Archive of Our Own

Pete likes to sit in darker corners of bars. 

It offers a fuller view and gives him more flexibility in picking out his hookups without being seen. Besides, nobody wants to deal with too much light in their eyeballs, particularly not when they’ve had a lot to drink. 

Tonight, he’s tucked by the stairs leading to the restrooms of a jazz bar, listening to the live band perform with one ear while the other attempts to register what the girl sitting with him has to say. She drank way less than Pete had and runs on and on about politics and human rights and things that don’t at all imply a night of steamy sex on Pete’s bed. 

He keeps up with her anyway because she’s incredibly, outstandingly hot. The talking sort of intimidates him, like it demands special brain gymnastics Pete’s intellectual level doesn’t really measure up to. If he’d met her at work or in the cliche frameworks of coffee shop happenstances, he’d gladly indulge her with his wholehearted attention, even give his own contributions where they’re due if he manages to. 

But Pete frankly just wants to have sex. And he’s not going to have sex at this rate.

He could have gone to a club, but clubs are for sleazy, gross nights. Tonight, he felt a little fancier, and the sudden urge to pretend to make love to his currently nonexistent long-term spouse had overcome him. He’s always up for roleplay, even if it’s an excuse to have vanilla sex. 

Not with this woman though. Judging from the way she’s enthusiastically tearing apart capitalistic policies with her genius, Pete figures she’d know better than to go home with him. Now, she’s just looking at him expectantly with wide, passionate eyes, frowning behind the rims of her glasses, awaiting. 

Pete returns the stare, bringing his glass to his lips, and says, “yeah, that’s terrible.” 

“I know right!” the girl exclaims as she throws her hands in the air. She launches into a span-new monologue about global warming, and Pete just sighs. 

His eyes roam around as she continues her spiel. Low lighting shrouds the bar in a mysterious dimness, and the crowd here seems to match the immediate radius of his age. The people don’t set off in a crazy dance of pinwheeling limbs thinking they’re hot shit like in the clubs, they just stand or sit in place and nod their heads along the music. 

Which is exactly how Pete scopes out this tall scrawny boy with ugly glasses without much effort. Apart from sticking out like a sore thumb, he seems to be having the time of his life, swaying more than just his lower half in time with the beat. He sports weird hair, a nerdy T-shirt and looks like his name is Jared, but he has long legs stuck in tight skinny jeans that would drape nicely across Pete’s shoulders. Without the jeans. 

By some sort of lucky coincidence, he’s by himself doing his semi-dance thing by the bar and unknowingly grants Pete the perfect excuse to slink away. 

Pete downs his glass, sticks a thumb over his shoulder and cuts the girl mid-sentence, “‘M going to get another drink.” He doesn’t add be right back or a the barest hint of a smile. 

Without looking back, he slips through the thin crowd of people that circles the live band and ambles towards the back. At the bar, he slowly drags his elbows to a pin on the countertop, angling his body towards the kid and making it obvious that he’s sizing him up. The kid doesn’t miss it and stops his headbanging to weigh Pete with the most neutral look he’s ever seen on anyone. 

“What?” he says. His voice sounds nasal, but not like he’s sick. Pete would know. It’s more of a natural, monotonous nasal.

“You’re the only one dancing here,” Pete points out. 

“I’m aware.” 

“Alone.”

“Okay?” The kid begins to furrow his brows. 

Pete orders a drink and gathers himself upright, slouching towards the kid. “I can totally fix that,” he says, shrugging, edging in a sly smirk. 

“You’re going to dance?” 

“I think that’s what I said.” Pete turns to accept his drink, and as an afterthought, offers it to the kid with a grin. Everybody loves Pete’s grins. 

“I’m really drunk,” the kid says, gesturing between the drink and himself with his hand. Pete spots long, thin fingers and nails blistered to hell. “You said you were going to dance.”

“I did say that,” Pete smiles, finishes his drink bottoms up and sidles up closer to the kid. He’s greeted by the smell of sweat and, because the kid reaches the perfect height to tickle Pete’s forehead with his hair, hairspray. Strong, feminine hairspray. “Better watch out for my killer moves.” 

“You’ve got nothing on me,” the kid says, and Pete finds himself gazing at the way his slick lips stretch into an awkward smirk, revealing one seriously pointed tooth. That works well in prompting Pete to curve an arm around the kid’s waist and set off into a smooth rhythm. 

Mikey knows even before he opens his eyes that he’s hungover. 

That seems to be the only state in which he wakes up lately, and the fact that the memories of last night are reduced to tattered remains doesn’t alarm him the least bit. 

It’s par for the course now that he finished his last exam and is thrown into the throes of summer break where he possesses the freedom to do as he pleases. That includes getting shitfaced, having sex, playing excessive amounts of the Sims and all the good things he couldn’t do when he was neck-deep in his studies. 

He stays motionless and hiding behind the darkness of his lids for a while, thinking back to his dad. It’s a weird first thought for a hangover morning, but the guilt of wasting his money on booze and drugs never fails to catch up to him. He needs to cut back if he wants to help out his dad. 

“Ugh,” he mutters as he shifts to lie on his back. He bumps into something hard -- a naked shoulder. This, too, is par for the course. Strangers’ naked shoulders and other naked nameless parts. He peers over himself and startles when he finds a pair of wide-awake eyes staring back at him.

“Good morning Mikey, you splendacious, flexible god,” the naked guy beside him says with a stupid grin. His elbow is propped on the pillow, head resting in his hand, and his other arm is innocuously wound around Mikey’s waist above the covers. 

“Who are you?” Mikey croaks out before realizing these kinds of questions are pointless. He blindly pats around for his glasses on the nightstand and places them on his face. 

“You seemed to know that very well last night, pumpkin pie, when you were screaming my name.” The guy flashes his two rows of extremely white teeth. His curly hair, coiled into a mane of obsidian on top of his head in a display of defiance against hair straighteners, reminds Mikey of sheeps. 

“But I don’t know your name,” Mikey deadpans. He squints more at the guy, making a token effort to peg a name to this somewhat exotic face. He’s not a familiar presence around campus. Actually, he looks too old to even be walking around a college campus. “Is it Dan?” 

“You’re even cuter when you try to make jokes,” Dan pokes him in the nose and resets his arm where it was slung right above Mikey’s ass. Mikey blinks at him. 

“Oh, oh, Dan… ” he shuts his eyes and moans, testing the name on his tongue. It sounds ridiculously vile, and the horror on Dan’s face seems to concur. Mikey stops and shakes his head in disappointment.  “It’s not Dan.”

“Of course it’s not Dan, I’m way too cool for plain old Dan ,” not-Dan scoffs. If Mikey has to be completely blunt about not-Dan, he’d definitely admit that not-Dan is pretty hot. Spot-on Mikey’s type. “Do I really look like a Dan to you?” 

“Kind of,” Mikey shrugs. Truth is it doesn’t even matter. He sees not-Dan prepare to respond and suddenly remembers the cop-out he always uses to escape a stranger’s bed. He cuts in, “if you don’t mind, I have to get ready for class now.” 

Mikey kicks his legs to the side of the bed, expertly ignoring the soreness nested in his limbs, and parades his bare junk around as he searches for his clothes. Not-Dan doesn’t make his staring scarce, but most of all, his frown and gaping mouth lets Mikey know that he’s confused about something. 

“By class you mean like, yoga class or something right?” Not-Dan asks, laying back down in his bed and gazing at Mikey shimmy into his jeans through half-lidded eyes. 

“Do I look like I do yoga?” Mikey sends him a short-lived death glare. 

“Do I look like my name is boring-ass Dan?” Not-Dan retaliates with a finely arched brow. 

“Point taken,” Mikey sighs. He looks around for his shirt, somewhat surprised to see it swathed across a chair. “But no, I’m going to my econ class. I didn’t want to take it, but it’s a compulsory course. I also didn’t get enough credits last semester, so that kind of sucks.” He fetches his shirt and slips into it. When his head pops out of the hole, the sight of not-Dan and his generously sculpted upper body sat ramrod straight on the bed greets him. 

“You’re still in high school?” Not-Dan says in a too loud, shrieky voice. Mikey winces, longing for a paracetamol. 

“Are you kidding?” Mikey huffs, insulted. He refuses to appear that young. “I’m 22.”

“You’re 22?!” Not-Dan frowns. “Man, that’s kinda -- that’s kinda young. I swear you said you were like, 27 last night.”

“Oh,” Mikey says, pushing up his glasses. He recognizes with a little shame that it’s the technique his drunk alter ego uses to get himself laid with older men. Which only confirms it did work, as if waking up in a tangle of naked limbs on a stranger’s bed wasn’t enough proof. “Well I’m not 27, and I really don’t remember anything about last night past my third margarita.” 

“Well, if you come over here, I’ll help you remember,” not-Dan pats the empty space next to him on the bed where Mikey laid in moments ago. “I’ll make you squirm and you’ll yell Oh yes! Pete! More! Just like that! ” Pete, apparently, makes kissing faces as he grabs his own shoulders and tries to move sensually. It’s an appalling sight.

“So your name’s Pete?” Mikey observes, willing the heat in his cheeks away. Pete’s imitation of him is way off beam. He does not look like that during sex. He’s cool and sexy and humble . 

“Wait,” Pete’s hands drop from his shoulders to the bed in a lifeless slump. “You really don’t remember?” 

“Nope.” 

Mikey drifts to the adjoint bathroom and checks his reflection in the mirror. As he pats down his stupid uncooperative hair, he hears commotion in the main bedroom and seconds later, Pete walks in, still stark naked. It’s as good as Mikey’s first time seeing Pete’s dick, and noticing the distinct difference in their height, and that tattoo right under his navel that awakens strange temptations involving licking and biting in Mikey. 

“So like, I had sex with an unconscious person?” 

“Didn’t you say I was moving and yelling out your name?” Mikey asks, leaning in and rubbing under his eye where eyeliner was supposed to last. Now it’s all smudged in a way that makes it impossible for Mikey to completely wash off with water. 

“You did,” Pete says. Mikey notices him drawing nearer in the mirror, pulling up his leg and setting foot on the counter. He points at his thigh, where something black and smeary pans out into a set of numbers. “You even wrote down your number down here while you were sucking my dick.”

“How on earth…” Mikey wonders. He even wrote it correctly . He shakes his head, because the most important matter at hand is, “so I guess that answers your question. I was conscious, just blacked out. Does that make any difference?”

“It’s all a matter of morals, I guess, but I thought you knew my question was pretty much rhetorical,” Pete says, retracting his leg. In the mirror, Mikey watches droopy eyes stare back at him and thin lips curled into a lazy smile, all laid out on a canvas of olive skin. 

He darts his eyes away. Pete’s undoubtedly a very attractive man, but that doesn’t pair with the chances of them crossing paths ever again. As he does, Mikey’s gaze lands on a stethoscope and a bunch of medical supplies he can’t even begin to name sitting on the counter.

He nods at it. “Your personal doctor forgot it here when she came to check on your chlamydia?” 

“First of all, fuck you Mikeyboy, I’m clean. And that’s mine, actually.” 

Mikey turns around, not having realized Pete had him bracketed between two long naked biceps swallowed by tattoos. He crosses his arms and looks down at Pete. 

“ You ’re a doctor?” 

“What makes it so unbelievable?” Pete angles his head sideways. 

“Doctors bring their stethoscope home and leave it on the bathroom counter?” Mikey raises his brows. “That’s pretty unhygienic.”

“It’s my old one. I guess I’m not yet trained enough to know how to dispose of them.” He holds his shoulders at ear level.

“So you’re a doctor,” Mikey nods slowly in approving consideration, mimicking an impressed face. “That makes you old.”

“That makes me -- oh my god!” Pete throws his hands up. Creases appear in his forehead in that easy way that suggests they often appeared there. Mikey pegs it to stress. It’s always stress. “That does not make me old. I’m just 29, okay? I haven’t yet hit 30. I’m a young doctor, you hear me? Young doctor.” 

Mikey smiles, almost apologetically. “I hit a sore spot, didn’t I?”

“Sort of,” Pete touches his forehead, now settled back into a smooth surface. “Anyway, you should go now. Class and all, right?” The tone which he speaks in tells Mikey he knows it’s all an overused hoax. Only seasoned philanderers like Pete would see through his ruse. It is July, after all, a period of time when summer break should universally begin. 

“Sure,” Mikey laughs, somewhat sheepish. As he slips out of the bathroom, Pete smacks his ass and chases after him, still naked, to the front door. 

At least, he gets a kiss goodbye. 

Pete curls his hand around his steaming cup and takes a sip, looking out the window of the cafeteria. He sighs with contentment. 

The day dragged on and on even if he’d only had to deal with monthly checkups on regular patients and hadn’t had to announce horrible, life-changing news to unfortunate families. He’s beginning to think maybe it’s the blowjob Andrea had given him during the break that wore him out, or maybe it was the awkward position in the toilet cubicle giving him all these cramps. His stamina is perilously getting further behind his sex drive. It worries him sometimes. 

As though summoned by Pete’s mental powers, he spots Andrea emerging out of the lift and waving at him, jiggling the bracelets around her wrist. He carefully sits his cup back down and watches her stride towards him.

“Hey,” she says, taking a seat across from Pete and gathering her hands together atop the table.

“Thanks for sucking me off this afternoon.” Pete raises his cup in cheers. Andrea just smiles and fiddles with her fingers. She starts speaking, vaguely sounding like gossip, but it rapidly turns into white noise in Pete’s ears. 

He glances down at his watch and frowns when he realizes he’s late to dinner with his parents. If he doesn’t take off now, his mom will give him extra shit about settling down and starting a family just to piss him off. 

As per her passionate fixation on Pete’s future, his mom places enormous importance on weekly family dinners. She had refused to talk to Pete for a month when he missed out on one even if it was on accident, and Pete isn’t so fond of a scorned mother, so he had stayed faithful to the ritual ever since. It’s Patrick’s favorite aspect of Pete’s life to pick on. 

As much as he respects his mom’s wishes of maintaining a close relationship with her children, dinners are still a dreadful affair on account of those speeches about her greying hairs and still not having grandchildren from her firstborn. He doesn’t doubt for a second that it’s all she’ll be rattling about tonight. 

“Pete, I was thinking,” Andrea tunes back in. He stops himself from flinching when her hands slither into his palm and nestle into a hold. “We could take it back to mine tonight. You know, eat dinner, drink wine, watch a movie.” 

“Uh.” Pete tries not to give their laced hands a foul look. With terrible grace, he removes his hand from between hers and rests it in his lap. He watches her face fall. “I have to go, actually. I gotta get to this family dinner thing.” 

For a moment, they just stare at each other in silence. 

“Sure.” Andrea unfreezes and rolls her eyes, clearly not believing him even though he told the truth, and darts out of her chair with scowling lips. Pete catches her mutter “you’re short anyway” as she walks away to where she appeared from. He blinks at her retreating back, mulling over why he thought sleeping with his coworkers is a good idea, and then he turns to drain his coffee before scuttling out of the hospital. 

At home, the front porch glistens in the aftermath of rain and reflects the light overhead that his dad always leaves alight in case the street cats get lonely. The mailbox is freshly painted purple and a parasol is spread over a small set of deck chairs that Pete reckons is new. 

He smiles. They’re taking immaculate care of the house. With each time he visits, the house slowly seems to be transforming into the dream place his parents imagined up and doodled and pinned on the fridge of their old creaky kitchen when he and his siblings were still toddlers. Pete had to look at it every morning before getting orange juice, and it’s almost startling to be looking at it for real now. He had worked hard and scraped all the money he had at the time to bring it to life, and to say that he’s proud would be a euphemism. 

He feels guilty for associating these family gatherings with tedious conversations about dreadful children-related possibilities that do nothing but grate on his nerves. After all, they did talk beneath a brand-new roof in a kitchen that smells like food instead of rat-killing poison, and all of it is a product of Pete’s years-long struggle between medical studies and waiting tables for minimum wage. (And his first few paychecks when he began working full-time at the hospital.)

His good spirit is quickly spoiled when he steps into the house and his sister is suddenly shoving her face all up his personal space with a shit-eating grin, reminding him why he often hates to come home. 

“Knocked up a woman yet Peter?” she giggles as he sidesteps her and bumps into her shoulder with intent. What a strange, sisterly way to preface the lecture he’ll certainly be given later. 

“A ‘welcome home’ would have been a lot nicer,” he grumbles back, frowning at the giggle in response, and tossing his bag on the sofa among a pile of clothes he assumes have been collected before the afternoon rain soaked it to ruins. 

In the kitchen, his mom is stirring a pot that smells of her questionable cooking skills. His brother, undoubtedly under his mom’s commands, is slicing celery. 

“Hey, where’s dad?” he asks, directly venturing towards the fridge and bopping the back of his brother’s head on his way. 

In typical Andrew fashion, he ignores Pete and carries on his celery-cutting duties with cold indifference. He says in his best flat tone, “good to know you care about us too.” 

“He went to get us some eggs,” his mom answers, snapping a glare at Andrew, and then at Pete. “And don’t you think you’re too old to keep hitting your brother like that?” 

“You’re never too old for anything,” Pete says, pulling out a can of coke from the fridge and cracking it open. 

“You’ll be too old to have children when you’re 90!” Hillary’s voice echoes into the kitchen from the living room. 

Pete groans. Out of all the times he found himself at the mercy of his siblings’ evil ways, this has to be the worst. “Not if I bang a twenty year old!” he yells back. 

“Yeah but Ma and Dad would be dead by then,” Andrew says, nodding along his own words like he thinks it’s the wittiest thing ever. 

“Ma, you heard the way your youngest son talks about you?” Pete fakes a tone of shock, wearing the face to match. 

“He’s right, Peter,” she sighs a little too despairingly, not taking her eyes off her experimental stew. He rolls his eyes at their childish effort at teaming up on him and takes a swig from his coke. He kicks his brother’s leg when he notices him snickering under his breath. 

“Peter, cut that out.” His mom whisks her head around to glare at him warningly. “You’re a doctor and you’re almost thirty and you don’t even have a partner, but you’re hitting your brother?” 

“Oh come on, we’re not going to discuss this again, are we?” He leans back on the counter, crossing his arms and letting his coke dangle by his elbow. “It’s getting old now.”

“Like you,” Andrew grins and Pete thinks the swat to the back of his head is rightfully earned. His mom doesn’t seem to care about their banter and stays unwavering in her stare down solely narrowed on Pete. 

“Not until you come home with someone and give me a reason to believe you’re not sterile.” She points at him with the wooden spoon she’d been using and rotating it around while she speaks. She used to smack his ass with that. 

“If that’s the point in question, I can totally like, run tests on myself and all you know, it’s very convenient--”

“ Peter .” His mom’s death glare returns on him. He puts his hand up in a display of surrender, but that hardly works in placating her. “You’re impossible to reason with.” She turns back to her cooking with a defeated sigh. 

“I just don’t want any children Ma.” He stays calm, focusing on the can of coke in his hand and staunchly ignoring Andrew’s quiet triumphant face next to him. He really isn’t inspired enough for another argument. 

“But why not?” she whines, and because she’s pouting her irresistible super-mama pout into the stew, Pete’s edge slowly dissolves at the knowledge that tonight may not end up as serious as the others. 

“Because they’re expensive and covered in snot and even when they grow up, all they do is argue with you about not wanting children, right Ma?” He doesn’t elaborate beyond that. It’s becoming repetitive, anyway. She seems to have gotten the point, what with them reliving the same conversation every week, and effectively shows it with another pinning glower. “Besides, you still have Andrew and Hillary to give you a million grandbabies.” 

“Hey, mind your own business man,” Andrew quips, dumping the celery in his mom’s soup before strutting to Pete and snatching the coke out of his hand. Pete watches him drink triumphantly from it. 

“Peter,” his mom says as she wipes her hand on her apron. That, too, is new, Pete notes. She approaches them and frames Pete’s face with her gentle, mom hands. She smells like water and carrots. “If your Dad and I are pressing you to have babies, it’s because we worry about you, honey. It’s not out of spite.”

“I’m not following,” he frowns. “What does wanting grandchildren have to do with worrying about me?”

“You’re 30, Peter,” she says, but before she can continue, Pete nibbles on her finger and she lets go with a scolding shriek. “How very childish of you.”

“I’m not 30 yet, Ma. That’s in like, a whole year.” He crosses his arms. “And being 30 is not a landmark for settling down and having babies. It’s not inscribed in the law or between the stars -- I might reconsider by the time I turn 35, right? Why the rush?”

“Because,” his mom says in a tone and a look that distinctly implies if you just let me speak , “unlike Andrew and Hillary, you haven’t brought anyone home in five years now, honey. Look at the way you live -- you’re not falling in love, you’re not even talking about a somebody. We worry this might make it harder for you in the future.”

“I don’t have a lot of time or patience to date right now Ma,” he says, and it’s true. He might struggle with a subdued obsession with sex, and it might be slowly taking over his standards of living in more ways than one, but he does take his job seriously. He can’t not. He suffered and cried and bled through nine years for it. Even though he feels like he should despise every damning second of it, he has started to find enjoyment bringing a piece of himself in an environment that never expected the likes of him working within its walls. 

“Is it really that?” his mom asks him, her brows flipped up in a way that tells Pete her worry is only genuine, belonging to a caring mother. 

“Yes Ma.” He gently grabs her upper arm and pulls her into a hug, planting his chin atop her head. “I have inhuman hours sometimes, what with them needing me in the ER a lot lately. And I work one weekend out of two. If I found the will to go on a date when all I want is sleep and a lovely dinner with my family, I already would have.” He squeezes his mom tighter for emphasis. 

“Just, bring home someone terrific one of these days, at least. Will ya?” Her voice is muffled by his shirt. 

“Of course,” Pete laughs lightly. 

“Promise me.”

“Fine. I promise you, I’ll make an effort.” He sighs. He said the word. Keeping it is another matter altogether. 

He’d consider it, if only to please his mom and keep her from brooding over him. Stress will weaken her health, and it’s something that has been sorely repeated to him every year in his studies. How can he refuse anything to the most important woman of his life? 

With the stellar exception of children, obviously. 

Mikey doesn’t need to travel long distances to listen to music. 

He’d blast music through his earphones until he could feel the shell of his ears pounding with the bass. Even when he’d walk a few blocks down to the comic book store from his apartment, he’d never go without it. 

His dad’s house isn’t very far. Mikey counts five bus stops and three songs to reach his door, half a song to find where his dad decided to hole up depressingly this time, and many more when he picks up the chores his dad never manages to muster up the energy for. 

Each trip back home, Mikey has never gone one without one or two bags of grocery. Today, he carries an assortment of instant foods, several cans of soup and three bottles of water. His dad consistently gets angry -- with the exuberance of a boiled potato -- whenever he sees Mikey trying to compensate for his totally unacceptable way of life. He thinks the intentions are mocking, and if anything, that alone mocks Mikey like a slap to the face. 

When Mikey makes it to the front porch of his dad’s home, it looks halfway abandoned as it always had everyday for the past four years since Mikey left for college. Much to his surprise, he scouts his dad by the mailbox, bent midway to check out its contents. 

Mikey uproots his earphones and tucks them into his pocket with his phone, heaving a sigh as he crosses over the porch towards him. Conversation with his dad remains civil for the most part, except for this one, where it sinks a thousand levels deep into lowkey anguish.

“Hey dad,” he says, gently laying his hand on his shoulder so as to not scare him. Despite the subtle warning, his dad shoots upright anyway, protecting his glasses before they fly away. 

“You’re home,” he smiles that smile Mikey can’t stand. It’s sad at the corners, but grateful, in a way that looks forced. Never happy. 

“Gerard written anything yet?” Mikey asks with an edge of caution, not actually expecting an answer. He knows Gerard hasn’t written anything. He never will. His dad, clinging on desperate and stubborn hopes, checks everyday, as far as Mikey is aware. 

“Not today, it seems. Let me help you with that.” His dad gestures to the bags swaying in Mikey’s grip, but not moving to get them. He knows Mikey will shake his head and walk past him, which he does. 

Mikey lets himself into the house, adjusting to the darkness and misty feeling of dust drifting in the air. He stays unmindful of his dad’s trailing feet behind him, following like a ghost. 

He makes an effort and doesn’t jam his earphones back into his ears and eases into the same old ropes of picking up his dad’s slack, beginning with stuffing the bottles of water in the mostly empty fridge so his dad doesn’t die of dehydration during the week. Cold water is always a fresh streak of vivacity in a heat wave. Or, in his dad’s case, a depressing cycle of uninspiring work, sparse eating, and restless sleep.

“Mikey,” he hears his dad call from the doorway to the kitchen. He turns, and ignores the way his heart shrivels in on itself seeing the guilt flooding his dad’s face. A lot of his dad’s emotions towards him aren’t real, overshadowed by his intense despair over Gerard’s absence, but this is. It’s too real. 

“You don’t need to help, Dad.” He doesn’t take his eyes off the long shadows on his dad’s face, stretching under his glasses. Mikey almost sees his own reflection. He fidgets with the fridge door for a moment, and says, “why don’t you check out the playlist I made? You’ll like it.” 

His dad smiles again, deepening the lines bracketing his lips. He’s a man who once smiled a lot. “That sounds great, Mikey. Thank you.” 

Mikey hands his phone and earphones over to his dad, who takes it gingerly the same way he handles all electronic devices, and watches him retreat into the living room. He sighs and turns back to the tasks at hand. 

He fills the cupboards with the new purchases, leaving his dad with more food options. Mikey has trouble feeding himself, he can’t possibly be more capable of feeding his dad. In any case, they’re insanely similar, and often vouch for takeout dinners, mostly eating the same things for three days straight. 

The sink is always the hardest. His dad leaves it to pile up and fester in nasty, grimy water until Mikey eventually comes home to its horrendous greetings. He doesn’t know how long it’ll keep going on for, and as he looks into the middle distance through the window above the sink, he wonders if there’s anything he can do at all. 

He can’t leave, though, it was never an option. It’s his dad, the only piece of family he has left. Even if the thought of him breaks Mikey in half more than it fills him with strength, even if this whole thing weighs him down, Mikey can’t ever leave. 

He gets on with dinner, a half-assed spaghetti dish that is shamelessly overcooked with a side of beans. It’s as disgusting as it looks, but it’s as far as Mikey’s cooking expertise will take him. His dad never complains anyway. He’d eat sand if Mikey put it on a plate and made it look like food. 

They sit across each other, eating in silence. Mikey made it a habit not to look at his dad. Their similarities go beyond demeanor -- Mikey is the spitting image of his dad. And whenever he really takes in the sight of his dad’s wrinkling face, sometimes, he feels shame and fear crawl under his skin like tiny electric snakes. It feels like staring into the future. It’s all Mikey doesn’t want to become, yet it’s staring right back at him as if confirming that it’s what awaits him.

“So,” Mikey clears his throat, unable to bear the weight of his thoughts. “How’s work?” 

“Nothing much, boy, you know it. The factory’s calm as always.” His dad looks up at him with a small smile, echoing the forced gratitude from earlier, before glancing back down to the unhappy lump of food on his plate. “How about you? How’s summer?”

“Good,” he says, hating the way his voice sounds exactly like his dad’s. Flat, void of life. 

“Have you thought of reaching out to Gerard?” he asks. He’s plagued with innocence and naivety for a man his age. There are times Mikey aches to scream it to his face, but he never will.

Mikey tightens his grip on his fork. “No.”

“Oh, well. How about your mother?” 

“She’s a bitch,” he says, blankly glaring at his dad. Anyone who cheats is a bitch in his eyes. 

“Mikey,” his dad sighs. It’s meant to be a reprimand, but his dad doesn’t have the vigor to make it sound like one. 

He shrugs. “It’s warm there in LA. They don’t need a cold gust of wind from Belleville. They left for a reason.”

“Mikey,” his dad repeats, and unlike the first time, it’s serious. 

“Dad.” He cuts in before he can attempt to talk Mikey into changing what they don’t have control over. Like the past, or his mother’s feelings, or Gerard’s life philosophy. “How much do doctors earn in a year?”

“Oh, uhm.” His dad frowns. “I don’t know. A lot, surely. Why do you ask? Do you want to be a doctor?”

Mikey shakes his head, wrapping the remaining spaghetti around his fork. “I met a doctor.”

They have mutually acknowledged without even mentioning it that Mikey ‘meeting’ someone means he had sex with someone. Usually. In his dad’s greyscale world, Mikey enjoys watching him turn red in understanding whenever it comes up. 

“Oh, that’s great Mikey. Is she, uh… are they nice?”

He grins at his dad’s efforts. It warms him, how compassionate his dad tries to be with the one half of his children that has stuck around. “He’s really smug, but yeah, he’s nice. I won’t be seeing him again, though.” 

Mikey thinks back to Pete, now that his brain managed to reconstitute missing parts of that night, and his tattoos, especially the one under his navel, intersected by a line of coarse hairs. He wishes to remember if he’d given it the attention it deserved. 

“That’s too bad,” his dad says, finally lighting up with the warmth of their conversation. “He could have helped you. With your paranoia, and all. You know.” 

Mikey nods. He’d thought of it too, but only briefly. “Yeah, that’s too bad. Are you finished with dinner?” 

“Oh, yes.” His dad’s hands hover over his plate with uncertainty, helpless, as though his brain can’t compute what to do with dirty dishes. “Uh.”

Mikey gets to his feet with a sigh. “It’s okay, I got it.” 

His dad cranes his neck to display a smile. Forced gratitude, Mikey tells himself, and maybe a little guilt. Pity, but for himself or Mikey, he doesn’t know. “Thank you, Mikey,” he says, all gentle and languid. 

“Don’t thank me,” he laughs, just a little, just as feigned and forced. For good measure. 

Mikey gathers everything back into the kitchen. He shuts down mentally when faced with chores, it’s almost visceral. He washes the dishes, wipes down the counter, takes out the trash and pours a big glass of water for his dad. He doesn’t bring it to him, just leaves it by the stove for him to discover later. He could use some adventure. 

Before hauling himself upstairs, Mikey fills the ice tray with water and locks all doors, making sure unnecessary lights are shut. 

He passes by the living room to retrieve his phone, but his dad is holding onto it with the earphones already dangling from his ears, staring at it with more enthusiasm Mikey has seen in him for months now. It’s strange how a man as mellow and sweet-tempered as his dad could derive any pleasure from Mikey’s playlist of hard metal. 

He doesn’t say anything and takes off towards the stairs, stealing a last glimpse of his dad’s endeavors of being part and present in Mikey’s little world.  

He’s laying on his stomach across his bed, kicking his feet in the air as he puts together several more playlists with songs he thinks might appeal more to his dad’s placid inner nature. As he frowns over which Rolling Stones song is his favorite, his dad cracks the door open and peaks in. 

“Mikey?” he says in his tone of constant unsurety. 

Mikey turns his head around and hums. His dad holds up the phone and points at it, wordlessly indicating a call. 

“Who is it?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” he says, face crumpling as though he’d disappointed Mikey.

“It’s okay dad. Give it to me.” His dad crosses over the room and carefully slides the phone into Mikey’s palm, smiling, and then he’s gone through the door. Mikey stares at the door for a few seconds before pressing his phone to his ear.

“Mikey Way, who are you?”

“I’m wounded you don’t have my phone number registered, sugarplum.”

“Is that an identity?” Mikey arcs a brow at his computer screen, pertaining to his scrolling and searching. 

A laugh rolls through the receiver, and Mikey recognizes it instantly. “Apparently it is, as perceived by you. Unknown Number . That’s me, but I usually go by Pete.”

“Oh, you. How did you get my number?” Mikey wonders. 

“‘ Oh, you ?’ Please baby, I deserve more enthusiasm than that.” There’s shuffling on Pete’s end, and the tinny sound of an engine revving. How dangerous, calling and driving. “And don’t you remember? You wrote it down on my thigh. You know, when you gave me a blowjob? When we hooked up?”

“That was a week ago.”

“Well, I happen to have a picture of you sucking my dick, and your phone number written on my thigh. Which leads us to now.” 

It doesn’t make sense, but Pete doesn’t look like someone who adhered to conventional definitions of sensical reasoning. “What inspired you to call a random number on one of your pictures?”

“First of all, not random. It’s you, right baby? Nobody as pretty as you.” Mikey rolls his eyes. He’s heard that one before, and with each time he hears it, it never sounds any different. Pete probably knows it too. “And secondly, I want to ask for a favor.” 

“Sex is not a favor,” Mikey deadpans, closing all tabs and rolling onto his back. 

“Then let it be a reward,” Pete says, and there’s a pause punctured with distant radio ramblings and the whirring of a moving car. 

Mikey doesn’t have time for pauses intended for dramatic effects. “A reward for?”

“Listen, there’s no way to put it in a way that’d make you want to do it, but I just had to try.” Pete pauses again, but this time, Mikey waits. “Will you be my fake boyfriend for a while?”

Mikey doesn’t think Pete is wrong when he says there’s really no way to prompt him into this. But he’s curious. “For what?” 

A heavy sigh. “It’s hard to explain.”

“That’s not helping in terms of getting me to agree.”

“Okay, okay.” Another sigh. “My mom wants grandchildren, and I don’t want children. We argue like, every chance we get. It’s come to a point where she thinks I’m lonely and just wants me to have a partner since I don’t seem to be going anywhere near steady at all. She knows I’m bi, and I’m planning on bringing a boy home so she’ll lay off for a while on the children fiasco. It’ll crush her a little, but she’ll be happy to know I’m not emotionally incapacitated or something.”

“Well, are you?” Mikey asks, inspecting his nails. They’re completely destroyed as a result of school-related stress laced with The Paranoia whenever he falls sick. 

“Not the point, Mikeyboy,” Pete groans. 

“Why would you deliberately lie to your mom? Why not find an actual partner? It’s about time, you know.” That’s what Mikey would do if he somehow got involved in these kinds of problems with his dad. But he wouldn’t know. His dad gives him too much space for freedom. 

“ You tell me. You’re familiar on these grounds too, don’t go lecturing me like a hypocrite babe.” He hears the blow of a kiss from the other side. Mikey scrunches his nose. “Besides, it’s hell. I can’t tell you the amount of times I had to see her sad because our needs just cannot meet halfway. It’s one of my last resorts.”

“What’s the last one?”

Pete sighs, heavy and filled with regret. “Knock up a girl.” 

“That’s bound to go well,” Mikey observes helpfully. “Why me?”

“I can’t ask one of my friends, cottontail. It’s a principle of life. You’re the last man I hooked up with that showed enough detachment, and that’s what I need for this kind of relationship. I saw that photo and decided it was fate.”

Just how many people did Pete have sex with? Must be a daily affair for him to talk about this and turn it into business and pick from a lineup. “Do you usually rely on fate to make all the decisions in your life?” 

“Only when it’s convenient.”

“Hm.” Mikey blinks. He would, too. “What do I get from this?”

“Uh, I didn’t think of that,” Pete says, and Mikey hears a glint of amusement wedged in his voice. “I don’t know. Sex on the regular?”

“I already have enough sex,” Mikey answers, now idly staring at his ceiling. 

“I bet I’m the only doctor you’ve ever had sex with.” The wiggle of Pete’s brows somehow slips through the line into Mikey’s ears.

While it’s true, Mikey can’t give a narcissist the satisfaction he thrives on. “Yeah, you’re the only old man I’ve ever had sex with.”

“Low blow, dude.” Pete sounds so defeated Mikey just had to let out the smallest of giggles. “Come on, don’t you want a hot doctor at your service on the regular? We don’t even have to roleplay. You get the real experience.”

“You can’t always use your career to your advantage, you know. Not everybody gets off on that.”

“Well, do you?” Even though he can’t see Pete, Mikey can almost visualize the teasing smirk and the piercing way his eyes would size him up and down like how he vaguely remembers back at the bar. 

“I--” Mikey feels himself heat up for a reason or another. “Kind of. I’ll admit.”

“Well there, we got ourselves a bargain!”

“Hardly.” He rolls his eyes.

“What can I do to make you agree?” Pete’s bordering on whining now, and maybe that’s part of why Mikey caves, just a little, folding on the edges. 

“How long will I have to act it out for?” he sighs, not quite believing himself. 

“For as long as you want. I’ll even take one family dinner and you can pretend to flake off the surface of the earth afterwards.” The sun practically shines through Pete’s voice, pouring out of lips Mikey can imagine are beaming. “Is this you agreeing?”

“I may need a little more persuasion.”

“Count it as a harmless little favor for a friend?” Pete says, and with that, has virtually forced the establishment of a friendship between them. 

Mikey sighs. “One round of sex for every family dinner.” 

“Oh baby I can do all night if that’s what you need.” 

Mikey contemplates his options. He’d get to hang around a hot doctor and have mind-blowing sex in exchange for a little deceitful theatricals. It’s temporary, and it means no harm. He’d get to pretend to have a life that seems to progress into the dark uncertainty of stability, too, which will probably fool his mind into some sort of never-before reached equilibrium. And it’s fucking summer break, what else is there to do if not fool around? It doesn’t sound unfair. 

Or, a repressed part of his mind whispers to him. Or, you’re just lonely, Mikey.

“Fine,” he says, shrugging. 

Pete’s grin resonates into his ears, as well as the sound of the brake lever being pulled. “Let’s start laying ground rules, then.” 

Pete sheds his coat when he lets Mikey into his office and tosses it aside. As soon as the door shuts, he whisks Mikey by the waist and pins him against it. 

They kiss with want, reduced to panting breaths and slick sounds of lips. He hasn’t had this all day just so he could hold out for Mikey, and he hopes to heavens it shows in the way he aggressively nibbles his way into Mikey’s mouth. Mikey drags out a low whine, and it’s a noise so weirdly pleasant Pete has to pull back to see the expression on his face.

Mikey chases after his lips, glasses unbalanced on his nose and hands snaking to grip Pete’s hair. “You should have kept your coat on. You look hot as hell.” 

“We do so much better without clothes baby, so you should take this off,” Pete pants and tugs at Mikey’s tight shirt like it’s the biggest bane of his life. 

Mikey strips out from his top and Pete doesn’t waste any time touching every sliver of exposed skin, covering space with his lips. He’d been drunk the last time they did this, the mental images aren’t acute. Which sucks because it could come in handy when he’s incredibly horny and only has his right hand at his disposal. 

“When you prescribed medicine to that girl,” Mikey says, voice wavering and dripping with lust. Pete watches in utter fascination as he sinks to his knees and grips Pete’s inner thigh. “I wanted to blow you so bad. Want you, want to suck you off.” 

Pete laughs softly at this. He’s done more amazing things than prescribe aspirin to a girl, and no matter how he flips it in his head, he can’t see the turn on. But it got Mikey bruising his knees for him, he won’t complain. 

“Glad to know you have a thing for doctors. You have your chance now babe, make it good.” He threads his fingers through the gunk of hairspray in Mikey’s hair as Mikey yanks his jeans and underwear down. 

“Hmm,” he hums, cross-eyed at Pete’s cock. He’d never really taken pride in size, but the half shock half terror in Mikey’s eyes helps Pete believe that maybe he should. 

Mikey isn’t vocal when he’s sucking dick, but he’s extremely focused on it. Pete just wishes he’d keep eye contact longer, especially through the fogged up lenses of his glasses. Pete, though, likes to flaunt when a sexual favor is good, so he groans and moans and gratefully tucks Mikey’s hair back, keeping his voice measured. He particularly enjoys seeing Mikey curl his hand around the base of Pete’s cock where he can’t reach with his mouth. It’s a metaphorical wrap of bad porno. 

“Look at me, Mikey,” Pete says around another moan, skating his hand from Mikey’s hair down to his cheek and then towards his chin to tilt it up. It’s the only time Mikey lets slip a tiny whimper, and paired with his glazed eyes and Pete’s cock still pressing heavy on his tongue, it sends Pete’s conscious reeling. 

He comes in Mikey’s mouth, groaning away the shivers, and it goes right down his throat with a swallow. Mikey slides away from Pete’s cock, wiping his bloodshot lips with the back of his wrist, and goes sprawling on the floor. Pete scrambles to his knees and drapes himself over Mikey, shoving his hand where buttons and flyers shoot open. He jerks Mikey off sloppy but effective, holding him down by his throat and kissing under his jaw. This is the part where Mikey grows loud in uncontrolled bursts, caught between heat and an array of profanities. A squirming heap and clawing hands when touched in all the right places. 

“Oh fuck!” Mikey grunts out through gritted teeth and goes completely taut. Pete feels his dick throb in his hand before Mikey comes in several spurts. 

Pete keeps jacking him off with a loose grip and finds Mikey’s lips, kissing and kitten-licking along the seams of his mouth, catching the last taste of himself. 

“This doesn’t count,” Mikey says shakily. When he reaches up to bump his glasses back in place, Pete spots fingertips flushed red, a little slick. 

Pete throws his head back with laughter, peeling himself away and tucking everything back into his jeans after whipping out tissues to clean them both up. Being in a doctor’s office with hygienic rules and all that. They reek of irony and sex. 

“I’ll count it as foreplay,” Pete says as he crawls back to a stand. 

“Not even, I won’t let you count this,” Mikey protests. He does up his pants and lurches to his feet as well, stumbling against the wall. Pete watches him with growing interest. He notes the little things down: jerk Mikey off, and he’ll have trouble standing up. He can’t even begin to imagine when he’ll get to fuck Mikey again. “This isn’t my payment, since I haven’t had dinner with your parents yet. Just a hookup.”

“We’re leaving for it now, when you’re ready.” Pete gathers his stuff, hangs his coat at its appropriate place and turns to appraise Mikey. “And you take this as a form of payment?”

“I set the bar pretty low, yeah.” Mikey is blushing all over, seething with pink. He pats his hair down, almost self-consciously, if Pete didn’t know better. 

“Hey, getting paid in sex isn’t too bad.” He slides the door open and gives way to Mikey first like the gentleman his mom had taught him to be. Not in all situations, but he’ll take credit where it’s due. “I know I’d do it if I was on summer break as well.”

“It’s kind of sad,” Mikey says as they drift across the hall towards the lift. “But we agreed to it.”

“If we’re in some sort of race, I’m most likely the most pathetic here.” 

“How so?” Mikey scoffs, dodging out of some nurse’s way who waves at Pete. Even when he’s flustered to hell and barely walking straight, Mikey always seems to talk in flat tones. 

“I asked for the favor. It’s middle school all over again.” 

“You did this in middle school?” They have just arrived at the front entrance and Mikey stops to give him the most apathetic of arched brows. 

“You didn’t?” he tries to emulate the brow action, but he clearly doesn’t have the same catatonic magic Mikey naturally brandishes. It’s ridiculous, but it makes Mikey crack that pointy-tooth demi-smile. 

“I guess middle school in the 50’s is much different from 10 years ago.” 

“Oh fuck off,” Pete barks out a laugh and nudges Mikey. They push their way out of the hospital into the front parking lot where Pete struggles to pick out his car in the dark. 

It’s only as they settle into Pete’s car that he realizes how fucked up and strange it all is. He’s asking a borderline stranger to meet his family upon fake premises, and regardless of how fun Mikey is to hang out with, it doesn’t mean Pete can easily reconcile the facts of the situation. What seems to worsen it is that this borderline stranger agreed without putting much of a fight. But the bottomline is that it’s happening right now. Pete never really proved well in putting his ethics and age on proportionate levels. 

He turns to Mikey with a tight smile as he readies to rev the engine. “You ready?”

Mikey shrugs, but the fragments of light catch tellingly at the corner of his lips. He’s smirking. “As ready as a con artist can be.”

Pete gives him a curious look. “Huh. How much is that?”

“I’d say,” Mikey pretends to think. “About 110% ready.”

“You take this really seriously. Done it before?” Pete can’t seem to stop smiling.

“You’re the first and only person to have hired me. Hope my services please you.” He tips his head into a slight bow. And then he pins Pete with a sudden glare. “I hope you don’t actually believe I’m a con artist.”

“I’d have to pay actual cash otherwise. Wouldn’t be fun if we cut the sex, would it?”

“Totally not.” Mikey considers this. His way of doing it is to stare emptily ahead of him. “Although I could use a couple of bucks…” 

Pete laughs and shakes his head, shifting back to turn his car on and pulling out of the parking lot. He feels brown eyes watch him guardedly, and the weight of the scrutiny has him squirming. It’s too intimate. He made a habit of recoiling away from it, it has always been the easiest solution, and this won’t fall through the cracks of his balance. 

--

If truth be told, Pete hadn’t set any expectation on how the encounter would turn out. 

Expectations usually equal a one-way ticket to disappointment and a consequential deep-rooted bitterness towards yourself and all that you have never accomplished, but even that consideration had flown over Pete’s head. His way of planning is simply erratic, impulsive and extremely short-term. 

But all things considered, if there’s one thing he never even thought about, it’s that his mom would adore Mikey straight off the bat.

Undeniably, Mikey is good-looking. He makes the worryingly thin figure work somehow, not to mention his jeans-clad wonky legs stretching to infinity and those eyes of mysterious colors. He walks around with casual indifference clinging to him like a malediction, but the flat face seems to reflect the charm of a timid genius. It baffles Pete as much as it annoys him. 

No doubt his mom would swoon over him and throw herself at him with food at the ready in her hands, fully equipped to flesh this boy up like it’s her life mission. He probably charmed her with the same pointy-tooth grin spellwork that Pete was treated to. 

It’s a pleasant surprise, one that didn’t stay completely foolproof to his siblings’ skeptical observation. He knows they suspect something, they probably know he knows, and they know not to snitch, which Pete is thankful for. But it definitely worked its deception on his parents like staring at a burst of fairydust.

They fall under their schematic pretenses without much trouble. Pete obligingly presses a hand on the small of Mikey’s back to veer him into the dining room as he gets ambushed by his mom and her endless list of questions, by which point his fake career as a kindergarten teacher is revealed. This further buries his mom in ecstasy land. Good with kids , she mouths to Pete at several intervals. 

By the time dinner is served, Mikey puts his elusive table manners to good use and accepts a second serving when offered, always smiling, flickering his lashes like some sort of live doll. He compliments the food, gives revised, polite answers to questions he seems to have gambled on, kisses Pete on the cheek pretending to think nobody would see. It only sets his mom into a happy fit of giggles. He’s either a naturally perfect boyfriend or just a damn excellent impersonator. 

He’s really, really impressive for a boy of few words and even fewer emotions. 

Dessert marks the time when Pete slings an arm across Mikey’s chair and strokes his shoulder and engages in a very unwanted talk about politics with his dad while the rest of his family watches. It’s also the time Mikey shows smart neutrality and therefore bedazzles the shit out of Pete’s dad -- who cracks a subtle yet telling smirk, and Pete can read the sheer approval off of that only . 

But things take an unexpected turn, again, when the conversation wraps back around them. 

“So, Mikey, what do your parents do for a living?” his dad asks.

Pete unconsciously presses his lips in a straight line and remembers not knowing a single thing about Mikey’s life. He’ll have to heavily rely on his improv skills if he ever needed to step in. 

“My dad works in a glass factory,” Mikey answers, smiling. He doesn’t look like he wants to, and it almost demeans his great wisdom in favor of his young age -- at least in contrast to Pete. “My mom… she...” Mikey falters, losing the edge of confidence he’d sustained all night. “I don’t know, actually.” 

“Oh dear, did she leave when you were young?” Pete’s mom asks cautiously, leaning on her elbows atop the table. Her brows are flipped into a sad frown.

“I’m not very close to her,” Mikey says, and it’s the most genuine he’d sounded to Pete since the moment they’d met. He watches Mikey, his twitching lips and the rapid blinking behind his glasses. “She’s in LA now, with my older brother. We don’t visit them very often.” 

“That’s too bad,” Hillary says, and Pete knows she means it. 

“It’s been a while, it’s not as bad as it sounds.” Mikey commits a vague hand gesture, magically wiping the topic free. 

The Wentz family has always struggled with comforting a distressed case. They were never close in that design, and they demonstrate it quite clearly in the way nobody really has a clue on how to respond. Even Pete finds himself addled. 

The silence stretches on for a second that feels like way too long. It’s Mikey who intervenes with a clear of the throat, his face going back to his perpetual schooled expression. Pete is surprised he can tell the difference. 

“I think these dishes need washing,” he says, skulking to his feet and stacking the plates on top of each other. 

“Oh, honey, I’ll take care of it.” His mom gets up too and begins to collect anything within reach. 

“It’s really no problem, Ms. Wentz. You prepared an amazing dinner, I’d be delighted to finish up for you.” Mikey doesn’t wait for an answer before he’s carrying half of the table into the kitchen. Seconds later, Pete hears the tap running and ceramic clinking.

“You really got yourself a keeper there,” Hillary says, giggling and nuzzling in her palm dreamily. Whether or not she knows it’s all an elaborate performance to fool his parents becomes unimportant when she tries to throw shit at him. 

“And god knows how you did that.” Andrew rolls his eyes. “This is literally the definition of too good to be true.”

“Shut up,” Pete quips.

“You better not break up with him,” his mom says with an armful of other plates and glasses, skewing a murderous look at him. And then she walks away into the kitchen where her tone sweetens drastically when directed to Mikey. 

“He’s the one who’s gonna break up with you,” Hillary says, giggling again. It intensifies when she finds herself at the reception of Pete’s middle finger.

“You’re so childish, that’s why he’d leave you.” The words his dad speaks are heavy with disappointment. He has his arms crossed as he slowly shakes his head. “Flipping your sister off, always late, still wearing those god awful sneakers. I mean, sky blue? Really Peter? When are you going to wear proper dress shoes to match with your dress code?”

Where Pete would have normally riposted with something sharp and witty and touching his dad’s most profound insecurities for revenge, this time, he remains quiet. 

Here he is, blatantly lying to his parents’ faces with the help of a young boy who’s obviously afflicted with unsolved issues running deeper than Pete would ever be capable of reaching into. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to see it. 

Here Pete is, idling on his chair in bemusement as Mikey takes charge of chores nobody asked him to do (regardless of whether it’s part of the act), letting his family rip him apart for being involved with someone the whole universe seems to think he doesn’t deserve. It’s probably true. 

It’s bringing out truths Pete isn’t sure he wants to face. His own dysfunctionality is something he’s always had to live with and adapt to, but never something he considers necessitating some sort of clarifying or, god forbid, fixing . He’s not ready for this. And Mikey certainly shouldn’t be put in this situation either. 

Nobody comments on Pete’s uncharacteristic silence. When they finished cleaning up and bidding goodnight, Pete escorts Mikey to the spare room in his parents’ house. It was assigned to Pete as his bedroom, but it’s new and untouched and even still smells as such. 

Nothing in it reflects on Pete’s person, but if that were the case, he’d had no idea how it’d turn out. He’s a nut case with no distinct personality. Just an impression of one from when life was less of a routine and more of an adventure. 

Pete’s childhood bedroom had reeked and screamed of pent up anger and old school rock and typical teenage boy all strung together. Now, as he watches Mikey flip on the light and slam himself face down into the bed in the confines of four identical white walls, it looks more like a motel room. 

“My payment can start now,” Mikey says, voice muffled by the sheets. 

Pete sidles up to the bed and crawls over Mikey’s back, settling down on his ass. Mikey groans and complains in a word or two that Pete’s crushing his tailbone, but eventually his voice flattens into tiny moans. 

“How would you like your payment? I accept transfers, but I prefer paychecks. In sexual favors.” 

“You said you could do all night,” Mikey recalls, angling his face over a shoulder to bat his eyelashes at Pete.

Pete grins, forgetting all about his inner turmoil earlier, and slides his hands up the curve of Mikey’s back. He feels every tremor, every purring, every convulsion. Warm summer skin buzzing under his fingers. Mikey is no ordinarily shaped boy. 

And then he leans down to whisper in Mikey’s ear, “then let’s not waste a second,” before he kisses him. 

Mikey comes home to shitty grey weather and his dad leveling his head with the mailbox, again. He fights the urge to roll his eyes, because one’s hopes can only stay alive so long before it starts to resemble utter desperation.

The sky cracks out a rumble as Mikey approaches his dad and stows away his earphones. “Hey.”

His dad jerks and reveals his deer-caught-in-headlights expression, quickly letting go of the mailbox lid. It almost makes Mikey laugh, if the sight wasn’t getting so dire. “Mikey. Good timing. I was making dinner.”

“Oh?” He quirks both brows. This time, he doesn’t hold back a smile.

“Yeah, I looked up how to cook meat sauce, it’s cooking right now, but I forgot the onions.” His dad’s face crumbles, lips twisted and droopy eyes cast to their feet. 

He always looks and sounds so terrified of disappointing Mikey, like a chastised child. Living reversed familial roles has been part of his habits for a long time, but Mikey cannot underestimate his dad’s near trauma of Gerard’s abrupt retreat from their lives. His dad’s current worst fear is surely a repetition of history with the only son he has left. Mikey tries to understand. 

“I’ll go get them Dad, relax,” he says with slight laughter, although laughing is the last thing he wants to do. He loves his dad more than anything, but sometimes he just hates to confront his miserable, wilted aura. “Just give me a minute, okay?”

“Thanks Mikey. Thanks so much.” His dad’s lips twitch into a smile, an effort of happiness. Mikey reciprocates with the same amount of enthusiasm, which is not a lot, and darts out of the yard. 

When he’s paying for the onions and a couple more bottles of water, Mikey hears the rain beginning to plummet on the concrete and crash into the glass door and windows of the mini mart. The backdrop is completely dusted with grey and flickers of rain. What a curse. 

He sighs as he eyes the umbrella for sale on a rack nearby. He promptly does up the math on how much booze money it’ll cost him, and decides that a shower and cleaning his clothes would cost way less, if he just powers through it. 

He tucks the plastic bag in his jacket and pulls his beanie down so it exposes less metaphorical space for him to get sick, because if there’s anything he dreads most, it’s to get sick. 

He stands outside in front of the mini mart, already freezing in the push and pull of the raging downpour, considering the distance and puddles that stand between him and his home. 

“Why am I such a fucking coward…” he mumbles to himself, readjusting the bag inside his jacket. A wet onion will probably launch his dad into a breakdown the same way a drop of water can make a vase overflow. Mikey just wants to fucking avoid problems. 

So he dashes through the silver curtain of rain that blurs the neighborhood into vague geometrical shapes, immediately getting drenched. The rain beats down on him like a high-pressure shower, soaking into his clothes, invading his skin, pumping coldness into his bones. The bag digs into his ribs, he trips and catches himself a few times, and jogging under a practical rainstorm means splashing water up to his thighs. He can’t name a part of himself that isn’t wet. 

He has never been so ecstatic to see his dad’s front door come into view. He carves his way towards it, relenting his uncoordinated limbs that have hardly ever appreciated sports, and stands in front of the door. He lets the cold water run down his face and glasses, dappling the floor, and wildly shakes his head in a pathetic attempt at being less wet. He glares at the damn mailbox, opens the door and enters.

He doesn’t get a word out before his dad is running out of the shroud of darkness the house seems to perpetually live in, holding up a towel and tossing it over Mikey’s head. 

“I’m so sorry Mikey, I should have known better than to make you go out.” Mikey feels hands rubbing his hair through the towel.

“Dad,” he says, blindly catching his dad’s wrists. “It’s okay, I’ll just go take a shower.” 

“No, I’m-- Mikey, I’m sorry. It’s--”

“Dad, please,” he insists and removes his dad’s hands so he can peak past the towel and straighten his glasses. “It’s okay. It’s not a big deal.”

“Mikey, you’ll get sick.” When he sees the fear-stricken look on his dad’s face, it’s Mikey who suddenly gets gripped with guilt. He worried him. He doesn’t want to worry him.

“Let me just put this in the kitchen, okay? Then I’ll hop in the shower. It’s okay.”

He ends up doing more than that, because the kitchen is a disaster. He normally uses ‘toxic wasteland’ to describe his own bathroom, but the kitchen would have to take it. 

He cuts the onions into graceless pieces, ignoring his dad’s soft protests about taking care of it himself somewhere over his shoulders, and pours them into the simmering pot even though he knows they’d be better tossed in a pan first.

He forgets about his own sodden clothes weighing his whole body down as he wipes the counter and even some spots on the wall, shivering through putting his hands in the freezing sink water to wash the overload of pots and pans, putting things he didn’t even know his dad owned back to their places. There are tissues and an old shirt of Gerard they use as a dishcloth scattered around. He cleans those up, too. 

His dad has ceased his vocal objections but Mikey still feels the pity of his stare at the back of his soaked beanie as he gathers the stray ingredients and almost throws them in the fridge. He can’t show his anger. Not in front of his dad.

“Try not to let it get this messy next time, please Dad,” he says in a low voice, pushing his glasses up and managing a smile. There’s a puddle in his shoes and he needs to get rid of the hairspray rotting in his damp hair. 

“I was going to do it. Go take a shower now, you’re shivering.” His dad places a tentative hand on Mikey’s shoulder, flinching a little, from the rare contact or the cold, he’d never know. “You’re… come on, Mikey, go.”

He doesn’t say a word and climbs up the stairs into the dark silence of the hallway. The rain continues to fall and numb his surroundings. 

--

Dinner is no louder than usual. In fact, his dad seems ever the more detached as he rakes his conscientiously cooked food around on the plate without eating much from it. Absence takes up a large capacity of his dad’s face, but Mikey has never seen it exhibited so blatantly, like he’d given up in all endeavors. He doesn’t even try to conceal it. The change in air edges on disturbing for the dull standard he normally treads on. 

Mikey abstains from asking any questions. It’s not like he wants to hear the answers, anyway. 

--

Mikey does wind up sick. Looking back, he’d been stupid the moment he refused to buy an umbrella. 

But it’s not the casual cold any average person with a functional immune system can walk off. He’s alone back in his apartment, bed-bound and wishing the world would stop spinning for a moment. It’s like being drunk minus the drinking and plus an ever rising fever. 

Loneliness seems especially intolerable when he deals with it sick and alone, left idling in a haunting silence. He’s supposed to be out there making the most of summer break, not lounge around in a mental space that will screw him over. 

He misses his dad when he was still capable of reassurance, and Gerard when he was still around to nurse him back to health. The only thing his mom could do was drive him to the hospital, but he still finds himself missing that sort of convenience, too.

He hates hospitals. He doesn’t want to go, so he’s not going to. People usually think he jokes about preferring to die withering in his disease rather than stepping foot in a hospital for any reason that concerns health. But it’s the truest Mikey’s ever been to himself. 

Sterilized white walls, fluorescent lighting, the scent of medicine ominously floating around, an institution juggling the fine line between life and death. You know there’s something wrong with you when you’re in a hospital and can’t stay home to sleep it away. It’s a place of bad omen. 

Mikey groans and rolls over on his stomach. His pillow feels particularly cold on his scarlet hot face. Even his eyeballs feel like marbles set alight. The room is stuffy as much as it’s freezing, even as summer bares its petulant vivacity through his window. His limbs ache worse than last time he had sex. 

He needs to do something about this, urgently, because filling himself with water and pissing every five minutes hasn’t proven most efficient. If he had the means to swallow a pill or two, he would, but he doesn’t even own a first aid kit. 

He reaches out to his nightstand and grabs his phone, sniffing and then groaning at the invasive wave of headaches assaulting him. He squints through his contact list and settles for the P section, staring at Pete’s name. It suggests ‘doctor’ instead of ‘sex’ this time. 

The last thing they said to each other via telecommunication is a backhanded good job! on behalf of Pete, a week ago. It was sent a few days after the dinner night, so it must be a belated referral to Mikey’s cheesy stagecrafts. Mikey never bothered responding. 

He can’t muster up the energy texting would necessitate, so he calls. He waits two rings before the opposite line clicks.

“Are you on your way to my office for a round of sex? Because I could totally use some right now. I won’t put it on the bill. It’s on me.” 

He rolls his eyes. “I didn’t know you can get so bored at work that you’d need sexual intervention as a doctor.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” Pete laughs. “I just make time for it.”

“You’re a sex addict,” Mikey says matter-of-factly. It hasn’t been hard to have him pegged. 

“So I’ve been told. But I much prefer sex god, though. It’s more accurate.”

“I hope it’s not your therapist appointing you all these terms.” Mikey raises his brows, catching himself grinning. He does it unconsciously sometimes, and he only becomes aware of it when his fangs graze his lower lip.

“If my therapist slept with me, sure. But I don’t need to see one for any other reason,” Pete snorts. “And what’s up with that? You sound even more nasal than usual.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mikey frowns, picking at his nails. Even his nails are burning up.

“I mean that you sound sick.”

Mikey didn’t miss the implication of his apparently inherent nasal voice, but Pete’s half-witted observation of him matters very little right now. “I am, actually.”

“Oh. That sucks. Take some meds and rest up.” Pete’s tone wavers on confused and even a little strained, but no less nurturing. It’s what Mikey needs. Nothing is fatally wrong with him if Pete doesn’t seem abnormally concerned.

“No, I-- actually, it’s not working. I’ve been sick all night. I threw up, too. Last night. I don’t know.”

“Okay… you want to come over and let me have a look?” Pete says, and Mikey shivers at his surety, the lack of panic, the stability in his voice. He feels himself relax. 

“I was hoping you could come. ‘Cause I’m, I, uh,” he trails off, wondering how he can even put it to words. “I’m too weak to travel right now.” Besides, it’s not like he can afford the kind of luxury the private hospital Pete works in offers anyway.

“Alright, okay. Can you wait until tonight? I’ll be right there when I get off work. It’s probably nothing, just make sure you sleep more than you wake up.” 

“Okay,” Mikey mutters. 

“Okay, take care, see you in a bit. And text me your address.” Pete hangs up before Mikey can seize the chance to thank him. 

Mikey looks down at himself, his scrawny body stretching in front of him, undecided whether it wants to freeze or burn. He can almost see the fumes emanating from his body. But Pete confirmed that it’s nothing, so he won’t die in his sleep before he gets here, and Mikey will have a peaceful sleep without having to force himself awake to check if he’s still alive. 

His head weighs heavy with disease and his nose clogged to hell. Pete’s a doctor, it’s his profession to spot disease like it’s written on skin. Calmly telling Mikey the doctor's variation of ‘ everything’s going to be alright’ probably became a reflex for him. One that Mikey finds himself depending on. 

He falls asleep easily. At the edge of his half dream half daze, Mikey realizes how kind Pete is.

Pete normally doesn’t have time for this. 

For the amount of circumventing he does, he actually is a busy man outside of his sex vagaries. His priorities have run out of whack since the moment he lost his virginity, and entertaining the profuse desires of his dick has grown into an increased exigency that he has to plan his life around. 

Mikey’s not at all wrong; Pete is a raging, unreasonable sex addict in denial. 

When your sex life outshines -- outweighs, outbalances, overcomes -- your work life, it’s often easy for people to forget you even have a job. It all seems so absurd, but at the end of the day, Pete has to go through workload at the hospital first before he can fold to his ludicrous sex caprices. And today, like many other days, Pete had a lot of shit to take care of. 

It’s safe to say he has let himself go and unreservedly assumed the life of a sex addict. His every decision revolves around sex, therefore , Pete normally doesn’t skirt around the opportunity of getting laid for something else. If Mikey’s call hadn’t come through in the middle of work, Pete would have intended on taking up Andrea’s second-chance proposal. 

But Mikey’s deadpan nuance of a sad, dispirited face still haunts him at his most unguarded times. He’s helping Pete out with one of the most problematic aspects of his life (though it underlies a little bit of questionable morals). It’s only fair Pete returns the favor when he’d been the one roping Mikey into this. Performing what he does on a regular basis and what he has been taught to do for the past 10 years on Mikey is the least he can give. 

When he gets to Mikey’s apartment, Pete lets himself in. As Mikey promised, the door is unlocked in his welcome, and a spotless kind of dark interior greets him. 

Mikey’s apartment smells like lingering cigarette fumes and the phantom of a stale summer breeze. As far as Pete makes out, it’s small but contains just enough to live life without too much suffering -- a living room with TV, a miniature kitchen, a bedroom and a bathroom. The biggest thing is probably the overflowing bookshelf pushed into a corner. 

Only a sunset-colored square hovering from the window lights up the place, outlining edges and valleys of the furniture, including Mikey’s resting form slumped into the couch. The frame of light moves with the slow rise and fall of his chest. His breathing ripples in the silence. 

Pete quietly drifts towards the floor lamp by the couch and flicks it on. It unveils Mikey’s sleeping face, sans his glasses, as still and frozen as his waking face. With nothing framing his features, Pete isn’t prepared for the emergence of thick eyebrows and full lashes. 

He meanders to sit on the armrest, crossing his arms, and stares down at Mikey. The lamp smoothens Mikey’s skin into a honey-like texture despite bearing obvious signs of illness. The taste of his lips and his sex mannerisms are all that Pete is acquainted with. It’s relatively unsettling to be viewing a man he’s fucked around with a few times in this light. 

When he feels enough like a creep, he nudges him with his thigh. “Hey, fluffhead, wake up.” 

Mikey doesn’t stir, so Pete nudges him again. He figures Mikey must have been in a light sleep when he groans and flickers his eyes open within 7 seconds of Pete trying to wake him up. 

“Hey man,” Mikey croaks out, blinking away his daze and squirming around. He retrieves his glasses from between himself and the couch. Pete watches him with patience as he rubs his eyes and adjusts his glasses, patting down his hair into its weird extraterrestrial shape, all in his sick leisure. 

“Feeling any better?” he asks, which is stupid because he knows Mikey’s feelings must reflect the way he looks; disheveled, tired, disoriented. 

Mikey shakes his head slowly, like too much movement will wreck him. “It’s been getting worse.”

“You didn’t take medicine,” Pete points out. 

“I don’t have any,” Mikey retaliates in the same tone of defiance. “You can check my cabinets. I don’t think I even have bandaids.” 

“It’s like you’re asking for it,” Pete snorts, but softens when Mikey doesn’t respond with his offhand sass like he expected him to. He remains empty and near-catatonic, thoughtlessly looking ahead of him. “Okay, let me have a look.”

Mikey nods, as lifeless as always, but with the addition of bruise-like bags under his eyes, which are bloodshot and rimmed with red, and a blushing nose. His pale complexion has taken a few shades lighter, something Pete didn’t consider a possibility. 

He doesn’t need to perform a full procedure to determine what exactly is plaguing Mikey. A hand on his forehead reveals a fever, his voice implies bacteria-infused snot and he mentioned throwing up. Pete can conclusively imagine throbbing joints, a sore throat and perpetual coldness. 

“Does it hurt to move?” 

“Yes,” Mikey replies, the most stern Pete has ever heard him. 

“Are you cold?”

“I’m fucking freezing,” he says and motions to his shivering arms and the extremely thin blanket draped over his lanky limbs. Pete blinks, sighs, and nods. 

“Just the common flu.” Pete retreats from the couch and reaches into his bag. He’d suspected it. “You’ve been playing in the rain?”

“Something like that,” sounds Mikey’s muttered answer. 

“Then be sure to, you know, stay dry. It’s summer. This is what happens.”

“I threw up.” He hears Mikey say. When he looks over his shoulder at Mikey, he spots an expression too perfectly schooled to be natural. 

“Yeah, okay. Your body was probably exhausted, it can happen.” 

Pete doesn’t miss the significant deflating of Mikey’s shoulders, he can almost see the tension deserting him. He thinks better of paying it any mind and pulls out multiple tablets and bottles he has slipped in before leaving work. He sits on the low table and faces Mikey with what will become his saving grace. 

“What you have is a virus, and while there’s nothing we can do about that virus, we can cure the symptoms. Your body will heal itself as long as you take care of the symptoms. So, follow what I wrote on each of these,” he holds up the items, “and it’ll be gone soon enough.” 

“Okay,” Mikey says, and though he looks and sounds all the perfect parameters of a sick person, there’s something breathless and unassuaged about him, like he’s trying to hide whatever he’s feeling behind a façade of indifference he has to force out. Trying to read Mikey is like reading a book with a million front covers before he can get to the story. 

Pete thinks of a joke he can procure to lighten the mood, and hopefully lift Mikey’s deflated energy. And of course he can only think of, “huh, too bad. I was hoping it wouldn’t be something contagious so you could suck me off tonight.”

The only thing Pete lifted is the corner of Mikey’s lips, but just for a split second before it curls back down. “Guess not.” 

Pete plays with the things in his hands for a moment, observing Mikey as he stares back, the brown bangs matted to his forehead with sweat and his chapped, dehydrated lips. He decides to set the medicine aside and wrings his hands together.

“Is everything okay?” he tries.

Mikey nods, but doesn’t provide more. 

“Are you scared?” Pete asks, keeping his voice quiet. 

Mikey refrains any movement at first, but his obvious stiffness only manages to make his tiny nod stand out. 

Pete is merely a general physician, but right now, the circumstance seems to call for a psychiatrist. Worlds separate these two positions. There is no easy step-by-step handbook that can educate him on how to operate this delicate situation. It’s make or break.

“I don’t have the money to pay you,” Mikey eventually says. 

“You idiot,” Pete laughs, though slightly. He places a hand on Mikey’s forehead and removes the damp hair coiled like snakes out of his face. It burns his fingers. “You’re not going to pay me. Consider it a favor for a friend.”

Mikey smiles, and the sight immensely relieves Pete. “Thank you. I wish I could suck you off right now. Just for that.”

“Amazing,” Pete says. “Your fetish even lasts through all that layer of sick.” 

“Don’t you understand? It only fuels it.” 

“See? We didn’t need to roleplay.”

“I’m not sure this is worth the full experience.” Mikey’s grin keeps growing, and Pete has never felt better about comforting someone. As soon as his good mood flickers on, his face falls again. “Are you…” he starts. 

Pete leans in, waiting. He’s being inordinately gentle tonight. “Am I?”

Mikey doesn’t meet his eyes as he says it, “you sure it’s not serious?” 

“It’s just the flu. I’m sure you’ve survived it before.” He shrugs. 

“No, I mean…” he mumbles. Mikey has never before shown such alarming signs of self-consciousness. He brings his nail to his lips and chews on it, then lets go and clenches his fingers. “I mean, are you sure it’s the flu and not something else?” 

“Not one to boast but I’ve never made such a mistake before. It’s hard to confuse it with something else with different levels of gravity.” He waits for a moment, during which he scans Mikey’s physical language. It would be so much easier with Patrick here to nitpick every little movement and associate it with precise emotional responses like the painstaking shrink that he is. 

“You can tell me, you know,” he mutters. The air feels too fragile for his normal voice.

Mikey raises his brows in response. Pete sighs. “You can tell me what you’re scared of.”

“I can’t stand being sick. That’s all.” 

“Hypochondriac?” Pete understands.

Mikey nods. “Yeah. Something like that.” He seems to be really fond of non-elaboration. 

“Something like that?” Pete asks, a little amused, but quickly sobering at Mikey’s dull face. 

“It gets severe. Really severe.”

Pete notices Mikey’s hands, picking and twisting the sheet covering him. The bouncing foot. Patrick would exclaim with ecstatic confidence that it’s anxiety, but if Pete caught it, a child would, too.

“Are you anxious right now?” Pete asks, and begins to reevaluate his approach to sentimental confrontations when Mikey rolls his eyes. 

“I’m glad you could tell.”

“Mikey baby, not everyone has an easy time reading your rapid-fire reactions to your environment.” Pete puts his hands up. “I’m just,” he lets his hands fall into his V-open lap. “I’m fucking awkward. Help me out here.”

Apparently, anxiety in Mikey’s books is his usual blank face and a couple more familiar symptoms. The real turmoil must be happening inside, like water rushing under a thick crust of ice. Pete watches for the slightest twitch. 

“Hey,” he says and reaches out to take Mikey’s hand in his. He squeezes the hand when Mikey flicks his eyes to him. “I’d know, okay? I’d know if you needed more than medicine. It’s not that easy to be seriously ill. You can trust me and all that magic that nature provided your body with.” 

For the first time since Pete stepped into his home, Mikey’s face seems to relax fully. As it shifts back to its loose quality of nonchalant, Pete recognizes it straight away. It makes him look markedly less small than he’d been before by comparison. A little closer to the normalcy Pete has grown privy to -- between his utter emotionlessness and the face he does when he orgasms.

“Thanks.” Even if Mikey’s answers are lacerated into tiny bits, Pete knows he means this one piece. Most of Mikey’s well-obscured feelings show best in his face, which is now turned to Pete and lit up in a silent expression of gratitude. 

Pete stays until Mikey falls back asleep. He had complained about leg pains and refused to relocate to his bed, so Pete conceded and made him swallow his meds upright on the couch. As Mikey curled himself further into a cocoon of protection, Pete rummaged his cupboards and brought a jar of water as well as some biscuits. He left it on the table for easy reach. 

Mikey wouldn’t have the peace of mind to figure out the medical mathematics of his medicine when he wakes up, so Pete kindly distributed it in a box and instructed what to do with what on a piece of paper. 

The sky has turned completely dark by the time Pete has secretly filled Mikey’s bathroom cabinet with bandaids and tucked a thicker blanket up to his chin. He stands in the center of the room for a moment, simply gazing at Mikey’s resting features, before he scurries out of the apartment. 

Pete jerks off instead of having sex that night. 

A few days later, Mikey wakes up and decides it’s time to pay his dad another visit. He really does try to stay consistent in his visits. 

The flu hadn’t completely gone away without leaving slight handicaps behind, like the way it seems to have trimmed Mikey’s energy pool into useless bits. 

It forced him to depend on energy drinks and minimize the amount of movements per day. Never once in his life did he have to assess how much of his stamina he should use and how he should divide it in a manner that will supply him with a productive day. But if he wants to function and get food in his system, this is practically a means for survival. 

Pete dropped his concern in the form of sporadic phone calls and awkward monologues in enigmatic doctor language, all of which Mikey finds himself smiling through and appreciating. With someone checking in on him on the regular, he barely has to worry anymore that the flu has miraculously transformed itself into a rare and incurable mutation of a brain tumor. Pete now knows to remind him of that.

It fends off one less thing for him to ruthlessly chew over. Pete’s kind intentions still remain a complete mystery as much as they are abrupt. He can’t even get sex in return, yet he looks after Mikey with the same motivation of a reward-chasing sexual deviant. Mikey will take full advantage of the luxury while it lasts. He suspects he’ll have to optimize his acting abilities for the next time he has dinner with the Wentz. 

But today, Pete mentioned being busy all day and opting against telephonic distractions, so the check up will have to be held in person by the time he gets off work. 

Mikey thinks this is the universe berating him for locking himself indoors for so long and not visiting his dad. He has been living off the convenience of remote communication so he wouldn’t suffocate in loneliness too much, but it’s time he takes bigger steps. 

So he packs his bag with two Gatorades and the meds that Pete had organized for him, and flees to the bus stop where a bus scoops him up and takes him to his dad’s house. 

When he gets there, he doesn’t find his dad by the mailbox this time. He blinks at the desolate crumple of wood and concrete that his dad calls home, kicks the mailbox in aimless respite and removes his earphones.

He enters the house and doesn’t scout for his dad. Knowing him, Mikey would be less than surprised to see him tangled in the old covers of his bed and snoring away in his Gerard-colored dreams. 

His knees are already beginning to buckle under his own weight when he sifts through the cabinets to work on some snacks. Nothing turns up when he opens them, and with a sigh, he goes upstairs in a descent to wake his dad up. 

The door creaks when he pushes it. He stops all movement when the bedroom is void of life and only presents a neatly made bed. He stands there for a moment, just thinking, and shifts back towards Gerard’s old room. That’d be the second place his dad is most likely hiding in. 

Gerard’s old room is empty, too. Even emptier, aside from comic books he’d left behind and paintings he never bothered to pack with him. His bed doesn’t even have sheets or pillows, and it lies naked almost in shame tucked by the corner of the room. Mikey’s always hated this room. They should have gotten rid of it since Gerard left.

He runs a hand through his hair, coming in contact with a forehead he suddenly finds burning. His legs tremble, and he can feel his energy depleting. How does one possibly lose a dad in an average-sized home… 

He sighs and goes to his own room, which the door reveals in a state of emptiness, too. He doesn’t move from his spot and immediately dials his dad’s number. The line goes straight to voicemail and Mikey pulls his phone away to begrudgingly stare at it like it bit his ear. That never happens. 

He pelts his way back downstairs and kicks the basement door open. He scours the place. It’s dusty and the air is heavier to breathe, filling in his defunct lungs that have done nothing but cough for days. Why his dad would hide away in here is absurd, but he’s nowhere to be seen, and Mikey is starting to feel his skin crawl.

He checks the backyard, too, only to find flower bushes as wilted as his dad’s complexion and an abandoned deck chair. 

He’d known how dilapidated the house had become, but to be standing on the creaky patio overlooking their now wasted garden brings a whole new dimension of awareness. It’s been years since he last stepped foot out here. His dad’s mysterious absence makes the house and its backyard seem even bigger, haunted, and officially abandoned. 

His insides twist as the realization catches up to him. 

He calls his dad, and when he doesn’t pick up, Mikey calls again. And again. And again. Until the number 17 tells him he’d called enough and it might be time to consider something else. He huffs and wills himself not to panic just yet. 

To the best of his knowledge, his dad never leaves the house. His depressing condition would never allow for such an occurrence. That cursed mailbox marks the furthest he’d ever gone in a long, long time. He relies on Mikey for things that concern the outside world, of course he’d know. 

For a long time he just stares out into the expanse of the yard that has browned over the years. Dried leaves dapple the ground and have piled along the wooden fence. Fallen branches from fleeting autumns poke out from every direction and spots of dirt peek through what’s left of the grass from restless winters. The works of a family break up. 

Mikey sighs and starts biting on his nails. 

He doesn’t know what to do. 

It might just be progress, the conception of which Mikey might have severely underestimated. Getting the cops involved will serve as a huge fuck you to his dad. And it does seem like an instrumented leave. 

He can’t call anyone else. No coworker of his dad, let alone Gerard or his mom. It’s sad that he owns neither numbers. The neighbors have dropped from speaking terms with them since his dad stopped engaging in community work. He could call his uncle, but what would he say?

And it, again, does seem like an instrumented leave. His dad intended this. He wants this. 

So Mikey crawls back inside, where the afternoon sun of this doomed summer can hardly seep through. He’s still clutching his phone like it might save him as he meanders towards the couch. He stares, and breathes in, until he has to blink and exhale, for lack of something else to do. 

Mikey often wondered about this day. The day something in this fucked up routine and his dad’s unpromising way of living would crack and bleed and spell out trouble in their own blood. It had precariously kept its balance for five years since the ugly divorce, and nothing explains why today would be that day. Through all of his wonders, never once had he known what to do, what to think and how to feel. It’d been mere fantasies, but his incompetence still pertains to reality. 

He climbs up the stairs, slow, as though in a daze of disbelief. When the sight of his bed greets him, he slumps into the covers in a messy heap of limbs. 

It’s only as he tightens the blanket around himself, desperately holding back tears, that he notices the fever and the shivers that have found a home deep in his cold, hefty bones. He feels pinned to the bed, unable to move his leaden weight, finding comfort in his own diseased warmth. 

He closes his eyes, and falls asleep.

--

A buzz in his left pocket wakes him up. 

He picks up his head and squints through the veil of darkness that swathes the room. The deep, constant ache has repossessed his limbs, and his throat is in dire need of water. But another buzz recaptures his attention, and after a moment’s confusion, Mikey scrambles to free his phone from his pocket.

His heart seizes when he sees Pete’s caller ID, and he lets out a breath he’d been holding. It’s not his dad. The whole world crashes back onto his shoulders, bringing back the fever, the pain, the dizziness and his closing-up throat. Even the blanket seems too tight around him, webbing him in place. But it’s the reality that punches the hardest. 

“Hey Pete,” he mumbles through a sniffle as he accepts the call. His nose stings. 

“Sorry, did I wake you?”

“S’okay.”

He hears a running car and the shifting of gears. “Yeah, sorry -- just wanted to say I’m on my way. You better be hungry because I’ve got soup that will put a decisive end to your misery.”

Mikey wishes for the existence of such a soup. More than ever, right now. “I’m not home. I’m at my dad’s.”

“Oh,” Pete says, sounding surprised. “Is this a bad time? I’ll come back tomorrow. Reheated soup is even better.”

Mikey thinks about it with a scan around his dark room. Cold and alone. “No. Don’t. My dad’s not home. Can you come over here instead?”

Pete doesn’t say anything for a moment that drags on. Eventually, he says, with the background sound of indicator lights being flicked on, “okay, sure. Is everything okay? You don’t sound so…” He never finishes, but Mikey gets it. Gets the inability to determine the exact word for the likes of him right now.

“It’s fine. M’just sick.”

“Still?” He sighs. Mikey winces at the disappointment. “I thought we were making progress here babe.” 

“I thought so, too.” 

Mikey has a feeling Pete knows he’d skipped his medicine, but to his defense, it wasn’t at all part of his intentions. He’d slept all day. Luckily, Pete refrains from mentioning it. Silence sounds off-putting and almost eerie when it comes from Pete’s end, something so atypical of him that it resonates a few tones more serious. 

“Give me the address. I’ll be there in a minute.”

Pete likes Mikey. 

He enjoys Mikey’s easy company and his flat-faced jokes, although they have barely done anything together besides sex and check ups. 

For Mikey, Pete has broken a lot of his fundamental rules as of late. If there’s anything being 29 taught him, it’s that life is often better lived selfishly. He might have grown up in a loving environment, but it makes his parents no less critical of him. 

Pleasing them had been essentially all they’d disciplined him to do as an eldest brother, as if the two were correlated in some important way. But after buying that house for his parents, Pete no longer does things with an unassailable afterthought of them. The vast majority of his decisions are centered around him now. 

If Pete were to stick to his own rules, he wouldn’t have made that detour to reach Mikey’s dad’s home. He would have said too bad and retched out a deplorable excuse about which he wouldn’t care, rinsing his guilt with great sex and a late night TV show. 

But aside from obviously needing Pete’s assistance, Mikey is nice. Nice to hang around. Grounding. He’s calm but fun and has the taste of music that leaves you in awe. It suits him. 

There’s something so stiff and broody about him that makes Pete want to wrench the thoughts out of his pretty head, break through the surface. He’s a dish so weird that Pete just has to keep tasting. 

When he pulls up in front of Mikey’s dad’s home, he first wonders if he got the address correct. His sense of orientation has never deceived him, so the dark, stranded-looking house with shuttered windows and looming walls must really be it.

Inside, it’s even darker. He passes by an unoccupied couch and a kitchen only abiding by the faint ticking of a clock, so he figures he must find Mikey’s room. He abandons the soup on the kitchen counter and heads towards the stairs. 

The room is easy to find. The only open door at the end of the hallway gives it away. He finds himself reliving a familiar event as he steps into the blackhole that is Mikey’s room, hands in his pockets, and stares down at his wiry body gracelessly dumped on the bed facedown.

He stands still for a moment, knowing Mikey is aware of his presence, and watches. A black nerdy T-shirt clings to his toso, raked up to his elbows, exposing a square of skin and the curve of his protruding spine. The silence continues unbroken as he goes forth to sit on the bed, dipping the mattress. He scoots up until he levels his waist with Mikey’s upper body.

Mikey looks unusually distressed. Tired, making no effort to greet him. From the little Pete’s learned of Mikey, it’s that he’ll never express as much. There is more than a simple flu to cure in him.

“You’re not gonna get better if you don’t take care of yourself,” he mutters kindly. He slides a hand up Mikey’s hot cheek and rests it on his sweaty forehead, feeling a layer of the persistent fever. 

Mikey stays unresponsive, laid down between the sheets. He looks trapped, like he’d rather be anywhere else on this earth than getting his legs knotted with the blanket, sweating. 

“My dad left,” Mikey says into his pillow, so quietly that Pete had to take a moment to reprocess what he’d heard. 

“Where to?” He strokes Mikey’s bangs and curls them behind an ear. 

“I don’t know. He ran away.” 

Pete stops. He weighs in Mikey’s eyes behind the lenses, unseeing and sad, and waits. Mikey doesn’t seem to like rushing, so Pete continues to wait even when it feels like he’s never going to say another word. 

“He left some money behind. He took some clothes with him. He wanted to leave.” Mikey exhales, dragged and tired. 

Things seem to have only descended into a downward spiral ever since Pete stepped into Mikey’s life. And once again, he has never been trained to deal with these things the way he knows how to identify illnesses. It’s like his social skills have downgraded to choppy basics. He isn’t sure of how to answer. 

“Talk to me baby. What happened?” He’s here for a friend, not a patient in a psychiatric ward. There is no strictly paved way to do this. 

He’s glad to see Mikey shifting and pulling Pete’s wrist down so he can look and play with anything else that doesn’t concern his eyes. His fingers are bony and thin, but longer than Pete’s. “My dad is the only family I have left since my parents divorced. My brother followed that cheating bitch to LA, and it destroyed my dad. He’s a shit. My brother. My mom, too. They both are.”

Pete nods and hums. “Your dad must treasure you.”

“I guess.” Mikey shrugs, picking at Pete’s nails. He definitely doesn’t sound convinced or ready to unpack that one. “I try to come twice every week. And today, he’s just, gone. I don’t know where he can possibly be.” 

“You’re also the only family he has left. He can’t be too far away,” he tries, tentatively tapping Mikey’s lips with an index. Mikey reclaims his hand as his shoulders sag with a sigh. Pete can almost hear his head reeling with thoughts longing to be given a voice, but it appears as though Mikey is done talking. Pete removes himself from the bed and stands again. “But right now, you still need to look after yourself. Where are your meds?”

Mikey vaguely points downstairs. “By the couch.” He fixes Pete with a look. “Please?”

“I wouldn’t make you go,” Pete says. He goes to retrieve the bag, and when he comes back, the room is lit and Mikey is sitting up against the headboard. 

Mikey takes every single pill with his Gatorade, and judging from the messy trails leaking out from the corners of his mouth, he must have drank very little today. 

“Fuck me dude,” Mikey groans and slams himself back down into the bed.

“Unfortunately, no,” Pete laughs. He’d never thought he’d hear these words coming out of his own mouth when answering to an offering of sex.

Mikey glares at him, but then the anger melts away and he’s back to slumping into the sheets like his energy won’t let him feel even the most trite of emotions.

“If only my brother was here,” he sighs out, but doesn’t expand. And then he scoffs. “He wouldn’t care.” 

“There’s nothing you can do right now,” Pete says as he sits back down. “I know nothing about your dad, but he’d have left a long time ago if you weren’t worth coming back to.”

When Mikey smiles, Pete knew he’d said the right thing. It warms him up with relief. 

“You want that soup now?” he asks. 

“You’re the best fake boyfriend I’ve ever had,” Mikey beams. 

When Mikey is finished eating, Pete decides staying longer wouldn’t hurt. He draws Mikey a bath as his tired eyes and downcast lips convey in a silent plea. They have a mildly argumentative back and forth on who will wash Mikey’s used bowl, and fearful of Mikey’s lowkey potential of authority, Pete surrenders and difficultly watches this weak, sick boy clean the kitchen spotless. 

Later, Mikey lowers himself in the warm bath and sighs out blissfully as the water fully encompasses him in a forest of bubbles. Pete settles at the rim of the bathtub and delicately removes Mikey’s glasses from his face. 

He weighs them in his hands with a hum and levels it with his eyes. “Damn, you’re fucking blind dude.” He blinks away his discomfort, listening to Mikey’s high-pitch quiet chuckle as he folds the glasses and slides them on the counter. 

“Been blind since I was 9. It’s a pain in the ass.” 

Pete stores away this information in the Mikey drawer his brain has created. “You know what else is a pain in the ass?” he wiggles his brows. 

Mikey looks at him with his suddenly round eyes, utterly unimpressed. “Are you going to say you?”

Pete laughs. “Exactly.” He shrieks when Mikey gently splashes water on his thigh. Pete dips his hand in a mountain of bubbles and flicks it down Mikey’s hair. He lets it happen, only blinking back at Pete with a lazy smile. 

“How are things with your mom?” Mikey asks suddenly, resting the back of his head against the bathtub. Pete thinks this is a better conversational topic than discussing the fact that he’s still here, in Mikey’s naked presence and doing nothing sexual about it. 

“It toned down now. She stopped asking for grandkids since she met you. I guess she prefers me having a good boyfriend over grandkids.” Pete shrugs, combing Mikey’s hair down and trying to poke his eye out with the wet tip of his bangs. Mikey swats at his feckless attempt. “But she started asking about you a lot. She loves you, you know?”

“How low of you to guilt-trip an indisposed adolescent.” 

“I’m just saying,” Pete laughs. 

“They all are just saying.” Mikey rolls his eyes. 

Pete grins, and sobers as he flattens Mikey’s bangs with soapy water. He’s developed a subdued obsession with his bangs. “I’ve never seen her so happy for me. She was always on my case about being perfect in life and doing things by the book. Graduate highschool, get a PhD, work in a hospital, buy a picket fence for my suburban house.”

“Did it work out that way?” Mikey asks.

Pete feels ashamed to nod. “Pretty much.”

“It’s not the life you want?” 

“It’s the life I need, honestly. Everyone wants to be well-off. But I could also be happy without these things. I’m sure.” There was a time when he had to, anyway, and he hadn’t been unhappy. 

When Pete thinks back to his childhood, he often has a fear of seeing his teen skater boy self frowning at future him, what he has grown into, in disappointment. The things he has achieved are honorable. He’s put hard work in it all. But he’d only been meeting his mom’s high standards to make her shut up, not his own. There are times when he wonders how things would have turned out if he listened to himself. 

He ponders on it, and says to Mikey, “as a kid I wanted to be in a band.”

“Yeah?” Mikey perks up. He glances at Pete sideways with his big eyes and thick lashes. 

“Totally. I’d go to college and then drop out in the middle of it. Then I’d gather some friends and we’re going to form a band called Fall Out Boy. I’d play bass, and I’d want amazing vocals. The vocals would be the highlight.” He sighs, thinking of Patrick. Patrick would make the perfect frontman for Fall Out Boy if he wasn’t a psychiatrist. Pete is suddenly filled with fondness at the daydream he encounters most often. 

It’s nothing but a hum beneath his brain, his organs, a fire very much alive in him but never to see the light of day. Maybe in an alternate reality, Pete would set the world ablaze with his music. But he’s long made peace with the fact that this is his life now, and he’ll let the alternate version of Pete relish in this dream. It’d be his dream in any dimension of life. 

“What genre of music would you make?”

“Punk. For sure. Pop punk, classic rock, stuff like that.” He touches the area under Mikey’s eye. “I’d wear eyeliner just like that, too. I used to.” 

“You did?” Mikey smiles, like he wants to laugh at Pete but doesn’t want to disrupt his sentimental confession.

“I’m a cool doctor,” he says, shrugging. He moves his hand to sweep Mikey’s bangs to the side. It feels so domestic, but Pete is domestically affectionate in nature. It doesn’t worry him. It doesn’t mean anything. 

“It’s true,” Mikey says, tilting his head so green eyes face him directly. “Never in my life have I been to a hospital and saw a doctor wear leopard print sneakers and ripped jeans under his coat.” 

“It’s protocol not to, but well. Sometimes, you can do what you want.”

“You’re saying you wouldn’t look any different if you were a rockstar.” Mikey seizes his arm and brushes his thumb over the ink on his skin. 

Pete inspects his own tattoos. “I’d have crazier hair and more eyeliner, for sure. I’d probably have my nudes leaked, too.” 

“You’d be a sex addict no matter what?”

“I want to believe otherwise,” he scoffs. “But I’d love sex anyway. So I’d have sex, even virtually. And I wouldn’t be careful, because I would hardly realize I’m a rockstar and my life is a little more public than the average person.”

“I’d love to see those nudes.” Mikey pokes at Pete’s lower stomach with a wet finger, where his tattoo lays dormant. Pete giggles. “You’d be very active on social media about your feelings and your most personal fetishes. You’d be a notorious lyricist who writes countless songs about your love interests.”

“For 15 years.” He smiles. “About the same person.”

“That’s a very long time.” 

“It’s not long if you love someone. Really hit-the-nail-on-the-head in love with someone. Bingo love.”

“Bingo love,” Mikey repeats with a chuckle. “Have you ever?” he asks. 

Pete shakes his head, then thinks about it, then shakes his head again. “I don’t think so. I’ve had like, two short-term girlfriends before I realized I was bi, then instead of just fucking girls, I fucked boys, too.”

“Interesting,” Mikey says. “There’s one thing I have that you don’t.”

“Love?” Pete arcs a brow. 

Mikey nods. He seems markedly less tired than when Pete stepped into the house and first saw him lying prone on the bed. He almost forgets this is the same boy whose father had very recently run away from home. “A friend in highschool. Frank. I was like, 16.” 

“Tragic ending?” 

“I’d have stayed with him forever if he didn’t fall out first. He dumped me on our third anniversary. It was an accident, though. He forgot. But he’s happily married to a woman called Jamia now.”

“That’s fucked up.” Pete makes a face. “And married? At 22?”

“He’s 21.” Mikey shrugs. “He’s in love, what can I say.” 

“You were too,” Pete sighs. 

“I’m not anymore.”

“Anyone else after Frank?” Pete asks, unable to hinder his curiosity. 

Mikey glances up the ceiling, twists his lips, and scrunches his nose. “I think I loved Gabe, too. I was still hung up over Frank, and he took my mind off it until he just replaced him. He was great, and really funny. Patient. I think I might have a thing for people with a savior complex.”

Pete backtracks for a second. The self-centered part of his brain alerts him this can be Mikey dropping subtle signs of affection, but Mikey gazes in front of himself at his pickled hands, seeming completely out of the loop. 

“And Gabe is how long ago?”

“We stayed together for a year and a half. We broke up last winter. He wanted a threesome, I didn’t, and that was the end of our relationship.”

“That’s stupid,” Pete says.

“I know,” Mikey sighs.

“I mean why would you refuse a threesome?” Pete jerks as Mikey slaps a wave of water onto his thigh, soaking everything up to his crotch. “I’m serious!” he laughs, trying to fight back against the softened flickers of water flying in his direction. “A threesome is twice the amount of pleasure!”

“Not with a dude that was so obviously in love with my boyfriend.”

“So you’re against polyamory too? You suck dude.”

“I’m not,” Mikey huffs with a roll of his eyes. “The world can do what it wants. I don’t want that. My kind of love is between two people.”

“Narrow-minded,” Pete mutters, but only in jest. He knows. 

“No, just simple-minded.”

The smile on Pete’s face doesn’t fade. The corners of his lips remain hooked up, like holding on, as he slowly becomes aware of their disposition. He’s 29 and is listening to a young adult telling him tales about love. It ages Mikey up, and him down, like flipping an hourglass upside down. He’s supposed to be more knowledgeable, the one weighing heavy with experience and lessons to teach Mikey. 

He feels strange, like a little boy suddenly, just then resigning himself to the fact that he doesn’t need sex to have fun, to have a tasting lick at happiness and self-fulfillment. His value doesn’t measure up to the amount of sex he has, or how good his performance in bed is, or how much gratification it may bring him on a temporary basis. 

It’s not like Pete can control his addiction; he’s never tried. But that’s the problem. He’s okay with the way he lives. 

As he sits in his car, stroking his wet jeans and looking at the faint circles of soap left in the wake of bubbles, Pete rethinks the past 10 years of his 20’s. 

Mikey hasn’t left his dad’s home for three days now. 

With each day that passes, his hopes don’t dwindle. He’s starting to understand where his dad’s desperation for a word from Gerard stems from now. It’s only when you excessively care about someone, anticipate something with delusional force, it seems. 

Silence has always eaten up a broad space in the house, even when his dad is there, passed out on his bed or staring at the TV. But with the knowledge that he left, time crawls by in deeper, louder silence, one that clearly implies Mikey is all alone, no matter how hard he tries to fool himself into expecting otherwise. 

He’s laying in bed, stretched out to the fullest and listening to loud music through his earphones. He needs to fill the empty spaces until he can’t hear the looming silence anymore. 

Scales of grey stain the sky beyond his window which he left open, inviting the humid wind to billow out the curtains. It makes him wonder if his dad is looking at the same overcast sky bearing clouds so white they’d better belong on a sheet of clean blue. If he thinks that as well. They tend to think alike.

He’s about to switch songs when his phone receives a call. It reads Pete, and Mikey involuntarily shudders. 

He picks up and immediately hears the indistinct rolling of wheels on concrete. He sighs. “You’re driving and calling again.”

“Huh?” Pete says. 

“Nevermind,” he mutters and flips onto his stomach, pressing his cheek into his pillow. “Something up?”

“Listen man, I know you’re going through shit right now, but if I didn’t try, I’d never know.”

Mikey raises a brow. “Okay?”

“My parents want to go spend a day at the beach. Saturday this week. I’m not exactly asking for a favor, even if it seems like it, but I was thinking more of a change of air for you. You know, go for a walk, read a book on the sand and all. Eat food.” 

Mikey pauses and checks the date. It’s Wednesday. It’ll leave a lot of time for him to contemplate his options. But really, he knows which is the best decision for him to make. “Sure. I’ll go,” he replies. 

“Uh, okay? I was not expecting that.”

Mikey wants to make a joke, it’s right at the tip of his tongue, but he can’t muster up the words to string together. Instead, he settles for a sigh and nuzzles his nose deeper in the pillow. He smells his own hairspray, collecting like mold. “I’ll see you on Saturday then.” 

“You okay Mikey?” The words come out rushed and squished together. Mikey probably gave the impression that he’ll hang up as soon as Pete leaves a blank opportunity for him to. 

He’s asked himself that a million times over the past three days. He never came up with an answer that sits right with him. “I’m fine,” he says anyway. “Better now.”

“You don’t have to agree if you don’t want to come. No hard feelings, promise. I don’t want it to jar you babe.” 

“I want to,” he assures, and he thinks it, too. Pete is right; Mikey is in a pressing need to change his environments. Staring at the four walls of his room and the bottomless abyss of instant noodle cups is becoming an eyesore. 

“Okay, as long as you’re not forcing yourself. We can call the deal off whenever you want. I’ll come up with a breakup story.”

“Pete,” he sighs, making an effort to roll his face away from his pillow. “Don’t worry. I can do it.” Pete has been a critical factor for his recovery. If Mikey found no reason to help him before other than summer boredom, now he has one. 

“Alright baby, but say the word when you need it and I’ll take care of it.”

“Thanks. Bye,” he says, and when Pete echoes it without elaboration, he hangs up. He discards his earphones and drifts to sleep. 

--

Pete’s mom is a short woman with brown hair that bobs around her happy face. 

She laughs at everything and never raises her voice for any other reason than expressing her delight. Pete’s evolving quarrel with her almost seems made up. How this woman is capable of terrorizing Pete’s freedom on the question of children, Mikey can’t have it figured out until he sees it for himself. 

Anything involving family puts a huge grin on her face, and she bounces giddily around Mikey, making sure he, too, can absorb some of the radiance that she emanates into the blankness inside of his body, like all she wants is to include Mikey in her world. She must sense that something is wrong, or worse, Pete might have slipped a word or two to her. 

He tries to make himself scarce, shyly sitting on the towel laid out beneath him, bathing under the shade of a parasol. Pete has gone farther down the sand to play volleyball with his siblings, which Mikey has opted out of. 

“Mikey, honey,” Dale calls out, snapping his focus back. He looks to her and pushes his glasses up. “Some watermelon?”

She nudges a paper plate towards him, carrying slices of red, fresh watermelon. He doesn’t have the appetite, but he has even less heart to turn her down when her eyes glimmer so bright the sun pales by comparison. “Thank you.” 

He pinches one slice and carefully bites the tip, gazing into the distance. Pete is shirtless, glowing under the sunlight that seems to pierce through the clouds and pour over him, and his face reflects perfectly that of his mother’s; bright and laughing and baring two rows of stark white teeth. 

“Mikey,” this time it’s Pete’s dad, Pete, who catches his attention. He’s just come back from a stroll to the mini mart nearby, holding two cans of beer in one hand as he ducks under the parasol overhead. He offers one to Mikey, who takes it reluctantly. “Are you not boiling in those clothes?”

Mikey looks down at himself, his Darth Vader t-shirt and skinny jeans. Only his toes are naked. “Oh, I’m used to it. I’m okay.” 

“Are you sure?” Pete insists, cracking open his can. 

“I’m really okay,” Mikey says and remembers to smile. A forced smile is better than none. “My brother and I, we both hate to tan. It makes us red. It’s really not a good look.” At least, it used to be like that. He has no idea how much living in LA has changed Gerard.

“I don’t want you to die from a heatstroke of all things boy,” Pete laughs, and Dale laughs with him. 

“Oh leave him be darling. Mikey’s a shy boy.”

Mikey tries to laugh with them, because these people deserve it. The happiness. But when he can’t anymore, he stuffs his face with the watermelon and downs it with the beer. 

“Pete told us you were sick the past week,” Pete’s dad comments with worry after his gulp of beer. He’s sitting in a camping chair Mikey had helped him unfold. “Are you better now?” 

Mikey takes this as a cue to talk his fake boyfriend up. “Very much better now. I have a very bad immune system, it usually takes up to 2 weeks for me to recover. But Pete has done more than enough to keep me well.” He adds a chuckle for good measure.

“He’s a good doctor,” Pete nods.

“And a good boyfriend,” Dale agrees. Even if Pete isn’t really Mikey’s boyfriend, he can’t deny that. Pete’s future spouse will be a lucky person. 

The day progresses uneventfully. He makes small talk with Pete and Dale as Pete the son drags his siblings into the water. They managed to make friends with a bunch of teenagers and are now engaged in a game of water volleyball. They come running back when lunch rolls by, and Pete plunks himself down next to Mikey and gets everything in his way wet. 

“Hey babe,” Pete says, pressing a kiss to Mikey’s cheek. Mikey wipes the salted sea from his face with his palm. “You should join us out there.”

“No thanks,” he mumbles. “Don’t wanna run.” 

“At least come in the water with me,” Pete suggests. Mikey stares at him as he pushes half a sandwich in his mouth. Pete is staring at him meaningfully. 

“You can’t take no for an answer, can you,” Andrew drones boredly from beside Dale, chewing on his own sandwich. Mikey thinks Pete’s younger brother is very similar to him. They’re around the same age, too, and should get along best. If he were really to become part of this family, he can almost imagine himself having elaborate conversations on Star Wars with Andrew. 

“Eat your sandwich,” Pete retorts and turns back to Mikey. “Come on dude, just for 15 minutes. We can make out.” He whispers the last part in Mikey’s ear and giggles. 

“10 minutes.” Mikey sighs.

“12 minutes?”

“5.”

“Okay okay,” Pete concedes around a new mouthful of bread and tomato and ham. “10 minutes.”

When Mikey wills himself to change into a pair of long boxers that aren’t even swim trunks, they end up spending more than 10 minutes between the waves. Mikey has shown hesitation since he tentatively dipped his toe in the sea, and it took Pete pulling on his wrist and making him crash face first into the water to finally have him wet. 

They’ve been floating around aimlessly for a while now, with Pete on Mikey’s back before Mikey shifted to drape himself in Pete’s lap. The water carries their weight afloat, and they ripple up and down with the push and pull of the waves. Mikey thinks, watching the heat fizzle the air above the surface of the glittering water, that this really isn’t so bad.

“You’re in outer space right now,” Pete mutters, dragging him back to reality. His hands that were laced by Mikey’s lower back move to cup his nape. 

“I’m where?” he asks, flicking his eyes back to Pete’s widespread grin and greeting all 32 teeth that flash back at him. 

“Not here, apparently. You zoned out.” Pete reaches up to card his fingers through Mikey’s bangs. “So y’know, you’re in outer space, making cosmic small talk with the aliens instead of kissing me.” 

“Surely felt like it,” Mikey snorts, thinking about all the thinking he’d done. It’s a lot, and he hadn’t had a gasping breath of reality until he stepped out of the house and felt the summer sun on his skin. He’s alarmingly becoming like his dad. “You wanted me to kiss you?”

“We planned on making out, didn’t we.” Pete winks. 

Mikey wants to look over his own shoulder at the Wentz family lingering by the beach, most likely sharing more watermelon. But he doesn’t want to be obvious. “Are they looking?” he mumbles. 

Pete tosses a brief look behind Mikey, then back at him before shifting him properly back into his lap like he weighs nothing. “Yeah, they are. You should give me a real kiss.” 

Mikey doesn’t protest with another word and leans down to kiss Pete. He puts on a show and snakes his arms around Pete’s neck to keep him steady, licking the salt off his lips and pecking his way to tongue action. He tilts his head this way and that, tightening his thighs around Pete’s waist, playing with his hair. His arms slip a little atop Pete’s shoulder dotted with water. When Mikey trails down Pete’s jaw and toward the juncture between neck and shoulder, he smells sun-lapped skin and, faintly, men’s shampoo. 

He tries to immerse himself into a person who truly loves Pete, and it’s pathetic that it’s the most he’s felt in months. A fire igniting on a play-pretend basis, in a heart that doesn’t belong to him. 

Pete moans approvingly at all he does, like Mikey’s change in character caught him off guard. He, too, slides his hands up and down Mikey’s back, rounding over his ribs to pinch his nipples and claw his collarbones, before they snake back to grab his ass. 

When they part, Mikey blinks at the huge grin on Pete’s face. “What are you fucking smiling about?”

“Man, I should tell you more often that my parents are looking,” he laughs, covering his mouth with one hand while the other supports Mikey’s ass underwater.

“They weren’t looking?” Mikey raises a brow. When Pete shakes his head with soaring laughter, Mikey flicks him on the forehead. “You fucking asshole.” 

“Dude, you were totally into it! I mean it was great! But you should really do that more often. It’s fucking hot.”

“Should they watch us when we have sex too?” Mikey rolls his eyes. 

“I’m considering it,” Pete huffs out as his laughter tapers out. Mikey glares at him, but he ignores it. “Speaking of sex, we seriously need to have sex. Like, now.” 

“You owe it to me,” Mikey berates. Pete blows him a kiss. 

When they go home, the first thing they do is lock themselves in Pete’s room. 

--

Mikey believes Pete’s addiction to sex has bestowed him with a very appropriate gift. 

Pete is incredible in bed.

And this part, he doesn’t have to pretend. 

It really shows that this man had been rampant in his sex adventures for the past 10 years. His every move balances practice and surety, and he always seems to know what to do to make Mikey feel good, so good his brain shuts off several times. 

Mikey has a wandering mind that prefers imagination over reality. But Pete’s lips and tongue and hands and other parts of his body bring out this forlorn desire in Mikey to stay anchored in the real ephemeral world just to live the sensation again and again. Undoubtedly, sex feels great all the time, but it seems that much more elite when it’s with Pete. 

Frank and Gabe had both also been good at sex. Frank was more vanilla; if asked, he’d unhesitatingly answer he’d do missionary for the rest of his life if he could. And while Gabe was also the making-every-moment-romantic kind, they had a decent amount of freaky sex, too. Often it went overboard, with the inclusion of toys of which Mikey had never even conceived the existence. And of course, the threesome that broke everything. 

The men that Mikey slept with afterwards, the one night stands and bar hookups that followed, he can barely remember. They were probably meant to serve as a rebound for the love he hadn’t been able to pursue, so it only made sense Mikey had them all filed in a place of his brain that isn’t made for remembering. 

But there is not even a part of Mikey that feels cold and lonely when he has sex with Pete. He’s careful with every inch, touching and licking and kissing, giving love and affection. His hands seem to set everything in its trail ablaze, every muscle twitching in their wake. They feel so good around Mikey’s throbbing cock, even better when his hot mouth is around it. 

The last time they had sex, they’d gone multiple rounds. Pete had promised all night, and he’s still certain that would’ve worked out as he’d promised if Mikey hadn’t blacked out the fourth time he came. 

Mikey can safely assume he’s quite familiar with Pete’s maneuvers. But with each time they touch comes something new. 

Like now, Mikey on all fours with his head buried into the pillow and Pete’s warmth behind him, somewhere, as he presses his three fingers into Mikey in a repeated pattern. He varies his angles, the width between the fingers, the pace; everything is something Mikey can’t anticipate. 

He used to contain his moans, out of embarrassment and the habit of hiding from Frank’s mom. But Pete had confessed to loving them, so much it gets him stiff and leaking with them alone, so Mikey has learned to let himself go. He moans and cries out and yells sometimes, and he can feel it in his throat, the realness, the ultimate meaning of feeling good. 

He has never been so happy about being called a pillow-biter, until he had to clench his teeth through the intense waves of pleasure that won’t fucking stop when Pete hits that sweet, sweet spot. He will bite everything in his way; he can’t handle the pleasure. 

“M’going to fuck you now,” Pete grinds out from somewhere above him. Mikey is a sweating, squirming mess atop the sheets. He feels ever so dizzy as he watches Pete’s arms bracket both sides of him and prepares to push in. 

“Oh shit,” he moans when he feels half of Pete’s cock sink into him. The width and length fill him to the brim when Pete’s hips meet Mikey’s ass. He might look like an animal fearing for its life right now, but inside, he’s loving his life.

“Shit, Mikey,” Pete groans, bending his head to nuzzle Mikey’s neck. Hot breath warms the sweat already clinging to Mikey’s shoulder. 

Pete moves slowly, with a grace that Mikey doesn’t see but definitely feels deep inside of him, grazing his organs, reaching the core of his soul. Before long, Pete starts snapping his hips in a rapid pace, reducing them to two moaning, crying heaps. 

Surprisingly, it’s Mikey who has the most trouble reining it in. Sex has never felt so good that he needs to clutch something in a death grip -- the sheets, Pete’s hair, Pete’s arms, Pete’s shoulderblades, the headboard, or that time in the bathroom, the shower head. He curses most in bed, when someone like Pete is pounding into him without a pause or a hitch. He speaks more and even gets sick of his own shrieky voice constantly moaning harmonies of vowels. 

Sex has never felt so good that it steals half of his lungs away and leaves him gasping and breathless and heaving. When he’s on his back, he can sometimes see his own chest seesaw up and down in his desperate efforts to breathe. And Pete would hover right above him, thrusting until Mikey can hear Pete’s skin smacking his better than he can feel it. 

And when Mikey comes, he always shudders. He remembers having sex with a girl back in highschool and she’d vibrated so hard he had to hold her before she could fall off the bed. He feels like that now -- when an orgasm is so overwhelming your eyes roll back as your whole body seizes in violent convulsions. 

He’s had this calibre of orgasm with Frank once, a dozen of times with Gabe just because they had way more sex than Mikey’s ever had before. And Pete had managed to be spot on every single time. Mikey couldn’t even blame himself for wanting multiple rounds if they were going to keep up the standards. 

He makes a point of it when Pete slips out of him, wiping his hole with a thumb and smearing it on his spine. Mikey is spent. His knees have given up and let him collapse onto the bed, tears wetting his cheeks and elbows trembling. 

Pete flops down beside him and rakes his bangs aside with his gross hand. He still has his condom on. “You’re so fucking sensitive. It’s awesome.”

That’s probably why sex makes him feel so much. “Get your nasty fingers out of my face.”

“Why?” Pete blinks at him. “You were sucking on them just minutes before.”

“Let’s go again,” Mikey sighs, content. 

“You’re kidding right?” Pete asks, but Mikey picks up on the underlying satisfaction in his voice. 

“Sure. I’m kidding. I just got fucked hard and I’m still horny. Of course I’m kidding.”

“No need to be grumpy,” Pete laughs, throwing a leg over Mikey’s and leaning down to kiss his cheek. Mikey protests vocally when he feels his warm tongue flick at his face.

“Keep that for my dick. In a few minutes. God, that was fucking intense.”

To Mikey’s surprise, Pete doesn’t respond. With their proximity, he feels Pete’s happy humming through his chest, spilling onto Mikey’s back, seeping into his skin. Mikey doesn’t have his glasses, so he only sees Pete’s fuzzy form bringing his hand to twirl Mikey’s bangs between his fingers, before they push it away from his face. 

Mikey’s hand creeps down towards his pelvis and he starts to stroke himself. When he thinks his dick can manage another wave of bloodrush, he shakily leans on an elbow. 

He looks at Pete. “Ready to go?” 

“You know it,” Pete grins. Mikey smirks, too, and doesn’t waste any time before he pounces him, tearing the condom out of his cock and settling in his lap. 

This time, he’ll make sure to ride Pete until his parents can hear him call his name. 

Pete reaches the bookstore just in time as the rain begins to pour. 

As he makes it through the door, he looks over his shoulder to the curtain of grey painting each little window of the shop. A rack of newspapers gets blasted off and he watches as a few people run after the flying papers, holding their hats and huddling their shoulders in. Pete could have been those papers. He lets out a breath and scuffs his shoe on the welcome mat before wandering further. 

He’s just hooked up with Justin from the ER services, and he can’t quite say the man’s sex performance is up to par with his brilliant work at the hospital. But it might have been the squeaky clean men’s restroom that got Pete crabby, or it might have to do with the fact that he kind of got used to Mikey. He’s not satiated. 

Either way, Pete heavily relies on his break to quell his frustration that has randomly appeared in the past few days. A visit to the bookstore across the hospital would be a calm way of fixing himself.

For a while he just browses through the store in thoughtless absence, skipping from one section to another, avoiding crowds no matter how small. He turns down customer service with a charming smile and continues on searching for something that’ll occupy his current mental cavity.

He isn’t even sure what caused his frustration in the first place. Pete gets these bouts of sourceless anger and impatience like menstruation, only in that it seems to cling onto him once a month. Reasons lurk in the far reach of his brain that he can’t touch, like fumes hanging in the air and slipping through fingers. Or like trying to catch a dream, a spot in your vision your eyes made up. 

Pete doesn’t think about these things, and never tried to find a cure for them. Cures are only for illnesses like a fever or food poisoning or abdominal infection. Not for ghost-like issues he doesn’t have the means to parse if they don’t even properly exist. 

In a head that constantly ferments thoughts and inner reflection, Pete drowns himself out with light humming and touching things within his reach to give his brain other cognitive activities. Call it a cheap case of doctor swindle, but it works. He likes to pretend he didn’t study the painstaking brain anatomy for naught. 

Once he approaches the rack flooded with magazines at the very back of the bookstore, he smiles to himself. If he finds old school porn, he’s taking it home with him tonight. But instead, what stands out is a collection of comic books, the likes of which he’s certain would make a happy little present for Mikey. Or Andrew. Whoever he sees first. 

He picks one up and sticks it in front of him. It’s something obviously underrated with eccentric themes of outer space and extraterrestrial pirates that glide through the ripples of the universe. It’s a rip-off of Star Wars, that much he can tell. Pete smiles approvingly. Mikey would definitely bury his nose in this until the corners fold into themselves from gripping. He doesn’t care much about copyrights as long as it’s one long, good read that leaves a thoughtful smile on his face. Pete rolls it together and tucks it under his arm.

Something colorful made of red and yellow and blue catches his eye. When he wedges it up from between the stack of magazines, he scans the glossy page almost carefully.

It’s beautiful. This one he knows with conviction that Mikey would fall in love with. 

The main character reveals himself in the middle of the cover, wearing a yellow helmet with the words Good Luck colorfully painted across the visor, paired with eyes and lips reminiscent of a clown. A red leather jacket draws the perfect outline of the scrawny character’s arms and torso, concealing a printed shirt of sorts underneath. Crouched next to him is another man with bright red hair and a blue jacket, but he seems so faded into the background it lets Pete believe the spotlight is supposed to shine over the red one. Both look to be stranded in a dry, ruthless ocean of desert. 

“The Adventures of Kobra Kid,” Pete mutters to himself. 

He flips the comic book to its back and is immediately drawn to an image of the author. It reads Gerard Way. 

In one time stopping heartbeat, Pete recognizes the name.

He knows there must be thousands of Way’s out there, but Gerard Way bears a horrific resemblance to Mikey, too perfect not to be related to him. Where Mikey is built with defined edges Gerard has them rounded, from his cheeks to his cupid’s bow to his pointy nose. Even the eyes carry the same indescribable shade of green and brown in them. He’s prettier, smoother, and even in a small square of photo he looks self-confident. Mikey slouches his spine in a constant effort to curl his flesh and bones into disappearance. They look like opposites of the same person. 

This has to be Mikey’s brother. 

It’s only because curiosity is the biggest bane of his life that Pete reads the description; artist based in LA, graduated from Los Angeles School of Visual Arts, received honors in best digital artist and character designer in his final year of attending. Gerard Way is an exceptional painter with vast, creative visions of the world and an imagination marked with the grey vivacities of life. 

Pete can barely stop himself from sifting through the pages, fleetingly seeing Kobra Kid’s and, as he discovers, Party Poison’s faces in different panels. He cracks it open towards the end, where he lands on an interview with Gerard -- Mikey’s brother. The same one that Mikey claimed has abandoned him. 

Nothing of interest catches his attention until the interviewer begins to delve into questions about motives and the makings of his comic book. 

Q: Do you have any particular objective for the creation of Kobra Kid?

G.W. : I do, actually. I started this series with [my little brother] in mind. We’ve been estranged since I moved from New Jersey, and I wished for nothing but to see him again. 

Q: What prevented you from that?

G.W.: I think he changed his number. I wasn’t able to contact him for years. I don’t think he wants to see me, so I never went back home. I hope he’ll still want to see himself in my comic book. Just so he can know that he still exists for me, in more ways than just family. He was my platonic other half. He still is.

Q: Do you think he’ll see this and understand the message you’re trying to put out?

G.W.: Oh, definitely. I’m basically writing about [him]. Even the character looks like him. I slipped in some inside jokes we used to share when we were little kids. He’ll instantly recognize himself, I’m sure. I don’t know how he’ll react to it, though. But I hope he knows he’ll always be my kid brother. 

Pete snaps the issue close and stares at the front cover one more time before he looks for a proper sketch of Kobra Kid without his helmet. A second viewing permits him to notice the similarities he’d missed the first time. Kobra Kid really does reflect what Mikey would look like with bleached hair and sunglasses. The clothes don’t seem like the things Mikey would wear, but Pete thinks maybe Gerard would be the most suitable to know what best compliments Mikey’s skinny figure. As an artist, and as an older brother. 

With a determination that almost feels like betrayal, Pete searches for a number and registers it in his phone. 

Mikey got fed up with confining himself in his dad’s home. 

It was clear from the beginning that his dad isn’t going to come back any time soon, and his staying balled up on the bed and staring out the window hadn’t proven to speed the process. If anything, it only seems to have slowed time down, where his distress becomes more and more excruciating, like an imaginary itch he can’t get rid of no matter how much he scratches.

He’d gone back to his own apartment a few days prior to at least clean up and tie himself to some sort of diversion. But all that he’d gotten out of that is the same old routine of moping around and window-watching and listening to the same songs, just on a different bed. 

At least, he managed to whip out the comic book Pete got him earlier in the week. He’d finished it in one sitting, curled beneath his sheets and feeling the sun creep down the sky and turn it dark. 

How ironic it all wound up. Years ago, Mikey had promised himself never to grow into a second coming of his dad, step into his skin like a suit and wear his phlegmatic lifestyle like a smothering necktie and be comfortable with giving up. Now, when the person he ought to avoid transforming into disappears, Mikey ends up replacing him. 

He can’t let it get that far. 

Years ago, when the divorce and Gerard’s departure was still a novelty they thought they’d never surmount, Mikey’s dad had sent him to his uncle’s private beach house. The place was a vast paradise of pale soft sand and an ocean made of diamond, but to him it was just another regular clearing on earth. What’s the point of heaven on earth if he was going to be alone in it… 

Mikey had still been crushed by the neverending pain of his family issues that he’d dulled down with a refusal to believe its permanence. In an attempt at self-consolation, Mikey had gone out kayaking all by himself. He remembers a boundless plane of crisp blue surrounding him, and he’d drifted so far into the horizon that the palm trees shrunk to the size of his pinky. 

He remembers, as he laid idle on his kayak and listening to the water gurgle underneath him, that it’s the loneliest he’s felt all his life. Gerard was gone, Frank barely spoke to him anymore, and his dad wasn’t even with him.

He’d let the sun beat down on his shoulders, shivering in the heat because he wished there could be someone’s naked back sitting in front of him, helping him get this kayak somewhere. Though his uncle and aunt were waiting for him ashore, halfheartedly waving for him to come back, Mikey felt angry at the world with inexplicable determination. 

Since then, the loneliness only ever went away when someone was there to chase it away. He’d appointed it as other people’s responsibility, because there was nothing he could do about feeling lonely. His own company had always been endless stretches of silence. 

With the exception of his mom, Mikey misses his family. He misses when he was in love, even if the last time was 6 months ago with Gabe. He misses Pete, surprisingly, the way he’d offer everything Mikey has ever longed for without them mentioning a word of it. 

With a sigh, Mikey crawls to sit at the end of his bed and pulls out his phone. As he dials Pete’s number, he looks out the window and squints through the explosion of sunlight deep in the sky. What a waste of good weather. 

When Pete picks up, Mikey is the first to speak. “Hey man.”

“Mikey? Everything okay?”

For a moment, he doesn’t say anything. Is this really how it is? Has he projected himself as someone so withdrawn into his own sadness that the first words out of Pete’s mouth are those of concern? 

“Yeah, fine,” he blinks and shakes his head. “I was just wondering.”

There’s a pause during which he emptily stares at his bare feet. He hears shifting on the other line, and Pete’s rumbling phone voice. “Mikey? You were wondering?”

“Yeah, sorry.” He doesn’t know anymore if this is a good idea. His guts have deserted him in an act of treachery. “I was wondering if you wanted to have dinner with me tonight.”

Against all expected replies that Mikey could have imagined, he’s surprised to hear Pete snort. “Dinner?”

Mikey frowns. The derision in his tone is thinly veiled. “Yeah, dinner.”

“Are you inviting me out?” 

“Is there a problem with that?” Mikey asks with a sinking feeling in his stomach. 

“No, not at all.” Pete coughs, then clears his throat. If Pete didn’t see him as someone on the verge of shattering if not treated delicately, Mikey wonders how true to himself he’d be in his rejection. “It’s surprising, that’s all.”

“Okay,” Mikey says, and contemplates ending the call. He knows his place now. 

But Pete starts to speak before he abruptly cuts himself off, like he wants to lay him down gently. Mikey doesn’t need that. Not right now when tripping over his own feet will make him cry. 

“It’s no big deal. Like I said, I was just wondering. Alright, bye,” he says. 

“Wait, Mikey.” Pete sighs, and Mikey waits with bated breath, his thumb already hovering over a button that will save him the awkwardness. “I… you know I don’t do that, right?”

There is so much he wants to retort. But Mikey is no social butterfly who can mend any situation with tactictfully placed words. So he says, “okay.”

Pete doesn’t fold. “I mean like, it’s not my fault, okay? I just don’t do that. You know it…” 

“Have dinner?” Mikey arcs a brow. He’s starting to genuinely be confused. 

“No, yeah, like, go on dates. And all that. Yeah. I don’t date.” Pete doesn’t sound 29. Just his hesitance robbed 10 years off him. 

“Okay,” Mikey blinks. “I’ll see you.”

“Wait,” Pete repeats. “You’re not mad, right? You can’t. It’s not my fault.”

“Yeah, I’m cool.” 

“Alright, because I told you. I told you I don’t date, and I don’t want to. I mean like, not right now.”

“I got it Pete,” Mikey grinds out. He’d understood the first time. Nobody needs to be rejected three times to come to grips with it. 

“I’ll see you.” Pete clears his throat anew. “See you, yeah?”

“Okay,” Mikey says.

“Saturday?”

“Sure,” he says, and hangs up on a word he isn’t sure he guarantees. 

He tosses his phone away and drags himself towards his closet. He picks up his tightest shirt and jeans before slipping into them. The mirror reveals his pallure and the strange nakedness of his eyes without the rings of black makeup under them. He fixes that with a daub of eyeliner and moves on to part his hair in ways he never had before. He forgoes hair wax and straightener altogether; it doesn’t even matter.

He lunges back into bed and sleeps, waiting for the sun to skid below the horizon, stealing day from his window and summoning night.

--

If there’s one thing Pete giving him the brush-off spurred, it’s a newfound resolve to get wasted. 

Mikey has a little bit of money left, but if he angled his hips right, he’d significantly increase his chances of getting free drinks. People love his hips for a reason or another. They’re bony and meager, but if the charm works, he won’t complain. 

As usual, the nightclub is bursting at the seams with people when he arrives. He’s never studied the meaning of being on time anyway. 

He weasels his way through the ebb and flow of the crowd and ends up by the bar. He gathers himself on a stool, determined to stay there for the whole night. A bartender comes by to pick up his order, and he places only one with more alcohol than mixer. It’s the most he can afford.

No longer than 10 minutes, someone approaches him. 

Mikey knows who it is before he sees a face. 

Gabe still wears the same dollar-store perfume which he washes down his chest like regular soap, and the smell wafts to Mikey in an encompassment so familiar he can’t ignore. 

He turns in his stool to face Gabe, his glorious 195 centimeters and clothes in colors so jarring it hurts to look at him. Though Mikey absolutely does not want to smile, he does so anyway. “Hey.”

“Hey yourself,” Gabe says, sizing him up like they’d never seen each other before. 

Mikey no longer holds meaningful emotions towards Gabe, but old loves never fade peacefully without leaving behind a dent or two in the heart. Mikey definitely feels them like a phantom, throbbing within him. A familiar ache.

“Still picking out who the third candidate should be?” Mikey asks, leaning his elbows on the countertop. Gabe rolls his eyes and flails his arms in a way that settles to corner Mikey.

“Come on Mikey, you can’t tell me you’ve never considered it before.” The light flushes Gabe’s grinning face in neon colors, drowning out his clothes in contrast, and his voice seems to follow the thudding beat of the song blaring from above them. 

“Never. I’d warned you how I felt about it before,” he flatly explains. 

Gabe waves his hand in dismissal. “Either way, I’d missed you these last few months,” he says, slanting in and ghosting his arm around Mikey’s waist. 

“Of course you did. You were so lonely, banging that dude. William?”

“Hey, it was just a one time thing.” Gabe’s face turns serious all of a sudden, lips pursed and eyes regaining their downward appeal, and Mikey’s heartbeat freezes. “I mean it. I missed you. You didn’t come by at all, and I was always hoping I’d see your face among these people. You really broke my heart, you know?”

Mikey can’t explain why he’s abruptly seized with panic. He doesn’t feel the same way, but seeing Gabe’s face that he’d learned to touch and kiss and love for a year and a half stirs something within him. He misses this. The contact, the want that weighs more than just a stranger’s unfamiliar embrace. Something more than just fucking and blithely dancing around each other… 

“Mikey,” Gabe calls, reducing the space that separates them until Mikey has to crane his neck to look at him. Gabe’s fingers pull through his hair in a gesture of affection, and Mikey hates that it reminds him of Pete. “Will you come home with me tonight?”

“For what? You’re going to drop me.”

“And aren’t you?” Gabe arcs a brow. 

He has a point. If his blinking eyes twinkling innocuously under lights that suggest sin and sex don’t convince Mikey, the unyielding arms now holding onto his waist on both sides manage to. He concedes with a sigh and lays his head on Gabe’s chest. He hears and feels a chuckle rumble through. 

“You should buy me drinks,” he offers casually, pulling apart completely. He’s going to need the inebriation. 

“That’s the way it has always worked, hasn’t it,” Gabe laughs somewhat morosely, like he sees through Mikey, and orders multiple rounds of shots. It’s a referral to how they’d first met and how they’d fallen in love. Mikey forgot half of it now. 

He’s in for a long night. 

Pete’s hospital shift ends on a sour note. 

He hadn’t been able to shrug off his conversation with Mikey all day. The words, the dryness of his tone, how Pete tripped over himself to defend his point without him even needing to. It spins in his head like a screwdriver drilling a hole in the dead center of his brain. 

The guilt sleeping at the pit of his stomach only keeps growing. He might have been actively caring after Mikey in the wake of his dad’s getaway, he’s even gone out of his way to keep tabs on the guy, but when it comes to the invitation Mikey had laid bare for him to decide, on the spot, Pete felt himself falling upon flighty instincts. 

A few seconds is not enough for him to turn down a boy obviously within vertigo distance of crashing down a pitfall of sorrow. In the hot seat it’s impossible for Pete to come up with something that won’t inescapably destroy whatever balanced dynamic had stretched itself out between them. Now, he knows for certain something has changed. No matter how scarce, it makes a notable difference. 

He feels bad, to say the least. 

In the end Pete settles for what he does best, which is not to think about it and let it fester until bugs start masticating his brain as it shrivels into decay. 

His only method of remedy is to drop by the nightclub almost as soon as his shift ends. Opportunities like these arise more often than he’d like to admit, those that involve pushing aside feelings and conflicts he isn’t prepared to confront. Pathetically, Pete is prepared for not being prepared by stocking clothes meant for clubbing more than for work in his car -- which basically look the same. 

Pulling up at the parking lot, Pete only has to switch his shirt into a black button down that he leaves open by the collar in exposure to his collarbones and chest hair. 

He remembers to drink appropriately to decent driving skills because he’s not abandoning his car again like he had done numerous times before. He’d once left with vomit on his sleeves and Patrick holding his weight up by the waist as they took a cab home, grumbling about Pete’s irresponsibility and how elated he’ll be to find his car missing its front wheels in the morning. 

He shakes his head and cringes at the memories. Pete hates himself, but he hates his old self even more. Even if mid 20’s Pete is practically the same as now-Pete, there are things he wished he could completely erase from his haunting memories. Looking back, it’s like Pete doesn’t even care about himself. He’d rather get used to his wretched lifestyle than change a thing about it. 

The moment he walks past the entrance of the nightclub, the world becomes a sudden blur. Shrouded in a vision of flashing lights and snuggled within the heated embrace of a bustling crowd, Pete downs booze like water. 

He thinks he’s hallucinating when he sees a figure so scarily similar to Mikey slouched by the bar, turning his wide eyes to a man and talking to him, but a moment’s distraction by foreign lips and another set of hands on his hips snaps him out of his head. 

He isn’t sure of how long he stays on the dance floor. He’d gotten used to boisterous loud music smothering his ears and adventurous hands exploring his body, but so far most of the faces had been visually reduced to vague shapes of eyes and lips and swirling hair. He makes out with a girl holding him from behind, and the guy he’s dancing with has crept his hands down towards his crotch. 

It doesn’t take long until he feels himself being dragged to the fancy restrooms and stapled shut in a stall. He makes out the girl’s face, green aggressive eyes with equally aggressive makeup veiled behind a cloak of aggressive red hair -- before he makes out the guy’s face nestled between his thighs, short brown hair and that’s as far as Pete distinguishes. 

He’s sitting between the girl’s legs with his back pushed into her plump chest, and she tips his head to the side as they continue to make out -- lappings of tongue and smearing lipstick. 

Down by his crotch the guy is working his zipper down, which reveals Pete’s throbbing hard cock constrained in thin grey, stained cotton. The guy frees him from his underwear and starts licking, mouthing, spitting, sucking. 

Pete seizes and shivers and moans without any reserve, gripping the girl’s thigh and biting down on her lip when the guy’s teeth drag along his length. 

The world becomes a frenzy that spins too fast, messing with the illusion of time and making it sail faster, and faster, and so much faster until he unconsciously thinks of Mikey and how Pete would infinitely enjoy this drunken experience in a fancy restroom with him. 

He thinks the fluorescent lights would beam off Mikey’s glasses and blind him as he graces Pete with a blowjob from the heavens, groaning each time his knees slide against the clean tiles, guiding Pete’s hand to his hair and letting him pet the dusty brown bangs, those bangs he’s so crazy about. 

He imagines Mikey’s moans, the ones that sound so different from his voice it’s like he isn’t the same person. He sees the mental image of Mikey flicking his eyes over the glasses that have skidded down his nose, stark with lust and rounded and richly framed between thick lashes. 

When he comes, he takes a second to recover before he pushes the guy’s face away with as much caution as he can muster and sidles off the girl’s lap. He does up his zipper, weak in the knees, and stumbles out of the stall, leaving behind two confused faces he doesn’t want to see. He uses the back of his hand to wipe his lips, surely bloated and smudged with lipstick. 

There’s still steam inside of him he has to bust out, the same hefty smog of frustration clogging his blood vessels that he can’t dispel no matter how much he tries. Where this would have been more than enough, Pete stumbles out of the nightclub less than satisfied. He’s restless. 

Summer air is cold and sticky at night. It glides over his skin and prickles at everything in its wake. Pete feels scolded. He pays no attention to the loitering lot of drunk, vomiting people staggering against the wall and leans on a lamp post. With shaky hands he digs out a pack of cigarettes he always keeps on him when he goes clubbing. 

The ground beneath him spins even more when he sucks his first inhale in weeks off the cigarette. He lets it out like he’d been running miles, and cranes his neck to look at the sky. There are no stars in sight, and somehow, it sort of saddens him. The night is lonely, empty and lifeless just outside a place of chaotic fiesta. 

Letting his cigarette dangle between his lips, he procures his phone and calls Mikey. 

Within three rings, Mikey picks up. Pete sighs out coiling smoke and says, “hey, Mikey. Listen, I just--”

“Hey, Pete right?”

Pete pauses. It’s not Mikey’s voice. This person sounds… enthusiastic. “Yeah, it’s Pete,” he says warily. 

“Yeah, that’s the caller ID. Okay Pete, you were saying?”

Pete opens his mouth, then closes it. The fingers trapping his cigarette tremble, he notices as he brings it to his lips. The fire burns like coal in his lungs, and it seems to reach his warbling stomach, too, wedging its way into his swelling heart. “Can I have Mikey on the line?”

“I’m afraid not, Pete. Pete Wentz. Am I pronouncing it right?”

“Yes,” he grinds out. “Why not? What’s he doing?”

“Mikey’s sleeping. He’s very tired. He was very active tonight, doing some, uh, bed activities, if you know what I mean…” the man on the other line laughs, and judging from the teasing tone in his voice Pete assumes the statement is meant to be accompanied by a nudge in the ribs. 

His insides constrict sardonically. Once more, Pete feels scolded. 

You fucked up. 

“Right,” he replies lamely, running a hand in his hair. He curses when cigarette ash crashes down his hand. His chest is suddenly too small for air. “Okay thanks, bye.” 

Pete doesn’t wait to hang up. And when he does, he gives himself a moment to glare at his phone before shoving it down his pocket. He finishes his cigarette in two long drags, scuffs it out beneath the sole of his shoes and walks towards the parking lot.

He sleeps in his car that night. 

The first time it happens, Mikey is laying stomach-down on his bed and playing the Sims. 

There’s still a hollow void gaping in the middle of his chest when he stares at his phone that erupts in rings, displaying Pete’s name. Why he insists on calling Mikey instead of texting him most of the time, he’d never know. 

He waits until it rings almost all the way through before he picks up, half expecting to hear an engine running in the background. “Pete?”

“Are you still at your dad’s house?” is the first thing he asks. Mikey can make out the happy chirping of birds from Pete’s end. He hears it, too, coming from his own window. 

“I am,” he replies. 

“Good, because I’m here. Can you open the door for me please?” 

Mikey doesn’t respond. He blinks at his Sim character paused in the middle of woohooing, and finally slides off the bed. As he treads down the stairs, he says, “what the fuck Pete, what are you doing here?”

“Just thought I’d stop by, you know?” 

Mikey shakes his head and reaches the door. Sure enough, as he undoes the bolt and pulls the door open, Pete is standing on the other side, showered in sunlight and holding his phone to his ear. His face splits into a grin Mikey can’t help but find halfhearted. 

“Hey baby,” Pete beams. The sound echoes into his phone too and Mikey ends the call with a sigh. 

“Did something happen?” he frowns, keeping his hand on the door, caging his home. 

“No, nothing at all.” Pete drags his hand through his hair before it trails down and wipes his face. “I just, uh, can I come in?” 

Mikey considers his face for a moment, trying to read intentions off of Pete’s abnormally tight features, before the loneliness tugging at his insides screams at him for company. He sighs and steps aside without a word.

“Thanks,” Pete huffs out, like he’d been as ready to be welcomed as he was to be thrown out. 

Mikey wants to get back to his game and rot his way through the rest of his day, but maybe an invitation to his bedroom would convey subliminal messages he doesn’t really mean. Sex with Pete might be incredible, but the things he’d said the other day still lingers in the form of a bitter taste on the roof of Mikey’s mouth. He’s vindictive if not tired of all the shit that had been thrown his way lately. 

“I’m gonna go back to my game, upstairs,” he says, vaguely pointing to his bedroom. 

“Cool. What are you playing?” 

“The Sims.” Mikey clears his throat. He feels himself flush with embarrassment as he says it. 

“Cool.”

It gets easier by the time he’s back on his bed and watching his Sims live all the aspects of life that he hadn’t been able to in his. Pete stays quiet beside him, alternating his gaze from the screen to Mikey, as far as he notices. 

There’s tension lining Pete’s shoulders and an unsurety eating the broad movements so typical of him and turning them demure, mild-mannered. It’s so bad that the uneasiness crawls into Mikey, too, and clings like a parasite. Mikey doesn’t ask about it. He isn’t sure of the possible soul-killing topics that would crop up from the conversation. 

By the time dusk colors the sky a stark red, they haven’t eaten and had hardly spoken save for a few vapid comments on the game. Eventually, as Mikey’s character’s wife gives birth to twin boys, Pete points at an elderly Sim burying his hands in the small garden of only lemon trees. “That supposed to be you or your dad?”

“What?” Mikey asks, breath caught in his throat. He studies the Sim carefully, the glasses, the wilted lips and brackets of faded happiness around them. 

“This dude. He looks a lot like you. But older. Is it your dad?”

It’s awfully straightforward all Mikey can do is look down at his fingers hovering above the keys and mumble, “yeah.”

Mikey feels an arm wind around his shoulders, and it’s only with the added weight that he realizes how much he needed to lean into Pete. It’s the first time today he relaxes his muscles and deflates against Pete’s sturdy figure. 

He lets go of his game and rolls over Pete so he can lay his head in the alcove of his neck. There has been an obvious change in the subtext of whatever their relationship with each other is, and he wonders if Pete feels it too, the way their fingers touch softer and with less venereal intent, how they can both hear the unspoken.

“Do you ever think about reaching out to your brother?” Pete says suddenly. 

Mikey is surprised, but manages to sigh. “Sometimes, on my best days.” 

When everything looks more optimistic than the bleak reality this house seems to transfer him into, Mikey thinks of Gerard and the life they shared as brothers when everything was less grey and sad and lonely. He thinks he wants it back no matter how bitter he is that Gerard chose her and not them, he thinks they can emulate it once more if Mikey can find a way to breach the radio silence. 

Then, he scoffs. “But most of the time, I just think he was a massive asshole.” 

“Has it ever occurred to you that he might love you more than he loves the world?” Pete says. There’s a definite crick in his voice, like he’s trying hard to hold something back, or like he’s been dying to mention it.

“He hates the world. Besides, it’s been five years. If he really did care, he would’ve done something by now. Like, call.” Mikey pauses and imagines the fucking mailbox innocuously sticking out from the ground like it hadn’t been driving his dad insane. “Or write. He hasn’t made an effort.”

“Would you?”

“I wouldn’t have left in the first place. It’s his dues to pay. He can at least write to my dad. Shit like this would have never happened.”

“How are you so sure he’s done nothing for you?” 

Mikey lifts his head away from Pete and glares down at him. “What are you saying?”

Pete darts his eyes to the side, then back at Mikey, and sags down with a sigh. “I just, I don’t know. It’s a thought.”

Mikey would rather have sex than talk about this. When Pete showed up looking like he swallowed a boulder, he thought the whole visit was meant to revolve around him. So, as the thought of Gerard never fails to beget, Mikey grudgingly obeys to what would suit the situation best. 

“How about I suck your dick?” he deadpans. 

“You-- I-- what, Mikey,” Pete sputters. He doesn’t refuse, and that’s all Mikey was looking for. He dives for their belt buckles and starts getting his hands dirty. 

--

The second time it happens, Mikey is half asleep in his bed, swimming in the playlist he’d made for his dad many weeks before. 

Today isn’t a mediocre day like he’d managed to perpetuate since his dad left. 

Lately he’s been hit with a sporadic wall of sadness, adding on to what he’s already been dealing with, which has him skipping about 4 showers and eating toast for dinner. 

This particular day, sleep is a myth’s length away from him and he has to leave every single light in every single room open in a pretense that his dad is in one part, any part, of the house. 

He’s been staring at the ceiling for an hour straight, torn between praying as though he’d been a god-fearing christian boy all his life that his dad comes home soon and safe, and cursing this son of a bitch universe for forsaking all that he’s ever loved. The loud music works effectively in covering the noises in his head, the ones with the same voice as his paranoia’s smothering threats. It’s numbing. 

He almost forgets about his own body spread out atop the sheets in a real tangible world with real emotions and social interaction when he feels the bed depress by his side. He whips his head up and wrenches his earphones out of his ear, startled to see Pete sheepishly looking at him from where he sits beside him. 

Mikey frowns and crosses his arms. 

Pete grins a grin that looks uncomfortable twisting at his lips. “You shouldn’t leave the door open. People could come in and… I don’t know, rob you or something.”

Other than a TV and a barely functional microwave, there’s nothing worth stealing from a house that looks like a shitstain in a beautiful neighborhood. Mikey doesn’t mention as much and sighs. 

“What are you doing here?”

“Well, like I said, you left the door open, so I thought…” Pete visibly recoils at Mikey’s unflinching stare affixed on him long enough to perturb him. He snaps his lips shut, and then says, “I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that.”

Mikey is confused more than he’s angry, actually. He was hoping Pete had an answer that would clear things up, especially when whatever unresolved tussle is still tussling between them. 

“So you don’t know what you’re doing here?”

“I was bored, I guess.” Pete shrugs. “I’m off for two weeks.”

It’s all Pete needs to say to flesh out his desires so impersonally, so Mikey sits up to kiss him, press him into the sheets and peel the shirt off his chest.

--

The third, fourth, up to the seventh times it happens, squeezed into a week and spilling into more, Mikey is always in his dad’s home, adjusting to Pete’s sudden interest in seeing him. 

Undoubtedly, it’s all about sex, and they’d gone out to bars and shows and clubs to make out in the middle of a crowd instead of at home, grinding and groping in bathrooms instead of in bed. 

At the brink of dawn they’d come creeping back to Mikey’s dad’s house to resume whatever unfinished dick business they started on some dance floor, grimy with sweat and drunker that they cared to acknowledge. 

In the grand scheme of things, nothing seems different, but Mikey knows it is. It’s something he isn’t capable of pinpointing with clarity, whether it’s the issue or when the issue even spawned. 

Pete’s sex drive has never been something he questioned, just something he naturally associated with the built-in flair of a sex addict. Mikey himself probably has more sex than the average person on a general consensus. 

But somehow, this seems like too much. Pete’s coming by everyday, only steering clear on Saturday and sparing Mikey the awkwardness that would unavoidably entail should he join the Wentz for dinner. With each time he drifts into bed with Mikey and shucks off their clothes with wanting hands and ravenous lips, Pete stays closer to wordless than he normally is to mouthy word machine. 

Mikey doesn’t know why this is happening, but in turn he doesn’t bother asking. It’s probably Pete’s turn to go through something he might not have the words to express. But in the end, Mikey is more than just a hole to fuck or a dick to suck. 

Years ago, he wouldn’t have batted an eye. He’s familiar with the ‘fuck and run’ scene too, much like Pete seems to pride on, but it doesn’t mean he wouldn’t want to settle for more. Unlike what Pete broadcasts, Mikey does have a penchant for love, and some space inside of him reserved for it as well. 

It’s almost unbelievable how much that prodded at Mikey’s personal life philosophy. A part of him had constantly wished for utter detachment from emotions and the things that make life a trainwreck of happiness and despair at once.

But when he gets to catch a glimpse of what that might amount to, holding himself flat against the bed as Pete seesaws in and out of him without even saying a word or his name, Mikey dares think he’s insane for ever longing after a void that will only dig a wider hole of loneliness in him. 

It feels great physically, Pete is no less of a god in bed -- no less touchy, no less loud. But deep down, inside a second brain where pride swallows his thoughts before they can make it to the surface, Mikey knows something he’d hate to admit. 

The time after the last is when the realization comes to life and Mikey can’t take it anymore. 

They’re in the shower together, one thing they’ve done only in the Wentz household as a bold statement of how very intimate and supposedly in love they are. This time there’s no acting in motion, and Pete’s on his knees for real, sucking Mikey off, without a faraway audience to unwillingly hear their bonding moment. 

Mikey comes in Pete’s mouth with a muffled cry. He gives Pete’s swallowing face a brief glimpse before pushing off the glacial tiled walls. He turns the shower head on himself, squeezing his eyes shut against the scalding stream of water. Sensitive, his knees tremble and his ass is still sore from fucking multiple times a day everyday, but the need to get out of here outweighs it all.

He steps out of the shower, whisking the towel from the rack and wrapping it around himself. His brain has reduced Pete to a mere bundle of movements and nervous system behind him, following him. 

Mikey lets his towel drop and leans his back against the sink, crossing his arms and watching Pete pat his hair dry with his towel. When his face emerges with a new layer of redness and features still attractive no matter how long Mikey spends looking at him, he takes a shuddering breath and readies himself. 

“Look, Pete…” he says. Pete looks up and nods at him, cool and casual when it feels everything but. “Why… I don’t get it. What are you doing ?”

“I think we just had sex,” he explains, blinking round innocent eyes but knowing exactly it’s not the right answer. Mikey grits his teeth.

“Then let’s not have sex anymore,” Mikey offers, undeterred by sarcasm and feigned oblivion. Pete doesn’t react, so Mikey continues, “I’ll still, uh, help you with your mom as much as you need me to, but I don’t want… I don’t think we should keep going like this.”

Pete shifts on the spot and sits at the rim of the bathtub, blank in the face and wearing his heart as far away from his sleeve as can be. Mikey is annoyed that this is the time Pete chooses to be completely guarded behind an emotionless shell of bottomless eyes and pursed lips he can’t penetrate.

“It was part of the deal, it wouldn’t be fair on you,” Pete says calmly. 

“It doesn’t matter. There are many other ways you can pay me back. Free doctor appointments. Make it premium.”

Pete snorts. “I’m not sure it works like that Mikey…” 

“You did it, when I was sick.” 

“I bought the meds for you. I had to.” 

Mikey sighs. “You can pay me?” 

“Like a prostitute?” 

“Like a con artist ,” he retaliates. He just hopes his flat-face expertise doesn’t desert him now and betray how unnerved and annoyed he is. Pete just stares hard at him in an effort Mikey recognizes is to read him. 

“I’ll be paying you to convince my parents that we fuck.”

“Or just, I don’t fucking know Pete, you do my laundry for a month.” At this point he only sounds ridiculous, and Pete seems to agree with the way he frowns at Mikey, bracing his elbows on his knees. His tattoos appear so relentless and weighty on his skin under this light, with no cloth to conceal them. 

“I barely have time to do my own laundry,” he mumbles, then shakes his head like it doesn’t matter. “Alright man, what is this all about?”

“No more sex,” Mikey asserts. 

“So no more sex,” Pete observes, holding eye-contact. It takes a lot of nerve for Mikey not to cower. For once, Pete looks, sounds, acts all the parts of a 29-year-old adult. “Then what’s the point of keeping up the pretenses?”

When Mikey doesn’t answer, too withdrawn into himself and that damn voice screeching inside of him, Pete speaks up again, methodical like they’re negotiating on a business deal. “It’s very sudden, I just want to know why.”

“You’re very sudden, too. This was supposed to be a once in a while thing. We’re fucking everyday now.”

“It’s healthy.” Pete shrugs. 

“That’s not the fucking point,” Mikey says with a roll of the eyes, patting around the counter for his glasses and sliding them on. It irritates him that he can’t see Pete as well as Pete sees him, in every sense. He rubs his eyes first, supporting his glasses on his knuckles. 

“Then what? Like I don’t understand Mikey, you’re not being very clear and it’s just--”

“Just see for yourself, it’s not something I have to explain--”

“Well clearly it is, I have no idea what the fuck is going on with you right now and you’re--”

“--what the fuck is going on with me, are you even--”

“--freaking me out here, dude. Like you have to fucking--”

“--serious, you ’re the one who showed up at my doorstep everyday to fucking have sex with me--”

“--you have to fucking learn to explain yourself so I know what to do--”

“--and you’d never-- excuse me? Learn to explain myself? If you just looked-- ”

“--it wouldn’t be so damn confusing to fucking read you all the fucking time--”

“I like you!” 

Pete cuts himself mid sentence and Mikey watches as he slowly snaps his lips shut, eyes wide and glazed over. 

He’d only wanted to imply it, but it got dragged out of him.

He said it in a relatively cool voice, but it’s not the volume that silenced Pete. When all Mikey can hear without directly glancing at Pete is their breathing, he repeats, slow and calm, “I like you. I know you don’t date or whatever. So let’s stop.”

“Are you blaming me?” Pete’s voice is the only thing Mikey is able to discern, and the childish logic relieves him in a small way.

“No,” he sighs. “It’s nothing I can control. So, just. Yeah. Let’s stop having sex.” He waits a moment, for Pete to say something, anything, to his admission, but nothing comes to fill the silence. Mikey feels it like a grip around his throat. He swallows thickly as he contemplates it more, and finally concludes, “actually, let’s stop seeing each other at all.”

“That’d be better,” Pete mutters.

“Yeah,” Mikey agrees, winding his arms around himself tighter. 

They’re still naked and beginning to freeze with the scent of orgasm suspended around them like fumes of irony. It’s not the worst possible way it could have gone, but as Mikey stares at his bare feet, he can almost make out his dignity shattered like glass around himself. 

“That’d be better for you,” Pete adds unnecessarily. Mikey frowns, but he’s not going to comment on that.

“Sure,” he says. Then, with more hesitation than he shows, “I’ll see you someday, Pete.”

“Okay,” Pete responds, but displaying no intention to move. 

“Yeah.” Mikey holds himself still. 

“Okay,” he repeats, gets to his feet and drifts past Mikey into the hall, where he hears a door opening, footsteps padding around, the rustling of clothes, and, way later, the front door sealing shut.

Mikey absently gazes into the silence. It’s so thick that it feels like an asshole cousin of loneliness crawling upon his shoulders like a tamed beast twice his weight making a nest. It settles there with its claws digging into Mikey’s skin and its tail coiling around his throat, not menacing, but ever present. 

Pete thinks this is what it feels like to have shut down mentally. 

He’d only ever been familiar with blanking out at length when he had to pull all nighters five days in a row in what passes as studying. It was a time in his life when his grades mattered more than his own body and failing meant another long year between him and his internship. 

Where cramming effectively worked to numb everything else around Pete in the past, now he fully relies on his job to serve as a similar diversion. Except when Mikey basically gave him the boot, Pete still had an entire week left before he started work again. 

It’d been easier than he’d predicted. After being gripped with the sudden, persistent, hot  craving to fuck Mikey, Pete expected himself to suffer the equally sudden withdrawal. But his knack for building walls of steel around himself so the whole world around them dissolves has never paid off better. 

Today, Pete covers the night shift. His superiors administered this plan with Pete’s brief vacation in mind and an affinity for balance, clearly, but he doesn’t mind. It’ll give him one more reason not to go home and do stupid shit like call Mikey or check if he’s still sinking in the same spot on his bed.

Just as his last patient of the day slinks out of the door with Pete’s signed prescription in hand, Patrick pokes his head of blonde hair through the opening. Immediately he frowns over at Pete behind his desk. 

“Are you seriously wearing your ‘Suck my Richard’ shirt to work?” 

“And my yellow Air Jordans,” he says proudly, skewing his feet on his desk in demonstration and leaning back in his chair. 

“Where’s your coat, Pete?” Patrick sighs and slants against the slide door. 

“I don’t need it.” He shrugs. “I’m in my office.” 

“Schechter is going to kill you.” 

“Schechter can suck my dick. He never comes in, anyway.” 

Patrick gives him a sidelong glare through his thick glasses and pushes himself off. “Speaking of Schechter, he had to take care of an emergency. His wife is going into labor.”

Pete couldn’t care less about Schechter’s pregnant wife. “So?” He arcs a brow. 

“So, uh, he kind of left his patient in 201 in limbo. Duty is calling for you.” 

“Me? Why me?” Pete groans and rubs his face with his hands. “Can’t you do it?”

The look of disbelief Patrick pins on him is one of the most withering Pete has ever seen. “I’m a psychiatrist .”

“So what are you doing in our wing?” 

“To call you.” Patrick throws one hand up in a motion to stop Pete’s mouth from opening further to talk. “Schechter’s orders man. Now get off your ass, wear your coat and hustle while the man is still unconscious and doesn’t know how much of a jerkface doctor you are.”

“Fine,” he huffs out, fully aware this shouldn’t be his response to a situation that concerns a sick patient.

“Change your shoes, please , for the love of god,” Patrick hisses at him and crosses his arms. He’s blocking the way out, leaving Pete no choice. Patrick claims he can wrestle like a pro, and though it sounds totally unlikely, right now is not the time Pete should test out the truth of something that can hurt him. It’s protocol anyway. 

So Pete changes his shoes, glides into his coat and leaves with Patrick in tow with him. As they draw to a stop in front of 201, Pete plucks out the clipboard with the patient’s details from the clear container pinned next to the door. He scans through it almost too quickly, getting acquainted with the man’s status and reflexively follows up with the proper solutions. 

Patrick glances at the clipboard over Pete’s shoulder. Close to his ear, Pete hears his trademark noise of surprise that sounds like a semi choke. 

“Dehydrated, starved, minor fractures in the rib. What has this man been doing?” It’s obviously not the worst case they’d had, not in a hospital , but it’s definitely unusual. 

“This dude was found in the train station,” Pete frowns, flipping through the pages. Someone had brought him in not even an hour ago. 

“Just go in there,” Patrick says. 

When they enter the room, the first thing Pete thanks the heavens for is that Schechter had enough time to stick an IV drip in the man’s veins before sauntering off to his wife. But even if Pete wasn’t a doctor, he’d be able to tell the job is unfinished. It must not be urgent if Schechter didn’t come hurling in Pete’s office to hunt him down himself. 

Pete continues assessing the damage after he’s washed his hands, and Patrick leaves soon after with a pat on his shoulder and a fondness that takes over his face every time it’s time to clock out and go home to his own wife. 

It’s painless enough to pick up where Schechter has left off. All Pete needed to do is sanitize the man’s dirty fingernails and some of the places where his skin had torn off. He draws some blood for good measure which he sends for someone else to put under analysis. As an afterthought, he takes the man’s glasses off and rests them on the table next to the bed. Noting down the updates on the clipboard, Pete sighs and peruses the pale, sleeping face slumped into the pillow. 

Beneath the lighting the man appears as white as teeth and as frail as a fistful of twigs. The details on the clipboard don’t say that this man is homeless or anything that might imply a case of starvation and dehydration. Beyond that, the man had acquired skin-deep injuries and their appropriate infections. It’s like he hasn’t seen the interior of a house in a while. 

The lack of visitors doesn’t perplex him. They’d had to handle cases of homeless wanderers found unconscious numerous times before. But this man is not homeless. 

A tingling sensation prickles at his skin, spurring him to pick up the clipboard once more. In a moment of surprise, his eyes widen at the name that should have been the first thing he looked at. 

It reads Donald Way.

“Welcome home,” Pete mumbles with a small smile, somewhat relieved. 

Mikey wakes up early for once. 

If he peels his eyes open to the bland sight of his room one more day, Mikey thinks he’s going to lose his mind. It’s with a repugnant sensation gurgling in his stomach that he gets off his bed and drifts through the house. 

He stops in front of the glass door that overlooks the backyard and peers out. He doesn’t know if he’s hoping for things to shift into a more pleasant view the longer he stares, but it’s not like shit like that happens accordingly to his ludicrous insights. With a sigh, he steps out on the patio and squints at the sun partially glaring from behind billowed clouds. 

Once upon a time, when they could still call themselves a complete, happy family, Mikey’s dad loved to spend his time tending the garden and keeping it lush. Mikey would help, Gerard would stay tucked by the shades and watch with Mikey’s favorite Capri Sun between his grubby hands, and their mom would be watching TV inside. 

It’s their little Sunday morning thing, something that younger Mikey never thought would vanish from his life. Now, the mere concept of soil curling in under his nails and getting up early enough so the sun won’t burn through his shirt fills him with lead. It’s not something that he wants to do anymore. Especially not with a dad gone missing, a traitor mother and a brother he thought loved him. 

Mikey stays standing, eyes as dry as the pathetic bed of hay-like grass in front of him. He stumbles towards the deck chair, speckled with dried, dusty rain and leaves that crunch like cereal beneath his weight when he settles down. 

Even this early in the morning, at least by Mikey’s warped standards, the sky extends above his head in a canvas of grey, the darker clouds heavy with rain. Wherever his dad is, Mikey hopes he doesn’t look up to see this kind of weather. Wherever Pete decided to fuck off to, Mikey hopes it pours down on him, even if every day is a day he spends wondering if his phone is going to ring, bearing his name. 

A rumble rolls through Mikey’s stomach. He places his hand where it would be throbbing in hunger underneath his skin, halfheartedly comforting it that there would be no food in a while. He hasn’t run out of money, but he just doesn’t think he can swallow something that is not his own breaths without gagging. 

He falls back asleep like that, a lifeless fascicle unwittingly cutting the swerving rain wind in half. When he wakes up again, it’s to the sound of pelting rain around him and the backdoor sliding open. In his daze fuzzy with sleep, his heartbeat speeds up, because there’s only one person’s footsteps that can be so unconsciously loud when trying to be quiet. 

Pete announces his presence with a clear of his throat, and like every time, he seems to know Mikey is awake even though he hasn’t opened his eyes. But Mikey knows better than to move or respond. He remains idle.

“So, uh, hey,” Pete begins, drawing closer and carefully sitting down on the sparse stretch of space unoccupied by Mikey. A brief glance reveals Pete’s tired eyes looking down at him and his doctor’s coat papered over him. 

“You’re gonna be late to work,” Mikey says emptily without looking in Pete’s general direction. 

“Actually, I just came back from work.” Pete sighs as Mikey uncooperatively refuses to answer. “I know you probably don’t want to see my face, but, I think you’d want to hear about this.”

“What?” he asks, because Pete getting off work at 10 in the morning is objectively strange. 

“Your dad’s in the hospital. He woke up a few hours ago.”

Mikey springs upright and pushes his knees up. He thinks he has forgotten how to breathe as he stares into Pete’s bizarrely solemn face. He wouldn’t lie about this. 

“Unless I got it wrong, and Donald Way isn’t your dad and--”

“Donald Way,” Mikey repeats on autopilot. “Is he…” 

“Okay?” Pete asks, and with the twitch of his lips, Mikey suddenly becomes aware of how exhausted he looks, the bruises under his eyes and the wan quality of his face. “Yeah, he’s okay now. Awake, stable. We just needed to get food and water in his system, and he definitely needs a lot of rest. And a shower.”

Mikey feels like he’d been walking with pipes and wires and heavy, metallic poles speared through his body until someone turned him human again. The rush of blood in his veins is warm, his heart beats happily against his ribs, the ice laboriously freezing his muscles has finally melted off. He feels so light he could float, and he does, sagging onto Pete’s shoulder. 

“He’s back,” he whispers, and the trembling breath that comes out of him leaves him weak with sheer relief. Pete’s arm comes around his shoulders and holds him tight against his warmth. The loneliness monster shirks away into the air like chased by Pete’s hands. It’s gone. Mikey can breathe again. He rolls his shoulders and feels them crack like old furniture. 

“He’s back,” Pete repeats into Mikey’s hair, where a peck of a kiss lands. Mikey winds his arms around Pete’s waist and clings with all the gratitude he knows how to express. 

Pete peers through Mikey’s lenses into his brown eyes. He keeps his hold on Mikey’s arms steady, because Mikey might bolt into the room unsupervised like nobody’s business if he ever lets him go. 

He’s tired and hungry and starting to get sick of the over-sterilized walls keeping him hostage, but he needs to finish his job. 

“Before you go in there,” he tells Mikey. “I want you to know your dad is very weak right now. He’s just had his first meal in what we think is a week, and it’ll take time until he feels better.”

“I’m not going to smother him.” Mikey frowns. 

“I know,” Pete says with a sigh. He slides his hands down Mikey’s arms and stops at his palms. Their fingers instinctively curve around each other’s without much preambular thought, and Pete gives it an additional squeeze. 

Mikey looks shaken, eyes downcast and lips weighing heavy with inquiries. Finally, he caves, and asks in the smallest voice that has ever sounded out of him, “what happened to him?”

“I’m not sure either,” Pete explains. “He was found unconscious at the train station. It’s a few blocks down, we’re probably the closest medical service around. He just hasn’t been eating and drinking for longer than he should. Looks like he fell or got beaten up, but we took care of that too. That’s all I’m able to tell you.” 

Mikey doesn’t say anything to him in response and keeps his gaze strapped to the ground. His fingers tremble in Pete’s grasp, and though this is the most appropriate time for Mikey’s feelings to peek through, his face remains blank and unfeeling. Eventually, Pete sees him swallow and nod. 

“You can go in now.” He keeps his voice barely above a whisper so not to cripple Mikey’s vulnerability even more. 

“Thanks Pete,” Mikey mumbles, releases his fingers, and turns to the door. Pete leans back and takes in the way Mikey’s hands hover above the slide door, almost like he’s afraid of what will meet him once nothing can cover his sight anymore. 

Mikey draws in a breath and slides the door open, and he stands in place with his eyes pulled to his shoes before he slowly creeps towards the bed.

Donald’s condition is nothing of fatal concern, but he did disappear for a while and leave his son with nothing but worries and self-pity circling him like pesky flies. This is the most important person in Mikey’s life, and the fact that Mikey will walk in there and see him frayed and exhausted on a hospital bed is not going to put his guilt at ease. He’s probably blaming himself in some way.

Pete steps into the room as far as he dares and leans against the wall where a closet will hide his identity should Mikey or his dad suspect anything. As he watches Mikey sink down in a plastic chair by the side of the bed, he starts to feel shame chastise him for planning to eavesdrop. But he just wants to know. It can’t be wrong to know. 

“Hey, dad,” Mikey says. Pete notes the low volume, the audible swallow. 

Donald’s stubborn glaring at his hands doesn’t let up. It’s like he can’t even bring himself to look at his own son. Pete’s heart aches. He wouldn’t know what to do if it were him in the chair and his dad on the bed. 

“It’s okay, I’m not mad, but please talk to me.” 

“I’m sorry Mikey. I was stupid. I should have never left you.” 

Mikey remains silent to that, and the heartbreaking agreement is loud between his trembling breaths. “It’s okay,” he mumbles. 

Donald’s face twists into one that clearly expresses pain. “I made you pick up the habit to say that, didn’t I? Oh, Mikey. You babysat me for too long. I’m sorry… I should have never--” 

“Dad,” Mikey says almost warningly, like they’ve tried to have this conversation before but without much success. Never anywhere past that one word. 

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry Mikey. I’m a terrible father, I know I am. I never took care of you the way a father should. I-- Mikey--”

“Dad, come on,” Mikey insists. He’s fumbling with his own fingers, neck bent and giving himself only the view of the tiles beneath his feet. 

“No. I don’t want to ignore it anymore. I made you suffer. These past 5 years, it’s always been about Gerard. About your mom. I took you for granted, Mikey, and I hate myself for it.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“It’s true, it’s true Mikey, I--”

“It’s not your fault.”

“No...” 

“We’re gonna get you some help. It’s going to get better from now on.” Mikey covers his face with his hands and rubs beneath his glasses. He lets out a long sigh that probably lifted the weight of the world off his lungs. “Just, will you tell me what happened?”

“I didn’t want to tell you. I was planning it for a while now, but, you know. You know how my plans go.” They chuckle for a bit, but it mainly sounds dry and humorless. “I left to go see Gerard. I found your mom’s address -- he still lives with her. I couldn’t help myself. Not when I’m one train ride away from him.”

Pete can’t imagine how crushed Mikey would feel hearing this. To listen to his father dredge up old wounds and show how interminably he clings onto the tattered remains of the past instead of the person who cares most about him. This is much worse than the petty case of favoritism Hillary teases his mom about everytime she gives Pete more gifts on Christmas than his siblings. 

As if affirming Pete’s thoughts, he surveys Mikey biting down on his lip and never once letting his gaze wander anywhere near the hospital bed. “So, you just left me to find him?”

“It-- it wasn’t supposed to sound like that. I was coming back. Of course I was. I always will. Mikey, you’re… I’m sorry I ever made you feel that way. I’m so sorry. I was hoping I could come back with your brother along. We could start again.”

“But he left us,” is all Mikey feebly offers, slightly frowning. 

“I know. I know, but he’s still my son. You’ve got to understand. I love my sons, I love them both so much, and I just wish -- I just wish things were like they were before.”

“No.” Mikey’s lips twist with obvious disdain. “That bitch can go fuck herself.”

“Come on Mikey.” Donald sighs. 

“She cheated on you and she kept Gerard. She never sent him back, not even sometimes. She probably started a new life. Fuck her, dad. Fuck them.”

It’s to all of their surprise that his dad’s hand reaches out to pat Mikey on the crown of his head. “Kiddo, how far will holding a grudge take you?”

Mikey doesn’t answer even though he looks like he aches to. He’s not buckling under the misery Pete has seen looming over him for weeks, even when the source of the problem is right there staring him in the face. If it were himself, he would have probably imploded from the inside out. How Mikey can keep his emotions under wraps of steel is a mystery Pete can’t get through. 

“So did you find Gerard?”

“No.” Donald whispers, like trading a secret. Pete had never heard so much sadness pushed into one word. Donald retracts his hand and folds it over his lap. “I didn’t find him.”

“Then, why--” Mikey cuts himself off and cryptically gestures at the hospital bed, unable to voice his concern. 

“It’s just -- I wasn’t -- I got jumped, and they beat me up, took most of my money -- please don’t make that face, it’s okay, I’m okay. But I needed to get home after wandering LA for a few days and never getting a glimpse of your brother. I used what little I got on a ticket back. I was starving, but I couldn’t imagine leaving you like this.” He swallows, and Pete has to bite down his own fist when Mikey starts wildly wiping his eyes. “I could never bring myself to eat even when I was here, you know it. It was no different over there. And by the time I really needed it, I was already starving and completely out of bucks. I just remember this… this extremely sour taste in my mouth before I passed out. I didn’t even realize I was back in Jersey.” 

“You’re okay now,” Mikey says around a stifled sob. Pete learns right then that Mikey’s emotional constipation extends to him stomping down the need to cry as well. “It doesn’t even matter dad. You’re back, and, just, don’t fucking pull that stunt on me again.” 

“I thought I was never going to see you again,” his dad mutters. His gaze pouring down on Mikey’s lowered head is heavy and loving and despairing all at once. If Pete hadn’t heard what he said, he would’ve understood it from that gaze alone. 

“Dammit dad, please.” 

“I’m sorry Mikey.”

“I’m sorry too. I’m sorry Gerard is fucked up.” 

“It’s not your fault, kiddo.” 

“You’re okay now.” Mikey leans back into his seat and the plastic creaks under his rustling weight. He sniffles and wipes his eyes, and for the first time since he stepped into the room, he treats his dad to regretful eyes and a faint, grateful smile. 

“I love you Mikey,” Donald mumbles. It’s only as Pete pays attention to the way they look back at each other, through their respective glasses, that he realizes how similar they are. Everything from the dusty brown hair to the way they blink is like an echo. 

“I love you too,” Mikey grins, flaunting the glint of his canine. When his dad mirrors it, there’s one wedged in his own smile, too. It amazes Pete. 

This moment feels particularly intimate, so charged with the Ways’ freaky language of affection it feels downright inappropriate for Pete to have a place in it. The whole exchange wasn’t even supposed to host an extra, unwarranted audience in the first place. 

Slowly and quietly, Pete drifts through the door with a peacefully beating heart. 

When Mikey receives a call from Pete a few days later, he briefly entertains the idea of turning off his phone. 

It wouldn’t sit right with him if he did that though. If Mikey and his dad weren’t beleaguered by extortionate hospital bills, it’s because Pete offered to pay them in their stead. It would seem as though their relationship laid more upon favors to reimburse than any real affection between them. 

But it’s only because Mikey doesn’t want to deal with anymore complicated heart equations that he actually powers his phone off. That part definitely out-reasons the hospital bill. It’s time they put an end to it, anyway, and Mikey will be the first to force it upon themselves. If they keep owing each other things, it’ll be insufferably unending. 

That only works to damn him. 

An hour later, his now healthy and a little less damaged dad creeps into Mikey’s room and scuffs his shoe awkwardly on the carpet. Mikey looks up from his game and roots out one side of his earphones. He nods at his dad who looks nothing short of bashful. 

“Uhm, there’s uh, your doctor friend downstairs. He said he wants to have a word with you.” 

Mikey blinks over to his dad. “Are you serious?”

“Please Mikey. I don’t have coffee or tea or food to offer. I don’t know how to make him feel welcomed.”

Mikey thinks that’s the least important of their problems right now, but he won’t declare such a thing to his dad. “Did he tell you what he wanted?”

“He just asked me if I was resting well. And that, well, he wants to talk to you about something. I’m not sure what it could be.” His dad pauses for a moment and fixes Mikey with a cautious look. “You didn’t get in trouble did you Michael James?”

God, his dad hasn’t called him that in years. Last time was probably when he and Gerard got caught smoking on the sofa. It relieves him more than it scares him anymore. A sense of normalcy returning in his life. So he smiles, this time genuinely, and says, “none that I know of. I’ll be down in a second. Just, try to ask about the weather or something.”

“Oh Mikey,” his dad mumbles, rolling his eyes. Mikey had to stifle a laugh despite having Pete-related responsibilities awaiting him in the very near future. “I haven’t lost all social capabilities, you know.”

“Sure seemed like it,” Mikey grins. A week before, it would have been an accusation. Today, both his dad and him knew it’s just a joke. 

“Well, come down soon. I don’t want to be talking about this god awful weather for too long.” 

“Sure dad.” Mikey watches the scrawny figure of his dad skulk out of his room, a gentle smile gracing his face. Finally, they can manage some form, any form, of happiness. 

He saves his game and drags himself out of his room. Like he usually does when premature signs of stress begin nipping at his insides, he stands still by the top of the stairwell and stares. It rarely ever helps in preparing him or stabilizing his thoughts, but at least it stalls him some time. 

When he finally makes it down, Pete is sitting comfortably on their worn sofa in front of his dad, sharing scattered pieces of small talk. They seem very much at ease, quietly smiling and laughing about something that certainly doesn’t pertain to the scorching weather. 

It’s such a strange sight, Pete’s abundantly tattooed arms and his dad’s skin of boiled chicken quality, Pete’s red jeans and blue converse and his dad’s baggy t-shirt and socks older than Mikey. It’s definitely one that Mikey would have never bet on ever unraveling in his life. 

“Uh, hey Pete.” He clears his throat. His dad takes it as his cue to leave, trailing muffled words of apologies in his wake as he disappears into the kitchen

Mikey hasn’t even sat down yet when Pete is already on his feet and wearing an expression of frantic surprise in contrast to how loose and relaxed he’d been with his dad, keeping a safe distance between them like Mikey is a jumpy stray cat and him a feline collector. 

“I know what this looks like. I’m not-- I’m not stalking you or anything okay? You weren’t picking up your phone and, well, I have one last thing to ask of you. It’s really important.”

Mikey crosses his arms, hoping it effectively communicates how unreceptive he dares be. “If you’re going to say--”

“Yes that’s exactly what I’m going to say, but this time it’s important. I really can’t miss this. Please Mikey.”

“How is it different?” He furrows his brows. “It’s just dinner with your parents.”

“I can’t tell you yet, but you’ll know. I promise you will. Just. One last time?”

“This isn’t what we agreed on.”

“I know. I know but, fuck man. Just. Can’t we break some rules? This is crucial to me. I can’t let my parents down now. It was going too well. They’ll be asking into it.”

“Is that it? You’re going to disregard our agreement because you want to make our breakup more convincing?” It’s not like Mikey wants to put it out into the world a second time that he has feelings for a dumbass doctor that he’s absolutely unwilling to discuss for the rest of eternity. 

“Come on dude, that’s not what I meant. I don’t know what to say, Mikey, I need your help for this. This one time. Last. It’s a promise.”

Mikey sizes him up. Going by how Pete makes no attempt to touch him or tack conviction to him in the form of kisses and hugs, Mikey can tell he’s not here for manipulation. It’s possible Pete is acting as though this truly does matter more than any other time, but from what Mikey has seen of his aptitude in that field, it’s safe to assume this is much too good to be acted by Pete. 

“Only if you tell me what the hell makes this occasion so special,” Mikey says, pointing a finger towards Pete. 

“I really can’t.”

“Why?” He narrows his eyes.

Pete sighs and flings a hand in his hair. “Believe me, you don’t want to know yet. You’ll probably even thank me, but I really need your help.”

Mikey deflates a little, just because he already knows how his answer will sound. Unpleasant like dragging a fork against ceramic. “I’m honestly sorry Pete. I can’t help you this time.”

Pete doesn’t answer him, a possibility he’d underestimated. It looks like Mikey really has left him in lurch, and it’s a major concern that Mikey’s the one at the receiving end of silence. 

An inexplicable need to justify himself bubbles through and he finds himself sighing exasperatedly, too. “Look, I really can’t do it, it’s not a good idea. We shouldn’t see each other like this anymore.” It was longer and more elaborate in his head but this is all he manages to procure. 

Even if Pete doesn’t seem to appreciate his brush-off, he still looks understanding. Enough to nod wordlessly before mumbling a sad excuse of a goodbye and trailing towards the front door. After it clicks shut behind fading footsteps on the porch, Mikey is left alone standing in the living room, staring at his feet and biting his lip. 

This really seems like the best decision to land on. He knows it because life changing decisions always hurt the most, and this is almost testimonial of it. 

Pete doesn’t go steady, he bed-hops like it’s a national sport and Mikey can’t shackle him into the kind of relationship he wants. It doesn’t mean Pete’d ever hurt Mikey intentionally, and he has never doubted that. And it’s why Mikey has to call the shots. Only Mikey would know when is the appropriate time to stop. Pete isn’t the one gambling with his feelings at stake. 

It seems like hours have passed when Mikey’s dad tiptoes back into the living room and pats Mikey on the shoulder. His dad instincts must have reignited in him somewhere between his last day at the hospital and this moment, because for the first time in what feels like forever, he encapsulates Mikey in a bony side hug. 

“I don’t know what’s going on between you two, and it looks like it wouldn’t just take one conversation to fix this, but Mikey…” 

Mikey doesn’t want to hear it, but when it comes to his dad, he’s got no choice. He’ll listen even if he’s telling him to go to hell. “Hm?”

“Don’t you think you can go with that boy? He’s paid the hospital bill for us. You know how much money that saved us. Swallow your pride a little, macho man.”

For a moment, he doesn’t respond and contemplates the option to walk away. It has placidly solved many of his problems. But in the end, his dad is right. If there is one favor that Mikey should reciprocate, it’s Pete putting his own money on their hospital bill. 

“It’s complicated…” he says, because it’s true. 

“It’s really not. He paid for my stay at the hospital. He helped us. You know I’d never have that kind of money to spare. You should help him too. Didn’t he say it was important?”

“I guess he did.” Mikey nods, bumping up his glasses. “But what about me?”

“I’m not sure what you mean, but I don’t think that Pete boy thought of himself when he helped us. You shouldn’t as well. So go with him.”

“That’s all I have to do?” he asks in mumbles, more to himself than anyone. 

“I suppose so.” Mikey’s dad sighs. “It’s my advice to you, as a father, and as a person who’s fucked up many times too.” 

Despite himself, Mikey smiles. He’d never take lightly what his dad offers as advice, especially when he atypically slipped in a curse to make a point of it. No matter how shitty, it’s still valuable and comes from a place of concern. And it’s what drives Mikey to shimmy out of his dad’s arms and speeding after Pete. 

To his surprise, Pete’s shiny black car still remains parked by the curb. The engine isn’t revved and one look inside unveils Pete resting his forehead on the topmost curve of the steering wheel. Mikey dashes towards the car and presses his face into the passenger side window, jostling his glasses and fogging them up.

At his gentle tap on the window, Pete’s head snaps up and confusedly examines his squished face. The window rolls down and Mikey curls his hands over the now empty space, looking Pete’s drained yet bewildered expression dead in the eye.

“I changed my mind. I’ll do it.”

--

Saturday comes with another sticky heat wave. 

The end of August is already edging by, so this one should be the last to arise. Which also means Mikey will soon have to face the fact that his education is unfinished despite growing closer to his 23rd birthday now. There is still approximately a year and a half he needs to tolerate before he has enough credits to graduate. 

But today, none of this matters. Today, he’s Pete’s boyfriend and works as a kindergarten teacher and doesn’t feel horrible about lying to his pretend-boyfriend’s parents. He’s attending a special dinner that doesn’t seem all that inordinate in all its ordinary setting -- eating in the dining room under what looks like new light bulbs, one of Pete’s mom’s experimental lemon chicken in the center of the table, surrounded by Pete’s parents and siblings. 

For all the insisting on Pete’s part that this dinner night is like no other, Mikey doesn’t see anything different about it except for his improved dressing methods he has put together with the belief that it’s actually going to be different. 

But it’s not, and they’re all seated sagely around the table with most of them treating the chicken on their plate to a dirty look. It seems Dale’s adventurous cooking has fallen short of working again tonight. Even if Mikey wasn’t acting, he’d still have made the effort of finishing his food. 

“Have some more, dear,” Dale croons as she reaches over her plate to the star of the night, her lemon chicken. Mikey plasters on a smile he’s been told can charm the most wicked of witches and holds up his plate. She serves him with a dramatic flourish. She must be really happy about it. 

“Thank you. It’s delicious Ms. Wentz. Is this your signature dish?” he asks. Hillary giggles and Andrew makes weird eyes at his own plate just as Pete covers his mouth to catch what little of his obnoxious laughter slips through.

“Certainly not.” It’s Pete the father who answers on her behalf with a shake of his head. “She can’t cook to save her life, but she pretends like she can.”

“I can cook! Mikey said my chicken is delicious. I will take his word for it,” Dale huffs and retreats her hands to her lap, spearing a death glare at her husband. 

“I really mean it,” Mikey says, worming a piece of chicken into his mouth. It’s another thing he’s lying about, but not completely. It’s not delicious, but at least it doesn’t assault his taste buds like licorice would. “You can totally make this your signature dish.”

“Flatterer,” Dale and Pete the son say at the same time, one with the bat of her lashes and the other with a roll of the eyes. 

“You must have a broken palate, honestly,” Andrew mumbles under his breath. It’s the sort of thing Mikey would do, too, if Gerard were here to bring home someone who compliments his dad’s imaginary cooking skills. His smile falters a little, imperceptibly enough.

“Or he’s just polite. It really looks like you have not one evil bone inside of that skinny body, Mikey,” Pete the father says, dropping his gaze to the chicken innocuously staring back at him on the plate. 

“Or he just likes my cooking, unlike all you ungrateful people.” Dale has already finished her food and is now free to kick her husband’s feet all night should he make another comment on her chicken. Just as Mikey suspects, she sends her foot flying against Pete the father under the table when he opens his mouth to quip something at her.

He groans in agony and Hillary lets out more happy giggles, her shoulders touching the tip of her ears as if embarrassed but delighted. Andrew merely rolls his eyes and turns them back on the chicken sitting still on his plate. Pete the son has a fist over his lips, imprinting his smile on his knuckles in an effort at concealing it. 

“Honey, you can’t kick me just because--” Another dull thud snaps Pete the father’s mouth shut and he winces minutely. 

“Say my chicken is delicious,” she demands, leaning back in her chair and inspecting her nails. 

“I can’t honey, it tastes like too much lemon zest and it’s bitter-- ”

“How is my chicken bitter?” Dale asks, wide-eyed, before she flicks her incredulous gaze to Mikey. “Is my chicken bitter Mikey?” 

Mikey shakes his head, unable to stop himself from grinning. “Not at all Ms. Wentz.”

“Nobody’s going to kill you if you tell the truth Mikey,” Hillary says, dodging away from the tissues of wrath Dale has launched in her direction. She giggles. “Ma!”

“I think Ma’s actually going to kill him if he tells the truth,” Pete the son says, shying an arm around Mikey’s shoulders. Mikey glances sideways at Pete, still quite aflutter with trying to mimic a man who is comfortable with affection. It’s supposed to be fake and Mikey has no place to pretend it’s real. It’ll be an inception of simulations. 

“Remember that one time Hillary’s ex boyfriend took four servings of Ma’s Thanksgiving mash? The guy stayed on the toilet for hours the next day,” Andrew drones in a tone that would fit better in a weather announcement. Pete, Hillary and Pete simultaneously spew forth in laughter, leaving Mikey out of the joke and Dale sulking at her end of the table. 

“It was that lousy beer Hillary bought, not my mash. I used fresh potatoes, you lugged home a pack of expired beer,” Dale counters. That seems to have hit a sort of unresolved squabble button Mikey isn’t aware of when Hillary erupts in giggles and the family starts arguing about the possible causes of her ex boyfriend’s food poisoning. 

Mikey watches the show unfold in front of him. He’s always been fond of family banter, when his mom hadn’t cheated and Gerard hadn’t left and his dad hadn’t started living like a comatose zombie, when they’d fling rice at each other’s hairs and his mom would stomp to her feet and pull on their ears and their dad would be sorry about passively spectating her tyrannical tendencies. 

He misses it without a doubt. But he can’t make the past come back and he certainly wouldn’t dream of it anymore. It’s like poking at old scars that have numbed and spurted out skin tissues that remind him of what once was, but what would never return. 

Just as the argument shifts onto how Dale gives Hillary a criminally disproportionate amount of Christmas gifts compared to her brothers in an act of obvious favoritism, Mikey feels Pete unwrap his arm from his shoulder. Instead, a warm hand comes to clasp around his palm and fingers fill in the empty spaces between Mikey’s. 

He looks up and catches Pete gazing at him, lips pursed into a timid smile and eyes inspecting him the same way Gabe has looked at him on the night of their first anniversary. And he knows Gabe had really loved him. 

Mikey darts his eyes around only to find that nobody is paying attention to them. It makes no sense to hold Pete’s hand, but when he makes a move to pull it away, the fingers root tighter into his knuckles. Before he can ask any questions, Pete has placed his head on Mikey’s shoulder, silently breathing in. 

Though it’s definitely unusual, Mikey doesn’t know what else to do other than gently press his cheek into Pete’s hair. It smells like scalp and Head & Shoulders. 

If this is what Pete meant by special, then Mikey doesn’t look forward to the conversation that lays ahead of them. 

--

Pete is so deep inside of Mikey that he feels it in his stomach. 

He’d assumed his favorite position as soon as they started kissing on the bed -- pressing his palms on each side of the pillow and bracing his lower half in the air. He arcs his spine into a curve and lets Pete handle the rest.

This is how Pete and Mikey choose to have their conversation. It was never supposed to happen again, but maybe Pete’s issue with sex runs much deeper than Mikey expected, and Mikey just has weak defenses against the things he shouldn’t want. It all works out for them, anyway. 

But tonight, Pete is slow, much slower. He slips his fingers between Mikey’s and covers the entire expanse of his back with his torso, not pounding into him but pushing, rolling his hips, breathing heavy into his ear. 

“Fuck me harder--” Mikey manages to croak out between his moans. “God just go faster please!”

Pete responds by slipping out of him and draping him on his back. Mikey doesn’t see his eyes straight away; they’re lowered on Mikey’s hip where his thumb gently sweeps at the pink creases Mikey’s jeans have left in his skin. 

Not a word sounds out of him as his head sinks between Mikey’s thighs and he starts kissing around his pelvis, keeping his hands cradling Mikey’s waist. To say this is a brutal swerve out of Pete’s lane is a euphemism Mikey can’t begin to describe. 

He’s left with no option but to watch as it happens, his slick lips parted. As Pete’s rough hands slide over Mikey’s bare skin and trailing flutters by the lightness of his touch. He gulps down something that tastes like bitter hope swelling in his throat when Pete flicks his eyes to him before he takes Mikey in his mouth. Mikey throws his head back and relishes, bathes in the new sensation of this slow, languid definition of sex that Pete is improvising. 

If there’s one thing he’s noticed for the past weeks he’d spent in Pete’s debauched company, it’s that Pete has a stubborn thing for kissing. But so far most of the kisses have been a necessary preliminary for sex, while the others remain casual. He’d never laid kisses so fragile on Mikey’s skin as if Mikey was a dandelion and he’d fly away into weightless specks of dust should he breathe too hard on him. 

Between kisses on his hips and brittle nibbles on the inside of his thighs and bobbing his head up and down Mikey’s length, Pete never stops giving him the most focused of attentions. Mikey gasps and grips his own hair and curls his toes through it. The moment feels strangely too delicate to settle for screaming the way Pete likes. 

Right when the pleasure starts to reach a point of overwhelm, Pete stops.  

“Don’t come yet,” Pete murmurs after a while of sucking Mikey off, insisting on his point with his hand wrapped sternly around the base of his cock. 

“What do you mean?” Mikey heaves, delirious with the need to come. Pete just shakes his head and clambers up to level Mikey with his gaze. His brown eyes glisten. He feels their weight on his face like a blanket of warm sand, consuming him, inspecting him, reading every inch of him. 

“Mikey,” Pete whispers, flickering his gaze from Mikey’s eyes to his nose to his lips to his forehead and back to his eyes. He drags his hand to cup Mikey’s cheek. It scares him. The way Pete seems to have put their normally fast-paced moment on slow motion. 

“What are you doing?” Mikey asks in his croaky voice. 

Instead of entertaining his question, Pete looks down between their bodies, presenting the crown of his brown hair to Mikey. He grabs himself and aligns his cock with Mikey’s ass. 

“Just don’t come yet, alright?” 

Mikey’s throat closes in. He can’t answer. 

As it goes, the air is squeezed out of him when Pete pushes in and he moans, pressing his head deeper into the cushion and lapping his arms around Pete’s shoulders. The burn is there and the condom barely has any lube left on it and Pete’s girth still manages to delightfully stretch him, but Pete is going so slow it might kill Mikey not to orgasm in the immediacy. 

“Please go faster,” he insists, and to his muscle-relaxing relief, Pete does pick up the speed. But compared to what Mikey has gotten himself used to, it’s not by much. 

“Pete go faster, please,” he whines, digging his nails into Pete’s shoulder blades in frustration. 

“Hey, relax,” Pete says, unpinning his hand from where it was nailed on the bed next to Mikey’s face and carding it through Mikey’s bangs. He’s stopped and Mikey can’t stand it, he’s on the edge and his dick is throbbing with the need to come but Pete is not moving. Instead, he’s fingering the strands of Mikey’s hair, watching it twirl and flutter down between his fingers. His lips are set into a line. 

Laying still and breathing frantically, Mikey doesn’t see much without his glasses. But he can somehow notice how fixated Pete is on his bangs, on his face, the parts which are normally the furthest things from his attention when they have sex. If normal could fittingly describe this situation, Mikey would be on all fours to begin with. 

It feels like forever when Pete moves again, hardly sheathing out of Mikey before he pushes back in, again and again, making waves with his abdomen pressed flat against Mikey’s pelvis. It’s so deep he could cry. So deep the feeling comes back hitting the tip of Mikey’s stomach. 

Pete bends his neck to bump his forehead with Mikey’s as he starts to shudder and feel where the depth of Pete’s dick buried inside of him leads them to. The hairs on his arms raise with the temperature of his body and he’s taken back to weeks ago when a fever boiled inside of him. But this is so much better. Everything inside of him is on fire and ripples with each gentle thrust of Pete’s hips, with each time he surges forward to tenderly stamp a kiss to his jaw, to his cheek, to his lips. 

In this moment Pete smells of sweat and of his own body musk and a faint hint of shampoo. Mikey has always loved the scent. When he’d fallen asleep holding Pete in his arms, he’d woken up with this same smell lathered onto him like non-washable paint. For a long time it’s what has comforted him whenever he’s near Pete, and he’s never realized it until now, when Pete makes close feel closer somehow, uniting their upper body like there’s treacle sticking them together. 

“Jesus, Pete,” he cries out. His lids darken his vision and he presses them into Pete’s neck, breathing in, breathing out, thighs convulsing so bad from withholding his orgasm and spine quivering when Pete pushes in and out and in and out. 

He almost wants to parse the underlying meaning of the way Pete is making love to him. 

It’s less about letting the Wentz family know that they’re having sex and more about how Mikey feels, if he can feel Pete dig deeper and deeper into him like excavating a secret that will ruin the world if spoken aloud. 

Pete peels Mikey’s face out of his neck and looks down at him. His eyes are glazed over, but it’s not them that are staring at Mikey. He feels like it’s his soul that’s seeing Mikey. 

“Come,” Pete says, low and raspy and still regarding Mikey with the most charged gazes ever. In a snap, Mikey is arching his back and leaning into Pete, clinging to him as he comes with a shriek. The high dizzies him and the world blurs into a pinwheel of color and he feels like the bed is falling from him. 

Just as he steadies himself back to consciousness, Pete is holding onto Mikey in a grip so tight he struggles to breathe. Warmth shoots up his ass and coils into the rubber around Pete’s cock. It’s over. 

Mikey barely has any time to think about what this means when his neck suddenly fills up with dampness. Pete’s face is tucked away there, his nose probing his skin. 

It’s only as Pete lets out a sob that sounds like it wasn’t meant to come out that Mikey realizes he’s crying. He tries to scramble away to ask him what would probably turn out to be all the wrong questions, but Pete’s embrace only tightens around him. 

“Pete,” he says breathlessly. He’s just had the best orgasm of his life and the world still hasn’t quite settled around him yet and Pete is crying in his neck. He has no idea where to even begin. “Pete,” he repeats with a nudge. He doesn’t know what to say. 

Pete’s hair is a crow’s nest of brown strands when he extracts himself from Mikey’s neck. He pulls out of him, discards the condom and maneuvers to sit at the edge of his bed. Mikey silently observes his broad back, the tattoos on his skin. He still doesn’t know what to do or what to say even when Pete presses his hand over his face, stifling his sniffles. 

“Pete…” he tries again, because he can’t just watch this happen. It doesn’t matter anymore where the fuck it had all gone wrong. 

He inches closer and hesitatingly looms his arm over Pete’s shoulder. With a sigh, he decides to hug him from behind, lacing his arms around Pete’s waist. Enmeshed in Mikey’s arms, Pete has never seemed smaller. He’s not sure if he’s relieved or scared when Pete covers his hands with his own. 

“This is embarrassing,” Pete mutters into the hand that shields his face from Mikey’s eyes. He doesn’t elaborate on what ‘this’ may imply beyond the fact that he’s crying. 

“It… you can talk about it, if you want.” Mikey sighs into Pete’s nape, catching that comforting scent again. The shampoo smells stronger here. 

“I want to talk about it, I just-- I don’t know how.” 

Mikey waits. That’s all he’s ever learned to do. It seems to be the right solution when Pete untangles himself from him and crawls to sit in front of Mikey. He wipes his eyes bearing lashes that Mikey’s seen damp on himself but never on Pete. 

“If I could name a day I felt this way,” Pete starts, still pushing his fingers into his eye sockets. “I wouldn’t be able to. You just, you’re so fucking weird .”

Mikey reels back and blinks. “Okay?” 

“I don’t mean to sound like some dude with no heart in a movie or whatever, but fuck, man. I think I’m in love with you.” 

Mikey downright stops breathing. Out of reflex, his eyes drop to his hands stiffly twined by his fingers. Shock burns in the center of his guts and he irrationally wants to slap Pete across the face. He figures he has to say something, but he can’t get it out of him. 

“Did you hear me? I’m in love with you,” Pete repeats with the kind of impatience that makes Mikey’s blood run cold. He doesn’t even want to know what Pete looks like right now. “I’m in love with you.”

Mikey opens his mouth to make a sound, any sound that he can possibly emit in this moment, but nothing comes. 

“Can you at least look at me please?” Pete’s voice cracks into a weak tone, and Mikey’s shoulders slump. 

Reluctantly, he blinks up at Pete, and his chest seizes. This is really happening. He’s looking into Pete’s eyes, moist with the remaining tears he hadn’t shed, the words that will seal it all on the verge of his lips. He scrunches his nose involuntarily, and says warily, “don’t fucking scare me like that man. It’s not funny.”

“You think I’m joking?” Pete’s jaw goes slack. “Mikey. You know why I said today was like no other.”

He doesn’t answer. 

“You knew,” Pete asserts with confidence. “You said you liked me.”

The words promptly bring him back to high school days, when his young and tender self had conflicting feelings he never realized was love and wasn’t able to pronounce them as such. Pete is 29, he should probably be married and considering having kids, but here he is, living a period of his life that he seems to have carelessly glossed over. He’s only catching up to love confessions now. 

“I didn’t think you’d, you know, actually…” he tries to explain. 

“So what does it mean?” Pete asks. 

Mikey shrugs. He’s spineless. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?” The frustration is clear in his gestures as he wipes his eyes again and tugs at his hair. “I just told you I loved you. You’re not-- is this--”

“There’s more to that, Pete,” he says, frowning. “Do you know how to love me?”

“No,” he admits unflinchingly. “No but, I can, I can make it work. It’ll be worth it. Right?”

Mikey shrugs again. It’s inconceivable that a man who has never loved would turn to him spelling out the three damning words that never made it out of his shriveled heart in the past 10 years. “I…”

“C’mon Mikey,” he pleads, reaching for his hands. “Why am I the one asking this? You said you liked me. Do your feelings flicker on and off that fast?”

They don’t , Mikey wants to say. He’s not one to be unsure about relationships, they have always worked out for him, before meeting an end he considers inevitable anyway. But Pete had opposite ideas in the past. A future with him looks much less promising… 

“I think I’m in love with you too,” Mikey mumbles still, too much of a coward to look at Pete as he says it. The words leave him with all the breath in his lungs. His elbows hang uselessly by his sides. He really is spineless. 

Pete lets out a choking sound of relief. His grip on Mikey’s hands tighten meaningfully. “Okay. Okay, Mikey,” he says, scooting closer and perching himself in Mikey’s lap. “I want this, okay? I really, really want this. I started thinking about it a lot, and I just, I couldn’t see myself without you. Do you know how terrifying that was to me?”

Mikey doesn’t really know. Each time he’d pictured Frank or Gabe’s presence in all the aspects of his life, he’d always been filled with hope and joy. Hope and joy by Mikey’s standards, anyway. Never terror. Love is not supposed to scare you, only abandon and the subsequent loneliness would. He sits still and continues to listen.

“I don’t know why it had to be you,” Pete says. Mikey rolls his eyes, pinning them back on him. 

“Thanks.”

“I mean everything though, I really do. I love you, and I don’t know why, and I can’t stop it. I’m fucking crazy about you.”

Mikey leans down and kisses Pete, swallowing the words, feeling them vividly in his heart. “I can’t stop it too,” he mutters. He’s a man of few words, he doesn’t know how to make it sound better. It’s not the best of timing either. 

Pete seems to understand anyway. He smiles and pushes Mikey down on his back before hovering over him. His hands naturally reach for his bangs like two magnetic forces. Mikey feels himself warming up with affection and he cradles Pete’s nape to score a long, long kiss on his lips. 

By the time they’re finished with their fourth round, Mikey has let all inhibitions go. 

Pete picks Mikey and Don up on a Saturday. 

They’d capitalized on the announcement of friendly weather for the rest of summer and decided to go on a walk around the park to enjoy the end of the season before it wilts into a damp, fiery autumn. 

Meadows of fuzzy green dotted with the occasional flower stretch out in front of them. Kids are wailing out laughter, dates are timidly sitting on a shared checkered blanket, teenagers are perched by the swings and smoking things they certainly shouldn’t be smoking with their air of superiority reigning over the area. 

Don has gone ahead of them, camera between his hands and snapping the trivialities of life. He’d been ecstatic about reviving old passions, one of which was photography. His attention is definitely not on Pete and Mikey. 

“I start my fifth year in a week,” Mikey says dejectedly, staring at his shoes as they aimlessly follow the gravelly paths swirling around the park. He swings their linked hands back and forth, and it strikes Pete how easily this couple thing comes to him. He’s going to have to learn from someone 7 years younger than him. 

“The last year is always the best,” he responds, grinning. “You only have a few courses you need to catch up to, right? The rest of the time, you’re free to do whatever you want. You can start with me.”

“Doing you?” Mikey blinks down at him, then shakes his head in feigned disapproval. “You suck, dude.”

“You suck too, you know,” he says, unable to stop himself. Mikey tugs on his hand so Pete’s weight falls onto him. He breaks their laced fingers only to catch him by the waist. 

“You’re the least funny guy on earth,” he deadpans. Pete widens his grin and wraps his own arms around Mikey’s waist, sneaking his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. This must be what love is , he thinks almost cynically. To risk a fine for indecent fondling in a public area . 

“Hey, you know,” Mikey begins, and when he furrows his brows, Pete wants to lurch out and wipe the frown away. Ever since he’d been able to admit to himself that his life means nothing without Mikey in it, he’s often been gripped with this protective streak that will probably make him run until his legs fall off if it means Mikey is okay. “My dad, he’s uhm, he said he’d been feeling weird lately.”

So he’s worried. “Weird, how?” Pete asks cautiously.

“He said he’s been feeling lightheaded, like he can float, or more like, floating in water. Or something. I’m not too sure either.” 

“Huh, floating in water. That’s new,” Pete tries to joke, but seeing the way Mikey’s frown drops down an inch, he reckons it’s not the right thing to say. He’ll have this nailed down, someday, the ability to mitigate all of Mikey’s worries. 

“I don’t know. He keeps squirming when he’s sitting, like he’s not comfortable or something. He says, uh, he’s dizzy and yeah. That floating feeling.”

Pete tries to boil it down to the basic medical jargon he’s more familiar with. It seems like it mostly has to do with dizziness, and considering the predicament they’d found Don in recently, it’s not hard to connect the dots. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he says. “When your dad came back, he was starved, remember? He’d lost a lot of weight in too little time, and it probably shocked his body. Has he been eating well?”

“Not much better than before, but he’s trying.”

“Then it’s totally normal,” Pete smiles, brushing Mikey’s bangs with his fingers. “Just a general lack of food and the process of recovery. It’ll take some days for him to feel better, if he agrees to eat better.”

“I’m sure he will,” Mikey smiles back, leaning into Pete’s hand. He sighs fondly and looks at him through hooded eyes, seeming much more at ease in the way his shoulders relax and  his arms slacken. 

The gaze is intense, full of love and appreciation and Pete has never felt so proud to be at the receiving end of it. Where a month ago he would have made a run for it, today he finds himself wanting to be in this kind of spotlight more and more. 

He doesn’t know what about Mikey makes him so special, why it had to be him of all people. It’s not that Mikey is ‘different’ from the endless list of people Pete had slept with. It’s not that Mikey is perfect. He’s just someone Pete can’t get enough of no matter how much he sees him and hears his voice. For the first time Pete has dreams about repeating Mikey-filled days for the rest of his life with the sane conviction that he’ll never grow bored. 

Pete might not be familiar with the concept of dating but he knows affection like he knows how to flag an appendicitis. He’s just never had to direct it at one particular person he seems to want to be around all the time. 

He’s 29 and just discovering the things that love makes you do. It’s seriously a societal stigma to expect everyone to acquaint themselves with the cycle of love and heartbreak and recovery during high school. In fact, it’s all backwards. High school romance is often the most repugnant and regretted. 

If Pete finding love way too late means he always finds his way back to Mikey, he’d do it all over again a thousand times with the same stamina and the same determination. If Pete can imagine himself as a rockstar living rotten and rich in another timeline of the universe, he certainly can imagine himself living millions of lives in which he meets and falls in love with Mikey in all of them, one way or another. 

The fact that he can’t ever bring himself to explain it makes him believe in fate all the more. This has to be it. Love is a game of trials and errors until you land on the person seemingly built specially for you as fate laughs in your face when you cling to the wrong one. 

This has to be it. 

He can laugh in fate’s face now. 

“Oh,” Mikey snaps him out of his trance. He digs into his front pocket and slips out his vibrating phone. Pete snuggles into Mikey’s chest and peers at the screen. 

“What’s up?” 

“I got an email.” 

Pete’s heart soars into a big fuzzy ball of blood when he sees it. It worked. He made it happen. 

An email from Gerard Way. It reads, “ Hey, Mikey. We have a lot to talk about. ” 

Their lives have only just begun.