After the End: Book 3

75. Downward

Harry's POV

I was in a back room making life choices I knew I'd regret, but the preemptive regret just wasn't strong enough to stop me. Cory had been right. I was hopeless.

She'd accepted me graciously into her household with only a few verbalized complaints. I had been right. She did have a party going, although it was small and I thought that if I'd felt better after arriving, I would have joined it for the evening. I didn't. Instead, I told her what had happened with my sister and she'd looked at me like I was absolutely insane for ever getting in the car. Her friend Madeline had cut the conversation short, trying to put her best flirtatious foot forward in my presence instead. It was annoying. Everything was annoying. Even the way Cory let Ash stand at her side with a hand at her waist was annoying. He glared at me when I walked in. I glared back.

I was only part of Cory's gathering for about 30 minutes before I wandered to her bedroom with a bottle of Gin from her kitchen. I railed some coke, turned on the Breakfast Club, and sat on her bed watching it for several hours.

She came in to tell me to get out of her room sometime into the second play through. She had that look in her eye and I knew it was a sex thing. I told her to use a guest room and she stared at me like she couldn't quite believe I was so entitled after all this time. I thought she shouldn't have been surprised. She chose a guest room and I could still hear her faking orgasms through the wall. It was unpleasant.

Sometime in the middle of the night she wandered in looking timid and nervous. We drank gin and watched the Breakfast Club and didn't speak about the sex, or my entitlement, or about how the last time she'd seen me, she'd yelled at me. She urged me to go to bed a few times, but I just periodically did coke to stay awake and she sent me to the shower in the morning without any concrete complaints.

If Cory had wanted to tell me off, she didn't. She barely acknowledged that I was a problem. Her only request was that I not step out of her car high because she didn't want to feel responsible for whatever I planned on doing on TV. That made me think she probably had talked to Louis and so I didn't argue because I didn't want to know. Then she gave me a ride and gave me more Tupperware cookies. I still didn't have it in me to ask where they were from.

That was what I liked about Cory most of the time. She was always forgiving and she was always willing to ignore the elephant in the room. When we were together, the other things didn't feel real. It was like an emotionless business deal where we allowed eachother to exist unquestioned nearby. It was comforting.

I did show up sober, or as sober as someone who drank gin with cocaine all night could be. I'd showered and nibbled on cookies and several hours had passed, but sobriety isn't quite linear. I definitely still felt the light of the night before, and I told myself it was enough. It wasn't.

I wanted it to be enough because I knew the alternative was being out of control.

Then they got to work on vanishing my dark circles and putting me together and when I looked in the mirror at the put together guy in the reflection, it felt fake. They'd done my hair and makeup, and they'd got me in a bright floral suite. It glittered a bit and I had to assume that Louis had probably picked out because he knew me so well, and that thought was just depressing. If I looked at my reflection, I knew what was missing. There were key details that made me an imposter. My nails weren't done. My smile wasn't real. My dark circles broke through the makeup under bright lighting. My cheeks were getting hollow because I lived off Tupperware biscuits and alcohol. I had agreed to transparency and the promotion of wellness. I was not the guy they wanted.

And if I wasn't the guy they wanted then I might as well be the guy that I actually was.

I was the guy whose own sister couldn't recognize him. I was someone who looked so messy, everyone worried. I wasn't the image of wellness or recovery, I was the illness and that reflection was fake.