Ryden Smut

Hidden In Plain View

Hidden In Plain View by @ Sunday_Porch on LiveJournal
http://sunday-porch.livejournal.com/14521.html#cutid1

The bus lumbers around toward the back of the venue, providing ample time for everyone inside it to observe the parking lot of the mall across the street.

"It's--oh my god, it's a carnival!" Brendon's kneeling up on the seat in an instant, leaning toward the window as he grins. "They're totally having a carnival, with rides and everything. Oh, man, we have to check it out."

"It's just a shitty little one," Spencer remarks, craning his neck to see better.

Jon nods his agreement. "Like, the kind of stuff they unfold off trailers. Totally unsafe."

Brendon spins around and drops back to his seat. "Whatever, I don't care, I'm going anyway. You guys can sit around and bitch and not come, but I'm fucking going. And Ryan's coming with me, because Ryan loves me."

Spencer raises an eyebrow at Ryan, smug, and Ryan can practically hear it: he is your responsibility, you know. He almost protests aloud, he's not Brendon's keeper (if anything, that would be Zack's job), just because now he's... he and Brendon are. Something. The something trips him up, though, and before can actually argue everyone's moved on to bickering about the day's schedule and whether funnel cakes are better with powdered sugar or fruit.

*

The schedule, it turns out, works in Brendon's favor and they've got a good couple hours before soundcheck with nothing at all to do in the meantime. There's another fight about whether there will be too many fans there, but it's decided that anyone who might cause trouble will probably be in line on the other side of the venue, and so Zack ushers them all into a van and they stealthily make their way across to the lot.

Zack does some quick reconnaissance and finds that their theories were mostly correct; this early in the afternoon, the carnival is nothing more than family day, parents with young children whose fingers are sticky from cotton candy as they clutch the handholds of the rickety airplanes and motorcycles chasing each other around in perpetual circles.

"Don't even think about it, Brendon," Spencer says, following Brendon's eyes.

Brendon protests loudly, "Fuck you, I'm not seven, I'm not gonna go on a fucking merry-go-round, okay? God."

"I don't know," Jon says with an easy smile. "Those little racecars look like your kind of thing, maybe."

Brendon flips him off. "Are we going to find a Tilt-A-Whirl or what?"

They pick a direction and start off that way together, Brendon tapping Ryan's waist to make sure he comes along. Brendon scuffs his shoes on the thick black cables as they step over and Ryan lets his own heels scrape across them, too, feeling the grit of dust.

They pass along the row of carnival games and some of the workers holler at them, practiced carnie banter, "three tries for a dollar!" One of the guys winks at Brendon and asks if he wants to win something for his friend, the word tainted with meaning. "Which one?" Brendon shoots back, grinning as he throws an arm around Jon's waist. Ryan feels his cheeks flush though, realizing that he and Brendon had been walking awfully close, knuckles brushing with each stride. He feels weird and wonders if it's obvious or if it looks perfectly platonic, a group of five friends hanging out, no one suspecting that two of them are something more.

And that's basically it, that's the something that's still catching Ryan, making him pause and think, wonder. Everyone who knows has got a different way of thinking about it, a different name for that something more. Spencer, when he has to mention Brendon and Ryan's relationship, he says they're fucking. "No, no, we definitely got that controller before then, we got it way before you and Brendon were fucking." Like that's the only thing that changed, just sex. Ryan thinks it's kind of reductive. Not that there isn't sex or something, because there definitely, definitely is, but there's also definitely more to it than that. Still, he supposes it makes sense that Spencer would see it that way. Whatever Ryan does with Brendon now, whatever they are, whatever it is that makes Brendon walk closer to Ryan than anyone else, that won't erase the years that belonged to Spencer, what they have. They're still Ryan and Spencer, even though there's also a Ryan and Brendon now.