Chapter 8: 8. My Room Looks Worse from His Room

8. My Room Looks Worse from His Room

Sometimes I wondered if it was fully intentional of Ryder to always call my name wrong.

April was not a name that was hard to remember, wasn’t it? It certainly wasn’t in the same par as Serenitia or Henrietta or Tymyra. It only constituted of two syllables, one vowel for each syllable.

“Uggmm, brebbbrrerllergh,” Ryder was in the middle of groaning and crooning and crying as he followed me to the front of my house. “I hate my father much.”

In the course of twenty meters distance between the place where he harassed my window to my front door, he’d tripped on his own foot twice and nearly stumbled down head-first trice.

“March, slow down,” he said.

Okay. So maybe he wasn’t faking not remembering my name. After all, just yesterday I wasn’t even sure if I was within his radar. Even if I was, I was  only the nameless cuckcosucker’s sister, anyway.

“Wait here first, okay?” I told him, before then I hurried inside my house to check whether any of my family members were still up.

Bless my blood, everything was pitch black, and the only sound that could be heard was the distant snoring from Quentin’s room.

When I went back to Ryder, he was fumbling on the zipper on his trousers, his torso directed dangerously to the flower pots near the porch.

“No-no-no-no! Don’t pee on my mother’s pansies!”

Ryder snorted as he started laughing. “But I want to take a pee.”

“I’ll take you to my bathroom!”

“The flower looks like they need water.”

“Your pee is toxic water!” I nearly screeched, because I knew how much love and care my mother gave to the pansies. “And it’s yellow!”

Ryder took this way too lightly and started sniggering in a manner that would be out of control in seconds.

This was way worse than what I’d imagined it’d be. And this was only the beginning. I could feel my eyes sink as I stared at the stairs that would lead to my room. Holy stars, was Ryder even capable of taking the stairs?

“March,” Ryder was coming closer to me. Right know he might be devoid of the intense glare that he would normally strap on his eyes, but the fact that he was so tall and broad-shouldered and tattooed still made me squirm whenever he was around my vicinity. “I need to pee.”

Oh, snap it.

Closing my eyes, I grabbed Ryder’s arms and tugged him along with me. He was warm and his skin was a little rugged and I was pretty sure I’d clawed him more than necessary, but somehow I managed to get through the stairs without fainting twice. When I opened the door to my room, Ryder immediately went to the bathroom and not long thereafter, I could hear the sound of water hitting against water and a scandalous moan coming from him.

As the bathroom door flung open, Ryder staggered out, a smile was still on his face as he took in my room.

You see, I was way too aware that I wasn’t the very definition of normal, but my physical body carried no such proof of that. My room, however, was another story.

Tons of movie posters were plastered all over the walls, ranging from Star Wars (because a lot of times I felt the need to explore the galaxy world) to Mean Girls (because watching Regina George would made me scream and hyperventilate so much that it would wear me off before I sleep). Action figures were all over my desk, and don’t even ask about my bed.

It was swarmed with Teddy Bears.

It was supposed to be a harmless hobby. Buy one small Teddy Bear. Just one. But over the course of years, it became something close to an addiction. If I was taking a stroll to a mall and stumbled across a Teddy Bear that looked at me in the eyes, I’d start to have dreams about it. The more I tried to ignore the dreams, the worse it got. It took trials and errors, but after a while, I decided that I’d just buy any Teddy Bears that ‘spoke’ to me right away. It was a good thing that I never spent my money on going out or clothes.

Ryder looked around my room with widened eyes. He then progressed to stare at my photos at the comic-con that were hung on the wall, before, shortly thereafter, he showed obvious signs that he would puke.

“Trash-bin?” I offered, and in just a second, there was Ryder’s half-digested food in it.

Seeing how revolting his vomit could be, I believed my face changed colors to purple. Ryder sat on the floor, his back facing the wall. Now, he had just completed the first three stages of getting drunk.

1. Having zero control of the coordination of his mouth and brain.

2. Peeing. A lot.

3. Puking.

What came after this would be losing consciousness.

At least, that was how Quentin’s four stages of intoxication usually worked out for him.

It would be very easy for me to be disgusted by Ryder at this moment. His breath induced strong smell of alcohol mixed with vomit. His eyes couldn’t quite focus and whenever he attempted to talk, all that was out was a bunch of badly strung sentences. He was a good looking guy when he was sanitary, but I doubt that any girl would find him attractive in this particular condition.

But then I made a big mistake by looking at him right in the face. He looked tired, that was for sure. And he looked sad, if not depressed. It was a pretty funny notion since there was a bit of smirk left on his lips, but then he couldn’t really hide the wave of sadness that washed over his eyes.

I knew I was gonna regret this, but I actually stormed off to Quentin’s room. He was snoring and the room was dark. I felt guilty for doing this, but I finally said goodbye to conscience as I pulled his clothing cabinet and grabbed a t-shirt from the very bottom.

“Great bedroom,” Ryder said dreamily to me when I got back to him. His voice contained an unhealthy amount of innocence that I didn’t know he had it in him.

I had difficulty repressing myself from saying ‘awww’ and start pampering him. When he wasn’t scowling, Ryder was a really cute guy. His eyes were big, deep set, and perpetually starry. His lips looked like they were permanently swollen, but a good swell. And a good color, too. I kneeled in front of him and take a clutch of the blanket that he’d thrown over his body. “Now take this off.”

“Horny?” he asked.

This time, the difficulty was to stop myself from headbutting him in the eye.

“No,” I said patiently. “I bring you fresh clothes.”

Ryder grinned. “You want to see my naked.”

I groaned, but I slid off the blanket anyway, trying to ignore him smirking at me. As his bare upper body was revealed, I could finally take a good look of his bruises. It was a lot, more than before he went to that party with his friends.

“Did you fight again?”

He shrugged a yes. “Somebody called my dad  a ‘fucking douchebag’. Nobody calls him that but me.”

I had to fight a smile to hear him say that. He might get into arguments with his father daily, but deep down, he still loved his old man.

“You know,” I could feel Ryder’s hand rested on top of my shoulder. “This is the first time you talk to me and don’t look scared.”

I backed away from him, because his hand was heavy on my shoulder, and because the feel of his skin against mine made me feel weird. Like there was a whirlpool that suddenly originated from the place where our skin joined. “I find it easier to talk to you when you’re drunk.”

“You don’t even talk all Yoda.”

I actually smiled proudly because of that. “I know. It’s an accomplishment. Maybe if you don’t look so intimidating in real life, I could talk to you like this all the time.”

“I can be intimidating now,” Ryder tried to get up and put on his ‘intense stare’, but then he failed miserably as he only managed to narrow his eyes slightly. “This is me. The outcast everyone’s scared of! This is Ryder Black! The guy who makes a girl faint by talking to her!”

I never laughed so much in my life. Ryder laughed too, before he flopped onto the floor. I showed him Quentin’s shirt, and that was when Ryder’s whole face changed.

“Ew! No, it’s cocksucker’s!”

I didn’t have any idea how Ryder knew about this.

“You have to put on a shirt, Ryder! My room’s air conditioning is cold, and it’s going to be morning in four hours and it’s going to be extra cold!”

“I sleep naked all the time,” he said.

“No, you sleep with matched pajamas,” I said automatically. “Unless you bring a girl home.”

“Stalker.”

My cheeks heated as I realized how much of a creep I come across as.

Ryder looked straight to me as he continued. “It’s actually cute. You’re cute.”

This time, my whole body was on fire.

“So is this how it needs to be?” Ryder asked.

“What?”

“I tried flirting with you like, for million of times today. You reacted to nothing. Even my best moves. And now I’m drunk and I say the cheesiest things ever and you’re blushing mad.”

“I-I’m not blushing!”

“You are.”

“No! It’s just the AC.”

“Is it?” Ryder looked around, before then he realized that he was still shirtless and started to hug himself.

I stretched the shirt and slid the hole inside his head, but before I could push it further to his body, he’d caught my hands in a death grip. “No!”

“Why not?”

“It’s cocksucker’s.”

Against my characteristic, my temper tantrum broke. “You imbecile! You need clothes or you’re going to freeze to death!”

After hearing that, Ryder’s whole movement halted. I almost felt that all the problems were all solved when- “What’s imbecile?”

I sighed. Even his vocabulary level had dropped into what a six year old would have. “It’s a fancy way to say ‘stupid’.”

He pulled down the shirt to his shoulder so that his face was exposed to me. It was undeniably cute and again, I was overwhelmed with maternal instinct to pinch his cheeks. “But I genius!”

Yeah, right. A genius who couldn’t even form a decent sentence structure and acted like a five year old.

Wait, I think I know how to handle this.

“But Ryder…” I talked sweetly. “You’re not a genius unless you wear Quentin’s shirt.”

Like any five year old would do, he quickly put on the shirt. And then he looked at me expectantly, hoping for a praise. I grinned at him and then led him to the bed. Despite his childish demeanor, he looked exasperated. My predictions was true, because as soon as his body reached the mattress, he closed his eyes and took a sleeping position.

Looking at him now, I couldn’t remember why I was afraid of him. Yes, he might be capable of breaking my bones, and there were hard proofs that he’d done that to people, but I wasn’t sure that he’d do anything bad to anyone without any provocation.

And besides, I heard that when a man was drunk, his true self is revealed.

And Ryder’s true self is a five year old who longed for appraisals.

But still, I found it hard to believe that the stoic, out-of-control bad boy whom the whole school feared was a five year old at heart. I almost had the urge to kiss him on the forehead and sing him lullabies so that he wouldn’t have any nightmares about boogeyman.

“April,” Ryder’s voice almost went on unnoticed as he only whispered it quietly.

I leant closer to him, actually surprised that for the first time he got my name right.

“The room’s better than it looks from my room.”

It took me quite a lot of time to digest that perfectly structured words properly. I thought I had heard it wrong, but I couldn’t ask for confirmations, because Ryder had already started snoring softly.

So, all this time, he had also watched me from his room?

Geez, that made both of us stalkers.

Against all odds, I smiled.

Actually, it didn’t sound so bad at all.

The problem is, where am I going to sleep now?!

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Okay, so I'm sorry for the delay. I've just finished my other story and it drained me to the boot. I hope that you like this chapter, though. :) Things are getting juicer!

p.s: I know that the guy on the gif has light hair. but that kinda expression, them eyebrows. that's how I imagine Ryder would look like. :)