we'll all soon come to an end. [s/a]
TITLE: we'll all soon come to an end.
AUTHOR: inamorate [fght_ffyrdmns].
RATING: light R.
POV: third.
PAIRING: ryan ross/jarrod gorbel.
SUMMARY: two letters apart.
DISCLAIMER: i do not own either of these boys.
A/N: written because, at present time, i am obsessed with the honorary title and wanted some fic. based on 'snow day' by said band, which you can listen to under the cut. title taken from 'bridge and tunnel'. as a side note, this is probably the only fic in the world with jarrod in it. seriously.
The window fogs from my breath,
My face pressed up close, up close against.
Catching the snowfall under a beam of streetlight
And praying for accumulation all through the night.
These confrontations puncture the skin,
Reveal evidence that you’re easily broken,
You’re so easily broken.
Exposed and relentlessly bleeding from the cracks,
At that age where everything’s seemingly life or death.
Please let the snow swallow the streets whole,
Keep the bus from coming,
Let us stay at home
So we can avoid the daily drudgery,
The cruelty fueled from laughter that will echo in our sleep.
Seasons, weakening the hold,
The blades dulled from the frost that hints at snow.
Warming, the engine slowly turns, stuttering;
Awakened from the sounds of the shovels scraping concrete,
At that age where everything’s seemingly life or death.
Adrenaline fuels my fist, grinds my teeth through sleep.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
He has to turn his bedroom lights out to see into the night, erasing the reflection of his bedroom with a careless flick of his hand, and stumbling in the dark to settle into the uncomfortable chair by the window. He presses right up close, so he can see the outline of his face lit up by the orange glow of the street lamp, the clouds reflecting back in the same pastel shade. The snow is flying down with such force through the beam that he imagines it hitting the ground and digging tiny holes, tearing up the concrete and asphalt into a thousand tiny shreds, rocks and sand buried under the snow.
He sits up until he can’t keep his eyes open, because he’s afraid if he goes to sleep, if he isn’t watching the snow fall and bury the road, it will stop falling. It will stop falling, and the bus will come or the little car will be able to plow its way through the drifts, and there will be no snow day. No long day building forts he’s too old to be building, no long day with him, soaked wet through their running shoes and laughing.
The window sill doesn’t make a very comfortable pillow, all coated with flaking paint and dust, but he sleeps, eventually, pressed against the cold, always-shifting glass. The snow keeps falling, even without his watchful eyes to guide it to earth, and the road, the sidewalks, the low bushes and gardens disappear under a down blanket, perfectly white and sparkling when he wakes up. The sun paints it fresh gold, slate shadows curving around the drifts, and today is the best day of his life.
-
Ryan has a blossoming bruise across his neck when they meet up under the tree, but he just shrugs, laughs, pulls up his scarf, mumbles something so low it’s just a rumble, and he doesn’t ask him to repeat it.
He just reaches out to touch the darkening smudge, royal purple and grey, contrasted by the white of his skin, kisses the bruise.
“Everything’s fine,” Ryan whispers, pulling his head away, pulls his sleeves down over his hands.
Jarrod slips his fingers past Ryan’s, past the worn edges of his sleeves, stroking over smooth skin and old scars.
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
-
“I’m moving somewhere that it never snows.”
He flinches, twisting his numb fingers together and digging his heels into the snow.
“Well, what do you mean? I thought you were just moving to the next town, I thought. It snows there, of course it does.” He swallows, crushing a handful between his reddening palms, droplets snaking between his chapped fingers, clinging and shining in the winter sun, drilling wet holes in the snow under him. “The next town, right?”
“We’re moving to Nevada.” He looks over, and Ryan’s voice, it’s so fucking dead right now, and he’s just staring straight out over the snow, feet dangling over the edge of the porch. “Fucking Nevada, Jay.”
“Why the fuck would you move to Nevada? Where the fuck is Nevada?”
“The desert,” Ryan whispers, and a chill crawls up Jarrod’s spine. “I’ll never...I’ll be so far, Jay. So far.”
“You can’t,” he mumbles, watching the water drip off his index finger, drop. drop. drop. He thinks, I need you here, not in the fucking desert.
“I can’t not,” Ryan whispers again, because saying it too loud makes it real, and looks over, teeth sinking hard into his bottom lip. “I’m sorry.”
And he says it’s alright, because that’s what Ryan needs to hear, but it’s not alright, and it won’t be, it won’t ever be, but he says it...and when Ryan smiles like the world maybe isn’t ending, a slow quirk of his lips, and reaches over to twine his cold-blushed fingers between his, well. Maybe a lie isn’t the worst thing in the world.
-
“So, when the winter is over,” Ryan says, peeling his gloves off and throwing them on the vent. “When the winter’s over.”
“You’re going then,” he murmurs, picking clumps of wet snow out of his slicked-down hair, cold drops sliding down his back.
“I’m going then,” Ryan echoes, and slides up behind him, wrapping his arms around his waist and pressing his mouth against the nape of his neck. “Jesus you’re cold, Jay,” he whispers, kissing warmth around his neck and up into the dark strands of his hair, hands rubbing heat into each others fingers. And when they’re falling into the bed, all hands and eyes and lips and cold fingers, all he can say is ‘please don’t go' and try to take comfort in the familiar planes of Ryan’s skin when what he really means, what he really wants to say, is ‘I love you’.
It isn’t any consolation when Ryan’s eyes go dark, ‘I’m sorry’ planted firmly on his tongue, the taste of defeat bitter between their mouths.
What he really means to say is ‘I love you, too’.
-
New Year’s comes and goes without a hitch; they just get pissed as fuck locked up in Jarrod’s bedroom, his parents out at some tawdry adults-only party, and thank god for that. Their laughter echoes through the house, drowned out by whatever’s coming from the stereo, and later when the only sound left is harsh breathing, the music strains through the particles and swirls around the room, filling the empty spaces between inhale, exhale.
If it weren’t for the red X’s on the calendar counting down ‘til the beginning of March, this would be the best night of his life, lips tasting strongly of beer and cigarettes and fireworks going off again and again in his head, between their bodies, in the night sky.
When he hears his parents come in through the door, keys jangling, hushed intoxicated laughter through the floor, it’s three a.m. and he tightens his arm around Ryan’s waist, pressing deeper into the blankets and counting on blood alcohol levels to keep them across the hallway where they belong. Ryan moves, the satin slide of skin against skin sending chills up his back, and presses a kiss against Jarrod’s jaw.
“They won’t,” he whispers, voice harsh from singing laughing screaming and heavy with sleep. “They won’t know I’m here.”
“And they wouldn’t know if I was gone,” he says to the darkness on the ceiling, and Ryan smoothes a hand across his stomach and props himself up on his elbow.
“You can’t.”
“I could.”
“Where would you stay?”
“With you. We’re almost old enough to be on our own, we could...”
“Jay.”
“We could do it. I can’t fucking lose you.”
“You won’t. Don’t forget, and you’ll have me.”
“That isn’t good enough!” he hisses, voice rising perilously close to too-loud, and Ryan presses a finger to his lips and hushes him.
“Hey, shut the fuck up man,” Ryan hisses back.
“I’m...fuck you, Ryan, that isn’t good enough. I can’t live with letters and e-mails and long distance phone calls after...after this, after being able to...” he stretches his fingers out and catches Ryan’s jaw, pulling him in and kissing him. “Touch and kiss and fuck and feel and...it won’t be good enough, Ryan, you know that.”
He doesn’t expect Ryan to say anything, really, because no matter what, it would be a lie. So when he settles down against his chest without a word, he just stares at the ceiling and matches their breathing together, breathing in the word ‘close’, breathing in ‘here’ and ‘now’ and trying to forget about ‘gone’ and ‘later’.
Sleep comes too fast, like a thief through the window, sliding in on the beam of light painting the floor, and he’s never hated it more.
-
He’s just standing where the driveway meets the road, muddy slush washing around his shoes, watching the car drive away, chasing the U-Haul truck. People are shoveling the last specks of melting accumulation off their driveways and sidewalks, clearing way for the grass shoots and tulip bulbs under weak rays of blurry white sun, as if the world isn’t falling apart. As if he’s not standing here with soaking wet feet and soaking wet eyes, watching Ryan stare back through the wire-striped back window of the car, hand pressed against the glass.
As if, with the way his parents were watching, the way they could barely hug goodbye, the way he couldn’t memorize every last detail of his mouth before he left, that wasn’t enough to send everything spinning into apocalypse.
He stands there until the water soaks through into his skin, chilling his feet all the way down to the marrow, until his tears have crusted cold on his cheeks and the neighbours have stopped staring, have gone inside shaking their heads at him once again. He stands there until the car driving away is just a memory, the tire tracks in the slush melting in the afternoon light, the exhaust fume smell evaporated completely into the atmosphere.
He stands there until his mom comes out and holds his arm, pulling him back inside with offers of cookies and hot chocolate, as if he was twelve years old and he hadn’t just lost everything in one swift fucking moment. She’d never been the one to ask questions or pay attention, and she hadn’t even noticed he’d grown up, grown out, grown apart.
He tells her ‘no, thank you’ and settles for a cigarette and a bottle by the open window of his bedroom, instead.
-
The letter has been folded and re-folded, so it’s creased up, three horizontal and one vertical, dirt smudged around the outside edges. There’s a picture in the bottom of the envelope, printed off the computer, of Ryan standing outside his new school, laughing at something outside the frame. The letter doesn’t say much, really, but the ‘WISH YOU WERE HERE’ in angular script on the back of the picture, that’s everything.
He can’t stop touching it, as if he could just reach through the veil of the glossy paper into another world, and find Ryan’s face with his fingertips.
He digs through the shoe box under his bed and finds the last picture of the two of them, printed on Kodak paper in black and white, heads together, exaggerated pouts on their faces, drinks in hand. He uncaps the marker and flips it over, ‘DON’T FORGET’, and slips it into an envelope, closing it and stamping it and scrawling Ryan’s new address, somewhere called Summerlin, and he hates having to turn the Y in NY to a V. So close, yet so fucking far.
-
All he hears in his dreams is the abrasive sound of plastic shovels hitting hard against concrete, the soft sound of snow piling into drifts, the sharp echoes of ice cracking under boots, and he wakes up with a sore jaw. It’s winter again, and that means it’s been almost a year. A year of no-one-else and sparse communication, never enough. A year of summer.
A kid at school calls him faggot, and when he laughs in the kids face, he hits him square in the eye. Maybe ‘you wish, asshole’ wasn’t the most appropriate response, but it’s the only one he liked. He’s never been more thankful that this is the last year of the high school circus. He wants out. Out of school, out of the house, out of town.
And thing is, he isn’t a faggot, not in the general sense of the word. There’s just this one boy, and he lives in the desert, two letters and about a million miles away, where it never snows, where there’s a whole year of summer.
-
Three years disappear into the speeding, rushing darkness of time. He gets an apartment by himself, he goes out on Friday night, he works five, sometimes six days a week. He hasn’t forgotten, exactly, but. Sometimes it’s just too much to write a letter, to walk to the post office, to remember the address. And it isn’t like Ryan makes an effort, either. His silence is just as profound, Jarrod’s mailbox just as empty. Ryan, he has a new life there, new friends, new schools, new house. He doesn’t include ‘new boyfriend’ or ‘new girlfriend’ on the list, because that still maybe hurts a little.
Okay, a lot. But. He tries not to think about it. It isn’t like he’s been alone. He hasn’t dated anyone, exactly, but he hasn’t been alone, hasn’t been sleeping alone or drinking alone. That doesn’t stop it from tugging at his chest, though, when he thinks of someone else in Ryan’s bed. Holding his hand. Touching...
It just, doesn’t stop him from thinking about four winters ago on New Years Eve, when a boy he doesn’t know kisses him at midnight, and later when he can’t take him home, can’t fuck him, because all he can see is Ryan’s face rearranged onto everyone else in his silver, drunken haze. When all he can hear is ‘I promise’, and ‘I’m sorry’, instead of ‘I love you’.
Words that meant nothing, so they never said them, never knew they were true, until it was too late.
-
His legs are too long for the car now, and the seat is old and rusty, stuck forward so they’re crunched up under the dash, but at least it’s his now. He sits back and pushes play on the stereo, the CD player sleek and shiny in all the old dirt of the car, and ducks his head to find the ignition, the key in his hand etching lines into the plastic before fitting into the gap, teeth sliding into place.
He lifts his head to check that the road is clear, hands settling into a comfortable position on the wheel, CD whirring to track one, and with the dust filtering down through the weak yellow beams of sunlight, the auburn in his hair picked out by the light, the world hits pause. He’s shaking his head now, trying to clear his eyes, because he must be hallucinating, dreaming, still drunk from the weekend, something, anything. That tall…that man at the end of the driveway, that man in the hat and the blazer with his hands in the pockets of his tiny jeans, that isn’t who he thinks it is, but, he can’t move, pinned by the bright stare, those same fucking eyes.
When he walks to window, Jarrod rolls it down without even really telling his muscles to move, looking out and up at that same face, that same face from every dream he’s had for the past three years, still the same, bending down to peer in the window.
“I remembered,” Ryan whispers, lips curling up at the corners, voice darker under age, but the same, the same, settling at the base of his spine like smoke. He swallows and taps his fingers on the wheel, turning his head to stare out the windshield.
“Get in.”
-
“The tattoos,” Ryan says, reaching across the centre console to run his fingers over the inked lines on Jarrod’s forearm, the back of his hand. “I didn’t know. I like them.”
“Yeah, thanks. My parents want to kill me.”
“Same as always, then,” Ryan says, chuckling and sitting back in his seat, staring out of the windshield at the clouds skirting across the sky, bringing the Styrofoam coffee cup to his lips, narrowly avoiding singeing his hair with the ember of his cigarette.
Jarrod looks over at him, not the clear-eyed boy he remembers, but someone older, someone new. But, all the same, undeniably Ryan.
“Yeah,” he says, nodding his head and pulling his bottom lip into his mouth to keep from smiling. “Same as always.”
AUTHOR: inamorate [fght_ffyrdmns].
RATING: light R.
POV: third.
PAIRING: ryan ross/jarrod gorbel.
SUMMARY: two letters apart.
DISCLAIMER: i do not own either of these boys.
A/N: written because, at present time, i am obsessed with the honorary title and wanted some fic. based on 'snow day' by said band, which you can listen to under the cut. title taken from 'bridge and tunnel'. as a side note, this is probably the only fic in the world with jarrod in it. seriously.
The window fogs from my breath,
My face pressed up close, up close against.
Catching the snowfall under a beam of streetlight
And praying for accumulation all through the night.
These confrontations puncture the skin,
Reveal evidence that you’re easily broken,
You’re so easily broken.
Exposed and relentlessly bleeding from the cracks,
At that age where everything’s seemingly life or death.
Please let the snow swallow the streets whole,
Keep the bus from coming,
Let us stay at home
So we can avoid the daily drudgery,
The cruelty fueled from laughter that will echo in our sleep.
Seasons, weakening the hold,
The blades dulled from the frost that hints at snow.
Warming, the engine slowly turns, stuttering;
Awakened from the sounds of the shovels scraping concrete,
At that age where everything’s seemingly life or death.
Adrenaline fuels my fist, grinds my teeth through sleep.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
He has to turn his bedroom lights out to see into the night, erasing the reflection of his bedroom with a careless flick of his hand, and stumbling in the dark to settle into the uncomfortable chair by the window. He presses right up close, so he can see the outline of his face lit up by the orange glow of the street lamp, the clouds reflecting back in the same pastel shade. The snow is flying down with such force through the beam that he imagines it hitting the ground and digging tiny holes, tearing up the concrete and asphalt into a thousand tiny shreds, rocks and sand buried under the snow.
He sits up until he can’t keep his eyes open, because he’s afraid if he goes to sleep, if he isn’t watching the snow fall and bury the road, it will stop falling. It will stop falling, and the bus will come or the little car will be able to plow its way through the drifts, and there will be no snow day. No long day building forts he’s too old to be building, no long day with him, soaked wet through their running shoes and laughing.
The window sill doesn’t make a very comfortable pillow, all coated with flaking paint and dust, but he sleeps, eventually, pressed against the cold, always-shifting glass. The snow keeps falling, even without his watchful eyes to guide it to earth, and the road, the sidewalks, the low bushes and gardens disappear under a down blanket, perfectly white and sparkling when he wakes up. The sun paints it fresh gold, slate shadows curving around the drifts, and today is the best day of his life.
-
Ryan has a blossoming bruise across his neck when they meet up under the tree, but he just shrugs, laughs, pulls up his scarf, mumbles something so low it’s just a rumble, and he doesn’t ask him to repeat it.
He just reaches out to touch the darkening smudge, royal purple and grey, contrasted by the white of his skin, kisses the bruise.
“Everything’s fine,” Ryan whispers, pulling his head away, pulls his sleeves down over his hands.
Jarrod slips his fingers past Ryan’s, past the worn edges of his sleeves, stroking over smooth skin and old scars.
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
-
“I’m moving somewhere that it never snows.”
He flinches, twisting his numb fingers together and digging his heels into the snow.
“Well, what do you mean? I thought you were just moving to the next town, I thought. It snows there, of course it does.” He swallows, crushing a handful between his reddening palms, droplets snaking between his chapped fingers, clinging and shining in the winter sun, drilling wet holes in the snow under him. “The next town, right?”
“We’re moving to Nevada.” He looks over, and Ryan’s voice, it’s so fucking dead right now, and he’s just staring straight out over the snow, feet dangling over the edge of the porch. “Fucking Nevada, Jay.”
“Why the fuck would you move to Nevada? Where the fuck is Nevada?”
“The desert,” Ryan whispers, and a chill crawls up Jarrod’s spine. “I’ll never...I’ll be so far, Jay. So far.”
“You can’t,” he mumbles, watching the water drip off his index finger, drop. drop. drop. He thinks, I need you here, not in the fucking desert.
“I can’t not,” Ryan whispers again, because saying it too loud makes it real, and looks over, teeth sinking hard into his bottom lip. “I’m sorry.”
And he says it’s alright, because that’s what Ryan needs to hear, but it’s not alright, and it won’t be, it won’t ever be, but he says it...and when Ryan smiles like the world maybe isn’t ending, a slow quirk of his lips, and reaches over to twine his cold-blushed fingers between his, well. Maybe a lie isn’t the worst thing in the world.
-
“So, when the winter is over,” Ryan says, peeling his gloves off and throwing them on the vent. “When the winter’s over.”
“You’re going then,” he murmurs, picking clumps of wet snow out of his slicked-down hair, cold drops sliding down his back.
“I’m going then,” Ryan echoes, and slides up behind him, wrapping his arms around his waist and pressing his mouth against the nape of his neck. “Jesus you’re cold, Jay,” he whispers, kissing warmth around his neck and up into the dark strands of his hair, hands rubbing heat into each others fingers. And when they’re falling into the bed, all hands and eyes and lips and cold fingers, all he can say is ‘please don’t go' and try to take comfort in the familiar planes of Ryan’s skin when what he really means, what he really wants to say, is ‘I love you’.
It isn’t any consolation when Ryan’s eyes go dark, ‘I’m sorry’ planted firmly on his tongue, the taste of defeat bitter between their mouths.
What he really means to say is ‘I love you, too’.
-
New Year’s comes and goes without a hitch; they just get pissed as fuck locked up in Jarrod’s bedroom, his parents out at some tawdry adults-only party, and thank god for that. Their laughter echoes through the house, drowned out by whatever’s coming from the stereo, and later when the only sound left is harsh breathing, the music strains through the particles and swirls around the room, filling the empty spaces between inhale, exhale.
If it weren’t for the red X’s on the calendar counting down ‘til the beginning of March, this would be the best night of his life, lips tasting strongly of beer and cigarettes and fireworks going off again and again in his head, between their bodies, in the night sky.
When he hears his parents come in through the door, keys jangling, hushed intoxicated laughter through the floor, it’s three a.m. and he tightens his arm around Ryan’s waist, pressing deeper into the blankets and counting on blood alcohol levels to keep them across the hallway where they belong. Ryan moves, the satin slide of skin against skin sending chills up his back, and presses a kiss against Jarrod’s jaw.
“They won’t,” he whispers, voice harsh from singing laughing screaming and heavy with sleep. “They won’t know I’m here.”
“And they wouldn’t know if I was gone,” he says to the darkness on the ceiling, and Ryan smoothes a hand across his stomach and props himself up on his elbow.
“You can’t.”
“I could.”
“Where would you stay?”
“With you. We’re almost old enough to be on our own, we could...”
“Jay.”
“We could do it. I can’t fucking lose you.”
“You won’t. Don’t forget, and you’ll have me.”
“That isn’t good enough!” he hisses, voice rising perilously close to too-loud, and Ryan presses a finger to his lips and hushes him.
“Hey, shut the fuck up man,” Ryan hisses back.
“I’m...fuck you, Ryan, that isn’t good enough. I can’t live with letters and e-mails and long distance phone calls after...after this, after being able to...” he stretches his fingers out and catches Ryan’s jaw, pulling him in and kissing him. “Touch and kiss and fuck and feel and...it won’t be good enough, Ryan, you know that.”
He doesn’t expect Ryan to say anything, really, because no matter what, it would be a lie. So when he settles down against his chest without a word, he just stares at the ceiling and matches their breathing together, breathing in the word ‘close’, breathing in ‘here’ and ‘now’ and trying to forget about ‘gone’ and ‘later’.
Sleep comes too fast, like a thief through the window, sliding in on the beam of light painting the floor, and he’s never hated it more.
-
He’s just standing where the driveway meets the road, muddy slush washing around his shoes, watching the car drive away, chasing the U-Haul truck. People are shoveling the last specks of melting accumulation off their driveways and sidewalks, clearing way for the grass shoots and tulip bulbs under weak rays of blurry white sun, as if the world isn’t falling apart. As if he’s not standing here with soaking wet feet and soaking wet eyes, watching Ryan stare back through the wire-striped back window of the car, hand pressed against the glass.
As if, with the way his parents were watching, the way they could barely hug goodbye, the way he couldn’t memorize every last detail of his mouth before he left, that wasn’t enough to send everything spinning into apocalypse.
He stands there until the water soaks through into his skin, chilling his feet all the way down to the marrow, until his tears have crusted cold on his cheeks and the neighbours have stopped staring, have gone inside shaking their heads at him once again. He stands there until the car driving away is just a memory, the tire tracks in the slush melting in the afternoon light, the exhaust fume smell evaporated completely into the atmosphere.
He stands there until his mom comes out and holds his arm, pulling him back inside with offers of cookies and hot chocolate, as if he was twelve years old and he hadn’t just lost everything in one swift fucking moment. She’d never been the one to ask questions or pay attention, and she hadn’t even noticed he’d grown up, grown out, grown apart.
He tells her ‘no, thank you’ and settles for a cigarette and a bottle by the open window of his bedroom, instead.
-
The letter has been folded and re-folded, so it’s creased up, three horizontal and one vertical, dirt smudged around the outside edges. There’s a picture in the bottom of the envelope, printed off the computer, of Ryan standing outside his new school, laughing at something outside the frame. The letter doesn’t say much, really, but the ‘WISH YOU WERE HERE’ in angular script on the back of the picture, that’s everything.
He can’t stop touching it, as if he could just reach through the veil of the glossy paper into another world, and find Ryan’s face with his fingertips.
He digs through the shoe box under his bed and finds the last picture of the two of them, printed on Kodak paper in black and white, heads together, exaggerated pouts on their faces, drinks in hand. He uncaps the marker and flips it over, ‘DON’T FORGET’, and slips it into an envelope, closing it and stamping it and scrawling Ryan’s new address, somewhere called Summerlin, and he hates having to turn the Y in NY to a V. So close, yet so fucking far.
-
All he hears in his dreams is the abrasive sound of plastic shovels hitting hard against concrete, the soft sound of snow piling into drifts, the sharp echoes of ice cracking under boots, and he wakes up with a sore jaw. It’s winter again, and that means it’s been almost a year. A year of no-one-else and sparse communication, never enough. A year of summer.
A kid at school calls him faggot, and when he laughs in the kids face, he hits him square in the eye. Maybe ‘you wish, asshole’ wasn’t the most appropriate response, but it’s the only one he liked. He’s never been more thankful that this is the last year of the high school circus. He wants out. Out of school, out of the house, out of town.
And thing is, he isn’t a faggot, not in the general sense of the word. There’s just this one boy, and he lives in the desert, two letters and about a million miles away, where it never snows, where there’s a whole year of summer.
-
Three years disappear into the speeding, rushing darkness of time. He gets an apartment by himself, he goes out on Friday night, he works five, sometimes six days a week. He hasn’t forgotten, exactly, but. Sometimes it’s just too much to write a letter, to walk to the post office, to remember the address. And it isn’t like Ryan makes an effort, either. His silence is just as profound, Jarrod’s mailbox just as empty. Ryan, he has a new life there, new friends, new schools, new house. He doesn’t include ‘new boyfriend’ or ‘new girlfriend’ on the list, because that still maybe hurts a little.
Okay, a lot. But. He tries not to think about it. It isn’t like he’s been alone. He hasn’t dated anyone, exactly, but he hasn’t been alone, hasn’t been sleeping alone or drinking alone. That doesn’t stop it from tugging at his chest, though, when he thinks of someone else in Ryan’s bed. Holding his hand. Touching...
It just, doesn’t stop him from thinking about four winters ago on New Years Eve, when a boy he doesn’t know kisses him at midnight, and later when he can’t take him home, can’t fuck him, because all he can see is Ryan’s face rearranged onto everyone else in his silver, drunken haze. When all he can hear is ‘I promise’, and ‘I’m sorry’, instead of ‘I love you’.
Words that meant nothing, so they never said them, never knew they were true, until it was too late.
-
His legs are too long for the car now, and the seat is old and rusty, stuck forward so they’re crunched up under the dash, but at least it’s his now. He sits back and pushes play on the stereo, the CD player sleek and shiny in all the old dirt of the car, and ducks his head to find the ignition, the key in his hand etching lines into the plastic before fitting into the gap, teeth sliding into place.
He lifts his head to check that the road is clear, hands settling into a comfortable position on the wheel, CD whirring to track one, and with the dust filtering down through the weak yellow beams of sunlight, the auburn in his hair picked out by the light, the world hits pause. He’s shaking his head now, trying to clear his eyes, because he must be hallucinating, dreaming, still drunk from the weekend, something, anything. That tall…that man at the end of the driveway, that man in the hat and the blazer with his hands in the pockets of his tiny jeans, that isn’t who he thinks it is, but, he can’t move, pinned by the bright stare, those same fucking eyes.
When he walks to window, Jarrod rolls it down without even really telling his muscles to move, looking out and up at that same face, that same face from every dream he’s had for the past three years, still the same, bending down to peer in the window.
“I remembered,” Ryan whispers, lips curling up at the corners, voice darker under age, but the same, the same, settling at the base of his spine like smoke. He swallows and taps his fingers on the wheel, turning his head to stare out the windshield.
“Get in.”
-
“The tattoos,” Ryan says, reaching across the centre console to run his fingers over the inked lines on Jarrod’s forearm, the back of his hand. “I didn’t know. I like them.”
“Yeah, thanks. My parents want to kill me.”
“Same as always, then,” Ryan says, chuckling and sitting back in his seat, staring out of the windshield at the clouds skirting across the sky, bringing the Styrofoam coffee cup to his lips, narrowly avoiding singeing his hair with the ember of his cigarette.
Jarrod looks over at him, not the clear-eyed boy he remembers, but someone older, someone new. But, all the same, undeniably Ryan.
“Yeah,” he says, nodding his head and pulling his bottom lip into his mouth to keep from smiling. “Same as always.”