let's call this the quiet city [1/1]
TITLE: Let's Call This The Quiet City.
AUTHOR: therecordskipsx
RATING: PG-13-ish...so that means you aren't legally allowed to read this if you aren't 13 or over or have a parent with you, which would be weird. Sorry, kiddos.
POV: Third-ish.
PAIRING: Ryan/Brendon. Why do you ask me this question, still?
SUMMARY: "It’s not like he couldn’t have seen it coming. Miles away, really, thumping ungracefully towards him along the ground, dragging its left leg or something, damaged and obvious. A glaring neon sign, a puddle of blood snaking under a locked door, overheard snippets of conversation. Something or anything or nothing, but he should have seen it coming."
DISCLAIMER: This probably didn't happen just a while ago, but hey, I can dream, and I do.
A/N: Uhm, this is possibly set in the time after they stopped touring, right before the porno!cabin, and uhm, it may or may not be factually inaccurate, but that's okay. It's long, 5000+ words. Enjoy, if you will! Title/cut text: Thursday <3
It’s not like he couldn’t have seen it coming. Miles away, really, thumping ungracefully towards him along the ground, dragging its left leg or something, damaged and obvious. A glaring neon sign, a puddle of blood snaking under a locked door, overheard snippets of conversation. Something or anything or nothing, but he should have seen it coming.
Especially, especially it should have been obvious, because he doesn’t think its normal for things that you are feeling to sneak up on you; usually you know about them, deny them, repress them. They don’t just stab you in the eye one morning when you pick up the phone or when you go to get groceries. That’s not how this is supposed to work. Right? Right.
It’s supposed to fester, or something, supposed to grow and multiply like germs, and you’re supposed to stick a band-aid over a bullet hole and tell everyone that everything is fine, until you’ve got gangrene and you finally die, or come close to it, and you have to tell everyone and get it amputated. That’s what’s supposed to happen. You’re not supposed to get caught in a drive-by.
Great, he thinks. I’m thinking of this, of everything, of love, as a drive-by shooting, a random, mindless, idiotic act of violence. And then he thinks, no, okay, I see where I’m coming from with that, I really do. See, this is how it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to think of it before it tackles you to the ground and slits your throat. Yeah.
And he hears the voice on the other end of the phone, tinny and distant, softened by wires, saying something. Hey, earth to self, wake up, pay attention, he thinks.
“Hey, hey Ry, are you there? Did you hang up on me?”
Shit, yeah, I’m here, he thinks. But thank God he can’t hear inside your head, so you need to actually answer, you idiot.
“Oh, uh, yeah. I’m here.”
The voice on the other end laughs.
“Get out of your head and get dressed, man. I’m coming over.”
Fuck. No. Don’t ever come near me again. But he says,
“Oh, okay, see you in a bit,” in a way that he hopes isn’t totally distracted, and the voice laughs again.
He doesn’t think of it as being a part of the person, not the way it sounds over the phone. That’s why it’s making his stomach churn. Why he can’t really breathe.
“Yeah, see you.”
Click. The buzz and purr of a dead line. He puts the receiver down.
----------
He doesn’t get dressed, just sort of sits there, all dead and limp on the couch, staring through the T.V., and he almost forgets what he’s waiting for, so the knock on the door makes him leap out of his skin, leaves him plastered to the ceiling like pizza dough, if only in his head. He gets up and walks to the door, praying for the UPS man. For a serial killer. For anyone else.
Because it’s been, what, months, maybe a year, of saying all the right things, and really believing them. Making up elaborate excuses, lies, fairy tales; saying all the right things in all the wrong tones to every journalist and raised eyebrow he’s come across. And it hits him, kind of all of a sudden, right across the face so he almost falls: denial. It spells itself in his brain, a big word, six letters. D-E-N-I-A-L.
He opens the door. He thinks, oh fuck, and the world kind of crumbles under his bare feet. Yeah, he thinks, I really am screwed, aren’t I? He thinks of earlier, of drive-by shootings and infections, and he kind of gets it. Maybe the whole thing about denial is that you don’t know you’re doing it, until someone else accidentally rips off the band-aid and you bleed all over the couch.
“Hi,” he says, staring over the voice’s shoulder, out into the wavering heat.
“Hi. Are you actually going to let me in? Or am I going to stand here, staring at you in your underwear?”
And that shouldn’t make him blush, but it does.
“Uh...come in, no, I’m just,” totally in love with you, or something, “not feeling like myself.”
“I got that, yeah. Thanks.”
And Brendon comes in behind him, shuts the door, sealing out the heat, and locking in the cold, artificial air pumping out of the vents. Locked in, he thinks, kind of vaguely. I’m stuck in here, now, with this, with him, now, and I want to run screaming into the street and let my feet burn and blister on the asphalt, anything, anything else but this.
“Are you sick, or high, or something?” Brendon says, dropping into the couch and curling his legs up under him, a smile bending the corners of his mouth like a used staple. “Because you’re being really fucking weird.”
“No,” he says, to the air, to Brendon, and mostly to himself. “I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh, fine, laying on the couch in your underwear when it’s like an ice box in here, watching infomercials. Just fine.”
“Yep,” he says, wishing he had pockets he could stick his hands into, because he’s fidgety when he’s nervous, and shoving his hands in his boxers is probably not the best idea.
He goes into the kitchen, feet sticking on the linoleum, and yanks open the fridge, pulling out a water bottle.
“Drink?” he says, over his shoulder, into the living room.
“Water?” Brendon says, and Ryan hadn’t realized it, but Brendon’s a stealthy bitch, he’s snuck up on him, he’s way closer than he thought, and he jumps, nearly closing the fridge door on his hand.
“Yeah,” he says, pulling it back open, rescuing his fingers from the rubber and metal jaws of death, and grabs a second bottle. “Glass?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
And they sit down at the kitchen table, across from each other, unscrewing the water bottles, and his fingers burn, a little, from the friction. This is, he thinks, really fucking awkward.
“So I came over to see if you wanted to do anything,” Brendon takes a sip of his water, and Ryan watches his throat convulse. “But it seems like your day is already pretty full.” Ryan rolls his eyes, taps his hand skittishly against the table, licking a drop of water off his finger.
“Yeah, totally thrilling,” he mumbles, but actually, today has been more exciting, in a totally bad way, than much of anything that’s gone on in a while, since he came home.
“I can see that.”
“Mm.”
Cue the silence now, Mr. Director; please cue the fidgeting and nervous chugging of an entire water bottle, goose bumps creeping up arms, the air thick enough to taste, like stale crackers and burnt plastic. Cue that, and watch it crush me to death, okay, Sir? Okay, excellent, thank you.
“How’s the girlfriend?” Brendon says suddenly, and Ryan feels like he’s been punched in the gut.
“Oh, uh...good, yeah.”
“Alright,” Brendon says, shifting in his chair. “Good to hear.”
“Yeah.”
You could say something intelligent any time now, they both think to themselves; like, break this ice that shouldn’t even be here. Ryan says,
“I don’t think it’s going to last,” which seems to take Brendon completely by surprise, because as far as he, as far as anyone knew, everything was going along swimmingly, perfect, she was a ‘nice girl’.
“Why’s that?” Brendon says, spinning the bottle cap on the table, anxious.
“I just...” think I’m totally falling for you, “I don’t think we’re...”
“Right? Meant for each other?” Brendon supplies, interested in the way the bottle cap flips over when he pushes the edge.
“Something like that,” Ryan says, interested in the way Brendon’s hands are flipping the bottle cap, and then the way his own hands are tangled on the table. “I think I need...” he clears his throat, “something...I’m not getting.” You.
“Uh-huh,”
“You have no idea what I’m talking about.”
“Nope, sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
And it’s not, but well, it’s not like he was expecting this to be easy, since he’s only been thinking about it for about half an hour, really thinking about it. Not letting it lurk in the back of his mind; that’s not thinking. That’s denial.
So he says,
“I think I need to talk to you,” and Brendon says,
“Okay,” and puts his elbows on the table, and that’s not really the answer Ryan wanted. “Talk.”
“I uh, was thinking this morning.”
“Yes, on the phone. Do you remember anything I said to you?”
“Not really, no. Sorry.”
“It’s alright. Now what were you saying?” Love me, please, please, Ryan thinks, and make this easy.
“Oh, um, right. I was thinking, after I picked up the phone, that I kind of…” Like you. Maybe. Just say it, he thinks, spill the beans, and then sweep them up and make coffee, or casserole, depending what kind of beans they are, you know?
“You kind of...?”
“Kind of, well,”
“If you don’t want to tell me whatever this is…” Brendon says, spreading his hands in front of him, and Ryan watches his mouth move, his lips shaping the words.
He leans his body across the table, suddenly, tipping his empty water bottle and sending it clattering to the floor. He grabs the front of Brendon’s shirt, the way they do in those cheesy movies, and pulls him forward, kisses him a little too hard. This is, he thinks, the best way to find out if you have, really have, feelings for someone. He closes his eyes.
Brendon makes a surprised noise, something like a gasp or a shout, but he doesn’t move. Maybe he can’t, what for Ryan’s death-grip on his t-shirt, green and kind of tight. The shirt, not his hand, Brendon thinks, a little absurdly. And then, I don’t understand this, but it wouldn’t hurt, not really, to kiss him back, right? So he opens his mouth a little, barely has time to touch Ryan’s lips with his tongue, and Ryan’s crawling further over the table, licking the roof of his mouth.
And then he’s kind of sliding off the edge of the table, sitting in Brendon’s lap, and they both really need to breathe, need gills, but no. I’d rather drown, or maybe the right word is suffocate, Ryan thinks. I could die like this, and probably be okay with that. Really, really be okay with that, because the table is hard against his back, and this is way better than talking.
Way better, and so much less awkward, because this doesn’t require thinking. It’s all just hormones and instinct and blood flow and skin, there’s no thinking, no stumbling for words. It does, however, require oxygen, and when you have to breathe, you have to stop, to think, and he finally does, and he’s really sitting across Brendon, t-shirt still clenched harshly in his fist.
“Um,” Brendon breathes, eyes wide, hand on Ryan’s hip. “I don’t really know...maybe, I have to think about this.”
Ryan nods, and it takes a second, but then he’s swallowing tears he wasn’t expecting, shaking his head.
“Uh-huh,” he mumbles, swinging off Brendon’s legs, feeling suddenly ridiculous, suddenly exposed, flames racing up his neck. He stands in the kitchen, twisting his fingers and lifting one foot after the other off the floor, slow. Then, “I’m going to...just, close the door when you leave, okay?”
“Yeah,” Brendon says, flipping the bottle cap against the table rhythmically, and Ryan shuts himself in the bathroom and sits down on the floor, cold and hard against his legs, the porcelain of the bath tub sending chills up his spine.
He waits until he hears the front door close.
Then, and only then, he starts to cry.
----------
Brendon leaves him a message that night.
Ryan, he says, and call me, and I’m sorry, but Ryan just presses ‘7’ for delete, and curls up on top of his mattress. If he’s being honest, he’s feeling pretty stupid, and pretty fucking sorry for himself, and he kind of likes it that way. He would rather hold onto the shame curling in the pit of his stomach, hold onto the embarrassment and the regret, than really deal with anything else that’s going on.
He takes two Tylenol and an undetermined number of Gravol, and he likes the way it makes his limbs float off, the way it makes him sleep, the way it clouds his head too much for him to think. He hears the phone ringing, every ten minutes, but his arms are too heavy to lift, and it feels too good to just stay still, and he just wants to sleep. He finally bumps the phone out of the cradle and floats away.
He doesn’t dream about anything that he remembers, but he wakes up in the morning in a panic, shivering cold, mouth dry from fear. He stretches his arm over and clunks the phone back into the receiver, lays back on the sheets and rubs his face, watching the dust float irregular through the beams, silt in a pond. He’s starting to think maybe he hallucinated, dreamed it all up, something, anything.
And then the phone rings, sharp and loud in the late-morning silence, the dust floating through the air silently; sharp and loud like a knife through skin and blood pouring onto dirty concrete, like glass and metal crunching against pavement, a car-crash. He thinks about ignoring it, but it rings and rings and the light burns his eyes, so he closes them, hard, and wraps his fingers around the cold plastic of the phone.
“Hey,” he mutters, and his throat kind of hurts, like he’d been screaming all night. He sounds a little bit like cigarettes and whiskey, a little bit like old-time country songs, and he kind of feels that way, too. Dark and melancholy and thick, twangy and rough around the edges, soft under layers of steel strings.
“Didn’t think you would answer,” and fuck, he sounds miserable too, sleepless and nervous, like a night spent staring at the digital read-out on an alarm clock and counting flecks in the carpet.
“Uh-huh.”
“Look, I’m sorry.”
“No.”
“No?”
“You aren’t. You shouldn’t be. You…”
“Well, I could have talked to you, I mean.”
“No.”
“What?”
“I don’t…I don’t think I could’ve talked. I have nothing to say.”
“I said I could have talked.”
“I would have had to answer. Questions. You should have those, right?”
“I…well, yeah.”
“Right. And I don’t…I don’t have the answers. I never have the answers.”
And then there’s that silence again, the one that tastes like burnt plastic residue, the sound of breathing over wires and through transmitters, and the faint rustle and clunk of him moving around, shifting against sheets, something like the wind through a crack in the window.
“You’re always so good with words,” Brendon says suddenly, like it’s the answer, the prayer to say in just this kind of situation, devotion.
“This isn’t like that,” he whispers, realization and resignation. “This is real life, man, this isn’t some story I can write the ending to, something you can squeeze into meter and write a guitar riff to match. This is...”
And Brendon says,
“What? What is it?” in this voice like he’s afraid, like something might shatter, Ryan might shatter, if he talks too loud, if he says the wrong word, if the air in his voice box contorts in the wrong way. And then Ryan moves, rolls over, and the curly-cue cord connecting the receiver to the base, the base to the wires, Brendon’s voice to his ear, snaps out of its place with a resounding plasti-metallic click like bone snapping, and there’s silence.
Ryan fumbles for the cord, pulls it up onto the bed, and the plastic is broken, snapped in half, useless. He plugs it back in, anxious, hopeful, and it falls out without a second thought.
Half way across town, Brendon listens to the purr of the dial tone, steady and warm, until it recedes into silence.
----------
He throws the phone across the room, crashing against the wall, and it breaks into a thousand mechanized pieces, like a broken robot with plastic skin, dead on the carpet of his bedroom. It peels and scratches back the primer on the unpainted wall, leaving spots that look like cardboard, dirty brown and dusty. He curses himself for only buying one phone, for his Sidekick being forgotten on the charger at Spencer’s, for everything.
He stares at the ceiling until his eyes burn, paces back and forth across the carpet, smoking cigarettes he’d stashed in the bottom right drawer of his dresser, for just in case. The ashes litter the carpet, dusty and velvet under his feet, black and white like newsprint. He almost hopes that some ember catches the carpet, sends the cheap fabric and plastic and glue soaring to the ceiling in some immolating house fire, front page news like the ashes tickling his toes. Still, nothing happens.
He walks from the window to the bedroom door, staring down the hallway, staring down the driveway, staring at the shattered body of the broken phone in the corner of the room. He throws a crumpled cigarette filter at it, crushed out in the palm of his hand, not thinking, like flowers for the grave, and falls backwards onto the bed with a huff of breath. He waits, counting the seconds in his head. He waits, and he tells himself he’s waiting for nothing in particular. He’s getting good at this.
----------
He stares at the phone, blinking and swallowing fiercely, something approaching anger, and something approaching tears. He thinks, maybe he didn’t hang up. Maybe something happened. But then, wouldn’t he go to a payphone, wouldn’t he try to come over, wouldn’t he do something, anything? Then he thinks, maybe that’s what this is, the answer to the question. Silence. The dead sound of a phone off the hook. Empty.
He thinks, why does this matter to me? It doesn’t. It shouldn’t. It’s been such a long time of saying all the right things. He believes them, at least on the surface. This is like that film on water, the way molecules want to cling together, want to hold on to what they know, and yesterday was the glass tipping all over the floor.
He wonders what’s going to happen in a few days, a week, when they have to get together. When his mouth isn’t a vague, surreal memory in the back of his mind. When he has to spend days, weeks, months next to him, thinking about it every time their hands brush accidentally, or maybe on purpose. He wonders if he’ll get up the nerve, to say something, to do something, or if it will eat them alive from the inside out, corrosion. He waits, for some sign of life, for the phone to ring, for a knock on the door. He doesn’t lie to himself. He doesn’t bother.
----------
It’s past dinner time, going on eight o’clock, but he isn’t hungry. He thinks if he walked out of the room and back in again, it would be like walking into a sauna, what for the amount of cigarette smoke that must be contained in this tiny space. The phone on the floor whispers things he can’t hear, like dying breaths, and its guts are spread out and glittering on the carpet. He inhales, sharp, counts to five, and breathes out slow. The silence lays heavy on everything, a thick layer of dust and an absence of light, and he goes to the window. He tells himself it’s the last time.
He’s staring blankly at the street turning dusk, and the glass is freezing. There’s no one on the street. Not a car driving, not a dog barking, not some little brat riding their bike around or climbing the tree on his side lot. Maybe he’s dreaming. It feels like he’s the only one alive, the only one awake. Or it could be that he’s the only one asleep, some kind of ghost to everyone else.
There’s this soft, rhythmic noise filtering its way up the stairs, distorted and muffled, and it sounds a lot like the noise a bed makes when someone fucks on it in the next room over, but, he thinks, it’s actually someone at the door. Someone I didn’t see, knocking on the door. Not a ghost or a daydream fucking in my spare room.
He goes down the stairs slowly, one step at a time, hand gripping hard onto the wooden railing, and he’s shaky, maybe hungrier than he thought, maybe tired. He pulls open the door, letting in a thick wave of air, tinted salmon pink and gold by the sun, and for a second he thinks there’s no one there. He scans his eyes over every inch of the porch, and they finally come to rest on the shadow sitting in his deck chair, dark and crumpled, backlit. He wishes for the UPS man. For a serial killer. For anyone else.
He takes it back. He wishes for Brendon. He wishes for some tiny miracle, that maybe this is yesterday, and all of today was a dream, and he has a chance to do it over, to take it back, to go on the way things were.
“How long have you been here?” he croaks, voice thick, and it sounds alien, from someone else.
“How long have you been smoking?” the voice shoots back, and he realizes he’s got the stub of a burning-out smoke in his left hand, and reaches up to scratch his forehead with his thumb.
“I don’t,” he says, and inhales hard, throwing the stub overhand onto the path leading up to the door, burning bright orange in the gloom, before flickering out.
“Right,” and the shadow stands up, steps forward into the grey shaft of light streaming out of the door, and it’s not the UPS man. It’s not a serial killer. He isn’t sure whether to be relieved, or to run back up to his room and hide.
“I’ve been here awhile, sitting, thinking,” the shadow continues, “but I just knocked, because I wasn’t sure you were home, I wasn’t sure you’d answer.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and rocks on his heels, staring at his shoes in the dim light. Ryan pulls the door open, steps back.
“Come in, if you want.”
“Yeah.”
Brendon comes in, toeing his shoes off onto the mat, shutting the door behind him with a muffled thump. He falls into the couch, folding his legs up under him, rubbing at his eye with the tips of his fingers. Ryan sits on the big, overstuffed chair across from him, tapping his foot anxiously on the floor, leg bouncing and eyes darting around the room like a caged animal.
“I...” Ryan says, biting down hard on his lip, wishing for blood. “Need a fucking cigarette.”
“You don’t smoke.”
“I know,” he sighs. “I do today, or any day like today.”
“Go get one. Two.”
He nods and stands up, jogging up the stairs, turning around at the top.
“Go into the kitchen. Get a drink or something. Try and...relax.”
Brendon barks a laugh, smiling ruefully.
“Sure. Relax. Yeah.”
----------
When he comes back down, Brendon has something in his hand, is staring hard at it like he’s trying to engrain it in his memory. He sits in the chair and holds the lighter to the cigarette, drawing in a hard breath, hands shaking. Brendon looks up at him and extends a hand, and Ryan leans over, putting a cigarette and the lighter into his palm, folding Brendon’s fingers around it.
“You don’t smoke,” he suggests, sitting back in the chair.
“I know. Neither do you.” He puts it in his mouth anyways, flicks the lighter, inhales.
“What’s that?” Ryan mumbles through a cloud, waving his hand at whatever’s in Brendon’s lap, barely an outline in the gloom.
“Oh,” Brendon says, “this picture, I didn’t know you still had it, from way back.” He laughs, soft, and rubs the side of his face. Ryan grimaces a little in the dark, turning his head, a drag.
“I’m a pack-rat.”
“I know. It’s a nice picture, we look...”
“Young,” Ryan supplies, because they do, they look green and ridiculous and scared, he remembers without looking the way they’re smiling and have their arms around each other’s shoulders, the way they’re staring out of the picture with wide eyes.
“Yeah, and happy.”
Ryan sighs. Brendon stares at his outline in the dark.
“We were,” he says, flicking ashes into an empty glass on the table beside him.
“Were,” Brendon says, and they both fall silent, the smouldering brightness making soft sizzling sounds and glowing in the dark, the only sign of life.
----------
It takes a long time. It’s like shaking a bottle, it builds up while they sit there in the dark, trying to make the cigarettes, his last two, last as long as possible. He flicks the lighter on and off, on and off, casting orange glows across his face, his thumb burning from the friction against the metal. He eyes glitter and reflect the flames, and Brendon stares, thinks Ryan must be able to hear the way his mind is racing, babbling on.
All Ryan hears is his own blood rushing in his ears, his own breath rattling in his chest, the hum and song of his body working, living. The bubbles start down low, in his stomach, but they’re climbing his ribs, working his way up his throat, and he chokes, chokes, swallows, throws the cigarette into the glass, fizzing when it hits a drop of water left in the bottom. He coughs, trying to hold it down.
“I think,” he says, suddenly, a spark in the darkness, vomit. He stops, swallows again. “We need,” a shaky breath, “really need to talk this out. I can’t...I don’t want to do this, this thing, whatever it is.” Brendon stares, not at him, but maybe through him. “We can’t let this ruin us.”
“This,” Brendon says, still staring. “Ryan, I don’t...all that happened, all that happened is that you kissed me, and I kissed you. Why does this matter? Why is this such a big deal? We should be able to...to not care.”
And as much as he’s talking to Ryan, he’s talking to himself, talking to the air, and the words hit the floor hard. Ryan winces.
“Because it’s not...” he waves his hand, “I shouldn’t have, and you shouldn’t have, it should...”
“If I hadn’t have left,” Brendon says, like he can’t even hear Ryan, “we would have, maybe not fucked, but something.” His voice is barely there, floating, soft, and Ryan has to strain to hear him. “And I don’t think either of us would have stopped that.” He looks up, catches Ryan’s eyes, and they’re both frozen. “Why?”
Ryan opens his mouth, shuts it, stares intently at his hands folded in his lap.
“I...” the walls close in around him, and everything slows down, the second hand on the clock bends, bends, almost snaps, before ticking on to the next second. Panic rises in his throat, but he swallows, digs his nails into the soft skin on the back of his hand. “Neither of us wants to be the first to say it.”
Brendon nods gravely, scratching his wrist hard enough that it burns, that he’s afraid he’s going to draw blood, and afraid he isn’t going to.
“I think…” Brendon says, “maybe talking isn’t going to work. Maybe we should…take some time to sort this out. I don’t want things to be like this, awkward, it’s not...”
“We can’t just leave it. It’ll...we can’t.”
“We also can’t seem to talk about it.”
“Because it’s hard. Weird.”
“I know.”
They lapse into silence again, and Ryan bites at the skin around his nails, biting, biting until he tastes blood, copper and salt, and it stings. He closes his eyes and rests back against the chair, trying to steady his breathing, to think of something to say. He doesn’t hear, doesn’t see, Brendon standing up, stepping towards him. He feels the darker shadow of his presence cover his body, and he doesn’t open his eyes, doesn’t want to.
Brendon kisses him, square on the mouth, but soft, his head tilted to the right and breathing through his nose. Ryan grabs hard at his neck, not opening his eyes, and Brendon comes forward, some small noise of agreement in the back of his throat, and Ryan shifts in the chair, giving Brendon just enough room to slide beside him. He still doesn’t open his eyes, afraid to see and break the moment. He opens his mouth. This is so much better than talking.
Breathing becomes cardinal sin number one, because breathing means stopping, and there are reasons they can’t stop, they won’t stop. Ryan tentatively brushes his fingers under Brendon’s t-shirt, over the angle of his hipbone, and Brendon tilts his head a little more and sighs, and the sound echoes in Ryan’s head, and he curls his fingers in Brendon’s t-shirt, wants him to come closer.
He does. He shifts, slides his leg between Ryan’s, somehow reaching for the lever on the side of the chair, tipping them back, letting him stretch out, and pushes down. Ryan gasps into his mouth, skin tingling, and puts his hand on the side of Brendon’s face, feeling the way his jaw muscles flex under the skin, the way his eyes are fluttering like he’s dreaming. He thinks, kind of vaguely, that maybe he’s dreaming this, Brendon’s hand on his hip and his leg pushing insistently in just the right place, but Brendon biting his lip is just as good as being pinched, and he’s awake, he’s here, he’s now.
Brendon pulls his head back, resting his forehead against Ryan’s collar bone, and the way his breath hits Ryan’s neck makes him shiver, makes him think about teeth grazing skin, sinking in, bruising.
“Why is this so easy?” Brendon whispers into the bend of his neck, where it smells like soap and skin, and slides his hand up his side, fingers fitting into the grooves of his ribs. “It shouldn’t be so easy, you know, for me to climb into this chair with you and kiss you like you aren’t my best friend.”
Ryan closes his eyes and swallows, running his hand up the back of Brendon’s arm, guiding it around his side.
“I think there are things we haven’t been saying.”
Brendon pulls the skin on Ryan’s neck with his teeth, and Ryan tips his head and groans, shifting his hips restlessly.
“Things we should have been saying this whole time,” Brendon whispers, and it brushes Ryan’s skin like silk, settles in his chest and makes a nest.
“I...” Ryan says, tries to say, but Brendon kisses him again.
“I know.”
----------
They wake up. The clock is behind them, and neither of them wants to untangle, to move, to see what time it is. The way the sun falls in through the door, Ryan thinks it’s probably around nine, and Brendon shifts against him and smiles into his skin.
“Morning,” he mumbles, his voice sleep-thick and soft, and Ryan smiles.
“Mm,” he agrees, moving deeper into the chair, curling closer, tighter into Brendon’s arms, and Brendon into his.
“You know,” Brendon says, “if someone, like Spencer, came over right now…”
Ryan laughs, low in his throat, nosing Brendon’s shoulder.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Brendon smiles and closes his eyes.
“Me either.”
AUTHOR: therecordskipsx
RATING: PG-13-ish...so that means you aren't legally allowed to read this if you aren't 13 or over or have a parent with you, which would be weird. Sorry, kiddos.
POV: Third-ish.
PAIRING: Ryan/Brendon. Why do you ask me this question, still?
SUMMARY: "It’s not like he couldn’t have seen it coming. Miles away, really, thumping ungracefully towards him along the ground, dragging its left leg or something, damaged and obvious. A glaring neon sign, a puddle of blood snaking under a locked door, overheard snippets of conversation. Something or anything or nothing, but he should have seen it coming."
DISCLAIMER: This probably didn't happen just a while ago, but hey, I can dream, and I do.
A/N: Uhm, this is possibly set in the time after they stopped touring, right before the porno!cabin, and uhm, it may or may not be factually inaccurate, but that's okay. It's long, 5000+ words. Enjoy, if you will! Title/cut text: Thursday <3
It’s not like he couldn’t have seen it coming. Miles away, really, thumping ungracefully towards him along the ground, dragging its left leg or something, damaged and obvious. A glaring neon sign, a puddle of blood snaking under a locked door, overheard snippets of conversation. Something or anything or nothing, but he should have seen it coming.
Especially, especially it should have been obvious, because he doesn’t think its normal for things that you are feeling to sneak up on you; usually you know about them, deny them, repress them. They don’t just stab you in the eye one morning when you pick up the phone or when you go to get groceries. That’s not how this is supposed to work. Right? Right.
It’s supposed to fester, or something, supposed to grow and multiply like germs, and you’re supposed to stick a band-aid over a bullet hole and tell everyone that everything is fine, until you’ve got gangrene and you finally die, or come close to it, and you have to tell everyone and get it amputated. That’s what’s supposed to happen. You’re not supposed to get caught in a drive-by.
Great, he thinks. I’m thinking of this, of everything, of love, as a drive-by shooting, a random, mindless, idiotic act of violence. And then he thinks, no, okay, I see where I’m coming from with that, I really do. See, this is how it’s supposed to work. You’re supposed to think of it before it tackles you to the ground and slits your throat. Yeah.
And he hears the voice on the other end of the phone, tinny and distant, softened by wires, saying something. Hey, earth to self, wake up, pay attention, he thinks.
“Hey, hey Ry, are you there? Did you hang up on me?”
Shit, yeah, I’m here, he thinks. But thank God he can’t hear inside your head, so you need to actually answer, you idiot.
“Oh, uh, yeah. I’m here.”
The voice on the other end laughs.
“Get out of your head and get dressed, man. I’m coming over.”
Fuck. No. Don’t ever come near me again. But he says,
“Oh, okay, see you in a bit,” in a way that he hopes isn’t totally distracted, and the voice laughs again.
He doesn’t think of it as being a part of the person, not the way it sounds over the phone. That’s why it’s making his stomach churn. Why he can’t really breathe.
“Yeah, see you.”
Click. The buzz and purr of a dead line. He puts the receiver down.
----------
He doesn’t get dressed, just sort of sits there, all dead and limp on the couch, staring through the T.V., and he almost forgets what he’s waiting for, so the knock on the door makes him leap out of his skin, leaves him plastered to the ceiling like pizza dough, if only in his head. He gets up and walks to the door, praying for the UPS man. For a serial killer. For anyone else.
Because it’s been, what, months, maybe a year, of saying all the right things, and really believing them. Making up elaborate excuses, lies, fairy tales; saying all the right things in all the wrong tones to every journalist and raised eyebrow he’s come across. And it hits him, kind of all of a sudden, right across the face so he almost falls: denial. It spells itself in his brain, a big word, six letters. D-E-N-I-A-L.
He opens the door. He thinks, oh fuck, and the world kind of crumbles under his bare feet. Yeah, he thinks, I really am screwed, aren’t I? He thinks of earlier, of drive-by shootings and infections, and he kind of gets it. Maybe the whole thing about denial is that you don’t know you’re doing it, until someone else accidentally rips off the band-aid and you bleed all over the couch.
“Hi,” he says, staring over the voice’s shoulder, out into the wavering heat.
“Hi. Are you actually going to let me in? Or am I going to stand here, staring at you in your underwear?”
And that shouldn’t make him blush, but it does.
“Uh...come in, no, I’m just,” totally in love with you, or something, “not feeling like myself.”
“I got that, yeah. Thanks.”
And Brendon comes in behind him, shuts the door, sealing out the heat, and locking in the cold, artificial air pumping out of the vents. Locked in, he thinks, kind of vaguely. I’m stuck in here, now, with this, with him, now, and I want to run screaming into the street and let my feet burn and blister on the asphalt, anything, anything else but this.
“Are you sick, or high, or something?” Brendon says, dropping into the couch and curling his legs up under him, a smile bending the corners of his mouth like a used staple. “Because you’re being really fucking weird.”
“No,” he says, to the air, to Brendon, and mostly to himself. “I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh, fine, laying on the couch in your underwear when it’s like an ice box in here, watching infomercials. Just fine.”
“Yep,” he says, wishing he had pockets he could stick his hands into, because he’s fidgety when he’s nervous, and shoving his hands in his boxers is probably not the best idea.
He goes into the kitchen, feet sticking on the linoleum, and yanks open the fridge, pulling out a water bottle.
“Drink?” he says, over his shoulder, into the living room.
“Water?” Brendon says, and Ryan hadn’t realized it, but Brendon’s a stealthy bitch, he’s snuck up on him, he’s way closer than he thought, and he jumps, nearly closing the fridge door on his hand.
“Yeah,” he says, pulling it back open, rescuing his fingers from the rubber and metal jaws of death, and grabs a second bottle. “Glass?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
And they sit down at the kitchen table, across from each other, unscrewing the water bottles, and his fingers burn, a little, from the friction. This is, he thinks, really fucking awkward.
“So I came over to see if you wanted to do anything,” Brendon takes a sip of his water, and Ryan watches his throat convulse. “But it seems like your day is already pretty full.” Ryan rolls his eyes, taps his hand skittishly against the table, licking a drop of water off his finger.
“Yeah, totally thrilling,” he mumbles, but actually, today has been more exciting, in a totally bad way, than much of anything that’s gone on in a while, since he came home.
“I can see that.”
“Mm.”
Cue the silence now, Mr. Director; please cue the fidgeting and nervous chugging of an entire water bottle, goose bumps creeping up arms, the air thick enough to taste, like stale crackers and burnt plastic. Cue that, and watch it crush me to death, okay, Sir? Okay, excellent, thank you.
“How’s the girlfriend?” Brendon says suddenly, and Ryan feels like he’s been punched in the gut.
“Oh, uh...good, yeah.”
“Alright,” Brendon says, shifting in his chair. “Good to hear.”
“Yeah.”
You could say something intelligent any time now, they both think to themselves; like, break this ice that shouldn’t even be here. Ryan says,
“I don’t think it’s going to last,” which seems to take Brendon completely by surprise, because as far as he, as far as anyone knew, everything was going along swimmingly, perfect, she was a ‘nice girl’.
“Why’s that?” Brendon says, spinning the bottle cap on the table, anxious.
“I just...” think I’m totally falling for you, “I don’t think we’re...”
“Right? Meant for each other?” Brendon supplies, interested in the way the bottle cap flips over when he pushes the edge.
“Something like that,” Ryan says, interested in the way Brendon’s hands are flipping the bottle cap, and then the way his own hands are tangled on the table. “I think I need...” he clears his throat, “something...I’m not getting.” You.
“Uh-huh,”
“You have no idea what I’m talking about.”
“Nope, sorry.”
“That’s okay.”
And it’s not, but well, it’s not like he was expecting this to be easy, since he’s only been thinking about it for about half an hour, really thinking about it. Not letting it lurk in the back of his mind; that’s not thinking. That’s denial.
So he says,
“I think I need to talk to you,” and Brendon says,
“Okay,” and puts his elbows on the table, and that’s not really the answer Ryan wanted. “Talk.”
“I uh, was thinking this morning.”
“Yes, on the phone. Do you remember anything I said to you?”
“Not really, no. Sorry.”
“It’s alright. Now what were you saying?” Love me, please, please, Ryan thinks, and make this easy.
“Oh, um, right. I was thinking, after I picked up the phone, that I kind of…” Like you. Maybe. Just say it, he thinks, spill the beans, and then sweep them up and make coffee, or casserole, depending what kind of beans they are, you know?
“You kind of...?”
“Kind of, well,”
“If you don’t want to tell me whatever this is…” Brendon says, spreading his hands in front of him, and Ryan watches his mouth move, his lips shaping the words.
He leans his body across the table, suddenly, tipping his empty water bottle and sending it clattering to the floor. He grabs the front of Brendon’s shirt, the way they do in those cheesy movies, and pulls him forward, kisses him a little too hard. This is, he thinks, the best way to find out if you have, really have, feelings for someone. He closes his eyes.
Brendon makes a surprised noise, something like a gasp or a shout, but he doesn’t move. Maybe he can’t, what for Ryan’s death-grip on his t-shirt, green and kind of tight. The shirt, not his hand, Brendon thinks, a little absurdly. And then, I don’t understand this, but it wouldn’t hurt, not really, to kiss him back, right? So he opens his mouth a little, barely has time to touch Ryan’s lips with his tongue, and Ryan’s crawling further over the table, licking the roof of his mouth.
And then he’s kind of sliding off the edge of the table, sitting in Brendon’s lap, and they both really need to breathe, need gills, but no. I’d rather drown, or maybe the right word is suffocate, Ryan thinks. I could die like this, and probably be okay with that. Really, really be okay with that, because the table is hard against his back, and this is way better than talking.
Way better, and so much less awkward, because this doesn’t require thinking. It’s all just hormones and instinct and blood flow and skin, there’s no thinking, no stumbling for words. It does, however, require oxygen, and when you have to breathe, you have to stop, to think, and he finally does, and he’s really sitting across Brendon, t-shirt still clenched harshly in his fist.
“Um,” Brendon breathes, eyes wide, hand on Ryan’s hip. “I don’t really know...maybe, I have to think about this.”
Ryan nods, and it takes a second, but then he’s swallowing tears he wasn’t expecting, shaking his head.
“Uh-huh,” he mumbles, swinging off Brendon’s legs, feeling suddenly ridiculous, suddenly exposed, flames racing up his neck. He stands in the kitchen, twisting his fingers and lifting one foot after the other off the floor, slow. Then, “I’m going to...just, close the door when you leave, okay?”
“Yeah,” Brendon says, flipping the bottle cap against the table rhythmically, and Ryan shuts himself in the bathroom and sits down on the floor, cold and hard against his legs, the porcelain of the bath tub sending chills up his spine.
He waits until he hears the front door close.
Then, and only then, he starts to cry.
----------
Brendon leaves him a message that night.
Ryan, he says, and call me, and I’m sorry, but Ryan just presses ‘7’ for delete, and curls up on top of his mattress. If he’s being honest, he’s feeling pretty stupid, and pretty fucking sorry for himself, and he kind of likes it that way. He would rather hold onto the shame curling in the pit of his stomach, hold onto the embarrassment and the regret, than really deal with anything else that’s going on.
He takes two Tylenol and an undetermined number of Gravol, and he likes the way it makes his limbs float off, the way it makes him sleep, the way it clouds his head too much for him to think. He hears the phone ringing, every ten minutes, but his arms are too heavy to lift, and it feels too good to just stay still, and he just wants to sleep. He finally bumps the phone out of the cradle and floats away.
He doesn’t dream about anything that he remembers, but he wakes up in the morning in a panic, shivering cold, mouth dry from fear. He stretches his arm over and clunks the phone back into the receiver, lays back on the sheets and rubs his face, watching the dust float irregular through the beams, silt in a pond. He’s starting to think maybe he hallucinated, dreamed it all up, something, anything.
And then the phone rings, sharp and loud in the late-morning silence, the dust floating through the air silently; sharp and loud like a knife through skin and blood pouring onto dirty concrete, like glass and metal crunching against pavement, a car-crash. He thinks about ignoring it, but it rings and rings and the light burns his eyes, so he closes them, hard, and wraps his fingers around the cold plastic of the phone.
“Hey,” he mutters, and his throat kind of hurts, like he’d been screaming all night. He sounds a little bit like cigarettes and whiskey, a little bit like old-time country songs, and he kind of feels that way, too. Dark and melancholy and thick, twangy and rough around the edges, soft under layers of steel strings.
“Didn’t think you would answer,” and fuck, he sounds miserable too, sleepless and nervous, like a night spent staring at the digital read-out on an alarm clock and counting flecks in the carpet.
“Uh-huh.”
“Look, I’m sorry.”
“No.”
“No?”
“You aren’t. You shouldn’t be. You…”
“Well, I could have talked to you, I mean.”
“No.”
“What?”
“I don’t…I don’t think I could’ve talked. I have nothing to say.”
“I said I could have talked.”
“I would have had to answer. Questions. You should have those, right?”
“I…well, yeah.”
“Right. And I don’t…I don’t have the answers. I never have the answers.”
And then there’s that silence again, the one that tastes like burnt plastic residue, the sound of breathing over wires and through transmitters, and the faint rustle and clunk of him moving around, shifting against sheets, something like the wind through a crack in the window.
“You’re always so good with words,” Brendon says suddenly, like it’s the answer, the prayer to say in just this kind of situation, devotion.
“This isn’t like that,” he whispers, realization and resignation. “This is real life, man, this isn’t some story I can write the ending to, something you can squeeze into meter and write a guitar riff to match. This is...”
And Brendon says,
“What? What is it?” in this voice like he’s afraid, like something might shatter, Ryan might shatter, if he talks too loud, if he says the wrong word, if the air in his voice box contorts in the wrong way. And then Ryan moves, rolls over, and the curly-cue cord connecting the receiver to the base, the base to the wires, Brendon’s voice to his ear, snaps out of its place with a resounding plasti-metallic click like bone snapping, and there’s silence.
Ryan fumbles for the cord, pulls it up onto the bed, and the plastic is broken, snapped in half, useless. He plugs it back in, anxious, hopeful, and it falls out without a second thought.
Half way across town, Brendon listens to the purr of the dial tone, steady and warm, until it recedes into silence.
----------
He throws the phone across the room, crashing against the wall, and it breaks into a thousand mechanized pieces, like a broken robot with plastic skin, dead on the carpet of his bedroom. It peels and scratches back the primer on the unpainted wall, leaving spots that look like cardboard, dirty brown and dusty. He curses himself for only buying one phone, for his Sidekick being forgotten on the charger at Spencer’s, for everything.
He stares at the ceiling until his eyes burn, paces back and forth across the carpet, smoking cigarettes he’d stashed in the bottom right drawer of his dresser, for just in case. The ashes litter the carpet, dusty and velvet under his feet, black and white like newsprint. He almost hopes that some ember catches the carpet, sends the cheap fabric and plastic and glue soaring to the ceiling in some immolating house fire, front page news like the ashes tickling his toes. Still, nothing happens.
He walks from the window to the bedroom door, staring down the hallway, staring down the driveway, staring at the shattered body of the broken phone in the corner of the room. He throws a crumpled cigarette filter at it, crushed out in the palm of his hand, not thinking, like flowers for the grave, and falls backwards onto the bed with a huff of breath. He waits, counting the seconds in his head. He waits, and he tells himself he’s waiting for nothing in particular. He’s getting good at this.
----------
He stares at the phone, blinking and swallowing fiercely, something approaching anger, and something approaching tears. He thinks, maybe he didn’t hang up. Maybe something happened. But then, wouldn’t he go to a payphone, wouldn’t he try to come over, wouldn’t he do something, anything? Then he thinks, maybe that’s what this is, the answer to the question. Silence. The dead sound of a phone off the hook. Empty.
He thinks, why does this matter to me? It doesn’t. It shouldn’t. It’s been such a long time of saying all the right things. He believes them, at least on the surface. This is like that film on water, the way molecules want to cling together, want to hold on to what they know, and yesterday was the glass tipping all over the floor.
He wonders what’s going to happen in a few days, a week, when they have to get together. When his mouth isn’t a vague, surreal memory in the back of his mind. When he has to spend days, weeks, months next to him, thinking about it every time their hands brush accidentally, or maybe on purpose. He wonders if he’ll get up the nerve, to say something, to do something, or if it will eat them alive from the inside out, corrosion. He waits, for some sign of life, for the phone to ring, for a knock on the door. He doesn’t lie to himself. He doesn’t bother.
----------
It’s past dinner time, going on eight o’clock, but he isn’t hungry. He thinks if he walked out of the room and back in again, it would be like walking into a sauna, what for the amount of cigarette smoke that must be contained in this tiny space. The phone on the floor whispers things he can’t hear, like dying breaths, and its guts are spread out and glittering on the carpet. He inhales, sharp, counts to five, and breathes out slow. The silence lays heavy on everything, a thick layer of dust and an absence of light, and he goes to the window. He tells himself it’s the last time.
He’s staring blankly at the street turning dusk, and the glass is freezing. There’s no one on the street. Not a car driving, not a dog barking, not some little brat riding their bike around or climbing the tree on his side lot. Maybe he’s dreaming. It feels like he’s the only one alive, the only one awake. Or it could be that he’s the only one asleep, some kind of ghost to everyone else.
There’s this soft, rhythmic noise filtering its way up the stairs, distorted and muffled, and it sounds a lot like the noise a bed makes when someone fucks on it in the next room over, but, he thinks, it’s actually someone at the door. Someone I didn’t see, knocking on the door. Not a ghost or a daydream fucking in my spare room.
He goes down the stairs slowly, one step at a time, hand gripping hard onto the wooden railing, and he’s shaky, maybe hungrier than he thought, maybe tired. He pulls open the door, letting in a thick wave of air, tinted salmon pink and gold by the sun, and for a second he thinks there’s no one there. He scans his eyes over every inch of the porch, and they finally come to rest on the shadow sitting in his deck chair, dark and crumpled, backlit. He wishes for the UPS man. For a serial killer. For anyone else.
He takes it back. He wishes for Brendon. He wishes for some tiny miracle, that maybe this is yesterday, and all of today was a dream, and he has a chance to do it over, to take it back, to go on the way things were.
“How long have you been here?” he croaks, voice thick, and it sounds alien, from someone else.
“How long have you been smoking?” the voice shoots back, and he realizes he’s got the stub of a burning-out smoke in his left hand, and reaches up to scratch his forehead with his thumb.
“I don’t,” he says, and inhales hard, throwing the stub overhand onto the path leading up to the door, burning bright orange in the gloom, before flickering out.
“Right,” and the shadow stands up, steps forward into the grey shaft of light streaming out of the door, and it’s not the UPS man. It’s not a serial killer. He isn’t sure whether to be relieved, or to run back up to his room and hide.
“I’ve been here awhile, sitting, thinking,” the shadow continues, “but I just knocked, because I wasn’t sure you were home, I wasn’t sure you’d answer.” He shoves his hands in his pockets and rocks on his heels, staring at his shoes in the dim light. Ryan pulls the door open, steps back.
“Come in, if you want.”
“Yeah.”
Brendon comes in, toeing his shoes off onto the mat, shutting the door behind him with a muffled thump. He falls into the couch, folding his legs up under him, rubbing at his eye with the tips of his fingers. Ryan sits on the big, overstuffed chair across from him, tapping his foot anxiously on the floor, leg bouncing and eyes darting around the room like a caged animal.
“I...” Ryan says, biting down hard on his lip, wishing for blood. “Need a fucking cigarette.”
“You don’t smoke.”
“I know,” he sighs. “I do today, or any day like today.”
“Go get one. Two.”
He nods and stands up, jogging up the stairs, turning around at the top.
“Go into the kitchen. Get a drink or something. Try and...relax.”
Brendon barks a laugh, smiling ruefully.
“Sure. Relax. Yeah.”
----------
When he comes back down, Brendon has something in his hand, is staring hard at it like he’s trying to engrain it in his memory. He sits in the chair and holds the lighter to the cigarette, drawing in a hard breath, hands shaking. Brendon looks up at him and extends a hand, and Ryan leans over, putting a cigarette and the lighter into his palm, folding Brendon’s fingers around it.
“You don’t smoke,” he suggests, sitting back in the chair.
“I know. Neither do you.” He puts it in his mouth anyways, flicks the lighter, inhales.
“What’s that?” Ryan mumbles through a cloud, waving his hand at whatever’s in Brendon’s lap, barely an outline in the gloom.
“Oh,” Brendon says, “this picture, I didn’t know you still had it, from way back.” He laughs, soft, and rubs the side of his face. Ryan grimaces a little in the dark, turning his head, a drag.
“I’m a pack-rat.”
“I know. It’s a nice picture, we look...”
“Young,” Ryan supplies, because they do, they look green and ridiculous and scared, he remembers without looking the way they’re smiling and have their arms around each other’s shoulders, the way they’re staring out of the picture with wide eyes.
“Yeah, and happy.”
Ryan sighs. Brendon stares at his outline in the dark.
“We were,” he says, flicking ashes into an empty glass on the table beside him.
“Were,” Brendon says, and they both fall silent, the smouldering brightness making soft sizzling sounds and glowing in the dark, the only sign of life.
----------
It takes a long time. It’s like shaking a bottle, it builds up while they sit there in the dark, trying to make the cigarettes, his last two, last as long as possible. He flicks the lighter on and off, on and off, casting orange glows across his face, his thumb burning from the friction against the metal. He eyes glitter and reflect the flames, and Brendon stares, thinks Ryan must be able to hear the way his mind is racing, babbling on.
All Ryan hears is his own blood rushing in his ears, his own breath rattling in his chest, the hum and song of his body working, living. The bubbles start down low, in his stomach, but they’re climbing his ribs, working his way up his throat, and he chokes, chokes, swallows, throws the cigarette into the glass, fizzing when it hits a drop of water left in the bottom. He coughs, trying to hold it down.
“I think,” he says, suddenly, a spark in the darkness, vomit. He stops, swallows again. “We need,” a shaky breath, “really need to talk this out. I can’t...I don’t want to do this, this thing, whatever it is.” Brendon stares, not at him, but maybe through him. “We can’t let this ruin us.”
“This,” Brendon says, still staring. “Ryan, I don’t...all that happened, all that happened is that you kissed me, and I kissed you. Why does this matter? Why is this such a big deal? We should be able to...to not care.”
And as much as he’s talking to Ryan, he’s talking to himself, talking to the air, and the words hit the floor hard. Ryan winces.
“Because it’s not...” he waves his hand, “I shouldn’t have, and you shouldn’t have, it should...”
“If I hadn’t have left,” Brendon says, like he can’t even hear Ryan, “we would have, maybe not fucked, but something.” His voice is barely there, floating, soft, and Ryan has to strain to hear him. “And I don’t think either of us would have stopped that.” He looks up, catches Ryan’s eyes, and they’re both frozen. “Why?”
Ryan opens his mouth, shuts it, stares intently at his hands folded in his lap.
“I...” the walls close in around him, and everything slows down, the second hand on the clock bends, bends, almost snaps, before ticking on to the next second. Panic rises in his throat, but he swallows, digs his nails into the soft skin on the back of his hand. “Neither of us wants to be the first to say it.”
Brendon nods gravely, scratching his wrist hard enough that it burns, that he’s afraid he’s going to draw blood, and afraid he isn’t going to.
“I think…” Brendon says, “maybe talking isn’t going to work. Maybe we should…take some time to sort this out. I don’t want things to be like this, awkward, it’s not...”
“We can’t just leave it. It’ll...we can’t.”
“We also can’t seem to talk about it.”
“Because it’s hard. Weird.”
“I know.”
They lapse into silence again, and Ryan bites at the skin around his nails, biting, biting until he tastes blood, copper and salt, and it stings. He closes his eyes and rests back against the chair, trying to steady his breathing, to think of something to say. He doesn’t hear, doesn’t see, Brendon standing up, stepping towards him. He feels the darker shadow of his presence cover his body, and he doesn’t open his eyes, doesn’t want to.
Brendon kisses him, square on the mouth, but soft, his head tilted to the right and breathing through his nose. Ryan grabs hard at his neck, not opening his eyes, and Brendon comes forward, some small noise of agreement in the back of his throat, and Ryan shifts in the chair, giving Brendon just enough room to slide beside him. He still doesn’t open his eyes, afraid to see and break the moment. He opens his mouth. This is so much better than talking.
Breathing becomes cardinal sin number one, because breathing means stopping, and there are reasons they can’t stop, they won’t stop. Ryan tentatively brushes his fingers under Brendon’s t-shirt, over the angle of his hipbone, and Brendon tilts his head a little more and sighs, and the sound echoes in Ryan’s head, and he curls his fingers in Brendon’s t-shirt, wants him to come closer.
He does. He shifts, slides his leg between Ryan’s, somehow reaching for the lever on the side of the chair, tipping them back, letting him stretch out, and pushes down. Ryan gasps into his mouth, skin tingling, and puts his hand on the side of Brendon’s face, feeling the way his jaw muscles flex under the skin, the way his eyes are fluttering like he’s dreaming. He thinks, kind of vaguely, that maybe he’s dreaming this, Brendon’s hand on his hip and his leg pushing insistently in just the right place, but Brendon biting his lip is just as good as being pinched, and he’s awake, he’s here, he’s now.
Brendon pulls his head back, resting his forehead against Ryan’s collar bone, and the way his breath hits Ryan’s neck makes him shiver, makes him think about teeth grazing skin, sinking in, bruising.
“Why is this so easy?” Brendon whispers into the bend of his neck, where it smells like soap and skin, and slides his hand up his side, fingers fitting into the grooves of his ribs. “It shouldn’t be so easy, you know, for me to climb into this chair with you and kiss you like you aren’t my best friend.”
Ryan closes his eyes and swallows, running his hand up the back of Brendon’s arm, guiding it around his side.
“I think there are things we haven’t been saying.”
Brendon pulls the skin on Ryan’s neck with his teeth, and Ryan tips his head and groans, shifting his hips restlessly.
“Things we should have been saying this whole time,” Brendon whispers, and it brushes Ryan’s skin like silk, settles in his chest and makes a nest.
“I...” Ryan says, tries to say, but Brendon kisses him again.
“I know.”
----------
They wake up. The clock is behind them, and neither of them wants to untangle, to move, to see what time it is. The way the sun falls in through the door, Ryan thinks it’s probably around nine, and Brendon shifts against him and smiles into his skin.
“Morning,” he mumbles, his voice sleep-thick and soft, and Ryan smiles.
“Mm,” he agrees, moving deeper into the chair, curling closer, tighter into Brendon’s arms, and Brendon into his.
“You know,” Brendon says, “if someone, like Spencer, came over right now…”
Ryan laughs, low in his throat, nosing Brendon’s shoulder.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Brendon smiles and closes his eyes.
“Me either.”