loveless // haylor au

chapter twenty four

chapter twenty four
the karma problem

October 4th

I pushed the door to my flat open at around nine o'clock in the morning and stumbled in, feet dragging, almost causing me to trip.

I watched a drop of my blood drip onto the floorboards, splatting softly.
I reached a hand up to wipe my nose.
Mirror, I thought, bumbling over to the old antique mirror in the entryway.

I didn't even react when I saw my face.
I knew it was going to be bad.
The left side of my lip was busted, nothing too bad but still not nice to look at. The bruise was the worse. Forming underneath my eye, I let my fingers brush against it, retracting my hand immediately at the sudden sharp ache. Christ.

My nose was bleeding still, and the sleeve of the borrowed long sleeved shirt was now just a patch of red blood as I'd been pressing it against my nose.
I cringed. This was the worst moment of my entire life.

Sleeve still pressed against my nose, I turned away from the mirror, and as I did, a blanket clad Taylor appeared, stepping in from the kitchen.

She was still here.

~

October 4th
1am

Before that, there was the pub.
Just after Taylor dropped the pregnancy bomb on my head... there was the pub.

One of the things I noticed first, about the pub, was that it smelt like oranges. And body odour.
Mainly the body odour.

It was busy, and the bar staff weren't friendly, which was fine, I wasn't in the mood for talking.

I'd walked straight into town, head in a cloud, not paying attention to anything.
I was lucky I wasn't killed; hit by a bus, stabbed by a mugger. Fuck, would that solve things though.

The Pot Belly — was where I ended up.
That was the pub. It was crowded, and loud, looked like a good family place for dinner.
Right now it was full of drunken old blokes, and me, a drunken pathetic wanker.

Wooden walls and wooden floors, the lighting dim — I felt like the room was caving in on me, and the more I drank, the better I felt.
It was not the right way to cope, I knew that. But I needed this. I think I needed this.

'You done?' the bar man asked, looking at me with piercing brown eyes under a set of bushy eyebrows. His beard was scruffy and ginger.
And he looked like he wanted to punch me, a bit.

'One more,' I said, voice strained, 'Thanks.'

There was another drink in front of me a few moments later, and I looked back down at it, trying to catch myself in the reflection of it.

Fuck.
A baby.
I shook my head.

There weren't many things, by the age of twenty-two, that had shaken me to my very core.
There's not many sentences, or circumstances that had brought me to my knees.

At twenty-two, I still felt like a kid. A kid who does some adult things, but still... a kid.
I'd said and done things I shouldn't. I'd made mistakes. Some mistakes, bigger than others.