Dark Places

59 | you called 911

—OKAY. So, I'm realizing that I started posting Dark Places around this time last year, and I have STRETCHED IT OUT SOOOOOOO MUCH (ahem because I love fucking with Drake and Luz) but I'm HOPING it's going to come together soon 😂😂😂

❝take me, take me back to your bed,
i love you so much that it hurts my head.
say, i don't mind you under my skin.
i let the bad parts in, the bad parts in...❞

☽

VI. HAZY BEDROOMS

IT'S SILENT IN OUR APARTMENT. Nadie está en casa, Melo.

I doze thoughtlessly, helplessly, flushing and thawing through icy chills and hot flashes, forgetting to fall asleep. His bedroom is hazy, dusky, sleep-dazed details beneath a gauzy sheen. Timberlands, left kicked over by his door. Our soggy clothing, puddling together in a corner. A half-empty bottle of Bacardí—Anejo Cuatro—on the floor beside his bed; if I look hard enough, I know I'll find an empty Coke. The lumpy, covered cage for Horacio. His Bulldogs jersey I'd stripped off blindly.

Drake paces quietly, restlessly, in low-slung sweatpants, murmuring under his breath in soft Spanish. His clenched jaw. His staggered, distracted rhythm, jotting notes in a sketchbook sporadically. His fingertips, tracing invisible veins off a Sharpie-scrawled map of Portland.

Fuck.

Terror sifts across my skin. Icy. I try to shift, to stand up, to steady, and Drake is too quick, turning, realizing, cloaking a blanket over my bare shoulders. "Drake," I croak, unsure why. "Drake, I—" I blink, but I'm buckling under its weight, being hauled back into his bed, burrowing, breathing shallowly. Every motion becomes another so fucking slowly; I'm blurring. "I..."

"I'm sorry, I'm keeping you up, amorcita."

Somehow, it hangs between us, painfully frayed stitching, unraveling as I soften, soothed by a raspy apology.

I'm afraid of darkness, but of silence, too.

"Medina, me da miedo, I..."

"Ay, ay, estás bien," he's slurring, breaking it, reclining us, "you're in my bedroom, you're safe," he's saying, peppering kisses across my cheeks affectionately, as if it's 2015, and I'd woken up in a cold sweat, clinging to him, needing Drake Medina to soothe us back to sleep, "todo va a estar bien, Melo."

I don't want to love him again.

"How long... does it take?" I ask vaguely, laving off a seasick wooziness. Hypothermia? I'm so dizzy. "Am I dying?"

"No, you're not dying." Drake snickers, stealing a soft, sweet kiss. I barely feel my fingertips curl around his neck, but I know I'm holding him, close, soaking him in, in, in. Heat. "I think you're fine," he mumbles, grinning tiredly. "It's okay."

It feels so simple, almost as if it never happened.

It fades as seamlessly as it did happen, leaving sluggish lungs and stinging skin in its wake.

Drake doesn't stay. Drake careens away, and I tug on his Bulldogs jersey, sidling up to him, if only to prove a stubborn stability. Everything clings to my skin as I ascend into its silky, heady haze. His bedroom is smoky. I follow his gaze. The coordinates, scratched onto a sticky note, taped off to the side of the map, off the Old Port, off the Maine State Pier.

Battery Steele, I'd told him. Peaks Island.

Drake... Drake was supposed to be at Battery Steele tonight.