fic: Sweetheart of the Rodeo
SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO
Always-a-girl!Mikey; Mikey/Frank, Mikey/Ray, Mikey/Bob, mentions of others. Not at the same time. NC-17.
5062 words
Mikey accidentally has sex with everyone in her band. Except sometimes it's not an accident. Or even really sex.
Thank you to nokomis305, harborshore, and graceoftheworld for their help. Bonus porny Mikey/Bob outtakes are here.
Mikey fucks Frank the first time she ever meets him, which is at some house party thrown by one of her girlfriends' boyfriend's bandmate's friend or something. She first sees him when he's in line behind her at the keg and she first notices him when he doesn't try to take the nozzle from her and refill her cup for her.
After she fills her cup but before he fills his, he touches her arm briefly and says, "Hey, I like your shirt."
She looks down her nose at him and says, "Do you like the shirt, or just what's underneath and you're being polite?"
He tilts his head sideways as he thinks and a moment later says, "It's about fifty-fifty, but it is a pretty sweet shirt."
Mikey likes his honesty. And his face, if she's being honest with herself.
He fills his beer and disappears with a lingering look at her chest, swept away by a group of his friends.
She runs into him again a couple hours later, and she smiles at him when he waves at her. He's lost the friends and picked up a kind of intense look in his eyes, and the next thing she knows, she's pressing him up against a wall in the basement bathroom, sucking on the side of his neck while he tries to get a hand down the front of her jeans.
He doesn't ask her to suck his dick, which takes her a little by surprise. When they fuck, it's with her straddling his lap where he's sitting on the carpet-covered closed lid of the toilet.
Mikey bites at his earlobe, and he groans and thrusts up hard into her. The sudden pressure sends a jolt down her legs. She chews on her own lip and rocks her hips down against him. It strains her thighs but that's easy enough to ignore.
His hot breath in her face is starting to fog up her glasses, which are sliding down her nose as she works up a sweat.
He palms at her chest, cupping her breasts one at a time. She's not wearing a bra and it feels pretty good. He finally slides a hand under her shirt, up her stomach and over her ribs. It's hot skin on hot skin and it makes her shiver when his fingers graze against her nipples.
Her heart pounds in time with the thrum of the bass from the band playing in the living room above her head.
He comes with a bitten off fuck, fuck, and then rests his forehead on her shoulder and breathes hard against her neck. A minute later he puts a finger on her clit and starts rubbing, trying to get her off even though he's already finished and going soft inside her. She's too high to come but it feels nice anyway, and she appreciates the thought.
She can feel his sweat seeping through the fabric of her shirt and she decides that she's had enough. Her legs are a little shaky and she almost loses her balance climbing off his lap, but she catches herself on sink.
She pulls her jeans back on as fast as she can, but she doesn't feel his eyes on her as she dresses. When she glances back he's staring at his knees like he's giving her her space. He touches her arm again as she heads for the door, and he meets her eyes and smiles.
He doesn't ask for her number, and she doesn't ask for his. It's just another party hook-up.
It's not until the next afternoon when she crawls out of bed to check her e-mail and start comparing notes with her girlfriends that she realizes he looked kind of familiar. It takes the rest of the day but she figures out that he was the singer from this new band, Pencey Prep, and she's probably going to have to see him around everywhere all the time.
But Frank seemed like a decent guy last night-and while that's no guarantee he'll still be decent to her now, she thinks it might go okay. She knows how to deal if it doesn't, so she doesn't worry too much.
They ignore each other the first few times they end up in the same place, but after they've been re-introduced for the fourth time, Mikey actually sticks around to talk to him. It turns out that he's funny and has good taste in music and he talks to her like she's a human being and not an orifice, and they get along really well.
And then a few months later, she hears-from someone else-that his band needs a new guitar player.
She doesn't think the fact that she fucked the singer before she knew he was the singer should be any reason not to audition. It wasn't a big deal then and it's not like it matters to her now, except for how it apparently matters to him.
"That sounded good," he says when she's done her three songs, but she can see on his face that he wasn't listening to her play, he was thinking about the one time they fucked.
"Thanks," she says. She doesn't mean it, and she wonders if he can tell.
"We'll let you know," he tells her. He's strangely business-like, nothing like the Frank she's friends with.
"Sure," she nods. Her hopes were never up that high, but now they're pretty much gone.
He's nice about it when he calls her that night to tell her no. She knows she probably wasn't good enough to play with them anyway, but she can hear exactly what he isn't saying and it stings.
She doesn't talk to him for three weeks afterwards, and she knows he knows she's avoiding him and she doesn't care. She can never remember why she ends up forgiving him but in the end that doesn't matter; they go back to being friends and after another month she's mostly let it go. It's not really Frank she's angry at, anyway.
The next two guys she hooks up with aren't in bands. She makes sure.
Then 9/11 happens and then My Chemical Romance happens. Nothing is right in the world anymore but at least now she's trying to do something good. And this time she has an instrument she actually (mostly) knows how to play.
Frank is constantly around, these days. They share a practice space with Pencey and Frank gets them shows and stands right up front when they play, singing along and pumping his fist in time with the beat.
"I'm your biggest fan," he declares after their third show, grinning wide and giving them all sweaty hugs.
Most of the time, it's like nothing ever happened between him and Mikey, and she's glad for it.
One night at a Thursday show, Mikey finds graffiti in a bathroom stall that's about her. It's in green Sharpie right next to the toilet paper dispenser, and it says Mikey Way is a SLUT!!! Mikey stares at it for a minute, then reaches into her bag for a marker so she can add, For a good time call 555-7602 to book My Chemical Romance! She runs into Frank on her way out of the bathroom but doesn't say anything to him about it.
Pencey Prep breaks up, and then Frank's next band is there and gone so fast it barely counts. It comes as no surprise to anyone when Gerard and Ray ask Mikey and Otter how they'd feel about having Frank join the band.
But even though she saw this coming a mile away, Mikey doesn't have an answer. She knows the right answer and she knows the answer her guts want her to give out of spite, and they're different. She thought she was past holding a grudge, but apparently not.
"I have to think on it," she says abruptly.
Gerard looks a taken aback, like he wasn't expecting that at all. "Why?"
"I just do," she snaps at him.
"Oh," he says. He blinks at her. "Well, let me know when you decide."
Mikey wonders if Frank knows about the potential offer yet, if her taking her time is making him wait. She can't decide if she'd feel better or worse if that were true.
She gets her answer after a day and a half when Frank calls her up to ask her out for coffee in the middle of the afternoon. It's completely out of character for him so she's uneasy when she shows up at the diner near Frank's mom's house. Frank's there already and he looks more nervous than she's ever seen him.
It turns out that it makes her feel terrible.
It's only after the waitress comes by to refill Mikey's coffee, then Frank's, that Frank gets to the point.
"Ray called me the other day," he starts.
Mikey nods.
"I need to know that you're okay with it," Frank says. He leans in across the table, almost into her space but not quite. He doesn't touch her arm. "I understand if you say no."
If she fucked him now-pun intended, she thinks wryly-she'd be fucking them all, and that's really not what she wants.
So she says yes.
* * *
Mikey's always thought it's a bullshit cop-out to say that sex "just kind of happened", but that really is how she ends up having sex with Ray.
They're alone in a rare motel room somewhere in Illinois. She's claimed first shower and Ray is enjoying the opportunity some for peace and quiet. Gerard and Frank and Otter have all disappeared with the van to continue their search for the megamart liquor store they'd heard about earlier, Mikey thinks. She's not too clear on the details, but she's drunk enough right now that she doesn't really care if they find it or not.
The shower is good enough to get her clean, but there's not enough hot water or water pressure to really help her work out the knots in her shoulders. They've spent the last week sleeping in the van to save money, and between that and how much her bass weighs and the incident earlier where she'd tripped over nothing in the parking lot and landed too hard on the asphalt, she just hurts fucking everywhere.
She feels even drunker now than she did before she got into the shower, which is weird. Maybe all the steam made it worse somehow, like smoking does. Maybe that doesn't make sense. She doesn't know. It doesn't matter.
She stopping caring a long time ago about having to put dirty clothes back on after a shower, but the shirt she's been wearing is really too gross for words, so she just wraps a towel around her chest before she goes back into the room.
Ray is sitting on one of the beds, staring rapt at the tiny TV in the corner.
"What are you watching?" she asks.
"This place has HBO!" He doesn't look away from the screen.
"Nice," she says. The screen is full of tits when she finally focuses her eyes on it, but she sits down to watch anyway. HBO is a luxury not to be scoffed at. They watch in silence, caught up in the Sopranos rerun.
"Does it get Sci-Fi, too?" she asks a little later. That's what she misses most about home, she thinks, the constant stream of terrible fucking movies.
"Dunno," Ray shrugs.
"Whatever," Mikey says, then falls onto her back on the comforter. The ceiling spins above her. She starts rolling her shoulder without really thinking about it, like she can somehow pull the knots out if she can find a way to stretch just right.
"You okay?" Ray asks her.
"I hurt everywhere," she says with as much feeling as she can muster. "I might die."
Ray snorts in amusement. "If you say so."
"You should give me a back rub," she tells him. "You'll save my life."
"You're not gonna die, Mikey," Ray laughs.
"I know, because you're going to fix this for me. Right?" She looks up at him through her eyelashes. She doesn't remember him sitting so close, before.
"Okay, fine," he says. "Roll over."
She does, pulling her towel away to bare her back, and she rests her face on her hands. A moment later she feels the bed shift as Ray climbs over her legs. She relaxes under him as he starts touching her back.
He really digs his fingers in, and fuck, it feels good and it's working. She moans when he jabs his thumb into the middle of the biggest knot, and he freezes.
"Don't stop," she orders, and a moment later he starts up again.
She loses track of time as he works his way down her back. It hurts but it's the good hurt, and the knots are starting to loosen. She feels warm all over, happy, and liquid, like she could just melt into the bed. She feels like she could maybe fall asleep.
He shifts to slide his hands over the tops of her shoulders and she feels his dick pressing against the curve of her ass. He's hard. She doesn't think, just lifts her hips to press against him. The warmth in her body changes suddenly into arousal. Her breath hitches.
"Yeah?" he asks, next to her ear.
She nods, and then twists around to lie on her back. She presses up against him again and then they're kissing, fast and messy.
Ray's hands are on the button of her jeans, and then he moves down her body to peel them off.
There's no way Ray's not drunk too, but he's holding it well. She wouldn't be able to tell at all if she didn't know that when he's drunk he smiles a lot and touches things, taps his fingers on any available surface. And right now that surface happens to be her inner thigh.
He's confident when he goes down on her but his moves are just a little off, like he's used to somebody else's body and hasn't figured Mikey out yet. But then he slides in two fingers as he licks her clit and she comes, clenching around them.
Her eyes are closed but she can feel him get up from the bed, and she hears him unzipping a bag. She opens one eye to squint at him when he comes back to sit on the edge of the bed. He's rolling a condom on.
"You're a real gentleman, Ray Toro," she slurs around a yawn.
"I hear that a lot," he says softly. He sounds amused. And then he's on top of her, pressing her down into the bed again as he settles between her legs. His fingers are on her for a moment and then he's pushing in, one long slow stroke that gets him deep, all the way.
Mikey hisses in a breath, bites down reflexively on his shoulder. They lie still for a moment before Ray pushes himself up on his forearms and starts thrusting.
She wants to wrap her legs around his hips and pull him in closer but her limbs all feel too heavy and she can't quite move them. She yawns again, so wide it feels like her jaw might crack, and she can't keep her eyes open.
"Mikey?" Ray asks from somewhere very far away.
She can barely get her lips to move to mumble something in reply. She drops off but wakes up a second later to Ray sighing and pulling out and getting off the bed. The bathroom fan goes on a moment later and stays on as she falls back into sleep.
Mikey wakes up with the sun on her face and a shitty headache and she almost rolls out of bed to get a glass of water before she realizes that she's mostly naked. She cracks an eye open and reaches for her glasses where she vaguely remembers leaving them on the night stand, and then sees one of her hoodies folded neatly on the floor next to her side of the bed. She wiggles into it under the sheets-which are covering her, even though she passed out on top of them-and figures she can deal with everyone seeing her in her underwear-which she doesn't remember putting back on, but there they are.
It takes a moment for the chaos of the room to come into focus, but when it does she notes that the TV is on and Gerard and Otter are debating whether or not Frank has the balls to go through with getting his neck tattooed.
Frank comes out of the bathroom and yells, "Fuck you, I'm totally going to do it!" At a more reasonable volume he adds, "Hey Mikey, can I have ten bucks so I can get my neck tattooed?"
Mikey finds her wallet in her jeans on the floor and gives him the money, mostly to make him shut up. Her hangover fucking sucks.
"You can't just do that kind of shit on the spur of the moment, Frankie," Ray says reproachfully, but he also coughs up ten bucks when Frank asks.
When they're leaving the room to start the day's drive, Gerard falls into step beside her. "Did you sleep well?" he asks conversationally. "Looks like you were tired, if you passed out so early."
And she just bursts into laughter, headache be damned. Ray cracks up too, a breath later. Gerard looks confused but doesn't ask what he missed, for which Mikey is profoundly grateful.
The first time they stop for gas that day, Ray pulls her aside once everyone's gone in to buy food.
"Sorry I fell asleep," Mikey says pre-emptively. She does feel bad about it, but it's mostly for herself. Sex is sex and guys are guys but she doesn't feel totally safe hooking up on the road the way she does at home, and the tour still goes for another couple weeks yet.
Ray grins, but he doesn't laugh the way he had earlier. "You were tired," he half-heartedly imitates Gerard.
"This is true," Mikey nods, smiling a little.
"It's probably for the best anyway," Ray says tentatively.
"Yeah?" she prompts him to go on.
"It was a bad idea. And it shouldn't happen again."
"You're right," she agrees, not hesitating but not too quickly either, and he visibly relaxes.
"Because if it was a thing, I mean... you know what people would say. About you." He looks and sounds really embarrassed as he says it, but they both know it's true.
"Fuck that shit," Mikey says. She surprises herself by meaning it. "I just don't want Gerard to have to kick you out of the band after it goes bad."
Ray laughs at that. "He would, wouldn't he," he muses.
Mikey doesn't ask why Ray thinks it would be a thing and Ray doesn't ask why she thinks it wouldn't stay good.
They already know each other too well.
* * *
She fucks Bob when he's doing their sound for free on their first European tour.
"Don't think this is, like, payment or anything," she says as she leans into Bob's space, vodka-confident, and curls a finger through the carabiner hanging from his belt loop.
"So what is it?" he asks her. He doesn't touch her back but he doesn't pull away, either.
She looks at him and shrugs with one shoulder and says, "I'm horny and you're here, did you want something more?" When he didn't respond right away, she adds, "Besides, you speak English, which is more important than you might expect."
Within half an hour, Bob is able to find an unused room where, at her request, he bends Mikey over a card table and holds her down and fucks her so hard that it almost collapses.
It's exactly what she wants, what she was hoping for. It's intense, almost too much, like it might overwhelm her if she tries to think about it and doesn't just let go and and let it fill her.
She pushes that thought from her head, and every other thought too.
Mikey holds on tight to the edges of the table, to try to hold it up and to try to keep from sliding off the varnished surface. The rough edges bite into her palms. That shouldn't feel so good, she thinks. But it does, it all feels good, even Bob's belt buckle where it's pressing into the back of her leg, pinching hard every time he thrusts.
She gasps for breath, feels the sting of sweat dripping into her eyes, and she presses her hips back into him, relishing the steady beat of his body against hers.
"Harder," she urges him.
He fucks her harder. The table shudders underneath her, skids forward in inch-long jolting hops. Bob just takes half a step forward and keeps holding her down, puts his whole body into it.
She snarls and bucks under him, and he wraps his fingers through her hair and pulls hard enough to lift her head off the table. Stars explode behind her eyelids.
She bites down on her forearm when she comes. She barely notices how gross the taste of her hoodie is.
Bob groans and keeps up the pace, fucking into her hard and fast until he goes tense and then he's dead weight on top of her. She can feel the heaving of his chest against her back as he tries to catch his breath, ragged panting against the back of her ear.
After Bob pulls out and gets off her she keeps lying there, just thinking about the feel of the table sticking to her sweaty face, the squish of her breasts into her chest, but only for a minute. Then she rolls her shoulders and lifts herself up, peeling herself off the table.
Her muscles are already getting stiff and sore and it's kind of awkward pulling her jeans up from where they fell to bunch around her ankles. But she'll be fine. She's not worried.
Bob's already put himself back together. The only sign anything happened is the residual pink flush across his cheeks and nose. Mikey thinks that's a good look for him, but she's not about to say anything.
He digs into his pocket and comes up with a pack of cigarettes. "Need a smoke," he says. It's not awkward, not running away, just a statement of fact.
She nods and surprises herself by following him out back.
It's raining but only lightly, and Mikey shrugs and flips her hood up. Bob is still wearing his beanie; he never took it off. They sit on a low concrete curb under some sign all in French. Mikey thought they were in Germany.
They sit in easy silence and she watches Bob smoke half a cigarette before she thinks to ask him for one.
He raises an eyebrow but doesn't say anything. When he hands it over, she waves him off and lights it herself.
They never do talk about it, but a lot of things happen on that tour that nobody talks about.
* * *
She never slept with Otter. She never says as much to anyone, but in retrospect that really should have been a big sign it wasn't going to work out.
* * *
Mikey has had exactly five sex dreams about Gerard now, and it never gets any less weird when she wakes up sweaty and flushed and half-remembering the dreamed feel of her brother hot on her skin.
She stares up at the ceiling of the bunk above her for almost ten minutes, waiting for the last bits of dream to fade away. It's probably the only peace and quiet she's going to get today, she thinks. Warped is a fucking madhouse. She still can't quite believe they're headlining.
Eventually she rolls out of bed and goes into the front lounge to see if anyone's made coffee yet, and of course the only person in there is Gerard. He's sitting at the table with his laptop and a pile of comics.
She pours herself a cup of coffee and stirs in two sugars, enjoying the comfort of her routine, then she sits down across from Gerard.
He nods at her but doesn't take his eyes off the screen.
"I just had a sex dream about you," she announces.
Gerard spits out his coffee. Onto the floor, luckily, and not onto his computer. "Why would you even tell me that?" he asks plaintively.
"To share my pain," she mutters.
"Consider it thoroughly shared," Gerard says, sounding kind of strangled.
Mikey smiles grimly at him. "Good."
They sit quietly except for the clacking of Gerard typing.
"Do you want more coffee?" she asks him when her own is finished.
He pushes his mug across the table towards her, and she refills it, stirring in creamer and sugar. She tops up her own mug and then brings them carefully back one at a time.
Gerard's face disappears behind his mug as he gulps at his coffee, and when it reappears he says, "You shouldn't worry about the dream."
"Neither should you," she says.
"It didn't mean anything-"
"I know."
"-and it's perfectly normal, even if it is kind of weird," he concludes.
"I know," she says over top of him.
"Okay," he says mildly.
She bumps her foot against his under the table and he nudges hers back.
She could feel bad about the dream, but why bother? She's pretty sure that lots of people have sex dreams about people they don't actually want to have sex with. The lingering remnants of her dream are basically gone now anyway, and it's like it never happened-except for how she's probably going to be laughing about that spit-take all day. And now she knows what to do the next time it happens, too.
Not that she's hoping there will be a next time.
"Maybe it just means I need to get laid," she sighs. She's a little dramatic about it, mostly in hopes of making Gerard uncomfortable again. This is turning into great entertainment.
"Has it been a while?" Gerard asks. The words are bland enough but Mikey is left with the very unsettling impression that he knows that it has been-and he's kind of curious why. The fucker, he totally just turned her goading against her and he knows it. But-
Mikey frowns at him. "Since when have you been keeping track?"
"Since always," he says simply. "I've always been watching out for you."
Her mouth falls open in surprise. She knew that, of course, because she kept an eye on him too, but she never thought he actually noticed the details of her sex life, let alone even acknowledged that she has one. This is something strange and new that she can't quite wrap her head around yet.
"I'm not judging," he says when she doesn't say anything right away. He's as sincere as always. "I'm just wondering."
Mikey shrugs. "It's just, I don't know, whatever. I want different things, now."
"That's okay, too," Gerard says. "If you're having sex or not having it, it's totally up to you. Whatever makes you happy."
"Did you just..." Mikey gapes at him. "Did you just give me permission to be in charge of my own sex life?"
"Well, society's not going to do it," Gerard says. He's staring down at his coffee and she can see that he's turning a little pink.
"Thanks, " she tells him, feeling absurdly touched even as she starts blushing too.
"Can we talk about something else now?" he asks.
"Fuck yes," she agrees fervently. She will get her revenge on him later. "What are you reading?"
His eyes light up. "There are spoilers out for the V for Vendetta movie."
"Sweet!" she says, and gets up to squeeze him over on his chair so she can sit on the edge and look over his shoulder at the screen.
Mikey spends the rest of the day thinking about their conversation, more introspectively than she's entirely comfortable with, and she's glad for the distraction that playing the afternoon's show provides. After, she sits next to Gerard on a picnic table backstage and rests her head on his shoulder.
"You okay?" he asks, concerned.
She nods. "Just thinking." The velcro on the top of his bullet-proof vest digs into her cheek but she doesn't mind.
When she doesn't say anything else, he wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her into a one-sided hug.
They're both sweaty and rank and stage-hot and by all rights it should be too gross for words, but right now she can't imagine anything more comforting.
"And by the way?" she says.
"Yeah?"
"I still jerk off all the time, I'm not dead or anything," she tells him quietly, smirking.
Gerard groans, and she knows without having to look that he'll be blushing, probably worse than last time, and maybe squeezing his eyes shut like if he can do it hard enough it'll be like he never heard her say anything. Point for Mikey, for sure.
She lets him stew for a moment before she adds, much less flippantly, "It's just hard to start dating someone when you're on the road all the time."
"Any guy would be lucky to have you, touring and all," Gerard says immediately.
"Well, yeah," Mikey agrees, "but that doesn't make it easier for me."
"Nothing worthwhile is ever easy," Gerard advises faux-sagely.
Mikey punches him in the knee. "I will have you know that I am both easy and worthwhile."
Gerard gasps out something that's half-laughter, half-sob. "Why do you do this to me?"
"Because I can," she tells him, then almost as an afterthought she says, "Pete Wentz asked me out yesterday."
Gerard makes a noise like he's choking on his tongue.
"I said yes. I haven't decided if I'm going to sleep with him or not, though," she says thoughtfully.
"Whatever makes you happy," Gerard grits out through clenched teeth.
"Exactly," Mikey smiles.
Always-a-girl!Mikey; Mikey/Frank, Mikey/Ray, Mikey/Bob, mentions of others. Not at the same time. NC-17.
5062 words
Mikey accidentally has sex with everyone in her band. Except sometimes it's not an accident. Or even really sex.
Thank you to nokomis305, harborshore, and graceoftheworld for their help. Bonus porny Mikey/Bob outtakes are here.
Mikey fucks Frank the first time she ever meets him, which is at some house party thrown by one of her girlfriends' boyfriend's bandmate's friend or something. She first sees him when he's in line behind her at the keg and she first notices him when he doesn't try to take the nozzle from her and refill her cup for her.
After she fills her cup but before he fills his, he touches her arm briefly and says, "Hey, I like your shirt."
She looks down her nose at him and says, "Do you like the shirt, or just what's underneath and you're being polite?"
He tilts his head sideways as he thinks and a moment later says, "It's about fifty-fifty, but it is a pretty sweet shirt."
Mikey likes his honesty. And his face, if she's being honest with herself.
He fills his beer and disappears with a lingering look at her chest, swept away by a group of his friends.
She runs into him again a couple hours later, and she smiles at him when he waves at her. He's lost the friends and picked up a kind of intense look in his eyes, and the next thing she knows, she's pressing him up against a wall in the basement bathroom, sucking on the side of his neck while he tries to get a hand down the front of her jeans.
He doesn't ask her to suck his dick, which takes her a little by surprise. When they fuck, it's with her straddling his lap where he's sitting on the carpet-covered closed lid of the toilet.
Mikey bites at his earlobe, and he groans and thrusts up hard into her. The sudden pressure sends a jolt down her legs. She chews on her own lip and rocks her hips down against him. It strains her thighs but that's easy enough to ignore.
His hot breath in her face is starting to fog up her glasses, which are sliding down her nose as she works up a sweat.
He palms at her chest, cupping her breasts one at a time. She's not wearing a bra and it feels pretty good. He finally slides a hand under her shirt, up her stomach and over her ribs. It's hot skin on hot skin and it makes her shiver when his fingers graze against her nipples.
Her heart pounds in time with the thrum of the bass from the band playing in the living room above her head.
He comes with a bitten off fuck, fuck, and then rests his forehead on her shoulder and breathes hard against her neck. A minute later he puts a finger on her clit and starts rubbing, trying to get her off even though he's already finished and going soft inside her. She's too high to come but it feels nice anyway, and she appreciates the thought.
She can feel his sweat seeping through the fabric of her shirt and she decides that she's had enough. Her legs are a little shaky and she almost loses her balance climbing off his lap, but she catches herself on sink.
She pulls her jeans back on as fast as she can, but she doesn't feel his eyes on her as she dresses. When she glances back he's staring at his knees like he's giving her her space. He touches her arm again as she heads for the door, and he meets her eyes and smiles.
He doesn't ask for her number, and she doesn't ask for his. It's just another party hook-up.
It's not until the next afternoon when she crawls out of bed to check her e-mail and start comparing notes with her girlfriends that she realizes he looked kind of familiar. It takes the rest of the day but she figures out that he was the singer from this new band, Pencey Prep, and she's probably going to have to see him around everywhere all the time.
But Frank seemed like a decent guy last night-and while that's no guarantee he'll still be decent to her now, she thinks it might go okay. She knows how to deal if it doesn't, so she doesn't worry too much.
They ignore each other the first few times they end up in the same place, but after they've been re-introduced for the fourth time, Mikey actually sticks around to talk to him. It turns out that he's funny and has good taste in music and he talks to her like she's a human being and not an orifice, and they get along really well.
And then a few months later, she hears-from someone else-that his band needs a new guitar player.
She doesn't think the fact that she fucked the singer before she knew he was the singer should be any reason not to audition. It wasn't a big deal then and it's not like it matters to her now, except for how it apparently matters to him.
"That sounded good," he says when she's done her three songs, but she can see on his face that he wasn't listening to her play, he was thinking about the one time they fucked.
"Thanks," she says. She doesn't mean it, and she wonders if he can tell.
"We'll let you know," he tells her. He's strangely business-like, nothing like the Frank she's friends with.
"Sure," she nods. Her hopes were never up that high, but now they're pretty much gone.
He's nice about it when he calls her that night to tell her no. She knows she probably wasn't good enough to play with them anyway, but she can hear exactly what he isn't saying and it stings.
She doesn't talk to him for three weeks afterwards, and she knows he knows she's avoiding him and she doesn't care. She can never remember why she ends up forgiving him but in the end that doesn't matter; they go back to being friends and after another month she's mostly let it go. It's not really Frank she's angry at, anyway.
The next two guys she hooks up with aren't in bands. She makes sure.
Then 9/11 happens and then My Chemical Romance happens. Nothing is right in the world anymore but at least now she's trying to do something good. And this time she has an instrument she actually (mostly) knows how to play.
Frank is constantly around, these days. They share a practice space with Pencey and Frank gets them shows and stands right up front when they play, singing along and pumping his fist in time with the beat.
"I'm your biggest fan," he declares after their third show, grinning wide and giving them all sweaty hugs.
Most of the time, it's like nothing ever happened between him and Mikey, and she's glad for it.
One night at a Thursday show, Mikey finds graffiti in a bathroom stall that's about her. It's in green Sharpie right next to the toilet paper dispenser, and it says Mikey Way is a SLUT!!! Mikey stares at it for a minute, then reaches into her bag for a marker so she can add, For a good time call 555-7602 to book My Chemical Romance! She runs into Frank on her way out of the bathroom but doesn't say anything to him about it.
Pencey Prep breaks up, and then Frank's next band is there and gone so fast it barely counts. It comes as no surprise to anyone when Gerard and Ray ask Mikey and Otter how they'd feel about having Frank join the band.
But even though she saw this coming a mile away, Mikey doesn't have an answer. She knows the right answer and she knows the answer her guts want her to give out of spite, and they're different. She thought she was past holding a grudge, but apparently not.
"I have to think on it," she says abruptly.
Gerard looks a taken aback, like he wasn't expecting that at all. "Why?"
"I just do," she snaps at him.
"Oh," he says. He blinks at her. "Well, let me know when you decide."
Mikey wonders if Frank knows about the potential offer yet, if her taking her time is making him wait. She can't decide if she'd feel better or worse if that were true.
She gets her answer after a day and a half when Frank calls her up to ask her out for coffee in the middle of the afternoon. It's completely out of character for him so she's uneasy when she shows up at the diner near Frank's mom's house. Frank's there already and he looks more nervous than she's ever seen him.
It turns out that it makes her feel terrible.
It's only after the waitress comes by to refill Mikey's coffee, then Frank's, that Frank gets to the point.
"Ray called me the other day," he starts.
Mikey nods.
"I need to know that you're okay with it," Frank says. He leans in across the table, almost into her space but not quite. He doesn't touch her arm. "I understand if you say no."
If she fucked him now-pun intended, she thinks wryly-she'd be fucking them all, and that's really not what she wants.
So she says yes.
* * *
Mikey's always thought it's a bullshit cop-out to say that sex "just kind of happened", but that really is how she ends up having sex with Ray.
They're alone in a rare motel room somewhere in Illinois. She's claimed first shower and Ray is enjoying the opportunity some for peace and quiet. Gerard and Frank and Otter have all disappeared with the van to continue their search for the megamart liquor store they'd heard about earlier, Mikey thinks. She's not too clear on the details, but she's drunk enough right now that she doesn't really care if they find it or not.
The shower is good enough to get her clean, but there's not enough hot water or water pressure to really help her work out the knots in her shoulders. They've spent the last week sleeping in the van to save money, and between that and how much her bass weighs and the incident earlier where she'd tripped over nothing in the parking lot and landed too hard on the asphalt, she just hurts fucking everywhere.
She feels even drunker now than she did before she got into the shower, which is weird. Maybe all the steam made it worse somehow, like smoking does. Maybe that doesn't make sense. She doesn't know. It doesn't matter.
She stopping caring a long time ago about having to put dirty clothes back on after a shower, but the shirt she's been wearing is really too gross for words, so she just wraps a towel around her chest before she goes back into the room.
Ray is sitting on one of the beds, staring rapt at the tiny TV in the corner.
"What are you watching?" she asks.
"This place has HBO!" He doesn't look away from the screen.
"Nice," she says. The screen is full of tits when she finally focuses her eyes on it, but she sits down to watch anyway. HBO is a luxury not to be scoffed at. They watch in silence, caught up in the Sopranos rerun.
"Does it get Sci-Fi, too?" she asks a little later. That's what she misses most about home, she thinks, the constant stream of terrible fucking movies.
"Dunno," Ray shrugs.
"Whatever," Mikey says, then falls onto her back on the comforter. The ceiling spins above her. She starts rolling her shoulder without really thinking about it, like she can somehow pull the knots out if she can find a way to stretch just right.
"You okay?" Ray asks her.
"I hurt everywhere," she says with as much feeling as she can muster. "I might die."
Ray snorts in amusement. "If you say so."
"You should give me a back rub," she tells him. "You'll save my life."
"You're not gonna die, Mikey," Ray laughs.
"I know, because you're going to fix this for me. Right?" She looks up at him through her eyelashes. She doesn't remember him sitting so close, before.
"Okay, fine," he says. "Roll over."
She does, pulling her towel away to bare her back, and she rests her face on her hands. A moment later she feels the bed shift as Ray climbs over her legs. She relaxes under him as he starts touching her back.
He really digs his fingers in, and fuck, it feels good and it's working. She moans when he jabs his thumb into the middle of the biggest knot, and he freezes.
"Don't stop," she orders, and a moment later he starts up again.
She loses track of time as he works his way down her back. It hurts but it's the good hurt, and the knots are starting to loosen. She feels warm all over, happy, and liquid, like she could just melt into the bed. She feels like she could maybe fall asleep.
He shifts to slide his hands over the tops of her shoulders and she feels his dick pressing against the curve of her ass. He's hard. She doesn't think, just lifts her hips to press against him. The warmth in her body changes suddenly into arousal. Her breath hitches.
"Yeah?" he asks, next to her ear.
She nods, and then twists around to lie on her back. She presses up against him again and then they're kissing, fast and messy.
Ray's hands are on the button of her jeans, and then he moves down her body to peel them off.
There's no way Ray's not drunk too, but he's holding it well. She wouldn't be able to tell at all if she didn't know that when he's drunk he smiles a lot and touches things, taps his fingers on any available surface. And right now that surface happens to be her inner thigh.
He's confident when he goes down on her but his moves are just a little off, like he's used to somebody else's body and hasn't figured Mikey out yet. But then he slides in two fingers as he licks her clit and she comes, clenching around them.
Her eyes are closed but she can feel him get up from the bed, and she hears him unzipping a bag. She opens one eye to squint at him when he comes back to sit on the edge of the bed. He's rolling a condom on.
"You're a real gentleman, Ray Toro," she slurs around a yawn.
"I hear that a lot," he says softly. He sounds amused. And then he's on top of her, pressing her down into the bed again as he settles between her legs. His fingers are on her for a moment and then he's pushing in, one long slow stroke that gets him deep, all the way.
Mikey hisses in a breath, bites down reflexively on his shoulder. They lie still for a moment before Ray pushes himself up on his forearms and starts thrusting.
She wants to wrap her legs around his hips and pull him in closer but her limbs all feel too heavy and she can't quite move them. She yawns again, so wide it feels like her jaw might crack, and she can't keep her eyes open.
"Mikey?" Ray asks from somewhere very far away.
She can barely get her lips to move to mumble something in reply. She drops off but wakes up a second later to Ray sighing and pulling out and getting off the bed. The bathroom fan goes on a moment later and stays on as she falls back into sleep.
Mikey wakes up with the sun on her face and a shitty headache and she almost rolls out of bed to get a glass of water before she realizes that she's mostly naked. She cracks an eye open and reaches for her glasses where she vaguely remembers leaving them on the night stand, and then sees one of her hoodies folded neatly on the floor next to her side of the bed. She wiggles into it under the sheets-which are covering her, even though she passed out on top of them-and figures she can deal with everyone seeing her in her underwear-which she doesn't remember putting back on, but there they are.
It takes a moment for the chaos of the room to come into focus, but when it does she notes that the TV is on and Gerard and Otter are debating whether or not Frank has the balls to go through with getting his neck tattooed.
Frank comes out of the bathroom and yells, "Fuck you, I'm totally going to do it!" At a more reasonable volume he adds, "Hey Mikey, can I have ten bucks so I can get my neck tattooed?"
Mikey finds her wallet in her jeans on the floor and gives him the money, mostly to make him shut up. Her hangover fucking sucks.
"You can't just do that kind of shit on the spur of the moment, Frankie," Ray says reproachfully, but he also coughs up ten bucks when Frank asks.
When they're leaving the room to start the day's drive, Gerard falls into step beside her. "Did you sleep well?" he asks conversationally. "Looks like you were tired, if you passed out so early."
And she just bursts into laughter, headache be damned. Ray cracks up too, a breath later. Gerard looks confused but doesn't ask what he missed, for which Mikey is profoundly grateful.
The first time they stop for gas that day, Ray pulls her aside once everyone's gone in to buy food.
"Sorry I fell asleep," Mikey says pre-emptively. She does feel bad about it, but it's mostly for herself. Sex is sex and guys are guys but she doesn't feel totally safe hooking up on the road the way she does at home, and the tour still goes for another couple weeks yet.
Ray grins, but he doesn't laugh the way he had earlier. "You were tired," he half-heartedly imitates Gerard.
"This is true," Mikey nods, smiling a little.
"It's probably for the best anyway," Ray says tentatively.
"Yeah?" she prompts him to go on.
"It was a bad idea. And it shouldn't happen again."
"You're right," she agrees, not hesitating but not too quickly either, and he visibly relaxes.
"Because if it was a thing, I mean... you know what people would say. About you." He looks and sounds really embarrassed as he says it, but they both know it's true.
"Fuck that shit," Mikey says. She surprises herself by meaning it. "I just don't want Gerard to have to kick you out of the band after it goes bad."
Ray laughs at that. "He would, wouldn't he," he muses.
Mikey doesn't ask why Ray thinks it would be a thing and Ray doesn't ask why she thinks it wouldn't stay good.
They already know each other too well.
* * *
She fucks Bob when he's doing their sound for free on their first European tour.
"Don't think this is, like, payment or anything," she says as she leans into Bob's space, vodka-confident, and curls a finger through the carabiner hanging from his belt loop.
"So what is it?" he asks her. He doesn't touch her back but he doesn't pull away, either.
She looks at him and shrugs with one shoulder and says, "I'm horny and you're here, did you want something more?" When he didn't respond right away, she adds, "Besides, you speak English, which is more important than you might expect."
Within half an hour, Bob is able to find an unused room where, at her request, he bends Mikey over a card table and holds her down and fucks her so hard that it almost collapses.
It's exactly what she wants, what she was hoping for. It's intense, almost too much, like it might overwhelm her if she tries to think about it and doesn't just let go and and let it fill her.
She pushes that thought from her head, and every other thought too.
Mikey holds on tight to the edges of the table, to try to hold it up and to try to keep from sliding off the varnished surface. The rough edges bite into her palms. That shouldn't feel so good, she thinks. But it does, it all feels good, even Bob's belt buckle where it's pressing into the back of her leg, pinching hard every time he thrusts.
She gasps for breath, feels the sting of sweat dripping into her eyes, and she presses her hips back into him, relishing the steady beat of his body against hers.
"Harder," she urges him.
He fucks her harder. The table shudders underneath her, skids forward in inch-long jolting hops. Bob just takes half a step forward and keeps holding her down, puts his whole body into it.
She snarls and bucks under him, and he wraps his fingers through her hair and pulls hard enough to lift her head off the table. Stars explode behind her eyelids.
She bites down on her forearm when she comes. She barely notices how gross the taste of her hoodie is.
Bob groans and keeps up the pace, fucking into her hard and fast until he goes tense and then he's dead weight on top of her. She can feel the heaving of his chest against her back as he tries to catch his breath, ragged panting against the back of her ear.
After Bob pulls out and gets off her she keeps lying there, just thinking about the feel of the table sticking to her sweaty face, the squish of her breasts into her chest, but only for a minute. Then she rolls her shoulders and lifts herself up, peeling herself off the table.
Her muscles are already getting stiff and sore and it's kind of awkward pulling her jeans up from where they fell to bunch around her ankles. But she'll be fine. She's not worried.
Bob's already put himself back together. The only sign anything happened is the residual pink flush across his cheeks and nose. Mikey thinks that's a good look for him, but she's not about to say anything.
He digs into his pocket and comes up with a pack of cigarettes. "Need a smoke," he says. It's not awkward, not running away, just a statement of fact.
She nods and surprises herself by following him out back.
It's raining but only lightly, and Mikey shrugs and flips her hood up. Bob is still wearing his beanie; he never took it off. They sit on a low concrete curb under some sign all in French. Mikey thought they were in Germany.
They sit in easy silence and she watches Bob smoke half a cigarette before she thinks to ask him for one.
He raises an eyebrow but doesn't say anything. When he hands it over, she waves him off and lights it herself.
They never do talk about it, but a lot of things happen on that tour that nobody talks about.
* * *
She never slept with Otter. She never says as much to anyone, but in retrospect that really should have been a big sign it wasn't going to work out.
* * *
Mikey has had exactly five sex dreams about Gerard now, and it never gets any less weird when she wakes up sweaty and flushed and half-remembering the dreamed feel of her brother hot on her skin.
She stares up at the ceiling of the bunk above her for almost ten minutes, waiting for the last bits of dream to fade away. It's probably the only peace and quiet she's going to get today, she thinks. Warped is a fucking madhouse. She still can't quite believe they're headlining.
Eventually she rolls out of bed and goes into the front lounge to see if anyone's made coffee yet, and of course the only person in there is Gerard. He's sitting at the table with his laptop and a pile of comics.
She pours herself a cup of coffee and stirs in two sugars, enjoying the comfort of her routine, then she sits down across from Gerard.
He nods at her but doesn't take his eyes off the screen.
"I just had a sex dream about you," she announces.
Gerard spits out his coffee. Onto the floor, luckily, and not onto his computer. "Why would you even tell me that?" he asks plaintively.
"To share my pain," she mutters.
"Consider it thoroughly shared," Gerard says, sounding kind of strangled.
Mikey smiles grimly at him. "Good."
They sit quietly except for the clacking of Gerard typing.
"Do you want more coffee?" she asks him when her own is finished.
He pushes his mug across the table towards her, and she refills it, stirring in creamer and sugar. She tops up her own mug and then brings them carefully back one at a time.
Gerard's face disappears behind his mug as he gulps at his coffee, and when it reappears he says, "You shouldn't worry about the dream."
"Neither should you," she says.
"It didn't mean anything-"
"I know."
"-and it's perfectly normal, even if it is kind of weird," he concludes.
"I know," she says over top of him.
"Okay," he says mildly.
She bumps her foot against his under the table and he nudges hers back.
She could feel bad about the dream, but why bother? She's pretty sure that lots of people have sex dreams about people they don't actually want to have sex with. The lingering remnants of her dream are basically gone now anyway, and it's like it never happened-except for how she's probably going to be laughing about that spit-take all day. And now she knows what to do the next time it happens, too.
Not that she's hoping there will be a next time.
"Maybe it just means I need to get laid," she sighs. She's a little dramatic about it, mostly in hopes of making Gerard uncomfortable again. This is turning into great entertainment.
"Has it been a while?" Gerard asks. The words are bland enough but Mikey is left with the very unsettling impression that he knows that it has been-and he's kind of curious why. The fucker, he totally just turned her goading against her and he knows it. But-
Mikey frowns at him. "Since when have you been keeping track?"
"Since always," he says simply. "I've always been watching out for you."
Her mouth falls open in surprise. She knew that, of course, because she kept an eye on him too, but she never thought he actually noticed the details of her sex life, let alone even acknowledged that she has one. This is something strange and new that she can't quite wrap her head around yet.
"I'm not judging," he says when she doesn't say anything right away. He's as sincere as always. "I'm just wondering."
Mikey shrugs. "It's just, I don't know, whatever. I want different things, now."
"That's okay, too," Gerard says. "If you're having sex or not having it, it's totally up to you. Whatever makes you happy."
"Did you just..." Mikey gapes at him. "Did you just give me permission to be in charge of my own sex life?"
"Well, society's not going to do it," Gerard says. He's staring down at his coffee and she can see that he's turning a little pink.
"Thanks, " she tells him, feeling absurdly touched even as she starts blushing too.
"Can we talk about something else now?" he asks.
"Fuck yes," she agrees fervently. She will get her revenge on him later. "What are you reading?"
His eyes light up. "There are spoilers out for the V for Vendetta movie."
"Sweet!" she says, and gets up to squeeze him over on his chair so she can sit on the edge and look over his shoulder at the screen.
Mikey spends the rest of the day thinking about their conversation, more introspectively than she's entirely comfortable with, and she's glad for the distraction that playing the afternoon's show provides. After, she sits next to Gerard on a picnic table backstage and rests her head on his shoulder.
"You okay?" he asks, concerned.
She nods. "Just thinking." The velcro on the top of his bullet-proof vest digs into her cheek but she doesn't mind.
When she doesn't say anything else, he wraps an arm around her waist and pulls her into a one-sided hug.
They're both sweaty and rank and stage-hot and by all rights it should be too gross for words, but right now she can't imagine anything more comforting.
"And by the way?" she says.
"Yeah?"
"I still jerk off all the time, I'm not dead or anything," she tells him quietly, smirking.
Gerard groans, and she knows without having to look that he'll be blushing, probably worse than last time, and maybe squeezing his eyes shut like if he can do it hard enough it'll be like he never heard her say anything. Point for Mikey, for sure.
She lets him stew for a moment before she adds, much less flippantly, "It's just hard to start dating someone when you're on the road all the time."
"Any guy would be lucky to have you, touring and all," Gerard says immediately.
"Well, yeah," Mikey agrees, "but that doesn't make it easier for me."
"Nothing worthwhile is ever easy," Gerard advises faux-sagely.
Mikey punches him in the knee. "I will have you know that I am both easy and worthwhile."
Gerard gasps out something that's half-laughter, half-sob. "Why do you do this to me?"
"Because I can," she tells him, then almost as an afterthought she says, "Pete Wentz asked me out yesterday."
Gerard makes a noise like he's choking on his tongue.
"I said yes. I haven't decided if I'm going to sleep with him or not, though," she says thoughtfully.
"Whatever makes you happy," Gerard grits out through clenched teeth.
"Exactly," Mikey smiles.