templemarker

by templemarker

Notes: Three thousand words about Ryan being a twat. You’d think I’d have written it in response to this, but no. Thanks to cass404.

***

Ryan looked at the slowly spreading ink splotch on the finely made page in front of him. The nib of the fountain pen Spencer’s dad had given him for his birthday last year dug into the paper too deeply to write anything legible; the nib had broken on a thoughtlessly crossed “t” and Ryan had been too deep in thought to register the leak until it was too late. His last three sentences were buried beneath expensive blue ink.

In Los Angeles, using old-fashioned materials like a fountain pen and leather-bound notebook felt anachronistic and out of place. He used them on purpose, sitting in the shade of the cafe’s umbrellas and sipping his iced gingerbread latte absently in the sunlight of early spring. Ryan liked LA, liked that he didn’t quite fit in there and yet his particular sense of style was never more unusual than anyone else’s. He was staying with Brendon, and with Shane, crashing on the pulled-out sofa next to Spencer. It felt young, doing that, younger than Ryan had felt in–a long time.

He crossed his sandaled feet and pushed the vintage Chanel sunglasses he’d stolen from his (ex-)girlfriend up his nose. They had a habit of sliding down, especially when he broke out in a light sweat and didn’t catch them. Spencer had suggested he return them, in that neutral voice that meant Spencer actually had a Very Specific Opinion about his suggestion but wouldn’t spell it out. Ryan had just looked back blankly, hiding his cowardice beneath the haze of the joint Brendon had rolled and lit moments before.

They weren’t important sentences, he thought, returning to the ruined page before him. Probably not important, anyway. He hadn’t been able to write anything for weeks, after months and months of nearly inescapable creativity. All the words he’d strung together these days seemed false, ringing untrue even to his biased ear. The last few weeks had left him feeling dry and wrung-out with nothing to show for his attempts.

Maybe it’s punishment. He turned the thought over and over in his mind: punishment, justice, anger, righteousness, false righteousness, capital punishment, justice. It’s a shame he didn’t believe in gods, he thought. This would be an excellent opportunity to appeal to one.

Somehow he’d managed to avoid the well of self-pity he usually stumbled into the moment anything went wrong. Spencer looked less and less apprehensive as the days and weeks went by and Ryan hadn’t destroyed things or gone into seclusion or drugged himself into a stupor. Or at least more of a stupor than normal. Ryan wasn’t sure what made this fuck-up different–it wasn’t as though he didn’t know he’d managed to ruin the second-best thing in his life. And he didn’t think he was isolating himself from the pain of it. It felt real enough. It just didn’t…hurt. Not like it might have before. When he’d slept with that girl, with those other girls, he’d known the risk. He did it anyway. And he accepted that Keltie left, and her reasons for leaving. Ryan hadn’t offered to make it right, hadn’t begged for her to take him back, hadn’t done much of anything, really, except let her go.

He half-remembered a conversation he had with Pete when two bottles of cheap red wine had knocked whatever sense remained out of him. He remembered asking if Pete thought it was ever possible to be truly happy, and he remembered the silence that followed.

The problem was, he didn’t remember the answer.

The sentences probably were terrible anyway, he thought dispassionately, and folded the soft leather of the cover over the mostly-dried pages. Right now he didn’t think he’d care if the spilled ink destroyed a few more of the pages in the book. A just punishment, and all.

He leaned back and pulled his iPod from the pocket of his wrinkled, faded jeans. He put the half-frayed earbuds in and let the player shuffle through songs. The first song to come up was The Smiths, “This Charming Man,” and Ryan let Morrissey’s upbeat ode to homoeroticism occupy his mind while his iced latte sweated away in a stray piece of sunlight.

He didn’t notice that someone had sat down opposite him until AC/DC jarred him from his reverie; Ryan looked from the brick wall he’d been staring at to the table where his iPod sat and found Spencer reading a newspaper across from him. Ryan pressed pause and looked at Spencer, waiting for him to explain why he was there.

“What, do I need an invitation to your pity party?” Spencer said with his usual infuriating calm, flipping the page of yesterday’s Le Monde. Ryan knew for a fact that Spencer couldn’t read it. He’d taken Spanish in high school.

“I had them engraved for a reason,” Ryan said, lifting his glass from the puddle that surrounded it and drinking the watery remnants of his coffee.

Spencer snorted, and flicked another page. Ryan was pretty sure that Spencer had drunkenly confessed to a really big crush on Carla Bruni Sarkozy, but the last month or so hadn’t been the best application of sobriety. It would explain Spencer’s laser-like devotion to the political section of his newspaper, anyway.

“So when are you going to stop sulking and call her?” Spencer asked, his Very Specific Opinion voice identifiable light-years away.

“Call who?” he said, purposefully obtuse.

That got Spencer to look away from what turned out to be a sneak peek of that season’s haute couture designs in the Culture section of the paper. God, how he would pay for that later.

“We could play this game, the one where you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, the one where you don’t acknowledge that you haven’t strung more than five words together since she broke up with you for being a douchey tool. I’m pretty good at this game. But you know, sometimes I get sick of watching you pretend like you’re fine when even your admittedly fine-tuned self-awareness is throwing red cards like a soccer player with a grudge.”

Ryan blinked slowly. Nothing pissed Spencer off more than not answering him right away. There were days Ryan reflected how fortunate they had been not to really get into a knock-down drag-out argument; they knew far too many ways to hurt each other hard.

“Since when do you know what soccer cards are?” he asked guilelessly. Spencer just rolled his eyes at the obfuscation and lifted his paper again.

“Did you walk here?” Ryan asked after a beat. “I walked.”

“I borrowed Shane’s car,” Spencer said, looking up at the waitress who had brought him an acai berry smoothie. Spencer had somehow taken to LA. It was rather mystifying.

“Can we go to Target? I want to get a pen.”

“You’ve got, like, sixty pens. You’ve got one in your hand right now.”

“I broke it.”

“Didn’t my dad give you that pen?”

A beat. “Yes.”

Spencer made a noise halfway between a sigh and assent, and Ryan held in the smile of satisfaction that wanted to show. It wasn’t that he delighted in pushing Spencer’s buttons, at least not most of the time. More that Spencer’s patience was probably too well-worn for Ryan not to use it, sometimes. Less so now that they were both of legal drinking age.

Ryan left a twenty on the table for his six-dollar drink, and Spencer rolled his eyes at Ryan’s thoughtless flash. “What?” Ryan said. “The server can use it more than I can.”

“And here I wondered how you were going to support your feathered hat lifestyle,” Spencer said dryly.

Spencer had parked Shane’s grey Honda hybrid a block and a half away, and Ryan lost himself in the not-quite-hot sunshine and the soft thwack of his sandals against the pavement. When they got in the car the radio station was turned to mariachi music, and neither of them changed it as Spencer made a smooth u-turn and pulled out into the main road.

“I don’t think I meant to hurt her,” Ryan said, mulling over the words even as he said them.

Spencer was quiet for a moment, and it took Ryan a second to realize he was laughing silently, towards the window so Ryan wouldn’t see. “What?” Ryan asked. “I don’t think I did.”

A short, sharp laugh that sounded a little painful to Ryan’s ears managed to escape from Spencer’s control. “You didn’t mean to hurt her when you fucked that girl from the club in Dublin, right? When you called her that night in New York and asked how her day was? Or what about that time in Iowa, Ryan, bus call was at fucking one a.m. and you still managed to find something to do involving the backseat of a Lincoln and the condoms you stole from Brendon. Did you mean to hurt her when you got drunk at fucking Trace Cyrus’s party in LA and the girl you were going down on in the spare bedroom fucking shouted your name so loud the whole house could hear it? I mean, and those are just off the top of my head, Ross, so don’t give me a fucking line like that. Just don’t.”

“Are you mad that I fucked around on Keltie, or are you mad that you didn’t stop me?” Ryan asked curiously.

Spencer cut him a glare that was clear even through the dark lenses on his Ray-Bans. “I have never been able to stop you doing a damn thing, ever, in your life.”

The strident sounds of a half-muted trumpet cut the silence in the car pretty effectively.

Target wasn’t as crowded at eleven in the morning as it would be later on that day, and maybe the best part of LA was that no one paid even a little bit of attention to them. There were far too many other, more interesting people to look at and follow around. A couple of quasi-famous musicians in that band with that one video were of completely no notice to the larger mall-going population. Ryan ambled around in the direction of the office supplies, Spencer trailing behind him with his thumbs firmly planted on his phone.

The thing was, he hadn’t meant to hurt Keltie. All that shit he did wasn’t about hurting her, or cheating on her. It wasn’t about her at all. Which was probably why it had been impossible to apologize to her. Fucking some girl in the closet of a venue was never about his relationship with Keltie, or trying to get out of it, or whatever. It was about Ryan, if it was about anything at all, and there were still huge parts of himself he didn’t know well enough to talk about yet. This was probably one of them.

Fine-tuned self-awareness floated through his mind. Yeah, and fuck that too. Admittedly he could spend hours, days, within the confines of his own head if someone didn’t come drag him out of it. But he was used to its edges and sharp pointy bits, anyway.

“The point is, you did hurt her,” Spencer said, gummy bears and Vitamin Water in hand twenty minutes later. “You hurt her, and she left you, and you’re torn up about that, and you never apologized for it. For hurting her, the way that you did, and letting her leave.”

“You think she wanted me to fight for her?” Ryan asked, surprised.

Spencer snorted. “I think she wanted something more than silently letting her walk out the door with your tiny dog,” he said.

“I do miss Hobo,” Ryan said regretfully.

Spencer smacked him upside the head, prompting a laugh from the guy behind the self-check out station. “Fucker, you should miss your girlfriend that you fucking cheated on who still thinks it was only the one time, you enormous tool.”

“Would it work if I texted her?” Ryan asked.

Spencer’s stare could have melted glaciers.

“Do you even want to get back together with her?” he asked. “Because, while you’ve been a miserable, self-pitying misanthrope–more than you are normally, anyway–for the last month, you sound like you don’t even care if she was back in your life.”

That thought kept him occupied until they pulled up to the taco cart on the side of the highway for lunch. Over carne asada fries and cheesy, grease-stained styrofoam, Ryan said, “I think I was uncomfortable with that much happiness.”

Spencer didn’t even blink, just stole Ryan’s peppers and put more hot sauce on his taquitos. “No shit? Really? You, scared of being happy? Why, I never.”

“Sometimes I tire of your sarcasm.”

“Sometimes I tire of your face.”

Ryan got up to buy some extra crema agria, and when he came back half his fries had disappeared and half of the taquitos had reappeared in its place. “You always make them too hot,” Ryan complained, sitting down and dumping the entire thing of sour cream on top of his food.

“Too hot, too hot,” Spencer mimicked, shoving a forkful of entirely too spicy food into his mouth. “God, why can’t you just fucking man up and apologize instead of hiding out at Brendon’s like a bitch?”

“I’m not sure I’d mean it,” Ryan said, staring down at his food, trying to scrape off all the fucking hot sauce Spencer loved.

“Setting aside that tasty little factoid, did you think that maybe the apology isn’t to make you feel better, but to give her something for fucking her over?”

“It seems a bit late for that, don’t you think?” Ryan pointed out.

“Probably. But you should do it anyway.”

They finished their food in relative silence, apart from the alerts letting Spencer know he had a new text message, and when they got back in the car it was hot enough that they turned on the air conditioner and waited until it was blowing cool, processed air on them to leave. Afternoon traffic had started to pick up, and still the mariachi music came through the speakers. Ryan thought idly about changing it, turning his right hand over and over to see the different shapes his pen’s ink had left there.

“What makes you think she’d even want to hear from me?” Ryan asked softly. He would never admit that Spencer was right–not in a situation like this, anyway–but Spencer was right, and the first step towards keeping him from the hateful satisfaction he always had when Ryan acquiesced to his point of view was to bypass talking about rightness or wrongness altogether and go straight into the action part of the conversation.

“What makes you think she doesn’t?” Spencer asked philosophically, and Ryan could hear the bastard’s satisfaction in the question.

“I dislike it when you’re right,” Ryan informed him as he took out his phone.

“Some days you dislike it when I breathe,” Spencer pointed out. “Just fucking call her already.”

Fine. He would.

The shrill ringing drowned out the plea from the radio for “mi corazon, mi corazon,” and Spencer’s incessant tapping of the wheel to the beat of the music. Ryan wished Spencer could stop being a drummer for five minutes, but that would be like asking Ryan to stop thinking, and they were both terrible at controlling such ingrained traits. Ryan’s heart started to beat faster, and he prayed silently for voicemail, to stutter out an insincere faked apology to the uncaring void of her phone company. The universe refused to take pity on him and connected him through.

“Ryan.” Keltie answered the phone flatly, sounding out of breath. It was almost four in New York, so she was probably training at the gym near her apartment.

“I’m sorry,” he said before anything else. It didn’t come out in a rush and it didn’t taste like a lie.

There was silence, and the cynic that lived in his heart thought that maybe she would just hang up on him. He could write a hundred songs about the one that got away, the one whose heart he broke, the one who broke his own. It would be much better than the relentless, sweeping optimism of that first song he wrote for her.

“I wonder if you actually mean that,” she said, and the cut-up pieces of fear swarmed up into his throat at the brittle, unhappy tone of her voice.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I never meant to–” came spilling out of his mouth. Spencer pulled over to the side of the road, turning off the car and the damned radio, watching him from behind shadowed eyes. Ryan kept going on and on, surprised by the force of his words. He was sorry, and he hadn’t mean to hurt her.

When his words finally died off, there was silence in the car and on the line. He waited patiently for her to say something, letting his (her) sunglasses slip off his nose and into his lap, rubbing the heel of his hand against his eyes and watching Spencer’s fingers tattoo against the gearshaft.

“I forgive you,” she whispered down the line, and he closed his eyes, let himself sag against the seat. “But we’re over, Ryan.”

“I know,” he said. “You just needed to know that. That I’m sorry for hurting you.”

“Thank you,” she said. “And tell Spencer thank you too.” The line clicked dead, and he let the phone fall into his lap, clinking against the sunglasses.

“She says thank you, you bastard,” Ryan said roughly.

“Sucks when you have to be a man, doesn’t it?” Spencer said with no trace of sympathy.

“Life was easier before I met you.”

“Like you’d remember life before me.”

Wasn’t that the truth.

***