Thursday
“Fell down some stairs.”
He said it with a smirk and a shrug and goddamn it, he was mocking me. He knew I’d know he was, knew I’d get the Fight Club reference. He jumped into the pool then, obscuring my view. Getting away from me.
So I didn’t ask again. At least, I didn‘t ask him. I did ask Spencer. Fuck privacy, I wanted to know. Spencer just shook his head at me.
“Brendon,” he sighed, “Ryan’ll tell you if he wants to.”
“He’s got marks on his back the length of the Great Wall, man, something’s wrong.”
The look Spencer gave me was heavy as he left my car and walked up to his front door. It meant something, I knew it did, but I didn’t know what. It gave me a sick feeling and I tried to push it from my mind.
And I succeeded, at least for awhile. For days. For weeks. For months. Until tonight when I wake up to someone pounding on my door. That someone is Ryan. Ryan soaked all the way through from a rare Vegas thunderstorm. Ryan panting and sobbing and collapsing onto the ratty carpet in the dark hall as soon as I can get the door open to yell at whoever it is.
“You didn’t answer your phone.”
It’s all he offers up before he starts shaking so hard his teeth are chattering. Not why he’s here. Not how he got past the apartment doorman. Not how of course I didn’t answer my phone since it’s the middle of the night and I sleep through the ringing most times.
I’m half-dragging, half-carrying him inside, struggling with him because of his violent tremors. And yeah he doesn’t weigh much less than me, but I can lift him up usually. Once I get the chain back in its place on the door, I’m helping him up and trying to kind of carry him into my room because this just doesn’t seem like something that should happen on my couch. It’s more important than that.
For the first twenty minutes, he just cries, and I’m as wet as he is soon because I’m holding him. And finally, finally, his gasping for breath is dry and his shaking has subsided. Aside from the occasional shiver, he’s still. Still and clutching so hard at me I know it should hurt. But it doesn’t, and I hope he’s not hurting with how hard I’m holding him. He loosens his grip and moves away.
Then I get my first good look at his face since he came in and I want to go right back to how we were.
I also want to run and never look back. I want to run away from his problems and away from him. But that’s not an option. It’s never an option with Ryan, even if the way he looks right now is beyond startling.
What’s left of the eyeliner he’d worn earlier that day for fun is smeared down his cheeks and for a minute I think that he’s put more on his left eye. But no, that’s not eyeliner or eye shadow or anything resembling cosmetics. It’s a black eye. Or the beginning of one with his eyebrow swelled slightly and his bright brown eye sticking out in the purple like white does on black.
My stomach is twisting in the way it does before you throw up everything you’ve ever eaten, but that’s not it. God, I wish it was it. There’s an angry bruise running from his cheekbone to his jaw opposite his black eye. From what I can see where his v-neck shirt is sagging with rain water, his sharp collarbone has a bruise forming, too.
And I’ve got a feeling that’s making me want to run away still, making me at least want to run to the toilet and heave. A feeling and I’m pretty sure I’d be accurate in saying that there were marks where I couldn’t see them, like those ones I saw on him months ago.
I’m trying not to shake; I need to be strong for him, right? He’s just staring at me, eyes wide with something I can’t place.
“Ryan?” I finally manage. He looks away, sighs, and looks back.
“Your dad?” I venture. He won’t meet my eye again. Almost imperceptibly, he nods. Almost.
The sick feeling is being replaced with something hot and burning. It takes me a minute to recognize it as rage because I don’t think I’ve ever been this mad. Maybe when my parents kicked me out. Maybe. It’d take second place to this, though.
I must make an unconscious move to get up, find his most likely drunken father, and fucking kill the bastard, because Ryan’s fighting to pull me back down to the bed. He’s stronger than he seems and I’m sitting again, though doing so is killing me.
“No,” he says.
“Why the hell not, Ryan?” I yell, and he flinches and I regret it. Lowering my voice to a furious whisper, I continue, “He did this to you. He fucking did this to you.”
He shrinks away from me a little but he’s still holding my arm. “It’s not like it’s the first time,” he mumbles.
I freeze. I’d had my suspicions for ages. I knew his dad was a sorry excuse for a father. I knew he was an alcoholic. I knew he didn’t really like Ryan. I’d seen the bruises before, and the scrapes, but he’d always had a plausible explanation. And I believed him because I wanted to. Needed to.
But now, now with him in front of me, a mess of tears, black eyeliner, bruises, and hurt, I can’t deny it. Some part of me still wants to, needs to. The part of me that wants to run and never see him again. The rest of me wins over, but I’m still a little torn.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He gestures to me. “Because of this. How I knew you’d react,” he says simply.
“How in the hell else am I supposed to react?” I snap. He flinches again but holds his ground. I apologize quietly, some of the anger ebbing.
He sighs, letting go of my sleeve. “Look, just, there’s nothing you can do. It’s the first time it’s happened in a long time anyway. The first time since I told him I dropped out of school.”
It clicks then. He quit college to spend more time on the band about five months ago. That night we all went swimming in the community pool after practice. That’s when I saw the scratches and bruises all over his torso.
“You fell down some stairs.” I say it weakly, feeling almost like I should be laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.
“Kind of. He pushed me when I was on the landing. I tripped on that ugly blue throw rug and fell backwards down our stairs.”
And, oh, there’s that sick feeling again. Stronger now and I can taste the bile.
“He actually felt bad about it, I think,” Ryan muses, bitter laughter in his voice. “He hadn’t laid a finger on me for awhile actually. It’d mostly been just yelling for four or five years since Mom left. I don’t think he meant for me to end up on the first floor. He was probably just trying to get me on the ground so he could kick me around a little.”
And, God, Ryan’s too calm about this. This is too normal for him, way too normal.
I swallow back the bile. “For how long?”
“Since I was twelve. He overheard me telling Mom that I thought a boy in my homeroom was cute one night. She left that weekend for her birthday to go visit my aunt in Reno. As soon as we were alone, Dad backed me into a corner, called me a fag, and backhanded me so hard I blacked out.”
Way. Too. Calm.
“It was pretty intermittent until Mom moved out a year and a half later. He got drunk the night he found her note on the kitchen table. He came back from the bars a little after midnight, yelling that it was my fault she’d walked out. I was too skinny, too girly, too gay.
“I stayed the rest of the night at Spencer’s. When his mom found me in the guest bedroom the next morning, more black and blue than a prize fighter, I said it’d been a bully at school. Spencer backed me and I never told him everything.
“I never told anyone. Until now.”
“Until now,” I repeat. He nods. “What set him off tonight?”
“The makeup,” he says heavily. “He was supposed to be gone until tomorrow on that business trip, so I didn’t wash it off when I got home. He found me reading in the living room, saw the fucking makeup, railed about it, and them took a swing. Or twenty.
“I gave him a bloody nose, though, trying to get away. I elbowed him and ran for it. It’s the first time I’ve ever made him bleed. Hell, it’s a night for firsts, isn’t it? First time I hurt him. First time I told anyone. First time he hit me when he was sober,” Ryan says, ticking them off on his long fingers.
He laughing that bitter laugh again and it’s starting to sound a little scary, a little unhinged.
“We have to tell someone,” I say. “The police or something. He can’t do this to you anymore.”
Ryan shakes his head. “There’s no point now. We’re leaving for the tour in a couple weeks anyway. I can hold out for a little longer. I’ve already dealt with it for six years, what’s sixteen days?”
“You’re staying here.”
“What?” He’s confused, unable to understand my meaning.
“Until we leave, you’re staying here, instead of at home,” I say, talking before I think but it doesn’t matter. “Please,” I add.
Uncertainly, he nods. “If you’re okay with it, yeah, I guess I can.”
“You can’t go back home. Besides, it’ll be fun, right? We can stay up all night beating video games and playing music. It’ll be like a sixteen day long sleepover. Or something,” I say. I’m winning him over. I can tell by his slight smirk.
“Fine. I’ll run home and get my stuff while Dad’s at work tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow, well, it’s after midnight, right? Yeah, so today, today’s a Thursday and I don’t work. I can go with you if you want.”
His smirk is turning into a nod and, at last, a smile, and I’m glad. He still has a pretty smile, even through the bruises and blotched makeup. He laughs then, a real laugh.
“What?” I’m the one confused now.
“Your shirt.”
And sure enough, yeah, there’s a weird-shaped smudge of eyeliner all over the shoulder of my white shirt. I laugh, too. It’s not that funny, really, but it doesn’t matter. We both need something that just resembles funny right now and him accidentally ruining my shirt is enough.
When the slightly hysterical laughter dies down, I get serious again with, “Are you sure there’s no bones broken?”
“Yeah, I’d know.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t break any when you fell down the stairs.”
“Yeah, I don’t break bones that easily. My doctor said a couple years ago it was because I drank so much milk when I was a kid. The calcium, you know.”
Yeah, the sick feeling’s back. He didn’t say why that subject was breached in his doctor’s office, but I’m sure I know why and he’s sure I know, too.
I pull him into my tiny bathroom and get him changed and cleaned up as best I can. He protests taking the bed, but I shush him. He’s asleep in minutes, which is strange for him I know. Then I remember that he ran more than a mile in the rain to get here and it’s not so strange.
After triple-checking my door locks, even though Ryan’s dad has no idea where I live, I go back to my room. I close the door and quietly slip into bed beside him. I don’t know why I do it, I just know I have to. I sneak an arm around him because I know I’ll end up holding him in my sleep anyway. He makes a sound in the back of his throat and snuggles into me. I get my other arm around him carefully and find it hard to believe that Ryan isn’t easily breakable.
All I can think of are the bruises on his ribs and the lingering scars on his back. His face is buried in one of my pillows and he still looks like an angel. With the lights off and the streetlights just barely making their way through my shades, you can barely see his bruises. I somehow manage to hold him tighter and wonder how far underneath his skin those bruises go.
Then I wonder if he’ll ever let me help him heal them.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Thanks for reading! Doubly thanks if you comment!
Tuesday [1]
Wednesday [2]
Monday [3]
Also, in case you're confused, the only ways all seven of these are (and will be) related is that
they're Ryan/Brendon and they have a Day of the Week Title. This one occurs before any of the others, obviously.
edit: I'm not actually suggesting that Ryan's dad beat him. I just felt the need to add this. It is fiction. All of this is
fiction. I understand this and, if you're reading this, I hope that you sure as hell understand. I also really hope
that the guy's never been abused, in any way, ever in his life. Just clarifying here.
He said it with a smirk and a shrug and goddamn it, he was mocking me. He knew I’d know he was, knew I’d get the Fight Club reference. He jumped into the pool then, obscuring my view. Getting away from me.
So I didn’t ask again. At least, I didn‘t ask him. I did ask Spencer. Fuck privacy, I wanted to know. Spencer just shook his head at me.
“Brendon,” he sighed, “Ryan’ll tell you if he wants to.”
“He’s got marks on his back the length of the Great Wall, man, something’s wrong.”
The look Spencer gave me was heavy as he left my car and walked up to his front door. It meant something, I knew it did, but I didn’t know what. It gave me a sick feeling and I tried to push it from my mind.
And I succeeded, at least for awhile. For days. For weeks. For months. Until tonight when I wake up to someone pounding on my door. That someone is Ryan. Ryan soaked all the way through from a rare Vegas thunderstorm. Ryan panting and sobbing and collapsing onto the ratty carpet in the dark hall as soon as I can get the door open to yell at whoever it is.
“You didn’t answer your phone.”
It’s all he offers up before he starts shaking so hard his teeth are chattering. Not why he’s here. Not how he got past the apartment doorman. Not how of course I didn’t answer my phone since it’s the middle of the night and I sleep through the ringing most times.
I’m half-dragging, half-carrying him inside, struggling with him because of his violent tremors. And yeah he doesn’t weigh much less than me, but I can lift him up usually. Once I get the chain back in its place on the door, I’m helping him up and trying to kind of carry him into my room because this just doesn’t seem like something that should happen on my couch. It’s more important than that.
For the first twenty minutes, he just cries, and I’m as wet as he is soon because I’m holding him. And finally, finally, his gasping for breath is dry and his shaking has subsided. Aside from the occasional shiver, he’s still. Still and clutching so hard at me I know it should hurt. But it doesn’t, and I hope he’s not hurting with how hard I’m holding him. He loosens his grip and moves away.
Then I get my first good look at his face since he came in and I want to go right back to how we were.
I also want to run and never look back. I want to run away from his problems and away from him. But that’s not an option. It’s never an option with Ryan, even if the way he looks right now is beyond startling.
What’s left of the eyeliner he’d worn earlier that day for fun is smeared down his cheeks and for a minute I think that he’s put more on his left eye. But no, that’s not eyeliner or eye shadow or anything resembling cosmetics. It’s a black eye. Or the beginning of one with his eyebrow swelled slightly and his bright brown eye sticking out in the purple like white does on black.
My stomach is twisting in the way it does before you throw up everything you’ve ever eaten, but that’s not it. God, I wish it was it. There’s an angry bruise running from his cheekbone to his jaw opposite his black eye. From what I can see where his v-neck shirt is sagging with rain water, his sharp collarbone has a bruise forming, too.
And I’ve got a feeling that’s making me want to run away still, making me at least want to run to the toilet and heave. A feeling and I’m pretty sure I’d be accurate in saying that there were marks where I couldn’t see them, like those ones I saw on him months ago.
I’m trying not to shake; I need to be strong for him, right? He’s just staring at me, eyes wide with something I can’t place.
“Ryan?” I finally manage. He looks away, sighs, and looks back.
“Your dad?” I venture. He won’t meet my eye again. Almost imperceptibly, he nods. Almost.
The sick feeling is being replaced with something hot and burning. It takes me a minute to recognize it as rage because I don’t think I’ve ever been this mad. Maybe when my parents kicked me out. Maybe. It’d take second place to this, though.
I must make an unconscious move to get up, find his most likely drunken father, and fucking kill the bastard, because Ryan’s fighting to pull me back down to the bed. He’s stronger than he seems and I’m sitting again, though doing so is killing me.
“No,” he says.
“Why the hell not, Ryan?” I yell, and he flinches and I regret it. Lowering my voice to a furious whisper, I continue, “He did this to you. He fucking did this to you.”
He shrinks away from me a little but he’s still holding my arm. “It’s not like it’s the first time,” he mumbles.
I freeze. I’d had my suspicions for ages. I knew his dad was a sorry excuse for a father. I knew he was an alcoholic. I knew he didn’t really like Ryan. I’d seen the bruises before, and the scrapes, but he’d always had a plausible explanation. And I believed him because I wanted to. Needed to.
But now, now with him in front of me, a mess of tears, black eyeliner, bruises, and hurt, I can’t deny it. Some part of me still wants to, needs to. The part of me that wants to run and never see him again. The rest of me wins over, but I’m still a little torn.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He gestures to me. “Because of this. How I knew you’d react,” he says simply.
“How in the hell else am I supposed to react?” I snap. He flinches again but holds his ground. I apologize quietly, some of the anger ebbing.
He sighs, letting go of my sleeve. “Look, just, there’s nothing you can do. It’s the first time it’s happened in a long time anyway. The first time since I told him I dropped out of school.”
It clicks then. He quit college to spend more time on the band about five months ago. That night we all went swimming in the community pool after practice. That’s when I saw the scratches and bruises all over his torso.
“You fell down some stairs.” I say it weakly, feeling almost like I should be laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.
“Kind of. He pushed me when I was on the landing. I tripped on that ugly blue throw rug and fell backwards down our stairs.”
And, oh, there’s that sick feeling again. Stronger now and I can taste the bile.
“He actually felt bad about it, I think,” Ryan muses, bitter laughter in his voice. “He hadn’t laid a finger on me for awhile actually. It’d mostly been just yelling for four or five years since Mom left. I don’t think he meant for me to end up on the first floor. He was probably just trying to get me on the ground so he could kick me around a little.”
And, God, Ryan’s too calm about this. This is too normal for him, way too normal.
I swallow back the bile. “For how long?”
“Since I was twelve. He overheard me telling Mom that I thought a boy in my homeroom was cute one night. She left that weekend for her birthday to go visit my aunt in Reno. As soon as we were alone, Dad backed me into a corner, called me a fag, and backhanded me so hard I blacked out.”
Way. Too. Calm.
“It was pretty intermittent until Mom moved out a year and a half later. He got drunk the night he found her note on the kitchen table. He came back from the bars a little after midnight, yelling that it was my fault she’d walked out. I was too skinny, too girly, too gay.
“I stayed the rest of the night at Spencer’s. When his mom found me in the guest bedroom the next morning, more black and blue than a prize fighter, I said it’d been a bully at school. Spencer backed me and I never told him everything.
“I never told anyone. Until now.”
“Until now,” I repeat. He nods. “What set him off tonight?”
“The makeup,” he says heavily. “He was supposed to be gone until tomorrow on that business trip, so I didn’t wash it off when I got home. He found me reading in the living room, saw the fucking makeup, railed about it, and them took a swing. Or twenty.
“I gave him a bloody nose, though, trying to get away. I elbowed him and ran for it. It’s the first time I’ve ever made him bleed. Hell, it’s a night for firsts, isn’t it? First time I hurt him. First time I told anyone. First time he hit me when he was sober,” Ryan says, ticking them off on his long fingers.
He laughing that bitter laugh again and it’s starting to sound a little scary, a little unhinged.
“We have to tell someone,” I say. “The police or something. He can’t do this to you anymore.”
Ryan shakes his head. “There’s no point now. We’re leaving for the tour in a couple weeks anyway. I can hold out for a little longer. I’ve already dealt with it for six years, what’s sixteen days?”
“You’re staying here.”
“What?” He’s confused, unable to understand my meaning.
“Until we leave, you’re staying here, instead of at home,” I say, talking before I think but it doesn’t matter. “Please,” I add.
Uncertainly, he nods. “If you’re okay with it, yeah, I guess I can.”
“You can’t go back home. Besides, it’ll be fun, right? We can stay up all night beating video games and playing music. It’ll be like a sixteen day long sleepover. Or something,” I say. I’m winning him over. I can tell by his slight smirk.
“Fine. I’ll run home and get my stuff while Dad’s at work tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow, well, it’s after midnight, right? Yeah, so today, today’s a Thursday and I don’t work. I can go with you if you want.”
His smirk is turning into a nod and, at last, a smile, and I’m glad. He still has a pretty smile, even through the bruises and blotched makeup. He laughs then, a real laugh.
“What?” I’m the one confused now.
“Your shirt.”
And sure enough, yeah, there’s a weird-shaped smudge of eyeliner all over the shoulder of my white shirt. I laugh, too. It’s not that funny, really, but it doesn’t matter. We both need something that just resembles funny right now and him accidentally ruining my shirt is enough.
When the slightly hysterical laughter dies down, I get serious again with, “Are you sure there’s no bones broken?”
“Yeah, I’d know.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t break any when you fell down the stairs.”
“Yeah, I don’t break bones that easily. My doctor said a couple years ago it was because I drank so much milk when I was a kid. The calcium, you know.”
Yeah, the sick feeling’s back. He didn’t say why that subject was breached in his doctor’s office, but I’m sure I know why and he’s sure I know, too.
I pull him into my tiny bathroom and get him changed and cleaned up as best I can. He protests taking the bed, but I shush him. He’s asleep in minutes, which is strange for him I know. Then I remember that he ran more than a mile in the rain to get here and it’s not so strange.
After triple-checking my door locks, even though Ryan’s dad has no idea where I live, I go back to my room. I close the door and quietly slip into bed beside him. I don’t know why I do it, I just know I have to. I sneak an arm around him because I know I’ll end up holding him in my sleep anyway. He makes a sound in the back of his throat and snuggles into me. I get my other arm around him carefully and find it hard to believe that Ryan isn’t easily breakable.
All I can think of are the bruises on his ribs and the lingering scars on his back. His face is buried in one of my pillows and he still looks like an angel. With the lights off and the streetlights just barely making their way through my shades, you can barely see his bruises. I somehow manage to hold him tighter and wonder how far underneath his skin those bruises go.
Then I wonder if he’ll ever let me help him heal them.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Thanks for reading! Doubly thanks if you comment!
Tuesday [1]
Wednesday [2]
Monday [3]
Also, in case you're confused, the only ways all seven of these are (and will be) related is that
they're Ryan/Brendon and they have a Day of the Week Title. This one occurs before any of the others, obviously.
edit: I'm not actually suggesting that Ryan's dad beat him. I just felt the need to add this. It is fiction. All of this is
fiction. I understand this and, if you're reading this, I hope that you sure as hell understand. I also really hope
that the guy's never been abused, in any way, ever in his life. Just clarifying here.