When We're Both Thirty

“Why the fuck are you calling me? I said no calling me! I made that explicitly clear. Do you really want me to dismember you?”

“Okay first of all, ew,” Frank says, “second of all, different circumstances, I figured I should call.”

“There is literally never a good reason to call me. Never. Not ever. You could call anyone else in the world and it would be a good idea, but no. Do not call me,” Gerard says. He might have repeated that a few too many times.

“You’re unbearable,” Frank says, “so whatever, I have a friend who’s somehow interested in meeting you even though I told him about you with as much honesty as I could possibly muster, so basically, I told him that you look like the creature of the black lagoon. That didn’t work, so maybe he’s mentally unstable.”

“Well aren’t you a doll,” Gerard says. “But I haven’t had as much luck in finding anyone who could possibly put up with you, so it looks like you’re going to be alone tonight like you are most other nights. Really the screening process would all be so much quicker if I could just show them a picture of you and then wait for the gagging and/or the running away screaming.”

“That wouldn’t be their reaction,” Frank says, “I don’t know, if I were someone else, I would want to get in my pants too.”

“You’re disgusting. You’ve already spent enough of your life falling in love with yourself in mirrors, you could at least try to act modest about it.”

“Right so, I want to get off the phone with you really soon, because talking to you is making me lose some IQ points.”

“Oh no. Anymore and you’re intelligence will be less than the number of arms you have,” Gerard says.

“Still more than you. You know I hear it was a record breaking discovery to have someone’s IQ be in the negative digits. I’ve got to hand it to you on that one. I always thought you’d break records.”

“Just tell me what it is you have to tell me, okay?” Gerard says.

“So the guy I’m setting you up with is three years sober and he doesn’t want to meet at a bar, so I figured you could just call him and plan it yourself, because I don’t really give a shit.”

“Alright fine, just give me his number then.”

“I gave yours to him already, expect him to call.”

“Is he pretty?” Gerard asks.

“I... you’re a weirdo. I guess so?” Frank says.

“Good,” Gerard replies, “I deserve pretty.”

“You’re so narcissistic.”

“Go away. Just let me try to find someone quickly, okay? I don’t know how many of my friends I’m willing to lose because of how bad a date you are. Like seriously, I’d hate me too if I was forced to go on a date with someone as ugly, self-involved, untalented, idiotic, and immature as you.”

Frank makes a noise on the other end of the phone then says, “You probably researched for several hours just to figure out what those words even mean.”

“Fuckhead.”

“Back at ya,” Frank spits.

“Just, hang up so I can get back to slamming my head against a wall, which, by the way, is a whole lot less painful than having to listen to your whiney little voice.”

“You’re probably not smart enough to figure out that hitting your head against the wall isn’t how you complete routine tasks,” Frank responds.

“Someday you’re going to be walking down the street and be pushed in front of a bus, Frank, and I, I am just going to laugh and spit on your little pancake self.”

“I’m hanging up,” Frank says, and then the phone clicks.

“Thank fucking god,” Gerard says to himself.

He looks around at his painfully unexciting apartment and mutters to himself how much he hates Frank. If his walls had ears they’d probably tell him to shut up already about this Frank guy and just kill him. Frank isn’t worth a lifelong prison sentence though. He wouldn’t waste the rest of his life just to kill Frank. That would make him all the more special, and Frank’s life just isn’t that important to him that he’s willing to risk his own freedom. Now if only there were a way to take him on a trip to Antarctica and ‘accidentally’ push him off an iceberg.

Gerard falls over the back of his couch lazily, and puts his phone on the coffee table. The coffee table is really just a hunk of wood at this point, because it’s so fucked over and old that it is definitely not classifiable as furniture anymore.

The apartment around him rattles as the subway passes by his window and he yells at it, because that’s just how you talk to a train. You yell at it. It can’t hear you, but that’s just the way things work. Gerard’s logic is not up to par. He threw away any sense of actual logic back in tenth grade math though.

Gerard flicks through channels, going past a million different reality shows which have about as much reality in them as Star Trek, before he settles on some cooking show with a far too perky host making something that looks like it should be put in the Louvre rather than eaten.

So when the guy, whose name Gerard doesn’t remember, and doesn’t even care that he doesn’t recall it, calls him, he almost forgets to answer the phone. He’s not even positive if Frank gave him a name to work with. He probably did, but Gerard wasn’t paying any real attention to it.

Gerard basically just says ‘whatever’ or ‘okay’ to whatever the guys says. He’s not really paying attention. Something about meeting tonight, but not at a bar. Then something about going to Gerard’s place and he’s like ‘fine whatever,’ because he really doesn’t care. He’s more interested in how the lady on the screen is going to turn that nasty looking asparagus into something edible that ‘the whole family can enjoy.’

When the guy asks him if he’s paying attention to a word he says, Gerard replies with ‘I’m sorry, what was that?’ Basically, he ends up ruining the date before it’s even started. Eventually the guy gets tired of trying to handle how uninterested Gerard is and he just hangs up. It’s at that point that Gerard realizes that he fucked up quite a bit there, and he groans, because, wow, seriously? This was all basically his idea in the first place and he’s now completely blowing off the dates Frank sets him up on? He’s an idiot.

Gerard doesn’t know what to do now. Half an hour ago he’d been talking to Frank and tried to be all haughty and now he just blew a date that hadn’t even happened yet. That has got to be a record, no one has ever messed up a date that quickly before. He doesn’t even know the guy’s name who he just totally missed his chance with. Frank is going to give him shit for this.

He decides to just screw it and he picks himself up from the couch, walks around singing show tunes incredibly loudly for about fifteen minutes, stomps on the floor when his neighbors downstairs seem not to appreciate how loud his singing is, and then he starts to make his way to the bottom of the bag of potato chips in his kitchen. Gerard and time management compute about as well as Gerard and logic. So, not at all.

By the time it’s about seven at night, Gerard is tired of doing nothing all day. He’s also kind of tired of thinking about Frank. He tries to push the man out of his head, but it’s not working in the slightest.

Why couldn’t Frank have been uglier? Everything in his life would have been so much easier if Frank had been ugly. If only he’d just gotten the bad genetics passed down to him than Gerard wouldn’t be having this problem. His problem is that Frank is hot, which sucks, because usually Gerard doesn’t feel guilty about finding people hot, but when it’s Frank, it just feels wrong. The last person on the planet Gerard want’s to find hot is Frank. He’s just so gross, and dumb, and stupid, and hot.

Gerard just growls, paces around his apartment, which isn’t big enough to do any real pacing in the first place, before he falls on top of his bed with a loud huff.

“Why couldn’t Frank look like a walrus?” Gerard asks the ceiling. The ceiling doesn’t respond, because Gerard is stupid and he’s talking to inanimate objects.

It really is a dilemma. Gerard can’t seem to get past it. Frank is so attractive and it’s so fucking annoying. He can’t just strum one off thinking about Frank and then pretend it never happened, because how could he ever look the guy in the eye ever again? Answer, he couldn’t. It’s not like he intends to ever have to see Frank again or anything, but really, he wouldn’t even get any sleep.

Then Gerard’s mind goes even further and now he’s thinking about what it would be like, not just to picture Frank, but oh god, what if Frank was there with him. That image sends Gerard into a mixture between a shiver, a gag, and a moan, because, really, he’s still a teenage boy on the inside. Just thinking about it is gross. But hot. But gross. Mostly hot. But also gross.

Frank though. This is Frank he’s thinking about. This is the boy who used to write ‘fuck you, Gerard’ on little post-it notes and leave them in his locker. This is the guy who put glue in his hair. This is the guy who used to trip him in the school halls whenever he got the chance. This is the guy who threw eggs at Gerard’s window once. He can’t think of Frank like that, it’s wrong. He knows it’s wrong. He knows it’s so far past wrong that you’d need to create a whole new language just to be able to enunciate how wrong it actually is.

But it’s also so fucking exciting to think about. Gerard tells himself he doesn’t feel that. Doesn’t feel a sort of curiosity at the bottom of his stomach. He tells himself that it’s all in his head, that he doesn’t want to picture Frank and that he’s just getting sick. He tells himself to picture Frank being dropped off a cliff, or being mauled by lions. That’s a nice picture and all, but really... Frank naked?

“Nonononononononononono,” Gerard says, pulling himself up into a sitting position on his bed. He’s not thinking any of these things, he can’t be. He tells his brain that he’s not thinking about all that, but, by telling himself to stop, he’s only picturing things more clearly.

This is really very inconvenient.

Gerard groans, and just puts his face in his hands. He looks down between his legs to confirm a suspicion that he was already pretty sure about in the first place, and then he falls back on the bed again.

“Not good,” Gerard mutters to himself.