012 Girl on the couch

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Twelve / Girl on the couch.

Tonight's too quiet—the kind that feels heavy

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Tonight's too quiet—the kind that feels heavy.

Cicadas buzz somewhere in the distance.

A streetlamp down where you turn into the trailer park flickers overhead, throwing long shadows across the dry grass.

Dallas sits on the picnic table in front of his trailer. His chest is bare, his skin prickles from the cold—but he does nothing about it, loose pajama pants, and miss matching socks. Hes got one arm resting lazily on his knee, the other holding a cigarette. Smoke curls from his mouth like a slow exhale of everything that hasn't been said and probably needs to be. There are dark circles under his eyes.

He hasn't slept. He didn't want to reach for a pill. He can't go asking Briar for another bottle any time soon—it'd be too soon, too worrisome. Especially now.

Nothing still has been said about Chrissy, but there's a search party now.

Her mother kept calling the station—My daughter is gone! Don't you understand me! What has already happened to me!

It's been four days, even with the search party. It hadn't taken this long with Cassandra. They should have found Chrissy by now.

So many shoulds. What ifs.

Is Chrissy still even there? I mean, she has to be. Where the fuck else would she have gone?—

Footsteps crunch on the dead grass a few feet before him.

He looks up, heart a little startled and shoulders tight.

He stops mid drag, shoulders sinking back down. His eyes widen a bit, because the girl from the apartment complex stands before him. She shifts in her high tops and pushes back her bangs with a shaking hand. She hums, tries to smile. She's half in the shadows, half in the pale glow of the trailer porch light. She's clutching something—his jacket, wrinkled, folded over her arm.

She looks unsure of what she's doing, or how she got here. She's in pajama shorts and a thin looking long sleeve—just like before—her hair a little messy, eyes wide and tired. A little lost. A little cold looking.

Still?

Her voice, that he's never heard before, is like honey. "I know it's, like, super late and whatever. But I have walked laps around this trailer park hoping I'd get some clue I was in the right place... The guy with the green hair, few doors down from me—he'd said I could find you here. He described your place, but it was kinda bad. They all look the same. I think he might've been on drugs, but it's fine. I found you."

I found you.

No one's ever said such a sentence to Dallas before.

No one's needed to find him. Wanted to.

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⏰ Last updated: Jun 21 ⏰

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