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redorchidsBack to introduction and notes || Back to story overview
“Hi, man,” Jon says, a slow smile spreading on his face. “Wow, you look like hell.”
Ryan stands frozen as Jon eases off the bed, walking across the room towards him, sheet of paper still in his hand. Spencer comes up behind them, a second towel under his arm that he hangs over Ryan’s shoulders before pointing at the thin object in Jon’s hand.
“What’s that?”
Jon grins, tossing the hair out of his eyes and holds up the mostly empty page for Spencer to read. Ryan’s lungs slowly fill up with air again. Not the letter. He’s fine. It’s not the letter.
“My pen is a funhouse contortion,” Spencer reads, frowning even as a huge smile spreads across his face. “My words a distortion of the obvious… Jesus, Ry, you really won’t ever completely get over Circus, will you?”
Ryan shrugs and breaks away, moves quickly over to the bed and gathers up every last page of scattered paper, rips the entire pile into so much confetti and throws everything into the trash can by the wall. “I was really drunk,” he states, managing to put some of his usual defensive tone into the words. “You know what kind of utter crap I come up with when I’m drunk.”
Jon takes the carnival poem back from Spencer and crosses the room again, holding the page out for Ryan to take. “Here,” he says, and Ryan quickly accepts the offered sheet of paper, rips it in eight, throws the pieces in the bin with the others. “Seriously, man, you look like shit.”
Ryan shrugs, finally able to feel his heart resettle into a normal rhythm in his chest. “It’s all your fault, anyway,” he play-accuses, bumping Jon with his shoulder a little. “Besides, you don’t really look too hot yourself.”
‘Not too hot’ is a gross understatement. Jon looks like someone chained him to the centre of a road and ran him over multiple times with a rusty old car. He’s pale and shaky, with red-shot eyes and messy hair standing in all directions. His smile is still bright and attractive, though, and Ryan feels a tug at the corners of his own mouth for the first time since he woke up.
“So, now that we’ve gotten rid of Ryan’s drunken emo nostalgia and confirmed that both of you look like hell,” Spencer cuts in, putting an arm around Ryan’s shoulders and leading him into the main room, where a box of donuts and a tray of take-away coffee sit temptingly on top a small table, “let’s have some breakfast and then go wake Brendon, shall we?”
Ryan takes the offered paper cup and nods, biting into a donut to have an excuse not to formulate an actual answer. Going over to see Brendon after he’s just realised that he’s totally fucked where the shorter, energetic man is concerned and slowly kill himself with all the words he knows he can never say?
Maybe he deserves that.
Simple and understated || Poetic and free-flowing
