The Chasing of Moons

Frank’s not having as great a time as he keeps assuring Gerard that he is having. It’s mostly because Gerard is a fucking idiot.

He keeps looking at Frank when he thinks Frank’s not watching and he looks like Frank feels. He wants to give it up and just tell Gerard he likes him but he doesn’t want to be creepy and that’s not how he wants to remember this. He doesn’t want to be pushy about it. It’s got to feel right, and that just wouldn’t feel right.

Gerard feels almost exactly the same way as Frank. He is madly crazy about the guy, but he can’t have him because Frank isn’t into it, and it’d be weird. He keeps pulling himself back, but he’s also trying to flaunt the fact that he’s not uninviting. He puts his hand on the table, as casually as he can, and he’s waiting for Frank to maybe take it. He hasn’t yet. But Gerard’s hoping for it anyway.

Frank is oblivious to this, and thinks Gerard’s hand is inadvertently lying there as some sort of heavenly prank being pulled on him.

Basically, both of them are idiots. It’s the same problem as Mikey and Pete. Everyone knows. They’re not kidding anyone. Everyone who looks at them knows that they like each other. But still they pretend not to. They ignore everyone’s eyes and they do what they can to seem completely casual, when neither of them wants that.

If this were the Sims, and Brendon was in charge, they would be making out in the bathroom like an hour ago. Well, if Brendon was in charge they’d have been making out like ten minutes after they first met, or at least Gerard and Frank, not Gee, because Brendon is blissfully unaware of Gee’s existence. Lucky bastard. Brendon has incredibly promiscuous Sims though. He tried to Woohoo with everyone in town once. He made several enemies in doing so.

The first ten minutes are incredibly awkward minutes that Frank barely makes it through alive. Then Gerard starts talking to him about David Bowie, and this is a conversation that he knows how to be a part of. David Bowie is soon replaced by “how epic is the movie Labyrinth though, I mean seriously” which somehow turns into a discussion about The Emperor’s New Groove, and Frank couldn’t tell you how they got there if you asked.

Frank could talk to him forever. He could literally talk about every topic on this planet and never get bored. Frank could talk about the most boring thing ever, like maybe golf, and he would never in his life stop being thrilled by every word out of Gerard’s mouth.

Frank feels like he’s been personally assaulted when their cut off by a long guitar chord, being pumped through an incredibly old and worn speaker system. This is what forces him to shut up however, so it’s the guitar chord from hell. Yes, he knows they’re here to see Gerard’s band, but Frank really wishes that they could not be here for that. Just here to talk and flirt and make out and stuff.

Instead of listening to the band, Frank focuses his attention on an assortment of different things. He looks at Gerard’s hand, and at Gerard’s face, and at Gerard’s arm, and at Gerard’s smile, and at Gerard’s eyes, and then back at Gerard’s hand, and so on and so forth. If it is not in some way a part of Gerard, Frank does not look at it.

He’s going to end up short circuiting if he keeps looking at Gerard, he knows that. Gerard’s like the sun, you can’t look at him too long or you’re blinded by him, because he’s that gorgeous. Frank can’t see enough detail of Gerard’s face though. He’s gotta get closer.

Frank does what he hopes is not an obvious scooch over towards Gerard. He’s now maybe six inches closer to Gerard. Six inches is only a small fraction of the space he needs to scooch.

After what Frank feels is an appropriate amount of time later, he fakes a sneeze which gives him the cover to scooch over about another six inches, give or take a few inches. There’s about a foot left of space. He needs to remove about, he’d say, like maybe seven or eight of those inches because he wants to be close, elbow touching close, but he doesn’t want to be so close that Gerard realizes he’s really fucking close.

Frank makes his way, an inch at a time at sporadic intervals until there’s about five inches between them. This is good, he can work with five inches. Five inches is a lot closer than the several feet that it had been.

He doesn’t know what to do from here though. He looks at Gerard’s hand, it’s still mocking him, staring him right in the face. Frank expects it to start talking to him and taunt how much of a coward he is. Then he realizes how stupid that thought is, and he resigns, taking his own hand and staring at it angrily, like he’s blaming the appendage for his own fear of grabbing that fucker’s hand.

He really wishes Gee had left him with an intricate, step-by-step guide as to how he is supposed to get this stupid asshole to fall in love with him. All he basically said was good luck and ran away. That is not helping Frank right now! Sure he knows the outcome but he doesn’t know a fucking thing about how that outcome becomes itself.

Frank’s too busy being angry at himself, that he has to physically restrain his socks from falling off when he feels Gerard’s hand, the hand not on the table, accidentally brush up against his thigh. It’s like he’s hyperaware of everything the moment it happens, because one second Frank is sulking, staring angrily at some couples initials scratched into the table in the shape of a heart, wishing they were his and Gerard’s, and the next moment, he’s looking up with eyes so wide that they’re almost perfect circles.

“Sorry!” Gerard says in a tone suggesting he just did something extremely serious like accidentally dropped Frank’s entire china cabinet on the ground and everything shattered into a million pieces.

Gerard is then scooting away from Frank, and all the hard work that Frank put into getting himself closer is lost.

He barely remembers to mumble a response, something like, “no s’okay.” It’s too late. He’s now over a foot and a half away. Frank feels like he’s lost a very large amount of hard work, like he wrote an essay and then the computer shutdown before he got to save it. That’s what this feels like.

Frank’s mumbling something about the bathroom, and that’s all he says before he’s hurrying out of the seat. He’s not sure that you could pay him any thousands of dollars to actually use the bathroom in a place like this, and he has to use the hem of his shirt to even open the door handle, which was once a silver color, but is now chipped away to reveal a gross brown color underneath. Frank doesn’t even want to contaminate his shirt on that nasty doorknob, but he has no other choice.

When he escapes to the bathroom and hears the door shut behind him, the music quiets to a low rumble. If it were a nicer venue, he’d still be deafened from in here, but he’s not, which is how you know it’s a shithole.

After a quick assessment which entails lowering his head so that his hair almost touches the grotty bathroom tiles, he discovers that he’s alone. There’s only two stalls, so there’s not very many places to hide, and Frank is thankful of the privacy as he groans out as loudly as he can, because he needs to release some amount of his anger into the world in order to maintain his sanity.

Frank wants to splash some water on his face, but he can picture Brendon’s face if he found out that all of his work got washed away to the pipes, and that is not something Frank wants to have to deal with. Instead, he just glares at the sink and wishes that it would swallow him so he won’t have to be so miserable and hopelessly optimistic.

He’s still banking on the fact that it could happen. Gerard might make a move. Maybe even tonight, he could. That’s not going to happen though, Frank knows it won’t, but he refuses to give up on the idea.

He huffs, glares at his reflection in the mirror and frowns at what he sees. He doesn’t look bad, he doesn’t know why Gerard doesn’t want to at least flirt with him, he doesn’t know what it is he’s missing. He looks better than usual he supposes, his eyes aren’t as tired, and his hair isn’t too unkempt. Frank was pretty sure that there was one guy who’d been making eyes at him as they entered the place, but he didn’t really care. That guy wasn’t Gerard, so he was incidental. Frank would hit on himself, he thinks, so he doesn’t know why Gerard isn’t doing that.

Frank knows that the only way that this will work is if he makes the first move. That’s what it’s come to. He has to do it. If he doesn’t, it will never happen.

So, Frank grabs a wad of paper towels, opens the door using his newly acquired paper towel mitten, and then throws his paper towels away in the trash can near the bar. He walks back to their table, pushing through what feels like way more people than he’d been through the other way, but he finally spots their booth.

Gerard is actually looking for him when Frank spots him, and as soon as he sees Frank, his eyes dart away. He feels his inner Chandler release mentally when his brain screams, “could he be any more obvious?”

“Hey,” Frank says, because now is not the time for snotty remarks about how obvious Gerard’s crush is. Frank scoots into the seat, and then scoots some more. When he settles back into the booth, he’s more than made up for the space he lost when Gerard had scooted away, so maybe his spontaneous bathroom break was cleverer than he’d planned on it being.

Frank is almost bumping shoulders with Gerard. There’s nearly seven feet on Frank’s other side that he could be occupying, which is literally enough space for him to lie down. He wouldn’t do that of course, he doesn’t trust this seat enough, but if he wanted to, he’d have more than enough room, it would just be a strange angle, because of the curve of the booth.

Gerard’s pretending that he doesn’t notice how close Frank is. He’s got his hands clutched together tightly, and he’s trying to concentrate on the show, this is why he’s here. He’s here to see a band, not to be absolutely petrified by how close Frank is. He doesn’t need that. He doesn’t know if he doesn’t want it, but he knows that it’s not something he wants to have to think about.

So he looks at the band, tries to tell himself he’s more attracted to the bassist than to Frank, but it’s not working. That chin carpet isn’t doing any favors for that bassist, and there’s nothing about Frank that Gerard would see fit to change, except for maybe his sexual orientation.

Frank is not going to give up. This is going to happen, and he’s decided it’s going to happen today. As in, sometime in the next half hour.

Gerard looks away from Frank for so long, that he almost forgets why it is he’s not looking at him. To be fair, he doesn’t exactly know why Frank is so close. He’s too close. There’s so much space. Gerard’s got barely a couple of inches between him and Frank, and he could scoot over and away, but he doesn’t want to. He’s an oblivious idiot, but he’s an oblivious idiot who likes how close Frank is.

Frank looks away from him, over to the band, and he realizes that he hasn’t been listening to a single chord all night. He couldn’t tell you a thing about a single one of their songs. Not a single word or anything. Frank couldn’t pick the lead singer out of a line up. That, however, may not be because of his horrible attentiveness, but because he can’t see more than ten feet in front of him.

The lighting, honestly, is atrocious. Frank can barely see his own hand let alone the band on stage. He’s pretty sure that this club must have been designed back in the 70s, it’s got the aura of having hosted several later regretted discoes. It smells like weed and alcohol and poorly cooked club food, as well as the very immediate stench of body odor.

But Frank looks at Gerard, even despite the bad lighting, the bad smell, and the shitty sound equipment and he looks like he’s having the time of his life so Frank must not have screwed everything up. He’d have been here with Mikey if Frank hadn’t invited him, and he might honestly have had a better time, Frank’s never going to actually know whether that’s true or not, but he thinks that he’s not doing too bad.

He’s gotten Gerard smiling almost completely all night and he hasn’t said more than a few rude things to Frank, so he’s counting this so far to be a success. His internal screaming is not exactly ideal, but Gerard’s not screaming at him, so it’s Frank’s fault that he feels like shit right now, not Gerard’s. Well, it’s partially the fact that Gerard is too stupid to see that Frank is, in a very dumb and completely hopeless way, coming on to him.

The thing that sucks though is that there’s one light. One light, right above Gerard. It’s dull, and it keeps flickering in and out, and the light is too-yellow and distorted to even be a good source of lighting, but it’s the way that it’s hanging over Gerard. It makes him look like an angel. Like the sun is shining directly on him, pointing him specifically out in a sea of different, less impressive faces.

Frank’s not an idiot. He knows that, unbiasedly, there’s dozens of people in this room who are tons more typically attractive than Gerard. He knows that there are several who he could even have a shot with because there’s a few of them making eyes at Frank like he’s in some sort of display case. He knows that Gerard isn’t spectacular when you put everything in perspective, he’s got a lot of potential to be, Frank knows that for certain, but he’s just a pimply kid right now. He’s just a chubby, dorky, grudge-holding, rambling, stubborn, and not least of all snarky kid, that you could easily look over. He wouldn’t be the guy in the movie that the girl falls in love with, he would be the guy she’d take pity over.

Frank knows that, and it kind of kills him inside, because he sees Gerard and it’s like looking at some sort of angel. He’s aware that other people look at Gerard with only the briefest amount of interest, and Frank thinks that he could read an entire encyclopedia series on what he had for breakfast on November the second in 2008. He’s in utter disbelief that there’s any human in the world who could somehow not be in love with Gerard. He thinks that everyone human needs to be for them to even be human, because Gerard’s too perfect. He’s too everything that Frank has ever wanted.

Frank’s not entirely proud of his assertiveness in the best of times, and if he feels that way in the ideal scenario, than he’s certainly not proud of his assertiveness in the worst of times. He sometimes wishes he could be like Pete, passive aggressive at best. Or at least that’s what he calls it when he throws a bowl of potato chips at you for beating him at Halo. Or Go Fish. It doesn’t really matter. Either way, he’s a sore loser.

He just can’t handle how much he wants Gerard to just open his eyes and see that Frank is crazy for him. He’s sick of it. He’s sick of having to pretend he doesn’t know that Gerard is pretending to hate him when he actually is in love with him and has been for years.

Frank likes Gerard, and that’s really where the story is left. That’s it. He likes Gerard. Frank is crazy for Gerard. He wants to date Gerard. He wants to be a dumb cliché couple that makes everyone around him gag, and he wants to hold the guys hand, and cry into his shoulder, and flick corn at him at the dinner table, and cream him at Mario Kart. He doesn’t give a shit about Gerard’s little game of hiding his feelings away. He’s done with that. He’s not into it. He doesn’t want to have to deal with it when it’s so obvious that Gerard does, in fact, like him.

Gerard turns his head, huge smile plastered on his face with extreme intent like he’s been smiling for years and never wants to stop. Frank can’t blame him. He’s in a room surrounded by dozens of people who are all screaming for a band that he loves as much as anyone else, and he’s with the guy he likes who he thinks is unaware that he likes. Everything is great.

Gerard opens his mouth to say something, right at the beginning of strong, and ear splitting feedback from the shitty audio equipment that could honestly make a person punch someone in the face, but Frank interrupts him before he can say a single word. He doesn’t get a chance to say what he thinks of the song that Frank is completely alien too, or how awful he thinks the stereo is, or how on point the drummer’s hair is, because seriously, she could make a Pantene commercial feel bad about itself. Gerard doesn’t get a chance to say any of those things.

Frank kisses him.

Simple as that. Frank just leans in, with almost lightning speed, and that’s really that.

Frank doesn’t have that much time to savor much of anything. He’s too caught up in the adrenaline so it’s over before it even starts, which is an entirely inaccurate description of it, because it lasts for about fifteen seconds, which Frank would consider to be a success if he were capable of computing any second of it.

He doesn’t however. Frank is entirely unaware of the way that Gerard is in dire need of chapstick, like seriously, has this guy ever moisturized ever? He’s completely ignorant to the way that Gerard’s eyes close almost immediately after his lips touch Frank’s. He’s absolutely oblivious to the fact that, despite how dry his lips are, the kiss is literally perfect in every way. It’s a kiss that was painstakingly designed by an over-working perfection seeking engineer intent on creating the most fantastic kiss that the world has or will ever see. Frank misses all of that, and instead only knows the panic of Gerard’s face in the moments following the kiss that puts all other kisses, including Westley and Buttercup’s, to shame.

“Oh my god!” Gerard says emphatically, and conveniently the last chord of the song rings out quietly so that Gerard can actually be heard without having to scream at the top of his lungs. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know why I did that, I shouldn’t of... and I just, god I’m sorry, I don’t even know why, or how it just... and I’m really really sorry, because... but you’re straight, and I’m just completely-”

Frank, sufficiently confused, because he’s pretty sure he was the one who kissed Gerard, cuts him off from rambling because he’s not making any sense at all.

“Gerard!” Frank stops him before he says sorry one more time. “I was the one who kissed you!”

“You what?” Gerard asks, looking at Frank like he’s said something impossible.

“I kissed you,” Frank tells him.

“You... really?” He asks with sheer disbelief across his face.

“Yes!”

Gerard stares at the table for a moment and then looks back at Frank, completely unaware of anything around him that isn’t Frank. He’s not even aware of the glaring guitar behind him like a gunshot of sound.

“I just assumed... I mean, you’re Frank Iero, no way you would kiss me. I just realized I was kissing you and figured I had to have been the one who did it... why would Frank Iero kiss me?”

“Why are you saying my name like that?” Frank asks, because Gerard keeps saying his name like he’s talking about someone important, like Obama or Queen Latifah.

“What?” Gerard asks, “I mean, you’re Frank Iero.”

“I know I am. You’re Gerard Way.”

“No,” Gerard shakes his head, and says, “I’m Gerard Way.” He says his own name in the way that you would say that you’ve recently been diagnosed with a yeast infection.

Frank looks at him disapprovingly, “What the fuck are you even saying. You’re Gerard fucking Way.” Frank says his name like he’s talking about Elton fucking John and Gerard looks at him like he just punched a duck in the face.

“No,” Gerard shakes his head, “You’re Frank-”

“I know my own name! The point is that I kissed you, and I think you’re pretty great even though you keep talking about yourself like you’re the gum at the bottom of a shoe. It’s starting to offend me.”

“Offend you?” Gerard asks. “Why?”

“Because you’re saying something shitty about someone I like, and it’s pissing me off.”

“I’m talking about myself.”

“Precisely, but I like you, and you’re being a jerk, so shut up,” Frank says.

“But I’m allowed to say that about myself, I am myself.”

“I can still be offended by it though, because it’s not nice!”

“Why would you kiss me though?” Gerard asks.

“Because I like you?” Frank says, feeling like that’s the only answer that there can be and it’s plainly obvious.

“Why would you like me though?” Gerard asks, and Frank is caught off guard by that, because he doesn’t have a mirror to shove into Gerard’s face as an explanation.

“Because I do.”

“Why would you like me though?” he asks again. Frank’s starting to feel like rolling his eyes, but decides that’s probably not going to help him win his case here.

“Why wouldn’t I like you?”

“Do you have all day?” Gerard asks him.

“You’re a complete idiot.”

“That is reason number one,” Gerard says, and makes to start talking again, but Frank gives him a look that tells him to shut up.

“Really, what needs to be asked is whether or not you would mind me kissing you again?” Frank says.

“But you’re not into guys.”

“I think the fact that I just kissed you should tell you otherwise.”

“But you dated girls. I know, I-” Gerard is about to say that he watched them with Frank and imagined ripping their heads off, but instead decides he shouldn’t. “So you like both?”

“No,” Frank says shaking his head, “Gerard, you’re not getting any of this. I like you, and that’s what matters. I was confused for a while, but I know, with absolute certainty that I like you.”

Frank can’t honestly believe how long this conversation has been. He’s been trying to convince Gerard he likes him for what feels like hours, but he’s not getting it. He’s refusing to see his own strengths, and instead completely overlooks every single feature and quirk that makes Frank lie awake at night with despair and desire.

“So you kissed me because you like me?” Gerard asks, with the tone of him asking Frank if he’d solved a particularly difficult math problem correctly.

“Yes.”

“And to be clear, you’re sure I’m not the one who kissed you?”

“I am positive,” Frank says.

“And you want to kiss me again?” Gerard asks.

“Yes.”

“Oh,” he says, looking at neither Frank nor at the space behind him, but seemingly at nothing at all, like he’s just looking at an empty canvas and trying to decide what needs to be done to it.

“Well?” Frank asks expectantly.

“Well what?”

“Can I kiss you?” Frank says, annoyed with how obvious that is.

“No,” Gerard says, frowning a little bit, which makes Frank feel like someone just murdered his entire family right in front of him. This is how it feels to watch Bambi’s mother die, except it’s worse.

“Oh,” Frank says, voice broken.

“No!” Gerard says like he’s panicking with Frank’s response, “because, I mean, you kissed me the first time. I’ve dreamt about kissing you since forever. Shit, I wasn’t going to tell you that. I mean, well, now you know. It’s not that I’m creepy, I just sorta liked you, but not in a perverse way or anything. But you kissed me, and fuck I want to kiss you this time, because that’s how I always pictured it when I- never mind!”

Frank thinks that he’d kind of really like to hear the end of that sentence, but he’s not going to pry if Gerard’s decided not to give up that information. What really matters is that Gerard wants to kiss him, and Frank is silently saluting Gee right now for the fact that it’s because of him that Frank ever looked twice at Gerard.

“Wait!” Frank says, and then he literally wants Gerard to smack him in the face, because did he seriously just stop himself from being kissed by Gerard? How stupid is he?

“What?” Gerard asks and he looks like he’s anticipating some awful punchline where Frank says that he was only joking and that, really, he doesn’t like Gerard.

“Fucking hell, I want to hold your fucking hand.”

“That is not how that song goes,” Gerard says.

“I’m going to punch you in the fucking face.”

“You keep using ‘fucking’ as a modifier, I don’t get it,” Gerard says, and Frank is seriously going to punch this guy in the fucking face.

So, he says, “I’m seriously going to punch you in the fucking face.”

“Right, sorry,” Gerard says, and Frank grabs his hand, because there’s no way he’s going to just not now that he’s gotten Gerard’s attention.

Frank has had many many many many many many dreams about the first time he’d kiss Gerard. He has also completely forgotten his first kiss with Gerard even though it was a minute ago. He could tell you several thousand different stories of how he imagined it.

One of those such stories is that he was going to walk out of school with Gerard, and then spontaneously throw him against a wall and kiss the shit out of him. Another story was that he would somehow convince Gerard to come to his house and he would play some variation of spin the bottle with only the two of them there and he would kiss Gerard and it would be perfect and they would begin writing the screenplay to their lives at that very minute. There’s also the story of how he would do that arm thing at a movie theater and kiss Gerard in the last row of the Magic Mike movie because one of them would have been like “hey let’s go see the movie with the half-naked men” and the other would’ve said “I didn’t see the first one” and then they’d have said “yeah, but half-naked men” and the other would say “touché,” and then Frank would kiss him and they’d get kicked out of the movie theater for dry humping or something equally as improbable. Another one of his plans was that he would find a way to push Gerard on a swing and then kiss him when he went Frank’s direction, and Frank never did quite manage to figure out how that would be possible, because surely, Gerard would just swing away a second later.

Frank’s made a billion stories that would warm the hearts of millions of teenage girls, but he never planned for the first kiss that he was self-aware enough to consider himself to be a part of to be quite so... awkward.

Frank’s pretty sure it’s because he’s putting too much thought into it. He can’t remember the first one enough, but he knows it was better than this, this can’t have been what it was like.

Frank pulls away a second later with seriously distressed eyebrows, and Gerard looks equally as concerned.

“I was expecting fireworks,” Frank says.

“Yeah, that was kind of off,” Gerard replies, “I think I went too far to the left.”

“Let’s try again,” Frank suggests, and Gerard doesn’t really pause before he’s kissing Frank again, and this is when Frank pinpoints the problem.

He pushes Gerard back and says, “Fuck, you need some fucking chapstick, that’s the problem.”

“You’re insulting me?” Gerard asks, looking somewhat like a kicked puppy, and also somewhat like a teacher who’s just been told that the dog ate their students homework.

“Gimme a sec,” Frank says, and he reaches into his front pocket, before he pulls out his chapstick and hands it to Gerard who rolls his eyes at him.

“Frank,” Gerard says, looking down at it, “You use cookie flavored chapstick.”

“I allow myself certain luxuries, alright,” Frank says, “I don’t want the shit that tastes like candlewax!”

Gerard makes a face that says ‘I’m not judging you, but dude, I am totally judging you.’ He’s about to ask if it’s weird that he’s using Frank’s chapstick before he remembers that he did just stick his mouth on Frank’s mouth, so really, it’s not like it’s particularly weird. And really when it comes down to it, Gerard’s gay, his mouth has been weirder places.

“Alright, let’s try this again,” Frank says.

“I can’t believe this is so complicated,” Gerard says, almost being interrupted by Frank practically hurdling himself at him, and, alright, Gerard won’t admit it to his face, but Frank was right.

It’s not going to go down in the record books as one of the best kisses ever, but it’s easily the best kiss that Frank is aware of ever having. He’s pretty sure that that other one was spectacular, but he was not concentrating, so he tells himself not to forget to savor this one.

Gerard is a fairly decent kisser. Well, he’s the best kisser ever. Frank says that in the most ironic of senses though, because for some reason, Gerard is infinitely better than Gee. He’d been okay, but it’s kind of like the way a shoe doesn’t fit until your foot grows to fit it. Frank’s foot wasn’t big enough yet when he kissed Gee, right now, his foot is exactly the right size. It’s because Gerard is the age that Frank needs for him to be, and that makes him all the better. Because he is amazing. And Frank is going to allow himself to die here from lack of oxygen. He doesn’t care.

Gerard is a dick. Frank decides that he hates him, because he’s pulling away, something about not being able to breathe. Frank growls back at him, which just makes Gerard look guilty and Frank is feeling slightly possessive right now. Possessiveness is not a common feeling for him, because Frank generally refuses to believe that his friends are even his friends, nervous that they might decide otherwise if he says it too often.

“I don’t get any of this,” Gerard says, looking away from Frank, at the stage, but Frank doesn’t know how he could possibly be concentrating on the music right now.

“Get what? What are you missing?”

“It’s just that,” Gerard says, sighing, “You ignored me for too many years and now you want to just kiss me? What’s going on, Frank? Honestly.”

“I...” Frank says, “I don’t know if I can tell you that. I mean, I could, but it’s a long story, and it’s crazy, and you’re not going to believe it, the point is that I like you. I have for, well, since that day at lunch. But trust me, I will tell you someday, and I’ll explain everything, and then you’ll understand why I put off the explanation, but it’s just not something that has to be dealt with at this very moment. What matters is that ever since I came up to you at lunch, I’ve been crazy about you.”

“Okay, there’s another thing. What the hell was that about? You were acting crazy.”

“I was having an off day,” Frank says.

“An off day? So you just decided to come up to me and tell me I looked like someone else?”

“So you haven’t forgotten about that, have you?”

“No!” Gerard says, a bit too loudly.

“Why is it important?” Frank asks. “Why do you care when the point is that I like you, and I want to kiss you. I’ll do basically anything, Gerard, I really like you. The problem is that the explanation you need, I don’t have right this minute, because it’s a lot more complicated than just a few words. It’s just not important, why does it have to be? What is important is that I like you. Like a lot.”

“It’s important because it is Frank,” Gerard says, making a discontented face.

“Okay, so yeah, I phrased that a bit wrong, does it have to be important now? Right now, we’re here, we’re having fun, everything’s great, I’ve been trying to find the nerve to kiss you or hold your hand or fucking anything all night, and everything is great, but now you’re mad and I don’t know why and I’m like... I’m really sorry that everything is so messy, and I want to be able to tell you the whole story because it’s important, but I’m afraid if I tell you everything you won’t want to kiss me again, because it’s not like it’s bad or creepy or anything, it’s just a bit crazy, and it’s not something that you’re going to want to have to deal with, so I think it’s best if we just set it aside and talk about it when it becomes important, and-”

“Frank, oh my god, take a fucking breath,” Gerard says, because Frank didn’t breathe once during his rant. He’s a little purple in color.

“Sorry,” Frank says.

“Jeez, fine,” Gerard says, “I mean we have to talk about whatever the hell is going on with you later, but right now I’m living the dream, so fuck it.”

And, in his attempt to throw caution to the wind, Gerard kisses him again. Frank could definitely get used to this. He’s happy. He’s very happy. This is the good life. Gerard’s right, living the dream.

Frank has this small feeling in his stomach that he really should have made a bet with Mikey on who could get their guy first, but it’s too late, so he’s not going to dwell on that now. Besides, there are more important things to focus on, like the tongue that is not Frank’s tongue in his mouth which is really a very good place for Gerard’s tongue to be, if you ask him.

So, Frank decides, he doesn’t care what trouble he’s going to find himself in later, as long as he has this moment now.

And it’s also important to note that this kiss dramatically beats the first one.