To Whom it May Concern (ON HOLD)

Shadows of Scarlet

I woke up so easily, so quietly. His arms around me. I was there, against his chest, drowsy in morning, my dress beneath his jacket and his hands against my back. Strong, supported. I could feel his breath, soft and hot and real against my neck, warm against my skin. I could taste it, I could taste him...Oh no... His warm, heavy breath, the shallow, shuttered breathing, and there it was... Oh God...this pounding, this beating that slithered against my skin, his lips, his hands, he smelled like alcohol. He smelled like alcohol.
He had been gone.
I ripped myself away from him, pushing up from the carpet and stumbling backwards till I hit the wall.
James stirred and in his drowsy stupor he tried to focus on me, but he couldn't.
"Ella," he said and his voice swept the air like a palm, like a hand, like he had hit me.
"Ella I am so sorry," he reached for me, eyes glazed over, lips chapped. He smelled like a crowd. Perfume and smoke and body odor and it made me want to hurl. I felt sick.
His skin looked rough and cracked and there was cut on his chin, just a slight one, but the skin was red and soft. Like a little boy, like a child with a bruise. He looked so broken, he looked like he needed me, no he needed someone, not me. I tore my gaze away from him and felt something like vile rise in my throat.
"Get up," I whispered, and James took a sad breath, "Ella please,"
"Get up," I said quietly, the words coming out clipped and empty. "Ella..." My name hung in the air like a question and I found I couldn't bring myself to even look at him. I couldn't even look at his face "Ell-"
"Get up!" I screamed and the silence was shattered, so I stood there raw and shivering in the dank, musty hallway, my voice cracking.
"Go take a shitting shower or something," I said again, in almost a whisper. I stood there, watching him curl away from me. Shrink away from me like I was going to hurt him. Like he was scared of me. "Go!" I begged him again as he began to stagger to his feet.
"Ella, I'm sorry, I forgot, just let me talk to you," he reached for me and I pulled away from him.
"Go take a god damn shower James," I whispered and he stopped, afraid, his eyes glistening like broken mirrors, little little spitting shards and I just let them cut me.
"You smell like alcohol James," I said. "Go wash it off,"
He took a step forward. I turned and coughed onto the dirty, reeking tracks he had made on the kitchen floor.
"Don't touch me, " I said, "Don't touch me or I will leave you standing here, by yourself, right now," He backed away and I pointed to the bathroom. "Go James," I said, and he left, so I watched him go.
~***~
When he returned he was wearing one of his old t-shirts, the one with the hole on the sleeve.
It made it seem almost as if he were okay, his old t-shirt and his fingers, tapping lightly against his leg. But I knew he wasn't, I had to remind myself he wasn't okay.
You have to talk to him.
His eyes, his brown, brown eyes were blood shot and tired and sad. Ringed with scarlet. Like old, stale blood.He was distant, as he stood there, far far away from me.
I didn't move, merely waited in front of him completely speechless because I didn't know what to do. All I could think of was when his own father did this to himself, and James had had to watch. Didn't he care? Did he want me to see that?
As I looked at his hands mine curled at my sides. I didn't know what I expected him to do, and I didn't know what I was supposed to do. This was the moment when I needed to make a statement and I said nothing, I just looked at him, like he might disappear. He might disappear and then confident, protective, stable James would come in through the door. He would come in and he would apologize and he would hold me and he'd have this wonderful explanation of why he'd been gone so that he could take me away from this. This emptiness, this consuming, frightening state of mind.
"Ella," James began, and my eyes wandered to his feet, then his hands.
"Ella, please look at me."
But I didn't want to, I didn't want to see him, yet, but there was nothing else for me to see.
"Ella?"
I looked at him but said nothing. Talk. I begged him silently. Explain this to me.
No, you have to talk Ella.
He couldn't, and I knew that, so why I kept asking I didn't know, except it would seem that I couldn't either.
"You can't do this James," I said, and I prepared for him to move, or to say something. He didn't though, he just listened.
"This had happened before."
There was a pause then, a silence, and it shuddered as though it was in pain.
I didn't know if he was listening to me, he looked so blank, so incredibly far way from me and slowly I stepped toward him.
My pulse quickened bang bang bang but it didn't feel like my heartbeat, it felt like bullets, heavy, heaving breaths that pounded against my body. That pounded inside my head.
"Do you remember what happened?" I asked him, "Tell me what happened,"
James looked at me sadly and I felt the pounding being to fade, then we just watched each other in a silence made up of everything.
"I don't know Ella," he said, I think it was meant to be a statement but he sound so unsure it broke the air like a question. There was a sadness too, something to regret, and the exhaustion of some long weighing tiredness that I had never really seen before. He had said it like a question.
"Do you know how you got home?"
He shook his head.
"James, you have to tell me what happened,"
He shook his head, "You have to understand that I don't know,"
I tried to make myself think that maybe I could just comfort him, just let it go and make him feel better but, I couldn't.
Because I knew this wasn't something that was going to go away, this wasn't something that was going to end. Yet, when he reached out I let him hold me, I let him hold me against him, and even though he had showered and changed, I could smell it on him, and I knew when I pulled away, I would smell it on me. The alcohol, and I would have to remember everything he forgot.
His arms went around me and I stood in them. My hands went around him too and beneath my fingers, I could feel him shaking, or maybe, maybe that was me.
"Ella, I'm fine" he murmured, over and over again. But every time he said it, it meant even less.
I don't think you are. Is what I thought.
"Okay, James," Is what I said. It's not what I should have said.
~***~
I sat with him for awhile, me laying against him like everything was fine. His hands ran through my hair, playing with it, twisting it softly around his fingers. He seemed so perfect, so fine, and I hated him for it. I hated me for not pressing him. I hated feeling so strung, so suspended.
I left at about noon, saying I had to work, James frowned at me then but said nothing. I didn't have to work today.
I didn't know why I felt like I needed to leave. He needed me. But I left anyway.
I got in the car and slammed my fists down on the dash, making it rattle. Then I just started to drive.
What kind of half-ass friend was I? The first time he may actually have ever needed me and I was walking out on him? What did I expect to hear? That he needed to be alone, and the truest measure of friendship was knowing when to give a person space? Bull. I was scared and I didn't know what to say, I didn't know what to do so I was getting out. I was getting away. I was running from the person I was supposed to be there for. He would never do this to me. He was sitting at home, alone, trying to sort this out. Stupid Ella.
I sighed, fingering the shift before beginning to turn, when I realized I knew where I was. I hadn't just been driving to get away, I had come somewhere.
Carefully I climbed out of the car and made my way up to the door. It was a green door, but I didn't notice, because I had been here before. Something so familiar that you only think about what it looked like because it changed.
I rapped on the door without really knowing why I'd come. A blonde haired man opened it. He had the kind of face with the potential to be happy, but something had happened to pull all the lines down. He leaned against the door frame, not casually but because he needed it for support.
"Ella," he said.
"Sir," I said.
He gave me a small smile and shifted away from the doorframe.
"He's not here," he told me softly, "James,"
I looked at the man in front of me, his thinning hair was pushed across his forehead, the wisps so light that the sun made them look silver. Here I could see it, that exhaustion I saw in my best friend.
"I'm not actually looking for your son," I reached up and pushed my hair behind my ear, letting the curl that tumbled back again rest on my cheek.
"I need to talk to you,"
~***~
He led me inside and I followed as quickly as I could. I had been here what felt like a thousand times, but something about it now, made it seem like I'd never been here before. It felt as if it had changed.
We walked into the living room and James's dad let me sit on the couch. He asked me if I was thirsty but I shook my head.
"No thank you Mr.Wiled," He had been telling me, for years now to call him David, but I never had. It had been one of the things that hadn't needed to change, so it hadn't. It was very possible that it never would.
"Call me David," he suggested absentmindedly, and I smiled slightly down into my hands.
"Thank you, sir"
He nodded and sat down in front of me, "What is it you need sweetheart?" He asked me, and the question seemed to be an effort, but he smiled at me anyway. "What can I do for you?"
I stared at him for a moment, and I felt the puzzlement lift to my face because, what did I need? What was I here for?
"I..." Maybe the the silence that followed wasn't that long, but it stretched out before me in a great plane of emptiness that swallowed time as though it was never there.
"I wanted to ask you..." and as I talked my voice seemed to fall away, "If James came to see you yesterday," Here the silence returned and slowly I watched it consume the air, break down behind the eyes of a man who soaked in silence anyway. The room was so dark I felt as if I might be nothing more than a silhouette. A shadow through the window of the mid-afternoon light.
He looked at me and if he attempted to shrug, what came across instead seemed more like a deflation, the way he moved now, made it seem like he was giving up.
"Yeah, he was here," He told me, and a small smile floated over his face at the thought of his son, but when he looked at me again it had disappeared.
"He always comes, you know?" He said, and his mouth hovered in the verge of a darker frown. "But this time, he was, we were both," he looked at me and tapped his pointer finger against the chair arm. "We both seemed off," he shook his head now and shifted so that the light coming through the window caught him from behind and made his figure like a shadow.
"I knew why, of course," he continued, "but it still bothered me,"
I didn't know whether to nod or to look away, to say something so I kept politely silent and squeezed my hands together.
When he didn't continue I looked out the window and pushed my hair behind my ears again. I wasn't even sure why I'd come, just to bother someone else, I suppose. I wondered if I needed to go back to check on James.
"It was fine," He said suddenly, startling me, "but, uh, it was when he was about to leave that..." Here he trailed off and I found myself staring at him rigidly. "Please continue sir," and my voice sounded hollow in my own throat. This was why I had come. "Please continue," I repeated, forcing myself to sound pleasant.
"See," he said. " James, was about to leave and I got a..." He gestured toward the telephone with flailing fingers and I waited as he brought his arm back down.
"I got a call from, from uh, from his mother and, so then I went and she found out he was here, James. An' then after that she uh, wanted to uh, come over and see us both," He looked at me, "See us together ya know? And what she thought she was gonna gain from such a sight I, I don't know,"
There was something slow, about his dialogue, like some great suspense was building, but all the extra words were just dragging him through the mud. Even though they were important.
"He even told me he had somewhere to go, somewhere important, and I would have let him go, but he sat on those front steps and waited for her." My fingers were tightening on the fraying fabric of the chair so that the worn material gave in beneath my fingers.
"When she got here, he just stood up and walked by, when he got to his car I thought he must have forgotten something because he turned around. All he did was walk up and hug me, then he nodded to Julie and he left." "He just walked out,"
"Sad boy, and got into his car and he drove off so fast that he was a blur through the windows."
The man looked at me across the room with the look of someone much older, and rubbed at his head.
"He looked blank when he left," he said to me now, " I don't think there was a rational thought in his head at the time.
I watched James' father put his head in his hands, "You know this is the first time I've seen her in 16 years?" He changed the subject so abruptly I started. He was speaking to me thorough his fingers, and his head still shook. I don't know if I wanted her to stay but..."
And as he looked up at me, I felt myself jerk away from him. In his eyes, was something so lost, so broken. He looked at me through brilliantly shining eyes, that glimmered like dying stars.
"Julie left just after James did," he told me.
I had never heard her called Julie before, but the way he said it, I had to expect it was the only thing he had ever called her.
I have never been so afraid as I was when I left that house. Because I had never really thought James resembled his father, and now for the first time in my life, I was seeing it. I was seeing it in the way that they were so lost that they had somehow found one another. But they were becoming too far gone to recognize who the other one was.

Hello readers! I hope you like this chapter, I wasn't really sure how it was going to come across and it may also be slightly confusing. BUT you have read the whole thing because you are a wonderful, exceptional person, so thank you. PLEASE comment and vote, if you want to.