Sunbound

☀ Blue

C H A P T E R   18: Blue

☀ ☀ ☀

It took Skylar two days to get the the other side of Arizona. It was only a seven hour drive, but he spent those two days on a drunken binge, surveying the bottoms of shot glasses at a different bar every city limit. The inside of the Chevelle wasn't as interesting as the inside of a bottle of Tequila, even when he was burning up a fever from near-alcohol poisoning. He was sure he drank his liver blue, but he never cared too much for how long he lived anyway.

Skylar was somewhere just outside of Yuma, his forehead resting on the cool bar top of some shit-hole dive. He was so full of booze he could barely see. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt this way. He'd been sober for over three years, but he couldn't decipher why it mattered anymore. Sober was reality, and feelings, and responsibility. Sober was all of the things people like Skylar thought they weren't meant to deal with. Sober was Scout, and the burden of feelings not his own. Intoxicated was easy. Intoxicated was the next drink, and whether or not he should eat the worm, and that was about all of the decision-making he was capable of at the juncture in his life.

In all actuality, Skylar really wasn't capable of anything. He couldn't even respond when the redhead that had been eyeing him from the opposite end of the bar finally made her way over to the stool beside him. If he squinted hard enough, she almost looked like Scout. Sober, she looked all used up, but Skylar's fever was burning, and that "almost" was starting too look a lot more like "definitely."

"Can I get you another one?" the redhead asked. Her voice was smooth and soothing, and Skylar thought for a second that she must have done this pretty often. But he would've been lying if he said her long, baby-blue nail gliding across his forearm wasn't enchanting him like it had for many other men.

Skylar tried to focus on just one of the three, pulsating images of her slipping past and overlapping one other. In his drunken stupor, she reminded him of a Hydra; a pretty, Scout-looking Hydra with eyes like a fusion of jasper and peridot. In reality, her eyes were as cold and dark as freshly-dug graves, and her only resemblance to Scout was being of the same sex.

The woman flicked her wrist at the the bartender, who slid down another shot glass sloshing over with bronze liberation. She picked it up slowly, a sly smile pulling at her lips. More baby blue crescents than Skylar could count were dangling the blurry glass in front of his face. Her opposite hand ran through the hair on the back of his head, gently scratching his scalp in way that left him wanting much more than that. She gripped a patch of hair at the crown, slowly tilting his head back. Every move she made was seductive as hell. She wasn't the kind of person to fret over what all she had done with her body, and that was the kind of person Skylar needed in his life right then.

Or, so he thought.

Skylar's jaw fell agape, her hand still gripping his hair as the other tilted the shot over his mouth. She angled the glass farther and farther until the bronze was a thin river running out, and Skylar's eager mouth swallowed it all down.

She smiled wider, turning his face towards her. "That was a 'yes,' wasn't it?"

Skylar was without words. He didn't know if he was too drunk to fathom a coherent response, or if he was too mesmerized by her, but whatever it was made him want to follow her into whatever fresh Hell she came from. And that was exactly what he did.

"Jerry, put it on my tab," she hollered down to the bartender straining some mixed drink into a tall glass. He shot her a look as if she was telling him something he already knew to be absolutely certain.

Her thin fingers wrapped around Skylar's wrist and pulled him up from his stool. In the state he was in, she looked like an ant, and he was gigantic. He lifted his feet high off of the floor, stepping down like he was afraid to crack the foundation. She smiled, eyeing him with shiny eyes; and, at that instant, her eyes reminded him of the shiny, black exoskeleton of the beetle in the pothole. But the moment passed quicker than it came, and she was jasper and peridot and whatever other romanticized bullshit he could conceive because wherever she was going was a much better place to be than drinking himself into a breakdown he couldn't come back from.