Fic: Don't Dream It's Over.
Title: Don't Dream It's Over.
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: FOB (Patrick/Pete).
A/N: Written for the
peterickfics halloween ficathon. Prompt was: psychic. I started this as soon as I got it, but then sort of forgot about it. Realised today that it was due, so I finished it off, brushed it up. Didn't have time for a beta, so if you pick up on any gramatical errors, please give me a shout-out! Pretty uncertain of it, would love to know what you all think.
*
Find me in my field of grass.
*
Patrick sleeps with the world in the crook of his neck.
He dreams in black and white.
*
The first night he dreams in shades of grey, he’s thirty-four years old with a receding hairline, with wrinkles catching at the corners of his eyes and skin that looks sallow beneath the light that slinks through the cracks in the blind.
He’s just jerked off to the early Blondie recordings.
Patrick, he dreams of flesh and bone, of eyelashes and sweat and fingernails. He dreams of wide eyes and an open mouth and he wakes up with his hands clenched in the sheets and the lamp light burning his back.
Rip Her to Shreds is still blaring through his speakers.
*
In a day, Patrick will: get up, have breakfast, go to work, go home, have dinner, sleep.
He works in the administration department of a local high school and his mum, she’ll call him the brains of the whole goddamn operation and Patrick won’t reply, but will think he’s much more like the appendix.
Patrick’s thirty-four and he liveseatsbreathessleeps alone.
Patrick lives for the sake of not dying, for not having to leave his mother with the expenses for a funeral. This, he supposes, is a rather pitiful way to live.
Patrick, he has muesli for breakfast.
*
He wakes up some sunny day in September to his heart beating in his throat, to his stomach coiled around his toes and his palms pooling sweat like sewers crowd rain water.
Patrick, he wakes up and he hurts in places he can’t pinpoint, in the spaces between his veins and vessels, the hole between his heart and his lungs and they’re all spots he can’t get prescriptions for. That doctors can’t diagnose.
He drinks from the glass beside his bed, even if the water there is three days old.
*
When Patrick’s riding his bike to work the next morning, he swerves, sways onto the road and almost hits a car.
Reason being there’s a boymanguy sprawled on the grass by the footpath. Patrick swears, curses, berates and the guy doesn’t even open his eyes.
This is important.
*
Speak to me.
*
For the first time in Patrick’s life, he dreams in colour.
Shades and tones that splash across the canvas of his eyelids, drip through his lashes, blurs his vision, pool in his irises. He can’t make out shapes, can’t make out pictures until he can, until he can see expanses of tanned skin and half-lidded brown eyes that look like earth after rain, thick and muddy and Patrick can see the shoe prints, paw prints, the grass that drinks it all in.
Patrick can hear shallow breathing; can hear scratchy inhales that pull too tight against cilia, across tiny hairs that litter trachealungsbronchialtrees. He can hear the screech of tyres in an empty parking lot, the liquid voice of Rufus Wainwright rolling in his ears.
Patrick can see the cheap, fluorescent lighting of a chain store sign, can see the way it reflects violently off pills that litter the dashboard, the empty passenger seat. Patrick’s not dumb, he knows what this means, knows what’s happening and he sees the irony that the first time he dreams in colour, he dreams of death.
*
Music’s played by the mad man.
*
Patrick epitomises common sense, has never, ever been mislead by instinct, impulse, gut, heart, and that’s why he can’t quite explain why he’s out of bed, pulling on his tracksuit and bolting out the front door, falling down stairs and tripping against the footpath.
It doesn’t explain why he’s at the local Best Buy, staring at the car that sits in the vacant parking lot like the only kid left in gym, like the last soldier in the trenches.
It doesn’t explain why he walks over, stepping over cracks in the bitumen, skid marks on black; doesn’t explain why he presses his fingers against the glass to some kid sprawled in a seat, eyes glassy and head back over the top of the chair.
It doesn’t explain why he opens the door.
*
“I’m not-“ and the kid, guy, man, he slurs the words out of lips that don’t so much part as they do collapse, fall in on themselves and stumble over air, space, time. “Not…”
Patrick has to put his arms up, has to hold on as the guy falls into him, topples like a child-built tower, crumbles like a cliff face and suddenly Patrick, he’s left there with an arm full of boy; a boy full of grief, rage, drugs. Heart that’s a two-tonne weight, pulls down his body, tugs at his eyelids and Patrick isn’t a doctor, but he’s seen enough ER to know that this is not the time to sleep.
“Hey, wait, no,” he mumbles, stretches the words through the guy’s hair, through his skull. “Maybe I should call someone.”
And the guy, he tugs backwards, almost falls back into the seat, would if he wasn’t so high, wasn’t so suspended. “No,” he says, “not, don’t, please.”
Only the guy shuts his eyes, lashes that quiver, tremor and it’s the end of the earthquake, end of the natural disaster, not quite end of life. The guy’s pissed himself, Patrick can feel it soak through the guy’s jeans onto his, can see tears bundle at the ducts, see them tumble down his cheeks like raindrops, glue, balls of wool.
There’s an empty plastic bottle clenched in the guy’s fist.
Patrick, he pulls him out of the car and carries him home.
*
Thing is, he's not beautiful. Not here, not right now.
Not yet.
*
Patrick opens the door to his flat and notices a sink full of dirty dishes, old magazines on the counter and half-finished novels sprawling over the coffee table. Patrick opens the door to his flat and he's stumbling, half-dragging, half-carrying this guy, this man who's thrown up three times on the way home, who's still vomiting, retching and choking over air, dust, over the moment.
The guy pulls off, away, stumbles into the bathroom and over to the toilet and Patrick, he cleans up, tidies away piles and dirty clothes and when the guy, when he stumbles back in, he smells worse than before, looks worse under this light.
“Fuck you,” the guy says, whispers, chokes out, but the words catch around his voice box, come out fragmented, broken, lost and Patrick just stares. He watches the way sallow skin stretches over muscle, the way eyelashes flicker over cheekbones; tremors that wrack him, break him and Patrick knows he’s going to fall before he does.
He doesn’t stop it, but he staggers over when the guy tries to get back up, when he falls a second time and bangs his head on the coffee table. When the guy, when he vomits again, throat catching around clots of old food and waste and clumps of pills.
Patrick leans in close and brushes the guy’s hair off his face, fingers the lily-soft skin on the back of his neck and just, he lets him retch onto Patrick’s carpet, lets the smell wrack his own nostrils, make him stifle dry-heaves that claw from his throat. He lets the guy be sick until he’s got this, got the pills and the anger and whatever it is that made him do this out of his system.
When he stops vomiting, stops coughing up bile and spit and fluid, Patrick digs his fingers beneath the guy’s arms, buries them in his pits and heaves him over into the other room, into Patrick’s room, and lets him fall on the bed, collapse like a shot down criminal, a victim of capital punishment after that final flick of the switch.
“Fuck you,” the guy says again, but his eyelids are clenched shut, firm and desperate and Patrick just pulls him tighter beneath the sheets, tucks him in until the blankets clench around his sides.
He grabs a second pillow, a too-big sweater from the chest of drawers next to the bed and he’ll sleep on the couch tonight, he’ll be the good Samaritan, Christian, the good fucking guy who opens doors for women and gives up his bed for men who’ve just tried to kill themselves. He’ll do that tonight, because he’s not a good guy all the time, but he’s not a bad person.
Patrick, he turns around to leave, but there are fingers on his sleeve, clenched around his wrist and when he swivels back there are wide eyes (desperate, big and the pupils are moon sized, irises as black as night-time sky and Patrick, he can’t control the way his pulse racks his body, the way his heart ba-dums against his lungs, stifles his breath, makes it harder and harder to sit back and breathe).
“Don’t, you can’t-” and the guy, he shivers, tremors, clenches harder and Patrick doesn’t understand, can’t grasp this. “Stay.”
No, Patrick thinks, but he says, “Okay.” Says it before his head’s caught up with his open lips, and he moves close enough to sit on the edge of the bed, tries to ignore the way the guy moves over, scoots to make room, pulls Patrick to lie beside him.
Patrick, he’ll sleep with this guy who’s sunken into the bed, heavy with pills and heart and head and not much of anything else. Patrick, he’ll stay here with this guy for the whole night, eyelids half covering the bulbs until the alarm clock flickers, blares out rampant noise to wake him up. Patrick, he won’t hear it, won’t hear anything but the soft snuffles of this guy choking out breaths into Patrick’s neck.
Sometime between midnight and sunrise, the guy’ll whisper, “I wanted to die,” choke it out into the moment and Patrick can see, hear where the air tears holes into it. He won’t point out the use of past-tense.
"I know," he says instead, and he holds the guy to his chest, presses his head into a tanned neck and wonders if this, if it'll help him want to stay.
Death, Patrick supposes, will never be as glamorous as we hope.
*
“Love me.”
*
Patrick doesn’t remember falling asleep, but when he wakes up, he’s left with an empty bed and the smell of vomit wafting in from the living room.
*
He rides to work every morning on a bike that’s sort of too old and definitely out of fashion, any fashion, with the rust that creeps across the handlebars like algae on a pool-top.
The route to work is pretty exact, pretty specific, drawn out on the sketchpad of Patrick’s head, beneath his eyelids, and it’s too easy to direct himself there, turn on autopilot and swerve at the cracks in the pavement and around the guy who sprawls on the grass outside a McDonalds.
Just this time, this morning, he recognises the guy.
He doesn’t stop.
*
I'm just savouring familiar sights.
*
The sun’s setting when Patrick pedals home and it leaks colour over the sky like spilt ink, paint, like blood down a sink and the light reflects off his glasses, burns the back of his neck. His knees are sore by the time he reaches the half-way point tonight, the condensation thick in the air.
The guy, he’s sprawled out on the grass still, fingers curled in on themselves and hair too dark against too-green grass. His eyes are shut, lips parted and his chest rises too smoothly, breathing as gentle as someone comatose. His eyelashes have fanned over his cheekbones, they cast a shadow and Patrick, he won’t stop for the sunset, but he’ll stop for this.
*
That night Patrick dreams in greens and browns, in black hair and the whites of eyes.
He dreams of red lips.
*
“Most people don’t make a point of lying in the middle of the pavement.”
The guy shields his eyes, stares up with a grimace and waves a little, just enough to greet. “You know, you’re the first person to point that out?”
Patrick starts, his throat clenches around his trachea, oesophagus and he manages to grunt out an, “I’m a master of fact.”
The guy sits up slightly, props up on his elbows and his eyes are darker than anything Patrick‘s ever seen; melted chocolate, burnt toast. “I’m just Pete.”
“Patrick.”
*
He can’t explain why his bed feels empty when he sleeps that night, but he roll around, shifts, fidgets and he throws his arm out somewhere in the middle and can’t explain why his heart, why it hit’s the mattress with a dull thud when his arm does the same.
*
Patrick, he walks past Pete at a local Thai restaurant the next night when ordering take-out.
He’s not too sure, but maybe he’s starting to believe in fate.
*
When Patrick pedals past Pete the next morning, he doesn’t even pretend not to stare.
Neither does Pete.
*
The wheels of his bike stop turning, halt on the grass and he clambers off, wishes he was less awkward, more in control, stable, solid. Pete must hear him stumble because he sits up before Patrick even gets over there, is hunched over, in on himself, his fingers curled on top of his knees.
“I used to be a model,” Pete says, “but, y’know, whatever.”
Patrick doesn’t move to sit down, rather, stands over Pete, tries to be taller, bigger, tries to be the ears, the diary, the pen. “What do you mean?”
“I’m thirty-eight,” Pete says, and he doesn‘t look at Patrick, just moves a hand down to pluck at strands of grass, a natural disaster, destroys the home of some bacteria, insect, fairy. “The average life-expectancy of a model is like, twenty-five. They’re born, built, fucking shaped for the spotlight. They can’t fade into the background so the managers, they fill them with drugs and booze and force them into relationships that’ll kill them. They’re supposed to be dead by thirty.”
He purses his lips and Patrick sways, shifts his weight and flexes his fingers at his side, knows what he wants to say, just not quite sure how to put it out there, can’t breathe it out in a way that won’t stifle this. “Is that why you tried to kill yourself?”
Pete clenches his eyelids and Patrick wishes he came with a remote control, wishes he came with a mute, a rewind, an undo. Is about to backtrack when Pete says, “Do you know what my agent told me when I was sixteen and on the cover of Tank?”
He breathes in too deep and Patrick can see where it falls out in the air, tumbles from his lungs, throat, to escape into the outside, the outdoors. “She told me that hair and fashion would come and go, but bone structure, that was forever.”
Pete, he does look at Patrick, stares with wide eyes and a face that isn’t so young anymore, isn’t so paper-cut cheekbones and porcelain skin; more tired lips and lines that crinkle beside his eyes like a crushed shirt. “She said it didn’t matter that I was short and dirty, that it didn‘t matter if I was nervous or awkward or if I only knew three poses, four fucking facial expressions. She said none of it would matter.”
The wind is biting at this time of the evening, freezes the moment, claws at Patrick’s neck, ankles, fingers. “But it did?”
Patrick can read Pete’s eyes like an open book, like a tabloid, a film, a photograph. This guy, he doesn’t even need to say anything, but he mumbles out the words anyway, clenches his fingers in the grass. “But it did.”
*
One day I might feel all right again.
*
“I want to be moved,” Patrick whispers, “I want to feel something important.”
Pete, he doesn’t reply, but Patrick can feel dark eyes burning into the side of his face, can feel them map out expanses of pale skin and try to meet blue eyes with baby brown. Patrick doesn’t turn, not even when Pete nudges his thigh with blunt knuckles.
*
Patrick dreams of fingers, small and lean and they grasp his in the darkness, clench around his wrist and draw patterns on his back. They whisper words into his spine and Patrick, he can’t read them.
*
“I wanted to sing forever,” Patrick whispers and Pete’s watching with dark eyes, has his back arched and his fingers clenching the grass behind him.
“Then sing,” Pete says.
Patrick doesn’t reply, but he brushes off his jeans and goes home.
*
When Patrick rides his bike to work the next morning, the grass is empty, dead in patches, but Pete’s imprint is still there, still solid and firm just, just not him.
*
Patrick dreams of shivers and muscle, of lips and Pete.
He dreams of Pete.
*
Pete won’t be there all week.
The grass starts to grow back.
*
Thing is, routine falls back into place too quickly.
In a day, Patrick will: get up, have breakfast, go to work, go home, have dinner, sleep.
In a day, Patrick will not: look for Pete.
He won’t.
He won’t.
*
One day it’ll be all right again.
*
Maybe a month slides by, slips through Patrick’s fingers and he can’t pinpoint any particular instance, can’t find any grain of sand caught in his flesh, beneath his nail worth remembering.
There’s a knock on his door though, a rat-a-tat-tat and Patrick he opens thinking mum, he opens thinking, Kevin, Beatrice, Vicky. He opens thinking family until he’s met with burnt eyes and miles of dark skin. “Hi,” and the voice is soft, raw, croaky and it’s ripped out, forced over before maturity.
“Hi,” Patrick replies, watches awkward limbs, a hand that goes back to rub at a head full of hair.
“Do you want,” and Pete, he gestures towards the corridor, towards the stairs that trail downwards like the gates of hell. “Do you wanna grab a coffee?”
Patrick rocks on his heels, plants fingers on the doorway. “Not really.”
“Okay,” Pete says, “fair enough coz I, maybe I’m not a good guy at all and you sort of are and just, wow, your wallpaper is a lot uglier than I remembered.”
“Yeah,” Patrick says, and he steps out, closes the door behind him. “Probably not the best thing to say.”
“Probably not,” Pete agrees, and he shifts, leans backwards enough that he looks eighteen, looks too young and too desperate, like this is prom night and Patrick’s some girl that’s too good for this, him.
“I’m not angry,” Patrick says, “We’re not even friends.”
“Right,” and Pete nods, but he’s flinched, has clenched eyes shut too quickly and pressed fingers to rub at the lids, at the surface, the cover. “I should-”
“Probably,” Patrick says, and he moves backwards, goes to get back into his apartment, to wind back the handle (clock, month, year).
Pete, he starts back down the hallway, sways a little as he moves on stiff limbs and Patrick sighs, thinks of this as closure, as an ending for something that never really started. Only Pete’s turning around, is staring with big eyes and parted lips.
“Thing is,” he yells down the hall. “Thing is, I can’t fall apart again.”
He stares at the side wall before leaning back, moving forward just enough to hit Patrick with a painted-face, with wide eyes and lashes that stretch forever. “I can’t,” he says, and this, right here, now, this is when Pete is beautiful.
*
Breathe.
*
Patrick goes to work.
Pete watches from the grass.
*
Patrick dreams of legs, of back and waist and neck. He dreams of Pete lying next to him, cold and desperate and he dreams of the snuffling breaths that he heard that night and thinks that Pete’s not as beautiful when he’s falling apart as he is when he’s holding it together.
*
The sun burns Patrick’s face, his cheeks, lips, nose and his feet are dragging, catching blades of grass against shoelaces, soles. He can see Pete from here, can see ribcage and flesh, hair and tattoos that don’t so much decorate as they are a part of it, a part of Pete and Patrick, he gets close enough to touch, close enough to lie down beside him.
He clenches his fingers in the grass, doesn’t pay heed as Pete, as he stares openly, desperately and Patrick, all he can feel is where Pete’s fingers aren’t, how his breath is too far away and his flesh is too tight, constricted where it should be loose.
All he can hear is what Pete isn’t saying.
Patrick sighs, breathes too deeply and sways his feet in the grass. “You can’t fall apart again,“ Patrick says.
Pete stares still, his body firm and tight and Patrick can’t leave him, can’t stop himself from reaching over, grasping for his fingers, interweaving them and they fold too awkwardly, don’t fit right.
“Thing is,” Patrick says, “Thing is, neither can I.”
“Then we’ll have to practice,” Pete says.
“I don’t know anything about you.”
“Then we’ll have to learn.”
Patrick looks over at where Pete watches with cavern-eyes, with chapped lips and white teeth, looks at where Pete is frozen, paused, stopped and thinks that life should never be this hard when it’s this simple.
“What is this?” Patrick whispers, and Pete, he leans back into the grass, plays with his fingers, is moving pointer, thumb, little; is clenching, releasing and holding this moment tight between their hands.
“I think this is the moment that people talk about in harlequin romances,” Pete mumbles, breathes out into the air above him. “This is the second time stops and you realise that it, all of it, that it’ll be okay.”
“Oh,” Patrick says and he rolls onto his side, presses into Pete and says, “I figured this was where you kissed me to make me stop talking.”
Pete turns and he just, he smiles and Patrick was wrong before, because this Pete, this one with wide lips and crinkling eyes, the one that doesn’t look old or young, the one with no face or façade or mask, just looks, this is the one that’s beautiful.
Patrick kisses him.
He has to.
*
Lyrics from:
‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ - Crowded House.
‘Mother Nature’s Son’ - The Beatles.
‘Forever Young’ - Youth Group.
‘Flame Trees’ - Cold Chisel.
‘The Debt Collectors’ - Ben Lee.
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: FOB (Patrick/Pete).
A/N: Written for the
peterickfics halloween ficathon. Prompt was: psychic. I started this as soon as I got it, but then sort of forgot about it. Realised today that it was due, so I finished it off, brushed it up. Didn't have time for a beta, so if you pick up on any gramatical errors, please give me a shout-out! Pretty uncertain of it, would love to know what you all think.
*
Find me in my field of grass.
*
Patrick sleeps with the world in the crook of his neck.
He dreams in black and white.
*
The first night he dreams in shades of grey, he’s thirty-four years old with a receding hairline, with wrinkles catching at the corners of his eyes and skin that looks sallow beneath the light that slinks through the cracks in the blind.
He’s just jerked off to the early Blondie recordings.
Patrick, he dreams of flesh and bone, of eyelashes and sweat and fingernails. He dreams of wide eyes and an open mouth and he wakes up with his hands clenched in the sheets and the lamp light burning his back.
Rip Her to Shreds is still blaring through his speakers.
*
In a day, Patrick will: get up, have breakfast, go to work, go home, have dinner, sleep.
He works in the administration department of a local high school and his mum, she’ll call him the brains of the whole goddamn operation and Patrick won’t reply, but will think he’s much more like the appendix.
Patrick’s thirty-four and he liveseatsbreathessleeps alone.
Patrick lives for the sake of not dying, for not having to leave his mother with the expenses for a funeral. This, he supposes, is a rather pitiful way to live.
Patrick, he has muesli for breakfast.
*
He wakes up some sunny day in September to his heart beating in his throat, to his stomach coiled around his toes and his palms pooling sweat like sewers crowd rain water.
Patrick, he wakes up and he hurts in places he can’t pinpoint, in the spaces between his veins and vessels, the hole between his heart and his lungs and they’re all spots he can’t get prescriptions for. That doctors can’t diagnose.
He drinks from the glass beside his bed, even if the water there is three days old.
*
When Patrick’s riding his bike to work the next morning, he swerves, sways onto the road and almost hits a car.
Reason being there’s a boymanguy sprawled on the grass by the footpath. Patrick swears, curses, berates and the guy doesn’t even open his eyes.
This is important.
*
Speak to me.
*
For the first time in Patrick’s life, he dreams in colour.
Shades and tones that splash across the canvas of his eyelids, drip through his lashes, blurs his vision, pool in his irises. He can’t make out shapes, can’t make out pictures until he can, until he can see expanses of tanned skin and half-lidded brown eyes that look like earth after rain, thick and muddy and Patrick can see the shoe prints, paw prints, the grass that drinks it all in.
Patrick can hear shallow breathing; can hear scratchy inhales that pull too tight against cilia, across tiny hairs that litter trachealungsbronchialtrees. He can hear the screech of tyres in an empty parking lot, the liquid voice of Rufus Wainwright rolling in his ears.
Patrick can see the cheap, fluorescent lighting of a chain store sign, can see the way it reflects violently off pills that litter the dashboard, the empty passenger seat. Patrick’s not dumb, he knows what this means, knows what’s happening and he sees the irony that the first time he dreams in colour, he dreams of death.
*
Music’s played by the mad man.
*
Patrick epitomises common sense, has never, ever been mislead by instinct, impulse, gut, heart, and that’s why he can’t quite explain why he’s out of bed, pulling on his tracksuit and bolting out the front door, falling down stairs and tripping against the footpath.
It doesn’t explain why he’s at the local Best Buy, staring at the car that sits in the vacant parking lot like the only kid left in gym, like the last soldier in the trenches.
It doesn’t explain why he walks over, stepping over cracks in the bitumen, skid marks on black; doesn’t explain why he presses his fingers against the glass to some kid sprawled in a seat, eyes glassy and head back over the top of the chair.
It doesn’t explain why he opens the door.
*
“I’m not-“ and the kid, guy, man, he slurs the words out of lips that don’t so much part as they do collapse, fall in on themselves and stumble over air, space, time. “Not…”
Patrick has to put his arms up, has to hold on as the guy falls into him, topples like a child-built tower, crumbles like a cliff face and suddenly Patrick, he’s left there with an arm full of boy; a boy full of grief, rage, drugs. Heart that’s a two-tonne weight, pulls down his body, tugs at his eyelids and Patrick isn’t a doctor, but he’s seen enough ER to know that this is not the time to sleep.
“Hey, wait, no,” he mumbles, stretches the words through the guy’s hair, through his skull. “Maybe I should call someone.”
And the guy, he tugs backwards, almost falls back into the seat, would if he wasn’t so high, wasn’t so suspended. “No,” he says, “not, don’t, please.”
Only the guy shuts his eyes, lashes that quiver, tremor and it’s the end of the earthquake, end of the natural disaster, not quite end of life. The guy’s pissed himself, Patrick can feel it soak through the guy’s jeans onto his, can see tears bundle at the ducts, see them tumble down his cheeks like raindrops, glue, balls of wool.
There’s an empty plastic bottle clenched in the guy’s fist.
Patrick, he pulls him out of the car and carries him home.
*
Thing is, he's not beautiful. Not here, not right now.
Not yet.
*
Patrick opens the door to his flat and notices a sink full of dirty dishes, old magazines on the counter and half-finished novels sprawling over the coffee table. Patrick opens the door to his flat and he's stumbling, half-dragging, half-carrying this guy, this man who's thrown up three times on the way home, who's still vomiting, retching and choking over air, dust, over the moment.
The guy pulls off, away, stumbles into the bathroom and over to the toilet and Patrick, he cleans up, tidies away piles and dirty clothes and when the guy, when he stumbles back in, he smells worse than before, looks worse under this light.
“Fuck you,” the guy says, whispers, chokes out, but the words catch around his voice box, come out fragmented, broken, lost and Patrick just stares. He watches the way sallow skin stretches over muscle, the way eyelashes flicker over cheekbones; tremors that wrack him, break him and Patrick knows he’s going to fall before he does.
He doesn’t stop it, but he staggers over when the guy tries to get back up, when he falls a second time and bangs his head on the coffee table. When the guy, when he vomits again, throat catching around clots of old food and waste and clumps of pills.
Patrick leans in close and brushes the guy’s hair off his face, fingers the lily-soft skin on the back of his neck and just, he lets him retch onto Patrick’s carpet, lets the smell wrack his own nostrils, make him stifle dry-heaves that claw from his throat. He lets the guy be sick until he’s got this, got the pills and the anger and whatever it is that made him do this out of his system.
When he stops vomiting, stops coughing up bile and spit and fluid, Patrick digs his fingers beneath the guy’s arms, buries them in his pits and heaves him over into the other room, into Patrick’s room, and lets him fall on the bed, collapse like a shot down criminal, a victim of capital punishment after that final flick of the switch.
“Fuck you,” the guy says again, but his eyelids are clenched shut, firm and desperate and Patrick just pulls him tighter beneath the sheets, tucks him in until the blankets clench around his sides.
He grabs a second pillow, a too-big sweater from the chest of drawers next to the bed and he’ll sleep on the couch tonight, he’ll be the good Samaritan, Christian, the good fucking guy who opens doors for women and gives up his bed for men who’ve just tried to kill themselves. He’ll do that tonight, because he’s not a good guy all the time, but he’s not a bad person.
Patrick, he turns around to leave, but there are fingers on his sleeve, clenched around his wrist and when he swivels back there are wide eyes (desperate, big and the pupils are moon sized, irises as black as night-time sky and Patrick, he can’t control the way his pulse racks his body, the way his heart ba-dums against his lungs, stifles his breath, makes it harder and harder to sit back and breathe).
“Don’t, you can’t-” and the guy, he shivers, tremors, clenches harder and Patrick doesn’t understand, can’t grasp this. “Stay.”
No, Patrick thinks, but he says, “Okay.” Says it before his head’s caught up with his open lips, and he moves close enough to sit on the edge of the bed, tries to ignore the way the guy moves over, scoots to make room, pulls Patrick to lie beside him.
Patrick, he’ll sleep with this guy who’s sunken into the bed, heavy with pills and heart and head and not much of anything else. Patrick, he’ll stay here with this guy for the whole night, eyelids half covering the bulbs until the alarm clock flickers, blares out rampant noise to wake him up. Patrick, he won’t hear it, won’t hear anything but the soft snuffles of this guy choking out breaths into Patrick’s neck.
Sometime between midnight and sunrise, the guy’ll whisper, “I wanted to die,” choke it out into the moment and Patrick can see, hear where the air tears holes into it. He won’t point out the use of past-tense.
"I know," he says instead, and he holds the guy to his chest, presses his head into a tanned neck and wonders if this, if it'll help him want to stay.
Death, Patrick supposes, will never be as glamorous as we hope.
*
“Love me.”
*
Patrick doesn’t remember falling asleep, but when he wakes up, he’s left with an empty bed and the smell of vomit wafting in from the living room.
*
He rides to work every morning on a bike that’s sort of too old and definitely out of fashion, any fashion, with the rust that creeps across the handlebars like algae on a pool-top.
The route to work is pretty exact, pretty specific, drawn out on the sketchpad of Patrick’s head, beneath his eyelids, and it’s too easy to direct himself there, turn on autopilot and swerve at the cracks in the pavement and around the guy who sprawls on the grass outside a McDonalds.
Just this time, this morning, he recognises the guy.
He doesn’t stop.
*
I'm just savouring familiar sights.
*
The sun’s setting when Patrick pedals home and it leaks colour over the sky like spilt ink, paint, like blood down a sink and the light reflects off his glasses, burns the back of his neck. His knees are sore by the time he reaches the half-way point tonight, the condensation thick in the air.
The guy, he’s sprawled out on the grass still, fingers curled in on themselves and hair too dark against too-green grass. His eyes are shut, lips parted and his chest rises too smoothly, breathing as gentle as someone comatose. His eyelashes have fanned over his cheekbones, they cast a shadow and Patrick, he won’t stop for the sunset, but he’ll stop for this.
*
That night Patrick dreams in greens and browns, in black hair and the whites of eyes.
He dreams of red lips.
*
“Most people don’t make a point of lying in the middle of the pavement.”
The guy shields his eyes, stares up with a grimace and waves a little, just enough to greet. “You know, you’re the first person to point that out?”
Patrick starts, his throat clenches around his trachea, oesophagus and he manages to grunt out an, “I’m a master of fact.”
The guy sits up slightly, props up on his elbows and his eyes are darker than anything Patrick‘s ever seen; melted chocolate, burnt toast. “I’m just Pete.”
“Patrick.”
*
He can’t explain why his bed feels empty when he sleeps that night, but he roll around, shifts, fidgets and he throws his arm out somewhere in the middle and can’t explain why his heart, why it hit’s the mattress with a dull thud when his arm does the same.
*
Patrick, he walks past Pete at a local Thai restaurant the next night when ordering take-out.
He’s not too sure, but maybe he’s starting to believe in fate.
*
When Patrick pedals past Pete the next morning, he doesn’t even pretend not to stare.
Neither does Pete.
*
The wheels of his bike stop turning, halt on the grass and he clambers off, wishes he was less awkward, more in control, stable, solid. Pete must hear him stumble because he sits up before Patrick even gets over there, is hunched over, in on himself, his fingers curled on top of his knees.
“I used to be a model,” Pete says, “but, y’know, whatever.”
Patrick doesn’t move to sit down, rather, stands over Pete, tries to be taller, bigger, tries to be the ears, the diary, the pen. “What do you mean?”
“I’m thirty-eight,” Pete says, and he doesn‘t look at Patrick, just moves a hand down to pluck at strands of grass, a natural disaster, destroys the home of some bacteria, insect, fairy. “The average life-expectancy of a model is like, twenty-five. They’re born, built, fucking shaped for the spotlight. They can’t fade into the background so the managers, they fill them with drugs and booze and force them into relationships that’ll kill them. They’re supposed to be dead by thirty.”
He purses his lips and Patrick sways, shifts his weight and flexes his fingers at his side, knows what he wants to say, just not quite sure how to put it out there, can’t breathe it out in a way that won’t stifle this. “Is that why you tried to kill yourself?”
Pete clenches his eyelids and Patrick wishes he came with a remote control, wishes he came with a mute, a rewind, an undo. Is about to backtrack when Pete says, “Do you know what my agent told me when I was sixteen and on the cover of Tank?”
He breathes in too deep and Patrick can see where it falls out in the air, tumbles from his lungs, throat, to escape into the outside, the outdoors. “She told me that hair and fashion would come and go, but bone structure, that was forever.”
Pete, he does look at Patrick, stares with wide eyes and a face that isn’t so young anymore, isn’t so paper-cut cheekbones and porcelain skin; more tired lips and lines that crinkle beside his eyes like a crushed shirt. “She said it didn’t matter that I was short and dirty, that it didn‘t matter if I was nervous or awkward or if I only knew three poses, four fucking facial expressions. She said none of it would matter.”
The wind is biting at this time of the evening, freezes the moment, claws at Patrick’s neck, ankles, fingers. “But it did?”
Patrick can read Pete’s eyes like an open book, like a tabloid, a film, a photograph. This guy, he doesn’t even need to say anything, but he mumbles out the words anyway, clenches his fingers in the grass. “But it did.”
*
One day I might feel all right again.
*
“I want to be moved,” Patrick whispers, “I want to feel something important.”
Pete, he doesn’t reply, but Patrick can feel dark eyes burning into the side of his face, can feel them map out expanses of pale skin and try to meet blue eyes with baby brown. Patrick doesn’t turn, not even when Pete nudges his thigh with blunt knuckles.
*
Patrick dreams of fingers, small and lean and they grasp his in the darkness, clench around his wrist and draw patterns on his back. They whisper words into his spine and Patrick, he can’t read them.
*
“I wanted to sing forever,” Patrick whispers and Pete’s watching with dark eyes, has his back arched and his fingers clenching the grass behind him.
“Then sing,” Pete says.
Patrick doesn’t reply, but he brushes off his jeans and goes home.
*
When Patrick rides his bike to work the next morning, the grass is empty, dead in patches, but Pete’s imprint is still there, still solid and firm just, just not him.
*
Patrick dreams of shivers and muscle, of lips and Pete.
He dreams of Pete.
*
Pete won’t be there all week.
The grass starts to grow back.
*
Thing is, routine falls back into place too quickly.
In a day, Patrick will: get up, have breakfast, go to work, go home, have dinner, sleep.
In a day, Patrick will not: look for Pete.
He won’t.
He won’t.
*
One day it’ll be all right again.
*
Maybe a month slides by, slips through Patrick’s fingers and he can’t pinpoint any particular instance, can’t find any grain of sand caught in his flesh, beneath his nail worth remembering.
There’s a knock on his door though, a rat-a-tat-tat and Patrick he opens thinking mum, he opens thinking, Kevin, Beatrice, Vicky. He opens thinking family until he’s met with burnt eyes and miles of dark skin. “Hi,” and the voice is soft, raw, croaky and it’s ripped out, forced over before maturity.
“Hi,” Patrick replies, watches awkward limbs, a hand that goes back to rub at a head full of hair.
“Do you want,” and Pete, he gestures towards the corridor, towards the stairs that trail downwards like the gates of hell. “Do you wanna grab a coffee?”
Patrick rocks on his heels, plants fingers on the doorway. “Not really.”
“Okay,” Pete says, “fair enough coz I, maybe I’m not a good guy at all and you sort of are and just, wow, your wallpaper is a lot uglier than I remembered.”
“Yeah,” Patrick says, and he steps out, closes the door behind him. “Probably not the best thing to say.”
“Probably not,” Pete agrees, and he shifts, leans backwards enough that he looks eighteen, looks too young and too desperate, like this is prom night and Patrick’s some girl that’s too good for this, him.
“I’m not angry,” Patrick says, “We’re not even friends.”
“Right,” and Pete nods, but he’s flinched, has clenched eyes shut too quickly and pressed fingers to rub at the lids, at the surface, the cover. “I should-”
“Probably,” Patrick says, and he moves backwards, goes to get back into his apartment, to wind back the handle (clock, month, year).
Pete, he starts back down the hallway, sways a little as he moves on stiff limbs and Patrick sighs, thinks of this as closure, as an ending for something that never really started. Only Pete’s turning around, is staring with big eyes and parted lips.
“Thing is,” he yells down the hall. “Thing is, I can’t fall apart again.”
He stares at the side wall before leaning back, moving forward just enough to hit Patrick with a painted-face, with wide eyes and lashes that stretch forever. “I can’t,” he says, and this, right here, now, this is when Pete is beautiful.
*
Breathe.
*
Patrick goes to work.
Pete watches from the grass.
*
Patrick dreams of legs, of back and waist and neck. He dreams of Pete lying next to him, cold and desperate and he dreams of the snuffling breaths that he heard that night and thinks that Pete’s not as beautiful when he’s falling apart as he is when he’s holding it together.
*
The sun burns Patrick’s face, his cheeks, lips, nose and his feet are dragging, catching blades of grass against shoelaces, soles. He can see Pete from here, can see ribcage and flesh, hair and tattoos that don’t so much decorate as they are a part of it, a part of Pete and Patrick, he gets close enough to touch, close enough to lie down beside him.
He clenches his fingers in the grass, doesn’t pay heed as Pete, as he stares openly, desperately and Patrick, all he can feel is where Pete’s fingers aren’t, how his breath is too far away and his flesh is too tight, constricted where it should be loose.
All he can hear is what Pete isn’t saying.
Patrick sighs, breathes too deeply and sways his feet in the grass. “You can’t fall apart again,“ Patrick says.
Pete stares still, his body firm and tight and Patrick can’t leave him, can’t stop himself from reaching over, grasping for his fingers, interweaving them and they fold too awkwardly, don’t fit right.
“Thing is,” Patrick says, “Thing is, neither can I.”
“Then we’ll have to practice,” Pete says.
“I don’t know anything about you.”
“Then we’ll have to learn.”
Patrick looks over at where Pete watches with cavern-eyes, with chapped lips and white teeth, looks at where Pete is frozen, paused, stopped and thinks that life should never be this hard when it’s this simple.
“What is this?” Patrick whispers, and Pete, he leans back into the grass, plays with his fingers, is moving pointer, thumb, little; is clenching, releasing and holding this moment tight between their hands.
“I think this is the moment that people talk about in harlequin romances,” Pete mumbles, breathes out into the air above him. “This is the second time stops and you realise that it, all of it, that it’ll be okay.”
“Oh,” Patrick says and he rolls onto his side, presses into Pete and says, “I figured this was where you kissed me to make me stop talking.”
Pete turns and he just, he smiles and Patrick was wrong before, because this Pete, this one with wide lips and crinkling eyes, the one that doesn’t look old or young, the one with no face or façade or mask, just looks, this is the one that’s beautiful.
Patrick kisses him.
He has to.
*
Lyrics from:
‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ - Crowded House.
‘Mother Nature’s Son’ - The Beatles.
‘Forever Young’ - Youth Group.
‘Flame Trees’ - Cold Chisel.
‘The Debt Collectors’ - Ben Lee.