Folie a Deux

Hi everyone, it's been a long time. I put my author's note on my website (contentsofmymess.webs.com) because I didn't want to take up too much space. Also, just as a heads up to anyone who's interested in writing and/or improving their writing, I've started a second tumblr (I have a lot of social networking accounts, I know, and I'm sorry,) tagged-forwriting.tumblr.com. I use that page for reblogging / posting about all things writing, everything from online writing tools (hemingwayapp.com is a life-saver,) to tips about how to improve plot, character create, and describe emotions.

Anyway- I'm so sorry that this chapter is so short, considering how long you all have waited, but I hope you enjoy!

---

Gerard was on his side, his mouth opened, black hair unruly. He was sort of snoring which was cute, considering I'd never really heard him snore before. I lifted my hand and touched his cheek, soft, his pale skin smooth beneath my fingers.

His eyelids fluttered, like he wanted to wake up but was just too tired to, and I shushed him, kissing his nose. He was so cute when he was sleeping. It'd been two months since he last slept in his mother's house and something about the change of scenery and the way my knees fit snuggly against his at night was helping him sleep.

I let my palm rest on the side of his face, my thumb touching his cheek.

"Hey, Gerard?" I said, soft. His lips sort of twitched, but it was hard to tell in the dim lighting of our bedroom. I patted his cheek with my fingers. "Hey, Gee, wake up, you fucking cutie."

He blinked his eyes open slowly, lips curving up in the cutest little smile when I pressed a kiss against his nose.

"You haven't called me Gee in a while," he kind of laughed, tired.

"I know," I said, looking at him.

His eyebrows pulled together in that sleepy, confused, really fucking adorable way. "Wait, wait. Is everything okay? Why'd you wake me up?"

"Everything is fine," I assured him.

We had moved Gerard's bed from his mother's house to here, our apartment. The sheets were dark black and the room was white, there were stacks of books and Gerard's art all over the floor. My guitar was leaning against the wall by the door and the only form decoration in the room were pictures that Gerard had tapped up while I'd made lunch last Wednesday, pictures that I'd taken of us and drawings that he was proud of. Our closet was on the wall opposite the bed, and there was a tall window about two feet above mine and Gerard's heads.

"I was just wondering," I said, softly, looking at Gerard. "Are we, uhm- are we ever gonna' get married, Gerard? Are you gonna' marry me?"

He just looked at me for a few seconds, like this was some sort of mystery that my eyes would hold the answer to. "'Are you gonna' marry me,' sounds a lot like 'will you marry me?'" he whispered.

I blinked, pushing dark strands of hair off of his forehead with my fingers. "Well," I said, breathing the word out, sort of terrified. He was looking at me with those damn sweet brown-green-hazel-fucking-gorgeous eyes of his. "Will you?"

His lips brushed against my mouth, his eyes focusing on mine, his face still so tired. "Of course I'll marry you."

I was pulling him into a hug before he even finished the sentence and he chucked at me, draping a tired arm over my waist.

"I love you," I said, kissing every inch of skin on his face and neck that I could reach.

"I love you, too." He pressed his face against my neck and mumbled, tired; "Frank, I'm sleepy, can you finish kissin' me later?"

I laughed and held him close. "Yeah, I can finish kissing you later."

He made a content noise, his lips brushing against my collar bone, and then he fell asleep again.

---

I woke up the next morning to the sound of a piano.

When we'd moved the first thing Gerard had asked was if he could put his piano in the living room, and of course I had told him yes. It wasn't even really in the living room, though, it was against the wall in the dining room, beneath this window that Gerard was in love with because it overlooked this little courtyard that had a fountain in the middle of it.

"Babe," I yelled across the house, laying my arm across my face to block the light streaming through the window. "Shut up."

The piano stopped and I could hear him laughing at me. "What, you don't like my music?"

I rolled my eyes at my own skin. "I love your music," I said, hearing his footsteps near the bedroom door. "You know that."

I lifted my arm a fraction of an inch to look at him. He was leaning against the doorframe, dark hair falling in soft strands around his face. He had on skinny jeans and white socks and a button-up white shirt and he looked completely fuckable.

"Damn," I said. "I love your hair like that."

He grinned. "Yeah? I sort of like it too."

"It's very artist-y," I told him. "You look like you should be a teacher or something. An art teacher."

He raised his eyebrows at me. "Does someone have a teacher fetish that I didn't know about?"

I let my arm cover my eyes again. "No. It's just a very attractive look for you."

"Really, calling me Mr. Way and fucking me over a desk wouldn't turn you on?"

I rolled over and he chuckled at me.

"It's like, noon, babe," he said.

"I've been asleep forever, whoa."

"Exactly. Get up, I made you breakfast."

I grinned, rolling back over so that I could look at him. "So, basically you made coffee and bought a fresh pack of cigarettes?"

He smiled back. "Yeah, exactly. I'm a perfect boyfriend, I know."

I laughed, sitting up and running my hand through my hair, like I could push the sleep out of my brain. "That's true, actually."

"C'mon," he said, as I stood up. "Before the coffee gets cold."

I followed him through the living room and into the kitchen, my socks slipping warmly against the brown carpet. I realized then that the carpet wouldn't stay new forever, it already needed to be vacuumed. I wondered if Gerard would help me do it or if I would end up doing it myself one day when he wasn't home. We had a small apartment so hopefully it wouldn't take long. That was part of the good thing about us not being able to afford much, it meant we had less to take care of.

"Hey, Gerard?" I asked, standing next to him by the counter. The counters were pale gray, and the kitchen walls were a soft, eggshell white. Gerard had been talking about maybe painting them blue, like a light blue. A baby bird blue, he'd called it, like the pastel feathers of a blue bird.

He poured me a cup of coffee, passing it to me and letting our hands touch.

"Last night you were sort of half-asleep," I said, "But do you remember, uhm. Well."

He was looking at me from behind his mug, eyebrows raised, and right then he looked very grown up and I felt very grown up and I suddenly realized that the words coming out of my mouth were incredibly adult.

He lowered his cup as I spoke.

"You were sort of half asleep," I said again, trying not to sound too scared. "But I asked you to marry me."

Gerard nodded slowly. "Yeah, yeah you did."

I stared at him and he stared back and I felt like everything from my previous high-on-happy was crashing at once, because fuck, oh god, oh fuck, I was so young. I was only seventeen, not even out of high school yet, and here I was asking someone who was a legal adult to spend the rest of his life with me.

I was standing in my apartment with a man that I was in love with and he had to go to work in an hour, he had gotten a job at a comic book store downtown last month, and I had to go talk to someone about buying furniture later today because we didn't have a dining room table. I don't think I'd ever felt more grown up than I did standing there drinking coffee and watching Gerard sip at his.

"Do you ever think we moved too fast?" I asked, and the weight of the words felt crushing, because I so knew we had.

Gerard's expression turned a bit to mush and I couldn't tell what he was thinking, which was a rare occurrence.

"Sometimes I wonder if we did, yeah," he admitted. "We haven't even known each other a year. Hell, it's been- what, eleven months since October? We've known each other eleven fucking months. But I can't imagine living any way but with you."

"Do you think we should wait?" I asked, my fingers curling tighter against my mug. "I mean, to get, uhm-"

"Should we wait to get hitched?" he asked, smiling slightly. I nodded and the smile faded, his shoulders rising and falling in a soft shrug. "Whatever you want to do," he said. "I'd wait forever if you wanted me to or I'd do it tomorrow if it would make you happy. But, yeah, we should probably wait until you're out of high school. It's gonna' be your senior year and a lot can change during that, y'know?"

I nodded again and said, "I suddenly feel so young," and I sounded like I was choking.

He reached over and pushed hair away from my face. "You're seventeen," he said, like he was agreeing. "You can figure out a lot about yourself in seventeen years but you still have a lot of lessons on living left to learn. Both of us do."

I looked down into my coffee mug like the brown liquid would take away the pain in my chest and I suddenly wanted to get drunk, I wanted to call Pete and beg him to get beer from somewhere and let me sleep on his bedroom floor and drown the troubles away. "You're only eighteen," I told him. "But, Gerard, you can do anything you want. You're an amazing artist and you're so good at piano and you could go so far with whatever you want to do and-"

His hand was touching mine, but it wasn't sexual and it wasn't friendly, it was just there, it was him touching me and I felt like crying because, oh god, he had so much more potential than I ever could and what if one day he decided he didn't want me anymore because I was holding him back?

"Frank, look at me," he said. I sighed and looked up. He looked just as scared as I felt and for some stupid reason that was reassuring to me.

"Let's think about this," he said, voice soft. "We've known each other for eleven months, yeah? We've been dating for the majority of that."

I nodded and my heart was beating so fast it felt like it would fall out of my chest.

"If you want to wait," he told me. "We can wait. If you don't want to live here that's completely understandable, too, it happened really fast and-"

"I don't want to go back to my mom's house," I interrupted, shaking my head. "I've been wanting to leave since I turned ten and if I have this opportunity to live with you I'm going to take it."

He nodded. "Okay. But just listen for a minute, okay? You need to hear this. Everything has happened fast, you're right about that. If there comes a day when you want to leave, I'm not going to stop you. We're both just- gosh, we're both just kids, Frank. If we end up not working out then I don't want to hold you back from anything you want to do."

Gerard placed a kiss softly on my forehead and I wanted to kiss him back and that's when the thought struck me that maybe this was just lust and infatuation, because fuck, what did love feel like?

I wanted to kiss him all the time so did that mean I just wanted the idea of romance or did that mean I loved him?

But it was more than just kissing, I knew that. Gerard was much more than just a boyfriend to me, he was a lot more than someone to kiss and touch and whine about my problems to. He made me feel better and when he wasn't around I felt this aching hole in my chest, when he was upset I wanted to give him the world. His emotions and his feelings controlled mine and if that wasn't love, if the way not being able to touch him when he wasn't in the room made my every limb ache wasn't love, I was pretty sure I would want to kill myself before I ever loved anyone. If there was an emotion stronger than what I felt for him, it would probably destroy me.

"C'mon," he said, and there was a cigarette being pressed against my palm. "You need to calm down, you look like you're going to puke."

I stared at the cigarette and with the weight of all this realization pressing down on my shoulders came the fact that everything tasted like cigarettes to me and my lungs never felt clear.

I looked at Gerard and then at the cigarette and I wanted to fucking kill myself because I knew the cigarettes had already started the job.

"I love you," I told him, but I wished he had said it first.

He kissed the top of my head. "I love you, too."

We went back to the bedroom and sat on the floor, we were drinking coffee and smoking in our socks and something about that just felt right. "You talk like you'd been thinking about all this already," I accused him.

Gerard shrugged, looking at the cigarette in his hand instead of at me. "I've kind of been thinking about it since we first talked about moving in together. I mean, it just feels sort of soon compared to what I've heard about other people's relationships."

I blinked at him. "Like, too good to be true."

He looked at me and smiled a soft smile. "Yeah. It's all totally too good to be true. Sometimes I still wonder if this is just a dream."

"If it is, I never want to wake up."

His foot brushed against mine. "Yeah. We're young and in love. So far everything has worked out so well."

"Yeah," I said.

We were quiet for a minute, and then he said, "I was thinking we should invite Pete and Mikey over for dinner sometime next week, or something."

I raised my eyebrows at him. "What's going on between those two, anyway? I can't get a word out of Pete about it."

"From what Mikey's said, they're not dating 'cause of the age difference."

I wrinkled my nose. "Yeah, that's like, what? Three, four years?"

"Yep. But, when you think about it, if they just wait a few years, it wouldn't be half as bad. Right now it's kind of awkward since Mikes was just a kid a couple of years ago but if you think ahead, when he's twenty-two and Pete is twenty-five or twenty-six it won't seem nearly as weird."

"So you're okay with it, then?"

Gerard shrugged, cigarette between his lips. "Not exactly. If Pete is what Mikey wants, I don't want to stop him, but I don't want him to get hurt, y'know? The age difference at the time being really freaks me out. He doesn't really hang out with kids his own age so I'm worried he's clinging to false hopes."

"Pete wouldn't hurt him," I assured Gerard. "And if he did I would punch him in the fucking face."

Gerard grinned. "And all this time I thought Mikey got on your nerves."

I smiled back. "He can be obnoxious but he's a sweet dude. Him and Pete both."

"Yeah," Gerard said. "They're both alright, I guess."

---

I rolled over and stretched out my arm, disappointed when my hand landed against the pillow instead of in Gerard's hair. Wrinkling my nose, I forced my eyes open. There were wrinkly blankets and the room was dark, but Gerard was no where to be found. I figured he was in the bathroom, or something, but then again the pillow my hand had fallen on was cold and the bedroom door was shut, and he always left it cracked if he got up in the middle of the night.

"Gerard?" I said, not loud, asking like maybe he was hiding under the bed.

I sat up and frowned, because he didn't answer and the apartment was silent, like, creepy-dead silent.

"Gerard," I said, louder, loud enough that he would hear me if he were in the other room. I was just met with the creepy-dead silence so I started feeling fidgety. I was too tired to really be scared or freaked out or anything, though, so the feeling settled in my stomach was more annoyed than anything else.

I swung my legs out of the bed and curled my toes against the carpet because fuck, it was cold.

"Gerard?" I said, walking out into the living room, slow due to lack of sleep, squinting in the dark.

The light in the kitchen was on so I migrated there like a moth, blinking around in confusion when he wasn't, like, sitting on the counter drinking coffee how I expected. I rubbed my eye with the back of my hand, looking at the clock on the stove. Fucking four in the morning, what the fuck? As soon as I figured out where Gerard was, I was going to hit him.

There was an empy coffee mug with an unlit cigarette on the counter, a piece of paper folded inside. I sighed and reached for the paper because Gerard could be a fucking dumbass sometimes and he'd probably had a nightmare and run off to his mom's house because he thought it would freak me out, or something. Or maybe there had been an emergency with his mom or Mikey, but wouldn't he wake me for that?

The note answered all the questions, though. Grandma's birthday. Graveyard. Breakfast on counter. Love, G.

I sighed and rubbed my forehead. I wasn't doubting him, or anything, I knew anything involving his grandma was a big deal, but couldn't he have waited until a normal time to leave?

I reached for the cigarette, too lazy to make coffee, and walked into the living room, my feet sounding loud in the empty house. There was an ashtray on a little table next to the couch, and my lighter and my cellphone and another note from Gerard. Cellphone is off, don't bother calling. Home before noon. Love, G.

I rolled my eyes and lit my cigarette, picking up my cellphone, because of course the dumbass had left me a voicemail, too. Waking me up and telling me what was going on would've been, like, ten times easier.

His voice sounded shaky, though, when I listened to the message, and that softened the annoyance. "Hey Frankie, sorry I didn't wake you up." There was a pause and he sighed. "I didn't want to worry you, I figured if I just went ahead and left you'd be pissed off instead." I almost laughed, he knew me way too well. "But, yeah. Grandma's birthday was- is? I don't know. But, like, today. I wanted to get to the cemetery before anyone else so I could be alone. I may or may not have, uh." He sort of chuckled. "Jumped the fence? But, whatever. I'm here and I'll be home soon. I'm turning off my phone, though, so- so I'll talk to you when I get home, okay?" There was a pause and then he said, "Okay. I love you, Frankie."

I sat my phone down and considered trying to call him, anyway, just to be an annoying shit, but I ended up calling Mikey instead. It took two calls and a million rings before he finally answered, "Huh?"

"Hey Mikey," I said, sounding way more awake than I felt.

He groaned and sounded like he was rolling over. "It's not even five, man, what the fuck?"

"I woke up and Gerard was gone," I said, and he went quiet.

His voice was eerily awake when he spoke next. "He was gone?"

"Don't freak out," I said. "He's at the cemetery."

Mikey paused and I heard some fumbling noises, he was probably putting on his glasses. "Today is Tuesday, isn't it?"

I nodded but realized he couldn't see me. "Yeah."

He took a deep breath. "Asshole was supposed to go with Ma and I at noon."

"He said he'd be home at noon," I sighed.

Mikey sort of grumbled for a second, dropping a few profanities. "I'm gonna' call him, can I call you back in a minute?"

"Don't bother, his phone is off."

Mikey sighed. "Fuck him."

"Yeah," I agreed. "Fuck him."

"Okay, well." He paused. "I'm gonna' go back to sleep, call me when he gets home."

"Okay," I said. "Hey, uh- dude, before you go. Have you talked to Pete recently?"

"Uh, yeah. Why?"

"Just asking," I said, and sort of grinned. "What's goin' on there, man? Gerard and I were talking about it last week."

"Nothing is going on," Mikey huffed, but I could totally tell he was smiling. "But yeah, we watched Night of the Living Dead last night."

"Last night?" I said. "Dude- dude."

Mikey sort of laughed. "He's like, three years older than me, shut up. Nothing happened, it's not like we slept together, or anything. He crashed on the sofa."

"Wait, he's still there?"

"Yeah," Mikey said. "We talked a lot yesterday about, like, where we wanted to go with whatever."

"You mean, relationship-wise?"

"Yeah."

"What decision did you guys make?"

"Well, once he's eighteen everything would be, like, totally illegal. So we're just gonna' stay friends until we can work out something."

I sucked in on my cigarette. "Just friends, huh?"

"Just friends," Mikey confirmed. "Who sometimes, like, kiss and stuff."

I grinned. "Wait, have you guys kissed again?"

"Three times," he said. "Fucking three times, Frank."
"So, you're like boyfriends, but not called boyfriends."

Mikey giggled, fucking giggled, a sweet, Gerard-type giggle. "Yeah, boyfriends but not called boyfriends. Not until I'm eighteen."

"I'm happy for you guys, man," I said. "Pete is a sweet dude and so are you."

"Yeah," Mikey said, and he sounded like he was glowing.

"What does your mom think about all this?"

"I think she's cool with it. I mean, she doesn't like Pete as much as she likes you- she worships you, man- but she hasn't questioned it much yet. I'm kind of worried about what Gerard will say, though. I know he's not really the biggest fan of Pete."

"He'll be cool with it," I promised. "I'm pretty sure you guys have his metaphorical blessing. But speaking of Gee, where's the, uh, cemetery at?"

"It's the one downtown," he said, after some hesitation. "At the church with the big flowers outside."

I wrinkled my nose. "The one with the stained glass cross on the side?"

"Yeah, yeah. That one. Are you gonna' go look for him, or something?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Tell him I say he's an asshole and that I love him."

I laughed. "I love your use of profanity."

"Well, I got it from you. You're a bad influence."

"Damn right I am."

I was ninety-nine percent sure he was rolling his eyes.

"I'll call you back when I can," I said. "Get some rest and tell Pete I say hey."

"Okay. Bye, Frank."

"Bye, Mikey."