Fell In Love In Stages // a matty healy fanfic

Demons

***TW: talks of S/A***

I was still in bed when I heard him walk to the bathroom. I look at the window and notice it's dark out. We must've slept for ages. I could hear the sound of running water. I thought he'd went in for a smoke. I didn't ask because I was still annoyed at the vague answers he was offering me earlier. Then he called me over.
"Why?"
"Please."
The bathtub was almost full and steam rose thickly clouding the mirror, the windows. He stood behind me and started unbuttoning my nightdress. I began to protest and I didn't fully understand why. I've had no problem showing my bare body to a stranger before. But this felt more intimate than something trivial like sex. But when I caught a glimpse of our image in the mirror, I was someone else. Held by a stare, by his hands, quick and cold through the fabric. When it dropped to the ground, he asked me to step into the tub.
I did. The water was scathing. In a moment, he was out of his t-shirt and jeans. We fit snugly, like twins. Then he soaped my back, my shoulders, my hair.
And despite the steam, I saw how he looked nothing like the musician exuding confidence and sex appeal on stage the other night. In front of me was a timid and pensive boy who even though was only seventeen, was filled with an old sadness.
"The reason I didn't wanna go home... well.. things aren't great..." his voice almost a whisper. "My mother-", that word made me instinctively reach around my neck for my locket and he must've sensed the tension in my actions because then he said "I have your locket" and he reached out his arm and picked his jacket off the floor and handed it to me. He saw my face wash over with relief but knew better than to question me about it till I was comfortable enough to bring it up myself.
"Oh, I'm sorry, do go on"
"It's a long story", pause, "Don't you feel", he says, "as though you are elsewhere?"
I knew what he meant; in the midst of Wilmslow's lush landscape and fast cars, inside my family home, in my bath tub, it felt foreign. It felt as though we had apparated to a different realm, just the two of us.

He finally decides it's time to tell me that last night after he'd tucked me into bed and switched off the lights, he'd gone downstairs to refill his drink. While in the kitchen, he'd overheard a group of guys talking about seeing me black out and speculated where I could be. On instinct, he ran upstairs to the room I was in to find Aiden trying to unzip my dress. I shudder upon hearing this but say nothing.
He continues telling me about how he grabbed Aiden and dragged him out of the room. By then a large group had gathered to witness the fight. Finally after all was said and done, he fell asleep on the couch in the room I was in because he couldn't stand the thought of leaving me alone.
I say nothing.
He lights a cigarette and lets it smoulder between his fingers. His hair clung to his neck in dark wet curls. Again, I wasn't sure whether he'd prefer I left it alone.
"Are you alright?"
He looked at me as though no one had asked him that in a long time.
"Someone I know" he said, "tried to kill herself."
"Oh." I wasn't sure to ask whether she'd succeeded.
In the stillness of the evening, his words skimmed over the water and sank without a trace. He told me how she wanted a decisive relinquishment- a once-and-for-all crashing of a plane. Instead, in the end she chose cocaine, but it couldn't fix her brain.
And that's when I wept.
I didn't understand why, but still I was overwhelmed by these strange, yet familiar, emotions.
He didn't say a word but he understood.
We laid there, perfectly still, until the water cooled.