As part of the games Hayden and Ash used to play, they would sometimes remain at his apartment for days until one of them got really injured and had to walk away. The boys, dealers, would come by the place and leave a few packages each time.
It's been three days that Hayden hasn't left the place. She screams in her sleep and almost spits blood every time she does. She vomits every now and then since Ashton threw away the remnants of the drugs she had brought with her. Calling his name in the middle of the night doesn't work anymore, he just sits still, waiting for it to pass. He noticed that whispering to her that it would all go away isn't helping. Avery calls once a day, too scared to come by, but terrified at the thought of her having an overdose once again. And it seems as if everyone is against her. Her eyes are burning, and her head feels so heavy she is struggling not to scream right now. Her body falls on the bed and she can feel her hands burning as they go from her shoulders to her forearms. She does not dare to stand up and look in the mirror, too scared she would see bruises she doesn't remember getting, or blood she doesn't remember spilling. As she cries once more in the pillow next to her, she can hear Ashton's footsteps coming in from the bathroom.
"Hey babe." The words escape his mouth as a sigh while he wipes his eyes. They're red. Just like hers but not quite. His are because of all the crying.
When she doesn't answer, he joins the bed with a soda and something to eat. She gives it a quick look, goes for the soda then turns in the bed as to turn her back to him. Pink hair vanishing through the covers.
"You know, I remember. I remember the pain of getting the drugs out of my system. I remember it feeling like you're drowning, as if all air has been taken from your lungs and they're pouring poison straight into your brain. Because it not just the lungs that feel like suffocating, it's your brain too. You're felling as if you're losing all capacities. That's what heroin does to you. Then, you can't feel the high anymore and you just seem to be falling, like in a loophole. Now that's coke." He lifts his eyes from the bread he's holding to check if she is still listening. A ruffle through the sheets shows she is. "But do you know what I remember way more vividly?" he pauses, expecting her to answer. He really wishes for her to answer.
It's not quite a word that comes out from her side of the bed though, it's more like a sound.
"I remember Cara chocking in my arms. I see her grey eyes turning to black then to white in an instant. I remember the gagging sound that she was making while the blood started to touch her lips."
Hayden's eyes are closed but she knows he will keep on talking. She knows he will because he hasn't since the day they arrested him. Not once.
"I remember the sirens screaming in the street, and you just screaming in here. I can still smell it sometimes too. Then, I hear Vinny and the boys leaving the room, rushing to get towels and water. And I always asked myself, why didn't they run?"
She manages to keep her mouth shut as the tears run down her cheeks, burning every ounce of her skin that hasn't been chopped off already. At east that's what it feels like.
"You know those kids, Lou, Vinny and the other guys, we weren't raised together as some sort of secret club, eh? We just kind of crashed together. So why didn't they leave me?" he keeps on, his body fully turned to the window now. His eyes looking for some sort of explanation in the skies.
"And as I hear all of you rushing to get things done, and as I hear the ambulance getting closer, I can't seem to leave Cara' sight. Not in a perv way, you and I had already been- you know," he stops himself screwing up. "She was just there, and not there at the same time. As if her body was still, on that dark disgusting carpet, but her soul or something was already out of it."
Hayden takes off the sheets and grabs his neck, turning his face to her. "Stop it." First, she asks it gently almost, while she keeps on crying those bloody hot tears. Then, she repeats with more fire: "stop it. She isn't dead, alright. She isn't dead. So now you just stop saying that."
Her hands go crashing on her knees as he unwraps himself from her and gets up fast. He runs a trembling hand through his hair, goes for a cigarette on the nightstand, lights it up, and finally stands still. "She isn't dead, but you could have been. Now you listen to me alright? You're not going to Lou's anymore, not for that shit anyways. Don't. Don't fucking leave me Hayden alright?"
***
A couple days after her return home, Hayden still doesn't feel like going anywhere. She senses that someone will enter soon to get on her bed, throw a pillow at her, call her for breakfast, yell at her for the fucking pink hair, ask her where she was, what she took, what she did, and tell her she's an addict. She knows. That's what she has been telling herself for a week now. The thing she cannot get her head around though is why her neck is hurting so much. She tries to remember, but only what happened before taking the hits come back to her. The blur of the detox still very colorful in her mind. Some images from after are stuck in her memories, but they don't make any sense.
She finally gets up, looks straight at her neck in the mirror, not paying much attention to the dark circles around her eyes, nor to the chipped lip that she wears. She tries remembering what happened. She closes her hand around her neck, simply to ease the pain by caressing her skin. But then she notices it. The perfect way a hand could close around her neck. The perfect traces, but not bruises, that his fingers had left.
Last night, she had noticed his eyes as he stared at her while he thought she was sleeping. He wants her to stop, he wants her to quit. It has been six months now that she has not been clean. Six months that this all started. If she could, she would seriously lose herself in some shadowed street, try to get hit by a cab, even. She would just try not to get into that garden and yell for Ash six months ago. Yelling for someone you don't know yet in their back-garden at night seems a bit creepy anyway. She would hit the girl who had given her his address. She would hurt her so bad. Ash would have stayed in that stupid world of his, full of himself and full of Lou's drugs. And she would still be clean, she would still hide to cry, she would still be screaming into a pillow before falling asleep at night. But she would still be sleeping at night.
The drugs she had tried before meeting him were harmless, or so she thought. She was not addicted back then. But Ash came in with the addiction. As if it was a freaking package deal of some sort.
The girl who gave Hayden his address is Cady. She would have hit Cady so much six months ago. She starts laughing, she laughs alone in her perfect white bedroom.
YOU ARE READING
Settle Down
Romance"She came and it was two in the morning. She'd been crying. She started screaming in my backyard. She was yelling for me to let her in while I had never met her before. Mate, she was nuts. She wore that fucking purple dress. You know, the dark one...
