pretty chapped lips : malum :

4.1

It wasn't the first time it occurred to me that my memory was more than just a little hazy, but it hit me that night when I sat with an aching jaw and a bright lit screen that caused my eyes to hurt in the darkness of my bedroom, that perhaps I was a little more practical than I realised in that state.

It wasn't a matter of should or shouldn't when I pressed the call button. Nor was it the matter of whether or not he remembered the whole exchange as I for one did not. But, it was a matter of stay in this house or escape even if just for a night.

I have no idea how he even understood what I was asking when he picked up, because I couldn't even understand what I was saying myself. My voice was wavered and cracking in which a way that it seemed like nothing more than thin glass being jumped on and smashed to pieces. He kept telling me to breathe, like it was easy with his calming voice and music once making my head ache from the volume began fading away. He told me to meet him as I scrambled to find the words to explain that this wasn't meant to happen, how it's never this bad and I'm so sorry for everything that's happened and how I'm weak enough to be reduced to tears from tough love and a couple of bruises.

I knew by the next day I would be hating myself. I would feel like shit for crawling back on my hands and knees in hopes he could make me forget what was happening. But I knew I would eventually when my mind was clear and it was just a matter of time. But that night I didn't think about it as I crept out of the house with my parents yells echoing behind my back and my mothers feverish words like cold sweat running down the back of my neck.

He grabbed my hand at the end of the street and didn't look at me when I cried. I didn't know where we were going and I couldn't ask for the words were clogging my throat to the point I couldn't push them out. I remember telling him I was sorry, again and again like a broken record as he clutched my hand and told me in the softest voice I ever heard him use to shut up and breathe.

We ended up at a little house not even fifteen minutes away, his jacket around my shoulders since he cursed at me for leaving without my own. I didn't ask where we were, I hadn't spoken since we turned the corner that lead away from my street. I didn't make a comment on how when we went inside he told me to stay quiet, or the fact there were pictures along the walls of a boy with big brown eyes and a toothy smile with a mother, a father and an older girl with long hair an big brown eyes with crinkles by the sides that matched his.

I kept my thoughts to myself even when we ended up standing in the middle of a bedroom with dark blue walls behind layers of posters. His hand gripping the back of the jacket around my shoulders, muttering curses into my hair that I could barely hear about undeserving people and life being so damn unfair. I never asked him to repeat any of it, even when he gripped the back of my neck and pressed his lips to my head while I wondered what it even meant.

"I'm sorry." Was all I heard beyond, "you don't deserve this," and, "why is everything so fucked?"

After a while, I think I was the one holding him. Arms around his shoulders and lips pressed to his hair, I began to realise that maybe those times I saw him cry weren't just false memories made from a hazy mind.

He kept saying sorry. Gripping onto the back of the jacket he loaned me and muttering incoherently against my shoulder. Each time he said it, I realised more and more he wasn't just talking about the fact my dad had a temper.

"I forgive you."