Fic: This Love is Not Obedient
Title: This Love Is Not Obedient (it has its own agenda) (1/4)
Rating: PG? M?
Fandom: FOB P!atd (Patrick/Pete, Brendon/Ryan)
Sometimes Patrick dreams that he’s standing on the edge of something a whole lot bigger than this. He dreams that he’s swaying on a building top, resting on a ledge, on a thirty-foot-wall. He’s dreaming, he knows he’s dreaming, but the cars below, and the birds above and the voices that wrack his body, they bounce off the walls of his skull, all of it is just so real.
He dreams that all of this actually means something; that the wall and the ledge and the cars, they’re all some sort of metaphor, subconscious implications, a realization, a revelation. He dreams that Sunday school was right, and he’s been put here for a reason.
He dreams until his head is too heavy with ideas and concepts and thoughts, and his body’s spinning, coz up here, on top of this wall, the air is too thin, the gravity weighs a ton and his lungs ache with every breath drawn.
He dreams the voice, the words don’t fall.
These dreams, they’re usually (always) anticlimactic, building and building to some unknown finish until the sunlight filters through the blinds and Patrick starts awake with eyelids weighed down by just, by it all, by everything.
He wakes up in his four-by-four office. He wakes up to his face stuck to contracts and his fingers numb on the desk top.
These dreams are always followed up by a reality that has always been more of a slap in the face than anything else.
*
The thing about life - and Patrick, he’s sitting beneath his desk, ankles sore with the imprint of cheap woolen carpet - is that it always falls short.
The thing about life - and Patrick has a pocket knife in his fingers, is carving into the underside of the wooden desk - is that it is really kinda shit.
He runs his fingers back over the engraved letters, rubs away the flecks of wood and rocks back on his heels. Life is all about constraints, and Patrick, he carved that in two weeks ago, life is all about labels, three weeks, all about those Godforsaken four walls, and Patrick supposes that particular one was yesterday.
Four walls of every room in every house on every street in every town. Four corners to every desk, four stanzas to every poem. Well, not necessarily, but Patrick, he’s not enough of a poet to know better.
He pulls himself out from under the desk after twenty-six minutes and forty-five seconds of trying not to get gum stuck in his already receding hairline. This started, and he checks his watch, this started twenty-three days ago when he wondered how long he could disappear for before someone would notice. He increases his time under the desk each day by one-point-one-five minutes. This is a rather pointless endeavor as he reckons he could be gone weeks with no one noticing.
Point is, Patrick works in a box. A shoe box filled with Hot Wheels, and maybe this isn’t the most profound metaphor, but Patrick, what he’s getting at is that he is a car salesman.
This, he figures, isn’t nearly as exciting as he thought it’d be when he took the fucking job.
*
The screen of Patrick’s computer flickers, wavers, glows.
Radiates with possibility, or at least, this is what the pamphlet said. Patrick, all he sees is an empty Microsoft word document and that paperclip with the eyes, the one that says ‘what would you like to do?’
Well, Patrick thinks, I would like to not be here. I would like to be at Disneyland with a million lovely women who not only hang onto my every word, but are also intelligent conversations with perfect teeth.
“Thanks for asking,” he mumbles, and it’s more than a little depressing that he means it.
“What?” And it’s Maja. Maja with her perfect hair and perfect face and that perfect promotion that she took right from Patrick’s desperate fingers. She’s slipped in through the crack in the door, through the keyhole.
“I was thanking the paperclip,” he says, and he pulls off his glasses to rub short fingers across his bleary eyes.
“Oh,” she says, and her eyes widen, fingers tap on the manila folder in her white-as-white hands. “They’ll take over the world one day,” she says, “it probably is best to stay on their good side.”
“Exactly.”
Maja, she grins, all pristine teeth and hair that, well, okay, he knows it’s the epitome of cliché, knows that this is going to sound like some harlequin romance, but her hair cascades over her shoulders, down to that space above her breasts.
It would be much better if she were not in a formal blouse.
Well, it would be much better if she were not in any shirt. Patrick, he swears the paperclip nods.
“I need to discuss something of importance with you, Mr. Stump.”
“Maja,” he says, stares with blind eyes. “We’ve worked together for six years. I’m pretty sure ‘Patrick’ is fine.”
“Right,” she says, and she almost collapses into the chair on the other side of his four-cornered desk, runs a hand through her hay-yellow hair. “Right, so, this promotion I received last month left me in a bit of a…I don’t know, a bit of a situation.”
“Yes,” Patrick says, this promotion that she received last month instead of him, the very thing that might have made him a little less suicidal, you know, as a single, almost-31-year-old man, living in some sleazy little apartment with only his three-legged-cat for company. Sigh.
Patrick’s not bitter.
He’s not.
“Well, suddenly I’m in charge of all these other things, and…”
And in Patrick’s blank word document, the one with the overeager paperclip that eyes him off like he’s Fight Club’s newest victim, Patrick, he can see the reflection of the car yard in his computer screen, the window behind him is painting a picture.
“I just, well, the company is really on a downward spiral, Patrick. No one wants to buy cars from small dealerships anymore. Everyone’s running off to Toyota and fucking Honda and it’s just so…”
There’s a sea of cars, a flock of them, and okay, Patrick sees this every morning on his way to work, the whole day in which he is at work, and in the evenings, when he locks up after work. He hates cars.
“We need to promote ourselves better, you know? And, well, I just really need someone to talk to about it. I can’t talk to Andy, and I can’t talk to Ray or Gerard, and the whole thing, it’s just becoming this mess, Patrick.”
Well, his problem is not in promoting himself per se, Patrick thinks, it’s that suddenly there’s this man outside his window, reflected very blatantly in his computer screen that he has never, ever seen before. A man that is rather shamelessly promoting himself.
This is quite sad really, especially when this man is rather-very good looking and currently shirtless and covered in oil. Which, in retrospect, is actually quite a good thing, Patrick supposes. This man should be shirtless and covered in oil more often. Not that Patrick would care or anything. Not like he’s gay, he’s just…open-minded. A content observer of art.
It’s for Maja really, she’d appreciate it.
“I was thinking we could take a few interns.” And is she still going? “You know, get more involved in local communities and just, keep on promoting, y’know?”
“Sure,” he says, but not because he likes her or agrees or anything, just because she looks like she needs it. She’s prettier when she smiles.
Maja sighs, long and deep and she grins as hard as she can, showing all her teeth and almost all of the fleshy part of her gums. “Thanks, Patrick. I can always count on you to listen and just, well, you’re so reliable.”
She’s packed up her stuff and is halfway out the door before Patrick can utter another word.
The paperclip scratches its head.
So does Patrick.
*
“So,” Maja says, and she might actually flutter her eyelashes a little. This alone stuns Patrick into a rather embarrassing silence, scares his vocal chords away.
“So, I’ve kind of been hoping you’d pick this up on your own.” She doesn’t giggle, but she tucks a chunk of hair behind her ear and might roll her eyes skyward as she does it. This is all of a sudden very highschool to Patrick, only, he never had pretty girls flustered around him unless there was a six-foot-tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed jock somewhere in range.
Patrick, he turns around, scours the coffee-room, and Maja’s eyebrows are tucked into her hairline when he finally turns back.
“You all right?”
“Uh, yes?” he says, runs a hand through his hair. “Maybe?”
“Oh, right,” and she seems to take this as a statement rather than a question. “Uh, you want to, well, I was hoping we could maybe go out to dinner sometime…” She shakes her head to the side as she does it, wrings her fingers and then, and then she touches the necklace her ex-boyfriend gave her three years ago. Patrick knows, he remembers, can still feel her tears soak into his shoulder.
“Maybe that isn’t such a good idea, Maja.”
“Oh, right,” she says, and her eyes are wide, her smile an earthquake in itself, tear-duct-volcanoes on the brink of explosion. “Of course, it would be unprofessional.”
“Yeah,” Patrick says, and he can already see the expression on the paperclip’s face when he stumbles back to the computer. That paperclip, it’ll…well, it’ll be how it always looks. “Maja, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” she says, “me too.”
And wow, way to increase that feeling, that pressure across his sinus, behind his eyes, in his stomach, way to increase it ten-fold. Make it throb and ache and just, suck in general really, coz Patrick, he’s one hundred sorts of shit when it comes to women, when it comes to relationships, and-
“Why’d you turn her down?”
Patrick turns around too quickly, almost collides with Shirtless-Oil-Man who, rather fortunately (or maybe unfortunately), is wearing a shirt.
“What?”
“Why’d you turn her down?” the Man-Formerly-Known-as-Shirtless-Oil-Man says, and takes what can only be referred to as an enormous bite from a rather tiny apple. “She’s hot. Not many women can work stilettos and tight office-pants like that. She has legs from here to Alaska.”
Patrick, he can’t really explain why the previously shitty feeling has evolved into something that bubbles in the pit of his stomach. Not very pleasant really, even less so when he opens his mouth to say: “If you think she’s so gorgeous, why don’t you date her.” Because really, what started as a highschool situation has lost everything that made it adolescent, and further reduced itself to what is maybe an elementary school level.
The Man-Formerly-Known-as-Shirtless-Oil-Man, he just laughs though, grins out with teeth almost as perfect as Maja’s, only they stick out more on him coz his face is almost black with the tell-tale-oil-stains. “Not my type.”
*
“Has he always worked here?” Patrick asks, and he throws a foam tennis ball at the wall, watches as it bounces back rather pathetically.
“Who?” Joe asks, and his mouth is full of one of those revolting burgers from the stall across the street.
“I don’t know his name. He walks around shirtless, covered in oil, eating apples and doesn’t go for women like Maja.”
At Joe’s rather blatant stare, Patrick responds with a, “Just for the record.”
“Pete?” Joe asks instead, swallowing his bite and continuing to turn in his swivel chair, rolls it round and round and round until Patrick wants to throw up the burger in Joe’s stomach.
“Maybe?”
“Uh, not always,” Joe starts, rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “But maybe over the last few years? I dunno, he only started a few weeks after me, so when did I start?”
“Two years ago.”
“Yeah,” Joe says, “so two years ago minus a few weeks. He’s a cool guy.”
“How come I never noticed him?”
Joe shrugs, finishes the burger and screws the plastic-paper up in his long fingers, aims a perfect throw at the waste paper basket in the corner. “You work in the office, he actually works with cars? I dunno.”
“I work with cars, Joe.”
“No,” he says, stares through the wayward fringe of his hair. “You work with a computer and a psychotic paperclip that does crazy things every time you try to save anything.”
Patrick’s not quite sure how to respond to that, and when he doesn’t know how to answer something, he tends to answer it stupidly. “Paperclips are going to take over the world one day.”
“Right,” Joe says, “now piss off, I have work to do.”
“What do you even do here? Every time I see you, you’re eating or playing Star Wars games.”
“Secret business, Mr. Stump. I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”
*
So Patrick can safely say that he has not taken to watching Pete outside of his window. Not at all. His eyes do not ever stray from his computer screen and his thoughts are scarce to wander. All in all, he’s quite proud of himself.
Of course, if he were to casually see Pete across the hall or, you know, so happen to walk past him when taking an untailored stroll of the car yard, well, it can’t be helped if he may allow his eyes to make some relaxed observations.
For instance, Pete has a tattoo on his lower stomach. This is not a result of chronic gawking, merely a passing inspection. Right.
And the fact that today, Patrick notices that Pete is not alone, well, that’s just…well, that might be the result of a slight attempt at stalking, but really that’s not the point.
The point is Pete has the prettiest little thing attached to his arm, and Patrick, well, he’s not jealous, coz really, he’s known Pete for three minutes, and this is just a passing observation. Kind of a ‘hey, Pete, he likes them tiny and pretty and, well, he likes them jailbait. Whatever.’
But that kid, that doll with the perfect eyes and skinny, skinny little body, he’s pretty damn gorgeous, and with the way Pete tucks an arm around his waist, well, Patrick, maybe he is jealous.
Just a little bit.
Tiny bit, hardly noteworthy really.
And it most definitely isn’t that that keeps him seated beneath his desk for the rest of the day.
*
“Hi.” And okay, Patrick thinks, okay.
So it’s been three days since Pretty-Faced-Jailbait cat-walked his way onto the scene with jutting hipbones and pouty lips, and Patrick doesn’t think he’s left. The kid must have set up camp underneath one of the cars, in the cracks in the wall or something, coz Christ, he’s thin enough.
Either that or he goes home with Pete each night, and Patrick’s going to stop that train of thought right there.
“Uh,” the kid says, and he’s leaning over the desk, staring at Patrick with those honey-dipped eyes that must make Pete fucking swoon.
“Hi,” Patrick says.
“Why are you under a desk?”
“Well,” Patrick starts, runs a hand through his hair and stares up into that oil-painting of a face. Dorian Grey eat your heart out. “Why are you not under a desk?”
Brilliant retort, really, Patrick amazes himself more every day. It takes all he has not to slam his head onto the edge of the desk. A concussion might be less embarrassing.
“Oh,” Pretty-Face says, and he shrugs shoulders that you could cut glass on, before moving round and sliding beneath the desk next to Patrick. Right.
“I’m Ryan,” he says, and he hugs his knees to his chest, lets a super-model smile escape onto his face. Not one for secret identities apparently.
“Patrick,” he replies, and completely unintentionally moves as far away from the other boy as he possibly can. “You work here too?”
“What?” Ryan asks, and his brow furrows and his lips, those awful, perfect lips, they twitch up, and Patrick has to resist the urge to slam his head across the counter again.
“You work here too?”
“Have you seen me working?”
“Haven’t seen Pete working, but he is supposedly employed here, so…”
Ryan laughs a little, tucks bangs behind his ear and stares at the floor too hard. He’s shy and Patrick can’t think of any reason in the world as to why he should be. “No, I don’t work here.”
“Oh,” Patrick says, “so, why do you hang out here so much? I mean, you’re what, fifteen? Can’t be the best place to hang out.”
“I’m nineteen,” Ryan says, “and I want to be a writer.”
Patrick blinks. “Okay.”
“Just for the record,” he says, and his eyes are wide and maybe Patrick can see forever in them. “Pete and I are just friends.”
“Oh.” And suddenly, suddenly Patrick likes Ryan a whole lot more. Completely inexplicable really. “You wanna grab lunch?”
Ryan smiles, all teeth and sunshine eyes. “I’d like that.”
*
“You took Ryan out,” Pete says, and maybe it was intended as casual conversation, but it kinda comes out more like an accusation. Patrick will tally this up later as being the second conversation that they have had around the coffee machine as well as being, well, the second conversation that they have had full stop.
Ryan has an oil-painting face, but Pete, maybe he’s one canvas short of a masterpiece.
“I did,” Patrick replies, and grabs two sachets of sugar. “He’s a nice kid.”
“He’s still a baby,” Pete says, and he doesn’t take his eyes off the coffee dispenser in front of him.
“He’s a baby with a crush on you,” Patrick says, “but he knows it’s not going to happen. He’s a smart kid, there’s no reason I can’t take some smart, half-starved kid out to lunch.”
Pete doesn’t say anything right away, but he stands as tall as he can (which isn’t really all that tall), and pours boiling coffee into a mug with a purple cat on it.
“He’s very pretty,” he says finally, bites his lip, and Patrick, well he’s not going to deny it. Especially when this whole situation seems to disturb Pete off as much as it does.
“Yeah. Gorgeous.”
*
Continue to part 2.
Rating: PG? M?
Fandom: FOB P!atd (Patrick/Pete, Brendon/Ryan)
Sometimes Patrick dreams that he’s standing on the edge of something a whole lot bigger than this. He dreams that he’s swaying on a building top, resting on a ledge, on a thirty-foot-wall. He’s dreaming, he knows he’s dreaming, but the cars below, and the birds above and the voices that wrack his body, they bounce off the walls of his skull, all of it is just so real.
He dreams that all of this actually means something; that the wall and the ledge and the cars, they’re all some sort of metaphor, subconscious implications, a realization, a revelation. He dreams that Sunday school was right, and he’s been put here for a reason.
He dreams until his head is too heavy with ideas and concepts and thoughts, and his body’s spinning, coz up here, on top of this wall, the air is too thin, the gravity weighs a ton and his lungs ache with every breath drawn.
He dreams the voice, the words don’t fall.
These dreams, they’re usually (always) anticlimactic, building and building to some unknown finish until the sunlight filters through the blinds and Patrick starts awake with eyelids weighed down by just, by it all, by everything.
He wakes up in his four-by-four office. He wakes up to his face stuck to contracts and his fingers numb on the desk top.
These dreams are always followed up by a reality that has always been more of a slap in the face than anything else.
*
The thing about life - and Patrick, he’s sitting beneath his desk, ankles sore with the imprint of cheap woolen carpet - is that it always falls short.
The thing about life - and Patrick has a pocket knife in his fingers, is carving into the underside of the wooden desk - is that it is really kinda shit.
He runs his fingers back over the engraved letters, rubs away the flecks of wood and rocks back on his heels. Life is all about constraints, and Patrick, he carved that in two weeks ago, life is all about labels, three weeks, all about those Godforsaken four walls, and Patrick supposes that particular one was yesterday.
Four walls of every room in every house on every street in every town. Four corners to every desk, four stanzas to every poem. Well, not necessarily, but Patrick, he’s not enough of a poet to know better.
He pulls himself out from under the desk after twenty-six minutes and forty-five seconds of trying not to get gum stuck in his already receding hairline. This started, and he checks his watch, this started twenty-three days ago when he wondered how long he could disappear for before someone would notice. He increases his time under the desk each day by one-point-one-five minutes. This is a rather pointless endeavor as he reckons he could be gone weeks with no one noticing.
Point is, Patrick works in a box. A shoe box filled with Hot Wheels, and maybe this isn’t the most profound metaphor, but Patrick, what he’s getting at is that he is a car salesman.
This, he figures, isn’t nearly as exciting as he thought it’d be when he took the fucking job.
*
The screen of Patrick’s computer flickers, wavers, glows.
Radiates with possibility, or at least, this is what the pamphlet said. Patrick, all he sees is an empty Microsoft word document and that paperclip with the eyes, the one that says ‘what would you like to do?’
Well, Patrick thinks, I would like to not be here. I would like to be at Disneyland with a million lovely women who not only hang onto my every word, but are also intelligent conversations with perfect teeth.
“Thanks for asking,” he mumbles, and it’s more than a little depressing that he means it.
“What?” And it’s Maja. Maja with her perfect hair and perfect face and that perfect promotion that she took right from Patrick’s desperate fingers. She’s slipped in through the crack in the door, through the keyhole.
“I was thanking the paperclip,” he says, and he pulls off his glasses to rub short fingers across his bleary eyes.
“Oh,” she says, and her eyes widen, fingers tap on the manila folder in her white-as-white hands. “They’ll take over the world one day,” she says, “it probably is best to stay on their good side.”
“Exactly.”
Maja, she grins, all pristine teeth and hair that, well, okay, he knows it’s the epitome of cliché, knows that this is going to sound like some harlequin romance, but her hair cascades over her shoulders, down to that space above her breasts.
It would be much better if she were not in a formal blouse.
Well, it would be much better if she were not in any shirt. Patrick, he swears the paperclip nods.
“I need to discuss something of importance with you, Mr. Stump.”
“Maja,” he says, stares with blind eyes. “We’ve worked together for six years. I’m pretty sure ‘Patrick’ is fine.”
“Right,” she says, and she almost collapses into the chair on the other side of his four-cornered desk, runs a hand through her hay-yellow hair. “Right, so, this promotion I received last month left me in a bit of a…I don’t know, a bit of a situation.”
“Yes,” Patrick says, this promotion that she received last month instead of him, the very thing that might have made him a little less suicidal, you know, as a single, almost-31-year-old man, living in some sleazy little apartment with only his three-legged-cat for company. Sigh.
Patrick’s not bitter.
He’s not.
“Well, suddenly I’m in charge of all these other things, and…”
And in Patrick’s blank word document, the one with the overeager paperclip that eyes him off like he’s Fight Club’s newest victim, Patrick, he can see the reflection of the car yard in his computer screen, the window behind him is painting a picture.
“I just, well, the company is really on a downward spiral, Patrick. No one wants to buy cars from small dealerships anymore. Everyone’s running off to Toyota and fucking Honda and it’s just so…”
There’s a sea of cars, a flock of them, and okay, Patrick sees this every morning on his way to work, the whole day in which he is at work, and in the evenings, when he locks up after work. He hates cars.
“We need to promote ourselves better, you know? And, well, I just really need someone to talk to about it. I can’t talk to Andy, and I can’t talk to Ray or Gerard, and the whole thing, it’s just becoming this mess, Patrick.”
Well, his problem is not in promoting himself per se, Patrick thinks, it’s that suddenly there’s this man outside his window, reflected very blatantly in his computer screen that he has never, ever seen before. A man that is rather shamelessly promoting himself.
This is quite sad really, especially when this man is rather-very good looking and currently shirtless and covered in oil. Which, in retrospect, is actually quite a good thing, Patrick supposes. This man should be shirtless and covered in oil more often. Not that Patrick would care or anything. Not like he’s gay, he’s just…open-minded. A content observer of art.
It’s for Maja really, she’d appreciate it.
“I was thinking we could take a few interns.” And is she still going? “You know, get more involved in local communities and just, keep on promoting, y’know?”
“Sure,” he says, but not because he likes her or agrees or anything, just because she looks like she needs it. She’s prettier when she smiles.
Maja sighs, long and deep and she grins as hard as she can, showing all her teeth and almost all of the fleshy part of her gums. “Thanks, Patrick. I can always count on you to listen and just, well, you’re so reliable.”
She’s packed up her stuff and is halfway out the door before Patrick can utter another word.
The paperclip scratches its head.
So does Patrick.
*
“So,” Maja says, and she might actually flutter her eyelashes a little. This alone stuns Patrick into a rather embarrassing silence, scares his vocal chords away.
“So, I’ve kind of been hoping you’d pick this up on your own.” She doesn’t giggle, but she tucks a chunk of hair behind her ear and might roll her eyes skyward as she does it. This is all of a sudden very highschool to Patrick, only, he never had pretty girls flustered around him unless there was a six-foot-tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed jock somewhere in range.
Patrick, he turns around, scours the coffee-room, and Maja’s eyebrows are tucked into her hairline when he finally turns back.
“You all right?”
“Uh, yes?” he says, runs a hand through his hair. “Maybe?”
“Oh, right,” and she seems to take this as a statement rather than a question. “Uh, you want to, well, I was hoping we could maybe go out to dinner sometime…” She shakes her head to the side as she does it, wrings her fingers and then, and then she touches the necklace her ex-boyfriend gave her three years ago. Patrick knows, he remembers, can still feel her tears soak into his shoulder.
“Maybe that isn’t such a good idea, Maja.”
“Oh, right,” she says, and her eyes are wide, her smile an earthquake in itself, tear-duct-volcanoes on the brink of explosion. “Of course, it would be unprofessional.”
“Yeah,” Patrick says, and he can already see the expression on the paperclip’s face when he stumbles back to the computer. That paperclip, it’ll…well, it’ll be how it always looks. “Maja, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah,” she says, “me too.”
And wow, way to increase that feeling, that pressure across his sinus, behind his eyes, in his stomach, way to increase it ten-fold. Make it throb and ache and just, suck in general really, coz Patrick, he’s one hundred sorts of shit when it comes to women, when it comes to relationships, and-
“Why’d you turn her down?”
Patrick turns around too quickly, almost collides with Shirtless-Oil-Man who, rather fortunately (or maybe unfortunately), is wearing a shirt.
“What?”
“Why’d you turn her down?” the Man-Formerly-Known-as-Shirtless-Oil-Man says, and takes what can only be referred to as an enormous bite from a rather tiny apple. “She’s hot. Not many women can work stilettos and tight office-pants like that. She has legs from here to Alaska.”
Patrick, he can’t really explain why the previously shitty feeling has evolved into something that bubbles in the pit of his stomach. Not very pleasant really, even less so when he opens his mouth to say: “If you think she’s so gorgeous, why don’t you date her.” Because really, what started as a highschool situation has lost everything that made it adolescent, and further reduced itself to what is maybe an elementary school level.
The Man-Formerly-Known-as-Shirtless-Oil-Man, he just laughs though, grins out with teeth almost as perfect as Maja’s, only they stick out more on him coz his face is almost black with the tell-tale-oil-stains. “Not my type.”
*
“Has he always worked here?” Patrick asks, and he throws a foam tennis ball at the wall, watches as it bounces back rather pathetically.
“Who?” Joe asks, and his mouth is full of one of those revolting burgers from the stall across the street.
“I don’t know his name. He walks around shirtless, covered in oil, eating apples and doesn’t go for women like Maja.”
At Joe’s rather blatant stare, Patrick responds with a, “Just for the record.”
“Pete?” Joe asks instead, swallowing his bite and continuing to turn in his swivel chair, rolls it round and round and round until Patrick wants to throw up the burger in Joe’s stomach.
“Maybe?”
“Uh, not always,” Joe starts, rolls his eyes to the ceiling. “But maybe over the last few years? I dunno, he only started a few weeks after me, so when did I start?”
“Two years ago.”
“Yeah,” Joe says, “so two years ago minus a few weeks. He’s a cool guy.”
“How come I never noticed him?”
Joe shrugs, finishes the burger and screws the plastic-paper up in his long fingers, aims a perfect throw at the waste paper basket in the corner. “You work in the office, he actually works with cars? I dunno.”
“I work with cars, Joe.”
“No,” he says, stares through the wayward fringe of his hair. “You work with a computer and a psychotic paperclip that does crazy things every time you try to save anything.”
Patrick’s not quite sure how to respond to that, and when he doesn’t know how to answer something, he tends to answer it stupidly. “Paperclips are going to take over the world one day.”
“Right,” Joe says, “now piss off, I have work to do.”
“What do you even do here? Every time I see you, you’re eating or playing Star Wars games.”
“Secret business, Mr. Stump. I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”
*
So Patrick can safely say that he has not taken to watching Pete outside of his window. Not at all. His eyes do not ever stray from his computer screen and his thoughts are scarce to wander. All in all, he’s quite proud of himself.
Of course, if he were to casually see Pete across the hall or, you know, so happen to walk past him when taking an untailored stroll of the car yard, well, it can’t be helped if he may allow his eyes to make some relaxed observations.
For instance, Pete has a tattoo on his lower stomach. This is not a result of chronic gawking, merely a passing inspection. Right.
And the fact that today, Patrick notices that Pete is not alone, well, that’s just…well, that might be the result of a slight attempt at stalking, but really that’s not the point.
The point is Pete has the prettiest little thing attached to his arm, and Patrick, well, he’s not jealous, coz really, he’s known Pete for three minutes, and this is just a passing observation. Kind of a ‘hey, Pete, he likes them tiny and pretty and, well, he likes them jailbait. Whatever.’
But that kid, that doll with the perfect eyes and skinny, skinny little body, he’s pretty damn gorgeous, and with the way Pete tucks an arm around his waist, well, Patrick, maybe he is jealous.
Just a little bit.
Tiny bit, hardly noteworthy really.
And it most definitely isn’t that that keeps him seated beneath his desk for the rest of the day.
*
“Hi.” And okay, Patrick thinks, okay.
So it’s been three days since Pretty-Faced-Jailbait cat-walked his way onto the scene with jutting hipbones and pouty lips, and Patrick doesn’t think he’s left. The kid must have set up camp underneath one of the cars, in the cracks in the wall or something, coz Christ, he’s thin enough.
Either that or he goes home with Pete each night, and Patrick’s going to stop that train of thought right there.
“Uh,” the kid says, and he’s leaning over the desk, staring at Patrick with those honey-dipped eyes that must make Pete fucking swoon.
“Hi,” Patrick says.
“Why are you under a desk?”
“Well,” Patrick starts, runs a hand through his hair and stares up into that oil-painting of a face. Dorian Grey eat your heart out. “Why are you not under a desk?”
Brilliant retort, really, Patrick amazes himself more every day. It takes all he has not to slam his head onto the edge of the desk. A concussion might be less embarrassing.
“Oh,” Pretty-Face says, and he shrugs shoulders that you could cut glass on, before moving round and sliding beneath the desk next to Patrick. Right.
“I’m Ryan,” he says, and he hugs his knees to his chest, lets a super-model smile escape onto his face. Not one for secret identities apparently.
“Patrick,” he replies, and completely unintentionally moves as far away from the other boy as he possibly can. “You work here too?”
“What?” Ryan asks, and his brow furrows and his lips, those awful, perfect lips, they twitch up, and Patrick has to resist the urge to slam his head across the counter again.
“You work here too?”
“Have you seen me working?”
“Haven’t seen Pete working, but he is supposedly employed here, so…”
Ryan laughs a little, tucks bangs behind his ear and stares at the floor too hard. He’s shy and Patrick can’t think of any reason in the world as to why he should be. “No, I don’t work here.”
“Oh,” Patrick says, “so, why do you hang out here so much? I mean, you’re what, fifteen? Can’t be the best place to hang out.”
“I’m nineteen,” Ryan says, “and I want to be a writer.”
Patrick blinks. “Okay.”
“Just for the record,” he says, and his eyes are wide and maybe Patrick can see forever in them. “Pete and I are just friends.”
“Oh.” And suddenly, suddenly Patrick likes Ryan a whole lot more. Completely inexplicable really. “You wanna grab lunch?”
Ryan smiles, all teeth and sunshine eyes. “I’d like that.”
*
“You took Ryan out,” Pete says, and maybe it was intended as casual conversation, but it kinda comes out more like an accusation. Patrick will tally this up later as being the second conversation that they have had around the coffee machine as well as being, well, the second conversation that they have had full stop.
Ryan has an oil-painting face, but Pete, maybe he’s one canvas short of a masterpiece.
“I did,” Patrick replies, and grabs two sachets of sugar. “He’s a nice kid.”
“He’s still a baby,” Pete says, and he doesn’t take his eyes off the coffee dispenser in front of him.
“He’s a baby with a crush on you,” Patrick says, “but he knows it’s not going to happen. He’s a smart kid, there’s no reason I can’t take some smart, half-starved kid out to lunch.”
Pete doesn’t say anything right away, but he stands as tall as he can (which isn’t really all that tall), and pours boiling coffee into a mug with a purple cat on it.
“He’s very pretty,” he says finally, bites his lip, and Patrick, well he’s not going to deny it. Especially when this whole situation seems to disturb Pete off as much as it does.
“Yeah. Gorgeous.”
*
Continue to part 2.