Devil's Effect

Hard Conversations

Morning came, and Chester woke up with a smile on his face. For the first time in weeks - maybe months - he woke up feeling good, all the worries and cares of life in the background. He'd gotten up and had breakfast with Amir and Noah. It was breakfast tacos, which he was getting tired of, but they tasted good that morning. He ate two of them before heading to the bathroom to get cleaned up for the day. He put on a nice outfit - a red dress shirt, with a white collar and matching breast pocket. He found a nice pair of dark gray shorts, and gray socks with little red devils on them to match. Even his underwear was in line, red with a gray waistband.

By the time he sat down on his bed, his foot propped up on a pillow and his journal in his lap, he felt a thousand years away from the heartache that had plagued him over the last few weeks. The mounted television was on, but the sound was next to nothing as cartoons played across the screen, the faint sound of SpongeBob, Patrick, Sandy, and all their underwater friends lending an indescribable element of comfort as Chester wrote.

I still can't believe how things went yesterday. It's like it was a dream. A dream from when we were still in love. I guess we still are, to a point. I know I am. He says he is, too, but he's still leaving so I'm not sure what that means. Fuck. I really don't want to pick his motivation apart. I just don't. For the first time in a long time, he feels like the Mike Shinoda I love, the Mike Shinoda I fell IN love with. He just hasn't been the same person lately, but yesterday, he was my Sexy Boy. I've missed him so much. Long before we broke up, and he cheated, and I moved out, I missed him.

Chester stopped, his rainbow pen paused on the page of his leather bound journal. It was hard to think about all the ways Mike had changed over the last six months. How he'd gone from the sweet boyfriend Chester adored, to someone who lied and cheated. Someone who lashed out and said cruel things that hurt Chester's insides. It was the Mike he didn't want to have anything to do with, the Mike he'd walked out on, the Mike he'd broken up with. The Mike he'd cursed, the Mike he'd written in red about. It was the Mike he wanted to forget, and write off as an anomaly, not his real boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. He's my ex. He chose someone else.

The reality hit, and Chester sniffed in the tear that wanted to fall, and went back to writing, ready to discuss with his journal all things happy and carefree and fun instead of pondering everything that went wrong. We have things we want to do over the two weeks he's got left, he wrote, just as he heard the front door. His pen went silent, and then he dropped it altogether as he set it and the journal off to the side. He knew it would be Ryan, showing up on time, just like his text message earlier said he would.

Chester sat himself up a little straighter, the journal on the nightstand now as he watched the television instead of staring out the door like someone desperate for company. It was only a few seconds before he heard Ryan's voice out in the apartment as he greeted Noah and then Amir, and Chester smiled. He hadn't seen Ryan for a few days, and he was ready to have his friend sit with him, and talk about things. I'm going to tell him. Not details. I don't think I should...we've been too close with stuff like that. I'll tell him, but I'm not going into the horny details like I always have before. That's just for me and Mike now.

Ryan didn't waste time with small talk. He spent only seconds saying high to Amir and Noah, and then he was knocking on the doorframe of Chester's room, the door standing open. Chester was on the bed, looking better than he had in days, maybe weeks. He looked refreshed and at ease, like all the tension and sadness had been washed away somehow. He was sitting with his back against a pillow, his hands in his lap. Ryan smiled instantly when he saw the small stuffed alien he'd given Chester sitting next to him on the bed. "Hey, Chazzy," he called, "can I come in?"

Chester looked over, and the sight of Ryan made him grin. "Of course," he answered, waving his arm before patting the spot on the bed next to him. He watched as Ryan stepped in, shrugging off his black leather jacket, and laid it across the end of the bed before he sat down. Chester could tell he was taking his shoes off, even though he couldn't see what Ryan was doing. "It's good to see you," he said, once Ryan had twisted around, his legs coming up on the bed out in front of him. Like always, Ryan was head to toe in black, his muscle shirt showing off his tattoos, and Chester took a second to appreciate them. They were very different from his own colorful body art, but they fit Ryan Shuck perfectly.