So the rule is, if someone gets lucky and somehow convinces someone else to have sex with them in an actual bed in an actual house, they have to take the rest of the band with them.
Not for the sex part, obviously. Well, not usually for the sex part, although there was that one time in Vegas when Mikey and Ray both crashed with this chick and both came back the next day with hickies. And exhaustion. And sex hair.
Stayed up all night talking Gerard’s ass.
Anyway, the point is that Mikey has worked his magic once again, and is upstairs getting laid by this vaguely scary girl with more fucking metal in her face than Optimus Prime. Over-pierced or not, the girl – Louise? Lucy? Lara-something – has a house, a real house with a real shower that she let them all use, and a real guest room with a real bed that Toro and Otter immediately claimed as their own ‘because we’re tall,’ whatever, which left Frank and Gerard to sleep on the fold-out bed in the basement.
Gerard still doesn’t understand why they couldn’t have slept in the living room. The living room had a couch and comfy-looking chairs and even a floor which Gerard would gladly have taken after seriously nine hundred years straight sleeping in the fucking van, but apparently there’s some situation with the alarm system and an over-achieving motion sensor, so here they are, in the pitch-black boiling hot basement, on a lumpy mattress that still feels like heaven to Gerard’s spine, which he swears is like one more van night away from permanently fusing into a sitting position.
He stretches a little and immediately gets pinched in the side by Frank. “Ow! What the fuck?”
Frank is jammed in between Gerard and the wall. He made Gerard check the entire basement for spiders before they turned off the crazy-bright fluorescent strip light, but he’s still wrapped himself up in the blankets like a burrito, jamming the edges under his body until he’s fucking airtight. “If you stretch you’ll pull the blankets out,” he says, muffled because his face is pressed under Gerard’s chin. “And then the spiders will get in, and then I’ll have to kill you.”
“If you kill me there’ll be nobody to rescue you from the spiders,” Gerard points out, trying to wriggle a hand up to scratch his chin where Frank’s hair is tickling it. Frank doesn’t like that, though; he mashes their chests together so there’s no room for Gerard’s hand. Gerard sighs and rubs his chin on the top of Frank’s head instead.
“I’m too hot,” Frank says, pulling his face out and gasping somewhere near Gerard’s cheek. “Fuck. It’s so fucking hot.”
“It’s the boiler,” Gerard tells him. That’s been his answer for everything, so far – what’s that weird noise, did you hear that clanking sound, what the fuck is that thing by the window that looks like a murderer/giant spider/giant, murderous spider. It’s seriously so dark Gerard couldn’t even see his hand if he was allowed to wave it in front of his face, or if he opened his eyes, which he is not doing, because so long as his eyes are closed, that’s why he can’t see anything. “I’m scared of the dark,” he says to Frank.
Frank says, “I know.”
“I wish we could have slept in the living room.”
“You hate sleeping in the living room.” Frank makes a pfft-noise and his breath hits Gerard sharply in the eye. “You hate waking up with strangers around.”
Gerard rolls his eyes at nothing and blinks when Frank makes the pfft-noise again. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m trying to stop my face melting, it’s like a million degrees in here.” Frank starts wriggling around crazily under the blankets. “Fuck, fuck. Fuck, seriously, Gerard, I’m going to fucking boil to death here, I can’t even take it.”
