featuring: @rickymoretti 🗣location: casa de moretti 🏠time/date: wednesday, ~6:30pm ⏰summary: RICKY SAID HE’D GRILL FREDDIE A CHEESE. FREDDIE TOLD RICKY HE’D MAKE HIM WATCH SING. THEY’RE GONNA PRETEND MEETING STRANGERS ON THE INTERNET IN REAL LIFE FOR THE FIRST TIME ISN’T KINDA SCARY. 🐨
Freddie was, like, nervous. REALLY nervous. Not right now, just in general! Nervous about the whole Wink thing! Nervous about everything that had happened in the past with his disaster of a past relationship. Nervous about really moving past that because he knew that he could be… a bit much. Or a lot much.
He was too loud, too excited, too into things when he got excited. And that could scare people away. He didn’t want to keep scaring people away or turning them off. And then, like, Ricky happened, and Ricky seemed stupidly fitting in a lot of ways, and maybe that did make him nervous, because it just made everything seem like it was that much more likely to totally EXPLODE, you know?
Like… he’d read The Outsiders in school. He’d watched the movie — the extended edition, the one where you could practically see Rob Lowe’s ding-dong in the shower scene — and he knew that nothing gold could ever stay. So, like, was Ricky too perfect? Was Freddie just overthinking things?
Let’s be real. Freddie was overthinking things.
“SO, I shouldn’t get in a car with you, and I should also keep my cow-shaped mail box far the hell away from your vehicle? I spent my hard-earned moolah on that, you know.” And then he, naturally, chuckled at his own pun. Because of who he was as a person.
Ricky was really freaking cute. That was just kind of the thought that kept zipping around in his brain as his eyes followed him through the kitchen, watching as he got everything set up to put the grilled cheeses into motion. Every time Ricky’s eyes caught Freddie’s on his own, he had to look away.
Because, like. An embarrassment. Clearly not as cool as he thought he was. The Paulie Bleeker of datehang partners.
He picked up an old metallic Pokéball with a gold-plated Togepi on it — he was almostpositive (actually, scratch the “almost,” he just kNEW) that he’d collected almost all of these from Burger King when he was a kid. “Do you have all of these?” Did his voice just squeak? Jesus God.
The ball nearly dropped right back down on the shelf — clattered, nearly — when he heard Ricky tell him that he’d been thinking about him. THINKING! ABOUT! HIM! “It would be an honor,” Freddie declared, hand to his heart, finally taking the plunge of moving between the divider that separated the living room from the kitchen and deciding that his next plan of action would be to investigate all the bits and bops that were covering Ricky’s refrigerator.
“So, like…” he rocked back on his heels for a second, pushing a few letter magnets together until he’d spelled out the name FR3DD1E in multi-colors and peeking back over at Ricky, “why’d you join the whole… dating app game? You seem too cool for that school.”
Ricky did not think he was cool, for the record.
He always preferred to stand out over fit in. His mom always used to drop that cheesy line about dancing to the beat of your own drum. Ricky would rather set the other drum on fire and then dance in circles on the ashes, violently fist pumping the whole time.
The word cool made him roll his eyes nine times out of ten. Freddie, however, was AWESOME, which was, like, next level cool and therefore a zillion times better.
See, Freddie laughed at his own hilarious puns, something that made Ricky’s heart pound ridiculously hard in his chest and Freddie didn’t think he was stupid for holding onto his childhood. The question about his precious Togepi startled him in such a good way that he nearly forgot to flip the grilled cheese when it was time.
“ALL OF THEM, YEAH!” He cleared his throat, suddenly wondering if the yelling might eventually drive this poor guy crazy. Initial excitement sometimes squeaked by his dates but it wouldn’t take long for him to smash into a road block of cynicism. The last thing he wanted to do was scare off someone as nice as Freddie. “I get more and more impressive, I know.”
Making grilled cheese was simple enough but Ricky really was struggling with focusing when he could feel Freddie’s eyes on him from time to time and there was that added layer of terror that came with somebody new being in your personal space. It was going well so far but you could never tell what might be a crazy dealbreaker.
WHAT IF THAT SEA WORLD MAGNET WAS HIGHLY OFFENSIVE? HE JUST COUDN’T GET RID OF IT, OKAY. HIS GRANDMA GAVE IT TO HIM. AND HIS GRANDMA WAS DEAD. DEAD! WHAT WAS HE SUPPOSED TO DO WITH IT NOW? HOLD A SEANCE VIA OUIJA BOARD AND TELL HER THAT SEA WORLD IS PROBLEMATIC?
He breathed in and out deeply, yanked out of his overdramatic inner monologue by Freddie’s most direct question since they’d met. For a second, all he could see was Freddie’s face and the letters on his fridge and he wanted to say that this was what he was looking for when he signed up but, much like so many of his auditions, he fucking choked.
“Uh, you know… just, like, thought it couldn’t hurt?” he shrugged his shoulders and prodded at the sandwich in the pan with the spatula. “I don’t have a lot of luck with dating, it’s sorta all over the place, or people don’t like me, or you know, a whole lotta craziness but… I like new people! So even if it’s not, like, the next big love of my life, at least it’s fun.”
dededos
tangentwithtanner
romaincrisis
areudirty
andulkaphoto