Cemetery Boys -7-

The morning sunlight was gentle but insistent against my eyelids, like a little kid trying to wake up its parent without getting its ass kicked. Being the shitty dad that I was, I waited an incredibly long time before I even bothered to let my eyes slide open. It was worth the effort; the first sight to greet my sleep-encrusted eyes was a peacefully snoring Patrick, flat on his stomach beside me with his limbs stretched to the four directions. Definitely not a bad thing to wake up to.

Stifling a yawn, I rolled onto my side and inspected him. I was in that weird just-woke-up place where your brain barely functions, so your senses work overtime to compensate. My eyes drank in everything. The sweet curve of his shoulder, sliding into the arm that had been carelessly flung over his pillow. The way the light played across that pale skin, catching on the tiny blond hairs and the smattering of Irish freckles that dotted his arms. The brilliant, angelic tangle of that blond-red-strawberry-whatever hair that roughly indicated where his head lay. The perfect geometry of his body, from the curve of his neck down through the flow of his spine, past the tuck of his waist and that glorious, glorious place where his tee shirt had ridden up, exposing the small hollow of his lower back to the golden morning sunlight. From there, everything else was covered by a tangle of blankets, except for the plump, ruddy toes that curled out from underneath the edge of the sheet.

It was just. In a word, perfect. Absolutely perfect in every shape and form and particle, from the dust motes that danced in the lazy morning sunlight to the soft sigh-snores that clambered out from between Patrick’s lips every time he breathed out.

Just as that thought crossed my mind, the snores stopped, to be replaced by some odd snuffling that morphed into a mumble that might just have been a word if it hadn’t been swallowed by a gigantic yawn. Amused, I looked on as he stretched in a sudden explosion of limbs, set off by his right arm jerking out and flopping back down against the side of the bed, followed by a slow tightening and loosening of his shoulders, which flowed down his back in the form of a quick ripple down his spine that caused both his legs to kick out, tightening his calves and flexing his ankles in a motion that ended in a luxurious curl, release, and wiggle of his toes.

I couldn’t help myself; I laughed, then tried to stifle it halfway through, ending up with some weird kind of snort. I’d forgotten what an amazing process Patrick went through when he woke up.

At my odd snort, he rolled over, greeting me with half-closed eyes and a sleepy smile.

“Morning,” he murmured, dragging a hand across one cheek, stretching one corner of his smile halfway up to his eye. I didn’t reply; I was transfixed.

And then…well, then, I couldn’t really tell you exactly what happened. It was, I think, some kind of miracle of physics and coincidence. I leaned forward, he stretched again, and in a slow, lazy, cosmic sort of way…we collided. Read: kissed.

It should have been awkward. Really, it should have been painful, involving some kind of mash-up of noses, teeth, and jaws, with very little actual lip contact. We were both barely awake, drifting in that in-between place where you’re half asleep, half awake, and not really functioning in either world. Floating through a dream land populated with people and places you know.

And in a way, it was sort of dream-like in the way it happened. I had no idea what was going on until it hit me all at once. The softness, the warmth, the taste, the thick, concentrated Patrick-taste that I had only guessed at when I’d sipped his coffee. He had, I thought faintly, very nice lips. Not that I hadn’t known that beforehand, but somehow it came as a surprise every time. And, yeah, I’d kissed him before, of course I had. But this time was different. Very, very different. It wasn’t one of those forced, sweaty onstage mouth-mashes, or awkward and teenage, when he was stunned and nervous and I was aggressive and nervous. I wasn’t trying to shove my tongue into his mouth, he wasn’t trying to pull away, and no one was shouting at us or pouring beer onto our heads. It was slow, sleepy; a languid interlock of lips, mouths working ever so gently against each other. It was, I decided, my new favorite thing in the world.

And then, just as suddenly as it had started, it was over. I lay back against my pillows, slightly stunned. Leaning back as well, he smiled, eyes half-closed, a sleepy, contented sigh slipping out of his slack mouth. For one amazing, terrifying moment, I though that he was okay with it, that everything was alright.
Of course, that couldn’t last very long; after a half-second of peace, his eyes snapped open, his mouth snapped shut, and he jerked slightly, the force of the truth striking him like a big, embarrassing hammer.

He fell out of the bed.

“Um…shit,” I muttered, sitting up and scrambling across the mattress. He was sitting on the carpeted floor beside the bed, propping himself up on his elbows, his legs half bent and splayed out in different directions. From my vantage point, I could see clearly how pale he was, the way his chest was heaving slightly, the way a faint cloud of cherry-blossom pink was spreading across his nose and cheekbones.

“Uh…Trick?” I asked softly, plagued with the nonsensical fear that any loud noise would startle him into fleeing like a terrified deer. “You okay?”

“Uh…yeah, yeah, I’m fine, yeah,” he stammered, getting clumsily to his feet. “Er…I’m gonna, gonna go make some, uh, uh, breakfast…”

Oh, god, no, he was not doing this. No, no, no, no…

“No,” I said flatly, pushing myself upright and swinging my legs off the edge of the bed. “We are not pretending like this never happened, Trick. We are going to talk about this, and we’re going to talk about it now.”

He let out a long, heavy sigh, like he was trying to blow me away by expelling air from his mouth as forcibly as possible. When that didn’t work, he passed a hand over his eyes, clamping his fingers down onto his forehead and squeezing, hard. Just as I was starting to worry about the pressure popping out his eyeballs, he lowered his hand slightly, rubbing at his eyelids as he muttered, “It is way too fucking early for this. I need coffee.”

“Patrick-”

“A few minutes, Pete,” he cut me off, somewhere between commanding me and pleading with me. “Just a few fucking minutes so I can have some fucking coffee and start thinking clearly, okay?”

“Alright,” I sighed, slumping slightly. He did have a point. Maybe a few minutes and some coffee would be good for both of us…

A few minutes and a cup of coffee turned into a ridiculous amount of time spent fussing with the fucking coffee maker, and then an even more ridiculous amount of time spent waiting around for it to make the fucking coffee. And once Patrick had his fucking coffee, he decided to waste some more time by completely avoiding me and wandering around the house checking to see if everything was still working. And then he had to check on Bronx, who of course needed to be fed and changed. So the formula had to be made, the diaper had to be changed, and the baby had to be cajoled into actually drinking the stuff.

And just to make it all totally perfect, by the time Patrick finally, finally sat his ass down at the kitchen table, I was getting cold feet. I looked at the chair opposite him, moved to sit down, and then stepped back.

“Um…you want anything?” I asked awkwardly, like he hadn’t been living in my house full time for the past week (and on and off for the past, oh, seven years). “Milk? Sugar…?”

“No, Pete,” he sighed, setting his mug down on the table with what seemed to me to be unnecessary force. “Are we talking or not?”

“We are, we are,” I said hastily, taking a desperate sip of my coffee before continuing. “I just…well. Um. What do you think?”

“What do I think about what?”

I rolled my eyes; when it came to being extremely unhelpful, Patrick was a master when he wanted to be. “You know what, Trick.”

“No, I don’t, Pete,” he harrumphed, folding his arms. “Why don’t you tell me? You were the one who was so keen on talking in the first place.”

I blinked at him; he was teasing me, teasing me in a way very different from his usual playful jokes. He stared back at me, eyebrows quirked, wide eyes daring me to say something.

“Well…this,” I sputtered, waving my arms expansively and nearly dumping coffee all over myself in the process. “All of it. We need to talk about this.”

“There is no this, Pete,” he snapped, eyes darting from my face to the tiled table in front of him.

“Why not?”

Now it was his turn to blink at me in surprise. And believe me, if it were possible, I would have been blinking at myself, too. That was definitely not supposed to come out.

“Because it’s wrong, Pete!” he damn near shrieked, his ears burning bright red through his hair. “Your wife of, what, two years, died a week ago! The mother of your child, Pete, who, I might remind you, is still in this fucking house! Do you really think he’d appreciate growing up with, with two dads?”

There was a pause, and he looked down at his fisted hands, that same blush creeping out from his ears and across his cheeks. I obviously wasn’t the only one blurting things out today. It sounded like…well, somehow it sounded like he would be okay with…with us, like he wasn’t refusing me for his sake. That…wow, well, that gave me hope.

“Better than growing up with just one,” I shrugged, setting my mug down on the counter behind me and walking around to lean on the table and face him.

“Pete, don’t,” he mumbled, reaching up to cup his hands around his mouth, as if to block any more untoward comments from tumbling out.

“Why not, Patrick?” I demanded, throwing my hands up into the air. “Why do you have such a fucking problem with this? Who’s gonna say anything to us now, Trick? Who is there to judge us anymore? What is stopping us?”

“I don’t…I don’t want to mess things up,” he sighed, dropping his hands to the tabletop and daring a glance up at my face. “We’re…we were doing okay. We could-”

“Okay?” I repeated in outrage. “Okay? How, exactly, do you quantify me having nightmares every night, and you walking out, and, and us screaming at each other all the time, how does any of that count as doing oka-”

“And you think that, that me and you being…us, will fix that?” Patrick interrupted me loudly, pushing his chair back and standing abruptly. “Well, I’ve got news for you, Pete-”

“Has it ever occurred to you that maybe not being together is the problem?” I yelled at him.

“No, as a matter of fact, it hasn’t!” he retorted, planting his hands on his hips. “Because that would be a problem, not this. Okay? Doing…being…that, just causes more problems, okay? And more problems is the last thing we need right now.”

My heart plummeted into my stomach as he kicked aside his chair and turned away from me, heading for the kitchen door. Somehow, the thought of impending heartbreak only made me angrier. He was not going to pussy out and leave me now, not before I’d spoken my mind.

“Don’t you fucking walk away from me!” I yelped, suppressing the urge to stomp my foot like an enraged five-year-old. “Fucking listen to what I’m telling you, you…you…”

“What more is there to say, Pete?” he snarled, turning back to glare at me.

“I love you, okay, Patrick?” I snapped. “Patrick Stump, I fucking love you.”

His reaction was…well, let’s just say it wasn’t what I expected (not that I was really expecting anything, but). He sighed, almost groaned, really, and slumped back against the nearest wall. For one terrible moment I thought he’d fainted or something, but my fears were assuaged when he buried his face in his hands. However, after a few long, long moments of silence, I started to get nervous.

“Trick?” I said softly, feeling a faint flicker of déjà vu.

“Why are you doing this, Pete?” he sighed after another long silence.

Like a total idiot, I just sort of grunted out: “Huh?”

“You jerk me around, Pete,” he said unhelpfully, lowering his hands and staring fixedly at the table beside me. “It’s always up and down. I never know where I am with you. One minute you kiss me, then you ignore me, then we’re friends, then you tell me that I’ve saved your life, and then you go and marry…you marry Ashlee, for Christ’s sake, and now you tell me that you love me? Pick one, for God’s sake, and stop messing with my head.”

“I didn’t…I’m not…I…” I gasped, spluttered, groped for something to say. “I…Patrick…Patrick.” I pushed myself away from the table, stumbled over to him, and put my hands on his shoulders, looking him in his unwilling eyes. “Patrick, I’m not kidding, okay? I…I may have been an asshole sometimes, but…I love you. I’ve always loved you.”

He snorted quietly, finally meeting my gaze. “Yeah? Then how do you explain-”

“I loved her, too,” I admitted. “I did. Really, I did. It was…marrying her was the hardest decision I ever made. It was like choosing between two different halves of myself. I gained something, but something equally important was ripped away. And maybe it was a mistake. I don’t know. If it was, I’m sorry. But…”

“Now that she’s gone you want a replacement?”

“That’s not how it works, Patrick!” I exploded in frustration. “You’re not a replacement, get that into your fucking head! Are you not hearing me right now? I. Love. You. Okay? Make what you want of that, but just fucking listen to me. I loved you all along, wanted you all along. It just…”

“It didn’t work out, I get it,” he sighed. “Yeah. Okay. I…I just…oh, god, this is too much.” His body crumpling slightly, he hid his face in his hands, hunching his shoulders and drawing his elbows in close. And right there, backed up against the sheetrock wall of my kitchen in a beam of late morning sunlight, he was just so…so vulnerable, so afraid, so adorable…how could I have ever let something like that escape me?

“Patrick,” I said softly. “Trick,” I tried again when he didn’t respond. “Tricky.”

At that, he looked up, eyes two big, confused blue marbles. Staring at me as if transfixed, he didn’t even flinch when I took my hands off his shoulders and used them to cup his chin. To my great surprise and infinite satisfaction, he didn’t resist when I tilted his face upwards and stepped forwards and kissed him, captured his lips as gently as humanly possible.

It was at the point when I had his wondrous, full bottom lip captured between mine that I realized that he wasn’t pulling away. Oh, god. He wasn’t pulling away. He wasn’t pulling away. He wasn’t, he wasn’t…oh. He pulled away.

“Thanks,” he said breathlessly, blinking a few times and licking his lips. “I…I needed that.”

And with those unlikeliest of words, he placed those cute, talented little hands of his on either side of my face, pushed himself up onto his tiptoes, and kissed me square on the lips. As I turned my head to the side and let my eyes fall shut, I couldn’t keep my rather preoccupied lips from stretching into the faintest of smiles. Because, okay, yeah. I kind of really needed that, too.