My Fucking Nightmare

We watched Matt listen to the voicemail, unsure of how to react to the changes of expression in his face. From angry to hurt, to scared, and the indescribable: only what I can assume was an amalgamation of rage and murderous tendencies. Brian had to sit him back down on the bar stool to calm him down, and I was terrified Matt was going to lash out violently and take all his anger out on us. Melissa offered to go check out the apartment again, and scope out the 4100 to make sure things weren’t as fishy as we all thought they were.
She left while the rest of us were between four and six beers in. Brian offered to go with her, as did I. Personally I hadn’t seen the inside of the 4100 even though I heard it was a fantastic spot, though familial obligation meant that I stay and make sure my brother in blood didn’t go on a murderous rampage through the city. For a while, I worried a lot. I worried for the sake of the band, if Matt’s situation crashed the way it did with the last one that did this to him, as much as I worried for the well-being of all of us. He told me all he wanted to do was drink. Get fucked up, throw-the-towel-in drunk.
Melissa called Brian just as she left the apartment. Guess Harriet lied to Matt about where she was calling from, since she said she was at her place and Aaron wasn’t there. She begged him to come and talk, but near the end of the conversation Jimmy picked up the phone, said a few nasty things, and hung the fuck up. Probably triggered a sulky reaction in her. Perhaps she really was at the bar after all following that shit show.
She called back twenty minutes later, her voice quick and panicked. Pissed, it seemed. Brian slammed the phone shut and back onto the counter. “She’s at the bar with the fucking Ghost Adventures crew. The guys Melissa did her article on. They were all a little too…friendly towards Harriet, I guess. Melissa asked one of the other servers how long they’d been there, but she hung up before giving any more details. But she’s on her way back now, so we’ll know the full story in a few minutes.”
Right on cue, she walked through the door. I guess it started raining at some point while she was gone, because she came in soaking wet. And looking absolutely pissed. “Ugh!” she grunted, tossing her wet jacket over the half-wall in the porch. Kicking her shoes at the doorway, she didn’t hesitate to almost put a fucking hole in the drywall. Girl was pissed. We were about to find out.
Turning to Matt, she writhed in what seemed like a sort of anger where she’d burst out crying before anything else. “You better divorce her, Matthew. That fucking bitch needs to pull her head out of her ass.”
“Well what did you see, Liss?” Brian piped up, pulling her onto his knee as he stayed sitting on his own bar stool. “What the hell happened?”
“Fucking Harriet! I walk in there, not many people around, and of course she’s the loudest chick in the place. Absolutely wasted from the sound of it! Hanging off that Aaron guy, just being an absolute slut, I don’t know how to even describe to you what she was doing. But honest to god man, you need to cut that shit off. Nip it in the bud. ‘Cuz there’s no way in hell they’re just roommates.”
I wish Melissa didn’t go that far, because we all watched Matt just break down and start sobbing. Brian calmed her down and Jim and I tried calming Matt down, but he wasn’t having it. He barely told us what she said on the phone. All I knew was that his marriage was about to come to a quick close. We all felt so, so bad.
Melissa was the worst of all of us. She was sobbing into Brian’s shoulder, muttering something none of us could hear. Brian picked her up and carried her to the bedroom, where her sobs got louder and uglier. Girls crying was the worst sound in the goddamn world. About a half hour later, just after we got Matt to calm down and drink another beer or two, Brian came back out without her, and informed her that she actually cried herself to sleep. “She’s embarrassed, guys. Matt, she didn’t mean to give you Harriet’s number if she had known that Harriet would have pulled this shit. I don’t know what to say, man. What the hell did she say on the phone?”
“She can’t do it anymore, and that she needs someone to stick around and make her happy. And I can’t be that guy because I can’t stick around. Then she started going on about some sobriety shit, and I just wasn’t having it, so I hung the fuck up. So here we are. At yet another conundrum. And I have no idea where to go from here. I can’t fucking believe it happened once again. She knew how insecure I was…” he trailed off into some drunken slur of incoherent words, dropping his chin to his chest. Eyes clenched tightly shut. Only god knew what he was thinking.
But the rest of us knew what we were thinking. There was no way Matt was coming back from this one unscathed. And we were gonna do everything we could to keep him from spiralling downward, once more. I’ll admit, I was terrified to leave him alone at that point.
And that is the biggest reason I prefer sexy, naked dancing girls over the god-awful drama of love and relationships. If I ever say anything different, I’ll eat my fucking shorts.

Notes