Author's note: As always, thanks for all the compliments, particularly assurances that you don't feel Ryan and Marissa are too out of character since that's my biggest worry. We've gotten to Season Two! I'm going to be honest right off the bat and tell you that Lindsay is, bar none, my LEAST favorite character that's ever been on the show. I don't even particularly hate Theresa (although I considered her to be manipulative), but I LOATHED Lindsay. I'm trying to be as fair as I can regarding Lindsay and Ryan, but that bias may well show. On the other hand, when we get to Alex, I freakin' ADORE her. So that may show as well. This is just a brief little chapter; the next one probably will be too, then I'll do a long one on The Ex Factor.

Chapter Sixteen

Ryan- as Marissa had known he would- ended up actually helping her with dinner instead of just watching. Marissa patted herself on the back as they teased and laughed their way through the simple meal. She'd actually gotten a decent night's sleep and three square meals in the boy.

"Hey, where are your parents?" Ryan asked curiously as they carried their dishes back to the sink.

Marissa shrugged. "I never ask these days. I don't think I want to know the answer. I mean, I'm cool with them basically being back together this time around, but they're my PARENTS. I don't want to think about that."

Ryan smiled absently, his mind starting to drift back to far off times. "It's weird how things change, isn't it? You went from hating the idea of your parents divorced to hating the idea of them back together and now you're just kind of at acceptance."

Marissa lifted her shoulders. "Things change. We certainly did."

Ryan took it as that as the hint it was to re-start their conversation and followed her into the living room. "Where do you want to start?" he asked as they curled up together on the sofa.

Marissa chewed her lip thoughtfully as she debated. "I don't know…I think we should probably start a little before you came back to Newport. So much of our lives were separate back then," she remembered sadly. "They stayed that way for awhile. We should talk about how and why that happened."

Ryan was quiet for a long minute. "That was you calling late at night sometimes, right?" he suddenly blurted out. "I mean, that wasn't me going crazy?"

Marissa closed her eyes briefly as she remembered those agonizing phone calls, then nodded. "I couldn't bring myself to speak to you after that one day, but sometimes at night, I'd…" she sighed, then went ahead with it. "I'd be drinking a lot. And I wouldn't be able to stop thinking about you. And I just…had to hear you breathe or something."

"I always knew it was you," Ryan recalled softly. "I would get this feeling in my gut and I'd just KNOW. I think I would have stayed on that line all night if you had, just listening to you breathe."

"I remember the last time I ended up calling you," Marissa murmured, half to herself. "I'd had dinner with Kirsten and my dad at your place earlier that night, and I'd gone out to the pool house just to stare inside, but I couldn't go in. That big empty space…it felt like the space inside of me. So I went under the lifeguard stand and got drunk as usual, and I called you."

Ryan remembered that, too. He'd been getting steadily more miserable and restless with his emotionally empty relationship with Theresa and what felt like an increasingly useless life in general. Still, a silent thought nagged at him. Taking a deep breath, he decided to voice it. "So where did D.J fit it?"

Marissa instinctively almost rolled her eyes. That relationship had possibly been the biggest waste of her time. Ever. Still, it was important to what happened to them at the time, so she didn't make light of it. "Honestly, he really didn't fit in much of anywhere," she admitted frankly. "I don't like to say it because he was truly a nice guy, but I spent time with him BECAUSE I didn't really care. He had no power to hurt me, not even really as a friend. We hired him on not long after I moved in, and he was always flirting with me…it was almost like another form of alcohol. It was an escape.

Ryan thought her words over carefully. "I can understand that," he said at length. "While what I ended up doing wasn't quite so casual, it wasn't altogether different than that, either. We can get into that later."

"I was never OUT of love with you," Marissa said firmly, wanting to make sure she got that point across. "I never even considered myself out of love with you. I was just angry at being in love at the time, and I thought I needed that escape into nothingness. And then you came home."

"And then I came home," Ryan echoed. "Theresa lost the baby and told me to not bother coming back, and I hate to say it but I was all too eager to take her up on her offer. I was nervous as hell to approach you, though. At first I wasn't even considering that I had the right to come home and face you at all. But then I got here and I couldn't stop thinking about you…I decided I was going to be casual about it, just approach you like I was coming back from summer vacation. It probably wasn't the best idea, so I was shocked when it actually worked, or I thought it did." He sighed. "I should have sat you down and had a serious talk with you. I knew you'd been drinking over the summer. I knew it couldn't be as easy as you were making it seem."

Marissa shook her head tiredly. "I should have told you; I know that now, of course. I honestly had every intention of breaking things off with D.J for good after you asked me to the carnival, and I was so scared of you disappearing from my life again if you found out. I talked myself into not telling you and talked Summer into agreeing with me…but then I had to go see D.J. God, I everything I did with that poor guy was selfish. I told myself it was because I didn't want to be a complete bitch and leave him hanging without a clue, but the truth is, I was just scared."

Ryan's head shot up and he looked at her curiously. "Scared?" he repeated. "Scared of what?"

"Of all kinds of things," Marissa confessed. "I was scared I'd lose you no matter what and then I wouldn't have anyone because I'd thrown D.J away. I was scared to lose that second escape beyond alcohol. Most of all, I was scared to let you back in again when I hadn't begun to heal from the pain of you leaving in the first place. I knew that I loved you but part of me was upset with myself for still being so vulnerable in that area."

Ryan sighed and ran a hand over her hair. "I can really understand that," he admitted. "I did pretty much the same thing when I found out. Part of me wishes you would have told me back then; I don't think I would have been angry. But you know…we were still so closed off from each other back then, and I think that's something only time was able to heal."

Marissa nodded. "I'm not trying to excuse myself from lying, but I think you're right. When you walked off at that carnival, I was still so cold and…dead inside that I barely even felt it. I think we needed new experiences. We needed to know what it was like with other people so we'd really KNOW we're supposed to be together." She faltered and blushed, realizing how ahead of herself she'd gotten. "I mean…that's how I feel, anyway."

Ryan smiled tenderly and lowered his hand from her hair to stroke her face. "I feel that way, too," he assured her, leaning in to give her a quick kiss. "If the time apart did anything, at the end of the day it convinced me I'm a lot better off with you."

Marissa flushed with pleasure this time and leaned her head into his shoulder. "Of course, I was a little in denial at the time," she remembered. "When we met up at the concert that night and we had a good time…I felt like you missed me…"

"I did," Ryan admitted frankly. "You're such a big part of my life here. Having it so empty of you felt all wrong. I told myself we could be just friends and that was a way to make the emptiness go away…I mean, it helped because it's better than not having you in it at all, but it was never quite right, for as long as I tried to ignore it."

Marissa smiled faintly; it was nice to know on some level he'd felt the way she'd pretty much accepted feeling all along: a little lost without each other. "So I was going to see you," she went on. Ryan raised his head, his eyes puzzled. "Seth and I had a talk and I was telling myself I just wanted to know if you wanted to hang out as friends, but the truth is at the time I was thinking it would be like the last time we decided to just be friends. So I went to school to find you…and I saw you with Lindsay." That had hurt. It still hurt a little bit. It wasn't a feeling of betrayal, really. Not even like Theresa, where she knew she hadn't been betrayed but felt that way anyway. She'd just been sad that she couldn't make him smile like that.

Ryan ran a hand over his face. Lindsay. He'd known this would come up and he still wasn't quite sure what to say about it. He didn't even know what it was; looking back, it hadn't been much of a relationship. It's hard to have a relationship when you're breaking up with the person every other day. He voiced the thought out loud. "I'm not sure exactly what to say as a whole about her, but back when you must have seen us…I was trying SO hard to be normal, to be the good guy. I'd caused so much trouble and pain for the Cohens over the summer. I wanted to make as few waves as possible. So there Lindsay was, and she seemed to want to help me get on that track…"

"…And she wasn't as complicated as I was," Marissa finished ruefully. "You can say it. I think I more or less said the same thing about D.J."

Ryan chuckled at her straightforward response in spite of himself. "There was that," he conceded. "Lindsay was almost more an idea to me than she was a person; I'm not even sure I got to know her all that well."

Marissa considered that. "I don't think I DIDN'T know D.J," she said at length. "I mean, he was a pretty straightforward, nice guy. I had a decent enough time hanging out with him. He was basically just a friend with privileges, I guess. When I went after him after seeing you with Lindsay-" she winced at just how bad that sounded in retrospect "I think- I hope, at least- we both accepted that's what it was about."

Ryan nodded slowly; he'd kind of known that from the get go about her relationship with D.J and if he was honest with himself now, it had been what kept him from being all that jealous. "So I guess we've reached that point," he commented aloud. "We were officially separated, and we stayed that way for awhile."

Marissa nodded a little sadly. "I guess so. We still had our little moments, though. And I think this next part is really important- it's when we learned how to be friends."