Who Knows When (Joger/Dealor)

Chapter 6

The day had quickly turned into night and I found myself unable to fall asleep, staring at the blank pad of paper in front of me, illuminated by the moonlight shining through the window behind my bed. I chewed the pen cap I'd affixed to the end of the writing utensil, hoping that if I kept ahold of it, it would give me the inspiration I needed. However, every idea I came up with ended up on the floor in a crumpled-up paper ball—not good enough.

My waning attention wandered over to the digital clock that sat on the nightstand in between my bed and John's, the two of us sharing a room while Freddie and Brian shared the other. Freddie originally insisted on having a room all to himself, but after several heated arguments and constant complaints from the three of us about how uncomfortable it was trying to sleep at night or have any kind of privacy with all of us crammed into the closet the landlord passed off as a bedroom, we finally agreed on splitting the rooms up two and two. The guitarist moved in with singer, leaving John and me to the somewhat lesser crowded hole in the wall. Our beds were so close that some mornings I'd wake up to John's hand resting on the edge of my mattress, or John would wake up to my blankets thrown on top of him. It wasn't the most pleasant living situation, but we made it work.

The glowing red numbers on the clock read 03:37, and in less than four hours from now, they'd begin to flash, sending a shrill beeping sound through the small flat's thin walls and dragging the four of us out of bed one by one—first, Freddie, then Brian, followed by John, and lastly, me. It was like that almost every morning, unless one of us woke up somewhere else—which hadn't been as frequent an occurrence as it once was with our stricter regiment the singer had implemented. If we weren't working on writing songs, we were practicing, and if we weren't practicing, we were out at the clubs getting wasted, or as Freddie like to call it, "inspired."

Maybe that's what I needed—a drink.

I tossed the notebook to the foot of my bed in frustration and rolled out of the bed, going to sneak out of the room—my hand wrapped around the cold doorknob, turned halfway—when the creaking of John's bed hit my ears and froze me in my tracks. I slowly glanced back over my shoulder to see the bassist sitting up on his elbows, a tired expression slathered across his face as he asked drowsily, "What are you doing?"

"I-I couldn't sleep," I whispered, the pink that had crept up in my cheeks going unnoticed in the darkness of the room.

His languid gaze dragged itself to the clock that now read 03:42, a groan emanating from the back of his throat and his hand moving back and forth in a lazy, lethargic wave. "Come back to bed," he grumbled, his body flopping back down on his mattress, "It's late."

I stood at the door, contemplating what his offer really entailed. I wanted him to mean something more than the simple command he gave, but deep down, I knew that he didn't mean what I thought he meant at this hour. He couldn't; he shouldn't; he wouldn't, and so I shook my head and slipped out, softly closing the door behind me and falling back against it as soon as it clicked into place, that panicked feeling I thought I'd left behind at the beach starting to creep its way back.

Memories of the day we'd just had flashed before me—John standing over me, outlined in that heavenly glow from the sun; our hands touching as we passed the cigarette between the two of us, the stick shortening in length with each drag drawn from it; me straddling John as our pointless argument reached its climax, his eyes staring into mine as we wondered the same thing—What now?

I frantically rubbed my face with my hands, desperately wanting to get rid of the visions of the past, but I couldn't stop thinking about what had transpired between him and me. I rushed over to the kitchen sink and turned the cold water on, a scratchy, metallic sound coming from the pipes before water spewed out from the faucet. I cupped my hands under the unsteady stream of lukewarm water and splashed the small pool up to my face, clinging to the counter as I let the water drip down my cheeks and chin into the sink.

"Rog," I heard softly from behind me, startling me into turning around and spotting John in the doorway, arms folded over his chest and one leg crossed over the other as he leaned against the threshold. "What on earth are you doing?"