Chapter Text
PART ONE: TOAST, OR WHAT’S LEFT OF IT
It’s early in the morning, dusty silver-blue light washes the living room out through their sunbleached curtains, and Jay doesn’t wake up when Matt steps over him to access the whiteboard. He’d fallen asleep watching The Prisoner last night and refused to go to bed, despite Matt’s warning that he'd be complaining about his shoulder five minutes after he wakes up. Jay’s arm is stretched out above his head and one of his legs dangles halfway off of the couch, looking dead to the world with a blanket tucked under his chin. Matt can just barely see a strand of graying hair at his temple.
The wind kicks up and their front window rattles. Matt remembers that there are about five or six phone calls he needs to make, to whoever deals with these sorts of things, so the house doesn’t collapse or burn down. It’s probably fine. He takes a bite of the toast that he burnt twenty minutes ago and is only just now eating. It’s awful but his stomach is begging for food, he’s been awake for an hour and he’s expecting a long day of work ahead. Mornings like this are good for him, because today’s the day. Every day could be the day.
“Bird! Wake up!”
"Huh?” Jay starts to sit up before he realizes he’s caged by Matt. “What time is it?”
“Time for the best plan of your life, man. Get up!”
“What are you eating? Matt, you’re crumbing on me…" He turns over to shield himself from another shower of bread crumbs.
Matt gestures over to the piano. “Hurry!”
“Then move!” Jay says.
“Is it gonna be like this all day with you?” He takes a step backward off of the couch.
Jay groggily stands and shakes the blackened dust off of his dark red sleeping shirt. He takes forever to wake up, like a thirty-five year old teenager.
"So-" He finishes writing 'Hook, Line, Rivoli' on the whiteboard. Underlines it twice. "I have some serious intel that's about to change our lives. You and your sleepy little head are about to explode. Hey - are you listening?"
"Could I get five minutes? One glass of orange juice?" Jay says as he sits on the piano bench and scrubs his hands over his face.
"Absolutely not." He motions for Jay to play. "Intrigue! But - keep it playful.”
Even half-conscious he finds the right melody. Matt nods along.
"The Rivoli has a new booking agent."
"What happened to the last guy?"
"Killed! A freak accident.”
"For real?" Jay looks over his shoulder, eyebrows raised.
"No. That'd be crazy." He laughs and takes another bite. Just awful, and it was the last slice of bread too. "You don't hear about that sort of thing as much anymore - insane accidents in the papers. It’s all true crime now. And no one wants to write it in the obituary because it seems undignified. But I'd be so proud if I had a like, a Rube Goldberg-esque death-"
"Matt?"
"Right - right! The new booking agent at the Rivoli..." He reaches into his blazer pocket and pulls out a badly printed photograph of a man in his 40s, with the words GAY written in thick marker at the bottom. "He's gay."
"Uh huh…"
Matt can hear the suspicion in his voice. He just needs to get through the pitch and can work on the rest. Getting Jay to do something isn’t hard, it never has been, but Matt maintains a complicated set of equations in his head outlining the ways he can push him before something could break. It takes a special kind of patience he only reserves for Jay.
"And!" He writes Scandals underneath his picture. "He frequently goes to this gay club on Saturday nights."
"Step one: We stake the place out. Dressed to blend in."
"How dressed up?" Jay asks.
"To be determined. Step two: Locate Derek. Simple waiting game. And finally, Step Three: You lead him on, enough that he’ll give us a show at the Rivoli thinking he can sleep with you."
"Wait, wait-" Jay stops playing.
"Jay. I know we had trouble with the last gay plan, but this one, ok? Rock solid. As rock hard as this guy will be when he gets you in his sights."
“Since when are we doing seduction plans? We’ve never done one before."
"Because it's cruel to trick women?" Matt narrows his eyes.
"All we do are tricks!”
Jay’s silent for a moment, Matt watches the gears turn in his head. Seeing Jay think is like watching an incredibly fragile, overly complex machine at the mercy of humidity and air pressure tick away.
“But it's fine to trick a gay person?” Jay continues, turning around on the bench. “I wonder if that’s…worse."
"That's-" Matt pinches the bridge of his nose. "Bird, we could be here all day for that one. Gays vs. Women...I mean, Jesus Christ, right? We don’t have the qualifications."
"And what about gay women?"
“Not enough hours in the day. And do we really want to pull the morality thread, now? At this stage? I don't think this even breaks top five."
Jay nods.
"So it's a yes on the plan?"
“It feels like you’re pimping me out…” He crosses his arms, staring at the floor.
“The point is that you don’t do anything with him. It's about teasing. And what, you’ve got a problem with being the cute one all of the sudden?” He caps the marker and sits on the back of the couch. “Mr. Charmer can’t bestow his talents on the gay community for one magical night? Or - can you not handle the heat? This is a very Jay-centric plan.”
"I can handle a plan.” He sounds a little petulant. Matt smiles. “I just don’t know how to hit on guys. It’s probably different.” Jay says, scratching the side of his face at the edge of his facial hair.
“You want to practice?”
“Uh…” His expression is pained.
“Imagine I'm some gay guy at a bar.” Matt half turns away, and loudly mimics sipping a drink. He’s reminded, in the very back of his mind, of when they’d practice lines for girls on each other. Matt would make them go for hours and hours.
A long moment of silence passes where Matt keeps peeking behind him while Jay gets more restless. He hears the bench creak.
“Hey!” Jay finally says.
Matt points to himself, with a questioning look.
“Do you-” He blanks out. His eyes search the room.
Matt burst into a laugh. Jay breaks with him, laughing into his hands.
“Hey?” Matt says, leaning back on the wall. “You gonna hit me with the ‘How’s it hanging?’ next? Exquisite work, Romeo.”
“I just woke up!” He says through his fingers.
Matt sighs. "I mean it can't be that different. It’s all one love, right? And I'm telling you - you really won't need to do much. One look at that smile? He'll go crazy." Matt says, knowing this approach is Jay’s ticket onboard the plan. And he means it, he’s going to be like catnip to these guys. Something twists in his stomach and the rattling window is starting to get to him. It’s probably the shitty breakfast.
Jay rolls his eyes, but a smile creeps across his face.
“See? Come on!”
When they were younger Jay would bristle like a caught animal if Matt would try to gas him up. Every so often Matt misses the volatility of Jay from a decade ago, when they could wail on each other and everything was a game of chicken. But he knows, truthfully, he’s not equipped to handle it anymore. Their status quo is precious to him. Matt prefers them united in service of a plan.
"Maybe it could work. It’s better than the last gay plan.” Jay shrugs. His eyes narrow at Matt. “Whoa, you cremated that toast, MJ.”
“I’m struggling with it, bad.” Matt coughs through a mouthful, nearly choking. “There was nothing else in the house. Let’s go get a burrito or something.”
“That sounds good…” He stretches out his arm. “Ugh. My shoulder hurts.”
Matt throws away the wrapper to his breakfast burrito and puts an arm around Jay. Spring is just starting and the morning air has a brisk chill, but the sun is out. He’s excited, maybe a bit nervous to rely on Jay for tonight. Matt looks at his profile while he eats, noting the line of his nose and chin, his dark hair falling over his forehead. Jay catches him staring and half turns away as if Matt is going to ask for the rest of his food.
When was the last time Jay talked about romance, sex, or whatever? He suspects Jay got action when Matt was in Europe with his parents last year. He looked equal parts guilty and satisfied, like a dog that got into the trash when Matt asked him what he’d gotten up to. It made Matt realize again he hated thinking about Jay’s sex life more than anything, maybe even more than he hated thinking about money. So he didn’t press it.
“Okay, let's go shopping!” Matt shakes him.
Putting Jay in the driver's seat could be good for him. Matt hopes he’s developed a good sense for when he seems restless by now. He starts staring off in the distance like the main character in a melodrama. He can look like the most serious man alive, then turn around and tell Matt they should write a song about how they put too much air in bags of chips. Jay’s private world is a unique biome he can only tend to secondhand.
“Oh, maybe we could pierce one of your ears.” Matt says.
“No.” He covers one ear, wincing, “And I don't think they do the gay ear thing anymore.”
“Really?”
“You know the dangly earring guy in the burger truck? Mullet, wears a cut off shirt in summer?” The sidewalk is busy with commuters, and they weave through the crowd with a practiced ease.
“Yeah, the gay one that gives us double fries sometimes.”
“Girlfriend. Homophobic.”
“No! That’s - that’s impossible.”
“He was talking to his coworker about picking up girls. Very regressive stuff.”
“You can pick up girls looking like that?”
“I think we’re getting old,” He says, taking the last bite of his breakfast and shrugging Matt off of him. “Remember when you said I shouldn’t buy that watch because you thought it looked too girly?”
“I’m telling you - the ugliest fucking watch - to this day, I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I just said it looked homo so you’d put it down. And we’re not getting old. We’re in our prime.” Matt says, and then leans down to take a sip of Jay’s drink while he’s still holding it. Cherry coke with no ice, and Jay swishes it around in the cup so it’ll go flat faster. Barbaric.
“Stop…just ask if you want some.”
They find a trendy looking vintage shop a couple of blocks down. He spots a rainbow flag sticker on the glass and the shopkeeper is of an indeterminate gender. Goldmine. They’re going to look like the gayest guys in Toronto.
“My buddy and I, we’re going to a gay club for the first time tonight. We’re putting our fate in your hands.” Matt says.
Jay wilts at Matt’s pronouncement but it gets the job done, the shopkeep looks like they’ve been handed two precious newborn kittens with their eyes still shut.
One dress-up montage later Matt looks at the two of them in the mirror. He’s been put in a tight, black short sleeve button up shirt and slightly too big white denim pants. And some working class type boots. This isn’t what he expected.
“Is it just me, Bird, or are these like…” Matt adjusts the shirt again, as if it’s going to make it any looser. “Kinda normal clothes? I could just wear my clothes.” Matt reaches for his hat.
“I think when someone with two nose rings tells you not to wear something to a gay club, you listen.” Jay says, stopping his hand.
“That’s not a saying. You’re inflecting like it is - but it’s not. That’s a brand new sentence.”
“But is it wrong?” He tilts his head.
Jay looks good, but less flamboyant than he’d expected. He realizes he didn’t know what his idea of Homosexual Jay was, it feels like an image that was redacted from his mind for reasons he doesn’t have time to elucidate. He’s wearing a oil-slick dark colored shirt with a purple and green pattern, left open with a white tank top underneath so his chest hair peaks through. And his own black jeans made the cut.
“Do we look gay?” Matt asks, “Or, wait - was this a lesson about how normal guys go to gay clubs now?”
“I don’t think so… I think we just got nice clothes.”
“Right, right.”
“Your arms are starting to look good.” Jay says, much to Matt’s embarrassment. “Maybe try undoing the next button.”
He shakes his head in response. Jay rolls his eyes and takes it upon himself, Matt freezes with a sudden prey instinct, eyes wide. Matt should say ‘You’re really getting into character…’ or, ‘Not even gonna buy me dinner first?’ but he just feels a sudden pressure in his head, like a blood clot in his brain.
“Why are you even hitting the gym if you're so shy about it?” Jay says, obviously taking some delight in upsetting him. He smooths out Matt’s collar.
“I’m not-“ Matt takes a step back, pushing a hand through his hair. “I’m doing it to be the muscle, and the brains. So you can just look - you can just like, look cute at the piano. Or whatever, fuck.” What an insane thing to say, he thinks. “We’ve been over this.”
“Okay…” Jay shrugs, preening the mirror and not sounding like he believes him.
They mess around until the sun sets, rehearsing and going over the plan. Matt feels good about keeping things simple, sticking to primal emotions. Nothing needs to get complicated tonight.
The club is exactly what Matt was expecting. Flashing lights and high humidity, music he feels at the bottom of his stomach.
“Ok, Bird. You hit the floor and I’ll stay here.” He half-shouts over the thrumming beat and points to a table with a good line of sight to the entrance.
“I’m gonna get a drink.” Jay says.
“You sure? Don’t you want to stay alert? This is a pretty delicate operation.”
“Well…” Jay squints, trying to find the right words. “I don’t do this sort of thing sober, so — it’s a mindset thing.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah…that’s normal.” Jay shrugs.
“Uh huh. The mindset.” The air gets strange between them. They stopped talking about “This sort of thing” a few years ago, outside of referencing women as an abstract concept, a demographic that would get their attention once everything fell into place. Matt decides to leave it, skip the thought, this is their plan time.
Jay returns with a short glass of something neon blue, and tall glass he hands to Matt.
“It’s just soda water, you look creepy doing nothing.” He says. “Wow. They pour, really, really strong here.”
Matt can tell that Jay is nervous, the way his eyes dart around the cavernous room. He’s drinking too quickly and nodding to the music.
“You got this? Like I said, this will be easy work for a guy like you. He’ll be eating out of the palm of your hand.”
Jay rolls his eyes but smiles.
“Ok! Go on – get out there.” Matt motions for him to leave the table. He’s got a good feeling about this one.
A lot of time passes while Matt just sits around. It’s a lot like how he remembered clubs from when they used to go in their early twenties, but with a lot more men grinding up on each other. Clubs were always farcical failures for Matt and mostly failures for Jay. They wouldn’t have set foot in a place like this back then. It would have scared the shit out of them.
Even from a distance, Jay has always been a goofy dancer, Matt can only describe it as “wiggly” but his natural ear for tempo compensates for it, somewhat.
Eventually Matt spots Derek at the bar, but has lost track of Jay. He stands up and weaves through the pods of drunken conversation. There’s a warmth of anticipation running through him, he finally gets to do something. Derek is a bigger guy with a well trimmed beard and fashionable wire-frame glasses. He scans the dance floor for Jay and still doesn’t see him, it’s a complication but nothing impossible. An easy, “You’ve got to meet my friend, you’re his type.”
Matt realizes he didn’t come up with his own angle. He was caught up with getting Jay in the door and doesn’t know how he should play it. He’ll have run it close to the chest, but that’s fine. He remembers what he found out about Derek online. He loves to party, travel, was born in Toronto, upper middle class, likes gin and modern short story anthologies that Matt’s never heard of. Incredibly boring. Matt mentally throws a dart at the board and lands on “software engineer, also from Toronto, liberal” and prays that Derek finds naivety charming, because he’ll be scrambling otherwise. Not that he doesn’t like to scramble, but he needs to focus on finding Jay. He really let a tall, skinny guy with dark hair into a sea of other men and didn’t think he would immediately lose him.
Derek smiles back when Matt approaches the sticky bar top. Takes a look at him from head to toe and doesn’t mind what he sees. Matt’s a bit taken aback, he’s used to playing into an insane first impression, people underestimating him or just being taken off guard. He doesn’t think he likes this.
“Have I seen you before?” Derek asks. He already seems a bit tipsy.
He cringes internally, hoping they don’t still have his old picture up at the Rivoli somewhere.
“I mean - I’m around…” Matt chuckles. “But it’s my first time here. Or anywhere like this.”
“Really? Is this…all new?” Derek tilts his head.
“No, I’m just a really, really bad dancer.” Matt runs a hand through his hair. He’s sweating like crazy. Is this working?
“That’s never stopped me.” He leans forward conspiratorially. “But I’m off the floor tonight, I celebrated a bit too hard last week. I’m Derek. Let me get you a drink?”
“Liam, nice to meet you Derek.” Instinctively he reaches out to shake his hand, like a buffon. People are always shaking hands at a club, right? Derek seems to find this extremely charming and laughs out loud. “Uh - What was the occasion?”
He must be a regular because the drink is in his hand almost immediately. He takes a sip and nearly chokes. Syrup and paint thinner – there’s no way it’s only a double. Derek laughs again and says it really must be his first time at a place like this.
“Got a new job, booking shows at the Rivoli.”
“Really?” Matt doesn’t have to play it up, he can’t believe it’s this easy. But he won’t play his hand all at once. “I’m a software engineer. I know, I know. Another one! Sorry.”
Derek puts a hand on shoulder as he laughs. Matt forgets how much he doesn’t like anyone besides Jay touching him, as it happens so infrequently, but he doesn’t show it. Where the fuck is Jay? Matt successfully stalls for time by falling back on an expertise: lovingly complaining about Toronto. What changed and shouldn’t have, what hasn’t changed and needs to. They move to a low table facing the dance floor and sit close together. Matt can smell his cologne, it’s too strong, but he keeps finding himself wanting the attention. He wants Jay to see him getting it.
The gin starts to hit and it invites an unwelcome, familiar thought about a fundamental difference between himself and everyone else. This is why he stopped drinking. Where others drink to outrun lucidity, there’s a fifty-fifty chance he’ll crash into it after one drink. He wants to think it’s because Derek is a man, but he finds that he’s much, much less put off than he would be with a woman. He schedules pursuing this line of thought in the same way he’s scheduled phone calls about the outlet in their kitchen that sparks when they plug something in, or the troubling curve of a load bearing beam he noticed in the basement last month.
He looks out onto the dance floor and sees two guys really going at it. Good for them, Matt thinks distantly. They’re kissing like they’re trying to find something in between each others teeth, one man has his hands threaded through the other’s dark hair -
“Jay.”
PART TWO: CAKE FROM THE GROCERY STORE!
The entire room seems to go quiet as Matt watches a man slide a hand up the back of Jay’s tank top, with the other firmly locked onto his waist. Jay is holding onto his collar, and despite Matt’s vision starting to blur like an FPS character that was hit with a flash grenade, he sees that he's sucking on his tongue. He didn't know that was an option.
“I’m trying to get more experimental acts in, something kind of crazy for the slow nights, so if you know anyone-“ Derek says, and Matt hears some of the words, but they may as well be out of order, total nonsense.
“What the fuck…” Matt stands up. Derek follows his line of sight with concern.
“I know that look. Which one do you know?” He chuckles. “I talked to the skinny one earlier, he’s rolling pretty hard. Seemed like his first time too.”
“He’s what? Rolling what?”
“Molly?” He narrows his eyes like it should be obvious. “Let’s hope so, these days.”
“Fuck. Fuck.” Matt starts running, he thinks he hears Derek calling to him, but it doesn’t matter.
“Matt!” Jay shouts when Matt pulls on his shoulder. The other guy just dances away, uninterested in the psychodrama about to play out. The flashing lights cast Jay’s skin in an array of colors, violet, red, blue, reflecting off of his sweaty face. He’s smiling like it’s every holiday at once.
Jay being beautiful is a presence in Matt’s life that’s not unlike High Park at night in the summer, or Jay playing piano, or the exhilaration of a scheme piecing itself together. Anyone on earth would know it as sublime. But his close proximity at random moments will feel so, so good that it starts to burn him up inside, the recognition and sense of possession breaks through some invisible membrane and he becomes convinced he’s missing something that will rip it all away. This is one of those moments.
Jay throws his arms around Matt’s shoulders and he looks like he’s going to say something. His skin is burning hot, his pupils are blown out and there’s blue and green glitter smeared across his chin. Matt opens his mouth to interrupt him and say what’s happening, but Jay closes the gap to kiss him like he’s been caught in a gravity well.
One hundred nuclear fallout alarms sound off in Matt’s head as Jay’s tongue runs along his top lip and he can feel the rough facial hair on his chin, his exhale on his face, he tastes like sweat and vodka and he’s kissing Matt on his mouth, with his mouth, with no hesitation or shyness.
They part for a single second before Jay is on him again, his hand on the back of Matt’s neck hot and damp. The points of Jay’s teeth graze his bottom lip and Matt starts panting. Everything is hot and damp and loud and strobing, his tongue slides against Jay’s and he can feel the both of them making some kind of noise but can’t hear it over the music. He’s about to drown. He clings onto Jay’s shirt as his head spins.
And then Jay stops, as if they don’t live there forever now, and that image wasn’t the final frame of the movie that everyone is sent home from the theater with. That’s it for Matt and Jay, roll credits. The seconds just run into the next and Matt’s blinking like an idiot, still as a statue on the dance floor of a gay club in Toronto with his best friend.
Jay laughs and rocks Matt back and forth to the tempo of the music. Just some innocent fun, right? His face seems to say. This goes on for a short while as Matt stares directly at him, with no clue what expression he could be making. Jay drinks it up regardless.
“I lost Derek,” Jay shouts into Matt’s ear.
“Who?” Matt says.
“Derek!” Jay yells again. “Our guy. I got distracted, this place is really crazy-“
Matt hauls him off the dance floor to a quieter section of the room. Nothing seems entirely real, he thinks Jay might have just kissed him. The change in volume forces Matt to realize how far the overpoured drink has gone to his head, he’s such a lightweight, but he knows that even stone cold sober the last two minutes of his life would have put him in the self ejecting seat of his own body. Jay keeps talking in one unbroken sentence, practically hanging off of his shoulders. God, is this what he’s like?
“It’s so great here everyone is so nice, I never knew I liked dancing so much-“
“Jay- Ok. Jay, Birdie.” Matt covers his face and shakes his head sharply, twice. They need to get out of here. “I think you were, you got drugged.” Matt pushes back gently to look at him. Jay runs his hands down to Matt’s arms, so the tips of his fingers brush underneath the sleeves of his shirt.
Threat level: Does anyone know what that big, blinking red light means? Someone spilled coffee on that section of the lab manual and the boss isn’t picking up the phone.
“Ohhh. That explains a lot.” Jay says. “Do you think it was the mint? Did you get one?“
“The - a mint? What mint?”
“I met a dental hygienist that was wearing a dog collar when we first got here, we danced and then he gave me a mint from a little baggy. It made sense that he’d carry those around, but then…” He just shrugs.
“Oh, Birdie,” He laughs, but it’s desperate, like a cry for help from the bottom of a well. “Was it minty?” His voice sounds three octaves too high.
“I couldn’t tell. It’s so loud in here.”
Matt nods in understanding. The dozen or so times in his life he’s parallel parked he’s had to turn off the radio. The same thing probably applies here. Memories of parallel parking seem like a good distraction, Jay’s hands are feeling up the muscles in his arms, the ones he said looked good in his stupid shirt. He imagines a streetcar in front of him and three inches of clearance. His heart rate lowers minutely.
“Are you…okay?” He can't be okay, Matt thinks.
“I couldn’t feel bad if I wanted to.” Jay shakes his head, chuckling. Matt looks at his teeth and involuntarily remembers how they felt on his bottom lip. He conjures up images of adjusting the rearview mirror, of six point turns.
“No because like - I wanted to get mad that I couldn’t find you, or Derek, but then I wasn’t getting mad and was having so much fun dancing with these nice guys and I thought ok - it can’t be the alcohol because I’d be so much more mad if I was drunk. So I thought about that time when you dropped my gameboy into the lake! And I got so mad we fought, bad and I - I knocked one of your teeth out. On accident.”
“Jay, I know this one. I was there. Listen-“ Matt tries to step away from him, but Jay doesn’t budge.
“And your parents got mad and told my parents and I got grounded for half the summer, and it was the worst summer ever and we were thirteen-“
“Jay. I actually hate this story.” He runs his tongue along the fake tooth he was given over twenty years ago.
“And I remember saying to my mom ‘I’m gonna kill myself if you don’t let me see Matt!’ and she was like ‘I’m gonna send you to military school!’ and I was the saddest I've ever been for a second even though I was a kid, which sucked, so bad, but then you snuck into my yard with a grocery store cake and your gameboy and I was really happy, and then my mom said she was sorry the next day.”
Matt clenches his jaw. He hates that story. Matt’s the drunk one, he can get angry. He’ll die angry on behalf of thirteen year old Jay with his lisp and clothes that never fit, his bouts of total silence that even Matt couldn’t break through. He’d buy every plastic tasting cake in Ontario for him and drop his parents into a volcano. That night in the pitch dark of his backyard Jay couldn’t speak and Matt knew better than to make him try, but he could make him laugh, and Jay looked at him like he was the only other kid in the world. So he diligently held up a flashlight to his gameboy screen as they shivered in the cold, eating cake with their hands.
Currently, thirty-five year old Jay’s hands are at the nape of his neck, playing with his hair. Threat Level: Incandescent. The dial has pinged off and stuck into the drywall.
“Matt…” He looks at him, beseechingly. “Someone told me I should drink water.”
“Ok, yeah, let’s hydrate you, man. Let’s sit down.” Getting a table between them is a fantastic idea.
Matt parks him at a narrow booth with three plastic cups of water and realizes he needs to use the bathroom, urgently. And he needs to get out of Jay’s eyeline and regroup. They’ve never lost the plot like this, so much for keeping things simple. They’re on the opposite end of the dance floor from Derek but that feels like it happened a week ago.
Jay is still talking, he only stops to drink an entire cup of water in one swig. Matt looks away from the drip that runs down his chin and over his adam’s apple. He’s telling him the big twist in some show he’s been watching, saying he likes Matt’s new shoes and wishes they were the same size, asking Matt to sit with him on the same side of the booth.
“I’ll be right back. Stay here, ok? I’m serious. We can’t get separated again.” He reaches out to put his hand on Jay’s shoulder and stops. Jay doesn’t notice and drinks another cup of water.
As he walks towards the bathroom, it’s the end of a straight-to-DVD thriller with a rug-pull that everyone but him saw coming, the heavy handed flashbacks queue in one by one. Staying up all night when they were fifteen just to hear Jay whisper “Should we get out of here?” a hundred times in the basement of Matt’s house. The overcrowded beach where they had split a flask of what could only have been battery acid, unsuccessful in getting girls, Matt said something in his ear, looked down and saw the thin line of dark hair on Jay’s stomach and got the spins so bad he missed the sunset and just watched the sky change colors, flat on his back. A few nights before they moved out of the apartment, ecstatic that they were staying together, he had Jay pinned and kissed him on the forehead as a gross-out joke and he got clocked on the side of the head so hard his vision sparkled, and he had to crouch on the ground unmoving while Jay shouted at him because he was so hard if he shifted a centimeter it would all be over. Or when their AC broke two years ago and he watched a bead of sweat slide all the way from between his shoulder blades and down his back. Jay in the rare, fleeting moments he reached out to touch Matt or tease him or undo the top button of shirt.
On their own, the loose fragments fit in a junk drawer in the back of his mind, but as a cohesive truth threaded together by Jay kissing Matt like he was trying to crawl inside him, it fits nowhere and now he has to carry it. He’s fucked, and he’s drunk. Matt closes the bathroom stall door behind him. But there's a way out of this. There’s always a way out.
The reality of the situation is that Matt isn't losing his mind. He presses his head between his hands with considerable force for three seconds. Matt will be normal in three, two, one. It helps. The roaring river between his ears is a few decibels quieter, but now he hears the angel and the devil on his shoulders go to war. Matt stares at the bathroom stall in front of him, it must have been remolded recently because it’s shockingly clean, he feels around in his stupid eighty dollar secondhand pants and finds a dry erase marker. He needs to hurry. Jay could be dick-deep in somebody with a 401k by now, or deep-throating a DJ, or tenderly kissing a part-time microbrewery employee that's "getting into" ceramics these days. The bottom floor of hell lowers another few meters as he pictures these tableau vivants.
OPTIONS:
1) Murder Suicide
2) Plausible Deniability
3) The Gentleman Hero
Someone snorts a line of coke in the stall next to his and starts coughing.
Matt gives himself thirty seconds to consider Option Two. He closes his eyes and really, really pushes himself to seriously think more than one hour into the future about something unrelated to a show at the Rivoli. For Jay.
For Option Two, he lets Jay do what he wants. What Matt wants, apparently, he has no time to unpack it, and then…they wake up the next morning? Yeah, Bird, you were high as fuck, which you hate, and doing a bunch of gay stuff I’d never seen before so like - I figured it’d be fun to try. Turns out we’re gay guys that get high and fool around now, is that cool? And - this is important - I don’t cry during, before or after sex, which is something I’ve successfully executed before and have a normal kind of interest in. You imagined the crying because you were so insanely high, which I had nothing to do with this time. So I had sex with you and didn’t cry. Let’s play Mario Kart and never talk about this again.
Hard sell. Really hard sell. Insurmountable, even worse if Jay forgives him. His ears are ringing. He really doesn't know what to do about calling himself a gay guy who would cry during sex in that extrapolation. He skips that thought.
Option Three. Where he takes Jay home and absolutely nothing else untoward happens. Jay will think: Wow, he’s such a gentleman, I didn’t have my wits about me and he tucked me into bed with a glass of water even though I was being such a crazy, gay slut. He saved me from all those graphic designers and dental hygienists. I need him sooo bad, I should make a move on him of sound mind and body and it’s actually so sweet if he cries really bad for a second. And then we can play Mario Kart.
Exquisite. He’s done it again. He could probably just park Jay at the piano all night and he’ll tire himself out feeling the music like he’s never felt it before. The perfect plan. Except that the gay crying stuff came up again? Super weird, but it's not an actionable problem for present-time Matt.
He erases the writing on the bathroom stall. At the sink, he asks the person who just did coke how long molly lasts, he seems very uninterested in Matt and tells him it depends, but probably a couple of hours. And to “watch out” when it wears off, because that’s when the demons come out. What the fuck is he supposed to do if the demon is already out?
He finds Jay in the same spot with another two cups of water. He didn’t manage to get into any trouble going from there and back to the table, Matt sighs with relief. He figures Jay took the pill about an hour ago, so they have at least two more hours of this. He knows he can make it work. He can execute a flawless extraction and get home with the two of them still intact.
Jay’s face lights up and he reaches out his arms for Matt to sit next to him in the booth. This is the first test.
He sits across from Jay and gets a look like he just shot a particularly sweet and innocent animal at point blank range. Blew its head clean off.
“Matt…” He whines. Whatever. This is nothing.
“Hey, Jaybird. We gotta fucking leave.” Matt tangles his hands together in his lap so hard it starts to hurt.
“You don’t even want to sit with me?” Jay says.
He digs his nails into the meat of his palm. Plan Two is a dead end. Plan Two is the mind-killer. Plan Two is the little-death that brings total obliteration. Matt will face Plan Two and permit it to pass over him and through him.
“I’ll sit with you - every single day for the rest of our lives - if you leave with me right now.”
Jay rolls his eyes. “Why do you hate fun all of the sudden? I know, come dance with me! Get another drink, or we can find the dentist guy in the collar and then we can find Derek and get a show and dance all night. Please…”
He reaches out his long, lanky arms and just barely reaches the inside of Matt’s elbows with his perfect fingers. His chin is nearly on the table and he’s looking up through his eyelashes. Matt wishes he’d pulled the fire alarm on his way over to the table.
“Wait…” Jay’s smile turns crooked, “You’re mad because I kissed you! You’re shy!”
Jay laughs like he’s just been told the funniest secret of his life. There’s a mocking edge to it. Matt compulsively laughs with him and finds he can’t stop, but it’s not funny. It’s lunatic laughter, full on derangement, he can’t move and he’s starting to double over.
Threat Level: A cataclysm so profound that the greatest minds of the generation will die inventing a new hazmat standard in order to enter within a 100 kilometer radius of the surrounding environs.
With incredible speed Jay is on the other side of the table and has both hands around Matt’s arm in a vice grip, he’s sitting sideways with one leg bent so he can face Matt with full attention. In a cobweb-ridden, dilapidated corner of his mind he’s thinking about how good Jay smells even though it has to be all sweat by now, maybe because of that. Like pine needles sat out in the sun and a syrupy, dark fruit just on the edge of overripe.
“I’m not - I’ve never been shy. You wish. You wish I was. Not for one day in my whole life. You’re lashing out. Fucking junkie. Unhand me.” Matt tries to press his back further into the wall.
“It’s cute.” Jay says. But there’s no way he just said that, Matt thinks.
“What?” Matt says, desperate to give either Jay or his ears another shot.
“It’s cute when you get shy. I know you liked kissing me. Do you remember when we were-“
“I’ll kill you.” Matt says. “Both of us can die today.”
Matt knows exactly what he was about to say and skips over it like a flat stone on surface tension. He’s not fifteen anymore, he’s not begging Jay for anything except to get the fuck out of this club and untangle if he wants Jay to regret tonight or not, so Matt can pray accordingly.
Jay grins beatifically. This is a new kind of monster, the sweetness and goading playfulness of the Jay he knows now and the one who wanted to thrash him around the yard from their early twenties.
“Well, in that case…” Jay sighs, shrugging woefully, his eyes flitting to the dance floor and back to Matt. “I guess I’ll just have to find someone that wants to dance with me and do plans with me.”
“For fucks sake-“
“No, Matt, it’s fine! There’s a bunch of nice guys here, I bet they like plans. And I already know they like having fun.” He stands, walking towards the floor.
“Bird, wait!” He grabs onto his wrist. Matt doesn’t like looking up at Jay like this. “I’ll go with you - I’ll dance for a little bit.”
An extraordinarily bad idea. But if he ever sees Jay look at another man like he looked at Matt out on the dance floor he’ll die. What is he supposed to do after tonight? He can’t live with that look rattling around in his head, like the window in it’s frame back at the house.
Jay curls his fingers over the hand on his wrist and chuckles, looking like he’s always known it really is that easy with Matt sometimes. Whatever. He knows deep down he’s being messed with and he’s too stupid to stop it from happening. He’s led onto the dance floor with Jay holding onto his hand and looking back at him like a soon-to-be-dead wife from the setup of a revenge plot in an action movie.
They’re both abysmally bad dancers. Matt can dance to Jay’s songs, in his own way, but however someone should move out here, they don’t have what it takes. There’s a lot of jumping around and very little coordination. It's a good thing they’ve become the only two people on earth and any crowd that could give them a passing glance has faded into the background. The frantic movement is exorcising some of the misery out of him, and he feels marginally back in his own body. Jay will put an arm around his middle or hang off of his shoulders like it’s something he’s done a hundred times before and Matt attempts to etch it into his memory. He can’t hear anything outside of the music, can’t see anything beyond the flashing lights on Jay’s face again and Matt’s suddenly in one of the best moments of his life. The whiplash is disorienting but he was built to weather it. Jay’s hands are on the back of his neck again, his eyes are closed and he’s just listening to the music.
Matt’s in love with him. Big, real, stupid love. He’s unable to skip the thought. It’s going to hurt like hell in the morning but for now it’s just another one of those beautiful things in the world that’s self evident. This is the eye of the storm, alone with Jay in a club nearing capacity.
They stay there for a long time. It becomes a game of chicken like when they were younger, one of them gives the other a “Are we done?” look and the other shakes their head. Eventually Jay’s forehead is pressed against his temple and he can tell he’s starting to fade, he takes him to get more water.
“How you holding up, Birdie?” Matt says as Jay looks out onto the crowd. He looks significantly more lucid than before.
“Good. I think it’s almost over…” He wipes his forehead with his open shirt. He’s sweat through the collar of his tank top, Matt can see dark hair pressed underneath the fabric.
“Should we get out of here?” Matt says, close to his ear, without thinking. He cringes. It’s the line from their teen years. He sees the empty cans of soda and the menu screen to Metal Gear repeating itself in the background.
“Yeah.” Jay grins at him. Of course, Matt thinks, Jay can’t remember a grocery list or his keys when he leaves the house, but he remembers that stupid line, even when his neurons have been fried half to death.
Jay catches Matt off guard and kisses him again, but it’s softer, sweeter, he's holding both sides of his face. Matt pulls away about five seconds too late. Jay is still burning hot and smells like musky sweat. It would be so, so easy to just sink into the touch.
And where Plan Two has gone past, Matt will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where Plan Two has gone there will be nothing. Only Matt will remain.
They get their coats but don’t put them on right away once they’re out in the cold nighttime air. Matt was hoping for a reset to his system, but it just makes him shiver. They walk a ways down past the smokers and people lingering near the entrance. Matt’s trying to think of a single thing to say while Jay seems content beside him.
“Bird…” He says, putting on his jacket. The lining is freezing cold against his damp shirt, he keeps shivering.
Jay smiles and pulls up Matt’s hood, pulls it too far over his face and shakes him a bit. He’s just fucking around and Matt’s in love with him. It’s sick that none of this is real, just a chemical misfire, but up against the pain is some relief. Matt’s never been more out to sea than he was tonight. He tells himself he wants everything back to normal, or at least under control. Delusionally he wonders how he can pack all of this away. It’s impossible.