Lost in Hollywood

Unspeakable Things

Rule number one of recovery:

Don't hang out with addicts.

Even if it meant cutting out your family, your best friend, your sister, or your brother or throwing your granny to the wolves - you fucking did it, without looking back, because staying clean while spending time with people who did drugs, was impossible.

No one was that strong.

Sky knew that.

Her therapist kept repeating it, the staff at the outpatient clinic where she went once a week kept saying that, her dad kept saying that. Hanging out with people who do drugs, makes you do drugs. You don't want to throw away everything you worked so hard for, do you, Sky?

And yet, looking at Luke, standing there in the doorway, his eyes foggy, his smile just a bit slow, Sky knew she didn't have the heart to do what would have been the smart thing.

She had lost too many people already. She wasn't going to lose Luke too.

"Luke," she breathed, hugging the plates against her chest. "Luke, oh no—"

The smile on his lips faltered and his shoulders sagged as he turned his eyes down.

"You want me to leave?"

"Luke, why? Why did you start that shit again?"

"Fuck—" he shifted weight on his feet, restless and tense. "Well, what do you think? You'd have to be a saint to live with my parents and not do drugs. But hey, it's cool— if you want me gone, I get it."

Sky let out a sigh as she took a long look at Luke, who was still standing by the door, ready to walk out of it if she chose to ask that of him. He was even thinner than before, the skin was stretched tight over the delicate bone structure of his face. His nose was so sharp it resembled a bird's peak, his hand that lingered on the door handle, was nothing but skin and bone. The neon yellow hair that had reached his shoulders was gone - replaced by a shorter, shock-pink cut, yet long enough for the strands to fall over his eyes, curl around his ears. He was wearing black - black boots, black pants with chains and spikes, a loose, long-sleeved, black T-shirt with a band logo, and everything about him was so familiar that it hurt.

"Of course, I don't want you gone," she said, abandoning the plates and the forks on a nearby table. "God, I missed you!"

She threw her arms around his neck and relieved, he caught her, hugged her tight against his bony chest. Luke. In a heartbeat it was all back - the first nights in rehab, when he held her hand when she cried and cried and cried. Luke - sneaking with her into Nurse Rivera's office to steal some cigarettes. Luke - painting her toenails after dinner in pajamas on the floor of her room. Everything about him was familiar - from the way he held her against his lean, tall body, to the scent of his skin, but—

There was a weird smell in his clothes, a different smell, like burning plastic and sugar—

She let go of him and took a step back, her chest clenching tight, tight. The music and people's voices were coming from the next room, but they sounded like they came from a different world, when Sky slowly took Luke's hand in hers and peeled up his sleeve.

He let out a tense breath but didn't stop her.

The new self-harm scars were a map of bright, bloody stripes over the old ones that had already turned different shades of red, white, and silver. But that wasn't the worst. Wherever the veins were close enough to surface, the needle marks covered his pale skin, red and bruised and nasty. Sky's stomach turned, she tasted the bile at the back of her throat.