"Hey, mind if I hang out for a bit?" Chrissy asked as we pulled up to my house. "I don't feel like taking that long ass drive right now. I want a beer and some air conditioning."
"Your choice." we got out of the car. "Just don't be an idiot, like you usually are."
Walking up to the door, I had surprisingly found it unlocked and slightly cracked open. Had I just been overreacting and thought someone had broke their way in, or even picked the lock to get in? Quietly, I pushed open the door and looked around. Everything had seemed to be normal and nothing was missing or moved - at least from what I had remembered before leaving. Which, granted, had not been something I paid much attention to.
Slightly lowering my guard, I jogged my way up the stairs while listening for Maggie who could have been in the bathroom or another room doing something. As I reached the second floor, I had made my way down the hall making sure to check the open doors as I passed them until I had reached the master bedroom. It was there that I, just in case, lightly pushed the door open. Maggie had been in there, just not even close to the way I had imagined. At all.
She was sleeping peacefully. Very peacefully. What had been wrong with the picture was the fact that there was a syringe on the nightstand and the guy sleeping next to her - both completely naked. Honestly, I had sat there for a moment. Dead silent, and completely motionless. Had they been fucking with me? Had all this been some horrid joke, some ploy to test my patience as a human being?
More than anything, it had looked real. From the syringe that likely been used for heroin to the fact that they had probably fucked directly on that bed had left me speechless. She had said so many things that previous night that I hadn't expected to see this. Again, what kind of fairness had this been? Life had just decided to step on and crush my feelings once again. Why couldn't it have been someone else for once?
Sure, I had cheated on her myself, but I hadn't done it again. Nor was I high while doing it, especially not on heroin. Could I trust her? Probably. Could I trust her and the drugs at the same time? No, because I knew just as well as she did that a person didn't control the drugs, the drugs controlled them.
What had I done that was so bad? What had I done to deserve all of this pain and misery? The same pain, the same hurt, and even the same tightness of my throat. I felt like I was being choked to death by that very tightness. It had been as though the oxygen had left my body, leaving me to suffocate in my own thoughts, my own despair. Fuck it. What was the point in resisting?
Fuck all of it. Fuck everything. Fuck Maggie, and fuck this world. Fuck my life and fuck anyone who was near me. Better to feel pain than to feel nothing at all, they say. Better to feel nothing than something was always the better choice. That alone had been the reason for the existence of drugs. Numbness was an answer. Pain wasn't. Pain never did anything to help anyone. Drugs did, alcohol did.
"...Whatever." I shook my head, picking her phone up from the dresser. Tapping the messages button, I let keyboard pop up and wrote one single word. Just one. "Bye."
I wasn't going to fight the inevitable. She had lied to me, and that was that. No amount of fighting or violence had been the answer, nor was it worth it. Neither would have fixed anything, ever. Had this been what it felt like to be given up on? Had this been what it felt like after the last straw? I couldn't have blamed Maggie, I had been the worst possible thing for her. I had been a disease, yet she'd given me so many chances to be something more, something better.
Time and time again, I ruined all of those chances and had fallen back into my old ways. I wouldn't have been angry if she had dumped me, nor would I have been angry if she never talked to me again after running away from me - but I had been angry because she cheated on me. All I wanted was someone who could withstand my abrasive nature, my self-loathing, and even the way I would temporarily collapse on myself. Why had it been so hard?
Rather, why had I been tugged around in this game to begin with? After Kylie had died, I had pretty much vowed that I would never date or fall for anyone again. It was always purely sex and drugs, and if anyone had gotten close, they would've been been left in the dust. Why did I make that exception for Maggie? Because she was Kylie's sister, because she had some blood relation to her?
Had that been the only reason for the whole thing? Had I been that much of an idiot to let someone in my life because they had been related to the only thing I had ever truly loved? If that were the case, how could I blame her? If my reasoning had been that shallow, how could I blame Maggie for that?
Coming down the stairs, I could barely hear the light typing on a keyboard from the couch in the living room. There, Chrissy had sat as she looked intently at something on the screen. Scrolling, typing, scrolling, and then more typing. So repetitive, the pattern had become apparent, it had become clear - just like myself and my own actions. My own had been quite simple; hurt before, hurt again. It would always continue that way and never stop.
"You look like a fuckin' zombie." she closed her laptop, chuckling. "You catch her cheating or something?"
She had no idea how right she was.
"Let's get out of here." I muttered. "You can drive, right?"
"Definitely."
**
With her hair wrapped around the fist of my right hand and panting like a damn dog, I rested on top of her - entirely out of breath and energy. The one thing I felt, however, was her teeth still digging into my left thumb like it was a chew toy. Loosening my fist from her hair, I rolled over onto the dusty smelling bed and landed on my back. She hadn't taken much longer to follow.
"That was fun." her hand traveled below my waist. "Sorry about biting you. I just got a little too into it."
"Whatever." I reached to the side of the bed and grabbed the joint I had rolled and put out earlier.
As her left hand had continued to perform lewd acts, her right took to petting my hair - stroking her fingers through what seemed like every individual strand. Her fingernails came down and pressed themselves into my scalp, not painfully, but ever so softly. It had been subtle, yet I could hear her laughing, or had it been more of a giggling? Same difference, little meaning. All of it had been nothing more than the equivalent of whispering sweet nothings all night long.
"I wouldn't mind doing this more." she grinned, whispering. "No strings. Just sex."
That had been a good thing to hear, honestly. She had been fun and there was nothing attached emotionally. It had just been good old-fashioned sex. I didn't want the drama or the games, and I hadn't needed them then. However, there wouldn't have been much more of it. The reason for that had been quite simple, I wasn't going to stay there. I was going back to the shithole. Why would I go back to the shithole? Simply because I was left alone there, where I could take advantage of equally messed up people and get as high as I wanted to. Without anyone else stopping me.
"That sounds good, but I'm not staying." I exhaled the smoke. "I might come back after Crest gets taken down, so maybe then."
"I get it, I get it. Gonna try fucking and smoking her out your system? I may have to visit every once in a while to help out with that." she pressed her mouth against my ear. "Do you want me to kill them?"
That had been a good question. Even after what she had done, had I really wanted her dead? Had I wanted to get her brains splattered all over a wall? Had I wanted to put her through pain she had put me through? Had cheating equaled death? Even if I had been angry, I could see that the action hadn't matched the consequence - cheating hadn't equaled death, at least in the United States.
Besides, I hadn't been innocent at all. I had cheated on her myself with someone I had known for quite a while. Yet, she had never known or put anything together. What right had that given me to call her anything but her name? None. Had she gotten high and cheated on me, and had it been wrong? Sure. Did not getting high make my cheating any better? Barely.
Lifting my right arm, I flicked her forehead and let my arm fall back down. "I'm not any better or any worse than her."
"You aren't the one who cheated. She was. Even if you cheated before, you never got caught and that means it never happened." she smirked. "Don't fall for tricks of the pussy, and don't let her hold you down. If she did it now, she's going to it again, even if you stay with her and forgive her. Stop being a bitch and sow your oats."
Stop being a bitch? Had that been what I sounded like? Had I not sowed my oats? Had this woman even cared if I was fucked up or not, or had she just been in it for the sex? Had this really been it for me and Maggie? Had this little episode pretty much finished off our relationship for good? In a relationship that had been frail from the beginning, we had always treaded on careful ground. Even then, one of us would usually snap. That one was typically me.
That snapped me would shatter, leaving Maggie to pick them all up and put the puzzle back together again. If she had left me for that, I wouldn't have blamed her. If she would have just told me that, I would have tried to fix it. If she would have tried punched me in the mouth, I would have taken it as a wake-up call. I had wanted us to work, not because of Kylie, but because I'd known that possibilities had existed. She had consistently been a stable ground, that light I could look for in the dark.
She finally had enough of me; it was that simple. I was so easily breakable, that even the strongest glue couldn't hold me together. I was like a delicate piece of fine china, and something as small as an ant would be the bull to me. I was a weak, broken, and a hollow shell of what I had been and wanted to be, of what I used to be capable of being. The slightest push was always enough to break everything.
Every time I had tried to come back stronger, to come back better, I failed miserably. I came back worse than before, a slight bit weaker than before. Every time I broke, Maggie had been there for me. She put everything back in the proper place, but slivers hadn't been found each time I broke, and would leave a piece of me empty. Who wouldn't have gotten tired of doing that? Who would want to do that, over and over again? If anything, I should have been better to her. I should have thanked her more, and I should have told her that I loved her more.
What she had done, moving on, and even leaving this place; they were all bad excuses for me to run away like I always had. Things had gotten rough, so I'd gotten weak. I'd gotten weak, so I ran away. All of my life, I lived like a scarred puppy and ran like the filthy mongrel that I was. All I ever had from my friends was support, and I constantly pushed it away, thinking that I was strong enough on my own - that I hadn't needed things like support or love to keep myself alive. I thought they were nothing but a fraying leash to pull me along until I met my grave.
At the end of the day, it wasn't Maggie's fault at all. It was mine. She tried so hard every day, every hour, and every minute to make our lives better together, so that we could heal our own wounds together. I failed her and her expectations of me. I was a failure to her, and to myself. I was just the person that had taken advantage of her kindness and our commonality. I was the reason she cheated, I was the reason she touched that drug, and I was the reason for her life falling apart.
"I'm sorry."
ns 15.158.61.20da2
