I know he's not perfect in your eyes
But somehow he's flawless in mine
Chapter 12 ~ Fool in Love
Ryan Rivera
Fuck these stupid feelings.
I had gone my whole life being totally okay with the fact that the love of my life was a straight male. I never tried to do things that could potentially jeopardize a perfectly functioning friendship with said male, until said male coerced me into sucking his dick and making me fall even harder than before.
Never would I have thought that my first gay sexual experience would be with my best friend, but Bobby was such a hardheaded tool that thought he was doing me a favor, so I gave into the pressure. In a way, I guess, he did do me a favor by letting me live out my wildest fantasies, but none of that was worth the way my insides were currently twisting and turning in my stomach every time I laid eyes on him.
I didn't want to feel this way because feeling this way was going to cause problems, and problems were the very last thing I needed right now.
So it was safe to assume that I said as little as possible to Bobby for the rest of the entire evening, for fear of letting something slip that would forever alter our friendship. Bobby didn't seem to pick up on it; in fact, he didn't really say much either. Even when my family insisted that he stay over for dinner and we were seated next to each other like always, listening to the table talk and taking occasional bites from our Italian-style food, we still didn't talk.
And I knew what that meant.
He was already regretting it.
Fuck, Ryan! You should've just said no like you always do! Why'd you have to let that stupid spit-shake break your defenses?
"So, everyone..." Scar clasped his hands together to force the table to bring our attention to him. On any normal circumstance, I would've been indifferent towards my father's announcements, but today, I found whatever he had to say to be particularly interesting. After all, it was better than sitting around and racking my brain about how Bobby must've been feeling, "...we have great news!" No one said anything in response, which made him slightly irritated. "What, none of you are dying to know what it is?"
Bryan scoffed. "Dad, you guys never have great news. There's always bad news attached to it."
Kahori and I shared a laugh at our brother's comment because it was sadly true. Nothing good ever really happened in our household. Everything that was even the slightest bit of good news was always because something bad had happened to cause it. When we found out that we were finally getting to live with them, it was because our foster mother was ill. When we moved to a new neighborhood with a brand new house that was much bigger than our last, it was because a burglar was terrorizing our old one.
"Oh," Scar said as his shoulders slumped and he looked to his husband for help.
Jamie rolled his eyes, and let go of a heavy, disinterested sigh. "Well, Scar got a bonus at work and instead of putting it in the bank to save it for something that's actually important like your college tuitions, because we do have three kids, you know—" He sent a side glare to Scar, "—he decided he wanted to take a family trip."
"To Lake Grenwald," Scar continued as a huge grin that looked like it wasn't going to go away anytime soon came into his face. He was practically radiating with energy about the idea of a family trip, and it was oddly adorable to see him so excited. "We'll have a cabin to ourselves, access to the lake and the boardwalk, and most importantly, we'll have fun. It's gonna be our spring break trip."
Kahori perked her head up from the book that she was reading, and she pouted. "That sounds expensive."
"Yeah," Jamie agreed in a heartbeat. "Sounds very expensive—thank you, Kay." He fully expected her to back him up on the insane cost of the trip, but she followed up with a: "I love expensive!" that made Jamie's shoulders fall in defeat.
"Sweet, can I come?" Bobby asked. It was first time that he spoke since we sat at the dinner table, and even though I had heard his voice a million times before, my skin prickled with anxiety at the sound of it. The only thing I could think about was the way his voice sounded when he was moaning my name—so rough and deep.
Shaking my head to clear my mind of my sexual thoughts, I prepared myself to hear whatever excuse my parents could come up with regarding why Bobby wouldn't be able to come with us, but I was utterly surprised when Scar nodded with a smile. "Yeah, actually, I got the idea from your parents. They said that we should all take a trip together. To relax and bond."
Bryan stuffed his entire fork of pasta into his mouth and didn't have any remorse about speaking with his mouth still full with it. "Don't they hate us?" His question was directed at Bobby, who gave him an non-committed shrug in response.
My lips downturned into a frown as I pondered the thought of Bobby's parents actually wanting to get to spend time with us. They were always so stuck-up in their ways, thinking they were better than us. Even if they were, it was strange for them to want to keep their distance from a family that meant a lot to their son.
"Which is exactly why this is bad idea," Jamie added, but that only made Scar roll his eyes. "Seriously, Patterson. They didn't like us back then, and they can't just change their minds overnight."
Scar pointed his fork at Jamie. "The wheels are already in motion."
Jamie narrowed his gaze, skeptical. "What? What does that even mean?"
"It means that the cards are in play."
"Scar—"
"I've already taken the plunge."
"Why are you speaking in idioms, Dad?" Kahori joined the ridiculous playful exchange, while I switched my attention to Bobby who was absentmindedly pushing a piece of chicken across his plate with his fork.
"You okay?" I found myself asking. What I really meant to ask was if we were okay, but I didn't want to be too forward.
"Yeah." Bobby dropped his fork and turned to me, a gleam in his brown eyes. "What's up?"
"Nothing, I just—" I took a deep breath in an attempt to slow the increased beating of my heart, "—look, um, we can just forget about what happened."
"I already did," he laughed.
Well, that stung. "Wow, um, alright. Cool."
And that was the last we spoke to each other until after dinner was over and it was time for him to leave.
I should've let him leave. Time apart was what we needed after today's events, but for some reason, my heart hurt to watch him walk out of the front door, so I asked, "Do you wanna stay over?" The words flew out of my mouth before I could recant them, and it wasn't like I was surprised that they did. I knew this would happen eventually, especially right after I had blown Bobby with all the power in the world. Even if we did have a little mishap afterward, I wouldn't have traded the experience for anything else. It was his dick for Christ's sake! His big, thick, juicy...
"Why would I stay over?" Bobby spun around and folded his arms across his hard chest, his brows drawn together to resemble one single line.
"It's, uh ... it's getting late."
"It's only seven, Ryan."
"Well, what about Chem? You said you wanted to study together." In that moment, I really wished the gods would have struck me with lightning to get me to stop running my mouth. Did dick really make it that hard to keep my cool?
"You said Mr. Adney was going to help you study," he retaliated.
"Yeah, yeah, I did, but—" Squeezing my eyes shut and violently shaking my head to get rid of all the nasty thoughts entering my mind, I said, "—just stay over, please."
Bobby raised a questioning brow, but it didn't take long for his signature smug grin to reappear. "Alright, but just 'cause you said please."
I might've been abusing our friendship, fully aware that Bobby would go through hell and back to do things that he thought would make me happy, but I didn't care. I wanted him to stay and I was going to do anything to make sure he did.
Bobby waltzed back into the house. With a smile dominating my face, I led the way back to my bedroom where my brother was positioned on our bean bag chair, upside down, typing away at his phone. "Bobby's staying over," I told him, making him flip onto his side to stare at me.
"Seriously, Ryan? My back still hurts from practice today."
"Bobby is staying over," I repeated, this time with a much deeper, strained voice. My brother gave me a look of berated disbelief, but not much time passed before he shot to his feet to gather his belongings for a night's rest on the living room couch.
Once he was gone, I pushed the door closed and locked it. Bobby moved across the room to begin to raid my dressers in search of something to wear and when he finally had, he lifted his shirt over his head and threw it to the floor, revealing his toned back muscles. He flexed unknowingly which certainly didn't make anything better. "Fuck," I whispered under my breath, silently wondering how I let it get to this point.
I watched him undress, trying my hardest to not let it faze me. I had already seen him naked plenty of times, but after having such an intimate moment really changed the way I viewed him. My sexual feelings were all that consumed my thoughts, so Bobby had to call my name a few times for me to finally hear his questions. "I said, what are you going to do about preppy Preston? Are you still going to be his partner?"
"Oh." I grimaced at the memory of the brown-eyed boy. "I'll have to find someone else, or I can continue to be his partner and constantly remind him of what he couldn't have."
"You know what's funny?"
I lifted a brow.
"That Mr. Adney picked up on the fact that Preston was into you."
"He said that he kept looking at me."
"Well, yeah." He flopped onto my bed and began to get comfortable by slipping his legs under my comforter. "But how would he know that unless he was doing the same thing?"
I followed suit by climbing into my brother's bed on the opposite side of the room with my laptop in hand. I had already begun to pull up Felix's Facebook page again, but despite what Bobby might have believed, there was no possible chance for me to get with him, no matter how brilliantly beautiful he was. "You gotta stop with that. I'm not even into him."
"Yeah?" Bobby's voice lingered in the air. I couldn't see him, but I knew he had to be smiling that little conceited grin of his. "Then why are you stalking his profile?"
"I'm not," I lied easily.
"Or you're watching gay porn and jerking off to him."
I pulled my hands out of my pants and sent him an invisible glare. "I'm admiring from afar."
He countered with, "that's synonymous with stalking."
"You're synonymous with annoying."
Bobby's thick laugh filled the air, but that was all that was said for a while. Nothing else could be heard aside from the slight whir of the air conditioning and the clicking noise my mouse made every time I tapped through Felix's profile. I mistook the silence for Bobby having fallen asleep, so I shifted in my brother's bed to get in a more comfortable position to quietly and shamelessly stalk my chemistry teacher. Ten minutes later, Bobby called my name, making me jump in my skin.
"Ry, are you sleeping?"
"Yeah," I responded with an eye roll.
"Don't you think it's funny how I'm always the one you experiment on?"
I tore my eyes away from my laptop and stared at the ceiling instead. "What are you talking about?"
"In second grade," he clarified, and at the mention of such a pivotal part in our friendship, I flinched, "you kissed me."
I sat up abruptly, staring at Bobby through the darkness. "You remember that?"
"My memory's not complete shit," he spat, sounding quite amused. "Of course I remember it. You were my first kiss."
My stomach began to turn again. "I was?" The only reason why I kissed Bobby back in second grade was because everyone was teasing me about not having kissed anyone yet. Bobby was one of those people, saying that he already had his first kiss with Traci Denuma. "Are you fucking kidding me, Bobby? You lied to me."
"Everyone was lying to you, Ryan. No one in our class actually had their first kiss. They were just pretending they did to sound cool."
"Jesus," I breathed out in exasperation as I fell back onto the bed. The most embarrassing moment of my life thus far could've totally been avoided if I hadn't succumb to the second grade standards. Hell, if I didn't kiss Bobby in the first place, I wouldn't be feeling what I was currently feeling.
"If it helps you feel better," he began, "there's no one else I'd rather have my first kiss with." And he was wrong because it didn't make me feel any better.
It made me feel worse.
_____
Morning came around slow. It was mostly due to the fact that I hadn't gotten much sleep because I was up all night with thoughts of Bobby. I thought about how soft and full his lips were when I kissed him for the first time, and I wondered how they'd feel now. I thought about his dick, for obvious reasons, and I thought about what would happen to our friendship now that things weren't really the same anymore.
Bobby wasn't the type to break a spit-shake; after all, he was the one who created it in the first place. But we had never shaken on something as serious as this before.
I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to preserve a nine year friendship after something like this had happened. I valued our friendship more than anything else, and I wasn't about to lose my best friend over a very satisfying, dream-fulfilling, blowjob.
As soon as the sun broke through the blinds to hit me in the face with its blinding rays, I rushed out of bed to meet my father downstairs in his office. He was always up at this time because his job required him to do a lot of paperwork that he insisted he could only get done at six in the morning. I felt bad for intruding at such an early time, but I needed to shake these thoughts, fast.
Jamie looked over his shoulder at me, and gave me a lazy smile. "Morning, Ry. Why are you up so early?"
"I have something to tell you," I said, playing with my fingers.
Jamie returned his attention to the heavy amounts of paper scattered across his desk, but he nodded to show me that he was listening. "What's going on?"
"I sucked a dick for the first time."
His pen stopped moving and his body stiffened right after those words. I saw him take a deep breath before turning his chair around to face me, giving me his full attention with his clear eyes. "Who's the lucky guy?"
"Bobby."
His eyes widened and a strange facial expression came to his face. I couldn't tell if he was happy or mad. "Bobby," he repeated as though he didn't hear me the first time, "isn't Bobby straight?"
"Yeah, he is."
Jamie smiled. "Okay."
"And now I'm really freaking out because I like him, and I think it's going to change our friendship."
He nodded, but the smile on his face stayed. "It probably will."
"Dad, you're not supposed to—" I started to whine, feeling slightly annoyed by the fact that Jamie wasn't trying to make me feel better, "—wait, you're not surprised that I like Bobby?"
"No, I already knew you did."
In the midst of trying to pour my heart out to Jamie, I could only find myself getting more frustrated. "Why does everyone know stuff before I tell them!" I cried out in a breathy whisper.
"You follow him around like a lost puppy," he said, which only made me more upset. "It's okay, I get it. Trust me, I've been there, too. Love makes you lose all sense."
My eyes fluttered shut just so I could take a large deep breath and exhale heavily. "Okay, sure, but I don't want stuff to change between us."
"Shouldn't have sucked his dick, then," he countered with a smug grin.
"Jamie!" I called out again. I noticed that I only really used his real name whenever I was frustrated with him.
"What do you want me to do about it, Ryan?" His smile faded away just as his clear eyes turned a darker color. "It's going to change the dynamic between you two. It might be for better, or it might be for worse, I don't know. But if you want things to stay the same, you'll have to act like it is the same which you're obviously failing at."
I let my head fall to the floor.
I heard Jamie sigh deeply and just mere seconds later, he grabbed onto my hands and began to rub the back of them, soothingly. "Friendships where one party is in love with the other hardly ever work out unless that party moves on. It happened with Scar and Uncle Trey, and it happened with me and Max."
"So you're saying I need to move on?"
"If you want things to stay the same."
"But Bobby—" A tear welled in my eye. Talking about my feelings for Bobby was a sensitive topic, "—I loved him for all my life. I can't just stop loving him."
"You don't need to," he said, "but you can learn to love someone else if you don't want your feelings hurt. Because Bobby will hurt your feelings if you let him."
I hated that Jamie was right. I had known Bobby for the majority of my life and had loved him for just as long, so it was hard to imagine a life where I didn't have feelings for him. He didn't even have to do much—it was the little things he'd say, or the little things he'd do that would make me fall deeper into the pit of never ending darkness that was loving Bobby. The truth was that loving him would only cause me more pain in the end.
So I needed to move on.
_____
a/n: Hey guys! This is gonna be the last frequent update for a while. I'm starting school again in a week, so I have a lot of preparation and packing to do. PLUS, I do have a few chapters of other stories that I want to update just so you guys don't complete stone me for "not updating in three years". My absence won't be long, though.
What do you think of Ryan finally moving on?
In other news, I'm so happy with the response the last chapter got. You guys are so amazing and I loved reading every single one of your comments. And the winner of last week's challenge is @riverfrostiselmer Congrats!
I hope you enjoyed this chapter and if you did, give it a vote and leave a comment! Follow me and share with your friends!
Until next time,
Lara <3