Thank you for all the commments! I really appreciate them and I enjoy reading what you have to say. My main concern is always that I'm not doing a good job of keeping the characters IN character. I know my view of Marissa may be a little kinder than some, but I hope I'm making where she's coming from make SOME kind of sense. Although I admit, I'm a little nervous about that in the episodes that will follow this. Also, I think it's very possible for Marissa and Ryan to have a fully sexual relationship in the future, but there's no 'quick fix' for the trauma Marissa experienced and I wanted to make that clear. It's going to take time and effort.

Disclaimer: I know I blow by The Secret really quickly. It's actually one of my favorite episodes, but there isn't a whole lot to say and like I mention at the end, it's hard to think of it alone considering what comes next.

Chapter Eight

Marissa re-entered the pool house almost two hours later to find Ryan sitting on his bed staring at the wall. She inwardly sighed; she knew exactly what bringing Trey up on the heels of having a talk about sex would remind him of and she knew it would just depress him further. She simply hoped they could find some closure through all of this.

"Hey," she said lightly aloud, shutting the door behind her. "Did I interrupt a brooding session?"

Ryan looked up and smiled faintly. "A welcome interruption; don't worry." He returned the kiss she gave him as she came to sit by him on the bed and wrapped his arm around her shoulder. "Should we pick up where we left off?"

Marissa nodded, doing her best to hide her unease. Trey didn't hurt you then, she reminded herself. He didn't hurt you for a long time afterwards. "After the best date ever" she gave him a playful smile and he chuckled "I guess the next big thing is Thanksgiving."

Ryan laced their fingers together. "I was really touched you wanted to come with me to Chino that day," he remembered, trying to delay directly mentioning Trey as long as possible. "I know I didn't do the best job of showing it, but it meant a lot that you cared enough to try and find out about where I came from."

Marissa's brow knitted. "So why didn't you want me to come?"

Ryan almost smiled. He kind of admired the way Marissa just FELT everything. If she was happy, she let herself feel it. If she was sad, she let herself feel it. If she was angry, she let herself feel it. Even with the problems it so often caused her, he almost envied that freedom. The idea of hiding a feeling like being grateful your girlfriend cares was so foreign to her. "Because I was…embarrassed, I guess," he admitted aloud. "About a lot of things." Marissa's eyes silently encouraged him to continue and he sighed. "I was embarrassed about Chino, obviously. I mean, it's a long way from Newport Beach. I didn't want you to see that ugliness, and it doesn't much uglier than a member of your family in prison. I was also…" he faltered for a minute; this was still new territory for him. "Our relationship was so new, you know?" he said at length. "I was embarrassed to admit I needed you there." He remembered the conflicting emotions vividly; how he'd desperately wanted her to come and had been desperately afraid that she'd turn away from him if she did all at the same time.

Marissa melted inside. She knew she shouldn't need the words. She knew the way Ryan proved to her how he felt should be enough. She just couldn't help it; it was the way she worked. In their particularly low times, she needed to be able to pin point those moments where he came out and told her how he felt; she needed that absolute certainty. "I would never turn away from you because of who your family is and where you come from," she said aloud, using her free hand to stroke his cheek. "It's never had any effect on how I feel about you."

Ryan smiled gently and leaned in to kiss her hand. "I sorta started to figure that out that day. I gotta admit, even if you lied, it's flattering you'd literally rather spend the day in jail with me than with your mother," he teased.

Marissa giggled. "Any day of the week," she assured him, lowering her hand to tickle his side. "I just…couldn't let you go without me. I felt like if we let this wall stand between us then, it might never go away. So I thought the only way to insure that didn't happen was to just…invite myself along." Closing her eyes briefly, she sighed and rubbed her forehead. There was no avoiding it anymore. "So then….then we went to see Trey." It was bizarre; shortly after that happened, she…hadn't exactly forgotten about it, but had simply put it out of her mind and hadn't focused on it again for more than a year. And yet, she now could remember every single detail of her first glimpse of Trey now. She could even remember how the slight wind had felt against her skin as she walked up to Ryan's older brother; she vividly recalled the jolt as she'd first seen Trey, beaten and broken in his orange jump suit and yet still looking strikingly like Ryan. Strangely, focusing on that memory wasn't as difficult as she'd expected; remembering Trey so vulnerable and helpless was easier than remembering the animal he'd turned into in those final weeks.

Ryan had tormented himself over that moment in recent weeks. Had it started then? Had Trey seen her as a toy he could take from baby brother even back then? He tried to remember if Trey had looked at Marissa in a way that would have indicated something of what was to come. Had there been something there that he should have seen that would have helped him know he should shield Marissa from Trey instead of encouraging her to go near him time and time again? Would it have been any different if Ryan hadn't taken her that day; was part of Marissa's appeal the sheer length of her commitment to Ryan? He knew he'd probably never have those answers, but the questions haunted him at night all the same.

"You can't blame yourself for taking me there." Marissa's voice startled Ryan out of his thoughts and he looked up in surprise to see her smiling sadly in that 'I know what you're thinking' way. "You had no way of knowing," she said firmly. "None whatsoever. Besides, I took myself there."

Tired all the sudden, Ryan simply nodded and decided to focus on that visit as it had affected them then. Everything else would come soon enough. "I knew Trey wanted something as soon as he called me," he admitted. "My loyalty to him seems insane now; how many times did he screw me over? But he was my big brother; one of the few family members I had left."

"We love our family," Marissa said simply. "Even when they screw up; even when they don't deserve it."

Trey is not my family. Ryan didn't voice the thought aloud; there'd be time for that later. "I was honestly shocked you wouldn't leave me," he said aloud. "I really thought you'd run the other way and not look back when I told you I was helping to steal a car."

Marissa raised a brow. "Because it turned me away so quickly the first time?" she said wryly. "Please. It's not so easy to get rid of me."

The warmth spread through Ryan now as it had then. Her loyalty that day had chipped away at some of his defenses; if she could see that side of him and still want to be with him, maybe he wasn't so hopeless after all.

"And after all that came that horribly awkward meeting with Theresa," Marissa remembered. Her tone was light, but her memories were not. No one in her life, not even her mother, had made Marissa feel as horribly inadequate and insecure as Theresa. Not that she didn't like her, she did. All the same, Theresa brought out all the ways that Marissa felt…not good enough. Not good enough for Ryan, not good enough in general.

Ryan groaned, bringing her back to the present. "Oh man, I thought you were going to kill me." He winced, still remembering the almost comical horror he'd felt when Marissa and Theresa realized they were both girls next door. He'd been half convinced Marissa would never speak to him again after they left Chino.

"You COULD have given me a little warning," Marissa said, her voice mockingly scolding.

Ryan just shrugged in an 'I'm an idiot' manner, somewhat embarrassed and guilty about the reason he hadn't: he truly hadn't thought about it. He hadn't thought about Theresa being there because he hadn't thought a lot about Theresa since arriving at Newport. He knew now there was no doubt he'd never been in love with her, but she'd been a good friend and she HAD deserved more from him than that. "You two seemed to get over it pretty quickly," he said aloud, still shaking his head about their odd little friendship. "You were chatting it up when Arturo and I came back."

"Oh, that wasn't immediate," Marissa laughed. "She threw catty comment after catty comment at me at first. I'm not blaming her; she resented me and I could see why. When I didn't rise to the bait, I saw more of the real her and I liked her."

"I love that about you," Ryan said softly and she looked at him in surprise. "I love that you don't get petty about stuff like that," he elaborated. "Even if I don't always return the favor."

Marissa blushed a little, not quite knowing how to respond. She caused him enough drama; it was nice to know she was capable in at least one area of the relationship. "So then you yelled at me," she teased. "But I won you over when I saved your ass."

Ryan laughed. "Well, the idea of dealing with your mother was exhausting, but in retrospect I know you were just trying to knock down some of those defenses, and it's probably good you did. And I gotta admit, I was impressed when you saved my ass." He had been; he'd never expected Marissa to either care so much or think so quickly. "I think it made our relationship more…I don't know. I don't want to say real because it was real before then, but it was more obvious we had found something that could last after Thanksgiving." He suddenly knew he wasn't up for talking about the return visit to Trey and decided to quickly move ahead. "I guess after Thanksgiving was the whole thing with Luke's dad, right?"

Marissa observed him for a second, then decided to let his obvious avoidance go. Nothing had happened in between those periods that severely affected their relationship, and he must be desperate if he were actively encouraging talking about that issue. "Mmmm hmmmm," she said simply, keeping her voice teasingly even.

Ryan winced. "Okay. I really, really, really blew that one," he said ruefully.

"Yes, you did," Marissa said sternly, then broke into a smile in spite of herself. It was kind of amusing looking back on it, and bizarrely refreshing to remember them bickering over something so normal. She voiced the thought. "It was really our first normal couple fight. It's a milestone when you think about it," she teased. "I'm so rarely in the right; it's nice that I was in that one."

"I really am sorry about that," Ryan said somewhat sheepishly. "I don't think I really apologized when it happened. You'd never given me any reason to think you'd tell the whole world something I told you in private, and I jumped on you anyway. I regretted it so fast; I remember feeling like you'd punched me in class when you wouldn't sit next to me."

Marissa struggled to conceal her grin; she remembered his 'kicked puppy' expression that day. Look at all that sweetness he was completely unaware of. "You earned it," she retorted, even as she kissed his cheek to let him know she was mainly kidding.

"I probably didn't deserve you looking past it so easily, but I was grateful," Ryan admitted. "It was another good step for us; if you could look past things like that, we really had a shot at making this work.

Marissa simply shrugged. "It bothered me at the time, I won't lie. It hurt that you didn't trust me. But at the end of the day, I knew you were sorry, and I knew why you did it. You had issues trusting people and you have good reason to." Admitting she knew that, admitting she'd known it on some level back then, was difficult. That would be one of the last times he was the screw up for quite some time in their relationship, and it didn't begin to compare what she would do in the days and weeks to come that no doubt blew that theory of his about how well they worked together all to hell. She closed her eyes for a moment to brace herself, then went ahead and took the plunge. "It's hard to feel magnanimous about that," she admitted softly. "Not considering what happened next. Not considering that next comes Chrismas."