Friggin December arrived and with it the whole world seemed to go upside down. About twenty-three days ago, Hayden stopped taking drugs. About twenty days ago, Ash started living off his sister's couch when he wasn't out partying to piss Hayden off.
It felt like a thousand days but really it had just been twenty-three days since she was sober. Every time she woke up was harder, everytime she set foot a foot in front of the other was harder, everytime her dad looked at her in the morning when she got in the kitchen was harder. Not because of the drugs not in her system anymore. Not because she wanted it so bad, but because she knew than anyday now, Ashton could be gone. Just like that. He felt like he'd finally fixed her, as if. And so it was okay for him to leave now. Just before Christmas. The air she used to breathe was so much lighter before, it wasn't that disgusting then, she didn't feel like there could be another one after that, before. As she gets in the shower, she holds her breath. When she sinks, she holds her breath. She doesn't move, her eyes shut. She breaks into tears as she opens her mouth, breathing in and feeling life running through her veins does that.
Twenty days since Ash had been living with his sister and everything that came with it. Not only his dad coming home and falling asleep almost before even reaching the sofa, the kids running around barely clothed, jumping from one cardboard box to the other, but also Dee. Dee is doing alright, she has always done alright, and will be fine until the end of times, since she'll probably survive it. Everybody seems to get along with their life just fine, trying not to get into each other's way. Sometimes, Dee smokes a cigarette at night with Ashton and tells him about the kids' father. She tells her brother about how she didn't get beaten, never. She tells him about how he used to be a good man, a good father, though she wished he'd have been a monster. She tells Ash about how she would get yelled at a lot. But it was fine because they loved each other. That night, Ash goes to sleep with the light on, asking himself if it's okay for Hayden to wake up with bruises and blood on her body.
Smith Jennings had met Diane Murphy when they were both around the age of fourteen. They got married at twenty-one and moved in Beswick. Just like Dee's parents had. Every single time, Dee compared her own life to her mother's. She'd told herself she would already be living in the Northern Quarter by now but her shifts at the hospital were getting longer and her checks weren't. She got pregnant with Ava six years into the marriage and her life had changed for the best. Now, her job wasn't her priority anymore, her blood was. Smith returned to work after a couple weeks and started getting into debts. Nobody ever really knew how, Dee just noticed the paperwork being dealt with on the side was getting a lot bigger than usual. Then Beth Murphy, Ashton and Dee's mother died of an heart attack. Dee hadn't seen her since before the birth of her daughter. Ez was finally born three years after that, while the debts were long and never-ending, and Smith's excuses were almost non-existent. Life shifted without Dee even noticing. As if someone had decided to move around their furniture during the night, but only of two inches on the left. Everything seemed right, but nothing was anymore. Diane knew her life had started to resemble her mother's in a way. Two kids, financial problems, still stuck in fucking Beswick at thirty years-old. She took the matter in her own hands, asked around about her husband's problems and found out they were bigger than anything she'd ever known. Whenever she tried to bring it up, he'd yell.
Thirty-three year-old Dee was fine. She was separated, two kids on her hands, a depressed father and an addict little brother. She. was. fine.
***
"One, two, three!" Hayden opens her eyes ans sees Ashton's, sparkling in front of her. He presses his lips against hers and puts a full glass of hot chocolate in her hand. "Happy one month."
She smiles and closes her eyes, leaning against his shoulder. The fog taking in her every move. Her cheeks gt hotter as she sips the drink. "We can do this, right? We can definitely do it." She feels her heart beating faster as she asks him that one question.
Ashton turns around just enough to only kiss her forehead. "Sure." It's then that they hear the door closing at the back of the house.
For the last days, she had started feeling as if she didn't belong anywhere anymore. Ash didn't have his own place, he'd found someone to rent it to, and Hayden wouldn't dare set a foot in Dee's house until she was sure she could handle the family. So she'd stayed home, in her room and hadn't moved a lot. Focusing on the withe ceiling above her bed, she could hear the silence in her house when the twins were at school, or when Ethan was finding a cure to AIDS or cancer somewhere probably, probably not. Nobody was making sure she got back into her room fine anymore, since she just never left it. She would read a lot, about drugs, about dependance, about alcohol, she had already read the whole Manchester AA's page on Facebook.
While Dee was a good person, she used to go crazy when she held a grudge against someone. So when Hayden stepped into her living room, hidden behind Ash's frame, you could say she'd lost her shit. "Really?" She said, eyeing the girl from head to toe. "Nah-uh, not in my house."
While Ashton is already trying to find the next argument, Dee stops in front of Hayden and puts a strand of her hair behind the girl's ear. "Were you there? Were you there that night?"
Hayden's cheeks start to redden, her veins pumping all the blood they can find to her heart, already screaming after any possible form of drug, and now she can smell fear. She reeks of it.
Ash's hands get into fists as he tries to release whatever the hell he can find from his brain to his heart, he releases everything, he thinks about the fucking blue bird he saw in that one magazine three days ago so he doesn't end up breaking a vase or something. "Dee, please. Leave it, okay? She's got nothing to do with it." Wrong.
"No, she's got a right to know. I was there."
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...
