Just Before You Go

When I emerged from the bunk, I was surprised to find the bus completely deserted. It was a total mess, bottles everywhere and assorted types of powders and pills scattered every which way. I’d anticipated stumbling over bodies upon my emergence, but there wasn’t a single fallen soldier to be found.
I was smart enough to grab a pair of sunglasses before trudging my way outside into the daylight. It was nearly noon, which seemed early for the guys to be up and at it. Sure enough, they were nowhere to be seen.
However, to my left I caught sight of the infamous Blair Peterson, seated in a folding chair just outside her bus. I assumed she was smoking, as she almost always was. Maybe she knew where the guys had run off to…or where we were.
“Hey,” I called to her as I approached.
She winced, her hand quickly finding her temples, “Dude.”
I smiled softly, admiring the way her face seemed to change beneath her oversized wayfarer shades. Her hair was pulled back into a messy bun, a look I’d never seen on her before. As she shifted in her chair, reaching down to grab her pack of cigarettes from the concrete, I noticed she had a tattoo on the back of her neck. She moved back before I could see what exactly it was. I’m not sure why, but I just found her so fascinating. She had so many tattoos—it would have taken a whole day to sit and review them all in detail. I was sure she’d never give me that kind of time.
“How’re you feeling?” she asked me quietly, lighting her smoke.
I shrugged, “Not too bad, considering.”
She scrunched her nose up at me. It was adorable.
“What about you?” I asked, taking a seat on the pavement across from her.
She groaned from the back of her throat, “I’m pretty sure I got hit by a fucking freight train last night. Pretty sure.”
I smirked, “Yeah, his name’s Jimmy.”
She pointed her smoke at me with a grin, “Touché, Aria.”
“You can really keep up with them though, huh?” I tried not to let my jealousy sound through. “I’m not sure if I should be impressed or concerned.”
“Now you sound like Ty,” she laughed lowly.
“Where is Ty?” I asked smoothly. “Where is everyone?”
She shrugged her shoulders, slipping further down into her black chair, “I couldn’t tell you. Tyler is in the bus showering. I know Jimmy and Zach were going…shopping.”
The way she tripped over that last word made me sure that Jimmy wasn’t shopping at all. Shopping the illegal narcotics market, maybe.
“Have you seen Brian?” I asked her, trying to distract myself from the rage brewing deep inside.
She shook her head, breathing out a big puff of smoke.
“Jimmy didn’t come to bed last night,” I told her hesitantly. “And when I woke up he was gone…So, I’m trying to piece it all together…”
“Why didn’t he come to bed?” she asked with a cocked eyebrow. “I passed out an hour after I got into my bus. I slept at a fucking ninety degree angle all night.”
That visual was nothing short of valuable. It explained the way she kept creaking and cracking at her neck, rubbing at the sides every few seconds absently.
Poor thing.
But that’s what you get for railing drugs with my boyfriend all night.
“I sort of…asked him not to,” I said with some serious embarrassment.
Blair scoffed at me, shaking her head just a little as she placed her cigarette between her perfect lips and used both of her hands to tighten her hair, “Why would you do that?”
“Because I’m jealous,” I told her honestly.
“Of what?”
“You,” I sighed.
She dropped one hand to her side and the other snatched the cigarette from her lips. Her sunglasses dropped to the bottom of her nose as she stooped her neck down to really look at me. I was surprised to find she looked saddened.
“Jealous of me why?” was all she could think to ask.
I shrugged, “Jimmy just really likes you. I’m used to having most of his attention, I guess. It’s no big deal or anything.”
“Mm,” she hummed, straightening back out. “Jealousy will destroy your relationship, Aria. You need to reign that shit in.”
“Coming from someone who’s never actually been in a relationship,” I noted harshly.
She smirked but it wasn’t in a good way, “Right.”
“Wouldn’t you be jealous, too?” I asked more pathetically this time around.
I was tired of pissing off the people around me. What was wrong with me? Surely I hadn’t always been this way…I was starting to feel a little out of control in my own life.
“Of me?” she choked. “Absolutely fucking not.”
My disbelief showed through on my face.
She bit at her bottom lip, “You don’t know me, Aria. And if you did, you’d realize there’s nothing to be jealous of.”
“I know you a little,” I argued with a tired shrug. “And I like what I know…All the guys like you…It’s intimidating.”
“Not all the guys,” she frowned but shook it off immediately. “Besides that, I don’t sleep with other girls’ boyfriends. I can be a real cunt when I want to be, but that just isn’t how I operate.”
I decided to believe her—mostly because I couldn’t bear the anxiety that my paranoia was casting down onto my life. She hadn’t stepped over any lines so far as actual issues went. The biggest complaint that I had about her and Jimmy was how close they were getting—and how similar they were in spirit. Other than that, they had never lingered too long, or given eyes to one another. Maybe I was just ridiculous.
“Oh, come on,” I laughed. “I thought you didn’t care about that anymore.”
“I don’t,” she affirmed. “Matt asked me to dinner this weekend…So, I guess you were right about his feelings.”
“What’d you say?” I asked nosily.
She shrugged, “I told him that I’d think about it.”
“Brian hasn’t totally sealed his fate yet then?” I smiled.
“Fuck Brian,” she grumbled, tossing her cigarette away.
The Haven bus door flew open and a toweled Tyler stepped out. He waved at me, and almost showed me more than a smile as his towel loosened around his waist. Blair shielded her eyes dramatically, groaning and gagging about what she’d almost seen. I, however, was ashamed of myself for not reacting in such a way. I hadn’t averted my gaze at all.
“Shit, sorry,” Tyler cackled, fixing a grip on the ends of the cloth so they wouldn’t slip.
“Can you not put clothes on before you fucking strut around?” Blair grinned, still covering her view of her best friend. “I’m nauseous enough as it is, Ty.”
“That’s what happens when you snort coke all night, Blair,” he retorted playfully.
She grumbled something rude before climbing out of the chair and announcing that it was her turn to scrub away her recreational drug use. Like all it would take to cleanse your system was a bit of water.
Tyler took up Blair’s chair, grabbing her cigarettes from the pavement and dropping them into his lap.
“If I don’t bring these in, she’ll leave them here forever,” he told me.
I just smiled.
“So? How’d you sleep?” Ty asked me pleasantly.
“Fine enough,” I lied.
It hadn’t been a good sleep at all. Sure, I didn’t want Jimmy waking me up with his intoxicated bullshit, but I really thought he’d show up at some point. Instead, I’d woken myself up every hour on the hour to solidify the absence in my brain. I’d heard him partying with Brian almost every time I’d woken up. But for the last time, everything was silent.
“I had a solid sleep,” Tyler told me, stretching his arms out in front of him. “Now I’m ready for sound check. Blair’s going to be a real fucking treat to work with today.”
I thought of the way her own thoughts had caused her face to grimace with pain, “No kidding.”
“Do you know if Zach’s back yet?” he asked me. “I have a guitar question for him.”
“No, I don’t think so,” I replied unsurely. “But Brian’s probably kicking around here somewhere.”
Tyler scoffed loudly, “Like I’d ask that guy anything.”
I was sure that Blair had told me that Tyler idolized Synyster Gates once upon a time. So when had that changed? How had he made such a large leap from idolization to unadulterated hatred? Maybe there was still a tinge of adoration deep inside Tyler’s bones, in the way that I both admired and resented Blair Peterson. Human suffrage was a weird thing, and I’d found that we mostly put ourselves into the mix.
“Oh, there he is!” Tyler smiled happily, nodding over yonder.
I looked up to find Jimmy and Zach headed in our direction. Just as I’d thought, neither held a single shopping bag in their tattooed hands. I was caught between disappointment and self-assurance. At least, I’d thought, I do know him—but what to do with that, I was still unsure.
“Isn’t this cozy,” Zach noted once they were near us.
Jimmy didn’t look particularly pleased. He took one look at me and one look at Tyler in a towel, and nothing else, and sneered to himself.
“Morning,” he said weirdly before turning back around and heading back in the direction he’d come from.
“Excuse me,” I smiled awkwardly to Zach and Tyler as I moved onto my feet and walked after my boyfriend.
I tried not to notice the knowing look on Zach’s face.
I caught Jimmy by the arm just as he was reaching for the bus’s door. He glanced at me over his shoulder but didn’t stop. He pulled the door open with a grunt and stepped inside the confines of our mobile home.
While I didn’t really want to follow him by that point, I sure didn’t want to stay in the wasteland that I found myself waking up in. So, I followed him aboard and closed the door firmly behind me.
“Where have you been?” I asked, trying my best to sound curious and not suspicious.
“Out,” he replied shortly, digging through a bag on the couch and pulling out random bits of clothing.
I sighed, “I got that much…But where did you go?”
“Are you really going to do this?” he snapped at me, his blue eyes focused with frustration.
“Do what?”
“Mother me,” he hissed.
I was a little taken aback.
“I’m not mothering you, Jim…”
“Sure you are,” he shrugged, pulling out a black shirt and stuffing everything else back into the bag. “You’re telling me who to be friends with, what I can and cannot do, wanting to pin-point my exact location every day. I don’t spend a whole lot of time with my mother, but I sure as shit can recognize when I’m being parented.”
I was hurt. Not because of what he was saying, but because of the way he was saying it. He was angry—which wasn’t something that I’d generally use to describe him. He was typically fairly patient with me, occasionally slipping up to say something condescending or cold. But…Jimmy hardly ever hurt my feelings on purpose.
“I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly.
“You’re not,” he scoffed, finally turning to face me. “What you are doing is being a hypocrite.”
“A hypocrite?” I repeated confusedly. “How?”
He shrugged again, pulling his white tee over his head to reveal his tattooed chest.
“You can’t contain your fucking jealousy around Blair,” he told me casually as he pulled a Deep Purple shirt over his head. “But you can hang out with Tyler during all of your free time—and hardly bat a fucking eye when the dude is lounging around in a towel.”
I wasn’t sure what to say.
The way Tyler dressed himself hardly seemed like any of my business…And it hardly seemed like something for Jimmy to get worked up over.
When I told him this, he nearly lost his mind.
“You don’t fucking get it,” he finally laughed. “You just don’t fucking get it. You don’t even see what you’re doing, do you?”
“What am I doing, Jimmy?” I asked in my most demanding tone.
He shook his head at me, “You’re deflecting whatever fucked up feelings you’re having onto me. You wanted me to help you pit Blair and Brian together, but now you accuse me every other hour of secretly wanting to fuck her. Maybe it has less to do with you actually believing I’m going to cheat, and more to do with you wanting to do it yourself.”
He was way off base.
“I’ve never done anything to make you not trust me,” he continued as he walked to the fridge and pulled out a fresh bottle of water. “And yet, you don’t."
"Never?" I scoffed. "Are you kidding?"
He grunted at me in an exasperated way of telling me that it was irrelevant, "You need to let that go. You made the choice to forgive me--but you haven't. Don't you put that shit on me. I've gone above and beyond since then to make sure you felt safe with me...I'm trying to be good to you, Aria, I am...But it still isn't enough. I’ve done everything you’ve ever asked of me. I’ve gone to your fucking family dinners, I’ve let your parents fucking berate me, I've slowed right the fuck down on my partying, I've neglected my friends, I’ve let you get fucked up any time you’ve asked, even after you scream at me for being fucked up the night before—fuck, I offered to pay for your god damn house so that you wouldn’t have to worry about it…And what do I get, Aria? What the fuck do I get?”
“You get what you want,” I retorted, feeling my stomach in my throat. “You get to live your fabulous life and go on your tour…You get to have what you want. I’m here, aren’t I? Isn’t that what you wanted? I gave my life for you, Jimmy…and you haven’t even said thank you.”
“Thank you?” he choked. “Thank you? Are you fucked?”
I wasn’t sure but I was starting to think I might be.
“I didn’t ask you to give up your life,” he said calmly. “In fact, I think if anything it’s been like a trade. You traded in your bar apron for a chance to tour the country…meet some cool fucking people…be with me. What’s got me out of my fucking mind, Aria, is that you don’t seem to think it was a fair trade.”
“Would you have stayed behind for me?” I asked pointedly.
“To do what?” he replied with a defeated sigh. “To get a job doing whatever? To go back to scraping to make ends meet? I didn’t always have this fucking lifestyle, Aria. I worked really fucking hard for it. I’ve lived on the streets. I’ve lived in a fucking laundromat with no money to wash my god damn clothes. So, I’m sorry if I’m not willing to revert to that shit because you feel like I’m stepping on your toes or some shit. I didn’t ask you to give up your life, I asked you to make a new one…With me.”
My eyes were leaking now.
“I don’t know what this shit is,” he said, gesturing back and forth between us. “But what it’s become isn’t working for me. What I do know is that I’m not a jealous guy—but when my girlfriend is having a better time with some stranger than she is with me…You need to make a choice soon, Aria. You need to figure out if this is what you really want. It’s been two fucking days and I’m already regretting ever inviting you.”
“Jimmy,” I gasped, trying not to sob in front of him.
He was cold and uncaring, a side of him I’d never seen in full form, “I have sound check. I have to go.”
He pushed passed me and out, unbothered to shut the door behind him. I stood there in the doorway, stunned and totally dismantled.
What was I doing? You know, besides ruining everything. I had a lot of self-exploration to do.
If I'd thought for a second that I'd been alone when I woke up that morning, I couldn't have anticipated how alone I'd feel just thirty short minutes later.
Now I was alone. And I was awake.

Notes

:(

xx