pretty chapped lips : malum :

3.9

For a while hiding worked.

I spent a few weeks acting like I was invisible. Coping up notes from teachers themselves rather than peers, studying at any possible moment and throwing myself into extra credit work that I didn't really need. I drowned myself in work until paper was lapping like water over head and every time I tried to reach up, to push a hand out to try and drag myself to the surface, I would just feel the sting of paper slicing skin. But I did it, I forced myself into work, into anything to keep my mind off of one thing.

I avoided Luke and Ashton as if they were hunters and I the pray. Truthfully, part of me wondered if that was the scenario I had caught myself up in. Constantly feeling cornered by the two teens who seemed to appear everywhere, like ghosts stepping from the shadows to intervene with my life.

I tried to be content with being alone. The bruises on my hips began to fade. The ones on my wrists and neck long since turned green and yellow. It was like he was never there to begin with. Like my lips were never bruised and eyes never cloudy as I caught up with work and soon no one remembered the boy with the pink hair that had began to fade. It was like everything was normal again.

But it wasn't.

My father still yelled about anything and everything, my mother still downed sleeping pills like water and I still worked my ass off in hopes of getting away. But my father commented on my hair, my mother watched worriedly from the sides and now I longed for a boy who gave me a taste of both heaven and hell every night. It wasn't the same, and given that, it probably will never be again.

"I miss you."

For three years Luke Robert Hemmings had been the only friend I knew. With his pretty blue eyes and awkward smile, lips quirking before a smile would come to them like he needed to asses the situation to know if the action was okay. He was bubble gum and sunshine with his broken heart that he pieced together with glitter glue and stitched up with hopes and dreams he refuses to ever let go. He was my opposite, but that's why we fit. Because when I couldn't move without wincing he made me forget my pain with his silly antics, he made me smile after my father made me cry and everything felt simple with the blonde in my complicated life.

He was what I was missing.

I couldn't help but feel awkward and shy, feet pigeon toed and binder to my chest. I didn't want to look up from my feet and the tuffs of grass below them, I couldn't. I couldn't just encase he sat there with his stupidly blue eyes and the boy two years above staring at me like I was mad.

I half expected him just not to reply. And standing there, time running on, it seemed more likely that he would.

I couldn't blame him, because he was my only friend and I forgot that I was his. I ran off with a boy I didn't know, swearing I knew him like the back of my hand. I ignored his calls, his messages, his warning. I just left him.

Though standing there and admitting I had done wrong. Telling myself that I shouldn't have done what I did. That it was stupid, dumb and wrong. I didn't regret it. Because I felt something with his hands on my hips, his lips at my neck and whispered words against my ear.

I almost wondered if maybe, the only reason I was coming down, was because he was floated out of reach.

Distracted by myself, I almost didn't notice the blonde who's feet I started down to got up. I almost didn't notice his timid step forward. Almost. But what I did notice was how his arms wrapped around my waist and I clung to the back of his shirt.

"I missed you too, Mikey."