The Storms Of August

Chapter Twenty Three: I'm Safe Up High

It was somewhere quarter past two when we stumbled into our temporary home the next night. The boys were dragging a very hammered and very dysfunctional Demi between them as they stepped inside, heavy feet of alcohol and struggle came down with each step into the cool room. Demi did not want to leave the nightlife of girl watching and heavy drinking, so she made things complicated by dragging her feet and forcing Joe and Nick to hold onto the arm around their shoulders to keep her in place.

She bickered and mumbled insults to each of them as we walked back 'home'. There was something beyond the fact that she was shitfaced that made me so unmistakably sad. Through the darkness and over the crashing of gorgeous waves all around, I could hear the voice she could not project and I could see the unmistakable shade of ugly cast around us. She was hunched forward, staring at me with an unfocused gaze under angry eyebrows. She looked at me, and even from her saturated position, her gaze was still just as intense as when she was sober. The difference was she was tired and unhappy, her eyes were flatlining with no shot of a miracle. She was a dead man walking; drunk, angry, and lonesome in the night and she knew it. The glass was empty and she hit cutoff. There was no half full option. She was shit out of luck and there was nothing that could sway her perception. The way she looked at me was saying I was the one who drove the steak into her heart, I was the reason the low she was hitting came so hard on her liver. It was such a fragile intensity that I almost believed it. I walked back with the three of them just behind me, looking back at her every so often, trying to convince myself that what I was seeing was not real or was not permanent. I told myself the sad photograph in my mind was not captured with my hand, but Demi was very persuasive, even at her darkest.

When the boys plopped her on the couch, Joe went to hide the alcohol while Nick turned on the dim lamp in the corner and sorted out the remedy for when Demi woke up with a massive hangover. I didn't know what it was, but I saw him fly from the kitchen to her room to the bathroom like it was a routine he carried out regularly. I occupied myself by fixing Demi's position on the couch. She was falling off because she was positioned on the edge and she was too drunk to adjust. I reached behind the red fabric sofa and walked backwards with my arms hooked under her armpits. Lesson of the evening: Drunk, barely conscious people are heavy as fuck. After breaking a few sweats to move her up, I grabbed her hands and pulled her to the armrest. The final touch was moving one foot on the other arm rest and the other over the cushions of the furniture to keep her in place. Afterwards, I practically fell onto the floor beside her. I stared at the distressed peace written all over her face. I felt bad. It is what she asked for, though. She went into the bar looking to lose herself and here she is.

I slowly brought my hand up to her forehead and brushed the hair that had fallen onto her face back to where it belonged. "Why do you do this to yourself?" I whispered in a disappointed sigh. "This isn't how you want your story to end."

There was no response for a while, I thought she blacked out from the sudden silence we were enveloped in seeping into her toxic bloodstream. I was absentmindedly brushing her hair and tracing her face with my eyes when the weakest of voices mumbled though jointed teeth. "Nothing can touch me up here." After that, quiet snores whistled from her chest, so I kissed her forehead and let her be, leaving the tears and a priest's smile in a box beside her.

I walked down the semi narrow hall to Joe's room, where he sat on his bed and starred at the floor intently like it was all that mattered. When I crossed the threshold into his room he looked up lazily and found my gaze, "Hey," he said tiredly.

I walked over to him and rubbed his shoulder, undoubtedly sore from carrying half the dead weight in the living room, and looking down at him concerned. He looked outside of himself, tired and unfocused in a sluggish manner. His eyes dragged behind his head everywhere he looked and he seemed to move like their was an intense amount of friction with every motion. "Hey, you going to bed?"