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"Fuck!" Melanie Thomson screamed, picking a plate up off of her kitchen counter and hurling it across the room. It shattered satisfyingly against the wall and without really thinking about it, she picked up her nearby water glass and threw that too.
The pile of glass sparkled on the floor and she wished the act of throwing the dishes had made her feel better, but it hadn't and she had to stalk out of the room to stop herself from throwing more to try and see if it was a 'the more the better' kind of thing.
Just as she sat down heavily on the couch in the living room, the front door opened and Joey Jordison stepped inside. He was dressed in black jeans and a hoodie, his long dark hair loose and wild around his face, almost shrouding him like a hood of sorts. His pale skin shone a stark contrast against his dark clothes and his blue eyes fixed on her and immediately he seemed to be able to tell something was wrong.
"What happened?" he asked, and she shrugged.
"What are you doing here?" she tossed back at him, not really wanting to talk.
"Didn't my new cymbals get delivered here?" he asked her, his gaze still much too intense for her to connect with. Those ice blue eyes of his were just too good at making her feel things, making her talk about shit she absolutely did not want to. Instead of looking up at him, she nodded and walked to the closet just inside the door and opened it, pulling out the two boxes of cymbals and handing them to him.
"Sorry. I meant to bring them to the studio today," she told him, cursing herself for forgetting. He shrugged.
"It's okay. What I had did just fine for today," he told her, seemingly deciding that if she wasn't going to look up at him, he needed to look around. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched as his stare landed on the pile of glass in the kitchen.
"I don't want to talk about it, Joe," she told him before he could say anything, finally letting her gaze connect with his. Tears filled her eyes and he nodded.
"Fine, we won't," he said, and she could tell by his tone that he didn't really mean what he was saying, he was just hoping maybe she'd open up to him eventually.
"I don't want you to leave either, though," she mumbled, cursing herself again. While she really didn't want to tell him what was bothering her, she also wasn't fond of the idea of being alone. Joey nodded wordlessly, putting down the cymbal boxes and slipping out of his hoodie to reveal a similarly dark t-shirt.
He crossed the room, sitting on the couch beside her. Without thinking about it she rearranged herself into a laying position, her head resting in his lap. He stroked her hair slowly, the action of it comforting.
She wanted to tell him how thankful she was for him, how much she appreciated him not asking questions and just sitting with her quietly but didn't think she'd be able to without crying. If she started crying she wasn't sure she'd stop, so she opted to just close her eyes and let him silently comfort her for a while instead.
Melanie had known Joey for as long as she could remember; he and her older brother Mick were in the band Slipknot together, and not long after the band had formed with its final lineup and started touring, Mel had come on as Joey's drum technician when his original one quit out of nowhere a few weeks into their first big tour.
In the few years since, Mel and Joey had gotten closer than she'd ever expected. Other than her brother, she never really let anyone get too close. Granted, she loved the other guys in the band and they were her family just as much as her actual family was, but Joey was different. Joey knew her better, knew things about her that even Mick didn't.
It was funny too, because in the beginning they'd driven each other absolutely insane. They'd met for the first time before Slipknot was even the band it currently was, before most of the original songs were written, long before the lineup of the band was finalized.
Mel had thought Joey was obnoxious; the nickname 'Superball' - given to him because he was always full of energy, running around making noise and overall being a nuisance - fitting him too perfectly and making her want to duct tape him to the ceiling to make him hold still. Joey had thought Mel was a buzzkill - to the point that shortly after they met he started only exclusively calling her 'The Buzzkill'. She didn't like to party at all really and had a temper that rivaled only that of her brother, which made her useless to Joey in those early days.
In the few short years that had followed, though, all of that had changed. Working together had bonded them somehow, and even though both of them still possessed the qualities they'd hated about each other in the beginning, Mel suspected those very qualities were what had ended up making them work together so well and become closer friends than either of them would've ever guessed they would.
"You know I'm going to ask eventually, right?" Joey asked her a while later, snapping her out of the abyss she'd fallen into within her thoughts. Her eyes opened and looked up at him and she nodded.
"I have to clean the glass in the kitchen," she said, hoping for a distraction. She sat up and made to stand, but Joey caught her wrist.
"Buzz, come on," he said quietly, using the abbreviated version of her original nickname that he still couldn't seem to work out of his vernacular.
She sighed, closing her eyes tightly and trying to collect her thoughts.
"I don't want to tell you. Telling you makes it real," she told him, and when she opened her eyes and looked up at him again, his gaze was gentle and inviting.
"Okay. You don't have to tell me, but I think you do have to tell someone. You seem... fucked up," he said quietly, and she nodded.
"I am fucked up. I've always been fucked up."
"You seem more fucked up than normal," he corrected, and she nodded again. She sighed once more, closing her eyes tightly.
He was right. She needed to tell someone. She wasn't the kind of person that could just push things down inside, act like nothing was wrong. That just wasn't her. If she tried to do that, she ended up exploding at some point in some usually very self-destructive way.
She thought about her options. She could tell Joey, the one that was sitting in front of her right then and looking at her more innocently and warmly than she ever remembered seeing him look. She could tell Mick, who would try his best to be sweet and to comfort her but wouldn't quite know how and would just want revenge. She could tell some sort of professional, a stranger in a cold office somewhere. Of the three, Joey seemed to make the most sense.
"I think I was raped last night," she whispered, almost hoping he didn't hear her.
