Lunch With Lindsey. [Gerard/Frank, PG13].
Title: Lunch With Lindsey.
Author: fictionallies
Pairing: Gerard/Frank.
Rating: PG13.
Summary: Gerard's started a new job at the comic store, Frank's the boy two-hundred-and-fifty miles away, and Lindsey's the girl he works with.
Gerard honestly, honestly, honestly misses Frank more than anything right now.
Maybe it's because Mikey and Ray recently picked up a girl each and don't seem to want much to do with him anymore, maybe it's because they brush him off for them all the time. Gerard isn't being stupid, or selfish. He's more than happy for them, he's happy for them and they're lucky to have such great girlfriends. But it still gets to him, it really does. It gets to him when he starts off telling them about something or other - his day, the last painting he did, the new comics coming out - and all of a sudden the conversation steers completely towards the girls.
Maybe, maybe it's because of his job. Maybe it's the exhaustion of the last week or so getting to him. He took a couple months off after he quit working at the local Starbucks, just took some time off to get his shit back together, start things on a clean slate or something of the sort. Now he's working at the comic store a twenty-minute drive from his house, and yeah, true, it's pretty awesome. But lately all he's been doing, really, is running back and forth and up and down the store for seven, eight hours a day. He's either packing old issues into boxes, or unpacking new shipments, or shelving the stuff he's unpacked, taking stuff off to pack, cleaning shelves or the coffee machine out back, sometimes serving the customers. It's like his last job in ways, sure, but at his last job they'd started him off with three, maybe four hour shifts and eased into the full-on days. After not working for something like six months, he's all of a sudden working these long, non-stop shifts.
It could be the fact, too, that everything in general is just piling on top of him and exhausting him to the point of ridiculousness. Ray and Mikey, work, home, art. He should really be spending a lot more time on the last two, but work especially is just eating into it all of a sudden.
Gerard's standing out the back unpacking a new shipment with Lindsey, one of the girls who got a job at the store not long before he did, when they start talking.
“It's just so fucking hurtful, y'know? All I did, right, was go out for lunch with my best fucking friend, and his girlfriend's brother pipes up and tells half the fucking town I'm a slut, whore, whatever. It was like, lunch. With friends. And now my fucking phone is like, off the hook with texts and shit from every Tom, Dick and Harry telling me that everyone else is saying shit. Y'know?”
Gerard likes Lindsey, from what he knows of her. She's cool, it seems. He's only worked a grand total of two shifts with her, but they've talked here and there. Right now, apparently, she's really fucking nuts over this whole... dilemma with her friend. Which, of course, Gerard understands completely.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, taking the box-cutter from the shelf nearby and slitting the tape open on a new box. “Totally. I had this... well. He's my sort-of boyfriend, right, and back a couple years ago he had this girlfriend who hated my guts beyond belief and she had, like, everyone she knew ganged up on me in some way, for absolutely nothing.”
Lindsey nods, taking a sip out of the glass of water she's got up on the shelf. “It's just like... nothing is happening, leave me the fuck alone, get out.”
Gerard shrugs, opening up the box and starting to take out the comics, organizing them into little piles according to whatever they are. There is almost zero organization with the fucking things and it is ridiculous.
“Yeah. Like, back then, right, me and him were just, like... we were best friends. I mean, I liked him more than that and all, but nothing ever happened or anything. His girlfriend just... yeah. They broke up at one point for like, three fucking days before they got back together, and between the day they broke up and the next one, there was all this shit flying around that I'd fucked him and that's why they'd split.”
Lindsey moves a little closer, her hands delving into the big box to help out with the sorting. If Gerard gets one thing from this job, it's probably his ability to handle people he barely knows being so close, thanks to the tininess of the back room. That, and the fact that he now has someone he can talk to about whatever's going on, regardless, just because they have no idea who the fuck he's on about.
“Jesus,” Lindsey murmurs. “You didn't...?”
Gerard shakes his head. “No, no. We haven't.”
The door to the back room slides open and Brian sticks his head in.
“You two can go on your break, Elly's just come in and I'll throw Pete or Ryan out here to cover you,” he says, his voice all authoritarian. Both Gerard and Lindsey know he's really not that much of a hardass unless you start getting on his nerves, and they also know that if he didn't have all the tattoos and piercings he would be so much less intimidating at first. He's a nice guy, really, who likes to pretend he's all macho.
They leave the comics as they are, Lindsey downing the last of her water and chucking the glass in the sink on her way out.
“Where're you headed for food?” she asks.
“Um,” Gerard murmurs, totally unused to being asked about his food choices. “I was honestly just gonna get a cheeseburger from Maccas.”
Lindsey smiles. “I'll get nuggets.”
This, this is another thing Gerard is totally unaccustomed to. He doesn't eat lunch with people outside his friends, family, and... well, Frank. There was one time where he'd gone out to dinner with Frank and his aunt, mom, and friend Bob, but that had been it, really, from memory. Gerard just didn't eat with his coworkers.
Nonetheless, the two of them ended up in the food court of the mall across the street, Gerard with a cheeseburger and coke and Lindsey with nuggets and a lemonade.
“So. What do you mean by sort-of boyfriend?” Lindsey asks as soon as they sit down.
“Um,” Gerard says dumbly, unwrapping the burger. Oh, it is so going straight to his fucking thighs or something but he does not care, he wants a fucking burger right now. “Well, we're not together. But we like... we've done stuff. Not physically, right, he lives like... fuckin' two-hundred-and-fifty miles away or some shit. Like. We've kissed, that happened once. But it's like... we get on webcam every now and again, we did it heaps in summer, and things lead to other things. Never like, full-on nude or some shit, but y'know.”
“Yeah.”
“And like... we text and stuff, a lot. Phone calls, obviously. Fuck, the first shift I ever worked at the store, I was like a fucking zombie by the end of it because I'd spent most of the night on the phone to him with both of us in tears.”
Lindsey takes a bite off a nugget, chewing it and swallowing it before speaking again. “Why?”
“Just... a lot of shit,” Gerard says, pulling the top of the bun off his burger and taking off the pickles, grabbing a napkin and wiping off the onions as well.
“You can just ask for no onions or pickles, you know,” Lindsey laughs.
“It's a ritual!” Gerard insists, smiling back at her.
“Anyway, go on. Phone, crying, zombie the next day.”
Gerard shifts a little in his seat, putting the burger back together and taking a bite. “Seriously? I thought you had-”
“You're taking my mind of off things. It's good, seriously. I want to listen,” Lindsey says, finishing the nugget and taking a sip of her lemonade.
Gerard swallows. “Alright, so. We've both got, like, a lot of shit going on. And I guess it all just came down on top of us like that. I've got like, shit going on with my brother and best friend since they got girlfriends, because they don't seem to want to talk about anything but them all the fucking time. It's like, they whine about not being able to see them more than once or twice a week, and I'm sitting there like... Hello. I'm Gerard, I'm in love with a guy named Frank who lives fucking hours away and I never get to see him at all, I've kissed him once, and the closest we get to physical contact is smutty text messages.”
Gerard takes another bite of his burger.
“His name's Frank? And smutty text messages, really?” Lindsey asks, raising an eyebrow like she doesn't believe that Gerard is capable of dirty talk.
Gerard goes kind of red and he can feel it. A name-drop and a mention of those messages in one sentence, he's going fucking great for making a friend at work.
“Um. Yeah, and yeah,” he murmurs, taking another bite.
Lindsey shakes her hair out of her eyes and picks up another nugget. “Go on.”
Gerard lets out a breath he hadn't really been aware he was holding. Maybe he hadn't totally ruined a friendship before it began.
“Um. Okay. So we were both kind of talking, about everything. With us, right, nothing is ever just chit-chat or about everyone else in our lives, it always ends up being about us. The big us. He started crying first, and he never does, and that just set me off, and all I could do was ask him why we couldn't be together. I said to him, I said it's close enough, right? I said it's just like putting a label on it and making it official or some shit. I don't feel the need to tell half the fucking planet, and I won't if he doesn't want me to. He said... he said a lot of it's distance, because we can't physically be there. I know a lot of it's distance, but he made distance work with his ex. Then he said he doesn't want me to be a rebound, which is a sack of fucking shit if I've ever heard it, because they split at the end of last year and it's what... April?”
Lindsey finishes her mouthful, shaking her head. “Yeah, that's kinda... not rebound. Rebound is more like two weeks later or some shit.”
“Exactly what I said,” Gerard says, flailing his hands a little and taking another bite. He finishes before he speaks again. “And like, we're both in tears, I'm crying, he's crying, it's one big mess. And he comes out and tells me he loves me, that he really fucking loves me, but we can't be together.”
Lindsey sips at her lemonade. “Jesus.”
Gerard sniffs and mimics her actions, sipping at his coke. “Exactly.”
They're both kind of quiet for a moment, just sitting there and eating. The silence is kind of awkward, weird-feeling. Gerard curses inwardly again, because maybe he has totally dashed the chance at a friendship.
“Have you talked to him, since then?” Lindsey asks softly.
Gerard nods. “Yeah.”
“And?”
“He said he wants me to come see him, which totally collides with this whole job now because I've just started. And there's also the fact that I'm flat broke, and that we don't get paid until the first, which is too late, because he's still in his last year of school and all. He said he's trying to figure something out to get me over there, because I have no car, no money, no nothing. He said he's gonna try and pay for me to get a Greyhound over there, but I'm not sure I can do it.”
Lindsey flips her hair again. “Why not?”
“There's a stopover somewhere for an hour between, and like... call me strange, but I'm really fuckin' paranoid about bus stations like that. And Greyhounds in general, really. And, y'know, with work and all, it's like come at exactly the most awkward time.”
Lindsey smiles. “Really, Gerard, I think you should say fuck work, fuck everything else, and go and see him.”
Gerard sniffs and bites into the burger again, bringing his hand in front of his mouth as he opens his mouth. “Why?”
Lindsey laughs, she really laughs. “Oh my god, really? Because you obviously are so in love with him right now you have no idea what to do with yourself.”
The conversation kind of ends there, with Lindsey pointing out they have five minutes to get back to the store before Brian whoops their asses for being late back and Gerard shoveling down the remainder of his burger and sucking as much coke from the paper cup as possible.
They walk back, just talking about the smallest, most trivial of things, and Gerard starts to think.
Maybe it is that point where he should say fuck everything and go. He wants to. He needs to. Maybe it's Lindsey's reassurance, encouragement, validation of everything.
It's so weird talking to her like this, he thinks. He totally just spilled out half his life, maybe more, over lunch. To a girl he met a grand total of two days ago now. And she's cool with it, she's walking beside him right now as they swap Dead Baby jokes on the way back to the store, and they're just walking down the path like two people who've known each other for months and months, maybe years, on end.
Gerard is all of a sudden insanely grateful he took up the job, because even with the long hours, physical labor, and sore feet he comes home with, he's got someone now who he can talk to about whatever without judgment, without them knowing even vaguely who the fuck he's on about.
This, Gerard thinks, however cliched the line may be, could be the beginning of a wonderful friendship.
Nonetheless, regardless of everything, he still really, really misses Frank. His Frankie-Bee. He wishes so much that he could just turn around and say fuck work, fuck everything and go and see him, but there's that part of him that knows, despite Lindsey's encouragement, that he can't just do that.
Author: fictionallies
Pairing: Gerard/Frank.
Rating: PG13.
Summary: Gerard's started a new job at the comic store, Frank's the boy two-hundred-and-fifty miles away, and Lindsey's the girl he works with.
Gerard honestly, honestly, honestly misses Frank more than anything right now.
Maybe it's because Mikey and Ray recently picked up a girl each and don't seem to want much to do with him anymore, maybe it's because they brush him off for them all the time. Gerard isn't being stupid, or selfish. He's more than happy for them, he's happy for them and they're lucky to have such great girlfriends. But it still gets to him, it really does. It gets to him when he starts off telling them about something or other - his day, the last painting he did, the new comics coming out - and all of a sudden the conversation steers completely towards the girls.
Maybe, maybe it's because of his job. Maybe it's the exhaustion of the last week or so getting to him. He took a couple months off after he quit working at the local Starbucks, just took some time off to get his shit back together, start things on a clean slate or something of the sort. Now he's working at the comic store a twenty-minute drive from his house, and yeah, true, it's pretty awesome. But lately all he's been doing, really, is running back and forth and up and down the store for seven, eight hours a day. He's either packing old issues into boxes, or unpacking new shipments, or shelving the stuff he's unpacked, taking stuff off to pack, cleaning shelves or the coffee machine out back, sometimes serving the customers. It's like his last job in ways, sure, but at his last job they'd started him off with three, maybe four hour shifts and eased into the full-on days. After not working for something like six months, he's all of a sudden working these long, non-stop shifts.
It could be the fact, too, that everything in general is just piling on top of him and exhausting him to the point of ridiculousness. Ray and Mikey, work, home, art. He should really be spending a lot more time on the last two, but work especially is just eating into it all of a sudden.
Gerard's standing out the back unpacking a new shipment with Lindsey, one of the girls who got a job at the store not long before he did, when they start talking.
“It's just so fucking hurtful, y'know? All I did, right, was go out for lunch with my best fucking friend, and his girlfriend's brother pipes up and tells half the fucking town I'm a slut, whore, whatever. It was like, lunch. With friends. And now my fucking phone is like, off the hook with texts and shit from every Tom, Dick and Harry telling me that everyone else is saying shit. Y'know?”
Gerard likes Lindsey, from what he knows of her. She's cool, it seems. He's only worked a grand total of two shifts with her, but they've talked here and there. Right now, apparently, she's really fucking nuts over this whole... dilemma with her friend. Which, of course, Gerard understands completely.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, taking the box-cutter from the shelf nearby and slitting the tape open on a new box. “Totally. I had this... well. He's my sort-of boyfriend, right, and back a couple years ago he had this girlfriend who hated my guts beyond belief and she had, like, everyone she knew ganged up on me in some way, for absolutely nothing.”
Lindsey nods, taking a sip out of the glass of water she's got up on the shelf. “It's just like... nothing is happening, leave me the fuck alone, get out.”
Gerard shrugs, opening up the box and starting to take out the comics, organizing them into little piles according to whatever they are. There is almost zero organization with the fucking things and it is ridiculous.
“Yeah. Like, back then, right, me and him were just, like... we were best friends. I mean, I liked him more than that and all, but nothing ever happened or anything. His girlfriend just... yeah. They broke up at one point for like, three fucking days before they got back together, and between the day they broke up and the next one, there was all this shit flying around that I'd fucked him and that's why they'd split.”
Lindsey moves a little closer, her hands delving into the big box to help out with the sorting. If Gerard gets one thing from this job, it's probably his ability to handle people he barely knows being so close, thanks to the tininess of the back room. That, and the fact that he now has someone he can talk to about whatever's going on, regardless, just because they have no idea who the fuck he's on about.
“Jesus,” Lindsey murmurs. “You didn't...?”
Gerard shakes his head. “No, no. We haven't.”
The door to the back room slides open and Brian sticks his head in.
“You two can go on your break, Elly's just come in and I'll throw Pete or Ryan out here to cover you,” he says, his voice all authoritarian. Both Gerard and Lindsey know he's really not that much of a hardass unless you start getting on his nerves, and they also know that if he didn't have all the tattoos and piercings he would be so much less intimidating at first. He's a nice guy, really, who likes to pretend he's all macho.
They leave the comics as they are, Lindsey downing the last of her water and chucking the glass in the sink on her way out.
“Where're you headed for food?” she asks.
“Um,” Gerard murmurs, totally unused to being asked about his food choices. “I was honestly just gonna get a cheeseburger from Maccas.”
Lindsey smiles. “I'll get nuggets.”
This, this is another thing Gerard is totally unaccustomed to. He doesn't eat lunch with people outside his friends, family, and... well, Frank. There was one time where he'd gone out to dinner with Frank and his aunt, mom, and friend Bob, but that had been it, really, from memory. Gerard just didn't eat with his coworkers.
Nonetheless, the two of them ended up in the food court of the mall across the street, Gerard with a cheeseburger and coke and Lindsey with nuggets and a lemonade.
“So. What do you mean by sort-of boyfriend?” Lindsey asks as soon as they sit down.
“Um,” Gerard says dumbly, unwrapping the burger. Oh, it is so going straight to his fucking thighs or something but he does not care, he wants a fucking burger right now. “Well, we're not together. But we like... we've done stuff. Not physically, right, he lives like... fuckin' two-hundred-and-fifty miles away or some shit. Like. We've kissed, that happened once. But it's like... we get on webcam every now and again, we did it heaps in summer, and things lead to other things. Never like, full-on nude or some shit, but y'know.”
“Yeah.”
“And like... we text and stuff, a lot. Phone calls, obviously. Fuck, the first shift I ever worked at the store, I was like a fucking zombie by the end of it because I'd spent most of the night on the phone to him with both of us in tears.”
Lindsey takes a bite off a nugget, chewing it and swallowing it before speaking again. “Why?”
“Just... a lot of shit,” Gerard says, pulling the top of the bun off his burger and taking off the pickles, grabbing a napkin and wiping off the onions as well.
“You can just ask for no onions or pickles, you know,” Lindsey laughs.
“It's a ritual!” Gerard insists, smiling back at her.
“Anyway, go on. Phone, crying, zombie the next day.”
Gerard shifts a little in his seat, putting the burger back together and taking a bite. “Seriously? I thought you had-”
“You're taking my mind of off things. It's good, seriously. I want to listen,” Lindsey says, finishing the nugget and taking a sip of her lemonade.
Gerard swallows. “Alright, so. We've both got, like, a lot of shit going on. And I guess it all just came down on top of us like that. I've got like, shit going on with my brother and best friend since they got girlfriends, because they don't seem to want to talk about anything but them all the fucking time. It's like, they whine about not being able to see them more than once or twice a week, and I'm sitting there like... Hello. I'm Gerard, I'm in love with a guy named Frank who lives fucking hours away and I never get to see him at all, I've kissed him once, and the closest we get to physical contact is smutty text messages.”
Gerard takes another bite of his burger.
“His name's Frank? And smutty text messages, really?” Lindsey asks, raising an eyebrow like she doesn't believe that Gerard is capable of dirty talk.
Gerard goes kind of red and he can feel it. A name-drop and a mention of those messages in one sentence, he's going fucking great for making a friend at work.
“Um. Yeah, and yeah,” he murmurs, taking another bite.
Lindsey shakes her hair out of her eyes and picks up another nugget. “Go on.”
Gerard lets out a breath he hadn't really been aware he was holding. Maybe he hadn't totally ruined a friendship before it began.
“Um. Okay. So we were both kind of talking, about everything. With us, right, nothing is ever just chit-chat or about everyone else in our lives, it always ends up being about us. The big us. He started crying first, and he never does, and that just set me off, and all I could do was ask him why we couldn't be together. I said to him, I said it's close enough, right? I said it's just like putting a label on it and making it official or some shit. I don't feel the need to tell half the fucking planet, and I won't if he doesn't want me to. He said... he said a lot of it's distance, because we can't physically be there. I know a lot of it's distance, but he made distance work with his ex. Then he said he doesn't want me to be a rebound, which is a sack of fucking shit if I've ever heard it, because they split at the end of last year and it's what... April?”
Lindsey finishes her mouthful, shaking her head. “Yeah, that's kinda... not rebound. Rebound is more like two weeks later or some shit.”
“Exactly what I said,” Gerard says, flailing his hands a little and taking another bite. He finishes before he speaks again. “And like, we're both in tears, I'm crying, he's crying, it's one big mess. And he comes out and tells me he loves me, that he really fucking loves me, but we can't be together.”
Lindsey sips at her lemonade. “Jesus.”
Gerard sniffs and mimics her actions, sipping at his coke. “Exactly.”
They're both kind of quiet for a moment, just sitting there and eating. The silence is kind of awkward, weird-feeling. Gerard curses inwardly again, because maybe he has totally dashed the chance at a friendship.
“Have you talked to him, since then?” Lindsey asks softly.
Gerard nods. “Yeah.”
“And?”
“He said he wants me to come see him, which totally collides with this whole job now because I've just started. And there's also the fact that I'm flat broke, and that we don't get paid until the first, which is too late, because he's still in his last year of school and all. He said he's trying to figure something out to get me over there, because I have no car, no money, no nothing. He said he's gonna try and pay for me to get a Greyhound over there, but I'm not sure I can do it.”
Lindsey flips her hair again. “Why not?”
“There's a stopover somewhere for an hour between, and like... call me strange, but I'm really fuckin' paranoid about bus stations like that. And Greyhounds in general, really. And, y'know, with work and all, it's like come at exactly the most awkward time.”
Lindsey smiles. “Really, Gerard, I think you should say fuck work, fuck everything else, and go and see him.”
Gerard sniffs and bites into the burger again, bringing his hand in front of his mouth as he opens his mouth. “Why?”
Lindsey laughs, she really laughs. “Oh my god, really? Because you obviously are so in love with him right now you have no idea what to do with yourself.”
The conversation kind of ends there, with Lindsey pointing out they have five minutes to get back to the store before Brian whoops their asses for being late back and Gerard shoveling down the remainder of his burger and sucking as much coke from the paper cup as possible.
They walk back, just talking about the smallest, most trivial of things, and Gerard starts to think.
Maybe it is that point where he should say fuck everything and go. He wants to. He needs to. Maybe it's Lindsey's reassurance, encouragement, validation of everything.
It's so weird talking to her like this, he thinks. He totally just spilled out half his life, maybe more, over lunch. To a girl he met a grand total of two days ago now. And she's cool with it, she's walking beside him right now as they swap Dead Baby jokes on the way back to the store, and they're just walking down the path like two people who've known each other for months and months, maybe years, on end.
Gerard is all of a sudden insanely grateful he took up the job, because even with the long hours, physical labor, and sore feet he comes home with, he's got someone now who he can talk to about whatever without judgment, without them knowing even vaguely who the fuck he's on about.
This, Gerard thinks, however cliched the line may be, could be the beginning of a wonderful friendship.
Nonetheless, regardless of everything, he still really, really misses Frank. His Frankie-Bee. He wishes so much that he could just turn around and say fuck work, fuck everything and go and see him, but there's that part of him that knows, despite Lindsey's encouragement, that he can't just do that.