Third Time's a Charm ✓

six

TUESDAY. 22. FEBRUARY. 2022. (half edited!)

"SO EVERYTHING'S OKAY?" He asked, rolling his head against the top of the driver's seat, where he sat a little slouched.

A neon strip was painted over the outline of his face; following the bridge, shooting the arrow, the sun shining behind the moon. The night was tainted with something surreal and was too much like a memory to feel like it was actually happening. Tangible darkness poured into the car and seeped into us; swallowing us whole. I raised my hand from my lap and examined it, trying to place the second that it had become no longer part of me but part of the night's mouth.

"Brooks?" Archie inquired lightly, his shadowed face still turned curiously towards me, his body still an obscured silhouette. I wondered how real he was, if he was as distant as he felt. "Everything okay?"

"Yeah," I murmured, letting my hand fall. It was useless trying to make sense of it; a lesson I'd learned a long time ago and a lesson I'd continued to learn over and over and over again ever since. "Fine."

"She still arguing with Craig?" He asked, sounding like he wasn't really in the car with me. Maybe he wasn't— I could barely tell. "Brooks?"

"Yeah?" I replied, eyes fixed on the curved spine of the glove compartment.

"She still arguing with Craig?" He echoed, airy and quiet, lifting his head from against the seat, the blue-tinted beams of his moonlit eyes studying me.

"Think so," I muttered, rubbing my hands over my face, words muffled as I dragged my fingers over my lips. "I don't know. I think if they made up then she would've mentioned it to me— and she hasn't."

"Guess they haven't made up then," he murmured, reaching an arm out to me and tangling his fingers in my hair, tugging gently, brushing loose locks away from my forehead. Before retreating, he swept a playful thumb over the side of my face.

"Guess not," I agreed, hands limp in my lap and my lips pulling into a weak, fleeting smile.

"But she's doing good without him?" He asked quietly, his left fingernails pinching small stars into the sky of his right palm.

"Yeah," I nodded, gazing at his hands, little pokes of light shining out of a darkness that consumed us, melting over us like thick tar. "She's doing great."

"Are you?" He asked. Something in his voice was calm, so calm that it almost slipped past me, wind whirling through leaves of near naked trees. Somewhere other than here. It was making me dizzy.

Squeezing my eyes shut tight, I exhaled and opened them again, shaking my head. "Am I what?" I asked him, unable to remember what he'd said. I wasn't entirely sure I'd heard him.

There was a pause that made the air around us feel like fuzz. "Are you high?" He asked, one of his hands on the wheel as he angled his body towards me, his opposite elbow digging into his seat; eyes narrowed, midnight lashes flecked with warm neon light, skin painted silver. "Have you taken something?"

"No," I stated, tongue heavy in my mouth as I stared at the moon, a silver bauble hung on an invisible string. "I don't touch anything— you know that."

"Then what the fuck is going on with you?" He frowned. In the window, I recognised his faint, colorful reflection. "Where's your head, Brooks?"