A Song About Breaking Bones

There is a moment up onstage where Frank thinks, We could be here.

This is after the lights have gone down, after the instruments have been packed away in their tight plastic shells, after the floors have been swept. The blood from Mikey’s nose has been scrubbed from the stage from when Frank (accidentally) windmilled the back of his hand straight into poor Mikey’s face during their set, resulting in Nosebleed #4 of the week, and a fantastic blue bruise across the bridge of Mikey’s sharp nose. Frank’s ears are still ringing from the amp feedback and the pads of his fingers are scraped red from the frets on his guitar. Most of the sweat has dried from his clothes, leaving them stiff and baggy around his ass.

He walks across the stage, tapping out footsteps that sound hollow as they echo through the theatre, and he gathers an empty water bottle and two beer cans that they left behind when they’d exited stage-left. There’s something about the hours after a show that are just so intensely quiet that he can’t help but mourn the part of himself that thrashed about the stage with nothing but blood and frantic chords inside of him, possessed. The hours after a show that leave him, not possessed, but haunted.

(Frank echoes with ghosts as he disappears behind the curtain once again.)

He runs into Mikey while he’s searching around for a proper receptacle to recycle the crushed bottle and cans. Mikey, whose battered face is drawn into itself and vacant because the venue manager has told them that they can’t play here again until their erratic lead singer sobers the fuck up. It’s one thing to have a couple of drinks during a show, but it’s another to pass out on stage, choking on your own spit while your band plays on just to save face.

Mikey bites his lip like seeing Frank’s face is just about the last thing that his nerves can take, and he is silent with everything raw and poisoned that is pulsing inside of him.

“Is Gerard…?” Frank starts, and Mikey gives a short nod, mumbling, “Passed out on the bus,” in a weary voice. His brown eyes are watery and huge in the hollows of his face. There are tender purple bruises stamped across the skin under his lashes. He smoothes his mousy hair flat against his skull and blinks hard. Then he says in a very small voice, “He’s my brother, Frankie. He’s my brother and he’s killing himself.”

Frank’s heart slams around in his ribcage like a caged and wild bird until it feels like the bones just might shatter. In the morning he will be one giant bruise in bloom. Without thinking he walks right into Mikey, not even slowing his loping gait, so that when he reaches his friend, it’s more like crashing than anything else. He wants to hurtle straight through him just to tie feeling to reality. Mikey stumbles back a little as Frank unevenly wraps his arms around Mikey’s thin waist. Mikey is tall, and so Frank’s cheek rests just perfectly under his collar bone. Frank closes his eyes, willing Mikey to bridge the space between him until he does, slowly closing his arms around Frank’s shoulders and neck, holding onto him tight. Sometimes, especially on black-out nights like these, it’s all that they can do for comfort, clinging to each other wordlessly in an empty hallway in some city that they’ve already forgotten the name of.

Mikey finally pulls back first, his breath a deep sigh. “Ray sent me to find you, we’re getting ready to leave.” He doesn’t say the words “love” or “thanks” because he doesn’t need to after nine years of being best friends.

And Frank nods, folding his hand around Mikey’s fingers. Together they leave the venue behind, knowing how it looks and how it felt tonight, raw and pinching like a splinter made of glass, and how unlikely it is that they’ll ever find themselves back up on this stage with a crowd who loves them despite knowing little more than their names.

*

When Frank gets on the bus, the doors are just groaning shut and their driver is already pulling away from the curb. The mood is solemn, a harsh steel gray like the inside of his head. He feels like a thundercloud against the backdrop of a terrible sky.

Bob is sitting by the window, staring out at the street moving past them at a speed that blurs at the edges. Mikey pauses, bends to say something quiet to Bob as Frank inches by. God, he’s tired, and all he wants right now is a stiff drink, but even the thought of it makes him guilty, makes him sick. Makes him frightened of just how easily he and Gerard could switch skins. No,Frank contends, I’m not him. But he knows just how simple it would be to change.

By the time he’s reached the bunks, he already knows that it’s useless to try and get some sleep. They’ll be at the hotel in forty minutes, checked-in and settled in their rooms in the next hour. It’s two in the morning and Frank’s eyes are raw and gritty, as if he’s walking through clouds of dirt. His chest is strained so tight.

A cursory glance shows the curtain to Gerard’s bunk pulled closed, the rest of the beds empty and unmade. The band is scattered in avoidance and shame, the opposite of gravitation, like they are all magnets on the opposite end of the polar spectrum. Frank knows that Ray is off somewhere with his headphones on and a guitar already in his lap, even if he just played for three hours straight with hardly a break. It’s his way of blowing steam, the same way that Mikey will turn on the television and his iPod and his laptop, and text on his Sidekick until they reach the hotel, and even then he will light his face up with screens that don’t reflect his image back at him. The same way Bob will sit in the same spot for ten minutes, motionless, and then make the rounds, soundlessly passing by each of the guys just so that he knows that they’re okay before returning to the same spot for another ten minutes of switching off. And Frank will…despite everything torn up and disappointed inside of him, Frank will lie in his bunk with the covers all pushed down and listen for the only sounds that put him at ease: the rustle of sheets from Gerard’s bunk, his steady breathing pushing out from behind the curtain, all the appendages of sleep.

He does just that, pushing his pillows up against the wall so that he can sit partially upright, his feet reaching the three-quarter mark on the mattress. (For the first time that night, all things are suddenly still in a stale way, thin and fierce.) Despite everything, it’s all he can do not to crawl into Gerard’s bunk beside him, just to feel that breath on his neck.

*

The whole hotel thing takes a lot longer than expected. They’re overbooked, the manager says, an unexpected red-eye tour bus from Milwaukee for the lupus convention this weekend. The problem is that the band has five people, plus Brian, and the hotel only has five rooms left. So there’s this ten-minute debate about who has to double up, everyone mostly expecting Frank to volunteer to bunk with Gerard, but Frank is still out in the bus making sure that Gerard doesn’t choke on his own vomit while he sleeps, and the courtesy rule is that no one makes any decisions for anyone else. Eventually it’s decided that Mikey will take the second bed in Ray’s room, and at the next hotel they’ll splurge for suites. By 3:30 in the morning everyone is lugging their duffel bags up to their respective hotel rooms, and Frank is half-carrying a slowly sobering Gerard to the elevator.

“C’mon, Gee, you’ve gotta work with me, buddy,” he mumbles into Gerard’s hair as he tries to hold him up with one shoulder. He simultaneously wrestles with jamming a plastic key card in the lock, but it’s hard with Gerard’s fingers curled around his collar bone, digging into the dip there. It slides in on the third try, flashing green, and Frank kicks the door open with his heel, his hands full of Gerard.

“Ugh, god, I can smell myself,” Gerard mutters through a mouthful of his own hair as Frank juggles him toward the bed. “Frankie, can you smell me?”

When Frank inhales he gets a sour mix of beer, vomit, body oil and Gerard’s cigarettes. “Yeah, Gee, you’re smelling pretty fucking foul,” he says offhandedly as he pushes Gerard onto the bed. (And yet something about that smell, how they have always come off the stage so blind with energy and emotion and all those fucking screams, and come crashing together, always, their lips, that sweat smell just proof that it’s real.)

Gerard falls back with a slight whoosh of air from his lungs and bounces slightly against the mattress, his legs swinging off the edge. “I should shower before I sleep,” he groans, but he doesn’t move from the bed, and Frank just ignores the comment on the whole. (It’s not like Gerard has stopped being full of empty words, just that Frank has become used to picking out the ones that he will remember later on as Things That Gerard Might Actually Mean One Day). He kneels on the worn hotel carpet so that he is level with Gerard’s knees, pulling Gerard’s feet towards his chest. Yanking the laces so that they come undone, he quickly nudges Gerard’s feet out of the battered shoes and tosses them by the television stand one at a time. Next come the socks (and god, he really hasn’t bathed in days), then the fake leather jacket, then the sticky, sweat-stiffened t-shirt. Gerard wobbles around like an infant, unable to support his own weight.

“Lift your hips, Gerard,” Frank says with his hand already on the button of Gerard’s too-tight jeans, and Gerard obediently complies, wriggling his ass around a little in a semblance of helping Frank relieve him of the dirty clothing. All it does is make Frank lose his grip.

Frank scoops his arms up around Gerard’s calves and swings Gerard’s lower body until he’s lying the right way across the bed, his head crushed into the pillows and his legs sprawled out over the bed sheets. There are bruises already forming along Gerard’s pale shins and knees from where he crawled across the stage.

“Get some sleep, Gee, we’ve got another travel day tomorrow,” Frank says, even though he knows that tomorrow is really already today, just four or five hours from now, and that Frank himself will probably spend them watching HBO instead of actually trying to shut his eyes. (And he’s always kind of liked the idea of being awake when the sun comes up, as if he’s seeing something secret and antique, something that has existed longer than Frank can think to imagine. It doesn’t stop him from trying.)

He’s reaching over to twist off the lamp switch when Gerard’s clammy hand clamps around Frank’s wrist. The curl of Gerard’s thin, tar-stained fingers is so familiar that Frank almost smiles. “Frankie, where are you going?” Gerard leers through half-lidded eyes. He tugs roughly, yanking Frank over the edge of the bed so that he is sprawled across Gerard’s chest.

And Frank can’t help himself, for a minute he allows himself to be drawn into Gerard’s sloppy kiss. He opens his mouth when Gerard’s tongue prods against his bottom lip and he clenches his fingers around Gerard’s slack jaw. It’s hot and careless and god, it’s good. But then he tastes the vomit and the beer and something else, something bitter and metallic, and he pushes away from Gerard’s chest and has to breathe in patterns of two and three before he can chase away the feeling of wanting to vomit himself.

“Stop it, Gee,” he says quietly, averting his eyes as he retreats from his kneeling position at the edge of the bed. He finds his feet and quickly tangles his fingers in his own hair, pulling out and away from his head so that the hair stands practically on end. The dull sting at his scalp momentarily focuses his mind on things other than Gerard’s red, swollen lips.

Gerard’s voice teeters drunkenly on the edge of a whine. “Come on, Frankie,” he says, fluttering his eyelashes in a way he knows makes Frank’s knees a little weak. How he knows all of those little weaknesses and how they taste. He says, “Stay,” and brushes his fingers over the small of Frank’s back.

“Oh, quit it with the eyes, Gerard, I’m not fucking around tonight,” Frank snaps, a little harsher than he means it to come out, but it’s not like it’s not true, or even that he can take it back anyway. (If Gerard is a master of empty words, Frank is just the opposite, a keeper of words too full, and too heavy with things that scratch at his skin.) He flicks off the lamp and straightens his shirt across his chest. Then he stomps across the dark hotel room and clutches at the doorknob. Behind him, Gerard is quiet on the bed, not even shifting over the sheets.

Frank takes the elevator to the next floor up, where his room is located at the end of the hall, opposite the ice machine. Even close to four in the morning, some jackass is creeping down the hall to fill up his ice bucket for his mixed drinks and whiskey. Frank doesn’t bother to unpack. There is a strange comfort to know that he can live his life out of a bag. He lies down on the queen-sized bed in the center of the room and flips on the television to drown out the noise. But it’s what he sees when he closes his eyes that keeps him awake for the rest of the night.
*

In the morning he wakes to a courtesy call from the receptionist at the front desk. Frank’s eyes are raw and sore like someone sprinkled salt on them in the night. He showers quickly and slips on a fresh t-shirt. Wherever they are (he can’t tell from a quick glance out the window, except that the streets are narrow, and the buildings too, as if huddled together in preparation for the storm that is brewing just inside the line of dark, shifting clouds); wherever it is they’ve ended up, there are few people out on the sidewalks, and it’s too early for shadows. Those who are out don’t look up as they walk by, their faces tipped down to the cement. Frank suddenly feels quite alone as he shoves his clothes from last night into the front pouch of his bag and slips out the door, leaving his keycard on the dresser.

He’s somewhat relieved to find that he isn’t the last one to the breakfast bar in the hotel lobby. Mikey sits hunched miserably over a cup of coffee, his face close to the steam, so that when he looks up, his nose and eyes still tinted a bluish charcoal color from the night before, his thin cheeks are damp and heated, a deceiving blush. (To Frank, Mikey has always somewhat resembled a marionette, lovely and wooden and cross with loosened hinges. His strings are so thin.) He mumbles a belated, “Morning,” and averts his eyes once more. Frank nods anyway, knowing that Mikey won’t catch it. It’s not that Mikey’s pissed at him or anything, just that in all the years that Frank’s known him, Mikey has never once been glad to see the sun rise, and it shows like a scar on his weary face.

“Good morning, Frankie,” Ray beams, and this is how the tension breaks, as it always has. Every morning, like clockwork, Ray gets up before the sun and goes for a jog by himself. It doesn’t matter if they’re in Japan, New Orleans, the relentless heat of Los Angeles. He says it’s a mood-lifter, like sex and chocolate and your favorite movie at one in the morning. He says it helps him center himself so that he doesn’t have to worry about breaking down in the middle of the day. Frank’s never understood Ray’s need for exertion and fucking movement at ass o’ clock in the morning on a daily basis, but then again, it’s Ray who is sitting serenely at their table with his plate of eggs, and Frank who is trembling like a rubber band pulled too taut, so maybe he has no place to talk.

He squeezes in next to Bob, dumping his bag on the pile of luggage they’ve left near their booth, and says, “Yes, as black as it comes,” when the waitress asks if he’d like coffee, and then nearly cries when she tells him it’s a non-smoking booth. His teeth clenched tight, he shoves his package of cigarettes back in his jeans pocket, where he will feel them against his skin through a hole in the material, and it will drive him mad for the next half an hour. (It’s not so much the nicotine as it is the relief he finds in having something to hold between his fingers, as if he doesn’t know what to do with the strange appendages when they’re asked to be quiet and still.)

When the waitress comes back with his coffee and a plate of toast, he quickly dives in and burns off half of his taste buds with the very first sip. He doesn’t stop drinking, and the burn spreads to his throat, his chest, the pit of his belly. Frank drinks until the cup is empty and then sets it down, his insides on fire. Bob and Ray are talking quietly across the table, discussing tomorrow’s show in blessedly low voices. Frank looks up with his tired eyes and notices Mikey staring queerly at him across the table.

“Do I have shit on my face?” he asks, rubbing at his jaw line. He hasn’t shaved in a couple of days and he’s getting a bit scruffy.

Mikey just does that thing where he raises a single eyebrow, the thin line stretching halfway up his pale forehead before stopping there like a smudge of ink. It is a look so familiar that Frank just automatically files it away under the “Mikey” category of his brain and returns his attention elsewhere. “Where the hell’s your jacket, Frankie?” Mikey asks. “You do know it’s like, forty degrees out there, right?”

Frank wrinkles his eyebrows. The hotel lobby is cool, but not cold. He asks, “Where the hell are we, anyway?” and Mikey, Ray, Bob, and Brian all say, “Lyon,” all at the same time, and then it gets quiet. Frank can’t believe that they’re in France and he wasn’t even aware. He recalls a plane ride weeks ago, and then long stretches of just the tour bus, the six of them breathing the same air and crowding the room with the television to watch hours of reality shows and whatever movie happened to be airing on AMC. (He remembers, too, just faintly, the kiss in the terminal, how it was almost a promise, but always more like a goodbye, for no reason that Frank has ever been able to figure out. It seems that Gerard is always trying to leave through his lips.)

Brian breaks the silence first, clearing his throat like an apology before he’s even spoken. “Uh, where’s Gerard?” he asks, and even though his eyes move around the table, the question is obviously aimed at Frank.

His toast is a little too burnt on one side, black chars crumbling underneath the pads of Frank’s fingers, and the other side is limp and a little wet. Frank pushes the plate away and ducks his head in a shrug. “Dunno,” he mumbles, fiddling with his empty coffee cup; the cup itself is still steaming slightly in the cool room, even if all the coffee is gone. He looks up and brushes his hair away from his face, adding, “Last I saw of him was when I left him in his room last night.”

Brian looks at him skeptically. “You left him?”

Frank bristles, sitting up straight against the booth. “I’m not his fucking babysitter, Brian,” he replies coldly, and is about to go off further about his four hours of sleep and this fucking headache that he’s had for three weeks straight and how when he said yes, signed on for the band, he never agreed to any of this bullshit, when a soft, uncomfortable cough sounds from a few feet away, and everyone looks in that direction.

Gerard is standing fully-dressed in tight, dark jeans and a zip-up jacket, his hair wet and curled behind his ears. His eyes are bruised as if they were popped out of his skull and then jammed back in. “I, uh, I made Frank leave me,” he says quietly, his voice a pained rasp. “Last night. He offered to stay and I told him to…to go.”

The lie is obvious, weak and shaky on its feet, but with Gerard standing there, looking for all the world as if he’s been losing sleep since the last decade, nobody is willing to dispute it. Mikey stares up at Gerard as if Gerard just told him their parents have died, and Frank, Frank wills himself to look away. He knows that look, knows that Mikey is slowly but surely losing faith in the one person he has consistently believed in since probably before he can remember; and it kills Frank, absolutely wrecks him inside to see his best friend’s eyes go black and narrow with disappointment. (He remembers the time Mikey showed up at his house in the middle of the night and said, “My brother is going to make us famous,” and Frank said, “Okay,” because he really, truly believed in Mikey, even more so than Gerard, and the next day he got in a shitty van headed for California and never looked back.)

“I, uh…I’m sorry,” Gerard continues in a low mumble, and Frank isn’t sure if he’s apologizing for the worry and tension he’s caused within the band, or the distress, the distrust, or even if it’s just for being late to fucking breakfast. Either way, his face is pale and sheepish, and his wrists look devastatingly thin.

It’s Bob who finally tilts his head in a nod, his lips twitching up in a gruff, but forgiving smile. Despite his menacing demeanor, it is always Bob who caves first, accepting apologies for everything, from broken guitar strings to a bent-up fender that one (and only) time Frank drove home drunk from a party in Bob’s brand-new Honda. Frank often wonders how Bob does it, and then is all at once grateful for Bob’s casualness, and his orientation. Frank likes to think of the band as a compass, with Bob lingering at the center, watching his friends drift off in all directions; he knows it in his heart that they will forever be tied at the middle by something more powerful than they can even comprehend, and that force inexplicably exists in Bob’s cool calm.

“Come on, Gerard, squeeze in,” Bob says now, waving his hand toward the edges of the booth.

Brian nods too, draping his arm around Mikey along the back of the seat. “Last chance for coffee for a few hours,” he adds, smirking a little, and Frank knows that Brian is thinking, somewhat sympathetically, of the hangover Gerard must be facing.

There is a moment where Gerard hesitates, and Frank can see it on his face; how he feels like maybe he should walk out of the hotel right now and just keep walking until the road ends and the earth falls away and he stops being on the forefront of everybody’s mind. Frank’s fingers twitch at the thought, and he knows that if the day were to come that Gerard left, Frank would follow him unconsciously, as if by impulse or magic or just by nature itself. (On their compass, even though Frank and Gerard are on opposite sides of the polar spectrum, they are always on the same path.)

But Gerard doesn’t walk out, and he doesn’t try to hide. He slowly squeezes his body into the booth, nudging Frank aside with his right hip as he balances on the edge. They don’t look at each other, but Gerard’s hand settles repentantly along the inseam of Frank’s thigh, like he is afraid, and Frank feels the bitterness of his coffee deep at the back of his throat. He reaches down and slides his fingers up the sleeve of Gerard’s jacket, and when he feels the swell of Gerard’s veined forearm, he digs his nails in as hard as he can. Frank feels it along the whole left side of his body as Gerard tenses from the pain, but when he glances over Gerard is merely biting his lip, hard, as he concentrates on what Ray is saying to him. He can almost feel the stick of Gerard’s skin under his nails as he loosens his grip and peeks down at the deep, crescent-moon grooves indented in the flesh. They flex like tiny wriggling fish under Gerard’s tightened skin. His anger has faded to a throbbing pulse in the hollow of his chest, and he breathes out in a steady stream between his lips. Gently, he wraps his fingers around Gerard’s wrist, and holds them there until they’re ready to leave the hotel.

*

At midday they are driving through a sparsely populated town that no-one can find the name of on their map. The great, intimidating swell of the Rhône river sweeps along the left side of their bus, and it seems gray and angry in the harsh lighting. Parts of the river are brittle with ice. Brian has said that they need to be in Cannes by noon tomorrow, but they’ve already stopped twice today for snacks and walking and a desperately-needed break from each other’s faces, so there doesn’t seem to be any real rush. France is a narrow country, and it is winter, and everyone is feeling a little bit homesick and worn down.

Frank isn’t quite sure where everyone is, except that as soon as they all boarded the bus again after the last stop in Givors? Vienne?; he really can’t remember the signs on the outskirts of the towns, but noticed that everyone, even Brian, had retreated to separate corners of the bus, tired of being around each other after so many months of this. (Whatever “this” is, Frank can’t quite articulate, except that it’s foreign to him, and bitter, like the leaves that always settle in the dregs of his tea.) Frank is seated at a table near the kitchenette, reading a book his mother mailed him last week. Every week she mails him a new one, and he devours them like sweets, savoring each word and missing his mother’s face. He dreams, sometimes, of how nice it would be to simply get on a plane and go home to her house wedged away like an old book in Jersey, on a street whose sign had been stolen long ago.

He is closing in on the fourth chapter of his novel when he suddenly feels a change in the atmosphere of the kitchen, a tightening of the air. Someone is behind him, hovering close by, and Frank can’t help it, he feels a little sick in the bottom of his stomach, as if he has been punched. (He thinks, somewhere inside of his head, that it’s the magnets in them, constantly repelling the other as they try to become close.) He breathes out slowly, and Gerard wraps his arms around Frank’s shoulders and chest.

“What’re you reading?” he mumbles against the shell of Frank’s ear. His voice is soft and deeper than normal, and when Frank leans back into the embrace, Gerard smells like sleep, warm and a little bit musty.

Frank inhales a little bit and rests his head against Gerard’s collar bone, tilting his temple into Gerard’s neck. “Camus,” he replies quietly, and tips the cover of L’Étranger for Gerard to see. “Brian’s been e-mailing with my mom back-and-forth, and she’s been sending me these books every week to keep me entertained on the road, and he must have mentioned we’d be going to France…” He trails off, feeling like he’s talking too much, like he’s trying too hard to take up all of this empty space. Gerard is warm against his shoulders, and his hands are pleasantly tight near his armpits. Frank lets his eyes fall shut.

The only sound then is the drone of the engine and Mikey’s soft humming from the driver’s seat at the front of the bus. Frank dog-ears his book and then turns in his seat so that Gerard has to straighten up again to keep from falling forward. “Were you sleeping?” Frank asks idly, pushing his fingers up under the hem of Gerard’s t-shirt where there is only bare skin.

Gerard makes a quiet kind of sighing sound at the back of his throat and looks down with bleary eyes. He nods and brushes some hair behind his ears. It’s dried funny from where he slept on it wet after they’d gotten back on the bus this morning, and bits and pieces of it stand away from his scalp like little mountain peaks. It makes Frank all at once incredibly charmed and achingly sad.

“Brian says we’ll probably have to stop in Valence for the night,” Frank continues, brushing his hands over Gerard’s hip bones. “It’s supposed to start snowing in an hour or so, and it’ll be hard to keep going until the storm breaks.”

“We’ve got a hotel?” Gerard intones, and Frank shakes his head. “We haven’t made any reservations, and budget’s kind of tight as it is, so we’re bunking tonight,” he says to Gerard’s belt, tracing the line of it across Gerard’s hips.

Gerard whines a little and relocates his hands to Frank’s hair. “I know I should be grateful or whatever that we’ve even got a bus to get around on, but—”

“I know,” Frank cuts him off, and glances up through his eyelashes. It’s hard when they’re on buses all the fucking time, when they’re sleeping just a few feet apart but cramped up in these tiny spaces with no room to move; when they’ve been fighting for what seems like months, and it’s really starting to hurt in a way that seems almost permanent. The past few times that they’ve had hotels, Gerard has gotten blindingly and impressively fucked-up before the sun’s even gone down, and by the time they make it to the room Frank wants nothing to do with him. His skin crawls when Gerard is nearby. He’s just so fucking tired of pushing Gerard away night after night, tired of lying awake, alone, tired of his own fucking right hand.

Frank leans forward in the thick gray light of the kitchen and places a soft, dry kiss to the skin just under Gerard’s navel. The dark hairs there are very fine and tickle his nose, and he subconsciously fights the urge to sneeze. Above him, Gerard makes a low sound and, ever-so-slightly, his grip on Frank’s hair tightens. Everything in Frank is a reflex, tightens with a small shiver, too.

“Who’s in the bunks?” he murmurs into Gerard’s skin.

It takes a moment for Gerard to answer, swallowing thickly, but he says, “No-one. Ray’s in the studio with Bob, Brian’s up front with Mikey, Worm is…everyone else, the crew, they’re all on the tech bus.”

“Okay,” Frank says, and he stands up from the table and pushes in close. For a moment Frank just presses into him, the length of their bodies, foreheads smashed tightly together; the ease with which they have always fit into each other. Gerard’s lips on his are hot and a little painful, greedy with teeth and tongue. Frank licks into his mouth and tugs on the back of Gerard’s head a little insistently. The lines of their bodies meet and mesh like fragile wires. (Frank wonders, then, if their bodies have always fit like this, would have done so, in theory, even if hadn’t met like they had, become the people they are; or if it’s simply that they’ve learned how to seep into each other, to eradicate space, in an attempt to keep what they have tightly locked away.)

“I’m sorry about last night,” Gerard says quietly against Frank’s mouth, and they stop moving, foreheads pressed together hard and lips still opened against each other’s, releasing hot, frantic pants that don’t quite dissipate, but spread out like a thin fog around their heads.

Frank keeps his eyes closed, doesn’t want to see Gerard’s earnest gaze, his fear, his uncertainty about where he stands. He just says, “Please, Gee, I don’t want to fight right now,” and Gerard says, “Alright,” and when they kiss again it doesn’t hurt. He folds in close to the curve of Gerard’s body and then pushes away.

Gerard makes a strangled, unhappy sound at Frank’s back as he moves through the center of the bus, but once he catches on to where Frank is headed, his footsteps are sharp and quick to follow. Rounding a corner, Frank reaches his hand out behind him and is relieved when Gerard’s fingers latch on. He’s not sure why this is such a surprise, or why this vertigo is particularly intense, or why it always feels like the last time, I swear, but it never is. His grip is tight and warm and when they reach Frank’s bunk (it is the farthest from the hall, and possibly the tidiest), Gerard still doesn’t let go, pinning Frank’s hand above his head as they tumble down onto the sheets.

(And, really, at this point, everything in Frank’s life feels like just another variation of falling, and he often wonders when he’ll hit the ground and how badly it might hurt, or if he’ll only just feel another variation of relief, different, but good.)

It is a tight squeeze in the bunk, and maybe a bit uncomfortable, but it’s been days or even weeks since they’ve said two words to each other that haven’t ended in screams, and Frank is so goddamn tired, and he wants…he just wants. Gerard has showered this morning and he still smells like soap and shampoo, and cigarettes, and sleep, and those are really all just different words for saying that he doesn’t smell like booze, and it’s all a little heady in this enclosed space. Frank squirms against Gerard’s weight above him, curls his wrist into the pressure of Gerard’s fingers holding him here. It’s a desperation that makes him push his hips up into the empty space between them, distracted moans slipping out in all the places where their lips don’t quite meet. All of this noise is too much for keeping this hidden, but he can’t help himself. Frank twists his hands in Gerard’s shirt and thinks, This is everything that I am, for you, and in some strange way Gerard seems to get it, like he always does (just like melting into Frank’s skin) and he curls closer, his hands taking everything they can. (And when they get like this, just the two of them with nothing in between, it even stops feeling like a sacrifice, to be what Gerard needs.)

Gerard is rutting down on Frank’s hips in quick, jerky motions, and he only pauses to let Frank push his shirt off and to slide Frank’s own away from his arms, abandoning them in a tangle at the foot of the bed. He knows that Frank has always loved the part of this where they undress each other like it’s the first time, fingers shaky and clumsy with lust, and so he makes an obvious effort to slow down. His eyes go dark and hot and he chews his bottom lip full of dents. Frank shudders under Gerard’s hands on his waist and lifts his hips again and again until it’s only bare skin that is brushing against the sheets and the flesh of Gerard’s thighs. The small, dark hairs there, and the shallow silver of stretch marks, that Frank has seen thousands of times against the flicker of a pale, pale moon.

When Frank looks up Gerard’s eyes are already there, waiting, and Frank gets this sickly-intense feeling that he can read every thought that is falling through Frank’s mind, and all the thoughts that ever have fallen, and it makes his stomach drop out and his limbs go kind of slack. He fears that he is just another skeleton, and that maybe Gerard is tired of just bones and sharp words; that maybe this is why Gerard drinks and takes pills and goes strange places with iridescent mirrors. Why he comes away from it all, iridescent in a way that Frank falls unwillingly into the shadow of. If maybe Gerard loves the part of Frank that becomes a hungry beast on the outskirts of their skins, but not the part of him who stays, stretched out and thin and frail when it comes to fighting Gerard’s monsters.

(He thinks, anyway, that Gerard would love him if he weren’t so intent on burning the world just to see if it could possibly still love him back.)

*

Most of the other buses have already arrived at the camp grounds by the time the band bus shudders to a stop just outside the city limits. Frank is back to quietly reading his book, this time on the battered couch shoved up against one wall; head balanced in his lap, Gerard dozes serenely with his hand curled around Frank’s knee. (The way he holds on like he expects an evacuation, stirring fitfully every time Frank stretches out his leg; it’s as if he’s become afraid of all the future moments, rather than growing pale at the sight of what they’ve become now. Frank can’t even remember the last time that he felt like they were separate people.) The blood has been cut off from Frank’s feet long enough for them to throb with an uncomfortable numbness. He lifts his hand from Gerard’s neck, scratches the side of his nose, turns the page. Reflexively curls his fingers back into the hair that spills over Gerard’s face, tucking the loose strands behind one pink ear.

With a loud groan, Mikey pushes through the curtain that separates the bus’s living area from the driver’s cab. His glasses are smudged and his clothes are rumpled from sitting in one place too long, and if he were ever to look more like a stumbling puppet, the time is now. In the insipid winter light that filters through the windows, the bruising along his nose and eyes looks even worse, like soot and unripe fruit.

“Time is it?” he mumbles through a yawn, twisting around at the waist until his spine crumbles with a series of snappy pops.

Frank tilts his head over the back of the couch to read the digital clock on the microwave door. “Bout six o’ clock,” he says, straightening with care around Gerard’s sleeping form. He dog-ears the book and lets it fall to the couch cushion beside him, and then there is just silence. Frank watches Mikey watching him and doesn’t say a thing. He doesn’t know if there are words in there anyway.

Finally Mikey stoops to touch his toes with a low sigh and then leans back into the wall. “Listen, Frank,” he says in a voice that is tired like winter, and he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose with the heel of his palm. “I’m not gonna do the speech thing now because I know it’ll just piss you off and you’ll probably smack me in the face again—”

“Dude, I swear to God, that was an accident,” Frank stresses, feeling somewhat affronted, but Mikey just holds up one thin hand and waves it around, as if he’s brushing all the words and tension away. (Often, Frank has sought Mikey out in the middle of the night just to hold his fingers, scrambling for their tight grasp and their knowing empathy; even in sleep, Mikey’s hands know enough to hold on tight and absorb the sting of disappointment.) Now Frank stills, his own hands resting along Gerard’s back. He wonders if it’s somehow the same.

Rubbing his eyes under his glasses, Mikey continues, “Just—God, I can’t believe I’m saying this to you—just…don’t forgive him this time, Frankie, alright?”

Frank feels his body tense all over, and he presses hard into seat of the couch. “What the hell does that even mean, Mikey?” he asks, and his voice is terse and cool.

Mikey walks into the kitchenette and roots around the fridge with probing, meticulous fingers. His face in the too-bright glow of the refrigerator light is sharp and carved with shadows. (When Frank first met him, he considered the fact that Mikey might merely consist of these things alone, qualities too shallow and gaunt to become close to. He has always counted it a blessing the many times he has been proven wrong.) Letting the refrigerator door swing shut, Mikey pops open a carton of orange juice and takes a swig from it that stands out sharp against the column of his throat.

“Mikey, goddammit, you can’t just say shit like that and then ignore me,” Frank says irately, his voice quietly fuming. “What the hell are you talking about?” He wants to yell, wants to snap out of his skin and leak across the floor. For months now Frank has let his blood set to boil, and yet…and yet. Gerard’s peacefully sleeping face bends up like the eye of a storm, the cool center around which Frank gravitates.

The light of the fridge returns as Mikey props the carton back in among cans of beer and crusty loaves of French bread, a jar of jam, butter. The glare of it against his glasses blinds his eyes from Frank’s view, but it can’t stop him from feeling Mikey’s narrowed gaze on his own. “I told you I’m not going to lecture you, Frank, because you’re a fucking adult now and I can’t stop you from doing what you’re doing with my brother. But I meant what I said: don’t forgive him, Frankie. It doesn’t matter if the rest of us ignore him or yell at him or leave him on the side of the fucking road. It’s you.” He palms his face and rubs the tight, lined skin around his mouth. “If you forgive him again for what he’s doing to you, Frank, he’s just going to carry on with the way things are until he kills himself. But if you…if you tell him to stop, if you tell him it’s all over if he keeps this shit up…he’ll do it for you, Frankie. He…he won’t lose you.”

Frank considers this in the rapidly dwindling sunlight creeping in from the bus windows, watching it paint freckles of red and gold across Gerard’s cheeks. On so many nights Frank has pushed Gerard out of their hotel room, only to find him asleep out in the hallway in the morning, cheek pressed hard into the matted floral carpeting, shoulders slumped against the door. So many nights where Gerard has moaned the wrong fucking name and come on Frank’s face without warning him. Nights with Gerard gray-in-the-face with drugs, swollen like the atmosphere. Too many nights that Frank has seen the sun rise, alarming and tragic and striking with its tattered hands.

(Even Gerard’s emptiest words, Frank has kept them in a pocket in the lining of his withered heart.)

*

In the end, Frank leaves Gerard sleeping restlessly on the couch, leaves Mikey in the barren field where the buses are parked for the night, and sets off into town because he can’t stand to hear his own voice any longer, echoing in all the empty space they’ve planted here. It’s about a ten-minute walk from the country to the town, even with the crisp wind tugging on Frank’s limbs. The darkening sky is the color of stones and shadows, and there are no stars. Even though they are officially in the south of France, the air is still bitter, and sharp against Frank’s bared cheeks.

He passes Ray, who has wandered over to the tech bus to talk to one of the guitar technicians about tomorrow’s show; the amplifiers have been giving off this clanging sound recently, like aluminum, and even though it sounds kind of awesome when it’s thundering around them onstage, Ray is worried about how it sounds from the seats. Too artificial, and ominous, like a death rattle. Frank catches snatches of the conversation but only nods his head at Ray’s fleeting smile. It isn’t long before he can no longer hear any of their chatter, but only the sound of insects buzzing in the tall grasses around the dirt road, and the electrical drone of the sky preparing to break. The smell of impending snow reminds Frank, once again, of Jersey.

*

By the time he gets to town, the sky is like the murky bottom of a lake, and Frank is regretting that he only wore a thin zip-up jacket over his long-sleeved t-shirt. The cuffs of his pants are caked with dirt from the road he came in on.

He wanders into the first lit-up place he comes across, a cozy inn with a bar that blessedly has no flashing neon signs strung up or cranky jukeboxes cluttering up the floor. No one is hovering in the doorway, spilling out onto the street like viruses. Everything about the pub, from the cigarette smoke like ocean mists to the rich, dark wood floors and ceiling beams, reminds Frank of his father and grandfather smoking cigars in the den when he was four and five and six years old. He breathes out a breath he didn’t know that he was holding (and with it, a part of him, the sick, broken Frank who has felt only like an ancient plague these long months—he breathes this solid aberration right out of him and leaves it behind with the closing of the door).

The bartender is an attractive woman at least twice his age, with long, tapered fingers and gray eyes with lines like spider webs sprawling out from the corners. She is wiping down the counter with a damp rag and humming under her breath, a song that sounds less like a sensation than a mournful lullaby. When she sees Frank, she lifts up one finger and folds the rest against her palm, calling, “Un instant, s'il vous plait” over the low murmur of voices in the barroom.

Frank rubs his chilled fingers together and blows a few hot breaths over them for good measure as he takes a seat at the bar. The stools are low and the leather worn soft. Across the room, far enough from the alcohol and those who drink it, a fire burns carefully in a scorched fireplace, providing ample heat and a soft, feathery glow for the atmosphere. Frank can feel the burn seeping into his wind-beaten cheeks, like a kiss of blood.

After ducking beneath the counter to hoist up a few more boxes of napkins and pretzels to refill the bowls set out on the bar, the bartender makes her way over to Frank and smiles to reveal teeth that are just slightly too big for her mouth, and crooked the closer they get to meeting in the middle. “Que voulez-vous de boire, mon cher?”, she asks in a voice like syrup, slow and sweet.

“Uh…” Frank bites down on his lip and racks his mind for spare tires from his high school French. Nothing comes, and he can feel his hands desperately wanting to mime out a big fucking drink, and keep ‘em coming, please. He starts to shrug his shoulders and say that he doesn’t understand French when the bartender chuckles softly and pins back a few more strands of her hair. “English it is, yes?” she tries with a slow wink.

“Yes,” Frank breathes out, smiling broadly in relief. “I’m sorry, it’s just that I didn’t even know I was in France until this morning, and I’m not exactly in the most logical state of mind right now…” He pauses sheepishly and fidgets with the sleeves of his jacket. “I could just really use a drink right now, is what I’m trying to say.”

The bartender nods. “It is winter. Everyone could have use of a drink to keep warm.” Her accent is a little clumsy around the English phrasing, but she speaks certainly, as if each word is practiced and convinced. “What you need is a whiskey.”

“Bless you,” Frank says, and they share a smile like it’s a secret.

(In the back of his mind, a voice wheedles at the surface, poking sharp, dagger-like words into his conscience, of hypocrisy, of betrayal, of indecency. Frank does not care, and with each swallow of whiskey, he hears the voice less and less, until he no longer hears it at all, but the stab-wounds are still there.)

By the time Gerard wanders into the inn, Frank has knocked back a couple of whiskeys, but he isn’t really drinking to get fucked up, so he’s taken it slow; as a result, he feels like he just woke up from a long, uninterrupted sleep. But he isn’t drunk, which is the important thing, because the last thing Frank needs tonight is to be wasted when he tells Gerard to start shaping the fuck up and get his life under control.

He watches Gerard exchange words and a credit card with the innkeeper at the front desk with a foggy interest. Just from the curve of Gerard’s back underneath his leather jacket, Frank can tell that Gerard is on something. He is tense, tight around the hips and shoulders, and as he speaks in a quiet voice across the pub, he gestures widely with frequent, fluttering hands.

After the brief encounter, he turns, and Frank watches his eyes flick across the room at high-speed, all the same skeptical, as if they don’t quite trust what they are looking for. They zero in on Frank (and he feels it in him, the slow tug under his skin as Gerard’s eyes find his own), and he walks over to Frank with determination and respite in his skittish step.

“How did you know where I was?” Frank asks, slightly bewildered now that Gerard is standing right here in front of him, in a wintery town at the head of southern France, snow melting through the soft strands of his hair (the sky, too, can break down and just let go, if given the chance).

Gerard pushes his pale, stiff fingers into his pockets and grins a little guiltily. “Uh, Mikey told me you would have gone someplace where you knew I would find you, so…I guess it doesn’t say much about my character, or your predictability, but I’m just glad you’re here after all.”

The pinch in Frank’s heart is weak, but jarring. He twists around his bar stool and taps his feet against the metal bars that serve as foot rests. “Damn Mikey and his foolproof logic, huh?” he says halfheartedly, but it doesn’t sound much like a joke once it’s out in the open, and Frank would have rather he hadn’t said anything at all, to be honest. He picks at a hole in the thigh of his jeans.

“So I, um, I got us a room here.” Gerard isn’t looking at Frank when he says it, but picking at the white crescents of his blunt fingernails.

“A room?” Frank echoes quietly. “What about the budget, aren’t we supposed to crash in the bunks until we make it to Cannes?”

“I paid for it myself,” Gerard replies, “You know, like out-of-pocket?”

“Oh.” If Frank wasn’t already so hot from the fire at the back of the room, he would feel his cheeks flush, surging with misplaced blood.

Gerard looks up from his nails, and his shifty eyes are too-bright and hollow, the eyes he trades in nightly for his humanity. (Frank remembers a night where Gerard came to him, just weeks after Mikey first introduced them, and his eyes were radiant and sober, and endless in a way that made Frank shiver and think of the ocean, quiet and dancing with reflected light.) He says, “I’m trying, Frankie,” and all Frank can think is, I am ashamed of you, but he just says, “Okay, Gee,” and lets Gerard lead him up to their room.

*

(They leave the window propped open and start a fire of their own in the fireplace near the foot of the bed. Snow like cigarette ash flies in and around the room, settling on the carpet and the desk before melting away, apparitions of winter. The chill makes him ache to the very bones.

It’s when Gerard kisses him that Frank realizes that tonight, for the first time, they are on equal footing, expanding on the same searing buzz. He can taste the bitterness in Gerard’s mouth, and blood from where he’s bitten the inside of his cheek. He can taste the collision of whiskey and cocaine, wilted and growing stale, and desperate for company. Frank is desperate like a drug, clawing closer, a slave to skin.

He forgets his sin, and in its place he wonders if it will ever stop, this feeling that they are hurdling towards something of an end.

He thinks, Yes. Full everywhere that Gerard touches, full, full of everything, everywhere.)

*

Frank wakes up at a nondescript time in the night, early enough for his head to ache, but not so early that he feels intrusive. He peels himself away from Gerard’s chest and trudges, naked, into the bathroom. It is small, and the shower doesn’t have a tub, just a head that sticks out of the wall and trickles a stream of water down onto the top of his head, like rain. He doesn’t stay under it for long, just long enough to wash off the sweat and dried semen, long enough to purge the whiskey that has globbed up in his pores. He stays until he is sure that his skin has turned to steam. When he emerges, the steam has cleared his head, and he actually feels exhausted, all the way to the core. All he wants is to climb back into bed and feel Gerard pressed against him in a way that he’s missed, desperately, for longer than he cares to remember.

When he pulls back the shower curtain, Frank nearly jumps out of his skin.

Balanced on the edge of the closed toilet lid is Gerard, naked, his head bowed down (as if in prayer, his hollow head a silent contrition). A plastic ziplock baggie full of pills sags wretchedly in the curved palm of his hand. Some of them Frank recognizes: the pills for Gerard’s depression, some low-key painkillers, a handful of liquid gel caps for head colds. The rest are unmarked and muted in tones of nicotine-yellow or noncommittal white.

“Gerard, man, what the fuck? A bag full of pills doesn’t make a great argument for ‘I’m trying’,” Frank barks in an annoyed voice. His heart is still beating just a little too fast (he can hear it, the whine of his nervous system settling back into place). He grabs for one of the clean gray towels from the rack above Gerard’s head and starts rubbing it over his dripping hair.

Gerard moves as if his limbs are loosely tied down, slow-motion and worried tugs. He rocks his head back on his neck like it’s a chore. “Frankie,” he says, and around his eyes is a tiredness that suggests that he has been lying awake there in bed, Frank nestled close to his skin, for more years than he can think to count. The whites around his irises are pricked red with jagged lines of blood.

“Whoa, hey, Gee,” Frank murmurs now, wrapping the towel around his waist and bending to grab hold of Gerard’s shoulders as he tips over. “You take too many of these or something? Should I call Brian?”

Letting his head droop onto Frank’s moist shoulder, Gerard mumbles a negative and groans a little under his breath. His cheeks are getting wet from the droplets of water that sprinkle down from Frank’s hair.

“Gee, seriously, you’re freaking me out.” Frank breathes out on a chuckle, though he’s anything but amused. The laughter feels tight and constricting in his chest, and the way it echoes on the bathroom tiles sounds more than a little hysterical. He may even feel like an echo himself, just the rebound of a vibration that once shook him from the core.

When he says Frank’s name again, Gerard lips are a little red, still bitten and swollen from the hours before, where Frank nearly swallowed them whole, coming hard in a way that made him see stripes of black and white for full minutes after. “I need you to do it for me,” Gerard says, and then (in a voice that is muted and withdrawn, like a flower closing in on itself), “Please.”

Frank leaves the towel crumpled on the floor like a shadow and curls his arms around Gerard, who is trembling like wind-blown leaves. (There was maybe once a time—back when Gerard’s eyes reflected the world rising and bowing alone on its axis, and Frank could see all of the hazy stretch of forever in the way that Gerard’s fingers sometimes lingered on the curling ink along his hips—when Frank would have said, “Anything,” and meant it.) Now he brushes his fingers over the shallow knobs of Gerard’s spine and nearly whispers, “I swear to God, Gee, if you tell me, I’ll try.”

The way Gerard is so transparent, like a weak waterfall of glass, sets Frank’s heart to slamming against his ribcage, upset and derailed. But Gerard just pushes the pills to Frank’s chest, still hot to the touch and damp from the shower. He says, “You’ve gotta flush them for me, Frankie. I…I can’t,” his voice breaking on the last word. And really, Gerard is anything but frail.

Rocking back on his heels, Frank uses Gerard’s knee and the edge of the sink counter to lift himself back onto his feet. His back straightens, but there is still a phantom pain there from twisting around all night. The weight of Gerard’s shallow swell indented on his brittle skin. He slicks back some of his wet tangle of hair and reaches out. (He isn’t sure what he’ll do if Gerard doesn’t readily hand him the pills; at this point, Frank thinks that he might be beyond fighting it out with fists and words. If he closed his eyes right now, he would see the silhouette of himself walking away, the pieces of his heart rattling out behind him like dented tin cans trailing from the bumper of a Just Married car.)

Luckily enough, he only has to wiggle his fingers once before Gerard is reaching out too, his pale hand trembling so much that the pills almost jump into Frank’s palm. Gerard gives an exhausted, withered sigh with the transfer of the plastic bag; he almost seems to become A Man Without Bones, or, alternately, the Skeleton Of A Man Once Misplaced. His face is more a ragtag collection of jagged lines than it is a real, human visage. Like animal bones scattered in the blaze of a fire to tell the future in their delicate cracks.

Frank does not wait for further permission. He latches onto Gerard’s trembling forearm with his free hand and pulls him up from the toilet lid. The act of standing doesn’t quite translate, and Gerard collapses a little, sinking onto Frank like a thick coat of paint. His breathing is shallow and rough as it threads through his throat.

“Just…” Gerard moans.

And Frank lifts up the toilet lid with his toes, rips the plastic bag open with his teeth as he holds Gerard steady against his side. He slowly tilts the bag of pills so that they tumble down into the smooth, milky white of the toilet bowl, the sound of them hitting the water like ice rattling in a glass. The whiskey that burns sour in the birdcage of his stomach. Sunken below the surface of the water, the pills look just like sanded-out pieces of sea glass, caught up in the frantic whorl of the ocean disappearing into ancient sewers of France.

*

Later, in bed, (and with the pills went time, went all semblance of minutes and motion, and the circular orbit of the earth around the sun, too) Frank lies on his side, his hair still damp and his eyes ragged with sleep. The wall in front of him is just a wall, the sheets are sheets, and Gerard is not a crashing of cars, not a hurricane, not the shatter of glass, but just a man with the world balanced precariously upon his shoulders. Frank can’t blame him for quaking.

“I’m done, Frankie,” he whispers against the tight knuckles of Frank’s spine. The way his lips are cold with the fingers of winter’s fluttering hands. Gerard presses himself along the length of Frank’s body so that their legs are braided and their skin is so clean, and he says, “I swear to God, Frankie, I’m done.”

Frank lies awake until the sun comes up and his cell phone becomes shrill with Mikey’s voice, and he wishes that, now of all times, Gerard would just fucking lie.

*

That night in Cannes, Frank hides in the wings of the stage as the opening band launches into their final song. He is made-up and radiating from his very core, the heat spilling out and clinging to his skin like a shadow. Outside, the deafening hum of the crowd sounds like the pounding of the ocean against a cliff.

Mikey finds him first.

“Frank, Jesus, what did you tell him?” he asks. Mikey so rarely paints his face with any kind of emotion, so to see the bewilderment that is so clearly written on his fine features is something ultimately foreign and distressing.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Frank grips onto the scaffolding that leads up to the spotlights thirty feet above their heads and pinches until his knuckles grow white. He can’t even feel his fingers, let alone think about playing the guitar in front of a couple thousand people.

“Gee,” Mikey stresses, “I’m talking about fucking Gerard. He’s rattling around the dressing room like the Bride of fucking Frankenstein, and he won’t let the make-up crew touch him, and he’s had about fifty gallons of water to drink and he’s just…he’s fucking sober, Frank, he’s dry as hell.”

Frank raises his eyebrows and stops shifting. He’s managed to avoid Gerard for the better part of this day, since they wandered into the campsite this morning, only to be whisked away by Worm to suffer Brian’s half-hour-long lecture. It had taken another hour for Ray to soothe out the red in his face, distracting Brian with the details of their show that would take place that night. (It is their last show, Frank is reminded, the last show of their second tour. Somehow this one has managed to escape him, or he has managed to forget, or maybe there was really a part of him who wasn’t present for it at all. All he knows is that he is more than ready to just click his fucking heels and be home.)

It’s not that Frank’s been hiding, per se, but he managed to convince Bob to let him catch a midmorning nap in his bunk (where Gerard would never, ever think to look), and it had bled slowly into late afternoon and early evening, and Mikey had let him sleep through dinner, only waking him to slip a box of animal cookies between the sheets.

(A part of him knows that this makes him A Shit Boyfriend, but he thinks that if he walked out into the lounge and saw Gerard sprawled across the couch with a beer in his hand, watching the Discovery Channel, he might just smash the television screen with his fist.)

So it was easier, really, to sleep the day away.

Now Frank just purses his lips and gives Mikey a contemptuous look. “I thought that was the point, Mikes,” he deadpans, but before his voice can even reach the level of sarcastic that he’s aiming for, Mikey is on him and around him, his lanky arms bundled up around Frank’s rib cage and his warm hands pressed hard into his spine.

“We’re going on that stage in about fifteen minutes, Frank, and Gerard hasn’t had a drink all day. I…I searched his bag, and the blow is gone, the pills, fuck, even his medication, it’s all…none of it, Frank, I checked…” Mikey babbles into Frank’s collar bone, his mouth wet along the collar of Frank’s t-shirt, and his grip is like well-fitting clothing. He smells just like fresh-cut grass and Dove soap.

Somewhere amidst the cheering of the crowd out beyond the stage, the last strums of the opening band’s guitars, the crackling of the storm that will hit outside a few hours from now, Frank can hear Mikey whispering, “Thank you, thank you,”, and he is almost willing to sell his tattered soul just to feel the teeth of Mikey’s radiant smile against his skin.

*

Beneath the lights, Frank starts to feel it. At first it is just a tingle at the base of his spine, like hot fingers sneaking up the back of his shirt. As he thrashes about the stage floor, desperate to cure that itch, it spreads with the heated force of a virus. It crawls along the backs of his thighs, wrapping around his calves and locking his kneecaps into place. He tries to ignore it, slamming his fingers over the carnivorous frets of his guitar, but the sensation makes him miss his chords, makes them go flat and shrieking sharp, and the effect is a carnival, and even Ray nods his way, his hair a wild tangle stretching out into the webs of their music. Behind his drum set, Bob is slick with sweat and his eyes are closed, and you can just tell that each time he brings his sticks down onto the skins and cymbals, each crash, vibrates through him like the explosion of water turning into wine. And Mikey, his head thrown back on his shoulders like it’s been all night; only Frank knows that he is, in his own way, praying to the God that he could never quite leave behind. They can all feel it, the burning, shivering sparks illuminating their skins onstage, and it has never been so worth it, so opalescent, so high.

And Gerard.

Gerard.

He stands out on the edge of the stage, his hands stretched out toward the crowd that he can’t quite see beyond the spray of lights (except that all of them are one black, coiled darkness, shouting out his words like they are each of them praying too, invoking all that is red and writhing inside of him). Screaming hard into the microphone like his voice will reach below the ground, past where any of them can find him, or want to. Tears pouring down his naked, tired face. Each tear is illuminated by the frantic lights, so that Frank can see that Gerard wears them like jewels, and can imagine their bitter taste on his tongue.

So many times during the night, Frank swallows his heart and crosses the stage to where the lights will find him, spilling something like worship and completeness out onto the floor in front of Gerard’s weary feet. He tilts back his head and he screams too, feels the rip of his throat, and he wants to throw his guitar behind his back and take hold of Gerard’s animated, heart-wrenching face. He will open himself and Gerard and all of that light will leave them empty, empty and pure.

But somehow when the lights catch Gerard just right, Frank can see that there is nothing in his skin but frenzied terror. Gerard’s eyes that are wide and white with the hysteria of all of those phantom faces in the crowd singing to him. He has never once been present for a show (and even now, with his feet planted firmly at the edge of the stage, there are parts of him scattered about in all of the places he has left behind, and one of them, too, inside of Frank, where it has maybe never left at all.)

From his kneeling post at the base of Gerard’s holy platform, Frank reaches out and tangles his hands in thin, thin air. (It is almost as if they have spun right out of space, and that Gerard was the gravity this whole time; and that no matter how often and willingly they are a compass along the magnetic pull of this eager world, it is somehow not enough this time.)

And Frank knows, he knows that if he touches Gerard right now, his hand will pass right through him, like he is not even there.

*

The first week of Being Home, or at the very least Being Off-Tour, is simply a release. Frank goes to see his mother the very afternoon that they get home, and she makes him grilled cheese and tomato soup and doesn’t ask about Gerard. She says she watched an interview of Frank and Mikey, and how glad she is to see him doing well, and asks if Frank will make sure Mikey comes over for dinner like he did when they were just kids, as soon as he’s settled down again. Frank says that he will. That night he sleeps in the bed he had when he was a kid first, and then a teenager, those same angry faces on the wall, the same dull green stars plastered to the ceiling. He wakes up at seven and has coffee and bagels with his mom before she goes to work, and then he spends the day watching reality television and chatting on the phone with old friends. When it gets dark, he meets up with them for drinks and only feels a little guilty that there are two missed calls from Gerard on his cell phone.

On the fourth day he sees a James Bond movie with Ray, who has a thing for guns and tuxedos, and particularly likes when the two are mixed.

On the fifth day, he sleeps, and he doesn’t dream, not once.

The sixth day is when he knows it for sure. Frank wakes up and eats some eggs and takes a long shower, the steam pouring out around him like galaxies. He sings at the echoes of the bathroom walls until his voice breaks and seeps under the door. How easily he can give the parts of him away. It is nearly noon by the time he gets in his car. Frank starts the ignition with a sigh and heads off to open up his own apartment and get to cleaning five months worth of dust from the walls.

He makes a couple left turns where they should be rights, and ends up outside of Gerard’s apartment building.

When he knocks on the door, it’s Mikey who answers. Mikey with his tired, owlish eyes and his hair slicked back away from his face. Looking every bit a reminder that they just aren’t kids anymore. He leans in the doorway and stares at Frank like he is carefully extracting every thought and excuse from Frank’s mind. “He’s been waiting for you, you know,” he finally says, crossing his arms in front of his chest. The way Mikey is standing with his long legs crossed at the shins and his lips so understanding, Frank knows that Mikey’s been expecting this for a long, long time. (Mikey, who has known Frank for as long as he can remember; who has known all of the places where Frank will move before Frank even knew it himself, and always arrived there first to take some of the sting out of losing faith.)

And Mikey who said the words Don’t forgive him and meant it, but like an apocrypha (and knows too, how all things end, how they live through feeding off each other, and thus remain locked in the transience of revolution, always). Frank knows that there is love, has felt it like a weighty stone and greedily leeched it from Mikey too; but that it has been Mikey towering like a great false idol at Gerard’s doorway, and in his doorway he will stand, long after Frank has left. He will guard it until he too becomes stone, and the cycle begins again. In all things considered Gerard, Mikey has learned, jadedly, the virtue of patience.

For years, Frank has believed himself to be a patient man, a saint; now he merely accepts that blindness made him too often fall to his knees, and really, there was nowhere before to look but up.

He walks into the kitchen where Gerard sits curled into a wooden chair like a child, his knees bent under the rest of his body and his hands poised lovingly above a blank notebook page. In the waning sunlight he takes on the shape of a Methuselah, a vessel for words brimming like wine from his fingertips. He peers up.

“I’ve got this writer’s block, you know?” he says softly. There is a tentative smile on his bare, weary face.

Frank doesn’t move further into the room, but settles against the kitchen door frame, pushing his chilled fingers into his jacket pockets. He thinks, When did you become so far?

Slowly, Gerard unfurls from his seat, pausing in the winter light tumbling from the window to stretch his arms above his head. He turns his back and opens the refrigerator (a different kind of light that makes him less of a sheer ghost this evening, and more of a cryptic ghoul, like those that disappear into the knuckle-like branches of trees at night). The clinking of glass bottles rattle around the kitchen in a flash like wind chimes, but when Gerard turns around, he is only holding a bottle of mineral water, twisting off the cap to swallow the bubbles down in smooth gulps.

Every sound he makes in his throat is more of a goodbye than Frank has ever noticed before.

He crosses the kitchen to Gerard in hushed, unimposing steps that still land heavily on his heart. Stepping up close, Frank brings up one hand to gently push the bottle down to Gerard’s side, the other hand coming up to wrap under and around Gerard’s tensing jaw. To him, it seems that they are already over, and have been for years, and that all this time, these hurts, this fall, is just time going backwards. He will kiss Gerard so apologetically on his quiet lips and they will sink back into the start of things, into hello, into being.

When Frank kisses Gerard (his mouth bitter from the bubbles and the regret), he pretends that this is maybe just goodnight.

“I’m sorry,” he says when he finally pulls away, just enough to be able to see Gerard’s eyes. He is still close enough to feel the heat trapped between their skins. “I’m so sorry, Gee, but I can’t do this anymore.”

After the words have been said, it seems as if there are none left. As if all their lives they have been building up to this moment where their allotment finally runs out, and there is nothing left to say. No words. It is simply time breaking free.

Gerard rubs the side of his nose with the hand still holding the bottle of water. “I already kind of reasoned that out,” he admits quietly, his eyes never leaving Frank’s. When he does look away, his gaze drops down to the thick green bottle, as if he is accusing it. “Figures,” Gerard continues almost cynically, “As soon as I get sober and healthy for you, you decide you’ve had enough.”

Frank jerks back. “Well, fuck, Gerard, did you just expect me to turn the other cheek? And don’t you dare try to turn this around and hurt me…I’m doing this for you! You can’t be sober for me, Gerard, and you can’t be sober for Mikey, or Ray, or Bob, or even fucking Brian. You just…this needs to be about you, Gee…you need to do it for you.”

What he notices first is the rush of blood, the way it swirls in behind his eyes and around his brain, the taste of it way in the back of his throat, on his tongue, the sting of it. (The flush of it in his cheeks, so familiar on nights where Gerard was a jungle, and Frank simply let the moist, feral ground grow up over him until he was nothing but earth.) By the time he has slammed his fist into the wall next to Gerard’s slumped shoulder, he hasn’t even registered the pain yet, just the roar inside of him, and how he wishes he could take back every word, except that he can’t.

“Motherfucker!” Frank cries out when the pain finally catches up to him in an aching flood of bruised bones. He blanches and gasps like a child who has just scraped his knee for the very first time, and realized that there is blood pulsing inside of him that can so easily escape from under skin that always felt like steel before. Nearly crumbling from the pain, Frank cradles his fist to his chest and blinks back the sting of tears that pool behind his eyes.

Gerard simply appraises the crack in the wall with a cool, placid face, hardly even looking phased at the outburst. He swivels his unimpressed look to Frank’s crooked, throbbing knuckles. “There’s a song in all of this somewhere,” he manages thoughtfully. Reaching out one hand, he almost seems as if he is going to press his fingers into Frank’s cradled hand, but stops just short, so that his hand is merely extended in a warped blessing of sorts.

“A song about what?” Frank gasps wildly, “Breaking my fucking hand?” His face twists in agony as he attempts, tenderly, to unfurl his tightly clenched fingers.

Leaning close into Frank’s face, so that he almost thinks that they will kiss again, Gerard merely crinkles up his eyebrows in confusion and murmurs, “No.”

He says, "Stay."

"You know I can't do that, Gerard," Frank mumbles around his clenched teeth.

And Gerard smiles, a small, far away turn of his lips. "I know," he says. "But I had to say it anyway, you know?"

(And Frank will remember this, how the tears in his eyes burned like acid and his hand ached like a phantom limb, so far removed from the rest of his body that the strings forever flowed out into the wind, broken strands of a spider’s web, straining to make connection again, skin to skin, to get his blood flowing from the veins once again.)

He turns away from Gerard’s sad, pungent breath, and, embracing the pain in his hand to escape that which springs loosely from his heart, walks through the kitchen with his neck tense and foreign above the rest of his body. The feeling under his skin as if he has already exploded ten million light years away from now, and only just now is it reaching earth in a car crash of shattered bones and refracted light. It takes everything in Frank just to turn back once he reaches the doorway (where Mikey does not stand anymore, but his presence is still there, like the ghost of light left on the horizon after the sun has sunk down beneath the earth.)

“You’re in me, Gee, you know?” he says in a weary, cracked voice. “Just get better. Please.”

From the kitchen where shadows pour across the floor as the night sweeps in like a velvet curtain, Frank is sure he can hear Gerard singing under his breath, a low, sad lullaby that fills Frank up with the melancholy of pages turning. He fills his aching lungs up with air as the music rushes over him and thinks, This is a song.