#this is what I did with my English degree | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

ghostradiodylan · 1 year ago

Text

Dylan was the one with the big pathetic crush, right? Ryan was supposed to be cool about this. He was saying all the cool lines. So why didn’t he feel cool? His face felt physically warm and it wasn’t because of his proximity to the campfire.

Playlist Needle Drop: Kiss The Boy - Keiynan

Companion piece to Truth or Dare: Dylan's Version.

Both are excerpts from the second chapter of my longer story Particles & Waves.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Ryan had said he wasn’t coming to this party.

He’d been pretty adamant about it too, so much so that a couple of the girls had gasped at the intensity of his refusal. Ryan had fought with himself all afternoon. He wasn’t the most flexible person in the world when it came to plans changing and the upheaval of what should have been their final day at camp had been harder on him than on the others. He really couldn’t understand how easily they all seemed to take everything in stride. But even keeping his own particular sensitivities in mind, Ryan felt things had objectively been extremely weird.

Chris Hackett was being cagey as fuck, and that was so unlike him that Ryan worried he might be having a psychotic break. Then their van had caught fire out of fucking nowhere and now they were stuck spending the night at the empty camp. It would have been a long drive to make multiple times if they’d split up and taken shifts in Chris’s car, but didn’t he know anyone else nearby with a car? The whole Hackett family lived just through the woods and Ryan knew Kaylee and Caleb had their own wheels. Hell, they had their own scrapyard full of car parts, surely together they could have fixed the van in a matter of hours if they hadn’t all gone MIA at the same time. It hadn’t made sense to Ryan, but no one else had seemed overly concerned.

And now Ryan had been left in charge, but nobody particularly wanted to listen to him. And, really, why would they? He was being a total buzzkill and he knew it. Still, something was very, very wrong here and it stuck in Ryan like a splinter. His impulse was to find a quiet corner of the lodge, curl up into the smallest possible ball of humanity he could become, put in his earbuds, and check out of life until it had time to think about its actions and decided to start making sense again. But Dylan’s face had fallen when Ryan had expressed his highly reasonable concerns and the foundation of Ryan’s reserve began to crack as soon as that cheeky grin had slipped, he could feel it as it happened.

What was it about Dylan? He could be so fucking annoying. He tried to make everything into a joke or a bit and he had no respect for boundaries, especially not for Ryan’s. And every time Ryan let Dylan get away with violating those boundaries, he knew he was just reinforcing his bad behavior, inviting him to be even worse the next time. But when Ryan was honest with himself, he had to grapple with the fact that easily the most annoying thing about Dylan was how much he liked him.

Dylan had come after him when he stormed off, because of course he had. Of course he would ruin the sanctity of Ryan’s attempt at a dramatic exit. And Ryan pretended not to be pleased to see him. He did a lot of that, he wasn’t even sure why. They’d gone into the office to charge their phones and Dylan kept making stupid jokes and asking Ryan for his phone number and Ryan kept not giving it to him, even though he definitely wanted him to have it. He would give it to him eventually, he knew, he just wasn’t in the mood right now. Maybe tomorrow, though, on the ride home. Even once Dylan’s phone was charged, Ryan suspected his offer of shared earbuds would be accepted if he extended it again—Dylan might not have cared about Bizarre Yet Bonafide, but he definitely cared about getting to sit close enough to Ryan for the earbuds to reach him. He’d just start making a contact entry for Dylan in his phone and silently pass it over to him while they rode in the van and he’d text him with a noncommittal “hey” so he had his number. He knew Dylan would take it from there and Ryan knew that he would let him.

No big deal, he thought, I’m definitely not falling in love with him. Not even a little bit.

The truth was, Ryan had begun to feel the ground tilting beneath him, tipping him inexorably in Dylan’s direction. He knew that eventually the incline would be steep enough that he could no longer resist, he’d have no choice but to topple into the other boy and accept the fact that he was falling for him. But, for now, Ryan’s instinct was to stand his ground. For a while, he’d thought maybe he could wait it out and actually get away from camp before that happened, avoid a messy entanglement that surely wouldn’t be worth it in the end, but time was no longer on his side. He’d reached the tipping point and he couldn’t get away. He wasn’t playing hard-to-get, not intentionally, he was just cautious. Ryan didn’t trust people easily and though Dylan was steadily chipping away at his defenses, his natural response to someone frequently choosing to be near him was to question their motives.

In the meantime, Ryan would give Dylan what he wanted with regard to the party, he’d known that he would as soon as he’d said that he wouldn’t. It was just the principle of the thing, someone had to act like they gave a shit around here. He tried not to interrogate the fact that it seemed more important to him at the moment not to disappoint Dylan than it did not to disappoint Chris Hackett, but he was also mad at Chris for dipping out on him, on all of them, so that was a factor too.

Dylan had made Ryan into a liar, and Ryan sat at the fire pit hoping to sand the edges off his anxiety with some disgustingly unrefrigerated beer. He tried to tell himself he was doing it to keep an eye on everyone. It was a reasonable enough cover that he could tell anyone who asked, though no one did. After all, he could head off trouble much easier if he stuck with the crowd than he could from his intended position of isolation inside the lodge. But Dylan kept catching his eye with this dumb little self-satisfied smile on his face, like he was just so pleased that Ryan had come around to his scheming once again, and Ryan’s traitorous heart had leapt in his chest every time he did.

And then Emma had sniped Abi’s turn out from under her and fixed him in her sights.

“Ryan,” she had said, “truth or dare?”

Ryan had a general idea of what was coming. Kaitlyn had already planted the seed. This game was going to be all about forcing everyone’s naked feelings out into the open so they could be poked and prodded and judged by the crowd. Every truth would be a confession and every dare a kiss. Neither felt particularly safe to Ryan, but he went for actions over words and piled on the bravado, hoping he could fake confidence well enough to convince even himself that he wasn’t nervous or uncomfortable about this at all.

“Dare,” he said, “gimme what you got.”

She’d said he had a choice and he’d asked if she could do that. He wasn’t expecting to have to make another choice beyond choosing the dare and now he couldn’t predict what it would be. He felt like the whole camp knew Dylan was into him, who else would she involve?

“I dare you to kiss either Kaitlyn… or Dylan.”

Kaitlyn? Was Kaitlyn interested in him too? Did Emma think Ryan was interested in Kaitlyn? She might have flirted with him a little and he’d probably flirted back just a bit, but he hadn’t thought it was anything serious. This added wrinkle tripped him up momentarily, not because he wasn’t sure who to choose, but because he wasn’t sure how to go about it. He did like Kaitlyn, and were he not increasingly certain that his trajectory was set with Dylan at its endpoint, he might have welcomed the opportunity to kiss her. Certainly, if he’d been dared to kiss her outright without having the option to kiss Dylan instead, he would have done so and probably been perfectly happy about it. It was just a kiss, after all, not a commitment.

But in this scenario, kissing Kaitlyn meant not kissing Dylan. And the more Ryan thought about kissing Dylan, the more he thought that not doing so would be a wholly unacceptable choice for him to make. Ryan hadn’t told anyone at camp he was bi because it was none of their business, but the dare had seemed, in a way, calculated to ferret out the truth of his sexuality. He didn’t think he owed his truth to anyone, with the possible exception of Dylan, but it was the last night of camp and no one had been anything but supportive of Dylan being conspicuously gay for two solid months—any gripes his fellow counselors had about Dylan had nothing to do with his being gay and everything to do with his being Dylan. Anyway, Ryan might not owe anyone anything, but he didn’t have anything to hide either.

“Wow… I mean… I guess ‘both’ is off the table?”

Ryan thought better of this statement as soon as it was too late to take it back. He’d meant to indicate that anyone would be lucky to get to kiss either of his options, but he’d made himself sound a little too neutral. Plus, what if Emma called his bluff and told him to kiss them both? He’d have to do it and he wasn’t sure how any of them would feel about that, even him. Would his attempt at appeasement just end up upsetting both Kaitlyn and Dylan? It wouldn’t be unheard of for his good intentions to blow up on him in such a manner. Luckily for Ryan, Emma wanted him to choose, so choose he did.

“Dylan,” he said, “let’s go.”

Dylan rose and walked his way and Ryan hoped his own face didn’t reflect all the undignified fluttering his heart was doing. Dylan was the one with the big pathetic crush, right? Ryan was supposed to be cool about this. He was saying all the cool lines. So why didn’t he feel cool? His face felt physically warm and it wasn’t because of his proximity to the campfire. And then Dylan was leaning toward him and pressing his lips to Ryan’s so gently and it was so good and so right and then, abruptly, it was over.

The kiss had been too short and too restrained, barely more than a peck really. The kind of kiss you get when you’re playing spin the bottle in middle school. But the sparks had come from the closeness and the chemistry and they’d been undeniable. Dylan had so clearly wanted it, and yet he’d been the one who pulled away, as if he’d been afraid of taking too many liberties. This was the guy who’d been joking about boners and sex dungeons all night? Ryan had kind of expected something a little sexier, maybe borderline raunchy even, but he’d been so… respectful. It was equal parts disappointing and endearing. And Ryan’s lips, all of him really, had chased after Dylan, the movement had been involuntary. As Dylan retreated, Ryan had fought the urge to grab him by his shirt collar, to pull him back in for a second attempt. But he couldn’t let himself do it. The reaction from the onlookers if he had, well, Ryan was sure it would be enough for him to die of embarrassment on the spot. They didn’t deserve the free show anyway. Not here, he’d thought, and not now, but definitely later.

“Always happy to please,” Ryan had said, as if he had even done anything besides sit there and be stunned. God, he felt like such a tool sometimes.

But, to be fair, Dylan did look pleased. They had smiled at each other like two smitten idiots because, as Ryan was finally allowing himself to admit, that’s exactly what they were. Both of them. For the brief remainder of the messy game, Dylan kept giving him these smoldering half-lidded glances and Ryan kept thinking, later, we’ll come back to this later. Maybe in the lodge, or the broken-into cabin, or right here in one of these tents, they were going to get away from everyone else and give that kiss another try. Another several tries. Later. Later. Later.

And then all hell had broken loose and there was no later. And now there never would be.

Nick was bitten and became increasingly sick and scary. Then Dylan was bitten and everything turned to blood and chainsaws and ‘bears’ and Ryan hadn’t been sure if anything that happened before that counted anymore. He’d thought maybe the connection between them had been severed along with Dylan’s hand.

Still, Ryan was glad they’d shared that moment by the campfire. It was the last bit of blissfully ignorant normalcy they’d get to enjoy. As much as he’d wished their first and only kiss had gone differently, wished that everything that night had gone differently, he hoped it had given an affirmative answer to the question Dylan seemed to ask with his whole being any time they were within ten feet of each other.

Ryan would have liked to cut the memory of the kiss free of the rest of the timeline, paste it into a different volume of his mental scrapbook, and keep it from being tainted by everything that came after. But memory just didn’t work that way, it wasn’t like the partitioned plate Ryan used at home to keep different foods from touching. The blackness spread, branching, through his memories like it had through Dylan’s arm. No matter how hard he tried to build walls between them in his mind, the bitter would always seep into the sweet. Ryan might return to the memory of Dylan’s lips on his when he found himself craving sweetness, but he’d always come away with his mouth tasting of blood.

#the quarry #ryan erzahler #dylan lenivy #rylan #radioheads #dylan x ryan #ryan x dylan #kaitlyn ka #emma mountebank #the quarry fanfic #the quarry fanfic wip #my writing #this is what I did with my english degree

47 notes · View notes