A Single Moment of Sincerity

nine.

WARPED TOUR 2011 - WEST PALM BEACH, FLORIDA

I woke up the next morning, not only with an insane headache, but with a huge amount of guilt pushing down on my chest. It was making it hard to breathe. Though, truthfully, I deserved it. I was, what you call, a bad fucking person. No, that was too nice of a term. I was a fucking jerk. Even "jerk" was too sweet. Anything you could think of that was a synonym for asshole, that is what I was and more. Chris didn't deserve the way I acted that night. No one deserved that.

It hurt to even think about the events of the night before and how they happened. It made my stomach churn, to the point where I tried my best not to even think about it at all. If it did come to my head, I did my very best to try and distract myself with something else. That was difficult too, though. My brain had a habit of taking the worst things and replaying them over and over and over again until I was face down in my bed, screaming and crying, working through an anxiety attack. I deserved the anxiety attack, though. This time, I absolutely did. What kind of idiot takes the best thing they ever had and throws it away just for some fleeting moment? This idiot. Bailey Stills, the idiot. I kept telling myself that Chris and I never had the conversation about being exclusive, but it wasn't hard to gleam from any of our conversations that that is what he expected. There were multiple cases of him being vulnerable and insecure about my friendships with other men, so of course he wouldn't want me making out with someone else—especially Ben Bruce.

Then there was Ben. I was being horrid to him too. I was being horrid to both him and Danny, honestly. Was I using their feelings towards me to feel better about myself? Probably, but I was just too dense to realize it then.

I contemplated even telling Chris, but I felt like it would be even worse if I didn't. The truth would get back to him eventually, wouldn't it? If not from some random person from the tour, then absolutely from my band mates. They saw every stupid interaction I had with Ben that night, and they were close with Chris at that point, so they would tell him, no doubt about it. It was almost karmic—how close they were with him, and how far they had moved away from me. At the start of this tour, my band were the only people I knew I could trust with my life, and now? I didn't know if they could even keep the deepest secrets I had. Again, this was just another thing I deserved. I was a piece of shit, to put it lightly. No one around me wanted to be around me, and I didn't blame them a single bit. I wouldn't have wanted to be around me either.

I suppose, in my stupid, young, idiot head, I thought that I was able to blame my dumb decisions on my age. Yeah, I was twenty at the time, and yeah, twenty year olds make really fucked up decisions, but I couldn't ignore the fact that I knew I had leaned into that kiss with Ben, and I had wanted him to kiss me. There was a second where if I had pulled away and told him to stop, it would have been saved, but I didn't. What's even worse is what we did next. Maybe we were both jerks, but I wanted to take most of the blame. I was the one with a silent promise to someone else, he wasn't.

Either way, we came back into the club together and got so piss drunk, we were dancing on each other the whole night. Even drunk, I could see the annoyed and concerned gazes from our friends. I can't remember all of it, but I was pretty sure we were also making out a bit on the floor too. Just idiots, is all can really be said about that. I was ashamed, and I still am. I woke up, after apparently passing out at the club, in the Asking Alexandria bus. From my own experience, at least with Danny, I could only assume that meant one thing. I didn't want to think about it.

Surprisingly, the rest of my band mates acted like nothing had happened when I finally got back to my own bus. I didn't know if I should bring up the whole situation with them, but due to the fact that I really didn't want to even think about it, I figured if they wanted to talk about it, they would bring it up first. That was the best way to handle it, right?