Title: Seven
Author: newportbeachbabe
Rating: PG-13
Summary: 500 word drabble about Ryan and those three little unlucky words.
Spoilers: Do I even need to put this? Everything and anything is up for grabs.
Disclaimer: I don't own it. If I did, Marissa would have been a good girlfriend and Ryan would punch more.
A/N: Second attempt at drabble. I swear that I write more than drabble now. Really, I do.
A/N #2: I wrote this at 2:30 in the morning. Just kinda popped into my head. Anyway, any errors can be attributed to being at up 2:30 AM. Don't ask why I'm still up. I have no idea.
Seven.
That was how many times Ryan had said three simple words to Marissa. In three years, only seven times. He should have said them to her every fucking minute they spent together.
That would have been a lot of times. A lot more than seven.
He starts wondering just how many minutes that would have been. Just how many times. But the number is too great for his architectural design, 2200 SAT scoring brain. He just knows that it is more than seven.
Seven has always been his unlucky number. Seven was the age that his father started beating him. Seven was the number of times his ribs had been broken. It was the number of weeks he had been gone in Chino. She had called him seven times over the summer, each time saying nothing, just breathing.
And it was the number of times he told her he loved her.
When Ryan gets to Berkeley, he is assigned to building number seven. He decides that the universe really does hate him.
Seven weeks into his college experience, he leaves. It isn't intentional, this seven weeks thing. It could have been six weeks, or eight weeks, or seven days. He knew from the first day that it wouldn't work out.
On that first day, he bumped into Wes, his freshman buddy. Small talk inevitably led to Marissa. Ryan couldn't bring himself to say those three words. He said, instead, that the love of his life was taking a semester off, which wasn't exactly a lie.
And that they had gotten back together before he left.
It was seven minutes after Ryan told the second lie that he knew he would be leaving. It is one thing to lie about someone being dead. It is another to claim she was your girlfriend at the time of death.
Out of everything, that is what bothers him the most.
Yes, she died tragically in his arms.
But there had been no exchange of three little words. Just one last ragged breath on her part and a flash of memories on his.
Seven minutes after Marissa left Earth, the ambulances showed up. In the seven mile drive to the hospital, Ryan refused to let go of her body. Doctors had to pry her out of his arms—seven of them, in fact. Three to hold him down, two to pry her out, and four because it was so damn exciting.
And here he is, seven fucking years later, still berating himself about three words.
Ryan is engaged, had gotten engaged on Marissa's birthday. It is sick and twisted and wrong, and yet he planned it that way. He still needs something about his first love to hold on to.
He tells his fiancée that he loves her every time he has a chance. He is determined that when his second love dies, she will have heard it more than seven times.
So far, he has said it forty-nine times.
Seven times seven times.