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“He should definitely be back by now, right? I just… really feel like he should be back by now.”
Kaitlyn sighed.
“I don’t know, buddy.” She was leaning tiredly on Dylan at the foot of the lodge stairs, her cheek resting against his upper arm. “I’m sure he’ll be back as soon as he can.”
Dylan had asked her some variation on this question at an average rate of once every five minutes for the past hour. He was driving Kaitlyn absolutely batshit fucking crazy, he could tell that he was, but she was humoring him for the moment and he simply couldn’t stop. With the sun finally up and no more werewolves to contend with, his anxiety was now firmly fixed on Ryan.
When the sun first rose, they’d still been quietly chuckling about Kaitlyn teaching a werewolf to play fetch. Abi had been safely locked in the basement until they’d let her out and the others had all turned up one by one, Nick and Emma coated entirely in blood, Jacob limping along with a chewed up ankle, but otherwise unharmed. They’d already filled Nick in on everything he’d missed, which had been a lot.
Emma mentioned hiding in the van before she turned, which solved the lingering mystery of who the werewolf that had bitten Dylan in front of the lodge was. She was, really, very apologetic about it when she found out. To be fair, he had encouraged Kaitlyn to shoot her with silver, so Dylan figured they were more than even. If anything, he owed her a thank you for unknowingly healing his amputation wound. He’d have been pretty annoyed if she had killed him, but in the light of a hard-won dawn he could afford to be generous.
The others had gone inside to take turns cleaning up in Chris’s office bathroom and the big sinks in the kitchen and when Dylan had opted to stay outside and let the rest of them go first, Kaitlyn had stuck with him. They both knew they were waiting for Ryan, but they’d avoided talking about him at first. Instead, they’d playfully argued for as long as they possibly could over who had saved whose life the most times in the preceding hours.
“It was definitely you,” Kaitlyn had told Dylan, “you saved me twice. I only saved you that last time with the decoy bunny.”
“No way,” Dylan had shot back, “you saved me twice inside the lodge alone, I’m pretty sure. And you saved me outside too.”
“I only had to save you that first time because you’d just saved me! But if we’re counting every move someone makes, fine,” she said, “you saved me one time jumping on that werewolf in the parking lot—“
“Emma,” Dylan reminded her.
“Right, Emma, truly the least fashionable she’s ever looked but don’t tell her I said that. Anyway, one time from Emma, a second time lifting the car in the scrapyard, and a third time dropping the car on that werewolf. And you did it with one hand! That gives you a handicap.”
Dylan had looked at her sideways. “I don’t think you’re allowed to say that anymore, KK.”
“Not like that, dumbass. I mean a handicap on your score, like in golf!” Dylan nodded like he knew what she meant, though truthfully he had no idea.
“I’m not convinced me having one hand is much more of a handicap than you being basically four feet tall.”
“Excuse me, I know it’s hard to gauge from as far up in the clouds as your head is but I’m 5’2” and a quarter!”
Dylan snickered at this. Only the truly vertically-challenged would be counting quarter inches. But with that debate somewhat settled, they’d mostly run out of non-Ryan things to talk about.
And now Dylan had anxiously brought up Ryan every few minutes and it hadn’t seemed to magically call him back from whatever horrors he’d left them behind to face. With every passing minute that he still wasn’t back, Dylan lost a little more hope, felt a little more like he might throw up. He was timing his breaths, trying to will his rising panic back down. Then Kaitlyn grabbed his arm roughly and Dylan nearly scolded her for startling him before following her gaze to the approaching cop car, lights on but no siren. Dylan’s heart beat so hard and fast he thought it might explode.
The back door of the police cruiser was flung open and a figure in black was out and hurtling in their direction. It was unmistakably Ryan. Alive. In one piece. The tightness in Dylan’s chest, a feeling he’d gotten so used to over the past few hours that it had scarcely registered to him anymore, finally unwound and he found himself able to breathe easily again.
Wordlessly, the tall boy with the missing hand and the much smaller girl with the gun strapped to her back rose to their feet and started forward. The boy in black, Ryan, skidded to a halt before them, a little out of breath. Had it really been less than a full day since they’d stood in this exact spot in the golden evening light, shooting the shit over mundane topics like luggage and podcasts?
“‘Sup, man?” Dylan said, entirely too casually. He immediately wanted to punch himself, repeatedly, in the face. Every inch of his skin thrummed magnetically with Ryan this close and it took all of Dylan’s remaining strength to fight the urge to throw himself physically at the other boy.
“It’s over,” Ryan panted, “done.”
Dylan and Kaitlyn both responded with solemn nods. They both knew what that had to mean, that the end of the curse would almost certainly have required the death of their boss. Dylan felt a pang of regret at the realization. He and Mr. Hackett hadn't always seen eye-to-eye on everything, but he never would have wanted something like this to happen to the guy. He'd always seemed like a basically good person, even if he could be a stickler for some pretty stupid rules. But worse, Dylan knew what it would mean for Ryan that Mr. H had to die, knew how close Ryan had been to the camp leader and how much he'd seemed to look up to him. Ryan must be crushed, though it was hard to tell just now. He looked tired, worn out really, but beyond that his expression was as inscrutable as ever.
“Where’s everyone else?” Ryan asked.
“They’re all inside,” Kaitlyn informed him, “everyone’s okay.” Then she reached out and patted Ryan’s arm while he stood stiffly apart from them both.
“Glad you made it back,” she said with a small smile, “now, if you boys will excuse me, I need to check on the werewolf we left in the freezer.”
“The… what?” Ryan looked from Kaitlyn to Dylan and back again.
“Oh, right,” Dylan said with the slightest of shrugs, “we did do that.”
He watched Kaitlyn as she circled behind Ryan, taking an unnecessarily extended route to the lodge stairs. Once she was sure Ryan couldn’t see her, she began gesticulating wildly in his direction. Dylan wasn’t great at reading lips but he was pretty sure Kaitlyn was mouthing something along the lines of, ‘just fucking kiss him already!’ He shot her a withering glance. Easy for her to say. He still had no idea where he stood with Ryan. For all Dylan knew, any progress he’d made over the course of the night, over the course of the whole summer, might have been erased in one fell swoop by the whole… chainsaw thing.
As Kaitlyn retreated toward the lodge, Dylan and Ryan regarded each other for a moment in awkward silence. Ryan’s eyes weren’t meeting Dylan’s face and he realized with an unpleasant lurch of his stomach that Ryan was looking at the end of his arm where his severed hand should have been.
My eyes are up here, he thought, but managed not to say. Then Ryan’s eyes did make their way, slowly, up to his own and Dylan tried not to read anything into how soft and sad (and beautiful) they looked.
“Hey,” Ryan said, belatedly.
“Hey,” Dylan replied, “hi.”
Have you thought about punching yourself in the face and simply never speaking again? he asked himself. If Ryan noticed the redundancy of his greeting, he didn’t let on.
“So, uh, how’s your arm?”
“Oh! It’s, uh, y’know handless still but, uhh,”—ask your doctor if punching yourself repeatedly in the face and never speaking again is right for you—“otherwise it’s fine, actually. I got bitten again, funny story. Wait, no, it’s actually not that funny. Anyway, I never turned or anything but that healed it right up. Doesn’t even hurt now. Of course that’s… gonna make it even harder to explain to my family… since it’s already totally scarred over. Looks like it happened months ago. But, hey, I think I’m probably not going to get sepsis, so. That’s a plus.”
“Yeah. Huh. That is good.” The corners of Ryan’s mouth lifted slightly. “I got bitten too. And stabbed. The, uh, stabbing came first.”
“What?!”
“Yeah. This big dude stabbed me at the house. Laura had to bite me. I never turned either but… I would have bled out otherwise, so.” Ryan shrugged with a humorously bland expression on his face and Dylan wondered how in the fuck conversations like this had become so normal in such a short amount of time.
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“So…” Dylan began, really not knowing where he intended this sentence to go. It ultimately didn’t matter, because his train of thought was entirely derailed by Ryan surging forward and forcefully throwing his arms around him. Dylan was so startled by this development that he stood there stiffly for a moment before he was able to convince his own limbs to move enough to reciprocate the embrace. Ryan, he knew, did not do hugs. He barely did high fives. And yet, here he was, clinging to Dylan like he was the only shelter in a raging storm and Dylan wanted to be that for him, he wanted Ryan to shelter him too. It was as if Ryan had spent the entirety of their awkward conversation building up the nerve to do this and Dylan was taken aback but so, so glad that he had. Then Ryan made a soft sound and it took Dylan a beat to recognize it as a sob.
“Wait, are you… crying?”
Dylan hadn’t meant for it to sound like he was calling Ryan out about this—Ryan had every right to be crying right now, they all did—he’d just been shocked anew at this outpouring of emotion. He guessed everyone had their limits and Ryan had finally reached his. Dylan’s own eyes had filled with tears the instant Ryan’s arms had wrapped around him, but that wasn’t exactly unusual.
“No,” Ryan lied, very obviously sniffling against the shoulder of Dylan’s filthy t-shirt, his hold tightening a little more, “I’m definitely not.”
“Right, yeah. Of course. That’s… that’s good because neither am I,” Dylan half laughed, half sobbed into Ryan’s sweaty hair. Sure, why not? Might as well add tears to the blood and sweat they were both already covered in. Dylan rubbed gentle circles on Ryan’s back with his remaining hand.
“I killed Chris—Mr. H. I-I had to. Laura turned before she could do it and he, uh, he really was a werewolf. He would’ve killed me. I can’t believe he just… let this all happen.” This came out of Ryan spontaneously, like a confession, and the understated tragedy of it hit Dylan like a punch to the gut. It shouldn’t have been Ryan. He shouldn’t have had to do that.
“Oh, dude. I’m… fuck, I’m so sorry. Are you okay?”
Ryan, silent, his face still buried in the fabric of Dylan’s shirt, simply shook his head.
“No, of course, you wouldn’t be, huh? Like, no shit. You got stabbed and bitten by a werewolf and, fucking hell, you had to kill our boss, and now the idiot with one hand is asking if you’re okay.”
Dylan laughed then. He couldn’t help it. Ryan was alive and in his arms (and his arms only had one hand between them, what the actual fuck?!) and none of them would ever be the same. But Dylan kept circling back to the fact that Ryan was alive. They’d fucking made it. Dylan was practically delirious with relief and hope and exhaustion and confusion. Everything was terrible and somehow unbelievably wonderful all at once and he felt like he was at risk of crumbling into pieces under the weight of it all, was convinced that only Ryan’s arms around him were preventing that from happening.
“That’s… such a stupid question, Dylan. God. I’m sorry. I—I’m rambling aren’t I? It’s just, fuck, this is a lot and you’re so… close and, I mean, that’s okay, that’s, like, so totally beyond okay. I just can’t… Ryan, I’m just, um, I’m really glad you’re okay, y’know, even—even if you’re… also decidedly not okay. You know?”
“Yeah, man,” Ryan said gently, “same.”
They stood there, anchored to each other, for a minute or two in total silence. Then Dylan said, “so… what happens now?”
“I dunno,” Ryan said, pulling away finally, wiping at his eyes with the back of one hand, and Dylan immediately missed the warmth and the grounding presence of Ryan’s body on his. “Laura and Travis are working on some kind of coverup story and then… I guess we all go home?” Ryan pulled his battered white headphones from the collar of his shirt and stared at them sadly. “I think sharing earbuds on the way might be out of the question now, though. These guys are toast.”
“Oh, shit. RIP earbuds. You served Ryan well and you were obviously loved.” Dylan laughed softly and Ryan couldn't help doing the same. “But, hey, no worries, I have a pair in my bag!” Dylan looked down at his one, singular hand. “You, uh, might have to help me with the zipper, though. It sticks.”
Ryan’s hand slid into his, his fingers intertwining with Dylan’s, and even though nothing was even remotely okay, he was filled with renewed hope that somehow, eventually, everything would be.
“I can do that,” Ryan said, giving Dylan’s hand a squeeze, “I can definitely do that.”