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{tw: this chapter has mentions of drug use and some abusive language!}
By the time the tour was over a month later, Grace was nervous about leaving. She was nervous about not being around the guys anymore, nervous about being alone in her apartment. While she'd been doing so well on tour, she wasn't sure she knew how to do well on her own. Everyone assured her she'd be fine and they were still there for her if she needed anything, but knowing they were all so spread out across their hometown scared her.
The first few days went by just fine. Jim visited a lot and Joey and Mick stopped in too, and life almost felt normal. Almost.
After about a week home, Grace got stirred out of sleep by knocking on her door in the middle of the night. The alarm clock on her nightstand told her it was about three in the morning, and normally she would've just ignored it but she couldn't help the nagging feeling in the back of her mind telling her something was wrong.
She shuffled out of her bedroom, pulling on a bathrobe as she did so and swinging open the front door without bothering to look through the peephole. She immediately regretted not looking and tried to shut the door, only for it to be shoved open. She stumbled backwards, fear rising inside of her.
"What, you're not happy to see me?" he ex-boyfriend, Casey, asked roughly as he stepped inside and shut the door behind himself.
"No, I'm not. I've dumped your ass about twenty-five times and I'm clean, so I'm not even of any use to you," she told him, doing her best to keep her voice strong and steady. Casey had been her dealer long before he'd been her boyfriend.
They'd met in high school and he'd been getting her drugs pretty much ever since. They'd ended up dating and breaking up over and over, beating the shit out of each other while high frequently along the way. He was the absolute last person she needed to see, and she wished she'd taken Jim's offer to crash at his place. But no, she'd insisted she needed to make shit work in her own place, needed to feel safe there. Well, she didn't feel safe.
"Oh, you're clean, huh? That won't last long. It never does," Casey jeered. "I heard you've been fucking that guy, the one from that stupid fucking band you're always following around like a pathetic little groupie," he said, and Grace had to roll her eyes. She knew he definitely knew both Jim's name and the name of the band. He'd tried to get into the band himself back in the day and they'd told him he wasn't good enough -he could barely play guitar- and he'd been bitter ever since.
"I can fuck whoever I want, Casey," she said resolutely, crossing her arms over her chest. He shrugged, nodding.
"Sure you can. But you'll come crawling back to me. You need me," he said, and she raised an eyebrow.
"How do you figure?"
"You'll never be anything but a miserable junkie. We both know it won't be long at all before you're just a fucking mess of pills and booze again. Maybe this time you'll finally fucking succeed and off yourself," he spit the words at her, venom filling them. She shook her head.
"I'm not... I'm done," she said, her voice shaking just slightly. She absolutely did not want to give him the satisfaction of making her cry, but she was well on her way there already.
"Fine. If you're so clean, if you're so brand new, I'll just leave you this. It shouldn't be a problem because you've suddenly grown some self control, right?" he asked, pulling a bottle out of his pocket and shaking it.
"I don't want them," she whispered, and he shrugged.
"Then don't take them," he said, laughing as he turned and headed towards the door. "Call me when you need more!" he called as he stepped into the hallway, looking back at her with a malicious grin.
She tried. She really, really fucking tried. She tried to take the bottle into the bathroom and flush the pills, but somehow she just couldn't force her wrist to turn and dump them into the toilet. She tried to go back to bed, to just ignore them and wait until the next day to have someone come over and flush them for her, but she didn't even have a hope at sleeping. She tried to throw the whole bottle into the trash can in the kitchen, but immediately ended up fishing it out.
She tried and failed, and that's how she ended up sitting on the floor behind her coffee table with the twenty-two assorted pills the bottle had held sorted out in front of her into piles of ones she recognized right off the bat and ones she didn't. She kept counting them impulsively, almost like she was afraid she was going to accidentally take them without paying attention.
"Fuck you," she whispered at them, fingering the pile of ones she knew. "Fuck every single one of you."
She scooped them back into the bottle, throwing it back into the trash and making her way back to her bedroom and slamming the door behind herself.
"Fuck!" she screamed after laying in bed staring at the ceiling for another half hour. "Fuck, fuck, fuck!"
She got back out of bed, going to the kitchen and fishing the bottle back out of the trash and popping it open. She dumped a small handful of the pills out and knocked them back, swallowing hard.
"Fuck!" she screamed again, tears running down her cheeks. "I can't do it. I'm fucking sorry," she whispered, sliding to the floor and leaning up against the cabinets. "I can't do it," she sobbed, dumping the rest of the pills out onto the floor and grabbing a couple of them, swallowing those too.
