New Fic: Cowardly Acts 2/4, The OC, Seth/Ryan
Cowardly Acts, by Fabella (wistful_fever)
The O.C., Seth/Ryan, NC-17.
Slash, Long, Future Fic.
Summary
Seth Cohen: twenty years old, unspecified major, neurotic mess.
Disclaimer
Not mine, no money, don’t sue, yadda, yadda, you know the drill.
Notes
This is set while Ryan and Seth are attending an unspecified college together, and likely to be made AU in the next couple of years. Also, I began writing this before a lot of the events of mid-season two took place (then took a long break from it, before returning recently), so it’s already AU in some ways.
A new part should be posted weekly or bi-monthly, after the editing process.
Go Back To Part One
Cowardly Acts, part 2/4, by Fabella
It was like Seth was stuck inside a narrated road movie. He’d been driving nowhere all day, his brain snapping around like an aimless rubber band, listening to Iggy Popp sing about dangerous strangers. Green lights all the way, and then the open road, not the way it was in books, or movies, but with a car on either side, like cattle at top speed, lines on the pavement roping them in.
He passed another Alpaca farm, the second he’d seen, and it clicked in his head that Alpacas were currently trying to take over the world. He jotted a mental post-it to write a letter to Homeland Security, because, whoa-creepy-late-night-television, had they not been paying attention to those ‘you, too, can have your very own Alpaca farm’ commercials? Seth glared at the Alpaca lumbering near the fence, lifting its fluffy head, dark eyes wide and soft with light.
Ryan thought Alpacas were cute.
Ryan had knocked on the bathroom door, and Seth had looked up as the door pushed open without Seth answering. Ryan stood there, already dressed for bed in a pair of boxers and the much lamented wife-beater. He was staring hard at Seth, his lips pressed so tightly together that they had disappeared from his face. The toothbrush had rattled around in Seth’s mouth.
“What’s up, man?” Seth mangled out, toothpaste dribbling down his chin.
Ryan had stepped in, and.
Seth thought about the punk movement, and its influences, and how none of those influences had changed, because no one thought in new ways anymore, definitely not him. Seth thought, I wanna be your dog, and didn’t meet his own eyes in the rear view mirror, didn’t meet his eyebrows, either, but he could see that they were raised in perpetual question. Asking for stuff he hadn’t meant to ask for. His shoe went heavy on the gas pedal.
A pen rolled on the dash, slipping up against Captain Oats’s hoofs, before spinning away toward the cell phone Seth had turned off. Josh had probably tried to call, wondering why Seth hadn’t shown up yet, but Seth wasn’t checking his messages, and he didn’t want to live at the dorms. He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to hang out at the club. He didn’t know what he wanted. He’d considered going to Tijuana, blowing his savings on cheep beer and pot, but what stayed in Tijuana had a habit of not staying there at all, so he’d decided against it in the end. Before he knew it, he found himself driving in the direction of the ocean, toward home.
He’d spent his whole life trying to escape Newport.
Funny, wasn’t it, that he searched for solace there.
When Seth pulled into the driveway, his parents weren’t home, but he still had a key. His mom had insisted both he and Ryan keep one. He looked at the house he’d grown up in, unsure what he was supposed to feel about being there, before giving up on deep introspection, which had never been his favorite blood sport, and killing the engine. The front door opened smoothly on its hinges, welcoming him back, and for a second, the dark interior was bright with late morning sunlight, and Ryan was walking ahead of Seth with Kirsten, talking with her about their freaky shared adoration of architecture. He glanced back at Seth, mouthing something, but Seth couldn’t read his lips. The door shut behind Seth, and it was dark again, the outline of the furniture barely distinguishable.
“Creepy,” Seth said.
Without turning on the lights, Seth climbed the stairs to his room, which wasn’t quite his room any more. Everything that he’d left behind had been put in boxes and stored in the attic. Seth briefly imagined himself as an old man hanging around his parents’ attic, eating cheetos, growing a beard to his knees, and watching daytime television, but that was just depressing, so he dropped his stuff on the floor, and fell face first into bed, eyes already shut before the first resulting bounce. He slept for a long time, it felt, the black sleep of the emotionally whimpering.
The next thing he knew, someone was shaking his shoulder, and Seth was awake and shivering like he’d had a nightmare. Seth cracked his eyes open. The room was dark, but light came in from the hallway, by way of the open door, and his tongue was heavy, stuck to the roof of his mouth. Somehow he’d ended up with his head on the opposite end of the bed, on his back, with his hands tucked into his armpits. His mom was sitting next to his hip, her hand rubbing light circles on his arm.
“We saw your car out front,” Kirsten whispered, her concerned face lit only on the side near the door. It gilded her hair, giving it a soft glow. “Is everything okay?”
Seth nodded, and rolled onto his side, snuggling down in the bed. He hadn’t noticed before, but the sheets were fresh. Seth wondered if his mom changed them regularly, in case he showed up unexpectedly, kinda like he had tonight. The thought made him feel warm-little boy allowed to come home early from a night at his friend’s house warm-as he stretched and contorted on top of the clean smelling cloth.
“Is it okay if I stay here for a while?” Seth asked.
Kirsten smiled, cheeks dimpling. “Sure, sweetie.” She paused, putting her fingers in his hair and scratching the one spot where his scalp was always dry. “Is there some reason you can’t stay at your place?”
“Ryan and I kind of had a fight,” Seth said quietly.
He hoped that was explanation enough. It had been rough to get the words out past his sleep-dry throat, and his head ached a little hearing them, a throb that could become a migraine if he thought about it anymore. Kirsten’s fingers stilled for an instant, then returned to the soft scratch that made Seth shut out the hallway light behind his eyelids, humming deep in his throat. He was nearly asleep again, the headache drifting away as easily as a grain of dirt in the wash of a wave.
“Are you hungry?” Seth heard his mom ask, but from the end of a long road.
“Alpacas are evil,” a voice that sounded exactly like Seth’s said, and even most of the way asleep, Seth nodded, and agreed. The bed shifted, the hand leaving his hair.
Sometimes Seth had a dream that he was living in the same world as the X-Men. Kirsten was Jean, the see-all-know-all motherly figure, and Dad was Cyclops, the fighter for justice with right on his side. Summer was Storm, the all powerful vixen, and Marissa was Rogue, the girl that could only be touched on a magazine cover. Ryan was Wolverine, the superhero with the tainted past, and kind of short, but Seth didn’t fit anywhere in the comic strip that floated by in his head that night. Seth was standing on the outside, watching it all happen to someone else, watching people live. They all moved on, went away, and Seth was passive. Whatever that meant.
Seth woke again, and it was morning, the sun burning his shoulder blades. Drool had pooled on the bare mattress where sometime in the night, Seth had been restless enough to pull the sheet off, and Ryan hated him. Seth groaned and tried to suffocate himself with a pillow.
For a long time, Seth couldn’t get out of bed.
* * *
When he wandered into the kitchen, wearing one of his father’s bathrobes, and a pair of slippers he’d thrown into his overnight bag with other essentials like his mp3 collection, and Breaking Up For Dummies, his parents stopped talking with cutting suddenness. Kirsten took a delicate sip from her coffee mug, and Sandy opened the newspaper in front of his face. Seth frowned and shuffled all the way in, eyeing them warily as he reached for the coffee pot. He turned his back to them to pour the coffee, inhaling the steam that rose from the liquid as it filled his cup.
“I called Ryan,” Kirsten said.
Seth jumped, and splattered coffee on the counter top. Kirsten sighed behind him, and he heard her set her mug down with a quiet click. Clearing his throat, he replaced the coffee pot and dampened a paper towel to wipe up the mess. He took his time, circling the counter top with the paper towel long after the coffee had been soaked up. But that was just delaying the inevitable. After tossing the paper towel in the trash, he fixed his face to bland inquiry, and turned to face his mother with the coffee cup held before his chin like a shield. She was facing him already, sitting practically on the edge of the seat with her knees together, and her palms cupping them.
“Oh?” Seth raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
Kirsten’s eyebrows had their own power. Neatly plucked, they arched pointedly at him, and Seth took a nervous gulp of his coffee. When it scalded the back of his throat on the way down, Seth gave a mental shrug. He hadn’t needed those taste buds, anyway.
“It’s no big deal,” Seth said. “You look nice. Have you lost weight? Done something with your hair?”
She gave him more eyebrow than he could handle right then, and Seth dropped his gaze into the opaque liquid in his cup, seeing his own big hands wrapped around the delicate china. People said, “like I know the back of my own hand,” but Seth hadn’t spent a lot of time looking at the back of his hand. He’d spent more time looking at his belly button, and the back of his hand seemed alien and clumsy, his fingers too thin, the pores too big.
“Seth.” Kirsten had stood, and she was standing near the sink. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Seth muttered, wondering if he would be more or less attractive if he shaved his fingers. “Nothing, really, can we not talk about this?”
“I worry,” she said, and Seth looked away from his hands. Her wrinkles were deeper than he remembered, but then, Seth guiltily realized he hadn’t seen her more than a couple times each month for the past year. “You never tell me what’s going on with you anymore, and Ryan’s almost as bad.”
“You don’t need to worry, mom. I’m not five, anymore. Most of the time, I don’t even wet the bed.” That earned a small smile. “So, um. When you called Ryan. What did he say?”
“He didn’t answer the phone. What was your fight about?”
Seth shrugged. “We’re not getting along, that’s all.” He crossed his legs at the ankle and leaned back against the counter, strumming out the beat to and I ran, I ran so far away, I just ran, I ran all night and day, with his thumb on the ceramic bottom of his cup. “I’m moving out, actually.”
Kirsten’s mouth dropped open.
I couldn’t get away, Seth strummed.
“I mean, I think I am.” Seth laughed nervously. “It takes a lot out of a person to deal with my charisma day in and day out, and I think it’s hurt Ryan’s ego to stand in my shadow all the time. So I thought, hey, maybe my loving parents miss me. I know, wow, I miss them, like, constantly. It’s hard to get any homework done with all the missing going on inside this deep, deep hole they’ve left.”
Seth widened his eyes hopefully, just as Kirsten narrowed hers. Sandy snorted behind the paper, folding it down to peer at Seth over the top with an insulting amount of disbelief. Kirsten turned her glare on Sandy. Sandy blinked in return.
“What?”
“This is serious,” she warned, frowning forbiddenly. “Don’t be amused by it, or Seth will think it’s okay to act like this. If their fight was bad enough for Seth to move out, then we have a problem.”
Sandy’s smile faded in increments, and he nodded. He set the paper to the side, revealing the marijuana plant colorfully depicted on his t-shirt, but if that might have amused Seth, the effect was lost when Sandy dug his knuckles into his eye sockets wearily, shoulders stooping forward.
“We?” Seth said, moving woodenly to the table. “What we?”
“What your mother means,” Sandy said, straightening,“is that life could become very uncomfortable for everyone if you and Ryan can’t work things out.”
Life could become very uncomfortable.
Ryan had let the sheet drop behind him, and taken a step inside. It was a small bathroom, and with that one step, he was standing at the sink with Seth. In the mirror, Seth had seen Ryan’s hand reach out in slow motion, fingertips shivering up the nape of his neck, before digging forcefully through the curls at the back of Seth’s head. Seth had seen his own face slacken, go dumb and blurry as Ryan pressed against his side.
Uncomfortable for everyone.
Seth had lost his taste for coffee, so he sat it on the table, and stood with his arms crossed, looking at the space between his mother and father. The double doors lead outside to the open patio, and through the glass, Seth’s eyes focused on the shadow of clouds scrolling across the cement. As a kid he’d sat on the warm rock next to the pool with his legs stretched out in front of him, watching the sky move slowly over his knees. He let his eyes fraction out a blink, and then he was seeing a little boy sitting on the patio in a green t-shirt and rolled up jeans, feet bare, toes pointing toward the clouds.
The little boy pulled his knees up to his chest, face lifting to the sun, and dark curls fell back from his forehead. The headphones were too big on him, and his lips moved uncertainly along to whatever song he was listening to. A bruise was fading on his cheekbone, turning yellow.
He turned, looking straight at Seth. Seth stopped breathing. The cement under the kid was gray and flat and unchanging, and Seth had spent so many days there he couldn’t remember them all, just the impression of music in his ear drums, sun on the top of his head, an ant crawling over his big toe. His reflection in the water, wavering as he stuck his feet in. Lonely.
Blinking again, he found his mother staring at him in concern. She glanced out at the patio, and then back at Seth, her forehead wrinkling. Seth met her eyes, and thought of the day she had picked him up from school early and taken him into the kitchen when they got home, packing ice into a wet towel, holding it to his cheek. The embarrassment had hurt worse than the throb under his eye. She sat him in the chair and asked him what had happened, and Seth hadn’t wanted to tell her, ashamed that all the kids thought he was weird, different, not like *them*.
Ryan had pressed against him, heat and muscle up and down Seth’s side, his cheekbone dragging over Seth’s neck until his lips were at Seth’s ear, whispering, and Seth had felt-embarrassed, burning all over, and-ashamed.
“Just imagine the family reunions,” Seth offered, shrugging.
“I’d rather not,” Sandy said. But then he obviously did, because he shuddered dramatically, nose crinkling. Shaking it off, he stood and put a hand on Seth’s shoulder, squeezing the tendon. “But you’ve hit it on the nail, son. Fighting with Ryan isn’t like fighting with a friend from school. For one thing, you can’t just decide you don’t want to see him anymore.”
Yeah, because that was Seth wanted, to not see his best friend anymore. Seth rolled his eyes and pulled away from Sandy, picking his coffee up, because even though he didn’t want it, it was never okay to waste The Bean.
“That’s all very true, and sound, and apt to my current situation, but I don’t think I’m at the step where I’m up to any advice. Maybe day two, okay? If you don’t mind, I’ve lost my appetite, so I think I’m gonna go drown myself in the pool until either I develop gills or CPR is necessary. If I’m flailing and screaming as I hold myself under, you’ll know which happened.”
Sandy and Kirsten locked eyes, and Seth left, their murmurs following him.
There was baggage involved, he thought, with his feet in the water, the clouds on his knees, but he didn’t want them to know how shaky security at the Seth Cohen Airport had become.
***
Seth was molding in the living room, wearing sweat pants with holes in all kinds of inappropriate places. The phone was on the coffee table, just at the edge of Seth’s eyes, which were focused on the television. VH1 was running some kind of Paula Abdul marathon that Seth was just masochistic enough to subject himself to, and if he had found himself singing along to a few songs, he blamed it on the plant life that had begun growing on his face, cleverly concealed as a patchwork beard.
The couch and Seth had become good friends over the past week, but it was a mutual thing. The only action the couch saw these days was the type Seth definitely wasn’t thinking about, because parents, and ew, traumatized for life, so the couch had probably missed the Seth Cohen Mope. The Mope sure hadn’t been the same without this couch, that was for sure. The handy throw pillows that smothered screams, the coffee table conveniently placed so he barely had to move his arm to take something off it, the plump cushions just plump enough to hide a dustbuster under in the case of spills. Seth peered down at the chip crumbs spotting the front of the shirt he’d slept in last night and decided not to change out of. At least some things never changed.
“Woe,” Seth muttered, between Paula songs. “Misery. Tear drop.
Shit, this wasn’t as much fun as it had once been.
Seth groaned pitifully and reached for the phone, which was all of three inches from him. Ryan still wasn’t answering his phone when Seth tried to call him. All of the forty-three times Seth had tried to call him. Obviously, Seth wasn’t counting the aborted attempts, when he hung up himself after the first ring. If he counted all of those, over the next week, Seth had spent more time on the phone calling Ryan and hanging up than he had blinking. Which was. Well. Seth didn’t like to think of himself as a stalker. But he had to admit there were similarities.
The phone rang twice. Seth hung up, put down the phone, and picked up the remote control. He turned up the volume. He turned it up so loud, he unfortunately didn’t hear the knock on the door, or the door opening when the knocking was unheard. He didn’t hear the stalking of french heels through the Cohen halls. He didn’t hear the growling when he was spotted, becoming one with his self pity. He didn’t hear the slow cracking of knuckles, and he didn’t know to be afraid. Not until a pair of legs was standing right in front of him like every wet dream a thirteen-year-old graphic novel enthusiast had woken up from. Seth paused, mid-lyric, eyes lifting.
“Why aren’t I surprised?” Summer hissed, teeth bared. Seth screamed. He reached for the dustbuster to defend himself, but he was too late.
Cowards are punished in Hell.
At least that’s what Summer told him, several times, as she was beating him to splinters with her extremely fashionable handbag. It was a new one, he could tell, because he hadn’t been beaten within an inch of his life by it before.
“Ow! Ow!” Seth blindly tried to dodge the blows, falling of the couch and landing on his knees next to the coffee table. “What the fuck, Summer?”
“That’s for being a dumbass!”
She geared up for another swing at him, arm lifting just as Seth’s mom walked out from the kitchen, holding a glass of soda with a lemon on the lip. Summer froze, the murder weapon held aloft. Kirsten’s face remained expressionless, and the moment stretched. Summer bit her lip, starting to lower her arm.
“Oh, no, don’t mind me,” Kirsten said, taking a sip of her soda. “Continue.”
“Mom!” Seth put a hand over his heart, scandalized, but didn’t have time for proper outrage because he was too busy crawling away on his knees when Summer swung at him again. He hid on the other side of the couch, looking desperately to his mother for assistance. Summer simply climbed onto the couch, and whacked him on the top of his head, while his mother, fetching in a baby blue body suit, failed to provide the kind of rescue mother bears were infamous for.
“That looks like fun,” Kirsten said, dimpling when Seth gasped, holding onto his eye, which the zipper on the bag had managed to nearly gouge out. “I’d do it myself, Seth, but I threw out my back last night, and I don’t think I could put the force into it that Summer can. Which would be a shame.”
Summer behind him, Mother Dearest in front.
Next Thanksgiving, Seth decided, he’d have compassion for the wishbone.
“You’ll miss me when I’m six feet under, and I don’t mean as a guest character on the hit show. Which I miss. But let’s not go there.”
To make sure Summer understood this, Seth tilted his head and discovered her staring down at him over the top of the couch, her smile wide and a little wild. Seth waved at her and she waved back, like that one time she had on the playground before she forgot he existed.
“Hey, Seth.”
“Hey, Summer.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” Kirsten said, and from this angle, Seth could see up Summer’s nostrils when she looked at Kirsten and nodded. Kirsten disappeared in the direction her bedroom, humming happily under her breath, and Seth climbed to his feet, pretty sure he never wanted to know how his mom had thrown out her back.
“Blood traitor,” Seth mumbled, when his mother was safely behind closed doors, where she couldn’t hear him and sick Summer on him again.
Speaking of evil, crazy, dictator overlords...
Cautiously, he faced Summer, expecting an immediate resumption of the previous brutal death scene they had both been so engrossed in. Summer had since risen from the couch, and was standing with her hands balled on her hips. Truly, she shouldn’t be a scary sight, even with her face all scrunched up like that, but Seth knew her, and there were rage blackouts to be considered. Not to mention there were several heavy vases within grabbing distance of her expensive manicure.
Seth offered a tentative smile. “Have fun in Paris?”
Summer growled. Seth ducked behind his arms just as the handbag came cutting toward him. It hit his arm, but lacked the force of the other attacks, and Seth peeked through his fingers, framing her expression of disgust with his forefinger and thumb. Summer rolled her eyes, and marched into the kitchen on those deadly heels. Seth lowered his hands, following at a dragging pace, wary of being tricked.
He arrived in the kitchen just in time to see Summer tug her skirt down to a more reserved length as she sat in the chair at the end of the table, crossing her legs. Seth
had seen her make that move about a thousand times, and even now it was difficult not to a. have an aneurism b. trip over his tongue and have an aneurism. She had the leg over leg down, had made it an art; the subtle shift of muscle under tanned, satin skin; the way the skirt was just short enough to tease but long enough to keep the secret hidden. Ryan had once called it the Summer Slip and Slide.
Come to think of it, Ryan loved Summer, but he had never liked her very much.
Seth wondered what Ryan would think about the calm way Summer placed her bag in her lap, and rested her hands on it, one over the other. There was a stillness in her that had Seth willingly walking further into the room, eyeing her as she eyed him.
“I like your hair,” Seth said, planting himself on a stool.
If it happened to put a whole counter between himself and Summer’s hands of destruction-well, that’s just where the stool was. He was curious, not stupid.
Summer softened. She reached up self-consciously, touching the neat edges of her chin-length hair, then brushed her bangs to the side. The red-brown highlights brightened for an instant as they were trapped by the sunlight, and Seth realized he hadn’t talked to Summer in more than five months, since she’d called from the airport, saying she was going to find herself, so, like, don’t die of mediocrity while she was gone. He’d been skeptical, but somewhere in Paris, Summer had found herself after all.
“Really?” Summer asked, and unclenched a little more when he nodded. “I wanted something different. I’m going for Audrey Hepburn. She’s very fall season.”
Seth shifted uneasily, abruptly aware that he’d sat on this stool hundreds of times before, and his feet were banging against the legs of it like they always had. Everything about him-the clothes, the music, the mope sweat-was the same. It could be any day of any year. Mediocre, uninspired, boring. All synonyms for Seth Cohen. No wonder Ryan was so annoyed. Seth was living his life in neutral.
“Seth,” Summer said, and Seth blinked, bringing her into focus. He had loved her so much once, but he hardly recognized her now.
“Huh?” was his brilliant reply.
She peered at him, nose crinkling as her eyebrows lowered. He recognized that look at least: Seth Cohen, what the hell are you on?
“I said I’m going for an Audrey Hepburn look.”
“She’d be jealous,” he murmured, an old co-conspirator. He traced a circle on the island’s faux-granite surface, finding it warm with daylight under his finger, and looked at her from under his eyelashes. She nearly smiled, her lips twitching like they wanted to, and her face went as melted as a slushy left out of the shade. I still have it, Seth thought, feeling vindicated somehow-Summer couldn’t have changed too much if she was still susceptible-but then she stiffened and narrowed her eyes at him, her nostrils flaring, and Seth tried hard to remember when he’d last showered.
“Don’t try to get around me, Cohen. You’re not that cute.”
“You used to think I was.”
“Things have changed,” she said, pointedly.
Normally, Seth would have fought harder, thrown in a few puppy dog faces that had never failed to turn Summer into butter. Normally, but Summer had sounded a little hurt under all that edge, and Seth was tired of hurting the people in his life. Ryan had put him over his yearly limit. All he wanted to do for the next six months was lounge around in his sweat pants, watching VH1 and old Michael J. Fox movies until he fell into an exhausted coma, and ceased being a threat to anyone’s growth.
“It was worth a try.” Seth sank down to the counter, folding his arms together and setting his chin on them. A yawn wandered up his throat and was strangled gently by his tongue hugging the roof of his mouth. “So why are you mad at me this time? I don’t think I’ve harassed any of your boyfriends lately. No mouth breathing phone calls at three in the morning. I’m truly stumped.”
“I stopped by your apartment today,” Summer said, and Seth’s heart blinked widely inside his chest, before chaining itself to his ribs and refusing to move at all. “I used the key you gave me, because naturally, I wanted to surprise my best ex-boyfriend on the second day home from my journey of self-discovery.”
“Oh,” Seth whispered. “Naturally.”
“The weird thing,” Summer continued seamlessly, “was that it wasn’t your apartment anymore. And while I was away, Ryan had mutated into the Hulk, with only a marginally improved wardrobe.”
“Yeah.” He straightened, putting his feet on the floor. “About that.”
Summer held up her palm, lips thin, and Seth shut up. A funny fact about Summer: she liked to tell her stories whether her audience was willing, or in this case, not. She had a knack for dramatic timing.
“So of course I ask him, Ryan, what’s wrong, why are you wearing that tacky jacket again? And he throws me out. And he was drunk, Seth. Very, very drunk.”
“Ryan doesn’t drink,” Seth interrupted.
Seth remembered having that conversation with Ryan a couple of years ago, after waking up with a hangover and finding himself on Ryan’s bed, without a clue how he had ended up there. Ryan had already been awake, and was pulling on his pants near the doors when Seth finally felt the world stop spinning long enough to speak in complete sentences that didn’t involve ‘ugh’ and ‘gag’ and ‘gonna puke’.
“I just feel bad,” Seth had said. “You’re always the sober one, making sure I don’t fall in a ditch, or have pathetic drunk sex with anyone skanky. Tell you what, at the next party I won’t drink anything, so you can get completely smashed and attempt to have drunk, skanky sex. Or skanky, drunk sex. Whichever you’re more comfortable with.”
“No thanks,” Ryan said, opening the blinds and generally making Seth’s life a miserable blur of light. Ryan was the only dark shape in a sea of migraine, standing by the window and blotting out some of the hurt-maker, and Seth turned his face to Ryan’s shadow, trying to soak it up. Ryan paused, and Seth thought he maybe looked over his shoulder at Seth, but Seth couldn’t be sure, because of the misery, the pain, and the ow. “My mom is an alcoholic. Marissa is an alcoholic. Kirsten, she’s... I’ll have a beer, maybe, or one shot of the hard stuff, but I’ll never have two.”
Seth sat up. His shirt stuck to him in sweaty patches, peeling away from him as he moved. The room spun, his head spun, everything began to spin, and he gagged, clamping his eyes shut and pressing his fists to his temples. Death, he prayed, death unto all alcohol distributors, then Ryan’s hand touched the back of his neck, cool and dry and electric like the eye of a storm. Seth leaned into it, sighing, and felt the brief press of Ryan’s hard belly against his cheek as he was pulled forward into a hug.
The world was very warm and the color of Ryan’s t-shirt. Blue, laundry detergent, and Seth inhaled.
“Okay?” Ryan asked, backing away an inch.
“In a minute,” Seth murmured, wondering how it was possible to get an erection five seconds after he’d nearly blown chunks. And Holy First Edition Batman, what the hell had there been to get excited about? Stupid happy-go-lucky penis.
The room stopped spinning, and Ryan’s fingers had slipped away.
“No way he was drunk,” Seth said, shaking his head. “Were you? Did you break into the mini bar or something?”
“Do not make me stab you with my hate,” Summer snapped, with a level of viciousness she usually reserved for shopping mall brawls over shoes. Seth ducked his head, watching where his hands pulled at each other inside a cloud of dust mites. Her voice was strained when she continued. “Why is it that when a girl goes away for a few months to find herself the entire world falls apart?”
The refrigerator kicked on, a mild hum compared to the rumble of Seth and Ryan’s. I’ll fix it, Ryan had kept on saying. He’d even bought a book on it from the used bookstore, but when he couldn’t figure it out, he’d been too proud to call a professional in and Seth had grown to like the noise by then. Seth curled away from it now.
“You are the glue, Summer,” he was saying, “and we are the shattered pieces. You need to put us back together again.”
Summer breathed in sharply, mouth whitening around the edges with tension. It was dumb joke, because at one time Seth had believed it was true, and he’d never gotten to the point where he wasn’t resentful that she hadn’t held him together. Like Humpty Dumpty had sued the queen’s men, even though it was really his own fault for getting on that stupid wall anyway, Seth had wanted, for a long time, to find some way to exact revenge on Summer for moving on and leaving him behind. Summer picked at the edge of her skirt, smoothing it until the purse strings loosened their grip on her face, and then she uncrossed her legs and leaned forward to inspect him with her scary brain.
Seth dredged up a hollow chuckle from somewhere. He had hit a cat once, when he’d first gotten his license. It had been a lot like hitting a speed bump, except the speed bump had given way under the wheels. Popped. When he’d braked and gotten out to look under the car, the cat had still been alive, tail flopping back and forth on the pavement, tongue hanging out between its teeth. Seth’s laugh came from that place in his mind, that memory of the tail-flopping, flopping, then still.
He twitched, and Summer nodded.
“I think I’m having a mental breakdown,” Seth dead panned.
“Hmph,” Summer grunted, not objecting to his statement. “What happened?”
“I have no idea,” Seth lied. He shriveled in place when Summer’s hands clenched over the bag in her lap, quickly talking over the soundtrack of violence that was probably playing in her head. “I have a theory that Ryan was abducted by aliens and returned with one less funny bone, but I have to iron out a few details. Did they leave a robot in his place while they worked on him? I mean, there are some flaws in that theory. How did it take a shower? Not that I saw Ryan take a shower. That would be. Huh.”
“I should rephrase my last question.” Summer didn’t blink. “What did you do?”
She really should have become a lawyer. Especially if lawyers were anything like what Ally Mcbeal had claimed. With the short skirts and random lesbian action.
Seth widened his eyes. He was going for innocent, but would settle for a murky shade of grey.
“Why do you automatically assume I did something?”
“Seth,” Summer said, a hundred situations fitted in one short syllable.
The hot air drained from him, leaving his heart vaguely achy, like there was a corn chip lodged in his chest.
The day Summer left him, she had done it outside of the pool house, on a nice day, when the sun turned the water to glass. Seth had been sitting on Ryan’s bed while Ryan sat on the floor next to his knees, the wires to their controllers tangled because Ryan had a thing about being first player and Seth had a thing about fighting him for the honor. He’d just happened to look up in the middle of kicking Ryan’s fighter’s ass, and seen Summer standing outside the glass doors, in the shadow cast by the overhanging roof, one hand raised and fisted as if she’d wanted to knock but hadn’t been able to go through with it.
“Be right back, man.”
Ryan glanced at him, then at Summer, and nodded, pausing the game.
Outside, he hugged her hello, and sat down next to the pool when she told him they had to talk in that tone of voice that meant nothing good could possibly come out of a conversation. She didn’t sit next to him.
He had his head phones on, hanging around his neck, and tinny music filtered up to his ears as she bent down to him and kissed him without the anger that he’d tasted lingering behind her lipstick so much in recent weeks. He smiled at her, and she made a visible effort to smile back, but what came out looked more like the results of an appointment with a scalpel happy dentist than happiness. Seth’s stomach dropped as she reached out, her fingers forming ten points of pressure on either side of his face.
“I love you, but,” she’d said, and Seth had blocked out the rest of the words, watching her mouth move around words but with the volume down. Eventually she stopped talking, after the parting shot, “So, like, don’t kill yourself or anything,” that Seth only kind of heard, and walked off, sounding suspiciously like she was crying.
Ryan came out of the pool house when she was gone. Seth saw Ryan’s wavy reflection in the water, saw Ryan not wanting to involve himself, but Ryan sat next to him anyway, their bare knees bumping awkwardly. When Seth didn’t say anything, when they had just been sitting there for a while, Ryan lifted the head phones from around Seth’s neck and placed them over Seth’s ears. He steals the whole show with his last dying scene. No one sees the two sides of Monsieur Valentine. Seth ducked his head when Ryan settled an arm around Seth’s shoulders, and his fingers counted the drum beat of the song on Seth’s arm, fingertips sometimes landing on the cuff of Seth’s shirt, sometimes where the skin was soft and numb from heartbreak.
The next time he had seen Summer, he’d put the guy she was talking to in a headlock, and gotten suspended for three days.
“Okay, so I haven’t been the epitome of maturity,” Seth admitted.
Summer’s diamond heart necklace swung and landed crookedly on her collar bone as she lifted a hand to tuck her hair behind her ear. Seth had almost bought her one like that three weeks after they had broken up, except not a heart, a carnation, and with pink diamonds, but Ryan had dragged him away from the window, literally, and soothed him with a coffee from Starbucks. He’d mixed the sugar and creamer in for him and everything, all while keeping one hand tight around Seth’s forearm to keep him there.
Ryan had sat across from him at a table next to the wide restaurant window, and listened to Seth go crazy until Seth crazied himself out, and Ryan was.
Man, Ryan was scary.
“You have to stop this,” Summer said seriously, and the necklace was hidden again as she shifted, covered by the collar of her shirt. “You can’t keep running away from everything. Why are you running anyway, you crazy dork? You have everything. The perfect family. Perfect friends. The perfect life. Did I mention what perfect friends you have? You are the last person in the world that should be running.”
I can’t seem to stop, he wanted to say, and his foot began tapping against the side of the island as if to illustrate that point. If he had any normal friends, they would have neglected him in his natural vegetated sate until he felt like a whole person again, or at least like a cucumber. He’d run away and it wouldn’t matter, because no one would care. Sadly, his friends were abnormally interested in his welfare.
“Curse of having very long legs,” he said instead. For the sake of conserving time, he told himself. Because there was a real lack of it, what with his shaky attendance of classes and non attendance at the record store. He forced his foot to remain still, curling his toes around one of the stool legs. “Even when I’m walking at my slowest pace, I’m still moving faster than everyone else.”
Summer gritted her teeth, lips peeling back.
“Did I mention my shoes double as deadly weapons?” Summer pointed one foot at him in warning. Seth swallowed. The toes *did* appear oddly sharp. “Be serious for one second. I know that’s hard for you, what with having half your brain removed by accident, but you’re fucking up your life, and I just can’t allow that.” She paused, taking a deep breath. She must have been going to therapy again. “Christ, Seth, you’re such a fucktard. You didn’t even tell him you were leaving.”
“I was going to leave a note.” Seth scowled at the bread basket. “Probably.”
“You’re hopeless, Cohen.”
Yeah, he probably was. He was going to have to be surgically removed from that couch, and it was like a callback to those weeks dying over Summer and Zach, except worse, because Ryan wasn’t there to make him take a shower. Ryan wasn’t there to force Seth to live his stupid hungry life even if he couldn’t have what he wanted. And the two situations were *not* the same, right, but somehow, Seth found he was dying over Ryan anyway.
“You screwed up big,” Summer said, adding salt to an already festering wound.
Seth exploded.
“You don’t know what it was like!” Seth yelled. Summer’s eyes burst wide open, and her hand jerked, knocking the bag to the floor. Car keys and a tube of lip gloss spilled out of the opening, tumbling into a shaded area. Seth stood up, slamming his hands down on the counter, and. Ouch. “You didn’t live with him for three months while every other expression on his face said he hated your fucking idiot guts! I couldn’t move without him jumping down my throat, and I’m a very anxious person. I can’t live in an environment like that. I’m surprised I held out as long as I did, honestly.”
He stopped because he couldn’t breath, and his chest felt like it was about to explode. Summer blurred before him, and Seth realized that he was going to cry. Summer’s blurred shape moved, and if she said one wrong word, he was going to start balling. He’d always hated that about himself, the wimpy quality that made him cry at the slightest provocation. That’s why Luke had started to pick on him in the first place, back when he hadn’t been a Golden Retriever. He’d eerily been able to see right inside Seth, right inside what made Seth tick, and discovered that the crying over his skinned knee habit was one of Seth’s larger emotion holes.
As Seth had gotten older, the crying had mostly stopped. Why give everyone that thought he was a freak yet another reason to stuff him in his locker? Eating lunch alone was bad enough, crying while doing it would be much worse. Still, every now and then, something he should easily have been able to ignore hit him so hard it made his ears ring and his chest burn. He’d have to get out of wherever he was fast to avoid a breakdown.
Seth blinked his vision clear, and found Summer staring at him, biting her bottom lip like she wanted to say more, and was having a hard time restraining herself.
“Ryan didn’t look like he was having much fun himself,” she finally blurted.
Seth sat again, his knees weak.
“How is he?” he asked. “Besides drunk, I mean.”
“Wrecked,” Summer said, lips moving tremulously into a smile. Her silver eyeshadow glittered under the slant of sunlight. “And not just him. The apartment was trashed, too. A hovel. A dirty, dirty hovel. You have to go back there and fix him.”
Not good, Seth, breaking your toys like that.
Seth tried to speak, then turned away, lips pulling back in a grimace as he faced the sun head on, let it burn his eyes. Outside, the pool was bright blue and glimmering, undisturbed. Moving out, just admit it, leaving Ryan, was supposed to have been the fix to a bad situation, and things had only gotten worse since.
Two weeks later, and Ryan was deep in whatever darkness was eating at him, and no one was on Seth’s side, not even Summer. That burned. How could they not see that he was only trying to make things better?
“Move back,” Summer said. “It’s so simple, Cohen, even you could handle it.”
“That’s not happening,” Seth replied wearily. “For one thing, I doubt Ryan would let me. For another, that wouldn’t fix this. You may think I’m completely stupid, and well, yeah, but I left for a reason. You might not see it, but it’s a pretty good one. Like, okay, you know when Mulder and Scully finally got together on the X-Files? I mean, it sounded like a great idea, but the execution was pretty poor, and I just do not want to be that last die-hard fan holding onto mine and Ryan’s friendship.”
Summer blinked twice. “Wait a second, are you just getting stranger with age?”
“That’s my son,” Sandy called from the livingroom, where he’d no doubt been eavesdropping. When he came into the kitchen, he was wearing a robe and flip-flops, and he was loose-limbed and shining. “Like cheese, his quirks only become more apparent as time progresses.”
Seth shielded his eyes with one hand, turning as his dad moved into his line of sight again.
“That’s my dad,” Seth said. “The guy with the sex glow. Summer, tell me that’s not the sex glow.”
“Ignore the strange boy and tell me about Paris,” Sandy said, and kissed the top of Summer’s head as he passed to the coffee. She glittered a little, and they chatted like old friends, Summer bouncing in her chair as she recounted the details of her trip, Sandy propped against the sink and interjecting with his own tale of Paris as seen by bus.
Seth rolled his eyes, and grabbed a bagel to occupy his hands, tearing it into tiny chunks. Neither noticed his sullen mug, or if they did, they chose to ignore it in favor of discussing travel conditions during the spring. When he was reduced to building a replica of Michael Jackson’s lost nose out of the crumbs for entertainment, Seth wondered when his parents had begun to love Summer more than they loved him. It was a good thing that his and Summer’s break up had been more or less amicable, because if it hadn’t been, Seth was pretty sure Summer would have gotten his parents along with the anime.
His ears perked when he became the subject of their conversation.
“So I take it Seth and Ryan are still fighting?” his dad asked.
“No, Seth’s just being a dumbass,” Summer said pointedly. “And Ryan, strangely enough, resents him being a dumbass.”
“Seth’s good at that,” Sandy said, surveying his son with a satisfied smile, and Seth thought, yay, more fodder for my complex self-worth issues, and shoved a bit of dry bagel into his mouth. “But he turned out pretty well, considering the little, uh, accident where he rolled off the changing table.” Sandy and Summer shared a knowing glance when Seth immediately started choking on the bagel. “Are you here to take him off our hands?”
“I’m trying,” Summer sighed, ignoring Seth’s I’m choking, save me flailing. “Like I said. Dumbass.”
“Well someone has to do something, the smell is starting to spread from his room to ours. If he and Ryan don’t make up soon, I think we’re going to have biological warfare on our hands.”
“Funny,” Seth muttered, after finally managing to swallow the hard chunk of bread.
Sandy patted Summer’s newly shorn head a final time, then flip-flopped his post-had-sex-with-Seth’s-Mom-gross-dirty-bad-gross way over to Seth. He put an arm around his son’s shoulder, tightening his hold when Seth shuddered and tried to shrug him off.
“Son, I love you,” Sandy said. “But you stink. Take a shower. And after you’ve done that, study for your finals, so you don’t flunk out of college the way you’ve flunked out of your job.”
“I haven’t flunked out,” Seth mumbled. “I just haven’t gone in two weeks.”
“Flunked,” Summer sing-songed. “Didn’t I always tell you this was your future?”
“Ryan’s not going to class,” Seth pointed out. “Why is no one yelling at him?”
“No one likes a tattle-tale.” Sandy popped Seth lightly on the back of the head, but then rested his hand there, fingertips entwined with the curls. “But since you bring it up, I’ve been informed about that situation, and Ryan and I have already spoken. It would be nice if you took a crack at it, too. He’ll listen to you.”
“Since when?” Seth demanded sullenly, picking at the bagel more violently, sending large chunks flying. Ryan sure hadn’t listened to him the last time they had talked. And ignoring Seth’s phone calls wasn’t listening as far as Seth knew. “What funky alternative universe do you live in?”
“The one where both my sons listen to my wisdom,” Sandy said, mostly to himself, then squeezed Seth’s neck before releasing him. “I’ll leave you and Summer to the banter then.” He moved to leave, walking a little slowly, as if he was sore, before turning back with a gentle expression that immediately made Seth tense up, drop the last bits of the bagel. “I love you, Seth, I really do. And you can come home any time you want to. But if you’re not out of here by this weekend, I’m putting you on the curb with the trash. You’re tainting my groove, boy.”
On that last hideous note, Sandy exited stage left.
Seth groaned and bent down, banging his head repeatedly on the counter.
“I hate my life,” he stated mournfully. “And everyone in it hates me back.”
“It’s not so bad,” Summer said. Seth stopped beating up the counter with his head so he could glare at her, aware and unconcerned that there were bagel crumbs stuck to his forehead. Summer waved a hand in the air impatiently, snapping her fingers. “You could try, I don’t know, talking to Ryan about why he’s been more grumpy than he usually is. I’m pretty sure if you said two words to him, he would fall into your arms in cheesy Hollywood romance style.”
Seth flushed beet red, straight to his Aqua Teen Hunger Force boxers. Now even Summer was saying that, that, Seth couldn’t even go there, and he thought seriously about ending it all in the pool again. The image of himself floating face down in the water was pretty appealing compared to the current image of Summer smirking at him.
“Pointed jokes against my heterosexuality aside, you aren’t helping at all. Where’s the glue?” Seth asked. “Be the glue.”
“Seth. Come on.” She raised her hand, and tilted it back and forth in the universally politically incorrect sign language of flaming homosexuals everywhere. “I know, all right?”
“Glue!” Seth shouted, slapping the counter again.
Summer rolled her eyes. She collapsed against the back of the chair and muttered under her breath for a moment, before she bent and grabbed the handbag from the floor, before standing and stalking toward her frozen prey. Seth moved only his eyes as she approached, and when she was directly in front of him, his lips unglued themselves.
Barely.
“Um, Summer, you’re scaring me here.”
“Shut up.”
Summer snatched his ear and twisted it as Seth howled, tumbling off the stool and to his knees before her, which funnily enough, was where he had found himself often enough if their relationship that he almost found it comforting. If not for the huge pain coming from her nails digging into the cartelidge of his ear, he might have felt right at home.
“Okay, moron, you better be listening to me, because I am sick of your shit, and the gloves are coming off.” She twisted again, and Seth was lifted part of the way off the floor as she pulled his face close to hers. He could smell the shampoo she’d used that morning. “I gave you up two years ago. And it wasn’t easy. I didn’t want to. I loved you so much it made me crazy. Don’t make me murder you and ruin all my hard work.”
“I... I don’t get it.” He licked his lips, eyes flickering to the side. “What you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t.” Summer released him, and Seth drooped to the floor, rubbing his ear where it had begun to burn. Summer wiped her palms down the sides of her blouse, either smoothing the fabric or wiping Seth’s mope grease away. “You never know what anyone is talking about, because a few guys said some stupid things to you in highschool, and now you’ve shoved your head so far up your ass that it’s cut off the blood circulation in your brain.”
A few guys. Stupid things.
Summer didn’t know the half of it.
“Ryan’s been an asshole for three months,” Seth said bitterly, completely ignoring her point, because she had no idea what he’d gone through, and he would have died on the spot if she ever found out. “Am I supposed to forget that and crawl back? I’m a coward, but I have more backbone than that.”
“What am I, applying for sainthood? God! Don’t forget it,” Summer advised reluctantly. “Figure out why. Annoy him until he opens up or something, we all know you’re good at that.”
Seth laughed, a little, but he meant it this time.
“Ouch, and there she is with the backhanded compliment. I missed you, Roberts.”
“Same here, Cohen.” Summer smiled, for a moment, and ignored his flinch to smooth back the hair from his forehead. She looked lost for an instant, the motion of her hand slowing, then stilling as she stared down at him, before she startled, and abruptly ripped her hand away, nearly taking a few of Seth’s hairs with her. “Well, that’s my charity points for the day. I have to go to L.A. for dinner with Marissa, so you’ll have to excuse me, I don’t want to be late.”
Seth stood, slowly, and followed her out of the kitchen.
“How is Marissa?” he asked in the hallway..
“Still fabulous and famous and a little too friendly with Paris Hilton.” She didn’t turn around, waving at him over her shoulder. “Later, bitch.”
Seth grabbed her and spun her around, bringing her in close for a soft kiss on her mouth. She sighed, and pulled back, glaring up at him half-heartedly.
“See ya, ho,” he whispered.
She laughed too loudly and shoved him off as if he was the dirty gym sock he felt like. When she sauntered out the door, a swing in her walk, Seth faded a little, along with the day. He returned to the kitchen, and folding his arms together, he contemplated Michael Jackon’s nose reposed in all its former glory on the sunlit counter.
“You probably think I should stop cutting off my nose to spite my face.” The crumb nose seemed baleful and distant. “Yeah, I’m not as funny as I think I am. I get that a lot.”
* * *
TBC
A/N: I'm not completely satisfied with this part. It is very slow paced, and---no Ryan? Where's the good in that? But hey, it wanted to be written this way. Damn introspective, stubborn, STUCK Seth.
Feedback is my fuel. But hopefully not as expensive.
The O.C., Seth/Ryan, NC-17.
Slash, Long, Future Fic.
Summary
Seth Cohen: twenty years old, unspecified major, neurotic mess.
Disclaimer
Not mine, no money, don’t sue, yadda, yadda, you know the drill.
Notes
This is set while Ryan and Seth are attending an unspecified college together, and likely to be made AU in the next couple of years. Also, I began writing this before a lot of the events of mid-season two took place (then took a long break from it, before returning recently), so it’s already AU in some ways.
A new part should be posted weekly or bi-monthly, after the editing process.
Go Back To Part One
Cowardly Acts, part 2/4, by Fabella
It was like Seth was stuck inside a narrated road movie. He’d been driving nowhere all day, his brain snapping around like an aimless rubber band, listening to Iggy Popp sing about dangerous strangers. Green lights all the way, and then the open road, not the way it was in books, or movies, but with a car on either side, like cattle at top speed, lines on the pavement roping them in.
He passed another Alpaca farm, the second he’d seen, and it clicked in his head that Alpacas were currently trying to take over the world. He jotted a mental post-it to write a letter to Homeland Security, because, whoa-creepy-late-night-television, had they not been paying attention to those ‘you, too, can have your very own Alpaca farm’ commercials? Seth glared at the Alpaca lumbering near the fence, lifting its fluffy head, dark eyes wide and soft with light.
Ryan thought Alpacas were cute.
Ryan had knocked on the bathroom door, and Seth had looked up as the door pushed open without Seth answering. Ryan stood there, already dressed for bed in a pair of boxers and the much lamented wife-beater. He was staring hard at Seth, his lips pressed so tightly together that they had disappeared from his face. The toothbrush had rattled around in Seth’s mouth.
“What’s up, man?” Seth mangled out, toothpaste dribbling down his chin.
Ryan had stepped in, and.
Seth thought about the punk movement, and its influences, and how none of those influences had changed, because no one thought in new ways anymore, definitely not him. Seth thought, I wanna be your dog, and didn’t meet his own eyes in the rear view mirror, didn’t meet his eyebrows, either, but he could see that they were raised in perpetual question. Asking for stuff he hadn’t meant to ask for. His shoe went heavy on the gas pedal.
A pen rolled on the dash, slipping up against Captain Oats’s hoofs, before spinning away toward the cell phone Seth had turned off. Josh had probably tried to call, wondering why Seth hadn’t shown up yet, but Seth wasn’t checking his messages, and he didn’t want to live at the dorms. He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to hang out at the club. He didn’t know what he wanted. He’d considered going to Tijuana, blowing his savings on cheep beer and pot, but what stayed in Tijuana had a habit of not staying there at all, so he’d decided against it in the end. Before he knew it, he found himself driving in the direction of the ocean, toward home.
He’d spent his whole life trying to escape Newport.
Funny, wasn’t it, that he searched for solace there.
When Seth pulled into the driveway, his parents weren’t home, but he still had a key. His mom had insisted both he and Ryan keep one. He looked at the house he’d grown up in, unsure what he was supposed to feel about being there, before giving up on deep introspection, which had never been his favorite blood sport, and killing the engine. The front door opened smoothly on its hinges, welcoming him back, and for a second, the dark interior was bright with late morning sunlight, and Ryan was walking ahead of Seth with Kirsten, talking with her about their freaky shared adoration of architecture. He glanced back at Seth, mouthing something, but Seth couldn’t read his lips. The door shut behind Seth, and it was dark again, the outline of the furniture barely distinguishable.
“Creepy,” Seth said.
Without turning on the lights, Seth climbed the stairs to his room, which wasn’t quite his room any more. Everything that he’d left behind had been put in boxes and stored in the attic. Seth briefly imagined himself as an old man hanging around his parents’ attic, eating cheetos, growing a beard to his knees, and watching daytime television, but that was just depressing, so he dropped his stuff on the floor, and fell face first into bed, eyes already shut before the first resulting bounce. He slept for a long time, it felt, the black sleep of the emotionally whimpering.
The next thing he knew, someone was shaking his shoulder, and Seth was awake and shivering like he’d had a nightmare. Seth cracked his eyes open. The room was dark, but light came in from the hallway, by way of the open door, and his tongue was heavy, stuck to the roof of his mouth. Somehow he’d ended up with his head on the opposite end of the bed, on his back, with his hands tucked into his armpits. His mom was sitting next to his hip, her hand rubbing light circles on his arm.
“We saw your car out front,” Kirsten whispered, her concerned face lit only on the side near the door. It gilded her hair, giving it a soft glow. “Is everything okay?”
Seth nodded, and rolled onto his side, snuggling down in the bed. He hadn’t noticed before, but the sheets were fresh. Seth wondered if his mom changed them regularly, in case he showed up unexpectedly, kinda like he had tonight. The thought made him feel warm-little boy allowed to come home early from a night at his friend’s house warm-as he stretched and contorted on top of the clean smelling cloth.
“Is it okay if I stay here for a while?” Seth asked.
Kirsten smiled, cheeks dimpling. “Sure, sweetie.” She paused, putting her fingers in his hair and scratching the one spot where his scalp was always dry. “Is there some reason you can’t stay at your place?”
“Ryan and I kind of had a fight,” Seth said quietly.
He hoped that was explanation enough. It had been rough to get the words out past his sleep-dry throat, and his head ached a little hearing them, a throb that could become a migraine if he thought about it anymore. Kirsten’s fingers stilled for an instant, then returned to the soft scratch that made Seth shut out the hallway light behind his eyelids, humming deep in his throat. He was nearly asleep again, the headache drifting away as easily as a grain of dirt in the wash of a wave.
“Are you hungry?” Seth heard his mom ask, but from the end of a long road.
“Alpacas are evil,” a voice that sounded exactly like Seth’s said, and even most of the way asleep, Seth nodded, and agreed. The bed shifted, the hand leaving his hair.
Sometimes Seth had a dream that he was living in the same world as the X-Men. Kirsten was Jean, the see-all-know-all motherly figure, and Dad was Cyclops, the fighter for justice with right on his side. Summer was Storm, the all powerful vixen, and Marissa was Rogue, the girl that could only be touched on a magazine cover. Ryan was Wolverine, the superhero with the tainted past, and kind of short, but Seth didn’t fit anywhere in the comic strip that floated by in his head that night. Seth was standing on the outside, watching it all happen to someone else, watching people live. They all moved on, went away, and Seth was passive. Whatever that meant.
Seth woke again, and it was morning, the sun burning his shoulder blades. Drool had pooled on the bare mattress where sometime in the night, Seth had been restless enough to pull the sheet off, and Ryan hated him. Seth groaned and tried to suffocate himself with a pillow.
For a long time, Seth couldn’t get out of bed.
* * *
When he wandered into the kitchen, wearing one of his father’s bathrobes, and a pair of slippers he’d thrown into his overnight bag with other essentials like his mp3 collection, and Breaking Up For Dummies, his parents stopped talking with cutting suddenness. Kirsten took a delicate sip from her coffee mug, and Sandy opened the newspaper in front of his face. Seth frowned and shuffled all the way in, eyeing them warily as he reached for the coffee pot. He turned his back to them to pour the coffee, inhaling the steam that rose from the liquid as it filled his cup.
“I called Ryan,” Kirsten said.
Seth jumped, and splattered coffee on the counter top. Kirsten sighed behind him, and he heard her set her mug down with a quiet click. Clearing his throat, he replaced the coffee pot and dampened a paper towel to wipe up the mess. He took his time, circling the counter top with the paper towel long after the coffee had been soaked up. But that was just delaying the inevitable. After tossing the paper towel in the trash, he fixed his face to bland inquiry, and turned to face his mother with the coffee cup held before his chin like a shield. She was facing him already, sitting practically on the edge of the seat with her knees together, and her palms cupping them.
“Oh?” Seth raised an eyebrow. “Why?”
Kirsten’s eyebrows had their own power. Neatly plucked, they arched pointedly at him, and Seth took a nervous gulp of his coffee. When it scalded the back of his throat on the way down, Seth gave a mental shrug. He hadn’t needed those taste buds, anyway.
“It’s no big deal,” Seth said. “You look nice. Have you lost weight? Done something with your hair?”
She gave him more eyebrow than he could handle right then, and Seth dropped his gaze into the opaque liquid in his cup, seeing his own big hands wrapped around the delicate china. People said, “like I know the back of my own hand,” but Seth hadn’t spent a lot of time looking at the back of his hand. He’d spent more time looking at his belly button, and the back of his hand seemed alien and clumsy, his fingers too thin, the pores too big.
“Seth.” Kirsten had stood, and she was standing near the sink. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” Seth muttered, wondering if he would be more or less attractive if he shaved his fingers. “Nothing, really, can we not talk about this?”
“I worry,” she said, and Seth looked away from his hands. Her wrinkles were deeper than he remembered, but then, Seth guiltily realized he hadn’t seen her more than a couple times each month for the past year. “You never tell me what’s going on with you anymore, and Ryan’s almost as bad.”
“You don’t need to worry, mom. I’m not five, anymore. Most of the time, I don’t even wet the bed.” That earned a small smile. “So, um. When you called Ryan. What did he say?”
“He didn’t answer the phone. What was your fight about?”
Seth shrugged. “We’re not getting along, that’s all.” He crossed his legs at the ankle and leaned back against the counter, strumming out the beat to and I ran, I ran so far away, I just ran, I ran all night and day, with his thumb on the ceramic bottom of his cup. “I’m moving out, actually.”
Kirsten’s mouth dropped open.
I couldn’t get away, Seth strummed.
“I mean, I think I am.” Seth laughed nervously. “It takes a lot out of a person to deal with my charisma day in and day out, and I think it’s hurt Ryan’s ego to stand in my shadow all the time. So I thought, hey, maybe my loving parents miss me. I know, wow, I miss them, like, constantly. It’s hard to get any homework done with all the missing going on inside this deep, deep hole they’ve left.”
Seth widened his eyes hopefully, just as Kirsten narrowed hers. Sandy snorted behind the paper, folding it down to peer at Seth over the top with an insulting amount of disbelief. Kirsten turned her glare on Sandy. Sandy blinked in return.
“What?”
“This is serious,” she warned, frowning forbiddenly. “Don’t be amused by it, or Seth will think it’s okay to act like this. If their fight was bad enough for Seth to move out, then we have a problem.”
Sandy’s smile faded in increments, and he nodded. He set the paper to the side, revealing the marijuana plant colorfully depicted on his t-shirt, but if that might have amused Seth, the effect was lost when Sandy dug his knuckles into his eye sockets wearily, shoulders stooping forward.
“We?” Seth said, moving woodenly to the table. “What we?”
“What your mother means,” Sandy said, straightening,“is that life could become very uncomfortable for everyone if you and Ryan can’t work things out.”
Life could become very uncomfortable.
Ryan had let the sheet drop behind him, and taken a step inside. It was a small bathroom, and with that one step, he was standing at the sink with Seth. In the mirror, Seth had seen Ryan’s hand reach out in slow motion, fingertips shivering up the nape of his neck, before digging forcefully through the curls at the back of Seth’s head. Seth had seen his own face slacken, go dumb and blurry as Ryan pressed against his side.
Uncomfortable for everyone.
Seth had lost his taste for coffee, so he sat it on the table, and stood with his arms crossed, looking at the space between his mother and father. The double doors lead outside to the open patio, and through the glass, Seth’s eyes focused on the shadow of clouds scrolling across the cement. As a kid he’d sat on the warm rock next to the pool with his legs stretched out in front of him, watching the sky move slowly over his knees. He let his eyes fraction out a blink, and then he was seeing a little boy sitting on the patio in a green t-shirt and rolled up jeans, feet bare, toes pointing toward the clouds.
The little boy pulled his knees up to his chest, face lifting to the sun, and dark curls fell back from his forehead. The headphones were too big on him, and his lips moved uncertainly along to whatever song he was listening to. A bruise was fading on his cheekbone, turning yellow.
He turned, looking straight at Seth. Seth stopped breathing. The cement under the kid was gray and flat and unchanging, and Seth had spent so many days there he couldn’t remember them all, just the impression of music in his ear drums, sun on the top of his head, an ant crawling over his big toe. His reflection in the water, wavering as he stuck his feet in. Lonely.
Blinking again, he found his mother staring at him in concern. She glanced out at the patio, and then back at Seth, her forehead wrinkling. Seth met her eyes, and thought of the day she had picked him up from school early and taken him into the kitchen when they got home, packing ice into a wet towel, holding it to his cheek. The embarrassment had hurt worse than the throb under his eye. She sat him in the chair and asked him what had happened, and Seth hadn’t wanted to tell her, ashamed that all the kids thought he was weird, different, not like *them*.
Ryan had pressed against him, heat and muscle up and down Seth’s side, his cheekbone dragging over Seth’s neck until his lips were at Seth’s ear, whispering, and Seth had felt-embarrassed, burning all over, and-ashamed.
“Just imagine the family reunions,” Seth offered, shrugging.
“I’d rather not,” Sandy said. But then he obviously did, because he shuddered dramatically, nose crinkling. Shaking it off, he stood and put a hand on Seth’s shoulder, squeezing the tendon. “But you’ve hit it on the nail, son. Fighting with Ryan isn’t like fighting with a friend from school. For one thing, you can’t just decide you don’t want to see him anymore.”
Yeah, because that was Seth wanted, to not see his best friend anymore. Seth rolled his eyes and pulled away from Sandy, picking his coffee up, because even though he didn’t want it, it was never okay to waste The Bean.
“That’s all very true, and sound, and apt to my current situation, but I don’t think I’m at the step where I’m up to any advice. Maybe day two, okay? If you don’t mind, I’ve lost my appetite, so I think I’m gonna go drown myself in the pool until either I develop gills or CPR is necessary. If I’m flailing and screaming as I hold myself under, you’ll know which happened.”
Sandy and Kirsten locked eyes, and Seth left, their murmurs following him.
There was baggage involved, he thought, with his feet in the water, the clouds on his knees, but he didn’t want them to know how shaky security at the Seth Cohen Airport had become.
***
Seth was molding in the living room, wearing sweat pants with holes in all kinds of inappropriate places. The phone was on the coffee table, just at the edge of Seth’s eyes, which were focused on the television. VH1 was running some kind of Paula Abdul marathon that Seth was just masochistic enough to subject himself to, and if he had found himself singing along to a few songs, he blamed it on the plant life that had begun growing on his face, cleverly concealed as a patchwork beard.
The couch and Seth had become good friends over the past week, but it was a mutual thing. The only action the couch saw these days was the type Seth definitely wasn’t thinking about, because parents, and ew, traumatized for life, so the couch had probably missed the Seth Cohen Mope. The Mope sure hadn’t been the same without this couch, that was for sure. The handy throw pillows that smothered screams, the coffee table conveniently placed so he barely had to move his arm to take something off it, the plump cushions just plump enough to hide a dustbuster under in the case of spills. Seth peered down at the chip crumbs spotting the front of the shirt he’d slept in last night and decided not to change out of. At least some things never changed.
“Woe,” Seth muttered, between Paula songs. “Misery. Tear drop.
Shit, this wasn’t as much fun as it had once been.
Seth groaned pitifully and reached for the phone, which was all of three inches from him. Ryan still wasn’t answering his phone when Seth tried to call him. All of the forty-three times Seth had tried to call him. Obviously, Seth wasn’t counting the aborted attempts, when he hung up himself after the first ring. If he counted all of those, over the next week, Seth had spent more time on the phone calling Ryan and hanging up than he had blinking. Which was. Well. Seth didn’t like to think of himself as a stalker. But he had to admit there were similarities.
The phone rang twice. Seth hung up, put down the phone, and picked up the remote control. He turned up the volume. He turned it up so loud, he unfortunately didn’t hear the knock on the door, or the door opening when the knocking was unheard. He didn’t hear the stalking of french heels through the Cohen halls. He didn’t hear the growling when he was spotted, becoming one with his self pity. He didn’t hear the slow cracking of knuckles, and he didn’t know to be afraid. Not until a pair of legs was standing right in front of him like every wet dream a thirteen-year-old graphic novel enthusiast had woken up from. Seth paused, mid-lyric, eyes lifting.
“Why aren’t I surprised?” Summer hissed, teeth bared. Seth screamed. He reached for the dustbuster to defend himself, but he was too late.
Cowards are punished in Hell.
At least that’s what Summer told him, several times, as she was beating him to splinters with her extremely fashionable handbag. It was a new one, he could tell, because he hadn’t been beaten within an inch of his life by it before.
“Ow! Ow!” Seth blindly tried to dodge the blows, falling of the couch and landing on his knees next to the coffee table. “What the fuck, Summer?”
“That’s for being a dumbass!”
She geared up for another swing at him, arm lifting just as Seth’s mom walked out from the kitchen, holding a glass of soda with a lemon on the lip. Summer froze, the murder weapon held aloft. Kirsten’s face remained expressionless, and the moment stretched. Summer bit her lip, starting to lower her arm.
“Oh, no, don’t mind me,” Kirsten said, taking a sip of her soda. “Continue.”
“Mom!” Seth put a hand over his heart, scandalized, but didn’t have time for proper outrage because he was too busy crawling away on his knees when Summer swung at him again. He hid on the other side of the couch, looking desperately to his mother for assistance. Summer simply climbed onto the couch, and whacked him on the top of his head, while his mother, fetching in a baby blue body suit, failed to provide the kind of rescue mother bears were infamous for.
“That looks like fun,” Kirsten said, dimpling when Seth gasped, holding onto his eye, which the zipper on the bag had managed to nearly gouge out. “I’d do it myself, Seth, but I threw out my back last night, and I don’t think I could put the force into it that Summer can. Which would be a shame.”
Summer behind him, Mother Dearest in front.
Next Thanksgiving, Seth decided, he’d have compassion for the wishbone.
“You’ll miss me when I’m six feet under, and I don’t mean as a guest character on the hit show. Which I miss. But let’s not go there.”
To make sure Summer understood this, Seth tilted his head and discovered her staring down at him over the top of the couch, her smile wide and a little wild. Seth waved at her and she waved back, like that one time she had on the playground before she forgot he existed.
“Hey, Seth.”
“Hey, Summer.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” Kirsten said, and from this angle, Seth could see up Summer’s nostrils when she looked at Kirsten and nodded. Kirsten disappeared in the direction her bedroom, humming happily under her breath, and Seth climbed to his feet, pretty sure he never wanted to know how his mom had thrown out her back.
“Blood traitor,” Seth mumbled, when his mother was safely behind closed doors, where she couldn’t hear him and sick Summer on him again.
Speaking of evil, crazy, dictator overlords...
Cautiously, he faced Summer, expecting an immediate resumption of the previous brutal death scene they had both been so engrossed in. Summer had since risen from the couch, and was standing with her hands balled on her hips. Truly, she shouldn’t be a scary sight, even with her face all scrunched up like that, but Seth knew her, and there were rage blackouts to be considered. Not to mention there were several heavy vases within grabbing distance of her expensive manicure.
Seth offered a tentative smile. “Have fun in Paris?”
Summer growled. Seth ducked behind his arms just as the handbag came cutting toward him. It hit his arm, but lacked the force of the other attacks, and Seth peeked through his fingers, framing her expression of disgust with his forefinger and thumb. Summer rolled her eyes, and marched into the kitchen on those deadly heels. Seth lowered his hands, following at a dragging pace, wary of being tricked.
He arrived in the kitchen just in time to see Summer tug her skirt down to a more reserved length as she sat in the chair at the end of the table, crossing her legs. Seth
had seen her make that move about a thousand times, and even now it was difficult not to a. have an aneurism b. trip over his tongue and have an aneurism. She had the leg over leg down, had made it an art; the subtle shift of muscle under tanned, satin skin; the way the skirt was just short enough to tease but long enough to keep the secret hidden. Ryan had once called it the Summer Slip and Slide.
Come to think of it, Ryan loved Summer, but he had never liked her very much.
Seth wondered what Ryan would think about the calm way Summer placed her bag in her lap, and rested her hands on it, one over the other. There was a stillness in her that had Seth willingly walking further into the room, eyeing her as she eyed him.
“I like your hair,” Seth said, planting himself on a stool.
If it happened to put a whole counter between himself and Summer’s hands of destruction-well, that’s just where the stool was. He was curious, not stupid.
Summer softened. She reached up self-consciously, touching the neat edges of her chin-length hair, then brushed her bangs to the side. The red-brown highlights brightened for an instant as they were trapped by the sunlight, and Seth realized he hadn’t talked to Summer in more than five months, since she’d called from the airport, saying she was going to find herself, so, like, don’t die of mediocrity while she was gone. He’d been skeptical, but somewhere in Paris, Summer had found herself after all.
“Really?” Summer asked, and unclenched a little more when he nodded. “I wanted something different. I’m going for Audrey Hepburn. She’s very fall season.”
Seth shifted uneasily, abruptly aware that he’d sat on this stool hundreds of times before, and his feet were banging against the legs of it like they always had. Everything about him-the clothes, the music, the mope sweat-was the same. It could be any day of any year. Mediocre, uninspired, boring. All synonyms for Seth Cohen. No wonder Ryan was so annoyed. Seth was living his life in neutral.
“Seth,” Summer said, and Seth blinked, bringing her into focus. He had loved her so much once, but he hardly recognized her now.
“Huh?” was his brilliant reply.
She peered at him, nose crinkling as her eyebrows lowered. He recognized that look at least: Seth Cohen, what the hell are you on?
“I said I’m going for an Audrey Hepburn look.”
“She’d be jealous,” he murmured, an old co-conspirator. He traced a circle on the island’s faux-granite surface, finding it warm with daylight under his finger, and looked at her from under his eyelashes. She nearly smiled, her lips twitching like they wanted to, and her face went as melted as a slushy left out of the shade. I still have it, Seth thought, feeling vindicated somehow-Summer couldn’t have changed too much if she was still susceptible-but then she stiffened and narrowed her eyes at him, her nostrils flaring, and Seth tried hard to remember when he’d last showered.
“Don’t try to get around me, Cohen. You’re not that cute.”
“You used to think I was.”
“Things have changed,” she said, pointedly.
Normally, Seth would have fought harder, thrown in a few puppy dog faces that had never failed to turn Summer into butter. Normally, but Summer had sounded a little hurt under all that edge, and Seth was tired of hurting the people in his life. Ryan had put him over his yearly limit. All he wanted to do for the next six months was lounge around in his sweat pants, watching VH1 and old Michael J. Fox movies until he fell into an exhausted coma, and ceased being a threat to anyone’s growth.
“It was worth a try.” Seth sank down to the counter, folding his arms together and setting his chin on them. A yawn wandered up his throat and was strangled gently by his tongue hugging the roof of his mouth. “So why are you mad at me this time? I don’t think I’ve harassed any of your boyfriends lately. No mouth breathing phone calls at three in the morning. I’m truly stumped.”
“I stopped by your apartment today,” Summer said, and Seth’s heart blinked widely inside his chest, before chaining itself to his ribs and refusing to move at all. “I used the key you gave me, because naturally, I wanted to surprise my best ex-boyfriend on the second day home from my journey of self-discovery.”
“Oh,” Seth whispered. “Naturally.”
“The weird thing,” Summer continued seamlessly, “was that it wasn’t your apartment anymore. And while I was away, Ryan had mutated into the Hulk, with only a marginally improved wardrobe.”
“Yeah.” He straightened, putting his feet on the floor. “About that.”
Summer held up her palm, lips thin, and Seth shut up. A funny fact about Summer: she liked to tell her stories whether her audience was willing, or in this case, not. She had a knack for dramatic timing.
“So of course I ask him, Ryan, what’s wrong, why are you wearing that tacky jacket again? And he throws me out. And he was drunk, Seth. Very, very drunk.”
“Ryan doesn’t drink,” Seth interrupted.
Seth remembered having that conversation with Ryan a couple of years ago, after waking up with a hangover and finding himself on Ryan’s bed, without a clue how he had ended up there. Ryan had already been awake, and was pulling on his pants near the doors when Seth finally felt the world stop spinning long enough to speak in complete sentences that didn’t involve ‘ugh’ and ‘gag’ and ‘gonna puke’.
“I just feel bad,” Seth had said. “You’re always the sober one, making sure I don’t fall in a ditch, or have pathetic drunk sex with anyone skanky. Tell you what, at the next party I won’t drink anything, so you can get completely smashed and attempt to have drunk, skanky sex. Or skanky, drunk sex. Whichever you’re more comfortable with.”
“No thanks,” Ryan said, opening the blinds and generally making Seth’s life a miserable blur of light. Ryan was the only dark shape in a sea of migraine, standing by the window and blotting out some of the hurt-maker, and Seth turned his face to Ryan’s shadow, trying to soak it up. Ryan paused, and Seth thought he maybe looked over his shoulder at Seth, but Seth couldn’t be sure, because of the misery, the pain, and the ow. “My mom is an alcoholic. Marissa is an alcoholic. Kirsten, she’s... I’ll have a beer, maybe, or one shot of the hard stuff, but I’ll never have two.”
Seth sat up. His shirt stuck to him in sweaty patches, peeling away from him as he moved. The room spun, his head spun, everything began to spin, and he gagged, clamping his eyes shut and pressing his fists to his temples. Death, he prayed, death unto all alcohol distributors, then Ryan’s hand touched the back of his neck, cool and dry and electric like the eye of a storm. Seth leaned into it, sighing, and felt the brief press of Ryan’s hard belly against his cheek as he was pulled forward into a hug.
The world was very warm and the color of Ryan’s t-shirt. Blue, laundry detergent, and Seth inhaled.
“Okay?” Ryan asked, backing away an inch.
“In a minute,” Seth murmured, wondering how it was possible to get an erection five seconds after he’d nearly blown chunks. And Holy First Edition Batman, what the hell had there been to get excited about? Stupid happy-go-lucky penis.
The room stopped spinning, and Ryan’s fingers had slipped away.
“No way he was drunk,” Seth said, shaking his head. “Were you? Did you break into the mini bar or something?”
“Do not make me stab you with my hate,” Summer snapped, with a level of viciousness she usually reserved for shopping mall brawls over shoes. Seth ducked his head, watching where his hands pulled at each other inside a cloud of dust mites. Her voice was strained when she continued. “Why is it that when a girl goes away for a few months to find herself the entire world falls apart?”
The refrigerator kicked on, a mild hum compared to the rumble of Seth and Ryan’s. I’ll fix it, Ryan had kept on saying. He’d even bought a book on it from the used bookstore, but when he couldn’t figure it out, he’d been too proud to call a professional in and Seth had grown to like the noise by then. Seth curled away from it now.
“You are the glue, Summer,” he was saying, “and we are the shattered pieces. You need to put us back together again.”
Summer breathed in sharply, mouth whitening around the edges with tension. It was dumb joke, because at one time Seth had believed it was true, and he’d never gotten to the point where he wasn’t resentful that she hadn’t held him together. Like Humpty Dumpty had sued the queen’s men, even though it was really his own fault for getting on that stupid wall anyway, Seth had wanted, for a long time, to find some way to exact revenge on Summer for moving on and leaving him behind. Summer picked at the edge of her skirt, smoothing it until the purse strings loosened their grip on her face, and then she uncrossed her legs and leaned forward to inspect him with her scary brain.
Seth dredged up a hollow chuckle from somewhere. He had hit a cat once, when he’d first gotten his license. It had been a lot like hitting a speed bump, except the speed bump had given way under the wheels. Popped. When he’d braked and gotten out to look under the car, the cat had still been alive, tail flopping back and forth on the pavement, tongue hanging out between its teeth. Seth’s laugh came from that place in his mind, that memory of the tail-flopping, flopping, then still.
He twitched, and Summer nodded.
“I think I’m having a mental breakdown,” Seth dead panned.
“Hmph,” Summer grunted, not objecting to his statement. “What happened?”
“I have no idea,” Seth lied. He shriveled in place when Summer’s hands clenched over the bag in her lap, quickly talking over the soundtrack of violence that was probably playing in her head. “I have a theory that Ryan was abducted by aliens and returned with one less funny bone, but I have to iron out a few details. Did they leave a robot in his place while they worked on him? I mean, there are some flaws in that theory. How did it take a shower? Not that I saw Ryan take a shower. That would be. Huh.”
“I should rephrase my last question.” Summer didn’t blink. “What did you do?”
She really should have become a lawyer. Especially if lawyers were anything like what Ally Mcbeal had claimed. With the short skirts and random lesbian action.
Seth widened his eyes. He was going for innocent, but would settle for a murky shade of grey.
“Why do you automatically assume I did something?”
“Seth,” Summer said, a hundred situations fitted in one short syllable.
The hot air drained from him, leaving his heart vaguely achy, like there was a corn chip lodged in his chest.
The day Summer left him, she had done it outside of the pool house, on a nice day, when the sun turned the water to glass. Seth had been sitting on Ryan’s bed while Ryan sat on the floor next to his knees, the wires to their controllers tangled because Ryan had a thing about being first player and Seth had a thing about fighting him for the honor. He’d just happened to look up in the middle of kicking Ryan’s fighter’s ass, and seen Summer standing outside the glass doors, in the shadow cast by the overhanging roof, one hand raised and fisted as if she’d wanted to knock but hadn’t been able to go through with it.
“Be right back, man.”
Ryan glanced at him, then at Summer, and nodded, pausing the game.
Outside, he hugged her hello, and sat down next to the pool when she told him they had to talk in that tone of voice that meant nothing good could possibly come out of a conversation. She didn’t sit next to him.
He had his head phones on, hanging around his neck, and tinny music filtered up to his ears as she bent down to him and kissed him without the anger that he’d tasted lingering behind her lipstick so much in recent weeks. He smiled at her, and she made a visible effort to smile back, but what came out looked more like the results of an appointment with a scalpel happy dentist than happiness. Seth’s stomach dropped as she reached out, her fingers forming ten points of pressure on either side of his face.
“I love you, but,” she’d said, and Seth had blocked out the rest of the words, watching her mouth move around words but with the volume down. Eventually she stopped talking, after the parting shot, “So, like, don’t kill yourself or anything,” that Seth only kind of heard, and walked off, sounding suspiciously like she was crying.
Ryan came out of the pool house when she was gone. Seth saw Ryan’s wavy reflection in the water, saw Ryan not wanting to involve himself, but Ryan sat next to him anyway, their bare knees bumping awkwardly. When Seth didn’t say anything, when they had just been sitting there for a while, Ryan lifted the head phones from around Seth’s neck and placed them over Seth’s ears. He steals the whole show with his last dying scene. No one sees the two sides of Monsieur Valentine. Seth ducked his head when Ryan settled an arm around Seth’s shoulders, and his fingers counted the drum beat of the song on Seth’s arm, fingertips sometimes landing on the cuff of Seth’s shirt, sometimes where the skin was soft and numb from heartbreak.
The next time he had seen Summer, he’d put the guy she was talking to in a headlock, and gotten suspended for three days.
“Okay, so I haven’t been the epitome of maturity,” Seth admitted.
Summer’s diamond heart necklace swung and landed crookedly on her collar bone as she lifted a hand to tuck her hair behind her ear. Seth had almost bought her one like that three weeks after they had broken up, except not a heart, a carnation, and with pink diamonds, but Ryan had dragged him away from the window, literally, and soothed him with a coffee from Starbucks. He’d mixed the sugar and creamer in for him and everything, all while keeping one hand tight around Seth’s forearm to keep him there.
Ryan had sat across from him at a table next to the wide restaurant window, and listened to Seth go crazy until Seth crazied himself out, and Ryan was.
Man, Ryan was scary.
“You have to stop this,” Summer said seriously, and the necklace was hidden again as she shifted, covered by the collar of her shirt. “You can’t keep running away from everything. Why are you running anyway, you crazy dork? You have everything. The perfect family. Perfect friends. The perfect life. Did I mention what perfect friends you have? You are the last person in the world that should be running.”
I can’t seem to stop, he wanted to say, and his foot began tapping against the side of the island as if to illustrate that point. If he had any normal friends, they would have neglected him in his natural vegetated sate until he felt like a whole person again, or at least like a cucumber. He’d run away and it wouldn’t matter, because no one would care. Sadly, his friends were abnormally interested in his welfare.
“Curse of having very long legs,” he said instead. For the sake of conserving time, he told himself. Because there was a real lack of it, what with his shaky attendance of classes and non attendance at the record store. He forced his foot to remain still, curling his toes around one of the stool legs. “Even when I’m walking at my slowest pace, I’m still moving faster than everyone else.”
Summer gritted her teeth, lips peeling back.
“Did I mention my shoes double as deadly weapons?” Summer pointed one foot at him in warning. Seth swallowed. The toes *did* appear oddly sharp. “Be serious for one second. I know that’s hard for you, what with having half your brain removed by accident, but you’re fucking up your life, and I just can’t allow that.” She paused, taking a deep breath. She must have been going to therapy again. “Christ, Seth, you’re such a fucktard. You didn’t even tell him you were leaving.”
“I was going to leave a note.” Seth scowled at the bread basket. “Probably.”
“You’re hopeless, Cohen.”
Yeah, he probably was. He was going to have to be surgically removed from that couch, and it was like a callback to those weeks dying over Summer and Zach, except worse, because Ryan wasn’t there to make him take a shower. Ryan wasn’t there to force Seth to live his stupid hungry life even if he couldn’t have what he wanted. And the two situations were *not* the same, right, but somehow, Seth found he was dying over Ryan anyway.
“You screwed up big,” Summer said, adding salt to an already festering wound.
Seth exploded.
“You don’t know what it was like!” Seth yelled. Summer’s eyes burst wide open, and her hand jerked, knocking the bag to the floor. Car keys and a tube of lip gloss spilled out of the opening, tumbling into a shaded area. Seth stood up, slamming his hands down on the counter, and. Ouch. “You didn’t live with him for three months while every other expression on his face said he hated your fucking idiot guts! I couldn’t move without him jumping down my throat, and I’m a very anxious person. I can’t live in an environment like that. I’m surprised I held out as long as I did, honestly.”
He stopped because he couldn’t breath, and his chest felt like it was about to explode. Summer blurred before him, and Seth realized that he was going to cry. Summer’s blurred shape moved, and if she said one wrong word, he was going to start balling. He’d always hated that about himself, the wimpy quality that made him cry at the slightest provocation. That’s why Luke had started to pick on him in the first place, back when he hadn’t been a Golden Retriever. He’d eerily been able to see right inside Seth, right inside what made Seth tick, and discovered that the crying over his skinned knee habit was one of Seth’s larger emotion holes.
As Seth had gotten older, the crying had mostly stopped. Why give everyone that thought he was a freak yet another reason to stuff him in his locker? Eating lunch alone was bad enough, crying while doing it would be much worse. Still, every now and then, something he should easily have been able to ignore hit him so hard it made his ears ring and his chest burn. He’d have to get out of wherever he was fast to avoid a breakdown.
Seth blinked his vision clear, and found Summer staring at him, biting her bottom lip like she wanted to say more, and was having a hard time restraining herself.
“Ryan didn’t look like he was having much fun himself,” she finally blurted.
Seth sat again, his knees weak.
“How is he?” he asked. “Besides drunk, I mean.”
“Wrecked,” Summer said, lips moving tremulously into a smile. Her silver eyeshadow glittered under the slant of sunlight. “And not just him. The apartment was trashed, too. A hovel. A dirty, dirty hovel. You have to go back there and fix him.”
Not good, Seth, breaking your toys like that.
Seth tried to speak, then turned away, lips pulling back in a grimace as he faced the sun head on, let it burn his eyes. Outside, the pool was bright blue and glimmering, undisturbed. Moving out, just admit it, leaving Ryan, was supposed to have been the fix to a bad situation, and things had only gotten worse since.
Two weeks later, and Ryan was deep in whatever darkness was eating at him, and no one was on Seth’s side, not even Summer. That burned. How could they not see that he was only trying to make things better?
“Move back,” Summer said. “It’s so simple, Cohen, even you could handle it.”
“That’s not happening,” Seth replied wearily. “For one thing, I doubt Ryan would let me. For another, that wouldn’t fix this. You may think I’m completely stupid, and well, yeah, but I left for a reason. You might not see it, but it’s a pretty good one. Like, okay, you know when Mulder and Scully finally got together on the X-Files? I mean, it sounded like a great idea, but the execution was pretty poor, and I just do not want to be that last die-hard fan holding onto mine and Ryan’s friendship.”
Summer blinked twice. “Wait a second, are you just getting stranger with age?”
“That’s my son,” Sandy called from the livingroom, where he’d no doubt been eavesdropping. When he came into the kitchen, he was wearing a robe and flip-flops, and he was loose-limbed and shining. “Like cheese, his quirks only become more apparent as time progresses.”
Seth shielded his eyes with one hand, turning as his dad moved into his line of sight again.
“That’s my dad,” Seth said. “The guy with the sex glow. Summer, tell me that’s not the sex glow.”
“Ignore the strange boy and tell me about Paris,” Sandy said, and kissed the top of Summer’s head as he passed to the coffee. She glittered a little, and they chatted like old friends, Summer bouncing in her chair as she recounted the details of her trip, Sandy propped against the sink and interjecting with his own tale of Paris as seen by bus.
Seth rolled his eyes, and grabbed a bagel to occupy his hands, tearing it into tiny chunks. Neither noticed his sullen mug, or if they did, they chose to ignore it in favor of discussing travel conditions during the spring. When he was reduced to building a replica of Michael Jackson’s lost nose out of the crumbs for entertainment, Seth wondered when his parents had begun to love Summer more than they loved him. It was a good thing that his and Summer’s break up had been more or less amicable, because if it hadn’t been, Seth was pretty sure Summer would have gotten his parents along with the anime.
His ears perked when he became the subject of their conversation.
“So I take it Seth and Ryan are still fighting?” his dad asked.
“No, Seth’s just being a dumbass,” Summer said pointedly. “And Ryan, strangely enough, resents him being a dumbass.”
“Seth’s good at that,” Sandy said, surveying his son with a satisfied smile, and Seth thought, yay, more fodder for my complex self-worth issues, and shoved a bit of dry bagel into his mouth. “But he turned out pretty well, considering the little, uh, accident where he rolled off the changing table.” Sandy and Summer shared a knowing glance when Seth immediately started choking on the bagel. “Are you here to take him off our hands?”
“I’m trying,” Summer sighed, ignoring Seth’s I’m choking, save me flailing. “Like I said. Dumbass.”
“Well someone has to do something, the smell is starting to spread from his room to ours. If he and Ryan don’t make up soon, I think we’re going to have biological warfare on our hands.”
“Funny,” Seth muttered, after finally managing to swallow the hard chunk of bread.
Sandy patted Summer’s newly shorn head a final time, then flip-flopped his post-had-sex-with-Seth’s-Mom-gross-dirty-bad-gross way over to Seth. He put an arm around his son’s shoulder, tightening his hold when Seth shuddered and tried to shrug him off.
“Son, I love you,” Sandy said. “But you stink. Take a shower. And after you’ve done that, study for your finals, so you don’t flunk out of college the way you’ve flunked out of your job.”
“I haven’t flunked out,” Seth mumbled. “I just haven’t gone in two weeks.”
“Flunked,” Summer sing-songed. “Didn’t I always tell you this was your future?”
“Ryan’s not going to class,” Seth pointed out. “Why is no one yelling at him?”
“No one likes a tattle-tale.” Sandy popped Seth lightly on the back of the head, but then rested his hand there, fingertips entwined with the curls. “But since you bring it up, I’ve been informed about that situation, and Ryan and I have already spoken. It would be nice if you took a crack at it, too. He’ll listen to you.”
“Since when?” Seth demanded sullenly, picking at the bagel more violently, sending large chunks flying. Ryan sure hadn’t listened to him the last time they had talked. And ignoring Seth’s phone calls wasn’t listening as far as Seth knew. “What funky alternative universe do you live in?”
“The one where both my sons listen to my wisdom,” Sandy said, mostly to himself, then squeezed Seth’s neck before releasing him. “I’ll leave you and Summer to the banter then.” He moved to leave, walking a little slowly, as if he was sore, before turning back with a gentle expression that immediately made Seth tense up, drop the last bits of the bagel. “I love you, Seth, I really do. And you can come home any time you want to. But if you’re not out of here by this weekend, I’m putting you on the curb with the trash. You’re tainting my groove, boy.”
On that last hideous note, Sandy exited stage left.
Seth groaned and bent down, banging his head repeatedly on the counter.
“I hate my life,” he stated mournfully. “And everyone in it hates me back.”
“It’s not so bad,” Summer said. Seth stopped beating up the counter with his head so he could glare at her, aware and unconcerned that there were bagel crumbs stuck to his forehead. Summer waved a hand in the air impatiently, snapping her fingers. “You could try, I don’t know, talking to Ryan about why he’s been more grumpy than he usually is. I’m pretty sure if you said two words to him, he would fall into your arms in cheesy Hollywood romance style.”
Seth flushed beet red, straight to his Aqua Teen Hunger Force boxers. Now even Summer was saying that, that, Seth couldn’t even go there, and he thought seriously about ending it all in the pool again. The image of himself floating face down in the water was pretty appealing compared to the current image of Summer smirking at him.
“Pointed jokes against my heterosexuality aside, you aren’t helping at all. Where’s the glue?” Seth asked. “Be the glue.”
“Seth. Come on.” She raised her hand, and tilted it back and forth in the universally politically incorrect sign language of flaming homosexuals everywhere. “I know, all right?”
“Glue!” Seth shouted, slapping the counter again.
Summer rolled her eyes. She collapsed against the back of the chair and muttered under her breath for a moment, before she bent and grabbed the handbag from the floor, before standing and stalking toward her frozen prey. Seth moved only his eyes as she approached, and when she was directly in front of him, his lips unglued themselves.
Barely.
“Um, Summer, you’re scaring me here.”
“Shut up.”
Summer snatched his ear and twisted it as Seth howled, tumbling off the stool and to his knees before her, which funnily enough, was where he had found himself often enough if their relationship that he almost found it comforting. If not for the huge pain coming from her nails digging into the cartelidge of his ear, he might have felt right at home.
“Okay, moron, you better be listening to me, because I am sick of your shit, and the gloves are coming off.” She twisted again, and Seth was lifted part of the way off the floor as she pulled his face close to hers. He could smell the shampoo she’d used that morning. “I gave you up two years ago. And it wasn’t easy. I didn’t want to. I loved you so much it made me crazy. Don’t make me murder you and ruin all my hard work.”
“I... I don’t get it.” He licked his lips, eyes flickering to the side. “What you’re talking about.”
“Of course you don’t.” Summer released him, and Seth drooped to the floor, rubbing his ear where it had begun to burn. Summer wiped her palms down the sides of her blouse, either smoothing the fabric or wiping Seth’s mope grease away. “You never know what anyone is talking about, because a few guys said some stupid things to you in highschool, and now you’ve shoved your head so far up your ass that it’s cut off the blood circulation in your brain.”
A few guys. Stupid things.
Summer didn’t know the half of it.
“Ryan’s been an asshole for three months,” Seth said bitterly, completely ignoring her point, because she had no idea what he’d gone through, and he would have died on the spot if she ever found out. “Am I supposed to forget that and crawl back? I’m a coward, but I have more backbone than that.”
“What am I, applying for sainthood? God! Don’t forget it,” Summer advised reluctantly. “Figure out why. Annoy him until he opens up or something, we all know you’re good at that.”
Seth laughed, a little, but he meant it this time.
“Ouch, and there she is with the backhanded compliment. I missed you, Roberts.”
“Same here, Cohen.” Summer smiled, for a moment, and ignored his flinch to smooth back the hair from his forehead. She looked lost for an instant, the motion of her hand slowing, then stilling as she stared down at him, before she startled, and abruptly ripped her hand away, nearly taking a few of Seth’s hairs with her. “Well, that’s my charity points for the day. I have to go to L.A. for dinner with Marissa, so you’ll have to excuse me, I don’t want to be late.”
Seth stood, slowly, and followed her out of the kitchen.
“How is Marissa?” he asked in the hallway..
“Still fabulous and famous and a little too friendly with Paris Hilton.” She didn’t turn around, waving at him over her shoulder. “Later, bitch.”
Seth grabbed her and spun her around, bringing her in close for a soft kiss on her mouth. She sighed, and pulled back, glaring up at him half-heartedly.
“See ya, ho,” he whispered.
She laughed too loudly and shoved him off as if he was the dirty gym sock he felt like. When she sauntered out the door, a swing in her walk, Seth faded a little, along with the day. He returned to the kitchen, and folding his arms together, he contemplated Michael Jackon’s nose reposed in all its former glory on the sunlit counter.
“You probably think I should stop cutting off my nose to spite my face.” The crumb nose seemed baleful and distant. “Yeah, I’m not as funny as I think I am. I get that a lot.”
* * *
TBC
A/N: I'm not completely satisfied with this part. It is very slow paced, and---no Ryan? Where's the good in that? But hey, it wanted to be written this way. Damn introspective, stubborn, STUCK Seth.
Feedback is my fuel. But hopefully not as expensive.