SO BAD [MXM] [MAFIA]

31: COUNTERACTIVE

When Skylar wakes up, Ash is still asleep, and it's about 8 PM.

Skylar sits up and rubs at his eyes, realizing that he and Ash aren't cuddled up together anymore. The guy is lying on his stomach, one arm across Skylar's waist and the other hanging off the other side of the bed. It's similar to the position he was in when Skylar awoke after the fateful night of their first hookup, but there's something different this time around.

The cat, which Skylar shamefully forgot about when he was about to move out before, is lying on Ash's back, fast asleep. The sheets only cover him from the waist down, and she's passed out on the small of his back. This leaves his tattoo on full display, and Skylar finds it cute.

The tattoo takes up most of his back, and appears to be a guy with wings, the sun above him. He looks in distress, and there's a banner along the top that says something in Spanish. The tattoo itself looks pretty cool, and it's got to mean something for Ash to have it on such a prominent place on his body. Skylar makes a mental note to ask him about it sometime,

Anyway, Ash and the cat are adorable—a word Skylar didn't even know he was capable of applying to anything, let alone Ashton Rivera—so Skylar searches around for his phone. It takes him a couple minutes to find it, and when he does, he quickly snaps a picture of the scene, smiling down at it once it's taken. Then, he gets a familiar feeling in his chest, and his breathing starts to grow shallow.

Oh shit, here we go.

He recognizes it immediately as his body craving cytozine, and winces. He glances at Ash once more, before sighing and getting dressed. He walks to the bathroom, dragging his feet in dread the entire way. Skylar does not want to deal with this, taking a shaky breath in anticipation as he nears the bag he dropped on the floor when Ash began to distract him.

Skylar sits on the bathroom floor and opens it up, taking out the one pill bottle and dumping its contents onto his hand. He counts the amount inside, and finds that Ashton didn't even leave him a full container. There are only ten pills left in here, so if Skylar took one every day and didn't space it out like he should, he'd only have a little over a week.

He needs to do that, though. He needs to go as long as possible between each dose, and he knows it. He thinks ten pills might be too low, but clearly Ash has done more research into this than he has. Maybe Skylar should just be happy he's not living under a bridge right now.

Skylar's body is already craving it, and it hasn't even been a full twelve hours. This means his addiction is even worse than before for whatever reason, and it's going to be really difficult. Still, he puts all the pills in the container, grabs his empty bag, and stands up.

Ashton is still asleep on the bed, and honestly, he probably needed this. He was up at least as late as Skylar last night, probably later since he finished bandaging him and changed his clothes and everything. He also woke up before Skylar, at least long enough to start exercising, so yeah. Skylar is going to let him sleep in as much as he wants.

Skylar exits the room without another word, heading straight to his own and putting his empty bag on his dresser, before setting the pills on his bathroom counter. He stands there for a moment, sighing and just staring at them, before running a hand through his hair. He's frowning, feeling quite a bit of conflict, but it's mostly from fear.

He doesn't want to deal with the withdrawal again, with how bad it was. The hallucinations, the terror and hopelessness he felt at all times. It was awful, and of course he's fine now, but what if one day when he runs out, he doesn't come back? What if it just gets worse and worse until he loses his mind and can't get it back again? How much self control does he really possess?