"The Words" – chapter 5
Thanks, as always, for the feedback. It is much appreciated. This chapter is a short, bridging kind of thing, which flips through the days rather quickly but shows in two vignettes how Summer and Ryan expressed love for each other in their relationship without words.
On Sunday Summer followed her original agenda for Saturday. She lay around in her bed listening to crybaby rock and stuffing her face with chocolate chip ice cream and Cheetos ... until about five o'clock when she suddenly remembered she had a huge paper due tomorrow which she hadn't even begun. It was one of those ten page extravaganzas complete with footnotes and bibliography that was supposed to take you a whole quarter to work on but which nobody really began until a few days before the deadline. Summer abandoned her snack foods, flipped open her laptop and worked feverishly for the next few hours.
At about seven that evening her phone rang and her heart pounded.
"Hello?" she answered.
"Hey, Summer." Seth's familiar lisp was both a disappointment and a relief to hear. She was glad he had called. If she had had to spend one more second in the solitude of her empty house, she thought she would break down crying again.
"Hi," she said, feeling strangely shy. This was Seth, but because he was Ryan's best friend he was kind of like Ryan by extension. Besides, she knew he was going to try to get her talking about why she had broken up with Ryan and she didn't want to have that conversation with him.
But Seth surprised her. "Are you working on that term paper for Snyder's class? Because I'm only like halfway through and I'm already running out of things to say. What did you write?"
"Are you kidding?" Summer was on comfortable ground, glad to talk about mundane school stuff. "You're asking me? I started pulling analogies out of my ass after the third page. This is the stupidest report I've ever written. I'll be lucky to get a C minus."
They lampooned their teacher and bickered companionably for the next twenty minutes and Seth never once mentioned The Breakup. Summer was grateful.
"Well, I'd better get back to writing bullshit," Seth finally said.
"Yeah, me too." Summer paused. "Thanks for calling."
"Hey, just because you and Ryan aren't together right now is no reason you and I can't still hang, right?" Seth asked. "If we're really friends, then we should BE friends."
Summer nodded then realized he couldn't see her and said, "Yeah," quietly.
"All right," he replied. "So call me whenever you want to talk. I'll be around." He added, "Unless, of course, I'm out on a date with Nikki. Did you see her last night? She works at the restaurant with Ryan and me. Caliente, no?"
"Si. Muy." Summer smiled at his irrepressible enthusiasm. "You go!"
"Oh, I plan to," he answered with a chuckle. "As soon as she stops denying my remarkable charm and wit and agrees to go out with me."
The opportunity was there and Summer couldn't resist the urge to dig for facts. "And how about Ryan?" she asked casually. "I noticed he had a date at the party too. Fast worker," she added blithely as if it meant nothing to her.
"Date? Ryan?" Seth was astonished. "Oh! You don't mean that little girl, Heather? Are you crazy?"
"They went off together," Summer pointed out.
"That was nothing," he assured her. "The kid has a crush on him and she was embarrassed and crying and...." His voice changed as realization dawned on him. "You were jealous!"
"Don't be ridiculous."
"Yes, you were," he insisted. "Summer, how can you be so insanely paranoid? You know how Ryan feels about you, and you know that you guys would be together right now if you hadn't demanded your 'space.' Get a grip!"
Summer wanted to tell him, 'No, I don't. I don't know how Ryan feels about me at all.' but instead she cut Seth short. "Look, I still have that paper to write and so do you, so.... Goodnight, Seth."
"Summer...."
She hung up before he could say anything more.
She sat and looked at the phone in her hand for several moments. Seth swore that nothing had happened between Ryan and that little Bambi-girl. Well, that was promising, but Summer had to make sure for herself.
On Monday she went to classes and between them she stalked Ryan trying to catch him talking to the lovesick freshman again. Summer hid behind bookcases and locker doors, ducked into classrooms and dodged behind other students to hide. She knew her behavior was bordering on psychotic but she couldn't stop herself. She glimpsed Ryan several times throughout the day and she saw Heather walking by with a pack of her girlfriends once, but she never actually saw them together. By the end of the day Summer decided she should probably check herself into the clinic Marissa was at, even if she didn't have a measurable addiction like alcohol or coke. She clearly needed some medical intervention to cure her obsession.
On Tuesday as she drove to school Summer happened to catch the tail end of the old feminist anthem "I Am Woman" on the oldies radio station as she flipped past it. By the time she had belted out, "I am strong. (strong) I am invincible. (invincible) I am WOMAAAAN!" enough times, she decided to take back her life. With this newly empowered vision she called the local hospital and asked to be put back on the volunteer roster. No longer would she sit on her ass being useless and uselessly sorry for herself. She would bravely don the noble candy-striper uniform and head back into bedpan battle for the sake of the invalids. They were adding her into the schedule starting next week.
On Wednesday after school she continued her plan of making her life fulfilling sans Ryan. She was WOMAN and didn't require a counterpart to make her complete. Summer hauled out her stepmom's old ski machine and worked her body until sweat was pouring from every pore. Then she headed to the beach where she swam vigorously then sunned herself for an hour, followed this up with a heart-healthy dinner and passed out from exhaustion by ten o'clock.
On Thursday Summer was walking down the hallway at school and turned a corner. She almost walked into Ryan. There was no way to sidestep, ignore or pretend they hadn't seen each other. They both stared.
"Hey," Ryan finally mumbled.
"Hey," Summer answered faintly, feeling transfixed as some little forest animal by the bright blue beams of his eyes.
The first bell rang and startled them from their mutual stare-fest.
"I'm, uh, going to be...." His eyes shifted away from her, glancing down the hall then back again.
"Late for class," Summer finished. "Yeah. Me too." She gestured to her books. "I, uh, have a test."
Ryan nodded and started to walk past her but paused after only a step. He hesitated, looking at her, his brows knit in a frown. "Summer, I...." he began.
"There you are!" Amber's voice cut the air like the whine of a chainsaw. She ran a smooth interception, walking between Ryan and Summer and taking her friend's arm while throwing a look of utter disdain at Ryan. "You've got to show me your notes quick before class!" She led Summer away.
Summer didn't even get a chance to sneak a glance back to see if Ryan was still standing there as she walked away.
Thursday night - actually early Friday morning, Summer had one of her wakeful spells. She didn't think they were classic anxiety attacks because she didn't have a racing pulse or shortness of breath, but sometimes she would wake up at two, three, four in the morning with a pervading sense of unease and extreme loneliness. She would lie wide awake in bed listening to the sounds an empty house makes and realize that if she dropped off the face of the earth there was no one who would miss her; not her father, who was too busy globe trotting with his new wife when he wasn't working outrageous hours at his practice; nor her mother, who couldn't even be bothered to keep in touch. There was no one but Summer to care about Summer and that was a damn scary feeling in the early hours of the morning.
Before last week she would have called Ryan, and he would have made her feel better like he always did.
The first time she had ever called him late at night, Summer had been embarrassed when his hoarse, sleepy voice croaked into the phone, "Yeah?"
"Oh. Were you asleep?" she had stupidly asked.
"Well, it's ... 3:15," he answered, and then his voice became more alert as he asked worriedly, "What's wrong?"
"Nothing," she admitted sheepishly, "I just couldn't sleep."
"Oh." There was a pause. "Something bothering you?"
"Not really. I just ... I wish you were here," Summer answered truthfully then rushed on, "I'm sorry. I'm stupid. I shouldn't have called. Go back to sleep."
"No. No, it's okay," he assured her. "We can talk."
She had asked him to tell her one of his stories about growing up in Chino, and he did. It was something about Trey and a dare that involved spray- painting a highway bridge. But what he said didn't matter as much as his husky voice, which wrapped around her, painting word pictures. It was almost as good as lying in his arms.
After that first conversation, Summer called a few other times when the insomnia and sadness flared up. Ryan never seemed impatient or annoyed to be wakened. Sometimes they tuned into the same TV channel and made fun of the infomercials or the late night phone sex commercials.
Sometimes they had phone sex.
And one time, when she was feeling especially low, Summer even admitted to him how much she hated being so alone in the world and ended up crying. He shushed her and murmured soothing things and told her that he would come over if she needed him to. But Summer knew they were already on thin ice with Sandy and Kirsten and she didn't want Ryan getting grounded so she pulled herself together and told him it was okay. He listened to her some more and teased her a little until she was smiling again and then they both finally said 'goodnight' and hung up and Summer felt a lot better.
That was what she used to do when she was feeling shaky and scared at night. But tonight – or actually, today, Friday morning – there was no one to call, so Summer lay awake staring up at her canopy for an hour, willing herself to fall back to sleep. Then she gave up and got up for the day, making herself a huge breakfast and eating it out on the veranda as the sun slowly lightened the landscape around her.
She finished some last minute homework and then got herself ready for school. She made a mental promise to call Marissa today and see how she was doing at Fairhaven. And although she missed sharing her night fears with Ryan, Summer was also proud of herself for handling it on her own. She remembered that she used to take care of herself like this all the time before Ryan came into her life.
She felt good. She felt strong and capable. Of course, she also still felt really lonely.
And she realized that she had now spent a full week without Ryan.
On Saturday afternoon Ryan had a soccer match. He congratulated himself on spending a full week without calling Summer and begging her to take him back in a needy, obsessive and totally inappropriate way. He was doing just fine on his own.
He tried to play hard and concentrate on the game but couldn't help looking at the bleachers to the spot where Summer usually sat and feeling a sharp pang of disappointment not to see her there, even though he hadn't really expected to.
At the beginning, she used to complain that soccer was the most boring sport invented by man and she didn't understand why he couldn't play basketball or something.
He reminded her that he was kind of short for basketball and that she didn't have to come to the soccer matches if she didn't want to, it wouldn't bother him.
"Well, of course I'm coming. That's what girlfriends do," she said.
And she did. Even when the other 'soccer girlfriends' weren't there because it was too rainy or cold or there was some social event more pressing than sports, Summer always came. She sat in her spot, not always watching, sometimes doing her homework or her nails or chatting with Seth, but always there to see him.
It never ceased to amaze Ryan that he had people in the stands now who were there for him; Sandy, Kirsten, Seth and Summer in some combination were present at every match.
Sometimes afterward, when the game was especially grueling or he had overextended himself, Summer would amaze him further by coming to the pool house and offering a full body massage. The first time she did, he had said, "You don't have to do that," but after he found out how fantastic Summer was with her hands, he never turned down the offer again.
She had him lay shirtless, face down on his bed as she straddled his body. Her light weight pressing against his hips and riding his ass, immediately turned him on and he wanted to flip over and start making out with her, but instead stayed still as she had positioned him. Summer started on his scalp, running her hands through his hair and gently kneading with her fingertips from the crown of his head down to his neck. She spent a good deal of time working the tight muscles that extended from neck through shoulders, pulling the tension out and away. Her stroking hands over his shoulders and upper back elicited a little moan of pleasure from Ryan.
"Good, huh?" she asked.
"Mm," was all he could manage in response.
She put her weight into it as she massaged the muscle groups of his back, sometimes pressing painfully hard then easing off and releasing the tension through soft, slow strokes up and down his naked skin. Ryan didn't know whether he felt more horny or sleepy at this point. It was simultaneously erotic and completely relaxing.
Then Summer began to work her way over his glutes and down to his thighs and he knew that horny had won. He could feel every touch through the thin fabric of his boxers as she kneaded and pressed. He started to roll over, ready to take her in his arms, but she smacked his butt hard.
"Hold still. I'm not finished," she commanded. "Get your mind out of the gutter. This is sports therapy not foreplay, damn it!"
He chuckled into his pillow and let her carry on with her work.
She massaged all the way down each leg, her hands warm and soft yet hard as they manipulated the aching muscles of his thighs and calves. When she reached his feet, he almost dissolved into whimpering moans of pleasure again. She pressed and probed the arches and heels and manipulated each toe as he sighed in contentment. She ended by tickling the bottoms of his feet and he jerked away from her firm grip.
Summer laughed and moved back up his body, straddling him again. Now she was working his biceps and giving his arms and hands the same treatment as their counterparts below. When she had finished down to the last finger and after she had smoothed her hands up and down his arms a few times, she draped herself full length on top of him and nuzzled her face into the side of his neck behind his right ear.
She felt like a warm, Summer comforter covering his body, and Ryan felt completely peaceful and relaxed.
"Thanks," he murmured. "That was unbelievable."
"I know," she whispered and sucked his earlobe into her mouth. He squirmed as she peppered his neck and ear with kisses.
"I feel like I should do the same for you," Ryan said.
"You can pay me back some time. Just relax now."
"That's hard when you keep tickling me," he complained peevishly.
"You think THIS is tickling?" She nipped at the nape of his neck and said in a threatening growl, "I can show you tickling."
"No, ma'am. I'll be good," he promised.
She laughed and subsided against him. They lay in silence for a long time and never did end up making love since they both fell asleep until past the Cohens' imposed curfew and then Summer had to hurriedly kiss Ryan and leave.
Ryan knelt in the grass to relace his shoe and took a cleansing breath as he pushed the soccer-related memories of Summer out of his mind and prepared to focus on today's match. He gave a quick wave to Sandy, who was up in the stands munching popcorn, and Sandy grinned and waved back.
Ryan joined his team on the field.
By Sunday morning Seth had had enough.
He had thought it was bad back when Ryan and Summer first started dating, ripping his heart out, tearing it into a million bits, stitching them back together and ramming it into his chest again. This was almost as bad in a less intense way.
Watching Ryan drift robotically through each day, answering in monosyllables and never cracking a smile, was not a pleasant experience. Knowing that Summer was doing the same but without even Marissa around to confide in made it worse. Seth had tried to get Summer to talk to him but she evaded him almost as completely as she hid from Ryan. He so wished he could help her but when they did talk it was always about surface stuff.
Both of his best friends were miserable and so Seth was miserable.
But he had a plan to fix things. It wasn't really his plan. He had seen it put into effect on Full House, Dawson's Creek, the Brady Bunch and even in the cartoon world of Hey Arnold! It was a foolproof plan for patching up quarrels, whether between lovers, friends or siblings. He was confident it would solve things, but first there was a little groundwork he needed to accomplish.
To be continued....