all those broken promises | shyland

Chapter Twenty

When Shane stepped through the open door of their English classroom seven minutes before the scheduled bell was supposed to ring, he was surprised to find Ryland already settled into his chair. He ran his forefinger along the strap of his backpack and awkwardly cleared his throat, making the blue-eyed boy turn around to face him. Ryland froze at the sight of his ex-boyfriend standing behind him and Shane wished he had stayed by his locker for a few minutes longer.

"Uh—hey." Ryland stuttered. "Do you have the film ready?"

Shane nodded. "Everything's ready."

"Awesome." Ryland offered him a small smile and Shane felt his heart do a flip into his stomach. He took a deep breath and clenched his hands as Ryland turned back to his phone. This had to work. He knew Ryland was still angry, and there was no doubt he would be angrier when he figured out what Shane had done, but he hoped his happiness would outweigh all of that. "Do you need me to do anything?"

"No, uh—I'll take care of everything. Actually, you can stay seated if you want to. I think you're going to like our presentation better if you have a front and center row view."

"What the hell did you do?"

Before he could answer the question, two more kids filed into the room and Shane sighed in relief. He knew Ryland would kill him if he found out what he was planning to do. As everyone else filed into the room, their teacher glanced around the room and smiled when she saw everybody was in their seats. Her eyes stopped on Shane and she gave a nod of approval as he smiled back.

"Which pair would like to go now?"

Shane's hand raised. "Ryland and I would love to."

"We—" Ryland's eyes widened. "Uh—"

"Oh, well, okay then. Ryland and Shane, please stand to present your film. Tell us a little of what the film is about before you show the class – what the idea is, how you came to the idea, how the writing process was between you two. The front of the room is yours when you're ready."

"Actually—" Shane stood. "I was wondering if I could—act out the film in front of the class? It is filmed if you need to see it—" He held up the disc in his hands. "But—I think it's important that the person who needs to hear this hear it from my mouth directly."

"It seems like you put a lot of thought into this, Mr. Dawson."

"Shane! What the hell—"

He nodded and headed toward the front of the room without saying anything to Ryland. After taking a breath and glancing up to see the look of anger plastered over his partner's face, he continued. "So, I talked Ryland into doing a horror film in the beginning because—conspiracy theories and horror films and that kind of stuff is what I like to do. And—I was so excited to do a horror film, I spent so much time researching and changing the script and up until last night, I was so excited to present that to you because it was creative and took so much time and was fun and frightening and—I loved it. But—talking about this is more important than letting you sit through seven minutes of that. I'm only creative because Ryland inspires me to want to be as creative as I possibly can. And—that was creative. But this is real life and this is my life and it's something everybody here has known about me since Freshman Year and I'm—I'm not proud of that person."

"And—If you want a description of the things I'm about to tell you, it's this—For so long, I only saw the world in black and white, and when Ryland came into my life, things finally started making sense in color. It's why I showed up for class ten minutes early today, it's why I stayed up all night last night thinking about what to say and how to say it and how to incorporate creativity and reality into the same thing, and I guess—this is me telling you how finding love made me creative."