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Ryan’s been reading Donna Tartt again. The Goldfinch, but just the part in the middle, about Theo and Boris in Vegas. He’d like to be Theo, but he knows he’s Boris. Ryan always stops at the kiss. That would be a better end to the book, he thinks. He loses interest when Theo goes back to New York, when Boris grows up. No one ever gets out, not really.
He winds up in Spencer’s bed. Spencer’s room is on the first floor, and he never locks his window. He lives in a low to the ground stucco house, painted terracotta orange, all flat roofs and boxy shapes, designed to look unintrusive against the red dirt and rock walls, to blend in with the landscape, as though it wasn’t built by developers but grew naturally -- as if anything in the desert was ever made to hold life.
Spencer sleeps on his stomach, in his boxers, his duvet kicked to the floor and his sheets tangled in his legs. He’s always hot, he has three fans in his room, one on the ceiling, a tall tower at the foot of his bed, and one on his nightstand, pointed directly at his face. Ryan shivers as he slides through the window. Fabricated cold hits his skin; he prickles, breaks out in goosebumps. It’s hot outside, even though it’s September, even though it’s the middle of the night. The heat is anachronistic, it hits the back of Ryan’s throat like cigarette smoke and makes him feel as though he’s on an alien planet or outside of time.
Spencer snores and Ryan shimmies against him, fitting their bodies together, tucking his face against the back of Spencer’s neck. He can smell Spencer’s sweat. Ryan shivers and grabs the duvet from the floor, pulls it over himself. Ryan is always cold. He chases the warmth of Spencer’s skin, desperate and sick, forehead against Spencer’s shoulder, opens his mouth like he wants to bite, swallow Spencer’s warmth and get him in his bloodstream, take him like a drug. Ryan’s teeth graze the meat of Spencer’s shoulder, the muscle. Ryan wants blood, he’s a bit of a vampire, he always has been. Spencer could warm him up from the inside, maybe.
Spencer shifts in his sleep, his shoulder blade crushing against Ryan’s nose, pain blooming between Ryan’s eyes. His stomach swoops at the sting. Hit me baby one more time.
Ryan’s a light sleeper, Spencer always wakes him up as he gets out of bed, even when he tries not to. He’s sensitive, Ryan. He hates the sound of chewing, heavy breathing, people swallowing. He keeps his eyes shut as Spencer creeps around the room, stepping softly onto the pilly gray carpet. It’s nice to be cared for. Ryan breathes deeply, hears the soft shuffle of Spencer pulling on a shirt, switching out his boxers and tugging jeans on--the shing of the belt buckle that makes Ryan’s mouth water and his skin prickle.
Spencer walks over to him. Ryan can feel his eyes on him. He wants to roll over, expose his stomach. Gut me . He waits for Spencer to call his bluff. Spencer sighs and rucks up the duvet, revealing Ryan’s feet. He unlaces Ryan’s shoes and pulls them off, followed by his socks. He covers Ryan back up, tucks the blanket under his chin. Stands there, just for a heartbeat, then walks away, the door creaking when Spencer closes it.
Ryan doesn’t come out for breakfast. He lays in Spencer’s bed for an hour, breathing in his drool-stained pillows, then leaves the way he came in, stealing a few CDs and one of Spencer’s shirts on his way out.
Pete Wentz lives in an apartment that feels like a hotel room, a permanent transience, a one night stand stuck in a time loop, a party where everyone’s gone, a city that’s overstayed its welcome. Ryan always feels a little unmoored awash in the smoky darkness and colored lights filtering in from the floor to ceiling windows, Pete’s curtains nearly translucent satin. Pete’s older, old enough to live on his own, old enough to buy Ryan booze. He’s an artist--he takes pictures, develops them in the hulking darkroom of his one-bedroom, then writes poems for them. The poems hang in the galleries next to the pictures, he sells art books to morose millionaires who want something sophisticated for their coffee tables. He takes pictures of Ryan in his bed and takes his girlfriend to his openings.
Ryan lays stretched out and shirtless on Pete’s bed, an artfully rumpled silk sheet draped partially across his chest, looking away, chin tilted up to expose his neck. Pete will blur his face, a smudge, the suggestion of a boy, looking burned away by matches and memory. His skin will stand in stark contrast to the dark tones of the bed, in Pete’s black and white he’ll look almost corpselike, a cool marble statue, flesh without blood. The camera shutters, Ryan feels its eyes like mosquito bites.
Pete puts his camera down and turns off his lights, crawls back in bed, pulls the blanket from the floor and covers the two of them. He’s shirtless as well, dressed only in his black briefs and oversized gray sweatpants, which he kicks off as he climbs onto the mattress.
“Sorry,” he murmurs, kissing Ryan’s jaw, licking the curve of it, his breath warm and wet on Ryan’s face, breathing color back into him.
“It’s fine,” Ryan says thinly. He swallows and Pete presses his lips to Ryan’s Adam’s apple, feeling it go down.
“You’re just so…” Pete speaks muffled against Ryan’s skin. He’s sweaty and hot, his skin is tight and glistening and he’s always moving, always speaking, always so alive on top of Ryan, it’s intoxicating, it makes Ryan feel awake. He bites down on Ryan’s neck. Pete always marks him up, he can’t grasp ahold of something without leaving a bruise. “Gorgeous.”
They had been close to fucking before Pete had made him stop, had turned on his lights, so stark and exposing, a desert sun that Pete holds in his hand, Apollo with his oversized teeth and his chariot of light, and posed Ryan like a dead butterfly, beautiful and complacent. They snapped pictures for nearly an hour, Ryan’s Icarion mood melting further in the flashbulbs. Pete, it seemed, was unphased by the interruption.
“Thanks.” Ryan smiles a little bit, the barest twitch of muscle. Pete grooms his ego like a prized bonsai.
Pete hums and moves his attention to Ryan’s lips, upon which Ryan remembers that sex is something you do, not something that is done to you, and begins to kiss back, no longer an arranged doll but an active participant, his hands roaming Pete’s back muscles, the bottom of his stomach. Pete is an athlete, he’s solid, Ryan could hit him and it would hurt his hand. He could pin Ryan down and hold him there. His tongue invades Ryan’s mouth, Ryan would choke on it if he could. Pete’s teeth scrape against his chest, his tongue swirls around Ryan’s nipple. Carmilla used to bite her victims on the chest, not the neck -- in the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die--die, sweetly die--into mine.
Eat my heart out.
Pete sits between Ryan’s legs, pulling his boxers off.
“Are you with me?” he asks, tracing patterns on Ryan’s thigh. Pete can wrap his two hands around the meatiest parts of Ryan’s thigh. Pete could break his bones. His fingertips are hot hot on Ryan’s skin, he tickles the veins. “We don’t have to do this.”
“I know that,” Ryan tries not to sound annoyed. Pete is always so nice , it’s one of the worst things about him, the way he shreds Ryan to pieces with his claws and then kisses the wounds. Ryan lifts his narrow hips so that he can easily pull his underwear off, baring himself completely for Pete. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want it.”
Pete has the gall to look wounded. As if he doesn’t know what this is. As if he doesn’t set the rules, draw the lines around Ryan like a leash on his neck. “There’s a party tonight,” he says. “At Gabe’s. You should come.”
Ryan looks away. “Take Ashlee,” he says, trying to spit acid but sounding only whiny.
“Ashlee doesn’t like Gabe.”
Pete always says the wrong thing.
He grabs Ryan’s hand, laces their fingers together.
“Come with me.”
Ryan exhales, a huff, childish and only halfway on purpose, but he doesn’t let go of Pete’s hand. Would you open yourself up, if I asked? Would you let me climb inside? I like your dismal apartment, can I stay here forever? Can I die in your ribcage and grow something better in your lungs? Please don’t send me home.
“Fine. Now stop being a pussy and fuck me.”
Gabe Saporta wears the desert well, stretches it over his taut tan skin like his tight shirts or even tighter jeans. The Vegas lights shine on him and he plays the superficiality of their dazzle like he does his bass -- with careful precision and unexpected deftness. Where the valley swallows Ryan whole, Gabe conducts the neon and red rock, the eternal life of a never ending party.
Though I walk through the valley of death, I fear no evil, for I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley
The party Pete takes him to is indistinguishable from all of the others, flashes of bodies and bright colors, moments half remembered before they’re over. Ryan takes a perverse pleasure in being the youngest person there, jokes about him being “jailbait” and “barely legal” wet the spots behind his ears and he plays into it, trying to look as doe-eyed as he can, sticking his bottom lip out in the model pout that Pete likes so much. With strangers’ foreign skin pressing against him, faceless hands and sharp fingers in his hair, touching his cheeks and chest, he feels as though his whole life is ahead of him, and if nothing’s really started then nothing really counts, nothing’s been real yet, not really.
Ryan is sunken into overstuffed couch cushions, his face pressed against Pete’s armpit, his long legs dangling over the sofa’s arm, and Pete is drawing patterns with his fingers on Ryan’s lower stomach, Spencer’s t-shirt rucked up and exposing his skin and the band of his underwear that peeks out above his girly jeans. Gabe reaches over and snaps it. Pete doesn’t usually wear underwear with his girly jeans, but Ryan can’t stand the scratch of the zipper on his dick, and he gets no thrill from the exhibitionist danger of only having one layer of fabric between you and the world. Ryan likes to tease in a way that Pete doesn’t understand, hiding his vulnerability like the prize in a shell game, the heart on his sleeve is a decoy, a hand grenade with the pin half pulled, and the elastic of his tighty whities is more tantalizing than his bare naked body could ever be.
Gabe grins at him as he tugs at the button on Ryan’s jeans, daring Ryan to let him pull them open. Pete offers him a joint and Ryan shakes his head. He’s never been good at holding things in his lungs; asthmatic as a child and on a trajectory of slow asphyxiation since adolescence.
Gabe pops the button open. Ryan blinks at him slowly, can’t decide if he’s willing or dazed and Gabe laughs. He sticks his thumb in his mouth, wipes the spit on Ryan’s face like a tear-track, and stands up, moves to sit next to Pete, leaving Ryan half hard and whiny. Gabe’s never fucked him, despite Ryan and Pete’s lack of exclusivity. Ryan isn’t sure if it’s out of best friend deference to Pete or if Gabe finds Ryan more interesting as an idea than a chew toy, but he feels condescended to and young in a bad way when Gabe engages Pete in a conversation about politics that swirls around Ryan’s head like mint green mouthwash in circling a drain.
Gabe is talking about the drought, the imminent collapse of civilization, and the increasing hostility of the desert to human life. They’re all living on borrowed time, the artifice of oasis-like vibrance promised by the city only expediting its rapid demise. When they all dry out, may the radioactive fallout that lies dormant in the dust from the barren desert’s nuclear testing coat their bones in neon -- leaving the lights on until the end. Ryan read one time that Death Valley was one of the darkest places in the west, somewhere that you could still see the stars as they were meant to be viewed. He wonders how much glittering magnificence has been lost in an attempt to bottle the sublime and sell it to the out of towners for extortionate profit. He wonders how many people unscrew their caps on the way home to realize they’ve been sold a mirage, something you can only see when the heat is beating down hard enough to make you dizzy and dumb.
The end of the world is lead and bile in Ryan’s stomach and he hates Gabe, a little bit, for the giddy glee he has as he unloads his facts -- the barrel of annihilation is thrilling foreplay for a hedonistic nihilist, he supposes. Ryan turns his head and lets the fabric of Pete’s shirt blindfold him, his ears and mouth full of crushing cotton, Pete’s voice a soothing, indistinct rumble against him.
Maybe if we leave right now, I’ll fall asleep in the car, my head against the window, and maybe you’ll carry me in, and maybe I’ll wake up half-way up the drive with my head tipped back and you’ll pretend not to notice, and maybe if you hold me it won’t be so scary, to look the night sky in the face like that.
They end up in someone’s bedroom. The party is in a warehouse in the old part of town, far from the Strip and out towards the airport. It’s not Gabe’s place, Ryan doesn’t know how Gabe manages to find these people who will open their doors to his traveling circus of wannabe-bohemians trying to Joan Didion their way out of trustfund guilt but he feels a pang of embarrassment slash remorse slash preemptive regret for the unholy consecration he and Pete are about to perform in the resting place of a faceless stranger. Pete has him pressed against the door and Ryan can see the stranger’s bed -- two queen sized mattresses stacked on top of a metal Amazon frame without a headboard, gray sheets stretched over the sides, threatening to pop off in the upper left corner and a crumpled duvet kicked to the bottom third, with only two pillows (Ryan is dimly aware that Pete is biting his neck, sucking big purple blossoms into his collarbones like a locket of bruises, maybe later he’ll leave something inside the center for Ryan to carry around with him, something like blood and tears and a promise he hasn’t broken yet) and Ryan can’t imagine sleeping with only two pillows, Ryan can’t imagine sleeping with that much space, the bed is in the middle of the wall, at least two feet of space on each side. When Ryan was a kid he slept on the couch or in the bathtub or curled up in a faux-leather armchair and sometimes he slept under the bed and breathed in the dust and touched his tongue to the metal bars that kept the mattress from crushing him and it tasted like blood (when Pete pushes against him, he rams Ryan’s side into the doorknob, cold metal on Ryan’s exposed back, with enough force that Ryan can feel it, feel the blood cells bursting, promising a good one, a bruise that Pete can take a picture of and keep it for his spank bank or his PhD portfolio, with colors like the sky before a tornado -- not that Ryan’s ever seen a tornado, they don’t get them in Nevada). Above the bed is a collage of pictures cut out from magazines. Playboys, probably, Ryan didn’t know they still made skin mags like that, with everything on the internet busty babes on glossy pages seem naively pedestrian. The pictures are of women, either scantily clad in thin lacy bras or bare chested all together, but the owner of the bedroom has gone through and carefully cut the heads off of all the women, leaving them as indecent torsos with stub-like necks, a reign of terror style pornographic cornucopia that plays like a modern art piece about the dehumanization of women. Ryan would have added blood and viscera to the tops of the necks--beheadings don’t leave a clean cut like that.
Pete is pushing at his shoulders, coaxing Ryan down to his knees. Ryan is half hard from Pete’s tongue and the dull repetition of the doorknob against his spine. Ryan’s jeans are ripped and he feels the scratchy carpet rub against his skin as he sinks down, Pete’s bulge level with his face. Pete is brushing his fingers through Ryan’s hair, scratching at his scalp, pulling so that Ryan looks up at him. Ryan opens his mouth and Pete spits into it, then mumbles something poetic as the viscous, salty substance creeps down Ryan’s throat. He mouths at Pete’s clothed cock, the rough denim of his jeans drying Ryan’s mouth out, the sharp metal of his zipper rubbing the tip of his tongue raw. He pulls Pete’s belt off. Pete has one hand in his hair, the other gripping his shoulder, prophesying fingertip bruises, and Ryan ruts against Pete’s crooked knee. He pops the button, tugging with his teeth at the zipper, because Ryan’s a goddamn professional in pornstar sleaze. Pete likes it when he’s looking at him so Ryan doesn’t take his oversized doe-eyes off of his face as he swallows him down, opening his throat. It aches, his lips stretching, his jaw popping, his throat tightening from the sudden intrusion, it feels like waking up, the smell of Pete’s sweat and girly body wash make Ryan’s stomach twist, he can feel all the blood in his veins and he gags, garbled and pathetic -- he would jerk back instinctively if Pete wasn’t holding him in place with a vice grip.
Pete calls him pretty, so pretty and so good, words like slut and whore dripping thoughtlessly off of his lips and splattering on Ryan’s forehead, his open eyes. Pete presses his leg harder against Ryan’s cock. Ryan takes him deeper, aching to touch himself. Pete fucks his throat and it hurts, Ryan’s voice will be wrecked in the morning, he takes it like communion, he wishes that he could swallow Pete whole. He wants to take a box-cutter to Pete’s chest and pull out his heart, lick it like a popsicle, take the soft, meaty flesh into his mouth. Ryan would eat every last bite, cause Pete’s heart is big enough for the both of them. According to Freud, the oral stage is the first stage of psychosexual development, and neglect in the first year and a half of life can lead to an oral fixation. Ryan was fucked from the start.
Pete comes in his mouth. Ryan swallows and feels it fill his empty stomach.
Afterwards, Pete touches him on the bed, Ryan in Pete’s lap, his face buried in Pete’s shoulder so he doesn’t have to watch it. Ryan can’t stand to look at himself naked. When he comes, he bites down on the meat of Pete’s shoulder, deep enough to break flesh. Pete’s blood is hot in his mouth and Ryan sucks at the wound, coating his teeth and his tongue. Pete doesn’t stop, he gasps when Ryan rends flesh, tightens his grip on Ryan’s cock. Ryan whimpers, pressing against Pete’s chest. Pete strokes him a few more times, enough to make Ryan try to fight him off, the overstimulation making his head buzz. Pete grabs Ryan by the throat to get him still. He brings Ryan to another orgasm. Ryan cries this time.
“What you get for fucking biting me,” Pete mumbles into Ryan’s ear, bringing his hand up to Ryan’s mouth so that Ryan can clean the come off with his tongue. Ryan glares at Pete as he sucks his fingers.
“You’re probably going to give me an infection,” Pete says. “You little freak.” He kisses Ryan softly.
“Don’t be a baby,” Ryan says. He relaxes against Pete’s chest. Pete kisses his forehead.
“You okay?”
Ryan shrugs.
“Want something to eat?”
Ryan wants to eat all the stars in the sky. He wants to swallow the moon. Maybe Pete will buy him In-N-Out. He nods.
“Alright. Let’s go. Gotta get you home before you turn into a pumpkin.” He pats Ryan’s back. Ryan stands up, pulling on his discarded clothing. Pete is still bleeding. It makes Ryan’s heart skip. He hopes that Pete scars.
“Can I sleep at your place tonight?”
Pete is pulling his belt on, buckling it. He makes a face. Ryan scowls.
“Why not?” he asks.
“It’s just…” Pete pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. He lights one and takes a drag -- avoiding the conversation. “Ashlee and I have plans in the morning. Brunch shit. Her parents.” He waves his hand. “You get it.”
“Do you love her?” Ryan asks. He crosses his arms. He’s being bitchy and childish and he knows it, but he wants to stick his fingers in Pete’s wound and push , until he can scratch the bone.
Pete sighs. “I don’t know.” He takes another drag. “We wouldn’t work. You know that.”
Ryan scoffs. “Are you gonna get married? Have kids with her? You gonna take her picture? She even know how fucked up you are, or are you too scared to tell her?”
Pete leans against the wall. His expression is bored. “Are you done?”
Ryan bites the inside of his cheek. He follows Pete out of the party.
To: Spencer
>> Have you ever read the bell jar?
(2:34 am)
>> There’s the part where she says “to the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream”
(2:35 am)
>> I think I need lobotomy
(2:35 am)
To: Ryan
>> where r u
(2:40 am)
To: Spencer
[Current Location]
(2:40 am)
To: Ryan
>> omw
(2:47 am)
To: Spencer
>>One time I read about this torture method from ancient greece where they would put honey on you and make you eat a bunch of honey and then they would trap you in these fucked up boats and then bees and bugs and stuff would eat you alive cause they were eating the honey on you and they could smell the stuff in your stomach and so they would just eat right through your skin. You’d die really slowly. It might not have been a real torture method. Lots of greek historians liked to make stuff up.
(2:53 am)
>>I think if you make your outsides look too much like your insides it can kill you
(2:54 am)
>>It’s not the bees fault. They didn’t mean to do anything wrong.
(2:54 am)
>>It’s really fucking depressing living in the city. Even though we don’t live in the city. We don’t even get to live in the city but we still can’t see the stars because of all the fucking lights. They’re too fucking bright. People shouldn’t be able to do that. What do you think moths did before people were around? Do you think they just flew as high as they could? Do you think they ever broke through the atmosphere? Do you think that make moths were supposed to make it to space, but then we made all of our lights and they got distracted and never achieved what they were really meant for? Do you ever feel jealous of people who got to see the stars before light pollution? I think it would scare me. I think it would eat me alive. I think it would light me on fire.
(2:59 am)
>>Do you ever think maybe god can’t see us cause all the lights are too bright?
(3:00 am)
To: Ryan
>> im here
(3:06 am)
There’s an abandoned housing development about twenty minutes from Ryan’s house. It was supposed to be a nest for wealthy suburbanites, Vegas expats who still wanted the perks of the city but needed land and space to raise their families. There were plans for a golf course and two story movie theatre, but the project ran out of money sometime in 2012, when the landlords realized that no one actually wanted to live that close to Vegas, and the only people who raise their family in the desert suburbs are trapped by financial immobility. There were supposed to be nearly thirty poorly constructed little boxes but in the end only four of them were finished, and the rest were left to rot as half articulated skeletons in the museum of the valley. Ryan lays on his back on the dusty concrete floor, staring through hole in the roof, a gaping maw with jagged wooden teeth, a beast, Frankenstein abandoned by his monster, there are no stars in the sky and Ryan is eating drywall, trying to construct a home in his stomach so he can live in his skin. It’s over eighty degrees but Ryan can’t stop shivering, an anemic half dead thing, his blood wouldn’t steam in the snow.
Little boxes on the hillside / Little boxes made of ticky tacky / Little boxes on the hillside /Little boxes all the same / There's a pink one and a green one / And a blue one and a yellow one / And they're all made out of ticky tacky / And they all look just the same
“Ryan!” The door to the house was broken off its hinges years ago, so Spencer can walk unimpeded through the entryway. “What are you doing? It’s late, dude.”
Ryan breathes through his nose.
Spencer sits down next to him, drawing an absentminded pattern in the dust. Ryan scoots closer and puts his head in Spencer’s lap. Spencer strokes his cheek, touches Ryan’s hair, so gentle, with only the pads of his fingers. Ryan wants to tell him that he would let Spencer blow him apart if he wanted to, let him go full 80s slasher, but he can’t kill Ryan with an ax, he’s gotta be touching him, gotta rip him limb from limb with bloody hands and sharp teeth.
“Are you still a virgin?” Ryan asks. His eyes are unfocused, gazing at some middle distance, waiting for an oasis to appear.
“What kind of question is that?”
Ryan shrugs.
“You’d know if I wasn’t a virgin,” Spencer says.
Ryan takes Spencer’s hand. He looks at it and wishes he knew how to read palms. He’d make up a lie and tell Spencer they had matching love-lines, and they were both going to live forever. He pulls Spencer’s hand to his face and kisses the center of his palm.
“Ryan,” Spencer says quietly.
“I know,” Ryan shuts his eyes and lets Spencer’s hand drop. His throat prickles. Spencer strokes his back now, quietly counting the vertebrae in Ryan’s spine.
Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same -- except that Cathy’s dead before the story starts and Heathcliff’s dead before it ends, and death only brings people together in ghost stories and funerals.
“I think I need to get out of here,” Ryan says.
“Yeah. You should go home. Or you can come to mine? I can lend you pajamas.”
Ryan shakes his head. “The desert, I mean. I don’t think--I don’t think I can live here anymore. I feel like the air is trying to kill me. I’m cold all the time. I’m scared of the highways and the empty space and I think -- I think it’s all empty space.”
“Have you seen a doctor lately? You might have low iron.”
“I don’t wanna be pictures on some rich fuck’s wall, Spence. I think the camera is taking things out of me.” Ryan curls his hands into fists but he’s got short, stubby guitarist fingernails and the effect isn’t what he wants.
You can’t call a place home until you want to run away from it.
Ryan is crying and it feels like he’s dying, he feels everything in his body, his toes and his bones and the thorns in his throat that catch his words and rip them to shreds so he can only spit bloody rags and half truths. It hurts with a profound sadness that only happens when one knows they are utterly powerless, the opposite surrender to that which cannot be changed, the pain of holding so tightly onto something that has been broken for a long time now, its jagged edges slowly sawing into tender flesh.
Spencer pulls Ryan up and looks him in the face. He wipes at Ryan’s tears with his thumbs, his face set in concentration, breathing steadily and with purpose until Ryan starts to match it. He wraps his arms around Ryan’s shoulders and pulls him into a hug.
“Do you remember,” Spencer mumbles into his ear. “When we went with my mom to Washington. And we went camping?”
Ryan nods.
“Do you remember when you snuck out to go swimming in the middle of the night? And I followed you, and you were in the water, and you told me to come in the water, but I wouldn’t?”
“Yeah.” Ryan hates the sound of his voice, wet and cracked.
“I didn’t even know it was you, when I looked at you. It was dark, and the water was almost black, and you were there, and the moon, you could see it in the water, and you could see it on your skin, and I thought you couldn’t be real, like that. You looked like a dream, or a memory. I felt like I could see you, there. For a minute. I could see all that stuff inside of you that you won’t show me. It was spilling out of you like paint. Like a work of fucking art.”
Spencer exhales. He rests his head against Ryan’s.
“Let’s go home, kid. Tomorrow? I’ll take you anywhere you want.”
To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole.