Chapter Text
It’s not that Ryan particularly enjoyed keeping secrets, it just kind of seemed to happen. He keeps to himself, so there’s never any friends he needs to tell anything to, and his parents might as well not be there at all. What would they do about knowing he likes to kiss boys? Send him off to a conversion camp, boarding school– or would they simply excommunicate him from their home. It’s not that he liked having these secrets bubble inside of his gut, threatening to burst out with any slight catalyst, but it’s the way things always were, and always will be.
Hunter has always been there, but other than that he had no appeal. They never seemed to have anything to talk about, Ryan knows that he could never bear the deepest parts of his soul to someone as stoic and boring as Hunter– but at least he’s there. He’s been sort of around since the sandbox days of grade school– throwing sand and stomping on whatever sandcastle Ryan took ages to make. Pushing him off the swings and yelling at him whenever he got the chance. It seemed odd that he was the son of a pastor, as misbehaved as he was, but Ryan never cared enough to try to learn why he acted in such a weird way. He was at every family dinner party, every time Ryan blew out his birthday candles, and every church youth group function. They seemed to be experts in silence, not necessarily awkward silence, but silence nonetheless. They saw each other all the time– what was there to ever talk about?
Under the glow of the moonlight, after some church dinner party, sixteen years old, both reeking of cologne that they stole from their respective fathers. Both dressed in polos, awkwardly trying to appear slightly more formal.
“Hey” Hunter yelled out as Ryan was walking home.
His parents too drunk to want to leave, Ryan wanting to be anywhere else. He too might have been a bit tipsy from the wine he chugged behind his parents back as they put on their plastic smiles and had their fake conversations. It was too difficult getting through those parties sober, he needed some assistance. His parents were too drunk to realize that any wine mysteriously disappeared anyway. He was alone, vulnerable, tired, walking in a weird zig-zag pattern. Ryan didn’t dare turn around, he was too exhausted to deal with whatever stupid thing Hunter wanted to yell at him about.
“Hey Ryan I’m talking to you” Hunter continued. His voice getting louder and louder.
Ryan kept walking, pretending to be oblivious. Suddenly he felt a sharp pain on his lower back. A stone hit him right above his tailbone, then bounced off landing on the asphalt.
“Hunter what the fuck” Ryan turned around. Not willing to summon the energy to yell, but still caught off guard.
“I said I was talking to you,” Hunter asserted, whilst crossing his arms.
Ryan couldn’t help but think he looked just as he did in first grade when Ryan wouldn’t give him his toy truck. Upset, demanding that he be complied to.
“Fine– what do you want?” Ryan asked, appeasing the boy.
Hunter and Ryan were about 5 feet apart, the stone sitting just a few inches in front of Ryan. Suddenly Hunter closed the gap, walking closer and closer to Ryan until he was right across from his lips. Being slightly shorter than Ryan, he looked up and grasped the back of Ryan’s blonde hair, pulling him closer to his face, and sticking his tongue in his mouth.
Ryan backed away, his eyes widening in shock.
“Hunter what–”
Hunter looked back down at the asphalt, staring at the stone that laid next to Ryan’s beat up white sneakers.
“I thought that—” Hunter trailed off, blushing profusely with embarrassment.
Ryan had never seen him like this. Bashful, bordering on ashamed. Hunter always stood tall– despite his shorter stature– never willing to let anyone tell him what he could or couldn’t do. Even to teachers, he couldn't remember the last time Hunter turned in an assignment on time. They just stood in the dark night for a moment. Hunter looking at the ground, Ryan looking at Hunter.
Fuck it
Ryan thought.
He leaned back in, tilting up Hunter's head until their lips crashed into each other. It was aggressive, the opposite of tender. They were both grasping at the back of each other’s heads, each attempting to be the stronger one. Hunter’s tongue was too aggressive, constantly hitting Ryan’s teeth in a way he didn’t enjoy, but what else was he going to do? As they separated, Ryan could smell the wine off of Hunter’s breath, and his putrid cologne. Clearly someone else also wasn’t enjoying the dinner party. Ryan had honestly never looked at Hunter more than the boy who would tear up his math homework, but in that moment he accepted something new.
It wasn’t Ryan’s first kiss, but it was Hunter’s– and maybe that meant that it should have meant more to Ryan, but he had a hard time thinking of it as anything but a one time thing. A drunken mistake in the dark of the night, pent up frustration taken out on the first cute boy Hunter saw. Ryan’s first kiss was at a church camp he was sent to after spray-painting a bathroom stall at school. His parents sent him away, thinking it would teach him respect, but really it just taught him how to find the one gay person in a crowd full of uptight-straight- Christian boys. They all might dress the same, and be stuck in the same pews, but there are key differences.
First you look for disillusionment in their eyes as the preacher is talking. Sometimes he’s ranting about the depths of hell that one will be sent to due to lust, sometimes it’s completely unrelated to Christianity and no one in the room knows what he’s talking about. Either way, Ryan first looks to see if there’s a glazed over look of boredom in their eyes. Well– actually– he first looks to see if they're attractive enough that it would even matter to him that they’re gay. Next, he looks at their hands. If they’re fidgeting or tapping, they are either fighting some immense religious guilt, or are just really bored. He can work with either. Finally, he just talks to them. Ryan knows that he’s attractive enough that the average desperate gay guy is willing to hook up with him, so he just has to pull them aside for a small chat. It could be something random, asking where the bathroom is- but sometimes Ryan really likes to have fun with it. At church camp he pulled aside a boy just to ask him if he thought Ryan could pull off the church choir robes. If their gaze slowly starts drifting down to his lips– he’s set. In the specific instance at church camp it worked quite well, as not only did the boy look down at Ryan's lips, he also said "You would look really sexy as a church choir soprano". A three step process, that can vary due to the subject, but overall has so far had a 100% success rate
Hunter caught Ryan by surprise. It could be that he seemed so unabashed and egotistical that there was no way he could be hiding anything that he could possibly be ashamed of. It could also be that Ryan never really cared about Hunter at all, so he wasn’t paying enough attention to pick up on the smaller subtle signals. Either way, he knew that their mistake in the moonlight would only happen once. They were drunk off of cheap wine, and there wasn’t any way Hunter would do that again, especially sober. Hunter could barely even look him in the eyes in class before he stuck his tongue in his mouth.
Ryan’s theory seemed to be true, when at school the following Monday they caught each other's eyes in the halls. Hunter just stood there for a second, before dipping his shoulder down and rushing towards the bathroom. Ryan put his wired earbuds back into his ears and continued walking to his next class. His head down as he weaved through various crowds of students.
His theory seemed to be true until after school, Ryan was dredging through his homework in his backyard. His parents still at work, and away at least until dinner. His cargo shorts and bedsheets hanging and flowing in the wind, drying in the Australian heat.
A stone landed in front of him, narrowly missing his foot. He looked up in confusion.
“Hey” he heard a voice say.
“What are you doing here?” Ryan asked.
Hunter took Ryan by the collar of his crisp white school uniform shirt and pulled him in, lifting him unexpectedly from the metal chair he was sitting at, causing Ryan to slightly crumple his scratch paper he was using to write geometric proofs. In a brief moment he pressed his lips against Ryan’s with the fervor of man dying of dehydration in a desert. A man who just found an oasis.
They really weren’t good at talking.