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It was just another night on tour, specifically one of those long stretches between shows where the bus chewed through the highway and sleep became a thing other people did.
The clock was already somewhere in the A.M. and the lounge light was still on, which meant Gerard was still up, wedged into the corner of the lounge couch with his sketchbook propped against one knee, procrastinating on the inking process.
Frank barged in any way, dropping onto the couch beside him hard enough to make the cushions sigh in protest.
Gerard didn't look up.
Frank had been awake for something like three hours with nothing but the hum of the highway and his phone screen for company, the battery already down to twenty percent and the data ticking lower with every new tab he opened.
“Hey.” He didn’t wait for Gerard to acknowledge him. “Have you ever wondered if the Amish pay taxes?”
Gerard’s pen stopped moving for just a second. “What?”
“Social security” Frank tilted his phone toward no one in particular, as if the Wikipedia article could speak for itself. “They’re basically the only people in the country who’ve been legally exempt since like the fifties.” He’d found it somewhere around the Ohio border, sandwiched somewhere between an article about competitive dog grooming and something about the moon published by NASA.
Gerard set the sketchbook flat against his knee. He uncapped a different pen, the kind he used when he was just moving his hand around in warm-up for the real thing, and he flipped to a blank page near the back.
“Fine,” he said, without looking up. “Enlighten me.”
Frank closed the gap between them on the couch until their shoulders were pressed together, angling his phone screen toward Gerard out of habit. “Okay, so basically social security started as just a pension thing, right? So when you first got a job you got your card and that was basically it– actually, the whole system is fucked, but anyway–”
He kept going, the words tumbling out faster than he meant them to, covering the lamination thing, the teacher exemptions, all of it. The bus took a long curve somewhere in the dark outside and neither of them shifted. Gerard’s pen kept moving through most of it, a half-finished face accumulating on the blank page, just the jaw so far, and one eye.
“Land the fucking plane, Iero.” Gerard’s voice had a low warning in it but the corner of his mouth was doing something.
“Okay, okay–” Frank straightened up slightly. “The only people still exempt are communities that already take care of their own elderly, and the religion has to go back to 1950 at the latest. That’s it.” He spread his hands. “So. Amish people. Voilà.”
“Fascinating,” Gerard said, almost to himself, and then swore under his breath, leaning the sketchbook to look at where the ink had smudged under the heel of his hand.
Frank watched him blot at it. “Were you even listening?”
“Yes.” He didn’t look up. “Pensions. Old people. Why were you even looking that up?”
“I dunno.” He shrugs, picking at a loose thread on the couch cushion. “I was bored. I actually started with money laundering.”
Gerard’s pen slows again. “...why?”
“You never know!” He gestures vaguely at the dark window. “One thing leads to another.”
Gerard doesn’t answer that. He abandons the face he’s been working on and starts moving the pen somewhere in the margin instead, small overlapping loops that aren’t anything yet, just mindless doodles. “You wasted your roaming data on Amish tax exemptions.”
“Knowledge is priceless.”
“Your cellphone plan isn’t.” Gerard glances over at him, one eyebrow up. “Did you at least solve the crime thing?”
“...No.”
Gerard turns to look at him fully for the first time since he sat down. Just looks at him.
“Okay, but–” Frank shifts to face him slightly, one foot tucking up under his knee. “I genuinely thought money laundering was putting bills in the washing machine. Like literally.”
Gerard stares at him for a long second. Then he closes the sketchbook fully, spine-down against his thigh, and leans back into the couch, their arms pressing together again from shoulder to elbow. “You are so annoying,” he says, to the ceiling.
“And you love me for it.” Frank grins at the ceiling. “Okay, new question. If you had to launder money, what business would you use?”
Gerard didn’t even hesitate. “Italian restaurant.”
“Huh.” Frank thought it over. “Yeah, actually.”
“Why, what are you picking?” Gerard was already rummaging through the cushions for his phone, and when he found it, he opened the snake game. The tinny little sound effect chirps once.
“Laundromat. For the irony.” Frank leaned over to watch the little pixel snake navigate its grid. “Or maybe just a strip club.”
“Of course you’d say that.”
Frank watches the pixel snake begin its first lap. “What’s your best?”
“Don’t jinx it.”
The next twenty minutes passed weirdly quiet. Frank narrating close calls under his breath, Gerard occasionally lobbing a question into the air that had no business existing at three in the morning. Frank answers all of them. At some point the bus rocks gently through a long straight stretch of nothing, and somewhere in the middle of a question about whether fish can get bored, Frank tips sideways and doesn’t correct it, shoulder, then cheek, until his head comes to rest against Gerard’s arm.
Somehow they are now waiting for some signal to come through so their “Do cows have favorite songs?” Google search loads. Gerard’s snake is three apples from his best score, which Frank knows because Gerard has said it twice in the last minute.
“Do you ever wonder if we'll come out of this tour normal?” Gerard asks, eyes fully on the screen.
The snake hits a wall. The Nokia sound plays and Gerard exhales through his nose.
"Nope." Frank doesn’t try to make him laugh this time. "I think we were already kinda weird."
“I didn’t mean weird.”
“Whatever, the tour is weird. I keep having weird dreams I can’t remember and my bunk is basically a shelf. I almost cried this morning.”
“Do you miss your bed too?” Gerard asks after a brief moment of silence between them.
That takes a second to answer. “Yeah. Hotel rooms are nice. I’m glad we’re not in the old van anymore. But yeah.”
Gerard hands found an empty bottle somewhere in the cushions and is turning it slowly by the neck. His weight shifts a little further onto Frank’s shoulder, who has been staring at his phone settings long enough that the screen has dimmed once already. He wakes it back up and opens his texts from his mom instead.
“I get that. I miss going to work sometimes. Can you believe that shit?”
“There is no fucking way you miss Barnes & Noble.” Frank laughs, a short one through his nose.
They laugh at it. The very specific misery of it, the carts, the customers who treated a misfiled paperback discount like a personal offense. Gerard shakes his head through most of it. “I don’t miss it,” he says, once the laughing’s runs its course. He lobs the bottle at the small trash can by the window. It clips the edge and falls to the floor. He leaves it there and crosses his arms. “But I always knew who I’d see on a Monday.”
“Fair.” Frank’s thumb has stopped scrolling on his own phone, caught on a text from his dad asking where the good scissors were, sent three weeks ago, still unanswered. He stares at it. “...I think I’m forgetting what my room looked like.”
“You had a Black Flag poster.” Gerard is still looking at the trash can. “And there was something else. A lava lamp maybe.”
“That’s Ray’s. When were you even in my room?”
“Shit, like– a year ago? You asked me to grab an MP3 player. There were clothes everywhere.”
“Oh right.” Frank is quiet for a second. “ I had a beanbag too. It was missing like half the filling” The memory arrives in pieces. “I wonder if my fish is okay.”
“Wait.” Gerard turns to look at him, which mostly just means he feels the shift of Frank’s hair against his shoulder, the whole weight of his head adjusting slightly like a cat resettling. “You had fish? Since when? Is it like a goldfish or something more fancy?”
“A betta! He’s got this tail that goes–” He moves his hand in a slow, fanning gesture, then drops it. He can picture it clearly now, the little tank on the windowsill. “It changes color depending on the light. In the morning it was kind of red but at night under the lamp it went this weird purple-blue. Like a bruise but nice, he was a pretty motherfucker”
Silence settles back over them.
“...Why are goldfish crackers shaped like fish?”
Frank smiled. He did actually know this one. “The inventor’s wife was a Pisces.”
The questions have been getting further apart. Gerard isn’t running out of them, more like the night itself is getting heavier, they have been basically sleep-talking for hours now.
“Can I ask you something?” Same tone as always, same as the fish and the crackers and the cows.
Frank doesn’t look up from his phone. “That’s literally all you’ve done.”
“Fair.” Gerard snorts, and leans over to look at Frank’s screen, which means their heads are close enough now that Frank can smell his shampoo, something cheap and faintly chemical. The couch has been slowly winning this battle.
“Have you ever kissed a guy?”
“Yeah.” Frank doesn’t hesitate. It takes maybe a second to find the memory. “Me and this kid Danny, some girls dared us on a field trip. Sixth grade, maybe?”
“They pay you?”
“Five dollars.”
They’re both laughing, not really at the kissing part, just at the five dollars. The stupid smallness of it. Five dollars is not enough to buy anything, let alone a piece of your dignity.
“You?” Frank asks, once he has a chance to catch his breath.
“Nah.”
Frank lifts his head off Gerard’s shoulder to look at him. “Didn’t you go to art school?”
“Why does everyone always–” Gerard stops.“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Come on, Way.” He rolls his eyes so hard he might have seen his own brain for a second. “You spent three years in the weird bisexuality factory and just never kissed a guy? Not even a peck?”
“Nope,” Gerard says, totally calm since he has never once considered that this makes him statistically unusual. “Or if I did, I don’t remember“
Frank finally puts the phone down on the cushion between them, screen-side down. It was running low on battery anyways. “Would you like to?”
“Like, eventually? Or–” Gerard gestures vaguely at the bus, the night, the general situation.
“I mean.” Frank shrugs one shoulder, the one Gerard isn’t leaning on. “I wouldn’t mind.”
“Yeah right.” Gerard rolls his eyes, less committed to it than Frank’s earlier attempt.
“I don’t promise anything. I have very little experience.”
“And I have zero.” Gerard snorts, shifting his weight.
“So between us…” Frank trails off, then straightens up slowly. Sitting very properly now, hands on his knees.
Gerard mirrors him without thinking about it, both of them suddenly upright on the couch like they are about to be interviewed. “This is going to suck, probably.” He’s laughing a little more than the moment requires.
“Probably!” Frank cracks his neck for some goddamned reason.
“Well.” Gerard pushes a strand of hair back. They are fully face to face now, and it's somehow just another Tuesday night. “One way to find out, I guess”
Frank nods, and they go for it, they both lean in so loosely at the same time and bump noses hard enough that it actually hurts. Which is very funny, especially at three A.M. or so.
"Ow!” Gerard is already laughing, but his eyes are a little watery from the impact, hand flying up to his face.
“Are you bleeding?”
“No.” He checks. “No. Are you?”
“I’m fine.” Frank presses two fingers to the bridge of his own nose. The pain is already fading into something else. “Okay. Hang on.” Frank exhales. “I think you’re overthinking it.”
“I think we’re underthinking it?”
“You went too fast.”
They try again, more carefully. Frank gets close enough this time to feel the warmth coming off Gerard’s face, which is more information than he was prepared for, and then he pulls back. “You’re sideways.”
“I didn’t know which way to–”
“Your right!” He complains but doesn't pull away, just does one small and corrective push on Gerard’s temple with two fingers. The bus hums under them. He can feel Gerard’s pulse, or maybe that’s his own. He moves Gerard’s head slowly to the right until the angle opens up between them.
“Like this?” Gerard answers, way overcorrecting it.
“Have you seriously never–” Frank stops. Laughs once through his nose, waiting for Gerard to settle. When he does, Frank tilts his own head and holds it, expecting Gerard to copy. “Okay. Stay like that”
Frank leans in, and it happens.
It's not awful, and also not quite right, mostly just curious. Their lips take a second to start moving very slowly like this is an expedition, no one even thinks of going further than just a tentative dance, one opens, the other closes, some breath escaping every now and then. It’s like they are both waiting for the other one to decide what this is, and then something shifts and neither of them is waiting anymore. It’s warm. That’s the main thing.
It lasts maybe half a minute.
Neither of them seems willing to be the first to pull away, mostly because neither is entirely sure when you're supposed to.
It’s Gerard who finally does, leaning back with a quiet “Hmm.”
“Huh.” Frank says. He can feel the ghost of it sitting on his mouth, still being evaluated. “That was better than the five-dollar one.”
Gerard’s smile arrives before he can do anything about it. Then another eye-roll. “I would hope so.”
It's not exactly awkward like they would hope it would be, it's just the right amount of dumb and science experiment. It’s more like a baking soda volcano that actually worked, and now there’s stuff all over the table, and they’re both just standing there looking at it.
“Did we do it right?” Gerard asks. He runs his tongue over his lips without meaning to, still trying to figure out what just happened there.
“I don’t know.” Frank tilts his head, but now to the left. Like he is reviewing footage.
“I think so?”
“You were staring at me the entire time.” Frank says it like he is reporting a minor traffic incident.
Gerard just blinks. “...Oh.”
“Like, the whole time.” Frank looks at the space between them. “Did you close your eyes?”
“…No”
They sit with that for a second.
Then Frank exhales slowly through his nose, the way someone would before suggesting doing another trip to the buffet. “Again?”
Gerard shrugs one shoulder. “Yeah, sure.”
The second kiss lasts a bit more, Gerard gets a bit braver in his exploring and his tongue finds Frank's teeth for a second, which feel weird and maybe too cold for being, well, teeth. He opens his eyes before pulling away again.
“That’s better” Gerard sighs, then looks at Frank and the way his eyebrows are not as furrowed as before. "...Want me to give you five bucks, or?”
Frank smacks Gerard on the thigh in retaliation, not too hard, almost like a joke because that's all this feels like. He flips him off quite elegantly before his hand finds the back of his neck. "I kinda get why people do that now."
Gerard nods thoughtfully. "Yeah."
"It was… nice"
"Yeah” Gerard picks his sketchbook back up, he's not too sure what you're supposed to do after that.
Frank leans back until he’s basically horizontal, one foot still on the floor, the other knee up. He picks up his phone again, squints at the battery percentage and sets it face-down on his chest. "Do you think the Amish kiss with their eyes open?"
Gerard groans from somewhere deep in his chest, so loudly it probably makes either Ray or Mikey stir in their bunks. “Are you fucking kidding me?"
"What?"
"You had one moment."
"I had a question!" Frank turns his head on the armrest to look at him.
"You always have a question."
Frank looks back up at the ceiling. Two seconds pass. "...But do you think they do?”
“I have a better question,” Gerard looks at him for a long moment, then over at the minifridge wedged across from them in the narrow galley, its little amber power light blinking in the dark. “Wanna see if Ray left us cold pizza?”
Frank is already getting up. “Hell yeah!”
They waste no time and get up, ready to raid whatever edible thing is left on the bus.