“I don’t want help with that,” Damon snarled.
Then, for the millionth fucking time, forced himself to take a deep breath and calm the fuck down.
He should be used to this by now, anyway.
Everyone wanted to stick their fucking noses in and fuck around with a thing they just didn’t goddamned well understand.
But instead of the frustrated, hurting anger that usually rose, he just felt...so fucking tired. Drained. Maybe because he knew Rian, as much as he could by now—and where from most people that question came out of patronizing pity, he had a fucking feeling Rian was taking all his helplessness and casting around to be able to do something, anything, to feel like he was accomplishing something useful where he couldn’t do a single damned thing for Chris.
Even if it meant rummaging around in a few of Damon’s sore spots and fucking around with a subject Damon didn’t like getting poked in.
He rolled his shoulders, trying to ease some of the tension in his neck and get his hackles to settle, opening his eyes. “Look. I get that you feel like you have to do things for people so they’ll think you’re useful and worth keeping around,” he grit out. “But I don’t need you doing shit for me where my parents are concerned. Birth or adopted. I don’t need anyone making decisions for me there.” He leaned back against the counter, eyeing Rian and ignoring his breakfast; he suddenly had no damned appetite anymore. “I told you. I closed the book on that. No one asked you to fucking open it again.”
That’s not what I fucking want from you.
I don’t know what I want...but it sure as fuck isn’t that.
Rian stared at him, his eyes glassy. “I wasn’t trying to open anything again!” he protested.
“Then what were you trying to do?” Damon threw back. “Stick your fingers in an open wound? Maybe throw in a little salt and lemon juice?”
“No!” It came out as a broken gasp, Rian’s breaths hitching, his chest heaving. “I was just trying to...to...”
“What, Falwell?” Fuck, it felt more desperate than angry, this building frustration inside him when he was just so...so fucking tired of fighting with Rian. “The fuck were you trying to do?”
Rian drew himself up as if he was about to throw something back, eyes sparking—then dimming as he just deflated, seeming to shrink in on himself, his head bowing.
“...get you to talk to me,” he whispered, nearly swallowing the words, before with an irritable sound he looked away, glaring across the room and rubbing his knuckles against dry eyes, his movements restless and jerky. “I get it. Maybe I’m trying to push you too much, but God, if we’re in this together then we’re in this together, and you’re so locked up inside your own head and I’m left out here fucking alone with my own thoughts and no idea what to do. At all. If I walked out of here right now, you would ignore me for another week, refuse to answer my texts, my calls—because when I have problems I just explode everywhere, while you just completely shut yourself up as if you can wall away and try to fix everything on your own, and won’t come out until you’ve figured out how.”
Well... God damn.
There it was.
Whatever Damon had expected the morning after waking up with Rian naked in his bed, it sure as hell wasn’t having some of his worst personality traits read back to him like Rian had stumbled on a fucking Damon Edwin Louis instruction manual and found every last button to push to make Damon feel like the shittiest goddamned man on earth.
He sighed, rubbing his fingers along the bridge of his nose. “Okay. I get it. I’ve been pretty close-mouthed ’cause I’m mad as fuck at myself and trying not to take it out on anyone else. But you’re not just talking about Chris, are you.”
With an upset sound, Rian shook his head, gaze still fixed across the room. “No. I’m not.”
“You were the one who said it didn’t have to be anything,” Damon pointed out wearily. “Just comfort sex. Meaningless.”
“I never said it was meaningless,” Rian protested, voice cracking softly.
Damon just looked at Rian for several moments. “You didn’t have to.”
A single broken sound escaped Rian’s mouth—before he stopped himself with a hand clutched over his mouth, fingers digging into his cheek hard enough to leave dents. He closed his eyes tightly, his breaths filling the space between them with heavy, hurting rasps, and Damon just...just...
Damned this fucking wall they’d built between them, higher and thicker than even the barrier of the snappish barbs they’d thrown at each other to start. It felt like they’d created this impassable thing of cruel distance that he couldn’t even cross to pull Rian into his arms and tell him it would be all right.
Especially when Damon didn’t know what it even was. What the fuck was going on between them, what the hell this horrible feeling was, what the hell he needed or why suddenly Rian’s shallow smiles and careful deflections weren’t enough.
How the hell could he tell Rian it would be okay?
So he kept his hands and his thoughts to himself, giving Rian quiet and space to compose himself, averting his eyes so Rian wouldn’t feel like Damon was scrutinizing him, judging him, impatient.
But he looked back as Rian sucked in an audible breath and straightened his shoulders, wiping his fingers under his eyes once more even though they were still dry, and Damon thought he was betraying more than he intended about what he was repressing with those little gestures.
“Sometimes,” Rian said softly, looking somewhere just past Damon, not quite meeting his eyes, “when I’m afraid... I say the easiest thing that comes to mind. Anything that lets me deflect, and hide.” He offered a tremulous smile, one full of all the hurt that dwelled in his eyes, even if he seemed so stubbornly determined not to actually let it out. “Anything that lets me smile like I don’t mean it.”
That hit in ways it shouldn’t have—hard.
Because now Damon wondered...if, because he’d dared to have any emotion other than perfect patience, because he’d dared to be frustrated, in a bad mood, upset, hurt...
If Rian now saw him the same way others had. The people who had told him he was only good for brute military service. The kids who had acted like he didn’t have a right to defend himself when they hurt him. The past lovers that had begged him to be rougher, then flinched like he’d done something to hurt them if he was just grouchy and didn’t want to talk.
As a raging animal, someone to be afraid of, instead of a human being who was allowed to have feelings other than smiling complacence.
“So,” Damon asked, trying to keep his voice even, “what are you afraid of, Rian?”