#notfallinginlove

[mendzfuk]

#nope #notfallinginlove https://www.instagram.com/p/B9NYnWFnwSz/?igshid=14e9fknqu9yrx

[mercolleary]

Get off the internet, Bryan.

[ryan-tessa]

We're Not Falling In Love, We're Just Falling Apart ; self-para

Ryan's fourth boyfriend was Jake, who seemed to get it through his head after himself and his on-again-off-again girlfriend broke up for the thousandth time, that Ryan was a girl that was next to him through thick and thin and didn't ever leave. He supposed sometimes the fact that she never left him alone could've been considered quite annoying, but he knew Ryan, and he knew she didn't like to be left alone, and it never did get annoying with her. Maybe once or twice, Jake would find the fact that she was always lurking around to be annoying, but he'd accustomed to it when he was younger. After living with her for ten years he was used to it. 

Ryan didn't say yes right away when Jake asked her out. It took her a whole month to say yes. Jake, as annoying as he was sometimes, kept asking, almost every day, if she wanted to go out some time. She denied him time and time again because she knew Jake; she knew he got lonely, and he got sexually frustrated easily, and that he made impulse decisions. She refused to be one of those impulse decisions, so she kept turning him away. He didn't ever leave, so on one particularly rainy day in June she said yes to a date from the assistant coach on her soccer team. It rained a lot that week, but it was warm despite it, and by the time the day of her date rolled up the rain hadn't relented. 

They went out to dinner downtown, at some fancy restaurant Ryan didn't know the name of, then decided to walk around a bit before going home. They walked around under his umbrella, and Ryan enjoyed herself, as much as her feet ached in her wedges. 

Then he backed her into a corner, and Ryan wasn't sure how she felt about that. She definitely didn't like the way his hands tugged down on her strapless dress, exposing her bra and making her stumble. And she really didn't like the fact that she had to punch him in the face to get him off of her before running down the street, pulling her dress up and kicking her heels off her feet so she could go faster. She felt a hand on her shoulder, and she turned around to thwack the person in the arm with her shoes. 

"Hey! It's just me! Christ, Ryan..." Ryan paused, feeling a sigh of relief escape her when it was just Jake, looking confused and warm in his jacket and underneath his umbrella. He paused for a moment, watching her as she wiped her eyes. It looked like she'd been crying, but she was also walking in the rain without an umbrella so he couldn't be sure. "Bad night?" he guessed, watching as she turned to toss her heels into a nearby trash bin. 

"Horrible." she muttered, pulling her dress further up her chest before plopping onto the curb. Jake followed, sitting next to her and holding his umbrella over both of them, toeing his SUPRA's off his feet and kicking them towards her. Ryan gave him a pitiful look before slipping her small feet into them, tapping them absently. 

"Do you want to talk about it?" Jake offered, slipping out of his leather jacket and draping it over her shoulders. Ryan shook her head, running a hand through her tangled, fallen curls before slipping her arms into the warmth of his jacket. 

"Not right now. Can you take me home?" she sighed. Jake nodded, standing to his feet and holding a hand out to her. Ryan grabbed it and pulled herself to her feet, stumbling after Jake in his shoes and jacket. 

After that things between them got... weird. Jake, being the more popular of the two of them, had girls desperate to be with him left and right, and he used it to his advantage to make Ryan jealous. Ryan, in return, slept with his friends Tyler and Zach to get back at him for it. Still, Ryan was stubborn, and Jake had retreated to being stubborn because Ryan was. It became a vicious cycle, and eventually it became too much for both of them. 

"Where are you going?" Jake asked, not looking up from his homework as Ryan trotted down the steps with her bag slung over her shoulder and her phone in her hand. 

"Going to Zach's to play Soul Caliber. Why?" she asked, opening the refrigerator and pulling out a chilled water bottle. She took a sip of it and turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow at him and staring until he looked up at her. 

"No reason." Jake muttered, looking back down at his homework. 

"Does it bother you?" she asked, recapping her bottle and leaning against the kitchen counter, flipping her hair over her shoulder. 

"Yes actually, it does." Jake snapped without looking at her. Although half-expecting him to say so, Ryan felt a little caught off guard by his tone, and she immediately felt guilty. 

"As if you haven't been doing the same thing." she snapped back, at a loss of how to respond, because they both knew what would happen if she went to Zach's, and they both knew it wasn't just to play video games.

"Because you kept pushing me away." 

"You started it because you wanted to make me jealous and you know it." 

They both stewed in silence, the air in the kitchen uncomfortable as Ryan gripped her water bottle tight and Jake snapped his pencil in half. 

"Does it bother you?" Jake mocked harshly, and Ryan glanced down at the hard-wood floor, shifting nervously. Her and Jake didn't argue much, but when they did it was usually a big blow-out from holding things in for too long or was the result of them taking anger out on each other. This had never been a boundary they'd overstepped so seriously before, and even though they had made-out during the occasional game of spin-the-bottle or truth or dare it'd never been voluntary. 

At the same time, Ryan had always liked Jake, but had gotten accustomed to the thought that nothing would ever happen between them. This new boundary they were crossing was rattling her.

"You're acting like I haven't seen the thousands of sketches of me in your notebook."

"I told you not to go through my stuff!"

"And I told you not to wear my clothes without asking but you're wearing them right now." Ryan looked down at herself; she was wearing a shirt she'd stolen from him so long ago she hadn't even remembered it was his. "We already act like a couple, why don't we just get together?"

"Fine."

"Fine."

Silence. 

That was that. 

Ryan and Jake's relationship didn't change much from the outside looking in, but it did escalate into something way bigger than it was before. It escalated physically and emotionally, and after only a week of being officially together they had sex for the first time. 

And Jake finally found out what he was missing on. He did find it weird, because Ryan had slept with all of his friends, which meant whenever his friends asked him questions they knew the exact questions to ask and there was no way to dodge them without his face turning bright red. He was glad though, because in the midst of all the awkward sex stories about his girlfriend he discovered that Ryan was more intimate and personal with him than anyone else. She wasn't the equivalent of a "high-end well-paid classy prostitute" with him (as Tyler had described it, but then again Tyler had never been verbally eloquent); she always had this sparkle in her eye that made him feel like not only the most important person in her life, but like he was reason she existed. It scared him, how open and honest she was through her eyes, and he wasn't sure if he liked it.

So he wasn't entirely sure what had possessed him to say Kylin's name in the middle of him having sex with Ryan four months down the line. 

There was a suffocating pause; she pushed him off of her, stood to her feet and put her underwear and jeans back on, and walked out the door of his room as she slipped her shirt over her head. Once Jake had exited the room after trying and failing to get over how mortifying and embarrassing saying someone else's name during sex was, he found that Ryan was gone.

When she came back it was a blowout, because Jake was afraid of having so much weight on his shoulders and Ryan knew all the buttons to push to get a rise out of him. Jake tried to keep his temper and solve this problem rationally but Ryan wasn't letting him. She was being too vulnerable; she wasn't the Ryan he grew up with. She wasn't being guarded and wary and quietly angry, she was yelling and crying and Jake didn't know how to deal with it. Ryan was usually the one putting him back together, but it wasn't often when she was the one to fall apart, and Jake had never been the one to make all the screws come loose. He had been lost, and when she spouted something about him obviously not being over Kylin he found himself retaliating without thinking about what to say first;

"Well, I'm not like you, Ryan. Everyone I care about is still actually around-"

He stopped himself mid-sentence, because she was looking at him with those vulnerable eyes again and he didn't think it was possible for someone to cry as hard as she had been. She ran up the stairs to her room and slammed the door shut. 

Jake didn't even try to make her forgive him for that.

By the end of the week everything was moved out of her room, and she was on a flight to California to, what had become hopefully, live with her aunt. 

And that was the end of that.