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Ray’s beginning to get used to waiting in Bobby’s bedroom while the others are all busy.
It still feels sort of wrong, to spend an hour or two alone in Trevor Wilson’s mansion by himself, sprawling out on a California King that has no business belonging to a teenager and helping himself to coffees from the machine in the kitchen that’s probably worth than Ray’s amassed worldly belongings.
He is acclimatising, though.
Having a front door key helps him feel like he belongs there, even if it also makes him feel a little bit like he seduced the son of a rock star in order to gain access to his house.
Not that essentially stalking said rockstar’s son to look at his girlfriend’s graffiti really counts as seduction, but the guilty feeling in his stomach stays.
It’s soothed, at least a little, by the expression Bobby has every single time he opens his bedroom door to find Ray sat on his bed, typing frantically on the shitty laptop he and Rose share, trying to complete an assignment for class while he can borrow Bobby’s WiFi. The expression isn’t really that noticeable, not when Bobby has the expressive range of a brick wall, but Ray knows what it means by now, the quirk in his eyebrows and the soft exhale of breath, like thank god you’re here.
He has that expression now, bedroom door half open and school bag still in hand. It’s one of those ridiculously pretentious leather messenger bags. Willie makes it look scholarly and appropriate, but it always just looks like it’s weighing Bobby down.
“You’re here,” Bobby says flatly, hanging his bag on the hook on the back of his door.
“I’m always here on a Wednesday,” Ray reminds him, saving his word document at least five million times before he trusts it’s actually safe to close his laptop. “How was school?”
Bobby makes an uncharacteristic noise of frustration. “‘Sucked,” he mumbles throwing himself face down onto the bed next to Ray.
“Aw, Tesoro.” Ray automatically goes to soothe him, running his fingers through Bobby’s hair. “What happened, lindo?”
Bobby sighs, not his usual release of tension, but this time heavy and petulant, like a little kid trying to remind an adult he’s annoyed. He rolls onto his back after a moment, pressing his cheek against Ray’s thigh. “Fuckin’- I mean, stupid teacher. She wanted us all to read these passages aloud from the book we’re studying, which is fine, but then she kept commenting on pace and pronunciation and she told this one kid off for stammering and by the time she got to me I just knew it was gonna go badly, and then it did! She kept looking at me like she thought I was stupid, which is fair I guess, what seventeen year old can’t even read? And then it took me forever because I was nervous so it got harder and then she made some dumb comment about me holding everyone up and I just wanna drop out. ”
It’s probably the most Ray has ever heard him say in one go. Bobby doesn’t really try to hide things, but he’s concise, efficient with his words, and it’s often hard to figure out how he feels about what he’s saying. He doesn’t get like this, speaking quickly and with a whiny tone that conveys how genuinely upset he is about the issue.
“I’m sorry, baby, that sounds really tough,” Ray says, mind whirring as he tries to figure out how to handle this new side of Bobby. He doesn’t know whether to just let him vent, like Rose would want, or try to offer solutions, like Willie would want.
Bobby makes a muffled noise of agreement, his arm now tossed over his face. He makes another series of muffled noises, like he’s talking under his arm.
Ray brushes a stray bit of hair off of his forehead. “Mi amor, you know I can’t hear you like that.”
Bobby heaves another huge, petulant sigh and moves his arm. “I wanna drop out,” he repeats. “I wanna be, like… a builder, or something. I liked Bob the Builder. I bet I could do that. Nobody would care that my reading sucks, or that I don’t like people. They’d just give me my bricks and some cement - and probably one of those cool cement mixer thingies - and let me go about my day. I could build houses, or other buildings or whatever - which is honestly an awesome job, how many people can say they build a whole house? And then I’d have big arms, so I could finally beat Rosie in an arm wrestle, and- and I wouldn’t have to go to school.”
Ray knows, categorically, that there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Trevor Wilson will let his only son drop out of high school to become a builder. Trevor Wilson probably wouldn’t let his only son become a builder even if he’d finished college and then gone on to get a fucking pHD. Still, he can see Bobby ending up in construction, finally putting on some decent weight instead of staying at his near-worrying bird-boned runner’s build, no longer coming home frustrated with himself and sick of everything, but instead proud of himself and what he’d done with the day. It’s sort of heartbreaking, really. “I bet you’d be great at that.”
For a moment, Bobby looks like he thinks Ray’s making fun of him, but then his face relaxes into something that looks so damn hopeful that Ray wants to burn Trevor Wilson’s musical empire down to the fucking ground. “Really?”
Ray hopes his voice doesn’t sound too obviously choked up. He’s never really seen Bobby like this, petulant and hopeful and so obviously a kid in a way he never is the rest of the time. The first time they’d met, Ray had actually thought Bobby was older than him, maybe a vaguely malnourished but overly confident twenty two or twenty three, not seventeen and so severely emotionally neglected that it took something like a month to even see the kid smile. “Yeah, darlin’. I think you’d be great at that. Considering what you built with just gingerbread and icing, you’d be a force to be reckoned with if you had some real supplies.”
It would probably have landed somewhere on the side of way too fucking patronising normally. Bobby’s not exactly the kind of guy who likes, or even gets, many compliments, and he tends to bristle when he gets them, flustered and defensive as he grapples with how to process them. Now, though, he just beams at Ray, smile huge and toothy and somewhere near comical. It’s something close to the best thing Ray’s seen in his damn life.
It’s sort of worrying on level, that this is a whole new side to his boyfriend that Ray hasn’t seen even a hint of, but it’s hard to focus on that when Bobby’s wrapping blankets around the pair of them and laying with his head on Ray’s chest, letting out a tiny little sigh of relief once he’s finally comfortable.
“You okay?” Ray asks after a moment, just because it feels like the responsible thing to do.
Instead of the usual brusque fine or sarcastic never better, what he gets is Bobby’s eyes closing as he nods half heartedly, and a quiet hum of assent.
It’s the first time Ray’s ever believed he actually is fine.