Piece of Cake | Ashton Irwin [au]

Seventeen

I updated a lot faster than I said I would. Oops. 

Ruth’s POV

I think I just made the worst mistake ever. It’s like my curiosity got the best of me and I just opened Pandora’s box but instead of letting out demons into the world, I’ve done something much worse; I’ve allowed Ashton to talk my ear off about his high school life. It sounded like a good idea in my head to ask him about it, but as I watch him smirk like a child who is ready to show off his new Pokémon cards, I now know that I was gravely wrong.

Maybe it won’t be so bad though. Maybe it’ll actually be interesting to hear what he was like in high school.

“So where should I start?” Ashton asks, rubbing his hands together anxiously. Only he would be excited to talk to me about himself. Scratch that. He would be excited to talk about himself regardless.

I sit crisscrossed on the washing machine and rest my hands in my lap. “Well, you moved here the year that I graduated, right?” He nods. “Why not start there?” Even though I’m not mentally prepared to hear him ramble on about himself, I am still curious to know what Ashton was like as a teenager. Maybe he was less cocky and more of a normal, modest human being.

“Okay. Well, since I was new I was a little shy-”

I snort loudly, interrupting him in the process. “You? Shy?” I ask incredulously. “That’s pretty hard to believe.”

“Thank you for interrupting me, Ruth,” he says sarcastically, emphasizing each syllable in every word. “Now like I said, I was shy, but that didn’t last for long. Mikey was in my first period class and we were coincidentally wearing the same Green Day t-shirt.

“Aw, how cute,” I tease.

“I know,” he gloats. “It was friendship at first sight. We started talking and whatnot and my shy streak completely disappeared from existence.”

“So nothing has changed since then?” I rhetorically ask, earning a smile and roll of his eyes from him. ‘So what were you like in school? Were you a study bug like me? Were you in any extracurricular activities?”

He lets out a deep chuckle. “I don’t think anyone was a “study bug” like you. But I was in band.”

“The rock kind or marching?”

“The marching kind,” he answers with a grin. “I was in the drumline.”

“What did you play?”  

He shrugs. “A little bit of everything; bass, cymbals, snare, quads, but mostly snare.”

My eyebrows rise. “I didn’t picture you as a band geek,” I say, flicking my gaze to his arms. That explains why his biceps are so large…I just figured it was because he has to knead dough and possibly carry heavy bags of flour at work, but drumline makes a lot more sense.

“You also didn’t picture me as a baker, but I seem to be full of surprises to you,” he says, smiling widely because he knows he’s making a point about my judgment towards him. “I wasn’t in it for long though. I had to drop out mid-semester senior year.”

“Why?”

“I was failing English and Physics. It sucked because I loved band, but I got over it.”

“You couldn’t have gotten a tutor or anything?”

He shakes his head, causing a few curls to fall in his face. “The teachers could barely help me understand the material; a tutor wouldn’t have done me any good.”