“ i dunno, princess, why don’t you tell me why you decided to take up shop in a town so fuckin’ small that if i stand in the middle and turn around in a circle, i can see the whole thing? then maybe there’d be a different shop for me to work in. i’m a man of limited skills. ” really, he had many practical skills that he could probably turn into jobs in this shithole town full of people with no fucking practical skills—don’t get him started on the witches or, god forbid, the vampires—but he liked working in the shop, liked getting his hands dirty, liked the gentle purr of a car when it started after a repair, good as new. his lips twitched upward into something that almost resembled a smirk. almost. “ just think, i was starting to get the impression you liked the smell of motor oil. ”

damn. he really didn’t enjoy losing a point of argument. that was a good point, it’s not like there was a pep boys down the street that wyatt could just drop a resume off to. he opened his mouth, closed it, scratched at his stubble in a bit of frustration. “maybe you should expand your skill set,” he said, settling on avoiding the point altogether. expand his skill set, even as adam was fully aware that when it came to practical skills wyatt was the better of the two. his microwave and shower were evidence enough of that. what kind of day was it today? his eyes flicked out the window, to the slight overcast. soothing, then. he picked up the blue bottle of cologne and dabbed a bit on his wrist, then touched it behind his ear.

he gave a grunt of acknowledgment—or more like disbelief. mhm. sometimes it was just easier to communicate in sounds and monosyllables; all that extra shit overcomplicated everything. he shrugged, but make no mistake; he wasn’t buying whatever adam was selling for a second—it was clear in the arch of his eyebrow “ think of it this way, princess, guys like me work in greasy mold-infested hole in the walls so you don’t have to. ”

sure, adam sounded indifferent. ‘course. but wyatt, despite common belief, was not a fucking idiot, and when somebody casually mentioned something to you all the goddamn time, they weren’t indifferent about it. he hummed in acknowledgment, a low rumble in his chest, and then, “ sure, and there are other places you can piss on if you’re getting territorial. ”

if the cognac had anything to do about it, mason probably would talk, but ryan had long since learned how to gently ease onto the gas so the car didn’t jerk forward and how to just lean on the brakes so they didn’t lurch into a stop; delicate conversations weren’t much different. “yes, god, i can’t believe i’d forgotten about that,” he said, grin already spreading, the ghost of quiet laughter behind his words. “have i ever told you that sometimes all your cautionary digging leads to more trouble than it’s worth? because it does. i can’t count how many times we must’ve jumped to some wild conclusion over the disastrous results of your google searches.”  

but he let himself revel in the memory—there’d been nothing to revel about at the time, of course, what with the four of them picking apart what they thought might be the hidden signs of their parents’ failing marriage, who they would end up living with, if maybe someone had had an affair. but there’d been hundreds, maybe thousands of other midnight meetings like that one, talking about college or life or girls ( or boys ) or, even earlier, waiting for jake to pass out on the deck chairs while pretending to wait for santa so that they could help mom and dad set up the christmas gifts. all that came to a full stop, however, when mason uttered the word dumped. dumped. “wait, what?” that only had one meaning, right? ryan hadn’t fallen so out of touch with the kids that ‘ i got dumped ’ suddenly meant something else, right? “you got dumped? i didn’t even know there was a potential dumper in the picture, dude, or a pre-dumping. who—” he shook his head quickly. not the point. no point in asking if mason was okay, either; that answer was fairly obvious. “what happened?”

“you have.” and for the record, he knew. he knew he was paranoid and he knew that nine times out of ten he was being entirely ridiculous. but to him, that one time he wasn’t was worth looking like an ass the other nine times. “sure didn’t pay off that time.” he wondered briefly if their parents had divorced, maybe they’d still be alive. 

silly. that was definitely the liquor talking. he finished the glass, downed the last gulp and then closed his eyes. the buzz was stronger now, and he knew that if he pushed off of this bar to stand up, he’d waver a bit before he got his balance. it was a good level of buzz. a good place to stop. he poured more into the glass. “i was going to tell you...this weekend, actually,” he said, scoffing, the timing not lost on him. he rarely introduced his family to the people he dated. mostly because his family was important to him, and commitment was hard for him, and sharing the people he cared about the most meant it was....real. 

“ good to know. i’d be pretty miffed if all this time you were doing this without so much as an invitation. and you know how i hate to use the word miffed. ” the tease was warm and light, but the subtext remained: ryan wanted to know when mason dropped by unannounced, regardless of the hour; wanted mason to know, even more importantly, that ryan would always be around to talk, no matter how cryptic he needed to be ( or felt he needed to be, ryan could never be sure ) about the details of his life. of all of them, mason had always been the hardest to keep up with by several orders of magnitude, and ryan didn’t want to sound like an old grandma or anything but damn, he worried. “ eh, it’s just a glass. i’m not even going to remember it’s gone. ” he opened the drawer cabinet that housed his trashcan, one of those weird little symbols of his new life as a suburban domestic, and dumped the shards. no harm, no foul. 

ah, yes. there it was. ryan couldn’t help his wry half-grin, his airy snort; with mason, unforthcoming was an understatement. “ it’s cool, i was half-awake anyway. pour me one, and we can talk about it. or not talk about it, your call. ” he took a glass ( and the bottle, because who knew if they’d be looking for a refill later ) and with his elbow nudged open the sliding glass door to his back porch—the designated spot for any meaningful late-night conversation since he was a teenager. ( and not only because he sometimes smoked cigarettes when he drank, and ryan had had more than his fair share of deep talks about life out here, or on his parents’ back porch, accompanied by an entire bottle of bourbon and chain smoking nearly an entire pack—something about staring out over the lake, he’d noticed, made people more honest. ) “ so, rough couple of hours, ” he said, settling into a seat at the bar he and his friends had built together, “ any jail time involved? ”

“don’t want to talk about it.” mason was always very careful with his words. did he want to talk about it? no, god, he really fucking did not. but would he?...probably. did he need to?...probably. he sat on one of the chairs outside, one that he had claimed back when ryan had first gotten the place—unspoken, but absolutely his spot. he had his claim all over the house. his spot on the couch, his preferred stool on the island. after their parents died, everything felt...upheaved. and he never told ryan, because he rarely said anything out loud, but the steady comfort this house had eventually provided had helped them all. “do you remember when we were sure mom and dad were going to get a divorce because of that message from jim anderson on the answering machine and when i looked him up he was a divorce attorney? so we had that middle-of-the-night-under-cover-of-darkness family meeting with the four of us out on the porch to talk about it but then jake started crying and mom woke up and had to prove to us that jim wasn’t her divorce attorney he was just an old friend of dad’s who had reached out?” 

all things considered, ryan shouldn’t have been so comfortable with the thought ( never mind the evidence ) of someone more or less breaking into his house. but he’d always had an open door policy with his friends, and certainly more so with his brothers, and, well. their parents’ murder had happened in the middle of the day, anyway. so the sound of shattering glass didn’t send him bolting down the stairs in a panic, didn’t leave him in a cold sweat; no, he only sighed deeply and took a few mental bets on which of his brothers had broken something this time. ninety-nine percent, especially if it happened in the middle of the night? his money was on ty, but for some reason, today he’d convinced himself it was jake’s fault. lord knows what that kid got himself into these days.

maybe he’d leave it for tomorrow. he could deal with it tomorrow, right?

ugh, no. he’d definitely forget. or someone would injure themselves. probably jake, trying to clean up his damn mess. with a groan, he pulled himself out of bed, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, and padded downstairs, only to find mason in his kitchen, cradling glass shards and looking… lost. well. there went those twenty bucks, to whoever. “ shit, man. ” he nabbed the dustpan from the closet of assorted cleaning supplies and squat down on his haunches, sweeping up the glass shards with the small brush attached. “ rough night, or are you always in the habit of drinking alone in my kitchen at oh dark thirty? ”

“—wouldn’t call it a habit,” he said, frowning down at the pieces in his hand. he’d had the urge to break a glass earlier, when he was drunkenly enabling dramatic visions of launching a cup into the wall in a stunning display of fury, like tom cruise or ben affleck. but this cup he’d broken on accident, and it wasn’t nearly as satisfying. not to mention it wasn’t his and now he owed ryan a new cup. “i’ll replace it.”

he would have skipped the glass, but this was not his bottle of cognac. and he could have gone home, back to his own apartment, but it was hard to push his key in the lock when he knew there were things on the other side that would remind him of what he’d just royally fucked up. the plates on the small table with the muffin he hadn’t finished, the extra make up she kept at his place spread all over the bathroom counter, the book she was halfway through that was still on his nightstand. tomorrow, he’d deal with all of those things. but tonight his emotional capacity had been far exceeded and he sought recovery at the bottom of this bottle, in his brother’s house, where nothing reminded him of her and everything reminded him of family. 

PRESENTING: the mood board that no one asked for, ft. do people still do these things?