flirting with disaster

six

            Rye hadn't planned on calling Andy right away, honestly. If anything he was the type of boy who left you waiting beside your phone, anxiously awaiting a call that would never come. He wasn't a big fan of keeping in touch, or making small talk. The only time he ever opened up about what was on his mind was when he was high at Mikey's house, and even then, the words that came out of his half-baked brain didn't make much sense anyways.

The only reason he had a phone at all was because Mikey had cashed in on a buy-one-get-one deal. (He wasn't against phones, per say, despite not having much use for one. It was just an undeniable fact that a phone was way out of his budget. He couldn't even afford one of those plastic fake ones for little kids.)

But, now that we were being honest, Rye wasn't the sort of person to ask for people's numbers, either. Sure, he had plenty of numbers listed in his phone, accompanied by names that he didn't remember, or, even worse, ones like "Sugarboo" that made the whole situation even more confusing. The girls that he met at loud parties and the back of bars tended to be pushy, and the sort that took his phone without asking to first and entered their number, assuming that he would want to see them again. He didn't, and, most of the time, he never did.

There were occasional run-ins at places like the grocery store, in which the girls were either overtly awkward about the whole situation, or were angry, shooting unmasked glares and the occasional middle finger. Rye always, always managed to maintain a cool and calm exterior – and interior, for that point – because he simply did not care. Occasionally he did feel the need to shake some of the more persistent ones and tell them that he was not going to do anything that he didn't want to for their sake. That if he wanted their number, he would've said so. That what did they really expect from a boy who was late to everything, always, who threw away any potential that he might've had away like an empty wrapper, who felt more like an empty husk than a human being? Did they want him to call every night, pick them up for dates and buy them flowers? Did they want him to bake a cake and write "I'm sorry you thought I'm was a better person than I am" with frosting? You didn't find guy like that in the back of bars.

But he never deleted them, the numbers, because sometimes he did reply to a text or pick up when it rang, usually when he was drunk and antsy or avoiding the bar because his last visit ended him in the hospital and the bill earned him a beating that almost sent him right back in and he really needed something, anything, to get him out of his mind. It didn't hurt his reputation, either, to have a list of chick's names in his phone.

But now there was a name and a number in it that meant something to Rye, which was almost scary enough to toss it out the window, reputation be damned. But Ryan Beaumont wasn't afraid of anything, especially not a sequence of twelve numbers, so he didn't. But he wasn't planning to call it, he really wasn't.

If anything was to be blamed, it was the party. Rye didn't want to be here – Not that he ever did, but tonight he hated the whole scene a little more than usual. He was here only because he had to be, because where else would a guy like him be on a Saturday night? Rye attended parties almost as diligently as Andy attended his classes. Usually, it wasn't too bad. There was always something for Rye to get drunk or high off of – Sometimes both – And absolutely anything was preferable to spending a night at home with his father.

Tonight, though, although Rye was nursing a cup of lukewarm beer, his heart just wasn't in it. For one, it tasted like shit – Sure, it always did, but this sort was the particularly cheap kind, and the taste mattered a lot less when you were chugging it. Second, there was just something about visiting the twins that got Rye down. There was a piece of him that would always belong wherever they were – The side of him that could do better, that was perfectly fine with staying in on a weekend. The part of him that liked cooking and hugging his brothers. It was the part of him that felt ashamed to be here, that made him feel like the scum of humanity as the alcohol began to seep into his bloodstream. How hypocritical of him was it to want the best life for them while he continued to be the worst version of himself?