Work Text:
Sleep evaded Ryan once more. He had tried so many methods to fall asleep. Melatonin, an eye mask, a white noise machine, lavender candles. He was even desperate enough to try a hypnosis CD, but it didn’t achieve anything besides making him really annoyed at the droll voice repeating the same five lines over and over again.
He knew that he should keep off the caffeine as a last ditch attempt, but if he was going to get through a long day at work, he needed coffee to lift his spirits. Or at least help him not seem like a total zombie.
Ryan entered the kitchen to find Seth smearing a plain bagel with cream cheese at the counter while Kirsten sat at the kitchen table with binders and papers scattered about.
“Hey, man,” Seth said as he pointed to a plate on the island with his knife. “I made a bagel for you over there.”
Ryan thanked him as he poured himself a cup of Joe filled to the brim and, using his newly acquired skill from working at El Pavo Guapo, carefully balanced the mug and plate in his hands to set it at the seat next to Kirsten.
“Morning, Kirsten.”
“Morning, Ryan,” she replied without a second glance, too engrossed with vigorously writing into her notebook.
“Is this all for New Match?” Ryan asked his eyes scanned over the papers strewn about without actually reading anything, in fear of intruding on someone’s privacy.
“Yes. Julie and I decided to try a new anonymous system. We thought because we know all of our clients so well that it would be easier to find their best matches, but I’m afraid it’s possible that we have certain biases towards some people. So we decided to have our clients fill out questionnaires and we’ll match purely based on answers.”
Ryan sipped on his coffee as he tried to come up with the best response. He was proud of Kirsten and her new business endeavor, but he could not be less interested in matchmaking. “That’s sounds like a lot of work.”
“Well, the problem is that we don't have enough work,” she huffed as she shuffled through some papers. “We don’t have enough people in our database to know if this is a viable way for us to match people. Before we can continue with this, Julie and I need to find a new pool of people to join. Even if it’s just to experiment with this blind method.”
“If you need any help,” Ryan offered as he lifted the bagel to his mouth.
Kirsten paused then looked up at her adopted son. “You could fill out a questionnaire.”
From across the kitchen, Seth let out a “ha!”.
“I don’t think so, Kirsten.” Ryan leaned back in his seat as if it would discourage Kirsten from asking anymore. Suddenly, he lost his appetite.
“You just offered to help,” she pointed out.
“I meant putting up flyers around the mall or something.”
With a wide grin, Seth remarked, “Man, am I glad that I have girlfriend.”
“And when was the last time you talked to her?” Ryan shot back.
Seth’s smile fell as he grabbed his bagel and orange juice. “It’s a nice day outside. I’m eating by the pool.” Then he shuffled his way out to the backyard.
“Come on, Ryan,” Kirsten begged as she gripped his arm. “Please do me this one favor.”
“Kirsten,” he sighed, “I’m not ready to date.”
“Not even one date? You can’t give up an hour or two of your time to see if this is a viable route for my business?”
Knowing that he couldn’t argue that he was a busy man because the only reasons he’d leave the house for were to bus dishes at a Mexican fusion restaurant or to run on the beach, Ryan tried a different route. “Aren’t most of your clients middle aged women? I don’t think I’m in your demographic.”
Kirsten’s head bobbed from side to side, reluctantly admitting that he was correct. “We are trying to expand to a younger crowd, too.”
“Maybe I’ll join Seth outside,” Ryan said as he prepared to bring his breakfast out the back doors.
“Please, Ryan. I’m desperate. I really need New Match to go well. I’ve already invested a lot of money in this business, and we can’t afford to go under.”
Ryan set the plate and mug back on the table and sighed. “Just one date?”
Kirsten nodded with a weary smile. “It’ll be painless. I promise.”
Ryan took a moment to consider all the horrible ways this could end. He knew that most of the New Match’s clients were Newpsies, and Ryan dreaded the thought of being stuck at a nice dinner that he could barely afford on a busboy's paycheck with a woman who would only regard him as “Chino”, but as he felt Kirsten’s piercing eyes boring into his soul, he knew he couldn't say no.
“Fine. I’m only agreeing to one date. After that, it’s up to you to tell the girl that I’m not interested.”
“Deal.” Then she flipped through two stacks before she found a blank copy of the questionnaire and handed it to Ryan. “If you can get it to me by Wednesday morning before I leave for the office, that’d be great.”
Ryan quickly flipped through it and was shocked by the sheer intensity of it. “There’s, like, forty questions in this.”
“Mm-hmm,” Kirsten responded. “And here’s a pen.”
By Wednesday morning, Ryan had concluded the comprehensive questionnaire, answering questions that he had never considered while also giving the most simple responses he could.
He handed it to Kirsten as he passed her in the kitchen on the way to his car.
“Cutting it close, huh,” Kirsten teased as she tucked it into her briefcase.
“It takes a while to answer forty-three questions.”
“Well, Julie and I will be pouring over these for the next week. Matches should be determined by next Tuesday.”
“Can’t wait,” Ryan sardonically threw over his shoulder as he walked out the door.
“Taylor Townsend?!” Ryan shrieked after reading the letter that entailed his best match. “There has to be a mistake.”
“I know. I was just as shocked as you are,” Kirsten commented. “But like I said, the questionnaire was all anonymous. Julie and I covered all the names and personal information, except for age ranges, before we began. We only knew who everybody was once we matched everyone. And surprisingly, you and Taylor seemed like a good match on paper.”
Ryan was still dazed by the discovery. “I didn’t even know Taylor was a client of New Match.”
“She’s not. This was also a favor she was doing for me. Although she was more enthusiastic by the prospect than you were. Something about being on the prowl after being a ball and chain.” Kirsten shrugged at her confusion over what Taylor said.
“I can’t go on a date with Taylor Townsend.”
“Why not? Aren’t you friends with her? I thought I saw you and Seth watching a movie with her last weekend.”
“Yes, but—” Then he stopped.
“‘But’ what?”
Ryan could not think of a good excuse. He had already promised Kirsten that he’d go on one date with whomever he’d match with. And while he could use the excuse that Taylor was too much for him, since he helped her deal with her divorce, he had found her company… comforting. Yes, she may talk a lot, but sometimes, she would carry on a conversation all by herself, and he would not have to contribute at all which gave him time to think. Kind of like his conversations with Seth.
If you had asked Ryan three weeks ago if he would ever hang out with Taylor Townsend alone, he would've vehemently declined, maybe even run for the hills. But now, as he was faced with the fact that he was going on a date with her, he couldn’t find a reason why he shouldn’t.
Even if he really wanted to.
“Ryan,” Kirsten said, “just think of it as going to dinner with a friend.”
Ryan scoffed in his head. He was still wrapping his head around the fact that he and Taylor were friends.
They decided to have dinner at the Newport Bay Yacht Club. It was a nice place to dine but wasn’t so over the top that it felt like anything more than two friends hanging out. Not to mention that it was an easy place to get reservations at pending a membership there, and Kirsten happily offered to book a slot at 7:00 for them.
Ryan promptly arrived at 6:30 at the Roberts-Cooper House to pick up Taylor, and to his surprise, she wasn’t ready yet. Knowing her, he thought that he would barely have his finger on the doorbell before she swung open the door to greet him.
Instead, he was greeted by a very amused Kaitlin Cooper, with her arms crossed and a smirk on her lips, telling him that Taylor would be down in a few minutes. Then, in a tone that only younger sisters knew how to do, she mentioned that Taylor had spent the last forty-five minutes deciding on what to wear.
Ryan didn’t know why Kaitlin felt the need to tell him that, but if the intention was to strike fear into him, she accomplished that. If this was supposed to be a date without intentions, as it was meant to be, then Taylor would not have given her clothes much thought. But knowing that she had spent the better part of an hour trying on all the clothes she owned, Ryan felt the rock in the pit of his stomach growing bigger and bigger.
He almost bailed and ran out the door, but then he heard heels clacking on the stairs, and in that moment, he knew there was no way out.
Ryan turned to look at Taylor, and he was stilled.
He wasn’t a blind man. He knew that Taylor was an attractive person; he’d be lying if he said otherwise. But when she walked down the stairs in a short red dress with the strappy heels to match, it was just like he actually saw her in all her beauty for the first time.
And then it hit him. He was going on a real date.
“Hi, Ryan,” she said as she reached the bottom step. “You look nice. For a moment, I didn’t recognize you without your black t-shirt and jeans.”
It took a moment for Ryan to recover before he said, “You look nice, too.”
If Taylor hadn’t acted in Taylor fashion and commanded that they leave immediately to beat the traffic, then Ryan was sure that he would have been glued to that spot in the living room where time had slowed.
Ryan wasn’t sure how it happened, but the planned hour long dinner turned into getting ice cream on the pier then walking and talking on the beach until the silver moon rose, striking midnight.
The backs of his hands were pink from the slight tenderness that developed when Taylor insisted on playing the slap game. She had reflexes like a cat and won most of their matches. Ryan had always known her to be the studious type albiet a bit kooky. But tonight, he saw a more playful side of her. It enticed him and compelled him to let the silly side of him out, too. And to be honest, he forgot he ever really had one. It had been a long time since he let that side out.
It was nice. And for that brief moment in time, he felt a little lighter.
At one point in the night, when they were passing by some shops, in the reflections of the windows, Ryan caught a glimpse of them walking side by side. He was taken aback that what he saw were just two teenagers. And it disturbed him that that thought surprised him because that’s what they were.
Upon first glance, no stranger would see that Taylor had just gotten divorce from a French man she barely knew. No one would look at Ryan and know that he watched the girl he loved die in his arms. That he was dealt the worst hand in biological families. That he was just a kid from Chino who, after living in Newport for three years, still felt like the new kid trying to fit in.
They were just two teenagers on a date. Who were having fun.
He wasn’t sure what it was that Taylor brought out in him, but he kept making jokes one after another. They weren’t all that funny, admittedly. Seth would tell him to keep at it, but Taylor would laugh like it was the funniest thing she had ever heard. Ryan wanted to convince himself that she was only laughing to be polite, but no matter how kind a person wanted to be, they couldn’t fake the twinkle in her eyes as she giggled. And Ryan chose to ignore that pang of disappointment when she stopped.
They sat on the beach dangerously close to the water, but, eventually, it inched further and further away the longer they stayed. The Cohens had tried to instill a habit of keeping at least one picnic blanket in the trunk of each of their cars to bring to the beach, but it was rare that the blanket ever stayed in the car. Someone always found one reason or another to remove it. But luckily, this was one of the rare occasions where Ryan found a clean and folded picnic blanket waiting for him in the car. Usually he wouldn’t bother with such a thing, but he didn’t think Taylor would appreciate her dress being completely covered in sand by the end of the night. And to combat the chill in the air, Ryan draped his jacket over Taylor’s shoulders. She called him a gentleman for it.
It was a serene setting with the smell of salt water tickling their noses followed by the faint scent of a bonfire a hundred yards away until a group of young teenage boys passed behind them and an ill-timed breeze hit them with an inescapable wall of Axe body spray.
They couldn’t help but cough. Taylor waved her hand violently in front of the face as if it could help eviscerate the overbearing odor.
They turned to look at what had attacked them and saw a group of boys, no older than fifteen, were approaching a group of girls their age who did not appear to be accepting of them. Ryan knew that they were only a few years younger than he was, and yet, he felt like he had lived so many lifetimes since he was their age.
Once her coughing subsided, Taylor stated, “Someone needs to tell those boys that the body spray is actually girl repellent.”
“Any kid using that much of it is trying to cover a scent that’s much worse,” Ryan commented from experience.
“Ugh, it reminds me of my first kiss.” Taylor said with her nose still scrunched, but Ryan couldn’t tell if it was because she could still smell the Axe or because of a bad memory.
“That bad?” he prompted.
“Not the kiss itself, but everything surrounding it,” she replied as she tucked her hair behind her ear. “So, picture this.” She sat straighter with her hands out in front of her as if she could conjure the memory in the air. “It was the summer after seventh grade at theatre camp—”
“Theatre camp?”
Taylor smiled at him. “Don’t act like that’s a surprising fact. I was president of our drama club. The only reason that my mother allowed me to go to camp because it was when my grandmother—her mother—was still alive, and I begged her to convince my mother to let me go, and my mother could never say no to her—”
Must run in the family, Ryan thought.
“—Anyway, it was the last week and this boy, Milton—”
“Milton!” Ryan shouted as he chuckled.
Taylor flicked sand onto his shoes. “He was cuter than his name, okay? I mean, he was one of the few straight boys there, so he was a hot commodity. Well, after a late night rehearsal, he asked me if I wanted to take a walk around campus—”
“Campus?”
“Oh, it wasn’t a camp in the woods. It was held at UCLA. Dorms. Air conditioning. Working plumbing.”
“Okay,” Ryan said as he nodded to himself, “that makes more sense now.”
“I would say I take offense to that, but even I can’t pretend that I would fare well in the forest for even more than one night. But back to the kiss.” She took a breath before she began again. “So we walked around and ended up next to this tree and then he kissed me. It was a messy kiss, but for two kids who had no idea what they were doing, it went pretty good. Until some girls decided to Axe bomb us.” She frowned as she recounted the memory.
“I’m sorry.” Ryan knew there was nothing to do to fix the problem. It was so long ago, and it’s not like he could seek out the girls and demand an apology.
“The worst part of it all was that it was lead by the girl I thought was my best friend at camp. She said it was just a prank, and I believed her. But in hindsight, it was probably because she had a crush on Milton, too.”
“Well, Milton picked the right girl to kiss,” Ryan offered.
Taylor softly smiled. “Thanks.” To fill the silence, she swirled the last bit of ice cream in her cup. “What about you? What was your first kiss like?”
“Never had one,” Ryan said with a straight face.
Taylor guffawed at that line. “You are a lot funnier than people give you credit for.”
Ryan smugly shrugged.
Needing to hear the story, she laid a hand on his arm. “Tell me. It can’t be much worse than my story.”
“It was spin the bottle.”
“Of course it was,” she said as she shook her head in disbelief.
“And it was with Trey’s girlfriend at the time,” he sighed.
“No way!”
Ryan hummed in the affirmative.
“I know that I’ve never met him, but based on what happened right after junior year, I can’t imagine he was all that happy about it.”
“Yeah, he beat me up.”
“Ouch.” Taylor winced. “I’m sorry.”
“That fight wasn’t as bad as when the girlfriend broke up with Trey because she heard he beat me up.” Ryan leaned in closer like he was revealing a secret. “She didn’t want to date a guy who hit his family.”
“Smart girl.”
“Yeah, last I heard, she’s going to USC now.”
Their conversation was interrupted by a loud scream. They whipped their head to follow the distress—Ryan was just about to stand—when they heard laughter following it. An older teen at the bonfire was playfully shoving a guy with a Scream mask in his hand.
After Ryan had determined that everything was alright, he turned his attention back to Taylor.
“So,” she said as she licked the last of her ice cream off her spoon, “you never said. How did Kirsten convince you to go on this date?”
He bit the inside of his cheeks, ruminating over what was the best answer for him to give. He didn’t want to insult her by making it seem like this was a reluctant date, which at the beginning, it most certainly was. But he didn’t want to lie.
“I offered to help with New Match,” was all he said.
“Come on,” Taylor retorted while rolling her eyes. “No way was it that easy to get you to join a matchmaking service, and no way did it not take some convincing to go on a date with me. I’m honestly surprise that you didn’t run back to that seedy bar you worked at over the summer when you found out that we matched.”
“I thought about it,” he teased.
She gave him a friendly shove and he played along by swaying away as far as he could without toppling over and then swayed back to where he was.
She straightened and pivoted so that she was facing toward him more than the ocean. “Be honest with me.”
“Like how you were so honest with me about the contract you wanted me to sign?”
Taylor shook her head in embarrassment as if it would erase the memory. “I can’t believe I did that. I mean, I can, but I've already apologized for that. Do you want another apology? In English? French? Spanish? Whatever language you like. I, at the very least, know how to apologize in most languages—”
“Taylor, it’s fine. I was only joking."
She blinked as realization crossed her face. “Joking or deflecting? You’re really good at avoiding questions you don’t want to answer.”
Ryan held up his hands as he hung his head at being caught in his attempt to change the subject. “Alright. You got me.” Then he put his arms back down and stared out to the water. “She just asked me for a favor, and I couldn’t say no.”
Taylor nodded in satisfaction. “That sounds more like you. That’s pretty much how she got me to join, too. She sounded really desperate. Desperate in a way that I’ve never seen her act. Well, except when she wanted a drink before she went to rehab.”
That bit of Taylor-ism of saying an awkward and slightly inappropriate thing was something he’d have to get used to if he was going to hang out with her again.
Again? he questioned himself.
And as the slight breeze whipped their faces, fanning out Taylor’s hair out behind her as she glowed under the moonlight, he knew that this wasn’t going to be the last time they spend time together alone.
“Yeah,” Ryan started, “Kirsten mentioned that you were looking forward to it.”
“At that point, I was still riding the high of my divorce being finalized. It felt more real and daunting when I was filling out the questionnaire. Forty-three questions really make you think about what you really want in a relationship.”
Ryan stayed silent.
“Well, I’m glad that it worked out.”
Then the fear of Taylor developing feelings hit him. Just as he was going to clarify that this date was only a favor to Kirsten, and nothing more could happen, she added, “I would much rather spend the night with a friend than with some creep who doesn’t even bother to ask questions about me.”
And the fear subsided. They were on the same page. Even if a small part of him didn’t believe that.
With every minute, the air became colder, and even Ryan, a man who tried to remain stoic against the weather, couldn’t take it anymore.
“Let’s go back to the car,” Taylor said as her teeth chattered.
Ryan didn’t need to be told twice at that suggestion. So, they bounced off the blanket and used the breeze to blow away most of the sand off.
They hopped into the car. Taylor shivered as Ryan turned up the heat. Despite his full intentions of driving her home in that moment, his hand refused to put the gear into drive.
But eventually, he did. He had an early shift in the morning and he was going to return to this very beach for a run as the sun rose. Although he had resigned into knowing that he won’t get any sleep anyway, he liked to humor himself into thinking that he would.
"Positive thoughts" according to the sleep hypnosis guy.
He drove Taylor home while taking the more scenic route and driving at the exact speed limit. Somethings he never did. And because it was still technically a date, he thought that he should at least walk her to the door.
When they stood at the front door, waiting for the other to bid goodnight, Ryan was overcome with the impulse to kiss her.
And that scared him.
There was no reason for him to kiss Taylor Townsend. There were no French lawyers around. No mistletoe. Nothing. So why did her lips seem so inviting?
His mouth had to do something or else it would kiss hers. So instead of giving into that feeling, he asked, “Do you want to hang out tomorrow night?”
Taylor beamed. “Yeah. Sounds great.”
Then she went into the house, giving a little wave as she shut the door, and he couldn’t help but give a little wave back.
After his shower, Ryan felt rejuvenated. He cursed himself for showering at night instead of the morning as he usually did. At the end of his date, he felt flick of tiredness brush against his mind, so why did he do anything to risk it?
Still, he continued to do what he had always did every night for the past month and read a book.
And by morning, he missed the sound of his alarm clock.