Far Away Love ࿐ Ryden

6

hey everyone its rainy and gross and lorde is really good and here's another chapter. i might skip posting for a week bc i've got to focus finishing these two stories for a school project but if i don't post it won't be for long at all

6 -- [0204]

so hot that it makes me nervous, so large that it won't cool out, so big that it can't burn out

Ryan walks home with a dopey dumb smile on his face and he's two blocks away from his house when he trips over the curb and falls into the back end of a stop sign.

He curls around it, hugging it from behind, laughing so hard that he ends up sliding down it like some sort of deranged stripper and then he sits on the floor, literally curled over the stop sign, face pressed against it, laughing so hard that he's crying.

The sun sets fully as he sits like that, until the cool of the stop sign against his face and the fact that the sky had fully darkened up all came together and Ryan pulls himself up against the stop sign, pats it lovingly, and finishes the walk home.

Still with the dumb smile plastered to his face.

He sort of runs down his street to get home, not because he wants to get home, just because he wants to run. He sprints through the blue back darkness, feet pounding against the concrete, arms pumping by his sides, heartbeat in his throat, breath hot in his mouth, feeling like he's spread over the entire street because he's ran down it so fast until his house is close and his running tapers off into slower, heavy footsteps until he's just walking. Panting and walking.

He's flushed and sweaty opening the door to his house, and all the good feelings are sort of stripped away when he sees his mom standing in the entryway, arms crossed, looking relatively upset.

"Where have you been?" She demands in a high pitched, strained voice.

"I...I was hanging out with Patrick and then I went to the bookstore. What's wrong?" He asks, looking around and realizing that thank god his dad isn't home.

"What's wrong is that you're never home, Ryan! Not coming home at night, not being here in the mornings- what's going on? Why aren't you ever home?" Ryan feels like he can't reply because home used to be safe, home used to be fine, but now he'd so much rather be out being jealous with Patrick or being gay with Brendon or just being somewhere else even though there are so many more dangers outside.

"I'm just..." His mom stares at him, desperate, tears forming in her tired eyes. "I don't know. I'll be home more." He says as though that fixes anything and when he's trying to walk past his mom, she smacks him.

Well, okay.

Ryan raises a hand to his hot cheek, red with the mark of her hand, and stares in disbelief.

"You're horrible!" His mom sobs, holding the hand that just slapped her son up to her mouth. "You don't even care about how I feel! How your father feels!" The thing is, Ryan doesn't. He turns away with his face stinging, leaving his mother alone downstairs, the smile from only a few minutes earlier long gone.

--

Ryan is surprised when he sees Patrick standing outside the sign for the church on Monday morning. It's cold and Ryan can see his breath in the frozen air, and he can see Patrick's breath too. Lots of it. Because Patrick is talking to someone.

Ryan hears Pete before he sees him, and really, Ryan doesn't hate his voice. It's warm, it's energetic, and he's got bad grammar and he is sort of dumb but Patrick sounds so happy talking to him and Ryan hates slinking up behind them to third wheel in the activity of waiting for him.