Catharsis || Lashton AU - boyxboy

10. oharra

"Well hold on, my darling,
This mess was yours,
Now your mess is mine."
Vance Joy, Mess Is Mine ☯

l.h.

It'd been a number of dreary days since I'd last seen the boy with honey-colored curls and sad eyes.

It was quite definitely draining the raw life force directly from my body with little to no hesitation.

I wasn't too sure what to do with myself.

Since the day with Cassie and Sully in the shop, he seemed to had disappeared into thin air, and I wasn't sure if I should feel sad or scared or even relieved that I wouldn't have to fret about him and Cassie anymore.

Since that day, everything had become a very off-kilter blue color, and there hadn't been a day within the week that the sun had shown through the window of the shop or that I'd woken to the sound of birds. It was almost like the universe was mourning Ashton's disappearance as well.

I was very sad. Only, not the kind of sad that weighs down all of your parts represented best by the dark circles under your eyes. I was the empty kind of sad; the one that hollows you out and sends your body into autopilot so that you don't have to feel anything at all except the emptiness.

And I didn't even know why.

I didn't know why I'd become so sad but paid little to no attention to the complete and utter confusion that I should be feeling given the circumstances of the events Ashton and I had been through a few nights ago.

I mean, aren't I right? Shouldn't I be more panicked that making out with some stranger, and a guy at that, felt more natural than every kiss I've given Cassie?

I haven't even been able to kiss Cassie since the one she forced on me in the shop.

And I felt like it just shouldn't be like that.

I felt like just because I experimented with my sexuality for fifteen minutes, I shouldn't want so desperately to avoid my girlfriend of six months and I should want to kiss her more than I do and touch her more than I do and I just shouldn't feel this way.

Everything just feels very backwards.

And I'm fully aware of the fact that life is full of surprises and that sure, some of the best things can come of that and I'm totally a believer in opportunities and I am totally a live-in-the-moment kind of guy and I always let the road lead me to wherever it is that it leads, but nothing about this feels right simply because none of it feels wrong.

I can tell that people are looking at me differently; Sully stares at me from across the room with those terrible sad puppy eyes of his, and Cassie looks at me very critically like she knows that something's wrong, she's just annoyed that she can't figure out what, and even strangers on the corner when I'm listening to them talk seem like they're paying more attention to me than I am them.

I hated the attention.

Since my dad died, I have hated the attention.

It's overwhelming how much attention you get when your parents die. Because nobody seems to understand that you don't want to talk about it and you don't care if they're sorry for your loss, because you really just want to lock yourself away forever but nobody cares about that.

And, speaking of the attention, I was sure I could actually feel Sully's eyes boring holes into the back of my blond head as I bit down on my tongue and washed mugs rather aggressively in the sink.