Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Jay breaks a sweat on top of his old sweat retching into the sink. That he can smell himself makes it worse, so he pulls off his gross clothes and sits on the floor of the shower. There’s a soft knock on the door.

“Bird? You okay?”

“Yep.”

He wanted a reset, is what Matt said. He tossed it out casually there in the kitchen like that’s something you say, overly cheerful while he pretended to look for something in the cabinets.

“What have you been doing?” Jay said, at that point still shaking off the sick wave of déjà vu from coming back from the RV without him, hoping for some perfectly reasonable, non-catastrophic reason Matt could have gone inside. The clock on the oven said 11:55.

“Pushups,” Matt said. He shrugged. Avoided eye contact.

He had obviously showered and shaved and changed clothes before the alleged pushups. Jay pointed out that he left him in the sweltering RV, and he winced and said he was sorry. That was it. He wanted a reset. “Just wanted to do a reset, you know?”

Jay knew exactly. The thing where everything is the way it was at the top of the next episode, no matter what life-altering stuff happened last week. “Yeah, okay,” he said. “We can reset.” What else was he supposed to do?

He lets the cold water run over his head for a while until he feels steady enough to get up and shower for real. He tries not to dwell on the thought of Matt doing the same thing, standing in here next to the row of empty three-in-one soap bottles they never throw out, scrubbing the dried bodily fluids out of his chest hair. He tries not to dwell on the mess of hickies on his neck, or how he didn't notice any on Matt, and even though probably Matt just doesn't bruise as easily, it makes him feel like last night really did only happen to him.

He tries not to think at all, but it’s hard, even at the piano, where he can usually skim off the repeating thoughts, or at least change the language of them. Last night in the RV, he thought about playing something; he didn't do it, but he could feel in his fingers, something dreamy and warm. Now he sticks with songs someone else wrote. Footsteps creak on the stairs every once in a while, Matt coming down to peek in on him. That, or he’s expecting Jared to show up, but Jared never shows up. It’s just them. Eventually, Matt walks into the room and says, “This sounds like Jimmy Buffet, but if he wanted to kill himself.”

Despite that, he’s obviously trying too hard to sound normal. There’s something edgy lurking under that tone, and the flare of irritation dies before Jay can snap at him, so he just sighs and says, “A lot of Jimmy Buffet songs are like that.”

Matt’s grinning before he can get out the whole picture he’s got in his head, fishing in a tropical paradise spot where you cast your line and pull up a skeleton with a Hawaiian shirt on and a bullet hole in its skull. It’s not the time for this, and it's really not that good anyway. Like Jay said, Jimmy Buffet’s music already has that sort of feel. He can’t believe how quickly he thaws and starts to play an accompaniment. It squeezes at something inside him, acting normal. He’s not ready to actually reset; he doesn't want to just leave it and go back to rehearsing, even though if that’s what Matt wants, that’s what they’ll have to do.

He’s not ready for the next part of the plan, the one he’s put off for way too long, either. “Matt…” he starts, turning on the bench. “I was thinking.”

Matt perches apprehensively on the arm of the couch. “Okay?”

As usual, everything he's thought about saying flees his brain. “You know, since we have the show, and everyone really went for what we were doing last night – it’ll be both of us at the show, of course, but… I think I should play the wedding on my own.”

“I don't understand,” Matt says. “Why- I don't understand what you're saying.”

“I'm saying, you're going over some good stuff right now, maybe you save that for the actual show we’re going to play, and then for the wedding I can just do some super basic piano… stuff.”

Terrible pitch. Matt doesn't buy it for a second. “What? We've been doing this for years and years, Jay. Do you think we're going to run out of act to do?”

“No, but when you're at a wedding…” Jay says, not knowing at all where he's going, hating listening to himself, “it's not like- Have you been to a wedding before?”

“Okay.” Something heavy comes down behind Matt’s eyes, like a curtain. “What the fuck is going on? The whole plan was to play this wedding. She's my cousin.”

“The whole plan was to play The Rivoli,” Jay says. “And we're close to doing that. The rest of the plan-”

“The plan gets us to The Rivoli,” Matt interrupts. “The Rivoli is not the plan, the plan is-”

“The plan worked,” Jay says desperately. Arguing with Matt makes him feel like he's in one of those infomercials where they show someone trying to do a normal task and completely fumbling it. There he is, in black and white slow motion, trying to talk his insane best friend out of doing something clearly insane, but he keeps saying the wrongest thing possible. “Listen, we just have to not fuck up the rest, and we're there. If you go out there and start talking about Jimmy Buffet shooting himself in the head, that's not gonna- People’s grandmas are going to be there. It's not going to go over well. You have to see what I mean.”

But Matt doesn’t have to see what he means, ever. Or if he does, he’d rather burn down the whole thing than accept it. He shakes his head. “Man, you do one plan – that by the way, turned out pretty weird-”

“‘Turned out pretty weird?’”

They stare at each other. It's awful, but he does notice that bringing last night up seems to have put Matt on the back foot. He asks something he knows he shouldn't. “Do you want to play The Rivoli?”

“What the fuck kind of question is that?” Matt says, but for once, he isn't so confident he pulls Jay in with him.

“Because you don't act like you do,” Jay continues. “You act like you want to do a plan, and then another plan, and then another plan-”

Matt doesn't let him say forever. “Because I'm cleaning up after you, you fucking idiot. Look at the ego on you. You do one homo-tron plan that accidentally works and you think you're the mastermind. You wanna talk about how you normally complain and drag your feet all the time?”

Of all the things he could have said, for some reason homo-tron makes tears spring to Jay’s eyes. It takes a tooth-cracking amount of restraint not to come across the room at him. When Jay was a kid, he had a speech therapist who told him, stick with the facts before you react, which didn't have much of anything to do with speech therapy, and isn't something he thinks about really ever, but it comes to him now, and it’s a good thing.

“I want to play a show,” he says with as much authority as he can summon. “With you.” Those are facts. No matter how hard he tries to convince himself that him and Matt in their living room forever can be enough for him, he knows it isn't. He can’t stop thinking about how it felt for people to watch them and cheer for them, how strange and exhilarating it was for anyone outside of them to see them. He can’t stop thinking about what Maddy said, and how she said it about both of them, how he’s thought so much about wasting his own talent but never Matt wasting his. What kind of friend does that? “I'm doing this for us, okay?” he says. “Can you trust me on this?”

Matt's been chewing his lower lip to a pulp, worrying at the spot where last night Jay remembers sucking it between his teeth and biting down. “Fine,” he says. Jay lets the breath out of his lungs. On his way out of the room, Matt mutters, “So I don't fuck it up.”

The ride to the venue is quiet. Jules is less talkative without Maddy, and Matt stays completely silent in the backseat. That’s on purpose. About 15 minutes before she was due to pick them up, Jay realized with dawning anxiety that Matt wasn’t making any moves to get ready, was in fact settled in on the couch playing Majora’s Mask. Why would he need to be there, he said, if Jay’s doing everything? Couldn’t he have a night off? He never gets a night off. In hindsight, it was a mistake to let on that it bothered him. If he had played it cool, Matt probably would have ended up coming anyway, without needing to be begged. Without getting that smug look on his face and saying, “Oh man. You’re not still scared to be around my family by yourself, are you?”

He isn't. He hasn’t been since he was a teenager and he hardly ever saw them, because Matt had a whole basement to himself, and rarely seemed to join the rest of the household. Now they’re just people Jay’s known a long time but never gotten particularly close to, which is awkward in and of itself. And it’s still Matt’s plan too. He should be there.

“How are you guys holding up?” Jules asks. Jay makes a show of putting on a brave face, happy to let the hangover take the fall for the bad air they’ve brought with them. “Don’t tell Maddy I told you this,” she says, “but when Josh drove us home last night, Maddy was in the backseat not saying anything, which is weird, right? Then the second we park, she opens the door and pukes everywhere.” She turns to Matt. “So let me know if you want me to stop, okay?”

In the rearview, Matt double takes, gives a thumbs up. Jay wonders what he’s been thinking about.

Jay’s thinking about those days early on in Matt’s basement room with its own computer and TV and phone line, and furniture salvaged from the street, like something from a movie. He never wanted to go home, and Matt never wanted to let him. All the time, he'd try to convince Jay to call his mom and ask to stay longer, stay over. If he had asked as often as Matt wanted him to, his mom would have forbidden him from going over there ever, he was sure; she would have gotten suspicious that they were doing drugs or something. When he did ask, when the conditions were right, usually Fridays when the weather was too bad for him to ride his bike, his mom would ask if he was sure Matt’s mom didn't mind, and he'd tell her Matt’s mom said okay, instead of letting on how little supervision there was in that house. Then they'd get to go all night watching movies and making prank calls and laughing themselves into convulsions. The first time he ever talked to Emilia was one of those nights. Years later, during their clumsy early dating period, she told him her friends had conspired to distract Matt so she could go down there. Jay had seemed so cool, she said, but Matt wanted him all to himself. The ticklish feeling that kicked up in him at hearing that should have been about her, but it wasn't.

Current-day Emilia hugs them both, which surprises him, but less than it surprises Matt, who mutters, “What the fuck is her problem?” as she runs off to grab the music for the processional.

From the stage, the view of the white folding chairs on the floor sets off his nerves. So many of them, neatly arranged, all empty except for Matt, who's sitting alone because he’s the only one here who’s not actually in the wedding. Jay should have let him stay home. He should have at least told him he didn’t want to play without him there.

Maddy appears over his shoulder. “You ready for this?” she says, not seeming remotely like she got sloppy drunk last night. The highlights of being 24 years old. “I called The Rivoli. You’re on at ten thirty tomorrow.”

“Oh.” It's like she put an ice cube down his shirt. “Really?”

“Yep!” She leans in close. “So no hijinks, okay? Love the hijinks, but if there's any at my wedding, I will lose my fucking mind.”

The rehearsal doesn't take long, and he's sight-reading through most of it, so it doesn't say much to say it's a blur. It’s more of a crisis. He doesn’t even look up at what’s going on. Aside from the music, he looks between his own hands on the keys and Matt, sitting in that white plastic chair, not knowing that it's happening, for real. Technically, they knew, yeah, but that was bullshit. It always has been. He’d suspected it of Matt, especially lately, but it was him too. All the times, all the dozens of times he’s been sure they were on the cusp of doing this, he was kidding himself. There was always a buffer, something that kept him from hitting it face-first – some chance that it wouldn't happen, but now it's happening. They've lost their buffer and they're hurtling towards it.

Despite that, he must do okay enough, playing on the nicest piano he’s maybe ever gotten to play. Maddy and her fiancé sound happy anyway. He’s surprised by the fiancé. Maddy’s such a popular girl type, like Daria from Daria’s younger sister, he was expecting a football player type, but this guy is honestly kind of a dork. Not in a bad way, just soft-spoken, sweet, a little chubby, plus he’s Asian, so Jay’s extra glad he kept Matt from getting a chance to say something weird about that. It’s not too late, though. He could still let Matt ruin it for them and it could all go back to how it was. Complete reset. The thought is horribly comforting. He doesn't trust himself with it.

Standing outside, waiting for Emilia and her husband to drive them to dinner, he breaks the news to Matt.

“Really?” Matt says.

“That's what I said,” Jay says.

“Huh.” Matt laughs to himself. “Just like that, huh?”

“Guess so.”

As Jay knew to expect, Matt’s starting to get restless, touching his hair, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “You wanna get out of here? We should go home and rehearse.”

“We're going to dinner,” Jay protests, the momentary cheer he felt from being on the same wavelength fading quickly. He’s been looking forward to dinner, because he's hungry, of course, and it's been a rough day, and if there will also be people who say nice things about his playing, he supposes he'll tolerate that. “We can rehearse after.”

“Dude, we need all the time we can get. We have like 24 hours. That restaurant’s gonna be a piece of shit anyway; they're just going there cause it's a big group and there's old people coming.”

“No. I'm starving.”

“I will get you food, you fucking prima donna. Come on.”

It's a standoff now, and Jay never wins a standoff. Why would this be the time to dig his heels in? “I want to sit at this place for like 45 minutes and eat a plate of spaghetti, man. Then we'll go home and rehearse.”

They're interrupted by their ride pulling up, but he can feel Matt seething the whole way over, not to mention hear him say, “Fucking big shot now,” under his breath as they're getting dropped off there among the condos on Lake Shore by the park. Emilia gives him a perplexed look, what the fuck is his problem? This is why Jay can't win a standoff. If Matt can't have his way, he'll wreck the whole thing somehow.

Jay spots Matt and Emilia’s parents waiting next to the entrance. Like his own parents, they get a bit more stooped every time he sees them, but Matt’s mom has the same gold-tinted blonde hair she’s always had – bottle job, in Emilia’s words. Jay heard more about them from Emilia over the course of a year or so than he ever has from Matt, both of them, but especially their mom. She complained about her all the time, but then once when Jay said something offhand about how they don’t get along, she was offended. He gave up trying to understand. Their mom is always nice enough to him.

As they approach, she breaks off from Matt’s dad and heads down the sidewalk towards them with a purpose that unnerves him even before she points and says, “Matthew” in a tone Jay only hears her use when Matt’s in trouble. “Your little cousins had a tough time getting home last night. Mia lost her phone. She was sobbing to your Aunt Kathleen this morning.”

“What-” Matt stops next to him. “What are you talking about? How is it my fault that-”

“Well, who do I hear was buying them liquor all night? And then just disappeared and left them to fend for themselves? You know-” Another group passes by, and she lowers her voice, “that’s our money you’re spending. You could try to think about how that makes us look.” This is one of the things Emilia used to complain about, that their mom is obsessed with appearances. Still, Jay does feel bad. He remembers Mia, the one who seemed really young. Matt starts to say something else, but his mom cuts him off. “And what’s this I’m hearing about the two of you being an item?”

An item, such a mom way to put it. Jay’s own mom would probably put it the same way, though imagining his mom’s reaction makes him even dizzier than this situation.

Matt seems dizzy as well. “Okay. Alright,” he says. Jay catches a glance from him that clearly says this is his fault. It is, but it still feels unfair. Matt went along with it too. He had to know this could happen. “You know what it was-”

“Don't you dare tell me you were joking,” Matt’s mom says. “If I had to hear from my sister-in-law that everyone's talking about this because you thought it was funny-”

Everyone starts to talk at once: Jay says, “We didn't think it was funny” at the same time Matt says, “It was a case of mistaken homosexuality,” and Matt’s dad, who's joined the group, quietly tries to get Matt’s mom to go inside. But Emilia's the loudest. “Mom, they've been living together for like 20 years. Did you seriously think they were just friends?”

Matt turns on her. “What the fuck do you know about it?”

Matt’s mom goes on talking, but the focus has shifted. Jay can't find the words to join Matt’s dad in trying to defuse what is quickly becoming a scene, so he takes hold of Matt’s arm, but then just keeps holding it for unclear reasons. Matt shakes him off.

Emilia says, “Dude, I'm on your side.”

“You are? Okay.” Matt turns to their mom, his chin stuck out like a kid, in a way Jay’s certainly seen since then, but right now makes him think of teenage, basement-room Matt. “She used to strip. She was a stripper. As long as we're, you know… outing each other.”

Over the course of about three seconds, the color drains completely from Emilia’s face. “You’re unbelievable. You know, I thought I finally knew what was up with you, but you're- Oh my god. Were you fucking with me? Was any of that shit you said real? ‘Oh, I've never told anyone.’” That last part she says to Jay. Matt looks between the two of them, putting things together; in what shape or order, Jay has no idea. It is like something from a romcom, but in a romcom this would be the time to make a big gesture – no, the time to make a big gesture was last night, but this is when he would confess, pry himself open and let everything come out, right here in front of everyone. But he can't. He couldn’t last night, with the words as close to the surface as they’d ever been, when he and Matt were alone and he’d never been more sure that they were thinking the same thing. Instead, he watches uselessly while Emilia says, “Since we're being honest, I asked Jay to play without you at the wedding. I would have talked to you about it, but no one can tell you anything because you’re a 40-year-old child.”

There’s a wind-tunnel second of silence before everyone starts talking again, before Matt takes off down the street and disappears into the park, and in that beat Jay reaches deep for something he can say. “It was real,” he says to Emilia even though she’s fighting with her mom and probably isn't listening, because he wants to make sure Matt understands what he means. He says it again to Matt before he goes. “It was real.”

Out of the static emerges the thought: stop it from happening. Fuck the show, fuck everything. It’s all fucked now, and he has to go back. Matt detours up into High Park, refreshed with this new direction, simple and unformed as it may be, muttering to himself, “Stop it from happening,” rolling it around in his mouth. He only lets himself say it a few times, though; he’s aware he doesn’t look normal. On the trail at Humber Bay, earlier on his walk, he asked a guy for a pen, thinking about the thing you do where you stab yourself in the trachea when your throat’s closing up. The guy’s eyes got wider as they moved over Matt’s face. He said, “You okay?” then before Matt could answer, made him sit down on a bench and told him how to breathe – weird that you can forget something like that, but he had.

He was an older guy wearing hiking clothes, with a vaguely gay accent. He said his name was Jeff. “Thanks, Jeff,” Matt said, clenching and unclenching his shaking hands. “I don’t know what’s going on with me. Or anything, I guess.”

Jeff patted him on the back. “How about let's deal with the physical symptoms first.” Matt got up and started walking again when Jeff went to get him some water. His eyes were too kind, and Matt had already said too much.

An itchy, watched feeling creeps up on him. Jared, following somewhere? Trying to lose him, or force him to show himself, Matt tries sprinting ahead, diving into some brush, but no dice. He sits on a grassy incline and scans the open area. He lies down and lets himself roll – ground, sky, ground sky, ground sky – until he stops, pleasantly battered. A kid nearby says, “I want to roll!” and when his mom says no, he says, “But that man is doing it!” The mom says, “Sometimes people make bad choices, honey.”

Stop it from happening, this whole romcom business. Go back to the beginning, like Donnie Darko. Of course, he couldn’t really do any of that fake-science dimensional bullshit, but it could be faked convincingly – enough for Jay, anyway. He needs to erase, what? Forty-eight hours at most? There are drugs for that. And Jay’s called him like ten times in the last hour; it seems like he’s ready to take his medicine. But when he gets into the streetcar, the memory of Jay last night flashes behind his eyes; Jay, smiling like he knew something Matt didn't. Did it embarrass you? And an entirely new plan unspools. “Fuck!” he says out loud. Twin beads of sweat roll from under his hat and down his face. “That's right.”

He stops at home to grab a few things. He digs through the piles of rusting scrap in the backyard and the bins of collected junk in the basement. He drinks from the tap with his head in the sink, jumping at every sound. Then to the hardware store, the grocery store for a few more things, then back the way he came, back on the streetcar. “They're all going to laugh at you,” he mutters. People stare, but that's okay. “They're all going to laugh at you.”

The sun’s gone mostly down by the time Maddy and Josh and Jules find him sitting on a bench and drive him around looking for Matt. Jay wandered through the park on foot earlier, sick in the heat, past families and dogs, along the shoreline, before settling back by the restaurant, waiting. “Let him do a few laps and blow off some steam,” Matt’s dad said. Matt’s mom said, “I don’t know. We did our best with you kids,” to no one in particular as they were going inside. None of them ever did check if Matt had actually come back.

He remembers Emilia, back when, telling him that she thought their parents had given up on Matt a long time ago. She said it in a jealous way, because they were hard on her while Matt got to do whatever he wanted. The thought didn't seem to bother her. Matt wanted it that way, she said. Why else did he finish high school with awful grades even though he's clearly capable of doing better? Why else did he make his own little world in the basement and never talk to anyone? Jay didn't have an answer.

He can feel Jules looking at him. “I'm sure he's fine. He probably just went home.”

He stares out the window, past his own reflection into pools of streetlight. “Can we go by on Lake Shore one more time?”

In the driver’s seat, Maddy says, “We're not gonna find him if he doesn't want to be found, babes. Why don't I take you home?”

The lights are all off at the house. Maybe out of politeness, hopefully not because they can sense his reluctance to go in alone, Maddy and company accept his invitation to come in. He and Matt never have people over; he doesn’t remember how to act, but it’s fine once they get set up playing Mario Kart. Jay even pulls his punches a bit, since none of them are used to playing on the 64, and because he’s more interested in watching them than winning. Maddy sits between Jules and Josh on the floor, leaning into each of them affectionately just enough for them to not expect it when she reaches over to fuck with their controllers. “She sucks to play competitive games with,” Josh explains.

“She sucks in general,” Jules says.

Maddy says, “It’s not my fault you aren’t willing to do what it takes.”

“When we were roommates and we worked opposite shifts,” Jules says, “I would harvest and cook in Breath of the Wild all day, and Maddy would come home and fight shit all night. That’s the only way we can play games, hunter-gatherer style.”

“Sometimes Matt plays on mute and I play the music on the piano,” Jay tells them. He doesn’t know why, or what reaction he was expecting. Definitely not for them to all be super charmed by it and want him to do it for them. “No,” he says, after thinking about it for a second, “I only do it for Matt.” It feels wrong somehow for anyone else to know about that.

After they’ve gone, he plays some of his old, old recital songs as well as he can remember them. Muscle memory gets him pretty far, the result of teenage Jay’s feverish practice, always nervous to perform for a crowd even though he cleaned up at those things every time. He can still find the place in his body where he felt the audience erupt for him, the shape of teenage Matt among them, his messy hair, his shoulders in a tee shirt, never clapping like everyone else. He didn't have to. He was in on it. They were going places.

Jay sits on the bench until his ass goes numb, waiting for him to come through the door, but he never does. He wakes up slumped on the couch with his chin in his hand, in a silent house, and the thought invades his half-asleep brain that Matt had friends in that other reality, some nerds who lived with him and followed him around. Matt had people, and he had no one. He wonders what those nerds are doing over there now, without Matt.

His phone has gotten wedged between him and the couch, stuck to the skin of his lower back under his shirt. He's already called a dozen times, left some pointless messages. Matt’s not going to answer. It still rings, which is reassuring, in that he hasn't thrown it in the lake or anything. A moment’s hesitation at the voicemail beep. Then he starts talking.

“Hey Matt… it's Jay. From your house.” Stupid bit he's done forever. “We met when we were kids? And I guess we've barely been apart since then, except for when I went to college for a while, but then we started a band and we started living together.” For the sake of brevity, he skips over the part where Matt flipped the fuck out over the college thing. Also the part where Jay hated college, was bored and lonely even among the people he hung out with, and wanted to die the whole time. “Um.” Their living room feels eerie, unreal with the lights still on in the middle of the night, like a stage set. He squints at the clock on the DVD player. “It's like four-something, and I'm getting a little worried. I really want you to come home. I don't think I've ever slept in this house without you. Isn't that crazy? That’s not why I want you to- If you told me where you are, I’d come there too. I don’t even care if you’re plotting revenge – actually, I hope you’re plotting revenge and not hurt or in trouble or something, but you could tell me either way and I’d come. I always want to be where you are. Almost always. And when I don’t, I just end up remembering that I like you more than anyone else.”

“I don’t know why I can’t ever say that out loud. I used to try to tell you this stuff when I was drunk, but you don't take me seriously when I- Oh, fuck.” Finally, the Magic Eye puzzle of last night reveals itself. All day he’s been making himself sick wondering how he could have been so wrong, searching every word and gesture and expression for missed signs. Over everything, he worried that what he’d taken for nervousness was actually reluctance, that Matt just didn’t know how to tell him no. “MJ.” It comes out scolding, even though this is all his fault. “That wasn't goodbye.”

The time on the screen keeps ticking up: three minutes, thirty seconds. He hangs up. Calls back. Talking to Matt’s voicemail isn't enough anymore. There’s nowhere for this to go but back inside, and it won’t fit. No answer. By the time it beeps again, Jay’s on his feet. “Why do you do this? Do you know how it felt when you just weren’t there? I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to leave you. You make it so that I have to if I want to actually do the stuff we talk about doing, and then you-” He stops himself with the thought of Matt in bed with him this morning, so afraid that Jay was about to disappear that he did it himself. It’s kind of spooky, like he somehow absorbed Jay’s intentions from the future that never happened. “I wasn’t going to leave. I’ve wanted to-” he can’t say that out loud, “...do that… for a long time. It wasn’t about the show at all. I want to play a show, obviously, but I don’t need that. I don’t need The Rivoli, Matt. I need you.”

After that, he sits down again, fighting the pull of sleep now, inescapably tired. “I do still want to, though. And after we play The Rivoli, we can play more shows. That was always the plan. That was your plan. It’s gotten a lot weirder since then. I’m not complaining about that; I’m saying, I guess, I don’t know how long we can keep doing these plans.” There’s no good way to tell Matt that it’s not only getting weird, it’s getting dangerous, destabilizing, and not just for them. “But I’m not going anywhere. Okay? Um, call me back, please.”

In the three hours of sleep he gets before he has to start getting ready, he has conversations and fights and at least one Hanna-Barbera-style animated adventure with Matt, but there’s still no sign of him, on Jay’s phone or anywhere else. It’s not until he’s showered, dressed, and milling around waiting for his ride that he wanders into the kitchen and spots Matt’s phone, glaring unassumingly in the morning sun on the counter.

For half a second, long enough to call out for Jay out of instinct, Matt thinks he's blind. It turns out he just fell asleep with his hat over his face – which is stiflingly hot in direct sunlight, even though it's early. A plane flies low overhead; usually that’s a peaceful thing to look at, but the sound of sobbing elsewhere on the roof gives it a surreal quality.

“Hello?” A woman’s voice calls out on the other side of the HVAC unit. Matt peeks around it and there’s Maddy, standing several yards off in running shorts and a tee shirt that helpfully says Bride in big pink cursive letters. He drags himself upright, rolls his sore shoulders and stretches his legs, slowly regaining some feeling in his lower back after being in a sitting position for hours on whatever gravelly stuff they put on roofs.

“Hey-”

Maddy screams. Both hands fly up to her tear-streaked face. “Jesus Christ. What are you doing here?” She takes a step back as Matt approaches, like she's afraid of him. A thing his mom said to him once, in high school, when he got caught throwing fireworks off a bridge into traffic, pops into his head: Do you need to be institutionalized?

“Are you okay? Why are you crying?”

He doesn't mean to deflect necessarily, but it works. The tension in her posture lets up. “No, I'm fine. My makeup artist isn't texting me back, and I have a hundred people coming to brunch in an hour. And I don't want to get married.” She chokes up again over that last bit. You're supposed to hug someone when they're crying, Matt thinks, but aside from wanting to avoid shambling towards her like Michael Myers, he’s been sweating into the same clothes since yesterday and he probably stinks. What would Jeff do?

“Here.” He motions down to the ledge where they sat the day before yesterday – feels like it happened at least a week ago. “Sit down. Take a breath.” She sits, facing inward, but does not take a breath. Close enough. Matt sits down too. “Is it… because of Jules?”

Maddy’s had her hand over her face, but she looks up at him. “What? Jules? Why?” She sounds genuinely confused.

“Because at the bar, I was- Well, I was doing a little eavesdropping, and you guys were all, ‘We can’t ever tell Josh about our secret-’”

“Oh,” Maddy says. “Yeah. Kind of. I’m dropping out of law school, and I haven’t told him.” Matt doesn’t get a chance to reevaluate; she keeps going. “It’s so hard, and I’m not even that good at it. I’m busting my ass to be in the middle of the pack, and I’m not doing this to be mediocre. If I’m not going to be T1, then I’m not going to do it, you know?” She stops to sniffle, and Matt nods as if he does know. “And at my firm, right, I work with these women who bust their asses and then go home and take care of their kids after. Like, it never ends. I never get to see Josh as it is, cause he works all the time, and I know when I tell him he’ll be really supportive, but I don't even know what I want to do now. And I just keep thinking that I need to blow it all up or else I’m going to end up staying at home having kids like my mom. That can't be it, right? Like, I know this is so cliche and I hate that I'm saying it right now, but is that all there is to life?”

“Boy,” is all Matt can say for a second. This is heavy. Part of him wants to tell her no, that she can do whatever she wants, that she’d be surprised at the stuff she could get away with if she tried it, but something stops him. It feels like the rules are different for Maddy, somehow. “That is not what I was expecting. I thought you were trying to leave that guy for your friend. I’m sorry, I don’t think I can help with any of that.”

“Yeah, no duh.” Maddy laughs wetly. “You’ve never had a job.” She laughs some more, wiping her face. “You thought Jules and I were, like-?”

“An item,” Matt supplies, which makes her laugh some more. Then she makes a sort of high-pitched noise that says he wasn’t totally wrong, and he can't stop himself from going, “Aha!”

“Not an item, but,” she shrugs, “you know. She’s too free-spirited for me. Plus, I'm not gay like that.”

“Right.”

A moment goes by where they just sit, like friends. They wouldn't be friends, Matt guesses, if they weren't family. Where would they have met each other? “You can't go through with it if you don't want to do it,” he says. It sounds like something someone would say in a situation like this.

“Oh yeah, that'd be cute. I'll just call it off day-of, and my parents will be out like fifty thousand dollars, my fiancé will kick me out, and I'll have no direction in life and nowhere to live.”

“What if–” Matt says, projecting onto the whiteboard in his head, waiting for an idea to show up, “it wasn't your fault? Something went wrong. Like, just for example, a mysterious fire breaks out. You have to delay it.”

“You're gonna do arson?”

“A mysterious fire. A water main break? Wasp nest? It'll be like in Suspiria, maggots falling from the ceiling on everyone-”

“Ew! No. Oh my god, Matt.”

“You could move in with us,” Matt says. He's not sure he means it, probably not, but the idea of a Cousin Oliver situation, Maddy adding some background color, maybe helping out with plans sometimes – he could see it. They could try something new for a little while.

“That's very sweet.” From the way she's smiling, it seems like she’s being sincere, but now she's crying again. “That would be fun. You guys are so much fun. But I can't do that. Also no offense, but if I left Josh and then had to watch you two do puppy eyes at each other all day every day, I'd kill myself.”

“Puppy eyes?”

“Yeah. Not to be gross, but Jay looks at you like he wants to take a bite out of you, like all the time.”

“No he doesn't. Jay?” Being obtuse comes from habit, partially. It's not like people never comment on this. Just not normally about Jay.

Now Maddy pulls back and studies him. “What's going on with you? Jay was really worried about you. He said you were fighting with Emilia? Were you up here all night?”

It's getting hot up here, Matt’s noticing. Closer to the sun. “So many questions.” He pulls his hat down, braces his sunburned forearms on his knees. “The thing about Jay and me is that… sometimes we're kind of really fucking terrible to each other.”

Most of the time, Matt’s noticed, people get shy when you say stuff like that. They look away, they remember they have somewhere else to be. Maddy frowns a little, but she keeps looking at him. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Guy stuff.”

“Come on,” Maddy says, not unkindly. “Be for real.”

“I don’t know, I guess I’m probably gay or something.” He takes a shaky breath while Maddy rolls her eyes.

“You can just say you don’t want to talk about it. I just poured my heart out to you, but whatever-”

“No, I’m serious.” Matt laughs, and it pisses Maddy off more, which makes him laugh more. He stays stuck in that for a few seconds, until he can pull himself together. “I know you already thought that, but… Okay, I have to come clean about something. We’re not a couple, not like that; we’re just best friends. Or, we were. Now I don’t know. I guess I’m kind of freaking out about it. But we thought – okay, it was Jay’s idea – but we thought it'd make us more popular so you'd help us get a show.” When he looks up from his knees (very dirty, also sunburned), Maddy’s on her phone. “What are you doing?”

“I'm texting Jay to let him know you're okay.”

“No! What?” Betrayal! From all sides. Briefly, he considers snatching her phone and throwing it, but first he tries reason. “Look, don't. I will fucking jump. Is he here right now?”

“Okay, okay.” She puts down her phone gently. “He's here, but I wouldn't tell him you're up here. He was seriously looking for you for hours last night. Whatever else is going on, I know he loves you.”

“No, I'm saying, it wasn't real. It was a promotional stunt.” But that wasn't what Jay said. It was real, Jay said. Bits and pieces are coming to him now, leaks in the dam. Jay, lit from above, singing to him. Emilia's furious face.

“I hear you,” Maddy says, “but I don't know if I believe you.”

“You don't believe me,” he says. “Oh, this is funny.” Hoist on his own gay petard. Or Jay’s, as it were.

“I at least don't think you and Jay are on the same page about that. And not that it’s any of my business, but he's also got like a million hickies right now. Was that part of the promotional stunt?”

Jay’s stubble against his bare hip. Jay saying his name in the dark RV, and Matt said what?, like an idiot, like he was trying to get his attention and not just saying his name because he wanted to. Jay’s crestfallen expression when he came inside yesterday. A bucket of blood balanced in the stage rigging. Matt gets to his feet. “I gotta go. I gotta fix something.”

Maddy follows him towards the hatch. “Did you do something? What did you do?”

“It's okay,” he calls, hoping desperately that it still is. “It's okay. I'm gonna fix it.”

The building is an obstacle course, people everywhere, in caterer uniforms and formal wear, carrying trays and pushing carts. Behind him, Maddy gets intercepted almost immediately by bridesmaids. Matt breaks into a run.

“Jay!” His voice is like a gunshot in the reception hall. Every head snaps toward him, including Jay’s, on the stage, standing next to the piano with his sister.

“Matt!” he calls back. “What are you doing?”

“There is no reason for you to be here,” Emilia says, but he keeps stumbling forward, panting, one arm extended. From the looks on their faces, he thinks he must look like a flaming bag of dog shit.

Jay looks fantastic. Of course he does; he's about to play piano beautifully at a wedding, in a suit. He's going to make everyone cry about love, but really secretly about music, and the thought of anyone else looking at him like that makes Matt feel like he's going to disintegrate. But it's okay. “Don't move,” Matt says, and Jay immediately disobeys and moves in the direction of the piano. “Don't move!”

Closer up, Jay looks tired. Still good, just creased and irritable. “Were you here all night?”

“Yeah. Hang on, Bird, I just have to-”

“You really don't have to do anything,” Emilia says, at the same time Jay says, “No! No more plans!”

“I'm not doing a plan! I'm undoing a plan,” he tries to say, but Jay’s talking over him, saying they’ll talk after he's done here, and starts reaching for the bench, so he’s forced to go nuclear. He barrels forward, windmilling his arms to keep Jay and Emilia and the other wedding party people who've started closing in on him out of his radius, then yanks the bench back. He rigged it to not come down easily. He wanted Jay to be in the middle of playing when it happened.

Compared with Carrie from Carrie, he thinks it's probably better to know it's coming, but the split second the cascade of liquid takes to hit feels long enough for him to fool himself into thinking he can jump out of the way. The other important aspect that is not addressed in the movie is the smell, which after sitting there all night and morning in the heat, is so rank it makes him actually want to cry. Fighting a dry heave, he leans forward to let his hat fall onto the stage. The room is silent enough to hear it distinctly splat.

He's afraid to look up, but when he does, in a crowd of shocked and angry faces, Jay’s looking at him with more tenderness than he could possibly expect or deserve. Not like he wants to take a bite out of him, but considering the circumstances, it's pretty miraculous.

“I'm sorry,” he says thickly, waving off Jules, who’s approaching with a cloth napkin. “I’m sorry, Birdie. I want to do this with you forever too. If you still want to.”

Jay says, “Marry me.”

It was an unbelievably stupid thing to do. Matt was confused, in a vulnerable emotional state already; he did not remember proposing bandmate marriage back in 2008. It could have been worse, though. Maddy let him save some face by calling it a promotional stunt. “I figured that’s what you were doing,” she said, “because what kind of fucking psychopath would get engaged at someone else’s wedding?” She thumped him on the back. “Right?” What other kind of psychopath would set a bucket of pork blood to topple onto a baby grand, she seemed less interested in, but Jay got the impression that she and Matt had already touched on that.

Maybe she also felt guilty. Before she went off somewhere with Josh alone, she confessed that she did not actually get them a show at The Rivoli tonight. “They’re booked solid further out than I thought.” She cringed. “I thought I could still negotiate. Then I just thought it might make you guys behave better if you thought that.” No one commented on the extreme wrongness of that reasoning. It's fine. It's even a little vindicating that she couldn't get it done just like that after all.

Mostly, Jay thinks, people probably won't remember their almost wrecking the wedding. Emilia flew into action moving the brunch outside, Jules apparently gathered the early arriving guests to do a bullshit tour. Jay helped close off the reception hall until the blood situation could be dealt with.

Now he follows Matt’s voice into the bathroom and finds a scene from a slasher, blood tracked and smeared on the white tile, a red set of fingerprints on one of the white urinals, a blood-soaked hat on the ledge by the mirror. Matt turns from the sink, shirtless and dripping. “Can you check if I got it all?” he says.

In the mirror as he approaches, Jay catches a couple of tiny red splatters on his own shirt before directing his attention to the back of Matt’s head, parting the wet curls at the base of his neck, looking for chunks of viscera. He picks a few things out, not all related. He wonders what else Matt got up to yesterday while he was gone, but he doesn’t ask. They don’t say anything while he’s doing it, even as he keeps at it longer than he needs to, long after all the debris is gone. He moves to the sides, scratches around his ears, then to the crown of his head, Matt inclining further to give him access while he runs his fingers through. Once he’s run out of scalp to touch, Jay holds him by the shoulders and kisses his forehead, right where it meets his hairline. Matt grasps his arm above the elbow. A choked sound comes from him. Jay looks the other way to let him wipe his eyes, so he doesn’t see it coming when Matt tips his chin down and kisses him on the mouth, quickly, shyly. He has to hold himself back from smiling too big while he presses in to kiss him for real; Matt’s never shy. Or maybe he is more often than Jay usually notices.

They stand there kissing until they hear the door start to open. No one comes in, whoever it was either put off by the blood or the two guys kissing against a sink. Jay starts to pull away then, but Matt latches on harder, arms around his waist; he grinds their hips together and whimpers like a girl, and the only thing that brings them to their senses is the sink starting to buckle under his weight. They laugh a little, separating finally.

“Did you mean that?” Matt says, considering his ruined shirt in the next sink. Jay never has the impulse to paint anything, but Matt’s profile there in front of the mirror makes him want to. He risks getting them started again by kissing the hinge of Matt’s jaw.

“I meant everything.”

“Okay.” Matt nods to himself. “Yes, then.”

“Yes…?” Jay catches the dopey look on his own face in the mirror before meeting Matt's eyes.

“Yeah. Yes. Let's get married.”

“Skip right over boyfriend.”

“Chump shit. And–” Impossibly, Matt’s got that glint in his eye again, “I know just the place to do it.”

“The courthouse.”

“No. The Riv-”

“No, no, hear me out. What if we got married regular, and for the Rivoli, we record-” a pause for dramatic effect, “a demo.” Maddy insisted that the booking guy was interested in the videos she sent him, but that a demo was what they really needed. She also thought they should change their name, but that's a nonstarter. “Think about it?”

Matt promises to think about it, and maybe he will. Maybe they really will file the paperwork too. Historically, they're not great with paperwork, but he could see this being a time they're motivated.

The wedding goes ahead, Jay only finding out later that it almost didn't. After she and Josh come back from their talk, Maddy will go to Matt, who's by then wearing a shirt loaned from Josh’s suitcase, to debrief. She says sometimes you have to stick with the plan you made, and Matt says he never sticks with a plan; once it's done, you chunk that shit and get a new one. She says no offense but maybe that's why he can't get one show in 20 years. Jay stays out of it. Maybe they'll take up Maddy on her offer to set them up with a recording studio once she's back from her honeymoon. Jay’s skeptical on that one.

Jay will play as people filter into the white plastic chairs from outside, as the wedding party takes their places on stage, and Maddy walks down the aisle, transformed by the dress and the makeup and the swept-up hair into someone from a fancy magazine. During the vows, while he's not playing, he watches Matt, sitting off to the side of the stage, carefully out of frame so he doesn't show up in the photos and make people ask for the rest of their lives why there's one guy in jeans. He watches as Matt wells up here and there, but has to look away when Matt’s face wobbles fully into tears, because he has to keep it together to play through the end of the ceremony. Everyone files out, the important part finished.

A lot of people will compliment him on the music at the reception, from both sides, and including Matt’s mom, who really gushes about it. She pats Matt’s face and shakes her head in an exasperated, fond sort of way, and tells him she's just glad he's happy. They get that sentiment from several of Matt’s family members, with varying levels of veiled disapproval. Eventually, Matt and Emilia bump elbows and call a truce without either of them apologizing.

They'll find themselves sitting at what is clearly the gay table, which ends up being a lot of fun. Jay loves talking to people with Matt, getting to ride shotgun while he blasts through conversations without worry or self consciousness. They'll dance a bit, sore but in much better moods after eating something. Jay might wrap his pinky finger around Matt’s during that sappy Death Cab song people like to play at weddings. Or maybe he doesn’t. With no one else looking, who's to know?

Further out, where Jay's just guessing, he imagines they'll go home and take showers, and Matt will listen to his series of increasingly intense voicemail messages. Maybe they'll talk about it. Maybe they won't need to; they'll just consider it understood. They'll go to bed, hopefully together. He doesn't think they'll have any juice left to finish what they started in the bathroom, but maybe in the morning. Whatever happens, he is absolutely sure that he'll never be more relieved to cross that threshold, into the place they've made for themselves.

First, though, they carry a bucket, some rags, some bleach, and a roll of paper towels onto the stage, and start to clean up their mess.