Mysterious Skin - I Wish I Was (9/15)
Title: I Wish I Was (9/15)
Author: osaki_nana_707
Pairings/Characters: Wendy, Neil, OC Jay, OC Julian, Eric, Brian, WendyxJay, EricxBrian
Rating: light R
Warnings:language, mentions of abuse, drug abuse, sexual situations
Summary: Brian's not through with Neil. Neil's not through destroying himself.
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Chapter 9
(Wendy Peterson)
I didn't know what to do. I not only couldn't afford to take Neil to the hospital, but I also couldn't afford to get him out of jail if I were to take him to the hospital. I couldn't remember if doctor-patient confidentiality applied to illegal substances, and I didn't want to risk it. I didn't think Neil could make it in prison. He was barely making it in New York…
…as obviously shown in the way that he was currently unconscious and covered in blood.
I panicked, nearly passed out as well, but managed to call Jay instead and beg him to come help me. It took him less than five minutes to get there, his roommate Julian on his heels with wet hair and no make-up.
"What happened?" Jay asked, helping me put Neil into a pair of boxer shorts and onto the couch.
"I don't know… I mean, I think he's on some kind of drug, but I don't know where the blood came from or why he's naked or any of that. I came home and he was screaming, and I heard glass breaking, and then it was quiet, and he opened the door and just… hit the floor. I don't think it was the drugs though, I think it's from the blood… Is he still bleeding?"
Jay was parting his hair away from his head to find a rather grisly looking wound. It seemed to have stopped bleeding, and I thought maybe he'd just lost too much when his nose started to bleed, and all I could think was that I hoped that was all.
"His heart's going a mile a minute," Julian mumbled, pressing his ear to his chest.
Neil squirmed then, eyes squeezing tightly shut, and his mouth screwed up, and all of a sudden he was shouting, "Get the fuck off of me!"
Julian stepped back, raising his hands in defense. Jay stumbled back as well. Neil propped himself up on his elbows looking like some sort of caged animal, dilated pupils searching all of our faces for the one he must have been seeing in his head.
"What… what's going on here?" he asked, seeming to calm his nerves. He sniffed.
"That's what I'd like to fucking know!" I shouted.
Jay grabbed my shoulders and squeezed them, reminding me that now was probably not the best time to start yelling at him.
Neil cleared his throat, seeming to come to his senses about what had happened. "I…" He stopped because really there was nothing he could say to make the moment less unbearably awkward. He sniffed. I wanted to punch him in the face.
Julian asked where the bathroom was and vanished into it after I weakly pointed, never taking my eyes off of Neil. He returned with a wet wash cloth and handed it to Neil. "You should at least wipe the blood off your face, man. Oh, and the coke too."
Neil's eyes went wide like saucers, and for a second I feared for Julian's safety, but I knew that Neil was still a bit too dizzy to be any sort of threat.
Julian shoved his hands in his pockets and stepped back into the group. Neil sat there like he was on display, holding the rag to his nose uncomfortably, almost like he no longer knew how to use it. I couldn't watch him like that for more than a second before I knelt down next to him and started cleaning him off myself.
Thank God, I thought when I realized that the head wound wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. He probably still should have gone to the hospital but… "How did this happen?" I asked him, gently, even though I still wanted to yell. He looked like he was going to fall to pieces if I wasn't careful. At least one of us had to be careful.
"I don't really remember," he lied. Normally he was a pretty convincing liar. He wasn't really selling it this time, and I knew it wasn't because he was out of practice. I thought that maybe it was Jay and Julian's presence lingering around behind me. I thought about maybe sending them out, but I needed them for me, and I was tired of being selfless for Neil.
"Yes, you do."
He exhaled through his nose and gave me a desperate plea sort of look, but I wasn't giving in to him now.
He gave up surprisingly quickly, considering who he was. He looked down into his lap, rolling one hand over the other again and again. "I… I was…" he stammered a little which also wasn't typical of him, and if I didn't know him better, I could have sworn I heard guilt. "I was sucking this guy off, and I bit him, and he slammed my head against the wall." He was so quiet that it took a minute for me to register what he'd said.
"Oh, God damn it, Neil!" Crap. I was yelling again. "You're hustling again? Fuck!"
"I'm sorry!" he yelped, and I almost believed him except for the fact that Neil was never sorry for anything. "I didn't want to, but you said you'd kick me out if I didn't pay the water bill and stuff, and I tried to get a real job but no one would hire me, so I went back to the hustler bar but then I fucking panicked and I only got fifty bucks from that guy and so I… I'm sorry!" Desperation was bubbling up with every word until he was a quivering mess, grasping to the sleeve of my shirt for dear life.
…and then his eyes were wildly darting towards the door to his room where Julian was peeking inside. "Get the fuck out!" he shouted.
Julian stepped away from the door, lifting his hands in the same fashion he'd already done. "There has got to be at least a hundred dollars on the floor in there. Where'd all that come from?"
"None of your goddamned business! Who the fuck are you? Get the hell out!"
"Neil, calm down," I told him, pressing the rag to the wound on his head, and he whimpered as a shot of pain surely hit his skull.
"Why are they here?" he asked, and his voice was quickly losing his bite. I felt that he was fearful that control was slipping from him, and he never did like control to be taken away from him. The only thing he couldn't control was himself.
"I called them to come over and help me when you dropped to the floor like a puppet. I couldn't exactly move you on my own, you know, no matter how lightweight you've gotten."
"You couldn't have called someone else?" he asked bitterly.
"Like who?" I complained right back, dabbing the wound a little more harshly than I should have. "Eric? Your mom? Your little league coach?"
That was extremely harsh, even with as mad as I was.
The look on his face was something I'd never seen… it was something like he was trying to feel pain, but he didn't know how to. "Fuck you," he spat, more bitter than I'd ever heard. He grabbed the rag from me and pressed it to his temple on his own. "I can take care of myself. Bitch."
"Apparently you can't," I said. "Where did the money come from, Neil?"
"It's mine."
"That's not what I asked."
"You think you can just-"
"Where did you get it?"
"What does it matter?"
"Why are you avoiding the subject?"
Voices were rising to unbelievably loud levels, and I worried that our neighbors might start beating on the walls if it kept up, but I was getting strung out and fed up, and I couldn't take it anymore.
"I took it, okay? I took it to pay your goddamned fucking water bill, you insufferable bitch!"
I wondered how much he meant the insult when he burst into tears and buried his face into my neck.
"You fucking bitch. How could you… you fucking…"
Jay and Julian shifted awkwardly from foot to foot but didn't dare move more than that. Neil cried heartbreakingly in my arms until he crashed from his high and fell asleep.
(Eric Preston)
Brian's slow ascent to recovery was worth celebrating, and so when we made it to Indianapolis, we splurged a little and bought sushi. I used my fake I.D. and a little flirting to get a bottle of wine, and we sat on the hood of the car in the hotel's nearly empty parking lot and drank straight from the mouth of the bottle.
"To new beginnings," I said, holding the bottle in the air. He clacked his Styrofoam sushi container against the bottle and swallowed a piece while I took a large swig of the bottle. I passed it to him, and he drank from it gratefully as well.
He hiccupped a little and handed the bottle back, leaning back on the windshield and staring up at the stars. The night was completely clear, and the moon cast a silvery hue to everything. If I hadn't thought him so untouchable, I would have found it romantic… well, about as romantic as I could afford.
"Hey, Eric…"
"What?"
He paused, thinking hard, and then shrugged, snickering a little. "Nothin'."
He was drunk. He was so cute when he was drunk.
I swigged out of the bottle again, tasting a bit of Brian's sushi there. I figured it would be as close as I would come to his lips, so I savored it even if it was a little fishy.
"You know, I don't think I ever had sushi before now," Brian slurred, popping the last bite of his into his mouth. He couldn't use chopsticks, so he ate it with his hands. I had a feeling that even if he could have used them, he wouldn't have been able to in the state he was in. "It's really good."
"Yeah, we eat hip, chic things like sushi all the time in California," I joked, but he just nodded, apparently thinking I was completely serious.
He was so cute.
We talked a lot about nothing for a few minutes, next to each other on the windshield, staring up into the sky. He wasn't making any sense at all, stumbling over his words and laughing at any moderately inappropriate words. He was so young, I thought, even with the very grown-up things that had happened to him. It was worth admiration. I liked that I felt so young when I was with him, even when we were doing grown-up things.
He drank from the bottle, and I watched his Adam's apple bob up and down. "You know," he spoke, barely understandable under the guise of alcohol, "with the moon like this, and the parking lot all empty, it looks a lot like a stage, doesn't it?"
He was trashed. It didn't look anything like a stage.
"Sure, it does," I offered, nudging his knee with mine but only slightly so that he wouldn't go rolling off the side of the car. "…though… I think it looks a little more like a dance floor."
"That's what I meant."
Like those two things were the same.
I hopped off the car and turned on the ignition so music was blaring from inside, extended my hand to him and bowed dramatically. "Care to dance, good sir?"
He laughed at me and nearly fell off of the car as he reached for my hand. He had to slump against me for a second, and what a beautiful second that was for me.
"I don't really know how to dance," he said, and I figured he wouldn't have been able to dance well regardless of years of practice or not.
"It's okay. It's easy," I said, placing his hand on my waist while I put my hand on his shoulder. "Just like this."
"Yeah…" Brian mumbled, rocking side to side with me, though I wasn't entirely sure if it was from trying to dance or just losing his battle with gravity. "I didn't go to my school prom or nothin'. I didn't have a date."
"Neither did I," I said, chuckling a little. "Prom's for yuppies. Here we can dance to whatever music we want to." I started moving my feet, and he clumsily followed but eventually figured it out. "All those girls who didn't go with you were missing out anyway. Football players and all those other sports guys tend to be real assholes."
He laughed, pressing his forehead against my shoulder.
"Yeah, and most of the time they turn out to be repressed homosexuals," I added, and then we were both laughing into each other's shoulders. I hadn't even realized how close we had started pressing ourselves together. Surely it was just him leaning against me to keep his footing. After all, I didn't need to lean against him to keep from falling. I'd already done that.
God, I got so cheesy when I was drunk.
I swung him out by the arm before spinning him back to me, and he looked just a little panicked from the sudden movement but smiled and laughed again.
"Now you're getting it," I said and started sweeping him around the parking lot. I'd never been an amazing dancer or anything, but my mom had taught me a lot of basics since she'd taken several years of it when she was young. She and I had danced together in the kitchen when I was a little boy, and I had never danced with anyone else.
Of course, Brian wasn't just anyone.
"You're actually pretty good at this, considering you're so drunk," I laughed, and I thought that I must have been pretty drunk too because I was feeling all warm all over. "Maybe we can go dancing at a cool club or something when we get to New York."
We slowed to a stop almost suddenly, and he looked at me kind of distantly like he was trying to remember why we were even going to New York.
How dare anyone not see how beautiful he was?
"I bet you miss Neil pretty bad, huh…" he said then, and there was insecurity in his voice that hadn't been there before. I tried to pass it off as nothing but alcohol, but I knew I couldn't. I was just a bit too hopeful for that.
"Honestly?" I said, raising my eyebrows. Hesitation… He was looking intently at me. I smiled. "Not at all."
"Really? But… I thought that you…" He was trying not to smile. It wasn't working.
"I did, but… I don't. Not anymore."
"Why?"
I shrugged. "I don't know." I did… but I couldn't exactly tell him I'm crazy about you, I love you, I absolutely fucking adore every last bit of your beautiful self, even the horrible, terrible parts because you're so wonderful and great and I don't feel depressed or like wearing black so much or writing crappy, melodramatic poetry or thinking about cutting myself because I'm just so much happier when I'm with you. After all, that was kind of a mouthful, and I was really drunk.
Brian had gotten distracted by the music and started singing along. He couldn't really remember all the words, but he was basically mumbling unintelligibly anyway.
"I'm a little dizzy," he said when he realized that I was staring.
"Do you want to go inside and go to bed?" I asked. "Maybe it was the spinning or…"
He pressed his forehead against mine, noses touching, and I could smell wine emanating off of him like it was cologne. I breathed it in, smelling how it mixed with the smell of the night air and of the laundry detergent from his clothes and from his shampoo, and it was perfect…
No, scratch that.
When his mouth just very lightly brushed, just a little more than ghosted against mine… now that, that was perfect.
It wasn't even ruined when he vomited all over my shoes.
Author: osaki_nana_707
Pairings/Characters: Wendy, Neil, OC Jay, OC Julian, Eric, Brian, WendyxJay, EricxBrian
Rating: light R
Warnings:language, mentions of abuse, drug abuse, sexual situations
Summary: Brian's not through with Neil. Neil's not through destroying himself.
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Chapter 9
(Wendy Peterson)
I didn't know what to do. I not only couldn't afford to take Neil to the hospital, but I also couldn't afford to get him out of jail if I were to take him to the hospital. I couldn't remember if doctor-patient confidentiality applied to illegal substances, and I didn't want to risk it. I didn't think Neil could make it in prison. He was barely making it in New York…
…as obviously shown in the way that he was currently unconscious and covered in blood.
I panicked, nearly passed out as well, but managed to call Jay instead and beg him to come help me. It took him less than five minutes to get there, his roommate Julian on his heels with wet hair and no make-up.
"What happened?" Jay asked, helping me put Neil into a pair of boxer shorts and onto the couch.
"I don't know… I mean, I think he's on some kind of drug, but I don't know where the blood came from or why he's naked or any of that. I came home and he was screaming, and I heard glass breaking, and then it was quiet, and he opened the door and just… hit the floor. I don't think it was the drugs though, I think it's from the blood… Is he still bleeding?"
Jay was parting his hair away from his head to find a rather grisly looking wound. It seemed to have stopped bleeding, and I thought maybe he'd just lost too much when his nose started to bleed, and all I could think was that I hoped that was all.
"His heart's going a mile a minute," Julian mumbled, pressing his ear to his chest.
Neil squirmed then, eyes squeezing tightly shut, and his mouth screwed up, and all of a sudden he was shouting, "Get the fuck off of me!"
Julian stepped back, raising his hands in defense. Jay stumbled back as well. Neil propped himself up on his elbows looking like some sort of caged animal, dilated pupils searching all of our faces for the one he must have been seeing in his head.
"What… what's going on here?" he asked, seeming to calm his nerves. He sniffed.
"That's what I'd like to fucking know!" I shouted.
Jay grabbed my shoulders and squeezed them, reminding me that now was probably not the best time to start yelling at him.
Neil cleared his throat, seeming to come to his senses about what had happened. "I…" He stopped because really there was nothing he could say to make the moment less unbearably awkward. He sniffed. I wanted to punch him in the face.
Julian asked where the bathroom was and vanished into it after I weakly pointed, never taking my eyes off of Neil. He returned with a wet wash cloth and handed it to Neil. "You should at least wipe the blood off your face, man. Oh, and the coke too."
Neil's eyes went wide like saucers, and for a second I feared for Julian's safety, but I knew that Neil was still a bit too dizzy to be any sort of threat.
Julian shoved his hands in his pockets and stepped back into the group. Neil sat there like he was on display, holding the rag to his nose uncomfortably, almost like he no longer knew how to use it. I couldn't watch him like that for more than a second before I knelt down next to him and started cleaning him off myself.
Thank God, I thought when I realized that the head wound wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. He probably still should have gone to the hospital but… "How did this happen?" I asked him, gently, even though I still wanted to yell. He looked like he was going to fall to pieces if I wasn't careful. At least one of us had to be careful.
"I don't really remember," he lied. Normally he was a pretty convincing liar. He wasn't really selling it this time, and I knew it wasn't because he was out of practice. I thought that maybe it was Jay and Julian's presence lingering around behind me. I thought about maybe sending them out, but I needed them for me, and I was tired of being selfless for Neil.
"Yes, you do."
He exhaled through his nose and gave me a desperate plea sort of look, but I wasn't giving in to him now.
He gave up surprisingly quickly, considering who he was. He looked down into his lap, rolling one hand over the other again and again. "I… I was…" he stammered a little which also wasn't typical of him, and if I didn't know him better, I could have sworn I heard guilt. "I was sucking this guy off, and I bit him, and he slammed my head against the wall." He was so quiet that it took a minute for me to register what he'd said.
"Oh, God damn it, Neil!" Crap. I was yelling again. "You're hustling again? Fuck!"
"I'm sorry!" he yelped, and I almost believed him except for the fact that Neil was never sorry for anything. "I didn't want to, but you said you'd kick me out if I didn't pay the water bill and stuff, and I tried to get a real job but no one would hire me, so I went back to the hustler bar but then I fucking panicked and I only got fifty bucks from that guy and so I… I'm sorry!" Desperation was bubbling up with every word until he was a quivering mess, grasping to the sleeve of my shirt for dear life.
…and then his eyes were wildly darting towards the door to his room where Julian was peeking inside. "Get the fuck out!" he shouted.
Julian stepped away from the door, lifting his hands in the same fashion he'd already done. "There has got to be at least a hundred dollars on the floor in there. Where'd all that come from?"
"None of your goddamned business! Who the fuck are you? Get the hell out!"
"Neil, calm down," I told him, pressing the rag to the wound on his head, and he whimpered as a shot of pain surely hit his skull.
"Why are they here?" he asked, and his voice was quickly losing his bite. I felt that he was fearful that control was slipping from him, and he never did like control to be taken away from him. The only thing he couldn't control was himself.
"I called them to come over and help me when you dropped to the floor like a puppet. I couldn't exactly move you on my own, you know, no matter how lightweight you've gotten."
"You couldn't have called someone else?" he asked bitterly.
"Like who?" I complained right back, dabbing the wound a little more harshly than I should have. "Eric? Your mom? Your little league coach?"
That was extremely harsh, even with as mad as I was.
The look on his face was something I'd never seen… it was something like he was trying to feel pain, but he didn't know how to. "Fuck you," he spat, more bitter than I'd ever heard. He grabbed the rag from me and pressed it to his temple on his own. "I can take care of myself. Bitch."
"Apparently you can't," I said. "Where did the money come from, Neil?"
"It's mine."
"That's not what I asked."
"You think you can just-"
"Where did you get it?"
"What does it matter?"
"Why are you avoiding the subject?"
Voices were rising to unbelievably loud levels, and I worried that our neighbors might start beating on the walls if it kept up, but I was getting strung out and fed up, and I couldn't take it anymore.
"I took it, okay? I took it to pay your goddamned fucking water bill, you insufferable bitch!"
I wondered how much he meant the insult when he burst into tears and buried his face into my neck.
"You fucking bitch. How could you… you fucking…"
Jay and Julian shifted awkwardly from foot to foot but didn't dare move more than that. Neil cried heartbreakingly in my arms until he crashed from his high and fell asleep.
(Eric Preston)
Brian's slow ascent to recovery was worth celebrating, and so when we made it to Indianapolis, we splurged a little and bought sushi. I used my fake I.D. and a little flirting to get a bottle of wine, and we sat on the hood of the car in the hotel's nearly empty parking lot and drank straight from the mouth of the bottle.
"To new beginnings," I said, holding the bottle in the air. He clacked his Styrofoam sushi container against the bottle and swallowed a piece while I took a large swig of the bottle. I passed it to him, and he drank from it gratefully as well.
He hiccupped a little and handed the bottle back, leaning back on the windshield and staring up at the stars. The night was completely clear, and the moon cast a silvery hue to everything. If I hadn't thought him so untouchable, I would have found it romantic… well, about as romantic as I could afford.
"Hey, Eric…"
"What?"
He paused, thinking hard, and then shrugged, snickering a little. "Nothin'."
He was drunk. He was so cute when he was drunk.
I swigged out of the bottle again, tasting a bit of Brian's sushi there. I figured it would be as close as I would come to his lips, so I savored it even if it was a little fishy.
"You know, I don't think I ever had sushi before now," Brian slurred, popping the last bite of his into his mouth. He couldn't use chopsticks, so he ate it with his hands. I had a feeling that even if he could have used them, he wouldn't have been able to in the state he was in. "It's really good."
"Yeah, we eat hip, chic things like sushi all the time in California," I joked, but he just nodded, apparently thinking I was completely serious.
He was so cute.
We talked a lot about nothing for a few minutes, next to each other on the windshield, staring up into the sky. He wasn't making any sense at all, stumbling over his words and laughing at any moderately inappropriate words. He was so young, I thought, even with the very grown-up things that had happened to him. It was worth admiration. I liked that I felt so young when I was with him, even when we were doing grown-up things.
He drank from the bottle, and I watched his Adam's apple bob up and down. "You know," he spoke, barely understandable under the guise of alcohol, "with the moon like this, and the parking lot all empty, it looks a lot like a stage, doesn't it?"
He was trashed. It didn't look anything like a stage.
"Sure, it does," I offered, nudging his knee with mine but only slightly so that he wouldn't go rolling off the side of the car. "…though… I think it looks a little more like a dance floor."
"That's what I meant."
Like those two things were the same.
I hopped off the car and turned on the ignition so music was blaring from inside, extended my hand to him and bowed dramatically. "Care to dance, good sir?"
He laughed at me and nearly fell off of the car as he reached for my hand. He had to slump against me for a second, and what a beautiful second that was for me.
"I don't really know how to dance," he said, and I figured he wouldn't have been able to dance well regardless of years of practice or not.
"It's okay. It's easy," I said, placing his hand on my waist while I put my hand on his shoulder. "Just like this."
"Yeah…" Brian mumbled, rocking side to side with me, though I wasn't entirely sure if it was from trying to dance or just losing his battle with gravity. "I didn't go to my school prom or nothin'. I didn't have a date."
"Neither did I," I said, chuckling a little. "Prom's for yuppies. Here we can dance to whatever music we want to." I started moving my feet, and he clumsily followed but eventually figured it out. "All those girls who didn't go with you were missing out anyway. Football players and all those other sports guys tend to be real assholes."
He laughed, pressing his forehead against my shoulder.
"Yeah, and most of the time they turn out to be repressed homosexuals," I added, and then we were both laughing into each other's shoulders. I hadn't even realized how close we had started pressing ourselves together. Surely it was just him leaning against me to keep his footing. After all, I didn't need to lean against him to keep from falling. I'd already done that.
God, I got so cheesy when I was drunk.
I swung him out by the arm before spinning him back to me, and he looked just a little panicked from the sudden movement but smiled and laughed again.
"Now you're getting it," I said and started sweeping him around the parking lot. I'd never been an amazing dancer or anything, but my mom had taught me a lot of basics since she'd taken several years of it when she was young. She and I had danced together in the kitchen when I was a little boy, and I had never danced with anyone else.
Of course, Brian wasn't just anyone.
"You're actually pretty good at this, considering you're so drunk," I laughed, and I thought that I must have been pretty drunk too because I was feeling all warm all over. "Maybe we can go dancing at a cool club or something when we get to New York."
We slowed to a stop almost suddenly, and he looked at me kind of distantly like he was trying to remember why we were even going to New York.
How dare anyone not see how beautiful he was?
"I bet you miss Neil pretty bad, huh…" he said then, and there was insecurity in his voice that hadn't been there before. I tried to pass it off as nothing but alcohol, but I knew I couldn't. I was just a bit too hopeful for that.
"Honestly?" I said, raising my eyebrows. Hesitation… He was looking intently at me. I smiled. "Not at all."
"Really? But… I thought that you…" He was trying not to smile. It wasn't working.
"I did, but… I don't. Not anymore."
"Why?"
I shrugged. "I don't know." I did… but I couldn't exactly tell him I'm crazy about you, I love you, I absolutely fucking adore every last bit of your beautiful self, even the horrible, terrible parts because you're so wonderful and great and I don't feel depressed or like wearing black so much or writing crappy, melodramatic poetry or thinking about cutting myself because I'm just so much happier when I'm with you. After all, that was kind of a mouthful, and I was really drunk.
Brian had gotten distracted by the music and started singing along. He couldn't really remember all the words, but he was basically mumbling unintelligibly anyway.
"I'm a little dizzy," he said when he realized that I was staring.
"Do you want to go inside and go to bed?" I asked. "Maybe it was the spinning or…"
He pressed his forehead against mine, noses touching, and I could smell wine emanating off of him like it was cologne. I breathed it in, smelling how it mixed with the smell of the night air and of the laundry detergent from his clothes and from his shampoo, and it was perfect…
No, scratch that.
When his mouth just very lightly brushed, just a little more than ghosted against mine… now that, that was perfect.
It wasn't even ruined when he vomited all over my shoes.