I Didn't Mean to Fall in Love (But I Did)

“I don’t like the name Aaron,” Gerard remarks. Frank looks at him oddly, because that’s an odd topic of conversation to have during breakfast.

“Why not?”

“I just don’t. I don’t like that name. I also don’t like the name Ethel. Or Olga,” Gerard says.

“Okay...?” Frank says, “and that’s important because?”

“Well I don’t know,” Gerard says. He’s been trying to figure out the source of his dislike for Aaron, and he thinks he’s onto something. He doesn’t like the name. That must be it.

“I like the name Aaron,” Frank says.

“Really? Aaron? Like Aaron Paul? Who cooks meth? Is that how your boyfriend got to be so rich?”

“That’s the weirdest fucking tangent you could have possibly made. So many Aaron’s you could’ve chosen from, and you go with the guy who played the meth maker? How about Aaron Tveit. The cute one in musical theater,” Frank says.

“I don’t know I just don’t like that name,” Gerard shrugs, “just my opinion.

“Okay,” Frank says, and he takes a sip of his coffee, trying to figure out what’s up with Gerard. “So how do you feel about Aaron though? Other than his name, do you like him?”

“I, um, I don’t really know him well enough to give a proper answer,” Gerard says, which is his way of saying ‘absolutely not. I fucking hate the guy with a fiery passion.’

“Okay,” Frank nods, “well I think you might like him if you get to know him a little bit better.”

Gerard struggles to hold back the ‘there’s absolutely no way in hell that’s true’ in his throat, but just ends up coughing. He coughs into his coffee mug slightly, and Frank looks at him inquiringly.

“You okay?” Frank asks.

“What? Oh I just, choked on my coffee a little bit. No big deal.”

“Yeah,” Frank nods, looking at him skeptically. “So I have to go to work now. I’ll see you later, and hopefully you won’t be acting so weird.”

“Who’s acting weird?” Gerard asks.

“You are, Gerard. You’re acting weird.”

“Oh,” Gerard nods. “Sorry.”

“Yeah,” Frank says and he grabs his keys off the counter. He keeps looking over his shoulder at Gerard, and Gerard tries to compose himself to look perfectly innocent, though he doesn’t know what he’s covering up.

“Bye then,” Frank says, and he walks out of the apartment after one more glance at Gerard.

Gerard sighs and his head falls onto the counter helplessly. He doesn’t know why he’s feeling so weird about all of this, he just is.

Frank’s cold seemed to go away overnight, which is good news. Gerard can’t exactly help but wonder why it went away so quickly, but he ignores that puzzlement in favor of questioning who this Aaron guy actually is.

Gerard’s not exactly proud of himself for what he does next, but he’s curious. He doesn’t want Frank to be hurt, and he doesn’t know why he doesn’t trust Aaron.

Gerard checks out the peephole he’d looked through last night to make sure that the hall is empty, before he creeps back, and enters Frank’s room. He doesn’t go in here normally even when Frank is home, but this is even weirder. He wants to know more about this Aaron guy though, but he doesn’t know the last name.

Frank’s pretty tidy, unlike Gerard whose room looks like it got caught on the bad side of a hurricane. Nothing much is really out of place though, and Gerard tries to figure out where he’d put something pertaining to Aaron. He needs a surname if he’s going to creepily Google the guy on the internet though.

Gerard immediately decides to check the pants Frank was wearing last night, because maybe he has a receipt or a business card in there.

Gerard has a moment where he realizes just how wrong this actually is. He’s invading Frank’s private life, and he really should leave this alone, but he can’t. He’s physically incapable of just letting this go, and seeing what happens. What if this Aaron guy is a serial killer, or a pervert, or a fraud or something? Gerard could really be saving Frank. Or at least that’s what he’s telling himself. He knows he’s being nosy, but it’s too late.

“Damn,” Gerard hisses to himself, because he’s got nothing. Frank’s room is spotless, and there’s nothing with any indication of who Aaron actually is. Gerard huffs to himself, and checks his watch. He should really be heading to work right about now, but he can’t give up yet.

Gerard looks around the room again, tries to imagine how it was when he entered, and sighs again. When he decides that everything looks to be in the same place as when he entered, he leaves quickly and then exits his apartment.

He doesn’t know what he’s actually doing. Not really, but he’s desperate and just a tad bit helpless.

Gerard knocks on the door of the apartment next to his. This is completely abnormal behavior for him, but he can’t stop himself.

The door opens to a very disgruntled, and unhappy looking, Pete.

“The fuck do you want this early in the morning?”

“It’s a weekday,” Gerard tells him.

“So? I don’t have to be awake for another,” he checks the clock behind him, “nine minutes. You’re cutting into my precious sleeping time.”

“By nine minutes.”

“Yes! A whole nine fucking minutes,” Pete says, and Gerard is starting to realize that Pete’s version of a long length of time, is very different from Gerard’s.

“I just wondered if you knew Frank’s boyfriends’ last name?”

“You woke me up, with, nine, no eight minutes now, worth of blissful sleeping time to ask me if I knew Aaron’s last name?”

Gerard processes his words and nods, “that’s right, yeah.”

“Why do you want to know so badly?” Pete asks.

“I want to see if he’s ever been arrested or if he’s a sex offender, or if he’s a thief, or if he has any dirt whatsoever on him,” Gerard tells him.

Pete evaluates Gerard’s words for a minute then groans, and opens the door further for him to come in. Pete’s apartment is smaller than Gerard’s, and also dumpier looking. They don’t spend as much time in their apartment as they do in Gerard’s though, so that’s mostly why it looks so dingy.

“I don’t know the guy’s name,” Pete says, stepping around Gerard to close the door after him, “but I’m pretty sure Patrick does.”

“Great so, we’ll ask Patrick.”

Pete yawns and stretches his arms before answering Gerard to say, “he left for work already, but I can call him.”

“Good, you should do that,” Gerard says.

“And why, may I ask, are we doing this so early in the morning? Or at all?”

“Because I need to know now. What if Aaron actually is a murder and he kills Frank at work with a chainsaw?”

“Frank works at a diner,” Pete tells him, “so what, did Aaron kill everyone in the whole diner with the chainsaw before he offed Frank?”

“Or he wore a mask,” Gerard says.

“We’re talking about Aaron, Gerard. Not Jason Voorhees.”

“But they’re both from Canada!”

“No, actually they are not. You’re an idiot, Gerard. I don’t know where Friday the 13th takes place, but I can assure you, it is not in Canada,” Pete says, as he grabs his phone.

“Okay, but Justin Bieber is from Canada and we can all agree that that’s a travesty to the country,” Gerard says.

“What is even with you today?”

“I don’t know,” Gerard confesses, “I just don’t know if I trust Aaron.”

“I see that,” Pete says, bringing his phone to his ear. Gerard can hear the small sonorous ring of the dial tone, and he digs his hands into his pockets. He’s nervous because he feels like a horrible person, but he also feels excited and way too overconfident that they’re going to find something. He wants the dirt though. He wants to find whatever dirty little secrets Aaron is hiding, and put them on display for Frank, so they end up not going out on a second date.

Does that make Gerard a horrible person? Kind of, but he convinces himself that he has honorable intentions.

“Patrick,” Pete says when the ringing stops and a click signifies that someone’s picked up.

Gerard can’t hear the other end of the conversation, because it’s too quiet, but he pretty much picks up on Pete’s half and fills in the holes.

A few minutes later, Pete hangs up and looks at Gerard.

“Okay, so Patrick wants me to tell you that he finds what you’re doing deeply disturbing, and if Frank catches on to this, than Patrick had no part of it. He did, however, give me a name to work with.”

“Yay!” Gerard says excitedly, and then realizes he looks way too excited.

“So you’re creepy, but now you’ve caught my interest,” Pete says, “I’ll help you out, but I have to leave for work in no more than an hour, got that?”

Gerard nods, and Pete grabs his laptop on the counter. He grumbles to himself all the while, saying that this is beyond wrong, and that Gerard is a major creeper, but that doesn’t stop him from putting Aaron’s name into the search engine.

“Well it’s a good thing that he doesn’t have an overly common name,” Pete says.

“Yeah, but how do we look for, like, arrest records?” Gerard asks.

“I don’t think we even can,” Pete says, “I don’t know. I’m not a technical person.”

“Well what’s the first link when you search his name?”

Pete rolls his eyes, but moves his finger around the track pad, then clicks on something. Gerard tries to lean over the counter to get a look of the screen upside down, but Pete just pushes his head away.

“It’s a newspaper article,” Pete says.

“Aha!” Gerard says and then stops to think about it, and realizes that he has absolutely no idea why he just said that. “What’s it about? Did he, like, steal a bunch of money from someone, or get caught trying to commit fraud?”

Pete looks over the article, and the light from the computer screen makes his face glow. It embellishes the small bags under his eyes, and Gerard is bouncing on the balls of his feet, waiting for Pete to tell him what it reads.

“Actually no,” Pete states, “it says that he spent a year in Africa, and built a school in a rural part of Tanzania.”

“Oh,” Gerard says, feeling like an idiot, “Well did he steal money from the school?”

“It says he funded the project to build the school in the first place,” Pete says.

“I don’t like this link, what’s the next one say?” Gerard says hurriedly, and Pete tries not to laugh at the way Gerard’s acting.

“The next one looks like his company website,” Pete says, “Wait, holy shit.”

“What? What!” Gerard shouts loudly at the look on Pete’s face. He doesn’t know what the reaction means, but he hopes Pete found something bad.

“Did you know that Aaron is the CEO of a huge company?”

“What kind of company? A company that tests on animals? A company that underpays there workers or uses illegal immigrants?”

“A nonprofit organization that provides aid for abuse victims including financial support, medical scholarships for victims of assault, and a lot of other stuff,” Pete says.

“But how does he make money if it’s nonprofit?” Gerard asks, feeling like he’s finally found the dirt.

Pete looks over the webpage in front of him, and his eyes dart across the screen for a moment before he says, “They have a substantial grant from the Government that keeps them running. Frank’s boyfriend is the CEO. It’s a small company, but they do some good work here, actually.”

“Fuck,” Gerard sighs, because Frank is dating a saint. He’s literally dating an angel sent from heaven, and Gerard is being a jerk about it.

“Is there anything else I ought to know about him?” Gerard asks, feeling deflated.

Pete clicks a bunch of links, and then starts shooting even more glowing compliments about Aaron, “he’s a professional violinist.”

“I hate the violin,” Gerard says, but he doesn’t really have an opinion one way or another about the violin.

“Wow, he has his own Wikipedia page,” Pete says. “Oh that’s a really good picture of him. Hot damn, Frank lucked out on this one.”

“Is there anything else I should know? Did he save a litter of kittens from a burning building?” Gerard asks sarcastically.

“He used to be a volunteer fireman,” Pete tells him.

“Ha! Used to be.”

Pete rolls his eyes, “Well yeah, but how long have you been a volunteer fireman, Gerard?”

Gerard scowls, “Valid point.”

“Oh! He won the eighth grade spelling bee for his region,” Pete says.

“I hate him,” Gerard says to himself, and then he realizes that he said that out loud, “I mean, he’s too perfect! He’s got nothing! He’s never done anything wrong. I hate that.”

“Dude, seriously, what is up with you?” Pete asks, looking concerned.

“Nothing,” Gerard snaps, and he turns around for the door, “thanks for that, Pete, but I have to go to work.”

He doesn’t say anything more before he’s walking out of the apartment, huffing to himself. It may be an irrational dislike, and it may be completely absurd, but Gerard doesn’t like Aaron. One way or another, he’ll find himself a valid reason. He just wishes that Frank didn’t pick out the most perfect human being on the planet.