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Patrick is drowning and it’s not as peaceful as literature has led him to believe.
What’s nice is that no one in the room is visibly distressed by this. Not the label suits, or the guys and gals from the legal department, not Joe, or Andy. Especially not Pete, who is the source of Patrick’s pre-dinner self-waterboarding and, therefore, really ought to show at least a tiny bit of concern. Patrick is dying in the middle of a boardroom meeting and no one is doing a thing. Which is odd, as all of them have a vested financial interest in him remaining alive.
A childhood built around the Public Service Announcements of the early ’90s has taught him many things; how to say no to drugs, how to avoid stranger danger, and that 88 percent of all drownings occur under supervision. The earnest debate goes on around him as his ears begin to ring and his vision begins to blur. So this is it. This is how he makes his final exit from this tired, mortal plane. And then, suddenly, he coughs up his Evian, a cubic liter of mucus and snot, and, possibly, his left lung.
He sucks in a huge, shuddering breath; honestly, breathing is a hugely underrated pastime. Casually, Pete reaches over and pats him gently on the back. As he is the reason for Patrick’s sudden-onset Zero Dark Thirty moment, this is, quite literally, the least he can do.
He doesn’t stop talking, though.
“But, yeah,” he says, “I mean, if we’re looking for things that’ll get us on the front page, I think that could be a winner.”
The suits murmur their approval, there is much tapping of keyboards and swiping of phones and muted conversation that seems to be generally positive. Something something generate buzz something something. Patrick begins to sweat.
“Pete,” he wheezes. “What the fuck?”
“Hmm?” Pete says, like he’s already forgotten the thing he said thirty seconds ago, the thing that caused his so-called “best friend” to almost choke — to death — during their first round-the-table with Island since they agreed that maybe, possibly, Fall Out Boy might be a thing they were ready to try again.
“Could…” Patrick begins, and it’s difficult, because he’s trying not to splutter. “Could you…”
“You should grab a drink,” Pete says sweetly. Patrick shows him his middle finger in response. “Rude much?”
He tries again, as firmly as he can, “Could you back up half a minute and repeat what the fuck you just said?”
Pete’s brow creases into a frown. “Um,” he says, “I said, ‘if we’re looking for things that’ll get us on the front page, I think that could be a winner.’”
“Further back,” Patrick instructs. “Just — A little further back.”
“Oh, right.” Pete’s frown deepens, like he’s thinking really, really hard, which is obviously untrue since Pete has clearly lost his fucking mind. “I said, ‘Patrick and I have a sex tape.’”
“Yeah,” Patrick nods, “that. Okay, so, to reiterate: Pete — What the fuck?”
“It’s not a terrible idea, actually,” one of the suits says. “Is it classy?”
She earns herself the position of Patrick’s second least favorite person in the room. Pete, obviously, is first.
“It is a terrible idea, though,” Patrick interjects. “It’s the worst idea I’ve heard today, possibly ever, actually. And I’ve got a decade of Terrible Pete Ideas as a frame of reference.”
“Super classy,” Pete assures them, talking over Patrick, which is rude. “Patrick’s a musical savant and he wrote the score. That’s how classy it is.”
“Is he legal?” another exec chimes in, fussing with his phone. Patrick immediately begins to reorder his list of people he doesn’t like. “Like, in the video, not like, now.”
“Just wait a second,” Patrick objects. No one waits at all.
“Is he fat?” asks a third, rocketing to the top of the list so hard it’s a wonder he doesn’t blow the roof off of the building. “It’s definitely better if he’s not fat.”
“Hey!” Patrick yelps.
“See?” Pete says, with one of his toothy Wentzian grins. “This is a really good idea.”
Alright. Well, Patrick has clearly passed out on the stairs just outside the boardroom door. He is now unconscious and bleeding out and he’s going to spend the rest of eternity watching this farcical meeting play out around him because, apparently, at some point during his life he did some dubious things and this is the punishment. It makes sense if he squints at it.
He turns to Andy and Joe. “Am I dying?” he asks plaintively. “You can tell me. Honestly, it’s either that or I’m having a nervous breakdown and I’m not sure which of those is worse. Wait, would I know if I was having a breakdown? Maybe it’s a panic attack…”
Andy steeples his fingers and looks at Patrick over the tips with grave, fatherly concern.
“Whilst I can’t say I’m particularly proud of you,” he begins in his Disappointed Mom voice, “I also can’t say I’m especially surprised.”
Patrick doesn’t like the Disappointed Mom voice because, until 2010, it was a voice that Andy reserved exclusively for Pete. It’s not, it transpires, particularly nice to be on the receiving end of it.
“Yeah,” Joe nods and shrugs. “We’re not mad. We’re just… disappointed.”
“Right,” Patrick says. “Like — right.”
“No one’s mad, Rick,” Pete echoes. “They’re just disappointed and disappointment is super easy to live with!”
“Um,” Patrick says. “Yeah, no.”
There is… a lot going on at the far side of the room. Someone is talking loudly about calling MTV, another is saying worrying things about burner phones and likely nightclubs where they can fake the loss. If Patrick’s mom gets wind of any of this — like, ever — he’s going to kill Pete with his bare hands. He won’t even hide the body. This is the sort of thing that’s worth going to jail for.
“I think Patrick’s a maybe on the sex tape,” Pete calls out loudly.
If the words ‘sex tape’ and ‘Patrick’ feature in the same sentence one more time, he’s going to hurl himself through the window and onto the sidewalk far, far below them. This is what he gets for allowing Pete back into his house and, by extension his life, with nothing more than a paper bag of burritos from El Zarape and a vague idea about writing a song. This is what he gets for imagining Pete might have grown up a little with his sexy, celebrity dad haircut and his carefully, casual fashion statement of ripped up jeans and slashed muscle tees. There was a whole decade in which Patrick was offered numerous opportunities to learn that Pete Wentz always has an ulterior motive and, ultimately, does not change.
“I’m not a maybe,” he retorts. “I am a definite, firm and absolute no.”
Pete pouts. This is an act of war. Patrick has spent the past two and a half years carefully disengaging himself from Pete’s ability to force him to think with his dick. There was the ten step recovery program with Michael Day in sweaty backstage rooms and the musky carpet of the floors they crashed on like teenagers. Twenty minutes in an executive boardroom and his thoughts — and resolve — are melting into a syrupy puddle of Pete’s hands, Pete’s thighs, Pete’s lips.
“Why not?” Pete asks sadly.
“Because,” Patrick says, loudly enough that everyone in the room, the building, and Lower Manhattan can hear them. “Because, Peter, first, there is no way in hell that I’m allowing my ass to be used as a marketing tool—”
“It’s a great ass,” Pete opines, somewhat wistfully. “Everyone thinks so.”
Joe gags quietly into his coffee. Andy covers his ears and aggressively bangs his heels together three times while whispering ‘there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home’ under his breath.
“Second,” Patrick continues, louder, all the better to drown out Pete’s inappropriate conjecture, “you — like, of all people — do not get to decide when my ass is revealed to the nation.”
“You’re no fun,” Pete huffs quietly. “You’ll literally never decide to do that without my help.”
“Third,” Patrick has no idea when he began holding up fingers but right now he smears all three across Pete’s stupid, handsome face, lest he misunderstand the magnitude of Patrick’s third and final point, “And I feel like I really can’t stress this enough — We do not have a fucking sex tape.”
The room falls temporarily and blissfully silent. Everyone is looking at him. It’s not that he’s unused to being looked at — growing up under stage lights and in front of telescopic camera lenses very quickly deadens the impact of staring — but he’s not used to being looked at while Pete licks his lips and brushes his tongue against the callus on Patrick’s forefinger. It’s definitely — probably — accidental. The heat curling through his groin is probably just a side effect of the choking fit. That sounds completely reasonable.
Then, Pete grins, lopsided and sexy, and says, “Don’t we, Patrick? Don’t we?”
His inflection is such that Patrick experiences a confusion so deep and fatalistic that it rearranges his molecular structure. Only Pete Wentz could cause him to doubt the validity of a statement so simple, so straightforward, so unbelievably obvious as ‘we do not have a sex tape.’ There have been moments over the past couple of years where Patrick has found himself missing the effervescent excitement of life with Pete Wentz. Right now is not one of those moments.
“We don’t,” he says, shrilly, and not firmly at all. “We definitely, absolutely, irrefutably do not have a sex tape. You’re delusional, and you’re dragging everyone in this room along with you on your carousel of lies. We have never made a sex tape. I would never have allowed you to make a sex tape. We do not have a sex tape.” He pauses and stares at Pete’s glowing eyes and louche grin and adds, uncertainly, “... like, do we?”
Pete smile stretches until it threatens to eclipse his sharp jaw, his balled cheeks and his bleach-stained, sleeveless shirt with the rips down the sides that reveal his ribs, pecs and dark, budding nipples. It’s a smile that’s all teeth and Patrick’s face feels hot and somehow, those two things are all tangled up together like veins that lead to the same pulsing, four-chambered heart. He needs to lie down.
Pete says smugly, “You don’t sound convinced.”
It turns out that his dick is still lagging on the idea of Pete Wentz fucking him in front of a camera. It twitches gently in his underwear, the tentative rise of a hand in a crowded room. Excuse me, boss, could we just talk about the sex for a second? Patrick feels woozy.
“Mrmmph,” Patrick says. Then, he carefully removes his fedora, sets it down on the table and slams his forehead into the wood. It’s… splashier than he anticipated, a small tidal wave of his own hacked up mineral water slicking wetly over his face and cardigan.
“When could you give us the tape?” asks the suit who called him fat. “Now?”
“Never,” Patrick burbles. “We can never show you the tape, because the tape doesn’t exist and Pete is insane and, also, fuck every single one of you.”
“Tomorrow,” Pete says, proving he’s a special variety, limited edition shit-for-brains. “We can get the tape to you tomorrow. Once my co-star and I have looked it over tonight.”
“No, we won’t,” Patrick says hysterically. “We won’t, because there’s no tape and you have no co-star and I’m not enabling you any further. You’re deranged.”
Although the only thing in Patrick’s direct line of sight is his own, manic-eyed reflection in the sad puddle spreading across the boardroom table, he can hear the shit-eating width of Pete’s grin. This is exactly how Alice must have felt, trying to deal with that hyperactive asshole of a Hatter and that cryptic, smart-alecky cat.
“Tomorrow,” Pete says again, decisively, and this seems to please the suits because chairs begin to scrape and laptops click closed.
Patrick looks at the cold, gray New York sky stretching out beyond the window and thinks how much nicer it would be if he were a goose so he could fly the fuck away. How sad then, that he’s trapped in this very human form in this very human office while his completely insane best friend, ex friend to the end, never-again lover talks utter horseshit about a sex tape that doesn’t exist. Hopefully, Pete will forget all about this by the time they reach the hotel.
***
To make a long story short, Pete doesn’t forget about it by the time they reach the hotel.
To make a short story longer, Pete spends the whole forty-five minutes in the back of a bright yellow New York taxi yakking on and endlessly on about the sex tape. He provides such overwhelming detail that Patrick is honestly beginning to believe it exists. There are a lot of things that happened between 2001 and 2010 that he’s spent a lot of time trying not to think about. A sex tape seems like exactly the sort of thing he would’ve worked very hard to repress.
To make a longer story short once more, Patrick is beginning to think that maybe, possibly, he did make a sex tape. It’s the only explanation for Pete’s insistence that, by this time tomorrow, the folks at Island will know exactly how Patrick looks when he comes.
“And, yeah, it’s filmed on a Sidekick so the quality isn’t, like, amazing,” Pete says as Fifth Avenue rolls by the window. “But, you can see all the major attractions, the, uh, points of interest, if you know what I mean.”
He waggles his eyebrows. Patrick considers throwing him from the car. It’s pointless — they’re not moving quickly enough to inflict any real damage.
“Pete,” he begins wearily.
Pete continues, “Honestly, this could be an excellent way to get us trending on social media. I’m basically a genius.”
“You are so far from being a genius,” Patrick assures him. “You and genius are not on the same floor of the intellectual building. You’re not even on nodding terms in the elevator. If you were on a bus with genius, it would spend the whole time looking out of the window and trying to avoid eye contact with you.”
“Ouch,” Pete says, pouting attractively once more. “You’ll be nicer to me when everyone’s seen our sex tape and you’re the most popular guy on the internet.”
“I keep telling you, we don’t have a sex tape, why are you still saying these ridiculous things?”
He has to shout to make himself heard because, once they climbed into the cab and Pete started talking about camera angles and on-screen dick shrinkage, the driver cranked the volume on his radio pretty hard. Patrick has never before heard a Persian folk cover of Freak on a Leash. He’d like it a lot if he wasn’t currently in a state of shock.
“Trick,” Pete says, with great condescension. “Denial is not a good look for you.”
Patrick’s limbic system grows an exoskeleton, fossilizes and shuts down. His brain is numb. There’s no way he can continue to process any of this.
“Am I having a stroke?” he asks Andy and Joe.
“I don’t know,” Joe says thoughtfully. “Can you raise your arms? Can you smell burnt toast?” to Andy, he says, “I saw that last one on an infomercial.”
“They can be surprisingly informative,” Andy agrees unhelpfully.
Patrick turns to Pete and looks him in the eyes and says, very seriously, “We do not have a sex tape.”
Pete shrugs casually. “We had sex.”
And Patrick’s dick twitches softly behind his zipper. Because they did. They did have sex and it was amazing and Pete’s mouth has kissed him, sucked his cock and licked him until he ached. At least, it was amazing until it wasn’t. Until they were fucking more than they were talking, exchanging rational conversation for slamming into one another with the ferocity of a fist fight. Until it wasn’t good unless one of them ended the night with blood on his teeth or skin under his fingernails.
Still, hearing Pete say it out loud when he’s never said it out loud in the past… Patrick makes a strangled, hnngh sound and presses his hands over his crotch.
“We did… do that,” Patrick agrees shrilly. “But—”
“Frequently,” Andy agrees, killing the mood and Patrick’s earnest, early-stage boner.
“Loudly,” Joe adds.
“Inconsiderately,” Andy says.
“Insharedspacesly,” Joe says.
“That’s not a word,” Patrick informs him. “And, like, be that as it may, I think I’d remember if—”
“Hey, look!” Pete says, pointing out of the window of their motionless cab. “We’re at the hotel. God, I’m so stiff, I could use a shower.”
What Patrick doesn’t need to deal with right now is the idea of Pete in the shower. He begins tossing crumpled twenties at the cab driver like he didn’t nearly bankrupt himself with the whole Soul Punk… thing. All parts of his higher functioning cortical matter have shut down for the duration of this episode. Where Patrick once had thoughts and intellect and a sense of self-preservation there’s now a flashing sign that says out of service, please try again later. Pete grins at him from the other side of backseat and a low, urgent heat uncoils in Patrick’s groin.
“You should come to my room,” Patrick’s mouth says, without any input from Patrick’s brain. “We have things to do. Uh, I mean — you know — to talk about.”
“They’re going to make the sequel,” Andy mutters to Joe with resigned inevitability.
Patrick shakes his head urgently. “We haven’t made the original. I — I can’t overstate this. There is no sex tape. Pete is insane and I need to explain this to him — again. Probably with yelling.”
Joe rolls his eyes. “They’re definitely making the sequel.”
“We know how Patrick likes to yell,” Andy says.
“Remember Atlanta?” Joe asks.
Andy shudders — shudders! — like Patrick makes any more noise when he’s being soundly fucked into the mattress of a tour bus bunk than anyone else in similar circumstances. Andy grumbles, “I try not to. I really, really try not to.”
Then, the two of them elect not to ride in the elevator with Pete and Patrick and, instead, Patrick finds himself staring resolutely at the swirls on the Jackson Pollock carpet as they shudder up through the floors and spill out right by his room. He cups both hands over his traitorous erection and tries to think unsexy thoughts with limited success. He is mad at Pete, not aroused by him. There’s no sex tape and now everyone at Island thinks there is a sex tape and no one is going to believe that there isn’t one when they arrive at tomorrow’s meeting without one. Everyone is going to think Patrick chickened out of an agreement he didn’t make and if the band collapses or no one buys the new album they’re going to say it’s his fault for not revealing his bedroom game to the internet. None of this should be making his dick hard.
The door closes behind them.
“We don’t have a sex tape,” he says, very firmly, which is difficult because seeing Pete in a hotel room brings back certain memories. It triggers Pavlovian responses and muscle memory in the darker part of Patrick’s lizard brain and, as Pete shrugs off his leather jacket and reveals his tattoos and his dark, dark underarm hair and his fucking biceps... Well. Patrick could break rocks with the solid heat of his cock right now, is what he’s saying.
Pete is messing around with his phone. Once upon a pre-hiatus it would’ve been his ubiquitous Sidekick but now it’s an iPhone, sleek and gray. There is, apparently, no version of Pete who can be found without a digital recording device surgically grafted to his hand. He fiddles with it for a moment, with those long, tanned, blunt-tipped fingers that Patrick hasn’t thought about at all since a night in another hotel room in New York City. God, is this idiot actually this fucking dense? Is he so idiotic, so prophetically foolhardy with Patrick’s battered, storm-bruised feelings that he can’t understand what any of this is doing to him? Finally, he props it on the dresser and he purses his lips and then he looks up and meets Patrick’s gaze, eyes glowing.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says, which worries Patrick greatly. “Specifically, I started thinking when we started looking over all of those contracts and waivers and documents and disclaimers.”
Patrick blinks. This is not the direction he imagined this conversation was going to take. “You’ve been thinking about — contracts?” he asks, his brow creasing in confusion. “That’s — is that a thing that you think about a lot?”
“I think about contracts a lot when you’re around,” Pete shrugs. “Recently, anyway.”
He moves the phone half an inch to the left then crosses the room to the bed, crouches, and nods quietly to himself.
“You… do?” Patrick’s frown deepens. He has no idea if this should offend or delight him. So, he’s both offended and delighted. And aroused. Offended, delighted and aroused. But, like, mostly aroused.
“Here’s the thing,” Pete says. “Contracts are basically rules, right?” He nudges the phone once more. “Could you move to the right a little? No, your right.”
Patrick shuffles across the carpet obediently. “Why? Wait, are you recording this? Why are you recording this? Is this revenge for the whole Punk’d… thing? Because, in my defense, I said it was a bad idea at the time, so—”
And then Pete takes his shirt off.
This is not part of the plan. Not that Patrick has anything that could be reasonably referred to as ‘a plan’. In fact, Patrick has nothing more than a loose handful of bullet points but still, this was definitely not part of it. Like he knows exactly what he’s doing, Pete stretches, flexes each muscle in his arms, back, shoulders and, if this is Hell, if he brained himself in that meeting room or walked in front of a bus or passed out cold in his lonely little house and never woke up, then Patrick is absolutely okay with that.
Fuck, but Pete’s whole torso is a work of art, pecs and abs and lats all smooth and hard and golden. Dark with ink and stomach hair, Pete shirtless is a beautiful, overwhelming thing. God, he wants to lick his way over Pete’s nipples, his ribs, down the length of his happy trail, to follow it to its inevitable conclusion and take his... his... Patrick makes a reasonable attempt to choke on his own tongue.
Autoerotic asphyxiation in a hotel room — what a rock star way to go out.
His knees buckle momentarily but, handily, Pete’s foray into directive instruction has placed him conveniently close to the bed. He collapses onto the edge of it and attempts to breathe deeply with limited success.
“So,” Pete says, like he didn’t just remove his shirt, randomly, during a conversation about contracts. “Rules and terms and whatnot.”
“Oh,” Patrick wheezes, concerned he might be about to have an asthma attack. Or an aneurysm. “I — You took your shirt off.”
His tongue feels very sticky against the roof of his mouth.
“Focus,” Pete says. “I need you to concentrate.”
Patrick finds this particularly unfair; it’s not like he told Pete to start playing a game of Strip Lawyer Talk.
He attempts to tell Pete this, but instead, just says, “Hnngh.”
“The thing is,” says Pete conversationally, “we’ve discussed everything about the band, right? Monetary split, creative issues, dos and don’ts and hard nos, the four of us have figured all of that out.”
If Patrick doesn’t taste Pete’s stupid bartskull soon, he’s going to drown in his own drool. He is more erection than functioning brain cells, more hormone than man, incapable of forming a rational thought. Repeating things that Pete says is all he’s currently capable of.
“Dos and don’ts,” he murmurs insensibly. “Figured it out.”
“So, here’s the thing,” Pete says, “you and I are discussing our terms right now. We’re going to make it clear, set it out in black and white, and there won’t be a single loophole, because, this time, we won’t break up and break apart our band.”
A small but determined cluster of blood cells stages a siege on Patrick’s frontal lobe. He pauses, blinks, and comes through the fog of lust for long enough to say, “Is this — Look, at the risk of this becoming a theme, Pete, what the fuck?”
When Pete kneels in front of him it makes each muscle in his stomach and chest flex and tighten. He reaches forward, as if to take Patrick’s hand, but then stops. He looks up at him, golden and endless, from under his lashes.
He says, “Okay, here’s the thing, I sort of had this whole speech planned about how the two of us are basically — Like, if you opened the dictionary and looked up ‘fate’ it would just be a picture of us and the words ‘see reference image’. I was going to take you to Central Park and tell you that I’ve had almost three years of me without you and that — Honestly, that me is an ass.”
Patrick tries very hard to concentrate and says, “But instead…?”
“Well,” Pete frowns, “instead I brought you here and took my shirt off and, like, yeah. I didn’t really think beyond this specific point, dude. Not gonna lie.”
“That was your original romantic plan? Take me to the park and talk about dictionaries?” Oh God, it’s been years and Pete is still a fucking idiot.
Pete huffs. “It was a good speech, okay? But then I said the thing about the sex tape and you looked — God, you had this look, like how you used to look at me right before we…” For someone who was tossing around the words ‘sex tape’ like a game of Scattergories, Pete is surprisingly coy about about saying it now. “So, it turns out I’m really shitty at planning things out.”
Patrick blinks at him. “No, go on, this is going great. This is like — one of your better schemes, if we’re being totally honest. Much better than the thing that happened in Munich, you know, when you almost got us arrested for indecent exposure?”
“Shut up,” Pete says sulkily. He has a good mouth for sulking, flat and wide and turned down at the corners. “I’m actually trying really hard to say I’m sorry about what happened. Last time. And I don’t want it to happen again. So. Here we are.”
Patrick’s eyebrows furrow. It almost sounds like Pete is acknowledging his role in the train wreck of the band — of them — falling apart. This is not the sort of thing Pete does. If there were a calendar on hand, Patrick would be circling the date. On this day in 2013, Pete Wentz said something rational. It’s so distressingly hard to think when Pete is shirtless, when he’s blinking up from those ancient eyes and biting into his lip and Patrick’s dick is filled with his pulse.
“So, we don’t have a sex tape?” he says, snagged on that single, scratched record thought.
“We don’t,” Pete grins. “But we could make one. If you want to?”
There is a phone recording them from the dresser. Patrick ought to have more misgivings about this than he currently does but really, the fact that he can form whole thoughts at all right now is something of a modern day miracle. He takes a handful of Pete’s belt buckle in his fist and feels the interested twitch of Pete’s impossibly hard dick rubbing up against his knuckles.
He hauls Pete closer and whispers against his lips, “Fuck me like the whole world is watching.”
When they kiss, it feels less like a decision and more like an inevitability. Pete’s mouth fits to his just so, like it always did, and his tongue is broad and strong and confident in Patrick’s mouth, like it always was, and his kiss is deep and thorough and exploring and it’s thrilling and new and familiar and... wonderful. How incredible, then, to kiss like new lovers and old darlings, with open mouths that melt for one another. Patrick nips into the heat of Pete’s lip and tastes Pete’s mouth and decides he is never going to get luckier than this.
“I think I’ll die if you don’t suck me off,” he gasps into the golden yoke of Pete’s collarbone, biting at the ink looped there, at the soft underside of Pete’s stubbled jaw. “God, Pete, I can’t — I’ve been hard for you since you said the words ‘sex tape.’”
“Fuck yeah,” Pete murmurs, working a hand along the swollen, blood and tissue stiffness of Patrick’s cock, pushed down along the inseam of his jeans. Patrick jumps, a whole body muscle cramp, one fist knotted in the rough hair at the back of Pete’s head, the other sinking into the sheets at his side. If he doesn’t feel Pete’s mouth on him in the next few seconds, his death is inevitable.
The button-and-zipper of his jeans resists for what feels like several minutes. Like several years. The delay is so impossible that Patrick considers cutting himself out of them with the tiny scissors from the sewing kit in the bedside drawer. Can he call the fire department and demand the jaws of death? His boxers snag on his zipper and his dick is so helplessly, hopelessly caged that it feels like it might qualify as an emergency.
He thrusts up into nothing then grabs at Pete, imagining he can just grind against his face until he comes, inevitably and explosively and embarrassingly quickly. Honestly, that sounds pretty hot and he’s sure Pete would be into it, so...
“Up,” Pete snarls as he wrestles Patrick out of his clothes. He’s aggressive, desperate, there’s no finesse. When Patrick’s back hits the bed, he is entirely bare with his cock dark against his belly. This is better, he decides, this is so much better. Pete surges after him, popping up like an unclothed jack in the box from the foot of the bed, his skin as hot as Patrick’s churning blood, biting bruises into the blue-vein pale of his thighs.
“Please,” he says. “God, Pete, please.”
Pete licks, just once, around the ridged cap of Patrick’s cock. He does it delicately, with curled tongue and lips wet, like he’s checking the flavor of the glistening evidence of Patrick’s arousal that pearls at the head. He dips his tongue, exploring, and savors, eyes closed and Patrick no longer has skin, just exposed nerves that burst electric along his synapses. He makes a fist in Pete’s hair and pulls, warning.
“God, Patrick,” Pete whispers hoarsely. “Fuck, when you see how you look when you’re like this…”
His breath stirs the copper of Patrick’s pubic hair, leaves him goose bumped and shaking as Pete buries his nose in the brackish salt of his groin and breathes deep. His cock brushes against Pete’s stubbled cheek and twitches. He drops his head back onto the mattress and sees stars — galaxies, the whole fucking universe — explode against the ceiling. “Pete, I need — I need —”
“Turn over,” Pete rasps, his hands big and golden against Patrick’s hips.
Patrick turns, willingly and without question. He flips onto his stomach and cants his hips up and back in search of friction. He whines, desperate and a little slutty, and gently fingers his wound-tender cock.
“Pete,” he says, because he’s forgotten everything else, “Pete,” he whines, because his thoughts are slushy and opaque, “Pete,” he gasps, because Pete leans in and, exquisitely, fits his mouth to the nervy quiver of his hole. “Pete, Pete, Pete.”
“I got you,” Pete murmurs, his mouth vibrating so that Patrick hears it less than he feels it, like morse code, shivering up through his spine.
Pete eats him like he kissed him; open-mouthed and tasting, his tongue edacious as it digs into the tight heat of Patrick’s body. It’s not like he’s the only one to have Patrick like this, but he’s the only one to have him like this, to bare him open and lick him until he cries out from the heat, the pressure, the lapping warm insistence of it. He squeezes his cock, feels it hot and tight as a burn against his belly. Behind him, Pete’s thumb touches his hole, rough under the smooth warmth of his tongue, reverent, the grant of absolution in the brush of skin to skin.
Pete’s tongue moves inside of him, fucking into him, impossibly supple and warm. He laps with unhurried curiosity, like he’s reacquainting himself with the feel, the dark-earth taste. He licks like Patrick is melting, each flick of his tongue thoughtful, measured, mopping him up and finding spots of impossible sweetness that leave Patrick sweating, thrusting into his fist.
Fingers next, one, then two, pulling him, stretching him, making a new way for Pete’s tongue to work inside of him. God, God, Pete has such wonderful fingers, so strong and broad and long. The callus on the pad of his pointer finds Patrick’s prostate and turns him molten, liquid between hips and knees. Patrick collapses into the pillows and finds them wet with his own needy drool. He’s embarrassed not at all as Pete rubs familiar bass riffs into the golden knot buried deep inside of him, damp around the mouth with spit that’s his own, wet between the legs with pre-come and spit that’s Pete’s that slicks his fingers and his belly and his sweaty thighs.
When Pete introduces the grazing threat of teeth against his rim, Patrick abandons his dick to fist the sheets and howl into the pillow. Needy, wanting, supplicant, Patrick whines and twists and cries out louder than he ever has and refuses to feel ashamed. There’s a difference between begging and being given, a difference between wanting and receiving, between power struggle and trust. Tomorrow, he thinks distantly, tomorrow he might be self-conscious about the noises he makes and the dirty way he’s riding Pete’s face. Right now, Pete’s rough-edged stubble grating heat into his thighs, the back of his balls, his spit wet perineum, he doesn’t care at all.
“Fuck,” he rasps, “Gonna come! God, fuck, stop! Want you inside of me, want you to — to fuck me through it.”
Pete keeps his fingers inside, deep and utterly perfect, and wraps his free hand around the length of Patrick’s cock, squeezing hard enough that he gasps. Then, just as Patrick tells himself that nothing could possibly feel better than this, his hands curled loosely at the side of his head, his throat contracting around soft, wet moans, Pete leans over his shoulder and kisses him.
Patrick kisses back blindly but with enthusiasm, with tears in the corners of his eyes and his mouth wet and open. “You’re so loud,” Pete grins against Patrick’s teeth and tongue, “such a mouthy boy.”
“Only for you,” Patrick says, with the honesty of a man with two fingers inside of him. “God, would you fuck me already, before I go soft?”
Pete squeezes Patrick’s dick, the raised eyebrow obvious in his voice as he rubs his palm along the rigid, unrelenting heat of it and says, “Really?”
“Shut up.”
On the dresser, the phone observes them. Another Patrick from another lifetime might feel embarrassed. This one smiles into the lens as Pete wraps and slicks his cock and presses back, the familiar feeling of hot skin under cold lube making Patrick twitch. The pause before Pete presses inside is loaded, questioning, but Patrick is open and willing and so, so hungry for it. He pushes back, feels the thick, blunt cap of Pete’s swollen dick pop inside of him. Pete is inside of him, and what a wonder, what a magical rush of bottled up emotion that Patrick is here and now when he never imagined that he would be again. They still, he bites a sob into his wrist. They don’t move or breathe in the center of this snowglobe of endless sensation.
Carefully, Pete takes Patrick’s hand and laces their fingers against the sheets. “You sure you want this?” he asks, his voice tight.
Patrick pushes back and manages, somehow, to take the next glorious inch of Pete’s glorious cock inside of him. An effigy of restraint, Pete braces a hand into the small of Patrick’s back as he stills and prevents him from claiming another land grab on his cock. “You,” he murmurs, punctuating the word with the dig of his thumb into the dimple at the base of Patrick’s spine, “are a greedy little man. Hold still.”
“Not greedy,” Patrick slurs into the pillow. “Waited for two years, God. How much more patience do you expect me to have?”
Pete laughs at that, breathy and familiar in Patrick’s ear. When his hips slide forward, when he stretches, fills and reclaims Patrick from the inside, he does so with a flawless certainty. The world is a foregone conclusion, Patrick thinks, every step and twist and turn preplanned and this is precisely where he was destined to find himself. Fucked diligently into the mattress by Pete Wentz, filled and conquered with exquisite assiduity. Each inch is sublime, stretching him until he aches, until he begs, senseless and wordless and so unashamedly loudly.
Pete fucks him insensible with long, slow pulls of his cock. He is deliberate and poised in ways he never was before, he takes Patrick apart like they were made for each other, fated. He slides inside and fills him, lock and key. There are nerves in Patrick’s body that he swears have been untouched since Pete last had him like this, secret places blooming ripe with sensation as Pete’s thighs flex and tense on each thrust. He moves liquid, like each muscle flows under his golden-glorious skin, his teeth sharp and heady against Patrick’s shoulder blade, his throat. He fucks him groaning, pulling Patrick apart so he can watch his cock sink inside.
When Pete pulls out and leaves him empty it’s not like he’s missing a dick but like he’s missing his own heart, like the pulse of Pete inside of him has replaced his throbbing blood. He groans and presses back, to seize and grab and take, but Pete has him firmly by the hips, rolling him over and pushing back between his thighs.
“I have to see you come,” he says, and thrusts back into him and Patrick thinks that sounds wonderful so wraps his thighs around Pete’s waist and takes him, takes him, takes him.
They move together like they always did, on stage and off, under the lights and in the darkness and the pressure of it builds and grows and brightens deep in Patrick’s groin. He bites his lip and sinks his fingernails into the planes of Pete’s ass, urging him, guiding him, asking for it deeper, harder, faster. Pete’s cock catches the glowing ember of Patrick’s orgasm, nurturing the slow burn of it, his fist forming loose over Patrick’s raw-nerved cock as he smooths his thumb over the weeping tip and makes him cry out.
Pete keeps his promise, nudging Patrick down into the mattress and sweeping back his hair with one hand as the other strokes, pulls, tugs. He looks deep into Patrick’s eyes as he smiles, white-toothed brilliance, playful and sweet and Patrick thinks I love you and you asshole and never leave me and comes, sudden and sweet. He bursts, ripe, over Pete’s palm and both of their stomachs, dripping heat and wetness into the humid space between them.
“Amazing,” Pete tells him wonderingly, and speeds his hips, fucking into Patrick with long, deep strokes that expand the heat inside of him, that wring each gorgeous, glorious throb from his groin. It’s good, numbing like morphine, sweet and sticky.
Pete comes on a heartbeat, his pulsing cock throbbing deep inside of Patrick like blood. Spread out on the bed, Patrick is a boneless puddle of endless content, his marrow pooling under the rubbery give of his bones as he breathes for the first time in two years. It’s possible he forgot how it felt to have someone soften inside of him, to do something other than roll away, to glow-down in the post-orgasm haze. He lies still and lets Pete kiss whatever parts of him he can reach without moving too much; his newly prominent collar bone, his freckled shoulders, the underside of his jaw.
He likes it best when Pete lingers on his mouth, kissing him sloppy with fucked-out laziness.
Pete pulls out eventually, his soft cock slipping free as he rolls to his feet and deals with the condom and messes with his phone. Gloriously and judiciously fucked, Patrick remains spread out in the center of the mattress and watches him idly, approximately three blinks from a post-coital coma.
“You gonna move?” Pete asks fondly.
“Can’t,” Patrick mumbles, “you’ve fucked me stupid. Can’t move. Can’t think.”
Pete chuckles and sits on the edge of the bed, rubbing idle patterns into the bone of Patrick’s ankle with the pad of his thumb. “You look good fucked.” He looks down at his phone for a second and then back at Patrick, smiling. “You always did.”
“Get everything you wanted?” Patrick asks, slurring like he’s drunk.
Pete collapses back onto the bed beside him, beautifully naked. “So much more than I bargained for,” he jokes, cupping a hand over Patrick’s junk. It twinges heroically against his palm. “God, I’ve missed you.”
“Missed you, too,” Patrick admits, feeling more exposed than he has done in the past twenty minutes. He struggles up onto an elbow and looks into Pete’s wide, elfin eyes. “Now you’ve fucked me past rationality, do you want to try explaining what the fuck you were talking about earlier? Contracts?”
Pete smiles with all of his teeth. This is how Patrick knows he’s hiding insecurity, even before he opens his mouth and says, “I was — asking permission. To make us… what we should have been all along.”
The two of them have never asked permission of one another in their lives. They issued a non-verbal, no-holds-barred consent the moment they met eyes across Patrick’s mom’s porch. Yes is the default — Patrick pauses — yes was the default, until everything went wrong. The difference is that Patrick knew what was happening and Pete — Pete with his runaway trainwreck relationship with Gawker, the man who took the daily beating in the sidebar of every gossip website — Pete didn’t see it coming at all.
If Patrick imagined anything back then, it was that Pete saw him as a constant and nothing more. Reliability, stability, an anchor. He didn’t imagine that Pete loved him. He didn’t imagine that Pete felt… guilty.
“You — You’re asking permission?” he asks eventually. “To be with me?”
“I’m asking for terms,” Pete corrects him, like it’s super obvious, “I’m asking… to parley.”
“You want to parley?” Patrick asks, the corners of his mouth twitching. “With… my penis?”
“You’re making this way less romantic than it sounded in my head,” Pete complains.
“We just made a sex tape,” Patrick observes dreamily. “Do you think I’d do something like that if I didn’t see this — us — as an inevitability?”
Pete shifts and digs the bony point of his chin into Patrick’s shoulder, fingers splayed above his heart.
“I thought we were inevitable before,” he says sadly. “You didn’t. Which is my fault, I know that, but... I don’t want you to hate me again.”
“I have never hated you,” Patrick says seriously. “I hated what we turned into, but I didn’t — I couldn’t hate you. God knows, I tried, but I couldn’t. I loved you. I love you.”
Pete falls silent and still. Patrick contents himself to stroke his fingers through the sweaty mess of Pete’s hair and concentrate on the throb of his heartbeat in every part of his soundly-fucked body.
He’s almost asleep when Pete speaks. “I love you, too,” he says softly. “I don’t want to share our sex tape, that was a stupid idea.”
Patrick frowns. “But, like, you wanted a sex tape. You said it would build hype.” He has no idea why he’s saying these reckless, insane things. If there’s one thing he doesn’t want, it’s his ass on the internet.
“Yeah no,” Pete shakes his head. “I mean, like, yeah I wanted to, you know, make the tape but I don’t really want to share it.”
“Huh,” Patrick says, because Pete is a very complicated and nuanced person and this is the moment where he reveals that complexity.
“Right,” Pete continues blithely. “I figure we’ll just use Plan B.”
Patrick’s brows pinch just a fraction more and a low, slow headache begins to unfurl behind his temples. “There’s a Plan B?”
“Oh, sure,” Pete nods. “Didn’t I — I feel like I mentioned it?”
“You did not, in fact, mention a Plan B,” Patrick informs him. “Would you like to share it with the group?”
“Huh?” Pete scruffs at his stubble and lounges on the bed, managing to take up far more space than anyone his height has any right to do. “Oh, yeah, I was just going to, uh — Go on Twitter the day before we make the announcement and tell everyone there’s no Fall Out Boy reunion. Then boom! Next day, we post the big reveal.”
Sometimes, Patrick thinks Pete is very nuanced and very complicated. This is not one of those times.
“Oh my God,” Patrick snaps, blushes furiously and shoves a pillow over Pete’s stupid, grinning mouth. “I swear to — I’ll smother you and no jury in the country will convict me. You fucking asshole, I’d already planned the apology email to my mom!”
He sets about beating Pete — to death — with the heavy hotel pillow. Because this is Pete Wentz, isn’t it; glorious and reckless and full of ideas and falling, falling, falling until he makes contact with the ground or with someone waiting to catch him. Patrick has not missed this. Patrick has missed this so much.
“Hey, Pat,” Pete says, when he’s done spitting out stray feathers and he’s climbed on top of Patrick and his hot, heavy cock is twitching, interested, against Patrick’s thigh. “You know what?”
“Hmm?” Patrick says, because it’s so hard to think when he can feel Pete broad and strong and stretched out over him. “What?”
“I think we’re going to be totally fine,” Pete whispers, and then he kisses him.
For the first time, Patrick thinks Pete might be right. It turns out, he really likes making sex tapes.