Cancer

Ryan's voice was so soft and quiet that at first I thought I must have imagined it. And the words were so strange...they made no sense. For my own good? How was abandoning me in Vegas in order to go off and be a rockstar with nothing left to tie him down for my own good? How could that ever benefit me?

It had completely wrecked my life!

"I don't understand," I said simply.

Ryan sighed and stopped fidgeting with the glass, turning his wide brown eyes upon me. He stared at me with a curiously intense expression for a moment, and then said, "Brendon never meant to hurt you, Kelsey."

I did my best to stare back at him, but the sound of Brendon's name made it hard to keep my face smooth. "But he still did," I whispered.

To my surprise, Ryan just gave me a dark look and turned away. He didn't argue Brendon's case any further than that.

"So... Why did you leave?" he asked softly instead, staring down into the glass again.

"Well...there was no reason for me to stay. I was just waiting for--" I broke off abruptly, swallowed hard, and then forced myself to say it: "...Brendon. I mean, I only came here in the first place because my mother made me. It's not like Vegas is my home."

"Is New York your home?"

That took me off guard a bit. "No...I guess not."

"Where is your home, then?"

He turned his piercing gaze on me then, and I wondered if he really could read minds--if he had somehow known I was wondering the same thing to myself just the day before, and was determined to force me to admit to all my most painful secrets.

I said, "I don't know."

"Everyone has a home," he urged me, more gently this time.

I shrugged, as callously as I could manage, but Ryan, of course, saw through the charade.

"It's okay, Kelsey," he comforted me, leaning in closer so that I was forced to look him in the eye. "Everyone has a home. Maybe you just haven't found yours yet."

He smiled at me, and I tried my best to smile back. "Maybe," I hoped.

He took a sip of his drink (I still didn't know what it was), and then turned back to me with a strangely cautious expression. "Can I ask you one more thing?"

Yeah, like I wasn't unloading all of my burdens onto him, like it was an honor to be allowed to play therapist for me. How absurd.

I nodded anyway, gratefully.

He put the words together deliberately, slowly, as if choosing them very carefully. "Why didn't you wait for Brendon?"

At first, I was too shocked, too confused, to do more than just blink at him a few times.

Then I pulled myself together and said, "I did wait for him. I waited for him for over a year--"

"But you left Vegas," said Ryan, the words coming out slowly, disjointed with misunderstanding, a question hidden in his tone. A tiny crease of confusion sprang up between his dark eyebrows.

I couldn't help but sound a little angry, a little defensive. "Yeah, after he dumped me." I flinched at my own harsh words--normally, I didn't allow myself to even think about...that, much less speak of it in such a way.

Ryan, too, seemed confused, and he wasn't willing to drop the subject. "But you just said that he didn't break up with you." (I breathed an inner sigh of relief at Ryan's rephrasing.) "You said he wanted to take a break."

"Same thing," I growled.

"No, they're not," insisted Ryan. "They're not the same at all."

"They are to me," I murmured, hoping the heartbreak in my voice wasn't as painfully plain to him as it was to me. "Either way, he didn't want me anymore."

"That's not true," said Ryan evenly.

"He said he wanted space, Ryan!" I shrieked, suddenly outraged. All the unreasonable fury of a few minutes ago came rushing back to me all at once as I remembered that night on the phone. "You don't want space from the person you love! Especially when you haven't even seen them in six weeks! How much more space can you get?"

"Maybe that was the problem."

I was exasperated. Where was the perceptive, omniscient Ryan Ross now? He was completely missing the point. "Of course that was the problem! We grew apart! He didn't want me anymore! He got tired of me! He moved on!"

Ryan shook his head grimly. "Kelsey, I don't pretend to understand Brendon, because, honestly, I don't. But I know he never meant to hurt you, and I know..." He took a deep breath, and, somehow, it seemed hard for him to get the words out as he said, "I know he hasn't moved on."

I stared at him blankly.

"He misses you," said Ryan simply, as if it should be obvious. As if that cleared up everything. Oh, ha ha, silly me, of course...

But the words made no sense to me.

I shook my head again. "I don't understand."

Ryan sighed and shook his head a little bit, too. "Me neither, Kelsey," he said wearily, taking another sip of his drink. "Me neither..."

But a faraway expression overtook his endless brown eyes as he gazed off into space, and somehow I was sure that he wasn't talking about the same thing I was talking about anymore.

-----

Apparently, Ryan was well-known as a local celebrity at this particular casino (so that explained the bartender), and the management let us hang out behind the restaurant area, outside, where we could be alone. It was quiet and peaceful, for the most part; the lively hum of the city was all around us, still, but it seemed far removed somehow. Like we were isolated in our own private bubble amongst all those sights and sounds.

Ryan and I sat down side-by-side on the concrete with our backs pressed up against the cool brick wall behind us. He bought two bottles of beer at the bar, and now we drank them in silence, lost in our own separate thoughts.

"Ryan?" I asked sleepily--it was getting late, and I wasn't used to drinking alcohol.

"Hm?"

"I really am sorry about your dad," I said quietly.

He looked at me then, and his eyes softened. "Me too," he murmured.

Suddenly the beer bottle was too cold in my hands; it burned the tender flesh of my palms, scorched them right through to the bones. I sat it on the ground beside me and scooted closer to Ryan, tucking my hands under my armpits to warm them up.

I shifted slightly to get more comfortable, and ended up leaning over with my head resting on his shoulder. It felt like the natural thing to do, and he didn't seem to mind.

"Do you miss him?" I whispered.

Ryan cleared his throat, but he still sounded hoarse when he spoke next. "Yeah. I do."

We were both quiet for a long time.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

I felt him shift a little beneath me, uncomfortably; I started to get up, but he stopped me, so I settled back into my former position. He sat still for a moment, and then he began in a hushed voice, "I was just...completely staggered. I knew it would happen someday, with the way he treated himself, but still, I didn't... I wasn't expecting it. I think I purposely turned a blind eye to it, and then I didn't see it coming when it happened."

He fell silent again. I closed my eyes and listened to the beating of his heart, the air rushing in and out of his lungs in time. A car alarm went off somewhere in the distance.

"It just...hurt so much, you know?" His voice cracked, shot up an octave at the end. "I should have seen it coming. I should have known. But I was just so caught up...so absorbed in my own life...so determined to be a rock star, to be somebody..." He laughed bitterly. "I ignored all the warning signs. I was in denial. I knew it was going to happen, but I wouldn't admit it to myself."

Yes.

How many times had Mom given me her Vegas boys speech? How many times had the brush of Brendon's fingertips across my cheekbones made my pulse speed up, not out of pleasure, but out of fear? How many times had I ignored my intuition, pushed past my better judgement?

And how many times had I regretted it?

"And I...I just felt so...alone. Isolated. The pain was just...indescribable. I'm sure you know."

I nodded into his shoulder as the tears stung my eyes.

"No one around me understood. They thought I was cold, heartless--too good for mourning. They thought I held a grudge against my dad because I wasn't crying over him all the time."

"But it hurts to cry," I whispered, picking up right where he left off. It was as if the words had come straight from my own mouth; they streamed out of their own accord now. "You try not to think about it, because it hurts. You try to put it out of your mind, to focus on other things. You shy away from the pain. You never mention it to anyone, you never talk about how much it hurts, because there are no words. You don't cry, because crying feels like a joke. And then you feel like a complete bitch because you're not grieving like everyone thinks you should."

Ryan chuckled humorlessly. "Yeah. A complete bitch. Exactly."

I bit my lip, fidgeting with my hands in my lap as I debated whether or not to say it. Ryan noticed.

"What's wrong?"

I shook my head a little, looking down at the dirty ground with purpose. "It's just..." I sighed. "Ryan, I haven't cried over my dad once yet--not really...but I cry over Brendon every single fucking day. Does that make me a terrible person?"

He seemed to consider that seriously for a long moment, and then he smiled tenderly at me. "No. You're not a bad person, Kelsey."

I wasn't convinced. "But--"

"Just because you're not crying over your dad doesn't mean you don't miss him, and just because you're still crying over Brendon doesn't mean he's more important to you. Different kinds of pain make us hurt in different ways."

Then he flashed me a forced, strained smile that made me think he knew firsthand what he was talking about.

Shifting me gently so that I was no longer resting on him, Ryan got to his feet, dusting his pants off briskly. "C'mon," he said, extending a hand to help me up, "it's late. Lets get out of here."

He lead me away from the door we had come out of, across the outdoor eating area, towards the low fence that separated it from the road. We finished off our beers as we walked and then tossed them into a nearby trashcan.

"Ryan?" I asked hesitantly as the bottles landed in the can with a loud clinking noise.

"Yeah?" He raised his eyebrows at me, waiting.

"I thought..." I cleared my throat and tried again, forcing the words out before I lost my nerve: "You used to hate alcohol. Because of your...your dad."

He saw what I was getting at, of course. "Well...I guess I just sort of...got past it," he mumbled, scratching at his mousy brown hair a little--a nervous habit. He sighed heavily and then explained, very seriously, "Alcohol didn't make my dad the way he was, Kelsey. He did that to himself. It wasn't the alcohol, it was the fact that he chose the alcohol. The choices he made."

Something throbbed electrically in my chest--my heart, giving a start of recognition... Suddenly, it was so hard to breathe.

"And besides," he continued, his voice brightening suddenly, "you've got to let things like that go eventually. Forgive and forget, and all that." A small smile spread across his face, and it was the most genuine I'd seen from him all night. "You can't carry grudges all your life, Kelsey. They'll break your back."

How could he read me so easily? How could he know...?

"Lets go, Kels," said Ryan again, jerking me out of my momentary awe. He started off towards the street, calling off-handedly over his shoulder, "The car's parked this way."

Kels. The bitingly-familiar nickname sounded strange, coming from his lips--different from the way it had sounded when Brendon had said it last Friday.

I didn't mind it this time. It didn't hurt when Ryan said it.