Beautiful Loser
Title: Beautiful Loser
Author: familybizness
Word Count: 2729
Summary: Ryan's not much for group therapy. These people aren't anything like him.
Author's Note: OKAY! Here's a new HeartVerse character for you. Ryan goes on to become a pretty permanent fixture in the Winchesters' lives, but this is how they first encounter him. I hope you like him, because I do.
Warnings: This is a sexual assault support group, so they're gonna talk about it some, but it's not graphic. Also, Ryan swears a lot.
Lydia comes to group.
“Michael says you don’t talk,” she said the last time she saw him.
He scuffed his foot on her carpet. “I listen.”
“You need to participate, Ryan.”
None of this is about what Ryan needs.
Ryan needs to be at home, curled up under all of his blankets, not out here where the lights are too bright and the voices are like sandpaper. Fuck you, Lydia.
“Where do you like to sit?” she asks him.
He hates being asked what he likes. “Whatever.”
She picks out two seats in the middle of the room. She knows he needs to be near the door. She’s fucking with him. Fuck you, Lydia.
Ryan takes his seat and zips his hoodie up to his chin. This hoodie used to fit. He used to have muscle from tumbling and basketball. He used to be someone who walked into a room and smiled at the people in it and said hello. Now he pulls the hood down low over his face and hugs his knees to his chest, heels up on the chair, and stares at them all.
This group is all men, and some of them are definitely plants because this just hasn’t happened to eleven men in Sonoma County, it can’t have.
Ryan is the youngest.
Ryan is twenty years old, and he’s eating, and as far as they know he isn’t using, so they shouldn’t be able to force him to be here.
So fuck you, Lydia.
***
He must have told her what happened, but he doesn’t remember, and he’s glad he doesn’t, because he only remembers telling once and the memory is enough to curl him up in the corner of his closet with the lights off and the blanket over his head, shaking and gagging and hating, hating, hating.
He didn’t tell Phoebe, not even when she cried and threatened to break up with him, not even when she actually broke up with him, not even when she called him and said if he didn’t cut this shit out she’d call an ambulance, not even when she called an ambulance.
He didn’t tell the doctors in the emergency room, or the one later who asked him why he’d stopped eating.
He didn’t tell his parents when they yelled at him for dropping out of school, or when they told him if he wasn’t going to get an education he’d have to move out.
But he must have told Lydia, because she found him this group, and this group isn’t for eating disorders.
Ryan doesn’t have an eating disorder.
***
The men in the room are mostly in their thirties and forties, fat, balding, wearing brown sweatpants in a community center basement. They look like their lives have been ruined. They cry and blow their noses on their sleeves, or they shout every single thing they say. Ryan hates them.
They pass around cookies. Ryan doesn’t take one, because fuck cookies, because this whole thing makes him feel like throwing up. The tall guy in the corner, the one who comes with Christa, doesn’t take any either. He talks in whispers and Christa rubs his back, and he lets her.
Ryan sort of wonders if she’d try to rub his back, if she were his doctor, or if she’d have enough sense not to (it’s not hard. Don’t assume he wants hands on him).
(No.)
Michael bothers them and makes them tell stories nobody wants to hear.
Christa’s tall guy is the only one, other than Ryan, who never gives any details.
***
He stopped eating because he ran out of food. It’s not fucking complicated.
He ran out of food because it had been two months and nothing was getting better. Going to the store was impossible. Going to class was impossible Going to the kitchen was nearly impossible.
They weighed him in the hospital. He’d lost twenty pounds and his girlfriend, and he felt sort of surprised, but not very interested, when they told him he’d lost his place at UCLA.
It was a month later that he met with the disciplinary board, that he told someone what had happened for the first and only time he remembers, but by then they weren’t very interested in him anymore.
***
“Who had a good week?” Michael slaps his knees, all good cheer.
Ryan hates him.
Lydia nudges him a little, like, talk, but fuck off, Lydia, he didn’t have a good week, what does she want him to say?
“Jim?” Michael tries.
Jim is forty, balding, brown sweatpants, sweaty palms (shit shit shit). “I got a cat.”
“That’s awesome, Jim!” Michael cheers, like they’re buddies. “What’s his name?”
“Her. Red.”
“Anybody else? Good things this week? Sam?”
The tall guy - Sam - hugs his chest. “ My brother got a job.”
Cats. Someone else’s employment. This is what counts as good news in these people’s ruined little lives.
Ryan really fucking hates group.
“Ryan?” Michael cues in on something. He probably kicked his foot or something. He’s seen Michael do this with the others, start from an eyebrow twitch and crack them wide open, reduce them to tears about abusive relationships and promiscuity and all the things they’ve done.
It won’t work with him.
He hasn’t done anything.
He doesn’t have anything to talk about except one night, one fucked up night, one drink and one blackout and one frat house basement.
He’s not going to tell them.
It’s not their fucking business.
He’s quiet for a moment. Lydia hisses talk at him and he feels four goddamn years old.
“Ryan’s not gonna talk,” someone says.
“Let’s give Ryan a chance.”
“I’m not gonna talk,” he grumbles.
“Tell us one thing you did this week,” Michael tries.
He shakes his head, too many times, can’t stop. No no no no.
“Ryan,” Lydia says all patiently, and puts a hand in the center of his back, shit shit shit, everyone’s looking at him, and his vision’s tunneling, he’s moving forwards and backwards and way too fast and everything spins around, don’t pass out don’t pass out oh my god -
“We built a treehouse,” a wheezing voice says
It’s like cold water splashed in his face. The room comes back into focus. He’s breathing too fast and Lydia’s hand is still on him and he jerks away from her hard.
They’re not looking at him now. They’re looking at Sam, standing up, towering over tiny Christa in her chair, and he’s talking about some treehouse his brother built for some kid, and Ryan’s not listening because all the attention is on Sam and he can breathe again.
Christa glances at him - just a glance, her eyes flicking over him and away almost before it has time to bother him.
Almost.
***
Ryan would like to say he doesn’t remember anything that happened that night (it would be easier to say that) but he does.
It would be better not to.
It would be better not to have that panicky feeling every time he came close to falling asleep. He takes NyQuil to sleep now, double doses, Ambien and Valium when he can get them. Lydia doesn’t know about it.
It would be better not to wake up startled and hyperventilating and shoving at blankets that somehow manage to feel like bodies draped over him (no, no, no).
The truth is that he blacked out only for a while, that he woke up at the worst possible time and didn’t understand what was happening to him until he did.
***
There’s a break after about forty minutes. Jim and a couple of other guys are in tears and the cookies come back out, because cookies are the answer to everyone’s problems. Ryan sits in his chair and hates.
“Why don’t you go talk to Richard?” Lydia suggests. Richard is probably the only person in this group who says less than Ryan - he never even said his name, his therapist said it, I’m Kayla and this is Richard like his unwillingness to talk was a foregone conclusion, and Ryan hated her for it and also wished people would fucking conclude that he wasn’t going to talk and treat him like furniture, and it was all so contradictory and he hates this place. He and Richard don’t have anything in common. Ryan has nothing in common with any of these men, thanks, and this business of being shoved together by well-meaning therapists thinking they’re going to solve each other’s problems is…
Look, it’s not better that this has happened to other people.
Is that supposed to make him fucking feel better about the world?
None of this ever makes him feel anything but shitty.
***
Checking the mail was the most exciting part of Ryan’s first month at college. He got letters from his sister. Care packages from Phoebe. Money from his parents. Notes about freshman mixers (he went) and talent shows (he auditioned) and intramural basketball teams (he joined).
He made friends with the guys in his dorm. They went out late at night for beer and pancakes. Ryan brought his old Asia cassette, badgered the others until they put it on, rolled down the window and howled at the moon.
In his French class, he and a partner acted out a scene from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Ryan wore a dress and shouted sacre bleu! four or five times, and grinned when everyone laughed.
He can’t remember now where these things, the smiles and the howls and the joining in, came from. They don’t feel like him. That was someone else.
***
He ducks away from Lydia and into the bathroom.
Maybe he’ll climb out the window (he always thinks this, he never does it) and run home and lock the doors and not pick up the phone and just so what if he starves and never sees anyone again.
He never goes, sometimes because Michael is in there (“great group today, huh Ryan?” no, no it isn’t, it never is and who the hell wants to talk to their therapist in the fucking bathroom, is he insane?) or sometimes because the window’s a good seven feet off the ground and Ryan’s a hair over five and a half feet and not a good jumper, intramural basketball notwithstanding.
And sometimes just staying where he is and - and taking it is easier than trying to run away.
Maybe he’ll take triple Ambien tonight.
There’s a groaning wheeze that makes him wonder if the plumbing’s backed up, but then he sees Sam, curled in a corner and pressing his temple into the wall, holy shit covered in some sort of rash, rocking and shaking.
“Shit - Sam?”
“Hhh …”
“Holy shit. Holy shit.” Sam has asthma, but this doesn’t look like any asthma Ryan’s ever seen. “I’ll - I’ll get help, I’ll get Christa - where’s Christa?”
He’s grey and confused, looks up at Ryan like’s he’s not sure who he is. “Dean?”
God, his voice is fucked. He’s shaking like he hasn’t eaten in a week, Ryan thinks, but then he notices Sam’s hand keeps coming back to his pocket (the pocket where his inhaler lives, he’s seen Christa fish it out a good thousand times) and he can’t get in there, he’s shaking too hard or he’s too blown out on whatever this is. “Sam, you need your inhaler?”
“Ep - Epi…” he gasps so hard but it’s nothing, it’s no air. Holy shit, holy shit, this guy’s dying at Ryan’s feet and oh fuck Ryan is going to have to help him (going to have to touch him).
He goes to his knees.
He reaches into Sam’s pocket, pulls out this weird tube thing that’s covered with medical writing and isn’t the inhaler.
He feels the heat of Sam in his space and breathes in hard, lightheaded with oxygen, so much air it crowds out everything else.
There’s a needle under the cap of the thing, and Sam’s hand wraps around Ryan’s. He squeezes. “Leg. Hard.”
“Wh-what?”
Sam guides Ryan’s hand to his thigh. “Count ten…”
His head droops. His hand falls away.
Holy shit.
***
Of course he knew all the shit about not leaving your drink unattended, but for some reason - because he was a guy, because he knew the kids at the party, because this shit doesn’t happen in real life, he didn’t think it would matter.
It fucking mattered.
***
Later, Sam will tell Ryan that he did it just right. That he kept one hand on Sam’s arm and the other firm on the needle, stuck him forcefully, held it for a count of ten, let go and checked Sam’s pulse and pupils as if he’d done this before. As if he had any idea what he was doing.
Ryan doesn’t remember any of that.
The next thing he’s aware of is sitting in the far corner with his knees hugged to his chin, Sam talking quietly and not saying Ryan’s name and not asking any questions. Just talking. Like he knows what he’s doing.
“Damn cookies,” he says, mildly. There’s a little shake in his voice. “Allergic.”
“To cookies?”
“Dairy.” Sam takes a deep breath. “My own fault. Shouldn’t have hugged anyone. Crumbs on their hands…”
“You didn’t even eat one?”
He laughs a little. “If I ate one you’d be calling an ambulance.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.” Sam rubs his hands over his thighs. “Do you mind if we don’t go back out there yet? I mean, if - if you don’t want to stay, you can send Christa, but I shouldn’t be alone…”
“I can stay.”
“We can do our own group in here, if you want.”
Ryan claps his hands together. “Sam! Have you had a good week? What’s made this week awesome?”
He’s mostly just being a jerk, but Sam laughs. “You’re fucking hilarious, kid, why don’t you talk?”
“I hate people.”
“Oh. That sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“I love people.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
There’s a silence that stretches and fills the room and somehow doesn’t overpower them. Ryan lets himself relax just a little, unballs and listens to the mellowing lull of Sam’s wheeze.
Michael’s really adamant about the no one’s experience is inherently worse than anyone else’s thing, but Ryan knows enough of Sam’s story - kidnapped, captive for a year - to wonder how he’s even functional, much less loves people.
Sam is just better at this than he is.
That fucking sucks. He’s just not really sure who it sucks for the most.
“Why do you come to group?” Sam says. He’s pushed upright now, away from the wall, one hand on his chest like he’s feeling the range of his breaths. “If you hate people.”
“Lydia makes me.”
“She makes you?” Sam frowns.
“I think she thinks it’ll help. You know. If there are…people like me.”
“And you don’t think so.”
“They’re not like me.” He fists a hand in his hair.
“Okay, hey.”
“They’re not.”
“I’m not saying…”
“It was one night. They drugged me and tied me up in a fucking basement and I left in the morning. It’s not the fucking sum of my life.”
“Ryan,” Sam whispers.
“Shit.”
“Ryan.”
“I’m sorry I’m sorry oh fuck.” Sam was fucking hurt for a year, what the hell is wrong with him, how could he throw that one night shit in Sam’s face, and who the fuck is he kidding because this is the sum of his life; college is gone and Phoebe is gone and his family is gone and this is all Ryan is anymore and this is all he will ever be shit shit shit -
“Ryan.”
He looks up. Sam’s about two feet away from him, not touching.
“It’s not the sum of my life either,” he says.
***
Lydia gives him hell for hiding out in the bathroom for forty-five minutes. She says things about being an active participant in his own recovery. Ryan nods along and doesn’t pay that much attention because he has other things on his mind than trauma and recovery. There’s this weird forward momentum. Something’s better than it was yesterday.
He wakes up gasping with nightmares again that night, but before that, Lydia drops him off at his apartment and he digs out his old Asia tape and puts it on the stereo and turns it up loud.
Author: familybizness
Word Count: 2729
Summary: Ryan's not much for group therapy. These people aren't anything like him.
Author's Note: OKAY! Here's a new HeartVerse character for you. Ryan goes on to become a pretty permanent fixture in the Winchesters' lives, but this is how they first encounter him. I hope you like him, because I do.
Warnings: This is a sexual assault support group, so they're gonna talk about it some, but it's not graphic. Also, Ryan swears a lot.
Lydia comes to group.
“Michael says you don’t talk,” she said the last time she saw him.
He scuffed his foot on her carpet. “I listen.”
“You need to participate, Ryan.”
None of this is about what Ryan needs.
Ryan needs to be at home, curled up under all of his blankets, not out here where the lights are too bright and the voices are like sandpaper. Fuck you, Lydia.
“Where do you like to sit?” she asks him.
He hates being asked what he likes. “Whatever.”
She picks out two seats in the middle of the room. She knows he needs to be near the door. She’s fucking with him. Fuck you, Lydia.
Ryan takes his seat and zips his hoodie up to his chin. This hoodie used to fit. He used to have muscle from tumbling and basketball. He used to be someone who walked into a room and smiled at the people in it and said hello. Now he pulls the hood down low over his face and hugs his knees to his chest, heels up on the chair, and stares at them all.
This group is all men, and some of them are definitely plants because this just hasn’t happened to eleven men in Sonoma County, it can’t have.
Ryan is the youngest.
Ryan is twenty years old, and he’s eating, and as far as they know he isn’t using, so they shouldn’t be able to force him to be here.
So fuck you, Lydia.
***
He must have told her what happened, but he doesn’t remember, and he’s glad he doesn’t, because he only remembers telling once and the memory is enough to curl him up in the corner of his closet with the lights off and the blanket over his head, shaking and gagging and hating, hating, hating.
He didn’t tell Phoebe, not even when she cried and threatened to break up with him, not even when she actually broke up with him, not even when she called him and said if he didn’t cut this shit out she’d call an ambulance, not even when she called an ambulance.
He didn’t tell the doctors in the emergency room, or the one later who asked him why he’d stopped eating.
He didn’t tell his parents when they yelled at him for dropping out of school, or when they told him if he wasn’t going to get an education he’d have to move out.
But he must have told Lydia, because she found him this group, and this group isn’t for eating disorders.
Ryan doesn’t have an eating disorder.
***
The men in the room are mostly in their thirties and forties, fat, balding, wearing brown sweatpants in a community center basement. They look like their lives have been ruined. They cry and blow their noses on their sleeves, or they shout every single thing they say. Ryan hates them.
They pass around cookies. Ryan doesn’t take one, because fuck cookies, because this whole thing makes him feel like throwing up. The tall guy in the corner, the one who comes with Christa, doesn’t take any either. He talks in whispers and Christa rubs his back, and he lets her.
Ryan sort of wonders if she’d try to rub his back, if she were his doctor, or if she’d have enough sense not to (it’s not hard. Don’t assume he wants hands on him).
(No.)
Michael bothers them and makes them tell stories nobody wants to hear.
Christa’s tall guy is the only one, other than Ryan, who never gives any details.
***
He stopped eating because he ran out of food. It’s not fucking complicated.
He ran out of food because it had been two months and nothing was getting better. Going to the store was impossible. Going to class was impossible Going to the kitchen was nearly impossible.
They weighed him in the hospital. He’d lost twenty pounds and his girlfriend, and he felt sort of surprised, but not very interested, when they told him he’d lost his place at UCLA.
It was a month later that he met with the disciplinary board, that he told someone what had happened for the first and only time he remembers, but by then they weren’t very interested in him anymore.
***
“Who had a good week?” Michael slaps his knees, all good cheer.
Ryan hates him.
Lydia nudges him a little, like, talk, but fuck off, Lydia, he didn’t have a good week, what does she want him to say?
“Jim?” Michael tries.
Jim is forty, balding, brown sweatpants, sweaty palms (shit shit shit). “I got a cat.”
“That’s awesome, Jim!” Michael cheers, like they’re buddies. “What’s his name?”
“Her. Red.”
“Anybody else? Good things this week? Sam?”
The tall guy - Sam - hugs his chest. “ My brother got a job.”
Cats. Someone else’s employment. This is what counts as good news in these people’s ruined little lives.
Ryan really fucking hates group.
“Ryan?” Michael cues in on something. He probably kicked his foot or something. He’s seen Michael do this with the others, start from an eyebrow twitch and crack them wide open, reduce them to tears about abusive relationships and promiscuity and all the things they’ve done.
It won’t work with him.
He hasn’t done anything.
He doesn’t have anything to talk about except one night, one fucked up night, one drink and one blackout and one frat house basement.
He’s not going to tell them.
It’s not their fucking business.
He’s quiet for a moment. Lydia hisses talk at him and he feels four goddamn years old.
“Ryan’s not gonna talk,” someone says.
“Let’s give Ryan a chance.”
“I’m not gonna talk,” he grumbles.
“Tell us one thing you did this week,” Michael tries.
He shakes his head, too many times, can’t stop. No no no no.
“Ryan,” Lydia says all patiently, and puts a hand in the center of his back, shit shit shit, everyone’s looking at him, and his vision’s tunneling, he’s moving forwards and backwards and way too fast and everything spins around, don’t pass out don’t pass out oh my god -
“We built a treehouse,” a wheezing voice says
It’s like cold water splashed in his face. The room comes back into focus. He’s breathing too fast and Lydia’s hand is still on him and he jerks away from her hard.
They’re not looking at him now. They’re looking at Sam, standing up, towering over tiny Christa in her chair, and he’s talking about some treehouse his brother built for some kid, and Ryan’s not listening because all the attention is on Sam and he can breathe again.
Christa glances at him - just a glance, her eyes flicking over him and away almost before it has time to bother him.
Almost.
***
Ryan would like to say he doesn’t remember anything that happened that night (it would be easier to say that) but he does.
It would be better not to.
It would be better not to have that panicky feeling every time he came close to falling asleep. He takes NyQuil to sleep now, double doses, Ambien and Valium when he can get them. Lydia doesn’t know about it.
It would be better not to wake up startled and hyperventilating and shoving at blankets that somehow manage to feel like bodies draped over him (no, no, no).
The truth is that he blacked out only for a while, that he woke up at the worst possible time and didn’t understand what was happening to him until he did.
***
There’s a break after about forty minutes. Jim and a couple of other guys are in tears and the cookies come back out, because cookies are the answer to everyone’s problems. Ryan sits in his chair and hates.
“Why don’t you go talk to Richard?” Lydia suggests. Richard is probably the only person in this group who says less than Ryan - he never even said his name, his therapist said it, I’m Kayla and this is Richard like his unwillingness to talk was a foregone conclusion, and Ryan hated her for it and also wished people would fucking conclude that he wasn’t going to talk and treat him like furniture, and it was all so contradictory and he hates this place. He and Richard don’t have anything in common. Ryan has nothing in common with any of these men, thanks, and this business of being shoved together by well-meaning therapists thinking they’re going to solve each other’s problems is…
Look, it’s not better that this has happened to other people.
Is that supposed to make him fucking feel better about the world?
None of this ever makes him feel anything but shitty.
***
Checking the mail was the most exciting part of Ryan’s first month at college. He got letters from his sister. Care packages from Phoebe. Money from his parents. Notes about freshman mixers (he went) and talent shows (he auditioned) and intramural basketball teams (he joined).
He made friends with the guys in his dorm. They went out late at night for beer and pancakes. Ryan brought his old Asia cassette, badgered the others until they put it on, rolled down the window and howled at the moon.
In his French class, he and a partner acted out a scene from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Ryan wore a dress and shouted sacre bleu! four or five times, and grinned when everyone laughed.
He can’t remember now where these things, the smiles and the howls and the joining in, came from. They don’t feel like him. That was someone else.
***
He ducks away from Lydia and into the bathroom.
Maybe he’ll climb out the window (he always thinks this, he never does it) and run home and lock the doors and not pick up the phone and just so what if he starves and never sees anyone again.
He never goes, sometimes because Michael is in there (“great group today, huh Ryan?” no, no it isn’t, it never is and who the hell wants to talk to their therapist in the fucking bathroom, is he insane?) or sometimes because the window’s a good seven feet off the ground and Ryan’s a hair over five and a half feet and not a good jumper, intramural basketball notwithstanding.
And sometimes just staying where he is and - and taking it is easier than trying to run away.
Maybe he’ll take triple Ambien tonight.
There’s a groaning wheeze that makes him wonder if the plumbing’s backed up, but then he sees Sam, curled in a corner and pressing his temple into the wall, holy shit covered in some sort of rash, rocking and shaking.
“Shit - Sam?”
“Hhh …”
“Holy shit. Holy shit.” Sam has asthma, but this doesn’t look like any asthma Ryan’s ever seen. “I’ll - I’ll get help, I’ll get Christa - where’s Christa?”
He’s grey and confused, looks up at Ryan like’s he’s not sure who he is. “Dean?”
God, his voice is fucked. He’s shaking like he hasn’t eaten in a week, Ryan thinks, but then he notices Sam’s hand keeps coming back to his pocket (the pocket where his inhaler lives, he’s seen Christa fish it out a good thousand times) and he can’t get in there, he’s shaking too hard or he’s too blown out on whatever this is. “Sam, you need your inhaler?”
“Ep - Epi…” he gasps so hard but it’s nothing, it’s no air. Holy shit, holy shit, this guy’s dying at Ryan’s feet and oh fuck Ryan is going to have to help him (going to have to touch him).
He goes to his knees.
He reaches into Sam’s pocket, pulls out this weird tube thing that’s covered with medical writing and isn’t the inhaler.
He feels the heat of Sam in his space and breathes in hard, lightheaded with oxygen, so much air it crowds out everything else.
There’s a needle under the cap of the thing, and Sam’s hand wraps around Ryan’s. He squeezes. “Leg. Hard.”
“Wh-what?”
Sam guides Ryan’s hand to his thigh. “Count ten…”
His head droops. His hand falls away.
Holy shit.
***
Of course he knew all the shit about not leaving your drink unattended, but for some reason - because he was a guy, because he knew the kids at the party, because this shit doesn’t happen in real life, he didn’t think it would matter.
It fucking mattered.
***
Later, Sam will tell Ryan that he did it just right. That he kept one hand on Sam’s arm and the other firm on the needle, stuck him forcefully, held it for a count of ten, let go and checked Sam’s pulse and pupils as if he’d done this before. As if he had any idea what he was doing.
Ryan doesn’t remember any of that.
The next thing he’s aware of is sitting in the far corner with his knees hugged to his chin, Sam talking quietly and not saying Ryan’s name and not asking any questions. Just talking. Like he knows what he’s doing.
“Damn cookies,” he says, mildly. There’s a little shake in his voice. “Allergic.”
“To cookies?”
“Dairy.” Sam takes a deep breath. “My own fault. Shouldn’t have hugged anyone. Crumbs on their hands…”
“You didn’t even eat one?”
He laughs a little. “If I ate one you’d be calling an ambulance.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.” Sam rubs his hands over his thighs. “Do you mind if we don’t go back out there yet? I mean, if - if you don’t want to stay, you can send Christa, but I shouldn’t be alone…”
“I can stay.”
“We can do our own group in here, if you want.”
Ryan claps his hands together. “Sam! Have you had a good week? What’s made this week awesome?”
He’s mostly just being a jerk, but Sam laughs. “You’re fucking hilarious, kid, why don’t you talk?”
“I hate people.”
“Oh. That sucks.”
“Yeah.”
“I love people.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
There’s a silence that stretches and fills the room and somehow doesn’t overpower them. Ryan lets himself relax just a little, unballs and listens to the mellowing lull of Sam’s wheeze.
Michael’s really adamant about the no one’s experience is inherently worse than anyone else’s thing, but Ryan knows enough of Sam’s story - kidnapped, captive for a year - to wonder how he’s even functional, much less loves people.
Sam is just better at this than he is.
That fucking sucks. He’s just not really sure who it sucks for the most.
“Why do you come to group?” Sam says. He’s pushed upright now, away from the wall, one hand on his chest like he’s feeling the range of his breaths. “If you hate people.”
“Lydia makes me.”
“She makes you?” Sam frowns.
“I think she thinks it’ll help. You know. If there are…people like me.”
“And you don’t think so.”
“They’re not like me.” He fists a hand in his hair.
“Okay, hey.”
“They’re not.”
“I’m not saying…”
“It was one night. They drugged me and tied me up in a fucking basement and I left in the morning. It’s not the fucking sum of my life.”
“Ryan,” Sam whispers.
“Shit.”
“Ryan.”
“I’m sorry I’m sorry oh fuck.” Sam was fucking hurt for a year, what the hell is wrong with him, how could he throw that one night shit in Sam’s face, and who the fuck is he kidding because this is the sum of his life; college is gone and Phoebe is gone and his family is gone and this is all Ryan is anymore and this is all he will ever be shit shit shit -
“Ryan.”
He looks up. Sam’s about two feet away from him, not touching.
“It’s not the sum of my life either,” he says.
***
Lydia gives him hell for hiding out in the bathroom for forty-five minutes. She says things about being an active participant in his own recovery. Ryan nods along and doesn’t pay that much attention because he has other things on his mind than trauma and recovery. There’s this weird forward momentum. Something’s better than it was yesterday.
He wakes up gasping with nightmares again that night, but before that, Lydia drops him off at his apartment and he digs out his old Asia tape and puts it on the stereo and turns it up loud.