THE BLIND GLASS RAGE

25

a/n: unedited. god im so fucking excited to bring what im brinGING

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It became obvious that the mere idea of falling asleep was nearly unfathomable, seeing as I was hyper-aware to the fact that Noah and Josh were out there, doing unknown, rough things, surrounded and swarmed by people who didn't know them, and didn't know that Josh had sex with me before deciding to fall back into the arms of someone who appeared stronger, simply because he wasn't real, and they would probably never know. I figured the two of them were kissing in bars they weren't old enough to be in, or dancing on each other in clubs that required fake I.D's, bodies sweaty and out of sync and false. Minds tainted with alcohol and hearts giving pathetic beats. They'd dance to those beats. Josh would pray his knees wouldn't give out. Noah wouldn't even think of holding him up.

The pain that came hand-in-hand with being so bitter ran deep and sharp through my veins, and sat in the corner of the room like a sacred promise, and a half-assed warning. Waiting and crouched and deadly. Hoping I would speed up the destruction process and give it some sort of sign, granting it permission to wreak as much havoc as it wanted. Because, for fuck's sake, I was bitter. And it was strong. But I was also drenched in jealously, and that hollowed me out like nothing I'd ever known.

"When Josh came by earlier," Parker spoke to me from the floor. Legs thrown up on to my bed while he lay on his back, peering up at me like a child. The blood sat his cheeks. Created new colors on his skin. His dark hair made waves against the carpet. An ache took the form of a tsunami when I heard someone else say Josh's name. "He looked pretty upset."

Some of my hair still wasn't completely dried, and was licking down at my forehead. I hated it. Turned my gaze away from his, made deep contact with the wall in front of me, and worked to scrub water droplets from my face.

"Did he?" I asked, sounding as unconcerned as I wanted to.

"He did." He finalized. "Did. Did you guys fight, or something?"

"No." I shook my head. "He's just busy."

But, the two of us knew Josh wasn't busy doing anything but fucking with me, and letting himself be controlled by a future veterinarian, and allowing myself to split and shatter and scream into millions upon millions of different pieces. I put my clothes on mechanically.

"He looked like he'd been crying."

Grabbing my laptop from the desk in the corner, I tried to reconnect with my body. It felt like my mind was straying from it, and it was a pain having to remind myself to float back.

My response sounded like a shrug. "I don't know why."

I was going to do something. To try and do something, in terms of assignments and reading and essays. But all I could think about was how hungrily I kissed him, like the world was never so close to ending. How it felt like swallowing down lightning bolts, and blowing up into something that only emmited bright lights when it was being destroyed. His hands pressed to my skin, our shirts dancing from us like they were going to flutter in the wind our bodies created when they moved. He fucking commanded wind, it seemed. That night, he commanded everything.

The stars were not ready for the way the lamp bounced sweat off his skin. Or the scent on him, like heaven and green grass and concrete and trees and all the life that teemed under the deceptive pale of his skin, because I was sitting down on that rough, college mattress, and it felt like my spine was being split in half. It was Josh's fault.