Fic: Lines On Palms (1/4)
Title: Lines On Palms (1/4)
Rating: R
Fandom: FOB (Patrick/Pete)
Okay, okay, okay. Three guys walk into a bar. This is important.
Three guys, young, they shove aside the door and trample feet-first into some smoke-addled pub with sticky tables and no coasters. One’s tall, pointed, femme (just), an almost moustache poking out too hard beneath his nose (it doesn’t look right, obscures the flesh, the pretty face), one’s some cookie-cutter jock, big and broad and complete with chiselled jaw and a height that the rest of him hasn’t grown into yet. The last is some short, podgy guy, red-hair hidden beneath a trucker cap and thick glasses shielding pastel blue eyes.
These three guys, they walk into a bar. They are not English, Irish or Scottish and none of them are blond.
All of them are American, all of them are minors.
So, they go up to the counter and pull up some barstools and that taller one, the guy with the moustache, he leans back and lets loose this smile that isn’t all that great, not all that pleasant and he turns to the guy in the trucker hat and says, “Jesus, we’re not asking you to fuck anyone.”
The jock guy, he laughs like, this snorting thing that catches in the stale air and the boy in the trucker hat grimaces, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Just proposition someone,” the moustached guy says and he orders two beers from the barman that they won’t ever receive.
“Right,” the guy with the trucker hat replies, and he pulls it off just enough to rub at his hairline, to knock his thick-rimmed glasses askew.
The moustached boy, man, whatever, he just smiles again and says, “You’re options are open, man, just, if Anna ever found out…”
That must be a big deal, a big thing, coz the guy with the trucker hat, he just sighs and says, “Whatever, just tell me what you want me to do.”
The thing about jokes is that until you get to the punch line, they’re really not funny.
Having said that, some jokes never are.
*
Patrick can’t quite remember how he ended up in the middle of this, but he’s pretty sure Brandon’s been planning it for too long.
“Okay,” Brandon says, “just get to the end of the street and then just like, wait for some middle-aged asshole to rock up and, y’know, approach him.” He doesn’t need to say in every sense of the word, because Patrick can hear that between the letters, read it between the lines. “Seriously, it’ll be some funny shit.”
The lot of them (coz there’s more than just Patrick and this douche. Brandon, he never travels alone, relies too heavily on a cohort, a pack of yes-men that giggle and nod and jeer) are standing at the cold, hard starting line of Thirds Avenue, Chicago, and Patrick, he can quite assuredly say that he has never been down here nor did he ever intend to before well, before tonight.
Reasons being that where Patrick’s Chicago is clean-cut and warm, families and that form of blissful suburbia made of clay houses and china doll people, Thirds Chicago is dirty in every sense of the word. Made out of bars and night clubs, brothels, strip clubs and too many prostitutes that are all too fucking young. Kids who are designed to not only appease your run of the mill client, but your average paedophile as well.
“Stumph,” Brandon says, and he thrusts out a hip, purses chapped lips just enough that Patrick genuinely believes that this skinny boy would be far better at playing the part of some alley hooker than Patrick.
Brandon shakes his head, thrusts out his pelvis a little more, and all Patrick can think is seriously.
“Right,” Patrick says instead, and he takes off his trucker cap just enough to rub a hand through his hair. He squints bleary eyes, and pushes his thick-rimmed glasses further up the bridge of his nose.
Brandon huffs out a wayward breath and the gaggle of boys behind him giggle obnoxiously enough that Patrick, not for the first time that night, wonders how the fuck he got into this predicament.
“I’m going,” Patrick says, and those words, both of them, they confirm it. The thought that he is actually doing this echoes around his skull, crawls down his spine fast enough to leave him shivering and nauseous, and fuck, he’s going.
He turns on his heel too quickly, and he’s walked three steps when he hears Brandon talk, when he hears the guy say, “I knew the fucker would do it,”
But right, he thinks, right, coz at least if he makes it to the end of the street, then he’ll be out of arms reach. Out of the way of angry fists and legs and leers, and hey, those guys, those assholes are too chickenshit to even follow, to even come down themselves. They don’t give a fuck if Patrick actually goes through on the dare, on this joke to proposition himself to the first middle-aged man he sees, they just want to watch to make sure he goes down the street far enough to make himself fucking uncomfortable. To make himself unhappy and awkward and susceptible to AIDS just from breathing the air down here.
Thing is, they graduated highschool two weeks ago and Brandon, ever the bully, couldn’t let go of whatever tentative authority he’d gained over his peers, could only cling to it a little tighter when he found Patrick (the bullied, the pressured, the freak, geek, victim) working at the local café. His actions don’t surprise Patrick that much, couldn’t.
Cracks litter the pavement like paper cuts, like scars after war and Patrick tries too hard to focus on them, to stare them down rather than the whores who look at him with raised eyebrows and wide eyes, with sneers and smiles.
There are more boys and girls, more sets of legs here than he can count, each clad in tight pants or tighter skirts, all arses and tits and cocks and thighs and the problem, the issue is that each of these kids (and all of them, they are, they’re Patrick’s age and he doesn’t like it, doesn’t like this), they all look like they should be tucked away at home, snoozing soundly beneath Disney blankets and high school woes. Not here, not doing this.
Too many of them glare as he walks past, too many flash him questioning eyes, suggestive pouts until Patrick’s on a bare street corner, hands deep in his pockets and seriously, what the fuck is he doing here?
There’s a sound to his left, something that rattles like bones in a cage, and Patrick, he turns around too quickly, spins on his heels until he sees the entirety of a dead-end street where one of them, one of the hooker’s staggers behind some hurrying business man, jeans still wrapped around his thighs.
The man, the client, he can’t be any younger than forty, tall and greying, with thin-rimmed glasses knocked askew. This guy, he can’t get away fast enough and that, Patrick doesn’t care if the kid being shoved aside is a whore, he’s a person and this, even watching this feels degrading. The client pulls a few bills from his pocket and shoves them at the hooker, scurries away like its hunting season and he’s the game. Bolts like there are a million cops, a fucking SWAT team tucked into the next bar.
The hooker’s pulled his pants up, covering the honey-brown skin of his arse and is flipping through the bills, shoving them into his pocket. He looks up, bends his neck around the street corner and purses his lips. He’s not tall, and he’s pretty in a way that maybe the more effeminate male models are. No stern jaw line, no broad shoulders, but he has that flawless skin, eyelashes that could cut through glass and hipbones that taper into a perfect arse.
“Forget it, kid,” he says, and this guy, this hooker is a nasally little thing and he‘s moved to stare directly at Patrick with a quirked brow and tattooed arms folded over his chest. “I don’t do virgins.”
Patrick, he’s, well, he’s taken aback. Gaping something fierce, and he’s hunting for words like a wounded predator, can’t find them, and the hooker, he just stares with half-lidded eyes.
“I’m not a virgin,” Patrick says, and he’s not, but he stutters over the words and that, he must look fucking twelve.
The hooker lets loose this half-smile thing that crawls up the corners of his face, and Patrick, he has to stifle his breath, these coarse sounds that are clawing their way out of his lungs. The hooker, he curves his body around a lamppost not four-feet away and this guy, he’s a kid, he’s young, and he moves his body like a…like a whore.
“Whatever,” the hooker says, and he closes his eyes. A car, a Toyota, a fucking family car pulls up beside him. He doesn’t cast a second glance back at Patrick, just folds himself into the car when some overweight, long-haired sleaze throws open the door.
Patrick watches the car speed off, squeaking tyres against the bumpy road and two seconds later a car slows past Patrick, and really, he can’t get out of there fast enough.
*
“Jesus, Patrick,” Anna’s eyes are wide and questioning, worried. “What happened to your hand?”
If he were a more honest person, he’d probably tell her that he fell over whilst running away from Thirds.
If he were more honest, he’d probably say that he spent the whole night at Joe’s trying to figure out if he was going to get HIV from where the skin gaped open on his hand like a dog’s mouth. (For the record, Joe says that this probably falls under that wide open header of arrogant. For the record, Joe was high when he said that.)
Point is, he’s not really an honest person, particularly when Anna’s sitting here, with eyes like liquid gold and skin like fresh-cut paper. He’s not honest and he’s not genuine and that’s probably why he always fucks up things like this.
Point is, he says, “Cut it on the corner of the stovetop last night,” and Anna eats it up like cake.
*
“You didn’t have to come,” she says, “I know your father seems to think that I’m incapable of going anywhere without having my hand held, but believe it or not, I am a rather competent woman.”
“Dad was just worried,” Patrick says, and he grins at her, fleeting and gentle and sits back further in the foam padding of the chair. “He’s allowed to be, it’s his job as the husband.”
“Right,” she says, “I’m not complaining about him being worried. I’m complaining about not being able to go to this damn function without him getting himself into a state. I’m complaining about him forcing you along. You don’t want to be sitting in on a swarm of old women talking books.”
“Mum,” he remarks, but this grin, it tugs at his lips, pulls at the corners of his face. “You’re not old and it’s not a big deal.”
She quirks a brow, but her bad mood has been pulled away through the air vent, is raining down on other people and Patrick, he doesn’t want to be here, but he’s serious when he says it isn’t a big deal.
The train pulls along in a raggedy pattern, tugs at the rail lines beneath them like a child jerking at a rope in gym class. It works in waves, movements as opposed to one great fluid lug and Patrick worries that…he worries.
It pulls to a stop and the doors heave open with a whine and a moan and too many feet shuffle across the mock-carpet floor. Toes before heels before bags before people and a voice (fuck, it’s familiar), it catches his ear, rubs hard against the cilia there, pounds against the drum.
There’s a giggle, a snort, a million murmurs in a million tones, and it’s enough to turn him around, enough to bring him face to silhouette with a small limbed, dark haired, bony thing that makes him shiver and sweat and fuck, his mum is right here.
The hooker doesn’t stop next to him though, mustn’t see him, because he’s stumbling down the carriage, propping himself into the lap of a boy that’s too much, a boy that’s taller and prettier and better dressed than Patrick and he doesn’t know why the hell that bothers him.
“Oh,” his mum says, and her eyes have wandered to the couple too, is observing them with vine-green irises and dilated pupils, eyelids pulled tight back into her skull. “They’re both lovely-looking boys,” and she grins at Patrick as she says it. “I envy the girl that gets to snuggle up with that.”
“Mum,” he groans, his teeth grinding hard in his mouth and he almost says something else, but the smacksmacksmack of lips behind him is enough to dampen his voice.
“Scratch that,” she says, and her eyes are still very wide. “They snuggle up with each other apparently.” She directs her attention back to Patrick, “Do you young ones still say that? Snuggle up?”
“Jesus, mum.” But she’s still grinning, flashing teeth and eyeing off the whore and his, fuck, his boyfriend and this, it shouldn’t irritate Patrick, and he can’t even say he knows why it does.
The boyfriend gets off after ten minutes or so, and the hooker, he gets off four stops later - the stop not two streets away from Thirds.
Fuck
*
“It’s the best one so far,” Anna says, and she’s all teeth tonight, incisors, canines, molars and smilesmilesmile.
“Nowhere near as good as the book though,” Patrick replies, and he scuffs his toe along the carpet, watches as Anna brushes the hair behind her ear.
“Well, that’s a given,” they’re out of the cinema, heading into the lobby and the rain, it pounds against the pavement, rebounds and fires and fights its way against the shield, the barrier that stops it from goinggoinggoing. “Fuck,” she says, “I didn’t bring an umbrella.”
“I’ll pay for a cab.”
“What? Patrick, no, I only live a few blocks away, so-“
“So it won’t be expensive,” he finishes, casts her a gentle smile and watches as she fumbles over words, her eyes widening and her teeth chattering against the bitter chill of Chicago’s autumn.
“Patrick-”
“It’s not a big deal, Anna,” and he feels repetitive, but it’s not a big deal; just like paying for her ticket to see the new Harry Potter wasn’t, just like holding the door open for her wasn’t.
They hail a taxi out on the sidewalk, and she clambers in, all hands and knees and doe eyes with heavy lids. “You coming?”
“Anna,” he says. “Anna, I live on the other side of town.”
She sighs, but Patrick, he just thrusts a twenty dollar note into her hesitant fingers and directs the cab down the street, down to Anna’s.
He sees her wind a window down enough for her to thrust out a hand, to call out a, “Thank you, Patrick Stumph! My valiant knight!”
The rain is still belting all around him, but he grins, lets his laugh splice against the water and heads down the street, wanders away from the cinema, from Anna and he’s halfway home when a car slows just in front of him, when this guy, this boy is tossed from a car. He falls too heavy on the ground and, fuck, he’s shirtless, his pants around his knees, but he’s on his feet tugging them back up before Patrick can so much as blink.
“Motherfucker,” the boy calls out as the car speeds off and Patrick, fuck, but he’d recognise those thighs, that haircut, that arse anywhere.
“Fuck,” he hears himself say, and Patrick, he’s watching all the passer-by’s scurry away with downward eyes, ants in a fucking storm. He can’t help the fact that good Samaritan pours out of him like a flood of unsaid words, can’t help but feel something when he hears the hooker mumble something about assholes not having the decency to drop off at a bus stop.
Patrick moves quicker, dodges puddles and those cracks in the sidewalk that separate the hooker from everyoneelse. “You alright?” He mutters out, tries to get a better look at this kid in the half-light.
“Abso-fucking-lutely.” The hooker turns around, gets one good look at Patrick and is stony faced. “Jesus fuck, are you stalking me?”
Patrick’s jaw drops and he can taste rain. “What? No!”
“Fine,” and the hooker’s soaked to the bone, clothes glued to his skin and Patrick can see every rib, every bone, every heartbeat. He swears the guy shivers.
Patrick bites his lip, rocks back on his heels. “Do you want my coat?”
“No, I don’t want your fucking coat!”
The silence is all consuming, biting at Patrick’s toes, ankles, calves, thighs. “I’m Patrick,” he says.
The hooker stares for a moment, but Patrick’s glasses are too hazy, too fucked-up with the way the raindrops have splattered over them like paint on canvas.
“Like I fucking care.”
*
There’s this library that sits in the middle of town and the books there tower like high-rises, like cliff faces and mountain tops and Patrick, he’s never felt more out of place. People think that the glasses, his stature, that it means he’s smart, a bookish sort of character and Patrick never has the heart to tell them that he doesn’t really read a lot that isn’t sheets of music.
Today though, today his mum asked him to pick up some novels for her, because her book club, it moves faster than she does sometimes and she’s busy for the next few days, working and cooking and socialising.
He tosses his bag onto the nearest table, hides the styrofoam coffee cup full of liquid addictive between the folds of the strap and leaves to wander the aisles.
“Christ,” someone says and it’s followed by a flurry of books collapsing off the shelves, tumbling down the cliff and this guy, kid, he’s buried beneath them. Patrick isn’t asshole enough to ignore it.
“You alright?” Patrick asks after pulling the guy out of the pile.
“Physically fine,” he says, “my pride might go into hiding for a bit though. It’s bad enough that my mum can kick my arse, the fact that a few books can do it too is kinda insulting.”
Patrick nods and tries to suppress a grin. “If it helps, most of them were hard-back.”
The guy laughs and it’s this high, almost wheezing sound that’s too, it’s familiar, and Patrick is sick of all this deja vu.
“I’m Mikey,” the guy says and it’s now that Patrick gets a full look at the guy, taller and lean with glasses that are thick-rimmed and dorky but maybe slightly more in-fashion than Patrick’s. He doesn’t even need to ask to know that this is the boy from the train, the hooker’s friend.
“Patrick,” he says and he holds out a hand, feels too much like his dad when Mikey just stares at it, laughs again before shaking.
“It’s nice to meet you and, y’know, thanks for not laughing in my face about the books.”
“It’s cool,” Patrick says. “Happens to the best of us.”
“So,” Mikey puts a hand on his hip, juts it out and runs a handful of fingers through his hair. “What brings you to this institution of words?”
Patrick’s not quite sure what to say to that, so he laughs, rocks on his heels and grins something fierce. “What?”
“What brings you here, Patrick?”
“Literature,” he doesn‘t say not for him, me. “And yourself?”
Mikey shrugs, “I work in a Borders. Am doing some undercover work - seeing what books are rented here the most, figure out what our waiting public wants.”
“Really?”
“Don’t diss it, man. It works, I’ve done it before.”
Patrick laughs, almost incredulous, but the guy, Mikey, he’s more than genuine. Silence settles like dust and Patrick he rocks back on his heels before leaning forward enough to say, “I saw you and your boyfriend on the train the other day.”
Mikey stops dead, stares at the floor and Patrick, he can tell the guy isn’t blinking. “Look, if you’re gonna beat me up, call me a faggot, then just fuck off, coz-“
“No, no,” Patrick flounders with the words, “It’s not, I’m not like that.”
Mikey takes another look. “Okay.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you, or-“
“Nah, it’s just, I haven’t told my parents or like, anyone, not even my brother and we’re like,” he crosses his fingers. “close, y’know?”
“Yeah.”
“He seems nice.”
“Who?”
“Your boyfriend.”
“Oh, right, yeah, he is. He’s like, really good-looking, y’know? I worry that he’ll wake up and wonder what the fuck he’s doing with me.”
Patrick shrugs, tries to suppress a grimace, coz, again, yeah, he can relate. Anna flashes through his head, but he shoves it, her down. He has time to deal with insecurities later. “How do you cope with him working?” and he didn’t mean to say it, didn’t, but there probably isn’t much going back now, not when Mikey stares like that.
“What do you mean?”
“You know,” and Patrick, he drops his voice, “selling himself?”
“…what?”
*
Continue to part 2..
Rating: R
Fandom: FOB (Patrick/Pete)
Okay, okay, okay. Three guys walk into a bar. This is important.
Three guys, young, they shove aside the door and trample feet-first into some smoke-addled pub with sticky tables and no coasters. One’s tall, pointed, femme (just), an almost moustache poking out too hard beneath his nose (it doesn’t look right, obscures the flesh, the pretty face), one’s some cookie-cutter jock, big and broad and complete with chiselled jaw and a height that the rest of him hasn’t grown into yet. The last is some short, podgy guy, red-hair hidden beneath a trucker cap and thick glasses shielding pastel blue eyes.
These three guys, they walk into a bar. They are not English, Irish or Scottish and none of them are blond.
All of them are American, all of them are minors.
So, they go up to the counter and pull up some barstools and that taller one, the guy with the moustache, he leans back and lets loose this smile that isn’t all that great, not all that pleasant and he turns to the guy in the trucker hat and says, “Jesus, we’re not asking you to fuck anyone.”
The jock guy, he laughs like, this snorting thing that catches in the stale air and the boy in the trucker hat grimaces, but he doesn’t say anything.
“Just proposition someone,” the moustached guy says and he orders two beers from the barman that they won’t ever receive.
“Right,” the guy with the trucker hat replies, and he pulls it off just enough to rub at his hairline, to knock his thick-rimmed glasses askew.
The moustached boy, man, whatever, he just smiles again and says, “You’re options are open, man, just, if Anna ever found out…”
That must be a big deal, a big thing, coz the guy with the trucker hat, he just sighs and says, “Whatever, just tell me what you want me to do.”
The thing about jokes is that until you get to the punch line, they’re really not funny.
Having said that, some jokes never are.
*
Patrick can’t quite remember how he ended up in the middle of this, but he’s pretty sure Brandon’s been planning it for too long.
“Okay,” Brandon says, “just get to the end of the street and then just like, wait for some middle-aged asshole to rock up and, y’know, approach him.” He doesn’t need to say in every sense of the word, because Patrick can hear that between the letters, read it between the lines. “Seriously, it’ll be some funny shit.”
The lot of them (coz there’s more than just Patrick and this douche. Brandon, he never travels alone, relies too heavily on a cohort, a pack of yes-men that giggle and nod and jeer) are standing at the cold, hard starting line of Thirds Avenue, Chicago, and Patrick, he can quite assuredly say that he has never been down here nor did he ever intend to before well, before tonight.
Reasons being that where Patrick’s Chicago is clean-cut and warm, families and that form of blissful suburbia made of clay houses and china doll people, Thirds Chicago is dirty in every sense of the word. Made out of bars and night clubs, brothels, strip clubs and too many prostitutes that are all too fucking young. Kids who are designed to not only appease your run of the mill client, but your average paedophile as well.
“Stumph,” Brandon says, and he thrusts out a hip, purses chapped lips just enough that Patrick genuinely believes that this skinny boy would be far better at playing the part of some alley hooker than Patrick.
Brandon shakes his head, thrusts out his pelvis a little more, and all Patrick can think is seriously.
“Right,” Patrick says instead, and he takes off his trucker cap just enough to rub a hand through his hair. He squints bleary eyes, and pushes his thick-rimmed glasses further up the bridge of his nose.
Brandon huffs out a wayward breath and the gaggle of boys behind him giggle obnoxiously enough that Patrick, not for the first time that night, wonders how the fuck he got into this predicament.
“I’m going,” Patrick says, and those words, both of them, they confirm it. The thought that he is actually doing this echoes around his skull, crawls down his spine fast enough to leave him shivering and nauseous, and fuck, he’s going.
He turns on his heel too quickly, and he’s walked three steps when he hears Brandon talk, when he hears the guy say, “I knew the fucker would do it,”
But right, he thinks, right, coz at least if he makes it to the end of the street, then he’ll be out of arms reach. Out of the way of angry fists and legs and leers, and hey, those guys, those assholes are too chickenshit to even follow, to even come down themselves. They don’t give a fuck if Patrick actually goes through on the dare, on this joke to proposition himself to the first middle-aged man he sees, they just want to watch to make sure he goes down the street far enough to make himself fucking uncomfortable. To make himself unhappy and awkward and susceptible to AIDS just from breathing the air down here.
Thing is, they graduated highschool two weeks ago and Brandon, ever the bully, couldn’t let go of whatever tentative authority he’d gained over his peers, could only cling to it a little tighter when he found Patrick (the bullied, the pressured, the freak, geek, victim) working at the local café. His actions don’t surprise Patrick that much, couldn’t.
Cracks litter the pavement like paper cuts, like scars after war and Patrick tries too hard to focus on them, to stare them down rather than the whores who look at him with raised eyebrows and wide eyes, with sneers and smiles.
There are more boys and girls, more sets of legs here than he can count, each clad in tight pants or tighter skirts, all arses and tits and cocks and thighs and the problem, the issue is that each of these kids (and all of them, they are, they’re Patrick’s age and he doesn’t like it, doesn’t like this), they all look like they should be tucked away at home, snoozing soundly beneath Disney blankets and high school woes. Not here, not doing this.
Too many of them glare as he walks past, too many flash him questioning eyes, suggestive pouts until Patrick’s on a bare street corner, hands deep in his pockets and seriously, what the fuck is he doing here?
There’s a sound to his left, something that rattles like bones in a cage, and Patrick, he turns around too quickly, spins on his heels until he sees the entirety of a dead-end street where one of them, one of the hooker’s staggers behind some hurrying business man, jeans still wrapped around his thighs.
The man, the client, he can’t be any younger than forty, tall and greying, with thin-rimmed glasses knocked askew. This guy, he can’t get away fast enough and that, Patrick doesn’t care if the kid being shoved aside is a whore, he’s a person and this, even watching this feels degrading. The client pulls a few bills from his pocket and shoves them at the hooker, scurries away like its hunting season and he’s the game. Bolts like there are a million cops, a fucking SWAT team tucked into the next bar.
The hooker’s pulled his pants up, covering the honey-brown skin of his arse and is flipping through the bills, shoving them into his pocket. He looks up, bends his neck around the street corner and purses his lips. He’s not tall, and he’s pretty in a way that maybe the more effeminate male models are. No stern jaw line, no broad shoulders, but he has that flawless skin, eyelashes that could cut through glass and hipbones that taper into a perfect arse.
“Forget it, kid,” he says, and this guy, this hooker is a nasally little thing and he‘s moved to stare directly at Patrick with a quirked brow and tattooed arms folded over his chest. “I don’t do virgins.”
Patrick, he’s, well, he’s taken aback. Gaping something fierce, and he’s hunting for words like a wounded predator, can’t find them, and the hooker, he just stares with half-lidded eyes.
“I’m not a virgin,” Patrick says, and he’s not, but he stutters over the words and that, he must look fucking twelve.
The hooker lets loose this half-smile thing that crawls up the corners of his face, and Patrick, he has to stifle his breath, these coarse sounds that are clawing their way out of his lungs. The hooker, he curves his body around a lamppost not four-feet away and this guy, he’s a kid, he’s young, and he moves his body like a…like a whore.
“Whatever,” the hooker says, and he closes his eyes. A car, a Toyota, a fucking family car pulls up beside him. He doesn’t cast a second glance back at Patrick, just folds himself into the car when some overweight, long-haired sleaze throws open the door.
Patrick watches the car speed off, squeaking tyres against the bumpy road and two seconds later a car slows past Patrick, and really, he can’t get out of there fast enough.
*
“Jesus, Patrick,” Anna’s eyes are wide and questioning, worried. “What happened to your hand?”
If he were a more honest person, he’d probably tell her that he fell over whilst running away from Thirds.
If he were more honest, he’d probably say that he spent the whole night at Joe’s trying to figure out if he was going to get HIV from where the skin gaped open on his hand like a dog’s mouth. (For the record, Joe says that this probably falls under that wide open header of arrogant. For the record, Joe was high when he said that.)
Point is, he’s not really an honest person, particularly when Anna’s sitting here, with eyes like liquid gold and skin like fresh-cut paper. He’s not honest and he’s not genuine and that’s probably why he always fucks up things like this.
Point is, he says, “Cut it on the corner of the stovetop last night,” and Anna eats it up like cake.
*
“You didn’t have to come,” she says, “I know your father seems to think that I’m incapable of going anywhere without having my hand held, but believe it or not, I am a rather competent woman.”
“Dad was just worried,” Patrick says, and he grins at her, fleeting and gentle and sits back further in the foam padding of the chair. “He’s allowed to be, it’s his job as the husband.”
“Right,” she says, “I’m not complaining about him being worried. I’m complaining about not being able to go to this damn function without him getting himself into a state. I’m complaining about him forcing you along. You don’t want to be sitting in on a swarm of old women talking books.”
“Mum,” he remarks, but this grin, it tugs at his lips, pulls at the corners of his face. “You’re not old and it’s not a big deal.”
She quirks a brow, but her bad mood has been pulled away through the air vent, is raining down on other people and Patrick, he doesn’t want to be here, but he’s serious when he says it isn’t a big deal.
The train pulls along in a raggedy pattern, tugs at the rail lines beneath them like a child jerking at a rope in gym class. It works in waves, movements as opposed to one great fluid lug and Patrick worries that…he worries.
It pulls to a stop and the doors heave open with a whine and a moan and too many feet shuffle across the mock-carpet floor. Toes before heels before bags before people and a voice (fuck, it’s familiar), it catches his ear, rubs hard against the cilia there, pounds against the drum.
There’s a giggle, a snort, a million murmurs in a million tones, and it’s enough to turn him around, enough to bring him face to silhouette with a small limbed, dark haired, bony thing that makes him shiver and sweat and fuck, his mum is right here.
The hooker doesn’t stop next to him though, mustn’t see him, because he’s stumbling down the carriage, propping himself into the lap of a boy that’s too much, a boy that’s taller and prettier and better dressed than Patrick and he doesn’t know why the hell that bothers him.
“Oh,” his mum says, and her eyes have wandered to the couple too, is observing them with vine-green irises and dilated pupils, eyelids pulled tight back into her skull. “They’re both lovely-looking boys,” and she grins at Patrick as she says it. “I envy the girl that gets to snuggle up with that.”
“Mum,” he groans, his teeth grinding hard in his mouth and he almost says something else, but the smacksmacksmack of lips behind him is enough to dampen his voice.
“Scratch that,” she says, and her eyes are still very wide. “They snuggle up with each other apparently.” She directs her attention back to Patrick, “Do you young ones still say that? Snuggle up?”
“Jesus, mum.” But she’s still grinning, flashing teeth and eyeing off the whore and his, fuck, his boyfriend and this, it shouldn’t irritate Patrick, and he can’t even say he knows why it does.
The boyfriend gets off after ten minutes or so, and the hooker, he gets off four stops later - the stop not two streets away from Thirds.
Fuck
*
“It’s the best one so far,” Anna says, and she’s all teeth tonight, incisors, canines, molars and smilesmilesmile.
“Nowhere near as good as the book though,” Patrick replies, and he scuffs his toe along the carpet, watches as Anna brushes the hair behind her ear.
“Well, that’s a given,” they’re out of the cinema, heading into the lobby and the rain, it pounds against the pavement, rebounds and fires and fights its way against the shield, the barrier that stops it from goinggoinggoing. “Fuck,” she says, “I didn’t bring an umbrella.”
“I’ll pay for a cab.”
“What? Patrick, no, I only live a few blocks away, so-“
“So it won’t be expensive,” he finishes, casts her a gentle smile and watches as she fumbles over words, her eyes widening and her teeth chattering against the bitter chill of Chicago’s autumn.
“Patrick-”
“It’s not a big deal, Anna,” and he feels repetitive, but it’s not a big deal; just like paying for her ticket to see the new Harry Potter wasn’t, just like holding the door open for her wasn’t.
They hail a taxi out on the sidewalk, and she clambers in, all hands and knees and doe eyes with heavy lids. “You coming?”
“Anna,” he says. “Anna, I live on the other side of town.”
She sighs, but Patrick, he just thrusts a twenty dollar note into her hesitant fingers and directs the cab down the street, down to Anna’s.
He sees her wind a window down enough for her to thrust out a hand, to call out a, “Thank you, Patrick Stumph! My valiant knight!”
The rain is still belting all around him, but he grins, lets his laugh splice against the water and heads down the street, wanders away from the cinema, from Anna and he’s halfway home when a car slows just in front of him, when this guy, this boy is tossed from a car. He falls too heavy on the ground and, fuck, he’s shirtless, his pants around his knees, but he’s on his feet tugging them back up before Patrick can so much as blink.
“Motherfucker,” the boy calls out as the car speeds off and Patrick, fuck, but he’d recognise those thighs, that haircut, that arse anywhere.
“Fuck,” he hears himself say, and Patrick, he’s watching all the passer-by’s scurry away with downward eyes, ants in a fucking storm. He can’t help the fact that good Samaritan pours out of him like a flood of unsaid words, can’t help but feel something when he hears the hooker mumble something about assholes not having the decency to drop off at a bus stop.
Patrick moves quicker, dodges puddles and those cracks in the sidewalk that separate the hooker from everyoneelse. “You alright?” He mutters out, tries to get a better look at this kid in the half-light.
“Abso-fucking-lutely.” The hooker turns around, gets one good look at Patrick and is stony faced. “Jesus fuck, are you stalking me?”
Patrick’s jaw drops and he can taste rain. “What? No!”
“Fine,” and the hooker’s soaked to the bone, clothes glued to his skin and Patrick can see every rib, every bone, every heartbeat. He swears the guy shivers.
Patrick bites his lip, rocks back on his heels. “Do you want my coat?”
“No, I don’t want your fucking coat!”
The silence is all consuming, biting at Patrick’s toes, ankles, calves, thighs. “I’m Patrick,” he says.
The hooker stares for a moment, but Patrick’s glasses are too hazy, too fucked-up with the way the raindrops have splattered over them like paint on canvas.
“Like I fucking care.”
*
There’s this library that sits in the middle of town and the books there tower like high-rises, like cliff faces and mountain tops and Patrick, he’s never felt more out of place. People think that the glasses, his stature, that it means he’s smart, a bookish sort of character and Patrick never has the heart to tell them that he doesn’t really read a lot that isn’t sheets of music.
Today though, today his mum asked him to pick up some novels for her, because her book club, it moves faster than she does sometimes and she’s busy for the next few days, working and cooking and socialising.
He tosses his bag onto the nearest table, hides the styrofoam coffee cup full of liquid addictive between the folds of the strap and leaves to wander the aisles.
“Christ,” someone says and it’s followed by a flurry of books collapsing off the shelves, tumbling down the cliff and this guy, kid, he’s buried beneath them. Patrick isn’t asshole enough to ignore it.
“You alright?” Patrick asks after pulling the guy out of the pile.
“Physically fine,” he says, “my pride might go into hiding for a bit though. It’s bad enough that my mum can kick my arse, the fact that a few books can do it too is kinda insulting.”
Patrick nods and tries to suppress a grin. “If it helps, most of them were hard-back.”
The guy laughs and it’s this high, almost wheezing sound that’s too, it’s familiar, and Patrick is sick of all this deja vu.
“I’m Mikey,” the guy says and it’s now that Patrick gets a full look at the guy, taller and lean with glasses that are thick-rimmed and dorky but maybe slightly more in-fashion than Patrick’s. He doesn’t even need to ask to know that this is the boy from the train, the hooker’s friend.
“Patrick,” he says and he holds out a hand, feels too much like his dad when Mikey just stares at it, laughs again before shaking.
“It’s nice to meet you and, y’know, thanks for not laughing in my face about the books.”
“It’s cool,” Patrick says. “Happens to the best of us.”
“So,” Mikey puts a hand on his hip, juts it out and runs a handful of fingers through his hair. “What brings you to this institution of words?”
Patrick’s not quite sure what to say to that, so he laughs, rocks on his heels and grins something fierce. “What?”
“What brings you here, Patrick?”
“Literature,” he doesn‘t say not for him, me. “And yourself?”
Mikey shrugs, “I work in a Borders. Am doing some undercover work - seeing what books are rented here the most, figure out what our waiting public wants.”
“Really?”
“Don’t diss it, man. It works, I’ve done it before.”
Patrick laughs, almost incredulous, but the guy, Mikey, he’s more than genuine. Silence settles like dust and Patrick he rocks back on his heels before leaning forward enough to say, “I saw you and your boyfriend on the train the other day.”
Mikey stops dead, stares at the floor and Patrick, he can tell the guy isn’t blinking. “Look, if you’re gonna beat me up, call me a faggot, then just fuck off, coz-“
“No, no,” Patrick flounders with the words, “It’s not, I’m not like that.”
Mikey takes another look. “Okay.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you, or-“
“Nah, it’s just, I haven’t told my parents or like, anyone, not even my brother and we’re like,” he crosses his fingers. “close, y’know?”
“Yeah.”
“He seems nice.”
“Who?”
“Your boyfriend.”
“Oh, right, yeah, he is. He’s like, really good-looking, y’know? I worry that he’ll wake up and wonder what the fuck he’s doing with me.”
Patrick shrugs, tries to suppress a grimace, coz, again, yeah, he can relate. Anna flashes through his head, but he shoves it, her down. He has time to deal with insecurities later. “How do you cope with him working?” and he didn’t mean to say it, didn’t, but there probably isn’t much going back now, not when Mikey stares like that.
“What do you mean?”
“You know,” and Patrick, he drops his voice, “selling himself?”
“…what?”
*
Continue to part 2..