Existential Indifference (Joshler)

11. Touch

Start the song. It's Drop the Guillotine by Peach Pit.

Josh was lucky. Josh was really fucking lucky. That was apparently the moral of the story today. It hadn't started out that way, of course, but things were working out quite nicely for him since he left Debby and Ashley.

After hanging out with Tyler, the fear of being unable to find any of Josh's friends that were clean had become overwhelming. Josh had gone to six different houses, most of which were either completely vacant or filled with people who were passed out with needles still in their arms. Then he got to Hayley's house.

Hayley looked like she was in a hurry when she opened the door, but she smiled brightly when she saw him. "Oh my god!" She laughed as she hugged him tightly, and he didn't want to admit that he clung to her a bit longer than necessary. "How are you?" She asked excitedly.

Hayley broke the hug, but held his arms as she smiled at him. He was so scared of being turned away from the only person he had left on his list-the only one who looked healthy.

"I'm...um...That's what I came to talk to you about actually," Josh told her nervously.

"Come in then. Holy shit. I haven't seen you in forever," she chirped, grabbing his hand and leading him inside of her apartment.

Her apartment wasn't much nicer than Josh's trailer by any means. It was small, stank of cigarette smoke, and looked like a crack house from the outside. The inside was decorated with bright colours though, and it was clear that Hayley spent every extra dime of her extremely limited income on making this place comfortable.

Hayley led Josh to sit on an overstuffed pink couch covered in needlepoint pillows that were just messy enough for him to know that she'd made them herself. He couldn't help but smile. Ashley had introduced him to a lot of people since he'd met her-mostly losers who either sold dope or knew someone who did-but Hayley had always been Josh's favourite.

Plopping down on the couch next to Josh, Hayley draped her legs across his lap cheerfully, completely comfortable in his presence. That was likely because of how many creeps Josh had protected her from over the years. Being a stripper clearly wasn't her first choice for a career, but the crackheads they were usually surrounded by seemed to think her job gave them permission to harass her whenever they wanted to. Josh couldn't even count how many times he'd had to knock someone out for trying to take advantage of her.

"Are you sure you have time to talk to me?" Josh asked self-consciously. "You looked like you were headed somewhere."

The small woman smiled. "Nah. I just was bored of sitting here alone and wanted to get out before I did something stupid."

That was incredibly understandable to Josh. "Yeah, I get that."

Hayley nodded, playing with his hair without seeming to think much of it. A lot of people seemed to do that with him, but he didn't mind. Touch was comforting to him. He was so used to feeling detached from his body that the reminder he was still in it was incredibly welcome. Hayley understood that.

Debby had told Ashley when they'd first started dating that Josh didn't have any real sense of ownership over his body. She'd said that the cocaine had probably burnt something out in his brain that helped him to understand that he didn't have to let people touch him all the time. Maybe that was true, and maybe it wasn't, but Josh certainly hadn't given much thought to being touched for a very long time. Still, he hadn't liked the way Ashley had been practically walking on eggshells around him for the first month of living in their trailer because she thought he'd freak out if she touched him or something.