fic: truth or dare
Nov. 6th, 2007 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
violaceaMy first foray into bandom fic. Perhaps this is the point at which I should hide, or something.
Title: Truth or Dare
Pairing: Patrick/Vicky T
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,494
Disclaimer: Not real, obviously. If you got here by Googling the name of someone you know personally, you should probably leave now.
Notes: Set during the Honda Civic Tour. Lots of love to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dragonsinger, who spent a lot of time today telling me to keep writing, while we both should have been working, of course. (But if I get fired, it's totally her fault!)
After a week of the tour, Victoria became an expert at knowing which parties to skip. She could feel certain moods slip over certain people – Gabe or Pete, mostly, with encouragement by other folks who were bored but didn’t possess the same sense of leadership – which usually spelled disaster, or at least humiliation for whatever poor sap didn’t duck at the appropriate time. The first party, she was able to remain on the sidelines while Pete sat on Nate while two other guys dressed him in a pair of pink lace panties. The second party, however, she found herself targeted. Passing out kisses to every guy working at the hotel front desk was okay, but being badgered for the whole evening to flash someone was not. She punched Gabe in the stomach when he tried to reach for the shoulder strap of her dress, and made a silent promise to be far, far away the next time she heard the phrase “I’m bored, let’s do something!” delivered in just the wrong tone of voice.
(Gabe apologized profusely the next day, and even bought her a box of Godiva chocolates. She forgave him enough to let him eat a quarter of the box, because Gabe was always going to be Gabe. She liked him in spite of it.)
They fell into a rhythm, in the end; most of the time, everyone laughed and played music and wrote songs and goofed off. Most of the time, Victoria loved whatever higher power decided she could have this completely awesome life. But, every once in a while, she’d see a look in someone’s eye, and she’d pick up her laptop and find the quietest place she could for the night. Boys would be boys, whatever, they were welcome to their fun. Somewhere else.
In Buffalo, she heard Pete’s voice drifting down the hall, somewhere several doors down from her hotel room. “Everyone in! The beatings will commence in five minutes!”
Victoria didn’t know if that was a literal statement or not, but one thing was for sure – she had absolutely no desire to find out.
She grabbed her laptop and peered out of her door. All clear from the direction Pete’s voice had appeared from. A look to the left saw an opening door – she saw just the edge of Ryland’s body before she ducked back into her room and closed the door. She waited until she heard footsteps pass, then opened it again. All clear. She closed the door behind her with as little noise as possible, and ran down the hall – five doors to the elevators, she could make it. Luck was with her, too, as there was an elevator door sliding halfway closed when she arrived. She slapped the “down” button, and it opened back up again. She slipped into the elevator with moments to spare, as she heard William’s voice booming from the other elevator – “I brought the refreshments! We can begin!” When the doors closed, she laid her forehead against them and sighed in relief.
“Safe from the teeming hordes of Mongols,” an amused voice came from the corner of the elevator.
She couldn’t help it. She shrieked a little, and had to juggle her laptop a little to keep from dropping it on the floor. “Fuck!” She turned around to glare. “Patrick, you scared the shit out of me!”
“Sorry.” He didn’t sound terribly sorry, but he was grinning, and Patrick’s grin always made her grin for some reason. “Where are you heading, aside from ‘away from the crackheads?’”
“That seemed like enough of a plan at the moment,” she admitted. “You?”
“I escaped from Pete’s room just as the cat o’ nine tails appeared. I’m going to hide in my room and pretend I’m dead for the night.”
“Um.” Victoria thought of and discarded several comments. “I was kind of hoping he was …”
“Joking? Obviously, you don’t know Pete well enough.”
“Shit. Can I play dead with you?”
The elevator doors slid open, and Patrick rearranged his face into a mock serious expression and held out his arm gallantly. Victoria felt her face split in a goofy smile. She shifted her laptop to the other arm so she could accept it. The position was a little awkward, as she could look down to see that the top of his yellow trucker cap had a rough skull sketched on it in Sharpie, with the signature “PW was here”. But, she bent over and rested her cheek on top of the drawing. “You’re a true gentleman, Patrick,” she sighed.
Several hours later, Victoria yawned while Patrick frowned at the screen they were both staring at. “Did I break it?” she asked.
“No, I just have to figure out …”
“Thank you for trying to teach me how to use GarageBand, but I’m apparently tired enough to nearly blow up your computer, and then you might kill me.”
“You’re not going to blow … oh, there, I’ve got it.” He successfully saved the music file they’d been playing with, but then shut the program down. “But, yeah, I’ve probably been boring you long enough.”
“Not boring!” she protested, stretching her arms over her head and leaning back against the headboard. Patrick set his laptop down on the table next to the bed. He sat on the bed next to her, legs crossed. When he turned back to her, his gaze was unfocused, and she noticed that his glasses were perched dangerously close to the end of his nose. Without thinking, she reached over and pushed them up. He looked up and made a face at her. She laughed. “You are so cute,” she said without thinking. Immediately, she wanted to clap a hand over her mouth. She either sounded like a twelve-year-old, or like she was talking to one. Either way, not precisely what she was going for. Not that she knew quite what she was going for, anyway.
Patrick confirmed her fear by sliding off the bed and grumbling, “Thanks, Aunt Norma. If you buy me a sweater with Scottie dogs on it for my birthday, I might wrap your body in it.”
“Sorry.” Apparently, exhaustion did bad things for her brain-to-mouth filter. She sat on the bed for a moment, while Patrick put his computer back in its case. “I should probably go to bed. Hopefully, I won’t be potential prey for the S&M party upstairs.”
“Nah, by now, they’ve all probably passed out. You’ll be fine.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. When she looked down at him, he glanced at her and quirked the side of his mouth upwards. “But, if you get into trouble, just give me a call. I’ve always wanted to be a white knight, or something.”
“My hero.” She had a sudden urge to throw her arms around him and kiss his cheek, but she resisted. After the ‘cute’ thing, she figured, maybe not the best idea. Instead, she tapped the bill of his cap, which made him instinctively duck his head a bit. “Thanks for the rescue, anyway.”
“Actually, I’m fairly sure they would have let you wield the whip if you’d decided to join them, so you probably didn’t need rescuing.” When Victoria furrowed her brows, Patrick shrugged. “I’m just saying. There was a whole conversation on my bus today … never mind, you really don’t want to know.”
“Patrick …”
“Seriously. I like my bass player, for some odd reason, and would rather you didn’t beat him to death.”
“If I don’t do it, someone else will, I guarantee it.”
“I figure. I just want to delay the inevitable long enough to write a few more songs.”
There was an awkward pause. Finally, Victoria lifted her hand in a small wave. “I’m off to brave the nineteenth floor. Wish me luck.”
“Go with God. And remember, most of those guys get off on domineering women. The whip would be your friend.”
She stuck out her tongue. “I didn’t need that image.”
“Sorry.” Once again, it didn’t sound sincere, and was accompanied by a mischievous grin. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
On a whim, she turned around in the doorway and blew him a kiss. His grin widened, and he slapped a hand to his cheek and pretended to swoon. She was still giggling when the elevator doors closed behind her.
The parties died down as the routine of touring set in. The longer they were on the road, the more people were interested more in rest than in time-consuming shenanigans. Victoria found herself immersed in her own band – an offhand remark from Gabe (“hey, guys, listen, I have an idea that would make an awesome song!”) turned into serious songwriting sessions, both on the bus and backstage. The creative give-and-take was awesome, she thought; for the first time, she began to feel like an actual member of her band, rather than a session player Gabe brought in for looks and backing vocals. Patrick joined them, because he seemed to have radar for any musical discussion that occurred within three miles of him, and suddenly they went from being bored on tour to having a new album, a producer, and a new purpose. Or, purpose was probably the wrong word for an album that was going to feature songs about prostitution and bored socialites. A newfound excitement, maybe, for what they were doing.
Long hours on the bus were spent sitting in a circle in the lounge, with instruments and computers and scraps of paper, turning phrases and melodies into songs that made all of them nearly giddy. But, it was the quiet moments that Victoria loved best. Many afternoons, she found herself curled up on the couch between Patrick and Nate, her head resting on Patrick’s shoulder. She started out watching him fool around on his computer, but after a while, it just felt comfortable to curl up next to him. Patrick was warm, and had a tendency to sling an arm over the top of the couch and rub her back absently when he was lost in thought.
Gabe looked at them once, a smirk on his face. “Aw, look at the happy couple.”
Victoria could feel Patrick shift against her, sliding away from her a miniscule amount. She frowned, something tumbling in her stomach that made her glare at Gabe. “You’re just jealous. I don’t snuggle with you because your elbows are too sharp.”
“Apparently,” Patrick’s voice was dry, “there are advantages to being fat.”
“You’re not fat,” she said automatically. “Just … soft, which is better than being sharp and uncomfortable, at least where I’m sitting.” She made a face at Gabe, who sat on the floor, laughing at them. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and go get us some sodas?”
“I am not your manservant, Victoria,” Gabe said, lying back on the floor.
“No, but you’re closer to the kitchen. And I’m too comfortable to get up.” She grabbed a pen and tossed it at him. It grazed the side of his cheek, leaving a black mark next to his mouth. “Soda, now, or I’ll grab my pocketknife the next time,” she told him smugly.
“God, I hired a homicidal lunatic to play in my band,” Gabe muttered as he pushed himself to his feet.
“Well, then, I fit in perfectly, don’t I?” She grinned and inched closer to Patrick. He shifted again, replacing the tiny bit of space she’d closed between their hips. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked, lifting her head for a minute.
“What?” He lifted his gaze from the papers he was rifling through. “Mind what?”
“Me, sitting like this. I’m not crowding you or making you too warm or anything, am I? I’ll move, if I am.”
“No, I don’t mind!” He looked over his glasses at her. “I just … no, I like it when you sit like that. It’s okay.”
Green eyes met hers, and for a brief moment, she contemplated closing the gap between them and kissing him lightly on the lips. She actually surprised herself with how much she wanted to do it. But, she knew that if Gabe saw them, he’d never let them hear the end of it. Patrick seemed uncomfortable with the joke, so … Victoria simply smiled, and curled close to him again. “Good.” This time, he didn’t shift away.
She was lulled into a false sense of security. Victoria figured that had to be the reason she didn’t have any idea the party was taking place until she walked onto her bus and most of the rest of the tour was already there. She had no choice but to stay – the buses were leaving for an overnight trip between Atlanta and Tampa, and Gabe had decided to throw an all-night party. “We can sleep when we get to Florida,” he said, throwing an arm around Victoria’s shoulders. “You don’t mind, do you? I mean, if you want to, you can go sleep on someone else’s bus. Hurley already wussed out on us, and Mark, Travis, and Shane decided they were, and I quote, ‘too old for you whippersnappers’.”
She almost took the out. But, over Gabe’s shoulder, she spotted Patrick wedged into a corner, engaged in conversation with Alex. He looked up, caught her eye, and smiled. If Patrick was here, she figured, it couldn’t end up that badly, could it?
Right. She forgot what crowd she was partying with.
The game started around 2:00am. Pete referred to it as “Truth or Dare”, but it was actually just “Dare”, as there was very little these guys would not admit to a gossip columnist, much less a bus full of their friends. “Truth is no fun, I already know everything,” Pete pouted. Victoria perched on the corner of the kitchen counter and was happy to stay out of the way. The guys were mostly interested in humiliating each other – though, she did have to draw attention to herself by declaring her luggage off limits. “If you want to do cross-dressing dares, you’re going to have to come up with girl clothing that I don’t own,” she said, ignoring several wails of protest.
Kissing was another popular dare – popular enough that it came with standard rules. “Thirty seconds, tongue is required, and you can’t kiss Victoria.” Apparently, only boy-on-boy action was desired, which was perfectly fine by her, thanks. It was pretty amusing, she had to admit, to watch Joe climb into Ryland’s lap and assault him with his tongue. “Dude,” Joe said afterwards, grabbing his beer in desperation, “you taste like sauerkraut! How is that even possible?” Ryland just burped in response.
Victoria escaped most of the evening unscathed – she’d only been chosen once, and she figured that drinking a cup of the juice out of the pickle jar was pretty lightweight stuff, comparatively speaking. So, she felt relatively safe until Pete’s turn rolled around for the third time. He pointed at her. “The lovely Vicky T!” he crowed. “Kiss!”
The rest of the room hooted, and Victoria felt her cheeks go red. There was no backing out – mostly, because the rest of the bus refused to move on until the person chosen performed their dare. With three hundred miles left to go, waiting them out was not an option. Thus, there had to be kissing, which was embarrassing. Hard enough, to be a girl on an all-boy tour, without being forced to act like some sort of token sex object. Of course, she thought, clutching at reason, it wasn’t like they were asking her to do something the rest of them weren’t doing. Pete, for his part, would probably offer his tongue to anyone in the room at a moment’s notice. But, still … there was something different about being a girl in this situation.
Her hesitation wound the bus up more. “Come on, Victoria; pick a victim, time’s a-wasting!” William, who stood next to her, poked her with a grin fuzzed by alcohol. From the floor, Pete, Joe, and Butcher started a chant of “Kiss, kiss, kiss!” “See if I choose any of you,” she grumbled at them, setting them off into hysterics.
She chose without conscious thought, actually. One minute, she was glaring down, contemplating whether her bare foot would do any appreciable damage to Pete’s crotch if she kicked hard enough. The next, she’d taken the two and a half steps it took to get to the back corner of the bus, draped herself across Alex’s lap, cupped Patrick’s cheek and pressed her mouth to his.
For a moment, all she could feel was Patrick’s body stiffening underneath her touch, while the rest of the room shrieked around them. But then, Patrick relaxed, and his mouth opened against hers. When his tongue flicked against hers, suddenly the noise around them faded, at least in Victoria’s ears. All she could hear was the low, happy sound that seemed to originate from the back of her own throat. Because Patrick was good at this. His lips were soft, his tongue teasing. His hands came up to touch her, one tangled in her hair, the other resting against her chest, where she was sure he could feel her pulse threatening to explode from underneath her skin.
The rest of the bus came back into her senses when she realized that part of the pounding she could feel was not her pulse, but a loud round of applause surrounding them. She pulled away and opened her eyes. Patrick’s face was flushed, and his hat had been knocked backwards on his head. Gently, she pulled it back down onto his forehead. He gave her a lopsided smile.
“Bravo!” Gabe shouted.
“I need a fucking cigarette!” Pete added. “That was way more than thirty seconds, kids. You’re adorable.”
Patrick’s expression changed. His jaw stiffened, and his eyes lost the light that had made Victoria feel a little bit breathless. She felt herself redden; in a split second, she’d scrambled off of his (and Alex’s) lap and back across the room.
It was her turn to dare, and since she couldn’t make Pete do something horribly painful (tag-backs were against the rules, like a game in the eighth grade), she contented herself with forcing Gabe to sort out two weeks’ worth of Nate’s dirty laundry with his teeth. After that, she folded herself back onto the kitchen counter. She glanced across the room, but Patrick was watching Pete and Butcher wrestling on the floor, then at Alex as he downed two cans of Red Bull without a breath, then at Dirty as he was forced to race across the bus on his hands and knees. He looked everywhere, it seemed, but at her.
There must have been something in her expression, possibly the match to Patrick’s glower, because no one tagged either one of them again. Possibly, they tagged Patrick eventually – Victoria didn’t know, because when the buses stopped at a truck stop for a brief gas break, she quietly left her own bus and knocked on the door of the bus parked across the lot, the only other one with lights burning in the back windows. “Can I bother you guys for the rest of the night?” she asked Mark when he appeared at the door.
“Mi casa es su casa.” He waved her in, and rubbed her shoulder gently when she walked past. “Partying hard over there?”
“Yeah. I think I’m partied out, though.”
“Come relax with the old folks, then. We may even scare up a game of shuffleboard before the night’s over. It’ll be crazy!”
She awoke the next morning curled up in Craig’s bunk, since Craig had been lounging on the edge of her own bunk the last time she’d seen him. The bus was at rest – in front of the venue in Tampa, she assumed – and the members of +44 were nowhere in sight when she peeked out of the bunk. She took advantage of her quiet hiding place to rub her eyes and try to figure out, exactly, what the fuck was wrong. Fact: she’d kissed Patrick. If she was being honest – and she’d started to be honest with herself a week or so earlier, very quietly – it wasn’t anything she hadn’t wanted to do for a while. She couldn’t really quantify the reasons, they all kept boiling down to “Patrick is awesome and kissing him seems like a really really really good idea.” But, a girl didn’t just go around kissing her guy friends. At least, she didn’t. Usually.
Fact: Patrick had been pissed off. So had she, of course; she was pissed at Gabe and Pete for being a combined mental age of fifteen, which was sort of like being pissed at water for getting her wet. She could only assume Patrick had the same problem. Right? Of course, he knew these guys a lot better than she did, so he should be past the fact that his best friend was a gigantic dick. One would assume, anyway.
Fact: she wanted to kiss Patrick again. Fact? She thought about it for a few minutes, stretched out in the bunk. She closed her eyes and pictured Patrick lying next to her, his face hovering inches above hers. She imagined lifting her head to close the distance between them, nipping at his lower lip while she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him on top of her. He’d feel wonderfully heavy on her left side, pinning her down while his knee shifted between her legs …
Right. Fact. And she’d better get up and stop fantasizing before she did something that Craig probably wouldn’t appreciate in his bunk.
Victoria walked back over to her bus, where at least seven people were passed out on most available surfaces – and that didn’t count whoever was snoring in harmony in the bunks. She quietly gathered up a change of clothes and her toiletry bag and dashed for the venue. Clean hair and teeth always supplemented a girl’s courage. And, if she was going to follow her facts to their logical conclusion, she was going to need all the courage she could get.
… and caffeine. Caffeine was always essential to courage, which is why she followed her nose to the green room after she was cleaned up. Her single-minded focus on the scent of coffee led her directly to the (lovely, beautiful) complementary carafe with tunnel vision, which was why she was startled enough to spill creamer all over the table when she heard, “Good morning.”
“Fuck.” She turned around. Patrick sat on the loveseat at the other end of the room, knees splayed open, elbows resting on top as he cradled a Styrofoam cup of his own. “Morning.” Courage, she reminded herself, and took a quick gulp of coffee, which steamed enough to make the back of her throat burn. She coughed and felt it run up her nose, which was a) very sexy, and b) a common enough occurrence for her that it usually made Patrick laugh. He was silent, however, and she felt courage slip a little farther away.
“Did you sleep at all last night?” she asked, leaning against the serving table and willing herself not to bounce on her heels from nerves.
“An hour or so, after people started to pass out. Had to push Butcher off my legs to get up and out of the bus.” They were both silent for several long, agonizing minutes, until Patrick finally stood up. “Listen, I should probably find a quiet dressing room to get some sleep, or my voice is going to be shit tonight.”
“Yeah.” He made it to the door before she grabbed her last shred of courage. “Wait! Patrick?”
He turned around. “What?”
“Um. Last night …”
“Yeah?”
“That whole thing …” She stumbled over words that didn’t quite make sense to her when she thought of them. “When I kissed you,” she finally began, “I don’t know, I just … I wanted … I’m sorry.”
Fantastic, she thought. She didn’t even understand herself.
His mouth twisted, and he turned back to the door. “It’s okay, don’t worry about it.”
“No, wait,” she said again, a little desperately. “God, I don’t even know what I’m apologizing for.”
Patrick turned around again, and his eyes were brighter than she could remember seeing them. It took her a moment to realize that the shine was anger, or something akin to it. “I don’t know, Victoria. It’s not like it was anything, right? It was obviously safe to kiss me.” The way he spit the word ‘safe’ left Victoria’s brain scrambling to reevaluate the random nonsense it was thinking about letting leak out of her mouth. While her mind whirled, he continued. “It’s all right, it got you out of the stupid fucking game. And if I get teased for the rest of the fucking summer about following you around like a stupid puppy dog, well, that’s not your issue, is it? Because you’ve got someone safe, a friend, and that’s what matters, isn’t it?”
Victoria’s brain finally gave up. Words couldn’t respond to this properly. Not at this hour of the morning and this level of caffeine. So, she did the only thing she could think of.
She crossed the room, grabbed his face in her hands, and kissed him.
Her first thought? God, I hope he doesn’t slug me. Second thought: Ouch. She’d never been on this end of a height difference before, and she wondered how guys dealt with the pains in their necks. The third thought came briefly, as Patrick grabbed the back of her head and kissed her back, with enough force to drive her backwards into the loveseat – Jesus. Yes. Like that. Possibly, those were actual spoken words. She lost track.
And then, they sat down and he sucked on her bottom lip, and all her thoughts went on a temporary vacation.
When they finally pulled apart, all Victoria could hear, aside from the gentle rasp of Patrick’s breath, was the distant rattle of equipment being wheeled down the hallway outside. She looked at him. His lips were swollen, his cheeks were bright red, and his grin could have lit up the entire arena. “Really?” he asked.
“Yes, really.” She leaned over and nipped at his jawline, which caused him to make a lovely growling noise. “But, hey, speaking of safe, I have a dare for you.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?”
“I dare you to go over there and figure out if the door locks.”
It did. And Victoria thanked every god she could think of. Loudly. Multiple times, possibly.
And if Gabe and Pete sat on the loveseat later that day and declared “hey, this thing smells like the inside of a bunk, what gives?” with sniffs of disgust, she felt no shame in laughing until her sides ached. They deserved no less.
Title: Truth or Dare
Pairing: Patrick/Vicky T
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 4,494
Disclaimer: Not real, obviously. If you got here by Googling the name of someone you know personally, you should probably leave now.
Notes: Set during the Honda Civic Tour. Lots of love to
dragonsinger, who spent a lot of time today telling me to keep writing, while we both should have been working, of course. (But if I get fired, it's totally her fault!)After a week of the tour, Victoria became an expert at knowing which parties to skip. She could feel certain moods slip over certain people – Gabe or Pete, mostly, with encouragement by other folks who were bored but didn’t possess the same sense of leadership – which usually spelled disaster, or at least humiliation for whatever poor sap didn’t duck at the appropriate time. The first party, she was able to remain on the sidelines while Pete sat on Nate while two other guys dressed him in a pair of pink lace panties. The second party, however, she found herself targeted. Passing out kisses to every guy working at the hotel front desk was okay, but being badgered for the whole evening to flash someone was not. She punched Gabe in the stomach when he tried to reach for the shoulder strap of her dress, and made a silent promise to be far, far away the next time she heard the phrase “I’m bored, let’s do something!” delivered in just the wrong tone of voice.
(Gabe apologized profusely the next day, and even bought her a box of Godiva chocolates. She forgave him enough to let him eat a quarter of the box, because Gabe was always going to be Gabe. She liked him in spite of it.)
They fell into a rhythm, in the end; most of the time, everyone laughed and played music and wrote songs and goofed off. Most of the time, Victoria loved whatever higher power decided she could have this completely awesome life. But, every once in a while, she’d see a look in someone’s eye, and she’d pick up her laptop and find the quietest place she could for the night. Boys would be boys, whatever, they were welcome to their fun. Somewhere else.
In Buffalo, she heard Pete’s voice drifting down the hall, somewhere several doors down from her hotel room. “Everyone in! The beatings will commence in five minutes!”
Victoria didn’t know if that was a literal statement or not, but one thing was for sure – she had absolutely no desire to find out.
She grabbed her laptop and peered out of her door. All clear from the direction Pete’s voice had appeared from. A look to the left saw an opening door – she saw just the edge of Ryland’s body before she ducked back into her room and closed the door. She waited until she heard footsteps pass, then opened it again. All clear. She closed the door behind her with as little noise as possible, and ran down the hall – five doors to the elevators, she could make it. Luck was with her, too, as there was an elevator door sliding halfway closed when she arrived. She slapped the “down” button, and it opened back up again. She slipped into the elevator with moments to spare, as she heard William’s voice booming from the other elevator – “I brought the refreshments! We can begin!” When the doors closed, she laid her forehead against them and sighed in relief.
“Safe from the teeming hordes of Mongols,” an amused voice came from the corner of the elevator.
She couldn’t help it. She shrieked a little, and had to juggle her laptop a little to keep from dropping it on the floor. “Fuck!” She turned around to glare. “Patrick, you scared the shit out of me!”
“Sorry.” He didn’t sound terribly sorry, but he was grinning, and Patrick’s grin always made her grin for some reason. “Where are you heading, aside from ‘away from the crackheads?’”
“That seemed like enough of a plan at the moment,” she admitted. “You?”
“I escaped from Pete’s room just as the cat o’ nine tails appeared. I’m going to hide in my room and pretend I’m dead for the night.”
“Um.” Victoria thought of and discarded several comments. “I was kind of hoping he was …”
“Joking? Obviously, you don’t know Pete well enough.”
“Shit. Can I play dead with you?”
The elevator doors slid open, and Patrick rearranged his face into a mock serious expression and held out his arm gallantly. Victoria felt her face split in a goofy smile. She shifted her laptop to the other arm so she could accept it. The position was a little awkward, as she could look down to see that the top of his yellow trucker cap had a rough skull sketched on it in Sharpie, with the signature “PW was here”. But, she bent over and rested her cheek on top of the drawing. “You’re a true gentleman, Patrick,” she sighed.
Several hours later, Victoria yawned while Patrick frowned at the screen they were both staring at. “Did I break it?” she asked.
“No, I just have to figure out …”
“Thank you for trying to teach me how to use GarageBand, but I’m apparently tired enough to nearly blow up your computer, and then you might kill me.”
“You’re not going to blow … oh, there, I’ve got it.” He successfully saved the music file they’d been playing with, but then shut the program down. “But, yeah, I’ve probably been boring you long enough.”
“Not boring!” she protested, stretching her arms over her head and leaning back against the headboard. Patrick set his laptop down on the table next to the bed. He sat on the bed next to her, legs crossed. When he turned back to her, his gaze was unfocused, and she noticed that his glasses were perched dangerously close to the end of his nose. Without thinking, she reached over and pushed them up. He looked up and made a face at her. She laughed. “You are so cute,” she said without thinking. Immediately, she wanted to clap a hand over her mouth. She either sounded like a twelve-year-old, or like she was talking to one. Either way, not precisely what she was going for. Not that she knew quite what she was going for, anyway.
Patrick confirmed her fear by sliding off the bed and grumbling, “Thanks, Aunt Norma. If you buy me a sweater with Scottie dogs on it for my birthday, I might wrap your body in it.”
“Sorry.” Apparently, exhaustion did bad things for her brain-to-mouth filter. She sat on the bed for a moment, while Patrick put his computer back in its case. “I should probably go to bed. Hopefully, I won’t be potential prey for the S&M party upstairs.”
“Nah, by now, they’ve all probably passed out. You’ll be fine.” She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. When she looked down at him, he glanced at her and quirked the side of his mouth upwards. “But, if you get into trouble, just give me a call. I’ve always wanted to be a white knight, or something.”
“My hero.” She had a sudden urge to throw her arms around him and kiss his cheek, but she resisted. After the ‘cute’ thing, she figured, maybe not the best idea. Instead, she tapped the bill of his cap, which made him instinctively duck his head a bit. “Thanks for the rescue, anyway.”
“Actually, I’m fairly sure they would have let you wield the whip if you’d decided to join them, so you probably didn’t need rescuing.” When Victoria furrowed her brows, Patrick shrugged. “I’m just saying. There was a whole conversation on my bus today … never mind, you really don’t want to know.”
“Patrick …”
“Seriously. I like my bass player, for some odd reason, and would rather you didn’t beat him to death.”
“If I don’t do it, someone else will, I guarantee it.”
“I figure. I just want to delay the inevitable long enough to write a few more songs.”
There was an awkward pause. Finally, Victoria lifted her hand in a small wave. “I’m off to brave the nineteenth floor. Wish me luck.”
“Go with God. And remember, most of those guys get off on domineering women. The whip would be your friend.”
She stuck out her tongue. “I didn’t need that image.”
“Sorry.” Once again, it didn’t sound sincere, and was accompanied by a mischievous grin. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
On a whim, she turned around in the doorway and blew him a kiss. His grin widened, and he slapped a hand to his cheek and pretended to swoon. She was still giggling when the elevator doors closed behind her.
The parties died down as the routine of touring set in. The longer they were on the road, the more people were interested more in rest than in time-consuming shenanigans. Victoria found herself immersed in her own band – an offhand remark from Gabe (“hey, guys, listen, I have an idea that would make an awesome song!”) turned into serious songwriting sessions, both on the bus and backstage. The creative give-and-take was awesome, she thought; for the first time, she began to feel like an actual member of her band, rather than a session player Gabe brought in for looks and backing vocals. Patrick joined them, because he seemed to have radar for any musical discussion that occurred within three miles of him, and suddenly they went from being bored on tour to having a new album, a producer, and a new purpose. Or, purpose was probably the wrong word for an album that was going to feature songs about prostitution and bored socialites. A newfound excitement, maybe, for what they were doing.
Long hours on the bus were spent sitting in a circle in the lounge, with instruments and computers and scraps of paper, turning phrases and melodies into songs that made all of them nearly giddy. But, it was the quiet moments that Victoria loved best. Many afternoons, she found herself curled up on the couch between Patrick and Nate, her head resting on Patrick’s shoulder. She started out watching him fool around on his computer, but after a while, it just felt comfortable to curl up next to him. Patrick was warm, and had a tendency to sling an arm over the top of the couch and rub her back absently when he was lost in thought.
Gabe looked at them once, a smirk on his face. “Aw, look at the happy couple.”
Victoria could feel Patrick shift against her, sliding away from her a miniscule amount. She frowned, something tumbling in her stomach that made her glare at Gabe. “You’re just jealous. I don’t snuggle with you because your elbows are too sharp.”
“Apparently,” Patrick’s voice was dry, “there are advantages to being fat.”
“You’re not fat,” she said automatically. “Just … soft, which is better than being sharp and uncomfortable, at least where I’m sitting.” She made a face at Gabe, who sat on the floor, laughing at them. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and go get us some sodas?”
“I am not your manservant, Victoria,” Gabe said, lying back on the floor.
“No, but you’re closer to the kitchen. And I’m too comfortable to get up.” She grabbed a pen and tossed it at him. It grazed the side of his cheek, leaving a black mark next to his mouth. “Soda, now, or I’ll grab my pocketknife the next time,” she told him smugly.
“God, I hired a homicidal lunatic to play in my band,” Gabe muttered as he pushed himself to his feet.
“Well, then, I fit in perfectly, don’t I?” She grinned and inched closer to Patrick. He shifted again, replacing the tiny bit of space she’d closed between their hips. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked, lifting her head for a minute.
“What?” He lifted his gaze from the papers he was rifling through. “Mind what?”
“Me, sitting like this. I’m not crowding you or making you too warm or anything, am I? I’ll move, if I am.”
“No, I don’t mind!” He looked over his glasses at her. “I just … no, I like it when you sit like that. It’s okay.”
Green eyes met hers, and for a brief moment, she contemplated closing the gap between them and kissing him lightly on the lips. She actually surprised herself with how much she wanted to do it. But, she knew that if Gabe saw them, he’d never let them hear the end of it. Patrick seemed uncomfortable with the joke, so … Victoria simply smiled, and curled close to him again. “Good.” This time, he didn’t shift away.
She was lulled into a false sense of security. Victoria figured that had to be the reason she didn’t have any idea the party was taking place until she walked onto her bus and most of the rest of the tour was already there. She had no choice but to stay – the buses were leaving for an overnight trip between Atlanta and Tampa, and Gabe had decided to throw an all-night party. “We can sleep when we get to Florida,” he said, throwing an arm around Victoria’s shoulders. “You don’t mind, do you? I mean, if you want to, you can go sleep on someone else’s bus. Hurley already wussed out on us, and Mark, Travis, and Shane decided they were, and I quote, ‘too old for you whippersnappers’.”
She almost took the out. But, over Gabe’s shoulder, she spotted Patrick wedged into a corner, engaged in conversation with Alex. He looked up, caught her eye, and smiled. If Patrick was here, she figured, it couldn’t end up that badly, could it?
Right. She forgot what crowd she was partying with.
The game started around 2:00am. Pete referred to it as “Truth or Dare”, but it was actually just “Dare”, as there was very little these guys would not admit to a gossip columnist, much less a bus full of their friends. “Truth is no fun, I already know everything,” Pete pouted. Victoria perched on the corner of the kitchen counter and was happy to stay out of the way. The guys were mostly interested in humiliating each other – though, she did have to draw attention to herself by declaring her luggage off limits. “If you want to do cross-dressing dares, you’re going to have to come up with girl clothing that I don’t own,” she said, ignoring several wails of protest.
Kissing was another popular dare – popular enough that it came with standard rules. “Thirty seconds, tongue is required, and you can’t kiss Victoria.” Apparently, only boy-on-boy action was desired, which was perfectly fine by her, thanks. It was pretty amusing, she had to admit, to watch Joe climb into Ryland’s lap and assault him with his tongue. “Dude,” Joe said afterwards, grabbing his beer in desperation, “you taste like sauerkraut! How is that even possible?” Ryland just burped in response.
Victoria escaped most of the evening unscathed – she’d only been chosen once, and she figured that drinking a cup of the juice out of the pickle jar was pretty lightweight stuff, comparatively speaking. So, she felt relatively safe until Pete’s turn rolled around for the third time. He pointed at her. “The lovely Vicky T!” he crowed. “Kiss!”
The rest of the room hooted, and Victoria felt her cheeks go red. There was no backing out – mostly, because the rest of the bus refused to move on until the person chosen performed their dare. With three hundred miles left to go, waiting them out was not an option. Thus, there had to be kissing, which was embarrassing. Hard enough, to be a girl on an all-boy tour, without being forced to act like some sort of token sex object. Of course, she thought, clutching at reason, it wasn’t like they were asking her to do something the rest of them weren’t doing. Pete, for his part, would probably offer his tongue to anyone in the room at a moment’s notice. But, still … there was something different about being a girl in this situation.
Her hesitation wound the bus up more. “Come on, Victoria; pick a victim, time’s a-wasting!” William, who stood next to her, poked her with a grin fuzzed by alcohol. From the floor, Pete, Joe, and Butcher started a chant of “Kiss, kiss, kiss!” “See if I choose any of you,” she grumbled at them, setting them off into hysterics.
She chose without conscious thought, actually. One minute, she was glaring down, contemplating whether her bare foot would do any appreciable damage to Pete’s crotch if she kicked hard enough. The next, she’d taken the two and a half steps it took to get to the back corner of the bus, draped herself across Alex’s lap, cupped Patrick’s cheek and pressed her mouth to his.
For a moment, all she could feel was Patrick’s body stiffening underneath her touch, while the rest of the room shrieked around them. But then, Patrick relaxed, and his mouth opened against hers. When his tongue flicked against hers, suddenly the noise around them faded, at least in Victoria’s ears. All she could hear was the low, happy sound that seemed to originate from the back of her own throat. Because Patrick was good at this. His lips were soft, his tongue teasing. His hands came up to touch her, one tangled in her hair, the other resting against her chest, where she was sure he could feel her pulse threatening to explode from underneath her skin.
The rest of the bus came back into her senses when she realized that part of the pounding she could feel was not her pulse, but a loud round of applause surrounding them. She pulled away and opened her eyes. Patrick’s face was flushed, and his hat had been knocked backwards on his head. Gently, she pulled it back down onto his forehead. He gave her a lopsided smile.
“Bravo!” Gabe shouted.
“I need a fucking cigarette!” Pete added. “That was way more than thirty seconds, kids. You’re adorable.”
Patrick’s expression changed. His jaw stiffened, and his eyes lost the light that had made Victoria feel a little bit breathless. She felt herself redden; in a split second, she’d scrambled off of his (and Alex’s) lap and back across the room.
It was her turn to dare, and since she couldn’t make Pete do something horribly painful (tag-backs were against the rules, like a game in the eighth grade), she contented herself with forcing Gabe to sort out two weeks’ worth of Nate’s dirty laundry with his teeth. After that, she folded herself back onto the kitchen counter. She glanced across the room, but Patrick was watching Pete and Butcher wrestling on the floor, then at Alex as he downed two cans of Red Bull without a breath, then at Dirty as he was forced to race across the bus on his hands and knees. He looked everywhere, it seemed, but at her.
There must have been something in her expression, possibly the match to Patrick’s glower, because no one tagged either one of them again. Possibly, they tagged Patrick eventually – Victoria didn’t know, because when the buses stopped at a truck stop for a brief gas break, she quietly left her own bus and knocked on the door of the bus parked across the lot, the only other one with lights burning in the back windows. “Can I bother you guys for the rest of the night?” she asked Mark when he appeared at the door.
“Mi casa es su casa.” He waved her in, and rubbed her shoulder gently when she walked past. “Partying hard over there?”
“Yeah. I think I’m partied out, though.”
“Come relax with the old folks, then. We may even scare up a game of shuffleboard before the night’s over. It’ll be crazy!”
She awoke the next morning curled up in Craig’s bunk, since Craig had been lounging on the edge of her own bunk the last time she’d seen him. The bus was at rest – in front of the venue in Tampa, she assumed – and the members of +44 were nowhere in sight when she peeked out of the bunk. She took advantage of her quiet hiding place to rub her eyes and try to figure out, exactly, what the fuck was wrong. Fact: she’d kissed Patrick. If she was being honest – and she’d started to be honest with herself a week or so earlier, very quietly – it wasn’t anything she hadn’t wanted to do for a while. She couldn’t really quantify the reasons, they all kept boiling down to “Patrick is awesome and kissing him seems like a really really really good idea.” But, a girl didn’t just go around kissing her guy friends. At least, she didn’t. Usually.
Fact: Patrick had been pissed off. So had she, of course; she was pissed at Gabe and Pete for being a combined mental age of fifteen, which was sort of like being pissed at water for getting her wet. She could only assume Patrick had the same problem. Right? Of course, he knew these guys a lot better than she did, so he should be past the fact that his best friend was a gigantic dick. One would assume, anyway.
Fact: she wanted to kiss Patrick again. Fact? She thought about it for a few minutes, stretched out in the bunk. She closed her eyes and pictured Patrick lying next to her, his face hovering inches above hers. She imagined lifting her head to close the distance between them, nipping at his lower lip while she wrapped her arms around him and pulled him on top of her. He’d feel wonderfully heavy on her left side, pinning her down while his knee shifted between her legs …
Right. Fact. And she’d better get up and stop fantasizing before she did something that Craig probably wouldn’t appreciate in his bunk.
Victoria walked back over to her bus, where at least seven people were passed out on most available surfaces – and that didn’t count whoever was snoring in harmony in the bunks. She quietly gathered up a change of clothes and her toiletry bag and dashed for the venue. Clean hair and teeth always supplemented a girl’s courage. And, if she was going to follow her facts to their logical conclusion, she was going to need all the courage she could get.
… and caffeine. Caffeine was always essential to courage, which is why she followed her nose to the green room after she was cleaned up. Her single-minded focus on the scent of coffee led her directly to the (lovely, beautiful) complementary carafe with tunnel vision, which was why she was startled enough to spill creamer all over the table when she heard, “Good morning.”
“Fuck.” She turned around. Patrick sat on the loveseat at the other end of the room, knees splayed open, elbows resting on top as he cradled a Styrofoam cup of his own. “Morning.” Courage, she reminded herself, and took a quick gulp of coffee, which steamed enough to make the back of her throat burn. She coughed and felt it run up her nose, which was a) very sexy, and b) a common enough occurrence for her that it usually made Patrick laugh. He was silent, however, and she felt courage slip a little farther away.
“Did you sleep at all last night?” she asked, leaning against the serving table and willing herself not to bounce on her heels from nerves.
“An hour or so, after people started to pass out. Had to push Butcher off my legs to get up and out of the bus.” They were both silent for several long, agonizing minutes, until Patrick finally stood up. “Listen, I should probably find a quiet dressing room to get some sleep, or my voice is going to be shit tonight.”
“Yeah.” He made it to the door before she grabbed her last shred of courage. “Wait! Patrick?”
He turned around. “What?”
“Um. Last night …”
“Yeah?”
“That whole thing …” She stumbled over words that didn’t quite make sense to her when she thought of them. “When I kissed you,” she finally began, “I don’t know, I just … I wanted … I’m sorry.”
Fantastic, she thought. She didn’t even understand herself.
His mouth twisted, and he turned back to the door. “It’s okay, don’t worry about it.”
“No, wait,” she said again, a little desperately. “God, I don’t even know what I’m apologizing for.”
Patrick turned around again, and his eyes were brighter than she could remember seeing them. It took her a moment to realize that the shine was anger, or something akin to it. “I don’t know, Victoria. It’s not like it was anything, right? It was obviously safe to kiss me.” The way he spit the word ‘safe’ left Victoria’s brain scrambling to reevaluate the random nonsense it was thinking about letting leak out of her mouth. While her mind whirled, he continued. “It’s all right, it got you out of the stupid fucking game. And if I get teased for the rest of the fucking summer about following you around like a stupid puppy dog, well, that’s not your issue, is it? Because you’ve got someone safe, a friend, and that’s what matters, isn’t it?”
Victoria’s brain finally gave up. Words couldn’t respond to this properly. Not at this hour of the morning and this level of caffeine. So, she did the only thing she could think of.
She crossed the room, grabbed his face in her hands, and kissed him.
Her first thought? God, I hope he doesn’t slug me. Second thought: Ouch. She’d never been on this end of a height difference before, and she wondered how guys dealt with the pains in their necks. The third thought came briefly, as Patrick grabbed the back of her head and kissed her back, with enough force to drive her backwards into the loveseat – Jesus. Yes. Like that. Possibly, those were actual spoken words. She lost track.
And then, they sat down and he sucked on her bottom lip, and all her thoughts went on a temporary vacation.
When they finally pulled apart, all Victoria could hear, aside from the gentle rasp of Patrick’s breath, was the distant rattle of equipment being wheeled down the hallway outside. She looked at him. His lips were swollen, his cheeks were bright red, and his grin could have lit up the entire arena. “Really?” he asked.
“Yes, really.” She leaned over and nipped at his jawline, which caused him to make a lovely growling noise. “But, hey, speaking of safe, I have a dare for you.”
He raised an eyebrow. “What’s that?”
“I dare you to go over there and figure out if the door locks.”
It did. And Victoria thanked every god she could think of. Loudly. Multiple times, possibly.
And if Gabe and Pete sat on the loveseat later that day and declared “hey, this thing smells like the inside of a bunk, what gives?” with sniffs of disgust, she felt no shame in laughing until her sides ached. They deserved no less.
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Date: 2008-02-03 04:19 pm (UTC)