Title: Let There Be Silence
Rating: PG -semi-dark, a little tongue-in-cheek in parts
Summary: Ryan and Marissa share silence and a smoke.
Disclaimer: I do not own anything...
Notes: This is, for the most part, an experiment with form (tense changes are on purpose). I need a new episode!! :( lol
Let There Be Silence
______
Noise.
Outside a party is still going on and drunks and prostitutes line the street like cattle.
The hospital is dark and dingy and doesn't smell like the bleach corridors his nose is used to.
He lights a cigarette, lets the nicotine fill his lungs and the tang of grief wet his tongue.
He tries to speak, but the words are lost when her hand reaches out and takes the burning Marlboro from his fingers.
_____
Life used to be so easy. She knew what she wanted. She used to want Luke. She used to want him so bad, she turned a blind eye to his sexual liaisons with
most of the female population, under seventeen, in Orange County.
And then Ryan came along and blew that to pieces. Suddenly she could see with such extreme clarity, she wanted to burn the images from her brain.
She understands those cheek-kisses and lingering touches on the backs of all those high-society ladies they used to run into at the country club now.
The thought of Luke and a forty-year-old woman getting it on in the back of his truck almost made her laugh, and then it made her gasp. Her own mother had
probably slept with him.
Figures.
Julie Cooper never minded sharing before. Hell, Jimmy still wanted Kirsten and probably always would....and Julie was okay with that...and now Marissa
understood why.
She wasn't prepared for Ryan. She wasn't ready to want and need him so very much.
________
She passes him back the smoke, a mountain of ash hanging from red embers. A smooth brush of her fingers against his. She watches closely. A tense strain
in his jaw is his only reaction.
Still, they sit in silence, a careful glance between them. A bastion of understanding forms.
The intravenous makes her skin itch.
The mise-en-scène couldn't be more perfect. Her laying in bed, him sitting patient by her side. The drapes drawn. Flowers perfuming the air. In a movie she
would be dying, but she's nowhere close to death.
She's as heathy as an ox. They laughed about that earlier. Much later, their vocal chords strained and their tear ducts dry, they don't find it so funny.
Because she almost did die...and she knows he wants to ask what it was like. Maybe he even wants to see for himself...
___
The first time he looked at her, he saw innocence...the very thing he yearned for the most. He thought, briefly, that he could drown in her innocence and
make himself pure.
And then he looked into her eyes.
She wasn't innocent. She was hardened and steadfast; a slave to the very darkness he tried to rid himself of.
But she was pure...purely tempting.
Seduction unravelled in her eyes like the peel stripped from a Seville orange with merciless, slow fingers.
She teased him with those little girl smiles and doe eyes that spelled sex under the curl of her lashes.
It was alluring and dangerous and too damned enticing to deny.
Beyond that, she was something familiar. Something he recognized in his own soul.
Something broken.
_____
He denies the tremor that rolls through him. Denies the questions in his brain that twist with sick, morbid fascination over and over in his head.
He hardly notices his flesh searing.
He does notice the fragments of peace in her eyes and wonders if he can drown in her now.
_____
The silence between them hangs heavier than the smoke that wafts from the burning tip of Ryan's cigarette.
It clogs her lungs and makes her feel dizzy, but at least she knows she's alive...and that's all that really matters to both of them.
___
end.