged penis. Clearly, he is guilty of some kind of hideous crime in a past life because no normal person deserves this level of punishment in a public place. As if to prove this theory correct, Patrick grins and slips the first couple of inches of popsicle into his mouth and begins to suck. His lips are stained pink, his cheeks hollowed. This is unforgivable. This is pornographic. At some point, Pete is going to have to go and slip someone twenty bucks or so for the fucking floor show.
Pete is only aware that everyone is waiting for him to speak because the whole tent has fallen collectively silent. That and Andy stomps on his foot under the table. He clears his throat frantically and grips the microphone with the same curl of fingers and thumb that Patrick exercised on Pete’s dick back in Chicago last month. He leans in close and says, “Yes. I’m actually a really big fan of System of a Down, I’ll definitely take the time to watch them tonight.”
If the look of abject confusion on everyone’s face is any sort of indicator, this was not the correct thing to say. They are looking at him like they think he might be unwell, or having some kind of temporary emotional collapse. They’re probably right because his head feels light and his dick feels heavy and, smirking, Patrick swirls his tongue down towards the base of the popsicle, chasing a bead of slowly dripping…
“Pete!” Chris hisses, throwing an elbow into his ribs.
“Um,” Pete says, nursing the sore imprint of Chris’s bone structure on his skin. “I don’t think I really understood the question. Could you repeat it for me?”
This is the smoothest line Pete has ever uttered. He is a darling of the journalistic community. One day, when the band is no longer profitable, there’s a career waiting for Pete in Public Relations. He leans back in his seat and smiles confidently.
The journalist who is not Patrick clears his throat, leans forward and, very slowly and with deliberate British sarcasm, he says, “What. Is the name. Of your next. Single?”
“Oh,” Pete mutters absently, and promptly goes right back to watching Patrick do naughty things with a popsicle. “Yeah, very excited about it… Should be a great show.”
They write him off as a lost cause, which is probably for the best. Patrick has rolled the sleeves of his shirt, exposing the pale line of his biceps, his top button popped to reveal his throat as he sucks, swallows, sucks. There is no way that Pete can stand up and reveal the magnificent magnitude of his deviant erection. He is trapped here by his own errant vascular system and Patrick’s unbelievable, decadent mouth.
He closes his eyes and attempts to convey the facts of the situation to his misbehaving penis:
Patrick was supposed to be a short-term thing. This was supposed to be resolved in the bathroom stall of a transatlantic flight two months ago. Instead, Pete is nursing an inappropriate hard-on and an under the skin itch whenever he hears the name Patrick out loud. Joe watches a lot of SpongeBob when he’s high. Pete is beginning to have unfortunate responses to the theme song.
But here is Patrick in his acid wash red shirt and black skinny jeans. In his fedora and combat boots with his red, shiny mouth wrapped around the thick, pink, wet length of something that is not Pete’s cock but could be. Should be. He grips his own knees under the table until he’s sure they’ll tear through the denim, leave it bloodied and frayed. He breathes deeply. He counts backwards from five-hundred. He imagines his Uncle Roy in his bathing suit.
Finally, the interview is over and they crowd from the stage, Pete with both hands firmly cupped over his crotch in a manner he hopes is casual. He has a plan, a loosely formed handful of bullet points that start with Patrick’s mouth and end with the dark heat of his bus bunk.
Instead, his band circle him like this is an intervention and herd him bodily towards the catering table. Now is not the time to argue over bottles of room temperature water and dried-out watermelon. Pete drops his shoulder and prepares to charge.
“What the fuck,” Andy says, “was that?”
“An interview,” Pete says slowly. “We do those sometimes.”
“We do,” Chris agrees. “But we generally don’t do them while you’re staring into the middle distance like you’re experiencing some kind of emotional revelation. Or like you just ate bad shellfish”
“I have lots of deep, emotional thoughts,” Pete says, defensively. “It’s hard to ignore them when they arrive.”
“You’ve never had a deep, emotional thought in your life,” Joe says.
Pete has won awards for his lyrics and his poetry. There are people with his words permanently scarred into their actual skin. He opens his mouth and says, “Bite me, dickwad.” This is probably not something that will inspire tattoos.
“We’re just concerned,” Andy says carefully.
“Like dick we are,” Joe interrupts. “I saw the twink with the popsicle, he’s the same dude who fell out of the window back in Chicago. Pete is boning Patrick fucking Stumph!”
Pete decides that Joe is currently his least favorite member of the band.
“I have never boned that twink in my life!” Pete says, because he hasn’t, because assholes like Joe keep fucking ruining his sex life and interrupting him right as it’s getting to the good part. He cranes his neck to look back into the press tent and finds Patrick’s seat depressingly empty. “Goddammit, are you guys intentionally trying to cockblock me?”
“You’re trying to fuck Patrick fucking Stumph?” Chris says, laughing until he realizes that there is no punchline. He looks at Pete, concerned. “Are you — Are you feeling okay? You remember we hate that guy, right?”
“Look,” Andy says soothingly. “I’m sure Pete isn’t fucking Patrick fucking Stumph. We need to calm down and—”
“We are not a fucking hive mind,” Pete objects. “The ‘we’ doesn’t have to be collective.”
“Oh God,” Andy says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “You are fucking him, aren’t you? You’re totally fucking him.”
“See?” Joe says smugly.
“I am not!” Pete shrieks operatically. Because this is unfair. He isn’t. He hasn’t. “Look, can we wrap this up? I have an elsewhere to be.”
“On Patrick fucking Stumph’s dick,” Chris mutters sourly. Pete strongly considers inserting the watermelon into an orifice it was never intended to breach.
“I want to make it very clear that I think this is a horrible idea,” Andy says seriously. “Think about this rationally. He’s vicious enough when he just hates our music. Imagine how bad he’s gonna get when he actively hates your guts.”
“I’m very charming and endearing,” Pete says scathingly, at odds with the middle finger he raises in Andy’s direction. “What makes you think I’ll piss him off?”
“We’re literally never getting a positive review again,” Joe mutters. “Not one. Never.”
“I’m leaving,” Pete says loudly, drawing himself up and straightening his shirt.
“When this backfires...” Andy begins.
“I give you full permission to tell me you told me so,” Pete finishes for him. “But right now, I have some business to finish. I’ll see you guys later.”
They don’t look particularly pleased, but no one attempts to stop him. Pete leaves the tent with his heart bruising his ribs and his dignity in tatters. Patrick is nowhere to be seen.
***
The internet is an amazing thing. Probably Pete’s third favorite invention after the personal vibrator and the electric toothbrush. Which also doubles as a personal vibrator in a pinch, if anyone was wondering. But the internet is a wonderful beast. It provides pirated movies, pornography in more flavors than Baskin Robins, and it created Livejournal. It is also a place where lots of people — lots of professional people — like to share their contact information. With a couple of clicks of his mouse, Pete has Patrick’s Twitter handle, his generic Outlook email address and his Instagram.
Which, by the way, is stuffed full of irritatingly adorable candid shots of Patrick in lots of very interesting places with a metric fuck ton of good-looking people.
Whatever, there’ll be time for jealousy later. Pete is also the proud new owner of Patrick’s telephonic communication information. His cell phone number. A link to Patrick via telecom masts and satellites rotating slowly along designated paths high above his head. There’s a lot that can be done with a phone number.
This is how Pete finds himself in the bathroom of the bus with his phone in one hand and his erection in the other. He is a desperate man. A man with no other options available to him. Well, there probably are other, better options but his brain is in his dick and his dick is in his hand and the shutter sound clicks and whirs and, suddenly, Pete is staring down the loaded barrel of a dick pic.
Apparently, this is a rake Pete intends to keep stepping on.
The thing is, Pete thrives on people thinking about him. He knows, objectively, that he’s a rock star. That there are magazines and websites and Hot Topic stores that carry his image like a signal. That his picture, his face, his knowing smile, is on the bedroom walls of kids on this and several other continents. It’s nice to exist outside of his own immediate sphere of interest. If someone else is thinking about him, it proves he’s real. Schrödinger's emo, if you will.
This in mind, he bites his lip, decides that all dicks are, fundamentally, less about aesthetics and more about intention, and fires it to the number that he found on the internet.
He then immediately has three consecutive coronaries when he remembers that he has no verification that the number belongs to Patrick.
For all he knows, he just sent a picture of himself, holding his erect penis, along with his name, a kiss, and his own number to the editor of Rolling Stone. This is the situation for which plausible deniability was created. There are a lot of people named Pete and conceivably, it could be one of those Petes who just sent a picture of his genitals to an unknown number. He is, however, forced to concede that not many of them have his bartskull tattoo. Or his face.
He spends five minutes pacing the floor of the tour bus, shredding his thumbnail between his teeth until he tastes blood. It’s okay. If he did send it to someone else, he’s heard the weather in Mongolia is great at this time of year. He can hole up in a yurt and eat yak butter until everyone forgets who he is. According to every review Patrick has ever written this shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks, absolute tops.
When his phone vibrates in his hand, Pete lets forth a panicked squeal and hurls it against the wall. Then, he grabs it and stares at it as though it’s armed and could explode at any moment. It’s just a phone. This is ridiculous.
“Hello?” he says cautiously to the unknown number displayed on his screen.
“You sent me a picture of your penis?” Patrick says, in lieu of something more erudite or charming or normal like, say, ‘hi.’ “Fucking seriously?”
“In my defense,” Pete says, experiencing relief on a visceral level. “I did just watch you perform enthusiastic oral sex on a popsicle. I’m citing temporary sexual insanity, what’s your excuse?”
“I can’t eat a popsicle now without you sending me pictures of your genitals? Is that what you’re saying?”
“It’s a funny thing, actually,” Pete says with a laugh that trails off when Patrick does not join in.
“What?” Patrick asks. “What part of this is funny?”
“Well,” Pete begins. “I was just thinking about you.”
“That’s either cute or frightening,” Patrick says. “Depending on perspective.”
Pete makes an irritated sound. “I was thinking about you and how we have this weird little thing going on and how people who have a weird little thing going on sometimes send one another gifts.”
“This is a terrible story,” Patrick informs him, although he doesn’t sound like he means it. “You should work on making it better.”
“It’s just, you don’t seem like you’d be into flowers, so I thought, hey, what do you get the journalist who has everything? And then I remembered that time on the plane when you waited until I fell asleep to look for pictures of my dick and I thought ‘Hold the goddamn phone! My dick! That’s something I can totally provide him with!’ and so I went into the bathroom and I got my dick out and now... here we are. Honestly?” Pete pauses and rakes a hand through his hair, listens to Patrick’s staticky breathing down the line. “I think I got my best side, don’t you?”
The line is very quiet and still. Pete’s cock twitches in his jeans. Somehow, Patrick has this perplexing ability to turn him on without saying or doing anything at all.
“Thanks,” Patrick says. It sounds like he’s trying very hard to be sarcastic but the breathy hitch to it gives him away. He sounds turned on. He sounds… needy. “It’s an okay dick, I guess.”
“Did you have some critique?” he asks hopefully, thumbing open the button of his jeans.
“The angle could’ve been better,” Patrick says. “There was a lot you could’ve done with light and shadow, and you really should frame the shot so your dick is the focus instead of that frankly ridiculous tattoo. But, overall? Not a bad effort. Maybe even one for the spank bank.”
“You should show me yours,” Pete says lightly, glancing down at the swollen outline of his cock through his jeans. “You should take a picture and send me and then I’ll know what you mean.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Oh God, I really, really would,” Pete says, with the honesty of a man with more of his intellect caught in his erection than his brain.
Like the popsicle he’s melting, running down and pooling in the horizontal parts of his anatomy, in the low humming throb of his cock that he palms furiously through the denim. The bus is quiet and cool. The time between now and Pete’s contractual requirement to perform to seventy-thousand people is measurable in hours. That is to say, there’s time to do other things. To finish other things.
“Unlucky for you, I don’t send dick pics to random dudes from MySpace,” Patrick says primly.
“What a wonderful coincidence!” Pete declares. “I’m not random or from MySpace!”
“I’m not sending you pictures of my penis.”
“Why not?” Pete pouts, which is less effective than he hopes it might be as Patrick can’t see him pout. He should’ve done this via facetime. People are so much more willing to show a tiny bit of dick if the evidence doesn’t hang around. “Complete this well-known phrase or saying: ‘I’ll you show mine, and you show me…’”
“It’s one of those things I think is so much better if it’s shared in person,” Patrick purrs.
Pete has a heart attack, dies. He ascends his mortal bounds for a moment and watches himself from above, listing lazily to the left as his central nervous system puddles into soup and he thumbs at the sticky tip of his cock through his shorts.
He swallows heavily. “Oh.”
“Oh,” Patrick repeats.
“I’m a big fan of seeing art in the flesh,” Pete agrees. “Like, who wants to hang a Mona Lisa postcard when you can go to the Getty?”
“The Louvre,” Patrick corrects. Pete suspects he could really get into Patrick correcting him. “The Mona Lisa isn’t at the Getty, she’s at the fucking Louvre. Fuck, you’re such an idiot. Why am I into it?”
Pete wonders if Patrick is familiar with the term ‘morosexual.’ He elects not to ask.
Instead, he whispers into the receiver, “Hey, Pat,” and Patrick hums softly in response and Pete can almost imagine he’s touching himself too, “you ever been fucked in a tour bus by a real-life rock star? I can get you backstage, show you the exciting stuff. And then...”
“What the fuck?” Patrick says sharply. “What the fuck did you just say?”
“Um,” Pete says, his brain still lagging somewhere between his heart and his knees. “Wait, what?”
“Are you for real?” Patrick asks frostily, the ice water to Pete’s rampant erection.
“Yeah,” he begins nervously. “So, I can see now that that’s not the turn this conversation was taking. I’d like to be offered the opportunity to back up, please.”
Patrick, quite clearly, is not in the mood. “You know what?” he says, “You’re a fucking asshole. I don’t know why I keep expecting to find your hidden depths because you don’t have any. I scratch the surface and there’s just more surface. You are endless fucking surface, Pete Wentz.”
“Whoa, hold on, that’s a little fucking harsh—”
“You think being a rock star is special? You think you’re important? God, you don’t fucking change, do you?”
“What the hell did I do?” Pete asks, bewildered.
His poor penis is suffering from emotional whiplash. It has possibly crawled into his abdominal cavity and inverted, such is the level of Patrick’s vitriol.
“It’s — You — I just,” Patrick stutters and stops, takes a deep breath and starts again. “I keep telling myself I can deal with you, but I can’t.”
Pete is a lot of things to a lot of people. To the tens of thousands of kids lining up already for barrier spots in the August sun, he’s a hero. To the Western media as a whole he’s a pariah. He’s the person they photograph falling out of clubs and making out with unsuitable individuals and build up to tear down. He’s the clickbait and the ‘told you so’ and the endless conversations with PR teams about what he’s done this time. To his bandmates he’s a friend but also a liability. He’s the person who can’t be counted on in an emergency situation. He’s no one’s hospital contact. To the man on the end of the line, he will clearly always be an asshole.
Softly, and into static silence, Pete says, “Patrick? Why do you hate me?”
“I don’t,” Patrick snaps abruptly. “I don’t hate you. I don’t care enough to hate you.”
“I’m going to go ahead and call bullshit on that,” Pete says. “No one acts like this without a grudge. No one cares this much and gets to say they don’t care. Ten years. Ten fucking years you’ve been fucking me over. What did I do?”
And Patrick pauses. He leaves this deathly little silence in which Pete can imagine him scrubbing a hand through his hair, grinding his teeth and pushing the pad of his thumb into his eye. Then he says something Pete isn’t expecting, his voice clipped and controlled like programming, like flickering lights on the soundboard.
“I don’t care about you,” he insists. “I care – Look, I just care about – About.”
He stops. Pete watches someone take a piss against the side of the tour bus parked next to theirs and wonders if this is the highlight of the music industry, the peak of his glamorous career.
“What did I do?” he asks again.
Patrick is so silent for so long that Pete has to check he hasn’t hung up. Then, he sighs, like Pete is the most irritating, emotionally-challenged individual he’s ever had the misfortune to meet. Which probably isn’t untrue.
“Chicago, 2001,” Patrick says quietly.
“I’ll take ‘Where did Patrick lose his virginity?’ for eight-hundred, Alex,” Pete jokes, because Pete is the kind of guy who does not know when to shut his mouth. He’s been awake for close to twenty-four hours. A full rotation of the planet past sun and moon and stars. He’s dizzy on jetlag and airline food. He would like it very much if Patrick would stop talking in Jeopardy questions, and would start explaining what the hell his problem is. “You know what?” he continues. “You were right. You are better on your knees.”
He regrets it immediately, but mouths don’t come with pause and reset options and it stays, ugly and loaded, on the line between them.
“I’m hanging up,” Patrick says.
“No! Just – I’m tired, okay? Between Ashlee and touring and whatever this is, my head is just… It’s stripped, and I can’t… I can’t figure this out. Please. Tell me.”
Every word is clumsy, sharp and bloody in his mouth, like spitting out mouthfuls of broken teeth. Pete is not a Patrick Whisperer; he’s not classically trained in the art of soothing aggravated music critics. Everything is instinct and the badly-timed application of half-formed theories and if anyone is giving out awards for bloody-minded tenacity, Pete would like to climb to the podium and accept his participation ribbon.
Annoyingly, he has no idea why he really cares. All he knows is that there is something, some invisible line that links the two of them together. All he knows is that when Patrick isn’t around him, something in Pete itches like a phantom limb. All he knows is that when Patrick’s near him, he feels contentment on a molecular level, so deep and unrelenting that it rearranges his DNA entirely. He knows that this is entirely ridiculous when he’s spent the sum total of twelve hours in Patrick’s company in the thirty-four years of his collective existence. He’s certain this qualifies as an unnatural obsession. He pinches the bridge of his nose and waits for the dial tone, for the evidence that Patrick doesn’t feel the same.
Patrick takes a deep breath and, seemingly determined to carry on saying things Pete does not expect him to say, he says, “Okay, fine. You held auditions. Back in Chicago, in 2001.”
“Oh,” Pete says, and honestly? That sounds like something he’d do. He had a lot of ideas back then, vague and reverential conversations held with Joe about how they were going to save rock n roll. “That checks out.”
“Right,” Patrick says, and then says nothing else. It’s like he believes that this is an adequate explanation for a grudge stretching over a decade. As though Pete is supposed to say ‘Aha! Auditions!’ and understand.
“Okay,” Pete begins carefully. “Could you… expand on that, maybe?”
“Fine,” Patrick snaps. “You held auditions, ‘Chicago softcore,’ that’s what you called it. I came along to try out as your drummer.”
Hesitantly, Pete says, “Can we pretend for a moment that I’m incredibly dumb—”
“Pretend?” Patrick snaps.
“Okay, can we acknowledge that I’m incredibly dumb?” Pete asks stupidly. “Tell me this story like you’d tell it to a toddler. Once upon a time it for me.”
“Ha,” Patrick barks. “Okay, how about this. Once upon a time, a boy went off to seek his fortune in a pop punk band with the dude from Racetraitor, the Prince Who Would Be. The boy knew this was a bad idea, he’d heard rumours about the cruelty of the Prince Who Would Be, but he had t-shirts made by local print stores. He had fucking posters on his bedroom wall.”
“Oh,” Pete says, again. “Is this one of those stories where the Prince Who Would Be is actually a super nice dude?”
“It is not,” Patrick assures him.
“Right,” Pete says, his belly in his boots. “Carry on, then.”
“The Prince Who Would Be was everything they said he would be,” Patrick continues ominously. “The Prince sat on his royal fucking throne with his court around him and called the kids up one by one like court jesters for his amusement. I got on that stage and you fucking laughed at me.”
Pete didn’t. Pete wouldn’t.
“I didn’t. I wouldn’t!”
“You did,” Patrick insists. “You said I looked like my mom dressed me. You said I looked like a middle schooler. You didn’t even let me play.”
Okay, first of all, there is no way that’s true. There is no version of Pete in this or any other part of the multiverse that would not want to be around Patrick Stumph. Aside from the version of him of two months ago, who was president of the Patrick Stumph Hate Club. That version of him would absolutely do something like that.
A further truth universally acknowledged is that Pete Wentz of 2001 was sort of an asshole. The kind of manchild who found it funny to laugh at the misfortune of others around him because he was twenty-one and sometimes twenty-one-year-olds are kind of dickish. At least, he was a dick but he likes to believe he’s grown out of it. He attempts to conjure it up, to imagine himself in the basement of a DePaul music building, watching a sixteen-year-old version of Patrick approach the stage.
“Oh,” he says, faintly this time. He is saying ‘oh,’ more times in this conversation than he’s said it in the past year collectively. “I don’t… think I remember.”
“Think harder,” Patrick says and Pete is thinking his hardest but he can’t place Patrick at the scene. That is, until Patrick continues. “I was fatter, then. Maybe that’s the problem. I was fat, and I wore an argyle sweater and fucking knee socks because I didn’t know how to be cool enough for you and I thought — I hoped — the music would be enough. I thought it would make you like me.”
Pete remembers. He remembers it suddenly and with crushing cognizance. The Kid in the Shorts, because their humor didn’t extend to amusing nicknames. He thinks they made the kid cry. It’s not a proud moment. There is a swooping rush in Pete’s stomach, a terrible sickness. He tries to stammer an apology but the words get stuck in his throat, dry chunks that choke him until he coughs and splutters and Patrick, on the end of the line, is so painfully silent.
“I didn’t know,” Pete gets out eventually, spitting it onto the table top. “I was an idiot back then and I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, well,” Patrick says blithely. It doesn’t fool Pete for a moment. “I gave up on performing, so you got what you wanted.”
“I didn’t want—”
“Please, spare me your half-assed apology. You won. You’re a rock star and I’m the dude who writes about rock stars.”
“Patrick,” Pete pleads, as a strong sense of where this conversation is going bleeding into his guts. “Come on, we were kids.”
“Right,” Patrick agrees, with sarcasm. “You were just a kid. I get it, still not willing to take responsibility for what you did. Cool. Cool, cool. This is fine. This is okay.”
“I’m trying to say—”
“Thanks, Pete,” Patrick snaps. “Both for fucking up my life and for giving me the opportunity to learn that you don’t change. The good news is your band fucking sucks — even I couldn’t have saved you from that. I don’t even have to lie in those shitty reviews I give you, everything you produce is terrible.”
“Patrick,” Pete says desperately. “Just let me explain.”
Patrick laughs mirthlessly. “Good luck learning how to play bass, asshole.”
And with that, Patrick hangs up.
Pete looks sadly at his soft dick, hanging out of his shorts and open zipper. It stares back at him morosely. They are two beings caught in the eternal suffering of being fucked over by their own poor decisions.
He still feels it, though. Not his dick, for the record, he’s not feeling that. He feels that internal tug that tells him he’s supposed to love Patrick. His guts are hot and squirmy with it, his head a flurry of white noise and static that only falls quiet when Patrick slips into his orbit. This is either kismet or love at first sight or a coincidentally timed bout of food poisoning.
Pete looks out of the tour bus window and puts his dick away before anyone else can board the bus and accuse him of exposing himself. Leeds festival will be over in six hours and Pete has no idea where in the world Patrick will go once it’s done.
There are schemes to scheme. He opens his laptop, and begins to type.
***
Pete is in the process of making a Grand Romantic Gesture.
The thing about Grand Romantic Gestures is that all of the ideas Pete comes up with in his head stop sounding Grand and Romantic and start sounding Weird and Certifiable when he types them into google.
For example, he thought about sky-writing but the light pollution from the stages would drown it out. That and it relies on Patrick looking up at just the right moment. Oh, and, also? People might think he’s a tiny bit peculiar.
Then there was the idea that involved getting an x-ray of his heart because nothing says romance like open chest cavities. But it turns out there are no private medical clinics open in Leeds on Sunday and he feels slightly… complicated about abusing the kindness of the British universal healthcare system by faking a heart attack.
This whole situation is highlighting to Pete how very out of tune he is with the concept of convincing someone that he’s worthy of love. With Ashlee it was easy. Easier. A photograph was taken outside of Angels & Kings, blurry and more filled with grain than Kansas, is hand up her shirt and hers down his pants. Then the headlines fell into place. His publicist talked to her publicist and there were prearranged dates. She smiled a lot. She laughed at his jokes. She was so effortlessly simple to fall in love with.
He is trying very hard not to think about how that felt in reverse. How much it hurt. So, he thinks about Patrick instead, which hurts slightly less but in an entirely different way because he broke Patrick without even knowing him. And now, it seems, that he won’t be offered the chance to rectify the situation.
Unless he can think of a better idea than (he glances at his laptop) serenading him with a mariachi band outside of the press tent. Which is a stupid idea. Where is he supposed to find a mariachi band at this hour?
So, if Pete can’t provide an apology in the form of pyrotechnics, aerobatics, Mexicana or via the medium of advanced medical science, he is going to have to go with what he knows. And what he knows is music. Music is what binds the two of them, the thing that brought them together. Music is the metaphorical glue to the thing that Pete is already referring to as a relationship when Patrick is clearly thinking of it as a mistake. With less than two hours until Arma take the stage, the possibility of writing a song — or, like, an entire musical rock opera — is wholly out of the question. What’s a bass player to do?
Pete taps his pen against his teeth and stares morosely out of the window of the tour bus. And then he jumps upright, electrocuted by the brilliance of his own astounding ability to pull something out of his ass. He fumbles for his cell, finds it half under the couch cushions, and fat fingers his way to his contacts list.
“Pete? Where are—”
“Andy!” he says, before Andy can ask something boring, like where he is or what he’s doing. “I have an idea for our set tonight.”
“Oh God,” says Andy. “I already say no.”
“It’s an excellent idea,” Pete insists. “This is a musical coup d’état; I’m invoking the laws of bandtatorship.”
There’s no way this won’t work.
***
Pete is watching seventy-thousand people move under the fat, molten round of the setting sun. He is sweating into his eyes and over his bass. His throat is raw and ragged with screaming. He could fall into his bunk and sleep for a thousand years, a genie done granting wishes. He could play forever and never get tired.
There is nothing like performing. Sweeter than heroin, more potent than liquor, it thrills through him, chases through his vascular system like chemical dye until he’s warm down to his fingers and toes. Usually, anyway. Tonight, Pete buzzes with anxiety every time he looks at the setlist taped to the stage boards at his feet. Pete hovers in a liminal space between knowing this will work and wondering which idiot came up with this in the first place.
(The answer is him. He came up with this. He is The Idiot.)
They reach a lull between songs, the place where An Anthem for Those Without Breath or Heart gives way to The Mortal Escapist. Only, that’s not what’s written on the setlist. Because Pete is an idiot but he’s also way too invested to back out at this point so instead he throws a fist into the air and grabs his mic with the other and, into the dull roar of so many voices, he begins to speak.
“So,” he says, and the crowd screams. “So, hey. I’m Pete.”
“What is this?” Chris says into the mic to Pete’s right. “The fucking church social? Did you bring casserole?”
“You kiss your mother with that mouth?” Pete asks. He’s stalling. He hopes Patrick is watching. He hopes Patrick is somewhere else entirely. “Anyway, so, you guys know that thing where you’re like — you’re into someone, right?” Right now, with the setting sun in his eyes and the crowd a stilted blur through his damp lashes, any one of them could be Patrick. “You know when you first meet and, like, you don’t know a thing about them but — you know how much you want to. And you learn a couple of tiny things about them and it’s like a puzzle, like the edges of the picture but you want to fill in the middle. You want to find the piece right at their center. You guys know anything about that?”
They make a noise like they do. A collective roar of confirmation that everybody hurts. The air is filled with hands and bottles and half-drunk plastic cups of liquid Pete is going to tell himself is apple juice. He grins, and tips his face up to the setting sun.
“Right,” he says, wrapping his hand around the neck of his bass. “This song is… not about that. This is a song about getting addicted to heroin and it’s not by us.”
They start softly, softly. Trading on childhood nostalgia and Simpsons references as Joe picks out the notes and sings. Pete sways with the music. He thinks it’s unutterably perfect.
But this is not that show and they are not that band and when the chorus kicks in, so does Arma Angelus. Andy’s drums, Chris’s guitar, rough and dirty, Pete’s less than stellar bass and his roaring, echoing scream throbbing up through his vocal cords and out over the crowd. Somewhere, Pete read that the human psyche only has capacity to care about around a hundred people. Right now, Pete loves a whole festival. They are his favorite people in the world.
It turns out, it is not only possible to play a screamo cover of Fire and Rain, it is possible to absolutely rock that shit.
They wrap it up and slide into It’s Not Me, It’s You and Pete dedicates the final four minutes of their time on stage to not thinking about Patrick fucking Stumph. Because thinking about Patrick Stumph caused him to concoct the idea to play a James Taylor song live, in front of more people than he has functioning brain cells. When he leaves the stage and hands his bass to Brian, when he descends the steps and avoids Andy, and Joe, and Chris, he dares himself to check his phone.
There is no message from Patrick. No missed call. Nothing.
He opens the messenger app, just to say he tried, and he freezes. His mouth is dry and his palms are not as three dots bounce, and stop. Bounce, and stop. Pete does not breathe. He does not blink. He is convinced that, if he does either of those things, he will terrify this fragile specter of a non-existent message into never materializing. Pete could prove to the James Randi Educational Foundation that spirits exist, such is the magnitude of his concentration focused on forcing something to appear on his screen.
That was quite something, Patrick’s text says, when it bounces into his inbox. Pete’s lungs are in his throat and his heart in his stomach. Each internal organ has rerouted and rehomed itself and there is nothing Pete can do about it.
Pete is all thumbs as he types back: i didn’t know if you’d stay to watch.
Bounce, stop. Bounce, stop.
I didn’t, but they showed it on TV.
Bounce, bounce, bounce.
I’m staying at the Radisson. Meet me there if you want to talk.
Pete hurls his sweaty stage shirt at Henry, who looks less than thrilled to receive it. He peels it from the side of his head and wrinkles his nose. He sniffs it and wrinkles his whole face. “Asshole,” he snaps at Pete, with venom. “You’re such an asshole.”
But fortune never did favor the slow. Pete grabs a clean shirt and a leather jacket that he is fairly certain does not belong to him and he runs. He’s halfway across the backstage bullpen, slipping on scorched grass gone dewy with the setting sun before he really registers that the Radisson is in the middle of the city and he is in the middle of nowhere.
He hits the waiting cars out by the VIP entrance and skids to a halt, breathing hard as he collapses into the back of something large and black and sleek.
“I’m not waiting for you,” says the driver of the expensive-looking Mercedes, barely glancing up from his newspaper. “You are definitely not Mr Armstrong.”
“This is an emergency,” Pete declares. “It’s a matter of the heart!”
His penis agrees, but the driver, apparently, does not.
“Not on my watch, pal. I don’t see any severed limbs or missing teeth. More than my job’s worth.”
The driver has absolutely no sense of urgency. Or romance.
“Look,” Pete says. “I didn’t want to name drop, but I’m Pete Wentz.”
He waits expectantly. The driver raises an eyebrow and does not look up. “Who?”
“I just played to seventy-thousand people!”
“You and who else, mate?”
“Ugh!” Pete throws his hands up and collapses back into the seat. He’s pretty sure Hugh Grant never had to deal with this sort of bullshit. “Listen,” he tries, “this is a mission of love, you know? Your chance to be part of one of the great romances of the twenty-first century.”
This time, the driver doesn’t reply at all. But he does turn the page of his newspaper very slowly. Very impolitely. Pete is all out of ideas but faint heart never won fair music critic so he tries one final, valiant push.
“I’ll pay you £200 to drive me to the Radisson,” Pete says, holding out a fistful of English bank notes.
With a cheerful huff and no sense of the gravity of the situation, the driver slips the car into gear and looks up with a bright smile. “Why didn’t you say so, chief? Let’s get moving, shall we.” He then accelerates to roughly Mach 10, throwing Pete back into the seat and making him doubt that this man has any respect for the other kind of gravity, either. “Shan’t take long.”
“Mmmphhhhreeelug,” Pete squeals, sinking his fingernails into the upholstery as he’s thrown with violence from one side of the car to the other.
They tip around the first corner, seemingly on two wheels. Pete can feel himself turn green, fumbles for his seatbelt, and prays to any deity that may be listening that they make it in one piece.
***
Pete endures the most terrifying car journey of his existence with good grace, he feels. He gags only briefly — and thankfully, drily — into the gutter as he swings his rubbery legs out of the car and signs the cross over his chest with a shudder.
“Here we are, then,” says the driver cheerfully. “Safe and sound.”
Pete tosses a handful of notes at him and makes a weak, undignified sound that he hopes conveys both his thanks, and his overwhelming wish that they never meet again. The car pulls away and Pete is left alone.
The hotel is impressive in the way all British buildings are impressive. Grand and Art Deco and older than most things in Los Angeles outside of the La Brea tar pits, it looms over the sidewalk. There’s a large man guarding the door. Like, comically large. Like Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage had a lovechild and deported the baby to England where no one would find out. When Pete attempts to enter the building, he swings a meaty forearm the width of Pete’s thigh to block his path. He looks like he could crush Pete’s skull with one hand. He looks like he would enjoy doing so.
“Can I help you?” he asks, but he sounds like he doubts it.
“Oh,” Pete says. “Yeah. Right. I have this friend—”
“Mmhmm.”
“He’s staying here,” Pete says. This must be exactly how Sisyphus feels, only instead of a rock, it’s a ridiculous driver and a terrifying doorman. The universe is conspiring against him. The universe can go fuck itself. “Um, he text me?”
“Don’t let people in based on texts,” he says sourly. “You could be anyone. Could be an international explosives expert for all I know. Could be a spy.”
Pete boggles. “Do I look like an international explosives expert or a spy?”
He sort of hopes so, because that sounds amazing.
“Well, how would I know? Spies don’t go around advertising it, do they?”
“He looks like trouble, between you and me,” says someone from the shadow of the doorway.
Patrick is leaning against the entrance, shadowy in twilight. He smiles, his teeth very white in the gloom, his arms folded and his weight braced on one thigh. He tips his ridiculous little fedora to the back of his head and rubs his prickled arms with his palms. He is so charmingly beautiful.
“Patrick!” Pete declares joyfully.
“He with you?” the doorman asks.
“Technically,” Patrick nods, and shows his key card.
Pete is ushered inside and into an elevator and along a hallway with striped wallpaper and into a hotel room like every mid-budget chain hotel room in every city on every continent. Patrick takes off his hat and his shoes and sits on the edge of the bed. For the first time, they’re in a room with a lock on the door. They have access to a bed. Romance novels and seventh grade social studies textbooks both agree that things happen to good-looking people in locked rooms with beds. Fun things. Sweaty things.
“Nice room,” Pete says. It’s not. There’s so much beige that it’s like standing inside a giant tortilla.
“Thanks,” Patrick says, gesturing to the spill of clothing from his suitcase. “As you can see, I’ve really done a lot with the place.”
It’s three days until September and the end of summer is significant. Patrick blinks at Pete through his glasses. In the muted light of the bedside lamp, his eyes are gold, his hair dazzling.
“So,” Pete murmurs. He moves two steps towards Patrick, another. He pauses, barely half a step between them, an unspoken invitation.
“When I woke up this morning, I honestly didn’t imagine today would be the day I’d hear a screamo cover of Fire and Rain,” Patrick says lightly.
“Did you like it?” Pete asks, performing a terrible impression of someone who doesn’t care at all.
“It was… interesting?” Patrick says eventually. His eyes are bright, his lips twitching. “Different. But while I appreciate the sentiment, please, never do that again.”
Pete grins. “Duly noted.”
“About what I said on the phone?” Patrick says awkwardly. “I was probably a little… much.”
“No, I totally understand,” Pete says, with great earnestness. “What I did was horrible, unforgivable. You should never forgive the Pete who did that to you. But, I’m not that kid anymore. I’ve changed.”
“Seasons change, but people don’t,” Patrick opines, wrongly. There’s still that twist, low in the gut. A response from Pete’s central nervous system that tingles through his nerve endings.
“You’re the one waiting in the back room,” he snaps back. It feels creative. It feels like writing a song, which is completely impossible, because this isn’t how Pete writes songs at all. He hasn’t thrown a notebook at Patrick once.
“Hmm,” Patrick hums, smiling.
“I found you on Facebook,” Pete says. Then realizes how weird that sounds but not before Patrick has given him a look that suggests he’s calculating the distance between the bed and the door and wondering which of them can make it there first. “Not in a creepy way! I wanted to see how you used to look. When I… Well. You know.”
“Oh God, you didn’t.” Patrick pales from the tips of his ears down to his throat. He cups his face in both hands and groans in a very sexy way for someone who’s not trying to sound sexy.
“Still cute,” Pete declares. “Fifteen out of ten. Would absolutely fuck.”
Patrick doesn’t look up. “You didn’t see the sideburns, then? Or the hats? What the fuck was I thinking? Actually,” Patrick looks up, visibly cheered, “I just remembered your underwear shoot and I feel a lot better.”
“Which one?” Pete asks cheerfully. “And why were you looking at my underwear shoots?”
“You look good in underwear,” Patrick shrugs, the tips of his ears turning pink.
“I look better out of it. But you already know that.”
“God,” Patrick says. “You’re awful.”
And Pete agrees with that so he grins and shrugs and leans back against the hotel room wall.
“Look,” Pete begins, after a pause. “I want you to know that I’ve been thinking and I should tell you what I want. Um, what I really, really want.”
“Dork,” Patrick mutters under his breath.
“Yeah, whatever,” Pete says, his lungs tight. This is it. It’s do or die. “So, the thing is, I’m kind of completely fucking sprung for you. You know more about music than literally anyone else I’ve ever met, you’re not even a little intimidated by me, and you have the kind of mouth I want to write songs about. You’re my ideal. I’m into you like Sid and Nancy but with less… you know, heroin and tragic early death, which is super inconvenient because you’re opinionated and annoying and you don’t like my band.”
He stops before he can embarrass himself further and also because he really needs to breathe.
“You’re really selling this to me right now,” Patrick says drily. “Carry on, this is going great.”
“And the thing is,” Pete continues, rather than acknowledge Patrick’s interruption, “I… sort of think you like me, too.”
“Objection,” Patrick says. “This is libel and I demand an attorney.”
“And I think,” Pete carries on, “that maybe we’ve been so hung up on the idea of being enemies, that we forgot that it was possible to be… something else.”
With idiocy disguised as courage, Pete reaches out and takes Patrick’s hand. And, by some miracle, Patrick doesn’t pull away. In fact, Patrick squeezes Pete’s hand softly.
“Oh,” Pete says wonderingly, watching their entwined fingers.
“This isn’t a concession that you’re right,” Patrick says softly. “But, in another, completely unrelated sense, like… maybe you’re right. We got so caught up in who was going to make the other come, who was going to win, and prove some ridiculous point… Maybe we went about this all wrong, after all.”
“We should do this the old-fashioned way,” Pete agrees. “I want to romance you, Patrick fucking Stumph. I want to take long walks on the beach with you and hold your hand like a Beatles song. I want to make you fucking pancakes. You make me want to woo you and win you over and take our time and worry about the sex stuff later.”
Patrick looks at him thoroughly dumbfounded, his mouth red and damp and comically round.
“Uh, that sounds super chivalrous and romantic and if this was a novel, I’d be so into it,” he assures Pete. “But I’ve had blue balls for two fucking months. If you don’t get me off like, right now, I’m going to kill you and bury you in a shallow grave. Your band will write a horrible album about it and, as the critic who will make it his business to review it, I can promise you it will not be critically acclaimed.”
Pete looks at Patrick. Patrick stares at Pete defiantly. This is not how Pete envisaged his evening progressing.
“And they say romance is dead,” Pete says lightly.
Patrick rolls his eyes. “I shot it in the chest and in the head.”
Patrick tips his head in the universally accepted gesture for ‘come closer,’ an elegant curl of forefinger. Eagerly, Pete does just that, curls his fist into the cotton of Patrick’s shirt, lifts the other to cup his jaw and rub his thumb across the thick, pink bow of Patrick’s lip with wonder. With astonishment. Patrick gets a hand under Pete’s shirt, grips into his hip with enough pressure to bruise, to squeeze a ridiculous little sound from Pete’s lungs.
“Fuck me,” Patrick whispers, his breath ticklish against Pete’s throat. “Like you owe me.”
That alone is probably the most erotic thing Pete’s ever experienced in his life. And he’s experienced a lot of erotic things. But then, in an act of sexual warfare, Patrick turns his head into Pete’s cupped palm and, maintaining eye contact, sucks Pete’s thumb into his mouth. Patrick does something clever with his tongue and Pete’s intellect heads south for his joyful erection. Patrick takes Pete’s face in both hands and pulls him closer. Pete makes a noise like a snarl, like a choking groan, and kisses Patrick with so much force that their teeth clash, that his lip snags on Patrick’s stubble and Patrick bites into his tongue.
It’s the kind of kiss that inspires poetry.
Their mouths aren’t gentle but biting, grasping. Patrick takes such long, grateful sips of the breath in Pete’s mouth that Pete thinks he might collapse. But Patrick’s hands on his face are tender, his thumbs rubbing under Pete’s jaw, tilting his mouth with reverence, finding the angle to bring their mouths closer. Pete’s confused blood shuttles in his veins, like a metronome it rocks between his heart and his hard-on. He is stumped by this need to never stop kissing Patrick’s mouth unless it’s to kiss other parts of him.
Then, Pete’s mouth does something that his dick hasn’t authorized: It spits out Patrick’s tongue and begins making word-sounds, like a fucking traitor.
“Wait!” Pete gasps, his hands on Patrick’s cheek and his hip respectively, his thumb digging under Patrick’s jeans where his skin’s hot and damp and there’s the coarse edge of wiry hair. “Wait a second, I have a question.”
“There’ll be a Q&A session when we’re done,” Patrick snarls, rubbing up, seeking friction from Pete’s thumb, his belt buckle, the length of his thigh.
Pete’s dick is so hard he’s going temporarily blind from it. He can no longer feel his frontal lobe. Which is weird, as he wasn’t aware he could feel it in the first place. All he can feel is below his belt but above his knees. He makes a final, frantic effort before he descends entirely into nonverbal squeaks and groans.
“I just want to know,” he chokes. “Are we doing this because it’s a thing, or because we’re a thing?”
His hold on Patrick has become less sexual and more full body restraint. He pins him still with an arm around his waist and the other around his neck. It means Patrick can no longer grind on him, which is doing wonders for his ability to form actual sentences. It means Patrick’s thick, hard dick is crushed up against Pete’s, which is less helpful. Patrick struggles back and blinks at Pete, his glasses adorably askew, his hair staticky around his face.
“Are you saying that if I fuck you, I have to keep you?” Patrick asks, his smile curled at one corner.
“No. Maybe. Sort of. Sort of, yes,” Pete says. He is in physical pain around the crotch. He squints into Patrick’s face and finds his eyes almost black, the pupil so wide as to eclipse all but the thinnest rim of blue-green. “I have… a lot of issues. Apparently.”
Somehow, Patrick gets a hand between them and, in a series of maneuvers that neither of them can truly believe are entirely inhibited by Pete’s rapidly loosening death grip, he thumbs the button on Pete’s jeans and lowers his zipper. Pete’s hot, red dick pops free: he’s never been a fan of underwear. This has the side effect of bringing Pete’s dick — so thick with heated blood it no longer bears description — into the warmth of Patrick’s palm. This is the best kind of side effect. Patrick strokes lazily, base to tip and back again, and looks into Pete’s eyes with cheery satisfaction.
“Yeah,” Patrick says softly, and bites his lip. Pete is a strong squeeze from experiencing the best orgasm of his life all over the front of Patrick’s jeans. He begins reciting soccer stats, possibly out loud, in an effort to prevent this. “Yeah. I think I’ll keep you.”
Pete drops like collapsing. His knees bruise on the carpeting, his knuckles burn with the friction of Patrick’s jeans. He presses his mouth, his face, to Patrick’s crotch and feels him, heat and hardness, behind his zipper. He mouths, desperate, over the rigid evidence of Patrick’s arousal. God, but Pete has thought about this a time or two in the past few months.
On his knees, it’s so much easier to see that Patrick is into this. His cock — his magnificent, handsome cock — presses up against the zipper of his jeans. When Pete tips his face to it he swears he can feel it throb with pulse. He can smell it, leaking salt and dark with sweat. Saliva pools beneath his tongue. He looks up.
“I’m going to fuck you,” Pete promises Patrick.
Patrick, for his part, looks happy to be ruined. “Oh, darling,” he says, smirking wickedly, “I’m going to fucking destroy you.”
Which is exactly the sort of thing Pete’s penis wants to hear.
Quick, now, before anyone can do something reckless like changing their mind. He drags at the denim on Patrick’s hips, peels down his underwear along with his jeans because with his brain in his dick and his dick in his hand, there’s no time at all to separate the two. Patrick’s cock pops free, swollen pink and heavy, an interesting weight against Pete’s hand as he strokes, squeezes, thumbs across the wet tip for the way it makes Patrick buck and whine. He holds him firmly, presses his fingertips into the engorged swell of it and thinks for a moment that he can learn the way Patrick’s dick likes to be sucked from nothing more than osmosis.
Patrick, because he’s not an idiot, has better ideas and twists a fist into Pete’s hair. He presses him down, down until Pete’s mouth brushes the weeping head. It burns like a scald, this sudden pressure against his mouth. They’re linked like this: the pink skin of Patrick’s cock pressed to the pink skin of Pete’s lips, one tasting of the other. Pete flickers out his tongue, kittenish, swipes up the bittersweet crown of pre-come staining the tip. Patrick makes a noise of no previously recorded human frequency.
“I’m going to suck you off now,” Pete says, more to Patrick’s dick than Patrick’s face. Patrick’s dick twitches in his hand like it approves.
“Fuck,” says Patrick, his voice shaking. “Fucking end me.”
Pete opens his mouth, takes the glorious heat and width and length of Patrick inside of him. Patrick grunts and spreads his legs. His jeans are still snagged on one ankle. He’s still wearing his socks. It’s hard to smile around a mouth filled with cock but Pete does it, feels the sharp points of his teeth graze Patrick’s most sensitive skin and hears him gasp, glorious heat tipping down his spine as Patrick arches his hips and brings his dick to the back of Pete’s throat.
Pete knows a thing or two about sucking dick. Or, like, several thousand things. He gets around. It’s not a big deal. With joyful satisfaction, he takes a deep breath, relaxes and, casually, allows Patrick to slip down his throat entirely. Above him, Patrick howls. Panicked, Pete scrambles to pull off but Patrick’s hand is tight in his hair, his hips rocking up as he pushes Pete’s mouth down and Pete realizes, remembers, that there’s more than one reason to howl. He sucks, swallows, sucks, like Patrick did with the popsicle. He licks up the dripping evidence that Patrick is already almost there, the steady leak of it salty bitter at the back of his tongue.
There’s no part of Pete’s mouth that isn’t stained with the taste of Patrick’s cock.
“Stop,” Patrick gasps, which is the opposite of what Pete wants to do, so he presses closer, chokes himself on Patrick’s dick and the warm, salt smell of his groin.
Journalists possess many questionable qualities, however. They are tenacious. They are focused. They are really, really good at ruining Pete’s fun. Patrick takes the hand that’s twisted in Pete’s hair and pulls him back. Pete slides off the wet, red length of Patrick’s cock with an obscene sound, his mouth, his chin, wet with drool and the bitter salt drips of Patrick’s almost-oblivion. “Stop,” Patrick says again, his hand a fist around his own cock, jerking himself slowly. “This isn’t how I want it to end.”
“So,” Pete rasps. “How did you see this playing out.”
“Get up here,” Patrick says, shoving back onto the bed, his beautiful cock curving up, his beautiful smirk coiling around Pete as dark as chocolate, as smoke. “This is one of those things that works better with a practical demonstration.”
“I’m good at practical things,” Pete says, and, again, kudos are deserved for the fact that he can link one thought to the other and make them come out of his mouth in order. “Good with my hands.”
He waggles his fingers in demonstration and Patrick laughs, a golden burst of sound that makes Pete want to hear him sing. There are so many sounds he hasn’t heard Patrick make, he wants to learn them all, to catalog them and play them back when the world seems dark and unforgiving. He crawls over him, shrugging out of his shirt and kicking off his jeans. He brackets Patrick’s thighs with his own. Their dicks brush electric. Pete shivers.
“You can fuck me,” Patrick murmurs, and Pete has to close his eyes and groan, to tip his face into the pale bowl of Patrick’s throat and smell him. Bodywash, laundry soap, skin, skin, skin. “You should fuck me.”
“If you keep saying things like that,” Pete says, his teeth gritted, his eyes closed. “This is going to be over embarrassingly quickly.”
“Embarrassing for me or for you?” Patrick asks lightly, rummaging in the pocket of his discarded jeans for condoms and a tiny foil pack of lubricant.
Pete doesn’t ask why Patrick had those in his pocket. There’s a possibility it’s linked to why Patrick came to an Arma Angelus open press event and fellated a popsicle. There’s a chance this will do nothing for Pete’s already questionable stamina.
“Hnngh,” he says, sitting back on his knees as Patrick spreads his legs, coats his fingers in lube and proceeds to open his own asshole as Pete watches.
The world winnows down to a series of linked images and sensations. Like snapshots of feeling. Pete watches the way Patrick pushes pale fingers into his own body, where he’s dark and earthy and rimmed with coppery hair. He feels this sharp and asthenic in the base of his cock, a throb like his pulse but made of electrons that prickle his skin. Patrick’s frown is considered, his flushed dick heavy against his belly. Pete adds a third without thinking, his own hand dark next to Patrick’s, his finger pushing in as Patrick’s rock out.
“Not quite,” Patrick groans, bearing down and angling his hips.
Pete grins, wickedly. He presses his finger up and forward and touches the golden heat of Patrick’s prostate. Patrick’s legs give, his thighs shaking as he cries out to the hotel ceiling. “How about that?”
“That’s quite,” Patrick says breathlessly. “That’s definitely quite.”
“Quite good?” Pete asks casually. He rubs in shallow loops, feels the quiver of smooth, tight heat, feels Patrick’s from the inside, like a Nine Inch Nails song.
“Quite sure I want you inside of me,” Patrick snaps. His hips rock up like he’s seeking friction from the circulated cool of the hotel air conditioning. His dick is an effigy of temptation and Pete leans down, casually sucks the swollen head between his lips and plays his tongue along ridge and flare. “Motherfucker,” Patrick gasps impolitely, his heel scraping shallow pain along the plane of Pete’s back. “I can change my mind.”
“You want me to fuck your mother?” Pete asks, Patrick’s cock against his chin, his finger still so deep in Patrick’s secret places. Patrick is so beautifully responsive. Pete would like to bet he makes incredible noises when he’s eaten out.
“Shut up,” Patrick says scathingly.
“Shut me up,” Pete counters, grinning wide as the waning moon.
Patrick does. He pushes Pete back and tackles him over, leaves him sprawled on his back on the mattress. They fight the condom wrapper together, hands slippery, until Patrick tears it with his teeth and rolls it over the throbbing heat of Pete’s dick. Patrick straddles Pete’s hips, touches his mouth to Pete’s pulse in his throat, to the tingling buds of his nipples. He licks over Pete’s ribs and collar bone and up to the shell of his ear where he whispers, his voice like syrup and molten sweet things.
“I’m going to ride you until you see fucking stars.”
“You’re setting the bar pretty high,” Pete says, and slaps Patrick’s ass for the way it feels under his palm.
Patrick lines Pete’s cock with his hole, rests the blunted and sensitive tip with its layer of latex and lube against his most tender, unseen place and grins.
“Allow me,” he begins, and lowers himself with flair, his body opening for just the swollen crown, enough for Pete’s thought to leak out of his ears because Patrick is tight and hot and fucking glorious, “to obliterate your expectations.”
“With pleasure,” Pete gasps, trying to be clever but failing as Patrick slides… the whole… way… down… “Fuuuck.”
Patrick does. Obliterate Pete’s expectations, that is. He also fucks him. Judiciously and without exception. He does things with his hips that Pete did not imagine were possible and, if they were, that no country would allow them to be legal. It’s nice that they are. Very nice. Pete has no written or verbal complaints.
And while Patrick does this, he says things. Gorgeous things. Poetic things in his smooth, caramel voice. At some point he reaches back and slides a hand between Pete’s legs, touches him where he’s tight and hidden and Pete levitates, passes out, possibly fucking dies. He takes Patrick’s painfully swollen dick into his hand, brushes his thumb up under the tender sticky head and rakes the other through Patrick’s hair.
“You’re the most beautiful thing,” Pete tells him earnestly and honestly, jerking him with percussion player precision. “The most beautiful, amazing thing.”
Patrick probably comes at that. Certainly, there’s tightness that becomes much tighter and damp heat in a merry, messy throbbing spill over Pete’s stomach. Yes, Pete’s sure that Patrick comes. But Pete can’t say for certain, because Pete is too busy being hurled headlong into the stars.
***
“Ground control to Major Thot?”
Pete blinks, dizzily. The room is spinning merrily. He groans and closes his eyes and feels the last tingling throb of his orgasm bleed out into the mattress beneath him. Patrick huffs, laughing against his collar bone and Pete decides that it’s possibly worth motion sickness to open his eyes and see how he looks freshly fucked.
He is not disappointed.
Patrick’s pale and lovely skin is pink in the lamplight. Pete’s hands and, possibly, other parts of his anatomy have left his hair a mess, slicked to his nape and his temples with sweat. His magnificent dick is spent and soft against his thigh. All previous declarations that other versions of Patrick were the most edible creature Pete’s ever seen are rescinded. This version of him, this soft and vulnerable footnote of their summer, this is the best possible Patrick.
“You fucked me stupid,” Pete declares, soundly ended in the middle of a budget hotel mattress. “You win.”
“I didn’t win,” Patrick says seriously, propped on an elbow at Pete’s side. “How can you think I won?”
Pete raises an eyebrow. “How can you think you haven’t?”
“Because — Because it’s not a game,” Patrick says eventually, his face pressed to Pete’s sweaty shoulder. “This isn’t scoring points anymore. I think I caught… feelings for you.”
“You make it sound like an STD,” Pete opines lightly.
“It’s so much worse than an STD,” Patrick mutters. “Because condoms clearly don’t help.”
“Did you…” Pete begins carefully. “Did you just compare me to chlamydia?”
Patrick huffs, embarrassed. “Well, I mean, you’re both hard to get rid of, and who wants to admit they picked either of you up at a festival?”
“Patrick, sweetheart,” Pete says, deadpan. “That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“It’s a low bar,” Patrick shrugs.
“It’s a very low bar,” Pete agrees. “You should say lots of increasingly romantic things to me. You should write a 5-star review of my sexual performance and print it in Rolling Stone. That would be totally romantic.”
“That’s not romantic.”
“Some people might think it’s romantic,” Pete, who thinks it’s the most romantic thing ever, objects. “Some people might think it’s the best part of dating a music critic.”
“Ah,” says Patrick. “Well, half of that sentence isn’t… exactly true.”
“Oh,” Pete says, and feels very stupid, because of course Patrick has no intention of dating him. He’s just a notch on Patrick’s bedpost. Maybe Patrick can be a line in a song. “No, I mean, like — I was just kidding, you know? I don’t think we’re—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Patrick rolls his eyes and shoves Pete’s shoulder far harder than necessary. “Of course I’m dating you, you idiot. I thought we established that I’m stuck with you now.”
“Huh,” Pete says, nonplussed. “So… which half of the sentence wasn’t true?”
“I… might not be a music critic for much longer,” Patrick says, staring at the ceiling. “This isn’t the direction I wanted my life to take. I’m a songwriter, a musician, I’ve got interest building, and contacts I’m making, and one day,” he waves his hand slowly from side to side, “one day I’ll fly away. And someone else can take over telling you that your band sucks.”
“You write music?” Pete asks, suddenly upright and looming into Patrick’s personal space. This is something Patrick is going to have to get used to. His heart is a messy swell behind his ribs. He hasn’t felt this excited since — well, since about half an hour ago, when Patrick stuffed a hand down the front of his shorts and fisted his dick. That was probably the pinnacle of his excitement. But this is pretty close.
“I mean,” Patrick shrugs modestly, and also edges back a little, as if slightly terrified by the intensity Pete can feel in every quivering pore of his skin. He takes a deep breath and dials it back to a seven. “Nothing you’d be interested in. It’s more — Pop-based. Melodic.”
“Dude,” Pete says with feeling. “I love pop-based melodic. I have lyrics for pop-based melodic. Oh!” He grabs Patrick’s face in both hands, better to demonstrate the gravity of the situation. “I have an idea.”
“No,” Patrick says quickly, shaking his head so fast his bangs whip into his eyes. “I know what you’re thinking and no. Absolutely not. Never. No way. Don’t say it. We’re not talking about it.”
Pete grins wildly. “We should, like, collaborate!”
“And now you’ve said it,” Patrick sighs deeply, “which means we have to talk about it. I am not being seen on stage with Arma Angelus.”
Pete, abandoning the laws of social grace that dictate one should maintain a distance of at least twelve inches between your own face and the face of the person you’re talking to, shoves his nose against Patrick’s. “Hey, Trick,” he says, “I have the best idea. We can dress in ski masks! We can be like Buckethead!”
“Don’t call me that,” Patrick grouses sourly. He is thoroughly adorable when he grouses sourly. “And no, for the record, you don’t have the best idea. It’s a horrible idea.”
“Musical vigilantes!” Pete continues. He suspects that the way to get Patrick to agree with something, is to bombard him with a stream of consciousness until he gives in. For silence, if nothing else. “We can be the next big thing, Mysterious Men of Music.”
“We’re not calling ourselves that,” Patrick says firmly.
“Ah, but you agree we’re calling ourselves something,” Pete crows. He’s won. He has definitely, absolutely won. “Band boyfriends. This is, like, the best thing!”
“You’re making it sound worse and worse,” Patrick groans, grabbing a pillow like he intends to smother the stupid out of Pete with it. “If I agree—”
“To be my band boyfriend?”
“To be your — ugh. Fine. Whatever you want to call it. If I agree,” he continues and Pete nods, his nose still crushed to Patrick’s, slightly cross-eyed from proximity, “you have to promise to stop with the screaming.”
“Scout’s honor,” Pete says. That twitching, crawling heat, the unsettled sense of the universe taking the wrong turn that itched through his veins whenever Patrick was close, takes flight. Left behind is nothing but the tingling rush of euphoria. This is either fate or food poisoning. “Best night ever,” Pete declares, to no one in particular. Then he rolls on his side and smooths a hand over Patrick’s hair. “Something… universal just happened.”
“... most annoying man I ever met,” Patrick is muttering, extricating his face from Pete’s armpit.
There is no way that this is true. Or, if it is, there is no way that it matters because Pete is Patrick’s most annoying man. He grins in the dark and Patrick smiles back, his teeth a bone white flash of sharp canines in the gloom. This is it. This is the start of something irreversible. The beginning of a grand and biblical moment in the history of modern music. Patrick makes a devilish sound, a big cat purr, and climbs to straddle Pete’s hips. Between his legs, Pete’s dick perks. He slides a hand around Patrick’s not-soft cock and strokes his thumb over the tip and Patrick makes a noise like an orgasm, forceful and greedy.
Pete can’t believe he gets to keep this — Patrick’s soft, sexy sounds, his huffing breath on sweaty skin — on a permanent basis. He can’t believe that, when they’re exhausted, he’ll get to learn the noises Patrick fucking Stumph makes as he falls asleep.
And, tomorrow?
Tomorrow, they’ll save rock ‘n’ roll.