Unspoken Vows
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All my loving, I will send to you.
All my loving, darling, I’ll be true…
The song plays muffled and tinny from somewhere among the discarded clothes on the floor, and Ryan stirs sleepily, trying to make sense of the sound. Against his neck, Brendon murmurs something unintelligible, lips tickling as they brush over his skin.
And then while I’m away,
I’ll write home everyday…
The ringtone grows louder, and something suddenly clicks in Ryan’s mind. The realisation travels down his spine, making his entire body stiffen as he remembers what number Jon programmed that particular song to sometime between beer and tequila shots at the party the night before. Brendon must feel the mood shift, because he opens his eyes and strokes a hand soothingly over Ryan’s chest.
“Are you getting that?”
“It’s Keltie. I don’t know if I can talk to her right now.”
Brendon nods against his neck, pulling Ryan a little tighter. The phone keeps ringing, louder and louder until it feels like the sound is filling the entire room. When it starts in on the second chorus, Brendon twists around, fumbling over the edge of the bed until he finds Ryan’s jeans, gets the phone out, puts it gently on Ryan’s stomach.
“Talk to her,” he says. “I’ll go take a shower. We’ll figure it out.”
Ryan nods, his throat suddenly very dry. A leaden feeling settles in his stomach, growing heavier and heavier as he takes up the phone, brings it to his ear.
“Hi, Kelts.”
He sits up against the headboard, closes his eyes, tries not to think about the fact that he’s in Brendon’s bed, naked and exhausted after having come more times in the last four or five hours than he usually does in a week. The entire room reeks of sex. Not thinking about it is impossible.
“Wow, your voice is really rough,” Keltie says, a teasing lilt to her voice. “Hard night last night?”
The sensation of a hard dick against his tongue, Brendon’s broken gasps filling the room as Ryan takes him in deeper, tries to teach himself how to swallow around the pulsing head…
“Yeah, you could say that,” he manages, and he doesn’t want to think in terms of innuendo, but it sounds like that in his head anyway. He breathes deeply, tries to calm his racing pulse. “How was the bachelorette party?”
Keltie laughs. “It was great,” she says happily. “I think there were over two hundred people there at one point. Lucy danced on the bar. Actually, we pretty much all did. How was yours? Any nice strippers?”
“Depends on how you count Gabe,” Ryan deadpans. “To be honest, I don’t remember too much after Jon and Bill pulled me to the bar and started lining up the shots.”
He’s not lying, he tells himself, trying to ease the immediate guilt in his gut. It works about as well as he might have expected.
“Jon Walker is a dangerous man,” Keltie muses. “It’s a lucky thing he didn’t kill you with those shots, or I would have had to get Cassie to kick his ass. I mean, what would I do with a 50.000 dollar wedding dress and no groom? Lace trains are a little formal for the clubbing scene, even if this is Las Vegas…”
She starts talking about arriving relatives, and Ryan does his best not to hyperventilate. With every name and time and little checkbox ticked on the things-that-need-to-be-taken-care-of-list, Ryan sees more faces on the back of his eyelids, more people to shock and hurt and disappoint with what he’s just done. There are Keltie’s cousins from Vermont, who came down to New York to help her shop for the perfect dress, Ryan’s grandma, who spends her days in a retirement home south of San Fransisco and who has been so happy to finally see her only grandchild get married that she even agreed to fly down, in spite of having sworn that she was too old to get in a plane again after she passed her eightieth birthday. There’s his mom, who puts up with her brothers and sisters in law for an entire week, even though she hates every single one of them. Keltie’s father, who’s picked out his first ever suit for his baby girl’s wedding. Pete and Patrick-who wrote them a fucking song-Spencer’s parents, almost everyone on the label…
The list goes on and on, and that’s even when he’s not counting the 150 or so of the plus-ones and more general acquaintances that add an extra layer of pressure on top of everything else. He feels utterly gutted where he sits, Keltie’s happy voice in his ear and Brendon’s touch still lingering on the inside of his thighs.
Ladies and gentlemen, we proudly present, a picturesque score of passing fantasy…
The last time he truly felt this kind of dark, twisted loathing, crawling and scratching its way through his blood, was at his father’s funeral. He doesn’t remember it having been quite this breathtakingly vicious even back then. He lets his mind move into autopilot, chatting pleasantly with his fiancée, promising to take care of picking up rings and somebody’s husband, saying it back (and finding that he means it, which feels even worse) when she tells him she missed him last night, that she loves him and that, just think, a week from now, they’ll be married, crazy huh?
Keltie hangs up with a ‘see you later, baby,’ and Ryan feels panic rise in his throat. The call clicks off and the phone falls with his hand to the mattress; Ryan pulls up his knees almost to his chest, wraps his arms around them and lets himself break.
***
“Ryan. Hey… Ryan, please…”
Warm arms around him and Brendon’s voice soft in his ear. He can’t stop shaking, even as Brendon somehow manages to uncurl his limbs and pull him into a tight hug, rocking him gently. He tries to protest when Brendon drags him off the bed, makes him stand on the soft carpet even though he can’t feel his legs-or any part of his body-anymore.
“Come on,” he urges. “Shower.”
Ryan wants to reply that Brendon’s already had a shower-that he can feel the smell of sweat and salt and sex on his skin replaced by something that smells a little bit like summer. His tongue is just as numb as the rest of him, though, so he lets Brendon lead him through the hallway and into the beautiful, tiled bathroom. The shower is the size of a minor castle (Brendon likes to dance around as well as sing when he showers), easily big enough for two. Brendon guides him under the enormous showerhead, turns on the water. Ryan closes his eyes and leans his head back into the spray.
***
“I can’t call off the wedding.”
The warm water is still pouring down over his body, hot and cleansing, calming nerves and tense muscles as it flows past. Brendon doesn’t answer, just moves his hands a little bit to the right, soaping up Ryan’s shoulder.
“I can’t do that to her, Bren,” he continues quietly. “There are too many people involved at this point. Way too much at stake. Fuck, everyone we know in the entire world is practically here to watch us get married.”
Brendon washes one of his arms in reply, caressing each finger softly before moving over to the chest. He places one hand over Ryan’s heart, the other at his waist and leans in, grabs a wet, lingering kiss.
“Before you proposed,” he starts, speaking against Ryan’s lips, “when you said you weren’t sure if it was the right thing to do, I stepped back. I thought we’d all be happier that way, that it would be easier, less pressure, less of a media circus and all that, you know?”
Ryan nods, eyes still closed as water keeps running down his face in steady streams.
“I kissed you then because I couldn’t not kiss you. I thought that even if I’d never know if we could have… I don’t know, the perfect fantasy, I guess, at least I’d know what it would be like to kiss you.”
He tilts his head, takes another kiss, then one more. Ryan’s mouth opens without prompting, matching Brendon’s lips, touch for touch.
“And now?” Ryan asks, fitting the words in between kisses, arms moving around Brendon’s waist as he backs them up against the shower wall. Brendon moans, pressing their hips close together, too spent to really get hard again, but still wanting so, so badly.
“I’ll kidnap you,” he says, pressing rhythmically into Ryan, pushing him back into the blue tile. “I’ll whisk you away to a desert island somewhere until we’re both old and grey and walking around on the beach with little canes made out of bamboo.”
“No, seriously.” Ryan breaks the kiss and pushes Brendon away. Just a couple of inches, but enough to sever the contact and shift the mood to something darker. “Seriously, Brendon,” he says, voice low and careful. “If this ends here, will we be okay?”
Brendon lowers his eyes, fixing them on the spot where his right hand is and doesn’t reply.
“Hey…”
Brendon looks back up, eyes dark brown and far too honest. “What do you think?” he says quietly, and Ryan registers the meaning of the slight inflection with a small pang. It’s not ‘what do you think?’ as in ‘where do you stand in this?’ but ‘what do you think?’ as in ‘are you really that stupid?’
Brendon leans in hesitantly, as though he really wants to pull away but just can’t help himself, and Ryan meets him half-way, surging forward. The kiss is rough and confused, painful in a number of ways and still so sweet and sure that Ryan can’t help but move closer, wrap his arms around Brendon’s neck and deepen the contact until there’s no room to breathe anymore. An acute sense of rightness wars with crippling guilt, and Ryan can’t tell which one is winning, just that they are slowly tearing him apart. He doesn’t know if he could bear this-survive this-living under the weight of guilt and pain every day, never free from it no matter how right it feels to love Brendon this way, with complete abandon and with everything inside of him.
Problem is, thinking about giving Brendon up, of never having this again now that he knows what it feels like, kind of makes him want to shrivel up and die.
Basically, he’s fucked beyond all hope of salvation.
There are no raindrops on roses and girls in white dresses, it's sleeping with roaches and taking best guesses…
“I love you,” Brendon murmurs against his lips. “I know I shouldn’t, and I definitely shouldn’t say it, not now, not like this, but I do. Fuck, Ryan, I’m so utterly, crazily in love with you that I don’t know what to do with myself anymore.”
Ryan chokes, the words me too-God, so, so much getting stuck in his throat, growing unsaid between his mouth and his lungs until everything is reeling. They kiss until they’re both exhausted and the water turns cold on their skin. They dress in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes, studiously not talking about what hasn’t been said.
It feels frighteningly like something coming to an end.
“Help me with these?” Brendon asks, and Ryan looks up from where he’s been buckling his belt with shaking fingers. He holds out his hands automatically when Brendon drops something into them and looks down, trying to make sense of the bundles in his arms.
Clean sheets.
Brendon starts stripping down the bed, and Ryan just stands there, clutching the creamy material, drawing in the soft smell of detergent and fabric softener through his nose.
They smell like goodbye.
MAKE YOUR CHOICE:
How does Ryan handle this?
Ryan tells Brendon that he loves him || Ryan goes through with the wedding