That Time Ryan and Chad Talked About Teddy in Ryan's Shower

[unprivileged]

“Man, did you bathe in JD last night or what?”

The extra weight on his mattress hardly goes unnoticed, but it still takes him a few moments to place who the voice belongs to.

“How’d you get in?” he asks without opening his eyes, remaining curled up tightly in a ball on his side under the blankets. Even behind his eyelids he can tell it’s late morning, though he has no sense of actual time.

“Followed your housekeeper in.” Chad seems to be settled for sitting in the empty space on Ryan’s bed, one hand on his phone sending a text message and the other running small circles over Ryan’s naked shoulder blade. “C’mon, get up.”

“Why?” It’s a genuine question. Ryan doesn’t see the purpose of getting up. Truth be told, Ryan doesn’t even remember falling asleep last night, though he must have if obviously Chad’s here.

“Because you smell like booze and you need a shower. Come on. It’ll make you feel better and I’ll make you pancakes.”

His stomach flips a bit at the word “pancakes” but then again, Ryan knows that Chad makes the only pancakes that cure his hangovers. He finally cracks an eye open after much difficulty, squinting around the room. The TV’s playing some crappy MTV show he must have fallen asleep to last night, and one look to his right solidifies why Chad asked the initial question. There’s a fifth of Jack Daniels sitting on his bedside table but it’s mostly empty.

Right…the pieces are falling into place. He was home alone and he was working and while he was working he started to think and thinking bummed him out, so he went downstairs to the liquor cellar, brought up a whole bottle with the intention of just mixing a drunk and wound up doing shots by himself in his room until he apparently fell asleep. His phone’s wedged somewhere under his hip and his boxers are riding up his ass due to wriggling around so much in his sleep, but at least that mystery’s mildly solved.

“…too dizzy,” he finally says, closing his eye again and burrowing under his covers. He hears Chad grumble under his breath, feels the covers being yanked from him and he suddenly hisses as the light streams into his bedroom.

“Okay, Rockstar. Get your hungover ass out of bed and get in the shower. I’ll make sure you don’t slip and crack your head open.” Chad’s already getting off of the bed, opening the curtains further and opening drawers to pick out clean clothes for Ryan. It’s oddly domestic and normally Ryan finds it funny that Chad essentially acts as an SO, but right now he kind of just wants to curl up and sink back into sleep.

Ten minutes later though finds him in his waterfall shower behind frosted glass doors, Chad sitting on the couch in his bathroom still on his phone and facing away from the shower to give Ryan some semblance of privacy.

“You haven’t come back to our place for a couple of nights,” he says conversationally as he scrolls through the highlights on ESPN.com. Ryan answers with a noncommittal grunt, followed by a thump of his head hitting the shower wall.

“I’ve been busy. Besides, I thought you’d love me being out of there so you could have all sorts of wild and tantric sex with Tay.”

“Hah hah. Like Taylor would go for tantric sex.” There’s a pause. “You don’t remember anything about last night, do you?”

Ryan doesn’t remove his head from the shower wall, but he turns to look out the doors. Just because Chad can’t see him doesn’t mean he can’t see Chad and he’s just giving him a puzzled look.

“Considering I don’t even remember how I got into my bed last night? No, not really. Why?”

“Ry, how long have we been friends?”

“Long enough that you apparently feel like it’s okay to babysit me while I’m showering?”

“You’re not even standing upright.”

“You’re not looking at me.”

“I have eyes in the back of my head. Now answer the question. How long have we been friends.”

“Since we were like five or six? I don’t remember, something like that though.”

“Okay,” Chad replies, sounding satisfied for a moment as he navigates to his Facebook page instead. “One of Taylor’s psych classes said that if people are friends for more than eight years, they’re like chemically ingrained to remain friends for life or something, and since you and I have known each other for about fifteen you’ve gotta know that you’re getting worse and worse at hiding shit from me.”

Shit, where is this going? Ryan’s not sure, but he’s standing up suddenly and turning to fully face the shower doors and peer at Chad through the haze of fog and water.

“…I’m lost.”

“You only drink whiskey when you’re trying to make yourself cry. Also you looked like you got hit by a bus this morning and I had to kick you into a shower before you saw yourself in a mirror and freaked out. And you drunk texted me last night.” Chad sounds far too nonchalant for this to be the main point, but now Ryan’s concerned. Ryan doesn’t even remember having his phone last night, but he did find the device wedged under his body this morning.

He can’t face Chad for this answer, even if Chad can’t see him.

“What did I say?”

“You literally sent me a text that had, like, eight tiger emojis.”

“…”

“…dude did you fuck him again?”

“…a few days ago, he came back into town. I was at Inferno and I happened to see him and we talked and then just…stuff happened. That’s it.”

“What were you doing at Inferno?”

“…dance…ing?”

“….you stalked him, didn’t you.”

“Why is that your first assumption?”

“Dunno,” Chad snorts. “Why aren’t you answering the question?”

A resounding thud echoes in the bathroom as Ryan’s head hits the tile again. “So maybe I looked at his Twitter. And maybe I stole his bottle of Jack and grabbed his ass and lured him back to the house and fucked him in my bed a few nights ago.”

The silence is deafening and would have remained so if Chad didn’t suddenly get to his feet. Ryan hears the squeak of his shoes on the tile, but he doesn’t anticipate Chad throwing the shower door open to stare at him.

“You did what.”

“Get out of my shower!”

"You fucked DJ Tig3r in your bed? You brought him back to your house? Dude it took you six months to let me come to your house, what the fuck are you doing letting some stranger come in?"

"He's not a stranger!" Ryan argues, even though the defense is weak. Chad knows it's weak, too, if the glare he's giving Ryan is anything to go by. "...he's not a stranger. It's complicated. It's really complicated and what else did I text you last night?" The look on Chad's face melts a little at the question and he suddenly looks more concerned and confused than downright angry. Pulling out his phone again, he scrolls through to review the messages.

"You sent me eight tiger emojis, uh, five martini glasses, that face with the heart eyes, then that sad crying face, some music notes, a giant house, a toilet and a baseball. You also sent me Taylor Swift lyrics and man please keep your auto correct on because between your dyslexia and your drunkeness I had to get my Taylor to crack the code."

"And you got that I was talking about Tig3r out of all of that?"

"Eventually." Chad finally pulls away from the shower, walking back toward the couch to flop carelessly on the cushions. Looking at the ceiling, he holds his phone above his face and types with his one thumb while browsing his own Twitter account. "I came over first thing this morning to make sure you didn't do something stupid but it kinda sounds like we were too late."

Ryan's silent again, letting the water beat down on his sore muscles and scald his skin, hair plastered to his forehead and droplets blurring his vision. He finally reaches for the shampoo though, grateful he doesn't drop that.

"Make me pancakes and I'll explain what happened. Deal?"

"Finish showering first."

Twenty minutes later finds the pair of them downstairs in Ryan's kitchen, Chad pulling ingredients out of his backpack and Ryan slumped over the island from his barstool, wet hair slightly dripping on the countertop as he shivers a bit. Even though it's already really warm in the day thanks to the southern California weather, he's still dressed in yoga pants and a long-sleeved shirt that Chad picked out for him.

"So. I'm starting to think that Taylor was right," he starts off as he watches Chad, head on his arms and eyes half-open. Chad's since moved on to figuring out Ryan's overly complicated expresso machine, but he looks over his shoulder anyway.

"She's pretty good at that." He grins at least, a little more than proud of his girlfriend. "But about what this time?"

"About me. And about why I sleep with people and about being kinda ready to move on. She's right. I don't like letting people close beyond surface level fucking."

"...but?" Chad winds up smacking the coffee maker and it's only out of luck that the thing sputters to life.

"But...I think I might want that with somebody else."

"You mean Tig3r."

"Yup."

"Man. Don't even go there, and I'm serious, Ryan. I dig the guy's music, I really do, but have you looked at yourself lately? You're gone for almost a year and the first thing you do when you get back is get drunk and fuck the guy. Then you're pining for weeks, then actively stalking him in a club and bringing him home to fuck him again and go back to pining and getting drunk and sending me texts my 15 year old sister would send. You sure that's where you wanna go with this?"

"He tried giving me road head while I was driving us back here."

"Dude. Come on! I don't gross you out with my straight people sex stories, I don't need to know your gay sex stories."

"It's an important part of the story, asshole. Coffee ready yet?"

Chad just rolls his eyes, reaching up into one of the cabinets and avoiding all of the crystal and china to bring down a red coffee mug with a white East High Wildcats logo. He pours coffee and pushes it in front of Ryan's face before resuming to his pancake preparations, mixing up the batter and pulling out a frying pan.

"What's so important about road head in this context?"

"...I mean I stopped him. You know I don't like stopping orgasms."

"So why'd you stop him?"

"...you know what I realized? Troy was the last person ever to give me head. And I was fine with Te--Tig3r doing it until I thought about it too long. What does that say about me?"

"That your promiscuity's now mobile?" The joke falls a little flat even as Chad begins pouring batter into the pan.

"No. It means that I'm comfortable around him. I was comfortable enough to bring him home. I don't bring people here, Chad, you know I kinda hate it here and I couldn't take him to your place because you and Taylor were at your place and I didn't want to lose him but I think I seriously pissed him off but I mean we still fucked and everything but this isn't a relationship, this isn't the start of a relationship and I can't read him and I think he finds me interesting at least, or at least attractive and I can deal with that but the problem is that he's getting closer and that urge to do clothed-things is hell of a lot stronger. Like. I want what you and Taylor have, I think, and I'm pretty sure if I work on it enough I could have it with him."

"You know that's not how things work in the normal world, right, Ry?"

"Huh?"

"People." Chad responds, just flipping a pancake. "You can't force people to do things even if you work on it enough."

"I know that."

"Think about what you just told me."

"It's different. You don't...there's something there, Chad. I just don't know what it is but you know I don't--it's gravity."

"What." He looks up from the pan, lifting an eyebrow.

"Me and the DJ. It's gravity. We keep being drawn back to each other and it's going to work. You'll see."

"You still haven't told me what got you upset enough to start with the Jack."

"...he likes Jack. That's a whole other point but I guess I just...the final purge of Troy-ness, you know? I cried about it a lot when Troy and I broke up but I was 19 and a major idiot, whatever. I never really got over it. I sort of just...pushed it down and masked it underneath the sluttiness because it was much easier to be special for a night than question why I wasn't special to him at all."

"You already had this conversation with Taylor, didn't you?"

"Sort of." Ryan pauses, sipping his coffee and pulling a face before reaching for a jar to dump sugar into it. "I thought about it a lot while I was sober and writing in the cabin, too. A lot of my songs are about Troy actually and it's sort of gross. I want to fix them and make them not-Troy, but then I started thinking that whether I like it or not? Troy's a huge part of my life. But I guess I just had to come to terms with that and come to terms with the fact that the first person to be in that bed in this house wasn't him." He leans on his hand, eyeing the slowly growing pile of pancakes. "Growing up sucks."

Chad doesn't say anything for a while, silently making pancakes as Ryan sips his coffee. It's not until he places three pancakes in front of Ryan that he leans on the stove, watching him critically before asking the question.

"Do you really like him that much?"

"...he challenges me. I like that. And I think I stand a chance at maybe getting to know him better."

"What makes you say that?"

"Syrup."

Chad rolls his eyes, grabbing syrup from the cupboard and dropping it in front of Ryan. "Okay, there. So?"

Ryan takes his time in answer, dousing his pancakes in syrup and butter before poking at the mess with his fork. "Because he told me his real name on the night we met. Guy wouldn't let me into his room and we fucked on his couch instead, but I know his real name. He trusts me on some base level and that's big."

"What's his name?"

"I'm not going to wreck this, Chad." The answer's calm, but there's a bit of venom behind the words. "So don't give me the ammunition to, okay?"

There's a sigh that follows and Chad goes back to making pancakes for himself this time.

"Just do me a favor and be careful, all right? I know you think you're healing just fine but Tay and I still worry about you."

"And I appreciate it. I'd probably be dead somewhere without you two and without Sharpay." A bite of over-saturated breakfast disappears in his mouth. "But I can handle this. Just don't get jealous if I start to like him more than I like you." The teasing grin's fixed in place and Chad rolls with the punches with ease.

"I don't know if my heart can take it, man." There's a beat. "So when're you going to see him again?"

"...I don't know. I hate waiting but I have to be patient. The good thing is that I know he's not. It'll be sooner than we think, trust me."

"And when are you going to introduce him to us?"

"Dream on." Ryan laughs, poking Chad in the arm lightly with his fork. "Just hurry up and make your pancakes so we can eat and go."

"Oh so you do remember we have plans today."

"Like I'm going to let you get out of ring shopping. I know this perfect shop that doesn't open until noon. You're going to love it."

"My wallet probably won't."

"No, probably not...but you love Taylor, don't you?"

"...yeah. Yeah, I do."

"Then...consider it a thank you."

"What."

"..."

"Dude," Chad breathes out slowly, the reality sinking in. "No. No, I'm not letting you chip in for Taylor's ring."

"I love her just as much as you do, man. And if she makes you happy then I want to keep that."

"Are you only doing this so I ease up on this Tig3r thing?"

"Maybe."

Chad turns off the stove and settles in with his two pancakes, regarding the blond carefully. Ryan's prone to making poor decisions lately, but the nice thing, Chad thinks, is that he at least usually runs his terrible plans by him now. Stealing the syrup back, he points at Ryan with his fork.

"Only if you let me drive the BMW to this place."

And Ryan could only laugh in response. "Deal."