Fic: Boomtown
Boomtown
R
2006 words
Gerard/Patrick/William
For this prompt at we_are_cities
This is, for the most part, a story about syphilis; a disease which, in the year after he turned seventeen, William Beckett managed to get three times. Patrick got it once, and Gerard sags visibly when they tell him this because he’s fairly sure he didn’t get anything that year, not even laid.
William’s expression is nothing short of stricken. "Really?" he says, as if Gerard had revealed that his whole family had been killed in a mysterious yet painfully messy fashion. "That’s awful." He sounds a little bit distraught.
"What did I tell you?" Patrick says, nudging Gerard’s foot with his own. "Just like Bob Geldof."
*
Just for the record, Patrick isn’t too bothered about the whole syphilis thing. It was a couple of days of irritation and pain, an injection from a nurse who looked embarrassingly like his mother and a lecture about caution, none of which phased him for a considerable period of time. The process of contracting it, which involved fisting his hands in William’s shirt and pressing his face into his neck and fucking him up against the door of a bathroom stall, provides him with useful mental images to this day. Patrick considers this a fair trade, especially as William’s apology for said irritation and pain involved sixty-nining in the back of a half-loaded van after a particularly shitty show, and the way they slipped and slid and just fit with each other provides several useful images all of its own. His main response had been curiosity.
"Bill," he’d asked, "why can’t you keep your cock to yourself for five minutes in a row?"
"The Greeks," Bill stated, as if no further explanation should be necessary. Obviously all promiscuity was the fault of ancient peoples. Had Patrick never been told?
"The Greeks?"
"They were clever guys. They invented democracy and the theatre and heated flooring - "
"I’m fairly sure that was the Romans."
William waved the comment away. "Inessential. My point is, the Greeks were intelligent men. And they thought that if a person didn’t have enough sex, they’d go mad. They said getting off with other people was vital for a person’s mental wellbeing, and who am I to argue with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom? This way, I don’t go crazy and neither does anyone else. Have you ever seen a state asylum? I’m just doing my bit towards keeping you all ticking over as you should. It’s good for you."
Patrick had allowed himself a few moments to digest this new information. Then: "You gave me syphilis," he said, very slowly, "for the good of my mental health?"
"Um." William replied. "I didn’t mean to?"
*
Patrick doesn’t talk to Gerard about those times much, mostly because the two of them spent most of one Warped curled up in whichever bus Mikey and Pete weren’t on doing what everyone thought Mikey and Pete did, and Patrick enjoyed himself far too much to risk bringing up the time he’d got an STD from a lecherous underage guy. It just didn’t seem important.
Right now Patrick’s glad he didn’t bother, glad about everything, really, because the three of them are sitting round a table drinking something that used to be coffee and he’s pretty sure that pretty soon they’re all going to have sex. And that sounds pretty good, as far as Patrick’s concerned.
*
Bill’s only happened to Gerard once before, during That Weekend At Pete’s, though Pete may or may not be aware of the fact. Pete isn’t aware of much that happened That Weekend, other than he bought a house and his friends celebrated that momentous event by trashing it. Gabe, being clever, realised this was going to happen, and so herded Pete into the kitchen and started doing body shots off him within the first ten minutes of the party in order to distract him from the complete destruction of his home. It worked well: no one can say for sure where the pair of them spent the next forty-eight hours, but when Pete reappeared on Sunday he was hazy and happy and didn’t give a shit about anything. Travis, who had thrown up in Pete’s bed twice, pissed on his television and had half a sexual encounter on his kitchen counter, bought Gabe a nine bar out of sheer hungover gratitude then stole half back when he was sober, but that’s not important. What is important is that, for want of a better word, William Beckett occurred.
He materialised in the living room, seemingly drifting into existence slightly too close for Gerard to be comfortable. "Hi," he said. "I’m Bill. I don’t think I’ve happened to you yet."
"Have we met?"
"No I’m Bill and I don’t remember you and I probably would because you seem memorable should I remember you." It came out just like that, shaky drunk-speak completely devoid of punctuation and intonation. Gerard assumed that the arm that snaked its way round his shoulders on the last word was for emphasis, although looking back it seems more likely that William was levering himself into position. Or was incapable of standing unaided. Either theory flies.
"You know Patrick," he pointed out, jabbing an accusatory finger into Gerard’s chest. "Patrick knows you."
"Yes!" It came out more enthusiastic than Gerard had planned, possibly because it was the only intelligible sentence he’s heard in the last hour. "Yeah," he repeated, slightly more subdued. "I know Patrick."
The jabbing softened, the finger was replaced with a palm, and then Gerard wasn’t really sure if William was trying to smooth a crease out of his shirt or, possibly, locate a nipple. Again, both seem plausible now.
"Patrick’s nice."
"Yes!" Another coherent statement. They were doing well.
The hand on Gerard’s shoulder shifted slightly, fingers twisting in the soft hair behind his ear.
"Your hair is gone," William pointed out helpfully.
"Yes. The hair is gone. The hair has been destroyed."
And William had looked a little bit heartbroken at destroyed, had muttered something about something being awful, and then the hand on the back of Gerard’s neck was tilting his head up and pulling him in and they were kissing, fast and messy and William was sucking his lip and there were no more coherent statements.
Well, there was one, when they were rooting through a drawer in Pete’s bedroom and William had said: "Coffee flavoured? People, there is a time and a place for coffee and this isn’t it and it’s brown so it’s not even an aesthetic -" but then a more acceptable flavour had been located and in-depth communication had ceased in favour of William lowering himself into Gerard’s lap and rocking his hips and tilting backupbackthere, after which Gerard couldn’t have formed a sentence if his life depended on it.
He discovered this shortly after, when he walked back out to the party and discovered Patrick - Patrick, who he knew and who was nice - had arrived. "Bill said it was nice meeting you," Patrick said. And it was then that Gerard realised William had dematerialised en route, beamed back up to whatever sinewy planet he’d come from, taking Gerard’s sentence-forming skills with him.
"Uh," he said. A loose translation of this would be: so, we have this kind of sort of on-and-off thing, and I don’t know if it’s on enough for you to hit me for fucking him but it just sort of happened and I don’t want to die, please, think how pissed Pete’ll be when he comes home to find a dismembered corpse on his lawn.
Patrick smiled serenely. "Yeah, Bill happens to people. I’m glad you finally met."
Gerard considered this statement carefully. It was, he decided, not as naïve as it seemed. "Am I being played?"
Patrick patted him on the shoulder. It would have been reassuring if the smile that accompanied it hadn’t been quite so calculating. "A little. Roll with it."
"Oh. Is that why he’s so…?"
"He’s kind of like Bob Geldof," Patrick explained. "He wants to help people. He thinks that everyone should have exactly what they need, when they need it." Gerard balked a little at that because a) he didn’t need help and b) if he was going to receive any completely unnecessary help, he didn’t want to sully the experience by thinking of Bob Geldof.
"It could be worse. You could be thinking of old men in togas."
"I. Patrick. What?"
"Roll with it." Another reassuring shoulder-pat. "It’s William. Earth logic does not apply."
*
This isn’t Gerard’s fault, this sex thing. Except if it’s not his fault it’s Patrick’s, and he’d quite like to cling to the delusion that Patrick is the sturdy, honest type for a little longer yet, which makes it Bill’s fault. That would be fine, except that Bill is, as far as Gerard can make out, twelve. He plays footsie. He is young.
Gerard’s not sure he’s old enough to have a midlife crisis. He’s even less certain that something so depressing should be triggered by the promise of group sex.
*
Mikey told Pete, who told Bill, who swiped Patrick’s phone, dialled Gerard’s number and handed it back to him, already ringing.
"I’m a grown man," Patrick pointed out as he flipped the phone shut. "I can arrange my own hook ups."
"Aware of that," William muttered, as he searched heap of clothes on the floor for his pants, "but I have a vested interest in this one."
Patrick, who was having this conversation for the eleventh time, didn’t even blink. "Because that wouldn’t freak the shit out of him. You can’t spring a threesome on everyone you meet, you know that, right?"
"Not straight away, no. So call. Be persuasive. Find my pants."
"They’re on the sofa."
"I don’t see you dialling, Patrick." Bill ducked as the phone sailed past his head. "You want to," he pointed out. "I want to. What’s the problem?"
"The problem is that there’s an uninterested third party who would run and hide."
"The third party is interested. He is also pretty and soft and fucks you like you’re made of silk and asks permission before he pulls out early and really, Patrick, there’s a time and a place to be polite." He swept the phone up from the floor and began scrolling through the list of numbers. "It’ll be an educational experience. It’ll be fun."
He got as far as saying, "Hi, I’m Bill. We were memorable this one time -" before Patrick dove off the bed and wrestled the phone out of his grip.
"That was Bill," he explained.
"Yes," said Gerard in a voice that was slightly more wistful than Patrick had been expecting. "I remember."
*
They arranged to meet the next day, in a coffee shop somewhere in the centre of the city.
Gerard, being the trusting, naïve soul that he is, didn’t really believe anything until he arrived twenty minutes late to find William already there, one hand in Patrick’s back pocket and a smile on his face that was just the other side of innocent. "Cheer up," he said, noting Gerard’s slightly shell-shocked expression. "It might never happen."
And Gerard, in a moment of weakness or possibly clarity, thought: I fucking hope it does.
*
So now they’re in Patrick’s apartment, Patrick’s bedroom, no less, and Gerard’s wishing he still drank or possibly that he smoked smack so that he’d have a decent excuse for this, but then William’s hands are on the hem of his shirt and Patrick’s kissing him and yeah, that would be the reason.
"If you’re not into this," William tells his navel, "we can stop."
"Or you could not," Gerard suggests. "That would be fine." Then Patrick pulls back and William peels his shirt off and really, they’re fucking tag-teaming him and it’s just not fair. He tries to tell them as much.
"This isn’t fair," he says.
"No," agrees William, who has moved on to his belt buckle. "I’ve had to wait ages."