𑣲 Ryland Grace .ᐟ.ᐟ

The porch light's been dead for a week, you keep meaning to replace the bulb, so you don't notice anything's wrong until you're already inside, shoes off and keys still jangling in your hand.

A chocolate box is sitting open on the counter. Your chocolate box. The ridiculous one your coworker Marsh got you as a joke gift, a gold tin labeled MIDNIGHT MOOD TRUFFLES (ADULTS ONLY), ONE PIECE MAXIMUM that you shoved to the back of the pantry, behind the rice specifically because you had zero intention of ever finding out what “adults only” meant in practice.

There are four missing.

“Ryland?”

Something answers you. Not a word. It’s… more of a noise, low, strangled, coming from the living room, and when you go to investigate you find him face down on the couch, a cushion clutched to his chest.

“I can explain,” the pillow says.

“Ryland.”

“I can explain,” he says again, louder, still not lifting his head, “and I need you to know, going in, that I have a PhD. I want that established. Before anything else happens today, on the record, PhD. From a real university, with a real a building and everything.”

You cross your arms. “What did you do.”

“Nothing! I-I did nothing! I was just hungry, there was a tin of chocolates in the pantry, and I’m a grown man legally permitted to eat chocolate sitting in a kitchen I have access to and—“ He finally rolls over, and you get your first good look at him, and immediately understand why he's been confessing to a pillow instead of to you.

His face is red. Not embarrassed-red, well, also that, but underneath that there’s a deeper kind of red, like he's been standing too close to an oven. His hair is messier than usual, like he's been dragging his hands through it every few seconds for the last twenty minutes, which, you will learn, is exactly what's been happening. Your eyes drift lower, pausing for a second on the tent of his sweatpants, quickly looking back up.

“—and there was a label,” he continues, words picking up speed the way they do when he's nervous, “which, in my defense, I did see, but I read the first word, which was 'midnight,' and I thought, sure, that's a chocolate name, chocolate companies love naming things after moods and times of day, very normal marketing, and I didn’t feel the need to read the other words on the label because I was hungry, and reading is a lot of effort when you're hungry, effort I did not feel I had to spare, and so I had one, and it was so good, so I had, um—“ He stops.

“How many, Ryland.”

“...a number,” he says to the ceiling.

“Ryland.”

“Four might be the number,” he admits.

You should probably be annoyed, and you’ll get there, but right now you're mostly watching him fan himself with a couch cushion like it's the middle of June and not almost September.

“How are you feeling,” you ask, carefully.

“Great!” Woah there, that was quick. Then: “Warm. I'm feeling warm. Is it warm in here? It's warm in here. Do we have— is the thermostat— I feel like the thermostat is doing something to me specifically.”

“The thermostat’s fine.”

“Then it's me,” he says in a little whimper, and it makes you feel something you didn’t want to name at the moment. “It's doing something to me. I looked up the ingredients. While you were—… I heard your car, I panicked, I looked up the ingredients in the ninety seconds I had, and there's a whole list of things in there I recognize from a context I did not expect to recognize them from.” He drags both hands down his face. “Also I want to be near you so badly it's making my teeth hurt, I mean— I always want to be near you but this… this is overwhelming.”

He sits up, which turns out to be a fatal mistake, because the second he's upright he seems to remember you're standing there, and something about that fact visibly recalibrates his entire nervous system. He quickly puts the cushion on his lap.

“…You look really good right now,” he says, and then immediately: “That's— I didn't— okay… I did mean that, but I didn't mean to say it out loud, there's a difference, there's a whole difference between…”

“Ryland…”

“Ignore me, please…” he says, and puts his face in his hands.

You should sit across the room. You know this... but instead you sit on the couch. Not close, but an arm away from him.

Another fatal mistake, because the second the cushion dips under your weight, Ryland migrates towards you like he's on rails. His knee finds your knee and his shoulder is one bad decision away from your shoulder, and he seems to notice this is happening at roughly the same moment you do.

“I— I'm not doing that,” he says, about the thing he is very clearly doing.

“…But you are”

He swallows hardly, Adam’s apple bobbing. “I'm so sorry. I’ll just sit on the floor.”

He does not go sit on the floor. He makes it a few centimetres in the general direction of the floor before his hand finds your thigh, fingers gripping loosely into your jeans like he needs the anchor, and then he freezes, mortified, staring at his own hand like it belongs to somebody else.

“Okay… I should probably drink some water,” he announces, like this is a considered multi step plan and not the first sentence that occurred to him. “Hydration. That’s what I need.” He stands, makes it as far as the kitchen doorway before stopping, turning around, looking at you with the expression of a lost puppy. “Are you coming?”