should've said something | shyland

Chapter Eleven

Do you want me to pick you up anything?

4:32 pm.

Ryland glanced over at his phone, his mouth curling into an immediate smile when he saw the name lighting up his screen. "Sorry, my husband's texting me." He reached for the device and typed a quick response as the camera rolled. Setting the device back beside him, he grinned up at the lens. "It's crazy to think how we can go from being so—so distraught and lost—to having everything we need. Clearly, as I'm sure you know by now, I wasn't the happiest kid was. Evidentially, Shane was. He was always happy and smiling no matter what he went through. Believe it or not, he kept me on my own feet."

"Anyway, I'm sure I won't have the house to myself for much longer, so skipping ahead about a year and a half, Shane was still living with us, he was seventeen and I was sixteen, and he was going on multiple dates a week and staying out late and going to parties and drinking and hooking up with people he would probably never see again, you know, things most teenagers do, but it wasn't really my scene, so I hung back a lot of the time. He would come home from these parties and he would be slightly tipsy, and he would smile at me the way I wished he did when he was sober. And every Saturday night, when I was tucking him into bed as if he were a child, he would tell me about the girls he wanted to try to set me up with, and I would laugh and roll my eyes and tell him to go to sleep, and then I would leave the room and break down crying."

"And—I think he started to grow suspicious after a while, because I agreed to go out with these girls because I wanted to be polite, but every time I came home to find Shane's hope-filled eyes waiting in the family room to hear about my date, I couldn't but tell him how much I didn't want to do it again. And—the problem wasn't even that I was into guys. I mean, that was part of the problem, but the first thing to cross my mind whenever I went on a date was that they weren't Shane, which—it sucks, you know? Because, you take someone on a date you don't want to be on, and you let them get attached to you, and then you're like, 'oh, this was fun and everything, but I'm in love with my best friend who happens to be a guy and I only went out with you to put a smile on his face. Of course, I didn't actually say that."

"But, he knew I wasn't trying. I could tell he was disappointed, and after a while, he stopped asking me how the dates were. Which, actually made me happier, because I didn't have to courage to tell him that the thing missing from all the dates I had been on over the course of seven months or so—was him."

—

It was a Saturday night.

As every other, Ryland was asleep when Shane stumbled into his room at a quarter past two. Shane refused to sleep in his own room on the nights his mind was consumed by illegal liquids, and although Ryland never understood why, he refrained from asking in fear that the auburn-headed boy would retreat back to his own bed and leave him lonely.

His eyes cracked open as Shane's presence loomed over him, the green-eyed boy focused on the reflection of the moon through the window as if it was his first time ever seeing it. Ryland swung his legs over the bed and reached over to turn on his bedside lamp, watching as the room was illuminated in a glow so bright, he had to shield his eyes. When he glanced up again, Shane was staring back at him as if he was trying to tell Ryland he loved him and couldn't find the words to do so, but Ryland had been heartbroken too many times to know that wasn't the case.

The front of Shane's shirt was stained with a mixture of vodka and vomit. His hair was sticking out in different directions, as though he had recently crawled out of bed with somebody, and by the way his pants were on backwards and inside out, Ryland guessed he had. Mentally pushing his heart to the pit of his stomach, he sighed and reached for the hem of Shane's shirt.