Fic: Compulsion
fandom: Fall Out Boy
pairing: Pete/Patrick
notes: What I did instead of work today, #133253. Started as an email to gigantic, decided it wasn't too ridiculous to post.
Pete doesn’t even notice at first. Later, they’re never really able to figure out how or where it happened, because it starts out so small, Pete just wanting to spend more time around Patrick. Being around Patrick has always made Pete feel...better, more sane, more funny, more interesting.
It starts out so small, at first, Pete finding himself claiming first dibs on seats, and making sure Patrick’s on his team for Taboo, and hanging out next to Patrick on the bed in their hotels when everyone gathers together in one room.
Pete doesn’t even really notice it.
*
Pete is talking to someone on the phone about the spring Clandestine line, the first time. Next to him on the couch, working on the computer, Patrick makes a surprised little sound. When Pete looks over he finds that he’s slouched himself down so they’re touching from shoulder to knee, Patrick’s elbow pressing into Pete’s side, and that Pete has been petting Patrick’s inner arm, the skin soft against his fingertips. He thinks, I don’t remember deciding to do that, even though he might have if he’d thought about it. Patrick’s skin is warm. Pete takes his hand away, and immediately wants to put it back, wants to get even closer. It’s almost a compulsion, and that’s the first time he thinks it.
*
He says, “Hey, band meeting,” from where he’s sitting on the floor, back up against the couch. His arm brushes Patrick’s shin.
Andy looks up from his DS, kicking Joe out of his doze on the other couch.
“What,” Joe says, blinking blearily.
“I was thinking about switching up the bus order,” Pete says. “You and Andy on one bus, me and Patrick on the other one.”
“The dog--” Patrick says right away, to be overridden by Andy yelping, “My stuff!” and Joe’s, “Uh. Yeah, I don’t know if that’s...”
“I was thinking about not bringing Hem out on this tour,” Pete says, and then, “Sweet, thanks, guys.”
*
Once they’re sharing a bus, it gets worse, because he’s shameless, there’s no one to make him feel ashamed, because Patrick doesn’t at all, and so Pete can spread himself across him when they’re watching movies, can drape himself over Patrick’s back as he stands in the kitchenette staring into the fridge. He is shameless, and he thinks, I don’t have a choice, with a desperate kind of exhilaration, because he doesn’t and so it’s like throwing himself over a cliff and hoping Patrick will catch him, each time, and Patrick always does.
Andy says, “You’re spending a lot of time with Patrick, huh.”
Pete shrugs. He doesn’t have to answer.
*
It’s like Pete’s outside of himself, watching his body doing all these things, these things that Patrick lets Pete do, and they’re not bad things, but Pete isn’t choosing to do them. He can’t talk about it, and it’s like it’s totally separate from the rest of him, from the Pete that plays stupid sports videogames with Andy, and conspires to prank-call Gabe fifty times one night from fifty different phones, and shoots the shit with Joe. Patrick sometimes looks at him, head tilted to the side a little, a long, speculative look. He doesn’t ask Pete about it, though, just shifts to accommodate Pete on the couch, tightens his arms around Pete’s middle when Pete climbs into his lap; one time he put his hand out to catch Pete when Pete started to topple backwards out of his bunk, curling his fingers firmly over Pete’s forearms, but that’s the most forward action he takes.
Pete thinks sometimes, when he’s curled up against Patrick’s side on the bus, head on Patrick’s shoulder, with his eyelids sliding closed to the sound of Patrick humming softly in time with whatever’s playing on his headphones and the rhythmic motion of the bus on the freeway, that he’d do anything Patrick asked. Anything. It’s probably a good thing Patrick doesn’t know that.
*
When it ends, it’s like a fever breaking, and Pete comes back to himself halfway through the ride to Indianapolis in Patrick’s bunk with his palm spread wide across Patrick’s stomach to feel the inhale and exhale and warmth of Patrick’s skin underneath his thin t-shirt. Pete shoves himself away so fast he bangs his elbow on the top of the bunk and sprawls out into the aisle, staggering across to the other line of bunks, clutching at his arm through the sharp shock of pain rolling up his bones.
“Fuck! Fuck! Motherfuck,” he yells, hearing Patrick behind him saying sleepily, “Pete?” A wave of nausea sweeps from Pete’s head down to his feet and sends him lurching toward the small bus bathroom.
Later, when they’ve stopped at a diner and are sitting across from each other with twin cups of thin coffee, bracketed on each side by Andy and Joe, Pete says, “You didn’t notice. What, I start trailing after you like a dog, and you don’t notice.” He’s keeping his voice flat, neutral, palms curved over the edge of the table, because he wants to send the entire thing flying, but he thinks that if he starts breaking shit now, he won’t ever stop until he’s ripped everything down around him, maybe even the sun and stars from the sky, but most definitely his band. Across from him Patrick is stirring cream into his coffee with jerky movements that keep banging the spoon into the side of the ceramic cup, plink. plink. plink.
“I didn’t. I thought,” Patrick says, and Pete’s heard Patrick’s voice called elastic before, but it sounds stretched thin now, like it might break if Pete adds more strain. “I didn’t notice anything was wrong,” Patrick says, finally. “Sorry,” he adds, almost inaudibly.
Joe puts a hand over Pete’s right hand, which is fisting on the table edge.
“Don’t touch me,” Pete says hoarsely, making Joe draw back like Pete’s hand is made of something unclean. Patrick flinches.
“I’m sorry,” Patrick says again, louder, a ragged edge of something under his voice, and his mouth is crumpling like it does when he’s trying not to cry, and it all makes Pete so angry, then, so much angrier, like he is actually going to explode. “Pete, I’m sorry,” Patrick says, and Pete can feel himself shaking just a little bit. He shoves at Joe until Joe slides out of the booth, and then gets out and walks away, slamming the diner’s crappy swinging door open so that it bangs hard against the wall and rebounds into Pete’s shoulder. The pain feels good, feels like something Pete has chosen to do, and he keeps walking.
*
When he gets back, he shoves all of his stuff into his suitcase and duffel bag. Patrick stays out of his way, tucked up on the couch in the front lounge, watching silently as Pete retrieves his stacks of books, data CDs, file folders.
At the stairs, Pete stops.
“I’ll send Andy over,” he says.
“All right,” Patrick says.
“See you in Indianapolis,” Pete says, and shoulders his way out the door.
*
The show goes on, because the show must go on, and Fall Out Boy is more than the Pete-and-Patrick show. Right now it’s the Pete-and-Joe-and-Andy-and-Patrick show.
*
He thinks about that month, poking at it like it’s a bruise he can’t help but push on to feel the burn. He remembers waking up in Patrick’s bunk with Patrick’s arm pushing against his, Patrick’s shoulder so close to his lips, and he remembers thinking about how much he wanted to press his mouth to Patrick’s skin and just touch him all over.
He wonders, late at night, his hand on his dick, how far the compulsion would have pushed him, if it would have carried him all the way, if it hadn’t broken. He jerks off to memories of Patrick’s skin and his mouth and how much Pete had wanted him, and he wonders if Patrick would have let him, if the compulsion hadn’t broken.
*
Patrick stays out of Pete’s way, and Pete doesn’t stop him. It’s not a punishment. There’s no one to punish, Pete points out, when Joe corners him over breakfast one afternoon.
“I will actually toast this poptart for you if you give me an honest answer,” Joe says, holding up a foil packet.
“Oh, wow,” Pete says, but it’s actually pretty good deal.
Joe stands up and shuffles over to the toaster, unwrapping the poptart and shoving it inside, then gives Pete a sideways look over his shoulder.
“Dude, seriously,” Pete says. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Fuck you, I’m eating this poptart,” Joe says, and Pete shrugs. Joe sighs. Pete turns to look out the window, focusing on the way the white ribbon of striping along the far side of the opposite lane stretches down the length of the road, undulating in and out when he lets his eyes unfocus; when he looks away from the window, Joe is gone, leaving behind the poptart on a small plate sitting on a folded square of paper towel.
*
“What--Pete,” Patrick says. He’s sitting on his hotel bed propped up with the fifty cushions hotels always give, his acoustic guitar in his lap with his hands still poised across the strings, his laptop pushed to one side, his carabiner with its mess of laminated IDs spilling across the bedspread next to the laptop, his cell phone jumbled together with a handful of change on the bedside table. He will go through thinking he’s lost half of those things tomorrow morning, Pete knows, in a mad hurry to make bus call, and he will actually lose the caribiner in his sheets.
Pete slides his extra copy of Patrick’s room key that he sweet-talked from their tour manager back into his back pocket and leans against the door.
All the hotel lamps are on; their diffuse glow turns everything into shades of orange, yellow, and brown. Patrick is in a perfect pool of illumination, curled over his guitar with light shining across his pale forearms and shoulders, neck, the side of his face.
“You really didn’t notice,” Pete says. He has his hands braced behind him, though he’s not sure for what.
Patrick holds still for a moment, like maybe he’s startled, or maybe he’s trying to find an answer, and then he sets his guitar aside, where it shoves the carabiner closer to the edge of the bed.
“I guess I noticed,” Patrick says finally. He looks down at his hands, shadows moving across his t-shirt with the downward slant of his shoulders, but he’s still the shining center of the room for Pete.
He’s got some sort of weird sixth-Patrick-sense now, some part of his mind paying attention and tracking what Patrick’s doing all the time. He doesn’t know when it started, because he didn’t used to be that way at the beginning, when the band was something Pete schemed and fought for but didn’t love, nor in the middle, when Pete loved it like he loves his childhood home, fiercely but absently. So the answer lies somewhere in between the middle and now, the band something essential to Pete, like his limbs, like his voice, like something he doesn’t know how to live without. He’d blame it on the compulsion if that didn’t sound like a lie.
“So,” Pete says unevenly. “So, what. You just thought--what.”
“I guess I had a different interpretation of what was going on,” Patrick says. “I don’t know, Pete. I guess I just.”
I don’t know, Pete mimics soundlessly, and Patrick echoes him a moment later, sounding defeated.
“You don’t know,” Pete says, fingers clawing at the wood of the door behind his back. “What, so when I didn’t, like, talk to you about anything--”
“--I thought it was weird,” Patrick says, looking up, his voice picking up speed and volume. “Yes, Pete, I thought it was weird, but, you know, you always make so much sense all the time, so.”
“So, what,” Pete says. “You thought I was just, like, lonely?”
“I--” Patrick says, staring at Pete for a long moment, before deflating back against the headboard. “I guess, yeah,” he mumbles.
Fuck you, Pete thinks, fuck you you fucking fuck. His face tightens, and Patrick opens his mouth as if he’s going to say something else, but one second passes, then another, and Pete shoves off the door and out of the room.
*
They all have to wait for Patrick the next morning, standing in a crowd of baggage down in the lobby while cell phones ring and Patrick comes hurrying out of the elevator, towing his bag behind him, saying, “Sorry, sorry, I couldn’t find my ID, sorry.” Pete would normally laugh at that, because he’d fucking seen it coming a mile away, but instead he looks away to where two of their crew are going through a stack of papers and fitting photo passes into envelopes. His sixth-Patrick-sense tells him Patrick is walking toward him, and so he’s not surprised when Patrick says, “Sorry I’m late,” over Pete’s shoulder. Pete shrugs.
He doesn’t talk for the rest of the day, and it’s amazing how easy it is. Nobody even says anything to him about it, and it makes Pete wonder how freakishly he could behave before someone took it upon themselves to talk to him about it. When he goes to speak into the microphone, his first sentence is raspy, like he’d been crying, and it hurts the back of his throat to say.
He goes back to Patrick’s room again that night. Patrick doesn’t even seem surprised to see him. The guitar is still in its case, and the laptop is just playing music into the empty air.
“What did you actually think?” Pete says, and his voice is still hoarse. Patrick opens his mouth, and Pete says, “Don’t fucking tell me you thought I was lonely, because that’s fucking bullshit. Just. Tell me.”
“Pete,” Patrick says, rubbing at his eyes. Pete doesn’t say anything, and Patrick drops his hands. He looks at his computer screen instead of Pete for a long moment, finger scrolling absently, and then he says, “I guess I thought you were into me.” Pete nods slowly and Patrick makes a face, one corner of his mouth crooking up, eyes apologetic on Pete’s behind his glasses. “I didn’t know you didn’t mean it.”
“I’m not--” Pete says, and then, “I didn’t get a chance to mean it or not, Patrick. I didn’t…get a choice.” Patrick is looking down again, nodding at Pete’s words, eyes hidden under the brim of his hat, his straight nose in profile.
“I want,” Pete says, and stops again, because he can feel nerves in his stomach, jittering up into his chest and his throat. “It just sucks, though,” he says, thinking about lying close next to Patrick in the dark, thinking of wanting to touch Patrick and then doing so, and Patrick looks up, eyes dark. “If we’re going to do something I want it to be because we decide to.”
“Yeah,” Patrick says quietly. “Me too.”
“Yeah,” Pete whispers. He sits down on the ground and draws his knees up toward his chest, because his legs feel a little weak now. He can just sit here, until someone makes a decision, or the hotel collapses, whichever comes first. He just sits, not looking at Patrick, as the silence stretches on, and he has a moment of almost hysterical thought that, yeah, maybe Patrick is going to wait until the hotel collapses and they have to dig Pete’s bones out of the rubble.
The bed creaks under Patrick’s weight when Patrick stands up, and then he is walking over to Pete, until his violently yellow and purple sneakers are near Pete’s left foot, and then he is kneeling down to Pete’s eye-level. He looks nervous when Pete looks at him.
“This was a lot easier,” he says, “when I thought I was letting you do all the work.”
Pete’s mouth quirks, and then Patrick puts both hands on either side of Pete’s face and says, “Let’s see how this goes.”
Pete smiles, then, hugely, and says, “Smooth, Patrick.”
Patrick says, “Fine, do it better,” and also, “I can’t believe you didn’t go for the alliteration there,” and, “‘Smooth, Stump,’ that would have been better.”
“So pretend I did,” Pete says, and kisses him.
[END] (at AO3)
pairing: Pete/Patrick
notes: What I did instead of work today, #133253. Started as an email to gigantic, decided it wasn't too ridiculous to post.
Pete doesn’t even notice at first. Later, they’re never really able to figure out how or where it happened, because it starts out so small, Pete just wanting to spend more time around Patrick. Being around Patrick has always made Pete feel...better, more sane, more funny, more interesting.
It starts out so small, at first, Pete finding himself claiming first dibs on seats, and making sure Patrick’s on his team for Taboo, and hanging out next to Patrick on the bed in their hotels when everyone gathers together in one room.
Pete doesn’t even really notice it.
*
Pete is talking to someone on the phone about the spring Clandestine line, the first time. Next to him on the couch, working on the computer, Patrick makes a surprised little sound. When Pete looks over he finds that he’s slouched himself down so they’re touching from shoulder to knee, Patrick’s elbow pressing into Pete’s side, and that Pete has been petting Patrick’s inner arm, the skin soft against his fingertips. He thinks, I don’t remember deciding to do that, even though he might have if he’d thought about it. Patrick’s skin is warm. Pete takes his hand away, and immediately wants to put it back, wants to get even closer. It’s almost a compulsion, and that’s the first time he thinks it.
*
He says, “Hey, band meeting,” from where he’s sitting on the floor, back up against the couch. His arm brushes Patrick’s shin.
Andy looks up from his DS, kicking Joe out of his doze on the other couch.
“What,” Joe says, blinking blearily.
“I was thinking about switching up the bus order,” Pete says. “You and Andy on one bus, me and Patrick on the other one.”
“The dog--” Patrick says right away, to be overridden by Andy yelping, “My stuff!” and Joe’s, “Uh. Yeah, I don’t know if that’s...”
“I was thinking about not bringing Hem out on this tour,” Pete says, and then, “Sweet, thanks, guys.”
*
Once they’re sharing a bus, it gets worse, because he’s shameless, there’s no one to make him feel ashamed, because Patrick doesn’t at all, and so Pete can spread himself across him when they’re watching movies, can drape himself over Patrick’s back as he stands in the kitchenette staring into the fridge. He is shameless, and he thinks, I don’t have a choice, with a desperate kind of exhilaration, because he doesn’t and so it’s like throwing himself over a cliff and hoping Patrick will catch him, each time, and Patrick always does.
Andy says, “You’re spending a lot of time with Patrick, huh.”
Pete shrugs. He doesn’t have to answer.
*
It’s like Pete’s outside of himself, watching his body doing all these things, these things that Patrick lets Pete do, and they’re not bad things, but Pete isn’t choosing to do them. He can’t talk about it, and it’s like it’s totally separate from the rest of him, from the Pete that plays stupid sports videogames with Andy, and conspires to prank-call Gabe fifty times one night from fifty different phones, and shoots the shit with Joe. Patrick sometimes looks at him, head tilted to the side a little, a long, speculative look. He doesn’t ask Pete about it, though, just shifts to accommodate Pete on the couch, tightens his arms around Pete’s middle when Pete climbs into his lap; one time he put his hand out to catch Pete when Pete started to topple backwards out of his bunk, curling his fingers firmly over Pete’s forearms, but that’s the most forward action he takes.
Pete thinks sometimes, when he’s curled up against Patrick’s side on the bus, head on Patrick’s shoulder, with his eyelids sliding closed to the sound of Patrick humming softly in time with whatever’s playing on his headphones and the rhythmic motion of the bus on the freeway, that he’d do anything Patrick asked. Anything. It’s probably a good thing Patrick doesn’t know that.
*
When it ends, it’s like a fever breaking, and Pete comes back to himself halfway through the ride to Indianapolis in Patrick’s bunk with his palm spread wide across Patrick’s stomach to feel the inhale and exhale and warmth of Patrick’s skin underneath his thin t-shirt. Pete shoves himself away so fast he bangs his elbow on the top of the bunk and sprawls out into the aisle, staggering across to the other line of bunks, clutching at his arm through the sharp shock of pain rolling up his bones.
“Fuck! Fuck! Motherfuck,” he yells, hearing Patrick behind him saying sleepily, “Pete?” A wave of nausea sweeps from Pete’s head down to his feet and sends him lurching toward the small bus bathroom.
Later, when they’ve stopped at a diner and are sitting across from each other with twin cups of thin coffee, bracketed on each side by Andy and Joe, Pete says, “You didn’t notice. What, I start trailing after you like a dog, and you don’t notice.” He’s keeping his voice flat, neutral, palms curved over the edge of the table, because he wants to send the entire thing flying, but he thinks that if he starts breaking shit now, he won’t ever stop until he’s ripped everything down around him, maybe even the sun and stars from the sky, but most definitely his band. Across from him Patrick is stirring cream into his coffee with jerky movements that keep banging the spoon into the side of the ceramic cup, plink. plink. plink.
“I didn’t. I thought,” Patrick says, and Pete’s heard Patrick’s voice called elastic before, but it sounds stretched thin now, like it might break if Pete adds more strain. “I didn’t notice anything was wrong,” Patrick says, finally. “Sorry,” he adds, almost inaudibly.
Joe puts a hand over Pete’s right hand, which is fisting on the table edge.
“Don’t touch me,” Pete says hoarsely, making Joe draw back like Pete’s hand is made of something unclean. Patrick flinches.
“I’m sorry,” Patrick says again, louder, a ragged edge of something under his voice, and his mouth is crumpling like it does when he’s trying not to cry, and it all makes Pete so angry, then, so much angrier, like he is actually going to explode. “Pete, I’m sorry,” Patrick says, and Pete can feel himself shaking just a little bit. He shoves at Joe until Joe slides out of the booth, and then gets out and walks away, slamming the diner’s crappy swinging door open so that it bangs hard against the wall and rebounds into Pete’s shoulder. The pain feels good, feels like something Pete has chosen to do, and he keeps walking.
*
When he gets back, he shoves all of his stuff into his suitcase and duffel bag. Patrick stays out of his way, tucked up on the couch in the front lounge, watching silently as Pete retrieves his stacks of books, data CDs, file folders.
At the stairs, Pete stops.
“I’ll send Andy over,” he says.
“All right,” Patrick says.
“See you in Indianapolis,” Pete says, and shoulders his way out the door.
*
The show goes on, because the show must go on, and Fall Out Boy is more than the Pete-and-Patrick show. Right now it’s the Pete-and-Joe-and-Andy-and-Patrick show.
*
He thinks about that month, poking at it like it’s a bruise he can’t help but push on to feel the burn. He remembers waking up in Patrick’s bunk with Patrick’s arm pushing against his, Patrick’s shoulder so close to his lips, and he remembers thinking about how much he wanted to press his mouth to Patrick’s skin and just touch him all over.
He wonders, late at night, his hand on his dick, how far the compulsion would have pushed him, if it would have carried him all the way, if it hadn’t broken. He jerks off to memories of Patrick’s skin and his mouth and how much Pete had wanted him, and he wonders if Patrick would have let him, if the compulsion hadn’t broken.
*
Patrick stays out of Pete’s way, and Pete doesn’t stop him. It’s not a punishment. There’s no one to punish, Pete points out, when Joe corners him over breakfast one afternoon.
“I will actually toast this poptart for you if you give me an honest answer,” Joe says, holding up a foil packet.
“Oh, wow,” Pete says, but it’s actually pretty good deal.
Joe stands up and shuffles over to the toaster, unwrapping the poptart and shoving it inside, then gives Pete a sideways look over his shoulder.
“Dude, seriously,” Pete says. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Fuck you, I’m eating this poptart,” Joe says, and Pete shrugs. Joe sighs. Pete turns to look out the window, focusing on the way the white ribbon of striping along the far side of the opposite lane stretches down the length of the road, undulating in and out when he lets his eyes unfocus; when he looks away from the window, Joe is gone, leaving behind the poptart on a small plate sitting on a folded square of paper towel.
*
“What--Pete,” Patrick says. He’s sitting on his hotel bed propped up with the fifty cushions hotels always give, his acoustic guitar in his lap with his hands still poised across the strings, his laptop pushed to one side, his carabiner with its mess of laminated IDs spilling across the bedspread next to the laptop, his cell phone jumbled together with a handful of change on the bedside table. He will go through thinking he’s lost half of those things tomorrow morning, Pete knows, in a mad hurry to make bus call, and he will actually lose the caribiner in his sheets.
Pete slides his extra copy of Patrick’s room key that he sweet-talked from their tour manager back into his back pocket and leans against the door.
All the hotel lamps are on; their diffuse glow turns everything into shades of orange, yellow, and brown. Patrick is in a perfect pool of illumination, curled over his guitar with light shining across his pale forearms and shoulders, neck, the side of his face.
“You really didn’t notice,” Pete says. He has his hands braced behind him, though he’s not sure for what.
Patrick holds still for a moment, like maybe he’s startled, or maybe he’s trying to find an answer, and then he sets his guitar aside, where it shoves the carabiner closer to the edge of the bed.
“I guess I noticed,” Patrick says finally. He looks down at his hands, shadows moving across his t-shirt with the downward slant of his shoulders, but he’s still the shining center of the room for Pete.
He’s got some sort of weird sixth-Patrick-sense now, some part of his mind paying attention and tracking what Patrick’s doing all the time. He doesn’t know when it started, because he didn’t used to be that way at the beginning, when the band was something Pete schemed and fought for but didn’t love, nor in the middle, when Pete loved it like he loves his childhood home, fiercely but absently. So the answer lies somewhere in between the middle and now, the band something essential to Pete, like his limbs, like his voice, like something he doesn’t know how to live without. He’d blame it on the compulsion if that didn’t sound like a lie.
“So,” Pete says unevenly. “So, what. You just thought--what.”
“I guess I had a different interpretation of what was going on,” Patrick says. “I don’t know, Pete. I guess I just.”
I don’t know, Pete mimics soundlessly, and Patrick echoes him a moment later, sounding defeated.
“You don’t know,” Pete says, fingers clawing at the wood of the door behind his back. “What, so when I didn’t, like, talk to you about anything--”
“--I thought it was weird,” Patrick says, looking up, his voice picking up speed and volume. “Yes, Pete, I thought it was weird, but, you know, you always make so much sense all the time, so.”
“So, what,” Pete says. “You thought I was just, like, lonely?”
“I--” Patrick says, staring at Pete for a long moment, before deflating back against the headboard. “I guess, yeah,” he mumbles.
Fuck you, Pete thinks, fuck you you fucking fuck. His face tightens, and Patrick opens his mouth as if he’s going to say something else, but one second passes, then another, and Pete shoves off the door and out of the room.
*
They all have to wait for Patrick the next morning, standing in a crowd of baggage down in the lobby while cell phones ring and Patrick comes hurrying out of the elevator, towing his bag behind him, saying, “Sorry, sorry, I couldn’t find my ID, sorry.” Pete would normally laugh at that, because he’d fucking seen it coming a mile away, but instead he looks away to where two of their crew are going through a stack of papers and fitting photo passes into envelopes. His sixth-Patrick-sense tells him Patrick is walking toward him, and so he’s not surprised when Patrick says, “Sorry I’m late,” over Pete’s shoulder. Pete shrugs.
He doesn’t talk for the rest of the day, and it’s amazing how easy it is. Nobody even says anything to him about it, and it makes Pete wonder how freakishly he could behave before someone took it upon themselves to talk to him about it. When he goes to speak into the microphone, his first sentence is raspy, like he’d been crying, and it hurts the back of his throat to say.
He goes back to Patrick’s room again that night. Patrick doesn’t even seem surprised to see him. The guitar is still in its case, and the laptop is just playing music into the empty air.
“What did you actually think?” Pete says, and his voice is still hoarse. Patrick opens his mouth, and Pete says, “Don’t fucking tell me you thought I was lonely, because that’s fucking bullshit. Just. Tell me.”
“Pete,” Patrick says, rubbing at his eyes. Pete doesn’t say anything, and Patrick drops his hands. He looks at his computer screen instead of Pete for a long moment, finger scrolling absently, and then he says, “I guess I thought you were into me.” Pete nods slowly and Patrick makes a face, one corner of his mouth crooking up, eyes apologetic on Pete’s behind his glasses. “I didn’t know you didn’t mean it.”
“I’m not--” Pete says, and then, “I didn’t get a chance to mean it or not, Patrick. I didn’t…get a choice.” Patrick is looking down again, nodding at Pete’s words, eyes hidden under the brim of his hat, his straight nose in profile.
“I want,” Pete says, and stops again, because he can feel nerves in his stomach, jittering up into his chest and his throat. “It just sucks, though,” he says, thinking about lying close next to Patrick in the dark, thinking of wanting to touch Patrick and then doing so, and Patrick looks up, eyes dark. “If we’re going to do something I want it to be because we decide to.”
“Yeah,” Patrick says quietly. “Me too.”
“Yeah,” Pete whispers. He sits down on the ground and draws his knees up toward his chest, because his legs feel a little weak now. He can just sit here, until someone makes a decision, or the hotel collapses, whichever comes first. He just sits, not looking at Patrick, as the silence stretches on, and he has a moment of almost hysterical thought that, yeah, maybe Patrick is going to wait until the hotel collapses and they have to dig Pete’s bones out of the rubble.
The bed creaks under Patrick’s weight when Patrick stands up, and then he is walking over to Pete, until his violently yellow and purple sneakers are near Pete’s left foot, and then he is kneeling down to Pete’s eye-level. He looks nervous when Pete looks at him.
“This was a lot easier,” he says, “when I thought I was letting you do all the work.”
Pete’s mouth quirks, and then Patrick puts both hands on either side of Pete’s face and says, “Let’s see how this goes.”
Pete smiles, then, hugely, and says, “Smooth, Patrick.”
Patrick says, “Fine, do it better,” and also, “I can’t believe you didn’t go for the alliteration there,” and, “‘Smooth, Stump,’ that would have been better.”
“So pretend I did,” Pete says, and kisses him.
[END] (at AO3)