We Can Live Forever If You've Got The Time

The thing about Gerard, to Mikey, is how easy he is. How natural they fit together. How they’re just two halves of a whole. It’s astounding.
When Mikey climbs into Gerard’s bed at 2AM on December 2nd, 2009, he’s stuck in a memory of when he did the same thing at five years old, then at ten, at fifteen, and most recently only three, four years ago, when Gerard had just moved into the dorms. That fated night where the seeds of their mutual destruction were sown and their boundaries washed from the sand.
He gets stuck in a spinning mental retelling of the days when, too old to climb into his brother’s bed with excuses of nightmares on his lips, he does so with the excuses of the cold. He pulls the covers tight around them both and Gerard pretends that he was sleeping before Mikey came in, but Mikey knows better.
He knows that the way Gerard draws his breath, in and out, not too shallow, not too deep, is a side effect of measured breathing. He’s listened to Gerard’s breathing and heartbeat for as long as he can remember; Gerard has always been the backdrop to his life.
The bed squeaks under his weight, and Mikey murmurs something to nineteen-year-old Gerard, barely still living in their mother’s basement, like he still has to pretend. He doesn’t. Gerard knows full well that Mikey is there because he’s lonely, or because he can’t sleep. Because, more than anything, he needs a person. Someone with whom to share the hurt, or at least share the death of living.
More often than not when Mikey crawls into his bed back then, when Gerard still lives in the basement, or any time before 2008, really, Mikey crawls in to find him shaking under the weight of his own life, and when he tucks himself against Gerard, one of two things happen. Gerard either gives up appearances, and clutches Mikey close, swallowing his pride to allow them both to simply exist together, or he closes off, curls into a tight ball, and only murmurs Mikey’s acknowledgement. Mikey is still, and then moves in close, either way, usually letting Gerard find his motivation to wrap arms around his little brother.
These nights are rarely ones on which anything happens; no carnal desires are fulfilled, no meaningful conversations really had. But they’re crucial, in Mikey’s mind, to sleeping, and to being around Gerard.
Gerard is intense, Mikey loves it, but people so intense as Gerard require almost first and foremost moments where the people they love simply exist with them, whether that means long days spent just spending time in the same room, or sleeping (or not sleeping) next to each other. No words need bind it.
Gerard doesn’t make Mikey feel beautiful, or astronomical, or whatever, because he doesn’t need to; Gerard makes Mikey, when they’re together, feel real. Complete. Like some part of him which has been meant to be turned on the whole time has a light switch that only Gerard can flick.
Beyond the fronting, the outside-societal expectations of beauty, normalcy, and love, Mikey and Gerard have been carving themselves out a nook to sleep beside one another in for nearly a quarter of a century by 2009. They’ve been reinventing definitions to fit whatever it is they have together, because it’s enough for them, it’s more than enough. It’s the next best thing to the best thing that could ever happen.
The best thing, that’s when Frank tucks himself between Mikey and the wall, on the other side from Gerard, in the tiny space left on the one person bed housing three. When they finally get a bigger bed, their own place, in early 2010, they all rejoice, but it doesn’t feel like the same brand of happiness. Things have changed. That’s okay.
Frank was a mistake. No, not a mistake, an accident. One of the happiest of Mikey’s life. They met when Mikey was sixteen, when Frank was in freshman year and thought he could ride the world on a skateboard and come out winning whatever he went into. He was ambitious and full of life and exactly the opposite of anything Mikey knew or wanted.
And he came up to him nonetheless and smiled his stupid dog smile and Mikey was doomed from the first second.
The first time Frank crawls into bed with Mikey is when he’s in senior year, and Mikey’s mid-gap-year and Frank is sobbing buckets about something Mikey simply won’t remember years later, and Mikey wraps his arms around Frank and pulls his head to his chest, whispering that it’s okay, it’s okay. They still have each other.
Since they met, Frank and Mikey have never fought. Mikey suspects Frank wouldn’t have the guts to stand up to him if it really came down to blows, but what he’s heard from Gerard, and later seen, about fistfights and a tough streak which lays just beyond Mikey’s perception in Frank, maybe he’s wrong.
Mikey will always accept the possibility he’s wrong about people; people prove him wrong too often not to. There are still moments when Gerard surprises him, and Mikey knows Gerard better than Mikey knows himself. And neither of them know Frank half as well as they know each other but somehow, the three of them just work. It feels like it’s always been this way. It feels like whatever dynamic they’ve created is the one where they can be themselvves.
Nights blur together, once they’ve found a solid rhythm, where Gerard’s bed in his and Ray’s dorm is their final destination every night, except those nights when they want to avoid being chewed out by Ray for loud sex or games after hours. (Sex without noise, Mikey discovers to his absolute delight sometime in 2008, is next to impossible with Gerard.) Gerard is either first or last to resign himself to an attempt to sleep after their last cigarette, between one and six AM, crawling into bed and drowning himself in a thick novel or his headphones until Mikey untangles himself from Frank, half asleep and already drifting into the blur of nights, and gets up from the couch. Mikey makes his way to Gerard’s bedroom with hardly any thought on his mind and collapses across Gerard’s lap, or shoulder, then rolls off to remove his shirt and shoes and jeans, and crawls back into bed.
Then Frank clambers over both of them, shoving himself between Mikey and a hard place. Most often, when they finally manage to settle, after murmuring and laughing and shifting til the bed squeals in protest.
Most often, both of his boys curl against Mikey, and he sleeps on his back, his hands drifting in and out of their hair and on and off of their skin every time they wake up. Often enough, though, Mikey will wake up turned to Frank, an arm slung across his shoulder while Frank curls into his bony chest, and Gerard into his bony back. Sometime during the night, they almost always steal the blankets off of Frank.
Most mornings, Mikey wakes up thinking ‘how fucking perfect is this?’ He wakes up wondering why the two most perfect creatures he’s met in his entire life are crammed into bed with him. Wondering why they never made him choose between the two of them, or why they even chose him in the first place. And more importantly, how so much pure awesome can fit into a tiny amount of square footage.
When it first fell into place, when there wasn’t a big blow-out between him and Frank, the one that Mikey expected and even prepared for, and instead Frank just crawled into bed with Mikey and Gerard, something clicked. Mikey stopped defining the relationship he and Gerard or he and Frank had by common terms. He stopped minding when they didn’t have terms or answers for things. They started being the answer to every not-yet-asked question. It didn’t matter anymore what people thought, besides, maybe, Ray.
Ray doesn’t mind, though, he’s said it. Because it’s just life. Life can’t be sectioned off into boxes of right or wrong, day and night. There will always be a dusk, is what Ray says, when Mikey brings it up to him alone on a smokebreak in late 2007, before he’s brought it up to Frank or Gerard. (Because Ray’s good people; Ray is trustworthy and won’t make rash decisions. He won’t blame Mikey for thinking about things, even if they’re not good things. But this isn’t a bad thing, Ray assures him of that.)
He spends mornings after that sneaking around the university library, researching the big P word, researching couples which live together, with a lover or a girlfriend. The facts are almost always a married man and woman, and their side fling. Mikey guesses that works for some people, but he can’t decide if Gerard or Frank would be his ‘husband’ in that scenario, and which one is the outsider. Gerard may have the majority of Mikey’s life, but Frank has the last few years, the important ones. The hardest of his life.
And neither of them are outsiders, is something Mikey will often find, when curled up in bed in the mid-morning light after they’ve figured themselves out, while Frank grumbles about getting up and clings to him, burying his face in Mikey’s shoulder or under his arm or in his chest, and while Gerard doesn’t so much hold Mikey against him as hold his entire body flush against Mikey’s and doze in and out.
Sometimes, mornings are for sex, for the hazy look on his boys’ faces, just after cumming and before coffee, when the three of them drag themselves from sweat and cum covered sheets to lean against one another and protest getting up until Mikey finally gives the order for one of them, almost always Frank unless Gerard’s been particularly difficult that morning, to go put on the coffee pot.
Gerard almost always starts smoking before they’ve even hit the door. It’s habit, with him. He cums and then collapses, pulls Mikey’s face close and kisses him like Mikey is the only thing in the world, the only thing worth looking at. For a long moment, they let the time solidify between them, and then Gerard rolls away for a pack of cigarettes.
Frank on the other hand, he’s either up and moving the second after sex, or he’s dead weight trying to be up and moving despite all of his limbs protesting with every ounce of what they have. Mikey usually takes Frank’s body’s side, holding him in bed and refusing to let him go until Frank’s thighs are done shivering and his breath has calmed down. Mikey still remembers all-too-well the time Frank shot out of bed and tripped on the skateboard he’d left on the floor the night before, resulting in a black eye and bloodied nose from the door and bookshelf.
Then there’s the morning smoke, when all of them have a cup of coffee in whatever mismatched mugs are clean, and they pile down the stairs and out onto the front steps of the residence hall, ignoring any RAs that try to stop them for checks or friendly good mornings. Gerard sits on the steps or the railing and lights another cigarette, and cups it close to his face and tucks his knees in before the caffeine kicks in, but when it does he becomes a flurry of movement, gestures and noise.
Frank stands with Mikey at first, lighting a cigarette, almost pensive, and then he too is moving, and the life wakes up in both of them and they’re off talking about this or that and Mikey’s chuckling along.
Mornings are almost outside of the world, and then slowly they’re reigned in.
Off to classes, or work, or on miracle days like the second of December, 2009, none of the above. By mid afternoon they’re stoned off their asses and Gerard and Frank have plopped down around the coffee table, Gerard taking up the side closer to the tiny TV they have, Frank closer to the couch, while Gerard draws and Frank sketches jewelry plans or bends wire.
Mikey’s mouth is still full of the reminiscent taste of sucked-through ash, but that doesn’t make the moment, glancing up from his phone to see both of his boys with their heads close together, pushed down to work on their respective art.
He spends a lot of time that afternoon, before they go to dinner with Ray and Pete and Patrick (and hopefully Andy, Pete and Patrick are trying to make him stay so Ray won’t be a sixth wheel), on silly, stupid blogs about polyamorous people who are making it work.
And then he comes across it, two moms and a dad raising a beautiful little girl, and something runs through Mikey which hasn’t ever before. A certain breed of longing entirely foreign to him.
Gerard looks up.
Mikey and Gerard don’t, in Mikey’s opinion, have telepathic conversations, per say. They just understand body language and connotation very well in one another, because they’re wired the same. They read each other’s subtle tells extraordinarily well.
Gerard recognizes whatever Mikey’s feeling as foreign only a second after Mikey does, and they share a look of slightest confusion and something else, and then Mikey’s eyes flick, for half a second, to Frankie, and Gerard drops his head again.
They’ve conceded to talk about this later. Not a telepathic conversation; mutual understanding. There’s a difference.
Mkey goes out for a smoke with Ray and they talk about it, because Ray’s good at talking about things, and because Mikey trusts Ray. He definitely trusts him more than Gerard or Frank not to react emotionally to things Mikey wants to set down and nudge around about.
Mikey suspects that Frank and Gerard both talk to Ray like Mikey does, too. He suspects that Ray is just good at getting people to talk.
Ray decides it’s time for them all to spend some time with his niece, that she’ll visit when his brother goes out of town. That maybe it might change some things.
(She does come, she visits the dorms and ends up staying with Gerard and Ray. She’s gorgeous, she has Ray’s big hair and alert eyes, and a face to rival the moon. She explains to Mikey, by her presence, perhaps why Ray isn’t so disturbed by his and Gerard’s situation. She reminds him by the fact she, Apollo’s great granddaughter, is also Artemis’ daughter, and that keeping love in the family is rather common for theirs. Something about genetic predisposition is comforting. The story of Gracie’s visit, and her concurrent involvement in their lives, however, is largely one for another night.)
They go out to dinner with Pete and Patrick and Andy, late in the evening, and Mikey’s hands stay firmly on the inside of his boy’s thighs until the food arrives. No one notices except the three of them.
A month back, he found a term for it. Ménage à trois.
It feels right, them being together, however it works, it changes on a daily basis but a day in the life is almost always the same. Some nights, Gerard has to drag himself to bed last of all and tosses and turns, mumbling to himself, and none of them get any sleep, or other nights, Frank comes back with a broken board deck, a bloodied lip, a black eye, and three cracked ribs, grinning like he won or grimacing like he lost. Some nights they get too drunk, or other nights are just simply unimpressive. But it doesn’t matter.
Mikey isn’t bothered by it, because they’re together.
When Mikey slides into an empty bed on December 3rd, 2009, at three AM, he is slowly joined, first by Frankie, pushing his way in between Mikey and the wall, and then by Gerard, who curls against his back and places kisses to the crests of his shoulders.
"I love you”s are mumbled. A gentle sighing is shared. They relax into that natural place, that tiny world, where just the three of them can be anything they want to be.

Notes