A Thirty-Year-Old Riot (Barney, Barney/Robin)
When he was sixteen, he fell in love.
This was in the years of his awkwardness and gangly limbs, shyly hiding behind text books in his chemistry class. She was his best friend. On Friday afternoons they used to hang in his room after school, listening to Teen Age Riot by Sonic Youth over and over again. Her name was Darby and he used to whisper her name to himself, rolling each letter over his tongue. She was slightly too cool for Barney (and god, nowadays he ached at the memory of his former geeky self) but too uncool for everyone else, and she constantly compared herself to Andie Walsh.
“And you’re my Phil Dale, my Duckie, Barney!", she would sing song to him, snug in her black stretch tights and oversized sweaters that would reach her knees. “The question is, who’s my Blane?”
And his heart would beat fast, and his knees slightly jerked but he never told her that he thought it was him.
At sixteen, love only meant infatuation. Infatuation in the way that Darby was infatuated with Todd Winslow, the captain of the tennis team. All lean limbs and toned arms, he walked a little closer to Darby each day in the school halls, or so she would excitedly tell Barney. Infatuation in the way that Barney was infatuated with Darby, the only friend he really had. Too opinionated for such a short girl, he used watch her, enthralled, as she spun around his room dancing to New Order records.
At sixteen, love only meant infatuation. And at sixteen, Barney’s infatuation was not returned.
At thirty, his love meant nothing. He liked the charade of it all, pulling the word to its limit, stretching out the corners and spitting it out like the nonentity it was. He had said it out loud to fifteen, no, sixteen girls and had only really meant it once, to Shannon. It was the ultimate aphrodisiac he discovered, turning grown women into messy teenagers, hopeful and desperate as they ripped off his tie.
Robin would hear no such words from him.
In the hours of night, splayed across his bed, she would press her thumb into his palm, humming an unknown song. She liked to drape her arms around his sides, kicking his feet gently. He liked the freckles around her mouth, pushing her hair out of her face, burying his face in her collarbones.
Sometimes, she liked to put on music, spinning in circles over and over again while listening to Air. Sometimes, she nearly made him think of Darby, of Shannon, of...some sort of feeling that he used to associate with them.
But she would probably never believe it anyway.
When they stopped, when the sun crept in and they awoke, bleary-eyed and tired, they returned to their lives. She took up the pretence of talking to Ted more, laughing harder at his stories than she normally would. As she slapped Ted’s arm, giggling at his questionably funny joke, her foot slipped up Barney’s leg, her toes dancing on his thighs.
Her eyes never left Ted.
He took her to his kitchen floor that night, her hips banging against the cold tiles, his fingers leaving bruises around her sides. He was rougher than usual, their bodies slamming together as he growled in her ear, “is this how Ted did it?” And when she whimpered no, he only went harder, as he pushed her over the edge and she cried his name over and over again.
He liked the idea that no one knew of them, that they were (in his mind) kind of secret super-heroes.
“Secret sex super-heroes,” he growled in her ear one night.
She only rolled her eyes, pushing her back into his stomach. “Must you always go there?”
Her ignorance burnt him, made him angrier, hornier, more desperate and lonelier than he had ever been. Days faded into the next and he couldn’t fathom each day from another, starting with Robin’s face and ending with her back. Robin liked to test the waters with her ice-cold poker face, almost torturing Barney until she pushed him over the edge. Skin against skin as she wrapped her legs around his waist in the MacLaren’s bathroom, biting his ear, moaning in his mouth.
“You almost slipped up out there,” She panted in his ear. “You almost put your arm on my arm. Lily nearly saw.”
He only dug his nails into her arms, forcing her to gasp.
When he was sixteen, he went to Homecoming. Barney of the present would have kicked him in the head, poured alcohol down his throat and told him to stop being lame, cut off the pony tail and go to a club. Barney of the past sat on the chairs at the back of the gym, watching Darby dance with Todd Winslow. Barney of the past, and present rolled his eyes of the irony of The Smiths Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want playing.
Darby ran up to him, her eyes shining as she grabbed his hand and grinned.
“Isn’t this perfect Barnes? Didn’t I say that ninety-ninety-four was Darby’s year? Don't you kind of want to stay sixteen, stay this way, forever?"
She pulled him up and they spun around together, the last drips of The Smiths song still playing.
“Oh Barney,” she smiled at him. “I’m so glad you’re my friend.”
His heart broke in two.
Later, after Shannon, he realised that he should have learnt from his past experience.
Robin wouldn’t do this to him.
Later, one night, he picked up a girl from MacLaren’s in front of Robin, to show her he can. She was an astronomer, with intense eyes and she loved the movie Contact.
“If you come back to my place, we can do a little contact of our own,” he murmured and cringed at the pathetic, immatureness of it all.
To his surprise, she nodded yes.
He introduced her to the gang, flitting over Robin like she was nothing and he got a secret rush over her visible wince. Ted loved that she was an astronomer, talking about the scientific nature of stars with the possibility of faith, and Marshall gently blushed when she gently corrected him that she was an astronomer, not an astrologist.
When they went back to his, later, she rolled back her head, sweat lining her upper brow. He couldn’t but stop thinking that she looked wrong, that her black hair should be brown, her torso longer, her mouth fuller. She was good, but unfamiliar, and he hated the idea that it should mean anything to him. She didn’t stay after, or he kicked her out, the memory already faded as he put a Sonic Youth album on, for all times sake, he told himself.
Robin stayed away for five whole days after that night.
On the sixth, she appeared, her warm body stretched against his, her hair tickling his shoulders.
“I was completely lame when I was younger,” he heard himself say.
“I know, I saw the Shannon video,” she said, smirking.
“No. Before that I…was sixteen. I was lame. Like Robin Sparkles lame,” he quietly said.
He wanted to tell her of Darby. He wanted to tell her of being sixteen, of being in love, when love only meant infatuation and he was immature enough to watch The Adventures of Pete & Pete after school. He wanted to tell her how Darby unknowingly broke his heart, and Shannon knowingly did, and how Robin never would, because he would never let her.
But he didn’t.
“You’re alright now,” she quietly said back.
After Ted found out, she never returned and he preferred it that way, he thought.
In a hospital bed, covered in bandages and the dance of delirium in his mind, he thought of his flashbacks. Of being in a disco-lit gym watching Darby grab his hand, pouring coffee with Shannon, peeing next to Ted, crying in front of Lily and Marshall, watching Robin spin around his room in her underwear, over and over again.
At thirty, he started to consider falling in love again.