Diamonds, Loose (Ryden)

Part 8

"Okay, you're going to tell me what's wrong." Mom's eyeing me over the breakfast table, and I slowly raise my head to look at her. I've been staring down at the cereal in the bowl in front of me, watching it turn to disgusting mush before my eyes. I maybe got in an hour of sleep last night, if that, and I can practically feel the bags under my eyes. The dark circles made it look like there was a panda in the mirror this morning. This is not how I wanted to spend my Saturday.

I don't eat breakfast with my mom that often, mostly because she gets up at the goddamn crack of dawn and I get up at a reasonable time. Today, though, I wasn't sleeping properly anyway when I heard them get up, so I thought I might as well. I may have forgotten how overwhelmingly probing she can be.

"Ry-an," she sing-songs, looking anything but cheery. "Come on, you look awful. Spill."

The thing is, I don't know how. Dad's out of the house, at work for a change, so it makes it easier, but I still can't. I can't form the words. I don't want her to judge me. "Nothing's wrong." I'm terrified.

"Nothing?"

"Nothing I could tell you," I mumble, and I don't mean to sound harsh but she looks crushed, sinking back in her seat from where she was leaning across the table. "No, I just mean," I say hastily, "I don't know if you'd understand."

She smiles, says, "Of course I would." And she sounds so sure that I kind of believe her.

I swallow, take a deep breath. Take a minute or three to compose myself, to queue up words and sentences that make sense together, that illustrate the situation in ways that don't make me look like a dumbass, even though I know that when they come out I'll still trip over them and sound stupid as hell. "I don't know what to do," I say finally.

She doesn't say a word, just keeps sitting there, placid and neutral, and lets me go on. And I think that's what I need right now; no interferences, no pushing.

"I kind of. Okay, look, the thing is that I'm. I don't think I'm... exactly straight." I pause there, after getting the worst out first, to gauge her reaction. Her eyebrows are pretty far up her forehead and her smile is a little frozen, but she's not yelling or telling me I'm in a phase or doing any of the things I thought she might, so I guess it's okay to continue. "There's this guy, uh. From school. And... Christ, okay, I've been seeing him behind Jac's back, and she has no idea, a-and it was meant to be—It was just a hook-up," I stress, cringing because I just mentioned casual sex to my mother, oh my god.

"Was," she says slowly, seemingly unfazed, "or is?"

I close my eyes for a second. "Was. I mean, I-I think I like him more than I should."

She takes a second to process it all, and I sit there, feeling like I'm chained to the chair. I'm crumbling, inside.

We go on for a while after that, me offering up random, jagged pieces of the story and titbits of information until eventually, eventually I think it's all there. It probably doesn't make much sense – hell, it doesn't to me and I've lived it – but it's all pieced together, and it's there.

"What I don't understand, Ryan," she ponders, surprisingly well-mannered after learning that her son is a giant dickhead, "is why you still carried on with Jac at the same time as you were with this... guy."

"Because it was different," I snap immediately, tired of answering the same question in my own head. "It's... If I had, like, a boyfriend – Mom, I'd be shunned. Like, crucified. You don't understand what it's like. You can't be that way there." I exhale roughly, kneading my tired eyes with the heels of my hands. "I started seeing Brendon because I wanted to. Him. And I didn't stop going out with Jac because I couldn't." I say it all frankly, monotone, giving up on trying to seem like a better person. She can take me or leave me as I am.