"I had them engraved for a reason," Ryan said, lifting his glass from the puddle that surrounded it and drinking the watery remnants of his coffee. Ryan knew for a fact that Spencer couldn't read it. "What, do I need an invitation to your pity party?" Spencer said with his usual infuriating calm, flipping the page of yesterday's Le Monde. Ryan pressed pause and looked at Spencer, waiting for him to explain why he was there. He didn't notice that someone had sat down opposite him until AC/DC jarred him from his reverie Ryan looked from the brick wall he'd been staring at to the table where his iPod sat and found Spencer reading a newspaper across from him. The first song to come up was The Smiths, "This Charming Man," and Ryan let Morrissey's upbeat ode to homoeroticism occupy his mind while his iced latte sweated away in a stray piece of sunlight. He put the half-frayed earbuds in and let the player shuffle through songs. He leaned back and pulled his iPod from the pocket of his wrinkled, faded jeans. Right now he didn't think he'd care if the spilled ink destroyed a few more of the pages in the book. The sentences probably were terrible anyway, he thought dispassionately, and folded the soft leather of the cover over the mostly-dried pages. The problem was, he didn't remember the answer. He remembered asking if Pete thought it was ever possible to be truly happy, and he remembered the silence that followed. He half-remembered a conversation he had with Pete when two bottles of cheap red wine had knocked whatever sense remained out of him. Ryan hadn't offered to make it right, hadn't begged for her to take him back, hadn't done much of anything, really, except let her go.
And he accepted that Keltie left, and her reasons for leaving. When he'd slept with that girl, with those other girls, he'd known the risk. And he didn't think he was isolating himself from the pain of it. Ryan wasn't sure what made this fuck-up different-it wasn't as though he didn't know he'd managed to ruin the second-best thing in his life. Or at least more of a stupor than normal. Spencer looked less and less apprehensive as the days and weeks went by and Ryan hadn't destroyed things or gone into seclusion or drugged himself into a stupor. Somehow he'd managed to avoid the well of self-pity he usually stumbled into the moment anything went wrong. This would be an excellent opportunity to appeal to one. It's a shame he didn't believe in gods, he thought. He turned the thought over and over in his mind: punishment, justice, anger, righteousness, false righteousness, capital punishment, justice. The last few weeks had left him feeling dry and wrung-out with nothing to show for his attempts. All the words he'd strung together these days seemed false, ringing untrue even to his biased ear. He hadn't been able to write anything for weeks, after months and months of nearly inescapable creativity. They weren't important sentences, he thought, returning to the ruined page before him. Ryan had just looked back blankly, hiding his cowardice beneath the haze of the joint Brendon had rolled and lit moments before. Spencer had suggested he return them, in that neutral voice that meant Spencer actually had a Very Specific Opinion about his suggestion but wouldn't spell it out. They had a habit of sliding down, especially when he broke out in a light sweat and didn't catch them. He crossed his sandaled feet and pushed the vintage Chanel sunglasses he'd stolen from his (ex-)girlfriend up his nose. It felt young, doing that, younger than Ryan had felt in-a long time. He was staying with Brendon, and with Shane, crashing on the pulled-out sofa next to Spencer. Ryan liked LA, liked that he didn't quite fit in there and yet his particular sense of style was never more unusual than anyone else's. He used them on purpose, sitting in the shade of the cafe's umbrellas and sipping his iced gingerbread latte absently in the sunlight of early spring. In Los Angeles, using old-fashioned materials like a fountain pen and leather-bound notebook felt anachronistic and out of place.
His last three sentences were buried beneath expensive blue ink. The nib of the fountain pen Spencer's dad had given him for his birthday last year dug into the paper too deeply to write anything legible the nib had broken on a thoughtlessly crossed "t" and Ryan had been too deep in thought to register the leak until it was too late. Ryan looked at the slowly spreading ink splotch on the finely made page in front of him. You'd think I'd have written it in response to this, but no. Three thousand words about Ryan being a twat. Smoke stupid cigarettes and drink stupid wine
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