Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There’s the rasp and snap of a lighter in the dark, Ryan’s face briefly caught in the warm bloom of light thrown off the small flame he tips towards the pipe held cradled in one hand. He’s watching as the glow moves down into the packed bowl when he inhales, when he leans back, breath held, and for a moment Shane forgets what they’re doing. He’s caught up in the heaviness of Ryan’s dark eyes and the press of his lips together, thrown into sharp relief by the small light on the back of the house cutting a wedge out of the night. The smoke that spills from Ryan’s lips when he exhales is thick, more opaque than usual in the chill March air.

Shane’s sitting perched on the brick steps behind Ryan’s parents’ house. He doesn’t know what time it is, but it’s late enough to be called early, easily past four in the morning. Ryan’s folks went to bed hours ago and the crew has packed up and gone home. They’re alone.

Shane’s chuckle comes stilted and on a delay, broken up as he remembers that Ryan’s taking a hit—of course he is—and the rest coming at his own expense, at himself, amplifying at the sound of his own, alcohol-drenched laughter. An answering grin breaks across Ryan’s face and he follows, his laugh getting briefly tangled in a cough as the smoke hits him.

Ryan’s still laughing to himself when he holds the little swirled purple and yellow glass pipe and lighter out for Shane, and their hands brush as he takes them from him with clumsy, cold fingers. He’s trying to arrange the small pipe in his hand the right way, not to drop it as he tucks in his thumb to cover the carb, but what he’s thinking about is that he’s about to put his mouth where Ryan’s just was. It’s not the first time they’ve shared a bowl or a beer when better judgment had gone, passing it back and forth between them. He wants to remember to think about that more tomorrow when he’s sober.

“Hey. You wanna maybe think about hitting that?”

Ryan’s got that tone in his voice. Heavy and grating, like he’s trying to be as annoying as humanly possible. Shane knows he’s not trying.

“Hey. You wanna shut the fuck up?” It’s half-hearted at best. Shane’s smiling, despite himself.

“You gonna fuckin’ make me, big boy?” Ryan flashes a smile that’s bright even in the predawn dark.

“I might, you… you little bitch.”

How he manages to coordinate his hands and his mouth to exhale, light the bowl and inhale can be chalked up to muscle memory, his body on autopilot.

Ryan’s hand brushes his again, taking back the lighter before it was offered, pulling the pipe from his still-curled fingers, setting up for his next hit without hesitation.

“Wow. Wow.” Shane’s trying for an incredulous tone, but there’s a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth that gives him away.

Ryan sets up and lights up, all while holding eye contact that feels like a clear and aggressive response to Shane’s wow; he’s showing him up. Shane doesn’t give a shit about that.

“That’s how it’s done, boy.” He holds on to that syllable—boy—like the strike of a drum, or like the echoing twang that comes when a spring door stop is pulled back and let go.

Ryan holds out the pipe and lighter for Shane to take back again, and as if on cue, the light on the back of the house clicks off and they’re plunged into darkness. Ryan yelps in the sudden dark, and Shane doubles over with a wheeze.

“It’s the motion—the motion detector,” Shane’s barely able to get the words out between helpless, breathless laughter.

“Motherfuck.” Ryan’s voice in the dark. Shane’s eyes still haven’t adjusted to the sudden change, but still somehow he knows that Ryan’s flailing an arm out sideways trying to trip it back on.

Shane’s laugh pitches high, hand coming down on his thigh, and he’s thinking about trying to stand to try and turn it back on himself when the light flicks back on without warning, and both of them groan at the sudden wash of light like it it's a physical force that meant them both harm.

Shane’s laughter's only just subsided, but as he catches sight of Ryan now—half-laying sideways on the red brick patio, one arm thrown out to wave the light back on, the other held out towards Shane, bowl and lighter held in a vise grip to keep them safe—he’s gone again at the sheer absurdity of it.

“You’re drunk,” Shane says as levelly as he can, and Ryan’s default is to reflect that accusation, firing back a laugh-pinched ‘you’re drunk!’ that only sounds like English insofar as Shane can decode it.

And yes, he’s right. Shane is drunk. Shane is profoundly, probably bordering on irresponsibly drunk. It was all he could do to stagger over to the brick steps in front of the french doors that lead to Ryan’s parents kitchen: this is where they always end up. Sitting together on the steps after everyone’s left for the night. Just talking and laughing on their own, like they’re reclaiming some of the night for themselves after exploiting their drunk laughter for content and view counts.

Filming Too Many Spirits is one of their most resource-light ventures. A selection of bottles of booze—often sponsored—a few hours of scheduled crew time, and the vulnerability of getting college-dorm-wasted in front of a panel of their employees. It’s nothing they haven’t seen before, by this point, and Shane does his best to keep his jokes from slipping towards the gallows or gutter, respectively. Rarely can the same be said for Ryan, but that’s par for the course. The biggest trade-off for the hangover Shane will be nursing all day tomorrow is this time here: this dark, secluded, four in the morning quality time with his best friend that they so rarely are able to afford themselves these days.

Even if they’re looking up through the bottom of four questionable cocktails, four passport-game shots, a shot of Jack and a Corona during setup, it’s still time together that’s been in increasingly short supply the more Watcher Entertainment has expanded.

“Next! Story!” Shane had crowed, waving the location themed postcard in the air like a starter flag at a drag race. “This one comes from user unexpectedly-beefy, on tumblr.”

Ryan, slumped so far down in his lawn chair his shoulders barely cleared the armrests, tilted his face toward the dark sky to giggle at the name through his nose.

“‘Long story short: I was almost seduced by a ghost before my sister’s wedding.’” Shane read, then immediately critiqued, “Okay, look, stop doing that! That’s the whole story right there, don’t tell us the punchline at the beginning!”

“Is there more?”

“Yes, there’s more,” Shane continued dolefully. “‘I was staying the night in my sister’s house, she’s ten years older than me, and was getting married the next day. She lives in this old ass house and I was sleeping in the attic bedroom. We’d been drinking at the rehearsal dinner that night, and I went to bed pretty smashed. I woke up around 3am—’ I’ve said this before, but I don’t trust these stories where they’re sleeping. Isn’t that a whole subgenre of sleep paralysis?”

“Like, drunk sleep paralysis?" Ryan crooned, eyes glassy as a taxidermied deer with his voice pitching high while he considered it. “I dunnooo, OH, I bet it is!”

“‘I woke up at 3am feeling someone’s cold hands, unbuttoning my pajamas!” He’d put extra mustard on those words as he got them out, continuing a little more quickly afterward. “I was so groggy I didn’t think too much of it for a minute before remembering where I was, and I was still pretty hammered I guess, because I just remember saying loudly—’" All the air in his lungs wheezing out at the next line on the card.

“Saying!?”

“‘I just remember saying loudly, ‘oh no I am being seduced!’ and then turning over,’” Shane read through strained laughter, “‘and going back to sleep. I have never slept in that house since, and my sister says I was just too drunk and was probably dreaming.’ Yeah you were.”

Ryan was teetering, doubled over in his chair, shoulders shaking. “Oh no I’m being seduced!”

“As one says, when waking up to ghostly hands undoing their buttons.”

What followed that had been an avalanche of increasingly filthy jokes that had them vibrating with silent laughter and Katie calling for mercy, but which would almost certainly result in the seductive ghost story ending up being cut from the episode entirely.

With Ryan leaned back on the steps now, hours after wrapping, shirt half undone under his open coat, his hand tight around the pipe and lighter and chin tilted toward the stars, Shane reminds him.

“Better watch that shirt, buddy, you’ll get seduced by a ghost."

Ryan guffaws, mouth open to release his trademark round, full laughter that makes Shane feel warm despite the cold predawn. If there’s anything in the world that wraps around Shane like a welcoming blanket, it’s the sound of Ryan Bergara laughing.

“I’ll be the one doing the seducing," Ryan promises, raising the hem of his shirt haphazardly to show his belly button and giving it a solid two-finger slap that sends Shane into a fit, eyes screwing shut while he doubles over, listening to the small hollow sound of Ryan giving his belly button another few smacks before tipping forward himself, squinting up at Shane with eyes dilated and black through the haze of absurdity and high proof humor, dropping a hand on Shane’s bent knee to prevent himself from giving into inertia and just rolling down the steps to the grass.

“Oh no," Shane wheezes. “I’m being seduced!"

It’s all so stupid. Their laughter is probably far too loud for a residential neighborhood at this time of night, but as Shane wipes a tear, he can’t find enough self control to give it much consideration. Ryan pitches forward, forehead on the bony jut of Shane’s shoulder, vibrating with mirth.

“Oh no,” Ryan repeats, voice muffled against Shane’s coat sleeve.

Most of this feels like a blur, but Ryan’s hand on his knee is a constant. Like the warmth spreading from his palm through the denim of his jeans is the only thing not slowly spinning around him.

“Okay, well—” Shane’s barely able to get the words out around his laughter. “Time to go back to sleep!”

Shane starts to move like he’s turning over in bed to go back to sleep, the way he’d mocked the writer of that story for doing, when suddenly he’s not. Suddenly he’s being pulled back in, Ryan’s hand sliding up to the back of his neck as their mouths catch.

Ryan’s kissing him.

But then, the sound of glass shattering takes them out of it as soon as it’s started.

Ryan jumps. Maybe Shane does, too, but what he registers is the frightened jerk of Ryan’s body and how his hand closed down on his thigh suddenly tighter, and he wheezes a laugh. And then Ryan’s laughing with him.

“Some—some ghost you are!” Shane manages between broken and breathless laughter. “Tryin’ to se—heh heh—” and he’s gone again. “Trying to seduce innocent sleepers, and you scare yourself.”

“Shut up, I think the pipe broke.” Ryan’s using Shane like handholds on a rock climb, the hand on Shane’s knee gripped tighter as his other hand drops away from his neck and grips the fabric of his jacket, as leverage to crane forward to look at the ground. “Aw, fuck.”

“Oh, you think?” Ripples of laughter are still present in Shane’s voice as he catches sight of what’s left of the pipe, scattered in pieces over the brick walkway beyond the stairs. “You dipshit.”

“Hey, fuck you!” Ryan’s voice pitches up as his laughter grows higher and more wild, hiding his face against Shane’s shoulder, the quaking of that laughter spreading through his small body and into Shane’s. Ryan laughing has always been like the strike of a match, igniting something in him that goes up fast. They pass it back and forth until it hurts, and Shane presses a hand over his belly like that will help.

“Euugh, I should prolly clean that up.” Ryan says with a put-out groan, coming down from the laughter and looking back over their shoulders at the french doors to the kitchen.

It almost certainly takes them longer to struggle to their feet together than it would have if they’d used the steps to brace themselves—instead, Ryan sways on his feet, using the fistful of Shane’s jacket like leverage. Then Ryan’s laughing again, the sound swinging low the way it sometimes does, like it’s something meant just for Shane.

“Al-right. Let’s go, Shaney-boy,” Ryan hits the punctuation pauses hard, creating some where there weren’t any, as he disentangles himself from Shane to head unsteadily for the door to the kitchen. The door doesn’t open immediately, and there’s the sound of fumbling—the click of the handle pulled down, the door tried, the handle pulled and door tried again—and Ryan gives the door a frustrated shake that rattles it on its hinges and shouts, too loudly, “Fuck!”

“Shhh!”

“Fuck!” Ryan tries again, this time in a quieter but still-too-loud stage whisper that sets them both off laughing again as Ryan tries and fails once more to open his own parents' back door.

“That side’s locked, you dumb bitch.” Shane offers helpfully, probably standing too close behind Ryan when he does so.

“That side’s locked,” Ryan mocks in that grating voice he does to parrot things back, this level of unbearable saved for when he’s really, really drunk. It’s a bit that pushes Shane’s buttons and makes him want to push back, so no sooner has Ryan gotten those words out than Shane reaches around him to tug the other handle down, the door easily swinging open into the kitchen.

He doesn’t need to say or do anything after that to revel in his victory—it’s right there, plain as day, and Shane knows Ryan knows he was right and Ryan was wrong. But he gloats anyway, can’t resist the smug chuckle that bubbles out of him as Ryan spills through the open door and into the kitchen.

“Shut up.”

“Oh, you’re one to talk.”

Ryan comes around the island to the fridge, swinging one of the doors open, bathing the dark kitchen in pale yellow light. Shane’s dimly aware that Ryan’s using the fridge door for balance as he inspects the contents because he hears more than sees it; the rustle and clatter of things inside on shelves as Ryan rifles around.

Shane’s hand comes down on the edge of the sink, and for a moment, he just stands there, taking stock of himself. There’s an odd similarity between this feeling and that of the few seconds right after a car crash. The moments between being hit and being aware of it, before you know the extent of the damages, of the injuries.

“Fuckin’ leftover asparagus bullshit, everything sucks.”

“No meatball dishes?”

Ryan staggers with silent, convulsive laughter, grabbing at the open refrigerator door to keep himself standing.

Standing at the sink, Shane feels dizzy. He’s aware of how dry his tongue is in his mouth—that he can fix, maybe, and he opens and closes a few cabinets before producing a glass which he fills from the water pitcher that lives beside the sink, and guzzles down half of it so fast it hurts, feels solid in his throat. He coughs once and drinks the rest slower, feeling like it barely takes the edge off his dry-mouth.

Pouring himself a second glass, he hears Ryan swearing again less than six feet to his left, this time incredulously asking no one how many heads of lettuce one family needs. Was he imagining that Ryan had kissed him?

He tries to retrace his steps backward to that moment, like he's trying to find lost keys. They’d come in through the unlocked french door from the patio because they needed to get something to pick up broken glass. Broken glass, because Ryan dropped the pipe.

His tired, inebriated mind is trying to piece how the pipe and the kiss fit together, but all he can remember are fragments. The warmth of Ryan’s hand on his knee, the weight of his head on Shane’s shoulder… and the brief brush of their mouths together as Ryan crowded in close.

Out of nowhere—from approximately two inches directly behind him—comes two abruptly solid slapping sounds that shake Shane out of his thoughts and damn near right out of his skin. The glass slips out of his hand and into the basin of the sink where it thankfully doesn’t become the second thing they’ve broken tonight, and he whips his head around to see Ryan standing right there, huge grin plastered across his face, and he promptly stops trying to contain his wild, high laughter at Shane’s reaction.

“Some ghost I am, huh? First ghost that’s ever gotten the big guy to flinch, though, am I right?"

Shane flinches again, this time at the volume of Ryan’s voice. “Jesus Christ,” he hisses. “You’ll wake the whole street hollering like that!”

“I’m a great ghost. Say it."

“Hush!" Shane has the weirdest impulse to hunch down, make himself smaller. Like they’re waking the enemy and not Ryan’s sixty-something parents. This is not the type of situation Shane ever expects to find himself in, much less at thirty-six years old.

“You hush.”

“Ryan.”

“I. Am a. Great ghost." Ryan burps, leaning to the side to cover his mouth with a balled up fist before snickering into it. “‘Scuse me."

“You’re a great ghost, buddy, fine. Those chumps got nothin’ on the Bergooze. Even though you have the advantage of not being dead and having a body. Now will you shut the fuck up?”

“Hah!” Ryan slaps the counter beside Shane with one flat palm. Shane imagines the glasses rattling in the cupboard, it feels that loud.

“Shhh!!" Shane makes a swipe for Ryan’s face, aiming his hand at his laughing mouth and somehow missing. Ryan, drunk as he is, still manages to juke away at the last second.

“Shh!” Ryan counters, and it’s the loudest shush that’s ever come out of anyone’s mouth. He slaps his other hand down on Shane’s other side, backing him up against the sink while his shoulders bounce. “Listen, a good ghost knows an opportunity when it sees one.”

“Oh boy, I bet they do the moment you walk in." Shane puts on a voice, keeping it low volume, his patented old-timey ghost character that always seems to have a bit of an undefinable twang that sounds a bit like a carnival barker. “Look at this lil’ chickenshit with his stupid ass radio tuner and Xbox camera.”

Ryan sputters, “Oh, these ghosts know about Xboxes?”

“The ones in this scenario do, yeah, they’re dudebro hipsters who died in a vaping accident." Despite how this doesn’t track with the character voice, he runs with it, and Ryan laughs so hard and loud, Shane’s shoulders come up around his ears again. “Shh! Jesus!”

“What’s that, you know, how’s that go. The pot."

“No more pot, Ryan, you broke the goddamn pipe.”

“Not—not that kind of pot,” Ryan squeaks. “You know. The kettle. He calls it black.”

“That’s racist.”

Ryan loses all the air from his lungs for a moment, then howls.

“Ryan!" Shane swipes for him again, and even with him right there, bracketing him in against the counter, his aim is off or the air is too thick and his limbs are too long, he can’t estimate the speed or the reach of his arm, and had he been imagining what he thought happened outside? Had Ryan kissed him as part of the seduction ghost bit or is that Shane’s own hammered intellect tripping and falling on its face?

Ryan laughs long and high, his head falling back enough that Shane can look right into his face, even in the dark kitchen he can see his eyes bunch shut, he can see the shape of his loud, open mouth, and Shane plants both hands on either side of that face and returns the action he can’t remember if he’d just invented or they’d just fully ignored.

He shuts Ryan up with his own mouth, sealed over his, and there’s a shock there like static.

It lasts about two heartbeats before he lets go, and his impulse is to apologize as much as it’s to cover his face, but neither are necessary before the sound of Ryan’s laughter comes roaring back to life with a long, throaty snort before erupting out high and ringing, shaking the windows. Everything feels so loud at four in the morning. Even Shane’s heartbeat.

“Oh no,” Ryan wheezes, staggering away into the dark kitchen. “I’m being seduced!”

There’s the sound of Ryan’s sneakers squeaking on the tile, escaping into the hallway. There’s the distinct whine of door hinges, a wash of light, and the sound of the coat closet clicking shut.

Shane follows the sound, dizzy. The earth is tilting under him now, a vague charge of nausea withering him against the kitchen door frame for a beat before passing, leaving him in a cold sweat in his winter coat, standing in the dark outside the large walk-in closet these old Los Angeles houses have sometimes. He’d seen one like this once that had climate control for furs.

Inside the coat closet, he hears Ryan laugh. They can probably hear him a street away. They can hear him in Oklahoma. Shane knocks gently on the door with tensed up knuckles.

Somewhere in the cavern of the coat closet, Ryan calls, “We don’t want any!”

“Are you sure? Not any? What if I had tacos?”

“Tacos. FUCK. I want tacos." There’s a click on the other side of the door, the knob half-twisting. “Shane, order me tacos, I can’t find my phone. Order me tacos and you can come in.”

“Joke’s on you, all we’ve got is meatballs, buddy.”

Ryan’s already got the door half open, shaking with silent laughter while Shane gets a foot in the door.

“Meatballs!” he squeaks.

“Easiest home invasion of all time,” Shane says, hearing the slur in his own voice. The closet door creaks open further, a widening stripe of amber light stretching over the terracotta spanish tile and the toes of Shane’s boots.

“I’m so fucking hungry, I’ll die for meatballs, baby."

“That’s how you became the world’s best ghost. Kirbying ‘em down. Death by meatballs."

Ryan laughs again, high and loud, but with the closet door closing behind Shane’s back, it’s contained within the little box filled with his parents’ collection of neatly hung ski jackets and woolen overcoats, scarves, and an empty stretch of wooden hangers over a small bench for the removal of, presumably, rain boots. Shane doesn’t know. In his house in Schaumburg, they’d had a mudroom for that sort of thing, and the familiarity of all that and his plain little midwestern house and his plain little midwestern life is feeling as far away as other galaxies and burned out stars and celestial bodies doing laps out in space, somehow, standing in a coat closet in Arcadia looking down at Ryan Bergara with the most heavy lidded eyes imaginable, his black eyes burning up at him like the hot coals still dying in the fire pit outside.

“Death by meatballs,” Ryan repeats, and kisses Shane hard enough their teeth strike together.

Chapter Text

Ryan collides with him until his back is pressed up against that closet door, and Shane is letting it happen. It’s like Ryan is something that happens to him, like a car crash or getting caught in a storm—things too big to be controlled, laws of motion or the weather. Ryan is a force, that catalyst that pushes a body to move so that it stays in motion, and though they stop abruptly when Shane’s back hits the door, they don’t. Ryan’s still moving.

It’s his hands, moving over his body, over his clothes. It’s his mouth moving against his own, and if every teasing kiss so far has been a little flash of heat this is like a sudden house on fire. Shane’s too wasted to follow any one thing, because it’s so much all at once. Each kiss before this had been so brief, both of them pulling away quickly, breathlessly laughing, echoing jokes back and forth between them. They’re not laughing now.

Shane’s world shrinks down to just this. To fingers that close in a fist in his hair, urging him down, or Ryan raising up—he doesn’t know which—but they’re closer. He can taste him, his whiskey and smoke flavored tongue in his mouth, the world vaguely spinning at his feet.

And he should be freaking out. Instead, he’s got this feeling like the opposite of deja vu. A fear rising in him, this sense that he’s missing something big. That this is something he’d meant to avoid, that there was a reason he shouldn’t be kissing Ryan Bergara. If there is, he doesn’t know what it could possibly be, but somewhere in the back of his intoxicated brain, it feels like there might be one.

What’s there instead is the awareness of the way Ryan’s hands feel on his body, over his clothes and then at the nape of his neck again, then curling fingers in his hair to yank him down. There’s the wet sound of their mouths and their hard breathing when they part, and how insistently Ryan surges forward for another and another another, the start and end of them bleeding together.

Shane’s already half-hard when he realizes that Ryan is too; that what he feels against his thigh is Ryan grinding against his leg as he pushes in close, and that in turn he’s got to feel the press of his cock low on his belly as he does. It’s surreal—to be so aware of this and so unsure what to do with it. It’s like every time his thoughts get close to his awareness of this, his brain skips like a record and all he can do is feel the heat and press of Ryan’s body against his and let himself be swept up.

He doesn’t realize he’d been moving into Ryan so much that he’d come away from the door until he bumps against it again with a dull, hollow sound; Ryan shoves his jacket over his shoulders and down his arms–shoving him back in the process–and Shane moves to try to help when he catches on, when his brain manages to catch up just enough to realize he should. It hasn’t even cleared his wrists when Ryan’s mouth pulls away from his, exhaling a harsh, frustrated sound in the new space between them. He realizes, belatedly, staring down into Ryan’s upturned face, at his soft, open mouth, that Ryan was trying and failing not to lose the kiss as he struggled his way out of his own coat. While Ryan redoubles his efforts to shake his way out of his sleeves, Shane cranes forward to chase his mouth, to take it back.

But Ryan sways back—due to the combination of being so wasted and fighting to free his arms in the least efficient way possible—and Shane follows. He grabs for him, for his shoulders, knocking off that orange knit cap in his haste, and he moves to bury his fingers into those dark curls, keeping him close until Ryan can do it himself again.

No sooner hears the soft sound of Ryan’s jacket hitting the floor than Shane feels fingertips skimming up and under the hem of his sweater, tracing over his ribs, and he reacts like an electric shock. A thread of sobriety shimmers through his brain like a splash of cold water at feeling Ryan’s hot hand on his skin, fingertips finding and skimming over a nipple and then, slowly, circling it. There’s a groan swallowed between their mouths.

Again, he doesn’t realize that he’d come away from the door—that between losing their jackets and finding each other again that they’d drifted, stumbling together towards the center of that small room—until he feels that hand start to snake back down over the bare skin of his stomach to where he’s straining against the front of his jeans. He realizes then, in that moment, that the wall isn’t at his back—Ryan’s hand is there and it’s cupping him, and Shane is a lost ship at the mercy of the stormy sea. He does all he can—he clings to Ryan wherever he can reach.

Ryan’s mouth parts from his and mindlessly he chases it, needing the anchor of connection, but he can’t because Ryan’s glancing down between them, and—in lieu of being able to find his mouth, to kiss him again—he buries his nose in that wild, soft mess of dark curls and breathes him in instead. He hears and feels Ryan exhaling hard around a single word. “Fuck.”

And then he’s back like a charge, kissing him hard and Shane feels like he’s in limbo—caught between this moment and the next, like there’s something he should do but he can’t think. His mind is quicksand, and the harder he tries the faster he sinks. There’s a moan—hard to know whose—and almost a break for air, but Ryan leans in and the wet connect of their mouths prevents them parting just yet.

But they do again, mouths barely a breath apart as Ryan’s hand rubs down between his legs and back up, skimming over the full length of him through the denim of his jeans and again, Shane vaguely longs for the door at his back to help hold him upright.

“Holy shit.” Ryan’s too loud again as he repeats the motion, and Shane is lost. Has been since that first press of his hand, but now as he’s spanning the length of him through his clothes over and again, his brain has skidded to a halt. Something must be wrong—Ryan keeps swearing—and dimly he tries to look back over his shoulder, some half-formed thought teasing at him about maybe the door isn’t shut.

“This isn’t a meatball.”

Then it clicks. Shane turns back, catches sight of Ryan grinning up at him conspiratorially, bringing him in on the joke, dark eyes shining from drink and lust, and Shane wheezes helplessly into his open mouth when Ryan bridges the distance.

Just in case he hadn’t fully pieced it together that Ryan was losing his mind about what he’d just barely discovered in Shane’s jeans, he makes another slow pass, the heel of his hand pressing hard between them. Then suddenly, Shane feels both of Ryan’s hands at his waist, knuckles grazing his stomach as he unzips his jeans in a rush, and with a shiver of uncertain anticipation, Shane feels his stomach turn over.

“Oh, uh, R-Ryan, are you sure—”

But Ryan’s already sliding his hand inside, his palm sliding along Shane’s hard cock through his boxers without hesitation, like he means to learn the size and shape of him. He’s still clinging to Ryan, holding fistfuls of his hoodie to brace against the sway that keeps threatening to pull him over.

“Where have you been hiding this?”

Shane has never heard Ryan’s voice quite like this—low and awestruck, delighted and so, so mischievous—and suddenly Shane’s breath is starting to shake.

“Uh—well, I—” He’s stammering his way around, hoping an answer will present itself, but the immediate response that comes to mind—in my pants—feels too stupid to say out loud, and in lieu of that he can’t think of a response.

Ryan giggles then, high and clear and so close to Shane’s mouth that he can feel it, like he knew where it was Shane was trying to go with that answer. Shane’s mind is still two steps behind when Ryan tightens his hand on his cock and starts to push him backward gently.

Shane had thought he was reeling before.

His mind blanks out, everything tamped down except for this, except for Ryan. Where they’re touching and where they’re not, one hand shoved down the front of his jeans and his mouth close but not close enough. Shane bumps into something, and realizes as he stumbles back that it was the low bench along the back wall of the closet that he’d bumped into—that Ryan had walked him back to sit him down.

And now that he is, Ryan is following.

There’s that feeling again: that he should protest somehow. Be some kind of voice of reason that’s clearly lacking, but he can’t build a coherent argument for why. His vision swims a little, the Earth tilting under him again like a pinball game. Ryan’s face appears above his in the dim room like a cheshire cat’s wide smile materializing out of the dark.

The bench is a built-in, part of the wall with small shelves underneath for shoes, and sturdy enough Shane doesn’t feel like he’s about to hit the floor, even when Ryan posts a knee beside his hip and sets his weight there, looming a few inches over Shane’s head now that he’s sitting, leaned back against the wall between coats that hang like curtains on either side of a stage.

Ryan wobbles, grabbing at the wall with a thin laugh, palms flat to hold himself up while he regains something like balance, looming over Shane. It occurs to Shane to make a comment, something about Ryan’s height, but the joke evaporates when Ryan dips down far enough to catch Shane’s mouth with his once more in a kind of slow motion, like moving underwater.

Any protest Shane could’ve made leaks out of his head while Ryan’s hands come off the wall beside his head and capture both sides of his face, tilting it for a better angle to fit his tongue in the way he intends. If Shane hadn’t been sitting, he would’ve buckled.

When Ryan’s mouth lifts from his, Shane’s joke materializes on his lips, “Look at you, up there. You must be this tall to ride the Sh—” The sentence trails off into a gust of air and silent laughter bubbles out in place of the rest, his eyes bunching shut, his body vibrating while he tries again and fails, tipping his head back against the wall. “The Shane Tr...”

Ryan’s hands fist up on his shoulders, a handful of his gray sweater in each hand while he jerks with soundless mirth before finishing the thought for him, enunciating with slow emphasis on every word. “The Shane Train?!"

Breathless, eyes squeezed closed, Shane just nods emphatically.

“You proud of that one?”

Shane, for his part, is not that proud of it, but he quakes with restrained laughter regardless. He’s teetering on the edge between two states of being, between euphoria and anxiety. Between dizzying arousal and formless dread. He can’t for a second remember anything other than simply Ryan is so, so attractive, that the way he laughs makes him feel wrapped in cotton batting, safe from the world, that his hands feel so, so good, and he likes being with him more than anyone else alive.

“Well, I hate to disappoint you,” Ryan murmurs, sucking Shane’s earlobe into his mouth and pinching just enough with his teeth it feels like a conduit closing a circuit, a jolt sizzling down Shane’s spine and settling, buzzing with sparks, between his legs. “I think it’s you that might be in for a ride, big guy.”

Just more words that inspire a dichotomy of opposing forces pulling on each other somewhere behind his ribs, a gravity well dragging his internal organs into chaos. More sensory overload he just doesn’t know what to do with. Ryan’s lips find his again, laughter vanishing like a snuffed flame between the hard crush of their mouths.

There’s the drag of Ryan’s teeth against his bottom lip, his hands on his face, gliding through his hair—the pads of his fingertips along Shane’s scalp makes him shudder in his hands, something Ryan chuckles about without releasing his mouth, the low vibration humming between them, nasal and full of heat. He’s too dizzy to follow everything that’s happening to him. Ryan’s mouth sliding away, appearing wet and blistering hot on his throat, mouthing downward between gusts of breath that skip along Shane’s skin, crawl beneath it, and burrow deep like fish hooks, ripping up gooseflesh in their wake. It’s an almost violent kind of sensation, shuddering under Ryan’s hands and mouth, losing track of the sequence of events while his hands trowel down the front of his flannel and slip into the open fly of his jeans. His knees spread to accommodate Ryan standing, now kneeling, between them, affords him an unobstructed view of Ryan’s hands fishing Shane right out of his boxers and into plain sight—and if Shane had a shred of sobriety left he’d have blushed wildly, but instead just stares wordless and near gasping.

What is happening?

“Here’s the star of the show,” Ryan breathes, so low Shane would’ve missed it if he hadn’t been watching everything with every remaining fiber of his consciousness. He watches Ryan’s tongue flick out over his lips, his hand sliding down the curved length of his exposed cock to the base, giving it a gentle squeeze that wrests a shivery sound of nervous anticipation from Shane’s throat.

It’s not until Ryan bends, twisting his head and settling his lips against the side of his cock, dragging them upward in agonizing slow motion that what is about to happen becomes apparent. It could just be he’d had far too much to drink, and it could simply be that he’s not often been faced with this situation, but now it’s crystal clear what Ryan intends.

He watches Ryan’s lips reach the tip, open-mouthed kissing the head before dragging his tongue across and taking it into his wide, hot, loud mouth that is now completely silent as he fills it inch by inch with Shane’s aching cock.

Shane draws in a choking breath, his nerves rattling inside him. He’s far, far too drunk for this. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. His spine wants to arch, his lungs need more air. His clothes feel too tight. Ryan slides his mouth down, his head lifting before another long slow drop, and Shane needs to touch him somewhere or he’s going to die.

He settles for his shoulders, grasping at them, feeling them tense under his palms while he moves his head. Ryan’s hand slips into his open jeans and anchors itself on his bare hip, the other now joining his mouth in driving Shane to the edge of something so high up in the stratosphere he can’t see the Earth below.

Dropping his head back, it strikes the wall hard enough to make a concerning thump, but Ryan doesn’t look up, simply reaches up for Shane’s hand on his shoulder, dragging it to the top of his head and gripping it there in what Shane can only take as instruction. He takes a fistful of Ryan’s dark curls, feeling his own mouth drop open to breathe deeper, panting, his free hand white-knuckle tight on front edge of the bench while he’s watching as much as he can, slipping down against the wall until it’s only his shoulders still touching, knees spread, pushing his hips up in an almost involuntary motion, gently pistoning upward with every bob of Ryan’s head, a feeling of something like a key turning in a lock inside him.

Something winding, growing warm and then hot. Like a slowly condensing star at the base of his spine.

He’s going to come.

He has to warn Ryan—has to warn him now or it’s going to be too late—and he fumbles a hand to his shoulder, patting him maybe closer to a slap than he’d meant it in his haste. Nothing changes.

In his stupor, Shane realizes belatedly that he needs to find words to say it; near panic, he rushes to try again.

“Ryan, I’m—” He falters. His voice sounds foreign in his ears, too low and straining for breath. “I—I’m, guh…”

I’m going to come was what he’d tried for. What he’d managed was a handful of sounds trailing off into a groan. He’s hoping that was enough, that it got the message across, that Ryan heard in those half-formed words the warning that was intended—and that he’d move away. He’s not moving away.

Maybe Shane’s imagining it, his drunk mind filling in blanks and making meaning that’s not there, but it certainly seems like Ryan understood and was choosing not to heed that warning. His heartbeat thuds heavy in his chest like slowing down, like his blood and body and time itself knows something he doesn’t. That before everything speeds up and out of control, it slows down, practically grinds to a halt.

“Mmmhhmm.”

Ryan knows exactly what he’s doing. And if there’s still any shred of doubt, it’s erased when somehow, impossibly, Ryan doubles down. Shane can’t even begin to imagine just what it is he’s doing with some combination of his mouth and hands, just knows the way it feels like being seen. Feels like being cracked open somehow, like the clanging mass of raw nerves that make him up are being lit up one by one and he can’t stand it and he doesn’t want it to ever end.

He comes with a shout, trapped between Ryan and the bench or the wall holding him like one of his butterflies pinned beneath glass, beneath his hands and his mouth. Ryan doesn’t stop yet—swallows as he brings him through the other side until he feels wrung out—his voice breaking around a moan.

Ryan sways backwards, one hand coming to swipe at his mouth before he surges forward and leans in close.

Ryan ’whispers‘ none too quietly, “Now who needs to shut up?”

Then he makes him. Blots out any lingering sounds waiting to rattle out of him with his mouth like he’s ready to swallow that down too.

He can taste himself on Ryan’s tongue, mingling with the smoke and whiskey.

There’s motion—too much and inexplicable with their mouths still fastened tight—and he doesn’t realize what it is until Ryan pulls back; he’s wrestling a hand into his jeans. Shane watches as Ryan pulls himself out, as he drags his still-wet hand along the length of his shockingly hard cock. Ryan lets out an audible breath with parted, shining lips and eyes locked on his.

Whatever it is Ryan’s feeling rocks him and he sways with it, and then he’s moving to drop back to sitting from his knees and then lays back, flat on the floor with legs bent. Shane’s thoughts are heavy and slow, but when they catch up with him they overtake him like they’d built up momentum. He’s struck with the image of just how easy it would be to slide off this bench to the floor, how he’d land right on top of Ryan in a tangle of limbs.

But Shane just watches like he’s trapped—a deer in headlights, a man standing on the tracks of an oncoming train—watching as Ryan starts to work himself over. Watches how he curls his hand around himself, the strength of those fingers, the way he moves his wrist every time he sweeps over the head, fluid and slow and fuck, he wants those hands on him again. He wants his hands on Ryan.

He just wants, struck with a yearning so keen it aches through him like a loss.

One of Shane’s hands rubs down the plane of his own thigh, over the rucked up denim of his still undone jeans, but it doesn’t stop the ache. He’s getting hard again; how could he not be, watching Ryan writhing on the floor like that? His glassy, heavy-lidded eyes remain locked on Shane's, keeping that contact focused and intense even as his head falls back sharply against the tile floor, riding out a wave of something Shane can only see in the tight lines of his face and the rhythm of his fist around his cock.

There’s an odd silence between them that falls like the hush before a storm, unreadable for Shane. He’s too wasted, too tired, too overwrought to have the mental capacity to spare for parsing out whatever is being passed back and forth unspoken between them.

Shane rubs the heel of his hand against the base of his still-exposed cock, just pressure, but soon he’s taking himself in hand. Somewhere beneath him on the floor, Ryan moans, head rolling along the tile left to right, never losing his eyes. Shane feels Ryan’s foot pressed against the side of his boot. Trust Ryan to find a way to touch.

Shane starts to copy Ryan‘s movements. The same slow, heavy drag, the same twist of the wrist. Ryan’s stretched out on the floor and Shane’s sitting slouched on the bench above him but for a moment as their hands fall into sync, it almost feels like it’s his hand on Ryan. That he’s the one wringing those sounds out of him, the one causing his hips to buck up, his breath to catch.

Ryan’s pace quickens suddenly and Shane follows, matching it, watching how Ryan starts to come apart. This tremor passes through him, moan shuddering out of his mouth and his hand almost falters. But at the last second he doesn’t. He holds their matched rhythm—faster, more desperate—and it’s hard to know if Shane is following or leading anymore, but one thing’s for sure; he is definitely not in control here.

And then Ryan comes, and Shane watches that too. The way his back arches and he comes up off the floor, sweatshirt bunched and exposing bare skin but not enough that it’s missed by the mess he’s making, striped white over his tensed belly and the black knit fabric. He watches the last few strokes of his hand as the sound he makes rings inside of Shane like the strike of a bell; high and strangled, almost pained.

No longer is being quiet a thing that remotely concerns Shane, it doesn’t occur to him at all in those moments while Ryan pants through the last pumps of his fist, the high keen he’d made echoing through the grooves and valleys inside Shane’s consciousness. There is no outside world, nothing that exists outside of the coat closet they’ve found themselves in for this sordid exchange. No ears to hear and no air for sound to travel through. They sit in the center of an alternate reality, one with strange gravity and shifting polarities, the way Ryan talks about the bermuda triangle or leylines. UFO stuff.

And Shane still has his hand on himself, his breath ratcheted up high while his wrist still moves of its own volition, having come too far down that path to turn back around. The heat prickles in his spine, the tension of his muscles rising again while Ryan lolls his head on the tile floor, watching him with a lazy, dark smile. That sound still travels through the cells of Shane’s body, the cry of Ryan reaching climax. He wants to hear it again. He wants to be the one to wrench that noise out of him. What if he can’t remember it tomorrow?

What if he never gets to hear it again?

Ryan remains stretched on the closet floor, his filthy hand palm-down on his soiled sweatshirt, jeans peeled open enough to have fished himself out, still exposed and flushed pink in the cold air, glittering wet. His ADIDAS sweatshirt is strung with pearls of his own come, a swipe of it wet across his strip of exposed abdomen.

Shane’s head is swimming, starting to ring with blood pressure. Somehow he feels more intoxicated now than he did ten minutes ago before this all started. When he’d been standing in the kitchen, joking about hipster ghosts and ordering tacos, before he’d slid sideways into this alternate universe where he’s cock-out and stroking fiercely in full view of Ryan Bergara’s beautiful, enormous dark eyes.

Maybe that means when he leaves this closet, things will be back to how they were before. Like this is something that can be contained in a bubble. A little snow globe he can close his eyes and visit sometimes.

Probably that’s the alcohol doing the thinking. Most of the blood in his body isn’t in his brain.

He’s close again, somehow. He can feel that telltale tension ticking upward, and he tightens his fingers, turns his wrist a little more to concentrate the pressure where he needs it, grasping at the head with long slippery fingers while pushing up into his fist with his hips just enough to satisfy whatever primitive urge wants him to twist and contort and stretch into strange positions to reach the crest of this mountain he’s climbing for a second time. His mouth falls open around a hard exhale, and he speeds up.

Before he was intently witnessing Ryan’s pleasure at his own hands, now he’s putting on the same show. Slouched on a bench in a closet with his Alice in Wonderland legs miles too long and bent awkward at the knee, he can feel the tension in his brow, his eyebrows snapped down low with the back of his head planted on the wall—it simply cannot have the same allure as the erotic experience of watching Ryan undulating on the tile with his wet cock in hand, but he’s too far gone for self-consciousness. He needs this now, it's a kind of desire that’s got hooks sunk into every inch of him, he needs it like he needs to breathe, and a whine escapes his parted lips when he finds the tempo that’s going to bring him up and over the edge. From the floor, Ryan gives a throaty rumble that’s almost but not quite laughter.

“Fuck yes, Shane. You can do it, baby.”

And if he’d needed a little push, that was enough to send him tumbling over. Shane’s eyes squeeze shut while he pants into another orgasm, one that shivers through him in such a peculiar rush it’s like something that’s gone through a catch-net—something he’d been trying to capture and only had for a single moment before it slipped away. Wet heat dribbles out over his fingers, pulsing out weakly down his knuckles and catching in the nest of dark hair at the base of his oversensitive cock. His shoulders come off the wall while he convulses through it, twitching in his hand, his stomach tensing sharply when he gasps hard before the final ringing silence that follows, just the sound of his own breath amplified but flattened by the strange acoustics of the small room with tiled floors and hanging jackets.

“Goddamn,” Ryan chuckles, low and full of breath, and Shane is too far gone to blush. Or even to open his eyes right away. He’s dizzy. Exhausted. His arms weigh a hundred thousand pounds each. The bench is going to buckle under the sudden weight every inch of his body seems to possess when he tries to move it.

There’s more silence, then the scuffling sound of Ryan moving. Sitting up, probably. Shane’s consciousness is flickering like a wet candlewick. He hears Ryan opening the door before he manages to open his eyes.

“I gotta clean up,” Ryan says, his smile too bright to look directly at—it’s like squinting into the sun, and Shane is too tired to shield his eyes. His heart thumps heavy in his chest while he watches Ryan gesture vaguely to himself, and then toward Shane, as though to imply he should do the same. “You okay? You’re all set up on the sofa in the office.”

Dimly, Shane nods, and Ryan gives a little wave. It’s not until he’s already turning into the open door frame that Shane registers the desperation still throbbing through him—the smoldering desire for one more kiss before this is all over maybe forever. But he can’t seem to make words. Can’t seem to do anything at all.

He’d beg if he could. His tongue feels paralyzed.

Don’t go.

When Ryan’s gone, it’s a solid couple of minutes before he regains control over his limbs, easing himself off the bench to the floor to his hands and knees before going down to his elbows, shrinking down to the floor with his cheek on the cool tile. It’s where Ryan had been laying only minutes before, and Shane imagines there’s still warmth in the stone from his body. He imagines him still there, beneath him, his arms closed over Shane’s back. Breathing in his ear. Kissing him. Calling him baby again.

There’s a knot in his throat.

A burning feeling blooms in his sinuses while he fights to even out his breath, a heat under his eyelids that’s too inexplicable for his exhausted, wasted brain to demand explanation for. He drags a clammy hand up to block out the overhead light, hooking the thumb over his nose to cast the shadow across his face, the smell of his release—maybe of Ryan’s—flooding his senses followed by a shock of dizziness, then consciousness leaves him.

Chapter Text

It’s like a time warp, a cut to black in a film—less like sleep and more like ceasing to exist—and when he comes to, the sun is rising, lighting the terracotta tiles he can see through the gap in the open closet door.

His body is made of lead. Of cement. Antimatter. Whatever else weighs a hundred trillion pounds. He breathes against the tiles for long minutes, trying to orient himself to which direction is up. His mouth is bone dry, an ashy taste lingering on his tongue. His throat is a desert.

On trembling arms, he hefts himself up, finding his pants open, everything exposed and sticky, peeling off the tile below when he gets a knee up under him to stare down. His head protests the movement, a wild pain like he hasn’t known in ages coming to life behind his eyes like a thunderclap. It spikes with every movement, his vision so blurred he has to feel around for a handhold and settles on the bench top to pry his body up to a full sit.

There’s a charge of dull nausea in his gut, and a tight knot of anxiety that cinches harder the more he comes back to himself. The more the past couple hours trickle back into his recollection.

Holy fuck what did he do?

What did they do?

His watch reads 6:12am.

Finding his way through the still dark, silent Bergara residence to the pull-out sofa that Linda had sweetly offered to prepare for him when they’d arrived to film, he finds himself furious with Yesterday-Shane, who had refused the assistance and insisted he’d be able to pull out the sofa bed when the time came.

It turns out there’s quite a lot Yesterday-Shane couldn’t have begun to imagine that Today-Shane would be recovering from. The hangover is the least of his concerns, but the most immediate.

He can’t fathom summoning the energy to pull out the foldaway mattress, instead he just collapses on the sofa with the offered pillow, his skull pounding, ears ringing, gut twisting. He falls back into a fitful sleep until the smell of frying breakfast meat lures him out from that uneasy, restless slumber.

There’s hesitation, certainly, but his stomach protests too loudly to spend much time fighting with himself about following the enticing smell that promises some relief from the misery his body is enduring.

In the bright kitchen, Linda is poking expertly at something in a sizzling skillet while Ryan is already seated at the little round oak table with wet hair and a plate full of eggs and toast. The digital clock on the stove reads 8:56 am, and Shane’s body feels worse just with the confirmation of how little rest he really achieved.

Ryan, for his part, seems utterly unaffected. He casts a gleaming smile with his straight, white billboard of teeth in Shane’s direction. “Hey, Mom, looks like he’s alive!” He chirps. “We won’t have to call the coroner after all."

Shane can’t contest that summary. He feels like he belongs in a morgue drawer.

“Oh, honey,” Linda coos from the stove, “I saw you didn’t get the sofa bed pulled out after all, I knew we should’ve set it up ahead of time. You must’ve slept awfully."

She’s not wrong, but turns out that a portion of his rest had been face down on the tile of the Bergaras’ walk-in coat closet, and that put the discomfort of a sofa to shame.

The memory brings an avalanche of others, and he feels his face flush hot while he pulls out a kitchen chair, determinedly avoiding Ryan’s intent gaze.

“How’d you sleep, big guy?” Ryan croons with such a smirk Shane can hear it in his voice, even without looking up.

“Well, I slept.” It’s a non-committal answer, because he’s sure as hell not about to say that he’d split his meager sleep time between that unmade sofa bed and laying face down on the floor of the closet with his pants still open.

Shane isn’t sure Ryan remembers, or if he’s the only one with dregs of last night swirling through his memory. Is it better or worse if he doesn’t? But maybe that’s why he’s acting like this—like nothing had happened—because he’d forgotten. But he knows Ryan. He’s known him for years, through more than one legitimate blackout night; he knows that when Ryan can’t remember the night before, he looks rough the morning after.

The fact that he looks okay is suspicious, makes him wonder.

“Oh, you sound exhausted. How late were you boys up?” Linda asks over her shoulder as she flips pancakes on the griddle over one at a time, prompting little sizzles to erupt as they land.

As it turns out, he doesn’t have too long to wonder.

“I don’t remember. Do you, Shane? You were up later than I was, I think.”

There’s something about Ryan’s tone of voice, and Shane doesn’t think he’s imagining the emphasis Ryan puts on the word up, like he’s not so subtly implying a double meaning. He remembers. He has to.

Shane opens his mouth and closes it again, scrambling for a reply when Linda—bringing a stack of three pancakes over and depositing them on his plate—interjects and rescues him.

“I think it was about four when we heard you banging around the kitchen.”

Sort of.

“Uhh…”

“That sounds about right.” Ryan cuts in. “I was starving and looking for something to eat.”

“Oh, I haven’t gone shopping yet this week, there isn’t really much in there.”

This feels intentional, even though Shane knows it can’t be.

“I made do.”

Well, that sure as hell was intentional. Shane can feel Ryan’s eyes on him and he’s steadfastly avoiding meeting his gaze. Instead he stares down at his plate, pouring syrup over the stack of pancakes and cutting into them, stuffing a too-big bite into his mouth so he has an excuse not to join the conversation.

“Oh good, I’m glad.”

Shane doesn’t want to be here for this. He can’t help but think about how Linda wouldn’t be half as glad if she knew that Ryan is actually referring to blowing him in her front hall coat closet. That Shane had woken up hours later with the closet door open, pants still undone, just layng there for anyone to see if they woke up and happened to walk by. He doesn’t know how he’s ever going to make eye contact with Ryan’s parents ever again.

For a few moments Shane works hard to keep his mouth full so he can’t be spoken to, and it works. But the reprieve Shane gets is brief, and he’s only just getting his first sip of coffee, gulped down between too-big bites that he knows he’s going to regret later, when Linda asks him, “Shane, would you like some sausage?”

Within a split second of the question being asked and before Shane has a chance to reply, a single sausage link is deposited swiftly and unceremoniously onto his plate from across the table.

Horrifically, the unspoken joke doesn’t miss him. Ryan was slipping him a sausage.

Please, for the love of god, don’t say it.

“He can have mine.”

At least it’s not quite as bad as any number of the things he could have said, but this is still skating too far out of bounds. Shane knows that on a certain level this is Ryan—this buoyancy, too-escalated humor, over the top and not so subtly suggestive—but it isn’t usually happening in front of his mother.

Or the morning after whatever had gone on in that coat closet.

“What?” Linda turns back to the table—Shane feels it rather than sees it because he isn’t looking at her, he’s staring into his black coffee like there might be some way to disappear inside it—and continues. “Honey, there’s more on the stove, you don’t have to give him one of yours. I cooked the whole package.”

“I know, but I’m starting to get full.”

Shane makes the grave mistake of looking up across the table at Ryan when he says that, and catches the way he’s looking back at him. The way those big dark eyes sparkle as he gestures with the sausage he has impaled on the tines of his fork as he catches it in his teeth and then between his lips, before, after a pause, slowly taking a bite of it.

This is intentional.

Shane isn’t sure he’s going to survive it.

Shane wants to sink into the floor. He wants the earth to open up and swallow him whole. He wants anything except being here, sitting across from an inexplicably chipper Ryan who seems not at all hungover and hell bent on putting his thumb exactly where it hurts and digging it in. Shane can’t imagine how red his face must be.

“You want any more?”

“No.” Shane answers too quickly, wincing at the unintentionally brusque tone, and then tempers it with, “This is fine, really. Thank you, though, it’s delicious.”

“Yeah, better not to overdo it. We got pretty drunk last night, don’t want to push it.”

There’s too much on his plate to abandon, and if he eats any faster he’s going to be sick. Like it or not, he’s stuck here for at least several more minutes of this. It’s while Shane is quietly doing math around how much he can eat and how fast in order to get out the door in the minimum amount of time possible that fate decides he hasn’t had enough just yet.

“Hey, morning kiddo, morning Shane.”

Shane barely clocks that Ryan’s dad had made his way into the kitchen when he feels his hand clap down on his shoulder, and everything inside of Shane clenches. A bolt of pain shoots through his head, behind his eyes from tensing up. He should be drinking water instead of coffee, but there’s no way in hell he’s asking for anything more.

With another pat pat, Steve gives a firm squeeze and lets go, walking around the table. “How you feeling? You boys really put those drinks away last night.”

“Did you lose something last night?”

He’s looking at Ryan, but a cold fear washes over Shane that they’d left something out—something that let on what they’d really been up to in their house late last night. Shane looks at Ryan, sitting there with brows inching together, waiting for the wind up to swing and hit.

“I found what appears to be a pipe broken on the back steps, or what’s left of it. The dogs almost walked right through it, Ry, you’ve got to be more careful about how you leave the yard after your shoots.”

“Oh shit,” Ryan says. “Aw, man, that was my Lakers pipe… I meant to clean it up. We came in looking for a bag or something, but I got distracted looking for something to eat and completely forgot.”

“Uh huh.” Steve doesn’t sound impressed. Shane chances a sideways glance at him as he stuffs another forkful of pancake into his mouth, looking rested and put together with his neat beard and tucked in polo shirt. Put together is the very last thing Shane feels right now.

“Oh.” Linda turns around, wiping her hands dry on a kitchen towel and goes to pick something up off the counter and brings it over to the table and sets it down in front of Shane. It’s his glasses. “Speaking of losing things, Shane, I found these in the sink.”

She thankfully doesn’t point out just how strange that is, but she doesn’t need to. It’s all there, in the tone of her voice and the simple fact that they’d been found in the sink.

Ryan’s giving Shane a little smirk that he’s trying to ignore with every fiber of his being, cleaning the smudged lenses with his shirt before he puts them on, but Ryan won’t let himself be ignored.

“That’s kind of weird. Isn’t it, Shane? Must have been really thirsty not to notice that, huh.”

Steve completes his circuit around the breakfast table and comes to a stop behind Ryan, and delivers a clap to his shoulder that mirrors the one he’d given Shane.

“What’s weird is you not cleaning up the glass in the yard. Come on, grab the dustpan and go clean it up before it gets tracked around.”

Busted.

Shane doesn’t think relieved has ever been the word he’d use to describe how it feels to see Ryan getting called out for his actions, but today it’s the understatement of the century. Shane watches as Ryan’s shoulders slump and he scoots his chair backwards from the table, chugging the last of his coffee before getting up to go find the dustpan.

“Alright alright… I’m going.”

As Ryan moves through the kitchen and outside through the French doors, Steve goes over to the stove and snipes one of the sausages cooling down on the plate beside the stovetop before Linda can stop him, and to top off his early morning heist, leans in to steal a kiss from her before he escapes out into the yard after Ryan. Shane can’t help but think of sitting out on the steps last night, and how Ryan had pulled that same move.

And how he’d thought maybe he’d imagined it.

That relief Shane feels with Ryan leaving is short lived, because now he and Linda are alone.

And as soon as Ryan’s disappeared through the doors, he can feel Linda’s eyes on him the way Ryan swears he can feel himself being watched in a haunted hospital.

Linda isn’t much like his own mother, but they have their maternal similarities. At least in how they mother their sons. But while Sherry Madej would likely turn a blind eye to all of to his bizarre energy as something she didn’t want to involve herself with, Linda is pulling out a kitchen chair and curling her dainty hands under her chin.

“Are you alright, Shane, honey? You’re looking pretty pale.”

Shane nods, still chewing. If he could chew forever, he would. But Linda has the patience of a redwood tree. Ryan wasn’t blessed with her genetics in this area.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m just. Had too much, but that’s the show, you know? Head hurts." He gestures with his fork, swallowing the too-dry bit of pancake he’d been speaking through. “As always, thank you for letting us film here—”

Linda, without another word, reaches across the table to lay a hand over Shane’s forehead, then the back of her hand on his cheek. “Your eyes are glassy,” she says.

Glassy. Sure, that’s what they are. He drops his gaze back to the plate, the shreds of food eaten with such haste he’s barely tasted it. But having something in his stomach has settled his jangling nerves, soothed the strange, lead-heavy pit in the center of his gut.

“Did something happen?" Linda asks softly. “You’ve been so quiet, and Ryan’s been on his best yukking it up routine since the moment you sat down. Did you fight about something?”

Why there’s a charge of heat behind his eyes, Shane can’t begin to guess. The corners of his mouth draw tight in response, and god, there is, out of nowhere, a real danger of him breaking down. He’s not even sure why. He feels so strange.

“Wha—no, no. Noth—nothing like that." His voice cracks, and he wants to walk into the ocean.

“Oh, honey. What’s wrong?”

“Really, I—I’m fine."

Linda reaches to lay a hand over his, and Shane is going to cry. There’s a moment that stretches forever where he’s suddenly petrified of what she will ask him next. What had she heard last night?

“Listen,” she says gently. Motherly. “When I was dating Steve, for such a long time, I couldn’t figure him out. So many jokes all the time. Never anything serious. To the point that, honestly, when he was saying something genuine, I couldn’t tell. And I know, Ryan’s just like his Dad that way.”

Shane stares at the wasteland of his plate. His pancake aftermath. The wreckage of buttered toast. A sad, uneaten sausage—the only survivor.

“We were driving once, up to Big Bear. You’ve been there, right? Going up the back of the mountain, all those hairpin turns? You can’t see around the corners, it’s scary. Steep."

Shane has been there. Why he’s being told this story, he can’t imagine, but he’s locked up. Linda’s hand on his. Staring unfocused at shards of splintered toast on his floral patterned plate. His stomach churns.

“Steve was driving too fast. We were fighting about something,” she chuckles. “I can’t remember what. But, we weren’t speaking to each other. Anyway, it was evening, and snowing. Had cables on the tires but, still should’ve been going slower. Steve took the turn too wide, overcorrected the wheel.”

Shane’s eyes pull up from their anchor on the tabletop. He wants to ask why she’s telling him this story, but also, he wants to know what happened next. Ryan got his storytelling prowess from his mother. His head hurts so badly. It’s like maggots are eating his brain.

“Well, we tipped off the side. Slid half down the mountain, took out some trees, got wedged in the rocks. I’ve never been so scared in all my life."

“What happened?”

“Well, we survived. The car not so much,” Linda laughs, patting the back of Shane’s hand. “But the point is that, as soon as we started sliding off the road. As soon as things were out of control, Steve turned to me, and he told me I love you.”

The heat is back behind Shane’s eyes. Relentless.

“It felt like time stopped, for a second. And I was just as afraid for Steve as I was for myself, you know? Not like I,” Linda laughs again. “Accepted death or something. I wanted to protect him. From falling down a mountain. I know that sounds ridiculous."

“It doesn’t,” Shane croaks, but it does. All of this does. “Why...why are you telling me this story?”

“I don’t know,” Linda says, patting his hand again. She stands up, pushing in her chair. “I guess, it just seemed like you needed to hear it."

“Oh,” he manages, staring into his coffee cup as Linda appears to refill it.

“Just remember that Ryan is a lot like his Dad. He can be very difficult sometimes."

As if he doesn’t know that; as if he doesn’t know that better than maybe anybody. Shane isn’t sure they’re careening down a mountain just yet, but regardless, he does feel on the edge of something.

There’s a soft clink of a plate being set in the sink, the rush of the tap being turned on, and Shane stares down at his plate with unseeing eyes. He doesn’t want to eat any more of it. He hates that he’s not appreciating Linda’s cooking, but between being hungover and how Ryan has been this morning, and now this, he wants to be done.

“Hey… I think I’m going to head out. Breakfast was delicious, but I’m just so exhausted—”

“You don’t need to explain,” Linda says gently, drying her hands with the towel she’s holding, the morning sun catching in her hair. “Are you sure you’re feeling okay enough to drive?”

“Oh, yeah,” Shane says, putting more enthusiasm and certainty behind the words than he feels. “I’m alright. I just want to get back before everything catches up with me.”

Too late.

“Don’t worry about your plate, sweetheart, I’ll take care of it.”

Where Shane might normally push back to help clear his dishes, today he accepts the offer gratefully.

“Thank you. Um, hey… would you let Ryan know I left when he gets back in?”

If Linda wants to ask him if he wouldn’t rather go pop his head out the back door and tell him himself, she doesn’t, to Shane’s immense relief.

“Of course I will. Drive safe, alright? And drink some water before you lay back down.”

“I will.”

“Hey… c’mere.”

No amount of wanting to keep how awful he feels as far away from everyone can stop the hug that Linda pulls him into. He doesn’t realize how much he’d needed it until she’s rubbing his back slowly, and out of nowhere he feels like crying, right here in her arms like a child. He bites down on that impulse—against the prickle of heat behind his eyes, the urge to suck down a gasping breath—that he tenses, shoulders jumping up towards his ears. He just prays she doesn’t notice.

“Oh, Shane, honey…” Linda starts, hand freezing in its circular path over his back.

Of course she’d noticed.

“Thank you.” Shane fumbles over his words, voice thick in his throat, and pulls away from her, keeping his eyes down. “For breakfast and everything.”

He manages to gather his things and get out the front door without further incident, and before Ryan comes back inside, and by the time he’s pulling into the parking lot at his building, he feels both better and worse. Better for the miles he’s put between himself and the events of last night, and worse for possibly the same reason. He’s trying not to think too hard about it.

He’s so acutely aware of how gross he feels—and it would be bad enough if it was just that feeling of being hungover and having slept in his clothes, too warm and with that post-sleep, pre-shower greasiness—but it’s all of that plus knowing that underneath the scent of liquor and wood smoke there’s stale sex, like the base note in a cologne no one wants.

He walks inside and locks his apartment door behind him, intentionally not turning the living room lights on. His head is throbbing, the kind of headache he can feel behind his eyes like seismic plates grinding together. Obi is sitting beside the shoe mat, and bends to sniff in the direction of Shane’s boots as he kicks them off one at a time, shucks off his jacket. He makes his way through his apartment to the kitchen with Obi quietly in tow, unwelcome mid-morning sunlight streaming through the windows, and pulls a bottle of water from the fridge and drinks almost half in one long gulp. He brings it with him when he goes to the bathroom to shower.

It feels like every step of his journey home has been twenty. He thinks back to turning the key in the ignition as he’d sat in the Bergara’s driveway, thinking about the drive ahead, how the distance between him and a shower, between him and his bed had felt like an insurmountable journey. Now that he’s here, standing on the cool tile floor of his bathroom, his bed still feels so far. The things he has to do before he can crawl in are piled high; he has to get out of his clothes, brush his teeth, take a shower, make more than a passing effort to dry off. He should feed Obi. He probably needs to charge his phone so he can set an alarm, so his nap doesn’t turn into a sleep that will ruin the week ahead.

He should have stopped off at the bedroom, undressed directly into the hamper, but that’s not happening. He’s got to brush his teeth—his mouth feels foul—and sets the bottle down on the edge of the sink as he comes to stand in front of it.

He picks up his toothbrush, narrowly missing knocking over the cup it sits in, like he’s lost some measure of control over his limbs to the exhaustion and the sharp pain behind his eyes. He pulls the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet open and pulls out his toothpaste, and fumbles through the routine, the too-many steps that stand between him and climbing into bed again. Water on, wet the brush, squeeze the tube and click the cap back into place before standing it back up on the bottom shelf next to a little white tube of sunscreen.

It’s not until the door shuts again and he’s brushing his teeth that he realizes he must have avoided looking at himself—really looking at himself—before picking up the toothbrush. Avoided it at the Bergara’s, in the bathroom this morning, when he’d splashed his face before coming in for breakfast.

He realizes that because now that he’s looking at his reflection in the mirror—at the pale cast of his skin (Linda was right), and the dark circles under his eyes from lack of sleep—he sees something he’d missed. Something that should have been glaring, something that is glaring, he’d just been so busy steadfastly avoiding looking himself in the face that he hadn’t seen it until now.

There’s an enormous red bruise right there on his neck.

Obvious is an understatement, and with a dawning horror the full scope of the impact of this hits him like the slow unfurling of night into day, the world thrown into harsh relief. His sweater doesn’t cover it—hell, his jacket probably didn’t cover it. Ryan saw it at breakfast. That explains his behavior at the table, that chipper glee, the things he’d said.

That means Linda had seen it, and probably Steve too—though he hadn’t stayed too long in the kitchen, maybe he hadn’t noticed. Maybe he’d been too focused on getting Ryan to clean up after himself to notice the rest of the mess he’d left. But, Linda absolutely saw this, couldn’t have possibly missed it. That whole conversation—about Ryan being difficult like his dad, about that day they’d taken a curve too fast and fell halfway down a mountain—had been in response to this too.

Just one more in a laundry list of details that add up to something damning that he’s afraid just might be true.

Shane understands suddenly why Linda told him that story. She can see that he and Ryan have taken a curve too fast, and if they’re not careful, they’re going to careen right off the side.

Chapter Text

There’s a clatter of plates and cutlery, the flat din of voices and laughter on a Friday night in Little Tokyo, and this glass of Japanese lager is the first drink Shane’s had in almost six weeks.

Not for any one, singular reason, but for several. A sense of caution. A distrust in his own judgment, maybe. For weeks, he’s been avoiding looking too closely at his culpability in the events at the Bergara’s in March. It’s easier to blame someone, to blame Ryan, for being too drunk. Too flippant. Too casual with his affection. It’s easier to gloss over whatever Shane himself may have brought upon himself, what he may have welcomed. What it all may have thrown too bright a spotlight on for him to easily handwave all away.

Like Ryan can. Like Ryan has done.

But tonight, tonight is a celebration, and while it should be safe here in the presence of every single one of their employees, sitting beside Ryan at the long, dark table in this low lit Izakaya, he’s just as alert to the sense of danger that’s followed him like a malicious spirit, poltergeist, since March. Whatever kind of folklore ghost latches onto a person and follows their every movement and thought, hanging over their life like a shade.

Ryan’s finishing off another glass of beer, reaching for the pitcher with a laugh at Carter’s impression of Matthew McConaughey. They’ve won an award, a Webby, this is a great night, this is a reward for all of the long hours and effort and stress and funds they’ve emptied into a pet project. But withdrawn in his corner of the table, Shane just sips at his lager meekly, the few wooden sticks from the yakitori he’s managed to eat sitting on his vacant plate is the only evidence he’s eaten anything at all.

It’s a defense mechanism, maybe. Ryan doesn’t seem to need one. His high, happy laugh soars over the voices, biting into Shane in a way it shouldn’t. And maybe he shouldn’t focus so much on him, should gaze down the table at the roster of happy, proud faces enjoying their dinner and drinks on Watcher’s dime, celebrating their well-deserved recognition.

But as it’s been for weeks, he crackles with anxiety in his presence. Like a kind of radiation, pervading outward from Ryan Bergara, the closer he is, the more unstable Shane feels.

The more he can feel his phantom hands on him. Like a gun that had been held to his head, he can still feel it, months later. It’s nearly May, and he can still feel the pressure, the heat. But like trying to remember a dream after waking, the details are blurred together. Just indistinct images. Sensations. The negative space of emotions he’d felt in bursts that had now receded, leaving afterimages, like looking too long at the sun.

But still, it’s almost all he can think about. Whether he’s sitting beside Ryan in the office, on a plane, in a meeting, or alone in his kitchen in the morning. Feeding his cat. Taking a shower. Doing his laundry on a quiet weekend.

Shane sips his lager. The world clatters on around him. The proprietors greet new customers with a resounding irasshaimase! There’s an eruption of applause and laughter, paper poppers from a far corner of the pub, someone’s birthday celebration.

Their waitress materializes, handing out blank ordering slips for nigiri sushi and yakitori. Shane takes his quietly, his eyes only skating over it. He’s agonized all week about coming to this dinner. It feels like, somehow, he’s both terrified and desperate for it all to happen a second time.

What that says about him, what that means, he’s not even sure. Aside from the obvious. Of course he’s attracted to Ryan. Of course he maybe has some kind of unresolved feelings about him. But that’s life, isn’t it? That’s how this all works. Trade offs, give and take. A steadfast best friend, reliable creative partner. He doesn’t get to mourn every little thing he can’t have in life when it’s unreasonable to think he can have everything he might want, or when he waited too long to throw his hat in the ring, and it would upset the balance of everything in not only his own, but dozens of other lives he cares about.

This is how the past several weeks have sounded in his head.

When Steven and Ryan had come to him about leaving Buzzfeed, about starting Watcher, his first response had been fear. Uncertainty. He’d scraped up from the bottom and been graced with so many strokes of good fortune to end up where he was—but they had been so sure. So certain. He trusted their judgment and ability far more than his own. And...

And it just cannot be his fault for it all to fall apart just because—

The waitress rounds the table, handing Ryan his ordering slip with the same kind of enamored, demure smile he’s accustomed to seeing leveled at Ryan throughout his time knowing him. At the top of the slip, there’s handwriting. A telephone number, and a name: Sachiko. A little pink heart filled in with highlighter.

Without missing a beat, as soon as it’s in Ryan’s hand, Shane watches him smile, that little flash of his teeth, then fold the paper into a small square to slide into his jeans pocket.

Somewhere behind his breast bone, there’s a needle pushing through Shane’s lungs. It’s named Sachiko.

It’s named anything at all, really.

Shane pulls in a deep breath, dropping his eyes closed a second while he fights the impulse toward anger. It’s fully nonsensical. His guts have turned to snakes in the seconds since he watched Ryan pocket that phone number, and it’s all so embarrassing. He can’t look himself in the eye in the mirror lately, with the weird, covetous, pitiful monster he’s become these past few weeks, desperate for any acknowledgement at all of what happened between them that night at Ryan’s parents, only to come up empty. Like some kind of starving dog, snarling over dry bones in the street.

Planting his hands on the table, Shane pushes himself standing. He just needs a few minutes away from all this. To get his head right again. They’re all celebrating, and when there’s this many people at once, Shane tends to fade away into the background anyway. No one will even notice he’s gone, probably.

Much less Ryan, who is, as ever, having the time of his life. He’s eating a yakitori of some kind of succulent, roasted meat, entirely oblivious to Shane’s misery, partaking in a basketball-centric debate with raised eyebrows and gesturing hands. As he should be.

This isn’t his problem. It’s Shane’s.

“You okay?" Sam, off to his left, asks Shane over the rim of her Kirin beer bottle, and Shane gives a vague nod, a quick thumbs up that might be a little too much. Then he’s off to find the bathroom just to be alone for five minutes. Just to try and find a reset button for all this anxiety and entitlement. For whatever all this is, bubbling up from the ground floor of him.

The bathroom is a two-stall situation with a sink and urinal, down a small corridor toward the kitchen and behind a fringe of hanging twists of nautical rope. Inside it’s quiet and smells of Windex, the cacophony of people and their good-time-Friday-night muted from within the white walls and tile. Shane pumps the tap and cups his hands under it, making a basin with his palms to fill with the cold water before he brings it to his face. He does this a number of times, hands gripping the edges of the white, porcelain sink with his head hanging down from his shoulders and his glasses tucked in the breast pocket of his blue flannel jacket.

He doesn’t want to look in the mirror. He doesn’t recognize himself anymore, but to look in the mirror and see himself as he’s always been, despite the mess that’s happening inside, it feels like a punch in the gut. He feels like he should look in the mirror and see someone else entirely. Or some kind of bizarre, alternate universe version of himself. Somehow, that would feel better than seeing his same old stupid face in the mirror, looking back like everything isn’t different.

But it is.

In the mirror, unfortunately, it’s just his same face. Brown eyes. The remnants of a bleach job he’s growing out streaking his hair. Purple shadows hanging under his eyes. No more bite marks or bruises on his neck to discover. That was the last time he’d looked in the mirror and found something new—and every morning, it’s like he’s looking for it again. That tangible proof in the shape of Ryan Bergara’s mouth, even if he can’t recall the moment or the sensation of it being created.

What he remembers is the loss of it. Not the feeling of Ryan’s mouth on his skin, but what it was to watch the last traces of it slipping away. How each day he’d leaned close to the mirror to see how it was changing color and shape, red becoming purple, green turning yellow, the mark Ryan left on his skin shrinking and fading day by day until one day there was nothing of Ryan left on him at all.

Soon he’s going to have to head back to the table. He doesn’t know how long he’s been in here, but he knows it’s already been too long. But every time he thinks about trying to straighten up, square his shoulders and steel himself to go back, he just can’t. Instead he washes his hands again, and feels the cold water flowing through his fingers. Presses a wet hand to his forehead. And he doesn’t go back out there, not yet.

There’s the sound of a hand on the door, the squeak of the hinges as it swings in and when Shane’s eyes lift to the mirror in front of him to check who’s coming, it’s Ryan standing there, letting the door swing shut behind him.

“Hey man, you okay?”

Their eyes catch in the reflection. The question is laughable—that Ryan couldn’t tell just by looking at him, that it even had to be asked. Has Ryan even looked at him? Now, here, he’s standing at the sink, hair damp from where he’s raked wet hands through, and he looks withdrawn, pale like he’s coming down with the flu. And it’s taken Ryan six weeks to ask him if he’s okay.

It’s taken him until tonight. Until the weeks of working and filming and sitting beside him pretending he hadn't been quietly dying while Ryan had carried on living his life unbothered had become too much. Until inevitably, he happened to be sitting there when someone made a pass at Ryan, and Shane couldn’t take it any longer and had to get away for just five minutes to come up for air.

And now, he can’t even have that.

Shane doesn’t turn around. He’s leaning on the sink, watching Ryan’s mirror image watching his. Neither of them are looking at the other, but at the glass, and whatever trick reflections play is trying to convince Shane that in distance there’s safety. It’s that optical illusion where objects in the mirror are further away than they appear. That he’s looking Ryan in the eye even though he’s not, confronting him even though he can’t bring himself to turn and face him, and somehow that lets him summon the courage to say something.

“Of course I am, Ryan. I'm just fine.”

“Are you sure? You don't look fine.”

“Oh really? Did you put that together on your own or did they send you in here after me?”

Shane watches him fidget in the mirror. He can tell how badly Ryan wants to look away but he doesn’t. Maybe wants to leave, but stays bolted to the floor, trapped here because Shane’s holding his gaze. Because mirror Shane is watching mirror Ryan while their bodies stand on the outside looking in at a conversation between reflections of themselves because they can’t look at each other face to face and say anything that’s true.

“Are you feeling sick?” Ryan tries, floundering obviously, and lands on, “I can call you an Uber if you drank too much… if you want to go home.”

That, that does it.

Ryan of all people accusing him of drinking too much when he's had almost nothing.

How fucking dare he pay so little attention that it’s not clear how far that is from the truth?

Shane spins on his heel, his anger sudden and it overrides everything else—takes up the space he’s just barely managed to fill with the nerve to say anything at all outside of their normal. Outside of what’s been absolutely necessary to get through the day, through meetings and filming. Anything that might acknowledge that he wasn’t—has not been, is not fine—that something had happened between them to make him that way.

Shane feels a dark twist of satisfaction to see Ryan’s face, his wide eyed shock. Good. It feels good to see something in Ryan that’s a response to something real from him. But right on the heels of that satisfaction comes another swell of anger, because Ryan looks at him the way he looks when he thinks he’s seen a ghost. Afraid to look at it, like whatever he’s thought he’s heard or seen can be chalked up to the supernatural, that kind of bullshit thinking that lets people off the hook rather than taking responsibility for the fact that sometimes actions have consequences.

That Shane’s anger isn’t just a specter in the dark, but a solid thing that’s stalked them both all the way here to this bathroom, something that can be traced backwards six weeks to a coat closet in Arcadia.

“Sure Ryan, that’s the answer to every time I don’t act quite like you expect me to, isn’t it?”

Shane edges closer to Ryan, his hand still on the sink until it drops off, and Ryan steps back on instinct or reflex until he bumps into the wall, back against the tiles next to a paper towel dispenser and the door.

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean.” He catches the words and releases them back with vitriol, his tone flat with disbelief. This isn’t the time or the place. He’s been holed up in here trying to calm back down, trying to keep from escalating here in a public bathroom, at their celebration dinner with all of their employees between them and the exit. This is exactly what he’s been trying to avoid. Shane rakes a hand back through his hair again, desperate for Ryan to just keep ignoring this. “Get out of here, Ryan.”

And to his credit, Ryan almost does. His hand extends towards the door handle. He’d been given permission to go—a get out of jail free card, a chance to put the lid back on this even though the contents are already spilling out—and he should take it. But he doesn’t.

Instead, Shane stands there and has to watch as Ryan drops the act. As that confused expression falls away with a drop of his shoulders and a heavy sigh.

"Are you going to call her?"

Shane hears himself say it. Even though he doesn’t want to talk about it, it’s like he can’t help it. Watching Ryan starting to go, it just slips out. Worse, he can tell by the clueless expression on Ryan’s face that he doesn’t immediately know what he’s talking about, or at least he’s back to pretending not to. Like this happens to him so often it’s barely a blip on the radar.

“Call who?”

“The cute little waitress.” He hates the possessiveness he hears in his voice, the sharp edge that’s impossible to hide. What he hates more is her name is on the tip of his tongue—Sachiko—but he stops himself from saying it. There’s got to be a limit to just how much he’ll show he’s paid attention to.

Ryan laughs automatically, the way he always does when he’s nervous or afraid, that bright burst of inappropriately timed laughter. Right now, it grates on his raw nerves rather than how it often strikes him—how it often trips his own hair-trigger laughter in response.

“Oh! Heh. No, probably not.”

He knows he only has himself to blame—he’s the one who couldn’t let it slide. The one who couldn’t shove it down and ignore it like Ryan clearly is. He’s the idiot who couldn’t sit by and watch Ryan pocket the phone number of a pretty girl and continue to function like the world hadn’t ground to a screeching halt and he was the only one who’d noticed.

“Oh. Why not?”

Ryan shrugs, and Shane watches him searching for an answer that doesn’t immediately come, and Shane regrets asking. He doesn’t actually want to know why because it seems clear that whatever Ryan is about to say is just going to be for his benefit, something that might smooth this over and let them walk out of this bathroom and back to the table and keep pretending that they’re fine. That six weeks ago never happened, and that even if it did, then it’s something they can forget.

“I dunno… I haven’t really thought about it that much. I mean, she’s young, you know. And it’s pretty clear she’s a fan.”

That’s probably true, but it doesn’t stop the cold sinking pit of dread that yawns inside him as Ryan stumbles around trying to explain why not. He doesn’t know where Ryan’s going to land this, and he’s afraid wherever it is will hurt worse than it already does somehow.

Ryan’s mouth works to verbalize an answer, opens and closes again, stammers, looking for something else, some other words to hold up between himself and Shane, but in failing to, he falls silent. Regardless, his eyes and body language tell the truth.

It’s with disbelief that Shane watches Ryan’s eyes slip down like he’s losing a battle with himself--like Shane’s not the only one fighting tooth and nail to hold himself together--and linger over his mouth. He has to be wrong, has to be reading into this what he wants to see, but then it’s unmistakable when Ryan’s gaze drags down his neck like it has teeth. When it lands where Ryan’s mouth had six weeks ago, locked on that same patch of skin where Shane searched for Ryan each morning before tying a scarf or pulling a turtleneck over it.

Shane stuffs his hands into his pockets because he doesn’t trust himself, and he stalks into Ryan’s space in spite of that same fact.

Ryan answered the question, but he hadn’t. And he’d let slip with a glance that Shane isn’t alone with the memory that’s been haunting him these past six weeks like a ghost that’s decided to make a home in his foolish heart; Ryan remembers too. This is the first hint he’s had since the morning after that Ryan remembers anything at all, and recklessly he needs to pull on that loose thread. It doesn’t matter that he knows when it unravels, he’ll be wound up in this even more than he already has been. That he’ll start coming apart too.

“Why not?” Shane repeats his question, this time dangerously low.

This time close enough that when Ryan tries to look away, he can’t. Instead he tries to turn away, to find somewhere to escape to, but Shane catches his shoulder to stop him from avoiding this, from avoiding him. It’s with a dull note of satisfaction that he feels Ryan backed to the wall, that he crowds close enough that there’s nowhere Ryan can look that he isn’t.

“Do we have to do this now?” Ryan asks, voice small, eyes huge with not-quite fear, but something like it, and that sick satisfaction twists in his gut once more.

“Tell me why you won’t call the waitress. I want to hear you say that out loud.”

“S…say what…”

“I know why you won’t call her.”

At least, he’s got a sinking, hot feeling in his chest that says he knows why he won’t call her. Ryan won’t call her, perhaps, for the same reason Shane has dragged his feet in every relationship he’s been in for the last seven years. For the same reason why, maybe, none of those relationships had gone anywhere—why he found himself setting depth charges to blow them up when they felt like they might be drifting toward something that would render him unavailable.

Maybe Ryan won’t call her for the same reason that Shane has spent the last six weeks of his life so turned around he can barely remember to do the most basic things that keep him alive. Eat, sleep, grocery shop. He’s run out of everything in his house, including clean clothes.

So busy twisting himself up over the messy collision of what he wants so badly and what he can actually have that he’s been forgetting to prioritize survival.

Ryan is well-practiced in appearing unfazed. He walks through haunted mansions with his flashlight off, talking himself through it, affecting a fairly neutral expression these days despite the rattling dread Shane knows is gripping him during every moment he spends alone filming his solo investigations. And Shane, well, he just doesn’t believe anything can hurt him there. It’s easy to be flippant about things that don’t exist.

But Shane knows with absolute certainty just how dangerous this is. This moment, edging closer to Ryan in a public bathroom. This is standing on the edge.

When he dips his head down and Ryan doesn’t shy away, doesn’t put out a hand to stall his movement—that’s tipping over the side.

Where he manages to find the nerve when for the last few weeks he’s scarcely been able to look Ryan in the eye, it’s anyone’s guess. He’s Mirror Shane, some otherworld version of himself, swapped places for the moment to take control of this train that’s pitched off the rails. To start cleaning up the mess Regular Shane has made of everything.

“Tell me...that you don’t think about it." He says, close enough to Ryan’s mouth he can feel his breath. “Tell me it hasn’t kept you awake at night."

Ryan doesn’t answer. There’s a quick exhale. A little huff of breath, but no words. Shane can hear the sound of him swallowing, wetting his lips. Preparing to shoot him down.

Shane doesn’t let him. He closes the scant space he’d allowed, tipping forward with his weight balanced—hands on the wall, and sealing his mouth over Ryan’s the way his memory can’t quite put a picture to from that night. All he remembers is this: this feeling.

This soaring feeling. Like falling through clouds. This feeling of his heartbeat thundering in his chest like he’s running for his life.

Ryan’s mouth opens under his so gently; there’s the sound of him pulling in a deep breath through his nose. His tongue slips against Shane’s bottom lip, his hand reaching to take a fistful of Shane’s flannel before climbing up like a spider to grip his elbow, towing him closer.

That otherworld version of Shane, the one that feels satisfaction when Ryan’s off guard or shocked, he’s smirking in the backseat of Shane’s mind. Like a rustle of batwings in an abandoned building, something sibilant and ominous in the caverns of his intellect, there’s a sort of shivering sadism that wants cute little Sachiko with her pink highlighter heart and bubbly school-yearbook-handwriting to walk through that door and see why Ryan Bergara isn’t going to call her tonight.

He draws back just enough to pull in a breath through his mouth, his lips bumping with Ryan’s, listening intently to the way Ryan’s breath floods in and out, the tiny lament that creaks in the back of his throat when their lips part. His fingers on Shane’s elbow tighten, tug him back in, tilting his head to the side when Shane obliges and fastens his mouth to his again, pulling in a deep, rattling breath, everything dropping into white-knuckled slow motion while Shane fits a hand up under the ridge at the back of Ryan’s skull, dropping his hips forward to trap him against the wall, his nerves buzzing at the contact.

There’s a humming deep in Ryan’s throat that makes him forget where they are, makes him slide a flat palm down Ryan’s ribcage, his fingers curling around his waist, slipping around to find the curve of his lower back and the swell of his ass under his dark jeans, gripping there and dragging him tighter against him.

For a moment, with Ryan’s tongue sweeping against the ridge of his teeth, Shane has a vivid snapshot of a memory from the coat closet. Ryan on the ground with his jeans peeled open, working himself, his face contorted while he huffed and bit at the air. And the way Shane’s hands had sweat and ached, wanting to touch but only able to touch himself instead. He hadn’t had the courage that night he had now, too drunk to even stand or even communicate what he really wanted.

He’s not drunk tonight. And Mirror Shane has crawled between his ribs and taken control of him. Tonight, he can do anything. With Ryan whimpering against his mouth, he knows he was right. He’s not going to call the waitress because of Shane. Because of this. Whatever this is.

“We...we can’t do this here...” Ryan manages, between slow, syrupy connections of their wet mouths, and Shane almost laughs. He feels high, like the way winning something must feel. Like winning a jackpot in a casino. Like finally taking a breath after spending six weeks underwater.

Shane kisses him deep enough to taste the lager he’s been drinking, speaking so quietly into the hollow of Ryan’s mouth he’s almost not sure he’s actually saying anything out loud. “Do you want to do this somewhere else?”

Ryan swallows those words, hands coming up to find Shane’s face, warm hands on his cheeks, the wet slip of his lips catching Shane’s in a little trap before breathing out in what is almost a shudder, and nodding.

“After dinner,” Shane whispers, dipping in for another slow kiss that lingers long enough he almost forgets the rest of the sentence before he can get it out. “Come home with me.”

There’s another long kiss, their mouths not seeming to be able to part long enough for full sentences, but Shane can feel a shift. A tiny, imperceptible change in the air between them, like the first day of winter, and for a moment Mirror Shane falters in his certainty—he’s regular Shane again, worried he’s suggested something beyond what Ryan is willing to give him. However it’s possible, Shane is now hungrier than he’s ever been, there’s an almost clumsy urgency to the way he cranes in to kiss him again, drinking something from each connection of their mouths the way a vampire consumes blood to survive.

Through the rattle of possessive animal lust flashing its fangs in the dark, Shane hears Ryan finally reply. “Okay,” he whispers, and Shane’s gambler-spirit soars in another jackpot-high, dipping in to taste that agreement off Ryan’s lips like he’s sampling some sweet dessert.

Nothing in his life has ever tasted so good.

“Okay,” Shane echoes him, and he knows, that means it’s time to end this. That there can be more later. More, better than this, not against a bathroom wall. It’s bizarre to think, somehow, of all the places they’ve been together, all the time spent, this is how the stormcloud broke open, in a men’s restroom on a random Tuesday night in April.

There’s another kiss, another, slow then not, gripping, harder, frenetic suddenly with the agreement to stop, hands turning into claws, kissing the way a parched man drinks water before Shane drops his forehead to Ryan’s shoulder, gulping breath.

“You go out first,” Shane intones, and Ryan seems to empty his lungs in a long gust, the humidity of it crawling up Shane’s exposed neck, then breathes in quickly through his nose. Again, Ryan just nods. Without another word, he ducks under Shane’s arm and opens the door, looking back when he’s through, adjusting himself in his jeans.

“I’m gonna need a minute,” Ryan husks out, and Shane can’t help it. He laughs, chuckling long and low, reaching down to shift himself in his slacks that are suddenly too tight.

Then he’s gone again, and Shane’s left leaning his hands against an empty bathroom wall. He remembers, again, like the world lit up briefly in the strobe of lightning during a storm, an empty floor where Ryan had been. Crawling down to lay there, feel where he’d been like a ghost leaves a heat signature. Now there’s an empty wall, and a far-from-empty promise.

They just have to get through dinner.

Chapter Text

The last hour of dinner had been an exercise in misery. He’s as aware now of Shane’s body just inches from his own as he had been then, when Shane finally emerged from the bathroom and took his seat again beside him at the table. The difference is now he doesn’t have to play a part. He doesn’t have to be that same Ryan, quick to laugh and quip and poke fun. Ryan, life of the party. Ryan—one third of the public face of Watcher.

But he is, and that has always been part of the problem: playing a part like it’s an identity for so long he forgets where it ends.

When Ryan slides across the backseat of the Lyft that Shane had ordered for them just about an hour later, his anxiety is through the roof. He’s hyper aware of Shane climbing in the car behind him, folding his excessively long legs up to fit himself in the backseat of the Volkswagen Jetta even though he’s watching it from the periphery of his vision.

The car door shuts and there’s the rustling of bodies getting settled, of fabric on leather and fishing for seatbelts, and the metallic scrape of them clicking locked.

Ryan listens as Shane confirms the address with the driver—one address, Shane’s–and then the car shifts into drive and pulls away from the curb to join the late night Los Angeles traffic like this is just another Tuesday. Like they aren’t ten to fifteen minutes away—traffic depending—from something equal parts stupid and life changing.

The air in the car around them crackles as much as it had in the restaurant, like they’re bringing the storm along with them. This tension hanging between them is charged, sharp like ozone signaling that rain is coming. Like this thing that’s been after them has finally caught up with them, storm chasers who’ve lost their way.

Ryan pulls out his phone just for something to do with his hands, because he’s got to play it cool and he feels anything but. If he has to sit here next to Shane, close enough that he could reach out and touch him—and not touch him—much longer he’s going to crawl out of his skin. Instead he’s scrolling through instagram blindly, eyes barely registering anything that swims past on the small screen.

Instead his focus is still on the edges, where Shane is. Hands folded in his lap, looking out the window. As far from him as he could possibly be without leaving the car.

The volume of the music, which Ryan had previously barely noticed, bumps up a few clicks and initially only barely draws his attention, but then after a few seconds of listening to the opening synth and rhythm pick up, bringing along the occasional strike of a chime, he starts to notice that the voice that starts in is absolutely not speaking English but absolutely is laying down some very aggressive gangster rap in…is that French?

He can’t help it. His reflex, when faced with the ridiculous, is to turn to Shane to see if he’s noticed it yet, and if he hasn’t, to abruptly bring his attention to it to see if he finds it as hilarious as Ryan does.

For the first time since they got in the car—and maybe for the first time since coming back from the bathroom—Ryan is actively trying to catch Shane’s eye, and when he manages it, Shane’s response tells him everything he needs to know. His eyes are scrunched up with barely contained joy like drawn lines, and he gives a desperate little shake of his head no. His body language says don’t look at me.

Ryan knows this look; knows this version of Shane so well. Knows it means Shane’s holding on by a thread, that he doesn’t trust himself to keep it together if Ryan looks at him. If they share a knowing glance, communicating without words with that kind of humor they share, one that transcends language.

Ryan doesn’t look away—he can’t. He needs Shane to acknowledge that their extremely blond socks and sandals Lyft-driver had been turning up for French rap. And to Ryan’s sheer delight, he does. It comes like it often does, like a lit match held to paper, the spark Shane had been holding at bay going up in that instant and he’s left silently quaking with his hand pressed over his mouth so he doesn’t let out an audible wheeze.

Ryan lets out a helpless, high pitched laugh, rocking forward in his seat as he grapples with himself to find whatever shred of inner strength he has left to tamp this down, but he’s not finding much. This is one of those moments where he knows they’ll have their own personal debrief afterwards, that everything that’s unsaid will explode out of them once they’re out of the car and onto the sidewalk outside Shane’s, throwing on shameful French accents as they retell the absurdity of the music switch, tossing back and forth asinine Frenglish rap lyrics as they make the walk from the sidewalk to the building door.

Right now it’s just silent, shaking laughter. Wordless communication, all eyes and energy, like lightning jumping across the sky: their own personal language. Right now, it’s just them the way they always have been, laughing themselves sick at the worst possible moment without a single thought given for mundane things like time and place and appropriateness, like they’re the only people who exist.

Out of nowhere, Shane reaches out and squeezes Ryan’s hand in his, and he keeps it there.

And the world around them falls away again, the way it always does.

Their laughter fades out, and through the cut of heavy French rap, a comfortable silence falls between them again. It feels like a drop in barometric pressure, feels like the storm that had been rolling in at their heels slows down. This feels normal, somehow. Familiar, even though it’s not.

The song starts to end, rhythm slowing, volume dipping lower, and then the track switches. Ryan’s listening distractedly for when the lyrics pick up, expecting more of the same, but his attention is distracted—drawn down to their hands folded together on the dark leather seat, stripes of street light and shadow sweeping over their skin rhythmic like keeping time.

A sudden movement catches Ryan’s attention out of the corner of his eye, and he looks. He sees Shane laughing silently, fingers of his free hand curled up under his nose like that will do anything to stop it. He doesn’t realize immediately what struck him so funny until a split second later when it clicks into place–when the track switched, so had the language and the genre. It sounds like German, so it tracks that Shane would have clocked it first, but…

“Is this reggae?” Ryan asks soundlessly, mouthing the words for Shane to read his lips when he knows he’s got Shane’s eye.

And that was a mistake, because the silence Shane has been precariously managing is lost to an explosive wheeze-laugh that he manages—barely, and poorly—to disguise as a cough.

The fact that they make it to Shane’s without causing some sort of international incident in the back of the Lyft is some kind of miracle, and as they spill out on the sidewalk and the Jetta pulls away, they erupt in loud and raucous laughter. The kind of laughter that’s an echo chamber that feeds itself, passed back and forth between them until they start to lose what set them off–until they’re laughing at themselves and each other, at the spitballed jokes that offshoot the original trigger. Until it’s just the two of them making things up together and laughing themselves sick.

“So—what was he even?”

“What do you mean what?” Shane echoes back, too loud in the lobby of his apartment building for past ten o’clock. Stopping in front of the elevator Shane hits the button, lighting up the up arrow and somewhere above them is the mechanical whir and click of the elevator car coming to life to answer its summons.

“I mean, was he French or German? Or like—what?”

“He was severely European.”

“Severely—” Ryan starts with a squeak of laughter. For some reason that set him off again, and when he looks up as the elevator arrives with a ding, he sees Shane looking back at him with a wide smile barely contained.

“Ryan, this is serious. He probably has Terminal European Syndrome…you know, where no matter what you do, you always have socks and a fanny pack.”

Ryan snorts with laughter and repeats it back—Terminal European Syndrome—with disbelief and laughter, shaking with it, eyes wet as he grabs hold of the chair rail in the elevator, watching as Shane hits the chrome metal ringed button for the third floor. The doors close, and Ryan’s wiping at his eyes, gaze tracking from Shane’s outstretched hand to his face.

They’re alone.

It feels like Shane is realizing that too–that underneath their uncontained and probably disrespectful laughter is the awareness that they’re finally alone for the first time since the men’s room back in downtown LA.

“There’s no cure, Ryan. I mean, for Christ’s sake, his name was Jonas.”

Shane looks delighted, his smile and silent laughter lighting up his face, and Ryan is struck by how much he wants to kiss him, right here in the elevator like he’s a teenager who can’t wait two minutes. Because that’s how this feels. Because the half-hour ride from downtown had been too long, because the rest of dinner after the bathroom had passed in slow motion, the way checking the clock seemed to slow down time. Because these past six weeks he hasn’t been able to shake the feeling that he’d blown his chance on a night when they’d maybe been too drunk to make the most of it, and that there wouldn’t be a do-over.

But there’s going to be a do-over, and these last minutes or seconds are giving a wild edge to the high of his mood. When Shane says Jonas, Ryan’s gone, like somehow that’s the icing on the cake. That’s the one thing that’s too much, and he can’t.

Ding.

How they make it to Shane’s apartment, he doesn’t know. That part skips, and it feels like time is making its own rules, shoving them ahead with a lurch now after so long making them fight the second hand forward.

They’re laughing as Shane fumbles the key in the lock. Not about the driver anymore, but about something else. The joke had morphed into something new and now it’s unintelligible, Ryan laughing as Shane puts on impressively skillful but increasingly awful European accents that he somehow laughs through until someone squeaks out laughcents. The best Ryan can manage is a cartoonish French, oh ho ho! That kind of probably offensive Inspector Clouseau-esque accent that’s effective nonetheless.

Ryan’s still laughing as the door swings shut, but he isn’t for long.

Shane dumps everything he’d been holding—phone, keys—on the console table near the door, and Ryan couldn’t say if they landed or not because at that moment he finds himself pushed back against the wall, and their mouths catch like this had been the trajectory they’d been moving along all night—guided as if magnetic, drawn in to connect as soon as they’re close enough to be caught in the tow-line of each other’s inexorable pull. It’s abrupt, that time-sped-up lurch forward into what’s been just out of reach all evening.

In the bathroom Shane had been slow, leaning in like he wasn’t sure—like he was waiting for permission or proof but this is different. This is a kiss a long time coming, like the delay and the build up means it gained mass and momentum, meaning that when it hit the collision would be devastating.

They’re not laughing now.

Ryan’s hands find Shane again, knuckles skimming his sides under his jacket, over his shirt, catching a loose fist full of fabric with a tug. He uses it as a handhold, another way to draw Shane close.

Standing here at the edge, he thinks how easy it would be to get lost in this. Hell, if he’s honest, he is lost in this. Somewhere in the catch and release of their mouths he realizes the momentum was too much—that this thing has built up an unwieldy speed and he doesn’t know where they’re going.

“Ok, ok…wait. What are we doing here?” Ryan breaks from the kiss just enough to ask, the words husky and warm against Shane’s open mouth.

It’s not the question Ryan really wants to be asking, but it’s the one he knows he needs to.

Simply because: what are they doing here?

In the dim light of the apartment, just hallway light burning somewhere behind Shane’s towering figure, Ryan can only see edges of things. The crest of Shane’s cheek, lit from behind, as he gives a breathless little nod and backs up enough to bring his hand to his forehead.

“I don’t know,” Shane admits dryly, and for the first time Ryan can see his surroundings without obstruction. Shane’s sofa, piled with laundry. Shoes on the floor, stacks of paper on the console table. In full disarray like it never is.

“Well,” Ryan prompts, still leaning on the wall where he’d been led. He watched Shane take another step back and take a deep breath. “What do you know?”

“I know...” he begins, not facing Ryan until he turns, and Ryan still can’t make out his features—but he has them memorized. Knows the face he must be making. “I know what happened at your folks’ house that night. And how, we never talked about it. I know I’ve been so preoccupied with it..." He gestures around vaguely, searching for an end to that thought and coming up dry, dragging a hand through his hair without making eye contact.

“You left before I even came back from outside at breakfast. You gave me a pretty clear signal not to bring it up, I thought."

Again, Shane nods. His hands are planted on his hips, eyes on their feet. “Yeah. I did."

“How much do you remember?”

“Not as much as I’d like..." Shane replies after a moment, his face shifting into some light from outside the living room window. He looks tired, his gently downturned eyes heavy-lidded and ringed with shadow. “But enough that..." again he struggles.

“Enough that it’s got you wondering what you’re missing from it?" Ryan finishes for him. He remembers a fair amount, the visceral memories, but not clearly. Not the way he would have hoped for. Not the way he wants.

“Yeah,” Shane says finally, after a long enough pause he seems to have thought about it quite a bit. “Enough that...I just can’t seem to think about anything else."

Ryan licks his lips. It’s his turn to nod.

“We sure waited a long time..." Ryan begins and again, Shane gives a nod, this one a little frustrated. “If we’d done this, I don’t know...back at Buzzfeed..."

“I know what you’re going to say. And I know. There’s an awful lot riding on Watcher. I don’t want this to...”

There’s a heavy feeling growing in his stomach when Shane doesn’t finish that sentence. An understanding. “I’ve held back...” Ryan whispers bleakly, and Shane draws close again, close enough to feel the heat radiating off his body. All those chemical reactions, the sheer size of him.

“Have you?” Shane returns, just as softly, leaning in again to find his mouth, and Ryan is gone. Whatever he might’ve said in response has turned to smoke. Gone up in flames. It’s deep, the velvet sweep of his tongue skirting along the ridge of Ryan’s teeth, and he feels his knees wobble under him.

“Yes,” he gasps, a word lost somewhere in the gape of Shane’s mouth closing over his again. The apartment is so silent, he can hear the compressor click on in the refrigerator. There’s the hum of some electrical device off to his left, the high pitched whine of something charging. Soft and high as a mosquito flying by his ear.

“So, what now?” Shane hums, his mouth rumbling sounds against his neck, and Ryan lets out a shuddering breath.

What now indeed.

“Well we...we can’t let this fuck everything up for us. I know that. If we were going to do this, we should’ve done it when our liabilities were limited to ourselves—"

Against his neck, his mouth open and hot against the tendon that reaches up under his ear, Shane hums an agreement.

“Maybe,” Ryan whispers. “Maybe because we can’t remember it well, it’s become...you know, something that’s bothering us.”

“And you think,” Shane’s voice blossoms up from somewhere under Ryan’s ear, “we just have a funny old time here tonight and, what—that, that just clears it up?”

“Well, we’ll stop wondering about it so much.”

Shane stills, his hands on Ryan’s biceps, tight enough to hold him there. “I guess that makes sense."

“So, we mess around a little. Get it off the table.”

“Out of our systems, is that what you mean?”

“Yeah,” Ryan breathes, “Yeah, get it out of our systems. Then we can, you know. Move on from it. Stop thinking about it so much. One and done. Get back to work.”

Shane says nothing for a long time, but if he has protests, he doesn’t make them known. He brings his hand up from Ryan’s arm to the back of his head, burying his fingers in his hair, finding his mouth with his again and fastening it there.

“Okay,” he agrees, drawing back just enough to let the word buzz there against Ryan’s lips, before dipping back in.

“Should we—I don’t...I don’t know, set some ground rules?”

“Ground rules? Like no hitting below the belt? No biting?”

Ryan smirks in the dark, “I’m okay with biting...”

Shane kisses his chin, dropping his lips in spots along his jawline, working back toward his ear. “What are you not okay with?”

Anything we can’t come back from, his mind supplies. But Ryan doesn’t share his intrusive thoughts. They’re adults. Business owners. Best friends. Reasonable is their middle name.

Ryan chuckles, but doesn’t respond. The guidelines implicit in the term “fooling around” are good enough for him, and Shane continues on his path down his neck, giving a sharp bite for good measure and Ryan, instead of laughing again, huffs out an overheated breath.

“Maybe just...” Ryan manages, “Let’s agree not to mark each other up too much, and—you know. Be reasonable about...everything...”

“Easy for you to say,” Shane intones, dropping a kiss under the cut of Ryan’s jaw, switching over to fit his mouth against the skin on the other side, nipping lightly enough with his teeth that Ryan feels a shiver erupt between his shoulder blades in response. “What’s too much?”

“I don’t want to have to wear stupid knotted bandanas around my neck for a week and a half—”

Shane laughs outright at that, the sound echoing up in the small hollow between the wall and where Shane’s mouth meets Ryan’s throat.

“I can’t get away with that like you can,” Ryan defends himself, and Shane laughs more until he finds Ryan’s lips and snuffs the laughter like a candle being doused.

It’s a long few minutes, stretched out in the silence between the wet sounds of their connecting and releasing mouths, the punctuation marks of their shivering breath. The slip of hands along clothes.

“Okay,” Shane whispers. “We get it out of our systems and be done with it." With that low confirmation, he’s pulling Ryan along with him in the dark, dropping him backwards onto the overstuffed low sofa that’s against the far wall, and following him down.

Chapter Text

The air goes out of him briefly, just the shock of movement and reality of Shane climbing on top of him, kneeing his thighs apart to fit himself between them, and diving back in to drink more slow motion kisses from the open flower of his mouth.

And while yes, certainly, his imagination has supplied some aspects of this fantasy for him over the years, it manages not to hold a candle to what it’s really like having Shane’s attention centered on him with such laser focus. It was nothing compared with the actual drag of his big hands down his body, anchoring on his hip to pull him up against the cradle of his pelvis. Nothing compared with the daunting size and unmistakable press of Shane’s substantial cock trapped in his nice dinner-out slacks that they’re likely to be on their way to ruining if they’re dry clean only.

Ryan can’t wait.

But also he’s already afraid he’s missing details. Glossing over the little things he’ll mourn losing later. He’s already feeling the clock ticking until this is all over, until it’s out of their systems, and they’re back to how everything was before he went down on Shane in a closet at his parents’ house—not because he was too drunk to know better, but because he was too drunk to remind himself why he hadn’t already done it.

Because he was too drunk to stop himself taking what he wanted.

That’s one thing Ryan remembers with incredible clarity. Taking Shane in his hand, the sound of his ratcheting breath somewhere above him. Giving it a testing stroke in his hand, the skin pink and with the texture of a lily. He remembers the salty taste of his skin, and Shane’s sharp, labored gasping. He remembers the hot pulse of release, Shane’s hand gripped in his hair. Shane coming in his mouth with a ragged shout.

What he doesn’t remember is the expression on his face. He doesn’t remember the gentility of his big hands untangling from his hair. He doesn’t remember enough of how they actually got there.

But he’ll remember this.

Shane holding him down on his sofa, here in the same spot they’ve spent a hundred nights watching shit movies and drinking shit beer. Where they’ve drifted off together at 3am watching Jaws for no reason or the worst horror movie they can find on Amazon Prime.

Between his thighs, Shane grinds down against him with one upward motion, dragging himself along Ryan’s body with enough precision Ryan feels his mouth drop open at it. His eyes roll back in his head while a shuddering breath escapes him. While he’s recovering, Shane does it again, his mouth coming in to catch the tail end of that long, shaking exhale Ryan had gusted out in response.

“Yeah,” Ryan whispers, tipping his hips upward without even intending to. His body moving on its own, asking for what it wants. And it wants more of that.

Shane’s body listens; it answers. It gives Ryan more of what he’s after. Another slow, deliberate grind and another as they stumble on moments of connection that they chase in between. Like give and take or call and response, their hips start to move together slowly, locked together. They fall into step, quick to find that perfect rhythm like it already lives in them, waiting to be discovered. A rhythm created by years of contagious laughter and late nights that turn into mornings.

Ryan can hear and feel Shane’s breathing, open mouthed and just under his ear, hot over his neck–can hear the huff of surprised satisfaction that happens deep in his throat and buzzes between them like completing a circuit, sizzling along his pathway of nerves, stealing a shiver down his spine that pools low and hot in his belly.

It feels like Shane is everywhere. Larger than life, stretched over the length of his body like an eclipse, lips at his neck, his jaw, his mouth. Once again, they could be anywhere or nowhere because the world has fallen away—it’s just Ryan and Shane together. Just their faltering breath, the hushed rustling of their clothes as they move. The wet sounds of their mouths as they catch in slow motion. Ryan can’t get enough air to fill his lungs, like he’s drowning here on dry land.

Ryan’s hips move up again like they have been, his body with an agenda. His body asking for what it wants and moving to take it; his body a force of nature.

One of Shane’s hands finds Ryan’s face, palm on his cheek and guides his awareness back up through his body to his mouth, to Shane’s, to the slight rasp of day’s end stubble against his skin. To the scrape of teeth and the slip of his tongue, begging entry.

Then that hand travels the length of his body down, the spread of palm and fingers covering so much ground, and Ryan feels himself arch into it as that hand catches under the swell of his ass, and uses that leverage to hold their bodies together tighter.

Ryan can feel the outline of Shane’s cock against his body, and feels how it drags against the length of his own. How it drags a slow, deliberate circuit, dragging up and back down, up and back down and every time the solid shape of him finds home between the spread of Ryan’s thighs, his breath hitches. Fingers gripping whatever he can reach.

His mind is blank. It’s right here trapped somewhere between their bodies and all these clothes. It’s miles away, behind the door of a coat closet. It’s in his parents’ backyard. It’s looking around his monitor at his old desk at Buzzfeed at big, beautiful Shane. It wants less in between them. It wants more.

If there can’t be less obstacles, he’ll settle for less clothes—settle for getting his hands on Shane’s bare skin.

Ryan reaches between them to tug at Shane’s belt, barely room for his hand between the crush of their bodies. The belt comes open with the clink of metal and he fumbles his pants open, reaches his hand inside, palm pressed against the length of Shane through the silky fabric of his boxers, and this is so much better already, it’s like a kind of relief.

And Shane’s hollow, shuddering breath falls over his open mouth between kisses, that’s a kind of relief too. Ryan flashes back six weeks, to another sound not unlike this.

Shane moves to grind into his open hand like answering a call, and Ryan is suddenly and vividly aware of the size and shape of him. The way his cock moves as his hips drag slow, the moments he comes back for, tries to repeat. Ryan’s hand curls, cups against him—wants more than this, goddamnit—and things, already scarcely controlled, start to fall apart.

Their kisses get progressively more frenetic, grow sloppy, don’t always catch. Increasingly, they just breathe into each other's open mouths, forehead to forehead, as they pick up intensity, so close their vision blurs out like opening your eyes underwater.

And it must be too much for Shane, or not enough, because all at once he moves.

He rears up on his knees, the open sides of Ryan’s waistband in each hand, peeling the jeans back and down his thighs, hefting his hips off the sofa with enough strength that if Ryan had been possessed of the ability to be impressed, he would’ve said something.

Instead, he just lets out a long breath, watching Shane strip his pants inside out over his ankles, pausing with a frustrated huff to push his shoes off before jerking the denim over one bare foot, boxer shorts included.

Splayed out on the sofa, Ryan posts up on one elbow to tug at the buttons on his shirt with his free hand, watching Shane edge off the sofa to kneel on the floor, tugging at the laces of his other shoe before sliding it off, dark eyes burning up at him while he discards the jeans behind him onto the dark carpet. Ryan shrugs out of his dress shirt, sitting up enough to pinch at the collar of his undershirt and tug it over his head, leaving himself nude and aroused on Shane’s sofa in the same spot he’d often find himself on a lazy weekend, half wasted with popcorn in his teeth.

Shane’s hand smoothes over Ryan’s calf, settling gripped across the top of his thigh, his gaze dropping with his head and Ryan watches, flushed and mystified while he drops a soft-mouthed kiss there beside his long fingers. It smolders on Ryan’s skin, like a hot coal catching flame, and Shane drops another further up, then another, chasing up the length of Ryan’s muscular thigh, the tide of warm breath gusting up to the center of him, turning cool as he grows closer to where he really craves that attention. He turns his head, gentle, pressing his mouth to Ryan’s skin with pursed lips on his inner thigh, the jut of his hip bone, breathing out a long gust of breath over his exposed, aching cock but shying away, leaving Ryan squirming under the scrutiny and tease, leaving him breathless.

Shane drops a kiss to the skin of his drum-taut stomach, eyes closed, lingering, and this all has veered at a breakneck pace beyond the borderlines of the concept of messing around.

It might have been past that frontier the moment they kissed. Because with every kiss, Ryan aches. Every sweep of Shane’s hands on his body feels reverent, every kiss a kind of worship at an altar. He touches him, kisses him like—

Well, like he loves him.

A kiss with a swiping tongue on Ryan’s left nipple sends a lightning bolt down his spine, a welter of heat and sensation nestling between his legs, a drip of precome spilling down the side of his cock like wax down a candle, and he hears his own voice call out.

“Shane…!”

Shane’s mouth is tasting along his collarbone, a sharp bite making him gasp before the hot, clinging sweep of his tongue is soothing the nip, his voice rumbling out from the narrow canyon between Ryan’s shoulder and neck.

“Oh, thought you were okay with biting.”

Despite himself, Ryan lets out a chuckle, watching Shane’s knee sink into the cushions beside his bare hip.

“Unbelievable. I’d be more okay with you taking those stupid fucking pants off.”

There’s a wheeze of almost-laughter, the heat of Shane’s mouth on his neck before Ryan snatches up the open sides of Shane’s slacks—already half peeled down his hips—and jerks them down over his ass. The sound and physical rumble of Shane’s laughter against his skin is like war drums while he helps him clumsily shake off the pant legs, leaving him nude from the waist down, giggling something unintelligible about Donald Duck while he takes Ryan’s earlobe in his laughing mouth.

And Ryan turns his head to swallow that laugh, to slide his mouth against Shane’s. To silence the laughter with a surge of something boiling between his lungs he doesn’t have a name for.

His hands burrow into the close shorn crop of Shane’s dark hair, and god how it satisfies something obscure and buried deep, how he’s wanted to touch it like this for years, and now, crushing his mouth to his, feeling Shane’s arms jerking out of his shirt without pulling his mouth away, turning his head at a difficult angle to keep from drawing back, freeing one arm and burying his long fingers along Ryan’s scalp—it’s almost as though Shane is satisfying a similar desire. He fits his palm tight along the curve of Ryan’s skull while he slips his other arm free and he dips closer, his bare knee slipping against the hot skin of Ryan’s inner thigh, balancing his weight there, his hips bowing inward between the brackets of Ryan’s open legs, settling himself there with his tongue wet and velvet against Ryan’s, slipping deep before curling back, tasting.

Ryan understands the impulse. But the first searing hot press of Shane’s naked skin on his, from knee to collarbone, pulls a shudder from him that erases everything else from his mind. The bump of Shane’s cock, heavy, wet-tipped, against his hip before laying flat there, pressing, grinding forward, rips another gasp from him.

There’s a moment he feels settled, buried in this hot embrace. It’s a feeling like coming home. And then there’s a stab of hunger. Like it’s just a taste, a sip, a nibble of a banquet when he’s been on a seven year hunger strike. He anchors his hand on Shane’s shoulder, gripping there for leverage, pushing up with his hips while Shane bears down, a sound mingling in the join of their gasping mouths. There’s the press, the grind of skin and flesh and hair, a hiss of breath, a biting of lips. Ryan feels his voice in his throat, a deep rumble of satisfaction that escapes without his awareness.

“Fuck”, he says, to no one but himself, and it comes out hollow, echoed from the open gape of Shane’s mouth gasping into his.

In response, Shane’s hips push against his. Sliding every inch of his impressive anatomy along Ryan’s, and Ryan loses all the air from his lungs in a rush.

That. He wants that again.

It’s clear he’s not alone in that because it’s a motion Shane repeats, slow and deliberate, and it's like a balm, the press of Shane’s skin to his. Soothes something he hadn’t known was on fire—or at least had thought he had contained—and then it’s not. Then it’s heat that builds. Then it’s a need that gnaws at him.

This is a kind of hunger unlike any he’s ever known. It feels like it grows the more it’s fed, this desire bottomless.

Ryan lifts his hips to meet the way Shane moves, and then again, both of them seeking the same thing, that rhythm their bodies had found before, with clothes on, but it’s different now. There are false starts, moments where they almost find it, but falter. Moments where the lift and press of their bodies in time is too much, and there’s a sound, a high, thin moan that escapes between them like steam. It’s not enough.

That’s when Shane slows it all down, almost grinds it to a halt, and there’s the appearance that as they pick up that Ryan is leading, because when he moves it’s desperate and deliberate, but there’s only so much he can do with Shane solid and heavy against him—Shane’s body the boundary of his movement. Shane is a subtly guiding force, moving slowly to give Ryan more room as he picks up the pace again—and Ryan moves to take it. Moves to keep from losing again what he’s only just started to find, the heat and slip of their skin together, the way it feels when Shane’s cock drags heavy and thick alongside his own.

This is them falling into lockstep.

The groan it inspires—guttural and animal and low—is swallowed between them, something Ryan offers up and Shane drinks down, something he savors. Together they manage to hold the rhythm of their bodies together, and it’s unmistakable, what this looks like—what it feels like it could almost be. It’s not a coherent thought, not words or even pictures, but just that ache. It’s just his heartbeat drumming in his ears, or it’s wayward thunder catching up with them, or it’s the heat that’s pooled, throbbing between his legs—but like lightning cracking across the sky he has moments with his nerves lit up that he can fully envision Shane inside him.

And that’s too much again. That thought and this feeling, the match of their bodies, how one of them picks up when the other falters, how somehow, together, they hold the desperation of this pace together until the muscles in Ryan’s thighs start to tremble. He feels like he’s running a marathon, like wobbly legged he’s rounding to the final stretch, and he knows he’s going to come—fast, and just from this.

He doesn’t want this to be over so soon, but that’s not something that’s really within his control—not with the wet slip of their skin, a mix of sweat and precome easing the give and take of their bodies. When he comes it adds to that desperate mess between them, makes the next rock of their hips come slick, a near shout breaks their kiss, and he falters—thighs shaking and all he can do is arch desperately for more, for don’t stop, and hope the wordless message makes it through.

And somehow it does—Shane single mindedly rolling his hips into him as he comes apart at the seams, carries him through. Shane panting hot over Ryan’s jaw, over his ear; Shane’s breath becomes a soundtrack—ambient, a backdrop, those shuddering, heavy breaths stalking inside his skull, becoming bigger inside his body.

Ryan hears a moan, and it’s heavy and deep and Shane—and it wants. It shivers along Ryan’s already lit nerves down the length of his spine. This can’t be done. In the clarity that follows release, there’s a flash of fear that the trajectory will change now, and it can’t. Ryan needs this, more, needs to feel Shane when he comes, needs to feel the heat of his release and the crush of his body.

“Please… keep going…”

That moan resounds again, reverberating up from deep in Shane’s gut, like an echo through a canyon. Ryan fights a shivery convulsion at the drag of heat and pressure along his sensitive, still-leaking cock, his sensitivity to every grind of hips honed to a fine point, and despite himself, he shudders. His legs relax, the muscles milked of their desperate tension, hips still tipped up to maintain contact as Shane braces himself above him on his elbows, his mouth still roving open and hot along the ridge of Ryan’s mandible. The slick wet mess is spreading between them, seeping with every tidal wave roll of Shane’s body against him. It rolls in heavy drops along the seam where Ryan’s leg meets his hip, rolling down between his legs, catching in hair and spotting the sofa below.

In any other situation, he’d be sitting up to stop the mess from staining the furniture. He’d be calling it enough, but it’s not.

This close, locked together, he’s witness to Shane in a state he’s never observed. He’s mindless, driven by need, by instinct. His body desperately chasing something just out of reach but closing in on it, a kind of hunter, a primitive persona that’s existed buried under a quirky love of weird history and niche music and gin martinis with three olives and stupid hats. All those sophisticated, cultivated human tastes boiled away in a flash burn, leaving behind this animal, panting and sweating and rutting against Ryan’s slick mess in a breathless pursuit.

A predator closing in.

It’s the snap of teeth on a neck, the crush of bone, the sinking in of sharp claws. The primal urge. Shane hums out a sound that buzzes against Ryan’s neck, and it’s like taking a shot of whiskey—so good it burns all the way down his body.

“Yeah,” he hears himself whisper, and it’s like tapping the gas pedal on a roaring engine, how Shane seems to shift into another gear at the sound of his voice, sparks firing in all cylinders as he slips the length of himself along the slicked crease between Ryan’s legs. The angle is different, and Ryan feels every inch of Shane sliding, driving against him, fevered in his pace, and Ryan brings up his knees slowly, arms lassoed around Shane’s undulating body, holding on.

With that motion, the angle pitches downward again, Shane pushing himself openly and wantonly in the open cleft of cheeks, a muffled moan creaking out of Shane as he bucks, his breath ratcheting higher and faster.

There’s a concentrated point of compacted heat and pressure that Ryan feels between his legs—it grows then retracts, hotter with each rush, a stretching feeling. And Ryan tenses for only a moment before he rises his knees higher, hugging Shane’s sweat damp ribcage.

It’s not a difficult feat of logic—even in this state—to understand what that feeling is. What they’re hurtling toward. To know just how far beyond the fence of fooling around they’ve found themselves now.

A millimeter at a time with each tentative thrust, Shane is pushing inside him.

And he wants him to. He wants him inside so urgently it’s like a taste at the back of his throat. It’s a kind of desperate hunger he’s never felt before, and he lifts his hips another inch against Shane’s body—letting his muscles fall relaxed in his core. He breathes in deep—the salty aroma of sweat, the distinctive smell of ejaculate, the hint of deodorant and soap and faded cologne on Shane’s neck: a heady array of deeply familiar things in a foreign combination.

Certainly he could shift to one side, drop a knee, let Shane slip a different direction. But he doesn’t. They’ve been skirting this since the moment they started, and while this isn’t exactly the arrangement they’d agreed to, the idea of it is intoxicating.

With a deeper push, Shane’s breath comes quicker, and he stalls in his movement, hips still twitching, and Ryan hears his own voice gusting out in encouragement when he hears Shane mutter a breathless “oh.”

“Yes yes yes,” Ryan breathes, lifting his hips against him. “Fuck. Yes.”

At the sound of his voice, once more, Shane seems to come alive. His knees replant themselves on the sofa, pushing his thighs forward to lift Ryan’s legs up, his feet lifting off the sofa cushion when Shane bears down, pushing against him, the slip seemingly aided by the copious mess of Ryan’s release smeared between them, rolling down, thick and slow as honey, to gather below—and Ryan groans more approval without even examining the thought or motive.

He wants it.

And from the way Shane dips in again with a slow, pumping motion—forward before drawing slightly back, then forward again until Ryan can feel the stretch, the heat—maybe he wants it just as much. There’s the feeling of his body giving, opening up—he hasn’t felt it in awhile—and he shudders out a breath involuntarily, Shane seizing up until Ryan bounces his hips up against him once more. A half inch at a time, the resistance lessening and then fully vanishing until Ryan can feel it: the solid length of his best friend, after all this time, buried inside his body. His head falls back limp against the throw pillows, breathing out a lungful of what feels like steam escaping something boiling and suddenly uncovered. It’s a shock, it’s a salve over the strange agony of desperation. It’s the feeling of a clenched fist held tight for years, finally releasing.

“God,” he hears Shane whisper, “God, Ryan”, and Ryan tips up to taste that awe he hears in Shane’s voice for himself. It’s a delicacy, a rare gem, something he’ll maybe never hear again. He wants it spread over his tongue like fine champagne, bubbling between his teeth. Like the slow liquid melt of imported chocolate. The sweet gush of the ripest strawberry.

When Shane’s body stills again, sunk inside him slow and purposefully until he’s near buried to the hilt, Ryan groans so low, an involuntary reaction like taking a breath when surfacing from underwater, it rumbles out like distant thunder. His hands skid down to find Shane’s hips, still for the moment, gripping them hard and pulling him the last centimeter until they’re flush. He can feel a tight tremble in Shane’s body, in his arms holding him up above him, in the muscles that bunch along his spine. It’s a tremor of restraint. Of holding back. His breath is high and fast, a lion lathing its tongue over raw meat.

The light from the bulb in the hallway is only enough to cast a dull amber haze into the front room. Only enough for Ryan to gaze up into the collected shadows of Shane’s face to find his dark eyes, hooded, burning down in the sodium yellow glow from the street lights sneaking through the blinds from outside. He draws back slowly, keeping Ryan’s gaze, then drives in again with more force than before. Then he repeats the action, his mouth falling open while Ryan watches his features bunch and pinch with the sensation, his face going taut, his forehead creasing between his eyebrows.

“Oh fucking god,” Shane hisses out, picking up speed while Ryan hooks his ankles over his thighs, breathing deep and shuddering at the wet, effortless slip where their bodies are joined together. Where Shane is deep inside him, driving forward, snapping his hips now, swearing again under his breath and dropping his head onto the throw pillow beside Ryan’s head with a long, low, inarticulate sound of white hot boiling desire, of pleasure, letting the curl and bunch of his spine and every taut muscle take control, letting his body lead without interference of doubt or worry or strategy.

Letting it chase the rabbit with every hungry instinct in his long, lean, sweat-slicked body.

Ryan feels like he can breathe deeper now than he ever has. Like he’s spent his life with lungs half full, and never knew until this moment, with his body full and nerves buzzing alive with rapture. His eyes roll in his head, dropping closed while he’s gasping for more air. Knowing now that he can breathe. Like he’s been saved from drowning by Shane.

Saved from falling off a building of incredible height. Caught midair and now soaring.

This is how church is supposed to feel.

Saved from starving slowly to death in desperation for a single taste of nourishment, and now he’s full.

So mind-bendingly full.

This is what their bodies have been chasing, in spite of them. In spite of the distance they tried to keep and Ryan’s once-steadfast refusal to cross the line from coworker to friend, here he is crossing again from friend into whatever they’re becoming. In spite of the blockades they’d put up and the back and forth unavailability of relationships on one side or the other, until luck or inevitability found them single at the same time, and maybe then this was just a matter of time.

Being too-drunk together had been the push, but maybe it could have been something else—a night in the dark of some haunted place when fear or adrenaline made him brave or stupid, a joke gone too far, one of those many nights sharing a bed when he’d laid awake all night staring at the ceiling and listening to the soft and steady sound of Shane asleep beside him. Or maybe he would have gotten the nerve to just speak up about it.

This is a victory lap after the slow motion marathon that led them back here—right through the clash of tonight’s and how many other countless fights they’ve had over the past seven years that brought them back eventually to Shane’s sofa in the near dark. It’s fitting that tonight should end here, too. Maybe every night that ended with popcorn and movies and eyes flicking sideways in the glow of the flatscreen had inched them closer to this, to making something new together, right back where they’ve always been.

Ryan would be lying to say this isn’t something that he’s thought of before, that this isn’t something he’s wanted. It is, but it’s something he’s always told himself he can’t have, and he thought that it might be something he could stop or divert, something he could keep ahead of and outrun. That if he put enough barriers in between himself and this that he might stand a chance, but the truth of the matter is that if he were to walk this collision back he’d have to go so much further than six weeks ago—he’d have to go back to the very start, practically to day one.

And this has been catching up with him. He’s known that a while.

Now it feels like being overcome. Shane the predator, clenching his jagged jaws over the capture—Shane like a hurricane rolling over him, the heat of his body and his breath on him and in him, moans shuddering against his ear in a rush of sound. Ryan cants his head, presses his sweat-damp cheek against Shane’s—another point of contact—like they haven’t already found enough ways to touch.

Like Shane isn’t everywhere all at once. Like every thrust doesn’t spark through his nerves like electricity.

His body rocks with the force of Shane moving over him—beneath his sweat soaked back is the drag of the sofa cushion, uncomfortably warm from the contact with his overheated skin—hips rolling into him as he stalks his pleasure. Above him, Shane is panting against his ear, down his neck, breathing like he’s running from something. Ryan’s arms tighten around his back, gripping at his shoulder.

From nowhere, Shane’s big hand comes down to grasp his hip and he uses that hold to pull their bodies together tight, to hold Ryan against him as he slows, each thrust becoming deep and deliberate—just barely dragging over that raw nerve deep within, and something inside Ryan is going molten, pushing him towards almost—and then shifts again, shallower than Ryan wants it, drawing away what had just barely been given and the sound in his throat grows high and needy like a distress call, Shane’s answering one rumbling in his ear thunderously low. As single minded as Shane has become, so has he—he needs that feeling back.

So he chases it, legs hooked around Shane’s thighs for leverage he moves against him, the muscles of his thighs straining to find and strike the pace they’d lost. With that arm slung around Shane’s shoulders he’s getting there, bodies locked together, finding the same perfect rhythm they’d found before with clothes on except now the only thing between them is the wet sounds their bodies make. And then there it is.

The change is subtle, whatever it is—angle or speed, or some combination—but the effect is anything but. It’s the sudden perfect drag and press of Shane against his prostate, like a thumb to a bruise, finding what aches and pressing hard, and it launches Ryan over the edge again, suddenly and profoundly.

Ryan comes like a bow fired dry, the arrow meant to send all that force away nowhere to be seen and instead it shakes his limbs. Instead, it threatens to tear him apart. There’s nowhere in his body for the way he feels to go, and his body jerks like waking up before hitting the ground when you’re dreaming that you’re falling—and his head drops back to the sofa hard, like it’s thrown, and he comes with a shout that grows louder, that loses breath and gasps again for it.

The words come airless: “Oh… oh, fuck.”

It feels like his body has been remade, like being taken apart and put back together with the pieces sharp.

Heavy and hot against his ear comes Shane’s throaty, groaning oh. Ryan hears and feels it, that sound like sensation, dragging raw down his nerves. And there again. Oh.

Above him, Shane’s still moving against him like the beating of a drum. Hard, deliberate, Oh. The way he’s moving, the wet strike of their bodies—Oh—and then faltering, pace stuttering, Shane is pouring himself into him. And oh, he’s so much more vocal than Ryan would have imagined—and he comes with voice breaking under the weight of it.

Ryan feels a moment of overlap, a place where the wake of his pleasure is still rippling outwards as Shane’s closes in, as it takes him over, together slipping breathless beneath the surface. There’s a long stretch of time—where there had been heavy breath and strangled sound, not unlike that airless wheeze that often hits when laughter comes too fast or wild—that hovers in shaking silence before the sound rushes back in like the tide, and Ryan’s enveloped in Shane’s voice saying nothing. Just the throaty rumble of another moan, and there’s the sweat-wet slip of that long, fine nose against the curl of his ear as he tucks a kiss there beneath it, on his neck.

It’s been a long time since Ryan remembers sitting through an earthquake, but he remembers this is how it feels. The shock of the quiet stillness that follows, like he’d forgotten in that short time that the world could be anything but chaos.

In a similar way, laying here on the sweat damp sofa beneath Shane, it’s like he’s forgotten everything that came before this. Or that anything might exist after it. He simply lays, humming like a box of lightning, like a wasp nest, filled with a million joules of potential energy but stalled in one place with his eyes closed, letting it all arc though the walls of every cell in his body: through his skin, his lungs, his heart. Every atom is electrified, charged with the potential energy fisted tight in the center of him, held at bay like a pendulum at its pinnacle, frozen at the moment before the drop. Before velocity carries him toward the inevitable.

The inevitable being that all things end. That things, once joined, must come apart. That fire turns to ash.

That agreements to get something out of one’s system duly imply that specific something happening only once and then never again. It implies there being no further need.

On his back, still chasing his breath, Ryan already knows what a foolish mistake that had been--at least on his own part. Because only moments after the finish, Ryan can feel his appetite for this blown wide, his need for it: this thing he’s spent seven years telling himself he can look in on, press his nose up against the glass and covet, dream about, but never touch because it would ruin his world.

Shane, breathing heavy against the curve of his neck, most of his weight caught on his elbows that are sunk into the sofa on either side of Ryan’s shoulders, remains still. After a moment, there’s another soft press of his mouth on the side of Ryan’s neck. There’s the sweep of his hand, the press of his palm in an almost searching way against his chest and Ryan wonders, thoughts full of static and stars, if he’s feeling for the profane thump of his still racing heart.

While Ryan considers this, Shane’s mouth finds his again, kissing away the tension he feels gathering in his gut, forcing his breath to begin to slow in the strange phenomenon that seems to grip them when they kiss: like the world around them drops dead, falls away. Like nothing around them exists, like the physical world is nothing but a cage keeping them apart.

That thought cinches around Ryan’s heart like a razor wire, tightening until it cuts, but Shane’s kiss deadens the sharp ache that would otherwise pervade his body at something far more raw than he was ready to parse.

So Ryan opens his mouth, lets Shane deeper in. Here, he’s living a different life. He’s some reflection of himself, someone who looks quite like him, has lived a thousand identical days, but just made a few different choices. He’s Ryan reflected in a mirror. He’s Ryan who can lay beneath Shane Madej, can be made love to, kissed into near insanity and not have it ruin everything that comes after it.

He’s a shadow of himself, and he’ll return to how he was eventually. When the sun rises, or when that overhead light is switched on. When it’s time to put everything back together and pretend this was enough.

Pretend this was the solution they’d thought and not the exposed root of the problem; the uncovered, bloody nerve ending, now rubbed raw.

Shane, still buried inside him, tilts his head, opens his mouth against his. Kisses him deep like the antidote to this is somewhere in the back of Ryan’s throat. And again there’s that feeling like nothing exists around them, like time stops, like they’re one thing, sharing oxygen and chemical reactions that keep them alive, like they’re falling from a great height or sinking deep underwater. Like, locked together like this, they’re something without expiration. Without laws of motion or boundary.

There’s an entire otherworld behind Ryan’s closed eyelids, the spin of offset fractals flickering like stars, the thrum of blood in his ears, the liquid rush like an ultrasound, like a great waterfall. Like wind or rain, like the turning of the machinery of the universe, there inside his head, in his chest, in the place where they’re still joined, in the core of his body.

Behind his eyelids, his eyes burn. He reaches up to hold Shane’s face with both hands, holding his face between his palms. This was such a bad idea.

And when Shane’s mouth lifts from Ryan’s and there’s the gentle breath of spoken words, the world comes crashing back, snapping back into place around them because it never left.

“Well,” Shane whispers, drawing back just enough that Ryan feels him slip free of his body, and there’s such a sharp pang of loss that harpoons through him that he almost jumps at the sensation. “Sure glad that’s out of our systems, buddy."

He chuckles softly, and Ryan’s guts twist inside him.

This was such a bad idea.

Because Shane is joking. Ryan isn’t fucking stupid.

He’s not fucking stupid.

Even though this was. This was fucking stupid.

Maybe that’s what Shane really means. That, boy, are they fucking stupid.

With his heart in his throat, his eyes burning, Ryan knows he’s supposed to chuckle too. He’s supposed to volley it back, turn the spotlight back on how this is supposed to be over now despite it feeling like this.

Despite all of this feeling...like this was how everything is supposed to be.

Like the otherworld is the real one, and that Ryan in the mirror is living the life he wants, this life he can only look in on briefly, his face pressed to the glass, wanting. Not able to look away.

Like he’s the one that has to go without, because they’ve said so, because this is it. Because this is about scratching the itch and moving on with life as it’s always been. And it burns through him, Shane’s gentle chuckle, it lances through the globes of his eyes, it pulls tight that piano wire around his heart and cuts.

But if Shane is able to laugh about it, well. Even though it’s a joke, and Ryan understands that, agrees with it, he can’t laugh. Something about even the idea feels like carving something out of him. Feels like giving up something he can’t stand to part ways with.

It’s a nonsense feeling. He’s too emotional, too wrecked. Shane has dug a grave and dropped him in it and is looking down at him with a gentle chuckle, expecting they can ride that laughter back to Earth, or Ryan can climb it like a ladder. Expecting they can rib each other about how this went, make jokes about their performances. Like things can go back to normal.

Ryan opens his mouth and, in a voice that barely sounds like his own, he tries for casual. “I’d better get going."

Even without being able to clearly see Shane’s face, Ryan can feel the smile fall from it, and whatever it is inside that’s cutting him up takes another dive for his organs.

Drawing back further, what Shane says is, “Oh.”

He shifts backward, his weight off his elbows, pulling back like a retreating tide, and Ryan wants to cry.

This is over now. This is done. It has to be.

It has to be.

For all the reasons they didn’t discuss that they both know. All the reasons they haven’t done this before is why they can’t do it again. It’s been one of those things Ryan has had to let go of in order to just live. They didn’t need to talk about why: that’s why they didn’t.

But Ryan needs to hear why now. In excruciating detail.

Except, no. He doesn’t.

From the look on Shane’s face, that agreement had been a little premature. “You don’t...you want something to drink? I can—”

“No, no. I..." Ryan clears his throat, finding his voice wobbly and raw. “I really....I’d just." Again, he clears away the cobwebs that seem to have gathered up around his vocal chords and tries again for a more neutral tone,choking back the urgency of impending panic. “I’d better go."

The sudden silence buries them both. It’s like an avalanche, like thirty feet of snow settled around them. The chill is unbearable. Ryan fishes on the ground for his pants and finds them, pulled inside out with his boxers clung around the outside, and rights them before beginning to tug them back on. He’s sticky, a complete mess. Leaking on the sofa, he can feel the wet heat releasing from his body the more he moves, but he steadfastly dresses with Shane sitting quietly where they’d lay, the set of his shoulders telling Ryan everything he needs to know.

But Ryan has to get out. He needs to get out of here. Whatever Shane wants to say, whether it’s that this can never happen again, or why they’re so stupid and this needs to happen every day, both those things feel like a hot sword sliding through his chest. There are invisible hands closing around his throat, diving down it, pooling hot in the pit of his stomach, gnawing through him like fire ants.

He buttons his shirt with numb fingers, licking his dry lips, finding his phone on the dark floor and pocketing it.

And what does he say now?

Thank you? Fuck you? How dare you? I’m sorry?

I hate you, I love you, please kiss me again?

Let’s talk about this later?

Let’s never talk about this again?

He’s so fucking stupid. This was such a bad idea.

Ryan swallows against the desert in his throat. Shane hasn’t moved. His gaze seems to cast thousand mile shadows into the cluttered dark of the room, a kind of dark that Ryan feels at the back of his eyes, licking up his spine, a kind of dark he’s going to let swallow him whole once he’s alone, and his knees tremble when he walks, fighting the turn of the Earth to stay upright.

“I’ll see you in the morning, man." And with that awful, awful, dismissive, horrific, worst possible sentence having left his mouth, he turns on weak legs, his stomach clenching like a fist around a burning hot pit of shame and fear and something he doesn’t have language to name, and he leaves Shane’s apartment without looking back.

Chapter Text

The sky is beautiful and blue and goes on forever, and Ryan is so tired. Sitting at a red light the next morning, he’s gripping the wheel too tight and staring out through the windshield at the cars rushing the other way on their green. He’s running late.

He’d done it to himself, but it’s not the result of any one thing he’d done this morning. He’d already been running late when he got in the car, sitting too long in the parking lot beneath his building with the key in his hand, staring at nothing and trying not to think about the day ahead, willing himself to turn the key in the ignition.

He was running late when he’d pulled on clothes, from the moment his eyes finally drifted shut somewhere between seven-thirty and eight, and even in the shower, hours earlier. And he was too late the second he’d stepped from the sidewalk at Shane’s into the Uber not long after midnight.

It’s a combination of everything. This is the kind of late that changes the course of your life. This is missing the plane, not sleeping through the alarm. It’s choosing one path and forsaking the other, and this is something that had been set into motion years ago, setting him down this road that has him about to be twenty minutes late for work, and seven years too late for the life he could have had.

The thought jumps into Ryan’s mind that he could take his foot off the brake. He could lay it on the gas, run the red light. Surge out into the traffic streaming through the intersection. He could let the void call him back.

As fast as it comes, the thought is gone again, and like he’s afraid that his body might take the cue from it anyway, he presses down harder on the brake like doing so will keep his foot from betraying him without permission.

Ryan glances at the rearview mirror when the car behind him inches forward, impatient. The driver is a young woman and in the passenger seat a man, both of them close to his age. She’s drumming her fingers on the steering wheel and bopping her head to the music that must be playing, and he’s smiling and looking over at her like he loves her. For them and everyone else, this is just another day.

It doesn’t even feel like a different, distinct day at all. It had been daylight before he’d fallen asleep, for however long he’d managed to. It feels like he’d been awake so long a curtain was pulled back from the world, and the idea of days being separate things is revealed to be an illusion. That it’s all just one long day with shadows created in between by sleep.

It’s like he’s living in the aftermath of his own personal earthquake, the only one who felt the ground break open, and so everyone around him is going about their lives like the earth hasn’t shifted beneath their feet and brought their world crashing down. Because it hasn’t.

The light turns green and he moves his foot to the gas, losing the young couple in the car behind him to the downtown LA traffic and closing the distance between him and the conversation he’s dreading. He wants to turn around and go back home, wants to crawl back under his covers and try or fail again to sleep. He wants to roll back the clock to last night and stay at Shane’s, curled against his chest instead of leaving in a rush.

He wants to go back six weeks and not kiss him, stop himself from setting this in motion. Except, he doesn’t want that at all.

He just wishes he could have handled last night differently. That in the wake of what happened, he hadn’t just started to cave in. That he was capable of talking about this at all instead of talking around it. The most he’s admitted out loud to Shane was that he’s held back. He hadn’t elaborated, didn’t connect the dots because that would be drawing a line that leads all the way back to the center of his heart, and they’d been talking about getting this out of their systems. And when that didn’t happen, he’d bailed, because this is why. This is why he’d held back as long as he had. Why his intention had been to keep holding back, to let this be something he shoves down and compartmentalizes. A sacrifice for the greater good.

Because this thing had been too big already, and then it was all he could think about, and then, like a bomb they’d set off in the middle of their lives, it had blown everything open wide. Because he’d known this wasn’t something he could do in half measures.

It’s not something he could have ever gotten out of his system in one night because it hadn’t been an itch to be scratched or a curiosity sparked six weeks ago that needed sating—it had been lying dormant longer than that like it was something written beneath his skin. Like it was in the makeup of his cells, waiting to be switched on like a mutation. Waiting to transform him into some other Ryan, the same but different.

Which meant it wasn’t something he should have done at all.

If he lived his whole life never tripping that switch maybe he wouldn’t have ever known the loss of this potential life, but it would still have been there waiting to be uncovered, like a buried and abandoned landmine.

The hours between leaving the Uber around midnight and when he’d set foot outside his building at nine this morning, already late, he’d spent running circles around his regrets. He wishes he could have stayed there in the middle of it, lost and wrapped up in Shane, in the physicality of him, the sound of his breath and the way the world fell away around them.

The whiplash of the loss was like plummeting to earth without a parachute, was like waking up the moment before impact in a dream where you’re falling. Terminal velocity in the blink of an eye. It feels like more than he could survive, going from that feeling that this was the way things were supposed to be—this feeling of rightness, like there was nothing wrong in the entire universe—to everything snapping back into place to the way it really was, complete with its city noise and air pollution, and Shane not being his.

He wishes he doesn’t feel the way he does, that Shane doesn’t either—that this is something that could be done and filed away, one mystery solved. He wishes he’d known what to say. He wishes Shane had tried to stop him from leaving, but he understands why he hadn’t.

Shane deserves so much better than this.

Shane deserves so much better than him.

The thought, quick and wild as it is, swooping through his head like a bird diving for prey, still gives him a sharp throb in his chest.

Because he’s a piece of shit.

He wishes there was an easy way to approach apologizing for something like this. He wouldn’t blame Shane for hauling off and socking him in the face over it. He’d run out so quick, running like a rat fleeing a sinking ship, Shane hadn’t even a chance to dress. He’d left him there, still naked and half-winded, having barely caught his breath before Ryan was shutting the door behind him and shrugging into his coat on the way down the outdoor stairwell with the tears already running down his face. Like he was leaving a crime scene.

He’s the worst person alive.

He could barely imagine treating anyone that way on some one night stand. And while it had been that, by agreement, it wasn’t just some cute little waitress he’d gone home with. Not some tall hipster baristo he’d picked up in Silverlake.

Instead, it was his best friend he’d done this to. Something he can’t imagine doing to a near stranger.

The surreality of it all, of their quick agreement and what they’d done, how it had immediately felt immensely less casual than they were framing the whole idea—the tenderness of it burning on his skin afterward like traces of acid—somehow it all coalesced in his throat as a wave of panic.

And he’d run from the only thing he could run from, because he couldn’t run from himself. As much as he always wants to.

The truth is, none of this is that far off from how much Ryan typically despises himself, but this morning that ever present loathing has gained an entirely new dimension.

Because there’s often some silver lining he can talk himself into. Some kind of redeeming factor, some kind of positive spin. Even if that’s sometimes just that Shane has the grace to endure his endless vulgarity and bullshit, and if Shane likes him, he couldn’t be the worst.

Like Shane is his credential into humanity.

Because he’s human garbage.

Pulling into his parking space, now a full half hour late, Ryan pushes the gear shift into park but doesn’t turn the car off, merely sinks his forehead to rest on the wheel to breathe away the nausea swelling in him.

Only Ryan Bergara could take something so wonderful, so incredible, and turn it into a problem.

But it is a problem. His guts have turned into eels even thinking about looking Shane in the face. He’d gotten home and stepped out of his clothes, right into the shower, and stood under the hot water until it ran cold. He’d lay awake all night, watching the sunrise slip through the blinds and grow brighter on the ceiling before he’d drifted off and been bullied back awake by his cell phone alarm.

Here in the parking lot, with the perpetual smell of Korean BBQ drifting through the air even at nine in the morning, Ryan could almost fall asleep with his head balanced on his knuckles, gripping his steering wheel, eyes closed against the blue glare of the bright spring day.

He doesn’t want to go inside. Shane’s Forester is parked where it always is, which isn’t a surprise except it is. As though Ryan had thought Shane would call in sick and miss his chance to corner Ryan and break a few of his teeth.

No. No, he’s not afraid Shane is going to hurt him. He’s afraid he’s hurt Shane. In fact, he doesn’t have to be afraid—he knows. He knows he has. And that’s worse than fear. It’s an intense brand of regret he’s not sure he’s ever felt before.

Maybe he should’ve brought him a coffee.

Either way, it’s probably too late for anything like that. So it’s with feet made of lead and his head aching from the glare and the lack of sleep that Ryan drags himself into the office suite and nods at the faces that tip up from their computer screens to greet him good morning.

The office is humming, running edits on a series, starting post on another. There’s a bullet point brainstorm still up on the white board, the glass door to the conference room standing open with voices floating out. The mood is still on the high of winning a Webby, something this team deserves immensely, and somehow, listening to their voices and the clack of their fingers on keyboards, he feels so selfish there’s a new flash of nausea blooming in his belly, simmering under the cup of yogurt he’d horked down before slithering out his front door.

Like he’s putting all their livelihoods on the chopping block just to have the thrill he’d promised himself he wouldn’t chase. Like he’s betrayed them.

Like they’d all be so disgusted to know he’d just walked out on Shane, who everybody loves almost as much as Ryan loves him, and with good reason.

And there he is. At his desk with his phone held to his ear, wearing a red buffalo plaid flannel, looking tired but focused as though everything is exactly as it always is.

His eyes flash over briefly when Ryan approaches, only to skid away at the moment their gazes connect. He turns his desk chair away to face the window, and the low simmering nausea turns withering, threatens to knock Ryan’s knees out from under him, and he grabs at the back of his desk chair for support.

His focus falls to the top of his own desk, his monitor and cup of pens, his figurines, his keyboard with his wallet perched conspicuously on top of it.

His wallet.

On reflex, Ryan reaches into his back pocket as though he’ll find it there, despite the fact that he’s looking right at it. It’s unmistakable, it’s his wallet, and it only occurs to him now that he hadn’t seen it since. Well, since last night.

Shane doesn’t turn back around in his chair. Ryan hears the low tones of his voice replying over the phone, but there’s static in his ears while he picks his wallet up and turns it over in his hand, numbly opening it as though he really needs to inspect whether it’s his own—like he needs to see his own driver’s license there in the clear plastic window before he believes his wallet had fallen out of his pants at Shane’s and he’d left in too much of a hurry to notice.

Inside the wallet, folded and tucked in the first card slot so it covers everything else on the left side, is the sushi list from the izakaya last night—the bubbly, year-book handwriting of the waitress. The little pink heart.

He hadn’t put this in his wallet. He’d fisted it up and tucked it in his pants. Just another thing, presumably, he’d lost in the rush to get out and then back into them. Something Shane had plucked up from the floor and tucked inside with the number facing out.

It’s not a big deal, but it is. Ryan isn’t even sure why, and maybe he’s just exhausted, or maybe he’s just a selfish piece of shit bemoaning internally that his actions have consequences, but Shane put this here as a kind of reminder that their agreement had been to fool around, sate the curiosity, and move on with things. And since Ryan had run out with no ceremony or even tying up the loose ends and shaking on it, Shane put this here to reinforce the stake Ryan had driven through the heart of their would-be romance. Fling. Affair.

Whatever the right word is. If there’s even a right word, or if that even matters.

It’s Shane saying, here, now you can call that waitress.

It’s Shane saying, it’s done now, don’t forget.

It’s Shane saying...something.

For now, there’s acid burning in Ryan’s throat, and the echo of Shane’s voice through the caverns of his memory, “I know why you won’t call her.”

The agreement had been just to fool around. Just fool around. Kiss, slip some clothes off, touch each other’s body while they were sober enough to make a clear memory of it, taste each other’s skin and lips and then file it all away, put a checkmark in that box and move on.

But it hadn’t worked out that way, because as soon as opportunity had presented itself, Ryan had nearly begged for it and Shane had seemed quite pleased to oblige.

So, they’d accidentally had sex. It was probably best to think of it that way. It limited liability for it all, shifted the blame away from either of them who could have stopped it whenever they’d wanted, and simply had not.

And now Ryan’s staring at his desk feeling almost seasick while Shane turns back to his computer, ending his phone call and opening up an email in Outlook, beginning to type. He doesn’t look up at Ryan, doesn’t nod at him or say good morning.

Ryan, dizzy, watches his hands, his long fingers plucking at the keyboard, and feels his face flush thinking about the feel of those hands on his body, gripping his hip, his shoulder, crawling through his hair. About how Shane had been inside his body less than twelve hours before, and now they’re just sitting here at their desks in the office like nothing happened. Like everything is the same.

The acid is burning in his throat. He slips his wallet into his back pocket, watching for Shane to look over, to invite conversation the way he normally would. Instead he types, the clatter of plastic keys and nothing else, the voices and regular sound of their office rattling around them.

And this is it. This is how things will be now. They’d agreed to get it out of their systems, and this is what that looks like. It’s been less than twelve hours and every second that ticks by brings them further away from that moment where they were one thing—like it had felt so many times before while sharing a joke, finishing each other’s thoughts, comfortable in silence working side by side toward a common goal—and it already is wrenching Ryan in half to be so removed from it.

This is the closest he’ll ever be again to having Shane. Every breath brings them further apart, like traveling down a river. The distance will stretch with time, and time will do what it does. They say it heals all wounds, but that’s wrong—the truth is that time just desensitizes you. The truth is that it’s like finding a bruise and pressing down with your thumb until it goes white, until the throb goes numb. Until the constant pain is canceled out by the brain, simply because it’s constant. Like going nose blind to a smell over time. It’s just a kind of giving up. A kind of trick to survive.

Things will return to how they’ve always been—they’ll travel, they’ll film, they’ll talk like they always have. Shane will look him in the eye again, probably sooner than later. But when it does, they’ll be so far from the time they were together. From the time he was cocooned in Shane’s long arms, feeling the heat radiate off his skin while the oxygen and calories burn in his body and Ryan won’t feel that again. Won’t be in his arms, won’t feel the heat and thunder of his heartbeat, the tidal rush of his breath.

With his eyes cast over again at Shane, typing, his eyes are shadowed in his face and under the brim of a ball cap. His eyelids so swollen they shine, pink, heavy over his exhausted, dull, red eyes. It doesn’t take a genius to see how hard and long he’d been crying to look like this now. And while they’d both chosen this path, Ryan is the one to blame for the sheer drop over a cliff that path ended on.

The sudden intensity that Ryan wants to throw himself at Shane, wants to feel his arms around him. He’d wait until the mountains gave out to have it again. He wants to be buried there.

And Ryan is going to throw up.

Really. He’s going to throw up. Right now.

He stands quickly enough his desk chair is sent back on its casters and teeters, Ryan rushing to the restroom and locking the door behind him just in time to bow deeply with his hands gripped on either side of the toilet seat, emptying his yogurt and coffee and bile with a deep, barking retch into the porcelain bowl. It’s another few empty heaves before he’s flushing it all down, washing his face in the sink with the coldest water he can get, and catching sight of his face in the mirror—his waxy, pallid complexion and red eyes like he’s fighting off the plague.

He puts in a couple unfocused, foggy-headed hours at his Wednesday morning email box, and It’s not until somewhere around lunchtime that the office empties out. It’s in the near full silence of that midday hush that Ryan swallows back the burn of bile, turns to Shane, still typing with airpods in, and forces out a greeting. The only beginning of an olive branch he can seem to conjure with his dry, sore lips and aching throat.

“Hey...can we talk?”

Shane’s red eyes slide over to him, the corner of his mouth visibly tightening as he reaches to tug an AirPod out of his right ear, holding it primly in his long fingers as though he’s preparing to put it right back in.

“What?”

“Can...can we talk?”

Ryan watches the tip of Shane’s tongue flick out, wetting his lips as he moves to pluck the other AirPod out of his ear and sets them on the desk, his hands fisting up on either side of his keyboard like he’s bracing himself for a plane landing.

“If we have to.”

Those words hit Ryan like a punch to the chest, and for a moment he wonders if he can do this. He knows he deserves that kind of vitriol and more, that he’s got this coming, instant karma as payback for what he’d done last night in leaving before they could have a conversation. But that doesn’t change the sudden twist he feels, though there’s nothing left inside him to throw up.

The impact of what he’d said and how he said it must be apparent, even though Shane hadn’t been looking at him, because barely a beat passes before one of Shane’s curled hands opens with a little wave, and more softly, he course-corrects, “Sorry. Yeah, we can.”

That twist in Ryan’s gut unclenches a little bit when Shane softens, and he has a passing thought about how he hates how much he’d needed that.

“Listen…I wanted to say I'm sorry.”

Ryan feels like the words just fall flat the second they’re out of his mouth. Like they’re nowhere near enough to encompass what it is he’s trying to convey.

Shane’s quick to accept it, even if it isn’t enough. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

Ryan wonders if he’s just willing to take whatever bare minimum Ryan seems like he’s offering as long as it means they can go back to not talking about it. That’s not what he wants, but he supposes that’s what he’s trying to do here—offer some kind of apology, some context, so that Shane can maybe understand why he’d left, even if it isn’t something he can forgive. And maybe that’s fine—maybe that’s the best he can hope for.

“I just…I want you to know, though.”

“I get it.” Shane says. His voice sounds foreign. Like Shane but not. And hearing it, that knot in Ryan’s stomach clenches tighter again. “Really. It’s fine, we don’t have to get into it.”

The more Shane tries to shut the conversation down, the more desperate Ryan feels—because this is it. They’re never going to be closer to last night than they are right now, and the longer they wait—the more doors they shut and lock behind them as they move forward into the never ending tomorrows—the more impossible it will be to find their way back to it.

“I feel like we do.”

Ryan’s searching for eye contact that doesn’t come, because Shane’s looking anywhere but at him, like he can’t or won’t. Ryan wants to scream: look at me! He wants to grab Shane by the shoulders and shake him out of this, wake him up, make him face this. Make him look at him.

And he’s a hypocrite. Because he wants from Shane what he couldn’t give to him last night, when it mattered the most.

He’s a hypocrite, because this is the first time today he's looked at Shane. Really looked at him. He looks like hell.

He’d noticed it in his puffy, red rimmed eyes, but now that he’s looking at him he sees that it’s so much more than that. It’s in the slope of his shoulders, like the exhaustion he feels extends outwards through his body to his limbs, weighing him down. The stretched out neck of last night’s t-shirt is visible under the wrinkly flannel, and Ryan can’t tell if it was one that sat too long in the dryer or if it had come from the laundry basket.

His hair is greasy. He’s wearing the same clothes. He hasn’t shaved—and Ryan remembers how that shadow felt dragging over his neck a few hours ago as Shane had breathed him in, as he left a damp line of kisses in his wake. Has Shane even showered? He can’t stop himself from thinking about what it means if he hasn’t, how Ryan must still be clinging to Shane’s skin beneath his clothes like evidence.

“I didn’t mean to…push you into anything.” Shane says, staring down at the surface of his desk or maybe the edge of his keyboard like it’s the most fascinating thing on earth.

How can Shane possibly think he’d pushed Ryan into anything that happened last night?

“You didn’t push me, dude.” Ryan says. “I was just…I don’t know. I guess, just, a lot happened and. I guess I kind of panicked…”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.” Shane repeats, still pulling back, keeping himself at arms reach or further, but at least Ryan thinks he sees a measure of relief in his expression, mouth relaxing with a heavy exhale.

Still, that hadn’t come out the way Ryan meant it to, but there was no way for him to say what he meant. He couldn’t sit here in their office, with their employees mostly gone for lunch but some of them in side rooms or upstairs, just out of earshot, and tell Shane in exactly so many words how desperately he’d wanted everything that had happened last night and more.

How could he tell him it was exactly what he’s been trying to keep himself from wanting for a hell of a lot longer than six weeks?

“Yeah, I do. I do.”

“You don’t. Really.” Shane’s fidgeting, fingertips tapping on the edge of his desk, all this nervous energy pent up and Ryan knows this Shane. This is no-sleep-Shane, four-cups-of-coffee-Shane. Shane suffering, on the edge of breaking down.

That desperate feeling tightens its grip on Ryan as he watches Shane’s hand fishing to pick up his discarded AirPod, ready to close the book on this conversation and get back to work. Like that’s something they could do.

But it’s something they have to do.

“I wanted it. All of it. I just…I didn't expect it to feel like that.” Ryan throws the words out like a lifeline, except neither of them are on solid ground so it’s just a line drawn between two men drowning.

“Did I…did I hurt you or anything?” Shane asks, looking somewhere between the two of them, some no man’s land on the desk between their stations. It’s the closest he’s come to looking at him since he’d walked in and Shane caught his eyes briefly before turning completely away. Ryan thinks he must be able to see him in his periphery, shape and color at the edges.

“Oh, no, no. I didn’t mean like that. Just—” Ryan fumbles the words out. That wasn’t what he’d meant—he doesn’t want Shane to think that he had, at all, doesn’t want him to even question it. But he can feel the heat in his face as he rushes to answer, and knows it has to be obvious—if Shane would just look at him. Maybe it’s for the best that Shane can’t bring himself to.

“Oh.” Shane’s tone shifts, and Ryan can hear it in his voice—he understands his meaning. He’s put it together, that he hadn’t meant physically. “Right, yeah. Yes.”

Ryan doesn’t know what else to say. He knows what he wants to say, and he’s dangerously close to it. What he’s already said has been edging closer to something they shouldn’t acknowledge, since that wasn’t what this was supposed to have been. This was supposed to be getting it out of their systems. One and done.

They were stupid to think that was something that was possible.

Ryan had been foolish enough to lie to himself and to Shane to have a chance to experience what it was he said he’d live his life ignoring, and now it’s set off a charge that had been buried beneath both of their lives.

Shane clears his throat, wipes his palms on his pants, looks down at his knees, and he nods. “So, well. We’re fine. We’re good.”

Ryan has to accept that. Good has to be enough. Fine has to be okay, because he can feel how tenuous a hold they have on this.

“Okay.” Ryan’s voice is hollow, like the sound from air rushing past an empty vessel. That’s how he feels, anyway. “Good, great. Okay. I just, you know, didn’t want you to…”

“Yeah, I know. I'm good, really. We’re alright.”

“Alright.”

And, well. That’s that.

This is how it’s going to be.

They’re fine. They’ve talked it out, no hard feelings on either side. They’re alright, or they’re going to be. Ryan knows they both need time. Distance from last night, more accurately from this morning.

They’re good, but it doesn’t feel good yet. He can’t shake this awful, sick feeling he’s left with, like he’s ruined the two best things in his life because he was greedy enough to think even if he couldn’t have them both the way he wanted to, he could get close enough to pretend—and that somehow that would be okay.

And of course it wasn’t, and then he’d hurt Shane because he couldn’t deal with the enormity of his emotions. He had no right to have acted on what he wanted if he knew he couldn’t follow it up. And he had known. Even though he hadn’t expected it to feel the way it had last night, he’d known that trying to have both was a mistake. That’s why he’d made a point to avoid it as long as he had.

But the way he feels now is going to fade. Time will take them away from this moment and into the next, and they’ll find a rhythm again. He’ll get used to this ache. It’ll become background noise, like the hum of electricity in the fridge or the ever-present sound of the city outside his apartment windows. Time will pass, and other things will happen that fill up the growing space between them and last night.

And they’ll be fine.

Shane puts his AirPods back in slowly, stiffly, like he half expects Ryan to say something to stop him, but he doesn’t. And then Shane turns back to his screen, to his email, and it’s over.

Ryan turns back to his monitor, and he stares at nothing, eyes unfocused but Shane’s in his periphery, at the edges, just a blur of shape and he’s all he can think about. Shane is sitting at his desk, he’s within arm’s reach, yet he feels as distant from him now as he had seven years ago, sitting at neighboring stations in another office, when he’d barely known his name.

Ryan already knows he isn’t going to get anything done here today. He’d leave if he could, but he doesn’t want to run out again. There are still emails he could read, try to reply to, shot lists he could pretend to review, maybe think about. Low-stakes work he could lose himself in to make it through the day, and tomorrow he’ll be further from last night, and by Friday, even further.

He shuts his eyes for a moment and lets out his breath, trying to let this tension out. Trying to remember what it is his therapist says, about grounding. Notice where the feeling is in your body. Sit with the discomfort.

What do you do if it’s everywhere?

How is he supposed to sit with this?

“You look exhausted, man. Maybe you should take the rest of the day. You know, go home and sleep.”

Opening his eyes, he just misses catching Shane’s.

He’s got the suspicion Shane just wants him to leave, wants some distance from him and from this, but he’s also grateful for the out.

“Yeah, I am, but—”

Ryan doesn’t even get a chance to argue.

“It’s fine. I’ll hold down the fort. Not much is happening anyway—most everyone’s pretty hungover.”

“Right.”

They aren’t the only two people in the world, the only people who’d experienced last night, who’d been out to celebrate. Who may have indulged more than they’d intended.

Ryan is so selfish.

“Yeah, okay…thanks.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Ryan closes down his computer and rubs his eyes. He wants to stay as much as he’s glad for the excuse to go. He has a lot more he wants to say, afraid that by leaving he might miss the chance to—afraid he may already have—but tells himself it’s fine. He can say it all later when things are feeling normal again. When it doesn’t feel like there’s crushing weight behind every single word. When they can at least pretend to be casual.

Ryan gathers his stuff—phone in his pocket, pulls out his keys—and swings his backpack over his shoulder. Now is the time he’s supposed to leave, but he can’t seem to make his feet move.

He wants to say goodbye, but he’s overthinking it. He’s second guessing the decision to go at all, so he’s standing with his hand on the back of his chair like he thinks he’d forgotten something, grabbing at excuses to stay.

“Seeya tomorrow, man.”

Shane says it for him. Breaks the silence with a push, and Ryan takes the hint.

“Yeah, man. See you tomorrow.”

It’s a few minutes after he watches Ryan’s sedan back up from its parking space and disappear in the northbound lane of Olympic before Shane really feels alone again. He’s a pragmatic person by nature, and this is the simplest solution to a complicated problem. To just not dwell and fret about things over which he has no control. To simply let it be. Like a wound that would heal if you could only just stop picking at the scab.

But you can’t.

“I just didn’t expect it to feel like that.”

And if that doesn’t just sum everything up. Tie it up in a nice little bow, a nice, neat little streamlined package. Perfect and deadly, like a bullet in the head. A flawless summary he’d have never expected out of Ryan.

He should feel better after all that. He knows he should.

His head throbs in time with his heartbeat. Every cell in his body is sore and dehydrated. His eyes sting, the muscle at the hinge of his jaw aches from clenching his teeth for hours.

Everyone must think he’s hungover, and he hasn’t corrected them. The truth is that he’d only had a single beer he’d nursed the entire dinner, but had let something else more toxic into his system as soon as he’d arrived home, and it’s still coursing through him now, unshakeable.

And like some cocktail that Steven might mix up without measuring, heavy handed and imprecise, filled with contradictions, his gut is still boiling with its effects.

A heavy pour of self-loathing, disgust, embarrassment. A couple ounces of rage. A few dashes of grief, of bitterness, all topped with a garnish of misery instead of a fancy cherry.

It’s the kind of mixture that will rot right through, it would take rust off an engine, and as soon as he’s sure he’s alone again, Shane bends forward to catch his face in his hands, clamping down on the sob he feels building in his throat like a thundercloud ready to burst. He tries to hold it in but it escapes, wet and lonesome sounding echoing off the high ceilings.

No one can hear, it’s alright. He just needs to get it out. Eventually this well will dry up.

Just maybe not tonight.

Because Ryan is right: he hadn’t expected it to feel like this.

He hadn’t expected it to swell back up inside him at the sound of Ryan apologizing for running out before the sweat on their bodies had even cooled.

He hadn’t expected just the sound of his voice to force a recall of Ryan gasping under him, whispering “yes yes yes” when Shane found himself beginning to nudge inside with every slippery, savage thrust against him. Chasing his desperate need for Ryan’s body and whatever piece of it he was allowed to have for the short time they’d agreed.

He hadn’t expected this to have left barbs sunk into him, like the snapping teeth of an animal snare burrowing deeper when he struggles against it, a lance of pain every time he remembers any moment of what had been the most thrilling, incredible minutes of his stupid life. Now he’s just flayed open, a prey animal in a trap, ready to gnaw his own leg off to escape the agony.

He hadn’t expected kissing Ryan to feel so tender it’s painful just to nudge at the memory, bloody and raw and sweet like something newborn too weak to live and then drowned as a mercy.

It’s been twelve hours. The memories are sharp now, they draw blood, but they’ll lose their edges. He’ll start to forget, it won’t be like this forever.

It’s only been twelve hours.

It’s only been twelve hours and he misses it all with such violent, pathetic desperation it’s excruciating. It’s embarrassing. It’s unbearable.

And Ryan is sorry, and he forgives him, and he can’t blame him for anything. His boiling anger isn’t at Ryan. He’s not sure what it’s at, if it’s simply at himself, his own stupidity for suggesting it, or for agreeing to it, for wanting it at all.

For wanting it so badly he’d ignored every impulse toward self-preservation and thrown himself at the mercy of his own desire.

Like throwing himself into a burning building for a drink of water.

All night he’d sat on the sofa, in the place where he’d made love to Ryan, alone and naked and letting the tears fall like a child until his head throbbed and throat was sore. Until it almost hurt to breathe.

Until the sun rose.

He hadn’t been able to articulate his grief at all, or even understand it. It had just flooded out of him, these pitiful smothered, shuddering wails he’d caught in his hands all night long, trembling under the invisible weight of it and all he could do now was mourn.

Because that’s exactly what it is. Mourning. Loss. Because something had been born, something beautiful had struggled its way into being that night, and then been crushed. Smothered. Dropped in a shallow grave with plans to forget it, dead with its first breath still in its lungs. Something that never even really was, just an illusion that existed for the short time the conditions were just right, a mirage, a trick of the light. Smoke and mirrors.

And the truth is that he’d had no real idea what he was promising when he’d said they could just fool around this once and be done with it. He hadn’t known what he was losing. What he was throwing in the fire.

What was being taken away from him.

And he’d tried to keep it light. Tried to broach the subject of just how inadequate the plan to get their mutual attraction out of their systems felt now on the other side of what felt like an epiphany.

Because there was sex, there was fooling around. There was hand stuff and mouth stuff, screwing your buddy because you’re drunk or bored. And then there was whatever the fuck they had done.

Shane drops his aching head into the cradle of his arms, folded on the top of his desk, and lets out a tired, trembling sob. His hot breath reflects up, the smell of coffee and hours of dry mouth and not having brushed his teeth or even showered this morning because of the urgent sense of dread it gave him to wash the traces of their time together off his body.

He’d given himself a rudimentary wipe-down. Crotch, pits, washed his face, raked some water through his hair. Deodorant, cologne. Tugged on a cap and hoped it would shadow the mess that was his face.

In the mirror, his eyes were so red. The other Shane had had a rough night as well. Maybe his life wasn’t so perfect after all.

Maybe he’d finally had and lost Ryan all in one night too.

“Shane?”

He jerks, shoulders going tense so fast they cramp on one side and he lurches up from the cradle of his folded arms, rubbing one eye with the heel of his hand.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you up,” Brittney says sheepishly, a half-empty pink Starbucks drink in her hand and her jacket hood still up, nose red from the cold wind. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah yeah,” Shane croaks, breathing deep to settle himself, blinking profusely. “Just didn’t sleep great, I think.”

“Too much last night?”

Shane’s stomach turns. Yes. Far, far too much.

“Can I get you something? You want some tea?"

Shane’s eyes burn again. He doesn’t need anyone to take care of him. He doesn’t even deserve it, passing himself off as sick or exhausted or hungover when he’s just destroyed.

Just drowning in his own grief because he’d had everything he hadn’t been aware he wanted in life, and now it’s gone and he can’t let go of it yet. Like a child throwing a quiet, sulking tantrum.

He shakes his head, averting his eyes as they start to run over again, praying Brittney doesn’t see but she does—she’s rushing forward, setting down her drink on the desk, dropping to her knees to bring herself level with him, and it’s only now that Shane notices he’d been tipping out of his desk chair.

“Shane!” Brittney looks so worried, eyes enormous in her face, hands braced on his slumped shoulders then laying a hand on his forehead like his mother used to do to check for fever.

“I think you ought to go home. Is Ryan back from lunch? I’m sure he’d be more than happy—“

God. It’s always Ryan, their names are linked together forever and not in the way they’re supposed to be. In the way they can’t be because they promised. Because so much rides on them now. Because it would endanger everything they’ve made.

“He went home,” Shane creaks out, steadying himself with a hand on the desk while Brittney rocks back on the heels of her shoes with a frustrated, tight-lipped expression.

“Ok, I’m going to call you a Lyft. You’re not looking right.”

Shane wants to resist. He doesn’t want to be here but he doesn’t want to be at home either. His empty, quiet apartment that still smells like him and Ryan together. His apartment with that sofa in it that he’ll never be able to sit on again.

“I’m okay, really,” he waves a hand vaguely, like he’s clearing away smoke. “Just need to lay down a few minutes. Take an Advil.”

Please, don’t make me go back there yet.

“Something wrong?" Steven’s holding a box under one arm and an empty Tupperware in his hand that he sets down immediately.

Shane doesn’t want to talk to Steven. More than anyone, maybe even more than Ryan, Steven sees right through Shane in a way that makes him feel naked.

But it’s too late, the way it’s always too late, and Steven is bending down and replacing Brittney in his field of view. And Steven can see what Brittney either couldn’t or didn’t want to mention. Maybe it’s just his red eyes. Maybe it’s the set of his mouth. But Steven reaches up to squeeze his shoulder.

“Shane,” he says, and it’s so earnest. So gentle. Shane doesn’t deserve any of these people. He’s selfish, he’d spent the night throwing a fit because he can’t have the thing that would shred this newly flourishing company to ribbons in record time. Their internet reputation alone would be compromised to hell. He’d spent all night wanting to blow up the company just so he could have what he wants, this company Steven put his soul and blood and thousands of hours of work into and just as much in personal capital.

Shane wants to sleep for a thousand years.

“Shane, what’s wrong?” Steven is such a sweet man. It’s not fair. He should punch him in the face. Brittney should spit on him.

“I’m—” Shane’s voice breaks, and he’s mortified. He covers his face with one hand and Steven gives his shoulder another squeeze before leaning in to put his arms around him, and Shane lets it happen. He can’t recall if he’s ever hugged Steven before, but now Steven will be able to tell that he’s shaking, which is even worse, but Shane can’t just push him away. He goes limp.

“What happened?”

Shane just shakes his head against Steven’s shoulder, and the next question, the inevitable one, feels like being lashed with a chain.

“Where’s Ryan?" Because if something is wrong with Shane, everyone wants to be sure Ryan knows. But oh. Ryan knows.

“He went home,” Shane repeats dully. “I’m fine, really. I’m just—”

“Did you guys fight?” Steven sounds so serious, and Shane feels like such an asshole when his response is a sharp laugh.

“No,” he tacks on the end of that cryptic laugh, probably too late. “No, we’re fine. Everything’s fine."

Steven braces his hands on Shane’s shoulders now, the way Brittney had done, but with more conviction. “It’s okay if you don’t want to tell me, but you should go home. Get some rest. Any of this can be done tomorrow. If something’s time sensitive, give it to me, I’ll take care of it."

And Shane nods. Because he has to. He can’t kick and scream and have them let him stay here at his desk on the edge of weeping all day, staring blankly at his screen with his mind entirely somewhere else.

They protest him driving himself home, as they would, of course, but Shane is fine. He’s not sick or drunk or about to pass out. He’s just throwing a tantrum. He’s just being a child.

He’s fine.

He just needs to go to sleep, and tomorrow this will all look a little less like the end of the world. Distance and time makes everything fade. Even if he isn’t sure he wants it to.

Chapter Text

It’s the first day of summer, the longest day of the year, and boy does it feel like it. Lately, every day is the longest day of the year.

Just like he’d known or feared would happen, time has put distance between him and that Tuesday night in late April, and now it’s nearly July. It’s not better now than it was then—it’s still unbearable—but he gets through. It feels like that’s all he does, just get through it. Like the joy’s gone out of everything. There’s nothing he’s moving towards, he’s just moving away, always moving away.

Away from Ryan. Away from that night in April, from the biggest mistake he’s ever made, one he plays and replays in his memory too often, rewinding back to revisit particular moments, so much so that if it were a VHS he’d be in danger of wearing the film straight through. He feels like he has one foot still in that night and the other kicked out in front of him, ready to run, and rationally he knows that’s not sustainable. No feet beneath him, he’s unsteady. With little connection to the present, he misses things. Anxious for time to pass, for the next thing to come and the next, to get to the next meeting, the next project, the end of the day or week. He’s running.

He’s running, but there’s nowhere to go, like he’s on a treadmill. Like he’s motionless in space even though he’s running flat out, because what he’s trying to get away from is Ryan and their lives are too intertwined to untangle unless he wants to bring things crashing down, and he doesn’t. Desperately, he doesn’t want that. So maybe he's just running from himself.

When he’s running he’s looking at what’s next, or the ground ahead of his feet, and doesn’t have time to look around at his surroundings. Doesn’t see all the things he’s neglected in throwing all his time and energy into putting one foot in front of the other—doesn’t see the dark circles ever-present beneath his eyes, the uneven, overgrown beard, the careless appearance. He barely looks at himself in the mirror anymore. He doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to find that the Shane in the mirror is the same.

That he’s falling apart, too. That the world around him is in shambles, just like his. But if he doesn’t look, that other Shane isn’t there. Some kind of Schroedinger’s Shane situation, where if he’s not looking then maybe there’s a universe somewhere in which he hasn’t lost everything. If he doesn’t look, maybe it’s not as bad as his imagination is making it out to be. If he doesn’t look, maybe he doesn’t exist at all.

Because he knows exactly what looking does. It erases the question. It solidifies the truth, makes it undeniable. And if the question is how is Ryan coping with all this? then the answer seems to be: just fine.

Because when he stops to look at Ryan over these past few weeks, what he sees is that he’s starting to fill out his clothes better. He sees the muscles in his arms gaining definition and tone beneath his skin, he sees a new solidity and strength in his shoulders. He’d changed how he was doing his hair, got it cut, and was emphasizing the curls. Ryan’s taking care of himself.

He looks good.

It feels like an attack.

Like he’s rubbing it in his face, to be doing so well while Shane is slowly falling apart. It feels like Ryan’s reaching for one of his loose threads and pulling, like a twist of the knife. Adding insult to injury.

To go from walking out after, before either of them had caught their breath, to I didn't expect it to feel like that, to turning into the best version of himself over the past few weeks feels like a slap across the face. He couldn’t stay and try to navigate through how that night had unexpectedly felt with him, but he sure could drop a bomb and walk away and back into normal. Into better than normal.

It’s hot for June, close to a hundred and Shane’s leaning against the side of the building, finishing a cigarette. The brick at his back is warm even though he’s in the shade. There’s not much breeze, but when it comes it’s hot. He’s glad he’d checked the weather before getting dressed, pulling shorts instead of jeans from the stack of clothes that didn’t seem to make it past the sofa one way or the other. He hasn’t done laundry in weeks, so the shirt he’s wearing isn’t clean by a long-shot, but what does it matter?

He checks his watch. Lunchtime. The office should be mostly cleared out. When he’s done with his smoke, he can go back in, make a coffee, go hole up with some editing that will take him to the end of the day. That’s the goal. Make it through without looking at anything too closely, like how race horses run with blinders to keep them looking ahead. The goal is not to notice how Ryan starts to pack up at a quarter to five, how he carries a duffle bag instead of a backpack these days, because he goes to the gym after work.

And tomorrow, he won’t notice how he comes in with wet hair, his shirt sticking to his shoulders and chest because he’s clammy from showering at the gym, because Ryan’s bookending his days with working out. He won’t think about Ryan running, or lifting weights, breathing hard as he breaks a sweat, because those are thoughts that take him back to that night in April and he’d lose this distance he’s hard won from it, and he’d be right back there with the ache of the loss of him like it was new and huge and eclipsing him instead of how it is now—still huge, but from the perspective of distance it’s smaller, more manageable, even if it’s not really changed.

The door around the corner opens and closes, and the scuff of footsteps on the sidewalk says someone is heading this way. Whoever it is, Shane doesn’t really want to get into a conversation about why he’s smoking—even if it’s probably not a secret from anybody anymore—so he stubs the cigarette out on the brick wall beside him before giving it a toss. It was almost done anyway.

He doesn’t even have time to fish his phone out of his pocket before the person rounds the corner, and it’s Ryan. Of course it’s Ryan. Why wouldn’t it be? Isn’t it just like life to put the very thing he’s trying his damndest to avoid right in front of him, even when he’s trying to steal a moment for himself?

“Hey man.”

“...Hey.”

Now that Ryan’s standing here, Shane realizes that he hasn’t actually seen him yet today. Or if he had, he hadn’t really looked, because with Ryan standing a few feet away from him now, beyond the edge of the shade Shane had folded himself into, Ryan is glowing, bathed in the late June sunlight.

He’s dressed up, nice gray slacks with a dark floral button down tucked in, those short sleeves folded up once to reveal the contrast color hem—and draw attention to Ryan’s biceps pushing at the limits of the woven fabric’s ability to contain them. He’s wearing a belt that coordinates with his leather shoes. He’s got some product in his hair, he’d taken his time styling it so the curls are soft and defined and frame his face. He’s resplendent.

Shane feels like he’s forgotten something big.

“They said you were out here. Aren’t you too hot?”

It is hot, but it’s better boiling out here in the shade alone than it had been inside and surrounded by people he’d be letting down if he were honest with them.

“No, it’s freezing in there. Warm air feels nice.”

Ryan makes a face that Shane knows means he doesn’t agree with that statement but he isn’t challenging it—and that’s annoying. Why the fuck is Ryan even out here? Just to bring the small talk that’s been the only kind of conversation they seem capable of having these past few weeks right to him?

“Is that what you’re wearing?”

It’s the tone of Ryan’s voice as he asks that really gets to him, but then everything about Ryan sets his teeth on edge these days.

This is clearly what he’s wearing, because he’s wearing it. It’s a trick question—and if what he means to ask is if this is what he’s wearing to something, why hadn’t he just finished the sentence and clued him in? Why didn’t he lead with the reminder, why did he have to say it in a way that made it crystal clear that Ryan thinks he looks like shit?

Shane does look like shit, though. The weather said it could get over 95 today and is delivering on its promises, so Shane’s wearing flip flops, shorts and a t-shirt, one he can almost guarantee isn’t clean, but it had been on top of one of the ever-growing piles of clothes in his apartment and it was one he didn’t think he’d worn recently, the two criteria he’s been going by these days.

Shane doesn’t need a reminder that he looks bad. He knows.

“Yeah…?” Shane sounds annoyed because he is. There’s a sharp edge that he can’t keep out of his voice if he tries, and the truth is, he isn't trying.

“Did you forget we're meeting with Jason later?”

Oh we’re calling him Jason now.

“Jason,” Shane repeats flatly.

“Yeah. Jason. From Scentbird.”

Shane knows who fucking Jason is.

“You forgot, didn't you.”

“Fuck.” Shane mutters under his breath. He’s going to have to go home and change. Maybe he’ll just go home and not come back, but as much as he doesn’t want to have a meeting with Jason today, he can’t think of anything he wants less than going home and knowing that Ryan is here, looking like this, having the meeting with slimy, charming Jason without him.

He needs another cigarette.

He hasn’t smoked in front of Ryan because he doesn’t want to talk about it, just like he doesn’t want to talk about how he looks like he’d crawled out of a pile of dirty laundry. He doesn’t want to talk about any of this, because he’s been walking a tightrope, just barely getting through the day in one piece with such a tenuous grasp on the balance that anything at all could upset it.

But here they are, talking about Jason, and if that’s not ever a topic poised to cut him off at the ankles when he’s just trying to put one foot in front of the other and make it across the stretch of one more endless day, he doesn’t know what is.

So, fuck it. He reaches into his back pocket, finds the cardboard pack there and flips the lid back. He fishes out a cigarette with a practiced move—his last one—bumping it up with his thumb, catching it between his lips as he searches around for where he’d put his lighter.

Fuck.

This is his last pack. That means he’s got to stop at a gas station to pick up another on his way home to change for the Scentbird meeting. Is there anything else that could go wrong? Maybe he’ll get a flat tire, and need to stop off at Firestone too. Maybe a flaming asteroid will fall from space and crush him like a bug.

Lighter now in hand, he cups his hand around the cigarette as he snaps the lighter with the other, but it isn’t lighting. He tries again, and again, each failed attempt ratcheting his nerves higher because this is the last fucking thing he needs on top of everything else—his last cigarette he can’t even light, Ryan standing mere feet from him, watching him him fall apart and fail to even do that correctly. And Jason from Scentbird is coming.

On the fourth or fifth try he gets it, the flame coming to life, cradled in his curled hands and it just adds one more heat source to the oppression of the day as he takes a long drag off of it, watching to be sure it lights.

Shane can feel Ryan’s eyes on him. He can feel how badly he wants to say something, and he’s half expecting him to open his mouth and be a fucking hypocrite. Ask him how long he’s been smoking, tell him how bad it is for his health. Push his thumb right into the festering wound of this and pry it open wide.

But he doesn’t.

Instead, he just stands there in his clean dress clothes that fit his body well, clinging just so to biceps and thighs in a way he’d like to pass off as accidental, but Shane’s known him long enough to know that the fit of his clothes is something he spends an embarrassing amount of time on. All of this is intentional.

Intentional today. With Jason coming.

It’s been too long since either of them have said anything. There’s an awkward, pregnant silence stretching out between them and Shane blows out a slow stream of smoke like a challenge.

Finally, Ryan looks down at his watch and says, “It’s like twelve-twenty. The meeting isn’t till four—”

“Yeah.” Shane cuts him off, doesn’t let him finish. Yeah, he knows. He’s got time to go home and change and come back.

Shane’s glad he needs to go, actually. He needs to get out, further from HQ than just around the corner. He needs to drive, even though he hates to. He needs a distraction—loud music, windows down. He needs out of his skin.

He needs something he’s not going to get, but second best is anywhere but here.

Shane stops at the gas station first. There’s a line at the register, and he takes his place in the back of it, hands stuffed into the pockets of his shorts. Irritable already, he’s listening to the people ahead of him. Sixty on pump three. Two Ultimate Millions scratch offs. A thirty rack of beer. That guy can’t find his ID, and he’s holding up the line.

Shane checks the time on his phone. Twelve forty-eight. He clears some notifications—Instagram mostly, some junk apps he hasn’t deleted. A text from Steven asking him if he’d forgotten they had the Scentbird meeting. Asking if he’s okay.

One from Ryan: ‘Take your time.’

Gee, thanks.

With a click the screen goes black, and he shoves it back in his pocket.

When it’s his turn at the register, he asks the clerk for two packs of cigarettes, and reaches for a lighter from the cardboard display of colorful plastic Bics, and tosses one down on the clear plastic coated counter.

He’s fishing out his wallet, prepared to show his ID, and watches the clerk pull down two red plastic-wrapped packs, pausing to mark something off on his inventory clipboard. Shane drops his wallet down on the counter and drums his fingers, impatient. He’s got time—he’s fine—but he wants to go. Wants to go home, wants to get back. He needs another smoke.

In his back pocket, his phone chirps.

Shane closes his eyes and exhales through his nose.

Maybe it’s Ryan, telling him to take his time again, like it’s a benevolent remark. Like he gives a shit about his well being. Maybe it’s Ryan suggesting he skip the meeting altogether. Telling him he can handle Jason from Scentbird on his own. He’ll shoulder this lift. Good old Ryan’s got it, don’t worry.

I swear to god, if it’s Ryan…

Back facing the register, the clerk punches a few keys, and with a few electronic beeps, his items are scanned and Shane picks his wallet up, looking at the small black and red readout showing his total and starts to pull out his debit card.

“This gonna be it for you today?”

Shane looks around, and his gaze falls on a display to the right of the lighters—a plastic fish bowl filled with purple and silver packets that read Astroglide. On impulse, Shane reaches his hand in and grabs one, tossing it down with the rest of his things.

“That’s it.”

A few more buttons are pushed. “Twenty-seven fifteen.”

And if that doesn’t spell out for any detective-minded observers how he plans to spend his afternoon, then, they aren’t paying attention to the tension he’s carrying in his shoulders over all this bullshit. A few months ago, buying a single-use pack of lube midday in front of the whole world because he can’t be bothered to figure out where any he already owns might be buried in the garbage pile that is his bedroom these days would have sent him into a tailspin of mortification.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Jesus or whoever updates the excel spreadsheet of who’s yanking it. Seems like a weird job to give an angel. He might be a little more respectful if he believed in any of that kind of thing.

Whatever. Who fucking cares. Nothing matters anyway. Life is hell and then you die, then you’re worm food. Rotting flowers in a vase, choked with mold. Just another thing to be thrown out.

He’ll jerk off, have a smoke on the balcony to bring himself back to his baseline of a general, low-hum of functioning misery, then he’ll shower and clean himself up enough that he can bear to sit through a meeting with Jason Greenbriar, poster boy for dental veneers, whose everything-blond face is wasted working as a rep for an online perfume company and which Shane has thought about rearranging with his fist more than once.

Shane hates him. Shane hates his face and his teeth and his dimple in his chin like a fucking Marvel superhero. His stupid Hollywood looks and his slim fit suits and bare ankles with his dress loafers that make Shane feel old and, worse, too ugly to breathe on the same planet as this dumbfuck that sells fucking perfume. Shane hates that Watcher is now apparently on a first-name basis with who they’d previously referred to as The Scentbird Rep.

It’s hotter in the car ride home than it had been standing against the brick wall of the office complex, the sunlight caged up enough in the cabin of his Subaru that the AC can’t quite dent it until he’s already home, dropping his things and stripping his now sweat-damp shirt over his head on the way to the bathroom and letting it just fall from his hand wherever gravity takes it.

The old Shane would’ve put it in the hamper. Would’ve put his shoes in the closet side by side. The Shane he’d been when he counted down the ball-dropping on New Year’s Eve would’ve had a lot to say about the state of his apartment, now reduced to a wild animal enclosure, and probably his appearance, which he still doesn’t inspect too much as he passes the bathroom mirror and twists the knob to turn on the shower.

He’s already putting shampoo in his hair when he remembers his little packet of Astroglide he’d tucked in his wallet in absence of anywhere ever offering any kind of goddamn plastic bag anymore, and exhales hard through his nose. He can’t even follow his own plans properly.

Just fuckin’...whatever.

Showers are just a chore to get through, he breaks it down into every annoying little step he has to complete to be done. It feels like a list of two hundred things, just like anything does. Everything is just a million tiny things done in a sequence, waiting for sundown, waiting to get in bed and be unconscious and not exist for eight hours.

But the warm water does feel good on some level, running between his shoulder blades out of his too-long hair. He soaps up twice, not stupid enough to think he can really remove the cigarette smell that’s been clinging to him but knowing he can lessen it enough it doesn’t take over a room or anything. He tries to only smoke outside, so it’s not everywhere yet. But he knows it’s not a thing he can probably keep up that long.

Buying that first pack of cigarettes on a whim back in early May, he’d just been floundering for anything that might take the edge off things. It had worked for him in college for the short time he’d done it, and surprise surprise, it still worked the same way when he’d lit up on his balcony that night and pulled the smoke into his lungs, the pleasant burn blotting out the ever looming echo of regret and self-loathing.

All of this, this anxiety and tension and constantly sidestepping each other, this was why they’d never done anything to begin with. Now after one night, not even a full night, it’s like they’ve skipped over all the good parts of being together and just landed face first in the breakup phase that they knew would punch a thousand holes in the side of Watcher Entertainment.

The whole thing has been a self-fulfilling prophecy fast tracked to the worst, most destructive ending.

Shane rinses his hair, letting the water spray him directly in the face, keeping his mouth closed in a tight line, eyes bunched shut. Letting the water take some of the tension back, the heat pulling the tightness from the muscles in his back and letting it circle the drain at his feet.

Any trace of Ryan he’d carried on him is long gone down the same drain.

Ryan. His favorite person in the world, now the person he can’t stand to be in the same room with for more than ten minutes because it feels like he’s suffocating. Like Ryan just existing near him pulls all the air out of his lungs, pushes his head underwater while he flails. Dumps another shovel full of dirt on top of the lid of Shane’s coffin while he pounds at the lid with bloody fists, begging to be let out.

Shane scrubs his hands over his face, rakes his fingers back through his wet hair, the pressure of his fingertips on his scalp, then kneading into the back of his neck, craning it side to side to loosen the tight muscles under the hot spray. He massages the body wash suds in sweeping circles, absently. His hands on his own skin doesn’t bring much comfort, but it’s something.

He slips his hands lower, down his abdomen, soaping. Breathwork. Self-guided meditation. He’s somewhere peaceful. Somewhere safe. Somewhere where everything is the way it should be. Where he hasn’t fucked everything up.

He’s swimming in Busse Lake, the summer before his freshman year. It’s quiet, there’s the sound of frogs on the reservoir. A warm breeze in his wet hair.

He’d grown like a foot and a half that summer. Come back to school with all his pants inches too short, the butt of everyone’s same “how’s the weather up there, Madej?” joke.

But immersed in the water, floating, he’d been happy. No tension, no worries. No black clouds on his horizon. Suspended and supported by the lakewater, eyes closed to the sky.

The way church is supposed to feel.

For the rest of the summer he’d tried to find that sort of peace again, but life had already caught up with him by then.

The most recent time he’d found that kind of silence, that sort of floating sense of perfect harmony, had been with Ryan on his stupid goddamn motherfucking sofa in April. The night his whole life caught on fire. The memory of that night has been like a rifle in his mouth for months now, and the trigger is Ryan. The smell of him, the sound of his laugh.

The memory of Ryan’s hands on his body, the warmth of his mouth, the smell of his skin. Ryan’s breath rabbit-quick against his ear.

To hell with it. He doesn’t need the stupid astroglide.

He doesn’t want to think about Ryan, doesn’t need to. He’s perfectly capable of wringing an orgasm out of himself without the tactile memory of Ryan’s skin and strong thighs hooked around his legs, fighting him for leverage. He doesn’t mean to think of Ryan’s tongue coiling in his mouth, the echo of his voice out of the hollow of his own throat. He doesn’t think about the perfect wet slip of their joined bodies, the way he’d never felt before.

He pushes into the wet channel of his fisted hand, and it’s nothing like that. It’s a candle flame next to a lighthouse lamp. Next to the sun.

Shane doesn’t need to think about Ryan. He doesn’t want to.

He’s not going to.

He doesn’t think about much of anything. Just lets his mind go blank, drops his head back—face toward the ceiling, working himself until his muscles are tense in anticipation, until his breath comes fast, the hot spray on his back not yet cold but starting to lose its delicious heat.

It’s fine for his body to just feel things. That was how everything had gone so wrong with Ryan that night--he hadn’t just let his body take over. Hadn’t just let it be the physical act they needed to chase away the haunting of what they’d done in an intoxicated haze after wrapping Too Many Spirits in March.

If he’d just let it be sex, just kept the thoughts and emotions where they belonged, he wouldn’t be here, on the edge of coming but not quite there because he’s goddamn thinking too much.

Leave it to him, to make something as simple as sex as complex as possible. It should have been simple. When he’d agreed to it, it had seemed so simple.

Only for it to be the farthest thing from simple he can imagine once he’d felt what it was to lay in Ryan’s embrace, the thump of his heart under him, the expand-contract of his lungs, the sound of him coming once and then again after he’d urged Shane to push inside him. The burning hot squeeze of his body while Shane pumped himself deeper, faster. Every time he closes his eyes he’s there again, on fire, burning alive with his face buried in the throw pillow on his sofa, panting and pushing into Ryan’s body with driving hips like he’d been possessed, and Ryan tensing beneath him, shuddering and crying out—

With a gasping convulsion, Shane comes in a thick spurt onto the shower floor. Another thing lost down the drain, thinking of Ryan because he’s the only thing he’s been capable of thinking about for months.

It’s not what he’d planned. He plans things and then doesn’t follow through with them. He’s either a coward or just incredibly lazy, or a liar, or all of these things, because it’s a mistake thinking he could do anything the way he intends to anymore.

On his own. Without some ache of regret or loss, without thinking of Ryan while he jerks off in the shower just to get through a meeting he doesn’t want to go to.

There’s a surge of rage that starts at the base of his spine, rolling upward like the building of a stormcloud somewhere under his liver and the chaos of all his internal organs. The anger finds a home in his fist, swinging at the tiled shower wall with a solid and satisfying crack that does little to solve the problem, but adds to his list of them when he draws it back to find his middle knuckle split and bleeding under the shower spray. It leaks a trail of pink water down his wrist to color the clear swirl around his feet.

“Fuck,” he breathes out, the throb of the wound hitting him only after he flexes his hand a few times, stretches his fingers out and feels the bones protest at the movement, reasonably certain he’s at least cracked something.

There’s a sharp pain in his chest too, but he ignores it. Like he always does.

At least maybe some genuine physical pain he can focus on will distract him enough to get him through sitting in the conference room with Jason from Scentbird for a fucking hour to talk about price points and upgrades and target audience content analytics and other bullshit that makes his brain go dead.

Once he’s dried off, scrubbing a towel into his overgrown dark hair, his hand is on fire, and in a strange way, it’s a kind of relief to feel it. A twisted kind of pleasure to have this sharply tangible punishment for not listening to his own better judgment.

He’s brushed his teeth and moisturized what he needs to when he confronts himself in the mirror with an electric trimmer, intending on doing away with the beard but instead just bringing it back to presentable, neatening the edges and taming the shape, avoiding his eyes until he can’t, looking at the plum shadows that hang under each eye like he’s never even heard of sleep.

In the mirror, that Shane is trying to get his life together. His eyes are tired and small, his mouth set in a permanent scowl, a sharp crease between his eyebrows. There’s the squint of a three-day headache, standing there in his bathroom with that invisible gun to his head. Watching him is cementing the truth—that he’s not taking care of himself at all, actively causing harm in multiple respects. A kind of slow motion self destruction, like the wearing down of a mountain under the wind.

He has to talk to Ryan. As much as he’d wanted to just let things be when Ryan had come to him with the ‘no hard feelings’ olive branch and the old ‘sorry I bailed the same moment you realized you might be in love with me’ routine.

Didn’t expect it to feel that way, is what Ryan had said. Neither had Shane. He hasn’t expected any of this to feel this way.

Love isn’t supposed to be excruciating, is it? Slow like water torture, somehow worse every second?

In the mirror, a tear drops out of Shane’s eye, and he reaches up to his own face, feeling it reflected there too.

He supposes that is indeed the root of the problem.

There’s not much anybody can do about that now, if he ever could. He’d been walking into this entire thing doomed from the start.

He licks his lips, looking down at his hands gripped on the edge of the counter, the welling blood from his split knuckle, the surrounding skin already darkening into a bruise.

When he locks his apartment door to leave, the sky to the east is the dusky color of mission figs, an early summer thunderstorm brewing over the inland desert that will look threatening, grumble and cause his phone to blow up with weather alerts only to result in nothing. Dusty sunlight comes through the patchy clouds like angel’s ladders, the sounds of an increasingly humid afternoon rising up over the valley floor while Shane gets back in his Subaru to make the two mile drive back to the office.

It’s 3:43 pm when Shane pulls back into his parking space at Watcher, wearing a moss-colored dress shirt, pressed cognac brown slacks and a tight ace bandage on his hand and somehow in a far more sour mood than the one he’d been in when he’d left.

He’s not exactly cutting it close, but after all, Ryan had made sure to remind him to take his time. So he had. Out of spite partially but mostly it really had taken him that long to navigate making himself presentable.

In the lot, there’s a white Tesla SUV that he is certain without actually knowing must belong to Jason from Scentbird, who is fucking just early enough to be obnoxious instead of punctual.

He should key it. He should piss in the gas tank.

Instead he just pulls in a long breath and holds it a moment before letting it out slowly through his mouth. Self-guided mediation had failed him already once today, he’s not willing to let it put him in that kind of peril now.

The office is cold and half deserted already this late in the day. There’s just the robotic thrum of the industrial AC unit pumping cold air through the vents, the sleepy whir of desk fans, and from the conference room, the bubbling, round chorus of Ryan’s laughter, mixed with someone else’s, unfamiliar but familiar and Shane feels his stomach tense. As though Ryan’s laughter mingling with anyone’s but his is some kind of unfaithful act.

Not that their laughter has been doing anything of the sort recently. It’s been a dour, quiet couple of months at best, and anxious and strained at worst.

Shane takes one more breath, dragging his hands down his clothes before turning on the business persona he hates where he has to tolerate the most phony, inauthentic people imaginable and smile at their pitiful attempts at jokes and inevitable offering of whether or not they believe in ghosts.

How is this Shane’s real life? How did he get here?

In the conference room, Ryan is already in a seat by the tinted glass wall that separates it from the main work area, and in the chair directly next to his, instead of the literal eight other empty chairs around the sturdy reclaimed wood table, Jason from Scentbird has slithered in and taken up a blond, tanned, bullshit Hollywood Ken doll residence with his bare ankle crossed over his knee. Somehow Shane had hoped, almost even thought, that Ryan was laughing at the draft edit the post crew had been getting ready, but no.

He’s been in here laughing with first-name-only Jason, and Shane wants to throw up.

But he doesn’t. Instead, he sits down as far away from them as he’s physically able. If it were possible to be any further from them while still being technically in the same room, he’d have been there.

“Well, hello! Glad you were able to join us, buddy.” Jason chirps in a warm greeting.

The way he’s smiling too big feels personal, feels like a slap across the face, and Shane closes his eyes against it for a moment longer than a blink might be, just to steel himself. All he has to do is make it through this.

“Wouldn’t miss it.” Shane can hear the tension in his voice, the flat lack of inflection.

That he’d gotten the words out without too much of the venom he feels coursing through his veins seeping into them was a small miracle, but still he feels Ryan’s eyes on him, burning through him like he’s trying to send a message without saying it. Shane doesn’t look at him. He can’t.

It’s like he’s standing on the edge of a cliff while the world tips violently beneath him, this way and that, threatening to buck him off and over the edge while he fights to keep his feet on solid ground—and he feels like if he looks at Ryan, that’s going to be the final push that upends him.

“Hey, relax, big guy.”

It’s one thing when Ryan calls him that. It’s quite another when it’s Jason.

Shane gives a poisonous little laugh, his expression unchanging. If the intention with that was to smooth things over, it doesn’t. It rubs Shane wrong, like nails on a chalkboard. Like Scott finding the exact thing that was the most grating and digging in there, doing it again and again and again when they were teenagers, just because he could. Just because he knew eventually it would get a rise out of Shane. This feels like that. Like being annoying for its own sake.

Under other circumstances, Shane might say something just to keep the conversation moving along, but he can’t. He doesn’t care if the conversation comes to a screeching halt. Let it. He’d actually prefer it if Jason were shocked into silence, so unsure what to say in response to Shane’s uncharacteristically rude demeanor that he just says nothing.

No such luck.

“I was a little early—” Jason takes it upon himself to keep the conversation moving. How good of him. “—so Ry and I were just chatting about the Knicks.”

Shane’s stomach tightens like his fists are in his lap—he’s calling him Ry now.

With a clenched jaw, he rakes around his mind for something to say in reply, but there’s nothing there. He can’t find words, like he’d lost touch with whatever part of his brain creates language, all he keeps coming back around to is just the image of Jason getting hot pokers pushed into his eyes.

Shane can’t handle this. He’s being unreasonable, he knows he is, but this is more than he can take. He feels like a runaway train car, feels himself careening, unstoppable, inevitable. The knowledge that this is going to get worse before it gets worse, and the only thing that can possibly stop him is hitting the wall. And when he does, he’s going to hit so fast and hard that everything will be lost in the wreckage.

“Well, since we’re all here, should we get started?” Ryan asks.

Shane hums vaguely, lips pressed into a tight line.

“Mind if I grab a coffee real quick?” Jason asks, starting to push his seat back from the table.

Of course this piece of shit realizes he needs a coffee now, after he’d gotten here early and sat wasting time chatting about the Knicks.

“Oh, I can get you one.” Ryan’s quick to answer, and quicker to jump to his feet. Shane hears more than sees him stand, his chair rolling a few inches over the floor as he gets up. In his periphery, he sees Ryan pass along behind Jason and out into the office toward the kitchen.

Rationally, he knows Ryan’s being hospitable. That he’s trying to be welcoming to their sponsor, but Shane’s blood still boils knowing that Ryan’s running to grab him coffee real quick like he’s at his beck and call.

Worse, it leaves Shane alone here in the room with Jason, and he can feel the pressure to fill the lull, but he’s steadfastly ignoring it. What does he care if they sit here awkwardly under the fluorescent lights, the AC cycling on and off the only thing interrupting the yawning silence between them?

He shifts to pull his phone from his pocket, catching sight of the notifications stretching down the screen, and taps to unlock it. He doesn’t do anything more—just sits staring at the app that opened up. His email. Everything’s been marked read in the inbox that pops up, except for an email at the very top, some mailing list email from a site he must have visited sometime. Mindlessly, he starts scrolling, looking at nothing, just to have something to do.

“Traffic must’a been killer.” Jason can’t leave well enough alone, can he? “Ry said you left like twelve-thirty? Gotta love those LA commutes.”

Shane’s eyes come up from his phone to look across the table at Jason. So he knows he’d left earlier. Great.

Shane could correct him, let him know he only really lived two miles away, that his route didn’t even take him on the freeway, fall into the small talk like a normal person, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to give him any more than he has—any more than Ry has shared without asking if it was okay to—and he sure as hell doesn’t want to chit-chat with him.

“Mm.” Shane offers by way of response. Just that curt, noncommittal hum. If looks could kill, Jason would be dismembered on the floor of this conference room, limb ripped from perfect limb. He wouldn’t be so attractive then, now would he?

Before there’s a chance for much more interaction—or more accurately, more uncomfortable silence—Ryan comes back in with two coffees in hand and sets one of them down in front of Shane. He hadn’t asked for coffee.

“You need a little caffeine or something, man?” Ryan asks under his breath, voice low, giving him a hard, pointed look.

Shane feels a stab of something.

Remorse, maybe.

He knows he should say thank you, but he doesn’t. He can’t, because before he’s even able to conjure speech, Ryan brings the other mug over and sets it down in front of Jason. Then he’s taking his seat beside him again.

“Oh, thanks bud. I appreciate you.” Jason looks so falsely sincere.

Shane has to fight not to roll his eyes.

Since when is that even a thing people say? What happened to saying ‘I appreciate that’? Shane hates how fake it feels, just another way to glad hand, working to win people over with surface rather than substance just to get the easy in.

“I didn’t want to stop off and grab a cup and risk being late.” Jason adds, catching the handle of the mug and pulling it closer.

What a shame that would have been.

It occurs to Shane at that moment—catching sight of the creamy, pale brown color of the coffee in that mug—that Ryan knows how Jason takes his coffee, and that thought stops him in his tracks. It sets his blood to flash-boil. Rationality be damned, because his brain is filling in the blanks with a thousand reasons why Ryan knows that information, each of them more salacious than the last.

Maybe they’ve spent some mornings together that Shane didn’t know about. Maybe that’s when they’d collectively started using not just first names, but nicknames.

He watches as Jason picks up the mug of coffee and holds it cradled in his perfectly manicured hands, taking a long sip with an exaggerated mmm. Shane sits there on his side of the table, fantasizing about that mug slipping between Jason’s fingers and sending the hot, cream and sugar coffee spilling over his lap. Imagining, with a sick satisfaction, Jason getting third degree burns like that lady who sued McDonald’s in the 90s, making his stupid, pathetic little dick even more useless than it already is.

No such luck.

Jason sets it back down and reaches for his iPad Pro, flips the cover open to unlock it, and loudly taps around on the screen to open up whatever file he was looking for.

Shane takes a sip of his coffee so that he’s not just sitting here boring holes through Jason’s stupid fucking face while he silently screams ‘why the fuck does Ryan know how you take your coffee, you yuppie piece of shit?’

“Okay, so let me just cast up to the screen here.”

Once the file is showing up on the screen at the head of the room, Shane doesn’t have to look in Jason’s direction at all. He just sits there, hands balled into fists in his lap with the effort it takes not to pick up his mug of black coffee and pitch it at Jason’s stupid blond head, and truthfully the only reason he doesn’t try it might be because he’s fairly sure he’d miss and hit Ryan and furious as he is, he doesn’t want to hurt him.

A few slides flick past and Shane hasn’t absorbed a single thing that’s been said. He glances down from the monitor at his hands in his lap, fussing with the edge of his ace bandage. He’s apparently been sitting with his fists clenched tightly enough that the split of his knuckle has started to bleed again, and there’s a spot of it visible in the cream colored muslin.

Jason is talking and Shane steadfastly tunes him out. Like how he’s practiced in the art of ignoring the roar of traffic outside his apartment when he’s trying to sleep, or the sound of his upstairs neighbor walking like he’s adjusting to the pull of earth’s gravity for the first time.

“Do you guys have your analytics tracking stats handy, by chance? Just for the last two videos we sponsored so we can compare it with the sales stats for these dates coming through your reference link.”

“Oh, yeah, we’ve got that. Shane can bring that up… right, Shane?”

“Sure.”

Why the fuck not? Just send him to fetch shit. Give Jason more time to talk to Ryan alone. After all, that’s what they want, isn’t it? Shane gone. Freedom for Jason to kiss Ryan’s ass without Shane there to interrupt.

Shane stands so abruptly his chair rolls backwards across the floor, slowing down only as it approaches the wall. The expressions on Jason and Ryan’s faces, while different, are distinct and exaggerated. Jason is surprised, all eyebrows up and stupid open mouth, and while Ryan’s got a hint of the same, he looks both incredulous and pissed.

Shane recognizes that he’s unreasonably angry, too angry. He knows that it’s obvious, that he’s letting it out all over the room, bleeding out of him like a stuck pig, but he can only get far enough through that thought to land on a kind of dark satisfaction.

Good. Ryan should know he’s mad. He’s spent these last eight weeks looking past Shane like he’s a car crash, grappling with the warring urge to rubberneck and to look the other way. Ryan moves through his days like the fatal collision of Shane’s destroyed life is slowing and diverting traffic around him, an inconvenience for everyone else trying to get where they’re needing to go.

Shane leaves and crosses the office to his desk and sits down, waking his computer from sleep and clicking through folders to find what he’s looking for. It’s something they do track, it’s just a matter of finding the right spreadsheet.

Clicking around, he has a few false starts, sure it’s in one folder but it’s not, so he navigates away and tries again only to land in the same folder because that’s where it should be. Shane wants to throw his laptop across the room. If he did, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d wrecked a couple thousand dollars worth of Apple equipment in this office. At least this time it would be satisfying.

From the conference room, Shane hears laughter. It’s Ryan—his high, wild laughter that’s always so contagious, that trips something in Shane that helplessly sets him off laughing not too far behind. But it’s Jason he’s talking to, laughing with, and Shane feels his stomach churn at the thought even as he clicks away from their advertising stats folder and over to the security cameras.

Shane sifts through the folder, the dump folders that backup and store footage and the links into the cameras’ live feeds, until he finds the one labeled conference 1, and clicks into it. There’s a half-second delay, and then the camera program takes over his screen. Shane wants to know what it was Ryan laughed at—how he was sitting in there with Jason, laughing, when Shane was falling apart in front of him—but even as he scrubs backwards in the footage he knows he’s not going to find the answers he’s looking for. The audio in these is never really good enough to tell what’s going on in that kind of detail. The system is set up for security, to protect them from theft, not to monitor the ways their sponsors flirt with Ryan.

But from the angle the camera sees, Shane thinks he sees exactly that. Jason leaning in close to Ryan, mouth moving, obviously saying something Shane can’t hear. Ryan says something in response, and Shane watches the moment unfold, a shrug of his shoulders and a glance cast through the glass wall.

Are they talking about him? Shane stares between the two figures on the feed, tall stupid blond Jason and Ryan, dark curls and high cheekbones prominent even in 720p. Jason says something else—he doesn’t know what—and then the image of Ryan on the delayed feed tips back his head and laughs, putting a visual to what he’d heard just seconds ago.

Shane’s mind is moving at hyperspeed, filling in the gaps he can’t know—Jason’s flirting with him. He’s asking him out. Maybe inviting him to drinks, or to dinner. Wants to show him some stupid popup downtown, some one-night-only affair that’ll attract crowds, that promises a unique experience. The kind of bullshit that’s just a money grab, creating scarcity and demand for its own sake. Showy without substance. Just like Jason.

Shane clicks away into the security system settings, and hovers his cursor over the controls for just a second before toggling the cameras off. What is he doing? Truthfully, he doesn’t fully know, but at the moment he’s thinking about marching back in there and punching Jason in the face. Ending this meeting and their partnership all in one violent swing and with a mouthful of blood. It’d be worth it to bring his fist down on something that will give, that will break. To rearrange Jason’s perfect fucking nose on his stupid fucking face, give back just a modicum of the misery that Jason brings to him.

Instead, after almost a full minute, he clicks back into the Finder and navigates around through their analytics to find the document he was sent for. A couple of wrong clicks lead him to the right file, and he hits print and sits there, waiting until he hears the printer kick into action across the room.

Shane just sits there for too long after, staring at the security camera control panel, at the system status that reads: Disabled. He should turn it back on.

He doesn’t.

Chapter Text

What the everloving fuck is taking Shane so long?

Ryan would honestly be horribly worried about him if he wasn’t so furious with the timing of his apparent crisis or whatever has him suddenly acting out like a surly, moody teenager.

Scentbird is one of their most generous sponsors, and the rep, Jason, is a bit of a tryhard that he’s always known to rub Shane the wrong way, but he’s just another young LA kid out there trying to get ahead and coming off a little strong while doing so. Ryan can relate. He’s sure others had felt the same of him in his first years in the industry with all his unorthodox camera angles and his personal kit of colored light gels.

But this has been inexcusable. Unprofessional. Rude.

Of all the things Ryan catastrophizes over, he’s never once worried Shane of all people—who saves drowning bees, smiles at children and takes fugly spiders out of the office in cups—would be insolent and borderline threatening to a sponsor or an employee or even a stranger in a restaurant. So when Jason leans over a bit closer and asks softly if Shane is alright, Ryan really doesn’t know the answer.

Certainly, he hasn’t exactly seemed alright for awhile. Ryan doesn’t want to consider too many of the reasons why that might be; he’s fairly sure he knows at least part of the problem.

For his part, Ryan hasn’t been anything really resembling alright for the same amount of time, but he’s been channeling that distress into outlets that feel like the healthiest option for what has felt, maybe inexplicably, like a breakup.

He’s spent mornings and evenings at the gym, keeping his brain on silent like a cell phone in the movie theater, lifting and focusing and not thinking about Shane.

He’s been in bed by nine, up by five. Running circuits around his neighborhood. He’s been trying to sweat Shane out of his system, the way they used to say you could cure an illness.

How effective that’s been, Ryan can’t quite say. He’s spent most of that time not thinking about him. About what they did. About how it felt. About how it had made him feel.

Maybe it’s not so weird that this has all felt like having a broken heart. Maybe that’s why seeing Shane seem just downtrodden and angry feels personal.

“I’m sorry, dude, I’m not sure what’s wrong, you know he’s not normally like this.”

Jason waves a hand, taking another drink of the coffee Ryan had randomly thrown cream and sugar into, realizing he had no clue how Jason took his coffee and just guessing in his rush to return to the room with a black coffee for Shane to maybe snap him out of his mood.

“We all have some bad days, man." Jason gives a sage little nod over the rim of his cup, the storied wisdom of his maximum twenty five years on earth. “I get it. Not taking it personally.”

“I just hope you know how much we value your guys’ partnership. It’s not something we take lightly--”

“Ryan, you guys do great numbers and we’re thrilled to have you. Hell, I’m thrilled to have the account, honestly. No one loves giving these product updates and meeting about numbers like we couldn’t just send an email, but the high ups think that’s impersonal, especially since the product is so hands on. We can send out sample kits and emails til the cows come home, but having a rep here to showcase new merchandise lines is part of the business model that’s really taken off for Scentbird."

“Yeah, yeah. Honestly, I do appreciate the time you guys take to come out,” Ryan crosses his legs in the leather chair, pushing against the ground just enough for the round casters to glide back a couple inches from Jason, who is, as ever, sitting just a little too close. “Anyway, I’m sure he’ll chill out, I don’t know what happened while he was out. He doesn’t normally throw around the death glare like that."

“My girlfriend Kelly would say that’s part of his charm,” Jason chuckles. “She’s a big fan, I hope I can bring her along to meet you guys some time. But she told me people say Shane’s a demon.”

Ryan doesn’t know why that triggers such a long, hard laugh from him. It’s always been a funny bit of fan lore, made especially ironic because there is no one in the world to Ryan that seems less scary than Shane Madej. He’s the blazing bonfire the world crowds around for light and heat. He’s a walking safety net, his touch is gentle and tender, and when Ryan is in his arms—

Well. Ryan laughs because that’s easier than thinking about what all that means.

What the everloving fuck is taking Shane so goddamn long?

It’s just a spreadsheet. YouTube practically generates the numbers on its own, it’s just Katie likes them in a specific format and Steven is picky about numbers.

But they’re right in the company cloud, Ryan could’ve pulled it up on his phone but wanted a chance to apologize to Jason and give Shane a couple minutes to walk off whatever had crawled up his ass and died.

Out in the office, beyond the tinted glass wall that looks out into the workspace, Ryan hears the multi-function printer power up and load paper from the tray, and there’s a small relief that Shane had indeed gone to print the spreadsheets and hadn’t just left entirely.

Or maybe that would’ve been better. The look on Shane’s face when he reappears through the door with the papers pinched between his fingers makes Ryan question that relief, and in the same moment, his gaze falls on Shane’s hand, wrapped tight in a bandage with a bright red seep of blood wicking up in the fabric that crosses over his knuckles, and the relief that had turned to doubt turns to anxiety.

Ryan wants this to be over. He wants to go to the gym. He wants to run a mile.

He’s already put a few hundred miles between himself and that night at Shane’s, and he’s still too close to it. Maybe Shane is too. Standing out around the corner of the building alone, smoking a cigarette and staring at traffic is how he’d found him at lunch, and there had been a lot of accusations and warnings and pointed fingers he’d wanted to throw at him then, but something about watching Shane put a cigarette in his mouth and light it without any kind of preamble and a thousand-yard stare had just made Ryan feel all the fingers that would be pointing right back at him if he said anything at all.

But he hates that Shane is smoking. He hates it. He hates that they haven’t properly talked in months. He hates that he can see the stress on Shane’s face, in his unshaven state, his too-long hair, his glassy, tired eyes he keeps well away from any kind of eye contact when he can help it. In his disheveled, scattered stare.

He hates that it has to be this way. That they’d agreed to it.

They had, hadn’t they?

He doesn’t want this to be the new normal. He misses Shane. He’s right here and he’s never felt further away.

Even with his beard trimmed, his hair combed and tucked behind his ears, in clothes that don’t look like they’d been picked up off the floor, he still looks exhausted, but his eyes, for once in ages, don’t look far away. They’re sharp and dark. They’re angry. Shane would say, jokingly—back when they joked and didn’t just sit in uncomfortable, fraught silence—it’s just his slavic lids, but that’s not true.

Ryan wants to know why. It can’t just be the same old misery that’s wearing them both thin.

Shane gingerly drops the papers on the table top near Jason’s hand, just far enough away that Jason needs to stand to reach it, but then he’s just glancing through the numbers and praising them, using buzzwords like “adoption rate” and “click rate conversion” and “client retention”. There’s the tap of his fingers on the screen of the iPad, cycling through slides that demonstrate the new magnetic vial and the locking mechanism, through revenue share rates per hundred clicks, there’s the robotic thrum and rattle of the air conditioner blasting cold air through the vents, the long, high squeak of Jason’s highlighter on the printed out analytics like the hinge of an old door, and Ryan feels so tired. He could so easily just drop right off but he keeps his eyes rapt on the flat screen on the wall, nodding occasionally while watching Shane slump in his seat in his far peripheral, checking the bandage on his hand and watching Jason with an expression Ryan would describe as bored-serial-killer.

“Do either of you have any questions?"

Jesus Christ, no.

“I feel like you covered pretty much anything I would’ve wanted to ask, Jason,” Ryan says, pushing his chair back another few inches, ready to stand, ready to signal it’s time for this to wrap up. Time to hit that old dusty trail.

“Well, gosh, thanks so much for having me out today, you guys are really pulling fantastic numbers, so I can’t see why we won’t be extending out the baseline contract for another five spots, with Blaine’s final approval I can have Katrina make up the addendums and send over by Friday, if that’s cool."

“Yeah, man, thank you,” Ryan extends a hand to shake and Jason takes it firmly, giving it a squeeze before letting go and starting to pack up his equipment. “Again, apologies that Steven couldn’t make it, I’m sure he’ll be interested in seeing these slides though, if you don’t mind sending them."

“No sweat!" Jason chirps, reaching over to finish his coffee, throwing back the cold dregs, and Ryan watches Shane watch him with the kind of eyes-narrowed, withdrawn disdain he typically would reserve for despicable suspects in crime stories and over the top theatrics in supposed ghost evidence.

“Do you have a long commute home?” Hopefully this doesn’t sound like he’s shoving poor Jason out the door, he’s already had a good hour of Shane glowering at him like he’s cataloging methods of torture, the last thing Ryan wants is to make him feel pushed out.

Those boys over at Watcher sure know out to roll out the red carpet for a sponsor. One looks like he wants to murder you and the other can’t stay awake through the presentation and then small talks you out the door. It reminds Ryan of how his Dad signals he’s ready to get off the telephone, “Welp, I’m gonna let you go!”

Just a friendly way to get that needle moving toward departure. Jason isn’t dragging his feet too much, he’s already aware of just how much his welcome was worn through already by the time Shane appeared in the doorway. He’s slipping on his sunglasses and Ryan is shocked to see Shane standing and offering to walk him out.

With another handshake and a chuckle at one more reference to apparent Knicks supremacy, good grief, Jason is out the door followed by Shane looming behind him like a doppelganger.

He hears the rumble of voices before the door shuts behind them, and Ryan goes boneless in the chair, sliding down a few inches with his arms hanging over the rests, head tipped back against the chair’s backrest, closing his eyes. He feels like he could sleep for a year. He’s so hungry.

There’s the door opening again and closing, just the soft whine of the pneumatic hinge, and the click of the deadbolt that’s loud enough to hear from the conference room. Ryan checks his watch, and it’s true. They’re closed. It’s afterhours by almost forty five minutes.

And they’re going to fight. Ryan can feel it. They’re going to scream at each other, through whatever it is that’s eating Shane, it’s going to come back to what they won’t discuss. Or maybe Ryan just wants it to.

He was already upset earlier in the day, when Ryan had reminded him about the meeting, after all. Whatever it is, it’s not about Ryan.

Shane appears in the conference room doorway, arms crossed, leaning, and Ryan can’t help prodding the animal through the cage.

“Is Jason in your trunk?”

There’s something almost resembling the shade of a smile on Shane’s face for a moment, but Ryan’s not sure if it’s at the joke or if Jason is indeed in his trunk.

“What happened to your hand?" Might as well just jump in. Whatever it is that Shane’s always saying, about how if you’re going to get wet you might as well go swimming. Something like that.

Shane casts a glance down at his bandage and shrugs so subtly it barely registers as movement. “Nothing,” he says flatly, and Ryan bites the inside of his cheek.

“Well, your nothing is bleeding through, big guy."

Shane glances down again, holding his hand out for inspection for a spare moment before clenching it in a way that looks painful even to Ryan.

“You pretty proud of yourself for all that?" Shane’s eyes burn at him. Accusatory.

“For what? For trying to salvage our relationship with an important sponsor representative that you were just unbelievably rude to?”

“That’s what you’re calling it, huh."

“What would you have called it?”

Shane takes another step into the room, letting the door swing closed behind him. “Stand up.”

“What?”

“You fuckin’ heard me,” Shane says. “Stand up.”

Ryan had sensed they were going to fight, but he hadn’t imagined it was going to get physical. Now, with Shane standing there just this side of the doorway, making and unmaking his hands into fists, he’s not so sure.

Ryan stands slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on Shane as he rises to his feet.

The look on Shane’s face is so foreign, so not Shane that he doesn’t know what to do with any of this. If he jerked awake from this moment right now, like it was a nightmare, to find himself laying in his bed at home, he’d be less surprised than he is now.

In that moment, between Shane’s repeated demand and Ryan yielding to it, everything is so hushed that the rattling of his chair’s casters rolling the short ways back across the polished concrete floor is the only sound between them. It’s like the moment in a movie when the audio drops out and there’s just heavy nothing, or buzzing static, or the rush of wind gone silent signaling the coming storm.

Ryan’s tense. He feels it everywhere—in the hard set of his jaw, the lift of his shoulders around his ears like he’s preparing to fight, in the desperate clenched fist that’s taken up residence where his stomach used to live. He’d expected Shane to say something, do something. He’d said stand up, after all, so Ryan waits for him to instigate further, to take a swing at him.

When he doesn’t, Ryan takes up the space Shane isn’t. Squares his shoulders, looks Shane in the eye.

“Listen, I don't know what the hell is going on with you, but—” Ryan starts.

“Right.” Shane scoffs, interrupting him. The set of his mouth is harsh, the corners turned down in a scowl that could be carved there for how ever-present it’s been lately. Ryan doesn’t remember the last time he’s seen Shane look any way but this.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“How about you tell me.”

Ryan squints up at him, drawing a blank as he tries to figure out what it is he’s supposed to already know. It seems like Shane’s taller now than he usually is, more imposing.

“You want to bring me up to speed on what the fuck is going on with you and Jason, Ry?”

Ryan can’t believe what he’s hearing. It feels like they’re having two conversations, like they’re in two separate timelines even. Of all things he could have brought up now, that is the fight he’s picking.

“Are you fucking joking?” Ryan’s voice rises, incredulous. Shane’s joking. He has to be.

“Do I fucking look like I’m joking, Ryan?”

He doesn’t. That’s the part of this that’s stopping him in his tracks. Shane looks serious as a heart attack, inflated with a kind of rage that Ryan had imagined he reserved for something more than just…Jason from Scentbird.

“Of all the goddamn things you could want to fight with me about right now, and you’re picking me being nice to Jason?”

This, and not the tectonic shift of them drifting apart, the ground shaking along the growing fault lines between them. Not him leaving Shane’s apartment abruptly eight weeks ago. Not the thing they’ve been avoiding tackling head on since that night at his parents—the fact that whatever this is, it’s not something they could get out of their systems.

“You’re being fucking crazy! What is wrong with you!”

Ryan watches his words hit—watches anger flash across Shane’s face, followed by disbelief, and then hurt. For a moment it looks like he might be winding up to sling some of that ache and anger back at him, but he doesn’t. And then he stops, like he’s considering the question: what’s wrong with you?

That’s when the air goes out of Shane. Whatever was building there disappears in a second, and everything changes. His shoulders slump, suddenly smaller, like he’s folding in on himself, like anger had been the only thing holding him up. His gaze is the last to drop away and he looks down at his injured hand again, gingerly flexing his fingers, like he’s just realized his hand hurts.

And he nods.

It’s acknowledgement or defeat. Ryan watches as Shane crosses his arms, hugging himself.

“Yeah.” He says, voice rough as if from overuse, or disuse.

Ryan can see it then, in every facet of every part of Shane: the naked agony in him. It’s in his expression, in his body language, just for a second. But it’s in the details—and it has been, for weeks. It’s in his too-long hair, the wrinkles in his slacks. It’s in his chapped lips, the dark circles under his eyes. It’s seeping through that ace bandage.

It’s crushing him beneath the weight of it.

“Good night, Ryan.”

It feels so final. Good night.

It’s not something they say. Not like that, anyway.

If Shane leaves, this is it. This is how it’s going to be. The new normal. Their friendship is ruined—it’s over, and these are the broken pieces that are left. Panic rises in Ryan at the thought of Shane turning away from him, leaving through the conference room door, and walking out of their office and his life entirely.

Shane turns to go without looking up, and that panic in Ryan catches fire. It goes ice cold. It’s now or it’s never. It’s maybe already too late.

If it is, well then, he doesn’t have anything left to lose.

“Don’t you dare fucking leave.”

Ryan’s voice is thick with unshed tears. It’s shaking with the effort to hold himself together.

When Shane turns back around, his eyes are so sad. Ryan knows he hasn’t been doing well, he’s seen him these past weeks, the signs that he’s struggling to keep it together. That he’s failing, falling apart, and Ryan knows this is his fault; but it’s the first time he’s seen him look like this.

It’s the first he's seen the grief. Whatever he’d thought was behind this downswing, he’d underestimated it. Seeing him now, seeing this unchecked misery on his face—even just for a moment while he tries and fails to school his expression into something acceptable—tells him all he needs to know.

All he’s spent these last two months trying not to see.

He hates this. He’d done this. In leaving that night, he’d set this in motion. But that’s a lie—he’d started it weeks before that, in the closet between his parents’ coats. Or maybe on the back steps in the dark, before everything around him started to break.

He wants to go back. Not to undo it, but to do it right—to have been less drunk, to have remembered more, to have said something. He wants to go back to Shane’s apartment and stay.

He wants to fix this.

He doesn’t know how to.

But the fight Shane had come here looking for had dissolved into flight, and he can’t let him leave. He still doesn’t know where they stand, with any of this. Somehow they’d gone from friends to something more than friends but undefined, to this: to not knowing if Shane was more likely to accept a kiss or punch him in the mouth. To standing here in the conference room of the company they built together, begging him to stay.

So he takes a chance. Reckless, stupid, maybe, he steps inside the invisible circle that surrounds Shane, the blast radius, the area of effect, puts himself in the path of destruction if he’s wrong—if Shane is still a bomb going off and taking everything down with him, a reactor gone critical, scorching the earth. He moves in, and he closes the distance between them finally, throws his arms around his shoulders and stretches up to catch his mouth, to find a way to say to him all that he can’t find the words to.

It hits Ryan like a sledgehammer in the ribs—a harder blow than Shane could’ve ever dealt him. His mouth on Shane’s again after so long feels like a wash of medicine down his throat. A devious itch finally scratched. A moment of cool relief in this horrendous, endless heat wave.

It’s an excruciating moment before Shane’s mouth opens against his, the cool gust of his breath flooding out of his nose while his head falls into a tilt to accept whatever desperate plea Ryan is offering with his body instead of, as usual, with words.

It’s a feeling like stepping on a decaying bridge to test it, and finding it holds your weight, that it will bear you across.

It’s passive at first, just like that: acceptance. Letting Ryan move in, Shane on delay like an echo. He’s slow to respond—maybe it’s disbelief, like stumbling across a mirage image of a spring in the desert, or anger he still can’t shake off, Ryan doesn’t know—but it’s brief. His arms move, folding around Ryan’s body before drawing him in, his mouth beginning to offer its own pressure with an almost trembling reticence, like he’s afraid it will be taken away from him before he even gets the chance to have it. Again.

But then it shifts with a clutch of hands and a sharp inhale; they come together like a reversal of magnetic poles. Like whatever force had been pushing them apart these last few months has flipped the switch, drawing them in like a strange, specific gravity.

Between them, there’s the soft, wet sound of their mouths parting for air, and Shane lets out a long, shuddering breath. Like a starving man set before a feast.

Like an alcoholic bringing his lips to the mouth of the bottle to drink.

Chapter Text

They should not be doing this here. That’s a given; there isn’t a single part of him that believes this is a good idea, and yet, Shane’s mouth opens against his and he doesn’t move a muscle to remind him of this.

Ryan’s head is ringing, like the aftermath of the explosion he’s somehow managed to sidestep. When he dips in to kiss him again, Shane’s hands shake, reaching to catch Ryan’s face on either side before trowelling back into his overgrown hair, drawing him closer with fingers hooked into desperate claws.

So many of their employees have keys. It’s still daylight out. Anyone could have forgotten their phone or laptop and come back to grab it. There are two security cameras in this room alone, documenting this lapse in judgment.

And it’s not that Ryan doesn’t care, but that he can’t. He can’t care. Because he’s run a hundred miles and lifted a thousand pounds and ended up every night right back at this. At this, mourning the memory of the taste of Shane’s mouth and the feel of his hands, and the way, when they kiss each other, it’s like the rest of the world drops dead.

It means something. He knows it does. He isn’t stupid.

He isn’t fucking stupid.

He knows he isn’t making this up in his head. Shane feels it too; he’d nearly admitted as much when they’d talked, however briefly, in the office the day after that night in April, when Ryan had tried to apologize, but had no real idea of what he was apologizing for until days, weeks later, when the effects were tangible. Irreversible. When he’d watched Shane, in slow motion, withering away like an unwatered houseplant.

Kissing him feels like falling, like floating. Like flying. Like he’s out of his body, just inundated with heat that sucks the breath from him and leaves him thankful for the rawness of flesh and the solidity of bone. Grateful for the carnal thing that is the body and the hands, for touch and breath and lips. For the earthly thump of someone’s beloved heart.

Ryan is in love with Shane.

It’s not really that he didn’t know that, buried somewhere in the silence of his soul. It’s part of the fabric of his reality, part of an entire undiscovered continent of truths he’s spent years knowing he’d missed his opportunity to properly act on and therefore only ever looked at glancingly, from the corner of his eye. It’s just the words haven’t come together in his head quite that way until now, drinking kisses from Shane’s hungry mouth that tastes like coffee and the sparest hint of those dumb expensive hipster cigarettes he’s been buying. Until this moment with Shane’s hands in his hair, Ryan’s face tilted back as far as it can to be able to reach his mouth with his own; until now it’s just been sounds, letters, shapes without distinct edges. A background roar like something enormous passing overhead, covering the world with its shadow, and Ryan never looking up.

He unwinds his arms, moves his hands along the mountain range of Shane’s shoulders, slipping one palm up the back of his neck, feeling the dip of his head under his gentle fingers, the way Shane dives down to kiss him, a little deeper each time. Like diving for coins in a swimming pool, holding your breath longer and longer until you can reach the bottom.

And that’s what this is like. Like floating at the bottom of a pool; the silence and weightlessness. Like all the clattering worry and unease about every aspect of the world that’s a constant rattle in his head, like the deep rumble and breaking glass of an endless earthquake has just gone quiet.

This is how church is supposed to feel.

In his hair, Shane’s hand tightens into a fist.

Ryan’s only just slipped under the surface of that tranquility when it retracts, Shane’s hands tight on his shoulders, wheeling him around to back him against the glass wall beside the door, pinning him there with a hip planted hard against his body, pressing the breath from him.

Shane’s hands have turned to iron, dragging down Ryan’s bare arms with appraising slowness, like he’s trying to dig his fingers in, like he’s made of something malleable as beach sand. Ryan is held up by the flagpole of his spine propped against the wall and little else, pinned there while Shane pulls his mouth from his just enough to gasp and shudder like he’s freezing or burning alive, like someone drowning and just barely getting their lips above the waterline to suck in a breath before submerging again and braving death.

His hands bite into his flesh, his body a blockade limiting the expansion of Ryan’s lungs, being kissed just as much as being devoured, and he fights for breath. The ringing in his skull is louder, echoing like the strike of a tuning fork, there’s a tingle at the tips of his fingers as something closes its hands around Ryan’s throat, part desperation, part panic, slow and welling up inside from the bottom of his gut up into his throat.

There’s a tremor in Shane’s hands that only seems to gain ground on him the longer they go, his breath flooding in and out of his body so audibly Ryan almost feels dizzy listening to it.

Against his mouth, Shane’s lips move, the whisper of skin and breath and the sound of his voice, low like far away thunder in the summertime, so deep it’s almost subliminal. “What do you want, Ryan?”

Does he really expect him to speak? To make words? To give directions and articulate thoughts? Ryan licks his lips, trying to summon his voice and only producing a high, thin whine when Shane’s hips push him more fully against the wall.

“Tell me what you want,” Shane whispers into his mouth, and Ryan doesn’t even know. He wants this, whatever’s happening here, he just wants it, wants to follow it to whatever conclusion it can reach here, but Shane seems to want to hear specifics, and Ryan just doesn’t have any. He just wants Shane.

“Don’t stop,” Ryan manages, reaching up for Shane’s face but finding himself pinned and one hand caught before it can reach its destination.

“That’s not an answer,” Shane says, his free hand roving, open-palmed, up the side of Ryan’s neck to catch his jaw and turn his head enough that he finds himself staring into Shane’s eyes, sharp and black and wanting something more definitive than just Ryan’s amorphous approval.

Why this makes his face flush, why he wants desperately to look away, why he doesn’t know how to reply—none of that really makes any sense but it’s all the truth. Words crowd up behind Ryan’s teeth but trip, tumbling out inarticulately like wooden blocks falling down stairs.

“I want you to touch me,” he whispers, and hopes it’s enough to end this moment that’s too intense for his brain to wade through, like it’s all too bright to look at directly, like staring at the sun trying to see the eclipse.

Shane snakes an arm around his waist so quickly Ryan isn’t even sure he’s actually done it, there’s the grip of his hand in his clothes somewhere and he finds himself being spun, his hands coming up on instinct to anchor himself against the thick tinted glass, the reflective sheen of black coating mirroring the shock on his own face and the side of Shane’s with his mouth open against Ryan’s neck. There’s the scrape of his teeth, the velvet swipe of his tongue, and Ryan watches the reflection of Shane’s hands slip down his body—one bare and long fingered, the other bandaged up, spotted with darkening blood—to unhook Ryan’s belt.

His breath rushes out, fogging his reflection a moment, watching the leather come free of the buckle and slide out, the slip of the button through the hole, zipper opening and Shane’s unbandaged hand slipping inside his dress slacks, and with just an expert maneuver of his fingertips, into his soft modal cotton boxer briefs, tracing down the length of his already aching cock, and wrapping it with his long fingers. He draws it out of his open fly, sweeping the pad of his thumb over the wet tip, smearing the pearl of fluid in a little circle that gets Ryan’s hips to jump forward, and there’s that thunder again, the sound of Shane’s voice while he repeats that motion and Ryan feels the breath shudder out of his lungs when he does.

“Like this?" Ryan watches in the glass, the heat of Shane’s body crowded up behind him, the reflection of Shane’s hand on him, stroking, enormous, insistent. There’s the sharp edge of teeth again, this time through the fabric of his shoulder, sinking into the round apple of his shoulder, and Ryan shivers at the discomfort that rounds the corner into pleasure.

He’s gone boneless, breathless, his eyes wanting to slip shut while he drops his head back against Shane’s chest, feeling the flex and gentle piston of Shane’s forearm, working him just enough to wipe out any kind of coherent thought. Behind him, there’s the heavy press of Shane’s hips, the drag of his body along the curve of Ryan’s lower back, and whatever he had to say in response to the question just comes out a dry whisper.

“What do you want?” Shane’s voice could move mountains. It’s the crash of the ocean. It’s the sound of the earth opening up.

Ryan’s knees wobble, and before he can reply, he finds himself wheeled around again, this time by the hips as his center of gravity, and his flailing hands land palm-down and fingers spread on the top of the conference table. There’s the rattle of chair casters on concrete—just obstacles shoved out of the way—there’s the hot wash of Shane’s breath down the back of his neck and his palm flattened against his tailbone, pushing him flush against the tabletop.

Ryan can’t draw in a full breath.

“Tell me what you want, Ryan."

Ryan skips over that request or demand like he can’t process it; his mind is a scratched disc. Tell him what he wants? More of—more, just more. This is information overload. It’s a side of Shane he’s never seen before, never more than hints and flashes anyway, moments where a crack formed in the cool exterior and something wild could rise up to it and peer out from the depths of him, snapping its jagged jaws at the fresh air. Moments when his tone hardens, gaze darkens, when his personality is honed sharp enough to vivisect.

What happened here with Jason was that tenfold.

Ryan doesn’t answer. He can’t answer. He feels like he’s choking on the air, like he can’t catch his breath. He’s simply incapable of diverting enough brainpower to stay on his feet and refill his lungs and be aware of how Shane’s hands feel on his body all at the same time to be able to piece together the awareness that he wants a response, let alone try to formulate one.

“Ryan…”

Ryan feels a single point of contact on his neck, above the collar of his shirt, and the warm flood of breath over his bare skin should give it away—that it’s the pointed tip of his long nose skimming the nape of his neck—but the shiver that steals down from that point to tingle low in his belly, the tops of his thighs, again overrides rational thought.

The warm expanse of that big hand rides up the center of his back, bunching up his shirt along the way, exposing heated bare skin to the cool, air-conditioned office air, and Shane moves in to close the distance between them.

To lean forward, eclipsing Ryan with the size of his body, pressed forward over the curve and arch of his back. And he grinds into him, heavy and slow and insistent, and Ryan can feel everything. Even with clothes between them, he can feel the hard line of his cock as he moves, feels it in the same place his hand just was, against his tailbone, the small of his back. Vividly, Ryan knows the answer to Shane’s question.

He knows exactly what he wants.

He wants their clothes gone. He wants to feel Shane’s naked body against his like they had been two months ago. He wants every inch of Shane buried inside him, but he wants it to be intentional this time. Not a slip or an afterthought, he wants it to be something given openly. Something taken.

The spread of Shane’s hand cradles the back of his neck, offers a gentle squeeze like kneading sore, tense muscles, and his skin prickles in the absence of what he craves—that hand in his hair again, gripping tight, nails scraping along his scalp, sending shivers tripping down his spine—and he’s buzzing with the want of it. Aching in the negative space of not yet being touched the way he needs to be.

And somehow through that, he finds his voice, tremulous and thick with need.

“I want to feel you inside me again.”

Behind him, Shane’s breath shudders. Ryan feels it, hushed and humid under the collar of his shirt.

The hand at his back pushes him down now and holds him there against the tabletop, as if there’s anywhere he wants to be but here. Ryan’s still recovering when he hears the response to his request come carried on the metallic jangling of Shane undoing his belt behind him. This is it. He’d asked for it and Shane is wasting no time in obliging, and Ryan’s breath is coming faster, too shallow. If it wasn’t for the table and Shane behind him, he’d be in danger of falling over, he’s so dizzy. This is happening.

After months of thinking of nothing but Shane everywhere, around and over and inside him, spread out on that sofa in his apartment in Oakwood, sure he’d never know that feeling again, Shane is rushing to give it to him now simply because he’d asked for it.

There’s the soft, telltale zzzt of his zipper as he wrestles his pants open, and the bump of Shane’s knuckles against the partly-clothed curve of Ryan’s ass as he shoves the fabric down enough that it’s out of the way, just enough to be utilitarian.

Shane pins him to the table with his hips, his freshly exposed skin flush with his and Ryan feels Shane’s cock pressing between his legs heavily. Feels how it catches against the bunched fabric of his slacks and underwear, and Ryan is burning alive with a need unlike anything he’s ever felt before.

Then his hands move again behind him, shove his pants down around his thighs and out of the way, removing this last thing that stands between them so that so that Ryan feels all of him as Shane moves back in, as the fingertips of his good hand curl against his hip, bandaged hand bracing his weight against the table. Above him, Shane lets out his breath like he’d been holding it.

It’s only when he turns his face the other way, trying to look back at Shane, that he becomes even remotely aware that his cheek had been against not the tabletop but a highlighted print-out, and turning, it comes with him, clinging to the sweat on his skin.

Out of nowhere, Ryan flinches at a sudden sound, startling at what he realizes is Shane’s wallet slapping down on the table not too far from him. Ryan blinks at it, unseeing, brown leather bifold tossed down and flipped open. It doesn’t even register to him why it’s there until seconds later when he hears the sound of a foil packet being ripped open.

A condom?

Every fiber of his being is straining to hear, but when he catches the soft yet distinctive, slick-wet sound of lube being spread over skin, he doesn’t have to work to imagine just what’s happening. Even if he did, he wouldn’t have long to wonder because he feels something—Shane’s knuckles, fisted around himself—slipping wetly against his ass, erasing all questions. Ryan doesn’t know what to make of this fact, the fact that Shane had brought lube, and truthfully he doesn’t have the kind of brainpower to go much beyond that—it’s just a stuck point. Shane had lube. Had he planned this? It’s a place his thoughts keep returning to, a fact they snag on, the knowledge that his hand and his cock were wet with it.

Unexpectedly, Shane’s hand dips down between his cheeks, and he feels the cool slip of Shane’s long fingers dragging down and back up, getting him slick and ready, and Ryan’s mind flashes him the memory of being pinned beneath Shane on his sofa and wet just like this as their bodies sought each other out. The sound that escapes from Ryan then is high and airless and undignified, as the pad of Shane’s thumb presses there, circling slow and firmly enough against him that Ryan feels his body want to give.

“Shane, oh my god.”

Shane’s mouth is on him, on his neck, breathing him in and kissing to chase the shiver up his neck. His hand moves away and Ryan exhales, whining at the loss even as Shane replaces it with his hips, with the slip of his cock nudging between Ryan’s thighs. And it’s not enough—Ryan wants more more more. Hands curled into fists on the table, he pushes back for more, more pressure, more anything, and Shane gives it in the grind of his hips. In the wet press of their bodies seeking again, the blistering drag of almost.

“Please…Shane.”

Is that really his voice? He doesn’t recognize it in his ears, strange and devoid of air.

Behind him, Shane’s answer comes with teeth, grazing and then sinking into the round of his shoulder again. The edges of Ryan’s vision are starting to blot white under the crush of his arousal.

“Please fuck me…”

He’s begging.

He doesn’t care.

“Oh, I’m going to…I’m going to fuck you over this conference table until you’re begging to come, Ryan.”

Shane’s hand finds its way flat on his back, fingers splayed, holding him down. His voice is heavy as his hand is, and it holds him still just the same. He can’t believe what he’s hearing, the words that are spilling out of Shane’s mouth like this is normal. Like this is how he talks. And fuck, it’s just the beginning.

“Until you’re begging me and weeping, and when you finally do, you’ll never be able to sit at a meeting in here again without getting hard and dizzy, remembering this moment right now where I’m promising to fuck you until you’re sobbing. And you will.”

Shane’s voice grows softer then, in volume but not in tone—low like a growl and closer to his ear. And it’s not a threat, but a warm promise, lips brushing the shell of Ryan’s ear as he speaks each word slowly, deliberately, so that there’s no question; Ryan hears every single one of them, and they hit true.

“Please…” Ryan’s breath catches in his chest like the path between his lips and lungs is winding and lined with thorns.

There’s nothing to prove here. No pride to hold onto, no dignity to be stripped away. This isn’t about that. This is about letting Shane in. It’s about speaking the unspoken, paving the way through this so they can both find their way back out together.

This is letting Shane know how badly he needs this.

“Every time we’re meeting with a sponsor, you’ll feel me inside you all over again, bending you over this table and these papers. Feel my hands on your body, touching you under your clothes like all these bullshit ghosts we’re always hunting, Ryan. You’ll never wash that feeling away.”

This is Shane letting him know the same in turn.

It’s laying claim. Ryan feels Shane’s feet between his, nudging his legs further apart, as far as is possible with his pants bunched up around his knees like they are. Whatever was left of Ryan’s intellect is long gone, but even wrung out, with the force of this pulsing need bleeding the thoughts out of him, the feeling he has is claimed. The promise of a mark impressed on him like a brand, one he can’t escape or outrun.

Ryan’s face burns hot. His pulse throbbing in his throat, and someone in the room is whimpering like they’re broken—it’s Ryan. Eyes wet, gasping for air, he’s dizzy. Shane’s hand is on his back, the slick drag of the thick head of his cock between his cheeks, guided probably by his fist. And then it’s a focused pressure and Ryan can’t catch his breath.

The sound that strangles out of Ryan is high, and it’s lost against the table, or the report beneath his cheek, or the cool air of the room, as Shane starts to sink inside him. As his body starts to give, to let him in.

All the air rushes out of his body; the instinct is to tense up at the intrusion. His hands are wet with sweat on the table top, leaving ghost prints of his hands on the polished wood while he flexes his palms for purchase, like some kind of gecko.

He pulls in a rattling breath, exhaling as slow as he can, letting his muscles go slack. His eyes drop closed, his mouth falling open, letting the tension drain out along with his breath. He lowers his stomach onto the tabletop fully, his forehead falling down between his hands, the heat of his breath flashing up against his face when he exhales again. He’s boneless. He’s ready.

And there it is, the slow glide inward. The stretching, the pinch of almost-pain that has a blue fire of pleasure at the edges. There’s the thrill of it up his spine, like his blood’s turned to champagne, every exhale steam-hot.

“Oh,” he hears himself, the word reverberating against the wood and back into his mouth. Shane’s hand is spread on the table close enough to see the purple edges of the bruised ridge of knuckle where the bandage has slipped upward.

Behind him, Shane breathes out hard, the word yeah buried somewhere in the rush of breath as his hips come flush with Ryan’s body, and it’s only a moment before he’s drawing back out, and it’s incredible how something can be agonizingly slow and still be happening so fast.

Maybe it’s the cocktail of adrenaline and dopamine, maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s elation. Ryan moans involuntarily at the feeling of Shane pushing in again, his body relaxing around him in a way that’s practiced but undeniably rusty.

It’s a blur of pleasure and ragged breath, his thoughts evaporating into steam, all that remains is abstraction composed of rhythm and sensation. There’s the choking grip of intense immediacy, as Shane picks up speed with the timbre of his voice turned primal, low in his throat, just huffs of breath and sound, the strike of his skin meeting Ryan’s.

Ryan’s not using his legs to bear any of his weight, but regardless, they shake, tensed against the ground for an anchor, his right foot flexed in his dress shoe like he’s somehow holding onto the Earth with it. There’s a slip of Shane’s hand from his hip, crawling upward under his abdomen, snaking his arm beneath Ryan’s chest to catch around the curve of his throat, and Ryan’s mouth falls open around an inarticulate cry while Shane shifts his stance wider behind him, using his arm to lever Ryan up on his elbows.

The sharp edge of the table presses on his pubic bone with the force of each thrust, and the vague change of angle sets off a spark inside, a ripple of involuntary contractions so deep inside his body it feels like it’s everywhere, fluttering, climbing the delicate ropes of muscle along his spine, drumming along the round shapes of his liver and kidneys, and sizzling into the nerves that branch outward through his limbs to his fingers and toes, cramping along the flexed soles of his feet, and he whimpers aloud for more.

“Oh fuck, fuck,” there’s a cry in his voice, something already desperate for release while they only climb higher, Shane’s hand slipping up from its catch hold on Ryan’s throat to his mouth and dipping in, wetting his fingertips along Ryan’s lips, his tongue, and Ryan closes his teeth on them gently, hissing out breath.

Shane’s voice, dulcet and feverish in his ear, chest flush along Ryan’s back so every word rumbles through him like an earthquake. “This what you wanted?”

The idea of being able to respond is laughable. He grinds out a noise with Shane’s fingers still in his mouth, closing his lips around the tip of one, reduced to foregoing language in the haze gripping him. Another spark flashes inside him, that sudden firework of sensation like a supernova, so strong his eyes fall shut, his head dropping forward to hang down toward the tabletop, swaying with every strike of Shane’s hips, and when he cries out, Shane’s palm flattens against his throat again, and there’s the drag of his mouth along the back of Ryan’s neck, kissing with slack, wet lips.

At the same time, Shane slows. The rhythm, the sound of it, it turns to a crawl. Ryan can feel every centimeter of Shane drawing out from the grasping velvet cling of his body around him, and it rips a strange shudder from him that starts at the nape of his neck and tears through him at the speed of light, ending in a twitching cramp in his tensed calves.

He finds words to protest. “Do-don’t stop,” he pleads, and the chuckle that shakes out of Shane vibrates every nerve ending.

There it is again: Shane’s mouth against his ear. That foreign tone like he’s speaking through clenched teeth. “What do you say?”

There’s no such thing as pride here. There’s nothing but Ryan desperate for that spark again, that flash of euphoria that’s inching away like the tide drawing back before a tsunami. Too far away to chase the longer he waits, so he fishes for language and comes up with what Shane wants.

Dry as paper, it comes out: “Please."

“Please...who?”

His throat is a desert. “Shane.”

“Please, who?" Shane repeats, slower. Lower. He punctuates the question with another slow, frustrating thrust.

“Please, Shane. Please.”

“Not Jason?”

“Wha—?" Ryan pivots his head to try and look back, to stare him in the eye, but Shane’s hand flexes on his throat, gently but just enough to notice. Just enough to understand “no”.

“Not that fucking pencil-dick Jason?”

“No. No-not Jason. Jesus Christ, Shane—d’you really—”

Shane levers himself up on both hands, withdrawing his arm from under Ryan’s chest to lean heavier on the table, to bear his weight evenly. With a huff of breath, he begins to snap his hips hard and fast, and Ryan’s vision blurs.

A wordless shout erupts from Ryan, sinking back flat against the table again, palms on the wooden top, slipping from the sweat. And just like that, again, the tide rushes back in, he’s climbing. He’s ticking toward the top of the track, eyes to the sky, anticipating the final drop.

“Can that piece of shit Jason fuck you like this?”

Ryan can’t speak. Even if he could, he’d be speechless. He moans, mouth open against the table top. Heat and breath and the vibration of sound; his cock is striking the side of the table where it’s hanging over, and Ryan gasps at the added sensation. He shakes his head, in case the lack of response would prompt Shane to slow down, or god forbid, to stop.

There’s a sound from Shane’s throat, a grunt, a kind of approval, and he drives his hips downward, a staccato tempo, hard and fast and just right there, and Ryan is falling through the clouds. The sky is lighting up around him, full moonlight. It’s starlight, daylight, thunder and lightning, it’s the silver gleam of sunlight on the swell of the open sea, and Ryan is going to come.

Here in their little rented office in Culver City, in their conference room, on this expensive enormous table they’d nervously picked out together despite its price tag— with hopes and dreams and anxiety and fear and so much money on the line—with his best friend and co-host and business partner, his favorite person on Earth, the best thing that’s ever happened to him, Shane, buried inside his body. He is angry and jealous and in pain and it’s Ryan’s fault and Ryan is going to come.

As long as Shane doesn’t stop. As long as Shane doesn’t back off again to demand he say please or look disgusted at the prospect of fucking Jason from Scentbird as though that’s a thing that’s ever entered Ryan’s head ever once in his life. As long as Shane lets him, Ryan is going to come.

As long as he doesn’t stop. Ryan is going to dissolve into white light. It’s climbing up his spine, his bones heating to glowing red hot, his flesh softening and melting off like wax, he’s going to turn into something else, transcend his body, melt into liquid mercury, he’s going to shatter apart into a trillion-million molecules, he’s going to cry.

He’s going to come, and he’s going to cry.

“Please,” he chokes out. Just for good measure. Because he means it. “Please, Shane."

Please.

Behind him, the ragged tide of Shane’s breathing shudders out a hum of approval.

“Please,” he gasps. “Shane.”

Shane lifts his good hand from the table, reaching around Ryan’s hip to slip his fingers around his hanging, aching, dripping cock, giving it a tight, quick series of strokes and the spark that had been shimmering through his bones catches flame, hot and fast like throwing dry pine needles into a campfire, igniting so quickly it crackles with light and sound, and Ryan erupts with a choking sob, his voice creaking and faltering as it fights its way out of his throat.

Thick wet heat pours down his leg, his cock pointed down toward the floor, soaking into his dress slacks still caught around his thighs, pearling the concrete below, striping over the toe of his right shoe.

At the same time, something wet and hot drops from both eyes, gathering in dewdrops on the tabletop between his trembling, clenched hands.

He’s soaring and he’s plummeting down to the earth at terminal velocity. He’s riding the high of the best orgasm of his life and the awful certainty of how deeply he’d hurt Shane, swinging between the two—it’s like whiplash. It’s like falling in a dream and waking up still falling. It’s more emotion than his body can hold.

Behind him, Shane sucks in air through his teeth like a snarl of satisfaction, and everything begins to shift. Shane’s hand moves, letting go of his cock and sliding upward over the nest of his pubic hair to catch briefly at his hip before falling flat on the table top beside him.

“Fuck…yeah.”

The next thrust is abrupt and it’s powerful and Ryan rocks with the force of it, breath shaking from his body as Shane lets go. As any attempt at restraint evaporates and Shane bucks into him hard and picks up the pace. Behind him, Shane is grunting and swearing and fucking into him like an animal, taking his pleasure hard and fast. This isn’t a Shane he’s ever known.

Turning his head to the side, through teary, blurred vision, Ryan sees the shape of their bodies reflected in the glass wall of the conference room. Sees Shane huge above him, head hanging limp as he doesn’t stop, as he keeps driving into him. His best friend fucking him in the dark reflection.

Or at least someone who looks just like him.

It feels like whatever he knows of Shane keeps being peeled away, torn back layer by layer over these past few months to reveal something else underneath, some thing not some one. Something raw and wild that was never meant to be exposed to the light.

He wonders if this could be the truest version of Shane, or if he’s being slowly torn apart and this is all that’s left. Just this lookalike Shane he sees reflected back to him in the glass, barely human.

And either way, it’s his fault.

Ryan needs something he can’t name. Everything inside him is buzzing bigger than his body and his face is wet. The way he feels, pulled in so many directions all at once, is something he normally brings to Shane, because he always can catch him. He can hold what Ryan can’t. Ground him. And Ryan knows he doesn’t deserve it—he knows—but still his hand finds its way into Shane’s.

He needs the anchor of him in this storm. He needs a point of contact, to know Shane is still there—and to make sure Shane knows that he is.

But Shane jerks it away like Ryan’s touch burns with a sound like he’s angry, like he’s been struck.

In the wake of being shrugged off of taking Shane’s hand, Ryan is floundering. He swallows back the sad sound of protest that wants to come, and his mind races through the worst possible outcomes. Because Ryan knows. He knows he’d hurt Shane, and he understands, but all he can think of now is how Shane is going to leave. He’s going to finish, and then he’s going to leave. He would deserve it if he does, but the prospect of carrying the weight of everything he’s feeling if Shane stands up after and walks out is more than he can bear.

Shane’s hand moves again and finds Ryan’s, and it feels like hours have passed between being brushed off and now, Shane laying his hand back down over the top of his own even though it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. Maybe Shane’s changed his mind. Ryan’s afraid to even hope, but he can’t help the deep feeling of relief that’s sparked in him as Shane weaves their fingers together. Ryan passes the pad of his thumb over the knuckles of Shane’s gripping hand, the noose around his lungs loosening a fraction when Shane’s fingers squeeze around his in response before he drops his head down onto Ryan’s back, his forehead between his shoulder blades, and Ryan shivers at the damp heat of his breath through his shirt.

He’s still moving, skin slipping where they’re touching, but he keeps Ryan’s hand clasped tight in his like it’s some wordless communication. Like they’re running too fast together and this is the tether that keeps them from getting lost, from careening over the edge. It’s this—the choice to hold on, hold tighter, to not just let this be an accident or coincidence or a mistake, but a choice actively made.

Ryan feels the rumble of a groan on his back, chased by the brush of Shane’s mouth—not a kiss, but perhaps the ghost of one—and he doesn’t stop rocking into him single-mindedly. Shane is chasing his pleasure one abrupt, deliberate thrust after another, making it so that together they’re threatening to move the table on its metal feet, sending conversion traffic spreadsheets and graphs off the other side.

Shane is getting louder, panting into it like each grunt is a pressure-relief valve, a way to let what’s built up inside him out in measures before it goes up at once like a match to kerosine and takes him with it—like it’s the mirror of what Ryan felt minutes before, like not even his skin and bones are enough to hold him together through the release.

With swimming vision, he watches the dark reflection of Shane’s head fall back, face toward the ceiling, his mouth dropping open around what starts as a sharp, seizing cry; a sound tearing out of him unlike anything Ryan’s ever heard, a scream that becomes a helpless, throat-ruining bellow. It sounds like pleasure, and it sounds like pain. It sounds like Shane is pouring out everything he’s held back all these weeks into Ryan, because he can or because holding anything back isn’t an option anymore.

And then it’s silence except for the heaviness of their breathing, Shane sucking down air like he’s been running. They’ve both been running.

It was maybe foolish to hold hope that they’d crossed some line, or that their trajectories had brought them crashing together instead of even further apart than they were before, but Shane hasn’t even caught his breath before he pulls out. Before he pushes himself upright. Before he tries to take his hand back.

Ryan’s never felt so empty in his life.

“Don’t you dare fucking leave.”

Ryan echoes what he’d said before this started, but now his voice is hollow—he’d understand if Shane did, but he couldn’t take it.

He doesn’t let it happen.

Shane doesn’t get far before Ryan’s there with him, up and turning around, following him. Losing hold of his hand, instead he wraps Shane in his arms like if he just tries hard enough he can make him stay. Like he can hold on tight enough to erase the mistakes he made eight weeks ago and however many weeks before that, as if staying now could make it so he hadn’t left then.

Shane’s tense and this isn’t working. He won’t look at him, won’t lift his eyes, and it’s too late. And he understands, but it’s more than he can stand. He’ll let go if he has to, if Shane needs to go now, but not yet. Not ever, some childish voice in his mind cries out, pushing back, like wanting something is enough to keep it. Even though he knows better. Even though he knows that wanting isn’t always enough.

If Shane wants him to let go, he’ll need to ask—like Shane had made him ask, made him say what it was he’d wanted. He needs to hear him say let go of me.

But he doesn’t. Instead, the silence between them thickens, throwing everything into an awful, stark relief like the fluorescent lights over their heads seem to—sparing nothing, showing this for exactly what it is, highlighting the worst of it. But then the tension in Shane’s body leaves him like a held breath let out.

Ryan’s embrace tightens, one arm thrown around his shoulders, hand at the nape of Shane’s neck as if to urge him down, or to crawl his way up—and he starts to let him. And when Ryan’s mouth finds his, searches it out and catches it hesitantly , Shane allows that, too, and after a moment that feels like a year, he softens into the embrace. He lets his arms move from his sides, lifts them around Ryan's body, holds him close.

They start to move in slow motion, Ryan sidling back when Shane displaces him, somehow not close enough and so taking up his space—possessive now. Bumping back against the polished table, Ryan shifts to sit perched up on the edge, and Shane follows—crowding in closer, heedless of the mess of Ryan’s destroyed dress slacks tangled between his knees, standing there anyway. Catching one thigh and then the other to urge him to scoot back, but all it takes is that barely-a-push and Ryan slides along the polished surface of the table until he’s stopped by the bend of his legs, the way eased by the wet mess they’d made leaking out of him.

And none of it matters. Not the unflattering fluorescent daylight of the conference room, not the wreckage all around them, or the damage done to Watcher’s relationship with Scentbird—because Shane’s kissing him back. Not biding his time until Ryan lets go, not just letting himself be kissed.

Swimming, because wet as he is, he might as well.

And then there they are, the both of them sinking together as the embrace slows, like moving underwater. Like filming at 120 fps and playing it back at half-speed, every detail crisp and defined like it was possible to reach between one frame and the next and stop time to hold this just a little longer.

Ryan wants to stay here as long as he can, afraid when they part, whatever spell had kept Shane from taking back his hand and walking out would snap suddenly like something made from cheap plastic. But somehow it doesn’t feel as inevitable now—at least he hopes it isn’t.

At least, he thinks, he’s prepared to fight for this if it is. To apologize. To try to do now what he hadn’t been able to do in any of the past hundred and two days—to try to fix this.

But Ryan’s stomach growls audibly, and what comes whispered into Shane’s mouth between one kiss and the next is, “I am so fucking hungry.”

Shane laughs so suddenly and so loud at that, and god how Ryan had missed it. The pure joy of it—helpless when it catches him by surprise, wheezing out of him in its haste.

“The only time you’re not hungry is when you’re asleep.” Shane’s voice is gentle yet playful, like he’s testing the waters. Like he’s seeing if this ship might stay afloat, after everything they’ve put it through.

It’s the first time he’s really sounded like Shane in weeks, the first time he’s addressed him without a flat, detached voice and averted eyes, and the tears that already wet Ryan’s face begin to stripe down his cheeks again.

With a hard exhale, Ryan drops his face against Shane’s chest, biting back a sob that wants to rise, and he shakes his head. “That’s not true,” he says tearfully into his shirt. “I get hungry while I’m asleep."

There’s the pressure of Shane’s arms cinching around him, his face dropping down to balance the rise of his cheekbone on top of Ryan’s head, still catching his spent breath. The hot breeze of it from his mouth ruffles through his hair, against his scalp, and Ryan’s shoulders bounce under the weight of holding back a breakdown.

“I don’t doubt that,” Shane says softly. His hand sweeps gently up Ryan’s back, fingers spread in a soothing gesture.

“Please don’t leave,” Ryan whispers. It’s not a threat this time. It’s a plea. The first petition in a litany, but the rest he keeps to himself. For now.

Shane, for his part, just nods silently above him for several long seconds, like he’s acknowledging some silent question before responding. “I’m not. I won’t.”

Ryan wipes at his face with the knuckles of his right hand, settling his cheek over the still-quick drum of Shane’s heart.

“I miss you,” Ryan says, soft as he can to keep his voice from breaking, and Shane’s hand repeats the gentle motion over his back.

“I miss you too,” Shane says, his voice low and thunderous in Ryan’s ear pressed to his chest. It feels appropriate for his voice to shake the heavens.

“You don’t have to miss me. I’m right here."

“I know."

“What did you really do to your hand?”

Shane’s voice is flat, “Punched a wall."

Ryan lifts his head, reaching for Shane’s bandaged hand to examine it, and this time Shane lets him take it with no protest. The fight has left him. The beast is back asleep. “Jesus, dude. Why did you punch a wall?”

In his periphery, Shane makes a face. “It’s hard to explain."

With gentle fingers, Ryan turns Shanes hand over, held between both of his now, running a thumb over the edge of the bandage that’s crept up enough to see the purple stain in the valleys between his knuckles. He doesn’t ask for clarification; Ryan knows that, directly or not, Shane punching a wall has something to do with him.

“We should clean this up,” Shane deflects, and Ryan tips up to kiss those words off his lips, turning his head when their mouths seal together again, when the long, slow, shuddering breath gusts out of Shane while Ryan exchanges Shane’s injured hand for both sides of his face.

There’s the rough bristle of Shane’s freshly trimmed beard under Ryan’s palms, the damp catch of his lips, the heat of his sweet breath as he leans in to kiss him deeper.

God. Ryan is in love with him. Now that the words have fallen together in his brain in that order, he wants to tell him. Wants Shane to know, even if it’s professional suicide. Even if it’s just tying a noose for their careers. Their credibility as professionals.

But what if it’s not?

In a gut-twisted flash, there’s the shotgun blast of the memory of Shane snatching his hand away when Ryan had gone to hold it; Shane rejecting his attempt to connect, to turn them back toward tenderness when Shane had seemed to desperately want anything but.

Even if he’d gone back on it immediately, there’s something there. Something Shane hasn’t said. Something Shane wants, and definitively, something Shane does not want.

What Shane might not want to hear is exactly what is trembling on Ryan’s lips. He hates keeping secrets, he’s shit at it.

If what Shane wants is just this, Ryan doesn’t want to risk telling him. He doesn’t want to put Shane back into that shell; to hear that flat voice. To watch him outside lighting a cigarette because Ryan is in love with him and Shane had just wanted...

He can’t finish that thought.

Against Ryan’s lips, a chance at reprieve comes in the form of what is almost tangibly an olive branch. “You want to get tacos?”

“Tacos. Fuck. Yes, I want tacos.”

Forehead against Ryan’s, Shane chuckles, running his hands down both of Ryan’s arms, ending with his hands before letting them free. “That’s always the answer, right? Tacos."

“Tacos are nature’s most perfect food."

Shane gives a long, airless wheeze, and Ryan’s heart feels a thousand pounds lighter. “Nature...like they grow on a bush.”

“Don’t they? The endemic taco bush? Native to Southern California?”

“That sounds so dirty."

Now it’s Ryan’s turn to laugh. As though they can call anything dirty, with Ryan bare-assed on the top of their conference table, sitting in their filth. The floor spattered with it under their feet.

“That does sound like something you’d believe, though. The hair grows through the skull, ghosts are real, tacos grow on a bush." Shane gives his arms another little squeeze with his hands, and instead of snapping back, Ryan tips up to kiss him one more time. Slow, soft-mouthed and lingering.

“We really do have to clean this up,” Ryan agrees, then gestures downward. “And also my pants are trashed."

“Yeah...sorry...about that.” Shane licks his lips, regarding the destruction of Ryan’s nice slacks, and he doesn’t look that sorry. His eyes seem clear. Even the dark shadows he’d had ringing his eyes for weeks seem lighter, like he’s coming out of some kind of coma. Let free from a living tomb. “We clean this up. Change your pants. Then tacos.”

Ryan smiles, and for the first time in what feels like so long, it’s real. “Then tacos.”

Chapter Text

It’s warm, even for a June night.

The heat of the day clings to the outdoor stools under the awnings of the brewery, warm under Shane’s legs with a dew of sweat, a half-empty beer cool in his hand, and Ryan’s head leaned against the round of his shoulder.

He almost feels like himself again.

It’s embarrassing, having thrown what feels like the most petulant tantrum imaginable, and being fully rewarded for it. Like a vile, spoiled child getting a pony on their birthday.

Ryan quietly sips his beer and leans his temple back on Shane’s shoulder, their hands clasped under the edge of the table, facing the wall under the string of bare bulbs.

He’d apologize, wants to even, but Ryan seems to be floating. He’s put away about eight street tacos and two beers, and his voice is light and high when he speaks, so they’re back to their well-worn common tongue of shared laughter, comfortable silence and all the things they don’t say.

And everytime he laughs, he feels more like himself. Sounds more like himself. It’s not that brittle, broken-glass facsimile of laughter that had fallen out his mouth earlier, when they’d been meeting with Jason. When he’d been someone else—this jealous, raging monster who wants to own and hoard and take what he thinks should be his despite what he’s agreed to and despite what he’s been told.

But sitting here, grimy under his clothes with dried sweat in the warm night, a bright moon waxing in the east in a bright cobalt sky with Ryan’s hand clasped around his, this feels like something he can believe in. Something tangible.

If only he could find the words to just ask for it. Not bottle up his rage until he shatters like a lightbulb under a boot heel.

You’re being fucking crazy! Ryan had near-shouted at him, hours before. What is wrong with you?

For what it’s worth, he’d known it. Acutely known he was being unreasonable, deplorable. Rude, entitled, demanding. He hadn’t had words to describe what was wrong with him, and he’d been ready to back away and hide in bed with his tail between his legs, alone and aching as he’d been for two months, ready to swallow back the aimless rage to let it continue to compact inside him under pressure, like how the earth forms diamonds.

There’s a light gust of wind that sways the string of bulbs over the beer garden, the awning ruffling overhead and Ryan tips his head up to kiss Shane on the mouth.

In front of all these people, he’s kissing him and there’s the euphoria that always comes with it, but now surreality. They’ve been to this brewery a thousand times before, but never sat holding hands under the table, never sat so close like they’re afraid of not touching somewhere. Never sat at the furthest table in the darkest corner kissing in front of waiters and patrons and security cameras. In front of whoever might recognize them from the internet. And it’s only that it feels so strange—something so unfamiliar in such a familiar place. The way all of this has felt since the beginning.

When Ryan speaks next, it’s against Shane’s mouth—the sensation sizzling over him while the words make his stomach twist inside him: “We can’t keep doing this.”

When he doesn’t respond, Ryan continues. “It’s not sustainable. To keep, you know. Pretending something isn’t going on when it is.”

The gordian knot that is Shane’s guts slowly unties, and he lets out a breath he was apparently holding. “I know."

“Either we’re, you know,” Ryan pauses to turn and sip at his beer, some IPA with a clever name that smells like Pine Sol. “Either we’re sleeping together, or we’re not."

“Whatever you want to call it, can’t exactly say we’re not at this point." Shane phrases it in present tense with a sour sort of hope, because Ryan’s comment left room for interpretation that he just doesn’t have the strength to wonder about quietly.

And Shane doesn’t know. They haven’t exactly slept together in the literal way the phrase implies, but there’s so many euphemisms that fall somewhere between to describe it that don’t feel right.

Shane has no idea what they’re doing, but he certainly remembers what they’ve done.

“Well, right, but I mean." Ryan’s hesitation is giving Shane anxiety that tightens every tiny ligament in his back and shoulders. “Acting like we’re not. Or like, pretending, like we have been, that nothing happened, that nothing’s going on until we end up...”

“Fucking on the conference table,” Shane finishes, blunt and crass as he can, because calling it anything else feels like assuming more than he should.

“Right,” Ryan says, and if it wasn’t dark, Shane might be able to tell if he’s blushing.

“Which is irresponsible,” Shane says dryly, and picks up a cold taco from his pressed cardboard takeout box from the food truck that’s still parked on the curb outside the brewery, taking a bite of the pollo asada just so he can occupy his mouth and not say anything stupid to tack onto that observation.

“So many people have keys. So many people could’ve walked right in on that."

“Well, but they didn’t." Shane doesn’t mean to sound so defensive. “No use worrying about it now."

“We’re going to have to erase the security footage, too,” Ryan says, as though it’s only just now dawned on him, hours after the fact.

“I turned them off."

“You..." Ryan sets down his beer abruptly, turning to Shane fully with round eyes and his eyebrows up. “You what?”

“The cameras. I turned them off."

“When?”

“When I was printing out that stupid spreadsheet."

It should perhaps not be a surprise to see Ryan is shocked. “Wh...did you...were you planning all that?”

Now Shane is the one grateful for the dark corner in which they’ve planted themselves. He can feel his face heat with the implication he’d been planning to bend Ryan over the conference table the second that fuckface Jason was out of the way. “No, I just..."

He isn’t sure it’s much better to admit he’d been planning lurid, imaginary violence upon his return to the conference room because he’d heard Ryan laugh at something—anything—Jason had said, and it had turned him into some kind of monster, worse than he’d already been, sulking and angry in plain sight. That he’d turned off the cameras because he wanted plausible deniability after he stalked back in there and gave Jason a haymaker right in those neon-white veneers for daring to exist in his proximity when things between he and Ryan were so strained.

Again, Shane doesn’t have a clue about fighting, knows everyone he can imagine would be so disappointed in him for even considering it, but still he’s pretty sure he could wipe the fucking floor with Jason from Scentbird.

Sorry, Mom. Sorry, God or whatever.

“I don’t like that look on your face,” Ryan chuckles, reaching up to comb his fingers through Shane’s hair, and all of the anxiety drains off like rainwater.

“What look?" Shane closes his eyes, Ryan’s fingers tracing down the side of his face, and Ryan spares him the embarrassment of explaining, leaning in instead to seal his mouth back over Shane’s. He tastes like pine trees smell, like hops and cumin from the tacos, and the muscles in his back relax again, leaning in fully to turn his head. To accept the kiss properly. To slide his palm along Ryan’s thigh.

Anyone could recognize them here. If they really want to keep this under wraps, this isn’t the way to do it.

“Promise me something,” Ryan says, and Shane just nods, because yes. He’ll promise him anything. Anything except that this is the last time.

“Promise me we’ll be alright,” Ryan whispers, and Shane finds his hand under the table, sliding his fingers between his, dove-tailed together the way something sturdy is built to last.

And Shane, leaning forward to taste pine trees and spice, he says yes.

It’s eighty-five degrees at 3:12 am, and this is only one reason why Shane can’t sleep.

Making a shield with his right hand, hiding the little flame from the wind like a secret, he lights a cigarette and breathes out a thin stream of smoke into the hot Los Angeles predawn. Bare feet on the warm concrete of his balcony, obscured enough on the third floor he’s not concerned with being caught in his underwear. With the sliding glass door mostly closed behind him, he’s here but he’s not. He’s here in the flesh, but his mind is two miles away, still in the Watcher parking lot hours before, saying false goodnights to Ryan; their inability to let any kiss be the last one making liars out of them both.

If he closes his eyes, he’s still there, lingering in those moments with Ryan backed up against the driver’s side door of his Prius, the wind whipping across the asphalt of the empty parking lot, the hollow, echoing scrape of fast food cups caught in the gale, and the wet sound of Ryan’s mouth releasing from his, only to let out a breathy laugh before leaning in again.

Alone now, in place of Ryan’s mouth, he takes a drag from the cigarette. It’s too hot to sleep, and he’s too wired. He’d taken a cold shower hours ago now, his hair already dry, but between the heat and memories of the day, he may need another.

Cigarettes and cold showers to get him through the night until he can go to the office. Until he can be with Ryan again.

For months he’s dreaded waking and facing that reality. Now he can’t sleep in anticipation of it. Like he’s nine years old on Christmas Eve.

Not just to see Ryan, but because tomorrow brings him a day closer to Friday, when they’ve planned for Ryan to come stay for the weekend, since coming home with him tonight was out of the question. His apartment has been overrun by Hurricane Shane and everything awful that has come with his inability to continue functioning since his life had been lit on fire in April.

Not that Ryan would care. Ryan would barely notice, at least not until Shane was asleep and Ryan had to get up. Had to turn on a light to find a pathway through the laundry and fast food containers to find the bathroom. Had to excavate the sink to find the tap in the kitchen.

Sure. Ryan wouldn’t care, but Ryan would think things about it—just like anyone would, if anyone had seen it. Aside from poor Obi, picking his way through the shame jungle of laundry and trash and dirty dishes, no one has set foot in Shane’s apartment in months.

He has no excuse except inertia. One pile had led to another the way one awful day had bled into the next like wet paint, until the devastation that was his life had spread all over his apartment the way disease spreads through tissue. Like gangrene.

Shane just can’t stand the idea of Ryan seeing this open wound of an apartment the way it is now. Altogether it’s an abstract art installation that someone without a soul might title “Ennui” and a romantic might title “Lovesick”.

Neither of those are quite right. It’s been more like paralysis. And while he hasn’t done a bang up job keeping his state of mind fully a secret from Ryan—he’d unleashed it on him in the Watcher conference room in a way that still has muscles in Shane’s thighs aching—for him to see his home in this kind of mess just feels too personal, like he’s showing him the most pathetic, flayed open carcass of himself, raw meat exposed, bones splintered, chest cracked open enough to see the red twitch of his beating heart that had been left so forlorn by loss he’d just erupted ruin out of himself. Everything he’d touched had turned to trash, piling around him, burying him. And it hadn’t mattered. Had barely registered with him, to be frank.

Looking at it now feels like looking at some mess he’s made in his sleep. Like he’s sleepwalked through two months of his life and awoken here, on a hot night in June having turned Ryan down when he’d asked to come home with him.

Ironically, what would have seemed unthinkable to him two months ago.

There had been a loud part of his intellect that had protested saying no to the only thing he could’ve imagined wanting over the past weeks. If he’d told late-May-Shane that he would turn down Ryan’s offer to come crawl into bed with him tonight, he can’t imagine what his reaction could have been. Possibly something close to how he’d approached the unfortunate reality of Jason Greenbriar existing in his proximity earlier in the day.

But he had—said no—with the promise this all wouldn’t be just another attempt at scrubbing each other out of their veins with a bit more exposure. It’s more than clear now that a few rolls in the hay haven’t proved enough to inoculate themselves against an attraction they’ve denied and starved for years while pursuing success.

So between long, lingering kisses in the night wind and saying goodnight for the ninth time, they’d made a promise for Friday night and the weekend. Shane’s imagination is already alive with a selection of things they might do to pass that time together, and only some of it involves getting Ryan in his bed.

Here’s just another reason why he can’t sleep. The cigarette cherry burns closer to his fingers when Shane inhales, his phone buzzing on silent-mode where it’s been left face-down on the wicker patio chair he’s got backed into the corner by a potted plant.

It’s 3:27am. There’s no question who might be texting him right now.

But he’s almost afraid to check it. As anyone who receives unexpected correspondence in the dead of night often finds themselves.

He should probably be cleaning his apartment right now. Put this restless energy to work.

But instead, he picks up his phone, watching the screen light up at the motion, and there is Ryan’s name. A text message notification.

And of course he can’t. Ryan gets so wired, so focused. He lies awake worrying about deadlines and edit workflow timelines. Worries about filing corporate taxes on time and if the yogurt in his fridge is still okay to eat even if it says it expired two days before. Ryan operates on a fuel of buzzing anxiety, so why Shane had thought of Ryan as laying in bed blissfully asleep while Shane stares off his smoky balcony with all his molecules vibrating at high frequency, he’s not sure.

Of course Ryan’s awake. Thank god Ryan’s awake.

So Shane replies.

It’s barely a moment before the bubble appears that indicates Ryan is typing, and another message materializes.

That message is quickly followed by another:

Shane sits in the patio chair that creaks as he leans back into the wicker, his bare skin on the plastic woven straw. It’s nothing fancy. A good solid wind gust would probably take it right over the side. He’s got a little can for cigarette butts on the fold-up tray table and drops his in, letting it finish smoldering on its own while he takes up his phone again to reply.

Ryan’s already texted twice more.

And an emoji. A winking face.

Shane is far from sure, but also he’s sure. Only a cursory glance back through the sliding glass room into the living room reminds him why he’d put Ryan off for a couple days.

But tonight at least, it would be dark...

Shane imagines Ryan googling “what do you call scented dried flowers in a bowl at your grandma’s house” and chuckles aloud.

Ryan Bergara: not the world’s brightest man, and yet, the sky’s brightest star. Before Ryan can defend his knowledge of the scented bathroom contents of yesteryear, Shane messages again.

The typing bubble spends a long minute appearing and disappearing in turn before Ryan’s apparently hesitantly authored reply appears.

And on the dark, half-moon lit balcony, Shane feels his face flash-heat.

For what it’s worth, Shane had felt that way for weeks, a kind of dread of sleep because of what might be waiting there for him in a dream state, but avoiding it so long it felt for a few days he’d forgotten how to fall asleep. Like he’d trained his body against nature in his avoidance.

Then he’d started smoking.

Shane waits to reply until he can put together a sentence that reads like he’s not feeling the blood pool hot between his legs just at Ryan’s description.

Shane rereads the words as if he’d missed something in reading them the first time, because in his mind he’s far away from these words and this tiny screen. He’s back in the conference room with Ryan’s body beneath his hands, or he’s trying to imagine Ryan as he is now, alone in his bed and remembering the same thing. He doesn’t get a coherent thought together to send back before Ryan’s next message pops up.

Shane thinks back to earlier, to just one more, just one more as they tried and failed to say goodnight, until they finally had to or else they would still be there in the parking lot, borrowing time against tomorrow. Instead, they’re here and doing the same.

Shane knows what he means even though he only says half of it, and just like that he’s thrown back through time eight weeks to that night in April where this had started. Not started, but escalated, where it had gone from a voice in the back of his mind whispering what if to something hungry and newly alive inside his body, clawing to get out.

The switch from sweet to dirty hits him like the heat of the day had; from everywhere and all at once, finding its way under his skin through the cracks. Leaves him feeling the kind of hot that AC or cold showers or sticking his head in the freezer can’t touch.

This time implies a time after; one time in a line of them stretched out forever like possibility or beginnings. Shane reads and re-reads those messages and imagines them. Ryan in his bed with him, beneath and on top of his body, searching his way down with his hands and mouth. Straddling him and grinding until every rational thought is wrung from them, until that desperation that found them in spring finds them again in the dark, at the turn of summer.

Shane should reply, but his mind’s gone as blank as his blood has gone hot. He’s so hard suddenly it’s obscene, even at almost four in the morning, even in the dark, three floors up. Even if someone was awake on their balcony they couldn’t see it, but that doesn’t stop Shane from shooting a glance around like they could. His hand not holding the phone shifts over his lap and settles between his legs, grasping himself through his boxers, kneading himself slowly like that will make it go away.

Ryan’s text bubble shows that he’s typing again, that he has been, that whatever he’s writing is taking him a while. Ryan’s typing is starting to get worse, and Shane can easily imagine why. In his mind, Ryan’s doing the same thing stretched out in his bed with the covers thrown back. One hand balancing his phone against his chest, alternating between swyping and slow, one-thumb typing, the other hand down the front of his boxer briefs, curled around his hard cock.

That image overlaps with the blurred memory of Ryan splayed out on the floor of his parents’ closet with his cock out and his shirt up. Of his dark eyes staring up at him behind heavy lids, of his kiss-flushed lips parted and gasping as he came. He probably looks something like that now.

Shane, his hand still massaging the rapidly stiffening flesh expanding against his leg, blinks at the screen. He hasn’t responded to anything Ryan has written. He’s such a fucking moron sometimes.

Ryan’s typing bubble appears again quickly. Then his reply.

Shane licks his lips, finding his tongue dry in his mouth, providing no moisture. In his hand, his cock throbs. He needs to go inside—can’t go whipping it out on the balcony, even if it’s almost 4am, and he already feels a bit like a creep. He gives himself a little squeeze that’s almost involuntary. Like he can calm what’s a bit of an overreaction with brute force. With one hand, he types.

Dragging his damp palms down his bare thighs, he reaches to settle his cock pointing upward toward the waistband of his underwear before standing, reaching for his cigarettes and lighter on the tray table to bring them inside and drop them on the cluttered sideboard by the door before heading back to his bedroom and climbing back onto the mattress with its riot of green cotton sheets.

By the time Shane’s stretched out on his back and unlocked his phone screen, Ryan’s already sent another text.

The arousal punches right through his guts, there’s an almost sharp pain that comes with it, and Shane slips his hand palm-down under the elastic waistband of his boxers, fumbling to grasp his fingers around his aching cock before testing the drag of his fist around it. He’d used up the little packet of lube he’d bought for this—boy had he—so he’s going to have to improvise.

Shane types with one thumb.

Shane starts to type, “I don’t know how you do this to me” but backs the cursor up. He’s not even sure what he means by that, except that he’d gone from the extreme of avoiding touching himself entirely for weeks because of the memories his mind conjured at the slightest provocation, to about to jerk it for the second time in under twenty-four hours, with a mind-blowing orgasm in between those two sessions.

Like he’s a fifteen year old.

Ryan wastes no time responding.

Shane finds a tube of hand lotion and settles on it before he can bother being picky. A generous squeeze of it creates a little slip, enough to ease the rough edges. But it’s nothing like sinking deep into Ryan’s body. That tight, velvet heat that clings around him. The sound of Ryan’s breath. He messages just to let Ryan know he’s still here. Boy, is he still here.

Ryan’s typing bubble appears, but instead of a message, it’s an image. A dimly lit still of Ryan’s stomach with his boxer brief waistband hitched down, and his fist around his fully erect, shining cock. Behind it, the stretch of his muscular thighs, his bare feet, toes pointed toward the ceiling. Shane pumps his fist, a little sound creaking in the back of his throat. Trying to type like this is insanity-inducing.

There’s a pause while Ryan types. The delay in messages has a clear cause.

Still working himself in an unsatisfying slow seesaw of his wrist, Shane huffs out a breath. Fumbles with his phone with his left hand, nearly dropping it entirely while trying to open the camera app and get the goddamned thing to focus before he snaps the dramatized action of his hand, pumping with his thumb slipping over the tip and jerking his arm down in a hard grip before sending the Live photo to Ryan, watching it load with mounting anxiety filling his chest like a ship taking on water.

The little ‘Live’ icon on the photo reminds him he hadn’t checked if Ryan’s candid snap had been Live, and to his increasingly hungry delight, it is. He holds his thumb on Ryan’s photo and watches his hand give a long, luxurious stroke. The phone volume is up enough to hear a shuddering breath come through the speaker, tinny and small, but enough to worm between Shane’s ribs and send him pumping himself quicker with the palmful of Nivea squishing out between his fingers when he grips tighter. The wet sound of it is obscene.

There’s a pause in messages. Shane’s calf is cramping with the tension and how he’s holding up his leg, everything tight and getting tighter, winding up. How he even has this in him after the day he’s had, it’s a mystery.

With an eye on the screen, nothing appears. Shane knows why.

Or maybe he doesn’t. The message app vanishes and is replaced by a full-screen rendering of Ryan’s contact photo, taken at a novelty tavern in San Antonio that served enormous racks of bone-in ribs and things like Elk and Venison steak and they’d lied and said it was Ryan’s birthday for free dessert. The photo showcases a baby-faced Ryan with his teeth flashing in delighted laughter, wearing a cheap plastic viking helmet and hefting an enormous drinking horn toward the camera. It’s been Shane’s favorite for years.

But his brain is too devoid of oxygen-rich blood to understand why it’s appeared for a moment before his eyes bother to make sense of letters.

Beef Boy, incoming call.

Shane doesn’t have the bandwidth to hesitate.

Even so, his heart is racing as he rushes to answer the call. In that instant, out of nowhere, he remembers the first time Ryan ever called him, years ago. He’d put him in his contacts already but hadn’t called him yet, and his heart had raced then too. For a second, he’d been nervous to answer. It’s that same feeling now but it’s not nerves, and as the call connects with a click, he thinks maybe it hadn’t been nerves then either.

There’s no hello when the call connects—just silence. Until it isn’t. There’s sound on the other end, rustling and…Shane can’t hear it well enough, trying to split focus between keeping the phone tight to his ear and his fist moving over his cock. Quickly, he fumbles to switch it to speakerphone, thumb moving to the volume rocker, making sure it’s all the way up, and it’s as he sets the phone down on his pillow beside his head that he hears it.

Ryan’s breath comes shuddering through the speaker loud enough he can practically feel it on his neck, raising goosebumps on his skin. Fuck.

Shane’s imagining him on the other end of the line, in his bed across town. How he must look right now, not just from the torso down, fingers tight as he works himself over like in the Live photo, but all of him. His dark curls pooled in a halo around his head on his pillow as he moves, back arching up from the mattress. He wouldn’t be still, because he never is. Just like he isn’t ever silent.

If he focuses he can hear the slick wet rhythm of Ryan’s hand on himself layered beneath the steady quickening of his breath. Squeezing his eyes shut, his dark bedroom around him drops away and leaves him alone with his hand and Ryan’s ragged breath. It feels like he finds that pace, that their hands must be moving the same—and with that, it could be Ryan’s fist curled around his cock instead of his own and vice versa. Like somehow with his eyes closed, the lines between them become permeable; like in inhaling he’s letting Ryan in.

Shane turns his face towards the sound and is surprised to find his cheek hit metal and glass and not Ryan’s skin, lost enough in that moment that he’s disoriented by reality. He’s picking up his pace in keeping up with Ryan, like this is a race and they’re running it together, or it’s a collision and they’re on the same track with the distance between them closing.

Ryan’s louder suddenly, so much voice in his breath, half-formed words that come out like nothing, like he’s forgotten language, and Shane’s spine is going tight under him like he’s bracing for impact. His body is coiling up like a spring, like this tension has nowhere to go except for in and in and in until it snaps. Until it all shakes loose at once and ripples out of him like seismic waves, and he bites down on the shout that rises up in his throat because he still wants to hear Ryan.

His cock is pulsing in his hand, his hot release splashing up over his chest, and somehow threaded gossamer and neon through his awareness is Ryan on the other end of the line. Ryan moaning in his ear something inarticulate, something trying and failing to be a word, with a lot of consonants, something that would have been a curse, knowing Ryan.

When Ryan comes it sounds like Shane always imagined it would.

In the silence and empty stillness of his dark room after, Shane is lightheaded. He’s alone.

The line is still connected—he can hear Ryan catching his breath, softer now that the storm has passed—but whatever that feeling had been, like the miles of late night Los Angeles that separated their bodies had evaporated and held them in overlap, is gone. In the wake of it is the reality of being alone in his bed, sweat barely cooling in the still too-warm room, and it feels like having something torn from him.

Their breathing grows steady as the moment stretches on, and Shane takes the phone back and taps the speaker button, pressing it up to his ear again. On the other side there’s just…nothing, and Shane pulls the phone from his ear and watches the screen go from black back to the contact card, Ryan’s face, the viking helmet, the call still connected. With the receiver returned to his ear, Shane speaks up.

“Are you okay?”

He’s talking about right now, in bed, coming down from his orgasm, come cooling wherever it had landed—but he’s really he’s asking about earlier. He’s thinking about the heavy silence at the end, in the conference room.

He’s thinking about Ryan struggling not to, and then unable to stop himself from crying. The sound of Ryan’s voice haggard from those barely-restrained tears, begging him not to leave.

There’s a rolling swell of guilt at the memory. He had indeed intended on storming out. Deplorably, had wanted to inflict that pain on Ryan the way he had on him.

Had wanted to get away before his own tears welled up and spilled.

On the other side of the line, Ryan speaks. It’s the first he has on this phone call.

“Yeah.” His voice is soft and small and unlike him. “I wish I was there.”

“I do too.”

God, does he. Receiver to his ear, he turns his head the other way, towards the empty space beside him in his bed. A space Ryan’s never occupied except in his mind.

“What would you do to me if I was there?” Ryan asks, his tone lilting in the direction of flirty even as it comes sleep-heavy and dulled.

Shane doesn’t stop long enough to think on his answer, just says it before he thinks better of it, the threads that hold him together loose enough that the filter between how he feels and what he says isn’t there.

“Kiss you until you’re asleep.”

It’s only after that Shane really registers what he’d said and how, voice soft and still breathless. Giving too much of himself away in that answer.

Ryan doesn’t say anything else. Shane would almost wonder if he’d heard what he’d said, but even without confirmation, he knows he did. It’s a different kind of silence, shivery and fragile before finally it cracks, a little ragged breath Ryan couldn’t quite disguise giving away the truth; that he’s struggling. That the sharp turn right back into sexual and suggestive had been a desperate bid to side step his emotions.

Shane feels like he should say something else, but he doesn’t know what to say. Finally, the burden of feeling like he should break the silence lifts when Ryan does it for them with a whisper.

“Goodnight, baby.”

Shane licks his lips. He feels like he should protest that name before it sticks. Before it solidifies into something permanent, but the wake of it ripples warm through his chest and he can’t find it in him to tear this feeling away. This is one he can keep.

“Goodnight,” Shane replies, voice barely above a whisper and so at odds with how he’s gripping his phone so tight to his face. Like he’s afraid of missing a second of this, or of dropping his phone off the cliff he’s standing on the edge of. Somehow, then, he’s able to let go of both, thumb pressing end and dropping the phone to the bed beside him. Friday can’t come soon enough.

Chapter Text

Ryan wakes up, but he doesn’t open his eyes.

He’s stretched out on his back, starfish style, in his queen-sized bed with the floor-fan whirring white noise across the room. Morning sunlight peeks through the rust colored corduroy curtains on the right wall, the door to the bathroom kept shut to preserve some darkness. It’s how he wakes up every morning, just about.

It’s so early and he’s already sweating, his sheets kicked off and gathered in a bunched up roll along the foot of the bed, trapped under one of his ankles. There’s the clock-tick sound of his ceiling fan roaring on high speed above the bed, the pull chain bouncing off the glass light fixture in a rhythmic metronome he’s learned to tune out. His alarm hasn’t gone off yet.

This is how he wakes up every morning. Except for the past two. When he’d been with Shane.

Ryan doesn’t open his eyes.

The past two mornings, he’d woken in the cool of Shane’s little bedroom, the sound of birdsong out the window and his body in a cradle of mile-long arms. Shane’s breath in his hair, the smell of his familiar shampoo and traces of his cologne soaked into every inch of bedsheets and the air around them.

He’d woken up tired both days, a little sore in the best way. He’d rolled in Shane’s arms and settled his face on the plane of his chest, finding his heartbeat under his ear, and camping out there until Shane stirred awake, his hands sliding over Ryan’s skin with increasing familiarity that made Ryan’s head feel stuffed full of cotton.

Now it’s Monday. The weekend, unbelievable as it had been, is over. He’d had to return home to get ready for work. Had to return to reality. The one where he wakes up alone under an unbalanced ceiling fan in a shared house and an electric bill so high they keep the temperature at 78.

The heat isn’t really the problem.

Ryan’s alarm begins to chirp. It’s 7:15. His early-morning gym alarm had been promptly silenced hours before. He’s not going to be doing any workouts today.

It’s on heavy legs he carries himself to the bathroom to empty his bladder, brush his teeth. Ryan in the mirror looks exhausted but lighter, carrying himself without that thousand pound yoke around his neck that’s been there for months.

In the shower, Ryan closes his eyes. There’s the memory of Shane’s arms around him here, too, under the hot spray. Saturday morning. Sunday night. Shane’s fingers in his wet curls, massaging in shampoo before fashioning a mohawk out of his soapy hair and wheeze-laughing at his masterpiece when Ryan turned to him for appraisal.

“You think you’re so funny,” Ryan had told him, before leaning out of the open shower door to catch his reflection in the bathroom mirror, and joining him in his laughter.

“I do,” Shane had agreed, jovial before smashing the mohawk down with his palm and raking it back. “I do think I’m so funny.”

Alone in his Monday morning shower, Ryan washes his hair in silence. He doesn’t turn on the sports podcast he’ll often begin the week with. It’s just the sound of the water raining on the tile, the occasional glug of the drain. He turns his face up under the spray to clear his head.

The specter of the weekend follows him to the closet as he dresses, the memory of Shane’s hands stripping his shirt over his head in a rush on Friday night in the dark of his bedroom. It trails him down the hallway into the kitchen where he makes toast, and where the echo of Shane is cooking dinner on Friday night—spaghetti, hilariously—concentrating intently while he made sauce and Ryan sat on his kitchen counter with a glass of red wine, ribbing him for adding what he deemed too much garlic and offering to empty random bottles of spices into the pot while Shane wasn’t looking. The flash of Shane’s teeth when he threw his head back and laughed when Ryan asked if they’d be having meatballs.

It’s going to be a long day.

Opening his car door, Shane is there too, in the passenger seat on Sunday morning, holding his hand over the middle console driving to the beach. There’s still sand on the floor mats from their feet, trapped between the seams of the upholstery.

They’d spent the cloudy morning on Santa Monica beach, their blanket on a sandy rise away from the throngs of sunning tourists and locals, keeping to themselves with their cooler of beer and snacks, clotheslining each other into the rising surf and coming up gasping and vengeful. After being dunked enough times, Ryan had launched himself through the water towards Shane’s knees, wedging himself there before planting his feet in the sand under the water and making use of Shane’s high center of gravity, sending him sprawling into the water with a hoot. After, Ryan had lassoed his arms around Shane’s neck, his legs around his ribcage, letting buoyancy and Shane’s arms bear him up, and they’d kissed there in the surf with salty lips. They’d shared a beer or three on their blanket, stretched out under the sun as the marine layer burned off around noon, that morning shroud they call the June Gloom, spraying sunblock on each other’s arms to avoid misery during the workweek. Shane especially burns like he’s made of paper.

The joy of it had been the publicness of it all. The little thrill up his spine to be with Shane out in the sunlight, to crawl over him on a beach blanket and not serve the impulse to keep a foot of space between them, to touch his skin gritty with beach sand and not apologize for it. To lean down and press his mouth to his under the blue sky, with the sun and the wind, the charging surf and people laughing far away at the water’s edge, but no one paying them any mind.

That had carried with him all the way back to Shane’s, getting takeout on the way before climbing in the shower and rinsing away the sand. Before smoothing aloe over each other’s shoulders, chasing it with kisses on the skin still frosted with light sunburn despite their best efforts.

When Ryan parks his Prius in the lot at Watcher, the ghost of Shane is there too, saying goodnight over and over again on Wednesday evening when they’d returned late from the brewery. Ryan had been desperate not to part, had wanted to follow Shane home so urgently, would have invited him back to his own bed if he hadn’t shared a house with three others, but Shane had—in that way Shane does—shied from the idea.

Even now, Ryan can’t imagine why Shane would be so worried about his apartment being a mess. It’s as though he’d never seen Ryan’s bedroom before. And by the time he’d arrived at Shane’s on Friday night with a bottle of wine and a nervous cloud of butterflies in his gut, it had looked generally as it ever had. Ryan hadn’t been there since that night in April, when the entire world fell out of orbit and Ryan had run out with his tail between his legs.

He wouldn’t be making that mistake twice. They’d eaten Shane’s spaghetti, argued about a movie, watched The Shining with the lights off and their hands slipping together halfway through, and then finished their bottle of red in Shane’s bed after a blur of touching and motion and the taste of wine on Shane’s tongue in his mouth.

If he hadn’t been ready that night on the sofa for what it would feel like to sleep with Shane, nothing could have prepared him for spending the night with him. The way he took his time, the way that slow deliberateness took root in them, locked together, barely moving with rocking hips and quick breath like scared animals, one long endless kiss melting into another and another until a slow moving flash flood of an orgasm had washed over Ryan, closing over his head like he’d been pulled under by a riptide, again nearly bringing him to tears.

Sunday night, after their shower, slicked in drying aloe, Shane had sunk to his knees and made good on his promise to taste him, and Ryan had been too shocked and overwhelmed to produce barely a sound, just quivering and clutching at Shane until his knees wanted to give out, dragging Shane to his bed to make good on his own promises.

Ryan locks his car, the June heat merciless as it bears down around him, worming behind his sunglasses and stinging on the faint sunburn still pink on the back of his neck. The wash of cool air that meets him as he goes through the door, says his good mornings, and finds himself face to face with Shane in the kitchen pouring coffee, does nothing to dispel the heat.

“Hey,” Shane says, and the impulse to reach for him makes Ryan’s hands search out something to hold instead. They close convulsively on his elbows, arms around himself while his tea pod percolates through the Keurig machine, and he returns the casual greeting.

“Hey,” he says breezily as Sam comes through with an empty Yeti mug to wait her turn for coffee, giving a nod and a smile. “How was your weekend?” he asks Shane, and he should get an Emmy for this performance.

“Not bad,” Shane says. He’s bright-eyed behind his glasses, his beard is trimmed up neat and close. He’s got a slight pink sunburn across his cheeks and nose, and he brings up his cup to sip coffee. “Spent most of it in bed, honestly.”

When they ask him later what had happened to bring on such a coughing attack, Ryan says it’s because he’d gotten just some tea down the wrong pipe. You know how it is. Doesn’t take much to send anyone in a spiraling, sputtering fit like an emphysema patient.

Or just Shane thinking, once again, that he’s so funny.

They’re setting up to film this morning, the first three installments of the next Survival Mode that’ll take them through the afternoon, and keeping his hands to himself feels like they’re on fire.

But then there’s a stone forming in his stomach when Lizzie reminds him, arms loaded with binders, that it’s Monday. Before they get started filming, they need to do the weekly briefing for the team.

In the conference room.

Ryan had forgotten, or maybe he’d just wanted to so badly that he’d pushed it to the very edges of his memory.

Walking into the conference room feels like moving through deep water, like the record scratch moment in a horror movie leading into the big reveal, or like that moment in a nightmare where no matter what you do you can’t stop what’s coming. The guilt he feels is immense. It feels like everyone knows.

It feels like this is an intervention. Like they’re about to sit him down and gather around, say things like Ryan, we love you, but you need to stop getting railed on company property. Ryan knows Shane said he had turned the cameras off, but…had he? It’s not that he doubts him, that he doesn’t believe him, but in the back of his mind there’s that paranoia gnawing at him that somehow it had kicked back on. That somehow there’s footage somewhere of what they’d done, video of it, or even just audio. Just some sound-only security recording backed up to the cloud of him screaming Shane’s name.

By the time he circles the room there’s only one seat available: the same place at the table he’d been bent over on Wednesday. Because of course it is.

Even knowing it’s the only open seat, he still gives a glance around the table as if he’s praying the ground under the conference room might open up, swallow someone and leave a gap at any other spot. Better yet, that it might open up and swallow him so he doesn’t have to suffer through this meeting.

He’s tempted to just leave, make up some excuse—except he can’t really think of a decent lie. Being extremely aware of sex he’d had in this room not-quite a week ago isn’t a good enough reason for him, a founder, to start skipping steering meetings. Besides, Shane is sitting there in the seat beside the open one, and he won’t give him the satisfaction of leaving. He remembers what he’d said, all of it, exactly as crystal clear in his mind now as it had been then, as if Shane had carved those words into his skin.

Ryan’s afraid that like a prophecy or a curse, those words are going to come true. He may not be hard or dizzy yet, but as he takes his seat and keeps his hands on the arms of the chair rather than rest them on the table in front of him—where Wednesday he’d been pushed down flat on his chest—he’s remembering that moment when Shane was promising to fuck him until he begged. Until he sobbed.

And he had.

They’re not sitting with a sponsor, but when the binder drops down in front of him as Lizzie moves to distribute them, he just about jumps out of his skin. It jostles loose the memory of Shane’s wallet slapping down on the tabletop last week.

Shane beside him now should feel like a comfort, but instead it feels like a blinding spotlight is shining on him, making it so obvious what they’d done here. As though, even if the cameras were off, the room held echoes like ghosts walking through the last moments of their lives on an endless loop. Like the two of them close enough together are throwing off radio waves or morse code that could be interpreted if you had the tools to decode it; if you knew what to look for.

Had he taken his meds this morning? He’s fairly certain he had, but the swelling anxiety makes him second guess his memory. Maybe they’re not working. Maybe he’s discovered a new medication resistant strain of super-anxiety by letting his lives, work and personal, bleed together in a way he’d always said he never would.

He’s bouncing a knee, it’s just automatic, because moving helps when there’s more anxiety inside him than he can cope with or medicate away. He flips his binder open but keeps his hands off the table, and back on the arm of his chair, he’s tapping away, finding a rhythm like he’s beating a drum. It’s not really helping.

After a few minutes of this frenetic fidgeting, under the table, there’s the cool slide of long fingers on his wrist, slipping upward until they close around his hand to give a gentle squeeze, and with that simple gesture, all of the motion inside Ryan stops. His knee halts and then his foot drops, flat on the office floor beneath his sneakers, and something that was clenched in him releases. He struggles not to react too much, not to look, and instead keeps his gaze steady, staring at the meeting agenda on the top page of the open binder in front of him. He still isn’t taking in a single word—but he’s still here, and he’s breathing, and right now that’s good enough.

Maybe this will be okay.

Maybe he’ll get used to this. Desensitized to it. One more thing buzzing in his brain that he manages to turn down the volume on so he can focus and get through the day. Maybe he and Shane can figure this out somehow, steal pockets of pleasure when no one’s looking.

Ryan doesn’t know what’s being discussed, but he does surface from the roiling mess of his thoughts when he hears someone addressing a question to Shane, because it’s in that precise moment that Shane’s fingers jump from his hand like it’s made of hot coals.

Rationality would say it’s nothing to read into, that it’s just Shane needing to focus on the question, or just needing his hand back to flip the page, but Ryan can’t shake the feeling that there’s more to it than that.

Late Saturday night or early Sunday morning, he’d woken up in Shane’s bed and found him missing. He remembers how he’d sat up, bleary and half-asleep, searching for him in the near-dark room and finding him out on the balcony, sliding door mostly shut to keep the smoke from being blown back in. He’d been circled with it, rising around him like a mist, blurring the late-night Los Angeles lights.

Shane had been sitting in the wicker folding chair with his head in his hands, the curved shape of his body like a question mark, cigarette burning down to the filter between two fingers, all but forgotten.

Ryan hadn’t asked what he’d been thinking about, after. He didn’t want to know. He hadn’t needed more confirmation than he’d already gotten in the figure he’d cast against the night, the portrait of confliction. He didn’t want to ask and hear him say it. Didn’t think he could handle it to hear Shane say to him that he wasn’t sure. That he thought this was maybe a bad idea, that they were putting too much on the line. Not in the middle of the weekend they were having.

And it wasn’t that Ryan didn’t already know both these things.

So when Shane had come back in, Ryan had pretended he was still asleep, and laid there in the cool dark of Shane’s room as he crawled back into bed beside him, mentholated tobacco joining the otherwise familiar scent of him.

Laying there in the dark as Shane settled back down and finally fell back to sleep, Ryan had tried to push back on those anxious thoughts too. Tried to challenge them. He didn’t know what exactly it was Shane had been thinking about, was so conflicted over, but it was clear it was something, and it felt just as clear that Shane didn’t want to hear that Ryan loves him. Whatever the specifics were of what he was sitting outside smoking and mulling over—that much seemed obvious. After all, Ryan had pieced together why it was that Shane had started smoking in the first place.

That wasn’t the only reason he hadn’t said anything over the weekend, but it was enough. It was enough in the same way it had turned out a single weekend—spent watching movies, drinking beers, going to the beach and making love at every turn—could never be enough. It was another piece of evidence in the burden of proof asserting that there was no way to drink his fill of this. There was no one-time event that could sustain him when it came to Shane, no one night, no one weekend, and even riding the high of it he knew that eventually what he could have wouldn’t be enough and they’d have to talk, and he doesn’t know what will happen then, and that uncertainty is more than he can stomach.

There’d been thankfully nothing Ryan had needed to contribute to the meeting, though there had been a point where Lizzie had asked him ‘how that sounded’. Ryan didn’t know what that was, but he’d said it sounded great without hesitation. Yes, absolutely, anything to get the spotlight back off of him. Anything to get him closer to the end of this meeting and into the next part of Monday.

He’s so relieved when he hears Katie tell the crew to take ten and then finish getting set up for Survival Mode that it doesn’t fully click just what that entails, he’s just so glad to be able to leave the conference room.

It’s thirty minutes and some rudimentary shoot logistics before they’re arranged in their chairs in front of the gaming laptop and supplemental keyboard and mouse setup. Shane chuckles about Ryan’s inability to navigate the stone-hallways in a game called Amnesia while Ryan insists it’s not as devastating to his nervous system to play a horror game like this when he’s been in so many dark, decrepit buildings with his heart in his throat in real time.

Ryan clicks around for his first-person character to open drawers in search of items, and his heart is in his throat, but it’s not the game. It’s Shane’s knee pressed against his, leaning in to see the screen, sitting as close as he ever has, or closer—it’s the puff of his breath nearby and the fresh morning smell of his cologne and his shampoo, and Ryan can’t keep his concentration on the screen or where he’s supposed to be going. Something about an orb, pages of a diary, and a shadow.

There’s a puzzle he can’t solve, an item he needs to find, and Shane’s backseat-player-two frustration is mounting while Ryan fails with increasing good-natured frustration, reminding Shane how unhelpful his half-coherent anxious navigation tips are before Shane’s got a hand on him—casual, just a clap on the shoulder and a squeeze when he finally succeeds, but it’s enough to send hot pins and needles down his arm, from his rotator cuff to the tips of his fingers on the keyboard, sizzling like fire ants on his skin.

This is more maddening than he could have ever guessed, sitting here like everything is as it’s always been when it’s never been more different.

Because he’s in these little chairs, playing games on camera with his buddy, cracking jokes and screeching with laughter at every death but in his memory he’s on a sofa with the same buddy, settling in to watch a horror movie they’d watched at least four times, but never before in each other’s arms.

The whole experience was new, which made the movie new. Like Ryan had never seen The Shining before. Had never watched a young Jack Nicholson smirk his way through a job interview in a bad tie, never watched Danny Torrance ride through the Overlook hallways followed by a steadicam, never witnessed the Kubrickian distillation of claustrophobia through distant shots and symmetrical framing; overwhelming dread with those long steady shots and lack of background music. He’d turned to Shane to mention it and found his eyes soft in the dark, the light of the television blue on his heart-shaped face, watching him instead of the film. Reaching with his long fingers to touch Ryan’s cheek, he’d drawn close, and the rest of the movie had been a wash. They hadn’t seen the later acts when Kubrick had switched modes, the camera shots quick and close, like a rabbit running for its life. While Shelly DuVall had been screaming on the screen, an ax chopping through the door toward her in that stark lighting, they’d been lost in each other. They hadn’t seen Jack Torrance’s frozen face in the hedge maze because Shane had been nosing along his collarbone, dropping kisses on his way up his throat, his arms hooked around Ryan before pulling him up by the hands in a daze while the camera was zooming in on the Fourth of July 1921 photograph—escaping to his bedroom to the tinny old sound of “Midnight, the Stars, and You”.

If they hadn’t already been irrevocably changed, that night had been crossing the rubicon. That night spent in Shane’s bed with no clock ticking, no time limits, making love with an intensity like a slow-moving fire, a ferocity that Ryan had never known existed, and then watching Shane walk naked back to the living room for their abandoned wine, to finish drinking it in bed.

Hours later, with sunrise streaming in, Ryan had watched Shane’s face in that golden morning light, relaxed with sleep, every beat of his heart shouting the words he couldn’t find the courage to say aloud, and so he said them with every touch and every kiss and every look in his direction for the rest of the weekend, hoping he could guess it on his own and eliminate the need to confess it at all.

“To the left, left! No! Dude!” Shane crows with anxious delight, voice jumping up high when Ryan turns his character to the right, the sound of the beast chasing him through the red-laced stone corridors echoing louder than ever, and Ryan screeches back.

He’s so distracted, he’s not even sure where he’s going. What he’s even doing. Shane’s hands land on him again and he tips toward him in defeat as the game over music plays, his head landing on his shoulder where it most assuredly doesn’t typically end up in these videos, but it’s difficult to drag himself back upright when he can smell the citrusy aftershave on Shane’s neck that close, and the temptation feels like a boxing glove pounding him in the ribcage.

“This is bullshit,” Ryan whines, stretching both arms over his head and adjusting his glasses while Shane props a foot up on the table, taking a drink of coffee from his Puppet History mug and waxes philosophical about what it would be like to hunt ghosts in a castle genuinely filled with preternatural creatures out for their blood.

“Would that be more scary or less scary if you were in a castle haunted by, like, Draculas?”

Ryan can’t help himself. He reaches for Shane’s hand to squeeze it while his shoulders bounce. “Draculas!” he squeaks, letting Shane’s fingers free to bring that hand to cover his mouth. He pulls off his backwards baseball cap to scrub at his hair before replacing it.

“Yeah!” Shane doubles down on the collective noun. “Spiritbox don’t pick up on Dracula talk, you’d need all new toys.”

“Yeah, yeah, wooden stakes," Ryan drawls, playing along. “Crosses. What else?”

“You can reinstate your funny old holy water pistol. Actually might be of some use finally.”

“Unbelievable,” Ryan says, the smile stretching over his face feels obscene; it's so wide.

“Only time you’ve ever shot that thing was at me, mon frere.”

“And your face didn’t melt off like that guy in The Last Crusade. Sadly."

“Can you imagine?” Shane mimes his face melting with his hands sliding down his cheeks before laughing, setting a foot up on the table crossbar and leaning on his knee. “Your Great-Value Holy Water ain’t enough to make a dent in me, baby.”

Baby. Ryan’s insides tingle at the word, something they throw around casually all the time but not necessarily directed at the other. But the last time he’d heard it, he’d been astride Shane’s hips in bed, watching him gasp it, his hands gripping at Ryan’s thighs, his face a collection of moonlight and shadows and tense with lust.

Ryan folds his arms tight over his chest, clearing his throat. Shane is going off on a bit about buying Holy Water at Walmart and Ryan laughs along, because it’s funny. Because laughing at it is the normal reaction. But also the laughter releases some of the tension that’s been ticking higher in him since the moment he sat down next to Shane without the simple freedom to touch.

“So now’s the part of the show where we wrap things up by giving this game a rating on the Scream-meter, Ryan, what would you give it out of a hundred screams?”

Ryan can barely remember the game. Had it even been scary? “I’ll give it a...forty...three?”

Shane explodes with laughter, clapping his hands once, twice with his head thrown back. “Is that a question?”

“No, I’m going forty-three. A solid forty-three. I had a time."

“A time,” Shane echoes appreciatively before adding “I’ll give it a seventy-two,” and Ryan watches while Shane justifies his number, drinking more coffee and smiling over the rim of his cup. “Yeah, it had scary energy, I got an ulcer watching you go the wrong way every chance you got." He trowels a hand back through his dark hair and takes off his glasses to scrub at one eye with a knuckle.

“It did a lot with what you can’t see, you know? Especially for such an old game. You know, waking up on a blood spotted floor of an old fucked up castle and you have to read your own diary to figure out who you are and what you did, yeah. That’s good. Spooky! It’s like, you know, in The Shining, the environment does a lot of the work. Sets the tone. When was the last time you watched that?”

How Shane can say things like this with such a straight face, Ryan will never understand. He’s some kind of sociopath, he has to be. Some kind of gorgeous, charismatic sociopath.

“It’s been awhile,” he lies, smiling. He’s telegraphing those words he can’t say on repeat. He can’t turn it off anymore. “No Draculas in The Shining, dude. Just drunk-ass party ghosts.”

“Just drunk-ass ghosts, an old naked lady in a bathtub and furry porn.”

“Furry porn!" Ryan cackles loud and open-mouthed, and again there’s the impulse to touch so strong his palms itch. This is so embarrassing. Everybody knows, don’t they? They all know how he feels about Shane. It’s so obvious, he’s being so obvious. Has he always been?

“That’ll do it for this week, join us next week when we play Pony Island, oh, well that sounds delightful.”

“Speaking of furry porn.”

“And thanks again to Scentbird for sponsoring this video,” Shane closes out and Ryan coughs at the mention, covers his mouth again and leans forward for his cup. He doesn’t know how he’ll focus through another one of these today and they’re scheduled for three.

“Okay, that’s a cut on cameras, wrap on rough for episode. Break for fifteen and pick up with Pony Island, can we get that loaded up and running, Brendon?"

A voice confirms it from behind the set, there’s a clatter of sound. Somehow, it’s almost as though Ryan had forgotten there were crew members, their employees, behind those cameras and lights, watching them. His paranoia runs deep on the best of days. Today he feels like everyone is looking at them sidelong. As though they aren’t always, because they’re loud and ridiculous and they command attention. This is why people watch their videos, after all. Chemistry. It’s why they’ve tuned in. To watch them just do bullshit as long as it’s together.

This is what he’s putting on the line. That lightning in a bottle they keep capturing over and over. This is what he’s threatening to smash on the concrete if this all goes wrong.

And if he can’t even feel normal on camera with Shane, everything is in trouble.

But the truth is, all this, what they’ve given into, this is the source of that lightning. This buried spark, the one they’ve been afraid to examine, it’s been fueling years of snappy, engaged rapport. And if that spark burns out, or catches fire and blows up and burns the entire company down around them along with their careers, their reputation for professional employers, and the interest and trust of their audience, they’ll be tanking a lot more people’s dreams and livelihoods than just their own.

But it’s in his nature to follow thoughts to their most disastrous possible conclusion. It’s a terrible character flaw. Unhelpful.

He can get used to this. Compartmentalizing things. Letting the secret of it fuel a new energy. They can use this. This will be alright. They’ll be alright. They just have to relearn some things. Feel out the edges of a new dynamic. They’re still friends, after all.

Aren’t they?

Ryan bites his lip, swallowing back the anxiety that’s rising up again and stands, stretching his back to look as casual as he can manage.

“Gotta hit the bathroom real quick,” he announces to nobody, slipping away from the set with a put-on natural ease he does not feel in the slightest.

He’s bent over the sink basin, bringing a pool of cold water in his palms up to wet his face when he hears the door open behind him, and more noticeably, the metallic click of the door lock.

And then, the slow slide of enormous hands around his waist.

“You think you’re so fucking funny,” Ryan says, his eyes still closed, face wet.

Shane’s mouth moves against his neck, “I do think I’m so fucking funny."

Then those hands are spinning him around, his tailbone against the porcelain lip of the sink.

Shane dives in to kiss his mouth the same way he’d launched his body at him in the ocean yesterday; without hesitation or a second thought. It’s a kiss like a trust fall, so solid in the knowledge that Ryan is going to be there to catch him, and it’s a kiss like taking revenge. Like he’s getting payback for something Ryan had thrown his way with this kiss that pulls him under like a riptide, that knocks his legs out from under him at the knees so the waves can close over his head.

Oh, thank god. Shane’s mouth against his mouth, his cool hands on his body, touching him under his shirt, crowding him back against the sinks—it’s doing what the cold water he’d splashed over his face couldn’t. It’s grounding him, it’s conducting this energy that’s been buzzing through his limbs all morning safely back down to earth.

But who is he kidding? The slow catch and release of their mouths, their shared breath passed back and forth like it’s meant to save a life or take one—it’s also a siren’s song. It’s something he’d throw himself into the deep, dark unknown for, had again and again even though logic would dictate it’s safer on dry land.

How something could soothe him and consume him at the same time is beyond him, but here he is again, wrapped in Shane’s arms as time slides away from him meaninglessly.

The same way the ghost of Shane has haunted his entire morning, from his shower to his burned toast to the parking lot outside, it’s here in this bathroom together alongside another one in Little Tokyo, just a few miles and two months removed from here and now. Another bathroom with the door locked, shutting them in alone together, where they stole time they didn’t have to say everything except what they meant.

And the seismic roll of Shane’s voice when he confronted him about what happened in that coat closet. When they’d set this all rolling downhill, unstoppable. “Tell me you don’t think about it."

Today, Ryan’s not saying I love you, just like he hadn’t said it over the weekend, and especially not after waking in the middle of the night to see Shane alone on the balcony wrapped in curls of cigarette smoke against the backdrop of Los Angeles, night sky muted with light pollution. The right time hasn’t presented itself for Ryan to ask what had kept Shane awake that night. Or if it’s keeping him awake every night, out on his balcony with his head in his hands, agonizing over something near invisible but seemingly everywhere—like the smell of smoke from a wildfire.

Instead, Ryan is saying everything without words. Like pausing before jumping off a cliff and tossing rocks down instead, like a surrogate or to test the depth. He’s slipping it into Shane’s mouth one kiss at a time in a foreign tongue, a song without lyrics. And in the quiet they create when their bodies touch, he could swear Shane says it back to him in the same language. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking. He’s prone to that, after all.

Shane’s fingertips graze the line of his jaw and the rasp of his fingernails over the stubble there sends a shiver down his spine, raising gooseflesh on his skin like braille that just says Shane’s name all over him, the way you label property. He feels held in the cradle of his hand the way he had felt when he had woken in his arms over the weekend, held against his chest, breath in his hair, heartbeat slow and measured under Ryan’s ear.

Why are they fighting this so hard? After the weekend together, indulging every casual desire to touch and kiss they’d been bottling up, it’s been impossible to stash all that back behind the label of best friendship. He’d wanted to kiss Shane good morning with a potency he could taste at the back of his throat. He’d wanted to taste his coffee and his lips and wake in his bed with the smell of his skin under his nose, the sound of birds from his window instead of the whir of his unbalanced ceiling fan.

The corners of his mouth tighten, his eyes burn. Nothing has ever felt more inherently right than this in every moment of his life that came before. Shane’s mouth over his does little to assuage that burn. It only intensifies until he has to draw back and drop his head against his chest. When he does, there’s the shift of Shane’s arm behind him, being brought up to check his watch.

“Four minutes,” he whispers and leans in again, and Ryan lets him. He doesn’t notice the ragged breath Ryan lets out, and if he does, he says nothing. Instead his hand sweeps up Ryan’s back, under his t-shirt, his fingers tracing up his space, flattening between his shoulder blades to pull him closer, and Ryan holds on.

Four minutes and then nothing for the rest of the day. They’ll be filming until afternoon, then meetings, and a post-production review on two episodes for release that should take them through the end of the workday. Tomorrow they have appointments for livescan at the insurance company that provides bonding for the crew to enter private properties for filming, and a reup of their entertainment insurance premium, which should take the entire day, and absconding to the bathroom together would be probably just out of the question.

Probably three minutes now. Ryan wants to turn off his brain but it’s in overdrive, spitting out the bleak timeline of the next couple days and how little it affords them any time alone, as a typical workday generally does not in any case.

“Can I come over later? After work?" He feels so silly, for some reason, asking that. Like he’s begging for something. Wanting something he can’t have.

Shane hums into his mouth, sliding his lips along Ryan’s jaw, his arms tight around him in an embrace. His forehead drops to Ryan’s shoulder, and finally, he nods.

There’s a shameful amount of relief in that, and Shane’s arms squeeze him against his body, almost like he may feel the same way. But the hesitation, that moment before he’d nodded, had been agony.

“I actually do have to use the bathroom,” Ryan forces a chuckle and Shane reciprocates, his hands letting go after sliding down Ryan’s arms on either side.

“Drain your lizard,” Shane says, righting his hair in the mirror over Ryan’s shoulder, dipping in for one more kiss with a soft, pliable mouth and then one more to Ryan’s temple before turning to unlock the door. In a breath, he’s gone, and Ryan is alone.

Two minutes. Everything is on a schedule around here. He can’t throw it off to cry in the bathroom for no reason.

He uses the toilet, splashes his face again after he washes his hands, that clean almost-coconut smell of the pink hand soap they buy in bulk from his wet hands on his face, scrubbing at his eyes just a little to clear away anything that might have clung, any redness. He swipes his wet fingertips through his hair and replaces his hat backwards over the top, replacing his glasses he’d set balanced on the back of the sink and appraising himself in the mirror.

There he is. Ryan. Just regular Ryan. Nothing looks amiss from the outside. His lips are a little red is all.

Sweeping casually out the bathroom door, he heads back towards the Survival Mode set, where they’ve got the new game already running, and Shane is talking to Katie in his seat, looking down at something she’s showing him on her phone. He has time to get a tea, if they’re not all standing behind cameras waiting only on him.

Ryan takes a shortcut through the kitchen, filling his mug with green tea from a Keurig pod and escaping without being asked any questions or being sidelined toward the editing booth for an opinion, appearing back in his seat only a minute after the call-time, and Shane is typing into his phone, Katie now disappeared back to her office or Sam’s desk, depending on what’s on her plate for the rest of the day.

Adjusting his lav-mic back under his shirt, he settles into his chair while Mark is adjusting light on the panel.

“Time for ponies, now, huh? Have you played this?”

Shane doesn’t respond. He’s scrolling through something on his phone. It looks like Twitter.

Ryan nudges him with his knee. “Is that a no?"

With his mouth tight, Shane’s eyes come up at him with an expression far removed than how he’d left the restroom minutes before. Enough that it’s jarring. Ryan licks his lips while Shane tilts his phone screen toward him, showing him what’s there.

It’s a photo on Twitter. It’s a couple on the beach, laid out on a beach blanket on a rise of sand. It’s grainy, taken from a distance.

The couple, two men in swim shorts, are embraced. One straddling the other’s hips, the other reaching to catch at the other’s face. Their faces close enough they couldn’t be doing anything else but kissing. Which is normal. That’s a thing couples do at the beach.

Except the photo is of Ryan and Shane at the beach yesterday. Pretending to be a couple, touching and kissing and cavorting in public like no one would ever see or care if they did. The caption on the photo, Ghoul Boys? More like Ghoul Boyfriends, followed by every hashtag imaginable to help it be found. And retweeted. Which it had.

Eighty-seven thousand times and counting.

Chapter Text

There’s a stone where his stomach had been, a swell of withering nausea at Shane’s blank stare.

“Okay, rolling in two, Survival Mode episode 2, cameras 3 and 4, common mark." And the clapboard’s snap. The flat, almost robotic sound of Shane’s voice while he introduces the episode.

“Welcome to Survival Mode, this is a show where I introduce my anxious friend Ryan to some sick and twisted video games to really freak his little ass out."

Ryan stares over the camera, the crew staring back through lens and computer screens, the mill and faces of the employees beyond. Since this morning he’d been talking down his paranoia, the way he often does, but this time he’d been right. His gut had been, for once, absolutely dead on.

They do all know. All morning: in the conference room, flirting on camera, playing that last game. Disappearing into the bathroom together, thinking it’s a secret only they know.

Not just the crew. It’s everyone. Their fanbase. Their friends and colleagues. Everyone.

Everyone knows.

This is what Katie had been showing Shane on her phone when Ryan had come out of the restroom. Katie knows. And if Katie knows, Lizzie knows.

Sam, Mark, Brittney, Ben, Meredith, good god, the interns.

Steven. Steven knows.

And while this isn’t the worst thing that could possibly happen, it’s certainly on the list. Not because he’s embarrassed about it—he’s not—but rather they’ve said very little to each other about what all this really is, what it means, how they plan to go about it in the future.

And what they’d agreed on—the only thing they had agreed on— was that they couldn’t keep pretending nothing was going on when it was. And then, ultimately, they had continued doing just that. Honestly, when Ryan had said it, certainly he’d implied they should stop trying to deny things between them, but it had resulted simply on their hiding it from everyone else instead of themselves.

But that didn’t include making an announcement on Twitter before ironing out all the things laid out like stumbling blocks between them. Their professional integrity being questioned, the wisdom of starting a relationship already seven years in with a business partner, how up in smoke the company would go if the chemistry between them fizzled and died.

How selfish they’re both being, pursuing this despite knowing what they’re putting on the line for it. How bad it makes them look in the eyes of their employees, their fans, their colleagues.

Is this what has kept Shane out on the balcony at night? Is this what he can’t justify?

Is it more than that?

Shane is too good at keeping his cards close to his chest when he wants to. He’s stone-faced, cordoned off. That Shane from the bathroom is shut up tight inside him, head in his hands on the balcony in Ryan’s mind’s eye. Wreathed in smoke because everything is on fire.

Ryan is afraid to check his texts, his DMs, his messages. He always has so many that he can’t read until later in the afternoon, his notifications are always off during work-focus. Checking that number briefly, that red medallion on his text app, it’s climbing. He can only imagine what’s in there.

Maybe he can’t imagine.

“Alright, you ready to go, buddy?"

Ryan gives a nod, taking up the keyboard with a chuckle about the incredibly wholesome title screen and the weird vibes the game is excellently creating by spawning an error message upon trying to start a new game.

“This is gonna be a weird one,” Shane remarks dryly. Give the man an Oscar.

It’s an hour and some change before they wrap and Ryan’s head hurts, his stomach is whining about late lunch and high acid from prolonged anxiety, and a peek at his messages shows the number inching into the hundreds.

He refills his tea mug, sipping at it to let the hot liquid calm his stomach.

Pony Island was a trip, full of swerves and puzzles and banter with demons, and it had helped to almost distract him from the emergency at hand, and how they’d likely be meeting about it afterward, or whatever Shane had promised Katie he’d do, or not do, until they could come to a meeting of the minds on how to handle all this unplanned attention on Twitter.

So Ryan waits for Shane in the kitchen, casually, for their first chance to talk off camera. Without the performance held up between them expertly, because they’ve been doing it for years. Pretending. Putting on a mask and pretending nothing is there.

The cadence of footsteps heading toward the kitchen couldn’t be anyone but Shane, he’d know the sound of that walk anywhere, that long-legged lope thumping toward the kitchen, and he’s right. Shane appears, his shoulders drawn down toward his ears, and Ryan knows this Shane.

This is Shane from years back. Shane the intern at Buzzfeed, quiet and shy and withdrawn into a shell a mile thick. This is Shane from Test Friends, a wizard editor who felt isolated from his peers—all in their twenties while Shane was in his thirties—who had almost not even been hired because he was slow and meticulous, not ideal for pumping out the junk clickbait content for which Buzzfeed was famous. Fastidious, discerning and self-conscious about all of it. Who was nicknamed Beautiful Shane during a random shoot with Keith and never shook it even after they’d resigned to build their own production company.

Shane had been the last to sign onto Watcher, and it had taken Ryan giving him big sad eyes and promising they wouldn’t be tanking their careers to leave Buzzfeed. He’d been worried about no interest, about letting people down. He’d worried that he’d barely made it as far as he had—and risking that, gambling it for a chance at even more, felt foolhardy at best and greedy at the worst. He worried about losing a fortune in startup capital only to go down the drain when nobody cared to watch their content without the Buzzfeed name on it. He worried about failure, and, unreasonably, about it being his fault.

Ryan remembers that night. Beers in Ryan’s kitchen while his roommates were away at a game. Shane gripping his beer bottle, biting his lip. Not wanting to disappoint Ryan, but not wanting to write his name on the line yet. He’d spilled his guts, his fears of failure, his voice shaking in his throat until Ryan grabbed one clammy hand in his and swore they wouldn’t tank the company.

That it wasn’t greedy to want more. To want to be happy. To want to be free.

This is Shane pulled back into his protective shell, his head down, arms pulled in defensively. It’s like looking into the past. He sets his empty coffee cup on the counter and opens the drawer of pods, shuffling through them without a word, eyes downcast, posture hunched like he’s making himself smaller.

“Shane,” Ryan keeps his voice low, glancing through the door into the open studio, where they’re setting up for the last filming of the day. “We gotta talk about it."

“Do we?”

“What did Katie say?”

There’s a long moment where Shane is just preparing coffee. There’s the click and hum of the machine, the pressurized hiss of the machine dispensing Donut Shop blend, before Shane supplies flatly. “That she’s really happy for us.”

“O-oh." Ryan isn’t sure what he’d expected, but definitely it wasn’t that. “Well. That’s...nice. Was she...she wasn’t mad?"

“She just wanted us to know it’s out there.”

“Do..." Ryan hates that he can’t just get a sentence out plainly. “Does she think we ought to like...release a statement? Or, like...talk to the crew...”

“What for? It’s a photo on the beach. It doesn’t matter.”

“But shouldn’t we like...say something? At least here? The crew...”

“They’re not children. Why call more attention to it like that? Steven might want to talk about it, but it’s nobody else’s business."

“I mean, it kind of is..." That earns a sidelong glare from Shane that Ryan hadn’t anticipated. “Are you angry?”

“Not exactly.”

“I know we haven’t really...talked that much about, you know. What this is. What’s going on, like. Between us,” Ryan grinds it out haltingly, gesturing vaguely in the space between them. Maybe it’s not the right time, but the right time seems to have passed them by. Now it’s just time to get on the same page before people start to confront them about it, whether Shane thinks it’s their business or not. They lead public-facing lives, and that comes with an unsettling gray area when it comes to what’s private and what’s not. Obviously, they’d both forgotten that over the weekend.

Shane’s hand looks bloodless around his coffee mug; Ryan expects it to spontaneously shatter in a burst of coffee and shards with how much force his big hand is putting on that mass-produced ceramic.

“It’s definitely not ideal that it’s out there before we’ve had a real chance to...I don’t know. Get on the same page. But, I mean. I guess, we just go with the flow, right? So when someone asks, we’re just, we’re together, right? Like. No big deal." Ryan’s voice goes tight, because it’s the biggest deal in the world. This isn’t how he wanted it decided, but if Shane doesn’t want to confront it, then this is what it looks like to let sleeping dogs lie.

“I mean. That’s what you do, isn’t it? Just. Go with it?" Shane is staring hard when Ryan looks up, and nearly startles at the venom that curls those last words.

Whatever that look is on his face, Ryan doesn’t like it. A sardonic half-smile twisting on his mouth; like a man in front of a firing squad, laughing at his own death. Like laughing at a terminal diagnosis instead of buckling to the floor and sobbing.

“What?”

“You go with it,” Shane says, words low and tight. A barely-restrained fury condensing in the air like humidity. “I come onto you in that bathroom and you go with it. We fool around on the couch and it turns into something else...and you just, you go with it. You just go with that flow and then you run out because you went with it and it was too much. Then you see how—fuckin, how fucking destroyed it made me, and you just, kept on truckin’, doing your little workouts, being your best fuckin’ beefed up self until I corner you in the conference room...and you just...”

“Shane.”

“You just fucking let it happen, don’t you? Have you actively wanted any of this or just...you’re just happy to let this happen to you and have no feelings either way about which way everything ends up?”

“Are you fucking serious right now? What about me begging you not to leave after you,” Ryan casts his eyes around again, dropping his voice conspiratorially lower. “Fucked my brains out in there? What about me asking to come over? What about that I was the one that started this whole goddamn thing? What about this weekend? You think that’s just me doing whatever falls in my lap? Is that what you think of me?”

“Have you once, this entire fucking time, just told me what you really wanted out of this?”

“Have you?” Ryan hisses, big-eyed. Incredulous.

“I’ve shown you. I’ve shown you exactly...”

“Unbelievable. How convenient, you get to show me but I have to tell you."

“You only tell me what you want when I fucking make you. And you were clear." Shane steps closer, his voice dropping low enough it shakes something inside Ryan. A kind of panic, welling up from below like from a broken pipe in a basement. “Or did you forget about that?”

“Don’t hang that over my head. You’re making this into something it doesn’t have to be. Every second of this you’ve telegraphed clearly that you don’t really want to hear how I feel.”

“How the fuck would you know what I really want?”

“I don’t know, Shane, why don’t you show me?”

What Ryan doesn’t expect is for Shane to rush him, for his free hand to come up and knock him back into the cabinets just hard enough for his glasses to jostle on his face, the shock of it so thorough that he just stands there blinking for a solid three seconds before he launches himself back. Here’s just the other side of the coin from what they’d been doing at the beach yesterday morning, the fine line flipped from play into violence, and Ryan arcs a hand out to slap the coffee cup out of Shane’s hand.

There’s a small wet explosion on the tile where the cup hits, and Shane closes a huge hand on Ryan’s shirt, dragging him forward with a hard shake to snarl in his face. Here it is, again, this Shane that Ryan doesn’t know—these hard black eyes that Ryan’s only seen in flashes. That beast crawling back out into the light, sniffing at blood in the air.

What’s awful is Ryan’s nerves still buzz with the same electric charge at his touch, at his proximity, only now it’s gone toxic. His blood heats, his eyes dropping to Shane’s sneering mouth and his body coming alive.

Ryan pushes back, knocks his head into Shane’s hard, straining forward with his legs, their almost-embrace turning into an aimless wrestle before they shatter apart. The entire thing had only lasted seconds, a sudden flurry of savagery, but Ryan is shaking, and when Shane brings his hand to his forehead, Ryan can see that he is too. Under the visor of his visibly quaking fingers, his eyes shine with something that’s indistinguishable from horror.

“Sorry,” he says, so quietly Ryan could’ve imagined it. Except that then Shane turns, his posture like a kicked dog, his shoulders so rounded he’s lost nearly a foot of height as he bows through the kitchen doorway toward his desk.

And Ryan just stands over the shattered pile that had once been a Puppet History mug, in fifty pieces on the floor tiles in a puddle of cooling black coffee, trembling with adrenaline and dread.

Then he watches Shane sweep out the door with his bag and car keys, not even looking back.

Red points of light from electronics and the dull yellow glow striping down the walls where the curtains can’t hold back the street light keep the bedroom from being entirely dark, and the whir of the ceiling fan, metal chain tapping rhythmically against the glass fixture like it’s keeping time, keeps it from being silent. But there’s also the faint, familiar sound of one of his roommates snoring on the other side of the house, muffled by the doors and walls between them, and there’s the forced air hum of the AC unit in his window fighting for its life against the late June heat. Light and sound that are always there, things he’s learned to ignore because they can’t be escaped.

But there’s the buzz of an incoming notification that lights up the screen of Ryan’s phone, casting a faint blue glow up from where it lay face up on his stomach that pushes back at the dark, breaking through the din of what he’s learned to live with.

He doesn’t want to look. It’s probably Twitter, or another friend or acquaintance crawling out of the woodwork to send a text to add to the nearly four hundred others sitting unread his Messages, asking him if it’s true. But it might be Shane.

He flips the phone up enough to check, and it’s not Shane. It’s Ricky this time, his text on top of a telescoping stack of others he hasn’t opened. What he catches in the preview says he’s checking in, something like hey man, wanted to check in and see if you’re ok. Want me to come over? His is one of the few he maybe should reply to—he wants to be supportive, just really check in—unlike some that he’s skimmed on the lockscreen as they came tumbling in, the concern reading insincere, a guise to fish for more information.

He doesn’t click through into Messages, but back into Twitter for the umpteenth time tonight, following yet another tweet he’s been tagged in and scrolling when he shouldn’t.

‘Finally!!!’

‘Screaming crying throwing up omg the boys are back’

‘Babe wake up, the ghoul boys are ghoul boyfriends now.’

‘Man, talk about a slow burn, tf.’

‘Slow burn, 150k, idiots to friends to lovers, YouTubers AU. …Oh wait.’

‘Wtf? You mean they weren’t together before this??’

‘Does anybody else think Shane and Ryan were the last to know? Bc like, I been knew.’

He swipes the app up to close it and flips the phone back on his chest, face down this time. He can’t look any more. He can’t look at anything, can’t do anything. Earlier, he’d had the bright idea to use the time machine that is YouTube to go back to just before it happened, to those last moments where things were still normal. He’d opened up the app and clicked into the most recent Too Many Spirits, tapping fast forward on Drunkest & Most Haunted from Around the World to get through the credits so he could watch himself and Shane before everything changed, laughing easily with no walls between them, these versions of them that had no clue what was coming, and so soon.

It made him feel so much worse to see what he’s lost. If he’s honest, that’s what he’d wanted—just to wallow in this feeling, this gnawing twist inside him, like all the acid in his stomach is mounting a revolt against him because he hadn’t eaten. Because he’s a fucking idiot. This is what he does in moments like these, when he's too far in to even see the surface to swim towards—he just tries to self destruct. Tries to press a thumb to the bruise, to wallow in the misery of it until there’s nothing left but agony and self-hatred.

But he hadn’t been able to get even five minutes into the episode, with all the notifications streaming in, the banner at the top of the screen never leaving. Even if he flicked one out of the way, another would come seconds later. A text or Twitter. Horrifyingly, an Instagram notification that he’d been tagged by fucking Buzzfeed. He can only imagine the title of that story.

In the end, he’d closed YouTube and dropped the phone back to his chest. It’s unusable, unless he’s ready to face this and wade through the messages and tags and tackle this situation.

But he’s not.

He hasn’t texted Shane yet. He’d tried to. He’d started a text message a dozen times, watched the cursor blinking back at him, waiting for him to spit out what he was trying to say. He doesn’t know how to approach this. He should apologize or explain himself. He should admit that this whole thing is bigger than they’ve been acting like it is. It’s more than these three tumultuous months—it’s stalked him for years. Followed him all the way from that shared desk at Buzzfeed and through haunted buildings all over the world, and then to Watcher. It’s always been there. No matter how much he had tried to ignore the pull he felt towards Shane, it had found him in the end.

How do you say something like this in a text? How do you say it at all?

Shane is probably laying in his bed too, halfway across town. The same bed that less than twenty four hours ago they’d tumbled into together, still damp from the shower, Shane’s skin tacky from the aloe he’d spread on him to soothe his sunburn. Where they’d made love while everything around them ground to a halt like it didn’t matter. Because it hadn’t.

And now Shane’s laying there hurting, and—again—it’s his fault. Somehow every time he tries to reach out and bridge this gap between them he just ends up hurting Shane more. Maybe that’s a sign that this is a bad idea. The universe’s way of tipping them off that this isn’t going to work, not the way they want it to.

That to continue this would be selfish. Would be putting himself above the good of everyone else, over Shane and Watcher and all of their employees and friends. It would be getting into this deeper, wading in past the exit signs and escape routes until the water closes over his head and the choices he has left are tread water or drown.

As if he’s not already treading water.

He should give this up. Figure out some way out as if they’re not already in too deep. That would be the right thing to do, but just the thought of it wrenches something inside him. It’s selfish, but the idea of stopping it now feels like he’d be cutting out a part of himself. Peeling back his flesh, sticky and red up to his wrists, dissecting himself, cracking his ribs open to get to the heart of him—twitching and slippery in his hands like a fish—and taking that out too. Dragging his fingers through the soup of what’s left of him. Maybe that’s still the right answer, regardless how much it hurts to think about.

His phone buzzes again on his chest and he has a split-second impulse to launch it across the room, but the buzzing has a different cadence—it’s a phone call, not a text or a notification, and it might be Shane. He picks the phone up, squinting against the lit screen and sees that it’s his mother.

It’s 11:30 pm.

She either knows, or someone in the family has died.

He’s not sure which would be worse.

“Hello?”

“Hey honey…”

From just the tone of her voice, Ryan can tell that she knows. He doesn’t know how and he doesn’t ask, because he doesn’t really want to know. By now it’s been retweeted over a hundred twenty-five thousand times, so of course she knows. If not just finding out on her own because #ghoulboyfriends is trending in the number two spot on Twitter, then maybe Jake told her. Or maybe someone else in the family had reached out, checked in to see if she knew yet.

That means his Dad knows.

Who’s he even kidding? Everyone knows. Everyone knows, and they’re all trying to talk to him, his phone overloaded with enough notifications to set the damned thing on fire, and not one of them is from Shane.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Oh, you sound a little scratchy, does your throat hurt?”

His voice does sound awful, even to him. He’s been crying off and on since he got home somewhere around three, when he couldn’t bear feeling judged and pitied by everyone in the office anymore. They couldn’t film anyway once Shane had left, so when Katie gently suggested that he just go home and get some rest and try not to worry too much about it, he took the suggestion. Half of it, anyway.

Clearing his throat a little bit, he pushes up onto his elbow and then scoots back in the bed so he’s slumped against the headboard, more or less upright, head throbbing in response to the movement.

“No no, I’m alright.”

Ryan scans around for the water on his nightstand, taking a sip when he finds it, and setting it back down again too heavily, not paying enough attention to the glass and its distance to the nightstand.

“Are you sure you’re okay? Why do you sound sick?”

“We filmed today… rough day, lot of talking. We shot all the Survival Modes back to back. The video game one. And allergies have been pretty bad this year…”

It’s a lie, and he’d feel bad about it, but it’s a desperate bid to escape talking about this.

“Maybe try some tea? I can send your father over with some chamomile if you don’t have any—”

“No, Mom, really, I’m fine. It was just a long day.”

He wants to add more there—I just need to get some sleep or something, some excuse or explanation to help put her line of questioning at arms length because he knows she doesn’t buy it. He knows she sees through this, and he’s just hoping that she’ll see this isn’t something he wants to talk about yet and leave it alone for now.

There’s silence, and for a moment he thinks maybe she won’t push. But, if that had been her plan, she wouldn’t have called him at all.

“Ryan.”

It’s just that. Just that one word, just his name said so gently but it’s the push he didn’t want, but needed.

He knows that sound. The sound of his name, spoken by his mother with that firm, gentle tone. The sound when she’s nailing him on a lie. When she’s giving him the chance to come clean.

When she’s telling him the performance is over.

He lets out a long, shuddering breath. “Mom,” he says, and his voice falters, pitching up high. They’ve been through this before, a hundred times. Every time Ryan, who wore his heart on his sleeve, who fell for every girl who gave him a smile, and a few boys who didn’t, and then paid for it with heartbroken agony when they moved along to their next high school conquest.

“Oh baby.”

“Who told you?”

“Your brother did. He’s texted you but said you haven’t responded. I knew if I called you’d pick up, especially this late.”

Ryan tries to reply, but instead it’s just a ragged breath.

“Is this a bad thing?”

“That the whole world suddenly knows I’ve...” His voice sticks in his throat. “We’ve...kept it silent for a reason, and now...”

“Why have you kept it silent?”

“It’s...hard to explain, I guess. It just looks bad, to start with. Unprofessional. It would’ve been different if it was before we started the company. Even then, if it had happened then...”

“Is there a reason it didn’t happen then?”

Ryan sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, worrying it with his teeth. “I don’t know. I guess...”

“Is this because Shane is a man or is it more than that?” It’s the first time she’s said his name in all this. Why it feels jarring, to hear it out of his mother’s mouth—he doesn’t even know. Like the Twitter debacle didn’t make it as real or disastrous as talking about it with his mother.

“No no. It’s. I don’t know, Mom, you remember how many times we’ve been through this. Me throwing everything at a relationship. Having it go sour and. You know. Over and over, I just. I never get it right. And this...there’s a lot more at stake if I ruin this...I’ve waited for the feelings to go away. Like, I can’t have everything I want, right? Especially at the expense of the whole company and our reputation and all our employees....”

“So you’re going into it already looking at it from the angle that it won’t work out,” Linda says sharply. “That doesn’t seem like the best way to go about it. Seems like an insult to Shane too.”

“I don’t mean it like that....just...”

“How long has this been going on?”

Ryan almost lies, nonsensically. He bites down on the impulse. He supposes the truth feels incriminating somehow. “Since March. Since...”

“When you filmed here last, right?”

It feels like a sledgehammer to his ribs. “H...did—”

“Oh honey. You act like your old mama doesn’t have any eyes in her head. You two were so strange at breakfast that day. I could hear you two clattering around in the kitchen at night, then that poor boy looked like he was going to cry on his pancakes all through breakfast.”

Another sledgehammer. This time to his chest. “He did?”

“He left before it could get the best of him. I gave him a hug when he got up to go, he looked like he needed some mothering. He practically ran out. At first I thought you’d had a fight, but. Well, baby, Shane was pretty marked up on his neck, it was tough to miss.”

There’s a swell of embarrassment in place of the horror.

“What does Shane have to say about all this?”

And then regret. “I...I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“Well, we kinda. Haven’t talked too much about it. He said I...just go with the flow. He said it like it’s a bad thing.”

“Nobody likes to feel like they’re just something you settle for because it’s there.”

“It’s not like that...”

“Ryan, you’re an adult now, you can’t carry on like this and not have an adult discussion about what this all means to you both. You said yourself there would be big consequences to getting it wrong, so if you choose to do it anyway...”

“I know, I know. I just. I don’t know, Mom, it’s been years! I thought. I don’t know! I thought it would go away, I thought I could get over it. I thought maybe I just needed...to try it and get it out of the way...”

“Oh Ryan. Relationships aren’t little science experiments.”

“I know! I didn’t...fuck. I didn’t mean it like...like Shane doesn’t have his own feelings or anything.”

“You’ve been circling each other quite awhile, honey. It didn’t occur to you that you needed to find out how he felt?”

“He wasn’t super forthcoming with that information.”

“Have you been?”

The sledgehammer takes another swing for his body. “I guess not. I had myself talked into the idea that he didn’t want to hear about that. That, you know, hearing it would make everything so much harder.”

“Harder to go back on?” His mother’s sweet voice making this kind of accusation stings more than he’d have ever imagined.

“No,” he insists, sitting up more fully in bed, his head throbbing at the sudden motion. “No, that’s not it.”

“So now the whole world sees what you haven’t even told each other?”

And, he supposes, that’s the heart of it. Between the hundreds of comments and tweets he’s read tonight and shouldn’t have, that is the running theme.

“Have you two decided how you’ll handle this, now that it’s out?”

Ryan’s tongue sticks in his jaw, it’s so dry. “We had a fight. Kinda didn’t talk much about what to do yet. If anything.”

“Considering how you two have handled it so far, a fight was probably inevitable.”

“I guess.”

“So now what? If you don’t say something to each other now, you’ve just become a self-fulfilling prophecy of everything going down the tubes and destroying what you two have spent so much time building up. If you thought it was going to fail then you’ll make sure it does.”

“Mom...” Ryan’s throat burns.

“Ryan, how do you feel? How do you really feel, baby?”

“I’m...” A tear runs down his face, hot and stinging where he’s wiped away a hundred that came before it. Maybe it wasn’t Shane who didn’t want to hear the truth. Maybe it was Ryan who didn’t want to hear himself say it because it feels so foolhardy. It feels like everything he’s ever avoided. And giving it voice means he can’t keep it trapped in his head, safe and sealed away. Where it can only hurt him as much as he lets it. Where he’s still in control. “I’m in love with him, Mom.”

“And you don’t think he needs to know that? Especially now that you two are all over the internet?”

“Of...of course, but—”

“But what?”

“I don’t know!” His voice shakes, covering his face with his free hand, feeling the hot wet of the tears now that won’t stop, flowing like a melting glacier. “What if...Mom, what if I tell him that and he...he doesn’t...”

“He doesn’t feel the same? Do you know that for sure?”

“N-no...just...”

“That’s just...that’s the risk you take. Loving someone. You put your heart out there for them. I know you know this. You’ve let yourself take that risk before, and of course, it hasn’t always gone well. But it’s not meant to stop you from continuing to try until you get it right.”

“What if I don’t get it right when it’s the one that really matters?”

“If it’s the one that really matters, you keep trying, baby. That’s how it all works. You think your father and I haven’t had troubles over the years? Relationships are hard. They’re...you choosing over and over to keep trying for someone. Because it’s worth it in the end, even if you want to punch them in the face sometimes.”

“I do want to punch him in the face sometimes.”

“I think you’re more comfortable telling him that than you are how you feel the rest of the time.”

Ryan sniffs. She’s right, of course. Because she always is. It’s like she knows him, or something. “You’re right.”

“Shane’s a lovely boy. I’m sure there’s someone out there willing to tell him how much he means to them, if it’s not you.”

Ryan sits up straighter on reflex. “Mom.”

“Well? You just expect him to sit around and wait for you to tell him how you feel forever?”

“Nothing’s stopping him from saying it!”

“Are you sure you’re not stopping him from saying that?”

“Christ Mom, whose side are you on here?”

“Always on your side, baby, but I want what’s best for you. I don’t want to see you lose what you want because you’re too afraid to ask for it.”

There’s a hot coal in his throat and something writing in his gut like a tangle of snakes. “What if I’ve already waited too long?”

There’s the long, slow sound of his mother sighing on the other end of the line. “That doesn’t mean you should wait even longer.”

“What if he says he...doesn’t feel the same way?”

“And what if he does?”

Ryan bends forward, forehead to his knees, breathing hard into the phone. “I can’t stand the idea of losing him, Mom.”

“Doing nothing can only accelerate that possibility, I’d think.”

He lets that sit, simmering in his stomach like something on a low boil. That doing nothing will only ensure failure. That someone else will eventually tell him what he deserves to hear.

And that Ryan will lose him either way.

“Mom,” he whispers. “I have to go.”

It’s ten minutes and a protracted goodbye with his mother and her gentle, stern voice before he’s staring at his contacts. At Shane’s contact card, the photo he’d saved to it is just some random dumb thing he’d taken years back in a place he doesn’t even remember offhand. But Shane had looked happy, and that’s all that had mattered.

He’s been repeating it to himself, under his breath. Until he can say it without his voice shaking.

I love you.

I’m in love with you.

Shane, I’m in love with you.

Shane, I’m...

His finger hovers over the call button. It’s nearly midnight.

A text is easy to spend an hour composing, just as easy to ignore, and even easier to misinterpret in ways Ryan would never anticipate. Just like if his mother had texted him tonight, he may have waited until morning to respond. When the volatile mood has passed a little. Because it would be easier. Because he could.

If she’d only texted, would he have come clean about any of this? He could guard his heart so much better when it’s only words on a screen.

Shane may not have told him his feelings exactly, but the truth is, he was right. He has shown him. He’s put himself out there, taken risks asking and pursuing things Ryan would never have unless armored and cushioned by a gallon of booze in his gut.

He barely remembers most of the evening that had culminated in their encounter in his parents’ coat closet. But he knows he was so trashed, even the idea of rejection hadn’t concerned him more than going after what he craved.

Shane had looked him in the face, sober, and said “Tell me you don’t think about it.”

He’d said, “Come home with me.”

He’d said, “Tell me what you want.”

And Ryan, stupid Ryan, he’d thought he’d just meant the sex. He was too dumb, too buzzing with nerves, too starved for Shane’s touch to give the real answer or even understand the real question.

What do you want?

And all he’d told him was: more of this. The sex, the thrill, the intrigue. The feel of him inside his body instead of the feeling of being held in his arms.

That he wants to fall asleep every night with his arms around him; to wake up that way in the morning. That he wants to cook breakfast and dinner making stupid jokes, doing voices, arguing about the virtues of bad cinema or the use of olives in cocktails or if bears or sharks are the true apex predator.

That’s what Shane had been asking him. What do you want?

“You were clear,” Shane had said in the kitchen. Ryan was just too busy defending himself to even listen. To take ten seconds to understand what Shane meant.

He has to give him the answer he’d been looking for. The actual answer.

What he wants is Shane.

He lets his phone dial the number. His stomach bunches up like a fist, squeezing inside him.

It doesn’t even ring. Voicemail picks up without a single trill, the sound of Shane’s recorded voice comes, chipper and smooth: “You’ve reached Shane Madej, I can’t answer your call...”

He can’t leave this on a voicemail. He’d needed to hear Shane’s voice, but not a performance of it. He can’t leave him a message just composed of his ragged breath and a plea for him to call him back.

So, before the voicemail greeting is over, he taps “end" It would do no good to call again: Shane has solved the problem of his phone being as unusable as Ryan’s is by simply shutting it off. Not tempting himself to look at Twitter and all the commentary, to watch the unread message count climb into the hundreds.

He’s probably asleep. Shane can sleep through anything, pretty much. Even the end of the world.

At least, it feels that way.

He opens the message app, his gaze going soft focus on the list of names and their various levels of questionable concern, reopens Shane’s name and looks at the last text they’d exchanged on Sunday night, before the radio silence.

Shane. He types. Please talk to me.

And before he can question it, before he can delete it or talk himself into something else or out of it entirely, he hits send.

In the minutes, hours that pass afterward, there’s nothing more he can think to add. There’s nothing he can append to those words that makes them feel less needy. He can’t whittle off some of the desperation that sentence brings with it with an emoji or some clever gif.

Regardless, Shane doesn’t reply.

And by the time the sun is rising, by the time Ryan is finally drifting off, it still hangs there in space, those words. Merely delivered.

He’s asleep, dead to the world, when it changes to: Read, 5:12am.

Shane is on his sixth cigarette. Sitting on the end of his bed, leaning his elbows on his knees, he’s got the smoke detector on the ceiling disabled with its batteries popped out and rolling around on the top of his dresser.

Who gives a fuck about the smell. About the security deposit.

Who gives a fuck about anything?

He’d wanted to change his sheets. Wash his towels. Clean his apartment of the little traces Ryan had left over the weekend, but he’s just sat for hours, ineffectual. Making plans and doing nothing. Doing nothing but stewing, his gut churning. Phone turned off and sitting on a table by the bed to keep the temptation to check at a minimum.

Nothing good could come of it. He has a thousand messages. Emails, texts. Direct messages. His voicemail is full.

None of them exist with the phone off. The buzzing noise of every notification can’t notch his anxiety higher if it’s just an object on a table with its battery half dead.

He’d wanted a distraction but none of his usual pastimes held any allure. Twitter and the internet just made him think of Ryan. Movies make him think of Ryan. Reading makes him think of movie adaptations make him think of the virtues of film as a medium makes him think of Ryan. Video games make him think of Survival Mode makes him think of Ryan. Just laying in bed makes him think of the perfect weekend, makes him think of moonlight and a half full bottle of wine makes him think of making love over and over makes him think of Ryan.

This moebius strip, this MC Escher print of a thought pattern, it’s nothing new. He’s spent seven years like this, with Ryan in every corner and crack of his mind, fit into every aspect of his life the way cigarette smoke will worm into the fabric of his curtains, into the carpet and bedding. Into his hair and skin until he can’t wash it off anymore.

And he’d hit him.

Not in the face, not with any force or with a balled fist or even an open palm—just a hard push to the shoulder, a reaction to the accusation he’s been anything but as strong as he can force himself to be when he’s been fighting a knee-knocking terror at every turn, waiting for this all catch to flame and spread across his life like fire climbing the wallpaper in a burning room; inch by inch everything curling up and turning black.

Their reputation. Their company. Their relationship. Their future.

And maybe that’s wrong, probably all this is rather uncharitable when it comes to Ryan’s character and for what it’s worth he knows it. But the panic doesn’t discriminate when it’s feeding the covetous, jealous beast that Shane knows lives inside his heart.

It had never been entirely clear until that moment in the kitchen. That none of this outside of those drunken moments in his parent’s closet in Arcadia, none of this has been something Ryan has actively sought.

“Well, it’s not that big a deal, if anyone asks, we’re just. We’re together. Right?”

As if it’s not the biggest deal he can imagine. As though that’s just another thing he can roll with the punches, not rock the boat. Just let the tide take them out to sea.

He’ll end up out there by himself eventually. Out to sea, adrift. Just something that happens to Ryan Bergara, just another ghost to ignore when he’s alone.

It’s a kind of fear that has gripped him at the root, turning him into a monster. A scared animal, snapping at a kind hand. Something possessive and needy and full of aggression, a dog guarding its things because they’ve only ever been taken away.

He doesn’t recognize himself anymore. The fear, the anxiety, the desire. It’s twisted him up so bad he’s sitting in his bedroom lighting his seventh cigarette of the night, alternately staring at the wall and the floor, desperate to think of nothing and instead just remembering every moment of the most wonderful weekend he could’ve ever imagined.

When it had to end, he’d wanted to beg. To get on his knees, or turn back the clock back to Friday night. Just to have nothing but this over and over forever. Just the blithe, quiet reality of everything they’d ever been combined with everything he’d ever been afraid to ask for.

But it had ended just the same, and the tide has come in on its heels. They’d been careless to think they could parade around without being noticed. They’d been careless to think they could do these things and not have to pay some kind of price for it.

He had been careless to fall in love with his best friend and not think the weight of it would crush him one day.

He’d just thought, maybe, there would be more time to sort this all out. Before they had to address the inevitable question of their public persona and what their relationship might do to that.

And inevitably, what it falling apart might mean in the end.

That it might mean things like Shane lashing out, pushing Ryan against some cabinets in a sudden moment of being fully incapable of anything but panicked aggression, and Ryan pushing back.

He’s been numb since he got home. He’s barely moved. He’s starving and thirsty, too hot and a little nauseous, he has the kind of headache that God might smite you with in the Old Testament. Tears won’t even come.

There’s a hole in the bottom of his soul, and everything’s leaked out onto the floor. Everything he is, tangled up on the carpet among clothes he and Ryan had stripped off each other and left in piles to be plucked up for the wash later on.

What can he tell him? What can he even say? How can we articulate he’s not willing to take the windfall of having everything he’s ever wanted for the price of never feeling actually chosen.

Like Shane supposes he’s always been. A backup, a second-best. Something he had to turn to when the original thing he’d wanted hadn’t panned out. He was a backup, a fill-in for Unsolved, the thing that made them.

He’d fallen into place beside Ryan, and Ryan had run with that too. He should be used to this feeling, but somehow, he’s not.

And it’s not that Ryan hasn’t reacted with any sentiment, that he’s never expressed anything to him beyond just taking advantage of fate, but neither has he spent much time spelling it out. Or any time.

Or if he had, it hasn’t been to Shane. For someone so anxious, who worries every scenario to its worst conclusions and has a contingency plan for every one of them, Ryan Bergara charges forward into life like a freight train sometimes, especially when Shane is there to take the hit.

You go first, Ryan always says.

Well, he’d gone first. And now here they are. And Shane is going to look like such a fool in the end, just taking what he can get while he can get it. Never something actually chased after, just something caught in a net and settled for.

Again, it’s uncharitable. Cruel, even.

But if Ryan hadn’t really been ready to move forward with a relationship, he can’t risk everything for it. He can’t. Not just for himself, but for everyone who relies on him for anything.

It’s with a sick sort of certainty that he has to tell Ryan these things, but couldn’t make words when confronted with it in the Watcher kitchen.

Tomorrow they’ll be headed to the insurance broker to renew premiums. Bonding insurance for the crew, hazard insurance. Entertainment and public liability insurance, duo-performer insurance—practically a life insurance policy on each other. The blow that would happen to their content should something happen to the other.

It’s fitting that Shane will have to tell Ryan, maybe on the way to putting their names on that line, that he can’t continue doing this anymore. That he can’t take it. That they can’t take it.

He’s going to suggest they never address the photo at all. Just something someone caught that has no explanation; something that will never happen again. Just a wild card. Two guys on the beach that might not even be them. Just someone’s wishful thinking and a viral firestorm for a few hours before everyone moves on to something else.

And that they, themselves, also move on.

Because otherwise, their implosion will destroy everything.

It’s sunrise before Shane turns his phone back on. He’d thought originally it would help him sleep, but instead he’s only obsessed about it from afar. The Apple logo occupies the screen while it fires back up, Shane pouring coffee and drinking it on his aching, empty stomach.

There’s a thousand texts, notifications stacked on the screen the OS can only vaguely assure him is 99+.

But on the top of all of them, a missed call. 11:53pm. Ryan Bergara. No voicemail.

A minute later, a text.

He sets his phone down on the counter. It’s after a few false starts and a second cup of coffee that he manages a neutral tone with an embedded suggestion to ride together; to get it all out of the way before a day spent going over paperwork that will result in going home again without this settled. And Shane can’t bear another night like this. Better to just tear off the bandage all in one go.

The silence in the car is the same kind that Shane is always going on about in haunted places—so deep and complete, so quiet it’s loud, that it drowns out the sound of the engine and the road noise, the sizzle of the tires over freshly wet pavement, the wind ripping past the windows, the rhythmic swipe of the windshield wipers as Ryan pulses them on occasionally to swipe away the misty drizzle that had just started to fall as they’d been leaving the insurance broker’s office.

In the passenger seat of Ryan’s Prius, Shane scrolls his phone with his stomach in knots. This is what he’d wanted. Ryan driving them, eyes on the road instead of on him—he’s always preferred to be the driver; Shane’s driving makes him nervous but so does everyone else’s. Here’s just another instance of Ryan keeping control over his anxiety by taking control of a situation. Limiting outcomes.

But they’ve been driving eight, no, nine minutes and Shane is no closer to saying what he’d planned.

When they’d all departed from the office for the brokerage in the late afternoon, the unexpected addition of Mark riding in Ryan’s backseat had kept Shane’s mouth shut entirely. They’d ridden in companionable silence, making comments about the songs on the radio. Throwing false smiles around. They’re performers, nowadays. They can fake it if they have to.

And perhaps, for a while, they’ll have to.

Mark had caught a ride back to the office in Lizzie’s SUV with the rest of the participating crew, trailing behind them somewhere on Cahuenga, probably at someone’s pointed suggestion that, according to Twitter, maybe Shane and Ryan would like some time alone.

The longer the day went on, the more the dread had settled in. The longer they reviewed contracts, updated contact information, affixed the corporate seal and signed, initialed and dated—the more he questioned his conclusions. The more he wanted to find another way.

But he knows: there is no other way now.

He can’t let everything he relies on in his life be a casualty to all this. If he has to be the one to stick a pin in it, he will be. Because Ryan becomes so indecisive he’d starve to death in a fruit tree trying to decide which apple to pick.

Again. Uncharitable. Shane feels he can allow himself a little of that. It soothes the pain a little, to paint Ryan as a villain when really he’s just as much a victim to all of this as Shane has been. It’s not Ryan’s fault they don’t really want the same thing.

Even if, to Ryan, it might seem like they do.

But if Ryan is fine with just ending up together, Shane would just as soon be alone.

He can’t help if he just wanted Ryan to want him as much as he wants him. In the same ways. But people are different, have different values, priorities, ideals. It’s not Ryan’s fault if this feels all good enough.

Shane doesn’t want good enough. And maybe it’s selfish to nitpick them into this corner. But here they are. Backs against the wall, nowhere else to go.

There’s the hollow pip-pop of Ryan’s indicator as he changes lanes. The sun’s not entirely down, but the road is lit with headlights as dusk falls like a shroud over the valley, the topaz angel’s ladders catching on the highest fronds of date palms, worming between the gauzy dark clouds sitting low over Cahuenga Canyon, their edges turning the color of flame in the rearview mirror. There’s a low roll of thunder somewhere behind them. Monsoons always follow the heatwaves.

“Ryan.”

There’s a sharp intake of breath from the other side of the car, and Shane can’t bring himself to look yet.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice thick.

“I don’t think we should comment whatsoever on the photo.” The words almost hurt coming out, because Shane knows what follows them.

“At all?” Ryan sounds incredulous. “You don’t think that reflects badly on us? On all of Watcher? For something to trend on—”

“We don’t even have to confirm it was us. We can even lie and say it wasn’t.”

“It’s just a matter of time before someone else gets us on camera, Christ, especially if we deny it! People will be on the lookout for us, it’ll just pop up again next week and make us look like liars. We have to say something.”

“Ryan,” Shane clenches his hands in his lap. He bites his lip hard enough it hurts. “They won’t catch us because it won’t happen again. We won’t be out anywhere doing anything like that.”

The silence he’s met with feels like suffocating, his lungs filling with water. Like all the air’s been purged from the cabin. Like an airplane whose engine has flamed out and it's falling from the sky, terminal velocity, a hundred fifty miles per hour straight at the ground.

“What do you mean...you don’t want to go anywhere again? With me?” Shane can hear it in Ryan’s voice that he knows this is not what he meant by it. Not remotely. He’s giving him a chance to backpedal. He almost takes it.

“I mean because. We won’t be doing that anymore. Anywhere. On the beach. At the brewery. In the office. In our houses. Nowhere. We won’t be doing any of that. Because I can’t, Ryan. We don’t want the same thing out of this and that’s going to be a disaster if we keep this up. We still have some plausible deniability. It’s not the clearest photo that’s ever been taken.”

“Shane.”

“We never used to respond to anything that’s even remotely smelled like this, and it’s happened a few times. Even if it hasn’t trended on Twitter, we’ve had our share of this and never said a word. It’s on brand to just keep quiet.”

“Shane.”

“Interest will die off on it, we move on, they move on.”

“Shane, Jesus Christ! What do you fuckin’ mean we don’t want the same thing out of this! You’ve been so volatile this entire time I—I haven’t...”

“You’ve been pretty clear, man. On what you’ve hoped to get out of all this. I—listen, I just want to end this on an okay note while we still can. I know I was out of line. I know I’ve been hard to be around. I know it because I barely recognize myself anymore—and I can’t keep this up when you just—”

“When I just what? I straight up told you in the kitchen I want to be with you.”

Shane grinds his teeth, looking up at Ryan’s profile against the descending dark out the driver’s side window, pearled with summer rain. His face in the green dashboard glow. His eyes are shining, his hands fisted tight around the wheel.

“That’s not what you really said, Ryan.”

“I know what I fucking said.”

“Have you, this entire time, for a second, a single fucking second, been inclined to pursue any of this further if I hadn’t been losing my mind? I’m breaking it off because this is not what you really want. You’re just willing to go with it, somebody on the beach with their phone out forced your hand and you’re fine with that but I’m fucking not.”

“Leave it to you to be so goddamn pedantic. You don’t like my choice of words? You wanted me to get on my knees and have flowers and balloons and—fuckin’, I don’t know—confetti or some shit?”

Shane surprises himself by laughing, hard and sharp. “Yes, Ryan. That’s what I fucking wanted.”

In the driver’s seat, Ryan turns his head so fast toward him it’s like he’s been hit with a baseball bat, looking so wounded Shane has to look away. “Don’t fucking laugh at me.”

“Jesus, eyes on the road.” Shane keeps his arms tight around himself so he doesn’t reach for Ryan’s hand.

“Nobody wants to feel like they’re just something you settle for,” Ryan says, flatly, like he’s reciting something off a cue card. “You think I’d just be settling for you?”

“That’s generally what it means when something falls in your lap and you just go along with it.”

“Listen, I know I did a lot wrong with all of this,” Ryan plows a hand through his hair before replanting it on the steering wheel, twisting his palm around it fitfully. “I ran out on you the night we had sex on your couch. I know that was a shit thing to do. You asked me what I want. To tell you what I want, and I was stupid and—didn’t understand what you were asking me with your hand down my fucking pants and—I didn’t answer you right.”

“You’re not—” Shane bites the inside of his cheek, a raised-up ridge of scar tissue where he’s been worrying at it all night.

“The right answer was you. Shane, you fucking piece of shit, giving me fucking riddles when there’s no blood in my goddamn head. Asking me what I want with your hand on my cock after months of nothing—expecting me to be able to think—”

“Not every question you find difficult to answer is a riddle...”

“You asked me, and I’m dumb and I fucked it up. The right answer was you, you, fucking goddamnit. I called you last night so I could tell you, I fucking practiced—”

“You...what?”

“I practiced!” Ryan’s voice raises, pitches high, ramps up until he’s nearly shouting. “I called you because I...didn’t want to text it. I’ve already fucked this up bad enough, I wanted to tell you, I wanted you to hear it. It may not be confetti and flowers and balloons and—fuckin’ Disneyland fireworks—but I’m not just going with the fucking flow and I’ve waited too fucking long for all of this for you to just rip it out from under me because I got the fucking stupid words wrong—when I’ve wanted to tell you, I’ve wanted to fucking say it every day—but you—I took your hand and you ripped it away, I wanted to tell you every goddamn day but—!”

“Ryan! Fucking Jesus!”

Ryan snaps to attention, gasping sharp and hard when he sees he’s drifted over the double yellow line, just enough there’s the blare of a horn from the oncoming lane, a sound in motion ramping up in volume like a freight train. “Oh, shit! Shit!”

Shane grabs at the stability handle above the door when Ryan corrects the drift, jerking the wheel to miss the oncoming car so abruptly Shane can feel the car tip and lurch on the still freshly slick pavement, and he pulls in a lungful of air in such a loud rush that Ryan’s eyes find his in the dashboard light, those same eyes, huge and luminous with horror that Shane is so accustomed to seeing in the dark places of the world. Glowing with the palpable fear of the unknown, spirits of the dead, demons from hell immured in the walls of an abandoned room, but this looks different from that.

The terror is focused, immediate, visceral, and Ryan’s arm comes out toward him, reaching—fingers extended and Shane can’t think of what to do except grab it, fold it tight in his own, flesh and blood origami, the way his instinct is always to protect Ryan when he’s on the edge.

An instinct that is, in this moment, as useless as a squirt gun full of holy water.

There’s the shriek of rubber on wet asphalt and a great hollow sound, a sharp heave of motion. There’s a sickening sense of spinning, a loud popping sound, the wail of metal tearing. Directionless cacophony, shattering, grinding, but the sound of their ratcheting breath somehow the loudest thing funneling back into Shane’s ears to merge with the ultrasound rush of his own thundering heartbeat.

Ryan’s hand in his, squeezing. His voice is so clear in the screaming mess of it, ragged with despair and fear: “I love you.”

Then there’s just noise, deep and resonant like cannon fire. Metal on metal. Impact, and then: nothing.

Chapter Text

Smoke fills the car after the impacts stop.

Everything's gone silent after the squeal of rubber on asphalt, after throwing his full weight into holding down the brake pedal and sliding on the rain-slick blacktop. After the shotgun blast of the airbags deploying, plunging the car’s cabin into darkness. After he couldn’t see where he was going, and even if he could, the car had spun with the impacts so much he didn't know anymore which way was forward and which was back. After the rise of layered car horns like the warning call of birds alerting the back of the flock to the coming danger, the bottom drops out.

Like pulling the plug. Like suddenly lifting the tonearm before the music’s over, a record scratch to silence. Like a rolling blackout turning off every appliance at once without the warning of a storm, leaving behind a stifling wall of summer heat.

Nothing.

And after a long beat, the sound picks back up like a movie coming off pause. Like switching the circuit breaker back on after blowing out the fuse, the symphony of usually tuned-out sound coming back like the rise of an orchestra waking from intermission. The world and the sound and the chaos outside this shell of metal and broken glass had never stopped at all.

Ryan’s ears are ringing.

How had he thought the sound had dropped out? The sound is everywhere. His panicked breath inside his own head is like a megaphone or a lightning rod, amplifying or attracting, sound layered over fear over everything. The mounting terror, hammering like a baseline alongside his heart with every second that ticks by motionless, that the next impact is coming. That beyond the curtain of airbags shrouded in a haze of smoke they’re coming like fate, careening through time and space and Los Angeles, the next car is on a collision course to hitting his.

Ryan’s still got the steering wheel banked hard left in both hands, knuckles white, still holding down the brake even though the car has stopped moving. His brain hasn’t gotten the message from whatever part of him knows they’re not in motion, hasn’t sent that piece of information tripping down his arms to his fingers to let go.

Then finally he does. Right hand drops to the shifter on autopilot to put the car into park even though there is no forward for it to go if it were to roll. Something grinds in the gears as he pushes with force, the track from drive to park a reprise of metal on metal, scraping, something broken he can’t see. His hands are shaking.

Shane’s hand isn’t there, in his.

Shane.

“Shane!”

Ryan swivels in his seat and Shane is slumped lifeless in his. His seatbelt is all that’s keeping him against the seatback.

There’s blood on the dashboard. It doesn’t register yet.

“Shane.” His voice drops like a stone, like the sinking of his heart.

Shane’s not moving. Outside he can hear cars still driving by them, the roar of engines passing by. Is Shane breathing?

“Shane… shit, Shane, are you okay?”

Ryan swipes a hand out to find Shane’s but he can’t reach it, he’d been trapped against the back of his seat when the seat belt locked on impact. Shane’s not moving. Ryan can’t hear sirens. Has anyone called 911? Someone needs to. Phone, he needs his phone—it’s not on the dashboard mount. The dashboard is split open horizontally like the gutting scar of an emergency incision, the spray of white-peach fabric of the airbag deflating like blood retreating back into the vein. Where is his phone?

“Shit.” His knee-jerk response is to check the floor, but when he looks there’s nothing but air bags and plastic panels of the car’s interior, trash from the backseat floor and god knows what else. It’s like a giant had taken the car and shaken it in one mighty palm before dropping it back down, and that’s how he feels—like he can’t tell up from down.

He leans to see if the phone is on Shane’s side, by his feet, but he can’t see—the seat belt is a sharp, hard line on his neck holding him down.

“Shane?” Ryan’s voice rises in panic, the way it does when he’s alone for his solo investigations. Walking the halls of some world’s most haunted something in Shane’s footsteps, trying to make it through the dark just minutes after Shane’s called for something he doesn’t believe in to end his life. Ryan’s terrified that years spent inviting death to take up residence inside his body has caught up with him all at once, from all sides, careened into them not in some decrepit basement in the wee hours of the night, but at sunset on a Tuesday in June before Ryan had a chance to say I love you.

He’d said it, but had Shane heard him?

What if it was already too late by the time he finally got the words out? It’s not that he hadn’t had opportunities; he had. He could have this morning, before they’d gotten in the car. Last night, practicing in bed how he’d say it, that wasn’t the first time he’d tried to figure out how to say what he felt. But it had been the first time the fear that he could already be too late had won over the mountain of other anxieties that have been eating at him for months. For years.

“Fuck!” He shoves a hand down between the center console and his seat, scrabbling for the seat belt release. It’s hard to find, hard to work with shaking fingers, harder when it’s pulled so tight he can’t bend or move to allow it any slack. “Shane, please… shit, Shane don’t leave me. Don’t you dare fucking leave me.”

Free from the seat belt, Ryan reaches across the center console for Shane. There’s a dark spray of red on the side curtain airbag behind Shane’s head like an abstract background in some postmodern painting.

That’s Shane’s blood. He’s bleeding from somewhere and leaning closer and looking now, he can see it trickling down the long plane of Shane’s lean face, catching up in the tail of his eyebrow, smeared.

There aren’t words then. Time drops again, or his stomach does. Maybe time speeds up, maybe he’s the one frozen, rooted to his spot, motionless if not for the shaking. Shane’s bleeding from a head wound. Shane’s unconscious. Is Shane still breathing?

“Shane!” Ryan’s voice is rough and thick, raw as it ratchets ever up and he grabs wildly in his direction, catches his bicep and shakes him. And then nothing.

And then crunched metal sounds squeal to his left and amber stormlight glittering into the doorway off the wet pavement, deceptively beautiful despite the danger of the storms it’s trailing behind.

There’s a small group of uniformed officers or emergency services personnel standing outside the door, and everything is happening at once. They’re talking, asking him questions, and he can’t think. Shrugs them off. Yes, he’s fine. Yes, he can move. He’s moved his neck, he’s looked back at them. No, nothing’s broken. No, he doesn’t think he can get out of the car, he can’t get out of the car without Shane.

“Shane, please—” he starts and stops as he’s guided out of the car by gentle hands, a two person effort, a wiry, muscular young woman reaching into the car to guide and support him out, while a man to her right reaches in a hand to shield Ryan’s head. All he absorbs of the moment is that he fights it, grabbing at anything he could hold on to so he could climb back in for Shane. Because in the middle of it, while he’s half-in and half-out of the vehicle, Ryan hears Shane’s voice behind a low groan, and every atom of his being needs to follow the sound and breath of him in case it’s the last.

“Shane! Oh, my god—oh my god. Shane. I—”

“Uh uh uh,” a young woman’s voice says, low and stern. She stops him from practically folding himself back into the shell of a car, urging him up, steadying him. “This way, come on. We’re getting your friend, don’t worry… just worry about you, we got to get both of you safe. Okay?”

An arm scoops around him, guides him to let them shoulder some of his weight as they bring him around the front of the vehicle and towards the side of the road and to safety.

Ryan steps out into the rain, craning his neck back to catch a glimpse of Shane through the obliterated windshield, fragments of clarity in intricate cracked patterns like looking through a kaleidoscope, the EMT’s flashlights shining a spotlight over Shane’s bloodwet face. Ryan can see his eyes fighting open between the crystalline spider web shapes, he can see his mouth move but can’t hear what he says. He wants to call out to him again but bites down on the impulse sitting on his tongue, like a rotten fruit or a capsule of cyanide, it feels that awful.

There’s blood in Ryan’s mouth. He can taste it. Like sucking on metal. It tastes like a sweaty handful of pennies smells.

There’s firefighters milling in with pneumatic clippers to cut the destroyed door, the jaws of life, to pry open the door like opening a sardine can in an old cartoon. Ryan stares, nauseous, at the surreal image of them cutting open his car that looks like a half-crushed Pepsi can.

How long had they sat there in the car before EMS arrived? He can’t remember hearing sirens, or even that whooping sound they make to make cars let them through. Ryan has no sense of time. With ringing ears and a swimming head, they sit him on the curb to look into his eyes with a penlight, have him follow the sweeping, back and forth movement of a finger while they observe. They’re checking for brain injury, he’s pretty sure, telltale signs of things he doesn’t understand, so he keeps as focused as he can while his gaze wants to wander so badly to where he can see the team carefully shearing open the mutilated passenger-side door and bending the metal as far outward as it will go with the hinge mechanism obliterated.

“Do you know what day it is?”

Ryan blinks a few times before he understands they’re asking him this question. “Ah, uh, it’s...Tuesday? June...fuck, what day is it." God forbid he remember the date he’d just finished putting on about six-hundred pages back at the insurance broker. “June 27th.”

“Okay, good. What’s your name?”

“Ryan."

“Alright Ryan, it looks like you really dodged a bullet here, but we’re gonna need to—”

“Is Shane okay?”

“Is that your friend, Shane? We can’t be sure yet, but he’s responsive to questions. Let’s worry about you for the moment here.”

“I’m fine,” he insists, twisting to the side to watch a few uniformed EMS workers helping Shane climb out of what’s left of Ryan’s Prius, careful to lever each long leg out through the twisted metal without catching an edge, then his arms over the shoulders of the team the same way they’d done with Ryan.

They mill around him while he walks with a pronounced limp toward the brightly-lit open back of an ambulance, its lights still flashing while an EMT is telling Ryan something about getting him cleared and something about stitches.

There’s blood on Shane’s face, on his hands. His pant leg is spotted with it on one side.

But he’s breathing. His eyes are open. He’s standing.

“Do you remember what happened?”

Ryan remembers; he remembers everything. It had happened so fast. Which is what they say about any kind of disaster: one moment everything is fine, and in less than the time it takes to blink, everything’s upended. You’re hurtling toward middle age at light speed, you’re driving in a misty summer rain, and then something happens—you veer left or right, you hydroplane, you get drunk and kiss your best friend outside your parents’ house, it’s all just enough to send everything spinning and the sound of shattering glass.

A windshield, a little glass pipe, dropped on the concrete, or just a broken heart—it all happens so fast, and after it, everything is different.

“The slick pavement—I tried to correct the wheel and panicked...”

The EMT nods with his little flashlight, the gestures to the sidewalk behind them. “I think you have some friends waiting to see you over here. You can check in with them but we’re going to need to get you to emergency services for that cut.”

“Cut?" Ryan cranes his head to see the crew that had been following in Lizzie’s SUV huddled in a group on the sidewalk outside the nearby strip-mall, faces tight with anxiety. He’d utterly forgotten they were even behind them, and a lightning bolt of guilt lances through him. They could’ve slammed right into him. Could’ve been victims of his negligence, could’ve been hurt just as bad, or worse—and he’d forgotten them completely.

The EMT hands Ryan a sterile cloth with the instructions to clean his face, so he presses the towel in both palms over his cheeks and pulls it back to find a wet red print, a negative of how he looks right now, like a death mask for posterity. He shows Ryan his blood spotted blue latex gloves and points to Ryan’s temple with two fingers. “Glass laceration here. Stitches, like I said. The scalp has a lot of capillaries, bleeds a lot. So that’s where most of this is coming from.”

Most of this is referencing the next thing the EMT gestures towards, Ryan’s once white button-down shirt with tiny palm trees is a sodden, garnet mess on one side. The more he focuses, the more he feels the pain, tastes the blood running from his nose and down the back of his throat from the impact with the airbag.

“And what about Shane?"

The EMT gives a patient smile, “You can see him in a minute, they’re checking his responses. You’ll both need to be cleared by the ER.”

Ryan cranes to the side again, tipping on his tailbone to see Shane getting a light shined in his eyes, a grimace on his face. His chest is tight watching, holding his breath. Rain falls on his face and he uses his death-mask cloth to wipe at his face again, and there’s no distinction between the rain and the tears he’s drying off.

After the EMT has closed up his cut with a tight, uncomfortable set of butterfly bandages, they allow him to stand. Police cars are blocking the northbound lanes of Cahuenga now, setting up a detour at the next cross street to shunt the flow of traffic away from the scene. It’s the first Ryan’s gotten a look at it, the first he’s even thought to. Aside from the mangled remains of his car, there’s a spun-out Dodge Stratus that had rear ended his Prius, and some kind of big Mazda SUV with its driver’s side backseat doors caved in; the driver is having lights shined in her eyes. The couple in the Dodge seem no worse for wear, except being rattled and upset.

Ryan returns his attention to the back of the ambulance and finds Shane no longer lit by its fluorescent halo, and his heart lurches into his throat. Had they loaded him onto a stretcher? Was in the back of it, coding out? Being hooked to tubes and monitors and machines; was he worse than they thought?

He turns in a circle so fast his head swims, the tip of his sneaker catching on the rise of the sidewalk as he ascends it toward the crew, lingering on the sidelines after clearly being admonished by EMS to stay back.

His mouth opens to greet them, to apologize, to thank them—something, he’s not even sure, but all that comes out is a small, creaky facsimile of his voice before they crowd him, five voices of overlapping alarm and fear and hands gentle on his shoulder, asking him what had happened, narrating what it all had looked like as they’d followed a few car lengths behind, asking what they all are supposed to do now, and of course, to ask after Shane.

I don’t know, he manages to tell them. I don’t know.

Ryan twists around to survey the scene, to try to find and catch the eye of the EMT that had cleaned him up to ask for an update, but instead the eyes he catches are Shane’s.

He’s just standing there on the street behind Ryan’s destroyed car, clutching an ice pack to the gauze-patched angular ridge of bone along his temple, one eye with a violet shadow blooming underneath like watercolors wicking up over paper. He gapes at Ryan, his hand coming out toward him to trace haltingly over the still-wet stain of blood creeping over his collar and shoulder, the smear of it down his neck when it had trickled over his face from his hairline.

“Oh my Jesus Christ,” he chokes, palming Ryan’s face as carefully as he’d handle antique glass. Something that might crumble just from touch alone.

“I’m okay,” he whimpers, but it’s only in this moment that he actually feels that may be true with Shane here, in front of him, breathing hard with fear glassy in his bright eyes and rain in his hair.

With his gentle hands on the precious artifact that is Ryan’s face, Shane leans down to kiss him.

In front of everyone. In front of their crew and gathered onlookers, the EMS team and the pissed off Mazda driver, in front of strangers and firefighters and God, he kisses him with a soft, open mouth and Ryan does nothing else but hold him in his arms and kiss him back with the same quaking fervor.

There’s that wash of silence, not terrifying and empty like the horror after the impact, but warm and welcoming and calm. Like turning your key in a lock and walking through your front door, like coming home after being away for so long.

This is how church is supposed to feel.

When he draws back, Ryan sputters on a sob, and hurls himself toward him, hurtling into his body in another impact but this one flesh and bone, wrapping his arms around his slim, long torso and burying his face in his ruined shirt, creating a new mask there of what he looks like crying.

There’s the weight of Shane’s head leaning on top of his, the slow expand-contract of his lungs under his cheek, the cinch of his arms coiling tight around him. There’s a tremor in his long limbs, a shudder in his breath, shoulders jerking convulsively when he stops fighting the tears and lets them fall in Ryan’s hair.

This is how he knows that this is worth risking anything to have, because without sacrifice, without risk, without throwing themselves out to the mercy of fortune, they would have nothing. Certainly not each other.

And here, in the descending night, in the misting rain catching amber streetlights and shivering on the asphalt at their feet, in the middle of a barricaded street, this is the far end of every decision they’ve collectively ever made. Every choice that brought them closer together until somehow, one day, they met, and after that, nothing was the same.

Just like it could never be the same after that first kiss. That first touch of skin.

And now, after this.

The rain turns heavier, no longer a slow drizzle but falling in earnest, clattering to the asphalt around them, jumping around their feet like little glass crickets. There’s bits of bumper and ripped tire, shards of broken rearview mirrors catching the streetlights and gleaming gold up into his eyes, too bright to catch a reflection, and nothing matters but this.

Not his destroyed Prius. Not whatever’s trending on Twitter. Not what they might lose if this all goes wrong. Not their corporate bank accounts or reputation or their sponsorship with Scentbird. Nothing matters. Only this.

Only this. Forever only this.

“I-I don’t know what happened…I’m so sorry…" Into Shane’s shirt, he repeats what he’d barely managed to get out before, and had, in those last seconds, been haunted by the bone-deep dread that Shane hadn’t heard—would never hear it, and his voice shivers on every word. “I love you.”

Shane’s shoulders jerk again, a wet sound erupting from him that’s as much as sob as it is a laugh while his arms cinch Ryan tight, clutching him to his chest and burying his wet face against his before bending in to kiss him with relief as tangible as the rain now bouncing off their shoulders.

“Dear Reddit, I drove into oncoming traffic when this guy tried to break up with me, am I the asshole?,” Shane whispers, his voice nasal and thick with tears. Joking, but not. “Jesus.”

“I didn’t! I didn’t mean to, I don’t know how it happened! It was, I don’t know. The road was wet, and, I couldn’t see—and, the wheel jerked, I must have overcorrected it, and then everything was out of control…"

“Overcorrected?” Shane intones, and Ryan waits for him to poke fun at what feels like far too bland a term for what they’d just experienced, but instead Shane’s wet, beard-rough cheek drags against his, and there’s another thick, wet sound and a sharp jag of new, violent trembling while his arms drag Ryan closer, flush to his chest. It’s a long, surreal beat before Ryan is sure it’s not that he’s crying—he’s laughing.

“Your mom was right,” Shane creaks through tears, his hands coming up on either side of Ryan’s face and pressing kisses to the rise of his bruised cheekbone. “You are a lot like your Dad.”

Shane is laughing. And crying. Ryan opens his mouth to object to that weird generalization, but Shane catches that protest in his mouth and kisses him again, there in the rain and in the street, in front of their crew watching like a tiny studio audience in a cluster under an overhang on the sidewalk.

“I love you,” Shane says, “You fucking idiot.”

It’s almost four in the morning by the time they make it back to Shane’s. They’re still in the same clothes, blood now dry and stiffening the fabric almost eight hours later, and exhausted doesn’t even begin to describe how Ryan feels.

It’s been a long day. Of course they’ve had longer when they’re filming, days that bridge into the next, where sleep is an afterthought, but all of that pales in comparison to this. And it’s not just one thing, it’s everything—it’s that the day had started in the wake of yesterday’s fight, it’s the way the tension throughout the day ratcheted up higher and higher like a roller coaster climbing for the drop. It’s the statements, it’s talking to the crew, it’s navigating what’s next, it’s the hospital—it’s everything piled up together, and the sum of all the parts adds up to so much more.

After the drive back from the meeting, after the accident, all the rest of the night is just a blur. Just an endless trudge through one more thing that had to be done before they could be allowed to leave and go home. Something else standing between them and a shower, fresh clothes, something to eat, and laying down, hopefully curled up together.

One of the nurses at the ER had told him that he won’t really start to hurt until tomorrow. He’d been cleared—they both had—nothing more than bumps and bruises thankfully, CT scans and whatever else all having come back clear. But, the nurse had said, tomorrow they’d wake up feeling like they’d been hit by a bus. Ryan’s not looking forward to that, but at the same time, this is how he’s been feeling every morning of his life for the past five months—how much worse can it be?

It wasn’t until about ten thirty that Ryan’s stomach loudly reminded him that they hadn’t even had dinner. By that time, they’d both been brought back from the waiting room, albeit one at a time, and were in separate rooms and at various points in the process of being seen and further evaluated. They’d filled the time by texting each other anytime a nurse, doctor or technician wasn’t in the room with them. Ryan had complained that he was starving and craving breakfast, wondering if it was possible to DoorDash scrambled eggs and pancakes to the emergency room, to which Shane had texted back that of course he was thinking of his stomach at a time like this.

Together, they decided they were picking up Denny’s on the way home, even if it was two in the afternoon the next day by the time they were released. Every now and then throughout the night, between other texts, Ryan would add in something else he wanted to add to his order of Moons Over My Hammy®️. Hashbrowns for sure. A side of pancakes.

Making their way inside Shane’s apartment now, Ryan shifts the bag of takeout into his other hand so he can hold the wall for balance as he toes out of his sneakers, a little unsteady on his feet as Shane locks the door behind them and drops his keys in the dish. The heavy sigh he lets out mirrors how Ryan feels. How he’s felt all night since they’d had to pull from that embrace by the side of the road and deal with all the things that needed to be dealt with before the day could be over.

Shane had stuck close by, fingers laced with his as he gave his statement and his license and registration to the police. Tightening his hold on his hand as the questions that were asked increasingly made Ryan feel sure he was to blame for what had happened, even though he knew that he was. From that point on until they were discharged from the hospital just after three it felt like they’d drifted further and further apart.

It had taken a little convincing for the EMTs to let Lizzie drive them to the hospital instead of taking them in the ambulance, but since they didn’t have any signs of serious injury, no obvious signs of neck trauma, it was their choice if they wanted to refuse the ambulance. They were both warned to be careful, not to move too abruptly until they were checked out, and in the end the EMTs called Los Angeles General to let them know they were on the way and to expect them, and they were allowed to go themselves.

Holding hands in the back of Lizzie’s SUV on the way to the emergency entrance was the last real opportunity they’d had to be close until they walked out of the hospital and into the backseat of their Uber at three fifteen the next morning.

Shane’s sigh now feels like a bookend to the night, a mark of exhaustion and relief here on the other end of everything that had stood between them clinging together in the rain and broken glass on the blacktop and this moment here and now. Ryan sets the bag of food down on the table near the door and wordlessly turns toward Shane, his arms slipping around his waist as he presses his face into his shoulder, and Shane sinks back to lean his weight into the front door and just closes his arms around him.

They just stand there, sock footed in the doorway of Shane’s apartment, clinging to each other the way they haven’t been able to for the past few months. Ryan’s got his fists buried in Shane’s shirt like he’s afraid he’s going to be torn from him, the way it felt like he was in the long stretches of strained silence between the bumbling moments when they’d come together trying to figure this out since March. But he’s not going anywhere now.

Shane’s chin rests on the top of Ryan’s head, bracketing him in, held folded in his arms. Shane’s large hands are warm on his back, one hand making a lazy circuit up and down like he means to soothe him, and it’s working. There’s the unmistakable press of Shane’s lips against the top of his head, and it’s Ryan’s turn to let out a heavy breath he’d been holding too long now that it feels safe to do so. Ryan had spent the night yearning to be home, but it wasn’t his room in the house he shared with his friends or his bed that he missed, it was this. The feeling of being at home in Shane’s arms.

Neither of them say anything for the longest time, until the growling of Ryan’s stomach breaks the silence between them.

“Doing okay, Bergooze?”

“Yeah.” Ryan’s voice is muffled against Shane’s body. He doesn’t want to move away now that they’ve found themselves back here again, coiled around each other, but he knows they have to. "I've gotta pee so fucking bad, and I'm so hungry."

“I don’t know if I’m more hungry or tired at this point.” Shane admits, his hand making another slow pass down the length of his back, lingering at the small of his back for a moment. “Okay, you go to the bathroom, I’ll grab drinks and stuff and we’ll eat in bed because I’m done moving today.”

“God, so am I.”

“Am I moving yet?” Shane asks a few seconds later when neither of them move to pull away.

“I don’t think so.”

“Shit.”

Ryan smiles against Shane’s chest and breathes him in. He can smell hospital antiseptic on his clothes mixed with gunpowder from the airbags, stale and dry, and faint hints of copper from the blood dried in speckles over the front of his shirt.

“I think I stink. I should shower.” He can’t imagine it, though—can’t visualize himself getting undressed and into the shower, drying off, getting into bed. There’s too many steps, and he’s starting to wonder if that nurse overestimated the time it’d take before they started feeling like they’d been hit by a bus, because he feels it starting to settle into his bones.

“It can wait. If we both stink, neither of us stink.”

“I guess I can’t argue with that.”

Reluctantly they part, Ryan to the bathroom and Shane to the kitchen, their brief detours on the way back to each other. In the bathroom, Ryan gets the first glimpse he’s had of himself in a while. He’d seen his reflection in the hospital a few hours ago when he’d used the bathroom there, saw his shirt blood stained and the bruises on his face starting to bloom. Now they’ve darkened and grown, like shadows lengthening as the sun sinks down behind the horizon. He peels his shirt off—finally—and takes a moment at the sink to wash his face with Shane’s cleanser and dry it before walking back out into the bedroom. He tosses his shirt on top of the clothes hamper, on top of the similarly balled up and bloodied shirt that Shane had been wearing today.

But Shane isn’t there.

The food is, though, sitting perched on the end of the bed still in the brown paper bag it had come in, the top still folded down and stapled shut, next to two bottles of water, condensation dripping down the plastic, still cold from the fridge. The balcony door is ajar, and beyond the glass sits Shane, hunched over in his small folding chair, bare back sloped and illuminated in the light from the apartment. There’s smoke swirling around him against the dark sky.

Ryan’s remembering the last time he saw him like this, alone on the balcony in the middle of the night, questioning or maybe regretting everything.

Tonight, Ryan can’t fault him for needing a cigarette after all of this. A nice smoke certainly would knock some of the edges off.

But some of them would remain. The sharper edges. The ones that catch your flesh when you try to slip by them, that bite in like jagged metal.

He’s been carted back and forth between machines and doctors and had twelve stitches in the slice on his head, so he hadn’t had a chance to think more than glancingly about the fact that Shane had tried to end things in the car, and that Ryan had nearly killed them both.

Not in an on-purpose kind of way, but certainly it’s not been his best reaction to being broken up with.

Now here they are back at Shane’s with their bag of Denny’s takeout like none of that ever happened, and while Ryan would love to just forget it forever, he’s never been the type to let a sleeping dog lie.

“Penny for your thoughts?” he says through the gap in the sliding glass door, and Shane looks back over his shoulder, letting out a slow lungful of smoke in a stream toward the ground, holding a cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, watching the cherry burn red near his palm.

“I feel like I should negotiate a higher rate for my thoughts, with inflation and everything,” is what he says, but his face didn’t get the memo that they were doing comedy bits here on the balcony at three AM with their food getting cold, and no amount of thoughts are worth cold hash browns when you’ve been in the ER for seven hours.

“That YouTube money has gone to your head,” Ryan says, opening the door wider and dragging out the other folding chair that’s leaned against the wall and standing it up in the space toward the railing before reaching for their Denny’s bag and tearing it open.

“YouTube money,” Shane chuckles, taking another cigarette drag while Ryan levels a thin-lipped look of disapproval in his direction. It must land somewhere between his aching ribs, because he turns and leaves it resting in his makeshift ashtray, picking his battles. “Just been a hell of a night, man.”

“It has,” Ryan agrees, opening a plastic clamshell that contains his breakfast sandwich, and takes a bite that would choke a dinosaur in the gold light coming through the door. Enough to eat by, but barely enough to read Shane’s expression as he casts it out into the dark, watching where the glow of blue along the skyline hints at the coming sunrise.

“Do you, really..." Shane asks suddenly, and Ryan stops chewing to hear the rest. “You didn’t just tell me you love me because I wanted to break it off, did you?”

Ryan swallows his mouthful of eggs and bread. “Does that sound like something I would do?"

“No,” Shane is quick to say, bringing his arms up around himself, hugging his bare arms despite the lingering warmth from the day. It’s rarely below 70 this time of year at night, but it’s at least in the 80s tonight. “No, I just...if that’s what you thought I wanted to hear and...”

“Is it what you wanted to hear?”

“Yes and no...” Shane shrugs, eyes on the sky. His pancakes are getting cold but he makes no move to pick them up and take a bite. Ryan feels like an asshole for continuing to eat, but his stomach is insistent. He chews and swallows, giving himself some time to think.

“Well,” Ryan says. “Even if it’s not what you wanted to hear, it’s what I meant. It’s what I’ve wanted to say for a lot fucking longer than March. I didn’t mean to swerve into oncoming traffic over it—-”

“Okay." Shane says softly, and it sounds peculiarly final.

Ryan doesn’t take another bite. “Okay?"

“Yeah,” Shane says, leaning down to gather up a container and peek inside, digging for a plastic fork in the bag and shoveling a chunk of hash browns in his mouth before poking around in the bag again. “Did they give us ketchup?”

“So you’re just dropping your beef?"

Around his mouthful of potato, Shane laughs, swaying forward in his chair. The kind of laugh that Ryan can imagine the expression on his face perfectly, even if he can barely see it. The crescent shape of his eyes, the upturned edges of his mouth. “What?”

“Your beef. You know, that I just go with the flow and—that I didn’t go after any of this with you so that must mean I didn’t want it and just—-you’re just dropping it? You were going to break up with me and now because I almost killed you, it’s fine?”

“Well, you did buy me pancakes."

“Well that makes up for everything."

“Dropping your beef sounds like some new internet slang to say you lost your mind."

Ryan chokes on a sudden laugh, clapping a hand over his mouth to catch any food that might fly out, offering an example that springs to mind. “I dropped my beef I was so mad!”

“Just out here dropping our collective beef in the comments,” Shane wheezes.

“This guy has fully dropped his beef.”

“Dude dropped his beef and drove into oncoming traffic."

“Come on now."

“Yes,” Shane chuckles. “We could’ve died tonight and I guess that just has a way of forcing some perspective on things that shouldn’t matter. So I guess, yes, I am dropping my beef, Ryan. I had a hangup on how quickly you accepted that everyone would just know, and...it really fucking bothered me in that moment, that...everyone would know, like, everyone except me. Only I would still feel in the dark about...what all this has been and what it means and you’d just, you know. Go with it even if it’s not what you really wanted out of this. And all that judgment and betrayal that felt like would be perceived along with it.”

“Betrayal?”

“I don’t know,” Shane sighs, forking up potato shreds, having forgotten his search for ketchup. “I felt like...people would feel like we had been hiding something, maybe for a long time...misrepresenting ourselves...jeopardizing our studio, our employees..."

“You sound like me. Catastrophizing.”

“Maybe you’ve rubbed off on me."

Ryan raises his eyebrows suggestively and Shane coughs, reaching down for his water bottle and twisting off the plastic cap with a crack.

“Just ended up talking myself out of everything. Like, you ever get so frustrated at something..." Shane trails off.

Ryan finishes his sandwich and closes the plastic up, reaching down to swap it for another. “You don’t even have to finish that sentence: yes. At all of this, continuously. Every day, for months."

“Yeah.”

“Years,” Ryan continues, opening the container containing blueberry pancakes and unending the plastic condiment portion cup full of syrup over them.

Shane is still poking at his hashbrown. “Years, huh?"

“I think people are mostly happy about it. About...us, I mean."

“I’ve tried not to look." Shane says, before adding. “Are they?”

“They are, I think.”

“And what about you?”

Ryan stabs a chunk of pancake and gestures with it, flapping at the end of his plastic fork like a syrup soaked battle flag. “I’m eating Denny’s on a balcony under the stars with the only person I ever really want to be with,” he deposits the pancake into his mouth and chews. “Why wouldn’t I be thrilled?”

“Well there’s the matter of your mangled car,” Shane begins, but there’s a smile in his voice a mile wide.

“Hush,” Ryan warns.

“And our indiscretion on the beach all over social media.”

“Shane.”

“Your car insurance is probably going to skyrocket.”

“I’m going to launch this pancake at your dumb face."

Shane laughs again. “You’d throw pancakes at a man who’s dropped his beef? This beefless man?”

“I’ll drop your beef."

“Promise?”

“You asked me what I want.”

Shane quiets immediately. No longer eating, just staring down at the remains of crispy potato shreds at the bottom of his container. “In the conference room?”

“I answered you wrong. My brain was fixated on sex, I couldn’t think of the real answer,” Ryan clasps his hands together hard, the knuckles on one side skinned up by the blast of the airbags. “The answer is that you are what I want. You. Because I love you. I’m in love with you.”

Shane presses his lips together in the dark. Like he can't quite believe it. “How long have you known that?”

“Long enough to know how it feels to ignore it. Because of how much it complicates everything around us. This all fell into my lap and it felt like I'd be fucking crazy not to take it. But it never occurred to me you’d feel like me going along with things meant I didn’t really want them. As though this could somehow be the one single thing I’m easy going about.”

“Well, that’s a fair point.”

“Thank you,” he says, leaning forward, seeking out Shane's eyes but he has them downcast. “I’m only easygoing about things I’m sure about. And you’re the only thing I’ve ever been completely sure about. Maybe ever, dude.”

“I think I’ve been in love with you from the moment I met you,” Shane blurts to his pile of hashbrowns, so quietly Ryan barely hears it, but at the same time it’s so loud it’s echoing toward the mountains. He swallows tightly, seeming frozen there, afraid to look up.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

Shane shrugs, eyes still down. “Never seemed like a good time...by the time I figured it out, it felt like it was too late. We were...”

Ryan takes a bite of pancake before shifting the takeout container to close it up and place it back in the pile of takeout refuse, standing up and gesturing to Shane to do the same, moving around boxes and balancing forks against them on the little table before he’s up and Ryan is in his arms, his ear pressed to the plane of his chest, seeking out the hidden rhythm of his beloved heart.

“It’s not going to be perfect,” Ryan says. “You’re going to want to strangle me sometimes."

“Nothing new there.” Shane’s fingers land in his hair, raking it back gently. The casual freedom to touch and be touched they’ve never been afforded—the thing that was the hardest to dial back after that weekend together and then having found themselves in their office, pretending nothing had changed except the most fundamental foundations of their entire relationship.

The rainstorm has passed, leaving the city around them rain slick and clean again, everything washed away and new, gleaming diamond-bright in the scant moonlight from a quarter moon close to setting in the northern sky.

“I really could’ve killed us,” Ryan says again, and Shane’s hands settle on his back. “You didn’t respond when I called for you at first. Scared the fucking shit out of me."

“I know, but you didn’t,” Shane whispers into his hair. “And now we’re here."

So they are. Here on Shane’s balcony in the warm dark of each other’s arms. To passersby in the street below, if they had been observed, they wouldn’t look like anything but ordinary. Two lovers having early breakfast, waiting for the sunrise. For a new beginning. Another day to try again.

Shane’s head is craned back, staring up into the dark where the clouds have cleared off—just the dim sparkle of the few stars that make it through the light pollution of Los Angeles.

“Now we’re here,” Shane says again.

Ryan listens to his heart.

“Did you know,” Shane gestures, lifting one arm to point out into the dark, and this is just a way of changing the subject—to shift Ryan’s thoughts away from their nearly dying tonight because he’d lost control in a crucial moment and ended this all before it could even really begin. Shane has always been great at this—steering Ryan away from the edge. “That star, that super blinky boy right there, they say it’s probably already gone?”

And Ryan sighs. He can’t help but fall for this shit every time. “How do they know that?”

“Uncharacteristic patterns, mostly. Weird changes in brightness it’s never shown before. They think it went supernova maybe a hundred years ago and the fluctuating patterns that led up to that are only now reaching us here. Where it actually is, that star is already dead and gone. But we can still see it, because all we see is the light. Looking up in the sky, you’re looking into the past.”

“Well that sounds awful.”

“It’s just the way light travels. It’s kind of poetic, if you think about it. The future that’s out there, just waiting to catch up."

“Feels ominous to me. When things have already happened and you don’t know it yet." But, he supposes, that’s how they’ve ended up here, now. Because of things that happened long ago, the far end of now. Like seeds planted, it’s taken this long for it to all catch up, like all that light they can’t yet see. Stars that are already gone, love that’s wormed its way in and taken root, growing underground until it breaches the surface and takes over a life like a weed in a garden bed.

Stars that are already gone. The untimely demise of things we take for granted will always be there.

“Well, it’s very far, Ryan. It won’t have much effect on us here, just that one day it’ll get very bright and then it’ll be gone. No more Betelgeuse in constellations.”

“You better not say that twice more or Michael Keaton will show up in your bedroom.”

Shane chuckles. “I’ll allow it. Batman Michael Keaton though, not pretentious bullshit Birdman Michael Keaton."

“Are you saying you would bang Michael Keaton?”

“Is that what I’m saying?" Shane thumps him on the back. “You’re ruining my funny little star thing, shut up.”

“So, the last few months. That’s just been the light catching up with us?”

“Yeah,” Shane says. “You know, you look up into the sky, and you could be anywhere. Any time. It’s the same sky so many have stood under and seen the exact same stars, for millennia but one day, all at once, one of them’s gone. Napoleon and Plato and Cleopatra and Tycho Brahe, and I dunno. Andy Warhol. They all looked up and saw these same stars.”

“And now us."

“Yeah,” Shane says, letting go just long enough to bend down, pluck up his cigarette still waiting in the ashtray, and crush it out. “And now us."

And maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s what he means. To stand under the same stars as everyone that has come before. It’s like Shane’s always saying in famous haunted places where they find themselves alone: it’s a privilege.

“So you almost killed us,” Shane says. “Big deal. It’s not like it took almost dying for me to pull my head out of my ass and drop my beef.”

And Ryan explodes with laughter, head dropping back on his shoulders, his already sore body shaking with the release of it, mouth open around a string of high, soaring laughter that’s far too loud for the hour, but that’s on brand for the two of them, to end up here in the middle of the night—late enough to call early—in the dark, where they belong: quaking with mirth in each other’s arms. It’s a new beginning built off everything that came before, all their failures to launch, all their late nights spent, every painful minute of the last several months finding their way here, together, before everything went up like a firework. Before their shining light went dark, winking out of the sky like a dead star.

They’re so small, everything is so small, standing under the same stars as giants of history and everyone else, just trying to make their way forward with the sky between them cleared now, dissolved to nothing, like the smoke from an old war.

Far in the east, the horizon glows blue where the sun is inching up. It’s going to be another scorcher, another hot June day, and another warm starry night will follow, and Ryan will be here. Where he belongs, immersed in the joyful silence of the mundane and extraordinary, for however long he’s allowed.

Because on a long enough timeline, the only constant is change. Either gradual or all at once, wind erosion or a supernova, but one day the mountains will become sand, the oceans will rise. They will grow old. For however many sunrises life will afford them, peeking over the horizon to find them curled together in bed like a pair of cats.

Everything else is just a question for the future. Just waiting for the light to catch up.