kurt cobain's wet dream

Max’s brows furrowed as she shared the details, details he didn’t care to know but felt that he deserved to know. He didn’t like hearing about Bradley with other men, Bradley in serious relationships with anyone that wasn’t him. Maybe Billy was a better person, in a lot of ways, or at least better for her. He couldn’t really know that. 

“Don’t,” he said, shaking his head. 

He hated that she even thought he’d think this negatively of her, judge her for being with anyone after his track record. “I’ve been with some shitty people in my time, Brad. It’s hardly even bad. You’re free to do what you want. It’s your life, after all.”

He wished he could change it. He wished he could turn back time. Those were thoughts that passed through his mind over and over again, but he couldn’t do any of those things.

Billy was just a result. A result of his choices that he couldn’t fucking take back.

“I’m glad your dad likes him,” he said, wetting his lips and glancing down between them. He couldn’t imagine a scenario where her father would see him as anything other than a pathetic scared little boy, maybe even a junkie at best. He couldn’t imagine being the kind of man that Bradley’s father would be pleased to see her take home to him. That said, Max felt good about that fact, more than anything. He felt like if her father hated someone, they must be doing something right. 

Max almost scowled at her admittance, the thought of being compared in any way to Billy a little sickening to him, but relief set in at the knowledge that he was better in some way. 

An intense air seemed to fill the room and it felt as though the temperature had risen a few degrees, but he didn’t say a word, just watched her as she explained herself. A thick swallow seemed loud inside his head and he wondered if Bradley could hear it, but he just let out a shaky breath, shrugging a shoulder.  “Depends on the context. I like this context,” he clarified. Any other circumstance, he would have hated hearing her speak of her current relationship, but the context fit something that Max had created in his head himself a few times. “It makes me feel…” he trailed off, but special was the word he wanted to say. He felt like he meant something, which lately, was a feeling that was rare for him. 

“Was that the end of the story or is there more?” he asked, amused grin on his face as his eyes wandered over the area her fingers wandered. 

Max found himself cherishing her every touch and missing it as soon as it was gone. He wished that he could take it back, all of the things he’d done, maybe even start fresh. He wondered how things would go if he knew what he knew now and they could go back in time to when they first met, relive the things that they already had and do things differently. 

“Of course you care,” he mumbled under the touch of her thumb, eyes fixed on hers. “I’d be offended if you didn’t care. People deserve… they deserve more than what I gave you. Everyone does.”

He glanced down to his lap, a heavy sigh escaping. 

“Billy,” he repeated, lips wet with the way his tongue had brushed over the harsh chapped skin there. “You’re really with him, huh? You’re staying with him?” he asked, running a hand over his face. 

“I get it.”

Of course he did. Once you opened up that pandora’s box, it was hard to get it closed again, as if it was filled beyond the recommended line. 

“Fuck Billy,” he said, shaking his head. He wanted to get angry. He wanted to throw something, punch something. His fists clenched around the sheets again, but he breathed through it, knowing it’d only startle Bradley, make her uneasy around him again. That was the last thing that he wanted. 

“God, this just – it sucks… I’m sorry.”

He reached a hand up, placing it gently at her cheek, fingers caressing against the soft skin. He wished he could wipe away the bruising, make it go away.

“I love you,” he mumbled, lips pressed tightly together into a thin line as he glanced down between them. More than anything, he just wanted to close the gap, but he didn’t know if he had that kind of privilege anymore. Instead, he just found his hand wandering, lightly brushing over the skin of her neck to her collar bone and down her shoulders, brushing gently along her lower back.  “And I miss you. And… fuck Billy. He doesn’t have to know.”

“Yeah,” she exhaled, tone as irritably monotonous as a child forced to recite their five times tables in front of the rest of the class. “We live together and everything.”

Cracking a small smile like she’d just told a joke worthy of the five star comedy circuit, Bradley’s lips subconsciously parted as she stayed as still as set cement beneath his touch.

“It’s kind of the most serious relationship I’ve ever had, I guess.”

Pressing her mouth shut again, she swallowed down the urge to sigh and allowed her eyes free roam to wander his face, instead.

“My dad likes him, you know? He likes him. I don’t really--... I mean, that’s probably a fucking bad thing. I don’t know.” Wetting her lips, her stare shifted down between them as she searched for the words. “The last time he found out I was dating someone he got Marco to kick his front teeth down his throat. It’s an improvement.”

Fiddling absently with the moth bitten hem of her band t-shirt, she tugged it as casually as she could to cover the blotchy shape of a scar sitting high up on her thigh, shoving the sight of it away in her mental closet along with the rest of her skeletons. Billy’s lips had been infected with a grin for a whole afternoon, once, at how angry she’d gotten when he poked fun at them. Sometimes when she looked at them she could still hear how hoarse his throat was, a tittered “what, were you on bath salts trying to dig to fuckin’ China, or something?” echoing off of high ceilings as he sank back into cheap cotton sheets snorting to himself.

“He’s--...” she trailed off, wanting to finish with “not so bad” but not quite being able to stomach a lie of that magnitude. “He’s Billy. Whatever. I don’t--... I don’t fucking know what you want me to say about it, anyway.” Jaw clenching with the gut reaction to preemptively defend herself, her eyes flit aimlessly around the room away from him. “He’d try to fuck me either way, so. May as well...” Swallowing softly, she pitched a limp shrug like she wasn’t at all affected, like she was commenting on something as mundane as the morning weather report. “I may as well want him to, okay? I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t--I don’t want to fucking talk about it. If you’re just going to judge me, well... You can just fucking eat my ass and fucking not.” 

Pulse insistently throbbing as she averted a bleary stare, she had to swallow to compose herself again as the tips of his fingers explored the small of her back.

“Sometimes,” she started after a significant delay, hesitance clear in the way she bit her tongue before meeting his eyes again. 

The tension in the air between them was so thick that she was left wishing she’d brought a butcher’s knife to hack through it with.

“Sometimes I’d try to just pretend it was you but he’s--... It’s not the same. He acts like he’s manning a fucking mechanical drill half the time.”

Fingers straying along the waistband of his boxers, she tried to fool herself into believing she was merely investigating the softness of the fabric. An innocent act of curiosity without any ulterior motive. 

“So it’s fucking... annoying. Can’t even close my eyes and imagine something different because he’s thrashing around like a fucking shark on land,” dissolved into a half laugh, lips wrestled together to contain it before it could linger for too long. 

“I have to wait until I get in the shower,” she sighed, head angling onto a slight slant as she studied him, while the middle finger of her left hand continued in a casual path up her inner thigh that she wasn’t even conscious of having started.

Max listened intently, eyes fixed on her face in a way that had every other element of the room blocked out. He opened his mouth a few times to speak, but it never felt like the right time. He didn’t want to interrupt, didn’t want to make it more difficult for her to get her point across. 

A name pulled from the past. Jesse. He sighed heavily, unsure how to stop himself from making a snide comment. That was the kind of person he was, always tempted to pipe up and say something in situations he felt was necessary to do so. But instead, he let her speak. It didn’t matter how he felt about him, he knew he was good, better than Max ever could be. 

But than another name was proposed and Max stiffened under her touch, frozen in place for a moment as if trying to process what she’d just said, but being completely unable to do it. 

“What?” 

His eyes fixed on hers intently, he didn’t know what to say to that. Fingers clenching and releasing around his comforter, he shook his head, gaze dropping to his lap in a bid to make sense of why she would think such a thing. 

“Yael’s nothing to me,” he said, teeth mistakenly gritted as he tried to explain himself, but he didn’t know what it was he was trying to prove. 

“He’s nothing but… an abuser and a – he’s nothing,” he shook his head, picking at his cuticles. “But maybe part of that is right.”

“Maybe I feel like that’s what I deserve. There were days when Yael was nothing but cruel to me and I had to stand on the sidelines, small as ever, and pretend that I didn’t want to fucking choke up and cry right there in front of him and his… stupid shitty friends. I just accepted the punches like they were nothing after a while, because I was nothing but good to him and that’s what I got. So, maybe that’s what I think I deserve. But it’s not – that’s not what I want/ Yael isn’t it, he’s just… trauma. That’s all he is. Past fucking… trauma.”

Brows furrowed, he met her gaze again, a soft sigh leaving his lips. “I’m sorry I ever made you think you weren’t it, because I can’t imagine it being anyone else.”

This much was true. There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t think about Bradley in some manner. She was always on his mind and when she wasn’t, it was because something else had his attention, but it was never nearly as important. It was just unfortunate that that one time, it had been a distraction that had made him unfaithful. 

“I do think you’re kind of right, though. In some ways,” he said, nodding his head. “He fucked me up. I don’t think – I don’t know how to accept that kind of love, the healthy kind. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I can’t process it.”

Hands dropping from their careful exploration of a face she knew just as well as the back of them, the next few seconds ticked by as tortuously slow as a dollop of caramel dribbling down a wall from a third story window. 

Thumb tucked smaller, she quickly dragged the rigid joint of it along the damp smudge on her jawline, erasing the lapse in judgement like a parent irritably cleaning the jam from their firstborn’s fingers. 

She knew it was stupid. Or, at least, she wanted to. 

It was just how she was now.

You could have presented her with a man sentenced to death for a string of brutal, slit-throat murders in a kindergarten and she’d still spend at least ten minutes uncapping a red marker and circling bits of him that she viewed as far more redeemable than anything she had to offer. 

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” she recited stiffly, suddenly feeling far more vulnerable than she had, initially, with her oversized t-shirt riding up over the jagged pale outline of her father’s initial, haphazardly hacked into her right thigh with a dismantled razor long before Max had ever got the chance to see it without.

Oddly enough, something about the fresh sense of discomfort had her itching to steer the warm press of his palm low enough that it found an equal heat emanating through thin cotton, the flimsy fabric of her underwear coloured like a sunset so rich it all but fried beetles like cracked eggs between the rhododendrons. 

It was a somewhat new instinct, since living with Billy.

Sex as an apology.

Sex as a wet blanket to smother the stove fire.

Instead, though, she remained as still as marble.

“I don’t even care,” came out eventually, eyes pointedly fixed on a patch of duvet until she blinked with the realisation that they were stinging with the need to. “I don’t,” she repeated, wrenching her focus back towards his face so that her eyes could flit slowly between his. “If you can’t, I mean. I don’t--... I miss you. I miss you,” slipped out again under her breath, almost as softly as the brush of a feather or a sigh or the way her thumb slid fondly along his bottom lip within the next passing millisecond. 

“I miss you.”

Fully aware of the fact that she’d got herself tangled up in a whole other web, venturing into a romantic setup with Billy, Bradley met his eyes like she was knowingly dangling her bloody carcass for a long starved animal to sink its teeth into. 

“It’s kind of fucking inconvenient, really, because I think--... I don’t really doubt that he’d fucking kill me if he even knew I was speaking to you, never mind...” she trailed off, wetting her lips before derailing her stream of thought entirely so as to not dwell on where the sentence could’ve ended up. 

To anyone else, this would probably seem strange. The two of them lying close together like this, after everything he’d done, separating themselves from that only in this moment. He could get used to it, the way his fingers traced over curves in her back, familiar tracks that he’d wondered if he’d ever get to touch again. 

But her voice, what she had to say, told a different story. It was clear that she was angry. Frustrated. He couldn’t blame her for feeling such a way and even though he wished he could take it all back, that wasn’t in the cards. Life didn’t work that way, as much as he wanted it to.

He couldn’t help but wonder where she’d been, had she been lying the same way with Billy, repeating the same mantra about not being built to have this. This exact thing that she had in this moment. 

“You’re here,” he said. “That means something.”

Of course, he knew what she meant. He’d fucked it all up already and there were no take backs. Life wasn’t that forgiving. 

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, but that’s definitely not true. I didn’t… I didn’t get bored. In that moment I was just fucking – so fucking weak.”

He shook his head, eyes flicking back and forth between both of hers as she sat up straighter. He didn’t know how to explain this to someone that didn’t experience it. It probably sounded crazy, or like made up excuses to make him seem like he was the victim rather than the villain. But when it came to this, sometimes he felt that way. 

“It’s fucked, okay? Completely fucked up.” 

He didn’t know how else to put it, because it was just that and only that. He could fill silence with apologies and explanation, but nothing would change the fact that it was completely, more than anything and without a single doubt, simply fucked up. 

“But you deserve all of those things. You did. I fucked it all up, but –,” he took in a sharp breath of air, clearing his throat with it. “I fucked it all up.”

Expression as cool as a mortician three years from retirement digging in his scalpel, Bradley made a limp ‘L’ with her finger and thumb like she was Van Gogh setting up his painting easel, index sitting further along his jaw as she delicately propped up his chin. 

“You know,” she eventually started, wetting her lips with a subconscious desire to taste leftover traces of whiskey there in order to give herself the liquid courage necessary to continue, “I think--... This is going to sound shitty. Or not... not shitty, but like I’m trying to get you to tell me I’m wrong. Like I want you to tell me it isn’t true,” she clarified, swallowing softly around the urge to let the words tremble, “but I’m not. Okay? I’m not.”

“When I was with Jesse, I felt kind of like I was living a big, cosmic joke. Because, thing is, he was good. Really good. He was actually nice to me and I didn’t--... I don’t know. I didn’t fucking get it. Sometimes, you know, it sounds fucking stupid, but sometimes it even made me mad.” 

Eyes trained down on her thumb, she grazed the pad of it idly along his chin, following the curve that paved way to his jaw soon after.

“I liked him, yeah. I mean, he was my friend, right? So I just thought... I just thought it’d be fine. It’d be fine. He cared so much and he said all the right things.” Adamantly avoiding his eye-line, she pressed on in an effort to cut to the point and avoid dwelling too long on a boy she knew sent Max’s blood boiling. 

“And I didn’t understand why I kept--... Why I kept fucking up. I mean, I fucking ran away twice. I snorted fucking... an entire country whenever I thought he’d try to hold my hand. I was shit. I really wish I was exaggerating but I’m not. I was fucking shit and I can’t even think about it for too long because I know it wasn’t fair. I was pure shit and all he ever was to me was nice.” Forcing out a short laugh, she pressed her lips together as her head subtly shook. “Christ. Cook vibes. I sound like a fucking asshole. Very on brand.” 

Smile fading down a few notches the longer she studied him, the tip of her nose brushed up against his cheek as her lips wandered to place an absent kiss on his jaw like she felt the need to pay him an unprompted apology. 

“Point is it couldn’t work. Because I’d just--... Even if he was everything someone’s meant to be, it couldn’t work. Because I always had you in the back of my mind. It was like--... It was like trying to have a family brunch while you’re having a fucking aneurysm. I couldn’t concentrate.”

Drawing off into silence, she barely even realised a tear had escaped to skim down her cheek until she was irritably rolling her eyes up to the ceiling to compensate. 

She could practically feel her cheeks aching with the ghost of the grin her father would be wearing if he could see her now.

“And I’m not mad at you. I’m not mad but I think that’s who I am for you, too. I think--... You know,” she trailed off as her voice trembled, swallowing adamantly in an effort to cling onto a shred of composure. “I think it doesn’t matter--... It doesn’t matter how nice I am. It doesn’t matter if you live inside my head somewhere. Because as much as we both--... God,” came choked along with an attempt at a scoff, chin dipping down as she silently willed the earth to gape wide open and swallow her whole. “I fucking hate saying things out loud. You could’ve made it fucking easier by having telekinesis or something, at least.”

Pitching a short sigh, she lifted her chin again and met his gaze dead on.

Max knew he’d went off on a tangent the moment Bradley was straddling him, legs bare, pleading with him to calm down. Chest almost heaving with the way that he’d rambled on desperately, he let his eyes slip shut, feeling better about the situation when he was reminded that she was still here. She was still here and it didn’t seem like she was going to leave any time soon, considering she’d abandoned her jeans on the hardwood floor next to his bed. 

He’d been through moments like these before, with girls that meant way less to him than Bradley did. He always slipped up somehow, sometimes early on and other times later in the relationship. But it always happened.

The thing that broke his heart the most about this particular situation was the fact that he’d been convinced this wouldn’t happen with Bradley, that she was the one that was going to finally heal that part of his brain that seemed to need constant rewiring and boosts. He’d slipped up. Slipped up in the way that he had in meaningless relationships that didn’t make his heart ache with it, slipped up like none of this mattered. 

But it did. 

It mattered to him more than anything had in his life and though that likely seemed absurd now, with the occurrences of the last few weeks, he still believed it to be true. 

“I’m so fucking sorry,” he said, head falling forward to bury into her shoulder, a move from a helpless man that couldn’t help himself but to fall apart at the smallest sign of forgiveness, affection and consolation. Weak. That was the word for it, right? He wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about the way that he’d reacted to this situation, but he felt like it was the only appropriate way. In this moment, he needed to collapse into it. Into her. 

Catching his breath, his chest began to rise and fall more slowly, a safe pace that made him feel less panicked and ill with it. Hands braced firmly at her back, he felt the desire to bring her closer, but the gap was already completely closed between them. “I can’t stop thinking about how stupid it was,” he said, shaking his head. “So senseless. I don’t understand it. I really don’t,” he said. “It never should have happened, but it especially shouldn’t have happened that way.”

Thin cotton of her left sock tugged down by the mattress to reveal a rotten peach pit of a bruise on the crest of protruding bone on her ankle, Bradley looked more like a matchstick tucked inside his arms than a fully functioning adult. Late nights slung over Billy like an expensive Prada purse kept in the lap of a conservative white woman hardly did anything to bring the flush back into her cheeks or revive her appetite, never mind the amount of time she’d spent stooped over a glass table with a rolled up twenty within the space of just a week or so. 

Chin shifting slightly to sit on his shoulder as he bowed his head into the crook of her neck, her brain stayed stuck on the heat of his fingers as they slipped into the outline she’d relentlessly chalked out on top of her spine, over and over until the stick of January frost clutched in her fist had crumbled and caked up beneath her nails like vaporised bone.

She’d had plenty of dreams like that. 

Bradley Milligan as a science experiment. 

Bradley Milligan as a dissected frog, scalpel slicing through tendons so that she could label memories of him on her bloody body parts in the girlish font of a fourteen year old schoolgirl. 

Bradley Milligan as a tombstone with every nice thing he’d ever said to her scratched out on the gloomy grey face of it with the plied out enamel of her top left canine. 

She dreamt about him all the time, really. In fact, there wasn’t a single week where he hadn’t cropped up in her brain’s movie reel like the Helena Bonham Carter to her limbic system’s Tim Burton.

It sounded strange, as pathetic as it was, but sometimes her dreams about Max were the only thing that reminded her she was a person capable of caring about things any more.

It was easy to forget, living with a man like Billy.

“I think you just got bored,” she suggested casually, voice steady enough to suggest that she’d been stewing on the idea for so long, she’d learned how to pretend it didn’t bother her. How to accept it. “Don’t really blame you,” slipped out after a small pause, lips inching down to rest against the bare skin of his shoulder like she was a disconnected adult seeking comfort by trailing her fingers along the brick walls of her childhood home -- the place she’d been happy in, once. The place she’d lived before she’d forgotten how to be.

Max had already laid back against the pillow once the door had shut behind Bradley, hands placed tiredly over his eyes, fingers rubbing so harshly against them it was almost painful. “Fuck,” he’d muttered to himself, lips pressed into a tight line as he began to see colours the more he pushed against his eyelids. Propping himself up on his elbows, he sat there with his eyes shut, knowing that he’d be unable to sleep tonight. 

When the door swung open again, he just blinked up at her, afraid to say something as if it would scare her away. Instead, he let her rant, something about the cold. Judging based on how hot it was in his room, he didn’t think that excuse was entirely true, but he wasn’t about to push the issue. 

He almost opened his mouth to offer her a jacket, but thought better of it. 

“Alaska? Yeah… Better wait it out,” he said, awkward laugh leaving his lips as he stared fixedly at the back of her head. He didn’t know what else to say, the usual words worn out by repetition, combined with the now and the times he’d said those words before. I’m sorry. It was as natural as a hello or goodbye to Max now.

“What’s not the same?” he asked, though he was pretty sure that he knew. He didn’t want to push his luck. Instead, he just stared at her, waiting for some kind of hint of movement that would make this situation better. As she began to explain herself, he rested his head back against the pillow again, staring blankly up at the ceiling fan as it spun slowly in circles. 

“I wish I didn’t, too,” he said, shaky breath leaving his lips. “And anything I say, there’s no excuse for it. But I don’t even get why I did it. I don’t get why I do any of these things,” he said. “It’s not satisfying. It’s not like I enjoy wiping my fucking dick and thighs clean in a room full of people and shamefully pulling my jeans up, pretending what happened didn’t. I mean, Jesus Christ, there’s video documented proof and the thought of it makes me want to retch or fucking kill myself. It makes me that sick, I want to die. I wish I didn’t, too. I don’t understand it. It’s not like I can even say ‘there’s something wrong with me’, because I know that. I know there’s something wrong with me and I know what’s wrong with me and I’ve done so much to try and make it something I can live with and people around me can live with and instead, it all just turns to shit at my own hand. I’m sorry. God, I’m so fucking sorry.”

Hair far softer than usual as it fell easily forwards over gaunt cheekbones – a clear sign that her father was visiting, for the fact that she’d actually even bothered to drag a comb through it – Bradley swallowed around the crushed up beer can of a lump in her throat and remained studying her hands. She’d almost forgotten that the jagged scar marking her palm was uncharacteristic for someone to have until earlier that week, a cashier at the local supermarket having scanned through her bottle of vodka and pointedly informed her that the Bio oil was located on aisle three. 

Needless to say, she’d opened the bottle right then and there, swilled a burning mouthful and spat it square in her face like a feral child raised in the wild and forced three days earlier to integrate into society again. The incident was only resolved when Billy dished out three hundred dollar bills to both management and the staff member affected, lumbering Bradley back inside his car outside with a roaring laugh while she sat there blank faced and silent. 

Jaw setting instinctively at the small details, ones she’d done her best to bleach from her mind so that she wouldn’t be able to create an associated image, Bradley hitched her chin an inch higher to find his face in the dark room. He barely looked like he was able to fit in a breath, with how rapidly he was speaking, one sentence blurring into the next like she’d inadvertently turned a page and wound up inside the streams of endless consciousness that made up a Virginia Woolf short story in her high school literature class. 

“Max,” she started softly, so quiet that she wasn’t even sure he’d heard her, which he confirmed a few seconds later as he pressed adamantly on without so much of a flinch. 

Pushing off from the corner of his desk that she was loitering by like a ghost hesitant to commit to leaving purgatory, she wordlessly tugged her boots off somewhere after his second “I wish I didn’t, too.” His apology had barely left his mouth and she was already encroaching on his side of the bed again, jeans hastily kicked clean from slim legs and left in a crumpled pile on the carpet before she could pull the covers back.

Sometimes being in the presence of Bradley felt like it could heal any negative events from the week, other times, he felt like he was her negative event. Today, however, seemed as though it was the former. Her harsh brush with reality had passed and left a mark angry on her cheek. 

He didn’t know what to say in these situation, never did. He knew that he wanted to do something. Get his dad involved, maybe even face her father himself, but he respected her more than he cared about his own vendetta. As badly as he wanted to get some kind of revenge, he knew that it would only upset her and that was something he usually didn’t want to do. At least, not on purpose. 

And even with what he’d done recently, he didn’t mean it. Not really. He didn’t mean for it to ruin things, had been thinking in the moment and not thinking about the broad spectrum, what it could mean for them. He thought in impulses, in the way that his body had reacted. 

“I didn’t mean it,” he began, eyes fixed on hers. “I didn’t. I know this sounds like something any fucking dickhead cheater would say, but I really didn’t mean it. It felt like… I don’t know. I felt like I – I don’t fucking know. I can’t describe it. Everything just… it blurs… reality… it blurs and I fade into this like… I’m not me,” he said, running a hand over his face. “It happens almost every time I have sex. Even with you sometimes. Something animalistic takes over and it’s just – just something I need to do. But I should have turned my brain on, then.”

Max’s eyes flicked down to her once more when she’d tilted his chin downward, wetting his dry lips from the humid room they lay in. It felt like they were verging on kissing, his heart beating hard and heavy in his chest as he tried to resist the urge to close the gap between them. 

The contrast between moments was striking and Max found himself jolting to a seated position once Bradley had begun to rant, shaking his head minutely. “I wasn’t supposed to be involved. It wasn’t meant to happen like that,” he said, biting his bottom lip. “That’s not – I didn’t mean for it to happen. I didn’t – I’m sorry,” he said, cursing himself for saying it again, but it rolled so easily off the tongue. 

“Please don’t leave.”

Bradley had already been midway through aggressively yanking the door shut behind her when his final request came out, handle clutched so tightly in hand that she felt like a child navigating through a pitch black corridor clinging desperately to a relative for them to lead the way. It even had her flinching, the crude slam of thin wood as she shut the scent of freshly washed sheets away and stranded herself alone with her thoughts again. 

Instead of leaving, though, she found that she was just left standing still. It was like she thought any movement at all would send a jagged splinter along the carpet beneath her foot, entire room momentarily transformed into a pool of frozen water with her left in the middle, the stupid little girl that had wandered out too far as her parents screamed from the sidelines. 

Dropping the handle, Bradley froze for another few seconds before awkwardly turning back to face the door again, eyes combing along the grains of painted wood like she was searching for the braille translation of what to do next. Shifting on her feet slightly as her brain played tug of war with itself, time ticked by as slowly as a dollop of caramel dribbling down the side of the Eiffel tower, light slicing through the inch tall gap at the bottom of the door and flirting with the shadows her thick boots cast to make it glaringly obvious that she was still stood hesitantly outside. It was only when a floorboard creaked beneath her weight that she irritably flung the door open again, heading abruptly inside and rubbing her hands together like she’d at least attempted to brave the cold. 

“I can’t just--... I’ll catch fucking pneumonia.” she insisted suddenly, pacing through his room to loiter aimlessly by his desk just so that she wouldn’t have to meet his eye and acknowledge how obvious her lie was. “It’s like Alaska out there and I only have a shitty fucking t-shirt on.” Pressing her lips together to suffocate an uneven breath before it could spill out and betray her composure, Bradley cast her eyes down as she pretended to be busy chipping at the black polish on her thumbnail.

The request that he not say sorry again had him itching to apologize for that and he swallowed around a lump in his throat, placing his fist at his mouth so not to speak. He was a man of apology, a man of remorse, but it never changed the way he lived his life. Recklessly, giving into urges and self-destructive impulses that he knew would only make for an unfortunate finale. As she crept up from her space in the bed, he wasn’t at all surprised to witness her departure, expecting her to bolt out the door. 

“You thought what?” he asked, words careful and kind, as if he were talking to a baby bird that had flown straight into a glass window. Eyes caught glimpse of a darkened bit of skin on her cheek, reaching over to lightly caress the spot with his thumb. “Stupid fucking prick,” he mumbled under his breath, fists clenched tightly in his lap. 

“I can’t do that,” he said, the words falling off his lips like the strap of a oversized silk blouse off a shoulder. “I can’t tell you to do that, Brad. You have to make that choice on your own.”

Just like he had the night he’d ruined things. He’d made a choice. He could blame magnetic pull and psychological miscalculations, but at the end of the day, he made a choice. It didn’t matter that he’d thrown up after and again in the shower that night, the reminder of what he’d done met with the sheer need to reimagine it again by himself only brought on more crippling guilt. 

“But if you want to know what I think…” he started. “I don’t think you should stay here. Because if you do, it’ll only make things more complicated for you. Fuck what I feel, but you’re going to be stuck in this… conflicted state of mind. You’re back here because it’s familiar and you still – you still love me… But I know I hurt you too badly to fix it.”

“I don’t know,” she mumbled again pointlessly, constantly feeling the need to undermine her own feelings before anyone else could get the chance to. Abstract concepts, chock full of stalls and empty spaces that even you sounded unsure of, were far easier to shrug away than something you’d really poured your heart into. 

Tuning back into the present faster than a head plunged underwater in an overflowing bathtub, Bradley’s entire body tensed when his thumb set about carefully tracing popped capillaries, the instinctive need to clench her jaw summoning a fresh ache from the ugly bruise blemishing the freckles there. 

Eyes averting to find a fleck of peeling paint on the wall behind his headboard, Bradley tried to ignore how desperately his touch had made her tongue itch to say something she shouldn’t. 

“I’ve forgiven worse.” Pupils inflated to something Saturn sized in a room so starved of light, they skimmed down the slope of his nose like a dice circling down a casino roulette wheel, still completely unsure whether the fact that they wound up at his mouth was equivalent to a staggering cash prize or a bank vault clear out. “That’s--... I’ve forgiven worse. I know you didn’t--... I don’t think you meant it. So it’s not fair. I don’t even--... I don’t fucking know why it’s in my head. But it’s there. It’s there all the time like a wine stain on a fancy new fucking carpet and...” trailing off into silence, Bradley ignored the blaring alarm bells in her brain telling her to continue wriggling off his muddied sheets, instead shifting over so that she was propped partially on top of his chest, warmth of her lips assassinating whatever cold her fingers had unintentionally tracked along his pulse point with the feather light impression of a kiss. 

“It’s not fair,” she repeated in a soft muffle against the skin there, hand eventually following suit in her body’s disobedient attitude towards her brain as the tips of her fingers found his chin to gently tip it down towards her.

Hovering there frozen for what felt like an entire minute, Bradley found herself stuck a mere inch away from his mouth as she wrestled the all-consuming need to close their distance with the niggling reminder rousing its wings like an ugly black moth in the back of her head. 

with her hands still on her hips and annoyance still pulsing through her veins, imagine shelby’s surprise when she hears the onlooker crack a joke. truthfully, she’s thankful for the comedic take on the situation. “bradley,” she huffs out, exhaustion evident in her voice. she begins to walk over to the bench the other girl is perched on, “look I don’t give a fuck about what lindsay lohan has to say about this,” she sits down. she’s given up entirely at this point. “I don’t even care that she’s not working”    Shelby gestures to the car, “I’m just pissed I can’t get home to take care of my eighteen year old brother” she’s tired, and probably delusional, a mix of these two, mean one thing, divulging information she would never do usually. “that’s sad, isn’t it.”