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Patrick in the beginning of 2021 seems tired to Pete. Pete worries about him. Pete worries about him so much that he’s worried he’s suffocating him. He tries to give him space, tries to let him have studio time and not knock on the door every five minutes asking if he’s still okay.
Pete’s way of giving Patrick space is to call up everyone who interacts with Patrick and ask how Patrick seems to them.
“What do you think?” he hisses at Joe. “Is he okay?”
“Why are you whispering?” Joe asks.
Pete looks around his deserted kitchen. The window looks out onto the studio by the pool, so it’s not like Patrick is going to sneak up on him. And Tennyson is visible lounging under a palm tree with a book (not on Zoom school, and Pete frowns and looks at the calendar and then remembers it’s Saturday). Pete whispers, “I don’t know why I’m whispering.”
“Could it be,” Joe asks calmly, “because you are spying on your boyfriend and you know you shouldn’t be?”
“I’m not spying on him!” Pete protests.
Joe makes a considering humming noise, and then concludes, “Seems like you’re spying. Seems like you are whispering out of guilt. I diagnose you with a guilty conscience.”
“I’m not spying on him, I’m just worried about him.”
“You could ask him if he’s okay, you know.”
“That would be pointless, because I know he’s not.”
“Then why are you asking me?” asks Joe.
“I don’t know.” Pete sighs in frustration and picks up a mango and contemplates cutting it to have something to do. “Sorry. I don’t know.”
“Have you considered,” says Joe, “that we’re in the middle of a pandemic of a deadly virus that you just tested positive for?”
“I know. He’s emotionally exhausted. I know.”
“You’re emotionally exhausted,” Joe says.
Pete stares at the mango in his hand, struck. He says, “Do you think so?”
“Pete,” says Joe in exasperation.
“I mean.” Pete frowns. “I feel fine. I’ve been fine this whole time.”
“You’re talking to me about Patrick instead of talking to Patrick. That’s never a good sign. Andy and I call it a Code Magenta.”
“Code Magenta?”
“Red is too boring for you.”
Pete can’t really argue with that. He says, “I’m talking to you because I don’t want to have to make Patrick avoid making me feel bad over stressing him out over the holidays.”
“Maybe you should instead deal directly with how bad you already feel for stressing him out over the holidays.”
This sounds so reasonable and probably true. Pete should have probably already dealt with this in therapy. He says, “Okay, alright, maybe. Maybe I do feel bad about that.”
“Uh-huh. My bill will be in the mail,” says Joe.
***
Pete stops worrying about suffocating Patrick – Joe’s right, since when does he worry about suffocating Patrick – and knocks on the door of the studio.
“Yeah,” Patrick calls.
Pete pokes his head in and says, “Hi, can I come in?”
“Uh-huh,” says Patrick, making a few final adjustments to whatever he’s doing and then turning to face Pete as he comes in.
“So,” Pete says. He sits on the floor by Patrick’s feet, because the couch across the room suddenly seems too far away for this conversation.
Patrick doesn’t think this is strange. Patrick looks curiously relieved. He says, “Oh, thank God.”
Pete blinks in surprise. “What?”
“You’re going to actually fucking talk to me. You realize you’ve been avoiding me?”
Pete frowns. “I haven’t been avoiding you.”
“Yes, you have. Just now you knocked on the door and asked if you could come in.”
Which is maybe kind of avoidance in the world of Pete and Patrick, Pete allows. He tries to shrug and says, “I didn’t want to, like… I’ve been worried about you.”
Patrick’s gaze on him is even. “Have you been?”
“Yeah. You’ve been tired.”
“Yes,” Patrick agrees mildly.
“Right,” says Pete. “Right. And I didn’t want to—”
“Pete,” Patrick interjects gently.
Pete knows the reason for that interjection. He takes a deep breath and tries for a little more truth, tries not to pour so much out. He looks at the worn and dirty laces of Patrick’s sneakers and says, “I feel really terrible that I ruined Christmas.”
“You didn’t ruin Christmas.”
“I kind of did.”
“Pete.” Patrick slides off his chair to join him on the floor. They sit opposite each other, cross-legged, and Patrick takes Pete’s hands into his and rests them, intertwined, on their knees. He says, “Stop thinking about me.”
“What?”
“Stop thinking about me, and stop thinking about Tennyson. I’ve been letting you do that, I’ve been letting you worry about us, because I get it, I do, but you’re killing me here, Wentz. Tell me about you.”
Pete looks at Patrick, and he almost wants to say that he doesn’t know what Patrick means, because he doesn’t, he is telling Patrick about him, but then he opens his mouth and he hears himself say, “I thought maybe I might die.” Which is the stupidest, most melodramatic thing in the entire universe, so of course Pete Wentz thought it.
Patrick’s gaze is unwavering. “I know,” he says.
“How can you know?” Pete retorts. “I was never sick, not even a little bit, I was totally fine the whole time and anyway, I’m healthy and relatively young, I was never going to actually die, I—”
“You thought you might die, all alone,” Patrick says simply.
He did. He used to lay awake, unable to sleep without Patrick near him, his heart beating at panic pace, imagining his lungs filling up with fluid, imagining drowning on land, with Patrick and Tennyson hidden from him by layers of plastic, and he wouldn’t even get to tell them everything he wanted to say. “Fuck,” Pete chokes out, because he didn’t really expect to be talking about this all of a sudden, and then Patrick pulls him into a hug, and Pete presses his face into his shoulder.
“You’ve been trying so hard to be brave for us and you let me fall all to pieces and you never did it and I have been waiting for you, Pete,” he murmurs.
“It turns out I really don’t want to die,” Pete admits, trembling in Patrick’s arms.
“Good,” Patrick says, and kisses the top of his head and strokes his hair and lets him shake against him. “Good.”
***
Pete is feeling thoughtful as he slices vegetables for dinner. He says to Patrick, “Do I do that a lot?”
“What?” Patrick doesn’t even look up from where he’s adding sour cream to the mashed potatoes he’s making.
“Avoid talking about important things by pretending I have better things to talk about.”
“Yes,” Patrick answers immediately.
“Really?”
“I mean, of course you do.” Patrick snorts. “Fuck, I think all of Fall Out Boy has been you pretending you have better things to talk about through song instead of, you know, dealing with the entire subject of us.”
“I kept you in a box,” says Pete.
“You kept me in a Schrodinger box,” Patrick agrees, “and kept pretending you had better things to talk about.”
“Like what?”
“Like, ‘Should we get a Tinder?’” Patrick dips a spoon into the mashed potatoes and holds it out to Pete. “Here, taste.”
Pete obeys and says, “Delicious.”
“More salt?”
“No. It’s perfect. Just like you.”
Patrick says, “I am not perfect,” but then he kisses him, just because, and Pete strenuously disagrees, Patrick is definitely perfect.
***
“He has a superhero chin,” Pete observes. “Like, the perfect superhero chin.”
“That’s what you’re coming away with from this rewatch?” says Patrick. “You’re watching the guy’s chin?”
“Oh, no, are you jealous?” Pete pokes at Patrick’s chin. “You have a superhero chin, too.”
“Well, now you’re just blatantly making things up,” Patrick says good-naturedly, and then playfully bites Pete’s finger.
“You could totally be Batman.”
“Batman doesn’t wear glasses,” Patrick replies, and then takes his glasses off and pinches at the bridge of his nose.
“My Batman wears glasses,” says Pete.
“What is that even supposed to mean? I’m your Batman now?”
“Dude, yes,” says Pete, and slides onto Patrick’s lap. “Do you want to do Batman roleplay?”
“Remember that time you wanted to pretend to be a vampire so we had to come up with the world’s most complicated music video storyline for no reason?”
“Um, the reason was I wanted to pretend to be a vampire, which is a very good reason. Do you want to do vampire roleplay?”
“And I really thought that was going to be the most complicated music video I would ever have to endure until you decided you wanted me to be a zombie who you would have to kill.”
“Mutually kill. And that was for the cathartic payoff of our hug in the end. Do you want to do zombie roleplay?”
“Tell me, in your head, how the sexy zombie roleplay goes,” says Patrick.
“I mean, it was pretty hot when that zombie nurse, like, flung you onto the table or whatever it was and had her way with you.”
“Grr argh I’m an angry zombie, have my way with me,” Patrick says, with some kind of attempt at a ferocious growl.
Pete laughs until he literally cries as Patrick growls and grunts and bites his way through some semblance of zombie roleplay sex, and this is how he knows Patrick loves him more than anything in the universe, and this is how Pete knows he wants to spend the rest of his life with him. Because Patrick is perfect.
***
Tennyson is really obsessed with The Night Circus. He wants a Night Circus-themed birthday party.
“Do you think we’ll be able to have birthday parties this summer?” he asks wistfully.
Every day there is more and more news about the vaccines, when they might be expected to be rolled out, when they might make it onto the list. Sometimes the date is as late as July and sometimes the date is as early as April, but either way, there is a curious feeling in Pete’s chest that he recognizes unfamiliarly as hope.
“Maybe,” Patrick says. “Could be.”
“Uncle Andy says we have to hope for everyone to believe in science.”
“Uncle Andy is, as ever, correct,” says Patrick.
Pete watches the two of them. Patrick is painting Tennyson’s fingernails black, because Tennyson is definitely Pete’s kid in some respects. Patrick used to paint Pete’s fingernails black for him, and Pete would never have imagined, back then, that someday Patrick would be doing this for the next generation. Pete floats lazily around the pool on the unicorn float and feels very content, very happy, very settled.
He feels like getting married.
He should probably be thinking about how to propose. Like, he knows Patrick considers them already engaged, but obviously a post-coital We should get married does not count as a real engagement.
Pete really should have done the engagement right, instead of the half-assed thing he did, which is what Patrick’s gotten from him their entire relationship. Half-assed nonsense, when Patrick has always been perfect.
“You’re very quiet over there,” Patrick calls to him.
“I’m thinking.”
“Always dangerous,” Patrick replies.
“Hey, I was just thinking of how you’re perfect!” Pete defends himself.
“I am not perfect,” Patrick says, which is an obvious lie.
“How are those nails, Tennyson?” Pete asks.
“Perfect,” Tennyson chirps.
“Brat,” Pete hears Patrick tell Tennyson fondly.
Perfect, thinks Pete.
***
Pete thinks that probably before he, you know, formally proposes, he should talk to Tennyson about it. Like, he should make sure Tennyson is involved in that decision, right? He shouldn’t just, like, foist a stepfather onto his kid unexpectedly.
They’re supposed to be making a collage of sexualized advertisements for social studies. It’s supposed to be teaching the kids about sexism, but Pete kind of feels like all it’s doing is building up future masturbatory fantasies. If Tennyson’s the type of kid who’s eventually going to fantasize over boobs. Which he might not be, who knows.
Anyway, Pete is sitting on the floor of his ten-year-old son’s bedroom carefully cutting boobs out of magazines and Tennyson is next to him carefully pasting boobs onto posterboard that he is going to present over Zoom school next week. At first, Pete thought they would make a digital collage, like, it is the future and all that, except that Patrick was like, “How about you go and Google ‘boobs’ and see how that goes?” and Pete decided instead to just pick up some magazines on the next grocery store run.
“Hey,” Pete says, as casually as he can manage, “what would you say to Patrick staying around for a while?”
“Dad, Patrick lives here,” Tennyson explains to him, in that tone of voice he has that’s pure exasperation because his dad needs to have to so much explained to him. It was exactly that tone of voice, explaining Valentine’s Day to Pete, that had started all of this, Pete thinks fondly.
“No, I know. But what if he lived here permanently?”
There’s a moment of silence, then Tennyson says, “Dad, I think Patrick already thinks he lives here permanently.”
Tennyson’s right, of course. Pete is maybe handling this badly. “I know. And I know we talked about this when he moved in, but I want to talk about it again: Is it okay, that he’s here with us? That he’s part of our lives like this? That it’s not just you and me anymore?”
Tennyson looks blank. “Patrick’s always been around. Now that he lives with us he’s just around more.”
“And that’s okay?”
Tennyson narrows his eyes at Pete. Tennyson’s eyes are their major point of physical resemblance, Pete thinks, although Patrick insists Tennyson also has Pete’s smile. Tennyson says, “What’s really going on?”
“Patrick and I would like to get married,” Pete says.
Tennyson shrugs and says, “Cool,” and reaches for the latest set of boobs to paste onto his posterboard.
“That means he’d always be around. Forever and ever.”
“Unless you get divorced,” Tennyson points out.
“Not really the outcome we’re aiming for.”
“Just saying,” says Tennyson, positioning the boobs just so and then looking up at Pete. “Dad, I love Patrick. I love having him around all the time. I can’t imagine going through this pandemic without him.”
“Neither can I,” Pete agrees.
“So it’s cool. You should get married. You love him and he loves you and that’s why people get married, right?”
“So I’ve been told,” says Pete. “I’ve never tried it before.”
“When are you going to do it? Are you going to wait until we can have a party?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t properly proposed yet, so I think I’d like to do that next. But then, yeah, I guess we’ll have a party. Will you be my best man?”
Tennyson grins and nods and adds more boobs to his collage.
Pete watches him and says carefully, “If something happens to me, would you like to stay with Patrick?”
Tennyson gives him another narrow-eyed gaze. “What would happen to you? You’re not getting married because you’re dying, are you?”
“No, I’m not dying.”
“If you were dying, you would tell me, right?”
“I would tell you. I’m not dying.” Pete pauses. “I maybe thought I might die, when I had Covid, and maybe that started me thinking about how it doesn’t make sense that Patrick and I aren’t married. Maybe I couldn’t believe that I might actually die before I could get it right. Like, I met my soulmate twenty years ago and I still haven’t put a ring on him, you know what I mean? This is more information than you need. Anyway, what I’m saying is, I’m not dying. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t get hit by a truck tomorrow.”
“We barely leave the house anymore,” Tennyson points out.
“Hit by lightning, then. Or a shelf could fall on me or something. Houses are dangerous places, you know. The point is, if something happened to me, would you like to stay with Patrick?”
“Here?”
“In this house, you mean? Would that matter to you?”
Tennyson curls up a corner of a poorly-pasted set of boobs, then smooths it back down. “Well, yeah. This is our house. This is where… Of course I’d want to stay with Patrick, and I’d like to stay here with him.”
“I’ll make sure of it, then,” Pete promises him.
“Grandma won’t be mad if I choose Patrick?”
“Not in the least.” Pete’s actually already had this conversation with his mom, who was surprised he hadn’t already changed everything to make sure Tennyson would stay with Patrick.
“Okay,” Tennyson decides. “I’ll stay with Patrick, but nothing’s going to happen to you. We’re all going to stay in this house together forever.”
“You might want to go to college someday,” Pete tells him, amused.
“I can live at home and go to college,” says Tennyson, and Pete, who lived at home well past the point when many people would have moved out, totally gets that. Sometimes, he totally sees that Tennyson is his kid.
“You can live here as long as you want,” says Pete.
Tennyson nods, satisfied, and says, “Do you think we should add some legs to the boobs?”
***
Tennyson does a rehearsal of his boob collage presentation for Patrick. Patrick sits on the couch in their family room, his eyebrows lifted high on his forehead as he studies the collage. Tennyson helpfully points out all of the boobs and reads off some statistics he has about scantily clad women versus scantily clad men. Pete sits off to the side and tries not to snort laughter at the expression on Patrick’s face.
“Wow,” Patrick says faintly when Tennyson is done. “This is quite a presentation.”
Tennyson beams. “Dad helped me.”
“Did he? Well, yeah, that makes sense, he used to be an expert in the commodification of women as sex objects.”
“Badum-tiss,” says Pete, and a smile twitches onto Patrick’s face.
“Not just woman,” Patrick amends.
And then Tennyson, to Pete’s surprise says, “No, I know, I’m going to borrow the Rolling Stone cover for that.”
This is news to Pete. “The what?” he says.
“The Rolling Stone cover. The one you have framed in your office.”
The one they’re on, yeah, Pete is familiar with it. “Why?” he asks blankly.
“Because you’re shirtless on it,” Tennyson explains, and then gestures toward his collage of boobs as if there is a connection.
“That doesn’t have to do with the commodification of women as sex objects,” says Pete, confused.
“But it does have to do with the commodification of people as sex objects,” Patrick replies. “It’s a good idea, Tennyson. You should get it now so it’s ready.”
Tennyson nods and races out of the room.
“Hang on,” Pete says, although Tennyson does not hang on, so he addresses Patrick. “That’s totally different.”
“Is it? You were the hot one, so you were the one who had to take your shirt off to make sure we sold enough magazines. And I had to keep my shirt on so that we didn’t scare buyers away.”
“No. What?” Pete frowns. “That’s not what happened.”
Patrick seems to ignore him. “Sometimes I can’t believe I let you do it. Every time you took your shirt off, I should have told you to put it back on.”
Pete doesn’t understand what is happening. “Because you were jealous?”
“No, because you were selling yourself as an object and you hated it, and I knew you did, I was reading all of your lyrics about how much you hated it, and I let you do it anyway because I let myself think I was the last person in the world who could truly grasp how people who were ‘normal’ about sex and body image felt about taking their shirt off constantly.”
“I didn’t hate it,” Pete protests, but it’s feeble because actually, now that he thinks of it, he kind of did. He’s maybe relieved that they’re past the point where people ask him to do it anymore. That the only person who ever asks him to take his shirt off is Patrick. Pete tries another angle. “Anyway, I’m not normal about sex and body image. Or you’re not not normal. Or something.”
Patrick gives him a little smile. “Whatever. Either way, your kid is perceptive about a thing you apparently still didn’t realize about the band’s marketing.”
“He’s a lot smarter than me,” Pete says, as Tennyson comes back into the room, clutching the cover. Pete’s always thought he looks like an asshole on the cover, like, shirtless and pouting while the rest of his band was normal around him. But it’s true that it wasn’t like he demanded he be photographed shirtless, and it’s also true that at the time nobody in the band blinked an eye: That had been Pete’s job, to be the one who stripped down for the girls, and he did it so nobody else had to, but the fact that any of them had to…and the fact that it was assumed he would like it, would be flattered by it…
Tennyson sets the cover up next to his boob collage.
Patrick says, “I don’t know, this still seems like a vaguely inappropriate assignment for a fifth-grader, although I guess it’s better than all the terrible fifth-grade math your father and I don’t understand.”
Pete’s too busy to respond, busy looking at how low his jeans are on his hips on that cover.
***
Pete is reading in bed when Patrick finishes in the bathroom and clambers into it next to him.
“Are you staying up?” Patrick asks, his hand hovering over the light switch.
If he asks, he knows that Patrick will leave the light on for him. Patrick, unlike Pete, can sleep in any circumstance, heavily, like the dead, only with more drool. He’s slept through Pete staying up hours later than him plenty of times before.
Pete says, “No,” and closes his book and sets it aside.
Patrick turns the light off and settles into bed next to him. He’s tired, Pete can tell. Not the bone-weary emotional exhaustion he’s grown adept at spotting through the pandemic, just the natural tired of a day in their life. He’s just going to pull the covers up over him and go to sleep. His breaths flutter, soft and even. Pete will snuggle close to him or not, depending on Pete’s fickle sleep mood, and either way Patrick rolls with Pete’s co-sleeping punches.
Pete throws him a new one by sitting up and turning the light back on. “I never even thought about it,” he says.
Patrick blinks at him owlishly, trying to focus without the glasses he’d removed. “Huh?”
“The sex thing.”
“You’ve got to be more specific, there’s any number of sex things you—Oh, the sex commodification thing.”
“Hang on, what ‘any number of sex things’?”
“I just mean, like, I don’t know, wait, I was just falling asleep, give me a second.” Patrick reaches for his glasses, perches them onto his nose, and looks more collected.
This is the kind of boyfriend Pete is. Patrick is perfect, and Pete wakes him up to freak out about things that happened fifteen years ago.
“Sorry. Never mind. Go to sleep,” Pete says, regretful.
“Shut up. Talk to me about the thing.”
“I did hate it.”
“I know. It was all over your lyrics.”
“I didn’t even know, I thought it was—Like, I thought I was pretending to hate it. Because I was supposed to be so cool that I liked it. Or something.” Pete can’t get his thoughts to straighten out.
Patrick is so calm and unsurprised at the disaster he’s decided to marry. “Yeah, you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Get confused about what’s pretend and what’s real, sometimes. Like, which are the stories you’re telling yourself and which are the things that are really happening.” Patrick shrugs, like this isn’t a horrifying thing to learn about yourself. At this late stage in life.
“Why am I like this?” Pete cries, but then amends the question. “Why am I still like this? I didn’t know that the Covid thing upset me so much and that I was pushing you away. I didn’t know that you were my soulmate and that I was in love with you and wanted to do filthy things with you. Why am I like this?”
Patrick is smiling at him softly, like this is smile-worthy, Jesus. “I don’t know.”
Pete huffs in frustration. “You’re so perfect. Wouldn’t you rather marry someone who’s, you know, not like this?”
“I’m not perfect. And I would be so sad if you weren’t exactly the way you are, because exactly the way you are is you, and I love you.” Patrick kisses his cheek, because Patrick is the world’s sweetest boyfriend. He says ruefully, “I really should have stopped letting you take your shirt off so much. I was too young to know how to handle that situation with you yet.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Pete says. “It all turned out okay. I just can’t believe I never thought about how much I hated it.” Pete looks at Patrick, who’s looking a little guilty, which is silly, because this wasn’t Patrick’s fault, none of it. If anything, Patrick is the only thing that’s ever managed to save Pete from himself. Pete takes Patrick’s face between his hands and says, “Thank you for always knowing when to make me stop telling stories and start telling the truth.”
“I don’t always know that,” Patrick says.
“You know it better than I do.”
“Well…” There is color high on Patrick’s cheekbones. He’s embarrassed by this praise, Pete realizes.
Pete loves him so much. He says fondly, “My Pete-whisperer,” and rubs their noses together before kissing him.
“Mmph,” says Patrick into his mouth, and it’s probably supposed to be some kind of meaningful word; Pete gets the gist.
He whispers against Patrick’s lips, “Hey, Patrick, how about I take my shirt off and you can turn me into a sex object?”
***
Tennyson gives his sexual commodification in advertising presentation to Joe and Andy on a Fall Out Boy Zoom and Andy makes him give it again so he can record it this time and Joe just says, “Wow, fifth grade is way different than I remember it being.”
His next project is supposed to be about a country, which shouldn’t involve any boob artwork, Pete assumes.
Tennyson chooses Japan because he knows Pete loves Japan. They spend a lot of time “researching” by watching anime. Patrick says he doesn’t think this is the point of the assignment but he gets sucked into Cowboy Bebop, too.
He begs out of My Hero Academia because he’s got a movie soundtrack he’s agreed to do.
“One of us has to work,” he tells Pete.
“Dude, you say that like I didn’t make sure we’d have a constant stream of residuals in our lives,” Pete replies, only mildly offended, because he’s aware that some of the structure of work is good for them or they’d have lost their minds by now (and almost have, frankly).
Tennyson says, as they watch an episode, Patrick-less, “You know, next week is Valentine’s Day,” because apparently Tennyson will never believe that Pete is aware of things like dates and holidays and Valentine’s Day.
Pete looks at him. “I know that.”
Tennyson is looking at the television and munching on sunflower seeds. He says, “So what are you going to do for it?”
“What do you mean?” Pete asks blankly.
Tennyson looks at him then. “It’s Valentine’s Day,” like in two years Pete has learned nothing. “You have a fiancé. You’re supposed to do something for Valentine’s Day.”
“He’s not really my fiancé, I haven’t properly proposed yet.”
“You can propose on Valentine’s Day.”
“Well, that’s a little on the nose,” Pete frowns. Like, okay, he’s every cliche but he never thought he’d be the type to propose on Valentine’s Day. Anyway, it doesn’t seem right to him, proposing like this, in the middle of a pandemic, when they can’t do anything. Patrick deserves a perfect proposal and Pete doesn’t know what that looks like yet.
“Fine, you’re not proposing, what are you doing?”
“You know, you really don’t need to worry so much about your dad’s romantic relationship.”
Tennyson snorts dubiously. “Yeah, I do. If I left it up to you, you would never remember Valentine’s Day and then Patrick would break up with you.”
“Patrick’s not going to break up with me over that, he’s put up with much worse.” Pete is confident about this. But still. He chews on his bottom lip and says, “Do you think I should have planned something for Valentine’s Day?”
Tennyson gives him a look instead of wasting oxygen on the reply.
“Okay, okay.” Pete huffs out a breath. “I mean, what can we do? We can’t go anywhere.”
Tennyson shrugs. “You could do something here.”
Pete slants a glance at him. “You want to help me out?”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to worry so much about my dad’s romantic relationship.”
“You’re a brat,” Pete informs him. “And if you’re going to be stuck in this house with us, then you might as well come on this date with us.”
“Just admit it: You need my help.”
“I need your help. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobe. You’re my only hope.”
Tennyson giggles at him.
***
It really isn’t much, some lights they string up in the backyard, a table they set with a fancy tablecloth and nice china that Pete’s mother gave him at some point “for dinner parties,” and Pete didn’t have the heart to tell her that his dinner parties mainly involved, like, weed and skinny-dipping and not fancy china. But he and Tennyson use the fancy china now, and a bottle of expensive champagne that he buys special for the occasion because it’s been a while since he had Dom Perignon laying around the house. He orders burgers for dinner, not because they’re especially rare and fancy a meal for them but because it nostalgically reminds him of the time in their lives when burgers were a treat because they were surviving on peanut butter sandwiches and Cheetos.
Pete and Tennyson can only pull the surprise off because Patrick’s lost in his studio, deep in his music in that way he can sometimes get, that Pete has to pull him out of.
Pete goes to pull him out of it.
“Is it dinnertime?” Patrick asks, barely looking at him when he goes into the studio.
“Yeah. Can you take the night off?”
Patrick sends him a quick, apologetic smile. “Sorry. Yes. I haven’t been pulling my weight at the house, I know.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s Valentine’s Day.”
Patrick finally looks fully at Pete, his mouth open. He looks at his phone. “Oh, fuck,” he says.
“And see, Tennyson was so worried I was going to fuck everything up and forget Valentine’s Day,” Pete teases.
“You realize Tennyson cares more about Valentine’s Day than either of us,” Patrick points out.
Pete leans against the table next to Patrick. “He thinks I’m going to do something to piss you off and you’re going to break up with me.”
“That would have happened a while ago, I think,” says Patrick thoughtfully.
Pete laughs. “That’s what I told him. Come have dinner with us? Tennyson put together a whole thing.”
“Tennyson did?”
“I might have helped. But he is very dedicated to the cause of you not breaking up with me. I mean, I am also dedicated to that cause, but in a different way.”
Patrick smiles and stands and stretches and grimaces.
Pete says, “I should have made the treat a massage. You could use a massage.”
“We’re still in the middle of a pandemic, remember?”
“I could give you a massage.”
“The one time you tried that, you pinched a nerve in my neck.”
“It was supposed to be erotic,” Pete defends himself.
“It wasn’t. Let’s go find our kid.”
They don’t have to find their kid, because as soon as Patrick steps out of the studio he’s greeted with the twinkle lights all over the pool area, and the elegant table with its flickering candlelight, and the sound system crooning 5 Seconds of Summer. Pete let Tennyson pick the soundtrack, and this is apparently what passes as romantic.
“Surprise!” Tennyson says, gesturing to the table in case Patrick may have missed it.
“Oh, wow,” says Patrick, and he sounds and looks surprised and delighted. “Did you do all this?”
“Dad helped a little,” Tennyson allows.
Patrick says, “We have china?” and nudges at a gleaming fork.
“We polished the silverware with toothpaste,” Tennyson informs him gleefully. “We looked it up. It’s a hack.”
Patrick says warmly, “This is lovely, thank you.”
Tennyson replies gravely, “Please have a seat and I’ll have the kitchen serve you.” Then he scurries off into the house, Bella following behind him.
Pete says, “He’s our waiter for the evening,” as he opens the bottle of champagne. The music flips over to some YouTube rapper. “He’s also the deejay for the evening.”
“Christ, is he your kid,” Patrick says in amusement as he sits down.
Pete chuckles and sits opposite him, pouring champagne.
Patrick looks at the third place setting between them.
“It’s a family Valentine’s Day,” Pete explains. “It’s not like he had anywhere else to go.”
“No, of course. This is nice. Thank you. I’m sorry I didn’t think to do anything for you. See, that’s me not being perfect.”
Pete shrugs. “I wouldn’t have done anything if Tennyson hadn’t brought it up. So, see, that just makes you perfect for me.”
Patrick heaves a skeptical sigh. “If you say so.”
Tennyson comes out with a take-out container and puts it on Patrick’s fancy china and says in explanation, “I couldn’t get it open,” then goes back into the house for the rest.
Pete says, as Patrick coaxes the cover off the container, “Admit it, this is the most seductive Valentine’s Day ever.”
Patrick licks ketchup off his fingers unselfconsciously and then quirks a smile at him and says, “You are totally getting lucky later, Wentz.”
***
Tennyson goes to bed without complaints because it gets him out of cleaning up and he is nothing if not an opportunist. Pete comes back from the bedtime routine (which these days has dwindled to just Did you brush your teeth? Okay, I love you, good night) to find Patrick very gingerly washing china in their kitchen.
“Don’t do that, it’s your Valentine’s Day,” Pete tells him.
“Yeah, no, I did nothing for Valentine’s Day, the least I can do is clean up.”
Pete sits glumly at the kitchen island. “Tennyson is getting too old and I hate it.” Pete has this complaint often.
“I know,” Patrick says, and turns from the sink, drying his hands, and then says, “Come here.”
“Where?”
“Here.” Patrick takes his hand and tugs him off the chair and outside. The table has been cleared but the lights are still strung up. “Stand there,” Patrick instructs Pete, and takes his phone out, fiddling with it, until there’s the sound of music crooning through their poolside sound system.
“Look at that,” Pete says, “did you just figure out the Bluetooth?”
“Shut up and dance with me,” Patrick says, and pulls Pete in.
“Are you going to lead?”
“Yes.”
Pete pretends to protest but it’s kind of nice to be led. He admits that he does a lot of leading, and he doesn’t usually mind it, but it’s nice to just put his head on Patrick’s shoulder, close his eyes and tuck his face against Patrick’s neck, and let him sway them to and fro and make sure they don’t fall into the pool or something.
“Tracey Chapman,” Pete murmurs against Patrick’s skin. “Is this the sappiest song you could have chosen?”
“It’s Valentine’s Day. Sorry I didn’t know of any Rihanna or Beastie Boys to play for the occasion.”
Pete chuckles against him, kisses him, sighs and relaxes. Patrick’s hands are linked on the small of Pete’s back, a gentle pressure that makes him feel tucked up and safe.
“This was nice,” Patrick whispers into his ear. “Thank you for this.”
“Happy anniversary,” Pete replies.
“You know it’s not actually our anniversary, right? We didn’t get together on Valentine’s Day.”
“Valentine’s Day was the inciting event,” Pete informs him primly, and snuggles closer.
“You showing up at my house to make me audition for your band was the inciting event,” Patrick retorts.
Pete laughs. “Yeah, we can celebrate the anniversary of that date, too.”
“I’ll be in charge of those plans,” Patrick promises.
“Looking forward to it,” Pete says.
They stay like that, tucked together, barely moving, in the backyard they share, and Pete thinks it’s perfect. It only occurs to him later that he probably could have proposed really nicely in that ambience, but it was too perfect as it was.
***
It’s not like the pandemic goes away as abruptly as it descended. That’s not how it works. But for them that’s how the vaccine works.
Pete gets a call from Patrick while Patrick is out picking up a few groceries, and Patrick sounds odd when Pete answers. “Um,” he says in response to Pete’s yo.
It alarms Pete. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, unbelievable, actually. They are giving away extra vaccine doses here. And this guy’s telling me if you can get down here in twenty minutes, you can have one.”
Pete blinks. It was weeks and weeks of studying vaccination charts and eligibility and availability, and then, on a random Thursday evening, an out-of-the-blue phone call from Patrick. “What? Yes. I’m there. Of course.”
And so that’s how their vaccination happens, in the same way the pandemic did: gradually, and then suddenly.
***
Patrick, again out-of-the-blue, says, “Okay, I found this place.”
“A place?” Pete looks up from the book he’s reading. “What do you mean?”
Patrick shows him a website. It’s an AirBnb up the coast, small and cozy, with terraces spilling out toward the ocean.
Pete can’t conceal his surprise. “You want to go away?”
“Just for the weekend,” Patrick says. “I think we have to get out of the house. I think we have to…find a way to move. There’ll be no one else there. Just us. And we’re vaccinated. I think it’s safe enough, right?”
They haven’t left the house in so long, Pete feels overwhelmed by the thought. Which probably means they should do it. “Yeah,” he agrees, scrolling through the pictures on the website. “It looks nice. It’s a good idea.”
“Joe said he’d watch Tennyson and Bella.”
“Tennyson’s not coming?”
“It’s kind of our anniversary,” Patrick says wryly. “Like, our real anniversary, not the fake Valentine’s Day thing you celebrate.”
“Is it?” Pete scrunches his face up, thinking. It doesn’t seem like he remembers meeting Patrick around this time of year.
“Not that anniversary,” Patrick says, reading his mind. “Our actual anniversary. The day I showed up here and…you know.” Patrick makes a vague gesture with his hand.
Pete watches the gesture, fascinated. “Is that Patrick Stump sign language for sexual intercourse?”
“Shut up,” Patrick says, blushing. “Do you want me to take you away on a romantic weekend for our anniversary or not?”
Pete grins. “I do, I do, I very much do.” He pauses. “What does Tennyson say about being shuttled out of the house off to someone else? Like, it’s been a very long time.”
“Yeah. And he’s excited. If he was freaked out about it, I was going to abandon the plan, but he is ready to get out of here.”
“Good,” Pete says, and that is good. He feels like the pandemic is ending in the opposite direction it began: suddenly, then gradually. Painstakingly slowly, both of them testing what it feels like they can and cannot do.
He looks back at Patrick’s phone, the pictures of the little house on the coast, and he smiles. This feels like absolutely something he can do.
***
This anniversary trip should be the perfect opportunity for his perfect proposal.
Except that Pete still hasn’t figured out how to propose to Patrick. He’s only going to do it once, so it has to be perfect, and he’s all over the place. He has a million ideas: intimate little dinners, tucked-away jazz clubs, scavenger hunts, specially composed songs. He’s considered asking for input from Joe and Andy and then he hates himself for the fact that he can’t come up with the perfect proposal on his own. Like, how hard is this? Seriously? He’s a master ideas guy, and he loves Patrick desperately, this should be the easiest thing in the world for him, to give Patrick the best idea. But he can’t settle on it.
He mulls over a million ways to propose on this trip, and then decides not to steal Patrick’s thunder. This is Patrick’s romantic trip, and Patrick clearly has a plan for it.
“Bring going-out clothes,” Patrick tells him.
Pete is surprised. “Are we going out?”
“No. But I know you miss dressing up to go to parties. So let’s dress up.”
Pete considers him. “My definition of dressing up to go to parties—”
“Is, like, sweatpants that cost a thousand dollars instead of a hundred. I know.”
“Just wanted to make sure we were on the same dressing-up page,” Pete confirms. Then he goes into his closet and stares at the array of clothing he hasn’t looked at in a really long time. Wow, remember he used to own a clothing line? He can’t believe how long it’s been since he really thought about what he should wear. The prospect of it is a novelty, and he loses an entire afternoon to the idea. It’s like a throwback sort of day, to the times when he would hand out guidelines for what they should wear on stage, or carefully shift his belt off-center, or spend forever looking at his ass in the latest pair of girl-jeans. Things that seemed so important at a certain point in his life. And then it seemed like another chore he was just performing unthinkingly. Another aspect of the commodification of his body.
He forgot that, actually, clothes can be fun.
Anyway, he packs going-out clothes, and when he asks what other kind of clothes he might need, Patrick says lazily, “None.”
Pete says brightly, “Boy, oh, boy, this might be a good vacation, huh?”
They drop Tennyson and Bella off at Joe’s, and Tennyson gives Pete a very tight hug before he leaves, and Pete says, “If you miss us, call us,” and Tennyson just nods, and Pete feels a twinge of guilt, and then Tennyson seems to notice and says, “I’ll be fine.”
“He’ll be fine,” Joe promises. “You two kids have fun now. Don’t anybody get pregnant or anything.”
“Bye, Joe,” Patrick says pointedly.
Pete laughs at him as he gets in the car.
Patrick drives to the house, following the GPS in his careful, religious way. He lets Pete control the music, but their tastes have grown closer over the years, have merged into a ton of nostalgic overlap, and Pete makes Patrick sing along with him, and it reminds him of their first time in California, when Pete used to have to coax a sullen and sleepy Patrick into wakefulness through car ride singalongs.
He can’t believe that they’re still those two kids, still driving up the California coast together, singing.
Life is so fucking weird and wondrous.
***
It’s dark by the time they get to the house, and Patrick is obviously tired from the drive.
He says, “Can we just go to sleep and do sex stuff later?”
Pete lifts his eyebrows. “Listen, we never have to do sex stuff this whole trip if you don’t want to. You know that, right? You know I only ever want to have sex if you want to have sex.”
“No,” Patrick says. “I know. I’m just saying that tonight, I really don’t feel like having sex.”
Pete smiles. “Yeah, that’s fine. It’s all good.”
It is all good, except for the fact that Pete can’t sleep, and after tossing and turning for ages he leaves Patrick snoring slightly and goes to sit out on one of the terraces. He can hear the ocean crashing below him, and there’s that wide open sea smell to the air, and Pete actually falls asleep outside.
He wakes in the morning to a blanket thrown over him, and finds Patrick floating around the pool.
“What’s this?” Pete says, sitting by the side of it and dipping his feet in. “You never go swimming.”
“Sometimes I go swimming.”
Pete gives him a look.
Patrick says, “We’re on vacation. This is like a vacation activity, right?”
“Yes. You look cute in your little sun hat, by the way.” Pete uses his feet to splash a little bit of water in Patrick’s direction.
Patrick takes him completely off-guard by tumbling him into the pool.
Pete comes up sputtering, pushing his sopping wet hair out of his eyes.
Patrick pushes him up against the side of the pool and says, “Hey, I kind of feel like having sex now, what do you think?”
“Don’t have to ask me twice,” Pete says breathlessly.
***
Patrick tells him to get dressed up, so he does. He had, after a ton of consideration, decided on a designer pair of jeans that looked like he had just pulled them out of a dumpster that afternoon and a green and white striped polo shirt with the collar popped. When he meets Patrick on the terrace for dinner, Patrick says, “Whoa, that’s a throwback look.”
Pete does a full 360 turn, arms outstretched to better show off the outfit. “Do you like it?”
“Yeah. Should I bring back the trucker hat thing?”
Patrick’s dressed in a cardigan and a fedora. Pete shakes his head. “No, I like what you’ve got.” He sits next to Patrick. “Honestly, I had no idea what to wear. It’s been so long since I thought about what I was wearing.”
“I know. That’s why I thought we needed to do it.”
Pete looks at the table, which is laden with food and wine. “Where’d you get all this?”
“Ordered in. It was this whole service, they set the whole deal up for me. Romantic dinner while we watch the sunset.” Patrick gestures.
It’s so perfect – so perfect – that Pete suddenly wonders with a start if Patrick is going to propose to him. Fuck, Patrick is going to totally propose to him. Pete spent so long fretting about how to do it, so Patrick is just going to do it himself. And Pete…is kind of excited for this. He’d never actually thought that he’d be the one being proposed to in his life. He kind of wants it a lot, all of a sudden.
Except Patrick doesn’t propose. Patrick spends the evening being perfectly wonderful, perfectly Patrick, but at no point does Patrick get down on one knee and propose marriage.
Pete is weirdly disappointed by this, considering that it never even occurred to him that Patrick might do it until a few hours ago, considering that he knows Patrick thinks they’re already engaged, considering that Pete told Patrick that he would propose. Pete is the most ridiculous fucking person, and he has a perfect boyfriend, and he’s being an idiot.
Pete takes Patrick upstairs to take him apart, and Patrick says, “Leave the polo shirt on,” and Pete says, “I really didn’t know you had this thing for me in polo shirts, I am going to wear them all the fucking time now.”
***
In the morning, he finds Patrick on the terrace, sipping coffee, a selection of donuts in front of him.
“Jesus, you are like Batman on this trip, where does all this stuff come from?” he asks, tucking himself up against Patrick’s side and snagging a donut.
Patrick laughs. “I did a lot of planning. I wasn’t really Batman, I was more like Alfred.”
Pete laughs in response. “That’s kind of hot actually.”
“You think everything I do is hot,” Patrick says.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” says Pete, munching on his donut. The sea is brilliantly blue. The sky is cloudless. It’s a perfect day. Pete doesn’t want this weekend to end. He misses Tennyson but he’s felt completely out of time in this little house, like the past year of stress never happened, like his whole life is just this level of calmness: Patrick taking care of him, producing food at intervals, cuddling him close, splashing with him in the swimming pool.
Actually, this is pretty much his life, now that he thinks about it. Wow, he is a lucky bastard.
Patrick is nosing behind his ear, and Pete’s wondering if there’s time for a quickie on the terrace. “When do we have to check out?”
“A couple of hours.” Patrick stops nuzzling to tip his head against Pete’s shoulder. “I just want to sit here for a little bit. Do you mind?”
“Why the fuck would I mind this?” Pete asks.
“I know you miss Tennyson.”
“He’s having the time of his life.” On their check-in phone calls Tennyson had obviously been enjoying his weekend away every bit as much as his dads were. “We can have the time of our lives for another hour or so.”
Patrick chuckles.
They fall into silence, breathing together. There are surfers in the sea below them, tiny specks of people from their distance, and Pete watches them idly. He can hear their shouts to each other very faintly, under the crash of the waves and the drone of a small airplane somewhere.
He shades his eyes, looking for the airplane, and finds it skywriting.
“Oh, hey,” he says to Patrick, “it’s one of those skywriting planes.”
“Hmm,” says Patrick.
WI, the plane has written. It wavers in the bright blue of the sky.
“I’d like to ride in one of those planes,” Pete remarks.
“You hate flying,” Patrick reminds him.
“Yeah, but that’s not really flying.”
“No? What is it?”
“Writing. And I love writing.”
“I think once you got up there, it would be more like flying than writing,” Patrick tells him.
WILL the plane has written.
“I’ve got to admit, I have not missed flying this past year,” Pete says.
“I can’t believe you don’t surf,” Patrick says suddenly. “It seems like totally your thing.”
“You think?” Pete looks back down toward the surfers. “I don’t know, I wasn’t into it the couple of times I tried it. Should I give it another try?”
“I think Tennyson would love surfing.”
“Maybe we’ll get surfing lessons for him,” Pete muses. “I want to, like, get him out of the house when this is over, you know? He’s spent way too long with just us for company. That cannot be good for any kid.”
Pete looks back up into the glare of the sun. WILL YOU, says the plane now.
Pete watches it, watches it drift its way into an M.
Pete cocks his head. “Hey,” he says slowly. “I think that’s going to be a—”
Patrick slides out from next to him, down to one knee on the floor of the terrace. And Patrick is holding a fucking ring.
Pete stares at him.
“It’s going to say ‘Will you marry me, Pete?’” Patrick says. “It’s just, I didn’t think through how long that fucking takes to skywrite.”
Pete stares at him. Pete stares at the ring. It’s solid and flashy and showy and Pete fucking loves it. “Oh, my God,” he says.
“Will you marry me, Pete?” Patrick repeats, prompting him.
Pete shakes himself into action. “Yes. Yes. Sorry. Yes. Fuck. You. I. You weren’t supposed to. I was supposed to. Fuck. Yes. Yes.” He slides to be on the floor with Patrick, kneeling and catching his face up and kissing him all over, while Patrick laughs at him. “I was supposed to be the one to propose!” he protests, when he can gather his thoughts.
“I knew you thought that, and that’s so stupid, I’m just as capable of proposing. Plus, I knew this is the kind of proposal you would want. You know I don’t care that we got engaged in bed in an offhand way. But I knew you cared about that a lot. So. I thought I’d make sure I gave you the proposal I knew you actually wanted.”
Pete thinks he might be crying. Certainly the message in the sky looks even more wavery now. WILL YOU MARRY ME. As Pete watches, the plane starts in on the P.
“Patrick,” Pete says. Okay, yeah, he’s definitely crying. But the thing is. “This is perfect.”
***
Pete can’t take his eyes off his flashy ring. He loves it. He hangs his hand out the car window and watches the sun gleam off of it.
Patrick says, “Please don’t lose it before we can get it resized.”
“It’s perfect, Patrick,” Pete says happily. “It’s perfect.”
“Good. I’m glad you like it.”
“I mean, I was always going to love anything you did for me, but, Patrick, that was perfect. I had no idea how to propose to you and look at you! Look what you did! It was perfect.”
Patrick looks pleased with himself, slightly flushed as he drives. He says, “You didn’t need to be worrying about how to propose to me. I was happy with the proposal I had.”
Pete shakes his head at him and admires his ring some more.
Patrick says suddenly, “Can we talk about something?”
Pete looks at him. He looks grim and stricken.
Pete is alarmed. What the fuck could this be about? “Um. Yes. Sure.” He says this very slowly, hoping maybe Patrick will change his mind in the time it gets him to agree to a discussion.
Patrick says, “I…I know I’m not normal.”
“Patrick, I wish you wouldn’t say that about you. I mean, you’re not normal, but that’s because you’re extraordinary, and that’s never how you mean it when you say it.”
“I’m just saying, like.” Patrick switches lanes, waits until the maneuver is executed before he resumes talking. “I don’t want to have sex with anyone but you, ever. I never have and I never will. I know this about me. All of this, like, lust and desire that other people feel all over the place, that’s not how I operate. My head – my body, I guess – is just ‘you, you, you,’ all the time. I don’t understand, like, how anyone can bear to have sex with anyone else.”
“You know that’s fine with me, right?” Pete says drily. “Like, there is no complaining from me that your body is just ‘me, me, me’ all the time.”
“What I’m saying is – or trying to say – is if that’s not how your body is, like, if your body is saying, like, other people’s names, or whatever…” Patrick trails off and shrugs, and even though Pete waits, Patrick seems to think the conversation is over.
“Hang on,” Pete says. “What? What are you talking about right now?”
“Getting married,” Patrick says.
“Uh-huh. I already agreed to get married. A while ago, and then again this morning. Your body likes my body, and my body likes your body. We are all good.”
“But if someday we’re not. Like.” Patrick huffs in frustration, and Pete wishes he understood what Patrick was trying to say so he could help him better than he’s managing to. “Look, I don’t want to push you into monogamy if that’s not what you want, okay? If normal people with normal sexualities want to have a lot of sex with other people – if that’s what you want – I don’t want to be the weird husband who won’t let you…be you.”
Pete looks at him for a second. “You think it would be ‘weird’ of you to not want your husband to cheat on you?” he asks flatly.
Patrick rolls his eyes. “Well, when you put it like that—”
“I’m just trying to define the parameters here. Like, it is not weird to not want me to cheat on you, Patrick.”
“Right, but it isn’t cheating if we agree to it beforehand.”
“So you want to have an open relationship?”
“No, I never want to fuck anyone but you ever again in my life. But if you want an open relationship, I don’t want to stop you from going for it because I’m weird about sex and wanting sex.”
“Please stop saying you’re weird, because you’re not. I mean, what even is ‘weird’ as a concept, when you get right down to it. We’re both weird, or whatever. Like, in what universe do you think I represent any kind of ‘normal’ sexuality?”
“Yeah, but people understand when other people are experimenting sexually all over the place. They respect that. Sowing wild oats or whatever. People don’t understand when other people don’t want to have tons of sex.”
“That’s true, and not fair, but also, like, completely not relevant to anything right now. There’s only two people in our relationship: you and me. You don’t want to fuck other people. I don’t want to fuck other people. That’s the end of it.”
Patrick is quiet for a second. “If you want to someday—”
“Patrick, if someday I want to fuck someone else, I promise to tell you. It’s never going to happen. But I promise to tell you if it does. Because I promise, you are not keeping me from anything I want. You are the only thing I want. You are giving me everything I want. I want you and you and you. My body does and my head does and my heart does. And honestly, I always have, even when I didn’t know it.”
Patrick’s silent for a second, and then he says quietly, “Okay,” and it sounds convincing to Pete, like he believes Pete.
“Okay,” echoes Pete. “So we’re not going to worry about this again, right?”
Patrick nods.
“We are going to keep talking to each other about sex and what we want and don’t want, right?”
Patrick nods.
“Good. We are going to get married and be very happy forever and ever, right?”
Patrick smiles and nods.
Pete says, “Good.” Pete says, “Perfect. Like you.”
“I’m not—” Patrick begins.
“Perfect,” Pete says more firmly. “Just like you.”