Re: [Ren's apartment.]
He was protesting too much probably. A little too eager to prove that he was over it even if it were obvious that he wasn't. He let her talk, let her run fingers through his hair, because it was nice, and he didn't have to look at her. She might know if he were lying if he did, and it was easier to not look - to just keep his eyes on his socks - which he should throw out. This pair had a hole. He kept his forehead in his hands, and pressed his fingers to it, as if pressing would keep the emotion at bay too.
Ren didn't know if he was being too hard on himself. Perhaps he didn't know what not being too hard on himself looked like. He'd been given such impossible expectations from his parents and his uncle from the time he was small, that he didn't know if he was a particularly good judge. He'd tried to figure out what reasonable looked like, and he didn't think he ever had. "You shouldn't dislike him," he mumbled this between his hands, but there was a certainty to it. "He's good too."
He didn't move though, and he didn't really bother protesting much else. It was true that Louis hadn't told him things, and while Ren wasn't certain that was a sign of anything other than just being private, it was true. He couldn't argue with it. For a moment he just let things be quiet again. Did he want to say things? Did he just want to push them off again? He didn't know if he wanted to talk. His mind felt a little slippery and maybe in another circumstance he'd have been more worried about it, but this was Hannah, and Hannah was safe.
And safe was really nice.
But safe was still hard. "I'm not open." He pulled his head away, and he shook it, with a sigh. "I'm -"
He'd liked Adrian. Genuinely liked him, they'd had good conversations, and there'd been this weird congruence of events, and Ren thought everything had probably been ruined. He'd not really been a good friend to Adrian at all, and he didn't think Adrian had been pining. Why would he have been? It seemed arrogant to assume he might have been interested in something more than what they'd done. Friendship was okay there. He still liked Adrian, and he thought they could be good enough friends.
He liked Archie too, but he was possibly self-aware enough to know that he at least partially just liked how Archie made him feel, which was a long ways away from how he felt when he thought too much about his life. And also, Archie somehow had pulled out a thousand tricks without Ren even really needing to ask, and in so doing, it had made Ren feel a little bit more seen.
"It's complicated," he said finally. Or maybe it wasn't that complicated. He blew a breath out, his hair briefly blowing up with that breath, and he pulled a breath in again and straightened up. "I like the way I feel when I'm with him. I don't think it's like that. I don't think he feels like that. It's just we're friends, and then sometimes we have sex." Not that he'd actually had that conversation with Archie, a stray thought that made his head hurt. He maybe should. "And I don't think the other person - like, maybe at one point it maybe could have been a thing, but I think that time has slipped away and maybe it should have. I don't know that I'd have been particularly good for him."
He glanced over at Hannah quickly, just for a moment out of the side of his eyes. "Telling people things never usually pays off. It just ends up with me getting hurt. It's not worth it. Like, I can do what I'm doing right now. I don't really need anyone."