1.

When The Used finish their summer tour, finally, the first thing Bob does is pile some shit into his car. He doesn't so much sleep at home as nap on the futon in Patrick Stump's living room, where he technically doesn't live anymore, for about 24 hours starting in the middle of the afternoon. When he wakes up he eats a reasonably healthy breakfast and drives to New Jersey. It takes almost two days.

Belleville is pretty much like he remembers it - it hasn't even been a year - but it seems smaller for some reason with the asphalt baking under the August sun. Bob checks into a hotel because he hasn't bothered calling people to call people for him before he came: the Jersey scene has ties to people, of course, but he hasn't ever worked there personally, not until the live recording sessions last spring that he did as a favor to Jeph. He hasn't talked about his plans with anyone at all, ever. He has one seven-month-old phone number still in his cell, but he doesn't call it. He just takes a shower and goes looking for some live sound.

The Jersey scene is different, and fucking crowded, but it's cool. He keeps running into people who know people, and he could pick up a month's work in the first night, if he knew he was staying. He smiles and tells guys he's met before and friendly bartenders and the band he's helping out that he isn't sure yet, getting a feel for the place. It only takes him three nights to run into Ray Toro again, and by that time he is pretty sure he knows every place in the town.

"Bob! Hey!" says Ray Toro, and claps Bob on the back, and his round eyes get rounder in surprise before his face breaks into a cheesy grin.

He is a big guy, but Bob thought the first time they met that he looked like a kid when he grinned. He's trimmed his curly hair some, Bob sees - trying to make it behave, maybe. The reddish-tinged afro is smaller, but it is as bushy as ever. His teeth are white and his eyes are black in the shadowy darkness a few feet away from the bar, where neon signs and track lights provide the only opportunity to see if his skin and his eyes and his worn-out favorite t-shirt are really the same colors Bob remembers. He saw that fucking shirt five times in four weeks of recording earlier this year.

"What are you doing here, man?" says Ray. "Aren't you on tour with The Used?"

"Yeah, just got done with that," says Bob. "I've got a break for a few months - I mean, I was kinda tentatively planning to go back out with some guys I knew back home and that's in February, so I'm just - keeping busy," and smiles a little bit, self-deprecatingly, and tries not to sound too embarrassed. It is pretty dark in the club, but Bob's skin would show if he even thought about blushing.

It isn't exactly awkward because, Bob tells himself, drifting around to different scenes is what he does, it is what people like him do anyway, and not one of the guys he knows would think twice about him coming back to Jersey after he did a few weeks of work up here and liked it in the spring. Not one of them would ask him why he really came back, so the only reason to be embarrassed is that Bob knows the answer himself.

That doesn't mean Ray Toro has to know, but Bob isn't realistically worried about that. His surprise is wearing off but he is still smiling, pleased, and leaning forward a little, his big round face wide open and receiving.

"Still working sound?" says Ray. "You're one of the best in the business, man."

"I like to do music that I want to hear," shrugs Bob, and Ray doesn't smile or flinch or anything, doesn't even take it as a personal comment at all.

"It's really great to see you again, man," is all he says.

"I was hoping to run into you, actually," says Bob, because if he wants to tell the truth he is a little annoyed at Ray Toro's complete imperviousness to flattery despite the way he shreds electric guitar like a god.

He pauses just long enough for Ray to stutter, "Um, yeah, this is where I - I mean, here I am," and then he smiles a little more and says:

"I hear a lot about the Jersey music scene. Maybe you can introduce me to some people while I'm here."

"Yeah, yeah," says Ray, "yeah, of course. I'd love to. I mean, I do know a fair number of people."

A lot of people know a fair number of people, but it's possible that everybody knows Ray Toro, Bob thinks.

It's an unproven hypothesis because it isn't like he's asked everyone he runs into about him, but Bob got the feeling last time he was here, before he even met Ray, that they were recording with some kind of legend. He'd expected one of those blues-playing grandfathers who turned out to have taught guitar to half the state and shaken hands with Sinatra, not a tall guy with a white boy fro who dressed like a college student and who slid into the studio like he didn't know how tall he was and was apologizing to you in advance in case he hit you with the guitar case. Ray turned out to be an experimental guy, flexible, laid-back, and amiable; but he could do a perfect Brian May impression, and he turned out to be a perfectionist underneath, and on stage Bob saw him get actually bossy.

So Bob had been a little confused by his first impressions, but was already disposed to like Toro after watching him give gentle but firm guitar lessons to the pierced punk bassist of the band he was backing up, right there on the stage. Then he'd spotted him reading a Superman comic which turned out to be a total classic one and not a recent issue at all, and that resulted in a long conversation and the kind of easy friendship that happened not because Ray was nice and cool and easy to make friends with but because it was like they were just delicately discovering that they'd been friends for years. Sleeping on his couch had been like something he was surprised to remember, not like something he was doing for the first time.

They exchanged numbers when Bob left to tour with The Used, but they never used them. And now seven months later Bob is here halfway across the country from his parents and the last place he'd paid any rent - checking out a whole new area of the country because knowing Ray Toro is there makes it seem a lot more exciting and interesting, all of a sudden, than any of the gigs he could be running sound for or any of the bands he could be touring with right now.

It isn't just because he can't forget their all-night conversation about Superman even though he can't remember anything they said and it isn't because Ray can do things with a guitar that make Bob kind of jealous even though he doesn't play the guitar. It isn't because he is a really nice guy, which he is, or because they have a lot in common, which they do, but not really a lot more than any other two non-assholes on the scene. It might have had something to do with the way he hung upside-down over the edge of his own couch when he was too trashed to say a whole sentence at a time without laughing and stuttering, with his crazy fro made even crazier by gravity and his face flushed brilliant red.

Bob has a couple of beers during and after the band's set. They're okay, and they have a style he likes without being especially good or having any memorable songs. Ray Toro stands out from their sound even though he, like Bob, is doing a pretty good job of making them sound better.

Physically he kind of fades into the background, or at least, he tries to, but he is tall and it's hard to miss his huge head-banging afro and the way he braces his legs like his guitar is a weapon that might get away from him. It looks like he's getting a pretty good workout up there. He comes up to the bar later wiping his face on a handful of stiff brown paper towels from the bathroom, his shirt stained with sweat, and smiles at Bob silently for a second before he says anything.

It's just on the edge of being awkward when Ray says, "What did you think? You heard these guys before? "

Bob shrugs and says, "It was a good show," which it was, and then "You were great," which goes without saying.

Ray ignores it like he hasn't even said it, just grins and shakes his head. He drains half the beer the bartender gave him still in the bottle and then sets it down, licking his lips absently, and Bob thinks so clearly he can almost hear the word inside his head, "Fuck."

He isn't upset or surprised, exactly; he's almost glad to have the suspense over - the suspicion confirmed.

"You need someplace to crash?" says Ray fucking Toro, tilting his head to the side, completely earnest.

"That'd be great," says Bob instantly and a tad absently, because somewhere inside his head he is now busy figuring exactly how far in he is - but he is already sure he wants into Ray Toro's pants.

Ray smiles at that like Bob is the one doing him the favor, and he insists on helping carry Bob's shit from the hotel to the car to his apartment the next day.

In between teaching guitar to what seems like half the people in the state, Ray is in his apartment at enough odd hours to catch Bob when he's coming in after a late show or when he's getting ready to head out in his car and find another coffee shop and waylay him with the Playstation. There is a game of Mario Kart paused on the screen when Bob first gets there, and an unopened box of Guitar Hero, which, oddly enough, is the only thing Ray can't beat Bob at no matter how hard he tries.

Bob can always find a gig, a show, a bar to help out with their sound when he wants to, and when he doesn't he sniffs out all the record and music stores in town, catches up on Ray's collection of comics, gets addicted to the Montel Williams show and starts boycotting Maury Povich. He learns the names of a handful of people who walk their dogs in the litter-strewn, pathetic little park closest to Ray's apartment, where dirt and weed-strewn sand the color of mud is pitted with rain into mud puddles under a rusting swingset and slide and monkey bars. He gets comfortable in Belleville, unreasonably fond of Ray Toro's couch, and a habitual knot in his chest when he comes back to Ray's place late at night and sees the light glowing in the window.

***

"If we were chicks, you'd paint my toenails, wouldn't you," says Bob one night while Ray picks mushrooms out of Bob's cardboard takeout container of fried rice (but not without glancing at his face for permission first).

"No way," says Ray primly, "what a great way to contract some kind of foot fungus."

Bob snorts and inhales a grain of rice. Then he stuffs his dirty sock down the collar of Ray's shirt while he's laughing.

"Probably I would," says Ray earnestly a minute later, after he decides they should finish eating before they clean the noodles out of the carpet. "You know, if you asked."

"And we were having a slumber party," Bob points out, wiggling his toes, which do not have any fungus at all, thank you.

"Yeah, at a slumber party," agrees Ray placidly, "like tonight."

It's different from the other nights Bob's slept on his couch mainly because they're both sitting on the floor, but Ray has plans to watch as many movies as they can before they pass out. They were so hungry when the Chinese got there that he doesn't even remember the part of his plan involving getting drunk yet.

As a sound guy who never has any trouble making rent, and whose principal ambition is to travel and hang out with bands that he loves, Bob tends to let the guys he meets pay him what they can afford, more or less. Unless they are total assholes, and then he usually won't work for them again and charges as much as he feels like trying to get away with. The first week in town he took half his usual rate and half a meal; a few beers and some really good nachos; and an introduction to a guy who knew a guy (a guy who needed a sound guy, not the other kind of guy. Sometimes you had to specify, in Jersey).

Ray argues with him about this every now and then with tactics such as "Gus's wife had to fight in court for alimony and he has a pool" and "Okay, Bob, I guess there's no nice way to say - Harv voted for Bush".

He has settled down, though, and gotten used to Bob's "little quirks", and now he's keeping a list on the refrigerator, on a piece of torn out newspaper with a pizza grease stain on it. So far the list reads "1 Case Canadian Beer (This is a good deal!!), 20 bucks for 7 hours, 1 wk/Mex food (Bob is wrth @ lst 2 wks), 1 chocolate cake + used Docs (medium condition) (but they fit)".

This is what Ray asks him instead of "How was your day?" on the occasions when he isn't there to keep track.

Bob hasn't told him about the two times he's done completely gratis yet, but Bob really likes the little geezer band he worked for. They had the guitarist's kid, a skinny 17-year-old who couldn't even drink, singing (and screaming) lead in a voice like the chick from Paramore minus twelve years.

"Did you accept any wooden nickels in exchange for honest work today?" Ray asks him when they're down to one container of Chinese and their forks keep bumping in the box.

Bob shakes his head and scratches his jaw where some beard stubble is growing in. "Not today, dear," he says, and crams in another bite of lo mein. "But actually, I accepted a couple of tickets to Taking Back Sunday next weekend."

"What, really?" Ray sits up a little straighter and his eyebrows lift with excitement.

When he is pleased, or happy, or intrigued, he looks surprised, which is yet another way to look about five years old (although in a six foot tall way where he has more muscles in one leg than Bob has in his entire upper body). His fro is a little flattened on one side; it's kind of sweet.

"That's cool, it's hard to get seats for them at short notice - not like you can just walk in backstage without a ticket like most of the gigs around here! Have you toured with them before? Yeah, you must have, right. You're gonna have a great time." Bob has been living with Ray for a month, and that's the only reason he can detect the note of wistfulness in his voice.

"Well, so are you, right?" says Bob. "Unless you have a 10 pm Saturday guitar lesson I don't know about."

"But - I - really?" says Ray.

"Are you coming?" Bob prods.

"Oh! Thanks, of course!" says Ray. "I mean, I'd really like it, that's really great of you. You don't have to or anything."

Bob spends a lot of time around Ray trying not to smile too much, but he's been getting a little lax on that lately. He doesn't really try to stop himself now. "I know that," he smiles, and Ray smiles back and Bob feels the weirdest sensation, like something in his chest flips over too quickly. It's almost nauseating.

They start with Bring it On because it's Bob's favorite movie, and Ray tries to say the cheer at the beginning along with the cheerleaders and fails miserably. Bob throws all the couch pillows he can reach at him, but he doesn't shut up until it's over and then he waits all the way until Eliza Dushku goes to Kirsten Dunst's house before leaping on Bob with two couch pillows. Bob goes down in a bemused pile and... actually doesn't struggle that much. Ray laughs and punches Bob's belly through his stupid flat orange and blue fake fur pillow and then puts his head on it. Bob doesn't remember watching much of Legally Blonde, which they watch next - just the warmth of Ray lying halfway in his lap and reaching out casually for handfuls of potato chips. The only parts that really stick with him are the blond jokes.

After Legally Blonde comes a slight scuffle about whether to keep going with the blonde chicks theme and watch Clueless or to take a break for My Big Fat Greek Wedding or Gangs of New York or something else serious/dark-haired. Ray beats Bob at arm-wrestling, so they watch Clueless and then My Big Fat Greek Wedding. By that time Bob can't eat any more chips and they've climbed up onto the couch and their three stockinged feet and Bob's bare foot are lined up in a neat row, left to right, on Ray's scratched second-hand coffee table.

The couch smells like dust and stale cigarette smoke and takeout and Ray - the arms, especially, have a faint hint of the smell of Ray's hair in them, Bob is pretty sure. The cushions are flattened with age and dented in the shape of asses in the middle, so there are really three spots where you can sit without your ass being at a weird angle from which you'll slowly slide down to one side or the other.

So there are a decorous few inches between them, except at their heads, because Ray's fro takes up some extra space, and Ray's long legs are sprawled apart a little, one big hand lying on his thigh, and by the end of My Big Fat Greek Wedding Bob can feel something cramping in his brain with lust.

Of course, it's been a while that he's been here - the leaves are turning colors now, and Bob had been crashing on this couch for long enough to have jerked off in Ray's bathroom a lot of times and on the couch (very, very carefully) four times. Thinking about it, anticipating, with Ray right there next to him, though, that is a little weird. Bob wasn't having these thoughts when Ray was curled up against his side with his head on his belly - it's something about his big round Bambi eyes, maybe. He just seems so innocent. Bob really needs to get laid.

Luckily, they watch Spider-Man after that, and it's so awesome that he pretty much forgets to be turned on, at least until after Ray goes to bed. Then he turns his face into the arm of the couch and shivers a little, silently, and breathes through his mouth while he takes care of his hard-on deliberately, efficiently. When he comes in his boxers Bob opens his eyes slowly, holding his sticky hand inside the waistband, and looks up at the ceiling, gray in the darkness, glowing with splotches of color from the streetlights outside the window. He doesn't think things like "What are you doing here, Bryar?" very often, but he wonders for a moment right then. He thinks about what he can do - go back to Chicago, find someone to tour with, move out, stop thinking about Ray completely, start stealing his underwear, make a move - and hasn't thought of anything better than what he is doing by the time he falls asleep.

***

On Tuesday Ray is out at some recording gig when Bob leaves and at some other club when he comes back, and on Wednesday he's asleep already when Bob gets back in. On Thursday Bob wakes up early purely by coincidence, at like, seven thirty, but Ray's already left, so he plays Playstation alone for two grumpy, desolate hours before slouching out to a coffee shop and wandering into the nearest used record store. He kills an enjoyable couple of hours there and surreptitiously fixes their alphabetization system, which is something you couldn't have paid him to do in high school, because he wanted to work with real music and not just music sealed up in plastic cases.

Then he buys some comics that Ray doesn't have and a Grima Wormtongue action figure to keep Han Solo company on top of the television and goes back to the coffee shop until five o'clock, when he's supposed to do sound at the Houndstooth, which is his favorite bar in town because of the pool tables.

Their speaker situation is pretty shitty, though, which means that most of Bob's work is a waste if you aren't going to stand near the stage and listen on purpose. He is nibbling salted peanuts and drinking Coke before the band arrives when a big gust of laughter lets in some drunken community college girls, a guy with part of a drum set, and Ray Toro's hair, followed by Ray Toro and a white paper bag from Taco Bell.

Bob totally loves him in that moment, fervently. His cheeks are pink and the cold air comes across the room with him because he hasn't even taken off his leather jacket. He sets the bag on the counter and looks around and very obviously notices Bob, one side of his big mouth curving up faster than the other. Bob debates, later, whether what he feels is a physical shock of electricity when their eyes meet or not, but either way, he is speechless until Ray has already eaten half a burrito.

"So are you trying to say this is for me?" Bob says, raising an eyebrow at the bag Ray literally shoved into his face and then prodded, pointedly, in between bites.

"I'll eat it all if you're not hungry, but it's possible there might be a chicken soft taco and some nachos inside," says Ray. "Will you give me some hot sauce?"

Ray, the fucker, knows Bob's weakness for chicken soft tacos and their oodles of melting fake cheddar and stupid squishy Taco Bell nachos. On the other hand, he can never remember that Bob prefers mild sauce. Bob gives Ray most of the handful of packets and dribbles a bit of hot sauce, gingerly, inside the fold of the soft taco.

"Are you playing tonight?" says Bob, who actually has no idea who is playing, but Ray's eyebrows crinkle up and then smooth out in a look of wide-eyed alarm.

"No, no, I just, you know." He makes a little gesture with the hand holding his paper-wrapped burrito, presumably meaning something like Picked up dinner for both of us and psychically showed up at the right bar with it or something. "I saw Ed down at the college today and he mentioned the gig tonight, asked me along, you know - and of course when I realized it must be the gig you were working since the Hole in the Wall had to cancel all their shows for the week and the Crimson's doing poetry readings..." he shrugs and licks a piece of cheese off his finger, and reaches into the bag for another burrito.

Bob is impressed by the encyclopedic knowledge of area bars revealed in this explanation, but he isn't really surprised on reflection; this is Ray's scene and also his full-time job pretty much. Ray even gets invited along, every now and then, to things where he has to dress up in a suit - classical music things that he gets alternately defensive and nervously giggly about. He has a really weird, high-pitched giggle like a girl's. Bob eats a nacho meditatively and zones out watching Ray's hands as he orders a couple of beers, slides his wallet in and out of his pocket, shrugs out of his jacket and passes it over the bar for Jake to stick in the back.

Ray got a ride to the bar, so he gets pretty drunk by the time the set closes down, drooping over the bar like a wilted flower, his hair damp with sweat. He leans into Bob's shoulder and nestles his head on his shoulder when Bob tries to put his jacket on him. Bob finally just shakes his head and waves to Jake and steers Ray out to his car.

He has to let them into the apartment, and then Ray flops down on the couch with one arm out of his shirt while Bob is ridding himself of their coats and keys and his comic store purchases.

Ray has kicked his shoes off and his face is pressed into Bob's pillowcase. He is already drooling. Bob stares at him for a second and then mutters, "Fuck it," and goes into the bedroom to sleep on Ray's bed.

He wakes up at, like, ass o'clock in the morning, sometime around dawn, to Ray grumbling, "Ugh, move," and nudging Bob's foot with his knee. When Bob struggles up out of a dream he sees Ray standing there in his boxers, half-asleep and wrapped in the afghan from the foot of the couch. He starts to roll out of the bed and gives up when he lands on his back.

Ray doesn't mind, though. He crawls between Bob and the wall, ignoring his own blankets, and burrows into the tangled afghan until just his curls and lower legs stick out. Bob falls asleep trying to decide what to think about that.

By the time Bob finally wakes up, well-rested and coming suddenly and completely awake with a crystal-clear memory of a dream about picking barrels of butterflies from butterfly trees in an orchard, it is afternoon.

The mini-blinds have been closed and he is tucked in under the fluffy Garfield sleeping bag that Ray uses instead of a comforter. He remembers vaguely the noises of Ray leaving in the morning and maybe an image of Ray's face in the doorway, but that's all. He takes the afghan back out to the couch and then does his laundry because he isn't gross enough to lie around smelling Ray Toro's spit on purpose. Sweat, yeah, hair, yeah, but spit, no. There is a definite creepiness line there and Bob doesn't feel like he's ready for it yet.

He's kind of stupidly creepy over Ray as it is, anyway. He plays Playstation by himself and watches the first season of the Gilmore Girls on DVD that evening because he said no to a gig this Friday on the theory that he shouldn't be out all night two nights in a row and would want to be awake for Taking Back Sunday, and totally doesn't think about Ray at all Friday night, through a couple of hours of TV on the couch.

His lack of creepiness persists until Saturday afternoon, when he takes a long shower and jerks himself off as slow as he possibly can, slicking his fingers with shampoo to probe at his ass and thinking about Ray's stupid nipples and his half-hard cock straining against his jeans when he rocks out.

Great, almost two days of avoidance wasted.

Ray drives to the venue, which is half an hour away, and they get there early and wander through the merch tables, comparing the sizes of people's ear gauges and the number of Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Black Sabbath references (more points for buttons, patches, and indirect references than for merch shirts; Ray is leading when the show starts). Their seats are sort of decent - at least they don't have to stand on their chairs - and there is so much crushing of sweaty bodies that even physical contact with Ray doesn't seem all that appealing.

At least, not until they're leaving, when some guy trips on the chain hanging from his belt and goes down like a lead balloon, trailing artistically tattered messenger bag and cheap dye job everywhere and knocking over two and a half nearby people. The half person is Bob, and he doesn't fall because Ray catches him - with both hands, or actually, in his arms; and suddenly the dreary trickle of sweat between his shoulder blades and drying on his face feels like pleasant heat and the irritating jostling and rubbing of elbows and shoulders and backpacks in a huge crowd becomes the even tighter, but far more comfortable, full-body embrace of muscular guitar teacher, with his hard thighs and tall shoulders and the soft pudge of his belly, and, God, Bob already knew he was big everywhere.

The crowd moves around them and then they manage to disentangle themselves without falling over. "Thanks," Bob says, and is momentarily grateful that Ray doesn't tell him to be careful there or anything, and they make it the rest of the way out without mishap except for the traffic jam in the parking lot that gives them time to listen to a whole album's worth of radio. They talk a little about the gig and the band's latest album and Bob's policies about Friday nights and Bob keeps thinking things like "His thighs are hot" and "Really hot" and "His ass isn't bad either" and "I would totally blow him in the car, to hell with road safety".

Later they are back in Belleville at a club, drinking, and Ray is leaning on Bob's shoulder. You might say he is hanging off it. This is something that just happens to him, sometimes, after a certain amount of alcohol or videogames. "Remember when you were a kid and you used to get smashed at the gig?"

"And you weren't the designated driver," says Bob.

"Mm," Ray agrees, nods against Bob's shoulder, and snorts a little to himself. "Except I usually was the designated driver," he admitted.

"That's not hard to believe," says Bob. Ray is the kind of guy that parents ask to be the designated driver or else their kid isn't coming to the party.

"Do I have peanut butter, Bob?" says Ray. Saying "Bob" all the time is another thing he does when he is smashed. Also, getting the munchies, which Bob has tried to tell him is only supposed to be for pot, but it hasn't done any good.

He doesn't, but they go back to check anyway while Bob can still remember the way on foot. The party picks up back at Ray's apartment, though, with vodka shots and a case of Samuel Adams that Bob got in exchange for a gig.

Bob is pretty smashed. He is pretty sure he can't even spell 'smash' anymore after a while, and he isn't sure how much either one of them has had to drink. He tries to decide whether to count from the bar or just at home, and forgets what he is doing halfway through. Meanwhile, Ray is rubbing his face on the shoulder of Bob's shirt suddenly, like a little kid trying to wipe his nose on his mom's clothes or something.

"You're not wiping boogers on me, are you?" says Bob.

"Mmmm," sighs Ray, "what?"

When Bob turns his head Ray's face is tilted up towards him, his hair making a jagged russet-brown halo, his mouth wide and wet, his eyes glazed and unfocused but definitely looking at Bob.

"What are you," Bob starts, and then changes his mind. "I mean, how did you..." and then he forgets what he is saying.

Ray blinks his short, curly eyelashes and looks trustingly and intently into Bob's face from like two inches away, because he hasn't really given up leaning on Bob's shoulder yet.

"Yeah," says Ray dreamily, "Bob. Bob - you know, Bob - "

"You sound like a telemarketer letter," says Bob. He doesn't mean telemarketer. He means a paper telemarketer, the kind that comes in the mail. In the mailbox. But it's still an ad. He can't remember, but Ray doesn't care.

He giggles, short and high-pitched, and then says, contemplatively, "I feel like - I don't know - sad? Bob, are you sad?"

Ray is tipping slowly towards the floor, and Bob honestly can't tell if that's on purpose or not. He doesn't know if he's sad or not either; he just feels warm and pleasantly drunk and kind of turned on.

He lies down on the floor, too, and the floor feels soft and gentle, easy to lie down on, and when their wrists and knees and shoulders and Bob's face and Ray's belly and Ray's hair and Bob's mouth get all tangled up, it's almost like it isn't even their fault. It's like the floor, or the whole room, picks them up and gently moves them together and they comply limply, obediently, like dolls, and steal touches from each other while the parts of their bodies are passing by.

Then they catch each other, finally, by the elbow and the shoulder and the face, and Ray moves his mouth back to Bob's face and Bob wants to kiss him more than anything, as much as he can want something while he is this smashed. He wants Ray, wants to be closer to him, to lie with him and touch him and kiss him so hard they forget anything exists but each other's mouths. So he pulls Ray's hair gently, moves his face closer and softly touches Ray's mouth with his again, slow and careful, testing where the best angle to kiss might be.

"Yes," Ray is whispering, "Bob. Bob, come on," and he pulls Bob's head up and slides his tongue into Bob's mouth all at once, hot and slippery and full of his taste that Bob knows by smell, even though he's never tasted it before. Ray tilts his head, searchingly, and licks inside Bob's mouth and makes a high-pitched gasping sound.

Even through the alcohol Bob feels his arousal then, a pulsing fire throughout his body and a stronger, harder one centered on his cock. It takes three fumbling tries to get Bob's pants open, longer to open Ray's, and a stupidly long time to realize he can roll over right on top of Ray. Ray exhales, long and low and shaky, and shifts his body under Bob to get comfortable, wrapping his arms around him.

"We're gonna do it right here on the carpet," says Bob breathlessly, and puts his hand in Ray's pants.

They get tangled in Bob's pants and later Bob can never remember how they did it, or even if it felt very good, but Ray bites down hard on Bob's lip when he comes and shudders and babbles something desperate that turns slower and slower until he trails off, panting, like a music box winding down. Bob tries to tune in, but something about his ears won't work right - being drunk is kind of fascinating sometimes.

***

Bob wakes up with his least favorite kind of hangover the next day, the kind where parts of his memory are foggy and he can't remember falling asleep at all and he keeps thinking if he just finds the right way to lie or hold his head he can keep from throwing up, but he can't.

Ray has the kind of hangover where he crawls out of his bedroom to use the bathroom with bags under his eyes at, like, two, and then walks back with his head held very carefully because moving it gives him a stabbing headache.

"What are you going to do like that?" says Bob.

"I thought I'd write music," says Ray, but instead he comes back out into the living room and hands Bob the latest issue of Batman and then drops onto the couch with a sigh.

Bob's hangover is a little milder than Ray's because he already feels like roadkill that doesn't need to throw up, which is practically healthy again. "What am I supposed to do with this?" he asks, flipping through the comic.

"Well, I kind of thought you might want to read it out loud," Ray says apologetically.

"What, so if I feel like lining a birdcage with it that's okay too?"

"Let me think about that for a minute," Ray murmurs. His eyes are closed, and Bob can see the bags under them sort of continuing over them. His eyelids looks faintly purplish, too, although not the sort of neon blue and magenta Bob's turn if he stays awake for a couple of days in a row. Bob is starting to think Ray's forgotten their non-conversation when he says, "No, but I probably can't stop you if you try to destroy my comic books now, so please don't try."

"Don't worry. That wouldn't be fair play anyway," Bob explains. Then he opens the comic and starts reading.

The strange part of all this is that it doesn't occur to Bob that he fucking slept with Ray fucking Toro for like, three days. Considering how often Bob usually thinks about Ray and how he kind of wants to fuck him, that is actually almost bizarre. Even though he isn't dwelling on Ray's thighs or his fucking mouth or whatever 24/7, it's still a habit, which is why he can appreciate his ass without taking a trip down memory lane complete with vivid sense memories. It doesn't help that he was so trashed there are parts missing all over the place.

Bob is stirring sugar into his coffee one morning and thinking about Ray's mouth and he stumbles accidentally onto a vivid memory of the taste of stale beer in it and the lush fullness of his wide wet lips. Then he thinks, Holy fuck. Then he wonders about the way they've both been acting as if absolutely nothing is out of the ordinary - did Bob hallucinate it all? Or is this the kind of thing Ray Toro expects from all his buddies? Or has he forgotten all about it? After three days, Bob can't exactly ask whether Ray remembers hooking up when they were drunk. The window of non-awkward has passed.

Bob doesn't ask. He doesn't say anything at all and Ray doesn't say anything either, and even though Bob doesn't forget it again, it is pretty easy to settle back in like everything is normal.

And he doesn't mind. Too much.

***

It's less windy but a little colder in Jersey, and it's just kind of dirty; at least, that is why Bob thinks he's gaining weight here, although it could be because of the real food he keeps getting in exchange for his work, and because of how Ray magically produces the lasagnas that all residents of New Jersey are born knowing how to make, even if they are Puerto Rican. He's bought some new clothes, bigger, but it's colder anyway now so he doesn't notice that much. He starts growing his beard out because that way his face doesn't look as fat. ("You look older," says Ray, "it's weird," but he smiles.)

Bob's parents try to sucker him into coming back for Thanksgiving, but he isn't falling for that again. The last thing you need on a long weekend is both of Bob's parents in the same room. Instead he goes with Ray to eat dinner with Mikey Way, a cool yet freaky guy who is also definitely the skinniest scene kid in town.

He takes them to his mom's house instead of to his place. It is a half-brick two-storey house shaped like a shoebox, but on the inside it's like Little Thrift Shop of Horrors. Stuffed dead animals and cheap porcelain dolls and plastic-coated pieces of novelty tree stump are all over everything; every flat surface holds a grandmother-esque glass bowl full of fake flowers, and the whole thing is crowned off with an orange shag area rug.

Mikey Way's mother has a bleached updo and that baked beauty parlor look that old ladies get, but she is wearing ugly velvet pants and goth jewelry, and her tacky table is covered with food, and only half of it is actually Italian. Bob digs happily into potatoes and green beans and turkey and garlic bread and minestrone and lets Ray take care of a polite conversation with Mrs. Way. She sends them home with a plastic bag full of casserole dishes and they eat Thanksgiving leftovers, after that, for four luxurious days of Playstation and old movies on TV, when Ray doesn't have any lessons and Bob doesn't take any gigs.

They are watching some awful Lifetime made-for-tv movie about a serial-killing bulimic cheerleader with an abusive mother two days after Thanksgiving when Bob makes a bowl of buttered popcorn (in the microwave, not in any way that takes a lot of work or anything), and when he sits down on the couch Ray teeters over in his personal space, clutching his arm and hovering over the popcorn and inhaling blissfully. "Bob Bryar," he says, "You are a god," and kisses him loud and smacking on the mouth.

"Thanks," says Bob.

After they eat all the popcorn, which isn't even past the photocopier murder scene, Ray licks salty butter off his fingers.

"The only butter that's left is on our mouths," Bob points out. "You know, when you eat something salty, the way it sticks."

"Hmm," says Ray, "Can I try it?" He waits for Bob's permission, but he is halfway laughing about it, and he is still laughing when he leans over and kisses Bob, sucking at his upper lip and licking what feels like every molecule of butter away.

"I think you got it all," Bob mutters, dazed, when they stop making out like, two hours later (but going by the movie, it is only a couple of minutes). Ray laughs and crushes his afro against Bob's neck to fit his head down on Bob's shoulder.

Ray is so relaxed and casual about this that it changes Bob's perspective. And it is true that popcorn is great and kissing is great, although the movie they are watching is frankly shit. So there isn't really anything to worry about. Bob has it good.

He stops wanting to ask if Ray remembers that embarrassing sex-and-alcohol episode, too. If Ray remembers, he is obviously not angry or upset about it, so Bob figures he shouldn't be upset about it either.

And it's pretty easy to keep laid-back, because a few days later Bob slumps onto Ray's shoulder while they wait for the coffee machine to gurgle its last gurgle, and Ray turns his head and nuzzles Bob's ear until it tickles and Bob pulls away protesting, his heart struggling to thump faster through the cloud of sleepiness. He doesn't get far before Ray's hand slides inside his shirt and onto his hip, and Bob stops struggling entirely. It feels like he falls, almost, because Ray pulls him gently and doesn't stop until Bob is against his chest.

Then he hesitates, looking at Bob with his eyes really wide open, more open than anybody's eyes should be that early in the morning, questioning. Not worried, exactly, but Bob doesn't feel like decoding before coffee, so he just kisses Ray and Ray goes with it. Ray is totally into it, apparently, just like the last time (Bob can't really remember the drunk time that well). Maybe a little more so, because it's like he's trying to suck Bob's tonsils down his throat, and he's almost succeeded by the time the coffee machine finishes.

It's probably the morning wood that is making him eager - it is obvious through Ray's pajamas and Bob's sweatpants, and Bob appreciates it whole-heartedly without having the free braincells for detailed oral sex fantasies on top of kissing.

They pull apart then, though, to get their coffee while it is hot. They aren't crazy.

And that's maybe the last indication of sanity that Bob has for weeks or months. After breakfast Ray goes to teach guitar to a new pupil and Bob does some laundry and goes down to the Crimson to help the band, who are from out of town, set up for the night's show.

There's some electricity happening when he first sees Ray that night, halfway through the gig and halfway across the room, so palpable that Bob can't look away when they lock eyes, just helplessly watch Ray blink and then smile and then lick his lips, and Jesus, who needs sanity at a time like that?

Ray turns out to be friends with the group, some guys down from Brooklyn, and he sits around eating nachos with them after the show while Bob busies himself around the room to keep from watching them.

Bob is a little surprised when Ray comes up behind him when he is unhooking the track lighting to get it out of the way of a speaker cord.

"Hi," Ray says, "can I hold that for you? I said I was helping," so Bob hands him the light and reaches around behind the speaker to fumble for the connector.

"I saw you during the show," Bob mumbles.

"Yeah, I got here a little late," says Ray. "It sounded good. I think they were really on tonight. The last time I heard them there were some rhythm problems with Johnny, but I advised him to get some extra practice with the drummer and I think they've really cleaned up since then."

Bob can barely process that, and he mumbles something at random and takes the light back from Ray and hands him the cord. Ray looks down and coils the cord around his wrist, and the brown curly fro covers up his entire face, and Bob, who is standing in a chair, has a kind of embarrassing thought about the nearness of Ray's head to his crotch and wonders what it would be like to come in his hair. "You've got a real way with coffee, Toro," he says.

Ray looks up at him and wrinkles his nose. "It is special, isn't it?"

"If you help me finish up," says Bob after an agonizing half a second of internal debate, "I can finish up faster and we can go back to your place and take up where we left off."

He kind of expects one of Ray's surprised faces then, but Ray says seriously, "That's why I'm over here, man, just tell me what you want me to do." They make it home in forty minutes and sit on the couch necking and gradually peeling their clothes out of the way for forty more.

Ray is panting and so turned on there's a wet spot on his boxers, but when Bob goes straight for his cock he stops him with both hands on his wrist. "Wait wait wait, not yet. Just touch me somewhere else, okay? No, come here," and he slides back into the corner of the couch and tugs on Bob's thigh to get him closer.

Ray's chest is paler than his arms, sort of goldish and olive all over but just a lighter shade. His nipples are big and his belly and chest are a little flabby - there is a round smooth belly that is hidden by his shirts entirely, so you can never tell how pudgy it is.

"Do you really want to try this on the couch?" he says, while Bob is licking salty dried sweat off his collarbone. Bob's not even drunk but he feels light-headed with it. The taste is making him crazy.

"Better than the floor," says Bob, and licks slowly across the flat nipple, and Ray grabs his shoulders so hard he leaves scratch marks.

"I was thinking bed," says Ray in a rush, his voice higher than usual.

They leave their clothes on the floor and the couch and Bob follows Ray's round white ass into the bedroom and right into the bed and under the covers, too, because it's sort of cold in the bedroom. Bob reaches blindly for pieces of Ray's body - the outsides of his muscular thighs dusted with curly reddish hair, the soft flesh between his hips and his pubic hair, his belly button. "You can touch it now," says Ray, "I'm not that much of a tease," and Bob shrugs the Garfield sleeping bag back and straddles Ray's legs and sucks as much cock into his mouth as he can fit.

"Fuck" is the next thing Ray says.

Bob just licks his hand and wraps it around the base of Ray's cock and keeps working while Ray goes tense and then starts muttering and breathing heavy and thrusting up into Bob's mouth, but Bob isn't having that shit, and he pins Ray's fucking hips to the bed and sucks him in deeper.

After Ray comes all over Bob's beard, he shoves Bob over on his face and licks at his ass - not actually rimming, more like eager nuzzling - until Bob calls him a motherfucking tease and Ray laughs, all loud and happy, and moves aside so Bob can roll over.

"What are you laughing at, fuckface?" says Bob, but he can't help smiling too.

"But Bob - " he sticks out his lip and clasps his hands pleadingly, "will I still be a tease if I put out?" and then turns limp and giggly again while Bob shoves him over on his back and climbs on top of him.

Bob sleeps in Ray's bed after that.

And the first sane thought he has is two weeks later, when his mom calls to ask him about coming home for Christmas, and he realizes Christmas is in two weeks. Ray is at the stove, stirring a pot full of vegetables for pasta primavera (which, says Ray, he likes to eat better when it is seasonally inappropriate).

"Uh, I don't really know," says Bob. "I mean, yeah, mom, it took like two days last time so it's just a matter of when I want to get there."

"I certainly hope you're going to be here for the Christmas Eve service," says Bob's mother, and Bob immediately thinks, oh yeah, I can't arrive before the Christmas Eve service or I'll have to fucking go to it.

"I've got some stuff I agreed to do that week," Bob lies, "so I'll see, okay? I'll call you."

Bob is inhaling the first half of his meal in peace and silence, which is what he normally does, so he doesn't even notice until halfway through the plate of pasta that Ray is eating his food in introspective, tense silence. Bob pauses with a fork halfway to his mouth and raises his eyebrows right when Ray glances up at him sheepishly.

"Is it good?" says Ray, with the absent air of a man who isn't planning to listen to the answer.

"It could taste like cardboard, as long as someone else makes it for me," Bob says casually.

Ray rolls his eyes, so maybe he is listening.

"It's fantastic," says Bob. "Just seeing if you were paying attention."

"That was your mom, huh?" says Ray, proving that he totally wasn't paying attention after all.

"Yeah," says Bob.

"You're gonna drive down there?"

"Well, for Christmas, yeah," says Bob.

"Oh, right," says Ray, "of course. How's your family?"

"Fine as long as all of them aren't in the same place."

"Are you going to, uh, how long are you going to stay?"

Bob makes a special effort not to blink, and reaches for his glass of milk to hide behind. "You know. Not too long."

Ray nods. "Oh, okay, I was just wondering. Because I knew that you were going to be touring in a few months again. So I just thought - that's good, though."

"Yeah... February," says Bob. "But I can leave from here."

"Definitely," says Ray, and nods more vigorously. "You're welcome as long as you can. As long as you want."

Bob doesn't know how to answer that, so he eats some more pasta. After that he figures he has to say something, so he says, "Thanks." He's almost forgotten how to talk, but he can manage that much on autopilot.

He is unbalanced, though, like a band-aid has been halfway pulled off a bleeding cut and is flapping every time he moves. He doesn't feel like himself again until Ray slides into the bed next to him, when Bob is halfway asleep and halfway staring at the ceiling.

Ray's cold toes touch his foot and Bob flinches, and he feels Ray shiver behind him and cuddle close. Bob feels like holding onto his hand or something, suddenly, but with Ray's arm heavy and casual over his belly he doesn't have to. Ray sniffs into his pillow the way he does every night and Bob relaxes and decides to forget about it.

***

It's normal that Bob wakes up alone in Ray's bed, and the morning he drives back to Chicago is exactly the same, so he's been gone six days by the time he's driving back into Belleville, way past midnight and so fucking nervy he'd probably jump out of the car and cause an accident if you said "Boo" in his ear.

It's also normal that Ray would already be asleep if Bob made it back past two or three in the morning, but even though the light is off in the window, when Bob opens the front door he can see lamplight and hear music turned down low from the bedroom. He drops one of the bags he is carrying in surprise and makes himself put the next one down carefully, because there's a limit to how moronic he wants to act if Ray is awake to see it.

Bob isn't really a stage fright kind of guy, even though he doesn't love attention like some people. He's okay subbing in bands that need a spare drummer and he didn't really mind doing his thing when forced to perform in the school play, except when people tried to bug him about mumbling.

But he can still remember pretty vividly the time he had real, serious stage fright, when he was in sixth grade - old enough to get what embarrassment was but not old enough to be really cool with himself. He'd just been a fat nerd and he'd had to read a bunch of Shakespeare shit, because the teacher thought that picking shy, fat kids would encourage them apparently, and it wasn't to an audience of parents but to an audience full of kids from other English classes. He didn't actually mumble the entire time, but it was close. He can still remember every second of it because it was so awful and clear, like a nightmare being pounded into his memory with every slow deliberate beat of his heart in his chest, and he knew then, with resignation and disgust and a little fear, that he was probably going to remember what that felt like forever.

Bob has asked people out before too, and he asked his girlfriend to move in with him once, back when he thought he wanted to marry her, and he had to stand there and have her tell him no and then break up with him because she didn't want "as much" as he did.

And the feeling he's been struggling with all the way from the state border and into the parking lot and up the stairs is definitely more like stage fright than like the lump in his throat, the incredible nervousness and uncertainty he always felt about asking for a date.

That is even though he isn't afraid, but anticipating. He's been away and now he's coming back, and as he sped through the last blocks to Ray's apartment he made two Hollywood stops at stop signs and even sort of ran a red light. His chest was taut, every breath was crystal clear; he couldn't stop obsessing over what would happen when he got back.

He is still straightening up when Ray opens the bedroom door from the inside and the warm yellow light of the bedside lamp spills out of the room behind him while he stands there, pale and shirtless in his sweatpants, nipples standing straight up in the cold air. His hair is a little squashed and a little wilder than usual too and half the bed is covered with music magazines behind him.

"You're back!" says Ray.

"You're up," says Bob, and stands there with his hands hanging uselessly.

"I've been doing that almost every night," Ray admits, "but hey, it's vacation, right? Are you, like, really worn out?"

"Um." Bob isn't too worn out to have driven another five hours if he hadn't gotten here already, and he isn't worn out enough to want to go straight to sleep, but he is definitely feeling a time limit on how long he should remain vertical. "I guess so, kinda."

"Good," Ray grins, "then I can get back under the covers and I won't have to get dressed," but as he says that he's coming out of the bedroom and reaching for Bob's shoulders and reeling him in for a hug, probably, but fuck that, Bob's chest is about to explode if he waits any more.

He pushes his fingers carefully into the fluffy, airy curls and pulls Ray's head down for a kiss. Ray doesn't resist or act surprised, just tilts his head obediently and slides his tongue into Bob's mouth.

Bob's humping his leg by the time they got back into the bedroom. They shut the door because Ray's cranked up the heater in there since he's evidently been chillin' in bed surrounded by magazines and comics. Ray shoves an armful of magazines out of his way and kicks the sleeping bag back and they crawl into the fleece blanket underneath, Ray still fumbling with Bob's jeans.

"Fuck me," says Bob.

"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck," Ray chants, and they finally get rid of the pants. He grabs Bob's t-shirt, too, and pulls it off of him, and then kisses him all wet and sloppy and slow. He takes his time about pressing his face into Bob's belly and fingering his ass open, too.

"Do you want an invitation?" Bob asks.

"I want a condom!" Ray corrects him, reaching into the bedside drawer. "Condoms are great things, condoms enable fucking..."

"I think you've got the start of a top 10 hit there," says Bob. Ray flips him off and then flicks two foil packets at him, and Bob cuts out the joking and goes straight for the condom. "Not magnum?" he says, lifting an eyebrow as he tears it open.

"No, sorry, it's the same size it always is," says Ray.

Bob smirks a little, and wraps his hand around the shaft before he rolls the condom on. "Absence doesn't make it grow fonder?"

"That," says Ray, shakily, "is, um. Isn't that hearts? Okay, okay, that's enough." He wraps his hand around Bob's to pull it away and then doesn't let go of it, either, while he moves into position and steadies himself with the other hand on Bob's thigh.

It hasn't been all that long, but Ray is big; the swift spike of pain at first as he forces his way inside, then the sweet burn of friction as his cock slowly opens Bob up with steady pressure, that is familiar, but it feels even better this time. It's like he's satisfying a thirst. With his cock.

Finally Ray stops all the way in, and Bob actually says "Oh" when he moans, which he never, ever usually does. It's so good, and when Ray braces himself on his arms and pulls slowly out it's just as incredible all over again, that touch reaching deep inside him, stroking out and in, prickling every cell in his body up with electricity.

"Okay?" says Ray. Bob nods, hard. "Okay," says Ray, "if you're sure."

Bob's drained from two days of driving, but he can lie there and arch his back and just twist himself up on Ray's cock, while Ray and his hips do all the work. When Ray's rhythm picks up, drumming faster than a heartbeat, pulsing through Bob's body until it feels like his heart will move that fast too, Bob starts jerking himself off in time to the thrusts. He comes in another minute, one of those orgasms that relaxes his whole body and leaves him feeling half asleep. He totally misses Ray coming, too, drifting in afterglow while Ray's amazing cock keeps moving in him and touching him, warm and weirdly gentle.

Then it's over and Ray is throwing the condom away and Bob is getting come on the edge of one of the fifty spare blankets Ray keeps lying around on his bed, and Ray must have had a really good orgasm (or else really missed him), because he doesn't even give Bob a funny look for that.

"Nice work," Bob says to Ray, sleepily. "If you want to cuddle you'd better hurry, though. I think I'm seventy percent asleep."

"Don't worry," says Ray, "that won't stop me," and wiggles around until he can contort himself into a giant S-shape or something and fit his head on Bob's shoulder. Bob falls asleep before Ray even drools on him.

***

The next day is Bob's birthday, which is kind of what made him decide to come back as soon as he did: he deserves some self-indulgence then, and he really doesn't want to be at his parents' house. The problem is that it is weird to say it and weird not to say it, but there is really nothing to be done, so when they are eating Froot Loops and Cheerios for breakfast at like, one pm when they finally get out of bed, Bob just comes out with, "It's my birthday."

"What?" says Ray absently.

Okay, so it was more like he mumbled it. Bob repeats himself a little louder.

"Oh! Happy birthday," says Ray, his wide eyes widening even more. "I didn't know! Why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't know I was going to be back for it," says Bob a little awkwardly. Because, yeah, absence sort of did make the heart grow fonder, and being back in Chicago was slightly sucky.

"I would have gotten you something," says Ray, looking disappointed. Disappointed Ray Toro is a sight - big round puppy dog eyes, pouty full lower lip, even his big fluffy hair drooping sadly.

"Don't worry about it," says Bob, as casually as he can, and takes a big bite of Froot Loops. "I'm just glad to be back here." He can't really say his welcome-back sex would have done it for two birthdays. He is feeling a little well-fucked today, still, and it's delicious.

Of course, by the end of the day, Ray has somehow gotten a wrapped action figure of Neo for him.

A friend of Ray's is still in town for Christmas and New Year's and they run into him at the big New Year's party that some rich kids are throwing in the illegal club in the basement of someone's daddy's motel.

For once Bob isn't doing the sound because nobody actually thought he would be back in town yet, and he spends like ten minutes all together telling everybody that he just got back yesterday throughout the night. So by the time Ray grabs him and introduces him to this kid, who is apparently in college but looks about fourteen, Bob is actually kind of glad to be cornered.

The guy is a little bit high and he keeps giggling a freaky little giggle like a scared monkey. His name is Frank, he is barely five feet tall and looks kind of like a punk-haired little weasel, and he bounces around like a weasel too, but he also knows his shit about music. He talks to Ray about guitars and listens intently to a brief lesson from Ray on polkas which includes drawing on a napkin, and then they talk for a while about ninja movies and the Green Lantern.

Later in the night he finds Bob again when Bob has lost track of Ray, and he bitches for like five minutes about how much he hates Spider-Man, but he is grinning and giggling the whole time. He also tries to climb up Bob's back and God knows what, sit on his head or something, but Bob scrapes him off on the bar and the bartender gives him another beer and he happily asks Bob what he thought about Taking Back Sunday.

"It was a great show, they were really on," says Bob honestly. "It sounded good, they played most of my favorites, so yeah. It's a change to watch from the front of stage."

"You do sound, yeah, but you must still go to a lot of shows," muses Frank.

"Well, yeah." Bob doesn't know how to say "But not theirs, because usually when I've heard them I have been part of the tour" without sounding like a dickwad. Frank is a scene guy but he's kind of a new acquaintance and it isn't really safe to be name-dropping.

"Not theirs, though," Bob finally says, and hopes it's mysterious instead of misleading, but Frank is probably too blitzed to mind.

"I think the e's wearing off," he informs Bob sleepily. "Hey, I was gonna crash at Mikeyway's place, but you know how he is, always the last one to leave the after-the-afterparty. Do you know where Ray is?"

"I've kind of been at the bar for the last half an hour," Bob admits. "I haven't really seen him."

Frank pulls a face that makes him look five years old, and Bob sighs. Usually he doesn't tend to pick up five-year-old friends after a couple of hours of comic book talk, but there is something charming about the little asshole. Ray seems to really like him. "Stay here," says Bob, and leaves him picking at his beer label and goes looking for Ray.

He finds him back to the side of the stage, with silver tinsel in his hair and disposable cups of champagne around him, playing Inna Gadda Da Vida on someone else's guitar. This is probably where he's been for the last hour or whatever. Ray's attention is pretty easy to get. He'd probably have gotten in the car with strangers if they offered him a guitar, too. Bob wonders if his mom had a problem with that.

"Hey, Iero's looking for you," says Bob, shaking his head a little to make his hair fall in his eyes. Ray is kind of in the shadow of a speaker and halfway blocked off from the rest of the room, so with luck his face is not completely visible and showing some kind of visual sign of the way his stomach tightened into a slippery knot when his eyes landed on Ray.

Ray looks up at him, all eyes and big wide mouth, and says, "Hey."

"Hey," says Bob.

"Where did you say you want me?" says Ray, and then adds quickly - even though there is nobody else right there - "To go?"

"Bar," says Bob, "if you're done there. I think Iero wants to ask you for a place to crash." He quirks an eyebrow slightly.

Ray's face doesn't change either. He is silent for what feels like an extra-long second and then he says, "Yeah, okay, I'd better - let me give this guitar back to Dave."

"I'll do it," says Bob.

"Thanks," says Ray, and hands it to him by the neck with complete trust and not the slightly wary attention Bob received the first time he handled Ray's guitar.

So Bob goes and hunts up Dave Nilsson and gives him back his guitar, and by the time they find the case (because Dave isn't really ready to play) and put it away Frank is gone from the bar, but Ray is standing near it listening intently to a chick with straight hair almost as bleached as Mikey Way's mother's.

Bob goes straight back to the far end of the bar and grabs another champagne cup, and drains it with his eyes closed.

When they get home at about 4 am it's without Iero, who, says Ray when Bob asks him, "already found a place to crash", so there is no one to see them walking home drunk through the dirty slush in the gutters. The frost sparkles on the trees and turns the slush harder, freezing it in translucent muddy wave shapes and boot prints and curls, and their boots crunch before they squelch through to the wet part underneath.

And when they go inside there's no one to see Bob groaning as he kicks his shoes off his numb toes and Ray pulling his scarf off him with a sharp tug that jerks his head back into kissing range. The kiss tastes like champagne and Cheez-Its.

"I'm going to be playing with Criminal Typography in January," Ray tells him, completely matter-of-fact, between kisses. "Angie Banks is having a baby."

Then Bob places the blonde girl - Amber from CT, usually wearing a lot more black and red streaks in her white hair. "Do you have to wear a skirt?" says Bob.

Ray blinked. "I didn't ask."

"You've gotta check the fine print," says Bob, but Ray has already stood up and wandered into the kitchen.

Playing with Criminal Typography takes kind of a lot of Ray's time, which is cool - they're a good band, even if they are a little more old-school than Bob's taste - and Ray is enjoying it a lot. Bob drops into a bunch of their shows on Fridays and Saturdays before and after the gigs he is working. He can't do that constantly, though, so he starts taking a few more gigs and a few more than that and it gets, by the end of January, so that if Ray and Bob are having sex it is probably on the living room floor, either during Saturday morning cartoons or on Wednesday morning in between video games. It isn't regular, or anything. It's the cold part of the year too, and playing video games is warmer and means less taking off your clothes.

"The snow pretty much comes out of the sky already dirty," Ray tells him on the first weekend in February, when it's snowing again after a melt, and the grass outside is turning slowly... gray.

"It's cause it's not getting up enough speed, I bet," says Bob. "In Chicago it doesn't have time to get dirty, it's in such a hurry to completely fill the driveway. You need some more wind. Snowing sideways is the best."

"Yeah, I've heard about snowing sideways," says Ray, dubiously. "I don't think we're going to get to make a snowman."

Bob shrugs. "There's always Chicago."

"Yeah," says Ray.

***

The tour is due to start in a week, and Bob starts picking up his things when he finds them, like his socks under Ray's bed and his own comics when he finds them under a stack of music magazines on the kitchen table.

Ray is giving slightly fewer guitar lessons than usual - the beginning of spring is the slow season for music lessons, even though people get their guitars for Christmas as presents. Just one of the many pieces of information about guitars Bob didn't know before.

He keeps finding other things that he doesn't plan to take with him, things he bought that are part of the apartment now: the action figure on the tv, the comics he picked up on his way somewhere because Ray didn't have them yet, the DVDs of The Addams Family and Abyss and Mystic Pizza and Batman and Robin.

He sits through an entire episode of The O.C. without catching a single piece of dialogue, thinking the whole time about touching Ray and not wanting to do it until Ray touches him. When they turn the tv off he follows Ray into the kitchen and finds him getting milk out of the refrigerator, and when he sets it down and reaches up to the top shelf of the cabinet for a glass Bob slides his hands into the snug back pockets of his faded jeans and feels his ass muscles moving under his hands.

Ray pours his milk with just a glance at him over his shoulder. "Want some?"

"Um," says Bob, "no, because my hands are kinda busy."

Ray laughs his high-pitched giggle and says, "There's not very much in the jug." He drains half the glass in one and then pours the rest of the jug into it and puts it in the sink. "There."

He can't get his head around for a kiss, though, and Bob just leans against him, so his hands are trapped, and smiles at the back of his neck.

"Would you - ugh," says Ray, and reaches behind him to drag one of Bob's hands out so he can turn around. There is still milk on his mouth when he kisses Bob. "See?"

Bob isn't really sure what they're talking about, but he really likes this pair of jeans and he really likes Ray, a lot, and more than really likes him, more than anyone. He pushes Ray back into the edge of the counter until he can feel the hard edge of it on his knuckles through Ray's pocket.

Ray shifts a little, moving his ass in Bob's hand, and makes a little turned-on sound and leans his head back against the cabinets. Bob leans forward and scrapes his chin against Ray's neck so he squeaks and then slides his mouth over the scrape in a wet kiss.

"Fuck," says Ray, and mutters something half-out loud in Spanish. "Want to go to bed early?"

"If you mean now, yeah," says Bob. "I could go for that."

"So could I," says Ray, "I could go for a blowjob." Bob moves his hand, thoughtfully. He never gets tired of the way ass inside jeans feels different from ass without jeans. "My ass could go for a blowjob too," Ray adds.

"I believe the word you're looking for is rimjob," says Bob.

"I'm not saying no," says Ray, and grinds his cock into Bob's hip.

They don't get around to a rimjob, though, because after the blowjob Bob is so hard it hurts, and when he gets an eyeful (and two handfuls) of Ray's ass and starts licking, he doesn't last long. Ray arches his back and spreads his legs apart and his voice turns even higher than usual - he tries not to talk too much, but there is a lot of "oh" and "fuck" coming out of him after a while, and the first time he says "Just fuck me," Bob takes him seriously.

"Fuck you?"

"Condom," says Ray instantly, and pulls one out from under his pillow. "Here. Come on." - Like Bob needs to be encouraged.

He curls his toes so tight they cramp while he is rolling the condom down, but he barely notices the pain and he definitely doesn't stop. Ray is propped up on his elbows and looking over his shoulder, and when Bob is ready he pushes himself up to his knees without being asked.

"Has anyone ever come in your hair?" Bob asks him, mostly to have something to do while he is getting into position, lining his cock up.

"Only by accident, but yeah, a couple of times," says Ray, and then he catches his breath audibly because Bob is guiding the tip in, carefully. This isn't as tight a fit as Ray's big cock in Bob's ass, quite, but still. He can hear Ray breathing deliberately, trying to relax when he exhales. It feels incredible, with just the right amount of lube, slow and steady and a little rough, exactly how Bob wants it, the muscles shifting in Ray's back as he finally starts pushing back against Bob.

Ray likes to wait with a cock in his ass - although to be fair Bob doesn't know how he feels when it's other people's cocks - he likes to rock his hips a little and have his hair stroked and his nipples rubbed before the real fucking starts. Bob isn't really in the mood to take it slow, though, and he feels Ray clenching in protest when he pulls out, squeezing him, and for a second he thinks he's about to come, it's so good.

"Fuck," Ray says, "Okay." Bob pushes in again and he is relaxing, slowly, holding himself still and bracing against the wall for hard thrusts until he starts going "Harder, harder," and Bob fucks him harder until the bed creaks back and forth with every thrust.

It feels like he comes for five minutes, and of course it isn't really that long, but it comes on slow and lasts long enough for Ray to notice and laugh, happily, satisfied and deeper than his regular giggle, and push back against Bob.

"Fuck," Bob sighs, when he pulls out and tosses the condom in the trash.

"Mm-hm," Ray agrees.

Bob lays himself down again carefully in his spot next to Ray and pulls one of the fifty blankets over his back and ass and a different one over his legs, because that way he doesn't have to get up. Five days, he thinks. Five days and then three months and eight days. He's already calculated the number of days exactly: ninety-six.

If he called every sixteen days that would make five times. It wouldn't be too weird, thinks Bob. Or maybe it would, but it might be okay to send him text messages. Or postcards.

He falls asleep early, and when he wakes up, Ray is still there, for once, even though it's a Thursday. The light is clear and white around the edges of the curtains, not too early, and Ray is snoring a little, one of his arms sticking out of the blanket. They both slept naked, so when Bob touches his hand it's ice cold.

He moves it under the top blanket and then turns onto his back so he won't stare. He wishes it were darker in the room, somehow. He can hear himself breathing.

Ray's knees are a lump rising under the blankets like a mountain; when Bob finally slides closer, under the edge of the felt blanket that is tangled around Ray's legs under the Garfield sleeping bag, he finds Ray's cock nice and half-hard, and he touches it lazily, not really jerking it, and not wanting to wake Ray. It just seems like the safest part to touch.

The second time he wakes up at an angle, with his feet almost hanging off the bed and his head on Ray's pillow, and Ray is curled towards him and shuffling under the covers. Bob feels his hand touch Bob's arm slightly and retreat, and then come back; he moves closer with a sigh, and Bob realizes he is awake too.

They don't even kiss on Sunday, but Ray asks if he can help Bob pack his car about twenty times and buys him coffee and a little plastic Yoda keychain from the comic store when they drop in to check for anything new.

Bob leaves on Monday. "Listen," says Ray, leaning into the driver's window with his arms on the rolled-down window, a half-tied scarf sticking out of the neck of his fleece jacket. "This was great, it was really nice having you here. You're always welcome here. Any time you want to come back, my door is open. Consider it permanent."

"Okay," says Bob. "I will."

2.

Ray is totally fucking dumbfounded. He had no idea that Bob was even coming back.

They've exchanged a couple of text messages - literally, a couple, and the last time Bob texted him more than two weeks ago he just said they were finishing the tour at the end of May in Chicago.

But then he came home from another hour and a half guitar lesson with Mrs. Haldeman five minutes ago, after drinking some lemonade and saying no to sandwiches and cookies and potato salad and a swim in the pool and a ride home, and he opened his own door and stepped into his quiet living room, full of sunbeams and the sunbeams full of dust motes, and he tripped over a black duffel bag.

Bob is just there, sleeping on Ray's couch with his shoes on, and Ray just stands there in the door staring, feeling like his whole brain is blank and white with confusion and warmth, and he has no idea what is going on. He hasn't really been thinking a lot about whether they are in a relationship or if they are friends - he was used to them being friends, while Bob was on that tour.

And he didn't expect to see him again - didn't think about it either way, that he would or he wouldn't, but he realizes now that he didn't expect to see him again so soon, and that it's been a long time for Ray, really. Now his chest feels a size too small. He feels like an intruder in his own living room. He thinks that he hasn't seen Bob sleeping on his couch, instead of in his bed, for longer than four months. Bob has gained some weight in the face, his hair is longer, and he didn't have the shirt he's wearing with him the last time he was here.

It's supper time, and so finally Ray tiptoes across the room into the kitchen and gets some leftover pizza from last night out of the fridge and microwaves it, watching the timer to take it out one second before it goes off. He puts a paper towel on it and tiptoes back towards the bedroom to eat it, but Bob's voice comes rough with sleep from the couch - "Is some of that for me?"

He's sitting up now, looking over the back of it with his eyes half-closed from sleep, and sitting up makes the sunlight go crazy with the shaggy ends of his pale golden hair, all rumpled and flat on the side of his head.

"Hi," says Ray, when he remembers how to talk. Bob smiles at him, slowly and tentatively and still sleepy-eyed, and he smiles back so fast it's automatic.

He takes the plate of pizza over to the couch and crouches down next to the coffee table to hand it over. There's just one piece on it because Ray felt like that was all that would fit on the plate and he wanted to make sure there was some for Bob. Bob picks it up and snarfs it in about five bites, and Ray, for lack of anything else to do, puts the empty plate on the table.

When he's done eating Bob yawns and rubs his hands over his face. "I noticed you were outta coffee," he mumbles - which is practically an accusation in Bob-speak.

Ray starts to stand up to go make some, but Bob grabs his arm. "Where are you going?" he asks, looking amused.

"Uh," says Ray, "I didn't mean to wake you."

Bob shrugs and swings his feet back onto the floor. "It's okay. I wasn't up all night or anything, it's just a little jetlag. Your couch isn't that comfortable anyway, man."

Ray blurts out, "Don't sleep there, then." You'd think he was the one who'd just woken up. But he didn't want Bob to sleep there before, either. Still, he's cringing inside because that was possibly the least cool thing he's said in the last three months, if you don't count the times he stuttered.

"I wasn't planning to," says Bob. He sounds totally normal, so maybe he didn't even notice - Bob is kind of cool like that, and he's always been cool about... this. Ray still remembers the double-take he did the day he walked back from the bathroom in his sweats and found Bob lying on his stomach in Ray's unmade bed, flipping through the classic Batman Ray had just been reading. He glanced up at Ray and asked if it was his turn in the bathroom like if Ray kicked him out of bed he wouldn't get what the big deal was at all.

He leans back and stretches his arm out along the armrest, and touches Ray's hand probably by accident, but it makes Ray shiver anyway.

It's hitting him like a wave now, or even like a whole bunch of waves in a row, like when you're swimming in the actual ocean and a big whitecap knocks you under and then two more knock you back down before you can come out and you wind up lying on your belly on the sand, coughing salt out of your nose, with your trunks full of sand.

He didn't even know that he was wishing Bob would come back, Ray thinks, even though he kind of knew that he missed him - especially in the beginning, and to be honest, even now, this morning, he noticed his empty bed and empty couch and empty apartment in the back of his head. But now that he knows how much he missed Bob, it's like he is missing him suddenly for the whole three months at once, hard enough to sort of give him a stomachache.

That's sort of the problem with making friends with musicians. To be accurate it's not really a problem, but it is a fact of life. Ray, being a musician himself - a local musician - has plenty of connections to other ones like the nice dudes in Taking Back Sunday and the guys he records with in the studio. Local guys and out of town guys overlap, but it's always the same local guys and the out of town guys change all the time.

Ray went on a couple of short tours with little bands back when he was in college, of course. Not really because he was hoping to make it big, but more because he thought it'd be fun in the summer, a way to play more shows and see more people. He'd be lying if he said he'd never imagined what the big version of that life would be like, the guys who seriously tour constantly, who go to Europe. He's played with guys who've toured Japan.

In the end, Ray loves Jersey and his job: he likes having a low-pressure life that he controls himself, and he likes teaching guitar to kids and old ladies, too. As long as he's doing music, it doesn't really matter to him. But the difference between making music in Jersey and making music all over the whole world comes up when you're making friends with some guys who are out of town again next week, next month, at the end of the summer, or guys who are on tour six months of the year.

You don't see that kind of friend a lot. Which, to be honest, is usually a good thing when you're sleeping with them. Ray's slept with guys and a few chicks who've been back to Jersey three times since then and have been busy and missed him every time, and it kind of makes it easier if you're not running into them every week at gigs. (Ray still hides from one of his exes at gigs, sometimes, if he's not feeling up to it.)

Bob's not like that, though. Ray was already used to having him around the first time they kissed. It's never been the kind of awkward that would tempt Ray to leave his own place until Bob got out of it, and that's happened before too (although never with anyone who was living there - nobody has lived there since the two weeks Mikey was between apartments like, a year and a half ago, and Ray certainly never slept with him).

"Man, it's been so long since I've sat down on a real couch that wasn't moving and eaten dinner that wasn't takeout," says Bob, "you don't even know."

"Does that mean you're going to cook me something?" says Ray.

Bob's head is leaning on the back of Ray's sofa, his chin up in the air, stretched up and showing the thick golden stubble on the pouchy soft skin of his neck. He grins without opening his eyes. "I could probably manage, like, rice. If you have a rice cooker. Or spaghetti, if you make the sauce."

"I charge five bucks for my spaghetti sauce," says Ray. "The rates went up while you were gone."

Bob cracks the near eye open. "Fucking inflation."

"That's what I say," Ray murmurs, and finally gives in and reaches out to touch him, starting with the dirty hair on his forehead. Then he wrinkles his nose. "When was the last time you showered?"

"I'll trade you a shower and a blowjob for spaghetti sauce," says Bob immediately.

"Awesome." Ray doesn't even care who's getting the blowjob at this point. He scratches his fingernails idly through the beard under Bob's chin until Bob snorts and smacks his hands away.

"Payment on delivery," Bob adds, and Ray takes the hint and goes in the kitchen. He was totally planning to have takeout, but he feels like celebrating, anyway. He breaks one of Mrs. Iero's little Tupperwares of homemade pesto out of the freezer and opens a bottle of red wine.

It's not a bottle of expensive red wine or anything, but Ray likes it with spaghetti, and Bob's not complaining either, but Ray has a weird moment of vertigo while he's pouring it into glasses, almost like deja vu except not. With the wine it seems sort of like a date. And of course, Bob was snarfing leftover pizza on his couch a while ago, so it's not exactly a fancy occasion. They're eating in their pajamas and socks, too. Besides which, it's Bob, who was sleeping every night in Ray's bed three months ago. That thought, though, makes it worse, not better.

The shower cuts off and Bob wanders into the kitchen in a clean pair of cargo shorts and a new merch shirt from the tour, Ray guesses. He's trimmed his beard some, too, and he goes straight to the sink and drinks two glasses of water. Ray forgets to stir the sauce the whole time, just looking at the long back pockets sitting low on Bob's ass.

Fortunately the sauce is done, anyway; he turns the stove off and carries the pot to the table when he remembers to. "Whoa, fancy," Bob jokes, when Ray hands him a paper towel folded in half.

"If you want any more, you're going to have to fold them yourself, though," Ray cautions, and sets the roll on the counter behind him.

Bob doesn't answer him, though, because he's in a pasta trance. After he's sniffed his plate appreciatively and slurped down about a quarter of it, he asks his favorite spaghetti-related question, "Are you sure you're not Italian?"

"I'm from Jersey, which some people say is the same thing," Ray says apologetically.

"I'm just saying, Spanish and Italian sound the same. It'd be easy to make the mistake," says Bob. He can never joke at all without his eyes starting to crinkle up and his mouth starting to tilt up in a smile.

"Well, there is that, of course," says Ray, "that's a good point," and Bob smiles even more before he ducks his head back into his plate like he's embarrassed.

They only drink half the bottle of wine because Bob is more tired than he thought he was, and he's sort of falling asleep already after that much, his head in his hands on the table and his eyes closed. "I think I'm going to have to go to bed," he mumbles.

"Yeah," says Ray, "you look pretty tired. Um. Go ahead."

Bob tilts his head and cracks an eye at him. He seems to be thinking something, but he doesn't say anything except "What time is it?"

"About eight-thirty, I think?" says Ray.

"Fuck." Bob sighs. "Still early. Well, whatever."

Ray jumps up to take the plates off the table and rinse the worst of the spaghetti off them and stack them up in the dishwasher. He hears the water running in the bathroom and then he sees the overhead light go off in the bedroom out of the corner of his eye, and by the time he's thrown away the crumpled up paper towels and stuck the half-bottle of wine in the fridge, the bedside lamp's off too even though it's not even nine pm yet. He turns off the overhead light in the living room and stands in the bedroom door for a minute.

Bob has crawled right back into his bed and he's a dark lump under the blanket. Ray shrugs and goes to brush his teeth and piss and then crawls into the bed, too.

"Hey," says Bob suddenly, in a groggy voice that tells Ray he was at least mostly asleep. "Isn't it early still?"

"Pretty much," Ray whispers back, and shrugs the blanket up over his shoulders.

He hesitates then because if Bob is tired enough to fall asleep sitting up at the table it's not the best time to put the moves on him, and there's that little voice in his head saying too much, too fast. But then, hello, Bob crawled into his bed. He didn't have to come back to Jersey. He didn't have to stay here, and he is. Well, okay then.

"Come here," Ray whispers, and Bob grunts a little, not in surprise or reluctance, though, and rolls into Ray's arms. He presses his nose between the pillow and Ray's neck and Ray can actually feel the muscles relaxing in his back under his hand, even though it's not like he's exactly tense.

He's too lazy to really get comfortable, in fact. He flops on top of the awkward arm and his elbow must be like digging into him, but he just lies there for like ten seconds before he drags it out from under himself and worms it around under Ray's ribs and slides the other hand up under his shirt. Then he shakes himself a little and settles in again.

With every slow breath it gets quieter in the room. The ticking of the clock in the kitchen, the humming of the AC, the gurgling of water in the pipes and the sounds of cars out on the street all grow louder and louder in the silence and then fade away into the background, and Ray's got like middle of the night X-Ray Hearing and he can hear the rough texture of his fingertips catching on the skin of Bob's hips. It sounds as loud as a zipper. He can hear both their heartbeats.

Bob's breathing still isn't totally even, though it's slow and warm and damp on Ray's neck. Ray is so caught up just listening to the calm, waking rhythm of it at first that he doesn't notice Bob moving his head slowly. His forehead nudges Ray's chin and Ray moves his head, but Bob just twitches his nose a little and nuzzles down into the hollow of Ray's throat. His chin scrapes over Ray's collarbone and the rasp of beard startles Ray into shifting a little in place, mainly because it feels so good, and nerves are firing up all over him at that scrape, sex nerves that don't grasp the difference between making out on the couch and cuddling before sleep.

Bob gives up pretending to be asleep then, and even though he doesn't say anything, he pets Ray's back under his shirt, stroking over the small of his back and then tracing the same path just with the tips of his fingers.

It's weird cuddling without having had sex first, but Ray kind of thinks it all evens out, like he's grabbing the post-coital cuddles he's due for the past three months of jerking off alone, not to mention gently turning aside come-ons from guitar pupils without getting to come home and laugh about them with Bob later. He thought about texting Bob about it the first time, but then he realized that texting a guy who used to crash at your place and fuck you sometimes about the people hitting on you could be taken a number of ways, and Ray wasn't even sure how he wanted Bob to take it, so he didn't. And he really missed Bob, Ray thinks again.

Falling asleep before nine and sleeping for like ten hours actually works out pretty well for Ray, like a weekend in the middle of the week.

Ray's in the studio this week for some guys with a limited amount of time to lay down tracks and a fussy imported producer from Vancouver or something. That's a lot of playing, which is pretty much okay for Ray even when the guy gets in a snit and walks out without telling anyone where he's going in the middle of the afternoon. All the communing with the guitar gives him plenty of time to think. He's got both more and less to worry about than any time in the last three months, all that time when he didn't think Bob was coming back.

The fact that Bob just walked right back into his bed, that's what Ray keeps coming back to, because, like. You don't just do something like that out of nowhere. You don't go across the country to just climb into a bed for a day or so or because you're kind of horny or it's convenient. The thing is, Ray kind of wishes that he'd known the last three months that he was in a relationship, if he was. In retrospect, he might've been happier.

And in retrospect, Ray can admit he has been fighting pretty hard not to be bummed.

Bob's doing sound for a show Ray agreed to play in months ago this Friday, before his solid week of studio time was scheduled. It's not like Ray's been working overtime exactly, but he's kind of in the mood to chill at home and fall asleep after kicking Bob's ass at video games. He's totally ready to make a comeback on Guitar Hero. But obligations are obligations, and besides, he likes Donny and Joe and their buds, although not as much as Bob likes Donny's preppy little punk-singing jailbait son.

Ray's doing backup guitar because one of their buds is on his semi-annual fishing trip or something like that, and he absolutely couldn't reschedule it. Donny's a fucking legend at improvising riffs and stuff, but he likes to jam and he gives Ray a couple of solos too. Bob's up shaking the kid's hand like usual, talking to him about Brit Pop and the Sultans of Swing. Ray has to admit that the kid is a cute fourteen or however old he is, and he's always liked him. He seems like a nice kid, and he knows more about swing than Ray does, although he doesn't play any instruments except (he tells Bob) the trumpet.

Joe and Donny have been friends with everyone at the Houndstooth since Ray was a baby, and it's not unusual for old Mr. Basset to come up on the stage and shove Joe aside on the keyboard while his son mans the bar.

Tonight Donny hands Joe his guitar and Mr. Basset takes over on the keyboard and starts playing "Georgia on My Mind", and Donny goes up to the mic to take over from his kid. Ray's turned around watching Junior leave the stage sort of absently, tracking all this while he keeps up with Mr. Basset's flourishes, and that's why he sees Bob coming up on the stage at a series of gestures from the drummer and changing places with him. He picks up the sticks and starts with a basic beat, but he quickly gets into the more impressive territory that Ray, like, totally had no idea he could do at all.

He's watching Bob in amazement for the entire chorus, although he thinks he remembers to look at everyone else every now and then just to check that they're not trying to give him the cut signal or anything. Because, really, the universe doesn't seem to be playing fair with Bob. He's one of the best sound guys around and he's really tight on the drums, too. Ray tips his head down over his guitar and faces away.

"I didn't know you could do that," says Ray later, when they're walking home with their hands in their pockets, elbows brushing together, through the muggy warm night.

Bob sounds slightly mocking. "What, play?"

"No, you told me you could play the drums. I mean I didn't know you could - "

"Not suck? Is that what you're trying to say?" says Bob.

Ray laughs and elbows him in the side. "Great, thanks. I mean I didn't know you were like a speedy jazz drum virtuoso," says Ray.

"Mmmm," says Bob. "So, like, you were trying to compliment me?"

"Shut up," says Ray. He's smiling, though. Bob must really have liked playing, because he's in a great mood.

Bob makes an innocent mime face and shrugs, sticking out his lower lip. Ray has an absurd impulse to change the subject by saying something like "You're really hot when you can't stop smiling," because he really is, with this secret little half-smile that makes him look either shy or mischievous, depending how the light hits him. It's mischievous right now.

"I've never seen you play," he says instead.

Bob shrugs, "I have a job."

Ray points out, "So do I." Bob sticks his hands in his pockets and shrugs again, a little more serious.

"I know. I didn't bring a drum kit with me, you know, and I usually don't use my own anyway. I've usually been into jamming with my friends every now and then."

"So your drum muscles have just been slowly atrophying in my house of guitars?" says Ray.

Bob snorts. "I've been more in practice, but I've only been here a week."

For some reason it surprises Ray that Bob was jamming sometimes on tour. Then he realizes of course he would, that's where it makes the most sense for the other people around the band to keep up with their music - it's like it's in the air all the time, there's always something to do and someone to jam with. The thing is, to Ray, Jersey is like that too. He lets the subject drop, though, because Bob seems kind of tense about it.

***

"I'm not sure - would you like me to check?" Bob's saying when Ray wakes up and comes in the kitchen, and Ray looks and he's on Ray's cell. Ray makes a face at him and he raises his eyebrows at the phone, and then Ray makes another face - not a happy face, but a sort of confused face - and Bob's mouth twitches visibly. It's the smile that makes Ray reach for the phone, really. He wonders if his hair actually looks that stupid.

"Hello?" he says, doing his best not to sound like he just crawled out of a surprisingly empty bed at one in the afternoon.

"Ray? Hi, this is Maggie Morris. I'm just calling about Ronnie's guitar lessons, to let you know we won't be able to have them here at the house anymore."

Her voice sounds suspiciously tense. Ray does his best to be soothing. "Okay, Mrs. Morris, that's fine. So you want to arrange another time?"

There's a little burst of static and then she says in a rush, "I can drop him off after school Monday on my way to my hair appointment, if you have someplace. Otherwise, I guess..."

Ray interrupts to save them both time, "I've got my apartment, or I also have access to some practice rooms at the community college, if that's more convenient."

"Yes - okay, that's fine. The music building?"

"Um. Is four still okay with you?" says Ray.

Bob's made coffee by the time he gets off the phone, and Ray gratefully gets up to pour himself a cup. "I always liked that mother," he muses. "She's nice enough but she never tries to start pointless conversations by asking how you fix the strings when they break or how anyone can like any rock music made after 1979."

"That does sound like a nice change," Bob agrees. "I'm going to have leftover pizza for breakfast. Want some?"

Ray nods. "Sure. But I mean, now she sounded sort of psychotic, so I don't know. I wonder what's going on. I hate when they yell at their kids in front of me. I hope that's not going to happen."

"Just imagine if you were a trumpet teacher," says Bob.

"The mistakes would be a lot louder."

"Yeah, but if someone was yelling and you didn't like it you could just - " he picks up a fork, pretending it's a trumpet, and mimes blowing a note.

He does have a point. "I could just get some cymbals," says Ray, but Bob just rolls his eyes and hands him some cold pizza.

After their nutritious meal, Bob beats Ray at Guitar Hero a few times - he needs a little more practice before he can win - and then Ray beats him at Mortal Kombat. They watch a couple of episodes of the Gilmore Girls from Ray's DVDs, and Bob rolls over on his back on the floor and stretches his arms up over his head, showing a wide stripe of pale skin at his waist that Ray really wants to bite. And then he wants to strip all his clothes off him and fuck him right there on the carpet, long and slow. He'd have to pause the DVD for that, though, so he just decides to wait for the end of the episode.

When it's back to the main menu, though, and Ray props himself up on his elbows and looks over at Bob, he ends up kissing him instead. Bob returns the short kiss with a medium-long kiss and then Ray gets tired of opening and closing his eyes and just closes them and lowers his mouth to Bob's by memory. Bob's beard scratches at his face, and that time they have a long kiss. Bob opens his mouth after a minute and pulls Ray down on top of him.

On Monday Ray wakes up with his alarm and notices that Bob isn't in bed. He's kind of sweaty and he kicks off the covers and rolls over, burying his face in the spare pillow that's kind of flat which Bob has always put his head on without any complaining. Then he falls back asleep, so he winds up getting to work one minute late with his hair still dripping. Even though it's barely June, his car is so hot that he thinks his hair is steaming when he gets into the air conditioning, and with his luck it's going to condense back into icy cold droplets and he'll wind up with pneumonia.

He doesn't get pneumonia, but his day doesn't get a lot better, either. His last E-string breaks and he has to borrow one, because he forgot to get some the last time he went to the store to replace them. They get his order wrong at Taco Bell, but he eats it anyway, and then he can't find any parking at the music building and has to walk four blocks from the parking lot at the soccer field.

Ronnie Morris is sulking on the raised edge of a flowerbed with his guitar case, a pair of sunglasses and one of those uncomfortably close haircuts that guys end up with when their moms haven't accepted that teenagers need to be in charge of their own hair. Maggie Morris has the car running, but she's got the window rolled down and soft rock blaring out of the speakers. She waves to Ray when she sees him and speeds away in her sparkly green Corolla, and Ronnie rolls his eyes for no reason that Ray can see.

"Hey, Ronnie. What's up?"

The kid is twelve. He looks up at Ray through his sunglasses and says seriously, "It's Ron now." There's like, a backpack and two duffel bags next to his feet. Then he shrugs, "Nothing."

"Hot today," says Ray.

"Yeah," says Ron soberly. "Did you walk here?"

"Nah, I parked at the soccer field cause the lot was full," says Ray, "were you waiting long? Can I get one of those bags for you?"

Ron lets Ray carry a bag only after assessing the four things for him to carry versus Ray's single guitar case. Ray tries to look laid-back and not threateningly adult. Sometimes he wishes he weren't so tall.

When they've gone through the same chords he had trouble with last week and the melody he was working on at home, Ray plays, by request, "The House of the Rising Sun", "Long-Legged Guitar-Pickin' Man" (a song Ray knows mostly because of the number of people who have made jokes about it to him over the years), and, oddly, "Kryptonite" ("I don't like most of their stuff, just that song," says Ron defensively). He plays a little slow and makes Ron improvise the backup chords, but he decides against stopping to correct him. He's getting better at correcting himself, anyway.

When Ray glances at the clock and asks if they should be getting out of there, Ron shakes his head emphatically and keeps right on playing. "It's my dad," he mutters a few seconds later, when Ray doesn't start back up. "He's always late." Ray finishes the song before they pack up, but the kid's right, his dad is late.

It's not like the community college campus is the unsafest place in the world, especially since the doors lock automatically after five, and he could just wait in the lobby if he felt like it, but he can't just leave a kid with a pile of suitcases on the curb. That's just asking for trouble.

"If you keep my guitar until next week I could just walk to the Greyhound station," says Ron sourly. He sounds like he's only half joking.

"Nah, it'd be a waste of money to take a long bus ride and come back again next week for your lesson. How bout I drive you home?"

"Drive me where?" says Ron. "I don't even know where he's staying."

But that's when a relatively new Mercedes SUV squeaks to a stop at the curb and Ron's dad rolls down the passenger side window. He's blasting early Queen so loud the windows would shake if Mercedes didn't make such nice suspension, but he turns it down to background-decibels and leans over to open the door. "Hey, Ron, sorry about that! Thanks a lot, Ray, I hope it wasn't too much trouble."

"No, no, we just came out," says Ray quickly. "Can I put this in the back for you?"

"Oh, sure, just throw it in the back seat," says Ron's dad. What is his name? Tommy? Tad? Something like that. Ray opens the back seat and sticks the duffel in, and then Ron silently (and defiantly) pushes in his own bags and climbs into the back after them. The guitar solo coming from the car speakers has ended and Ray is able to place the album as Sheer Heart Attack.

Thomas or Timothy is still apologizing up there, blah blah caught in traffic leaving the office and how hectic the last few weeks have been with the divorce, which he says with a slight hush like he's talking about a funeral. Then he looks over at Ray and looks kind of genuinely sad, and Ray remembers to feel bad for him, too. Nobody in this family really looks happy right now. "I guess my wife - " he breaks off and then says "she is still my wife for now - told you."

Ray says politely, "I'm sorry. I hope you'll all adjust all right."

"You know," says Tim or Tom, "we're figuring that out. About next week - I don't know if I'll have a place ready yet or if it'll still be that lovely six-star motel."

"He means Motel Six," puts in Ron.

"As it's otherwise known," he says gravely. "So I can come all the way out here if you want, but it's across town for me and if you'd rather try somewhere else, I think Maggie mentioned?"

"We can do it at my place if Ron doesn't mind the occasional decaying pizza crust lying around, sure," says Ray. "I live in Belleville Heights, behind the old mall. That's not too far away."

"That will be great," says Tom or Tad, "I could bring him over there, if it's okay with him?"

"Cool," says Ron casually, but he gives Ray a tiny little smile that makes him feel better about the whole thing. Besides, Tim or whatever his name is has pretty nice taste in music at least. Ray's having a hard time not humming along.

"Cool," says Ray. "Great album, Mr. Morris."

"Please," says the dude, "call me Todd." Todd - that was it. "You like Queen?" he sounds deeply approving. "Freddie Mercury was the greatest. We'll have to talk about it next week!"

Ray's always up for talking about music, but he's glad to hike back to his car alone humming "Sheer Heart Attack".

***

On Tuesday and Wednesday they watch sitcoms and play video games until late, and on Thursday Bob's supposed to have a paying gig at the Latin Lounge. This is in contrast to the gigs where he gets paid in pecan pies, concert tickets, and spare furniture. Ray doesn't have anything against pie, concerts, or furniture; he just likes to keep track of Bob and how nice he is to everyone and remind him that being a sound guy is actually his job and not just a cool hobby.

Ray himself is practicing with Donny and Joe and their friends, although in this case it means jamming with them both on the guitar for a few hours and then listening to them jam and watching Joe work at his basement mixing board for a few more. He leaves with a big Tupperware full of hamburger pie cooked by Joe's wife, and Donny's new cell phone number, because there's a dusty out-of-tune drum set sitting under some sheets in the corner of Joe's basement that used to belong to his step-son, and he's happy to lend it to Ray for the foreseeable future if his roommate needs a practice kit.

So it's like after nine when he gets to the Latin Lounge and accidentally almost knocks over the plaster cactus sculpture hat tree inside the door. The music tonight isn't really so much Latin at all, but they make up for that with Spanish menus and colored tissue paper decorations over the bar. Ray scans the room a couple of times automatically, not just looking for Bob, but looking for people he knows, which is something he always does in music places.

There are lots of people he knows but he can't spot Bob, so he goes to the bar and orders a margarita. This is a girly drink, but it's kind of a tradition in this place, even though it's not Friday night, and he thinks Sergio behind the counter might not even understand him if he asked for something else first.

He's eating chips and the extra-fiery homemade salsa they keep for when you order in Spanish which is, although Ray would never say this out loud to a soul, better than his mother's. Actually, he might say it to Bob, Ray immediately realizes, but definitely not in public.

"Hey," says Bob, so close to Ray's ear that he drops a chip and gets a spot of salsa on his jeans. He kind of expects it to burn a hole through, that's how much chile is in it, but when he scrapes it off his leg it just leaves a small dark spot.

"Hey!" says Ray, catching Bob's arm and dragging him up into the light at the bar and onto a stool. "I thought you were working this show?" He obviously didn't get the time wrong or anything, because here Bob is, but Ray glances over at the stage anyway, and yes, that live music that he hears actually is still live music. Bob isn't usually the type to go wandering off during the set.

"So did I," says Bob, "but they just fed me a couple of Coronas and some nachos and said they could manage tonight, but then they still paid me. For last week, they said."

He sounds bemused, but Ray just offers him a chip. "Can't say my people aren't generous. Want some hamburger pie?"

"That's not hamburger pie," says Bob. "That's a nacho. Not that I want to pick nits or anything." He takes the chip and dips it in Ray's salsa.

"It's not a nacho, if you did want to pick nits," Ray informs him while he's turning red and trying not to choke. "It's just a tortilla chip. But I've got hamburger pie in the car."

"Fuck," says Bob. "That's good."

"They'll give it to you if you ask in Spanish," Ray tells him, and nudges his margarita towards Bob, who takes a couple of drinks of it without a single comment about how girly it is.

"I'd better bring you with me, then," says Bob. "My Spanish has more to do with el baño and el restaurante en la esquina, that type of thing."

"Not bad," Ray says, but he doesn't tell him how to ask for salsa. He's willing to be brought. "How about that food? If you don't want it, I'll eat it myself."

Bob raises his eyebrows. "You just want to try and beat me at Guitar Hero again."

He's not even joking, actually. Bob gets totally competitive about Guitar Hero even though Ray has never beat him once. It's actually wonderful. "Bring it on!" he says.

They're in the car when Ray's phone rings. Bob digs it out of Ray's pocket and answers it without even asking, which Ray notices is the second time he's done that in a week. It's stupid to notice things like that when he carried the last bag in from Bob's car himself last night when Bob was asleep and put his clothes in Ray's closet and his comics on Ray's bedside table. He can't help noticing, though.

"Yeah, nothing much," Bob is saying on the phone. "Uh-huh. Sure. Yeah. Okay, I'll tell him."

He hangs up the phone and puts it down in his lap. "So, that was Donny. He's got the drum set and he's on his way to your place. He says he decided to go ahead and take it on his way home tonight because his wife was coming to pick him up in the truck."

"Oh," says Ray.

The car is completely silent. Bob doesn't ask the question or make the comment Ray is expecting, and he keeps not doing it and keeps not doing it, until it's been so long that Ray is afraid to turn his head and look at him.

When he sort of arranged this whole thing Donny had offered to bring the drums in his car on the weekend and Ray had figured on telling Bob about it first, somehow, although he has to admit he didn't give a lot of thought to how he would bring it up.

It didn't really occur to him in advance that it would be this awkward, even though there was a kind of warning bell somewhere in his head that he just ignored. There's picking up dinner and comic books for someone and then there's borrowing a drum set for a guy who kind of seems to not want to talk about it. Also there's that "roommate" thing.

Also there are other things - Ray doesn't have any idea at all why Bob isn't talking, in fact. By the time he pulls up in the parking lot he's full of a terrible certainty that Bob is angry. It will suck if Bob doesn't talk to him the whole rest of the time he's here, however long that is.

When he gets out of the car Ray is completely bummed. He sees Bob's face while he's locking the doors, but Bob's got shades on. His coolest pair, actually, and they look really hot on him, but his face is - Ray can't even tell what face he's making under them, and he doesn't let himself stare.

"Are you gonna need some help carrying it?" says Bob, expressionless behind his shades.

"Um, yeah," Ray squeaks, "thanks," and sits down on the hot hood of the car. Bob sits down next to him, sneakered feet spread apart and his pale hands braced on the bumper.

Donny's wife waves to them from inside the truck, but she keeps her shades on and the music playing, a nice mix of classic country and blues and modern rock. Donny himself hops out and waves with a hearty "Hi, boys!" He's even taller than Ray and used to play football in his youth, so of course one of his knees is weak now. He walks around to the back of the truck and opens the hatch for them, crawls in and lifts the pieces down into Bob's and Ray's arms.

"I'd help you carry these up if she wasn't driving, but the worrying I'd have to put up with about walking on the damned knee isn't worth it," he apologizes to Ray in a normal voice.

"I love you too, honey!" his wife yells back from the cab.

"No problem, we've got 'em all," says Bob, with his shy smile that makes people like Donny's kid think he's cool and interesting when they're still worried Ray's going to tell their parents on them or something.

"You keep in practice, you'll be sounding better than Jerry in no time," says Donny. "Come around to play with us any time you feel like it, now. Don't let the fact that your buddy here can play anything I can play faster keep you away," he adds, with a wink for Ray, "cause my buddy can do things with that keyboard he can't even imagine."

Ray and Bob thank him and carry the drums upstairs in just two and a half trips, with the half trip being Ray's after Bob's already started setting things up in the corner of the living room and tuning. He's still silent when Ray comes in and locks the door behind him and goes to put the hamburger pie in the microwave.

"Are you still hungry?" Ray asks, sticking his head into the living room when the timer goes off.

Bob turns around, looking surprised, and says, "Oh, yeah."

The hamburger pie tastes awesome. She's even got carrots and broccoli in there; it's like a whole school lunch of meatloaf and steamed veggies and ketchup and French fries mashed up in a pot, with the sweet scent of basil and oregano rising from the sauce. From the faces Bob's making he likes it even better than Ray's spaghetti, which makes it seem like a relatively safe moment to talk.

"I'm sorry that I, you know, the drums, without asking you first," says Ray. "It was really a spur of the moment thing." Bob's got his mouth full of food, and he just blinks slowly. "I was jamming in Joe's basement and he had this old drum set gathering dust, and when I asked about it he said he'd been meaning to get rid of it or something so I just mentioned that I could borrow it. I mean, that you could borrow it. I was going to ask you about it but they were just so eager to bring it over, I guess he couldn't wait to get them off his hands. He said they're really out of tune and stuff, so maybe you wouldn't be able to play anyway. And I mean, there's really no need to if you don't think you want to. It's no pressure or anything."

"Wait," says Bob, after he swallows. "What?"

Ray stares at him for a second. "Are you mad?"

"Am I mad? Like, mad that you didn't ask about the drums?"

Ray waves his hand with the fork in it a little. "Yeah, I mean, whatever. We didn't talk about it so I didn't know if you even wanted any - I mean, you never really talk about it and you didn't play the whole time you've been here, so. But I just thought it would be cool to jam together. If you wanted to."

"That's awesome," says Bob, really quickly, like he's afraid Ray is going to start talking again. Not that Ray blames him. "I'd love to." His face is still kind of not moving.

Ray's brain is stuck in its worried track and not sure the message has sunk in. "Really?"

"It was really awesome of you. The drums," says Bob. "I've been, you know, wishing for some. So thanks."

"Oh." Ray has just been staring at Bob and not eating for a while now, probably. "You're welcome," he says, and Bob looks back down at his plate after the tiniest smile, quieter than usual. Ray takes a bite of his food and is surprised that it's not even cold. That little smile did more to him than all his nervous adrenaline before could.

"Do you want to sit around and jam some after dinner, maybe?" Ray says recklessly. That smile made him feel like pushing his luck, and besides, he's got this itchy feeling now and he thinks he needs a reason to keep his hands to himself.

"Yeah." Bob looks up at him a little and smiles a little more. "I've gotta finish tuning and stuff, but yeah."

Ray strums the guitar and watches Bob kneeling in and under and around the drum kit with his shirt crawling up, tuning snares and oiling things and muttering to himself. There's a Bob Marley poster that someone gave to Ray like ten years ago under a Slayer poster on the little bit of wall between the window and the corner behind him, and on the other side there's a teetering stack of DVDs that has migrated away from the cheap shelves that they don't really fit on. Also, there's a plate of crumbs, which Ray reminds himself to move after Bob's done there.

The drum kit is sitting in the corner like something as out of place in a living room as an elephant, although kind of smaller, because that familiar corner is usually full of nothing. It's like it's learning camouflage, though, as Ray sits and watches, and soon it'll have blended right in and become part of the room. Ray switches from the melody he was idly making up back to "House of the Rising Sun" for a bit, transitions into Für Elise, strums some chords and finally gives in to his urge to play something slow and sweet.

Ray's apartment is full of slow and sweet right now, and it's confusing and a little scary. He can feel it in his throat and his chest. He thinks his heart might be swollen and tender, because it keeps throbbing painfully like a strained muscle protesting at being stretched out again every time he catches Bob's eye, and every time he tries to phrase the sentence about giving the drum kit back after Bob leaves.

He finally gives up on that, and concentrates on his guitar. He doesn't come out of his thoughts again until a snare drum comes in to accompany him, and they play until he's not too worried about keeping his hands to himself anymore.

Though they've stayed up late, and they don't stop playing until Ray's eyes are sliding closed all by themselves, once they've gotten into bed he's wide awake again and staring at the dark ceiling.

"I didn't expect you to come back," says Ray. "After the tour."

The sheets scratch together as Bob shifts next to him. His voice is clear and sounds closer than it is in the darkness. "You said I was welcome back any time."

"You were," says Ray quickly, "and you are. I really meant it. I mean - it was a surprise. But a good one."

"Mmm," says Bob, and shifts again. When Ray turns his head, he can catch a glint of light in the whites of Bob's eyes. He's curled on his side and facing Ray, one arm folded under his head, and Ray curls up on his side, too. Once he knows where Bob's eyes are he can see them, or can imagine he sees them, even in the dark.

"Door's always open," says Ray after a while, even though he doesn't know if Bob is awake or asleep. What he wants to say is "Come back to me next time, after your tour, and the time after that".

When he wakes up in the morning, he realizes that he dreamed he was lying awake and looking at Bob's eyes. He's not sure anymore what he said out loud, and when he walks out into the living room and sees the drum kit he's reflexively startled, like he might have dreamed that part, too.

***

Mr. Morris calls Ray from work on Monday to ask for his apartment number and then shows up like twenty minutes early with Ron for his lesson while Ray's working through some music he's going to be in the studio recording in a couple of days and Bob's alternating between drumming along and and playing Tomb Raider.

Ray gets up and answers the door with his guitar in his hand, and Mr. Morris - well, Todd - says, "Already working, I see."

"Just practicing some songs for work this week," says Ray. "How's it going, Ron?"

"Okay. Sorry I'm early," says Ron. He doesn't have that sulky cloud over his head that he had last week, so maybe staying at the Motel Six has been good for his morale. Or maybe it's just not hearing his parents fighting right in front of him. Ray would be more worried if his parents were fighting quietly in another room, but then, his never fought that much. He remembers Bob's horror at the idea of going home for Thanksgiving, and Bob's parents aren't divorced. That's probably enough said.

Ray tells him it's no problem and invites them both in. Ron's dad looks on indulgently while he studies the posters on the walls with a look of concentration. "He has pretty good taste," he tells Ray when Ron catches sight of some vintage Black Sabbath vinyls and goes a little pop-eyed.

"Yeah, he does," Ray agrees.

Ron has made his way around the room and is standing close to the drum kit now and watching it out of the corner of his eyes. Bob's still on his stool behind the bass, with the video game controller in his hand, but he pauses it after a second and says hi. After a minute Ron's got a drumstick and is carefully tapping the rim of the cymbal with it and making a noise more like when Ray accidentally walked into it this morning than like the range of metallic bell-clear noises Bob produces from it.

It looks like they're making friends, Ray notices, while Mr. Morris - "Call me Todd," he interrupts to urge Ray again - is talking about the time he saw Ozzy live. Ray's seen Ozzy live too, of course, so there's something to talk about. He kind of envies the guy for getting to go back when Ozzy was young and Ray was still wearing diapers, though.

The conversation really takes off when the guy says, "You obviously like a lot of different kinds of music," completely earnestly.

That surprises a laugh out of Ray. "Well, there's not much that I hate."

Todd looks pointedly around at his posters and stacks of vinyls and CDs. "Yeah," says Bob, "you're an encyclopedia of everything from rock to hard rock."

"Not so much soft rock, though," Ray feels compelled to point out, apologetically.

"No, the rock, though," says Bob.

"You mean there's other music?" says Todd, sticking his hands in his pockets and laughing. It's as hard to imagine him at a Black Sabbath concert as it is to believe that Ozzy's the same dude now he was in the 70s, even if he still rocks.

"Have you ever played with an accompanist before, Ron?" says Todd.

"We've done a few duets," Ray offers.

"I just wondered if he was ready for his own drummer," Todd explains. "If I'm going to be needing a garage soon so he can practice with his own band I should know in advance."

"Dad," says Ron, sounding pained, "that was really lame."

"Don't worry," Bob puts in, "I've got some errands to run this afternoon."

Ray glances over at him as he's picking up his wallet from the table by the tv, but Bob doesn't see him on his way out.

"Well, I'll see you guys in about an hour, too, I guess," says Todd. "Is that right? That'll be at a quarter to five?" And he goes even though Ray says he could stay and listen if he wanted for a while, probably because of the way Ron blanches and shakes his head.

Todd laughs. "That's okay. I never wanted my parents to hear my music, and I didn't even play it myself. See you, kid. Thanks, Ray," and Ray waves and says he's welcome automatically although he doesn't know what he's thanking him for.

So they work on chord improvisation for about half the hour after Ron's warmed up, because they seem to be getting somewhere with that, but then Ron asks him about how to play "All The Young Dudes", which apparently he heard on the radio this week and his dad found the single on vinyl. This was a pretty big event.

"I probably have that on a tape or a CD somewhere," says Ray. "Let me check, all right? I wouldn't want to get it wrong." He has one CD of Mott the Hoople that he found for a criminally low price in a used record store a few years ago, but it turns out not to have the track, so he has to dig through his main box of records and then check the second box with the lid that he keeps in the end of his bookshelves. He finds the album, though - one that Mr. Earl from church gave him back when he was a teenager.

That's what they're doing when Ron's dad gets back and asks Ray first about his favorite bands, and then what his first musical influences were, and then what groups' stuff he likes to play on his own, and Ray is talking animatedly about Brian May's long solos on "A Night at the Opera", with a detour about Santana, when Bob pushes the door open with a jingle of car keys and a plastic bag of takeout. He tips his head down and looks at Ray over his sunglasses and then takes the takeout into the kitchen.

"But what about modern metal?" says Todd. "I mean, I admit I don't listen to it a lot, but the stuff you hear in the record store is all by the great old bands, or so it would appear. Where's the Ozzies in this generation?"

"Well, they've still got Ozzy," says Ray.

Ron pauses in the middle of fingering the bridge over and over again to inform Todd, "He has his own tv show, Dad."

"That's not what I meant, of course," says Todd. "I just meant, what's coming out of new metal nowadays?"

"No, plenty!" says Ray. You always get this from old people. "There's a lot of great bands on the scene, a lot of classic and modern influences. There's really a lot to hear."

"Oh?" Todd tilts his head a little doubtfully, but he smiles in a friendly way that takes the sting out of it. "You'll have to tell me more about them some other time. I'm afraid I've become pretty ignorant in the last decade about any type of 'scene'. Maybe we can continue this conversation over dinner after Ronald's next lesson."

Ron triumphantly makes it through the bridge with hardly any mistakes this time before he says, "It's Ron, Dad."

"Sure," says Ray.

"My treat," Todd adds, which Ray might ordinarily argue with, but not for a guy driving a Mercedes who used to live in his (now Ron's mother's) house.

Ray shrugs. "Sounds good."

The sound of the refrigerator closing and the water running in the kitchen makes Ron look up, and Bob calls out, "Want a Coke?" to Ray.

"Yeah, thanks," Ray yells back.

"Practice time, I guess," says Todd. "We'd better let Ray get to work, Ron. But we'll see you next Monday!"

"Oh, it's no problem," says Ray. "Keep working on 'All The Young Dudes' instead of those other exercises, for now, if you want to, Ron. That was fun today, so if you find anything else you want to work on together, just let me know, okay? Preferably something one of us has on CD next time."

"Pink Floyd," Todd offers.

"In your dreams, Dad," says Ron. "They're boring," which makes Ray laugh so hard he actually misses it when Ron gets up and takes his guitar case, and he recovers just in time to wave goodbye to them. Then he gets up and locks the door behind them, because... wow, they're nice enough, but fucking finally.

When he goes in the kitchen, there's an open can fizzing next to a glass of ice for him at the table next to the bag of Chinese food, but Bob's not there. He must be in the bathroom. Ray shrugs and washes his hands before he digs in the drawer for clean forks.

He carries the Chinese and two forks and glasses of Coke into the living room and fires up the DVD they stopped halfway through before, and then he spaces out looking at the menu and inhales about a half a carton of garlic chicken before Bob comes back out of the bathroom and sees Ray on the couch. He comes over and snags a cardboard container of beef with broccoli without a word.

"We could probably watch the rest of the season tonight," says Ray with his mouth full. "I have to be in the studio tomorrow, but I think if I go to bed at midnight I'll still be able to get up at six without any more pain than usual."

Bob chews and swallows before he says, "Actually, I thought I'd head down to the Loop Lounge after dinner. I just remembered Jimmy told me I should check out the new band opening for Dave and Chris's guys and they're going to be trying them out today before the show on Thursday."

Now that Bob says it, Ray remembers Jimmy saying that, last weekend, because he'd been there too. Since Bob's going to be at the gig Thursday, he hadn't thought he'd want to go tonight, but it's not like Ray hasn't watched tv by himself a thousand times before.

"Oh, all right. Cool," he says. It won't hurt him to get enough sleep for once.

***

Ray gets all the sleep he could possibly want over the next week. Bob's already gone out every night when Ray makes it back from work or guitar lessons, and Ray knew about all those gigs in advance, and he drops in to three of them during the week, but he has to leave again without Bob twice. By Saturday he misses Bob so much he's tempted to wake him up just to keep him company, because it's not like that would be any more pathetic than lying here next to the wall in the dark and staring at him when it's too dark to even read comics.

When the alarm says it's noon he finally scoots closer, shrugging out of his knitted cotton blanket, and gets close enough to smell Bob's skin. He puts his face almost against the back of Bob's neck and breathes carefully, but Bob doesn't stir. Even his skin feels warm and welcoming under Ray's mouth, and his whole heart, his whole ribcage, his whole torso fills up with an urgent physical sensation of missing him, of loneliness, even though Bob is right there.

Ray slides an arm carefully over Bob and lets it settle against his ribs so he can feel the gentle movements of his sleeping and feel his heat and his heartbeat in his back, and when he snuggles closer Bob shifts a little in his sleep, automatically, just getting more comfortable, and settles into the curve of Ray's body. Then he stills again, and Ray just lies there with his eyes closed while the loneliness fades gradually. He still wants to wake Bob, but he doesn't.

And it's just as well, because when he wakes up again, it's because Bob is waking up too, and he climbs carefully and deliberately out of bed without looking at Ray and leaves the room as quietly as a ghost.

Ray makes coffee while Bob's in the bathroom and starts cooking French toast because Bob really likes it, and when Bob comes into the kitchen he hands him the first steaming cup just the way he likes. "Sit down and have some French toast," he says.

"Okay," Bob mumbles, sounding a little surprised, and he still looks maybe surprised, Ray thinks, as he's dumping the crispy fried slices onto Bob's plate. It can be hard to tell with Bob.

"I don't think we have any powdered sugar," says Ray.

"There's maple syrup," Bob points out, but he's already eaten half a piece of toast without. Ray gets out the syrup and carefully pours it all over his plate until the toast is an island floating in a small lake, and then starts cutting it up.

"This is completely awesome," Bob adds after a minute, and he doesn't sound surprised about that.

Ray looks up in surprise to see Bob smiling at him and his eyes twinkling a little for the first time in what feels like years. His heart lurches and seems to get louder for one slow-motion beat and Ray stuffs a forkful of dripping French toast in his mouth to prevent it from hanging open in astonishment at how completely crazy he is about Bob.

It's not like he didn't know, really. Ray's been wanting more of Bob for a long time, and he's been looking for weeks for a way to ask Bob to move in here and stay, for real, with him, and be, like, his boyfriend, in a way that Ray's never actually had a boyfriend at all, because all his exes were boyfriends in the dating way and not in the buying apartments together way. The ones who weren't just occasional hookups, that is. So it's not the first time he's been hit like this with love, but it seems to hurt more right now because of how Bob hasn't smiled at him all week. He's sure it won't be the last time either, because - crazy.

Ray smiles back at Bob while he has the chance. He's probably grinning like a nut, actually, even though he tries to tone it down a little. "Want another cup of coffee?" he says. "I thought I'd drop by the comics store today - do you want to come?"

Bob shrugs and drains the rest of his coffee and pushes it over to Ray. "Sure. And - sure." Then he goes back to his French toast.

Bob helps rinse stuff and stick it in the dishwasher after they eat and everything, and by the time they get to the comics place Ray's not even sure if he imagined that Bob was avoiding him this week, or if he was just busy.

When they're walking down the sidewalk and taking in the grimy, gangster-ridden Belleville streets and the faint stink of dirty asphalt in the sun, Ray feels ten pounds lighter and filled with amazingness. If amazingness felt like helium.

He's walking down the sidewalk on a sweaty June day with Bob slouching beside him, and if he steps back and looks at them, you know, as if he doesn't even know either one of them, they're kind of two ordinary dorky young guys, Ray in his jeans and sweaty t-shirt and Bob in his fat black skate shoes and his favorite long gray cargo shorts. Ray's a little on the tall side and he's got an epic afro; Bob's a little on the chubby side but in that hot way that looks like he could bounce you out of a club for being rowdy if he felt like it and maybe shove you up against the wall. Which Ray would totally be up for, for the record.

And they're walking easily in step, maybe a little close together. Ray suddenly thinks he should be holding Bob's hand. He doesn't, though.

He's browsing around the comic store when his phone buzzes, and it's Frank - "In twn wkend wanna meet?"

Ray calls him back immediately.

"Hey," says Frank. "What's up, man?"

"Just got to the comic store," says Ray, "so, you know, we're probably gonna be here for a couple of hours."

"Oh, cool," says Frank happily. "You mind if I come with?" Ray can hear him moving around, so he's probably not waiting for an invitation.

"Sure, go ahead, we can grab something to eat later maybe," says Ray.

Ray finds Bob on the other side of the rack and tells him it was Frank on the phone.

Bob says with interest, "Oh, Iero?" He's smiling a little.

"Yeah, he's a good guy," says Ray.

"He's a manic little pipsqueak," says Bob, shaking his head, but he seems to mean it as an agreement.

Frank kind of is a manic pipsqueak, but he's a really cool guy and Bob likes him a lot, too. He's down for a long weekend after his Friday afternoon class was canceled, because, he says, he decided he'd rather get drunk in Belleville than on campus for once.

"I can get drunk on campus any day," he shrugs. "There's different, like, music here. I mean, for example, the sound guys, the sound guys are much cooler. I even heard there's this big asshole who used to tour with like, The Used and Taking Back Sunday and stuff here now!" He pauses to scratch his chin thoughtfully, and adds innocently, "He must be really stuck up, huh?"

There's a pregnant little silence while Ray tries to remember if he's ever mentioned exactly how awesome Bob is, but he can't, because he's been drunk with Frank a couple of times over Christmas and he's pretty sure that he talks more about Bob when he's drunk. Bob's face is completely motionless, but Ray actually thinks he's amused. Or else trying to decide where to hide the body, maybe.

Anyway, their indecision about what to say is put to an end when Frank lets his freaky giggle out and it echoes around the whole comic shop.

"Oh, man, seriously. You guys should've seen your faces. You're a total asshole, Bob, by the way, for not, like, saying something when I was making an ass of myself about those guys before. If, you know, that's, in fact, what I did? I'm sorry, my memories of New Year's get a lot more, um, impressionistic after like the fiftieth shot of Jack."

"We can't all hold our liquor," says Ray.

"He's small," Bob says excusingly.

Frank giggles with delight and climbs up onto Bob's back. It's really fast, too. He probably is part monkey. What a freak. Ray makes sure he's too far away for Frank to reach his hair. When people get giggly, they tend to consider the fro fair game, but Ray has very delicate hair.

They buy a couple of issues of things they've read before and something about a robot that Bob says he hasn't read before that looks kind of cool, and also an Aquaman action figure - "Oh, cool," says Frank. "Aquaman! I bought one the last time I was in here. I'm glad to see someone keeping up the tradition."

"What tradition?" Bob scoffs, trudging up the aisle without dropping Frank. "Aren't you like, twelve?"

"Oh, come on!" says Frank. "College, here! Twenty-two, thanks. How old are you, anyway?"

"Twenty-four," says Bob calmly.

Considering that Ray fucked Bob on his birthday and there was some joking about the number, he shouldn't find that statement as surprising as he does, but it seems younger here in the comics store considering that Frank is only a couple years younger.

Not that Ray hasn't fucked younger guys than that - occasionally - but it's just that Bob is hot and young and he still blushes pink when he's embarrassed and hides behind his bangs when he doesn't want you to see his face and he's that blond everywhere and he can make a shitty band sound almost fantastic and he's an awesome drummer and a tight fuck who seems to love bottoming and Ray just - really - is crazy about him.

Where did Bob come from, he wonders suddenly, and how did he end up in Belleville, where there are playgrounds you should stay out of because bodies get dumped there, fixing sound at the Houndstooth and the Loop Lounge and the Crimson for local gigs on weeknights, and sleeping in Ray's bed and learning how to make grilled cheese even though he used to not even scramble eggs?

Ray and Bob sit on one side of the booth in a diner near the comic store, and Frank sits across from them and talks excitedly about the bands from New York he's been hearing at school and, less excitedly, about hours and hours of economics homework, which is a memory Ray had happily repressed.

"I've gotten to hear a lot more bands," says Frank, though, slurping ketchup off a French fry and then dipping it back in the ketchup pool. Back to cheerful. "And all of them know you, I think, Ray." He stops and takes a bite of tofu burger, and continues with a smirk, licking his lips, "I've been asked about you by guys I've never met before. Of course, it could just be that I was drunk at the time."

"That was most of the gigs you went to in high school," says Ray dryly.

"True," says Frank. "But the guy who asked me about your cock, I'm pretty sure I haven't been introduced to him." He shakes his head. "I told him I wouldn't say hi to it for him, but I agreed to ask how it's doing. Who'd have thought going to Rutgers would bring me all this unwanted knowledge about your cock? I mean, cock in general, yeah, but no offense, man, ideally not yours."

"None taken," says Ray, and prays that Frank will stop talking before he turns completely red.

But God is still punishing him for whatever made Bob avoid him this week, probably, because Frank goes on thoughtfully, "He had a purple streak in his bangs that was pretty wicked. Also a tongue ring." Oh, him, thinks Ray, but Frank sees the recognition on his face and cackles. "Awesome. I guess you weren't as drunk as I was. Well, you know, purple streak guy sends his regards. I'm not sure if his name is, like, Damien or Darren."

Ray isn't sure either, but he's definitely not going to say that. He goes for "Uh-huh."

"Oh," says Frank, and Ray takes a relieved breath, but then he says, "speaking of your cock," and Ray has to restrain the urge to dump a drink over his head. "Speaking of that, I heard that skinny singer from Ninja Liberation was your ex? Is that, like, the ex that you were too busy with to take me to Green Day like three years ago?"

"Um, well, more or less," says Ray. "Actually, he was going to that gig, and I wanted to avoid him."

Frank waves his hand. "Same difference. He's nice enough. Seems like kind of an ass."

"Oh," says Ray, "you know."

"No, but considering how much you got around the scene a few years ago, I'm really impressed that you just have the one guy you don't want to be in the same room with," says Frank thoughtfully. He pauses, and Ray wonders if the torment is over, but it's no such luck. "Do you mind if I fuck him, though?"

"Well... sure," says Ray, "but I don't think you're really his type."

Frank laughs and jumps out of his chair to reach for Ray's hair. "Fuck you, Toro!" he exclaims when he's got a fistful, "I am a sex machine. I am a god."

"I believe you, I believe you," Ray squeaks, somewhere around negative ten on the Dignity Scale, and Frank bounces back into his seat and eats the rest of his tofu burger in complete satisfaction while he talks about the Justice League and Ray stews in belated penance for the way he slept with, like, just enough people on the scene that someone who knows them is always around at any gig. He contemplates moving to, like, Florida, or, say, Ohio. Somewhere where Frank can't find him. It would suck to have to make all the contacts again, though. He's heard Chicago is great this time of year, if Bob is willing to be in the same car with him.

Anyway, Bob wouldn't kick him out of the car, probably. And Chicago probably sucks even more than Jersey this time of year.

Frank gives his last twenty to one of his high school buds when they're on their way out of the diner, so Ray and Bob drive him back to his mom's place to ask for a ride back to school or some bus money.

"Hey, thanks, guys," he says, hitching up his girl jeans and leaning over to look through the passenger window. "Nice seeing you again, Bryar. Give me a call, I'll bring those DVDs the next time I'm back."

"Kay," says Bob, stoic at the wheel of Ray's car because Ray was busy ripping the packaging off Aquaman.

There's a creaking noise from near the house and Frank says, "Shit, hurry, go, go, or you'll never get out without a car full of like, frozen buffalo and two years' worth of alfredo sauce. I'm not even exaggerating."

Ray would have stayed to talk to Linda and lived to regret it, but Bob pulls out of the driveway fast and waves at her from the window, earning the same glowing Nice Boy smile she bestows on Ray when he eats a lot of her food at once.

Ray really isn't sure how he ended up sleeping with so many guys in his early twenties. Actually, he knows it had to do with the kind of party where pretty much everyone gets trashed after a show.

Add that to the lack of sleeping quarters when you're playing every night and not always breaking even and it's sort of a surprise when the night doesn't result in a hook-up of some kind. Sleep deprivation is probably the number one impeding factor and food, music, significant others, STDs, and the hygienic standards of bars and anonymous hosts' couches are all way down there on the list.

Still, when he looks around a gig a lot of times Ray feels kind of like a slut. Not necessarily in a bad way, until recently, but it's just... really surprising, and pretty embarrassing.

It's not like he's a sex maniac, unlike Frank. And yet he's pretty sure he could halfway fill up a comprehensive "Rate My Jersey Scene Kid" website, if there were such a thing. Frank's full of entrepreneurial spirit, so maybe he should give him the idea.

...Nah.

Anyway, he's not an old man unless you're comparing him to Frank - twenty-six isn't exactly over the hill - but sometimes he feels like one. His life has slowed down a lot in the last couple of years since he really got busy with his guitar lessons in addition to all his time in the studio, and started thinking of music as his job first and his hobby second, instead of the other way around.

It's been a good change for him, probably. You remember more of a show if you wait until after most of the music to get smashed.

And he hasn't been sleeping around, well, at all in the last year or so, but it was an occasional thing before that because he stopped having time for it.

He's surprised to realize that where before he could barely find time to sleep with anyone at all in between working and lessons and song writing, a week of full-time work when Bob's not around feels full of empty time, little pieces of it hanging around before and after things, in the morning and bedtime and a couple of hours between appointments, that all add up to an overwhelming memory of boredom and loneliness.

As it turns out, that's how he's destined to spend the rest of the weekend, too. Bob gives Ray his keys back so he can get in and says he wants to get to the Hole in the Wall early tonight, and immediately gets in his own car and drives away while Ray is still trying to get out a sentence about dinner and meeting up.

Ray is playing with Joe and Donny at the Crimson, a younger crowd than they usually entertain, and Junior is wearing what looks like his school uniform vest and pants with a ripped t-shirt and solemnly asks Ray if he needs to wear eyeliner like his girlfriend says. The girlfriend's in some kind of tiger-printed cheap shirt and a jean miniskirt and high heels and a lot too much makeup and she looks like she's probably never been to a club before, but also like she's kind of turned on by the eyeliner.

"You should listen to her, man," says Ray. "Don't ask me, girls know about that stuff."

Junior submits to her with a long-suffering face and she draws raccoon eyes on him and a diamond on his cheek, and the young crowd seems to excite him a little, even if the college students there are an average of 10 years older than him, and his energy translates to screaming louder than ever in the mic. It suits the music, though, and Ray has such a good time that he forgets to worry for about half the drive home. It's not until he parks next to Bob's car in the parking lot that he really remembers.

Bob is dressed in his boxers and eating Lucky Charms out of the box on the couch, watching the Power Rangers, though. He looks up when Ray comes in and smiles a little around his mouthful of cereal and waves hi before Ray can say anything.

"How was the show?" says Ray.

Bob shrugs and bobs his head and keeps chewing, and a man in a lobster suit chases some chick out from behind a bush and through the window of, like, a high school chemistry lab.

"What, that's all?" says Ray, and grabs the box.

"Shh," says Bob. "The yellow ranger will smack you down."

"Is that the yellow ranger?" says Ray. The chick has carefully put her purse down on the ground and is fighting off the lobster with karate and also throwing things.

"I think so," says Bob. "Or the pink one." It turns out to be the pink one, and she keeps fighting in pink and white spandex for a while while Ray turns his attention away from the tv and munches Lucky Charms. Bob's eyes are glued to the action, though.

You'd think it was the Bourne Identity and not a dubbed Japanese green-screen kids' show about magical robot dinosaur tae kwon do. He voices this thought even though it's kind of bitchy, because he knows Bob will appreciate it.

"Dude, magical robot dinosaur tae kwon do," says Bob wonderingly.

"Yeah, okay, it sounds cool," Ray has to admit. "So how was the show, again?"

Bob shrugs. "It was really good, actually." He leans back into the couch just far enough away to disinvite Ray from leaning into his shoulder and cuddling. It's such an automatic move now that Ray catches himself swaying forward anyway and has to prop his elbow on the cushions like a dick.

"Had a good time?" Ray prods.

Bob nods. "Yep. And I got some Lucky Charms."

"So I see."

Bob starts chuckling and says, "I also got some money," so Ray is probably making a face about that, but he can't really help it. Bob's willingness to be paid in food, toys, etc is just weird. Ray could hardly start accepting crayon drawings instead of money for guitar lessons, even if his refrigerator would look pretty bitchin' after a while, because he needs that money. On the other hand, his regular job doesn't pay as well as Bob's tours, probably.

"What would you do if you didn't have my place to stay at?" says Ray curiously. "When you first came up here last fall, were you just going to stay in a hotel the whole time? Would you have had to take money for all your gigs instead of Lucky Charms and ice skates and concert tickets that way?"

Bob's mouth is still full, so it takes him a second to answer. "I guess so," he says slowly.

Ray waits for more, but that's it: he goes back to the Lucky Charms. "Oh," says Ray lamely. He goes to bed a while later, but Bob stays up reading the new issue of Batman on the couch.

On Monday Ray decides to stop doubting whether he's going crazy and just go with the assumption that Bob is pissed at him. If so, then what? Ray hasn't seen Bob seriously pissed before, at least, not at him. Bob is so stealthy about it it's hard to notice at all, let alone guess what it's for, and it would be stupid to bring it up when he can't even prove it's happening.

He's apparently allowed to cuddle in the middle of the night, although "allowed" might not be the correct word for something that happens when Bob is sleeping, but in the day it's like Bob's just taken a step back behind a curtain inside his face, thinks Ray. It's like the week before he left on the spring tour, and Ray starts to suspect something really awful is happening - is Bob planning to leave again, and not even telling him?

He just shuts himself in the bedroom a little before four and tells Ray he's going to hide out during his guitar lesson, though, and Ray lets Ron in by himself this time for a remarkably quick and distraction-free hour of "All The Young Dudes", finger exercises, and Metallica. Ron's a pretty cool guy, actually, and in the absence of either one of his parents barely seems like a teenager, doesn't whine or act bored or anything. There's a laid-back little soul hidden under there.

The bell buzzes at five past, and Ray gets it while Ron's stuffing note-covered blank composition paper into the pocket on his guitar case. His dad's standing out there looking like a print ad for a department store with his gray hair and golf shirt that looks slightly more expensive than Ray's last guitar.

"You guys ready to go?" he asks. "We still on for dinner?" he adds for Ray's benefit.

Ray had actually forgotten completely about that, but now he thinks about it he guesses he mentioned this week, and Ray agreed. He doesn't really want to leave right now, but on the other hand, it's probably better to leave when Bob is avoiding him anyway than when Bob would be up for watching DVDs or, like, blowjobs, right?

"Yeah, let me just put my guitar away," says Ray.

He gets his sneakers and wallet from by the tv and follows Ron and his dad out, making an effort to smile when he asks where they're headed.

"Well, first we're going to drop Ron here off with his mother," says Todd. "After that... what are you in the mood for?"

"Uh," blinks Ray, "just, you know, whatever you had planned is fine? We could hit one of the little joints on the downtown strip."

Ron twitches an eyebrow at Ray in a pretty good silent imitation of his dad's face when Todd says "Ah. Well, if it's all the same to you, I'd rather not go to one of those places. I don't like feeling too rushed for my food, and they can be so crowded." Although not, Ray thinks but doesn't say, on a Monday night. Translation: nothing cheap. Well, as long as he's not paying.

"Pizza?" Ray tries.

They end up at this place Ray didn't actually know existed called the The Old Rugged Colonial Stone Mill Country Bakery and Micro-Brewing Farm or something like that halfway out of town in, like, what he always thought was a rich person's house, where you can't even see the parking lot from the road due to a dip and some artistic landscaping.

There's no sign of any stone mills or anything, and the house is definitely not authentically colonial, but they've gone all out after that New England air, like they're hoping to attract the crowds of people who have wandered into Jersey instead of Massachusetts by mistake.

The outside's painted white with black trim and pillars and bushes and lots of big windows and striped white curtains that look like the fabric of a bare mattress in the doors open to the patio. The inside is full of pieces of boats and plows and other things that rich people like to own. The tables are all giant wooden antique things and the menu is half "old world stone-baked pizza" and half seafood which hopefully doesn't come from the local corpse-infested lake and things like "California-style Provolone Spinach BBQ Chicken Wrap with Hispanic Rice".

Ray can't stop Todd from ordering shrimp and artichoke appetizers and the microbrew of the day, but he orders a pretty ordinary pizza without any corn or baby eggplants or garden feta cheese on it.

The menu talks about the pizza's authenticity, which Ray thinks is kind of ballsy for a restaurant so obviously run by and for WASPs in the middle of Jersey, where ten moms Ray can think of make more authentic red sauce than this, like, once a month, and would probably give it to the cook by the Tupperware if he asked for it. The crust is pretty good, though, and the pizza's not bad, even though it's not really worth twenty bucks.

There are people around them eating things like home-style cherry-honey-oatmeal muffins and Paris Meringue Cake and éclairs from the bakery part of the Old World Bakery and Country Farm and Brewery.

Of course, a meal of pizza while talking about Megadeth and Metallica and Slayer and their influences on the modern scene is pretty much a good meal, and Todd's seen Queen live three times, which is three more times than Ray has.

He talks about the incredible longness and skinniness of Brian May's hands and says they're so freakish (actually he says "extraordinary", but he means freakish) that could almost explain how he's such a guitar legend by itself, and asks Ray to hold up his hands to compare.

Ray's fingers are limber and his hands are big, but he's no Brian May. For one thing, he's not a skinny little fucker - now, Mikey Way, he looks kind of like May, but Ray doesn't mention that.

"I've never seen Dylan live, though," says Todd regretfully. "I didn't really get around to it before... Ron's mother," which he makes sound like he's saying "the accident" or something. "And of course, after that, well," he shrugs, and launches into a long thing about the battles over Ron's guitar lessons and the battles over Todd's own music and the motorcycles he used to be into and how he had to turn down the stereo system he installed in the garage because that was where he could enjoy his rock music, although Ray is a little weirded out that anyone would install a more expensive stereo system in their garage than in their living room. No wonder his wife was pissed.

Somehow that gets into Maggie stifling Ron's creativity and how sad it is that divorce has to inevitably turn children into a battleground.

"Especially for the children," says Ray. "It must be tough for Ron. I know the kids of divorce I knew had a pretty rough time during the divorce period."

"Definitely," says Todd sadly. "I certainly think that's the case. I think it's probably a very natural thing to a mother to sort of reach out and clamp down on her children under stress, though. He's something that she's always considered hers and he's something she still thinks she can control."

All the bitterness is, like, negatively affecting the taste of Ray's beer, and he's gone all the way down to mumbling "uh-huh, uh-huh" because he really doesn't want to listen to this but he isn't sure how to shut it down. "So, uh, I guess that was a big issue for conflict," he says awkwardly.

Todd seems to interpret this as a question instead of an attempt to close down the conversation and says, "Well, you could say that, yes. But in the big picture, it was really my little identity crisis that was the main thing. Or, to put it another way, it was my coming out of the closet." He adds thoughtfully after a dumbfounded second, "Not that I would have expected Maggie to be all right with that. I suppose I should have been ready for her to be so bitter about it."

Ray is the one who is dumbfounded, of course. For one thing, the guy doesn't seem all that gay. But for another, coming out of the closet when you're like, sixty and your kid's a teenager? Isn't that something that happens, you know, to secondary characters on sitcoms, not to real people?

Ray's never met anyone over the age of, like, twenty-two who hasn't figured it out yet and is likely to ever, at all. And are we talking about figuring it out or coming out of the closet? So does that mean he was, what, banging his clients or something? The guy's like a perfect candidate for the senate.

"Oh," says Ray. "Oh, yeah. Wow, I didn't realize."

Todd raises one eyebrow and gives Ray a conspiratorial smirk. It reminds Ray of his elementary school principal, who used to wink whenever he walked past you in the hall instead of saying "Hi." Creepy.

"Didn't realize...?" he says.

"Well, yeah, you know," Ray says, and sits on his hands to keep from making an embarrassing gesture. "I had no idea you were gay. It must be all those years in the closet, I guess. That must be hard."

He's actually trying not to be nervous, because like with the principal, it's not really Todd's fault that he's coming across as kind of creepy. Old people can't help it when they talk to ordinary people, sometimes - they don't know what they sound like. He probably thinks this is how to be friendly with young dudes or something.

"Oh," says Todd, the way he'd probably sound if someone tried to tell him he was over his credit limit. He's got both elbows on the table and his mouth's caught open. "That I was... " then he chuckles and actually does wink at Ray. "You'll forgive me for being a little disbelieving that you would ask that, Ray!"

What? "Well, um," says Ray.

Todd doesn't seem to need Ray to contribute that much to the conversation, though. He says a little smugly, "Well, I think you and are able to understand each other okay, regardless."

Ray knows his eyes go buggy when he's really surprised or upset, and right now he's pretty much both. His eyes probably look like two little dessert plates with chocolate muffins in the middles of them - which isn't a super poetic metaphor, but Ray leaves the lyrics to other guys, okay. The point is that he's being hit on by a guy who looks like his elementary school principal and probably plays golf with him on the weekend.

"Actually," Ray says, trying really hard not to squeak, "I'm really surprised. I mean, honestly, I had no idea. Maybe it's just me, but - I didn't pick up anything like that from you." He really lays on the stress there.

Basically it's a very upsetting night. Ugh. He's probably going to be having nightmares about this date.

He calls Frank from the side of the patio that you can get to from a door next to the bathroom, biting his lip and mentally chanting "Pick up, pick up!" like hypnosis works on phones.

"Yo," says Frank.

"Frank! I accidentally went on a date!" Ray exclaims.

"Toro? Wait, wait, wait, what?"

So Ray lays out the whole story in its sordid glory, from the Mercedes and dorky jokes to the Queen nostalgia, the stereo in the garage and blaming his ex-wife and the smarmy leer.

"Duuuuuuuuuuude," says Frank exasperatedly. Then he cracks up and laughs like a hyena for five or ten minutes.

"Shut up!" Ray hisses. "There are other people here!"

"Where are you?" Frank asks with interest.

"He took me to some yuppie restaurant called the Old Stone Rustic Mill Brewery and Bakery Farm or something!" says Ray.

"Oh, that place halfway out to the lake?" says Frank. "Wow, is it really that cheesy inside?"

"Yes! But I can tell you about that later, okay?" Ray mutters.

"Huh. Just a hint, Toro: if he picks you up in his car and wears a shirt with buttons, it's always a date."

He opens his mouth to tell Frank to fuck himself, but then he realizes that is probably good advice.

"That's why you called me, isn't it?" says Frank. "Unless it was just to give me something to laugh about in between this Econ."

"Well, I'm glad I've given you a nice break," Ray tells him. He actually halfway is.

"Too bad you don't have your car, though," says Frank.

"I know," Ray mutters.

"Call Bob?" says Frank, but Ray can't call Bob and ask him to get him out of this.

One thing he can do is get out of there as fast as possible, though. He's already done eating, and Todd's polite even if he is creepy, so apologizing and saying a friend called him with a family emergency and he needs to go over to his mother's house works fine.

"Oh, I hope everything's all right," is all Ray gets, and he says sincerely and fervently, which is probably good for realism, that he hopes so too.

Of course, even though it's Monday, it's possible Bob won't be there when he gets home, and Ray's previously inactive Paranoia Brain runs into overdrive - Bob's run to the store, Bob's at the laundromat, Bob's already asleep, Bob's gone to a gig at the last minute, Bob's carried all his shit out in the two hours Ray's been gone and is already halfway to Chicago. Well, halfway through New York, anyway.

By the time he hops out of the car Ray's ready to run upstairs because he's halfway convinced himself he's racing the clock before Bob sneaks out the window. He barely remembers to thank Todd and say the food was great and the conversation was great, bye, thanks, and then sprints up the stairs and into the apartment.

The lights are all on, the bedroom door's open - Ray bursts in and then pauses - the bed's empty and disarranged. Then he sees Bob sitting on the floor in the middle of a pile of music magazines, reading an old Rolling Stone with Fiona Apple on the cover.

"Bob," says Ray. He drops to his knees without taking off his shoes and shoves a couple of issues of Justin Timberlake and Korn and a guitar catalog out of his way.

He feels like such a moron, he hardly knows where to start, but he finally blurts, "I accidentally went on a date."

"If you're talking about tonight, you went on purpose," Bob points out. "Speaking of that, you're back early, aren't you?"

"Because I didn't mean to!" says Ray, running his hand through his hair distractedly. "I mean, I meant to eat, I just didn't mean to go on a date."

Bob rolls his eyes. "This might sound like a dumb question, Toro, but why the fuck didn't you just say no, then?"

"Look," Ray sighs. "I said yes because I thought he just wanted to grab something to eat, okay? I thought I was saying yeah to talking about Megadeth and Ozzy Osbourne over a burger, not a candlelit old world pizza at some yuppie place that has shrimp artichoke appetizers."

"So you're just mad because he was acting like a sugar daddy," says Bob skeptically. "You can't blame a rich old guy for eating rich old guy food."

"I can blame him for asking me on a date!" Ray sputters. "He's like sixty!"

"Which is why you don't go!"

"He was married!"

"And he's not anymore!" says Bob.

"Okay!" says Ray. "Okay, obviously, I get it now! I didn't realize he was hitting on me, though. I'd never have gone if I thought he was hitting on me. The guy's as old as my dad!"

"Because old guys going through a mid-life divorce never hit on hot younger guys."

"But you thought -" says Ray, suddenly, horrified, "You honestly thought I would - why would I want to date him?"

"I don't know," Bob says slowly, his mouth a tight line and his arms crossed over his chest. "Why would you want to date half the Jersey music scene?"

It's so unexpected that Ray completely freezes. It's two completely separate things to him - this laughable skeevy old guy, a bunch of random hookups that ended years ago - but obviously, so obviously, it's one thing to Bob now. And Bob thought he was going on a date, God, he thought all week that Ray was - he feels sick, and he's not sure if it's guilt or hurt.

They're battling it out, actually. He can take the implication that he was a slut, even if he doesn't see it in exactly that way, because he expected something like that after Frank's little revelations on Saturday. But the idea that Bob would class the gay dad, and God, even worse, himself, in with Ray's ex and his hookups is just.

"Even if it hadn't been years since I was fucking around, you know I haven't - I haven't even wanted to - since last fall," says Ray. It's not the easiest thing to say with the way Bob is looking at him - especially when it was something he thought they were taking for granted, and Bob was apparently on some completely different page. "Since you crashed on my couch."

Bob's face is really hard for Ray to read. It's not like there's a curtain in the way, it's just that Ray never knows what things mean. He's staring at Ray hard, and thinking, and his eyebrows are wrinkling, but he's still not saying anything.

Ray starts humming the Jeopardy theme inside his head, and has a crazy impulse to hum it out loud too which he viciously stifles.

Finally Bob says, "Okay; I'm sorry."

"Sorry? For what?"

"For what I said," Bob says reluctantly. "I didn't mean to - I mean - I've slept with a few scene kids, I'm not trying to say anything about that. And I know it's been... a while."

"Bob -"

But Bob keeps going, "But you're actually telling me, last week when the flashy newly divorced chickenhawk was standing here drooling all over you and talking about bands he's met like some hipster at a club trying to impress a girl, you didn't notice anything? And when he asked you out to dinner, and picked a date and all, and said he'd treat you, and came and picked you up in his car, you actually never realized he was trying to hit that?"

"Yes," Ray exclaims, completely frustrated, but Bob doesn't look angry anymore - he's actually smiling by the end of his speech.

And then he starts laughing.

It's just slowly, at first, a few little chuckles, and then he's kind of giggling along quietly, and then he lets out a really big laugh, and before long he's straight-up guffawing. By that time Ray, even though he's a little bit embarrassed, has to laugh too. Bob actually laughs until he cries though.

"Thanks," says Ray, "this is really affirming, you know? This makes me feel really great about my stupidity."

Bob ignores him, though, and wipes at his eyes. "Tell me this: how many dates have you accidentally gone on, anyway?"

"None!" says Ray indignantly. "Well - maybe one or two." Then he really thinks about it and realizes... "Shit."

Bob's giggling again, kind of weakly, though, and he lies down on his back and rests his hands on his belly.

"But wait," says Ray suddenly, and crawls over the magazines with no regard for any pages he might wrinkle, "let's go back to something here for a minute. You thought I'd -"

Bob looks uncomfortable. "I said I was sorry."

"No, I don't want you to be - Bob, that's not the point."

"What is the point?" Bob asks him politely.

"The point is that I'm kind of dating someone already!"

"Kind of," Bob echoes expressionlessly.

Fuck. "I thought I was, anyway," says Ray, less loudly than he meant to.

Bob turns his head and looks right at Ray seriously with his pale laser-bright blue eyes, his mouth turned down at the corner. "You weren't sure," he points out. "And neither was I."

It upsets Ray to think that, but he obviously has a point. Then he decides that that, at least, can be fixed.

"Okay, Bob Bryar," he says, and that time it actually comes out pretty loud, because he's trying, and he knows if he doesn't his voice might come out high or wobble around all over the place. "Do you want to go steady with me?"

Bob doesn't look away from him for a second, just blinks and says, "Yeah."

Ray sighs and leans over against the bedside table - luckily, it's handy. "That was harder than I thought."

"What do you think I'd do if I didn't have your place to crash?" says Bob suddenly, out of nowhere.

"What?"

"You asked me the other day. You were trying to convince me not to accept cherry pies for sound work, which, by the way, is totally worth it, but I'm interested."

"I guess you'd have stayed in the hotel or found an apartment or somewhere else to crash."

Bob shakes his head. "Maybe at first. I mean, if you hadn't asked me to stay here right away, I'd probably have stayed in town and kept trying for a while. But honestly, if I wasn't here I'da probably been back in Chicago a long time ago."

"Do you want to go back to Chicago?" says Ray.

"No." Bob's still just looking at him with his blue, blue eyes, the overhead lights glittering in his blond eyelashes and on his cheeks. "Do you?"

Ray's heart jostles unexpectedly against the top of his ribcage. "Maybe to visit."

Bob's smiling now, slightly. "Okay."

"Okay?" says Ray breathlessly, and lets go of the bedside table even though he feels unbalanced sitting there. He lets himself lose it and collapse next to Bob, stretch his toes out through the mess of magazines on the floor and kick the pajamas lying near the foot of the bed.

"Yeah." The smile's a little bigger, that shy one that Ray would tie himself in knots for, and it's different this time, a little smug, not exactly mischievous. "Of course."

Of course. "Of course?" echoes Ray stupidly. Bob's hands are in his hair and he's not sure if he's questioning the statement or just repeating what he hears like a parrot.

"Mmmm," says Bob, and Ray kisses him, although Bob's the one pulling Ray down and lifting his head up, stretching his neck so it's like kissing when they're both standing, and his lips and tongue are wet and soft and so good, so good Ray's sighing softly and rolling over on top of him.

Bob pulls back to breathe after a minute, and says, "So, was that the expensive-ass pizza? Not bad."

Ray laughs and drops his head down on the floor above Bob's shoulder.

"You know, Toro," says Bob thoughtfully, "you're kind of a moron. Seriously, I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around you."

"If you wrap your legs around me, it might help," Ray offers hopefully.

Bob snorts, and Ray jumps when he feels Bob's warm hands on his belly, sliding inside the waist of his jeans. He starts popping the buttons one at a time, and says, "Okay, now repeat after me: I -"

"I -"

"Will -"

"Will -"

"Not..." and then he runs out of buttons and wraps his hand around Ray's cock. Ray loses track of what he was supposed to be saying. "Go," Bob continues. He doesn't seem to mind - he's moving his hand slowly inside Ray's boxers. "On... any... dates."

Ray is fumbling for somewhere to put his hands, somewhere to put his knees, that will keep his cock in Bob's tight, tight fist, but he eventually realizes Bob is waiting and manages to dredge up a "Cross my heart. Not even by accident."

Bob makes an impatient noise halfway between a question and a sigh and pulls his hand out of Ray's pants to grab him by the front of his shirt and drag him down and kiss him some more, decisively and firmly and, wow, not slow, and not careful at all, really running his tongue around Ray's mouth like he's looking for every last molecule of pizza, and stopping twice and biting gently at Ray's lip until Ray is grinding his cock down into Bob's hip somewhat desperately.

Bob is one of the most methodical people Ray knows, and if rubbing himself all over him isn't going to make him hurry up then Ray knows that begging won't either. Once Bob is going to do something he's pretty much going to and you're not going to stop him, and apparently he has something in mind with Ray's tongue or something like that. He slides his hands slowly up under Ray's t-shirt, fake-casually (because Ray knows it isn't casual), and eventually pulls it off him and starts sucking on Ray's neck.

"It's really great that you're all possessive," Ray says squeakily, and of course, he doesn't realize it exactly until he says it, but of course that's what Bob is being, possessive - something Ray realizes he's never really been before, not even the rare occasions when he got bossy.

"M-hm?" Bob prompts, and starts pushing Ray's jeans down off his hips. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. I'm just wondering, though -" oh, that's Bob's hand on his ass, finally - "Is this going to lead to fucking? Me? To fucking me?"

Bob has pushed Ray's boxers down on his thighs and is cupping the back of his leg with one long hand that feels burning-hot on Ray's skin and slowly caressing the crease of his ass with his thumb. "Signs point to yes," he says, slow and amused. Okay, yes, Bob has a point.

"Good," says Ray, just as he feels the first fingertip push into him. "Oh, fuck. Yeah."

"Yeah," Bob agrees, quietly. "Let's get on the bed."

Ray peels himself off of Bob's chest with his clumsy turned-on hands and feet and his stupid, slow, turned-to-jelly muscles, and flings himself onto the bed, kicking at his jeans and shoes until he manages to get them on the floor. Bob strips quickly and drops his clothes in a pile, climbs onto the bed between Ray's thighs, and reaches onto the bedside table for the condoms they haven't used in a week.

Bob wastes all this time with lube and stretching - not that stretching and lube are bad, it's just he goes overboard - but Ray doesn't want to kill his possessive buzz, so he concentrates on relaxing into it and fucking himself on Bob's fingers and only says "Come on" and "Hurry" like five times.

Possessive Bob is as stubborn as usual, though, and he doesn't even bother to answer, just curls his finger (and Ray's toes) or scratches gently at Ray's thigh with his free hand.

When he finally says fondly, "Shut the fuck up, Ray," Ray sighs happily because he knows it means he's finally ready - and he is, he wraps his hands around Ray's hips and tilts his ass up, kneels and gets into position, and then he's falling slowly forward, his cock pressing Ray open, tight and hot and heavy, sinking into him while Ray's legs fold up around him, pulling him in, God, until he's lying on Ray, pinning him down to the bed, shifting inside him with tiny rocks of his hips as he comes deeper and finally all the way home.

A shiver skates down the side of Ray's spine and he wraps his hands around Bob's solid forearms, in the fine crispy blond hair, and holds on tight. Bob pulls out and it feels like all the air is sucked out of Ray's body; he shakes his head, eyelids heavy, pale hair sweaty, and pushes back in, and Ray's gasping from the burn, high on oxygen, opening his thighs wide and pushing his ass back into Bob's thrusts.

A thought about fucking and how often he finds time for it flutters by and Ray doesn't bother to work it out; he doesn't have time for that, now, he doesn't need time for anything, he would probably agree, right now, to let Bob take payment in food and bus tokens for a year if he'd just twist his hips again like that and fuck him harder. He reaches for his cock and Bob catches his hand, pulls it away and pins it to the bed and keeps moving.

"What," says Ray, and Bob just stares into his eyes, and licks his lips, and it is so hot Ray is going to shake apart, or explode or something, or worse, come, and he doesn't want to come yet - he wants it to last, he is just struggling with the mindless conviction that he will die if someone doesn't touch his cock nownownow.

His hands jerk in Bob's grip of their own volition, but Bob holds them down and smirks at him, and when he wraps his other hand around Ray's cock it's like - fuck. It's like nothing else.

When Ray comes, Bob slows down enough that Ray can feel the slow luxurious clench of his ass around Bob's cock, still hard inside him, and Bob touches his leg and leans forward and kisses him until his fingers have stopped twitching with shocks of bliss. Ray kisses back lazily, preoccupied with the sensation of his whole body transmuting into... into... something happy and really well-fucked. Then Bob sits back up and grips his hips and fucks him some more, fast and hard, so good Ray's begging him not to stop, just a little harder, even though his dick is completely down for the count.

Bob basically ignores him, or at least he seems to, but he's looking straight at Ray when he comes and his eyes say he heard every word. They also say "I hope you're going to think about me every time you try to sit down tomorrow", which Ray probably will, and something else underneath, cautious and unreadable and warm, and completely fascinating.

***

Ray isn't getting any closer to beating Bob at Guitar Hero, and he's not ready to give up without a good reason, so he's kind of glad when the phone rings. Bob pauses the game automatically and Ray lurches up across the room towards the door and grabs his phone from the table next to it.

"Hi," says Mikey Way's bored, droning voice. "How did the date go?"

"Fuck, not you too?" says Ray.

Bob sets the controller on the floor and sneaks into the bedroom to steal the Spider-Man that Ray totally wasn't done reading yet, but Ray doesn't say anything about it.

"Frank told me to ask," Mikey explains wearily.

"Great," says Ray. "Let's never speak of it again."

"It went great?"

"It was an experience," Ray says, "that I'm glad to have put in the past, and might talk about some day at a party. With alcohol involved." He pauses to shudder a little, and Bob touches his shoulder lightly and hands him a cup full of steaming coffee.

This going steady thing has its perks. Not the coffee - he got the coffee before - but more the way he doesn't wonder in the back of his head if it's all going to be over tomorrow. It's as good as an extra spoonful of sugar - it makes everything taste better.

"Summer school's, like, over this week," Mikey sighs. "So Frank and I were thinking about going into the city on Thursday to catch this black metal night at the Zebra but my car doesn't work."

Ray looks up at Bob and mouths "Thursday?", and Bob shakes his head, so he says, "We've got two dudes and a car at your disposal provided you supply some food for the car."

"Doritos or potato chips?" Mikey says. "Or, like, carrot sticks."

"Potato chips and pretzels," says Ray. "Let's leave the carrots for Frank."

"What about your brother?" says Ray.

"Gerard?" Mikey's giving the impression now that he forgot he had a brother, which would be more believable if he hadn't been, like, the head of the brother fan club his whole life. "He's not leaving the basement right now."

Ray shrugs. "Okay."

Mikey Way is a surprisingly good driver for a guy so clumsy, and with so little sense of self-preservation, that he can't be trusted with sharp objects, flammables, or electrical devices unsupervised. He might as well be, like, four years old, as Ray knows to the detriment of the bathroom floor at his old apartment, which was never the same again. But he's generally okay at the wheel of a car. He can sometimes take the philosophical approach to road signs and lights, but not when there are other cars around. Usually.

Anyway, that just makes him blend in in New York, and since he doesn't mind driving - or at least he only shrugs and mumbles when they ask him - he gets to drive most of the way. Bob fucks with an ancient Gameboy and Ray plays a game he hasn't enjoyed since he was in high school, namely the one where you inch as slowly as possible across six inches separating you from someone on a bench and jerk back and/or freeze whenever anyone glances towards you, like a demented hormone-crazed version of Red Light, Green Light.

He wonders if he could call it Red Light, Green Light District, and then he decides that would be a good name for a band if it weren't so long. He thinks about this problem for a long time with his knee brushing Bob's as the car rolls along over the bumps on the freeway, and leaves his hand on Bob's thigh until Mikey stops at a gas station.

"Candy!" crows Frank, scrambling out of the front seat, where he was folded like a pretzel and alternately dozing off and bouncing along with Mikey's Joy Division CD.

"Bathroom," Mikey mumbles, and slams the door behind himself.

"Put that game down now so I can reach your pants," says Ray, sliding across the seat until their legs are pressed together.

"No fucking way. I'd rather not get arrested today."

"I'm not going to blow you!" Ray rolls his eyes. "I just want to put my hand in your pants."

"Oh. In that case..." Bob pretends to think about it, "no." Ray sticks out his lower lip and he grumbles, "Fine, but if I come in these pants you're buying new ones, Toro."

Scientifically proven: the exaggerated cheesy pouting face works better than any more subtle attempts to look sad. At least on Bob, it does.

Bob doesn't have to worry, anyway. Ray's good with his hands, but even he isn't good enough to get Bob off with a handjob in like, two minutes when he wasn't even hard. A little turned on, maybe, because Ray's been inching closer to him for half an hour.

"That can wait," Ray whispers against his ear, undoing the button and leaving the zipper alone and sliding his hand in to touch the sweaty band of silky belly under the waist of Bob's boxers and then down to the line of his thigh. Then he has to take his hand back, but he's won like a million points in Red Light, Green Light District.

Black metal night is just as awesome as it sounds. There's some DJ from Norway who probably rode polar bears to school with the dudes from Dimmu Borgir, and some really weird body piercings, even by metal gig standards.

They stay at the club until like, 5 am, and most of the metal heads and punk and goth tourists are too busy with their spazzy dancing - Mikey and Frank included - to notice when Ray and Bob are halfway and sort of one-third of the way shit-faced, leaning on the wall near the corner and stealing occasional short kisses back and forth. (This could be because Bob is pretty drunk.)

Then they crash with some dudes Frank goes to school with who live just far enough away that, being kind of drunk and stupid, it takes them like an hour to find it.

Bob wakes him up the next morning - Ray doesn't know exactly how, but when he opens his eyes, wide awake all at once, sunlight filtered through green curtains is lying all over the floor and Bob is crouching silently in front of him, a few feet away. Ray frowns and blinks and sits up, bending and stretching to pull his spine back out of the S-shape it was cemented into by the floor.

Frank is sleeping on his side on the loveseat, curled up fetally with his mouth open and long blue shadows under his big cat eyes. Mikey has the couch and a faded pink floral sheet wrapped around him like a mummy, and his glasses are still on his face.

They tiptoe back out through a tiny kitchen that's mostly empty, but full of that general feeling of dirtiness that made Ray never want to eat any food cooked at his Aunt Louisa's house. No breakfast, then, not yet. They find the place deserted and the front door unlocked, and go outside to smoke on the steps.

Bob actually is the one smoking on the steps, but he leans over so their shoulders brush and gives Ray a drag every now and then, cupping his hand close to Ray's face even though it's not that windy. When Ray glances up quickly and their eyes meet in the shelter of his curved, drum-callused hand, Bob's mouth is quirked up and crooked in one corner, his eyes laughing sweetly, if you can laugh sweetly. It feels sweet to Ray. The face is more mischievous, to be honest.

They're talking about the trip back to Jersey, how long it's going to take, both thinking about what time they'll make it back and the gigs they've got tonight, when the door opens and Frank and Mikey come out, yawning and dirty-haired (so in other words, just like normal).

Ray takes the wheel for the first half of the trip back to prevent himself from falling asleep, leaning sideways, and tying his spine into an even worse knot, and Bob sits next to him and maintains custody of the radio. Frank and Mikey, the skinny little fuckers, conk out again as soon as they hit the road, and by the time Bob and Ray switch places they've oozed sideways out of their seatbelts and the back seat is one big tangle of pointy noses, beer-stained t-shirts, and girls' jeans.

He concentrates on staying upright and cracks his neck a lot until they make it home, and every time he does Bob pops a finger or his neck or something back at him. It's like a whole coded secret conversation between Snap, Crackle, and Pop at the Rice Krispies factory.

They pour Mikey and Frank out of the car at Mikey's place and wait for them to fumble their way through the door, and then Ray sighs and says, "I think I might have actually tied my spine in a knot last night."

"Wow," says Bob.

"Yeah. I think you're going to have to remove the entire spinal cord to fix it, too," says Ray.

Bob just keeps driving. "Could get messy," he observes after a while.

In fact it is kind of messy, but having the throbbing kinks rubbed inexorably out feels kind of like getting fucked with no stretching first - as intense and eyes-roll-back-in-your-head fantastic and painful, and when it's done he feels completely fucked and can barely move, so that's the same too.

"God, yes," he mumbles into the pillow. "You can just feed me with a tube. I'm not planning to move for about a week."

Bob slaps his ass and says from somewhere behind him, "You're not bad for my ego."

"Good thing, since we're going steady," says Ray.

"I don't remove spinal cords for just anybody," Bob assures him.

"You're a monogamous kind of guy?"

"Mm." The bed shifts and creaks, and then Bob lies down between Ray and the wall, on what's usually Ray's side of the bed, where Ray can see the top of his face peeking over his folded arms. "Yeah, I am."

"I'll totally try to be," says Ray earnestly. "Maybe we can get me some interpersonal communication classes or a self-help book, like How To Know When Someone Is Hitting On You For Dummies."

"It's kind of sweet, really," Bob tells him. "You're just so all about me you can't even imagine dating anyone else."

"I -" says Ray, and feels himself blush. Considering Bob is his boyfriend he probably shouldn't feel embarrassed about that, but - Bob is joking, and that's kind of exactly the way it is. "Yeah, kind of," he says nervously. "I mean, I probably could imagine, you know, if I tried to. It's just by default, I... don't."

Ray can't see Bob's face to tell if he's laughing, but it sort of sounds like he is. "I know," he says. "What do you think about New York?"

Ray blinks. "You mean like, nice place to visit, wouldn't want to live there? Or like, great music scene, shitty taxis?"

Bob says, "Not exactly. More like if I was working sound on tour and we played two festival days in New York state, would you want to come up and hang? I mean, there's other places too, but New York is closer. There's Chicago," he adds at the end, like an afterthought.

Ray doesn't say anything for a minute because he's pretty sure he was just asked to meet Bob's parents in the least likely - okay, not really that unlikely, but definitely the least direct - way ever.

"I could make Chicago," he says carefully.

"Oh." Bob's quiet and Ray picks at a loose thread on the edge of his pillowcase. Then Bob says, "You want to, like... see stuff, meet some people?"

The effort of restraint gets to be too much, and Ray bursts out, "Of course! " Then he remembers manners and says, "Is that a problem? Will there be time?"

Bob shrugs. "We can make time. It might be easier for a couple of days at first, anyway. Hopefully my folks will be on their best behavior."

"I'd love to!" says Ray, maybe a little too vehemently.

"Oh," says Bob, "okay, good," and unfolds his arms and puts his head down on the pillow, smiling a quirky little smile. "If your back is feeling better now, I think there's something in my pants you could take a look at."

Ray laughs. "Oh, is there?"

"Yeah," says Bob. "And for future reference, that was a come-on."

***

Ray isn't exactly cheap, but if you asked any of his friends they would probably say he was. Ray never has a problem with spending a lot of money on music equipment, music, and sometimes even video games and DVDs. It's just that he has priorities, and he doesn't want to waste music money unnecessarily on clothes, car repair, travel, or food.

On the other hand, he's bought plenty of cool t-shirts for like twenty times the price of a shirt in a thrift store, if they were cool enough, with hardly a pang at all. And up until Frank got a good-paying part-time job, back when he was in high school and at the mercy of his parents, Ray used to spend more taking him along than he spent on gas money. Frank never seemed to notice that, though, and Ray's been really careful to make sure it stays that way.

So usually if walking is better he walks, and if driving is possible, he drives, not that he usually goes as far away as Chicago. The point is, Ray has only flown a couple of times in his life, but he doesn't hesitate at all about this, because the same amount of getting Dave and one of the part-time teachers at the community college to cover his guitar lessons can give him two whole extra days, maybe more, with the tour. So he flies.

Bob meets him at the airport, and it takes Ray almost thirty seconds to notice the shiny thing - not thing, the shiny silver ring in his lip.

"Hi," says Ray, "nice piercing."

"Hey," says Bob, "nice trip?" like Ray wasn't just practicing his new knowledge of come-ons on him? Maybe he didn't do it right.

"Yeah, you know, glad to be here," Ray says, and grabs his second bag from the carousel.

"I've heard mouth piercings can be really interesting," Bob tells him while he's unlocking the back of his car.

It's definitely true. "I've, uh, heard that too," Ray says, because at short notice he can't think of a better way to avoid the subject of the various guys with mouth piercings who have blown him.

Bob's sardonic eyebrow twitch says he noticed, but doesn't mind. "You'll have to try it out," he says.

"Yes, I definitely have to," says Ray. "I look forward to it."

"No need to do that," says Bob, pushing him into the backseat and climbing in after him. "It's had plenty of time to heal up now," he adds, and leans in close until the cool metal ring is brushing Ray's lip but he can't feel Bob's mouth yet. "I think." Then he kisses him and starts undoing his belt buckle.

"Arrested?" says Ray faintly, moving back obediently on the seat to give Bob more room to kneel between his legs.

"'S why I parked behind a pillar," Bob mumbles, tugging down Ray's zipper.

"Mm," Ray agrees intelligently, and then Bob pulls his cock out and licks, and he completely stops talking.

It's true that mouth piercings can be interesting, okay, but this is different. Ray hasn't seen Bob in almost a month, and he's lost weight and trimmed his hair and shaved, maybe for the piercing, and his beard is just starting to grow in around it, short and prickly. His mouth is so pale that the pinkness of it used to sort of get lost in the beard, but the silver ring on it, going straight into his mouth - it's hot, it looks kinky, and fuck, it feels fucking kinky too, cold and hard and smooth on Ray's cock, breaking the soft circle of Bob's lips.

"So I think I like it," says Ray, when his brain has started to form up inside his head again. He's staring at the ceiling light in Bob's car, and Bob is carefully tucking and zipping and putting Ray's pants back together.

He must have finished with Ray's belt, because he grips one thigh in each hand and levers himself up until his head appears in Ray's field of view. "Good."

So Ray has dinner twice in a row with Bob's parents, and likes his mom better than his dad even though he's a little afraid of her, even after he does the dishes. They seem nice if not exactly quiet, so they must be on their best behavior after all. He meets half of Fall Out Boy because Bob used to room with the singer, and he shakes hands with the guy because it's not his favorite genre, but Ray loves a good chord progression.

They go to three of The Used's gigs because Bob has to, and hit a few clubs full of guys Bob knows and even more that he doesn't because Chicago and Springfield are both bigger than Belleville.

Ray takes a cab to the airport in Springfield because Bob's job was in conflict with Ray's flight time, and lingers on the way they'd stood there facing each other, each with one of Ray's bags in his hands, staring at each other and then leaned into an awkward, silent hug.

His phone rings when he's in the air, though, after he's turned it on, and Bob says right away, "How's the flight?"

"Hard to rate it so far," says Ray. "I haven't got my pretzels yet so I can't compare. I've got a pretty nice view though. Kind of small."

"It won't be that long," Bob says.

For a second Ray thinks he's talking to someone else in the background or something, but Bob's like, waiting for him to answer, he guesses. So he says, "What?"

"The tour," Bob explains. "These guys owe me more than a few over all the years, and I met up with a guy we've toured with before and he agreed to join up with them in a few more weeks, once we hit Colorado."

Ray scrapes the peeling edge of the STOW TRAY IN UPRIGHT POSITION FOR TAKEOFF AND LANDING sticker with his thumbnail. "Oh," he says.

"I just," says Bob, "I kinda wanted to come home early."

Come home. Come home. "Oh," Ray says again. Oh.

"Take a break, take it easy for a while. Do some gigs in exchange for frisbee golf lessons or friendship bracelets. Practice my flower-arranging..."

"Okay," says Ray dazedly.

"You're not listening to me at all," Bob accuses.

"Flower arranging," Ray manages.

"Nice try, Toro, but there's no way you'd let me take frisbee golf for work."

"I - sorry," says Ray. "You can if you want to. I mean - wait, frisbee golf? What the fuck does that even mean?"

Bob starts laughing. In the background Ray can hear what sounds like Quinn asking him what's so funny, and Bob says, "Your face," and then there's a door slamming.

"So - Colorado - that's two and a half weeks?" says Ray.

"Yeah, probably Wednesday. But I'll have to drive back to Chicago or someplace unless I want to just abandon my car in the desert."

"And I think you'd have a hard time getting anyone to pay you for sound gigs in cars."

"It's happened before," says Bob. "You'd be surprised."

"Did they start?"

"Seriously, Toro, you are cheap."

Ray starts to explain that he's not cheap, but he gives up at "priorities" because Bob is laughing too hard. He doesn't really care, though. "Look, just don't throw away a perfectly good car," he says. "You can work on my cheapness when you get home."

He was really just looking for a way to work that in a sentence, pretty much.

"Yeah," says Bob, "when I get home," and Ray smiles out the tiny round window at his nice view hard enough to hurt his face, because that's pretty much all there is to be said.

End