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Ryan is no longer quite the same shaken mess as he used to be, upon returning to their hotel room from a shoot. Shane remembers him quiet and sullen in the early days, showering and downing a beer or two just to send him into a dreamless sleep. Nowadays, save for the odd exception (Charleston, St Augustine), Shane has noticed that Ryan’s relief to have finished a shoot tends to burst out of him in excited giggles and chatter, the promise of a late-night taco right there on the horizon with the rising sun.
Despite this, their wind-down ritual is very much the same as it always was: Post-shoot feast at the nearest drive-thru before rolling back to the hotel with the crew. In the room, they take turns showering if needed, changing into more comfortable clothes, chatting quietly. Shane turns on the TV, volume down low, and they fall asleep in the same bed, next to each other.
Shane has never been the best at expressing himself — not just with feelings but with words. He stumbles over the big things, because he’s too careful, overly aware of all the ways he could fuck up, with just one thoughtless sentence.
He remembers 4am in Atchison, the quiet drive back to the Holiday Inn where there was a room for them. Ryan was quiet in the elevator, tired but so painfully lucid and on edge that it had been painful just to stand near him.
“Are you gonna be okay?” Shane asked him in the room, and Ryan nodded.
“Sure,” he said, unconvincingly, already making his way towards the bathroom. “I’m gonna take a shower.”
“Wash the demon off,” Shane joked, aiming for light and then wincing at the way Ryan closed the bathroom door a little too loudly. Too soon, he thought to himself. When Ryan emerged, ten minutes later, he hadn’t looked much better, and Shane— well, he did the only thing he could think of.
“You wanna sleep here?” he asked, instead of ‘are you okay?’. Ryan was clearly not okay.
“Your bed?” Ryan frowned, visibly confused.
“Yeah, I just thought— you wanted to be closer, earlier, in the house.”
I’m gonna get closer to you, I don’t care.
Ryan, shifting from one foot to the other, looked over warily at where Shane was already tucked under the covers on the left side of the bed, closest to the door.
“And you’re okay with that?” Ryan asked.
“Yeah, if it makes you feel better,” Shane replied, flatly. “You’re my friend, Ryan. It’s okay.”
Seconds of painful silence.
“Okay,” Ryan said, eventually, taking a step towards the bed. “Alright. Thank you.”
They managed to grab a few restless hours of sleep before their flight home, and that was that.
It took several trips and many shared beds for Shane to realize that Ryan slept better in rooms with noisy aircon, some kind of white noise to soothe his mind, which was when he decided to start turning the TV on, letting Ryan drift off to a sitcom laugh track, tucked in next to Shane.
Somewhere along the way, after maybe the twentieth or thirtieth hotel room, Shane woke up wrapped around Ryan and couldn’t remember when exactly that had started happening, just that it was normal now.
(Which brings us back to the present.)
Shane pulling back the covers, Ryan climbing in beneath and curling right up, not a moment of hesitation. Shivers loosened from his shoulders, the line of his back soft as he tucks in, a relaxed kind of Ryan that few people get to see as often as Shane does.
He thinks, this has to mean something. Right?
“What’s in this for you?” he finds himself asking, apropos of nothing at all. Ryan will understand. He always does.
The silence isn’t so painful this time.
“It’s—” Ryan sighs, but not heavy or put-upon in a way that would make Shane think he’s upset, or mad at Shane for wanting to talk about this. ‘I don’t know. You’re, you’re safe. You’re like my safety blanket.”
“I think you’re muddling safety net and security blanket,” Shane says, and he’s not sure why he’s being pedantic now of all times. There’s no camera, no audience to put on a show for. He doesn’t need to goad Ryan into some snarky retort.
You’re friends, he reminds himself, as he’s reminded Ryan so many times before. It’s okay to get real sometimes.
“Maybe,” Ryan says, already half asleep, his face turned in towards Shane’s arm. Shane can’t bring himself to look down at him, but he feels the minute movements of Ryan’s stifled yawn, the edge of Ryan’s jaw against his skin. “Means the same thing to me. You’ve got my back.”
Shane sighs, tucking his chin just over the crown of Ryan’s head. His hand curls into the back of Ryan’s shirt.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got you.”