Don't drink kids.

TW: nonconsensual groping, drinking, curse words.

In an ideal world, I turn this into a novel one day, potentially this being the first chapter. While no one reads these I thought I would put this out here. Be warned this has some heavier themes as listed above.

Thank you for reading as always.

-Natalie.

Sometimes, Elijah was intoxicated. He gripped the word ‘sometimes’ much like how he gripped the neck of a bottle: tightly. Alcohol suspended him in a cloud of deniability where he existed under the guise that he had everything under control. Yet, the words ‘sometimes’ and ‘drunk’ were never able to coexist in his hands, each one forcing the other to lie. Instead, his hands curled on the cage of his hamartia, pouring it down his throat. 

The vodka hit like mere raindrops in the ocean of his impacted bloodstream. While he was immune to the taste, the wave of dizziness pulled his head back against the moldy couch. 

Fuck. Nausea twisted in his stomach, vertigo playing in his mind, and he relished in it. He found comfort in the ability to blame a concrete thing for his suffering, rather than being plagued by his own thoughts. 

He drifted into blissful unconsciousness. 

A sweet voice weaved carefully through the knit barrier between his senses and the outside world. He could hear it, laced with poison. 

“Eli,” it purred. 

The voice’s words left slips of the party in the wake of its incision; he could hear music and laughter, he knew somewhere out there his teammates were deep in a game of beer pong, and even further away his girlfriend slept, wrapped loosely in a lavender duvet. 

Being drunk was messy, numbing. He offered only a mumbled response. The nausea was curdling now, maybe he drank too much….

While the party raged around him, his blank mind registered none of it, lulled to silence by his drink. Distantly, he could feel soft hands, but they existed in a world outside his own. He was far too gone to stop them from slipping under his clothes. 

Here, he murmured words of protest and was met with lofty giggling and the cooing of his name. 

The hand crept further. 

This he recalls, as his mind could recognize the foreign entity along the inside of his pants and find discomfort in it. 

What are you doing? He maybe asked. 

The hand ignored this, sliding further. 

Elijah finally ripped himself from his daze, blinking furiously until the world around him materialized. 

He had sunk deeper into the old couch, suddenly heavier than he had been twenty minutes prior. A girl, sat on his lap, straddling him. 

Her hands in his pants, her lips along the column of his throat. 

Immediately, acting first, he threw her off of him. His fingers skimmed fishnets and caused yelps as she struck the dusty floor. 

“What the fuck?” 

Elijah’s mind was a mess of thoughts. He struggled to grasp any two and mesh them together in the hopes of forming words. He couldn’t. Instead, he just stared.

He stared at her, her long black hair and pitted eyes. He stared at her swollen lips, her defensive position. And then, he left. 

Elijah tripped and stumbled through the doorway on the hem of his pants, hung low on his waist in a place he had not left them. 

Fuck. Head clouded, he tipped forward. Fuck. 

The house choked him, the walls mocked him, and the floor…was awfully close. 

He smashed into it. Dull fingernails scratched drywall as he pulled himself back up. 

Music, lights, the noise…it was too much. He needed to keep moving. 

Fresh air hit him like ice water when his body finally carried him outside. Rain caressed his face, leaving sobriety in its trails as it trickled down his throat. Spinning with his mind he wandered aimlessly along the lawn. Bodies littered the earth, tangled with their partners or with the substances they valued equally as much. 

The next morning, he’d remember only flashes of this party, as if he was flipping through a lewd photo album. Early images of him playing beer pong, followed by frames of soft skin and sweet mouths coaxing him to compliance. He would flip to this moment and watch himself approach something in the distance; a mass of people surrounding a conflict. If he kept flipping he’d watch himself push into the middle of the fight and punch Johnathan Mitchel square in the nose. He’d watch the crowd surge and retract around him like a living, breathing organism as he repeatedly pounded Johnathan. He’d watch his own dark eyes flick onto a figure huddled in the corner; the individual Johnathan had just been harassing. He’d stare at this one mental frame for hours. He’d attempt to focus on this boy, to see his dusty blonde hair and freckles more clearly, but all that bled through the pages in his mind were the coal-black eyes of Johnathan, and how much they reminded him of the girl that had stolen something from Elijah just ten minutes before. Finally, he’d watch him drag himself to his friend's house down the street, and collapse on a living room couch.

~~~~~

Sunday passed in a slow crawl. The hours in between waking up and getting up were full of silent contemplation. Well, mostly silent. It had been silent before Anthony stormed into the living room and yelled, and it was again silent after he left for church. While Anthony was gone, his words lingered in Elijah’s mind, tangled in the fingers he could remember in his pants. 

You’re going to die if you keep this up. 

Elijah had looked into Anthony’s glassy eyes, his childhood friend who had grown distant as their interests had, and hoped to God that he was right. 

He waited several minutes after Anthony’s departure before getting up. A wave of dizziness hit, and he hung his head between his legs, breathing deeply and wishing it away. Deep down, he knew the only solution to this feeling. 

This is what pushed him into motion. Anthony’s house was small, cozy. Tucked into a cul-de-sac just a few houses down from the neighborhood center. Anthony was lucky to live in Meadowridge, the center for all the parties stemming from Crestwood High, and while he did not take advantage of this, Elijah sure did. The drag of bare feet on the carpet disturbed the still air of an empty house as Elihah groggily dragged himself through hallways he could navigate with his eyes closed. The kitchen was the heart of this house. Here, he was able to plug his phone in, not necessarily eager to see the screen flash to life with several missed calls from his mother. He flipped it face down on the counter and kept moving. Nausea was a rough beast in his chest, twisting the world around its fingers, wrapping his vision into a spiral. The kitchen provided him with more than a phone charger, it also harbored several bottles of bourbon. 

It was three p.m. on a Sunday, and Elijah’s head tipped back to welcome an old friend. He wondered idly if he felt guilty for abusing Anthony’s house and trust before the bourbon coaxed the thought away. Down his throat went several sips of the substance, dragging with it the memory of coal-black eyes and invasive fingers as his mind was soothed to silence. In this state, Elijah did not have to remember the girl on his lap, in his pants. In this state, he didn’t have to wonder what had happened in the gap of his memory. The gap between the drink that snuffed his consciousness and the hand that rekindled it.