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His hands fit easily around her hips, boosting her up between him and the wall like she doesn't weigh anything. Pete grips his shoulders as tightly as she can anyway, digging her fingers in until it has to hurt. He--Gabe--Gabe from Midtown, Gabe fucking Saporta--laughs low and kisses the side of her neck.
"I'm not a nice girl," she says.
He licks the tendon where her neck meets her shoulder and pushes her skirt up with one hand. She squeezes her eyes shut while he slips his hand between her legs and hooks his fingers in her underwear. "Okay."
"I mean it. I'll fuck you up. I'll give you bruises." Guys she's fucked before didn't believe her when she said it. They thought that since she's tiny, she's a kitten. All fucking wrong. She's got bigger claws than that, and fangs, and maybe poison in her skin, maybe that's why she's still here.
He bumps his chin against hers and kisses her mouth, pushing his tongue in like he's pushing his fingers inside her up under her panties. She would bite him to make her point, except he's doing just what she wants.
She scratches him instead, clawing up the skin at the back of his neck where the t-shirt doesn't cover. He groans against her mouth, hisses a little when she slides the edge of her nail against his skin sharp enough to break it. But he doesn't stop fingering her, not until she comes, and then he licks her off his fingers, kisses her all vodka-tonic sweet, and takes her out to Midtown's shitty van to fuck her in the back seat.
She tells him she's on the pill so he won't use a condom and she can feel him inside her, sticky-warm-wet on the insides of her thighs when she rides the El back to where she left her dad's car.
She writes a song about it, but the guys veto it, so she writes one about cities on fire and blood on her fingers instead. It's about fucking and menstruating more than anarchy, but the guys never ask.
**
Gabe never calls or IMs or--anything.
She figured as much, but she still writes over her t-shirt so Midtown saves! becomes Midtown sucks!, wrecks her dad's car, and spends three days hassling the Carden kid until he punches a wall and splits his knuckles down to the bone.
"If you were tougher it would've been my face," she tells him, and walks away shaky and wet and disappointed.
She's not a nice girl. She'll probably never see Gabe again anyway.
**
She's in the parking lot behind a gig in Philadelphia the next time she sees him. She's got a bottle of nail polish in one hand and the fabric of her thigh-highs in the other, stretched tight between her fingers so she can drip Pomegranate Passion onto the fabric to stop a run. He's holding a bottle of vodka out in front of him like he's doing an impression of The Lion King.
"Peace offering," he says, grinning sheepishly at her. "Hey."
She squints to place the polish against the fabric. "Hi."
"This is top-shelf shit."
"Good for you."
"It's a present. I'm sorry I didn't get in touch."
"Whatever." She lets go of the nylon and twists the cap back on the nail polish. It's still wet, and it'll stain her skin, but fuck it.
"I mean it. I'm sorry." He pushes the vodka at her. "Take it, c'mon. I know you can't afford to turn down free booze."
He's got a point. "You sticking around for the show?"
"Definitely. I'll be moshing. Can't miss me."
She wants to ask if he's going to stick around after, but fuck if she's giving him the satisfaction. She nods, takes the bottle, and hurries back into the venue. He can do what he wants.
The dressing room is freezing cold and the atmosphere is weird. Bad. She's sleeping with Chris again, which is going about as well as it usually does, which is, not. But it keeps her from thinking too much, and it gives the guys something to focus on besides how they're kind of starting to hate each other. That's something.
She sticks the booze in her duffel bag and checks her makeup in the mirror. Punk enough for this place, where the lights are bad and the crowd doesn't care, they just want to scream along and fight. She likes those shows the best, sometimes.
**
Gabe really can't be missed in the pit. And he knows all the words, even the ones she forgets.
He's waiting in the parking lot after the show, sweaty and bruised, twirling car keys around his finger. "Last show of the tour, right?" he asks when she steps out of the building. "Heading back tonight?"
"Sleeping here, heading back in the morning."
He twirls the keys again. "Come back to Jersey with me."
"You're joking."
He raises an eyebrow at her. "I'm not laughing, am I?"
"What am I going to do in Jersey?"
"Me."
She rolls her eyes and flips him off. "Asshole."
"You got something better to do back in Chicago?"
"My whole life."
He tosses the keys in the air and catches them. "I'm not a nice guy."
"You bought me a present, didn't you?"
"Doesn't count." Toss and catch, toss and catch. "I'm not a nice guy, you're not a nice girl. They start songs that way."
The guys are expecting her to help with load-out, but fuck, it's not like they could expect her to stand a chance after he said that.
**
Gabe still lives with his dad, which she wasn't expecting, but it's not like she has any room to talk. His bedroom is neat and organized, with stacks of books and CDs on the desk and guitars leaning against the wall. She checks out the guitars and the media in the morning, when she's wide awake and he's still sleeping off the sex and vodka.
She pokes through his shelves and then puts on one of his t-shirts and steps out into the hallway. The house is quiet, which makes sense; he said his dad gets up early on the weekends and goes to temple, and his brother's off at college. She can do whatever she wants, even if what she wants was way more exciting or complicated than finding the bathroom and then coffee.
She's rifling through the kitchen cabinets, just hoping for Folgers crystals, when he comes up behind her and slides his hands up under the t-shirt. "Hey."
She leans back into his touch. "Hey. Thought you were still asleep."
"I got cold." He puts his hands over her breasts and squeezes a little, rubbing his thumb over her nipple rings. "Come back with me."
"I need coffee."
"Later."
"Now." He pinches her nipples, hard against the metal, and she elbows him in the chest. "I mean it."
He sighs and lets go, reaching for a cabinet above her head and pulling out a bag of whole coffee beans. "I'll make you the good stuff."
"You don't have to. I'll take instant."
He wrinkles his nose. "Instant is an abomination."
"It's fine."
"I'm a gentleman."
"I thought you weren't a nice guy."
He shrugs and pours the beans into the grinder. "I'm complicated." They listen to the machine whir for a moment. "Not as complicated as you, but I do okay."
"Nobody's as complicated as me. I've got the whole universe shoved in my head and set on blend."
"Do you end up with planets in your eyeballs?"
She smiles a little bit. "And black holes in my brain."
He moves the ground beans to the coffee maker and switches it on. "Sounds like a song."
"I think my band's breaking up."
He tugs her closer and puts his hand up her shirt again. "You want to come be in mine?"
**
That doesn't happen, but it means something that he asked.
Pete goes back to Chicago; she still, always, feels like things are crumbling under her fingertips; she and Joe and Patrick keep digging deeper into this thing they're doing. This band. It's going to be good. It's going to be awesome. She knows it, because she has a secret weapon.
Patrick.
She knows what people say--from the minute she sees him, she knows what people are going to say--but it's never true. It could be. The wall between them is thin and flexible, and she leans on it pretty hard sometimes, but she never goes all the way through. She has different reasons for different people--
She's not a dirty old lady.
She is dirty, and he's too precious to touch.
They're saving themselves for their wedding night.
They're saving themselves for their Grammy night.
She loves him but not like that.
He loves her but not like that.
It would fuck up the music.
It would make the music so good human ears couldn't stand it.
They're all a little bit true, or she believes them all a little bit, anyway. None of them are the whole truth.
She never mentions Gabe as a reason, because that would be weird. He's far away. They chat online, they text, sometimes she calls him in the middle of the night. Those calls usually end with her knuckle-deep and him panting into the phone like he's breaking. But they're rare. She goes on dates with scene guys in Chicago. He's tearing it up in Jersey and New York, she assumes. She never asks. She sees his cameo on the Real World, breaking that poor girl's heart by explaining what an after-show hookup is, and she doesn't laugh, but she isn't mad.
She wraps up and ties down everything in her life with words, but not him. She never puts words on him at all.
**
One night he calls and tells her that he just met a girl named Bianca.
I never believed in love at first sight before, Wentz.
She knows the feeling in the pit of her stomach better than she wants to. It sucks. Literally: it's a sucking vortex, a pit pulling her in.
She drinks all night and gets in a fight just as the bars are closing. Punches the girl so hard she actually feels her nose pop out of place under Pete's knuckles. It's not a good moment. It's not anything. Just Pete fighting to stay out of the pit, and failing.
Her dad bails her out and tells her it's the last time he's going to do it. She can shape up or move out.
Those are the choices that bad girls get, after all.
**
Fall Out Boy happens.
She didn't totally expect that.
Patrick and Joe are dazzled and terrified, and Andy has all the killer instinct of a baby panda, so she's the one who makes the calls practically by default. She doesn't know what she's doing. She can't even run her own life.
But she can do this.
**
She doesn't see him again until they tour with Midtown in 2005. She's a different person, by then. She's Pete fucking Wentz. She's everything that's wrong with the scene. She's a pinup. She's a rock star.
Gabe's the same person he was, only sadder, and sharper around the edges. His band is on the rocks and he's in every vodka bottle he can find.
He kisses her like he can lick the success out of her mouth. She grips his shoulders tight enough to bruise because she knows he can't, and she wants to leave him with something.
"What about your girlfriend?" she asks, hoarse and breathless.
"Broke up," he mutters, leaning in for her mouth again. "Every couple weeks she decides she doesn't like me all that much."
Broken up is fair game. She nods and eases her hold, rubbing her thumbs over the span of his shoulders.
"Still not a nice girl?" he asks, his hand halfway down the front of her jeans.
"Never."
"They don't make you be nice when they make you the flavor of the month?"
That stings, enough that she'd pull away if she wasn't already wet and ready for his fingers. She wants to get off. If he's a dick about it, she won't return the favor. "They don't make me be anything."
He kisses her again, works his knuckles against her, and she wonders if he'll ever figure out that the reason it had to be them and not Midtown is that most people don't want to stare at the sun. They want to look at its reflection, wrapped up pretty and refined once to get the strongest of the bitterness out.
"I think about you," he says in her ear. She closes her eyes tightly and rides down against his hand.
He wipes it off on his jeans when she's done, and doesn't ask for anything in return at all.
**
Cobra Starship isn't what she expected. It's sour instead of bitter, but sour injected with vodka and then coated in sugar, like hallucinogenic lime gummy candy designed in hell.
The more she thinks about it, in between Gabe's explanatory e-mails and phone calls and terse, drunk-fumbled texts, the more she likes it.
He already has Travie. She gives him Bill. She cameos in their video, extra-careful with her look so she won't steal any attention from the main event. She's a special prize for people who know what they're looking for. Gabe is the cake and the icing and the cherry on top. She's, like. The cherry stem, or maybe the sprinkles.
He puts his hands around her waist and leans in close, nuzzling her face without quite kissing her. "I'm back with B. You should know."
"I know." She had no idea.
"I can't, like. I can't shake her. She's in me. I think it might be for real. Love, you know?"
There's so much about that shaken-up collection of sentences she wants to get between her teeth and rip to shreds. "Yeah. Totally."
"But you and me, we're friends. Right? You and me, Pete. Taking over the world."
"Right."
"You and me and my vision."
She should kick him in the goddamn crotch. "You should go finish your video."
"This is a means to an end, you know?" He stares into her eyes and she hates that she wants to look away. Never look away. Never back down. Own these three inches from eye to eye. "This isn't my endgame."
"I know."
"It's not the last word."
"I know." She shrugs him off and steps back. So much for owning it. "Go finish your shit. I've gotta get to the airport."
**
In the world's least effective revenge fuck, she sleeps with Bill.
It's ineffective for a lot of reasons. For one thing, she's slept with Bill before. Plenty of times. It was something to do, in the stupid early days when she was frantic and bursting her skin and in need of something hot and solid and real, and when he was so beautiful and had such sharp words in his hands and a voice like an angel who wasn't Patrick. A different angel. One with fair game written all over his skinny hips.
So she fucks him, when they're both back in Chicago and he picks up his phone when she calls. She tells him to come over, to bring whiskey and demos, to let her see Santi in the womb. She meets him at the door in her bra and a pair of backless panties, the kind of thing she knows damn well he hasn't ever seen before, not on any of the girls on the road and never ever on his sweet Chicago princess who he loves so much on and off again.
"Pete," he says, standing in her doorway, staring at her wide-eyed and helpless like he's that scene kid again, her fair-game angel. "What?"
"We can drink the whiskey first."
"Oh, thanks."
"We can even listen to the demos."
"I don't need bribes."
She puts her hands on her hips, lifts her chin, makes the kind of pouty face that looks so good on the other girls in the magazines. She can't imagine it works for her half as well, but he's definitely looking. "Prove it."
She wanted it to be awful, a punishment, but it's not. Not at all.
**
They lie in bed together after, trading sips of the last of the whiskey and staring up at the ceiling while the demos play, again and again, on the same loop they were on the whole time they fucked.
"I like it," she says. "Solid."
"Thanks." His fingers brushes against hers as he takes the bottle and she opens her hand up, offering him her palm. He drinks, sets the bottle aside, and takes it, holding carefully. "May I ask you something?"
"Anything you want."
His thumb rubs slow lines over her knuckles. "In all the times we've... done it--"
"Bill."
"In all the times you've dragged me back to your lair like an angry puma--"
"Bill."
"In all the times we've fucked, Pete--"
"Continue."
"You've never once told me to use a condom." She doesn't answer and he raises an eyebrow at her. "Do I have to actually state my question in the form of a question?"
She shrugs, trying to pull her hand free and sit up, but he won't let go. "You know the story."
"I really don't."
"Everybody knows the story. It's in all the articles. The Pete Wentz abortion story."
"Ah. Yes." He squeezes her hand and finally lets go. "Pete."
"What?"
"You were fourteen. It was your-- your soccer coach, right?" She shrugs and leans over him for the bottle, swerving away when he touches her chest. "Pete, even the most insane politician would agree that situation gets a pass."
"I don't care about that part." The bottle finally settles in her hands, solid, the last of the whiskey warm as piss and sour with backwash. "You want the part that never makes it in the articles?"
He's watching her with those goddamn serious eyes. "Yes."
She points the bottle at him. "Sometimes, Bill. Sometimes, when a girl has an abortion, things go a little bit wrong. And then the doctor's all, oh, sorry, you are never going to have a baby. This whole uterus is a no-go zone."
He opens and closes his mouth a few times. She finishes the rest of the whiskey.
"I'm sorry," he says finally.
"It's for the best."
"I guess I shouldn't lecture you about other reasons for safe sex."
"You really shouldn't."
"You should use condoms anyway."
She rolls her eyes and smacks him with the bottle, but he bats it away and wraps his arms around her, pulling her in close, and he's so fucking gentle and there's so fucking much of him, long limbs and stupid big cock and big heart, she can't even make herself try to get away.
**
Time passes. Things change.
She gives Gabe Bill all over again, and Travie, puts Cobra and The Academy and Gym Class out in their own orbit where she watches from afar and doesn't touch too much. They don't need or want her for a mentor. They're all headstrong and proud and want to do their own thing and if she pushes, they'll shove. She doesn't deal well with rejection. She won't invite that kind of pain. And besides, they know too much, they can see through her, she can't even put up with that anymore. Leave her to her illusions and her lies.
Instead she has Panic, and the babies that come after Panic, Hey Monday and The Cab, and they do want her to hold their hands and walk with them. They're not stubborn little shits who want to do it their own way or not at all. They need her.
Gabe's never going to need her. Not in a million years.
She's got other things on her mind besides what might be going on in Gabe's. Like the fact that she feels like she's slowly losing the hold she's got on her mind and her emotions. Like the way she's spiraling, sliding down into the place that's all jagged light and dark where it hurts to look at anything. Like the way she's tired, and she feels like she's losing her words. She can still put them down on paper or pixels, still send them spinning off into the Internet, but they keep breaking on her tongue. When she tries to talk to her best friends, her band, the lovers she can pick off the C and D list because they move in the same parties and breathe the same Hollywood air--
She loses herself mid-sentence, and it all comes out wrong.
**
"What is wrong with you?"
Patrick asks unfair questions. Pete shakes her head and burrows further down into her bed. "Lots of things. Go away."
"Pete. Get up. We have a meeting."
Sometimes she doesn't know what's worse, meetings or holding still. "I don't want to."
"Too bad. Get up."
Pete shakes her head. "I feel shitty. Leave me alone."
"You feel shitty because you drink too much." Pete can hear Patrick moving around the room. "And you don't take your pills. You take other pills, that are bad for you."
"Don't lecture me."
"Don't be so stupid, then." Patrick yanks the covers off her. "Here, I got you some clothes. Get up."
"I don't want to. You go to the meeting for me."
"No. Absolutely not. Get up."
Pete turns onto her back. "What should I do instead?"
"Instead of getting up? Nothing. You should get up."
"Instead of drinking and shit."
"You should... not do that."
"But my life hurts."
Patrick sighs. "Pete. Can we not? Not now?"
"It's all..." She waves her hands. "Jaggedy and it doesn't fit together and nothing makes any sense."
"Nobody's life makes sense."
Pete turns her head to look at him. "Yours does."
"Ha. I sincerely hope you're kidding." He drops her clothes on the bed. "Get up, get dressed, I'll buy you coffee before the meeting. Come on, Pete. Get it together."
"Get it together," she mutters. "Right. I can totally do that."
**
She's in New York for... something. The bar. Her bar, because she needed something else, there was a dangerous recurrence of empty hours in her days. Angels, kings. AK. AK-47, because why put down one layer of vague referentiality when you could have two? She would go for the hat trick if she could just think of a way to make it an AKA.
She's in New York, and she's drunk, and she's low again, way down low where her chest aches and her eyes blur and chasing her emotions down with vodka is the only thing that works. It's bad for her and she knows it, but what's killing her now is anxiety, and alcohol works better for that than anything else. Let the doctors bring her every pill ever made. Vodka works better. Put them in her together and she could almost be happy again.
Gabe is there, because Gabe is always there when she closes her eyes. He matches her drink for drink and half-carries her to the cab when she decides it's time to leave. "I have a hotel," she tells him, gripping his t-shirt tightly, twisting the thin fabric between fingers she can't quite feel.
He boosts her up against his hip and puts her in the back seat. "I have an apartment."
She tries to let go and can't quite manage it. Her fingers are stiff and unbending and stuck. "I'm made of bones."
"I know, Petey." He leans forward and gives the driver an address. She closes her eyes and leans against him, breathing in the smell of salt and cologne.
"Are you and B on or off?" she asks the skin of his throat.
His hand smooths her hair down, sweat sticking to the gel. "Off. She's in Paris and not happy with me."
"We should have sex." Her tongue slips past her lips and tastes the beat of his pulse. "I love being second-best. It's the best way not to win."
**
She blacks out before they get to the apartment, so they don't have sex until the morning, when her head and her stomach and everything else hurts too much to enjoy it. She insists, though, gets her hands on him in the ways she knows he likes and says yes over and over until he's there. He goes slow and careful, like he isn't hungover too. He does all the thing he knows she likes.
"We do this," she says in his ear after, when they're curled around each other, sticky skin and tangled limbs. "What does it mean that we do this, over and over again?"
He's warm against her, warm like if she closed her eyes he'd glow. "I think it means something in me talks to something in you, and the other way around. Like, something in us speaks the same language."
"And nobody else does?"
"Nobody we've met yet."
"Not Bianca?"
He sighs against her hair, ruffling the jagged split ends against her temple. "Something in her talks to me in a totally other way."
"You could marry her. You could have kids with her." The words taste dry, make her tongue hurt. "She's a real person."
"You're a real person."
"I'm half made of medicine and half made of mirrors." Her mouth twists; she's saying it wrong again. "Smoke and mirrors. Magic. I'm saying I'm not real."
He rubs his chin against the top of her head, then ducks down to kiss her mouth. "But you've got this way with words."
**
She has Gabe cut her hair, using his electric razor to cut the back and sides close, leaving the top little longer and her bangs swooping down over her forehead.
"You look fierce," he tells her, popping the blade and rinsing it in the sink. "You look like you're going to kick ass and take names."
She looks in the mirror and turns her head left and right. "I feel like a warrior."
"Write something about that." He stands behind her, wraps his arms around her, rests his chin on her head and looks into the mirror.
She lets herself study his face in reflection, the shadows under his eyes and the lines at the edge of his mouth. "I want to be a disaster with you."
He lifts one hand and traces his thumb over the circles under her own eyes. "I don't want to drag you down."
"I'm already there. You're not taking me anywhere."
He's quiet, hand cupping her face, breath hot against her scalp through the newly-shorn hair. "Give me six months."
Shrugging him off puts an elbow in his ribs. It's half an accident. "Fuck you."
"To figure things out. To get my shit together." He drop his arms and steps back, giving her room to twist and face him, her back against the counter, her jaw tight. "Ask me again in six months."
"Asshole." She knocks the razor into the sink, a weak gesture of defiance but the best she has in the moment. "You can have a year. If I even remember by then."
**
A lot can change in a year. Hearts can break. The whole world can end.
**
"I don't think I want to do this anymore," she tells Travie, curled up in his bed watching the sky threaten to light up with morning.
He's lying with his eyes closed, but she knows he's still awake and listening. His eyebrow arches up before he answers. "Which this?"
"Not the being with you this. Being here. That part's good." She fidgets against the sheets, worrying the hem of her t-shirt between her fingers. "The... my band is mad at me all the time."
"Growing pains, baby."
"It doesn't feel like growing pains. It feels like... dying pains." Her throat hurts just saying it.
"Pete." He reaches out and catches her hand, wrapping his fingers loosely around her wrist. "It's not like that."
"I feel like I'm wearing a costume and I'm lying all the time and everybody can tell." She shakes her head. "They're so mad at me."
"You still setting up the spring tour?"
"Yeah." She wipes her eyes with the back of her free hand. "Yeah, you know, we've got to. Gotta promote. Gotta hustle."
He rubs his thumb slowly over her wrist, back and forth over the X. "Take Gabe and his crew out with you."
"What?" She tugs until he lets her go. "Why would I do that?"
"You and Gabe get each other."
"We totally do not."
"Yeah, you do. You're just both so fucking stubborn." He rubs his face with both hands, then peers through his fingers at her, eyes red and blurred. "Get over it already."
"You know I hate it when you think you know me better than I do."
"You just hate that I'm right."
"I hate your face," she mutters. "Let's smoke some more."
"It's five in the morning, Petey."
"I'm not tired."
"You're never tired." He catches her wrist again and she lets him pull her in and kiss her face. "But I am. Lie down and sleep with me."
**
Travie's right, which she hates almost as much as she's glad he was right about it. Cobra and crew tour with them, and she finds herself around Gabe more often than not. They're not a couple. She's not his goddamn girlfriend, and this is not dating. It's first aid; emergency wound care, for both of them. He presses on the places where she's bleeding, and she puts spit and hope on his chemical burns.
"Hiatus," she says into the too-cold air of the bus one night, when he's stretched out in her bed and she's tucked between him and the wall, sitting up with her legs threaded through his, staying awake so the monsters can't bite. "It's another word for fuck off and die."
"Not exactly." His voice is blurry and slow; she didn't get to all the chemicals in time tonight. They're weaving slowly through his veins in light and wire. "Maybe it just means a rest."
"I don't rest."
"Other people do."
"You don't."
"That's true." He flashes a smile at her in the dim light. "You and me, we're the same."
She loves when he says things like that. It makes her want to glow. "We are."
"Tell me something you've never told anyone else."
She blinks and reaches out for him, pulling herself close enough to put her head on his chest. "What?"
"Tell me something. Anything. As long as you've never told anyone else."
She frowns and bites her lip, staring down at the smooth skin of his chest, pale and not-pale. "I'm not sure there is anything."
"Think really hard."
His hand slides over her hair and she pushes up into it, reveling in the caress. "I am very brave," she says. She doesn't even whisper. It comes out strong.
His fingers linger at the nape of her neck. "You never told anybody that before?"
"No."
"Then how did I know it already?"
**
She's tired of fighting. She's not supposed to fight like this with her band. They're supposed to understand.
Gabe stands in her dressing room at the Latin VMAs, his hands on her shoulders. They're heavy, but they don't hurt. They might be the only things in the world right now that don't hurt.
"You look tired," he says. She blinks at him in the mirror, watching the feathers glued around her eye rise and fall. She cut her hair again, short-short-short except for a crest down the top, and she's gelled it up sharp and spiked tonight. She's a warrior again, but her armor is weak.
She has to swallow before she can answer. "I don't think I can do this."
"I think you can."
"Promise me something if I do." It's not fair for her to ask. She's not playing by the rules. She can't even remember the rules tonight.
His hand moves to the back of her neck, his thumb rubbling slowly over the bump of bone at its base. "I'll take you to Uruguay."
"What?"
"Uruguay. My grandma's house. The beach. The mountains. We'll see it all."
"You don't take anyone to Uruguay. Ever. Nobody gets to do that. It's yours."
He shrugs and rests his chin on top of her head, meeting her eyes in the mirror. "I'm saying. I'll take you."
"There's a lot of stuff I haven't told you. Stuff that's going to matter."
"I know. It can matter later." He's still meeting her eyes. "Right now I just want things to not suck for a little while. Together."
Her breath hitches in her chest. It hurts. "What do you mean, you know?"
"I'm not always as stupid as I look, Wentz. I pay attention to you."
She can feel him swallow. "
And even if I don't know the thing I think I know, well... tell me later."
She makes herself take a breath, lick her lips, speak. "I'll have to change all my plane tickets."
He breathes slowly against her. "Please."
He's never asked that before.
**
They go to Uruguay. Everything is different there. Gabe is different there.
Pete breathes deeply, moves slowly. It takes more than a week for her to realize what she's feeling is mourning.
It feels okay to mourn here, in reach of a sea that doesn't know her. Even the sky is different, the stars. She doesn't have to bring anything with her, because she's new here, soft-skinned and wet and crawling out of any kind of shell.
Gabe doesn't touch her, and she doesn't ask. He's wet and crawling, too.
This is what he comes here for, she suspects: to break down and be born new. There's freedom to it, and possibility, even though their bones stay the same.
**
The feeling lingers when she goes home to LA. Her body feels raw and new, and she finds that she wants to do new things in it, with it, to it. She wants to try being different versions of herself and see how they bloom.
She goes out in sundresses and high heels. She let her hair grow out for a while, then has it straightened and cut into a sharp bob. She gets her makeup done like a silent film star. It's fun, being a different kind of girl, nothing close to pop-punk princess. It's a costume she could get used to.
She lets her hair go natural and wears Docs and khakis and plaid shirts. That's fun, too, in a different way. Nobody recognizes her at first. When they do, they're mean about it, but it's a costume, it doesn't go under the surface. It's just keeping her body safe.
She stumbles across the clothing-skin that feels the best almost by accident. A picture of Midtown-era Gabe comes up on the Internet and she stares at it for a while, remembering how that body felt under her hands, how that mouth tasted against hers. She remembers wanting to sink her fingers into him and keep him for herself, or to pull out his heart and eat it alive.
It makes her start thinking. Thinking twists around and tangles itself up and becomes something new and then she's flying to New York, texting from the gate that he should meet her at the bar that night.
**
Pete's wearing a Midtown T-shirt and loose jeans. She bound her chest and didn't use any makeup or any product in her hair, just let her bangs fall over her forehead, ironed flat and only half grown out from the last time she shaved them back.
She passes for androgynous like this, and she knows it, and she's glad. She likes it, this skin, the one where she's half a boy with bruise-dark eyes and rough bangs. She's soft packing,too, in a halfassed way; she hasn't worked up the nerve to buy any of the stuff online yet, so she's rolled up her second pair of boxers and stuffed them in the crotch of her jeans, tucked back between her legs. It feels right, today, for this.
Maybe tomorrow she'll wear a miniskirt with no underwear and make Gabe finger her in the back of a taxi while she grips his free hand and lets her nails slice into his skin. And he'll let her, because Gabe-- he gets it, somehow, somewhere. What it feels like to not know how to make your skin fit. He gets part of it, from the inside.
When he sees her he doesn't say anything, just looks her slowly up and down. He doesn't smile, but he doesn't not.
"I'm not a nice girl," she says finally. "But I'm not a bad girl, either."
"What about a nice boy?"
She shakes her head, her bangs sticking to her sweat-damp skin. "I'm just me."
"Just Pete?"
She nods and looks up at him, searching his eyes. "Just Pete."
He holds out his hand and when she takes it, it doesn't waver. His fingers curl into hers like they want to fit.
I'll fuck you up, she thinks. I'll give you bruises.
He doesn't let go.