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bandomstuffsit2011-12-24 05:46 pm
stuffitmod.livejournal.com) wrote in bandomstuffsit2011-12-24 05:46 pm
Wishbone Days of Summer: gift for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
morganya
Title: Wishbone Days of Summer
Author:verbyna
Pairing(s): Ashlee/Travis & Gabe/Travis, Gabe/William (implied William/Mike Carden, past Ashlee/Pete, one-sided Gabe/Pete)
Rating: R
Warnings: underage drinking, one reference to symptoms of depression in the the context of bipolar disorder that can be read as anorexia
Word count: ~6,600
Summary: We might've started singing just a little too soon. A summer-before-college AU.
It takes Pete all of senior year to get Ashlee to date him. It’s not a particularly dignified process – Gabe is always good for a reenactment of that time Pete threw pebbles at her window until the glass shattered and her dad called the cops, or the time Pete asked her to Spring Formal by hijacking the PA system – but eventually she did agree to go on a date with him. And another. She stopped elbowing him when he referred to her as his girlfriend the week before graduation.
It takes Pete five minutes to lose her. It’s quiet and private and all the things he hadn’t known she wanted.
“It’s obvious I’m in love with her,” he tells Gabe the next morning. “How could that freak her out? Like, at this point? What the fuck.”
Gabe gives him a pitying look and shrugs; says, “Jessica’s the one who jumps in.” Gabe’s always liked Jessica. They double-dated the same people for four years, which is almost like being friends. He’ll miss her when he leaves for college. At least she won’t be around to mention his crush on Pete anymore, because it’s not like that helps. Gabe’s sure that Mikey was the beginning and the end of Pete’s dabbling in the gay side. And Gabe’s not the relationship type, like, at all.
“I wish I had a crush on Jessica like everyone else,” Pete says in a tiny voice.
“How do you come up with this shit?”
Pete pulls the blanket over his head and shuts up. Gabe makes himself comfortable at the foot of Pete’s bed and watches daytime TV until Pete’s mom comes home and politely kicks him out.
Thing is, Pete’s taking a gap year. Gabe is pretty desperate to spend as much time with him as he possibly can at this point. He doesn’t tell anyone that he’s babysitting his best friend, but everyone probably knows. Where the fuck else would he be?
*
Ashlee’s trip home is uneventful. That’s good, because she needs to plan ahead. Mom and Dad went to bed before she left, but they sleep like… rabbits. Or something. Something that wakes up really easily.
God, she’s still drunk. And single. Both good things, but not at the same time, she’s come to realize.
Victoria drops her off at the corner with only a little disdain for the furtiveness. Easy for her to talk. Ashlee watches the car until it’s out of sight before she takes off her shoes and runs across a lawn and into the backyards. It’s easier to sneak in through the kitchen door, but it’s eerie out here at four in the morning.
A dog barks close by and the lights come on in a window ten feet to her right at the same time. She has to sit for a minute to calm down.
If Pete was here, they’d be busted. He’d go to the window and scare Bill or Courtney or Mrs. Beckett, because that’s what Pete’s like. All adventure and no self-preservation.
She gets up eventually and keeps going until she’s at the kitchen door, then enters the security code and goes in. Jessica’s sitting at the table, all sleep-mussed and Victoria’s Secret catalog-pretty. She got home hours ago, but she can never sleep until Ashlee’s back.
“You look tired,” Jessica says, smiling a little. “Who dropped you off, Pete? I heard a car outside.”
Ashlee rubs her eyes, smearing gel eyeshadow all over her hand. “Yeah. Didn’t stick around.”
“You broke up with him on Wednesday, Ash.” Jessica taps her fingernails against the side of a salt shaker and looks Ashlee up and down slowly. “I’m sorry, whatever he did. C’mon, I’ll help you with the makeup. You’re a mess.”
She leads the way up the stairs and into the bathroom. Ashlee tries not to cry. She hates crying, she’s no Jess, who can’t watch The Notebook without tearing up. She must be such a pretty picture right now – grass stains, runs in her pantyhose, panda eyes, sitting on the edge of the tub like she needs looking after.
“He told me he loves me,” she tells Jessica. Jess frowns at herself in the mirror, so Ashlee elaborates before she jumps to conclusions. “That’s why I broke up with him. Because he said—he said. That.”
“Boys do that. You think he means it?”
Ashlee tilts her head up so Jess can wipe the stuff from her face. “He meant it,” she says quietly.
“But you don’t love him. You did the right thing. Poor Pete, though.”
Jessica smells really good and her hands are gentle and she believes in forever, in marriage and babies and Christmas mornings. Ashlee used to think she was adopted, especially when they pulled her out of ballet school and moved the whole family here for Jessy’s career. It’s so much easier to love Jessica. Ashlee’s going to miss her so damn much she can’t even think about next year.
“Hey. Hey, Ash.”
“What?”
“Can I borrow your shoes tomorrow?”
“They’re yours,” Ashlee reminds her. “They were in a box in your room.”
“No wonder I like them,” Jessica mutters. “Look up, panda, you’re wearing half my MAC.”
Ashlee focuses on swaying as little as possible. It helps a little if she focuses on the bright backlit halo of Jessica’s hair. Old habits die hard.
*
Halfway through July, Victoria and Patrick stage an intervention to get Gabe and Pete out of Gabe’s basement. Pete goes willingly, since it’s Patrick asking and attention from Patrick can make him do almost anything, but Gabe is less cooperative.
“I don’t know if it’s Stockholm Syndrome or you got the depression bug from your buddy there,” Victoria says. Gabe glares at her hazily. “You do realize you’ve spent three weeks down here? When’s the last time you went to a party?”
“I went out with Bill last week,” Gabe says. “I’m not a hermit.”
“You went to see Bill’s show, you stayed in the corner the whole time, and you left without him. That’s not going out, that’s basically stalking.”
“It really isn’t. How do you know what I did, anyway? Is Bill in on this?” Gabe specifically asked Bill not to tell anyone about it. He only went because Carden was playing right after Bill and Bill needed someone who could throw a punch to back him up in case Carden pulled his pigtails. Bill promised Gabe an unspecified favor in the future, which may or may not be sexual, Gabe knows, depending on how soon Carden grows a pair.
“Bill’s out of town,” says Victoria. “He left a week ago.” He can practically see her running through possibilities, figuring out that Gabe chose to hang out with Pete on a downswing to the exclusion of, well, Bill’s excellent denial-fueled hand jobs. He makes an executive decision to give in and distract her.
“Fine, so it’s been a while.” He sits up and waits out the head rush, then sighs dramatically. “Wait in my room, I won’t be long.”
She raises an eyebrow at him, which used to turn him on something awful a few years ago before he realized she’s not actually evil, just annoyingly smart.
“Where will you be, hmm?”
“Taking a shower. I know you have a plan for tonight, I’d rather not smell myself through it.”
“Good boy.”
She looks relieved. Gabe can’t get out fast enough. It’s one thing to give in; admitting it was for good reason is a completely different problem, and he has enough problems right now. Sometimes it sucks to be him.
He finds his phone in his pocket when he takes off his pants and texts Pete a sad smiley.
Ptrck made me showr, Pete texts back.
Gabe pictures it in gloriously shameful detail for the next fifteen minutes. Then he turns the water as hot as it goes and bangs his head against the wall slowly until he’s ready to face Victoria without looking guilty, or worse, depressed, because he has no reason to be. No reason he’s willing to share.
*
Ashlee still reads Pete’s blog. Usually when she’s just got home and it’s starting to get light outside, and neither of them has slept, even though she could sleep just fine if she wasn’t so desperate to avoid being alone with her thoughts. It’s routine by now: sneak upstairs, strip down to her underwear, read Pete’s latest stream-of-consciousness, contemplate coffee, get a bitter taste in her mouth.
He writes about her. Little things, nothing anyone could figure out but the two of them. (My body is an orphanage and anchors on shirts, who else would know what that means to them?) It’s not comfortable to be reminded of how well he got her, but he did. She has no illusions that he doesn’t know she’s reading, anyway, and half of it is for her benefit, misplaced chivalry. He says all the bad stuff and Ashlee never brings it up. Mix them up and divide by two and you get two healthy reactions, one apiece.
Jess came into her bedroom once when the tab was still open and Ashlee was in the study with dad, going over college shopping lists. When Ashlee came back and found Jessica sitting cross-legged on the bed, frowning at the screen, she almost turned right back around and hid, but then Jess closed the laptop and talked about something else entirely.
Ashlee wants to talk about it, except she doesn’t want the talking part. She wants someone other than Pete to get into her head so she doesn’t have to hear herself babbling around the truth until she gives up.
So when Travis puts a hand on her waist at a party and asks her if she wants to get out of there, she says yes. Because it’s better than going home to her empty room. And because it’s better than watching Gabe and Victoria and Nate doing their hipster thing and knowing that Pete and Gabe got Victoria in the split, even if Victoria would never avoid her on purpose.
Travis’s hand is warm and heavy in the small of her back. He keeps it there without steering her, just something solid she can push against as they make their way out of the overheated living room and into the humidity outside. It wasn’t raining when she arrived; she doesn’t know how long she was inside. They stop on the porch so that Ashlee can say goodbye to a couple of people, then set off across the grass, into the woods at the edge of the property.
Travis was one of the artsy kids who wore spotless sneakers and always had dirty fingernails – paint, actual dirt, who knows. None of it matters. They graduated; social lines have been breaking down since they walked off the auditorium stage. Ashlee studies Travis properly for the first time that she can remember.
She likes what she sees. She might even like it tomorrow, in better light, standing still instead of picking their way over tree roots. Her feet hurt like hell.
It doesn’t take long to reach an area where the trees give way to a manmade clearing with a picnic table. Travis is tall enough that he has to bend his knees to sit on the damn table. She doesn’t want to get her jeans wet, so it makes sense that she would stand in front of him. When he pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and lights up, she lets him take a couple of puffs before she steals one.
She gives him the cigarette back and their fingers brush against each other.
And the thing that Pete got better than anyone, better than Jessica, is that Ashlee’s only careful when she doesn’t know what she wants.
“Hell of a party,” Travis says, frowning at her like he can’t figure out how they got here. “I’m not going back.”
“I’m not going home,” Ashlee says. She feels like she should be smiling; if it was a movie she’d be smiling, but her mouth tastes like smoke and that never happens in Hollywood anymore. She wonders if it means anything that she doesn’t have that nagging feeling that she should be elsewhere right now.
“I wasn’t gonna ask, but are you really done with Pete?”
Ashlee giggles for no reason, except for how ironic the question is. It’s Pete who has to be done with her, not the other way around. Still, she can’t help herself, so she asks, “You think you’ll get to step on his toes?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.” She’s definitely not imagining that smile he’s hiding behind the hand with the cigarette. He smiles with his eyes, he can’t hide his whole face. She steps a little closer and his other hand settles on her hip.
“I can’t handle complicated right now,” she says, more honestly than she intended.
She just wants to make out with someone. It’s been almost two months since she broke up with Pete. The look on Travis’s face is way too knowing, but her mind’s made up. They didn’t mean anything to each other for four years, they’re moving away at the end of summer; she can have this. She can make out with someone without being terrified she’ll say the wrong thing and break his heart.
Travis stubs out the cigarette on the underside of the table and pulls her closer.
“Something easy, then,” he says quietly, still with that smile on his face. She’s the one who leans in. He’s a good kisser, but with the hickeys he always had when they were in History together, she wasn’t expecting anything less.
*
Ok, so maybe he stopped answering his phone.
“I’m not gonna say anything,” says Nate, sounding pained. Gabe doesn’t turn around because, quite frankly, he’s embarrassed. He’s been sitting in the tire swing in front of Pete’s window for a while. He even parked around the corner so Pete’s dad wouldn’t hear the car and bring him ice cream out.
“Don’t tell Victoria,” Gabe says. “It’s just. Fuck.” He does swing the tire around now, because it’s not just about him anymore. “Pete heard about Ashlee and McCoy from Trohman.”
“So what, he locked himself in his room? And you’re sitting here like it’s a fucking John Hughes movie?”
Gabe doesn’t want to explain that his summer has too little Pete and too much of everyone else. That last year he and Pete thought their worlds were falling apart, that Gabe got over it but Pete covered it up with Ashlee, and he can’t think of anything to do now that she’s leaving. That they’re both stuck – Pete in his room with his words, Gabe out here because Pete needs space when he’s really messed up.
He can’t say any of that because Nate isn’t that sort of friend, or the kind of person who can relate.
“Fuck off, I can sit here all I want. Maybe I like the swing.”
Nate scratches the back of his neck and looks at the house, then back at Gabe. “Victoria wanted me to tell you to stop listening to Lana Del Rey in the dark like a freak. She figured you were in the basement.”
Another ‘fuck off’ would be a little repetitive, but Gabe hopes his expression adequately conveys the sentiment. Nate smirks. “She also wanted me to tell you that she has vodka and the keys to her dad’s studio.”
“You should’ve just said so, fuck. Spared me the intro,” Gabe says as he climbs backwards out of the tire and dusts himself off.
Nate shrugs and starts walking away. “Lana Del Rey, seriously,” Gabe mutters, following.
They take Gabe’s car to get to Victoria’s house, even though it’s only a couple of minutes away. Gabe lives on the other side of town. He doesn’t have this sort of house. It’s better now that his brother’s in college, just him and his old man, but still. Not crowded is not the same as big.
They run into Ashlee, who’s just coming out the front door as they get in. They nod at each other like they’re acquaintances, not people who spent weeks together before the breakup and who’ve known each other since middle school. He wonders, vaguely, if she thinks he encouraged Pete to go after her after she first shot him down. Because he didn’t. He almost tells her so, but when he looks at her, she’s staring right back at him over her shoulder. The words dry up in his throat. They were cruel, anyway. Gabe’s not that guy.
“The vodka’s this way,” Nate says helpfully.
In some fucked up way, Gabe misses Ashlee and Jessica so much for a moment that he almost trips over the threshold.
“Right,” he says blankly. And then, pulling himself together, “Any mixers?”
“Like we’re amateurs.”
Gabe knows they’re not, but that’s not the point. He has no idea why he asked.
*
Ashlee has a lot to do. She really does. She has to sort out her clothes, reply to the email from her future roommate and confirm she’s not a pod person (or a music major who wants to practice in the dorm), buy sheets for a single and pillows and an alarm clock and a lamp and all the stuff she hasn’t even put on lists yet, and she’s meeting Travis later.
Instead of doing anything, she lies in her bed and counts the faded glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.
Jessica stops by at some point to talk around the subject of their dad. What Ashlee gets out of it is an old sort of sadness, no more. When she was taken out of Juilliard she put on make-up and people thought that was her now, and she smiled and people thought she had reason to smile, and the only person who ever saw through it without passing judgment is off-limits. It’s just life. Things hardly ever work out. Or if they work out, they get broken eventually.
She lets Jessica talk because Jessica will be stuck here without Ashlee, but she thinks about the way that Gabe looked at her. The way her dad looks at her, the way her mother doesn’t whenever Jessica’s around.
Pete wrote in his blog, pass me a note if you cant kiss me. dont let me make you worse. She used to tell him when she just couldn’t take his attention, and he always backed off. He never pushed too far, until he did.
“…and singing lessons.”
Ashlee gets back to the conversation with an effort. “Sorry, what?”
Gabe had looked like he’d wanted to say something. Most people can’t tell how much he holds back. God, he probably hates her.
“I said, I’m getting more vocal coaching in the fall.” Jessica frowns at her. “You weren’t listening, were you?”
“Sorry. Sorry, Jess, I just have a lot going on.”
“Forget it.”
“No, seriously, what are we talking about?” Ashlee asks, since she hates seeing Jessica like this, all disappointed.
“Dad’s worried about you. He doesn’t think you’ll deal with college and the dorms and all your classes. I think he wanted you to apply somewhere closer.”
Ashlee blinks at her for a minute. She considers telling Jessica that he already told her that, several times, and sometimes he was pretty loud about it, too. Then she says, “Are you? Worried?”
Jessica makes that face like she wants to laugh but doesn’t want to hurt Ashlee’s feelings. “Of course not, honey. You got into Juilliard once, this doesn’t even compare. You’ll be fine.”
It’s not as exciting as dancing and pushing herself and bleeding into her shoes; it doesn’t compare, Jessica’s right. Not the way she means it, but it’s still true.
“Help me pick out the sheets?” Ashlee asks, glancing at the laptop where it’s open on her desk. They might as well.
When Travie tries to take her hand later, she slips it under his shirt instead. He’s warm and surprisingly quiet and he’s breathing on her neck. She can’t hold his hand because that’s holding on, that’s taking something to keep it. She wants him differently than she wanted Pete, it’s more immediate. She wants, so she scratches her nails deliberately over his ribs.
He breathes out sharply, smells like cigarette smoke and chemicals; he whispers in her ear, “I don’t have to get it. Come on - come on. Ashlee, c’mon. Back to my place.”
She pulls back to look him in the eyes, but just zeroes in on his lips. Dammit, that mouth, she’s beginning to suspect she has a problem. “Yeah?” she asks, just to hear him say it again.
They made it this far.
He does take her hand when they’re in his bed, but only to press it against the mattress before she flips them over. He muffles a laugh against her collarbone, then scrapes his teeth slowly over her skin. She can barely make out his tattoos in the strange orange light from the streetlamp.
She should ask him about them sometime, but not when her hands are in his hair and the muscles in her thighs are beginning to hurt just right and he can make her stop thinking.
Afterwards, he asks her if she can stay. She could spare a couple of hours and still make it home earlier than most nights.
“I have to help Jessica with something,” she says. Then she adds, “Sorry.”
“Nah, it’s cool. Another time.”
Because there will be another time. They have a whole month ahead of them. It’s easy to smile back and put on her clothes, let him walk her out, knowing she’ll be back.
*
In the past three days, Gabe has considered and dismissed the possibility of sleeping with three different people. He smokes his way through five packs of cigarettes, watches more porn than he has since he lost his virginity four years ago, and keeps his phone on the edge of the bathtub while he washes off the layer of nicotine, just in case Pete sends him anything.
The internet tells him that he’s suffering from an excess of dopamine in his system. Armed with this new knowledge, he shows up at Carden’s I-might-get-a-record-deal party with the sole purpose of getting laid. It’s not the smartest thing he’s ever done, letting himself slide like this and inflicting himself on his peers without Victoria to keep him out of trouble, but he can’t take his own company anymore.
Also, he’s brought William along. He neglected to mention that it was Carden’s party they’d be attending.
“Oh my god, I can’t believe you did this to me,” William says, color high in his cheeks. He plasters himself against the car door as if he wants to go through it, back to safety and repression. “I can’t believe you want me to go into Carden’s house. He’ll poison my drinks.”
Gabe laughs, he can’t help it. “Poison, Bills? Dramatic much?”
William looks momentarily hurt, though he covers it up fast, and well. He wasn’t the only out bi kid at school, but he was the only one with long hair and a wardrobe that could double as a death wish in certain circles. Gabe holds his hands up as a peace offering.
“Why are we even here? You were having a quarter-life crisis. That was nice and safe. You should take it up as a lifestyle.”
“Cruel, William,” Gabe says. He’s too young to call it a quarter-life crisis. He hopes. Bill just crosses his arms and looks at him. “Yeah, fine, I wanna hook up. Happy? Can we go look for the keg now?”
“It’s in the dining room,” Bill says absently, then makes a horrified face. Interesting.
“And you know this, how?” Gabe asks, but Bill’s already walking up to the house. Gabe wonders if William knows about the other rooms (like, say, Carden’s bedroom), not that he’d say anything if he did. At least he’s getting with the program.
He’s getting with the program so well, in fact, that they’ve barely had a couple of watery beers when he kisses Gabe on the neck. Carden’s probably close by; Bill’s not one for gratuitous, sober PDA at parties. Gabe’s just getting into the familiar rhythm of it when someone taps him on the shoulder. He ignores it, because Bill’s mouth brings back happy memories, but whoever it is, they don’t give up.
“Carden’s about to set you on fire,” they say, very close to Gabe’s ear. Bill abruptly pulls back and Gabe turns his head to find himself face-to-face with McCoy. “Just sayin’, you might wanna take this elsewhere.”
William glances at Carden and Butcher, who are indeed watching, and opens his mouth to speak. He stops himself with a frown, though, and pushes his plastic cup into McCoy’s hand, slipping away with all the grace of… something tall and not very graceful. Whatever. Gabe takes the cup back from McCoy and swallows the dregs.
“Love to watch him leave,” McCoy says idly. He leans against the wall and crosses his arms, because apparently everyone who talks to Gabe tonight needs to signal their distance nonverbally. It looks less petulant on McCoy, like he’s just getting comfortable propping up the plywood. “Didn’t know he was seeing you, Saporta.”
Gabe angles his smirk away from the room. “I’m not boyfriend material, McCoy. Speaking of which—“
“Neither am I,” McCoy interrupts. “So whatever you were gonna say, don’t.”
They let the party happen around them for a minute. Gabe doesn’t know why he wanted to ask about Ashlee. Whatever she does is her business, and he can see why she’d rebound with McCoy. He’s not blind.
“What else do we have in common?” he asks, testing. Stupid, but he’s here and he’s horny. He does his worst thinking with his head, anyway – that’s how he ended up pining for his best friend, who’s probably straight.
McCoy unfolds his arms and sticks his hands in his pockets, hunching a little to reach them. He says, “Not much. Let’s go get some beer, find out. I’m not driving.”
“I’m crashing here,” Gabe offers. “Carden doesn’t know.”
He can’t tell whether McCoy is laughing at him or because the look on Carden’s face in the morning is going to be really fucking entertaining. Either way, he’s laughing. Gabe’ll take it.
He doesn’t remember the sequence of events that ends with the two of them making out in Carden’s parents’ room, McCoy coming in his pants when Gabe couldn’t even get it up, but he texts William and leaves while McCoy’s in the bathroom.
What happened? William replies after a while, long enough that Gabe’s almost home. He stops under a light and stares at his phone, but he can’t think of anything to say that Bill won’t be able to decipher. He could use Bill’s superior insight into the human psyche right now, it’s just that he’d rather not look too closely at this. He has the uncomfortable feeling that he cheated on someone, but if McCoy and Ashlee aren’t exclusive, that’s just idiotic.
Bill’s message does ease his mind, though. No one saw them. That’s good, that’s good. It’s almost like it didn’t happen. Fuck.
His dad’s watching a science show in the den when Gabe lets himself into the house. He tiptoes past the open door and falls into bed, thinking hazily about the sounds McCoy made and his weird smell, nothing like the body spray Gabe’s used to, and falls asleep before he can even jerk off to someone that isn’t Pete for the first time in almost a year. He just acknowledges the urge and passes out.
In his dream, Jessica and Victoria are yelling at him.
*
There are bruises all over her back. She read somewhere that they’re badges of honor, so even though she makes sure to wear T-shirts instead of tank tops to hide them from her parents, she keeps stopping in front of the mirror to look at them as she packs. She’s had sex with Travis almost every day since she went to his house, but she still doesn’t know the stories behind most of his tattoos. They look like they transferred on her.
She does know one story; his first tattoo was for a friend of his who died. He got the ink when he was a freshman. It feels like she knows too much about him from that one little throwaway line, even though she doesn’t know how his friend died, or even where Travis lived before he moved here. She needs to keep her distance – it should be easy, but he never hides; she can’t help but look and listen.
Yesterday, Pete wrote, tell me how long you can stand to miss me. It wasn’t for her, she can tell. It was probably for Gabe or Patrick, or maybe for some other girl that Pete dated before her.
Ashlee doesn’t want to be the sort of person who’s full of other people’s marks. She doesn’t want people to know who gets to her just by looking at her. Pete and Travie are the exact opposite. When she’s feeling less than charitable, she wonders whether they think they’ll change so much that they need reminders of who they used to be. She’s not that naïve; when she gets her tattoos, they’ll be about the future, not the past.
She won’t change enough to forget who she is right now. She worked too hard at gaining her independence to forget the last summer before freedom, or what it cost her to get here.
Pete needs to throw questions at everyone who can hurt him. Ashlee would rather ask herself why she’s vulnerable instead. With Travis, the answer’s easy: she’ll never be one of the stories on his body, and he’ll never leave a mark deep enough that it won’t heal in a few days. They can’t break each other.
“Come on, baby girl, let go for me,” Travie says, digging his fingers into her back. Ashlee wants to sob every time because she knows she should be able to do it, she should be able to trust someone, she should. She can’t.
*
“This,” Gabe says, “is a booty call. Just so we’re clear.”
“Cool,” says Travis. “What’s the occasion?”
An honest reply would be that Patrick and William went to Pete’s house and found out he wasn’t eating. He didn’t even tell them himself, they found out from his mom. Gabe hasn’t seen him in two weeks.
“I’ve never done it in the backseat,” he tells Travis. “That’s a high school experience and I’m bored. Are you in or not?”
Travis is weirdly quiet for a few seconds and Gabe almost makes it into a joke, but then Travis laughs, a loud burst of air that sends shivers down Gabe’s spine. “What the hell, I’m easy. We’re pretty tall, though. It’s gonna suck.”
“Do I care?” Gabe asks rhetorically.
“You wouldn’t. I’m coming over.”
Gabe takes a shower and waits for Travis on the front steps. If there’s an etiquette for hooking up with a guy who’s dating your best friend’s ex, Gabe doesn’t know what it is, but he’s got the casual bit down pat. He watches Travis roll to a stop on his skateboard on the curb, his hair pulled back in two braids, and finds it as surprising as ever that they can actually make smalltalk despite their intentions.
“Are we going to the woods?” Travis asks as he throws his board into the trunk.
Gabe snorts. “Around here they’re more like shrubs, but whatever. It’s a bitch to drive in this on a dirt road, trees or no trees.”
“This used to be farmland,” Travis informs him. His knobby knees are actually touching the glove compartment, which gives Gabe pause. “Back in the ‘80s they bought the land and built affordable housing. I think about the cows and stuff that used to be here, I bet they hated it too.”
“Cows and stuff?” Gabe asks dubiously. “I should warn you, dude, you don’t wanna get into this conversation about the economy with me. It leads to talking about oppression. Nate leaves the room when I start on that.”
“You wanna talk about oppression, you should talk to my mom, not me,” Travis says. Gabe wonders if it was as hard for him being, well, not white in this town as it was for Gabe. At least McCoy had English as his first language. But Gabe actually doesn’t want to talk about it, so he doesn’t ask. He can’t remember when Travis moved here, but he didn’t have any friends in freshman year. Gabe was pretty popular.
After they park the car and get out to stretch their limbs before they go injure themselves in the backseat, Travis says, “Ashlee would love it here. It’s peaceful.”
“I know,” Gabe says, a little thrown. “They all would.”
Travis smiles up at the leaves and spider webs and birds. When he looks back at Gabe, the moment’s gone, but the tension went up pretty spectacularly.
“Get in the car, Saporta. I learned a thing or two about ergonomics in school.”
Gabe does what he says. It’s more fun than he’d be allowed to have if he was really in love, he thinks. Just a crush, just protectiveness to overcompensate for Pete’s self-neglect, and it doesn’t show on Gabe’s face, because otherwise Travis would get the fuck out of here.
*
When in doubt, both Ashlee and Jessica go talk to Victoria, not to each other. They have boundaries. It’s true that the boundaries come from the fact that they don’t approve of each other’s choices, but the important part is that they exist.
Victoria was the first person to tell Ashlee that sometimes parents are people first, and back in sophomore year, when Jessica hadn’t told Ashlee that she’d have to stay a year behind in school, Victoria was the one who calmed her down enough for the conversation with Ashlee.
Victoria was also the first person that Ashlee kissed on a dare. Pete and Gabe and Nate were all there, but it was Mikey who looked Victoria in the eyes and told her to kiss Ashlee. She made the same face she’s making now.
“You realize he’s never going to go for it, right?”
Ashlee groans and buries her face in her arms. “This is the opposite of lack of drama.” She thinks about it for a second and says, “I make no sense. Stop me anytime.”
She didn’t mean to walk in on Travis with Gabe. She’d just gone over to Travie’s house to get her phone charger and found them mid-handjobs, even though it was seven in the morning. She wishes she could say that she cleared her throat or something, but she just watched them and left when they were done, hoping they weren’t paying attention to the sounds from outside.
“You’re pretty creepy,” Victoria tells her. “Gabe may be hot, but he’s also got rules, and one of them is that he doesn’t sleep with his friends’ exes. Especially Pete’s.”
“I wouldn’t actually sleep with him,” Ashlee says, which is only half a lie. “Maybe if I didn’t know him. He’s Gabe. He threw up on me in fifth grade. And now he’s hot, what the hell?”
Victoria gives her a sympathetic look and shakes her head. She actually seems a little sad, which makes Ashlee feel less like she’s blowing this out of proportion. She’s not the only one who grew up too close to Gabe to look at him that way.
“And then there’s all the college stuff – did I tell you that my dad said he’ll stop paying my tuition if I don’t come home for every holiday? Who does that?”
“People who don’t trust their parenting skills enough not to resort to threats,” Victoria says quietly. “It’s about them, not you.”
“I would’ve come home anyway,” Ashlee says. More than half a lie. “Your dad would never do that.”
“That’s because my dad left home when he was seventeen to be a musician. Apples and oranges.”
Jessica would’ve made excuses for their dad and seen right through Ashlee’s claims about coming back for visits. Victoria does too, but she’s not directly affected by it, and she’s never tried to spare Ashlee’s feelings. Not once. Even though they can’t talk about Pete, she’s still the most honest person in Ashlee’s life.
i keep thnkng u alrdy know how fast my hearts beating, Pete texted her once. She never told anyone, but she knew all along. When Ashlee broke up with him, Victoria pursed her lips but didn’t say anything. That was all the external validation Ashlee needed for her decision. It didn’t make it easy. It just told her it had been necessary.
*
The week before Gabe leaves for college, he calls Travis every time he thinks he’ll call Pete and tell him something a little too revealing. It adds up to a lot of time spent in the basement or in Travie’s room. Ashlee’s things are everywhere, like they used to be in Pete’s room, but unlike Pete, Travis doesn’t flaunt them. He doesn’t hide them, either.
Gabe watches Travis folding a pair of Ashlee’s jeans to make room to sit down on the rumpled bed. He’s about to jump out of his skin – he woke up wired and hasn’t been able to settle down all day. He actually did call Pete (five times) but he didn’t answer.
“Why do you do it?” he asks.
Travis pauses without turning around. “Do what?”
“Why you let us do what we want,” he elaborates, but he’s already regretting saying anything. “I mean, what do you get out of it?”
“What does anyone get out of anything?” Travis asks. It doesn’t sound like a philosophical question. “What do you get out of being friends with Pete? What does William get out of being friends with you, other than being tricked into dates with Carden?”
“I don’t know. It’s easy.”
Travis finally stops and turns to look at Gabe. He’s still holding pieces of Ashlee’s clothes. “We all get as much as we can get away with. And I’m allowed to care. Just so we’re clear. I don’t have to be exclusive or some shit to care.”
“I’m sorry I asked,” Gabe says. He cares too, sort of. Not enough to fold McCoy’s clothes like that, and he’d bet neither does Ashlee.
“Whatever,” Travis says. “I always know what I’m getting myself into.”
It’s the last time they see each other before Gabe leaves town for good. He asks about every one of Travis’s tattoos. They could’ve been friends, but it’s ok. They’re the farthest thing from strangers that Gabe could imagine under the circumstances.
*
we might’ve started singing just a little too soon, Ashlee reads. She thinks about it for a moment, then leaves an anonymous comment. Pete’ll know who it’s from.
Love songs are tricks. Take two years, call me when you’re better.
She closes the laptop and looks at the boxes on the floor. Jessica finishes taping the last of them closed and says, apropos of nothing, “Out of the two of us, you’re the one who’d be fine single. You should try that in college. Experiments, right?”
“I think I will,” Ashlee says. “I should call Travis.”
“You should. He used to have a crush on you. Did I tell you? He asked Victoria for your number, like, three years ago.”
“I was a mess.”
“Everyone’s a mess.”
And that, Ashlee thinks, is the problem. If not for Pete, she could’ve fallen for Travis. She never wanted the white picket fence. And without her, Gabe might’ve gotten through to Pete before they all went their separate ways. It doesn’t matter, though. It’s over. They’d outgrown each other before this summer even started. Their lives were already elsewhere.
Notes: Many thanks to my beta and to everyone who listened to me talking about this when it was still known as 'the dysfunctional teen poly fic'.
Author:
verbynaPairing(s): Ashlee/Travis & Gabe/Travis, Gabe/William (implied William/Mike Carden, past Ashlee/Pete, one-sided Gabe/Pete)
Rating: R
Warnings: underage drinking, one reference to symptoms of depression in the the context of bipolar disorder that can be read as anorexia
Word count: ~6,600
Summary: We might've started singing just a little too soon. A summer-before-college AU.
It takes Pete all of senior year to get Ashlee to date him. It’s not a particularly dignified process – Gabe is always good for a reenactment of that time Pete threw pebbles at her window until the glass shattered and her dad called the cops, or the time Pete asked her to Spring Formal by hijacking the PA system – but eventually she did agree to go on a date with him. And another. She stopped elbowing him when he referred to her as his girlfriend the week before graduation.
It takes Pete five minutes to lose her. It’s quiet and private and all the things he hadn’t known she wanted.
“It’s obvious I’m in love with her,” he tells Gabe the next morning. “How could that freak her out? Like, at this point? What the fuck.”
Gabe gives him a pitying look and shrugs; says, “Jessica’s the one who jumps in.” Gabe’s always liked Jessica. They double-dated the same people for four years, which is almost like being friends. He’ll miss her when he leaves for college. At least she won’t be around to mention his crush on Pete anymore, because it’s not like that helps. Gabe’s sure that Mikey was the beginning and the end of Pete’s dabbling in the gay side. And Gabe’s not the relationship type, like, at all.
“I wish I had a crush on Jessica like everyone else,” Pete says in a tiny voice.
“How do you come up with this shit?”
Pete pulls the blanket over his head and shuts up. Gabe makes himself comfortable at the foot of Pete’s bed and watches daytime TV until Pete’s mom comes home and politely kicks him out.
Thing is, Pete’s taking a gap year. Gabe is pretty desperate to spend as much time with him as he possibly can at this point. He doesn’t tell anyone that he’s babysitting his best friend, but everyone probably knows. Where the fuck else would he be?
*
Ashlee’s trip home is uneventful. That’s good, because she needs to plan ahead. Mom and Dad went to bed before she left, but they sleep like… rabbits. Or something. Something that wakes up really easily.
God, she’s still drunk. And single. Both good things, but not at the same time, she’s come to realize.
Victoria drops her off at the corner with only a little disdain for the furtiveness. Easy for her to talk. Ashlee watches the car until it’s out of sight before she takes off her shoes and runs across a lawn and into the backyards. It’s easier to sneak in through the kitchen door, but it’s eerie out here at four in the morning.
A dog barks close by and the lights come on in a window ten feet to her right at the same time. She has to sit for a minute to calm down.
If Pete was here, they’d be busted. He’d go to the window and scare Bill or Courtney or Mrs. Beckett, because that’s what Pete’s like. All adventure and no self-preservation.
She gets up eventually and keeps going until she’s at the kitchen door, then enters the security code and goes in. Jessica’s sitting at the table, all sleep-mussed and Victoria’s Secret catalog-pretty. She got home hours ago, but she can never sleep until Ashlee’s back.
“You look tired,” Jessica says, smiling a little. “Who dropped you off, Pete? I heard a car outside.”
Ashlee rubs her eyes, smearing gel eyeshadow all over her hand. “Yeah. Didn’t stick around.”
“You broke up with him on Wednesday, Ash.” Jessica taps her fingernails against the side of a salt shaker and looks Ashlee up and down slowly. “I’m sorry, whatever he did. C’mon, I’ll help you with the makeup. You’re a mess.”
She leads the way up the stairs and into the bathroom. Ashlee tries not to cry. She hates crying, she’s no Jess, who can’t watch The Notebook without tearing up. She must be such a pretty picture right now – grass stains, runs in her pantyhose, panda eyes, sitting on the edge of the tub like she needs looking after.
“He told me he loves me,” she tells Jessica. Jess frowns at herself in the mirror, so Ashlee elaborates before she jumps to conclusions. “That’s why I broke up with him. Because he said—he said. That.”
“Boys do that. You think he means it?”
Ashlee tilts her head up so Jess can wipe the stuff from her face. “He meant it,” she says quietly.
“But you don’t love him. You did the right thing. Poor Pete, though.”
Jessica smells really good and her hands are gentle and she believes in forever, in marriage and babies and Christmas mornings. Ashlee used to think she was adopted, especially when they pulled her out of ballet school and moved the whole family here for Jessy’s career. It’s so much easier to love Jessica. Ashlee’s going to miss her so damn much she can’t even think about next year.
“Hey. Hey, Ash.”
“What?”
“Can I borrow your shoes tomorrow?”
“They’re yours,” Ashlee reminds her. “They were in a box in your room.”
“No wonder I like them,” Jessica mutters. “Look up, panda, you’re wearing half my MAC.”
Ashlee focuses on swaying as little as possible. It helps a little if she focuses on the bright backlit halo of Jessica’s hair. Old habits die hard.
*
Halfway through July, Victoria and Patrick stage an intervention to get Gabe and Pete out of Gabe’s basement. Pete goes willingly, since it’s Patrick asking and attention from Patrick can make him do almost anything, but Gabe is less cooperative.
“I don’t know if it’s Stockholm Syndrome or you got the depression bug from your buddy there,” Victoria says. Gabe glares at her hazily. “You do realize you’ve spent three weeks down here? When’s the last time you went to a party?”
“I went out with Bill last week,” Gabe says. “I’m not a hermit.”
“You went to see Bill’s show, you stayed in the corner the whole time, and you left without him. That’s not going out, that’s basically stalking.”
“It really isn’t. How do you know what I did, anyway? Is Bill in on this?” Gabe specifically asked Bill not to tell anyone about it. He only went because Carden was playing right after Bill and Bill needed someone who could throw a punch to back him up in case Carden pulled his pigtails. Bill promised Gabe an unspecified favor in the future, which may or may not be sexual, Gabe knows, depending on how soon Carden grows a pair.
“Bill’s out of town,” says Victoria. “He left a week ago.” He can practically see her running through possibilities, figuring out that Gabe chose to hang out with Pete on a downswing to the exclusion of, well, Bill’s excellent denial-fueled hand jobs. He makes an executive decision to give in and distract her.
“Fine, so it’s been a while.” He sits up and waits out the head rush, then sighs dramatically. “Wait in my room, I won’t be long.”
She raises an eyebrow at him, which used to turn him on something awful a few years ago before he realized she’s not actually evil, just annoyingly smart.
“Where will you be, hmm?”
“Taking a shower. I know you have a plan for tonight, I’d rather not smell myself through it.”
“Good boy.”
She looks relieved. Gabe can’t get out fast enough. It’s one thing to give in; admitting it was for good reason is a completely different problem, and he has enough problems right now. Sometimes it sucks to be him.
He finds his phone in his pocket when he takes off his pants and texts Pete a sad smiley.
Ptrck made me showr, Pete texts back.
Gabe pictures it in gloriously shameful detail for the next fifteen minutes. Then he turns the water as hot as it goes and bangs his head against the wall slowly until he’s ready to face Victoria without looking guilty, or worse, depressed, because he has no reason to be. No reason he’s willing to share.
*
Ashlee still reads Pete’s blog. Usually when she’s just got home and it’s starting to get light outside, and neither of them has slept, even though she could sleep just fine if she wasn’t so desperate to avoid being alone with her thoughts. It’s routine by now: sneak upstairs, strip down to her underwear, read Pete’s latest stream-of-consciousness, contemplate coffee, get a bitter taste in her mouth.
He writes about her. Little things, nothing anyone could figure out but the two of them. (My body is an orphanage and anchors on shirts, who else would know what that means to them?) It’s not comfortable to be reminded of how well he got her, but he did. She has no illusions that he doesn’t know she’s reading, anyway, and half of it is for her benefit, misplaced chivalry. He says all the bad stuff and Ashlee never brings it up. Mix them up and divide by two and you get two healthy reactions, one apiece.
Jess came into her bedroom once when the tab was still open and Ashlee was in the study with dad, going over college shopping lists. When Ashlee came back and found Jessica sitting cross-legged on the bed, frowning at the screen, she almost turned right back around and hid, but then Jess closed the laptop and talked about something else entirely.
Ashlee wants to talk about it, except she doesn’t want the talking part. She wants someone other than Pete to get into her head so she doesn’t have to hear herself babbling around the truth until she gives up.
So when Travis puts a hand on her waist at a party and asks her if she wants to get out of there, she says yes. Because it’s better than going home to her empty room. And because it’s better than watching Gabe and Victoria and Nate doing their hipster thing and knowing that Pete and Gabe got Victoria in the split, even if Victoria would never avoid her on purpose.
Travis’s hand is warm and heavy in the small of her back. He keeps it there without steering her, just something solid she can push against as they make their way out of the overheated living room and into the humidity outside. It wasn’t raining when she arrived; she doesn’t know how long she was inside. They stop on the porch so that Ashlee can say goodbye to a couple of people, then set off across the grass, into the woods at the edge of the property.
Travis was one of the artsy kids who wore spotless sneakers and always had dirty fingernails – paint, actual dirt, who knows. None of it matters. They graduated; social lines have been breaking down since they walked off the auditorium stage. Ashlee studies Travis properly for the first time that she can remember.
She likes what she sees. She might even like it tomorrow, in better light, standing still instead of picking their way over tree roots. Her feet hurt like hell.
It doesn’t take long to reach an area where the trees give way to a manmade clearing with a picnic table. Travis is tall enough that he has to bend his knees to sit on the damn table. She doesn’t want to get her jeans wet, so it makes sense that she would stand in front of him. When he pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and lights up, she lets him take a couple of puffs before she steals one.
She gives him the cigarette back and their fingers brush against each other.
And the thing that Pete got better than anyone, better than Jessica, is that Ashlee’s only careful when she doesn’t know what she wants.
“Hell of a party,” Travis says, frowning at her like he can’t figure out how they got here. “I’m not going back.”
“I’m not going home,” Ashlee says. She feels like she should be smiling; if it was a movie she’d be smiling, but her mouth tastes like smoke and that never happens in Hollywood anymore. She wonders if it means anything that she doesn’t have that nagging feeling that she should be elsewhere right now.
“I wasn’t gonna ask, but are you really done with Pete?”
Ashlee giggles for no reason, except for how ironic the question is. It’s Pete who has to be done with her, not the other way around. Still, she can’t help herself, so she asks, “You think you’ll get to step on his toes?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.” She’s definitely not imagining that smile he’s hiding behind the hand with the cigarette. He smiles with his eyes, he can’t hide his whole face. She steps a little closer and his other hand settles on her hip.
“I can’t handle complicated right now,” she says, more honestly than she intended.
She just wants to make out with someone. It’s been almost two months since she broke up with Pete. The look on Travis’s face is way too knowing, but her mind’s made up. They didn’t mean anything to each other for four years, they’re moving away at the end of summer; she can have this. She can make out with someone without being terrified she’ll say the wrong thing and break his heart.
Travis stubs out the cigarette on the underside of the table and pulls her closer.
“Something easy, then,” he says quietly, still with that smile on his face. She’s the one who leans in. He’s a good kisser, but with the hickeys he always had when they were in History together, she wasn’t expecting anything less.
*
Ok, so maybe he stopped answering his phone.
“I’m not gonna say anything,” says Nate, sounding pained. Gabe doesn’t turn around because, quite frankly, he’s embarrassed. He’s been sitting in the tire swing in front of Pete’s window for a while. He even parked around the corner so Pete’s dad wouldn’t hear the car and bring him ice cream out.
“Don’t tell Victoria,” Gabe says. “It’s just. Fuck.” He does swing the tire around now, because it’s not just about him anymore. “Pete heard about Ashlee and McCoy from Trohman.”
“So what, he locked himself in his room? And you’re sitting here like it’s a fucking John Hughes movie?”
Gabe doesn’t want to explain that his summer has too little Pete and too much of everyone else. That last year he and Pete thought their worlds were falling apart, that Gabe got over it but Pete covered it up with Ashlee, and he can’t think of anything to do now that she’s leaving. That they’re both stuck – Pete in his room with his words, Gabe out here because Pete needs space when he’s really messed up.
He can’t say any of that because Nate isn’t that sort of friend, or the kind of person who can relate.
“Fuck off, I can sit here all I want. Maybe I like the swing.”
Nate scratches the back of his neck and looks at the house, then back at Gabe. “Victoria wanted me to tell you to stop listening to Lana Del Rey in the dark like a freak. She figured you were in the basement.”
Another ‘fuck off’ would be a little repetitive, but Gabe hopes his expression adequately conveys the sentiment. Nate smirks. “She also wanted me to tell you that she has vodka and the keys to her dad’s studio.”
“You should’ve just said so, fuck. Spared me the intro,” Gabe says as he climbs backwards out of the tire and dusts himself off.
Nate shrugs and starts walking away. “Lana Del Rey, seriously,” Gabe mutters, following.
They take Gabe’s car to get to Victoria’s house, even though it’s only a couple of minutes away. Gabe lives on the other side of town. He doesn’t have this sort of house. It’s better now that his brother’s in college, just him and his old man, but still. Not crowded is not the same as big.
They run into Ashlee, who’s just coming out the front door as they get in. They nod at each other like they’re acquaintances, not people who spent weeks together before the breakup and who’ve known each other since middle school. He wonders, vaguely, if she thinks he encouraged Pete to go after her after she first shot him down. Because he didn’t. He almost tells her so, but when he looks at her, she’s staring right back at him over her shoulder. The words dry up in his throat. They were cruel, anyway. Gabe’s not that guy.
“The vodka’s this way,” Nate says helpfully.
In some fucked up way, Gabe misses Ashlee and Jessica so much for a moment that he almost trips over the threshold.
“Right,” he says blankly. And then, pulling himself together, “Any mixers?”
“Like we’re amateurs.”
Gabe knows they’re not, but that’s not the point. He has no idea why he asked.
*
Ashlee has a lot to do. She really does. She has to sort out her clothes, reply to the email from her future roommate and confirm she’s not a pod person (or a music major who wants to practice in the dorm), buy sheets for a single and pillows and an alarm clock and a lamp and all the stuff she hasn’t even put on lists yet, and she’s meeting Travis later.
Instead of doing anything, she lies in her bed and counts the faded glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling.
Jessica stops by at some point to talk around the subject of their dad. What Ashlee gets out of it is an old sort of sadness, no more. When she was taken out of Juilliard she put on make-up and people thought that was her now, and she smiled and people thought she had reason to smile, and the only person who ever saw through it without passing judgment is off-limits. It’s just life. Things hardly ever work out. Or if they work out, they get broken eventually.
She lets Jessica talk because Jessica will be stuck here without Ashlee, but she thinks about the way that Gabe looked at her. The way her dad looks at her, the way her mother doesn’t whenever Jessica’s around.
Pete wrote in his blog, pass me a note if you cant kiss me. dont let me make you worse. She used to tell him when she just couldn’t take his attention, and he always backed off. He never pushed too far, until he did.
“…and singing lessons.”
Ashlee gets back to the conversation with an effort. “Sorry, what?”
Gabe had looked like he’d wanted to say something. Most people can’t tell how much he holds back. God, he probably hates her.
“I said, I’m getting more vocal coaching in the fall.” Jessica frowns at her. “You weren’t listening, were you?”
“Sorry. Sorry, Jess, I just have a lot going on.”
“Forget it.”
“No, seriously, what are we talking about?” Ashlee asks, since she hates seeing Jessica like this, all disappointed.
“Dad’s worried about you. He doesn’t think you’ll deal with college and the dorms and all your classes. I think he wanted you to apply somewhere closer.”
Ashlee blinks at her for a minute. She considers telling Jessica that he already told her that, several times, and sometimes he was pretty loud about it, too. Then she says, “Are you? Worried?”
Jessica makes that face like she wants to laugh but doesn’t want to hurt Ashlee’s feelings. “Of course not, honey. You got into Juilliard once, this doesn’t even compare. You’ll be fine.”
It’s not as exciting as dancing and pushing herself and bleeding into her shoes; it doesn’t compare, Jessica’s right. Not the way she means it, but it’s still true.
“Help me pick out the sheets?” Ashlee asks, glancing at the laptop where it’s open on her desk. They might as well.
When Travie tries to take her hand later, she slips it under his shirt instead. He’s warm and surprisingly quiet and he’s breathing on her neck. She can’t hold his hand because that’s holding on, that’s taking something to keep it. She wants him differently than she wanted Pete, it’s more immediate. She wants, so she scratches her nails deliberately over his ribs.
He breathes out sharply, smells like cigarette smoke and chemicals; he whispers in her ear, “I don’t have to get it. Come on - come on. Ashlee, c’mon. Back to my place.”
She pulls back to look him in the eyes, but just zeroes in on his lips. Dammit, that mouth, she’s beginning to suspect she has a problem. “Yeah?” she asks, just to hear him say it again.
They made it this far.
He does take her hand when they’re in his bed, but only to press it against the mattress before she flips them over. He muffles a laugh against her collarbone, then scrapes his teeth slowly over her skin. She can barely make out his tattoos in the strange orange light from the streetlamp.
She should ask him about them sometime, but not when her hands are in his hair and the muscles in her thighs are beginning to hurt just right and he can make her stop thinking.
Afterwards, he asks her if she can stay. She could spare a couple of hours and still make it home earlier than most nights.
“I have to help Jessica with something,” she says. Then she adds, “Sorry.”
“Nah, it’s cool. Another time.”
Because there will be another time. They have a whole month ahead of them. It’s easy to smile back and put on her clothes, let him walk her out, knowing she’ll be back.
*
In the past three days, Gabe has considered and dismissed the possibility of sleeping with three different people. He smokes his way through five packs of cigarettes, watches more porn than he has since he lost his virginity four years ago, and keeps his phone on the edge of the bathtub while he washes off the layer of nicotine, just in case Pete sends him anything.
The internet tells him that he’s suffering from an excess of dopamine in his system. Armed with this new knowledge, he shows up at Carden’s I-might-get-a-record-deal party with the sole purpose of getting laid. It’s not the smartest thing he’s ever done, letting himself slide like this and inflicting himself on his peers without Victoria to keep him out of trouble, but he can’t take his own company anymore.
Also, he’s brought William along. He neglected to mention that it was Carden’s party they’d be attending.
“Oh my god, I can’t believe you did this to me,” William says, color high in his cheeks. He plasters himself against the car door as if he wants to go through it, back to safety and repression. “I can’t believe you want me to go into Carden’s house. He’ll poison my drinks.”
Gabe laughs, he can’t help it. “Poison, Bills? Dramatic much?”
William looks momentarily hurt, though he covers it up fast, and well. He wasn’t the only out bi kid at school, but he was the only one with long hair and a wardrobe that could double as a death wish in certain circles. Gabe holds his hands up as a peace offering.
“Why are we even here? You were having a quarter-life crisis. That was nice and safe. You should take it up as a lifestyle.”
“Cruel, William,” Gabe says. He’s too young to call it a quarter-life crisis. He hopes. Bill just crosses his arms and looks at him. “Yeah, fine, I wanna hook up. Happy? Can we go look for the keg now?”
“It’s in the dining room,” Bill says absently, then makes a horrified face. Interesting.
“And you know this, how?” Gabe asks, but Bill’s already walking up to the house. Gabe wonders if William knows about the other rooms (like, say, Carden’s bedroom), not that he’d say anything if he did. At least he’s getting with the program.
He’s getting with the program so well, in fact, that they’ve barely had a couple of watery beers when he kisses Gabe on the neck. Carden’s probably close by; Bill’s not one for gratuitous, sober PDA at parties. Gabe’s just getting into the familiar rhythm of it when someone taps him on the shoulder. He ignores it, because Bill’s mouth brings back happy memories, but whoever it is, they don’t give up.
“Carden’s about to set you on fire,” they say, very close to Gabe’s ear. Bill abruptly pulls back and Gabe turns his head to find himself face-to-face with McCoy. “Just sayin’, you might wanna take this elsewhere.”
William glances at Carden and Butcher, who are indeed watching, and opens his mouth to speak. He stops himself with a frown, though, and pushes his plastic cup into McCoy’s hand, slipping away with all the grace of… something tall and not very graceful. Whatever. Gabe takes the cup back from McCoy and swallows the dregs.
“Love to watch him leave,” McCoy says idly. He leans against the wall and crosses his arms, because apparently everyone who talks to Gabe tonight needs to signal their distance nonverbally. It looks less petulant on McCoy, like he’s just getting comfortable propping up the plywood. “Didn’t know he was seeing you, Saporta.”
Gabe angles his smirk away from the room. “I’m not boyfriend material, McCoy. Speaking of which—“
“Neither am I,” McCoy interrupts. “So whatever you were gonna say, don’t.”
They let the party happen around them for a minute. Gabe doesn’t know why he wanted to ask about Ashlee. Whatever she does is her business, and he can see why she’d rebound with McCoy. He’s not blind.
“What else do we have in common?” he asks, testing. Stupid, but he’s here and he’s horny. He does his worst thinking with his head, anyway – that’s how he ended up pining for his best friend, who’s probably straight.
McCoy unfolds his arms and sticks his hands in his pockets, hunching a little to reach them. He says, “Not much. Let’s go get some beer, find out. I’m not driving.”
“I’m crashing here,” Gabe offers. “Carden doesn’t know.”
He can’t tell whether McCoy is laughing at him or because the look on Carden’s face in the morning is going to be really fucking entertaining. Either way, he’s laughing. Gabe’ll take it.
He doesn’t remember the sequence of events that ends with the two of them making out in Carden’s parents’ room, McCoy coming in his pants when Gabe couldn’t even get it up, but he texts William and leaves while McCoy’s in the bathroom.
What happened? William replies after a while, long enough that Gabe’s almost home. He stops under a light and stares at his phone, but he can’t think of anything to say that Bill won’t be able to decipher. He could use Bill’s superior insight into the human psyche right now, it’s just that he’d rather not look too closely at this. He has the uncomfortable feeling that he cheated on someone, but if McCoy and Ashlee aren’t exclusive, that’s just idiotic.
Bill’s message does ease his mind, though. No one saw them. That’s good, that’s good. It’s almost like it didn’t happen. Fuck.
His dad’s watching a science show in the den when Gabe lets himself into the house. He tiptoes past the open door and falls into bed, thinking hazily about the sounds McCoy made and his weird smell, nothing like the body spray Gabe’s used to, and falls asleep before he can even jerk off to someone that isn’t Pete for the first time in almost a year. He just acknowledges the urge and passes out.
In his dream, Jessica and Victoria are yelling at him.
*
There are bruises all over her back. She read somewhere that they’re badges of honor, so even though she makes sure to wear T-shirts instead of tank tops to hide them from her parents, she keeps stopping in front of the mirror to look at them as she packs. She’s had sex with Travis almost every day since she went to his house, but she still doesn’t know the stories behind most of his tattoos. They look like they transferred on her.
She does know one story; his first tattoo was for a friend of his who died. He got the ink when he was a freshman. It feels like she knows too much about him from that one little throwaway line, even though she doesn’t know how his friend died, or even where Travis lived before he moved here. She needs to keep her distance – it should be easy, but he never hides; she can’t help but look and listen.
Yesterday, Pete wrote, tell me how long you can stand to miss me. It wasn’t for her, she can tell. It was probably for Gabe or Patrick, or maybe for some other girl that Pete dated before her.
Ashlee doesn’t want to be the sort of person who’s full of other people’s marks. She doesn’t want people to know who gets to her just by looking at her. Pete and Travie are the exact opposite. When she’s feeling less than charitable, she wonders whether they think they’ll change so much that they need reminders of who they used to be. She’s not that naïve; when she gets her tattoos, they’ll be about the future, not the past.
She won’t change enough to forget who she is right now. She worked too hard at gaining her independence to forget the last summer before freedom, or what it cost her to get here.
Pete needs to throw questions at everyone who can hurt him. Ashlee would rather ask herself why she’s vulnerable instead. With Travis, the answer’s easy: she’ll never be one of the stories on his body, and he’ll never leave a mark deep enough that it won’t heal in a few days. They can’t break each other.
“Come on, baby girl, let go for me,” Travie says, digging his fingers into her back. Ashlee wants to sob every time because she knows she should be able to do it, she should be able to trust someone, she should. She can’t.
*
“This,” Gabe says, “is a booty call. Just so we’re clear.”
“Cool,” says Travis. “What’s the occasion?”
An honest reply would be that Patrick and William went to Pete’s house and found out he wasn’t eating. He didn’t even tell them himself, they found out from his mom. Gabe hasn’t seen him in two weeks.
“I’ve never done it in the backseat,” he tells Travis. “That’s a high school experience and I’m bored. Are you in or not?”
Travis is weirdly quiet for a few seconds and Gabe almost makes it into a joke, but then Travis laughs, a loud burst of air that sends shivers down Gabe’s spine. “What the hell, I’m easy. We’re pretty tall, though. It’s gonna suck.”
“Do I care?” Gabe asks rhetorically.
“You wouldn’t. I’m coming over.”
Gabe takes a shower and waits for Travis on the front steps. If there’s an etiquette for hooking up with a guy who’s dating your best friend’s ex, Gabe doesn’t know what it is, but he’s got the casual bit down pat. He watches Travis roll to a stop on his skateboard on the curb, his hair pulled back in two braids, and finds it as surprising as ever that they can actually make smalltalk despite their intentions.
“Are we going to the woods?” Travis asks as he throws his board into the trunk.
Gabe snorts. “Around here they’re more like shrubs, but whatever. It’s a bitch to drive in this on a dirt road, trees or no trees.”
“This used to be farmland,” Travis informs him. His knobby knees are actually touching the glove compartment, which gives Gabe pause. “Back in the ‘80s they bought the land and built affordable housing. I think about the cows and stuff that used to be here, I bet they hated it too.”
“Cows and stuff?” Gabe asks dubiously. “I should warn you, dude, you don’t wanna get into this conversation about the economy with me. It leads to talking about oppression. Nate leaves the room when I start on that.”
“You wanna talk about oppression, you should talk to my mom, not me,” Travis says. Gabe wonders if it was as hard for him being, well, not white in this town as it was for Gabe. At least McCoy had English as his first language. But Gabe actually doesn’t want to talk about it, so he doesn’t ask. He can’t remember when Travis moved here, but he didn’t have any friends in freshman year. Gabe was pretty popular.
After they park the car and get out to stretch their limbs before they go injure themselves in the backseat, Travis says, “Ashlee would love it here. It’s peaceful.”
“I know,” Gabe says, a little thrown. “They all would.”
Travis smiles up at the leaves and spider webs and birds. When he looks back at Gabe, the moment’s gone, but the tension went up pretty spectacularly.
“Get in the car, Saporta. I learned a thing or two about ergonomics in school.”
Gabe does what he says. It’s more fun than he’d be allowed to have if he was really in love, he thinks. Just a crush, just protectiveness to overcompensate for Pete’s self-neglect, and it doesn’t show on Gabe’s face, because otherwise Travis would get the fuck out of here.
*
When in doubt, both Ashlee and Jessica go talk to Victoria, not to each other. They have boundaries. It’s true that the boundaries come from the fact that they don’t approve of each other’s choices, but the important part is that they exist.
Victoria was the first person to tell Ashlee that sometimes parents are people first, and back in sophomore year, when Jessica hadn’t told Ashlee that she’d have to stay a year behind in school, Victoria was the one who calmed her down enough for the conversation with Ashlee.
Victoria was also the first person that Ashlee kissed on a dare. Pete and Gabe and Nate were all there, but it was Mikey who looked Victoria in the eyes and told her to kiss Ashlee. She made the same face she’s making now.
“You realize he’s never going to go for it, right?”
Ashlee groans and buries her face in her arms. “This is the opposite of lack of drama.” She thinks about it for a second and says, “I make no sense. Stop me anytime.”
She didn’t mean to walk in on Travis with Gabe. She’d just gone over to Travie’s house to get her phone charger and found them mid-handjobs, even though it was seven in the morning. She wishes she could say that she cleared her throat or something, but she just watched them and left when they were done, hoping they weren’t paying attention to the sounds from outside.
“You’re pretty creepy,” Victoria tells her. “Gabe may be hot, but he’s also got rules, and one of them is that he doesn’t sleep with his friends’ exes. Especially Pete’s.”
“I wouldn’t actually sleep with him,” Ashlee says, which is only half a lie. “Maybe if I didn’t know him. He’s Gabe. He threw up on me in fifth grade. And now he’s hot, what the hell?”
Victoria gives her a sympathetic look and shakes her head. She actually seems a little sad, which makes Ashlee feel less like she’s blowing this out of proportion. She’s not the only one who grew up too close to Gabe to look at him that way.
“And then there’s all the college stuff – did I tell you that my dad said he’ll stop paying my tuition if I don’t come home for every holiday? Who does that?”
“People who don’t trust their parenting skills enough not to resort to threats,” Victoria says quietly. “It’s about them, not you.”
“I would’ve come home anyway,” Ashlee says. More than half a lie. “Your dad would never do that.”
“That’s because my dad left home when he was seventeen to be a musician. Apples and oranges.”
Jessica would’ve made excuses for their dad and seen right through Ashlee’s claims about coming back for visits. Victoria does too, but she’s not directly affected by it, and she’s never tried to spare Ashlee’s feelings. Not once. Even though they can’t talk about Pete, she’s still the most honest person in Ashlee’s life.
i keep thnkng u alrdy know how fast my hearts beating, Pete texted her once. She never told anyone, but she knew all along. When Ashlee broke up with him, Victoria pursed her lips but didn’t say anything. That was all the external validation Ashlee needed for her decision. It didn’t make it easy. It just told her it had been necessary.
*
The week before Gabe leaves for college, he calls Travis every time he thinks he’ll call Pete and tell him something a little too revealing. It adds up to a lot of time spent in the basement or in Travie’s room. Ashlee’s things are everywhere, like they used to be in Pete’s room, but unlike Pete, Travis doesn’t flaunt them. He doesn’t hide them, either.
Gabe watches Travis folding a pair of Ashlee’s jeans to make room to sit down on the rumpled bed. He’s about to jump out of his skin – he woke up wired and hasn’t been able to settle down all day. He actually did call Pete (five times) but he didn’t answer.
“Why do you do it?” he asks.
Travis pauses without turning around. “Do what?”
“Why you let us do what we want,” he elaborates, but he’s already regretting saying anything. “I mean, what do you get out of it?”
“What does anyone get out of anything?” Travis asks. It doesn’t sound like a philosophical question. “What do you get out of being friends with Pete? What does William get out of being friends with you, other than being tricked into dates with Carden?”
“I don’t know. It’s easy.”
Travis finally stops and turns to look at Gabe. He’s still holding pieces of Ashlee’s clothes. “We all get as much as we can get away with. And I’m allowed to care. Just so we’re clear. I don’t have to be exclusive or some shit to care.”
“I’m sorry I asked,” Gabe says. He cares too, sort of. Not enough to fold McCoy’s clothes like that, and he’d bet neither does Ashlee.
“Whatever,” Travis says. “I always know what I’m getting myself into.”
It’s the last time they see each other before Gabe leaves town for good. He asks about every one of Travis’s tattoos. They could’ve been friends, but it’s ok. They’re the farthest thing from strangers that Gabe could imagine under the circumstances.
*
we might’ve started singing just a little too soon, Ashlee reads. She thinks about it for a moment, then leaves an anonymous comment. Pete’ll know who it’s from.
Love songs are tricks. Take two years, call me when you’re better.
She closes the laptop and looks at the boxes on the floor. Jessica finishes taping the last of them closed and says, apropos of nothing, “Out of the two of us, you’re the one who’d be fine single. You should try that in college. Experiments, right?”
“I think I will,” Ashlee says. “I should call Travis.”
“You should. He used to have a crush on you. Did I tell you? He asked Victoria for your number, like, three years ago.”
“I was a mess.”
“Everyone’s a mess.”
And that, Ashlee thinks, is the problem. If not for Pete, she could’ve fallen for Travis. She never wanted the white picket fence. And without her, Gabe might’ve gotten through to Pete before they all went their separate ways. It doesn’t matter, though. It’s over. They’d outgrown each other before this summer even started. Their lives were already elsewhere.
Notes: Many thanks to my beta and to everyone who listened to me talking about this when it was still known as 'the dysfunctional teen poly fic'.
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I like that phrasing a lot. I also like this fic a lot. It's messy and complicated and everyone's getting their emotions all over everything, which is a lot like being seventeen in real life. The William/Carden subplot was amusing, too.
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It'd be interesting to come back and visit this 'verse in a year or two, to see how everyone has changed and grown.
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I really liked how messy it was, with no clear cut answers.
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And Travis, he is just so perfect here.
Just so we’re clear. I don’t have to be exclusive or some shit to care. Which is so true.
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