Cause for Concern ✓

nine

SATURDAY. 02. OCTOBER.

IT was three-thirty am and Max's head was over a toilet bowl in one of Nick's pristine white bathrooms. His hands were flattened against the cool, white sides, his knees were driving into the spotless bathroom tiles, hard and persistent through his jeans, and his toes were still digging into his shoes as he bent them towards the ground to steady himself. Beneath him was a foul concoction of everything he'd eaten from his breakfast pancakes to the slice of pizza that Danny had forced him to eat an hour or so ago once he's discovered that Max hadn't eaten in almost twelve hours.

Ever patient, Cole stood behind him. His left hand pressed the loose locks of Max's dishevelled, light brown hair back against his head so that it stayed out of his eyes while he threw up his internal organs. His right hand was rubbing small, soothing circles in-between Max's shoulder blades, his fingers kneading deep into his skin through his blue sweater.

"Get it out, Maxie," he murmured, his voice like a lullaby. "Get it all out."

The bathroom was almost offensively bright. The gleaming beams of white from the lights fell like a wide spotlight over the room, a spotlight that highlighted the crowd instead of the performer. It was like heaven if heaven could give you a headache. On the bright side, the terrible throbbing of his head, which felt as though it had doubled its' weight in the lash hour, was so consuming that it eased the bursting pulse of the reddish bruise that had formed over his eye.

"You okay?" Cole asked softly.

"Yeah," he croaked, hands still pressed desperately against the sides of the toilet bowl.

When nothing more seemed to be coming out of his mouth, he paused and hovered, counting one, two, three, four, five in his head before he ripped bunched up sheets of toilet paper and cleaned his mouth, slumping back against the cabinets underneath the sink. After wiping his mouth, he leaned up to throw the tissue in the toilet and flushed it, immediately collapsing back against the cabinets.

Cole held out a tall glass of clear liquid and he shuddered and grimaced, a sharp shiver crawling over his spine and goosebumps sneaking under the sleeves of his sweater. His tongue tasted bitter in his mouth and his throat burned with the blurred collage of vodka shots.

For the sake of his unwavering supporter more than his own well-being, he hesitantly accepted the glass and took a tiny, tentative sip as his body fell limp and his head, ponderous and dull, tilted against the cabinet. Through almost drooping eyelids, he squinted at the corner bathtub at the opposite end of the long room and a lazy smile split into an amused grin that burst into a laugh that made his stomach squeeze tight and his eyes clench shut and some of the water from his glass spill onto the tile.

He felt like flowers were blossoming in his chest, a garden growing around a heart that felt swollen. His own chorus of laughter made him think he might still be way too drunk, even after vomiting.

"Carter!" He called, laughing so hard he could barely make a noise. "Get down, man!"

Carter was attempting some kind of deformed handstand next to the bathtub. Funnily enough, Max had actually seen Carter do a handstand before and, even upside down, Carter had noted his own 'impeccable form'. Now, his arms seemed to be shaking and he couldn't quite get his legs straight up.

Either five minutes or an hour ago, Carter had made the drunken discovery that Cole and Max were in the bathroom together and had impatiently and incessantly pounded his fists against the door and jiggled the doorknob hopelessly, calling through the surface in an emphatic, slurred voice that he 'immediately be granted access'. Since he'd arrived, Cole's control over sobering Max up had been horrifically deterred as he was now split, as the soberest of the three, between trying to keep Max from vomiting and trying to keep Carter from breaking his neck.