Escapism.

Chapter 1

You wake up to the sun beaming brightly through your living room window, making you rub your eyes and groan. You'd fallen asleep on the couch last night after drinking yourself plumb into oblivion.

Clutching your head in your hands, you rose from the couch as gingerly as you could manage, grimacing as the apartment swirled around you. Remind me never to take on a bottle of Bacardi again, you thought to yourself, heading for the bathroom to find the ibuprofen.

Your phone rang loudly, startling you so that you dropped the bottle of ibuprofen, catching it but not before several of the precious blue gels scattered across the bathroom floor. You silently cursed whoever was calling you before you answered the phone, clicking it to speakerphone and setting it on the counter beside you.

"God, what the fu-"

"Goooood morning, Vietnam!" Your overly peppy best friend greeted you. "Did you and James have fun last night?"

You groaned as you leaned down to pick up the scattered capsules, squeezing your eyes shut as once again, your head began to spin.

"Yeah, I can't really rememb-" you cut yourself off as it all came flooding back.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

James set his glass down on the coffee table as he came to sit down beside you.

"Babe, er-" he used your first name and you cringed, knowing something serious was on his mind. Serious talks and confrontations, amongst other things, were not your forte.

"Yeah?" you asked, looking up at him through your lashes, your head down.

"I've been thinking, and I don't think this is working out. It's just with me going into Team Lead at the office, and with your... well, 'job'" he made air quotes. "It just wouldn't look good for me to have a girlfriend who... does what you do." He finished lamely.

Your mouth hung open slightly and you looked at him fully. "What do you mean a 'job like mine'?" You mimicked his air quotes, not believing what you were hearing.

"Well, it's just... I don't know," he wrung his hands where they were resting on his lap.

"It's not like I'm some street hooker," you bit out, throwing your hands up. "All I do is host at a nightclub. A very reputable nightclub, if you remember. In fact, I think I've seen one or two of your office buddies there in the last couple of weeks."

He wouldn't meet your eyes. You scoffed, reaching for his hand.

"Babe, I can find another job, please. Remember what we talked about a couple months ago? About getting married, maybe starting a family. Please, if this is about my job, I can fix this." You were practically begging.

"No." He stood up and grabbed your jacket, holding it out to you. "I'm not doing this anymore. It's embarrassing, every time someone asks what you do for a living, I lie to them. Team Lead should not have a girlfriend who works at a nightclub." He spit the last word out, getting angry now.

"James-" he held his hand up, cutting you off.

"I'm not doing this anymore. We're done, goodbye."

After you had gotten home, angrily kicking your sneakers off, not caring about the dirt scattering over the hardwood, you tried calling James again. He immediately sent you to voicemail and wouldn't answer your texts, though you could see that he had read them. After sitting numb for a few minutes against the side of one of your loveseats, you began to cry. It started as soft sniffles and tiny tears but quickly escalated into sobs and snot. You cried for well over an hour, huffing to yourself and trying to ignore the aching pain in your chest.

After you had somewhat composed yourself, you took out a shot glass, one that James had gotten you, and poured yourself a shot of Bacardi. You didn't much care for the taste, but it had gotten you fucked up quickly before, and all you wanted to do was stop hurting. You took shot after shot, eventually discarding the glass and opting to drink straight from the bottle.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

"Babes? Do I need to come over?" Your best friend, on the other side of the line. You snapped out of your daze, angrily grabbing the gels off of the bathroom floor and tossing them into the trash. A few missed and fell back onto the floor. You sighed.

"Sorry Lis'," you said, downing two of the ibuprofen that hadn't fallen yet. "Yeah, come over and I'll tell you about it."

Less than 10 minutes later, Lisa knocked on your door. She lived two floors down, so it was as simple as her taking the stairs up to your room. She despised elevators and said they scared her. She blamed it on you and the horror movies.

"Hey babes," she greeted you with a warm hug and presented a bag of clementine oranges, one of your favorite snacks. "Got these for you the other day and forgot them last time I was over. So what happened?" She dropped her bag onto the kitchen counter and sat criss-cross on your couch. You told her all the gory details, glaring at the Bacardi bottle that still sat not so innocently on the coffee table.

"See, this is easy. Here's what we do!" She clapped a hand on your thigh, excited. "We dress up, go to Wit's End since you're not working tonight, and you'll be able to actually enjoy your place of work!"

"I already enjoy my place of work," you mutter, slouching further down into the couch cushions.

She gives you a stern look and you roll your eyes a bit. "You know what I mean, babes. You can drink, be merry, and maybe find some sexy guy to take home. Forget about James, he doesn't deserve you after dropping you like that when he's the one who brought marriage up in the first place."

"Fine. You know what?" You sit up straighter, ignoring the slight crick in your neck. "It is his loss, and I am not sitting at home like I did last night. I can't feel this way anymore. I've spent enough time fawning over him, changing everything about myself to make him happy." Lisa looked at you, grinning ear to ear.

"Now you're getting it," she said, clapping her hands together giddily. "Now you know why I stay single."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Five hours later, you were ready to go. You had changed most of your wardrobe in the year that you had been with James, opting for more modest, office-like clothing as he seemed to like it better on you. Lisa had given you a pair of her six-inch black platforms, chunky since you hadn't worn heels that high in quite some time. You found a black silk dress in the back of your closet, one you had gotten when you first got the job at Wit's End. It had rhinestones on the straps, which was as far as you were willing to go in terms of sparkles, and a slit that went up the front of your thigh, leaving the perfect spot for a thigh chain.

James had crushed as much of your style as he could, making you change your hair color to an auburn brown as opposed to the black and pink you had before. Now that you thought about it, you had no clue how he had managed to hook you and change so many things about you in the span of a single year. There wasn't much you could do about the hair color, so you left it and opted for a bit of control with smoky eyeshadow, cat eye, and your signature dark red lipstick, things you had all missed but hadn't realized. One of the only things James had let you keep was your signature perfume, a smoky vanilla cinnamon that you cherished. You spritzed it on your neck, wrists, and ankles before grabbing your clutch and smoothing your dress, admiring the silver thigh chain peeking from between the slit.

Lisa looked amazing, as usual, strutting around the apartment in her emerald green dress, a beautiful long-sleeved, v-necked, sequined thing that reached down to her mid-thigh, barely covering her ass in the back. Her heels were stilettos since she did not have a man holding her back for the past year and therefore could actually maneuver in them. You felt a pang of sadness at all the time you had lost but shook it off, already feeling much better about yourself as you watched her use her hairbrush as a microphone, singing along to Ariana Grande. Not your favorite, but not horrible altogether.

Some things never changed, and she was the constant in your life.

You both hopped in the taxi a few minutes later, and a few minutes after that hopped back out and walked through the wrought iron doors of Wit's End.