The Chasing of Moons

The Word "Fucking" Is Used A Lot In This Chapter

Frank makes his way, an inch at a time at sporadic intervals until there's about five inches between them. This is good, he can work with five inches. Five inches is a lot closer than the several feet that it had been.

He doesn't know what to do from here though. He looks at Gerard's hand, it's still mocking him, staring him right in the face. Frank expects it to start talking to him and taunt how much of a coward he is. Then he realizes how stupid that thought is, and he resigns, taking his own hand and staring at it angrily, like he's blaming the appendage for his own fear of grabbing that fucker's hand.

He really wishes Gee had left him with an intricate, step-by-step guide as to how he is supposed to get this stupid asshole to fall in love with him. All he basically said was good luck and ran away. That is not helping Frank right now! Sure he knows the outcome but he doesn't know a fucking thing about how that outcome becomes itself.

Frank's too busy being angry at himself, that he has to physically restrain his socks from falling off when he feels Gerard's hand, the hand not on the table, accidentally brush up against his thigh. It's like he's hyperaware of everything the moment it happens, because one second Frank is sulking, staring angrily at some couples initials scratched into the table in the shape of a heart, wishing they were his and Gerard's, and the next moment, he's looking up with eyes so wide that they're almost perfect circles.

"Sorry!" Gerard says in a tone suggesting he just did something extremely serious like accidentally dropped Frank's entire china cabinet on the ground and everything shattered into a million pieces.

Gerard is then scooting away from Frank, and all the hard work that Frank put into getting himself closer is lost.

He barely remembers to mumble a response, something like, "no s'okay." It's too late. He's now over a foot and a half away. Frank feels like he's lost a very large amount of hard work, like he wrote an essay and then the computer shutdown before he got to save it. That's what this feels like.

Frank's mumbling something about the bathroom, and that's all he says before he's hurrying out of the seat. He's not sure that you could pay him any thousands of dollars to actually use the bathroom in a place like this, and he has to use the hem of his shirt to even open the door handle, which was once a silver color, but is now chipped away to reveal a gross brown color underneath. Frank doesn't even want to contaminate his shirt on that nasty doorknob, but he has no other choice.

When he escapes to the bathroom and hears the door shut behind him, the music quiets to a low rumble. If it were a nicer venue, he'd still be deafened from in here, but he's not, which is how you know it's a shithole.

After a quick assessment which entails lowering his head so that his hair almost touches the grotty bathroom tiles, he discovers that he's alone. There's only two stalls, so there's not very many places to hide, and Frank is thankful of the privacy as he groans out as loudly as he can, because he needs to release some amount of his anger into the world in order to maintain his sanity.

Frank wants to splash some water on his face, but he can picture Brendon's face if he found out that all of his work got washed away to the pipes, and that is not something Frank wants to have to deal with. Instead, he just glares at the sink and wishes that it would swallow him so he won't have to be so miserable and hopelessly optimistic.

He's still banking on the fact that it could happen. Gerard might make a move. Maybe even tonight, he could. That's not going to happen though, Frank knows it won't, but he refuses to give up on the idea.

He huffs, glares at his reflection in the mirror and frowns at what he sees. He doesn't look bad, he doesn't know why Gerard doesn't want to at least flirt with him, he doesn't know what it is he's missing. He looks better than usual he supposes, his eyes aren't as tired, and his hair isn't too unkempt. Frank was pretty sure that there was one guy who'd been making eyes at him as they entered the place, but he didn't really care. That guy wasn't Gerard, so he was incidental. Frank would hit on himself, he thinks, so he doesn't know why Gerard isn't doing that.