Sweet Tooth [HS]

EIGHTY ONE

Two weeks later.

Harry Styles was lost.

He felt like he did not belong to himself, like he was watching his life play out from somewhere higher up or from a far-away distance. Time passed and people came in and they came out and he did interviews and he took pictures and went to meetings but he could not recall any of it, no people, no places. He was there, but he just wasn't.

And being not in control was better than being in control, he thought. Because control meant bad decisions and hurting people he cared about- hurting the woman that he loved. But being out of control, being separated from himself, like his mind was severed from his body - it meant that he didn't have to hate himself for what he'd done. Meant that he couldn't even remember an hour ago, let alone what happened months back.

It meant he was functioning without feelings.

It was like this numbness or a feeling of falling through space that had no end. And it was getting bigger and bigger, falling faster and faster- and he knew that was induced by the drugs and the drinking that he'd started resorting to more and more.

At first, it was only at parties. Going to as many so he could distract himself from the emptiness inside his chest- taking anything, everything offered to him. When he was there he fucked anyone, too. He let the usual leeches have their turn because he was too high to care and he thought that a body might fill the space. Might help him forget.

Except, of course, it didn't.

Because the space inside him was the shape of Mackenzie Sweet.

So the sex did not work - actually made him feel worse. Because there was no golden brown skin and no eyes that turned violet. It was just nothing. It was fucking a stranger and all the while thinking how Max had fucked someone else. It was waking up the next morning and realising how vast the void inside him had grown.

So to cope with that, and really just to get by without hating himself - he went harder with the drugs. He started taking Valium and Xanax in the evening to help him sleep. Before, he'd been waking up in the night in a sort of fit of panic because he'd been seeing Max's face in his dreams. But the benzos turned his dreams to darkness, made him feel so numb he couldn't always remember his name. So he started taking them more regularly; benzos became breakfast, then lunch, then dinner. And he was never far away from a joint. And he was almost always drinking. It was anything he could get his hands on. He'd started putting whiskey in his coffee, mixed vodka with water. He had been so high one time that he'd accidentally brushed his teeth with tequila.

It helped. It really did. This way, he was able to live with himself. This way, he didn't have to think about Max sleeping with someone else. This way, he didn't think about her at all.

Of course, Tom didn't like it. But where Tom was concerned, Perry Proctor just said he needed to compartmentalise. As long as he put on a good show, he said, then he didn't care what Harry did. And that was not a problem for Harry.

He knew what putting on a performance was. He was well-trained in distraction, knew how to throw off the scent of his decay by flashing a smile and spewing some shit about Addison. He'd been doing it for years, had been decaying for years - so this was nothing new.

Although, he supposed, the brokenness was something he hadn't dealt with before. This feeling of his heart literally breaking inside his chest every time he thought of Max, and Finn, and how it was all his fucking fault.

Harry sighed and turned onto his back.

I need to not be sober. He thought, clutching at his chest as violet eyes flashed through his brain. He found a half-smoked joint on the beside table, and in the drawer he found a bag of Valium. He swallowed down two with what was left in a Jack Daniels bottle.