Hold On To Me ☾cake au

19

Luke and Calum didn't understand how it was so easy to physically neglect each other for so many months. Senior year was almost over and Luke would barely steal a glance at Calum while passing him in the hallway, which he did between every class, but he always, always, wanted to look back.

Calum had only gotten worse. Drugs became a normal thing for him, even after nearly overdosing one night when he was home alone, and emotionally, he was a wreck.

Almost every night, he would go out with Josh and the football team and have sex with a girl he didn't know. For the first few nights of his random hook ups, he couldn't help but count them. After six, he gave up and completely depended on the perky drunk girls and whatever pills were closest to him to distract him.

There was a night in February when Luke was home alone and his thoughts, which he thought he had buried, swarmed his mind. He stripped himself of his clothes and filled up his bathtub with water as high as it could go and sat inside. In a state of desperation, he held his nose and sunk his head beneath the surface of the water, cutting off all available oxygen for him to breathe. He wanted to give up.

He stayed there; his chest began to feel tight as he clenched his eyes shut, trying with every fiber of his being not to come up from the water. His head started throbbing and his throat and chest began to feel numb as he could feel himself losing strength. It hurt. It hurt his chest to the point where he felt like ripping his own lungs out, and as much as he wanted to stay submerged under the surface until the world went black, he couldn't take it anymore and suddenly sprung up from the water with a loud, deep breath. Luke's hands clutched the sides of the tub as he coughed and breathed deeply.

Since then, he was surprisingly okay. There was a day, for the first time in years, that he hadn't caught himself thinking of Calum once. He was slowly continuing to not feel broken anymore and that was enough for him.

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there's only one more chapter left!!

sorry this was super short, next one will be longer!

-cee :)