It’s cold and it’s cold and it’s cold but you wish that it was colder, icy and still and biting away at the edges of your skin until you can’t feel the blood on your hands and the aching in your left jaw and the guilty beast of an animal pacing around with it’s claws bared inside your head, and you figure that’s maybe where the headache has been coming from, but then again, someone hit you there, right? You can’t remember, which would be cause for concern if you weren’t desperately shrinking away from any type of memory at all.
It’s all in your chest, you think, and you’re pacing forward and forward as hard and as fast as you can even though you can barely fucking see straight, and as you grip at your own hands and tug at knuckles just to feel them again, you try and breathe, but it hurts. (That’s where he kicked you.)
You should’ve known not to pull shit like this, but you wanna scream and kick until the sky turns red, even though you know the closest you’ll ever get is bad neighborhood boys who are just as spiteful and broken as everyone else tearing you to bits for your bad decisions because that’s what you deserve, isn’t it? You got exactly what you asked for, because you knew better but did worse, and so it’s no big surprise that after weeks and weeks of passively avoiding all of the people that would die for you, you broke, and broke everything else right along with you, and God, you can’t do anything right!
And of course you ended up in fragments on the dirty pavement with the tall angular karma kids screaming words that still ring in your ears, and it runs around in your head that a long time ago they were just little kids who probably picked the weeds thinking they were flowers just the same as everyone else, and now you have their bootprints on your face and their blood on your hands and they gave you what you deserved but that doesn’t make it right that little kids who have a chance grow up into nothing but dark nights and words that run around in your head when you’re walking and walking and walking until you feel like you’re going to pass out.
This is what you get for drowning yourself in liquid courage that calls you a fucking coward as it burns your throat, and for allowing it to lead you in swerving subconscious wishes all the way to a bad town to face a pretty girl with a sharp face that belongs anywhere else but running away as tall little boys scream and scream and scream while you fight back as best as you can, and now you’re covered in blood and stinging liquor full of plight and screaming and dizziness that you can’t convey through words anymore, and probably never could.
You’re compensating for everything you’re keeping in the space between your teeth and your bloody bottom lip, and that’s fine, because you’re not surprised anymore. How long has it been like this? When did this start? Weeks? Okay. Maybe. And sure, it’s been eating away at your, chipping into your chest as you breathe shallow breaths and try and look away from the girl to your left, but it has to stop now, of course, because you got what you deserved and you’re feeling something besides the overwhelming sense that you’re drowning again, and it’s all in the stinging of your knuckles, so surely, something has to change.
Ha. You should be so lucky.
You let out a small cough and stop in the middle of the road, directly under a streetlight, and pretend it’s the moon as you steady yourself and close your eyes until they quit fucking burning. Then you keep walking and pretend like you don’t know where you’re going.
This whole night was a terrible idea, so at least you take solace in knowing that at least you’ve still managed to hold on to your natural judgment through all of this. And, maybe, if you could manage a little more sobriety out of your dizzy mind, you’d take a better hold of the overt fact that going to see Riley in this condition will only make things worse, and she’ll be worried, and you’ll mess everything up, of course.
Which is exactly how you ended up in this situation- you were just trying not to mess everything up. But, ah, wrong place, wrong time, wrong person against your lips- everything about it is wrong. Everything about you is wrong. Which remains no big surprise, so the blood trickling from your nose is a redundant reminder, and the chide of fucking dyke! that rings in your ears is, quite frankly, complete overkill.
Before you realize that you’re even in her neighborhood, your legs have led you (with minor buckling) to her fire escape, and though you stumble on your way up, you find your knuckles wrapping against the window with vigor, despite the pangs of whimper inducing pain that shoot up through your hand all the way to your shoulder blades as you do.
Though it takes a minute, the girl you tried to replace eventually makes her way to the window, and you exhale for the first time in what you’re sure is an hour.
She gasps and reels back when your caricature distortion of a silhouette moves into the light, and you almost mumble in agreement, but you just try and breath again instead.
You blink as she spits out question after question with concern you don’t deserve and you’re even more guilty, all of the sudden, and so as you cut her off, you mumble some slurred version of the line, “I should go.”
“Maya!” She exclaims, grabbing at your bloody hands, and when you wince she falls on a question as simple and as complicated as, “why are you bleeding?”
“Calm down, the blood’s not mine. Well, not all of it,” you breathe, but you don’t think it really helped your cause, because she looks even more terrified now, and you shouldn’t have come, you shouldn’t have come, and it takes her shaking you to realize that’s what you’ve been repeating out loud in the dark of her bedroom as tears well up at your eyes and you blink them away frantically.
“I’m fine. Okay?” You try again, with your breath caught in your chest, because even now, you realize she absolutely cannot know what happened, or why it happened, for that matter, so you clench you fists and try to leave again.
“Maya, you have to tell me what happened, look at yourself!” She presses, and you want to disappear more than anything else, because she can’t know, but she’s looking at you with those fucking eyes, fuck it, and so you sigh and sit down, wiping some blood from your face.
“It’s not a big deal,” you mumble, like a fucking liar, “I just got in a little fight.”
“A ‘little fight’?! You’re a mess!” She scolds, and even though you know it’s only out of worry, you still shrink back at her words slightly, despite them not being the worst you’ve heard tonight.
“Don’t worry about it, Riley, it doesn’t matter.” Your throat is aching and you’re looking anywhere at all except her eyes, just like you have been for weeks now.
“Maya, what really happened?” She crosses her arms with this worry for you lacing into her face and movements, and you just look down and keep your mouth shut.
“...Ring power!” She spits, after what is, quite possibly, the longest pause of your entire life. “Tell me the whole story,” Riley demands while she starts to wipe away at your bloody forehead with a tissue.
Fuck. You’re not going to lie to her. You just can’t. You’re not the greatest person, but you can’t just lie to her, not after that.
You draw your knees to your chest and start slow, but it takes no time for your intoxicated brain to spin into a full on slurred ramble, starting with a girl in a bar with a sharp face, moving to an alleyway with her hands on your hips and her tongue in your mouth as everything is warm and tastes like bourbon, all the way to the words in your head and the fists on your face and the blood that’s almost everywhere in the world, and you’re pretty sure at some point you even get around to the part where it all comes back to her, and trying to distract yourself from her, and loving her more than anything, and how you know that it’s wrong, and how even with a cheap replacement, you still got what you deserved from boys in the street playing God because you were with another girl instead of one of them, and that made them almost as angry as it made you, and by the end of this all your voice is cracking and her arms are wrapped around you as she cries for you into your neck and tells you it’s okay, and you still feel this terrible guilt, see, because she’s crying, and it’s your fault, and isn’t everything, usually?
But, oddly enough, now it’s her apologizing to you, telling you she’s so, so sorry, and it feels wrong, and she’s telling you she loves you and holding you, and you kind of start to cry, too.
“Oh Maya,” She says, pulling away from you and putting her hands on your shoulders after wiping away at her eyes a little. You laugh slightly, but it’s kind of dry. “I’m so sorry. That’s awful. I’m going to clean you up, okay?”
You nod and it burns a little, because, well, you just sort of confessed your love to her, but now everything is kind of up in the air, really, and she’s ignoring it, maybe, or maybe she just didn’t hear you- you’re sort of slurring, it’s plausible- but frankly, you’d like a little confirmation.
She reenters the room after your miniature inner monologue and begins to clean your wounds and remove any blood she hadn’t gotten before, and it begins to occur to you how fucking exhausted you are. You’re not upset anymore- just a little empty. She knows now, maybe. The world hasn’t ended. Almost nothing has happened. Huh.
It doesn’t take her long for her to fix you up, despite the ache that lingers throughout your body, so you get up and walk towards the window. “Thanks, Riles, g’night,” you mumble, but she grabs your arm before you can so much as open the window.
“No. Absolutely not. You’re staying here,” She says, and it’s an order, of course, and you kind of pause. “Come on, Maya,” Riley says softly, holding your hands in hers, and she pulls you into her bed before you can so much as protest.
“Okay,” you breathe tiredly, laying your head down on the pillow.
Ever so softly, she leans in and says, “I love you too, by the way,” and when her lips brush your cheek and her forehead touches your head, nothing is wrong.