Stereo Blast Volume 1 [MxM]

Chapter 1.2

Sometimes he wondered why he was friends with such a peculiar person. Their first meeting was too crazy to believe, even to him now. Ryan wasn’t anyone special to the Wolves. The gang was made up of many throw away men and women. They were underlings that had no real value to the gang. He hated to think Ryan was part of that group.

Taylor had never seen Ryan before that day when he’d stumbled from a broken and burned building that had stood on the edge between Nitro and Nitro. He didn’t know anything about him.

Ryan knew Taylor though. Word of mouth was a powerful thing in the Districts. Without any form of connection, besides landlines that sometimes worked, the only way news got around was by gossip. And Ryan had grown up under the Eastcliffs ruling which meant he’d heard a lot about the Wolves, their leader, and the heir to the gang.

After the Eastcliffs had been flushed out, he’d survived on the streets without anyone on his side. He’d fought the Wolves off for weeks before he was wounded. Taylor found him. He’d found him beaten bloody by the Wolves’ lowest members. He was half alive by then, barely holding on as he bled in the street.

It might have been their age that had them gravitating towards each other. Taylor was the youngest, younger than Ryan by three years. Ryan’s spirit, the cheery smile he always wore and his oblivious attention for personal space, was very different from his own. In Mason, in Taylor’s world, it was hard to find someone who still believed in the good of humanity. Ryan was that someone. Even when the world was against him, he never faltered in his beliefs.

Taylor had learned to cut his ties to emotion.

It was annoying sometimes. When Ryan clung to him, without a care, it was like babysitting and more irritating to hang out with him than fun. Most of the time Ryan’s ability to change a dreary situation on its heels was what kept Taylor around. Between these things, the feelings he had about his life and his relationship with Ryan, there were moments when he felt like he was only born to take his father’s place. He wasn’t his dad—thank f*****g christ—but the resemblance couldn’t be ignored. He looked like him, talked like him, and fought problems out like him.

“What’s going on?” Taylor gestured out towards Kitro. Collapsing buildings and trash-filled streets. It was beautiful in a disgusting and filthy way. Perhaps it was nostalgia creeping on him. He never liked living here. It was only he never had a choice whether he could leave.

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “In general. You know.”

Ryan gave him a look. He was looking at him like he said the dumbest thing he’d ever heard. To be fair, he was wasting time. The silence had grown on him and it made him unsettled to sit there with his own thoughts plaguing him. He had to deal with himself for days on end and when he got a break when Ryan came along to clear the cloudy sky around him, he didn’t want to waste the time they had together.

Even talking to Ryan had been hard to do these past months. Their conversations, not unlike the one they were having now, was full of emptiness. They were talking but had nothing to say. The distance between them couldn’t be as bad as he thought it was. He wondered though if there was anything he could do about it. He was the one making it strange, awkward, to be around Ryan. This was all on him.

He looked down at his cigarette. The blue residue stained his fingers.

“Well,” Ryan said, shifting to lean against Taylor. Goosebumps raised along Taylor’s skin where they touched. “There was a problem outside Silic. Cleo to be exact.”

Taylor frowned. “What’s he doing now? Trying to f**k his way into Nio?”

Ryan laughed. It was an uncomfortable laugh. He scratched the back of his head. Taylor tried to meet his eyes, but Ryan averted them to his hands. “Maybe. I’m not sure about that. He was mostly hassling us.”

“You and Logan?”

Logan wasn’t part of the Wolves, but she acted like she was. She was a twelve-year-old who liked fighting as much as she liked eating. She also had the biggest crush on Ryan, ever since she met him. Though she was a kid, she knew what she was doing and knew what she wanted. Taylor hated the little s**t, couldn’t stand her, but he could respect her. She reminded him of himself when he was younger. He’d thought he was invincible at that age until he found out the hard way that he wasn’t.

Ryan still didn’t look at him.

“Yeah.”

Cleo wasn’t anybody he gave a s**t about. The s**t-smear was the brute of the Eastcliff gang. They worked the Nitro District, setting fires, and beating anyone who didn’t agree with their “policies”. They were also the Wolves’ biggest rivals due to them both bordering the No Man’s Land route. It was the biggest trading route in Mason that the gangs had access to. The only other trading route had been claimed by the Blue Fangs inside Nio.

The fight between the Wolves and the Eastcliffs had started long before Taylor’s dad was born. It had probably stemmed around the time it was outlawed for vampires to feed on unwilling victims.

The f*****g law didn’t even enforce that one. No one, not even police, wanted to mess with fangers.

A gust of wind knocked leaves from a branch hanging over them. The brown and golden leaves drifted past Ryan and landed in Taylor’s hair. He shook them out, but one caught at the nape of his neck.

Ryan laughed, watching Taylor struggle to reach for the small leaf. He could feel it scratching his skin, but it cracked under his touch. The small fragments littered his hair. It was torture to grab every individual peace. Agonizingly.