Tangled
If Ryan thought back hard enough, he could recall many memorable driveway moments during his three years of permanent residence in the Cohen household. Amusing moments such as Seth's drunken not so stealth like tumble into Kirsten's plant pots. Heart breaking moments such as the stomach-wrenching goodbye to Kirsten as she headed off to rehab. Moments of unease such as when Eddie turned up looking for Theresa. But whenever Ryan returned to Newport after a period of absence, there was only ever one memory that insisted on rushing into his head, one that seemed determined never to let him alone, one that he wished he could banish forever from his mind, and that was the very first one. It was the memory of a warm August night, the air a mingled fragrance of ocean spray, jasmine and cigarette smoke and a sixteen year old girl, hair fallen over her face, bent over her cell phone, oblivious for a few seconds to the watchful boy beside her. He wondered sometimes if he hadn't got out of Sandy's car, if he hadn't walked down the driveway to get his nicotine fix, would they have ever hooked up? He'd have met her eventually of course, she lived next door, how could he not have? But that first glimpse of her was seared into his consciousness almost as strongly as the memory of his mother raising her hand in silent goodbye from the same spot a few weeks later. And despite all that he had learned about Marissa Cooper in the following weeks and months, it was the near perfect vision of her that he caught in that moment, her body on the verge of womanhood but still hinting at the child within, her flawlessly tanned skin save the freckles that danced on her nose and her eyes, intrigued and enticing, that had stayed with him for all these years.
"Hey kid. You ever gonna get out of the car?" Sandy stood with the car door open beside Ryan expectantly, chuckling at the look of surprise on his foster son's face.
"Sorry! Daydreaming I guess!" Ryan flushed awkwardly, hauling himself out of the seat.
Sandy studied him, a quizzical look on his face.
"You know, I can never park this car in this driveway with you in the passenger seat without thinking of that night…" Ryan smiled at his directness. It was kind of nice that Sandy read him so well.
The front door swung open and Kirsten ran down the incline to greet them.
Beaming broadly, she pulled him into a hug.
"My goodness, look at you! You look so grown up!"
"Kirsten, I just saw you two months ago," Ryan laughed.
She smiled and held him out in front of her to get a better look.
"You've lost weight. Are you eating properly?" she asked sharply.
Ryan rolled his eyes, amused, and allowed her to lead him into the kitchen. Her comment was always the same whenever he or Seth or both of them returned home from college. She seemed to think it her main duty in life to send them back to college twenty pounds heavier than when they left.
"Yes, I'm eating properly and no, I haven't lost weight. Actually I think I've put on a few pounds. Too much sitting around studying in the library and not enough time working out."
He picked up a bagel from the bowl, hitched himself up onto the island in the middle of the kitchen and began picking at the sesame coating.
"See?" she remonstrated. "I knew you were hungry! Let me cook you some bacon…" Ryan's eyes widened in mock alarm. "No, honestly, this is fine. A cup of coffee would be really great though…" he added, in an attempt to distract her from the stove.
"You look good!" he eyed her approvingly, his mouth full of bread.
Kirsten blushed, pleased that he had noticed but still slightly self-conscious that everybody was still watching her like a hawk, after almost six months of sobriety. It had been a long road since her first visit to Suriak, with several wrong turns along the way but she was finally allowing herself to believe that she might just make it.
"I'm getting there," she answered shortly and then changed the subject swiftly, "Your partner in crime is already holed up in the pool house. Apparently you have a semester's worth of comic books to help him catalogue and bag…"
Ryan made a face. "That'll be fun…"
Kirsten laughed.
"See if you can persuade him into the house. I want both of you boys around me as much as possible. Once this wedding gets under way, I know we'll hardly see you."
Ryan's face clouded momentarily as he was reminded of the reason he and Seth had been hauled back to Newport from their respective colleges just three weeks before the end of the spring semester.
He put down the bagel, his appetite suddenly lost, and took a deep breath in an attempt to steady his rapidly increasing heart rate.
"Have you seen her?" he murmured, barely able to look at Kirsten, fearful of her answer.
Kirsten groaned inwardly but forced herself to keep her tone light. In a second his demeanor had transformed from carefree to careworn and the old style brooding Ryan Atwood had reappeared.
His words hung in the air unanswered as Kirsten walked over to him and caught up his hand in her own. She brushed his bangs away from his forehead affectionately.
"Yes, I've seen her. She looks really well," she answered simply.
He nodded and swallowed nervously. "That's good, right? That's good…"
"Ryan, you always knew you'd have to see her sometime," Kirsten began softly. "The Coopers are our oldest friends. It was inevitable your paths would cross sooner or later."
"I know," he answered shortly, "it's just… you know…" he shrugged.
She squeezed his hand sympathetically.
"I know sweetie. But think about it, it'll be just as hard for her as it is for you,"
Ryan looked doubtfully at her.
Kirsten decided now was the time to change the subject.
"Look, go and find Seth would you? Drag him back in here and we'll get out the Take Out menus. You and Seth can pick O.K.?"
Ryan swung himself down from the island and headed off to the pool house, watched by a heavy-hearted Kirsten.
When Julie and Jimmy had announced they were to remarry, she and Sandy had relished the idea of an extra weekend visit from the boys but they had also both known that the festivities would be painful for Ryan. The summer that Marissa had killed Trey seemed a fading memory to her now but some of the wounds it had created still lay open, festering and refusing to heal, allowing no one involved in that dreadful event to really move on, and in particular Ryan and Marissa.
Almost two years had passed but both families were still struggling to deal with the repercussions of the emotional fallout brought about by Trey's death. In the few months that followed, Kirsten had watched from the relative distance of the rehab center as all four teens battled to reconcile their parts in the events of that traumatic night.
Seth had retreated into uncharacteristic silence, surrounding himself with his electronic gadgetry and his graphic novels, unable to forgive himself for not holding fast and waiting to talk to his father before talking to Ryan. Over and over that year, Sandy had repeated to both boys that if they were ever in any trouble that they should come to him, that they shouldn't try to handle things on their own. Yet once again Seth had ignored his father's words and the result had been cataclysmic. That Hailey had pleaded with him to remember that his father had been preoccupied that night and that he really shouldn't blame himself had meant nothing to the boy. Seth had witnessed before what happened when Ryan "lost" it and he couldn't forgive himself for not handling things differently.
Summer had spent the days after the shooting with her father. He had been shocked out of his normal absentee parenting and insisted keeping her close to him at all times. She had spent hours crying into his chest about what a dreadful friend she had been to Marissa and how her stupid love triangle with stupid Cohen and even stupider Zack had led her to neglect her best friend when she really needed her the most. She relived the sequence of events in her head on an hourly basis, hoping futilely that if she thought about it enough, history would change and she would somehow miraculously have gone to Julie or Jimmy and told them what had happened to Marissa and then she wouldn't have had to tell Cohen and then he wouldn't have thought he needed to tell Ryan and then…well, then she'd have her best friend and her boyfriend and they'd have had the most awesome summer like they should have had the summer before Ryan had run back to Chino and Cohen had sailed away. Instead, she shut out the glare of the summer sunshine and sat hunched up on the couch with her father while he stroked her hair, watching endless reruns of the Waltons where every crisis always turned out well after six commercial breaks and forty minutes.
After the police report had finally exonerated Marissa from any legal wrongdoing, she had been scooped up into the protective arms of her newly reunited family. Kaitlin had returned from boarding school for the holidays, surprisingly mature and empathetic towards her sister. The four of them had taken a long vacation to Hawaii and when they returned a couple of weeks before school started for the fall, Kaitlin had stuck to Marissa like glue, dragging her to the Mall, to Suki's, to the beach, anything to protect her from spiraling out of control.
Ryan, traumatized and grief stricken at the loss of his brother, coupled with the enormity of the realization that had Marissa not pulled the trigger, he'd probably be dead himself, struggled to pull himself together in a family already fractured by the absence of Kirsten in the household. Burdened by the guilt of his unswerving belief that he was the one who had put Marissa in danger in the first place and thus was entirely responsible for turning an already mentally fragile girl into a terrified and traumatized wreck and killer, he had even begged Sandy to emancipate him so that he could leave Newport and start afresh in a state where nobody knew him and nobody would expect anything of him. Sandy of course had refused point blank and at Kirsten's insistence, had battled with his foster son in order to get him to see a psychologist. Ryan had refused bluntly to see anybody.
"I don't like talking about stuff to people I know," he argued. "Why the fuck would I want to talk to some stranger?"
Sandy had ignored the language and done his best to attempt to change his mind. But Ryan had been determined. In some things, Ryan's roots were still firmly entrenched in blue collar Chino, where the very idea of a seventeen-year-old boy seeing a shrink would be mocked and ridiculed as a sign of unacceptable weakness.
Marissa and Ryan, kept apart at the initial stage of the police investigation, attempted a few dates later in the summer when Marissa returned from Hawaii but the great yawning chasm of guilt and hurt that lay between them made any meaningful contact impossible. And in the end, while Seth and Summer battled on with their relationship, growing stronger through it to the point, a year later, where they applied to and ended up at the same college, Ryan and Marissa's fledgling relationship had inevitably crashed under the strain of two teenagers who couldn't communicate with each other, each under the impression that they were not worthy of the other.
Finally, unable to bear seeing his daughter racked with pain every day she returned from school after yet another day of avoiding Ryan, he had packed up his family and relocated them to Hawaii, half way through Senior Year. Since then, the Cohens had not seen them, save the odd fleeting visit from Jimmy or Julie or both, usually in order to attend some Newpsie function or other which Julie mistakenly believed she absolutely should not miss.
Kirsten gazed out of the window at the Cooper's old house and silently wished herself back three years when all she had to worry about was Seth and if he would ever leave the house. Life had seemed so much simpler then.
"Hey!" Ryan leant his head against the pool house door and grinned at the sight before him.
"Hey dude, you're back!" Seth scrambled off Ryan's bed where he had been sprawled out, surrounded by comic books and discarded envelopes. They high-fived and Ryan sloped over to the bed and sank onto it. Seth pushed aside a pile of papers and joined him, resting his head against the pillows.
"So how goes it brother? Did you get any this semester?"
Ryan screwed his face up with distaste.
"Why would you even want to know that?"
"Because dude, I just want to make sure you're not going to come home this summer and be full of unresolved Ryan Atwood sexual tension, because we all know who bears the brunt of that."
Ryan picked up a copy of Legion and took a swipe at Seth's head.
"I guess that was a 'No' then…" he mumbled, rubbing the side of his face ostentatiously.
"Like I told you before Seth, I'm at college to study, not to get laid."
"Dude, you're taking this whole studying thing way too seriously. A degree is what you get in addition to three years of awesome partying…"
Ryan swung off the bed and pulled off his sweater. It was way too hot for East coast clothing.
"Yeah, maybe for you Seth, you've always been able to party and not study and still get great grades. I have to work a little harder and there's no way I'm going to waste your parents' money by slacking off."
Seth bagged up the last comic book and set it on the pile with the others. He looked up at Ryan, his face suddenly serious.
"So, are you nervous?"
Ryan turned away from him as he grabbed a short-sleeved shirt from his closet.
"Nervous? Why would I be nervous?"
Seth's eyebrows shot up.
Ryan pointed to them as he buttoned up his shirt.
"Dude, I think they're coming in,"
Seth pulled his mouth into a fake smile. "Very funny Ryan!" but he touched them anyway and ran to a mirror to check.
"Anyways, don't try and change the subject to me, much as I would normally love it. You didn't answer me. I asked you if you were nervous… of seeing her?"
Ryan looked down at his feet, his shoulders sagging, suddenly defeated.
"I guess. I don't know what I'm going to say to her. It's not like we've really talked since she left. Actually, we never really talked even when she was here…" he added, more to himself than to Seth.
Seth kicked one of his feet against the other. "Maybe if you had…"
Ryan looked at him, his lips tight and his blue eyes suddenly cold.
"She made it pretty clear at the time Seth. And who can blame her really? Now do we have to talk about this any more? Your mom wants us in the house anyway. She wants us to choose the Take Out."
Ryan squirmed in his seat in the chapel, flanked by Seth on one side and Kirsten on the other. Seth had been right as usual. He was nervous. So nervous he thought he might throw up. He wanted to take off his jacket that was threatening to suffocate him in this heat and walk outside and clear his head. He would have too if he hadn't thought he might bump into the wedding party assembling in the foyer.
Suddenly the music to the Trumpet Voluntary crashed through the muted chatter
and filled the room, people struggling to their feet in automated response. His heart clattered inside his chest as the inevitable moment drew nearer. Kirsten gave his hand an encouraging squeeze.
Julie appeared at the doorway, her arm linked through Sandy's, her face radiant. Sandy glanced over to his family and gave them a surreptitious wink before escorting his "former neighbor-come–mother-in-law" down the aisle to a waiting Jimmy.
Ryan's mouth was as dry as dust as he stood waiting for the procession to pass him. His breath caught in his throat, robbing him of oxygen, as he caught his first glimpse of her. It was stupid really, how she could still do this to him, after all this time, after all that they had been through. That she could still make his heart somersault and reduce him to a state of incoherency.
"Oh my God Ryan, don't look now!" Seth picked up the now redundant menu from amongst the debris at their table and hid his face behind it.
"What's the matter?" Ryan asked resignedly.
"The 'rents, Ryan. Totally getting it on on the dance floor…"
Ryan rolled his eyes and took a swift glance over to the dance floor, making sure his eyes swept first past the table where Marissa and her now remarried parents sat. She still hadn't made eye contact with him. He felt as though there was a rock sat in the pit of his stomach. If he was being honest with himself, he had pinned a lot on this day, hoping secretly that they might have had the chance to talk, so that he could at least say sorry.
Seth kicked him hard under the table.
"You could actually ask her to dance,"
Ryan gave him the Atwood glare of doom.
"Or not…" Seth trailed. "Come on dude, you've been mooning over her all day."
"I have not!"
Seth looked at him with mock indignation, his eyebrows raised and crooked.
"Ryan, you haven't taken your eyes off her since the minute she walked down the aisle."
Ryan looked concerned and shifted uncomfortably.
"Is it that obvious?"
"To me, yes, but then I am your brother and we do have this near telepathic connection…"
Ryan sighed, leaning back in his chair and loosening his tie. He took a sip from his glass of wine and rubbed his eyes tiredly.
Seth leaned forward eagerly, his deep brown eyes sparkling with determination.
"Dude, what is it you're afraid of?"
Ryan shrugged and turned away from the eyes boring into him.
Seth was frustrated with Ryan. Two years he'd had to put up with this crap. Two years of watching Ryan sulk like some love lost teenager. Oh right, that was it. He was a love lost teenager, well technically a love lost twenty-year-old now. He knew what Ryan had been through was dreadful, he got that and he wasn't trying to gloss over the horror of it all, but it was so painfully obvious to him that Ryan was still desperately in love with her, that he couldn't understand why he didn't just ask her if they could give it another shot. What was the worst she could say? He refused to give up.
"You know, Summer tells me Marissa hasn't dated anyone since you…"
Ryan scowled.
"Yeah, and maybe if I hadn't thrown her and Trey together that weekend, she would have…" he spat bitterly.
Seth lowered his eyes and rubbed his finger in circles across the rim of his wine glass.
"I don't think that's the reason dude…" he muttered softly.
Ryan leant across the table as close as he could get to Seth's face.
"Seth, she almost got raped by my brother. Do you blame her for not wanting another guy to touch her?"
Seth bit his lip, intimidated, torn between wishing he'd kept his counsel and wanting to make things right for Ryan and Marissa.
"Look, I'm not trying to diminish the awfulness of what happened Ryan, because it was awful, we all know that, but honestly, I think her not dating anyone has more to do with you than Trey…"
"We tried dating. It didn't work out. You know that."
Seth shrugged in irritation.
"Dude, that was nearly two years ago. Things change, people change. Memories fade…"
Ryan shoved his hands into his suit jacket pockets and allowed himself another surreptitious glance over his shoulder towards the table where Marissa sat, laughing at something her dad had whispered into her ear. As she tossed her head, her eyes met his briefly. A ghost of a smile flitted across her face before she turned towards her sister.
"Say something to me quickly…" she whispered urgently, brushing her hand through her hair and trying to appear nonchalant.
"What? Why?" Kaitlin screwed up her nose in confusion.
Marissa rolled her eyes in irritation at her clueless sister.
"Could you be any less stealth?"
"Oh, he's looking again right?" she teased. "I don't know why you don't just go over and say hello…"
Marissa sighed, planted her elbow on the table and rested her chin in her palm. Sometimes it was hard to remember that Kaitlin was her much younger sister.
"It's complicated!"
"It's always been complicated with Ryan," Kaitlin responded, pulling a flower from her bridesmaid's bouquet and picking off its petals absent-mindedly. I don't know why you're so shy. You guys lived in and out of each others pockets…"
"That was a long time ago," Marissa answered wistfully.
Kaitlin sat back and studied her sister. How could she not see? If Kaitlin had been unsure of Ryan's feelings towards her sister before the wedding, there was absolutely no doubt in her mind now. But Marissa was just too insecure and lacking in confidence to believe it.
Impulsively, Kaitlin grabbed her sister's hand.
"Come on, come with me…"
"What? Wait Kaitlin. Where are we going?" Marissa stumbled slightly as her sister yanked her from the table and pulled her towards Ryan and Seth's table.
Marissa, mortified at the realization of where her sister was heading, attempted to flee but her sister's grip was too strong.
Seth, from his position facing the top table, watched the ensuing battle with amusement. This was going to be interesting. It appeared that Marissa's sister had had about as much as he had of their respective sibling's intransigence.
A sharp tap on Ryan's shoulder jerked him out of his thoughts.
"You, her, dance floor, now!" Kaitlin shoved her sister in front of her, as Ryan stood up alarmed. He cast a quick desperate look at Seth.
"Not getting involved!" he said, raising his hands in a gesture of submission and tipping his chair back laughing.
Ryan turned towards Marissa, brushing his damp palms on his thighs and swallowing his nerves as best he could. Blinking rapidly, he found his voice from somewhere deep in the recesses of his stomach.
"Uh, you want to dance?"
tbc
