Archive of Our Own

The first time Pete sees him, he’s in the middle of a televised conversation with a bereaved fifty-something and her dead husband. The timing is unfortunate.

Pete is dressed in a crushed velvet blazer and tight black jeans and what fashion magazines might call ‘office casual eyeliner.’ He says, “Brenda, he’s showing me a backyard. Do you have a backyard?”

Does she have a backyard? She lives in Ohio.

“Yes!” Brenda squeals, like Pete is particularly brilliant. Which he is, but not for the reasons she thinks. “Ohmygodyes! Michael loved the backyard!”

Pete smiles a predator’s smile because he will never get over how easy this is. “I’m hearing him loud and clear, Brenda, honey.” Then he looks into Camera 2, smiles and says, “Let’s take a trip to Heaven’s Gate.”

Pete is a ghost whisperer, successful by the measures with which ghost whisperers are generally determined. He has his own national television show — Heaven’s Gate, naturally — and regular guest appearances on Oprah, and Sally, and Good Morning America. Michael is the fourth dead loved one that he’s communicated with today. He’s in the business of misery and business, quite frankly, has never been better.

(Heaven’s Gate is, for the record, the second-most successful psychic reading television show in the country. If Pete could find a way to oust John Edward without resorting to a hitman, he could claim the number one spot with ease. The only reason he doesn’t is this niggling worry that the afterlife is real, and Mr Edward may come back for angry, unsexy revenge.)

Pete’s brows pinch, he hopes he looks alluringly deep in concentration and not constipated. He grips the bridge of his nose and says, “He did, he really did love the yard, he’s pointing something out to me. I’m getting pink. Flowers, maybe? Roses.” Roses are a dead cert, who doesn’t love roses? “Do roses mean anything to you?”

Pete is giving the reading of his life. He is a jagged line of open communication between the spirit world and the land of the living. He is… lying out of his ass, but doing so in an extremely convincing manner. Then he goes ahead and ruins it.

“You fucking phony.”

Pete’s head snaps to the right so fast he gives himself whiplash. He is sitting, by himself, in the middle of the staircase that cleaves the audience in two (grieving spouses one side, parents the other). He is tiny, birdlike. A scrappy little wisp of a thing perched on the stairs in contravention of both societal norms and studio fire and safety regulations. His smirk is bladed. He looks at Pete with his head tilted to one side in expectation. 

“Oh,” he says. “You heard that, did you?”

“Excuse me?” Pete says, dripping with sarcasm. “Can I help you with something?”

“Yeah,” says the guy. “You could stop being a fucking phony.”

Pete tips a significant look towards Charlie, his head of security: it’s not the first time they’ve had a conscientious objector in the studio. It’s usually the atheists. Or the Christians. Weirdly, the one thing that unites them both is a strong and vocal disbelief in an afterlife that comes with an open channel of communication to the living. If they could overcome their other minor disagreements, the world might be a very different place. Charlie stares back at him, puzzled. Pete resolves to hold an in-depth team meeting about ‘when to intervene’ once they get into the green room.

Then, because Pete doesn’t really know what else to say, he says, indignantly, “I am not.”

The guy laughs and shoves a handful of platinum blond hair out of his eyes. He’s so handsome it’s unbearable. He’s wearing a white button down, a black vest, and a thick checked scarf and Pete has the strangest feeling that he’s seen him somewhere before.

“There’s no one called Michael communicating with you,”  the guy says, throwing sarcastic air quotes around the word ‘communicating.’ “You’re up there talking to yourself and you fucking know it.”

This needs to be shut down, before it becomes a situation. “Could you go back to your seat, please?” Pete says coldly. “If you want a reading, you’re going to have to wait and see if anyone comes through for you.”

“Oh, I don’t have a seat,” he says, still laughing. “And I don’t need a reading, you’re coming through loud and clear, asshole. Really, please, don’t mind me. You can keep talking to Michael-from-Columbus, who isn’t fucking here, for the record.”

Pete flicks his eyes to Brenda. She looks confused, but not distraught, which is surprising given the circumstances. “Brenda, I’m so sorry about this,” he says with great sincerity.

“Um,” says Brenda. “That’s okay. I – are you talking to Michael right now? Because I had a couple questions about the checking account...”

Pete shakes his head. It makes the feathers on the collar of his jacket ruffle slightly. “Not right now. I’ll have him removed and we can get right back to Michael. He’s still waiting.”

“No, he isn’t,” the guy says brightly. “He really, really is not. I’ll give you credit where it’s due, though, you’re doing a fantastic job of talking to yourself. If I was the poor bastard grieving for my dead husband, searching everywhere for a scant grain of comfort? I’d probably believe you too.”

Pete bristles. “Go fuck yourself!”

The audience gasps. 

“Pete?” says a voice in his earpiece: Vicky, up in the control room. “Pete, what the fuck is going on out there? Who are you talking to?” She probably can’t see the douchebag on the stairs due to the banks of cameras and control monitors. “This is very convincing but, like, rein in the fucking language, Uri Gellar.”

“Yeah, Pete,” the guy spits. “Tell her who you’re talking to.”

There is no way he should be able to hear what’s going on in Pete’s earpiece. There’s a pretty clear ‘no prank shows’ clause in Pete’s contract, so if Ashton Kutcher is involved in this, he is going to sue everyone at the studio. All of them. From director to catering assistant and back again.

Blondie’s grin darkens. “Michael isn’t here. Neither was Terry from Queens, or Odette from New Orleans, or fucking Clarence from Philly. You’re a liar, Pete Wentz, a goddamn charlatan.”

Pete’s hands coil into fists. “Just shut your mouth, okay? People are going through a lot. They’re grieving. The least you could do is show a little respect for the dead.”

“Riiight, and you’re the poster boy for respecting the dead, aren’t you?” Blondie purses his lips in mock earnestness. They are frankly ridiculous lips. Which is not something Pete needs to examine right now. “I mean, these people have lost their parents, their spouses, their fucking kids, man. There are actual, honest to God grieving moms and dads in this audience, and what do you do? You go ahead and you pretend you can talk to them. To dead kids. Isn’t that fundamentally fucked in the head?”

Pete grits his teeth so hard he’s sure his dentist winces out in Lakeview. “Can someone get this idiot out of here, please?”

Charlie looks at him with an uncertain tip of his head. “Who?” he mouths, squinting into the crowd.

“They can’t see me,” Blondie sing-songs. “You do know that talking to yourself is, like, an advanced stage of madness, right?”

“Okay,” Pete snarls, with ire in his blood. “Let’s fucking go, wise guy.”

And then a funny thing happens.

The guy just… disappears.

***

The green room is thankfully devoid of disappearing, scarf-wearing lunatics with sparkling blue eyes and enigmatic lips. Still, Pete checks behind the door and under the couch and in the closet, just in case security have failed again and allowed the lunatic to secret himself somewhere about Pete’s personal space. He’s nowhere to be found.

The green room, however, is not devoid of Joe, a fact Pete finds extremely irritating.

Joe is Pete’s best friend, based on the usual metrics of shared interests and close physical proximity. That is to say, they met at a hardcore show on Fullerton and it turned out Joe lived in the next apartment block over from Pete, both traits that Pete found convenient in a best friend, so he stuck around. Now, Joe is Key Grip, which is a position he isn’t qualified for, and he earns more than any other Key Grip on any other psychic TV show in the country. Nepotism isn’t always a bad thing.

Joe is eating his lunch and watching Pete with studied nonchalance. Around a mouthful of burrito he says, “Okay, I’ll bite. What are you doing?”

Pete, on his hands and knees with his ass high in the air, is not in the mood to be questioned. 

“I’m not in the mood to be questioned,” he snaps. “But if you must know, I’m performing important perimeter checks. There could be breaches in security, like, basically anywhere.”

If Pete finds Bleached Lightnin’ under his couch, he’s going to tear off both of his arms and beat him to death with the wet ends. Thankfully, there’s nothing but dust bunnies, a lonely sock and a pizza crust. Pete turns his attention to the space between the dressing table and the wall. He mutters under his breath as he searches.

“You can never be too careful with crazies. Look what happened to John Lennon. Or the dude in Misery. We’re all a Kathy Bates away from being tied to a typewriter and having our feet smashed in with a sledgehammer.”

“What you’re doing totally isn’t weird, by the way,” Joe tells him affably. “In case you were wondering.”

“Okay. Where the fuck even?” Pete demands, once he’s established that Peroxide Princess hasn’t positioned himself under the coffee table, or the rug, or behind the promotional poster for season ten of Heaven’s Gate.

Joe looks nonplussed. “Where the fuck what?”

Pete begins to suspect that this is, in fact, a studio-joke situation. Those are his least favourite kind of jokes, unless he’s the one organising them. He’s undecided if a joke is worse than a disappearing hipster. He peers at Joe, because he’s known Joe for a long time, and he has a good chance of spotting if Joe is lying, and then he says, seriously, “The brunette chick. On the stairs. In the studio.”

He says ‘brunette chick’ because he thinks, if this is a prank, that Joe won’t be able to resist blurting out ‘but it was a blond dude!’ and then Pete will have his answer and he’ll know he’s not going insane. It would be preferable if he isn’t going insane. He’d like that very much.

Joe’s look shifts from nonplussed to concerned in a way that’s very hard to fake. “Um,” he says eventually. “I don’t think anyone was actually on the stairs, were they? I thought. What I mean is. Wasn’t that… an act? Like, part of the show?”

Pete glares at him. “You thought I was talking to myself?”

“Um… yes?” Joe ventures. “That’s exactly what I thought. I mean, isn’t that what you do?”

That is a reasonable assumption on Joe’s part, since Pete does spend ninety minutes, three times a week, talking to himself in front of a studio audience. But this time, Pete wasn’t talking to himself. “Can we start this conversation again?” he asks. “I’d really like to start over.”

“Sure,” Joe says. Joe is Pete’s most agreeable friend. 

“Okay,” Pete begins, then stops. He looks at Joe with such earnest he can feel it all the way down to his chipped black nail polish. “Are you telling me that no one could see the dude sitting on the stairs in the studio? Bleached hair? Scarf? Nice mouth?”

“You said it was a woman,” Joe points out. Which proves he’s paying attention, but doesn’t help Pete to not think he’s going insane. “But no. I didn’t see anyone on the stairs, nice mouth or otherwise. Is this some kind of cryptic test? Is my next bonus based on how well I answer this question because, I gotta tell you man, if I go home with less than full quota, Marie is gonna hit the goddamn roof.”

“But he was right there,” Pete says. He says it with feeling.

“Pete?” Joe begins carefully. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I want to see the playback,” Pete says. “I definitely want to see the playback.”

Joe looks concerned. “I’m the Key Grip. I’m not the guy you want to speak to about that. I can show you the lights. Do you want to see the lights, Pete?”

Pete does not want to see the lights. “No, I want to see the playback. I want to show you the douchebag on the stairs, and then I want to go home and watch the Gilmore Girls and drink my own bodyweight in white wine, confident in the knowledge that I’m not losing my fucking mind.”

“That’s, like, the least heterosexual evening ever, which is totally on brand,” Joe says. “Okay, then. We should go and find Gabe.”

Gabe is the director of Heaven’s Gate. He is the man with his finger on the pulse of every conversation Pete conducts, and his eye on the control monitor, waiting to tidy it up into something watchable. His office is at the far end of the studio, through a labyrinthine tangle of spaghetti noodle corridors and coded security doors. The doors whoosh open, Star Trek style, as Pete and Joe hurry side by side in silence. Pete is so busy looking for a tell-tale flash of blond hair that he almost trips and smashes his skull on three different sets of steel-edged stairs. 

“I need to see the playback!” Pete declares, before he’s inside of Gabe’s office. “Today’s episode. I need to prove to Detective Scully here that I wasn’t talking to myself on camera.”

“Technically?” Joe says. “I think she was Agent Scully. And I’m not saying you didn’t talk to someone on the stairs, I was just saying I didn’t see them, that’s all. And, that leads me to draw a very reasonable conclusion that you’re either hallucinating, or you saw a...”

Pete doesn’t think this is a funny joke. “If you finish that sentence, I’ll hang you by your pubes from your own lighting rig. Don’t tempt me. It’s not a great day. Show me the fucking playback.”

Obviously, Pete didn’t see a ghost. Obviously he didn’t, because ghosts aren’t real, despite him building up a very lucrative career from pretending to talk to them. He glares at the potted fern Gabe keeps in the corner of his office. Not in a weird way. It’s just, the fern is the perfect height for someone small and slim and blond to hide behind. 

Gabe looks up from his laptop. “I’m getting the feeling you’d like to see the playback.”

“Yes,” Pete says. “Now."

“I need you to know that we’re going to have a very serious conversation about you telling our… guests,  to go fuck themselves,” Gabe says, pivoting the screen so that Pete can see. He hits play. 

There it is, the studio through the eye of camera three, the camera positioned directly behind the stage. The chandelier glows against the blood velvet drapes, the candelabras flickering around Pete’s Poe-esque wingback chair, flanked by bookcases crammed with leather bound books, the colours in their spines picking out the words Heaven’s Gate. He did not build his brand on subtlety. Brenda weeps gently in the third row. Pete’s ass looks fantastic from this angle. 

Pete from thirty minutes ago says, “He did, he really did, he’s pointing something out to me. I’m getting pink. Flowers, maybe? Roses. Do roses mean anything to—” then, he stops, like he was interrupted mid-sentence. His head snaps to the right. He looks at the stairs. “Excuse me?” he says, furiously. “Can I help you with something?”

Many people have commented on Pete’s readings over the years, many skeptics and non-believers, and the upshot of their feedback is always this: No one can hold an entirely natural conversation with themselves. It’s not possible. The pauses aren’t right, the body language is off, there’s an intangible, uncanny valley quality to the stilted conversation breaks and cadence. This is not one of those moments. This, Pete thinks, is clearly a two-way conversation between him and the idiot in the scarf. 

There’s only one problem.

The idiot with the scarf is nowhere to be seen. 

“This is brilliant stuff,” Gabe tells him. On the screen, Pete roars ‘Go fuck yourself,’ to absolutely no visible, physical someone. “Honestly, I didn’t know you had it in you, you’ve been holding out on me for nine seasons, man. If you can keep this up — without the potty mouth, obviously — we’re going to be beat the living shit out of John Edward. Metaphorically speaking. Please don’t actually hit him, that would be awful for your image.”

Pete thinks he might need to lie down. “There’s no one on the stairs.”

“Well, no,” Gabe says, puzzled. “Obviously not. There’s never anyone on the stairs, is there? Because ghosts aren’t real and you couldn’t talk to them even if they were. I mean, you struggle to hold intelligent conversations with living people. Take now, for example.”

“Fuck you, I’m a natural conversationalist. And there was someone on the stairs,” Pete says the last part weakly because, evidently, there is no one on the stairs. He can see Pam, and Brenda, and the other lonely, dead-eyed souls haunting the audience. But there is no one on the stairs and Pete is clearly in the middle of a psychotic episode. Or maybe not. He’s still not sure if he’d realise he was having one of those. “You have to believe me,” he implores of both Joe and Gabe. His lip wobbles. There’s every possibility he may break on a sob. “Maybe the camera’s broken…”

Gabe frowns. “The camera broke and… didn’t show one person in particular?”

Pete bristles. “That could happen. Joe, you’re a tech guy, tell him that’s a thing that could happen.”

Joe shrugs. “That’s like — dramatically not a thing that could happen. I mean, light comes into the aperture, people interrupt that light. If people are not there, they don’t interrupt the light and they don’t show up on film. Because they’re not there,” he finishes, in a way he probably thinks is helpful. It’s not.

“Pfft,” Pete says, with an airy wave of his hand. “Science. You can explain anything with science.”

“Pete,” Gabe says carefully. “There’s clearly no one on the stairs.”

“Well, obviously,” Pete snaps. “Obviously there’s no one on the stairs because he’s found a way to make himself undetectable to the camera. Ask anyone, ask anyone who was in the studio and they’ll tell you—”

“Dude,” Joe interrupts, very rudely. “I was in the studio. I thought you were talking to dead Mitch from Cleveland.”

“Michael,” Pete corrects. “From Columbus.”

“Whatever!”

Pete takes a deep breath. “No, it’s not whatever! This is important! I was called out by fucking Bubbles from the Powerpuff Girls and now he’s not on the playback and we don’t know where he went! I think that’s a huge security concern. Don’t you think that’s a huge security concern? Whatever he’s done, it’s dangerous, it could be military testing. What if he’s scoping the place out? What if he’s going to come back and, like, murder me, live on camera? I could die and there would be no evidence whatsoever!”

“Military testing?” Gabe repeats. “On Heaven’s Gate?” He doesn’t look like he’s taking this seriously.

Pete nods. “Yes. Testing. For the military.”

Joe and Gabe share a look. It’s a significant look. “Maybe,” Gabe begins, after a long, uncomfortable pause. “Maybe you need some time off.”

“Some time to decompress,” Joe chimes in, in a way that’s entirely uninvited and unwelcome. 

“A little time away from the studio,” Gabe continues soothingly. Pete has no desire to be soothed. 

Pete draws himself up to his full height and wishes, fervently, that he could conduct this conversation wearing anything but a crushed velvet jacket with feathers around the collar. It is extremely difficult to imagine anyone taking him seriously when he looks like Criss Angel. He is worse than Criss Angel. At least Criss Angel does some cool magic tricks. Pete just stands on stage looking like a Hot Topic shift manager talking to both himself and invisible, scarf-wearing lunatics. 

“My vacation will be paid,” he says grandly, and turns on his heel to stalk for the door. 

“Your vacations are always paid,” Gabe calls after him. “It’s your show.”

Pete chooses to ignore this in favour of executing the perfect exit from the room, his middle finger raised. His exit is ruined somewhat by the undignified squeal that slips out of his mouth when the potted fern ruffles its leaves under the air-conditioning. 

***

Pete lives alone in a large, Greystone townhouse on Chicago’s North Side. It’s very big, and very baroque, and has a towering turret with a single mullioned window that looks out over Millennium Park. There’s creeping ivy along the walls and the front yard is spotted with naked buckthorn trees, their branches dark and twisted in the twilight. It looks extremely haunted. If someone was to sketch a haunted house, a photo fit of the ideal conditions in which to observe otherworldly happenings, this is the kind of thing they would produce. The windows glower down at him with menace. It looks unfriendly.

Pete eyes the house dubiously from the driveway. He regrets having no roommates. He is not sure he wants to go inside. A hotel is always a possibility, just for tonight...

“I’m not staying in a hotel because of a disappearing hipster.” Pete glares at his steering wheel. His steering wheel stares back without emotion, because it’s a steering wheel. 

“I’ve lived in this house for eight goddamn years,” he tells the car door, which cares as much as the steering wheel. “I will go inside,” he informs his limestone porch steps. “And I will make dinner,” he says to his house keys. “And nothing weird will happen at all,” he advises the front door, which creaks softly, just once, as though it’s laughing at his hubris. 

Pete locks the door firmly behind him and hangs his coat in the charming little boot closet that is just the right size to house a camera-averse psychopath and then he moves through the house and makes swift work of checking every closet, corner and bathroom, switching on every light, lamp and torch as he goes. One can never have too much light, he reasons, panting, in the centre of his remodelled kitchen. 

“I want a dog,” he tells no one in particular. “A dog would be very good company for a lonely, hallucinating weirdo like me.”

And no one answers. Because the house is empty. 

So, Pete busies himself with the evening news and the preparation of dinner, the noise of the newscasters and the smell of ramen easing the prickling feeling of being observed from every corner of the room. He eats standing up at the kitchen counter, chewing mindlessly as he stares at the TV on the wall. This is not something he would’ve done back when he was married to Mikey, but he’s no longer married to Mikey. Mikey moved out with large boxes of his comic books and movie posters and now Pete is the kind of bachelor who eats his dinner at the kitchen counter wearing nothing but his underwear. 

His life is not how he imagined it was going to be.

It starts, like all good ghost stories, with a flicker of the lights overhead. Pete, by now engrossed in the news and his dinner and a vague idea about masturbating in the shower, barely reacts. They flicker harder. He glances up and thinks about getting an electrician out to look at the wiring. 

And ghosts. 

He also thinks a tiny bit about ghosts.

Sometimes, ghosts can be reasoned with. Pete knows this because he read it in a very expensive book while researching the idea of Heaven’s Gate, not because he thinks it’s possible to talk to the dead. The fine, dark hair at the nape of his neck prickles. He can’t shake the uneasy sensation that he’s being watched. 

“Look,” he says out loud, feeling stupid. “Are you like — pissed at me about something? Is it the show? I can understand that, but my show is a community service, really. I make people feel good about themselves. I make their grief easier. I’m not a bad person.” He swallows uneasily. “And you should, like, go away.”

Pete holds his breath, staring up at the ceiling. The lights don’t flicker again and, after a moment or two, he begins to relax. He begins to quietly insult his own overactive imagination. He cuffs away a speck of broth from his chin with the back of his wrist and glances out of the kitchen window and just about fucking dies.

There is someone standing next to him at the counter, reflected clearly in the inky darkness of the glass. They are blond and they are short and they are standing so close that Pete should be able to feel the body heat kicking off them, or feel their breath tickling his cheek. He feels absolutely nothing. 

Slowly — and hating himself for lacking both the mental capacity and physical ability to launch himself across the room and through the relative safety of a plate glass window — Pete turns his head towards whoever it is standing next to him. The muscles in his neck object, like they’ve gained sentience and more common sense than his ridiculous brain and want to save him from his own lack of basic self-preservation. His breathing is choppy, his pulse more so. His hands grip into the marble countertop with such fierce determination that he threatens to leave behind indentations. He turns and he hyperventilates and he meets the clear, seaglass eyes that most definitely should not be in his house.

Blondie smirks. 

“Boo.”

***

It’s not that Patrick intended to become a ghost. 

It was one of those accidental situations. One minute, he’s minding his own business quietly embezzling millions from unsuspecting tax fraudsters, the next he’s fully discorporated and hanging around the woods out by Lake Michigan. He didn’t even believe in ghosts when he was living. It was a shock to the system when he stood up from the loose earth of his own fresh grave and promptly floated through a pine tree.

Still, he’s tried to make the best of it, and there are some definite plus points to hovering between worlds. For example, he can now travel wherever he wants in the Chicagoland area free of charge. The El has no specific ticketing regulations for members of the recently deceased, so he’s calling that a perk. He can also drift around nightclubs in the shadier parts of town and laugh at the faces the living make during sex. Not to mention the fun he has with the amateur ghost hunters. YouTube is giving him a purpose in life. Death. Whatever. 

On the other hand, he hasn’t touched anything in almost a year and he’d really like to change his socks and scratch his nose and maybe call his mom. He misses conversation, too. 

Patrick is… lonely. 

Which is why he had the bright idea at the beginning of the summer to start hitting up venues hosting psychics and mediums and miscellaneous communicators with the spirit world. It’s not that he believed communication with the dead was possible but, he reasoned, until he became a member of the restless spirit club himself, he didn’t realise there was a population of sentient dead to communicate with. It stood to reason, he thought, that if ghosts were real then maybe some of those people weren’t lying. It made sense to try and find someone who could hear him, and then, at best, they could figure out how to get him out of limbo. At worst, they might be able to talk about the Jay-Z/Kanye collaboration. 

It turned out, none of them were telling the truth. 

None of them until Pete. Which was unbelievable because Pete was pretending to talk to a dead guy named Michael who wasn’t even there when he could have been talking to a dead guy named Patrick who was. An actual ghost. The only actual non-corporeal being in the studio. Patrick almost wanted to haunt him just for the chandeliers and the douchey jacket, but his mind was made up by Pete the Psychic’s inability to recognise a ghost when it was sitting in front of him. So, Patrick followed him home.

He watched Pete check his house for signs of life — which was stupid when Patrick’s heart hasn’t throbbed with blood since last November — he watched him switch on lights and talk to himself and fix himself a sad pan of ramen in his gorgeous kitchen. And it is a seriously gorgeous kitchen. Patrick hasn’t seen this much exposed pipe and brickwork since the property scam Bob ran back in 2009. Patrick watched Pete and Patrick thought Shit, he’s as lonely as I am, and Patrick tried to figure out the best way to introduce himself. 

Then, Patrick remembered that he was sort of an asshole in life and his personality hasn’t really changed in death, so he flickered the lights and apparated at Pete’s side and he said “Boo,” and now Pete is screaming bloody murder and streaking for his front door like Patrick is an actual, honest-to-God demon and not just a perfectly harmless ghost in a dirty shirt. This is not, exactly, going well. 

Patrick sighs. 

Across the hall, Pete has discovered the door is locked and, rather than doing something sensible and unlocking it, he is attempting to batter his way into his coat closet. He does not look back at Patrick. He makes high-pitched, panicked little ‘neeneenee’ sounds on every broken breath. The closet door gives and he collapses inside, slamming it closed behind him. 

For a clairvoyant, he is startlingly uneducated on the basic metaphysical principles of the spirit world. Namely, that there is no way to impose physics upon the metaphysical. TL:DR? Doors are not a problem for someone who isn’t corporeal.

Patrick follows, slipping through the door and into the dark, dark depths of the closet beyond. It’s cozy inside, his non-body tucked up against Pete’s, swaddled by coats and jackets and Pete’s choppy breathing. He watches Pete reach for the light cord cautiously, trembling gently. The light clicks on and Pete’s eyes meet Patrick’s once more. He has nice eyes, Patrick notices, gold and brown and warm and pretty. Patrick hopes Pete might mellow on second viewing.

“Hey,” Patrick whispers. “Why are we hiding in here?”

Pete takes a deep breath and does not mellow. 

“Skreeeeeee!” he shrieks, his nails raking against the door. 

Patrick decides it might be a good idea to explain that he has no intention of causing Pete any physical harm before he goes ahead and causes himself physical harm. “Hey,” he says again. “I have a — hey, stop screaming — a favour to ask you.”

Pete does not stop screaming. Instead of not screaming, Pete intensifies his efforts as he attempts to focus his motor control on the proper use and function of a basic push-down door handle. If Patrick had physical presence, he would help him. Probably. Instead he watches, nonplussed, and waits for Pete to… tire himself out or something. 

“It’s a door handle,” he tells Pete helpfully. And he is trying very hard to be helpful which is difficult, because it’s not really a state that comes naturally to him. He has no evidence to the contrary but he’s starting to suspect that Pete may struggle in certain areas of academic and cortical function. “You push it — no, push it. Down. Stop screaming. Okay, like that, yeah, just—”

“Oshkeebah,” Pete declares, a fluent speaker of advanced, panicked Russian in his attempt to escape from — Patrick feels — the most physically unthreatening ghost in a long and varied history of ghosts. 

“You’re overreacting,” Patrick informs him. “You need to — seriously, stop screaming — calm down.”

Patrick is not expecting Pete to attempt to touch him. Or he is, but he’s expecting it distantly, in a human way that’s no longer relevant to his current status of: deceased. It’s a normal, living reaction to push away the thing that is terrifying you. Particularly if that thing is 5’4 in shoes and roughly as intimidating as a small, shivering pomeranian. There would be significantly less pushing if Patrick was 7 feet tall and dressed in a tunic of human skulls, he feels. Still, Patrick is woefully unprepared for Pete to raise both hands, plant them solidly where Patrick’s lungs, heart, and other assorted viscera once were, and shove with all his might. 

This sparks an inevitable chain reaction of events whereby Pete barrels straight through Patrick and bazookas himself, headfirst, through the nest of assorted winter coats and into the wall of the closet. Because Patrick is not corporeal. This ends with a thump and a muffled bang to the forehead for Pete. The sort of collision that leads to no lasting injury whatsoever. 

Lucky Pete, Patrick thinks.

Or, that’s what Patrick would think, with great sarcasm, if he were capable of thinking about anything at all other than the immense and agonising pain tearing through his chest as Pete passes through him. Patrick is immolated in pre-lit gasoline, his long-gone skin and central nervous system replaced with a snuggie made entirely of sheet lightning. Patrick wants to die from this pain, so much so that he forgets he is already, actually dead. He falls backwards, straight through the closet door, which doesn’t hurt at all — or at least, doesn’t hurt more — and lands on his ass on the hallway floor where he writhes and twitches and lets out his own haunting wail.

“Aaaaaiiiiiieeeeee!” he howls, like a ghost. “Fucking fuckitty fuckstick ass!” he adds, less like a ghost.

From inside the closet, Pete emits a low, hunted warble. “Mmmphrmmgh.”

When Patrick has regained the use of his tongue, he puts it to swift and colourful use. “You absolute chucklefuck!” he screams at the door. “You complete and total assbadger! What the fuck is your problem?”

Dying hurt less than this. At least it was over relatively quickly. From within the closet, Pete shouts bravely. “Go away! I don’t know who you are but, like, I don’t want you here!”

“Tough shit, asshole,” Patrick informs him. “You can see me. Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for someone who can see me? Get out here and, like, validate me.”

For a long time, nothing happens. There are sounds of panicked movement from within the closet. Patrick considers sticking his head through the door to take a look, but he’s scared about what Pete might do to him if he does. 

When Pete emerges, cautiously, from the depths of the closet, Patrick has managed to float upright. He would tremble, if ghosts possessed the ability to tremble, which they do not. Pete is clutching two umbrellas that he’s arranged into a makeshift crucifix. He is also, for some inexplicable reason, wearing a Cubs beanie, a hockey mask, and a mothy raincoat. Patrick whimpers, and makes plans to locate Theresa Caputo. Or the creepy kid from Sixth Sense. Joel Something Something. Or maybe Haley. It’s hard to recall movie trivia when his head feels like an inside out gym sock.

“Stay back,” Pete tells him, like Patrick has any intention of getting within ten feet of this electron-charged moron if he can help it at all. “I’m warning you!”

Pete rattles the umbrellas with intent. If Patrick had physical presence — and control over his gross motor function — he would shove them both somewhere unpleasant. He curls into a tight and protective ball of ectoplasm, or dark energy, or whatever the hell he’s made of these days and asks, “Is my head actually in my ass right now? It feels like it might be in my ass.”

“Who are you?” Pete demands. He’s still holding the umbrellas like their vaguely cross-y formation will protect him from the guy lying on the floor, twitching in the static of his own reversed-polarity electromagnetic field. “What are you doing in my house? Is this a haunting? The, uh… the power of Christ compels you!”

Patrick glares at Pete. “I’m not Linda fucking Blair!”

Pete looks at his umbrellas. He looks at Patrick. He is still wearing the hockey mask. It’s like standing in front of a confused Jason Voorhees. 

“Oh.”

“Do you go around disturbing the presence of every good-looking phantom twink who walks into your house?” Patrick asks irritably. “Jesus Christ, this is why you’re single, in case you were wondering.” Patrick floats towards him. Pete makes a noise like he just caught his testicles in the zipper of his jeans. “Oh, fuck you. I’m not going to fucking hurt you. What am I going to do? Light flicker you to death? You literally passed straight through me, which, just so we’re clear, hurt like a motherbitch.”

Pete pauses. He pushes the hockey mask from his face which causes a charmingly sweaty, jagged line of hair to fall into his eyes. If Patrick had a pulse, it would be accelerating in appreciation. Pete Wentz may be a lot of things; an idiot, a charlatan, a hokey bastard ghost liar. But he is also unfairly attractive. His lips are curled into a tight, derisory snarl, threatening not at all. He is still brandishing the umbrellas. “If I promise to put these down,” he says, “do you promise not to try anything… weird.”

Patrick rolls his eyes so hard it’s a wonder he doesn’t see his own brain matter. “Yes, Pete. I promise I won’t do anything rash, like not beating you to death with my incorporeal fists, if you put down the umbrellas.”

Patrick passes his hand back and forth through the console table to his left in demonstration of precisely how non-threatening he is to the physical world. It doesn’t sting at all. But then, neither do all of the commuters who wander aimlessly through Patrick on the El platform at Kinsey. That Pete is the first person to have this effect on him is something he’ll examine when his ears have stopped ringing.

“Okay,” says Pete, a man apparently immune to sarcasm. He places the umbrellas down with caution. “Okay, you need to tell me what the fuck is going on. How do you know my name? Where did you get my address? I need names, I need places, I need dates.”

Patrick looks at Pete. He holds up his fingers and ticks each point off in turn. “Pete Wentz, his TV studio, this afternoon.”  

“Oh,” Pete says, the raincoat flapping open slightly and revealing an alluring suggestion of the tattoos beneath. Then he wobbles into a slushy pile of limbs and sports memorabilia onto the hardwood. “Oh. I think I need to… sit down. For a minute. Oh, I’m sitting down already. That’s good. That’s… convenient.” He looks up at Patrick with his coppery eyes. “Are you a…?”

“A ghost?” Patrick asks lightly. He’s had almost a year to accustom himself to a reality in which, non-specifically, ghosts are real and, more specifically, he is one. “A spirit? A spectre? A restless soul?” He tips his head to one side and floats incrementally closer to Pete who, though tense, doesn’t seem inclined to touch him again. “Yeah, I think so. At least, it would explain the whole ‘I was totally murdered but I’m still here and I can walk through walls and no one can see me’ thing. If I’m not a ghost, I have, like, no idea.”

Pete blinks at him. He is eminently, remarkably handsome. “Oh,” he says again, and reaches out to brush Patrick’s sleeve. Patrick, a man with no desire to experience the sensation of using a pylon as a jungle gym twice in one evening, jerks back out of reach. Pete’s hand drops. “Sorry. I just — I’ve never met a ghost before.”

“That,” Patrick says drily, “is a very bold statement from a man who makes a living out of communicating with ghosts.”

Pete scoffs: “That’s why I’m having a difficult time convincing myself that this is happening and you’re not just a figment of an undiagnosed mental illness. Or, like, food poisoning.”

Patrick surges lazily upwards and prescribes a listing barrel roll through the air as Pete watches. He didn’t realise how much he’s missed being seen. He lands silently, hovering an inch or so above the ground, legs crossed, five feet from Pete. He raises both eyebrows. “Your imagination isn’t this good and I’m pretty sure you can’t get food poisoning from freeze dried noodles.”

“Look, I eat other stuff sometimes. It’s a perfectly balanced meal if you add some chicken.”

“Yeah, nice coronary health, asshole.”

“Dick,” Pete mutters. He looks at Patrick. “I’m not afraid of you, I don’t think.” 

Patrick chooses not to be offended by this besmirchment of his clearly subpar haunting skills. There should’ve been more flickering lights, he thinks. More otherworldly moaning. 

“That’s fine. Maybe it’s easier if you’re not. Honestly, I don’t think I could deal with the screaming.”

They fall into a silence that feels eerily companionable. Patrick did not have many friends in life. There were very few people he spent time with without the intention of extracting money from them. This feels… comforting. “Do you have a name?” Pete asks suddenly. “Like, do you remember it? I don’t — I don’t know how it works... after. When. Um.” 

Pete staggers to a clumsy conversational halt. Patrick grins. 

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m Patrick. Patrick Stump. And I really need your help.”

***

Pete’s day is not improved by the presence of a ghost in his previously unhaunted house. Or, it is briefly improved, but only by the knowledge that he’s not going insane. Probably. He’s either not going insane and he’s talking to a ghost, or he’s not talking to a ghost but he is going insane. There is no winner in this particular sweepstake. 

Patrick is sitting on a barstool at Pete’s kitchen island. He is dressed, as he was in the studio, in a grubby white button down, a black vest and tight black pants. He is wearing fingerless gloves and a grey scarf and his top button is popped, like he’s on his way to a slutty business meeting. The drink Pete poured him — because he wasn’t sure if it was rude not to pour one, and he wasn’t going to ask — sits untouched at his elbow. He looks like someone Pete might have picked up from Grindr. Or he would, if his ass wasn’t hovering an inch or so above the stool.

“I knew I recognised you,” Pete tells Patrick. “You’re the asshole who conned all of those people out of their 401k accounts!” 

Patrick raises an eyebrow. “In my defence, I told them the value of their investment could go down as well as up. It was in the fine print.”

Patrick smirks up at Pete from the screen. It is a distinctly alive and rosy-cheeked Patrick, hale and hearty and distractingly sexy, dressed in a tuxedo at the fundraiser of a nonexistent charitable organisation. CONMAN HIJACKS $2.3 MILLION FROM REPUBLICAN INVESTORS screams the headline. This is not the only article Pete has found featuring Patrick’s name. This is not the only article by a very long shot. Patrick was, by all accounts, a very prolific hustler. 

“So,” he asks, taking a swig from the open bottle of cooking brandy that Mikey left behind in one of the kitchen cabinets. The alcohol is medicinal. It’s been a rough day. “Is that who killed you? A pissed off investor?”

Patrick’s smile is wan. “No. Not exactly. It was, um,” he pauses and passes a pale hand through his pale hair, “it was my business partner. And boyfriend.”

“Both of them? Jeez.” Pete’s eyebrows rise. He is embarrassed by the jump he feels in his guts when Patrick says boyfriend. Now is not the time to get excited by the sexuality of someone who shuffled loose their mortal coil some time ago. Pete has universally accepted worst taste in men, but ‘dead’ would be a new low.

“No,” Patrick says. “No, they were — one person. Just one person. Both roles. I think, well, I suspect the whole, uh, boyfriend thing might have been a scam. Which is ironic, don’t you think?”

He smiles with such earnestness that Pete almost imagines he might be blushing. If he had a vascular system. Which he does not, because he’s a ghost. 

Pete clears his throat. “Your ex… killed you?”

“Murdered me,” Patrick corrects, like a man who enjoys correcting people. “I prefer murdered because it sounds intentional. Killed implies it could’ve been an accident, but, like, luring your boyfriend to a deserted forest and then hitting him in the back of the head with a fucking golf club requires at least a passing amount of intent and forward-planning. I think most lawyers would agree on that.”

Pete blinks slowly. “I… Wow. Okay then, murdered it is.”

“I’ve had a lot of time to think about the technicalities, what with being dead and all,” Patrick tells him, smoothing a hand over the front of his waistcoat. “And now, apparently, I don’t get my go to the light moment, and this is all his fucking fault. Go ahead, google Bob Bryar.”

Pete does. He doesn’t like what he finds. “Local businessman Bob Bryar claims conman Patrick Stump duped him into using his own contacts to access huge amounts of government money in what turned out to be an elaborate ponzi scheme,” he reads out loud. Patrick snarls in a way that Pete would’ve found terrifying thirty minutes ago. “Bryar alleges that by the time his accountants discovered the discrepancy, Stump had disappeared, taking the money with him. ‘I don’t know where he is,’ Bryar stated at a press conference last week, ‘I suspect he made it over the border into Mexico, or fled to Switzerland to take advantage of the banking laws over there.’ The investigation into the missing funds continues.” Pete looks up. “Oh. That’s basically the shittiest thing ever. I’m sorry, dude.”

“Fuck that guy,” Patrick spits. He spits it with such heart. Which is understandable since it’s clear he didn’t see it coming. Either the break up, or the fatal blow to the back of the head with a nine iron. 

Pete props his chin in his hand and looks at Patrick across the breakfast island and asks the question he’s been wanting to ask since Patrick formally introduced himself thirty minutes ago. 

“So… Why do you need my help?” 

“Isn’t it obvious?” Patrick asks, his grin is a dazzling, toothsome thing. “I want what every ghost in every movie wants: I want revenge. This is my Nevermore moment. I want you to find my body and clear my name and prove Bob fucking murdered me.”

Pete is less thrilled about Patrick’s suggestion than Patrick appears to think he ought to be. His startled puppy yelp and the way he propels himself backwards from the kitchen island with the force of a Cat 5 hurricane demonstrate how not okay he is with the plan. Patrick frowns at him, puzzled, because clearly — to him at least — it’s an idea that’s both obvious and brilliant. 

“Oh no,” Pete says. “No, no, no.”

“Or, on the other hand, oh yes,” Patrick counters. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“You’ve got the wrong psychic,” Pete insists, backpedalling in long, hurried strides around his kitchen island. Pete has never backpedalled before. He doesn’t love it. 

“I definitely do not have the wrong psychic,” Patrick informs Pete, advancing on him across the tile with intent. “I have the right psychic, because I have the only fucking pyschic in the Chicagoland area who is actually psychic.” Pete makes a garbled sound of distress. “Yeah, I’m as shocked as you are.”

“Patrick,” says Pete, and Patrick’s name feels warm and breathless in his mouth. “Patrick, listen to me. Those kind of people — people like Bob Bryar — they are scary people. They are scary, violent people and they are dangerous and they are frequently armed with actual fucking guns.”

“Yes,” Patrick nods sagely. “Yes, I noticed that right around the time he murdered me.”

“Oh God,” Pete whimpers. “Oh God, he did, didn’t he? He straight up fucking murdered you with a golf bat. Stick. Club. The thing.” Pete mimes swinging a golf club in the direction of Patrick’s skull, which is probably disrespectful, at best. “And he allegedly liked you! If I go after him, he could do things to me. Terrible things. Awful things. Things I don’t even want to think about!”

“Stop being such a baby,” Patrick snaps. “I have a plan. It’s a good plan. It’s a really good plan that puts you at no risk whatsoever…” He pauses, head cocked. “Like, basically no risk. There’s very little risk. Not an amount of risk worth mentioning.”

Pete glares at Patrick. “That is not comforting.”

“No one’s going to hurt you,” Patrick tells him, earnestly. “You’re going to be absolutely fine, and Bob is going to go to jail, and you can go back to being Lifetime’s answer to Kylo Ren, and we never have to see each other again.”

“There is, like, literally no known universe in which you can know that for sure,” Pete says. He is brandishing his brandy bottle with fury. 

“There is this universe, and yes I can,” Patrick assures him, “because you’re going to approach the police, and they’re going to listen to you in ways they do not listen to me because you can talk and I can only make lights flicker and, apparently, no one teaches law enforcement Morse code anymore.” He enunciates each point with care. “You’re my golden ticket, Pete. You’re all I have.”

Pete gives this some thought, and then he says, “You know Morse code?” Which is not the point.

“That’s not the point,” Patrick snaps, proving that they’re either on the same wavelength, or that he can read minds. The last thing Pete needs is a mind-reading ghost. “The point is, if you go to the police and tell them you’re a paranormal investigator—”

“I am no such thing.”

“—then you can lead them to the construction site, tell them you have a weird feeling about one particular area, they call in the cadaver dogs and that’s it.” Patrick pauses and claps his hands together and gives Pete a moment to assess the brilliance of his plan. Pete agrees with this assessment not at all. “Infallible, right?”

This is the kind of plan that will get them both killed. Actually, this is the kind of plan thought up by someone who already got himself killed. This particular plan will kill only Pete. There will be no resolution, no passing into the light, there will be nothing more than another body buried in the the wet concrete foundation of an office block somewhere in Logan Square and John fucking Edward will host a Lifetime special in which he attempts to communicate with Pete’s spirit to find out where he is. That’s the kind of poetic justice Pete can look forward to if he engages in this plan. 

“You and I,” Pete tells him, draining the last of the brandy with vigour, “have wildly differing opinions on the word ‘infallible.’ Unless infallible is like inflammable. Is it like inflammable? I feel like it probably is in this case.”

Patrick stands in the centre of Pete’s kitchen. His shoulders slump, his hands sink into his pockets, he is still floating, which Pete wishes he wouldn’t do. It’s not that Pete doesn’t want to help. He does. He does. It’s just that ‘help’ is a universe away from ‘die for the cause at the hands of a pscyhotic fraduster who has already got away with murder once.’ Patrick looks at him with such sadness, Pete’s guts squirm and curdle.

“Do you have any idea what it’s like to live outside of the world?” Patrick asks. “You’re the first person I’ve met since I died who actually has a shot at helping me out. I don’t want to put you in danger, I swear it, I just want you to go and talk to the police and see if they can figure it out.”

Pete sighs and opens his kitchen cabinet and takes a swipe at a dusty bottle of cooking wine. He takes down a third of it in one long, ill-advised swig. There is every possibility that he will end the night with fatal alcohol poisoning and the point will be moot.

“Are you playing the ghost card?”

“Spectral being,” Patrick sniffs. “And yes.”

“Fine,” Pete says, gasping at the sour bite of merlot at the back of his throat. “But if I die, I swear to God, I will drag you down into hell with me.”

***

“If this all goes to shit and I wind up arrested, or dead, I want you to know that I’ll — I’ll—”

“Haunt me?” Patrick asks casually. “Yeah, not really a threat. I wonder if we could fuck if we were both ghosts? Do you think that’s possible?”

They are walking through the Magnificent Mile towards the police station. Pete exudes an air of sticky reluctance with every step of his purple high tops against the sidewalk. Patrick knows the air must be cold and crisp because, logically, he knows it’s October and he knows Pete is wearing a battered woolen military coat and he can see the way the tips of Pete’s ears flush pink, but Patrick feels the same hollow lack of sensation he’s felt since he blinked awake on top of his own makeshift grave. He misses feeling warm. All Patrick has really felt since he came to limbo is different shades of sad and lonely.

Pete makes an irritated sound in the back of his throat. “I would not fuck you, we barely know each other,” a man looks at Pete in alarm and then steps to the side, giving Pete a wide berth but walking straight through Patrick, “Oh God,” Pete hisses, “everyone thinks I’m talking to myself. Or hitting on them. If you don’t get me killed, you’re gonna get me sectioned.”

“Well, if you’d stop flirting with me for one second…”

Pete grunts. He begins to blush. “I am not flirting with you. You would know if I was flirting with you. I have a PhD in advanced astral flirting.”

“I’ve caught you looking at my dick, like, sixteen times so far.”

“Shut up! I am not! It’s just… my eye is naturally drawn because—”

“Seventeen times.”

“You mentioned it! You can’t mention it and not expect me to look at it!”

“Oh, Pete, you know how to flatter a guy.” Patrick grins brightly, all teeth. Pete doesn’t mention that Patrick didn’t react to the commuter walking through him, so Patrick doesn’t bring it up either. He doesn’t understand why Pete had such a visceral, violent effect on him the night before. 

“Okay,” Patrick says, as they pause to the side of the towering glass door. “Do you remember the plan?”

“Stand outside, get filmed talking to myself on CCTV, go in there and tell them I see dead people—”

“Dead person. Singular. Aside from me, your psychic powers suck.”

“Whatever. Tell them I’m communicating with the ghost of a known conman, offer to lead them to his body — which you still haven’t told me the location of, just so we’re clear—”

“Oh, I’m sorry! It was a little disorienting being hit in the back of the skull with a golf club!”

“Uhuh. Then I’ll have them lock me up in an institution where, hopefully, I’ll be safe from your scary gangster ex when he finds out I’m trying to frame him for your murder. Does that cover the salient points, or did I miss something?”

Patrick bares his teeth at Pete and Pete doesn’t have the grace to look intimidated. Patrick is going to find a new, better psychic and then he’s never going to talk to Pete Wentz or think about his stupid TV show ever again. Patrick doesn’t say any of this because it’s not the sort of thing that will encourage Pete to enter the police station. Instead, he makes vague plans about making sure every light Pete ever owns flickers constantly from this moment on. 

“I am not trying to frame him for murder,” he grits out icily, and if his teeth were made of anything but dark matter, he’s sure he’d risk compound fracturing. “The thing about framing is — and this is super important, you should pay attention — the thing about it is, the person who is framed didn’t actually do anything. Bob, on the other hand, did actually murder me.”

Pete’s eyebrows do that migrating for the moon thing that widens his eyes and makes his brow crease attractively. “Says you.”

“Says me?” Patrick repeats. “Ladies and idiots of the jury, I would like to draw your attention to Exhibit A in the murder of Patrick Martin Stump: the ghost of Patrick Martin Stump.” He gestures expansively to himself, just in case Pete doesn’t make the connection. “The prosecution rests, your honour.”

“Your middle name is Martin?” Pete asks, instead of making an intelligent observation about the plan. 

Patrick scowls, he knows where this is going. “Martin is a perfectly acceptable middle name.”

“And your first name is Patrick and your last name is Stump.” Pete’s lips prickle with mischievous intent. “So... your initials are PMS?” His smirk transcends the physical plane. Patrick, who has felt nothing beyond aching stillness for eleven months, begins to feel… flustered. 

“How old are you?” he snaps. “Do you think I made it through four years of public high school without hearing that joke, like, a dozen times a week?”

“Did your parents dislike you from birth or did that develop later?” Pete asks gleefully. “Did no one say it out loud, in front of them, and like, check they understood? Oh God, are you blushing? Can ghosts blush? Is that a thing?”

Patrick has no idea if he’s blushing or not, so he clears his throat and points to the police station in a manner he hopes is commanding. 

“Can we go inside, please? We have a diligent and professional police force to coerce into action. There’s, like, not a moment to spare or something.”

“You are blushing,” Pete mutters gleefully, and earns himself some serious side-eye from a police officer leaving the building. Good, Patrick thinks, hopefully she’ll arrest Pete, and then he’ll shut his stupid handsome mouth. “Alright. Let’s go… get me killed, I guess.”

The short version of the story is this: Chicago PD’s finest do not believe a single word that comes out of Pete’s mouth. 

The longer version is that they enter the police station and Pete approaches the front desk with the enthusiasm of a member of the French aristocracy approaching the guillotine. Dressed in his military coat and ridiculous shoes, with his hair in wild fuck me spikes and last night’s eyeliner dark on his lashes, he looks like a man who has committed many crimes. So, when he brings both hands down sharply in front of the harried-looking officer seated behind the desk and shouts, “I need to talk to you about a murder!” she jumps back like she imagines he might be about to commit another one. 

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to take a step back from the desk.”

Pete looks to Patrick for assistance. This means that, to the untrained eye of the police officer and every other person around them, Pete is looking at a blank spot to his left. Patrick points at the police officer aggressively. “Look at her, you idiot! She can’t see me! You’re making yourself look completely fucking insane!”

“Right,” Pete says hurriedly, to Patrick, nodding his head. This does nothing to make him look less insane. He snaps around to face the officer once more. “I need to talk to someone about the Patrick Stump disappearance. I have, like, intel.” He flashes Patrick a thumbs up that he must think is subtle. He thinks incorrectly.

“The what?” 

It is so, so gratifying to be memorable, Patrick thinks sarcastically. “Rude,” he hisses under his breath. 

“This guy,” Pete says, and Patrick is grateful that Pete doesn’t turn to look at him or gesture to him in any sort of crazy-person way. He just shoves a hand down into his pocket to retrieve his phone, removing his hand from her line of sight.

Which is the wrong thing to do: “Sir, get your hands where I can see them!”

“I just wanted to show you something! Oh, did you think — the thing wasn’t my penis! I’m gay and on TV!” 

Pete is not destined for a career as a cool on-the-fringes police consultant. If Pete were to appear in a crime drama, he’d be the bit part who gets shot in the first seventeen seconds of episode one. He would not be named in the credits.

“Please stop talking,” Patrick begs. “You are so not the Jamie Lannister I need right now.”

“Listen,” says Pete, kicking out at Patrick subtly and catching him in the shin. This time, it doesn’t hurt. This time, a golden warmth pools out from his touch that makes Patrick shiver. “I just need to talk to someone about the Patrick Stump case. I have important information to share. I have, like, inside info, if you get what I mean. Uh, not that I’m saying I killed him, that’s not what I’m saying at all. But maybe I know who did, you know?”

“Wait,” she says, holding up a hand. Pete stops talking. Which is a shame because clearly it’s going super well. “Aren’t you that guy from that TV show? Heaven Something?”

“Heaven’s Gate,” Pete preens, like an idiot. “We’re the second most popular paranormal conversation talk show in the country. I almost won an Emmy. Well, I was shortlisted. Well, I was shortlisted for the shortlist. You know how these things are rigged.”

“Stop. Talking,” Patrick hisses. 

Pete does, but only so the police officer can eye him dubiously and say, “My grandma loves that show. But we don’t accept assistance from, uh, what did you say you are? A ghost whisperer?”

“Paranormal investigator. You know it’s official because it has the word investigator.”

Maybe Patrick is in purgatory. Maybe this is what happens to all of the bad people who don’t do good things with their only shot at life. Maybe he’s destined to spend the rest of eternity trailing an idiot like Pete. Patrick pinches the bridge of his nose and wishes he had any reason whatsoever to breathe deeply. Some deep breaths would be very soothing for him. The police officer looks at Pete. She looks at her computer. She looks back at Pete. It’s not a look that inspires hope in her ability to have this all fixed by lunchtime. 

“I think,” she says carefully, “that I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Pete baulks. “But you’re supposed to protect and serve,” he objects, a man with no sense of self-preservation, or a healthy respect for the firearms carried by law enforcement and their willingness to use them at the slightest provocation. “I have been neither protected, nor served, and I want to speak to your supervisor.”

“Pete,” Patrick mutters with urgency. “Pete you’re no use to me whatsoever in a police cell. We should let the nice lady with a gun do her job and we should leave.”

“I am unhappy,” Pete tells the police officer, whose fingers move incrementally towards her belt. “I am very unhappy and I’ll be lodging a formal complaint. I have a voice. I have a presence!”

“You won’t have one for much longer if you don’t knock that shit off,” Patrick shouts, and only Pete reacts and Pete is the only person in this whole godforsaken city who can hear him and Patrick wants to know who he has to approach for the refund he so clearly deserves. “Leave her alone and let’s go!”

With that, Patrick does something incredibly reckless. He reaches out and he snags his pale, ghostly fingers around Pete’s wrist and, as he would have done in life, he tugs, hard. When Patrick has forgotten what he is and grabbed at poles on the El or handrails in the park — a stupidly corporeal affectation that he doesn’t need, since the metaphysical world isn’t under the thrall of something as human as balance — his hand has drifted straight through. Patrick has felt, as with all things now, absolutely nothing. 

That’s… not what happens when he touches Pete. 

It’s a tiny thing, really. Nothing like his non-astral body, where he could grasp and tug and pull and feel resistance. Nothing like the night before when it felt like being submerged in acid and torn apart from the inside. This is subtler than that. This feels like the intricate webbing of Pete’s veins and nerves and tissue linking briefly with the shivery dark matter of Patrick’s hand to form a bond that tug, tug, tugs. It’s sluggish, the pull of a shoe in thick mud, but Patrick feels it, and Patrick gasps, and Pete does too, yanking his hand away like he’s been stung. 

They stare at one another in stunned silence. “I felt you touch me,” Pete whispers. “How the fuck did I feel that?”

“I have another idea,” Patrick says weakly, his hand still tingling with pins and needles. Maybe he’s turning into a poltergeist. At least then he’d stand a chance of getting a movie made about him. “I’ll tell you when we get outside. Please come with me before she fucking shoots you.”

“Sir?” says the police officer. “Do I need to call someone?”

Pete doesn’t say a word. He just spins on the heel of his ugly purple high tops and heads back out into the weak October sun. Patrick turns to the police officer and says, “Fuck you very much,” and then he follows him. 

He brushes his hand through three different people on his way out of the door.

He doesn’t feel a thing.

***

When Patrick said he had another idea, this was not exactly what Pete had in mind. He thought Patrick, with his plethora of underground contacts, might know a private eye or a gun for hire, or anything cooler than a solid oak door with a neat brass plaque:

PROF. A HURLEY, PHYSICIST. 

“How do you even know about this guy?” Pete asks, his voice low. 

Patrick shrugs. “I overheard a couple of his students talking about him on the El one morning, so I followed them and listened in to a couple of his lectures. Not gonna lie, if I was alive when I heard him, I’d have thought he was insane, but… I’m surprisingly more open to the whole ghost thing since I became one.”

It’s dark now. They are standing outside of a door in a secure and security-coded block in a greystone building of the University of Chicago. They have no right to be here, but have finagled access using a series of increasingly complicated excuses. Patrick came up with the excuses and Pete repeated them in a panicked bleat. Only one of them will feel any ill-effects if a security guard comes along with a nightstick. 

“So… this is your idea?” he asks. 

Patrick looks as though he thinks it’s a very good idea. “It’s a good idea,” he says haughtily, his hair flopping into his eyes in distracting, sexy spikes. Pete’s thoughts are unsettlingly erotic. “A great idea.”

“Cool. Cool, cool. Would you say it was a better or worse idea than approaching Chicago PD? If you were ranking them.”

“Admittedly, my first idea didn’t pan out, but I feel like this might be the one that turns it all around for us,” Patrick says, looking not-at-all-abashed. His conman confidence has not been disaffected by his sudden expulsion from the ranks of the living, it seems. “I’m like, totes confident in my assessment of this as an excellent idea.”

Pete gives him a look he hopes conveys exactly how unlikely he finds this. “Who says totes? What is this? 2009? And who the hell is Prof A Hurley, anyway?”

“Well, I’m sorry I can’t keep up with what’s cool on Twitter from beyond the grave,” Patrick snaps. “It’s surprisingly difficult to get AT&T on the metaphysical plane. And Professor Hurley is a respected scientist in the field of… You know?” he gestures to himself like he did in the police station. Pete is still distracted by the crotch. “Me.”

“It says here he’s a respected scientist in the field of physics,” Pete offers helpfully, tapping sharply on the plaque in front of them with his pointer finger. “Isn’t physics generally, like, the polar opposite of whatever it is you happen to be? And, honestly, I still haven’t ruled out ‘psychosis’ or ‘gas’ as possible trigger points for you apparating in my kitchen.”

“I apparated in your studio first,” Patrick points out. “And he’s an expert in theoretical physics. You do know what theoretical physics are, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Pete snaps. “Of course I do!” 

He does not.

The door thumps open and a muscular, bearded, bespectacled man appears. He does not seem happy to be interrupted.

“I don’t care what your excuse is, I don’t care about your assignment, it’s eight at night and I’m not in the — Oh! You’re not one of mine. Who the fuck, pray tell, are you?”

“I’m here on purpose!” Pete declares, like a lunatic.

Prof A Hurley looks at Pete with the quizzical intent of a man who just had someone tap on his office door. Pete still has no idea about how this man may be able to help them. He opens his mouth and says, “What do you know about ghosts? I think I might have a ghost, and I think he might be, like, faulty.”

“Fuck you!” Patrick shrieks. “I’m not faulty! I’m not a fucking furby!”

Amazingly, Professor Hurley doesn’t slam the door in Pete’s face. He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t even crack a smile. Instead, he peers at Pete closely, examining him for faults or flaws or the possibility of a prank, perhaps. He takes off his neat little wire-framed glasses and buffs them on the hem of his crossfit shirt. Professor Hurley does not look like a theoretical physicist. He steps to one side and gestures to his office behind him. It is a room stacked with papers and books and with a weight bench crouching in one corner. A desk is not immediately apparent. 

“You should come in,” he says. And he leads the way, looking distracted and confused and not at all like a brilliant academic who’s going to figure out how to help Patrick at all. “Come on, get inside. Take a seat. I have, like, nothing interesting for you to drink. Water. Is water cool? I have water somewhere. I have, like, a half dozen different kinds of water, it’s a crossfit thing. Did you say ghost, by the way?”

Patrick breezes ahead and makes himself at home, hovering louche and sexy across the tiny couch in the corner of the room. “Tell him I’m not your ghost, by the way. I’m not a possession, I’m — I was —  a person.”

“That’s what you’re concerned about right now?” Pete asks.

“Hmm?” Andy hums, looking at Pete with his brow creased. 

“No,” Pete says. “Not you. I was talking to him. My ghost. Who is very insistent that I make sure you don’t think he’s a furby.”

Andy looks no less puzzled. “A... furby?”

“My ghost is kind of an dick,” Pete says. “Is there a special thing you use to deal with dick ghosts? A proton pack or something?”

“Not your ghost,” Patrick reminds him. He sinks through the papers and couch and onto the floor, his eyes and smile sparkling out at Pete from the gloom. “We hardly know each other, remember?”

“Oh,” says Andy, talking over Patrick because he can’t hear him, and handing Pete a bottle of water. “I want you to know right from the start that I’ve had a lot of kids show up here who think it’s funny to pretend they’re serious about the whole ghost thing. I also want you to know that I can bench press two-ninety, I have a punch force of six-hundred pounds, and I can pretty much guarantee that I can outrun you. Those facts are completely unrelated, by the way. Also, I know you’re the dude from that stupid fucking TV show where you pretend you can talk to the dead. Now, tell me about your ghost.”

Patrick snickers from the couch. “He could fucking destroy you.” 

Pete finds he can’t stop staring at Andy’s knuckly, tattooed fists. He has no idea how to provide the proof of the presence of Patrick. He really doesn’t want Andy to hit him. 

“Is there a way to talk about this that won’t end with you punching me?” Pete asks nervously. 

Andy looks at Pete like he doubts it. “Ask him to tell you what’s in the top drawer of my desk.”

Pete looks at Patrick. 

Patrick looks back at him.

“Dude,” Pete says. “Go look.”

“I’m performing tricks now, is that it?” Patrick snaps. “This is degrading, you know. Do I get a treat for doing this? Will you tell me I’m a good boy?”

“Do you want him to help you, or not?”

“Mostly, I want him to punch you,” Patrick grumbles, but he drifts to the drawer and he disappears for a second. “Gross! Tell him there’s a banana at the back of the bottom drawer that looks like it’s making a bid for freedom. Okay, top drawer. He has… a picture. A kid and a lady. The kid’s wearing a striped shirt.”

“He says there’s a picture. A lady and a kid.”

Andy looks skeptical which, okay fair. Pete was skeptical, too, until Patrick appeared in his kitchen. “Lucky guess.”

“Seriously?” Patrick mutters, ducking back into the desk. “Okay, fine. He has a Rubiks cube, a letter opener, a bar of vegan chocolate that makes me not miss real food at all, and a magazine he probably wouldn’t want his mom to see. For shame, Prof Hurley.”

Pete recounts this to Andy — aside from the magazine — and Andy begins to look like he’s seen a ghost. Which he hasn’t, because if he had, Pete wouldn’t be forced to list the contents of his desk drawer. 

“Holy shit,” Andy whispers, staring down at the desk. “I — Holy shit.”

Pete frowns. “Did he pass?” 

“Did I pass?” Patrick shrieks, popping up from the desk. “What am I, a fucking collie? How do I fail? How do I not be a ghost? Enquiring minds want to know.”

Andy rocks back on his heels and looks at Pete with such deep and enduring awe that Pete almost wants to remind him that he’s not particularly remarkable, that he didn’t do anything of note. He just found a random ghost and accompanied him where he wanted to go. He’s not classically trained in the art of communicating with the spirit world. He’s nothing more than a glorified Patrick Whisperer.

“I’ve spent my whole fucking career trying to prove the existence of something beyond the physical plane,” Andy says, his eyes shining behind his glasses. “I’ve written papers and conducted studies and argued with some of the most esteemed professors in the field. And you’re telling me that there’s a ghost in this room right now.”

Pete shrugs. “Yeah. Pretty much.”

Hurley looks around, but not at Patrick. He looks like a man in the midst of the pinnacle of his academic career. “Jesus fuck,” he whispers with such touching reverence. “I bet he’s magnificent, isn’t he? Is he magnificent? Ethereal?”

Pete looks at Patrick, who has drifted out from under the couch and is crudely simulating oral sex on a fertility statue balanced at the corner of Hurley’s desk. Pete sighs.

“Yeah,” he says, deadpan. “He’s fucking magical.”

“Fuck,” Andy whispers. He whispers it rapturously. 

Patrick flips Pete off. “Ask him about the sex thing,” he says. The chances are, the good professor would be less awed if he could actually hear Patrick, Pete thinks. “Ask him if we could fuck if we were both ghosts. I’m interested. It’s for science.”

“Shut up,” Pete grits out. “I’m not asking him that!”

“Ask me what?” Andy asks eagerly. 

Patrick rolls his eyes from across the room. He has a very attractive eye roll. And mouth. An unreal mouth. “Ask him… how do I cross over? How do I make this end?”

Pete relays this question to Andy and Andy looks up and puts down his ghost hunting equipment and shifts himself more comfortably on his stack of papers on the floor. 

“Okay,” he says, blinking up at Pete seriously. “Start at the beginning. Tell me everything.”

So, that’s what Pete does. He takes a deep breath and he recounts the whole story from the moment he saw Patrick sitting on the stairs. Patrick interrupts constantly, which is annoying, but worse because Andy can’t hear him. Pete tells Andy about the feeling of being watched in the kitchen and the moment Patrick appeared beside him and the way Patrick screamed like he was being murdered all over again as Pete charged through him. He tells Andy about the police station, about the moment Patrick snagged a hand around his wrist and prickled him with static electricity in his blood. He tells it all in a rush and he leaves out the part about finding Patrick insanely attractive — for a ghost — until he staggers to a halt and says, all breathless and rushed, “And now we’re here. And he wants to know how to like, get to the other side. Can you help him?”

Andy frowns. 

Andy drifts a hand over a stack of papers and rubs his thumb over the spine of a fat, leather bound book. He strokes his beard in a very learned way. 

“You need to find his body, and lay him to rest,” he says eventually. “Spirits roam when they have unfinished business and this is like…” He waves the phone at Pete once more. “He has more unfinished business than Glengarry Glen Ross.”

“Ding ding ding! I’ll take ‘What is the most obvious answer to Patrick’s quest for eternal rest?’ for six hundred, Alex,” Patrick chimes in. 

“Okay,” Pete says, nodding. “Okay, that makes sense.”

“And if this is the guy?” Andy continues, waving his phone at Pete, the alive, tuxedo-wearing Patrick smirking from the screen. “You need to act fast. You have a year from the date of death, and he went missing November 1st.”

“What?” Patrick squeaks, bolting upright so quickly his head pops up through the desk. “I have what now.”

“November 1st?” Pete repeats faintly. “But that’s less than two weeks away!”

Andy looks around the room vaguely. “He’s smart. I bet you’re super fucking glad this is the one guy who can see you.”

“Totally,” Patrick says, even though Andy can’t hear him. 

***

Patrick sits at Pete’s breakfast island and watches him drink his third cup of coffee. 

“You know,” he opines. “If you hooked up an IV, it would be way more efficient.”

“Hmm.”

“You should probably eat something with that.”

Pete shrugs and adds sugar. “There. That’s a solid. It has calories.”

Patrick sighs and makes no sound at all with his stupid ghostly non-breathing lungs. “Bon appetit,” he mutters, and hovers over the stool at the breakfast island. He doesn’t need to sit down, obviously, but he finds it soothing to repeat the ritual, to continue in death the way he behaved in life. It’s the same reason he makes his uncorporal legs take steps, even though he floats an inch or two above the pavement. He likes that it makes him taller. It’s the little things. 

Pete grouses and sighs and shoves his hands though his hair until it sticks up around his face in wild and cresting spikes. Pete is a man who looks like he’s slept very little. He’s wearing the same homemade t-shirt and ripped black jeans he wore yesterday, his slim feet bare, his eyeliner greying and smeared around his lovely eyes. Patrick is unsure if this means he shrugged them back on this morning, or if he slept in them. He doesn’t ask, for all the same reasons he didn’t float into Pete’s bedroom the night before: Pete closed the door and Pete isn’t his and he has no right to the details of Pete’s life when he doesn’t even have one. 

“So,” he begins, when it becomes obvious that Pete isn’t going to talk. “Can we talk about what happened in the police station yesterday?”

“Do you mean the part where you almost got me shot?”

“I mean the part where I touched you and you fucking felt it.”

“Oh.”

Pete adds another spoonful of sugar to his coffee. He tops it off with milk that looks half a degree from botulism and stirs with vigour. Patrick isn’t alive, he reminds himself, he’s a dead thing and he’s sitting in this bright and brilliant man’s kitchen and he’s draining the colour from the room like a black hole. But he stays, because he doesn’t want to be alone. He doesn’t do too well on his own. He’s had eleven months to work that out. 

“I haven’t touched anyone since…” and he trails off, because he doesn’t like saying ‘since I died,’ so he passes his hand through the counter top and doesn’t feel it. “You know?” he finishes, waggling his still-visible fingertips above the cut granite. Pete cracks a tiny smile. “We should’ve asked Andy about it yesterday.”

“Yeah,” says Pete, still smiling. “Yeah, maybe. Do you think I’m taking this whole ghost thing well?”

Patrick blinks at him. “Super well. Like, the wellest. There’s basically no person living or dead who’s taken the revelation of an afterlife as well as you. I’m impressed. This is my very impressed face.” He beams at Pete, his sunniest and most vibrant smile. 

“I feel like you’re flattering me,” Pete says, and yes, that’s exactly what Patrick is doing, but that’s because Patrick can’t use his usual methods of a) flirting and b) fucking to get what he wants. He doesn’t want to be a ghost forever. He really needs Pete to pull it together and help him out. 

Patrick clears his throat. “So, I have, like, two weeks to find my way into the light, or whatever the hell happens. Do you think there’ll be actual light? This dye job wasn’t really designed for direct light.”

“This is no time for hijinx,” Pete assures him. “We need a plan. And, like, no offence, but it needs to be significantly better than your last plan. The one that ended up with… You know…?”

Patrick mimes a golf swing and says, “Thwack!”

“Exactly,” Pete winces, looking paler than he did a moment ago. “You’d think I wouldn’t appreciate the Adam West era Batman sound effects, but I really do. They’re very comforting. More comforting than you might think they’d be when they’re in relation to the sound of the human skull under the force of a golf club.”

“It was my skull, you need to stop being so squeamish,” Patrick points out, and Pete shudders and looks like he’s trying very hard not to look at the back of Patrick’s head. He doesn’t need to worry, Patrick’s pretty sure his spectral form came sans fatal blunt force head trauma. “Okay, let me think for a minute.”

Pete stirs his coffee and stares at Patrick and Patrick tries to think of a plan but keeps getting lost in the swirls of amber and copper in Pete’s eyes. Those eyes are direct action against his ability to make a plan. Pete keeps smiling at him, all soft and mushy at the corners, like overripe fruit. Maybe this is a thing that happens to all restless spirits. Maybe the challenge is making it through the final two weeks in the face of everything he’s ever wanted, all wrapped up in morning eye crust and ripped jeans. He jolts. Pete is not everything he ever wanted. He barely knows him. 

“Alright,” he says eventually, chewing thoughtfully on his lip. Pete stares at his mouth and this is Patrick’s love life in a nutshell: he always wants the things he can’t actually have. “Okay, I think we need to get my laptop. If we can get that, then we’ll have access to all of the emails, the fund transfers, the files that prove that Bob negotiated the heist. If we take that to the police, they’ll have to listen.”

“Okay, cool,” Pete beams. “Where’s your laptop?”

Patrick mumbles into his hands. “Mmphhmmpphrrrphgh.”

“I’m sorry,” Pete says, leaning closer. “I don’t speak fluent avoid-the-question. Where was that?”

“Bob’s office,” Patrick grunts. “It’s in Bob’s office. I mean, it’s probably in Bob’s office. Bob’s office seems like the most likely place for it to be.”

Pete looks at Patrick like he’s seen a ghost. Which he has. The ghost is Patrick. 

“I’m going to say this out loud, just so I can check we’re on the same page,” he begins slowly. “You want me to go to the office of your psychopathic ex-boyfriend, the office where he works and probably keeps his golf clubs, to steal the laptop that contains incriminating information against him? The kind of information that’s going to get him arrested for, like, grand larceny, fraud and probably, like, treason?”

“I don’t think he committed treason,” Patrick coughs delicately. “But you’re forgetting murder. Murder’s kind of the biggie. Also? I mean, not to be petty or anything, but you’re not stealing the laptop. That’s my fucking laptop, it doesn’t belong to him, so, by the very definition of theft, he stole it from me. We would just be… liberating it.”

“Oh, totally, that’s fine,” Pete nods agreeably. “This is totally fine. I should make an appointment and ask him nicely to give me his ghost ex’s laptop, hold on a sec, I’ll just get the number…” Pete begins scrolling through his phone, one finger held aloft.

Patrick leans in. “Are you actually getting Bob’s number?”

“No, you fucking idiot! I’m getting the number of a local priest, so he can come here and exorcise the shit out of you and I can go back to pretending to talk to dead people instead of getting myself fucking killed for them!”

Patrick peers at Pete’s screen. “No you’re not. You’re looking at Bob’s Twitter.”

“Of course I’m looking at Bob’s Twitter,” Pete snaps. “I’m looking at Bob’s Twitter and I’m trying to figure out how I’m gonna get into his office so I can get your fucking laptop. Because, apparently, I’m genuinely certifiable and I want to get myself killed.”

Patrick mulls this over for a moment. He was never the kind of man who inspired great acts of friendship or personal chivalry unless those acts of heroism came with a check. He’s known Pete for the sum total of two days and Pete is willing to go to war for him. Patrick may be starting to feel golden, curling sparks of feeling for Pete Wentz, which is tragic when Patrick is caught in limbo and Pete is so very alive. 

Pete is also passionately, wonderfully stupid, or else…

Or else, he actually likes Patrick. And wants to help. Of his own volition. 

“Wait,” Patrick says doubtfully. “Do you mean that? You’ll do it?”

Pete runs a hand through his hair and drags another volcanic spike in his wake. “I said I would, didn’t I? I can’t just leave you to rot between worlds, can you imagine the negative karma? I feel like I owe this to every single dead person I’ve lied about over the years.”

Pete, Patrick thinks, is completely and bafflingly insane. But Pete also pretends to talk to dead people on national television with viewing figures that regularly tip into the millions, so Patrick decides that there’s no point trying to argue with that level of ridiculous. Besides, Patrick is a conman, he can think up a plan that won’t get Pete killed. Probably. He is, like, ninety-nine percent sure that that’s a plan he can come up with. He closes his eyes, because Pete’s eyes and Pete’s smile and Pete’s just-been-fucked hair conspire together to distract him from thinking up brilliant and rational plans. 

“Okay,” he says eventually. “I know how we’re gonna do this. It’s gonna work like a charm.”

***

For the record, this was not what Pete had in mind when Patrick said he had a foolproof plan. Pete was imagining something slick and well-constructed, A business meeting or an elaborate, Tom Cruise-style mission in which he rappels into Bryar’s office from the ceiling, avoiding red-beamed security sensors. Something a little more James Bond, a little less Three Stooges. Pete’s life isn’t like that. Instead, he’s dressed in a polyester shirt and shorts with a FedEx ball cap jammed over his hair. His exposed and skinny knees prickle with the cold and terror alike. 

It’s probably an offence to impersonate a delivery driver. 

“I hate you,” he tells Patrick, from the corner of his mouth.

“You don’t hate me,” Patrick says sweetly. “You feel sorry for me; a very important distinction, I’m sure you agree. That was basically the cornerstone of my whole schtick: I made people feel sorry for me, and then I offered them stuff to help me out, and then they did what I wanted, and then I got things. But you,” he stops walking/floating and looks at Pete curiously, “You haven’t asked me for anything. Why is that?”

Pete shifts the empty box he’s carrying. He tries to make it seem heavy, which is harder than he imagined it would be. “You’re dead, what can I ask you for, exactly? Hey, Patrick, helium supplies are down, want to come hold up balloons at my nephew’s birthday party next weekend?”

“You,” Patrick says, “are a terrible human being.”

“And you’re awfully vocal for a dead guy.” Pete sighs. “I guess I like you, is all.”

Patrick narrows his eyes. “People don’t like me,” he says, and Pete can’t imagine a world in which that’s true, but then, apparently someone’s dislike for Patrick was such that they killed him and dropped him in an unmarked grave, so what does Pete know? “Which is why everyone just… believed Bob when he said I’d run off. No one stood up and said, ‘Hey, maybe we should look for Patrick.’ No one.”

“I like you,” Pete objects stubbornly. “Clearly I like you or I wouldn’t be here, in this outfit, outside of Mafia HQ, holding an empty box with the name of a known murderer on the address label. Do you see the things I’m doing for you, Patrick? My friendship knows literally no bounds.”

“He’s not actually in the Mafia, he’s not actually cool enough to be in the Mafia… Ah, here it is.”

They both look up. There were a lot of things Pete was imagining when he thought about the business premises of Bryar Holdings. One of the huge, gleaming tower blocks that scar the Chicago skyline and loom over the business district, perhaps. Or maybe a seedy little back alley office, a massage parlour and illegal gambling ring operating just behind the printer. He’s not expecting the perfectly normal looking corner building on a pedestrian street just off a major street. It’s neither staggeringly nice or notably shady. It’s… boring. 

Pete tries to imagine Patrick here in a business suit. Then he stops, because thinking about Patrick in a business suit is more erotic than he initially imagined it might be. It’s the tie, he thinks, the idea of twisting his hand into it and yanking Patrick to him, mouth-first, and…

His vascular system shudders, confused, all oxygenated blood unsure if it should route to his lungs for a speedy escape, or to his penis for other, obvious reasons. It would be entirely on point if Pete were to pass out cold on the sidewalk, the victim of his own terrible fear for his own mortality and the  inappropriate half-chub he has for a dead guy. 

Pete is a strong man. He can ignore his budding erection in the face of imminent peril. Any minute now, he’s going to be inside that stronghold of money and missing morals, alone with a predator, and his penis is going to invert from heart-stopping fear. 

“Do we have a plan?” Pete asks faintly. And quietly. People are beginning to stare.

Patrick looks at the box and then looks at Pete. “You’re holding it.”

Pete begins to regret many of his major life choices. “That’s it? That’s the extent of the plan? Have box, will travel?” 

“Do you have a better idea?” Patrick asks, with this sarcastic lift of his left eyebrow. 

“Yeah. I have an idea where I go home and pretend I never met you. That’s the idea that doesn’t get me killed. My life was so much better without you in it.”

The eyebrow stays up. “Yeah. Did you know ghosts can see things in UV? All of those stains on your couch? Seems like you were having a great time by yourself…”

“Shut up,” Pete hisses and strides towards the doors. Patrick walks with him. Patrick passes straight through. “You’re making me look—”

How Pete looks is fated to go unheard as he bangs off the glass doors, hard and nose-first, with a comedy sound effect doink. It hurts. It hurts so much. It’s broken nose hurt. Pete does not want to open his eyes and face a universe in which he has walked into a solid glass door, in public, in the middle of Chicago’s business district, because he was following a ghost. 

“Ow,” he whispers, and prays for death. 

Patrick whistles through his teeth. “Ouch,” he says, and it sounds like he’s wincing. It’s not as comforting as he possibly imagines it might be. “That had to hurt.”

The intercom next to the door buzzes and a concerned voice says, “Um, sir? Can I — Help you? With... anything at all?”

Pete may die of humiliation before he makes his lips (numb, swelling rapidly) form actual human words. He makes a low, garbled sound of distress and feels the staticky prickle of Patrick touching his shoulder in solidarity. The box is dented at one corner. His ball cap has done nothing to absorb the impact. 

“Come on, champ, you’ve got this,” Patrick’s saying, from a long, long way away. Maybe Michigan. Maybe Mars. Maybe the fucking Andromeda galaxy. His voice filters in through the ringing in Pete’s ears and the throbbing red blood-pain in his face and Pete thinks this may well end with him in a hospital, but at least it won’t be at the hands of Bob fucking Bryar and his driving swing.

Then, in an act of direct insubordination, his last lingering shred of Pete’s self-preservation prostrates itself on the ground and his stupid, swollen mouth wheezes, “I need to see Bob Bryar.” 

Or, that’s what his stupid, swollen mouth tries to say. He’s probably concussed, and possibly missing a couple of integral front teeth, so it comes out as, “Ineederseebahbryyaaa.” His day is going so badly. Even getting shot would be a step in the right direction. At least bullet scars are cool.

“Sir?” asks the voice on the intercom. 

“Bryar,” he repeats with finality. The kind of finality that happens right before the person dies of extended public humiliation and maybe a touch of facial blood loss. Pete licks his lip and tastes metal and salt. “Just, open the door and let me see Mr Bryar.”

“Do you have an ID badge or a serial number, sir?”

Pete bristles. Like hoarfrost, the last lingering crystals of concussion melt away. Pete is pissed. 

“A serial number?” he repeats. “What is this? The fucking Mayflower? Open the door or, like, get me an ice pack or something because I’m bleeding my actual fucking life blood all over the sidewalk outside your building. I could sue, you know? My dad’s a lawyer, I’m pretty sure this is a thing I could sue for. This is, like — obstructing the mail. Did you know obstructing the mail is a criminal offence? It totally is.”

Pete hopes it’s an offence to obstruct the mail and that an empty printer paper box counts as ‘the mail.’ He has a newfound respect for all forms of mail-delivery personnel. He stomps his foot and glares into the security camera and defies the voice on the intercom not to open the door. 

In a maneuver surprising to literally no one at all, they do not open the door for the bleeding maniac on the sidewalk. “Mr Bryar doesn’t take mail here,” they say, snooty and stuck up and like Pete, a fake delivery driver, is supposed to know that. “You’ll have to take it away.”

“No way. This package has ‘Bob Bryar’ written on the front and I’m gonna hand it to Bob Bryar. It says urgent. Open the door.”

“No. Sir, step away from the door or I’m going to call the police— Oh!”

By some miracle of electrical engineering, the door clicks open. Come to think of it, Pete hasn’t seen Patrick for the duration of the conversation, two facts that are probably linked. Pete slips inside and doesn’t get far before he slams into a security guard so solid, so broad and tall and unfeasibly muscular, that his ears ring almost as hard as they did when he connected with the door. 

The box crumples between them. He probably should’ve put something inside it and lent some authenticity to his costume and structural integrity to the box. Maybe he could’ve stuffed his dignity in there. Clearly, he doesn’t need it anymore. He still has no idea where Patrick is but assumes a ghost is capable of fending for himself or, at the very least, escaping from prison, which is clearly where Pete is destined to end his day. He clears his throat and arranges his split and bloodied lip into his most charming and self-effacing grin. 

“I’m here to speak to Bob Bryar,” he says, with all the authority available to a man wearing polyester shorts and bleeding heavily from the mouth. “Do you think you could be a pal and tell me where I might find him?”

A voice right behind the meaty security guard says, “He’s right here. Can I help you with something?”

Pete swallows heavily. His mouth dry and his palms wet, he peers around the security guard’s boulderous shoulders and meets the inscrutable and distinctly non-bloody gaze of the man from the newspaper articles. Bob’s blue eyes are cold and flat in the way swamps are cold and flat, with the same threatening capacity for danger lurking just underneath. He doesn’t smile. There is a raw, animal instinct humming inside of Pete: This is an apex predator. 

The problem is that they didn’t really discuss what would happen if Pete happened upon Bob Bryar in the vestibule of the building. There was no contingency plan or escape route. In fact, referring to it as ‘a plan’ at all appears to be a testament to their own hubris and Pete’s questionable ability to keep himself alive. But, Pete is nothing if not an overachiever so he opens his mouth and lets the Gods take control of what happens next.

“Uh…” he says, intelligently, blinking rapidly in the face of Bob’s cold lizard eyes. “Hi.”

Bob looks him up and down slowly. It’s like being in a cartoon: Bob is the slavering wolf and Pete is the anthropomorphised steak-with-a-head. Bob’s lip curls. “You’re bleeding,” he says, like it’s not obvious to Pete, the bleeder. “And you crushed my box,” he pauses and peers into the gap between the dented lid and ripped side of the box. “Of air,” he finishes, “How… strange.”

Pete leans back. He has no desire to remain in Bob’s breathable air space for any longer than necessary, and the bodyguard looks like he agrees with this decision. The bodyguard who is not so much large as he is mountainous. He has fingers that look like they could pinch Pete’s head off at the neck.

“Um…” Pete tries again. The brilliant excuse is going to come to him any second now. “Well…”

Any second now.

“Pete!” Patrick cries, barrelling out of the elevator shaft with more aggressive speed and determination than Pete knew he had. “Fucking run!”

Pete, in a motion that is neither smooth nor calculated, hurls the printer paper box into Bob’s arms, shrieks, “Okay, gotta go, bye,” and takes off running. 

He doesn’t look back.

He’s very, very pleased that the doors open automatically from the inside.

***

Patrick hasn’t said much at all since they fled the scene of what probably counts as several minor and major criminal misdemeanours. The silence is tactical on his part. He’s allowing Pete to process things and hoping that Pete’s desire to help will outweigh his low, low survival instincts. 

He is perched on the counter top in Pete’s magnificent kitchen, his feet swinging a foot or so above the tile, his ass floating casually an inch or so above the granite. Pete is day drinking with enthusiasm from an open crate of Sam Adams. Well, he was day drinking when they got back to the house, but now it’s ten at night, so it’s socially acceptable and not indicative of a problem. Pete opens a fresh bottle with his teeth and looks at Patrick, wild-eyed and unshaven.

“Okay, so I appreciate that today didn’t go, like, super well, but we can’t give up now,” Patrick says.

“Oh no,” Pete says, and takes a deep swig from his drink. “We definitely don’t want to give up now. Not when we’re so close to getting me killed!”

“You have a flair for the dramatic,” Patrick pouts, pointing at Pete. “Has anyone ever told you that?”

“You’re right, I’m being totally dramatic about the ghost in my kitchen, and the psychotic ex-boyfriend who made him into a ghost, and the fact that I threw a box of nothing at the psychotic ex-boyfriend and then ran away. I should dial down the drama. This is a regular Wednesday night.”

Patrick doesn’t appreciate the sarcasm. “You make it sound interesting,” he says sulkily. “When really, all that actually happened was you walked into a door and yelled at the receptionist. Bob won’t even remember you.”

“You’re doing a wonderful job of convincing me not to exorcise you,” Pete says. The sarcasm is strong in this one. “My life is ridiculous now. It’s full of ridiculous things. Who knows what I’ll do next, maybe I’ll go fucking buck wild, summon a demon and have it haul your ass off into a hell dimension. How does that sound?”

Patrick isn’t worried. Patrick is fairly convinced Pete isn’t capable of summoning a demon. In fact, he thinks fondly, Pete probably isn’t capable of summoning a cab. 

“You wouldn’t do that, you’d miss me,” Patrick grins, and shimmies his hips a little. 

Pete mutters into his beer bottle, “Not if I line the shot up juuust right.”

“Not corporeal.”

“I don’t like you.”

“You think I’m awesome.”

“I do not.”

“Yes, you do,” Patrick sing-songs. Pete scowls at him darkly. “Do you know what I think?”

“I’ve known you for three days,” Pete growls, “I don’t know you well enough to know what you think, but I think I know you well enough to know that you’re going to tell me what you think, whether I want to know what you think or not. I think.”

“You think?” Patrick grins. Pete doesn’t smile. Pete doesn’t find Patrick’s sense of humour amusing at all at the moment, which is very remiss of Pete because Patrick is supremely funny. “Okay, grouchy. Here’s what I think: I think you want to know what I found when I disappeared at the office. And when I tell you that I found my laptop in the safe in Bob’s office, I think you’re going to want to know about my plan to get the laptop…”

Pete’s lip twists. “You think so wrong. You’re wronger than the Mayor of Wrongsville with a Wrong Machine.” He takes a swallow of his beer and twists his whole face. Patrick waits, one, two, three, and… “But I’ll probably do it. Because I’m stupid.”

Patrick’s grin widens. He floats down from the countertop and drifts to Pete’s side and rests a hand on Pete’s shoulder just because he can. It prickles, tingling up his arm and into the roof of his mouth and Pete’s hair crackles with static. 

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” Pete mutters, leaning a little closer to demonstrate just how much he wants Patrick to not touch him. “It’s like living under a transmission tower,” he continues, trying to sound displeased. “I mean, it’s not the worst thing, I guess,” he finishes quietly, and slides his hand into Patrick’s. “It’s... nice.”

Patrick makes stupid decisions with men, he thinks, as he lets Pete’s hand blur with his. But he wishes wistfully and with all of his heart that he could’ve met a man like Pete three years ago. Before Bob, and scams, and endless lying to everyone around him. Back when Patrick imagined he might be someone worth caring about, instead of someone worth rolling in a rug and ditching in an unmarked grave. I think you’re my best friend, he thinks, but doesn’t say out loud, because it would be insane for a ghost to say that to a living person who he’s known for three days. There are conventions about these things. It takes time. 

“Why are you helping me?” he asks. “And don’t tell me it’s because you like me.”

Pete blinks at him. Pete with his striking copper eyes, with his flat wide mouth, prone to smiling. Pete with his hoodies and his tight jeans and his hair falling jagged into his eyes as he stares up at Patrick, moued with… with longing. 

Pete shrugs, helpless, and says, “Because my ex told me I didn’t know how to care about anyone but myself and I believed him. That’s why I let him leave. He said, ‘You’re selfish and you don’t give a shit about anyone else unless you can get something out of them.’ Which seemed, like, on brand. And then I met you, and I felt — I feel something I’ve never felt before. I want to help you. I care about you like... I care about me.”

Patrick makes a soft and strangled sound of distress: this is not what he needs to hear a week before he makes a break into whatever lies beyond, or finds himself trapped here indefinitely. 

“You don’t,” he says firmly. It’s so much easier to believe he’s a gimmick, a fun story. “You don’t think any of those things and I should stop trying my best to get you killed. It would really suck if I got stuck here and you passed over. Who would I talk to?”

“I’d slip you a wristband,” Pete laughs and shows his teeth. “You’re an idiot. But I feel like you’re my idiot, in a weird way. Like I’m supposed to… Whatever. I don’t believe in anything like that. Just tell me the plan.”

This is not a man without belief. Pete is a man who believes in ghosts so wholeheartedly that he’s stopped questioning Patrick’s existence and instead throws himself without caution into whatever idea it is that Patrick might have had. Patrick’s ideas that, so far, have nearly got him, in chronological order, arrested, punched, and killed. Patrick’s ideas are escalating. Pete should run before they hit ‘international incident.’

The moment breaks.

“The plan,” Patrick says, wriggling his fingers against Pete’s. “The plan is simple. Tell me, how familiar are you with buddy cop movies?”

“I know Turner and Hooch,” Pete says, looking like a man who doubts the sanity of the ghost in his kitchen. “Are you going to dress me as a dog, Patrick? Is that the next plot twist? I feel like this would make a good novel, should I start writing it down? Chapter six — Patrick dresses Pete as a bloodhound.”

“You’re being ridiculous.”

“Am I, Patrick? Am I really? Yesterday I talked to a physicist about ghosts, today I dressed as a FedEx driver and ran into a door, I don’t feel like I’m wrong.”

“You are,” Patrick insists. “Please step forward and collect your mayorship for Wrongsville because Hooch was a dogue de bordeaux. Everyone knows that. And no, for the record, I’m not going to dress you as a dog. Dressing you as a dog would be a really stupid idea.”

Pete brightens, but only marginally. “This is good news. I’m feeling better about this idea already.”

“Good, this is good. I feel like you’re going to like the idea,” Patrick says, and doesn’t add anything else. He has a feeling that Pete won’t like what he’s going to say next. He has a feeling Pete won’t like it at all.

“So… What’s the plan?” Pete asks, pushing his fingers deeper into Patrick’s hand. It’s warm, sloppy and relaxed with alcohol and bonhomie. Patrick can feel the feathered edges of Pete’s feelings bleeding out through his skin. Pete is delicious with contentment. 

Patrick clears his throat. “We’re going to break into Bob’s house and steal a security pass for the office,” he says, then adds, quickly, “Don’t freak out!”

“What!” Pete shrieks, freaking out magnificently. “What the fuck? Are you fucking insane?” 

But Patrick doesn’t hear him. 

Patrick doesn’t hear him because he is rocketed across the room, slammed through the kitchen wall and sent skidding into the hallway by the ferocious force of Pete’s towering, hideous terror.

***

The short story is that Pete agrees to the stakeout against any and all better judgement he possesses. There isn’t much ‘better judgement’ putting up a fight. He figures that he gave up on better judgement the moment he agreed to help a ghost, who, by definition, can’t hurt him, take revenge on a murderer, who, by definition, very much can. Pete’s high school guidance counsellor was right all along, he is a poor decision-maker. He is easily-led. 

They pull up on a street that stinks of ill-gotten wealth and Pete kills the car lights and slumps down low in his seat and waits for the click of a gun cocking in his ear. Then… nothing happens. 

People come home from work and the lights go on in high, arched windows and garage doors whir and nothing interesting happens. 

Stakeouts, it turns out, are spectacularly boring. Pete wishes he brought a novel, or a charger for his phone, or travel scrabble, or something that would break up staring at the house on the corner of Hermitage until his eyes cross. 

“I spy with my little eye, something beginning with… C,” Patrick says from the passenger seat. They started playing ‘I Spy’ an hour ago. Pete prays for… not death, because, he thinks, looking at Patrick, that’s not actually a guarantee that he’d get to escape. There is very little to spy in a neighbourhood like this aside from ‘hedges’ and ‘fancy-ass hedges’ and ‘really fancy-ass hedges’ but Patrick said Pete was cheating when he tried that. Which is ridiculous coming from a man who made a living  — and subsequently a death, Pete really can’t forget that Patrick is dead — from cheating.

So, there are hedges and also ‘security cameras’ but Pete is trying not to focus on that. 

Pete rolls his eyes. “Car? Is it car, Patrick?”

“You’re lukewarm, at best.”

“Car radio? Car seat? Car mirror? Car window?”

Patrick grins smugly. “Nope. You’re gonna love this one.”

“I can promise you I won’t,” Pete tells him. The lights in Bob’s house twinkle merrily, mocking Pete and his numb fingertips. 

“Do you give in?” Patrick asks and Pete nods, and wishes he could punch Patrick in the arm, because he’d really enjoy punching Patrick in the arm right now.  “Are you sure you give in?”

Pete gives Patrick a look that he hopes conveys how much he gives in. “I’m sure.”

“You should make another guess,” Patrick says, hovering in his seat with his blue eyes sparkling. “You’re not playing by the rules if you just give in all the time.”

“You weren’t playing by the rules when you embezzled from all of those billionaires,” Pete points out mildly. 

Patrick scowls at him. “That was different. That was — different.”

“Not according to the Federal Reserve Board,” Pete shrugs, ticking them off on his fingers. “Or the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Or the Securities Exchange Commission. Or the Internal Revenue Service. Or the—”

“Go to hell. They were hardly going to miss it.”

“No, the shit you pulled filters down, Patrick. Do you think Mr Fucking Tax Dodge took the loss and learnt a lesson about shady investment funds? No. He passed that shit on to the people who worked for him. Yeah, you’re so fucking smart, stealing from a rich guy — now a single mom is working triple shifts with no overtime and no healthcare. Great job, asshole.”

Patrick looks bereft. “Right, and lying to grieving parents is absolutely indicative of the kind of moral fibre you could use to weave a coat.”

“Oh fuck you, I’m offering them comfort, a connection, the chance to say all of the things they didn’t find time to say in life. People leave my studio feeling better. Did anyone come out of one of your scams feeling better?”

“They feel better because you fucking lie to them!” Patrick snarls. “Because you prey on them when they’re at their weakest and they want to believe you more than they want to question the validity of a man claiming he can talk to the dead.”

“I can talk to the dead! I’m talking to the dead right now! You, on the other hand, are dead precisely because you lied to people!” Pete shouts, his pulse pounding in his ears. Patrick looks at him in the same way Mikey used to look at him when they fought and Pete was unnecessarily cruel.

Patrick sniffs. His look of irritation matches his look of soul-crushing sadness. Pete feels like the most enormous fucking jerk in Chicago definitely, Illinois probably, the United States possibly. “Okay, okay, I get it.” Patrick says quietly. “You have a moral awfully-high horse and access to Google and you think I brought this on myself. I’m a terrible person and I got exactly what was coming to me.”

“I don’t think that,” Pete says, because he doesn’t. “I don’t think that at all.”

Patrick shrugs. “Whatever.”

They sit in uncomfortable silence. Pete regrets picking a fight because he’s discovered that being unkind to Patrick is unsatisfying in the way that kicking a puppy is unsatisfying: he winds up feeling worse than if he’d done nothing in the first place. Not that he’s kicked a puppy before, he’s not a monster. It’s just an obvious metaphor when Patrick blinks down at his hands, wide-eyed and hurt, from the other side of the car. If he makes a ghost cry, that will be a new low in his life-long career of poor interpersonal relationships. 

Finally, and tired of hearing his own breathing and nothing more, he hedges his bets and says, “Crazy-fancy hedges?”

And Patrick smiles, one corner of his mouth tipping up reluctantly, like he doesn’t want it to. 

“Not even close. It was cupholder.”

And that’s how the first night goes.

***

The second night is the same. And the third, and the fourth. They sit in Pete’s expensive car on the expensive street and no one looks at them twice. Bob is always home. He’s become quite the recluse since resorting to homicide. 

“I liked Bowie, you know,” Patrick says quietly, four hours into their vigil on the fifth night. 

Pete jolts, he was dozing lightly, the red glow of the clock on the dashboard illuminating his cheekbones and casting his striking eyes in shadow. “Hmm?”

“Bowie,” Patrick says again, nodding to the radio where someone on the graveyard shift at WLS is playing Let’s Dance. “I don’t get to listen to it much because, like, I can’t tune in a station or switch on an iPod. But, yeah. I liked Bowie. A lot. And Prince. A lot of music, actually.”

“I like music,” Pete says, and maybe he does, but not like Patrick used to like music. “I like Bowie, too. And Prince. Tell me about your favourite albums.”

“There’s no point,” Patrick says sadly. “The thing about being dead is it dulls everything. I can hear you, and I can see you, but it’s like watching a recording, or listening from underwater. The joy isn’t there. The... vitality of living isn’t something I get to enjoy any more. Art is so tied up in life and human experience that it doesn’t mean anything. The part of me that could appreciate it is gone.”

“Of course there’s a point,” Pete replies, fiddling with his phone until he finds a Bowie playlist on Spotify. Life on Mars begins and Patrick smiles a thin, watery smile that barely tugs one corner of his mouth. 

“Have you ever heard Through Being Cool?” he asks.

Pete smiles. “Saves the Day? That’s your favourite album?”

Patrick shifts and turns to Pete and his brown eyes are bright with teasing and Patrick says, “One of them. I mean, it’s not even that great but, like, I had a job when I was in high school at this shitty local radio station and, because I was the only person under the age of, like, fifty, they had me pick out the new albums to showcase. I chose that one, once. It’s just — it’s an honest album, you know?”

Pete nods. 

“It reminds me of being seventeen,” Patrick continues quietly, looking out through the windshield at nothing. “It reminds me of being me.”

They talk more about music as they wait for signs of life at Bob’s house. Eventually, Patrick says, “I wasn’t a hustler from day one, you know?”

Pete cocks a heavy eyebrow at him. “You mean you didn’t come out of the womb and shake the doctor down for loose change?”

Patrick laughs and looks out of the window at the quiet Chicago street. This was supposed to be his life, his golden ticket out of the suburbs and anonymity. Was it worth it? Is anything like that ever worth it?

“It was something he talked me into, at the start,” Patrick admits, and, when Pete doesn’t respond, he keeps talking. “Bob said I had the right face for it. I looked like someone waiting to be fucked over so no one would ever suspect I was the one pulling the strings. ‘Just a couple of big hits.’ That’s what he said to me. A couple of hell-or-glory busts and we’d have enough cash to make a run for it and start over in Mexico.”

Pete makes a soft sound of encouragement. He takes Patrick’s pale and intangible hand and cool, blue sympathy pours from him like water. 

“That charity fundraiser was supposed to be our Catch Me if You Can moment,” he sighs, and his chest would ache and his eyes would prickle if he were capable of either of those things, but he’s not. He’s dead and gone. “We pulled it off and we split up and he texted me from a burner phone to meet him at one of his phony property developments. There’s a private airfield out by Cicero, do you know it? He said he’d chartered a jet and I believed him and I was just… so happy. So thrilled that the lying was over. We were going to escape and everything would be like a fairytale.”

Right now, Patrick doesn’t feel that echoing sadness he felt for the past year. He feels angry. He feels… robbed of the opportunities he’ll never get and the life he’ll never live and the Pete he’ll never kiss. He glares at his stupid ghostly knees. He doesn’t look at Pete.

“He told me to grab something out of his briefcase, I don’t even remember what exactly. A piece of paper, his wallet, something. And I did it because I loved him. Because who wouldn’t trust their boyfriend of three years, right? I didn’t even see it coming. I didn’t get a chance to fight.”

“I’m so sorry,” Pete says, with pity Patrick doesn’t want to deal with. 

He remembers that he doesn’t actually have to deal with it and says, “I think I’m done for tonight.”

Then, without another word, he disappears.

***

They break into Bob’s house on the seventh night and Pete’s guts — and testicles — shrivel with fear as Patrick, outside of a dark house with an expensive-looking alarm system, pauses at the french doors and looks at Pete with a bright and conspiratorial grin. 

“Don’t worry,” he says before he goes, like Pete is going to do anything but literally panic himself into a heart attack on the stone deck out back. “I’ll be right back. Try to look like you’re not committing any crimes.”

And then Patrick walks through the wall and Pete tries to be a picture of model American citizenship. He peers into the bushes like he’s checking for intruders. He glares at the windows in rebuke for their inability to keep out predators. He… realises both of these actions probably look suspicious as fuck on the security cameras and stops doing them immediately. 

It takes an eternity for Patrick to reappear. Or, it feels like an eternity. Like time has slowed down so each beat of Pete’s heart takes days, years. He stares very hard at the spot on the wall where Patrick vanished and coaches himself on his constitutional rights as an American. They’ll be good to know during his inevitable arrest and detention. 

“Psst,” Patrick hisses, poking his head through the french doors in a ghostly manner. 

Pete screams. “Don’t do that!”

“Jumpy,” Patrick says, grinning. “Look at you! You look like you’ve seen a—”

“If you finish that sentence, I’ll exorcise you myself.”

Patrick doesn’t finish the sentence but he does click open the security doors, which is nice of him. Now Pete can be caught inside of Bob Bryar’s house, which will really add something to the prosecution’s case. Maybe he’ll take off up the stairs and meet his horror movie demise cowering in a closet instead of running for the door. 

“I’ve disabled the locks and the security cameras,” Patrick tells him, which does nothing to lower Pete’s pulse or blood pressure. 

“Great,” he says weakly. “Just… great.”

The house is beautiful. John Hughes movie beautiful. Pete hurries behind Patrick and tries not to gape at how opulent everything is, from the carpets to the wallpaper to the unfeasibly large TVs in every room. Bob wears his wealth like armour, like if he shows it off to the world then no one can question his claim to it. Pete wants to rip his face off. 

“Top drawer,” Patrick says, pointing to a desk in an office bigger than Pete’s kitchen. 

Pete opens the drawer. He reaches inside and he grabs a flat plastic security pass and Patrick’s grin sparkles up at him from the employee picture. “Your own ID?” he asks. “Seriously?”

“Don’t you think that there’ll be a beautiful sense of irony to my name flashing up on the access list?” Patrick says, grinning, convinced of his own charm. Which is fair, because he is eminently charming. “Don’t you think he’ll shit his pants?”

“You’re awful,” Pete says, the most pleased he’s been since they climbed out of the car.

***

Bryar Holdings is terrifying by moonlight. Technically, Bryar Holdings was also terrifying in daylight and, although Pete has no source of reference, he suspects it would be similarly terrifying both at dawn and twilight. It’s scary by its very existence. The castle of a fairytale ogre. Sticky with the uneasy sense that Bob is watching Pete breach the gates.

“You’re awfully pale,” Patrick tells Pete cheerfully.

Pete is frightened all over. Genuinely, pants-shittingly scared. Every hair on his body bristles and his breath escapes his open mouth in low-pitched, moaning whimpers. Somewhere, he read that the human eye responds to terror by expanding the pupil, maximizing the flow of light to increase visual perception in times of danger, that hearing increases to pick up the noise of approaching predators. Pete’s base biological instincts can go fuck themselves. This would be so much more tolerable if he were blind and deaf.

“Nngh,” Pete says, softly and with feeling. A hulking man-shape looms out of the darkness and Pete – brave not at all – shrieks and flings himself behind Patrick. He doesn’t care that Patrick isn’t corporeal. Maybe the dark matter will slow whatever it is down before it inevitably rips off Pete’s head and shoves it…

It’s a potted plant, its leaves dark and ominous and faintly humanoid in the low light. Pete would’ve been terrible in Predator. He knows this. He does not care.

“Jumpy?” Patrick asks easily, like this isn’t life-or-death. Which, technically, for Patrick it is not, but it would be nice if he could pretend for Pete’s sake.

“I’m going to die here,” Pete tells him, with much certainty. “Any second now the security traps are going to trigger and this is going to turn into something from Saw. I can’t cut off my own foot, Patrick. I lack the necessary drive and moral fiber. I’m a horrible horror movie hero.”

Patrick rolls his eyes so hard he grants Pete a brief look at the back of his eyeballs. “Would you calm down? We’re grabbing a laptop and then we’re leaving. There’s no way you can mess this—” Patrick stops, stock still, his head tilted to the side. He widens his eyes. “Did you hear that?”

Pete’s heart stops and then accelerates wildly, until Patrick starts laughing and says, “Your fucking face, man,” and Pete begins to suspect he ought to find better friends. Friends with a pulse. He raises his middle finger at Patrick and stalks through the office block without knowing where he’s going. It’s a safe, not the lost ark of the covenant. Pete wants to get in and get out. There’s a chart for this, an x, y graph where x is the number of minutes spent breaking and entering in a privately-owned office complex and y is the number of years spent considering his poor life choices from inside of a cell at Stateville prison.

“You’re not funny,” he tells Patrick as he searches. Patrick grins and shoves his hands down into his ghostly pockets and hovers just above the carpet. It’s still unnerving, just for the record, the way he floats and drifts and looks so very solidly real until he moves and it’s obvious he’s not.

Pete finds the safe in an office he assumes belongs to Bob, all oak desk and huge leather recliner and a view out over the Bean, if the viewer cranes their neck in just the right direction and stands all the way up on their tiptoes. “Nice place,” he tells Patrick casually, rapping his knuckles against the cold metal of the door. “Did he bring you here often?”

“Jealous?” Patrick asks lightly.

Pete stops short. He’s never considered himself a jealous person, but looking at Patrick right now, he is insanely jealous of Bob who got to touch him, be with him, take him for granted. He grunts.

Patrick sits just above the desk, crosses his legs and says, “The combination is left four, right twenty-seven, left eight, right four. My birthday.”

Pete works the safe open. He reaches inside and grabs the laptop. He looks up at Patrick who looks back levelly with those lovely ocean eyes. There’s no time for poetry but if Bob walks in, Pete could actually die and when better to make a confession than when his adrenaline is high and he can blame it on fear in the morning.

“In a different life,” Pete begins. “I think I’d have adored you.”

Patrick looks at him, puzzled. “That’s – What?”

“I’m just saying, life is unfair, and with a different set of circumstances, maybe you and I…” Pete trails off and begins to feel stupid.

“You hardly know me,” Patrick points out.

“I’ve spent the past week and a half in your company constantly,” Pete says. “How long is a date? Two hours? Three? That’s, what? Eighty dates? Two dates per week? We’ve been dating for the better part of a year. Trust me when I say I’d have made you happier than Bob did.”

Patrick’s mouth creases at the corners. “I mean, he killed me, so I’m not sure you could’ve done worse.”

Pete closes his eyes and tries to think of the best thing to say. He’s not the kind of man who allows himself to open up. Opening up leads to getting hurt, it leads to impossible feelings that Pete can’t control, no matter how much he tries. He’s an endless inferno of terrible, painful inability to love things in the right way. Which probably explains why the only person he understands is dead.

“You are the best, the most wonderful person I’ve ever met,” he begins quietly. Patrick looks at him like he thinks Pete might be insane. “You’re funny, and you’re so smart, and you’re, like, I mean, you know what you look like, right? You’re the whole package, Patrick Stump, and I—”

“Shut up,” Patrick hisses.

“No,” Pete says. “No, you don’t get to keep hiding away from how amazing you—”

“No, seriously, shut the fuck up,” Patrick whispers furiously. “I… Did you hear that?”

Pete doesn’t find this funny. “That’s not funny, I…” And he stops. Because he does hear that. There’s someone rattling keys just beyond the front door, separated from Pete by an entrance lobby and two inches of negligibly cheap plywood. “Fuck.”

Pete’s whole heartbeat is contained in his throat. His legs are soft, structurally unsound in the way overcooked noodles are soft. He wobbles sideways. This is okay, he is okay, because no one will get away with murdering an actual celebrity.

“We have to move,” Patrick says, which would be fine except for the aforementioned noodle legs. Pete makes a soft, terrified sound in the back of his throat and prays for death to be swift and merciful. “Okay, listen to me. There’s a security door at the end of the hallway, okay? You push it – hard – and it’ll open into the alley out back. The alarms will go off. You will run and you will not stop running until you’re far, far away from this place, okay?”

“He’s going to—”

“Shut the fuck up, and start moving.”

Pete whimpers. “I can’t.”

“Goddammit,” Patrick hisses, the keys growing louder, the scrape of the lock thunderous in the tiny office. He passes over to Pete, he hovers inches in front of him. He looks Pete right in the eyes and whispers, “I’m sorry. This is probably going to feel, like, really weird.”

And then, Patrick sinks into him.

It’s surreal. An aching coldness that moves through his bloodstream. Pete is aware of the movement of his body but no longer in control of it. It’s like being a video game character: he is Pete, but he is not behind the wheel.

“I’m sorry,” Patrick whispers, using Pete’s mouth, and it’s the strangest thing, but Pete thinks back, what the fuck? And Patrick hears him, says softly, “I don’t know! I didn’t know it would work, but like, we have to go.”

Patrick stands using Pete’s legs. He grabs the laptop and tucks it up under Pete’s hoodie and Patrick runs. He slams through the office building like the floor is lava, like the world will end if he stops. Pete sits in the passenger seat of his own physical presence and feels warm all over with the closeness of Patrick. He doesn’t care if they don’t make it. He doesn’t care about anything but this moment. 

They make it out, but barely.

Pete has never felt more alive.

***

Back at the house, Pete says, “If this was a buddy cop movie, I’d have kissed you by now.”

Twenty minutes ago, Patrick was inside of Pete, feeling him move and live from the inside. It was the most arresting, the most intimate moment of his life. To feel Pete surrender to him like that, the give of him, the irresistible trust of him. 

And Patrick, feeling impossibly daring in the dark house on the dark couch with Pete’s dark eyes on him like he wants to eat him for breakfast, leans in until Pete’s electrons buzz against his own, and whispers, “Why don’t you try? We’re due a miracle.”

Pete reaches up and cups Patrick’s cheek with reverence, with caution. He could pass straight through but he doesn’t. He’s careful, considered. Buzzing everywhere Pete touches, Patrick rubs up into his hand like a cat, he feels it prickle like pins and needles and reckless, he darts out his tongue to lap over Pete’s thumb. There’s no taste, no sensation beyond the low-humming tingle. Patrick has never felt a greater desire to be kissed in his life, or what’s come after. 

Theory: When Pete touches Patrick, his emotions come through like a radio signal, the way the waves burst out larger and larger from the source. This is why it felt like burning alive when Pete shoved him in terror, why it prickled and stung when Patrick grabbed him in the police station.

Practical test: When their mouths touch, it’s brief, a warm and gentle rush, like shower spray or summer rain. There’s no pressure or resistance but a suggestion that there could be. Pete makes a sharp, startled sound and jerks back and presses his fingers to his mouth. He looks at Patrick with such deep, enduring want that Patrick swears he feels an answering echo of a heartbeat in his chest. Just for a moment. Patrick is content. He is, for the first time, still.

Conclusion: Good theory, Patrick thinks.

***

Pete wakes on the morning of Halloween with a hangover and without a ghost hovering disconcertingly above his bed sheets. A dream lingers: warm arms around his waist, lips on the back of his neck. This is what happens when you talk to ghosts, he thinks. He blinks and stares at the silver branches of the light fitting he picked out with Mikey. It’s so… peculiar, to be alone.

Slowly, he struggles onto his elbows and remembers last night’s conversation in a series of snapshots. They broke into Bryar Holdings. They made their way to the office and Patrick was inside of Pete in the most literal, unsettling of ways. They escaped, barely, and they fell together into Pete’s house and Pete drank and Patrick laughed and, at some point, Pete realized he’s spent the past two weeks falling in love. He’s still falling in love. He may never stop falling in love. This is freefall. Velocity: terminal.

And now Patrick is gone.

Pete looks around the room and sees his pants and his shirt and his tie and… a grubby pair of black dress pants. A white shirt that isn’t Pete’s. Pete glances to his left like this is a horror movie and sees an indentation in the other pillow, the sheets tossed back. He touches the mattress. It’s body temperature.

Carefully, and unsure of why he does it, Pete creeps from his bed and collects a novelty Cubs bat from his closet. He is 99-percent sure that home intruders don’t snuggle with their would-be victims but if they do, he wants to meet that particular brand of lunatic armed.

He pauses in the hallway, head cocked like a golden retriever, and listens. The shower is running in the bathroom down the hall and Pete knows with a vicious and knifing certainty, that he’s not alone in the house. 

He doesn’t stop to question why, exactly, a burglar or stalker-fan or serial arsonist might stop to take a shower. The DNA trail will be stunning. In the inky-grey murk of pre-dawn he’s running on caveman instincts and fight-or-flight compulsion. So, he tiptoes — in case they’re listening — and he grips the bat — in case they’re big — and he creeps along the hallway and he pushes open the door and he slides across the bathroom floor and he yanks open the frosted shower screen and he comes face-to-dick with Patrick, shower-wet and rock-hard and stroking himself off with furious enthusiasm.

This is not what Pete was expecting. He attempts to process it but his brain lags, buffering on the sight of Patrick naked, Patrick naked, Patrick naked. He thinks he can be forgiven the bug-eyed stare. It’s a big deal. He stares at Patrick’s dick. A very big deal.

“Oh my God,” Pete yelps at Patrick’s erection. Patrick’s pink and lovely erection. Pete needs to stop staring at Patrick’s erection. He jerks his eyes up and sees Patrick, all flushed and wet and astonishingly lovely, his hair plastered to his brow under the spray and that’s worse somehow than looking at Patrick’s erection. Which is still lovely. And flushed. And oh, God. Pete opens his mouth and hopes that something reasonable will come out. 

“What the fuck?”

It’s a structured and functional sentence. It counts.

“Pete, hi!” Patrick exclaims, with joy and a breathy note of arousal. He doesn’t stop tugging lazily at his cock. “So, funny thing, I woke up with a body. My body. I have my body back. Crazy, right?”

Naturally, the first thing he’s chosen to do is masturbate. In Pete’s shower. It’s so hard to take in details and note them down for future sessions of self-gratification because every part Pete looks at is lovelier and more distracting than the last. He finds himself eyeing Patrick’s rosy nipples, because, until he saw Patrick’s nipples, he didn’t realise that nipples were a thing he was into. It turns out, he’s really, really into them.

“Uh…” he says. Then, “Um…”

Pete’s cortical function is contained very firmly in his own joyful hard-on. It springs from ‘lazy morning stiffy’ to ‘raging monster-cock’ in two or three rapidly accelerating beats of his heart. If he passes out and brains himself on the edge of the tub from this rapid reroute of his pulse, he hopes he’ll get the chance to haunt someone into keeping the details out of his eulogy.

“You should get in here with me,” Patrick purrs.

Pete is so hard he thinks he might be going blind. Going blind will be tragic. How will he see Patrick’s dick if he goes blind? He shakes his head, Etch-a-Sketch style. “What the fuck?” he says again, with feeling. “What the fucking fuck?”

Patrick waves his dick at Pete. Or waggles it. Pete’s not sure of the difference although he thinks one may be introspective and this is definitely more like carnal beckoning. Pete’s own dick throbs in response and he wants, very much, to climb into the shower and climb into Patrick in short order. Pete yanks the shower screen closed once more. He thinks it might be easier to think if he can’t see a wet and naked Patrick stroking himself off.

“Oh, come on!” Patrick objects. “I have, like, the erection of the century and you’re gonna ignore it? People will write folk songs about this hard-on, Pete. They’ll write plays.”

It turns out, it’s no easier to think with the screen closed. Now Pete just gets to watch the shadow of Patrick tugging on the shadow of Patrick’s cock through the frosted glass. He gets to listen to Shadow Patrick moan like he’s charging by the hour. It turns out that imagining  Patrick masturbating is almost as distracting as watching Patrick masturbate.

“This is a little too fucking City of Angels for me,” Pete bleats, but he doesn’t sound like he means it. “I feel like there’s — there’s probably ethics and maybe ancient curses at play here. Did you touch a Roman artifact in the past twenty-four hours? Or break into a tomb or something?” Behind the curtain, Patrick’s moans increase in both force and volume and, based on the pornographic shadow puppet show he’s hosting, he begins plucking languidly at his left nipple. Pete makes a noise that he hopes is not a groan. A groan would really scupper the outward facade of calm he has going on. “I can’t fuck you right now! It’s not morally sound!”

“God, Pete,” Patrick moans – moans! – low and filthy and way down in register. Using Pete’s name is unfair. “Pete, Pete, Pete. Come on, Pete, don’t you want to? I think I’m uncircumcised now, you ever seen a real-life foreskin?”

Fuck, Pete wants to. He wants to climb into the shower and crush Patrick against the wall and kiss him dizzy. He wants to lick into his mouth and bite the newly minted curve of his collarbone. He wants to kiss every inch of his stomach and hips and those heavenly thighs and lose himself in the salt-taste of Patrick’s obscenely handsome cock. Pete’s seen it for, like, less than ten seconds but already it’s got a place in his Cock-n-Ball Hall of Fame. He shakes his head. He thinks of ancient curses. They do less to dampen his enthusiastic penis than he hoped they would.

“You’re not helping me with the thinking!”

“So stop trying to think,” Patrick says. Pete boggles at him through the curtain. “We have an opportunity here to take advantage of a cosmic loophole and, so fucking sue me, I don’t want to question it. I’ve had enough bad luck for one fucking lifetime. Fuck, Pete, I want something good, can’t I have something good? Stop trying to think and just get in here and do.”

The beauty of Patrick’s speech is offset a little by the fact that he doesn’t stop stroking his cock. Fuck, but it’s such a lovely cock. And what if Patrick’s right? What if this is a tiny little slice of miraculous Halloween magic and this is his chance to be with someone he really… cares about? Yesterday, Patrick was dead and Pete was staring down the loaded barrel of a financial fraud/murder investigation. Now, Patrick is very much alive and Pete is staring down the loaded barrel of… well, Patrick’s loaded barrel. 

Maybe a sensible man would stop this uncontrolled detonation before it begins, would snip wires before something explodes out that they can’t put back. There must be professionals or religious zealots or someone who can work out what the fuck is going on right now. Maybe that’s what a sensible man would do. But Pete has never claimed to be a sensible man. 

Pete takes a deep breath and, still wearing his Cubs pajama pants, he pulls back the screen and he meets Patrick’s grin and he scrambles into the shower with his brain lodged firmly in his cock. He’s soaked immediately, the cotton clinging to his skin, his hands clinging to Patrick’s hips, his ribs, his broad and gorgeous shoulders. He cups Patrick’s face as gentle as a whisper, rubs his thumbs along Patrick’s cheekbones and tips up his mouth and whispers, “Is this real? Is it really happening?”

And Patrick grabs the waist of Pete’s pants and shoves them down onto the floor with a wet splat and frees the violent heat of Pete’s gravity-defying erection and murmurs, “I don’t fucking care if it’s real. It feels real. Just kiss me.”

Pete meets the kiss with his eyes closed and his fingers buried in Patrick’s hair. Patrick’s mouth moves under Pete’s, alive and vibrant and hot with blood. Their noses bump, someone’s tooth snags someone’s lip and then they pull back and laugh and start again and this time… this time, they kiss like springtime. Pete makes a sound, a soft and breathy scrape of an exhale that Patrick swallows like the last breath of air is at the bottom of Pete’s lungs. Pete presses forward and opens Patrick’s mouth with his tongue. 

Patrick kisses relentlessly. He kisses like he’s dying and Pete is the life support machine. He kisses like something cataclysmic will happen if they stop. He takes huge and tufty handfuls of Pete’s shower-trashed hair and urges Pete to crowd him back against the tile. Pete might pass out. He might actually die if Patrick keeps kissing him like this. He will die gladly, if Patrick promises to never stop kissing him.

So, it’s a great kiss, objectively speaking. Potentially life-ruining, if Pete’s being honest, because there’s no way he’s ever going to be kissed like this ever again so he needs to resign himself to only kissing Patrick. This is not a hardship. He tugs the thick lush of Patrick’s lower lip between his teeth and grunts, breathless, biting down as Patrick takes an experimental double handful of Pete’s ass and squeezes like he’s picking out cantaloupe. Pete jolts from his heart to his hips, his swollen dick brushing like a lightning bolt against the thick, vibrant heat of Patrick’s groin. Pete is going to go insane from this kiss. 

He kisses Patrick until he can’t breathe and then he pulls back and looks at Patrick with his half-closed eyes and his kiss-swollen mouth and he thinks how unutterably, astonishingly beautiful Patrick looks right now. 

“Look at you,” Pete murmurs, and nips a kiss to Patrick’s collarbone. 

“Fuck,” Patrick whispers, grabbing Pete’s hands and guiding them to his chest, his hips, skirting around his thick and curving cock. “Don’t stop touching me,” he babbles, as Pete thumbs over his balls, “feels so good, feels so, so good. Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop.”

Pete maps a scenic route over Patrick’s chest and stomach, across the flushed and lovely planes of his pectorals, pausing at the rosy pebble of his left nipple. Patrick gasps, and pulls Pete’s hair in a blind and desperate way. His head is thrown back, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he swallows, gasps and cries out throatily. Pete moves lower, diligent in this exploration of all things Patrick. He kisses the shivering softness of his abdomen, licks the hollow of Patrick’s navel and follows the gingery trajectory of his happy trail. He bites at the neat jut of Patrick’s hip bones, digs his fingers into the meat of Patrick’s glorious, inspirational ass. He deliberately avoids the heat, the Washington Monument marvel, of Patrick’s glorious and red-tipped erection. 

“Gorgeous,” he murmurs, biting a kiss to Patrick’s inner thigh. “Fuck, you’re so much more than I could’ve dreamt of.”

“Shut up,” Patrick hisses. “Shut up and touch me.”

Pete crouches on his heels and looks at Patrick’s cock, nested in the neat and coppery tangle of Patrick’s pubic hair. Pete nibbles along the edge of that soft hair, traces ticklish swirls with his tongue against the creases of Patrick’s hips, his groin. He catalogues the taste, how it differs in each place, how it changes the pitch of each melodic groan. He reaches up and wraps a loose fist around the swollen heat and hardness of Patrick’s penis and hears Patrick’s breath hitch. Patrick twitches earnestly in his hand, crowned with the pearl-slick of pre-come, wet from the shower. 

“Mmm,” Pete hums with approval and a devilish grin. “You should look for this part.”

Patrick opens his eyes and watches Pete’s mouth with intent. Pete adores an audience and makes it showy. He pouts and brushes his mouth against the obscene red swell of Patrick’s tip. He licks his lips and lets his tongue graze the nervy quiver of it, tastes salt on his mouth. Patrick sinks a hand into Pete’s wet hair, takes a grippy fistful of coarse, dark strands and tugs, just once. A warning, probably. Pete grins. He holds Patrick’s hips, his gaze, and then he opens his mouth and takes Patrick’s dick like he’s taking the sacrament. On his knees. With rapture. With worship. He gives him lips and tongue and toothy threat, he sucks and he licks and he hollows his cheeks.

Patrick’s cry is celestial.

Patrick holds Pete in place with a hand splayed to the back of his head and rolls his hips, lets the swollen length and width and girth of him push Pete’s mouth wide open. Their eyes stay locked and Pete thinks look at me, look right at me and don’t look anywhere else, as Patrick’s cock pushes into his throat and out, again and again. He digs red divots into the smooth pale of Patrick’s hip bones as Patrick’s cock leaks over his tongue, as the shower pounds down onto his shoulders. If this is a miracle, Pete won’t question it, he’ll just wrap his arms around Patrick and feel him solid and warm and alive.

Patrick cries out, a cracked mirror sound. His grip tightens on Pete’s hair and he rides up onto his toes and he starts to come, hot and thick and into Pete’s mouth. His knees buckle and he collapses, still coming. His dick pops from Pete’s mouth with the inevitability of gravity and he comes on Pete’s chin, across his chest, his stomach, slicking wet and filthy against Pete’s thighs. He lands on Pete’s lap, blissed out, his arms around Pete’s neck. He nuzzles into the hollow of Pete’s throat. Pete holds him steady. His dick throbs desperate between them as he kisses Patrick’s closed eyes, his nose, his jaw and his lips. 

It takes a while for Patrick to come back, and Pete must have blown him into low-flying orbit because come back is exactly what he does. His blue-pale eyelids flutter. His breathing calms. He blinks at Pete with such comical, wide-eyed astonishment that Pete laughs and clasps him hard to his chest. 

Pete likes it here. There’s always the chance that something might happen, now. That Patrick might drift away with the shower steam and Pete will wake up, alone, with a ghost in his kitchen. So Pete kisses him and holds him close and savours every second of this dream, if it is one. 

Patrick, very determinedly, does not disappear. 

“That,” Patrick declares, water caught in his lashes, “was fucking outstanding.”

“I have a very particular set of skills,” Pete tells him, without modesty. “Skills I’ve acquired over a very long career.”

Patrick shoves him back, so hard that Pete’s head cracks against the shower wall and he yelps but then Patrick is hovering over him, over the red missile heat of Pete’s aching dick, so close his breath stirs the dark shadow of Pete’s pubes. He looks up, eyebrows raised, eyes entirely innocent and his pink, flushed mouth mere molecules from the tip of Pete’s quivering cock. Pete watches him with his eyes so wide he’s sure he’ll dislocate his own eye sockets. If he doesn’t feel Patrick’s mouth on him immediately, he’s convinced he’ll die.

Slowly, Patrick draws a fingertip around Pete’s bartskull. He scrapes his fingernails lightly through the hair just beneath and leans down and buries his nose in Pete’s groin. The noise he makes does not bear description; like he’s taken a punch to the gut and enjoyed it, like being hit by a runaway El train. He sags like he’s drunk, like he’s been deprived of Pete’s scent his whole life and he won’t go another moment without it. 

Patrick’s lips quirk. He says, “I’m going to fucking end you.” 

He opens his mouth and takes Pete’s painfully rigid dick into his mouth. His mouth is so good. So good. Hot, tight, velvet suction. Pete possibly levitates. Possibly projects. He doesn’t care as long as Patrick keeps sucking him with those quick, clever rolls of his tongue.

And then, Patrick fucking ends him. 

***

They find their way to the bed. 

Patrick has no solid recollection of leaving the shower, but they must have because they’re sprawled on Pete’s mattress, mouth-to-cock, and Pete’s sheets are sticking to his wet and tacky skin. He sucks on Pete’s soft cock, flicks his tongue over the tip, as Pete walks his fingers lightly along the curve of Patrick’s hip. He is very, very happy to be here.

“Fuck, you’ve got the mouth for that,” Pete declares, watching him. 

Patrick’s half-hard again already and thinking distantly about another round. He grins at Pete with tooth and charm and smacks his lips, tasting Pete or dick or Pete’s dick clinging to the roof of his mouth. God, Patrick has missed living. Patrick has missed existing. The world is so gloriously vibrant that Patrick can taste the colour of it sharp on his tongue. 

“I am so fucking happy right now,” he tells Pete, pillowing his chin on his cupped palm and running his fingers through the short, dark curl of Pete’s pubic hair. Pete smells heavenly. The sheets are warm and soft. Patrick is caught in the centre of a pleasant cocoon of sensory overload. He quirks his eyebrows at Pete. “Do you have any ice cream? I feel like ice cream might make this perfect.”

Pete rubs his stubble over Patrick’s hip and breathes him in and kisses, precise, on the flushed and sensitive tip of Patrick’s cock. It burns in wonderful ways. 

“I have no ice cream,” he admits. “I have no waffles, and I have no pancakes. I think there might be a couple of Pop Tarts in the cabinet. Oh, and a box of Wheaties I bought when I thought I might try living like an adult.”

Patrick smiles and touches Pete’s chin. “How’d that work out?”

“My TV is bigger than my couch and I have Star Wars bed sheets. How am I doing so far?”

Patrick shifts on the bed. He climbs to straddle Pete’s hips and pins his wrists playfully either side of his head. He’s so fucking lucky, he thinks. Second chances like this, they’re unheard of. They should take full and frank advantage of it before the universe catches up.

“If I could pick any moment to keep, with any totally respectable adult-in-the-chronological-sense, it would be right now, with you,” Patrick says, with deep, enduring seriousness. 

“I have a really depressing secret to tell you,” Pete says in a conspiratorial whisper. “I’m actually really bad at dealing with… feelings. I’m selfish and I don’t play well with others and pretty much every single significant relationship in my life has ended in a cloud of emotional shrapnel when I detonate the inevitable time bomb in the middle of it.”

Patrick frowns, and decides that Pete is really a lot stupider than he thought he might be. “You’re stupider than I thought you might be,” he says, because it’s the kind of thing he feels ought to be shared. “You weren’t with the right people, obviously. And, to make things extra perfect, I’m not even people! Not really! There’s no way this can’t be perfect.”

Pete looks troubled, which saddens Patrick. He doesn’t want Pete to look troubled ever. He wants Pete to beam out that molten golden core that goes right to his centre and throw it out into the universe. He wants the world to watch Pete shine. 

“Actually, about that,” Pete says. Patrick considers clapping a hand over his mouth, but it’s too late. “I think we should call Professor Hurley.”

Patrick frowns. “Not really into threeways.”

“Very funny. I meant about you.”

“What about me?”

“That you’re — you’re real,” Pete says, exasperated. Patrick releases his wrists and rolls off to the side. “Come on, don’t be like that. This isn’t normal, let’s not fake like it is.”

“And talking to ghosts is normal?” Patrick points out sulkily. 

“It is now I know they’re actually there,” Pete says, chasing Patrick across the bed. He wraps him in a warm koala grip, his thigh over Patrick’s, his arm around his waist. “I want to take you for breakfast, but like, what if I take you outside and you sparkle in sunlight.”

“That’s vampires. And not even fun, gay, 80s Joel Schumacher vampires, with totally cool bleach jobs and, like, motorcycles. It’s Meyer vampires. The worst of all the vampires.”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” Pete says reasonably, and fuck reason. Patrick doesn’t want reason. Reason is the denial of hope, and — God knows — Patrick needs hope right now. “I don’t want us to get our hopes up, just for you to… to…”

“Die. Again.” Patrick says it flatly and feels Pete wince against his shoulder. 

He turns in Pete’s arms and looks at him and Pete looks back levelly. He touches Pete’s mouth and his hair and thumbs across the high crest of his cheekbone. 

“You’re not going to drop this, are you?” he sighs.

Pete shakes his head. “I am not.”

“Fine,” he mutters, wriggling out of bed and out of Pete’s arms and heading across the hardwood with a deliberate sway to his hips. “Phone stupid Hurley with his stupid doctorate on your stupid phone. I’ll be in your closet. Masturbating into your underwear.”

He slams the door loudly, just to show he’s displeased.

***

“Who am I? Ray Stantz?” 

Andy is far too alert for seven in the morning. He sounds like he’s already taken a dip in Lake Michigan and eaten a hearty breakfast of rowdy undergrads. 

Pete blinks at himself in the mirror and says, “Uh, yeah? I mean, for the purpose of your own Ghostbuster analogy? Yeah, you’re Ray Stantz in this. I’m sure as shit not Ray Stantz. I’m not even Louis. I’m, like, the guy who worked in the hotel. If the guy who worked in the hotel had sex with Slimer before he called the Ghostbusters.”

“Ugh,” Andy says, his nose wrinkle audible. “You’re fucking disgusting.”

“I’m not paying you to judge me,” Pete tells him, half an ear on his closet. It’s not that he necessarily thinks Patrick will jerk off in there, but he’d like to be prepared in case he does. 

“You’re not paying me at all,” Andy points out. “Are you planning on paying me at some point? I’ll be way more helpful if you pay me.”

“I’m not planning on paying you,” Pete agrees. “Don’t you get all those fat Chicago tax dollars, anyway?”

“Don’t make me crash into you in my 2004 Honda Accord,” Andy threatens. “Look, what exactly is going on over there? We barely know each other, I’m assuming you didn’t call a random professor you once met to tell him about your sex (after) life.” 

Yes, Pete hears the parentheses. No, he doesn’t appreciate them.

“Look,” he says. “My ghost is no longer a ghost. He’s very much corporeal. As evidenced by his laudable use of his frankly magnificent—”

“It’s an All Hallow’s Eve thing!” Andy interrupts. “Fuck, do not finish that sentence. Never ever finish that sentence. I will pay you if you don’t finish that sentence.”

Pete frowns, puzzled. “Could you back up to the first thing you said?”

“The ghost having a body situation,” Andy tells him blithely, like it doesn’t fucking matter. “It’s an All Hallow’s Eve thing. Once that’s over, it’ll be less Night of the Living Dead and back to Caspar the Friendly Ghost.”

Pete’s heart calcifies in his chest. It’s like stepping on a landmine, hearing the click and waiting for the inevitable agony of detonation. 

“All Hallow’s Eve? You mean, Halloween? He’s only real on Halloween?”

“The veil between worlds is thin today,” Andy says, gentler than before. “Maybe he can pass through into our world because you’re here and you can see him and you’re pulling him over to our side. For now, at least. A one day thing.”

“That can’t be right. No. There’s, like, no way that’s right. If that’s an established thing, why doesn’t everyone know about it? Why doesn’t the transport chief complain about a sudden surge in numbers on the El every Halloween? You’re wrong. You’re so fucking wrong, and I’m—”

“Hey, calm down,” Andy interrupts. “Maybe I’m wrong, I don’t know. You asked me to play Ray Stentz and that’s what I’m doing. This is the folklore.”

“So, what do I do?” Pete says sadly, plucking at the edge of the comforter. “What the hell do I do?”

At the end of the line, Andy takes a deep breath. “What does anyone do with the finite amount of time we’re given on earth?” he asks. “Have fun with it. Do something great. Make amazing memories. You know you have one day, how many people who lose a loved one in a car wreck wish they’d had that kind of forewarning?”

One day. Pete’s knees give and he collapses down onto the mattress and he looks at the clock at the side of the bed and he thinks there’s no way that he only gets this for seventeen hours. It’s not fair. In the closet, Patrick is singing in a smokey, bluesy voice, hangers rattling cheerfully. 

“Everything okay?” he calls, his voice so rich and lovely, curling around Pete like an italicised question mark.

“Fine, babe,” he calls back. To Andy, he says, “I’ve got to go. But — Thanks.”

“Any time,” Andy replies. “Make it count, ‘kay?”

He hangs up and spends a minute staring at his phone. He tries to deal with what could be the hardest moment of his life; harder than military school, harder than dropping out of college, harder than watching Mikey leave. He takes a deep breath and looks at the closet door warily. Because there is something harder than hearing that you have one day to live in the physical world with your soulmate. That something is telling your soulmate that he has one day to spend as a living, breathing entity walking among the good folks of Chicago. 

The only practical solution Pete can think of is that they get on a plane, and they aim for the Pacific, and they see if they can outrun the sunset. Pete thinks about this seriously for two or three seconds before he remembers Australia and the International Date Line and realises this won’t buy them any more time in a practical sense. So, he’s back to telling Patrick the awful truth. 

“Hey,” he calls out, hands and voice shaking like he’s running laps. “Could you come out here for a minute?”

Patrick shouts back, muffled, like he’s stuck his head into the dryer. “Just give me a second, I’m just — perfecting something. You’ll see. I think you’ll like it.”

Pete, who loves everything about Patrick, doesn’t doubt that for a second. He sits on the bed and he listens to Patrick crashing around and he thinks, if he just holds himself still enough, then his heart won’t splinter in his chest and he won’t bleed out over the bedroom rug. He sits until he can’t sit any longer, until they’ve lost another precious five minutes of time together, and then he stands and crosses the bedroom and peeks around the door and into the closet.

For a moment, it’s hard to make out anything among the swirling tornado of clothes dripping from hangers and onto the floor. Then, Pete sees him, the flicker of movement and pale-and-blond vibrancy dancing through a sea of every fashion mistake Pete’s ever made. He’s shirtless and barefoot, a pair of tight blue jeans hanging low on his hips. He’s pulled on his fingerless gloves and has a pair of Pete’s sunnies tucked into the platinum of his hair. He looks like James fucking Dean. Pete’s throat claws on a sob. 

Patrick gasps. “You’re cheating! You’re not supposed to look until I’m done! God, I haven’t picked out an outfit in so long, I’m not even sure if I’m getting it right. I’m going for Hollywood Heydey Rebel with elements of Twink Couture. That’s why I went with the gloves. Apparently, you don’t own a plain white v-neck, but… Hey. Are you crying?”

Pete is, in fact, crying. Pete is crying so hard he can’t actually see Patrick any more. What he’s trying to do, apparently, is not only ruin the mood entirely, but panic Patrick into a spontaneous cardiac arrest. He’s never been much of a crier, so the intensity of it is overwhelming. He thinks he might need to lie down, but collapses onto Patrick instead. 

“Hey, come on, it’s okay,” Patrick says, with the bold optimism of a man who isn’t privy to most of the facts. “I know, this whole thing is kinda weird, right? But that’s no reason for you to go all Julia Roberts, Best Actress on me. Pete, seriously, you’re starting to freak me out. What’s wrong? Did someone die?”

Pete shakes his head. Then he nods, because although no one has died yet, they’re on a countdown against November first. He has no idea how it’ll happen and wishes he’d asked Hurley for more details. Will Patrick disappear? Will he actually, literally die all over again and Pete will have a ghost, a looming deadline and a corpse to deal with? Will laying this body to rest negate the other one? God, he’s not emotionally equipped to deal with any of this. 

He allows Patrick to steer him back to the bed. Then, he takes both of Patrick smooth, warm hands in his and looks at him very seriously, and says, “This isn’t a permanent situation, Patrick.”

Patrick looks at him, thoroughly confused. “You and me?”

“No! God, no!” Pete holds Patrick’s hands a fraction tighter. Patrick begins to struggle, just a little. “This. You. Your… permanence, isn’t permanent. I called Professor Hurley and he says you get until midnight.”

Patrick stops struggling. He becomes very pale. 

“Oh,” Patrick says eventually. “Right. Well. That… Wow, that sucks.”

Unthinking, Pete grabs him and crushes him to his chest. Like this, he can feel the vitality of Patrick’s heartbeat against his own, the warmth of his breath on Pete’s neck. 

“Alright,” Patrick says on a shaky breath. “Well, I guess we have until midnight so we need to get moving.”

That — doesn’t sound right. Patrick looks at him; aquamarine eyes defiant, chin tilted up against the world. 

Pete blinks at him and Patrick blinks back, his pink and lovely mouth set. Pete thinks Patrick possibly didn’t understand him. That can happen with grief. Very gently, he says, “Patrick, did you hear what I said?”

“Yeah, that we have until midnight before I lose this.” He gestures to his body and looks at Pete like he’s an idiot. Maybe he is, because he doesn’t seem to be handling this well — at all. “So, get dressed. We’re heading out into the city. I’ve got, like, a ton of stuff I want to do.”

“But, Patrick—”

“No,” Patrick says firmly. “No, you listen to me. I’ve spent the past eleven months trapped in a sensory deprivation tank. I haven’t tasted, smelled or felt anything. I’m not going to waste this opportunity sitting around looking serious. I want, like, the best day. I want a Ferris Bueller day, but with less totalled classic cars and way more risky, outdoor sex. Fuck, I want ice cream. Can we go get ice cream? Please?”

There are many things in life that Pete doesn’t claim to understand: astrophysics, the electoral college system, high school math. But, he thinks right now, he understands Patrick. He wipes his eyes on the edge of the comforter and kisses Patrick slow and deep and breathless. When they break apart, his ears are ringing and he can feel the brand of Patrick’s tongue in his mouth. 

“We can do anything you want to do.”

***

They start their best day with ice cream, even though it’s fifty out. They’re wearing coats. They can deal with the cold. They huddle in a tiny Italian gelato place in Gold Coast. Patrick used to come here as a kid, watching the staff with wide eyes from behind the service glass. It’s barely nine in the morning and they’re the first customers. The server seems surprised by Patrick’s enthusiasm for ice cream.

He can’t decide on the flavour. Who in their right mind can choose their last taste of ice cream? So, he takes the day’s special, caramel cashew, and it’s so fucking good Patrick wants to roll around in it. Or smear it all over Pete and taste it from something far more enjoyable than a waffle cone. Instead, he has to watch Pete plan his funeral in sad, measured looks. 

Patrick might enjoy his ice cream a lot more, he thinks, if Pete would stop looking at him like he’s a tragic aunt experiencing her last minutes on the mortal plane. Patrick licks his cone defensively and fights the urge to tell Pete that he can see Uncle Jedd waiting for him in his wedding suit. He scowls at Pete over the syrup dispensers. Pete’s kicked-puppy look ramps up through several escalating stages. 

It’s pissing Patrick off.

“Listen to me,” he says. Pete looks up sadly, his ice cream melting down the side of the cone. “I’m not dead yet, okay? Can I just enjoy my fucking ice cream without you reminding me of my own imminent mortality?”

“I’m sorry,” Pete bleats balefully, like a pastor at a wake. He takes a maudlin, half-hearted lick at his ice cream then goes back to watching it melt. 

Patrick takes a huge, brainfreeze-risking lick of his caramel cashew. He doesn’t miss the way Pete’s eyes follow his tongue. “If you don’t cheer up, I’m going to walk you to the end of Navy Pier, and I’m going to toss you into Lake Michigan. I will not follow up with a life belt.”

“If I don’t pay my utility bill before you do it, will that count as unfinished business?” Pete asks. Patrick’s eyebrows rise into skeptical arches. He can feel them migrating for Mars. “Just because, like, if that’s the case, then I’d come back, and I’d get to be with you.”

And to hell with this. To hell with all of this. Patrick will not stand idly by and have his last day with functioning neurons and receptors ruined by a morbid psychic. Patrick bristles and takes an aggressive bite of his ice cream. The roots of his teeth ring with the cold but God, the ice cream tastes good. He wants waffles next. Or maybe pancakes. The thing about pre-diabetes is it doesn’t count if you won’t be around to watch it flourish.

“Fuck you, Pete Wentz,” he snaps. “Fuck you for thinking that’s something I want to hear, and fuck you for wearing your maudlin like a Hot Topic hoodie.”

The server looks at them with interest — he probably thinks Pete is breaking up with him. Patrick is so unused to being observed. It makes him itchy and uncomfortable. He shifts in his seat. He straightens his hair.

Pete leans in, his mouth moued with grief. “I was just saying—”

Patrick detonates, his irritation— his hurt — measurable on the INES. “No! No, don’t ‘just say,’ asshole. Don’t just fucking say. My own mom thinks I’m still alive somewhere and avoiding her. I have friends who think I ducked out on them with a briefcase full of cash and ran for the border without looking back. I never got to say goodbye to anyone, and you want to play it like it’s a tragic MySpace romance novel. This is not your grief, Peter. It’s mine. So, like, back off.”

“I don’t think MySpace is the typical platform for romance novels, but—”

“Shut up!” Patrick snaps, his volume ratcheting up from ‘whisper scream’ to ‘audible in Michigan.’ The server is definitely giving them side-eye now, not even pretending not to listen. “Could you stop beating your chest and rending your clothes like fucking Heathcliffe? It’s not cute, and it’s not funny, and I want to enjoy today so just… Could you make a concerted effort to not ruin it for me? Please?”

Pete seems to think about this, his brow creased, his thumb tapping against his cone.

“It’s hard for me,” he says eventually, then clearly realises how that sounds and experiences temporary rigor mortis of the soul before barrelling on. “I know it’s harder for you, but… I spend my working life talking to people who are like me. How I’ll be when you — You know? People who get left behind when their loved ones move on and—”

“Wait,” Patrick interrupts. “I’m your loved one? You love me?”

This is a very important moment. Patrick holds his breath and doesn’t even realise he’s doing it until his unfamiliar lungs begin to burn.

Pete looks at Patrick like he’s just suggested that the Earth is flat, after all. It’s a look that suggests Patrick is certifiably insane. “Well, yeah. Isn’t it kind of obvious? I feel like I’m not subtle.”

“Oh,” Patrick says, and stares at the lingering remnants of his ice cream cone. “I — No one has ever said that to me before. I mean, aside from my mom. Bob said it, but it was always when he wanted something, so I’m not sure that counts.” Patrick is aware he’s babbling. Patrick is unsure how to stop. “I think my sister might’ve said it a couple of times, I don’t know. But that’s different, isn’t it? That’s—“

“I love you,” Pete says earnestly, finally cutting over Patrick’s endless stream of consciousness. He leans over the tiny table and kisses a smudge of ice cream from Patrick’s cheek, and whispers in his ear. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

There’s something lodged in Patrick’s chest. A comfortable warmth beneath his lungs that spreads out through his veins like sunlight. For a man who made a living out of always knowing the right thing to say, Patrick finds he has no words at all. He’s always been the kind of guy that holds back. If you don’t put your heart on the line, he reasoned, you can’t get hurt. Well, look where that got him. 

Even now, Patrick is terrified. Which is ridiculous. What’s Pete going to do? Eyeliner him to death? He feels his mouth tip in a shy smile. He takes a deep breath. He thinks he might be blushing. 

“I love you, too,” he whispers. 

SIlently, Pete holds out his cone of melting ice cream. It’s pink in a very artificial way, more e-number than actual foodstuff. Patrick chases a drip along the cone and watches Pete watching his mouth as he licks Pete’s fingers clean. It’s cotton candy flavour, he thinks. Maybe marshmallow. Salty with Pete. He chases a stray fleck with his tongue and looks at Pete and says, “How long do you think my mouth will stay cold?”

Pete blinks at him stupidly. “What?”

“I’m going into the bathroom right now,” Patrick says, grinning wickedly. “A sensible guy might come with me and find out the answer.”

Pete knocks over his chair in his haste to follow.

***

Next on the list is the Museum of Science and Technology. Then the Shedd. Then the view from the Sears Tower. They take a walking tour of Wrigley Field like tourists and Pete buys him a bear in a tiny Cubs shirt and hat. Pete takes so many pictures it’s a race to see if he runs out of battery or storage first. They eat from every hole-in-the-wall place that looks interesting. By dinnertime, Pete is giddy on sugar and stuffed to the gills with greek food. He’s sucked Patrick’s dick in every bathroom stall, conveniently unlocked janitor’s closet and deserted corner that he’s found. 

Still, it isn’t enough. Still, his watch refuses to do him a solid and move backwards.

Pete looks at Patrick in the lights of Crown Fountain. He maps Patrick’s cheekbones, the curve of his jaw and the plump flush of his mouth and thinks you are so fucking wonderful. He’s said it so many times already today, fallen in love with Patrick in so many different ways. He even said it when Patrick was attempting to dislocate his own jaw like a snake, in order to maximise the ratio of falafel to hummus he could cram into his mouth which he thinks might be a demonstration of true love. 

He decides once more probably won’t hurt and takes Patrick’s chilled hand in his and kisses each of his knuckles in turn and says, into his ear, “You are so fucking wonderful,” and Patrick beams at him, so it was probably the right thing to say. He can hardly bear to check the time. 

“I want to go somewhere with music,” Patrick says suddenly. “Bob didn’t give a shit about music. I miss it.”

Pete doesn’t want to do that. He wants to go back to his house in Lakeview and lay Patrick out on the bed and map every square inch of skin with his hands and his mouth and his tongue. But this is Patrick’s last day and he gets frighteningly pissy when Pete argues with him, so Pete smiles and says, “I know just the place.”

They end up in an underground club because there are very few places in the North Side that don’t require tickets or ties on Halloween. The music is a weird, disjointed mix of eighties pop and current club numbers that makes Pete feel like his sense of hearing is having an aneurysm. They get shitty generic beer at the sticky bar and listen to Whitney Houston drift discordantly into Flo Rida.

“I love music,” Patrick murmurs, his eyes drifting over the dancefloor. “My dad was a musician, you know. Before he had to settle down and get a real fucking job. I always thought, maybe that could be me one day.”

What is Pete supposed to say to that? You can be whatever you want to be? Or maybe, Who knows what life might throw at you? They both know what happens at midnight. Pete settles on, “Maybe some things don’t happen for a reason.”

Patrick laughs sadly. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. Maybe there are infinite Patricks in infinite universes and somewhere, somehow, one of them joined a band. Maybe he’s happy.”

“If he did, I bet he’s insanely successful,” Pete murmurs into Patrick’s hair. He hasn’t styled it today and it falls in choppy, messy spikes of gold across his brow. 

“Maybe he met you,” Patrick says, grinning. “After a show, or in line for the restroom.”

Pete rolls his eyes. “Restroom lines? Really? You have such giddy hopes for our alternate selves.”

“I’m just basing this on the existing data that you welcomed a ghost into your home and went on to commit, like, so many crimes to help that ghost. You seem like you’d be a restroom line kind of guy in another universe.”

“Alternate universe me is so, so flattered.”

Patrick raises an eyebrow. “He should be. God, I wish I could just… go back in time. I get this, whatever the fuck this is supposed to be, why can’t I have the chance to make it all okay?”

“What would you do?” Pete asks, trailing his straw through his drink. 

“I have no idea,” Patrick admits. “I’d turn Bob in, I guess. I’d do something right for once, instead of doing whatever’s easiest. Maybe I’d do something completely fucking insane and, like, set up a recording studio or something. I’d find you. I’d — God, how do you redesign a life when you don’t fucking have one?”

“I don’t know,” Pete admits. 

“Another shot at life,” Patrick muses, smiling a faraway smile. “Ugh, no one wants to think about tragedy. Dance with me?”

Pete nods and they wind to the tiny dancefloor. The DJ begins playing Only You, which is horrifically ill-timed. Patrick leans into him with such gratitude, such pure, vital hunger that Pete’s hands tighten on his hips like an anchor. Patrick looks up through his lashes and brushes his lips softly against Pete’s and whispers into his mouth, “Hey.”

“Hi,” Pete grins, swaying to the music. Now he’s glad that Patrick talked him into this. Now he’s watching Patrick move to the music, humming softly under his breath, now Pete gets why Patrick had to have this day. Now he understands the beauty of lived experience. He kisses Patrick’s mouth again. 

Patrick pulls back, simultaneously frowning and smiling and on a shaky breath he says, “It’s so weird, hearing music like this.”

Pete frowns, confused. “Like, Yazoo specifically?”

Patrick pushes his shoulder with fondness. “Shut up. I never really thought about it before but it’s like I’ve spent the past year watching everything in black and white and now someone’s turned on fucking 4k high definition with digital surround sound. It’s like living inside that movie theater ad, you know the one with the vibrating speaker and the drops of water—”

“Non Newtonian fluid,” Pete corrects absently. Patrick looks at him askance. “What? I know some smart person stuff.”

Patrick shakes his head and laughs softly. “Non Newtonian fluid, then. It’s like coming up from underwater and it’s daylight. Everything is so bright and so much and so fucking wonderful. It sort of hurts. In a good way, though.”

The aching hollow in Pete’s chest expands. He slides his hands under Patrick’s shirt and digs his thumbs into the dimples at the small of his back. Patrick nips his ear in a way unsuitable for public viewing. 

“I want to do the filthiest things with you,” Patrick whispers.

Then his tongue dips into Pete’s ear, traces down and curls under the lobe. Pete’s blood lights up like runway markers. This is not something Pete previously thought he might find erotic. Pete was so, so wrong about his sexual predilections. It’s the most erotic thing he’s ever experienced. 

“I think I want to go home now,” Patrick whispers. 

Pete pushes his hand through Patrick’s hair. 

“Good,” he murmurs. “Because that’s exactly what I want, too.”

***

Patrick has missed out on a year of lived human experience. Of sensation. He doesn’t intend to miss out on a moment more.

He drags Pete over the threshold of his looming Greystone by the belt buckle. Their mouths clash like a bank robbery, like Patrick is making demands and Pete is handing over everything he has. If this will be his last kiss, he’ll pour everything he has into it. This is a kiss defined by twelve months of longing, two weeks of falling. Patrick wants this to be a kiss for the history books.

With Pete’s tongue in his mouth and Patrick’s hands groping desperately at Pete’s button and zipper, they half-fall up the staircase, homing in on Pete’s bedroom, his bed. They – shit! – miss a step, risking life-threatening injury as they pitch against the handrail. Pete squeals into Patrick’s mouth as he gets a hand down the front of his jeans and squeezes too hard at Pete’s cotton-covered junk, Patrick laughs against Pete’s throat as they right themselves and continue on their quest for a weight-supporting, horizontal surface.

They trip across the hallway, the bedroom floor. Patrick’s knees hit the bed frame before the rest of him and he collapses. He drags Pete down with him, the air punched from his lungs somewhere between the mattress and Pete’s chest. He thinks he might be mildly concussed. When Pete sinks a hand down the front of his jeans and grabs the throbbing, swollen length of his cock and squeezes with just too much pressure to be comfortable, Patrick decides he doesn’t care.

The glowing red light of Pete’s alarm clock taunts him from the night stand. Patrick kicks out at it, sends it crashing to the floor in a plasticky clatter of parts and ricocheting batteries. He doesn’t need to know how little time they have left. He tells himself he doesn’t care.

Pete smells of rum and licorice and clean, woodsy soap. His hair is wet with sweat and greasy with product. His mouth is hot against Patrick’s, kicking off heat like a furnace. It sucks the heat from Patrick, internalizes it, leaves him cold and shivering in the leather jacket he stole from Pete’s closet. He presses closer for body heat. Pete’s tongue flicks in idle patterns against the roof of his mouth. Patrick reaches down, reaches into Pete’s jeans and wraps a leather-gloved palm around the hot and swollen tightness of his erection.

“Fuck,” Pete groans.

They shift on the bed, mouth to cock. Pete’s breath is hot enough to burn through Patrick’s boxers. Patrick fights Pete’s jeans down his hips and leans in, mouths his intention into the cotton-covered swell of Pete’s cock, tastes him through the faint tang of fabric softener. He buries his nose in the thin, exposed edge of Pete’s pubic hair and smells him hot and brackish and so alive it makes his heart ache.

Pete gets a hand under Patrick’s shirt and plucks deftly at his nipple. It sends a throbbing pulse straight to the quivering tip of Patrick’s cock, linked by a perfect thread of gold and heat. Patrick stops thinking. It’s possible he stops existing as he arches up for more contact and cries out until his throat hurts. Pete shoots him a bastard’s grin and wrestles off the shirt over Patrick’s head and then, suddenly, Pete has seventeen hands and three mouths and all of them are occupied with finding every single pressure point of bliss that Patrick possesses. Patrick, untouched in so long, is happy to let Pete explore.

Pete licks Patrick’s nipple like it’s an experiment, like he’s collecting scientific data on the pitch and force of Patrick’s answering gasp for future comparison. He grins, the result as he expected and moves on to biting languidly at the sensitive skin just beneath Patrick’s jaw. Patrick could get used to this. Patrick mustn’t get used to this.

This is how they should’ve spent the day. They’ve wasted so much time and now they’re running out and Patrick grabs the waist of his jeans in both hands and shoves them down, lets his angry, red dick pop free. It springs from his shorts like the quivering point of a compass needle seeking north, and smacks against his belly.

Pete takes him in one rough hand and stokes, tugs, pulls. He drops his head and mouths at the straining head of Patrick’s cock until he’s sloppy with spit and the drooling slick of pre-come. Pete flips out the tip of his tongue, digs it hard and pointed into the slit of Patrick’s cock and Patrick goes cross-eyed, blows out every fuse in his neurological wiring and short circuits. The lights are on and Patrick is no longer home. Why waste time on thoughts when he can feel this? His hips twitch in desperate little thrusts. He holds his breath until he thinks he might pass out.

“You are so fucking gorgeous,” Pete tells him in a rough growl. His eyes glow electric in the gloom, his tongue already lapping at the tight heat of Patrick’s balls.

Patrick knows he won’t be beautiful in the morning. It’s a fairytale curse in reverse: you love me when I’m a prince, but how will you feel when you kiss me and I turn into a frog? He shivers, blinks back tears and tries so hard to be an asshole about it. “Your mouth has so many other, better talents than talking. Talking is like, the thing you’re least good at.”

Pete says, smiling crookedly. “It’s true, allow me to demonstrate.” And then he grabs Patrick by the hips and flips him over. “Nice ass, by the way,” he adds, and before Patrick can think of a clever response – Patrick isn’t sure he can think at all – Pete pulls him open and plants a wet, smacking kiss on the tight heat of Patrick’s asshole.

Patrick makes a noise like he just stepped into an open elevator shaft, a high and gurgling shout from the very depths of his diaphragm. His stomach bottoms out and his heart climbs into his throat and his chest is an empty, humming cavern in which the embarrassing noise can amplify. Pete introduces his tongue to the kiss on Patrick’s most intimate place, begins to move in slow, lapping undulations, lets his teeth skate along the nervy edge of Patrick’s rim. Patrick gasps, his hand gripping his cock, pulling in short, choppy jerks. It feels like finding home.

“Love you so much,” Pete mutters, and Patrick feels it rather than hears it, feels it vibrate up his spine and into his skull, a secret code. “So gorgeous.”

Pete pushes a finger in alongside the searching slick of his tongue, he wriggles with gentle curiosity until he finds the golden-glorious edge of that tingling, nervy gland. He presses in time with his unhurried tongue. He rubs and he fucks into Patrick with the finger and the tongue and Patrick sobs into the comforter, burning all over with sensation so sharp it feels it like deep pressure formation. Patrick is turning to diamond under the force of Pete’s touch.

His ass is high in the air, braced up on his knees. He is vulnerable, exposed. This is nothing like being with Bob, this is consideration, this is devotion. Like a computer disc, Patrick wants every god-fucked memory from before to be overwritten. He wants his past to vanish in a fatalistic flash of flame and thunder. He wants to try again, to do better this time. To be better. Pete treats Patrick with veneration of a previously unearthed, holy artefact. He treats Patrick like he’s something they forgot to label ‘fragile.’ Pete loves him in spite of his fragility. Maybe because of it. 

It’s so hard to apply due diligence to consideration of the facts when Pete is licking him like he’s testing for flavor.

“You need to fuck me,” he spits out, mangled, into the comforter. “Now. Now, now, now.”

“Now?” Pete echoes playfully, pulling off and landing a bright, messy kiss to Patrick’s ass cheek. He looks at Patrick from between his thighs, grinning toothily. His fingers are still inside, still curling interesting patterns against Patrick’s prostate.

“Now,” Patrick sighs, and rolls onto his back.

The headboard feels cool as he winds his fingers into the metalwork. His dick curves up in obscene invitation against the cinnamon thatch of his pubic hair. He is wearing his motorcycle gloves and nothing else. He flicks his hair out of his eyes and watches Pete watching him.

“Fuck,” Pete hisses.

“Did I fucking stutter?” he purrs. “Get over here.”

When Pete kisses him, it’s with such overwhelming tenderness that Patrick’s limbic system overloads. This is what he’s missed without realizing it; this connection, this wonderful and enduring bond with another living being. Whatever our souls are made of, Pete’s and mine are the same, he thinks, and thank you Bronte, laughing at his own ridiculousness. Pete kisses him like Patrick might defy the theory of gravity if he doesn’t and just float away through the roof and into the skyline. Pete kisses him like he can split Patrick down the middle with his tongue. Patrick just wants Pete to keep kissing him. He fists a hand in Pete’s hair and holds him close, smashes their mouths together until the swelling in his lips outruns the swoop in his lungs.

They open his ass together: two lubed fingers of Patrick’s, one of Pete’s. They move in slow tandem, working, stretching, seeking out every long-forgotten nerve ending until Patrick is a shaking, dizzy mess, his dick drooling thick and sticky onto his belly.

“I’m good,” he insists, panting, strung out. His dick throbs a chord progression, his hole fluttering around the invasion of fingers, craving more. “Fuck, Pete, come on.”

There is no tension anywhere in Patrick’s body, only his cock is hard and tight and red as a sunburn. He is a melting puddle of Patrick, leaking through Pete’s sheets and pooling in new and interesting shapes. Pete braces over him, weight all on one elbow, the other hand reaching down to line up. The angle isn’t great like this but Patrick needs to face him, needs to watch Pete’s face as he pushes inside of him.

Yes, just like that. 

Pete takes him in one slow, steady thrust, filling Patrick up until there’s no available space left inside to think. It’s a relief, not thinking. With slow and graceful precision, Pete begins to move inside of him, to scrape the slippery, nerve-edged insides of Patrick’s body with each rock of his hips. He keeps one hand on Patrick’s jaw, holds him steady as he licks into his mouth. The other, he twists over Patrick’s wrists, holding his hands down and into the mattress above his head.

“I want you to feel,” he whispers into Patrick’s mouth. “I want you to remember this even if you don’t remember anything else about today.”

Of course, Pete fucks Patrick like he was made for it. He fucks Patrick with such sound and diligent distinction that it’s hard for Patrick to imagine he was ever fucked by anyone else. His hips move with precision, his neat and trimmed happy trail grazes Patrick’s tip with every thrust. They fall together into a rhythm that feels like they’ve practised it, like Pete already knows exactly how to take Patrick right to the edge of too much. When to coax him over it. When to fall back. They match, lock and key. They are irreparably fated, even in this.

Patrick locks his ankles around Pete’s back, grips into the hold Pete has on his hands, and hangs on for dear life.

It feels so good, that Patrick is unprepared. He doesn’t feel the build of his orgasm. How can he, when his whole body feels liquid and molten from crown to toes? When every sensation is amplified, magnified, so he can’t tell which part of his body Pete is touching. He ripples under Pete, bites down onto the soft edge of Pete’s tongue in his mouth and comes, arcing white and hot into the space between them, dripping down onto his own belly, his chest. 

Pete makes a delighted, strangled sound. “Can I keep going?” he asks, and Patrick nods, tips his head back into the pillow and lets Pete fuck him through each tingling throb. It expands the pleasure inside of him. Drags it out and out and out until Patrick is gasping, head thrashing, his cock leaking desperate against his belly. He can’t think, can only let Pete finish with long, steady pulls of his cock, with a shudder that runs the full length of his spine. Patrick feels the hot rush of it inside of him, feels Pete’s cock twitch. He sighs, content, so unbelievably happy. 

Patrick lies back, fucked beyond rationality, beyond sensibility. His brain is offline, he has no current cortical function available for speech. He looks up into Pete’s happy eyes and lets his mouth curl into an exhausted grin. 

“You okay?” Pete murmurs, curling his fingers through Patrick’s sweaty hair. 

Patrick, tingling pleasantly, his skin a brassy buzz, lifts his eyes to Pete’s. “I don’t think I can feel my tongue,” he mumbles, and Pete kisses him, and Patrick feels Pete’s tongue, so it’s probable that there’s been no lasting damage to his central nervous system. “Okay, we’re good.”

They lie together in silence. Pete softens inside of him. He looks content in a way he hasn’t looked since Patrick first met him. 

Finally, Patrick decides to ruin this wonderful pocket of stillness. 

“I don’t know how it’s going to happen. Did Andy mention anything? Will it… hurt?”

Pete makes a soft, sad sound and snuggles closer. “I don’t know. I hope it doesn’t” he says, and holds Patrick close in a fierce and protective way. “I love you.”

“Yeah,” Patrick whispers, so scared he thinks, ironically, he might die from it. “Yeah, I love you.”

Pete falls asleep quickly. Quicker than Patrick would necessarily expect him to fall asleep. He hopes this is the universe’s final act of mystical kindness; to make sure that Pete isn’t conscious for the moment that Patrick must inevitably slip back into whatever place souls go to before they find rest. 

Like a coward, he slides from the bed, just to be on the safe side. He does not attempt to wake Pete. What could he say? How can he say goodbye? There is no happily ever after waiting for them. Instead, he pads down the hallway and into the living room and he sits on the couch, very precisely, and stares at the clock. He has less than two minutes left in human form. He throbs where Pete was inside of him and his chin burns with stubble rash and he holds on to those sensations. He cherishes them and imagines he’s filing them away for when he will, inevitably, feel nothing at all. 

For want of something better to do, he pulls his laptop across the coffee table, fires it up and keys in his password. He navigates to the hidden folder, the one that contains every incriminating email, evidence of every bank transfer, every well-executed and convoluted plan. 

It’s completely empty. There is nothing at all to suggest that Bob was ever involved in anything more incriminating than dinner reservations and the booking of theatre tickets. He did, however, conveniently buy a one way ticket to Mexico in Patrick’s name. 

“Fuck!” Patrick snarls, his stomach lurching. 

The clock ticks over to midnight and Patrick, for a moment, feels exactly the same. He’s given a few throbbing beats of his heart to imagine that they’ve broken the curse, that somehow he’s the exception to the rule. That he might be allowed to live.

Then it starts. It starts at his heart. Cold, like ice, spreading rapidly through his veins. He gasps and slides to his knees, clutching out, grasping at anything within reach. His nails claw uselessly against the edge of the couch. His eyes close and his mouth opens and his whole body is torn apart at the seams. Patrick doesn’t remember dying, he hopes it wasn’t like this. He hopes no one has to experience this. 

When it’s over, he opens his eyes and stares down at the concrete and realises he’s floated down through Pete’s living room floor and into the dust of the basement below. He looks down. He is wearing a grubby white button down, black dress pants, a waistcoat. He pinches his thigh, hard. He can feel nothing at all.

Silently, he curls in a ball in a corner and wills himself invisible.

Tonight, he feels like being alone. 

***

When Pete wakes, he’s alone.

It takes him a moment to piece things together, to remember that he fell asleep first. To remember that he left Patrick to face it alone. This hurts more than it has any business to hurt. His whole heart feels bruised, his eyes stinging. He scoops Patrick’s discarded shirt from the floor and breathes deeply. It smells of mothy closet and dust. Pete is not even gifted with the lingering scent of him. 

Pete makes his way through the other bedrooms, the bathroom, he peers into the room in the turret and doesn’t find Patrick. Then, with ramping panic, he searches the living room, dining room, home theater, kitchen and finds nothing, nothing, nothing. His chest is seized with fear, he can’t imagine what he’ll do if Patrick is gone. Finally, he descends the cold stone steps into the basement. It used to make him nervous down here. He’s not afraid anymore. 

He finds Patrick curled behind the furnace, half-through the basement wall, just his legs and shoes poking out. Relieved, he falls to his knees and, with reverence, he reaches out and brushes a hand over Patrick’s calf. 

“Patrick,” he says quietly, and he pours as much love into the touch as he can, he thinks so hard about how much he adores Patrick that he can taste it in his throat. “Babe, please. Come out.”

Patrick doesn’t move. When he speaks, his voice is muffled. “Go. The fuck. Away.”

“I’m sorry,” Pete whispers. “I’m sorry I left you alone. I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere.”

Patrick snorts. “I’m not afraid of being alone. I’ve been alone for a year. I don’t need you to hold my fucking hand through all of this.”

“That’s like, demonstrably not true. You’re hiding in a wall.”

“I’m happy here.”

“In a wall?”

“Yes, in a wall.”

“I’m not happy with you there. Come out.”

Patrick doesn’t reply for the longest time. Then he says, “I shouldn’t have stayed — I should have left, and not been so fucking selfish.”

The idea of Patrick leaving knifes through Pete with cold dread. He shudders and rocks back on his heels and grasps straight through the incorporeal nothing of Patrick’s ankle. 

“You don’t get to leave me without saying goodbye.”

Patrick drifts slowly back through the wall and into the basement. He wears an expression of intense irritation. He looks as if he’s attempting to glare Pete into submission. “I won’t be saying goodbye, because I’ll be stuck here in limbo forever.”

“You’ll be with me.”

“I won’t,” Patrick snaps back. “I won’t, because it’s not fair. You don’t get to tie the rest of your life to the — the memory of a person who doesn’t exist. A person you don’t even know.”

“You don’t get to make my decisions for me,” he tells Patrick. “You don’t get to decide what’s best for me, or what I can deal with, or make any sort of sweeping dramatic gesture because you think it’s in my best interest.”

Patrick floats away from him obstinately. “I get to make whatever decision I want if I know it’s in your best interests.”

“You’re in my best interests,” Pete insists. 

“I’m no one’s best interest! Don’t you fucking get it? I’m not real! I can’t marry you, or buy a dog with you, or raise, like, fifteen adopted kids with you. I’m a memory, not a person. You can’t love a memory, Peter. You can’t make a future with someone who is never going to leave the past.”

Inside, Pete is screaming. This fight is stupid. He doesn’t want to fight with Patrick. He doesn’t want to say goodbye to Patrick. He wants to go to sleep and wake up last November, to find the Patrick who has no idea he’s living his last day on earth, to collect him up and keep him safe. This is not an option that’s available to them. This is their lightning strike that won’t hit twice. Their iridescent, burning firework of a moment, streaking across the sky with beauty, with brilliance, but consigned to memory in a flash. 

He forces down his temper and says, as gently as he is able, “You don’t get to tell me who I can love. You can tell me you don’t love me, and I’ll be okay with that. I’ll accept it. But you don’t get to tell me I’m not supposed to love you, because I know I am.”

Patrick glares at him. “You’re the most annoying person I know.”

“I’m currently the only person you know,” Pete jokes. It’s a bad jokes. It hurts him. 

“The only psychic in Chicago,” Patrick drawls with fearsome sarcasm. “Lucky you.”

“Lucky me,” Pete repeats, means it. “Lucky, lucky me. Because I got you.”

This makes Patrick pause. He stops floating and he looks at Pete with his head tipped curiously to the side. His face is so exquisitely hopeful, so unbearably pained. “Do you — Do you mean that? You don’t regret this?”

Apparently, Pete is the worst kind of people. He’s managed, somehow, to spend two weeks falling in love with this maddeningly brilliant man. He’s spent the day holding him, touching him, fucking him beyond all rationality and stilll, somehow, Patrick doubts the validity of Pete’s feelings. Maybe Mikey was right. Maybe Pete is toxic, maybe he tarnishes everything he touches. Still, he moves forward and Patrick doesn’t move back and he steps across the basement floor until he can feel a low, humming prickle from Patrick’s presence. 

“Just because we don’t get long enough, doesn’t mean I don’t feel it,” he says. And then, very seriously, he leans in and kisses Patrick’s mouth. It tickles, like rubbing his fingers against the TV screen when he was a kid. A fuzzy burst of static on his skin that raises the hair on his arms. “I love you, Patrick Stump.”

Patrick’s smile is sad and small. He does not say it back. 

“Come on,” Pete says. “We need to send you home.”

“How?” Patrick asks miserably. “We don’t have any information on Bob.”

“We have the laptop.”

“It’s empty! He cleared it out. We don’t have any evidence that I’m dead. We have nothing. This is where it ends for me, this is where I spend the rest of… whatever this is, stuck in limbo like this where no one else can see me. This is it! I have nowhere else to go from here!”

Pete prepares to say something he doesn’t really want to say. Not because he doesn’t want to help, but because the implications of offering help in this way are so far-reaching, so all-consuming. This is the kind of thing from which he can never come back. If he makes this offer, if he stands by it, there will be memories that he’ll have to live with for the rest of his life. Not the good ones, not the ones of Patrick happy and golden with his pink mouth cold with ice cream. No. The kind of memories that will give him nightmares that will haunt him every living, breathing moment that he spends on earth.

He thinks he can be forgiven for the tiny moment of hesitation. 

There is literally no other choice. He takes a deep breath. He looks Patrick in the eyes. 

“Then I guess we need to show them a body.”

***

Patrick’s afterlife sucks.

It sucks because he’s standing on the shores of Lake Michigan, looking for his own grave, and all he can think about is the view across the water. It was so much more beautiful yesterday. It’s depressing, how death wrings the joy from everything.

Pete pokes experimentally at the earth with a shovel. He looks up. “Do you have any idea where…?”

The sentence goes unfinished. Apparently, he can’t bring himself to say Do you know where Bob dumped your body? Maybe it’s because yesterday, Pete touched that body.

Pete is digging random pockets of earth, scattering humps of soil in his wake like an errant labrador retriever, seeking bones. There’s dirt on his cheeks, dark and wet on the legs of his pants. They need a solid plan but instead, they scatter gun across the area. Patrick wishes he hadn’t been wrapped in a Persian rug the last time he was here. It would make retracing Bob’s steps so much easier.

All good plans need a leader and Patrick clears his throat and, with direction, he says, “Okay!” Pete looks at him hopefully and Patrick falters. He doesn’t actually have a clue what to do next. “Okay, good job digging. We’re doing, like, super great with the digging. The digging is A-Plus. Now, we just need to focus the digging on the correct… area.”

“Right,” Pete says, panicked but agreeable. “Right, that’s a good plan, but like – Where are you?”

Patrick wrinkles his nose. He hates that he’s the resident expert on the location of his own body. Classically trained in the art of locating the remains of Patrick Stump. Really, this is not the job he asked for.

“Um… we haven’t tried... over there?” he says, vaguely. He waves his hand in the direction of a small thicket of bushes. He could be there. There’s nothing to say he isn’t. 

Pete looks at his watch and then looks up sharply. He is visibly panicked. Nicely, he doesn’t tell Patrick precisely how little of November first they have left but, judging by the vigorous way he digs into the earth once more, Patrick suspects it’s somewhere between “little” and “next to none.” Patrick may be starting to panic. Patrick may be panicking a lot. He’s pleased he can’t hyperventilate.

“Try to remember,” Pete says, helpfully. It’s spectacularly unhelpful, since Patrick is trying his best to remember. Clearly. He is motivated to remember. Patrick floats aimlessly from one small clearing to another, Pete huffing in his wake, trailing the shovel behind him. He looks — if Patrick is being honest — totally murderer-y. If anyone comes walking through the woods, Pete is going to wind up arrested.

“Don’t do that,” he hisses at Pete, when Pete looks at his watch once more. “You’re not soothing me. I feel very unsoothed.”

Pete’s eyes are very wide and very dark in the gloom. He swings the shovel down into the ground once more. “I need to know where you are, Patrick. I don’t – I can’t dig up the whole fucking eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan. We’re running out of time!”

“I was shockingly fucking indisposed the last time I was here,” Patrick snaps viciously. He gestures to himself expansively. “On account of being fucking dead.”

He doesn’t want to fight with Pete. He’s not fighting with Pete. He’s just… angry at the situation, is all. 

Pete goes back to digging a new addition to his rapidly expanding collection of holes in the ground. They might as well plant palm trees, for all they’re achieving. “I need something to work with here,” Pete tells him, his breath clouding. “This is like playing battleships. Only there’s no board, no pieces, the person I’m playing with is in fucking Sydney, and if I lose, everyone dies.”

“Already dead,” Patrick points out.

Pete pulls a face. “Spectacularly not helpful right now.”

Patrick is finding it harder and harder to think. He needs to panic. He wants to panic. But instead, it feels like a thick, warm blanket wrapping slowly around his functioning thought processes. They’re so close to midnight. He can’t think.

“There’s a homeless guy,” he tells Pete. “A ghost. On the platform at Kinsey. Got pushed onto the tracks back in the seventies. College kids, no one caught them, he says one of them is in office now.”

Pete looks at him like he doesn’t know what to say. “Oh. Okay. About the body thing...”

“He’s completely fucking insane. Most of the time, he doesn’t even seem to know he’s dead.”

“I mean… maybe that’s good for him?” Pete says uncertainly, turning over a clod of dirt with the tip of his shovel. “Maybe it’s a kindness. Look, you can tell me all about it in a minute, I swear. Can we focus on finding you?”

“No.” Patrick shakes his head with vehemence, with fear. “No, can you imagine? When he forgets, he doesn’t understand why no one can see him. He thinks he’s going crazy. It’s like dementia, but it lasts forever and it gets worse and worse as the world changes and he doesn’t understand.”

Patrick can’t imagine anything worse than spending the rest of his life trapped among the living. One day, Pete will die, and he’ll pass over into… whatever it is that comes next. And so, the only person who knows the truth about Patrick will die and the world will keep on turning and Patrick will remain, trapped in a snowglobe of his own spiraling misery.

Patrick can’t bear it. His heart hurts with it.

Pete looks at him again, this time with urgency. “Patrick? Patrick, it’s like, uncomfortably close to midnight. You need to stay with me, okay? You need to think.”

“It’s so lonely,” Patrick murmurs vaguely. “Look at all that water. Do you think someone is drowning out there right now?” It is very important to Patrick that Pete gives this serious thought.

Pete shakes his head. “That’s nice babe, really not morbid. Can you give me a hint here? Please?” 

“I don’t want you to forget me,” he says, “you have to promise you won’t forget me,” and he tries to grab at Pete but slips straight through and this surprises him for a moment. Dread pools in his stomach. Is this how it begins? Is this the slow descent into madness? “Fuck, Pete. I can’t think. I can’t fucking think.”

“You need to give me something concrete,” Pete says, his voice bursting with panic. “For fuck’s sake, Patrick, you need to remember! Why can’t you remember?”

Patrick shakes his head. “No, I know, I’m trying,” he insists. His not-life is so fucking exhausting he could cry. “I’m really trying, I swear. It’s not like I’m gonna just trip and land on my fucking grave — Argh!”

Immediately, Patrick trips and falls forward. Unused to the effects of the physical world on his un-physical body, he doesn’t hold out his hands to save himself and lands, face-first, into the mud. It hurts, which is odd, but definitely not the oddest thing to happen to him in the past few days, so he doesn’t mention it to Pete. Patrick blinks and stares down at the ground beneath him, at the way it seems a little more earthy, a little less compact than the dirt around it. For the first time, Patrick’s ghostly form feels something other than sad and lonely and guilty.

He begins to feel pain.

The headache starts low in the base of his skull. It spreads quickly, like tree roots, clawing up and into his temples in waves of exquisite agony. Patrick rises to his knees and sinks through the first few inches of leaves and twigs and he can smell the dirt. He can taste it. This is fantastic. This is just great. For twelve months he’s imagined how it might be to experience sensation in his ghostly form. He wants the record to show he was thinking about the taste of his mom’s pumpkin squares, the feel of human touch. His curiosity is rewarded with the mother of all migraines and the smell-o-vision experience of being buried alive. Death – whatever Death is – can kiss every square inch of his ass.

“Here?” Pete asks, too frantic to ask if Patrick is okay. Which he’s not. But what’s Pete going to do? Drive him to the hospital? “Patrick, is it here?”

“Nnnnngh,” Patrick gasps, and claws weakly at the ground beneath him. His hand does not pass through. He rakes up a tiny handful of loose earth, it catches under his nails, it stains his palm. The headache is so intense he wants to rip off his skin if there’s a possibility it might make it stop. He slaps the ground twice and gasps. “This baby can fit so many corpses.”

It’s an inappropriate joke. “Fuck you,” Pete hisses. Then, without question or hesitation, he thrusts the blade of the shovel down into the dirt and begins to dig. Patrick can’t do much, can just lie on his side curled up in a ball and will away the way it feels to have his head turned inside out. 

Pete begins to dig with earnest. The ground is wet from the recent rain, the shovel sliding through it rhythmically as Patrick closes his eyes and concentrates on the sound it makes. He counts the delves Pete makes into the earth. He licks his lips and tastes blood.

His head is spinning so fast he’s dizzy with it. There’s something heavy pressing on his chest. Logically, he assumes this is proximity to his physical body, the sensations somehow echoing forward in time, so violent that they’re carved into the air around them. There’s no way anyone can survive this. He’s going to be torn apart, ripped into ectoplasm, scattered into dark matter and cast into the air like dust. He makes a low, desperate whimper and says, “Pete? Fuck, Pete. I love you.”

It’s important that Pete understands this.

Pete doesn’t reply. Bathed in moonlight, he sweats and pants and shoves spikes of hair out of his eyes as he digs like he’s Steve McQueen. He’s shed his jacket, working in his t-shirt as his biceps bunch and lengthen on each drive of the shovel. He’s still astonishingly beautiful.

It doesn’t take long until the sound of the shovel changes. Pete hits something that isn’t dirt, or rocks, or tree roots. He pauses. He shifts a little of the soil to one side. “Fuck,” he whispers. “Fuck, Patrick. I knew, but… I didn’t know. Fuck.”

Patrick makes his way to the side of his own grave on shaky hands and knees. He doesn’t float. He stares down into the pit – barely two feet deep, it’s a wonder no one found him yet, aren’t bodies always being found by joggers or dog walkers – and he sees the faintest suggestion of a patterned rug. It’s battered, filthy. Patrick is struck with the sudden, aching memory of being tipped into this hole. If he had a digestive system, he’d throw up.

There’s a shock of filthy blond hair poking from the top of the rug, thick with dirt. Patrick cries out, an aching, visceral sound that rings from the very depths of his guts. Because this is it. This is how his life ended. This is reality and 27 is the oldest he’ll ever be. Like James Dean, like Jimi Hendrix, like Kurt Co-fucking-bain. Growing up is not something Patrick will ever do. He won’t marry, he won’t get to enjoy being in love. He will never grow old and he will never age and he will never sit on the porch and think it’s been a good life.

This echo of his soul is nothing.

Patrick Stump is dead.

Something is dripping from his chin and Patrick realizes it’s tears. He’s crying. He’s crying and he can feel it and he collapses onto Pete and feels Pete’s chest, heaving with quickened breath. He can feel Pete’s arms around him, taste Pete’s tears as they mix with his own. Patrick, for the first time in a year, grieves for the life he will never get to live and, somehow, the cosmic powers of oogly-boogly bullshit allow Pete to grieve with him.

Patrick cries until there’s nothing left, until he is a shaking, empty husk. The ground is damp under his ass and the smell of the lake is sharp in his nose. He rests his head against Pete’s shoulder. He is vibrantly aware of being present.

“What now?” he asks Pete.

“Maybe you get to stay like this,” Pete says, squeezing Patrick’s shoulder with such hope. Such heartbreaking hope.

Patrick shakes his head. “That’s me.” He points down into his own grave, at his own shock of blond hair. “I don’t get to keep this. But I’m grateful they gave us a moment.”

“I guess I phone this in,” Pete whispers, and his voice breaks on another desperate sob. “Fuck, I can’t – What the fuck do I do without you?”

“No. No crying.” Patrick takes Pete’s face in his hands, he thumbs gently at the tears. “Come on, this is – This is a good thing. You got by just fine without me before, you’ll get by after, I swear it.”

Behind them, someone clears their throat. “Mr Stump?”

They jump. Behind them, a tall man in a beautiful suit is waiting beside what Patrick can only describe as a vortex. Patrick didn’t imagine Death would invest quite so much of the budget on tailoring.

“I don’t want you to leave,” Pete murmurs. He clutches at Patrick’s lapels. His shoulders shake with sobs. He clings with so much aching, desperate need. “I just found you, I – Please don’t leave me. Don’t fucking leave me.”

Patrick touches Pete’s heart with reverence. “I’ll always be right—”

“If you fucking E.T. me, I swear to God, I’ll fucking kill you myself,” Pete cuts him off, laughing and crying and pulling Patrick against his mouth. “I love you,” he whispers. “Fuck, I love you so much. I want to say something profound and smart but – that’s it. I just love you.”

Patrick smiles crookedly. “I just love you, too.”

They kiss. They pour so much love into this kiss. A lifetime’s worth. Two lifetimes. They kiss like no tomorrow because, for them, there is no tomorrow. Two weeks is all they’ll ever know. Patrick strokes Pete’s cheek and Pete tangles his hands in Patrick’s hair and their tongues and lips move with such urgent feeling.

They pull apart, breathless. Patrick rests his forehead against Pete’s.

“I need you to promise me something,” he whispers. Pete nods, his eyes endless amber and gold and flecked with starlight. “I need you to promise me that you’ll move on. Fucking live, Pete. Make it worth it, because I didn’t. Live for both of us. Travel the world, listen to Bowie, drink good wine and eat terrible street food and fucking… make love. Love someone. You are so endlessly full of fucking love, and you deserve to share it.”

Pete breaks on another sob. “Fuck, Patrick.”

“No, don’t fuck Patrick me. Tell my mom I love her so much. Tell my friends I miss them. Then live your fucking life. Because that guy,” Patrick jerks his thumb over his shoulder at the man in the suit, “is the last appointment and every single person on earth is sitting in the waiting room. Make it count. Promise me?”

Pete nods, slowly. “I will miss you so much.”

“It’s okay to miss me. Just… not at the expense of everything else.”

Patrick stands. He misses the contact with Pete on a molecular level. His whole body hums with it. Underfoot, the damp leaves rustle and the breeze off the lake lifts Pete’s hair and he looks at the tall, strange man and says, “You here for me?”

“Mr Stump,” the man says with a professional smile. “If you’d like to step this way.”

Patrick hesitates, only for a moment, he thinks he can be forgiven a split second of hesitancy. This is forever, after all. Death is a selfish affair. There’s no room to think about anything else. To be dead is to have single minded focus on death at the exclusion of all else. Death is a thief. It steals every other thought. Now, Patrick considers what comes after. 

“Do you know what’s on the other side?” he asks. 

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Mr Stump, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

“Okay, cool. No spoilers, huh?”

The vortex swirls and pulses with every colour Patrick has ever seen and several he’s certain don’t exist on this plane. It’s edges are jagged, like a knife wound carved into the calm night air. It crackles and hums with static that prickles the hair on his arms. Patrick looks back at Pete over his shoulder. He blows him a kiss. 

Pete says, “I’ll love you until the day I die.”

“And everything that comes after, I hope,” Patrick grins. The vortex sucks at him, plucks at his skin and makes him shiver. 

“Don’t go hooking up with sexy… fucking angels or whatever the fuck is in there.”

“I’ll be waiting,” Patrick says. “I’ll be right here waiting, I promise. I love you.”

Then, Patrick takes a deep breath. He squares his shoulders, and he steps into the vortex. 

***

Patrick falls like he’s dropping through all four dimensions at once, and several dozen more beside. He tells himself he’s not afraid, which is a lie, because he’s very, very afraid, but he’s willing to fake it til he makes it. The air is stale and hot, the colours brighter here than they were outside. The bottom is conspicuous in its absence.

Maybe this is hell. To fall and fall through endless colour and heat and never land. Patrick closes his eyes tightly and tries to recall Pete’s face, his voice. It’s been less than a minute since he stepped into the vortex and already it’s so hard to remember. Pete is not a clear memory but a haze. Patrick can only look at him from the corner of his eye. If he turns his head, if he attempts to focus, the picture blurs. Patrick catches amber eyes, a flat, wide mouth, quick to smiling. Patrick whispers Pete, Pete, Pete until the word loses meaning.

Hell will be so much worse if he can’t remember Pete.

The air around him changes. There are sounds now; a loud and shrieking buzz that drills into the base of Patrick’s skull. He thinks the colours end beneath him. He thinks that might be the ground rushing up to greet him at bone-shattering, organ-pulping speed. Patrick attempts to scream at terminal velocity and finds his lungs have seized. He can’t remember what he was trying to think about. He closes his eyes. No one will be less surprised than him when he coats the floor of hell with his own viscera.

A hundred feet. Fifty. Twenty. Patrick holds his breath. He prepares to – whatever comes after dying, if not death. The ground below is white and Patrick braces for impact. Ten feet. Five. Fuck— 

Patrick wakes up breathing hard, drenched in sweat. He has the uneasy sense that he just had the strangest dream, but can’t remember it at all.

He snakes out a hand and smacks blindly at the alarm clock, then he flops onto his back and spends a minute staring at the ceiling. It’s been a year, and he’s still not used to seeing his childhood bedroom when he wakes up. Not that he’s ungrateful. And if you can’t go home when your boyfriend is indicted for grand larceny – his estate and assets seized, examined and liquidated, including the house – then really, where can you go. Sometimes, you have to go where everyone knows your name, even if that somewhere is the suburbs.

(Patrick may have been… partially responsible for that indictment. There were only so many things he could stand by and watch, only so many lives he could allow Bob to ruin indirectly. He is pleased for witness anonymity, though, although it’s less fun than Sister Act made it seem. He suspects Bob might be the type to take a creative approach to revenge. Almost as creative as he was with his accounting.)

He swings his legs out of the bed and rubs his toes through the rug. The reward for achieving verticality is coffee, and that makes standing up a lot more palatable.

Once out of bed, he sets about another unremarkable morning in a string of unremarkable mornings that turn into unremarkable afternoons, which give way to unremarkable evenings that lead to unremarkable nights and then Patrick sleeps in his unremarkable twin bed, watched over by posters of bands he adored as a teenager. And still adores now, which is not the point. He showers, anyway, to show willing. He dresses in a cardigan and jeans and pushes a hand through his coppery hair, so very different to the statement style he wore before.

Gentlemen prefer blonds, allegedly. Bob wasn’t a gentleman, so Patrick had precious little luck with that.

“Morning, sweetie,” his mom greets him from the kitchen table, pouring him coffee without asking. Patrick is a much more palatable person once he’s caffeinated. “I thought I heard you through the wall. Bad dreams again?”

 It would be spectacularly ungracious to respond with: ‘I live at home with my mother at the age of 28. I am single, I haven’t had sex in a year, and I’m scared to masturbate because, apparently, you can hear me through the walls. I’ve been jerking off in the bathroom at work, which I think makes me a deviant, at best. My life is a nightmare.’ So, instead, Patrick takes a long drink from his coffee cup and says, “I don’t really remember.”

Which is true, if not expansive. 

His mom cocks her head, clearly worried. “Sweetheart, maybe you should talk to someone about that.”

“I’ll look into it,” Patrick says, when he has no intention of doing any such thing. 

“And maybe you should go out more, you’re always at work, or in the house. It can’t be good for you.”

“I’m trying to grow the business, ma. These things take time.”

“I know, but you’re never going to meet a nice boy if you’re always working.”

Patrick pulls a face. “Sometimes nice boys come into work.” They do, even if those nice boys generally have their nice girlfriends with them. 

“You’re avoiding intimacy,” his mom informs him briskly. “Kathy showed me an article in a magazine, so interesting. All about people your age and a new wave of enforced celibacy. Wait, I think I clipped it for you…”

There is a small gasoline fire beneath Patrick’s chair. That’s the only possible explanation for the turn of speed he effects as he rockets to his feet and grabs at his leather jacket and crams a choking hazard-sized piece of toast into his mouth. Maybe the universe will do him a solid and he can choke to death before his mom tells him he needs to get laid more often. There is no possible distance that he would consider sufficient to place between himself and whatever article his mother is about to hand to him. It’s like she didn’t even listen when he was sixteen and she gave him The Talk and he told her he’d rather pull off his own ears than listen to her use the word ‘manhood’ one more time. 

Now she has the opposite problem, now she wants him to have sex. There are probably laws against this conversation. There are probably constitutional amendments. 

“That’s awesome, mom,” he mumbles, around a mouthful of crumbs. “Seriously, sounds great. Hey, why don’t you leave it in my room and I’ll read it as soon as I get back from working instead of having sex?”

His mom sniffs. “There’s no need to be crude.” 

There isn’t. But he maintains that she started it.

“Bye, love you,” he calls from the door.

“Be nice to people!” she shouts after him, like he’s ever anything but nice. 

There is nothing remarkable about Patrick’s morning. He works his way through the post when he arrives at the studio — his studio, his tiny pride and joy down a deserted street in Irving Park — and he checks his emails and updates the calendar with new bookings and he tinkers with a few tracks he has waiting for approval. He texts his mom and tells her he loves her. He thinks that, actually, his life is pretty good now. Less glamorous than it once was, definitely, but there’s something relaxing about knowing that the cops won’t show up to investigate the premises or that the IRS won’t seize his assets. 

But there’s still something missing. Patrick feels invisible these days, an echo of the man he used to be. Although he’s relieved to be away from Bob, it’s been a year since Patrick felt anything other than sad or lonely. 

Patrick squints at his laptop screen. It’s crammed with numbers and dates and names and he thinks, although he can’t be sure because this kind of thing has never been his strong point, but he thinks this might be the first month Nervous Breakdance breaks even. He takes off his glasses and sets them neatly on the desk beside him. He rubs his jaw. He takes a long swig of tepid coffee. He definitely doesn’t think about how it might feel to have a pair of warm hands dig into the tight tension knots wreaking havoc with his posture. 

He’s about to partake in a stale and commisatory donut when Joe slams through the door in a whirlwind of hair and tight jeans and denim vest. He doesn’t stop at the reception desk, he crashes through not one, but two doors clearly labelled ‘PRIVATE’ and he doesn’t knock. Patrick pulls a face like this bothers him greatly.

“Did the receptionist clear you for security?” he asks lightly.

“You don’t have a receptionist, or security,” Joe points out. He’s carrying a bag that smells of rice and warm, inviting spiciness. Patrick’s nose and stomach perk. 

“I could’ve been busy,” he tells Joe. 

Joe looks around the room with exaggerated slowness. “Yes. You could have been busy. Fortunately, you’re not busy at all. Lucky me.”

“Can I help you with, like, anything at all?” Patrick asks, only half as irritated as he manages to sound.

Joe begins unpacking cartons of Chinese food haphazardly onto Patrick’s desk. A tinfoil carton is already leaking, an aromatic bloodstain of black bean sauce oozing lazily towards Patrick’s paperwork. “Lunch,” he says, proudly, “is served.”

“I can see that,” Patrick grumbles, spearing a dumpling with a chopstick with murderous intent. He breaks and looks up at Joe with an affectionate smile. “Have I told you lately that I love you?”

Joe grins. “Van Morrison? Before 2pm? You need to get laid, Mr Stump.”

Patrick found Joe at Borders in the same way that children find stray dogs in movies. That is, he was minding his own business and absolutely not looking for a lifelong platonic bromance and Joe chose to be entirely, embarrassingly wrong about music directly in Patrick’s earshot. Now he’s not sure how to get rid of him. Or how to stop him in his eternal quest to find Patrick a date. Going anywhere with Joe is less relaxing socialization and more an endless game of Guy Spy. Joe has one qualifying criteria for potential Patrick dates, and that appears to be the presence of a penis. Everything else is just details.

“You’re looking especially miserable today,” Joe tells him unhelpfully, as they demolish the stack of take out. 

Patrick shrugs and tears into his noodles like they’re personally responsible. “Had a weird dream last night,” he tells Joe. “I keep having them, but then when I wake up, I can’t remember the details.”

“It’s sleeping alone,” Joe informs him, nodding sagely, like he’s a classically trained Patrick Sleep Whisperer. “If you have someone in the bed with you, you'll feel so much better.”

Patrick raises an eyebrow. He suspects he knows exactly where this is going. “Okay, who is he?”

Joe looks affronted. “I don’t know what you mean.” Patrick keeps his eyebrow raised. “I don’t always try to fix you up with people!” Patrick adds the second eyebrow and allows them to migrate towards his hairline. “Okay, fine. It’s my friend. Also my boss, but mostly my friend.”

“You’re trying to fix me up with two people? What, I’m a fucking two guy job, now? I’m not a Craiglist sofa! I know it’s been a while, but I don’t think anyone’s actually gonna need the jaws of life to pry open my—”

“No! No, he’s my boss and my friend,” Joe corrects quickly. “Pete. Pete Wentz.”

Joe is Key Grip on one of those hideous TV shows where pricks like John Edward pretend they can communicate with the dead. The prick in question is Pete Wentz, and he’s almost as famous for his pained, constipated facial expressions as he is for his douchey velvet sports coats. Patrick does not believe in ghosts, or Pete Wentz’s ability to talk to them. He has no desire to combine those two issues. 

“I’d rather be peeled and rolled in salt,” Patrick replies, curling his lip.

“No, you don’t understand,” Joe insists. “He’s actually a really great guy, and he’s been through a tough time recently. His husband left him last year, and he really needs to get out of the house before he drives himself insane.”

Patrick looks at Joe. It’s a look he loads with disdain. “So... you thought you’d give him to me? How kind.”

Joe makes a soft, stricken sound. “I’m, like, really not selling him here, but I promise he’s nice. And hot. So hot. If I were inclined towards dick, I’d want Pete’s.”

“Delightful.”

“Come on! One date, that’s all I’m asking! I promise you’ll thank me at you wedding.”

“My wedding to someone entirely different, because I’m totally capable of finding my own life partner, thanks awfully.”

“What do you have to lose?” Joe says, which strikes a chord deep inside of Patrick. What does he have to lose? Then Joe ruins it by carrying on. “And everyone knows gay dudes are totally terrible at finding themselves a viable life partner. Enter: Joe.”

Patrick agrees, mostly because he wants Joe to drop the subject before he sets back gay rights another couple of decades. “Fine. I’ll go for coffee with Peter Venkman.”

“Wentz,” Joe corrects absently, then thinks about, then laughs. “Oh, you’re funny. That’s a funny joke. Patrick, you’re a funny, funny man.”

Patrick drops his voice to a growl. “There is no Patrick. Only Zuul.”

And Joe lets it go, but gives Patrick Pete’s number and Patrick feels only the faintest frisson of delicious, spine-tingling anticipation when he texts Pete and says, Your friend thinks we should go for coffee, and Pete replies, with scant regard for punctuation or capitalisation, well if joe thinks that i guess ill see you at closers at 6! its halloween so dress up.

Patrick spends the rest of the day googling Pete Wentz and deciding that Pete is too hot to even exist in the same room as Patrick Stump. They are basically different species. There is no way that this is going to end in the way Joe imagines it’s going to end. Patrick is going to be humiliated for life. He suspects, based on the evidence of Pete agreeing to this date at all, that Joe has exaggerated Patrick’s fuckability to the power of ten. 

Obviously, Patrick doesn’t dress up, on account of not wanting to appear entirely insane to Chicago as a whole. But he does buy a pair of dollar store fangs, so, close enough, he supposes. 

He gets to the coffee shop early and finds a seat in the back. Maybe he’s hoping Pete won’t notice him, and he can slip away into the night. Maybe he’s hoping Pete won’t even show up, because he’s terrified of trying to make a connection. Maybe — he pauses, swallows, and keeps his eyes trained on the door — maybe he’s hoping the lunatic in the full Edgar Allen Poe ensemble is not actually Pete. 

The lunatic is Pete. He waves madly to demonstrate this and shouts, “Patrick? Is that you? Can I get you anything?”

There is something utterly charming about this man, Patrick thinks. So utterly unselfconscious and unreserved. He begins to feel a warm curl of hope in his belly. The warm curl turns into a fire, a raging supernova of bursting golds and reds and oranges when Pete crosses the coffee shop and sits across from Patrick and grins a dazzling, toothsome, familiar grin across the table at him. That is a smile that Patrick would cross deserts for, he thinks. That is a smile he can imagine seeing on the far side of his pillow every single morning. 

That is a smile made just for Patrick.

Pete looks at Patrick from huge golden eyes and sets his coffee down on the table between them. It’s lost under a fluffy cloud of whipped cream and thick, pumpkin spice drizzle. Patrick is forced to admit that Pete has quite the loveliest eyes he’s ever seen. 

“I’m Pete,” he says, and holds out a hand for Patrick to shake. “Joe’s told me, like, basically nothing about you. He said it would ruin the first date ambience and that we’d have nothing to talk about.”

Patrick likes Joe a little more than he did ten minutes ago. Pete’s hand is warm and dry in his, a small callus on his forefinger, his knuckles broad and strong and masculine. “Patrick,” he says. “I have crippling social anxiety so blind dates are, like, my favourite thing. Joe really indulges my passion for them.”

“Patrick,” Pete says, rolling it around in his mouth like melted chocolate. “I’m Pete. Nice to meet you. We’ll start light: tell me the worst nightmare you had as a kid and your deepest, most enduring fear.”

“Damn, and here I was, going to ask you if you had any pets. I feel so stupid. But, um, I once had a nightmare that no one could see me or hear me, but that was basically high school in a nutshell.”

Pete looks Patrick up and down slowly, with great speculation, his head cocked to one side. His amber eyes are deep and arresting and thoroughly lovely. He doesn’t look like he thinks being seen in public with Patrick is a joke. Patrick prickles with goosebumps. Pete cups his chin in one hand, his elbow braced against the table and Patrick’s got that prickling, first-date buzz that he hasn’t had in a long time. Patrick thinks this might be going well. Patrick wants to kiss Pete so much it hurts. 

Pete grins suddenly. “Hey, have we met before? I feel like I know you from somewhere.”

Patrick shakes his head. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I’m sure I’d remember you.”

Whatever our souls are made of, Pete’s and mine are the same, he thinks, out of nowhere. 

Which is a very peculiar thing to think, isn’t it?