Dirt

A Symphony of Crickets

    I sat there feeling more empty than the beer bottles that littered the bar, and stared blankly towards the doorway as it swung open, then shut, then open as Harry reentered the room, short of the man he had just dragged out. We had only shared some insincere chatter so I had absolutely no idea how his absence suddenly made me feel as if a hole had been punctured in my chest.
    I was drowned in the laughter of my drunk companions and the disgruntled groans of Lucy and Harry, I felt alone and sobered, which were both evil sentiments in my mind. Without a thought running through my head I jumped from my seat and ran towards the exit, with Quinn and Jade yelling after me to, "Come back!" and Lucy yelling after me to, "Pay up!"
    Nothing seemed to matter to me except seeing Trevor, the man who had just beaten a lowly drunk to a bloody pulp for even the slightest threat of touching him. There was no justification to my actions and I couldn't decide whether that was due to my blood alcohol level or some mixed emotions I wasn't yet ready to confront.
    The sound of my companion's laughter awoke within me a feeling of hurt and anger, as if they had been laughing at me and not Trevor. All I wanted was to get as far away from them as possible, to flee into a darkness in which they could never find me, and hopefully a darkness that Trevor had fled to many times before.
    I slammed my open palms onto the rotted wood doorway, picking up chipped red paint on them as I did, and sprinted outside into the cold desert night. At first I was terrified that Trevor might have already been gone and I was perfectly still, trying to discover some trace of him. I found that trace in the sound of crunching stone and sand off in the distance, he hadn't walked far.
    For reasons unknown to me he had taken to the desert in the opposite direction of the parking lot and facing away from the residential area of Sandy Shores. The night was bleak and grey and the only speck of anything that stood out was his white shirt, though it too was faded and stained. He took slow strides into the unknown, making me contemplate whether this was actually his home, and not some trailer or another back in the decaying park.
    "Hey, hey wait!" I called after him frantically, more frantically than I had just reason to do so. He immediately stopped dead in his tracks, but took his sweet time in turning to face me, as if waiting for me to come to him rather than move backward. I continued my jog until I was only a few feet away, panting and nauseous from having shaken up my alcohol filled stomach.
    "What the fuck do you think you're doing." He said, less of a question and more of an observation of my lunacy. He eyed me head to toe as if I were no longer the girl he had sweet-talked just moments earlier and instead the likes of those who had casted him away into the darkness. I couldn't help but feel slightly hurt but I simply didn't have enough energy in me to express it at the time.
    I took a minute to catch my breath, Trevor did not watch me as I did, instead he stared into the distance towards the flickering neon sign atop the bar. I looked back towards the dumpster I had just fled; no one had bothered to follow me, and this left a deep sinking feeling within my core, a mixture of hatred and loneliness and that feeling one gets when you don't want to feel bad about people who don't care about you but simply cannot help it. "What do you think I'm doing Trevor? I came out to see you."
    There was a moment of complete silence that felt like hours, and all that could be heard to us was the orchestra of dusty crickets inhabiting our surroundings. "Listen, you don't have to come see me, I'm fucking scum don't you realize that? Then again I could have guessed just by looking at you that you're a fucking idiot. Hell, I'm a pretentious asshole for even talking to you. Do you really think I haven't done this five thousand fucking times before? Do you really think I need someone to pat my back and feel bad for me? Now kindly fuck off, go back now before I have to fucking drag you there."
    His words didn't faze me, somehow I could hear no sincerity in them and instead a plea that had never been spoken. Hearing these insults for some reason just made me feel closer to him. I averted my gaze to the ground. "I don't want to go back to anything and I guess if you have to you can drag me there. I hate my friends and I'm pretty sure they don't give a rat's ass about me. So I'm here, this is where I want to be."
    Once again silence overcame the two of us until finally, "You're a stubborn piece of shit you know that."
    "That makes two of us." I replied instinctually, and finally looked up to meet his eyes. They were a murky mix of yellows and browns the likes of vomit consisting of Thanksgiving dinner, framed by unkempt brows furrowed into a scowl. It was at that moment that I wanted to be close to him, a stronger desire than any I had had to vacation to Los Santos, to have fun, to get trashed and impress strangers, to follow my friends from bar to bar; I moved forward to bridge the remaining gap between us. "Are you doing to drag me back to that shit hole or let me stay?"
    His eyes seemed to flash with either madness or some other emotion, and as quickly as he had shattered a chair on a man's back he was on me, fingers pulling at the tangles in my hair and dried lips pecking at mine as if to suck the life from my body. He reeked of vodka and cheap beer but I suppose I did too, and the aromas that had revolted me just an hour ago were now luring me to grip the blades of his shoulders and cling to the bloodstains on his shirt.
    There was nothing about this experience that I could have compare to anything in my life thus far. Not to give off the wrong impression, I had kissed a handful of guys in my lifetime, and I had even thought myself to have been in love once or twice, but nothing like this. Not that I was in love, and not that there was anything in particular about these kisses that made them different from others, it was something I couldn't quite put my finger on and that I had no intention of figuring out.
    Nothing about this embrace was comfortable, as if some hypothetical puzzle master decided he was fed up of trying and began shoving mismatched pieces together angrily, and yet it felt more perfect than any other I had had. His callused hands crept up the back of my shirt like spiders made of stone and gently grabbed at the excess fat on my sides. At this I moved my hands towards the back of his neck and traced the dotted line around until my fingers finally met his chest, tracing patters in loose thread and unknown black splatters.
    And then swiftly yet with grace I was flung to the ground, his arms cushioning what couldn't be cushioned by the soft sand. As I inhaled the night air brought with it the cloud of dust we had created and my lungs burst into a fit of coughing, and as if he has been breathing in dirt his entire life Trevor was unfazed, shifting his kisses instead to the tendons in my neck and then my collar bones.
    I coughed until I could cough no more while every nerve in my body seemed to flutter up through my chest cavity and then into my head, mingling with whatever poison still lingered there. I wrapped both of my arms around the back of his neck to pull him back towards my face where I would them be free to touch every part of his lips with mine and slip my tongue into his mouth. He took it eagerly and squeezed my back tighter, compressing me enough to make me short of breath and more light-headed than I had ever been whilst drinking at bars.
    With hands gripping the small of my back and nape of my neck he turned to one side, taking me with him so that we were now lying side by side in the dirt, intertwined like the tiny fibres of a caterpillar's cocoon and covered in a fine layer of dust. Everything slowed down to a standstill and once again the orchestra of crickets rehearsed their symphony, now accompanied by the haggard breath from our tired lungs.
    It was about 7 o'clock in the morning when I woke up to the blazing Los Santos sun on my back like hot tar and my head resting on Trevor's bicep as he slept as peacefully as Sleeping Beauty, if Sleeping Beauty had a receding hair line and snored as loudly as a growling cougar.