Till Next Time | completed | currently under re-edit

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An obtrusive banging inside my head makes me reach up and I press my palm hard against my forehead to quell the discomfort, all the while my fingers creeping with an intent to claw my eyes out.

Hummed whispers fall on my ears.

"...can you hear..."
"Hey..."
...snap snap...

I pry my eyes open, immediately squeezing them shut as the blazing sunlight blinds me. My mouth tastes of stale garlic.

A calming dullness eliminates the bright scorching light.

"You can open your eyes now, " the man says.

He slips something over my eyes, some plastic pads resting at the bridge of my nose and I flinch at the foreign touch.
I force my eyes open, my head instantly throbbing back and the man moves away.

"Those are just sunglasses, man." He puts his hands up by his side.

As my eyes accommodate and focus around the contours of his face, my memory refreshes me.

Skull smiles back at me sympathetically. "You passed out." He pushes a bottle of water towards me. "Drink up."

I persist to stare at him like a deer caught in the headlights, maybe wondering how much more intricate his tattoos look under the sun; how much more real.
His gaze shifts between me and the bottle on his coffee table. I pick it up and gulp half of it down, unwilling to ask questions just yet.

"Do you know where you are?" he asks me.
I shake my head. A renewed sting makes me regret it.
"You are at my place. Do you know why?"
"No." The muscles in my throat chafe against one another.
"Do you remember anything from last night?" He squints to look at me.
"No," I say.

He nods and moves on to his kitchen counter.
He comes back out again with a mug of steaming coffee and sets it before me, then yanks the curtain back in one cruel pull.
I flinch again.

"What happened last night?" I ask, partly to dismiss the tension and partly to distract myself from the newly acquired scalding on my tongue from sipping the coffee.

He eyes me head to toe like he is somehow offended by me.

Eventually, he speaks. "You came in last night and asked for a drink. Then another. Then another. And another. Then you picked up a fight with the bouncer when the club was closing and you were asked to leave. Mid-fight you tattered down, out cold."
He pauses to sip his own coffee.

"No one could figure out what to do with you. Ideas were tossed around. Check his ID, call him a cab home. But no ID on you. Leave him out on the alley and call 911 to have them pick you up. You looked important, you'd have been fine. But instead, I brought you to my house."

"Why?" I ask.

He sneers. "Leaving a drunk underage out on the streets of a red light area isn't exactly my style."
He chugs the last bit of his coffee and puts the mug away.

"So who's Anastasia?" he asks, not hesitating for one moment.

The dormant flicker in me rises again, a freshly ripped wound I don't think will get old in some time.
What I had carefully traded in for alcohol and pushed to the back of my head lets me know that it's still there.
Images of the night flash past me in tiny fragmented memories of  burning lights, like heat travelling down my throat and a permanent sloshed-ness.

"How do you know?" I ask.

He shrugs. "Multiple drunk references to her name throughout the night. So I'm curious."