Catching Fireflies

Seventeen

M

We met at a party. It wasn't some magical moment where we locked eyes for a split second and then suddenly the world was wider. It wasn't a spark that exploded between us the moment we shared our names. No, instead, it was a normal introduction at a table full of beer. Cris clung to my arm and nervously watched every person that walked by. She hated parties, and only agreed to come to this one just so she could say she had been to one. She also only came to decide she truly did not like them.

Cris was also hoping to see someone.

The people there were from all over town. Most were also students at our high school, and it was the summer before our junior year, so some were transfers or recently moved. I remember Isaac walking up to the punch bowl, and taking a cup of juice. He didn't take a glance at the beer.

"Maria, do you see Ashley anywhere?" Cris said into my ear. The music was so loud I could barely hear someone if they were to be speaking to me normally. That was when Isaac saw us.

"If you don't see him, then I don't either," I said. Cris stayed close to me until she saw her person walking through the front door. She ran right to him and spared me no glance. I smiled to myself as I watched the both of them run off to their own little corner. I nothing else to occupy me, so I took my cup filled with water and made myself look busy.

That's when he approached me. Cup in hand, a smirk plastered right across his lips as he leaned against the counter next to me.

It wasn't some moment where we shared a mutual love for storybooks or a moment where we could do nothing but talk for hours. It was just an attraction that both of us saw. Whether it was something to explore or something to visit one night then to never open that chapter again.

But it was something. I wouldn't have done anything about it, but he did for his own reasons.

"You don't look like someone who would fit in at parties." That was what he first said to me. I laughed to myself as I sipped my water and took a glance at his cup of contents.

"Says the person who took a sample of juice instead of beer." I looked up at him as I took another drink of water. I crossed my arms and leaned against the counter.

"You're a feisty one," There it was. The tension that blossomed. We weren't looking for commitment or romance. We sought a way out, a place to escape, and a sanctuary where we wouldn't be alone or just away in to set a standard for ourselves and station a point where we would never turn back too.

Isaac took my hand and led both of us to a hidden closet. We did things normal teenagers that had never seen a condom in person would do. We kissed until our lips were swollen and when another pair of immature bastards decided it was their turn to use the sacred room that used for childish hookup games. We exchanged numbers and from there it went on.

People started calling us a couple the more they saw us in school. They noticed how we met up together in the hallways and labeled us as an official dating pair. In reality, neither one of us announced our coupling. We just went along with it, without even bothering to educate others that what we were was far from what that label meant.

Regardless, though, we acted as if that label belonged to us. He told me he loved me, and I told him I loved him. I didn't know if he meant it, but I did not. We both knew each other's boundaries, and what would someday become of us. We weren't there for the attachments, just for the fun and to forget and run away.

As we matured together, things got hotter. More intense. It went from handholds and stolen kisses in the janitor's closet to hidden secrets in the dark. In the public's eye, he planted kisses and kept me close to him with his arm snaked around me. Alone in the dark, he worshiped me as a goddess as he undressed me and felt every curve and smooth surface of my body.

Innocence turned into lust. Children turned into adults.

The first thing that attracted me to him was his choice of a beverage that night. He looked at every option on the table and chose to stay sober. Then he saw that I had made the same choice too.

I had never had a sip of alcohol ever in my life, I never planned too either. But as time went on, day by day farther away from the night I found my dad dead on the floor, the urge to take a taste of it and then drown it in was starting to overwhelm me. I vowed that I wouldn't succumb to the same poison my dad killed himself with, but then I wondered if that poison could take me too.

I wanted to drown myself in it.

It scared me.

I drowned in Isaac instead.

I let him invited me over for dinners without his family when they weren't home. I let him be himself for moments and ate dinner with him. I laughed at his jokes and got to know him. I let him pull me closer to him and even sat on his lap if he wanted me too.

I let him use me, and he let me use him.

He'd slam me against the wall and kiss me so hard my teeth would hurt. He made me feel things in places I never thought could feel that way. He'd keep me awake all night with just his hands and mouth and explore my body as if it were brand new and unwrapped as if he hadn't just done that the previous night.

He could be doing anything to me and the distant thought of drinking alcohol until it killed me still rang in the back of my head.

Sex probably wasn't the best substitute, but it kept me alive.

I didn't want to keep thinking of the same moment over and over again where I rolled my dad's body over just see he was no longer breathing. I didn't want to think of the way the EMT's covered his body in a sheet and carried him away into the ambulance truck as if he was still worth saving.

Even if he was, I would probably still find him with another can of beer in his hand the day he'd be signed out of the hospital.

I wondered what would have happened if I had turned him and his offer of benefits down that night. I wondered if we would have still found ourselves in the same position but in a different way. I wondered if we would have had an actual relationship instead of a deal with no attachments and lies.

In real standards, we would have been nothing but strangers to each other if we hadn't had things to run away or save ourselves from.

We met that night at a party. He heard Cris speak and watched her leave my side.

He saw her, and then he saw me.

I realized something at one point, while I soothed a sleeping Isaac next to me.

I was his drug too, except it wasn't metaphorically. Instead, it was real.

He was a sex addict.