Stories I Never Finished

Heart Shaped Box

╞╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╡

P R E V I E W

╞╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╪╡

In a half-sized city, no bigger than a large town, there were many places to go but seldom things to do, and so—with time on their hands and youth in their minds—the young generation of teens and glowing adults who still had their sparkle would often find themselves in raves, pubs and night clubs.

Most of the clubs were run-of-the-mill, inundated with people living their life their way at any given time.

But for Michael and his boyfriend those types of clubs weren't their style, or their crowd.
They were filled by people who still held onto life, who would drink to have fun and dance with their friends.

Calum was a hopeless drug addict, obsessed with the highs of LSD and any party drug tab or pill he could get his shaking hands on. And Michael was a hopeless romantic who found his true love at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, only to see his heartbreak in the mirror of his bathroom every second morning.
They had no place in the society above them, so they found themselves drifting to a place called Nirvana.

It was tacky, Michael knew whoever had built the underground club—hidden within backstreets of a downtown area barely frequented by anyone with a sane mind—had likely been as fucked up and traumatised as he were.
But it was judgement free, no matter the bar fights or the suicide scares on the cheap chess-tiled dance floor.

Michael had taken up place in a booth, one of four lined back to back along the far side wall of the large club space, and though he found himself to be slightly more sober than usual he still held the neck of a bottle in his hand.
His free arm was wrapped loosely around Calum's shoulders, the brunet in black—from torn stockings beneath fraying shorts to tank top straps always falling from his shoulders—laughing with people he had met earlier in the night and invited to sit with him and his slightly intimidating boyfriend.

Michael didn't try to be intimidating, but the dark bags beneath sullen eyes and the lifeless gaze he held often meant he had no choice within layers of black baggy clothes meant to keep his cold heart warm.

He knew Calum thrived against his broken appearance, sometimes using him as a bargaining chip to get his hands on new pills, but he couldn't bring himself to utter a word about it; Calum was his world, all he had left to cling to in a cruel hellhole, and so he let the pretty twenty-three-year-old do whatever he wanted.

Calum laughed, his head spinning and eyes glazed with a fresh high as he chatted with a glowing smile toward the two women and a man he had stumbled across. Their style was close to his own, though far darker and more thought out than he could ever bother to be.

The man snorted back a laugh, a rolled five-dollar note held between his thin fingers as it hovered over the smeared edge of what had once been a line of pure white atop the booth's table surface.

"No, but seriously, they're fucking stupid!" The red head woman persisted, ranting about something Calum truly couldn't grasp an ounce of understand of.

The shaved blonde beside her shook her head, taking a large swig from her beer bottle before saying "you get too into this shit, conspiracy don't mean true."

"Wanna hear real conspiracy?" Calum offered, grinning as his fingers fiddled with a green weed-pattern lighter Michael knew he'd stolen accidentally.
"The queen murdered Diana." He stated quite proudly and leaned casually back against Michael's side; still facing the trio.

"Fuck!" The redhead gawked, "no fuckin' way? Are you real?"

"Bruh, I don't even know." Calum snickered, laughing when the man threw his head back with a dramatic wave of his arms; hollering out a 'midlife crisis! No!' in response.