May [H.S]

24

Magnolia
•••

Complexe sauveur.

"Your boyfriends a dick."

"He's not my boyfriend."

"I thought I'd recognized your face from Jack of trades in Malibu, that's not it."

"I'm gonna ask you one more time, where do I know you from?"

Awaking was nothing less than abrupt, opposite of gradual, a nice calm and slow process, like raindrops carving a path on a foggy smudged window, competing to be the first to fall into nothingness. A languid puddle of condensation awaiting its ultimate, evaporating demise.

A voice, Harry's voice thunders from afar in an echo. Long and drawn out, his speech pattern messy, abnormal, words far and few between. Dolor that shook the screws in the headboard backside.

The beating in my chest remained faint, steady as my eyes combed tiredly over the surroundings. A grimly lit room, only a stream of moonlight and the enlivening shade of the sky to show for it, glistening straight through the crack in the blinds. One full beckoning moon just offset the lush, abyssal forest. Bit by bit the lucid part of my mind crawled from the gloomy, floating dreamlike state I'd previously swam in. Blinking my lashes at the unpredictable dance of the wind-bound trees.

The lingering influence of alcohol in my body made itself known in every shape and form. A groggy rain cloud above my head.

Before anything else, my sinuses recognize the pungent scent of pine, profoundly memorable, and a switch for clarity. As like a fast-turning tide, I register the room around me, the sheets under my worn clothes, the wood flooring below the mattress of the bed.

I'm in Niall's old bedroom.

The walls appeared cold, untouched, and left to sit as I assumed they'd be, stripped of any and all personality they had the last time I was here. The last time I was here, just after the Vail trip, angry tears streamed down my face, avoiding contact with any kind of memorabilia that triggered the past in me. I remember the weight of my record crates, how my back ached after just as my tear ducts and the center of my chest.

I think the last time I even stepped foot in this room was a month before that blowout before the tides of my life changed for the worse.

Daring to peel myself from the cocoon I've nested in on the left side of the bed, I'm not able to think of something that entices my core muscles enough to pull me up. Opting to stare at the branches impeding the pearlescent glow of the moon. Tuning in the very low, polite hum of the breeze, crooning through the imperfections on the glass window.

"It wasn't that– Jesus Christ." His voice reverbs through the slick ajar crack of the door, "I told you, Luke handled it."

His tone ripples directly toward my eardrum, I pinch my eyes shut in focus. The croak of his rasp whispers secrets, battering his act. He's a crumbling antique, frayed under the influence of time, of stress, this trainwreck of a night. Trying to hide his intensive emotion from whoever he's speaking with, perhaps trying to hide them from himself. Listening to the interfered remnants of the sound waves is enough to know that.

"Yeah, probably."

"Well, it was either that or have her help me clean up—" He says snarkily, only to be cut off by the other person, or so I assumed with how he came to an abrupt stop, breathing so loud I don't have to bother actively eavesdropping.

"—I don't know what you want me to say." Harry huffs and puffs, grasping his withering tone with tightened fists, "I know," he lets out a frustrated growl.