Bandslash: Telepathy Means Never Having Privacy When You're Jerking Off
Title: Telepathy Means Never Having Privacy When You're Jerking Off
Author: naotalba
Pairing: Pete/Patrick, a little past Pete/Mikey
Rating: R, mostly for language
Length: 3100 words
Author’s notes: Thank you to megyal for her awesome beta work, and to sevenfists for the inspiration. Additional authors notes here (spoilers for fic within).
Disclaimer: This is a non-profit, non-commercial work of fiction using the names and likenesses of real individuals. This fictional story is not intended to imply that the events herein actually occurred or that the attitudes or behaviors described herein are engaged in or condoned by the real persons whose names are used without permission.
I'm a little man, and I'm also evil, also into cats.
When counting down all the best parts of being a rock star, no one would really put 'makes it easier to beat off' on the list. Or at least Pete would have told you that, if you'd asked him yesterday. But Patrick is staring off into the distance, clearly zoning out, with his mouth closed, and yet Pete can hear a voice in his head. Patrick's voice, thinking about how nice it is to finally be a big ballin' rock and roll god with his own private compartment on his bus to jerk off in.
It's a truly pathetic use of telepathic powers.
Pete walks onto Andy and Patrick's bus the next day and hears Andy answer Patrick's question about the purpose of eyelashes. Except Patrick is eating a spoonful of peanut butter and can't possibly have opened his mouth, let alone spoken. Also, Patrick knows better than to say something that stupid and pointless to Andy, who punishes that kind of transgression with long, lectured explanations. Like five hours of the biology and anthropology behind it, sometimes with diagrams. So Patrick must be projecting his thoughts, because he sure as hell wouldn't say that out loud.
Pete is a little embarrassed to realize just how bummed he is that Patrick is the telepath, not him. Also? Worst psychic gift ever.
Pete hops up on the counter and talks right over Andy. "So, you know we can all read your mind."
Patrick takes a sip of coffee to clear his mouth of the peanut butter residue. "No, you can read, like, my mental noise. Believe me, I've been trying to get the driver to make a stop all night, and all I got was a laugh at my list of words that rhyme with stop, which I didn't think I was thinking about until he added dust-mop to the list."
"How can you not know what you are thinking about?"
Patrick lets out a huff of laughter. "Dude, it's mental noise, I'd go crazy if I concentrated on it," he says. He's thinking about how much the printed area of his supposedly itch-free tag-less t-shirt itches his neck, though.
"That's great for you, but I can't block it out. Also, why are you not freaking out?" Pete gets down and starts to pace.
Patrick scratches his neck. "Oh, Doug warned me something like might happen. He gave me some kind of experimental medication, it's supposed to encourage better communication. He's still a little worried that us asking for separate buses is like, one step away from announcing the band is broken up. There were Izzy Stradlin references."
"Which makes me the Axl Rose in this scenario. Nice. He's never said a word to me about it, and he's on my goddamn bus!" Pete is going to kill him. For real this time.
"Because you would flip out on him, as we both know. Look, this stuff'll wear off in a week or two, just deal with my mental noise, if Doug asks, say you've gained a new appreciation of my way of thinking, and go back to your own bus."
Ouch. Patrick is maybe a little cranky, but he must not actually be as pissed as he sounds, considering all he is thinking about is that his coffee is a little bitter, the coffeepot must need cleaning again.
Doug is waiting for him back on his bus, strumming an acoustic guitar with a smirk. Pete doesn’t punch him. It’s a moral victory.
“What the hell, Doug?” He doesn’t even throw anything, and his shouting is well below his top volume. Really, it’s an amazing show of restraint.
“Tell me honestly, when did you and Patrick last talk about something other than music?” Doug is trying to look serious, which mostly means the smirk flattens his lips even further. It’s not a good look.
“What are you talking about? We talk every day.”
“No, you bullshit around every day, but you don’t talk. I’ve known you guys for how long, three years, four? And you both got dumped by your girlfriends within two weeks of each other, and you haven’t talked about it with him once.” Doug puts his hand up in a teenage girl ‘talk-to the-hand’ gesture before Pete can reply. “You didn’t, you called Ash a couple names, and Lisa a few more, and ended the discussion. So don’t tell me you talked.
“Look, Patrick is an amazing guy, but he doesn’t say the things he should say, not unless he’s pushed. And you’ve stopped pushing him. And anyway, I told him what I wanted to do, he agreed, now it’s up to you what you want to do with it.” Doug’s on the defensive, which means he knew how bad this was going to go, but he’s standing his ground, which means he knows something Pete doesn’t.
It puts Pete off balance enough to walk away from the conversation. He puts Doug's favorite fedora in Hemmy's pissing corner when Doug’s back is turned, though, on general principles.
Wouldn't you rather be a wheel than a diva, see?
It totally backfires, of course. Stream-of-consciousness is the junk mail of the brain - no one wants to hear it. For the first few days, everyone just avoids Patrick, so they don't have to hear a constant stream of 'Who invented liquid soap and why?' type questions. Also, there was an incident with the venue's sound tech that possibly scarred Joe for life. (Pete hadn't thought 'yeah, drop another quarter, bend over one more time' was all that big a deal, but when Patrick insisted that every straight guy had random thoughts like that, Pete was the only one who nodded yes, of course, while Andy, Joe, Dirty, Dan and Doug chorused together that no, they really didn't.)
Doug takes off after three days, claiming urgent business back at the office, but most likely just not wanting to deal with Pete's constant pestering of just what he'd done to Patrick, and when would it wear off. And maybe he was a little embarrassed that it hadn’t done any good, but hey, the fucker deserved it for drugging Patrick.
So mostly everyone is leaving Patrick alone. But Pete can't stay away for long, and after repeated exposure Pete starts hearing the tireless chatter set to a beat. He listens to the music behind the words, and not the words themselves, and it makes it easier to handle. He tries to keep the beat, tuning out the stream of thoughts like static until slowly he hears a melody as well.
It's hard, and more than once he loses the beat when Patrick's randomness pulls him in, makes his own mind go off on tangents of his own (mote is a funny word, he's out of deodorant, Scarlett Johannson's right boob is bigger than the left). And it's nearly impossible if Patrick is thinking of Pete (which he does, a lot, but not as much as Pete thinks of Patrick).
It becomes a challenge for Pete, to hear the music, and he takes the Patrick-thinking-about-him times as the bonus round. He starts stretching his mental ears until he can hear Patrick even when they aren't in the same room, if he concentrates. He finally wins one night, as Patrick is snug in his own bus, drifting off to sleep replaying a story Pete told in the dressing room before the show.
He focuses on a desperate drumbeat, letting Patrick's thoughts drift over and past him. The beat is joined by a frantic bass line, and he can sense that Patrick's train of thought has changed tracks. But it's like one of those magic eye puzzles, if he tries to see up close he'll never see the big picture, so he just keeps the beat, tapping it out with his toe on the foot of his bed while his hands play air-guitar to follow the bass line.
The guitars almost sneak up on him, he's so focused on the beat. When the melody finally comes in, clear and sweet, he tries to listen to it without getting distracted by victory. There are no lyrics, just a phrase chanted over and over, but the melody is gorgeous and sweeping, and Pete drops out of the near-trance he's in to transcribe it, since by now he's figured out that Patrick is the last to know what's in his own head.
He gets down as much as he remembers, and thinks that Patrick will be able to recreate the whole thing once he hears it. He replays it in his head, hearing Patrick's mental voice singing (slightly deeper and scratchier than his real singing voice) until the chant resolves itself into words. Three words, over and over again. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Heavy Irish pepper is a February day.
Pete doesn't sleep that night, trying to make sure he's written down every part of the song he can, going over it in his mind again and again and just being blown away by the melody. He's so involved in it that he doesn't notice Patrick come into his bus until he can hear him with his ears.
"Patrick Patrick Patrick, you wrote the most awesome song last night," and he starts humming the riff.
Patrick cocks his head for a minute, listening attentively until he seems to recognize the tune. Then he punches Pete in the stomach. "I can't believe you, you eavesdropping fucker!"
And he’s gone before Pete can even ask.
Pete's heard it said before that the rhythm of rock and roll music is the rhythm of sex. It hadn't occurred to him before that the beat of punk is the beat of jerking off.
It's a half hour before sound check before Patrick comes back, tail tucked firmly between his legs. (Not literally. Some freaky shit's going on, but Patrick hasn't actually grown a tail, thank fuck.)
"So, Andy pointed out that you would have made fun of me if you'd known what I was doing." Patrick's thinking about a Youtube clip he saw last week that wasn't funny. Not everything your cat does is that interesting, people, really.
"Are you kidding me, I would have fucking interrupted you." Pete punches his shoulder, lightly, and Patrick smiles a little awkwardly.
"Yeah, I figure if you had known I wanted a little privacy, you wouldn't have done anything as nice as just quietly listen in from another bus. You would have, what, called me and conferenced in your mom? Had Joe stick the fire extinguisher nozzle under the door and turn it on? Quoted 'Real Genius' at me until I craved popcorn too much to go on?"
"Called you and pretend I didn't know what you were doing, but casually mention I'd installed cameras, I think."
Patrick nods, good one, but he's thinking about bubbles. He's probably too old for bubble gum, but Pete thinks he'll get him some next bus stop anyway, just in case. It would be fun to watch him blow bubbles; Patrick has a pretty mouth.
Pete absently taps his foot to catch the beat, take his mind out of the mental current where Patrick's surface thoughts seethe, and instead slip into the music beneath. He finds he can hold an entire conversation without any annoying telepathy if he just sways to the beat. Patrick seems a little nervous at the rocking, though.
Three days later, a string breaks on Joe's guitar during a show, and Pete's just talking into the microphone, stalling while the tech takes care of it. He starts talking about John Mayer, and how awesome he is, and Patrick starts playing the riff of the masturbation song softly in the background.
Pete starts laughing so hard he almost misses his cue, until Patrick's wraps an arm around him to steady him into the next song. His arm is warm and solid.
Patrick’s arm had felt a little too good around him. It was distracting. Pete maybe needs to rethink his place on the Kinsey scale.
Here's the thing: Pete's never been inside anyone's mind but his own and Patrick's. And Patrick has sex thoughts about other guys all the time, so if it weren't for Joe's freak-out, that would totally be a point on the not-unusual-for-a-straight-guy side. But Joe definitely voted for 'no.'
Also, Andy sleeping on the pot-and-dog bus for a week rather than hear Patrick's thoughts might have just been due to the general annoyance factor. It might have just been an excuse to make Doug move to Patrick’s bus so that his sleep could be interrupted with Patrick’s favorite cereal jingles when he woke up to pee in the middle of the night (Patrick has a tiny bladder, it’s very irritating). And if that was the reason, Doug totally deserved it. But Andy actually put "I’ve seen Pete's dick enough as it is" on the list of reasons for the switch. And hey, why did Andy get visuals, while Pete only got words? That wasn't fair.
But he'd tried, with Mikey. They'd kissed and everything, and there just hadn't been a spark. Of course, he was still trying to get his head back on straight then, and Mikey was having problems of his own, but, still. Kissing, and lap sitting, and grinding, and no hard-on.
Come to think of it, Pete hadn't gotten hard that whole summer. He'd switched his meds so many times he was lucky he could remember his own name, and half those pills had 'sexual side effects' as they were so euphemistically labeled.
Oh, Mikey was gonna be pissed if he even found out that part. Pete had had to call him 'the Duke of Handsomeness' for days, his feelings had been so hurt by the faux pas.
Mikey had been the ideal candidate for the experiment, good looking, musical, famous enough not to resent the need for discretion, and above all, easy to avoid when the summer ended. It had been the closest thing to a grown-up relationship Pete had ever tried; friends first, going slow, talking about feelings and all that bullshit. If he sometimes resented that Mikey had wrote him off too easily, well, he couldn’t really complain, considering it had been Pete who said they’d be better off as lovers in the first place. But the glaring awkwardness of being ex-friends was a warning for Pete, one he’d paid a lot of attention to until recently.
Pete had never thought himself the mayor of Straighttown or anything, but maybe he’d never let himself seriously consider sex-with-guys. Or relationships with guys, even if it maybe isn’t a coincidence that he has exactly one male ex, and exactly one ex that answers the phone when Pete calls instead of digging up the restraining order.
And maybe he should be considering it, because Patrick's masturbation song made him makes him think about Patrick masturbating, which involves Patrick naked, stretched out and flushed, his hand gripping the skin of his dick and thrusting through it (Hey Chris had done a survey years ago, Pete knows exactly how all his friends jerk off, and will never, ever borrow socks from Chris).
But Patrick jerking off is a pretty good thing to think about. He sings the song absentmindedly in time with his own hand.
He's well hung, and I am hanging on.
The song becomes a running joke long after the telepathy fades away. Where before they would make the jerking-off-hand-gesture, now, if he's got his bass with him, Pete'll strum the bass line, or if not, he'll hum the riff, and Patrick will play or hum along. It never fails to crack them both up, and usually Andy too, especially after they teach him the beat so he can join in. It's even more hilarious because they won't explain the joke to Joe, who's still a little gun-shy about Patrick's inner thoughts, so Joe has no clue why the song's so funny.
It's funny all the way until the time that Pete absentmindedly sings the lyrics to Patrick.
"You didn't-- You couldn't-- How did you--" Patrick's sputtering, not angry for once, but looking lost. It hits Pete, suddenly, that having your thoughts open for anyone to listen to is just about the worst invasion of privacy ever. And Patrick had volunteered for it. Pete does what he should have done in the first place.
"Why didn't you just tell Doug to fuck off, when he offered you the drug?" And the great thing about Patrick is even in the middle of his own freak-out, he can follow Pete's train of thought, no need for magic pills or anything other than the connection between them.
"Sometimes, I get jealous, I guess. I get you, the way I don’t get anyone else, but sometimes it seems like every teenage girl with a modem gets you. I always say I think in music and everyone else thinks in words, and I just thought maybe this would prove I was wrong, that I'm not such a freak after all." Patrick's looking at the wall, and the reflection of the lights in his eyes is just a little too shiny.
"But you do think in music." Never let it be said that Pete doesn't have a handle on the obvious. And judging by the half-hysterical giggle, Patrick agrees. "No, wait, listen, Patrick, you think in music and it's awesome and amazing and I thank god for it, because my words would be useless without it." He puts a hand on Patrick's shoulder, tries to turn him around gently, then pulls a little harder when he meets resistance until Patrick spins into his arms.
Patrick's still freaking out a little, not actually crying, but shaking, the embarrassment overdose hitting him months after the fact, and Pete feels like a dick for causing it. Patrick really is amazing, his mind even more than his physical self. But his body is warm in Pete's arms, and Patrick's head is so full of music that he writes songs while he jerks off, and he loves Pete so much it spills into the music, and Pete can't help but kiss him.
Patrick's sex music is the same as the masturbation song, just slowed down and with a more elaborate bass line. Pete listens as attentively as he can under the circumstances. He's going to play it onstage tomorrow if it kills him.
Author: naotalba
Pairing: Pete/Patrick, a little past Pete/Mikey
Rating: R, mostly for language
Length: 3100 words
Author’s notes: Thank you to megyal for her awesome beta work, and to sevenfists for the inspiration. Additional authors notes here (spoilers for fic within).
Disclaimer: This is a non-profit, non-commercial work of fiction using the names and likenesses of real individuals. This fictional story is not intended to imply that the events herein actually occurred or that the attitudes or behaviors described herein are engaged in or condoned by the real persons whose names are used without permission.
I'm a little man, and I'm also evil, also into cats.
When counting down all the best parts of being a rock star, no one would really put 'makes it easier to beat off' on the list. Or at least Pete would have told you that, if you'd asked him yesterday. But Patrick is staring off into the distance, clearly zoning out, with his mouth closed, and yet Pete can hear a voice in his head. Patrick's voice, thinking about how nice it is to finally be a big ballin' rock and roll god with his own private compartment on his bus to jerk off in.
It's a truly pathetic use of telepathic powers.
Pete walks onto Andy and Patrick's bus the next day and hears Andy answer Patrick's question about the purpose of eyelashes. Except Patrick is eating a spoonful of peanut butter and can't possibly have opened his mouth, let alone spoken. Also, Patrick knows better than to say something that stupid and pointless to Andy, who punishes that kind of transgression with long, lectured explanations. Like five hours of the biology and anthropology behind it, sometimes with diagrams. So Patrick must be projecting his thoughts, because he sure as hell wouldn't say that out loud.
Pete is a little embarrassed to realize just how bummed he is that Patrick is the telepath, not him. Also? Worst psychic gift ever.
Pete hops up on the counter and talks right over Andy. "So, you know we can all read your mind."
Patrick takes a sip of coffee to clear his mouth of the peanut butter residue. "No, you can read, like, my mental noise. Believe me, I've been trying to get the driver to make a stop all night, and all I got was a laugh at my list of words that rhyme with stop, which I didn't think I was thinking about until he added dust-mop to the list."
"How can you not know what you are thinking about?"
Patrick lets out a huff of laughter. "Dude, it's mental noise, I'd go crazy if I concentrated on it," he says. He's thinking about how much the printed area of his supposedly itch-free tag-less t-shirt itches his neck, though.
"That's great for you, but I can't block it out. Also, why are you not freaking out?" Pete gets down and starts to pace.
Patrick scratches his neck. "Oh, Doug warned me something like might happen. He gave me some kind of experimental medication, it's supposed to encourage better communication. He's still a little worried that us asking for separate buses is like, one step away from announcing the band is broken up. There were Izzy Stradlin references."
"Which makes me the Axl Rose in this scenario. Nice. He's never said a word to me about it, and he's on my goddamn bus!" Pete is going to kill him. For real this time.
"Because you would flip out on him, as we both know. Look, this stuff'll wear off in a week or two, just deal with my mental noise, if Doug asks, say you've gained a new appreciation of my way of thinking, and go back to your own bus."
Ouch. Patrick is maybe a little cranky, but he must not actually be as pissed as he sounds, considering all he is thinking about is that his coffee is a little bitter, the coffeepot must need cleaning again.
Doug is waiting for him back on his bus, strumming an acoustic guitar with a smirk. Pete doesn’t punch him. It’s a moral victory.
“What the hell, Doug?” He doesn’t even throw anything, and his shouting is well below his top volume. Really, it’s an amazing show of restraint.
“Tell me honestly, when did you and Patrick last talk about something other than music?” Doug is trying to look serious, which mostly means the smirk flattens his lips even further. It’s not a good look.
“What are you talking about? We talk every day.”
“No, you bullshit around every day, but you don’t talk. I’ve known you guys for how long, three years, four? And you both got dumped by your girlfriends within two weeks of each other, and you haven’t talked about it with him once.” Doug puts his hand up in a teenage girl ‘talk-to the-hand’ gesture before Pete can reply. “You didn’t, you called Ash a couple names, and Lisa a few more, and ended the discussion. So don’t tell me you talked.
“Look, Patrick is an amazing guy, but he doesn’t say the things he should say, not unless he’s pushed. And you’ve stopped pushing him. And anyway, I told him what I wanted to do, he agreed, now it’s up to you what you want to do with it.” Doug’s on the defensive, which means he knew how bad this was going to go, but he’s standing his ground, which means he knows something Pete doesn’t.
It puts Pete off balance enough to walk away from the conversation. He puts Doug's favorite fedora in Hemmy's pissing corner when Doug’s back is turned, though, on general principles.
Wouldn't you rather be a wheel than a diva, see?
It totally backfires, of course. Stream-of-consciousness is the junk mail of the brain - no one wants to hear it. For the first few days, everyone just avoids Patrick, so they don't have to hear a constant stream of 'Who invented liquid soap and why?' type questions. Also, there was an incident with the venue's sound tech that possibly scarred Joe for life. (Pete hadn't thought 'yeah, drop another quarter, bend over one more time' was all that big a deal, but when Patrick insisted that every straight guy had random thoughts like that, Pete was the only one who nodded yes, of course, while Andy, Joe, Dirty, Dan and Doug chorused together that no, they really didn't.)
Doug takes off after three days, claiming urgent business back at the office, but most likely just not wanting to deal with Pete's constant pestering of just what he'd done to Patrick, and when would it wear off. And maybe he was a little embarrassed that it hadn’t done any good, but hey, the fucker deserved it for drugging Patrick.
So mostly everyone is leaving Patrick alone. But Pete can't stay away for long, and after repeated exposure Pete starts hearing the tireless chatter set to a beat. He listens to the music behind the words, and not the words themselves, and it makes it easier to handle. He tries to keep the beat, tuning out the stream of thoughts like static until slowly he hears a melody as well.
It's hard, and more than once he loses the beat when Patrick's randomness pulls him in, makes his own mind go off on tangents of his own (mote is a funny word, he's out of deodorant, Scarlett Johannson's right boob is bigger than the left). And it's nearly impossible if Patrick is thinking of Pete (which he does, a lot, but not as much as Pete thinks of Patrick).
It becomes a challenge for Pete, to hear the music, and he takes the Patrick-thinking-about-him times as the bonus round. He starts stretching his mental ears until he can hear Patrick even when they aren't in the same room, if he concentrates. He finally wins one night, as Patrick is snug in his own bus, drifting off to sleep replaying a story Pete told in the dressing room before the show.
He focuses on a desperate drumbeat, letting Patrick's thoughts drift over and past him. The beat is joined by a frantic bass line, and he can sense that Patrick's train of thought has changed tracks. But it's like one of those magic eye puzzles, if he tries to see up close he'll never see the big picture, so he just keeps the beat, tapping it out with his toe on the foot of his bed while his hands play air-guitar to follow the bass line.
The guitars almost sneak up on him, he's so focused on the beat. When the melody finally comes in, clear and sweet, he tries to listen to it without getting distracted by victory. There are no lyrics, just a phrase chanted over and over, but the melody is gorgeous and sweeping, and Pete drops out of the near-trance he's in to transcribe it, since by now he's figured out that Patrick is the last to know what's in his own head.
He gets down as much as he remembers, and thinks that Patrick will be able to recreate the whole thing once he hears it. He replays it in his head, hearing Patrick's mental voice singing (slightly deeper and scratchier than his real singing voice) until the chant resolves itself into words. Three words, over and over again. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Heavy Irish pepper is a February day.
Pete doesn't sleep that night, trying to make sure he's written down every part of the song he can, going over it in his mind again and again and just being blown away by the melody. He's so involved in it that he doesn't notice Patrick come into his bus until he can hear him with his ears.
"Patrick Patrick Patrick, you wrote the most awesome song last night," and he starts humming the riff.
Patrick cocks his head for a minute, listening attentively until he seems to recognize the tune. Then he punches Pete in the stomach. "I can't believe you, you eavesdropping fucker!"
And he’s gone before Pete can even ask.
Pete's heard it said before that the rhythm of rock and roll music is the rhythm of sex. It hadn't occurred to him before that the beat of punk is the beat of jerking off.
It's a half hour before sound check before Patrick comes back, tail tucked firmly between his legs. (Not literally. Some freaky shit's going on, but Patrick hasn't actually grown a tail, thank fuck.)
"So, Andy pointed out that you would have made fun of me if you'd known what I was doing." Patrick's thinking about a Youtube clip he saw last week that wasn't funny. Not everything your cat does is that interesting, people, really.
"Are you kidding me, I would have fucking interrupted you." Pete punches his shoulder, lightly, and Patrick smiles a little awkwardly.
"Yeah, I figure if you had known I wanted a little privacy, you wouldn't have done anything as nice as just quietly listen in from another bus. You would have, what, called me and conferenced in your mom? Had Joe stick the fire extinguisher nozzle under the door and turn it on? Quoted 'Real Genius' at me until I craved popcorn too much to go on?"
"Called you and pretend I didn't know what you were doing, but casually mention I'd installed cameras, I think."
Patrick nods, good one, but he's thinking about bubbles. He's probably too old for bubble gum, but Pete thinks he'll get him some next bus stop anyway, just in case. It would be fun to watch him blow bubbles; Patrick has a pretty mouth.
Pete absently taps his foot to catch the beat, take his mind out of the mental current where Patrick's surface thoughts seethe, and instead slip into the music beneath. He finds he can hold an entire conversation without any annoying telepathy if he just sways to the beat. Patrick seems a little nervous at the rocking, though.
Three days later, a string breaks on Joe's guitar during a show, and Pete's just talking into the microphone, stalling while the tech takes care of it. He starts talking about John Mayer, and how awesome he is, and Patrick starts playing the riff of the masturbation song softly in the background.
Pete starts laughing so hard he almost misses his cue, until Patrick's wraps an arm around him to steady him into the next song. His arm is warm and solid.
Patrick’s arm had felt a little too good around him. It was distracting. Pete maybe needs to rethink his place on the Kinsey scale.
Here's the thing: Pete's never been inside anyone's mind but his own and Patrick's. And Patrick has sex thoughts about other guys all the time, so if it weren't for Joe's freak-out, that would totally be a point on the not-unusual-for-a-straight-guy side. But Joe definitely voted for 'no.'
Also, Andy sleeping on the pot-and-dog bus for a week rather than hear Patrick's thoughts might have just been due to the general annoyance factor. It might have just been an excuse to make Doug move to Patrick’s bus so that his sleep could be interrupted with Patrick’s favorite cereal jingles when he woke up to pee in the middle of the night (Patrick has a tiny bladder, it’s very irritating). And if that was the reason, Doug totally deserved it. But Andy actually put "I’ve seen Pete's dick enough as it is" on the list of reasons for the switch. And hey, why did Andy get visuals, while Pete only got words? That wasn't fair.
But he'd tried, with Mikey. They'd kissed and everything, and there just hadn't been a spark. Of course, he was still trying to get his head back on straight then, and Mikey was having problems of his own, but, still. Kissing, and lap sitting, and grinding, and no hard-on.
Come to think of it, Pete hadn't gotten hard that whole summer. He'd switched his meds so many times he was lucky he could remember his own name, and half those pills had 'sexual side effects' as they were so euphemistically labeled.
Oh, Mikey was gonna be pissed if he even found out that part. Pete had had to call him 'the Duke of Handsomeness' for days, his feelings had been so hurt by the faux pas.
Mikey had been the ideal candidate for the experiment, good looking, musical, famous enough not to resent the need for discretion, and above all, easy to avoid when the summer ended. It had been the closest thing to a grown-up relationship Pete had ever tried; friends first, going slow, talking about feelings and all that bullshit. If he sometimes resented that Mikey had wrote him off too easily, well, he couldn’t really complain, considering it had been Pete who said they’d be better off as lovers in the first place. But the glaring awkwardness of being ex-friends was a warning for Pete, one he’d paid a lot of attention to until recently.
Pete had never thought himself the mayor of Straighttown or anything, but maybe he’d never let himself seriously consider sex-with-guys. Or relationships with guys, even if it maybe isn’t a coincidence that he has exactly one male ex, and exactly one ex that answers the phone when Pete calls instead of digging up the restraining order.
And maybe he should be considering it, because Patrick's masturbation song made him makes him think about Patrick masturbating, which involves Patrick naked, stretched out and flushed, his hand gripping the skin of his dick and thrusting through it (Hey Chris had done a survey years ago, Pete knows exactly how all his friends jerk off, and will never, ever borrow socks from Chris).
But Patrick jerking off is a pretty good thing to think about. He sings the song absentmindedly in time with his own hand.
He's well hung, and I am hanging on.
The song becomes a running joke long after the telepathy fades away. Where before they would make the jerking-off-hand-gesture, now, if he's got his bass with him, Pete'll strum the bass line, or if not, he'll hum the riff, and Patrick will play or hum along. It never fails to crack them both up, and usually Andy too, especially after they teach him the beat so he can join in. It's even more hilarious because they won't explain the joke to Joe, who's still a little gun-shy about Patrick's inner thoughts, so Joe has no clue why the song's so funny.
It's funny all the way until the time that Pete absentmindedly sings the lyrics to Patrick.
"You didn't-- You couldn't-- How did you--" Patrick's sputtering, not angry for once, but looking lost. It hits Pete, suddenly, that having your thoughts open for anyone to listen to is just about the worst invasion of privacy ever. And Patrick had volunteered for it. Pete does what he should have done in the first place.
"Why didn't you just tell Doug to fuck off, when he offered you the drug?" And the great thing about Patrick is even in the middle of his own freak-out, he can follow Pete's train of thought, no need for magic pills or anything other than the connection between them.
"Sometimes, I get jealous, I guess. I get you, the way I don’t get anyone else, but sometimes it seems like every teenage girl with a modem gets you. I always say I think in music and everyone else thinks in words, and I just thought maybe this would prove I was wrong, that I'm not such a freak after all." Patrick's looking at the wall, and the reflection of the lights in his eyes is just a little too shiny.
"But you do think in music." Never let it be said that Pete doesn't have a handle on the obvious. And judging by the half-hysterical giggle, Patrick agrees. "No, wait, listen, Patrick, you think in music and it's awesome and amazing and I thank god for it, because my words would be useless without it." He puts a hand on Patrick's shoulder, tries to turn him around gently, then pulls a little harder when he meets resistance until Patrick spins into his arms.
Patrick's still freaking out a little, not actually crying, but shaking, the embarrassment overdose hitting him months after the fact, and Pete feels like a dick for causing it. Patrick really is amazing, his mind even more than his physical self. But his body is warm in Pete's arms, and Patrick's head is so full of music that he writes songs while he jerks off, and he loves Pete so much it spills into the music, and Pete can't help but kiss him.
Patrick's sex music is the same as the masturbation song, just slowed down and with a more elaborate bass line. Pete listens as attentively as he can under the circumstances. He's going to play it onstage tomorrow if it kills him.