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Naim doesn’t hand the joint back after he takes a hit, which violates the principle rule of sharing a joint. Ryan’s eyes flicker, vaguely crossed over Naim’s slightly hollowed cheeks as he inhales before the smoke comes streaming back from between his lips. They’re thin, pale like the rest of him, and now that he’s gotten a brief taste of them against his, Ryan thinks he actually wants to take the joint so it frees up Naim’s mouth, not because he cares about smoking.
“Starin’,” Naim observes, coolly taking a third drag.
The mill is quiet around them save for the occasional whistle of wind against rusted metal, displaced dust and sand resettling against new surfaces including the pads of their fingers. Ryan rolls his pointer and thumb against each other, opening them only to receive the joint Naim finally offers.
His head buzzes like a single fly in an empty room. It only yields dull suggestions and incomplete thoughts rather than the typical onslaught of overlapping, unfinished dialogues that run through Ryan’s head on the regular. No voices but his own, and even that sounds a little muddy, like he’s thinking from underwater.
The single fly darts around, always winding back to Naim.
Ryan likes him. He likes him more than anything in Bandee, anything he’s briefly seen outside of Bandee’s restrictive, intangible borders that say once you come here, you cannot leave. I will absorb you and spit you out cold and rigid. That’s what believing in God does to them.
Naim had summed it up a few moments before this, idling around the subject of his mother while Ryan sucked smoke into his lungs. “We did a lot of puzzles together. She’s actually really funny,” he’d divulged. “Less funny though, since we moved to this shithole. Remember the frog we saw in the snake’s mouth? The first time we came here?”
“Yeah.”
Naim looks down, wistful and sad in the way he gets more and more often when his angry shell cracks open. He looks like he hates this town more than anything. Ryan knows he does, knows he’s selfish for wanting Naim to hate it just a little less.
“My dad had a pet frog. Not the same kind— like a tree frog. I hated to hold it when I was small. Thing was so sticky.” Naim shrugs, makes a pinching motion until Ryan surrenders the joint. “Held it a lot after he died though. Frog went soon after.”
“Sorry, mate,” murmurs Ryan, unsure what to do with this information, the image of Naim, a year off from now, cradling a dead amphibian in his hands and a dead father in his conscience.
Naim shakes his head. “My mum kept a garden, too. I miss it. Used to sit there—” He kicks haphazardly at a shard of gravel near his shoe. “Watch the cars drive by and the younger kids play. I’d draw, pick the flowers 'til she snapped at me. Helped her tend to it eventually.” Naim smiles a little. “Liked doing so a lot. You should’ve seen it in the summer. We made it look really nice.”
He swallows, wishing his mouth wasn’t so dry. “You could plant a garden here.”
“Soil’s shit,” Naim returns, handing back the joint and leaning overtly into Ryan’s space. His lips graze Ryan’s jaw and he can’t help a shiver.
That’s when they stopped talking, when Ryan took a hit and handed the joint back. When Naim claimed overship of it, eyelids heavier over his eyes, sclera stained in red. His mouth eases into a smile that doesn’t wipe off. Ryan feels his own doing the same. It’s nice when they get to the end of the joint, get all bogged down and honest.
“Shouldn’t’ve said that, about my mum,” Naim murmurs, when Ryan doesn’t take the bait about him staring.
Ryan shakes his head. “No, I—” His hand chafes against his clothes when he squeezes his own thigh as if he could grip the moment and refuse it permission to slip through his fingers. “—Like listenin’ to you talk.”
Naim takes him in, eyebrows twitching inward as he processes. He’s still smiling. “And you like staring.”
“Can’t help it,” Ryan answers, putting the joint out and stamping it with his shoe, grinding it into fine dust on the floor. Naim’s eyes skirt over to it and he exhales through his nose, pillowing his head on his palm.
He starts to giggle. Ryan watches, beguiled. Naim laughs, oddly high little rasps that travel up from his ribs to spill from his lips. He shakes his head. “Sorry— I don’t even know what’s funny,” he manages, through smaller peals of breathless laughter, as if he doesn’t do this every time.
Ryan goes to say as much when the abrupt press of slightly dry lips stops him. Then he’s tasting what they smoked from the subtle coating it left on Naim’s lips and tongue. Earthy and a bit damp, pressed behind his teeth like Naim’s laying a claim on him. His own eyes slide all the way shut and his shoulders relax. He kisses Naim like he’s caving in around him, cupping his face to keep him here, right here. The smaller wriggles between Ryan’s legs, happily pressing the insides of Ryan’s knees to his own hips, kisses turning hungry. He nips at Ryan’s lip and swallows the hey it warrants in response.
All things considered, it’s soft.
Under his shirt is a dusting of purple and blue. Miniature kisses from the sharper ends of rocks and knuckles. His older brother, his father, the priest’s son. Everything, everyone he’s ever let lay a hand on him has left a bruise. Naim has only ever left a bruise with his lips. Ryan didn’t know it could be like this, without pain.
Naim’s palm falls to his zipper. Ryan nods, frantically, his breath thinning against Naim’s lips. He says please, then gets his own hand under Naim’s waistband.
They didn’t have a lot of days like that. Not as many as Ryan wanted, at least. But when the school year ended and summer came, maybe they’d have every day. Or maybe Naim would graduate and leave like he’s always wanted to. Ryan doesn’t think he’ll leave. In a strange, saddening way that gives him a sinking feeling, he thinks he’ll die here. He doesn’t know how to be anywhere else, except maybe the mill in the brief hours he spends there, Naim in his proximity like a moon in his orbit.
The dull buzzing in his brain doesn’t quiet after the ritual. In fact, it gets much worse. He had felt the acrid bile rush up his throat, spurt from between his lips, and coat his face as he jerked involuntarily in his own pile of vomit. Ryan had stared stoically ahead as his mother wiped it away with a rag later on that evening, murmuring on about how this is a cleansing Ryan, these urges are too complicated for your age. You don’t know what you really want. It’s okay to be confused. We’ll help you find your way.
For the first time in his life, he actually doesn’t feel confused at all.
He hasn’t seen Hunter in days. They haven’t spoken. Ryan doesn’t know what there is to say. They didn’t speak much before, just hauled stones at each other from across the yard. He saw Naim at the servo and abandoned the soda he’d been filling. He doesn’t know what to say to him either aside from stay away. If there’s anybody he wants to protect from this hurt, it’s Naim. Though he’d felt hopeless, betrayed, for a split second when Naim turned tail and ran from the ritual, he’d also felt relief so strong it could’ve broken his bones.
It isn’t him who gives in to the gnawing desire to see Naim. Naim does first, comes striding into his backyard the exact way Hunter used to, eyes brighter and more hopeful than Ryan thinks he’s ever seen them.
Ryan freezes, hands going still mid-motion pinning up a shirt to dry. He doesn’t know how long Naim has been standing there when he finally sees him, given the bird didn’t cry out in her cage at his arrival. He’s in a crisp white shirt, similar to the one Ryan’s wearing, with his jacket from school thrown on over it. His hair’s a little out of place like the wind had dragged fingers through it.
“You can’t be here,” Ryan says, though his voice shakes on the way out and his resistance wavers like a single dandelion in the breeze, shedding wishes by the second. “I told you, not here.”
Naim huffs, the levity on his face dropping into something startlingly flat. “You haven’t come to the mill in ages,” he retorts. “I had to come here if I wanted to see you.”
Ryan blinks, gesturing helplessly toward the windows of his house, just meters away. “They’ll see us.”
“No one’s home, Ryan,” says Naim, extraordinarily cool in a way he usually isn’t. He seems so reassured when he takes another step forward into Ryan’s space. “Hey, it’s okay.”
Ryan can’t look away, not when Naim’s eyes are this close. Not when he’s finally getting to smell the slight tinge of lavender in Naim’s laundry detergent, the bite of cedar in the smell of his deodorant. Naim contemplates his face and hums sadly, tilting his head. Ryan can feel something crack open in his chest, a deep-seated want to be vulnerable. It’s the umpteenth time he’s wanted to cry since the ritual, but the first he’s wanted to do so in front of Naim.
And Naim, damn him, seems to sense it like a bloodhound.
“Ryan,” he says again, voice as delicate as a spiderweb. “It’s just us.”
“You’re sure there’s no one here,” Ryan murmurs, voice small. “You’re sure?”
“Yes.” Naim reaches and lays a hand on Ryan’s cheek.
His eyes slip shut so quickly. Fuck.
“Okay.” Ryan rubs his cheek against Naim’s hand, his palm, soft as a babe’s. “Okay,” he says again, turning even as it pains him to let Naim out of his sight when he’s just reappeared. After several nights of missing him so desperately, it’s almost like he’s prayed for an angel that’s finally arrived. “Come inside.”
Naim breaks into a smile, falls into step beside him. His bird cries out in her cage and only he flinches. So they’ve finally found a thing Naim’s not scared of, then, he thinks.
“This is what you do when you have free time,” Naim ribs. “Your whole family’s laundry?”
Ryan shakes his head, murmuring a fuck off.
“Too cool to talk to anyone else in the school hallways, to even give me a passing fuckin’ glance,” Naim goes on. “But whole time, you’re just thinking about all the laundry you’re gonna do later.”
“Oh my god.” Ryan rolls his eyes, pushes open his door, and steps inside. He lets it swing behind him but Naim catches it with an outstretched hand.
He laughs again. He only laughs this much when he’s high. Ryan knows that can’t be true, though. Naim wouldn’t know the first place to get weed in Bandee— Ryan’s always the one who brings it.
Naim looks around Ryan’s kitchen, white tiles yellowed with age and more than a little grout, the three mugs hanging from hooks beside the fridge. One for him, his father, his brother. His mother and sister didn’t drink coffee. His father’s mug was white, stained at the lip from years of drip coffee, and his brother’s black, shiny and deceivingly new-looking for how well it’s washed every time. Ryan’s had been intended to be blue but with every rinse in the dishwasher, lost a layer. It sits at the end of the row, small and purple. Dented.
Patterned placemats sit at their rectangular table, a single dish and candle alone in the center. It smells of juniper and mint and always singes his nosehairs when lit. Ryan’s contemplated pinching the flame between his fingers to put it out some nights, but his mother likes the smell.
Naim drags the tip of his finger over the back of a chair. “You sit here?” He asks slowly, jerking his chin down at it. “Man of the house?”
“No,” Ryan says. “My father. Then my brother, here.” He points. “I’m on the other side.”
“Me and my mum don’t eat together anymore,” Naim observes. “House is so quiet, y’know. It’s why I came over here.”
His chest soars, then tightens. Naim can’t be here. Not for long. Every second is too long, regardless of Naim’s new and unfounded naivety they won’t get caught. They can’t risk it.
Naim just about reads his mind, turning and walking through Ryan’s house like he’s been before, straight to the front door. “Let’s go somewhere.”
Ryan darts ahead, if only to open the door for him. “You want to go out somewhere?”
“Yeah. Let’s go— hm. Let’s go to the rink.”
He laughs. “No, Naim. Come on. There’s gonna be loads of people there.”
They continue through his front yard, Naim’s hands happily nestled in his jacket’s pockets as he argues. His voice tumbles over itself in his eagerness to push every word out of his mouth. Ryan kicks himself for not being happier. He thinks, maybe, that when the healer’s lighter went out, the wrong thing died in him. “We’ll be discreet. What, you think they won’t just assume we’re friends?”
Ryan shrugs, opens the gate for Naim too and watches him shyly grin before he passes through, ducking a little like he’s embarrassed to be shown chivalry. It’s sweet. He is sweet. Ryan wishes, for Naim’s sake, that he never moved here, and then for his own sake, that Naim never leaves.
“Nobody wants to be my friend,” Ryan points out. Not now, not ever. “There’s frog guts on one of my shirts. We’ve tried to wash out the stains. They won’t go.”
Naim levels him with a stare, his pace not slowing. He matches Ryan with perfect sync step for step. It’s… nice, a little, to walk together the routes they’ve only walked apart or biked home alone from. Ryan stares at him right back, doesn’t shrink away when a car passes by.
“You don’t want them anyway, do you,” asks Naim. “You spend your time with me.” His smile saddens. “Or you used to.”
Ryan’s been waking up to be sick on the occasions he actually does sleep. He wakes up drenched in his own sweat and so cold, scared to death he’s about to start shaking and spitting up again. And though he doesn’t, not like on the floor of the church, he winds up clinging to the toilet, the smell of the placid water dragging the nausea from his gut until he weakly flushes and walks himself back to bed. Purging sin, he would think, watching as the sky paled from black into blue like a giant bruise healing, and then, is this what holiness feels like?
Sometimes, before he has to get himself up for school, he imagines Naim there. In this imagination, they just talk. Back and forth. Kiss a little. Sometimes more, but less so lately. It’s so mortifying, so pathetic it almost makes him sick again. But he does. Even now, he just wants Naim.
“It’s not you,” Ryan assures him, voice firm. “I’m trying to keep you safe. I don’t want— what happened—” His voice gets thick. He stops talking.
Naim’s eyes flicker over his face. “They want you to be scared,” he states. “You realize that. You’re doin’ exactly what they want.”
His heart sinks. He chokes, feeling the same sort of nauseous he does when he’s awoken in the night. He purses his lips and walks faster. The rink is in the distance, parking lot quite barren actually, and through the open doors he can hear the opening beats of a pop song overplayed on the radio stations.
“You don’t have anything to say to that,” pipes up Naim behind him.
Ryan’s eyes harden. He turns around. “I’m not scared.”
Naim snorts. He runs a hand through his hair, flattening it. “Okay. Sure, mate.”
“I’m not,” he insists. “I’m trying to do the right thing, here—”
“—The right thing.” Naim laughs, sharp and humorless and unhappy. “The right thing is sitting and letting everyone at school treat you like you’re scum? Keeping your eyes down?” He’s taken his hands out of his pockets to swing around as he talks. “ I hate it. I fuckin’ hate watching them do that to you.”
It stings like a stone knocking against his ribcage. A hand to the face. The slap of his body wrenching itself back into the wooden floor like a fish flopping into sea, cold and frothing at the mouth.
Ryan sighs. “You still wanna go in,” he asks. “Or keep chewin’ me out?”
Naim inclines his head. “I wanna go in.”
He switches up almost immediately when they walk in. Naim’s face lights up. He knocks his shoulder against Ryan’s like he hadn’t just verbally eviscerated him right outside. “Got change in your pocket?”
Ryan stares at him, dumbfounded. “I don’t understand what’s going on. One second, you’re mad, the next, you’re… you’re normal again. Is something wrong?”
Naim whirls around, leaning a hip against the claw machine. Nearby, two girls shriek and skate. The sound of wheels rolling against hardwood rush through his ears as Naim speaks, Ryan’s heartbeat thumping impossibly loud between each word.
“You’re gonna make me say it out loud,” Naim says, flatly. He bites on the inside of his cheek and his eyes shift around the room before tracing their way back to Ryan. “Fuck. I like you.”
Ryan’s palms start sweating. His shirt turns from slightly restrictive to every slight wrinkle feeling like a papercut. He makes a choked sound of disbelief.
“What?”
Naim grins. “I’m trying to cheer you up by takin’ you out here. You said you liked coming here that one time. You won your sister a platypus.” Naim thumps his fist on the claw machine. “We can go back to the mill if you want,” he adds, shoulders climbing to his ears as doubt encroaches on his tone. “But, I dunno, I thought maybe we could get some pictures in the booth. To have. Just us, you know?”
Ryan could cry. Genuinely. Not because he’s sad, or scared. Not at all. He bursts into a smile so wide his cheeks sting.
“You’re serious,” he marvels.
Naim stiffens, face pinkening. “I wouldn’t fucking lie about this, Ryan.”
“You like me,” Ryan says, positively giddy.
Naim’s face goes red.
He lifts a hand from his side to point at the photobooth. “About the photos—”
“Fuck the photos,” Ryan laughs. “You like me.”
Naim starts walking toward the booth. He looks over his shoulder, eyes twinkling. “Are you gonna say it back, dickhead?”
Ryan bats the curtain out of their way and follows him in, savoring the way they have to squish their bodies in, their sides fitting against each other. Naim’s thigh bends over Ryan’s knee. One of his lanky arms gets swallowed by Ryan’s chest and bicep. Naim looks similarly thrilled, lips wavering as if he's testing his confidence. He’s still blushing.
“I’ll say it back if you smile real pretty,” he says to Naim’s lips, digging in his pockets for spare coins.
Naim goes still, like he’s too stubborn to give in to the kiss he so obviously wants. “Say please.”
Ryan exhales over Naim’s lips, then leans past them to press a soft kiss to the side of his neck. He noses down to his Adam’s apple, kisses there, and then looks back up at Naim, lips on the other side of his throat now. “Please.”
Naim’s half-hard between them. Even if Ryan couldn’t feel it pressed up against his hip, he’d see it in the light streaming into the photobooth. He pauses, listens in around them. Footsteps and skates and faded music, none of it very close. His palm comes up and he unabashedly gropes Naim’s cock through his pants.
Naim sucks in a breath. His eyes flash.
“You’re okay, it’s okay,” Ryan says softly. “Place is fuckin’ dead.”
Naim nods, gives a hitched little whine before he rolls his hips into Ryan’s hand. Ryan leans in to rub their noses together, imbued with confidence, and slots the coins from his pocket into the machine with his free hand. It crawls back to Naim’s jaw and turns him toward the screen. Ryan kisses his lips, savoring the moan breathed into his mouth before he pulls back.
“Smile.”
Naim does. It’s a cute thing flushed with nerves and shaky with the sort of hesitant joy currently strung between them. The pictures start to flash. Ryan leans back in to kiss him properly.
Naim backs himself into the wall, resisting.
“You scared?” Ryan asks, stopping when he senses this isn’t wanted.
“Yeah. A little.”
Ryan nods. “You wanna go?”
Naim bites his lip. “No.”
“It’s okay,” Ryan says again, the words settling over Naim like warm clothes fresh from the dryer. His posture relaxes. His cock fills out under Ryan’s hand.
He gazes between them before lifting his chin again, heart thudding in anticipation. “You want me to take it out?”
“Don’t say it like that,” Naim chastises, then— “yes.”
“Stand up,” Ryan says, voice deeper. His gut burns hot with arousal. They’d done this all before, but in the booth, like this, with not even a door separating them let alone miles of grassy land, is exhilarating. He likes it. He likes Naim, so much. Yeah— likes him like snakes like to devour frogs. He shuffles along the small booth, getting one of his legs awkwardly on the ground to support himself while Naim scrambles upward.
Ryan’s hand runs up his thigh. Naim lets loose a single needy giggle and swipes a hand from his own dark hair down his face. “Ryan,” he gasps. “This is mental.” Then he jerks his hips into the air without Ryan even laying a hand on him.
“You’re so hard for it,” he teases, popping the button on Naim’s pants and eliciting a strained sigh. “Bet you’re wet, too,” he adds, words slurring together with iron hot need.
Naim is like touching a hot stove. Ryan is all too happy to be burned, and burned, and burned. He’s lit on fire as he tugs Naim’s pants down his thighs, brushes his lips along the dripping head of his cock.
“Ngh—oh, God,” Naim whines before he shoves his fist in his mouth. He does it even at the mill, where nobody can hear them.
Ryan snickers, taking just the tip between his lips and bobbing his head while he digs for the few coins he knows he’s got knocking around his pockets still.
He’d been right. Naim is wet, drooling down the back of Ryan’s tongue and his throat, salty and perfect. Ryan’s kneeled plenty in his life, but this is the only time when it’s felt like there’s a purpose in doing it.
Naim mumbles something. Ryan pulls back, thumbing a few quarters as he looks up at him.
“What?”
“Your shirt.”
“You want it off?” Ryan asks.
“I’m not asking. I’m telling you to take it off,” clarifies Naim.
Ryan pouts. “You won’t do it, too? Just me?”
Naim flicks his forehead. “I’ve got my pants off. I’m trying to even us up.”
“Fine.”
Ryan sits back on his heels, slots another few coins into the machine, and all but tears his shirt in his eagerness to get it off in time. His necklace resettles with a soft clink against his skin.
The cameras start flashing as he goes in to suck Naim down his throat again. They’re both good, quiet. Naim’s head knocks against the wall as he throws it back, a single muffled noise sung into his own hand. Ryan smothers his own so they die in his throat, ruts into the heel of his hand like a dog. Lights flicker as the camera shutters around them but even that fades as his only tether to existence becomes Naim. Naim, heady on his tongue. Naim’s denim scraping Ryan’s cheek. Naim’s hand as it falls to his head and tangles in his hair, curls snagged on knuckles hooked like fangs. The ache in his jaw. The throb of his cock as it dribbles over his boxers. The singular euphoria in his chest, gliding through his veins like every blessing that’s ever missed Ryan and left him wanting in his life.
He’s found what Bandee covets here on his knees in a photobooth and he wants nothing else at all. Naim begins to melt into his hands. Ryan groans in encouragement while he goes to undo his own zipper—
A foot plants itself over his chest and knocks him down. Ryan goes sprawling, the wind knocked out of him, nearly moving the curtain had he not been careful to crunch and make himself small enough not to fall out. Naim stares down at him, face void of emotion.
“The fuck, Naim,” Ryan barks, getting his elbows under him to get up.
Naim doesn’t speak, just bends down over Ryan and casts him in a shadow that seems to stretch. Something cold settles in the pit of his stomach.
When Ryan blinks, he sees a flame extinguish. He feels sick. Naim isn’t Naim anymore. He doesn’t even know when he’d gotten dressed all the way, but he’s composed like nothing had even happened.
It dawns on him as a hand seizes him not by the collar— because he isn’t wearing his fucking shirt— but by the throat, and hauls him up like he’s weightless. The back of his skull bumps the ceiling and without a doubt he knows there’s blood. It feels very warm in his hair all of the sudden. Naim doesn’t flinch, nor does he strain. He just stares, his hand branded around Ryan’s throat with a grip that makes it impossible to breathe. It constricts like a boa, his hand, immune to Ryan’s relentless squirming. He writhes, same way he did on that fucking floor with their eyes glued to him. Naim doesn’t leave him this time. He stays right here, so close Ryan can smell, taste, watch him as he steals back every bit of security he’d built.
His head throbs, his throat had already grown sore but now feels bruised in every way, and he’s… so, so dizzy. Ryan’s eyes roll back into his head. He feels himself slump as his vision closes in.
Of course Naim doesn’t like him. That’s not how it goes. Hunter taught him that much.
Ryan’s eyes fill with tears so fast they sting as his hands come around Naim’s, clawing at the hand locked around his neck. It’s hard to breathe, harder when Naim’s other hand finds his back, right between his shoulder blades, and scratches. His nails course through Ryan’s skin like a knife through hot butter. He chokes, feeling himself lose color and lose oxygen, feet kicking slower against Naim’s stomach. Blood runs down the knobs of his spine. Collects in his nose, the back of his head. Something in his neck pops.
Naim hates this town. Ryan turned his back on him and left him alone. Because he was scared. Fuck. Fuck.
His thoughts begin to dissipate the longer the hand compresses his throat. Ryan stares down at Naim, mouth ajar in a desperate bid for air, as the boy squeezes the life out of him. His face is hard all over, unfeeling if not for something that looks an awful lot like hatred sworn across it. He didn’t even know Naim could look like that.
Even now, he’s the slightest bit grateful he’s spending his last moments with Naim to look at. There’s worse ways to go.
With a whoosh, Naim is gone. Ryan drops down on all fours to the hard floor of the booth. His palms slip, slick with sweat, and he topples out, stumbling like a baby deer before he’s even able to calculate his movements. He heaves for breath, crying out as it enters his lungs painfully. Ryan gets across to the rink before he registers the same old feeling— eyes on him. Always. Always eyes on him now.
He needs to leave. He needs to not be here, to not be anywhere.
Ryan hobbles toward where he knows the back door is, panting. A tear runs down his cheek. For a second, all he can think about is that he hasn’t cried in public since he was a toddler. He skids backwards when face to face with two girls from school.
They jump back, appearing just as scared as he is.
The incessant need to throw up rises in his stomach when he’s just been able to start getting air again, though still, every loud, rackety breath is chased by a faster, thinner one than the last. Hyperventilating, Ryan turns the other way. Sprinting toward the entrance brings him to another few strangers.
They flinch back. Ryan almost yells, why are you so fucking scared, what on Earth do you have to be scared of?
There’s a door past the rink. Cool air makes the blood on his back tacky as he turns tail and bolts across to it. He can’t feel his legs, his arms. They swing useless at his side. A pins and needles sensation crawls up him, a numbness everywhere but where tears cleave hot lines down his face and his throat burns with each breath and horrified sound.
The door doesn’t budge when his hands, then his entire body, smack against it. Ryan sobs, pushes and pushes again. Nothing. His stomach kicks and his body clenches like it doesn’t know whether to sob or be sick or shrivel up and die in front of the evening crowd at the roller rink.
Ryan turns. He’s really done it now. He ought to never leave the house— to resign himself to his backyard, poking at dying creatures with sticks. He’s got more in common with them than anyone else, anyway.
Footsteps come up fast at his side. Ryan’s pushing away from them before he even sees Naim stride up, his face so contorted with concern he’s hardly discernable from the Naim that did this. He shakes his head and trips over himself to put distance between them.
Naim just comes closer. He’s panting, too. He looks vaguely pained. Good. Good — he shouldn’t have even been able to do all of that. Fucking hell.
Ryan beats him to the chace when he opens his mouth. If he hears Naim’s voice after that, timid as it often is…
“Stop,” he gasps. “Stop following me.”
Naim’s face crumbles completely. “Ryan,” he pleads.
“Stop! Stop doing this,” Ryan begs, backing up because Naim just keeps walking forward. “Stop coming to my house.”
He opens his mouth to continue but he can’t catch his breath. He straightens to inhale properly and flinches when it fucking hurts his throat. He’s known pain. He’s been practically fucking weaned on it, but he can’t fathom it being at the scared boy across from him’s hands.
Naim lifts an arm in the direction of the photobooth. His voice is hardly even a whisper when he says it. “What was that?”
Ryan’s face screws up. He follows Naim’s finger, revolted, and then swivels back to his face. Anger surges up instead of bile, but it’s just as hideous for them both. “You,” he yells. “It was you!” He takes a jerky step toward Naim, because at last he’s pulled tears to the other’s eyes. Some solid proof he’s been affected by any of this. “It was you,” he repeats, voice folding in on itself when he realizes how mightily it hurts to raise his volume.
Naim gives an infinitesimal shake of his head. He stares at Ryan like he’s lost it.
He thinks that he has. He lost it somewhere in Naim.
He’s sure to make himself small as he angles into Naim’s space. “Please,” Ryan says. “Don’t make me tell anyone.”
Naim doesn’t speak.
“Just leave me alone. Please.”
Ryan gives him a wide berth. He doesn’t bring himself to look at any of their faces as he finally pushes his way from the building. He emerges beside a dumpster that reeks of marinara sauce and cigarettes. His hands fall onto his knees, his knees erode into the asphalt below him. He stays like that until he can get a breath in without flinching. It takes until sundown. He slinks into his bed after tiptoeing through his house like an imposter. When his head hits the pillow, he cries. Something he has so rarely done since his father forced it out of him.
He contains his sobs in the fabric of his pillow, one hand grasping the marks on his neck where Naim had choked him. Ryan can still feel him there when he closes his eyes.