One-shots

It’s almost eight o’clock in the morning.

The rain is cascading from the clouds heavily and blurring car windows as they’re passing by, the sky stretching over the horizon and giving the grass an earthier feel.
Frank is standing underneath a worn umbrella and waiting for a cab he could catch. He feels frozen to the core; but his mind is telling him that the ice he feels isn't a consequence of the cold November air hanging around him.

His head hurts, his fingers are sore and knuckles bruised from all the times he’s landed on them instead of the stage floor and saved himself a mild concussion this year. It’s been six long months, and he’s finally home. He’s nearly four hours late, but he’s home. In Jersey, only an hour away from his building, his apartment and his boyfriend- home.

He’s sleep-deprived, hooked on some cheap airport Aspirin, and his forehead feels like it’s being stretched open from all the stress. His flight was meant to land at four AM and he was supposed to be in Belleville at five tops, but no- his luck is nowhere as huge as that snowstorm that appeared over the Atlantic just as he was about to fall asleep last night.
All he was able to think of as the plane took off is how he was going to unlock the door before the sun is out, dump his bags in the hallway and wrap an arm around Gerard’s waist while he’s still asleep- breathe in his scent, the shitty Walmart shampoo mixed with strong coffee and the fags he’s been trying to dump for a while now.
Even though his mood is far from elated at this moment, he still manages to crack a smile when a picture of shiny dark locks and a faint smile fucks with his head and makes him curse storms all over again.Gerard wouldn’t like that, though, he always says how bad weather makes the best artists.

He zips his hoodie up, biting on his lower lip and wishing he were somewhere else, preferably amongst a mess of clean white sheets, hazel eyes and pale fingers travelling across his jaw line and making him smile.
But he is well aware that Gerard’s at work now, because he’s late and Gerard only works the morning shift. He always says he’d rather leave Frank alone all day long with his thoughts than make him fall sleep in a cold bed.

Frank sighs, long and pained as he’s shoving his backpack in front of his feet in the smelly cab, vaguely giving the driver directions and getting lost within his thoughts before they’ve even left for the main road. Jet lag’s a bitch, but he’s seen worse. And the tugging feeling he’s currently spawning inside his chest is familiar enough for him not to bang his head against something.

The streets pass in front of his eyes bluntly, quickly, and he’s looking at the entrance to his own before he’s even registered that an hour time has passed. Wasted, he thinks as he throws some money onto the driver’s palm, thanking him and mumbling an incoherent ‘keep the change’. He grabs his bags, shuts the cab door and soaks in the gray around him in, his footsteps getting heavier as they get closer to the building entrance.

He can see his reflection in the glass that is the front door but he pays no mind to deciphering the exhaustion behind the bags underneath his eyes, and he trudges upstairs. The seven flights of stairs are hard to walk but he’d rather do it all over again than find his apartment door locked.

The apartment smells the same way like it always does, flowery, with an edge- it smells like home but it doesn’t really feel like it without Gerard there.

Frank doesn’t waste time, or nerves, and he doesn’t even try to interrupt his immediate beeline towards their bedroom.
When his head hits the pillow, he craves a pair of arms to wrap around his waist, but the bed feels enough like Gerard to keep him sane and satisfied as he’s blacking out.

The last thing on his mind before he lets himself drift off is a blank paper page- probably because that’s what he’s felt like for a while now.

*

It’s close to four PM when the rain wakes him up.

Gerard didn’t shut the blinds this morning, and the drops are banging against the windows as if the sky is blaming the entire world for its crying. Frank doesn’t mind, he finds himself feeling guilty on sunny days, sometimes, too.

He walks around the apartment a bit, shoots a look at his guitar, but his fingers don’t ache to play. Not now, not when he’s too nervous to walk properly. He wakes himself up, makes coffee, steals a few of Gerard’s cigarettes- the ones he’s left on the kitchen counter this morning. He walks some more, goes through one of Gerard’s new sketchbooks messily lying on the couch; smiles when he sees a few sketches of himself here and there.

Gerard’s pencil patterns change, Frank knows, but it still surprises him when he sees 2H landscapes decorating the cheap drawing paper instead of dark contours and unknown superheroes. It’s surreal, but he understands, the gentle gray still suits Gerard more than the sharp edges of reds and oranges Frank used to see him spill over his pages.
He finds himself smiling even though he didn’t feel his lips twitch.

But he hasn’t got time to waste anymore, because he hears a key being plunged into the lock and a quiet hiss when it doesn’t turn. Gerard tries again- nothing, but then obviously something clicks inside his brain because he twists the knob to his left and the door opens.

Frank peeks with his head into the hallway, leaning onto the living room door frame and smiling as Gerard is cursing at the buttons of his coat. His hair is damp and sticking to his forehead, the space below his eyes purple, his fingernails bitten and red as he’s still fumbling with the fabric. Frank isn’t sure if it’s a righteous thing to admit, but he sometimes dares to think he likes Gerard best like this- distressed, worried, nervous- maybe just because he’s usually the one who gets to kiss his anxiety away.

“Need some help with that?”

Gerard’s fingers freeze, his head shooting up. “You’re home.”

“You bet I am.”

His heartbeat speeds up as Gerard runs towards him, and at the exact moment Gerard’s face is in his neck and Frank’s arms are around his waist, he really does begin to believe that he’s home. The air creeping against his shoulder-blades sometimes makes him feel like he’s lost, like he doesn’t have one, but each and every time he feels Gerard’s body shift against his- he knows that he’s a soul deemed to belong, after all.

Gerard leans his forehead against Frank’s, closing his eyes and inhaling, through his nose, sharp. He moves his hands over to Frank’s face; his palms hitting his cheeks like warm breeze does the trees in early fall. He opens his eyes, but then closes them again because Frank kisses him as if he’s the shore and Gerard’s the oncoming wave, blending together before disappearing all the same.

“I’ve missed you,” Gerard says. His words hit Frank’s lips softly, but there’s pain behind them and it would probably sting if he were to say them again. “I always get this idiotic fear just before you get home… every goddamn time… I feel like this is it, like this is the time you aren’t coming back.”

And Frank would trade everything in the world just so he could make Gerard know he’s always going to come back home. “Don’t say that.”

Gerard shakes his head, scared. “I’m sorry… I just… I get so paranoid at times. You meet so many people on tour and some of those people might change your life like I never could. And what if, one day, you wish to go with them? What if you want to leave the mediocre mess that this is and just… be happy, you know?”

Frank feels as if his face is heating up but he knows it doesn’t show, he can just sense the clenching in his upper gut as he tries to suppress the need to cry. “You make me happy.”

Gerard swallows, loud and defiant as he’s staring into Frank’s eyes and searching for the only thing he doesn’t want to find. “I hate myself for not believing that entirely.”

Frank still wants to cry, but he smiles nevertheless. “My plane was late.”

“I thought you found someone else.” Gerard’s eyes look so sincere it physically hurts to speak.

So Frank doesn’t, but he breathes in and out, trying to find words that would help, but his lips are as empty as his throat feels when he kisses Gerard again. He lets his hands speak for him as they intertwine against Gerard’s spine, pushing him against the living room wall. Gerard’s are on his neck, gentle and timid as if they’re afraid Frank’s nerves will flare up if he touches them in the wrong way.

“Your new drawings are amazing,” Frank tells him, “they are so… you.”

Gerard’s lips twitch, but then he closes his eyes and flashes him a full-blown smile that reminds Frank exactly why he’d fallen in love with him in the first place. “I drew each and every one of them while thinking about you.”

Frank’s knees feel reluctant when he pulls Gerard’s hand towards the bedroom, but his mind is as willing as Gerard looks as he smiles at him with a promise beneath his eyelids. Frank would say it feels like metaphorical suicide because sometimes people die when they want to protect others, and sometimes it’s not your hand pulling the trigger even though you’ve assigned it to. He doesn’t know what he means by that but Gerard would say it makes sense, of course he would- because that pair of light whiskey eyes embedded into his skull knows more answers that lie within the dents in his wrists than Frank himself ever will. And it sometimes does feel like it doesn’t matter because Frank doesn’t have the need to ask those questions, and maybe that’s what love is. Maybe it’s letting the other person get to know your darkness for you because you know that the sole understanding of the matter would crack your brain in half.

His train of thought gets shredded into pieces as he’s watching Gerard take his clothes off. He doesn’t know if it’s more painful for him to watch as he crawls into one of Frank’s huge t-shirts or simply the fact he looks reluctant to dress at all, but the itch at the back of his palm tells him it’s the good kind of pain. He doesn’t exactly feel it physically, and it’s a fact worth neglecting even though his grip on it is strong, but he somehow forgets everything about it as Gerard’s wrist touches his and the sheets creak along with the bed as he’s climbing on top of him.

He isn’t sure if it’s a good thing, being so enveloped in these weird kind of feelings to forget about his current state of mind but he somehow finds himself not caring at all and being satisfied with it.

Gerard's eyes are crushed leaves, Asian rainforests and eastern colors all mixed together with molten rocks and the fear of falling down, but it’s one of those days when they don’t feel like that.
They feel like the five AM fog on a Christmas morning, a kiss on the neck when you think nobody's looking, a Paxil pill you've stolen from the drugstore downtown.

"I'm going to marry you some day."

As Frank's fingertips travel across Gerard's bare thigh, a corner of his mouth turns upwards.
His shirt has ridden up all the way across his hipbones, now, but he doesn't seem to mind. It's not like Frank doesn't know every inch of him by heart.

"You are."

Notes

Ohayo, ladies and gents, and happy new year. Happy holidays, too, whichever you might be celebrating or not.
I'm feeling quite productive so I've finished this tonight [3:16 AM warning]- I guess it had to be done. Anyhow, as much as I love writing, proofreading isn't a developed skill of mine, so pardon any of the mistakes this story may or may not have.
I'm bored, completely caffeinated and kind of down [new year's plans gone terribly wrong], so now if you'll excuse me- I think I'm going to go sit in the bathtub and read some Shakespeare even though I don't really like Shakespeare. And I don't even have to read it. I just am going to because whatever. A thin line between strange and stupid, it is.

See ya soon.

xomls