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The AC was broken again.
Everything was covered in a little disgusting film of humidity and grime by now, it was one of those odd hours after their show, lunch had been quickly replaced by popsicles and ice cubes rolled in Sweet'n'Low, or powdered chili if you were feeling brave.
“Get this shit off of me!” Frank cries out, he is engaged in a miniature but very violent war against his shirt, which was basically vacuum sealed to him from wrist to shoulder.
On the far side of the bus, Gerard is observing way too closely from his bunk. One foot and half his torso hanging in hopes of catching some breeze, or at least not being completely suffocated by the bunk. “Why did you even pack a long sleeve shirt? It's summer you dumbass”
“Because you insisted on looking like this on stage!” Frank barks, arms locked upwards and then finally free from the fabric. He holds the damp shirt with two fingers, very far from his face and winces. “Jesus, I smell like spoiled cheese”
Gerard laughed at the comment, his eyes finally looking away, finding the floor and staying there because looking back up would mean more movement, and movement is not on the table when you can feel your organs dissolving.
“This shit is probably a pound heavier now” Frank says, setting the damp shirt down with a wet ‘plop’, then he kneels down beside the piles of unfinished laundry, which is maybe the second most disgusting place on earth.
He files through jeans and jackets and suspicious stains, but his search is dangerously approaching a shirt-less result.
“I think I have a shirt” Gerard murmurs, still fascinated by the floor, watching the three beads of his own sweat dripping downwards become four.
“Really?” Frank said, getting up and almost running to Gerard’s bunk like someone offered him a free car.
“Yeah, it's on the plastic bin over there” Gerard raised his eyes, pointing with his face and nothing else. “It's clean”
Gerard can't help it, he does a quick one over Frank's skin. The gleam of sweat and the flush of red over it has no business being as hypnotizing as it is, especially when it was so gross. There are a few little drops threatening to slide down. “It's, uh, dry”
“Thank fucking god! Can I?” Frank points back at the disaster zone of dirty laundry and miscellaneous stage gear before he’s even finished asking, already digging. He surfaces with the ‘i’m a pepper’ t-shirt pinched between two fingers like a crime scene exhibit. He shakes it out once. Wrinkled beyond saving, but dry.
“Sure.”
Frank pulls it over his head. It settles a little loose at the shoulders, the hem falling somewhere past where his own shirt would. He tugs it down over his abdomen anyway. Good enough.
“Any idea when the AC will be repaired?”
“Nope.” Gerard has gone fully slack again, one arm hanging straight down toward the floor, completely surrendered to gravity.
Frank fans the loose fabric against his stomach twice. “Yeah, I’m going outside. I’d rather cook outside than here.”
“Good luck.”
Outside, the venue was only coming alive, everyone moved like they had syrup for blood, the heat was devastating but slightly more bearable if you moved and chased the slow breeze on the little wooded areas. The techs and roadies were dragging cased amps and coiled cables, the heavy drone of the generator trucks kept the whole operation alive. Even the grass looked exhausted.
He was already sweating through his new borrowed shirt, but fuck it, at least it wasn’t soaking. He bee-lined towards a shabby pop-up canopy whose only purpose was to shield the sacred cooler from direct sunlight. The cooler itself was an ancient monster, covered in duct tape and stickers from previous tours, possibly haunted.
Frank kneels down to reach a water bottle and maybe just sink his hands on the ice water at the bottom of the cooler, only then he realizes the sickly red flush to his skin, his whole arm was tingling pleasantly, letting the chill leech into his skin.
He comes up, twisting the cap, downing half of it in one chug and pouring the rest over his head. The shock in temperature is annoying, but at least for a second he could imagine what it was like to not want to punch the sun in the dick.
One of the techs was standing nearby, watching the whole scene with an eyebrow arched and a popsicle in his mouth.
“What’s up?“ Frank says, still panting.
“…Someone got lucky?” the tech said, and the words landed just sharp enough to cut through Frank’s brief, watery relief, ruining the moment for both of them.
Frank blinked, still hunched halfway over the cooler, his hands wet and the shirt already clinging to his back. He was aware he probably looked half melted and on the verge of a medical emergency, but that was basically everyone else too. “What the fuck are you on about?”
“Isn’t that Gerard’s shirt?” The tech points at the shirt with a suspicious neon green popsicle.
Frank looks down, checking reality because maybe his brain melted somewhere between the bus and here. “Yeah?”
“Your face is red, just sayin’, man” The tech shrugged, a perfect little fuck-you motion. "Have you ever noticed how you only ever wear his shirts when you’re, like, really fucked up?” He took another bite, letting the sticky green run down his fingers. “It’s cute.”
It takes a long while, but the pieces start falling into place, and when they do, it's almost like a domino effect. Frank stares at him, the tech’s popsicle is melting faster than Frank’s dignity. The shirt is still there, hanging loose off his shoulders.
“Wait! No!” Frank starts blurting out the truth in very small increments. “The bus was— it was like a greenhouse in there, and he just—”
Something about the way the tech’s mouth curls around the popsicle stick finally does it.
“Actually, you know what? Fuck you.” Frank throws both arms wide at the sky and points at the blazing sun. “It’s a hundred fucking degrees out here!”
“Yeah”
“I’m sweating like a whore in church! Everyone is!”
“In mass” The tech corrects.
“I don’t care what the whores are attending! I could be dying of heatstroke right now and your brain goes there?!”
“Fine, sorry! I just assumed—”
“I’m melting, man!” Frank cries out, giving up the fight because he is about halfway melted into the pavement. He plants both hands on his thighs and stares at the ground like it owes him something.
The tech watches him for a moment, then crunches the last inch of his popsicle, stick and all, and fishes a fresh water bottle out of the cooler, he tosses it at Frank. “Yup.” The grin has not moved. “Very fashionably, though.”
On the other side of the venue, Gerard is almost done raiding the catering section, treating hydration like it's a sport. So far He’d emptied two Solo cups of lemonade, one after the other, chased by three thick, juicy slabs of watermelon. One roadie across from him watches, half disgusted and half impressed. The roadie’s eyes flicked between Gerard and the watermelon rinds, then over to the far-off picnic tables, where Frank was sprawled out, arms thrown wide like he was making a snow angel in the dust, the borrowed shirt several shades darker now.
“Wasn't that Frank wearing your shirt?” The roadie asks. He didn’t bother hiding the smirk.
“What?” He feigned surprise, then glanced over at Frank, did a little head-tilt like he’d never noticed before. “Oh, yeah.” He put down his glass.
The roadie furrows his brow. “You guys didn't do laundry again?”
Gerard shrugged and took another bite of watermelon. “Maybe? It was just there dude”
“So you just gave it to him?”
“He was hot.” Gerard speaks with a cadence that may count as early signs of heat exhaustion posted somewhere around the EMT tents.
For a moment neither of them speaks, Gerard way too busy inhaling the rest of his lemonade. He looks into the middle distance for a second, extra awkward, and Gerard’s tongue caught up with his brain “The bus was hot, I mean”
The roadie stared at him with patience, he had seen a lot of rock bands and he was not about to be impressed by some accidental double entendre. “Okay. Cool.”
Somehow, some way, the entire venue is sharing their points of view. The rumor that Frank was wearing Gerard’s shirt, and that this somehow Meant Something, was already migrating through the ground like a game of broken telephone. By the time it hit the merch girls, it was apparently a “territorial thing“ though no one could agree on what kind of thing they were talking about.
Two hours later, Ray has started a betting pool, mostly because he finds scamming the crew really funny, and he has nothing better to do. Mikey is the only one of them with enough common sense to supervise the HVAC guy, giving him as hefty a tip as a broke bassist on tour can give once he is finished.
Sooner or later, everyone migrates back to the bus, Ray goes straight into the bathroom to try and get rid of the stickiness while Mikey collapses into his bunk, leaving Gerard alone in the lounge with one job: sit in front of the freshly repaired AC unit and wait for the little red light to turn green.
Frank comes in last, the door swinging shut behind him. His hair is plastered flat on one side and sticking up on the other, dark at the roots in a way that could be water or could just be more sweat. He collapsed dramatically onto the couch and spread out like a man who had personally defeated the heatwave.
"Can you believe someone asked me if I'd slept with you?" Frank groans, taking a seat directly beside Gerard, they wait for a second more as the light turns green.
Gerard was already most of the way through a new popsicle—cherry, aggressively red, leaving a sloppy trail down the inside of his wrist that he hadn’t bothered to wipe. “Yeah, someone asked me why you were wearing my clothes"
"Not helping."
"We've done weirder things." Gerard shrugs, biting off a chunk of frozen red forty directly from the stick.
Frank snorted. "Have we?”
“You dry humped my leg on stage today.” Gerard takes another bite, thoughtful, like he’s remembering something he read in a newspaper.
“That's just for show, we played Prison” Frank lifts up his head, just a bit, squinting one eye open. “It's performance, you know that.”
“Was the moan necessary?”
Frank opens both eyes. “You know it was, Ray was shredding like crazy.” He laughs, dropping his head back down. Okay, fine, maybe the rumors had been coming for a long time.
Gerard manages to say “Fair.” before the AC does its fucking job, the first mechanical whir shoving cold air forward into the lounge. He is off the couch before Frank can blink, crossing the small space in two steps and dropping to his knees directly in front of the vent.
Frank follows, a bit more slowly, but he does. And now they're like ostriches with their heads almost colliding on the sand.
The breeze is so nice that they forget how to speak for a long while, the only sound being the drone of the AC and the rustle of their hair being aggressively blow-dried.
"So..." Frank said eventually, rotating like a rotisserie chicken so the nape of his neck could also get cool.
"Hm?"
"You don't mind if people think we're... like, a thing?”
Gerard doesn't answer immediately. It's not that difficult of a question, but he is busy with his eyes closed and chin tipped forward, letting the cold air tunnel directly into his brain. "... People are weird."
“That's not an answer." Frank says, turning once more and tugging the front of the borrowed shirt away from his chest, letting the air funnel straight in.
“I mean.” Gerard sighs, long and dramatic, and finally peels himself away from the vent just enough to actually look at him. There is a red grid pressed into his forehead from the filter. “If I saw us from ten feet away, I’d think we were dating too.”
Frank blinks. "...Really?"
"You've been wearing my shirt all afternoon."
"So? You and Mikey share clothes all the time too”
“Don't make it weird” Gerard answers, tilting his head back into the vent. "You also just admitted to dry humping me."
Frank chuckles. "Professionally."
“Point being” Gerard turns to look at him finally, the red grid of the filter still pressed into his forehead, and shrugs before biting off the last red inch of his popsicle. “I get why people think that sometimes”
“So you don't mind?” Frank takes the popsicle stick and tosses it into the little garbage can near the driver's seat. “Like, what if you wanted to, I don’t know, date someone else? Wouldn’t that screw you over if people thought you were, like, with me?”
Gerard seems to think it over with his eyes closed, temple resting against the vent. “Who would want to? Look at me, I'm melting and I have cherry juice all over me” He gestured at the general disaster area of his torso, now thoroughly adorned with cherry streaks and sweat stains.
Frank snorted, which, given the current state of his sinuses, sounded like a car malfunctioning. “Dude. You’re famous. People want to date you.”
“Yeah, for the experience of saying they did. Or because they’re into self-harm.” Gerard rolled his eyes so hard Frank could practically hear them click into place.
Frank flopped back onto the couch, spreading out as wide as the cushions allowed, like he was trying to make himself less of a target. “You’re so full of shit, man. You look fine. Actually, you look better than you do in half the official band photos.”
“Yeah, well,” Gerard said, “you’d think the label would pay for someone to Photoshop out the fringe gaps, but I guess we’re not at Green Day levels yet.”
“If we were there, we’d have a pool right now.” Frank pointed out, voice rising an octave with each syllable. “And probably our own AC guy, you’d still be a mess, though.”
Gerard lifted both hands, wrists up, displaying the cherry damage like evidence at a crime scene. “At least I’d be a mess with a pool.”
“...I'd date you” Frank blurts out, absentmindedly. “If I were a chick? Yeah. Give me a piece of that mess”
Something about that cracks them both open. Not a polite laugh but the ugly kind, the kind that makes your shoulders shake even if the rest of your body is defeated and currently being blasted with sub-zero air in hopes of getting out of it alive. Gerard turns his head a little more, feeling significantly more human.
“Sure, whatever you say” Gerard chuckles, eyes still closed. “But no, I don't mind it, people think whatever they want. If it gets them through the set or sells a couple more shirts, let them.”
Frank finally gathers enough momentum to just crash back into the nearest seat, feeling like someone just dipped him in nitrogen. “If anything, I’d think you were dating Bert”
“From The Used?”
“Yeah, what the fuck does ‘going out musically’ even mean?” Frank asks, body limp against the couch once more and one arm draped over his eyes.
“What does ‘professionally dry humping’ mean, then?”
Frank is about to answer with something equally stupid when the AC coughs up a weird sound, a bad and probably very expensive sound.
“Don't” Gerard fucking whimpers into the vent, quietly, like volume might make it worse. “No, no, no.”
Frank slowly raises one finger to his lips. His eyes are doing something complicated. “Don’t move. It can smell fear.”
They freeze for a couple of seconds while the AC clanks and groans a bit more, it coughs up an odd dust cloud into Gerard's mouth like it's suffering some strange mechanical disease and then returns to normal.
The two of them exhaled in unison, only then realizing they'd both been holding their breath celebrating the fact that they are not returning to the eight circle of hell, right along with the murderers, adultery enjoyers and those who cheap out on bus infrastructure.
Gerard coughed and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, leaving a gritty streak of recycled fiberglass and stage grime. “Pth.” He pauses to cough again, less aggressive. “Thank God.”
Frank eyed him, worried but not so worried that it overrode the underlying urge to make fun of him.“Did you get any in your lungs?”
“Maybe? I don’t care. I’d freebase this shit if it meant I could stop sweating for five seconds.” Gerard says before going back to pressing his face straight into the little filter. “Please don't do that again” His palm lingered on the cool plastic, fingers tracing the seam as if coaxing the unit into loving loyalty.
Frank watched him with his arms folded, head tilted, genuinely unsure whether to be impressed or file a report. “You are, like, one heatwave away from fucking the damn thing.”
“Bold of you to assume I haven’t already” Gerard snorts and goes to hug the wall instead, cheek pressed flat against it.
“Get a room! Or at least keep it to yourself, asshole.” Frank grimaces, crossing his arms. His gaze drifts sideways to the trash can near the driver’s seat, which has become a small monument to desperation, wooden sticks poking out at every angle, wrappers in three different colors crumpled and overflowing onto the floor. “...Question.”
“We're not looking for a third”
“Oh my God.” Frank picks up a shoe from the floor near the couch, weighs it in his hand for a moment, he considers throwing it against Gerard but decides against it. “Where the fuck did you find more popsicles?”
Gerard finally peels away from the vent, smiling. He’s got the look of someone who has recently committed a minor and victimless crime and feels terrific about it. “Catering”
“You stole from catering?” Frank smiles at the idea, he can picture it perfectly: Gerard speedwalking out of the catering tent with his arms full. “Got any left?”
“Obviously.” Gerard ducks down and pulls a small styrofoam cooler from the cabinet under the kitchenette sink. He flips the lid, fishes one out, and holds it up for Frank to take. “But the piña colada ones,” he says, already reaching back in for another one, “those are mine.”