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rsadelleSummary: The beginning. That's probably not where he should start. "Mikey and I-" There isn't an easy way to explain it to them. "We're long-term non-monogamous."
Notes: Last year I wrote Well Met for the![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
no_tags prompt "Everyone forgets that Nate and Mikey know each other. (AU or canon.)" As soon as I started writing the story, which is an AU, I thought of the canon version. This is that story.
Story on AO3
Nate's driving cross-country when it happens. He doesn't read celebrity gossip in the best of times, and certainly not when he's spending most of his days driving and the rest of them visiting people he knows along the way.
The first time he hears anything about it is three days after he gets home to L.A. when he logs in to Skype for a long-distance band meeting. He's the last one there, and everyone else has varying degrees of serious looks on their faces.
"What the fuck?" Gabe says.
"Nice to see you too." Nate looks at all of their faces on the screen. Gabe's the most pissed off, but no one else looks happy either. "What the fuck what?"
Victoria sends him a link to the MTV article that tells him all about how Perez Hilton broke the story that Mikey Way is cheating on his wife with some unknown man. MTV has reproduced the picture, someone's cell phone photo from a club where all you can see clearly is Mikey's head tipped back and someone else whose mouth is obviously on his neck. You wouldn't be able to tell who the someone else was if you didn't know them well enough to pick them out of an obscured lineup.
Nate's band knows him that well.
Nate clicks back from the article to Skype and wishes like fuck that Mikey had called him about it.
"You're fucking around with a married man!" Gabe yells at him. "Not cool, Nate."
"Oh, fuck you," Nate snaps. "You think I would do that? You think Mikey would do that?"
"That is you in the picture, right?" Alex asks.
Fuck, Nate wishes Mikey had called him.
"Yeah," he says. "Yeah it's me. Alicia knows." He shrugs. "Or, technically, I know about her. I was there first."
"Maybe," Ryland suggests, "you should start at the beginning."
The beginning. That's probably not where he should start. "Mikey and I-" There isn't an easy way to explain it to them. "We're long-term non-monogamous."
"I didn't even know you knew Mikey." And now Gabe looks more bewildered than angry.
"The first time," Nate tells him, "was in your basement."
*
You could have told me about the picture, Nate texts Mikey.
Two hours later, when Mikey hasn't texted him back, he sends, You should come over.
That gets him a response: Bad idea. I'm stuck with this but can keep you out of it.
I don't want out of it. Come here or I'll come there.
Mikey shows up forty minutes later, sunglasses on and hoodie pulled up over his head. He looks tired when he takes them off, and he comes easily when Nate pulls him into a hug.
"Come to bed."
Their relationship is about more than just sex, but it's the best way Nate knows to show Mikey that he doesn't want out of any part of this.
He lays Mikey out and takes his time driving him crazy before he finally lets Mikey come.
He doesn't ask, "How bad is it?" until Mikey's breath has calmed and he's no longer strung tighter than a barbed wire fence.
Mikey rubs his hands over his face. "Alicia's getting shit on Twitter. Me too. Management wants me to do some kind of interview."
Nate rubs his back. "I'll do it with you, if you want."
Mikey shakes his head. "I want to keep you out of it as long as possible."
"We always knew this was a possibility."
"Yeah, I just didn't think it would ever happen."
After a few minutes of silence, Nate says, "I told my band."
Mikey pushes himself up and hovers over Nate. "How did that go?"
Nate closes his eyes. "Could have gone better. Gabe was pissed that I was fucking around with a married man."
Mikey snorts. "He would be. You okay?"
Nate opens his eyes and looks at Mikey again, tracing the familiar set of his cheekbones and the way his hair always ends up messy after Nate's had his hands in it. "Yeah."
"We don't have to keep doing this."
Nate's looking closely enough that he can tell what it costs Mikey to say that.
"I moved to a Yankee state where I didn't know anyone, lived in a basement, and had my car stolen because I wanted to be in Gabe's band. I'm not going to let go of something I want just because it's uncomfortable."
Mikey swoops in and kisses him, hard. Nate kisses back, laughing.
"What was that for?"
"Sometimes," Mikey says, "I forget how much I love you."
*
The first day of writing in person with the rest of his band is weird, and Nate's all too happy to adjourn to Pete's for a party. Spencer's told him about other Nate and Bebe, but he still hasn't had a chance to meet them, and they don't know enough to be awkward around him. Everyone else does, though, and Nate escapes outside to put his feet in the pool.
Just about the time he's wishing he'd grabbed a fresh beer before he came outside, Spencer sits down next to him and hands him one.
"Thanks."
"Welcome." Spencer kicks his feet, stirring up waves in the pool.
Nate watches for the pattern, then kicks in a complementary one.
"How bad is it?"
Nate sighs. "Mikey doesn't want to talk about it. Victoria's acting like nothing's changed, Ryland keeps looking at me strangely, Alex is a little weird." Nate sips his beer. "Gabe's pissed at me. I don't know if he's mad I didn't tell him or if he disapproves."
"Mmm, could be. For all his partying, Gabe's kind of-"
"Conservative?"
"I was going to say vanilla." Spencer elbows Nate. "He'll get over it."
Nate nods. Spencer's probably right, and he cares more about what it's doing to Mikey than what it's doing to Gabe anyway.
They sip their beer in silence for a while.
Even from outside, they can hear when the tone of the party changes. Nate glances up, but can't see what made it change. He figures it out a few minutes later when Alicia comes out of the house and sits down next to him.
"Hey," he says. "How are you?"
She shrugs. "Hanging in there. How bout you?"
"Same."
Alicia adds her kicking to Nate and Spencer's, making chaotic waves on the surface of Pete's pool.
"Do you know what you're going to do?" Nate asks. He turns his head to look at her, and sees her shake her head.
"No. Mikey doesn't want to talk about it."
Nate sighs. "Not to me either."
Alicia nudges him in the side after a while. "Does one of us need to go rescue him from Gabe?"
Nate follows her gaze to the house, where Gabe and Mikey are talking, Mikey's back to the wall and Gabe in front of him. "I'll go." He shakes the better part of the water off his feet so he doesn't get it all over Pete and Ashlee's carpet.
"Hey," he says when he gets to Gabe and Mikey. "We're hanging out by the pool."
Mikey nods and slips toward him, away from Gabe.
"You coming?" Nate asks Gabe.
"Nah, gonna go see if I can get in some quality time with Bronx before the nanny makes him go to bed."
The space where he was sitting is still open, so Nate sits back down between Spencer and Alicia. Mikey sits on the other side of Alicia, cross-legged, without putting his feet in the water.
"It's nice out here," Alicia says. "Why didn't we buy a house with a pool?"
"We're from Jersey," Mikey says. "They're not standard issue for us."
"Don't look at me," Nate says when Alicia does just that. "I live in a condo complex with a pool."
Alicia keeps looking at him until he smiles sideways at her and says, "You can come use my pool anytime you want."
Alicia puts her arm around him. "You're the best boyfriend my husband could ever have."
*
Nate goes over to Mikey and Alicia's for dinner the next night.
"Strategy meeting time," Alicia says after they've eaten their sushi and are sitting around because no one wants to get up and serve dessert.
Mikey makes a face.
"You have to," Alicia says. "I'm taking shit for this, Nate will too if anyone figures out it's him, and you're going on tour again, which means interviews and publicity."
"Fuck that," Mikey says. "This is our private life. It's no one's business."
"Not anymore," Nate says. He shrugs when Mikey looks at him. "It's public now. I'll do an interview with you if you want."
"Christ," Mikey mutters. "Where did they even get that fucking picture? We haven't been clubbing in months."
"Maybe they didn't realize what they had, or they forgot. It doesn't matter." Nate puts his hand over Mikey's. "What are we going to do about it?"
"Not we." Mikey gets up and gathers plates together. "I'll do an interview or something. I want to keep you out of this shitstorm as long as possible." He bends over and presses his lips to Nate's in a brief kiss before he takes the plates to the kitchen.
"He's stubborn," Alicia says when Nate sighs.
"Yeah, I know." Nate leans back in his chair to look through to the kitchen at Mikey moving around. "You'll call me, right?" he asks low enough that Mikey won't be able to hear him. He'd rather Mikey called him, but, obviously, there are things Mikey doesn't tell him.
"If he goes off the rails? Yeah." Alicia leans around the table to look into the kitchen before she adds, "I know you and Mikey talked about it, but you can move in here, or we can find somewhere else for all three of us."
"Maybe someday." It's the same thing he told Mikey when he asked. "But not now. I like living alone."
Alicia fiddles with her glass. "As long as you know you can."
Mikey comes back with three bowls of green tea ice cream, and Alicia drops the subject.
Mikey walks Nate to the door later and they linger for a while, leaning against the wall and kissing.
"You don't have to do this alone," Nate says.
"I know. I don't want it to hurt you either."
"I'm tough, and I'm in a band formed by one of Gabe's drug-induced hallucinations. I can handle it."
"I really just want it to go away," Mikey whispers, eyes closed.
Nate hugs him close and says, "I love you," because he doesn't have anything else to offer to that.
*
Nate gets emails and texts from every member of his band, Pete, and Spencer directing him to an MTV article. It's Mikey's statement.
*
Nate has dinner with Gabe a couple of days later.
"Here's what I don't get. You and Alicia are friends?"
Nate shrugs. "Yeah, kind of. We don't hang out or anything, but we both love Mikey. It's not really that complicated."
"How did I never know about it?" And that's probably the real reason they're having dinner.
"We never wanted to make a big deal out of it. Mikey didn't think it would ever become public."
"But you did." Trust Gabe to be smart enough to pick up on that.
"We're both in bands. We live in L.A. It wasn't going to stay secret forever."
"And you're still not talking about it," Gabe says.
Nate gets it, really. Gabe has known Mikey a lot longer than he's known Nate, and Gabe believes in loyalty. Nate's being loyal; it's just that his loyalty belongs to Mikey over Gabe.
"I'll tell you whatever you want to know," Nate says. "I'd tell the rest of the world too, but Mikey doesn't want me to."
"What the fuck? You're his boyfriend and he's not going to let you be that in public?"
Good to know Gabe's loyalty goes both ways.
"I think he's trying to protect me." Nate waves it away. "It doesn't matter. We're good."
"Are you?" And there's Gabe's deepest loyalty, checking in on him.
"We are. I don't want anything more complicated right now, and Mikey's happy. No one's getting hurt."
*
When Nate checks his phone at a break, he has a text from Mikey: Let's go out tonight.
"Seriously?" Nate says as soon as Mikey picks up his phone.
"Yeah." Nate can hear Mikey's smile. "I want to go clubbing."
"Isn't that what got us in trouble in the first place?" Nate doesn't really mean it, but he's willing to give Mikey an out if he wants it.
"I love you," Mikey says. "I'm not going to stop living our lives because of it."
Nate smiles and knows it's pretty goofy. "Awesome. Meet at your place?"
"Yours."
Nate grins even harder. His place means Mikey's spending the night, and that is sure to be a good time. "Can't wait."
Notes: Last year I wrote Well Met for the
no_tags prompt "Everyone forgets that Nate and Mikey know each other. (AU or canon.)" As soon as I started writing the story, which is an AU, I thought of the canon version. This is that story.Story on AO3
Nate's driving cross-country when it happens. He doesn't read celebrity gossip in the best of times, and certainly not when he's spending most of his days driving and the rest of them visiting people he knows along the way.
The first time he hears anything about it is three days after he gets home to L.A. when he logs in to Skype for a long-distance band meeting. He's the last one there, and everyone else has varying degrees of serious looks on their faces.
"What the fuck?" Gabe says.
"Nice to see you too." Nate looks at all of their faces on the screen. Gabe's the most pissed off, but no one else looks happy either. "What the fuck what?"
Victoria sends him a link to the MTV article that tells him all about how Perez Hilton broke the story that Mikey Way is cheating on his wife with some unknown man. MTV has reproduced the picture, someone's cell phone photo from a club where all you can see clearly is Mikey's head tipped back and someone else whose mouth is obviously on his neck. You wouldn't be able to tell who the someone else was if you didn't know them well enough to pick them out of an obscured lineup.
Nate's band knows him that well.
Nate clicks back from the article to Skype and wishes like fuck that Mikey had called him about it.
"You're fucking around with a married man!" Gabe yells at him. "Not cool, Nate."
"Oh, fuck you," Nate snaps. "You think I would do that? You think Mikey would do that?"
"That is you in the picture, right?" Alex asks.
Fuck, Nate wishes Mikey had called him.
"Yeah," he says. "Yeah it's me. Alicia knows." He shrugs. "Or, technically, I know about her. I was there first."
"Maybe," Ryland suggests, "you should start at the beginning."
The beginning. That's probably not where he should start. "Mikey and I-" There isn't an easy way to explain it to them. "We're long-term non-monogamous."
"I didn't even know you knew Mikey." And now Gabe looks more bewildered than angry.
"The first time," Nate tells him, "was in your basement."
*
You could have told me about the picture, Nate texts Mikey.
Two hours later, when Mikey hasn't texted him back, he sends, You should come over.
That gets him a response: Bad idea. I'm stuck with this but can keep you out of it.
I don't want out of it. Come here or I'll come there.
Mikey shows up forty minutes later, sunglasses on and hoodie pulled up over his head. He looks tired when he takes them off, and he comes easily when Nate pulls him into a hug.
"Come to bed."
Their relationship is about more than just sex, but it's the best way Nate knows to show Mikey that he doesn't want out of any part of this.
He lays Mikey out and takes his time driving him crazy before he finally lets Mikey come.
He doesn't ask, "How bad is it?" until Mikey's breath has calmed and he's no longer strung tighter than a barbed wire fence.
Mikey rubs his hands over his face. "Alicia's getting shit on Twitter. Me too. Management wants me to do some kind of interview."
Nate rubs his back. "I'll do it with you, if you want."
Mikey shakes his head. "I want to keep you out of it as long as possible."
"We always knew this was a possibility."
"Yeah, I just didn't think it would ever happen."
After a few minutes of silence, Nate says, "I told my band."
Mikey pushes himself up and hovers over Nate. "How did that go?"
Nate closes his eyes. "Could have gone better. Gabe was pissed that I was fucking around with a married man."
Mikey snorts. "He would be. You okay?"
Nate opens his eyes and looks at Mikey again, tracing the familiar set of his cheekbones and the way his hair always ends up messy after Nate's had his hands in it. "Yeah."
"We don't have to keep doing this."
Nate's looking closely enough that he can tell what it costs Mikey to say that.
"I moved to a Yankee state where I didn't know anyone, lived in a basement, and had my car stolen because I wanted to be in Gabe's band. I'm not going to let go of something I want just because it's uncomfortable."
Mikey swoops in and kisses him, hard. Nate kisses back, laughing.
"What was that for?"
"Sometimes," Mikey says, "I forget how much I love you."
*
The first day of writing in person with the rest of his band is weird, and Nate's all too happy to adjourn to Pete's for a party. Spencer's told him about other Nate and Bebe, but he still hasn't had a chance to meet them, and they don't know enough to be awkward around him. Everyone else does, though, and Nate escapes outside to put his feet in the pool.
Just about the time he's wishing he'd grabbed a fresh beer before he came outside, Spencer sits down next to him and hands him one.
"Thanks."
"Welcome." Spencer kicks his feet, stirring up waves in the pool.
Nate watches for the pattern, then kicks in a complementary one.
"How bad is it?"
Nate sighs. "Mikey doesn't want to talk about it. Victoria's acting like nothing's changed, Ryland keeps looking at me strangely, Alex is a little weird." Nate sips his beer. "Gabe's pissed at me. I don't know if he's mad I didn't tell him or if he disapproves."
"Mmm, could be. For all his partying, Gabe's kind of-"
"Conservative?"
"I was going to say vanilla." Spencer elbows Nate. "He'll get over it."
Nate nods. Spencer's probably right, and he cares more about what it's doing to Mikey than what it's doing to Gabe anyway.
They sip their beer in silence for a while.
Even from outside, they can hear when the tone of the party changes. Nate glances up, but can't see what made it change. He figures it out a few minutes later when Alicia comes out of the house and sits down next to him.
"Hey," he says. "How are you?"
She shrugs. "Hanging in there. How bout you?"
"Same."
Alicia adds her kicking to Nate and Spencer's, making chaotic waves on the surface of Pete's pool.
"Do you know what you're going to do?" Nate asks. He turns his head to look at her, and sees her shake her head.
"No. Mikey doesn't want to talk about it."
Nate sighs. "Not to me either."
Alicia nudges him in the side after a while. "Does one of us need to go rescue him from Gabe?"
Nate follows her gaze to the house, where Gabe and Mikey are talking, Mikey's back to the wall and Gabe in front of him. "I'll go." He shakes the better part of the water off his feet so he doesn't get it all over Pete and Ashlee's carpet.
"Hey," he says when he gets to Gabe and Mikey. "We're hanging out by the pool."
Mikey nods and slips toward him, away from Gabe.
"You coming?" Nate asks Gabe.
"Nah, gonna go see if I can get in some quality time with Bronx before the nanny makes him go to bed."
The space where he was sitting is still open, so Nate sits back down between Spencer and Alicia. Mikey sits on the other side of Alicia, cross-legged, without putting his feet in the water.
"It's nice out here," Alicia says. "Why didn't we buy a house with a pool?"
"We're from Jersey," Mikey says. "They're not standard issue for us."
"Don't look at me," Nate says when Alicia does just that. "I live in a condo complex with a pool."
Alicia keeps looking at him until he smiles sideways at her and says, "You can come use my pool anytime you want."
Alicia puts her arm around him. "You're the best boyfriend my husband could ever have."
*
Nate goes over to Mikey and Alicia's for dinner the next night.
"Strategy meeting time," Alicia says after they've eaten their sushi and are sitting around because no one wants to get up and serve dessert.
Mikey makes a face.
"You have to," Alicia says. "I'm taking shit for this, Nate will too if anyone figures out it's him, and you're going on tour again, which means interviews and publicity."
"Fuck that," Mikey says. "This is our private life. It's no one's business."
"Not anymore," Nate says. He shrugs when Mikey looks at him. "It's public now. I'll do an interview with you if you want."
"Christ," Mikey mutters. "Where did they even get that fucking picture? We haven't been clubbing in months."
"Maybe they didn't realize what they had, or they forgot. It doesn't matter." Nate puts his hand over Mikey's. "What are we going to do about it?"
"Not we." Mikey gets up and gathers plates together. "I'll do an interview or something. I want to keep you out of this shitstorm as long as possible." He bends over and presses his lips to Nate's in a brief kiss before he takes the plates to the kitchen.
"He's stubborn," Alicia says when Nate sighs.
"Yeah, I know." Nate leans back in his chair to look through to the kitchen at Mikey moving around. "You'll call me, right?" he asks low enough that Mikey won't be able to hear him. He'd rather Mikey called him, but, obviously, there are things Mikey doesn't tell him.
"If he goes off the rails? Yeah." Alicia leans around the table to look into the kitchen before she adds, "I know you and Mikey talked about it, but you can move in here, or we can find somewhere else for all three of us."
"Maybe someday." It's the same thing he told Mikey when he asked. "But not now. I like living alone."
Alicia fiddles with her glass. "As long as you know you can."
Mikey comes back with three bowls of green tea ice cream, and Alicia drops the subject.
Mikey walks Nate to the door later and they linger for a while, leaning against the wall and kissing.
"You don't have to do this alone," Nate says.
"I know. I don't want it to hurt you either."
"I'm tough, and I'm in a band formed by one of Gabe's drug-induced hallucinations. I can handle it."
"I really just want it to go away," Mikey whispers, eyes closed.
Nate hugs him close and says, "I love you," because he doesn't have anything else to offer to that.
*
Nate gets emails and texts from every member of his band, Pete, and Spencer directing him to an MTV article. It's Mikey's statement.
"I'm not cheating on anyone. I love my wife and my boyfriend," Way said in a short statement. "They know about each other and it works for us. Please respect our privacy."Nate's Twitter feed is full of people retweeting Mikey and Alicia's comments and links to the article:
In a follow-up call, Way declined to name the man in the now-infamous cell phone picture.
mikeyway I'm not cheating on anyone. Love you both. #polyamoryNate texts Mikey: I love you too.
aliciaway You can stop calling me a doormat now. #polyamory
*
Nate has dinner with Gabe a couple of days later.
"Here's what I don't get. You and Alicia are friends?"
Nate shrugs. "Yeah, kind of. We don't hang out or anything, but we both love Mikey. It's not really that complicated."
"How did I never know about it?" And that's probably the real reason they're having dinner.
"We never wanted to make a big deal out of it. Mikey didn't think it would ever become public."
"But you did." Trust Gabe to be smart enough to pick up on that.
"We're both in bands. We live in L.A. It wasn't going to stay secret forever."
"And you're still not talking about it," Gabe says.
Nate gets it, really. Gabe has known Mikey a lot longer than he's known Nate, and Gabe believes in loyalty. Nate's being loyal; it's just that his loyalty belongs to Mikey over Gabe.
"I'll tell you whatever you want to know," Nate says. "I'd tell the rest of the world too, but Mikey doesn't want me to."
"What the fuck? You're his boyfriend and he's not going to let you be that in public?"
Good to know Gabe's loyalty goes both ways.
"I think he's trying to protect me." Nate waves it away. "It doesn't matter. We're good."
"Are you?" And there's Gabe's deepest loyalty, checking in on him.
"We are. I don't want anything more complicated right now, and Mikey's happy. No one's getting hurt."
*
When Nate checks his phone at a break, he has a text from Mikey: Let's go out tonight.
"Seriously?" Nate says as soon as Mikey picks up his phone.
"Yeah." Nate can hear Mikey's smile. "I want to go clubbing."
"Isn't that what got us in trouble in the first place?" Nate doesn't really mean it, but he's willing to give Mikey an out if he wants it.
"I love you," Mikey says. "I'm not going to stop living our lives because of it."
Nate smiles and knows it's pretty goofy. "Awesome. Meet at your place?"
"Yours."
Nate grins even harder. His place means Mikey's spending the night, and that is sure to be a good time. "Can't wait."
(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-16 10:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-03-16 11:55 pm (UTC)