friends (rick riley and scott holland)(INDEFINITE HIATUS)

chapter nine

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chapter nine: mama's (gwen's) boy

a/n:

jake banks pov? jake banks pov. someone play mama's boy by dominic fike.

tw(s) — past violence, closeted gay boys doing closeted gay boy things, teenage boys (written by a girl who kind of hates real teenage boys), rick is still a bully, teen angst (like so much teen angst)

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When Jake was a freshman at Eden Hall, he got asked to homecoming by Emily Anderson, the prettiest junior in the school.

He was so excited at the time—— as a scrawny fourteen-year-old who had braces and an older sister who did his laundry for him, he'd never been on a date, let alone with a girl like that. Jake'd spent the days leading up to it anxiously waiting for it, buying clothes with Scott and Rick in some boutique out in Osseo and learning how to tie a tie with Gwen. He'd been so anxious, so excited, so naive, that he failed to see the honeytrap laid before him until Emily walked him up to the older boys on the lacrosse team instead of inside to the dance. They laughed in his face. She laughed in his face. And then he, alongside every other freshman who was trying to join the team, got piled into a van, and taken out for the night from hell.

Gwen was waiting up for him when he got home, still all dressed up. He hadn't uttered a word to her about what happened but she knew. She saw his disheveled clothes and the tear tracks on his face and she knew.

That following Monday, Gwen made him tell her which one Emily was. They found her out on the quad after school. She was standing with friends and, at the sight of the two siblings, they started to giggle as if they were in on some joke that no one else was. Jake thought that they might have gone on to do that, laugh at him and any other person who was beneath them until they were red in the face, for the rest of their lives if Gwen hadn't silenced them when she launched herself across the green and punched Emily in the face.

Emily's head snapped back and her nose gushed blood, but that didn't stop Gwen from wrestling her to the ground. They rolled in the grass for a while, throwing punches and pulling hair as the crowd grew around them, but it ended with Gwen on top.

"You think you can screw with my brother like that? You think you can just hand him over to them and get away with it?" Gwen grunted. Her nails dug crescents into the skin of pretty Emily's pretty face as the brunette pawed at her. "Eat dirt you pig! Eat it!"

Jake remembers thinking it wasn't only about what happened to him. It couldn't have been.

Not after Gwen stayed there, pressing Emily's head into the dirt, until Cole lifted her, backward, over his shoulder and walked her a few paces away as she kicked at the air.

There were talks of Gwen getting expelled, but their dad's a lawyer and Rick's dad has made a puppet out of their principal, so all she got was detention and a warning to never do that again. Thoroughly humiliated, Emily left the school a few weeks later, and Rick, because he'll do just about anything that Scott or Gwen tells him to, saw to it that the captain of the varsity lacrosse team never knew a moment of peace until his graduation.

That night, though, when he asked her why she did it and risked everything for him, Gwen held his face with the very hands that committed violence on his behalf and smiled wide.