Neon Red [Order The eBook] [Zayn]

18

(DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. It's important to remember this is all totally fabricated, embellished, and exaggerated for entertainment purposes.)

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Change your heart, look around you

Change your heart, it will astound you

I need your loving like the sunshine

And everybody's gotta learn sometime

Everybody's gotta learn sometime

Beck - Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime

Later I lay across the center of my bed fully clothed, listening to Amy Winehouse's "Stronger Than Me" and neglecting my room service breakfast. The eggs were starting to stink up the place. Still, I spaced, studying the flecks in the sunshine as it filled the room like a tremulous breath. There was the allure of a fresh start calling; beckoning me as if I was peering down a long corridor at a shutting door. It was my last window to freedom; to normalcy. I raced to catch it, jamming my foot in the threshold to keep it from closing. Then a disembodied hand pulled me through into blinding light.

"Love Is A Losing Game" covered the room. I lit a Marlboro, not giving a fuck whether the smoke clung to the furniture and landed me in trouble with the concierge. I'd been lectured in every language known to man, chastised on every continent, fined in every currency. By now I did what I wanted, and I wasn't going to relent who I was just because I was in someone else's backyard for a day or two. Why the fuck should I have to adjust my behavior for the rest of the world? I was sick of that shit. Had been doing it since I was a kid. Everything was exhausting, sapping me as this job called us all over the planet, expectant that we should follow without question. Dare to voice any qualms and get fired. How was that fair? The world ought to adjust for me, for a change. How about we try that for a while?

Who did they think they were, anyway? Trying to inconvenience smokers at every turn? Systematically discriminating against us. Penalizing us into quitting. It was oppressive as fuck. Nazi Germany shit. Why couldn't I smoke in the privacy of my own room when I was shelling out thousands of dollars a night for it? Didn't I technically own this place for the night? Who the hell could tell me what to do in my own home? They could all blow me, as far as I was concerned.

"Rehab" was playing now.  My phone rang and the vibration barely penetrated the mental fog that left me staring at an indistinct mark on the ceiling. The entire surface seemed to swim and converge to a single point, flowing down into itself like a heaving whirlpool. I wondered if the mark truly existed or whether my brain had hallucinated it to justify my glaring in that direction. It sucked up bits of the room piece by piece. A picture frame here, a plant there. A chair, a pillow.  My shoes. When it shape-shifted and became a face, I shut my eyes, trying to forget its contorted grin.

I wanted to cry but my body was so detached from my mind the act was simply impossible. My tear ducts were drained anyway. Full of grit. That fight in the hall had taken a lot out of me. Will I be a broken man? That's all I wanted to know. Would this thing I had with him leave me bitter and disheveled long after it ended? I've seen the type, you know. Wastes of life. The sort who walked around neighborhoods barely cognizant of where they were headed, or sat in restaurants drooling over the porcelain; pitied by the waitresses. Gaze always fixed blankly ahead. Never feeling, never intermixing, only observing. That could be me in 10 or 20 years. Better to get out now and look after my future. Keep my wits about me. Fuck if he hadn't driven me mad already. There had been nothing but a rage-colored volatility since I met him. Emotions barely harnessed. Sheer instability. All things thrown out of balance.