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Spencer doesn’t fall in love until the other person does. There could be reasons for this. Maybe he’s in love with love. Maybe he loves being worshipped. Mostly he thinks he’s just too careful to fall in love on his own. He wants a sure thing before he commits. Spencer’s always been cautious.
He fell in love with Ryan first, though. He doesn’t remember not being in love with Ryan, so he knows he was first.
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Ryan falls in love willy-nilly. (Spencer’s mother always used to say that. It’s a ridiculous word. Perfect for Ryan.) He falls in love stupidly, suddenly, excessively, unbelievably. He falls in love with people who are perfect for him, with people he’s perfect for, with people who are train wrecks on legs, with people who aren’t even good for themselves. He loves them equally and indiscriminately, and Spencer’s never understood it. Ryan is as cynical as hell. His favorite love stories end with murder, suicide, tuberculosis, absinthe, car crashes, emptiness, loneliness, abandonment, despair. He doesn’t believe in happy endings, but he’s always expecting them.
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Spencer’s first, perfectly clear memory of how he felt about Ryan was in the second grade, when Ryan said he didn’t feel like playing dodgeball during recess even though it was his favorite, and Spencer saw the bruises all over his upper arm. Something wells up in Spencer at this memory, something bigger than he was, even then, now still. Something fierce and unafraid, the way Ryan was. Spencer thought about how if he were bigger he’d beat Ryan’s dad up and make him apologize, or how he would run away with Ryan and become pirates or astronauts or join the circus, or have his mom adopt Ryan, because Ryan practically lived at their house anyway.
Ryan came in increasing flashes during middle school, with various girlfriends, reading Chuck Palahniuk the way some people read the Bible, ignoring teachers and scribbling in his books instead of actually taking notes. Then faster in high school – parties, class, Spencer’s basement with the drums, Ryan’s room with guitar in hand. Spencer noticed more, noticed all the ways Ryan was honestly different from him. Maybe not the first time Spencer saw Ryan put on eyeliner, or the second, or probably even the third, but sometime around the fourth time he tried it, when it went from ridiculous to exotic and strange, less like Ryan was trying to be someone else and more like he already was.
The first time he saw Pete’s hand on Ryan’s bare back Spencer wanted to throw up. He would have given anything to be back in his parent’s garage, just him and Ryan, drinking Kool-Aid and trying to figure out Josie. He was all right with Jac and Keltie, not because they were girls but because they weren’t Pete, because he knew that Keltie would be good for him but that Jac wouldn’t, that Jac would make Ryan into what he wanted to be, while Keltie would make him more of what he already was. Spencer liked Pete, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t see the inherent train wreck.
He remembers the first time he saw Ryan with a drink in his hand. Not just holding onto one like he would at parties in high school, trying to fit in –not even trying, really. Spencer always saw it as trying because he knew Ryan, knew how he geeked out over Mark Hoppus and Pete Wentz and Moulin Rouge!, and that he didn’t give a damn about getting shit-faced listening to Britney Spears or Eminem, but to everyone else Ryan probably was cool – but actually drinking a beer, actually getting drunk, and it was like Spencer almost didn’t know Ryan anymore, because he hadn’t known that Ryan trusted himself that much.
They’re more snapshots than anything, little “oh” moments that Spencer staunchly refuses to analyze too closely. At the time they made something soft and warm burst in the pit of his stomach. Now they’re more like punches, and Spencer feels stupid thinking about any of these things. Stupid for thinking he could ever have changed any of those things. Stupid to think Ryan ever would have let him.
Spencer doesn’t remember when he wasn’t in love with Ryan, but he can certainly remember the times he knew he was.
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Spencer grows up. Not just in that he graduates high school, in that he gets older and taller, slims down and learns to carry himself. He’s part of a band that makes music he loves, he holds that band together when one-fourth of it starts to crack. He stops buying girl jeans, because even though he likes the way they fit on his hips, apparently girls don’t have thighs, and he stops shaving because, well, they run out of razors up the cabin, but he keeps growing his beard because he likes the way it looks. He stops automatically agreeing with Ryan about the music they listen to, the movies they watch, how much Red Bull Brendon is allowed to consume, but mostly about the band. Spencer thinks it over for almost three weeks before he agrees to scrap the stuff they wrote in the cabin. Ryan pouts and glares, mostly, but sometimes he looks at Spencer like he has no idea what to make of him anymore. Like he’s seeing Spencer for the first time.
But Ryan doesn’t say a thing until they’re on tour again, until they’re stuck on a bus somewhere on their way across Texas and Spencer doesn’t have a chance in hell of escaping.
“You’ve been different lately.” There’s no tone to Ryan’s voice, but Spencer sees accusation in the spread of Ryan’s feet, hurt in the fold of his arms, curiosity in the dip of his head.
“Weren’t you the one talking about people changing?” Spencer says mildly. Ryan’s latest reinvention is really no surprise. Ryan craves change the way most people require stability. Ryan’s never known stable. Even the things he’s come to count on are by nature transient – music, venues, tour buses, hotel rooms. Willy-nilly, Spencer thinks again, randomly, without any sort of rhyme or reason except the kind Ryan’s created for himself.
“I never.” Ryan stops and bites down on his lip. Spencer puts his Sidekick away and Ryan crawls into the bunk next to him
Did you think you were the only one allowed to change? Spencer wants to ask, because Spencer’s always been the reason. Always been the rhythm, the beat that Ryan changed along to. Maybe, deep down, Ryan is as scared of change as anyone else. Because he has changed, Spencer realizes, changed in the most fundamental of ways. You can only be in love with someone who doesn’t love you back for so long. Familiarity is supposed to breed contempt, and maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t, but Spencer knows it amplifies things. It makes them happen faster, makes them seem bigger or worse than they are, makes things change so much quicker than you ever thought possible. He thinks about how weird it’s been these past few months, how strangely awful and oddly remote, Brendon and Jon, Ryan and Pete, Spencer and Haley, like a particularly macabre merry-go-round where they always circle one another but never come any closer.
Ryan puts one hand in Spencer’s belt loop, presses his face right up against Spencer’s. Spencer puts one hand on Ryan’s chest, ends up with a fistful of handkerchief.
“Ryan.” Warning and promise all at once, because they have too much history to not know where this is going.
“Sorry,” Ryan whispers, and Spencer supposes he’s as sorry as he ever is. Not much and not for long, but sincerely. “Sorry, but I just –”
Spencer closes his eyes, thinks I’m not in love with you, not anymore, but that’s not the point. That doesn’t mean a thing.
“It’s okay.” It’s not even a lie. Not yet. Ryan’s thumb is running over Spencer’s hipbone and there’s a storm brewing in the pit of Spencer’ stomach, but Spencer’s never been any good at sorting out a genuinely bad feeling from a tempest in a teapot.
“I want it to be,” Ryan says intently, the same I want Spencer has heard so many times before, about Brendon and Jon and Pete, about drums and guitars, lyrics and chord changes, about 3 a.m. and girlfriends and boyfriends Ryan barely admits he has, the same I want that has pulled Spencer into this spot right next to Ryan. “I do, Spencer, really.”
And he does. Ryan falls in love first. Spencer falls in love last.
Spencer just hopes to hell that there’s overlap somewhere.