"Danny?" I almost stutter as I speak his name. I blink my eye lids a few times to ensure that I'm not hallucinating and when he doesn't disappear from in front of me, I'm shocked.
He touches my arm gently, his habit I'm guessing that he hasn't gotten rid of yet. His brain can't seem to fully process the fact that I'm standing in front of him just like mine can't process he's in front of me. "What are you doing here?" He looks at me intently and I immediately know he's not drunk from his awareness and the lack of alcohol. Danny looks at the cup in my hand and takes it from me. "You out here getting drunk?"
I grab it back, "It shouldn't matter to you what I'm doing no more." I defiantly take another sip and grimace as I swallow it. I attempt to walk past him but trip slightly when he latches on to me once more. "Let. Go." He does and as soon as I take one more step I hear a voice from the side of the house.
"Jacki?" Axel always did have impeccable timing. Shit.
Once he comes into view I begin to panic and my heart races slightly. I can't witness another fight knowing that I'm the one who started it. After he rounds the corner and spots Danny I hear him mutter, "Oh shit."
"Yeah, 'oh shit' is right you bastard." Danny gets too close to him and points a finger right into his chest and pushes him back. I know they're both sober and I know this isn't going to go well. "Did I or did I not tell you to stay the fuck away from my girlfriend?"
Axel smirks, "Last time I checked, she's not your girlfriend," he speaks in a condescending way. The testosterone was so apparent in the air I probably could have reached out and touched it.
Then Danny turns to me, "You came here with him? Out of all people? Really Jacki?" Now he's yelling and I flinch back. It feels like I can physically feel the alcohol in the pit of my stomach, moving every time I take a breath and I feel extremely nauseous. Under normal circumstances I can handle my drinking extremely well, it takes more than the the average person for me to even feel sick to my stomach. However, this wasn't a normal circumstance. "Are you even listening to me?" My head lifts slowly from looking at the ground to meet his eyes, everything is moving in slow motion and I can't seem to process any amount of words fast enough. "Look at me!" He demands again and I step away from him, he's getting aggressive. "Do you even see how I look right now? I spent all afternoon fucking crying over you and you do this? You don't even care."
I groan out loud, not caring if he or anyone else hears. I can feel the awkwardness billowing off of Axel as he stands slightly behind me, not wanting to provoke the angry man standing in front of me. "That was the problem Danny, I cared too much and I just kept letting you walk all over me and I won't put up with it any longer. I'm done." I take another deep breath then speak extra loud and clear, "You hear me? We're done."
He just chuckles a very self-depricating laugh and turns around in a full circle, "I'm not going to talk to you when you're like this. I'm coming to get you in the morning when you're sober and we can actually talk like adults."
"NO!" I yell very loudly and I feel Axel move closer behind me. His hand lightly touches my back, "I am done talking to you. I won't speak to you no more."
When he sees Axel's hand touch me he grimaces and turns away, serves him right. Then he speaks out, "Please, don't do that in front of me." He moves towards us a little and I automatically move back, stumbling over Axel's feet in the process. He gently moves Axel's hand away from me, that's the softest I'd ever seen him touch anything. No one resists anything that Daniel does, we just let it happen before he walks away silently, back around the side of the house and into the backyard that's covered in darkness.
"Can we go now?" I ask him and he nods vigorously, glad to be taken out of such a difficult situation. As he drove home I realized how genuinely surprised I was that there hadn't been a fight, I had been expecting Danny to at least push somebody or attempt to fight. He had always been like that, the first person to throw a punch just to prove a point. I sway slightly as my vision distorts a little bit before Axel steadies me and we walk away from the stench of the trash we were next to.
On the way back to the car I nearly trip over another person lying on the ground, passed out with wet hair, presumably from his drink that he spilled. The whole ride back to his apartment is silent and I wait and wait for him to say something but he never does so I put the silence to good use and I think really long and hard about what I want. I think about what it exactly is that I'm doing spending time with someone that I had told to fuck off. The more I think about our friendship, the quicker I begin to think about our time we had spent together and the spark I had felt so many years ago. I wondered if it still existed, if we still had that special connection that ignited a thousand different emotions within me.
My face got hot when I thought about that night, he had taken the train to my building. I had gotten home from school that afternoon to hear my little brother who was barely able to walk, screeching from his room and my mother nowhere to be found. The apartment was completely empty so I was fully responsible to not only find Graham, but to figure out why he was crying and get him to stop and find him somewhere to go for the night. I knew that if my mother came home in the middle of the night, wasted, I was going to start a fight with her. I wouldn't be able to help myself. So I found my brother lying behind the couch on the ground, no shirt on and disgruntled. I gathered him in my arms and rocked him against my chest, hoping to stop his screams, feeling sorry that we had such a shit mother. I used our landline to call Axel's apartment to see if I would be able to come over and stay at his, like I usually did.
After dropping off Graham at Arlene's I went down the stairs to see him leaning against the wall. He pulled my arm back to where his mom's car was waiting, he drove without a license, a lot of people did but he was alright. "Tell me what's going on, what did she do?"
"I can't even think about it clearly without wanting to literally fucking explode." I let a few more deep breaths and try to even my breathing but without avail, "She makes me so fucking angry, why have children if you don't want to take care of them?" I rub my hands over my face and all the grime and dirt from them transfer to my face, making me feel sticky. "I'm fucking 15 I shouldn't have to raise a child." I grunt in anger, "God."
"Have you ever thought about finding your dad? You know, to get outta there?"
"Fuck no, I don't wanna see him. I'd rather stay here and be miserable than be anywhere near him," I snap at Axel and immediately feel bad for acting so angry towards him, it wasn't his fault and I knew that. His face falls at my tone, "Sorry." I give a slight shrug, not having much else to offer."
"I shouldn't have brought it up. But I agree, you have a bad situation over there and you know you can stay with me all you want. I'm sorry this keeps happening to you." It's comforting for me to know that I can always have his shoulder to cry on even if it rarely got that bad.
When we arrive back to his apartment his hand brushes mine as we reach for the handle to his bedroom door and I look at him gently while removing my hand from his quickly, not knowing what to make of the tingling my fingers felt. He turns his face away from mine and pushes the door open, making me think if he felt the same thing or not. The turning in my stomach when he lays down next to me on the floor is something I had always felt around him but had not known what to make of it. It felt warm and I didn't mind it, I welcomed it. I welcomed anything he made me feel because it was never anything sad or angry. I talked to him for a few minutes about other things that went on in my day, how I had met the new kid Daniel because he was placed in my 3rd period class and that he kept calling me by my full name and it irritated me.
After his fingers brushed mine for the second time once he laid down next to me, I turned to look at him and saw that he was staring at the ceiling. I didn't know if he had done it on purpose or on accident so I moved a few inches away from him again to see what he would do. The air was silent for a few more seconds, tension surrounding us when neither of us spoke for a little while. Then he turned to me so fast and kissed me and I let him. I liked it, loved it even, and let him roll over me on the carpeted ground.
"Jacki?" I blinked a few times and was brought back to my reality, 3 years later and with a red face from thinking about that day.
Axel was playfully waving his hand in front of my face to get my attention and I noticed that his face was really close to mine. In a drunken stupor, I leaned forwards and kissed him and when he didn't pull back I attached my hand to the back of his head and that's when he began to kiss me back.
YOU ARE READING
The Way In Which Things Work
Teen Fiction"The road to self discovery is a long one and since I'm the one who stumbled down it, I can tell you it's not easy. I'm accepting but in no way am I naive. Many people will tell you that you can't do it alone and that you need someone to guide you...
