Dedication Takes a Lifetime (Jalex boyxboy)

x. I'm Really Not Fine At All

“Alex, you have to come out at some point,” Jack told me softly as he knocked on the bathroom door. I shook my head, despite knowing that he couldn’t see me, as I pulled my legs closer to my body.

“Come on, we’ve got to go. If you don’t want to talk to me, you don’t have to. But please, just come out,” he pleaded with me. I stood up and placed my hand on the door, but I hesitated before opening the door. I removed my hand and stared into the mirror hanging over the sink, staring at my reflection. My eyes were red and slightly puffy from where I had been crying earlier, so I filled the sink with some warm water to try my best to wash away the tearstains and remove the evidence that I had been crying as I didn’t want to give Jack a reason to worry about me any more than he usually did. I drained the water and finally made my way out to Jack, who had been sitting opposite the bathroom door leaning against the door. He looked up when he heard the door opening and stood up when he saw me walking through the door. I walked over to him and pulled him into a hug, gripping the hem of his shirt tightly as I buried my head deeper into his shoulder.

“It’s okay Alex. Do you want to talk about it?”

I shook my head.

“Okay I'll leave it for now. But you’re going to have to talk about it sometime, alright? It doesn’t have to be with me if you don’t want it to, but you need to talk to someone. It’s not healthy to keep it all bottled in.” He soothed me as he rubbed small circles into my hips.

“I know,” I nodded as I pulled away from him.

“Come on, we should go. We’re gonna be late as it is.”

“Yeah and whose fault is that gonna be?” He asked lightly slipping back into his usual playful persona. We made our way out of the apartment and the drive to the studio was silent. It wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t uncomfortable either. It was just silent. The silence caused the ride to drag out, making it seem longer than the ten minutes it actually took to get there. I was grateful when we did because while it wasn’t awkward, it was tense with all the unasked questions floating in the air. Jack wanting to ask me what was up and why I had locked myself in the bathroom for the last two hours and me definitely not wanting to talk about it. I was wondering why he cared so much, I mean logically I knew that he, and everyone else for that matter, cared for me, but some days it was just tough fighting through all of the negativity that liked to lurk around in my head making an appearance every so often. I was a lot better at dealing with it than when I was younger, but there were still the bad days where it got the better of me.

Today was a bad day.

I knew it was going to be a bad day when I couldn’t bring myself to get out of bed, Jack literally having to drag me out, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that it was only going to get worse. When we walked into the studio, I saw Matt sat on one of the couches talking to Rian and from what I could gather from the fragmented sentences I caught; he was trying to calm the drummer down.

“What’s going on here?” I asked, wincing as my voice came out quieter than normal, slightly timid.

“Ah, you’re finally here. Nice of you to turn up.”

“Sorry, we were running a little bit late,” Jack responded vaguely, telling neither the truth nor a lie. We both knew it was my fault that we were ‘running late’, and I think we both knew why. Even if Jack didn’t want to think it, I think he was suspicious of it at least.

“Care to elaborate?” Matt asked, sensing the half-truth straight away, having grown accustomed to our body language over the time he had spent with us.

“No, not really,” Jack shrugged, making it clear that he wasn’t going to give a proper explanation as to why we were late.

“What’s been going on here?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Doesn’t seem like nothing.”

“No, I mean nothing. Nothing is happening and that is the problem. Rian finished tracking the drums this morning and Merrick’s still MIA and you two have finally decided to turn up. There have been a few disagreements between people and I’m about to lose my shit if someone doesn’t calm the fuck down.”

“Why are you here?” Jack asked.

“I called him,” Rian answered.

“Why?”

“Because I felt like I needed to have someone here making the decisions and telling people what to do before I got pissed and started to smash my drum kit.”

“So we didn’t miss much then?” I muttered, slightly to myself but everyone in the room had heard it.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m done for the day so I’m going home.” Rian shrugged as he got up and left the room.

“Right then, if everyone can be civil to each other I’m going too. If I get another call this week I’ll…” Matt trailed off.

“You’ll what?” Jack asked, for once not in his usual sarcastic manner.

“I don’t know. I can’t think of anything, but just know it won’t be good,” Matty sighed and with that, he too left the studio.

“Right then, it just me and you left Lex,” Jack turned to me with a grin.