Disclaimer: These are not my characters. Sadly.

NB: Slash but not graphic.

Ryan loved to watch Seth sleep. It was the only time he was still, which made Ryan feel almost like he could get his mind entirely around the fact of him, could understand him and protect him. Awake, Seth always seemed to be moving a hundred miles an hour in fifty directions and in bed, well, that was a situation in which Ryan felt an unaccustomed and disorienting, if not unwelcome, lack of control. But asleep, Seth was contained, containable, entirely his. He usually slept on his back, limbs splayed, head twisted to one side, his hair a tangled halo, his wire-hard frame slack with relaxation.

Sometimes he talked in his sleep, mostly just muttering, but once in a while he produced a totally coherent and alarming sentence like, "Dude! We have to get the boat in before the lobsters leave Tahiti!" And Ryan would jerk awake, the lamp and his pants on before he realized there was no crisis, both of them were safe, and Seth was already subsiding back into his dream, undisturbed by the light or Ryan's panic.

Ryan drew the sheet up over Seth's chest and licked him lightly on the cheekbone. Seth was smiling in his sleep. That made Ryan smile. Everything about Seth made Ryan smile. Eighteen hours a day he was pretty pokerfaced about it, but now, alone and warm and sated, he could feel himself grinning like an idiot. He tugged a forbidden cigarette from the old cigar humidor on the night table, in which he also stashed the condoms he had not yet needed, and slipped out to smoke beside the pool.

He dangled his feet in the water and leaned back on his arms, watching the sky. Late August, after midnight. He could see Mars, as reddish and still as it had been back in Chino, the quiet, angry planet. And something low on the southern horizon called the Teapot that Trey had once shown him, back when Trey was still a cool older brother. Ryan was charmed by how much it actually looked like a teapot. And girls liked it, having a boy point out to them a witty and unpretentious constellation. He would show it to Seth.

He took a deep drag off his cigarette and exhaled slowly, voluptuously, at the sky. He was not a real smoker; he could take it or leave it, had noticed young in a family of drunks that he did not have an addictive personality, but the burn in his lungs was nice and the post-coital stereotype was no joke. There was nothing like the languor of a cigarette to reinforce the languor of really good sex. The coal glowed orange against the black lawn. Visible for a mile over open water, he had once noticed, as his father motored away from him across a dark lake on a fishing trip. Which was why it should not have startled him when Kirsten emerged from the house in her bathrobe and asked, "Ryan? Are you smoking?"

He scrambled up, leaned down to stub out the butt in the grass, and stuck it in his pocket. "Yeah, I… Sorry."

"Well," she smiled. "I know it's a hard habit to break."

He shrugged. "That's not really an excuse."

She pulled out a chair and sat at the table. "How many cigarettes have you smoked since you've been here? I mean officially been living here." Then she pushed out the opposite chair with her foot. "Here. Sit."

He sat and thought for a minute, counting silently. "Seven."

"Seven? In three weeks? I think it's safe to say you're kicking the habit."

He shrugged again and confessed, "I'm not really a smoker. I just like it. It gives me something to do when I'm thinking. I don't really have any excuse for not stopping when you asked me."

It occurred to her that the little bubble of adult privacy created by a cigarette had probably provided a solace for Ryan that had nothing to do with smoking. She said, "That's not really what I came out here to talk to you about."

He said nothing, just stared at her with wary eyes.

She switched gears again, asked, "So you were out here thinking?"

"Yeah. And looking at the stars."

She glanced up. There was no moon and the stars lay scattered in the windless blackness of the sky, in some delicate inexplicable architectural tension. "Do you like astronomy?"

"I know some constellations. More winter ones actually. I like Orion. I guess everyone likes Orion." Then he took a breath and said, "I like how they all just hang there together, everything dependent on everything else, perfectly balanced. It's not that different from what you do, in a way, the way everything works together." She looked a question at him. "Like building a house, making sure everything fits. It's like the house of the world." He blushed and looked way, embarrassed.

"Yes," she said, not embarrassed at all, charmed by the fact that he was this young and also somehow mentally familiar. They sat for a while in near-companionable silence, he still a little awkward, she feeling a strange peace. Then she remembered why she was there. "Where's Seth?"

She was not sure what she had expected, perhaps at least a frisson of guilt, but instead the wariness left his eyes entirely and he said, with exactly the correct combination of affection, condescension, and exasperation, "Asleep." He gestured toward the pool house. "We were talking and he kind of passed out, so I thought I'd come out here and, uh, sneak a cigarette."

"Ah." She was pretty good at reading people and Ryan was not hard to read. His eyes gave everything away. Even his signature brick-wall, don't-mess-with-me look held up a little sign that said, "I am guarded and pissed off and now telling you not to mess with me." It was sort of cute. Except the idea that she had taken in a good-hearted, noble, but damaged kid who was in the process of seducing her brainy but emotionally wide-open son was not cute at all. "Does he, ah, do that a lot?"

"What do you mean?" And just beneath the quite credible blankness in his face was something else, the looming edge of that brick wall. On the other hand, perhaps he had just gotten a glimmer of her meaning and she had offended him. It occurred to her that if he were truly the hetero girl-magnet he appeared, whipped over the pretty neighbor he kept asking out, and possessed of the mild homophobia that afflicted so many boys his age, her implication was pretty much a declaration of war. Still, she was rarely wrong about people. Besides, she liked this boy and she was his guardian, but she barely knew him. Seth was her son.

She smiled pleasantly, her eyes level, "Fall asleep in the pool house?"

"I guess so. Yeah. A couple of times." He shifted in his chair and looked out toward the ocean. "It's funny how he can just fall asleep like that, in front of people, in the middle of a sentence. I could never do that."

"No. Nor me." She sighed. "It's from Sandy. You have to have a great deal of faith in the world to fall asleep like that."

"Yeah, well, it's nice to know someone has that."

"I think so, too. Look, Ryan, you're a good friend to Seth but I think the two of you can be a little impulsive together." It seemed impossible to communicate to him that she knew about teenagers, that she had been one in living memory, in what sometimes seemed implausibly recent memory, and she knew perfectly well that when you met the person who loved you and knew you and belonged to you, it was literally impossible either to stay away from them or to refrain from having as much sex as possible. Oh my god, she thought, I really just thought that. But I could be wrong. At least, even if I'm not wrong about Seth and the way he looks at Ryan, and how could I pretend to myself I'm wrong about that, I may very well be wrong about Ryan. He's in love with a girl, I know that, I've seen it. Ryan was staring at her with an expression of concentration, waiting to understand her point. "Seth admires you a lot…" She trailed off.

"But so far our joint decision-making powers are sort of suspect?"

"That's one way of putting it." Ryan looked down at his hands, all the weight of the world returned to his shoulders. Which made her realize how relaxed he had looked when she walked out. Unnaturally relaxed and smoking a cigarette. Great. Well, even if Seth were having sex, at least he wasn't smoking. She snorted mirthlessly and Ryan looked up, startled. "I just want both of you to be more careful. Now I know Seth, I know how to talk to him and how to read between the lines," and here she watched a ripple of panic cross Ryan's face, "But with, you, I'm still learning. So I'm asking you to be careful and to use good judgment. Maybe better judgment than you have so far."

Ryan nodded. He looked incredibly solemn, respectful, thinking through what she had just said with great deliberation. It was true that he was never defensive. He certainly never talked back the way Seth did and he seemed earnestly determined to do everything right. Maybe this was all in her head. Not Seth's crush, but any idea of it as literal, any possibility of consummation, any risk of heartache for her adorable, buoyant, crushing, crushable son.

"All right then." She stood up and tilted her head toward the pool house. "Why don't you, ah, tell him to get up to bed. And maybe we can avoid these late nights in the future. School's starting in a couple of weeks." She said this last with artificial brightness. Ryan nodded seriously and wished her good night.

Fifteen minutes later, she lay awake beside a snoring Sandy. She said his name a couple of times, softly and then more loudly, until he woke up and turned to look at her. "I'm worried about Seth. With Ryan."

"Oh, honey, we've been through this. That kid with the gun wasn't even a friend of Ryan's and I think Seth has definitely learned his lesson about making friends with just anyone. I mean, after Seth's experience with Ryan, he was feeling pretty optimistic about any other new kid---"

"That's not what I mean."

"Well, what do you mean?"

"I think Seth has a crush on Ryan."

"A what?"

"A crush. I think the way he likes Ryan is…a little intense. I'm worried about him."

"Honey, they're friends! That's how boys are. They spend all their time together, they play videogames, they eat cheeseburgers, they talk about girls… They talk about girls all the time! You may have forgotten this, but before a person finds their romantic partner they usually have a partner in crime to break curfew with, try drinking beer with… When I was sixteen, I practically lived with Marvin Rappaport, we got in all kinds of crazy---" He broke off. "Is that what this is about? Should I ask you who your best friend was when you were sixteen?"

"Sandy. Don't do this. I know what it's like to have a best friend at that age and yes, I know what it's like to have a boyfriend at that age, and I've seen the way Seth looks at him. It's not exactly…platonic."

"Kirsten. I'm trying to be sensitive here, but I have to say, I think you're overreacting. Is Seth a little more excited than the average kid to have a brand-new live-in best friend? Yes, absolutely. But don't turn it into some kind of X-rated parental nightmare. Please," he took her hand and kissed it gently. "Just give it a little time. Give Seth a little time to calm down, give yourself a little time to get to know Ryan. 'Cause this is crazy."

"I hope you're right, Sandy."

"I am right. Just trust me and go to sleep." He kissed her on the cheek and was snoring again instantly. She lay watching the reflection of the pool lights playing on the ceiling, tensely aware that she had not yet heard Seth come in.

Ryan walked back into the pool house and watched Seth for awhile. Eventually, Seth rolled over onto his side, opened his eyes, saw that Ryan was not beside him, and looked up to see him standing over the bed.

"Hey. What're you doing?"

"Just had a little chat with your mom."

Seth sat up, wide awake, and yanked the sheet up around his neck as if even now she might be staring in through the windows of the pool house. "Where? What did you talk about?"

"By the pool. She saw me smoking a cigarette. But that wasn't what she wanted to talk about." Ryan sat on the edge of the bed and Seth dropped his head onto Ryan's thigh and inhaled his smoky t-shirt.

"Yes, you are indeed very smoky. Sexy." Then, "What did she want to talk about?"

"You. Sleeping in the pool house."

"How did she even know I wasn't in my room? What did you tell her?"

"She must have gone looking for you. Just that we were talking and you fell asleep. She's pretty smart, your mom. And she wouldn't like this at all. I mean, she wouldn't like it any better if I were a girl. The whole thing is just…really not okay."

"Ah, the end of the honeymoon period. So what do you think we should do?'

"I don't know."

"Well, Ryan, I do know. We're going to do exactly what we've been doing except a little more…stealthily. Now you can try to argue with me, but I already know that no matter how many resolutions we make, we're not actually going to change anything. It's a statistical impossibility. I want you, you want me, we live in the same house…the idea of actually having the strength of will to avoid doing…this," he took Ryan's earlobe between his teeth, "or…this," he slid into Ryan's lap and placed one hand on his cock, "or…this," and here he kissed him heavily, breathily on the mouth, "is, well, it's completely ridiculous. So make any kind of plans you want, but I remain secure in the knowledge that you are not going anywhere."

"Yeah. Okay. But you are. I told her I'd wake you up and send you back to the house. I'm sure she's waiting for you."

"Great, dude, fine. That's tonight. But don't get confused on me. Nothing is changing." Seth yanked on his clothes while Ryan sat on the edge of the bed wearing what Seth had come to think of as his resignation-to-the-guillotine expression. He did not move until Seth dragged him bodily upright, wrapped his arms around him, and started kissing him feverishly.

Ryan pulled away after a bit and said, "Yeah, okay, fine, yeah, I want you. But I really think you should go back to the house." Seth grinned, saluted him, and slipped out the door. Ryan stood, feeling forlorn, and watched him go.

Kirsten met Seth in the upstairs hallway and followed him into his room.

"What's up, Mom? Why are you even awake?"

"I want to talk to you."

"Yeah? You do? About what?"

"About you and Ryan."

"Mom. I'm totally sorry about the whole thing with Donnie. But it was my fault. Ryan had nothing to do with it. He told me not to take the guy to the party for god's sake. And it's not like he imported him from Chino or something. He was working at the Crab Shack! In Newport!"

"I realize that. That's not what I want to talk about."

"Well what then?"

"You two are spending an awful lot of time together."

"I know, Mom. He lives here. Do we have to do this now? It's three o'clock in the morning."

"It's just…You keep falling asleep in the pool house."

"So? We were talking. It was late. You know how sometimes I just nod off. It's not a school night or anything."

"Seth."

"What?!" Seth was starting to feel exasperated. He tended to respond to fair accusations with defensive exasperation and he knew his mother knew it. She was looking at him with her disturbing level gaze and he felt almost desperate but also very, very faintly tempted to talk to her. Which would be fine if Ryan were Summer. Which might even be fine if Ryan were some guy from school who lived across town. But which was absolutely unconditionally not fine given that Ryan lived in his house with him as his foster-brother. There was a whole squicky incest thing there that was pretty non-negotiable. Not to mention the unwisdom of workplace romances. There was no way he could ever talk to his mom about this. For two years, anyway. After that, who knew? They could leave home, drive cross-country, pancake-tour their way to some Eastern college where they'd be roommates and live happily ever after. Seth was an optimist.

"Just promise me…you're okay, right?"

"Seriously, Mom, I have never, ever been better." She did not look reassured and Seth realized that ecstatic happiness about life probably did sound suspiciously like the product of an illicit relationship. "Okay, Mom, this is the thing. I like Ryan a lot. And school is going to start soon and he'll meet a million other people, or Marissa will take him back, or that girl Anna from Cotillion will be back from Tahiti and I'll want to hang out with her, or Summer will finally realize I'm the best thing that'll ever happen to her. So right now, before the madness starts, I'm trying to cram what could have been ten years or something of knowing him into the last few weeks of summer. Which probably looks a little extreme to you, after years of not hanging out with anybody. But it isn't that big a deal, really. It's just like, the official beginning of my being a more social person. I mean, maybe I don't actually hate other people. That's kind of good news, I think."

Kirsten smiled and pressed her lips to his forehead. "Yes, good news. I just want you to be…careful."

"Careful, Mom, very careful, cross my heart," said Seth, doing so and kissing her good night.

After she had gone, he lay in bed thinking the safest course would be to surround themselves with hot girls. Maybe create a situation in which Marissa and Anna, or Marissa and Summer, were frequently lounging by the pool. And then, thinking about how a month earlier a surround of hot girls would have been an end in itself, not just a strategic cover for something so heavenly he could never have even imagined it, he laughed out loud.